Broken Bread: Latrine Blasphemy, Host Desecration, and 13th-Century Indecision Regarding Christ’s Physicality

I. Introduction

Christianity is a reconfiguration of the body, a doxastic revolution in the material. The central theological argument—that a human God walked among men, incarnated in their same anatomical form and sharing in their same fettered mortality—is nothing short of a metaphysical sea change: the gap between human and divine bridged, the physical body an instantiation of rather than fall from godliness.^[1]“The single biggest distinction [from Judaism] in earliest Christianity was its insistence on worshiping a person who once walked the earth,” a practice that, at best, had no analog in the Jewish religious lexicon and, at worst, embodied a violation of the Jewish ban on the apotheosis of human persons.^[2] Christians contemplate human Jesus as God Himself, worthy of cultic devotion, invocation during church rituals, and prayer offerings.^[3] Steeped into this Christian binitarian pattern of worship is the nature of Jesus’ body.^[4]

The physicality of Christ’s body and its Resurrection are substantively linked to Christian belief: “the four authors of the Gospels definitely compete with one another in illustrating the tangible, substantial dimension of this resurrection explicitly.” ^[5]The material historicity of the Resurrection was “an indispensable precondition for the recognition of [the Incarnation’s] significance for salvation.”^[6] The material and historical reality of the resurrected body completed the narrative arc of divine redemption. Jesus’ material physicality is not merely an ideological and eschatological charade, but a claim of facticity integral to the practice of Christian worship. In other words, Christ’s “earthly three-dimensionality” is not a debasement of the Christian paragon, but a consummation of his paramountcy.^[7]

The physicality of Christ’s body is also functionally relevant in Christian belief: its alleged empirical and material veracity is an attestation of the truth of Jesus’ proclamations and, thus, the entire Christian enterprise. Consider the ultimatum of Thomas the Apostle, or Didymus, in the Gospel of John: “Unless I see the nail marks in his [Jesus’] hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe [in the Resurrection].”^[8] When Jesus appears to the disciples, he instructs Thomas: “‘Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.’ Thomas said to him, ‘My Lord and my God!’” ^[9] Thomas ultimately trusts in the professed truths of Christ and his Resurrection, but only after engaging with his physical body; it is proof by laceration, tactile testimony. And while Jesus concludes that “‘blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed,’” earlier in the chapter he effectively employs the same evidentiary tactic: “He [Jesus] showed them [the disciples] his hands and side.

The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.”^[10] In the Christian biblical tradition, the body of Christ, on the material and tangible level, is a dispositive verification of his Paschal Mystery. The revolution of the body is proven by Christ’s body.

Such major transfigurations in eschatological and ecclesiastical understanding are not effectuated all at once. Accordingly, Christian doxastic commitments to the material and physical body of Christ have not held consistent across time; the theological principle has vacillated and been debated.^[11] This paper focuses on the writings of Gilbert Crispin, Odo of Tournai, and Anselm of Canterbury to review how materiality theology ebbed and flowed between the 10th and 13th centuries. It also considers Aggadat Bereshit, a 10th-century homiletic Midrash on Genesis that contained multiple anti-Christian polemical passages, to provide a tonal predecessor to the 13th-century Jewish-Christian theological disputes discussed at length.

A theological vacuum makes possible the weaponization of faith. Although most of the Christian tradition acknowledges that “God” as an entity is beyond mortal understanding, “many people of faith go on to claim great certainty about the will of ‘God,’ and to punish those who do not see things in the same way.”^[12] Absence of concrete religious commitments worsens this potential for social abuse: extempore alterations in the “will of God” lend a theological muscle and divine legitimacy to fundamentally areligious social otherization. The variability in Christian claims of Jesus’ physicality proved no different. Inconsistent citations or rejections of the principle of Christ’s material body enabled Christians to hide antisemitic attacks under the veneer of celestial instruction or to rebut anti-Christian theological criticisms by Jewish authors. This relationship can be cogently demonstrated by examining the role that Christ’s physicality played in latrine blasphemies and host desecration accusations of the 13th-century.

Latrine blasphemy was the purported Jewish association of Christian icons—particularly Jesus and Mary—with the grotesque elements of human existence: feces, semen, bodily fluids, excrement.

Such blasphemy was presented either through physical conduct, like disposing of Christian religious paraphernalia in outhouses, or polemical writing, like excerpts of the Talmud depicting Jesus “immersed in boiling excrement.”^[13] Anti-Chrisitan latrine blasphemy performances and texts rhetorically employed Christian commitment to Jesus’ material humanity to question the facticity of Jesus’ self-identification as God. Here, Jesus’ physicality was an intellectual blind spot in Christian thought that Jews used to their theological advantage: why would an omnipotent God submit Himself to the vulgarity of the human condition? In short, articulation of Jesus’ physicality had anti-Christian applications. This paper focuses on latrine blasphemies wielded against Jesus, particularly those found in the Talmud (as disputed in the Vikuah Debate of Rabbi Yehiel of Paris in 1240), in the Teshuvot ha-Minim of 1260, and in the 13th-century Sefer Nizzahon Vetus.

