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© 2008 The AuthorJournal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Religion Compass 2/4 (2008): 642–658, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00087.x

Early Medieval Christian Identity and Anti-Judaism: The Case of the Visigothic Kingdom

Rachel L. Stocking*Southern Illinois University Carbondale

AbstractThis article discusses the efforts by Catholic rulers to eliminate the Jewish com-munities of the Visigothic kingdom in Spain. Their sustained effort to defineChristian identity through the forced baptism of Jews and criminalization ofJudaism was unusual in early medieval Europe. In explaining Visigothic anti-Judaism,modern historians have disagreed over the roles of Iberian Jews, Visigothic kings,and Catholic church leaders such as Isidore of Seville. This article suggests thatrather than seeking causation in royal greed, religious fanaticism, or ‘crypto-Judaism’,historians can more fruitfully call upon the approaches used by scholars of latermedieval Christian identity and anti-Judaism in Western Europe.

In 694 ce, the Visigothic king Egica accused the Jewish population of hisIberian kingdom of plotting a rebellion as part of an international conspiracyagainst Christian rulers everywhere. He presented the conspirators’confessions to the Seventeenth Church Council of Toledo, which decreedthat as punishment the Jewish population, most of whom apparently werebaptized Christians, should be stripped of all their goods and enslaved.The king and council expressed themselves with vicious language andimagery: the conspirators were ‘defiled by the vilest stain of sacrilege,’ and‘stained with the blood of Christ.’ Their ‘cruel and stupendous conspiracy’had to be ‘exterminated’, and the ‘injustice of Christ’s cross’ would beavenged with an irrevocable sentence that would leave them ‘dispersedeverywhere’.1 The accusation, the decree, and the violent language – butnot the alleged confessions – were recorded in the collection of canon lawknown as the Hispana,2 ensuring a life much longer than the Visigothickingdom, which lasted only 17 more years before it fell to Muslim raiders.The king’s accusations followed a century of legal efforts to establishabsolute Christian uniformity in the kingdom by converting the Jewishpopulation and eradicating all traces of Judaism. The campaign had begunin earnest around 616 with a royal edict of forced baptism; subsequentlychurch councils and royal law-makers passed a series of increasingly complex

© 2008 The Author Religion Compass 2/4 (2008): 642–658, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00087.xJournal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Early Medieval Christian Identity and Anti-Judaism 643

measures mandating the use of force to prevent apostasy among theconverts, inflicting the death penalty for observing Jewish customs, andseverely restricting the legal rights of Jews, baptized Jews, and theirdescendants.

This effort to impose a common kingdom-wide Christian identity bylegislating the destruction of Jewish communities was unusual in earlymedieval Western Europe. The centuries following the end of the WesternRoman Empire were marked by fundamental changes in religious identityand political theologies, but those processes did not normally involvesustained attacks on Jews or Judaism. Most modern observers agree withBernard Blumenkrantz (1960, 1991) in his depiction of the period fromthe fifth to the eleventh century as one of relative peace and integrationfor Jewish communities in Europe, interrupted by sporadic incidents oflocalized persecution and the general but primarily impotent hatred ofecclesiastical leaders.3 The prevailing theological framework for Christianattitudes and policies remained that of Augustine of Hippo, the fifth-centurybishop whose Christian authority was preeminent in the early medievalWest ( J. Cohen 1982, 1999). He taught that Jews should not be forced toconvert. Rather, they should be permitted to continue their beliefs andcustoms, because in doing so they served as unwitting witnesses to thetruth of Christian history and scripture. Their adherence to the literalmeaning of Mosaic law, along with the dispersion and restriction oftheir communities, gave them a continuing place in Christian society asreminders of their own blindness to Jesus and his message, and theirconsequent rejection by God. Within this larger theological and socialcontext, modern scholars often view the series of Visigothic anti-Jewishpolicies as an exception to the early medieval rule, a mark of thekingdom’s generally anomalous nature.4 For the most part, Visigothicanti-Judaism, like the history of the kingdom itself, has not beenintegrated into historical understandings of the transformations of Europeanreligion, identities, and society during the early medieval period.5

One of the factors hindering the incorporation of Visigothic historyinto understandings of early medieval change is the lop-sided body ofevidence for the kingdom (Stocking 2007, p. 347). In seeking to defineand impose a unified Christian identity upon their subjects, seventh-centurychurch leaders and kings produced a large body of canonical and secularlaws that often contained elaborate theological explanations.6 Comparedto other regions during the period, the church was also unusually productiveof theological and educational treatises, written in the interests of cultivatinga literate clergy who could tend the homogeneous flocks of Christiansubjects according to orthodox precepts.7 But scholars are hard pressedwhen it comes to narrative histories, court or estate records, saints’ Lives,and other documents that might reveal what actual people did andthought in daily life. Moreover, there is virtually no evidence producedby Jewish individuals or communities (Sivan 2000). In other words, our

