Confronting a Gens Ferox: Jews in the Poetry and Prose of Venantius Fortunatus

A sixth-century Italian émigré to Merovingian Francia, Venantius Fortunatus produced a diverse and voluminous corpus of both poetry and prose. Of his numerous compositions, few have been the subject of as much sustained scholarly attention as his poetic narrative of the mass conversion of the Jews of Clermont in 576. Modern scholars have probed and analyzed this poem for evidence of the historical conditions that prompted the conversion, as well as compared and contrasted Fortunatus’s verse account with the later prose narrative written by the poet’s primary source for the events of 576, Bishop Gregory of Tours. Surprisingly, in light of this sustained scholarly interest, scant attention has been devoted to how the poem’s depiction of contemporary Jews relates to the poet’s treatment of this religious minority elsewhere in his extensive corpus. A comparative examination of these references reveals that while the Jews were not a major preoccupation for Fortunatus, he sustained across a number of verse and hagiographical works a depiction of Jews as a community unrelentingly and actively hostile toward Christians, and whose profound anger could only be assuaged through Divine Grace, frequently as mediated through episcopal agents. While Fortunatus’s depiction of Jews drew on stock themes in the adversus Iudaeos tradition, and was by no means incongruous with similar depictions by his Gallo-Christian contemporaries, his skepticism of the ability of even holy men to penetrate Jewish obstinacy and fury through preaching alone was very much his own, and consequently offers a unique example of how an elite Christian believer sought to explain the continuing presence of a religious minority defiantly opposed to full integration in an ostensibly Christian society.