The Medieval Roots of Antisemitism: Continuities and Discontinuities from the Middle Ages to the Present Day 2017059458, 2017060669, 9781351120821, 9781138630888

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The Medieval Roots of Antisemitism

This book presents a fresh approach to the question of the historical continuities and discontinuities of Jew-hatred, juxtaposing chapters dealing with the same phenomenon—one in the pre-modern, one in the modern period. How do the circumstances of interreligious violence differ in preReformation Europe, the modern Muslim world, and the modern Western world? In addition to the diachronic comparison, most chapters deal with the significance of religion for the formation of anti-Jewish stereotypes. The direct dialogue of small-scale studies bridging the chronological gap brings out important nuances: anti-Zionist texts appropriating medieval ritual murder accusations; modern-day pogroms triggered by contemporary events but fuelled by medieval prejudices; and contemporary stickers drawing upon long-inherited knowledge about what a “Jew” looks like. These interconnections, however, differ from the often-assumed straightforward continuities between medieval and modern anti-Jewish hatred. The book brings together many of the most distinguished scholars of this field, creating a unique dialogue between historical periods and academic disciplines. Jonathan Adams is a researcher for the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities and a docent in the Department of Scandinavian Languages at Uppsala University. Cordelia Heß is Professor of Nordic History at the University of Greifswald.

The Medieval Roots of Antisemitism Continuities and Discontinuities from the Middle Ages to the Present Day Edited by Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß

First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß; individual chapters, the contributors The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Adams, Jonathan, 1971 December 19– editor. | Hess, Cordelia, editor. Title: The medieval roots of antisemitism : continuities and discontinuities from the Middle Ages to the present day / edited by Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Hess. Description: New York ; London : Routledge, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017059458 (print) | LCCN 2017060669 (ebook) | ISBN 9781351120821 () | ISBN 9781138630888 Subjects: LCSH: Antisemitism—History. Classification: LCC DS145 (ebook) | LCC DS145 .M38 2018 (print) | DDC 305.892/4—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017059458 ISBN: 978-1-138-63088-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-12082-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments

ix xiii

Introduction

1

  1 Volcanic Archives: Towards a Direct Comparison of Pre-Modern and Modern Forms of Antisemitism

3

JONATHAN ADAMS AND CORDELIA HEß

PART I

Longest Hatred versus Invented Tradition

17

  2 The Medieval (and Ancient) Roots of Antisemitism

19

STEVEN ENGLUND

  3 The Making of Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century Europe as an Invention of Tradition

30

ULRICH WYRWA

  4 What Is Antisemitism Like? An Analogical Approach

42

BRIAN KLUG

PART II

Antisemitism without Jews

57

  5 Reception of Medieval European Anti-Jewish Concepts in Late Medieval and Early Modern Norway

59

YVONNE FRIEDMAN

  6 The Imitation Game? Japanese Attitudes towards Jews in Modern Times ROTEM KOWNER

73

vi Contents PART III

Christianity and Antisemitism

95

  7 The Role of Medieval Northern Europe in Generating Virulent Anti-Jewish Imagery

97

ROBERT CHAZAN

  8 Between Anti- and Another Modernity: Anti-Judaism, the Imaginary Jew, and Catholic Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Poland (1880–1914)

107

GRZEGORZ KRZYWIEC

  9 The Gospel According to Gibson: Medieval Passion Plays, a Mean-Spirited Nun, and What One Movie Can Tell Us about Jewish-Christian Relations at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century

121

JONATHAN ADAMS

PART IV

Islam and Antisemitism

143

10 Narrating Antisemitism in Historical and Contemporary Turkey 145 BEHRUZ DAVLETOV AND TAHIR ABBAS

11 Arab Antisemitic Discourse: Importation, Internalisation, and Recycling

161

ESTHER WEBMAN

PART V

Bodies, Gender, and Antisemitism

181

12 What’s in a Nose? The Origins, Development, and Influence of Medieval Anti-Jewish Caricature

183

SARA LIPTON

13 Jewish Bodies in Postcards and Street Art: Changes in Anti-Jewish Visual Polemics

204

ISABEL ENZENBACH

14 Masculinities, Carnal Israel, and Antisemitisms VICTOR SEIDLER

225

Contents  vii PART VI

Blood Libel and Ritual Murder Allegations

241

15 The Ritual Murder Accusation as Medieval Invention: Linking Libels and Boy Martyrs

243

MIRIAMNE ARA KRUMMEL

16 Norwich 1144: Origins and Afterlives

257

MIRI RUBIN

17 A Rational Model for Blood Libel: The Aftonbladet Affair

265

JONATHAN ADAMS AND CORDELIA HEß

PART VII

Neighbours

285

18 “. . . and order was upset”: Easter, the Eucharist, and the Jews of Prague, 1389

287

MILAN ŽONCA

19 Towards 1391: The Anti-Jewish Preaching of Ferrán Martínez in Seville

306

MAYA SOIFER IRISH

20 “The present causes of past effects”: The Background Beliefs of the Kielce Pogrom (4 July 1946)

320

JOANNA TOKARSKA-BAKIR

PART VIII

Economy and Finance

339

21 Jewish Usurers, Blood Libel, and the Second-Hand Economy: The Medieval Origins of a Stereotype (from the Thirteenth to the Fifteenth Century)

341

GIACOMO TODESCHINI

22 The Deeper the Roots, the Deadlier the Antisemitism? Comparing Images of Jewish Financial Control in Modern Germany and the United States RICHARD E. FRANKEL

352

viii Contents PART IX

Land and Home

361

23 The Theology of the Land in Jewish-Christian Relations and Its Role in Misunderstandings between Jews and Christians

363

JESPER SVARTVIK

24 Yearning for Zion in Jewish Tradition

377

RUTH LANGER

25 Between Eternity and Wandering: The Anti-Jewish Discourse on the Wandering Jew in the Long Nineteenth Century in Germany and Austria

392

TUVIA SINGER

PART X

Medieval Roots and Anti-Judaism

409

26 Europe, Christianity, Violence, and Jew-Hatred

411

VICTOR SEIDLER

27 Postface

428

CARLO GINZBURG

28 Which Past for Which Present? A Reply to Carlo Ginzburg’s “Postface” on Anti-Judaism

438

DAVID NIRENBERG

Contributors Index

456 463

Figures

  5.1 Årdal II, University Museum of Bergen MA 130. Courtesy of University Museum of Bergen/Photographer Svein Skare. 63   5.2 Detail of Årdal II, University Museum of Bergen MA 130. Courtesy of University Museum of Bergen/Photographer Svein Skare. 65   5.3 Detail of Ål Church, University of Oslo Museum of Cultural History, C11707. Photo: Eirik Irgens Johnsen. 66   5.4 Detail of Årdal II, University Museum of Bergen MA 130. Courtesy of University Museum of Bergen/Photographer Svein Skare. 67   5.5 Bibliothèques-Médiathèques de Metz, Ms. 1588, fol. 204r. 68   5.6 Baltimore, The Walters Art Museum, W. 104, fol. 1r. 69   6.1 Jews as the nation’s enemies, together with the Freemasonry and the Third International: “The lineage of movements for our country’s ruin” (Daitō bunka, October 1927). Author’s photograph.77   6.2 Number of newspaper articles in the Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s oldest and largest national dailies, as well as journal articles and books on Jews published from 1877 to 1945. 81   6.3 Number of newspaper articles (in the national daily Asahi Shimbun) as well as journal articles and books on 84 Jews and Israel published from 1945 to 1989.   6.4 The “second wave” of antisemitic publications: partial display of Uno Masami’s prodigious literal production, 86 1986–90. Author’s photograph.   6.5 “Jewish ingratitude” in a major revisionist manga text (1999): “Japan saved 30,000 Jews but the Jews created the atomic bombs and thereby assisted in the mass murder of Japanese.” Author’s photograph. 87 11.1 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published in Egypt in 1994. 167

x Figures 11.2 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Talmud Teachings. Published in Egypt with an introduction of Shawqi ‘Abd al-Nasser, the brother of president Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser. No date or place of publication indicated. Probably in the 1960s. 12.1 A grimacing Shylock with a large, hooked nose. William Luson Thomas, printmaker. England, mid- to latenineteenth century. Photo: Folger Shakespeare Library. 12.2 “Mr. Sharp-Eye-Ra”: caricature of Moses Shapira. Punch, no. 85, 8 September 1883, 118. Photo: Public domain. 12.3 Moses Shapira, antiques dealer, before 1884. Photo: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MosesShapira.jpg/ Public domain. 12.4 Niels Bohr, 1935. Photographer unknown. Photo: https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Niels_Bohr_1935.jpg/ Public domain. 12.5 Pilate presents Jesus to Jewish priests and Roman soldiers. The faces of the Jews are identical to the faces of the Roman. Egbert Codex, Stadtbibliothek Trier Ms. 24, fol. 82. ©Stadtbibliothek/Stadtarchiv Trier; Photo: Anja Runkel; Ru -Nr. 072 17. 12.6 Jewish Priests Pay Judas to Betray Jesus. Precious Gospels of Bernward of Hildesheim. Hildesheim, c. 1015. Dommuseum Hildesheim, DS 18, fol. 118. 12.7 The prophet Hosea. South nave window, Augsburg Cathedral, after 1138. Photo: SLUB Dresden/Deutsche Fotothek. 12.8 Empress Helena compels Judas to reveal the site of the True Cross. Judas’s reluctance shows in his gesture (he pulls his beard in rage, fear, or consternation), but not in his features. Detail, Stavelot Triptych. Belgium, c.1156–1158. The Morgan Library & Museum. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1910; Bequest of J.P. Morgan (1867–1943), AZ001. Photo: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. 12.9 The Crucifixion. The sponge-bearer who torments Christ is drawn in stark profile, with somewhat gross features, a brutish expression, curved nose, and a pointed, scraggly beard. Armilla of Andrei Bogolyubsky, Rhine-Meuse region, c. 1170. Source: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg, inv. KG1239. Photo: Sebastian Tolle. 12.10 The Nailing of Christ to the Cross. The Jew in the centre of the group on the left is drawn in stark profile, with a beak-like nose and a pointed beard. Portable Altar; The Crucifixion, c. 1171–1180. From North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany. Copper, enamel, gilt. OA8096. Photo: Jean-Gilles Berizzi. Musée du Louvre. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NYC.

168 184 186 187 188

190 191 192

193

194

195

Figures  xi 12.11 The fool from Psalm 52 (Vulgate), rendered as a full-fledged anti-Jewish caricature. Psalter and Hours of Bonne of Luxembourg, Duchess of Normandy, before 1349. From Paris, France. Tempera, grisaille, ink, and gold leaf on vellum. The Cloisters Collection, 1969 (69.86). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NYC. 197 12.12 Caricature teaches the French public how to “see” King Louis-Philippe. Charles Philipon, “Les Poires,” redrawn by Honoré Daumier after Philipon’s original sketch for publication in La Caricature, Paris, November 24, 1831. Wikipedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Caricature_Charles_Philipon_pear.jpg199 13.1 Illustration by Karl Paumgartten, around 1923 (Graz: Heimatverlag). Collection of Isabel Enzenbach, Berlin. 205 13.2 Kölner Hof series and representation of the hotel expansion from 1902 to 1912. Collection of Wolfgang Haney, Berlin. 207 13.3 “Cattle-trading and money-changing Jew,” postcard from the Kölner Hof hotel with attached advertising label, A. Baasch publishing company, Plauen i.V., 1 January 1902. Collection of Wolfgang Haney, Berlin. 209 13.4 “New Jerusalem and Franconian Jordan,” Kölner Hof postcard, postmarked 27 August 1898. Collection of Wolfgang Haney, Berlin. 210 13.5 “New Jerusalem and Franconian Jordan,” Kölner Hof postcard, postmarked 6 June 1899. Collection of Wolfgang Haney, Berlin. 210 13.6 “Free from the Jew,” sticker, around 1920. Collection of Wolfgang Haney, Berlin. 211 13.7 “Free from the Jew,” sticker, around 1920. Collection of 212 Wolfgang Haney, Berlin. 13.8 “Rebekka in her bath,” postcard, around 1900. Collection of Wolfgang Haney, Berlin. 213 13.9 “Nordseebad Norderney is free of Jews,” antisemitic letter seal, 1933. Collection of Wolfgang Haney, Berlin. 214 13.10 “If you buy from Jews, you steal national wealth!” National Socialist sticker. Collection of Wolfgang Haney, Berlin. 215 13.11 “If you go to the Jews, you are a traitor—Watch out, slaves of the Jew!” National Socialist sticker. Collection of 215 Wolfgang Haney, Berlin. 13.12 “If you buy from Jews, you are a traitor.” National Socialist sticker. Collection of Wolfgang Haney, Berlin. 216 13.13 “The Nazis are our misfortune,” a sticker from the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith, 1930, The Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust & Genocide, London. 216

xii Figures 13.14 Antisemitic graffiti, Berlin, June 1937. Stiftung Neue Synagoge Berlin—Centrum Judaicum, Archiv (CJA), 7.103, 4. 217 13.15 “Multiculturalism . . . No thanks!” Sticker from the “Freundeskreises Freiheit für Deutschland,” around 1993. Collection of Antifaschistisches Pressearchiv und Bildungszentrum Berlin e.V. (apabiz). 218 13.16 “Asylum: . . . stinks to the heavens.” Sticker from the “Freundeskreises Freiheit für Deutschland,” around 1993. Collection of Antifaschistisches Pressearchiv und Bildungszentrum Berlin e.V. (apabiz). 218 13.17 “Bogus asylum seekers: Out! No way,” sticker from the Nationale Alternative, around 1990. Collection of Antifaschistisches Pressearchiv und Bildungszentrum Berlin e.V. (apabiz). 219 13.18 Photograph of a graffito, Berlin around 2011. Collection of Irmela Mensah-Schramm, Berlin. 220 13.19 “Guilt-cult Holocaust,” sticker from the right-wing extremist organisation Nationaler Widerstand Berlin, around 2011. Collection of Irmela Mensah-Schramm, Berlin. 221 20.1 Painting by Karol (Charles) de Prevot in Sandomierz Cathedral, which presents putting a child into a spiked barrel. The scene of the Jew, luring the child, is depicted in the lower right corner of the painting. Source: Wiki Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Sandomierz_katedra_-_mord_rytualny.jpg330

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation for funding the meeting in Stockholm that provided the initial impetus to put this volume together and the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities for providing the venue. Special thanks for invaluable help in organising the event go to Helene Carson and Staffan Eriand Isa. We would also like to thank the Swedish Research Council whose generous funding from 2017 enabled us to complete our work with this book. Our colleagues and institutions at the University of Gothenburg and Uppsala University have been supportive in numerous ways. Much of the work leading up to publication was undertaken during research fellowships at Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung—TU Berlin, Germany (Cordelia), and the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions—University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia (Jonathan). Many thanks to both of these centres for their support, camaraderie, and generosity. We would also like to express our thanks to Dinah Hamm, University of Greifswald, who worked tirelessly on producing the book’s indexes. It has been a pleasure to have the opportunity to work on this book together with twenty-five other contributors from a dozen countries around the world. We have particularly appreciated our colleagues’ seemingly boundless patience and enthusiasm and are sincerely grateful for all their hard work. It is a delight to be able to present their scholarly and innovative research on the following pages.

Introduction

1 Volcanic Archives Towards a Direct Comparison of Pre-Modern and Modern Forms of Antisemitism Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß Auf einem Vulkan läßt sich leben, besagt Eine Inschrift im zerstörten Pompeji. (Günter Kunert, “Ich bringe eine Botschaft,” 1962)1

Continuities and Discontinuities What causes magma, always present under the Earth’s crust, to break through the surface at a specific moment in time, either in a slow, persistent flow or in an explosive, violent volcanic eruption? And how and to what extent are modern outbreaks of antisemitism informed by older fragments of knowledge about Jews as the Other? Over the past decades, several scholars have made attempts to conceptualise antisemitism as a phenomenon of longue durée and to write its history as a history of continuity. Considering the evidence of anti-Jewish violence (verbal and physical) occurring repeatedly over the centuries, this approach has obvious advantages. Walter Laqueur and Robert Wistrich’s accounts of the history of antisemitism can be considered two such examples. They choose a broad approach and take texts, legislation, images, and actual violence as evidence of antisemitic attitudes, and by describing those, the underlying manners of belief and thought are implicitly described as well.2 While these broad approaches serve to see the continuities in “the longest hatred,” they leave several epistemological problems unsolved, namely, the relation between antisemitic ideologies and latent knowledge about “the Jews” on the one hand, and tangible outbreaks of violence on the other. The same applies to those approaches that conceptualise medieval antiJudaism as fundamentally different from modern antisemitism, with the argument that the religious aspects of Jew-hatred disappeared with the Emancipation and were largely replaced by racist ones. This model of explanation, mostly employed by scholars of modern history, has a fundamental weakness: it conceptualises pre-modern societies as largely monolithic blocks, with one central ideology, namely, the difference between Christians and non-Christians, in which anti-Judaism appears to be the “natural thing to do,” at least from a Christian perspective. Once established, the religious

4  Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß difference serves as a matrix for modern antisemitism, which, although functioning differently, already has its victims identified. While this concept radically denies a continuity in the essence and nature of antisemitism, it relies on the continuity of victimhood. Yet a different approach, widely celebrated as a fresh start in the debate about continuities and discontinuities, was David Nirenberg’s conceptualisation of anti-Judaism as a figure of thought that re-occurs in various societies over centuries, always adopting the specific needs and circumstances of these societies, but always keeping a relatively unchanged nucleus: Jewhatred. His book is an example of the reconstruction of an archive of historical knowledge about “Jews.” Many articles here relate in some way or another to Nirenberg’s analysis of anti-Jewish ideas as a latent, underlying feature of many Western societies, even though they do not explicitly analyse ideas themselves. Instead, the historical comparison aims mostly at a comparison of concrete phenomena and manifestations of antisemitic ideas— the volcanic outbreaks of the latent existing magma, sometimes in the form of violence, sometimes as texts or images producing, merging, or translating stereotypes. The central idea of this volume is the existence of antisemitic ideas and stereotypes as latent components of collective knowledge, existing permanently but leading to specific outbreaks in specific historical circumstances. The interconnection between this latent knowledge and the specific outbreaks are analysed from the historical perspective of continuity or discontinuity. The latent knowledge is, in accordance with recent concepts of memory studies, called “archive,” as a more or less systematic collection of different kinds of sources, collected in different historical phases, and stored in a common room of collective ideas and ideologemes. In the cases of specific outbreaks, people draw from this stack of archival knowledge, update the information contained there, and transform or adapt it to their particular needs. The concept of “archive” provides a specific image for collective memory, knowledge, and the subconscious: a room full of files ordered according to their provenience rather than their topic and content, covering long historical periods, and structuring historical knowledge according to strict and unchangeable principles and rules developed for all archives. The image of the archival storage room also allows for the idea of gaps in collective knowledge, caused by earlier losses of archival holdings through external factors such as fires or wars, or by the structure of the holdings themselves, which necessarily omit certain large areas of source production and still are considered as the most complete foundations of historical knowledge we have access to. In Foucault’s terminology, “archive is first the law that determines what can be said.”3 The limits of the sayable is, however, not only a theoretical concept that determines the political, ideological, and discursive framework within which utterings about, for example, Jews are possible, and legally, culturally, and socially accepted. Pushing forward these boundaries of what can be said can also, as is often argued with reference

Volcanic Archives  5 to the emergence of violence against minorities and the general role of racist propaganda for this, open spaces for actual attacks. The archives are not only a virtual concept, but they influence first the definitions of victims and perpetrators, and then who actually can become a victim or perpetrator. Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and, inspired by these, Aleida Assmann have shifted the notion of archive from a place where knowledge is stored to one where it is produced.4 As long as the content of the archive is not canonised as an integral part of cultural knowledge and memory and as such constantly remembered and staged, it becomes a passive knowledge, half-way between remembering and forgetting. Applied to the “archive” of antisemitism, this means that the historical knowledge we draw from in the moments of outbreaks of antisemitism is structured specifically and mirrors its own evolution.5 Understanding the principles and structure of the archive means understanding the structure of the contemporary evidence of outbreaks of antisemitism. The direct comparison in this volume of specific phenomena from across the centuries is intended to shed light on the archives and to uncover any older, underlying arguments and strategies “justifying” the eruptions of violence. The present book aims at presenting yet another approach to the question of historical continuities and discontinuities. Its most tangible angle is the chronological one: the juxtaposition of articles dealing with the same phenomenon—one in the pre-modern, one in the modern period—and comparisons between them. How do the circumstances of interreligious violence differ in pre-Reformation Europe, the modern Muslim world, and the modern Western world? Besides the diachronic comparison, most articles struggle with the significance of religion for the formation of anti-Jewish stereotypes. Not all anti-Jewish phenomena before the Emancipation were religious in character, and many of them in the modern era contain religious aspects. The direct dialogue of small-scale studies bridging the chronological gap brings out these nuances: anti-Zionist texts appropriating medieval ritual murder accusations; modern-day pogroms triggered by contemporary events but fuelled by medieval prejudices; and contemporary stickers drawing upon longinherited knowledge about what a “Jew” looks like. These interconnections, however, differ from the often assumed straightforward continuities between medieval and modern anti-Jewish hatred. Wherever these are used in contemporary scholarship in order to explain the emergence of modern stereotypes, usually misconceptions about medieval relations are the basis. For example, a common perception of modern studies of antisemitism is that the connection between Jews and money is based on medieval Jewish economic activities and their exclusion from the Christian guilds and professions. Recent studies by medieval scholars such as Giacomo Todeschini have countered this perception, showing it to be overly simplified: while it is true that Jews were active in money-lending, these activities were not nearly as exclusive as suggested. Jews owned property, were active in all kinds of

6  Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß handicrafts and trades, as merchants and artists, and in all other aspects of everyday life. At the same time, the majority of Jews were—just like the majority of Christians—poor, and could hardly pose an economic threat to their neighbours; the often-heard, “go-to” explanation of anti-Jewish violence as deriving (solely) from economic competition does not hold true. Additionally, the Christian campaign against usury was for a long time an internal Christian issue, and its conflation with anti-Jewish resentment is a relatively late projection of this issue onto the Other. This example shows that the antisemitic archive is both resentful and forgetful. It sustains a basic connection between Jews and money but forgets the historical circumstances in which this connection emerged. The historical root of modern Europe is a Christianitas striving to become universal. It was profoundly Catholic, expansionistic, shaped by constant struggles between the Christian majority in the European centre and non-Christian minorities at the peripheries: an obsession with defining and affirming boundaries. Jews became a figure for the Other living amongst Christian Europeans, and this basic idea of Othering has survived, even though the religious nature of the difference is largely forgotten or even neglected. A question largely undebated in the present volume is whether antisemitism is a form of group-based hostility that is essentially different from other forms such as racism, misogyny, or antiziganism. The neglect of this question lies in the concept of the book: by focusing on antisemitism, it is easy to identify outbreaks of violence across the centuries. But is there any relationship between anti-Jewish hatred and hatred against other, religiously or otherwise, “othered” groups? Why do non-Jews so often through the centuries turn against Jews and pick them as scapegoats? These questions cannot be answered without taking the context of other forms of oppression, violence, and hatred into account, which is not the focus of this collection. The historical context of antisemitic incidents often contains similar outbreaks of violence and hostility towards other groups, such as the poor, heretics and non-Catholics, homosexuals, Muslims, Tatars, lepers, beggars, the disabled, and others who also fell victim to persecution wrapped in the garb of Christianity. The context thus provides a necessary relativisation of the seemingly inevitable focus on Jews as victims and scapegoats. The question is rather why Jews repeatedly became victims of violence in so many different historical circumstances, when these circumstances initially also contained the possibility for a different development.

Religion and Multiple Modernities The most central difference between medieval anti-Judaism and modern antisemitism is the significance of religion for each of them. This is related to the question of what modernity ultimately is: the emergence of capitalism, the industrial age, the Enlightenment—or is modernity ultimately about secularisation and a general loss of significance for religious models

Volcanic Archives  7 of explanation and ethics? These questions linger also in the conceptions of medieval versus modern antisemitism, and they have previously been discussed regarding the existence or non-existence of medieval racism.6 Most scholars of modern history tend to deny or at least downplay the role of religion for modern societies, and point instead towards the emergence of racist conceptions of human difference in the age of science. Medievalists, on the other hand, have been eager to re-evaluate the “modernity” of the Middle Ages, establishing various points of rupture in the monolithic conception of the period as the opposite of all things potentially denoting modernity. Examples for this are the detection of the “Renaissance” of the twelfth century, of medieval atheism, heresies, radical anticlericalism, and so on—all these phenomena testify to the multifacetedness of religious beliefs and expressions even before the Enlightenment. For the analysis of religious anti-Judaism, this means that Christian hostility towards Jews was possible and obvious, but not inevitable. Medieval Jew-hatred could be and often was religious, but not all people were religious in the same way and not all people necessarily hated Jews for the same things and in the same way. Religion was central and omnipresent as the ideological matrix for human interaction, but it was not monolithic.7 Whereas at the beginning of the Middle Ages, Jews’ “right to exist” was founded on their theological role of servitude (servitus judaeorum perpetua), this servitude came to be linked to the royal and imperial treasuries of Europe, and Jews’ right to exist “acquired the quality of a secular jurisdiction.”8 And Jews were not the only religious Other who occupied the Christian mind and societies; alongside Jews, pagans on the peripheries, Muslims in the Holy Land, and Orthodox Christians in the East formed a common category of threats to the universality of Christianity. The “hermeneutical Jew” was a prominent figure in medieval Christian thought, but he was not in all cases a Jew, and medieval sources often mix up terms like Jew, Saracen, and pagan.9 With the Reformation, Protestants used the term “Jew” against and to signify their Catholic opponents—and vice versa. Consequently, medievalists have been trying to explain anti-Judaism not solely as a result of the religious contradiction between dominant Christianity and diaspora Judaism, but as the complex and heterogeneous result of specific social, economic, personal, and religious circumstances. Scholarship that attempts to integrate religious aspects into the analysis of modern forms of antisemitism is somewhat less common.10 Rather, scholars of modern history seem to define secularisation as the primary sign of modernity, and do not accept the survival of religious patterns of thought in modern, secular societies. But does this really hold true? The major shift from pre-modern to modern Jew-hatred comes to be defined as nothing more than the shift from a primarily religious resentment to a racist resentment, due to the change in Jews’ newly granted civil rights and status and the consequent loss of significance of the religious factor for the definition of the Other. But this is overly simplified. Not all forms of pre-modern

8  Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß anti-Judaism were religiously motivated, and in the modern racist antisemitism that emerged around and after the Emancipation, religion continued to play a major role. Jan Weyand has, for example, pointed out the integration of Christianity into the conception of Germanness which became dominant in antisemitic circles: to be German meant to be Christian.11 To be a Jew in Germany meant to be German only on paper, not for real. This mixture of religious, political, and ethnic aspects can also be seen in medieval antiJewish phenomena. The attempts to assign Jews a particular physiognomy in Christian art, as described by Sara Lipton in this volume, are one example of this. The fact that not only Jewish locals and travellers, but also converts were repeatedly accused and killed for spreading the plague in the years 1348–50 is another sign that the initially religious difference was seen as so essential and absolute that it could not simply be washed away with the water of baptism—long before the Spanish inquisition focused its attention on conversos and doubted their religious status, which is often considered the first emergence of racist aspects in anti-Judaism. Applied to the initial question of latency vs. outbreaks of antisemitism, we must ask to which extent pre-modern knowledge informs modern antisemitic phenomena. In most modern secular societies, the question of who killed Jesus Christ seems of little significance, and many antisemitic utterings come from people who would probably not define themselves primarily by faith or as Christians. However, this does not mean that traces of religiously informed resentment are not contained in modern antisemitism. When protesters against the Israeli military intervention in Gaza screamed “Kindermörder Israel,” does this accusation not contain traces of a much older figure of thought? That Jews killed Christ has been one of the most fundamental and deadly allegations. Originally deriving from early Christian readings of the Gospel, the concept of deicide Jews flourished during the Middle Ages resulting in a broad and general idea that Jews like to kill innocent people, predominantly children, and the idea that Jews are child murderers has remained a constant in anti-Jewish propaganda. Even if the assignment of the role of Christian innocent victim has lost its significance in the political debate, the role of Jewish villain remains in place, and the charge of child murderers resonates in the popular imagination. The delicate and complicated line between anti-Zionism, antisemitism, and legitimate criticism of the State of Israel, its politics of occupation, and its use of overwhelming military force can be defined solely in political terms, but it can also be re-formulated with the knowledge of how fatal the accusation of deicide has been for all Jews through the centuries. Which role does the stereotype of Christ killers and child murderers play in a political context of war, occupation, and general political instability in the Middle East? Does the religious imagery influence criticism of the politics of the State of Israel? These questions are not only relevant for the analysis of modern antisemitism; they also point towards a more nuanced understanding of the role of religion in modern secular societies in general. Obviously, a number

Volcanic Archives  9 of epistemic ruptures occurred between the years 1000 and 2000. But the prevalence and continuities in antisemitic stereotypes, the (often cynical) actualisation of the archive of religious knowledge for secular-political purposes, suggests that these ruptures also allowed for the conservation of certain religious figures of thought that remained significant. The basic methodological idea of this book, a comparison between premodern and modern forms of antisemitism, does not take into account the significant and obvious points of rupture that defined Jewish-Christian relations in the post-Emancipation period until today: the Shoah, the foundation of the State of Israel, and the Six-Day War in 1967. All of these events had and continue to have considerable impact on the antisemitic archive and its outbreaks, but we decided to leave it to the contributors to define whether these events seemed relevant for their specific topic, rather than including events before and after 1945/48 and 1967 in all areas of comparison. Consequently, in some areas of comparison, the line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism plays no role at all, while in others that stretch their chronological range until the present, both Holocaust denial and an updating of antisemitic stereotypes within the conflict in the Middle East are debated. Thus, the significance of the State of Israel for the development of antisemitic stereotypes in the Western and the Arab world is touched upon, but not an explicit part of the concept of this book. This is not to downplay the importance of contemporary political issues for the development of antisemitic stereotypes—but from the long-term perspective of medieval studies, the dialogue bridging the centuries seemed an important first step, while differentiations in various forms of modern antisemitism might be a second one. Another question that this volume deliberately omits is the significance of the schism of the Western Church—the Reformation—and its influence on antisemitic imagery and outbreaks. In the wake of the five-hundredth anniversary of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, the Protestant Church—in Germany, at least—has made efforts to portray its founder as no longer a straightforward hero, but also to point out his antisemitism. This aspect of Luther’s thought is usually described as a “medieval” feature, deriving from his study of older Bible commentaries, such as the one by Nicholas of Lyra, as well as of more contemporary lay didactical works and, not least, plain anti-Jewish propaganda, such as the works of Anthonius Margaritha. Antisemitism was a strong feature of the early Reformation and thus remained relevant and significant for the development of Protestant theology and pastoral practice, consequently bridging the gap between medieval and modern.12

Christian Europe: Collective Identities and Religious Violence The Europe that became the hotbed first for anti-Judaism, and subsequently for racist antisemitism, was primarily a Christian Europe. It was a Christian majority that picked out a non-Christian minority as its victim and as

10  Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß its matrix for self-understanding and self-identification. It was a Christian Europe in crisis: the Crusades and the loss of the Holy Land, the popular success of heretical movements, the constant struggles between papacy and emperor, and the delegitimisation that the Church experienced through the Papal Schism and conciliarism. Just as a crisis of self-understanding among the populations of the emerging nation states, particularly Germany, called for a collective identity formulated through the demarcation of a collective Other, the constant crisis of the supposedly universal Christianitas called for various formulations of a collective Other. In pre-modern as in modern societies, Jews were not the only groups that had to serve this purpose, but the religious difference was and remained central. Today, antisemitism comes both from the Christian (largely “non-­ practising”) majority and from Muslim (or rather, Islamist) minorities, who are responsible for the largest-scale attacks on Jewish institutions, such as during the terror attacks in Brussels, Copenhagen, Paris, Toulouse, and elsewhere. At the same time, members of the Christian majority still engage in various forms of religious and political antisemitism. And even today, it is a Europe in crisis which produces anti-Jewish hatred, even though antisemitism is hardly a uniquely European problem anymore. Indeed, recent reports have shown a rise in the number of antisemitic incidents in the US.13 While most of the case studies in this volume reveal very specific contexts as determining outbreaks of antisemitic violence, such as local networks, economic relations, particular interests of power, Christian Europe provides the universal background of the pre-modern and modern developments. The constant crisis of European Christian identity seems to be utterly relevant for the treatment of religious minorities—Jewish, Muslim, and other.14 Most of the contributions in this volume focus on Europe, with a few contrasting examples from the US, Japan, the Middle East, and Turkey. That these three latter areas experienced different, alternate modernities, in which Christianity played a minor and different role, alters the narratives and structures of antisemitism but it does not alter the significance of Christian Europe for the emergence and development of anti-Jewish resentment.15 It was here, predominantly in northern and central Europe, that the shift from religious to racist antisemitism occurred, radicalised, and intensified.

The Present Volume Ainsi l’antisémitisme est-il originellement un Manichéisme; il explique le train du monde par la lutte du principe du Bien contre le principe du Mal. Entre ces deux principes aucun ménagement n’est concevable: il faut que l’un d’eux triomphe et que l’autre soit anéanti. [. . .] Chevalier du Bien, l’antisémite est sacré, le Juif est, lui aussi, sacré comme les intouchables, comme les indigènes frappés d’un tabou. Ainsi la lutte est menée sur le plan religieux et la fin du combat ne peut être qu’une destruction sacrée. (Jean-Paul Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive [Paris: Morihien, 1946 (written October 1944)], 50–51, 54)16

Volcanic Archives  11 In Sartre’s much-cited essay, the most used quotation is that if the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would invent him: Si le juif n’existait pas, l’antisémite l’inventerait.17 A much less appreciated line of thought in the same essay is the religious nature of antisemitism. Written in 1944, Sartre did not have in mind medieval anti-Jewish hatred, fed by sermons and meditations on the suffering of Christ, but he was attempting to demonstrate the fundamental similarity of religious and antisemitic passion that ultimately leads to the convergence of the two. This definition of antisemitism as a religious, non-questionable, holy belief and passion profoundly points towards Jewhatred as a phenomenon that bridges both the medieval-modern divide and the absolute demarcation between medieval-religious and modern-secular. That it belongs to the less discussed aspects of Sartre’s work also points towards the fact that most scholars prefer to work within the limits of their period and area of profession than cross chronological and epistemological boundaries. We are no exceptions to this—most of the articles collected here restrict themselves to one period and area. Our questions were many when we started the work on this volume. Does the existence of hatred towards Jews in areas with no Jewish population in the Middle Ages and today have the same causes as in those areas with “real” Jews? Can the rise and popularity of antisemitism from the nineteenth century onwards be explained solely within a contemporary framework? Can theories and analytical models of modern racial prejudice be applied to the Middle Ages and vice versa? The different methodologies employed in the essays demonstrate the many, often conflicting, approaches historians, sociologists, art historians, and theologians use to investigate anti-Jewish stereotypes and phenomena as well as the different questions they are trying to answer. The many essays in this volume do not provide a single, overarching theory of the history of antisemitism, but they do all show a keen interest, either direct or implied, in what came before or what came after. They demonstrate the usefulness and necessity of studying incidents of anti-Jewish phenomena within a broader chronological and geographical framework. And indeed, despite the varying and heterogeneous approaches, recurrent themes do emerge from this collection: for example, the ever-surprising significance of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a text that has managed to export, initiate, and fuel antisemitism in areas that beforehand had not known Jews (such as Japan) or anti-Jewish conspiracy theories (such as the Arab world). Also, the conflation of different, sometimes conflicting, motives—such as updated or contorted religious knowledge, local economic interests and networks, and the existence of anti-Jewish texts—for the outbreak of anti-Jewish violence remains constant throughout the centuries and points towards a simple but too often ignored fact: antisemitism has never been “the natural thing to do,” the logical result of a straightforward course of events. It has always been a combination of different aspects and interests, and neither the religious difference nor the racist construction is inevitable within a given historical situation.

12  Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß We hope that the juxtaposition of these studies dealing with the same phenomena in different periods and geographical areas will add to the understanding of the meta-historical nature of antisemitism. Religion re-appears as a focal point of comparison, as well as passion, irrationality, hatred, and ignorance—none of these seems to be specific to either pre-modernity or modernity. Our original idea, a perfectly symmetrical line-up of one medieval and one modern study each on various antisemitic phenomena, proved difficult to put into practice and had to be supplemented and fleshed out with other approaches. For topics such as blood libel, visual stereotypes, antisemitism without Jews, and usury, the “pairing” of pre-modern and modern case studies was beneficial. For questions such as the significance of the theology of land, a long-term perspective within each contribution and a dialogue between scholars of Christian and of Jewish theology seemed more appropriate. Geographical aspects, as well as broad topics such as Christian and Muslim antisemitism, could only be touched upon and elude a one-toone comparison over the centuries. Thus, the detection of the archives of antisemitism lies in some sections within the direct comparison, in others within parallel developments, and for the entire collection, in the attempt to approach the phenomenon “antisemitism” from as many angles as possible. The first section, titled “Longest Hatred versus Invented Tradition,” mirrors the differing approaches to the question of continuities and discontinuities, religion and secularisation. Steven Englund argues for the significance of religious aspects in the study of modern antisemitism, while Ulrich Wyrwa advocates a strict divide between religious and racist hatred. The discussion is rounded off by Brian Klug, who opens an analogy between antisemitism and Islamophobia and their significance for European nation-states. Antisemitism in areas where there is no day-to-day contact between Jews and non-Jews raises the question of how one is to understand Jewish absence with regard to perceptions of and fantasies about Jews. In Christian lands, “the Jew” was hermeneutically and doctrinally constructed—a figment of the individual’s imagination, conditioned and bounded by Christian tradition and the auctor-defined past. But how is the image of the absent Jew constructed in non-Christian areas? What authorities condition and bound the individual’s imagination here? The second section “Antisemitism without Jews” draws together studies of medieval (Christian) Norway and modern (non-Christian) Japan, both areas initially without a resident Jewish population. Both Yvonne Friedman and Rotem Kowner find anti-Jewish stereotypes to be much more than literary imports. Although Christian Europe is of relevance to nearly all of the contributions in the volume, the section titled “Christianity and Antisemitism” collects articles dealing more specifically with the significance of religion for medieval and modern antisemitism respectively. Robert Chazan argues that northern Europe became the breeding ground for the radicalisation and racialisation of antisemitism, and Grzegorz Krzywiec writes about Catholic antisemitism in Poland in the decades before the First World War. Jonathan

Volcanic Archives  13 Adams analyses medieval continuities in contemporary popular culture with the example of Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ. All three of them find different aspects of Christian religion, imagery, and culture to be crucial for the development of antisemitism, and all three of them find these aspects to be flexible enough to be adopted and understood in both premodern and modern circumstances. With two contributions in the section “Islam and Antisemitism,” Tahir Abbas, Behruz Davletov, and Esther Webman provide evidence for the relevance of European antisemitism even in the Muslim world. Abbas and Davletov contrast the historical situation of Jews in the Ottoman Empire with contemporary stereotypes in Turkey, and Webman explores the significance of the Arab-Israeli conflict for the actualisation and radicalisation of stereotypes in the Arab world. While historically, Jews held a relatively autonomous position within Muslim societies, which was grounded in the Qur’an and which allowed their communities to flourish, the situation changed entirely with the foundation of the State of Israel. Nowadays, a mixture of medieval Christian and modern racist stereotypes merge in the Arab world. The section “Bodies, Gender, and Antisemitism” deals with the representations of “Jewish” bodies in pre-modern and modern popular art. The depiction of Jews as corporally different began in medieval church art where it was necessary to depict the Jews of the New Testament as the embodiment of evil. An anti-Jewish visual code was developed that comprised various ugly and monstrous features to help the viewer recognise “the Jew.” Many of these markers of Jewishness continue to be used today in entirely profane contexts. Sara Lipton and Isabel Enzenbach explore the presence of visual stereotypes in public space in a relatively direct comparison of physical features. Victor Seidler writes more broadly about the (gendered) materiality of Jewish bodies and the ascription of carnality. Blood libel is probably, next to visual stereotypes, the most striking example of continuities and updated stereotypes. The twelfth-century invention that Jews ritually murdered children to extract their blood for religious purposes has survived through the centuries. Initially only found in Christian areas, this antisemitic canard spread to Arab and Muslim nations and can also be found used in secular discourses. In the section “Blood Libel and Ritual Murder Allegations,” Miriamne Ara Krummel and Miri Rubin analyse from different angles the original blood libel accusation from Norwich in 1144, while Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß develop a typology of medieval blood libel accusations in order to discuss whether a case from modern Sweden can be defined as blood libel at all. For centuries, pogroms constituted the most destructive atrocities committed against Jews to take place in Europe. In the Middle Ages, there are notable examples from Castile, Catalonia, France, and the German lands. With the Khmelnytsky Pogroms in Ukraine (1648–57), these riots reached genocidal proportions; the phenomenon was repeated throughout the nineteenth century in Tsarist Russia. During the Second World War,

14  Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß local populations in occupied Central and Eastern Europe, encouraged by German death squads, killed their Jewish neighbours in murderous riots— one of the ways that non-Germans became complicit and partook in the destruction of Europe’s Jews. These pogroms continued without the Nazis’ encouragement even after the war ended. The section “Neighbours” collects three micro studies of anti-Jewish pogroms which turned neighbours into enemies and created perpetrators and victims. In medieval Prague (Milan Žonca) and Seville (Maya Soifer Irish) as well as in post-war Kielce (Joanna Tokarska-Bakir), specific local interests and animosities led to violent outbreaks. While the results of the violence were similar for the Jewish victims, the justification provided by the Christian perpetrators differed widely. Accusations against Jews of usury and profiteering have a long history beginning with the laws of the twelfth century that prohibited Christians from loaning money at interest. In the section “Economy and Finance,” Giacomo Todeschini and Richard E. Frankel compare medieval and modern evidence of the stereotype of the Jewish usurer, the latter also building a bridge between Old Europe and the New World, which shows remarkable stability in the use of the stereotype despite the differences in their medieval history. The section “Land and Home” explores the significance of the land of Israel for the development of anti-Jewish hatred. Although there have been huge advances in the Catholic and Protestant churches in recent years on Christian teaching on Judaism, attitudes towards the Land and the State of Israel are still difficult. The Jewish homeland continues to be a source of antagonism. Jesper Svartvik draws a long historical line from late antiquity to the modern era in his description of Christian supersessionism and the centrality of the land for Jewish and Christian theology alike. Ruth Langer explores the theological foundations of Zionism and the significance of the Land of Israel for Jews, while Tuvia Singer explores the topics of homelessness and the Wandering Jew as anti-Jewish stereotypes in nineteenthcentury Germany. In the final section, “Medieval Roots and Anti-Judaism,” Victor Seidler reflects on some of the key themes that run through the volume: the role of authority, memories of violence, Christian Europe, and antisemitism among Muslim Europeans. Carlo Ginzburg comments critically upon the theoretical and empirical framework of this volume as well as on the most recent work arguing for a continuity of anti-Jewish thought, David Nirenberg’s book from 2013. Ginzburg points out the ambivalence in Christian-Jewish relations deriving from the common scriptural tradition. In the final essay in the volume, David Nirenberg counters the arguments raised by Ginzburg and concludes with an assessment of the usefulness of the central point of the book at hand: the importance of the past for the present (and vice versa) when examining and trying to understand antisemitism.

Volcanic Archives  15

Notes 1. “It is possible to live on a volcano, says / An inscription in destroyed Pompeii.” 2. Walter Laqueur, Changing Face of Antisemitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Robert S. Wistrich, Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991). 3. Michel Foucault, L’archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 170: “L’archive, c’est d’abord la loi de ce qui peut être dit.” 4. Aleida Assmann, “Canon and Archive,” in Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nünning, and Sara B. Young (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 97–107. 5. From the field of social sciences, a study from 2006 works with a similar idea of stored knowledge and contemporary stereotypes but does not describe the development of the stereotypes themselves: Susan Gniechwitz, Antisemitismus im Lichte der modernen Vorurteilsforschung: Kognitive Grundlagen latenter Vorurteile gegenüber Juden in Deutschland (Berlin: WVB, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2006). 6. See, for example, Geraldine Heng, “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. I: Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages,” Literature Compass 8, no. 5 (2011): 258–74. 7. See, for example, Dorothea Weltecke, “Der Narr spricht: Es ist kein Gott”: Atheismus, Unglauben und Glaubenszweifel vom 12. Jahrhundert bis zur Neuzeit, Campus historische Studien, no. 50 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2010). 8. Thomas Kaufmann, Luther’s Jews: A Journey into Anti-Semitism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 12. 9. Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 2–4. 10. Most recently, the Evangelische Akademie in Berlin has made an attempt to point out the significant role of antisemitism for Protestant theology. A complete documentation of the conference “Antisemitismus als politische Theologie” is printed in EPD Dokumentation 17 (April 2017). As an example of the lack of integration of religion in modern theories of antisemitism, see Samuel Salzborn, Antisemitismus als negative Leitidee der Moderne: Sozialwissenschaftliche Theorien im Vergleich (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2010). 11. Jan Weyand, Historische Wissenssoziologie des modernen Antisemitismus: Genese und Typologie einer Wissensformation am Beispiel des deutschsprachigen Diskurses (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2016), 286–95. 12. See, for example, the conference documentation Martin Luther und die Juden: Luthers Judenschriften und ihre Rezeption—ein Projekt zum Reformationsjubiläum (Frankfurt am Main: Gemeinschaftswerk der Evangelischen Publizistik, 2016). 13. See, for example, the Anti-Defamation League’s “2015 Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents,” available online at www.adl.org/news/press-releases/adl-audit-antisemitic-assaults-rise-dramatically-across-the-country-in-2015 (accessed 23 November 2017). See also Mark Openheimer, “Is Anti-Semitism Truly on the Rise in the U.S.? It’s Not So Clear,” The Washington Post, 17 February 2017, available online at www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/ wp/2017/02/17/is-anti-semitism-on-the-rise-does-anyone-care (accessed 23 November 2017). 14. For a similar argument about the similarities between “Old” and “New” Europe, see Brian Klug’s contribution. 15. See also Victor Seidler’s reflections on Christianity and violence in this volume.

16  Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß 16. “Thus antisemitism is originally a form of Manichaeism; it explains the course of the world by the struggle of the principle of Good against the principle of Evil. Between these two principles no reconciliation is conceivable: one of them must triumph and the other be demolished [. . .] The knight of Good, the antisemite is holy, so also the Jew, holy like the untouchables, like the natives afflicted by a taboo. Thus the struggle is raised to a religious level, and the end of the combat can be nothing but a holy destruction.” 17. Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive, 13.

Part I

Longest Hatred versus Invented Tradition

2 The Medieval (and Ancient) Roots of Antisemitism Steven Englund

Scholars do not hesitate to debate the question of the medieval origins of the modern state or of the nation. Books pour out on these topics, authored by social scientists as well as historians, pressing the reader to keep well in mind the weighty mantle of age worn by nations and states—not least evidenced by the strong and affective, if secular, “religiosity” that nation-states often generate.1 So why do many recent scholars of modern antisemitism dispute the relevance of a “deep” past? A strictly sociological answer to that question would point to the structure and functioning of the present-day academic profession: getting a job and getting ahead in the contemporary university require constantly renewed specialisation and productivity. They, in their turn, suppose reflexive revisionism of previous viewpoints, regardless of whether said revisions are justified or interesting. Then, too, we need to consider that the human brain does not grow apace with the uncovering of new historical sources and the ongoing production of historiography. We long ago reached a point in antisemitism studies where the amount of material available was overwhelming. The number of books and articles written in this field by intelligent, often brilliant, minds—minds which have come up with complex, original, and controversial thoughts—is disconcerting. It is certainly far greater than in, say, Napoleonic studies where I previously toiled for a decade, or even in nationalism, where I worked for three decades before that. To be obliged to add one’s own mite to Funkenstein, Katz, Yerushalmi, or Nirenberg is intimidating (the more so if one is not Jewish). But the chief factor at play in the reticence to adduce deep historical causality for modern antisemitism is, I would say, the sticky matter of religion. It is complicated: religion’s multiform afterlife in unbelieving ages; the forms that le religieux may take or that individual religiosity may give rise to; the varieties of so-called secular religions.2 The most summary inquiry quickly shows that what the unsuspecting contemporist might have taken to be a massive block (orthodox defunct religion) is in fact a moving kaleidoscope of shifting forms. No cheerful readiness to concede personal religious tone-deafness gets one off the hook; just because the scholar herself has no

20  Steven Englund background or interest in religion, she cannot with impunity exclude or underplay it in her subject matter. Nota bene, I do not mean to say that formal topics like “Catholic antisemitism in the Vatican or in the Kaiserreich” is a taboo research topic—far from it. David Kertzer’s and Olaf Blaschke’s works are ready at hand to remind us of the legitimacy of such subjects.3 Rather, I mean that the desirability, still less the necessity, of worrying out the religious inflections and pondering their consequence in hardcore racial-cultural, anticlerical Jewhatred such as Eugen Dühring’s or Theodor Fritsch’s is not evident, still less congenial, to many scholars. It is easier to take Dühring and Fritsch at their word—i.e., that they are free of any religious motivation and are offering the world an entirely new form of Jew-hatred. It is easy to do this. All of us, myself included, tend to account for the recent upsurge of antisemitism in Western societies in terms of current geopolitics and immigration trends. It rarely occurs to us that explanations tailored solely in the habiliments of Israeli-Palestinian relations or the problematic presence of numerous Muslim immigrants in modern society pass over in silence the fact that diverse publics intuitively understand the millennial negative meaning attached to the word—the epithet—“Jew” in Christian society. (To the point that “Aryan,” a concept with which we are acquainted, is sufficiently defined as simply the absence of Jewish blood.) The position that modern antisemitism has no important—indeed, ­decisive—“back of the store” dimension reminds me of an interview I once conducted, as a young reporter for TIME Magazine, with B. F. Skinner. The task at hand was to elicit from him a clear explication of the new field of psychological behaviourism. “That’s simple,” Dr. Skinner replied (he often found things simple), “it makes no sense—it is quite literally nonsense—to speak of mind and the unconscious when we can neither see nor measure them. Psychology will only be scientific when it concerns itself with the visible, measurable, and duplicable—and that is behavior.” You see where I am heading: the impulse to reduce modern antisemitism to its racial-economic-socio-political-cultural precipitants and triggers is indisseverable from the impulse to lay out a new academic field for cultivation, different from, and unrelated to, the endless forests of anti-Judaism in theology, literature, philosophy, folklore, and you-name-it. It has the appeal to historians of offering a field permitting archival mastery on a micro-­ historical basis, studying exempla of anti-Jewish behaviour in given venues and moments—and keeping it there. It frees the practitioner from the need to juggle five or six balls at once—balls from the deep past of the instances at hand, including their social psychology or mentalité, elements of which may be—usually are—unconscious to the actors. And speaking of the actors, this approach permits the contemporary researcher the demarche of collapsing etic and emic points of view (anthropologists call etic the scholar’s view, and emic, the subject’s, or as historians say, “the contemporary’s,” view). For it is well known that the antisemites themselves indignantly rejected

Roots of Antisemitism  21 any suggestion that they sprang from a Jesse’s stem of eternal hatred of the Christ-killers.4 To take them at their word reassures the scholar he has “something new” at hand, but this does not relieve him of the need for dubiety as to the complexity of his subjects’ political motivations or the frailty and superficiality of their self-understanding. Let it be said, however: a great deal has been accomplished via the positivist archival approach. Brick upon brick, recent historiography, particularly that coming out of the Centre for the Study of Antisemitism (Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung) in Berlin, has constructed an impressive wall of scholarship which establishes for the 1870–1914 era the birth of a “new kind of hostility against the Jews,” enfleshed in social-political movements: antisemitism-as-a-counter-culture, located not only (familiarly) in Germany and Austria-Hungary, but nearly simultaneously in related movements in much of the rest of Europe (Bulgaria, Romania, Russia, etc.), including even the French Republic before Drumont. While we may not go so far as to claim that antisemitism is an intellectually worked-out ideology in the same way socialism, anarcho-syndicalism, political Catholicism or the myriad of irredentist-nationality movements in the Danubian monarchy are, thanks to the centre we do now see it as a discrete political movement.5 We may now claim for antisemitism something like the sorts of discrete and complex social embodiments that we have long associated with socialism, anarchosyndicalism, political Catholicism, or the myriad irredentist-nationality movements in the Danubian monarchy. It is a splendid accomplishment.6 So, what is the problem, you ask. Well, here is an example of one. Three of the most productive of recent scholars write as follows about the specific social contexts that gave rise to “exclusionary violence”—the term now used to refer to violence against Jews. “The analytical problem,” note Messrs Hoffmann, Bergmann, and Walser Smith, in the Introduction to a valuable volume of recent essays, “is to explain why antisemitic violence, and not something else, constituted a popular response to problems extraneous to Christian-Jewish relations.” The answer, they assert, cannot be the pre-existence of a long-term anti-Jewish discourse, for a carte blanche appeal to “the longest hatred” of antisemitism does not tell us why Christians, now in this context, now in another, appropriated a persecutory discourse directed against a minority rather than, say, a discourse about the abuses of rulers or about the inequalities of class . . . [A]n explanation that focuses on the “structure of belief” or a “cognitive model” tells us little about the specific uses for which historical agents employed, and thus changed, vocabularies of hatred.7 True, a generalised “social imaginary,” such as that which David Nirenberg has excavated for Western anti-Judaism,8 does not tell us anything about the onset of specific instances of hatred in a given situation—any more than a general theory of class conflict can account for the outbreak of revolution in

22  Steven Englund Mexico in 1910 or in Russia in 1917. This is not because the social imaginary or a general theory are irrelevant, but rather because the preconditions of events are not of the same explanatory order as an event’s precipitants; and they, in turn, are not its triggers. Cause in human history, as befitting human beings, is a complex matter and cannot be reduced to Skinnerian behavioural models, much as it would be simpler to account for if it could be.9 Unhappily for the already overburdened historian, mind—including the unconscious, both individual and collective—often plays as decisive, if subtler, a role in determining events as does immediate behaviour. Specifically, to return to the case of anti-Jewish riots, the usual concatenation of issues associated with violence—discursive deployments by antisemitic actors in specific movements pushing tailored agendas, provoking riots—does not, for all that, cover the task of explaining what is going on. Richard S. Levy, in the very volume in which the editorial trio’s remarks appear, draws a perturbing conclusion. What emerges from these collected essays, Levy notes, is “that the precise role of antisemitic ideology in the violence becomes problematical. Was it causal or a casual accompaniment?”10 “Casual accompaniment”? If it is merely that, then what is the more dispositive explanatory factor than immediate provocation, conflict, opportunity, etc.? Does “structure of belief” sneak in through the back door, affecting overt behaviour in profounder ways than the precipitants and triggers? No one is maintaining that an ancient social imaginary of anti-Judaism is alone the determinant of, say, the Neustettin riots of 1881, via some kind of longue durée black magic, but the most archival-prone, present-minded scholar cannot fail to be aware of influencing elements that are unbeknownst to the carriers and other actors he is studying. Scholars of modern antisemitism conclude that anti-Jewish violence is best limed as the expression of resentment and rage on the part of an aggrieved population which feels that its traditional and legitimate “moral economy” (to use E. P. Thompson’s concept)11 has been violated by the arrival or, more likely, by the promotion, of Jews in some evident social, economic, political way. In worst case scenarios, the moral economy is seen to have been violated by the guardians of the State itself, who are accused of being in cahoots with “the Jew,” of having been corrupted by him, of having been “Jewified” or “Judaised.” We may ask—we indeed must ask: just what is this disrupted “moral economy” that underlies anger against Jews for positions being opened up for them in, say, the universities or the civil administration, or for the beneficent socio-economic effects on Jews of their political emancipation? It turns out to be nothing new, nothing stated in the formal ideology of Antisemitismus. Rather, the committed violation is against something unspoken: viz., the “proper ordering” of Jews (i.e., behind Christians) in society. But that is a very old concept indeed. You will find the same situation reiterated by Maya Soifer Irish in her book on Jewish-Christian relations in medieval Old (northern) Castile.12 Here, in fascinating detail, one encounters the same

Roots of Antisemitism  23 arrangements of socio-economic precipitants and triggers, causing the same sorts of exclusionary violence due to disrupted moral economy, which the contributors to Exclusionary Violence are often concerned with—to wit, “those uppity Jews, who do they think they are? They’re ‘Jews,’ for Christ’s sake.” Time and again, we see purely economic triggers, social precipitants, and, decisively, religious preconditions and presuppositions whose presence preclude any easy solution to the apparent problems. Exclusionary violence against Jews in fact poses a serious problem for the modern historian because it’s so little rational—or modern. Tim Buchen’s and Daniel Unowsky’s analyses of the vast riots against the Jews in Habsburg Galicia, in the summer of 189813 examine the essential role of fantastic rumour (often religion-based) in triggering these events—events which stand in stark contrast to other well-known forms of modern violence— e.g., anti-Gastarbeiter uprisings, brutal political campaigns, State-inspired political justice, etc.—all of it more rational and less implicitly religious than the anti-Jewish violence. The role of rumour was to limit any sense of personal responsibility or guilt on the part of the rioters. Buchen, citing Donald Horowitz, argues that rumour mobilised young Polish or Ukrainian men for what was, in effect, a “pick up game” of basketball, rather than formal participation in a plot. That is, it was culturally-learned, something “you just knew.” The point being: the “hard” socio-economic reasons were in many ways pretexts to an underlying disposition against Jews because they were Jews. Buchen shows that in gathering members for this “pick up riot”—­occurring most readily on religious holidays or Sundays—one could not represent the project as profitable nor permit himself to think about or debate its morality. There was a sense that the opportunity had to be fleetingly seized and quickly executed, that it might well be dangerous and illegal, but it was morally “great” in some unspecified way, and therefore had nothing to do with vengeance or profit. The rioters, rather, were righting a profound moral imbalance, even if vaguely aware they were also plundering, harming, and violating. This was unethical but it served a higher purpose. In Galicia, the rioters were seized by an “irresistible” sense that the occasion was “God-given,” that it was royalty and church-legitimated, and finally, that it was “morally incumbent” on the rioters to act, for at bottom their violence against Jews was self-evidently justified, it had “nothing to do” with vengeance or profit, but with the righting of a profound moral and spiritual imbalance. In short, rather different from Social Democratic led strikes and worker action, or the violence of political campaigns, all of which, if they had irrational elements, were less historically and religiously deeply determined. Thus, when scholars like Hoffmann argue that the only role of “medieval [and a fortiori ancient] roots” was as tactical political name-calling, intended to shame and defame the rioters—i.e., they “invented a ­tradition”—it is hard to concur. There are certainly examples of such tactics to be adduced

24  Steven Englund in the nineteenth-century history of antisemitism, but at the end of the day the Budapest riots attendant on the Tiszaeszlár ritual murder cannot be adequately explained as the merely “political” instrumentalisation of the medieval blood libel. Accusations of Jewish ritual murder had never disappeared in Europe; they were anything but unknown to the masses, even to the non-practising and unbelieving among them. The same could be said for the accusation, “Christ-killer!” Luther’s anti-Jewish views were not reparaded in the way kilts were invented, or even the way that Czech and other vernaculars were canonised into formal languages. Protestant and Catholic Christianity were very much alive in the late nineteenth century, if not as well off as they had once been, and the various religious accusations against Jews were familiar to vast masses of people, even non-­practising ones. “Christ-killers!” whether sincerely or tactically utilised, was no retrieval for the belle époque. The Christian anti-Jewish tradition lived very actively in these hearts, even in those who no longer believed in Christianity. In this connection, see the eye-opening, when not hair-raising, study by the Polish anthropologist, Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, which shows the power of the anti-Jewish blood libel, even in post-Second World War Poland.14 If we do not see this, we fail to account for the Tiszaeszlár affair’s shocking power of “interruption” into normal politics, even normal antisemitic politics of that era. It is sadly the case that this huge and violent episode stood in a direct continuity with a very longue durée—a fact that the antisemitic agents tacitly counted on for the widespread popular reception of their “presentist” ideological claims and explanations.15 But the largest problem with overlooking the persistent power of the deep historical roots of antisemitism arises in the matter of fantastical or chimerical accusations and inflections which constantly suffuse nineteenth- and twentieth-century Antisemitismus are, indeed, its most definitive characteristic.16 I am speaking of the well-known phenomenon which see Jews figure not only as social and economic competitors or even racial-cultural Others, but as world-historical enemies—in ways, for example, speaking of the Nazis, that “neither liberalism nor communism, neither Roosevelt nor Stalin” could ever be. Consider the Third Reich Press Office’s declaration in early 1944 that “The Jewish question is the key to world history.”17 If this example is too Nazi-extreme, then let us go back a generation, to the antisemites of early Weimar and their overarching conclusion that defeat, revolution, and hyper-inflation were due to “the Jews,” the perpetrators of these catastrophes, as part of their apocalyptic conspiracy against all of Christian civilisation. Ponder this a moment: one of the smaller minorities on the planet is alleged to be responsible for developments of world-historical import: liberalism, capitalism, socialism, trade unions, banking, class, and, withal, international war. Consider the immensity of the claim that “the social question is the Jewish question.” The Polish and French populations, with their armies and governments, were immensely larger and geopolitically more important

Roots of Antisemitism  25 than the Jews, yet could they have been plausibly blamed for causing “the social question”? The well-hated Catholic Church, and even the Jesuits with their vast network of highly educated underminers, could not, either. What is presupposed by such a claim? Why was “the Jew,” if not always plausibly, then at least familiarly, in people’s eyes, charged with these unique and incendiary roles? Surely not because antisemitic ideology made even remotely satisfying “scientific” cases for such nonsense; on the contrary, the antisemites, as scholars agree, were, with increasing frequency, laughed out of court, as 1914 approached.18 Bref, there are background suppositions here that do not enter into play with any other minority. Why can only “the Jew” be familiarly seen as the origin of evil in the world, of being the devil’s creature? No amount of archival ferreting for the racial-economic-socialpolitical-cultural precipitants and triggers of “Thoroughly Modern Millie” antisemitism will provide an answer to this question. What is needed, rather, is to recall the importance of the unstated presuppositions and preconditions of the bimillennial anti-Judaism which laid up the stage, the foundation, on which the entire “circus” transpires. Only the deep religious past can explain this curiously non-ideological, non-“scientific” development in antisemitism which sees the “firming up of an imagination of Jews as a menace that demand[s] no proof from experience.”19 Consider the economic myth of the Jewish usurer, as powerful a modern AND medieval theme as there ever was. No economy can function without lending, but the role of money-lender was forbidden to Christians, so it fell (often, not always) to Jews to perform this critical task—a task not dissimilar, as Giacomo Todeschini notes, to the role which the Shabbos goy plays for Jews. But with a telling difference: the Shabbos goy is paid and appreciated, while the Jewish “usurer”—though materially far more important and socially far more ubiquitous—is unacknowledged and attacked. The borrower receives what he badly needs, but instead of being grateful, he reviles the provider. To refer, in this context, to the first century as the UrProblem of Christianity’s undeclared dependence on Judaism for its initial theological identity and self-presentation is not to stretch a point. As distasteful or disconcerting as it may sometimes feel to scholars eager to record every wrinkle of change over time, historians are sometimes obliged to note continuities.20 Bref, the social imaginary of anti-Judaism never goes away despite the claims of the “new” antisemites as David Nirenberg shows in his magisterial analysis, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. One will not understand either their successes or their failures unless we see that anti-Judaism’s deep past offers a special social understanding and historical dimension which make antisemitism different from other ideologies of prejudice in retaining a special relation to religion, even in cases of overtly anticlerical and outspokenly secular racial antisemites. When a Dühring or a Fritsch maintain loudly that “race, not religion, is the key,” why is it they then follow this up with “the only way to fight ‘the Jew’ is with another, greater spiritual

26  Steven Englund conviction” (Dühring’s words, often cited by Fritsch). This is a wild contradiction, unless one keeps firmly in mind both the religious nature of the question and the longue durée. In conclusion, the discursive deployments and political offers of the new Antisemitismus are not the same things as the social understanding they implicitly depended on and the popular reception they actually received. How they were “heard” constitutes another research topos from what its proponents intended it to look like. The complex truth of the matter is that in political antisemitism, we always encounter the omnipresent, strong, but subtle (often semi-conscious) role influence of a trinity of unstated spiritual elements: institutional religion, to be sure—and often, especially in the Habsburg realm and French Republic; le religieux in the diffuse, or “metabolised,” sense; and rogue religiosity, in the motives of individual antisemites. These dimensions may be shown to have suffused the statements and conflicts of “ordinary” political, economic, social, cultural, and racial antisemitism. They carried the “new” antisemitic message to the deepest levels of understanding and emotion in populations that have been bathed in Christianity for centuries. As David Nirenberg has analysed the imaginaire social of anti-Judaism, what needs still to be done is to see where and how anti-Judaism joins and underlies political antisemitism. I might add, as a kind of negative proof of my position, that the umbilical cord of piano wire securing antisemitism to religion may also be adduced to explain political antisemitism’s lack of broad public success in the late nineteenth century, down to 1914. Helmut Berding notes the difficulty encountered by many trade unions of lower-middle-class white-collar workers in maintaining an antisemitic presence,21 but he does not speculate why this was so. I suggest that it might have had at least in part to do with the fact that without systematic State support of the new ideology, antisemitism’s chimerical accusations became, over time, too obviously “religious” for a self-proclaimed secular age. Emotional, highly spiritualised Pan-Germanism and völkisch nationalism were, by comparison, more congenial because they did not grow directly from Jesse’s stem, as antisemitism did—and therefore did not feel obliged to hide the religious root, and, in failing to do so, be caught out. In sum, I am advocating that modernists follow Clifford Geertz’s advice and adopt a hermeneutical (interpretive) approach to our subject along with the solid empirical one that all historians of course depend upon. The full understanding of antisemitism requires not only the excavation of more evidence about specific conflicts, but reflection on the “webs of significance” in which man is “suspended” and which “he himself has spun” over a very long period of time. Modern antisemitism might best be seen as a set of charges, conflicts and arguments taking place, as it were, on the broad and busy flatbed of a large lily pad, pullulating with parasitic life, both visible and invisible. Below the surface of the pad, a root weaves its long and serpentine way down through

Roots of Antisemitism  27 fathoms, to the bottom of a deep lake. That bottom—to the indifference or possibly surprise and indignation of the vermin fulminating on the lily pad’s surface—is religion, at its oldest. I am hardly suggesting a return to Heinrich von Coudenhove-Kalergi’s thesis which holds that the essence of modern antisemitism amounts to nothing but rather hoary fanatical religious hatred.22 Indeed, thanks to Maya Soifer Irish and to innumerable other medievalists before her, we know that even medieval Jew-hatred was anything but “purely religious,” and had instead “uncanny similarities with modern violence.”23 The socioeconomic factors leading to medieval anti-Jewish violence is a staple of the field: all recent studies about medieval pogroms, blood libels, or riots, see them as a combination of general religious and specific local economic and political reasons. I am saying that our modern notion of “the social,” as we have inherited it from the Frankfurt School, is indeed the venue of antisemitism, but the latter’s insertion therein cannot be adequately palpated by a scholar who ignores the “barbarous fury” that cannot only be explained by the stated parameters of the actors.24 Or, as Alon Confino puts it, “I do not believe [. . .] that centuries of antisemitism produced the Holocaust. But I do believe that the Holocaust cannot be explained without the deep tradition of anti-Judaism.”25 I have suggested that an arc spanning a wide gamut from, at the one extreme, overt anti-Judaism in an ecclesiastical catechism to, at the other extreme, the fervent spirituality in Dühring’s highly emotive and spiritual reflections on race, via—in the middle of the spectrum—the rogue religiosity of a Hermann Ahlwardt or the “metabolised religion” of German, Austrian, or French society’s Alltagsgeschichte may each come into play, and often does. Truth be told, despite Salo Baron’s well-taken but perhaps overly influential attack on the lachrymose theory of Jewish history—and it is certainly true that the history of the Jews cannot and should not be reduced to tears—ewiger Judenhass is indeed an imaginaire social of Christian, and post-Christian, society.26

Notes 1. For a recent take, see Caspar Hirschi, The Origins of Nationalism: An Alternative History from Ancient Rome to Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Ian Wood, The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); for a classic, see Joseph Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). 2. See, for example, Marcel Gauchet, Le désenchantement du monde: Une histoire politique de la religion (Paris: Gallimard, 1985); Olivier Roy, La sainte ignorance: Le temps de la religion sans culture (Paris: Seuil, 2013). 3. David Kertzer, The Popes against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism (New York: Vintage, 2002); Olaf Blaschke, Offenders or Victims? German Jews and the Causes of Modern Catholic Antisemitism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009).

28  Steven Englund 4. Thus, Hitler in 1919: “Antisemitism as a political movement must not obey any emotional or religious impulses; it must be founded on facts, the first one of which is that the Jews are a race, not a religion.” Cited in Thomas Weber, Hitler’s First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 246. 5. On the topic of antisemitism’s not being an “ideology like the others,” see Hillel J. Kieval, “Afterword: European Antisemitism—the Search for a Pattern,” in Sites of European Antisemitism in the Age of Mass Politics, ed. Robert Nemes and Daniel Unowsky (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2014), 255–63. 6. Some recent examples: Tim Buchen, Antisemitismus in Galizien: Agitation, Gewalt und Politik in der Habsburgermonarchie um 1900 (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2012); Marija Vulesica, Die Formierung des politischen Antisemitismus in den Kronländern Kroatien und Slawonien 1879–1906 (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2012); Klaus Richter, Antisemitismus in Litauen: Christen, Juden und die “Emanzipation” der Bauern (1889–1914) (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2013); Manfred Hettling, Michael G. Müller, and Guido Hausmann, eds., Die “Judenfrage”: Ein europäisches Phänomen? (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2013); René Moehrle, Judenverfolgung in Triest während des Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus 1922–1945 (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2014); Andreas Reinke et al., eds., Die “Judenfrage” in Ostmitteleuropa: Historische Pfade und politischsoziale Konstellationen (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2015); Iulia Onac, Antisemitismus in Rumänien 1879–1914 (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2010); Christoph Leiska, Jüdische Integration und Antisemitismus in Skandinavien: Kopenhagen und Göteborg 1870–1917 (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2014); Ulrich Wyrwa, Gesellschaftliche Konfliktfelder und die Entstehung des Antisemitismus: Das Deutsche Kaiserreich und das Liberale Italien im Vergleich (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2016). 7. Christhard Hoffmann, Werner Bergmann, and Helmut Walser Smith, “Introduction,” in Exclusionary Violence, Antisemitic Riots in Modern German History, ed. Christhard Hoffmann, Werner Bergmann, and Helmut Walser Smith (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2002), 7. 8. David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W. W. ­Norton, 2013), 296. 9. The classic exposition of the levels of causality—from presuppositions and preconditions to precipitants and triggers is available in Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution (New York: Routledge, 1994), first published in 1972. 10. Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, 296. 11. E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (1971): 76–136. 12. Maya Soifer Irish, Jews and Christians in Medieval Northern Castile: Tradition, Coexistence, and Change (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2016). 13. Buchen, Antisemitismus in Galizien, see especially Part II: “Gewalt”; Daniel Unowsky, “Local Violence, Regional Politics, and State Crisis: The 1898 AntiJewish Riots in Habsburg Galicia,” in Sites of European Antisemitism in the Age of Mass Politics, 1880–1918, ed. Robert Nemes and Daniel Unowsky (Lebanon: Brandeis University Press, 2014), 13–35. 14. Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Légendes du sang: Pour une anthropologie de l’antisémitisme chrétien (Paris: Albin Michel, 2015). See also the essays on blood libel by Tokarska-Bakir, Miriamne Ara Krummel, Miri Rubin, and Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß in this volume.

Roots of Antisemitism  29 15. I deal with this in detail in the chapter on Hungary in my forthcoming book on comparative political antisemitism: Germany, Austria-Hungary, and France, 1770–1920. 16. Recall that chimera is the term Gavin Langmuir uses to describe those charges levelled against Jews which leap into the fanciful and phantasmagorical in Toward a Definition of Antisemitism, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) and History, Religion and Antisemitism, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 17. Quotations are from Alon Confino, A World without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 194. 18. See the diminution of political antisemitism in Italy and Germany prior to 1914: Ulrich Wyrwa, Gesellschaftliche Konfliktfelder und die Entstehung des Antisemitismus: Das deutsche Kaiserreich und das liberale Italien im Vergleich (Berlin: Metropol, 2015). 19. Confino, A World without Jews, 86. Precisely what Napoleon I claimed he was trying to do with the Infamous Decrees of 1808 against the Jews of Alsace was to treat just socio-economic problems, nothing “ideological” or religious. Yet some contemporaries and two centuries of historiography suggest otherwise: i.e., there was a deeper animus at work in the Decrees than the abuses by some Jewish money-lenders. In short, when historians choose to be, they are well aware of the role of underlying longue durée anti-Judiasm in the formulation of contemporary charges. For an introduction to this question, see Steven Englund, “Napoléon et les Juifs: deux cent ans d’ambiguïté et d’ambivalence,” La Revue des Deux Mondes, December 2008, 45–60. 20. Giacomo Todeschini: “the economic arrival of the religious Jew” does not make the religious part of the problem go away even as the attack focuses on the “economic” (because the Jews’ success has upset gentile expectations about “proper ordering”). La ricchezza degli ebrei: Merci e denaro nella riflessione ebraica e nella definizione cristiana dell’usura alla fine del Medioevo (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 1989), 6. For an explication of the First Century as the Ur-Problem, see Englund, forthcoming, ch. 1. 21. Heinrich von Coudenhove-Kalergi, Moderner Antisemitismus in Deutschland (Stuttgart: Klett, 1988), 76. 22. Heinrich von Coudenhove-Kalergi, Das Wesen des Antisemitismus (Berlin: Calvary, 1901). Antisemitism, on this author’s telling, came into existence when Christianity (and Islam, for that matter) took up the intolerant fanaticism of Judaism and turned it against the Jews. He urged liberal Christians and Jews to ally in protecting religion as such, against the emerging menace of secularism. 23. Noted in her discussion at the Stockholm meeting. 24. Reinhard Rürup, “The European Revolutions of 1848 and Jewish Emancipation,” in Revolution and Evolution: 1848 in German-Jewish History, ed. Werner E. Mosse, Arnold Paucker, and Reinhard Rürup (Tübingen: Mohr, 1981), 1–54 (here 16). For his part, Richard Levy writes, the German “parliamentary antisemites were as unaware or as unwilling to admit the strong irrational appeal of anti-Semitism as the members of the [anti-antisemitic] Abwehr Verein were.” The Downfall of the Anti-Semitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 152. 25. Confino, A World without Jews, 239. 26. For a post-religious “religious” take on the Jews and Judaism, see the fascinating work by Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

3 The Making of Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century Europe as an Invention of Tradition Ulrich Wyrwa

In 1928, the young scholar Salo Baron launched a sharp critique of what, at the time, was the dominant emancipationist narrative of Jewish history.1 Soon thereafter, Baron received the first chair for Jewish history at a state university. In 1937, he published the first of what would be an eighteen-volume social and religious history of the Jews from antiquity to the mid-seventeenth century.2 In the subtitle of his early essay, he posed a provocative question: “Shall We Revise the Traditional View?” According to the traditional view, Baron explained, Jews had lived for centuries “in a state of extreme wretchedness under medieval conditions, subject to incessant persecution and violence.”3 Further, this view held that this miserable subjugation had come to an end with the age of emancipation. Baron was critical of the Jewish historiography advanced by leading figures, such Heinrich Graetz, Martin Philippson, and Simon Dubnow. For all of them, Baron asserted, emancipation “was the dawn of a new day after a nightmare of the deepest horror.”4 In his brief essay, Baron focused on two factors. First, the assertion that “the Jews did not have ‘equal rights,’” to which Baron responded by pointing out “that there was no such thing then as ‘equal rights.’” To the contrary, “the status of the Jews in the Middle Ages implied certain privileges which they no longer have under the modern state [. . .]; the Jewish community enjoyed full internal autonomy.” The existence of the Ghetto was key to the “traditional” view. Baron responds to this established narrative by pointing out that “the Ghetto grew up voluntarily as a result of the Jewish self-government, and it was only in a later development that the public law interfered and made it a legal compulsion for all Jews to live in a secluded district.” Summing up, Baron states: “The Jew, indeed, had in effect a kind of territory and state of his own throughout the Middle Ages.”5 Besides the Ghetto, the “terror of the Inquisition” played a pivotal role in the descriptions of medieval Jewry. “Its horrors have been fully portrayed,” but it “had no jurisdiction over professing Jews,” Baron insisted. To the contrary, Jews “had virtual immunity from [. . .] the operations” of the Inquisition.

Invention of Tradition  31 Baron further argues that not even “actual events”—“persecutions, riots, pogroms, monetary extortion”—served to diminish the legal privileges afforded Jews in the Middle Ages. Finally, he concludes that it is unquestionably “time to break with the lachrymose theory of pre-­Revolutionary woe.”6 At the same time as Salo Baron was proposing a new perspective on medieval Jewish history, at the University of Vienna, the young Jewish historian Lucie Varga,7 who had studied general medieval European history and would later act as Lucien Febvre’s assistant in Paris, submitted her dissertation about the concept of the “dark” Middle Ages.8 In her introduction, she pointed out that catchphrases like the “dark Middle Ages” are culturally and historically loaded. This expression, Varga noted, is primarily associated with the alleged spiritual terror, atrocious superstition and religious fanaticism of the Middle Ages. In her dissertation, Varga expressed the hope of combating the thoughtless persistence of this expression. Her hopes proved in vain; despite all of the atrocities of the twentieth century, this metaphor for the medieval period remains intact,9 and despite all the evidence to the contrary provided by medievalists,10 it continues to hold sway over public perception. Even more to the point, in spite of the persecution and the terror delivered onto Jews in Nazi Germany, the description of the medieval period as the “dark ages” for Jews, to once more draw upon Salo Baron, continues to dominate Jewish historiography as well.11 Salo Baron advanced a critique of the narrative of Jewish emancipation that went against the grain. Working with his anti-lachrymose understanding of medieval Jewish history, this paper will challenge both the narrative of antisemitism as the “longest hatred”12 and the perception of antisemitism as an eternal phenomenon within the Western tradition.13 We will begin with a brief overview of the early intellectual reactions to antisemitism among both European Jews and non-Jews to see how this new phenomenon was interpreted by contemporary observers. This will be followed by a discussion of the way in which some aspects of the antisemitic language draw upon medieval motifs.