644 Rachel L. Stocking


understanding of anti-Judaism, Jewish communities, and the enforcementof coercive Christian identity in the Visigothic kingdom must be filteredthrough the normative and ‘ideological screens’ (Castellanos 2003) constructedby a very small group of highly partisan men whose perspectives were, tosay the least, narrow and overdetermined. Unfortunately, the exceptionallynarrow perspectives of the Visigothic sources have reinforced some historians’assumptions about the Iberian Peninsula’s exceptional, and thereforemarginal, place in European history more generally.

Given the evidential problems, the anomaly of the policies, and thesubsequent Islamification of most of Iberia, it might indeed appear thatthis spasm of extremism in Christian identity construction is of limitedsignificance in understanding early medieval transformations. Yet, thepost-Roman Iberian peninsula was not a world apart from the rest ofWestern Europe. Like leaders in other ‘barbarian kingdoms’, Christianauthorities in Iberia drew on ancient Roman and Christian traditions andconcepts as they sought to maintain control over increasingly diverse localcommunities. Throughout Western Europe, struggles over the distributionof power were accompanied by changes in conceptions of individual andcollective identity as various contenders made claims for authority basedon differing ethnic, legal, intellectual, and religious precedents and histories(see, for example, Drinkwater & Elton 1992; Hallsall 1998). For instance,rulers and elites claimed shared identities as Franks, Visigoths, Lombards,etc., tying legendary ethnic histories to Roman and Christian traditionsto explain and support noble status and military power (see, for example,Geary 1988, 2002; Wolfram 1990; Pohl 1998; Gillett 2002). At the sametime, kings called upon notions of ancestral custom and the authority ofRoman legal traditions as they claimed social and fiscal control throughroyal law-making (see, for example, Wormald 1979; Collins 1998; Sivan1998; Barnwell 2000). They were aided in this by the educated elite,including both secular and clerical courtiers versed in Roman andecclesiastical literary traditions (see, for example, Riché 1962; Wood 1990).

Over time, these various claims for authority came to focus increasinglyon asserting divine access to the Christian god, and social power itselfcame to be understood by many as a holy force (Markus 1990; Brown2003). Consequently, for Christian leaders everywhere, defining andattempting to regulate communities’ religious identities became a crucialpriority. Rulers, nobles, and clerics came to express and pursue thatpriority in a variety of attitudes and policies that met with differing levelsof success or failure. While that variety obviously reflects important differencesin immediate circumstances (Brown 2003, pp. 355–79), it is safe to assumethat Western Christian leaders, including Iberians, shared key referencepoints – both in the ancient traditions from which they drew, as well asin the changing social dynamics they were attempting to address. Althoughthe Visigothic anti-Jewish sources obstruct our vision into the daily lives oflocal communities, their elaborate explanations provide an extraordinarily



detailed view of their authors’ changing conceptions of religious identity.In this way, the anomalous nature of Visigothic anti-Judaism could bean evidential boon to the current scholarship of early medieval identityand christianization.

In order to take advantage of this boon, however, it may be necessaryto consider the evidence from new, and perhaps counter-intuitive, vantagepoints. For many decades, the study of this field has been constricted bythe nature of the evidence and the methodology it encourages. First ofall, despite their non-narrative, normative nature, the seventh centuryanti-Jewish laws, when viewed in sequence, seem to present a relativelygraceful narrative arc, with a number of compelling principle protagonistsand key moments of plot-advancing conflict, as well as a morally chargedclimax and ironic denouement. Second, the lack of documentation fordaily life and relationships has encouraged a literalist approach to the legalevidence. As common sense would seem to dictate, in this approach anindividual legal action taken against a human activity or relationship isunderstood as indicating the existence and even prevalence of that activityor relationship in the society that produces the law. In the case of theanti-Jewish legislation, this method is particularly attractive, because itseems to allow a window onto the otherwise inaccessible circumstances ofIberian Jews and their communities: laws against Jews marrying withinthe sixth degree of kinship, for instance, would seem to indicate that Jewsdid in fact marry within the sixth degree of kinship (García Moreno 1993,p. 76). The combination of the apparent logic of the narrative structure,the ‘common-sense’ approach to the legal evidence, and the overall anomalyof the Visigothic anti-Jewish program has led to a fundamental set ofassumptions that are widely shared among those who study the topic. Theobject of analysis is most often understood as an historical problem witha rational solution, which can be discovered by determining the origin ofthe Visigothic anomaly, following its development through the sequenceof causes and effects, and identifying the motivations and relative levels ofinitiative and agency of the various parties involved (see, for example,Bachrach 1973; Albert 1976; García Iglesias 1978; Orlandis 1980; Roth 1994;González Salinero 1999, 2000; Martin 2003, pp. 336–46; Drews 2006).

