The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess

Adrienne Williams Boyarin is already the author of Miracles of the Virgin in Medieval England: Law and Jewishness in Marian Legends (2010) as well as the Broadway anthology of Miracles of the Virgin in Middle English (2015). Building on these important studies, she has now consolidated her reputation as a leading scholar of medieval anti-Judaism with her monograph The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess. Most studies of the representation of Jews in medieval England emphasize the way Christian writers marked Jews as different from the Christian majority not only in terms of their alien religion but also in their customs and even their appearance, culminating in the late-medieval stereotype of the Jew as the hook-nosed monster responsible for Christ's death as well as its constant reenactment through various scenes of child-murder. The first blood libel legend of this type arose in England with Thomas of Monmouth's Life and Passion of William of Norwich (1155) that inflamed anti-Semitism and has haunted European history ever since.Through close readings of English texts in French, Latin, and English, and by deploying an impressively rich array of textual and visual evidence combined with a scalpel-like heuristic precision, Boyarin has attempted nothing less than a major paradigm shift to redefine this self-other construction in terms of sameness rather than difference. Recalling Lacan's insight that identity is forged in terms of the Other rather than against it, Boyarin skillfully focuses on the frequently overlooked figure of the “unmarked Jewess” in these polemical narratives to show that Jewish women were liminal characters whose ambiguous location between Christian and Jewish identities destabilized the systematic othering of Jews in general. From texts like Thomas of Monmouth's William of Norwich to later variants and iterations of murderous Jews, Boyarin demonstrates that female characters such as the Christian maidservant in William of Norwich's blood-libel legend and her Jewish equivalent in the later narrative Adam of Bristol function literally and figuratively as transgressive figures in crossing the physical thresholds of Jewish spaces where these heineous crimes are allegedly committed. As such, they embody the unmarked status of Jewish women and the ultimate impossibility of placing Jews on the opposite side of the good/bad, Christian/Jewish divide. Representations of Jewish women such as Flora, the wife of Abraham of Berkhamstead—based on an infamous tale by Matthew Paris about a Jew who defecates on a statue of the Virgin that he has placed in his latrine only to discover that his virtuous wife has taken pity on it, removed and cleaned it and subsequently kills her in revenge—highlight the proximity and similarity between the statue of the Blessed Virgin and the Jewess herself. Conversely, in tales where Jewish women occasionally commit violence themselves, such as in Adam of Bristol, where the Jew's wife stabs the Christian child before witnessing the miracle of his survival and ultimately converts, we see a phantasmatic inversion of the vengeful role played by Mary herself in many Miracles of the Virgin where Jews are punished for their transgressions. And as Boyarin astutely points out, the cannibalistic motif in the same story starkly highlights the Christian ritual of consuming the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist.Although non-English material lies beyond her purview, European texts and images bear out and complement Boyarin's acute insights. For example, the faces of the two laughing Jews depicted on the central nave of Bamberg Cathedral in southern Germany (13th century) who stick out their tongues at the Christian faithful gathered around the pulpit below to witness the teachings of the priest or the bishop can best be understood in terms of repressed Christian doubts concerning the truth of the Christian miracle of transubstantiation projected onto grotesque mocking Jewish faces. A little way down the nave and closer to the altar, an almost identical image of Christ with the same forked beard as the laughing Jews destabilizes the same-other polarity that the artists—presumably the stonemasons working on the construction of the cathedral—have sought to portray. Further evidence of the same “projective inversion” (to use Alan Dundes's famous term) is a sculpture of an angel descending from heaven to stab a perfidious Jew in the eye on the Fürstenportal (Bishops’ Gate) of the cathedral exterior. This disturbing act of violence at once confirms the Christian belief that Jews were blind to Christian truth and undermines it since the violence has been enacted on rather than by a Jew. The sculpted scene also reminds us—if we needed reminding—of the real-life consequences of these proliferating libelous texts and images. In Easter week 1389 a pogrom broke out in Prague in which as many as five hundred Jews were murdered for allegedly throwing stones at the Eucharist as it was being carried in a monstrance through the Jewish quarter. If the initial act of desecration was probably invented by the Christian polemicist who wrote the Latin account of the Passion of the Jews of Prague, the violence that ensued was certainly not. For the Freudian theorist Otto Fenichel, the key to medieval and subsequent modern anti-Semitism is the unconsciousness of the anti-Semite himself: “One's own unconscious is also foreign. Foreignness is the quality which the Jews and one's instincts have in common.” And if Freud is correct in stating that human instincts are invariably violent and that war is more often the norm than the exception in human history, we must accept the logical conclusion that these phantasmatic medieval stories about murderous Jews act out and repeat the violence within the Christian unconsciousness itself in its tortured and agonistic relationship with Judaism

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