Andreas (archbishop of Bari)


Andreas was the Archbishop of Bari from 1062 to at least 1066, and probably somewhat longer. In 1066, he travelled to Constantinople where at some point he converted to Judaism. He then fled to the Muslim-dominated Egypt and remained there until his death in 1078.

Life

Andreas is attested in the ecclesiastical records of the Archbishopric of Bari, but very cursorily: Anonymi Barensis Chronicon, early-12th-century Bariot chronicle covering the years 855–1118, only mentions his elevation to archbishop in 1062, journey to Constantinople in 1066, and passing away in 1078.
However, Obadiah the Proselyte, another convert to Judaism and émigré to Egypt of about a generation later, was moved and inspired by Andreas's story, and recorded it in his memoirs. This autobiography, popularly known as "Obadiah Scroll", was preserved in the Cairo Geniza, a collection of some 350,000 documents that accumulated in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo, Egypt, from the 9th to 19th centuries, and since dispersed among libraries and collections around the world. In the course of the 20th century, fourteen fragments of the Scroll, now in Budapest, Cambridge and New York, were identified. The fragments in the Kaufmann Genizah Collection, Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, were discovered by the director of the Rabbinical Seminary Alexander Scheiber who published them in 1954. In one of the fragments, Obadiah tells the story that was widely discussed when he was still Johannes, young son of minor nobility, living with his parents in the small Italian town of Oppido Lucano:
In the Middle Ages, for the Catholic clergy to convert to Judaism was virtually unheard of, and only two high-profile cases are known: