Mazo K. - The Aerial Battle in The Toledot Yeshu and Sodomy in The Late Middle Ages

Medieval
Jewish, Christian and Muslim Culture
Encounters
in Confluence and Dialogue
Medieval Encounters 19 (2013) 493-533
brill.com/me
The Aerial Battle in the Toledot Yeshu and Sodomy in

the Late Middle Ages
Ruth Mazo Karras*
Department of History, University of Minnesota, 1110 Heller Hall,
271 19th Avenue S., Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA
*E-mail: rmk@umn.edu
Abstract
Thomas Ebendorfers fifteenth-century Latin translation of a Hebrew Toledot Yeshu text is
the earliest extant Latin version to include a full narrative from the birth of Jesus to the
events following the crucifixion, and predates existing Hebrew versions. After reviewing
the place of Ebendorfers work in the textual tradition of the Toledot, the article examines
carefully the works account of the aerial battle between Jesus and Judas, in comparison to
other versions. Ebendorfer includes the detail of sexual intercourse between the two, which
is absent in many later versions. In the context of a discussion of Christian and Jewish attitudes toward malemale sexual activity in the Middle Ages, the article concludes that while
this detail was in Ebendorfers exemplar, he could have elaborated on it in a way that indicates this was a particularly Christian concern.
Keywords
Toledot Yeshu, Thomas Ebendorfer, textual transmission, homosexuality, sodomy, Jesus,
Raymond Martini, University of Vienna, Christian anti-Judaism, Christian Hebraism
Introduction
Jews had a variety of negative things to say about Jesus in the Middle Ages;
Christians were aware of this, and blasphemy could be a pretext for persecution. Often the nature of the blasphemy was not recorded, either because
to repeat it would have been shocking in itself or because it was more effective simply to hint darkly at the horrible things that were said. In the first
half of the fifteenth century, however, comes the first documentation of a
narrative element that appears in later Hebrew sources, that Jesus was
raped by Judas Iscariot. The story of how and why this claim, which was
perhaps the bluntest narrative account of homosexual intercourse in either
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013
DOI: 10.1163/15700674-12342150
494
R. M. Karras / Medieval Encounters 19 (2013) 493-533
tradition in the Middle Ages, appeared, when read in the light of Christian
and Jewish attitudes toward malemale sexual activity in the Middle Ages,
reveals a new complication in inter-communal relations.
The year 1420 saw a major pogrom against the Jews of Upper Austria. The
underlying causes included ongoing tensions between students at the
University of Vienna and other Viennese and the Jews, the fiscal needs of
Archduke (later King) Albrecht V, and suspicion of Jewish complicity with
the Hussites; the triggering event was an accusation of host desecration
against a Jewish couple in Enns. The result was an edict of expulsion against
the Jews of Viennathe Wiener Geserah (Heb. gezeirah, disaster,
persecution)and in 1421 the burning at the stake of somewhere between
110 and 400 Jews. The situation of the Jews remained desperate until after
the accession of Frederick III (King from 1440, Emperor from 1458).1
Sometime during this period, Thomas Ebendorfer, a scholar of the University of Vienna, with the help of a convert from Judaism, compiled a text
called the Falsitates Judaeorum, or Lies of the Jews, the major part of which
is a translation of a Hebrew text of the Toledot Yeshu. Ebendorfer, born in
1388, was a student at Vienna from 1408, first in the arts faculty, then in
theology. From 1428 to 1460 he was Professor of Theology; as a priest he also
held several benefices, and he represented the University at the Council of
Basel (1432-1435) and the king on several diplomatic missions. A number of
his political writings survive as well as a Cronica Austrie up to the year 1463.2
This article is especially concerned with Ebendorfers translation of the
Toledot Yeshu, because it marks a break with the versions of this text that
can be documented to have circulated from late antiquity to the central
Middle Ages.
1 The fullest account of the events is still Samuel Krauss, Die Wiener Geserah vom Jahre
1421 (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumller, 1920). A more current account is given in Shlomo Spitzer,
Bne Chet: Die sterreichischen Juden im Mittelalter: Eine Social- und Kulturgeschichte (Vienna:
Bhlau, 1997), 79-98. For accusations of host desecration see Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The
Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); this
particular case is discussed at pp. 76, 116-119.
2On Ebendorfers work generally see Alphons Lhotsky, Thomas Ebendorfer: Ein sterreichischer Geschichtschreiber, Theologe und Diplomat des 15. Jahrhunderts, Schriften der
Monumenta Germaniae historica 15 (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1957).
495
The Toledot Yeshu and Its Medieval Latin Versions

The Toledot Yeshu is a version of the life of Jesus of Nazareth that circulated
within Jewish communities during late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and
beyond. It would be wrong to refer to it as a text; it is a set of texts or a textual tradition.3 There are several different ways of classifying the versions.4
The earliest manuscripts are fragments in Aramaic from the Cairo Geniza
and are dated no earlier than the tenth century CE; there are also Geniza
fragments in Judeo-Arabic from the eleventh century on, with a nearly full
surviving text dated from the thirteenth or fourteenth century.5 The dating
of the manuscripts thus does not shed any light on the geographical or
chronological origin of the textual tradition, which is variously dated from
the third through the fifth centuries.6 The date must be deduced in one of
two ways: from the language (for example, Michael Sokoloff deduces from
the language of the Aramaic fragments that the work was originally written
in Babylonian Aramaic around the middle of the first millennium CE), or
3There are so many dramatically different versions as to make a critical edition nearly
impossible; the project currently underway under the supervision of Peter Schfer, available
online at http://www.princeton.edu/judaic/special-projects/toledot-yeshu/, aims at producing transcriptions of all the existing manuscripts.
4Samuel Krauss, in Das Leben Jesu nach jdischen Quellen (Berlin: S. Calvary, 1902), 27-37,
classified the versions of the text as: the Wagenseil type based on the edition by Johann
Christoph Wagenseil in his Tela Ignea Satanae (Altdorf: J.H. Schnnerstadt, 1680; rpt Westmead: Gregg, 1970); the De Rossi type, based on a seventeenth-century Italian Karaite manuscript; the Huldreich type based on the 1705 edition with Latin translation by Johann Jakob
Huldreich, Historia Jeschuae Nazareni (Leiden, 1705), digital copy at Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, available online at http://www.mdz-nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn=urn:nbn:
de:bvb:12-bsb10239719-1; the modern-Slavic type based on nineteenth-century manuscripts;
and the Cairo type, based on Geniza fragments. More recently Ricardo di Segni classified the
versions according to who is the ruler of Judea in the time of Jesus: Herod, Pilate, or Helena.
Ricardo di Segni, Il Vangelo del Ghetto (Rome: Newton Compton, 1985), 29-42; di Segni,
La tradizione testuale delle Toledth Jshu: manoscritti, edizioni a stampa, classificazione,
La rassegna mensile di Israel 50 (1984), 83-100.
5Miriam Goldstein, Judeo-Arabic Versions of Toledot Yeshu, Ginzei Qedem 6 (2010),
9-42, at 27.
6The scholarship on this is most recently reviewed by Yaacov Deutsch in his Toledot
Yeshu in Christian Eyes: Reception and Response in the Middle Ages and Early Modern
Period (Hebrew) (MA Thesis, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, 1997), 5. I am
grateful to Deutsch for a copy of this unpublished work.
496
from external references.7 The external references of course, can be very

difficult to work with. The tradition has affinities with references to Christianity in the Talmud and with early Christian texts that refer to Jewish
stories, but it is difficult to interpret allusions to elements of the story that
would seem to derive from later versions of the text, rather than an earlier
corpus of traditions. Distinguished scholars on the Toledot have come to
rather different conclusions on when it came to be a text, with dates any
time between the third century and the ninth century CE (when writings in
Latin by Agobard and Amulo of Lyons indicate that they knew a fully textualized version).8 Most of the Hebrew manuscripts of the Toledot are very
late, from the eighteenth and even nineteenth centuries; Judeo-Arabic versions predate the surviving Hebrew texts, although they are likely to have
been based on Hebrew versions.9 Hebrew texts were, however, printed in
the early modern period by Christian Hebraists. The story was also translated into Latin in the Middle Ages, and these translations reveal a great
deal about the history of the text and of Jewish-Christian relations in the
later Middle Ages.
The version of the Toledot best known in the Christian world is a Latin
translation included in the Pugio Fidei of Raymond Martini (Ramn Mart),
ca. 1278.10 This text comes from a different branch than the earliest, Aramaic
texts, but like them it does not include the story of the conception of Jesus,
7Michael Sokoloff, The Date and Provenance of the Aramaic Toledot Yeshu on the
Basis of Aramaic Dialectology, in Toledot Yeshu (The Life Story of Jesus) Revisited, ed. Peter
Schfer, Michael Meerson, and Yaacov Deutsch (Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 13-26.
8Two of the major works on the entire Toledot tradition have never been published:
William Horbury, A Critical Examination of the Toledot Yeshu (PhD Dissertation, Cambridge University, Cambridge, 1970), and Deutsch, Toledot Yeshu in Christian Eyes. On
Agobard and Amulo see Peter Schfer, Agobards and Amulos Toledot Yeshu, Toledot
Yeshu, ed. Schfer et al., 27-48.
9Goldstein, Judeo-Arabic Versions, 18, suggests that the use of Hebrew rather than
Aramaic for names suggests that the Judeo-Arabic tradition may have drawn on Hebrew
versions, oral or written.
10Raymond Martini, Pugio fidei adversus Mauros et Judaeos, ed. Joseph de Voisin (Leipzig,
1687), 2:8:6, pp. 363-365. There is no modern edition of the Pugio. I thank Ryan Szpiech for
sending me digitized copies of the relevant pages from the St. Genevive manuscript, from
which he and Grge Hasselhoff are preparing an edition. He gives a full list of manuscripts
in his article, Citas rabes en caracteres hebreos en el Pugio fidei del dominico Ramn
Mart: entre la autenticidad y la autoridad, Al-Qanara: Revista de Estudios rabes 32.1 (2011),
71-107, at pp. 76-80. Both Szpiech and Katelyn Mesler, who has prepared an unpublished
edition of the Toledot story from the Pugio, have confirmed to me that there are no manuscript variants that change the meaning of the portion I discuss here.
497
beginning instead with his arrival in Jerusalem as a young man. Martinis

translation was included in the fourteenth century in other Christian
polemical works, such as the Victoria Porcheti adversus impios Hebreos by
Porchetus Salvaticus, an important work not because it brings anything
new to the text but because, in its 1520 printed form, it was the means by
which the Toledot was transmitted to Martin Luther.11
The next Latin version of the Toledot that does not just copy Martinis
text is found in Ebendorfers Falsitates Iudaeorum.12 There are two fifteenthcentury manuscripts, one of which is an autograph, now found in Vienna,
and the other of which is a copy of the extant autograph. The autograph is
contained in a volume with a number of Ebendorfers other works as well
as other religious and political treatises; the second manuscript, now at the
monastery at Gttweig, also includes other works of Ebendorfers having to
do with the Council of Basel.13 The modern editors of the work suggest that
the autograph, in a manuscript that includes texts dated to 1441 and 14511460, cannot be the original because of errors it contains.14 They suggest
that it was written after the pogrom of 1420-1421, because a marginal notation to xera, id est persecucio (xera, that is persecution) says xera
austeralica, or Austrian persecution, a likely reference to the Wiener
Geserah.15
If this manuscript is a copy, of course, the original could still have predated the pogrom. The Acts of the Theological Faculty of the University of
Vienna show a discussion in 1419 of an alleged Jewish confederation with
Hussites and of certain execrable books that they possess in insult of the
Creator and blasphemy to Christ and all the saints and the great injury of all
Christians.16 This could simply be a reference to the Talmud, or it could
11 Yaacov Deutsch, The Second Life of the Life of Jesus: Christian Reception of Toledot
Yeshu, in Toledot Yeshu, ed. Schfer et al., 289.
12Das jdische Leben Jesu Toldot Jeschu: Die lteste lateinische bersetzung in den Falsitates Judeorum von Thomas Ebendorfer, ed. Brigitta Callsen, Fritz Peter Knapp, Manuela
Niesner and Martin Przybilski (Vienna and Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2003).
13Vienna, sterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 4701, and Gttweig, Stiftsbibliothek,
Hs. 381. I am grateful to the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library at St. Johns University for
access to microfilm copies of these manuscripts.
14Fritz Peter Knapp, Zu berlieferung, Edition und bersetzung des Textes, in Ebendorfer, Das jdische Leben Jesu, ed. Callsen et al., 9.
15Manuela Niesner, Einleitung, in Ebendorfer, Das jdische Leben Jesu, ed. Callsen
et al., 80; Vienna, sterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Codex Vindobonensis Palatinus 4701,
fol. 38r.
16Paul Uiblein, ed., Die Akten der Theologischen Fakultt der Universitt Wien (1396-1508),
2 vols. (Vienna: Verband der wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaften sterreichs, 1978), 1:37.
498
have been a reference to the Toledot Yeshu in a version other than Ebendorfers. In fact, there was another version in circulation in the region in the
fifteenth century: a page from it was used in the binding of a Latin manuscript containing theological texts (including some of Ebendorfers work)
copied by a student at the University of Vienna in 1432.17 This fragment
contains two portions of the text, the scene where Jesus is first brought
before Queen Helena and the story of the apostles Peter and Paul, but they
differ in important details from Ebendorfers version on the portions they
both cover (in larger ways than does Martinis version).18 That two versions
of the Toledot Yeshu circulated in in the same place around the same time
indicates both the popularity of the story and its malleability.
It is possible, then, that Ebendorfers work predates the pogrom and was
part of the general suspicion against Jews that formed part of the backdrop
for it, but it is also possible that books he or the university acquired in the
course of the confiscations in 1420-1421, during which time he was studying
in the theology faculty, formed the basis for it, and he may have had several
versions from which to choose.19 It is no surprise that the pogrom was on
17The manuscript is Maria Saal Cod. 19. For an image of the front pastedown with the
Toledot fragment, see http://www.ksbm.oeaw.ac.at/hebraica/imgjpg/AT5800/AT5800-19_
VDS.jpg; for full description of the codex, Hermann Menhardt, Handschriftenverzeichnis der
Krntner Bibliotheken, vol. 1, Klagenfurt, Maria Saal, Friesach, Handschriftenverzeichnisse
sterreichischer Bibliotheken, Krnten 1 (Vienna: sterreichischen Staatsdruckerei, 1927),
275-276.
18I am grateful to Yaacov Deutsch for his transcription of this text and to Sol Cohen for
his help in reconstructing the missing portions. Paul is Abba Shaul before his conversion,
rather than Elia, and an etymological explanation is given for his new name which is not
present in Ebendorfer; Peter is Peter amor, the Ass, a name commonly used in Jewish texts
but not in Ebendorfer, also accompanied by an etymological explanation. Krauss, Das Leben
Jesu, 172-177, found the name Abba Shaul only in texts of the Slavic type; for an example,
see Gnter Schlichting, Ein jdisches Leben Jesu: Die verschollene Toledot-Jeschu-Fassung
Tam -md, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament, 24 (Tbingen:
J.C.B. Mohr, 1982), 172-186.
19A number of Hebrew manuscripts now in the Austrian National Library were likely
once part of the University Library, and two scholars, Nicholas of Dinkelsbhl and Peter of
Pulkau, both teachers of Ebendorfer, were commissioned in 1421 to acquire for the University Hebrew books that were available as a result of the pogrom. Arthur Z. Schwartz, Die
Hebrasche Handschriften der Nationalbibliothek in Wien (Vienna: Strache, 1925), ix. On
the fate of books from the Vienna Jewish community that survived in Jewish contexts elsewhere (and some that were used in the bindings of Christian books), see Krauss, Wiener
Geserah, 160-166. A list of Hebrew manuscripts in Austrian libraries and Hebrew fragments
499
Ebendorfers mind as he copied the text in the surviving autograph: his

