The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess

In her paradigm-shifting book, Adrienne Williams Boyarin assembles a fascinating array of archival sources—legal, historical, devotional, literary and visual—to consider how sameness, rather than difference, functions as a medieval Anglo-Christian anti-Jewish polemic. Boyarin explores this phenomenon through its gender-inflected representations of male and female Jews, emphatically rejecting any notion that ‘saming’ represents a neutral or more humane construction of Jewish identity than hostile depictions emphasising difference (p. 5). Rather, ‘[t]he observable sameness of the Jewess, by way of connection to and evolution from polemics of sameness as applied to the Jew, promotes the erasure of continuing Judaism and living Jews ... The Jewess ... reveals rhetorical and visual arguments that erode difference between Christians and Jews to absorb Jewishness into Christianity’ (p. 224). The introduction identifies the polemics of sameness as a necessary model for the interrogation of medieval English representations of Jews and articulates it briefly and specifically within

Art · Christianity · Judaism · Literature · Rhetorical question · Theology · Biblical Studies and Interpretation · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Religious studies · Religious Studies