Abstract
Including a unit on the “historical Jew” within a broader historical survey course is a vehicle for bringing historiography, historical methodology, contemporary views of identity construction, and the complex roots of cross-cultural conflict into an undergraduate classroom. Productive challenges inevitably arise in creating a unit that focuses on the shifting relationship between Jews and Christians in medieval England and considers the reality of cross-cultural conflict. The content of this course may vary, but the basic approach encourages the critical examination of primary sources and images related to Jews that were produced in medieval England. This chapter introduces ways to pair primary sources with secondary source readings that contextualize the material and demonstrate current approaches to the questions raised.
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Notes
- 1.
The website’s url is jnjr.div.ed.ac.uk.
- 2.
An excellent starting point for history, maps, bibliography, and links to other sites containing material pertaining to Jews in Medieval England is the Oxford Jewish Heritage site: www.oxfordjewishheritage.co.uk. An especially helpful resource for discussion of images of art and architecture is Sara Lipton ’s Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography (New York: Henry Holt, 2014). Some of the images discussed in Lipton’s book can be viewed on her website: saralipton.com.
- 3.
Albert Craig, et al., The Heritage of World Civilizations, 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2007), 2.345. Peculiar, condensed, and sometimes confused formulations, lacking broader context, regarding the relationship between Jews and Christians in medieval Europe are not difficult to find, even within longer, more nuanced discussions of the status of medieval Jews than the one above. I do not use the treatment of medieval Jewish history as a litmus test when choosing textbooks. My world history textbook, Robert Tignor and Jeremy Adelman’s Worlds Together, World Apart: A History of the World from 1000 CE to the Present (New York: Norton, 2013), only briefly mentions Jews in the Middle Ages, noting that they were one of a number of groups persecuted because they inhabited the margins of society, outsiders in a Europe that demanded conformity. This view of Jewish status in medieval Europe is clearly drawn from R. I. Moore ’s The Formation of a Persecuting Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987). Moore’s conclusions regarding the persecution of outgroups has become a regular explanatory feature in a number of textbooks’ discussion of Jewish status in Medieval Europe. Traditional views of Jews as money-lenders and their connections to developments in medieval kingship and the rise of commercial economies are also usually present. Among books still in classroom use, see: Robin Winks and Teofilo F. Ruiz, Medieval Europe and the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), esp. 124–25; see The Oxford Illustrated History of the Middle Ages, ed. George Holmes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), which unaccountably connects the 1096 crusader violence against Jews to usury (130). Felipe Fernández-Armesto, The World: A History (Upper Saddle River: Pearson, 2011), explains the “victimization” of Jews in a section appended to the Black Death. He notes anti-Judaism in the pre-Christian world and the influence of Christianity but also proclaims, “Wherever they went, Jews were alternately privileged and persecuted: privileged, because rulers who needed productive settlers were prepared to reward them with legal immunities; persecuted, because host communities resented intruders who were given special advantages” (374). He too is influenced by Moore. Far better are Barbara Rosenwein , A Short History of the Middle Ages, 4th ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014); and Judith Bennett , Medieval Europe: A Short History, 11th ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 2010).
- 4.
See Hyam Maccoby , Judaism on Trial: Jewish-Christian Disputations in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1993); Alex Novikoff , The Medieval Culture of Disputation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 172–221; Jeremy Cohen , The Friars and the Jews (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982); and Jeremy Cohen , Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
- 5.
For this particular reading, I prefer to use my own translation, although the work is available online. Short excerpts from William of Newburgh on the events at York can be found at the website referenced in note 1, “Jewish/Non-Jewish Relations: Between Exclusion and Embrace, An Online Teaching Resource.” William’s History of English Affairs is also available in its entirety on Fordham’s Internet Sourcebook site in the translation of Joseph Stevenson (London: Seeleys‚ 1865): sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/williamofnewburgh-intro.asp. Stevenson’s translation can also be found at catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/011987258, which includes other works by William. The translation by Stevenson is problematic, as discussed by Nicholas Vincent in his essay “William of Newburgh, Josephus and the New Titus‚” Christians and Jews in Angevin England, ed. Sarah Rees Jones and Sethina Watson (York: York Medieval Press‚ 2013), 57–90. Further information on William‚ including images of manuscripts of his work‚ is offered at this site: www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/haywardp/hist424/seminars/Newburgh.htm. For a discussion of William as historian, see Nancy Partner, Serious Entertainments: The Writing of History in Twelfth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 51–113, 183–230.
- 6.
Studies of the marked changes in attitudes towards Jews in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and the concomitant proliferation of anti-Jewish writings and images, especially as they are manifested on the local level, are too numerous to mention here. Among the works I find particularly helpful and from which I occasionally include excerpts or images discussed in this unit are Gavin Langmuir , Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Robert Chazan , Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Robert C. Stacey, “The English Jews under Henry III,” Jews in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary and Archaeological Perspectives, ed. Patricia Skinner (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003), 41–54; Anna Sapir Abulafia , Christian-Jewish Relations, 1000–1300: Jews in the Service of Medieval Christendom (Harlow, England: Pearson, 2011); Sara Lipton , Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography; and Debra Higgs Strickland , Saracens Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). Useful studies on representations of Jews, especially in literature, after their expulsion from England in 1290, include Steven Kruger , The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Anthony Bale , The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms, 1350–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Miriamne Ara Krummel , Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England: Legally Absent, Virtually Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
- 7.