Cronica Austrie is one of the main sources we have for the events of 14201421. Indeed, it is the only one of the chronicles to mention the host desecration accusation.20 If Ebendorfer came into possession of the Hebrew
text after it was confiscateda distinct possibility, since all the Jews possessions were sold to benefit the fisc of Albrecht Vhe would have had the
host desecration accusation on his mind as well, and Judass sexual violation of the body of Christ may have been, for him, the equivalent to a host
desecration.
The Falsitates Iudaeorum begins with an introduction, stating that Ebendorfers purpose is to demonstrate the insults the Jews commit against
Jesus and his blessed Mother. He had collected Jewish books and found
that there was one book which their children learn from the earliest age
and which they read publicly on Christmas eve and day.21 He claimed to
have translated this book with the help of a convert so that the hatred of
Jewish wickedness and the great generosity of divine mercy should be evident to all Christians.22 The context in which Ebendorfer would have been
likely to meet this convert is not clear. Prior to the pogrom Vienna had a
found in Latin books from Austria may be found at http://www.hebraica.at/_scripts/php/
hbf_lists.php (accessed 12 October 2012); as Almut Laufer notes, the fact that a large part of
the bindings made in Vienna and Lower Austria which contain Hebrew fragments date from
the 20s and 30s of the fifteenth century points to their origin in the Wiener Gezera, the
pogrom of 1420-1421. Laufer, berlegungen zu Relevanz und Zielsetzung des Projekts aus
judaistischer Sicht, Fragmenta Hebraica Austriaca, ed. Christine Glassner and Josef M. Oesch
(Vienna: Verlag der sterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2009), 33-48, here 34.
20Thomas Ebendorfer, Cronica Austrie, ed. Alphons Lhotsky, Monumenta Germaniae
Historica Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum N.S. 13 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1967), 370-371. As
Rubin notes (117), monastic chroniclers do not mention the host desecration accusation as
a cause of the pogrom, although it is confirmed in the 1421 decree of Albrecht V against the
Jews (Krauss, 68). A Jewish account of the persecution, as well as two versions of Albrechts
decree, are printed in Das Judenbuch der Scheffstrasse zu Wien (1389-1420), ed. Artur Goldmann (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumller, 1908), 112-133.
21 Marc Shapiro, Torah Study on Christmas Eve, Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 8 (1999), 319-353, at 334 and 340, discusses later reports that the Jews read this text on
Christmas Eve. Paola Tartakoff, The Toledot Yeshu and Jewish-Christian Conflict in the
Medieval Crown of Aragon, in Toledot Yeshu, ed. Schfer et al., 297-309, 303, and Paola
Tartakoff, Between Christian and Jew: Conversion and Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon,
1250-1391 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 121-123, presents evidence from inquisitorial records that Jews did indeed teach this material to their children.
22Ebendorfer, Das jdische Leben Jesu, ed. Callsen et al., 38.
500
large and intellectually active Jewish community. Henry of Langenstein,

writing at the University of Vienna in the generation before Ebendorfer,
showed an interest in the Jews around him, both in terms of apologetics
aimed at them and also in terms of making provision for those who did
convert.23 Toward the end of Ebendorfers life he wrote a consilium advising Bishop Ulrich of Passau (1451-1479) as to what should be done about a
converted Jew who relapsed; the text appears in the same volume that
includes the autograph of the Toledot translation. That convert was from
Florence and was living in Passau, so was likely not one of the Jews who had
converted in Vienna in 1421 to avoid death. Nevertheless, Ebendorfer wrote,
I speak as one who is not ignorant of these things... indeed we see not a
few of this sect, whom I named to the Lord Emperor, who, after solemnly
receiving baptism, returned to their original perfidy, and today, particularly
Israel [Isserlein] their great rabbi, live peacefully in Neustadt.24 These
may have been Jews who were forced to convert in 1420-1421, and subsequently left Vienna to make a new life in Wiener-Neustadt, which was
located in the territory of Steiermark.25 One of them may have been Ebendorfers informant; he seems in any case, to have had something to do with
Austrian Jewry in the years after the pogrom. Of course, the assistant/translator could also have been a Jew who converted later, as there were continued efforts at proselytization of the Jews.26
The introduction is followed by the text of the Toledot in Latin, with frequent insertions of transliterated Hebrew words and much less frequent
insertions of words or phrases in Hebrew characters. This is followed by a
23Michael H. Shank, Unless You Believe, You Shall Not Understand: Logic, University,
and Society in Late Medieval Vienna (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 166.
24sterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 4701, fols. 237r-240v (HMML microfilm).
A transcription of part of this consilium is found in Michael Denis, ed., Codices manuscripti
theologici Bibliothecae Palatinae Vindobonensis latini aliarumque occidentis linguarum, 2:3
(Vienna: Johann v. Trattnern, 1802), cols. 2286-2288. As Niesner in Ebendorfer, Das jdische
Leben Jesu, ed. Callsen et al., 30, points out, there is no evidence that Isserlein, a major
scholar in the mid-fifteenth century, had ever converted, although it is known that his
mother and uncle were among those who died in 1421. Isserlein was relatively lenient to
those who had converted under compulsion and later returned to Judaism. Shlomo Eidelberg, Jewish Life in Austria in the XVth Century, as Reflected in the Legal Writings of Rabbi
Israel Isserlein and His Contemporaries (Philadelphia, PA: Dropsie College, 1962), 57; Spitzer,
Bne Chet, 235-236; Israel ben Petahiah Isserlein, Sefer Terumat Hadeshen, 198, ed. Aharon
Volden (Jerusalem, 2006), pp. 146-147.
25Niesner in Ebendorfer, Das jdische Leben Jesu, ed. Callsen et al., 30.
26Eidelberg, Jewish Life in Austria, 21.
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Hebrew poem with interlineated Latin translation, which is a parody of a

poem with Kyrie eleison as the refrain, using , qeri lo-yesh, may a
nocturnal emission be with him. The Latin translation does not itself
include this phrase, nor a translation of the statement that Jesus is ben
Pandera, which is found in the Hebrew, but the poem is followed by a
commentary that explains it as pollutio sit cum eo, may pollution be
with him, and explains the fourth stanza as claiming Jesus was the son of
Pandera, so it is clear that even if the translator/assistant censored the
interlinear translation, he did not conceal the meaning from Ebendorfer.27
The final item is an Incomplete Tract Against the Jews, a refutation of the
Toledot, which discusses bodily vs. spiritual circumcision and argues the
error of the Jewish belief that the Messiah has not yet come.
Ebendorfers text of the Toledot is much longer than Martinis. It gives a
full conception narrative of Jesus. It is possible that Martinis exemplar
included this part of the story and he chose not to include it. Martinis point,
unlike Ebendorfers, was not to show that Jews were blasphemers, but to
demonstrate that Jewish texts themselves reveal the truth of Christianity.
The Jews themselves, he argued, do not deny that Christ performed miracles; rather, they tell a false story to explain the miracles, because the truth
of the miracles is too manifest for them to deny outright. Thus it makes
sense that he focused on the miracle portion of the narrative rather than
the conception.28
In Ebendorfers text, Miriam was the betrothed of Rabbi Jochanan.
A neighbor, Joseph ben Pandera, came to her at night and she thought it
was Jochanan. She said to him Do not touch me, because I am menstruous,
that is nyda. He had intercourse with her anyway, and then left. Later
Jochanan came in, and Miriam commented that it was not his custom
to come to her twice in one night. Thus the two discovered what had
28There has been considerable discussion of how good a Hebraist Martini was. Some
later writers said that he was a Jewish convert, although Jeremy Cohen has refuted this:
Cohen, Friars and the Jews, 129 n. 2. See Ursula Ragacs, Mit Zaum und Zgel muss man ihr
Ungestm bndigen: Ein Beitrag zur christlichen Hebraistik und antijdischen Polemik im
Mittelalter, Judentum und Umwelt 65 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1997), 19-24, and Ragacs, The
Forged Midrashim of Raymond MartiniReconsidered, Henoch 19 (1997), 59-68, on Martinis knowledge of Hebrew texts. For general discussion of the Pugio see Robert Chazan,
Daggers of Faith: Thirteenth-Century Christian Missionizing and Jewish Response (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1989), 115-136; Heinz Schreckenberg, Die christlichen AdversusJudaeos-Texte und ihr literarisches und historisches Umfeld (13.-20. Jh.) (Frankfurt: Peter Lang,
1994), 293-307.
502
happened.29 Neither Martinis or any extant Hebrew version prior to the

