Jews in Medieval Christendom: Slay Them Not

356 Pages·2013·8.781 MB·English

by  Kristine T. Utterback, Merrall Llewelyn Price

Jews in Medieval Christendom
Études sur
le Judaïsme Médiéval
Fondées par
Georges Vajda
Dirigées par
Paul B. Fenton
TOME LX
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ejm
Jews in Medieval Christendom
“Slay Them Not”
Edited by
Kristine T. Utterback
Merrall Llewelyn Price
LEidEN • BOSTON
2013
Cover image courtesy of the Royal Library of denmark.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data
Jews in medieval Christendom : slay them not / edited by Kristine T. Utterback, Merrall Llewelyn
Price.
  pages cm. — (Etudes sur le Judaisme medieval ; Tome 60)
 includes bibliographical references and index.
 iSBN 978-90-04-25043-7 (hardback : alk. paper) — iSBN 978-90-04-25044-4 (e-book)
1. Judaism—Relations—Christianity. 2. Christianity and other religions—Judaism. 3. Christianity
and antisemitism—History. 4. Jews—History—70–1789. 5. Judaism (Christian theology)—
History of doctrines—Middle Ages, 600–1500. 6. Europe—Church history—600–1500.
i. Utterback, Kristine T., editor of compilation. ii. Price, Merrall Llewelyn, 1965–, editor of
compilation. iii. Utterback, Kristine T., editor of compilation. Jewish resistance to conversion in
the late-medieval Crown of Aragon.
 BM535.J498 2013
 305.892’404—dc23
2013026459
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iSSN 0169-815X
iSBN 978-90-04-25043-7 (hardback)
iSBN 978-90-04-25044-4 (e-book)
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CONTENTS
Notes on Contributors  ................................................................................... vii
introduction  ..................................................................................................... 1
An iconographical Study of the Appearance of Synagoga
in Carolingian ivories  ............................................................................... 7
Nancy Bishop
The “Zeal of God”: The Representation of Anger in the Latin
Crusade Accounts of the 1096 Rhineland Massacres  ..................... 25
Kate McGrath
Race, Anti-Jewish Polemic, Arnulf of Seéz, and the Contested
Papal Election of Anaclet ii (A.d. 1130)  ............................................ 45
Irven M. Resnick
“Vitam finivit infelicem”: Madness, Conversion, and Adolescent
Suicide among Jews in Late Twelfth-Century England  .................. 71
Ephraim Shoham-Steiner
Politics, Prophecy and Jews: The destruction of Jerusalem
in Anglo-Norman Historiography  ......................................................... 91
K.M. Kletter
King Henry iii and the Jews  ........................................................................ 117
Robert C. Stacey
Aquinas on the Forced Conversion of Jews: Belief, Will,
and Toleration  ............................................................................................ 129
Jennifer Hart Weed
dante and the Jews  ........................................................................................ 147
Jay Ruud
vi contents
Jewish Resistance to Conversion in the Late-Medieval Crown
of Aragon  ...................................................................................................... 163
Kristine T. Utterback
Medieval Antisemitism and Excremental Libel  .................................... 177
Merrall Llewelyn Price
Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Rulers, Cities, and “their” Jews
in Austria during the Persecutions of the Fourteenth Century  .... 189
Eveline Brugger
Codifying Jews: Jews in Austrian Town Charters of the Thirteenth
and Fourteenth Centuries  ....................................................................... 201
Birgit Wiedl
Making the Jews in the Hours of Mary de Bohun  ................................ 223
Carlee A. Bradbury
The Christian-Jewish debate and the Catalan Atlas  ........................... 245
Judy Schaaf
Mythologizing the Jewish Other in “The Prioress’s Tale”  ................... 275
Barbara Stevenson
“Him Jesus, that Jew”!—Representing Jewishness in the
York Plays  ..................................................................................................... 287
Miriamne Ara Krummel
Complex Relations between Jews and Christians in Late Medieval
German and Other Literature  ................................................................ 313
Albrecht Classen
Select Bibliography  ......................................................................................... 339
index  ................................................................................................................... 343
NOTES ON CONTRiBUTORS
The contributors, from three continents, represent multiple career stages,
disciplines, and academic backgrounds.
