Jewish History: The Proselytes (Part 3/4: Medieval)
The Medieval Era
Yusuf As’ar Yath’ar (Dhu Nuwas/Zur’ah/Masruq) (r. c. 515/517–525 CE) – The final and most famous Jewish king of Himyar. Various sources relate that he was the great-grandson of Abu Karib As’ad and the son of Sharhabil Yakkuf; that his mother was a Jewish slave from the Mesopotamian city of Nisibis (Nusaybin, Turkey); and that he converted to Judaism prior to, or just after, his accession to the throne. He is said to have had curly hair and to have grown out his sidelocks (peiot). Yusuf employed the title “king of all the tribes”, and might have aspired to unite Arabia’s southern Jews in Himyar with its northern Jews in the Hijaz (of Yathrib, Khaybar, etc.). He figures in numerous Arabic, Greek, and Ethiopian accounts as a zealot who persecuted Christians—he reportedly announced that he would persecute the Christians of his kingdom to retaliate against Christian states that persecuted Jews in their realms—but more probably he organized and led local Yemenite resistance against Abyssinian encroachments and occupation and sought to expel the foreign invaders from southern Arabia. His ambitions, therefore, would have been primarily political and military rather than religious. According to contemporary Christian sources, Yusuf maintained political relations with the sages of Tiberias (two of whom were involved in negotiations with besieged Christian Arabs in Himyar). In 522, he began his military offensive by capturing the Abyssinian garrison occupying the Himyarite capital of Zafar, where he destroyed a local church, then confronted Abyssinian troops stationed in the Tihamah region (the western coastal lowlands along the Red Sea) and Christian Arab tribes allied with them. There he burned down the church in the coastal town of al-Mukha (Mocha, Yemen). At the seaside fortress of neighboring Maddaban he blocked the entrance to the harbor with a chain to impede the impending landing of the Abyssinian invasion fleet under the negus Kaleb Ella Asbeha (Kaleb of Axum), whose large-scale expedition would be logistically supported by the Byzantine Empire. In 523, when open revolt broke out against him in the neighboring oasis town of Najran, home to a substantial Monophysite Christian community, Yusuf dispatched his general Sharah’il Yaqbul, commander of the royal army, to blockade its caravan trade routes and to besiege the town. Although Najran eventually surrendered, Yusuf apparently executed hundreds of its Christian residents, including their chief Harith (Aretas) ibn Ka’b, and thereby quelled the rebellion. The alleged massacre and martyrdom of Christians shocked Christendom, whose leaders in Alexandria, Egypt and in Byzantium called for a crusade to avenge the slain Najranis. Yusuf’s attempt to secure Persian aid against Abyssinia was unsuccessful, and he was unable to thwart the Abyssinian maritime invasion featuring a fleet of 60-70 ships. In 525, he died in battle against the Abyssinians at Zabid (Yemen). Per a Yemenite legend, after his queen and his treasure fell into enemy hands, he preferred death to captivity and committed suicide by riding into the Red Sea astride his horse and drowned, though his tomb was unearthed by archaeologists in neighboring Ghayman, southeast of Sana’a, in 1931. Thus the Kingdom of Himyar met its sudden demise. The victorious Kaleb burned down Marib’s old royal palace (Salhin), constructed several new churches in Najran and Zafar, and instated a local client king—Sumyafa Ashwa al-Yazani (in Greek, Esimiphaios)—as his viceroy of southern Arabia. For the next half century, Yemen was under both Abyssinian occupation and Christian domination. A descendant of Yusuf, Saif ibn Dhi Yazan, led a revolt and overthrew the Abyssinians’ client king with Persian assistance. Around 575, however, Yemen became a Persian vassal state until the advent of Islam. In the Muslim tradition, Yusuf is viewed favorably and deemed a monotheistic forerunner of Muhammad.