Host desecration was the charge that “Jews would torture and seek to destroy consecrated Eucharistic hosts.”^[14] The theological substrate in which host desecration claims were situated was the centuries-long definitional clarification of Christ’s body, finished by the end of the 13th century: “the true body of Christ was now the Eucharist; the mystical body of Christ was the Church; and both were embodiments of the historical body of Christ on the cross.”^[15] Host desecration narratives perpetuated the archetypal Jewish sin (killing Christ, or deicide) by emphasizing the physical truth of Jesus’ body and the Eucharist’s material equivalence with that body. Here, Jesus’ physicality was a justification for antisemitic attacks. In short, articulation of Jesus’ physicality had anti-Jewish applications. This paper focuses on transubstantiation text from the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 and Florentine banker Giovanni Villani’s account of host desecration in 1290 Paris.

There was an inconsistency in the practical implications of Christians maintaining Jesus’ material, bodily, and physical facticity. The same contention necessary for host desecration accusations to carry religious weight—that Christ’s body is physical and human—opened Christians up to the rhetorical attacks of latrine blasphemy. How did Christians, before the question of Christ’s material facticity was conclusively resolved, mediate this tension? This paper argues that 13th-century Christians gerrymandered ad hoc commitments to or rejections of Jesus’ materiality to justify antisemitic attacks and tropes. The case studies are latrine blasphemy and host desecration. This paper limits its historical scope to the 13th century for three reasons. Firstly, the 13th century was rife with primary sources that presented or responded to latrine blasphemies. Secondly, the charge of host desecration “does not appear until the end of the 13th century.”^[16] Thirdly, the doctrine of transubstantiation—which calcified belief in Jesus’ physicality by incorporating it into Eucharistic practice—was not defined until the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, read as “a sine qua non of orthodoxy” until after 1300, or dogmatized until Period II of the Council of Trent in 1551^[17]. This absence of a theological commitment either way lent flexibility to the debate over Jesus’ materiality.

II. Claims of Jesus’ Physicality Across Time: From Ancients to Anselm

The issue of Jesus’ physical facticity has maimed the Christian tradition since its outset and generated enduring dispute. “Ancient theologians insisted upon the unimpaired completeness of the human nature of Christ” because Christ could redeem only that which he possessed. ^[18]Ancient Christology was constructed to place the saving work of Christ in his historical figure and the activities of his flesh, the rationale being that Jesus could only bring about real salvation if he bridged the human-divine gap by sharing in our humanity. ^[19]Ancients contemplated Jesus’ human nature as the metaphysical instrument through which Christ brought “incorruptible divine nature into such organic relations with human nature that the latter may be deified.”^[20] In this flavor of the Christian tradition, the suffering, poverty, and weakness of Jesus’ life were to be cited not as evidence to deny his identity as the omnipotent God of Exodus and of the Torah, but as evidence to clarify this God’s unconditional love. While Christ’s physicality was an elucidation of the Torah God’s character, His divine identity remained the same as a matter of substance. Christ delineated, but did not change, Yahweh.

Furthermore, canonical scripture accentuated the import of Christ’s materiality in the Passion. The physical and human properties of Christ’s flesh comprised its redemptive promise. In the Gospel of John’s Last Supper account, Jesus avowed that:

Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them.^[21]

The language here was distinctively physical: “flesh,” “blood,” “eats” (whose initial linguistic form, τρώγω, was used in classical Greek of animals)^[22]. The diction extends the claim beyond the narrative and symbolic to the gastronomical: Christ’s flesh is bread, the perfection of the edible Exodus manna, because “whoever feeds on this bread will live forever,” unlike the “ancestors [who] ate manna and died.”^[23] Inspecting the use of “flesh and blood” furthers this exegesis. This linguistic unit occurs elsewhere in the New Testament and in rabbinic sources to mean human.^[24] Its application in the Gospel of John concludes that eating Jesus’ flesh and blood is “to accept his true humanity.”^[25]

But a concurrent philosophical pessimism towards human life complicated the physicality thesis: “the evil from which man needs to be saved is grounded in his ‘nature,’” which is inherently corruptible.^[26] This doctrine of innate human depravity impelled Christians to deemphasize the natural human frailties of Christ: “the human nature of Jesus, linking him to this world of evil, was so modified that in orthodox Christology he is not a genuinely human person.”^[27] This inconsistency cut deep at the Christian doctrinal formulation. If God must descend into an ignominious condition to suppose the status of human life, “that life is so discredited that it cannot play a positive part in the experience of salvation.”^[28] Docetist and kenotic theological strains—the former contending that Christ’s body was phantasm rather than human, the latter rationalizing that a human corpus would spoil God’s divinity—perennially surfaced in the Christian doctrine. Should Christ be rendered physically amorphous, an impersonal metaphysical concept, or a human man? Is divinity made impotent by incarnation? Is God’s assumption of the manacles of human fragility a Christian theological flaw, or might the acceptance of that yoke be the whole point?^[29]