I The way in which both Jewish and non-Jewish contemporary observers perceived the emancipation and progress of Jews is reflected in the fundamental shock they felt at the sudden and unexpected eruption of violence against Jews in the early nineteenth century. Eyewitnesses perceived the outbreak of the 1819 Hep-Hep Riots14 as a rebirth of medieval atrocities. Some of them even interpreted the expression Hep erroneously to be a return to the cry of the crusaders as they entered Jerusalem: “Hierosolyma est perdita” (Jerusalem is lost).”15 In any case, the idea that the Hep-Hep Riots marked a return of medieval horror was widespread, even among Jewish observers.

32  Ulrich Wyrwa For example, in his history of the Jews, Heinrich Graetz wrote: “With the cry of ‘Hep, hep!’ against the Jews, the Middle Ages revived again like a jeering ghost.”16 He added that once the Hep-Hep violence spread across Germany, “no feature of the persecution of the Jews of the Middle Ages might be wanting.”17 The rapid increase in political and economic change in the final third of the nineteenth century created a general feeling of unease among the population, spurring a new hatred of Jews. In 1879, this public sentiment gave rise to the new term “antisemitism.”18 Once again, Jewish and non-Jewish observers alike primarily interpreted this outbreak of hostility toward Jews as a rebirth of medieval hatred. When leading German antisemites launched a petition campaign in August 1880,19 the French newspaper Le Petit Parisien saw it as the return of the popular clamour of the Middle Ages.20 British newspapers like the Times adopted this diction when they reported about the situation in Germany in November 1880: “During the last few months the newspapers have recorded insults and acts of violence” towards Jews “throughout Germany which would compare in some instances with the indignities offered them in the Middle Ages.”21 On the occasion of the Tiszaeszlár ritual murder accusation, the British-Jewish author Joseph Jacobs described in the Jewish Chronicle the medieval origins of the blood libel.22 In 1892, the Austrian Jewish newspaper Freies Blatt: Organ zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus characterised antisemitism as a kind of medieval fanaticism.23 Striking a combative stance in 1899, the Bulgarian Jewish newspaper Човешки права (Čoveški prava, Human Rights) declared its intent to prevent a return to the Middle Ages.24 When faced with an outbreak of anti-Jewish violence in Kishinev (Chişinău) in 1903, the Italian rabbi, Flaminio Servi, also spoke of “a horror like in the Middle Ages.”25 After the term antisemitism was coined, and immediately following the first wave of antisemitic agitation in Germany, the metaphor of a rebirth of the medieval hostility toward Jews gained entrance into the European public sphere. In this light, the German Jewish newspaper Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums reported from Brussels that the French newspaper Gazette, widely read in Belgium, had described the antisemitic agitation in Germany as worthy of the Middle Ages.26 While both Jewish and non-Jewish contemporary observers labelled antisemitism as the rebirth of an old medieval hatred of Jews, this assertion was not based on meaningful analysis, but rather was an expression of their own worldview and their understanding of historical progress. In keeping with this narrative, in Berlin in 1901, the Christian author Heinrich ­Coudenhove-Kalergi published the first comprehensive presentation of the history of antisemitism,27 treating antisemitism as a pathological phenomenon that had to be seen first and foremost as an expression of religious hatred. Describing the various ways in which Jews were persecuted in the Middle Ages, primarily at the hands of the Church, he further asserted that a process that had begun in ancient times and continued through the Middle Ages was now feeding modern antisemitism in its racial form.

Invention of Tradition  33 There were, however, contemporary witnesses who accurately analysed the novel nature of this phenomenon. In 1896, the archivist and historian Georg Winter published a study on antisemitism in Germany from a ­cultural-historical and socio-political perspective and established that the then current antisemitism differed in one distinct way from the persecution of the Jews in earlier centuries.28 “Formerly, Jews had been persecuted because of their religion, but today it is no longer possible to stage a huge popular movement under this banner. The religious motive, therefore, could not be used anymore.”29 One of the first comprehensive contemporary historical examinations of antisemitism was published by the Jewish historian Martin Philippson30— an author whom Salo Baron erroneously identifies as a representative of the lachrymose narrative tradition.31 Philippson, a reputed historian, arrived at the specific conclusion that antisemitism had nothing to do with medieval religious hatred. He observed that the clarion call for antisemitism had come from Pope Pius IX in the early 1870s, when he attacked Jews first for being journalists, as well as disparaging Jews for being solely devoted to making money. This, according to Philippson, “was the hour of the birth of modern antisemitism.”32 With the advent of scholarly research into antisemitism, an increasingly precise understanding of its particular characteristics gradually emerged, underscoring differences from religious hatred and the medieval persecution of the Jews. For example, in 1926, the Jewish social scientist and philosopher Julius Goldstein provided an analysis of the new völkisch antisemitism, presenting the emergence of antisemitism in the nineteenth century as an expression of bourgeois dialectics, with an earlier liberalism undergoing a transformation into conservatism during the second half of the century.33 For Goldstein, antisemitism was primarily an expression of the German middle class’s loathing for its own democratic and liberal past. These early historical studies of antisemitism challenged the initial interpretation of this phenomenon as a rebirth of medieval and religious hatred of Jews. They had gradually come to a clearer understanding of the specific features and the precise historical context of this new phenomenon of antisemitism. It was, in fact, the outcome of social and political upheaval resulting from the far-reaching transformation of society and everyday life in the nineteenth-century age of industrialisation, commercialisation, urbanisation, and the politicisation in the Western World.34 Nevertheless, one can observe in the development of scholarly research into antisemitism something like the movement of a pendulum, swinging from interpretations focused on religion to interpretations with a secular approach—and back again. Shortly before the First World War, Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi’s religious interpretation was replaced by Martin Philippson’s social and historical interpretation, supplemented during the interwar period by Julius Goldstein’s political and cultural assessment of the then nascent völkisch antisemitism. After Auschwitz, the pendulum swung back to a theological perspective, with an emphasis on the long historical

34  Ulrich Wyrwa view35—for example, the first volume of Léon Poliakov’s extensive Histoire de l’antisémitisme was published in the mid-1950s.36 Non-Jewish authors, Michael Müller-Claudius among them, placed an emphasis on the religious roots of antisemitism,37 and in his book published in 1963, the Reverend James Parkes wrote, “there is no break in the line which leads from the beginning of the denigration of Judaism in the formative period of Christian history [. . .] through the horrors of the Middle Ages, to the Death Camps of Hitler in our own day.”38 In the 1970s, as part of the trend toward social research and social history, this religious approach was once again replaced by a socio-­historical method; Reinhard Rürup and Werner Jochmann were two of the most influential German historians involved in this development.39 It was in this context that the Israeli historian Uriel Tal would recall that the leading ­nineteenth-century German antisemites “understood anti-Semitism not simply in terms of a rejection of Jews and Judaism, but also as a critique, and even a negation of Christianity and religion in general.”40 In fact, according to Christhard Hoffmann, in historically assessing the relationship between Christian anti-Judaism and modern antisemitic hatred, the religious tradition of hostility toward Jews is not relevant.41 In recent years, as part of a generalised resurgence of religion in public discourse,42 there has been a renewed interest in a religious interpretation. Michael Ley’s work reflects this new religious turn,43 and more recently David Nirenberg has presented anti-Judaism as a Western tradition, underlining the religious roots and elaborating the medieval contributions.44 Overestimating the importance of the continuity of anti-Jewish stereotypes and prejudices leads him to ignore their eclectic character. Antisemites have taken up older anti-Jewish motifs and adapted them to their own antisemitic obsessions, but there has been no continuity of specific motifs or precise ideas over time. Furthermore, Nirenberg disregards the fact that the same issue does not necessarily mean the same thing in different historical contexts. Nevertheless, the debate regarding the opposing interpretations of the roots of antisemitism is not ending any time soon, and this will certainly not be the last scholarly swing of the pendulum.45 Beyond Nirenberg’s overall perspective and the recent resurgence of religion, the thesis that antisemitism must be seen as a result of a religious conflict is far more alleged than substantially proven by the sources. To answer the question of the relationship between Christian-religious and secular motifs in the emergence of antisemitism, it seems necessary to go back to the sources.46

II Four linguistic and practical antisemitic motifs are central to any discussion of the medieval religious roots of nineteenth-century antisemitism: first, the ritual murder accusation; second, the accusation of well-poisoning; third, the medieval expulsions, and fourth, the accusation of usury.

Invention of Tradition  35 One of the most popular of the antisemitic medieval motifs was the ritual murder accusation.47 The origins of the blood libel can be traced back to the twelfth century. At that historical moment, Christian spirituality became more and more interested in the blood of Christ. Passion-related piety began to grow, reinforced by the eleventh-century theological struggles about transubstantiation. Psychoanalytically speaking, the emergence of the blood libel must be seen as a phenomenon of transference, with Christian contemporaries transferring their own apprehension about consuming the blood of Christ during Holy Communion onto the Jews. A second example of antisemitic language taking on a medieval motif was the accusation of well-poisoning, which first appeared during the Black Death of the fourteenth century.48 The actual cause of this catastrophe was still unknown, and the fact that the ritual purification practised by Jews provided them with a certain protection led to the superstitious belief that Jews were poisoning wells. Third, two episodes from medieval Jewish history that drew a good deal of attention from nineteenth-century antisemites were the expulsions of the Jews from England during the thirteenth century and from France during the fourteenth century.49 Both expulsions, however, owed more to the internal conflicts within England and France respectively, and to problems related to the establishment and consolidation of territorial states, than to any religious conflict. For Philip IV of France, the expulsion of the Jews was a matter consolidating the disordered state finances, and the Jewish removal from England under Edward I was connected to internal problems surrounding his sovereignty. Finally, one of the medieval motifs most commonly adopted by nineteenthcentury antisemites was the accusation of usury.50 This motif emerged in the twelfth century with the expansion of the medieval towns and the nascent monetary economy that developed within the rural subsistence economy of the Middle Ages.51 It first became an issue as part of a theological debate and an internal Christian dilemma about interest. When the issue of usury was later linked to the Jews, the connection actually reflected internal conflicts within the Christian Church and the emergence of the semantics of heresy and simony, rather than the realities of Jewish moneylending or economic competition.52 This process was accompanied by an official Church condemnation of moneylending—something that did not stop the Church from sanctioning and profiting from the monetary economy in other guises and through other ecclesiastical institutions. Nevertheless, this cultural change reinforced the accusation that Jews engaged in moneylending and usury. Although each of these motifs was an expression of a very specific conflict within medieval society, they were all used by nineteenth-century antisemites. Each of them had its own cause, and each of them had profoundly different consequences for the Jews. There was no coherent connection between these disparate events and episodes, and they in no way represent the continuity of a perpetual Christian-Jewish antagonism. All of these

36  Ulrich Wyrwa motifs reflected internal conflicts within Christian society. In nineteenthcentury antisemitic ideology, however, they came to constitute a unitary expression of the flawed Jewish character. It is analytically interesting that antisemites attempted to construct a coherent and unbroken narrative from these diverse and distinct incidents and motifs. In other words, they invented their own tradition and, to quote Eric Hobsbawm, “attempt[ed] to establish continuity with a suitable historic past.”53 Like similar nineteenth-century invented traditions, an exact knowledge of the events and their historical contexts was of little importance. In effect, antisemites took up certain aspects or features of the medieval motifs and adapted them to their own needs. In the case of the blood libel, for example, it was irrelevant to them that according to the medieval sources, it was primarily little boys who were the victims in ritual murder cases. Their historical indifference aside, it is nonetheless remarkable that nineteenth-century antisemites did not delve into the religious background of the blood libel allegations. Instead, as Hillel Kieval has pointed out, they simply structured the events “along the lines of crime novels.”54 In the case of the expulsions from France and from England, it was the historical contexts and circumstances that the antisemites overlooked. For example, in his handbook on the Jewish question, Theodor Fritsch wrote that Jews had been expelled from France for practising usury and murdering Christian children, and from England for counterfeiting currency.55 Finally, when addressing the accusation of usury, antisemites completely disregarded not only the profound difference between the role of money and moneylending in medieval feudal society and in the industrial consumer society of their own time, as well as the relative difference in the position of Jews within these distinct economic structures.56 The antisemitic narrative of usury had nothing to do with the logic underlying the usury trope in a (culturally and religiously embedded) subsistence economy; it simply suited the antisemites’ anti-capitalist attitude and their rejection of the market economy.57 Nonetheless, as Hans Rosenberg has pointed out, commercial resentments may serve as a “bridge of continuity” between medieval hostility toward Jews and modern secular antisemitism.58

III “Insofar as there is such reference to a historic past,” Eric Hobsbawm wrote, “the peculiarity of ‘invented’ traditions is that the continuity with it is largely factitious, in short they are responses to novel situations.”59 It is in this sense that antisemites used distinctively medieval episodes of hatred against Jews and motifs of anti-Judaism to legitimise the worldview they had developed in response to their own bewilderment in the face of the disruption of the social and political order. If antisemitism is the product of an invented tradition, then there can be no such a thing as an eternal antisemitism. As Johannes Heil has pointed out, the crucial feature of antisemitism

Invention of Tradition  37 is the bundling, systematisation, and instrumentalisation of older motifs of hostility toward Jews, which simultaneously gives rise to a deformation.60 It is in this sense that Hannah Arendt not only criticised the idea of an eternal antisemitism, she even declared the suggestion a dangerous one: dangerous, because its proponents operate under the delusion that they fully grasp antisemitism.61 The fact is that approaching antisemitism as if it has a long tradition neither clarifies the concrete form that medieval hostility took toward Jews62 nor nineteenth-century antisemitic manifestations or the emergence of annihilationist antisemitism in Nazi Germany. On this point Hannah Arendt agrees with Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Countering the assumption of continuity, the latter two remarked in their foreword to the German translation of Paul Massing’s study on the rise of antisemitism in Imperial Germany: “Whoever would like to understand totalitarian antisemitism”—a term that denoted the antisemitism that culminated in Auschwitz—“should not be tempted to assume a necessity.”63 Finally, in his Perceptions of Jewish History, Amos Funkenstein describes “the phenomenology of anti-Semitic utterances,” concluding that they “presuppose emancipation and are directed against it, which makes them a new phenomenon altogether in Jewish history.” Antisemites, Funkenstein continues, appeal “to the segments of the population least adapted to the modern, industrial, capitalistic, and mobile society.” As such, he concludes that “antiSemitism seems to be worlds apart from Christian anti-Jewish attitudes.”64 If, as Lucie Varga argues, the expression “the dark Middle Ages” must be repudiated, and if Salo Baron’s rejection of the lachrymose narrative prevails, then the trope of the medieval and religious roots of antisemitism must be abandoned.

Notes I would like to thank Matthew Lange for his linguistic revision of the first draft of this paper. 1. Salo Wittmayer Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation,” Menorah Journal 14, no. 6 (1928): 515–26; for Baron’s approach, see Michael Brenner, Propheten des Vergangenen: Jüdische Geschichtsschreibung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2006), 165–75; for current discussions on Baron, see David Engel, “Crisis and Lachrymosity: On Salo Baron, Neobaronianism, and the Study of Modern European Jewish History,” Jewish History 20, nos. 3–4 (2006): 243–64. 2. Salo Wittmayer Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 18 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952–83). 3. Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation,” 515. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 520. 6. Ibid., 526. 7. Peter Schöttler, introduction to Lucie Varga, Zeitenwende: Mentalitätshistorische Studien 1936–1939, ed. and trans. Peter Schöttler (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 13–110.

38  Ulrich Wyrwa 8. Lucie Varga, Das Schlagwort vom finsteren Mittelalter (Baden: Verlag Rudolf M. Rohrer, 1932). 9. On the emergence of this metaphor, see Klaus Arnold, “Das ‘finstere’ Mittelalter: Zur Genese und Phänomenologie eines Fehlurteils,” Saeculum 32 (1981): 287–300. 10. Jacques Le Goff, Für ein anderes Mittelalter: Zeit, Arbeit und Kultur im Europa des 5.—15. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1984). 11. Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation,” 516. 12. Robert S. Wistrich, Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred (New York: Thames Mandarin, 1991). 13. David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013). 14. On the Hep-Hep riots, see Stefan Rohrbacher, Gewalt im Biedermeier: Antijüdische Ausschreitungen in Vormärz und Revolution (1815–1848/49) (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1993); Jacob Katz, Die Hep-Hep-Verfolgungen des Jahres 1819 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1994). 15. This interpretation had just been rejected in Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste in alphabetischer Folge, vol. 2, no. 5, ed. Johann Samuel Ersch and Johann Gottfried Gruber (Leipzig: Johann Friedrich Gleditsch, 1829), 361. 16. Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, vol. 5 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publications Society of America, 1995), 528. 17. Graetz, History of the Jews, vol. 5, 531. 18. Werner Bergmann and Ulrich Wyrwa, Antisemitismus in Zentraleuropa: Deutschland, Österreich und die Schweiz vom 19. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2011), 34. 19. See Der “Berliner Antisemitismusstreit” 1879–1881: Eine Kontroverse um die Zugehörigkeit der deutschen Juden zur Nation. Kommentierte Quellenedition, vol. 2, ed. Karsten Krieger (Munich: K. G. Saur, 2003), 579–83. 20. Le Petit Parisien, no. 1408, 24 August 1880. I would like to thank Damien Guillaume for this reference. 21. The Times, 18 November 1880; quoted in Krieger, Der “Berliner Antisemitismusstreit”, vol. 2, 604. 22. Joseph Jacobs, “The ‘Blood Accusation,’ Its Origin and Occurrence, during the Middle Ages: An Historical Commentary on the Tisza-Eszlar Trial,” Jewish Chronicle, 29 June 1883. 23. Das Freie Blatt, 10 April 1892; quoted in Gerald Lamprecht, “‘Allein der Antisemitismus ist heute nicht mehr eine bloße Idee. . . ’: Strategien gegen den Antisemitismus in Österreich,” in Einspruch und Abwehr: Die Reaktion des europäischen Judentums auf die Entstehung des Antisemitismus (1879–1914) (Jahrbuch Fritz Bauer Institut), ed. Ulrich Wyrwa (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2010), 153–79 (here 173). 24. Quoted in Veselina Kulenska, “‘Die blödeste und kraftloseste Doktrin’: Die Antwort der bulgarischen Juden auf den Antisemitismus am Ende des 19. und Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Einspruch und Abwehr, 281–95 (here 290). 25. Flaminio Servi, “Le stragi di Kischineff e la pubblica opinione,” Il Vessillo Israelitico 51 (1903): 140–41 (here 140). 26. Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums, no. 47, 23 November 1880. 27. Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi, Das Wesen des Antisemitismus (Berlin: S. Calvary & Co, 1901). 28. Georg Winter, Antisemitismus in Deutschland, vom kulturhistorischen und sozialpolitischen Standpunkt beleuchtet (Magdeburg: Salinger, 1896). 29. Ibid., 5.

Invention of Tradition  39 30. On Philippson, see Ulrich Wyrwa, “Die europäischen Seiten der jüdischen Geschichtsschreibung. Eine Einführung,” in Judentum und Historismus: Zur Entstehung der jüdischen Geschichtswissenschaft in Europa, ed. Ulrich Wyrwa (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2003), 9–36; Brenner, Propheten des Vergangenen, 111–15. 31. Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation,” 516. 32. Martin Philippson, Neueste Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Fock, 1910), 2. 33. Julius Goldstein, “Völkischer Antisemitismus,” Der Morgen (1926): 13–22, 188–99, 223–43, 463–82; Der Morgen (1927): 68–84, 160–67. On Goldstein, see Franziska Krah, “‘Ewig Feuerspritze sein, wo ein Weltfeuer doch nicht gelöscht werden kann . . . ’ Abwehr und Deutung des Antisemitismus während der Weimarer Republik,” in Beschreibungsversuche der Judenfeindschaft: Zur Geschichte der Antisemitismusforschung vor 1944, ed. Hans-Joachim Hahn and Olaf Kistenmacher (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 262–85. 34. See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944); Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2009). 35. See Karl Thieme, “Der religiöse Aspekt der Judenfeindschaft,” in Judentum: Schicksal, Wesen und Gegenwart, vol. 2, ed. Franz Böhm and Walter Dirks (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1965), 603–31. 36. Léon Poliakov, Histoire de l’antisémitisme, vol. 1, Du Christ aux Juifs de Cour (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1955). 37. Michael Müller Claudius, Der Antisemitismus und das deutsche Verhängnis (Frankfurt am Main: Knecht, 1948). 38. James Parkes, Antisemitism (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1963), 60. 39. Thomas Nipperdey and Reinhard Rürup, “Antisemitismus,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache, vol. 1, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1972), 129–53; Reinhard Rürup, Emanzipation und Antisemitismus: Studien zur “Judenfrage” der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1975); Werner Jochmann, “Struktur und Funktion des deutschen Antisemitismus 1878–1914,” in Juden im Wilhelminischen Deutschland 1890–1914, ed. Werner E. Mosse and Arnold Paucker (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1976), 389–477. On Jochmann, see Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, “Werner Jochmann und die deutschjüdische Geschichte,” Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg 2 (2004): 14–20. 40. Uriel Tal, Religious and Anti-Religious Roots of Modern Anti-Semitism (New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1971), 5. 41. Christhard Hoffmann, “Christlicher Antijudaismus und moderner Antisemitismus. Zusammenhänge und Differenzen als Problem der historischen Antisemitismusforschung,” in Christlicher Antijudaismus und Antisemitismus: Theologische und kirchliche Programme deutscher Christen, ed. Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz (Frankfurt am Main: Haag und Herchen, 1994), 293– 317 (here 300). 42. Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, Die Wiederkehr der Götter: Religion in der modernen Kultur (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2004). For a critique of this ostensible return to religion, see Herbert Schnädelbach, Religion in der modernen Welt: Vorträge, Abhandlungen, Streitschriften (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2009). 43. Michael Ley, Kleine Geschichte des Antisemitismus (Munich: W. Fink, 2003). 44. Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, chapters 5 and 6. 45. See also Steven Englund, “De l’antijudaïsme à l’antisémitisme, et à rebours,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences sociales 69, no. 4 (2014): 901–24; Shulamit Volkov,

40  Ulrich Wyrwa “Movement in a Circle: The Research of Anti-Semitism from Shmuel Ettinger and Back. A Survey,” Zion 76 (2011): 3, 369–79. [In Hebrew]. I would like to thank Tuvia Singer for his English summary of this article. 46. See Ulrich Wyrwa, “The Language of Anti-Semitism in the Catholic Newspapers Il Veneto Cattolico—La Difesa in Late Nineteenth Century Venice,” Church History and Religious Culture 96, no. 3 (2016): 346–49; see also the chapter regarding the churches in Breslau (Wrocław) and Venice and the conflicts in the religious field in Ulrich Wyrwa, Gesellschaftliche Konfliktfelder und die Entstehung des Antisemitismus: Das Deutsche Kaiserreich und das Liberale Italien im Vergleich (Berlin: Metropol 2015), 243–357. 47. See the contributions in Rainer Erb, ed., Die Legende vom Ritualmord: Zur Geschichte der Blutbeschuldigung gegen Juden (Berlin: Metropol, 1993) as well as the contributions on ritual murder in this volume. 48. František Graus, Pest—Geissler—Judenmorde: Das 14. Jahrhundert als Krisenzeit, 2nd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1988), 34–37; Alfred Haverkamp, “Die Judenverfolgungen zur Zeit des Schwarzen Todes im Gesellschaftsgefüge deutscher Städte,” in Zur Geschichte der Juden im Deutschland des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Alfred Haverkamp and Alfred Heit (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1981), 27–93. 49. Gerd Mentgen, “Die Vertreibung der Juden aus England und Frankreich im Mittelalter,” Aschkenas: Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der Juden 7, no. 1 (1997): 11–54; Robin R. Mundill, “Medieval Anglo-Jewry: Expulsion and Exodus,” in Judenvertreibungen in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, ed. Friedhelm Burgard (Hannover: Hahn, 1999), 75–95. 50. Freddy Raphael, “Sechstes Bild: ‘Der Wucherer,’” in Bilder der Judenfeindschaft, ed. Julius H. Schoeps and Joachim Schlör (Munich: Piper, 1995), 103–18; Shylock? Zinsverbot und Geldverleih in jüdischer und christlicher Tradition, ed. Johannes Heil and Bernd Wacker (Munich: Fink, 1997). 51. Jacques Le Goff, Wucherzins und Höllenqualen (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1988), 15–31. 52. Giacomo Todeschini, “Christian Perceptions of Jewish Economic Activity in the Middle Ages,” in Wirtschaftsgeschichte der mittelalterlichen Juden: Fragen und Einschätzungen, ed. Michael Toch (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008), 1–16. 53. Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1–14 (here 1). Here I have picked up an idea from Christhard Hoffmann’s inspiring and clarifying article, “Christlicher Antijudaismus und moderner Antisemitismus,” 306. 54. Hillel J. Kieval, “Representation and Knowledge in Medieval and Modern Accounts of Jewish Ritual Murder,” Jewish Social Studies, New Series 1, no. 1 (1994): 52–72 (here 67). 55. Theodor Fritsch, Handbuch der Judenfrage, 26th ed. (Hamburg: Hanseatische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1907), 250–51. 56. Jacques Le Goff, Das Geld im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2011), 103–25. 57. On the nineteenth-century antisemites’ anti-capitalist attitude, see Matthew Lange, Antisemitic Elements in the Critique of Capitalism in German Culture 1850–1933 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007). On the legal approach to usury the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century market economy, see Matthias Pohlkamp, Die Entstehung des modernen Wucherrechts und die Wucherrechtsprechung des Reichsgerichts zwischen 1880 und 1933 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009). 58. Hans Rosenberg, Große Depression und Bismarckzeit: Wirtschaftsablauf, Gesellschaft und Politik in Mitteleuropa (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1967), 93. 59. Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” 2.

Invention of Tradition  41 60. Johannes Heil, “‘Antijudaismus’ und ‘Antisemitismus’: Begriffe als Bedeutungsträger,” Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 6 (1997): 92–114 (here 105). 61. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland: Meridian, 1958), 7. 62. The more penetrating scholars of medieval hostility against Jews have stressed the peculiarities of the age: Michael Toch, The Economic History of European Jews: Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2013); Todeschini, “Christian Perceptions of Jewish Economic Activity in the Middle Ages”; Alfred Haverkamp, “The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages—By Way of Introduction,” in The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages (Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries): Proceedings of the International Symposium Held at Speyer, 20–25 October 2002, ed. Christoph Cluse (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 1–16. 63. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “Vorwort,” in Paul W. Massing, Vorgeschichte des politischen Antisemitismus (Frankfurt am Main: EVA, 1959), VII. 64. Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 324.

4 What Is Antisemitism Like? An Analogical Approach Brian Klug

“Antisemitism” is not a word that wears its meaning on its sleeve.1 In this chapter, I shall try to throw light on the concept by exploring the question of whether there is an analogy with what is, on the face of it, a related concept: Islamophobia.2 I begin by reflecting on the logic of analogies in general. I then discuss the two terms and their relation to the concepts they name, after which I concentrate on the concepts themselves, comparing them in terms of their form and content. My primary focus is on logical or conceptual issues; however, as both concepts have empirical content, it is impossible to avoid the odd fact and the occasional excursion into history. The question of whether they are analogical, moreover, is topical: both in academic circles and in the public square it is one element in the debate about whether Muslims are the “new Jews” of Europe.3 This larger question lies outside the scope of the chapter. Nonetheless, it is instructive, for the purpose of elucidating the concept of antisemitism, to see how the analogy figures in the context of this debate. Accordingly, towards the end of the chapter, I revisit an essay by Matti Bunzl that bears on this debate and which I introduce briefly in the next section.

The Logic of Analogy Are antisemitism and Islamophobia analogous? Analogies in general have two curious properties. On the one hand, they can be stretched so thin that almost anything can be said to be like almost anything else: all you have to do is specify one or more properties that A and B have in common and you have grounds for asserting a similarity between them, even if, in all other respects, A and B differ. On the other hand, there is no such thing as a perfect analogy: if A and B are exactly alike in every respect then they are identical rather than analogous. All analogies are limited but some are more limited than others. So, the question becomes this: how limited is the analogy between Islamophobia and antisemitism? Is the analogy strong or weak? How do you assess an analogy? The anthropologist Matti Bunzl points out that “if one undertakes a comparison—as anthropologists, sociologists, or historians do—in the broadest sense we can always find, between

What Is Antisemitism Like?  43 essentially any two groups, similarities and differences.”4 He adds: “And it is often a political choice or an analytic choice whether we want to foreground the similarities or the differences.”5 This is a helpful observation but it calls for clarification. We can choose the basis for comparing two phenomena A and B, and, having chosen, we can select those similarities or differences that we wish to emphasise or deemphasise. Politically, these choices reflect the larger agenda that we are promoting. Analytically, they depend on the enquiry that we are pursuing. But, either way, we cannot determine by choice whether A and B do or do not have certain features in common. If we could, then analogy would be purely in the eye of the beholder and there would be no room for rational argument. Take, for example, Bunzl’s own work: his essay “Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia,” in which he foregrounds what he sees as the differences between the two phenomena.6 This is because his interest lies in how they function and he wants to emphasise what he sees as a crucial contrast: the contrast between the historical role played by antisemitism in protecting the purity of the ethnic nation-state and the role played by Islamophobia today in the project of creating a new Europe. Whether he is right about this or not is not the point. (I shall revisit his argument in the final section.) The point, in the first place, is this: while he can choose to examine the analogy from the point of view of function, the question of whether antisemitism and Islamophobia do function differently is not in his gift; it is a matter for investigation and argument. (Well aware of this, he includes six critical responses to his thesis in the pamphlet that contains his essay.)7 Second, function is only one basis for the analogy. We can also ask: are the two phenomena alike in terms of their sources or causes? Do they have a similar impact on the lives of Jews and Muslims? Is the scale of bigotry comparable? And so on. How we assess the analogy depends, in the first place, on the basis of comparison. Whatever the basis of comparison, both the concepts and the words that name them remain the same. So, let us now turn our attention to the two words and their meanings.

Word and Concept Any analogy between Islamophobia and antisemitism might, at first sight, seem to fall at the first hurdle: the terms themselves. In both the public debate and the more scholarly literature, a great deal of attention is paid to the terms, as if a great deal hangs on the matter. Commentators point out that both words are complex; and, assuming that a word is the sum of its parts, they proceed to enumerate the differences of meaning by adding up the parts. “Antisemitism” is the product of placing the prefix “anti” before the substantive “Semitism.”8 “Islamophobia” combines “Islam” with “phobia.” Now, “Islam” names a religion, while “Semitism” (at the time that “antisemitism” was coined) signified “a body of uniformly negative traits supposedly clinging to Jews.”9 “Phobia” means fear, “anti” indicates

44  Brian Klug opposition. Put the parts together and what do you get? What you seem to get, in the one case, is opposition to a particular group (or the traits ascribed to them), and, in the other case, fear and trembling in the face of a certain religion. Judging by the structure of the words, the concepts have little or nothing in common. But is this the way to understand the meaning of words? Sayyid refers to this species of reasoning as “etymological fundamentalism.”10 It consists in thinking that the meaning of a word—the concept for which it stands—is given by its semantic origins. You could also call it a form of literalism. To use an analogy (which naturally is not perfect), imagine asking someone what a pen is and they answer: a pen is a thin object, normally made of metal or plastic, usually about six inches long. Just as the etymological fundamentalist reduces a word to the parts that make it up, so this answer reduces the pen to its material properties; consequently, it fails to explain what a pen is. So, what is a pen? It is a writing implement of a certain kind. To understand the concept, it is necessary to look beyond the list of the pen’s physical properties and to grasp the use to which it is put. Similarly, to understand the concepts of antisemitism and Islamophobia we must look and see how the words are used. Wittgenstein remarks, “For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.”11 “Islamophobia” and “antisemitism” fall into this class. If, despite the disparities in the origin and composition of the two words, their uses turn out to be similar, then the analogy clears the first hurdle. There are a number of related fallacies that suffer from the same fault, namely, making a fetish out of the words. So, for example, again and again I have run into the view that antisemitism is aimed at Arabs as well as Jews as both groups are “Semites.” But, setting aside the dodginess of the category “Semite,” the word “antisemitism” in practice singles out Jews. This, its use in the language, is its meaning. As regards Islamophobia, some scholars prefer the term “anti-Muslim racism,” others have argued for “anti-Muslimism” or “Muslimophobia.”12 There is a similar debate over the word “antisemitism,” with “anti-Jewish racism” and “Judeophobia” among the alternatives. To which Wittgenstein’s response to an interlocutor in another context seems apt: “Say what you choose, so long as it does not prevent you from seeing the facts.”13 Each brand of bigotry is what it is: it is the same by any other name. So, choose another name if you will; but once a word is out of the box and into the language it takes on a life of its own. The words “antisemitism” and “Islamophobia” have caught on. No one can be compelled to use them but it is too late for a committee of academics to veto them. Like it or not, we are stuck with them. Rather than pursue a fruitless debate over the felicitousness or otherwise of the words, which I shall continue to use, better to pay attention to the concepts.14 The concept of antisemitism provides a good example of the way a word evolves once it escapes into the world. Antisemitismus is a term that was

What Is Antisemitism Like?  45 coined in a particular place and epoch: Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century. New terms are coined for a reason. The reason in this case was to mark a departure from the old hatred of Jews with its vulgar name: Judenhass.15 The new term was a highfalutin word for a secular idea that reflected advances in modern science, especially the “science” of race; and racial ideas were fundamental for the völkisch nationalism that was on the rise and which led to the National Socialism of the Nazi era. Thus, the term “antisemitism” was initially associated with a quite specific phenomenon: a biologically based conception of Jewish identity and a political movement rooted in a racial ideology. But, despite the practice of some academics who prefer to confine the word to its original, narrow sense, the word is out of the box. Today, in its usual, everyday employment, “antisemitism” covers a broad spectrum of hostile attitudes and acts directed at Jews, whether those acts and attitudes are based in biological racism or not. Moreover, the reach of the word now spans the centuries. We speak of antisemitism in antiquity and of antisemitism today. This is how the word has come to be used; this is what it has come to mean. Neither its etymology nor its provenance determines its meaning; only its use in the language does.

Form and Content At the heart of the concept of antisemitism is not so much the Jew as the “Jew.”16 The scare quotes indicate that this is essentially a figment, a figure of fantasy or myth. I say essentially because it can happen that there are individuals who are Jewish and resemble this figure, but this does not make the figure any more real: it merely muddies the waters by imparting an empirical sheen to the stereotype. The stereotype is a frozen image projected onto the screen of a living person; the fact that the image might on occasion fit the reality does not affect its status as image. Or to make the same point in a different idiom: the logic of antisemitism in its formative stages might well be inductive, going from “Rothschild, who is Jewish, is powerful and wealthy” to “hence Jews in general are,” but it ends up being deductive: “Jews are powerful and wealthy, just look at Rothschild.” The “Jew” becomes a priori.17 Consider the case of Peter Rachman, whose name has become synonymous with “slum landlord.”18 In the 1950s, Rachman ruled over a property empire based in the Notting Hill area of west London, charging his low-income tenants high rents that they could barely afford. Rachman was Jewish. He was also, apparently, money-grubbing, unscrupulous, shady, exploitative: stock themes in the figure of the “Jew.” Thus, he was also “Jewish.” Antisemitism consists in collapsing this distinction, so that to be Jewish is to be “Jewish.” The image, so to speak, fastens on to the reality: it uses the reality to proclaim itself falsely as real. It is the same with Islamophobia. The same collusion, as it were, between reality and image occurred in May 2013 with the “Woolwich attack,” when an off-duty British army soldier, Lee Rigby, was attacked and killed by

46  Brian Klug Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale. The Daily Telegraph reported that the men, described as “Islamist terrorists,” “attempted to behead the soldier, hacking at him ‘like a piece of meat.’” One of them, “holding a knife and a meat cleaver and with his hands dripping with blood,” spoke into a witness’s video phone, swearing “by almighty Allah” and declaring: “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” As they carried out the attack, “one of the men shouted ‘Allahu akbar,’ or God is Great,” while according to another witness, “they appeared to pray next to the body as if the soldier were a ‘sacrifice.’”19 These descriptions could almost have been lifted from a manual of negative stereotypes of Islam. Almost every major trope is there: backwardness, callousness, bloodiness, an ethic of revenge, mindless worship of a merciless God, and so on. Thus, the perpetrators were not only Muslim, they were also “Muslim”: they acted out the script written into the Islamophobic figure of the “Muslim” before the eyes of witnesses. The witnesses did not imagine what they saw. The attack really occurred. Nonetheless, the figure is not real: it is no less fantastic—in the sense of being an image projected onto Muslims collectively—for having been incarnated on the streets of Woolwich. I speak of the figure of the Muslim and the figure of the Jew. This might suggest that at the heart of the concepts of Islamophobia and antisemitism is a fixed, finite stereotype that does not change over time. But this is not the case. Nor does it need to be the case. It is tempting to think that, if the stereotype changes, then the concept changes. But this is a misconception about concepts, the kind that Wittgenstein tackles in his later work. In The Blue Book, he points out that there is a “tendency to look for something in common to all the entities which we commonly subsume under a general term.” He explains, using the example of “game”: We are inclined to think that there must be something in common to all games, say, and that this common property is the justification for applying the general term “game” to the various games; whereas games form a family the members of which have family likenesses.20 The same can be said about the concepts of antisemitism and Islamophobia.21 One way of taking up this insight is to parse the two concepts into form and content. So, in the case of antisemitism, we can say that the form of the concept—the form of the figure at its heart—is this: “to be a Jew is to have traits a, b, c,” as though those traits constitute the being or essence of a Jew. The content of the concept would be a set or subset of traits that flesh out the form, describing what the “Jew” is like; for example, arrogant, legalistic, cunning, conniving, clannish, rootless, parasitic, power-grabbing, money-grubbing, and so on. At any given moment in time, the set is openended. And, as time passes, new traits might be added while others drop out. Moreover, in different instances of antisemitism different traits or combinations of traits might be selected or emphasised. But there is a family

What Is Antisemitism Like?  47 resemblance between the different instances that holds the concept together. Thus, the “Semite” of “antisemitism” is the Jude of Judenhass in modern dress: the figures are similar. This similarity is what enables the scope of the word “antisemitism” to expand, reaching backwards to cover what used to be called Judenhass, and forward to today, when the antisemite does not necessarily reduce Jewishness to biology. The use of the same word to span the centuries does not mean (as we might think) that there is a single, unchanging phenomenon that it names; this false impression is a trick of language. The elasticity in the meaning of the word “antisemitism” reflects the way that concepts in general work: they work, to use a Wittgensteinian metaphor, like a length of rope whose strength “does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.”22 The overlapping sets of defining traits inserted into the empty form “to be a Jew is to have traits a, b, c” are what constitute the figure of the “Jew.”23 It is the same, mutatis mutandis, with Islamophobia; and in this point of resemblance the analogy between the two concepts is at its strongest. They share the same general logic. Simon Weaver, in his study of websites where Jews and Muslims are the butt of malicious so-called humour, comes to the same conclusion: “the underlying logic of racism is the same” in both cases.24 Taking his cue from the work of Michel Wieviorka, he argues that there is a “dual logic” in racism: it either excludes the Other from society altogether or it includes the Other as an inferior.25 This makes the concept of the Other fundamental to the underlying logic of racism, and it implies that the Other is the general category under which the figures of “Jew” and “Muslim” can be subsumed. Now, the category of the Other can be given by the formula, “to be X is to have traits a, b, c,” in which the list of traits differentiates the Other from the insider. Thus, when we abstract the schemata of the concepts, we can see that “Jew” and “Muslim” share the logic of the Other. Sharing the same form, they share the same general logic. The specific logic of antisemitism and Islamophobia, however, is determined by the content of the concepts. That is to say, in each case, there is a particular bigoted discourse, and this discourse is shaped by the particular traits that make up the figures of “Jew” and “Muslim,” respectively. And here, the comparison becomes complicated. I shall speak first about similarities and then about differences. Since both are forms of Othering, it is not surprising if the figures of “Muslim” and “Jew” have certain attributes in common—attributes they share with other Others. But, over and above this, Judaism and Islam share a similar fate in certain ways. First, they are both religions, with, moreover, a troubled relationship to Christianity. Second, they were thrown together in the Enlightenment. Third, they are both part of the history of what Edward Said calls “Orientalism.”26 These three ways overlap and between them give rise to a number of affinities between antisemitism and Islamophobia. I shall comment on them briefly.

48  Brian Klug First, Judaism and Islam are religions.27 This is not to say that either Islamophobia or antisemitism is reducible to religious bigotry, though both can be expressed by attacking the religion in question. Nor is it to suggest that only Muslims and Jews who are devout are at risk. But, as the press coverage of the Woolwich attack reminds us, the scriptures associated with Judaism and Islam provide material that is grist for the racist mill. The so-called lex talionis, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” cited by one of the perpetrators of the attack, is in both the Hebrew bible (Exodus 21:23–25) and the Qur’an (5:45), which refers to the Exodus passage. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus refers to the same passage, but as a foil: he advocates turning the other cheek as a superior ethic (Matthew 5:38– 39). From this teaching, there developed over the centuries a persistent and powerful binary in Christian polemics, with Christianity on the side of the angelic—the loving, the forbearing, the forgiving—and Judaism and Islam occupying the other side: the legalistic, the vengeful, the merciless. This binary, over time, morphs into a duality between Us and Them, in which the Us is conceived as “western” or “British,” and which is played out on many different sites. One familiar site is the controversy over “ritual slaughter,” in which Jewish and Muslim methods of killing animals for food are singled out and targeted in the name of kindness to animals. Some of the phrases and images in the Daily Telegraph report that I cited earlier—the barbarism, the slaughterer with hands “dripping with blood” and the description of the victim as a “sacrifice”—are commonplaces in the periodic campaigns on this issue, peppering the polemic against Muslim and Jewish practices.28 The Enlightenment, by and large, assimilated and secularised the predominantly negative narrative about Islam and Judaism handed down to it by the very Christianity that it saw itself as overturning. The two religions tended to be seen as antithetical to the Enlightenment project: the project of promoting reason over unreason, science over myth, freedom over tyranny, and so on.29 As such, their unsavoury images overlapped. Furthermore, not only was Islam firmly located in the East by Enlightenment thinkers, but Judaism was widely seen as an Eastern interloper, the Jew as the Oriental within, “the Asiatics of Europe,” in Herder’s phrase.30 “The standard image of the Jews in eighteenth-century British caricature,” Sander Gilman tells us, “was the Maltese Jew in his oriental turban.”31 To Said, the connections are so intimate that in the introduction to Orientalism he goes so far as to say: “I have found myself writing the history of a strange, secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism.”32 There is, however, a limit to the sharing. Even commentators who, in Bunzl’s word, foreground the similarities between Islamophobia and antisemitism, acknowledge this limit. Take Thomas Linehan, who points out “discernible and significant analogies in the content of earlier antisemitism and the content of later Islamophobia.” He believes that these analogies “help shed light on the nature of the latter.” But he concedes that “there are some significant points of divergence.”33 He mentions two. First, while

What Is Antisemitism Like?  49 there is an antisemitic trope of the stubborn Jew stuck in antiquity, there is also, paradoxically, the image of the rootless Jew, the cosmopolitan agent of modernity, threatening traditional values and ways of life.34 There is no counterpart to this in the figure of the “Muslim.” Second, in contrast with the antisemitic image of the money-making Jew, Muslims are not, according to Linehan, correlated with capitalism in Islamophobic discourse. He adds: “neither is there an equivalent discourse alleging Muslim control and orchestration of international finance, as in the Jewish ‘hidden hand’ myth.”35 This amounts to a third point of divergence, since the “hidden hand” of the “Jew” has a wider reach, controlling not only the banks and markets but also the corridors of political power. As Nasar Meer and Tehsen Noorani observe: “it appears that a recurring feature of anti-Semitism [is] the way in which Jewish minorities were imagined to be exercising a hidden power, which contrasts with the way in which Muslims are currently represented.”36 That said, several commentators draw a parallel between the antisemitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Islamophobic “theory” of Eurabia, which, as Matthew Carr explains, casts Muslims as “agents in a conspiratorial program of world domination.”37 In the Eurabian nightmare, “a masochistic and suicidal Europe” surrenders to “Islamic cultural and religious domination.”38 Similarly, in The Victory of Judaism over Germandom, the 1879 pamphlet in which Wilhelm Marr laid the basis for his League of Antisemites, a weak and abject Germany has been invaded and dominated by Judaism.39 It could be argued that the “hidden hand” of the Protocols is absent in Eurabia, where the “Islamicisation” of Europe is in plain view. But Martha Nussbaum believes that “part of the stereotype (as in the case of Jews in the Protocols) is that the enemy is a master of disguises.”40 Referring to the widespread aversion in the West to the Islamic practice of women covering their face, she observes: “The obsessive focus on removing the veil follows a long tradition [. . .] of imagining the existence of a secret conspiracy that will pop out of hiding to kill us when its time is ripe.”41 This prompts the thought that the Islamic “hidden face” is the Jewish “hidden hand.” But is it? Or is the resemblance superficial? A complex and nuanced account is needed of the connotations of hiddenness in these two contexts. Likewise with the ways in which Judaism and Islam are represented in campaigns against “ritual slaughter.” How deep do the similarities go? In the Jewish case, there are echoes of the Medieval blood libel that are missing in the Muslim case. This harks back ultimately to a Christian image of the Jew as Christ-killer, leaving all Jews with blood on their hands. There is no such view of Muslims within Christianity. Equally, notwithstanding the similarities, the treatment of Judaism and Islam in the Enlightenment and in Orientalism are far from identical. How do the differences inflect the specific logics of “Muslim” and “Jew”? These are just some of the questions that arise when we compare the specific logics of antisemitism and Islamophobia. I shall, however, break off

50  Brian Klug the enquiry at this point. Enough has been said, I think, to show that for the purpose of elucidating the concept of antisemitism it is fruitful to ask whether there is an analogy with Islamophobia. As we have seen, there is no simple answer to this question. (Or, you could say that the simple answer is: yes and no.) But the more we pursue the question, the sharper our concept of antisemitism becomes.

The New Jews? In conclusion, as a kind of coda, I shall discuss the case that Matti Bunzl makes in his perceptive and thought-provoking essay “Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia” (to which I referred earlier) for a fundamental disanalogy between the two phenomena. Bunzl acknowledges that there is “some validity” to the parallel between antisemitism and Islamophobia.42 But, viewing the two phenomena in terms of their role or function in the bigger political picture, he believes that to “argue for the fundamental analogy [. . .] is misleading.”43 As he sees it, “while anti-Semitism was designed to protect the purity of the ethnic nation-state, Islamophobia is marshalled to safeguard the future of European civilisation.”44 Furthermore, on his account, the position of Jews in Europe has changed radically since 1945 with the emergence of a European political project from the ruins of the Second World War and the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust: “Jews no longer figure as the principal Other, but as the veritable embodiment of the postnational order.”45 At the same time, he argues, the far right no longer has Jews in its gunsights: the viewfinder has swivelled and now seeks out Muslims. If anything, far right parties try to recruit Jews to their anti-Muslim cause, and not without some limited success.46 In a nutshell: “Whereas traditional anti-Semitism has run its historical course with the supercession [sic] of the nation-state, Islamophobia is rapidly emerging as the defining condition of the new Europe.”47 Curiously, Bunzl could have expressed this same thesis by arguing for a “fundamental analogy”; such is the pliability of analogy. His main thesis, after all, is that Islamophobia is to the project of a postnational Europe what antisemitism was to the project of the ethnic nation-state. So, he might have argued that fundamentally they serve a similar function: each is the Other to the dominant political project of its time. Similarly, when asked the question “Are Muslims the new Jews of Europe?” he could have said “yes,” for the reason that they are the defining Other of today, but he replied “no,” for the reason that Muslims are not “about to be targeted for something like a second Holocaust.”48 He chooses to deny a “fundamental analogy” because he wants to emphasise what he sees as a fundamental change in the bigger political picture: the shift from the ethnically pure nation-state to the postnational idea of a unified Europe. And if, despite his insights, I take issue with him, it is not because I think a “second Holocaust” is on the

What Is Antisemitism Like?  51 horizon but because I am not as persuaded as he is that the bigger picture has changed fundamentally. There are two main reasons for my reservations. First, even in the heyday of ethnic nationalism, an idea of Europe and the superiority of European civilisation lurked in the background and came to the surface in antisemitic discourse. Consider this remark: “It is only when [he] insists upon posing as a European, and being judged as a European, that one realises what an obnoxious creature he is, and how utterly out of place in a European country and in European society.” This is not a latter-day Islamophobe speaking about Muslims but Joseph Banister writing in 1901 in England under the Jews.49 Furthermore, beneath the surface of the multiple nationalisms that divided Europe there was a broad-brush racism: for the most part, the various ethnicities were different shades of white, where white was the colour of Europe as distinct from the brown of Asia, the black of Africa, and so on. The same passage in Banister illustrates the point. It continues thus: “His [the Jew’s] newspaper organs may flatter him by representing him as possessing all the moral and intellectual qualities of the European, but all the same he is an Asiatic, with all the Asiatic’s habits, principles, prejudices, ideas and morals.”50 Banister was an Edwardian antisemite. But this ­sentence—the second half at least—could almost have fallen from the lips of an Islamophobe today. “Eurabia” might be “Eurasia.” So, in both cases and in both eras, there is a civilisational discourse that is also racialised.51 Second, the “postnational order” does not yet exist. It remains a noble idea, a work in progress with a long way to go before it comes about—if it ever does. Though the hyphen that once linked “nation” to “state” might be fading, Europe is still a collection of nations and states; and while the civil concept of the nation now trumps the ethnic, the “neutral” liberal state passes laws with a pronounced national accent. I am not thinking only of the way laïcité works in France. Nonetheless, it is worth quoting from Paul Silverstein’s response to Bunzl’s premise about the place of the nation today: In their experiences of institutionalised discrimination, French Muslim men and women do not, pace Bunzl, face the nation as superceded [sic]. They precisely feel excluded from a nation whose citizenship they nominally hold, but whose recent laws [. . .] appear to disproportionately victimise them.52 In short, the old Europe is more like the new Europe, and the new Europe more like the old, than Bunzl’s argument assumes. The bigger political picture has changed—but perhaps not as much as he suggests. And this affects the question of whether we say that there is a “fundamental analogy” between the way that Islamophobia functions today and the way antisemitism functioned in the past. Basically, the more the gap between the two Europes shrinks, the stronger the analogy gets and the more pertinent it becomes. In my view, asserting it is more useful than not.

52  Brian Klug It comes to this. In a given historical or political context, the question to ask is not “Are Islamophobia and antisemitism analogous?” but “What is the analogy worth?” Is it worth asserting or better to deny it? The value of the analogy lies in the light it sheds on the empirical context within which we consider it. If it illuminates more than it obscures, embrace it. If the opposite, reject it. These things are a matter of judgment. Alluding to the turn of the twentieth century, Maleiha Malik writes: “Despite important differences, the treatment of British Jews provides an illuminating comparison with contemporary anti-Muslim racism.”53 On the whole, I agree.54 Finally, while Bunzl argues convincingly that in the context of the European Union Jews have moved from being “the principal Other” to being the “veritable embodiment” of the postnational idea, I am not so sanguine about the future. On the one hand, as he points out, many far-right parties are wooing Jews with their anti-Muslim agenda and for this reason dropping antisemitism like a hot potato.55 Meanwhile, Judaism has been written into the script of mainstream Europe via the cliché “Judeo-Christian,” an amity from which Islam is conspicuously excluded. On the other hand, as Dave Rich observes, “What targets one community at one time can very easily move on to target another community if the climate changes.”56 And the climate does change. When I read that the “modern form of anti-Semitism has run its historical course,”57 I am reminded of another bold pronouncement: that the spread of liberal democracy spells “the end of history.”58 But history has a habit of turning full stops into commas. Bunzl’s remark lights up the terrain of the present but both he and Fukuyama seem to forget that the clock is ticking and that formations from the past can reappear in a new guise. Aperçus like theirs can certainly be clarifying, drawing our attention to a turning of the tide in human affairs, but always, their value is limited. Like analogies.

Notes 1. This chapter is adapted from “The Limits of Analogy: Comparing Islamophobia and Antisemitism,” Patterns of Prejudice 48, no. 5 (2014): 442–59. 2. The reasons for choosing Islamophobia will become apparent. 3. See, for example, David Cesarani, “Are Muslims the New Jews? Comparing Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism in Britain and Europe” (2008), available online at www.isgap.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/cesarani-paper.doc (accessed 23 November 2017) and Maleiha Malik, “Muslims Are Now Getting the Same Treatment Jews Had a Century Ago,” Guardian, 2 February 2007, available online at www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/feb/02/­ comment.religion1 (accessed 23 November 2017). 4. Sindre Bangstad and Matti Bunzl, “‘Anthropologists Are Talking’ About Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism in the New Europe,” Ethnos 75, no. 2 (2010): 215. 5. Ibid. 6. Matti Bunzl, “Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia,” in Matti Bunzl, Anti-­Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007), 1–46.

What Is Antisemitism Like?  53 7. Bunzl, Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. The responses are by Dan Diner, Paul Silverstein, Adam Sutcliffe, Esther Benbassa, Susan Buck-Morss, and myself. 8. Richard S. Levy, “Antisemitism, Etymology of,” in Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution, vol. 1, ed. Richard S. Levy (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005), 24. The word could also be looked at as a combination of two affixes, “anti” and “ism,” plus the stem, “Semite”; it comes to the same thing. 9. Ibid. 10. S. Sayyid, “Out of the Devil’s Dictionary,” in Thinking through Islamophobia: Global Perspectives, ed. S. Sayyid and AbdoolKarim Vakil (London: Hurst & Co, 2010), 13. 11. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), 20. 12. Fred Halliday, for example, argues that “the more accurate term is not ‘Islamophobia’ but ‘anti-Muslimism’”: “‘Islamophobia’ Reconsidered,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 22, no. 5 (1999): 898. See also his Islam and the Myth of Confrontation: Religion and Politics in the Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996), ch. 6, where he introduces the term “anti-Muslimism.” 13. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 37. The interlocutor is imaginary (and could be himself). 14. As with antisemitism, there is always room for debate about what account to give of the concept of Islamophobia and of its relationship to neighbouring concepts, such as xenophobia. But the claim that it has no basis in reality does not hold up. See Brian Klug, “Islamophobia: A Concept Comes of Age,” Ethnicities 12, no. 5 (2012): 665–81. 15. Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 5. See also Richard L. Rubinstein and John K. Roth, Approaches to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and Its Legacy (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1987), 28. 16. The analysis of antisemitism in this section follows the analysis I first gave in “The Collective Jew: Israel and the New Antisemitism,” Patterns of Prejudice 37, no. 2 (2003): 117–38. I have refined the analysis most recently in “Interrogating ‘New Anti-Semitism,’” in Racialization and Religion: Race, Culture and Difference in the Study of Antisemitism and Islamophobia, ed. Nasar Meer (London: Routledge, 2014), 84–98. 17. Similarly, Geoffrey Brahm Levey and Tariq Modood have observed: “What we are now witnessing in the treatment of Muslims in the West is the shift from inductive to deductive generalisations about them”: “Liberal Democracy, Multicultural Citizenship and the Danish Cartoon Affair,” in Secularism, Religion and Multicultural Citizenship, ed. Geoffrey Brahm Levey and Tariq Modood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 239. See also Nasar Meer, “Semantics, Scales and Solidarities in the Study of Antisemitism and Islamophobia,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36, no. 3 (2013): 503. 18. “Rachmanism” is a word in the Oxford English Dictionary. Rachman’s exploits (or exploitations) led to the Rent Act of 1965, which gave tenants security of tenure. 19. Gordon Rayner and Steven Swinford, “Woolwich Attack: Terrorist Proclaimed ‘an Eye for an Eye’ after Attack,” Daily Telegraph, 22 May 2013, available online at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/10073910/ Woolwich-attack-terrorist-proclaimed-an-eye-for-an-eye-after-attack.html (accessed 23 November 2017). 20. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the “Philosophical Investigations” (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), 17.

54  Brian Klug 21. Compare Sayyid: the aim of this book is to think Islamophobia “through the notion of a family resemblance based on overlapping similarities,” in Thinking through Islamophobia, 2. 22. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 32. 23. This oversimplifies it. The figure of the “Jew” is not just the sum of its traits but the character that results from the way those traits are put together. Even this is too quick, but it must suffice for the present purpose. 24. Simon Weaver, “A Rhetorical Discourse Analysis of Online Anti-Muslim and Anti-Semitic Jokes,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36, no. 3 (2013): 483. On the other hand, he found that “the stereotypes and exclusions of Muslims and Jews presented in the jokes are not the same” (483). 25. Weaver, “A Rhetorical Discourse Analysis,” 485. 26. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books 1979). 27. Elsewhere I have argued against the idea that Judaism can be adequately summed up as a religion: see my Offence: The Jewish Case (London: Seagull Books 2009), 5–27. But let that pass. 28. See Brian Klug, “Ritual Murmur: The Undercurrent of Protest against Religious Slaughter of Animals in Britain in the 1980s,” Patterns of Prejudice 23, no. 2 (1989): 16–28. See also Tony Kushner, “Stunning Intolerance: Opposition to Religious Slaughter in Twentieth Century Britain,” Jewish Quarterly 133 (1989): 16–20. 29. I develop this theme in “Dealing with Difference: Jews, Muslims and the British Left Today,” European Leo Baeck Institute Lecture, 16 May 2013 (unpublished). 30. Johann Gottfried Herder, quoted in Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar, “Orientalism and the Jews: An Introduction,” in Orientalism and the Jews, ed. Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar (Waltham: Brandeis University Press 2005), xiv. Herder (1744–1803) is a figure of both the Enlightenment and the Romantic reaction that followed. Kalmar and Penslar observe: “orientalist depiction of the Jews was common in the late eighteenth century.” (xvi) It persisted into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 31. Sander L. Gilman, “Can the Experience of Diaspora Judaism Serve as a Model for Islam in Today’s Multicultural Europe?” in Sander L. Gilman, Multiculturalism and the Jews (London: Routledge, 2006), 8. 32. Said, Orientalism, 27. There is a voluminous literature on Said’s general thesis about Orientalism as well as his specific take on antisemitism. 33. Thomas Linehan, “Comparing Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Asylophobia: The British Case,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 12, no. 2 (2012): 380. 34. I have slightly embellished what Linehan says. 35. Linehan, “Comparing Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Asylophobia,” 380. 36. Nasar Meer and Tehsen Noorani, “A Sociological Comparison of Anti-­ Semitism and Anti-Muslim Sentiment in Britain,” The Sociological Review 52, no. 2 (2008): 209. This article is notable for its careful, measured approach, drawing attention to significant analogies and disanalogies. 37. Matthew Carr, “The Moriscos: A Lesson from History?” Arches Quarterly 4, no. 8 (2011): 14. 38. Ibid. 39. See the excerpt in Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 331–33. 40. Martha C. Nussbaum, The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 237. 41. Ibid., 24.

What Is Antisemitism Like?  55 2. Bunzl, “Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia,” 45. 4 43. Ibid., 14. 44. Ibid., 45. 45. Ibid., 14. 46. Ibid., 37–43. 47. Ibid., 4. 48. Bangstad and Bunzl, “‘Anthropologists Are Talking’ About Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism in the New Europe,” 214–15. 49. Joseph Bannister, quoted in Bernard Harris, “Anti-Alienism, Health and Social Reform in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain,” Patterns of Prejudice 31, no. 4 (1997): 6. 50. Quoted in ibid. The passage begins: “While not possessed of the courage of some Asiatic races, the immateriality of others, and the love of cleanliness of others, [the Jew] is nevertheless a fair specimen of the Asiatic brand of man.” In other words, the Jew is cowardly, materialistic, and dirty—classic antisemitic qualities—and thus a poor “specimen” of the “brand.” But there is a brand: a broad racial identity that he calls “Asiatic.” 51. On Islamophobia as the racialisation of Muslims, see Nasar Meer and Tariq Modood, “The Racialisation of Muslims,” in Thinking through Islamophobia, 69–83. Also Nasar Meer and Tariq Modood, “Refutations of Racism in the ‘Muslim Question,’” Patterns of Prejudice 43, nos. 3–4 (2009): 335–54. 52. Paul Silverstein, “Comment on Bunzl,” in Bunzl, Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, 63–64. 53. Maleiha Malik, “Muslims Are Now Getting the Same Treatment Jews Had a Century Ago,” Guardian, 2 February 2007, available online at www.­ theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/feb/02/comment.religion1 (accessed 23 November 2017). 54. For a model of how to handle the question with both balance and sensitivity, see Sabine Schiffer and Constantin Wagner, “Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia— New Enemies, Old Patterns,” Race and Class 52, no. 3 (2011): 77–84. See also, Racialization and Religion. The book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies 36, no. 3 (2013). 55. Bunzl, “Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia,” 37–43; Bangstad and Bunzl, “‘Anthropologists Are Talking’ About Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism in the New Europe,” 225. The far right also lean towards Israel in the Israeli-­ Palestinian conflict, thus exploiting a further wedge between Muslims and Jews. 56. Dave Rich quoted in Anne Karpf, “Don’t Be Fooled. Europe’s Racists Are Not Discerning,” Guardian, 28 March 2012, 30. 57. Bunzl, “Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia,” 24. 58. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin, 1992), xi. Fukuyama had second thoughts about his thesis—see his “Second Thoughts: The Last Man in a Bottle,” The National Interest 56 (1999): 16–33.

Part II

Antisemitism without Jews

5 Reception of Medieval European Anti-Jewish Concepts in Late Medieval and Early Modern Norway Yvonne Friedman

In his Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism, Robert Chazan lists five reasons for animosity toward Jews in medieval Northern Europe: 1) Jews were immigrants and newcomers; 2) they were the only legitimate dissenters in a religiously cohesive area; 3) they were business competitors, and 4) they were sworn allies of the barony. Finally, 5) the historic Christian legacy portrayed Jews as implacable enemies of the Christian faith and Christians, and as seeking to do them harm.1 Of these five reasons, only the last seems pertinent to pre-seventeenth-century Norway. Norway was a latecomer on the Christian commonwealth scene, and no Jews resided in Norway before the early modern period. Nonetheless, even in the absence of a Jewish presence, a number of laws referring to Jews were promulgated in medieval Norway. Of greater significance, however, was the spread of anti-Jewish concepts. In 1958, Bjarne Berulfsen concluded that although these anti-Jewish concepts were literary imports from Europe, they nonetheless became part of Norway’s normative heritage.2 This paper explores aspects of that “normative” heritage and its reception. Found in what I term the Biblia pauperum, Norwegian manifestations of anti-Jewish concepts are mainly preserved in homilies, miracle stories, and church art. The primary audience for these sources was the lay public, and they may well have had a more profound and far-reaching influence than written treatises.

Were There Ever Any Jews in Norway? Before discussing the reception of anti-Jewish concepts in Norway, we must first ask whether there were any Jews in medieval Norway, a question that was recently the subject of a computerised search of Norwegian legal and literary sources conducted by Jan Engh.3 To date, no historian has found any written evidence of an actual Jewish presence in medieval Norway.4 Surviving Norwegian documents from the Middle Ages are scarce, but they are rich enough that we cannot exclude the possibility that something might have been overlooked by earlier historians who sifted through the originals or reliable printed editions. Negative findings are as essential in our context as they are difficult to prove, thus a search in the newly developed digital

60  Yvonne Friedman versions of the documents was carried out. More precisely: a search was conducted of the digitised versions of the two main sources for our knowledge of daily life in medieval Norway, the Regesta norvegica and the Diplomatarium Norvegicum. In the former case, The National Archives website (www.dokpro.uio.no/dipl_norv/om-regesta.html) was searched, and in the latter, the Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog website, which is partly based on the Diplomatarium Norvegicum. In contrast to Christian literary sources, to which I will return later, the above sources contain testaments, contracts, legal cases, etc. It is, of course, possible that there were Jews in Norway who left no written traces, but this search, the results of which have yet to be published, yielded nothing new. The only Jews found were virtual constructs. These “virtual Jews” receive indirect mention in the law and in church legislation. In 1025, the saintly King Olaf legislated that Christianity was obligatory for all of the king’s subjects, and this was reiterated in Magnus the Law-Mender’s national law of 1274.5 This law, however, made no explicit mention of Jews. There is an indirect reference to Jews in an edict dated 20 December 1436—a Provinsialstatut promulgated by Archbishop Aslak Bolt forbidding Norwegians to keep the Sabbath in the Jewish fashion.6 If there were no Jews in Norway, what motivated the promulgation of this law? It would appear that in this case, Jews were symbols of nonChristian behaviour, given that two years later they were mentioned again, this time in the company of heathens. There is no evidence that the more iudeorum was the result of any real Jewish threat. It does, however, suggest that an actual problem sparked the bishop’s legislation, although we do not know its precise nature.7 In the same way the parish priest Laurits Lauritson from Tønsberg reported on 17 July 1552 that one Niels Olssøn had asked him a “Jewish question” som ingen christen, men som en jøde (“not like any Christian, but like a Jew”). Apparently, no real Jew was needed to define an insulting question as Jewish.8 In the seventeenth century, the Danish king allowed a small group of Portuguese Jews to settle in Norway—all of them connected to the same merchant families,9 thus strengthening the stereotype of Jews both as economic agents of the king and as the embodiment of greed and wickedness. This situation did not, however, lead to a change in the law; these Jews received exceptional privileges (leidebrev), whereas any other Jews found in Norway were fined 1,000 riksdaler. Following the Reformation, the same exclusionary approach was applied to another perceived religious threat—the Jesuits. In 1814, Jews and Jesuits were forbidden admission to Norway. Both were seen as a threat to a Christian state that allowed only true believers. Only in 1851, after a lengthy debate, were Jews legally permitted to enter Norway.

Anti-Jewish Concepts without Jews To understand the presence of anti-Jewish views in the absence of Jews, it is necessary not only to study the anti-Jewish ideas that were imported into

Anti-Jewish Concepts  61 Norway with Christianity, but also to look at their reception.10 Were these ideas literary constructs disseminated by intellectuals: for example, by bishops who had studied in Europe and picked up the undertones of the religion they learned, or, were they spread by the lower ranks of the clergy? How were these concepts received by the lay society that was dependent on the church leaders for its Christian education?11 The extant evidence shows that what I term the Biblia pauperum—homilies, legends, and church art—was the main means of disseminating Christianity and with it anti-Jewish concepts, among the Norwegian laity. In my search for Jews in the Norwegian literary sources, I specifically started with the thirteenth-century Norse book of homilies. Contrary to my expectations, the Palm Sunday and Easter homilies were relatively mild in their description of the behaviour of the Jews. I quote from the Palm Sunday homily: Christ patiently suffered the Jews’ blows and chains, their accusations and lies, their mockery and contempt, so that he could free us from the chains of sin, from the suffering of hell, and the coming of the devils and their triumphant mockery. So should we also suffer with patience the evil done to us by our neighbours, so that through our patience we will be led to the right path.12 The homily goes on to describe Jesus as granting salvation to the weak and to those “who do not know,” but not to the wicked. The emphasis both here and in the Easter homily, in which I found no description of the Jews’ part in the Crucifixion, is on inculcating proper Christian behaviour. The Easter homily was mainly an allegorical exegesis of the Crucifixion, focusing on what the lay Christian seeking proper conduct could learn from the placement of Christ on the cross—the way his head, arms, legs, and so on were positioned. The Jews are referred to as unbelievers who have lost their chance of salvation, but they are not the main protagonists of the story; nor is much emphasis placed on Christ’s suffering, something that is characteristic of later meditative descriptions. It seems as if the priest preaching to the lay Christian community was more interested in another issue—namely, the symbolic meaning of the Passion. Thus: “Let us do all we can to strengthen justice and proper behaviour and to break with all wrong and evil, so that we will not be like the Jews, who gave Jesus over to death and preferred to free a criminal. Let us foster patience in our hearts and seemliness in our speech, so that in our patience we’ll be like the suffering Christ.”13 Here the portrayal of the Jews is not far from that found in the Gospels—they are depicted negatively, but not as a real threat. Arnved Nedkvitne compared lay religion in Norway to a buffet dinner where individuals could freely choose from different dishes that somebody else had prepared and set before them.14 The caterer was usually the priest who, unlike the more learned bishops, had not studied abroad. The priests viewed their main task as teaching Christianity as a religion of salvation,

62  Yvonne Friedman using miracles to convince the parishioners of the new religion’s truth and power. The miracles were generally taken from Scripture, with a focus on those connected to the Virgin Mary. The prominence of Mary in lay belief is demonstrated not just by the vernacular legends about her in Maríu saga,15 but also by the fact that she is mentioned in runic sticks from Brygge in Bergen, a type of text that can be seen as a meeting point between literate and illiterate Christians16 who saw the cult of Mary as central to their beliefs and rituals. In this, they echo the popular twelfth-century European currents.

Mary and the Jews Accounts of the Marian cult and legends found in Norwegian texts indicate a close connection to anti-Jewish stereotypes found elsewhere in Europe. The most famous legend—the Jewish boy thrown into an oven by his father and saved by the Heavenly Mother—can be traced back to the sixth century, with the incident allegedly taking place in Constantinople. In Maríu saga, the Jewish boy accompanies a friend to church and receives the host. Upon his return home, his enraged father throws him, like another Daniel, into the burning oven, from which he is saved by Mary, who wraps her mantle around him.17 Because of this miracle, he and his mother convert to Christianity. His wicked father, however, remains sceptical. In another version, the father himself is thrown into the oven and burned to death. In the Draumkvedet version, the story is embellished: the boy sees an icon of the mother of God with Jesus in her lap and smiles at her. When he receives the host, it turns into a bleeding piece of meat. As a result, the boy recognises the truth and tries to convince his parents to convert, and they throw him into the oven.18 We might think that this use of a sixth-century legend reflects a slower process of reception of Christian lore in Norway as compared to elsewhere in Europe, where we find the development of theological anti-Jewish polemics. But, as Miri Rubin has shown, this story gained a new lease on life in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe. It developed from a miracle story of conversion into a legend connected to the host, and later to host desecration, and ultimately was used to incite blood libels.19 Thus, the Scandinavian version of the legend in Maríu saga and in the homilies book was in fact au courant with the anti-Jewish miracle stories told in Europe. It did not, however, spark accusations of host desecration or blood libels. It seems that such accusations required the presence of real Jews, whether as scapegoats in cases of social unrest or fear of plagues or as a way of demonising an Other who had a real place in society and was perceived as a threat.20 Other anti-Jewish miracles are recounted in Maríu saga, including the story of a Jew who lent money to a Christian, who used Mary and her son as guarantors. When unjustly accused of not having returned the money, the borrower was saved by an icon of Mary, who was also behind the

Anti-Jewish Concepts  63 miraculous manner by which the money was returned to the Jew.21 There is also the story of Jews caught red-handed abusing a wax effigy of Christ, who were punished accordingly.22 Also related is the miracle of a Jewish woman who was saved during childbirth by invoking Mary’s name,23 and in fact invoking Mary’s name was not an unusual phenomenon in twelfthcentury Ashkenaz.24 Nonetheless, the legend of the Jewish boy thrown into the oven remained the most popular.

Visual Depictions: The Altar Frontal Arnved Nedkvitne sees miracle stories as one of the two most important means used to preach and implant Christianity in medieval Norway—the other being the promise of salvation. The Church made miracles known not only through homilies and legends, but also through church art. Of the thirty-one extant painted altar frontals from medieval Norwegian churches, eight depict miracles. Half of those miracle depictions are connected to Mary, once again demonstrating her prominence in popular belief. Nedkvitne analyses the Årdal II altar frontal, on which the legend of the Jewish boy saved from the furnace by Mary appears opposite Christ’s harrowing of hell. He notes Mary’s participation in what he views as the most important

Figure 5.1  Årdal II, University Museum of Bergen MA 130. Courtesy of University Museum of Bergen/Photographer Svein Skare.

64  Yvonne Friedman aspect of medieval Norwegian Christianity—working toward the salvation of mankind.25 The Årdal church, in Sogn in western Norway, not far from Bergen, is not a major cathedral where one would expect the ornamentation to be influenced by contemporary art and beliefs from abroad. It can be viewed as an example of the local Christianity preached to the laity, and, as such, the altar frontal can be seen as a counterpart to the texts we have discussed. It should be kept in mind, however, that it is from a later period, tentatively dated to after 1300.26 The Crucifixion is the central theme of the altar frontal, giving prominence to Christ’s suffering, the flowing of his blood and his wounds. Beside him stands his mother, the Virgin Mary, whose heart is being pierced by a sword descending out of nowhere—a detailed dramatisation of her suffering (fig. 5.1).27 In contrast to contemporary and later depictions in Denmark and England, where the Jews’ part as tormentors is emphasised, we do not see those responsible for the suffering. In this instance, one could say that the Son’s suffering pierces his mother’s heart.28 The side panels of the altar frontal portray different themes: the panels on the right show Christ ascending from his tomb in a resurrection scene; in the lower panel, he is seen harrowing hell and bringing salvation to humankind, symbolised by Adam and Eve. The left side is more sinister. At the top, Christ is carrying the cross on the way to his Crucifixion and is being pulled by a rope. The drawing of the tormentor who drags him has been damaged, so his facial features can no longer be made out. What is discernible are his devilish grin and dark complexion (fig. 5.2). Comparison to similar paintings from medieval England makes it possible to identify him as a Jew.29 A comparison with an earlier crucifixion scene painted on the chancel ceiling at Ål Church, Hallingdal in Buskerud proves the identifications of the tormentor as a Jew, as he wears a typical Jewish hat, and his dark complexion and crooked nose are accentuated (fig. 5.3). The attributes common to both paintings show that this anti-Jewish interpretation of the scene had become commonplace. The Icelandic poem on the suffering of Jesus has a detailed description of this torment: “The Jewish people went up with cruelty and scorn and spat on him for a long time; they bound, injured, beat and mocked the one who is both man and our true God, fierce men chose a multitude of all kinds of torture for the prince of glory.”30 Given that only half of the Årdal panel is extant, it is impossible to prove any connection to this text. The lower scene, of which only half has been preserved, depicts the legend of the Jewish boy, clearly marked by a disproportionately long nose and adult look. Mary is holding him under her mantle to save him from the fire in the furnace. Although now missing, the wicked Jewish father who threw his son into the oven and the mother who saw the miracle and converted were probably portrayed in the painting (fig. 5.4). Note, however, that in contrast with the thirteenth-century European emphasis on Jewish agency and evil intent, the Årdal’s central Crucifixion

Anti-Jewish Concepts  65

Figure 5.2  Detail of Årdal II, University Museum of Bergen MA 130. Courtesy of University Museum of Bergen/Photographer Svein Skare.

scene lacks a depiction of Jewish malevolence toward Christ31 like that found in the text of the homilies. Take, for example, the prominence in Maríu saga of the mother who laments, “Why did the most horrible Jews crucify you?”32 Although the stabbed mother later recurs in the French Books of Hours, this is not the conventional depiction of the Stabat mater (figs. 5.5, 5.6).33 The angle of the sword piercing her breast connects her sorrow directly to her son’s wounds; she is being pierced by his suffering. The same angle appears in the Kinsarvik altar-frontal painting of the Crucifixion that depicts

66

Yvonne Friedman

Figure 5.3 Detail of Ål Church, University of Oslo Museum of Cultural History, C11707. Photo: Eirik Irgens Johnsen.

Longinus wounding Jesus with his lance with the symbolic figures of Ecclesia and Synagoga looking on.34 In the Årdal II altar frontal, there are no other figures in the scene, and the drama of the suffering mother is almost as central as the Passion itself. As a Biblia pauperum painted to convey the story of the Gospel to the same kind of lay believers who made up the audience for the miracle stories, this painting might also have conveyed an anti-Jewish sentiment.35 Isaiah Berlin is said to have defined antisemitism as hating Jews more than is absolutely necessary. Using this ironic definition one can ask: how much was absolutely necessary in Norway, given its Christian heritage? Did becoming Christian in the eleventh century automatically include hating Jews as the ultimate Christ-killers?36 We can certainly distinguish between the early Christian anti-Jewish polemics based mainly on Scripture and the full-fledged, more virulent twelfth-century European anti-Jewish concepts that verged on aggression, often crossing the line separating thought from action. I have shown elsewhere how Peter the Venerable used the guilt of the Jews at the Crucifixion to dehumanise his religious opponents, on one occasion concluding a tirade on the inhumanity of the Jews with the

Anti-Jewish Concepts  67

Figure 5.4  Detail of Årdal II, University Museum of Bergen MA 130. Courtesy of University Museum of Bergen/Photographer Svein Skare.

following outburst: “Who would contain our hands of your blood if not for the explicit psalm saying: Kill them not lest my people be unmindful.”37 As Anthony Bale has shown, this form of hatred needed no real Jews; for example, the Jews’ role in tormenting and ridiculing the suffering Christ was more vehemently attacked in England after the Jews were expelled, hitting its crescendo in fourteenth-century meditative literature.38 However, in Norway, a more recent Christian society, we do not see the development of such strong anti-Jewish attitudes; instead, Jews were simply portrayed as wicked in a general way. In the homilies, the most frequent description is jødenes ondskap, i.e., the wickedness of the Jews.39

68  Yvonne Friedman

Figure 5.5  Bibliothèques-Médiathèques de Metz, Ms. 1588, fol. 204r.

