Introduction: Haunted by Jews: Re-Membering the Medieval English Other

Abstract

On April 15, 2001, Easter Sunday 2001, people across the United States opened their morning papers. Turning to the cartoon section, some would have been confronted (others might have been assaulted) by an unusual B.C. cartoon, “The Seven Last ‘Words’ of Jesus.”² This cartoon, which I have been denied permission to reprint, features Jesus’s alleged final statements, culled from the Gospel accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.³ The cartoon unfolds in seven frames with a final frame represented as a triptych. The central image in this cartoon is a seven-candle menorah that appears fully lit in the first frame, but with each subsequent frame one additional candle is extinguished.⁴ Jesus’s “last ‘words’ “ appear singly in seven separate frames, each (re)representing the menorah. The forward movement, the progression, of Johnny Hart’s cartoon simultaneously relies upon the reduction of lit candles and the additional smoke of an extinguished candle. (The “menace” of the menorah disappears as the menorah slowly transforms into—and is made to resemble—a cross; thereafter, the process of the mimicry is complete.) And so, by the final frame, appropriately represented as a triptych (I think of Robert Campin’s “The Annunciation Triptych” and his displaced and dejected Joseph in the third panel), viewers see, first, a menorah with its last candle having been extinguished: only the shammes or sexton—the raised candle in the menorah—remains lit.

The discourse of post-Enlightenment English colonialism often speaks in a tongue that is forked, not false. If colonialism takes power in the name of history, it repeatedly exercises its authority through the figures of farce.… mimicry emerges as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge.… mimicry is at once resemblance and menace.¹

—Homi K. Bhabha