In the year 838 a deacon in the court of Emperor Louis the Pious converted from Christianity to Judaism. His name was Bodo and news of his conversion was received with disbelief and outrage in the Emperor’s court.
Louis the Pious was King of the Franks and Holy Roman Emperor. His kingdom was vast, stretching from Hamburg to Barcelona, from the Atlantic to the lands of the Slavs. Many scholars maintain that his father Charlemagne had been the person responsible for the establishment of Jewish communities in Northern Europe; he had brought merchants from Italy and settled them in cities along the Rhine in order to stimulate a trading economy. If that is so, it is likely that the process of Jewish settlement in the North, in the lands they called Ashkenaz, would have proceeded slowly over a period of years and Jews would still have been something of an oddity in Louis the Pious’s empire. Nevertheless, Louis is known to have been well disposed towards them, granting privileges to Jewish merchants and keeping at bay those Christian theologians and missionaries who were taking too much of an interest in the idea of converting them.
Bodo seems to have born into a relatively prosperous, noble Christian family and to have been marked out for a stellar career in the church. He had achieved the rank of deacon at a young age and, according to a contemporary account had been “imbued almost from the cradle in the Christian religion with the divine eruditions of the palace and the literature of the humanities.” His decision to abandon the Christian faith must have appeared as wholly out of character to his comrades in the church and the royal court. His choice of the Jewish religion, culturally alien and despised by medieval Christianity, must have come as an even greater shock.
One of the problems with trying to obtain a clear picture of events that occurred so long ago is that the existing sources are few and are often contradictory. Most contemporary historians have examined the few ancient documents in which he features and have tried to explain Bodo’s conversion as his response to a personal crisis of faith. In the absence of any better information they have tried to explain his actions theologically, quoting all sorts of arcane religious ideas that were floating round in those days and trying to understand Bodo’s conversion as having been influenced by them. However, his motivations may not have been so complicated.
The main document that discusses Bodo’s conversion, the 9th century Annals of St Bertin, says that he asked for permission from the Emperor and Empress to leave the court so as to go on a pilgrimage to Rome. He intended to undertake the journey “for the sake of prayer” and the Emperor gave him many gifts and offerings to take with him. However, the document continues “he was misled by the enemy of the human race, [i.e. Satan]; he abandoned Christianity and converted to Judaism.” He was circumcised, grew a beard, changed his name to Eleazar and married a Jewish woman. To top it all he coerced his nephew who was travelling with him to convert as well.
Reading the Annals of St Bertin we form the impression that when he left Louis the Pious’s court it hadn’t entered Bodo’s mind that he would convert to Judaism but that something happened on the way which enabled the Devil to seduce him into apostasy. It is possible of course that he had some great mystical revelation or that he fell in love with a Jewish woman who persuaded him to convert, but there may be a more simple explanation. He may have asked to leave the court with no intention of travelling to Rome but because he wanted to escape the life he lived there. His conversion to Judaism may have been the only way he could break the chains that bound him to a life he no longer wanted to live.
By all accounts Louis the Pious’s court was not as devout a place as the king’s honorific suggests. One report describes it as a “brothel where sorcery was practised”. Bodo himself told a correspondent that morals in the court were lax, that despite his vows of celibacy and chastity he’d had numerous sexual encounters during his time at the court. There is a poem written to him by his tutor Strabo, ostensibly written to encourage him in his studies but to a modern mind sounding every bit as seductive as it is exhortative. The poem ends with the words “Farewell dear fair one, always and everywhere most beloved, my little blonde lad, my little blonde lad.”
All the ancient sources that discuss Bodo castigate him for abandoning his faith and converting to Judaism. We would expect them to, they were all written by his Christian contemporaries or their disciples. But if it is true that he left the court in order to get away from its debauched environment, then he was not the weak willed character the sources describe him as. Rather he may have been far stronger than those around him and unable to bear the hypocrisy and corruption of court life. His conversion to Judaism may have been less about theology and belief and more about getting himself away from an environment that he found distasteful and morally polluting.
The idea of Bodo as a fugitive from a corrupt imperial court and a lascivious ecclesiastical environment finds some support in what we know about him after his conversion, when he was known by his new name Eleazar. He travelled to Spain where he began a correspondence with Pablo Álvaro of Córdoba, a convert to Christianity who had been born a Jew, in other words a man who was the mirror image of Bodo/Eleazar. In their letters each tried to convince the other to revert to their original religion. Alvaro tried to persuade Bodo that he had been mistaken in converting to Judaism and Bodo attempted to have Alvaro recant his Christianity. It all sounds a bit bizarre. In an age where religion and identity were intimately connected we find two men on opposite sides, each arguing with the other, trying to persuade them to change back to the faith they had rejected. It is almost as if they were each trying to justify their own apostasy to themselves.
Unfortunately we don’t have the whole correspondence between Bodo/Eleazar and Alvaro. The letters were originally preserved but long ago they were vandalised. Alvaro’s letters to Bodo are still extant but somebody must have taken offence at Bodo’s replies because his letters have been torn out of the manuscript. Only a few lines of his responses have remained.
Still, Alvaro’s letters do give us something of an insight into Bodo’s life after his conversion and they do confirm the idea that he had found something repugnant about his experiences in Louis the Pious’s court. Like many converts in the Middle Ages he would have been constantly attacked for his views and he would have responded, as so many others did, by doubling down on his new beliefs. Disenchanted with the Christianity in Louis the Pious’s court he tried to persuade the Muslim authorities in Spain to force the Christians in their lands to convert, either to Judaism or Islam. If they would not convert he urged that they be put to death. His entreaties came to nothing but the threat seems to have been taken so seriously that in 847 CE the leaders of the Spanish Christians sent an appeal to Charles the Bald, Louis the Pious’s son and successor, asking him to recall Bodo to France. Whether he did or not we do not know; we hear no more about Bodo after this.
Bodo was one of very few converts from Christianity to Judaism in the Middle Ages. The most famous case of conversion was that of the King of the Khazars, who it appears had his whole nation converted along with him. But he had not been a Christian before his conversion. Bodo’s story is unusual and deserves to be investigated further, because it doesn’t fit the way we usually understand Christian- Jewish relations in those early times.
Ludwig I der Fromme (Louis the Pious) was not the Holy Roman Emperor. He was born on the 16th of April 778 AD, and died on the 20th June 840 AD, 317 years before the title existed.
The Franks were a Germanic people and used Germanic names, but the world seems to prefer French names.
Karl der Große, King of the Franks (Charlemagne) was given the title Roman Emperor in 800 AD by Pope Leo III, because after Leo was deposed, he invaded Italy and put Leo back on his papal throne.
In 1157 Emperor Frederich I Rotbard (Barbarossa) added the word sacrum (holy) to the name of his empire, creating a Holy Empire (Sacrum Imperium). So he was the first person to use this title 317 years after the death of Louis the Pious.
With regard to conversion, I have heard that the Jews make no organized effort to convert people.
It seems that only Christians (both Protestants and Catholics) place a high priority on conversion, because the New Testaments essentially commands the apostles to go forth and convert people.
They call these agents evangelists, and throughout history much of these conversions have been by force. Innumerable people were killed for refusing conversion, or if it was suspected that they did not convert in good faith.
Most people know of the Spanish inquisition, but few know there were many other inquisitions from 1492 to 1826, and hundreds of thousands were killed.
The office of the inquisition still exists, but it has changed its name to Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. Cardinal Ratzinger led this office before he became Pope Benedict XVI. In addition to the inquisitions countless Children were abducted, baptized and raised as Catholics.
I know of no other religion that places so much emphasis on evangelism.