The Historical Jew in the Modern Classroom: Problematizing the Creation of Jewish Identity in Medieval England

Abstract

Including a unit on the “historical Jew” within a broader historical survey course is a vehicle for bringing historiography, historical methodology, contemporary views of identity construction, and the complex roots of cross-cultural conflict into an undergraduate classroom. Productive challenges inevitably arise in creating a unit that focuses on the shifting relationship between Jews and Christians in medieval England and considers the reality of cross-cultural conflict. The content of this course may vary, but the basic approach encourages the critical examination of primary sources and images related to Jews that were produced in medieval England. This chapter introduces ways to pair primary sources with secondary source readings that contextualize the material and demonstrate current approaches to the questions raised.

Most undergraduates have a complicated, if almost entirely unexamined and inaccurate, understanding of Judaism and Jewish history , including its relationship to Christian history—or what many think of as mainstream history. Students’ knowledge of these subjects seems to have been shaped not only by a patchwork understanding of Christian tradition‚ but also by a mélange of popular culture, an elusive and abridged, yet potent, apocalypticism associated with Protestant evangelism, modern political discourse (especially regarding Middle Eastern policy), and a variety of widely held prejudices and misconceptions, some of which have their roots in the Middle Ages.

I did not make the decision to regularly introduce a unit entitled “Jews and Christians in Medieval England” into medieval or world civilization surveys to address my students’ unfamiliarity with Jewish history although I do hope to increase their knowledge of the subject. Rather, as a scholar who has researched and written about the unstable nature of the relationship between Jewish and Christian populations in High Medieval England, I believe that I can effectively present material from my area of study to cultivate in my students an awareness and more sophisticated understanding of larger historical and sociological phenomena. While the topic of this unit, “Jews and Christians in Medieval England,” is quite specific, the issues raised in it can be linked to broader concerns, such as the external construction of identity , the political and judicial consequences of stereotyping or accentuating ethnic or religious differences within proximate communities, and the varied roots and expressions of cross-cultural conflict. I also want to expose undergraduates to less reductionist views of historical causality and challenge their understanding of what constitutes history. While these themes are echoed in other components of my courses, I see value in occasionally stopping the relentless pace of the survey and introducing students to the kind of layered and intensive analysis that discourages easy answers and promotes reflection. I am always mindful that the vast majority of students will take one, perhaps two, history courses during their college careers, and most often these will be surveys. Few will be exposed to historiography or a discussion of historical methodology.

The central work of this unit is close, critical reading of primary source texts and analyses of images from manuscripts, sculpture, and stained glass that shaped and express Christian attitudes toward Jews in High Medieval England. In terms of pedagogy, the approach I take in this unit—the study of history through primary sources—is not markedly different from the way I teach most history courses, so there is methodological continuity between unit and course. In this unit, students also read excerpts from scholarly secondary sources, some as background and others directly related to our primary source readings, which allows them to correlate primary sources with the ways that professional historians use and interpret them. In addition to the primary and secondary sources assigned for class discussion, I provide supplementary materials on the course website to contextualize these texts and images. I post maps tracing the foundation of Jewish communities in England, comparative timelines of English history and the history of Jews in England, and a small library of primary sources relevant to our topic, such as royal legislation pertaining to Jews, papal bulls addressing both Christian and Jewish usury, excerpts from letters regarding the Second Crusade and the Jews by St. Bernard of Clairvaux , and selections from patristic works that influenced the Church’s official stance on Jews, most notably passages from St. Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine and books 16–18 of the City of God, which endorse a limited tolerance of Jews in Christendom. Not all of these texts are discussed in class, but many are referenced. Although a paper specifically generated by this section of the course is not mandatory, by the unit’s end the compiled sources, including students’ notes from individual and group work, create a kind of textbook tailored to the material presented in any one unit that students can then use if they choose to write their final paper on Jews in High Medieval England.

