Jewish Suffering in Medieval Christian Drama

Bibliographic Data

ID5770054
AuthorsCaitlin Hamilton (0000-0002-0996-8144, University of Virginia, corresponding author)
Year2017
Publication date2017-04-25
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeTHESIS
VenueLibra (REPOSITORY)
PublisherUniversity of Virginia (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.18130/v35h1d
OpenAlexW2948439599
LanguageEN
References cited17

These works preserve their culture's worst tendencies for future generations-so it is in the Canterbury Tales that many modern readers encounter the myth of ritual murder, and in the great cathedrals of Europe that tourists may observe the figure of the blind Synagoga. 12Inseparable from the beauty of medieval art and the richness of medieval literature is the ugliness of medieval antisemitism.Critical opinion has long accorded to medieval drama a prominent role in this cultural promotion of antisemitism.Stephen Spector opines that "[t]he mystery plays comprise, in fact, one of the most vehemently anti-Jewish genres in the history of English literature" ("Anti-Semitism and the English Mystery Plays" 3).Jody Enders has suggested that the dramatic genre's particular aptitude for promulgating a culture of antisemitism lies in its embodied, communal nature, as in the French Mistere de la Sainte Hostie in which, she claims, the gathered audience "reenacted a drama that demanded that [the Host-torturing Jew] Jacob's effort to disembody the embodiment of Christ be avenged by the disembodiment of the Jews" (Death by Drama 120).Similarly, Michael Mark Chemers argues that antisemitic belief structures "encompass the core functions of the medieval stage, a space of torture and trauma that... works to link Christian unity with anti-Semitic violence" (36).More than the demonized depictions of Jews in medieval art or their emphatic condemnation in medieval poetry and prose, it was in the staging of Jews that medieval antisemitism reached its nadir.Yet surely theater invites other possibilities-surely dramatic embodiment and community might produce a compassionate, rather than a hateful, ideology.The question is, 11 The later ballad tradition, in which many of the details of the medieval libel have been changed (but the antisemitic tenor has not) appears in at least one twentieth-century anthology (English Poetry I: From Chaucer to Gray, published in 1909). 12For instance, the Cathedrals of Strasbourg and Notre-Dame de Paris.I discuss the blindfolded Synagoga in my second chapter

Art · Drama · Judaism · Literature · Theology · Biblical Studies and Interpretation · Classics · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Medieval and Classical Philosophy · Philosophy

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