sixteenth century contains this story, but several scholars have suggested
that it must be earlier. Judeo-Arabic texts that include the conception of
Jesus go back to the thirteenth century at the earliest, but there are earlier
fragments where the beginning is missing that may well have included it.30
Adina Yoffie takes the version found in Johann Jacob Huldreichs 1705
Latin-Hebrew edition of the Toledot, in which Jesuss mother voluntarily
committed adultery, as an attack on Mariolatry and thereby dates the origin of the version in Huldreichs now lost source manuscript to the twelfth
or thirteenth century.31 Peter Schfer suggests that the more common
Wagenseil tradition, into which both Martinis and Ebendorfers versions
fall, is more pro-Mary as it depicts her variously as a victim of either deceptive or violent rape, and therefore that it is likely to have its origin in the
period of greatest Christian veneration of Mary.32
A story of Jesuss conception under unsavory circumstances clearly was
in circulation before the time Martini wrote. Martinis text has Jesus state
that the sages referred to him as the son of an adulteress, an accusation
that appears in the Talmud as well.33 There are texts that go further, however, and suggest that not only was Jesus conceived in adultery but also
while Mary was menstruating. Solomon bar Simsons chronicle of the First
Crusade (1096) has the Jews say that they do not want to convert and follow
a bastard son conceived by a menstruating and wanton mother, and the
investigation/disputation about the Talmud in Paris in 1240 said that Jews
29Ebendorfer, Das jdische Leben Jesu, ed. Callsen et al., 42. All English translations are
mine unless otherwise noted; Callsen et al. provide a German translation.
30Goldstein, Judeo-Arabic Versions, 27-32.
31 Adina M. Yoffie, Observations on the Huldreich Manuscripts of the Toledot Yeshu,
in Toledot Yeshu, ed. Schfer et al., 61-77, at 68; Huldreich, Historia Jeschuae Nazareni.
32Peter Schfer, Jesus Origin, Birth, and Childhood according to the Toledot Yeshu and
the Talmud, in Judaea-Palaestina, Babylon and Rome: Jews in Antiquity, ed. Benjamin Isaac
and Yuval Shahar (Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 139-161, at 160.
33While the earliest, Aramaic texts do not include a conception story, Yaacov Deutsch,
New Evidence of Early Versions of Toldot Yeshu, Tarbiz 69 (2000), 177-197 (in Hebrew),
presents a Hebrew manuscript that is very close to the Aramaic texts that does include such
a story, suggesting that it may have been included in the Aramaic tradition also and did not
survive because of the physical fragmentation of the manuscripts. Schfer, Agobards and
Amulos Toledot Yeshu, 27, doubts this, but in any case, this story does not refer to Mary as
menstruating. On the Talmud, see Peter Schfer, Jesus in the Talmud (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 15-24; Jesus name is not mentioned but this passage was understood in the Middle Ages to refer to him.
503
called Mary polluted, Latin polluta and Hebrew , implying that Jesus
was conceived during menstruation, as claimed in Judeo-Arabic and later
Hebrew versions of the Toledot but not by Martini.34 There could, thus,
have been a longer text including these in circulation at the time Martini
wrote. The Spanish Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia (1240-after 1291) knew the
story that Jesus the son of Pandera was the son of a menstruating woman,
although he presents this in a context of gematria rather than a longer
narrative.35
34Deutsch, Toledot Yeshu in Christian Eyes, 37. For Judeo-Arabic versions referring to
Marys menstruation, see Goldstein, Judeo-Arabic Versions, 24; for the Crusades see
Shlomo Eidelberg, trans., The Jews and the Crusaders: The Hebrew Chronicles of the First and
Second Crusades (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), 32. At 144 n. 10, Eidelberg suggests that this shows the Jews of the Rhineland in 1096 were familiar with the
Toledot, but this could also have been a different tradition that was incorporated into
the Toledot later, or in fact an interpolation; the sole manuscript of Solomon bar Simsons
chronicle dates from 1453. See also Anna Sapir Abulafia, Invectives against Christianity in
the Hebrew Chronicles of the First Crusade, in Crusade and Settlement, ed. Peter W. Edbury
(Cardiff: University College Cardiff Press, 1985), 66-72. The Latin account of the Paris disputation says, The Jews are not ashamed to say that his mother conceived him through adultery by a man whom they call Pandera, a reference which could be to the Talmud and
not necessarily the Toledot Yeshu. The Hebrew word niddah is not used, and tamei or
polluted could refer to the adultery. Robert Chazan, Medieval Jewry in Northern France:
A Political and Social History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 126,
makes clear that the initial charges were about the Talmud story; see also William Chester
Jordan, Marian Devotion and the Talmud Trial of 1240, in Religionsgesprche im Mittelalter, ed. Bernard Lewis and Friedrich Niewhner, Wolfenbttler Mittelalter-Studien 4
(Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1992), 61-76; and Judah M. Rosenthal, The Talmud on Trial:
The Disputation at Paris in the Year 1240, Jewish Quarterly Review N.S. 47 (1956), 145-169 at
160-161. On the sources for the Talmud trial, see Ursula Ragacs, Die Disputation von Paris
1240 im Spiegel ihrer Handschriften und EditionenAnmerkungen zu einem Desideratum, Henoch 16 (2004), 264-274; Judah Galinsky, The Different Hebrew Versions of the
Talmud Trial of 1240 in Paris, in New Perspectives on Jewish-Christian Relations, ed. Elisheva
Carlebach and Jacob J. Schacter (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 109-140. The suggestion that the
Jews called Mary polluted could also refer to the Jewish practice of calling her aria
(excrement) instead of Maria, as found in the Nitsaon Yashan; David Berger, ed., The
Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages: A Critical Edition of the Niaon Vetus
(Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 1979), 302 n. 1 and passim in the text. See
William Chester Jordan, The Medieval Background, in Struggles in the Promised Land:
Toward a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States, ed. Jack Salzman and Cornel
West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 53-64, here p. 56.
35Abraham Abulafia, Maftea hashemot, ed. Amnon Gros (Jerusalem: Amnon Gros,
2001), 1:130; Alexandra Cuffel, The Matter of Others: Menstrual Blood and Uncontrolled
Semen in Thirteenth-Century Kabbalists Polemic Against Christians, Bad Jews, and
504
The name Pandera occurs in the Talmud and in Aramaic versions of the
Toledot known to Agobard and Amulo, but they do not refer to Marys menstruous state, and Agobard does not discuss Jesus origin at all.36 Other
medieval references to the Toledot also do not refer to the conception of
Jesus, including the so-called Passau Anonymous from around the end
of the thirteenth century, an account in the widely distributed Quaestio de
adventu Christi of Nicholas of Lyra, and an accusation at the Council of
Pisa in 1409 against Pope Benedict XIII, in which he was said to have a Jewish book that claimed that Jesus performed his miracles by sorcery.37 These
are only references, not extant copies of the text(s), and we do not know
what details they may have contained that are not mentioned; nevertheless, although the story of Marys adultery and menstrual impurity was
known in Martinis time, and he could have simply omitted that portion, it
seems plausible that there was a shorter version in circulation that did not
have a conception narrative.
There is a good deal more to the narrative of birth and childhood up to
the point where Ebendorfers story begins to coincide with Martinis than
the detail of whether Jesuss mother was menstruating at the time of his
conception, but this detail is important here because it is related to one of
the points on which the overlapping portions of the two texts differ. Where
Martini refers to Jesus as a son of adultery, Ebendorfer refers to him as a son
of adultery and menstruation. These passages also indicate how the two
could be translating the same Hebrew text, except for this difference.
Muslims, in Negotiating Community and Difference in Medieval Europe: Gender, Power,
Patronage and the Authority of Religion in Latin Christendom, ed. Katherine Allen Smith and
Scott Wells (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 249-284, here 253-260, although Cuffels argument that
Abulafia drew on the Toledot Yeshu tradition does not identify any particular textual manifestation of that tradition; Elliot R. Wolfson, Textual Flesh, Incarnation, and the Imaginal
Body: Abraham Abulafias Polemic with Christianity, in Studies in Medieval Jewish Intellectual and Social History: Festschrift in Honor of Robert Chazan, ed. David Engel, Lawrence H.
Schiffman and Elliot R. Wolfson (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 189-226, here 194; Moshe Idel, Studies in
Ecstatic Kabbalah (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988), 52-53, and n. 36:
The words Yeshu ben Pandera have a numerical value of 713 which is the same as that of the
words, Yesh mamzer ben hanidah (there is a bastard, conceived in menstrual impurity).
36Peter Schfer, Agobards and Amulos Toledot Yeshu, 27-48.
37Passau Anonymous and Nicholas of Lyra quoted in Niesner, 17; see Alexander Patchovsky, Der Passauer Anonymous. Ein Sammelwerk ber Ketzer, Juden, Antichrist aus der Mitte
des 13. Jahrhunderts, MGH Schriften 22 (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1968), 186; Johannes
Vincke, Acta Concilii Pisani, Rmische Quartalschrift 46 (1938), 81-331, here 189. I thank
Katelyn Messler for this reference.
505
Martini: & dixit eis, ob hoc dicunt sapientes me esse spurium quia super Israel volunt
habere dominium (and he said to them, the sages say I am a bastard because they
wish to have authority over Israel).38
Ebendorfer: dixitque eis, videte hij, qui me manserem vocauerunt et filium pollute
menstruis, ipsi volunt sibi ipsis principatum arrogare (and he said to them, behold,
they who call me a manser [bastard] and the son of one polluted with menstruation
wish to take the governance for themselves).39
We do not know whether the phrase appeared in Martinis exemplar and

he edited it out, or it entered this branch of the textual tradition (perhaps
via contact with a Judeo-Arabic version or a Hebrew version known to Abulafia) at some point after the writing of the manuscript that Martini used. It
certainly made the text more insulting to Christians. Implied charges of
adultery and whoredom against the Virgin Mary, which were certainly
found much earlier, including in the minor Talmudic tractate Kallah, were
obnoxious enough to Christians; menstruation was more so.40 Christianity
had come by the thirteenth century to accept the idea of the Virgin Mary
menstruating, out of humility, despite the fact that she had been cleansed
of original sin.41 But sex during menstruation was deemed by medical
authorities to be a potential cause of deformities in the fetus, and forbidden
by church authorities because of this throughout the Middle Ages.42 The
recovery of Aristotle in the West in the thirteenth century gave the idea of
menstrual pollution even more salience.43 In Christian culture, however, it
never acquired quite the force it had in Jewish culture, where it was used as
38Martini, Pugio fidei, 363.

40Deutsch, New Evidence, 181-82, discusses the background of the son of a menstruating woman concept.
41 Charles T. Wood, The Doctors Dilemma: Sin, Salvation and the Menstrual Cycle in
Medieval Thought, Speculum 56 (1981), 710-727; Albert Demyttenaere, The Cleric, Women
and the Stain: Some Beliefs and Ritual Practices Concerning Women in the Early Middle
Ages, in Frauen in Sptantike und Frhmittelalter: LebensbedingungenLebensnormen
Lebensformen, ed. Werner Affeldt (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1990), 141-165.
42Monica H. Green, Flowers, Poisons, and Men: Menstruation in Medieval Western
Europe, in Menstruation: A Cultural History, ed. Andrew Shaile and Gillian Howie (Palgrave,
2005), 57-60; James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 451, 508.
43Katharine Park, Medicine and Natural Philosophy: Naturalistic Traditions, in The
Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, ed. Judith M. Bennett and Ruth
Mazo Karras (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 84-100.
506
an ostensible reason for the exclusion of women from participation in various aspects of religious life, and also metaphorically for the worst of contamination, which could prevent even men from experience of the divine.44
It is clear that whether or not this would have been taken as a blasphemy
against Jesus and Mary, it was certainly intended as a serious insult, especially for anyone familiar with the Zohar, composed in late thirteenth- and
early fourteenth-century Castile, and Kabbalistic interpretations about the
evil of the menstruating Shekhinah and the possession of human menstruants by an evil spirit.45 As David Biale has suggested, menstrual blood and
semen were often considered together in early Jewish traditions.46 That
does not, however, mean that they were both introduced into the Toledot
by the same writer and for the same reasons; the idea that Jesus was conceived during Marys menstrual period and the connection with menstruation seem to have been more widespread both in the Toledot tradition and
outside it than the story of Judas and Jesus having sexual relations.47
The Aerial Battle

While there were precedents for the insult to Jesus by calling him the son of
a menstruating woman, the other detail that Ebendorfer includes, but Martini does not, is much more unusual. Both texts include a part of the story
that runs as follows: Upon entering the Temple it was possible for someone
to learn the name of God, ( shem ha-meforash, the pronounced
version of the Tetragrammaton), which would allow the possessor to perform supernatural feats, except that when one left the Temple, all memory
44Sharon Faye Koren, Forsaken: The Menstruant in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Waltham,
MA: Brandeis University Press, 2011).
45Koren, Forsaken, 84-97, 114-118.
46David Biale, Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol Between Jews and Christians
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 31-32. But see Shaye J.D. Cohen, Purity
and Piety: The Separation of Menstruants from the Sancta, in Daughters of the King: Women
and the Synagogue, ed. Susan Grossman and Rivka Haut (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 1992), 103-115.
47See also Elliot R. Wolfson, Venturing Beyond: Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 136. Alexandra Cuffel, Gendering Disgust in
Medieval Religious Polemic (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), passim,
discusses the depiction of Jesus as a ben niddah in the Toledot in the context of menstruation
and filth generally in religious polemic, but does not discuss the variants of the Toledot, nor
the aerial battle story.
507
of the name was erased. Jesus entered the Temple, learned the name, wrote
it on a piece of parchment, made an incision in his leg, and sewed up the
incision with the parchment inside.48 He then left the Temple, opened the
incision again, and took out the name. He was then able to perform various
wonders, including flying through the sky. The sages met and consulted on
how to bring Jesus down out of the air. They recruited a man named Judas
Scarioth or ben Asterota who similarly learned the name and gained the
same power. According to Martinis version, Scarioth attacked and fought
Jesus in the sky, and they both lost their power and fell to the ground:
Quando sapientes Israel viderunt sic, dixerunt ad Judam Scarioth ut diceret Schemhamephorasch, & ascenderet post eum: qui ascendit & luctatus est cum eo, & ceciderunt
ambo, & fregit sibi impius ille brachium: & super hoc opera singulis annis plorant
Christiani ante Pascha suum.
When the sages of Israel saw this, they said to Judas Iscariot that he should speak
Schemhamephorasch, and go up after him; he went up and fought with him, and they
both fell, and that wicked one broke his arm; and because of these deeds, every year the
Christians weep before their Easter.49
Ebendorfer, however, adds an additional detail:

