Charlemagne and the Jewish Communities of the Latin West (Enlow & Rivett)

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In this episode of The Multicultural Middle Ages, Loraine Enlow chats with Pilar Rivett about Rivett’s research into ninth-century baptismal and exorcistic rites and Jewish–Christian relations under Charlemagne and Louis the Pious. Their conversation challenges scholarly assumptions about a decline in the culture of diasporic Judaism in the Latin West in pre-Rabbinic times (4th–9th centuries). Instead, they argue in favor of a Latin Jewish textual tradition.

Loraine Enlow is an adjunct Assistant Professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary and a scholar of the medieval Bible, with particular interests in Jewish–Christian exegetical encounters and the material transmission of biblical texts. Enlow’s work combines close manuscript study with attention to intellectual history and to textual reception and transmission.

Pilar Rivett is a medieval historican, paleographer, and hebraist completing a PhD at the University of Oxford. Rivett’s research focuses on the use of Hebrew divine names in Christian liturgical texts and texts of ritual power such as exorcism and apotropaic amulets of the ninth century.

Episode transcript (Note that a time-dynamic transcript is available if you access the episode through a free podcasting platform such as Apple Podcasts or Spotify):

Loraine: Welcome to The Multicultural Middle Ages Podcast. I’m your host, Loraine Enlow, from the Jewish Theological Seminary.

In today’s episode, I’m joined by Pilar Rivett from the University of Oxford to discuss her fascinating research on ninth-century baptismal and exorcistic rites. Through a close reading of a single liturgical hymn, Pilar opens a window onto Jewish–Christian relations under Charlemagne and his son Louis the Pious, challenging long-standing assumptions about Jewish cultural decline in the Latin West.

This is a conversation about sacred names, exorcism, baptism, intellectual exchange, and what it really means to live together in a multicultural medieval society.

Before we begin, I want to start with the text that inspired Pilar’s doctoral research. It’s a Latin liturgical hymn, first recorded in an eleventh-century manuscript connected to northern Francia, but clearly much older in origin.

What makes it remarkable is its use of Hebrew divine names—something extremely rare in Christian liturgy. You’re about to hear the hymn in English translation.

Hymn reading

Lord God

True God

You are the true Yah

Hear me, assist me,

Deliver me from all evil

Hear my prayers

And release me from sin

Untie all bonds of obligations

And grant me peaceful days

By your holy Names

By this most sacred Name

Most strong and great Name

Glorious and illustrious Name

Which Adam from the underworld

While under punishment

In the most dismal hell

Called out to you, his own maker,

And he was granted grace.

All the living languages cannot grasp, my king,

This most sacred Name,

Nor can the human intellect and the five senses.

This unpronounceable Name

Aaron wore on his forehead,

The four-letter Tetragrammaton,

Sculpted on his forehead-plate:

Heh Yod Vav Tau.

Heh means lasting,

Vav means life,

Yod means beginning,

Tau is passion through death—

As it is explained in Latin.

Christ is the life of all things,

The beginning of this life through death,

Through the passion of the cross.

Loraine: Isn’t this an extraordinary composition? I recognize the urgency and rhythm of the Psalms, but the way the hymn invokes God’s name feels far more forceful—almost commanding.

It immediately raises questions. Is this related to exorcism? And more broadly, is it normal for Christian hymns in the Latin West to invoke Hebrew divine names in this way? Pilar, how did you come across this hymn?

Pilar: Thank you, Loraine—and my thanks also to The Multicultural Middle Ages for inviting me to share this research.

Let me start with some basics. A hymn is a form of metrical poetry intended for Christian worship. In the medieval West, especially after the spread of Benedictine monasticism, hymns became an important part of the Liturgy of the Hours, and they were also sung during Mass.

They were never neutral texts. Hymns were written to promote specific theological agendas, especially during times of disagreement—such as in the sixth century, when Arianism challenged traditional views of Christ, or in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, when Charlemagne tried to unify religion across his empire.