One model that I use for organizing the presentation of information is the website “Jewish/Non-Jewish Relations: Between Exclusion and Embrace, An Online Teaching Resource.”¹ Here, primary sources are presented with their historical background, focused discussion of the sources themselves, and questions to guide students’ analysis of the texts. A fair amount of the rich and varied primary sources for Jewish life in medieval England is available online in English. Many images from this period can also be found on the Web.² Online access to pertinent materials is an important concern at small universities like mine, with modest library collections and limited access to scholarly e-books and peer-reviewed journals. At the opening of all courses, I discuss the critical evaluation of websites used for researching papers produced for the class. Significant collections of primary sources only occasionally provide a framework or are structured for questioning the production of sources and are perhaps better suited to illustrating medieval anti-Judaism than analyzing it.

The Jewish Question

Students at my small, Methodist-affiliated university are usually cognizant of some kind of Jewish “difference” but have real difficulty in articulating what that difference is or why it might exist. Most have, as I noted, preconceived ideas about Jews, and few have been prodded to examine their essentialist views. Jews are an assemblage of specific characteristics, quasi-racial, quasi-theological, and certainly encompassing common stereotypes: Jews reject(ed) Jesus , but it is unclear why; they can be identified by the way they look (typically dark and with a prominent nose); they are good business people because they have an uncommon interest in money and power; they have an affinity for string instruments; and other such stereotypes. The eternal, ahistorical Jews are, in some ways, their historical Jews: static in their beliefs and proclivities, remaining marginalized by choice, eternally tainted by deicide , resented because they purportedly control banking and political systems, yet also tragic in that they are often the victims of unjust and cruel persecution.

Ironically, many textbooks, whether surveys of Western or world civilization or medieval European history, often present medieval Jewish history in ways that mirror students’ preconceptions about Jews. Jews appear as the objects of violent attacks, often in association with the First Crusade or the Black Death or in the context of the rise of cities and a European commercial economy, mainly as long-distance traders and moneylenders to key religious and political figures. Sometimes what seem to be efforts to bring in more recent research on the interaction between Christians and Jews result in peculiarly neutral or even misleading explanations. A passage from one widely used survey is instructive:

Towns also attracted Jews who plied trades in small business. Many became wealthy as moneylenders to kings, popes, and business-people. Jewish intellectual and religious culture both dazzled and threatened Christians. These various factors encouraged suspicion and distrust among Christians, and led to a surge in anti-Jewish sentiment in the late 12^th and early 13^th centuries.³

It is difficult to tell in this passage whether the authors of this textbook are attempting to assimilate recent research on the political and economic relationship of minority Jewish populations to Christian authority or on the theological underpinnings of changing Christian attitudes towards and representations of Jews . Does the mention of the potential danger “Jewish intellectual culture” posed to the Christian majority allude to the public disputations between Jews and Christians that began in the High Middle Ages? Or to Christian encounters with Jewish rabbinic material that seemed to override the Augustinian description of the reason for tolerance of the Jews in the world after the Incarnation, that is, to preserve the Hebraica veritas , and to cast them in the role of heretics?⁴ The passage is of little use in explaining many features of the rising anti-Judaism of the High Middle Ages—evident in the appearance of exploitation, pogroms, book-burning, expulsion , and sensational accusations of ritual murder and host desecration—which are never mentioned, but are, one assumes, what is meant by anti-Jewish sentiment.

Worse, this shorthand explanation of changing Jewish–Christian relations in the High Middle Ages encourages students to succumb to a reductionist view of historical causality. It also allows students to maintain an ahistorical double-mindedness about Jews. The dichotomous image of the Jews—as victims and as wielders of great power—is obviously detrimental to deeper historical awareness and excludes periods of peaceful coexistence and collaboration between Jews and Christians. Students, however, tend to gravitate toward reductionist, decontextualized explanations. Students’ efforts to explain tension or violence between communities often prioritize emotion or blind allegiance to an ideology. They are inclined to minimize historical background, as well as contemporary political, economic, and cultural conditions. In the post-9/11 world, they have been coached to consider the most likely root of conflict between groups to be fear, anger, envy, hatred, or simply irrationality. A constant stream of politically partisan speech and polemics passing for journalism encourages them to see tensions between the Middle East and the West, for example, as the result of irrational hatred, making it possible to dismiss a long history of cooperation, tolerance , exchange, colonization, exploitation, and political manipulation.