The anti-Jewish sentiments voiced in homilies, miracle stories, and church art were part of an effort to communicate Christianity to the laity, emphasising the importance of salvation. As we have seen, developments on the European mainland, especially with regard to the Marian cult, exercised strong influence on Norwegian anti-Jewish concepts. However, even if the anti-Jewish sentiments expressed in the legends were comparable to what we see in contemporary Europe, I would suggest that, as a recently Christianised country, Norway lacked the full-fledged development of anti-Jewish theology, and that the laity was only presented with the generally negative connotations associated with Jews. The anti-Jewish concepts that were in

Anti-Jewish Concepts  69

Figure 5.6  Baltimore, The Walters Art Museum, W. 104, fol. 1r.

vogue elsewhere in Europe may have been imported by Norwegian bishops who studied or travelled abroad, but they did not take root in the same way as they had in their original surroundings. To conclude, medieval Norway was not a persecuting society, as evidenced by the fact that the pagan Sámi were left undisturbed until the seventeenth century.40 Nonetheless, the introduction of Christianity into Norway was accompanied by the reception of anti-Jewish concepts that proved sufficient to make Norwegians unwilling to accept real Jews in their midst. It was not until 1851 that Jews were finally permitted to settle in Norway.41

70  Yvonne Friedman

Notes 1. Robert Chazan, Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 17. 2. Bjarne Berulfsen, “Antisemittisme som literær importvare,” Edda 58 (1958): 123–44. 3. Jan Engh, Senior Academic Librarian—Humanities and Social Sciences Library, University Library of Oslo. I thank him for sharing the as-yet-unpublished results of his research. 4. Oskar Mendelsohn, Jødenes Historie i Norge gjennom 300 år, vol. 1 (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1969), 5–42; Kirsti Lothe Jacobsen, Jøders rettsstilling i Norge: en historisk oversikt frem til 1851 (Bergen: Bibliotek for Juridiske Fag, Utstilling III, 2006). 5. Mendelsohn, Jødenes Historie i Norge gjennom 300 år, 9. 6. “Item prohibemus sub eadem pena proxime predicta ne quis decertero feriando festiuet sabbatum more Judeorum” (We forbid with the same punishment mentioned above that anyone shall keep the Sabbath the Jewish way), Norges gamle love, ser. 2, vol. 1, no. 2, Kirkens lovgivning, 1388–1604 (Christiania: Grøndahl, 1912), 552. This appears also in Diplomatarium Norvegicum, vol. 5, 469–73 (no. 659) in Latin and in vol. 7, 390–92 (no. 396) from Bergen in Old Norwegian. 7. Norges gamle love, ser. 2, vol. 1, no. 2, Kirkens lovgivning, 552; Jacobsen, Jøders rettsstilling i Norge, 6. Mendelsohn (Jødenes Historie i Norge gjennom 300 år, 9) thought it was promulgated against workers who wanted a day off from work, but why would that be part of Church legislation? 8. Diplomatarium Norvegicum, no. 1129, available online via www.dokpro.uio. no/dipl_norv/diplom_felt.html (accessed 23 November 2017). 9. Christian IV granted safe conduct to Gabriel Gomez and Emmanuel Texeira, both brothers-in-law of Albert Dionis (1621–51); Mendelsohn, Jødenes Historie i Norge gjennom 300 år, 9. 10. For the theory of literary reception, see the Konstanz school, e.g. Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1989); and Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). 11. Sverre Bagge, Cross and Scepter: The Rise of the Scandinavian Kingdoms from the Vikings to the Reformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 176–89. 12. Erik Gunnes, ed., and Astrid Salvesen, trans., Gammelnorsk Homiliebok (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1971), 86. 13. “In die sancto pasce sermo ad populum” (Gamal Norsk Homiliebok, 81–87; Gammelnorsk Homiliebok, 88); Draumkvedet, 161–62. 14. Arnved Nedkvitne, Lay Belief in Norse Society (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2009), 21. 15. Maríu saga: Legender om Jomfru Maria og hendes Jertegn, ed. Carl Richard Unger (Christiania: Brögger & Christie, 1871). 16. Terje Spurkland, “How Christian Were the Norwegians in the High Middle Ages? The Runic Evidence,” in Epigraphic Literacy and Christian Identity: Modes of Written Discourse in the Newly Christian European North, ed. Kristel Zilmer and Judith Jesch (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 183–200. 17. Maríu saga, 71–72. 18. Draumkvedet, 131–32. 19. Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 8–32; Denise Despres, “Immaculate Flesh

Anti-Jewish Concepts  71 and the Social Body: Mary and the Jews,” Jewish History 12, no. 1 (1998): 47–69. 20. Yvonne Friedman, “Christian Hatred of the Other: Theological vs. Political Reality,” in Fear and Loathing in the North: Jews and Muslims in Medieval Scandinavia and the Baltic Region, ed. Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 192–94. It should, however, be noted that in the case of the accusations at Visby, the region was under strong German influence, and the incident may have been part of what Berulfsen referred to as a “cultural import.” 21. Maríu saga, 87–92. 22. Ibid., 110: “‘Af likneski várs herra’; And when the archbishop came to their synagogue (tinghus) there was found a statue made of wax, in the likeness of a living man. It was battered and spit-drenched and there were many people of the Jewish people falling on their knees before the statue, some slapped it on the cheek. And there stood a cross nearby and the Jews had intended to nail that statue to the cross for the mockery and insult of our Lord Jesus Christ and all who believed in Him. And when the Christians saw this, then they destroyed that statue and killed all the Jews who were present.” 23. Maríu saga, 1058. 24. Elisheva Baumgarten, “Women’s Rites: The Custom of the ‘Sabbath of the Parturient’ and Its Cultural Context in Early Modern Europe” [in Hebrew], in Studies on the History of the Jews of Ashkenaz: Presented to Eric Zimmer, ed. Gershon Bacon, Daniel Sperber, and Aharon Gaimani (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2008), 11–12. 25. Nedkvitne, Lay Belief in Norse Society, 66. 26. Unn Plahter et al., Painted Altar Frontals of Norway, 1250–1350, vol. 1 (London: Archetype, 2004), 143–45. 27. Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 246. 28. Cf. Luke 2:35: “Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also.” 29. Ulla Haastrup, “Representations of Jews in Danish Medieval Art: Can Images Be Used as Source Material on Their Own?” in History and Images: Towards a New Iconology, ed. Axel Bolvig and Philip Lindley (Brepols: Turnhout, 2003), 346; Anthony Bale, Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), 17. 30. “Drápa af Maríugrát,” in Fourteenth-Century Icelandic Verse on the Virgin Mary, ed. Kelinde Wrightson (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 2001), 7 (ll. 1–6), cited by Rubin, Mother of God, 255. 31. Rubin, Mother of God, 252. 32. “Avve mik, avve mik, son minn sæle, krossfestu þik hinir grimmu iudar?” Maríu saga, 1010. 33. George P. Galavaris, “The Mother of God ‘Stabbed with a Knife,’” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 13 (1959): 229–33; Anne Anker, “Kristus og Maria på korsfestelsesantemensalet fra Årdal kirke—en uvanlig sammenstilling,” in Kristusfremstillinger: Foredrag holdt ved det 5. Nordiske symposium for ikonografiske studier på Fuglsang 29. aug.–3. sept. 1976, ed. Ulla Haastrup (Copenhagen: Gad, 1980), 9–18; Margo Stroumsa-Uzan, “Women’s Prayer: Devotion and Gender in Books of Hours from Northern France ca. 1300,” unpublished PhD thesis (Ben Gurion University of the Negev, 2009), II; Margo Stroumsa-Uzan, “Psalters for Men, Books of Hours for Women: Arras as a Case Study,” in Jews and Christians in the Thirteenth Century France, ed. Elisheva Baumgarten and Judah D. Galinsky (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 31–47.

72  Yvonne Friedman 34. Cf. the figure of Longinus piercing Jesus on the Kinsarvik parish altar frontal (c. 1275); also from Bergen University Museum used as the cover of the book Painted Altar Frontals of Norway, 1250–1350, note 26 above. 35. See also Kristin B. Aavitsland, “The Church and the Synagogue in Ecclesiastical Art: A Case from Medieval Norway,” Teologisk Tidskrift 4 (2016): 324–39. 36. Jeremy Cohen, Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 23–28. 37. Friedman, “Christian Hatred of the Other,” 188–91. 38. Anthony Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 9. 39. Gammelnorsk Homiliebok, 26, 57. 40. Aage Solbakk, Sápmi/Sameland: Samenes historie fram til 1751 (Karasjok/ Kárášjohka: Davvi girji, 2007). 41. Samuel Abrahamsen, “The Exclusion Clause of Jews in the Norwegian Constitution of May 17, 1814,” Jewish Social Studies 30, no. 2 (1968): 67–88.

6 The Imitation Game? Japanese Attitudes towards Jews in Modern Times Rotem Kowner

Attitudes towards Jews, and antisemitism in particular, have been shaped by thousands of years of contact in Europe and the Middle East. They are based not only upon social intercourse, an intimate acquaintance and an extended coexistence with Jews, but also on an array of religious, social, economic, and political motives. With a few exceptions outside this traditional cradle of Jewish diaspora, it was only in the modern era that many nations and groups were first exposed to Jews, often as a vague and remote concept rather than as a result of any substantial relationship with actual individuals or communities. Having had no direct contacts with Jews, they tended to adopt the diasporic notions of the time en bloc. Japan is a quintessential modern-day example of this phenomenon. Forced to open its ports to the West in 1854, after more than two centuries of quasi-isolation, Japan began to undergo a process of rapid modernisation. Starting in earnest after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, it embraced many of the contemporary currents, ideologies and technologies that were in vogue in the West. Among other things, Japan was introduced also to Europe’s notion of race and its traditional Other, notably Black Africans and Jews.1 Collectively, Jews had little or no impact on Japan’s modernisation and played at best a very minor role in the history of modern Japan, just as Japan, for its part, had a negligible impact on modern Jewish history. This is hardly surprising. During much of the period since the opening of Japan, members of the two groups had very limited contact, and, for the most part, scant knowledge of each other. Very few Jews ever lived in Japan, and apart from the early 1940s, the local Jewish community has never consisted of more than 1,500 members who, from a Japanese point of view, were indistinguishable from other foreigners of Western origin. Similarly, very few Japanese have ever lived in Jewish neighbourhoods in cities overseas, and only a handful have converted to Judaism. Moreover, a Jewish state was only established in 1948, meaning that Jews as a group had not previously been even in a situation where they could in any way pose a genuine threat to Japan. Given these restricted contacts, the limited mutual familiarity and the virtual absence of any historical or religious roots for conflict, it might be

74  Rotem Kowner presumed that the Japanese would not develop any substantial attitude, negative or positive, let alone an outright racist one, towards the Jews. This, however, is not the case. In fact, soon after the onset of its modernisation, Japan witnessed the emergence of relatively benign antisemitic and philosemitic views, which, by the 1920s, had led to increased polarisation. During what is known as the Fifteen Year War (1931–45), these attitudes turned into an orchestrated antisemitic campaign, culminating in concrete segregation policies being applied to the Jews living within the borders of the Japanese wartime empire. With Japan’s defeat in 1945, interest in Jews declined drastically. The late 1980s, however, saw a renewed fascination with Jews and their alleged impact on Japan. Indeed, Japan experienced relatively short bursts of intense attitudes towards Jews, interspersed with long intervals of indifference and ignorance. These attitudes were extreme enough that the most negative among them could be considered “antisemitism without Jews,” just as positive attitudes could be considered “philosemitism without Jews.” These generalisations, however, blur both the extremity and the uniqueness of the Japanese case. That is, the racial views of Jews in pre-war Japan and the racist policies of the Japanese state during the Second World War constitute a special case in the modern history of racism, and of East Asian racism in particular. This is because Japanese attitudes towards Jews were constructed with no real presence of the target group and because they lacked a genuine political, religious, or ethnic basis associated with the Jews. While quite a few countries in Asia and elsewhere have developed substantial idiosyncratic discourses surrounding Jews, virtually without their presence, by and large they have been far more benign and limited. In China, for example, the discourse on Jews never became an orchestrated campaign like that seen in Japan, whereas in Indonesia, the discourse emerged as late as the 1940s, initially at the prompting of the Japanese authorities and later on religious and nationalist grounds.2 By the same token, the Japanese views were imported from Europe, like many other ideologies, fashions and technologies willingly adopted during the early stage of modernisation. However, these views were modified consequently to fit traditional cultural conventions, to suit the changing needs of the state and to help reshape a national discourse on identity primarily directed at the West. Thus, Japanese attitudes towards Jews should be seen as a hybrid product that reflects an interaction between divergent foreign and domestic views.

Initial Encounters, 1854–1918 The first decades of Japanese-Jewish contact appear to resemble encounters with Jews in many other non-Western sites during the same period. The initial encounter with Jews, both concretely and conceptually, took place during the final decades of the nineteenth century, shortly after American gunboat diplomacy forced Japan to open its ports in the 1850s.3 Among the

The Imitation Game?  75 Western merchants that flocked to Japan soon thereafter were several Jews, and by the time of the Meiji Restoration of 1868, they numbered more than fifty families living in major port towns, such as Yokohama, Nagasaki, and Kobe. Although these Jewish sojourners built a synagogue in each of these cities and even purchased land for cemeteries, they made little impression on the local population. They dressed like other Westerners and were perceived as part of the foreign community, with even their religious practices initially being perceived as Christian in nature.4 The existence of a tiny Jewish community in Japan had little to do with the introduction of antisemitism, which was still very liminal until the end of the Meiji Era (1868–1912). Still, notions of Europe’s quintessential Other did reach Japan inevitably and were adopted by the local intelligentsia. The first implicitly antisemitic tract produced in Japanese was likely the translation of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, published around 1877. The play was an instant success. Soon after its publication it was serialised in a newspaper and then adapted for the Kabuki stage. The Jewish protagonist was stripped of nuances and complexity and portrayed as a greedy villain, with the translator providing the following explanation for those who did not understand the context: “The Italian Jew Shylock is what we call in our country Eta-hinin (traditional outcast group within the Japanese society).”5 This seemingly anthropological interpretation did not prevent local interest in Judaism and Jewish history in subsequent years. This interest was initially associated with Christianity and was driven by a few Japanese who had embraced Europe’s principal creed. Although the number of Japanese converts never exceeded a fraction of the population, Christianity carried a certain prestige and its adherents often occupied important positions, especially in education. With the end of the long ban on Christianity in 1873, Japanese translations of the New Testament proved instrumental in shaping early images of Jews. Unlike in Europe, however, this Christian influence did more good than harm to these images of Jews. Troubled by their identity in relation to the West, early Japanese Christian theologians, such as Uchimura Kanzō, Nakada Jūji, and Saeki Yoshirō, regarded the Jews as saviours, and even as sharing a common ancestry with the Japanese.6 Another seemingly positive early encounter with Jews that had a lasting impact was the involvement of the American-Jewish banker Jacob Schiff (1847–1920) in securing critical loans for Japan during the Russo-Japanese War. These foreign loans accounted for half of the financial aid the country received to fight and eventually defeat tsarist Russia.7 Shortly after the war, Emperor Meiji awarded Schiff the Order of the Sacred Treasure. This state honour reinforced the budding interest in Jews, as indicated by the sharp rise in the number of newspaper articles on this topic (see Figure 6.2). Likewise, it also helped to enhance the image of Jews as financially powerful, although some could not but interpret Schiff’s assistance as an example of the sly Jewish manipulation of world politics.

76  Rotem Kowner

From Theory to Practice: Interwar Views and Emerging Policies, 1918–41 This innocuous prelude to the Japanese encounter with Jews did not last long. By the end of the First World War, Japan began to witness a significant influx of blatant antisemitic propaganda. Between 1918 and 1922, shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, Japanese “intervention” forces controlled parts of eastern Siberia and were in close contact with White forces, in an attempt to halt communist infiltration southwards and expand Japan territories northwards. Many Japanese of this epoch, initially under Russian instigation, accepted the notion that the Bolshevik Revolution was a Jewish plot and identified the menace of communism with the Jews.8 In 1919, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, required reading among the White troops, was translated into Japanese for the first time. Although the text would be constantly republished well into the twenty-first century, it initially had little effect on the Japanese public. Moreover, the explicit antisemitism found in the ideas and theories of such extremists as Higuchi Tsuyanosuke and Sakai Shōgun never mobilised more than a handful of people during the early 1920s.9 Nonetheless, the repeated publications, some even in prestigious journals, about Jewish conspiracies and the danger of infiltration of “Jewish ideas” into Japan, would have a lingering impact on the local perceptions of Jew (see Figure 6.1). As elsewhere, indigenous theories of a possible Jewish threat did not take place in a vacuum and they unmistakably prepared the ground for the acceptance of more blatant propaganda. Hence, antisemitic propaganda in Germany and elsewhere in the latter half of the 1920s was like a packet of seeds dropped on fertile soil in Japan, and by the time the Nazi Party rose to power in January 1933, antisemitic views among Japanese, the elites in the particular, were rather widespread.10 As a nation, Japan became aware of the Jewish question soon after the establishment of the League of Nations in 1919, an event that heralded its transformation into a global power. As one of the organisation’s founding nations, it became a permanent member of its Council and the recipient of a ceaseless stream of international pleas for aid and support from Jewish individuals and organisations. This, as well as Japan’s insistence on including a “racial equality clause” in the Covenant of the League of Nations, at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, made its diplomats aware of the Jewish plight in the wake of the Great War.11 The Japanese Foreign Office responded by sending its overseas representatives an urgent request for intelligence on this group and its major figures and networks, leading to the establishment of a file entitled “the Jewish problem” (Jpn. Yudaya mondai) in 1922.12 A similarly significant watershed in the public attitude towards Jews took place in the early 1930s. Until then, the Japanese interest had mostly been academic or diplomatic and restricted to limited circles. It ranged from benign antisemitism to mild philosemitism, and had little to do with the few Jews living in the Japanese Empire or its vicinity. In late 1931, when Japan

Figure 6.1 Jews as the nation’s enemies, together with the Freemasonry and the Third International: “The lineage of movements for our country’s ruin” (Daitō bunka, October 1927). Author’s photograph.13

78  Rotem Kowner took possession of Manchuria, this began to change. In the city of Harbin, in particular, Japanese forces soon came across a vibrant Jewish community. With no more than 10,000 members, it was nonetheless the largest and most active Jewish community in East Asia: far larger and influential than any group of Jews the Japanese had previously encountered.14 This initial encounter prompted the rise of military “experts of the Jewish problem” (Yudayajin mondai kenkyūsha), the most prominent of whom were Colonel Yasue Norihiro (1886–1950) and the Navy Captain Inuzuka Koreshige (1890–1965).15 Blending European antisemitism with ambitious and visionary plans for Japanese expansion in the region, they began to view the Harbin community as a promising source of extensive financing.16 In the late 1930s, the interest in Jews witnessed a sudden but ephemeral turn, when these “Jewish experts” and other Japanese officials came up with obscure ideas about settling a large group of Jewish refugees from Europe in the vast realm of Manchuria to aid in its development. The solicitation of international Jewish collaboration in developing the region and the bear hug given to certain local leaders did not prevent the rapid dwindling of the Harbin community. The authorities did little to restrain local White Russians from terrorising the Jews, and at times even seemed to encourage the strife between the various ethnic groups in the area. This, together with declining economic prospects, forced many Jews to look for a new safe haven. By the eve of the Pacific War, the Harbin community had dwindled to about a quarter of its size a decade earlier. Many of its members had moved to Shanghai, which displaced Harbin as the seat of the largest Jewish community in the region.17 During the same period, Japan witnessed an increasingly vigorous debate on the Jewish question. As in the past, it did not emerge without an external context. The debate coincided with the rise of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and the onset of the systematic top-down persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. Various geopolitical interests and a growing ultra-nationalist mood in Japan led to warmer relations with Berlin. Conspicuous among the native supporters of Germany were many army and navy officers, who subscribed now to Nazi racial ideology and sanctioned its propaganda against Jews. Like the earlier Russian influence on Japanese attitudes, the Nazi perspective on Jews was detrimental. After all, it was in Mein Kampf (1924) that Hitler himself noted that “in his millennial Jewish empire,” the Jew “dreads a Japanese national state, and, therefore desires its annihilation even before establishing his own dictatorship.” In the early 1940s, in the context of increasing isolationist anxiety in Japan, Hitler’s suggestion that the Jew “now incites the nations against Japan as once he did against Germany” seemed more than relevant.18 Although Japanese intellectuals and media seemed initially united in their criticism and condemnation of the persecution of Jews in Germany, the eventual acceptance of aspects of Nazi propaganda was inevitable. To this end, a growing number of original Japanese publications on the “Jewish

The Imitation Game?  79 threat” began to appear, as did translations of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century. At first, this rapid development coincided with a severe economic crisis, and the entire decade was characterised by a growing distancing from the Western world, Britain and the United States in particular. At a time that saw both the revival of the pan-Asian Weltanschauung and a growing desire for a self-reliant sphere of influence, it is ironic that Japan, among all nations, collaborated with Nazi Germany and championed the Aryan race, as was reflected in the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936 and the Tripartite Pact of 1940, and the Axis collaboration in the Indian Ocean from 1943 onwards.19 Following the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Shanghai fell into Japanese hands, but the city’s International Settlement remained intact until December 1941. During these four fateful interim years, Shanghai became one of the few places on earth where European refugees could enter without a visa, making the city an attractive destination for Jews fleeing persecution. The growing antisemitism in Japan did little to curb the flow of refugees into the city. However, when thousands of Jews arrived in Shanghai in 1938, in the aftermath of the annexation of Austria, and even more so after Kristallnacht, the Japanese government decided to re-­ examine its policy towards Jewish refugees. On 5 December of that year, Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro convened a meeting with his four top ministers (Goshō kaigi: The Five Ministers Conference), where an official policy vis-à-vis Jews was formulated for the first time. At stake were the warming relations with Japan’s new allies and the desire to keep Europeans off its territories. These had to be weighed against a lingering pretence of “racial equality,” as well as a certain reluctance to estrange the world Jewry, whose capital and influence in the United States were still regarded as substantial. Two days later, the Foreign Ministry updated its overseas consulates about the new guidelines. Avoiding an active embrace of Jews expelled by Japan’s allies, the ministry’s message stated that Jewish refugees would be allowed the same brief transit as non-Jewish applicants.20 This policy and the outbreak of the war in Europe prevented Jews from coming to East Asia for a while. But in summer 1940, an unforeseen action by the acting Japanese consul in Kaunas, Sugihara Chiune (1900–86), brought a sudden wave of Jewish refugees to the Japanese Empire and its home islands in particular.21 This short-lived ambivalence notwithstanding, Japan was moving rapidly towards the construction of an Asian bloc under its leadership, a process accompanied by deterioration in its once positive attitude towards Westerners, including Jews. The few non-refugee Jews who resided in the country felt increasingly insecure. The German-Jewish philosopher Kurt Löwith (1897–1973) is a case in point. A professor at Tohoku Imperial University since 1936, Löwith sensed that the pressure of Nazi propaganda in Japan after the Tripartite Pact was signed made his position “unsafe” and consequently left for the United States in mid-1941.22 By then, neither old-time sojourners nor recent refugees felt at home in Japan. In

80  Rotem Kowner August 1941, with diplomatic frictions with the United States reaching new heights and war increasingly imminent, the Japanese government decided to rid the country of the thousand or so remaining Jewish refugees who had nowhere else to go, just as it attempted to do with other foreign residents. The last party of refugees was shipped to Shanghai around 20 October.23 Thereafter, only a tiny group of Jews remained in Japan, most of them being stateless “White Russians” who had arrived some two decades earlier.24

The Coming of Age of an Antisemitic Worldview: Wartime Policies, 1941–45 The outbreak of the Pacific War (1941–45) was followed by an immediate outburst of anti-Jewish, anti-Western, and anti-Christian propaganda campaigns. As for the Jews, a number of Japanese writers began to propagate Nazi theories, portraying them as an alien, sinister, and corrupt element in Western civilisation.25 Japan’s mission, they argued, was not only to liberate Asia from white colonialism, but also to free humankind of the Jews. Consequently, philosemitic or balanced writings on Jews were reduced to a trickle.26 The new antisemitic discourse became so pervasive that even Japan’s major dailies printed occasionally articles on Jewish influence and on the “Jewish peril.” This can be illustrated by the contrast between the 165 or so books and journal articles concerning Jews that appeared in Japan in the first decade of the Showa Era (1926–35) and the 883 books and journal articles on the same topic that appeared in the following decade, with the majority being published between 1938–44 (see Figure 6.2).27 The government’s role in inciting this wave remained indirect. While it may have manipulated the image of Jews when evoking ultra-nationalism, antisemitism had never become an official ideology.28 The lack of centralised directives, however, did not prevent local initiatives from taking root. From 1943 onwards, blatant antisemitic propaganda was promulgated in some of Japan’s newly occupied territories, most notably in Indonesia.29 Propaganda was only one and relatively benign aspect of Japan’s wartime policy towards Jews. In January 1942, about a month after the outbreak of the Pacific War, the government reformulated its official policy towards the Jews in its empire. By this point, the three-year-old policy drawn up by the Five Ministers Conference was dated, since Japan’s war imperatives required a greater accommodation of German pressures and Jewish financial power and political influence in the United States had become increasingly irrelevant. Furthermore, the war created an additional and more acute policy dimension, given that the Jewish community in Shanghai and smaller communities in several major cities in Southeast Asia suddenly came under full Japanese jurisdiction. By May 1942, Japan ruled over some 40,000 Jews—the highest number ever—living in diverse communities with little mutual contact.

Figure 6.2 Number of newspaper articles in the Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s oldest and largest national dailies, as well as journal articles and books on Jews published annually from 1877 to 1945.30

82  Rotem Kowner With this urgency in mind, the Foreign Ministry cabled its consulates overseas the outlines of a new policy. While Japan would not “drive the Jews out completely,” as its fascist allies were doing, the cable stated, it would hereafter treat them according to their citizenship. As for Jewish citizens of neutral countries, they were to be treated favourably in order to avoid conflict with those countries. While this may at first appear to be a sound policy, Jews were not an ordinary religious or ethnic group. Thus, when Nazi Germany revoked the citizenship of German and Austrian Jews living overseas on 1 January 1942, the Japanese government followed suit and decided to treat such Jews living in China as “stateless persons.”31 In reality, it took some time for the new policy to consolidate. At first, the Japanese authorities in the occupied territories treated the local Jewish communities in a non-discriminatory manner, in accordance with the rules and conventions they had established earlier.32 In addition, the authorities’ treatment of Jews initially followed both racial and national lines. That is, European Jews, in particular those of allied nationality, belonged to “White” Europe, while their Middle Eastern brethren belonged to Asia. This was particularly evident in Indonesia (then known as the Dutch East Indies), where the Dutch authorities had established a similar system of classification throughout centuries of colonial rule. During the first year of their occupation, the Japanese adhered closely to the Dutch guidelines, but as the war progressed, this initial policy faded. By early 1943, the Japanese authorities began to treat Jews as a distinct ethnic group, rather than as the citizens of designated countries or as members of a broader designation, such as Europeans or Asians.33 The treatment of Shanghai’s Jewish community, the largest of its kind in the territories occupied by Japan, set the standard. On 18 February 1943, the Shanghai occupation authorities announced their intention to establish a “designated zone” (shitei chiku, often referred to by non-Japanese as a “ghetto”) for “stateless refugees” in the ward of Hongkou.34 The announcement was to be acted upon within three months, and its actual target was all of the Central and Eastern European refugees who had arrived in the city since 1937 and whose nationality had been revoked—criteria which applied exclusively to Jews. By the time of the aforementioned announcement, half of Shanghai’s stateless Jews already resided in the designated ward. Three months later, the remaining stateless Jews moved to this poor, overcrowded zone, increasing the total number of its Jewish occupants to nearly 20,000. Only the Russian and Baghdadi Jews, who accounted for no more than thirty per cent of the city’s total Jewish population, were permitted to remain outside of this ghetto.35 The living conditions of those interned during the subsequent twenty-seven months were cramped and unpleasant, but the zone was not tightly guarded, visits out were permitted, and, crucially, there was no plan to harm, let alone to exterminate, those Jews.36 The Japanese emulation of foreign, mostly Nazi, views of Jews was a major characteristic of this period. There were a number of reasons for the deterioration of attitudes towards Jews in Asia and beyond, but German pressure was undoubtedly one of them. The pressure was exerted in

The Imitation Game?  83 various ways. For example, Alfred Rosenberg, by then the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, met with ambassador Ōshima Hiroshi in Berlin and urged the Japanese government to take measures to isolate the large Jewish population in Shanghai.37 In Tokyo, German representatives, most notably the police liaison officer at the German Embassy, Josef Mei­ singer, continuously meddled in occupied China’s Jewish affairs.38 Although the Japanese authorities did not comply with full-scale schemes for a “final solution” of the “Jewish problem” in their territories, the nagging and insinuations of Nazi officials did bear fruit. For example, their pressure appears to have played a role in the transfer to active service of Captain Inuzuka, the head of the Japanese Imperial Navy’s Advisory Bureau on Jewish Affairs in Shanghai from 1939 to 1942, for being too lenient in shaping the Japanese Jewish policy.39 Nazi pestering probably also played a role in prompting the Japanese authorities to concentrate the Jews in Shanghai and to incarcerate Indonesia’s entire Jewish community in the summer of 1943.40

Post-War Attitudes: The Fall and Rise of the Jewish Discourse Japan’s surrender in August 1945 marked a sharp decline in the interest in Jews. As a nation, Japan was struggling now to survive: rebuilding its ruined cities, repatriating its soldiers and civilians from the lost empire and coping with American reforms that would reshape its social and political fabric. In this context, the Jewish question seemed trivial, if not meaningless. The sudden disinterest was clearly reflected in the media. In 1938, for example, at many as 152 articles on Jews were published in the Asahi Shimbun, compared to merely thirty-two in 1945, a scant four in 1946 and only one in 1947 (see Figure 6.3).41 Within a few years, however, a more complex attitude towards Jews developed. For the Japanese government, the 1948 establishment of the State of Israel made the Jewish question first and foremost a political issue, and this was even more the case when Japan regained its sovereignty four years later. Thereafter, Israeli affairs replaced the pre-war interest in Jewish affairs (see Figure 6.3), with supporting or rebuffing of the Jewish cause appearing to have serious implications for trade, access to natural resources, and the capacity to form a useful network of diplomatic relationships. The first two decades after the war were a time for reconsidering the Jewish issue too. For quite a few Japanese intellectuals, however, the revelations about the nature of the Holocaust and Jewish victimhood led to the adoption of more sympathetic views. Ironically, several of Japan’s most vocal wartime antisemitic militants and ideologues underwent this transformation too, becoming supporters of the Jewish cause, and Israel in particular. One of them, Inuzuka Koreshige, even went as far as to establish the Japan-Israel Association (Nihon-Isuraeru Kyōkai) in 1952, remaining its president until his death thirteen years later. In this vein, the 1952 Japanese translation of Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl became one of the most successful

Figure 6.3 Number of newspaper articles (in the national daily Asahi Shimbun) as well as journal articles and books on Jews and Israel published annually from 1945 to 1989.42

The Imitation Game?  85 bestsellers in post-war Japan, sparking a closer, almost intimate, identification with Jewish wartime suffering. While many readers immediately considered the book an exceptional allegory for human suffering, including their own wartime suffering, the fact that Frank was Jewish took longer to internalise. Another sign of the shift in public attitudes towards Jews during this period was the establishment of two Christian sects that regarded Jews, the State of Israel, and Jerusalem, as major vehicles for fulfilling their mission of restoring apostolic non-Europeanised Christianity. The oldest among these, the Sei-Iesukai (Holy Ecclesia of Jesus), was established in 1946, whereas the neo-Christian Makuya (Holy Tabernacle) was founded two years later.43 Although Japanese Christians generally regarded Jews quite positively, these two groups stood out by supporting the Jewish cause to an extent unparalleled among similar groups that emerged thereafter. While philosemitic in principle, both groups employed the Jews as a means of reconciling their own Japanese and Christian identities. In later years, Israel also became another means of galvanising their distinctiveness among Christian sects. Today, these sects are still active, but both remain small and obscure, with congregations of less than 10,000 believers each. As in the pre-war era, this post-war interlude of relatively neutral and even positive views of Jews was short-lived. It ended with the 1970 publication of the book Nihonjin to Yudayajin (The Japanese and the Jews) and the subsequent revival of the dormant discourse of national and ethnic identity, often referred to as Nihonjinron (literally, “theories/discourse of the Japanese [people]”).44 The book was written by the Christian nationalist publisher and writer Yamamoto Shichihei (1921–91), who used the pseudonym Isaiah Ben-Dasan—allegedly a Jew born in Kobe and well versed in both cultures. Yamamoto compared the Japanese to the Jews by examining their respective cultural roots and traditional beliefs, and resorting to numerous traditional stereotypes about both groups. In essence, however, Yamamoto had little concern for Jews. His target was Japan and his aim was redefining the meaning of being Japanese in the post-war era. Thus, his book employed Jews as an antonym for the Japanese. Moreover, the fact that it won a literary prize a year later, and, even more so, that it sold spectacularly well (more than a million copies within a year and more than three million copies altogether), made the book a model for scores of imitators, who collectively heralded a new genre of popular literature concerned with the unique characteristics of the Japanese.45 This “Jewish wave” in Japan’s literary scene reached its peak in the latter half of the 1980s. While this may be seen merely as an echo of another cyclical upsurge of antisemitism in Western countries, Japan had its own reasons for this recurring trend.46 By this point, Japan had surpassed the Soviet Union in its gross national product to become the world’s second largest economy. As the economic gap with the United States was rapidly narrowing, Japan entered a phase of intense trade frictions with its postwar patron. In 1987, nearly a hundred books with the word “Jew” in their titles were in circulation, and large bookstores displayed them in a special “Jewish corner.” The author of the most successful ones was Uno Masami

86  Rotem Kowner (b. 1942), a high school teacher who had established his own “research centre” on the Middle East and the Bible in 1975, and who began to write profusely on Jewish affairs and conspiracies in 1986. In that year alone, two of his books (If You Know the Jews You Will Understand the World and If You Know the Jews You Will Understand Japan) sold a combined 1.1 million copies (see Figure 6.4). The prevalence of this genre and the lack of critical reception led American scholar David Goodman to assert in 1987 that antisemitism “has greater intellectual currency and respectability in Japan than in perhaps any other industrialised society.”47 While the circumstances in late 1980s Japan were ostensibly completely different from those of the early 1940s, the origins of and motives for the racist demonisation of a remote group remained largely the same. In both cases, writers and readers alike considered the Jews a small and detached group conspiring to harm others and a potential source of the international conflicts and even the natural disasters Japan experienced (see Figure 6.5). In a large-scale survey conducted among university students in the mid-1990s, almost 14 per cent of the respondents did not want to have Jewish neighbours, but only one per cent and four per cent of them expressed the same feeling about “foreigners” and “Westerners,” respectively.48 This apparent aversion, even among university students, shows the cumulative impact of a decade of anti-Jewish writings, and possibly of an earlier legacy as well. Moreover, in November 2014, three years after the Tōhoku earthquake and

Figure 6.4 The “second wave” of antisemitic publications: partial display of Uno Masami’s prodigious literal production, 1986–90. Author’s photograph.49

The Imitation Game?  87

Figure 6.5 “Jewish ingratitude” in a major revisionist manga text (1999): “Japan saved 30,000 Jews but the Jews created the atomic bombs and thereby assisted in the mass murder of Japanese.”50 Author’s photograph.

tsunami, a series of advertisements for a new book published in the national daily Sankei Shimbun asserted that the United States is a “Jewish dictatorship,” whose agents deliberately detonated a nuclear warhead off the coast of Japan to trigger an earthquake and tsunami.51

88  Rotem Kowner At present, many Japanese tend to equate Jews with extraordinary financial power and even global domination. A legacy of Jacob Schiff’s support and the repeated translations of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, this association can be positive or negative, depending on the observer’s outlook. Nonetheless, the connotations of this image can often be ambivalent, if not contradictory. A recent case in point is Motoya Toshio (b. 1943), the president and owner of the large hotel chain APA Group, who is active also as an essayist (under the pen name Fuji Seiji) with a revisionist bent. Like Uno and many other earlier “specialists” on Jewish affairs, Motoya is convinced that “Jewish people control American information, finance, and laws, and they benefit greatly from globalization because they move their massive profits to tax havens so they don’t have to pay any taxes” and similarly infers that “Jewish capital” stands behind all recent American global conflicts.52 With these views in mind, Motoya suggested in 2015 that the Japanese government would use Jewish marketing companies and “information network” to amend the way the modern history of the country, and its Second World War chapter in particular, is depicted in historical narratives.53 It should be no surprise that Motoya was shocked by mounting Jewish criticism of his views and confessed “I always mean to praise the Jewish people as wise, with excellent skills in the fields of information, finance, and the law.” Consequently, he was willing to remove the adverse observations from his website.54 Some of the recent antisemitic publications have included various ­Holocaust-denial works that repudiated the earlier links drawn between Japan’s suffering and the Jewish tragedy. Appearing first in 1989, this trend reached its apex six years later when an article published in a popular monthly named Marco Polo denied the existence of gas chambers in ­Auschwitz.55 Protests by overseas Jewish organisations led to the magazine’s demise, but, for some people, this very fact simply confirmed Jewish power and influence.56 Holocaust denial has not, however, disappeared completely, as demonstrated by a recent series of advertisements in the Sankei Shimbun.57 Nonetheless, these sporadic denials did not serve to diminish public interest in the Holocaust. In fact, over the course of thirteen years (1994– 2007), a travelling exhibition about the Holocaust and Anne Frank passed through many of Japan’s major cities. Organised by Tokyo’s Sōka University (affiliated with the Sōka Gakkai new religious movement) and the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, the exhibition attracted more than two million visitors. Furthermore, news of the defacement of some 265 copies of books by or about Anne Frank in thirty-one Tokyo libraries in February 2014 was received with widespread shock throughout the country and attracted media attention for weeks until the mystery surrounding the identity of the culprit was finally solved.58 Interestingly, the existence of the State of Israel and the status of IsraeliJapanese relations had little to do with unfavourable images of Jews in Japan. The Japanese left, as well as many liberals and intellectuals, followed

The Imitation Game?  89 European trends and began to view Israel critically, and after the Six-Day War (1967), even negatively. The Japanese government, for its part, reduced its economic ties with Israel to a minimum some six years later following the Yom Kippur War (or October War, 1973) and the ensuing oil crisis. The rise of a second wave of antisemitic writings in Japan took place years later, and its late stage even overlapped with improvements in diplomatic relations between the two states after the First Gulf War (1990–91). Thus, although the Japanese government’s policy towards Israel hardly affected public attitudes towards Jews in general, the opposite is also true. In other words, domestic public attitudes towards Jews had little or no effect on official policy towards Israel. In fact, throughout much of the history of the two states’ bilateral diplomatic relations, the Japanese government has striven to strike a balance between American geopolitical interests, on the one hand, and pressures from the Arab countries that provided Japan with a substantial quantity of its oil, on the other hand.59 This balance, rather than concern for Jewish perspectives, has remained a key for the policy towards Israel to this very day.

Conclusion: Japanese Attitudes towards Jews—Imitation vs. Uniqueness Like philosemitism, antisemitism does not require the presence of Jews or even minimal familiarity with them. In the Japanese case, both attitudes were originally borrowed from Europe and followed Western models, despite being primarily propelled by domestic motives. Still, this local version of “antisemitism without Jews,” and, to a lesser degree, “philosemitism without Jews,” was particularly peculiar for several reasons. First, it did not have deep roots, let alone a pre-modern tradition. In addition, it lacked a religious background; Judaism has never threatened or come into theological conflict with any of Japan’s leading religious traditions. Moreover, antisemitism in Japan never gained full governmental support, nor did it ever become a national ideology. At the same time, however, Japanese attitudes towards Jews cannot be attributed solely to Europe. The adoption of European racism was carefully manipulated by the governing authorities throughout the Japanese Empire—at times, even on a local level, as the divergent treatment of the various Jewish communities suggests, and at times, with the government’s tacit consent or encouragement, when it appeared to serve the state’s needs. More importantly, antisemitism played a vital role in shaping governmental and local attitudes towards Jews in wartime Japan. The increasingly racist attitudes in the 1930s and the harsh wartime treatment of many Jewish communities cannot be taken lightly. It is an undeniable fact that the Japanese government did not follow Nazi Germany’s vision and plans to exterminate Jews, but it certainly did not deliberately “save” Jews or offer Jewish refugees any significant humanitarian assistance. Worse, due, at first, to their enemy citizenship (or “stateless” status), and then, from 1943

90  Rotem Kowner onwards, because of their Jewish ethnicity (or “race” per se), the majority of the Jews living under Japanese rule were subjected to appalling and increasingly discriminatory treatment. That said, anti-Jewish racist sentiments in pre-war Japan were never as pervasive as in Europe, and certainly did not turn into murderous extermination policies. While it is difficult to generalise about Japan, it seems obvious that many of the leading decision-makers and members of the upper echelons of its wartime government and military accepted the notion that Jews were a negative element that manipulated and could even harm human society. During the war, this pervasive image was often used as a form of sublimation for anti-Western antagonism, as well as a means of self-­definition. Jews were everything that the Japanese were not or did not wish to be. Post-war Japan proved that the country’s short wartime experience with virulent antisemitism was not a one-time event. Although Japanese interest in Jews subsided during the early post-war era, it never fully disappeared. In recent decades, admittedly, positive attitudes towards Jews have proliferated too. Whereas some Japanese sense a certain identification with Jewish suffering during the Holocaust, a few others even endorse views of common ancestry, regardless of the dearth of scientific testimonies for its existence.60 All these, however, did little to prevent the emergence of a second wave of antisemitism in the late 1980s or to eradicate its remnants today.61 At present, more than a century after the Japanese became acquainted with the concept of “Jews,” along with its entire assemblage of stereotypes, antisemitism has ceased to be a product of imitation. Instead, it has gained a life of its own. As such, Jews in contemporary Japan, in their virtual non-existence, can be adapted to fit various social and political needs. At times positive and at times negative, the interest in them is prone to awakening whenever there is a public need for it.

Notes 1. E.g., John G. Russell, Nihonjin no kokujinkan (Tokyo: Shinhyōron, 1991). 2. See Xun Zhou, “Youtai: The Myth of the ‘Jew’ in Modern China,” in The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan, ed. Frank Dikötter (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), 53–74; Leonard C. Epafras, “Damn! Beckham is a Jew”: The “Jew” in the Indonesian Public Discourse (Saarbrücken: LAP, 2010). 3. Although this topic has not been explored in depth, it is more than likely that Japanese Christians were exposed to the concept of Judaism in both its theological and ethnic sense during the nearly one-century-long period of Christian evangelism in early modern Japan (1549–1630s). 4. For the history of Jewish communities in nineteenth-century Japan, see Herman Dicker, Wanderers and Settlers in the Far East: A Century of Jewish Life in China and Japan (New York: Twayne, 1962), 162–70; Ben-Ami Shillony, The Jews and the Japanese: The Successful Outsiders (Rutland: Tuttle, 1992); David G. Goodman and Masanori Miyazawa, Jews in the Japanese Mind: The History and Uses of a Cultural Stereotype (New York: Free Press, 1995).

The Imitation Game?  91 5. Inoue Tsutomu, Introduction to Jin’niku shichiire saiban [Merchant of Venice; lit. The Trial of the Human Flesh Pledge], in William Shakespeare [Wiriamu Sheikusupia], Jin’niku shichiire saiban: seiyō chinsetsu, trans. Inoue Tsutomu (Tokyo: Kinkodō, 1883), 1–2. 6. Goodman and Miyazawa, Jews in the Japanese Mind, 37–75. 7. Richard J. Smethurst, “American Capital and Japan’s Victory in the RussoJapanese War,” in Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05: The Nichinan Papers, ed. John W. M. Chapman and Chiharu Inaba (Folkestone: Global Oriental, 2007), 63–72. 8. Jacob Kovalio, The Russian Protocols of Zion in Japan: Yudayaka/Jewish Peril Propaganda and Debates in the 1920s (New York: Peter Lang, 2009). 9. For the translation and dissemination of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Japan, see David G. Goodman, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: Aum and Antisemitism in Japan (Jerusalem: SICSA, 2005); Rotem Kowner, On Symbolic Antisemitism: Motives for the Success of the Protocols in Japan and Its Consequences (Jerusalem: SICSA, 2006). 10. Christopher W. A. Szpilman, “Fascist and Quasi-Fascist Ideas in Interwar Japan, 1918–1941,” in Japan in the Fascist Era, ed. E. Bruce Reynolds (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 81–85. 11. Paul Gordon Lauren, “Human Rights in History: Diplomacy and Racial Equality at the Paris Peace Conference,” Diplomatic History 2 (1978): 257–78. 12. Japanese Foreign Ministry Diplomatic Record Office [JFM], Tokyo, “Jewish Problem” file [JP], I-4-6-0.1-2 (13 folders) and I-4-6-0.1-2-1 (one folder). 13. “Waga kuni ni okeru bōkoku undō no keitō.” Published as an appendix to Daitō bunka, October 1927, a copy in the Hiranuma Kiichirō kankei monjo, no. 1155, Kensei shiryōshitsu, National Diet Library. The author is grateful to Christopher W. A. Szpilman for providing this figure. 14. Dicker, Wanderers and Settlers, 22. 15. Hideaki Kase, “Nihon no naka no yudayajin,” Chūō Kōron (May 1971): 242; Avraham Altman, “Flight to Shanghai, 1938–1940: The Larger Setting,” Yad Vashem Studies 28 (2000): 51–86; Gerhard Krebs, “The ‘Jewish Problem’ in Japanese-German Relations, 1933–1945,” in Japan in the Fascist Era, ed. E. Bruce Reynolds (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 109. 16. Altman, “Flight to Shanghai,” 51–86. 17. See, for example, Marvin Tokayer and Mary Swartz, The Fugu Plan: The Untold Story of the Japanese and the Jews during World War II (New York: Paddington Press, 1979). 18. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), 640. 19. Gerhard Krebs, “Racism Under Negotiation: The Japanese Race in the NaziGerman Perspective,” in Race and Racism in Modern East Asia: Interactions, Nationalism, Gender and Lineage, ed. Rotem Kowner and Walter Demel (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 217–41; Rotem Kowner, “When Economics, Strategy, and Racial Ideology Meet: Inter-Axis Connections in Wartime Indian Ocean,” Journal of Global History 12 (2017): 228–50. 20. “Summary of Jewish policy.” Cable no. 3544 from Foreign Minister Arita Hachirō to Japanese diplomatic missions overseas on 7 December 1938, JFM, JP, folder 5; Pamela Rotner Sakamoto, Japanese Diplomats and Jewish Refugees: A World War II Dilemma (Westport: Praeger, 1998), 11. 21. Between July 1940 and June 1941, 4,413 refugees arrived in Japan using visas granted by Sugihara and others. See Irene Eber, Voices from Shanghai: Jewish Exiles in Wartime China (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 22; Hillel Levine, In Search of Sugihara: The Elusive Japanese Diplomat Who

92  Rotem Kowner Risked His Life to Rescue 10,000 Jews from the Holocaust (New York: Free Press, 1996); Masaaki Shiraishi, Roku-sen-nin no inochi o sukue, gaikōkan Sugihara Chiune (Tokyo: Kabushiki Kaisha PHP Kenkyūjo, 2014). 22. Birgit Pansa, Juden unter japanischer Herrschaft: Jüdische Exilerfahrungen und der Sonderfall Karl Löwith (Munich: Iudicium, 1999), 99. 23. Sakamoto, Japanese Diplomats and Jewish Refugees, 93–94. 24. The wartime memoir of Isaac Shapiro tells the story of one such privileged family. Isaac Shapiro, Edokko: Growing Up a Foreigner in Wartime Japan (New York: iUniverse, 2009). 25. Ben-Ami Shillony, Politics and Culture in Wartime Japan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 156–71. 26. Shillony, Politics and Culture, 161–64. 27. Shillony, The Jews and the Japanese, 170. 28. For the official policy towards the Jews adopted in 1938, which remained basically unchanged until Japan’s defeat, see David Kranzler, Japanese, Nazis, and Jews: The Jewish Refugee Community in Shanghai, 1938–1945 (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1976), 232–33; David Kranzler, “Japanese Policy Toward the Jews, 1938–1941,” The Japan Interpreter 11, no. 4 (1977): 493– 527; Tokayer and Swartz, The Fugu Plan. 29. Rotem Kowner, “The Japanese Internment of Jews in Wartime Indonesia and Its Causes,” Indonesia and the Malay World 38 (2010): 349–71. 30. The chart’s calculations are based on items derived from Masanori Miyazawa, Nihon ni okeru Yudaya, Isuraeru rongi bunken mokuroku, 1877–1988 (Tokyo: Shinsensha, 1990) and Asahi Shimbun: Kikuzo II visual (online database, accessed in October 2015). Although the newspaper is considered liberal, throughout the 1930s and the war it supported the government’s policies, and in November 1945, its upper management resigned for “compromising the newspaper’s principles during the war.” 31. “Japanese measures in view of the 1942 situation.” Cable sent from the Foreign Office, Tokyo 15/1/1942. Japanese Foreign Ministry Diplomatic Record Office [JFM], Tokyo. “Jewish Problem” file [JP], folder 11. 32. Sakamoto, Japanese Diplomats and Jewish Refugees, 41–43. For the Japanese internment of Western civilians during the war, see Bernice Archer, The Internment of Western Civilians Under the Japanese, 1941–1945: A Patchwork of Internment (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004). 33. Kowner, “Japanese Internment,” 352–54. 34. See cable from Consul-general Yano Seiki to the Minister of Greater East Asia, Aoki Kazuo, “Relocation of Jews.” Japanese Foreign Ministry Diplomatic Record Office [JFM], Tokyo. “Jewish Problem” file [JP], folder 11. For the content of the proclamation, see Dicker, Wanderers and Settlers, 118. 35. Kranzler, Japanese, Nazis, and Jews, 501–2; Martin Kaneko, Die Judenpolitik der japanischen Kriegsregierung (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2008), 112–18; Naoki Maruyama, Taiheiyō sensō to Shanhai no Yudaya nanmin (Tokyo: Hosei Daigaku Shuppankyoku, 2005); Bei Gao, Shanghai Sanctuary: Chinese and Japanese Policy Toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Eber, Voices, 7. 36. Kranzler, Japanese, Nazis, and Jews, 493–99. 37. A cable from Oshima to Foreign Minister Tōgō Shigenori, Berlin 7/5/1942. Japanese Foreign Ministry Diplomatic Record Office [JFM], Tokyo. “Jewish Problem” file [JP], folder 11. 38. Heinz Eberhard Maul, Warum Japan keine Juden verfolgte: Die Judenpolitik des Kaiserreiches Japan während der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (1933– 1945) (Munich: Iudicium, 2007), 134–59; Marcia R. Ristaino, Port of Last

The Imitation Game?  93 Resort: The Diaspora Communities of Shanghai (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 178–79. 39. Krebs, “The ‘Jewish Problem,’” 121; Kranzler, Japanese, Nazis, and Jews; Kaneko, Judenpolitik, 118–22. 40. Kaneko, Judenpolitik, 113–14; Dicker, Wanderers, 115–17; Astrid Freyeisen, Shanghai und die Politik des Dritten Reiches (Würzburg: Königshausen & ­Neumann, 2000), 460–61; Kowner, “Japanese Internment.” 41. These figures do not include articles that mention the State of Israel. 42. The chart’s calculations are based on items derived from Masanori Miyazawa, Nihon ni okeru Yudaya, Isuraeru rongi bunken mokuroku, 1989–2004 (Tokyo: Shōwadō, 2005), and Asahi Shimbun: Kikuzo II visual (online database, accessed in October 2015). 43. It should be noted that the early years of post-war Japan were exceptional in terms of religious activity and the search for spiritual meaning and redemption: more than 700 movements emerged during the 1950s alone. 44. Harumi Befu, Hegemony of Homogeneity: An Anthropological Analysis of Nihonjinron (Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2001); Rotem Kowner and Harumi Befu, “Ethnic Nationalism in Postwar Japan: Nihonjinron and Its Racial Facets,” in Race and Racism in Modern East Asia: Interactions, Nationalism, Gender and Lineage, ed. Rotem Kowner and Walter Demel (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 389–412. 45. In a large-scale survey conducted in the late 1980s to explore the diffussion of Nihonjinron tenets in contemporary Japan, no less than thirty per cent of the respondents stated that they had read Yamamoto Shichihei’s Nihonjin to Yudayajin [The Japanese and the Jews]. See Harumi Befu and Kazufumi Manabe, “An Empirical Investigation on Nihonjinron: How Real Is the Myth,” Kwansei Gakuin University Annual Studies 36 (1987): 97–111. 46. Simon Epstein, Cyclical Patterns in Antisemitism: The Dynamics of Anti-Jewish Violence in Western Countries Since the 1950s (Jerusalem: SICSA, 1993). 47. David Goodman, “Reasons for Concern in Japanese Anti-Semitism,” New York Times, 25 March 1987, 35. 48. Rotem Kowner, On Ignorance, Respect, and Suspicion: Current Japanese Attitudes Towards Jews (Jerusalem: SICSA, 1997), 44–45. 49. From left to right: Uno Masami, Yudaya ga wakaru to sekai ga mietekuru: 1990nen “shūmatsu keizai sensō” he no shinario [If You Understand the Jews You Will Understand the World: Scenario for the “End of Economic War” of 1990] (Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten, 1986); Yudaya ga wakaru to jidai ga mietekuru: doru en ga hōkaishi kinhon’isei ga fukkatsusuru [If You Understand the Jews You Will Understand This Era: The Collapse of the Dollar-Yen and the Resurrection of the Gold Standard] (Tokyo: Nihon Bungeisha, 1988); Miezaru teikoku: 1993-nen shionisuto Yudaya ga sekai o shihaisuru [The Invisible Empire: 1993, Zionist Jews Will Rule the World] (Tokyo: Nihon Nesco, 1989); Hitorā no gyakushū: Nihon no mirai wa geru man to Yudaya ga nigitte iru [Hitler Strikes Back: The Future of Japan Is Under German and Jewish Control] (Tokyo: Nesco/ Bungei Shunjū, 1990); 1992-nen Yudaya keizai senryaku: mohaya kaigai shisan itchōdoru wa kaettekonai [Jewish Economic Strategy of 1992: Overseas Assets of One Trillion US$ Would No Longer Return] (Tokyo: Nihon Bungeisha, 1989). 50. Kobayashi Yoshinori, Shin gōmanizumu sengen supesharu sensōron (Tokyo: Gentōsha, 1998), 338. On Kobayashi’s historical revisionism and the above book, see Rumi Sakamoto, “‘Will You Go to War? Or Will You Stop Being Japanese?’ Nationalism and History in Kobayashi Yoshinori’s Sensoron,” The Asia—Pacific Journal 6, no. 1 (2008), available online at http://apjjf.org/-RumiSAKAMOTO/2632/article.html (accessed 23 November 2017).

94  Rotem Kowner 51. Julian Ryall, “Japanese Paper Apologises for Anti-Semitic Advert: Simon Wiesenthal Centre Condemns Books That Claims March 2011 Earthquake and Tsunami Were a Jewish Conspiracy,” The Telegraph, 8 December 2014. 52. Eric Johnston, “APA Under Fire Again, This Time for Anti-Semitic Remarks,” The Japan Times, 14 February 2017, available online at www.japantimes. co.jp/news/2017/02/14/national/apa-fire-time-anti-semitic-remarks (accessed 1 March 2017). 53. Fuji Seiji, “Japan Should Use Jewish Marketing Companies to Correct Historical Falsehoods,” Essays on Today’s Japan’s 278, Apple Town, 24 September 2015, available online at http://en.apa-appletown.com/essay/222 (accessed 23 November 2017). 54. Apart from cultivating many Jewish and Israeli friends, Motoya reasoned further that in 2012 he had made a visit to Israel during which he “brought home a rock from Masada and displayed it on my desk, and I have always felt that we should learn from the Jewish spirit.” See Fuji Seiji, “Japan’s Second Founding, Aimed at Independent Self-Defense, Is Beginning,” Essays on Today’s Japan 295, Apple Town, 17 February 2017, available online at http://en.apa-apple town.com/essay/637 (accessed 23 November 2017). 55. Rotem Kowner, “Tokyo Recognizes Auschwitz: The Rise and Fall of Holocaust Denial in Japan, 1989–1999,” Journal of Genocide Research 3 (2001): 257–72. 56. David Goodwin, “Anti-Bigotry Fight Starts with Information,” Asahi Evening News, 9 April 1995. 57. “Conservative Daily Sankei Apologizes for Running Anti-Semitic Ad,” Japan Times, 6 December 2014, available online at www.japantimes.co.jp/news/ 2014/12/06/national/conservative-daily-sankei-apologizes-for-­running-antisemitic-ad/ (accessed 27 April 2017). 58. Alison Flood, “Anne Frank Books Damaged in Tokyo Vandal Attacks,” The Guardian, 21 February 2014, available online at www.theguardian.com/ books/2014/feb/21/anne-frank-books-vandal-attacks-tokyo-libraries (accessed 23 November 2017). 59. Akifumi Ikeda, “Japan’s Relations with Israel,” in Japan in the Contemporary Middle East, ed. Kaoru Sugihara and J. A. Allan (London: Routledge, 1993), 155–69; Cnaan Liphshiz, “After Decades of Distance, Japan Seeks Closer Ties with Israel,” Times of Israel, 6 January 2015, available online at www. timesofisrael.com/after-decades-of-distance-japan-seeks-closer-ties-with-israel/ (accessed 23 November 2017). 60. For example, Mimura Saburō, Sekai no nazo Nihon to Isuraeru (Tokyo: Nichi-Yū Kankei Kenkyūkai, 1950); Koishi Yutaka, Nihonjin to Yudayajin no rengō o sekai ga osoreru riyū: jū buzoku no daiyogen (Tokyo: Kōbunsha, 1987); Minakami Ryō, Yudayajin to Nihonjin no himitsu: kodaishi saidai no nazo seisho to kamon ga akasu shinsetsu nichiyu dōsoron (Tokyo: Nihon Bungeisha, 1992). 61. Goodman and Miyazawa, Jews in the Japanese Mind, 220–51; Kowner, On Ignorance; Kowner, “Tokyo Recognizes Auschwitz.”

Part III

Christianity and Antisemitism

7 The Role of Medieval Northern Europe in Generating Virulent Anti-Jewish Imagery Robert Chazan

As racial antisemitism gained strength across late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, its spokesmen and adherents claimed that they were offering a thoroughly innovative explanation of an age-old and widespread phenomenon. The allegedly ubiquitous phenomenon was universal fear and hatred of the Jews, which, according to the antisemites, was documented across the globe from antiquity to modernity. In the view of the antisemites, evidence from every corner of the world and all chronological periods reveals the lethal threat that Jews posed, recognition of this threat by non-Jews, and resultant resistance to the frighteningly dangerous Jewish minority. One of the great appeals of racial antisemitism lay in its striking claim to discovery of a radically new understanding of this purportedly ubiquitous threat—an understanding that promised to lead to elimination of the danger. According to the antisemites, prior grappling with the “Jewish problem” had misperceived and misguidedly explained fear and hatred of Jews as rooted in their religious distinctiveness. This widely shared view was—according to the antisemites—utterly misleading. For the antisemites, the “Jewish problem” was clarified by the newly emerging and exciting science of racial anthropology. The “Jewish problem” was to be understood and treated as a racial issue. This radically new perspective on an age-old problem was an impressive and appealing claim and attracted significant support for the movement. In the wake of the genocidal destruction of European Jewry triggered by antisemitic thinking and resultant governmental actions in Nazi Germany and Nazi-controlled areas of Europe, the tables were turned, and the focus of investigation and analysis has been reversed. Instead of studying the Jews and what purportedly made them universally feared and reviled, serious attention has focused on the phenomenon of modern European antisemitism and its sources. It has been agreed that comprehension of the modern European phenomenon of antisemitism can admit of no simplistic explanation; understanding of the problematic and puzzling phenomenon of modern antisemitism can only be achieved through careful sifting of the complex

98  Robert Chazan historical record. Given that this modern anti-Jewish animus was different from the pre-modern religious strife and animosity engendered by the existence of three competing monotheistic faiths, how then might this modern development be explained? As the Nazis came to power and even more in the wake of the ­Holocaust, the placement of modern antisemitism and its Nazi offshoot in ­predominantly— although no longer fully—Christian Europe focused attention heavily on the Christian legacy of anti-Jewish thinking. While recognising that nineteenthand twentieth-century antisemitism insistently distanced itself from religious concerns and commitments, many observers concluded that ostensibly nonreligious or even anti-religious antisemitic thinking drew much of its power and appeal from traditional Christian anti-Jewish motifs. Already during the 1930s, the English clergyman and historian James Parkes—deeply concerned over the rise of Nazism—began to investigate the roots of antisemitism and Nazism in traditional Christian thinking.1 In the wake of the Holocaust, many others took up the same line of thinking. Arguably the most important of these post-Holocaust voices was Jules Isaac, a distinguished French historian who brought to the study of antisemitism intellectual gravitas, important academic and communal connections, and personal pain.2 Isaac argued that the historic legacy of anti-Jewish thinking revolved around three major themes: 1) the degenerate state of Judaism at the time of Jesus, 2) the crime of deicide, and 3) the dispersion of the Jews as providential punishment for the crucifixion.3 Isaac’s claims of the role of traditional Christian thinking in modern antisemitism struck a responsive chord in many circles, most prominently in major Christian denominations. Many churches—most notably the Roman Catholic Church—devoted resources and efforts to investigating further the Christian roots of modern antisemitism and to altering the teachings that created these anti-Jewish elements in the historic Christian legacy. The innovative stances on Judaism and Jews proclaimed by the Roman Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council was the most important—but by no means the only—example of the reformulation of Christian views on Judaism and the Jews.4 The views expressed by Parkes, Isaac, and others as to the role of traditional Christian doctrine in modern antisemitism continue to be widely acknowledged. Nonetheless, a number of more recent scholars have noted the enormous distance that separates the traditional Christian view of the Jews as an errant religious community responsible for the death of Jesus and the vicious antisemitic imagery of Jews killing Christian youngsters to utilise their blood for ritual purposes and poisoning the wells of Europe in order to spread disease and death among their neighbours. While the traditional imagery may have contributed to the radical antisemitic projections of Jewish cruelty and harmfulness, the newer scholars—by and large ­medievalists—sought sources closer in themes and in time to the radical antisemitic sense of Jewish hatred of the rest of humanity and Jewish

Virulent Anti-Jewish Imagery  99 behaviours intended to bring maximal harm to non-Jews and non-Jewish society. Given as noted that modern antisemitism was a European phenomenon, it was certainly reasonable to seek this more proximate source for the radical thinking in Europe, more specifically medieval Europe. A major pioneer in seeking this more proximate source for the modern antisemitic imagery was the late Gavin Langmuir of Stanford University. Langmuir was a Canadian who had served in his country’s armed forces during the Second World War and had emerged with profound repulsion for antisemitic imagery and the horrific behaviours to which it had led. Although focused initially on medieval European political history, early in his teaching career Langmuir shifted his work to study the place of the medieval European Jewish minority in the political framework of French society and then to ideational issues, especially to analysis of the increasingly virulent negative imagery of Jews. Langmuir studied carefully a number of major anti-Jewish incidents and sought to identify the thinking that gave rise to these incidents or that was subsequently imposed on them.5 Langmuir sought to distinguish levels of medieval anti-Jewish perceptions. These efforts have encountered considerable resistance, but the basic thrust remains valid and important. Langmuir utilised psychological terminology in drawing his distinctions; he argued that human communities differ with one another in a number of alternative ways, which Langmuir depicted as rational, non-rational, and irrational. These alternative modalities of human disagreement lie at the core of Langmuir’s analysis of the new direction taken in imagery of Jews in medieval Europe.6 According to Langmuir, rational disagreement is susceptible to reasonable discussion and compromise. Humans can debate and discuss financial or territorial issues reasonably enough and arrive at some kind of consensus. The negative imageries produced by rational disagreement are—in Langmuir’s view—relatively benign. For Langmuir, non-rational disagreement does not admit of such reasonable discussion and consensus. Non-rational issues lie at the heart of the fundamental disagreements among Jews, Christians, and Muslims and cannot be rationally adjudicated. For Langmuir, the traditional Christian imagery of Judaism and Jews discussed by Parkes and Isaac reflect the unbridgeable non-rational divide between Christians and Jews. Christian non-rational imagery set the stage for the development of more radically anti-Jewish imagery of Judaism and Jews; it did not, however, include the kind of virulent anti-Jewish imagery that undergirded modern antisemitism. For Langmuir, there was a vast chasm that separated the Gospels’ and Church Fathers’ views of Jews and that of the modern antisemites. It was the connecting link between the two that absorbed much of Langmuir’s scholarly energy. For Langmuir, it was in medieval Western Christendom that the traditional and non-rational Christian anti-Jewish imagery evolved into the virulent stereotypes of Jews that formed the foundation of modern antisemitic thinking. Langmuir depicted this new imagery as irrational, in contrast with

100  Robert Chazan what he posited as rational and non-rational imagery of Jews. According to Langmuir, the irrational anti-Jewish imagery involved attribution to Jews of behaviours that had never been observed, for example the groundless murder of Christians, especially Christian youngsters; killing of Christians and again especially Christian youngsters in a ritualistic manner, particularly by crucifixion; murder of Christians and once more especially Christian youngsters in order to utilise their blood for Jewish ritual purposes; poisoning of the wells of Europe in order to kill large numbers of Christian contemporaries; gaining control of sacred host wafers and subjecting them to atrocious abuse. This imagery, which Langmuir labelled irrational, constituted for him and others the connecting link between the traditional Christian negativity toward Jews and the radical anti-Jewish stereotypes of the modern antisemites. This then makes medieval Europe the point of transition from traditional Christian anti-Judaism to modern European antisemitism. Langmuir’s invocation of psychological terminology—rational, nonrational, and irrational, especially the last of the three—opened his work to considerable criticism. Psychological researchers have not succeeded in clarifying these distinctions in a satisfactory manner. The concept of the irrational has proven especially resistant to widely accepted definition. Nonetheless, I would argue that the basic distinctions to which Langmuir was pointing make excellent sense and are very useful. Using different and looser ­terminology—for example locutions like “radical anti-Jewish imagery” or “virulent anti-Jewish imagery” instead of irrational imagery—­maintains the fundamental distinction that Langmuir sought to draw between the antiJewish images in the New Testament and the Church Fathers on the one hand and modern antisemitism on the other. This distinction is critically important for understanding the medieval European influence on modern European antisemitism, and a number of subsequent researchers have explored this influence further. While these researchers disagree among themselves as to the wellsprings of this new and radical anti-Jewish imagery, they very much agree with Langmuir on the proximate source of the virulent anti-Jewish imagery of modern antisemitism in medieval Europe.7 Langmuir analysed closely a number of major incidents that introduced new themes into the storehouse of European anti-Jewish imagery. In the course of this analysis, he made an important geographic observation that has generally been overlooked. In studying the emergence and proliferation of radical anti-Jewish imagery in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Western Christendom, Langmuir noted that the virulent anti-Jewish perceptions originated and initially spread across northern Europe, only slowly making their way southward into the Mediterranean lands. I would argue that this geographic concentration of the new imagery in the north is significant and helps us understand the wellsprings of the new imagery that was destined to exert such baneful influence on subsequent European thinking.8 In order to grasp fully the importance of northern Europe in the onset and spread of the new and radical anti-Jewish imagery, we must step back briefly

Virulent Anti-Jewish Imagery  101 and gain a broad sense of the historical geography of the Jewish people. From antiquity onward, the Jews had inhabited a broad swath of territory that stretched from Mesopotamia westward through the Land of Israel and then further westward throughout the Mediterranean Basin. Although the Hebrew Bible repeatedly proclaims the Land of Israel as the Jewish homeland and the normativity of settlement in this promised homeland, from relatively early on in their history the Jews in fact became a people whose major habitations were spread well beyond the narrow strip of land on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. Let us track briefly the broad outlines of this pattern of demographic diffusion. In the late eighth century BCE, the powerful Assyrian Empire began a push westward toward the Mediterranean. By that time, there were two separate Israelite kingdoms—one in the northern sector of Canaan and the other in the central and southern sector. Both were faced with the dilemma of reacting to the Assyrian danger. The southern kingdom accepted ­Assyrian domination and survived; the northern kingdom opted to resist the ­Assyrians, was unsuccessful in its efforts, was defeated, and was subjected to the standard Assyrian technique of exile and dissemination throughout the empire. This technique was intended to destroy the cohesion of recalcitrant communities, and in the case of the Israelites of the north it was totally successful. The Israelites of the north disappeared forever from the history of the Jewish people.9 A century later, the Assyrians were replaced by the Babylonians as rulers of the Mesopotamian empire, and the Judean kingdom of the south was emboldened to rise in rebellion against its imperial overlord. The rebellion was unsuccessful, and the technique of exile was once again invoked—this time by the Babylonians. In this new case, however, exile was not accompanied by thorough dispersion, and thus the exiled Judeans were able to maintain themselves as a vigorous and creative diaspora community in various areas of Mesopotamia.10 This was the beginning of a continuous Jewish presence in Mesopotamia, a presence destined to last for more than two millennia. Indeed, during a significant stretch of that lengthy time period, Mesopotamia housed the largest and most influential Jewish community in the world. Jewish tradition and Christian tradition as well posit yet another such exile in the wake of another failed rebellion, this one during the middle of the first Christian century. In the year 66, the Jews of Palestine rose up against their Roman overlords. The rebellion was powerful and took the Romans four full years and extensive effort to quell. According to both Jewish and Christian tradition, the victorious Romans adopted the traditional technique of exiling failed rebels, thus creating the foundations of a western diaspora in precisely the same way that the eastern diaspora had been created many centuries earlier. As appealing as this symmetrical portrait might be in presenting parallel rebellions, parallel Jewish defeats, and parallel exiles, it is historically inaccurate.11

102  Robert Chazan First of all, the Romans never adopted the Near Eastern technique of forced expulsion of rebellious subject communities. Moreover, Palestine remained the major centre of world-wide Jewish life long after the Roman victory of the year 70. The Jews of Palestine were sufficiently numerous and strong to mount yet a second potent rebellion against Rome little more than half a century after the first rebellion, and it was in Palestine that rabbinic Judaism coalesced and produced its first canonical literature. Indeed, a western Jewish diaspora long antedated the failed first-century rebellion against Rome. With the conquests of Alexander, the Near East in general and Palestine in particular had been increasingly drawn into the orbit of the Mediterranean Basin. As a result of the Roman conquest of Palestine in 66 BCE, the Jews of Palestine settled regularly throughout the Mediterranean Basin, thus becoming irrevocably part and parcel of the Mediterranean milieu. Throughout late antiquity and on into the Middle Ages, the Jewish world was composed of a community in the Land of Israel and two large and creative diaspora communities—one eastern and one western— as well. During the first half of the Middle Ages, the Islamic conquests changed the power constellation of the Western world and in the process reconfigured the circumstances of the Jewish people. Throughout the first half of the Middle Ages, the overwhelming majority of the world’s Jews—maintaining their habitation within the well-established boundaries of Jewish settlement from Mesopotamia through the Mediterranean Basin—found themselves living under Islamic rule. This was the case for Mesopotamian Jewry, which constituted the world’s largest Jewish community, for the Jewish community in the Land of Israel and other Jewish communities along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, for all the Jewish settlements of North Africa, and for the bulk of the Jews living on the Iberian Peninsula. The Jewish population outside the orbit of Islam included only the small Jewry of the Byzantine Empire and the even smaller Jewish communities of southern Europe, which encompassed merely northern Spain, southern France, and parts of Italy. In these limited areas of Roman Catholic Europe, the Jews constituted an old and well-established element in the population, and there is no evidence of innovative negative imagery of Judaism and Jews. A major change in the Western world began around the year 1000 in northern Europe—a change with enormous implications for the Western world in its totality and for the Jewish world as well.12 What had long been a backward hinterland to the more advanced Mediterranean areas began a slow climb towards what was to become domination of the modern West. In the process, Jews were emboldened to break out of the prior confines of Jewish settlement and move themselves into utterly new territories. This Jewish population movement involved personal advantages for those Jews willing to take the risks associated with migration, valuable placement of Jewish population in what would eventually become the new centres of the West, and significant dangers associated with settling in territories in which

Virulent Anti-Jewish Imagery  103 Jews no longer constituted an old and established element in society, but were instead widely perceived as newcomers and interlopers.13 The Jewish newcomers engendered a number of different reactions within the settled population of northern Europe. The ruling elite by and large welcomed the Jewish immigrants, seeing in them urban dwellers who could bring with them the advanced business techniques of the Mediterranean Basin and thus contribute to economic growth in the rapidly developing north. The support of the authorities for the Jewish immigrants is well documented. The Church maintained its traditionally balanced stance vis-à-vis Jews. On the one hand, Jews were guaranteed safe and secure existence in Christian societies; on the other hand, Jews were to be limited so that they inflict no religious harm on their Christian neighbours. This was wellestablished Church doctrine and policy and was by and large followed by the ecclesiastical leadership of northern Europe as it encountered a growing Jewish populace. The element in northern Europe that was most hostile to the newly arriving Jews was the populace at large. For the general populace of northern Europe, there were a number of negative aspects to the new immigrants. First and most significantly of all, there was the elemental fact of Jewish newness. Unlike southern Europe, where Jews were a well-established reality, northern Europe had no tradition of Jewish settlement and accommodation to Jews and Jewish mores. Moreover, the new settlers were Jews, who were quintessentially Other, both as a separate religious community and a separate ethnic community. The combination of newness, religious otherness, and ethnic otherness was potent and likely to stir up unusually negative impressions and passions. It is striking that, when Pope Urban II called into being the First Crusade, almost all participating crusaders understood clearly that the enemy to be engaged were the Muslims. Only in northern Europe was crusading exhilaration occasionally deflected against Jews. Too much should not be made of the violent assaults of 1096, which were very limited in time and space. Nonetheless, that such assaults as took place were confined to precisely the area of this new Jewish presence is noteworthy.14 The hostility of the general populace had important economic implications for the new Jewish settlers in northern Europe. While they came as an already urbanised group and did not intend to settle on the land, in southern Europe, they had at least constituted themselves as an economically diversified group, involved in a wide range of crafts and businesses. In northern Europe, general hostility toward the newcomers resulted in a restricted range of economic opportunities. In the earliest stage of settlement, this meant largely trade. During the twelfth century, however, as the Church mounted a relatively successful campaign against what it projected as the Christian sin of usury, a new, lucrative, and problematic economic specialty was opened for the Jews. Moneylending quickly became a dominant business activity of the economically limited Jews of northern Europe.15 This development—initially

104  Robert Chazan encouraged by the ruling elite for its own purposes—added further potent elements to the already negative imagery of the Jews of northern Europe. The first additional and potent element was the imagery of moneylending itself. Banking has never been a popular and respected economic activity. The imagery of Jews as moneylenders was in and of itself harmful. In addition, Jewish moneylending strengthened the perception of Jewish otherness. Jewish moneylending was grounded in the Church’s projection of the Jews as Others and hence allowed to give and take usury. More importantly, for everyday Christians—relatively unaffected by the niceties of the ecclesiastical definitions of otherness—Jews were simply different in being allowed to give and take usury while Christians were prohibited from such behaviours. Most significantly, the reality and the imagery of Jewish moneylenders created a new component to the broader perception of Jews as hostile to Christianity and Christians, which was an element in traditional Christian thinking. Jewish moneylending was now projected as an important vehicle through which Jews attempted to inflict harm and pain on their Christian neighbours, since borrowing—especially at the time of repayment—is normally a very painful experience. The imagery of Jewish hostility to Christianity and Christians intensified the negativity generally associated with banking; the negative imagery of the Jewish moneylender reinforced the sense of Jewish animosity and malevolence. As Jews became increasingly involved in moneylending, the links between the political authorities and their Jewish clients were strengthened. From the outset, Jewish settlement in northern Europe was heavily dependent on the ability of the ruling class to provide safety for potentially unpopular newcomers. One of the hallmarks of the rapid development of northern European society was the enhanced capability of the ruling class to provide the security that undergirds societal progress and economic growth. The increasingly effective rulers of northern Europe were by and large successful in protecting their Jewish protégés. The new Jewish economic outlet of moneylending deepened dramatically the links between the rulers of northern Europe and their Jews. For the Jews, governmental backing for Jewish lending meant that Jews could use land as collateral for large and lucrative loans; for the authorities, this support had to be paid for by the Jews through heavy taxation of their newly found wealth. For popular perceptions, the links between the Jews and the authorities were plain to see. What this meant was that anti-government hostility in segments of the northern European population would readily translate into anti-Jewish hostility. All these elements—Jewish newness; Jewish religious otherness; Jewish ethnic otherness; the limited Jewish economic outlets in northern Europe; the problematic Jewish specialisation in moneylending, its intensification of the sense of Jewish otherness, and its reinforcement of the traditional imagery of Jewish animosity toward Christianity and Christianity; and the potent links between the Jews and their overlords—set the stage for the generation of new and more virulent imagery of Jewish malevolence. It was

Virulent Anti-Jewish Imagery  105 twelfth- and thirteenth-century northern Europe that was the scene of all these developments, and it was in twelfth- and thirteenth-century northern Europe that the new and more virulent imagery emerged. One further thought. Beyond the specific developments I have highlighted in twelfth- and thirteenth-century northern Europe, it is generally agreed that the pace of change in medieval Europe was most pronounced in the rapidly developing north. In the year 1300, northern Europe had been transformed strikingly from what it had been 200 years earlier. It is precisely periods of rapid change that tend to result in disorienting insecurities and societal polarisation. Thus, we emerge with the sense that, in addition to the specific developments I have identified, the rapid and disorienting changes that took place in twelfth- and thirteenth-century northern Europe created a broad environment that fostered the increasingly radical negative imagery of northern-European Jews.16 This new and radical imagery subsequently made its way into the southern areas of more traditional European Jewish habitation and eventually was absorbed and disseminated by a number of major medieval Christian thinkers. Thus, the new imagery was maintained and transmitted by means of both widely known European folklore and influential literary works. This radical imagery of Jews and the dangers they allegedly posed to their contemporaries was thus readily available during yet another phase of societal disequilibrium—nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. Once again, anxious Europeans sought to identify and combat what they perceived to be malevolent agents of rapid and deleterious change. For these later disoriented Europeans, there was an available and rich fund of antiJewish images readily at hand, bequeathed to them by their medieval northern European ancestors.