Multiple Church councils throughout history sought to decisively resolve this indecision, from Nicaea to Chalcedon.^[30]

During the High Middle Ages, Jewish authors seized this doxastic vulnerability to call into question the durability of the Christian theological formula; Christ’s physicality was a point of theological contention. Jews compared the theses of Christian materialists and physicality exponents to the Torah citations in rabbinic compositions and Midrashim to disprove foundational Christian postulations. 13th century conspiratorial and absurdist tensions between Christians and Jews, like the latrine blasphemy and host desecration discussed in Parts III and IV of this paper, were positioned in the wake of substantive theological tensions. In order to evaluate the descent of religious argumentation into the ad hominem during the 13th century, one must examine the preceding era of intellectualism. This paper will review: the Aggadat Bereshit, a 10th-century homiletic Midrash on the Book of Genesis that contained two anti-Christian passages; Norman monk Gilbert Crispin’s Disputation of a Jew with a Christian from the 1090s; Anselm of Canterbury’s writings from the early 12th century; and Odo of Tournai’s Disputation with the Jew Leo, Concerning the Advent of Christ, the Son of God. This part of the paper will inspect the changes in both content and tone of Jewish-Christian debates regarding Christ’s materiality between the 10th and 13th centuries.

The Aggadat Bereshit (AB) was a late rabbinic homiletic Midrash from the 10th century. It followed the sequence of Genesis and was composed of 84 chapters, each one a self-contained homily. AB was divided into 28 three-chapter units: a homily on Genesis, a homily on the Prophets (Nevi’im), and a homily on the Writings (Ketuvim).^[31] “Anti-Christian utterances are to be found in Jewish literature in the Middle Ages more likely than in the earlier Rabbinic literature,” and AB was one of the earliest accounts of a medieval Jewish text with an anti-Christian polemical element.^[32] AB contained two major anti-Christian polemical statements that undermined the idea of Jesus as physical God: AB 27A and AB 31C. The Midrash also contained references to Esau or Edom, “a well-known rabbinic euphemism for Rome, whether pagan or Christian.”^[33] AB is relevant to the analysis of this paper insofar as it demonstrates Jewish skepticism of the physicality thesis and provides context for 13th-century argumentative conflicts between Jews and Christians. Moreover, AB was “an intermediary form between classical rabbinic homiletic Midrashim and medieval Jewish homilies” from the 13th and early 14th centuries.^[34] To understand AB is to understand the literary precursor of the 13th-century texts more immediately relevant to this paper’s historical scope.

The body of Chapter 27’s homily called back to the “Two Powers in Heaven,” a “heretical idea which surfaces throughout rabbinic literature from Tannaitic times” that there exist multiple deities, including a son of God as proclaimed by the “wicked Babylonians.”^[35] While this passage does not explicitly name Jesus or Christianity, “it is clear that they contain a hidden polemic against Christianity, which is the only significant religion that has as a major article of faith that God has a son.”^[36] Additionally, the biblical verses that comprise the midrash—Ps. 110:1, Dan. 3:25, and Zec 13:8.—“are known to have played a role in the history of polemics between Judaism and Christianity since its early beginnings.” ^[37]In short, the author reproaches Christians who commit the same Two Powers heresy of the old Bablyonians: believing that God has a son.

Chapter 31’s pericope verse was from Genesis, specifically on the Binding of Isaac, or Aqedah: “God tested Abraham^[38].” ^[38]The later part of the homily continued the narrative introduced by the pericope: “When he [Abraham] came to slaughter him [Isaac], the Holy One immediately felt compassion, and cried: Do not lay your hand on the body^[39].” ^[39]The anti-Christian critique took the form of a logical comparison. God had already shown demonstrable compassion for someone else’s son, as “he [God] could not see him [Isaac] in pain” and thus rescinded the sacrifice command. If God would He not have allowed his own son to be killed, if He would have had one.”^[40] Here, Christ would represent a deviation from Yahweh, a change in His character and dispositions. The peroration resolves, then, that “there is one [son] and there is no second, he does not have a son or brother.”^[41] And elsewhere in the Torah, it is alternatively concluded that “Israel is my firstborn son^[42].”^[42] Interpretation of the Aqedah played a notable role in the history of Jewish-Christian polemics.^[43] AB continued the tradition, specifically pinpointing a weakness in Christian theology: is Christ the physical, human son of God? Is he a son of flesh like Isaac is to Abraham? AB preemptively chastised this interpretation before it became official Church teaching.