Bulan (Sabriel?) (r. c. 740–786 CE) – The Khazar khagan (or khagan bek) who, together with some 4,000 nobles, converted to Judaism around 740 and abolished the diviners and idolaters (shamanists) throughout his dominion. Formerly it was thought that his name denoted “elk”, “stag”, or “hart” in certain Turkish dialects such as Old Turkic, but more recently it has been surmised that it means “one who finds out” in the Oghuz Turkic language. It was said that God appeared in a dream to Bulan and promised him might and glory. Inspired, Bulan won great victories over the Arabs. In 730, a tabernacle based on the biblical model was erected from the spoils of a Khazar military expedition against Ardabil (Iran), south of the Caucasus. Thereafter the Byzantine emperor and the Muslim caliph sent Bulan envoys bearing gifts and wise men to convert him to their respective religions. Bulan also invited Jewish sages, and proceeded to examine all of the representatives in order to apprehend the fundamental tenets, and to debate the merits, of their faiths. He discretely questioned the Christians and the Muslims as to which of the other two religions they deemed better; both preferred Judaism, therefore the khagan discerned that it must be the superior religion and opted to adopt it. Thus the reformist Bulan and the Khazar grandees, together with a sizable portion of their heathen populace, embraced the Jewish faith and were circumcised, and Judaism became the state religion. The fascinating tale of Bulan’s conversion to Judaism served as the basis for Judah HaLevi’s renowned philosophical dialogue, Seifer HaKuzari. If Bulan (a Turkic name) is identical with Sabriel (a Hebrew name, perhaps the equivalent of Bulan, and a personage to whom the Khazars’ conversion is sometimes ascribed), then his wife was the Jewess named Serakh, who encouraged his study and practice of Judaism. The scions of his royal dynasty are known as Bulanids.
In early 838, the youthful Frankish court deacon Bodo (c. 814–876 CE)—palatine chaplain and bishop of Carolingian ruler Emperor Louis I the Pious of Francia and a man of noble birth and upbringing (and a blond of Alemannic stock)—departed the imperial palace at Aachen, Germany with a sizable retinue purportedly on a pilgrimage to Rome, laden with his sovereigns’ rich gifts for himself and presents for Pope Gregory IV. But Bodo, who had been attached to the entourage of Hilduin, archdeacon of the sacred palace and chief of the royal abbey of Saint-Denis (France), was undergoing an acute spiritual crisis and may never have reached Rome. Instead, he finally resolved his internal conflict and acted peremptorily: he sold to non-Christian slavers the members of his retinue, excepting his nephew, then abjured his baptism and tonsure, converted to Judaism and was circumcised, assumed the Jewish name Elazar, grew his hair and a beard, and married a young Jewess, the daughter of one of his Jewish friends. In 839, he and his nephew (whom he had persuaded to adopt Judaism as well) migrated to Zaragoza, Spain to live in freedom as Jews. Tidings of these dramatic events soon scandalized the palace in Aachen and engendered disbelief and grief amid the imperial household; Bodo’s sudden defection was deemed a grievous loss to western Christendom. In 840, Elazar engaged in a debate via correspondence initiated by Pablo Alvaro of Cordova (Paul Albar)—either a Jewish apostate or a Christian with Jewish heritage—wherein each convert attempted in vain to convince the other to repent the error of his ways; seven epistles (four from Pablo and three replies by Elazar) of their exchange are extant. The tone of their duologue, initially dignified, deteriorated into vituperation. From their correspondence it transpired that Bodo had become disillusioned by the multiplicity of Christian doctrines and practices he had witnessed at the imperial court in Aachen, which led him to equate Christianity with superstitious idolatry; having experienced moral revulsion and spiritual upheaval, he became disgusted by his own lustful excesses, longed for a more authentic religiosity, and gravitated toward Judaism, which was esteemed in Francia. Thus had Bodo the Christian transformed himself into Elazar the Jew. Elazar moved to neighboring Cordoba; apparently, imbued with the convert’s zeal, he engaged in missionary activities and attempted to proselytize Mozarabs (Roman Catholics of Moorish Spain). He reportedly incited anti-Christian sentiment among the caliph and Muslim populace of Cordoba and implored them to impose on Mozarabs the ultimatum of apostasy or death, but this rumor might have been either a misprision or a deliberate Christian fabrication to evoke Frankish sympathy, for no such anti-Christian policy was implemented then by the Muslim rulers. In 847, the Mozarabs dispatched a formal petition to Louis’ son King Charles II the Bald of West Francia and sought Elazar’s extradition thereto, though the result of their appeal remains unknown to recorded history.