Notes 1. In the 1930s, James Parkes published two important studies on Christian-­Jewish relations: The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue (London: Soncino, 1934) and The Jew in the Medieval Community (London: Soncino, 1938). For a valuable study of Parkes, see Robert Andrew Everett, Christianity without Antisemitism: James Parkes and the Christian-Jewish Encounter (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1993). 2. In the wake of the Holocaust, Jules Isaac published an important series of books on anti-Jewish elements in Christianity. His overall summary of Christian antiJewish thinking and its impact can be found in The Teaching of Contempt, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964). 3. Isaac, The Teaching of Contempt, 37. I have reordered slightly the sequence presented by Isaac. 4. For full treatment of Vatican II, see the valuable study by John Connelly, From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews 1933– 1965 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 5. Langmuir’s innovative and influential essays have been collected in Gavin I. Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Langmuir worked his insights into a comprehensive statement

106  Robert Chazan in his History, Religion, and Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 6. Langmuir’s fullest treatment of these issues can be found in History, Religion, and Antisemitism, chaps. 8, 13, and 14. 7. R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987) treated intensifying negative majority imagery and harmful behaviours toward a number of European minorities, with the Jews featured prominently. Moore projected the political concerns of the feudal bureaucracy in this intensifying negativity toward the Jews. Subsequently, Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christians and Jews in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1995)—­suggested that the growing twelfth-century assertion of the rationality of Christianity resulted in the sense of the Jews as fundamentally irrational. Two years later, I published Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), in which I suggested—as I do below—that the specifics of Jewish existence in Northern Europe in tandem with heightened majority anxieties created by the rapid pace of societal change fostered the accelerating negativity of attitudes toward the Jews. 8. In my overview of the history of the Jews in medieval Europe, I emphasised the differences between the older and better-established Jewries of Southern Europe and the new Jewries of the north. See Robert Chazan, The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom, Cambridge Medieval Textbooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), chaps. 3–5. 9. The exile of the northern kingdom is treated in II Kings 17. 10. The exile of the southern kingdom is treated in II Kings 24–25. 11. In a forthcoming volume on Jewish migrations over the ages, I address this inaccuracy at considerable length. 12. For a brief but incisive overview of this process of change, see R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953). For a recent and more expansive treatment of the growing strength and creativity of medieval Latin Christendom, see Johannes Fried, The Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 13. See Chazan, The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom, chaps. 4–5. 14. For full treatment of these assaults, see Robert Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 15. See also the essay by Giacomo Todeschini in this volume. 16. As suggested in Chazan, Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism.

8 Between Anti- and Another Modernity Anti-Judaism, the Imaginary Jew, and Catholic Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Poland (1880–1914) Grzegorz Krzywiec Introduction: The Catholic Church, the Jews, and the ­Jewish Question in the Nineteenth Century Throughout the long nineteenth century, the belief flourished within the Roman Catholic Church that the only solution to the Jewish problem was the conversion of the Jews to Christianity. While there are examples of Church representatives using notions of race to denigrate the Jews, and even of Catholic theologians who wished to remove the Jewish minority from Christian soil, mainstream Catholic theology opposed any and all racist theories and never openly embraced racial doctrines. That said, Christian dogma provided an important, if not fundamental, bridge between traditional religious Judeophobia and the nationalist antisemitism that arose during the latter half of the nineteenth century and developed thereafter.1 Despite its obvious hierarchical structure, the Catholic Church was not a monolithic body. As was always the case when the Church found itself in a minority position, it opposed the government and the establishment. It strongly favoured liberal constitutional rights, openly opposed discrimination, and even considered moderating its traditional view of its eternal enemies, including Wilhelmine Germany. On the other hand, whenever the Church had no religious rivals and its principal antagonist was not the heretics but secular civil society, it was inclined to support absolute ­authority—for example, the Habsburg Monarchy—or focused on resisting any attempt to diminish its social and political position—Italy and France being examples.2 These generalities must be considered in light of the ambiguous legacy of the failed 1848 Revolution for the Catholic communities. It was a time when, on an intellectual level, many Catholics ultimately embraced the idea that the Jewish community shared the interests of the secular, “modern world.”3 This collective accusation arose at different times and in different places throughout the nineteenth century, with the pervading anti-Judaism joined by a new negative image of Jews, one that came to dominate the popular Catholic imagination in Europe this period.4 This new meaning of Judeophobia was deeply rooted in Catholic thinking throughout the first

108  Grzegorz Krzywiec half of the nineteenth century—and was, in fact, prevalent in Christianity in general. It was not yet, however, an independent concept with its own language structures. (The information available to us suggests that the term “antisemitism” was coined by the German journalist William Marr, in 1879.)5 It is not the purpose of this essay to delve in to all of the nuances of antiJewish discourse at that time, but it is worth noting that this new Catholic Judeophobia and burgeoning nationalist antisemitism arose and developed in parallel. The two traditions reinforced one another throughout the long nineteenth century. In what way and to what degree did this influence the situation for the Catholic Church and the Catholic community in the Polish lands under partition?

The Imaginary Jew, the Catholic Church, and the Jewish Question in Late Nineteenth-Century Russian Poland It was in the 1880s, during the partitions, that antisemitism became a socially acceptable political and economic project in Poland. Its main initial proponent was Jan Jeleński (1845–1909), a journalist and the editor of the weekly Rola (Soil). The weekly was established in 1883, in Warsaw, then part of Congress Poland, and was circulated throughout the Polish lands that had fallen to the Russian Empire. This was where the majority of Poles and most of the Polish Jews lived. The weekly consistently called for the political, social, and, above all, economic separation of the Jews from the Poles.6 To this end, it hoped to mobilise what its contributors referred to as the “silent Christian majority.” The ultimate goal sought by the editor and his team was an unconditional alliance of all social layers, with the Catholic Church in the leading position. Rola was popular, with approx. 2,000–3,000 copies sold every week. It portrayed Catholicism as a sort of greater good that permeated all levels of human activity. This was most apparent in the consistent emphasis placed on the need to reconstruct Catholic social morality and in the assertion that the clergy had played, was playing, and would continue to play a crucial role in the struggle against “foreign elements.”7 It was no coincidence that the group that evoked the strongest “antimodernist” sentiment was modern Jewry. Jews were the most easily identified symbol of foreign values, standing in opposition to every aspect of the traditional way of life. At the extreme, the Jews became a metaphor for “false” and “nasty” modernity, with all its disastrous consequences. Rolarze (land-tillers), as Rola’s contributors and supporters called themselves, were convinced of the profound crisis of modernity and the inevitable demise of the “materialist world.” Yet this conviction was accompanied by a belief in the imminent moral rebirth of the national Christian community. Rola, and Jeleński himself, often addressed the proverbial “ordinary man,” implying that they cared about the fate of every Catholic Pole, as a member of the religious and national community. The newly hostile approach

Anti- and Another-Modernity  109 to the Jews was based on traditional anti-Jewish economic and religious premises, but it also had a more modern grounding in an anti-emancipatory propaganda machine. The weekly consistently drew upon the authority of the Church hierarchy, pointing to its anti-Jewish legislation and rooting its political and social message in Catholic social teaching.8 Initially, what people noticed was a tremendous wave of aggressive invective against the Jews. All of the calumniations—“Jewish swamp” (żydowskie bagno), “filthy insects” (plugawe robactwo), “disgusting locust” (szarańcza podła), “weeds” (chwasty), “Jewish plague” (plaga żydowska), “enslavement by the Jews” (niewola żydowska), and so on—that constituted the late nineteenth-century Polish antisemitic vocabulary found their way into the Rola columns.9 Rola’s circulation during the last two decades of the nineteenth century— between 1886 and 1905, to be precise—made the magazine a key player among Polish opinion weeklies. In the mid-1880s, Antoni Zaleski, a conservative journalist at the daily Słowo (Voice) expressed his hostility towards Rola: “The antisemitic movement today is popular everywhere, and particularly here [in Warsaw] it has led to this mediocre periodical gathering an impressive number of subscribers.”10 Rola’s most sophisticated ideologue was Teodor Jeske-Choiński (1854– 1920), a writer and journalist well respected in the conservative literary world.11 In a way, Jeske-Choiński was a son of his age: a former progressive who turned into a die-hard conservative. However, his “spiritual” antisemitism did not target Jews as moneylenders, innkeepers, and peddlers to the degree that was common among his Rola colleagues. For him, the Jew was first and foremost a symbol of the modern age, with all its horrors, including capitalism, atheism, materialism, and socialism.12 Alongside the latest racial theories, Jeske-Choiński addressed a broad range of topics, including decadent literature, ritual murder, the psychology and failure of the French Revolution, the emancipation of women, and “sexualism in Polish culture.” His numerous works offered not only the key antisemitic tropes that were part and parcel of Polish antisemitism, but also advanced an extremely comprehensive justification for antisemitism as a form of national self-defence. From his point of view, the only hope for regeneration was to stop the imperative disintegration of the “modern” world by embracing militant Roman Catholicism. Initially, Jeske-Choiński’s works were not widely read, but following the 1905 Revolution, his publications achieved great, even enormous, popularity among the Catholic public. Interestingly enough, at the time, neither the Catholic hierarchy nor the official Polish Catholic journals devoted much space to the Jewish question.13 The new antisemitism, which attracted the support of many in the Catholic community, created a highly uncomfortable and embarrassing situation for Church spokesmen. Many Catholic journals found the style and tone of Rola drastic, vulgar, and unacceptable. An editorial of Przegląd Katolicki (Catholic Review), the most respected organ of the hierarchy in

110  Grzegorz Krzywiec Congress Poland, pointed out that Rola columns were full of “Prussian” brutishness and “pagan” pure hatred against the Jews without any traits of Christian mercy.14 The aforementioned Antoni Zaleski claimed that Jeleński had fought with the Jews with “Jewish methods” arguing additionally that Rola accuses the Jews of more than they really deserve.15 Another observer, a student at the Warsaw Veterinary School—who later became the famous writer, Stefan Żeromski, himself not free of antisemitic biases—noted in his diary that reading Jeleński’s feuilletons is just like “eating a raw potato.”16 The weekly, which was founded in the immediate aftermath of the 1881 Christmas pogrom, was then boycotted by many bien-pensants as an aggressive expression of the new Polish-Jewish tensions of the epoch.17 In reality, however, Church authorities shared most of Jeleński’s views on the Jewish question; at the time, they seriously feared the disorder and chaos incumbent in the nineteenth-century process of modernisation.18 It was not terribly surprisingly that Catholic Church officials appeared to support the status quo in the face of these new tendencies. Most articles about the Jews in the Catholic press were factual reports, occasionally manifesting a greater or lesser degree of anti-Judaism, but never anything akin to the strident antisemitism of Rola or numerous other minor initiatives of the sort. Nonetheless, the weekly successfully competed for Roman Catholic readers, catching the attention of many among the lower clergy, as well as of Catholic intellectuals of various stripes. While at the outset, the paper’s distribution and influence were limited, the introduction of openly antisemitic motifs into the world of late nineteenthcentury Polish journalism marked a significant, if not pivotal, turning-point both for future relations between Poles and Jews, and, in the long-term, for the whole of Polish Catholicism. Under martial law, beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century (following the January 1863 Polish Insurrection, to be precise), journalism remained one of the few legal ways of propagating a new ideology in Russian Poland. However, the enormous distrust that the Russian authorities felt for Poles in general, and for the enlightened classes in particular, effectively prevented the introduction of a mass political approach in this part of partitioned Poland. Moreover, the crucial role the Catholic Church played during the January Insurrection made the institution one of the main targets of subsequent Tsarist retribution. The wave of repression in the post-January period not only diminished the Church’s social and cultural position in the Polish Kingdom, but also had a notable crippling effect on a number of Church social practices such as conducting parochial schools in the provinces and even charity. Not to mention largely that a vacuum which had opened up in Catholic leadership produced an overwhelming feeling of instability among both the hierarchy and the flock, and created a climate of paralysing conformity and everyday conservatism that overwhelmed the Polish Church in this part of Poland.19

Anti- and Another-Modernity  111

Ex Vienna Lux? Habsburg Galicia as a Laboratory for Catholic Antisemitism in the Polish Lands Jews lived in a number of provinces in Habsburg Austria, with notable populations in Polish- and Ukrainian-speaking Galicia and in Bukovina in the far east, in Czech- and German-speaking Bohemia and Moravia, in ­German-, Czech-, and Polish-speaking Silesia, and in Vienna itself—and Jewish communities were growing in all provinces. Nonetheless, the achievement of legal equality under the constitution of 1867 resulted in a great influx of Jews from Galicia and Bohemia. For example, there was a population of 6,000 legal Jewish residents among the 500,000 people in Vienna in 1857, and 145,000 among 1,674,000 inhabitants by 1900. This became a source of enormous anger and frustration for the Christian middle-classes. Many artisans and white-collar workers who were excluded by the suffrage law faced Jewish and foreign competition, leading them to become increasingly suspicion of successful Jews. In the mid-1870s, a “chimerical” image of Jews as the main victors of the revolution 1848 appeared for the first time. Jews were portrayed as the driving force behind the hated German Liberals and Liberalism, and as being mixed up with the vicious and godless Social Democratic leadership and the corrupt capitalists responsible for the 1873 stock crash. This proved to be a powerful political weapon.20 To some extent, Karl Lueger (1844–1910), a gifted politician from Vienna and co-founder of the Viennese Christian Socials, then the first mass Catholic party in the Habsburg Empire, picked up on this Zeitgeist in the late 1880s.21 For many East European Catholics, neither German Catholicism nor that of any other European country offered a role model for the revitalisation of Catholic public life. It was Habsburg Austria—Vienna, in particular— that did so.22 While staying in the Austro-Hungarian capital in the early 1880s, the aforementioned Teodor Jeske-Choiński wrote in a letter to a friend: “Here in Vienna work is abundant; I am collecting material for new works in literary history that are unattainable in Warsaw. I am planning a forceful attack on liberals, Jews, and positivists, but I require scientific facts to do so.”23 Lueger was not, of course, the first person to discover how politically flexible a tool antisemitism could be. He was, however, the person responsible for redefining political Catholicism, returning it to its place as the ideology of the Catholic middle classes, for whom liberalism meant capitalism and capitalism meant Jews. Jews constantly recurred as a metaphor for “false” modernity in this narrative: love of money and the subversion of Christian order, the domination of the press and the spread of socialism, propagating various types of moral—especially sexual abnormality—were intermingled with “Jewish” traits. It was the time when a notion of “Judaisation” (zażydzenie), meaning not only the public visibility of Jews but also their real

112  Grzegorz Krzywiec or imagined fight against “Christian” values, became a well-known concept in many different lands.24 It would not be an exaggeration to claim that the discourse about “deceitful” modernity was one of the defining features of fin-de-siècle Catholicism, and this was no less true in the Polish lands. Lueger’s election to Vienna’s Rathaus in 1895 had an immediate and enormous effect both on Habsburg Catholic public opinion and, of more interest, on Catholicism abroad.25 In Habsburg Galicia, Lueger was seen as a beacon of hope by the indigenous antisemitic movement. In the late 1880s, the Galician Ultramontanist Catholics underwent a radical shift in their attitude to mass politics. They struggled to find a “Christian” way into modern times, including the use of newspapers, associations, parties, and other tools of mass politics to present their goals to the flock.26 In 1893, Głos Narodu (Voice of the Nation), the organ of the Cracovian Archbishop with a circulation of 5,000 copies and advanced slogans like “buy only from Christians” (kupuj tylko u chrześcijań), became the biggest daily in Cracow.27 It largely echoed the programme of Jeleński’s Rola. In subsequent years, other weekly and monthly newspapers appeared, often functioning as organs of one of the numerous newly founded Catholic and “Christian social” groups. They strove to win over their readers to Christian social doctrine and to “protect” them from the influence of “Jewish” Marxist social democracy. In reality, they sought to create a new “Christian” public sphere. In most cases, these initiatives were the providence of either Jesuits or new Catholic intellectuals.28 In 1895, another weekly targeting Catholic workers—Grzmot ­(Thunder)— was founded in Lwów (Lviv), the city where the Second Catholic Assembly had taken place. A year later, the paper moved to Cracow, where its circulation tripled, peaking at approximately 1,500 copies. That same year, the bi-weekly Prawda (Truth), which defined itself as a “newspaper for religious, national, political, economic, and amusing matters” appeared. Edited exclusively by Jesuits priests, it targeted villages and provincial towns. As historian Tim Buchen put it: “When we consider these newspapers, the appropriation of the Viennese Christian-social in different shades becomes apparent, as a common pattern.”29 In Cracow, and in Habsburg Galicia generally, this Catholic clerical camp had at its disposal neither people nor parties constituting a Catholic breakthrough into mass politics. Therefore, as Buchen put it, both Cracovian and Lvivian Christian-Socials looked across the Galician border to Vienna. One could quote from those various public appearances, but they were neither particularly vivid nor groundbreaking, nor did they produce magnetic leadership that could really move the masses, and so the Galician newspapers liked to claim Lueger as one of their own. As well as lacking a persuasive and charismatic figure, this political camp failed to draw the support of the hierarchy. In the end, the Viennese experience could not be transferred across the Vistula, and the imagined alliance remained a onesided dream.30

Anti- and Another-Modernity  113 After a year of heated debate, this “new-old” trend finally gained its own ideologue with popular appeal in Father Marian Morawski (1845–1901), a professor of theology at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, and most importantly the editor of the Jesuit monthly Przegląd Powszechny (Universal Review), one of the journals that exercised the greatest influence among the Polish clergy. In an article published in February 1896, Morawski staked out a position distinct from both liberal “philosemitism” and “pagan” antisemitism, proposing instead “asemitism.”31 Taking Viennese examples and presenting Jews as the “enemies of all Christianity and the Polish nation,” he chose to argue against any contact with them whatsoever, rather than focusing on why their influence was and would remain inherently harmful. Father Morawski understood his programme of “separatism” as an enforced policy of social, economic, and cultural segregation of Poles from Jews, in particular providing a detailed explanation of why Polish youth and Polish women should be strictly isolated from the everyday “presence of the Jewry.” At the end of the nineteenth century, Morawski’s Christian social “selfdefence” programme gained significant attention in Catholic social circles. The publication was reprinted both in the Kingdom of Poland and abroad.32 Rola, then the best-known antisemitic journal in Polish lands, claimed the label “asemitic” as its own.33 Niwa Polska (Poland’s Cornfield), another Warsaw antisemitic weekly, established in 1895 to defend the Christian order, also reprinted Morawski’s credo.34 Many other Catholic journals, such as the influential, official Przegląd Katolicki, saw in the programme a way to bridge the gap between the Church’s traditional social teaching and the new tendencies.35 “Asemitism” became the catchphrase of choice for nearly all of the Catholic movement, not only in Galicia, but in the Polish lands as well.36

The 1905 Revolution, the Challenge of Mass Politics, and Catholic Poland’s Turn towards Antisemitism The Revolution of 1905 marked a clear watershed in Polish politics and certainly in relations between Poles and Jews in the Russian Empire.37 In early 1905, Poles and Jews struggled side by side against the Russian authorities. However, as violence grew and anarchy spread in late 1905, the Christian public began to search for scapegoats, something that almost certainly increased in 1906, when the revolutionaries fell victim to government repression. The imagination of the conservative social sectors was increasingly seized by the spectre of revolution as a Jewish socialist plot. Jan Jeleński, the infamous “godfather of Polish antisemitism,” stridently opposed the 1905 revolutionary events, blaming the social unrest on the Jews. Feeling he had the wind in his sails, he set up a new daily newspaper, Dziennik Powszechny (Popular Daily), as a vehicle for spreading popular catchphrases throughout the nation like “Don’t buy from the Jews” and

114  Grzegorz Krzywiec “Beware of the Jew” as part of his overall political message. It soon became perfectly obvious that constituting the new Catholic political culture would be accompanied by a great rebirth of enmity towards the Jewish population. Even though the Catholic Church did not officially embrace antisemitism, it nonetheless expressed a great deal of ambiguity about the Jews’ place in the social order, allowing it to reduce the entire Jewish question to a social problem. Beginning in 1905, Catholic public opinion—on both the left and the right—increasingly adopted an uncompromising attitude towards the Jews. The Jew as an enemy of Christian civilisation became an established element in Catholic writing.38 Then, a new competitor appeared on the scene. The leader of Narodowa Demokracja (National Democracy; also known as Endecja or Endeks), Roman Dmowski had a vision of a disciplined society governed by a “national organisation.” His vision may well have appeared to be both an authentic barrier to the chaos of revolution and the only way to preserve Polish national identity.39 In contrast to Jeleński and other Catholic antisemites of the period, Endeks had not only centralised media at their disposal, but more importantly a mass party organisation. Lacking respectability and caught up in conflicts with the conservative hierarchy, the leading Catholic antisemites were finally driven into the arms of Endeks, whose aggressive counter-revolutionary and antisemitic platform provided the necessary point of reconciliation. In early 1906, the National Democratic political machine extended its reach across the entire country, winning a resounding victory in Congress Poland’s first elections to the Russian State Duma. The demise of the 1905 Revolution was the first significant victory of nationalist antisemitism over political Catholicism and Catholic antisemites, such as Jeleński and Father Ignacy Kłopotowski, founder of both the main popular Catholic daily at that time, Polak-Katolik (Pole-Catholic), and the weekly, Posiew (Seed).40 The new programme advanced by Catholic antisemitism and political Catholicism had failed to provide a platform for a successful mass movement, although it did serve to deepen already serious divisions around other clerical “issues.” Antisemitism may well have provided a potential unifying symbol for Polish Catholics at a time of declining religiosity and rising struggles with dissident movements (for example, the Mariavite Church), but it did not resolve other issues. As such, antisemitism was not so much a coherent political programme as it was an expression of disorientation in the face of fundamental political, economic, and social change, and, last but not least, evidence of the isolation of the Catholic Church during this period. Against this background, the Catholic political parties—for example, Związek Katolicki (Catholic Union), led by Jan Jeleński and Jeske-Choiński among others—failed to keep the Catholic bourgeoisie, clergy, and working class united under one roof.41 The old-new hatred did not bridge the divide between all of these groups, and, apart from the significant contribution

Anti- and Another-Modernity  115 Jeleński and his colleagues made to general antisemitism in the Polish lands, Polish political Catholicism remained a marginal force. Based on spurious notions of “protecting” Christian values and on the image of the Jews as the primary threat to the Catholic and Christian order, Endeks came to dominate the political scene. A new turning point in the spread of antisemitism among Catholics came with the so-called “Litvak psychosis.”42 The nature and intensity of antisemitic attitudes following the 1905 Revolution was influenced by the migration of Jews from Russia to Congress Poland. On the one hand, the arrival of the Russian Jews from the Pale of Settlement, so-called Litvaks, invigorated the Jewish community, transforming the character of Jewish public life, and breathing new life into cultural centres, theatres, and the press. On the other hand, the debate about the “Litvak threat” overshadowed Polish socio-political life in all three partitions. Although short-lived, the Litvak myth, along with the consequences of the Revolution, had an enormous impact on Polish politics. By late 1909 or early 1910, this antisemitic jargon had become established in the language and imagination of conservative Catholics in Congress Poland.43 When, in 1911, a tide of social tensions swept across the lands of the Russian partition, it coincided with the outbreak of the Beilis Affair in Kiev, an event that embraced ever-widening circles of Christian society throughout the Russian Empire, revitalising overwhelmingly medieval anti-Jewish myths in the Polish lands as well.44 The peak of this anti-Jewish wave came during the electoral campaign for the Fourth Russian Duma, in the summer of 1912, when the National Democrats cunningly escalated the simmering sentiments into a full-blown anti-Jewish fury.45 In the months following the election, fear, uncertainty, and anti-Jewish paranoia gripped Russian Poland, with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, an overwhelming majority of Catholic organisations and the Catholic press willingly supporting the anti-Jewish boycott campaign. The most important corollary of the drastic campaign of 1912 was a firm embedding of antisemitism in the political culture of Congress Poland, and subsequently in the Polish lands in general.

Conclusion During the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, the character of Catholic hostile neutrality in the face of aggressive anti-Jewish demagoguery underwent a significant change. What began as a marginal tendency among small but ideologically determined groups increasingly came to dominate the whole of Catholic public opinion in Polish lands. In the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution, and above all following the “anti-Litvak” wave, anti-Jewish sentiment spread among all strata of Polish Catholicism—first, in Russian Poland, then throughout the Polish lands. Paradoxically, however, the anti-Jewish boycott campaign proved to be the impetus for the final decline of the new form of Catholic mass politics.

116  Grzegorz Krzywiec The boycott became the ultimate step towards uniting all Catholic antisemitic and political ventures around the National Democrats. The Endeks formulated and put into practice a virulent antisemitic agenda, once again demonstrating how effectively they could directly communicate with the Catholic public. The majority of contemporary antisemitic initiatives, such as Father Stanisław Stojałowski’s Christian social movement in Habsburg Galicia, the weekly Catholic tabloid Postęp (Progress) in the Poznań district (Prussian Poland) and the remnants of Jeleński’s movement, were taken under the wing of Endeks. At the end of the day, Catholic antisemitism had prevailed on nearly every battlefield of public life, but had utterly failed to play any significant role in Polish mass politics. A hostile view of the Jews rapidly spread to all of the Polish partitions, particularly among Catholics. For Polish popular culture and for most Polish Catholics at the time, a negative concept of the Jew became the equivalent of Durkheimian “collective consciousness,” creating a social bond that was almost organic in nature. As Porter-Szűcs puts it: “Modern racialist anti-Semitism, then, had established a strong foothold among Polish Catholics even prior to World War I, and the doctrinal restraints of love for one’s neighbour and the universality of salvation were weakening.”46 It was with this toxic cocktail of xenophobia, aggressive anti-Judaism, and chauvinist nationalism that the Polish Catholics of the various partitions entered the First World War.

Notes 1. Steven Englund, “De l’antijudaïsme a l’antisémitisme, et à rebours,” Annales HSS 4 (2014): 901–24; David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism the Western Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 386. 2. Vicki Caron, “Catholics and the Rhetoric of Antisemitic Violence in Fin-deSiècle France,” in Sites of European Antisemitism in the Age of Mass Politics, 1880–1918, ed. Robert Nemes and Daniel Unowsky (Waltham: University Press of New England, 2014), 36–38; John Connelly, “Catholic Racism and Its Opponents,” The Journal of Modern History 4 (2007): 813–47. 3. Pierre Birnbaum, “Identité catholique et suffrage universel,” in “La France aux Francais”: Histoire des Haines nationalistes (Paris: Seuil 2006), 83–102; Katholischer Antisemitimus im 19. Jahrhundert: Ursachen und Tradition im internationalen Vergleich, ed. Olaf Blaschke and Aram Matoli (Zürich: Orell Füssli Verlag 2000), 203. 4. Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 2–3. 5. Englund, “De l’antijudaïsme à l’antisémitisme,” 907–13. See also the essay by Brian Klug in this volume. 6. Michał Śliwa, “‘Rolarski’ antysemityzm Jana Jeleńskiego,” in Obcy czy swoi? Z dziejów poglądów na kwestię żydowską w Polsce w XIX i XX wieku ­(Cracow: Wydawnictwo Naukowe WSP 1997), 7–14. 7. Maciej Moszyński, “‘A Quarter of a Century of Struggle’ of the Rola Weekly: ‘The Great Alliance’ against the Jews,” in The Making of Antisemitism as a Political Movement: Political History as Cultural History (1879–1914), ed. Werner Bergmann and Ulrich Wyrwa in a special edition of Quest: Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of Fondazione CDEC 3 (2012), available online

Anti- and Another-Modernity  117 at www.quest-cdecjournal.it/focus.php?id=297 (accessed 23 November 2017); Theodore Weeks, From Assimilation to Antisemitism: The “Jewish Question” in Poland, 1850–1914 (De Kalb: Northern Illinois Press, 2006), 89–99. 8. Agnieszka Friedrich, “Talmud i ‘talmudyzm’ w ujęciu ‘Roli,’” Studia Judaica 2 (2013): 145–69. 9. On the language and specific rhetoric of Rola, see Małgorzata Domagalska, Zatrute ziarno: Proza antysemicka na łamach “Roli” (1883–1912) (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Neriton, 2015), 19–45. 10. Baronowa XYZ [Antoni Zaleski], Towarzystwo warszawskie: Listy do przyjaciółki, vol. 2 (Cracow: J. K. Żypański & K. J. Neumann, 1889), 146. 11. Maciej Moszyński, “Antysemityzm w służbie ‘nowożytnego konserwatyzmu’ Teodor Jeske Choiński jako twórca programu ideowego tygodnika ‘Rola,’” in W kręgu młodo konserwatyzmu warszawskiego 1876–1918, ed. M. Gloger and W. Ratajczak (Bydgoszcz: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Kazimierza Wielkiego 2015), 93–105; Michał Śliwa, “Ksenofobie antyżydowskie T. JeskeChoińskiego,” in Obcy czy swój, 89–90; Michał Jagiełło, Próba rozmowy: Szkice o katolicyzmie odrodzeniowym i “Tygodniku Powszechnym” 1945– 1953, vol. 1 (Warsaw: Biblioteka Narodowa, 2001), 49. 12. Theodore Weeks, “The International Jewish Conspiracy Reaches Poland: Teodor Jeske-Choiński and His Works,” East European Quarterly 1 (1997): 39–41. 13. See Krzysztof Lewalski, “Problem antysemityzmu na łamach ‘Przeglądu Katolickiego’ w latach 1863–1914,” Nasza Przeszłość: Studia z dziejów Kościoła z kultury katolickiego w Polsce 84 (1995): 186–91; Weeks, From Assimilation to Antisemitism, 92–93; Brian Porter-Szűcs, Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity and Poland (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 279–80; Porter-Szűcs, “Why Do Polish Catholics Hate the Jews? Making Sense of a Bad Question,” in Antisemitism in an Era of Transition: Genealogies and Impact in Post-Communist Poland and Hungary, ed. François Guesnet and Gwen Jones (New York: Peter Lang, 2014), 2. 14. Lewalski, Problem antysemityzmu, 189–90. 15. Zaleski, Towarzystwo warszawskie, 150–51. 16. Stefan Żeromski, Dzienniki, vol. 3 (Warsaw: Czytelnik 1956), 330 (27 March 1889). 17. Agnieszka Friedrich, “The Image of the Warsaw Pogrom of 1881 in Late ­Nineteenth Century Polish Literature,” East European Jewish Affairs 40 (2010): 145–57. 18. Krzysztof Lewalski, Kościoły chrześcijańskie w Królestwie Polskim wobec Żydów w latach 1855–1915 (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2002), 160–70. 19. On the Tsarist repression of the Catholic Church, see Krzysztof Lewalski, Kościół katolicki a władze carskie w Królestwie Polskim na przełomie XIX i XX wieku (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 2008), 67–90; Ilona Zaleska, Kościół a Narodowa Demokracja w Królestwie Polskim do wybuchu I wojny światowej (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo DIG 2014), 41–50. 20. Gavin I. Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (London: I. B. Tauris, 1990), 341. 21. Richard S. Geehr, Karl Lueger, Mayor of Fin de Siècle Vienna (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1990); Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 156–70; John W. Boyer, Karl Lueger (1844–1910): Christlich soziale Politik als Beruf. Eine Biographie, trans. Otmar Binder (Cologne: Böhlau 2010); Robert Wistrich, Laboratory for World Destruction: Germans and Jews in Central Europe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 324–51.

118  Grzegorz Krzywiec 22. Tim Buchen, “‘Learning from Vienna Means Learning to Win’: The Cracovian Christian Socials and the ‘Antisemitic Turn’ of 1896,” Quest: Issues in Contemporary Jewish History 3 (2012), available online at www.quest-cdecjournal.it/ focus.php?id=302 (accessed 23 November 2017); Tim Buchen, Antisemitismus in Galizien: Agitation, Gewalt und Politik gegen Juden in der Habsburgermonarchie um 1900 (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2012), 156–66; James Mace Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 24–25. 23. Korespondencja redakcyjna Walerego Przyborowskiego, Biblioteka Ossolineum, Manuscript Ossol. 13602/I, 156 quoted from Maciej Moszyński, “‘A Quarter of a Century of Struggle’ of the Rola Weekly,” Quest: Issues in Contemporary Jewish History 3 (2012), available online at www.quest-cdecjournal. it/focus.php?id=297 (accessed 23 November 2017). 24. See Steven E. Aschheim, “‘The Jew Within’: The Myth of ‘Judaization’ in Germany,” in The Jewish Response to German Culture, ed. Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1985), 212–42; George Voicu, “The ‘Judaisation’ of the Enemy in the Romanian Political Culture at the Beginning of the 20th Century,” Studia Judaica 15 (2007): 148–60. 25. See Vicki Caron, “Catholic Political Mobilization and Antisemitic Violence in Fin-de-Siècle France: The Case of the Union Nationale,” The Journal of Modern History 2 (2009): 294–96; Derek Hastings, Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 24–25. 26. Buchen, “Learning from Vienna Means Learning to Win”; Buchen, Antisemitismus in Galizien, 156–66; Buchen, “Herrschaft in der Krise—der ‘Demagoge in der Soutane’ fordert die galizischen Allerheiligen,” in Imperiale Herrschaft in der Provinz: Repräsentationen politischer Macht im späten Zarenreich, ed. Jörg Baberowski, David Feest, and Christoph Golomb (Frankfurt am Main: Campus 2008), 331–55. Interestingly enough, Porter-Szűcs approached Lueger’s impact on Galician Catholic public opinion more sceptically, see Faith and Fatherland, 280–81; Porter-Szűcs, “Antisemitism and the Search for a Catholic Identity,” in Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland, ed. Robert Blobaum (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 106. 27. See Czesław Lechicki, “Pierwsze dwudziestolecie krakowskiego ‘Głosu Narodu,’” Studia Historyczne 4 (1969): 507–9. 28. Andrzej Kudłaszczyk, “Wpływ doktryn austriackiej i niemieckiej na katolicyzm społeczny w Galicji,” Studia Historyczne 3 (1981): 389–407; Andrzej Kudłaszczyk, “Koncepcje polityczne Karla Luegera,” Dzieje Najnowsze 4 (1994): 8–9; Jacek M. Majchrowski, “‘Antysemita’—zapomniana karta dziejów ruchu chrześcijańsko-społecznego w Krakowie,” Zeszyty Naukowe Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego: Prace z Nauk Politycznych 23 (1991): 191–97; Śliwa, “Grzmot” i “Antysemita” czasopisma antyżydowskie w Krakowie, in Obcy czy swój, 53–65. 29. Buchen, “Learning from Vienna Means Learning to Win,” 218. 30. Ibid., 226. 31. Marian Morawski, “Asemitism,” Przegląd Powszechny 49 (2 February 1896). On the discussion of Morawski’s article, see Porter-Szűcs, Faith and Fatherland, 285–89. 32. Michal Frankl, “Can We, the Czech Catholics, Be Antisemites? Antisemitism at the Dawn of the Czech Christian-Social Movement,” Judaica Bohemiae 33 (1998): 54–55; Michal Frankl, “Emancipace od židů”: Český antisemitismus na konci 19. století (Prague: Paseka, 2007), 111–50.

Anti- and Another-Modernity  119 33. Zbigniew Kościesza, ed., Ćwierćwiecze walki: Księga pamiątkowa Roli (Warsaw: Noskowski, 1910), 125; Domagalska, Zatrute ziarno, 48–54. 34. Maciej Moszyński, “Nieznośna konkurencja. O sporach między warszawskimi antysemitami końca XIX i początku XX wieku,” Kwartalnik Historii Żydów 1 (2015): 70–79; Małgorzata Domagalska, “The Linguistic Image of the Jew in ‘Rola’ and ‘Niwa’ Weeklies at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Century,” Studia Judaica 2 (2010): 320–21. 35. Lewalski, “Problem antysemityzmu na łamach,” 205–7. 36. On the violent side effects of this campaign in Western Galicia, see Daniel Unowsky, “Local Violence, Regional Politics, and State Crisis,” in Sites of AntiSemitism in the Age of Mass Politics, 1880–1918, ed. Robert Nemes and Daniel Unowsky (Waltham: University Press of New England, 2014), 13–35; Daniel Unowsky, “Peasant Political Mobilisation and the 1898 Anti-Jewish Riots in Western Galicia,” European History Quarterly 3 (2010): 412–35; Buchen, Antisemitismus in Galicia, 167–94. 37. Weeks, From Assimilation to Antisemitism, 140–43. 38. Robert E. Blobaum, Rewolucja: Russian Poland, 1904–1907 (Ithaca: Cor nell University Press, 1995), 240–49; Robert E. Blobaum, “The Revolution of 1905–1907 and the Crisis of Polish Catholicism,” Slavic Review 4 (1988): 667–89; Krzysztof Lewalski, “Kościół katolicki wobec społeczno-politycznej rzeczywistości lat 1905–1907,” in Rewolucja 1905–1907 w Królestwie Polskim i w Rosji, ed. Marek Przeniosło and Stanisław Wiech (Kielce: Wydawnictwo Akademii Świętokrzyskiej, 2005), 93–108. 39. Grzegorz Krzywiec, “Eliminationist Anti-Semitism at Home and Abroad: Polish Nationalism, the Jewish Question, and Eastern European Right-Wing Mass Politics,” in The New Nationalism and World War I, ed. Larry Rosenthal and Vesna Rodic (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 65–67; Grzegorz Krzywiec, Chauvinism, Polish Style: The Case of Roman Dmowski (1886–1905) (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2016), 340–41. 40. Israel Oppenheim, “The Radicalisation of the Endecja Anti-Jewish Line during and after the 1905 Revolution,” Shevut 25 (2000): 32–66; Theodore Weeks, “Fanning the Flames: The Jews in the Warsaw Press, 1905–1912,” East European Jewish Affairs 2 (1998–99): 70–72; Weeks, From Assimilation to Antisemitism, 149–69; Scott Ury, Barricades and Banners: The Revolution of 1905 and the Transformation of Warsaw Jewry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 214–63. 41. Ryszard Bender, “Związek Katolicki w Królestwie Polskim 1905–1918,” Chrześcijanin w Świecie 15 (1977): 36–37. 42. Ury, Barricades and Banners, 235–41; Francois Guesnet, “Migration et Stéréotype: Le Cas de Juifs Russes au Royaume de Pologne àla fin du XIX siècle,” Cahiers du Monde russe, 41, no. 4 (2000): 516–18; Jerzy Jedlicki, “The End of Dialogue, Warsaw 1907–1912,” in The Jews in Poland, vol. 2, ed. Sławomir Kapralski (Cracow: Jagiellonian University, 1999), 70–80. 43. A pamphlet by Father Jan Gnatowski seems to be emblematic for the time, W kwestii żydowskiej (Warsaw: Synowie S. Niemiry, 1909); see also the anonymous Chrześcijańska obrona kraju (Warsaw: Polak-Katolik, 1912); Jan Władziński, Semici i semityzm (Warsaw: Polak-Katolik, 1913), and above of all Jeske-Choiński, Poznaj Żyda (Warsaw: Kronika Rodzinna, 1913), and Antoni Werytus (Antoni Skrzynecki), Odżydzona ojczyzna: Obrazki z przyszłości, którą dziś tworzymy (Warsaw: [unkown], 1914). On the specific Catholic contribution to the anti-Litvak campaign, see Robert Blobaum, “Criminalizing the ‘Other’: Crime, Ethnicity, and Antisemitism in Early Twentieth-Century Poland,” in Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland, ed. Robert Blobaum (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 89–92.

120  Grzegorz Krzywiec 44. Jolanta Żyndul, “Bejlisy, czyli polska reakcja na proces kijowski,” Kwartalnik Historii Żydów 232 (2009): 407–10; Jerzy Jedlicki, “The End of Dialogue, Warsaw 1907–1912,” 201–2. 45. Robert Blobaum, “The Politics of Antisemitism in the Fin-de-Siècle Warsaw,” The Journal of Modern History 73 (2001): 303–5; Pascal Tress, Wahlen im Weichselland: Die Nationaldemokraten in Russisch-Polen und die Dumawahlen 1905–1912 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2007), 361–83; Stephan D. Corrsin, Warsaw before the First World War: Poles and Jews in the Third City of Russian Empire, 1880–1919, East European Monographs, no. 274 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 89–104; Stephan D. Corrsin, “Polish-Jewish Relations before the First World War: The Case of the Elections in Warsaw,” Gal-Ed: On the History of the Jews in Poland 11 (1989): 31–53; Paweł Korzec, Juifs en Pologne: la question juive pendant l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris: Presses de la Fondation National de Sciences Politiques, 1980), 42–45. 46. Porter-Szűcs, Faith and Fatherland, 289.

9 The Gospel According to Gibson Medieval Passion Plays, a Mean-Spirited Nun, and What One Movie Can Tell Us about Jewish-Christian Relations at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century Jonathan Adams Introduction Over a decade has passed since Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ hit screens around the globe on Ash Wednesday 2004. North America’s bestselling R/18-rated movie with worldwide ticket sales of over $610 million, sold-out viewings, and much controversy, The Passion, with its contentious representation of Jews, is not only “the greatest story ever sold,” but surely also the film that has had the greatest impact on Jewish-Christian relations so far this century. It unleashed a bitter dispute, with many Christian and Jewish leaders describing it as an attack on both the Jewish community and the teachings of the Catholic Church. The critic Jami Bernard did not hold back, calling it “the most virulently antisemitic movie made since the German propaganda films of World War II.”1 And yet, in spite of legitimate concerns, the film did not trigger widespread acts of antisemitic violence or revenge against either Jewish individuals or communities.2 The film’s director and producer, Mel Gibson (b. 1956), is an ultra-­ conservative, traditionalist Catholic who was raised as a sedevacantist and opposes both the liberalising reforms brought about with Vatican II and the papal leadership since the death of Pius XII in 1958. In The Passion, financed with $25 million from his personal fortune, he attempts to offer a corrective to what he views as the doctrinal and moral failings of the modern Church. One of the principal criticisms of the film is its portrayal of Jews that flies in the face of guidelines published by the Church. The views Gibson has expressed on Jews are ambiguous. While his father, Hutton Gibson, is an outspoken antisemite and Holocaust denier who describes Vatican II as “a Masonic plot back by the Jews,”3 Gibson’s own view of the Shoah is, at best, somewhat more ambivalent. In an interview with Peggy Noonan for Reader’s Digest, he said: “Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were

122  Jonathan Adams Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives.”4 Gibson is not sensitive to Jewish suffering nor does he recognise the uniqueness of the Shoah, its enormous significance for Jewish-Christian relations, or its consequences for Christian theology, self-understanding, and moral commitment. Furthermore, since producing The Passion, he has become notorious for drunken antisemitic outbursts, e.g. the Malibu police incident in 2006. This short essay examines The Passion of the Christ within the context of the history of dramatising the Passion and of Church statements on the portrayal of Jews. Historical inaccuracies, antisemitic stereotyping as well as theological perspectives are discussed before considering scholars’ and commentators’ claims concerning the film’s potential for antisemitism. The film also caused debate between Christian groups, bringing about coalitions between Catholics and Protestants where we might not have expected them (largely along an axis of liberal vs. conservative theology),5 and also between Jewish groups and academics. However, these intra-religious aspects are only touched upon here, where the focus is on Jewish-Christian relations, while recognising that neither religion is monolithic.6 The essay ends by considering what the film’s release can tell us about Jewish-Christian relations and their future.

Staging the Passion In the New Testament and patristic writings, Jews are depicted as “an accursed people, and children of the devil collectively condemned by God to suffer in degradation for rejecting and killing Christ.”7 This is particularly developed from two Gospel themes: the blood curse (Matthew 27:25), and the children of the devil (John 8:44). Thus, Origen (c. 185–c. 251) wrote “the blood of Jesus [falls] not only upon those who lived then but also upon all generations of the Jewish people following afterwards until the end of the world” and their crimes are “the most abominable of crimes, forming that conspiracy against the Saviour,” while John “golden-mouthed” Chrysostom (c. 349–407) described Jews as “men possessed by the devil” and the synagogue as “the domicile of the devil.”8 Indeed, Chrysostom concluded that there is “no expiation possible” for their “odious assassination of Christ” and they are “fit for killing.”9 Demonising Jews as Satan’s Christ-killing seed inspired anti-Jewish hatred and violence throughout the Middle Ages. The public sphere was saturated through art, poetry, drama, sermons, and theological treatises with the concept of the Jew as the evil Other. In descriptions of the Passion, this resulted in portraying the Jews as standing outside of humanity, gleefully mocking and tormenting Jesus as he carried the Cross and was crucified. This dehumanisation and demonisation of an entire people, all Jews, is one of the aspects of medieval anti-Judaism that carried over into modern antisemitism. The Middle Ages saw the rise of the Passion play, an offshoot of liturgical drama with similarities to the extra-liturgical composition the planctus

The Gospel According to Gibson  123 (lyrical lament), that allowed laypeople to engage in “affective piety,” to relive the events and emotions of the story of their redemption, and to experience and develop compassion for Christ’s suffering. First recorded in Italy (the earliest surviving manuscript fragment is the twelfth-century Montecassino Passion play),10 these performances were held outdoors in public streets and squares during Lent and often drew huge crowds: there are accounts of entire towns grinding to a halt on the occasion of a Passion play.11 They comprised a dramatisation of the events of Passiontide (Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday), that included Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, his arrest, trial, crucifixion, and resurrection. They mostly comprised spectacles of pain focusing on the excruciating story of Jesus being pilloried and tortured by the bestial, vicious Jews with Caiaphas and the Temple priests instigating the violence against him: a conflict between Christian mercy and cruel Jewish materialism. Performances were inflammatory, and, as evidenced in contemporary martyrologies, Passiontide was for centuries a time of terror for Jews. These gruesome Passion stories came about in a world where Jews were also accused of murdering Christian children, poisoning wells, desecrating the host, and spreading contagion. Within this oppressive climate of anti-Jewish hatred, the plays inevitably translated into violence against Jews, who were seen as a villainous minority bearing the guilt of deicide.12 The image of the deicide Jew continued to be confirmed in the modern era through such dramatisations; e.g. at the (in)famous stagings at Oberammergau where during the 1922 performance, one spectator attempted to shoot “Judas,” and where after seeing the revised 1970 play (i.e. the more sensitive version), a German spectator could say: The Jews are damned. In the moment when they crucified the Christ, the Lord repudiated them. They can entreat him what they want—you see what they endured in the concentration camps. It didn’t help them at all; the Jews are damned. They can pray all day, fast and plead, but it doesn’t help them. They are damned. They have no resting-place on earth. They haven’t recognised Christ. Even today they don’t convert. They still wait for their messiah. You can turn a Jew around however you want, but a Jew is a Jew.13 With the invention of film, audiences could be reached around the globe. Since Lucien Nonguet and Ferdinand Zecca’s La vie et la passion de Jésus Christ in 1905, there have been over thirty films depicting the Passion (not including parodies such as Monty Python’s Life of Brian). Suddenly, living images of the Christ’s final hours as conceived by film-makers (principally in Europe and North America) were accessible to anyone able to afford a cinema ticket. These films tended to try to appeal to as broad an audience as possible and focused on Jesus’ message of love and forgiveness—the Passion was just one element of the story.14

124  Jonathan Adams After the horrors of the Second World War, a number of Churches drew up guidelines for dramatising the Passion to avoid antisemitic stereotyping: most significantly for Catholics the Vatican’s Nostra Aetate (In Our Time, 1965), and its Notes on the Correct Way to Present the Jews and Judaism in Preaching and Catechesis in the Roman Catholic Church (1985), and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Criteria for the Evaluation of Dramatizations of the Passion (1988).15 At the beginning of the Notes, John Paul II is cited: “We should aim, in this field, that Catholic teaching at its different levels [. . .] presents Jews and Judaism, not only in an honest and objective manner, free from prejudices and without any offences, but also with full awareness of the heritage common [to Jews and Christians].” As Paula Fredriksen points out: Catholics have an additional reason to combat anti-Semitism. It is that popes and bishops, in plenum councils, have issued official (“magisterial”) teachings against it. Anti-Semitism violates magisterial instruction touching on biblical interpretation, on the theological significance of Christ’s sacrifice, and on Catholic-Jewish relations.16 These guidelines on staging the Passion remind us that the Gospels are not to be read as history but as texts for preaching and winning followers: “a factual history of the crucifixion and trial of Jesus has to be reconstructed rather than read from [the Gospels].”17 As Nostra Aetate makes clear, “what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.” Staging the Passion has indeed become more sensitive in recent years. The producers of the Oberammergau play now send the manuscript to Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish New Testament scholars for critique, and performances have (finally) caught up with the position espoused by the Catholic Church in 1965.18 Film directors and producers often consult New Testament scholars—as well as historians, archaeologists, and linguists— before beginning filming. Not just the realm of dramatic, but also choral performance has been affected by this new awareness: oratorios, such as the St. John’s Passion (Johannes-Passion) by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685– 1750), popular during Easter, remove or revise antisemitic passages or include a disclaimer in the concert programme.19

“It is as it was” Gibson claims to represent the Gospels’ account of Jesus’ final hours faithfully, saying: “Wow, the Scriptures are the Scriptures—I mean they’re unchangeable, although many people try to change them. And I think my first duty is to be as faithful as possible in telling the story so that it doesn’t contradict the Scripture.”20 Indeed, his insistence that people and events are depicted in The Passion in accordance with the Gospel accounts is a

The Gospel According to Gibson  125 controversial aspect of the film—and not just because it seems to be moving into the Protestant territory of sola scriptura. In addition to the inherent difficulties one might expect in trying to make a Diatessaron-like single coherent story out of the divergent Gospel accounts, The Passion includes a number of notable magnifications, ahistorical non-biblical additions, and deviations from the magisterial principles of biblical interpretation. However, Gibson’s advocates remain untroubled by these fictional expansions, even claiming that Pope John Paul II himself endorsed the film; upon seeing the movie, his private secretary, Stanisław Dziwisz, reported that the Holy Father had said “It is as it was”—a claim the Vatican has disowned. In spite of Nostra Aetate and its recommendations and clarifications about the Passion, Gibson remains unmoved, saying that scholars: “always dick around with [the Bible], you know [. . .] It’s horseshit. It’s revisionist bullshit. And that’s what these academics are into [. . .] Just get an academic on board if you want to pervert something.”21 Gibson rejects even widely accepted scholarly opinions on the Gospels. Thus, although all the Evangelists writing 70–100 CE had to rely on oral tradition, Gibson maintains they were eyewitnesses to the Crucifixion and their accounts are irrevocably accurate: “Matthew was there. And these other guys? Mark was Peter’s guy, Peter’s scribe. And Luke was Paul’s guy. I mean, these are reliable sources. These are guys who were around.”22 Unsurprisingly, then, Gibson also ignores the recommendations for dramatising the Passion, particularly with regard to the Jewishness of Jesus and his execution as a primarily Roman affair. His disdain for scholarship reflects a broader scepticism and scorn towards knowledge that seems to pervade contemporary Western culture where “alternative facts” are gaining ever wider currency. Nonetheless, Gibson and his staff at Icon Productions went to great effort to create the appearance of a factual, documentary-style film. This illusion of reality was created through various effects. For example, the film was shot in Matera and Craco in southern Italy chosen for their resemblance to the Roman province of Judea and dialogue is in subtitled Latin and a “mixed brew of Aramaic, Hebrew and Syriac with grammatical mistakes in all three.”23 The lingua franca of Roman Palestine (indeed, the entire Eastern Mediterranean), Greek, is completely absent: Pilate addresses the Jewish authorities in Aramaic [37:28] and Jesus speaks Latin to Pilate [40:04]. Perhaps Gibson is attempting to present Jesus as truly incarnate—he can speak any language he wants. Or perhaps only Latin—Catholicism—counts in The Passion, where even the titulus on the Cross contains no Greek (cf. John 19:20 [1:36:42]).

Sources Gibson draws on a range of sources for his account of the Passion: a mishmash of the accounts in the Gospels, the New and Old Testaments, traditional and medieval iconography, and the devotional writings of modern-day

126  Jonathan Adams Catholic mystics. The accounts of the Passion vary between the Gospels, and Gibson weaves them together selecting scenes as suits his requirements and papering over the joins. He extracts as much material as possible; so he includes, for example, the trial of Jesus at Herod’s court even though it only appears in Luke (23:7–15). Some spoken lines (e.g. “I make all things new” [1:15:23]) appear elsewhere in the New Testament (here Revelation 21:5), not in the Gospels. Furthermore, by presenting Jesus extensively quoting Psalms and crushing a serpent’s head in the Garden of Gethsemane (cf. Genesis 3:15) as well as introducing the film with a quotation from Isaiah 53, Gibson links the Old and New Testaments in a typological fashion. Much of the imagery in The Passion is not taken from Scripture. The instruments of torture, for example, are not mentioned in the Gospels, but by drawing upon centuries of iconography, relic veneration, and Stations of the Cross to present them [1:01:40], Gibson is choosing imagery that is familiar to and anticipated by his audience. He may also be using the Stations of the Cross known to Catholics worldwide as the film’s narrative framework: e.g. Gibson’s sixth station includes the legendary Veronica (credited as “Seraphia”)24 creating an icon when Christ wipes his face on her white cloth where its image miraculously appears [1:21:05]. Similarly, nails and a crown left by the Cross [1:51:26] also point forward to post-fourth-century relic veneration. Vincent Miller proposes the Five Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary as the devotional practice explaining the film’s structure.25 However, it seems more likely that The Passion is structured around the Seven Falls of Jesus—each one is filmed in slow-mo detail—as found in the visions of Anne Catherine Emmerich (see below). However, whatever its source, the narrative framework has no basis in the Gospels: subsequent commemorative inventions have become factual events that took place during the Passion. After his arrest, the Jewish guards throw the enchained Jesus off a bridge [14:56], leaving him suspended in the air, a mock execution at the hands of the Jews—whom the viewer can hear chuckling off camera—that prefigures his crucifixion by the Romans. This non-scriptural scene26 comes from medieval narratives27 via the violent visions of the Augustinian nun Anne Catherine Emmerich (Anna Katharina Emmerick, 1774–1824), collected in Das bittere Leiden unsers Herrn Jesu Christi (The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ) and penned at her bedside by Clemens Maria Brentano— Emmerich herself was unable to write as she bore the stigmata. Brentano edited and published these visions.28 Tellingly, he was one of the founders in 1811 of the Christlich-deutsche Tischgesellschaft (Christian-German Table Fellowship), a Prussian antisemitic society that advocated eliminating Jews from German society. Gibson is cited as saying that Emmerich “supplied me with stuff I never would have thought of,”29 and, like Gibson’s film, her visions are “strong on images and weak on words.”30 Her influence, including Satan in the Garden of Gethsemane [5:38],31 Mary listening to Jesus through the flagstones [33:35],32 Jesus’ mother and Mary Magdalene33 wiping up spilt blood [1:02:22–30; 1:03:05–30],34 the role of Pilate’s wife

The Gospel According to Gibson  127 (a quasi-convert) and her cloths [1:02:08],35 and the stretching and dislocation of Jesus’ limbs [1:33:44],36 cannot be overstated; she, or rather Brentano, is effectively “Gibson’s co-author.”37 Emmerich too was an antisemite who according to Brentano believed that Jews “strangled Christian children and used their blood for all sorts of suspicious and diabolical practices.”38 Scenes that Gibson has taken from her visions and that put Jews in a negative light include the bribes used to make the mob show up at Jesus’ trial [15:40–55],39 Satan’s presence in the midst of the crowd [1:11:30–41],40 and the presence of Jewish leaders at Golgotha [1:35:05].41 However, some of her more antisemitic material—and there is plenty to choose from—has not made its way into the film. For example, in an early version of the screenplay, the Cross is created in the Temple—Emmerich had “seen” the high priest ordering it to be made there42—but this scene was cut from the final version. Gibson has also mentioned Mística Ciudad de Dios (The Mystical City of God) by the Spanish visionary María de Jesús de Ágreda (1602–65) among his influences; compare, for example, the scourging scene in the film with the description in Book 6, chapter 20. Insisting The Passion “is as it was,”43 Gibson apparently believes that visions provide historical knowledge about Jesus’ life. What is particularly disconcerting about Gibson’s non-scriptural deviations is how, together with the film’s audio-visual effects, they all point overwhelmingly to the villainy and culpability of the Jews. Gibson’s imagery owes a huge debt to traditional Catholic iconography and a medieval atmosphere permeates the film. By focusing on Christ’s broken body, flain flesh, and bloody wounds, The Passion cultivates a meditative, affective piety: the camera angles—filming Jesus from the eye-level of the actors—draws the viewers in to a position of empathy. Its narrative framework is taken from Emmerich, while the plot in its broad outline is, of course, biblical. Even though Emmerich is not a particularly well-known mystic, the imagery of her visions fits so neatly into the style of medieval apocryphal Passion tales, that it seems strangely recognisable, and this potpourri of sources—biblical, traditional, iconographic, and mystical—­ combines to create moments of “unspecific recognition” for the audience— it all seems vaguely familiar, known, and understandable. It is a modern take on the medieval Passion play which—thanks to special effects such as seemingly limitless quantities of fake blood and latex scars—exceeds what medieval actors were able to dramatise. However, in spite of its debt to medieval drama, Gibson’s film, unlike medieval representations, leaves little time for the promise of final and lasting deliverance, i.e. the Resurrection (presented here without the sympathetic Jew, Joseph of Arimathea [1:52:35]). The flashbacks fail to place the suffering of Christ in a broader context of theological significance (it is, after all, The Passion, not the Gospel, of the Christ). The lack of context requires viewers to flesh out the story from their own knowledge, experience, belief, or expectation in order to make sense of what is going on. In other words, the audience is required to use their own story frameworks from outside of the film to create meaning.44

128  Jonathan Adams This may indeed have broadened the film’s appeal—some viewers may enjoy recognising the various nods to Jesus’ ministry while others may watch the action unfold in blissful ignorance of the broader context. Although in treating the Resurrection so fleetingly, Gibson’s film departs from Passion plays, in portraying “the Jews,” it lies squarely within the tradition of medieval dramatisation, as we shall see next.

Characters: The Jews vs. the Non-Jews Gibson overlooks entirely the Jewishness of Jesus and his commitment to Torah. Jesus wears neither head-covering nor tzitzit,45 whereas the Sanhedrin appear to be wearing tallitot on their heads (cf. also the witness [24:14]), while the two Mary’s appear to be dressed like Augustinian nuns (whereas other Jewish women are clad in burqa-like creations). Furthermore, when Mary utters the Passover-seder line “Why is this night different from all other nights?” [13:51], it sounds more like a Christian misappropriation than evidence of Jesus’ Jewish background and history. In the Gospels, Caiaphas, an appointee of Rome, called for Jesus’ death as it was better “that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not” (John 11:50), but in Gibson’s film Caiaphas (complete with rabbinical beard) intimidates Pilate with the threat of revolt if he does not execute Jesus [1:07:23–31]. This distorts the fact that the Romans were the occupying power and that the Jewish authorities were their agents. In Gibson’s film, Judea rules over Rome, and the Jews control the empire. This group of powerful Jewish leaders able to control the world could have stepped straight off the pages of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Their principal means of manipulation is, of course, money: bribing the crowds, paying off Judas—classic stereotyping of money-grasping Jews.46 Pontius Pilate, a man condemned as a cruel and arbitrary tyrant by Philo (Embassy to Gaius) and Josephus (Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities) is presented as sympathetic and reluctant to harm Jesus—rather like the worldweary procurator in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.47 He stands out as a light of humanity before a mob of bloodthirsty Jews, and it is with him and his wife (Claudia) the audience is to identify.48 Pilate’s weakness was to allow himself to be influenced by his filthy subject people—he is afraid that Caiaphas will begin a rebellion if he does not condemn Jesus.49 As Elaine Pagels points out: The more benign Pilate appears in the movie, the more malignant the Jews are [. . .] There are many examples in the film of a preposterous dialectic: the bad Jews and the good Romans. When the Temple police arrest Jesus, Mary Magdalene turns to the Romans as if they were the policemen on the block, benign protectors of the public order [17:42]. But the very idea of a Jewish woman turning to Roman soldiers for help is ridiculous.50

The Gospel According to Gibson  129 The Romans’ hands were tied as “[t]he Jewish authorities had ordered Jesus’ arrest, and there was nothing the Romans could do to change this decision.”51 The Romans are brutish, but the Jews are evil Christ-killers. Jewish might is also demonstrated through the appearance in the scenes of Jesus’ arrest and in the court of an exotically dressed troop of Jewish soldiers—as if the Romans would ever tolerate a foreign army in their territories arresting political agitators and meting out justice.52 When Pilate first sees the state of Jesus, he asks Caiaphas “Do you always punish your prisoners before they are judged?” [37:27] and goes on to say that the Jewish leaders do not even follow their own laws properly. Rome has spoken: Israel has lost her way. Herod Antipas appears—to the accompaniment of pseudo-Arabic, “Oriental” music—as a lewd, drunken transvestite [42:24],53 and Gibson’s ultimate blurring of genders in the androgynous Satan coincides with the zenith of evil. Satan mingles with (and motivates?) the Jewish crowds [52:24; 58:56; 1:11:29] affirming the belief that Jews are the devil’s agents on earth (John 8:44) whose satanic powers enabled them to sway Pilate. As Caiaphas and the Temple priests, their faces beaming with satisfaction, watch Christ being flogged, Satan walks between them, calmly, “at home,” among his/ her kin. One is reminded of Chrysostom describing the synagogue as “the domicile of the devil.” Including an omnipresent Satan as villain makes it all the more gratuitous that Gibson chooses to vilify the Jews—why do they need to be drafted into the role of villain if Satan is already playing it? In one scene [32:04], kippah-wearing Jewish children taunting Judas into hanging himself transform into demons—the Jews are both the metaphoric and physical progeny of Satan. Although Gibson includes the blood curse [1:09:09], he does omit English subtitles, because, as he explained, “if I’d left it in, they’d be coming after me at my house, they’d come to kill me.”54 However, the words are still spoken in the film, and one can only speculate why Gibson chose to include this particular toxic line responsible for Jewish suffering and death over the centuries in Christian societies. Similarly, an anonymous voice in the Jewish mob screams“‫( ”ממזר‬mamzer, bastard) at Jesus [1:07:55], but this too is not subtitled. Jews are presented as a rabble, paid and manipulated by their scheming religious leaders, particularly Caiaphas (who in a non-biblical fashion is present throughout the Passion and even at the foot of the Cross [1:39:43]). Jews in Jerusalem would have been too busy preparing for Passover to be overly preoccupied with the Romans trying and executing a Nazarene for sedition. Moreover, their presence at the trial would have been impossible without contravening the laws of ritual purity. Yet there is absolutely no sense of Jewish time in Gibson’s film at all: instead, the entire world is watching Jesus. Furthermore, the Barabbas of the Gospels is a rioter or revolutionary,55 but The Passion’s rebel is portrayed as a dirty halfwit, which only increases the savagery of the Jewish crowd that choose him over Jesus [48:00].

130  Jonathan Adams Gibson may insist that the film conveys the message that all humanity is responsible for the death of Jesus—he famously shot his own hand holding the nail to hammer Jesus to the Cross to express this sentiment—but surely an audience will have difficulty identifying with a monstrous, dirty crowd yelling wildly in a strange, unintelligible language, baying for Christ’s death. Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic wrote: In its representation of its Jewish characters, The Passion of the Christ is without any doubt an anti-Semitic movie, and anybody who says otherwise knows nothing, or chooses to know nothing, about the visual history of anti-Semitism, in art and in film. What is so shocking about Gibson’s Jews is how unreconstructed they are in their stereotypical appearances and actions. These are not merely anti-Semitic images; these are classically anti-Semitic images.56 There are elements beside characterisation that are negative towards Jews, who tend to be shot at night, in a sickly pale light, while Pilate radiates in a white light—dare one say he looks positively “Aryan”?57 The priests in particular are arrogant, rich, and opulently dressed and adorned with gold and jewels. Their faces are contorted, their teeth yellow and crooked, their bodies podgy and hunched, and they shuffle with a waddling gait [16:30]. One of Caiaphas’s lackeys wears an eye-patch [15:54]—a real villain and/ or a Jew blind to the truth before him? At one point, Gibson cuts from the hooked nose of one Jew to the hooked nose of Caiaphas in the ensuing scene [3:11–14]. “Jewish” clothes and identifying markers are not shared by Jesus or any of his followers (although the leading actor, James Caviezel, dons a prosthetic nose and his blue eyes have been digitally changed to brown). “Good Jews” look like movie stars (e.g. Mary Magdalene is played by Italian model and actress Monica Bellucci), but the “bad guys” look stereotypically “Semitic.” These crude marks of separation create an “us and them” dichotomy found in medieval church frescoes, altarpieces, illustrated manuscripts, and early prints.58 As pointed out by Amy-Jill Levine, the film score (composed by John C. Debney) also creates a distinction between the two opposing sides: Jews are accompanied by “augmented seconds familiar from klezmer music or Fiddler on the Roof,” while Romans are supported by “perfect fifths, that is lush, harmonious, classical ‘European’ sounds”:59 a reflection of Christian harmony and Jewish dis-harmony? Generally, the characterisation is very flat with “goodies” gazing mournfully, imitating icons rather than people, and “baddies” contorting their faces, playing a ghoulish mob—it is all rather caricatured and lacking in subtlety. To enable film-viewers to visualise the Passion, Gibson returns to pre-­ modern Catholic iconography and includes non-biblical tableaux vivants or animated icons; e.g. the Pietà scene at the foot of the Cross [1:51:19]— paralleled by Satan holding a vile homunculus [59:20] in his/her embrace— and Caiaphas whimpering in the destroyed—and superseded—Temple

The Gospel According to Gibson  131 [1:50:23]. This latter image plays on a particularly harmful anti-Jewish theology of replacement and supersessionism. The destruction of the Temple in the earthquake that accompanied the death of Jesus and that in the film is triggered by a tear from heaven is neither historical fact (it was not destroyed until seventy years later by the Romans) nor in accordance with the Gospel narrative (Matthew 27:51–52 in which the Temple curtain is torn). However, with its sobbing Jewish priests collapsed on the ground, tumbling braziers, and torn-up floor, the destruction provides a clear visual of God’s punishment and of Ecclesia’s triumph over Synagoga. In contrast, the same divinely activated earthquake only lightly rattles Pilate’s palace [1:50:11]: Rome is spared God’s wrath while Judaism dies with Jesus.

Reception In April 2003, while The Passion was still being made, Dr. Eugene Fisher, associate director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), and Rabbi Dr. Eugene Korn of the Anti-Defamation League put together a nine-person panel to analyse the script of the film.60 The group sent an eighteen-page confidential report with their analysis of his screenplay to Gibson.61 John T. Pawlikowski, director of the Catholic-Jewish Studies Program at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, summarised its contents thus: Certainly, films can present Jesus’ suffering and death in a powerful way. But they must remain faithful to the church’s current understanding. “The Passion of the Christ” does not. Gibson, in fact, rejects those teachings as well as modern biblical scholarship and thus stands outside official Catholicism today.62 Icon Productions subsequently made the group’s evaluation public, presenting it as an all-out attack on Christianity. No one seems to know how the screenplay found its way to the USCCB offices; some have suggested “it was leaked by a concerned member of the film crew,”63 while Alan Nierob, ­Gibson’s spokesperson, claimed it had been stolen and threatened to sue. Gibson’s supporters were quick to frame the discussion and draw up the lines of battle—in the “godless” corner: “egghead perverts,” the “antiChristian entertainment elite,” the “forces of censorship,” and “modern secular Judaism,” and in the other corner: “two billion Christians.”64 Gibson presents Jesus as a receptacle for suffering, focusing on his torture and agony with only short flashbacks to his life and ministry. These interpolated episodes are too brief to constitute a persuasive account of Jesus’ life and teaching and can be confusing for viewers without “Christianity 101” to appreciate (e.g. why was it important to include a scene about a kitchen table? [19:07–20:40]). The emphasis is not on narrative comprehension, but affective experience, which for some strips the film of humanity and any

132  Jonathan Adams moral and spiritual depth, creating “a blasphemous insult to the memory of Jesus Christ,”65 and for others provides an opportunity to meditate on the suffering of Christ. Gibson’s Passion may well become for millions of people across the globe the authentic account of Jesus’ final hours. Lamenting the lack of education about interpreting scripture thoughtfully, Mary Boys told The Jewish Week: “people are going to see this film and [. . .] conclude that’s the way it is because they don’t know anything different.”66 This ignorance is particularly dangerous with regard to the film’s portrayal of the Jews of Jerusalem, as the apparent isolated suffering at the core of the film provides an image of a bloodthirsty God requiring the torture of Jesus and focuses the viewers’ attention on the brutality of his earthly agents. David Morgan argues that the viewers are thus removed from responsibility and furthermore left unable to establish an empathetic relationship between their own sufferings and Christ’s.67 However, this seems to be contradicted by the findings of several surveys. On the key question—who killed Jesus?—the Pew Research Center found in 2004 that the number of people laying responsibility for the Crucifixion at the feet of the Jews had indeed risen by 9 per cent after the release of The Passion.68 However, in another survey of audience responses, 72 per cent agreed that after seeing the film, they were more convicted about their personal sins, and 82 per cent of Christians reported that “viewing the film helped them to see how much God loved them personally.”69 What “experts” and audiences see in this film is clearly not the same: an antisemitic blood-fest or a compelling treatment of Jesus’ sacrifice for humanity’s sins? The Passion is a graphic and bloody depiction of the last twelve hours of Jesus’ life from Gethsemane to Golgotha, and its glorification of suffering and martyrdom—rather than religious living—is another of its controversial aspects. Although flogging occurs only in a few lines in Matthew, Mark, and John (and I Peter 2:24), the scourging scene alone lasts twenty minutes in the first release of Gibson’s film. Peculiarly, this over-the-top violence has been used to obviate charges of antisemitism against the film: Deal Hudson, publisher of the conservative Catholic magazine Crisis, said “[b]y the time the Romans get through with him, you’ve forgotten what the Jews might have done.”70 Despite this focus on torn flesh and blood, the film has, ironically, found a large and loyal following among conservative Christians who are usually the loudest critics of Hollywood violence. Peter A. Pettit convincingly suggests that the extreme and graphic violence meted out against Jesus was considered acceptable by many Evangelical Christians as it mirrored their own feelings of marginalisation and victimhood in the pluralist USA. To them, The Passion of the Christ is the story of victimisation that reflects their own persecution through modern America’s “war on real Christian values.”71 Furthermore, Evangelicals clearly valued Gibson making a bold statement to portray the story of Jesus in a public forum.72 Conservative Protestants and Evangelicals, who have been particularly interested in and involved with Jews and Israel since 1967, have perhaps

The Gospel According to Gibson  133 more than traditionalist Catholics embraced Gibson’s film despite its specifically Catholic elements (e.g. the sacrality of blood and the primacy of Mary). Support for the film by fundamentalists, such as the evangelists Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell, shows that fidelity to the Gospels is no longer a fundamental(ist) theological requirement, but that the theory that Jesus personally and literally pays for our sins (i.e. it is a payment, not a sacrifice) is—a shift from Protestant to pre-modern Catholic theology. Perhaps it is the film’s lack of context for the suffering of Jesus that enables it to connect with members of different churches. The viewer is simply able to link the film to whatever s/he finds meaningful.73 The Passion has even received acclaim in the Muslim world and opened to packed houses in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.74 Although the Qur’an prohibits the representation of prophets and denies the crucifixion ever occurred, Gibson's film feeds into Arab antisemitism: “Many Muslims see political parallels between the Jewish treatment of Jesus in the film and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians today.”75 Yasser Arafat called it “moving and historical.”76 A Shi’ite cleric urged Kuwait to permit the film to be shown there as it “reveals crimes committed by Jews against Christ.”77

Legacy Gibson’s Passion is a test of the success of four decades of an interfaith reconciliation movement that has seen vast improvements in the relationship between Church and Synagogue. On the level of Jewish-Christian relations, the film has been called a “medieval Passion play rendered in celluloid”78 and an “act of interreligious aggression”79 that attacks many of the premises upon which reconciliation has been based, not least that the Jews are not Christ-killers. It further disregards entirely the Catholic Church’s declarations on the portrayal of Jews in dramatisations of the Passion and frustrates the desire of the Church to avoid such misrepresentations. The old wounds of antisemitism were reopened, antisemites assured in their views, and Christian anti-Judaism encouraged.80 Yet in spite of this, the film has been hugely successful, and this enormous success lays bare the failure of interfaith dialogue in rewriting attitudes towards Jews and correcting misconceptions. Indeed, if anything, The Passion’s greatest impact on JewishChristian relations is that it shows that awareness and implementation of those documents and recommendations, such as Nostra Aetate, that are much extolled and discussed in interfaith circles, have in fact had little impact on improving either problematic representations of Jews or audience expectations and levels of awareness. Indeed, it would seem that on this occasion, giving the public what they want has changed little since the Middle Ages. For many, The Passion is a devotional film, and audiences have largely been unconcerned with the portrayal of the Jews; in fact, only 4 per cent of surveyed Christians believed the film contained antisemitic elements.81 If a passionate and familiar portrayal of the Passion appeals to

134  Jonathan Adams audiences “over and against reconciliatory gestures towards the Jews,”82 then the religious orientation of American mainstream culture is closer to Gibson’s than previously realised: The Passion of the Christ should therefore be viewed not as an aberration in Christian relations to the Jews, but as representing a widely held and popular sentiment that was disguised and perhaps partially repressed for a while by the more liberal forces within western Christianity. The interfaith dialogue, after all, was led from above, in the more hierarchical or centralized mainstream churches and by theologically educated elites. Laypersons, such as Hutton Gibson, were not always asked about their opinion, but have now offered it with great passion and more publicity than ever before.83 Gibson’s testament of love is bad history, kitsch art, and incompetent theology that reinforces hatred and prejudice by feeding into the centuries-old teaching of contempt and perpetuates the misunderstandings, untruths, and hateful images that have plagued Jewish-Christian relations for centuries. On its release, there was a real fear that it had the potential to become Gibson’s “most lethal weapon of all.”84 The debate raised by The Passion’s release showed that many Christians are unaware that Jews are still accused of deicide and are unfamiliar with the long history of Christian antisemitism and stereotyping. Even commentators and opinion makers demonstrated a remarkable naïveté and ignorance of Christian theology and history. It became evident that many of the problematic scenes were only understood as such by viewers versed in the history of antisemitism, Jewish stereotypes, and dramatisations of the Passion. For many film-goers, the theological message, not the narrative details, was what they were interested in—interviews after screenings revealed that they often could not recall the problematic scenes, let alone their particulars. The discussion threads about antisemitism on the fan site www.PassionMovie.com suggest a very low level of understanding and awareness of the issues involved and include claims of Jewish control over Hollywood and the Jews hiding behind the Holocaust and hating Christians.85 It is as though viewers with different backgrounds and agendas saw different films, and particularly those not interested in reconciliation ended up talking past each other.86 Nonetheless, upon its release the film did, as Steven Jacobs has argued,87 reinvigorate dialogue between concerned Jewish and Christian groups and showed that the relationships that they had been developing over the years were real and had a solid foundation. Back in 2004, Jewish and Christian scholars went on the offensive in the media and the classroom—sometimes together—in order to discuss the antisemitic aspects of the film. Christian congregations and churches in the US issued documents to prepare their members, while European churches—Protestant and Catholic—were

The Gospel According to Gibson  135 particularly critical and publicly condemned the film. The Passion became a moment for teaching, discussion, and instruction. One notable exception to this was that the budding relationship between the Jewish community and Christian fundamentalists, who had uncritically come out in support of the film, suffered badly. But it seems to me that the improved relationship between religious organisations was not the only—or even the principal—reason why there was not a surge in antisemitic attitudes or attacks after the film’s release. It may be that Gibson’s film is a medieval Passion play pastiche, but the audience is not that of the fifteenth-century market square. Although filmgoers with prejudices would certainly come away from The Passion having them confirmed or exacerbated, we live in a different society to that in which the Passion play functioned. Medieval Passion plays did of course trigger antisemitic violence, but, as D. Andrew Kille reminds us, they were staged in a particular surrounding context ruled by social conventions that are quite different from today’s. They “were not isolated phenomena that stimulated aggression against Jews, but rather they appeared within a supporting structure of laws [. . .], myths about Jews, and rabble-rousing priests.”88 The plays were just one element (albeit a very effective one) in a social, religious, and political mix that targeted Jews. Gibson’s film builds on the Passion play tradition but is released into a very different world where political and cultural support for antisemitism no longer predominates—at least in Western societies. Nonetheless, it is a world profoundly affected by nearly 2,000 years of antisemitic myth-making where antisemitism is currently on the rise again, and it is disingenuous to argue that a devotional film depicting the Crucifixion will not stir up—consciously or otherwise—engrained anti-Jewish feelings and attitudes. The question is not whether religious films depicting the trial and execution of Jesus can turn audiences into antisemites, but rather, will moviegoers who already harbour antisemitic views in their understanding of the Passion have them challenged or tempered? Do such films give viewers the message that antisemites might be on to something? The Passion dramatically demonstrates the failings and achievements of interfaith dialogue and more generally shows that the Crucifixion and the question of Jewish culpability and complicity continue to be burning issues in Jewish-Christian relations two thousand years after a group of Roman soldiers led a young Jewish man from Judea to his death at Golgotha. ***

Film details Title: The Passion of the Christ Production year: 2004 Countries: Italy, USA Certificate: R/18

136  Jonathan Adams Runtime: 126 mins Director: Mel Gibson Studio: Icon Productions Cast: James Caviezel (Jesus Christ), Maia Morgenstern (Mary), M ­ onica Bellucci (Mary Magdalene), Mattia Sbragia (Caiaphas), Hristo Shopov (Pontius Pilate), Claudia Gerini (Claudia Procles), Rosalinda Celentano (Satan), Luca de Dominicis (Herod Antipas), Sabrina Impacciatore (Seraphia), Jarreth Metz (Simon of Cyrene), Pietro ­ ­Sarubbi (Barabbas) Times in this essay are provided as [minutes:seconds] or [hours:minutes: seconds] and are taken from the DVD version edited for release in Scandinavia by Scanbox (year: 2009; cert.: 15; run.: 123 minutes).

