Gerald of Wales:
Two Cistercian Monks turn Jews (before 1200)
A certain monk of the same order, or rather a certain demoniac in our own times, being
as it were tired of the Catholic faith and worn out with the sweet and light burden of
Christ's yoke, and scorning, at the instigation of the devil, any longer to walk in the
way of salvation. . . . as if phrenetic and mad, and truly turned to insanity, fleeing to
the synagogue of Satan. And to cut short the whole wretched story which we have
dilated upon at great length to show our detestation, at last he caused himself to be
circumcised with the Jewish rite, and as a most vile apostate joined himself, to his
damnation to the enemies of the cross of Christ.
Also on the northern borders of England, in a house of the same order called Geroudon,
a certain brother, likewise in our own days, by a similar error, or rather madness,
presuming to set at naught the part of Christ and reconciling himself with Satan, opposing
and exciting the mind to depravity by his depraved and pestiferous rites which he, the
monk, had renounced with sacred laver and baptismal oath, and again put on his chains from
which he had been freed, subjecting himself to eternal slavery as well as the punishment
of hell. For he, too, fled with ruinous and ruin-bearing ways to Judaism, the home
of damnation and the asylum of this depraved reprobation.
But when that man, known for his distinguished fame and extent of writings, as well as
gifted with wit, Walter Mapes, Archdeacon of Oxford, heard of these two having apostatised
out of that order alone, wondering, he broke out in public into these words,: It is
remarkable, said he, that those two wretches, since they wished to leave their
former faith, as being so perverse and infested with so many poisonous vices, did not
become Christians, adopting a safer and more salubrious plan, as if he would say and
hint, though indirectly and by sidelong words, that men of this order, on account of the
stains of deliberate vice and cupidity, and their faults so manifest and so clearly
unchristian, were not worthy to be called Christians.
But I myself am persuaded that those two wretches did not leave the truth and fly to a
vain shadow with damnable exchange out of mere devotion or desire of increasing their
religion. . . . but because they could no longer bear the harshness and rigour of that
order, and instigated by the spirit of fornication they committed this crime.
Source: Gerald of Wales, Opera (Rolls Series), iv. 139, ed. Joseph Jacobs, The Jews
of Angevin England: Documents and Records (London, 1893), pp. 283-85)
Scanned by Elka Klein
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© Paul Halsall, January 1999