The hymn we just heard is called Deus pater piissime—“God, most compassionate Father.” You’re absolutely right to hear echoes of psalmody. The Psalms were the Bible’s primary poetic language, and hymns were deeply shaped by them. In fact, hymns framed the psalm readings that opened each canonical hour, so they reinforced the theological theme of that moment in the day.

I first encountered this hymn in 2008, while working on a twelfth-century manuscript best known for preserving the Latin Rule of the Knights Templar. Initially, my colleague Simonetta Cerrini and I wondered whether the hymn had something to do with the Templars, especially given their reputation—at least comparatively—for pragmatic coexistence with Muslims and Jews in the eastern Mediterranean.

But the more closely I studied the language, theology, and manuscript transmission, the clearer it became that this hymn was a much earlier composition—and had nothing to do with the Templars at all.

Loraine: So Hebrew and Greek weren’t unheard of in Latin liturgy—but this still feels different.

Pilar: Exactly. Latin, Greek, and Hebrew were seen as holy languages of the Bible, so it’s not surprising that they sometimes appeared in Christian worship.

What is extraordinary is the devotional and adjurational use of Hebrew divine names—especially the Tetragrammaton. That simply does not happen in mainstream Christian hymnody. That’s what made alarm bells ring for me.

Loraine: Could you explain what a Hebrew divine name is, and why this matters?

Pilar: Of course, let’s start by remembering that in the Hebrew Bible, God is known by multiple names—El, Elohim, Adonai—but the most sacred is God’s personal name, YHWH, revealed to Moses in Exodus.

Because of its holiness, Jewish tradition avoids pronouncing it, substituting Ha-Shem, “the Name.” In Greek, this four-letter name becomes known as the Tetragrammaton.

Now, here’s where the hymn becomes radical. It presents the Tetragrammaton not as YHWH, but as YHWT, interpreting the final Tau as the Cross, and reading the name as a symbol of Christ’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection.

This interpretation is astonishing. Nothing like it appears again in Christian theology until the sixteenth-century Christian Kabbalists.

Loraine: You’ve used the word adjuration several times. What exactly does that mean?

Pilar: An adjuration is a solemn command that invokes a higher authority in God’s name to compel action. In Christian contexts, this language appears almost exclusively in exorcism.

Think of phrases like Mark’s 5:7 Adiuro te per Deum —“I adjure you by God’s Name.”

Outside official liturgy, we also find adjurations in para-liturgical texts—prayers and charms meant to protect the speaker from harm. These include traditions like loricae, or “breastplate prayers,” which ask God to surround the believer with spiritual armor.

One famous example comes from the ninth-century Book of Cerne, which opens with a prayer invoking the Hebrew name Heloi. These texts blur the boundary between prayer and protection, religion and magic.

The hymn we’re discussing fits squarely into this apotropaic, or protective, tradition of the loricae.

Loraine: How does baptism fit into this picture?

Pilar: In ninth-century Francia, baptism was not just for infants. Many adults were still converting, especially in frontier regions.

Baptism involved a lengthy instruction period called catechumenate, punctuated by multiple exorcisms. Crucially, a bilingual Latin-Greek creed was recited after one of these exorcisms, on the eve of baptism. A creed is a prayer that defines orthodox beliefs about the Trinity and the nature of Christ.

Deus pater piissime borrows heavily from this creed, which strongly suggests it was connected to baptismal preparation—and therefore to exorcism.

These elaborate rites disappear in the tenth century with the introduction of new liturgical books called Pontificals, making the hymn a distinctly Carolingian phenomenon.

Loraine: We’ve been talking about Christian practices, but let’s shift focus to Jewish communities in Francia. How did they fit into this religious landscape?