Notes 1. Jami Bernard, “Gore’s the Crime of ‘Passion’: Over-the-Top Brutality Saps Movie’s Power,” New York Daily News, 24 February 2004, available online at www. nydailynews.com/archives/news/gore-crime-passion-over-the-top-brutality-sapsmovie-power-article-1.622965 (accessed 23 November 2017). 2. A few acts of antisemitic vandalism connected to the film were reported in the US and Canada. See Amy-Jill Levine, “First Take the Log Out of Your Own Eye,” in On The Passion of the Christ: Exploring the Issues Raised by the Controversial Movie, ed. Paula Fredriksen (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2006), 197–210 (here 209). 3. Christopher Noxon, “Is the Pope Catholic . . . Enough?” New York Times Magazine, 9 March 2003, available online at www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/ magazine/is-the-pope-catholic-enough.html (accessed 23 November 2017). Of course, we have no right to assume that Mel Gibson shares his father’s views, but it is difficult to imagine that they have not had some influence on shaping his own. Indeed, the actor paid for a traditionalist Catholic church to be built that his father attends regularly. 4. Perry and Schweitzer, “The Medieval Passion Play Revisited,” 17. 5. See Julie Ingersoll, “Is It Finished? The Passion of the Christ and the Fault Lines in American Christianity,” in After the Passion Is Gone: American Religious Consequences, ed. J. Shawn Landres and Michael Berenbaum (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2004), 75–88. 6. This essay focuses particularly on Catholic-Jewish relations. For a discussion of the film and its meaning for Protestant communities, see Peter A. Pettit, “The Passion of the Christ and Its Ramifications with Reference to the Protestant Churches and Christian-Jewish Relations,” in The Protestant-Jewish Conundrum, ed. Jonathan Frankel and Ezra Mendelsohn, Studies in Contemporary Jewry, no. 24 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 71–90, and James F. Moore, “Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ: A Protestant Perspective,” in Mel Gibson’s Passion: The Film, the Controversy, and Its Implications, ed. Zev Garber, Shofar Supplements in Jewish Studies (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2006), 140–43. 7. Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer, “The Medieval Passion Play Revisited,” in Reviewing the Passion: Mel Gibson’s Film and Its Critics, ed. S. Brent Plate (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 2–19 (here 3). On the

The Gospel According to Gibson  137 development of Christian antisemitism more generally, see William Nicholls, Christian Antisemitism: A History of Hate (Northvale: Jason Aronson, 1993). 8. Perry and Schweitzer, “The Medieval Passion Play Revisited,” 4. 9. Ibid. 10. Robert Edwards, The Montecassino Passion Play and the Poets of Medieval Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). 11. Léon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism, vol. 1, trans. Richard Howard (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 129. 12. On violence resulting from Passion plays in the Middle Ages, see ibid., 126–34. 13. Perry and Schweitzer, “The Medieval Passion Play Revisited,” 8. 14. Mark Royden Winchell, God, Man & Hollywood: Politically Incorrect Cinema from the Birth of a Nation to the Passion of the Christ (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2008), 216. 15. For example: “True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ; [John 19:6] still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures. All should see to it, then, that in catechetical work or in the preaching of the word of God they do not teach anything that does not conform to the truth of the Gospel and the spirit of Christ.” Second Vatican Council, Nostra Aetate (1965): 4, available online at www.vatican. va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_­ nostra-aetate_en.html (accessed 23 November 2017). 16. Paula Fredriksen, “Mad Mel,” New Republic, 28 July 2003, available online at www.tnr.com/article/mad-mel (accessed 23 November 2017). 17. Bruce Vawter, “Are the Gospels Anti-Semitic?” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 5 (1968): 473–87 (here 486). 18. James Shapiro, Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World’s Most Famous Passion Play (New York: Vintage, 2000), 215. 19. Bernard Starr, “Passion Plays and Oratorios ‘Christ Killers,’ and the Magic Trick of ‘Deus ex Machina,’” Huffington Post, 20 April 2015, available online at www.huffingtonpost.com/bernard-starr/passion-plays-and-oratorioschrist-killers-and-the-deus-ex-machina_b_7097460.html (accessed 23 November 2017). 20. Kathleen E. Corley and Robert L. Webb, “Introduction: The Passion, the Gospels and the Claims of History,” in Jesus and Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ: The Film, the Gospels and the Claims of History, ed. Kathleen E. Corley and Robert L. Webb (London: Continuum, 2004), 1–5 (here 2). 21. Peter J. Boyer, “The Jesus War: Mel Gibson’s Obsession,” The New Yorker, 15 September 2003, 58–71 (here 66–67); similar remarks in Lawrence Donegan, “Christ in the Crossfire,” The Observer, 28 September 2003, available online at http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1050963,00.html (accessed 23 November 2017). 22. Boyer, “The Jesus War: Mel Gibson’s Obsession,” 64. 23. Bruce Chilton, “Mel Gibson’s Lethal Passion,” in Mel Gibson’s Bible: Religion, Popular Culture, and the Passion of the Christ, ed. Timothy K. Beal and Tod Linafelt (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006), 51–58 (here 56). Gibson went to great lengths to have the script translated correctly with the Jesuit Prof. William Fulco (Loyola Marymount University) acting as librettist. However, the “Aramaic” is risibly enunciated, sounding stilted and theatrical; e.g. the high priest more than once pronounces “messiah” in “a grotesque conflation of Hebrew and Aramaic” [47:54; 1:40:01]: David Berger, “Jews, Christians

138  Jonathan Adams and The Passion,” in Persecution, Polemic and Dialogue: Essays in JewishChristian Relations, ed. David Berger (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2010), 399–416 (here 409 n. 3); first published in Commentary 117.5 (2004): 23–31. The Latin, pronounced as if it were Ecclesiastical Latin, is at times faltering (Claudia’s sanctus est-speech [36:30–38] is cringe-worthy), although the “street Latin” spoken by some of the soldiers is more fluent. 24. The name comes from the German mystic and visionary Anne Catherine Emmerich (about whom more later): “Seraphia was the name of the brave woman [Veronica] who thus dared to confront the enraged multitude,” in The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, trans. George Smith (Westminster: S­ urmont, 1928), 240 (ch. 34). 25. Vincent J. Miller, “Contexts: Theology, Devotion, and Culture,” in Mel Gibson’s Bible: Religion, Popular Culture, and the Passion of the Christ, 39–49 (here 45). 26. Cf. Matthew 26:47–57; Mark 14:43–53; Luke 22:47–54; John 18:1–13. 27. For example, in an Old Danish sermon collection from 1515, we read: “Some scholars write about this that when they came to the river that flows between the town and the Mount of Olives, over which there was a wooden gangway and bridge that they used to cross when the water level was high, they dragged our Lord alongside in the water on the sharp stones with ropes around his neck and waist, and they pushed him over in the water although it was not very deep. They dragged him back and forth until he was as good as half dead” (my translation), Christiern Pedersen, Alle Epistler oc Euangelia (Paris: Josse Badius, 1515), fol. 112v. On the representation of Jews in this sermon collection, see Jonathan Adams, Lessons in Contempt: Poul Ræff’s Translation and Publication in 1516 of Johannes Pfefferkorn’s On the Confession of the Jews, Universitets-Jubilæets danske Samfund, no. 581 (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark), 44–49. 28. Emmerich was beatified in 2004—the same year as Gibson’s film hit the screen—but solely on the basis of her life, virtue, and personal piety without any reference to the material published by Brentano which is now considered as a “well-intentioned fraud.” See John W. OMalley, “A Movie, a Mystic, a Spiritual Tradition,” America: The Jesuit Review, 15 March 2004, available online at www.americamagazine.org/issue/477/article/movie-mystic-spiritual-tradition (accessed on 23 November 2017). 29. Boyer, “The Jesus War: Mel Gibson’s Obsession,” 71. 30. Mark D. Jordan and Kent L. Brintnall, “Mel Gibson, Bride of Christ,” in Mel Gibson’s Bible: Religion, Popular Culture, and the Passion of the Christ, 81–87 (here 81). 31. Emmerich, The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, 100 (ch. 1). In Luke 22:43, it was an angel from heaven that appeared in the Garden to strengthen him. 32. Ibid., 166 (ch. 11). 33. Gibson identifies Mary Magdalene with the adulterous woman of John 8:3–11 [1:03:30–1:05:01]. 34. Emmerich, The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, 218 (ch. 25). 35. Ibid., 211 (ch. 23). The elevation of Pilate’s wife, Claudia Procles, to a protoChristian is not based on the Gospel accounts, where she only speaks in Matthew 27:19 to warn her husband to have nothing to do with Jesus. 36. Emmerich, The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, 250 (ch. 38). 37. Jordan and Brintnall, “Mel Gibson, Bride of Christ,” 86. 38. Levine, “First Take the Log Out of Your Own Eye,” 203; see also Louis H. Feldman, “Reflections on Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ,” in Mel Gibson’s Passion: The Film, the Controversy, and Its Implications, 93–107 (here 94). 39. Emmerich, The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, 138 (ch. 4).

The Gospel According to Gibson  139 0. Ibid., 112 (ch. 1). 4 41. Ibid., 245 (ch. 36). In Emmerich, the Pharisees arrived on horseback; in Gibson, on asses [1:24:30–35]. 42. Ibid., 124 (ch. 2). 43. Peggy Noonan, “It Is as It Was,” Wall Street Journal, 13 December 2003, available online at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122451994054350485.html (accessed 23 November 2017). 44. On audience interpretation and Gibson’s cinematic techniques, see D. Andrew Kille, “More Reel Than Real: Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ,” Pastoral Psychology 53.4 (2005): 341–50. 45. Cf. Matthew 9:20: τοῦ κρασπέδου τοῦ ἱματίου αὐτοῦ, literally “the fringe of his rectangular cloak of linen or wool.” 46. The scene where Judas collects his money from Caiaphas—in the Temple— plays on the stereotype of the money-grabbing Jew. Note, for example, how the camera follows the Jews’ greedy gaze as the moneybag flies in slow motion through the air [3:45]. 47. See, for example, Philo, Embassy to Gaius, ch. 38 (in F. H. Colson, ed. and trans., Philo, vol. 10: The Embassy to Gaius [London: Heinemann, 1971], 150, 151); Josephus, The Wars of the Jews, book 2, ch. 9.4, and Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews, book 18, ch. 3.1–3 and 4.1–2 (in Josephus, The Complete Works, trans. William Whitson [Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1998], 730; 575, 578). On antisemitism in the Master and Margarita, see Mikhail Zolotonosov, «Мастер и Маргарита» как путводитель по субкультуре русского антисемитизма [The Master and Margarita as a Guide to Russian Antisemitic Sub-Culture] (St. Petersburg: Inapress, 1995). 48. This is hardly an innovation of Gibson’s part. In Christian literature, Pilate becomes increasingly innocent: Tertullian wrote that he became a Christian, and in the Ethiopic and Coptic Churches, he is even canonised. See Judy Yates Siker, “Anti-Judaism in the Gospels According to Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Mel,” Pastoral Psychology 53, no. 4 (2005): 303–10 (here 308). 49. The idea that Pilate sentenced Jesus to placate the Jews and prevent an uprising is straight out of the Middle Ages. For example, St. Birgitta of Sweden (Book 1, ch. 37): “Pilate knew well indeed that my Son had not sinned and did not deserve death. However, because he feared the loss of temporal power and the sedition of the Jews, he reluctantly sentenced my Son to death” (my translation). 50. David Remnick, “Passions, Past and Present,” The New Yorker, 8 March 2004, available online at www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/03/08/040308ta_talk_ remnick (accessed 23 November 2017). 51. Yaakov Ariel, “The Passion of the Christ and the Passion of the Jews: Mel Gibson’s Film in Light of Jewish-Christian Relations,” in Reviewing the Passion: Mel Gibson’s Film and Its Critics, ed. S. Brent Plate (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 21–41 (here 35). 52. Matthew 26:47 talks of a “great crowd armed with swords and staves” (ὄχλος πολὺς μετὰ μαχαιρῶν καὶ ξύλων); John 18:12 mentions “officers of the Jews” (οἱ ὑπηρέται τῶν Ἰουδαίων) where “officer” (ὑπηρέτης) means “servant, attendant; underling” as opposed to a person of military rank. 53. Emmerich, The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, 124–25 [ch. 2] 54. Peter J. Boyer, “The Jesus War: Mel Gibson’s Obsession,” The New Yorker, 15 September 2003, 61. 55. Matthew 27:16: “notorious prisoner” (δέσμιον ἐπίσημον); Mark 15.7: “who had committed murder in the insurrection” (οἵτινες ἐν τῇ στάσει φόνον πεποιήκεισαν); Luke 23.19: “Who for a certain sedition made in the city, and for murder, was cast into prison” (ὅστις ἦν διὰ στάσιν τινὰ γενομένην ἐν τῇ πόλει καὶ φόνον βληθεὶς ἐν τῇ φυλακῇ); John 18.40: “Now Barabbas was a lēstēs” (ἦν δὲ ὁ Βαραββᾶς

140  Jonathan Adams λῃστής.)—the word lēstēs, usually glossed as robber or plunderer, but may be used to refer to a freedom fighter or revolutionary. The same word is used to refer to the other two crucified with Jesus (identified in accordance with medieval tradition as Gesmas and Dismas by Gibson); Matthew 27:38 and Mark 15:27. 56. Leon Wieseltier, “The Worship of Blood,” The New Republic, 8 March 2004, available online at www.tnr.com/article/the-worship-blood (accessed 23 November 2017). 57. The physical portrayal in Christian drama of the reluctant Pilate as fundamentally different to the crowd is in no way new. For example, Adolf Hitler said about the Oberammergau play, “There one sees Pontius Pilate, a Roman racially and intellectually so superior, that he stands out like a firm, clean rock in the middle of the whole muck and mire of Jewry.” Cited in John Dominic Crossan, “Jewish Crowd and Roman Governor,” in Mel Gibson’s Bible: Religion, Popular Culture, and the Passion of the Christ, 59–67 (here 60). 58. On the development of the image of the Jew in art, see Sara Lipton’s essay in this volume. 59. Levine, “First Take the Log Out of Your Own Eye,” 206. 60. The advisory group’s members were Mary C. Boys, Michael C. Cook, Philip A. Cunningham, Eugene J. Fisher, Paula Fredriksen, Lawrence E. Frizzell, Eugene Korn, Amy-Jill Levine, and John T. Pawlikowski. 61. The report is reproduced as “Report of the Ad Hoc Scholars Group: Reviewing the Script of the Passion,” in On the Passion of the Christ: Exploring the Issues Raised by the Controversial Movie, 225–54. 62. Quoted in Jeremy Cohen, Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 252; originally appeared in the Catholic New World. 63. Donegan, “Christ in the Crossfire.” 64. Levine, “Mel Gibson, the Scribes, and the Pharisees,” in Reviewing the Passion: Mel Gibson’s Film and Its Critics, 137–49 (here 138). 65. James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), A19. 66. Levine, “Mel Gibson, the Scribes, and the Pharisees,” 143. 67. David Morgan, “Catholic Visual Piety and The Passion of the Christ,” in Reviewing the Passion: Mel Gibson’s Film and Its Critics, 85–96 (here 89–90). 68. John T. Pawlikowski, “Gibson’s Passion: The Challenges for Catholics,” in Mel Gibson’s Passion: The Film, the Controversy, and Its Implications, 129–33 (here 130). 69. Robert H. Woods, Michael C. Jindra, and Jason D. Baker, “The Audience Responds to The Passion of the Christ,” in Reviewing the Passion: Mel Gibson’s Film and Its Critics, 163–80 (here 170–71). 70. Laurie Goodstein, “Months before Debut: Movie on the Death of Jesus Causes a Stir,” New York Times, 2 August 2003, A1. 71. Pettit, “The Passion of the Christ and Its Ramifications,” 79–80. See also Leslie E. Smith, “Living in the World, But Not of the World: Understanding Evangelical Support for The Passion of the Christ,” in After the Passion Is Gone, 47–58. 72. Ben Witherington III, “Numbstruck: An Evangelical Reflects on Mel Gibson’s Passion,” in On the Passion of the Christ: Exploring the Issues Raised by the Controversial Movie, 81–93 (here 89). 73. See Kille, “More Reel Than Real,” 343, and Pettit, “The Passion of the Christ and Its Ramifications,” 76. 74. Feldman, “Reflections on Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ,” 93. 75. Ariel, “The Passion of the Christ and the Passion of the Jews,” 51 n. 3.

The Gospel According to Gibson  141 76. Levine, “Mel Gibson, the Scribes, and the Pharisees,” 144. The film has not been banned in Israel but it has never been released due to the lack of a willing distributor. 77. Gordon D. Young, “History, Archaeology, ad Mel Gibson’s Passion,” in Mel Gibson’s Passion: The Film, the Controversy, and Its Implications, 70–75 (here 73). 78. Chilton, “Mel Gibson’s Lethal Passion,” 52. 79. Charles Krauthammer, “Gibson’s Blood Libel,” The Washington Post, 5 March 2004, A23. 80. Gary Gilbert, “Antisemitism without Erasure: Sacred Texts and Their Contemporary Interpretations,” in After the Passion Is Gone, 125–36 (here 133). 81. Woods, Jindra, and Baker, “The Audience Responds to The Passion of the Christ,” 177. 82. Ariel, “The Passion of the Christ and the Passion of the Jews,” 37. 83. Ibid., 38. 84. Chilton, “Mel Gibson’s Lethal Passion,” 52. 85. The Hebrew (!) section of the site has an FAQ section with just two questions. The first asks whether the film is antisemitic. The answer is simply: “Paul Lauer, spokesperson for Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions, says: ‘Mel’s faith does not encourage hatred, narrowmindedness, antisemitism, or blaming the Jewish people for the death of Jesus’” (my translation), available online at www. passion-movie.com/hebrew/faq.html (accessed 23 November 2017). 86. See Mary C. Boys, “Seeing Different Movies, Talking Past Each Other,” in On the Passion of the Christ: Exploring the Issues Raised by the Controversial Movie, 147–63. 87. Steven Leonard Jacobs, “Can There Be Jewish-Christian Dialogue after The Passion,” in Reviewing the Passion: Mel Gibson’s Film and Its Critics, 43–52. On the film’s implications for Jewish-Christian dialogue, see Samuel and Carol Edelman, “Deicide Déjà Vu: Mel Gibson’s Film the Passion—an Attack on Forty Years of Jewish-Christian Dialogue,” in Mel Gibson’s Passion: The Film, the Controversy, and Its Implications, 124–28. 88. Kille, “More Reel Than Real,” 347.

Part IV

Islam and Antisemitism

10 Narrating Antisemitism in Historical and Contemporary Turkey Behruz Davletov and Tahir Abbas

Introduction In what follows, we will examine the experience of Jews in both Ottoman and present-day Turkey, exploring issues of diversity, social conflict, and religious intolerance in an historical and contemporary context. We will begin with a brief history of the Jewish community from the emergence of the Ottoman Empire to its decline. Then, we will look at the founding of the Turkish Republic and its impact on the Jewish communities in Turkey, concluding with some observations about Turkish antisemitism and the way it informs the lingering issues Jewish communities face in Turkey today. Differences between early and modern types of hostility towards Jews relate to the dominant discourses of their respective times: in antiquity, a particular reading of biblical texts, and, in the modern period, the rationalisation of scientific racism. During the Greco-Roman era, before the emergence of Christianity, anti-Jewishness was based on notions of ethnicity; after the spread of Christianity during medieval times, antisemitism was shaped by religious discrimination; political, social, and economic antisemitism emerged during the European Enlightenment; the rise of Nazism was marked by an increasingly racist formulation; currently, anti-Israeli and antiZionist frames of references shape antisemitism.1 These historical transformations and the subsequent implications of this “othering” are important for the issues being discussed here. Antisemitism, as a way of “othering,” evolved in Turkey in the midst of the social, cultural and historical changes that engulfed the wider Western European experience in the modern age, but with all the inevitable caveats that come with being at the axis of East and West, Asia and Europe, and Islam and Christianity.2

Flourishing and Floundering under the Ottoman Empire Jews have been living under Muslim rule for many centuries, although, unlike Christian domination, it has been a less subverted process. When the Jews were expelled from Spain (1492), Portugal (1496), Hungary (1376), France (1394), and Italy (1537), the Ottoman Empire opened its doors and

146  Behruz Davletov and Tahir Abbas offered them sanctuary, becoming “a safe haven for Jews” escaping persecution.3 They grew to be an autonomous community (millet, see below) with its own religious beliefs and cultural traditions. Jews were also economically and politically active, making a particularly significant contribution to the economic growth of the Ottoman Empire. Many Jews also served as diplomats in the Empire, and, in 1493, one year after their expulsion from Spain, the Jews David and Samuel Ibn Nahmias introduced the first printing press in the Ottoman Empire. Istanbul (Constantinople) became an important centre of Jewish scholarship and culture. In the mid-sixteenth century, the Jewish population of Istanbul stood at 50,000. By the end of the nineteenth century, approximately 400,000 Jews were living within the domain of the Ottoman Empire. Nearly half of them were located in the territory of present-day Turkey, with 100,000 living in Istanbul.4 The city of Salonica (Thessaloniki) also had a large population, rivalling Constantinople as the centre of Ottoman Jewry. From 1430 until 1912, Salonica was ruled by the Ottoman Empire, and in the late fifteenth century, many of the Jews expelled from Spain had moved there. Throughout the Empire, people of different religions and ethnicities lived in a multicultural and multi-religious environment.5 The Ottoman Empire continued the tradition of dhimmis (as was also the case in the early years of Islam in Medina), with Jews, as well as Christians and Zoroastrians, as non-Muslim “people of the book,” enjoying relative freedom of religion. They were a millet (a community that had the right to appoint its own religious leaders) and were not required to provide military service. But it was forbidden for Jews to carry weapons or to ride on horseback. They were also obliged to wear a distinctive sign (usually a yellow turban). According to Bernard Lewis, the yellow badge that was later adopted by Europeans was first used in Baghdad.6 There was, however, no attempt made to limit the Jewish population anywhere. The Jewish quarters in many cities were not walled ghettos like those in Venice, and Jews were permitted to live outside of them. Jews were not pressured to accept Islam or Muslim religious authorities, and unlike in Christian lands, the Ottomans did not censor Hebrew books. In general, Jews had better lives in the Empire than did Christians (Greeks, Armenians). There were two reasons for this: the Ottoman Empire was almost continuously at war with the Christian States of Europe, and Jews actively competed with Christians in trade and crafts, which displeased the Greeks and Armenians, contributing to the growth of anti-Jewish sentiment in Christian communities. All of this was to change for the worse. The Ottoman Sultan’s tolerance for the Empire’s Jews deteriorated when the Sabbatean movement began to gain adherents in Istanbul, Salonica, Gallipoli (modern-day Gelibolu), and other cities in present-day Turkey. The Sabbateans, a mass Messianic movement, developed out of a meeting in 1665 between Shabbetai Zvi (1626–76) and the theologian and author Nathan of Gaza (1643–80). Nathan profoundly believed in Zvi’s lofty mission, and his conviction helped to dispel Zvi’s own

Historical and Contemporary Turkey  147 doubts and fears. In Gaza on 31 May 1665, Zvi publicly proclaimed himself the Messiah. The news of the coming of the Messiah spread rapidly. Backed by the authority of Nathan and his messengers, Zvi attracted many supporters. Izmir, where he had spent his childhood and youth, greeted him enthusiastically, becoming the capital city of the Jewish Messianic movement. Inevitably, this Messianic movement clashed with the Ottoman Empire. When the government initially found out about Zvi’s activities in Izmir, it adopted a wait-and-see attitude. In late 1665, Zvi, along with his closest followers, sailed from Izmir to Istanbul to convince the Sultan to restore the Jewish Kingdom in the land of Israel. On the road, he was captured and imprisoned in a fortress near Gallipoli. In September 1666, he was delivered to the Sultan’s court in Adrianople (Edirne), where he and his closest followers converted to Islam, leading the vast majority of the Jews of the Ottoman Empire to lose faith in his Messianism and to return to Orthodox Judaism. Despite Zvi’s claim that his intent was to win over the Sultan to his cause and have the Sultan restore the Jewish kingdom in the Land of Israel, the authorities suspected that the Jewish populace was planning a coup. The emergence of the Dönmeh (Turkish for “convert,” “reversed”) should be noted in passing. It was a sect founded by a small group of Zvi’s followers after he converted to Islam. Although the sect publicly observed the Qur’an, it believed in Zvi’s divinity, professed Sabbateanism and saw itself as the bearer of the true Judaism. The response of the Orthodox Jewry to Dönmeh teachings was overwhelmingly negative and members of the sect were regarded as apostates who had broken with Judaism. By the late seventeenth century, a majority of the Dönmeh had gathered in Salonica and established an autonomous community whose members married both Muslims and Jews. Many members of the sect went on to play an active role in the Young Turks revolutionary movement, which was established in 1909. Throughout the nineteenth century, the standard of living and social status of the Jews living in the territory of modern Turkey declined. The Greek revolt against Ottoman rule in 1821 resulted in a protracted war, forcing the authorities to raise taxes, including those on Jews (without regard to their real incomes). In 1826, after the dissolution of his household troops, the Janissaries, Sultan Mahmud II (1785–1839) executed the Jewish financiers who had close ties with the corps commanders and who stood at the head of Istanbul Jewry. After the 1840 Damascus Affair, which involved the prosecution of local Jews for their alleged ritual murder of a Christian priest and his servant, Sultan Abdülmecid I (1839–61) issued a decree at the request of West European representatives on 6 November 1840, denouncing blood libel as slander and prohibiting the prosecution of Jews throughout the Ottoman Empire. Because of the overall weakness of the Sultanate, however, this order had no effect on the Christian populations of the Ottoman Empire. By the close of the twentieth century, Jews, who, unlike the Christians, did not have powerful patrons, had lost their once elevated status and had become an impoverished and persecuted minority.

148  Behruz Davletov and Tahir Abbas

Jews in the Turkish Republic In the early years of the Turkish Republic (proclaimed in October 1923), the country was home to about 200,000 Jews. In Istanbul, there were about 70,000 Jews, in Izmir about 30,000, in Edirne about 15,000, in Bursa about 3,000, and in Çanakkale about 2,000.7 In addition, relatively small communities existed in Tyre, Menemen, Kasaba, Ankara, Urfa, Gaziantep (Antep), Diyarbakır, Çorlu, Kırklareli, Uzunköprü, Keşani, and Silivri. The majority of Turkey’s Jews were Sephardim who had Ladino as their mother tongue. Only in Istanbul were small communities of Ashkenazi, Georgian Jews, Italian Jews, and Karaites found. Jews who had emigrated during the Russian Civil War (1917–22), and who had originally settled in Istanbul and Gallipoli, soon moved to Western Europe, North America, or the British Mandate of Palestine, with only a few choosing to remain in Turkey. There was also a small group of Kurdish Jews in southern and south-eastern Asia Minor.8 In late 1922, at a critical moment in Turkish history and a point when the country’s Jewish community favoured independence, the Turkish press launched an antisemitic campaign, intermingling the antisemitic clichés that echoed throughout Europe with “local” themes and even drawing upon the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion (first published in the magazine Millî İnkılâb [National Revolution] in 1934).9 Among other crimes, Jews were accused of disloyalty to the state, seeking to take over the national economy, exploiting Turks, supporting the Greeks, and illegally appropriating property abandoned by fleeing Greeks and Armenians during the war of Turkish independence. Although the campaign was purely rhetorical and did not receive a broad response in Turkish society, it created insecurity and—in conjunction with the financial difficulties of the post-war period— led many Jews to leave Turkey.10 In 1933, a Nazi group headed by the journalist Cevat Rıfat Atilhan (1892–1967) emerged in Turkey. Atilhan maintained close contact with Julius Streicher, the publisher of Der Stürmer and one of Adolf Hitler’s closest associates. The antisemitic propaganda disseminated by this group provoked pogroms in several cities in Eastern Thrace on the night of 2 July 1934, causing the Jews living there to flee to Istanbul. State leaders strongly opposed the antisemitism in Eastern Thrace and ordered the armed forces to protect Jews and their property. Many rioters were arrested and prosecuted. The authorities closed Atilhan’s newspaper (Millî İnkilâp), prosecuted him and punished officials who had not taken appropriate measures to prevent the disorder,11 stymieing this attempt to establish a mass Nazi movement in Turkey. In 1935, Dr. Samuel Abravaya Marmaralı (1879–1953), who ran as an independent candidate, became the first Jew to sit in the Grand National Assembly (the parliament of the Turkish Republic). Prime Minister Celal Bayar (1883–1986) issued a statement asserting that there was no “Jewish

Historical and Contemporary Turkey  149 question” in Turkey, and there was no place for “alien trends” (i.e. Nazism). Newspaper articles defending the Jews were also published at the time.12 In Turkey, the process of “othering” has occurred within specific parameters. The Turkish Republic was constructed as a nation-state, and the direct translation of the word “nation” in Turkish is millet. As noted above, in the Ottoman Empire the meaning of the millet system and the perception of millets were very different than they are now. In the Ottoman Empire, millets were classified by religion, and the different ethnic groups were subdivisions of various religions. The leader of a millet was a representative of the religion in question and was responsible for all of the legal and economic affairs of the group (i.e. Jews, Armenians, and Greeks). However, after the formation of the Turkish Republic, in lieu of the old millet, political authorities in Ankara established a new “Turkish model” of citizenship. In this case, religions became subdivisions of the nation13 in a nation-building project that altered the social, economic, and political lives of every individual. Through this process, the State was attempting to create a new, unified nation out of diverse communities, as well as engaging in an overall process of modernisation. As a result, Jews were caught between the efforts to preserve their Jewish language and culture and the new “Turkification policy.”14 This secular Kemalist reform created hope for democracy and equality, and the Jewish community welcomed the new Turkish nationalism with optimism. The shift from subjects to citizens, however, was not without its challenges, especially for people who previously had dhimmi status in the Ottoman Empire. During the first three decades of the Turkish Republic, there were indications that not all citizens were being treated equally: those who had had dhimmi status were still being treated like dhimmis.15 After the foundation of the republican nation-state, the main targets of Turkish “othering” were non-Muslims. In the 24 July 1923 Lausanne Treaty (one of the main documents to come out of the Lausanne conference, 1922–23), non-Muslims were defined as minority groups in Turkey. However, the definition of non-Muslim was questionable, as it covered only the three biggest non-Muslim groups: Armenians, Jews, and Greeks. Syriacs, another nonMuslim group, were not granted minority rights. The treaty simply ignored their existence.16 Other issues also created serious problems, among them, the 1923 Population Exchange (Nüfus Mübadelesi), a compulsory exchange of populations involving Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria. It was the result of the defeat of Greece in the Second Greco-Turkish war of 1919–22 and the conclusion of the Lausanne Peace Treaty. The exchange affected over two million people—the Greek population of Anatolia and Eastern Thrace in particular. The main objective of the exchange was to create homogeneous populations in the States formed in the territory of the former Ottoman Empire in order to prevent separatism from arising among ethno-religious minorities. As a result, Turkey had to accept the Dönmeh population in Salonica as

150  Behruz Davletov and Tahir Abbas a Turkish Muslim people. However, the government continued to classify them as Dönmeh, as became obvious when the capital tax was collected.17 The “Citizen, Speak Turkish!” (Vatandaş, Türkçe konuş!) campaign, initiated by government-backed law students, began on 13 January 1928 and continued on through the 1930s. The goal was to prevent minorities from speaking their own languages. During the campaign, varieties of fines were levied against people who spoke a language other than Turkish, even in their own districts. Then, in 1942, the capital tax (Varlık Vergisi) was imposed on the non-Muslim citizens of Turkey. Officially, the tax law was presented as taxation of the high profitability created by exceptional wartime conditions, and not as targeting any specific religious or ethnic group.18 These and similar developments were seen as strong evidence that minorities were not perceived as full citizens.19 In response to these measures, the Jewish population rapidly decreased. In 1945, the Jewish population was 76,965. Three years later, in 1948, with the establishment of Israel, the Jewish population in Turkey dropped to 45,995.20 The contradictory nature of politics in Turkey must also be taken into consideration. Despite secularisation, Islam remained a decisive factor in Turkey, used as a tool for exclusion and for discriminating against nonMuslims—although Islamist tendencies were also under constant pressure. For example, between 1924 and 1930, during the first attempts at multiparty democracy, the mood was that the Progressive Republican Party was influenced by Islamist ideology, and so it was banned. This contradictory political situation meant that antisemitism in Turkey survived within a policy of denials, which included leaders of the Turkish Jewish communities denying the existence of antisemitism. Non-Muslim minorities in Turkey have always had an uncertain place in society.21 Turkey always believed that non-Muslim minorities were in contact with their countries of perceived ethnic origin— Greeks with Greece, Jews with Israel, and Armenians with Armenia.22 Nonetheless, the events that negatively affected the Jews (Citizen, Speak Turkish!, the wealth tax, etc.) targeted non-Muslim minorities in general— and even some Muslim minorities. As Toktaş sees it, only the early events in Thrace directly targeted Jews, largely because of Nazi influence. The rise of fundamentalist Islam also played a role. For their part, many prominent Jews in Turkey denied the existence of antisemitism, instead seeing these developments as the result of events in the Arab world. Landau, for instance, points to the rise of anti-Jewish elements in Islamist publications, especially after 1950. In 1970, anti-Zionism pushed all of this into the forefront, something that was exacerbated by the impact of popular antisemitic publications, including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.23 Today, there are three categories of antisemitism in Turkey: Islamist, leftist, and nationalist.24 The 1945 establishment of a new multi-party system was a hopeful shift in the direction of democracy in the country. It was at this point, however, that the Islamist movements began to rise and take their place as leading purveyors of antisemitic rhetoric. After the establishment

Historical and Contemporary Turkey  151 of Israel, the conflict between the new state and the Palestinians provided the primary source for the antisemitic sentiments expressed in the Islamist media. The Palestinian issue also had an important Ottoman legacy; Abdulhamid II had refused Theodor Herzl’s demand for land in the Palestinian territories. The Islamists believed that the Jews were behind Abdulhamid II being deposed and the subsequent downfall of the caliphate. While Palestine is an issue for Islamists, it is also important to Turkish leftists, who see this struggle as a conflict between the oppressed in the Middle East and American imperialist hegemony, with Israel perceived as a US instrument. This idea originates in the 1970s, when some far-left activists received military training from the Palestine Liberation Organisation and joined in armed combat against Israeli forces. Today, some of these militants are in positions that allow them to play a role in shaping public opinion. Antisemitic rhetoric is, however, not confined to the Islamists and the left. It is also found in nationalist and neo-nationalist ideologies. In recent years, nationalists have been openly hostile to the European Union, the United States, and Israel. In 2005, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf was number four on the bestseller list in Turkey, which was perceived as signalling the rise of a new form of nationalist antisemitism in the country.25 These different antisemitic ideological streams—Islamists, leftists, and nationalists—are all interconnected and influence each other. While Islamists use the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a source of antisemitism, leftists and nationalists also use an antisemitic discourse to criticise and oppose the Islamists.26 Antisemitism has always been a tool of exclusion in the Turkish political arena where it also plays a role in diverting attention from weaknesses.27

Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and the Everyday Distinguishing antisemitism from criticism of Zionism is a difficult endeavour. On the one hand, a certain ambiguity allows for antisemitism to be presented as criticism of Israeli government policy. On the other hand, accusations of antisemitism are used in some quarters to discredit any criticism of Israel. Some scholars argue that criticising Israeli politics and opposing Zionism does not constitute antisemitism,28 but the line between the two is fuzzy. According to Alan Dershowitz, it is important to understand that although criticism of Israel is not, by itself, antisemitism, there are certain kinds of criticism of Israel that are clearly antisemitic, when criticism of Israel “crosses the line from fair to foul” it goes “from acceptable to antiSemitic.”29 For his part, Brian Klug argues that criticism of Israeli policies is not antisemitic, and that like any other state, the Israeli State is open to criticism. That said, it is undeniable that some criticisms of Israel and of “Zionism” serve to reinforce antisemitism.30 A certain double standard can also be seen around criticisms of Zionism. For many Jews, Zionism is a way of imagining the Jewish nation, just as in

152  Behruz Davletov and Tahir Abbas many nation-states, nationalism is the primary ideology. Modern Turkishness, for example, is a product of the Kemalist nation-state building project. Thus, Jews have the same right as any other nation in the world to shape an identity, and Zionism provides the necessary framework. Critics of Zionism are denying Jews their rights and treating them differently than they do others. In that sense, singling out Jewish nationalism as distinct from other nationalisms is antisemitic.31 The current Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and other officials of the Republic often visit Turkish communities in Europe to strengthen ties, to establish social capital within other countries, and to build a lobby in those countries. “You are part of Germany, but you are also part of our great Turkey,” Erdoğan said in Düsseldorf in 2011.32 Meanwhile, in Turkey, Jews are not permitted any attachment to Israel or to Zionism. Jews who reject Zionism and do not have any connection to Israel are accepted as “good Jews,” while Zionist Jews are the “bad Jews.”33 In early 2017, Erdoğan accused both the German and Dutch governments of being “Nazi remnants” when AKP ministers were barred from entering the countries to address Turkish audiences in relation to the April referendum on the executive presidency. Such utterances reflect a hostile approach to the EU in the light of growing nationalist fervour in Turkey, in part reflecting the personal ambitions of Erdoğan. The problem does not stop there. Islamist intellectuals who criticise Israel and Zionism often turn to specific verses in the Qur’an to justify their stance against Israel: “Believers! Do not take the Jews and the Christians for your allies” (Al-Ma’ida 5:51). However, they tend to ignore the other verses about the “People of the Book” (AlHaj 22:17). Islamic scholars who call for interreligious dialogue and peace, like Seyyid Hossein Nasr (b. 1933), Fethullah Gülen (b.1941), and Said Nursi (1877–1960), are criticised as apostates, as Zionism’s Trojan Horse. Those who hold these views are choosing to ignore the fact that renowned thinkers like the thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi and the eleventh- to twelfth-century Turkic poet and Sufi Khoja Akhmed Yasawi, both of whom are important historical figures in Turkish Islamic culture, were also open to interreligious dialogue. The implication is that while particular views are singled out, other distinct religious, cultural, and historical interpretations are ignored or even eradicated. The military coups of 1960, 1971, and 1980 were also of particular importance. Because the coups were ideological projects, state pressure was not just brought to bear by the repressive state apparatus, but also through state ideology. George Simmel contends that there is a relationship between ideology and repression.34 These authoritarian interventions into daily life led to a particular way of thinking that served to subdue memory, laying the groundwork for the ideologies still present today. Because they are among the least desired groups in Turkish society, all of the key ideological movements make use of conspiracy theories about Jewish people. The role of antisemitism in political discourse is to exclude these Others from the political arena. Scholars like Marc David Baer, Rıfat N. Bali, and Marcy

Historical and Contemporary Turkey  153 Brink-Danan counter the commonly accepted view of Turkish culture as ethnically and religiously tolerant, arguing that discrimination towards Jews is deeply embedded in Turkish social and cultural life.35 Brink-Danan’s articles and her book Jewish Life in Twenty-First-Century Turkey: The Other Side of Tolerance, based on field studies conducted between 2002 and 2009, use anthropological and semiotic methods to give a “thick description” of the tension embedded in the daily life of Jewish people in Turkey. However, when she argues that people’s names provide a basis for discrimination, it is not obvious that what Brink-Danan has noticed is antisemitism, but rather, that a more general phenomenon affects all nonMuslim groups.36 Kerim Balcı, a former columnist for the English-language daily newspaper Today’s Zaman, which was known to adhere closely to a conservative line, argues that these discriminatory acts and events are related to “ignorance” within Turkish society.37 Because people do not know the history, they believe that the Jews were always the Muslims’ enemies. This is important to understanding the contemporary situation of non-Muslim groups in Turkey. Many Turkish intellectuals who claim that there is no antisemitism in Turkish society argue that Turkish society has a history of tolerance towards the Jewish community. That said, the results of various surveys show that Jews are the least desired and most disliked community in Turkey. When searching for an effective way to start a discussion around these issues, the focus should be on ignorance about Others, rather than on intolerance. Turkish society is simply ignoring the existence of the Others—non-Muslims including Jews. Interaction between different groups engenders tolerance, as people are more likely to tolerate each other if they interact socially. In the final analysis, if they are simply ignorant or unaware of each other, they lack the immediate framework necessary for their behaviour to be defined as intolerance. On the other hand, it is not impossible for perceptions of Others to lead to a level of intolerance that limits or even prevents interaction. This ignorance and intolerance may well represent the impact of populist media and politics. As well as ignorance, we need to consider the issue of “distrust.” Turkish society is marked by a low level of trust.38 A citizen of the Turkish Republic who is not an ethnic Turk is simply not considered a Turk, which undercuts a sense of national belonging. Because of these attacks, the hate speech, and the language of discrimination, Jews feel increasingly isolated from the Turkish community, which in turn is heightening the level of distrust between the social groups.39 There are several popular themes related to Israel, Zionism, and Jewish conspiracies in Turkish media that call to mind traditional antisemitic stereotypes—among them: “Israel is not a legitimate State” and/or “Israel’s legitimacy as a nation-state is disputable”; “Israel’s treatment of the ­Palestinian people is no different than Nazi Germany’s treatment of the Jewish people” and/or “Israel is comparable to Hitler and the Nazis”; “The

154  Behruz Davletov and Tahir Abbas Jews control the American media and Hollywood and constantly feature the Holocaust to stir up sympathy for Israel” and/or “The American Jewish lobby controls Hollywood and the media”; “Israel uses the accusation of antisemitism as a shield against its critics.”40 Although in Turkey, we do not see antisemitic cartoons like those in the Arab media, the same themes can be detected in columns, in books, and on social media.41 The book Türkiye’de kim kimdir (Who’s Who in Turkey), which started as an anonymous Twitter account, is an example. It was subsequently published under the alias Oğuz Hakan Göktürk (this name has nationalist implications). In the book, many public figures, including Erdoğan, are presented as crypto-Jews, cryptoArmenians, etc. Many news websites, leftist, and Islamist opposition groups make identical claims.42 Posts on social media from members of the AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; Justice and Development Party) during Israel’s war in Gaza are also of interest. When Turkish singer Yıldız Tilbe said, “May God bless Hitler,” Ankara mayor and AKP member Melih Gökçek, who has millions of Twitter followers, responded, “I applaud you!”43 The pro-government newspaper Yeni Akit printed a much-debated crossword puzzle in Hitler’s image, with the slogan: “We long for you.” The progovernment newspaper Yeni Şafak shared a tweet quoting the director of IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation, Bülent Yıldırım, who declared: “If anyone can stop the Israeli operation, it is the Jewish community in Turkey; otherwise very bad things will happen.” AKP Member of Parliament, Şamil Tayyar, tweeted, “Let your race be finished off, and may Hitler never be too far away.”44 In Turkey, direct antisemitic actions are prosecuted by the government; for example, in 2009, a storeowner who hung a banner reading “Jews and Armenians are not admitted!” was sentenced to five months in prison. However, a recent media-monitoring report published by the Hrant Dink Foundation shows the continuing rise of hate speech, with Turkey’s nonMuslim communities—Armenians, Jews, and Christians—at the receiving end of more hate speech than other groups. Pro-government newspapers and Islamist columnists often use the words “Jews” or “Israelis,” instead of “State of Israel” or “Israel Defence Forces.”45 In 2008, during Israel’s Gaza operations, there was a wave of emotional response. In Izmir, nationalists smashed Jewish shops, after which the city closed the synagogue. In Istanbul, there were posters with appeals not to shop in Jewish stores and not to “serve Jews.” In Istanbul, some billboards displayed children’s bloodied shoes, accompanied by the words “You cannot be the children of Moses,” to protest against the deaths in Gaza. In Izmir and Istanbul, insulting and threatening graffiti was daubed on some synagogues. A list of local and international Jewish companies was created as part of a boycott.46 On 6 January 2009, a basketball match between Bnei Hasharon and Türk Telekom was interrupted by audience jeering and objects thrown at the Israeli players. The Turkish police had to protect the Israeli team from direct physical attack. In Istanbul, some shops put up a banner in June 2010 that read,

Historical and Contemporary Turkey  155 “Dogs are allowed, Israelis aren’t,” and the door of another shop was covered with a poster saying, “Do not buy from here, this shop is owned by a Jew.” The Anti-Defamation League’s Global 100 Report 2015 opinion poll found that 71 per cent of Turks believe that “Jews are more loyal to Israel than to Turkey.” Naturally, the Jewish community in Turkey feels increasingly threatened. The obvious relationship between the AKP’s antisemitic statements and provocative condemnation of Israel and the rise of antisemitism should not be overlooked.47 Although it may appear that Turkish society has been Islamicised under the AKP’s rule, it has been a long and complex process related to an overall transformation in the Middle East and to the rising Islamist tendencies throughout the region. Furthermore, the conflict between the AKP and the Hizmet movement, both Islamic groups, reveals a structural and organisational transition that is more complex than a simple ideological secular vs. Islamic polarisation.48 Some intellectuals see this situation as the mobilisation of the “periphery” into the “centre.”49 From that point of view, the Gezi movements and related conflicts symbolise the victory of the “Islamic-­ conservative” periphery over the “secular-Kemalist” centre, something that also indicates the victory of the “local, the national, and the Muslim” over the “non-Turkish and non-Muslim enemies at home and abroad” (effectively linking ideas about global Jewish hegemony with the concept of crypto-Jews inside the country). During the Gezi protests, Erdoğan himself blamed the “interest-rate lobby,” a concept generally associated with Jewish financiers. According to Erdoğan, the lobby was trying to undermine the government and the Turkish economy.50 The AKP is the successor to Refah Partisi (the Welfare Party), established by Necmettin Erbakan (1926–2011), a religious Islamist leader of the Milli Görüş (National View) movement who held strong antisemitic views and who was Prime Minister of Turkey in 1996–97. The AKP inherited their ideological predecessors’ antisemitic discourse. On 15 April 2015, A Haber (a pro-AKP, pro-government television channel) showed the documentary Üst Akıl (The Mastermind). The film starts with the story of Moses and his people, and then it quotes Erdoğan who says that “all of the conflicts are not with him or his government, but target the country and the unity of the nation, and are planned by the Mastermind.” Journalist Burak Bekdil argues that an antisemitic stance wins votes among Turkey’s conservative, nationalist, and Muslim population.51 TV series like Kurtlar Vadisi (Valley of the Wolves) that include antisemitic scenes are breaking audience records.52 The many fans of the series also have access to forums where people discuss which character represents whom in real life.53 However, as was noted above, the “Islamic vs. secular” approach is reductionist; it neglects the broader structural sources of these phenomena and the discrimination against non-Muslims that existed under the secular Kemalist regime. It would be more appropriate to read the current situation in Turkey as an outcome of shifts in social organisation: not merely the Islamisation

156  Behruz Davletov and Tahir Abbas of public and political life, but also the politicisation of Islam.54 Islamic groups, Sufi orders (tarikatlar), and social movements adapted to the State’s bureaucratic administrative structures as part of adjusting to modern public life, a process that started long before the establishment of the AKP. Islamist intellectuals and activists, such as Necip Fazıl (1904–83), Nurettin Topçu (1909–75), and Erol Güngör (1938–83), have played an important role in this transformation and the emergence of political Islam in Turkey. This trend has also been influenced by the Egyptians Hassan al-Banna (1906– 49) and Sayyid Qutb (1906–66) and by the Pakistani Abul Ala Maududi (1903–79); we should take note of the antisemitism embedded in their discourses. Secularism, the State, society, and Islam are all undergoing a transformation in Turkey. In the case of antisemitism and hatred towards Others, the authoritarian culture and patrimonial political structures are important factors that adhere to specific forms of religious interpretation. Today, the AKP makes expert use of the established political nationalist-Islamist discourse to win votes. An analysis of current political discourse uncovers a recurrent terminology. The “hero” and “traitor” concepts have a long historical place in Turkish memory. In the AKP government’s usage of these concepts, Erdoğan becomes the “hero” and the Hizmet movement represents the “traitor.” In the past, this framework was used against the Dönmeh, “crypto-Jews,” and “crypto-Armenians.”55 Both pro-AKP intellectuals and many leftist thinkers present the Hizmet movement as a “traitor” attempting to build “a State within a State” (the “parallel State”) and cooperating with the enemies of the State (namely the US, Israel, and a global Jewish conspiracy). This notion of the “parallel State” is subsequently extended to include all forms of social chaos, any instability, bombings, and the PKK conflict, as well as any economic difficulties. All of these phenomena are associated with a “Jewish conspiracy”—planned by the Jewish lobby, by Israel, or by the Mossad.56

Concluding Remarks The Jewish population dropped from more than 100,000 in 1927 to just 23,000 in 2010, and Jewish emigration has increased again in recent years. The Mavi Marmara incident, a confrontation between the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) and activists from the Free Gaza Movement, also known as the “Freedom Flotilla,” which took place off the coast of the Gaza on the night of 30 May 2010, was another turning point for Jews in Turkey. Six ships from the convoy approached the coast of Gaza, trying to break the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip, and were detained by Israeli border commandos. Nine Turkish activists were killed. It was the first time in Turkish history that Turkish citizens were killed by forces outside of Turkish territories. When people started to ask whose side they were on, Jews in Turkey grew concerned about increasing antisemitism and began to fear for their safety. By 2011, only 17,300 Jews remained in Turkey.57

Historical and Contemporary Turkey  157 The Jews have never been as few in number in Turkey as they are today. They do not play much of a role in political and economic life either. Why, then, are there so many conspiracy theories about this small community? Turkish society emerged from a long historical tradition of tolerance, but since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, it has been unable to build a truly cosmopolitan society. It has failed to overcome ethnic and religious discrimination against “non-Turks” in political and social life, and authoritarian state repression has created ongoing divisions between Turkish social groups. There has been very little study of antisemitism in Turkey, and the resultant lack of knowledge increases anxiety and fuels controversy by creating a vacuum that is filled by media debates that lack both a scientific methodology and a theoretical base. It results in discussions that merely reproduce the prevailing conspiracy theories about Jews in Turkey, reflecting the need for a deeper appreciation of the issues at hand. Much more needs to be done in Turkey to return to a much fairer time in history, politics, and society. Otherwise, Turkey risks drifting towards forms of authoritarian antisemitism which already exist in abundance in a complex and much-troubled region.

Notes 1. Jerome A. Chanes, Antisemitism: A Reference Handbook (Santa Barbara: ABCCLIO, 2004), 5. 2. Ibid.; Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986). 3. Avigdor Levy, ed., Jews, Turks, Ottomans: A Shared History, Fifteenth through the Twentieth Century (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002), 246. 4. “Turkey–Jewish Encyclopedia,” Jewish Encyclopedia, available online at www. jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/14546-turkey (accessed 23 November 2017). 5. Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430– 1950 (New York: Vintage Books, 2006). 6. Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites, 131. 7. “Turkey–Jewish Encyclopedia.” 8. “Istanbul, Turkey,” Jewish Virtual Library, available online at www.jewish virtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0010_0_09766.html (accessed 23 November 2017). 9. On the printing history of the Protocols in Turkey, see Rıfat N. Bali, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Turkey,” in The Global Impacts of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A Century-Old Myth, ed. Esther Webman (New York: Routledge, 2011), 220–28. 10. Marc David Baer, “An Enemy Old and New: The Dönme, Anti-Semitism, and Conspiracy Theories in the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic,” Jewish Quarterly Review 103, no. 4 (2013): 523–55. 11. Rıfat N. Bali, “The 1934 Thrace Events: Continuity and Change within Turkish State Policies Regarding Non-Muslim Minorities: An Interview with Rıfat Bali,” European Journal of Turkish Studies: Social Sciences on Contemporary Turkey 7 (2008), available online at https://ejts.revues.org/2903 (accessed 23 November 2017). 12. Mücahit Düzgün, “Cumhuriyetin İlanından İsrail’in Kuruluşuna Kadar Türkiye’deki Yahudiler,” Journal of Modern Turkish History Studies 3, no. 9–10 (2000): 65–83 (here 78). 13. Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites, 136.

158  Behruz Davletov and Tahir Abbas 14. Ahmet İçduygu, Şule Toktaş, and B. Ali Soner, “The Politics of Population in a Nation-Building Process: Emigration of Non-Muslims from Turkey,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 31, no. 2 (2008): 358–89; Şule Toktaş, “Citizenship and Minorities: A Historical Overview of Turkey’s Jewish Minority,” Journal of Historical Sociology 18, no. 4 (2005): 394–429; Rıfat N. Bali, A Scapegoat for All Seasons: The Dönmes or Crypto-Jews of Turkey (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2008). 15. Rıfat N. Bali, “The Politics of Turkification during the Single Party Period,” in Turkey Beyond Nationalism: Towards Post-Nationalist Identities, ed. HansLukas Kieser (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 43–49. 16. Hazan Kuru, “Türkiye’de Antisemitizm ve Büyük Doğu Dergisi,” unpublished Master’s dissertation (Istanbul: Yıldız Teknik Üniversitesi, 2010), 30. 17. Baer, “An Enemy Old and New: The Dönme, Anti-Semitism, and Conspiracy Theories in the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic”; Rıfat N. Bali and Paul Bessemer, A Scapegoat for All Seasons: The Dönmes or Crypto-Jews of Turkey (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2008). 18. Şule Toktaş, “Perceptions of Anti-Semitism among Turkish Jews,” Turkish Studies 7, no. 2 (2006): 203–23. 19. Avram Galanti, Ömer Türkoğlu, and Rıfat N. Bali, Vatandaş Türkçe konuş! (Istanbul: Kebikeç Yayınları, 2000). 20. Rifat N. Bali, “The Slow Disappearance of Turkey’s Jewish Community,” Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (2011), available online at http://jcpa.org/article/ the-slow-disappearance-of-turkeys-jewish-community/ (accessed 23 November 2017). 21. Ibid. 22. Toktaş, “Perceptions of Anti-Semitism among Turkish Jews”; Kuru, “Türkiye’de Antisemitizm ve Büyük Doğu Dergisi.” 23. Jacob M. Landau, “Muslim Turkish Attitudes towards Jews, Zionism and Israel,” Die Welt des Islams 28, nos. 1–4 (1988): 291–300. 24. Rıfat N. Bali, “Present-Day Anti-Semitism in Turkey,” Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, (2009), available online at http://jcpa.org/article/presentday-anti-semitism-in-turkey/ (accessed 23 November 2017). 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Baer, “An Enemy Old and New.” 28. Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Israel (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2011); Brian Klug, “Interrogating ‘New Anti-Semitism,’” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36, no. 3 (2013): 468–82; Emanuele Ottolenghi, “Anti-Zionism Is Anti-­Semitism,” The Guardian, November 2003, available online at www.theguardian.com/ world/2003/nov/29/comment (accessed 23 November 2017). 29. Dershowitz, The Case for Israel, 1. 30. Klug, “Interrogating ‘New Anti-Semitism,’” 471–82. 31. Ottolenghi, “Anti-Zionism Is Anti-Semitism,” The Guardian, November 2003. 32. Özlem Gezer and Anna Reimann, “Erdogan Urges Turks Not to Assimilate: ‘You Are Part of Germany, But Also Part of Our Great Turkey,’” Spiegel online, 28 February 2011, available online at www.spiegel.de/international/europe/ erdogan-urges-turks-not-to-assimilate-you-are-part-of-germany-but-also-partof-our-great-turkey-a-748070.html (accessed 23 November 2017). 33. Rıfat N. Bali, “The Image of the Jew in the Rhetoric of Political Islam in Turkey,” Cahiers d’Etudes Sur La Méditerranée Orientale et Le Monde TurcoIranien 28 (1999), available online at https://cemoti.revues.org/590 (accessed 23 November 2017). 34. Georg Simmel, “The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies,” The American Journal of Sociology 11, no. 4 (1906): 441–98; L. E. Hazelrigg, “A Reexamination of Simmel’s ‘The Secret and the Secret Society’: Nine Propositions,” Social Forces 47, no. 3 (1969): 323–30.

Historical and Contemporary Turkey  159 35. Marcy Brink-Danan, Jewish Life in Twenty-First-Century Turkey: The Other Side of Tolerance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); Marcy BrinkDanan, “Names That Show Time: Turkish Jews as ‘Strangers’ and the Semiotics of Reclassification,” American Anthropologist 112, no. 3 (2010): 384–96; Marc David Baer, “Turkish Jews Rethink 500 Years of Brotherhood and Friendship,” Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 24, no. 2 (2000): 63–73. 36. Marcy Brink-Danan, “Names That Show Time: Turkish Jews as ‘Strangers’ and the Semiotics of Reclassification,” American Anthropologist 112, no. 3 (2010): 384–96. 37. Kerim Balcı, “Is Anti-Semitism Rising in Turkey?” Today’s Zaman, 1 October 2009, available online at www.icjs-online.org/index.php?article=2074 (accessed 23 November 2017). 38. Max Roser, “Trust,” Our World in Data, 2015, available online at http://our worldindata.org/data/culture-values-and-society/trust/ (accessed 23 November 2017). 39. Bali, “The Slow Disappearance of Turkey’s Jewish Community”; Şule Toktaş, “Turkey’s Jews and Their Immigration to Israel,” Middle Eastern Studies 42, no. 3 (2006): 505–19. 40. See Bali, “Present-Day Anti-Semitism in Turkey”; “Antisemitism in the Turkish Media: Part 1,” MEMRI—The Middle East Media Research Institute, 28 April 2005, available online at www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/1365.htm (accessed 23 November 2017). 41. “Antisemitism in the Turkish Media.” 42. Kaya Ataberk, “Tayyip, Pakraduni mi?” Türk Solu Gazetesi, 22 Novem ber 2015, available online at www.turksolu.com.tr/tayyip-pakraduni-mi/ (accessed 23 November 2017). 43. “Gökçek’ten Yıldız Tilbe’nin ırkçı tweetlerine destek,” t24.com.tr, available online at http://t24.com.tr/haber/gokcekten-yildiz-tilbenin-irkci-tweetlerinedestek,264024 (accessed 23 November 2017). 44. Louis Fishman, “When the State Sanctions Turkey’s Ugly Anti-Semitism,” Istanbul-New York-Tel Aviv, 23 July 2014, available online at http://louisfish man.blogspot.com.tr/2014/08/when-state-sanctions-turkeys-ugly-anti.html (accessed 23 November 2017). 45. Hrant Dink Vakfı, İdil Engindeniz Şahan, Rita Ender, “Hate Speech and Discriminatory Discourse in the Media: May–August 2014,” available online at http://hrantdink.org/attachments/article/416/Media-Watch-On-Hate-SpeechMay-August-2014.pdf (accessed 23 November 2017). 46. Harut Sassounian, “Major American-Jewish Organizations May No Lon ger Back Turkey in Congress,” The Huffington Post, 25 May 2011, available online at www.huffingtonpost.com/harut-sassounian/major-american-jewishorg_b_161346.html (accessed 23 November 2017). 47. Simone Wilson, “At a Breaking Point in Turkey: Should Jews Stay or Should We Go?” Jewish Journal, 18 March 2015, available online at www.jewishjournal. com/cover_story/article/at_a_breaking_point_in_turkey_should_jews_stay_or_ should_we_go (accessed 23 November 2017). 48. Jenny B. White, “The Turkish Complex,” American Interest 10, no. 4 (2015): 14–23. 49. Ali Murat Yel and Alparslan Nas, “After Gezi: Moving towards Post-­Hegemonic Imagination in Turkey,” Insight Turkey 15, no. 4 (2013): 177–90. 50. Can Erimtan, “Who Was behind the Gezi Protests and the Dec. 17 Graft Probe?” RT International, 28 March 2014, available online at www.rt.com/ op-edge/gezi-protests-media-attention-897/ (accessed 23 November 2017). 51. Burak Bekdil, “Turkey’s Supposed Nemesis: ‘The Mastermind,’” Gatestone Institute, 27 April 2015, available online at www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5608/ turkey-antisemitism-mastermind (accessed 23 November 2017).

160  Behruz Davletov and Tahir Abbas 52. Cem Özdemir, “Controversy over Turkish Movie: Beyond the Valley of the Wolves,” Spiegel online, 22 February 2006, available online at www.spiegel. de/international/controversy-over-turkish-movie-beyond-the-valley-of-thewolves-a-401565.html (accessed 23 November 2017). 53. Faruk Arslan, “İşte Toplatılan Olay Kitap. Vadi’nin Şifresi Çözülüyor Veya Kurtlar Vadisi Fenomeni. Tıkla Hemen Bedava İndi,” Faruk Arslan, 6 March 2016, available online at http://farukarslan.com/ornek-sayfa/iste-toplatilan-olaykitap-vadi’nin-sifresi-cozuluyor-veya-kurtlar-vadisi-fenomeni-tikla-hemenbedava-indir/ (accessed 20 April 2016); “Kurtlar Vadisi Karakterlerinin Gerçek Hayatta Temsil Ettiği İddia Edilen Kişiler,” Onedio, 20 September 2014, available online at http://onedio.com/haber/kurtlar-vadisi-karakterlerinin-gercekhayatta-canlandirdigi-kisiler-371488 (accessed 23 November 2017). 54. White, “The Turkish Complex,” 14–23; Yel and Nas, “After Gezi,” 177–90. 55. White, “The Turkish Complex.” 56. “Turkish PM: Ruling Party Will Not Give in to ‘Jewish Lobby,’” The Jerusalem Post, 9 February 2015, available online at www.jpost.com/Middle-East/ Turkish-PM-Ruling-party-will-not-give-in-to-Jewish-lobby-390459 (accessed 23 November 2017). 57. Bali, “The Slow Disappearance of Turkey’s Jewish Community.”

11 Arab Antisemitic Discourse Importation, Internalisation, and Recycling Esther Webman

Introduction In his analysis of classical and contemporary perspectives on antisemitism, sociologist David Norman Smith shows that antisemitism is a social construction of Jews as enemies. He adopts Norman Cohn’s assertion that “the deadliest form of antisemitism [. . .] has little to do with real conflicts of interest between living people, or even with racial prejudice as such [. . . It is] rather a conviction that Jews—all Jews everywhere in the world—form a conspiratorial body set on ruining and then dominating the rest of mankind.” This teaching appeared to be specifically modern, forming a decisive extension of the late medieval view that Jews are “mysterious beings, endowed with uncanny, sinister powers.” Everyday religious and cultural strife had given way to a global dualism, a Manichean vision of a world divided between Jewish evil and Gentile good.1 Following Smith’s footsteps, this essay contends that Jews in the Arab world as well are “socially constructed enemies,” and the antisemitic perceptions mirror the European antisemitic worldview and vocabulary. Manifestations of ideological hostility to Jews were the products of modernity appearing already in the nineteenth century, before the emergence of Zionism, as a result of the growing European political and cultural penetration of the Middle East. Coupled with the weakness of the Muslim world they created a sense of deep crisis among Muslims, causing a worsening in their attitude towards the Christian and Jewish minorities, identified as the main beneficiaries of the growing Western influence and of various reform efforts carried out by local rulers.2 The import of anti-Jewish ideas and antisemitic themes along with other ideas, mostly by missionaries and Christian Arab graduates of European schools, exacerbated the intolerance toward the Jews.3 The emergence of Arab nationalism and Zionism, Jewish immigration to Palestine, and the deep trauma of the 1948 Arab defeat by the nascent Jewish state enhanced the anti-Jewish hostility and created a fertile ground for the entrenchment of antisemitic perceptions. As the conflict deepened, antisemitism underwent a process of Islamisation, using the Qur’an and Islamic traditions to rationalise the negation of Zionism, Israel,

162  Esther Webman and the Jews. Consequently, Arab antisemitism was promoted up to the 1967 War from above by governments for political mobilisation but was also expressed from below, reflecting popular beliefs. It has never been confined to the political fringes, but was shared by mainstream popular writers, academics, and politicians from leftists to radical Islamists. Rising hostility toward Jews was a major reason for the mass Jewish exodus from Arab countries after 1948. These contentions are based on two premises: 1) the antisemitic discourse in the Middle East is part of a broader anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish discourse, which developed as part and parcel of the Arab-Israeli conflict; 2) while Jews in Muslim lands never suffered the kind of persecutions they endured in Christian Europe, Islamic tradition did contain anti-Jewish themes,4 and those have been brought to the fore particularly by the Islamist movements since the 1970s. The essay focuses on the production of the antisemitic discourse and is divided into three parts. The first part typifies Arab antisemitism and introduces few examples of the antisemitic manifestations discourse since the turn of the twenty-first century, focusing on the pervasive usage of “the Jew” as a metaphor for evil, and on the emergence of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a tool for understanding the world. The second part briefly traces the historical evolution of antisemitism in the Arab world, and the third part presents the major approaches of the debate on the roots of this antisemitism in Western writings.

Typifying Arab Antisemitic Discourse Several characteristics typify contemporary Arab antisemitism: 1) It is mainly verbal and textual, expressed in books, newspapers, speeches, F ­ riday sermons, statements, leaflets, and caricatures. 2) It is a classic example of antisemitism without Jews. Most of the Jewish communities in the Arab countries no longer exist. It is directed at Israelis/Zionists who live across the borders, on the one hand, and at Jews and Judaism, on the other hand. While Israelis and Zionists constitute a concrete enemy who occupy what is perceived as the heartland of the Arab and Muslim world, the Jews and Judaism represent not only a religion or a religious community but an abstract concept symbolising an almighty, vicious, and conspiratorial force. 3) The terms Israeli, Zionist, and Jew are interchangeable. 4) Arab antisemitism undergoes an Islamisation process which radicalises the demonisation of Israel in Islamic terms, using the Qur’an and the Islamic tradition as well as the early Muslim-Jewish encounter, to rationalise the rejection of Zionism, Israel, and the Jews. The territorial-national conflict, thus, becomes an eternal historical, cultural, and existential struggle between Judaism and Islam. Moreover, the struggle with Israel is part of an even larger confrontation between Islam and the West, since Israel is completely identified with the West and is seen as its arm in the region and as a tool for its continued control and exploitation. Jews are depicted as meek, cowardly, and doomed to

Arab Antisemitic Discourse  163 misery and humiliation, on the one hand, and as warmongers and traitors, who betrayed their prophets and even killed them, on the other. 5) Holocaust denial and the usage of Nazi images and terminology to describe Zionists and Israelis thrive as part and parcel of Arab antisemitism. Zionism is also accused of cynically using the Holocaust or even inventing it as a means of financial and psychological extortion of the West. 6) Targeting Jews in terrorist attacks. The alleged eternal enmity of the Jews to Islam is dominant in Islamist thought, suggesting justification of genocidal measures against them to free humanity from their evil. Following are a few recent examples of the kind of discourse on the Jews pervasive in the Arab official, Islamist and social media. In a three-part article published by the official Palestinian Authority daily al-Hayat al-Jadida in mid-2011, Shaykh Ishaq Falayfil, a teacher of religion, asserted that the struggle between the Palestinians and the Israelis is not a struggle over land and borders, but a long existential struggle between Judaism and Islam. Falayfil defined Israel as a malignant, cancerous growth that seeks destruction and explained that the Jewish religion is a distorted, corrupted, and falsified religion hostile to Muslims. In the same vein, publicist Samir ‘Amru wrote in the same paper on 15 May that Zionism is an extremist religious ideology whose aim is gaining hegemony in Palestine, as a basis for its eternal rule over the world.5 The two statements, out of numerous others in Palestinian as well as in other Arab media outlets, clearly reflect prevailing antisemitic thinking. Antisemitic preaching continued unabated in television channels and particularly those identified with Islamists, such as al-Rahma and al-Hikma in Egypt, al-Manar in Lebanon (Hizballah), and al-Aqsa (Hamas), since the outbreak of the Second Intifada in September 2000 and the events of what came to be called the “Arab Spring” in 2011.6 Those contended that the signing of agreements with “the descendants of pigs and apes” is forbidden and that the elimination of Israel is a pre-requisite for a free world. The effort to destroy Israel is worthwhile “even if 10 million Egyptians would die,” claimed Egyptian journalist Muhammad ‘Abbas in an interview aired on al-Hikma TV on 4 September 2011. He reinforced his claim, referring to the Judgment Day hadith (oral tradition) that calls for an allout war between Muslims and Jews, when the stone and the tree will call on Muslims to come and kill the Jew hiding behind them.7 In an interview for Egyptian al-Rahma TV on 16 July 2011, Muhammad Gala’ Idris, head of the Hebrew Studies Department at Tanta University, Egypt, claimed that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are authentic, explaining that the Zionists hatched a conspiracy to destroy all Christian and Islamic countries, and establish a Jewish government. The Jews have an ancient secret plan to take over the world, he argued, and in order to achieve their aim they conspire and instigate strife among people.8 The Jews are the enemies of Islam and “the number one threat” to Muslims, asserted Kuwaiti head of al-Risala channel Tariq Suwaydan on the

164  Esther Webman al-Quds channel on 16 March 2012. “Therefore resistance should continue until Palestine is liberated.” In a similar vein, the General Guide of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt, Muhammad Badiʽ, stressed in a sermon published on the movement’s website in October 2012 that “the Jews’ [alleged] tyranny will lead to their extinction” and that Allah would “free the world of their filth and corruption.” Shaykh Bassam al-Qa’id, head of the Palestinian Islamic Scholars Association in Lebanon, said in an interview to Hamas’s alAqsa TV broadcast on 1 February 2012, that “the Jew is a Satan in human form.” Accusing the Jews of violating international laws, values, and all human norms, he added that he could almost say that the Satanic Jinn takes lessons from them.9 Muslim-Jewish encounters in the early period of Islam and Islamic scriptures are used frequently by Islamist preachers. They were the inspiration, for example, for an Egyptian TV series titled Khaybar, broadcast on the eve of Ramadan on 7 July 2013. Recreating the battle between Muslims and Jews in Khaybar in 629, it allegedly meant to show “the truth about the Jews and about making agreements with them,” and its main conclusion as the screenwriter, Yusri al-Jundi, asserted was that “these people have not changed a bit and the only language they understood was the language of force.” The drama also invoked several antisemitic remarks by its actors on the allegedly inherent traits of the Jews: “Jews are people with no moral values,” “slayers of prophets,” who think only about “accumulating money.”10 “Since the inception of Islam 1,400 years ago, we have been suffering from Jewish and Zionist interference in Muslim affairs,” summed up Shaykh of al-Azhar Ahmad al-Tayyib the relations with the Jews, in an interview aired on Egyptian TV on 25 October 2012. The Jews, he said, are arrogant and consider themselves the Chosen People, practising a hierarchy among people, according to the Torah. Therefore, “these practices and beliefs have made people, even non-Muslims, hate them.”11 However, most notable since the outburst of the “Arab Spring” was the widespread usage of the term “Jew” as a derogatory term to bash the adversary Other, while Judaising him. Each camp, whether the revolutionaries or the old regimes, not only accused each other of cooperating or conspiring with Zionism and the Jews but actually exposed them as “being Jewish.” The “Jew” was constructed in Arab discourse as a functional metaphor, an all-purpose villain, to explain the changing circumstances and catastrophes that befell Arab societies, particularly in the wake of the Arab Spring.12 The metaphor “Jew” has become a “cultural code”—“a sign of cultural identity, of one’s belonging to a specific cultural camp” and “a short-hand label of an entire set of ideas and attitudes.”13 It serves to define non-Jewish adversaries by Judaising them and attributing to them certain supposed features of Jews, while denouncing them for doing so. The Jews have become, as in European antisemitic thinking, a “symbol of the modern world.”14 The most prominent ideologue of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood since the 1960s, Sayyid Qutb and other Muslim scholars,

Arab Antisemitic Discourse  165 Hamas, and similar Islamist movements accused the Jews of spreading atheism, instigating revolutions and inventing corrupted ideologies. “Indeed, they institute these heretical doctrines in order to fight against Islam,” Qutb claimed.15 Hence, as Rachid Kaci explained, “the insult used by fundamentalists to describe enlightened Muslims or simply those who dare to defend the values of equality, secularism, tolerance and freedom,” perceived as contradictory to Islam’s values, is “dirty Jew.”16 Yet, the most predominant theme in the Arab antisemitic discourse is the belief in conspiracy theories associated with the Jews and epitomised in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. On 9 April 2008, Hamas Minister of Culture ‘Atallah Abu al-Subh said in an interview to al-Aqsa TV that “the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is the faith that every Jew harbours in his heart.” Everything we see in the Arab region and around the world, he went on to say—“the evil of the Jews, their deceit, their cunning, their warmongering, their control of the world, and their contempt and scorn for all the peoples of the world”—is based on the Protocols and proves their goal to control the world. Salih Riqab, Hamas deputy Minister of Religious Endowment, also referred to the Protocols in an interview broadcast a month later. The goal of the Zionist movement, he declared, is to establish a state in Palestine, “which would become a base for ruling the entire world,” destroy the religions it opposes, particularly Islam; corrupt values and morality; spread permissiveness and sex, and generate moral decline.17 Perceived as a historical fact and as an integral part of Jewish heritage, the Protocols were translated into Arabic a few years after their publication, and as in other countries, continuously assumed new life, meaning, and relevance. As of the 1950s, the myth of the Protocols appeared to be gaining ground in the Arab world, not only as part of intensified psychological warfare against the Jewish state but as part of a way of thinking which reflects on the condition of Arab societies. “Conspiracism provides a key to understanding the political culture of the Middle East. It spawns its own discourse, complete in itself and is virtually immune to rational argument,” claimed historian Daniel Pipes.18 A growing number of Arab intellectuals agree with this assertion, criticising what they term conspiratorial thinking (fikr ta’amuri) of “the Arab mind,” as an acute and dangerous phenomenon.19 Arab society was broken in back and spirit, hence the proliferation of conspiracy theories, explained a Saudi columnist in an interview. “It is comforting to say, ‘It is not our fault.’”20 Bernard Lewis made a similar observation. In his discussion of Arab antisemitism, he conceded that consecutive Israeli victories over the Arabs since 1948 presented a “terrible problem of explanation,” especially in light of traditional perceptions and the Arab media description of the Jews as a cowardly people. They required accounts “beyond the normal processes of rational thought,” found in European antisemitic literature, and specifically in the notion of the “malevolent but timorous Jew of the local tradition plots and schemes.” The struggle against such an adversary, he concluded,

166  Esther Webman gave “cosmic stature to those who engage in it, and lends some dignity even to those who suffer defeat, which, they firmly believe, can only be temporary.”21 Adopted out of a political need, the Protocols assumed a broader religious and social meaning.22 Their appeal became even greater, as R ­ obert Wistrich observed, since “for many Muslims and Arabs the notion of Jews as embodying an omnipotent, occult force has become more palpable and concretised through viewing the Protocols as a ‘Zionist manifesto for world conquest.’”23 Adopted by nationalists and leftists as well as Islamists, the Protocols became a “support-text,” assuming a functional role in “the new Muslim constructions of Jewish nature, intentions, and conduct.”24 Informed by essentialist assumptions, they have become a-historical, defying time. Their adoption demonstrates that there were no barriers in the process of their reception, despite the political, cultural, and religious differences between the environment in which the Protocols emerged and the recipient society. Moreover, traditional historical perceptions of Muslim-Jewish relations were reconstructed and re-moulded to conform with the spirit of the newly acquired text, presenting the Jewish people as a threat not only to Arabs and Muslims but to all humanity. By the 1967 Six-Day War, at least nine Arabic translations had been published, and between 1965 and 1967, fifty political books based on the Protocols were issued in Egypt alone.25 They were adopted by revolutionary and reactionary regimes alike and incorporated into the texts of nationalist Arab writers26 as well as into those of leftists27 and Islamists,28 in their discussions on Zionism, Judaism, and the Arab−Israeli conflict. Arab and Muslim reliance on the Protocols intensified after 1967, and a specific connection was made between them and the Arab defeat, leading to a spate of antisemitic expressions, conspicuously in religious circles.29 The notion of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy was echoed time and again in the interpretation of regional events and global developments. Hamas, the Islamist Palestinian movement which emerged out of the Muslim Brothers in the Gaza Strip at the end of 1988, cited the Protocols in its covenant, and the Lebanese Shi‘ite Islamist organisation Hizballah alluded to them repeatedly.30 The regional and international developments at the turn of the ­millennium—the rapid expansion of globalisation; the Second Intifada; the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath: the war against terrorism in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq—converged to enhance Arab public interest in the Protocols and in conspiracy theories in general.31 The most significant trend discerned during this period was the popularisation of the Protocols through artistic means, bringing their main themes closer to home and disseminating their message among larger audiences. Young Arab artists “volunteered their services to sharpen and stylise” the negative message concerning Israelis and Jews.32

Arab Antisemitic Discourse  167

Figure 11.1  The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published in Egypt in 1994.

