MICHEL BEHEIM’S FIFTEENTH-CENTURY POLEMICAL SONG-POEM AGAINST A CONVERTED JEW
MICHEL BEHEIM’S FIFTEENTH-CENTURY POLEMICAL SONG-POEM AGAINST A CONVERTED JEW

Summary/Abstract: In song-poem 346 it is impossible to determine whether Michel Beheim reports on an actual occurrence, or whether he fabricates a run-in at court with a baptized Jew in order to rail against the impermanence of Jewish apostasy. No-one has been able to identify this Jew as an historical person. If there was no such individual, then, of course, Beheim’s verses have a purely ideological bent, and are meant to fabricate a pseudo-autobiographical event in order to adumbrate his pernicious views on Jews and Judaism. Our evidence shows that Michel Beheim’s polemic against Jewish conversion is not at all anomalous, but mainstream in every respect. Still in all, his (dubious) achievement is threefold. First, he transforms anti-Jewish prose texts into a new medium, song-poetry, shaping written language without metrical structure into verse and music. Second, he finds a new audience for the subject matter, one ready to hear, and accede to, anti-Jewish invective – in this case, urban courts of the upper German nobility. Finally, he takes up early the subject matter of Jewish apostasy, attempting both through his Contra-Judaeos songs and song-poem 346 to establish that Jews cannot fully and convincingly join the Christian community by virtue of their nature – this concept communicated by the code-words: art, natur, wesen.

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