These approaches have had mixed results. The Visigothic anti-Jewishlegal texts have been published in critical editions, along with Englishtranslations (Linder 1997, pp. 217–33, 257–332, and 482–538). Summariesof the content of individual laws and overviews of Jewish legal status areavailable (see, for example, Katz 1937; Juster 1976) along with narrativeaccounts of the sequence of legislation as it was issued over the course ofthe seventh century (see, for example, González Salinero 2000, pp. 15–80).Anti-Jewish theological works also have been subject to editorial andanalytical scrutiny although English translations are lacking.8 The positionof Isidore of Seville, a leading seventh-century Catholic intellectual, in thelong-term development of medieval Christian attitudes towards Jews has



received particular attention (Albert 1990; J. Cohen 1999, pp. 95–122;Drews 2006). A number of issues regarding terminology, dating, andauthorship in both bodies of evidence have been identified and resolved.9

Yet, analyses of the Visigothic anti-Jewish program as a historical problemremain at odds about origins, cause and effect relationships, motivationsand agency within the narrow Visigothic context, making it difficult tomeaningfully integrate this period of persecution into the larger contextof religious change and identity construction in the early medieval West.

Very briefly, the story – at least on its surface – goes like this. In 589,the Visigothic ruler, Reccared, announced his conversion from Arian toCatholic Christianity at the Third Council of Toledo, which asserted andcelebrated religious unity between the Visigothic monarchy and nobilityand the Catholic ‘Hispano-Roman’ population. Subsequent kings andchurch leaders came to see religious uniformity as vital to the kingdom,and after the rejection of Arianism, the most prominent flaw in thekingdom’s unity was the presence of Jewish communities. In around 616,a religiously aggressive king, Sisebut, issued an edict calling for all Jews tobe forcibly baptized. After his death, this policy was criticized by Isidoreof Seville, and in 633 the Fourth Council of Toledo issued a canon thatcondemned forced baptism as ineffectual.10 The council also accusedthe forced converts of reverting to Judaism, and reaffirmed the validity ofthe baptisms that had already been imposed. Other canons institutedmeasures designed to force baptized Jews to maintain their Christianidentity, while at the same time restricting their legal privileges, such asthe rights to give court testimony, hold public office, or raise their ownchildren.11 These measures were reaffirmed later that decade when a newking decreed that only orthodox Catholics would be allowed to reside inhis kingdom.12 In 638, the baptized Jews of the kingdom’s capital, Toledo,were again accused of apostasy and forced to swear that they would rejectall Jewish customs and stone to death any of their number who failedto do so.13

After a lull in anti-Jewish law-making, in 654 the king Recceswinthissued a series of laws that imposed the death penalty not only for practicingany element of Judaism, but also for thinking any anti-Christian thoughtsor protecting anyone who had knowledge of Jewish practices.14 At the sametime, the baptized Jews of Toledo again swore a public oath admitting thatthey had been practicing Jewish customs and promising to refrain fromdoing so in the future.15 The last chapter of the story opened a generationlater, when another king, Erwig, working with a vitriolic anti-Jewishbishop, Julian of Toledo (himself reputedly of Jewish ancestry),16 issued 28anti-Jewish laws,17 which were subsequently confirmed at the TwelfthCouncil of Toledo in 681.18 They included a new order for all unbaptizedJews to submit to baptism.19 The bulk of the legislation made it clear,however, that baptism did not confirm the Christian identity of Jews ortheir descendants. The laws imposed an elaborate system of social control



for baptized Jews that included restrictions on travel, mandatory attendanceat church on Jewish holidays, confiscation of Jewish literature, and specialindividual written oaths promising to adhere to strictly defined Christianbeliefs and behaviors. More restrictions were added over the next 13 years,until the enslavement of 694. At that point, the series of laws comes toan end, but according to later sources, in 711 the Jews of the kingdomopened the gates of their cities to welcome the Muslim armies as theyinvaded (for bibliography, see García Iglesias 1978, pp. 199–202).