The polemics between Islam and Jews and Judaism, used as a means to de-legitimise Israel’s claims over Palestine, and to prove the deviant character of Zionism and the Jews, remain the most significant indigenous argumentation, constantly reinforced by new studies and religious verdicts. The Islamist discourse consists of relentless debates over the Qur’anic verses, dealing with the Jews and their inevitable demise. It is a war between good

168  Esther Webman

Figure 11.2 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Talmud Teachings. Published in Egypt with an introduction of Shawqi ‘Abd al-Nasser, the brother of president Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser. No date or place of publication indicated. Probably in the 1960s.

personified by the Muslims who represent the party of God (Hizballah) against “evil incarnated [. . .] the party of Satan” (hizb al-shaytan) represented by the Jews. According to this interpretation of Islam, the clash is irreconcilable and the destruction of Israel is not only predetermined by the Qur’an (the word of God) but is also imperative in order to save humanity and civilisation. Hamas endowed eschatological meaning to the elimination

Arab Antisemitic Discourse  169 of the Jews, which, it claims, was a prerequisite for fulfilling God’s promise to establish His rule on earth.33 Various Islamist writers state that “people will know that the extermination of Jews is good for the inhabitants of the world” and that “humanity will be relieved of their presence, since subsequently, not one Jew will remain alive.”34 The stigmatisation of the Jews as “essentially evil” and the division of the world between good and evil, which characterise the Islamist discourse, are typical to the Manichean worldview, as Smith shows.35 “For Manicheans, the demonic enemy personifies whatever is most reviled [. . .] That can be a ‘soft’ government, a protest movement, unruly legislature, the press, the intelligentsia, ‘permissiveness.’” The Satanic Jew of antisemitic fantasy is often a kind of composite stereotype of all these forces.36 In Arab societies as well, Jews, whether real Jews are present or not, personify what is most reviled and have been constructed to “serve as an explanatory master key,”37 for all disasters, and the traits associated with them “make a paradoxical mixture: they are seen as both domineering and wretched, both haughty and low.”38

The Emergence of Contemporary Arab Antisemitism In his book The Jews of Islam, Bernard Lewis quotes a British document from November 1806, according to which James Green, His Majesty’s consul general “in all the dominions of the Emperor of Morocco,” appealed to the Moroccan Sultan on behalf of the Jews of Gibraltar, asking him to annul an order “prohibiting all persons professing the Hebrew religion in general from appearing in any of his dominions wearing the European dress.”39 The case is particularly significant as it symbolises the shift in the balance of power between the western-Christian world and the eastern-Muslim world and the beginning of a new tripartite relationship of the West, Islam, and the Jews. The Jews sought the protection and intervention of the rising Christian power with the Muslim ruler, while still being under Muslim rule. Opting for the patronage of western Christian colonial powers and increasing identification with Western culture nurtured over the years suspicion toward the Jews in Arab lands and eventually gave rise to antisemitism. The development of European-style antisemitism in Arab countries is related to three major factors: 1) the penetration of European ideologies and concepts into Arab lands, among them antisemitism; 2) the collapse of traditional political systems and the loyalties and practices associated with them, giving way to the emergence of nationalist government structures less tolerant in their treatment of religious, ethnic and ideological minorities; and 3) the evolution of the conflict over domination of Palestine, beginning with the Jewish settlements in the late nineteenth century, followed by the establishment of the State of Israel and the ensuing Arab-Israeli conflict.40 A quantitative and qualitative rise in anti-Jewish utterances in Arab public discourse took place in the immediate post-Second-World-War era in view

170  Esther Webman of the exacerbating Jewish-Arab struggle over the future of Palestine and the pressing problem of Jewish Holocaust survivors, who sought refuge in Palestine. The intensifying conflict elicited a fierce public debate on Zionism, its nature, ideology, history, and political aspirations, which did not cease since then. Tackling Zionism was perceived as an existential national challenge. Zionism replaced fascist imperialism and racist, anti-human Nazism in the Arab anti-colonialist and national discourse leading to increasing preoccupation with the Jews and exposing a whole range of images and stereotypes of the Jews.41 Thus, in contrast to the general recoil from antisemitism in the West after the Holocaust, the Arab world underwent a change in the opposite direction, allowing antisemitism to flourish openly. The quantity and virulence of antisemitic literature published in the Middle East increased, and during the 1950s and 1960s was printed partially under governmental auspices. The shift to medieval antisemitic motifs to depict Zionism was swift. Zionism was defined as “a danger to humanity,” a ruthless gang of “a stubborn people,” “worshippers of money” who employed bacterial warfare and “contaminated Palestinian wells” in the war in Palestine in 1948.42 The birth of Israel in 1948 and the Arab defeat in the war they launched against it were perceived by many Muslims as contradicting the right course of history and divine order since God had destined the Jews to be inferior and subordinated to Muslims. Moreover, Zionism’s success became the most glaring symbol and proof of the deeper crisis of the Muslim world in the modern age. And because Islam’s modern crisis was unprecedented, so did Islam’s new Jewish problem appear to be of even greater dimensions than was Muhammad’s in Medina.43 The polemics against the Jews and the Children of Israel in the Qur’an, commented London-based Palestinian scholar Suha Taji-Farouki, “serves as a basis for the negative reconstruction of the Jewish character” and provides “an explanation for the Zionist successes, the offence in Palestine, and the political and economic Jewish domination in other parts of the world.”44 The swift Israeli victory over the Arab armies in June 1967 dealt an additional blow to Arab self-esteem and generated socio-political unrest that continued to be channelled against Israel, Zionism, and the Jews. Israel’s image turned over night from a weak country whose existence was threatened into “an all-powerful state.”45 This shift required satisfactory explanation leading to the further entrenchment of conspiracy theories and demonisation of Zionism and the Jews. Former Arab Israeli Knesset member ‘Azmi Bishara admitted this development, saying that antisemitism in the sense of hostility towards the Jews only began to spread significantly in the Arab world in the form of cultural and intellectual output after 1967. “Clearly,” he argued, “the rise of this phenomenon coincided with the rise of a metaphysical attitude that sought to explain the overwhelming Arab defeat of that year in terms of confrontation with an absolute evil bent on a global conspiracy of the nature of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”46

Arab Antisemitic Discourse  171 State sponsored antisemitism declined somewhat since the 1970s as Arab states began to change their policy toward Israel. Still, most Arab governments tolerated manifestations of antisemitism, which served as a safetyvalve, shifting the blame from the socio-economic failures of the regimes to an external enemy. Since the mid-1970s, Islamist antisemitism has come to the fore following the rise of Islamist movements as a major socio-political player in several Arab countries. Islamist movements became the main carriers of antisemitism. The 1979 Iranian Revolution gave a further boost to the Islamists’ strength, highlighting antisemitism as a basic tenet of Islamist worldview. Unlike mainstream nationalists and leftists, Islamist movements perceived the Arab-Israeli conflict as an essentially religious one between Muslims and Jews and between Islam and Judaism, going as far as advocating genocide against the Jews. The war against the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) based in Lebanon in 1982 was another landmark in the development of Arab antisemitism, reinforcing the powerful demonic image of Israel and the Jews. The intensified globalisation process in the 1990s; the Second Intifada in the Palestinian Authority against the Israeli occupation; the September 11 attacks on the US in 2001 and the subsequent war on terrorism as well as the launching of war in Iraq in 2003; the Second Lebanon War in July–August 2006, and the Israeli-Palestinian confrontations in Gaza in December 2008–January 2009, November 2012, and July–August 2014 exacerbated the demonic traits of the Jews. The blood libel, conspiracy theories, and the equation of Zionism with Nazism were used by the media— newspaper articles, cartoons, television series, and movies—to popularise the image of the Jew as bloodthirsty and a conspirator striving to control the world. The outbreak of violence between Israel and the Palestinians in September 2000 following the failure of peace negotiations in July also brought an upsurge in the antisemitic discourse and incidents in Europe, and Middle Eastern Muslim youths were behind most of these incidents. Radical Islamist incitement emanating from Arab countries by satellite TV, audio cassettes, CDs, and the internet in addition to European-based radical preachers calling for violence against the Jews inflamed anger over the Middle Eastern situation among Muslims. Frustration over their lack of integration in European societies and envy at the more successful Jews probably added to their animosity. Such feelings received additional legitimacy by the growing antiIsraeli discourse, particularly among the left, which increasingly challenged Israel’s legitimacy to exist as a state of the Jewish people.47 At the beginning of the upheavals in the Middle East in 2011, there were few rays of hope that the obsessive preoccupation with Israel and the ArabIsraeli conflict would diminish and give way to the many internal substantial problems of Arab societies. Although it seemed that the volume of antisemitic articles in the Arab press somewhat diminished, and the unrelenting struggle between the nationalist and the Islamist forces diverted attention

172  Esther Webman from the Palestinian issue, the Zionist, the Jew, and the Holocaust seem to be so entrenched in Arab public discourse that they were repeatedly invoked, as has been shown above.48

Contesting the Roots of Arab Antisemitism Historian Norman Stillman states that antisemitism in the Arab world does not go back in its present form to the medieval period. “It is a modern European import, spread at first among Syrian and Egyptian Christians by their European (mainly French) mentors in the nineteenth century. The local Christians in turn disseminated antisemitism more widely through books and the Arab press. Antisemitism only began to make headway in Muslim circles when nationalists adopted it in the 1920s and 1930s as a polemical weapon against Zionism and against the conspicuous overachievement of the Jews under colonialism. It gained still greater currency as Arabs turned in increasing numbers to German National Socialism and Italian fascism as powerful alternative models to the democratic liberalism of British and French colonial powers.”49 Indeed, the common stance among scholars of Arab antisemitism was that it was a new phenomenon, which developed out of the changing circumstances in the Middle East in the nineteenth century and particularly in the wake of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Arab antisemitism was “not a cause of the conflict but a product of it. The Arabs did not oppose Jewish settlement for antisemitic motives; their opposition aroused antisemitic emotions among them.” However, once the conflict existed and antisemitism had been created, it became one of the factors that gave the conflict its character, contended Harkabi.50 Antisemitism developed as a theme of an ethos of conflict, constructed to support its continuation with language, stereotypes, images, myths, and collective memory.51 With its inculcation, anti-Jewish beliefs became an organic part of Arab/Muslim worldviews. The radicalisation of rhetoric and incitement against Israel and the Jews in the Arab media, especially in the wake of the Second Intifada and September 11, undermined this approach, and strengthened the contentions that Arab antisemitism stemmed from a long religious and cultural tradition and that Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism bore inherent fascist traits. Moreover, the conflict is the result of this antisemitism.52 “We can no longer view Muslim Jew hatred as a ‘borrowed phenomenon,’ seen exclusively, or even primarily, through the prism of Judeophobic Christian traditions, the tragic legacy of Nazism and the Holocaust, or ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ from Czarist Russia,” contended Andrew Bostom, an American author and associate professor of medicine at Brown University. “The uncomfortable examination of Islamic doctrines and history is required in order to understand the enduring phenomenon of Muslim Jew hatred, which dates back to the origins of Islam.”53 Similarly, Efraim Karsh, head of Mediterranean Studies at King’s College, argued that Arab and

Arab Antisemitic Discourse  173 Muslim anti-Zionism seem to suggest that rather than being a response to Zionist activity, it is a manifestation of longstanding prejudice that has been brought out into the open by the vicissitudes of the Arab-Israeli conflict. “Where do such vicious stereotypes come from?” he asks, asserting that “the ease and rapidity with which the precepts of European antisemitism were assimilated by the Muslim-Arab world testify to the pre-existence of a deep anti-Jewish bigotry. This bigotry dates to Islam’s earliest days, and indeed to the Prophet Muhammad himself.”54 Summarising the conflicting views, social psychologist Neil Kressel accurately explained that one side in this debate, “which might be labelled the received wisdom, sees Jew-hatred as essentially alien to Islamic history and culture. Here, experts may acknowledge a variety of negative references to Jews in the Islamic religious literature and occasional antisemitic incidents through the years, but they portray Islamic political and social traditions as fundamentally tolerant, at least when judged by the standards of their day [. . .] They see antisemitism mainly as a European import, brought to the Muslim world by manipulative European antisemites and fuelled by the Arab-Israeli conflict.”55 On the other side of the debate, “the challengers of the received wisdom acknowledge that Jews at times fared tolerably well under Muslim rule in some places; however [. . .] these scholars assign more weight to hostile statements and incidents concerning Jews in the Quran, hadiths, and other religious documents of Islam. Moreover, [ . . . they] argue that a considerable body of anti-Jewish material, significant anti-Jewish discrimination, and substantial violence preceded the modern Israeli state and Zionism for centuries and sprouted from seeds planted at the very inception of Islam.”56 There is no definite conclusion to this controversy. David Nirenberg’s thesis in his book, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition,57 shows that throughout the vast sweep and range of Islamic history, there are abundant quotes “saturated with certainty about the Jews’ ontological status as figures of hypocrisy” and that Islam “contains within itself the potential to understand the adversity it encounters in terms of ‘Judaism,’” like Christianity before it. But until modernity this adversity under Islam was not translated into waves of massacres or mass expulsions of Jews.58 This does not mean that their status was better under Islam than under Christianity, he went on to say, but “that in Islam the Jews’ peculiar positions in scriptural ontology and their peculiar position in Muslim societies did not often combine in such a way as to generate politically useful general theories capable of explaining the world’s struggles in ‘Jewish’ terms.”59 Nirenberg does not dwell on the question why “a systemised model of thought capable of explaining all the world history in terms of the ontological trickery wrought by figures of Judaism” was not generated until modernity. But it seems that unlike the situation in medieval Christian Europe, as long as the Jews were inferior and did not pose a threat, there was no need to activate the idea of the Jews and Judaism. In view of the political

174  Esther Webman and social instability in modern times, and the reversal of roles between Muslims and Jews, Muslims thinkers, especially Islamists such as Sayyid Qutb, resorted to “the ontological trickery wrought by figures of Judaism” to explain the world around them. The “timelessness” of enmity of the Jews became dominant in Islamist thought, suggesting no room for reconciliation and justification of genocidal measures against them to free humanity from their evil.

Conclusion Arab and Muslim writers were not involved in the Western and Jewish debate over antisemitism, but they occasionally discussed the issue of antisemitism in the Arab world, and few even referred to its roots. Conceding that discussing antisemitism “requires questioning to what extent it is traceable to the Quran and the life of Muhammad, and to what extent it is imported from the West and symptomatic of the deep-seated civilisational crisis within the Muslim world,” Salim Mansur, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario, for example, asserts that the contemporary resurgence of post-Shoah antisemitism is an indisputable reality, “driven by anti-Jew and anti-Israeli hatred, packaged as religiously sanctioned by clerics.”60 Professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University Sayyid Husayn Nasr, contended that the usage of certain verses of the Qur’an for attacking present day Jews is “a modern development, less theological than emotional, and leaves as its casualty a long tradition of amity between Islam and Judaism.”61 Arab intellectuals were committed to supply the ideational infrastructure for backing up the total Arab rejection of the Jewish State and to socially construct the Jews as enemies. Hence, their goal was to challenge the precept of a Jewish nation, the Jewish historical right in Palestine, and the ancient roots of contemporary Jews. In Egypt, where the antisemitic discourse appeared particularly bolstered, it apparently served as an outlet for many intellectuals to express their frustration over Egypt’s failure in achieving national and regional grandeur, which was manifested in its compromise with its perceived erstwhile enemy, Israel. A seemingly tacit deal emerged between the government and the intellectuals, which allowed the latter to turn their anger and pens against Israel, the Jews, and the US in return for avoiding criticism of the government’s domestic failures.62 Samuel Tadros, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom and Amr Bargisi, senior partner with the Egyptian Union of Liberal Youth, consider antisemitism in Egypt, and most probably in all the Middle East, as “a well-established social belief,” even among “selfproclaimed liberals.” It is not simply a form of bigotry, they asserted, but “the glue binding the otherwise incoherent ideological blend, the common denominator among disparate parties.”63 London-based Lebanese academic Gilbert Achcar, on the other hand, admits the existence of the ugly

Arab Antisemitic Discourse  175 expressions of Arab antisemitism, but dismisses it as “fantasy-laden expressions [. . .] of an intense national frustration and oppression.”64 While this essay focuses on the production of the Arab antisemitic discourse, it is imperative to briefly refer to the question of the reception of antisemitic ideas, despite the difficulty to assess reception in non-democratic societies, where tools of evaluating public opinion are not developed. Audiences or consumers of ideas do not necessarily consume everything presented to them. They sometimes reject or reinterpret the ideas conveyed to them in terms that suit their norms and values and complement their modes of feelings and expressions. Such reconstruction may reverberate back to the producers of texts, thereby creating a dialogue or a “feedback loop” between the producers and consumers of ideas, leading writers to reflect prevalent opinions and adapt their production to meet the demand of their consumers.65 Polls and surveys carried out in some Arab and Muslim countries after 2001 indicate that certain antisemitic perceptions have struck roots in these societies. The recurrence of antisemitic themes and vocabulary in books, newspaper articles, and caricatures, in TV programmes and broadcasted sermons demonstrate their wide reception. Similar themes dominate the new media discourse, and the internet and social networks serve as a major platform without frontiers for them. Moreover, Islamist motifs have permeated the nationalist discourse and vice versa, blurring the lines between political and ideological streams. According to a Pew Poll released in July 2011, Muslims throughout the Arab world hold remarkably and consistently negative views on Jews. The favourability ratings of Jews in the Arab world (Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Authority) as well as Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan, range between one and four percent. Only in Indonesia the percentage rose to nine. Between 77 to 97 per cent also believe that Judaism is a violent religion. “The exaggerated attention given to Israel, particularly in the form of conspiracy theories, remains the clearest evidence of antisemitism,” the report concluded. “One cannot understand mass politics in the Arab world without admitting the role of antisemitism.” Harvard Crimson writer Eric T. Justin who spent the summer of 2011 in Egypt and Jordan wrote that he heard and overheard “countless antisemitic remarks” and that “arguments about politics almost inevitably turned to ‘those Jews,’ and conspiracy theories.”66 The late historian of antisemitism Robert S. Wistrich even compared Jew-hatred in the first decade of the twenty-first century to the situation in Germany at the time of the Kristallnacht (9 November 1938). Antisemitism in the Middle East, he claimed, “burns more fiercely,” and particularly among Islamists, constituting “a genocidal discourse” that could lead to another Kristallnacht.67 The chain of events in the Arab world since 2011, and up to the writing of this essay, does not promise a real change in the perception of Israel, Zionism, and the Jews. Israel and the conflict are not the focus of the Arab

176  Esther Webman revolutions but they still dominate the Arab political discourse as part and parcel of the ideological divisions and the public debate which has been going on in Arab societies for many years over the nature of Islam-state relations, the interaction with other cultures, and the course of change, liberalisation, and democratisation. The social construction of the Jews as enemies has been carried out in an era of emerging nationalism and nation-states, an era of change and search for identity, and, with the Arab-Israeli conflict, it exacerbated the ethno-religious enmity between Muslims and Jews. The antisemitic manifestations and attacks on Jews in Europe since the turn of the twenty-first century proved that this enmity affected Arab and Muslim immigrants to Europe and the US, thus creating a new situation for the Jewish communities there. In seeking to assert themselves socially, economically, and politically, and to crystallise their identity, some of these immigrants and especially the second and third generations, adopt Islamism and racism “as a way to integrate in a world which is not theirs,” asserted journalist Firas Zibib in al-Hayat.68 Moreover, as Wistrich contends, “the passions set in motion by uncritical identification with the Palestinians and the spread of global jihad have produced a growing cross-fertilisation of ideas, practices, and strategic alliances between leftists and Islamists based on anti-Western and anti-Zionist assumptions.”69 The Arab antisemitic discourse developed a uniqueness and authenticity that differentiate it from western antisemitism. While borrowing themes from it, the sources and motivation of Arab-Muslim antisemitism were indigenous, stemming from religious and nationalist sentiments, thereby producing a unique symbiosis of Islamic anti-Jewish motifs and classical Western antisemitic tropes, deriving from Christianity and from the repository of racist and political antisemitism.

Notes 1. David Norman Smith, “The Social Construction of Enemies: Jews and the Representation of Evil,” Sociological Theory 14, no. 3 (1996): 203–40 (here 215). Quoting Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of Jewish WorldConspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Chico: Scholars Press, 1981), 8, 25. 2. For the rise of antisemitism in the Arab world, see Sylvia G. Haim, “Arab AntiSemitic Literature,” Jewish Social Studies 17, no. 4 (1955): 307–12; Yehoshafat Harkabi, Arab Attitudes Towards Israel (Jerusalem: John Wiley, 1974); Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites (London: W. W. Norton, 1997); Robert Wistrich, Muslim Anti-Semitism: A Clear and Present Danger (New York: American Jewish Committee, 2002). 3. The most blatant manifestation of this phenomenon was the 1840 Damascus blood libel raised by monks of the Capuchin order, see Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: “Ritual Murder,” Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 4. For analyses of Islamic attitudes towards the Jews, see Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Bat Ye’or, The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University

Arab Antisemitic Discourse  177 Press, 1996); Andrew G. Bostom, ed., The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History (New York: Prometheus Books, 2008). 5. Al-Hayat al-Jadida, 13 and 15 May and 3 June 2011. 6. For a detailed account of antisemitic manifestations, see Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry, General Analyses on Antisemitism Worldwide, 2009–2016, available online at http://kantorcenter.tau.ac.il/­ general-analyses-antisemitism-worldwide (accessed 23 November 2017). 7. Egyptian journalist Muhammad ‘Abbas in an interview aired on al-Hikma TV on 4 September 2011, Memri, “Special Dispatch, No. 4138,” 15 September 2011, available online at www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/5649.htm (accessed 23 November 2017). 8. Memri, “Special Dispatch, No. 4018,” 22 July 2011, available online at www. memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/5494.htm (accessed 23 November 2017); “Special Dispatch, No. 4321,” 29 November 2011, available online at www. memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/5862.htm (accessed 23 November 2017). A similar opinion was voiced by Egyptian Faraʽin TV owner and presidential candidate, Tawfiq Ukasha, on 17 July 2011, who attributed to the Jews the Muslim-Coptic conflict in Egypt. Memri, “Special Dispatch, No. 4017,” 22 July 2011, available online at www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/5496.htm (accessed 23 November 2017). 9. Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry, General Analyses on Antisemitism Worldwide, 2012, available online at http://kantorcenter.tau. ac.il/sites/default/files/doch-all-final-2012.pdf (accessed 23 November 2017). 10. Al-Jazeera, 4 July 2013, available online at http://primage.tau.ac.il/asm/ 000250584.pdf (accessed 23 November 2017); Ynet News, 11 July 2013, available online at http://primage.tau.ac.il/asm/000250585.pdf (accessed 23 November 2017); Memri, “Actors of Arab TV Series Khaybar Make Antisemitic Remarks,” clip 3902, 14 March–13 May 2013, available online at www. memritv.org/clip/en/3902.htm (accessed 23 November 2017). 11. Memri, “Special Dispatch, No. 5538,” 28 November 2012, available online at www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/7599.htm (accessed 23 November 2017). 12. For a discussion of this phenomenon, see Esther Webman, “The ‘Jew’ as a Metaphor for Evil in Arab Public Discourse,” The Journal of the Middle East and Africa 6, nos. 3–4 (2015): 275–92. 13. Shulamit Volkov, “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code: Reflections on the History and Historiography of Antisemitism in Imperial Germany,” Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute 23 (1978): 25–46 (here 35). 14. Volkov, “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code,” 30, quoting Norman Cohen, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967), 23–24, 164–79. 15. Ronald L. Nettler, Past Trials and Present Tribulations: A Muslim Funda mentalist’s View of the Jews (Jerusalem: Pergamon Press, 1987), 80; Sayyid Qutb, Our Struggle with the Jews [in Arabic] (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 2001), 29; “Hamas Charter” (1988), available online at www.thejerusalemfund.org/ carryover/documents/charter.html?chocaid=397 (accessed 5 May 2015). 16. Rachid Kaci, “Antisemitism is the Legitimate Child of Islamism: The Real Cancer of Islam,” in Antisemitism: The Generic Hatred, ed. Michael Fineberg, Shimon Samuels, and Mark Weitzman (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2007), 212–17 (here 217). 17. Memri, “Clip No. 1745,” 10 April 2008, available online at www.memritv. org/clip_transcript/en/1745.htm (accessed 23 November 2017); “Special Dispatch No. 1905,” 22 April 2008, available online at www.memri.org/report/ en/0/0/0/0/0/0/2737.htm (accessed 23 November 2017); “Special Dispatch

178  Esther Webman No. 1944,” 30 May 2008, available online at www.memri.org/report/ en/0/0/0/0/0/51/2779.htm (accessed 23 November 2017). 18. Daniel Pipes, The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 1−2. 19. See, for example, ‘Abd al-Wahhab al-Masiri, The Hidden Hand: A Study of the Destructive Furtive Jewish Movements [in Arabic] (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 1998), 11. Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies embarked in 2006 on a research project which sought to establish the dimensions and characteristics of conspiratorial thinking in the Arab region, and in summer 2008, the online journal Arab Insight dedicated most of its issue to a discussion of Arab conspiracy theories. Arab Insight 2, no. 2 (2008): www.arabinsight.org, no longer exists. 20. Scott MacLeod, Time, 17 June 2002. 21. Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites, 191. See also Suha Taji-Farouki, “Thinking on the Jews,” in Islamic Thought in the Twentieth Century, ed. Suha Taji-Farouki and Basheer M. Nafi (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), 318–67 (here 337). 22. On the role of the Protocols and conspiracy theories in the reaction to modernising reforms in Egypt, see Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (New York: Penguin, 2004), 116−22; Goetz Nordbruch, “The Conspiracy against Community: Tracing the Popularity of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Contemporary Egypt,” Jewish Culture and History 9, no. 1 (2007): 71–90. 23. Wistrich, Muslim Anti-Semitism, 3. 24. Taji-Farouki, “Thinking on the Jews,” 336. 25. Husayn ‘Abd al-Wahid, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: The Conspiracy [in Arabic; serial no. 455] (Cairo: [s.n.], July 2002), 12; Ahmad ‘Abd al-Ghafur ‘Attar, The Zionist Conspiracy against the World [in Arabic] (Mecca: [s.n.], 1976), 150−54. 26. See, for instance ‘Abd al-Mun‘im Shamis, The International Zionist [in Arabic] (Cairo: [s.n.], 1958), 24−55; Muhammad ‘Ali al-Zu‘bi, Israel Britain’s Eldest Daughter [in Arabic] (Cairo: al-Maktaba al-Sharqiya, 1963?), 116−26. 27. See, for example Fathi al-Ramli, Zionism the Highest Phase of Capitalism [in Arabic] (Cairo: Wikalat al-Sahafa al-Afriqiyya, 1956), 97. 28. See, for instance ‘Abd al-Rahman Sami ‘Ismat, Zionism and Free Masonry [in Arabic] (Cairo: [s.n.], 1949), 40−48; ‘Afif ‘Abd al-Fattah Tabbara, The Jews in the Qur’an [in Arabic] (Beirut: Dar al-‘ilm lil-malayin, 1966); Qutb, Our Struggle with the Jews, 20−38. 29. See, for example, Sa‘d Jum‘a, The Conspiracy and the Battle of Fate [in Arabic] (Cairo: Dar al-Katib al-ʽArabi, 1968); Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, The Children of Israel in the Qur’an and Sunna [in Arabic] (Cairo: Al-Zahra’ lilIʽlam al-ʽArabi, 1968), 622−33; Sabri Jirjis, The Jewish-Zionist Legacy and the Freudian Thought [in Arabic] (Cairo: ʽAlam al-Kutub, 1970). 30. Muhammad Maqdsi, “Charter of The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) of Palestine,” Journal of Palestine Studies 22, no. 4 (1993): 122–34, available online at www.jstor.org/stable/2538093 (accessed 23 November 2017); Esther Webman, Anti-Semitic Motifs in the Ideology of Hizballah and Hamas (Tel Aviv: The Project for the Study of Antisemitism, 1994), 10, 20. 31. For a discussion of the impact of these events on manifestations of antisemitism in the Arab world, see Esther Webman, “Al-Aqsa Intifada and 11 September: Fertile Ground for Arab Antisemitism,” in Antisemitism Worldwide (ASW) 2001/2, ed. Dina Porat and Roni Stauber (Tel Aviv: The Stephen Roth Institute, 2003), 37−59. 32. New York Daily News, 8 December 2002; Jerusalem Report, 16 December 2002.

Arab Antisemitic Discourse  179 33. Maqdsi, “Charter of The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) of Palestine,” articles 13, 9, and 7. 34. Livnat Holtzman and Eliezer Schlossberg, “The Modern Religious Polemic between Muslims and Jews as Reflected in the Book Haqaiq Qur’aniyya Hawla al-Qadiyya al-Filastiniyya,” Historia 10 (2002 [in Hebrew]): 129–66 (here 156); Mukhlis Barzaq, The Promise from Khaybar to Jerusalem [in Arabic] (San‘a, 2000), available online at www.al-eman.com/islamlib/viewtoc.asp?BID=265 (accessed 23 November 2017). 35. Smith, “The Social Construction of Enemies,” 224. 36. Ibid., 233. 37. Ibid., 234. 38. Efraim Karsh, “The Long Trail of Islamic Anti-Semitism,” in Islamic Attitudes to Israel, ed. Efraim Karsh and P. R. Kumaraswamy (London: Routledge, 2008), 1–12 (here 3). 39. Lewis, The Jews of Islam, 154. 40. Bernard Lewis, “The Arab World Discovers Anti-Semitism,” Commentary (May 1986), 30–34 (here 33). 41. For a detailed analysis of this period, see Meir Litvak and Esther Webman, From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press), 23–58. 42. Muhammad ʽAwadh Muhammad, al-Thaqafa, 8 June 1948, 1–3; Michel Kafuri, Zionism: Its Activity and Social Impact [in Arabic] (Cairo: [s.n.], 1947), 17; ʽAbbas Mahmud al-ʽAqqad, al-Asas, 28 February 1948, Majallat al-Izaʽa, 5 June 1948, in Zionism and the Palestine Problem, [in Arabic] ed. ʽAbbas Mahmud al-ʽAqqad (Sayda: Al-Maktaba al-ʽAsriyya, n.d.), 86–87, 102. 43. Wilfred C. Smith, Islam in Modern History (New York: New American Library, 1959), 46–48; Nettler, Past Trials and Present Tribulations. 44. Suha Taji-Farouki, “A Contemporary Construction of the Jews in the Qur’an: A Review of Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi’s Banu Isra’il fi al-Qur’an wa alSunna and ‘Afif ‘Abd al-Fattah Tabbara’s al-Yahud fi al-Qur’an,” in MuslimJewish Encounters Intellectual Tradition and Modern Politics, ed. Ron Nettler and Suha Taji-Farouki (Oxford: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998), 15–37 (here 15). 45. This shift was also evident in Arab caricatures. Prior to the war, caricatures presented Israel and Israelis as miserable and despicable creatures who were about to be punished by proud, self-confident Arabs. After the 1967 defeat, the Israeli image changed into menacing brutal Nazi-type oppressors. See Esther Webman, “Antisemitic Images in the Rhetoric of the Arab Israeli Conflict,” Kesher 33 (2003) [in Hebrew]: 118–19; Arie Stav, Peace: The Arabian Caricature: A Study of Anti-Semitic Imagery [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Gefen, 2000). 46. ‘Azmi Bishara, “Ways of Denial,” al-Ahram Weekly, 21 December 2006. 47. “Overview: Anti-Semitic Manifestations Worldwide as a Corollary of the alAqsa Intifada,” in Antisemitism Worldwide (ASW) 2000/1, ed. Dina Porat and Roni Stauber (Tel Aviv: Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism, 2002), 61–75. 48. Affected by the emerging Arab-Israeli conflict, the Arab Holocaust discourse developed with the end of the Second World War as part of the ongoing polemic with Israel and Zionism. It encompassed various attitudes, ranging from justification to denial of the Holocaust. These attitudes still prevail, but since the mid-1990s, a new approach emerged, challenging aspects of this traditional approach and calling for the recognition of the Holocaust as a tragic Jewish historical event, which eventually would lead to the recognition of the Palestinian tragedy. See Litvak and Webman, From Empathy to Denial.

180  Esther Webman 49. Norman Stillman, “Myth, Countermyth, and Distortion,” Tikkun 6, no. 3 (1991): 60–64 (here 64). 50. Harkabi, Arab Attitudes Towards Israel, 225–26. 51. Daniel Bar-Tal, “Societal Beliefs in Times of Intractable Conflict: The Israeli Case,” International Journal of Conflict Management 9 (1998): 22–50; Daniel Bar-Tal, “From Intractable Conflict through Conflict Resolution to Reconciliation: Psychological Analysis,” Political Psychology 21, no. 2 (2000): 351–65. 52. See, for example, Wistrich, Muslim Antisemitism; Bostom, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism; Bat Ye’or, The Dhimmi. 53. Bostom, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, 33. 54. Karsh, “The Long Trail of Islamic Antisemitism,” 2. 55. Neil J. Kressel, “The Sons of Pigs and Apes”: Muslim Antisemitism and the Conspiracy of Silence (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2012), 122. 56. Ibid., 123. In addition to the debate on the roots of Arab antisemitism and its relation to the Arab-Israeli conflict, an ongoing debate evolves around the centrality of antisemitism in Islamist ideology and the impact of Nazism on its development. See, for example, Matthias Küntzel, Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 (New York: Telos Press, 2007); Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 57. David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W. W. ­Norton, 2013). 58. Ibid., 177–78. 59. Ibid., 182. 60. Salim Mansur, “Arab and Muslim Antisemitism: A Muslim Perspective,” Gatestone, 19 June 2014, available online at www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4364/arabmuslim-antisemitism (accessed 23 November 2017). 61. New York Times, 27 April 2002. 62. Fouad Ajami, “The Orphaned Peace,” in Fouad Ajami, Dream Palaces of the Arabs: A Generation’s Odyssey (New York: Pantheon, 1998), 253–312. 63. Amr Bargisi and Samuel Tadros, “After the Fall,” Tablet, 9 December 2011, available online at www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/85746/afterthe-fall/ (accessed 23 November 2017). 64. Gilbert Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives (London: Saqi Books, 2010), 256. 65. Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, Redefining the Egyptian Nation, 1930– 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), XII–XIII. 66. Eric T. Justin, “Protocols of the Elders of Crazy: On Anti-Semitism in the Arab World,” 3 October 2011, available online at www.thecrimson.com/­ article/2011/10/3/arab-world-antisemitism-jews/ (accessed 23 November 2017). See also Richard Cohen, “Israel’s Hostile Neighborhood,” Washington Post, 12 September 2011, available online at www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ israels-hostile-neighborhood/2011/09/12/gIQAHTtRNK_story.html (accessed 23 November 2017). 67. Robert S. Wistrich, “Arab Antisemitism Could Lead to a New Kristallnacht,” Courier Journal, 5 November 2011, available online at http://jewishrefugees. blogspot.co.il/2011/11/arab-antisemitism-could-lead-to-new.html (accessed 23 November 2017). 68. Al-Hayat, 6 April 2004. 69. Robert S. Wistrich, “Anti-Zionist Connections: Communism, Radical Islam, and the Left,” in Resurgent Antisemitism: Global Perspectives, ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2013), 402–24 (here 412).

Part V

Bodies, Gender, and Antisemitism

12 What’s in a Nose? The Origins, Development, and Influence of Medieval Anti-Jewish Caricature Sara Lipton In 1906, the Cambridge philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell wrote to a lady friend about a dinner party of philosophers and mathematicians recently convened in Paris in his honour. He commented not on the content of the conversation, but on the composition of the crowd: “I was interested to observe, on a review of noses, that they were mostly Jews.”1 This was not the only occasion on which Russell associated Jewishness with a certain kind of nose. In another letter, written in 1935, describing his first meeting with the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr, he seems to have been less struck by Bohr’s intellect than by his profile: “Nota Bene,” he wrote to his correspondent, “Both the Bohrs have noses that beat creation for vastness, though they are not Jews.”2 It is not hard to determine the source of Russell’s notions regarding Jews’ noses. They were not based, as most of Russell’s ideas tended to be, on logical reasoning, mathematical calculation, or wide reading in the scientific literature. Rather, they were shaped by a long history of antisemitic visual caricature, which consistently portrayed Jews with a stereotypical “Jewish nose”—large, bony, and with a prominent hook, bend, or bump—whether the figures in question actually had such noses or not (see Figure 12.1.) Disappointing as it is to find one of the most brilliant and ethical minds of the twentieth century parroting one of the crasser prejudices of his age, I do not cite these comments merely in order to air indignation or express regret. Rather, Russell’s observations provide a jumping off point for exploring where this particular idea—that there is such a thing as a “Jewish nose,” which is at once, and paradoxically, distinctive enough to identify Jews but also not infrequently appearing on non-Jews—came from. My answer is medieval art. In saying this, I do not mean to deny that some Jews do indeed have “Jewish noses,” or to assert a direct causal connection between medieval iconography and modern antisemitism. What I do claim is fourfold: 1) people do not see certain things until they are trained to look for them; 2) people have to be taught to assign meaning to the things they do come to see; 3) it was medieval Christian art that introduced the idea that moral and spiritual significance resided in Jews’ features; and 4) once people are trained to see meaning in certain shapes and forms, they may flip the process and,

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Figure 12.1 A grimacing Shylock with a large, hooked nose. William Luson Thomas, printmaker. England, mid- to late-nineteenth century. (Photo: Folger Shakespeare Library. ART File S528m3 no. 13 (size M) (CC BY-SA 4.0))

spurred by pre-existing assumptions, begin to see those shapes and forms where they do not, in fact, exist. This process does not inevitably generate discrimination or persecution (I would not class Bertrand Russell as an antisemite on the basis of a few thoughtless remarks),3 but history demonstrates that the tendency to classify strangers on the basis of their looks undoubtedly can, and frequently does, lead to discrimination and persecution.

What’s in a Nose?  185

Now You See It, Now You Don’t Let me start with my final point: that, spurred by pre-existing assumptions, people may see (or claim to see) things that are not actually there. A systematic comparison of textual and artistic invocations of noses with photographic evidence suggests that Jewish noses are as often imagined as observed. For example, a cartoon that appeared in Punch on 8 September 1883 portrayed the Jewish book dealer Moses Shapira, who stood accused of fraud, with a grossly large, downward curved nose (see Figure 12.2). A contemporary photograph, however, suggests that Shapira’s nose was neither particularly large nor noticeably curved (see Figure 12.3). Bertrand Russell’s second letter quoted above offers a similar case. In expressing surprise that Niels Bohr and his wife were not Jewish, Russell implied that their noses were not merely “vast,” but somehow distinctly Semitic (to use the terminology of the time). Yet photographs indicate that although Bohr’s nose was not small (few would argue that the famed physicist was a “looker”), there is little about Bohr’s nose to prompt an immediate leap to stereotypical Jews’ noses—it has no defined hook, bend, or bump (see Figure 12.4). The description of Margrethe is even more perplexing; in photographs, her nose appears to be straight, well proportioned, and quite elegant. Why then, did Russell’s mind turn to Jews when mocking the Bohrs’ noses? One is inclined to say not only that vastness is in the eye of the beholder, but also that the beholder’s eye is conditioned by the beholder’s expectations. For while it is true that Bohr was not a Jew, Bohr’s mother, the former Ellen Adler, was: she came from a prominent and politically active Danish Jewish family.4 Russell must have known this—since 1933, Bohr had been involved in the movement to help Jewish intellectuals flee Nazi Germany, and his brother, the well-known mathematician Harald Bohr, had recently taken a very public stand against antisemitic policies imposed by the German mathematical establishment.5 It seems likely, then, that it was this pre-existing knowledge, and the pre-conceptions about Jews’ appearances that went along with it, rather than Bohr’s nose per se, that made Russell think about Jewishness when he looked at and characterised Bohr’s nose. I have unfortunately not been able to locate a photo of the 1906 Paris gathering or ascertain its composition, so it is impossible to hypothesise about the noses of the esteemed guests. But we can probably discount the idea that Russell drew conclusions about the Jewishness of his fellow diners exclusively, or even primarily, from their noses. One cannot divorce perception from context. In this case, the context was a gathering of distinguished academics. Russell was presumably introduced to his fellow guests by name, and names (especially in Continental Europe, where the American/English practice of “Anglicising” Eastern European or Germanic names had not been widely adopted) are at least as liable to be relied upon for clues regarding ethnic origins as faces. It seems likely that Russell knew or assumed that there were many Jews present, either from their names or from the preponderance of Jews in the fields of mathematics and philosophy, and so

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Figure 12.2 “Mr. Sharp-Eye-Ra”: caricature of Moses Shapira. (The Rev. Dr. C. D Ginsburg accuses the antiques dealer Moses Shapira of forgery). Punch, no. 85, 8 September 1883, p. 118. (Photo: Public Domain)

was primed to see large noses in the faces around him, whether or not they were actually present. One could offer many other examples of more-or-less phantom Jewish noses. Michael Camille was probably the most brilliant art historian of his

What’s in a Nose?  187

Figure 12.3  Moses Shapira, antiques dealer, before 1884. (Photo: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MosesShapira.jpg/ Public domain)

generation and a remarkably sensitive reader of imagery. In a seminal article on the representation of books and book owners in a Bible moralisée manuscript in Word and Image, Camille wrote that “[one] could hardly miss the hook-nosed Jews [. . .] who are censured for their rejection of God.”6 Yet while the article examines and reproduces several hostile depictions of Jews from the manuscript in question, none of them feature hooked noses. Indeed, an exhaustive survey of that and a companion Bible moralisée manuscript reveals that although they contain thousands of images in which Jews display a range of unpleasant and distorted facial expressions and features,

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Figure 12.4  Niels Bohr, 1935. Photographer unknown. (Photo: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Niels_Bohr_1935.jpg/ Public domain)

including a variety of unattractive noses—some long and pointy, some squat and bulbous, some quite snout-like—there is not a single stereotypically hooked “Jewish nose” among them.7 In fact, imagination and contradiction are built into almost every utterance written about the “Jewish nose.” Bertrand Russell automatically thought about Jews when he saw (or thought he saw) big noses, even while conceding (or imagining) that non-Jews also had big noses. Even the most notoriously racially-oriented antisemitic group in history—Nazi ­propagandists—­admitted that it was difficult to draw conclusions from facial features. On the one hand, they forcefully asserted a correlation. The German National Catechism claims that Jews have “Physical characteristics that are passed along: the colour of the skin, the shape of the skull, and particularly facial features (shape of the nose, mouth, lips), etc.”8 A Nazi text called The Jewish Question in Education notes: “We use pictures as an aid: pictures of children of German-blooded parents, pictures of Jewish children, both of whose parents are full-blooded Jews, and pictures of children who are a mixture of Jew and German. We make the comparisons [. . .] We see the Jew in his face, his body, his appearance and manner, his thinking, feeling, and behaviour. We do not need to investigate deeply. Everything about him speaks of the Jew, of discord, of degenerate blood.”9 On the other hand, it was also conceded that these guidelines were imperfect:

What’s in a Nose?  189 “Every Jew does not have these characteristics [that is, bent nose, fleshy lips, heavy eyelids, a wary and piercing look]. Some do not have a proper Jewish nose, but real Jewish ears. Some do not have flat feet, but do have real Jewish eyes. Some Jews cannot be recognised at first glance. There are even some Jews with blond hair. If we want to be sure to recognise Jews, we must look carefully. But when one looks carefully, one can always tell it is a Jew.” (This is from “How to Tell a Jew,” in Der Giftpilz [The Poisonous Mushroom], an antisemitic children’s book published by Julius Streicher, the founder and publisher of Der Stürmer).10 And they frequently warned against Jews’ deceptions and disguises, as in the children’s story “The Poisonous Serpent”: “But one day, the Jew lets the mask fall and shows what he really is, a poisonous snake among people [. . .] There are various kinds of poisonous snakes. There are poisonous snakes in the most varied countries in the world. The same is true of the Jews. There are little and big ones, fat and thin ones, black-haired and even blond ones [. . .] But even if they look much different, if they hide in various occupations and speak the various languages of the world, they are and remain Jews.”11 And Goebbels wrote: “Today [the Jews] are simply practising mimicry, the art of appearance and disguise, an art at which the Jews are extraordinarily good, since they have always had to use it to maintain their precarious existence.”12 Where do these contradictory ideas come from? And why does the stereotype have such staying power, if it is so imperfectly supported by actual experience? To address these questions, I shall briefly survey the origins and development of anti-Jewish caricature in the High Middle Ages, a period when realistic representation began to be used to clarify what was regarded as a confused reality. I shall then consider the cultural processes by which such representations turn into a powerful, if less than fully useful or accurate, set of assumptions, which then, in turn, forcefully shape our perception of reality.

The Development of the Jewish Caricature For most of the Middle Ages, the stereotype of the swarthy hook-nosed Jew did not exist.13 Indeed, for many centuries Jews were indistinguishable in appearance from non-Jewish figures in western Christian art. Hebrew, Judaic, and Jewish biblical, legendary, or historical characters could be young or old, fair or dark, bearded or clean-shaven, and there was nothing distinctive about their features or expression. Even villainous Jewish characters, such as the priests who urged Pilate to crucify Christ, were outwardly unremarkable; they had to be labelled for their identities to be known (see Figure 12.5). The first time that Jewish characters were in any way visually marked was shortly after the turn of the first millennium, when an illustrated Gospel book made for Bishop Bernward of Hildesheim endowed Jewish elders and priests with pointed red hats (see Figure 12.6).14 These hats had

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Figure 12.5 Pilate presents Jesus to Jewish priests and Roman soldiers. The faces of the Jews are identical to the faces of the Romans. Egbert Codex, Stadtbibliothek Trier Ms. 24, fol. 82. (© Stadtbibliothek/Stadtarchiv Trier; Photo: Anja Runkel; Ru -Nr. 072 17.)

nothing to do with actual Jewish garb—there is no evidence that Jews at the time wore pointed hats, and religious Jews did not even regularly cover their heads until the sixteenth century. Nor do the hats at this point bear any negative connotation—the artist gave the same headgear to the Three Magi, indicating that these hats served in this manuscript, as in many contemporary works of art, to signal antique authority, eastern knowledge, and priestly status. The Jews’ faces—even those of Judas, who betrays Christ, and of Judas’s paymasters—remain entirely indistinctive. The use of the pointed hat to mark Jews spread throughout Christian art in the late eleventh century. In the pages of richly illuminated Bibles and on the carved facades of the Romanesque churches that began to rise across Western Europe, Hebrew prophets were depicted wearing various types of pointed hats and caps; the venerable authority of these figures helped confirm that the innovative art forms in which they featured had biblical sanction (see Figure 12.7). Soon the hat was closely associated enough with Jewishness to constitute an identifying sign and began to appear on the heads of Jews who did not have priestly or prophetic status. Some of these figures were flawed or infamous characters indeed—such as the miraculously

What’s in a Nose?  191

Figure 12.6 Jewish Priests Pay Judas to Betray Jesus. Precious Gospels of Bernward of Hildesheim. Hildesheim, c. 1015. Dommuseum Hildesheim, DS 18, fol. 118.

long-lived witness to the crucifixion who was forced by the Empress Helena to reveal the location of the True Cross (see Figure 12.8). But until the second half of the twelfth century, these Jews’ faces remained perfectly generic, undistinguished by any noteworthy feature or disfigurement.

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Figure 12.7 The prophet Hosea. South nave window, Augsburg Cathedral, after 1138. (Photo: SLUB Dresden/Deutsche Fotothek)

Images of Jews with truly noteworthy noses first emerged around the year 1170. At that time, a range of artworks from northern France and northwestern Germany began to feature at least one male Jewish figure drawn in stark profile, with somewhat gross features, a hostile, brutish, or ferocious

What’s in a Nose?  193

Figure 12.8 Empress Helena compels Judas to reveal the site of the True Cross. Judas’s reluctance shows in his gesture (he pulls his beard in rage, fear, or consternation), but not in his features. Detail, Stavelot Triptych. ­Belgium, c.1156–1158. The Morgan Library & Museum. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1910; Bequest of J.P. Morgan (1867–1943), AZ001. (Photo: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York)

expression, and a pointed, scraggly beard. These figures are inevitably threatening, mocking, or tormenting Christ or a holy Christian figure. In several of these works, the Jew in question displays a distinctively hooked or beaked nose (see Figures 12.9 and 12.10). So, for example, in an enamel casket from the Westphalia region, the central Jew in the group on the left, whose face is turned ostentatiously away from the crucified Christ, flaunts

194  Sara Lipton

Figure 12.9 The Crucifixion. The sponge-bearer who torments Christ is drawn in stark profile, with somewhat gross features, a brutish expression, curved nose, and a pointed, scraggly beard. Armilla of Andrei Bogolyubsky, Rhine-Meuse region, c. 1170. Source: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg, inv. KG1239. Photo: Sebastian Tolle.

a large, hooked nose, all out of proportion both to his own face and to the noses of the other figures on the casket. There is no reason to think that this Jew’s hooked nose, or the other comparable faces that appear in contemporary images, either reflect or were intended to convey ideas about Jews’ looks or ethnicities along the lines of modern racialist antisemitism. No Christian texts written up to this point attribute any particular physical characteristics to Jews, much less refer to the existence of a peculiar “Jewish nose.” Christian invective of the period (and there was ample and fierce anti-Jewish invective) maligns Jews’ moral, spiritual, and intellectual qualities, historical crimes, and interpretive errors, but not their bodies or faces.15 Twelfth-century Christendom had simply not yet formulated fixed physiognomic Jewish stereotypes or, for that matter, physiognomic stereotypes of any kind.16 Medieval Christians did distinguish among various “peoples”

What’s in a Nose?  195

Figure 12.10 The Nailing of Christ to the Cross. The Jew in the centre of the group on the left is drawn in stark profile, with a beak-like nose and a pointed beard. Portable Altar; The Crucifixion, c. 1171–1180. From North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany. Copper, enamel, gilt. OA8096. Photo: Jean-Gilles Berizzi. Musée du Louvre. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NYC.

and articulate concepts akin to “ethnicity,” but it was not twelfth-century practice to categorise human populations according to physiognomy, much less facial features.17 Instead, these coarse Jewish profiles were prompted by a change in Christian devotion—away from awe at Christ’s triumph, and toward compassionate contemplation of His mortality and suffering.18 While this new conception of a more human, vulnerable Christ spread quickly, some Christians struggled with the new emphases and imagery, discomfited by the idea and, even more, the sight of divine suffering. Proponents of the new devotions criticised such resistance as hard-hearted and “Jewish.” In the second half of the century, texts began to enjoin not only compassion for the suffering Christ, but also condemnation of those who caused or even simply remained indifferent to his pain. A vivid passion treatise known as the Stimulus Amoris of Ekbert von Schönau (c. 1155–80) seeks to prick Christians into love of Christ by dwelling in sometimes horrific detail on the Jews’ cruelty, describing their raging faces and open mouths, and labelling them “bestial,” recalling the beak-like noses and coarse features of our

196  Sara Lipton glaring Jews.19 This, then, is the context that informs our Jews’ ugly noses and coarse features. They are less artificial versions of the signs long utilised by Christian artists: like the devil’s horns or animal-like snout, they marked their owners, so ostentatiously blind to Christ’s beauty and indifferent to Christ’s suffering, as bestial or evil. But they did not—at this point—serve to mark the Jewish people as a whole as inherently or biologically different. For the rest of the twelfth century, and for several decades beyond, the shape of Jews’ noses in art remained too varied to constitute markers of identity. That is, Jews sported many different kinds of “bad” noses, but the same noses appeared on many “bad” non-Jews as well, and there was no single, identifiable “Jewish” nose. In the later thirteenth century, however, the range of features assigned Jews consolidated into one fairly narrowly construed, simultaneously grotesque and naturalistic face, and the hook-nosed, pointy-bearded Jewish caricature was born (see Figure 12.11). This development was prompted by contemporary intellectual and cultural trends. Following the rediscovery of Aristotelian works on natural science, the rise of secular governments, and the burgeoning of art markets, theologians granted new value to sensory perception; scholars invested new energy in studying and classifying flora, fauna, and human populations; and artists began to reproduce the proportions and anatomical details of the human face and body with new accuracy and care.20 Although the caricature was patently not a faithful portrait of any single Jew, much less a reliable guide to what most Jews looked like, we cannot discount the possibility that its features were inspired by observation of some actual Jewish faces. The relatively small Jewish communities of northern Europe were apparently fairly genetically limited: two thirteenth-century German texts, one Christian and one Jewish, both assert that Jews were darker than Christians, suggesting that at least some members of the German Jewish community were physiognomically unlike the surrounding gentile communities.21 It is therefore possible that a somewhat distinctive set of features may have been evident among members of Ashkenazi Jewish families, once there was impetus to seek it.

Conclusion However, to concede that some Jews may have looked somewhat like their caricatures is not to say that real medieval Jewish faces caused or explain the caricature. There is no reason to suppose that thirteenth-century Jewish communities were significantly less genetically diverse than twelfth-century ones. It is possible that if the various decrees of the reformist and disciplinary Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 banning intermarriage, cohabitation, and the employment by Jews of Christian servants were effective, reproduction patterns might have altered somewhat. But it seems unlikely that in such a short span of time, Jews’ looks could have changed enough to inspire

What’s in a Nose?  197

Figure 12.11 The fool from Psalm 52 (Vulgate), rendered as a full-fledged anti-­ Jewish caricature. Psalter and Hours of Bonne of Luxembourg, Duchess of Normandy, before 1349. From Paris, France. Tempera, grisaille, ink, and gold leaf on vellum. The Cloisters Collection, 1969 (69.86). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NYC.

such a significant representational shift. Moreover, caricatured Jews, complete with “Semitic” noses, began to appear in artworks from regions where the Jewish genetic pool was very different from that in Ashkenaz—in the famous illuminated manuscript of the Cantigas de Santa María, for example, which was made in Castile, where Jewish communities were considerably more ancient and numerous, where there was a substantial Muslim

198  Sara Lipton population, many of north African or “Semitic” origin, and where Christian communities were themselves of ethnically and geographically diverse backgrounds. Even very dark and strong-featured Jewish faces would not have stood out in the Iberian context. Rather, Iberian artists appropriated and wielded the Jewish caricature for ideological purposes—to instil an otherwise missing sense of Jewish difference, to inculcate anti-Jewish emotions, and/or to highlight the greater “fairness,” meaning spiritual enlightenment, of Christians. Finally, you did not need Jews at all to have Jewish stereotypes—hook-nosed Jews can be seen in art from Scandinavia, where few, if any, Jews ever resided, and in English illuminations made generations after all Jews were expelled from England. Rather than transparently reflecting reality, the “naturalistic” caricature used new artistic methods to convey the same fundamentally moralistic message as its less realistic predecessors: both the bestial, snout-like noses of earlier artworks and the more realistic “Semitic” nose of the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries helped give visible form to evolving Christian ideas of sin, morality and faith. But if the inspiration for the Jewish caricature was the same, its effects were not. Art does more than merely reflect ideas: in a dialectical process of back-and-forth, of give and take—a kind of continual feedback loop—it trains the gaze and contributes mightily to the shaping of new ideas (see Figure 12.12). King Louis-Philippe of France (d. 1850) knew what he was doing when he banned caricatures of himself and ordered the police to confiscate the journal containing Charles Philipon’s image of the royal head morphing into a pear—in rendering the king’s looks ridiculous, the image undermined his majesty, and made his downfall more imaginable.22 And Philipon himself was being disingenuous when he said that in drawing King Louis-Philippe with a pear-shaped head, he was only showing what Louis-Philippe looked like. Pear-shaped the king’s head may have been, but it took an artist to make people see that shape and register the resemblance, and in so doing, make the king ridiculous in their eyes. Medieval anti-Jewish art had a similar and far more destructive effect. After several decades of seeing images that associated large, long, hooked, and/or crooked noses with sin, medieval Christians were ultimately primed to pay attention to actual noses on real human beings. Most people with such noses would have been unremarkable: familiar neighbours with funny family features, perhaps, or unknown strangers displaying no noticeable vices. Because their appearances, personalities, or identities did not in any other way overlap with demonic imagery or lore, no associations between faces and souls would have been forced, and no particular conclusions about their moral qualities or spiritual worth would have been drawn. But when one of those people with a large, hooked, or crooked nose belonged to a religious minority that had long been linked to the devil and was increasingly subject to regulations insisting on its difference, and when many members of that minority practised a trade that was necessary but hardly endearing, and when that trade suddenly began to be associated with economic hardship

What’s in a Nose?  199

Figure 12.12  Caricature teaches the French public how to “see” King LouisPhilippe. Charles Philipon, “Les Poires,” redrawn by Honoré Daumier after Philipon’s original sketch for publication in La Caricature, Paris, November 24, 1831. Wikipedia Commons: https://commons.wiki media.org/wiki/File:Caricature_Charles_Philipon_pear.jpg

of an unprecedented kind, then that nose shape might well come to seem significant and be used to mark its owner as demonic.23 In this way, and largely because of religious art, viewers came to be trained to “see” significance in the noses of Jews. Eventually, the conjunction of appearance, faith, profession, and practice came to seem not just coincidental but necessary, meaningful, even “essential.” By the end of the Middle Ages such “essentialised” Jewish qualities as physical grossness, unlimited greed, and inherent deceitfulness were thought to apply even to members of the minority that did not share the same facial features, and a stereotype was launched. This stereotype would inform cultural attitudes toward Jews for the rest of Western (and, indeed, non-Western) history, aided by the proliferation of caricature: the “Jewish nose” can be traced practically decade by decade for each century between the end of the Middle Ages and the rise of Nazi propaganda.24 The postcards and stickers analysed by Isabel Enzenbach in her contribution to this volume testify to the endurance of both the imagery

200  Sara Lipton and the forms in popular culture. While the “Jewish nose” remained a sign for excessive attachment to the material, its resonances morphed as society’s concerns shifted, from medieval theologians’ disapproval of literalism and secularism, to Enlightenment rejections of “legalism, ritualism, and particularism,” to modern hostility to capitalism and concerns about sexual deviance.25 In each context, the “materialistic” Jew and his (it is almost always a him) fleshly nose embody feared aspects of culture that were projected onto Jews, but by no means alien to gentiles. I doubt many people learned to hate Jews solely because of a picture they saw. But centuries of seeing pictures that present Jews as fleshy, ugly, different, and demonic certainly had an effect: such images helped pin vague and otherwise free-floating negative emotions—frustration at political impotence or social inferiority, rage about economic difficulties, suspicion of difference—onto actual people, some of whom looked like the pictures and many of whom did not, but who belonged to the group for which the pictures were a synecdoche. It was undoubtedly such images, rather than lived and carefully catalogued experience, that led one of the most tolerant, ethical, and probing minds of the twentieth century to see “Jewish” noses where they did not exist. In recent years, both the United States and Europe have seen all too starkly the visceral power of the visual image—from a hoody-wearing boy on the streets of Florida, to turban-wearing Sikhs in a Wisconsin temple, to kippah-wearing shoppers in a Parisian market, individuals have been targeted not because of their actions but because of their appearances, which matched certain visual stereotypes and so triggered all the assumptions and emotions those images arouse.26 What’s in a nose? Depending on the eye and heart of the beholder, absolutely nothing, or all too much.

Notes 1. Letter to Lucy Donnelly dated 18 February 1906 in Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (London: Routledge, 2014), 189. It only seems fair to note that Russell continued, “They seemed most civilised people, with great public spirit and intense devotion to learning.” I thank Anthony Gottlieb for this and the following reference. 2. Letter to Margery Spence dated 9 October 1935, transcribed in Michael D. Stevenson, “‘No Poverty, Much Comfort, Little Wealth’: Bertrand Russell’s 1935 Scandinavian Tour,” in Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies 31, no. 2 (2011): 115–16. Stevenson notes (117 n. 14) that this is not the first time Russell showed an interest in noses, citing Kenneth Blackwell, “The Wit and Humour of Principia Mathematica,” Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies 31, no. 1 (2011): 151–60. In that article (156 n. 27), Blackwell writes: “Russell was fond of nasal examples. In ‘Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory of Types’ (written in 1907), he maintained that you could not avoid mentioning a topic by mentioning that you will not mention it: ‘One might as well, in talking to a man with a long nose, say ‘When I speak of noses, I except such as are inordinately long.’” 3. I am more disturbed by a letter in which Russell writes of a Jewish museum director he had just met: “I was interested and quite liked him, though he had

What’s in a Nose?  201 the Jew’s money-grabbing instinct, and cared about art only as a profession.” Letter to Alys Pearsall Smith, November 1894, in Bertrand Russell, The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: The Private Years, 1884–1914, ed. Nicholas Griffin (London: Routledge, 2002), 149. 4. Ray Spangenburg and Diane Kit Moser, Niels Bohr: Atomic Theorist, rev. ed. (New York: Chelsea House, 2008), 7. 5. Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze, Mathematiker auf der Flucht vor Hitler: Quellen und Studien zur Emigration einer Wissenschaft (Wiesbaden: Vieweg Verlag, 1998), 67. In 1943 Bohr himself would be forced to flee Denmark because of his heritage. 6. Michael Camille, “Visual Signs of the Sacred Page: Books in the Bible moralisée,” Word & Image 5, no. 1 (1989): 111–29 (here 118). 7. I undertook this survey as part of the research for Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999). 8. Werner May, Deutscher National-Katechismus, 2nd ed. (Breslau [Wrocław]: Verlag von Heinrich Handel, 1934), 22–26, available online at http://research.­calvin. edu/german-propaganda-archive/catech.htm (accessed 23 November 2017). 9. Fritz Fink, Die Judenfrage im Unterricht (Nuremberg: Stürmerverlag, 1937), available online at http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/fink. htm (accessed 23 November 2017). 10. Ernst Hiemer, Der Giftpilz (Nuremberg: Stürmerverlag, 1938), available online at http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/story3.htm (accessed 23 November 2017). 11. Ernst Hiemer, Der Pudelmopsdackelpinscher (Nuremberg: Stürmerverlag, 1940), available online at http://research.calvin.edu/german-propagandaarchive/pudel.htm (accessed 23 November 2017). 12. Joseph Goebbels, “Die Krise Europas,” in Der steile Aufstieg (Munich: Franz Eher, 1944), 205–12, available online at http://research.calvin.edu/german-­ propaganda-archive/goeb72.htm (accessed 28 March 2016). 13. The paragraphs that follow summarise the first four chapters of Sara Lipton, Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014). 14. On this Gospel manuscript, see Lipton, Dark Mirror, 25–45, with further bibliography. 15. Early and mid-twelfth-century anti-Jewish philosophical polemics accused Jews of an irrationality amounting to a kind of bestiality. See Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christians and Jews in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance (London and New York: Routledge, 1995); Dominique Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam, 1000–1150, trans. Graham Robert Edwards (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002); Irven M. Resnick, Marks of Distinction: Christian Perceptions of Jews in the High Middle Ages (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 34–44. See, however, Irven M. Resnick, “Odo of Tournai and the Dehumanization of Medieval Jews: A Reexamination,” Jewish Quarterly Review 98 (2008): 471–84, and William Chester Jordan, review of Iogna-Prat in Jewish Quarterly Review 95 (2005): 721–23, which caution against taking polemical rhetoric overly literally. 16. See Resnick, Marks of Distinction, 249–319; Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 53. 17. Bartlett, The Making of Europe, 197; Robert Bartlett, “Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 (2001): 39–56.

202  Sara Lipton 18. See especially Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 19. Thomas Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 79–90. 20. See Bernard G. Dod, “Aristoteles Latinus” and C. H. Lohr, “The Medieval Interpretation of Aristotle,” both in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of Scholasticism 1100–1600, ed. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 45–79 and 80–98, respectively. On medieval physiognomical study, see Roger A. Pack, ed., “Auctor Incerti de Physiognomia Libellus,” Archives d’Histoire et doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 41 (1975): 113–38; D. Jacquart, “La physiognomie à l’époque de Frédéric II: le traité de Michel Scot,” Micrologus 2 (1994): 19–37; Jole Agrimi, “Fisiognomica: nature alla specchio ovvero luce e ombre,” Micrologus 4 (1996): 129–78; Irven M. Resnick, “Ps.-Albert the Great on the Physiognomy of Jesus and Mary,” Mediaeval Studies 64 (2002): 217–40; Irven M. Resnick, Marks of Distinction, 13–52. On the influence of scientific study on art, see Michael Camille, “Illustrations in Harley Ms. 3487 and the Perception of Aristotle’s Libri Naturales in Thirteenth-Century England,” in England in the Thirteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1984 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. W. M. Ormand (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1986), 31–44; Madeline H. Caviness, “‘The Simple Perception of Matter’ and the Representation of Narrative, ca. 1180–1280,” Gesta 30 (1991): 48–64; Antonia Gransden, “Realistic Observation in Twelfth-Century England,” Speculum 47 (1972): 29–51. Michael Camille, “Before the Gaze: The Internal Senses and Late-Medieval Practices of Seeing,” in Visuality before and beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw, ed. Robert S. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 197–223, argues that Aristotelian ideas of vision explain Gothic naturalism. The realistic rendering of nature in the Bonne of Luxembourg manuscript is noted by Charles Vaurie, “Birds in the Prayer Book of Bonne of Luxembourg,” MMA Bulletin, n. s. 29 (1971): 279–83. 21. Multiple genetic studies of European Jewish populations, and the high frequency of many genetic disease alleles among Ashkenazi (European) Jews, suggest that medieval Ashkenazi Jewry was a relatively—though by no means absolutely—closed population. Doron M. Behar et al., “MtDNA Evidence for a Genetic Bottleneck in the Early History of the Ashkenazi Jewish Population,” European Journal of Human Genetics 12 (2004): 355–64, for example, found a prolonged period of low effective size in the history of the Ashkenazi population. See also Gil Atzmon et al., “Abraham’s Children in the Genome Era: Major Jewish Diaspora Populations Comprise Distinct Genetic Clusters with Shared Middle Eastern Ancestry,” American Journal of Human Genetics 86 (2010): 850–59. The Christian text is the Pseudo-Albertian Mariale (19.2.5), quoted in Resnick, Marks of Distinction, 239; for the Jewish text, see David Berger, ed. and trans., The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages: A Critical Edition of the “Nizzahon Vetus” (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979), 340. 22. See Elizabeth C. Childs, “Big Trouble: Daumier, Gargantua, and the Censorship of Political Caricature,” Art Journal 51 (1992): 26–37. 23. The process I am envisioning is analogous to the gendered “non-verbal marking,” similar to linguistic marking, analysed by the linguist Deborah Tannen in her essay “There Is No Unmarked Woman,” which first appeared in The New York Times Magazine, 20 June 1993. Tannen argues that just as gendered wordendings call attention to the female-ness of actresses, waitresses, etc. in a way

What’s in a Nose?  203 that the male forms of the words do not, so women’s clothes and accessories necessarily call attention to their sartorial choices, “mark” their gender identity and sexuality, in a way that men’s do not. My study of medieval representations of Jews suggests that the several decades-old practice of visually “marking” Jews served to “mark” Jews and their choices and activities as Jewish, so that a Jew with a big nose became a “big-nosed Jew,” a Jew lending money become a “moneylending Jew,” while a gentile with a big nose or a gentile who lent money would remain merely a person with a big nose or a person who lent money. See the well-known marginal sketch-caricature from a 1277 Essex Forest Roll labelled “Aaron fil Diable,” which combines a hooked nose, a parody of current naming conventions, and diabolic connections. 24. Studies of anti-Jewish caricature in various regions and centuries include Judith Vogt, Historien om et image: antisemitisme og antizionisme i karikaturer (Copenhagen: Samleren, 1978); Frank Felsenstein, The Jew as Other: A Century of English Caricatures 1730–1830 (New York: The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1995); Cilly Kugelmann and Fritz Backhaus, eds., Jüdische Figuren in Film und Karikatur: Die Rothschilds und Joseph Süß Oppenheimer (Stuttgart: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1996); Arie Stav, Peace: The Arabian Caricature. A Study of Anti-Semitic Imagery (Jerusalem: Gefen, 1999); Pierre André Taguieff, La Nouvelle Judéophobie (Paris: Fayard, 2002); Joel Kotek and Dan Kotek, Au nom de l’antisionisme: L’image des Juifs et d’Israël dans la caricature depuis la seconde Intifada (Brussels: Complexe, 2003); Andrei Oişteanu, Inventing the Jew: Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romanian and Other Central-East European Cultures, trans. Mirela Adascalitei (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009). 25. See especially David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013) and Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991). On later assumptions about Jews’ alleged sexual and gendered difference (which were present but not as predominant in medieval antiJewish discourses), see Jay Geller, “‘A Glance at the Nose’: Freud’s Inscription of Jewish Difference,” American Imago 49 (1992): 427–44. 26. “Justice Department Investigation Is Sought in Florida Teenager’s Shooting Death,” New York Times, 17 March 2012, available online at www.nytimes. com/2012/03/17/us/justice-department-investigation-is-sought-in-florida-teen agers-shooting-death.html (accessed 23 November 2017); “Gunman Kills 6 at a Sikh Temple Near Milwaukee,” New York Times, 6 August 2012, available online at www.nytimes.com/2012/08/06/us/shooting-reported-at-templein-wisconsin.html (accessed 23 November 2017); “French Gunmen Die in Raids,” New York Times, 10 January 2015, available online at www.nytimes. com/2015/01/10/world/europe/charlie-hebdo-paris-shooting.html (accessed 23 November 2017).

13 Jewish Bodies in Postcards and Street Art Changes in Anti-Jewish Visual Polemics Isabel Enzenbach Unlearned Stereotypes? A few years ago, I was invited to a school to teach a group of 15–17-yearolds about antisemitic stereotypes. I picked up a teaching guide with practical methods and chose the approach in the guide: the proposal that suggested deconstructing antisemitic images.1 With scissors or felt-tip markers, teenagers were to identify anti-Jewish stereotypes in images and then analyse them. So I brought along enlarged copies of postcards featuring various antisemitic stereotypes from the German Empire and the Weimar Republic and asked the pupils to highlight the depictions of Jews in these images.2 I quickly realised that they were unable to cope with this task. So I changed tactics, asking the students to simply describe what they saw on the cards so we could discuss it together, but this task, too, proved difficult. For the students, images that I recognised as well-known anti-Jewish stereotypes were merely motifs that they could not identify. Only two pupils felt able to work on their own pictures. Their teacher described them as highly motivated, excellent pupils. The postcard that they analysed depicts a carriage with a man sitting in it.3 Rather than being pulled by a horse, the carriage is pulled by a man fitted with a harness. The figure on the open top of the carriage fits the classic antiJewish visual polemics in his corpulence, body position, and physiognomy. Visual secondary attributes, such as a top hat, fancy clothes, and a double pocket-watch chain, add up to the stereotypical portrayal of a rich Jewish upstart.4 This stereotypical character is cracking his whip over the back of the harnessed man, who—his angular, muscular body dressed in a worker’s uniform and cap—represents the stereotypical German worker as depicted in so many cartoons of the pre-National Socialist era.5 Around his neck is a horse collar, the end of which is decorated with a magen David. The caption reads “Fight Capitalism.” The two pupils thought the worker was a Jew (see Figure 13.1). Next to the image they wrote “Jew,” “is oppressed,” “replaces a beast of burden,” “Jew has to pull the carriage,” and “rather poorly dressed.” Next to the figure sitting high up on the carriage, they wrote “cliché German,” “finely

Postcards and Street Art  205

Figure 13.1  Illustration by Karl Paumgartten, around 1923 (Graz: Heimatverlag). (Collection of Isabel Enzenbach, Berlin).

dressed, sitting in a dominant position,” and “the German has everything under control [reins, whip].” Obviously, the two pupils interpreted the image in exactly the opposite manner from its intended message and contrary to traditional antisemitic images. To them, it made sense that the oppressed person in the image must represent the Jew. They later explained that they had assumed the brutal oppressor had to be a non-Jewish German: of course, the Jews were the victims, and “the Germans”—by which they meant non-Jews—were the perpetrators who tortured and exploited Jews, just as in the picture. They referred to images of the Holocaust and the recurring theme of victimhood and suffering in Jewish history as presented in textbooks and in the classroom, in books, movies, and television programmes.6 After further discussion, the pupils adjusted their interpretation, taking into consideration the caption—“Fight Capitalism”—the historical period in which the image was created, and probably also prompted by my irritation at their initial reading of the postcard: maybe it really is just the opposite of what we thought, they admitted. Clearly, one cannot take for granted that nineteenth- and twentiethcentury antisemitic imagery is immediately understood as such today. The episode points to a significant shift in the way Jews have been visualised since 1945. Though this one incident does not prove that the old repertoire of antisemitic images has been forgotten and thus become obsolete, one can conclude that this particular body of antisemitic imagery is not

206  Isabel Enzenbach universally and timelessly comprehensible. The ability to decrypt antisemitic images depends on familiarity with the symbolic meaning of the visual elements, assisted either through contexts in which the images are presented or through accompanying texts. Even a mass distribution of images in a context that supports a certain interpretation can turn their symbolic meaning into a common understanding. However, the educational setting in which the antisemitic postcard was shown led the pupils to an interpretation within the context of Erinnerungskultur, or the culture of memory, in which Jews primarily appear as victims. Today, the “clear preponderance of victim testimony vis-à-vis perpetrator testimony”7 and the “victim-oriented culture of remembrance”8 even influence the perception of historical images that are supposed to represent Jews. In this context—as the above example shows— the pupils turned classic elements of antisemitic imagery upside down. In order to trace the development of antisemitic representations of Jews in images from the late nineteenth century to the present, images that also must be understood outside a disambiguating context, we will draw on a somewhat unusual source: adhesive stamps, stickers, graffiti, and postcards from the late nineteenth century to 2015. The advent of stickers and stamps with anti-Jewish content9 as well as anti-Jewish postcards marked the age of modern “antisemitism as a social and political movement.”10 What these items have in common—particularly stickers and postcards—is the fact that they condense images and messages into a small format (the smallest stickers are the size of postage stamps, and postcards usually measure no more than 10.5 × 15 cm). Small-format stickers and picture postcards have been widespread since the late nineteenth century, designed by numerous, mostly anonymous (or hidden) producers, aimed at a non-specific audience and appearing simultaneously in different contexts.11 These are ephemeral media, produced and purchased cheaply, that address current events with images and slogans that circulate in public. This also applies to graffiti, another category for presenting the development of images of Jews. A further shared characteristic is that these are all popular visual media that pop up in different contexts and are consumed quickly. Stickers and graffiti are further distinguished by the fact that their producers or distributors intend to spread their message in public.12 Being unofficial, they are easy tools for spreading opinions and images that could be illegal in Germany today or that are so taboo that they hardly dare venture into public space where they could be observed.13 At the same time, these unofficial media—stickers and graffiti—gain a certain credibility by the very fact that they push the boundaries of legality. The unspoken message is that the activists behind these stickers flaunt their messages without censorship, putting them into the public arena.14 This fast-moving medium also reflects every new area of conflict in the twenty-first century that has generated new “nests” of antisemitism: “the escalating Middle East conflict along with Islamist terrorism, globalisation issues, in particular the global financial crisis, and tensions in multiethnic immigration societies.”15

Postcards and Street Art  207 In order to render the images comparable to the medieval representations discussed in the preceding chapter by Sara Lipton, I will discuss examples that feature body images of Jews.

Type and Suspicion From the end of the nineteenth century, the Kölner Hof hotel at the railway station in Frankfurt am Main distributed a wide range of stickers, collectible stamps, and postcards with various anti-Jewish images and slogans. By the mid-1890s, the hotel was advertising itself as judenfrei (free of Jews). This “selling point” corresponded to the views of the owner, Herrmann Laass, and also proved to be a successful business model. The hotel’s stickers featured physical representations sold both in series and as individual collectible stamps or postcards. The representations served to concretise the fantasies about the Jewish body. The image was printed on a sheet of collectible stamps (see Figure 13.2), created in the tradition of early modern

Figure 13.2 Kölner Hof series, and representation of the hotel expansion from 1902 to 1912. (Collection of Wolfgang Haney, Berlin).

208  Isabel Enzenbach “type series.”16 It presents caricatures of men with job titles seen as particularly Jewish. Their denunciatory character lies in the similarities between all those depicted, as a means of shaping the notion of a “Jewish body.” The artist’s trick was to emphasise the physiognomy of the extremities as well as to depict distorted posture and gestures. Nevertheless, it is the verbal aspect that completes the picture. Take, for example, the seemingly neutral terms Vieh- u. Wechsel-Jude (cattle-trading and money-changing Jew) and place them alongside pejorative comments like Der Schnorrer oder: Der neueingewanderte Staatsbürger (the schnorrer [freeloader], or the newly arrived citizen). The use of the definite article before many descriptions, like Der Trödler (the junk dealer) or Der Bankier (the banker), emphasises the notion of a “Jewish type.” A linguistic tool is used to resolve the illustrator’s dilemma: the cartoonist had to depict representatives of such different jobs as “peddler” (Der Hausierer) and “boss” (Der Herr Chef), “junk dealer” (Der Trödler) and “lawyer” (Der Herr Rechtsanwalt), “public-opinion maker” (Der Macher der öffentlichen Meinung), and “rabbi” (Der Rabbiner) as being identical types. Through the different job titles, reflected in different clothing styles, it was possible to reveal the figures both as different in appearance and identical in their physicality. A prominent feature here was the oversized, hooked nose, which can be seen especially in profile (see Figure 13.3). The challenge inherent within antisemitism, reflected in the production of images, is to depict a heterogeneous group of people as if they were monolithic and at the same time to unite diametrical opposites such as “Jewish capitalists” and “Jewish beggars.” This challenge is exemplified in the ­Kölner Hof’s production of small-format antisemitic media in another location as well. The hotel’s three-part postcard series from the late 1890s claimed to relate the story of the Jewish exodus from the banks of the River Jordan via the River Main in Germany. The first two cards showed a large group of people leaving a barren desert. All of them are depicted as oriental (see Figure 13.4). They wear head-coverings, long, flowing garments and appear to be poor; their unifying facial characteristic is an oversized nose, but they also seem to be gesturing in an unusual manner. The text makes fun of “the beautiful noses that have become crooked” (den wunderschönen Nasen, dass sie alle wurden krumm). The third card of the series (see Figure 13.5) introduces an entirely different situation and a fully different image of a Jewish man. That is because the group—according to the text—now has arrived in the Promised Land: Germany—specifically, Frankfurt am Main, the so-called New Jerusalem. At first glance, this card with its caricature of a Jew seems to have nothing in common with the first two cards in the series. We see a fat man in a fancy suit, top hat, and monocle sitting on a bag of money. He is the same sort of fellow as the one we met in the postcard that the pupils reviewed. The accompanying text, however, makes it clear that this is one of the Jews who

Postcards and Street Art  209

Figure 13.3 “Cattle-trading and money-changing Jew,” postcard from the Kölner Hof hotel with attached advertising label, A. Baasch publishing company, Plauen i.V., 1 January 1902. (Collection of Wolfgang Haney, Berlin).

emerged from the desert and who now rule Germany. A second look reveals the physical markers that the “money Jew” could not hide under his clothes: his nose and his gestures. I assume that these shared images are recognisable to the viewer not only through the comparison of images from postcards 1 and 2 with those in postcard 3; rather, it was the massive number of such images of Jews in visual polemics from the nineteenth century to the Holocaust that allowed this stigmatisation to escape the subconscious to become anchored in the

Figure 13.4 “New Jerusalem and Franconian Jordan,” Kölner Hof postcard, postmarked 27 August 1898. (Collection of Wolfgang Haney, Berlin).