Videntes autem seniores ex Israel dicebant: Jude, cogita similiter haschem et procede
sursum post eum! qui fecit sic et ascendit post eum. Et cuncti mirati sunt, quia sic
volarent inter celum et terram, tam diu, quousque Juda amplexatus est rascha Jesus et
cogitans schem voluit, ut ambo caderent ad terram. Et rascha cogitavit haschem, ut non
caderent, et sic neque iste istum necque econtrario potuit superare, quia haschem fuit
cum utroque. videns autem Juda, quia superare non potuit, kilkel masaf ymo, corrumpit
opus suum secum, id est, concubuit cum eo, ve tyeb osos bo miskaf sochod, id est indignum eum fecit concubitu viri vsque ad emissionem seminis, et sic ambo maculate corruerunt in terram.
Seeing this, the elders of Israel said: Judas, similarly think haschem [the name] and go
up after him! and he did so and went up after him. And all marveled, because they flew
48Martini uses the Latin crus, leg or thigh; Ebendorfer uses sura which usually means the
calf, but gives the Hebrew (here in Hebrew characters) , presumably meaning the
Hebrew word ( yerekho, thigh). The fact that this is one of the few places in the work
where he gives a word in Hebrew characters rather than in transliteration may be significant. The incision in the thigh may be symbolic of circumcision since thigh can also be
used for loins or penis. See Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, Gods Phallus: And Other Problems
for Men and Monotheism (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994), 87-88.
49Martini, Pugio fidei, 364.
508

thus between heaven and earth, so long, until Judas embraced rascha [, wicked]
Jesus and thinking schem, wanted them both to fall to earth. And rascha thought
haschem, so that they would not fall, and neither this one could overcome that one, nor
the other way around, because haschem was with both. Judas, however, seeing that he
could not overcome him, kilkel masaf ymo, corrupted his deed with him, that is, he had
intercourse with him, ve tyeb osos bo miskaf sochod, that is, made him dishonorable
with malemale intercourse up to the emission of semen, and thus both sullied they
fell to the earth.50
The difference between these two accounts, although only one detail in a
longer story, is key to an understanding of medieval Christian and Jewish
attitudes toward masculinity and malemale sexual relations, and also for
an understanding of how texts circulated between Jewish and Christian
cultures. The question is whether Ebendorfer introduced the anal rape into
the text, or whether it was found in the Hebrew from which he copied; in
the terms that Horbury used to address another aspect of this text, whether
it derives from an anti-Jewish as opposed to a Jewish imagination.51 It is
not possible to answer this question definitively. I suggest, however, that it
is entirely possible that while Ebendorfer likely had a text before him that
involved Judas contaminating Judas, rather than the more straightforward
battle Martini presents, he made the sexual intercourse explicit in a way
that was not found in his Hebrew text. Four areas of analysis support this
possibility: a close analysis of Ebendorfers wording; a comparison with
phrasing found in later manuscripts, printed versions, and references; a
review of attitudes towards malemale intercourse in Christian and in Jewish medieval culture; and the specific context of the condemnation and
prosecution of homosexual behavior in the German-speaking lands and
the ideas circulating in Vienna in the fifteenth century.
Yaacov Deutsch suggests that at historical moments when the Jews felt
more under attack from Christians, their own attacks on Christians became
more forceful: the fifteenth-century versions that refer to (in Deutschs
words) sodomy indicate that already in the fifteenth century, some Jews
felt secure enough to insert it into the text of the Toledot Yeshu.52 Hanne
Trautner-Kromann also suggests in relation to polemical writing (of which
she uses a fairly narrow definition into which the Toledot Yeshu would not
51 Horbury, A Critical Examination, 71 (discussing here a detail presented in the Yuce
Franco trial).
52Deutsch, Second Life, 291.
509
fall) that the intensity of the argumentation corresponds to the degree of

current Christian pressurethe more pressure put on the Jews, the greater
the intensity of the polemical writings.53 Ebendorfers particular moment,
with the Wiener Geserah, was not exactly a point of security for the Jews. It
is clear enough, however, that the intensity of argumentation alone cannot
be used one way or the other to date and locate a particular version.
Ebendorfers Choice of Words

Corrumpuit opus suum secum corrupted his deed with him, is not a
commonly occurring Latin phrase, in fact is quite awkward, but corrumpuit opus suum is a very literal translation of , qilqel maasaw,
which is a Talmudic/Midrashic phrase for committing sin, corruption, or
immorality, often sexual intercourse in particular.54 The fact that Ebendorfer had to explain itthat is, he had intercourse with himis a further
indication that the Latin would not otherwise have made sense and was an
overliteral translation from the Hebrew. I have translated the Latin concubo as have intercourse withthe etymological meaning is lie with,
but in the Middle Ages it was no longer a euphemism but straightforwardly
meant sexual intercourse.
Ve tyeb osos bo miskaf sochod corresponds to the Hebrew
, we-tiew oto be-mishkav zakhur.55 Although Ebendorfer has
translated this phrase into Latin as dishonorably had malemale intercourse with him, a better translation would be and caused him to be an
abomination by malemale intercourse. Mishkav zakhur is the standard
phrase used in rabbinic Hebrew for what I translate as malemale intercourse.56 It is often translated into English as sodomy or pederasty.
Sodomy in modern English, however, is problematic because it can be
53Hanne Trautner-Kromann, Shield and Sword: Jewish Polemics against Christianity and
the Christians in France and Spain from 1100-1500 (Tbingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1993), 15.
54Ymo is , with him. For the usage see Marcus Jastrow, A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (New York, NY: Judaica
Press, 1996), 1382, s.v. , meaning 2, with references to a variety of rabbinic texts.
55Ebendorfer, Das jdische Leben Jesu, ed. Callsen et al., 57. As to why Ebendorfer has
sochod, my guess is that he, or whoever was transliterating for him, mistook a resh for a
daled, but otherwise the transliteration is quite clear. The Gottweig manuscript has corrected osos to oso in the transliteration.
56When used of someone penetrated by a man, for example a virgin who has not known
the intercourse of a man, the phrase is ( mishkav zakhar).
510
used in so many ways, whether for any sexual relations between two men
(and sometimes between two women), or for anal and sometimes oral sex,
regardless of the gender of the participants. Furthermore, the term
sodomy was available to Ebendorfer, and he chose not to use it. Its overtones were moral rather than clinically descriptive. There are certainly rabbinic texts where the phrase mishkav zakhur is used of sexual relations
between an adult man and a boy.57 But as it is also used of relations between
adult men, pederasty is too narrow a translation. I use the term homosexual occasionally here, but only as an adjective describing the sex act,
not to make any claims about the orientation or identity of the men
involved. I am not discussing either the Jewish or the Christian attitude
toward homosexuality or homosexuals, only about acts of same-sex
intercourse, and largely malemale. The texts under discussion here are
talking about acts, not homosexuality or homosexuals.58
Ebendorfers calque, concubitu viri, on mishkav zachur, is not as confusing in the Latin as corrupted his work with him, and it would have
been obvious enough to a medieval reader that it meant sexual intercourse
between two men, but he does not seem to have borrowed it directly from
another Latin discourse. The Vulgate Leviticus, although it translates the
root sh-k-v as coire in relation to other offenses, uses commisceo or dormio
when it comes to prohibiting relations between men, as in Lev. 20:13.59 This
may be because, as Mark Jordan suggests, coitus was reserved for penilevaginal intercourse between humans, but in fact the Vulgate does use it for
57Michael Satlow, Tasting the Dish: Rabbinic Rhetorics of Sexuality (Atlanta, GA: Scholars
Press, 1995), 197-198, notes that Sifra is the only text that specifically says sexual intercourse
between a man and a boy incurs the penalty for malemale intercourse. But even if rabbinic
texts disagreed on whether an adult man was legally liable, the texts cited below at n. 93
demonstrate that at least some medieval interpreters read the Talmud as being concerned
about mishkav zakhur with boys.
58While I do not think that Foucaults famous distinction between acts and identities is
universally valid for the European Middle Ages, in the present context it is clearly acts that
are at issue. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley (New York, NY: Vintage, 1990), 43. See David Halperin, Forgetting Foucault: Acts,
Identities, and the History of Sexuality, Representations 63 (1998), 93-120.
59On the original meaning of the Leviticus prohibitions see Saul M. Olyan, And With a
Male You Shall Not Lie the Lying Down of a Woman: On the Meaning and Significance of
Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, Journal of the History of Sexuality 5 (1994), 179-206. Olyan, And
With a Male, 186, suggests that the Levitical prohibition on lying with a man as with a
woman is directed at the penetrator; mishkav zakhur in rabbinic sources clearly is.
511
sex between a man and an animal.60 The Vulgate does use concubitores
masculorum, that is those men who have sex with males, twice in the
New Testament. This is the phrase that Thomas Aquinas uses in his famous
and influential discussion of the sin against nature.61 Concubitus was the
more common term in a philosophical context, and coitus in a medical
context. But concubitus viri is rare, and where it is found the vir refers to
the subject and not the object, that is, it is often used for the intercourse of
a man with a woman.
Ebendorfer does not give any Hebrew for usque ad emissione seminis,
and in fact the phrasing is characteristic of the discourse of canon law. The
emission of seed was what a woman had to claim if she brought a case in
the church courts for her defloration, or if someone wanted to prove that a
marriage had been consummated. The famous divorce case in the early
thirteenth century between Philip Augustus of France and Ingeborg of
Denmark turned in part on the question of whether seed was emitted in
the appropriate vessel (although it was ultimately ruled that that was not
the relevant issue).62 The phrase was not only used in a canon law context;
it was the standard Latin phrase for ejaculation. Ebendorfer was not a
canon lawyer, but he owned at least one canon law book and would have
had to be familiar with some aspects of it to represent the University at
Basel as he did.63 He may also have felt that it was helpful to elucidate
exactly what was going on here, stressing that actual intromission had
taken place. He may also have included it to explain the concept of
(toevah, abomination or ritual impurity) in Christian terms by clarifying that it is the semen rather than the penetration that pollutes.64
60Mark D. Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, 1997), 144 n. 20
61 Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy, 145-147.
62Jean Gaudemet, Le dossier canonique du mariage de Philippe Auguste et dIngeburge
de Danemark (1193-1213), Revue historique de droit franais et tranger 67 (1984), 15-26.
63Johannes Andreaes commentary on Books IV and V of the Decretals: Paul Uiblein,
Die Universitt Wien im Mittelalter: Beitrge und Forschungen (Vienna: Universittsverlag,
1999), 472.
64On the interpretation of toevah in Greek translation see John Boswell, Christianity,
Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe form the Beginning of the
Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 101102. On semen as polluting in Christianity, see Dyan Elliott, Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1999), 14-34.
512
Ebendorfers use of two separate phrases to describe what took place

(kilkel masaf ymo, corrupted his deed with him, that is, he had intercourse
with him, ve tyeb osos bo miskaf sochod, that is, dishonorably had male
male intercourse with him up to the emission of semen) suggests the possibility that he might have found one of them in his text and added the
other as he added the up to the emission of semen. Corrupted his deed
with him may have been sufficiently vague that he needed to explain it
twice, once with the that is, had intercourse with him and then again with
the specific phrase mishkav zakhur, id est concubitus viri. The obvious objection to this is that Ebendorfer would not likely have given the Hebrew for
this phrase, were it not in his original. This is not necessarily the case, however. The reasons why Ebendorfer includes the transliterated Hebrew for
various phrases are not always clear. Many of them are important theological points, as when he quotes Isaiah 7:14: hynne haalma et cetera, id est:
ecce virgo concipiet... ( , that is, behold, a young woman [virgin] shall conceive).65 Others are technical terms, like machaschebos, id est incantationes (that is, incantations).66 Still others are
straightforward translations, which we may guess Ebendorfer was including for the sake of creating an atmosphere of authenticity rather than
because the meaning was in question, as with cyporim, id est aves (,
that is birds).67
There is at least one point in the text, however, where Ebendorfer uses a
Hebrew phrase that cannot have been in the original. That is the title of the
entire Falsitates Iudaeorum, which he gives in Hebrew:

( Falsehood, Blasphemy and Reviling of the Evil
and Sinful Jews).68 Ebendorfer must have asked his translator/assistant for
the Hebrew for the title. It is not clear how much Hebrew Ebendorfer knew
on his own; he may have had some and used the convert he mentioned to
help him with difficult passages, or he could have proceeded by having the
assistant translate orally from Hebrew to German and then himself translating the assistants spoken German into written Latin.69 Certainly by

66Ibid., 52.
67Ibid., 54.
68Ibid., 36. There is the beginning of a transliteration at the top of the page (fol. 29r in the
Vienna MS) that the editors have not noted.
69Manuela Niesner, Einleitung, in Ebendorfer, Das jdische Leben Jesu, ed. Callsen
et al., 19-20.
513
Ebendorfers time texts written in Judeo-German indicate that there were

Jews literate in both that language and Hebrew.70 Some of the many places
where Ebendorfer inserts the transliterated Hebrew may have been places
where they had to have a discussion because the assistant was not sure of
the exact German equivalent. It is easy to imagine Ebendorfer being given
a literal German translation of qilqel maasaw imo which he translated as
corrumpuit opus suum secum, asking for further clarification, adding
that is, he had intercourse with him, and then, perhaps shocked at the
blasphemy or perhaps feeling the need to make clear what sort of blasphemy this actually was, asking for a further Hebrew phrase that might
convey it. In the same way the translator/assistant gave Ebendorfer the
Hebrew for the title, he could have given him the further Hebrew phrase for
dishonorably had malemale intercourse with him. This would further
explain why Ebendorfer has sochod for zakhur: it may not have been in the
text for him to look at while transliterating. Any account of Ebendorfers
process must be speculative in the absence of his exemplar or more explicit
comment about it than the fact that he worked with a convert, but this
account would seem to explain his use of specific terminology in the text.
Other Versions of the Aerial Battle

