Bodo-Eleazar: the emperor's deacon becomes a Jew
In 838 a deacon at the court of Louis the Pious asked leave for a pilgrimage to Rome, went instead to Muslim Spain, became a Jew and took the name Eleazar. Two years later he was arguing about faith with Alvarus of Cordoba—and the letters of that argument survive.
Bodo was a deacon and chaplain at the court of the emperor Louis the Pious, a man of the palace school, at home in the heart of the Christian realm. Early in 838 he asked leave to go on pilgrimage to Rome. Instead of Rome he went south, across the frontier of the caliphate, was circumcised, took the name Eleazar, let his hair and beard grow, and married a Jewish woman.
In 839 he was at Saragossa. From 840 he corresponded with Paulus Alvarus of Cordoba, a Christian scholar of Jewish descent. Each tried to bring the other back to the faith he had left, and neither succeeded. The letters survive: one of the very few records of a living argument between a Jew and a Christian to come down from that century in their own words rather than in report.
What makes the case remarkable is not that a man changed his religion. It is the direction. The traffic usually ran the other way, and the church took that for the natural order of things. Here it was the church's own cleric, from the emperor's inner circle, who left—which means that in the ninth century the argument was still live and could be lost.
A few years after Bodo's departure, Amulo, Agobard's successor at Lyon, wrote to the king against the Jews. We shall not join the two directly: there is no evidence for it, only the nearness of the years.
What became of Bodo-Eleazar afterwards is not known.
How we know
Sources
Documents of the period
- The correspondence of Paulus Alvarus of Cordoba and Eleazar, 840 — the argument about faith in the words of both sides
Scholarship
- F. Riess, From Aachen to Al-Andalus: the journey of Deacon Bodo, Early Medieval Europe, 2005 — an examination of all the notices of Bodo and their dates
Basis: documents and evidence.