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Brothers from Afar - Rabbinic Approaches to Apostasy and Reversion in Medieval Europe (Paperback)
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Brothers from Afar - Rabbinic Approaches to Apostasy and Reversion in Medieval Europe (Paperback)
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In Brothers from Afar, Ephraim Kanarfogel challenges a long-held
view that those who had apostatized and later returned to the
Jewish community in northern medieval Europe were encouraged to
resume their places without the need for special ceremony or act
that verified their reversion. Kanarfogel's evidence suggests that
from the late twelfth century onward, leading rabbinic authorities
held that returning apostates had to undergo ritual immersion and
other rites of contrition. He also argues that the shift in
rabbinic positions during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was
fundamentally a response to changing Christian perceptions of Jews
and was not simply an internal halakhic or rabbinic development.
Brothers from Afar is divided into seven chapters. Kanarfogel
begins the book with Rashi (1040-1105), the pre-eminent European
rabbinic authority, who favored an approach which sought to smooth
the return of penitent apostates. He then goes on to explain that
although Jacob Katz, a leading Jewish social historian, maintains
that this more lenient approach held sway in Ashkenazic society, a
series of manuscript passages indicate that Rashi's view was
challenged in several significant ways by northern French Tosafists
in the mid-twelfth century. German Tosafists mandated immersion for
a returning apostate as a means of atonement, akin to the procedure
required of a new convert. In addition, several prominent tosafists
sought to downgrade the status of apostates from Judaisim who did
not return, in both marital and economic issues, well beyond the
place assigned to them by Rashi and others who supported his
approach. Although these mandates were formulated along textual and
juridical lines, considerations of how to protect the Jewish
communities from the inroads of increased anti-Judaism and the
outright hatred expressed for the Jews as unrivaled enemies of
Christianity, played a large role. Indeed, medieval Christian
sources that describe how Jews dealt with those who relapsed from
Christianity to Judaism are based not only on popular practices and
culture but also reflect concepts and practices that had the
approbation of the rabbinic elite in northern Europe. Brothers from
Afar belongs in the library of every scholar of Jewish and medieval
studies.
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