A native of Oppido Lucano (Italy), Johannes of Oppido/Giovanni da Oppido (c. 1070–1150 CE) was the son of a minor Norman nobleman named Dreux and his wife Maria. As a child he was profoundly influenced by the paradigm of Archbishop Andreas of neighboring Bari, who had undergone circumcision (milah) and converted to Judaism (c. 1066) in Constantinople (Istanbul, Turkey) before migrating to Egypt, where he died in 1078; this high-profile defection sent shockwaves throughout the Roman Catholic Church, and apparently a large number of gentiles followed Andreas’ example. But for the time being, while his twin brother Rogerius studied the martial and chivalric arts and achieved knighthood, Johannes was directed toward the priesthood. In 1095/1096, he learned of (and may even have witnessed) the Christian persecutions of European Jewry at the outset of the First Crusade (1095–1099). In the first year of his entering the clergy he was inspired by a strange dream to become a proselyte and converted to Judaism in 1102, whereupon he assumed the Jewish name Obadiah—a common practice derived from the Jewish tradition that Obadiah the prophet had been an Edomite proselyte—and thenceforth styled himself Obadiah the Proselyte (Ovadyah HaGeir). Obadiah began observing the Sabbath and the festivals, and even composed pamphlets urging all religious people to return to the religion of Israel, for which the Christian authorities incarcerated him and threatened to kill him unless he repented of his deeds. He managed to escape Christendom and fled to Constantinople, where he was wounded by crusaders. Thereafter he migrated to Baghdad (Iraq), where he dwelt in a synagogue poorhouse (hekdeish) and with orphan youths studied Hebrew and Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) under Isaac ben Moses, head of the academy of Baghdad. There he also experienced the dire conditions of Baghdad Jewry, suffering from severe persecution, and witnessed the tragic consequences of failed pseudo-messianic movements. In 1113, he migrated to Aleppo, Syria and met the sage Barukh ben Isaac, head of the academy of Aleppo, who gave him a recommendation letter confirming the particulars of his conversion, so that “it might be kept by Obadiah the Proselyte in all communities of Israel to which he might go.” Next he sojourned in neighboring Damascus, whose Jewish community graciously hosted him during his stay. In 1121, he visited the Land of Israel, where in “Dan”—Caesarea Philippi (Paneas)—he encountered the eccentric messianic pretender Solomon HaKohen (Solomon ibn al-Ruji), a Karaite, who predicted that the Holy City, then under crusader rule, would be liberated within a few months; skeptical, Obadiah declined to join Solomon on a journey to Jerusalem and instead migrated via Tzur (Tyre) to Fostat (al-Fustat, Egypt). He indited in biblical Hebrew an autobiography, Megilat Ovadyah HaGeir (“The Obadiah Scroll”, a.k.a. “The Obadiah Memoir”). Fragments of writings related to him, discovered in the Cairo Genizah within the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fostat, comprise a chronicle; a siddur; liturgical poems (piyutim) including an elegy for Moses in six rhymed couplets entitled “Mi Al Har Horeiv”, ascribed by some scholars to the 11th-century Sephardic halakhist and poet Joseph ben Jacob ibn Sahl (Abu-‘Amr ibn Sahl) and perhaps intended either for the Shavuot festival or for Simhat Torah; music notes (Lombardic neumes); and the epistle of Barukh ben Isaac of Aleppo. His neumatic notations of synagogal chant constitute the only known exempla of Hebrew orisons set to Gregorian chant as well as the oldest surviving notation of Jewish music.