AB sat in a literary liminal space and acted as a junction between rabbinic and medieval polemics. The “anti-Christian polemic of Jews seems to have become more aggressive and more explicit when pressure from Christians became stronger,” including in 11th-13th century Ashkenaz, 12th-13th century France, and 14th century Spain. ^[44]The divine nature and sonship of Christ were common themes of rabbinic literature, and they were carried into the medieval polemics next reviewed^[45]. The distinction was tonal: anti-Christian Jewish writings from the 11th century and onward awerere “bold, fearless, and direct” and “exhibit[ed] the same courage and determination as that exhibited by Jewish representatives at the disputations in Paris, Barcelona, and Tortosa.”^[46] After AB, polemics progressively grew more rhetorically vicious, culminating with the impertinence of 13th-century latrine blasphemy and host desecration.

Norman monk and abbot of Westminster Abbey Gilbert Crispin’s Disputation of a Jew with a Christian—which dates to the 1090s—demonstrated medieval polemics’ continued interest in Christ’s physical nature, creation, and sonship. Disputation was a putative conversation between Crispin and members of the London Jewish community who immigrated from Mainz. Unlike the japing and derisive religious-argumentative literature of the 13th century, it was “presented in a respectful manner.” ^[47]The argument was “civil in both directions and the Jew [was] not made into a caricature.”^[48] In Crispin’s own words, “[the Jew’s] objections were consequent and logical.”^[49]

The “Disputation” directly interrogated the question of whether God became a physical, fleshly man in the form of Christ. “The Jew” wondered:

What reason, what scriptural authority is there, that I should believe that God can become a man, or come forth as a man already created? If there is no transmutation in God nor any shadow of change how could it be believed that so great a change could occur in him that God could become man, the creator a creature, and the incorruptible corrupted?^[50]

Crispin’s response as “The Christian” pulled from “the scriptural authorities” to prove that “God was made man and was seen by men,” relying on Baruch: “Jeremiah the prophet speaks thus: ‘This is our God, and none will be likened to him. He has found the whole way of knowledge, and gave it to Jacob his son and Israel his elect: after this he was seen on earth and conversed with men^[51].’^[51]” Christ has not changed God because he is God. By the eleventh century, Christ’s physical humanity had become an overt point of debate at the high theological level. Lacking any conclusive commitments, this segment of Christian thought was a bona fide morass that attracted Jewish theological resistance. While “the theological debates of the secular schools” in the 11th century compelled a close inspection of the Incarnation, so too did “the criticisms of Christian doctrine coming from the growing Jewish communities in western Europe.”^[52] But, until the 13th century, Christian polemical responses exhibited decorum.

Benedictine monk Odo of Tournai and Anselm of Canterbury’s works were emblematic of this increasing Christian awareness of “Jewish arguments from Jewish polemical literature against Christianity.”^[53] In his A Disputation with the Jew, Leo, Concerning the Advent of Christ, the Son of God, Odo probed the physical facticity of Christ’s humanity in the form of a dialogue with a Jew. Still, the Disputation did not provide a polemical expression of Christian anti-Judaism, but instead depicted Leo as an authentic argumentative opponent^[54]. Leo articulated concern with Christ’s physicality:

You say that God was conceived within his mother’s womb, surrounded by a vile fluid, and suffered enclosure within this foul prison for nine months when finally, in the tenth month, he emerged from her private parts (who is not embarrassed by such a scene!).^[55]

If Jesus was God, by consequence God grew in the confines of a fetid womb and interacted with unclean things: “genitalia, viscera, and excrement.”^[56] This line of reasoning served as the foundations for the latrine blasphemies launched in the 13th century, but rather than enhancing a tone of derision and sacrilege, Odo presented it from the mouth of a reasonable Jew in the context of a respectful debate. Odo peddled a formulaic Christological response common among physicality exponents: Christ “remains uncontaminated and pure,” there is “nothing unclean but sin,” there is nothing “more holy, more clean, more pure than the virgin from whom was assumed what God became.” ^[57]Odo verbalized a tepid commitment to Christ as physical, offering more of an apologetic proposition clarifying how God could have been man rather than an explanation of why He must have been. The principal difference between this disputation and the texts of the 13th century was its refined and courteous tone.