This narrative structure does indeed seem to beg particular questionsabout origins, cause and effect, motivations, and agency. In fact, the endingis almost too well-defined: the building tension in increasingly harshbut apparently ineffectual measures culminates with the accusations andenslavement, only to be followed by the (reported) Jewish aid in thekingdom’s destruction. Such an apparently morally fitting and cataclysmicfinal act naturally turns attention to the story’s opening. How and whydid this drama begin? What was the nature of the central conflict? Whowere the primary protagonists, and what motivated them? Three keymoments stand out in analyses of the beginnings of the story. In 589, thestage was set when Reccared and the Third Council made Catholicunification the sine qua non of the Visigothic state. In that context, itwould seem that the very existence of Jews in the kingdom led toSisebut’s edict of forced baptism ca. 616, which legally marked the Jewishpopulation as the focal point for efforts to achieve that goal. It also seemslogical that the consequences of Sisebut’s actions led, in 633, to theChurch leaders’ simultaneous rejection, of Sisebut’s strategy and affirmationof the baptisms, which identified Jewish forced converts as a permanentthreat to unity. After those opening scenes, for the rest of the centurylaw-makers and polemicists sought to resolve and explain the ‘Jewishproblem’, as some modern works describe it (see, for example, Cazier1979, p. 129; Orlandis 1980; Riesco Terrero 1993), until 694 when Egicaand the Seventeenth Council, in one especially anachronistic turn ofphrase, came up with the ‘final solution’ (García Iglesias 1978, p. 129).

While most scholars would agree on the general outlines of immediatecause and effect in these opening sequences, they have differed widely onthe fundamental nature of the central conflict, and the roles and motivationsof the various protagonists. For instance, the conflict can be understoodas arising from the obstacle that the existence of Jewish communitiesplaced before the rulers’ desire for stability through religious unification(García Iglesias 1977; González Salinero 1999). It can also be seen as aresulting from the theological contradiction between the church’s rejectionof coercion and its assertion of the indelible nature of Christian baptism(Orlandis 1980; González Salinero 2000). Or it can be seen as a chapterin the much longer-term conflict between Judaism and Christianity,which for some authors reaches back into the first century ce (Parkes1934; García Moreno 1993), continued on through the Spanish Inquisition



(Ruano 1972) and implicitly – in secularized, racial forms – into thetwentieth century (Dahan 1983, p. 358).

As far as the protagonists go, the apparent disagreement between Sisebutand Isidore over forced baptism might suggest a more fundamentaldifference in initiative and motivation between ‘church’ and ‘state’. Someauthors have emphasized the role of the kings, suggesting royal greed(O’Callaghan 1975, p. 72), the desire or obligation to emulate the‘caesaropapism’ and anti-Jewish actions of the Byzantine emperors (Rouche1979, pp. 118–119), or other political considerations as the primaryimpetus behind not only Sisebut’s initial forced baptism, but also the laterkings’ reiterations and elaborations. Conversely, the push for unificationwas clearly celebrated and encouraged, if not instigated, by church leaders.The gaps between outbursts of royal legislation may actually indicate adisinclination for active persecution on the part of most Visigothic kings(Parkes 1934, p. 348; Bachrach 1973, 1977). In response to Christian traditionsand Byzantine influence, or to further their own interest in assertingreligious authority, or as some experts have suggested, in response tomounting apocalyptical expectations, ecclesiastical leaders eagerly joinedwith kings in trying to eliminate Judaism and achieve absolute religiousunity (Albert 1976; Gil 1977; García Iglesias 1978, pp. 183–98; Roth 1994,pp. 7–37; Martin 2003, pp. 336–46).

Some scholars have focused on the role of the Jewish communities.These discussions are particularly dependent upon literal readings of thelaws, because of the lack of direct evidence. The virtue of the methodologyis that it can counter the historical marginalization that arises fromreducing the Jewish role to passive victimization.20 Yet, understandingJewish historical agency through measures designed to eliminate it can beeven more problematic. To be sure, the laws seem to reveal much aboutrelations between Christians and Jews, in which Jews appear to haveplayed active and sometimes dominant roles. For instance, one mightconclude that repeated laws against Jews owning Christian slaves, marriagebetween Jewish men and Christian women, and Jews holding public officewere all enacted because these relationships of power not only existed,but – as the laws often stated – Jews took advantage of them to proselytizeand convert Christians (Blumenkrantz 1960, pp. 177–209; González Salinero1999, pp. 137–42). Based on literal readings like this, some authors haveused the full range of anti-Jewish laws to support descriptions of the socialstructure, culture, and economic position of Iberian Jewish communities(Katz 1937; Blumenkrantz 1960; Juster 1976; García Moreno 1993). Forsome, specific characteristics of those communities also help to explainChristian persecution: Jewish wealth and commercial success inspiredChristian envy and greed; the cohesive vertical bonds of Jewish communitiesinterfered with competing Christian hierarchies; the foreign and exclusivenature of Jewish identity intensified Christian determination to eradicateit.21 The reasoning behind some of these formulations might seem logical,