Figure 13.5 “New Jerusalem and Franconian Jordan,” Kölner Hof postcard, postmarked 6 June 1899. (Collection of Wolfgang Haney, Berlin).

Postcards and Street Art  211 conscious mind. Suspicions against Jews were transmitted visually: no one knows exactly who is hidden under the clothing. The images foment distrust: even if Jews appear to be acculturated, their immutable Jewishness lies just below the surface. For opponents of Jewish emancipation—legal and social equality—­ suspicion and mistrust were essential components of their worldview. Once Jews were no longer recognisable as such at first glance, the critical second glance gained importance. Fantasies about Jewish bodies and the mutability of the phenomenon knew no bounds, as evidenced by these two adhesive stamps from the campaign “Free from the Jew.” The Jewish body appears in one as a black, bearded and hairy, lightweight, “removable” person and in the other as a very white, bald-headed fatso, quite different to his fellow Jew from the other sticker. What does that mean? It is a lesson for the non-Jewish observers: you can hardly recognise a Jew by his appearance. They look somehow different from us but in various ways. The pictures teach suspicion but do not give one consistent image of the Jewish body.

Figure 13.6  “Free from the Jew,” sticker, around 1920. (Collection of Wolfgang Haney, Berlin).

212  Isabel Enzenbach

Figure 13.7  “Free from the Jew,” sticker, around 1920. (Collection of Wolfgang Haney, Berlin).

Threatening Female Body The anti-Jewish postcards that were particularly popular around 1900 illustrate (in numerous variations) the topos of an endangered gender order in modernity,17 a condition that they blame on Jews and emancipated women. “Thus the cards illustrate clichés like the ‘masculine Jewish woman’ and the ‘effeminate Jewish man’ who could not be considered as members of society per se.”18 Many such cards depict stereotypes of the effeminate Jewish man and the “Jewish matron.” She is typified by repulsive corpulence and her dominant presence in the centre of the image; she is the exact opposite of the female ideal of beauty. It is a composition that warns of imagined gender confusion. Even the imaginary non-Jewish, pre-modern feminine ideal is included with the caricature of the Jewish woman’s body. The image “Rebekka in her bath” (see Figure 13.8) highlights several motifs of antisemitic propaganda. For the purposes of our study, it is particularly the presentation of Rebekka—with her dark, naked body twisted into a clichéd unnatural pose, her crooked gestures, and exaggerated physiognomy with oversized nose— that is of importance. Unlike postcards, most anti-Jewish stickers focus on the absence of Jewish women’s bodies.19 A letter seal from the Norderney Spa (see Figure 13.9) shows—through the combination of lettering and images of antitypes—how

Postcards and Street Art  213

Figure 13.8  “Rebekka in her bath,” postcard, around 1900. (Collection of Wolfgang Haney, Berlin).

gendered visual expressions of Jew-hatred could also be designed without depicting Jews. Here, the National Socialist ideal of the modern, “Aryan” woman is in the centre of the image. Her body is light, nearly white, well proportioned, and athletic; her posture is carefree and elegant, the facial features are also well proportioned. The text around the edges, “Nordseebad Norderney is free of Jews,” is not merely an aesthetic framework: the state of being judenfrei, “Jew-free,” is also staged as the protection that guarantees the lightheartedness and freedom of the depicted woman. The absence of the Jewish body is part of this freedom.

From Cartoon to Action In National Socialism, there are numerous examples of popular antisemitic stickers and stamps, as well as large-scale paintings of antisemitic body

214  Isabel Enzenbach

Figure 13.9  “Nordseebad Norderney is free of Jews,” antisemitic letter seal, 1933. (Collection of Wolfgang Haney, Berlin).

images of Jews on storefronts. Stickers were used in particular for the identification of businesses. Ultimately, a “Jewish business” slated to be destroyed or “Aryanised” had to be marked in order to be recognised. Many of the notes resembled official stamp seals, complete with the antisemitic caricature of a face in the middle, surrounded by the verbal demand not to buy in Jewish-owned shops or businesses where Jews work. Stamps with the text “Don’t buy from Jews” were already widespread in the 1890s.20 During National Socialism, they were often provided with caricatures that followed the strategy of stereotyping Jews described above as both poor merchants and as rich businesspeople (see Figures 13.10–13.12). This propaganda for boycotting Jewish businesses served to exclude the individual marked in this manner from economic life, and, at the same time, the pictures called on the viewer to see the Jewish “type” in the Jewish trader and to adopt this perception of reality. As early as 1930, the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith) disseminated a similarly designed sticker (see Figure 13.13) in response to the intensifying National Socialist propaganda.21 However, what was created as camouflage revealed a key difference: while the antisemitic caricature is

Figure 13.10 “If you buy from Jews, you steal national wealth!” National Socialist sticker (Collection of Wolfgang Haney, Berlin).

Figure 13.11 “If you go to the Jews, you are a traitor—Watch out, slaves of the Jew!” National Socialist sticker. (Collection of Wolfgang Haney, Berlin).

216  Isabel Enzenbach

Figure 13.12  “If you buy from Jews, you are a traitor.” National Socialist sticker. (Collection of Wolfgang Haney, Berlin).

Figure 13.13 “The Nazis are our misfortune,” a sticker from the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith, 1930, The Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust & Genocide, London.

perceived as a generalised type, the caricature of Hitler contains the image of the individual. There is no typologised counterpart to represent Nazis or antisemites. Instead of being reduced to a stereotype, they are represented through the individual features of the “Führer.”

Postcards and Street Art  217

Figure 13.14 Antisemitic graffiti, Berlin, June 1937. Stiftung Neue Synagoge B ­ erlin— Centrum Judaicum, Archiv (CJA), 7.103, 4.

Photographs of antisemitic graffiti also show how effective the caricature of the Jewish physiognomy was under National Socialism.22 The stereotype was so ubiquitous that individuals in many German cities easily reproduced it in shop windows as a recognisable variant within their repertoire.

Shifting Images and Motifs after 1945 After the Holocaust, and to this very day, stickers and graffiti—­particularly coming from the right-wing spectrum—employ the familiar antisemitic visual language that evolved from the late nineteenth century through the National Socialist era, but also draw on even older stereotypes. But one can observe alienation and offsetting effects here. For example, numerous stickers, such as those produced and disseminated in the early 1990s by the antisemitic, right-wing extremist Freundeskreis Freiheit für Deutschland (Friends of Freedom for Germany),23 used classic antisemitic representations of Jews as well as slogans that decry multiculturalism and the right to asylum (see Figures 13.15 and 13.16). No explanation is offered regarding the connection between image and text. Perhaps the producers expected their intended audience to need no explanation, since the right-wing extremist worldview embraces antisemitism, racism, and the rejection of refugees. But it is also possible that the caricature of Jews functions as a code that can be manipulated in various ways. In the example seen here (see Figure 13.15), a National Socialist, racist, and antisemitic caricature is linked with rejection of multiculturalism. Thus, the viewer is given space for different interpretations, which depend on whether he or she recognises the dark figure with

Figure 13.15 “Multiculturalism . . . No thanks!” Sticker from the “Freundeskreises Freiheit für Deutschland,” around 1993. (Collection of Antifaschistisches Pressearchiv und Bildungszentrum Berlin e.V. [apabiz]).

Figure 13.16 “Asylum: . . . stinks to the heavens.” Sticker from the “Freundeskreises Freiheit für Deutschland,” around 1993. (Collection of Antifaschistisches Pressearchiv und Bildungszentrum Berlin e.V. [apabiz]).

Postcards and Street Art  219 a hooked nose—meant as a counterpart to the beautiful white woman— as a Jew. Similarly, the link between a Jewish caricature and the caption “Asylum” does not emerge from pictorial tradition but rather through the viewer’s interpretation. In addition to examples in which classic antisemitic clichés are associated with new captions, there are also drawings that merge antisemitic visual polemics with racist stereotypes (see Figure 13.17). The hooked nose is now part of a hybrid character combining visual elements of antisemitism, orientalism, and racism and is dubbed a bogus asylum seeker. Once again, the question arises as to the intentions behind this presentation. Is it recognisable as an intentional visual strategy to render antisemitism and racism as linked ideological components of right-wing extremism?

Figure 13.17 “Bogus asylum seekers: Out! No way,” sticker from the Nationalen Alternative, around 1990. (Collection of Antifaschistisches Pressearchiv und Bildungszentrum Berlin e.V. [apabiz]).

220  Isabel Enzenbach Or do post-Holocaust antisemitic images in Germany blur into a vague image of the enemy as the stereotyped Other? A graffito photographed in 2014 (see Figure 13.18) suggests such an interpretation. Swastikas and SS runes refer to the neo-Nazi scene. The large nose and thick lips may also indicate the intention to design antisemitic graffiti. But what do the cowboy hat and nose-ring mean? Is the emphasis on the lips supposed to evoke racist imagery? Perhaps this irritating depiction is just the work of an untalented spray-painter. But it is also possible that the image reflects the effect of the taboo against antisemitic images in post-war Germany. It is a development that contributed to the difficulties that the aforementioned pupils had in interpreting a nineteenth-century antisemitic caricature. Elements of Jewish body stereotypes may be found on contemporary stickers within a new framework; shifts in visual polemics are evident. They

Figure 13.18  Photograph of a graffito, Berlin around 2011. (Collection of Irmela Mensah-Schramm, Berlin).

Postcards and Street Art  221 are also reflected in new pictorial language that illustrates the current topoi of anti-Jewish attitudes. Instead of body images, we see more symbolic representations. With anti-Israel stickers, for example, one often sees the magen David displayed in a disparaging context. As a symbol that refers both to the State of Israel and to Jews as a group both within and outside the state, it is open to interpretation: although literally only the State of Israel is vilified, the graphic triggers associations that refer to Jews as a collective. Finally, reference is made to the current strategy of using images of a nonJewish young woman in a textual framing to convey anti-Jewish messages (see Figure 13.19). As with Figure 13.9, this strategy avoids depicting a stereotypically Jewish body or character. Instead, a girl’s face is shown: it is

Figure 13.19 “Guilt-cult Holocaust,” sticker from the right-wing extremist organisation Nationaler Widerstand Berlin, around 2011. (Collection of Irmela Mensah-Schramm, Berlin).

222  Isabel Enzenbach distorted and she seems to be in pain, covering her ears. The image is reminiscent of Edvard Munch’s painting, “The Scream.”24 The photo is framed by the text “Guilt-cult Holocaust, I’ve heard enough.” Here, the process of grappling with the history of the mass murder of European Jews is denounced as a pure “cult of guilt.” The sticker represents a widespread attitude that rejects Holocaust remembrance, and is a visual representation of the perpetrator-victim reversal in post-war anti-Jewish attitudes. Jews are labelled as perpetrators: it is their fault that the National Socialist crimes have an impact to this day. In this variant of anti-Jewish thinking, as depicted here, the real victims are innocent, young, non-Jewish Germans. The visual imagery of post-war antisemitism undergoes a significant change in both its reception and in the new clichés it produces. But even if some images that are deeply rooted in European cultural history have lost potency for many younger viewers, they nevertheless turn out to be adaptable and versatile. Some visual elements are now taking aim at new groups, targeting them for discrimination and visual defamation. And all the while, antisemitism keeps on finding new images and characters.

Notes 1. Woher kommt Judenhass? Was kann man dagegen tun? Ein B ­ ildungsprogramm— Materialien, Methoden und Konzepte mit CD-ROM, ed. Bildungsteam BerlinBrandenburg e.V. and Tacheles reden! e.V. (Mühlheim: Verlag an der Ruhr 2007), 64–67; similarly, Johannes Valentin Schwarz, “Antisemitische Karikaturen und Cartoons,” in Didaktikmappe zur Ausstellung: Antijüdischer Nippes, populäre Judenbilder und aktuelle Verschwörungstheorien, ed. Jüdisches Museum Hohenems (2005), available online at www.politik-lernen.at/dl/ msLpJKJKoLnNoJqx4KJK/504_karikaturen.pdf (accessed 23 November 2017) 2. Taken from Juliane Peters, ed., Spott und Hetze: Antisemitische Postkarten aus der Sammlung Wolfgang Haney, Atlas des Historischen Bildwissens, no. 3 (Berlin: Digitale Bibliothek 2008). On the medium of the antisemitic postcards, see also Helmut Gold, “Die Postkarte als Medium des (frühen) Antisemitismus,” in Abgestempelt. Judenfeindliche Postkarten, ed. Helmut Gold and Georg Heuberger (Heidelberg: Umschau/Braus, 1999), 13–24. 3. Postcard: Der Kampf mit dem Kapitalismus, Heimatverlag, Graz (Spott und Hetze, no. 1151), dated around 1923. 4. Michaela Haibl describes the development of polemical depictions of Jews in the nineteenth century, in which body stereotypes gain in importance compared to other attributes. Michaela Haibl, Zerrbild als Stereotyp: Visuelle Darstellungen von Juden zwischen 1850 und 1900 (Berlin: Metropol, 2000), 246–65. Haibl points out representations of this symbolic figure of the Jewish capitalist on pp. 111, 115, 247, 256, and 347. 5. For example, the caricature “Terror,” Der Wahre Jacob, no. 718 (24 January 1914): 8215; postcard “Parabel,” in Eduard Fuchs, Die Juden in der Karikatur: ein Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte (Munich: Langen, 1921), 294; caricature “Wie steh jach do,” Kikeriki, no. 67 (27 February 1927): 8. In the NSDAP’s election posters this figure of the Aryan worker is developed further, cf. Gerhard Paul, Aufstand der Bilder: Die NS-Propaganda vor 1933 (Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz Nachf., 1990), 241.

Postcards and Street Art  223 6. Martin Liepach and Dirk Sadowski, “Vorwort der Herausgeber,” in Jüdische Geschichte im Schulbuch: Eine Bestandsaufnahme anhand aktueller Lehrwerke, ed. Martin Liepach and Dirk Sadowski (Göttingen: V & R Unipress, 2014), 10. 7. Aleida Assmann, Das neue Unbehagen an der Erinnerungskultur (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2013), 143. 8. Werner Konitzer, “Opferorientierung und Opferidentifizierung: Überlegungen zu einer begrifflichen Unterscheidung,” in Das Unbehagen an der Erinnerung: Wandlungsprozesse im Gedenken an den Holocaust, ed. Margit Fröhlich et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Brandes & Apsel, 2012), 119–27. 9. Isabel Enzenbach, “Aufgeklebt und eingeklebt: Eine mediengeschichtliche Übersicht,” in Alltagskultur des Antisemitismus im Kleinformat: Vignetten der Sammlung Haney ab 1880, ed. Isabel Enzenbach and Wolfgang Haney (Berlin: Metropol, 2012), 48–85. 10. Shulamit Volkov, Antisemitismus als kultureller Code (Munich: Beck, 2000), 13–36; Werner Bergmann and Ulrich Wyrwa, Antisemitismus in Zentraleuropa (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2011), 32–61. 11. On the history and function of the postcard, see Felix Axster, Koloniales Spektakel in 9x14: Bildpostkarten im Kaiserreich (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2014), 47–79. 12. Definition according to Norbert Siegl, “Definition des Begriffs Graffitti,” available online at www.graffitieuropa.org/definition1.htm (accessed 23 November 2017). On stickers spreading a message, see Julia Reinecke, Street-Art: Eine Subkultur zwischen Kunst und Kommerz (Bielfeld: transcript Verlag, 2021), 18. 13. In German criminal law, the following sections of the penal code are particularly relevant: Section 86 (Dissemination of means of propaganda of unconstitutional organisations); Section 86a (Use of symbols of unconstitutional organisations); Section 130 (Sedition), and Section 131 (Glorification of violence, incitement to racial hatred). 14. Isabel Enzenbach, “Angezettelt: Idee, Geschichte und Konzept einer Ausstellung,” in Angezettelt: Antisemitische und rassistische Aufkleber von 1880 bis heute, ed. Isabel Enzenbach (Berlin: Ausstellungskatalog des Deutschen Historischen Museums und des Zentrums für Antisemitismusforschung, 2016), 20–38. 15. Bergmann and Wyrwa, Antisemitismus, 135. 16. Michaela Haibl, “Juden in der Bildpolemik: Vom antijüdischen zum antisemitischen Judenstereotyp in der populären Druckgraphik des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Abgestempelt: Judenfeindliche Postkarten, ed. Helmut Gold and Georg Heuberger (Heidelberg: Umschau/Braus, 1999), 79–96. 17. A. G. Gender-Killer, ed., Antisemitismus und Geschlecht: von “effiminierten Juden,” “maskulinisierten Jüdinnen” und anderen Geschlechterbildern (Münster: Unrast, 2005). 18. Katja Leiskau and Daniela Geppert, “Alte Thaler, junge Weiber sind die besten Zeitvertreiber,” in Abgestempelt: Judenfeindliche Postkarten, ed. Helmut Gold and Georg Heuberger (Heidelberg: Umschau/Braus, 1999), 205 and related illustrations. 19. Jennifer Meyer, “‘Mit deutschem Gruß’: Antisemitische Brief- und Klebemarken im Nationalsozialismus,” in Alltagskultur des Antisemitismus im Kleinformat: Vignetten der Sammlung Haney ab 1880, ed. Isabel Enzenbach and Wolfgang Haney (Berlin: Metropol, 2012), 144–72. 20. Im deutschen Reich: Zeitschrift des Centralvereins deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens 2, no. 3 (1896): 167. 21. Isabel Enzenbach, “Kennwort: Gummi. Der Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens im Kampf um den öffentlichen Raum,” in Was

224  Isabel Enzenbach war deutsches Judentum, ed. Christina von Braun (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 203–20. 22. Christoph Kreutzmüller et al., Ein Pogrom im Juni: Fotos antisemitischer Schmierereien in Berlin, 1938 (Berlin: Hentrich und Hentrich, 2013). 23. The organisation was banned in 1993, cf. antifaschistisches pressearchiv und bildungszentrum berlin e.V, “Profil: Freundeskreis Freiheit für Deutschland (FFD),” available online at www.apabiz.de/archiv/material/Profile/FFD.htm (accessed 23 November 2017). 24. I thank Annette Vowinckel for pointing this out.

14 Masculinities, Carnal Israel, and Antisemitisms Victor Seidler

Time and Atrocity Historians often learn to identify themselves through the particular time period they study, so that when they think antisemitism, it is tempting to open up a conversation of how antisemitism has been shaped differently within different historical and cultural contexts. They might want to disturb the notion of a singular history which presents antisemitism as “the longest hatred” yet open up a conversation across the boundaries of pre-modern and modern histories of antisemitism to investigate how particular themes have been refigured across quite different temporal discursive practices to assume a particular salience or intensity. As a social theorist and philosopher, I have always felt the importance of engaging with histories, but I have also been aware that questions raised in the contemporary world, say, in relation to bodies, genders, and sexualities, help us to bring different questions and imaginations to our engagements with the past. So too can traumatic events like the recent atrocities in Paris in early January 2015. The veteran French cartoonist and writer Georges David Wolinski was one of the two French Jews who were murdered by jihadists at the offices of Charlie Hebdo. He had remained true to his Jewish identity all his life while being deeply affected by the events of May ’68 in Paris, events said to have also deepened the French sense of the absurd. His parents were both Jewish; his father, Siegfried Wolinski, was from Poland, while his mother, Lola Bembaron, was a Tunisian of Italian descent. So he straddled Jewish worlds and different cultural histories in relation to Christian and Islamic legacies. His father fled Europe’s pogroms to set up a business in Tunisia where he was murdered by an ex-employee in 1936, when George was two years old, provoking a move to France in 1945. Wolinski told his wife Maryse that “the ghost of my father has haunted me all of my life.”1 In a moving tribute after his murder at Charlie Hebdo, his daughter Elsa said: “I don’t think you can kill ideas.”2 The only woman to be murdered—allegedly because she was a Jew— was the psychoanalyst and writer Dr. Elsa Cayat. According to Gloria Tessler’s obituary, “The jihadists had called her a ‘dirty Jew’ and warned her

226  Victor Seidler to stop working for the paper.”3 Because the killers spared other women at the office, her grieving family believe her Jewishness had already marked her out as a figure of hatred. Her cousin Sophie Bramly says, “It seems she was selected to be executed because she was Jewish.” Also born in Tunisia, on 9 March 1960, she was one of three children who were moved by her communist parents to the Vincennes suburb of Paris. As a qualified doctor, analyst, and writer on issues of gender and sexuality first in 1998, Un homme + une femme = quoi? (A Man + a Woman = What?), and, nine years later, Le désir et la putain (Desire and the Whore),4 she was drawn to write a column Charlie Divan (Charlie on the Couch) for Charlie Hebdo—she saw the team of writers and cartoonists as kindred spirits. To a reader who asked if it was possible for partners to love each other equally, Cayat replied: “No, it is not possible. But then, why should it be exactly equal? Love is a fluid, mobile emotion that moves according to the time and circumstances but is basically there. Because it is easier to love than to hate.”5 These are ideas that I think are worth dwelling upon as we reflect upon the diverse sources of Jew-hatred in Christian and Islamic traditions and sufferings that it has produced. In her last published column, La capacité de s’aimer (The capacity to love oneself) she urged her readers to open up and make room for others—a feat she concedes is very difficult.6 What is the room we have to open up to religious others if we think, as Christians often do, that they are the bearers of a singular truth that has historically in pre-modern times allowed them to feel that if Jews refuse conversion they are inevitably destined for an eternity in hell—so that killing them can be “for their own good”? As Elsa Cayat explains, this is very different from what she was after—as she shares “[t]he goal of psychoanalysis is to turn back time” to enable people to regain “the open-mindedness they had as a child.” It is interesting to think about how historians might engage with this imagination and the desire to “to turn back time.” While Charlie Hebdo, as Gloria Tessler remarks, “is noted for its irreverent attitude to everything from religious figures to politicians [. . .] for satirical, edgy humour, Dr. Cayat’s column was proof of the deeper complexity in its journalism, which included politics, sociology and economics.”7 Possibly Cayat would have felt some sympathy for Jean Vanier, founder of the L’Arche communities—“In a world that values winning and coming first, L’Arche communities are places where people can discover who they are, not just what they can do,” is how L’Arche explains itself. According to Vanier, those who are often rejected by society as unimportant, such as people with learning difficulties, embody the most important truth: that of what it means to be human. As Guardian writer Giles Fraser has learnt, “to run away from our own vulnerability is to run away from ourselves: they are inextricably linked. Which is why those whose vulnerability cannot be hidden under a fancy suit have so much to teach us.”8

Masculinities, Carnal Israel  227 But this is also telling because Jews within pre-modern Christian imaginaries were often positioned as materially and culturally vulnerable. Rather than being reminded of vulnerability that can be experienced as a threat to dominant Christian masculinities that came to be framed in heroic terms during the time of the Crusades, it was Jewish and Islamic communities on the road to Jerusalem that had to be violently destroyed. Their vulnerability touches something that cannot be acknowledged and so is projected as violence onto disdained others. So it is that others are also made responsible for the sufferings and murders they endure—at some level, it is their own fault because they have refused the gift of conversion that could have not only saved their own lives, but also offered an escape from an eternity in hell. As we learn to read about the Crusades as the formation of new heroic masculinities who are ready to sacrifice themselves to regain Jerusalem from the heathen others, so we begin to ask different questions about how Jewish and Islamic bodies are othered along with their masculinities. But if we ask why historians have taken so long to engage with the critical studies of men and masculinities, we have to engage with how they might understand that masculinities are “socially and historically constructed” and how this relates to the long histories of Christian antisemitism. The German anthropologist Johannes Fabian interrogates in Time and the Other how Western anthropologists—and possibly also historians—use the language of time to distance themselves from the object of their study and to secure the dominance of a Western Enlightenment worldview.9 While they talked to people sharing the same temporal space as we might talk to the young Islamists responsible for the atrocities at Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket in Paris—yet when these encounters are written up, they tended to be situated back in time—they are medieval and pre-modern in their Islamist thinking. The anthropologist, like so many political commentators, lives in the present, but the people they study, for example, these young men, are somehow trapped in a medieval past of religious thinking. This corresponds to a centuries old narrative of the Middle Ages as a negative matrix for the emergence of a secular, enlightened, liberal West. This is what Fabian calls “a denial of coevalness”—a denial that we share the same temporal space with those who have different values or different cultural, religious, and political aspirations. The denial of coevalness, argues Fabian, has often been a feature of colonial discourses that have framed the colonised as living at an earlier stage of historical and cultural development. It is only through subordinating themselves to the colonial power and to a particular form of white embodied colonial masculinity that they can hope to progress and make a transition from nature to culture, from tradition to modernity, from the pre-modern world they are trapped in to progress to a higher stage of development that is represented by a particular form of white European masculinity that can alone take its reason for granted and so legislate what is good for others, as I argued in Unreasonable Men.10

228  Victor Seidler This is part of the discourse of otherness that was often used to sustain the colonial exploitation of others. In contemporary journalism, we often find ISIS described as “medieval,” and this familiar trope is based on the idea that the extreme violence of contemporary jihadists has somehow more in common with the public violence of the Middle Ages. No longer appreciated as a rich and complex period of human history, the Middle Ages are rendered into modernity’s Other—little more than that against which modernity comes to define itself. As Giles Fraser has noted, “in the secular salvation myth, we are told the simple story that we have been saved from the dark ages of barbarism and stupidity by the clear moral vision of science, rationality and Apple computers. This is just as much a salvation myth as any proposed by religion—though in this version of salvation it is religion itself that we need to be saved from.”11 Similarly, we can think about contemporary antisemitisms as throwbacks from the past and as an irrational hatred that has a long history but no basis in reality. As Fraser notes, “To think as much is to deny the need to look for contemporary causes and contemporary solutions.” As the historian Julia McClure has written: “Rather than [. . .] questioning the arrogance that has led us to believe that we are the inheritors of a historical tradition of success and progress, society has developed a neat trick: it simply denies that shocking events are part of our time.” Fraser also appreciates that “it is understandable that we want psychologically to distance ourselves from the mindset of those who decapitate prisoners. But this denial of coevalness hardly encourages us to seek to understand the phenomenon of contemporary jihadists or think more clearly about the best ways to respond to them.”12 The same can be said for contemporary antisemitism and the ways that Jews seem to have somehow become identified in the minds of Islamists with a secular modernity they need to destroy. John Dagenais has also argued that “the Middle Ages ‘shadows’ modernity, its existence driven by a repeated denial of coevalness with modernity of activities like repression and brutality: a productive and exploitative anachronism.”13 As Julia McClure agrees saying, “‘Modernity’ is often assumed to be the product of historical evolution, the triumphant outcome of the European Enlightenment and scientific revolution. Yet many dark crimes and threats of chaos occur closer to home, challenging the idea of a post-Enlightenment modernity [. . .] Instead shocking crimes and phenomena that generate fear are described as medieval.”14 As Dagenais has observed, “the typological use of ‘medieval’ was a way of exercising and containing those aspects of modernity that are inadmissible to itself.”15 As McClure also notes, “It provides an excuse for not engaging with the difficult and challenging process of introspection, that process of looking at ourselves and asking how have we, as a global society, created this problem and how can we respond to it.”16 We also need to think about how processes of introspection can be valued and respected as vital aspects of historical and cultural research.

Masculinities, Carnal Israel  229 But in relation to contemporary antisemitisms we can also learn from McClure’s insight that “[t]he irony is that, globally, there have been many developments in technology, there are more devices to record and circulate messages to ever increasing audiences, but we refuse to analyse the complex messages channelled [. . .] this dark age is not the medieval period but a dark age of consciousness.”17

Carnal Israel In Jewish Philosophy and Western Culture, I trace some other resonances of the dominant Christian imaginary of Judaism as “Carnal Israel.”18 This is a term that Daniel Boyarin has helped me think about, and I have learnt to understand the ways it shapes different bodily imaginaries and ways we think within a dominant Christian tradition to identify bodies with sexualities and the “sins of the flesh.”19 As I argued, Wittgenstein was attending to something different when he defined his later philosophy as Hebraic rather than Greek—about the nature of abstractions and ideals within a Greek tradition of philosophy that means that we are always feeling somehow flawed and inadequate because we inevitably fail to live up to the ideals we set ourselves.20 But there are also connections through ways that a dominant Christian tradition has shaped visions of the human in radical contrast with the animal. It is through transcending and so rising above our “animal natures” that are identified with bodies, sexualities, and the “sins of the flesh” that we can become human. It is in rising above, as Kant later frames it and I explored in Kant, Respect and Injustice, our “animal natures” that we can exist as human beings—as spiritual selves within a pre-modern Christian common-sense that become figures within a Kantian modernity shaped in part as a secularised form of Protestantism as rational selves.21 In this way, Kant is developing a Cartesian division between mind and body whereby bodies belong to a disenchanted realm of nature in which emotions, feelings, and desires connected with bodies are framed as forms of unfreedom and determination. They are part of an animal nature that is threatening the freedom that alone comes from our existence as rational selves. In this way, Kantian European modernities give a secular form to a dominant Christian disdain of bodies and sexualities that are not part of what it means to be human but rather their desires have to be eradicated as we learn to shape control over our “animal natures.” How does Christianity learn to deny the Jewishness of Jesus and frame the human through a rejection of the inner Jew who has to be denied, repressed, and even murdered because it is identified with emotions and sexual desires and so the “sins of the flesh”? This helps to shape an everyday experience that somehow is structured through an unspeakable notion that it is through the punishment of the body—a body that is inherently sexualised and so deemed to be “animal”—that the soul can be purified. How within the terms of

230  Victor Seidler European modernities do we translate the idea that it is only as spiritual selves who have transcended—and so repressed and “eradicated” their animal natures—that we can become human as rational selves? It is too simplistic to talk about how human beings have been divided against themselves but possibly significant in tracing connections between pre-modern and modern forms of antisemitisms to recognise how “Carnal Israel” is not only framed as an external enemy but as an inner enemy whom you are obliged to continually struggle against. As you learn to frame Jewhatred at different historical moments so you are also obliged to control an inner “animal nature” that you are constantly fighting through flagellation and other violent bodily techniques that stretch to forms of self-denial. Freud was talking out of a Jewish tradition when he insisted in his psychoanalytic theory that the repressions of sexualities within modernities that had been shaped through secularised Christianities were creating sufferings that were somehow rendered unspeakable. He questions the idea that sexuality is “animal” and that bodies always have to be sexualised. In his questioning of the terrible effects of sexual repression and his recognition that sexuality is part of what it means to be human and that in different historical moments through different cultural and ideological traditions people have to come to terms with their sexualities, he was questioning the terms of a rationalist modernity that in vital respects echoed pre-modern Christian body ethics. Freud also explored the connections between sex and food and so ways people feel they have to punish themselves because they have eaten sweets they had decided to give up. We could say that Christianity had shaped a certain war against the body which is framed as animal and identified with the “sins of the flesh.” This easily becomes a war against the Jews who have been identified with the flesh and whose spirituality was deemed to be defective for the very reason that they remain entangled in the materialities of everyday life and cannot transcend their bodies. Tied to their bodies, Jews could not transcend the earthly and so they could not become spiritual beings. This meant that they were defined as less than human when the human was identified with becoming a disembodied spiritual self. This becomes an idealisation that remains somehow ever present and which Wittgenstein helps us to question even if he himself remains caught within it. He is constantly struggling against his base and sinful nature and his sense of wretchedness. The notion that people are born into sin and so have to constantly prove themselves worthy through their intense activities is something that Max Weber explores in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.22 It is a text that helps us name how pre-modern Christianity is present within an everyday neoliberal globalised capitalism. We are still living in its shadows after the Holocaust—the Shoah—as we engage with the overwhelming silences of the Christian churches and the ease with which the war against the Jews could be continued—in part, it was framed by Hitler as a process of purification, and it invoked a language of eradication that Kantian ethics talks about in its disavowal of emotions, feelings,

Masculinities, Carnal Israel  231 and desires, gathered as inclinations and experienced as threats to masculine identities, as signs of weakness that cannot be tolerated. Emotions of fear and vulnerability are not to be acknowledged because they threaten ideas of heroic masculinity, but also within European modernities, it is dominant white Christian masculinities that can alone take their reason for granted. Somehow, it is still difficult for men to recognise how their experience is gendered and what impact this could have on their historical research. Within pre-modern thought, Jewish masculinities were feminised, and it was suggested that Jewish men menstruate. At the same time as they represented an inner animality as carnal Israel that had to be punished, repressed, and controlled, they were also feminised in ways that in everyday life helped to silence the inner threat. This makes a difference to ways that we might read antisemitic texts and the kind of therapeutic insights that historians might also need to develop if they are to make these structures of Christian power visible. It also helps us to think differently about the claims of Christian supersession and the notion that Christianity is the bearer of a singular truth and provides the only path through which people can seek salvation and be saved from an eternity in hell. Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations helps us grasp some of the difficulties we face in making visible forms of antisemitism that are embedded within everyday life within a liberal moral culture: The aspects of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something— because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundation of his or her enquiry does not strike a person at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck them.—And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.23 I was struck by this remark as I was gathering ideas for this essay, and it made me aware of the difficulties of starting with definitions of antisemitism that might somehow apply across different historical periods, premodern and modern. It also makes a difference to how we might learn to read antisemitic texts from the pre-modern period and what it means that we are always attempting to read them from a particular cultural present. What cultural assumptions do we ourselves make about emotions—is fear regarded as a negative emotion that must be discounted somehow, and how does psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic work help us to form a different kind of connection with our bodies and emotional lives that might help us bring different questions to the past? There is a following remark that can be helpful when we think about what antisemitism has meant and what it might mean in the present: Our clear and simple language-games are not preparatory studies for a future regularisation of language—as if were first approximations, ignoring friction and air-resistance. The language-games are set up as

232  Victor Seidler objects of comparison which are meant to throw light on the facts of our language by way not only of similarities, but also of dissimilarities.24 For we can avoid ineptness or emptiness in our assertions only by presenting the model as what it is, as an object of comparison—as, so to speak, a measuring-rod; not as a preconceived idea to which reality must correspond. (The dogmatism into which we fall so easily in doing philosophy.)25

Antisemitisms across Time In The World Must Know, Michael Berenbaum writes: “Historians agree that the break between Judaism and Christianity followed the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70 CE. In the aftermath of this devastation, which was interpreted by Jew and Christian alike as a sign of divine punishment, the Gospels were recast to diminish Roman responsibility and emphasise Jewish culpability in the death of Jesus.”26 Christianity became reframed as a religion of power while still talking the language of weakness and poverty. A different narrative had to be shaped, but it is also important, with Wittgenstein, to recognise different sources of the break that are entangled with different interpretations of the destruction of the Temple. Texts matter as do relations within imperial power that can enforce their particular readings. As Carol Rittner and John Roth write in “What is Antisemitism?” in The Holocaust and the Christian World, “One result of that emphasis was that for nearly two thousand years, Jews were ‘depicted as the killers of the Son of God’ (the deicide charge). Christian ‘teachings of contempt’ for Jews and Judaism became embedded in the formation of Christian scriptures. It also found its way into the writing and preaching of some of the early Church Fathers—St. Augustine and St. John Chrysostom, for example.”27 Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin’s Why the Jews? quotes Chrysostom who draws on animal imagery saying, “The synagogue is worse that the brothel [. . .] It is the den of scoundrels and the repair of wild beasts [. . .] the temple of demons devoted to idolatrous cults [. . .] the cavern of devils [. . .] a place of meeting for the assassins of Christ [. . .] the refuge of devils.”28 Rittner and Roth also quote Gregory Baum, a Canadian Catholic theologian who, echoing Wittgenstein, says “that behind the straightforward and obvious of religion and culture are hidden trends which exercise a powerful influence on society and sustain the authority of existing institutions.”29 As Baum says in The Forward to Charlotte Klein’s Anti-Judaism in Christian Theology “to discover the ideological influences in one’s religion requires more intelligence and good will.”30 It becomes possible “only when these find expression in a great and terrible historical happening where the destructive power is too obvious to go unnoticed.” Talking of “the hatred and persecution of the Jews in Hitler’s Germany,” Baum says it is clear that “this terrible event, surpassing all that could be imagined, would not have

Masculinities, Carnal Israel  233 been possible if hostility to the Jews had not been fostered by Christian preaching which spoke of the Jews and Judaism almost from the beginning only in terms of rejection.”31 As Rittner and Roth also acknowledge, the negative theological symbols and language of contempt applied to the Jews did not disappear with the secular age. The negation of Jewish existence which the Christian churches had symbolised in their liturgy and doctrines, their sermons and teaching materials helped to produce an endless series of persecutions and pogroms. Monarchs and secular rulers incorporated these symbols in laws and social structures which, in turn, fuelled hatred of Jews by Christians who were often unaware of what had become a kind of compulsive hatred of Jews and Judaism. The humanist Erasmus once reportedly said, “If it is Christian to hate the Jews, then we are all good Christians.”32 But as Giles Fraser reminds us: Jesus wasn’t a Christian—the word exists for his followers and came later. He was Jewish [. . .] He pretty much followed the Jewish law, departing from it only in the name of what he saw as its deeper meaning. “For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished,” he insisted at the end of the Sermon on the Mount. Sure, he debated furiously with the Pharisees and Sadducees, especially about the significance of the Temple. And in time, this argument came to be restyled by Jesus’ gentile followers as an attack upon Jews per se. But originally it was an internal debate within Judaism, not an attack upon Jews from the outside [. . .] in the same way that the prophets of the Hebrew scriptures, such as Jeremiah, often attacked the priests of the temple for missing the point.33 As Fraser says, “It is a horrible irony, then, that Christianity bears primary responsibility for historical antisemitism. Few ideas can have been as poisonous as, and inspired more murderousness than, the idea that Jews were the Christ-killer. Of course, only the Romans had the legal authority to crucify someone: it was their signature way of dealing with troublemakers. But this fact became historically inconvenient for a religion that was eventually to place its global headquarters within Rome itself.” Fraser also notes helpfully, “While Christians regard the cross as an inevitable part of human salvation, for Jews it remains a symbol of centuries of oppression. And the right and proper Christian response to this is a confession of complicity, not a trumpeting of theological superiority.”34 In another piece for Independent Voices, Fraser asks more directly, “How did an instrument of Roman torture end up becoming a club badge for pious Christians? The cross was supposed to inspire terror, and those crucified made into a public spectacle of Roman imperial power. Crucifixion sent a

234  Victor Seidler message: we, the Romans, are in control. Defy us and die a horrible death.” He notes “According to the historian Eusebius, on the night before the battle of Milvian Bridge, the emperor had a vision of a cross of light under which was written ‘in this sign conquer’ [. . .] Thus the cross came to be appropriated for almost the opposite purpose from which it was intended.”35 It becomes the sign of a militarised Roman masculinity that can later be invoked for the Crusades. It is reflected in a tight body that cannot allow itself to feel vulnerable. It is a body that has to crush its enemy and is ready to use violence to prove its theological superiority. For Fraser, it is politically naïve to insist that “the cross is a symbol of human salvation and has nothing to do with politics [. . .] because the Gospel story makes it clear that Jesus was crucified as a threat to the authority of the empire.”36 He also questions in his Guardian piece the idea that Jesus’ death is a punishment by God for human wickedness. He pays the price of human sin on our behalf. This understanding of what Christian means by salvation—known technically as penal substitutionary atonement—was actually unknown in the early Church, though some Christians seem to think it is the only way of understanding the cross. They ignore the fact that it transforms God into some sort of psychopath who murders his own son as a magical way of dealing with endemic human wickedness.37 But following Wittgenstein, this leaves you wondering how these feelings of sin and the notion that Jesus somehow died for your sins gives a particular intensity, at different historical and cultural moments, to the idea that the Jews were somehow responsible for the death of Christ. How does the idea that Jesus died for our sins, which is a notion that can be difficult to carry emotionally, for it brings a sense of guilt and responsibility, get entangled in intimate ways with antisemitisms? There are processes of projection whereby emotions we cannot tolerate, let alone name directly, somehow help to shape violence against an enemy that is framed as always deserving whatever sufferings they get. As Rittner and Roth say, “For centuries Jews were cast outside the universe of moral obligation, placed beyond the boundaries of the normal care and concern people owe each other in the human community. After so many centuries of Christian ‘teaching of contempt,’ is it any wonder that Christians and their churches [. . .] were indifferent for the most part to the fate of the Jews during the Holocaust?” As Christians, they quote Gregory Baum again, “Has there been any criticism of the ideology which prevailed up to Auschwitz? Or do people speak as they always did?”38 They also note, without really saying how this could be achieved, Irving Greenberg’s assertion that “No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of the burning children”—but they do recognise, talking as Christians, “[i]f we fail to do so we shall never overcome the anti-Jewish bias in so much of Christian

Masculinities, Carnal Israel  235 theology.”39 I do not think that the language of “bias” is necessarily helpful but it itself needs to be questioned. Similarly, we need to question the ways they talk about “how the original message has been distorted.”40 As Doris L. Bergen writes in “Collusion, Resistance, Silence,” also in The Holocaust and the Christian World, in indirect ways the German Protestant Churches and institutions, did contribute to the execution of Nazi crimes. Centuries of Christian anti-Jewish teaching served as a precursor to Nazi antisemitism. Some German Protestants [. . .] took special pride in the anti-Semitic pronouncements of their German hero Martin Luther. Luther’s tract Against the Jews and Their Lies (1542), with its vicious characterisations of Jews as parasites and its calls to “set their synagogues and schools on fire,” was widely quoted and circulated in Hitler’s Germany. Some Protestants in Nazi Germany even claimed that Luther’s hatred of Jews proved that Protestants were more authentically German than were Catholics. Protestant Churches provided the Nazi authorities with records that facilitated the differentiation of Jews and “Aryans.” In 1933, in the crucial early days of Nazi rule, Protestant leaders played a significant role in legitimating Hitler’s regime.41 Bergen, author of Twisted Cross, notes that even the courageous Martin Niemöller, who spent the years 1938–45 in Nazi prisons and whose organisation evolved into the Confessing Church, so separating themselves from the so-called German Christians who championed an explicit synthesis of Protestant theology and Nazi ideology, characterised himself during the Nazi era as an antisemite.42 She recognised the rights of converts to Christianity within his Church but in the 30s and 40s, “remained convinced that Germany suffered from a ‘Jewish problem’ and he openly described the history of Jewish suffering as punishment for crucifying Jesus.”43 But she also recognises that some German Protestants, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was executed in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, “came to recognise that respect for Jews and Judaism was integral to genuine Christian faith. But such thinkers and activists remained a small, isolated minority, even within the Confessing Church.”44 Bergen argues, “Although fewer in number than their Catholic counterparts, Protestant dissenters also suffered terribly, and deserve to be remembered and honoured.” She notes, “Nazi authorities didn’t punish Protestants or Catholics because of their religion. Rather, they persecuted them for violating laws having nothing to do with their religion [. . .] Nazi planners marked the Jewish people and Gypsies for death and treated members of these groups as already dead, even if they remained physically alive. The only Christians regarded the same way were those deemed handicapped—‘lives unworthy of living’—and those defined under German law as Gypsies or Jews.”45 As Franklin H. Littell writes in The Crucifixion of The Jews, “Adolf

236  Victor Seidler Hitler, the Third Reich, the Aryan paragraphs, and the Death Camps—these were not accidental appearances in the heart of Christendom.”46 Even before the Shoah, there were a few Christian theologians who recognised the dangers that could follow from the long histories of Christian antisemitisms. James Parkes wrote in The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue (1934): The great and overwhelming majority of [. . .] Christians in the world, still believe that the Jews killed Jesus, that they are [. . .] rejected by God, that all the beauty of the Bible belongs to the Christian Church and not to those for whom it was written; and if on this ground [. . .] modern anti-Semites have reared a structure of racial and economic propaganda, the final responsibility still rests with those who prepared this soul and created the deformation of the people.47 As Franklin H. Littell has argued after Auschwitz has been lived through as a reality, “A number of Christian theologians now maintain that the Holocaust was a ‘watershed event’ also in the history of Christianity, perhaps the definitive event in the history of European Christendom [. . .] the murder of circa six million Jews, primarily during the years 1939–45, by baptised Christians in the heart of Christendom.”48 He notes, “until the rise of modern biblical studies, Christian realities were read back into the ‘Old Testament,’ and until the Holocaust there were—and shockingly to acknowledge, still are—scholars of eminence in great theological faculties who denigrated the significance of the Old Testament. Where the Old Testament was treasured in the churches, its connection with ‘the Jews’ was not part of the story.”49 He notes, “Maintaining the memory and memorialisation of the Holocaust is imperative for Christians as well as Jews.”50

Suffering and Indifference Europe took many decades before it was prepared to really remember and memorialise the murder of European Jewry. For years, people did not want to know, and they certainly did not want to be reminded of the fact that they had turned their backs and often showed indifference to the sufferings of the Jews. The railway lines to Auschwitz were never bombed, and Allied governments thought it would be a distraction from fighting to end the war. But if it is the indifference that hurts, there are also ways that within a dominant Greek/Christian culture people learn to endure pain as a way of affirming their masculinities. Often, it is a dominant patriarchal masculinity that sets the terms through which people learn to assess themselves. As Simone Weil grasped, people will not thank you for reminding them of connections they do not want to make—of the widespread indifference to the fate of European Jewry.51 Jan Karski, a Pole who did his best to let the world know about the Shoah, was shocked to discover after the war that

Masculinities, Carnal Israel  237 governments and people often claimed not to know what was going on. As he writes in How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust, The Lord assigned me a role to speak and write during the war, when— as it seemed to me—it might help. It did not. Furthermore, when the war came to its end, I learned that the governments, the leaders, the scholars, the writers did not know what had been happening to the Jews. They were taken by surprise. The murder of six million innocents was a secret [. . .] Then I became a Jew. Like the family of my wife—all of them perished in the ghettoes, in the concentration camps, in the gas chambers—so all murdered Jews became my family. But I am a Christian Jew. I am a practising Catholic. Although I am not a heretic, still my faith tells me that the second Original Sin has been committed by humanity [. . .] This sin will haunt humanity till the end of time. It does haunt me. And I want it to be so.52 Reflecting on suffering within the Jewish tradition, we find: “People are born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upwards.” (Job 5:7) “Not to know suffering means not to be a human being.” (Genesis Rabba 92:1) “Feel the tribulations of the individual and of the multitude, and ­implore God to ease their burden.” (Nachman of Breslov)

Notes 1. Gloria Tessler, “Dr Elsa Cayat,” The Jewish Chronicle, 23 January 2015, 53. 2. Anne Penketh, “Charlie Hebdo Cartoonist Wolinski’s Daughter: ‘I Don’t Think You Can Kill Ideas,’” The Guardian, 9 January 2015, available online at www. theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/08/cartoonist-wolinski-daughter-elsa-charliehebdo (accessed 23 November 2017). 3. Tessler, “Dr Elsa Cayat.” 4. Elsa Cayat, Un Homme + Une Femme=Quoi? (Paris: Grancher, 1998); Elsa Cayat, Le désir et la putain (Paris: Michel, 2007). 5. Tessler, “Dr Elsa Cayat.” 6. Elsa Cayat, La capacité de s’aimer (Paris: Payot, 2015). 7. Tessler, “Dr Elsa Cayat.” 8. Giles Fraser, “On the Slopes of Davos, What the Weak Could Teach the Strong,” The Guardian, 24 January 2015, available online at www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/belief/2015/jan/23/slopes-davos-what-weak-could-teach-strong (accessed 23 November 2017). 9. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 10. Victor J. Seidler, Unreasonable Men: Masculinity and Social Theory (London: Routledge, 1993). 11. Fraser, “On the Slopes of Davos.” An article which takes up the contradiction between the idea of a secular West against a medieval religious Islam is Daniel Wollenberg, “Defending the West: Cultural Racism and Pan-Europeanism on the Far-Right,” Postmedieval 5, no. 3 (2014): 308–19.

238  Victor Seidler 12. Giles Fraser, “Our Secular Salvation Myth Distances Us from Reality,” The Guardian, 21 November 2014, available online at www.theguardian.com/­ commentisfree/belief/2014/nov/21/secular-salvation-myth-distances-us-fromreality (accessed 23 November 2017). 13. John Dagenais, “The Postcolonial Laura,” Modern Languages Quarterly 65, no. 3 (2004): 365–89 (here 374). 14. Fraser, “Our Secular Salvation.” 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Julia McClure, “ISIS and the Politics of the Middle Ages,” History Matters— History Brought Alive by the University of Sheffield, 12 September 2004, available online at www.historymatters.group.shef.ac.uk/isis-politics-middle-ages/ (accessed 23 November 2017). 18. Victor J. Seidler, Jewish Philosophy and Western Culture: A Modern Introduction (London: Tauris, 2007). 19. See, for example, Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), and his A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 20. Seidler, Jewish Philosophy and Western Culture, for example Chapter 3: “Reading, Texts and the Human Body,” 44–54. 21. Victor J. Seidler, Kant, Respect and Injustice: The Limits of Liberal Moral Theory (London: Routledge, 1986). 22. Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (Tübingen: Mohr, 1904). 23. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), 129. 24. Ibid., 130. 25. Ibid., 131. 26. Michael Berenbaum, The World Must Know: A History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1993), 7. 27. Carol Rittner and John Roth, “What Is Antisemitism?” in The Holocaust and the Christian World: Reflections on the Past, Challenges for the Future, ed. Carol Rittner, Stephen D. Smith, and Irena Steinfeld (London: Kuperard, 2000), 34–36 (here 35). 28. Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin, Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1983), 94. 29. Rittner and Roth, “What Is Antisemitism?” 39. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Rittner and Roth, The Holocaust and the Christian World, 40. 33. Giles Fraser, “Christians Must Understand that for Jews the Cross Is a Sign of Oppression,” The Guardian, 25 April 2014, available online at www.the guardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/25/jews-cross-symbol-of-oppressionchristians (accessed 23 November 2017). 34. Ibid. 35. Giles Fraser, “The Cross Is a Symbol of Cruelty, Not a Club Badge,” The Independent, 8 April 2012, available online at www.independent.co.uk/ voices/commentators/giles-fraser-the-cross-is-a-symbol-of-cruelty-not-a-clubbadge-7626854.html (accessed 23 November 2017). 36. Fraser, “Christians Must Understand.” 37. Ibid. 38. Rittner and Roth, The Holocaust and the Christian World, 40. 39. Ibid., 41. 40. Ibid., 39.

Masculinities, Carnal Israel  239 41. Doris L. Bergen, “Collusion, Resistance, Silence: Protestants and the Holocaust,” in The Holocaust and the Christian World: Reflections on the Past, Challenges for the Future, ed. Carol Rittner, Stephen D. Smith, and Irena Steinfeldt (London: Kuperard, 2000), 48–54 (here 50). 42. Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1966). 43. Bergen, “Collusion, Resistance, Silence,” 50. 44. Ibid. 50. 45. Ibid., 53. 46. Franklin Hamlin Littell, The Crucifixion of the Jews (New York: Harper & Row, 1975). 47. James Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue: A Study in the Origins of Antisemitism (London: Soncino Press, 1934), 59. 48. Ibid., 231. 49. Ibid., 233. 50. Ibid., 234. 51. This is a remark that comes from Simone Weil’s notebook, a selection of which is collected in Gravity and Grace (New York: Routledge, 2008). For a wider discussion of Weil’s development that helps to place her thinking in context, see, for instance, Lawrence Blum and Victor J. Seidler, A Truer Liberty: Simone Weil and Marxism (New York: Routledge, 1991). 52. E. Thomas Wood and Stanisław Jankowski, Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust (New York: Wiley, 1994), 236.

Part VI

Blood Libel and Ritual Murder Allegations

15 The Ritual Murder Accusation as Medieval Invention Linking Libels and Boy Martyrs Miriamne Ara Krummel

The tale about and accusation of ritual murder, emerging in the twelfth century, is a cultural phenomenon with roots in antiquity and links to modern times. Consider, for instance, Cordelia Heß and Jonathan Adams’s “A Rational Model for Blood Libel: The Aftonbladet Affair,” in this section of Jew-Hatred. Heß and Adams’s piece touches upon the early moments of the ritual murder accusation, tracing the tale back to 1144, as a way of charting a path from the libel’s early beginnings to the Aftonbladet affair that erupted in 2009. Heß and Adams arrive at the conclusion that the links are situated in the “basic structure” of both the medieval and modern iterations of an anti-Jewish libel that Jews sacrifice Christian children to mix Christian blood in Jewish food. As Heß and Adams see it, the unsubstantiated medieval belief that Jews kill(ed) Christians for “ritual purposes” has evolved into the more “rational” modern fantasy that Jews will go to any lengths for “economic gain.”1 Like the modern version’s reliance on an earlier medieval iteration of the libel, the medieval version is also built upon an earlier narrative: the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ Crucifixion.2 This chapter reflects on the reoccurrence of this medieval libel that has an uncanny ability to reappear at will and exist outside of the constraints of time exhibiting a “sempiternal nature” of being able to fold the time of then and now to become “a synchronistic religious act.”3 There is a disturbingly ugly desire to position the Jew—in the medieval past and even now in our present day—in the role of Christ-killer.4 This performance for the Jew brings us directly to Richard Utz’s injunction in Medievalism: A Manifesto: “medievalists have an ethical obligation to investigate and historicize religion and theology.”5 My essay tries to do such investigative work with three medieval versions of the blood libel tale: the first harkens back to a death that occurred in 1144 and is told by Thomas of Monmouth; the second is recorded by Matthew Paris and dated 1255; the third is narrated by Geoffrey Chaucer’s character, the Prioress, who closes her anti-Judaic tale with a reference to Hugh of Lincoln—­ allegedly martyred by Jews in 1255 as Matthew Paris claims. These three legends are intricately linked, and this essay explores that interconnection.

244  Miriamne Ara Krummel This chapter is concerned with the development of the ritual murder tale as it moves from Thomas’s narrative about William of Norwich’s alleged martyrdom; to Matthew’s account of the Jews’ supposed sacrifice of Hugh of Lincoln; to close with Chaucer’s fictional Prioress and her fantasy about the Jews’ murder of a young boy that the Prioress identities as a “litel clergeon” (a young schoolboy). This paper interrogates the gestures toward both temporal inclusion and temporal exclusion made by Thomas, Matthew, and the Prioress. In doing so, this chapter studies how the Jew is dangerously situated inside of—is included in—sacred Christian temporality and forever cast in a fantasy of Jewish violence that brings Thomas of Monmouth, Matthew Paris, and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Prioress to circle back to stories narrated in the Gospel accounts; the Jew also bi-locates outside of—is excluded from—secular Christian temporality as the eternal Other always destined to be written about rather than allowed to be living in the civil Christian world.6 The fantasies of Thomas, Matthew, and the Prioress promote this psychically fraught situation in between secular and sacred time. Starting with the conviction that the in-and-out-of-time Jew is cast in religiously impossible situations, this paper traces how Thomas, Matthew, and the Prioress both separately and together create narratives that generate inflammable responses that come to epitomise the actions and thinking in annus domini (the year of our lord) temporality.7

Combustible Inventions and New Technologies The ritual murder accusation is an invention. Traditionally, inventions figure as creative solutions to a lack in the world. Inventions offer positive ways to fill the gaps in our lives. The light bulb, the dishwasher, the automobile, the cell phone: these inventions simplify our lives, and we cannot imagine living without them. Medieval inventions were no different. Consider the appearance of fantasies about “ornithopters,” or mechanical hybrids described in the works of Roger Bacon; the glider tested by Spanish Arab scientist Abbas Ibn Firnas (c. 875); and the bird-man experiments of Eilmer, as told by William of Malmesbury (c. 1140); these medieval inventions “all constitute a medieval prehistory for the modern glider, helicopter, and airplane.”8 Although there are many dimensions to inventions, my characterising the ritual murder accusation as an invention, admittedly runs counter to the standard view of inventions. Inventions offer us the pleasure of newness, as Patricia Clare Ingham writes; even so, innovation can also threaten to upset the standard ways of life.9 To ease anxieties, then, the best inventions combine the old with the new so as to lessen the inevitable tension between past, present, and future. The most comforting medieval inventions do not shatter their relationship with the old, as Ingham notes, but rather build on that contact with the past through a “culture of artistic copying” that emerges as a “dynamic” interconnectedness.10

Ritual Murder Accusation  245 Thomas’s, Matthew’s, and the Prioress’s anti-Judaic libels are dynamically interconnected. Thomas’s anti-Judaic libel figures as another brilliant medieval innovation whose storyline and plot are affirmed by their reappearance in Matthew’s monastic history; following this reappearance, the libel finds a future in the Prioress’s Marian miracle. Thomas’s invention, in essence, perfects medieval anti-Judaism and folds so perfectly into ideas of sempiternity that its afterlife—in both the medieval, modern, and contemporary worlds—effectively models the utility of reusing narratives of antisemitism. Materialising as a new invention with roots in the old, where the “old” figures as the Crucifixion story offering the satisfying wholesomeness of community and the boundless pleasures of myths, Thomas’s libel renders William’s violent death an echo of Jesus’. Thomas’s libellous story, a hagiography that undermines the positions of Jews in the (Christian) social community, is the first of its kind to excoriate Jews in this way and also resonates as a new genre that will reappear frequently at different temporal and historical intersection. Thomas’s ritual murder accusation, thus, figures as a new medieval invention that unites itself with an earlier and different sort of a medieval new from the sixth century—that is, the invention of Christian time. Two events standardised Christian time. The authors of these events are Dionysius Exiguus (c. 470–544) and the Venerable Bede (c. 672–735). By calculating a Christian calendar based on a dating system that begins with a miraculous birth that involves a woman, a god, an angel, and a terribly gruesome death orchestrated by Jews, Dionysius Exiguus, probably innocently, mixes the telling of time with scapegoating, xenophobia, and violence. Even more, Dionysius’ calculations for a Paschal Table that could serve Christian need to tell time eventually renders distant and outmoded other time-keeping methods that still prevailed in the sixth century, such as Egyptian time, Roman time, agricultural time, and Jewish time.11 Bede’s eighth-century efforts further enforced a normative time by deploying annus domini in his histories. Thus, when Bede marks moments with anno domini in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, he creates a temporal cataclysm by uniting incarnational time with historical time.12 Bede’s work creates a significant temporal shift: Bede introduces a time-keeping method that collapses Christian sacred and secular time.13 Annus domini, based on a liturgical calendar that loops death and violence into a repeating cycle, figures also as a perpetual rupture from Jewish time.14 As Ambrose explains in Cain and Abel, when one number is added to another number, the first number disappears, making this argument to point to Judaism’s expected disappearance with the ascendancy of Christianity.15 Even more troubling than the embedded necessity of the expected erasure of another faith system, the Christian calendar hinges on a highly charged and deeply dangerous moment for Jews because Easter reminds Christians of Jesus’ death, and at Easter, Jews are positioned as the crucifiers of Christ. Importantly, Easter cannot be calculated without the Jewish

246  Miriamne Ara Krummel calendar and 14 Nisan, Erev Pesaḥ (the evening that marks the beginning of Passover).16 Forever locked inside of a fantasy of fear and vengeance, Jews do not materialise as physically Real in Christian time: Jews collapse into Christian time as uncivil, barbaric, violent, and evil one-dimensional props. Christians define time; Jews are defined by time. Thomas begins his story of William’s death on Passover.

The Hidden Narrative of Annus Domini Temporality The Passover/Easter temporal juncture in annus domini recalls a moment when a wound was opened that, for Christians, has not been healed. Thomas of Monmouth’s Life and Passion shows signs of recognizing the potential for creating a narrative we now call “ritual murder accusation.”17 The ritual murder accusation reveals that there is no possibility for a parallel Jewish time that is not always already framed by Christian time: Jews are typecast as villainous and homicidal actors in a drama of Christian temporality. Thomas of Monmouth composed Life and Passion in 1149/50—five to six years after William’s death—with no actual evidence outside hearsay and “common knowledge” about “Christian-killing Jews.”18 Thomas uses the potential for social and civic rupture between two neighbouring peoples with fatally interlocking temporalities to good effect when he situates William’s death on, as Miri Rubin calculates, “the evening of 20 March in 1144.”19 In a text concerned with arguing for the sainthood of a young boy, William of Norwich, a fair amount of energy in the first book is devoted to pinning William’s death on a community of Jews who operate as a “hivemind” rather than as distinct individuals.20 Thomas’s hagiography, a document that lays the claim for a person’s sainthood, creates a space where antisemitism can flourish and where the Jews’ behaviour hardly differs from that retold in the Gospel accounts. Thomas’s Life and Passion, thus, focuses its energies upon designing a scapegoat that is responsible for William’s death and in doing so, returns to the roots of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ final moments and writes William’s end-time as a type of crucifixion. In this creative enterprise, Thomas squarely situates readers in the violence of Christ’s death. As a document that rides on a certain vision of Christian messianic time, Life and Passion shows us that annus domini time—the time that has become a temporal standard for the world—is actually a temporality built on brutality, violence, and antisemitism.21 For Jews, as well as Christians, there is no temporal escape from the circular Christian time that folds in on itself (history repeats itself). Of the Jews’ behaviour, Thomas writes that the Jews acted “in mockery of the Passion of the Cross,” and Thomas’s words resonate strongly in a liturgical calendar that blends past and present to create a time of fear and crisis that culminates in a future apocalypse. In Thomas’s present, “the enemies of the Christian name ran riot around the boy in such a spirit of evil [that] there were others among them who, in mockery of the Passion of the Cross, sentenced

Ritual Murder Accusation  247 him to be crucified.”22 William’s body is imagined as undergoing severe and ritualised dismemberment, much like that endured by Jesus in the Gospel accounts of his crucifixion; as such, Thomas effectively fashions the perfect medieval invention that rides on a cycle of Christian victimhood, with Christians repeatedly coming into contact with murderous, saint-­making Jews. In this way, history repeats itself.

Concretising a Tradition The terminus a quo of this paper brings us to 1144 and Thomas of Monmouth’s Life and Passion when, to pull from Gavin Langmuir’s characterisation, “an investigation was pursued unofficially by an individual who arrived on the scene after the crime, disagreed with the official stand, pursued his own investigation, and reported the results.”23 The terminus ad quem can also be pinned to a specific year. Chaucer likely penned “The Prioress’s Tale” on 26 March 1387 when King Richard II and Queen Anne visited Lincoln.24 Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale” is a fiction indebted to the Miracle of the Virgin genre.25 Thomas, Matthew, and the Prioress long for a familiar past and present and future with clearly delineated binaries (evil Jew and good Christian) and with Jews who want to kill and to rekill Jesus. Thomas first and Matthew after him take the sterile word rendered passive on the pages of the New Testament and lend it life. And so, a story re-lives itself in the drama of a little boy martyr. Thomas’s boy, “twelve years old at the time and innocent indeed” becomes an important refrain in the Christian calendar as the Jews set their sights on William “at the beginning of Lent.”26 Matthew’s Hugh, a mere “eight years of age,” experiences an equally Christ-like death: the Jews “beat him till the blood flowed [. . .] they crowned him with thorns, derided him, and spat upon him.”27 The Prioress’s litel clergeon is “seven yeer of age” (seven years old), and his narrative is embedded in the eternity offered by the Marian miracle and Mary’s incredible intercessory skills.28 These medieval ritual murder libels build upon each other: Thomas’s hagiography, The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, composed in the second half of the twelfth century, is considered to be the first Western antiJewish ever told about Jewish ritual sacrifice of Christians (outside of the Gospel accounts); the mid-thirteenth-century antisemitic story in Matthew’s monastic chronicle, Chronica majora, is a simulation of Thomas’s with a few new dramatic plot twists; Geoffrey Chaucer’s late-fourteenth century “Prioress’s Tale,” stands as the third narrative in this lineage. These three accounts begin and end with episodes of violence for little sacrificed boys and a community of Jews who have sacrificed these little boys.29 Each of the libellous accounts also works as another episode that echoes the need for a Christian child to be sacrificed by Jews in the Christian liturgical calendar. Christian temporality is, thus, frozen in an ever reverberating fantasy of proving one’s vigilance and loyalty again and again and again.30

248  Miriamne Ara Krummel To design this invention, Thomas makes full use of thus-far unlinked material for his narrative by fusing four key ingredients that separately figured in the Norwich English culture: one, a Saxon community displaced and deterritorialised by Normans;31 two, a Norman cathedral built on land that maintained cultural significance to the Saxons;32 three, a recently dead young village boy who could claim “honest” English lineage;33 and, four, a Jewish community imported by the Normans to run money-lending businesses for the monarchy.34 To this well-wrought fusion of things, Thomas adds Christian temporality by seeking to sanctify William of Norwich’s death at the hand of Jews in the annus domini calendar at the Passover/Easter juncture: on this date in 1144, likely a date strategically selected by Thomas of Monmouth, the Christian and Jewish calendars collide as Thomas’s moment of sanctification/the first account of ritual murder in Latin Christendom occurs on 20 March 1144, which is also Erev Pesaḥ (the eve of Passover), Monday night of 14 Nisan 4904. Thomas assembles more furniture from Christian temporality to cement his claim about William through the mythic and cultic nature of visions, especially the dream vision about Herbert de Losinga. Thomas has his first vision in 1150—six years after William’s 1144 death. Thomas is visited “on Tuesday of the first week of Lent [7 March 1150]” by a vision of Bishop Herbert de Losinga, the “first founder of the church of Norwich.”35 The vision-Herbert demands that Thomas have William’s body translated from the outside to the inside of the church “as soon as possible [. . .] or they [the monks] will quickly lose him.”36 Thomas’s vision of Herbert is likely a carefully crafted invention that settles the growing unease in Norwich “between the cathedral priory and the city.”37 Thomas then sets his sights on the new denizens of Norwich—the Jews—upon whom Thomas too easily pins the death of the young Christian boy, William.38 Another ritual murder accusation circling around the death of a young boy surfaces in Lincoln and is relayed through a monastic history chronicled by Matthew Paris. As with Thomas of Monmouth’s tale, Matthew Paris’s legend is firmly situated in the Christian timescape: “about the time of the festival of the apostles of Peter and Paul.”39 To his legend, Matthew Paris adds his peculiar vision of a gathering of Jews. Similar to Thomas of Monmouth’s hagiography, Matthew Paris’s legend of the happenings at medieval Lincoln in 1255 is also pure invention. Matthew replays the story that the Jews of Lincoln assembled in a large number solely for the purpose of sacrificing a young boy.40 By depicting the Jews as “grinding and gnashing their teeth,” Matthew dehumanises Jews and, thus, renders them as disposable as animals.41 Matthew’s work with Hugh of Lincoln met with success and remained part of the record in Butler’s Lives of the Saints until the publication of the 1988 edition.42 “The Prioress’s Tale” closes with a direct reference to Hugh of Lincoln, one of the Minster’s saints. The Prioress’s invocation of Hugh of Lincoln’s alleged martyrdom circles back to Matthew Paris’s thirteenth-century monastic chronicle, Chronica majora, and in doing so embeds the 1255

Ritual Murder Accusation  249 libel with the authority of historical fact. To the pilgrims in the story, the tale is quite real and has immediate affects upon the merry crew of pilgrims by sobering their gaiety.43 In “The Prioress’s Tale,” a “litel clergeon” (young schoolboy) sings a hymn to the Virgin Mary every morning and afternoon as he walks through a Jewish community (a “Jewerye”) to and from school.44 The song to the Virgin only passed through the little boy’s mouth when he travelled through the “Jewerye”: Twies a day it passed thurgh his throte, To scoleward and homward whan he went.

The litel clergeon is silenced by the Jews, who are pushed to murder the boy through Satan’s encouragement (“the serpent Sathanas, / That hath in Jues herte his waspes nest, / Up swal” [the serpent Satan that has swallowed up the Jews’ heart in his wasp nest]).45

The Genre of Sacred Narratives Repeating a tale mired in a Crucifixion drama that perpetually entangles Jews and Christians in a story of violence and temporal cataclysm, the ritual murder accusation shows itself to be deeply invested in anti-Judaic gestures oft rehearsed throughout the medieval period by “Christian authorities— chroniclers, preachers, town officials.”46 To Thomas, William’s gruesome death and afterlife as a saint is a testimonial to God’s restorative presence on earth. In a tale dated anno domini 1255 that clearly resonates with the Crucifixion story, Matthew attributed Hugh of Lincoln’s death to a Jewish assembly gathered to “sacrifice” a kidnapped boy. Unlike Thomas’s Life and Passion, which Thomas worked assiduously to peddle as truth, “The Prioress’s Tale” begins and ends as a fiction that does, nevertheless, have a deeply sobering effect upon the other fictional pilgrims en route to Canterbury. As the narrator of the Canterbury Tales reports: “Whan seyd was al this miracle, every man/As sobre was that wonder was to se” (After the miracle was told, every man was left pensive after such a wonder).47 To the narrator of the Canterbury pilgrimage, the litel clergeon’s ability to sing after having his throat carved up by Jews (“he with throte ykorven” [he with a throat carved up]) is at once a “miracle” and a “wonder.”48 These three ritual murder tales admittedly belong to different genres both in their own time and now in ours.49 Thomas’s Life is a hagiography, and as a saint’s life, Thomas’s Life and Passion is intricately bound up by and in Church doctrine. But Thomas’s narrative about William of Norwich’s death is also fantastical and a “fable” built on hearsay collected sometime after a twelve-year-old boy’s death. Thomas’s new story captivated Christians because the discovery, so-to-speak, of ritual murder accusation lends credence to the Easter story and Christ’s crucifixion.50 To quote Gavin Langmuir, William of Norwich, “was a symbol of Christ’s truth.”51 So was Hugh

250  Miriamne Ara Krummel of Lincoln both for Matthew and for the Prioress. Composing a monastic chronicle or what Richard Vaughn considers a “domestic hagiology,” Matthew was undoubtedly building on the foundation laid by Thomas’s work yet also developing a tale that was even more fantastical than Thomas’s.52 Both Thomas and Matthew assemble their stories in Christian time. Their plots share the critical detail of a young Christian boy pitted against bloodthirsty Jews who feature evil intent. Thomas’s William was twelve; Matthew’s Hugh was eight.53 “The Prioress’s Tale” invokes Matthew’s hagiology as a way of investing her tale with sacred history and strongly situating her tale in annus domini. Her tale may be a fiction for us but is not so for the sobered pilgrims, who need an immediate restorative after the Prioress’s Miracle story. As Harry Bailey, the leader of the pilgrims, demands after the Prioress completes the narrative of her tale: “‘Telle us a tale of myrthe, and that anon’” (Tell us a funny tale and do that quickly).54 Assembled around the story of a “litel clergeon, seven yeer of age” (a young schoolboy of seven years), the Prioress reinforces her tale’s position in Latin Christendom with her prayers for spiritual guidance and intercessory assistance from God and Mary.55 The Prioress’s Christian time is darkened by community-destroying Jews, who have penetrated Latin Christendom only to undermine its peace and tranquillity: Amonges Cristene folk a Jewerye, Sustened by a lord of that contree For foule usure and lucre of vilenye, Hateful to Crist and to his compaignye.56 Among Christians there was a ghetto Sustained by a lord of that country For filthy usury and evil money handling That is hated by Christ and his disciples.

In “The Prioress’s Tale,” the Jewish crime—murdering the litel clergeon and dumping his body in a “privee place”—is authorised by—in fact, even an echo of the episode endured by—“yonge Hugh of Lyncoln, slayn also/With cursed Jews, as it is notable”.57 Whether representing themselves as fact or fiction, these tales all belong to a larger genre, the ritual murder accusation.

Out of (Historical) Time The historical realities of these boys fade into a backdrop as each boy’s images of martyrdom and sacred truth occupy the space vacated by the boys’ actual physical presence. In essence, the boys’ deaths become driving forces as their actual lives disappear into invisibility, merely shadowing Christ’s crucifixion. As simulations of Christ’s crucifixion experience, the

Ritual Murder Accusation  251 martyred boys’ bodies can then be used to orchestrate libels against the Jewish communities in their midst.58 The ritual murder accusation presents itself in multiple secular and sacred temporalities. Thomas’s tale, for instance, exists in and out of time. Thomas’s twelfth-century tale echoes a moment when Christian time begins or rather the calculations for a Christian time hinge on a central moment in the annus domini calendar: Jesus’ crucifixion. Thomas’s fusion of past and present, then, touches the thirteenth-century future and provides the evidence for Matthew’s monastic chronicling of Hugh’s fantastical sacrifice in Lincoln—a sacrifice that most likely never was and probably had been, instead, the wedding of Belaset, daughter of Magister Benedict fil’ Moses.59 Matthew’s libel also looks backward to central moments of extreme violence in the annus domini calendar. Even more, Thomas’s invention, albeit a doubtful present organised around improbable stories, gains authority when it becomes echoed in Matthew’s equally fallacious libellous account. Matthew’s hagiology then achieves canonisation, as it were, through Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Prioress’s Tale” as the closing invocation to Hugh of Lincoln serves as incontrovertible evidence and appears as a validation to her tale’s truth: O yonge Hugh of Lyncoln, slayn also With cursed Jewes, as it is notable, For it is but a litel while ago.60 O young Hugh of Lincoln, slain also By cursed Jews, as it is known, For it is but a little while ago.

Here in these closing eight words—“For it is but a litel while ago”—the Prioress overlays Hugh of Lincoln’s putatively sacred death with the litel clergeon’s murder-by-Jews trope and compresses an otherwise meaningful temporal distance of approximately one hundred and thirty years (between 1387 and 1255) into proximate times (“a litel while ago”). Packaged as a “litel” time (so near, so cute, so quaint, so packable) circles back to the youth (twelve, eight, and seven) and size (“litel”) of the boys, reminding us of the enormity of the event that threatens to subsume the small boys whose deaths are enlarged to resonate as martyrdoms and, thus, serve a sacred performance. In refashioning a distant past in a neighbouring time—with the word “litel”—the Prioress text brings all three libellous stories to a fictionalised future. William, Hugh, and the clergeon are all too-young and too-dead to speak for themselves. The well positioned, articulate, religious elders (Thomas, Matthew, the Prioress) silence the boys through stories about the boys’ saintly afterlives that outsize them. But perhaps it is the ultimate fiction of these accounts that makes them so appealing and that gathers people behind their perpetual repetition?

252  Miriamne Ara Krummel

In Sum: The Totality of It All Thomas, Matthew, and the Prioress are unable to see the humanity of Jews—to see Jews performing in their own time and outside the rubric and strictures of annus domini temporality, that demand a spectral utility for Jews and that always circle back (a return of the repressed) to the Gospel accounts as a hinge pin of history. In front of the anti-Judaic narratives told and retold in the work of Thomas of Monmouth, Matthew Paris, and the Prioress are the outlines of stories of a lost self that nurtures belief in fantasies, hides behind screens, and can think only of banal hate.61 Mired in the myths that mobilise her world, the Prioress cannot examine critically the authenticity of her antisemitic story. Nor can Thomas or Matthew. Invested in his hagiography, Thomas perceives the death of anyone who crosses his desires as justified. Thomas experiences no remorse, for instance, over the gory end of Sheriff John’s life because John protected the Jews: because Sheriff John “has withdrawn the Jews from justice [. . .] he began to suffer from an incurable disease [. . .] drops of blood began to flow, drop by drop, through his posterior.”62 Thomas also expresses little concern over the death suffered by Prior Elias because Elias arranges to have “the cloth so vilely removed from holy William’s tomb”; in fact, strangely enough, Thomas sanctions William’s after-death vengeance as the boy martyr “rightly punished [. . .] the hard-hearted prior.”63 Matthew, who “thought of his chronicle, primarily, as a history of England,”64 situates history in a domestic hagiology, and, as Bede did before him, promotes history being subsumed by a religious calendar. Situating historical time as subservient to religious time, Matthew Paris slavishly repeats a clear invention of a Jewish sacrifice in Lincoln in anno domini 1255 even though this ritual murder accusation remains visibly out of sync with his other accounts of kings, popes, and important or remarkable men in his Chronica majora. *** As we replay and rehearse violent episodes in our lives, we are trapped in moments when our concern with a future afterlife and a past death overwhelms our present lives. I end by turning us to the close of “The Prioress’s Tale.” The Prioress’s litel clergeon, seized in an alley and held down as his throat is cut, remains forever in his reliquary—“his tombe of marbul stones cleere” (his tomb of clear marble stones).65 The Prioress via Chaucer tells us, “Ther he is now” (There he is now).66 These martyrs and victims are all still there. Victims all, they return with a vengeance to remind us that stories of violence and trauma—whether ontologically real experiences or fantasies invented out of whole cloth—reopen injuries that reverberate in our world as unhealed wounds and missing limbs that have not and cannot heal.67 The living are left with the difficult task of discerning the difference between imagined and real traumas while also making peace with the past.

Ritual Murder Accusation  253

Notes Note: Cordelia Heß and Jonathan Adams have been extraordinary editors in showing their commitment to and vision for this important volume. I thank them both. This essay was completed while I was serving as a research fellow at the Frankel Institute for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. I would like to extend a thank you to Stanley Frankel for his generous support of this Institute and to my research assistant, Mayan Herman, for helping me prepare the manuscript. This essay reflects my thinking in a forthcoming book, Medieval Jews, In and Out of Time. 1. See Heß and Adams, “A Rational Model for the Blood Libel” in this volume. 2. The Gospel accounts, materialising as moments of extreme violence, appear and reappear as mainstays in medieval culture. On violence and the Crucifixion, see Anthony Bale, Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), esp. 30–64; and Robert Mills, Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), esp. 47–49. Christ’s body is an open wound that reinforces the “exclusion” and “inclusion” inherent in the established “community,” Sarah Beckwith explains in Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture, and Society in Late Medieval Writings (New York: Routledge, 1993), 30–44, 34. 3. Richard Utz, Medievalism: A Manifesto (Kalamazoo: Arc Humanities Press: 2017), 74, 75. See also Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 4. On this subject, see Jeremy Cohen, Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Miriamne Ara Krummel, “Staging Encounters: The Touch of the Medieval Other,” Postmedieval 7 (2016): 147–60. 5. Utz, Medievalism, 78. 6. One literal example of this temporal exclusion is made visible in “The Prioress’s Tale” when Chaucer’s Prioress notes that the Jews of her tale live in “a Jewerye” (VII 489: a ghetto) that is “Sustened by a lord of that contree / For foule usure and lucre of vileynye” (VII 490–91: Sustained by a lord of that country / For filthy usury and evil money handling). “The Prioress’s Tale” is taken from Larry D. Benson, gen. ed., Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 209–12, and cited according to the line number in the notes. All translations from Chaucer’s Middle to our modern English are my own. There also existed a wish that Jews be removed from Jerusalem, “the scene of the Crucifixion and Resurrection”: see Christopher Tyerman, Fighting for Christendom: Holy War and The Crusades (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 7. With “annus domini” (the year of our Lord), I refer to Christian time in general. The perhaps more familiar “anno domini” (in the year of our Lord) measures out annual units of time, such as anno domini 1255. In this distinction, I follow Bede: see Bede: The Reckoning of Time, trans. Faith Wallis (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999). On the subject of anno domini time, see Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism & Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 8. My examples of medieval inventions are taken from Patricia Clare Ingham, The Medieval New: Ambivalence in an Age of Innovation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 112. 9. Ingham, The Medieval New, touches upon the ambivalences that surface in times of change; see 194–97.