Another example of Jewish theological resistance that initiated Christian refutation was fellow Benedictine monk Anselm of Canterbury’s polemic on the Incarnation, Why God Became Man (Cur Deus Homo). Crispin’s debate with London Jews brought the issue of the Incarnation into the public, and Anselm visited him during the autumn of 1092 at the height of this dispute a few years before beginning Cur Deus Homo^[58]. ^[58] Jews questioned how the Incarnation—with God’s concomitant abasement, divine humiliation, and human suffering—could be squared with His omnipotence and impregnable stability.^[59] Jesus could not have been God, or else the “supreme indignities of Christ’s death” would dishonor God’s grace.^[60] Anselm rejected the theory that to believe in Christ’s humanity—that he “was born of a woman,” “grew up nurtured on milk and human food,” and “was subject to weariness, hunger, thirst, scourging”—was to inflict insult on God.^[61] Anselm wrote that to position Christ’s material humanity at the foundation of worship was to “wholeheartedly [give] him thanks and praise, and [proclaim] the ineffable, profundity of his mercy.”^[62]

More important than the content of his treatise, however, was the practice employed in his preface. Anselm described the enemies against whom he was writing as “unbelievers, deriding us for our simplicity, object[ing] that we are inflicting injury and insult on God when we assert that he descended into a woman’s womb.”^[63] This description of the enemy “could only have referred to the Jews” because they were the only historically documented religious group to reject the Incarnation on the grounds that it represented God’s humiliation.^[64] As polemical culture raced into the 13th century, this practice of identifying enemies in order to confute their ideas emerged as a “common didactic method.”^[65] This was largely due to the “creation of a ‘hermeneutical Jew’” who provoked the Christian religious design and was met with swift Christian refutations. This imagined character, who is seen in Crispin and Odo’s dialogues, was solidified by the 12th and 13th centuries.^[66] The decline of polite debates like Crispin’s and Anselm’s was linked to the calcification of this “imagined Jew” argumentative technique. And by the 13th century, polemical culture descended into the heightened hostility that made possible latrine blasphemy and host desecration.^[67] This was because of an increased belligerence of western Christendom toward Jews, the propagation of Christian counter-responses to a larger audience, and the development of direct anti-Jewish theological critiques.^[68]

Cur Deus Homo is relevant to this paper’s analysis because its tonality shows an emotive continuity between 11th- and 13th-century polemics. Despite a streak of Christian scholasticism between these two centuries, by the 13th century there still persisted the old fear that “the enemies of Christendom were somehow better prepared for an intellectual duel than the Christians.”^[69] The concern of being one-upped yielded aggressive rhetorical play. Over time, the Christian understanding of Jews as a theological foe—one that quietly flexed its muscles in AB, was imagined amiably by Crispin, and was expressly but innocuously denounced by Anselm—deteriorated from inexplicit and furtive to clamoring and combative. It is unwise to assume that the anti-Jewish social ostracism imposed by Christian rulers between the 11th and 13th centuries, including expulsions from Mainz and France and the First Crusade, rendered Jews “too remote from ordinary life to be thought dangerous, or worthy of refutation by Christian apologists.”^[70] Continued reports of conversions to Judaism and the growing association of Jews with anti-Christian religious debate primed more callous theological contention^[71]. And so long as the Church refrained from resolving the physicality and materiality questions of the Incarnation posed by Jewish thinkers, there was ample argumentative fodder. By the 13th century, the spark had become a bonfire.

III: Latrine Blasphemy and the Anti-Christian Applications of Physicality

The culture of balanced logic that used to mark Jewish-Christian religious disputes, like those of Crispin and Odo and Anselm, eroded by the 13th century. Polemicists began to channel the same theological critiques against the material Incarnation through more informal and inflammatory mediums that emphasized the impurity of the body. The lack of Christian allegiance to any coherent belief in the physicality of Christ enabled both Jews and Christians to recycle past scriptural interpretations on the matter to their practical advantage. In the marketplace of heresy, Janus-faced theologies are invaluable capital. Jews operationalized Christian claims of Jesus’ materiality and physical humanity to undermine his facticity as God. But, unlike the “unbelievers” chastised in Anselm’s preface who constrained their incredulity to rational and level-headed discourse, 13th-century Jewish authors applied a coarse impertinence in the form of latrine blasphemy.

Latrine blasphemy personalized and instantiated Jews’ same sanctity concerns with Christ’s materiality posed in Crispin, Odo, and Anselm’s works^[72]. Why was the Incarnation necessary? Did it undermine the impassibility and holiness of God by burying Him in the excreta of human materiality? Human self-abasement is inherently derogatory, so as Leo proclaimed in Odo’s Disputation, to declare physicality was to “attribute to God what is most unbecoming, which we [Jews] would not do without great embarrassment.”^[73] In anti-Christian latrine blasphemies, Christian commitment to Jesus’ material humanity was employed by Jewish writers to question the facticity of Jesus’ self-identification as God. Materiality and physicality opened Christians up to rhetorical attack. Jewish latrine blasphemy was borne out of “a basic difference in attitudes toward the body” between Jews and Christians.^[74] Jews associated Mary and Jesus with bodily waste to parody and criticize the Christian thesis that “its sancta, though human, are really spiritual.”^[75] Cultural practices and religious dispositions do not overturn instantaneously. Accordingly, some 13th-century polemics maintained an air of rectitude. In the Teshuvot ha-Minim of 1260, a Jewish polemical interpretation of the New Testament, rabbinic authors instrumentalized exegesis to cast their doubts on Christ’s physicality. How is an incarnated and visible God consistent with Yahweh’s Exodus command that “^[76]man may not see me and live^[76]?” ^[76]If it is true that “all men are liars” (Ps.