Pilar: Yes, thank you Loraine for your very relevant question. Under Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, the Carolingians didn’t forcibly baptize Jews across the empire, unlike some of their policies toward other non-Christian minorities such as the Saxons and the Avars. While there were a few local cases of coercive baptism, especially in Mainz, Jews were not forced to convert. Charlemagne issued royal charters protecting Jewish merchants, even when catholic bishops like Agobard of Lyons complained about their presence.

Imperial expansion was followed by the consolidation and promotion of Latin culture, with Carolingian theologians seeking to address all inconsistencies in versions of the Latin Bible that circulated within the empire, which meant studying the Hebrew text closely.

Loraine: I never realized that there was a Jewish presence in France as early as the ninth century.

Pilar: Unfortunately, the study of Jewish presence in the Latin West since late antiquity is not straightforward, because of a complete lack of primary source material. There are no Hebrew scrolls, manuscripts or fragments to be found in Europe between the first and the seventh century.

But despite the lack of Jewish sources, there are enough references in Latin texts that have allowed historians to detect a Jewish presence in central France around Lyons and Orléans and in the south, Arles, Narbonne and Marseilles show continuity of settlement from Late Antiquity. Agobard also mentions Jews in the towns surrounding Lyons, like Vienne, Mâcon and Chalon sur Saône.

Loraine: Can you tell us a little bit more about the treatment of Jews according to Canon Law?

Pilar: Canon law, which is the body of rules and regulations issued by the Church, evolved significantly during the early middle ages. While earlier canons made little distinction between Jews and other minorities, by the ninth century, Jewish legal status became more defined. As the Germanic kings in the West converted to Christianity, they began applying stricter definitions to minorities in their legal codes. Most of these stricter definitions reflected the Theodosian Code issued in the Eastern Empire in 438. In the Latin West, the Kingdom of the Visigoths in Spain was the one to adopt the most restrictive measures toward Jewish minorities in the sixth and seventh centuries. As result of these canons, the Jews of Spain became a separate judicial category and gradually lost their legal status and freedom.

But the same is not true of the Frankish kingdom. Under Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious, we find evidence of the court’s interest in protecting Jewish merchants, despite pressure coming from Catholic bishops. Let’s listen to an extract from one of Louis the Pious’s imperial edicts, which are known as “Jewish Charters”.

Let it be known to all bishops, abbots, counts, vicars, […] and other ministers of Ours that the Hebrew named Abraham, residing in the city of Zaragoza, came into Our presence and commended himself into Our hands, and We received him and keep him under the words of Our protection.

Therefore […] We decree and command that neither you nor your underlings or successors presume at any time to trouble the aforesaid Jew on any illicit pretext whatsoever, nor to generate calumnies against him, nor to take away or diminish anything from his own goods or his business; and that you shall not exact tolls or requisition horses or lodging or exact pulveraticum or traffic tax  or harbour dues or business dues […]. Rather, let him be permitted to live in peace under Our protection and defence, and to serve the part of Our palace faithfully without any unlawful opposition from anyone

Let him also be permitted to live according to his own law, and to hire Christian men to do his work, except on Sundays and feast days.

Loraine: I never realized the extent to which Carolingian rulers went to protect  Jews at court. What can you tell us about intellectual exchanges between Christian and Jews during this period?

Pilar: The traditional narrative has been one of clear separation between Jews and Christians, particularly in the realm of Biblical interpretation.

But the reality is that at least in the first half of the ninth century, separation was not enforced and scholarship is beginning to appreciate the extent to which Christian theologians working at court appear to have had access to Jewish intellectual help and sources. Church Fathers left no comprehensive commentary on the Old Testament Books of Samuel/Kings, Chronicles or Lamentations. So in their efforts to provide literal interpretations of Scriptures, theologians such as Theodulf of Orleans and Rabanus Maurus sought the help of Jewish scholars.

Avrom Saltman in the 1970s, and more recently Burton Van Name Edwards and Johannes Heil have detected elements of Jewish tradition from rabbinic sources in the works of Carolingians such as Haimo and Remigius of Auxerre.

