Over the course of the past two decades, a growing body of scholarship relating to the Jews of medieval England has been published, particularly by scholars working on literary sources. This research has done much to expand and reshape our understanding of perceptions of the Jews in England, both before and after the Expulsion (1290). Adrienne Williams Boyarin's The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess: The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism represents an important addition to this corpus. Boyarin also calls for a change in direction. As she argues, traditional scholarship in this area has been predicated upon difference, by dividing medieval society into categories that neatly separate Christian from Jew. Using what she terms as “the polemics of sameness” to her sources, which “argue[s] for the indistinguishability of Jew and Christian—to erase, assimilate, or embody Jewishness” (1), Boyarin argues that the barriers that separated the two were both opaque and flexible. The study has two parts, both of which are prefaced by historiae, in which a pair of case studies are set out, to be used as both an anchor and a guide for the following chapters (9). In the choice of sources, a second feature of recent historiography comes under scrutiny: the tendency to approach the topic of medieval Anglo-Jewry from the perspective of either the literary sources or the extensive legal records. Boyarin confidently deploys literary sources and legal records to argue that “when national-historical and literary sources are permitted to elucidate each other mutually and in light of the polemical investments in sameness” (115). Such an approach also serves as a reminder that a Jew in the Plea Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews can be as much a construction as one in a chronicle or hagiographical account, something that those who work on official records (the present reviewer included) have not always been sufficiently aware of.

In part one, Boyarin explores representations of the Jew and how the Jewish identity could be incorporated into the presentation of Christians to become the Christian Jew. Although this could be a source of anxiety in some contexts, as she demonstrates (most obviously through the case of Samson, abbot of Bury St. Edmunds) it also had the potential to constitute an important part of the Christian identity. Having said this, it is rightly acknowledged that to identify sameness is not to diminish the very real and deep-rooted divisions between the two religious communities but, instead, “uncertainty itself can be mobilized . . . in rhetorical challenge to Jewishness, or in redefinition of both Jewishness and Christianness” (92–93). This dichotomy is problematized even further in part two, where Boyarin adds gender to the equation to consider the unmarked Jewess. In both legal and literary sources, Boyarin shows that women could occupy, and transition through, spaces much more easily than their male co-religionists. In many ways, the English Jewess is more visible in the official sources (although cases relating to Jewish women in both the legal and financial records usually account for only around 10–20 percent of entries) because in literary texts “[b]y design, she is difficult to see, but reading for her reveals both a consistent polemic of sameness and a series of identifiable subtypes” (148). Through a series of close readings of both bodies of source material, Boyarin expertly draws out several strands that occur time and again in representations of the Jewish women in medieval England. As a result, it is concluded that the “caricature of a Jewess exaggerates her versatile social and religious capacity,” with Jewish women in medieval England “resting in an uncanny valley between the familiar and the monstrous” (220).

One of the great strengths of this book is Boyarin's engagement with core exemplars. Each chapter is based upon a series of case studies, some of which are returned to repeatedly throughout the study, meaning that Boyarin is able to slowly craft her argument by carefully drawing out all of the subtleties of the sources, demonstrating that the same tropes appear repeated, in a range of sources from different chronological, geographic, and linguistic contexts. Commendably, where the sources are drawn upon, Boyarin provides quotations in the original alongside English translations, thereby removing barriers to access. This is especially helpful given that the body of sources that Boyarin used are in Latin, Middle English, and French. Moreover, some of the more crucial sources are given in their entirety in the appendices to the volume, making some cases accessible that had not previously been available in print, while others that have been available only in problematic modern editions are updated. Like many important works, this book raises as many questions as it answers. The most obvious of these, which was beyond the scope of Boyarin's study, is how “the polemics of sameness” would apply to the urban context in pre-Expulsion England, when Christians and Jews were brought together as neighbors. It can only be hoped that future studies that seek to take account of the conclusions reached in The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess and apply them to different contexts are able to do so with the clarity and insight that Boyarin brings to bear upon her sources.