In an unassuming and scholarly fashion Ivan Marcus has offered what may well be seen as a revisionary treatment of its subject. Rather than a straightforward tale of persecution it explicates a two-way interaction between medieval Christianity and medieval Judaism, one in which Jews often fought back with the theological and intellectual weapons of the day as ‘assertive agents’ who are too easily and too often overlooked. Though the weight of numbers and of secular power and royal support leave little doubt as to the winners, in many ways it was a sustained two-way contest, though the memorable high points were so often those of violence, horrendous accusations, strange fantasies and the imposition of marks of what we can think of as second- or third-class citizenship, even when secular relations and business might be conducted with little concern for the barriers and boundaries.
The chronology of Jewish-Christian relations in medieval Europe (the coverage here does not extend much east of the Empire) is a familiar one; reasonable acceptance through the Carolingian era, the slaughters that marked the First Crusade in the 1090s, the blood libels and expulsions of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the creation of the ‘imaginary Jew’ of Chancer’s ‘Prioress’s Tale’ and of renaissance literature, and the somewhat uncertain or disputed links between the medieval legacy and the antisemitism of recent centuries. At the start, Judaism and Christianity split over the interpretation of their common roots. To Judaism, Christianity was a perversion of an established faith, having a god who came from a woman’s body and who would eventually become dead flesh. To Christianity, Christ offered the opportunity for a new message, one made sacred by his sacrifice and resurrection. In an Esau/Jacob framework, the Pauline message was that the elder son was there to serve the younger, this being the new message of the ‘true spiritual Israel’ (p. 9). Christianity, in this setting, was Judaism corrected.
But despite pressure for conversion, early relations were generally smooth, or at least below the level of active persecution, at least until the massacres of the First Crusade, when Jewish thought that ‘the Lord visited his wrath upon the holy communities’. It is important to emphasise that the papal call at Clermont made no mention of Jews, no focus on ‘the enemy within’ (nor did Innocent iii in the early thirteenth century ever offer that killing the Jews was the way to deal with them). Also, to keep the two-sides-of-the-coin interpretation before us as a dreadful balance of the slaughter in Mainz and elsewhere, there was a huge Hebrew literature about the newly-sprung violence, much of it coming down to us from Jewish writings; numerous Hebrew accounts of Jews killing themselves and their families as acts of martyrdom in order to escape Christian violence. Thus, new bands of martyrs and (Jewish) saints, though – in contrast to Christian hagiography – no relics and no pilgrimages. Nor were the Jewish communities always passive amidst the horrors, as at Mainz where Rabbi Qalonymos led armed resistance. But once the pattern of violence began it was repeated and emulated and disseminated, reinforced decades later by the zealots of the Second Crusade in the 1140s and the attraction that horror stories came to hold for Benedictine monks who seemed given to enlarging on antisemitic tales and incidents (real or manufactured).
The most infamous and widespread of the tales was that of the blood libel, resting largely on the pseudo-specificity of a few concrete incidents and a widespread fear of their repetition: names and details were readily supplied, as for William of Norwich, supposedly martyred around 1144, or Harold of Chichester in 1168, or at Blois in 1171, where there was not even the body of the little martyr. And beyond the familiar accusations of well-poisoning designed to bring on or to augment the plague of the 1340s, a body of thought was developed, focusing on Jewish retaliation or response and also on a perceived inherent difference between Jews and their enemies. Did Jews actually throw crucifixes into latrines, urinate on the host, argue that when ingested the host become fecal matter, and otherwise make their blatant contempt for Christian ritual a part of the own world? Whatever actually happened, one can imagine Christian imagination going wild in this area: ‘I can top that horror story with one of mine’ sort of discourse in what we summarise as ‘latrine blasphemy,’ perhaps based on the odd tale of someone who might have spat upon a crucifix. Then, beyond this, and to emphasise that there was an ‘ineradicable difference’, it came to be held that Jewish men were intrinsically different; darker skin and colouring (as against ‘Dark but Comely’ in the ‘Song of Songs’), given to monthly bleeding from the penis, invariably the uglier one when involved in two-party affairs and incapable of really accepting Christ’s message, even when converted. The cumulative effect of these views, allegations and pronouncements gives us antisemitism in the bold letters in which it was written by the later Middle Ages.
In the early modern Anglophone world the two most prominent Jews emerging from this painful narrative of up-and-down relations are those of Renaissance drama, the villains of the ‘Merchant of Venice’ and of Marlow’s ‘Jew of Malta’. Both plays were written by men who might have seen an occasional Jew but hardly an openly-practising one. Such is the power of myth and manufactured tradition. And as we turn in conclusion to modern times Marcus takes us through a number of scholarly views of the rise and basis for modern antisemitism whether it was Jews as people or their religion, the extent to which such factors as money-lending and interest play a role, and the sporadic but focused hostility of various branches of Christianity.
A final note of applause: scholarship is based on the individual’s effort to put one’s findings and interpretations atop work that has gone before. But even by conventional scholarly standards Marcus’ volume is built upon a most impressive body of scholarship, testifying to the importance of and continuing interest in the topic under review as well as to his skill in synthesising hundreds and hundreds of studies. The bibliography (in a volume of modest size) runs to ninety-six pages. Sources cited range from once-only reference to classical and patristic authors as well as to modern ones on to no fewer than twenty-six citations for Marcus himself (between 1981 and 2018) and a goodly number for others who have worked to elucidate this important chapter in Europe’s history: twenty-nine references to the publications of Robert Chazen, twenty-five from Jeremy Cohen, eighteen from William Chester Jordan, fourteen from Robert Stacey and a very goodly number from many others. What Marcus has offered is a book of modest length, deep scholarship and what may well be an alternative interpretation of what is frequently and too readily considered a one-sided, top-down view of Jewish-Chrisian relations covering the broad span of medieval and early modern Europe. A powerful and learned case.