116:11) and “man cannot be God and lie” (Num. 23:19), by syllogism Jesus could not have been God^[77]. Logic, not offense, was the vehicle.

But the rhetoric of other polemics progressively grew edgier. In Sefer Nizzahon Vetus, an anonymous 13th-century Jewish apologetic piece that documented Jewish rejection of the Incarnation, the diction was more acerbic and the imagery more visceral. The unnamed author wondered:

Consequently, how could this man be God, for he entered a woman with a stomach full of feces who frequently sat him down in the privy during the nine months, and when he was born he came out dirty and filthy, wrapped in a placenta and defiled by the blood of childbirth and impure tissue.^[78]

The fleshly disguise represented a break from the purity and sanctitude of God, primarily because of its “association with what the Torah regards as stringent impurities,” particularly childbirth by a menstruating woman^[79]. The argument used a distinctively negative physical imagery: “feces,” “dirty,” “filthy,” “defiled,” “menstruant,” “impure.” Whereas the Jewish arguments against the Incarnation in disputations and critiques prior to the 13th century chose to cite grotesqueness as an empirical, self-evident theory, Sefer Nizzahon Vetus marked the developing practice of detailing the concrete grotesqueness of the human material condition.

The public Vikuah Debate of Rabbi Yehiel of Paris in the spring of 1240 served as an escalation in Christian response to latrine blasphemy. Friar Nicholas Donin accused the Talmud of containing “blasphemies against Jesus,” specifically that “‘the Talmud says that Jesus is in hell, and his punishment is to be immersed in boiling excrement. (Turning to the Queen and speaking in French.)

This is in order to make us Christians stink.’”^[80] This erosion of propriety happened not just on the written level, but earlier on the behavioral level. Rigord, the royal biographer in the Court of

12th-century King Phillip Augustus of France, rationalized the kingdom’s expulsion of Jews because one threw Christian religious paraphernalia—“a gold cross marked with gems, a book of the Gospel decorated with gold and precious stones in an extraordinary manner, silver cups, and other vessels”—“into the deep pit where he used to relieve himself (for shame!).”^[81] This demonstrates the positive feedback loop between the force of Jewish anti-Christian rhetoric and persecution by western Christendom: as monarchical and temporal political ostracism of Jews expanded, anti-Christian Jewish polemics grew more fierce, which rendered Jews more attractive political targets. Correspondingly, the 13th-century Sefer Hasidim, an assortment of rabbinic exempla that outlined principles of ascetic behavior for Jews, advised “that Jews not insult Christian icons by eliminating on them, indicat[ing] that the issue was a live one and that Jews were debating it.”^[82] Latrine blasphemies generated one of two responses among Christians: 1) a reneging on the physicality thesis and internalization of rabbinic practices, or 2) a commitment to the physicality thesis and redirection of blasphemies towards Jews. This ad hoc flexibility was afforded due to the fact that physicality and materiality had yet to be conclusively affirmed in Church teaching.

Due to the argumentative pressures of Jewish latrine blasphemies, some Christians re-evaluated their already transient commitments to Jesus’ materiality in religious practice. Christians were attentive to Jewish concerns with the materiality of Christ’s body and that of the associated Eucharist, typically voiced by alluding to excreta. Christians correspondingly “tried to remove any association of bodily elimination of ingested sacred symbols” and de-physicalized Eucharistic practice^[83]. 13th-century theologians argued that the host became “‘not bodily food but food of the soul; not of the flesh but of the heart’” as to prevent the digestion of the Eucharist wafer.^[84] In some segments of Christian religious thought, the pressures of latrine blasphemy compelled the internalization of Jewish theological principles. The rabbinic tradition regarding manna rejected physical digestion, in the same way Christians—post-latrine blasphemy—“spiritualized the eaten host by denying that it is subject to physiological processes.”^[85]

Other Christians weaponized the physicality thesis to attack Jews and justify antisemitic violence. Some Christians committed to Jesus’ material facticity despite Jewish accusations of humiliating God. To exonerate themselves, Christians argued that Jews were the ones who “dishonored God in the Crucifixion.”^[86] This verbalization of Jewish deicide was the fulcrum of host desecration accusations. After hearing latrine blasphemies, some Christians concluded that the relevant part of Christ’s physicality, specifically the Crucifixion, was not that he “was subject to weariness, hunger, thirst, scouring, crucifixion between thieves, and death.”^[87] It was instead that Jews “wickedly conspired [in Christ’s death]” and are consequently “the slaves of those whom Christ’s death set free at the same time that it enslaved them.^[88]” In other words, Christians flipped the broader theological accusation voiced by latrine blasphemies—the humiliation of God—on Jews themselves. By the end of the 13th century, Christians also flipped the content of latrine blasphemies onto their initial Jewish articulators by “associating Jews, women, and other marginal groups with feces and latrines.”^[89] If Christians committed to Christ’s physicality, rather than retracting from it, they used Jews’ own words against them. In the process, Christian theologians vended a theory of intergenerational Jewish guilt and an aesthetic of Jewish ugliness to vindicate their antisemitic tropes and violence.

