This is a learned and significant study. Irven M. Resnick argues that the sharp distinction often made between medieval, religiously-based antisemitism and the modern form that invoked racial features purportedly characterizing Jews is considerably overdrawn. Rather, as the final sentence of the introduction affirms, by the central and certainly by the late Middle Ages, various “physical, somatic distinguishing marks were attributed to Jews” (12) so that even the supposedly modern question of whether or not conversion could be entirely efficacious in erasing Jewishness inevitably came to the fore.
Let me begin by presenting the table of contents with some parenthetical supplements and comments: “Introduction to Medieval Physiognomy” (with a concluding section on “Intellectual Deficiencies, Gender, and the Irrationality of the Jews” that points inter alia to an allegedly feminine Jewish nature); “Physical Deformities and Circumcision” (with a section on the Jewish badge and very little on deformities); “The Jews and Leprosy” (with a section on leprosy and sexuality, another on leprosy and diet, and two on plots, to wit, “The Lepers’ Plot and the Jews,” and “Jewish Physicians and a Plot against Christendom”); “The Dietary Laws, Food, and Illicit Sexuality”; “The Jews and Melancholy” (connected to hemorrhoids—and hence the blood libel—and to fearfulness); “Planetary Influences, or, The Jews and Saturn” (including sections on the Jewish stench, physiognomy and race, and Jewish names); “Case Studies Revealing a Jewish Physiognomy” (the controversy over Anaclet II's papacy, a virtually irrelevant second case, and discussion of the dark skin of Jews).
Many of these medieval Christian conceptions regarding Jews, several of which have been connected to a Jewish association with the devil, are well known to scholars. Thus, the beliefs that Jewish men menstruate and are disproportionately afflicted by hemorrhoids, that there is a Jewish stench, that Jews are darker-skinned than Christians and are beset by fearfulness have been noted in earlier studies. Moreover, it is very well known that in late medieval Spain, the position that Jewishness could not be immediately erased by conversion came to be affirmed by many highly influential figures. Nonetheless, Resnick has brought this material together in a manner that impels the reader to confront a larger picture in which Jews are essentially different from Christians for reasons rooted not so much in a diabolical nature as in a constellation of features spawned by humors, to which he devotes extensive and illuminating discussion, as well as other natural forces.
Nothing that I will say about what I see as problematic aspects of the book lessens this achievement. Nonetheless, the work would have been much improved had the author defined the scope of his work more clearly and marshaled his evidence more economically.
As we have already seen, major sections of the book have nothing to do with inherent, let alone patent, “marks of distinction.” The discussion of leprosy reveals that even that does not fully qualify since dietary and sexual restrictions observed by Jews were widely believed to neutralize their inherent proclivity and make them largely immune to this disease. Circumcision, to be sure, is a mark of distinction, but its only connection to inherent Jewish difference is the belief that it was imposed on Jews to help diminish (without much success) their tendency toward licentiousness.
Similarly, the discussion of dietary laws is justified primarily by the observation that since a food like pork was thought even by Christians to have harmful effects, it followed that such food was forbidden to Jews because they were naturally subject to the deleterious manifestations in question. Even granting that Resnick makes a few more comments about these laws that are germane to his thesis, we do not require a thirty-page chapter including such topics as Judaism's criteria for suspending dietary injunctions in the case of a life-threatening emergency and the Christian use of this information in polemic.
Distinctive Jewish names could, to be sure, serve as marks of distinction, but the fact that they are discussed in the chapter entitled “Planetary Influence” highlights how difficult it was to fit the discussion into the basic theme of the book. Jewish involvement in lepers' plots and the plots of Jewish physicians are manifestly irrelevant to a thesis centering on marks of distinction, physical or otherwise.
While the analysis of the scientific doctrines leading to affirmations of Jewish difference is at the heart of the book's contribution, it is assigned far too much space, to the point where long stretches of text have nothing to do with Jews and could have been shortened dramatically with no material loss to the evidentiary base of Resnick's thesis. In my estimation, the initial twenty-page section on leprosy could have been reduced to about three, and the first fourteen pages of the seventeen-page discussion of Saturn could have been reduced to a few paragraphs.
This proclivity toward prolix and unnecessary discussion—whose impressive erudition provides some compensation—is also evident in sections unrelated to science. The relevance of the blood libel to this book is the fairly marginal contention that Jews need blood to cure their diseases of the blood, to wit, menstruation and hemorrhoids. It is certainly important to document this, but doing so does not require a discussion that includes a learned account of the case of Thomas of Monmouth (where this contention was not present) and other information about the libel itself. Similarly, it is important to note that some—though by no means all—of Anaclet II's opponents asserted that his Jewish origins could be discerned in his appearance, but this does not come close to justifying a sixteen-page account of the details of the controversy.
On some occasions, Resnick strains to affirm that Christians believed that they could identify Jews by looking for one or another of the clear, discernible differences distinguishing them from Christians. Thus, he makes a point of an isolated Christian suggestion that the Inquisition could determine continued Jewish loyalties by examining a man for menstrual flow (205–206). It hardly needs to be said that such a suggestion had to have been stillborn and utterly without lasting influence. The same is true of the argument that the Jewish stench could be used by the Inquisition for the same purpose (241–243, 321). It is also worth noting that in these passages it is the retention of Jewish beliefs that leads to the persistence of certain physical traits, a notion that stands in tension with the scientific explanations that Resnick favors.
As to the possibility that real physical differences actually existed, I am inclined to think that on average Jews were probably darker skinned than Christians and may really have been less prone to leprosy. (Resnick provides an extensive discussion of a passage cited from my edition of the Niẓẓaḥon Vetus affirming that Jews have dark skin, but misses a striking remark in a different Jewish work noted in my commentary to that passage—that Christians deny that Jews have a mouth, eye, or nose.) At the same time, I consider it painfully obvious that Jews could not be identified simply by appearance. Resnick, who does not endorse any suggestion of real difference, nonetheless finds it necessary to demonstrate this truism by mobilizing stories where such an identification could not be made (254, 256). The need for the Jewish badge, as he recognizes, is further evidence of this self-evident reality.
I have complained about the repeated cases of excessive discussion of material that could—and in my view should— have been drastically condensed. The conclusion, however, elicits the opposite reaction. It is sketchy and does not underscore the key assertions of this study in a focused fashion. One has to search the volume for the author's most important formulations of the genuinely fascinating tensions between his “marks of distinction” and empirical realities. Still, those formulations are present, and the points they make are intriguing.
I wish that this book had been shortened and sharpened. But despite the obstacles that it places before the reader, it is a valuable study that will have a material impact on scholarly discourse regarding a topic of great significance.
