Nothing Pure

We are cautioned not to judge a book by its cover, but when faced with a monograph on Old English Biblical translation fronted by Gustav Klimt's 1901 painting Judith with the Head of Holofernes, one might be forgiven for expecting something unconventional. Mo Pareles's new book concerns what they label “supersessionary translation,” “a philosophy of interlinguistic and cultural translation that not only refers to but also models Christianity's triumph over and resignification of Judaism” (p. 4). Over the course of the book's five chapters, Pareles reads the Old English Heptateuch, select Biblical commentaries by Ælfric, and Wulfstan's Sermo Lupi ad Anglos to examine how Jewish law—particularly its dietary strictures—became a mechanism for reifying Christian cultural identity in pre-Conquest England. Their argument is compelling, original, and, yes, unconventional. A formidable first book, Nothing Pure sheds new and interesting light on otherwise familiar texts, carefully elucidating facets of meaning unrecognized or overlooked by earlier readers.Perhaps Pareles's savviest move is to focus on the pre-Conquest reception of Biblical dietary law (kashrut). References to and rejections of the laws of kashrut in Old English texts not only serve to condemn Jewish religious practices but also to convert them into ideological instruments of Christian triumphalism. In Pareles's words, “the supersessionary tradition of Leviticus as disgusting and boring . . . require[s] a new style of translation, an exegetical style that masticates and digests (and masticates and digests), and thus transforms, the raw material that offends” (p. 16). Thus grounding their argument allows Pareles to move beyond traditional notions of (perceived) Christian “replacement” or “succession” to a much more pointed analysis of the ways in which supersessionary ideology manifests itself on, in, and through the body, be it human or textual.Pareles's first chapter focuses on the Old English Hexateuch's translation of Leviticus's rules regarding the killing of animals for consumption. It seeks to reframe “the apparent anxiety of translating Scripture as an anxiety of cultural translation that arises from the irreducible problem of Jewish-Christian inheritence/rejection, and most of all from the inheritance and rejection of Jewish law, the continuing observance of which is itself associated with inappropriate forms of fidelity” (p. 19). Pareles labels this process “exsanguination”: “a skilled demonstration of Jewish otherness, which enacts through translation the Christian supersession of Old Testament sacrificial ritual” (p. 20). In doing so, the translator of the Old English Hexateuch “delicately removes the reader from the carnality of Judaism while stimulating interest in that carnal world” (p. 41).Pareles then goes on to discuss Ælfric's translations of the books of Maccabees and Job. They point out the centrality of Jewish dietary laws to Ælfric's translational practice and argue that much of his work is driven by a need not just to suppress Judaism, but to delegitimize it. Pareles suggests this need stems from an awareness that “a remnant of Jewish law survives in early English culture, [therefore] it is likely this survival, rather than ignorance, that calls forth the necessity to explain and repudiate Jewish law” (p. 46). Ælfric's strategy is an anthropological one that frames the laws of kashrut as an index of what he saw as Judaism's essentially primitive character. Yet as Pareles rightly observes, the frequency with which the distinction between ancient and modern breaks down highlights the fragile foundations of Ælfric's project, making the need for delegitimization all the more urgent.The book's third chapter, “The Benedictine Invention of Heterosexuality,” examines English monastic conceptions of Jewish sexual purity. Situating their argument in dialogue with recent work by scholars such as Steven Kruger, Daniel Boyarin, and Susannah Drake, Pareles argues that English Benedictine texts present the Jewish body as a model of procreative heterosexuality ultimately superseded by pure, monastic asexuality. This is the most wide-ranging of Pareles's chapters, touching on authors such as Bede and Aldhelm before finally returning to Ælfric, whose “linguistic choices forge a largely fictive continuity between ancient Jewish and Christian monastic sexual purity systems, while also authorizing their decisive temporal break” (p. 92).The theme of monastic purity continues into the fourth chapter, which focuses on Ælfric's translation of the Book of Judith. Channeling Agamben, Pareles argues that the representation of Judith's chastity allows Ælfric “to explore and undermine imperial sovereignty and oppose it to the independent sacred exception” (p. 94). Through his translation, Ælfric seeks to convert “Jewish purity to Christian chastity and female exceptionality to the sovereignty of chastity” (p. 117). The association of monastic chastity with concepts of self-rule thus establishes ecclesiastical authority as the exception that both grounds and supersedes the impure, heterogenous exercise of secular power.Pareles's final chapter is their strongest, though admittedly that may reflect the reviewer's bias. Turning from Ælfric to Wulfstan, Pareles brings together their analysis of the pre-Conquest reception of Jewish dietary law with the themes of purity, exceptionalism, and the nature of just rule introduced in the previous two chapters. Central to their argument is the Sermo Lupi's harsh condemnation of the sexual trafficking of female slaves and its comparison of the perpetrators to dogs wallowing in their own filth. Although this passage has inspired no shortage of scholarship, Pareles focuses on an aspect of the text unnoticed by previous readers: the degree to which it functions as a de facto translation of a series of Old Testament prohibitions regarding sexual sins. Appropriating Jewish law in this way construes the female captive as “a figure and object of supersessionary translation, who represents the question of God's sovereignty over land, law, and the bodies of human beings” (p. 120). Furthermore, Pareles argues, “the victimized human being at the centre of this text is key to reading Wulfstan's work, but also that these two issues—sovereignty over bodies, enslavement, and rape on the one hand, and translation, citation, and supersession on the other—are in fact inextricably linked” (p. 121). At the same time, the canine metaphor recalls the dogs that consumed the bodies of Ahab and Jezebel in the Hebrew Bible as well as the use of dogs as symbols of supersession in the Gospels—instances of digestion that metaphorize the relationship of Jewish to Christian culture and sacred to secular power. Taken together, the various resonances of this passage provide Wulfstan with a model of supersessionary translation that is both more complete and more absolute than that of his contemporaries. The result is a “rhetorically dazzling reparative project” (p. 138) in which the delegitimization of Jewish identity becomes unnecessary, for it has always already been consumed.Pareles has presented an argument of nuance and complexity that, at least for this reviewer, opens new avenues for investigating Old English notions of power, embodiment, and cultural identity. Though there are times when the monograph overly betrays its origin as a dissertation, the same can be said for virtually all first books. Rather than focusing on such minor quibbles, Pareles is to be congratulated for making an original and significant contribution to the field. This is a book that certainly merits its cover

Ideology · Judaism · Nothing · Old English · Historical, Literary, and Cultural Studies · Medieval Literature and History · Multicultural Socio-Legal Studies