Encountering Jews Beyond the Kingdom of Cathay: Imagining Nation in Mandeville’s Travelogue

Abstract

After 1290, England is bereft of Jewish bodies. Meir of Norwich, whose poetry is the subject of Chapter Two, and his fellow Jews are among those Jewish bodies that depart England for other, they hope, more hospitable shores.² To Sylvia Tomasch, 1290 and the Expulsion of the Jews of England marks a postcolonial moment.³ If so, and I believe that Tomasch’s hypothesis is correct, Mandeville, expressing a need to whiten and to Christianize the diversity he encounters, writes in and from a postcolonial world. The construction of a “Sir John Mandeville” is one key to the colonizing project of the The Book in which Jewishness appears only as deeply buried within the Caspian Mountains.⁴

As the belated postcolonial he marginalizes and singularizes the totality of national culture. He is the history that happened elsewhere, overseas; his postcolonial, migrant presence does not evoke a harmonious patchwork of cultures, but articulates the narrative of cultural difference.

—Homi K. Bhabha¹