but there are also signs that modern assumptions and stereotypes can seepin to fill evidential gaps. Arguments that assert the causative force ofJewish political and social power, including the possibility of internationalties with other Jewish communities, do not necessarily reflect the influenceof modern anti-Semitic stereotypes and images. But accepting the premisethat anti-Jewish laws were issued in response to real Jewish actions canobscure the Christian constructions of identity embedded in the laws.

The pitfalls of taking the laws at their word may seem obvious, whenit comes to the accusation of an international Jewish conspiracy in 694.22

A more subtle, but perhaps more illuminating example of the difficulties– and possibilities – involved in this approach is an assumption that virtuallyall modern interpretations share about the role of Jewish protagonists inthe story: the repeated laws and increasingly elaborate mechanisms ofsocial control aimed at baptized Jews and their descendants were issuedbecause the forced converts continued to secretly practice Judaism. Thisassumption is central to analyses of the role of the Fourth Council ofToledo, which for many historians created an inextricable practical paradoxby condemning forced baptism but calling for the use of force in assuringthat the baptized did not apostatize (Blumenkrantz 1960; Cazier 1979;González Salinero 2000). It is difficult to disagree with the Fourth Council’sbasic premise that forced conversions were ineffective:

. . . no one should henceforth be forced to believe . . . such men should notbe saved unwillingly but willingly, in order that the procedure of justice shouldbe complete; for just as man perished obedient to the serpent out of his ownfree will, so will any man be saved – when called by the divine grace – bybelieving and in converting his own mind. They should be persuaded toconvert, therefore, of their own free choice, rather than forced by violence.23

Moreover, it seems safe to assume that, as the council went on to assert,‘many’ of the Jews forcibly baptized by Sisebut were, 17 years later,‘practicing Jewish rites . . . and even daring to operate abominablecircumcisions.’24 Yet, the analytical value of that assumption is limited. Itdoes not fully explain why the council focused on free will rather than theAugustinian theology of Jewish witness in its rejection of forced conversion.It does not help in knowing how ‘many’ Jewish apostates there were, orwhy they were considered so great a threat to the Christian faith that theirchildren should be removed and they should be prevented from testifyingin court or holding public office.

Furthermore, assuming that Jewish apostasy was the primary inspirationbehind the council’s pronouncements can divert attention from the factthat the main thrust of the Fourth Council’s anti-Jewish legislation wasnot to criticize or prohibit forced baptism, but to codify its inadequacy asa means for erasing Jewish identity and eliminating the Jewish presence inChristian society. While the apostasy of forced converts may have figuredin the decision-making process leading up to that codification, it did not



determine the decision to enforce the forced baptisms, or the goal ofcreating an exclusively Catholic society, or the means deemed appropriatefor achieving that goal, or the belief that it was possible to do so.

Finally, the concept of widespread ‘crypto-Judaism’ – a term somewriters have borrowed from the scholarship of the Spanish Inquisition(see, for example, González Salinero 2000, pp. 81–84; Drews 2006, p. 304)– as a determining force in the story’s unfolding encourages a concentrationon the possible practical consequences of the Fourth Council’s decrees.Concentrating on the continuing apostasy of baptized Jews de-emphasizesthe influence on subsequent lawmakers exerted by the Fourth Council’scodified identification of forced converts as inauthentic Christians. Oncethe Fourth Council had established that canonical principle, the identityexisted in law no matter what baptized Jews did. Ultimately, failing torecognize the authority of that principle and attributing causative significanceto ‘crypto-Judaism’ can discourage the analysis of how seventh-centurylaw-makers used and modified images of apostatizing baptized Jews intheir constructions of Jewish and Christian religious identities.

Some of the narrative-driven, event-oriented, and positivistic methodsand assumptions discussed above are associated with historical perspectivesnow considered out-moded by many. The literal interpretation of earlymedieval law, for instance, has become increasingly complicated as somescholars have stressed the image-making, ideological, and aspirationalaspects of legislation during this period.25 When applied to anti-Jewishlaw-making, the method is further undermined by interpretations ofmedieval Christian anti-Jewish imagery that have found that it often hadmore to do with Christian identity definition and social anxieties thanwith representing actual Jews or their role in society. The wide-rangingand interdisciplinary scholarship that explores this facet of Christian–Jewishrelations is primarily focused on the later medieval period, for whichthe source material is plentiful.26 Still, the critical perspective on Christianattitudes behind the approach is vital to understanding the lop-sidedVisigothic evidence.

