Table of Contents

List of maps and plates; Acknowledgements; Permissions; List of abbreviations; Chronology of events; Overture; 1 God’s gift; 2 Father and sons; 3 The Messiah who never was; 4 What the emir saw; 5 Córdoba relics and the archbishop’s letter; 6 The Talmud and the Academy; 7 The answer of Maimonides and Judah Halevi; 8 Afterlives; Coda; Bibliography; Index

About the Author

Frank Riess is an Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck College, London. His monograph Narbonne and its Territory in Late Antiquity: From the Visigoths to the Arabs was published in 2013.

Reviews

‘Scholars interested in the nature of conversion in the early Middle Ages will find this book stimulating’ - Ruth Mazo Karras, Reading Religion'This erudite and engaging reconstruction of the life of Bodo/Eleazar situates its elusive protagonist at the intersection of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish worlds in flux, providing a sweeping account of the political and religious transformations of the ninth and tenth centuries and shedding new light on the meanings of inter-religious conversion' - Paola Tartakoff, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey'This is a nuanced and well-written study of Bodo/Eleazar, a ninth-century Christian convert to Judaism. As the first book dedicated to him and his journey from the Carolingian empire to the caliphate of Cordoba, it will be of great interest to scholars of medieval religious history, literature, and Jewish-Christian relations. Riess draws on a wide array of evidence, including archival documents, poetry, letters, and contemporary polemics to paint a fine-grained portrait of Bodo/Eleazar’s life and times. The richness of the historical account and attentive reading of relevant sources make this a valuable new study of an extraordinary yet overlooked figure' - Ryan Szpiech, University of Michigan