THE SEVENTH-CENTURY KINGDOM 137abandon circumcision and all Jewish rites as well as their dietary laws.
Anyone who broke one of these undertakings would be expelled
from their community to be stoned to death or burnt alive.
Depressing as this document may be, it is interesting to note that
whilst the Toledan Jews promised to accept all of the laws of
Reccesuinth requiring the abjuration of their former religion, they
were permitted to punish any transgressions within their own com-
munity in the first instance, and perhaps to employ their own distinc-
tive forms of punishment. Neither stoning nor burning feature
elsewhere in the judicial practice of Visigothic Spain. It is quite pos-
sible that a greater degree of latitude was practised than if bishops or
Gothic judges had been given jurisdiction. It seems likely that despite
the apparent ferocity of the laws, the individual Jewish communities
were able to retain a considerable measure of autonomy. From the
evidence of the 'professions' it is clear that they had their own lead-
ership and exercised at least some measure of judicial independence.
There may also have been quite a degree of intellectual vigour in
the Spanish Judaism of this time. It would be wrong to think that
conversions from Christianity to Judaism were possible on any scale
at this period, even if they had been sought. The laws and the local
power of the bishops would have seen to that, although conversions
inside a Jewish household were more likely to be ignored. However,
the intellectual arguments of the Jews against Christianity did exer-
cise an influence on the thoughts and writings of the leading Chris-
tians in the kingdom, and a corpus of polemical literature thus
developed. Of this we have today Isidore's Two Books on the Catholic
Faith against the Jews, Ildefonsus's On the Perpetual Virginity of the Blessed
Virgin Mary and julian's On the Proof of the Sixth Age. Of the three,
Isidore's work is perhaps the most interesting, as it is the most far-
ranging. The other two are restricted to specific points of contro-
versy, on the Virgin birth, and on rival Jewish and Christian views on
the spiritual chronology of human history, respectively.
Isidore, however, considered a range of issues on which Christian
and Jewish ideas differed, and although abusively, he did include
some Jewish arguments.^86 The first book is divided into sixty-two short
chapters, each devoted to one of the principal features of the life and
work of Christ, and in every case his arguments consist of passages
from the Latin Old Testament employed to show how each item was
there prophesied or mystically prefigured. His general thesis was that
the Jews' lack of belief was clearly condemned by their failure to see