If the literal meaning of an individual law is questionable, what aboutthe narrative as a whole? It seems unlikely that the entire story is a literaryconstruct – whether by the compilers of the Visigothic legal collections,by later transcribers, or by modern historians. It does not seem overlycautious, however, to suggest that certain elements, such as the reports ofJewish aid to invading Muslims and Julian of Toledo’s Jewish ancestry, mayhave been created later as fitting or likely details rather than out of concernfor accuracy. It is clear that the seventh-century compilers themselvessought to structure the sequence of laws in certain ways. For instance,Sisebut’s actual edict of forced baptism is missing from the law codes, andone particularly hostile ecclesiastical rule was either falsely attributed orremoved from its original conciliar context and included out of chronologicalorder in the Hispana (Drews 2002). While the reasons behind these



manipulations are not immediately clear, the processes of choice, catego-rization, and ordering that were involved in redacting and transcribingthese types of compilations should not be underestimated.

Yet, as out-moded as the pitfalls, anachronisms, and stereotypes discussedabove may seem, it is difficult simply to discard the assumptions andmethods that generate them. The laws provide one of the very few placesin the evidence where Visigothic leaders’ interpretations of inheritedtraditions, their theological constructions, and their conceptions of‘holy power’ intersect in any way with their kingdom’s subjects and socialcircumstances. While it may be inappropriate to interpret that intersectionliterally, it seems artificial to insist on an utter separation between laws andsociety. Moreover, the narrative gives shape and meaning to the almostinaccessible actions of seventh-century people. Without some conceptionof cause and effect, origins and outcomes, and motivations and actions,Visigothic anti-Judaism becomes utterly abstract – perhaps meaningfulin longer term theological or canonical developments, but of limitedsignificance in understanding contemporary contexts and consequences, anddifficult to integrate into broader early medieval trends. In other words,interpreting the legislation as purely ideological may help to reconstructthe ideals of seventh-century Christian leaders, but it does very little toilluminate seventh-century people and society. And entirely dismantlingthe narrative structure leaves the evidence in a static landscape that allowslittle if any room for understanding change.

Instead of simply reversing the paradigms, then, it may help to re-evaluatethe object of analysis, re-examine our assumptions, and re-imagine thehistorical project. First of all the concept of a ‘Jewish problem’, whetheror not one actually uses the term, implies a relatively straightforward‘solution’ – if not for the policy-makers and polemicists, than for thehistorian studying them. Approaching the topic as a rational problem tobe solved logically promotes some of the ‘common sense’ explanationsthat seem plausible but leave too much room for anachronistic assumptions.More importantly, human societies are never straightforward, and theseventh century was a period of particular cultural and political variabilityand transformation. Discarding the construction of a rational problem andsolution, and instead assuming a context of fluidity and change surroundingthe Christian law-makers and their subject communities helps relax theunforgiving rigidity of the evidence, and thus brings their world moreinto line with current understandings of the construction of religiousidentity in the rest of the early medieval West.

Second, we can assume that while the laws and law codes are not directreflections of the social circumstances and sequences of events that surroundedtheir promulgation and codification, neither do they represent purely abstractideals in the minds of their authors and editors. Instead, within the largercontext of fluidity and change, the legal evidence can be understood as aborder zone between circumstances and ideals, where Christian leaders



responded to the uncertainties of their society by experimenting withvarying configurations of religious identity drawn partly from their owncommunities, partly from their stores of tradition, and partly from theircontemporary goals, fears, and prejudices (see Drews 2002). Among theinhabitants of this border zone, images of baptized Jews and their descendantsoccupied prominent positions. We find them there individually and incommunities; as traders, travelers, rebels, and international conspirators; asreaders, writers, students, and teachers; as parents and children; and asslave-owners and as slaves. We see them swearing oaths and violating them;attending church and secret Jewish conventicles; losing their privileges andtheir children; bribing officials to avoid persecution; and suffering exile,beatings, dispossession, execution, and enslavement. Their imagined actionscannot constitute historical agency for real baptized Jews, but changes inthe concepts and definitions that law-makers used to construct their imagesdo reflect the range of possibilities for causes and effects, events andactivity. By exploring this territory between the abstract and the concrete,and by examining the boundaries between Christian and non-Christianthat Christian authorities made and remade, it may be possible to tell astory of change over time, and to understand actors and actions, withoutsurrendering the critical distance necessary for recognizing the manipulations,assumptions, and fears involved in constructing the identity of baptizedJews in the Visigothic kingdom. This approach may not help answer thequestion why Visigothic Christian leaders chose to focus their concernsabout religious identity on the Jewish population of their kingdom whileleaders in other kingdoms did not. Finding and exploring this linkbetween the anomalous Visigothic obsession with Jewish religious identitiesand the historical circumstances that gave rise to it may, however, make itpossible not only to understand this particular early medieval story ofhatred and persecution, but also to expand our understanding of theassumptions, concepts, and categories of analysis that other early medievalthinkers and rulers used in talking about and trying to control religiousidentity and difference.