Although I title this unit “Jews and Christians in Medieval England,” there is often an assumption that the material will take up an unbroken (Jewish) historical narrative that is steeped in suffering and ends in and explains the Holocaust . This vision is only partly squelched by the brief lecture I give explaining the chronological and geographical parameters of the unit and the very different nature of European anti-Semitism in the twentieth century from that of High Medieval England. As the class and I read primary source texts or look at medieval images together, I repeatedly emphasize the necessity of placing the production of a text or image or the occurrence of a specific event into a larger historical framework. I also ask students to consider the nature of the texts we are reading and how they can be used to understand past events: what purpose does a text seem to serve? Does it belong to a specific genre? What assumptions seem to lie behind the text? What rhetorical conventions shape the text? How can the text be used as evidence or as explanation? So, if we are reading an historical account produced in the Middle Ages, I often request that the students consider how the standards of medieval historical writing differ from contemporary historical writing as exemplified in our secondary sources. When we read the northern British historian William of Newburgh on the anti-Jewish uprisings following the coronation of Richard I and the gathering of forces for the Third Crusade, I draw attention to the internal inconsistencies in the text. William’s account offers many different kinds of explanations for the anti-Jewish riots. On the one hand, William of Newburgh highlights (1) political tensions, particularly anti-royal feeling, in England, and (2) the role of indebted nobles who nurtured and encouraged attacks against Jews and their property with the express purpose of destroying records of their debts. On the other hand, William believed that the fate of the Jews of York and elsewhere was divine justice—punishment for the offenses of a deicidal people gaining power and prosperity.⁵ Students are asked both to contextualize the passages we read and to consider the construction of the text, for example, the interweaving of descriptions of contemporary events‚ biblical passages, and allusions to earlier Christian writings relating to Jews. I may ask the students what function they believe is served by the omens and signs William mentions as preceding the attacks. The students often point out that William’s incorporation of prophecy or his use of abusive epithets does not conform to their understanding of the modern principles of historical writing.

I am aware that the fact that I mainly use sources produced by medieval Christians‚ some of which‚ at least on their surface‚ merely pertain to Jewish life in England but many of which contain virulently anti-Jewish material and may seem to endorse reading Jewish life in the Middle Ages through the lens of Jewish suffering. But it would be difficult to bring to light Christian fears and fantasies about Jews and elucidate the nature of Christian stereotyping of Jews without examining sources that treat Jews as a discrete group, a danger to Christian society, and enemies of Christ. In England, of course, Jews would also be foreigners, recent immigrants who almost certainly spoke French. More to the point, the image of the destructive, coercive, even monstrous Jew put forward in high medieval Christian legal, literary, theological, and polemical texts, as well as in art and architecture, was so pervasive on some level it can be seen as informing all interactions between Jews and Christians, whether those interactions were positive or negative and whether Jews were any longer present within a society, as shown by the continued production and elaboration of anti-Jewish stories and images after their expulsion from England in 1290.⁶ Anti-Jewish texts, art, and architecture produced in the Middle Ages have their own macabre attraction and may even support some of my students’ own prejudices, but my choice of sources plays an important role in this unit. When carefully analyzed and contextualized, the same sources may illustrate how Jewish status and Jewish life in England varied greatly from place to place and time to time. Chroniclers of the attacks on prosperous northern English Jewish communities in 1189 and 1190 sought to justify anti-Jewish violence on a variety of grounds, so their works may understandably be viewed as anti-Jewish. Yet these chronicles can also reveal sympathy toward Jews‚ amicable ties and frequent interactions between Jewish and Christian neighbors that are not characterized by violence‚ and the protective role of Church and crown in relation to Jewish communities, as William of Newburgh’s account attests.