E. M. Rose ’s The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) is the first truly in-depth investigation into William’s case and the legacy of the blood libel. On Hugh of Lincoln, see Gavin Langmuir , “The Knight’s Tale of Young Hugh of Lincoln,” Toward a Definition of Antisemitism, 237–62. A new translation of William’s Vita is now available: Thomas of Monmouth, The Life and Passion of William of Norwich , ed. and trans. Miri Rubin (London: Penguin Classics, 2015). A concise discussion of the politics of the ritual murder charge can be found in Robert C. Stacey, “Anti-Semitism and the Medieval English State,” The Medieval State: Essays Presented to James Campbell, ed. J.R. Maddicott and D. M. Palliser (London: Hambledon Press, 2000), 163–77.
- 8.
Clearly, as Anthony Bale points out, we must also consider the varied audience of anti-Jewish texts and images. Manuscripts and their illustrations were not accessible to all Christians, for example (The Jew in the Medieval Book, passim, esp. 20–21).
- 9.
Many of these charters are located at the British Library: see Additional MS 15667‚ Additional MS 32085‚ and Additional MS 38821. BL Additional MS 32805 has been digitized. A detailed description of this manuscript‚ bibliography‚ and images, here: www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/record.asp?MSID=9473. See also‚ of the many studies by Robert C. Stacey‚ “The English Jews under Henry III”; and “Jewish Lending and the Medieval English Economy‚” A Commercializing Economy‚ ed. Richard Brignell and Bruce Campbell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 78–101; “Crusades‚ Martyrdoms‚ and the Jews of Norman England‚ 1096–1190‚” Juden und Christen zur Zeit der Kreuzzüge‚ ed. Alfred Haverkamp (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke, 1999), 233–51; and “Royal Taxation and the Social Structure of Medieval Anglo-Jewry: The Tallages of 1239–1242,” Hebrew Union College Annual 56 (1985): 175–249.
- 10.
Joshua Trachtenberg ’s study, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (1943; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2014), is still relevant and useful for the examination of this phenomenon. See also the art historical works listed below and elsewhere in the notes.
- 11.
Sara Lipton , Dark Mirror, 1–3; Debra Higgs Strickland , Saracens, Demons, and Jews, passim.
- 12.
For a discussion of this image, see Miriamne Ara Krummel , Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England, 24–45, esp. 33, 34. For classroom use, the image and pedagogical content can be found at: www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/medieval-mystery/. See also Sara Lipton, “Isaac and Anti-Christ in the Archives,” Past and Present 232 (2016): 3–44, on the image as a criticism of court culture.
- 13.
Julie Mell, The Myth of the Medieval Jewish Moneylender (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), challenges the standard historical narrative regarding Jews’ roles as moneylenders and their place in the foundation of a European commercial economy. Mell suggests that the narrative itself, with its assumptions of the economic canniness of Jews and their supposed forced entrance into the practice of money-lending and usury, is deeply flawed. She questions this account’s inherent contradictions and its dismissal of a broader picture of European economic history. Mell kindly allowed me to read chapters of her forthcoming work.
- 14.
Debra Higgs Strickland , Saracens, Demons, and Jews , 77–79. A much different discussion, one that references the influence of the Middle Ages on twentieth-century Europe, develops when students read Canon 68 from the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 on the demand that non-Christians wear distinguishing clothing. For an image of the Jewish badge in England, see Fig. 17.2 in this volume; for a statute that institutionalizes badging, see Robin Mundill, England’s Jewish Solution: Experiment and Expulsion, 1262–1290 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 291–93, at 292.
- 15.
On the association between Jews and the devil (or demons), see Debra Higgs Strickland , Saracens, Demons, and Jews , 77–79‚ 122–30 and passim. On the development of anti-Jewish iconography in the High Middle Ages, see Lipton, Dark Mirror. The tallage role is not the only source of images of Jews and their connection with the demonic that I present to the class. We also examine images of the Theophilus windows at Lincoln Cathedral and Laon, as well as illustrations from the Rutland Psalter and the Bibles moralisées, all of which can be found online or scanned for classroom use from Higgs-Strickland. The use of images produced outside of England broadens students’ understanding of Christian European medieval culture as it relates to images of Jews.
- 16.
Nina Rowe, The Jew, the Cathedral, and the Medieval City (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
- 17.
William of Newburgh , Historia rerum Anglicarum, ed. Richard Howlett (RS 82; London, 1884–1885). See note 5 for information on the availability of English translations of the entire work.
- 18.
Elisa Narin van Court , “The Siege of Jerusalem and Augustinian Historians: Writing about Jews in Fourteenth-Century England,” Chaucer Review 29 (1995): 227–48.
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Kletter, K.M. (2017). The Historical Jew in the Modern Classroom: Problematizing the Creation of Jewish Identity in Medieval England. In: Krummel, M., Pugh, T. (eds) Jews in Medieval England. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63748-8_4
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