A brief concluding look at one ecclesiastical rule may help to illustratethe possible broader implications of the Visigothic perspective. An undatedseventh-century canon accused baptized Jews of avoiding the baptism oftheir own children by having the children of Christians baptized in theirplace.27 The canon’s authors asserted that in doing so, the baptized Jewskept their children as ‘pagans’. This blurring of traditional religious categorieshas been interpreted as an effort to denigrate Judaism by equating it withpaganism (Drews 2002). On the other hand, it could be that the canons’authors were employing the term ‘pagan’ to classify a new non-Christianbut also non-Jewish religious identity. Either way, the experiment inredefinition speaks to the fluidity of early medieval perceptions of religiousidentities (Pohl 2000) – particularly ‘paganism’, which has been a topic ofrecent discussion among scholars of early Anglo-Saxon England and the



Merovingian and Carolingian kingdoms (e.g., Meens 1994; Wood 2000;Palmer 2007). It also illustrates the dynamic relationship between thatconceptual fluidity and authorities’ efforts to rigidify identities and controlboundaries – a dynamic that played out not only in processes of religioustransformation, but also in other realms of identity construction as well(Hallsall 1998). The fact that this particular effort at identity constructiondoes not seem to have caught on in the Visigothic kingdom may indicate thatfluidity did not mean total elasticity, and under some circumstances effortsto construct and control identities had to conform to traditional categories.

Finally, despite its unusual application of the ‘pagan’ religious identity,the canon focuses on a number of other concepts and categories that werecentral to the vocabulary and imagery of Visigothic anti-Jewish policiesand ideologies. The identity of children of forced Jewish converts wasclearly an ongoing concern for policy-makers; they appear repeatedly inthe law codes and canons. Many other laws also shared this canon’s concernwith unmonitored and secretive relations between Christians and baptizedJews – in this case, expressed as the imagined collusion of Christian parentswho provided baptized Jews with substitute children for baptism. Finally,like many other anti-Jewish laws, the canon instituted new practices toachieve its declared goal, in this case, ensuring a legitimate baptism of thecorrect child: public oaths by the parents, the testimony of neighbors, andmultiple witnesses for the ritual. While it may be impossible to knowwhether baptized Jews were in fact seeking to avoid having their ownchildren baptized by borrowing their Christian neighbors’ children, findingpatterns such as these in the laws and tracing changes in them over thecourse of the seventh century will help us analyze the construction andcontrol of religious identity in the Visigothic kingdom and its relation today-to-day interactions between neighbors and public legal proceedings.How did law-makers understand the roles of children, of neighborlyrelations, of legal procedures, and did these understandings change overtime? Do changes in the laws and their imagery reflect changes in thesociety, or re-assessments of the meaning and constitution of religiousidentity? Asking new questions and suggesting new answers lays a newbasis for understanding the Visigothic effort to erase Jewishness andexploring its significance for other early medieval constructions and/ordestructions of religious identities and difference.

Short Biography

Rachel Stocking studies the history and historiography of the Visigothickingdom, with particular concentration on the period between the Visigoths’conversion to Catholicism in 589, and the invasion of the kingdom byMuslims in 711. Her book, Bishops, Councils, and Consensus in the VisigothicKingdom, 589–633, investigates evidence of local diversity and conflictembedded in the Visigothic assertions of Christian unity and uniformity



that appear in their elaborate compilations of royal and conciliar law. Hercurrent work focuses on Visigothic anti-Judaism and its role in Christianidentity construction and social control. Stocking teaches Early Medieval,Christian, Roman, and World History courses at Southern IllinoisUniversity Carbondale. She holds a BA in History from San FranciscoState University and a PhD in History from Stanford University.

Notes

* Correspondence address: Rachel L. Stocking, MC 4519, Southern Illinois UniversityCarbondale, Carbondale, IL 62901, USA. Email: [email protected].