An examination of the scene in several later Toledot texts, which were copied from manuscripts of unknown date, may help us determine how much
Ebendorfer innovated on this point. The author closest in time to Ebendorfer who referred to this scene in the Toledot is Petrus Nigri (Peter Schwarz),
a Bohemian Dominican educated in Spain as a Hebraist and possibly a convert from Judaism, who wrote several anti-Jewish treatises in Latin and
German. In his Contra perfidos Judaeos de conditionibus veri Messiae,
printed in 1475, he summarized the blasphemies of the Jews as found in the
Toledot: they claim that he was conceived by a menstruating mother
through adultery, and suffered a sodomitical act, and create other infamous
falsehoods about him.71 Nigri could have known a text similar to that used
by Ebendorfer, either in the Regensburg area where he was active or in
70Jean Baumgarten, Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, ed. and trans. Jerold C. Frakes
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 26-37.
71 ...asserunt a menstruate matre per adulterium conceptum ac a quodam alium sodomiticum actum compassum, hec et alia nefandissima in eum confingunt Petrus Nigri,
Contra perfidos Judaeos de conditionibus veri Messiae (Esslingen, 1475), fol. 33v, digitized
514
Spain where he had studied, or he could conceivably have seen a copy of

Ebendorfers work itself, although the known manuscripts are only from
Austria. Or he could have known an oral tradition in circulation that related
to the story but not to one particular text. Nigri also wrote a work in German, the Stern Meschiah, and there he tells the story of the Toledot in more
detail, but, he says, how Jesus lost the Name and his powers he will not say,
because it is unspeakable (unaussprechlich) and against nature (wider
die gancze natur). As we will see below, these are clear references to sodomitic and probably same-sex sexual activity. Nigri still describes the aerial struggle, however, with an etc. covering the unspeakable:
Wann die valschen Jden die tichten wie er flog in der krafft diss namens czwisschen
himel und erden und ein ander welicher auch kant die auszlegung des namens der flog
mit em vnd berwandt en. vnd czwang en etc. vnd also vielen de alle beed auff die
erden...
As the false Jews say, he flew by the power of the Name between heaven and earth, then
another who also knew the interpretation of the name flew with him and overcame
him and forced him etc. and so they both fell to earth.72
Yaacov Deutsch suggests that Nigri edited out the sexual aspect of the fight
from the vernacular version because it was inappropriate for lay people.73
The use of the more euphemistic language, unspeakable and against
nature rather than sodomy, would tend to support this. But Nigri tells the
story for two different purposes in his two works; the German is not simply
a translation of the Latin. In the Latin text the summary of the Toledot is
used to demonstrate that the Jews are blasphemers. In the German, the
longer passage about the aerial battle is used to make a point similar to
Martinis about the miracles that even the Jews concede Jesus performed.
Indeed, Nigri clearly knew the Pugio Fidei and relied on it at several points
unrelated to the Toledot. It may be that rather than censoring a longer version, he here relied on Martini, merely alluding to a point he knew from
another version similar to Ebendorfers.
copy from the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, persistent identifier urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb

00039976-5. Deutsch, Second Life, 291.
72Petrus Nigri, Der Stern Meschiah (Esslingen: Conrad Fyner, 1477), fol. 154v and 156v.
The volume has no folio numbers, but the copy I used (a microfilm loaned by the University
of Rochester Library) has handwritten numbers on every tenth folio.
73Deutsch, Toledot Yeshu in Christian Eyes, 49-51.
515
The first printed edition of the Toledot Yeshu, the one whose name Krauss
gave to the branch of the tradition into which both Martinis and Ebendorfers
texts fall, is the one by Johann Christoph Wagenseil, who published it in
Latin and Hebrew in his 1681 Tela ignea Satanae followed by a Confutatio.74
Wagenseils version has a more halakhically developed story in that it
makes clear the reasons why the name lost its power.

.
When Judas saw that he could not corrupt Jesus, he urinated on Jesus and they were
both contaminated and fell to the ground and could not use the Name because they
were contaminated until they immersed themselves.
Caeterum, Juda animadvertens, non valere se tantum ut opera Jeschu exsuperare
queat, corporis sui saccato humore eum proluit, unde immundi redditi, in terram prolapse sunt, ob contractam impuritatem ambo usu Schem Hamphorasch privi, quoad
abluerentur.
Further, Judas seeing that he could not prevail insofar as to overcome the deeds of
Jesus, he flooded him with the urinous humor of his body, by which, rendered impure,
they fell to the ground, both deprived of the use of the Name because of the impurity
contracted, until they would wash themselves.75
Wagenseils Hebrew text contains the same phrase that Ebendorfer translated as corrupted his deed. Wagenseil did not interpret it as referring to
sexual intercourse or even immorality in general, translating it word-byword instead of as a phrase, as overcoming the deeds. The prior passage
refers to an aerial struggle but without sexual implications, so Judas saw
that he could not corrupt him [sexually] would be somewhat of a non
sequitur. In any case, Wagenseils text suggests that the two separate
phrases of Ebendorfers account did not always travel together. Wagenseils
text couples corrupted his deed with urination, rather than rape, and his
Latin correctly, though rather pompously, translates this. After the two fall
to the ground, in Wagenseils retelling, Jesus goes and immerses himself in
the Jordan, after which purification he recovers the powers he gained
through the Name.
74According to Krauss, 27, it was based Leipzig Stadtbibliothek Cod.hebr. B.H. 27, a
sixteenth-century manuscript previously in Wagenseils possession.
75Toldos Jeschv, 13, in Johann Christoph Wagenseil, Tela ignea Satanae (Altdorf:
J.H. Schnnerstadt, 1680; rpt Westmead: Gregg, 1970), vol. 2.
516
One of the best-known manuscripts of the Wagenseil group or Helen

group of the Toledot tradition, identified by Krauss in the Strassbourg university library, comes from an eighteenth-century Galician Karaite milieu,
but is very close to Wagenseils version and may in fact be more faithful to
older traditions as it contains a good deal of Aramaic.76 Modern scholars
have stressed the close similarities between the Strassbourg manuscript
and both Martinis and Ebendorfers versions, and suggested that it represents a version that circulated already in the thirteenth or fourteenth
century.77 In this manuscript, as in Wagenseils version, Judas urinates on
Jesus, but the phrasing is closer to the first part of Ebendorfers doubled
account of sexual activity, and it does not give the halakhic explanation
that Wagenseil does:
'
And when Judah saw this, he corrupted him and urinated on Jesus and contaminated
him and he fell and Judah with him.78
If Horbury is right and the Strassbourg manuscript represents an early version of this branch of the Toledot tradition, something quite similar to it
could be the version that Ebendorfer used, and he could have embellished
this scene.
The urination of Judas on Jesus is found in several other parts of the tradition as well. The seventeenth-century German work of the convert Samuel Friedrich Brentz, Judischer abgestreiffter Schlangenbalg, gives a brief
summary of the Toledot Yeshu, in which the rabbis, seeing Jesus perform his
wonders, write the Name on the back of Judah the Gardener (not named
Iscariot), and the latter alsbald ber den Jesus geflogen und auff ihm geharnet (immediately flew after Jesus and urinated on him).79 Bischoff and
76Krauss, Das Leben Jesu, 20-21; translated into Italian in Di Segni, Il Vangelo, 51-66, who
renders this phrase as fece una azione cattiva e urin su Jshu; see William Horbury, The
Strasbourg Text of the Toledot, in Toledot Yeshu, ed. Schfer et al., 49-59. A very similar version was also translated into Yiddish.
77Horbury, The Strasbourg Text, 53-54; Deutsch, Second Life, 291.
78Krauss, Das Leben Jesu, 43. Krauss translates: Als das Juda sah, verbte er etwas
Schlechtes: er uriniert auf Jesum, so dass dieser verunreinigt wurde und zur Erde fiel, und
mit ihm auch Juda (55).
79Samuel Friedrich Brentz, Judischer abgestreiffter Schlangenbalg (Nuremberg, 1614), copy
digitized by Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, persistent link http://www.mdz-nbn-resolving.de/
urn/resolver.pl?urn=urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10772680-0 fol. 3r.
517
Krauss placed this text in the tradition of the Huldreich type, but in fact it
is not, as indicated by a variety of details, including the one in question
here, which is not in Huldreichs version of the story; however, neither is it
a pure Wagenseil type.80 The detail about urination is quite widespread;
it also appears in some Yemeni versions.81
There would seem to be three possibilities for the tradition of the aerial
battle: there was an older version referring to urination, which either was
not known in Martinis time or was emended by him, and which Ebendorfer changed to sexual intercourse/rape; there was an older version, in which
Ebendorfer participated, referring to sexual intercourse and which later
texts emended to urination; or there was an older version with qilqel
maasiw, which was so vague that various translators and copyists felt the
need to expand upon it.
If Ebendorfer did elaborate on what he found in his exemplar and introduce the idea of mishkav zakhur, it did not prove to be a dead end. In an
eighteenth-century manuscript edited by Krauss, Cod. hebr. 54 of the Israelitisch-theologische Lehranstalt, Vienna, which he identified as a German
rabbinic hand from the mid-eighteenth century and classified in the
DeRossi type, the elders tell Judas to contaminate Jesus with urine, but he
performs sexual intercourse on him instead.82
'

"
.
And they said to Judas Skarioto serve God and go up after him and bring him down and
make him fall and soil him with urine, and all his knowledge will do nothing. Judas
Skarioto immediately did as they said and went up after him and contaminated and
soiled him with malemale intercourse and made him fall to earth, and before he
soiled him they could do nothing to each other because both of them had the Name
until he soiled him with malemale intercourse, and because he soiled him and
80Adina M. Yoffie, Observations on the Huldreich Manuscripts of the Toledot Yeshu,

in Toledot Yeshu, ed. Schfer et al, 61-77, here 65; Johannes Jakob Huldreich, Historia Jeschuae Nazareni (Leiden, 1705), digital copy at Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, persistent link
http://www.mdz-nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn=urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10239719-1.
81Horbury, Critical Examination, 243, 290.
82Most of the books in this seminary were taken to Berlin and destroyed in an air raid in
1943; I have not attempted to trace what happened to this one.
518

the seed fell on Jesus the Wicked, both of them were contaminated and both fell to the
ground as one.83
This is clearly in a text quite different from Ebendorfers, which could point
to the detail about malemale intercourse in the aerial battle coming very
early in the tradition; on the other hand, it could point to cross-influence
among textual traditions, which has certainly been noticed elsewhere.84
MaleMale Intercourse in Christian and Jewish Traditions

The story of sexual intercourse between Judas and Jesus is not a story of
love between men. Although in many Christian interpretations the relationship between the two is a deep and passionate one, so that the betrayal
is more shocking, and although the kiss with which Judas identifies Jesus in
the Gospels can be seen erotically, in the Toledot there is no mention of the
two being friends before the flight: Judas is recruited to bring Jesus down,
but not because of a prior relationship.85 Nor is it a story about rape, in the
sense that what is key is the fact that sexual intercourse took placenot
that it was involuntaryand that the passive partner was polluted even
without consentingan attitude that is apparent in many medieval narratives about mens rape of women, for example the Lucretia tradition.86 It is
a story of forbidden sexual activity and of impurity.
Whether or not they considered consent a major issue, medieval writers
in general thought of sex as something one person did to another, rather
than something two people did together, and this was true of malemale
83Krauss, Das Leben Jesu, 74. Krauss translates mishkav zakhur here into German as
besudelte ihm mit Samen, contaminated him with semen (100); a note (268 n. 11) by
Bischoff he claims that because actual sexual intercourse would not be possible in the air,
mishkav zakhur must mean simply an emission of seed; a bracketed note replies Nein, Sodomie. It is not clear why the aerial battle would be possible and intercourse during it is not;
it makes more sense translate mishkav zakhur as intercourse.
84For a text of the Slavic type in which Judas brings Jesus down by emitting seed on
him, see Samuel Krauss, Une nouvelle recension hbraique du Toldot Yesu. Revue des
Etudes Juives 103 (1938), 65-88, at 81.
85On Judas see Ora Limor and Israel Jacob Yuval, Judas Iscariot: Revealer of the Hidden
Truth, in Toledot Yeshu, ed. Schfer et al, 197-220, and Susan Gubar, Judas: A Biography
(New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), who discusses the Toledot story on p. 197.
86On rape of women by men, see generally Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval
Europe: Doing Unto Others, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2012), 145-147 and 163-166.
519
relations as well as male-female. Medieval Christian Europe inherited the