Most students recognize specific ways that accounts of ritual murder vilify Jews. They understand the implications of medieval Christians accusing their Jewish contemporaries of murdering boys through a method clearly modeled after crucifixion . Occasionally, students may remark on the ways these accounts reinforce Jewish stereotypes or note the ways that these accounts are shaped to illustrate the contrasting inner natures of Jews and Christians. A comparison of the reception of some ritual murder accusations, however, reveals an entirely different aspect of the charge—namely, that the charges were deeply politicized. Broad support for the cults of boy martyrs and the prosecution and punishment of accused Jewish communities depended upon the self-serving endorsements of prominent political figures. The earliest accusation of the ritual murder of a child, the boy William of Norwich (1144), surfaced in the middle of civil war, received a limited amount of attention from the Christian community of Norwich, and did not result in a trial and judgment against any of Norwich’s Jews‚ although it did give rise to a succession of ritual murder accusations in England and on the continent. A little over one hundred years later, the case of Hugh of Lincoln (1255), whose cause was embraced by local ecclesiastical leaders and the embattled King Henry III, resulted in a flourishing cult and violent judicial repercussions against Jews in the Lincoln community, including the execution of nineteen Jewish men. Comparisons such as these demonstrate how the same types of stories, emerging in different political and religious climates, evoked dissimilar responses.⁷ Using a variety of sources, juxtaposed with one another and anchored by political realities‚ and encouraging discussions about the purpose, likely audience, and reception of a source illustrates the diversity and complicates the patterns of Christian anti-Judaism.⁸

My answer to the Jewish question is a decidedly historicist one. I ask students to locate as best they can the realities behind the production of our sources. I do not deny the existence of texts and images that contain positive images of Jews (or Hebrews). However, experience convinces me that the complexities of the relationship between Jews and Christians are most visible and most interesting to students when the class disassembles and dissects a range of dramatically anti-Jewish texts and art, revealing as much detail as possible about their composition, heritage, audience, and reception.

Premodern texts often defy students’ understanding. To some extent, most require a framework to render them comprehensible. That framework may be a brief, broad historical background that leaves room for student interpretation, or it can consist of guiding questions as on the website “Jewish/Non-Jewish Relations” mentioned above. Many of the scholarly secondary sources I use, or explanations and questions I produce, are intended to direct students’ attention to the ways in which Jewish identity was shaped and reshaped, much like English policies regarding Jews, based on the needs of the Christian majority. For example, I might have the students read an article by Robert C. Stacey on English Jewish communities and royal taxation and coordinate its contents with a timeline of English history and a primary source, such as one of the many charters granted to the Jews by English Kings between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries.⁹ The essential message of these charters was that the Jews of England belonged to the English crown, whose administrations created institutions that tracked money owed to Jews, appropriated Jewish bonds, and, over the course of two centuries, increasingly assessed special taxes against Jews, beginning with the Bristol tallage of 1207. English kings did not take these measures purely on the basis of anti-Jewish feeling. The development of these policies and the evolution of the view of the Jews as a source of revenue should be examined in the context of the crown’s need for money, for instance to pursue continental wars or for crusading ventures.

Much of the time, however, I allow an amount of flexibility within the classroom to foster student-directed discussion. I often use a handout, entitled “Reading for Evidence,” developed by my colleague, Carl Dyke, to assist students in reading primary sources (see Appendix A at the end of this volume). The handout provides a basic framework for assessing primary sources, first by having students identify author, date, and place of production of a text, and then moving on to the more complex questions of purpose, audience, context, and subtext.

Setting up the Unit

I do not dive immediately into medieval sources. Rather, I turn to modern works—such as excerpts from W.E.B. Dubois ’s The Souls of Black Folk, Edward Said ’s Orientalism, and Simone de Beauvoir ’s The Second Sex—to elucidate concepts and terms used in our discussions, such as Otherness, essentialism , social identity , alterity , hegemony, and acculturation. I grappled at first with the wisdom of using anachronistic texts, but I have found them to be effective in helping students grasp basic concepts and terms in historical, political, and social contexts that might not be entirely unfamiliar to them. In one class, the Dubois reading led to a dynamic conversation about concepts of race in the Middle Ages and whether conversion could be thought of as similar to acculturation. These first readings also underscore the notion that conclusions drawn from examining particular historical circumstances can be more broadly applied.

