Why did negative images of Jews and Judaism long outlast the presence of Jewish communities in England? Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England examines the role played by negative Jewish imagery in the development of Englishness—or, in Miriamne Krummel's terminology, English nationhood. Krummel's book contributes to an ever growing body of scholarship on the rhetorical construction of Jews in medieval Europe. Like many of her direct interlocutors (including Anthony Bale and Steven Kruger), Krummel seeks to understand how the expression of Jewish mendacity was so thoroughly domesticated and fundamentally integrated into the construction of Englishness during the late Middle Ages in the absence of living Jewish communities or publicly professing Jews. She finds her examples in legal, literary, and graphic representations of Jews that were produced in medieval England in the wake of the expulsion. Using an approach informed by postcolonial understandings of the nature of power and identity formation, she takes as her point of departure the assumption that European Christianity had appropriated or “colonized” the Jew as an active, frequently pernicious, ever-present though often concealed, force in society. This argument largely hinges on the distinctive historical circumstances in medieval England, where Jews were, in Krummel's words, “a present absence” before the expulsion and “an absent presence” afterwards (7). Ironically, the absent presence of Jews after 1290 was both deeply unsettling among the lettered elite and quite productive of exegetical innovations that contributed to a clear sense of English-ness. The argument that Jews were constitutive of Christian identity, even (or especially) in their absence, has emerged as a certainty in the study of medieval identities. Given that Christian theologians became increasingly intent about mapping Christian supersession of Jewish history and chosenness during the High Middle Ages, and in the face of recent proliferation of studies examining the impact of such theological awareness on how Jews and Judaism were perceived and treated, this is no longer a great surprise. However, Krummel's study adds insight into an important layer of the mechanics of medieval Christian identity formation in the distinct setting of England. Crafting Jewishness contains six substantial chapters, one focused on Jewish responses to the expulsion, the rest on representations or reflections of Jews and Judaism in medieval Christian texts. Following an introduction, which situates the work in the theoretical world of psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, and literary criticism, the first chapter grounds Krummel's analysis in the realm of the material world in which Jews coexisted with Christians: graphic images and the 1275 Jewry Statute. In the aggregate, she argues, these sources demonstrate an uneasy awareness on the part of the authors that Jews were both proximate and indistinguishable from Christians, leading Christians to presume Jews possessed non-human or extra-human characteristics. The exaggerated physical qualities linked to Jewish-ness—including large noses, pointed beards, dark or yellow skin (in contrast with the white skin of Christians)—became iconic images of Jewish greed and carnality that could be mobilized with equal ease in literary and pictorial form. The claim that the English had a proclivity (compulsion, even) to depict Jews with animalistic qualities that mirrored well known stereotypes is beyond dispute. However, Krummel's reading of Jewish caricatures might have been enriched had she situated this impulse to dehumanize Jews pictorially in the broader context of medieval representational conventions, including the vast array of fantastic creatures that abundantly populated the margins of texts, buildings, and literary exempla.

Perhaps the most original and engaging material in this book can be found in the second chapter. Writing against the grain of the dominant scholarship, which has tended to ignore or at least diminish Jewish responses to the expulsion, Krummel uses poems of lamentation to reveal a distinctive voice among the medieval English Jewry. The tendency to blithely look past or disregard the pain the 1290 expulsion may have caused to the Jewish community emerges from a longstanding tendency to deem worthy of serious study only those Jewish communities that maintained a robust tradition of rabbinic learning. As the Jews of medieval England are better known for their financial endeavors than for their scholarly tradition, relatively little effort has been exerted to reconstruct the emotional or intellectual responses to this expulsion among English Jewry. Krummel's analysis here is informed by methods borrowed from Holocaust scholarship for understanding human behavior in the face of trauma, humiliation, and radical disruption of the social fabric. While some readers are sure to object that this analytical strategy nonchalantly dismisses historical contingency, Krummel uses it to tease out concealed hints about how the trauma and dislocation caused by forced exile gave voice to and nurtured a sense of place and identity for the poet and his contemporaries.

In the remaining chapters, Krummel focuses on discrete passages from iconic texts and authors to further complicate the role allotted to Jews in the formation of English nationhood. Chapter 3 argues that Mandeville used Jewish difference—represented in one manuscript tradition by a story about a mysterious Jewish community in the Caspian mountains and elsewhere by the Jews' command of Hebrew—to affirm the safety and wisdom of (English) homogeneity. In contrast, Krummel argues in chapter 4 that Chaucer's “Prioress's Tale” revivified the English Jew by producing a complex Jewish character propelled by independent agency. In chapter 5, turning the tables once again on accepted wisdom about medieval English antisemitism, Krummel reveals an instance of “textual kindness” (117) in a translation rendered by Hoccleve of Guilliaume de Deguilevilles's Le Pilegrimage d le'Ame. Focusing on Hoccleve's conspicuous omission of a passage depicting a destructive, demonic Jew, she argues that Hoccleve positioned himself as a “putative Jew” in his recognition of “the psychic distress caused by sadness . . . and the intense loneliness of social isolation” (125). Finally, chapter 6, argues that the final conversion of Jews in the Croxton Play effected the physical presence and contemporary significance of Jews as fundamental to the (English) Christian narrative. Krummel's focus on marginal references to Jews provides convincing evidence for the claim that the Jew as Other continued to play a very active role in shaping and defining Englishness, long after England was purged of living Jews.