idea of a division of homosexual behavior into active and passive from the
ancient world. In classical Greece and Rome there was little shame for a
free adult man in being the active partner in same-sex intercourse, or
indeed any sort of intercourse in which he was the penetrator.87 He could
get in trouble if he chose the wrong partneranother free mans wife or
son, for examplebut not shame, and he could have sex with a slave or
prostitute of either sex without occasioning any opprobrium. Scholars do
not entirely agree as to whether it may have been dishonoring for an underage boy to be a passive partner with an older man, but the Greeks and
Romans had terms for an adult passive man, and they were not flattering.88
Christianity, however, did not accept wholesale these classical attitudes
toward sexuality; it also drew on ascetic traditions, whether Jewish, Stoic or
other, and from an early stage discouraged if not outright condemned sexual activity outside of marriage, and in some cases within marriage also.89
Homosexual behavior was part of a general tension in Christian attitudes
throughout the Middle Ages between an official condemnation of nonmarital sexual activity and hence the double standard that was perfectly
acceptable in Rome, and on the other hand a tendency to look the other
way from what an elite man did. Christian sources generally do not have a
whole lot to say about it through the early Middle Ages, except for some
references in penitentials.90 Even the earliest vehement condemnation of
87The distinction between active and passive was that between penetrator and penetrated; it did not have anything to do with who initiated the relations or who put more
energy into the physical union.
88Boswell, Christianity, 61-87; Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of
Masculinity in Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), esp. 160-224; John
J. Winkler, The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece
(New York: Routledge, 1992), 45-70; Amy Richlin, Not Before Homosexuality: The Materiality of the Cinaedus and the Roman Law Against Love Between Men, Journal of the History of
Sexuality 3 (1993), 523-573; Marilyn B. Skinner, Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2005), 10-16, 124-132, 197-200, and passim.
89Kyle Harper, Porneia: The Making of a Christian Sexual Norm, Journal of Biblical Literature 131 (2012), 363-383, on the development of Christian sexual morality generally.
90David Clark, Between Medieval Men: Male Friendship and Desire in Early Medieval English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) is one of the few works that focuses
on same-sex relations in the early Middle Ages, and because of the nature of the sources has
more to say about love than about sexual activity. See also Allen Frantzen, Before the Closet:
Same-Sex Love from Beowulf to Angels in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1998), esp. 111-137; Boswell, Christianity, 169-206; Pierre J. Payer, Sex and the Penitentials: The
520
these practices, that of Peter Damian, who coined the term sodomy as a
category, made a good deal more impact on the longer historical term than
he did in his own day, where the pope largely ignored his concerns.91 This
could be, as some scholars have thought, because malemale sexual practices were so widespread among the clergy that a crackdown would have
been extraordinarily difficult, or, as others have suggested, an effort to
avoid scandal.92
In Jewish tradition, malemale intercourse is part of a larger category of
forbidden sexual relations, arayot, and also an abhorrent thing or abomination, toevah.93 Although there is modern scholarship that comments on
Biblical and Talmudic texts on the subject, there is relatively little contemporary scholarly discussion of attitudes or practices during the Middle
Ages, in part because there are relatively few references to it in medieval
halakhic sources including response literature.94 References are more
Development of a Sexual Code 550-1150 (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1984),
40-44.
91On Damian see Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy, 45-66; Elliott, Fallen Bodies, 95-106;
Larry Scanlon, Unmanned Men and the Eunuchs of God: Peter Damians Liber Gommorhianus and the Sexual Politics of Papal Reform, New Medieval Literatures 2 (1998),
37-64; Conrad Leyser, Cities of the Plain: the Rhetoric of Sodomy in Peter Damians Book of
Gomorrah, Romanic Review 86 (1995), 191-211; William E. Burgwinkle, Sodomy, Masculinity,
and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England, 1050-1230 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 46-65. The first two chapters of Burgwinkles book generally provide an
excellent introduction to attitudes toward homosexual activity before Aquinas.
92Boswell, Christianity, 207-226; Dyan Elliott, Sexual Scandal and the Clergy: a Medieval
Blueprint for Disaster, in Why the Middle Ages Matter: Medieval Light on Modern Injustice,
ed. Celia Chazelle, Simon Doubleday, Felice Lifshitz, and Amy G. Remensnyder (London:
Routledge, 2011), 90-105.
93Historical reviews of Jewish traditions about malemale sexual activity can be found
in several thoughtful works written for the use of modern rabbis in providing pastoral
care. For the position of the Conservative movement in the US, see http://www.rabbinical
assembly.org/sites/default/files/public/halakhah/teshuvot/20052010/dorff_nevins_reisner_
dignity.pdf (accessed 10/2/2012). For a work approved by the Orthodox establishment in
Great Britain, see Chaim Rapoport, Judaism and Homosexuality: An Authentic Orthodox View
(London: Valletine Mitchell, 2004). For a very liberal Orthodox position see Steven Greenberg, Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition (Madison, WI:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004).
94Not only is there little scholarship, I found no hits in the Bar-Ilan database (http://
www.biu.ac.il/jh/Responsa/) for responsa about cases of mishkav zakhur.
521
common in kabbalah but tend to be expressions of homoeroticism rather

than discussions of behavior that remained forbidden.95
Throughout these understandings the distinction between the active
and the passive partner is maintained, and the passive partner is placed in
a feminized position; he is used as a woman.96 Often the one to whom
something is done is a boy, and men may be said to prefer boys to girls, or
boys to women. This may represent a general practice of juvenilizing a sex
object (as we still see today), or the fact that age differentials between men
and their female partners were common as well. In an era when at least
elite women were often expected to start bearing children as soon as physically possible, sexual attraction to those we today see as underage was not
unusual. What is interesting is the pattern of punishment for male homosexual activity. Although there are not that many sources about this from
across Christian Europe, in general we can say (largely based on later medieval evidence) that a mature man who was the passive partner was considered the worst offender, followed by a man who was the active partner,
followed last by boys who were passive.97 Under Jewish law a man who had
sex with a boy was liable to stoning, but not the boy.98
Mishkav zakhur in the Jewish tradition is also sometimes thought of in
terms of an age differential, and translated as pederasty. A key passage in
the Babylonian Talmud (BT), Avodah Zara 15b, dealing with idolatry, commands Jews not to give their children to be educated by idolaters; Rashi
(1040-1105) explains that this is because of the possibility of mishkav
95For the early modern period, with ample earlier background, see Shaul Magid, From
Metaphysics to Midrash: Myth, History, and the Interpretation of Scripture in Lurianic Kabbala (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), 111-142. On eroticism in kabbalah,
see Moshe Idel, Kabbalah and Eros (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), and Elliot
R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New
York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2005).
96Ruth Mazo Karras and David L. Boyd, Ut Cum Muliere: A Male Transvestite Prostitute
in Fourteenth-Century London, in Premodern Sexualities, ed. Louise Fradenburg and Carla
Freccero (London: Routledge, 1996), 101-116.
97Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance
Florence (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996), 97-111; Helmut Puff, Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400-1600 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003)
identifies fewer cases and does not make this point, but the pattern is similar if not as
marked.
98Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot issurei biah 1:14, ed. Yosef Qafa (Tel Aviv:
Mekhon mishnat ha-Rambam, 1983), 7:36.
522
zakhur.99 There is more discussion in BT Qiddushin 82a and its commentaries about the reason for a prohibition on an unmarried man or a woman
teaching children. The Mishnah prohibited this along with a prohibition on
an unmarried man serving as a shepherd or two unmarried men sleeping
under one blanket. However, the sages permit. The Gemara asks why the
sages allow it, and quotes a Baraita saying Israel is not suspected of male
male intercourse or bestiality. Thus the reason for the prohibition is not
due to a fear of sexual intercourse with the children, but rather a concern
about a female teachers encounter with the fathers of her students, or an
unmarried male teachers encounter with their mothers. The argument
that it is permissible for two unmarried men to share a blanket because
Jews are not to be suspected of malemale sexual practices, an argument
made repeated in a variety of commentaries over the course of the Middle
Ages, at least implies that these practices could be understood in a more
egalitarian way, that is, something that two men did together (or of which
both men were innocent or guilty) rather than something that one man did
to another.
The corpus of Hebrew love poetry from medieval Iberia contains a number of poems addressed to boys by mature men. As with Arabic poems on
the same theme, scholars once suggested that these poems were really
meant to express love for women but used masculine forms in order to
protect the womens reputations, or translated the masculine forms in the
feminine. Or they suggested that the eroticism was merely metaphorical, or
merely a copying of a genre rather than an expression of actual feeling. The
absence of concern over malemale intercourse in the abundant responsa
of Iberian rabbis has called into question the social reality behind these
poems. Obviously one can never assume that love poetry expresses the personal feelings of the author, but as Norman Roth convincingly demonstrates, the poems were about boys, not about girls or women with the
grammatical gender changed.100 The point to be noted here is not what
the poems may or may not say about the prevalence of malemale love or
99Rashi on Avodah Zara 15b. All Talmud texts, as well as Rashis commentary, are cited
in the Vilna pagination, used in all modern editions.
100See discussion of previous scholarship, as well as of the poems themselves, in Norman Roth, Deal Gently With the Young Man: Love of Boys in Medieval Hebrew Poetry of
Spain, in Speculum 57 (1982), 20-51; Jefim Schirmann, The Ephebe in Medieval Hebrew
Poetry, Sefarad 15 (1955), 55-68.
523
sexual activity, but rather that when such poetry does appear in the medieval Jewish tradition, it clearly describes an age-imbalanced relationship.
The Jewish tradition did distinguish between the active and the passive
role: for example, BT Sanhedrin 54b includes a discussion among the rabbis
about whether someone who has intercourse with a man (ha-ba al hazakhur) and with whom a man has intercourse (hevi zakhar alaw) incurs
one or two separate punishments. According to R. Akiva, depending on the
vocalization, lo tishkav (you shall not lie [with]) could be read as lo tishakhev
(you shall not be lain [with]). Maimonides also made this distinction: ben
she-hayah boel o nival (whether he was the one who possessed sexually, or
the one who was possessed). But both could be considered culpable, and
thus even the claim that Judas had intercourse with Jesus was a claim about
Jesus not just as a victim but also as a transgressor.101
One reason given by both Jewish and Christian writers against homosexual activity, and indeed any sexual activity other than penile-vaginal
intercourse during a womans fertile period, is that it is an alternative to
marriage and appropriate reproduction. There is no question that in medieval Jewish society the religious obligation to marry and reproduce was
even more the norm than in Christianity (BT Yevamot 63b). This idea was
used in arguments about the inappropriateness of mishkav zakhur: for
example, the thirteenth-century Pinas ha-Levi of Barcelona wrote that
He commanded us that human seed should not be destroyed by carnal
relations with males: for this is indeed destruction, since there can be no
fruitful benefit of offspring from it.102 The idea of reproduction was also
central to Aristotelian ideas about gender and about the body and nature,
which were transmitted to both traditions via Arabic culture.103 Thomas
Aquinas, the great systematizing Christian theologian of the thirteenth
century, put forward a hierarchy drawing on Gratian, Peter Lombard, Raymond of Peaforte and the influential moralist William Peraldus, in which
the worst sort of sexual offense was the sin against nature, worse than
adultery, incest and so on; the practices that made up the sin against
nature included bestiality, homosexual intercourse, and heterosexual
101 Loc. cit.

102Pinas ha-Levi, Sfer ha-Hinnuch: The Book of [Mitzvah] Education, 209, ed. and trans.
Charles Wengrov (Jerusalem: Feldheim, 1984), 2:365.
103Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy, 129.
524
intercourse in an inappropriate vessel.104 But he was a theologian, and