In the work of explicating text and image, students often confront their stereotypes of Jews and the ways they themselves may have participated in constructing identities for minority or marginal populations. I am aware that it is problematic to selectively introduce modern and somewhat peripheral materials. Yet I am reluctant not to give students a chance to draw correspondences between the situation of medieval Jews and the circumstances of other marginalized groups. A comparison of some aspects of African-American and Jewish history can illustrate that the acceptance of stereotypes in either image or narrative form and the assignment of specific qualities to outgroups (even in the absence of the biological notion of race) are not modern phenomena and that the processes that externally shape identity operate continuously and in many different spheres and historical contexts. Of course, I want them to go further, to consider that simply defining a group as marginal, without considering broader historical circumstances, is not enough.

Diachronic? Synchronic?

Does the history of Jews in medieval England begin with the arrival of Jews in England after the Norman Conquest? For example, the association between Jews and the demonic begins in the New Testament and reappears continually in anti-Jewish polemic throughout the Middle Ages.¹⁰ However, it is not until the High Middle Ages that anti-Jewish artistic renderings that include allusions to the demonic or to damnation, begin to appear.¹¹ I usually show students the infamous cartoon in the Norwich tallage roll (see Fig. 17.1) that exemplifies this new impulse to render visible the stereotypical Jewish characteristics of avarice and carnality , implicit in the representation of Jewish materialism, and reveals anxiety about Jews, moneylending , and royal power.¹² To my knowledge, there are no corresponding representations referencing Christian moneylending , about which numerous papal bulls were promulgated.¹³

When I show my students the sketch of Mosse-Mokke and his wife, Avegaye , that has been drawn onto the head of a 1233 Norwich tallage roll, I am showing them both a compendium, created across centuries, of theological, historical, and legendary ways of thinking about Jews, as well as a decidedly thirteenth century depiction of stereotypical Jews.¹⁴ The tallage roll cartoon features three real people: Mosse-Mokke, bearded, wearing a peaked cap, in profile, and Avegaye , both associates of Isaac fil Jurnet , a successful moneylender and property owner in Norwich . Around and between the couple are a crowd of demonic figures who resemble Mosse-Mokke and Avegaye . They hold scales, symbols of riches, moneylending , and judgment, and demonic accouterments. One demonic figure places his finger on Mosse-Mokke’s nose, as if the demon himself has created the Jew’s unnatural and grotesque physiognomy that reveals an interior wickedness.¹⁵ These demonic figures dominate the images of Mosse-Mokke and Avegaye . The images conflate the real and imagined Jew . To some extent, they represent shared and inherited beliefs about non-Christians, but most specifically Jews.

Similarly, the appearance in the thirteenth century of renderings of the estranged sisters, Ecclesia and the blind-folded Synagoga , are based on established Christian views of Jewish blindness to the truth of scripture.¹⁶ I introduce a selection of images with a reading from book 18 of St. Augustine’s City of God on Jewish “blindness.” This portion of the unit is perhaps the most effective because it generates a great deal of class discussion. I received one of the most insightful and well-researched undergraduate papers of my career on this topic. In her paper, entitled “Ecclesia and Synagoga: The Unbreakable Bond,” Diane Proctor examined the purpose of these images, the milieu in which they appeared, and the perpetual and simultaneous separation and connection of the two. She pulled together material from different parts of the unit, but her interest led her further into researching and comparing images of Ecclesia and Synagoga that we did not view in class. This broader view allowed her an opportunity to discuss how the relationship between the figures was both formulaic and dynamic. In her conclusion, she discussed the ways in which the figures functioned together and demonstrated a link between that function and the creation of disparate Christian and Jewish identities. Her paper fulfilled many of my aims for the unit.

Every aspect of this unit works better when sources are cross-referenced, especially by connecting image and text. Even a loose or hazy historical framework enhances the intelligibility of the unit and generates the impression of a developing relationship between Christians and Jews.