1 Toledo XVII, canon 8; Linder 1997, p. 537.2 Critical edition in Martínez Díez and Rodríguez 1966–1992.3 See, for example, Cohen, J. 1982, pp. 19–23; Moore 1992, p. 36; Cohen, M. 1994, p. 44;Stow 1992, p. 43. For an opposing view, see Rouche 1979.4 See, for example, Parkes 1976, pp. 14–15; Blumenkrantz 1960; Gil 1977, p. 2; GonzálezSalinero 2000, p. 24; Drews 2006, p. 7; Roth 1994, p. 1; Stow 1992, p. 47. Cazier (1979)presents arguments against Blumenkrantz’s harsh assessment of Visigothic anti-Judaism.5 For discussions of the role of anti-Judaism in the construction of specifically Visigothicidentity, see Martin 2003, pp. 336–46 and Drews 2002, 2006. For reviews, see Stocking 2006,2007. For a general bibliography on recent works on Visigothic history, see Ferreiro 2007.6 Generally, see Stocking 2000, pp. 13–14. On the content of the law code, see King 1972;on conciliar content, see Orlandis & Ramos-Lissón 1986.7 The most famous author of the period is Isidore of Seville. On him and his educationalprogram the fundamental work is Fontaine 1959. See also the articles collected in Fontaine1986.8 See, for example, Drews 2006; Albert 1982; del Valle Rodríguez 1991, 1998. Key textsinclude Isidore of Seville, De fide catolica ex veteri et novo testamento contra Iudaeos; Ildefonsus ofToledo, De virginitate perpetua Sanctae Marie; Julian of Toledo, De comprobatione sextae aetatis libri tres.9 For instance, agreement has been reached that Isidore of Seville did not write the anti-Jewishtreatise Liber de variis quaestionibus adversus iudaeos seu infideles vel plerosque haereticos iudaisantes exutroque Testamento collectus, which is now attributed to an unknown Saragossan author of theearly eighth century. See Díez Merino 1998, pp. 93–4.10 Toledo IV, canon 57; Linder 1997, pp. 486–7.11 Toledo IV, canons 58–66; Linder 1997, pp. 487–91.12 Toledo VI, c. 3, Linder 1997, p. 493.13 Confessio vel professio judaeorum civitatis Toletanae, Linder 1997, pp. 494–500.14 Leges Visigothorum, XII, 2.3–2.16; Linder 1997, pp. 259–78.15 Placitum iudeorum in nomine principis factum, Linder 1997, pp. 278–81.16 Julian’s Jewish ancestry is reported in a source from 754 known as the Continuatio Hispana,or Chronicle of 754. See Collins 2004, p. 103.17 Leges Visigothorum XII, 3.1–3.28; Linder 1997, pp. 284–332.18 Toledo XII, canon 9; Linder pp. 517–21.19 Leges Visigothorum, XII, 3.3, Linder, pp. 292–3.20 For a discussion of the ‘lachrymose conception of Jewish history’, a phrase coined by thehistorian Salo Baron, see Bachrach 1977, pp. vii–x. See also Cohen, M. 1994, pp. xv–xxi.21 The idea of the exclusivity, ‘xenophobia’ and cohesion of Iberian Jewish communities figuresprominently in García Moreno, 1993. A critical discussion of historiographical trends focusingon the causative role of Jewish wealth and commercial dominance appears in García Iglesias1978, pp. 13–30.22 Some authors do argue that this accusation was at least partially based in reality. See, forexample, Juster 1976, p. 283; Gil 1977, pp. 92–102; Bachrach 1973, 30–1; García Moreno1993, pp. 131–2.23 Toledo IV, canon 57; Linder 1997, p. 486.



24 Toledo IV, canon 59; Linder, p. 488.25 See, for example, Wallace-Hadrill 1971, p. 44; Wormald 1979; Stocking 2000. However,Collins (2004, pp. 223–5) argues that the Visigothic codes do not fall into the ‘symbolic’category of early medieval law-making.26 See, for example, Funkenstein 1993; Langmuir 1990; Moore 1992; Depres 1994; Abulafia1995, 1996; Foa 1996; Jordan 1996; Lipton 1999, 2002; Rubin 1999; Narin Van Court 2002. Foran interpretation of Carolingian constructions of pagan religious identities as means to ‘delineatethe parameters of acceptable [Christian] behavior’, see Palmer 2007, p. 413.27 The canon is known as Seville III, canon 10, and has been attributed to a Third Council ofSeville, the records of which have not survived. The council is believed to have been held in624. The Latin text of the canon can be found in Martínez Díez and Rodríguez 1966–1992,vol. 5, pp. 482–5. For a detailed interpretation of the canon that differs from the one presentedhere, see Drews 2002.

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