scientific thinkers (natural philosophers) did not necessarily equate
nature and reproduction as Aquinas did. Nor did Jewish authors who developed taxonomies of forbidden sexual relationships: they did not lump
together non-reproductive activity. For example, Abraham ibn Ezra (10891164), an influential Torah commentator who lived in Iberia, North Africa,
Italy, and France, cited Saadia Gaon (d. Baghdad 942) for a hierarchy that
went from a virgin or widow, to ones own wife when niddah, someone
elses wife, a non-Jewish woman, then a man, and finally an animal.105
Medieval scientific thought on the subject owed much to the pseudoAristotelian Problemata; commentaries on that work problematize the idea
that what is natural is what is procreative.106 Rather, they argued, some
men were so made that they derived pleasure from friction of the anus; it
may not have been natural in a general way, but it was natural to them. As
Joan Cadden shows, these attitudes were very complicated and contradictory, even within the writing of any given commentator. What is clear,
though, is that the discussion was about the desire to be receptive, not
about a desire for men vs. women as sexual object. Scientists did not concern themselves with whether an active penetrator preferred men or
women; this was not considered a medical or a natural-philosophical question. It was a matter of taste, or of choice and sin, as was generally the case
in Jewish thought as well. The scene of the aerial battle does not cast either
Jesus or Judas as a particular type of person with a particular biological
leaning or predilection, nor is a euphemism like against nature used.
A charge of malemale sexual activity is a likely one for late medieval
Jews to level against Christians. The Jews were not the only people to depict
such activity as a habit of some others: Christian culture attributed it particularly to Muslims or, in the later Middle Ages, Italians. There might be a
concern with Muslims as active partners seducing Christian boys, as in the
104Discussion on Aquinass taxonomy in Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy, 144. See also
Ruth Mazo Karras, The Lechery That Dare Not Speak Its Name: Sodomy and the Vices in
Medieval England, in In the Garden of Evil: The Vices and Culture in the Middle Ages, ed.
Richard Newhauser (Toronto, ON: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2005), 193-205.
105Abraham ibn Esras langer Kommentar zum Buch Exodus, trans. [into German] Dirk U.
Rottzoll (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), 2: 609-611. He also mentioned, but did not place
in the hierarchy, sex with ones mother, sister or daughter. Other Jewish authors during the
Middle Ages put the same categories in a different order.
106Joan Cadden, Nothing Natural is Shameful: Sodomy and Science in Medieval Europe
(Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
525
tenth-century story of St. Pelagius, a Christian boy whose purity is threatened by the Emir of Cordoba, or in a letter purportedly from a Byzantine
Emperor in the eleventh century, or as effeminate.107 Jews too could connect Muslims with malemale intercourse: Pinas ha-Levi understood the
qadesh of Deuteronomy 23:18, often connected with ritual prostitution,
with a man prepared to be used by males for carnal relations, such as
are known to exist in the land of the Ishmaelites to this day.108 But, while
there are certainly Christian writings that consider Jewish men as effeminate, including the idea that they menstruate, malemale sexual activity
was an accusation more likely to be directed by Jews against others than by
others against Jews.109
Although Jewish texts from medieval Europe do not often directly connect Christians with malemale activity, Judaism had a long tradition of
connecting Gentiles with such practices, both in rabbinic literaturefor
example the passages cited above from Avodah Zarahand Hellenistic
Judaism.110 Talmudic references to idolaters may have developed as a
107 Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy, 10-28; Jeffrey Bowman, Beauty and Passion in
Tenth-Century Crdoba, in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and
Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 236253; Gregory S. Hutcheson, The Sodomitic Moor: Queerness in the Narrative of Reconquista, in Queering the Middle Ages, ed. Glenn Burger and Steven Kruger (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 99-122; for the early modern period, Silke R. Falkner,
Perverted Spaces: Boundary Negotiations in Early-Modern Turcica, in Encounters with
Islam in German Literature and Culture, ed. James Hodkinson and Jeff Morrison (Rochester,
NY: Camden House, 2009), 55-72, 64-65. For the connection of malemale sexual activity
with Italy, particularly Florence, see Puff, Sodomy, 43-44.
108Pinas ha-Levi, Sfer ha-Hinnuch, 2: 361-362, citing Maimonides. The overall visibility
of malemale sexual behavior tended to be less common in Ashkenaz than among Jews in
Muslim lands. See Yaron Ben-Naeh, Moshko the Jew and his Gay Friends: Same-Sex Sexual
Relations in Ottoman Jewish Society, Journal of Early Modern History 9 (2005), 79-108, here
86; Magid, From Metaphysics to Midrash, 122-124.
109On Jewish men menstruating, see Irven M. Resnick, Marks of Distinction: Christian
Perspectives of Jews in the High Middle Ages (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011), 175-214; Irven M. Resnick, Medieval Roots of the Myth of Jewish Male
Menses, Harvard Theological Review 93 (2000), 241-263; Willis Johnson, The Myth of Jewish
Male Menses, Journal of Medieval History 24 (1998), 273-295; Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Idols
in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100-1450 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2009), 148-153; Cuffel, Gendering Disgust, 166-177.
110 See Satlow, Tasting the Dish, 203-206.
526
euphemism for Christians.111 Elliot Wolfson points out that in the Zohar,
the idolatrous nations are conjoined to the masculine potency of the other
[demonic] god through the feminine presence of the demonic realm.112
One of the most common contexts for rabbinic discussion of mishkav
zakhur comes from the Babylonian Talmud, Sukkah 29a, which quotes a
baraita listing it as one of four things that can cause an eclipse of the sun.
An eclipse of the sun also appears in Jeremiah 10 as one of the signs of the
heavens at which the nations (goyim), although not the Israelites, should
be dismayed. The Yalqut Shimoni, a well-known and influential midrash
collection from the thirteenth century, probably from Frankfurt, uses this
Talmud passage in its exegesis of Jeremiah 10, to explain the way of the
nations.113 Mishkav zakhur is a practice of the goyim, or an idolatrous practice that might be taken up by Israelites/Jews and therefore punished. Since
Judaism had this long tradition of considering malemale intercourse
something done by the other, in a situation where the other that they are
concerned with is Christian, it is not surprising that an attack on Jesus
would involve this sort of accusation.
Perhaps the most pertinent aspect of attitudes toward homosexual
behavior in the Middle Ages to the story of the aerial battle is that of pollution. This, interestingly, is much less significant than one might expect it to
be given the level of disgust connected with malemale sexual activity in
some modern discourses. Even the loquacious and polemical Peter Damian
seems more concerned about ritual pollution in his works on clerical marriage than he is in his work on sodomy, although that is a difficult call to
make, since the texts are not directly comparable. The idea that the hand
that touches a whores genitals should not touch the Eucharist is a much
111 Indeed, some medieval Talmud manuscripts, for example JTS MS 44830, a Sephardic
manuscript from around 1290 of the tractate Avodah Zarah, use goyim where later editors
emended to ovdei kokhavim, star-worshippers, to avoid offending Christians with accusations of bestiality: Masekhet Avodah Zarah (New York, NY: Jewish Theological Seminary,
1957). I am grateful to Sol Cohen for calling my attention to this phenomenon and this
manuscript.
112Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, 93.
113Yalqut Shimoni, ed. Dov Hyman (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Quq, 2009), 422. This is a
compilation, and I use it here not to claim that the way it approaches malemale intercourse is new in Jewish thought but rather to indicate how earlier texts were being put
together in the thirteenth century. See Jacob Elbaum, Yalqut Shimoni and the Medieval
Midrashic Anthology, Prooftexts 17 (1997) 133-151. On the dating of the Yalqut see Ursula
Ragacs, Der Yalqu Shimoniein Werkzeug der christlich-jdischen Kontroverse des
Mittelalters? Frankfurter Judaistische Beitrge 20 (2003), 91-101.
527
more direct expression of the ritual pollution idea than anything he has to
say about malemale intercourse.114 The term pollution for contact with
semen is frequently used in Christian sources but always for contact
with ones own semen through masturbation or more frequently through
nocturnal emission, not because the latter was more common than masturbation but because its moral status is more debatable since it can be inadvertent. The entire Christian idea of purity and pollution in relation to
bodily fluids was heavily influenced by Judaism.
Jewish writings varied in how concerned they were with the spilling of
seed compared to, for example, menstrual blood. Hekhalot mysticism
(a predecessor to Kabbalah) made seminal pollution, which blocked mystical experience, more prominent.115 In discussions of seminal pollution,
however, it is the ejaculant who becomes impure; there is little discussion
of becoming impure from someone elses semen, except through sexual
intercourse with a demon or contaminated woman.116 A man could, however, become impure from contact with (or even the sight of) a menstruant. Michael Swartz points to an important text of Hekhalot mysticism in
which an item touched by a woman of doubtful menstrual purity could
bring down someone engaged in an ascent to Heaven (albeit not a bodily
ascent, since his body was available to be touched with the item). It may be
that the semen functions similarly in Toledot Yeshu.117
114See discussion of this phrase in Damian in Ruth Mazo Karras, Unmarriages: Women,
Men, and Sexual Unions in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2012), 120-121.
115Koren, Foresaken, 9-11, 19-21, 26-27 (quotation at p. 10). For a review of the literature on
various polluting fluids in Leviticus, see Olyan, And With a Male, 200-204; David Biale, Eros
and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (New York, NY: Basic Books,
1992), 28-31; Biale, Blood and Belief, 31-32, 68. See Cohen, Purity and Piety, 104-107, for ejaculation as a greater source of impurity than menstruation in rabbinic texts. Cuffel, Gendering
Disgust, passim, gives numerous examples of semen mentioned in medieval sources in the
context of other bodily fluids, especially blood, but rarely of its being singled out. Patricia
Simons has recently argued that scholars have tended to ignore the place of semen in the
social construction of masculinity and male sexuality in medieval and early modern Europe,
but her argument does not extend to Jewish culture. Patricia Simons, The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
116Cuffel, The Matter of Others, 269-271, discusses seminal pollution, but there are no
examples of a man being polluted by someone else ejaculating on or in him, rather it mostly
has to do with mens handling of their own sexual organ (272).
117I thank one of the anonymous readers for suggestion that the aerial battle episode
may draw on Hekhalot mysticism, and for bibliographical references. See Michael Swartz,
528
The reason that malemale intercourse is toevah (often translated as

abomination) in Jewish tradition is something more than ritual pollution
(tame).118 In Wagenseils version of the Toledot, Jesus does go and wash
himself in the Jordan to purify himself after Judas urinates on him and
causes him to fall; he thus recovers his powers; but this purification is not
mentioned in versions where intercourse is said to have taken place.119
Mishkav zakhur as toevah appears mainly in the discussions of forbidden
sexual practices in Leviticus and commentaries thereon, and in discussions
of the behavior of idolaters. Mishkav zakhur continued to be associated
with toevah in the Middle Ages; for example, Rashi repeatedly glosses
toevah as mishkav zakhur.120
Based on medieval understandings of malemale intercourse, a variety
of reasons appear as to why this detail might have been included in the
Toledot tradition. Increasing Christian concern with sins against nature
from the thirteenth century onwards could have created a vulnerability
that a Jewish redactor sought to take advantage of; or the ongoing Jewish
emphasis on the connection of mishkav zakhur with abominations committed by non-Jews, exemplified in Rashi, could have led to this elaboration on the story of the aerial battle. Both of these developments could have
been in place by the time of Martini, and it may be just happenstance that
he had a text that did not include the elaboration; or, of course, there
remains the possibility that he edited it out. Or the later Christian translator, Ebendorfer, could have built on Christian attitudes toward homosexual
activity to depict the Jews as even more blasphemous. To evaluate this
last possibility we must turn also to Ebendorfers specific context: were
there particular concerns about sodomy in early fifteenth-century Vienna
and its region?
Like the Ministering Angels: Ritual and Purity in Early Jewish Mysticism and Magic, AJS
Review 19 (1994), 135-167, here 162-163.
118 There is some dispute over whether toevah should be translated as abomination or
whether it has more of the sense of taboo. The eating of pork or shellfish, for example, is
also toevah. The Jewish Publication Society edition of the Bible translates it as abhorrence.
I translate it as abomination in the context of the Middle Ages, because the Vulgate uses
abominacio.
119 Wagenseil, Tela Ignea Satanae, 14.
120Rashi on Ezekiel 18:12, 33:26, Neviim u-khetuvim im perush Rashi, ed. Meir Leibush
Malbim (Vilna: Romm, 1891), pp. 52, 101.
529
The Prosecution of MaleMale Sexual Activity in the Later Middle Ages

Although the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had seen enough hostility to
malemale sexual activity, whether under the name of mishkav zakhur,
sodomy, the sin against nature, or other terms, to indicate that it was a
concern, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw direct and outright
persecution. There were causes clbres across Christian Europe: the sodomites burned at the stake in Avignon in 1320, for example.121 Italy and
Florence in particular were connected with this offense: Florence established the Office of the Night in 1432, which received an astonishing number of accusations.122 This connection was so close that florenzen became
slang in Germany for malemale intercourse.123 There was a smattering of
accusations across Germany and Switzerland. Periodic waves of persecutions, such as against the Knights Templar in the early fourteenth century
or in Burgundian Bruges in 1490-1515, were politically motivated, with
charges of sodomy or malemale intercourse used as a convenient means
to get rid of inconvenient people, but the fact that these were the charges
chosen to level against political opponents shows that there was a widespread concern that could be played on.124 Helmut Puffs work on the persecution of sodomy within the German Empire does not discuss any cases
from Vienna, although four men were sentenced to death in 1471 for the sin
of unchastity which is called the mute sin against human nature in Regensburg, where Petrus Nigri held a disputation against the Jews in 1474.125 But
city governments throughout the Empire were concerned with sodomy as
well as other offenses against the peace.
Late medieval concerns about sodomy were tied to two related issues
within medieval Christianity. One was clerical celibacy, and its failure to
ensure a high moral standard of the clergy. Proposals were made, including
at the Council of Basel, which Ebendorfer attended, to allow clerics to
121 Bernhard Degenhart, Das Marienwunder von Avignon, Pantheon 33 (1975), 191-203,
from Paris Bibliothque Nationale MS Lat 5931, fol. 99r; Michael Camille, The Pose of the
Queer: Dantes Gaze, Brunetto Latinis Body, in Burger and Kruger, Queering the Middle
Ages, 57-86.
122Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, is based primarily on this body of material.
123Puff, Sodomy, 13 and passim.
124Marc Boone, State Power and Illicit Sexuality: The Persecution of Sodomy in Late
Medieval Bruges, Journal of Medieval History 22 (1996), 135-153; Anne Gilmour-Bryson,
Sodomy and the Knights Templar, Journal of the History of Sexuality 7 (1996), 151-183.
125Puff, Sodomy, 26.
530
marry.126 The greater evil that these proposals sought to avoid was concubinage and heterosexual debauchery, but the famous reforming tract Reformatio Sigismundi also claimed that not allowing clergy to marry led to
sodomy.127 The medieval English heretical group known as Lollards made a
similar accusation.128 I have not found evidence of a similar claim made by
the Hussites, the heretical movement active in Upper Austria at the beginning of the fifteenth century (with which the Jews were accused of collaborating), but the links between the two movements were strong. Ebendorfer
wrote extensively against the Hussites, largely on ecclesiological grounds,
but clerical celibacy did not figure largely in his discussion.129 But Ebendorfer would have had to be aware of sodomy charges against the clergy.
The second related issue is the association by the church of sexual deviance with heretics. There had long been such a connection, including
prominent accusations against the Cathars in the twelfth century. A German synonym for malemale and occasionally femalefemale intercourse
in the late Middle Ages was ketzerei or heresy, a term derived from Cathars.130
It was not deployed directly against the Hussites, but rather was a more
general association. We might speculate, however, that Ebendorfer, for
whom the Jews were already associated with heresy (the Hussites specifically) might have drawn the connection further to homosexual activity.
Ebendorfer spent much of his career connected with the University of
Vienna.131 Also connected with the theological faculty of the university
during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century were a group of theo-
126Karras, Unmarriages, 123.