Latrine blasphemy demonstrated the danger inherent in Christians’ lack of a sound theological doctrine regarding the physicality and materiality of Christ. Christians rejected or affirmed belief in the facticity of the Incarnation in response to latrine blasphemies of Jewish authors. In rejecting the physicality of Christ, Christians internalized Jewish rabbinic principles about the digestion of spiritual bread (manna and Jesus) and undermined the foundations of the contemporaneous host desecration accusations covered in Part IV of this paper. In affirming the physicality of Christ, Christians flipped the script, charging Jews with divine opprobrium and relating Jews to latrine filth. In short, the inherent theological inconsistency when it came to Christ’s materiality, the inability for Christians to make up their mind regarding Christ’s physical facticity, and the allowance of case-by-case resolution to these questions facilitated antisemitic attacks. The absence of concrete theology brought about violence.

IV. Host Desecration and the Anti-Jewish Applications of Physicality

The same enunciation of Christ’s physicality that exposed Christians to latrine blasphemy was the necessary hinge of host desecration charges. If Jesus was not materially human, how else could the host be deemed metaphysically sacred and destruction of that host construed as perpetual Jewish deicide or something substantively sinful? Host desecration could only be understood as actionable destruction of Christ’s body if Christ’s body was in fact material and that materiality fully embodied in the Eucharist. The accusation that Jews desecrated consecrated hosts was a re-expression of deicide.^[90] This paper reviews the transubstantiation language from the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 and Florentine banker Giovanni Villani’s account of host desecration in 1290 Paris.

During the 13th century, the host began to take up divine contours. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 extended an understanding of Christ’s materiality to the host by defining, but not canonizing, the doctrine of transubstantiation. This drove an increased interest in the Eucharist as an object of worship.^[91] The Council’s Confession of Faith declared the working theory of transubstantiation, that:

His [Jesus’] body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine, the bread and wine having been changed in substance, by God's power, into his body and blood, so that in order to achieve this mystery of unity we receive from God what he received from us.^[92]

For the bread and wine to be the genuine body and blood of Christ, Christ had material body and blood that, upon invocation, can be imposed upon the Eucharistic species. Transubstantiation was an endorsement of physicality; it ensured that Christ’s physical body could be materialized in perpetuity. Bread becomes flesh, meaning that Christ was fleshly in the first place. The paramountcy of physicality to the development of transubstantiation, and the definition of transubstantiation during the particular historical moment of the 13th century, was closely tied to the latrine blasphemies and heresies wielded by Jewish writers. This is best understood by examining the ambitions of the Fourth Lateran Council.

The Fourth Lateran Council was an institutional vehicle not just for theological clarification, but also for the proclamation of a new crusade. The pontiff used the crusade, and the declaratory infrastructure lent by the Fourth Lateran Council more generally, “as an instrument of ecclesiastical administration, combined with reform of the church, namely in a fierce war against heretics which he thought would restore ecclesiastical society.” ^[93]Such heretics included Jewish latrine blasphemers, whose works and deeds were well known by the temporal and papal rulers of Western Christendom for decades.^[94]

After the Fourth Lateran Council, accusations about Jews stealing, mutilating, and making the host bleed emerged. Such host desecration allegations, first raised in 1243 Belitz, were made under the presumption that Jews earnestly ceded to the truth of the Eucharist’s divinity, and thus the truth of Christ’s physicality, but still chose deicide. ^[95]There was a logical inconsistency here.

Transubstantiation, and the other tenets of the Fourth Lateran Council, were delineated in response to Jewish heresy, specifically the practice of Jews insincerely expressing belief in Christ’s physicality to emphasize its associated material filth (i.e. latrine blasphemy). However, host desecration narratives and their reliance on transubstantiation positioned Jews as sincerely expressing belief in, but disregarding, Christ’s physicality. Something was out of step: did Jews suppress a genuine belief in the physicality of Christ’s body and adjacent Eucharistic practice? But Christians themselves, as resolved in the prior section of this paper, had yet to determine whether Christ’s body was physical.