Contexts of Violence

The final text of this unit is an excerpt from the fourth book of William of Newburgh ’s History of English Affairs , which brings together many of the unit’s themes.¹⁷ I discussed this excerpt above, but I believe it will be useful to expand that discussion here. There are few notable English chronicles and histories detailing the events of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries that do not devote at least some space to the anti-Jewish riots that attended the coronation of Richard I and the assembly of English forces for the Third Crusade, or the events at York , where the destruction of the Jewish community was accomplished through a combination of murder and mass suicide. As I have noted, William’s highly poignant, detailed, and morally nuanced account of the violent attacks on Jewish communities includes William’s condemnation of the perpetrators of violence. Like other chroniclers, he justifies Christian anger by asserting that the reign of Henry II was one in which Jews enjoyed undue influence and a privileged status that defied and undermined the official theological rationale for their continued existence in Christendom—a common complaint. Yet William was skeptical about the motivations of the Christian mob who attacked the Jews and looted their homes, noting that some of the crowd burned bonds of indebtedness to Jews. He reports his suspicions that a number of the attackers were motivated by avarice, a vice usually ascribed to Jews.

Readers of the Historia must find a way to account for the harsh language used in reference to the Jews and its condemnatory remarks regarding their attackers. While William’s account is replete with formulaic anti-Jewish language, it can also be seen as a basic local paradigm for some kind of rhetoric of sympathy for the Jews. Whether or not one sees the pathos of William’s description of Jewish victimization and unstinting criticism of his fellow Christians as evidence of a cautious and limited attitude of tolerance , his work challenges the all-too-simple “univocality” inherent in many scholarly discussions of medieval anti-Judaism.¹⁸ As noted, I ask students to pay attention to the language (although the source is in translation) and to the use of scripture as well as other ancient sources, such as references to the works of St. Augustine or William’s comparison of the murder/suicides at York to those of the Jews at Masada at the end of the Jewish War in 70 C.E. William structures his account to emphasize both the local issues that led to violence and the ways in which the history of the Jews in England conformed to general and even eternal patterns of Jewish history .

William of Newburgh ’s narrative is invaluable for a number of reasons. He gives no single motive for the attacks against Jewish communities. Rather, it is obvious from the text that a complex tangle of populist, material, political, theological, and ideological factors, and even what might be called a spirit of the age, lie at the root of this and other occasional outbreaks of violence inflicted on Jewish communities. This point resonates with many students. A final paper by one student, David Stroh, took its theme from a class discussion about William of Newburgh ’s portrait of Richard I. David wrote a primary source analysis in which he argued that the narrative within the first six chapters of the fourth book of William’s history was unified by a claim put forward of a king who lacked control over his kingdom and set up expectations for a change in royal Jewish policy that went unfulfilled. David linked together William’s description of Richard’s actions at his ascension: Richard’s release of prisoners, the step of barring Jews from one part of the coronation ceremony, his inability to limit the ensuing violence or to punish rioters in London, his lack of influence over the north, the failure of mechanisms instituted to protect York’s Jewish community, and Richard’s inability to control his nobility. David concluded that the source provided ample evidence that the York attacks, while factual, were also used in the account to represent political destabilization and a lack of strong central leadership in England. The political destabilization was expressed in part by enmity towards and attacks against Jewish communities. David succeeded, in part by identifying and looking through William’s anti-Jewish tropes, in the difficult work of contextualizing a multifaceted source. Like his classmate Diane Proctor, he demonstrated a relationship between Jews and Christians that was in no way static or fixed.

Conclusion

As I describe some of the materials and approaches employed in this unit, I become more and more aware of its impressionistic and, perhaps, bewildering nature. Yet I believe that some students do, in many ways, achieve a number of the goals I originally had in mind for the unit, as evidenced in class discussion and papers. Students acquire specific knowledge of historical and sociological theory and develop a vocabulary to describe cross-cultural conflict and tension, as well as gain an impression of how modern historians analyze interactions between majority and minority populations. Students advance beyond some of their preconceptions. Most important, some students do seem to leave the classroom with a newly honed critical view of Jews/Others.