A native of France, Abraham of Augsburg was a French aristocrat who became a high-ranking Franciscan friar. Around 1243, he migrated to Augsburg (Germany), where he established and headed the local discalced monastic order, the “Schuhlosen”, whose monks went about unshod. Perhaps under the influence of the eminent sage Meir ben Barukh of Rothenburg (Maharam), he renounced Christianity and instead embraced Judaism, underwent circumcision, and assumed the Hebrew name Avraham ben Avraham Avinu in Augsburg. He was so enthused by his conversion and newfound faith that he became overzealous and reckless: despite the obvious risks to himself and to his fellow Jews, he began to advocate Judaism among the dominant gentile majority and in his homilies challenged his former coreligionists to abjure Christianity and join Jewry. He grew increasingly inimical to his erstwhile religion, which he contemned and denounced in public, and proved unable to repress his disgust for what he now deemed the abominable idolatry and iconography intrinsic to Roman Catholicism. In 1264, Abraham’s proselytizing campaign culminated with his sermonizing in neighboring Sinzig, where the impassioned preacher resorted to exceptionally dramatic and confrontational tactics: apparently inspired by his eponym, the patriarch Abraham, who (per the Genesis section of Midrash Rabbah) smashed the idols in the shop of his father Terah, and by the Gospels’ episode of Jesus of Nazareth “cleansing” the Temple in Jerusalem of merchants and moneylenders, he stormed local churches and physically attacked images of Christian saints and devotional objects—beheading Madonna figures, shattering crucifixes, and smashing religious portraits engraved in stone—in order to demonstrate their impotence. His iconoclastic rampage was blamed unjustly on the local Jewish community and triggered a terrible pogrom wherein all of the village’s 60–70 Jews—men, women, and children—were burned to death by the Catholics. Abraham was seized, arrested, shackled, and tortured by his Catholic persecutors, who offered him one last chance to return to Christianity, which he defiantly spurned and instead reasserted his staunch Jewish identity. On December 19, 1264 he was burnt at the stake and died a martyr’s death near the town hall of Augsburg. Upon his decease, elegies were composed by some of Jewry’s leading sages of the generation, including the liturgical poet (paytan) Moses ben Jacob and the halakhic codifier Mordekhai ben Hillel HaKohen. It is surmised that he courted death at the stake and died willingly, having incurred his own immolation perhaps as a means of effacing the stigma (whether real or perceived) of his gentile origin and of elevating his status as a Jew (much as repentant Jewish apostates hoped that martyrdom would expiate their sins): it was said of Abraham that he “yearned to present himself as a burnt offering” and that “he walked in purity and broke images…he revealed the glory of the Creator to the nations, denying belief in the crucified one; to martyrdom he walked like a bridegroom to the bride.” While his martyrdom was extolled as heroic in contemporaneous sources, nevertheless his life and death serve as cautionary tales of the perils of provocation and fanaticism.

In the 15th century, the despotic Emperor Zar’a Yakob of Ethiopia (r. 1434–1468 CE) appointed Ethiopian Orthodox monk Abba Sabra instructor of his children, including the prince Saga Amlak. In addition, Abba Sabra engaged in missionary activities and attempted to convert Ethiopian Jewry—known as the Beta Israel—to Christianity, but rather was converted by them to Judaism. He subsequently made a proselyte of his royal disciple Saga Amlak, who assumed the religious name Abba Saga and in turn converted to Judaism other tribes (per one account, Abba Saga Judaized because his mother, Seyon Mogasa, had been kidnapped from the Beta Israel before being brutally flogged to death). Abba Saga then revolted against his father (known in his chronicles as the “exterminator of the Jews”), who became enraged and vengeful. The monastic pair fled religious persecution and, via a series of waystations, sought refuge in the secluded Hohwara/Hoharwa mountains of the Amhara Region, where Abba Sabra founded the first monastery of the Beta Israel. Abba Sabra is also credited with inditing and copying religious texts—including Teezaza Sanbat (Precepts of the Sabbath), a compilation of laws and legends—and with implementing the stringent purity laws of the Beta Israel. The monastic tradition Abba Sabra had introduced among the Beta Israel endured for centuries until the community’s monasteries were severely afflicted by the Great Famine of the 1890s. Both Abba Sabra and Abba Saga became venerated as saintly figures and are often mentioned in the commemorative notes of several prayers and texts of the Beta Israel.