Nancy Bishop is an art historian currently working as visiting instruc-
tor at Fort Lewis College in durango, Colorado. She graduated from the
University of iowa and focuses on early medieval visual art.
Kate McGrath is an associate professor of history at Central Connecticut
State University. She works primarily on the imputation of anger and
shame in medieval European texts dealing with violence.
irven M. Resnick holds the Chair of Excellence in Judaic Studies at the
University of Tennessee in Chattanooga. He has published numerous
translations of historical documents dealing with Jews and Judaism in medi-
eval Christendom, including Peter the Venerable’s Against the Inveterate
Obduracy of the Jews, Fathers of the Church Mediaeval Continuation 14
(Washington d.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2013). His most
recent monograph is entitled Marks of Distinction: Christian Perceptions
of Jews in the High Middle Ages (Washington d.C.: Catholic University of
America Press, 2012).
Ephraim Shoham-Steiner is a senior lecturer in the department of Jewish
History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheva. He is interested in
most medieval Jewish social and religious history. His book: On the Margins
of a Minority: Leprosy Madness and Disability Among the Jews of Medieval
Europe (detroit: Wayne State University Press) is forthcoming in 2014.
Karen Kletter is an associate professor of history at Methodist University
in North Carolina. She focuses on historiography and intellectual history.
Robert Stacey is dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor
of European history at the University of Washington. He has published
extensively on Jewish history, particularly that of medieval England.
Jennifer Hart Weed is an associate professor of philosophy at the University
of New Brunswick. Her focus is medieval philosophy, particularly that of
Thomas Aquinas.
viii notes on contributors
Jay Ruud is a professor and chair of the department of English at the
University of Central Arkansas. He has published on Chaucer, dante,
Julian of Norwich, J.R.R. Tolkien, and medieval antisemitism.
Kristine T. Utterback is an associate professor of religious studies at the
University of Wyoming. Her interests include Jewish-Christian interac-
tions in fourteenth century Aragon and medieval pilgrimage.
Merrall Llewelyn Price is an associate professor of interdisciplinary stud-
ies at Western Kentucky University, and an affiliate faculty member at
Oklahoma State University. She publishes on religion and the medieval
body, and is at work on a Chaucer monograph.
Eveline Brugger is a research fellow at the institute for Jewish History in
Austria, St. Pölten. Apart from her work on editing medieval Jewish docu-
ments, her research interests include urban history, Jewish-Christian rela-
tions, and cultural translation.
Birgit Wiedl is a research fellow at the institute for Jewish History in
Austria, St. Pölten. Apart from her work on editing medieval Jewish docu-
ments, her research interests include urban history, Jewish-Christian rela-
tions, and cultural translation.
Carlee A. Bradbury is an associate professor of art history at Radford
University in Virginia. She is interested in medieval manuscript iconogra-
phy, particularly that of Jews and Judaism.
Judy Schaaf is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts,
dartmouth, interested in the delineation of Jewishness in English medi-
eval history, particularly in visual representation.
Barbara Stevenson is a professor emerita of English at Kennesaw State
University. Her research interests include Chaucer and medieval women
writers.
Miriamne Ara Krummel is an associate professor of English literature at the
University of dayton. She is the author of Crafting Jewishness in Medieval
England: Legally Absent, Virtually Present (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Albrecht Classen is distinguished Professor of German Studies at the
University of Arizona. He has published extensively in multiple areas of
medieval studies with particular focus on the late medieval period.
