Paola Tartakoff, PhD

Professor in the Department of History and the Department of Jewish Studies
Chair of the Department of Jewish Studies
Rutgers University

“My research explores Jewish-Christian relations in Western and Mediterranean Europe during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries through the analysis of published and archival sources in Latin, Hebrew, and romance vernaculars. It builds on the broad interdisciplinary training I received in medieval history, comparative religion, and comparative literature at Harvard and Columbia, where I wrote an undergraduate thesis on the Jewish-Christian Disputations of the Middle Ages (2001) and a dissertation on Jewish conversion in the fourteenth-century Crown of Aragon (2007). Upon receiving my doctorate, I accepted a joint appointment at Rutgers University in the departments of History and Jewish Studies. I have taught in these departments—with most of my courses cross listed between them—since 2007. I am now serving my second term as chair of the Department of Jewish Studies. In recent years, I have increasingly participated in public-facing work combatting antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism, and other forms of bigotry.

Across these experiences, I have been deeply intrigued by the possibilities and processes of personal transformation and especially by the phenomenon of religious conversion. What has it meant, over time, for a Jew to become a Christian, or vice versa? What has conversion meant for the convert, the community they join, and the community they leave behind? To what extent does a convert lose their former identity and adopt the identity of the community they formally join? To what extent does the convert assume an intermediate identity or marginal status? What can we learn from these dynamics about the ways communities understand themselves in relation to others? How do different historical sources—including inquisitorial trial records, chronicles, law codes, popular legends, personal testimonies, and literary texts—obscure and illuminate these aspects of human experience in different times and places?

These questions undergird my first two books (University of Pennsylvania Press, Middle Ages Series, 2012 and 2020) as well as my current research project. All three projects resemble each other also in each foregrounding a mysterious protagonist—an otherwise unknown historical figure mentioned in long-forgotten archival records who lived on the interstices of Jewish and Christian society.

My first book, Between Christian and Jew: Conversion and Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1250–1391, investigates the story of a young man from mid-fourteenth century rural Catalonia who sought out death at the stake to atone for what he came to see as the great sin of his conversion from Judaism to Christianity. Having conducted archival research in Catalonia, Valencia, and Aragon, I analyzed records in Latin, Hebrew, and medieval Catalan to make three historiographical interventions: First, reversing earlier assumptions that Jewish conversion to Christianity was extremely rare in Spain prior to the pan-Iberian massacres and mass forced conversions of Jews of 1391, this book documents a steady stream of conversions between 1250 and 1391 and shows that these were motivated primarily by a desire to escape personal hardships. Second, overturning the view that the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition (1478) inaugurated the fateful prosecution of Jewish converts, it demonstrates that, far earlier, the Papal Inquisition prosecuted Jewish converts and Jews suspected of bringing them back to Judaism, and it provides the first thorough account of a trial of Jews by the Papal Inquisition. Third, investigating Jewish responses to conversion to Christianity in Spain prior to 1391, Between Christian and Jew analyzes the rhetorical tools and ritual practices that Jews used to bring converts back to Judaism, showing that Jewish attitudes toward converts were divided and inextricably linked to Jewish attitudes toward Christians and Christianity. Laying bare the intensity and reciprocity of hostility between Christians and Jews in Spain during a period commonly celebrated as one of interfaith harmony, this monograph reveals that notorious events of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in fact represented an intensification of preexisting behaviors and patterns of thought. 

My second book, Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe, seeks to understand the story of a five-year old boy from Norwich England, whom Jews were accused of having forcibly circumcised to bring him into the Jewish community. In so doing, this book explores the seemingly improbable phenomenon of Christian conversion to Judaism—an act punishable by death—across medieval western Europe. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including unpublished archival documents from England, France, Germany, and Spain; rabbinic responsa; Jewish and Christian chronicles; biblical and talmudic commentaries; inquisitorial records; documents from the Cairo Geniza; Jewish liturgical poetry; Jewish folktales; Christian moral exempla; papal and episcopal correspondence; and tombstone inscriptions—it brings to light some forty conversions of European Christians to Judaism during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (in addition to the roughly forty that were already known to have transpired during the eleventh and twelfth centuries), and it shows that these converts included men and women, slaves, Christian commoners, and learned Christian clergy. More broadly, this bookexposes the bi-directionality of Jewish-Christian conversion in medieval Europe, not only as some Christians converted to Judaism and many more Jews converted to Christianity, but also as converts in both directions frequently tried to return to their communities of origin. This book also demonstrates that Christian authorities were aware of conversions to Judaism, that this knowledge led to the prosecution of Jews, and that the accusation that Jews proselytized Christians belonged to the same constellation of anti-Jewish libels as the better-known accusations of ritual murder, host desecration, and well-poisoning. All of these portrayed Jews as intent on harming Christ and his flock, and they were cast in the same narrative framework. Moreover, like the better-known libels, accusations of Jewish proselytizing portrayed Jews as threatening Christians’ bodily integrity. In the eyes of ecclesiastical authorities, converting Christians to Judaism not only corrupted Christians spiritually; it also wounded Christian men physically through circumcision.

My current project, Stories of Black-to-White Transformation Across the Medieval Pyrenees, continues to probe how medieval people sought to make sense of their similarities and differences. Inspired by the story of a Jewish woman from southern France, whose infant son was said to have turned from black to white at baptism, it investigates the cross-fertilization of narratives about Muslim and Jewish conversions around the medieval Pyrenees. I am eager to delve into this research and discover new perspectives on religious transformation, with a fresh focus on the historical meanings of blackness and whiteness and the relationship between identity and physiology.”

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