Season 1, Episode 117

Joan orders the bailiff of Girona to prosecute a group of young men who kidnapped a Jewish boy and performed a forced baptism on him.¹

Episode 117

Today’s Document

Sourcing: Joan’s insistence that the perpetrators face justice indicates both that he felt a duty to protect Jews but also that he considered attacks on Jews an affront to his own authority as king
Contextualization: the Jewish community of Girona had struggled since the devastation of the Bubonic Plague in 1348 and persistent in-fighting about leadership persisted through the 1380s²; Gampel also explains how social class tension among Christians, particularly peasant hatred of rentiers, in Girona fueled the violence against Jews³

Corroboration: the document examined in Episode 96, a document from Violant, corroborates the existence of Christian violence against Jews discussed in today’s document and also establishes that Joan and Violant co-ruled when it came to administration of justice in Girona; several of the episodes tagged with Jewish History further corroborate the ill-treatment perpetrated by Christians against Jews in the Crown of Aragon in 1387, but some demonstrate peaceful collaborations between Jews and Christians; further regarding Christians kidnapping and forcibly converting a Jewish child, Guerson found that this is the only instance of that happening in the 3,000 documents that she looked at in her dissertation⁴

Close-Reading: the word ‘presencia’ in the second line of the letter indicates that the boy’s father was there at the court in Barcelona, possibly in conversation with Joan himself; the word ‘lacrimabilis,’ weeping, indicates a level of pathos in the father’s petition to the royal court; Joan did not believe in the validity of forced baptisms, however many people of the Jewish and Christian communities considered the boy no longer Jewish after this incident; this led Joan to provide the solution in the document of finding the boy a Christian family to adopt him

This document presumes that the forced baptism of a Jewish boy is an illegal act.
The document recognizes that the boy has crossed a point of no return and employs the authority of the king to re-settle the boy in a Christian household.

Was this act of violence against a Jewish boy connected to the increased religious fervor around the Easter holiday?
Would the boy’s father, Solomon Scaleta, still speak to his son after this or would he be shunned?
What constituencies in Girona would have protected the kidnappers in this situation? Did they have a lot of support among the Christians of Girona?
Did Joan meet Solomon Scaleta? Did Joan empathize with Solomon as a father?

I gave an initial transcription by Gemini to Claude for a reconciliation. Claude then produced a translation with footnotes.

Baer, Yitzhak. A History of the Jews in Christian Spain. Jewish Publication Society of America, 1961.
Gampel, Benjamin R. Anti-Jewish Riots in the Crown of Aragon and the Royal Response, 1391-1392. Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Guerson de Oliveira, Alexandra. “Coping with Crises: Christian-Jewish Relations in Catalonia and Aragon, 1380–1391.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 2012.
Nirenberg, David. Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages. Princeton University Press, 1996.

Benjamin R. Gampel, Anti-Jewish Riots in the Crown of Aragon and the Royal Response, 1391-1392 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 202-203, footnote 15. ↩
Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain (Jewish Publication Society of America, 1961), Vol. 2, 44-46. ↩
Benjamin R. Gampel, Anti-Jewish Riots in the Crown of Aragon and the Royal Response, 1391-1392 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), fn27 on 127-128. ↩
Alexandra Guerson de Oliveira, “Coping with Crises: Christian-Jewish Relations in Catalonia and Aragon, 1380–1391” (Ph.D., University of Toronto, 2012), 150. ↩