The Medieval Postcolonial Jew In And Out Of Time

Introduction: Calculating Time: Eosturmonath, Nisan, and the Paschal Table -- Just In Time: Sacrificial Gifts, Rotting Corpses, and Annus Domini -- An (Un)Common Era: Passionate Narratives, Temporal Clashes-Jewish and Christian -- Taking Jews out and Putting Them Back in: Christian Chronometry, the York Massacre, and a Cycle of Mystery Plays -- A Time of Many Layers: Feasting on the Temporalities of The Siege of Jerusalem -- Repressing a Perpetually Resurfacing Temporality: Four Authorial Orphans and The Fifteenth-Century 'Tale of the Litel Clergeon and the Jews' -- Epilogue: The Empire of Common Time.

Vernacular writers of late medieval England were engaged in global conversations about orthodoxy and heresy. Entering these conversations with a developing vernacular required lexical innovation. The Language of Heresy in Late Medieval English Literature examines the way in which these writers complemented seemingly straightforward terms, like heretic, with a range of synonyms that complicated the definitions of both those words and orthodoxy itself. This text proposes four specific terms that become collated with heretic in the parlance of medieval English writers of the 14th and 15th centuries: jangler, Jew, Saracen, and witch. These four labels are especially important insofar as they represent the way in which medieval Christianity appropriated and subverted marginalized or vulnerable identities to promote a false image of unassailable authority.

How can immortality be a curse? According to the Wandering Jew legend, as Jesus made his way to Calvary, a man refused him rest, cruelly taunting him to hurry to meet his fate. In response, Jesus cursed the man to wander until the Second Coming. Since the medieval period, the legend has inspired hundreds of adaptations by artists and writers. Instrument of Memory: Encounters with the Wandering Jew, the first English-language study of the legend in over fifty years, is also the first to examine the influence of the legend’s medieval and early modern sources over the centuries into the present day. Using the lens of memory studies, the work shows how the Christian tradition of the legend centered the memory of the Passion at the heart of the Wandering Jew’s curse. Instrument of Memory also shows how Jewish artists and writers have reimagined the legend through Jewish memory traditions. Through this focus on memory, Jewish adapters of the legend create complex renderings of the Wandering Jew that recognize not only the entanglement of Jewish and Christian memory, but also the impact of that entanglement on Jewish subjects. This book presents a complex, sympathetic, and more fully realized version of the legend while challenging the limits of the presentism of memory studies.

An examination of how the Jews—real and imagined—so challenged the Christian majority in medieval Europe that it became a society that was religiously and culturally antisemitic in new ways In medieval Europe, Jews were not passive victims of the Christian community, as is often assumed, but rather were startlingly assertive, forming a Jewish civilization within Latin Christian society. Both Jews and Christians considered themselves to be God’s chosen people. These dueling claims fueled the rise of both cultures as they became rivals for supremacy. In How the West Became Antisemitic, Ivan Marcus shows how Christian and Jewish competition in medieval Europe laid the foundation for modern antisemitism. Marcus explains that Jews accepted Christians as misguided practitioners of their ancestral customs, but regarded Christianity as idolatry. Christians, on the other hand, looked at Jews themselves—not Judaism—as despised. They directed their hatred at a real and imagined Jew: theoretically subordinate, but sometimes assertive, an implacable “enemy within.” In their view, Jews were permanently and physically Jewish—impossible to convert to Christianity. Thus Christians came to hate Jews first for religious reasons, and eventually for racial ones. Even when Jews no longer lived among them, medieval Christians could not forget their former neighbors. Modern antisemitism, based on the imagined Jew as powerful and world dominating, is a transformation of this medieval hatred. A sweeping and well-documented history of the rivalry between Jewish and Christian civilizations during the making of Europe, How the West Became Antisemitic is an ambitious new interpretation of the medieval world and its impact on modernity.

This is the first study of monstrosity in Jewish history from the Middle Ages to modernity. Drawing on Jewish history, literary studies, folklore, art history and the history of science, it examines both the historical depiction of Jews as monsters and the creative use of monstrous beings in Jewish culture. Jews have occupied a liminal position within European society and culture, being deeply immersed yet outsiders to it. For this reason, they were perceived in terms of otherness and were often represented as monstrous beings. However, at the same time, European Jews invoked, with tantalizing ubiquity, images of magical, terrifying and hybrid beings in their texts, art and folktales. These images were used by Jewish authors and artists to push back against their own identification as monstrous or diabolical and to tackle concerns about religious persecution, assimilation and acculturation, gender and sexuality, science and technology and the rise of antisemitism. Bringing together an impressive cast of contributors from around the world, this fascinating volume is an invaluable resource for academics, postgraduates and advanced undergraduates interested in Jewish studies, as well as the history of monsters.

An increased awareness of the importance of minority and subjugated voices to the histories and narratives which have previously excluded them has led to a wide-spread interest in the effects of colonization and displacement. This collection of essays is the first to apply post-colonial theory to the Middle Ages, and to critique that theory through the excavation of a distant past. The essays examine the establishment of colony, empire, and nationalism in order to expose the mechanisms of oppression through which 'aboriginal' 'native' or simply pre-existent cultures are displaced, eradicated, or transformed.