Antisemitism, dance, and the law in the late medieval Holy Roman Empire

Bibliographic Data

ID13003495
AuthorsTamara McCarty (The Ohio State University, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume14
Issue2-3
Pages291-314
Publication date2023-08-15
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
Venuepostmedieval a journal of medieval cultural studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2040-5960 • E-ISSN: 2040-5979
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1057/s41280-023-00278-y
OpenAlexW4385839584
LanguageEN
References cited16

This article examines how late medieval Christian approaches to Jewish dance within antisemitic moralistic discourse and legal codes contributed to Jewish subjugation within Christian hegemony in the Holy Roman Empire. Analysing polemical debates, moralistic literature, and artworks, I demonstrate how Christians used the ancient Israelites’ dance around the golden calf in Exodus to vilify Jewish dance as an embodiment of ancient and contemporary Jews’ inherent immorality. Through this theological discourse, Jewish dancing, I argue, became symbolic of Jews’ spiritual inferiority to Christians. Antisemitic attitudes towards Jewish dance permeated into legal codes, which marginalized Jewish dance practices by subordinating them to Christian moral codes. I trace the documented and possible effects of antisemitic measures on the medieval Ashkenazi Jewish community’s wedding dance practices. Dance served as a significant medium for Christians to construct racist, antisemitic ideas about Jewish identity and project those ideas onto Jewish bodies, real and imagined

Antisemitism · Archaeology · Art · Dance · Judaism · Literature · Sociology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society · Religious studies · Religious Studies

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