127Reformation Kaiser Siegmunds, ed. Heinrich Kller, MGH, Staatsschriften des spteren Mittelalters 6 (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1964), 148-52; Lothar Graf zu Dohna, Reformatio Sigismundi: Beitrge zum Verstndnis einer Reformschrift des fnfzehnten Jahrhunderts
(Gttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1960), 127, and Hermann Heimpel, Reformatio
Sigismundi, Priesterehe und Bernhard von Chartres, Deutsches Archiv fr Erforschung des
Mittelalters 17 (1961), 527-537.
128Dyan Elliott, Lollardy and the Integrity of Marriage and the Family, in The Medieval
Marriage Scene: Prudence, Passion, Policy, ed. Sherry Roush and Cristelle Baskins (Tempe, AZ:
Arizona State University Press, 2005), 37-54; Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities
and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 94-95.
129I have not, however, read all of his writings that exist only in manuscript.
130Puff, Sodomy, 13-14, 18, 23, 42, and passim.
131 On the University of Vienna in larger terms, and particularly the relationship of its
theologians with the Jews and the pogrom of 1420-21, see Shank, Unless You Believe. See
also the essays collected in Uiblein, Die Universitt Wien.
531
logians known as the Viennese School who were concerned particularly

with transmitting theological teachings in the vernacular for lay believers.132
Henry of Langensteins Erchantnuzz der Sund, written around 1388, set the
example. Langenstein, drawing on Peraldus Summa de vitiis, speaks of
the sin of unchastity (lust) and divides it into five categories, the fifth
of which is the wicked sin, which is unpleasant and inhuman to speak of,
which is called the sin against nature. He connects it with nonreproductive activity: God, you created man and woman so that people should
increase; but I will exercise my zeal so that the human race will be fewer.
Because of this sin, Our Lord rained down fire and brimstone from heaven
on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.133 Langensteins treatise strongly
influenced the poet Michael Behaim (1420-1470s), who spent part of his
career at the court of Frederick III, although not until after Ebendorfer
was no longer popular with that monarch. Behaim wrote a poem cycle on
the seven deadly sins in which ten of thirty-nine poems are on unchastity,
one of them strongly attacking the sin against nature.134 Ulrich von
132Klaus Wolf, Hof-Universitt-Laien: literatur- und sprachgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zum deutschen Schrifttum der Wiener Schule des Sptmittelalters, Wissensliteratur im
Mittelalter 45 (Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 2006); Helmut Puff, Allen menschen nuczlichen: Publikum, Gebrauchsfunktion und Aussagen der Ehe bei Ulrich von
Pottenstein, in Text und Geschlecht: Mann und Frau in Eheschriften der frhen Neuzeit, ed.
Rdiger Schnell (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 176-197; Puff, Sodomy, 59; James Mixson,
Povertys Proprietors: Ownership and Mortal Sin at the Origins of the Observant Movement
(Leiden: Brill, 2009), 15-16; Fritz Peter Knapp, Die Literatur des Sptmittelalters in den Lndern sterreich, Steiermark, Krnten, Salzburg und Tirol von 1273 bis 1439, 2, Die Literatur zur
Zeit der habsburgischen Herzge von Rudolf IV. bis Albrecht V. (1358-1439), Geschichte der
Literatur in sterreich von den Anfngen bus zur Gegenwart, 2:2 (Graz: Akademische
Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 2004), 106-196 for Latin texts and 197-247 for vernacular; Isnard W.
Frank, Das lateinische theologische Schrifttum im sterreichischen Sptmittelalter, in Die
sterreichische Literatur: ihr Profil von den Anfngen im Mittelalter bis ins 18. Jahurhundert
(1050-1750), ed. Herbert Zeman with Fritz Peter Knapp, 1 (Graz: Akademische Drucku.Verlagsanstalt, 1986), 261-293.
133Heinrich von Langenstein, Erchantnuzz der Sund, ed. P. Rainer Rudolf, Texte des spten Mittelalters und der frhen Neuzeit, 22 (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1969), 96-97; Klaus
Wolf, Propter utilitatem populi: Durch des nucz willen seines volkes. Die staatstragende
Rezeption der Summa de vitiis des Guilelmus Peraldus in der sptmittelalterlichen Wiener
Schule, in Laster im Mittelalter, Vices in the Middle Ages, ed. Christoph Fleler and Martin
Rohde, Scrinium Friburgense 23 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 187-199.
134Helmut Puff, Same-Sex Possibilities, in The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender
in Medieval Europe, ed. Judith M. Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras (New York, NY: Oxford
University Press, 2013), 379-395.
532
Pottenstein (1360-1416/17) wrote a very comprehensive catechism, which

also extensively discussed the sin which cannot be named as the worst
of all sins.135 Nicholas of Dinkelsbhl (ca. 1360-1433), one of Ebendorfers
teachers, wrote in Latin and also placed this sin under the commandment
against adultery; he, too, called it the sin against nature, referring to Aquinas
and to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.136 These texts do not necessarily show an increased concern with the unspeakable sin at Vienna as
compared to elsewhere in Europethese descriptions were fairly typical.
Ebendorfer himself owned and copied a large number of texts, theological
and ecclesiological, and wrote works of moral theology, although in Latin.137
Ebensdorfers own treatise on the Ten Commandments goes into greater
detail about sodomy in the context of the Sixth Commandment than does,
for example, Nicholas of Dinkelsbhls, and his discussion of the sin against
nature in his collatio on lust in his Seven Deadly Sins cycle is specific about
sexual relations between men being part of it, but although the amount of
space he devoted to sodomy indicates a concern with the practice, and he
refers to Leviticus 18, he has nothing to say about it that had not already
been said by Aquinas, Albert the Great, and other sources that he cites.138
His circle at Vienna well understood the sinfulness of the sin against
nature, but he did not get the blunt description malemale intercourse
from them, nor is his more technical description about the emission of
semen found there.
As we saw, Ebendorfers translation includes one Hebrew phrase (
, qilqel maasaw, corrupted him) that appears in another version of
the text which is not likely derived from Ebendorfer, and another (
, we-tiew oto be-mishkav zakhur and had malemale
135Puff, Sodomy, 58-60. This work is not yet edited and I have not examined any manuscripts; I rely on Puffs description with extensive quotation from the manuscripts.
136Nicholas of Dinkelsbhl, De decem praeceptis decalogi, University of Pennsylvania
Library, MS Codex 620, fol. 87v (persistent link http://hdl.library.upenn.edu/1017/d/
medren/2357628).
137List of manuscripts in Lhotsky, Thomas Ebendorfer, 60-65, supplemented by Uiblein,
Die Universitt Wien, 466-473.
138sterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Codex Vindobonensis Palatinus 4886, fol. 42r
(Sixth Commandment) and 116rff (Sin of Luxuria). Digital copy provided by Hill Museum
and Manuscript Library. According to the manuscript the work on the Ten Commandments
was completed in 1448, that on the sin of Luxuria in 1440 and corrected in 1454; as we do not
know the date of Ebendorfers Toledot translation it is not possible to determine the chronological relation of these texts to it.
533
intercourse with him) that to my knowledge appears only in much later

branches of the text. It is clear that throughout the history of this text different branches of the tradition have either influenced each other or drawn
on orally transmitted versions, and eighteenth-century and later texts that
use the latter phrase (in a slightly different way) could have inherited it
from a version that relied on Ebendorfer or inserted it themselves to explain
an ambiguous passage in the same way that he did. The possibility remains
open, albeit speculative, that the introduction of the term mishkav zakhur
was an original contribution of Ebendorfer and his translator, with the
Hebrew term for what was not yet explicit in the exemplar supplied by the
convert. Ebendorfer was part of an intellectual group that condemned the
sin against nature, as well as the Jews and their supposed Hussite connections, but his Toledot Yeshu text is much more explicit than sin against
nature. If he did insert the phrase in the translation, it was not an attempt
to explain the story in terms Christians would have been familiar with,
but to present them with the full shock value of what he thought the Hebrew
text intended, even if it did not say explicitly. There is, then, a possibility
that what later Christians considered the most blasphemous Jewish attack
on Jesusone that Jews may have censored because of the possibility of
Christian reactionmay have been a Christian elaboration, with the help
of someone familiar with Jewish texts who could put the behavior more
bluntly than Christian sin against nature did.
Acknowledgements
A version of this article was presented at the Ruth Meltzer Seminar at the
Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
I thank the participants, especially Piero Capelli, Judah Galinsky, Katelyn
Mesler, David Ruderman, Yossi Schwartz, Uri Shachar, David Stern and
Elliot Wolfson for their comments. Yaacov Deutsch read an earlier version
of this article; Sol Cohen helped with translations; Ryan Szpiech provided
photographs of manuscripts; William Horbury and Yaacov Deutsch gave
permission to read their unpublished theses. This research was supported
by a Golub Family Fellowship at the Katz Center.

Mazo K. - The Aerial Battle in The Toledot Yeshu and Sodomy in The Late Middle Ages

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Mazo K. - The Aerial Battle in The Toledot Yeshu and Sodomy in The Late Middle Ages

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Medieval

Jewish, Christian and Muslim Culture

Medieval Encounters 19 (2013) 493-533

The Aerial Battle in the Toledot Yeshu and Sodomy in

R. M. Karras / Medieval Encounters 19 (2013) 493-533

R. M. Karras / Medieval Encounters 19 (2013) 493-533

The Toledot Yeshu and Its Medieval Latin Versions

R. M. Karras / Medieval Encounters 19 (2013) 493-533

from external references.7 The external references of course, can be very

R. M. Karras / Medieval Encounters 19 (2013) 493-533

beginning instead with his arrival in Jerusalem as a young man. Martinis

R. M. Karras / Medieval Encounters 19 (2013) 493-533

R. M. Karras / Medieval Encounters 19 (2013) 493-533

Ebendorfers mind as he copied the text in the surviving autograph: his

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large and intellectually active Jewish community. Henry of Langenstein,

R. M. Karras / Medieval Encounters 19 (2013) 493-533

Hebrew poem with interlineated Latin translation, which is a parody of a

R. M. Karras / Medieval Encounters 19 (2013) 493-533

happened.29 Neither Martinis or any extant Hebrew version prior to the

R. M. Karras / Medieval Encounters 19 (2013) 493-533

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We do not know whether the phrase appeared in Martinis exemplar and

38Martini, Pugio fidei, 363.

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The Aerial Battle

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Ebendorfer, however, adds an additional detail:

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fall) that the intensity of the argumentation corresponds to the degree of

Ebendorfers Choice of Words

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Ebendorfers use of two separate phrases to describe what took place

65Ebendorfer, Das jdische Leben Jesu, ed. Callsen et al., 50.

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Ebendorfers time texts written in Judeo-German indicate that there were

Other Versions of the Aerial Battle

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Spain where he had studied, or he could conceivably have seen a copy of

copy from the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, persistent identifier urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb

R. M. Karras / Medieval Encounters 19 (2013) 493-533

R. M. Karras / Medieval Encounters 19 (2013) 493-533

One of the best-known manuscripts of the Wagenseil group or Helen

R. M. Karras / Medieval Encounters 19 (2013) 493-533

80Adina M. Yoffie, Observations on the Huldreich Manuscripts of the Toledot Yeshu,

R. M. Karras / Medieval Encounters 19 (2013) 493-533

MaleMale Intercourse in Christian and Jewish Traditions

R. M. Karras / Medieval Encounters 19 (2013) 493-533

relations as well as male-female. Medieval Christian Europe inherited the

R. M. Karras / Medieval Encounters 19 (2013) 493-533

R. M. Karras / Medieval Encounters 19 (2013) 493-533

common in kabbalah but tend to be expressions of homoeroticism rather

R. M. Karras / Medieval Encounters 19 (2013) 493-533

R. M. Karras / Medieval Encounters 19 (2013) 493-533

101 Loc. cit.

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intercourse in an inappropriate vessel.104 But he was a theologian, and

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