Florentine banker Giovanni Villani’s account of a host desecration allegation in 1290 Paris clarifies. Villani wrote of a Paris Jew who, in return for loaning money to a Chirstian woman, demanded that she “‘bring me the body of your Christ.’” ^[96]The Jewish character used the Eucharistic metonymy—body as host—which lends credence to the claim that Jews believed in the truth of Jesus’ body. The account continued to describe the mutilation:

He put a pot on the fire with boiling water and threw the body of Christ in, but it could not consume it. Seeing this, he stabbed it many times with a knife and it poured forth a copious amount of blood so that the water turned all vermillion.^[97]

Once potential Christian debtors learned of the Jew’s sacrilege, the “holy body sprung onto a table all by itself” and the “Jew was captured and burned.”^[98] Christians maintained that Jews desecrated hosts despite knowing of their material truth. But Christians also maintained that Jewish rejection of the digestion of the bread of heaven was worth copying, as to resist unavoidable physical grotesqueness. When it came to the Incarnation, inconsistency allowed Christians to have the best of both worlds: refute latrine blasphemy by deemphasizing Christ’s physicality and levy host desecration accusations by emphasizing it.

While there is evidence that Jews considered or resolved to perform latrine blasphemies during the 13th century, there is no evidence that Jews debated killing Christians or desecrating the host. ^[99]Therefore, in the context of a vacillating understanding of Christ’s materiality, the practice that cut at the core of the physicality thesis was historically documented: latrine blasphemy. The veracity of the allegations that reaffirmed the physicality thesis, comparatively, were largely mythical: host desecration. Thus, the question of Christ's materiality was an illogical theological vacuum on two fronts. Firstly, because there was no dogmatic belief about the issue either way, Christians could design a cognitive dissonance that simultaneously circumvented anti-Christian polemics (by undermining physicality) and justified anti-Jewish host desecration accusations (by reaffirming physicality). Secondly, the behavior that questioned the Incarnation—latrine blasphemy—was veritable and historically documented whereas the behavior that was contingent on the Incarnation—host desecration—was largely mythical.

V. Conclusion

Prior to the dogmatization of transubstantiation at the Period II of the Council of Trent in 1551, stances on Christ’s materiality within Christian theological spheres were inconsistent. Some theologians—like Anselm of Canterbury, Gilbert Crispin and Odo of Tournai—countered other Christian thinkers and Jewish polemicists who rejected Jesus as a material man. The Christian tradition was seized with division and indecision; there was no dispositive belief in the facticity nor necessity of the Incarnation. Jewish authors capitalized on this intellectual soft spot and engaged in religious dispute with Christians. But, between the 10th and 13th centuries, debates between Jews and Christians about Christ’s physicality degenerated from a pacific respect to squalid profanity.

And the rhetorical ploys that existed by the 13th-century—latrine blasphemy and host desecration—show vestiges of Christian indecision regarding Christ’s physicality.

When it came to Jewish authors’ latrine blasphemy, or the association of Christian icons with excreta, materiality undermined first-order Christian religious arguments about messiahship. Latrine blasphemy also compelled Christians theologians to pull away from physicality and towards spirituality in Eucharistic practice. Alternatively, Christians accused Jews of the consummate humiliation of God—the Crucifixion—and projected the substance of latrine blasphemies onto the Jewish authors voicing them. Either way, physicality saw an anti-Christian application that compelled changes in Christian behavior. When it came to host desecration, or the accusation that Jews stole consecrated hosts and mangled them to kill Christ in perpetuity, Christian belief in Christ’s material body and that body’s physical equivalence with the host was crucial. Physicality saw an anti-Jewish application. But there was an inherent illogic, an inconsistency, between blasphemy and host desecration in relation to the role of Jesus’ material and physical truth. What helped Christians attack Jews in one context—belief in physicality that rationalized host desecration allegations—opened Christians up to retaliation from Jews in the form of latrine blasphemy. The absence of a theological commitment granted Christians case-by-case flexibility. In the 13th century, Jesus’ physicality was less of a resolute theological commitment than a convenient argumentative fulcrum. This allowed Christians to gerrymander ad hoc commitments to or rejections of Jesus’ metaphysical materiality to justify antisemitic attacks and tropes.

Why did the Church decide to opine on Christ's physical and material veracity? Why did transubstantiation become dogma? If the 13th century’s absence of commitment to the truth of the Incarnation granted Christians the leeway to both respond to Jewish critique and justify their antisemitic narratives, why would they yield this latitude? Perhaps for institutional power acquisition. As Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians preaches: “You [the Church], then, are the body of Christ. Every one of you is a member of it.”^[100] This “extension of Jesus’ materiality beyond the confines of his own corpus” bestowed a divine authority on the Church as an institution, thus legitimating its behaviors and political ambitions.^[101] Might an additional reason, though, be rooted less in power politics and more in the preservation of the antisemitic regime offered by 13th century indecision? In reference to both latrine blasphemy and host desecration, antisemitic attacks were carried out only when the materiality thesis was affirmed: attacks by words for latrine blasphemy (for example, transfering the vermin and excrement associations to Jews) and corporal attacks for host desecration. Was affirmation of physicality, of which transubstantiation’s dogmatization is the ne plus ultra, rooted in antisemitic violence?

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