IntroductIon
this collection of academic essays about the interaction of Jews and
christians in the christian world during the Middle Ages is framed by
Augustine’s theory of Jewish witness to the truth of christianity, a theol-
ogy original in its thinking and far-reaching in its implications. drawing
heavily—and creatively—on Psalm 59, Augustine argued that the words
of the Psalm—“slay them not, lest at any time they forget your law; scat-
ter them in your might”—constituted God’s instructions to christians for
dealing with Jews. one recent Augustine scholar calls this contribution to
subsequent Jewish/christian relations “brilliant and novel,”1 and there is
no doubt that it had a significant impact for centuries to come. the essays
collected here examine a variety of attitudes to Jews and Judaism in medi-
eval christianity, attitudes very much influenced, in one way or another,
by what the father of reform Judaism Moses Mendelssohn termed the
“lovely brainwave” of the Bishop of Hippo.2
In the late fourth and early fifth centuries, at a time when church authori-
ties saw heresy as an immediate and pressing threat and as other christian
thinkers were producing virulent anti-Jewish rhetoric, Augustine of Hippo
formulated a theory that allowed christians to account for the continued
presence of Jews in their midst and even, while condemning Jewish con-
tumacy, to see this presence as a net positive for christendom. His theory
of Jewish witness would play a significant role in the ways christians
interacted with Jews for centuries to come, and it has even been credited
with the continued survival of Judaism in the West. However, the witness
theory proved a double-edged sword; at the same time that it justified the
survival of Judaism as consistent with God’s plan for humanity’s salvation,
it could also be used to justify the subjection of Jews under christianity,
providing a severe circumscription of the conditions under which Jews and
Judaism should be allowed to survive. Eventually, the ambivalence of the
doctrine would prove to allow a latitude in christian policies toward Jews
which some would come to view as dangerous, while its supercessionary
1 Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism
(new York: doubleday, 2008), 211.
2 Alexander Altman, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (tuscaloosa: university
of Alabama, 1973), 212.
2 introduction
basis limited how valuable it could be to a Judaism that dared to change
and grow.
Augustine did not develop his doctrine in a vacuum. the fourth century
had seen christianity grow from a persecuted minority sect to the official
religion of empire. though its actual enemy at that time was less Judaism
than it was the threat posed by paganism, heresy, and schism, the prob-
lem of the appeal of Judaizing—the maintaining or adopting of Jewish
practices by christian converts—that had confronted Paul remained real,
and churchmen like John chrysostom did not hesitate to attack both Jews
and Judaizing in violent and uncompromising rhetoric. For chrysostom,
Jews are equally godless as pagans, and their impiety has turned them
into ungovernable animals, fit only for slaughter: “Although such beasts
are unfit for work, they are fit for killing. And this is what happened to
the Jews: while they were making themselves unfit for work, they grew fit
for slaughter. this is why christ said: ‘But as for these my enemies, who
did not want me to be king over them, bring them here and slay them.’ ”3
despite the violence of his rhetoric, chrysostom does not appear to be
calling for the literal death of Jews; he wished merely to “stitch shut the
mouths of the Jews”4 and to convert them to christianity.
Augustine, however, took a different approach. though unflinching in
his attitude toward heretics like the Marcionites and the Arians, Augustine
saw Jews as radically different, and perhaps more importantly, as ulti-
mately useful. their books and their practices and their exile from their
land could all be seen as testifying to the roots of the new testament in
the old, and to the replacement of the old Mosaic Law with the new cov-
enant of grace and salvation in christ. His earliest teachings on Jews and
Judaism, in Contra Faustum, associate Jews with cain, who, having mur-
dered his righteous brother, is marked by God so that he will not be killed
but forced to live out his life as a restless wanderer on the earth. cain is
thus a type for the Jews, who are seen as having killed their righteous
brother Jesus, and whose subjection in foreign lands is a part of their pun-
ishment: “And every emperor or king who finds Jews in his realm finds
them with this sign and does not kill them, that is, does not make them
cease to be Jews, who are set apart from the community of other nations
3 Adversus Iudeuos I:2, 6. the translation is that of Paul W. Harkins in St. John Chry­
sostom: Discourses against Judaizing Christians (Washington: catholic university Press,
1979).
4 Ibid., V: 1, 6.