Loraine: How would a Jewish scholar have communicated with his counterpart if they only spoke Hebrew and not Latin?

Pilar: Edwards showed that in his Commentary on Genesis, Remigius of Auxerre mentioned traditions from Midrash Rabba and from the Targum Pseudo-Jonathan. This not only suggests that these works circulated in Europe in the early ninth century, but they were available in Latin. More recently, Johannes Heil argued that the transfer of knowledge from Jewish tradition in intellectual circles in Auxerre and Fulda, was possible because of the existence of a broad Jewish corpus in Latin.

This goes against the grain of most scholarship on rabbinic history, which argues that Jews did not speak Latin and only worked on books written in Hebrew.

Lorraine: This is fascinating. Do you think that the interest in Hebrew divine names might have originated during one of these exchanges?

Pilar: It is hard to say. We can account for the etymology ten Hebrew divine names in Christian sources such as Jerome and Isidore of Seville. But we cannot find any parallels to the adjurational uses of these names. So it is possible that the author of this hymn may have searched for content outside of a traditionally Christian context. Consider, for example that we have little evidence of letter manipulation of Hebrew divine names, outside of later Jewish sources and these are all in Hebrew, which means the average Christian scholar would not have been able to read them.

There is one Jewish mystical treatise contemporary with our hymn, Sefer Yeṣirah, which is worth considering because of the emphasis it places on ten divine names, but, again, we only have evidence of it in tenth-century Jewish sources. It is possible that it circulated in a different form earlier than the tenth century. For example, Agobard of Lyons, who researched local Jewish customs to criticise in his anti-Jewish works, mentioned that Jews in Lyons believed that God created the universe by means of the letters of the alphabet. The text that best represents this tradition is Sefer Yeṣirah, which stated that God created the universe by means of arranging Hebrew letters, and he made reality by means of the letters Tav, Heh and Vav, and everything else with the three letters of his Name, Yod, Heh, Vav.

Let’s listen to the opening of this treatise:

1. In thirty-two mysterious paths of Wisdom, Yah, Eternal of Hosts [Yod-Vav Yod], God of Israel, Living Elohim, Almighty God, High and Extolled, Dwelling in Eternity, Holy Be His Name, engraved and created His world in three Sefarim: in writing, number and word. Ten Sefirot out of nothing, twenty-two foundation letters, three mothers, seven doubles and twelve simples.

Pilar: Isn’t it interesting that one of the earliest texts in Jewish mysticism mentions the letters of the Tetragrammaton in a similar context as our hymn? And the Sefer Yeṣirah also places great importance on the number ten. It states that there are ten building blocks of creation, the sefirot. Unsurprisingly, there are ten divine names in our hymn.

Like the prisoners in Plato’s cave, we begin to notice the outlines of traditions that were developing alongside Christian conventions, we catch fleeting glimpses of these in Latin, but we only encounter them much later, once they are fully formed in Hebrew texts.

What this means for the history of Carolingian thought is that sometime in the first thirty years of the ninth century or even before, the person who composed this hymn was open to para-liturgical traditions and may have even borrowed these from Judaism. You can obviously read more about it in my dissertation.

Lorraine: I can see how it all comes together now. What are they key points you’d like our listeners to take away from today’s podcast?

Pilar: Thank you, Loraine, and thanks to our listeners for bearing with me. I realise that what we discussed today is outside the realms of traditional historiography.

My key message is to remember that historians should not shy away from challenging traditional narratives.

In today’s example, we saw that the absence of primary source material did not mean that there were no Jewish communities in the Latin West.     On the contrary, these may have been more culturally integrated than we thought.

And if we consider the amount of context we were able to extract from just one hymn, we see how invaluable hymns are as historical sources.

So to conclude, I hope that today’s conversation gave you some food for thought!

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