254  Miriamne Ara Krummel 10. Ibid., 6. 11. Daniel P. McCarthy discusses the Paschal Table in “The Emergence of Anno Domini,” in Time and Eternity: The Medieval Discourse, ed. Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno-Riaño (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 31–53 (here 32). Wesley Stevens mentions other time-keeping systems in “A Present Sense of Things Past: Quid est enim tempus?” in Time and Eternity, 9–28 (here 17). 12. Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty, 104. See also McCarthy, “The Emergence of Anno Domini,” 46–47. 13. Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty, 3, points out that Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) both rely on a “globalised Christian calendar.” 14. On the liturgical calendar, see Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 15. Ambrose, Hexameron, Paradise, and Cain and Abel, trans. John J. Savage (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1961), 360–62. 16. Quartodecimans hold 14 Nisan as a central date in the Christian calendar because they believe that Jesus was crucified on this date; see Bede: The Reckoning of Time, xxxv–xxxvi, 126–29; and Elisheva Carlebach, Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 11. 17. See Hannah Johnson, Blood Libel: The Ritual Murder Accusation at the Limit of Jewish History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012). “Ritual murder accusation” offers more clarity of expression than “blood libel,” which is a less distinctive and more global designation of a local event. The ritual murder accusation certainly resonates as one of the “anti-Jewish tales,” like the host desecration accusation, that circulated in the Middle Ages: see Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late-Medieval Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), at 4. 18. 1144 is the year when William of Norwich died, but Thomas of Monmouth started composing his hagiography in 1150; see Miri Rubin, trans. and ed., The Life and Passion of William of Norwich (New York: Penguin, 2014), x, 5, 6. 19. See Rubin, Life and Passion, 209 n. 27. 20. See Richard Cole, “One or Several Jews? The Jewish Massed Body in Old Norse Literature,” Postmedieval 5 (2014): 346–58 (here 354), where Cole speaks of the “hive-mind” projected onto Jewish figures in a select group of texts from Old Norse literature. 21. Agamben has useful commentary on messianic time and the way that sacred temporality has imposed itself upon our vision of secular time. See his The Church and the Kingdom, trans. Leland De La Durantaye (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2012); and also The Time That Remains. 22. Rubin, Life and Passion, 17. 23. Gavin I. Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 209. 24. See Sumner Ferris, “Chaucer at Lincoln (1387): The Prioress’s Tale as a Political Poem,” The Chaucer Review 15 (1981): 295–321. Ferris’s reasoning includes the invocation (295–96), the five saints mentioned throughout the poem (296), and the Lincoln Minster’s connection to the cult of the virgin (297). 25. See Anthony Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms, 1350–1500 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 56–59; and Adrienne Williams Boyarin, Miracles of the Virgin in Medieval England: Law and Jewishness in Marian Legends (Rochester: D. S. Brewer, 2010), 149–64. 26. Rubin, Life and Passion, 13. 27. Matthew Paris’s English History from the Year 1235 to 1273, trans. rev. J. A. Giles, vol. 3 (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854), 138. Hereafter, all references to

Ritual Murder Accusation  255 the English version of Matthew Paris’s tale will be taken from this edition and cited in the notes. 28. Chaucer, “The Prioress’s Tale,” VII 502. 29. I use the term, “blood libel” or “libel” to refer to the generic impulse to demonise medieval Jews, but I follow Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales, Alan Dundes, and Hannah Johnson, Blood Libel, in preferring the specificity of the term, ­“ritual murder accusation,” to refer to the genre of the libel told by Thomas of ­Monmouth, then Matthew Paris, and following Matthew, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Prioress. See Alan Dundes, “The Ritual Murder or Blood Libel Legend: A Study of Anti-Semitic Victimization through Projective Inversion,” in The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes (Madison: ­University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 336–66. 30. This repeating drama reminds me of Steven Kruger’s notions of and remarks about proving one’s commitment to the Christian system in a continual state of having to convert again and again and again or as Kruger writes, “the yet and yet and yet”: see his “The Times of Conversion,” Philological Quarterly 92 (2013): 19–30, esp. 28–29. 31. For a fine discussion of the Anglo-Norman colonisation of Norwich, see Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “The Flow of Blood in Medieval Norwich,” Speculum 79, no. 1 (2004): 26–65. 32. The Norman Cathedral, where Thomas served as a monk, had been built on land with cultural significance to the displaced native English: Thorpe Wood, where Thomas’s body turns up; this site is also the former location of the Saxon Emporium. On the issue of the Saxon Emporium, see James Campbell, ­“Norwich before 1300,” in Medieval Norwich, ed. Carole Rawcliffe and Richard Wilson (New York: Hambledon and London, 2004), 45–47. 33. Thomas of Monmouth explains that William is a local Norwich boy raised by “lowly parents”—Elviva and Wenstan—who “passed their lives as honest people in the country” (Rubin, The Life and Passion, 10). 34. Campbell, “Norwich before 1300,” 39, 42. Robin Mundill, England’s Jewish Solution: Experiment and Expulsion, 1262–1290 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 16, cites the Gesta Roman Anglorum, in noting that the Jews came to England from Rouen during the times of William the Conqueror. 35. Rubin, The Life and Passion, 76–77. 36. Ibid., 77. 37. Campbell, “Norwich before 1300,” 33. 38. Thomas of Monmouth, I believe, models his twelfth-century invention of a saint that pilgrims could visit after Herbert’s eleventh-century project building a well-financed church. See Campbell, “Norwich before 1300,” 43. As Campbell notes, Herbert de Losinga built the Norwich Cathedral through “good gifts” and “taxation” (ibid., 41). 39. Matthew Paris’s English History, 138. 40. The tale of a very pagan sacrifice by Jews stands out from the other material Matthew chronicles, which includes records of births, deaths, as well as papal and monarchical visits. The libel is quite detailed and spans pages 138–41 of Matthew Paris’s English History. 41. Matthew Paris’s English History, 138. 42. See Krummel, “Globalizing Jewish Communities: Mapping a Jewish Geography in Fragment VII of the Canterbury Tales,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 50 (2008): 121–42. There, on p. 138 n. 22, I quote from the 1981 edition and the retention of the language of ritual murder accusation: “‘the charge against Jews of a general practice of ritual murder [. . .] has been amply refuted by both Jewish and Christian writers. This does not do away with the possibility of accidental or deliberate killing of Christian children by Jews out

256  Miriamne Ara Krummel of hatred for their religion [. . .] even to the extent of crucifixion and mockery of the passion of Christ.’” 43. See Chaucer, “The Prioress’s Tale,” VII 691–92. 44. Ibid., VII 489. 45. Ibid., VII 558–64, 568–70. 46. See Rubin, Gentile Tales, 3. Rubin discusses the newness of the host desecration myth in her introduction, esp. 1–2. 47. Chaucer, “The Prioress’s Tale,” VII 691–92. 48. Ibid., VII 610. 49. I mean to be attentive to allowing these narratives to remain “historically situated” (Rubin, Gentile Tales, 3; italics hers). See also Bruce Holsinger, “Pedagogy, Violence, and the Subject of Music: Chaucer’s ‘Prioress’s Tale’ and the Ideologies of ‘Song,’” New Medieval Literatures 1 (1997): 157–92. 50. Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism, 235. 51. Ibid. 52. Richard Vaughn, Matthew Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 195. There Vaughn twice remarks upon Matthew’s amplification of the “exciting account[s].” Matthew is clearly invested in chronicling saint’s lives, especially those in his “own house.” 53. For William’s age, see Rubin, Life and Passion, 11. For Hugh’s age, see Matthew Paris’s English History, 138. 54. Chaucer, “The Prioress’s Tale,” VII 706. 55. Ibid., VII 503; 487, 453–73. 56. Ibid., VII 489–92. 57. Ibid., VII 568, 684–85. 58. I think of Jean Baudrillard’s claims in Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), esp. 121–27. 59. On the subject of Belaset and her father, see Krummel, Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England, 98–100. 60. Chaucer, “The Prioress’s Tale,” VII 683–85. 61. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (New York: Verso, 1997), 54–60. 62. Rubin, Life and Passion, 72. 63. Ibid., 108. 64. Vaughn, Matthew Paris, 126. 65. Chaucer, “The Prioress’s Tale,” VII 568–71, 681. 66. Ibid., VII 683. 67. Sam Baker, interview by Terry Gross, Fresh Air, NPR, 26 December 2014. My ideas are informed Baker’s remarks about his song, “Broken Fingers.”

16 Norwich 1144 Origins and Afterlives Miri Rubin

Moments of inception are significant crossroads in human affairs. They pose historians with the greatest challenge, that of explaining novelty and so explaining change. One way historians seek to explain novelty is by searching for a trail of telltale signs presaging the evolving phenomenon and thus offering a gentler temporality than one of abrupt change. An even stronger historical understanding would claim the necessity of the given development and see its evolution as predetermined. Such foretelling may arise from the belief that the historical frame is unchanging and that what appears to be new is but another iteration of a fundamental set of relations. For centuries, the temporality associated with the history of JewishChristian relations has been one of continuity. Jews arose from Christian scripture as those who rejected Christ, as those who chose his death; from the epistles of Paul and the patristics that followed, Judaism emerged as the religion whose time had passed, and whose followers offended both Church and Empire in their persistent error. Augustine’s subtle formulations carved out a role for Jews as witnesses and as actors in the drama of Christian history; Jews were to be tolerated, even used to good effect.1 Around the Mediterranean and later in Europe’s northern regions, Jews lived and worked in a wide range of situations.2 Attitudes towards them, their legal status, and the ways they were imagined arose out of particular local combinations of theology, politics, economics, and law. There were places and times of harsh legislation—like in Visigothic Spain—and of relative safety and prosperity, like most of the eleventh-century Rhineland. Yet the writers of Jewish history until very recently have employed a perspective that emphasised the continuity of persecution and otherness.3 Even when historians carefully noted regional variations in the experiences of Jews as well as change over time, these were usually subsumed within a larger arc of continuity.4 Nothing about the bad treatment of Jews had the power to surprise. Several historians now seek to understand the relationship between Jews and Christians as more malleable, as dialogic, and thus amenable to change.5 The rush of new ideas and dispositions, new genres for reflection on Jews and Judaism, which became manifest after c. 1100, offers something of a

258  Miri Rubin challenge to traditional understandings.6 It is also a spur towards figuring out just how new ideas and attitudes to Jews might have arisen, so often, out of the challenges and questions faced by Christians in their communities and institutions. In this paper, therefore, we will concentrate on one product of the twelfth century, the first—known—attempt to accuse Jews of the murder of a Christian child, on behalf of all Jews. It is but the beginning of what would later—in the course of the thirteenth century—become a more elaborate narrative that linked such murder to the needs of Jewish ritual. What are we to make of this novelty? What were the conditions of possibility out of which it emerged? What were to become its legacies, its aftermath? *** Thomas of Monmouth, monk of Norwich Cathedral Priory, blamed the Jews of Norwich for the murder of a twelve-year-old boy, William, whose body was found in a wood in Easter Week 1144. He developed this accusation in a text, The Life and Passion of William of Norwich (Vita et passio Willelmi Norwicensis), that he composed between 1150 and early 1173 at the latest. Memories of the accusation—and the request of brother-monks— inspired Thomas to write in hagiographical tone, the life and death of William. The distance in time—several years—between the child’s death and the monk’s intervention, as well as the absence of any prior case of its type, encouraged Thomas to fashion himself as a detective of sorts. He visited the location, interviewed witnesses, and even found new exhibits at the site of the alleged crime. He enfolded this new knowledge, and the associated narrative that emerged in his mind, within the familiar rhythms of hagiography. And so Thomas provided the boy William with a biography: he imagined the intimations felt by the boy’s pregnant mother, showed the boy to have worked miracles even in his infancy, to have been a pleasant—even devout—youngster, talented at his trade. The boy-martyr was a type well known in Anglo-Saxon England,7 and yet everything about William and his martyrdom was new. Thomas worked hard at creating a narrative link between the boy and the Jews, first suggesting that he had worked for the Jews in mending their cloaks and furs, then that he had been tempted away from his maternal home as Easter 1144 approached by a cunning messenger of Jews. Thomas of Monmouth also offered a broader framing story which turned local Jews into agents of European—or perhaps world—Jewry. For he claimed to have heard from a Jewish convert that every year the Jews met in Narbonne and cast lots to determine who would kill a Christian boy. In 1144, the Jews of England were chosen, and the community of Norwich was charged with doing the deed. Thomas may have learned of this Jewish networked hierarchy from Peter the Venerable’s writings in the 1140s, and this too was a new idea, one with a long aftermath: the Jewish anti-Christian conspiracy.8

Norwich 1144  259 Most novel was Thomas’ manner of describing how Norwich’s Jews tortured and ultimately caused William’s death. It is a graphic passage and one which is rich in biblical echoes; for this reason, I cite it here at some length: Then the Jews received the boy kindly, like an innocent lamb led to the slaughter,9 and he was ignorant of what business was being prepared for him, and he was kept until the morrow. And so, following daybreak, which was their pascha that year, after the appropriate chants of the day were finished in the synagogue, the leaders of the Jews met in the house of the aforementioned Jew, and while the boy William was eating, fearing no treachery, they suddenly seized him and humiliated him in various wretched ways. For some of them held him from behind, others inserted into his open mouth a torture instrument known in English as a teasel, and fixed it with straps either side of his jaws, to the back of his neck, where they made a very tight knot. Next they took a short rope, about as thick as a little finger, and made three knots in places marked on it, and encircled that innocent head from forehead to back; in the centre of the forehead they pressed a knot, as they did at each temple. Both sides of the head were tied to the back, extremely tightly, and there a firm knot was made. The ends of the rope were tied round the neck and around under the chin, and there this unheard of type of torture was completed in a fifth knot. But the cruelty of the torturers could not be satisfied even by these torments and they added even worse pains. Indeed, having shaven his head, they wounded it with an infinite number of thorn pricks and made him bleed miserably from the inflicted wounds. They were so cruel and so very eager to inflict pains that you could hardly say which they were: more cruel or more eager in torture. Accordingly, their experience of torturing him fostered and furnished them with strength and with weapons. And so, while the enemies of the Christian name ran riot around the boy in such a spirit of evil, there were others among them who, in mockery of the Passion of the Cross, sentenced him to be crucified. Once they did so they said: “Just as we have condemned Christ to a most shameful death, so we condemn a Christian, so that we punish both the Lord and his servant in the punishment of reproach; that which they ascribe to us we will inflict on them.” And so, conspiring to execute such execrable malice, they next seized the innocent victim with bloody hands and raised him from the ground. He was put upon the cross and they competed among themselves in rivalry to kill him. Thomas turned scripture into a new narrative, the all-but-Crucifixion of the boy William in Norwich in 1144. Elements of the Passion story—five wounds (here knots), pierced head, hanging in a doorway—form the narrative, with its recurrent appeal to the biblical image of a lamb led to the slaughter.

260  Miri Rubin Thomas’ imagining is novel, and so of great interest to us as we discuss “roots.” Yet Thomas’ assemblage is familiar too, in its biblical knowledge, its hagiographical tropes, its liturgical echoes, and in the miracle tales, all of which were elements of monastic education and devotion.10 Lucie Doležalová has recently noted just how useful was the narrative of the ­passion—so widely known in image, word, and chant, from its performance in ritual and preaching—as a narrative frame for contemporary events.11 It was “loosely” available to many lay listeners and available to educated and clerical groups in sophisticated settings raning from exegesis to liturgy. Such was the community of Norwich Cathedral Priory, an institution founded by Bishop Herbert de Losinga in the 1090s. Indeed, the founder appears in three lengthy visions as a venerable elderly figure endorsing the cult of William against its detractors. Herbert was the leader of the young community for over two decades and we know something of his devotional style from surviving sermons: a devotion to the suffering of Christ on the Cross and an appreciation of the Virgin Mary as a symbol of purity and mercy. He even cited a miracle story about the cruelty of a Jewish father towards a son who appreciated Christianity. Some of the young monks of Herbert’s days may have still been alive in Thomas’s and may have been a source of information about the founder for the interested new recruit, Thomas of Monmouth.12 Yet the emerging narrative spun by Thomas did not sway all members of the Priory; Prior Elias resisted the efforts to mark the boy’s tomb as a martyr’s burial place. The child-murder story was new and bold, and its fragility is evident in such resistance by one of the community’s leaders. The new narrative of child murder is conveyed to us not by an eyewitness account, nor by contemporary officials; it has left no trace in the Priory’s records nor inspired any plangent Hebrew piyyuṭ.13 The text was confected in order to right a wrong: to offer the boy William the cult he deserved and to establish the Jews as the culprit who had escaped punishment. It is the sole witness to a boy’s death explained as martyrdom, and to a new way of thinking about Jews’ feelings towards Christians. Its author became an actor some six years after the events, and from that distance in time created a story to explain a child’s death. The Life and Passion, avowedly promoted a cause and created an audience. Those who study the Life and Passion soon develop strong feelings as they witness Thomas at work. Augustus Jessopp, who translated the work for its publication in 1896, saw Thomas as “a bit of a scoundrel; at any rate half knave and half fool and visionary” and complained on 2 March 1894: “It’s a horribly long business and this ‘Monumetensis’ is such a scoundrel!”14 Like Jessopp, I too formed opinions about Thomas’s vanity as an author, his cleverness in promoting the claims for “Saint” William, and his callousness whenever he mentioned Jews. The author’s intent, and the novelty of his claim, led him to produce a work with some moments of creativity, the product of English Latin letters in the mid- and later twelfth century. Once we understand the Life and Passion not as a defective witness to the earliest child murder accusation, but as a

Norwich 1144  261 creative text formed within a strong generic frame, written over a period of some twenty years; once we examine the material aspects of its production, something of the shape of its afterlife emerges more clearly, too. The manuscript in question is Cambridge University Library Add 3037. It was identified in 1891 by M. R. James, and contains the Life and Passion— which should rightly have been entitled Life, Passion and Miracles—over 77 folios, the first item in a series of texts, all the fruits of twelfth century writing. Thomas of Monmouth arranged the Life and Passion in seven books with a prologue. Book I of the Life and Passion, begins with portents foretelling the boys birth, and goes on through his childhood, with early signs of virtue, then the move from his parental home to Norwich, where he trained as an apprentice, and where he probably met his death. Book II traces the efforts by William’s uncle Godric, a married priest of Noriwch, to have Everard, Bishop of Norwich, recognise the Jews’ culpability in and the boy’s death, and his merit as a martyr; it also records sheriff John de Chesney’s refusal to pursue Godric’s accusation. Book III recounts the flourishing of the cult following the translation of William’s body for burial in the chapterhouse, and the beginning of miraculous cures experiences by lay people associated with the cathedral. Books IV–VII recount miracles—some dated—beginning in the 1150s and up to 1172/3. More than half of the book’s contents (Books IV–VII) are the accounts of miracles, in short tales rich in evidence on social relations and religious practices, but almost oblivious to the involvement of Jews in earlier sections. It is as if once the cult was established—first among Norwich people, and soon among modest villagers often from episcopal manors of Norfolk and north Suffolk—the founding context receded in importance. Those few cases after Book III, which refer to Jews, are usually occasions when Thomas muses to himself, commenting on the value of his own work, or on the fickleness of commitment to William’s cult. As long as he lived, Thomas seems to have promoted the cult of William of Norwich, of which he was the author. Indeed, the cult persisted liturgically into the thirteenth century, as the existence of an office for the feast day shows: this was treated as a festival of relics, rather than a martyr’s feast.15 The limited number of offerings at the altar in the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries, similarly show that interest was limited.16 This changed again in the fifteenth century, when an evident resurgence of interests in local cults and martyrs, saw the re-insertion of William among martyrs old and new, and the revival of the cult of the boy Robert across the county border in Bury St. Edmunds. The local afterlife of the event of 1144 thus resulted in the production of a text and the establishment of a local cult of fluctuating popularity. A sole manuscript survives, and historians hitherto have found it puzzling to discern the paths of the account’s influence, and the extent of its reach. Some have rightly assumed that a Benedictine network of influence operated, one related to the movement of persons between monasteries, and with them, news and books. In 1168 the chronicle of St. Peter’s Abbey at Gloucester,

262  Miri Rubin recounted the case of a boy allegedly killed by Jews.17 Knowledge of the story of William had reached Pershore in Worcestershire, whence a letter was sent to Thomas at Norwich in 1168 reported a miracle occasioned by the invocation of the boy’s name. There was also a case at neighbouring Bury St. Edmunds, which Anthony Bale has discussed so well.18 Yet, these Benedictine re-enactments were not the whole story. My recent research has established the strong Cistercian interest in the Life and Passion manuscript CUL Add 3037 and demonstrates the Cistercian environment of copying and use. The Life and Passion is followed by a short work by Isaac of Stella (c. 1100–c. 1169) in the form of a letter to John of Canterbury (1122–c. 1204), Letter on the Office of the Mass; by the Life of St. Wulfric of Haselbury (composed in the 1180s) by John, Abbot of the Cistercian house of Forde (c. 1145–1214); and by the Life and Miracles of Blessed Godric of Finchale, whose author, Walter, wrote it by 1196.19 The texts contained in the manuscript are by Cistercian authors, or about recent English saints, modest figures whose lives were in keeping with Cistercian commitment to poverty and simplicity of life. This sole manuscript was most probably copied at the Cistercian priory at Sibton in Suffolk, in circumstances that are extraordinarily suggestive. For Sibton was founded in 1150, following the death of Sheriff John de Chesney, the sheriff whom Thomas reported as a protector of the Jews of Norwich, who met a gruesome death. Sibton’s foundation narrative, as contained in its cartulary, tells of John’s request that his brother and heir—­William— found a Cistercian house as an act of expiation for sins he committed “both at times of peace and at times of war.”20 We may wonder whether a reputation attached to John following the affair of William, and made him reconsider his position thereafter. The Cistercian connection is highly significant when we consider the Life and Passion’s after life. For we know that the story of William, or perhaps a booklet containing his life, was known to Helinand of Froidmont, Cistercian author in northern France, c. 1200.21 Here was a major European chronicler and poet, and he had heard William’s story, of his death at the hand of Jews. The Cistercian communication networks were extensive and efficient, and our findings may hint at the pathways by which the child murder accusation reached the Continent, moving beyond the limited Benedictine dissemination we have witnessed in the later twelfth century. In England, the first accusation of child murder ending in violence against Jews, took place in a different context. A 111 years after 1144, in the city of Lincoln—a favoured stop on Henry III’s itinerary from England to Scotland—a preacher close to the court was able to turn the mere rumour of a child’ disappearance into a case against Jews, which cost nineteen Jewish lives.22 The story of William of Norwich, as told by Thomas of Monmouth, was a “first” in many ways. But it was only in the political setting created by Henry III, a king with a strong vision about the Jews of his kingdom, that

Norwich 1144  263 the story produced violence. The import of a narrative—for all its attraction and its poignancy—may remain unrealised until it gains a place in public life supported by those who manage law and violence. For all its portentous hatred and disturbing detail, Thomas’s Life and Passion remained just a local tradition, albeit a worrying tale for Norwich’s Jews, no doubt. The fulfilment of its possibilities depended on a future in which Europe’s Jews were discussed with greater urgency and dread. This realisation unfolded in many places and forms across Europe for centuries to come.23

Notes 1. Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (New York: Doubleday, 2008). 2. Michael Toch, The Economic History of European Jews: Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 3. For a critique of this tendency, see David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 3–17 (introduction). 4. For an impressive analysis of continuity—through adaptation—in thinking about Jews in Christian traditions, see David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013). 5. Israel Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Barbara Harshav and Jonathan Chipman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 6. Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christians and Jews in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1995). 7. Catherine Cubitt, “Sites and Sanctity: Revisiting the Cult of Murdered and Martyred Anglo-Saxon Royal Saints,” Early Medieval Europe 9 (2000): 53–83, and Paul. A. Hayward, “The Idea of Innocent Martyrdom in Late Tenth- and Eleventh-Century English Hagiology,” Studies in Church History 30 (1993): 81–92. 8. Miri Rubin, trans. and ed., The Life and Passion of William of Norwich (London: Penguin, 2014), xxiii–xxiv. 9. See in particular Isaiah 53:7: “he shall be led as a sheep to the slaughter, and shall be dumb as a lamb before his shearer, and he shall not open his mouth.” 10. For a recent study of the liturgical references in The Life and Passion, see Heather Blurton, “The Language of Liturgy in the Life and Miracles of William of Norwich,” Speculum 90 (2015): 1053–75. 11. Lucie Doležalová, “Passion and Passion: Intertextual Narratives from Late Medieval Bohemia between Typology, History and Parody,” in La Typologie biblique comme forme de pensée dans l’historiographie médiévale, ed. Marek Thue Kretschmer (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 245–65. 12. On the use of the figure of Herbert in The Life and Passion, see Simon Yarrow, Saints and Their Communities: Miracle Stories in Twelfth Century England (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006), 133–40. 13. For a (slightly later) trace in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, see Rubin, The Life and Passion, xxi–xxii. 14. 11 April 1894, Cambridge University Library, Add 7481, letter J51; Cambridge University Library, Add 7481, letter J54. 15. The Customary of the Cathedral Priory Church of Norwich, ed. J. L. B. Tolhurst (London: Henry Bradshaw Society, 1948), 73; the celdar entry is on p. 3.

264  Miri Rubin 16. Norman P. Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich 1370–1532 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984), 221; new interest is evident from the late fourteenth century, when the Peltiers’ guild adopted William as its patron saint, p. 69. 17. Joe Hillaby, “The Ritual-Child-Murder Accusation: Its Dissemination and Harold of Gloucester,” Jewish Historical Studies 34 (1994–96): 69–109. 18. Anthony Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms, 1350– 1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 107–11. 19. For a detailed discussion of the manuscript and its parts, see Rubin, The Life and Passion, liii–liv. 20. See the Narratio fundationis which links Sibton to its founders John and William de Cheney; Philippa Brown, ed., Sibton Abbey Cartularies and Charters, vol. 3 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1987), 1–2. 21. E. Rozanne Elder, “Early Cistercian Writers,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Cistercian Order, ed. Mette Birkedal Bruun (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 207–8. 22. David Carpenter, “Crucifixion and Conversion: King Henry III and the Jews in 1255: Part 1 and 2,” Henry III Fine Rolls Project, available online at www. finerollshenry3.org.uk/content/month/fm-01-2010.html and www.finerolls henry3.org.uk/content/month/fm-02-2010.html (accessed 23 November 2017). On the varieties of such accusations, see E. M. Rose, The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 23. For a study of the accusations from medieval to early modern centuries, see Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).

17 A Rational Model for Blood Libel The Aftonbladet Affair Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß

Introduction On 17 August 2009, the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet published an article by freelance photojournalist Donald Boström with the headline “Våra söner plundras på sina organ” (Our sons are being plundered of their organs). The material had been turned down by several other Swedish newspapers, although Boström had published it in a collection of photographs and essays about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict some years previously.1 In his article, Boström juxtaposes reports about an alleged US-based illegal organ trade in 2009, Israel’s shortage of suitable transplant organs, Palestinian accusations of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) harvesting organs from captured young men, and his own eye-witness account of the return of the body of the nineteen-year-old Palestinian, Bilal Achmed Ghanem, to his West Bank village of Immatain in 1992. The article is accompanied by three photographs: stone-throwing Palestinian men; Ghanem’s corpse after having been autopsied at the Abu Kabir Institute and returned to his family; and FBI agents in Brooklyn arresting Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, a rabbi charged with acting as intermediary in an organ-trafficking scandal. By using “whispers in the dark, anonymous sources, and rumours,”2 the article weaves a web of guilt by association, the effect of which, and presumably the author’s intent, is to present a picture of Israeli soldiers shooting and abducting young Palestinians to “plunder” their organs that can then either be used in Israeli transplant operations or trafficked on the illegal organ market.3 The author provides no real evidence, draws tenuous connections based on pure conjecture, and uses dubious testimony; the result is an unsubstantiated “revelation” that the Israeli authorities could have easily and calmly disproved. Instead, however, the story sparked nothing short of a diplomatic crisis and a media firestorm: Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu demanded that the Swedish government condemn the article and newspaper;4 Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon called it “a blood libel and the worst type of antisemitism,” and Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmar characterised it as “racist hysteria at its worst.”5 Commentators and organisations in Europe and the US were largely critical of the article, with the

266  Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß Anti-Defamation League calling it “a base recycling of the medieval blood libel.”6 The Swedish ambassador in Tel Aviv, Elisabet Borsiin Bonnier, published a press release—without the backing of her government—­describing the article as “shocking and appalling to us Swedes, as it is to Israeli citizens,”7 while the Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt cited freedom of speech and refused to condemn the newspaper as this would be in breach of the Swedish constitution.8 The reaction in parts of the Arab media was predictably incendiary with the Aftonbladet article being quoted as credible and cartoons of Jews stealing body parts and drinking Arab blood appearing in newspapers.9 The Palestinian Authority set up a commission to look into the claims in Boström’s article.10

The Abu Kabir Scandal In the wake of the Aftonbladet affair, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley and founder of the organisation Organ Watch, chose to release the transcript of an interview she had conducted in 2000 with Yehuda Hiss, Director of the Abu Kabir Institute (1988–2004) to Israeli Channel 2 Nightly News. The Abu Kabir Forensic Institute (L. Greenberg National Institute of Forensic Medicine), named in Boström’s article, is the facility in Israel and the occupied territories that is authorised to perform post-mortem examinations in cases of unnatural death. During the 1990s, Hiss was responsible for the removal of bone, skin, corneas, and heart valves during autopsies without consent from the family of the deceased. Body parts were removed in this way from Israelis (including IDF soldiers, victims of terrorist attacks, and new immigrants), Palestinians, and foreigners. A decade before Boström’s article, the journalists Ronen Bergman and Gai Gavra from the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth published an exposé of the inappropriate actions which received media attention around the world.11 Hiss was put before a disciplinary court and stepped down, and the events at the Institute were openly debated in the Israeli media.12 New guidelines were implemented, and controls at the Institute were subsequently tightened to ensure it would not happen again. Scheper-Hughes told the television station that she did not believe Israel murdered Palestinians for organs.13 Neither the staff at Aftonbladet nor any other Swedish media had been aware of these publications when Boström wrote his article, but nevertheless used the interviews by Scheper-Hughes and the subsequent international media coverage of the Abu Kabir affair for re-assessments of the Boström article after its publication between 2009 and 2012.

The Components of Blood Libel Fantasies about infanticide, haematophagy, and cannibalism have apparently always had a deep psychological resonance. Stories of people, monsters, and witches murdering children and bleeding them dry have existed

A Rational Model  267 since ancient times and been used against different out-groups (imaginary and real) before being largely associated with the Jews.14 Accusations against Jews first appear in Hellenistic (Alexandrian) works originating from two Egyptian versions of the pre-Maccabean period involving human sacrifice and cannibalistic “tasting” by Jews.15 In Inmestar c. 415, Jews were accused of torturing and executing a Christian boy during Purim, an allegation that reportedly provoked rioting and popular hostility towards Jews.16 ­Subsequently, however, the ritual murder accusation disappeared without a trace, only to burst forth again 700 years later in Europe during the High Middle Ages.17 There are several definitions of blood libel in current usage within the context of medieval and modern antisemitism; for example: “Christian child killed to furnish blood for Jewish rite,”18 “the accusation that Jews kill a young Christian boy and use his blood in the ritual preparation of unleavened bread or maẓẓah for the Passover ritual,”19 and “[t]he blood libel accuses the Jews of using the blood of Christian youngsters to perform rituals associated with the Passover celebration, specifically in central wine rituals.”20 The components shared by these definitions are a (male) Christian child and the draining of blood for use in Passover rituals (for matzah or wine). Nevertheless, by examining medieval and modern blood libel cases, it is possible to find other components than those in the definitions above and to trace how the libel has evolved to adapt to different environments and purposes. Ritual Murder and Blood Libel For this article, we considered thirty incidents in total, using both primary sources and secondary literature.21 Some of the earliest medieval examples of ritual murder—William of Norwich (1144), Harold of Gloucester (1168), and Robert of Bury (1181)— did not in fact involve blood as a central component of the accusation.22 Rather, they are examples of ritual murder in which a Christian boy is crucified in a ceremony to mock the suffering of Christ. These accusations were principally made to establish new cults that would increase the income and importance of those churches that housed the saint-boys’ relics. Nor is any mention of blood made in the records of allegations from Bray/Brie (the hanging of a Christian debtor during Purim festivities in 1171) and Blois (where a Christian servant saw a Jew throw the body of a dead child in a river in 1172). Nevertheless, among early cases, we do find blood and dismemberment as components of the libel. Richard of Pontoise (1163) was crucified by Jews on Good Friday/Passover23 and had his heart torn out and shared among the murderers. Two cases from Winchester also include the removal of organs: in 1192, a Christian boy was crucified on Good Friday, had his throat cut, and his heart eaten, and a few years later in 1232, the moneylender Abraham Pinche was accused (and found innocent) of strangling and castrating

268  Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß a one-year-old Christian boy and removing his eyes and heart.24 The killing and bleeding dry of five Christian boys in the famous case of Fulda (1235) is thus not, as sometimes claimed, the first blood libel,25 although with few exceptions, the most important of which is Little Hugh of Lincoln (1255), the draining the victim of blood becomes the prime purpose of the murder, rather than mocking the suffering of Christ by re-enacting the Crucifixion.26 Victims and Perpetrators In the medieval tales examined, all the victims were young, Christian, and male, with the exception of one seven-year-old girl bled to death in Pforzheim (1267). Occasionally, we can glean some extra information about the children (William was an apprentice tanner, Dominguito de Val was a choirboy) and their good Christian parents and pious upbringing. The perpetrators of the crimes are named, local Jewish males, although they may have been assisted by women particularly in luring the child (Nagyszombat 1494). The murder most often takes place in a secret ceremony during Easter/Passover, but also Christmas (Fulda) and Lent/Purim (Bray/Brie). The crimes are sometimes witnessed by Christians, usually women, such as the female servant in Norwich (1144) and the wet-nurse in Winchester (1232). The victims’ bodies are found dumped in woods, rivers, ditches, and wells; they are only rarely buried (Robert of Bury 1181; Winchester 1191). The lack of a body, such as in the case of the Little Boy of La Guardia (1491), does not prevent the occurrence of a blood libel or the execution of local Jews. The victims in modern blood libels are still mostly children, such as the baby offered for sale to a Jew in Copenhagen (1699) for him to bleed to death.27 However, there are cases of adult victims too: the Carmelite lay brother in Lublin (1636), the Christian monk in Damascus (1849), and the nineteen-year-old Anežka Hrůzová in the first Hilsner trial in Polná (1899). Females increasingly fill the role of victim: the peasant girl murdered in Sachkheri near Kutaisi (1879), the fourteen-year-old girl beheaded in a synagogue in Tiszaeszlár (1882), and the missing four-year-old girl in 1928 in Massena, USA (the girl later turned up unharmed, but not before the local Jews had been accused of her murder in a Yom Kippur ritual). Obtaining and Using the Blood The victims are disembowelled or drained of their blood for a variety of purposes. In Winchester 1192, the victim’s heart was torn out and shared as a form of communion: “ejus corde se communicabant” (they took communion with his heart).28 The Little Boy of La Guardia’s heart was intended to be used together with a stolen Host for a magic spell to avenge an auto da fé (1491), and Dominguito de Val’s heart was torn out as part of a spell to kill all the Christians of Saragossa (1250). Little Hugh of Lincoln’s entrails were also believed to have been removed for use in magic (1255).

A Rational Model  269 In Pforzheim in 1267, the young girl’s blood was drained to free the Jews from the Blood Curse (Matthew 27:25), while Simon of Trent’s blood was used in the preparation of matzah (1475). The blood in Fulda (1235) was taken for religious or medicinal purposes: “ad suum remedium” (for their remedy).29 The various uses for the blood in the Nagyszombat libel (1494) are frankly mind-boggling: to alleviate the wound of circumcision; to add to food as an aphrodisiac; to replace blood lost during male menstruation, and to fulfil obligations to the international Jewry regarding the performance of rituals. This international aspect of the crime is also found in the William of Norwich story, where Thomas of Monmouth informs his readers that Jews meet once a year in Narbonne to cast lots to decide which town to target for ritual murder. The use of the human blood in Jewish rituals remains a constant even in the modern stories. Der Stürmer even uses the term schächten in its descriptions of these killings forging a connection between slaughter in accordance with Jewish law (šḥiṭah) and the murder of Christians. However, in its most modern reincarnations—since the Beilis affair (1913)—the myth even occurs without the medieval theological underpinnings and religious symbolism, as if the Christian belief in sacrifice no longer plays a role. Indeed, in many ritual murder trials in modern Europe, investigations were conducted in an atmosphere of scientific rationality with the testimony of “expert witnesses” and with proceedings that attempted to distance the crime from what was considered medieval superstition. Purpose and Contexts The medieval libels had several purposes, such as the creation of a new cult and source of income, attempts to create religious and social cohesion by reinforcing boundaries, or even the targeting of Jewish creditors. The outcome, even in cases where the Jews were found innocent, was often lethal violence against the local Jewish community. The attitude of the medieval Church towards blood libel was somewhat ambivalent. Learned treatises, such as Ramon Martí’s Pugio fidei, provided theological proofs and explanations for the Jews’ taking Christians’ blood for ritual use, while other religious authorities condemned the libel as false.30 The accusations continued regardless into the modern period and spread to Orthodox Christian areas, where Russia became the principal area where the myth was perpetuated. It has been estimated that there were more accusations against Jews of ritual murder and cannibalism between 1870 and 1940 than during all the previous centuries combined.31 One reason for the legend’s continued popularity throughout Europe was certainly its effective application in local matters of disagreement. For example, in an attempt to rid himself of his Jewish creditors in the town of Bazin, Count Francis Wolf kidnapped a Christian child in 1529 and then orchestrated a libel against the local Jews that resulted in the burning to death of thirty Jews. Although

270  Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß such local and specific contexts continue to form the background to the majority of blood libels, gradually we also see the context broadening to include general, widespread, non-local motivations. Nationalism-inspired antisemitism becomes a stronger motive behind the accusations with Jews being seen as a murderous foreign element in the nations in which they live. A special “Ritualmord” (Ritual murder) edition of Der Stürmer (May 1934) included numerous stories accompanied by bloodcurdling illustrations and the accusation that Jews, “das Mördervolk” (murderous people), murdered entire nations: “‘Judah declares war on Germany,’ the battle-cry of the ritual murderers of alien race rang through the world.”32 The victim here is not the poor Christ-like child, but the entire Volk, while the perpetrator is not a local Jew, but an entire alien race. When confronting internal political disarray, some state organisations still continue to rally their Volk through tales of Jewish infanticide. Three centuries after the Gavriil Byelostokskiy blood libel of 1690, state television in Belarus aired a film alleging the truth of the event.33 The cult of the boy—canonised by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1820—was revived in the 1990s when Belarusian state media outlets began propagating the libel amidst rising antisemitism in the country. In 1992, the Church’s own magazine, Царкоўнае слова (Carkounaye slova, Words of the Church), warned its readers of cults that practised human sacrifice, identifying Ḥasidism as one such cult.34 The Kielce pogrom in 1946 was sparked by the disappearance of an eightyear-old boy and rumours that the city’s Jews—camp survivors—needed to tap blood for transfusions. However, as Jan T. Gross has shown, no-one really believed this absurdity, and what actually lay behind the massacre was the Poles’ fear that those “returning from the grave” would claim property and goods that had either been entrusted to or expropriated by them.35 The myth here served to sanction the annihilation of outsider rivals and to reassert the Poles’ authority and right to property—to a secure place in the world—at a time of massive upheaval. Local resentments, xenophobia, and fear similarly fuelled a case in the Russian city of Krasnoyarsk in 2005, when the bodies of five boys aged between nine and twelve years were found stabbed and burnt in the city sewage; it was alleged that a “Ḥasidic sect” had killed the children before Passover to collect their blood.36 The dynamic of the legend still lies in the entangled social, political, and economic relationships between secular authorities, clergy, and the Christian populace.37 The legend’s powerful hold and appeal in constructing local identity came to light after Vatican II when the Church took steps to downgrade the “miracles” and “child martyrs.” Townspeople’s resistance to and anger at the relegation of the cult of Little Simon in Trent (and even more markedly in Rinn, when the cult of Anderl and the Judenstein was also abolished) were similar to reactions in Oberammergau whenever “outsiders” (be they the Church, Jewish organisations, religious scholars, or others) interfere with or criticise the content of the decennial Passion plays.38 Local pride and self-understanding are very much tied up with these blood legends.

A Rational Model  271 Blood Libel in the Muslim World The Damascus blood libel (1840), instigated by the city’s Christian community, was the first in an Arab country, while that in Shiraz (1910) was the first to have been instigated by Muslims. Here, it was alleged that a four-year-old girl was ritually murdered by Jews who furthermore had desecrated copies of the Qur’an. Although the girl turned up later, the accusations triggered a violent pogrom in the city.39 The following century, particularly in more recent decades, has resulted in abundant examples of blood libels in which children’s blood is used as an essential ingredient in matzah. For example, in 2003, Al-Manar (Hizballah’s satellite television network) broadcast the Syrian-produced television series Ash-Shatat (The Diaspora) which, based on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, includes numerous antisemitic canards, including the murder of Christian children by Jews to drain the blood and use it in Passover matzah. The media in the Middle East is awash with images and stories of Jews/Israelis drinking children’s blood.40 Dan Cohn-Sherbok places this use of the blood libel in the context of the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians which has exacerbated Arab antisemitism: Jews are continually vilified, and the medieval European image of the demonic Jew is reinterpreted to express Arab antipathy to Jews.41 Some Middle Eastern nations continue to create domestic social cohesion through the formation of a persecuting in-group that can target an identifiable Other responsible for their misfortune.42 From Draining Blood to Trafficking Organs The Aftonbladet article was not the first time Israelis had been accused of the kidnap and murder of children in connection with organ theft. In Romania towards the end of 1995, several newspapers began running stories that a network of Israeli traffickers was buying babies—seven to twelve months old—and smuggling them out of the country to Moldova and Israel.43 In these initial reports, published in the sensationalist newspaper Adevărul and the now defunct Christian-nationalist Ziua, it was claimed that the children were to be used for adoption or for organ harvesting. At this stage, there was no ritual element to the allegations, but the ease with which these stories about organ trafficking slide into classic blood libel can be seen by the fact that on 14 November 1995 (and again on 19 December), the Bucharest weekly tabloid Baricada published a story implying that the babies were being used for ritual purposes, stating “as it is already well-known, the Jewish matzoth need the kosher blood of tender Christians.”44 According to Baricada, the babies were being smuggled out of Romania by “the Jewish Mafia of [human] flesh [. . .] under the cover of Mossad.”45 As those involved in “collecting kosher blood” were being protected by the Israeli intelligence service, the tabloid maintained that it was “unlikely” that proof of the horrible deed could be produced. In 2004, five years before Boström’s

272  Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß article, the Iranian channel Sahar 1 broadcast Češmhāye ābi Zahrā (Zahra’s Blue Eyes), a television drama series about the Israeli military, doctors, and civilians conspiring to steal the organs and eyes of Palestinian children.46 The screenwriter Ali Derakhshi claimed that one of the characters, Theodore, a paralysed Jewish boy with damaged kidneys, is a symbol for Israel, revitalising itself through the murder of innocent Palestinian children.47 Summary Some of the components of blood libel show a degree of flexibility. Blood is clearly important, but the removal of hearts, eyes, and entrails also occurs. These stolen body parts and blood, having been extracted under secretive conditions that may include ritualised torture and/or mockery, are subsequently used in religious rituals, magic, medicine, or as nourishment. In earlier stories, the victims were Christian boys, but over the centuries there has been an increasing number of female, adult, and non-Christian victims; at times whole nations are at risk of murder. The perpetrators are originally identifiable local Jews, but allegations against entire anonymous communities began with the rise of nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century. There is sometimes an international conspiratorial aspect to the crime. Being based on neither fact nor reason, the blood libel—as with all conspiracy theories—remains entirely unaffected by counterarguments and proofs. Perversely, the impossibility of finding supporting evidence serves only to strengthen the libel as this proves the omnipotence and control of the Jews. The libel’s appearance (one might say “accidents”) may change, but its substance and role—to create cohesion and provide a simple model of causality and social hierarchy—remain the same. Perhaps most profoundly, it is the mechanism by which Jews were transformed from being the devil’s instruments on earth to becoming devils themselves—a subtle but monumental shift that paved the way from anti-Judaism to antisemitism.48 After the Romanian case in 1995, several of the blood libels in Arab media introduce a major change in the blood libel plot—the perpetrators are identified as “Israeli authorities,” the victims as “Palestinian children,” and thus the accusation is projected onto the Middle East conflict.

Daniel Boström’s Article and Blood Libel The projection of certain elements of blood libel onto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is also the main feature of Boström’s article. The basic substance, that Jews kill innocent young people to exploit their corpses for their own dark purposes, is clearly present, although the accidents have changed. In the age of science and capitalism, the murders are no longer for Jewish ritual or magic, but for medical purposes and the acquisition of wealth through international organ trafficking. By insinuating a connection between IDF activity and the organ trafficking scandal in the US, the existence of an international

A Rational Model  273 Jewish conspiracy is suggested. As in some modern European libels, the religious aspect and connection to the liturgical calendar are absent. The crimes take place in secretive circumstances that cannot be explained: Why do they keep the bodies for up to five days before they allow us to bury them? What happened to the bodies during that time? Why do they perform a post mortem, against our will, when the cause of death is obvious? Why are the bodies returned at night? Why is it done with a military escort? Why is the area closed off during the funeral? Why is the electricity interrupted?49 Darkness and shadowy goings-on are themes running through the article that concludes in a call for light to be cast onto the macabre business: We know that there is a great need for organs in Israel, that there is a vast, illegal trade of organs which has been running for a long time, that it takes place with the blessing of the authorities, that senior doctors at the big hospitals participate, as do civil servants at various levels. We also know that young Palestinian men disappeared, that they were brought back after five days under great secrecy during the night, cut open and stitched back together. It is time to bring clarity to this macabre business about what is happening and what has happened in the territories occupied by Israel since the Intifada began.50 The typical blood-libel component of mockery is also present in the article.51 Rather than being local Jews or Jewish sects, the murderers are soldiers of the IDF, one of whom is identified as Captain Yahya “den svåraste av dem alla” (the most severe of them all). The victims are identified by their ethnicity (Palestinian Arab), not directly by their religion,52 and described in terms of their resistance to the occupation: “unga palestinska män” (young Palestinian men), “unga män” (young men), “den unge stenkastaren” (the young stone-thrower), “byns första martyr” (the village’s first martyr), “en av de ledande stenkastarna” (one of the leading stone-throwers), and “stenkastargrabbar” (stone-throwing lads). The power relations in blood libels which are always used downwards against marginal groups have been turned on their head in the Aftonbladet article.53 The social and political context of Boström’s case is quite different to those considered earlier. The Jews and the authorities have merged into a single group and it is the marginalised group accusing the powerful of murdering children. The libel has become a tool of resistance and (Palestinian and international) consensus is created through the identification (reaffirmation?) of Jews in both Israel and Brooklyn as immoral, cruel, and greedy. Boström’s article sparked further reports of organ harvesting in the Middle East and Europe. In September 2009, the Algerian newspaper El-Khabar

274  Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß reported that Jewish gangs were rounding up children in Algeria and sending them to Israel for organ harvesting,54 and in November of that year, a Ukrainian professor of philosophy, Vyacheslav Gudin, claimed that no fewer than 25,000 Ukrainian children had been taken to Israel to have their organs removed.55 On 20 January 2010, “T. West” posted a video on YouTube claiming that the IDF earthquake relief delegation in Haiti had as their goal to steal organs.56 The story was picked up by several Middle East news sources, and in the UK, Baroness Jenny Tonge was sacked by the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, from her post as health spokesperson in the House of Lords for suggesting that Israel should set up an enquiry if it wanted to refute the IDF-Haiti allegations.57

Responses and Debates in Sweden in 2009 and in 2012 Immediately after the publication of the Boström article, the media in Sweden more or less unanimously condemned it. The main argument was that it was based on hearsay and insinuated a connection between several incidents without proof. Commentators in the national dailies Svenska Dagbladet, Sydsvenska Dagbladet, and Expressen all expressed their concern regarding the violation of press ethics. The only articles in defence of Boström came from the two people who had made the publication possible: Åsa Linderborg, head of the culture section of Aftonbladet, and Jan Helin, general editor. In the weeks following the publication, they gathered a few other public profiles to write in defence of the Boström article in various sections of the Aftonbladet website, but no one else argued publicly for any aspect of the publication. The controversy circled instead around whether the Swedish government should intervene on a diplomatic level or not, a debate that is not relevant in our context. Aftonbladet was isolated regarding the publication of the article, while many voices from a variety of political parties and movements rejected diplomatic intervention due to freedom of speech issues.58 Aftonbladet’s journalistic reputation suffered from the publication, and over the following years, the newspaper made several attempts to regain credibility by writing about organ trafficking in Israel. When the Abu Kabir scandal was revisited by Scheper-Hughes, Aftonbladet took the opportunity to present it as proof of Boström’s article. Åsa Linderborg called it a “restitution” of the damaged image of her newspaper.59 Other journalists rightfully pointed out that the Abu Kabir scandal had nothing to do with Boström’s insinuation that the IDF systematically killed Palestinian teenagers for organ plundering and also pointed to the lack of chronological compliance of the events.60 However, while Swedish media and politicians were not willing to use this follow-up as proof for Boström’s article, a number of bloggers and commentators in web forums of various political colours were this time more active and picked the topic up under headlines like “Israel admits organ plundering.”61 Occasional bloggers found the practical

A Rational Model  275 circumstances of organ smuggling from Israel to the US quite unlikely but had no general reservations against the article.62 Regarding the narrower question of whether Boström’s article was antisemitic and the even more narrow accusation of blood libel, the reactions in Sweden were sparser. Most commentators who labelled the article as antisemitic did not base this on blood libel, but on other tropes, mainly conspiracy theories and guilt by association. These arguments came mostly from liberal and right-wing bloggers and writers. Torbjörn Jerlerup, a liberal Social Democrat publishing about antiracism and human rights, described the Boström article as the creation of an antisemitic myth and conspiracy theory.63 Blogger “klartexten” saw Boström’s article as an update of antisemitic myths and elaborated several times on the physiological details of Boström’s article and concluded that organs could not have been removed from the boy’s body in the way described in the article.64 Blogger “Sapere aude” commented repeatedly on the Boström affair and labelled him “Sweden’s most dishonest reporter.”65 A different group of bloggers, most of them in various liberal-left and pro-Palestinian groups, debated antisemitism exclusively in the context of “whenever someone criticises Israel, someone else screams antisemitism.” Bloggers used the Boström article and its political aftermath as an argument in recurring articles on the topic “the State of Israel has too much power and wants to tell us what to say and what not.”66 While in the first round of debate in 2009, those in favour of Boström did not pick up on the question of antisemitism, in the following years, many mentioned that in 2009, Boström had been accused of antisemitism in order to conceal the truth behind his article. For example, blogger “bahlool” wrote that antisemitism was only used in order to deter “the masses” from asking the “right questions.”67 None of the bloggers who wrote in defence of Boström’s article took up the blood libel accusation, instead they focused on a variety of opinions about the State of Israel, the occupation, general observations about “Jewish” behaviour, and the perceived impossibility of criticising Israel without being named an antisemite.68 In online forum debates in which people of all political and social backgrounds come together, such as flashback.se and familjeliv.se, the Boström article was also debated heavily and under many aspects. The only common feature to be seen in these is that antisemitism is debated, but blood libel is not mentioned at all (familjeliv), or only by openly antisemitic commentators who were later expelled from the forum (flashback). Those writers and politicians who took up the issue of blood libel in connection to the article usually mentioned briefly “the myth that Jews steal (Christian) children and use their blood” and the loose ends in Boström’s text which invite the reader to fill in the gaps with his/her own knowledge. Also here a variant of “guilt by association” appeared, claiming that Aftonbladet was antisemitic in total and had always been.69 Ulf Bjereld, a professor of political science at the University of Gothenburg and once head of

276  Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß “Socialdemokraterna för tro och solidaritet” (Religious Social Democrats of Sweden), discussed the Boström article, named its allusions to Jews stealing and slaughtering Christian children, and said Boström could have avoided accusations of antisemitism by taking up the medieval myths in the article and thereby proving that his story is about something else. Bjereld also accused amongst others Jesper Svartvik (professor of theology of religions at Lund University and the then head of the Swedish Committee against Antisemitism, SKMA) and Gunnar Hökmark (a Moderate Party politician who had labelled the article as antisemitic) of obscuring the struggle against antisemitism by labelling the article too quickly.70 Two remarkable contributions regarding the blood libel topic came from Aftonbladet itself. Jan Guillou, writer and recurring guest commentator in Aftonbladet, defended the Boström article, the general tenor of his article asking why “Swedish media” does not condemn the State of Israel more vigorously, both in relation to the current affair and in relation to war crimes in general. He then picked up the blood libel topic exactly in the way Bjereld had asked for: In the Middle Ages, there were a variety of antisemitic fantasies, for example that Jews murdered Christian children in order to mix the blood of the victims with the special bread baked for the Jewish Easter. Accusations of organ trafficking in modern times are the same, i.e. antisemitism. This is to be proved. It is a ridiculous analogy. Medieval hocus pocus is far from modern kidney transplants. The latter is a highly normal medical activity, in Israel as in Sweden. The difference between the countries is that there is an illegal market for organs in Israel. The Israeli accusations of antisemitism should have fallen with their own absurdity.71 Guillou knows the content of the myth; he strongly rejects the possibility of a continuity from medieval stereotypes to modern resentment by pointing out differences between the medieval model and Boström’s article, between blood rituals and organ transplants, and between hocus pocus and modern science, and thus ignoring the “scientification” of the libel since the nineteenth century. Åsa Linderborg chose an entirely different strategy. She wrote: There are those who are of the opinion that it is antisemitic, yes, even an expression of Nazi inclinations, to ask the question [i.e. what has happened to those men], because there is an (unknown to me) ancient myth that Jews bake bread with the blood of their enemies.72 Linderborg, like Guillou, paraphrased a variant of the blood libel myth particularly far from the Boström article (blood used for matzot), but added her own twist to it by replacing the usual Christian children as victims with

A Rational Model  277 the “enemies” of the Jews—a term that conjures up images of a collective enemy of the Jewish people or of war in general. But most of all, Linderborg claimed to have been ignorant of the blood libel myth before it was raised in connection with the Boström affair. This argument portrays the blood libel accusation as particularly far-off, due to the differences to the medieval myth (matzot or religious aspects instead of economic gain, children instead of enemies) and by stating that she did not even know that this myth existed—and probably neither does the majority of contemporary secularised Swedish society.

Conclusion: The Middle East Conflict, a Rational Model of Blood Libel The analysis of the blogs and online debates outside the institutionalised media landscape seem to support Linderborg’s argument—blood libel was, with the exception of two cases, not debated explicitly in connection with the Boström article, either due to a lack of knowledge about the myth or because the medieval model was perceived as very distant from the Aftonbladet story. But even though this portion of the Swedish public could or would not draw upon knowledge about the medieval child martyrs of Trent or Fulda, they filled the gaps in Boström’s article with other knowledge. Most readers and commentators “knew” that the IDF is an unethical, murderous army intent on killing Palestinians; for them, the article is “merely” critical of Israel, a state engaged in “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.” For readers who already harbour antisemitic views, the gaps in the article could be bridged by what they “knew” about Jews: Jews are cruel, engage in murder, are interested in making money at any cost, run secret, international organisations that span the globe, etc. For these readers, the behaviour of the soldiers (and doctors) is viewed from a broader context than the IsraeliPalestinian conflict; it is because they are Jews that they behave like this. As in the Middle Ages, Jews are guilty until they prove their own innocence. For those readers well versed in the history of antisemitism, the clearest way to tie up the loose ends is with the blood libel: Israeli soldiers killing young Palestinians for their organs is the same development of the thousand-yearold story of Jews killing Christian children for their blood that can be found elsewhere in Europe and the Middle East. The broad lines in the public debate about the Boström article in Sweden show how selectively people use their knowledge for the understanding and “making sense” of the gaps in the article: those defending the article claim not to know about the medieval myth, in their perception, they only criticise the State of Israel—on the basis of their knowledge, they have no problems believing that IDF soldiers would kill Palestinian children for the economic gain of shady rabbis in the USA. Also those condemning Boström’s publication have difficulties describing the blood libel allusions in the article precisely and instead point at its general antisemitic potential connected to

278  Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß conspiracy theories and the identification of Jews in general with the State of Israel and its occupation of the West Bank. The systematic comparison of medieval and modern blood libel has shown that major changes needed to be made to the medieval model in order to be usable for modern purposes. Elements of these appear in various cases particularly in Eastern Europe after 1945 and more recently in the Arab and Iranian world. The victims do not need to be Christian children anymore, and ritual purposes are replaced by economic gain or medical purposes creating a “rational” model of blood libel. Since there is so little knowledge in the secularised Nordic societies about the significance of blood in either Christian and Jewish symbolism and ritual, a “pure” blood libel according to the model “Jews murder Christian children for their blood” makes little sense and is rarely alluded to in debates in online forums. Instead, the modern blood libels need to evoke the connection with other, better-known antisemitic stereotypes, and this works across all other political boundaries and differences from left to right. The blood libel itself is only an initial spark for a gamut of the wide-ranging associations, such as Jewish greed; callous treatment of and hatred towards non-Jews; secret, international networks; media control; crying “antisemitism!” whenever Israel is criticised, and so on. The most important feature is that the basic structure of “Jewish murderers, innocent victims” remains stable. In the context of the Boström article, this leads to the definition of Palestinians active in the Intifada as innocent victims and the Israeli army as evil butcherers—an old stereotype is invoked in order to make a statement in an ongoing political conflict.

Notes 1. Daniel Boström, “Snickarens Hus,” in Inshallah: Konflikten mellan Israel och Palestina, ed. Daniel Boström (Stockholm: Ordfront, 2001), 153–57. 2. “Viskningar i mörkret. Anonyma källor. Rykten”: Mats Skogkär, “Antisemitbladet” (Antisemite newspaper), Sydsvenskan, 17 August 2009, available online at http://blogg.sydsvenskan.se/snallposten/2009/08/17/antisemitbladet/ (accessed 23 November 2017). 3. Subsequently, the newspaper insisted that the article was only reporting Palestinian concerns and simply asking the question: “Varför obducerades pojken när dödorsaken är uppenbar?” (Why subject the boy to a post-mortem examination when the cause of death is obvious?); Jan Helin, “Israelisk storm mot Aftonbladet” (Israeli Storm against Aftonbladet), Aftonbladet, 19 August 2009, available online at http://bloggar.aftonbladet.se/janhelin/2009/08/israeliskstorm-mot-aftonbladet/ (accessed 23 November 2017). 4. “Netanyahu Wants Sweden to Condemn Organ Story,” Associated Press, 23 August 2009, available online at http://newsok.com/netanyahu-wants-swedento-condemn-organ-story/article/feed/69296 (accessed 23 November 2017). 5. Herb Keinon, “Swedish Writer ‘Not Sure’ Story’s True,” Jerusalem Post, 19 August 2009, available online at www.jpost.com/Israel/Swedish-writer-notsure-storys-true (accessed 23 November 2017). 6. Press release: “Swedish Newspaper’s Charge of Organ Harvesting by Israeli Soldiers ‘Irresponsible and Shocking,’” available online at archive.adl.org/presrele/ islme_62/5586_62.html (accessed 11 April 2017).

A Rational Model  279 7. Her statement appeared on the embassy website but was later removed, and Borsiin Bonnier was reprimanded by the Swedish foreign minister. 8. “I vår grundlag står av hävd yttrande- och pressfriheten mycket stark. Och det starka skyddet har tjänat vår demokrati och vårt land väl. [. . . V]i fortsätter att hålla fast vid den yttrande- och pressfrihet som är en så väsentlig del av vår demokrati” (Freedom of expression and of the press is traditionally very strong in our constitution and that strong protection has served our democracy and our country very well. [. . .] We will continue to uphold freedom of expression and freedom of the press as an important part of our democracy). Carl Bildt, “Principer och praktik” (Principles and Practice), on the minister’s blog, available online at https://carlbildt.wordpress.com/2009/08/20/principer-ochpraktik/ (accessed 23 November 2017). 9. See, for example, the cartoons depicting Israelis harvesting Palestinian organs published in: Al-Arab Al-Yawm, 30 August 2009, Amman, Jordan; Al-Ittihad, 30 August 2009, UAE; Alra’i, 1 September 2009 and 5 September 2009, Jordan; Al-Raya, 25 August 2009, Doha, Qatar; Alwatan, 29 August 2009, Oman; AlWatan, 5 September 2009, Doha, Qatar; Tishreen, 17 September 2009, Damascus, Syria; Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, 13 January 2010, Ramallah. On the blood libel in cartoons, see Raphael Israeli, Blood Libel and Its Derivatives: The Scourge of Anti-Semitism (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2012), 111–12. 10. “High Level PA Panel to Investigate ‘Organ Theft’ Claims,” Ma’an News Agency, 3 September 2009, available online at www.maannews.com/Content. aspx?id=223274 (accessed 23 November 2017). 11. For example, see Judy Siegel-Itzkovich, “‘Sale of Organs’ to Be Investigated,” British Medical Journal 322/7279, 20 January 2001, 128; David Horovitz, “Laboratory Found to Have Been Retaining Body Parts,” The Irish Times, 11 January 2002, available online at www.irishtimes.com/news/laboratory-foundto-have-been-retaining-body-parts-1.1046262 (accessed 23 November 2017). 12. See, for example, Dan Even, «:‫ משכורת עתק ונזיפה למנהל המכון‬,‫נתיחות אסורות‬ ‫( »היסטוריה של מחדלים ושערוריות‬Forbidden autopsies, enormous salary, and a reprimand for the Institute director: A history of failures and scandals), Haaretz, 19 October 2010, available online at www.haaretz.co.il/news/health/1.1225841 (accessed 23 November 2017), and Dan Even, «‫פרופסור יהודה היס הודח מתפקידו‬ ‫( »במכון לרפואה משפטית‬Professor Yehuda Hiss dismissed from his post at the Institute of Forensic Medicine), Haaretz, 15 October 2012, available online at www. haaretz.co.il/1.1843043 (accessed 23 November 2017). 13. Kevin Flower and Guy Azriel, “Israel Harvested Organs without Permission, Officials Say,” CNN, 21 December 2009, available online at http://edition.cnn. com/2009/WORLD/meast/12/21/israel.organs/ (accessed 23 November 2017). In a subsequent article, Scheper-Hughes highlights the deplorable shortcomings at the Institute but does not suggest that Israel was involved in killing Palestinians to harvest organs. See Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “The Body of the Terrorist: Blood Libels, Bio-Piracy, and the Spoils of War at the Israeli Forensic Institute,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 78, no. 3 (2001): 849–86. 14. See, for example, Horatius, De Arte Poetica Liber (Zürich: Artemis, 1961), 34 (l. 340); Ovid, Fasti (London: Heinemann, 1956), 326 (l. 131)–328 (l. 143); Edith Ennen, Frauen im Mittelalter (Munich: Beck, 1994), 246; Michael Psellus, De Operatione Daemonum (Nuremberg: Fr. Nap. Campe, 1838), 8–9. 15. Bezalel Bar-Kochva, The Image of the Jews in Greek Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 253–79. Our knowledge of this derives principally from Josephus’ Contra Apionem (2:91–102). William Whiston, ed., Josephus: The Complete Works (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1998), 957b–58b. The Greeks also used the blood libel against others (for example, Persians drink human blood in Herodotus’ Histories 3:11), as did the Jews against the Canaanites (Wisdom of Solomon 12:5).

280  Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß 16. Gavin Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Anti-Semitism (Berkeley: California University Press, 1990), 214–15. 17. These Christian accusations do not draw on the accusations from Antiquity. Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christian-Jewish Relations 1000–1300: Jews in the Service of Medieval Christendom (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2011), 169. 18. Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: A Classification of the Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-Books, and Local Legends, vol. 5 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989 [reprint]), 471 (ref. no. V361). 19. Edward Kessler and Neil Wenborn, A Dictionary of Jewish-Christian Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 63. 20. Robert Chazan, Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 71. 21. William of Norwich (1144); Harold of Gloucester (1168); Bray/Brie (1171); Blois (1171); Robert of Bury (1181); Fulda (1235); Little Hugh of Lincoln (1255); Werner of Bacharach/Oberwesel (1287); Pforzheim (1267); Weißenburg (1270); Rudolph of Bern (1294); Simon of Trent (1475); Little Boy (Santo Niño) of La Guardia (1491); Dominguito de Val (1250/late fifteenth century); Nagyszombat (Tyrnau/Trnava) (1494); Blood Libel of Bazin (Bösing) (1529); Anderl Oxner von Rinn (1462/seventeenth century); Gavriil Byelostokskiy (1690); Velizh (1823); Blood Libel of Damascus (1840); Blood Libel of Rhodes (1840); Tiszaeszlár (1882); Kishinev (Chişinău) Blood Libel (1903); Shiraz Blood Libel (1910); Beilis Blood Libel (1911); Massena Blood Libel (1928); Kielce (1946); Romanian Press: Organ trafficking (1995–96); Ukrainian Organ trafficking (2009); Krasnoyarsk (2005). 22. Note that John McCulloh, Israel Yuval, and Anna Sapir Abulafia argue that the medieval legend is older and continental in origin. See John McCulloh, “Jewish Ritual Murder,” Speculum 72, no. 2 (1997): 698–740; Israel Jacob Yuval, «‫הללקהו םקנה‬, ‫»הלילעהו םדה‬, ‫[ ןויצ‬Zion] 58 (1993): 33–90; Israel Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), ch. 4; Sapir Abulafia, Christian-Jewish Relations, 169–70. 23. On the role of the calendar in such libels, see Miriamne A. Krummel’s article in this collection. 24. Sapir Abulafia, Christian-Jewish Relations, 177–78. 25. Langmuir’s claim that the blood libel started in Fulda has also been rebutted by Sapir Abulafia. See Langmuir, Toward a Definition, 266–68; Sapir Abulafia, Christian-Jewish Relations, 184–85. 26. Such re-enactments lie at the heart of the Host desecration allegations, when Jews were accused of stealing and mistreating a consecrated Host (the body of Jesus Christ). See Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 27. Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism, rev. ed. with foreword by Marc Saperstein (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1993), 125. 28. Abulafia, Christian-Jewish Relations, 179. 29. Langmuir, Toward a Definition, 264. 30. The popular demonic image of the Jews was never part of the official theology of the Church, although it was often propagated by its clergy. Pope Innocent IV (1243–54) forbade accusing Jews of using human blood in their rites; Pope Gregory X (1271–76) declared the evidence of a Christian inadmissible in a ritual murder charge against a Jew, and Pope Nicholas V (1447–55) forbade the spreading of blood-libel accusations; Shlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1988), nos 183, 234, and 765.

A Rational Model  281 31. Jeremy Cohen, Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 115. 32. “‘Juda erklärt Deutschland den Krieg,’ so hallte der Schlachtruf der fremdrassigen Ritualmörder durch die Welt”: Karl Holz, “Mordplan gegen Adolf Hitler” (Plan to Murder Hitler), Der Stürmer, May 1934, 13. 33. Leonid Stonov, “Неужели новое на постсоветском пространстве—это только незабытое старое?” (Is the New in the Post-Soviet Space Just the Unforgotten Old?), Вестник, 19/173, 2 September 1997, available online at www.vestnik. com/issues/97/0902/win/stonov.htm (accessed 23 November 2017). 34. In Eastern European antisemitic discourse, Ḥasidim are often portrayed as a fanatic Jewish sect (Israeli, Blood Libel and Its Derivatives, 3). This became particularly apparent in the Russian media during the campaign to have the books of the contested Chabad-Lubavitch Schneerson library returned. 35. Jan Tomasz Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (New York: Random House, 2006). 36. Mikhail Nazarov, “Жить без страха иудейска!” (Living without Fear of Jews), available online at http://rusk.ru/st.php?idar=322477 (accessed 23 November 2017); “Правозащитники требуют привлечь антисемита к уголовной ответственности” (Human Rights Activists Demand to Bring Antisemitic Criminal to Account), Regnum, 16 May 2005, available online at http://regnum.ru/ news/polit/454846.html (accessed 23 November 2017). 37. Jeremy Cohen, “The Blood Libel in Solomon ibn Verga’s Shevet Yehudah,” in Jewish Blood, ed. Mitchell B. Hart (London: Routledge, 2009), 116–35 (here 132). 38. James Shapiro, Oberammergau (New York: Vintage, 2000). 39. David Littman, “Jews Under Muslim Rule: The Case of Persia,” The Wiener Library Bulletin 32 (1979): 2–15. 40. See the website of the Middle East Media Research Institute, available online at www.memri.org/ (accessed 23 November 2017) for examples. 41. Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Anti-Semitism: A History (Thrupp: Sutton, 2002), 341. 42. See Esther Webman's article in this volume. 43. Andrei Oişteanu, Inventing the Jew: Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romanian & Other Central-East European Cultures (Lincoln: University of Nebraska & SICSA, 2009), 424–26. 44. “Bine cunoscut deja [. . .], pasca evreiască cere sânge cuşer, de creştin frăgesit.” Translation from Oişteanu, Inventing the Jew, 425. 45. “Mafia evreiască de carne [umană . . .] acoperită de Mossad.” Translation from Oişteanu, Inventing the Jew, 425. 46. The series is available online at http://iranitv.com/ (accessed 11 April 2017). 47. Video clip no. 422, “Interview with Ali Derakhshi, the Maker of the New Iranian Series,” 14 December 2004, available online at www.memritv.org/clip/ en/422.htm (accessed 23 November 2017). 48. Sigrun Anselm, “Angst und Angstprojektion in der Phantasie vom jüdischen Ritualmord,” in Die Legende vom Ritualmord: Zur Geschichte der Blutsbeschuldigung gegen Juden, ed. Rainer Erb (Berlin: Metropol, 1993), 253–65 (here 265). 49. “Varför kvarhåller de annars kropparna upp till fem dygn innan vi får begrava dem? Vad hände med kropparna under tiden? Och varför blir de obducerade när dödsorsaken är uppenbar, och i samtliga fall mot vår vilja? Och varför kommer kropparna tillbaka nattetid? Och varför med militäreskort? Och varför stängs områdena av under begravningen? Och varför bryts elektriciteten?” 50. “Vi vet att behovet av organ i Israel är stort, att en omfattande illegal organhandel pågår, att det skett under lång tid, att det sker med myndigheternas goda minne, att högt uppsatta läkare på de stora sjukhusen deltar, liksom tjänstemän

282  Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß på olika nivåer. Och vi vet att palestinska unga män försvann, att de fördes tillbaka fem dygn senare under hemlighetsmakeri på natten, uppsprättade och hopsydda. Dags att bringa klarhet i denna makabra verksamhet om vad som försiggår och vad som försiggått på de av Israel ockuperade områdena sedan intifadan startade.” 51. The soldiers’ shooting of Ghanem is described thus: “De fimpade cigaretterna, lade ifrån sig Coca-Cola-burkarna och siktade i lugn och ro genom det trasiga fönstret. När Bilal var tillräckligt nära var det bara att trycka av.” (They stubbed out their cigarettes and put down their cans of Coca Cola and nice and calmly aimed through the broken window. When Bilal was close enough, all they had to do was pull the trigger.) At Ghanem’s burial the soldiers behave disrespectfully: “Tillsammans med de skarpa ljuden från spadarna hördes enstaka skratt från soldaterna som i väntan på att få åka hem drog några vitsar för varandra.” (Among the sharp noises from the shovels, sporadic laughing was heard from the soldiers who, waiting to be allowed to head home, were telling each other jokes.) 52. Ghanem was Muslim, not Christian. 53. Mary Douglas, “Witchcraft and Leprosy: The Strategies of Exclusion,” Man 26, no. 4 (1991): 723–36 (here 724): “Sometimes the person who is to be rejected is not marginal at all: an unpopular leader, a young tyrant, or an aging monarch. It is necessary to realise that the same strategies of rejection may sometimes be used against the powerful. There has to be consensus. There has to be an imputation of immorality.” The Aftonbladet insinuations and claims rest on the consensus that Jews are immoral. 54. Andrea Levin, “Anatomy of a Swedish Blood Libel,” The Wall Street Journal, 14 October 2009, available online at www.wsj.com/articles/SB1000142405274 8704107204574470712953449876 (accessed 23 November 2017). 55. Lily Galili, “Ukraine Academic: Israel Imported 25,000 Kids for Their Organs,” Haaretz, 3 December 2009, available online at www.haaretz.com/print-edition/ news/ukraine-academic-israel-imported-25-000-kids-for-their-organs-1.2930 (accessed 23 November 2017). 56. “IDF Stealing Haitian Organs,” available online at www.youtube.com/ watch?v=pGLPZdhoh14 (accessed 23 November 2017). 57. Jonny Paul, “Haiti Organ Harvesting Claims False,” The Jerusalem Post, 14 February 2010, available online at www.jpost.com/International/Haiti-organharvesting-claims-false (accessed 23 November 2017). 58. For a summary of the diplomatic interventions, interviews given by Swedish and Israeli politicians, and the comments in the major Swedish newspapers, see Mikael Tossavainen, “The Aftonbladet Organ-Trafficking Accusations against Israel: A Case-Study,” 1 March 2010, available online at www.think-israel.org/ tossavainen.aftonbladetaffair.html (accessed 23 November 2017). Tossavainen mentions one single politician, Per Gahrton from the Green Party (Miljöpartiet), in favour of the Boström publication, but Gahrton’s article on the website newsmill is no longer accessible as the website has ceased to exist. Gahrton was also head of the lobby organisation Palestinagrupperna i Sverige (Palestine Groups in Sweden), who re-posted his article. 59. In 2012, Boström interviewed Chen Kugel about the extraction of organs from Israeli and Palestinian bodies. Åsa Linderborg called this an “upprättelse” (restitution) in several articles and interviews and repeated how difficult but important it is to criticise Israel in Sweden. Dante Thomsen, “Ett misslyckande för svensk journalistik” (A Failure for Swedish Journalism), Dagens Media, 16 November 2012, available online at www.dagensmedia.se/nyheter/print/ dagspress/article3585396.ece (accessed 23 November 2017). A criticism of her

A Rational Model  283 argument was published by SKMA, available online at http://skma.se/lognerfran-borjan-till-slut/ (accessed 23 November 2017). 60. Nathalie Rothschild, “The Blood Libel That Won’t Quit,” Tablet, 3 December 2012, available online at www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/ 118035/the-blood-libel-that-wont-quit (accessed 23 November 2017); Henrik Bachner, “Fördomar i repris” (Prejudices Revisited), Dagens Nyheter, 21 November 2012, available online at www.dn.se/ledare/kolumner/fordomar-irepris/ (accessed 23 November 2017). Bachner related the Boström article and particularly Linderborg’s attempts to use the Hiss scandal as proof for it to stories about Israeli organ plundering in the Arab world before and after the Aftonbladet affair. 61. Pär Johansson, “Israel bekräftar organstöld” (Israel Confirms Organ Theft), Proletären, 7 January 2010, available online at www.proletaren.se/utrikes/ mellanostern/israel-bekraftar-organstold (accessed 23 November 2017); Röda berget, “Israel erkänner organstöld” (Israel Admits Organ Theft), 21 December 2012, available online at https://rodaberget.wordpress.com/2009/12/21/ israel-erkanner-organstold/ (accessed 11 April 2017). “Röda berget” identifies himself as a Social Democrat. 62. Jan-Inge Flücht, “Organstöld och Israels Lieberman” (Organ Theft and Israel’s Lieberman), 30 August 2009, available online at http://jinge.se/mediekritik/ organstold-och-israels-lieberman.htm (accessed 23 November 2017). The blog jinge was the target of severe criticism from SKMA for antisemitism in 2009, while the leader of Vänsterpartiet (the Left Party), Lars Ohly, listed it as one of his favourite blogs and defended it against the criticism. Flücht was a member of the Left Party by then. The blog is now run by Anders Romelsjö. 63. Torbjörn Jerlerup, “Aftonbladet och myten om israeliska organstölder” (Aftonbladet and the Myth About Israeli Organ Thefts), 26 November 2012, available online at http://motargument.se/2012/11/26/aftonbladet-och-mytenom-­israeliska-organstolder/ (accessed 23 November 2017). 64. Klartexten, “Israel: Beviset, därför var det INTE organstöld” (Israel: The Proof Why It Was NOT Organ Theft), 31 August 2009, available online at https:// klartexten.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/israel-beviset-darfor-var-det-inteorganstold/ (accessed 11 April 2017). The blog is heavily islamophobic and includes, for example, articles praising the manifesto by Anders Behring Breivik as “containing many wise words” and others with titles like “Circumcision is against babies’ basic human rights” and “What responsibility do women have in cases of rape?” In other contexts, the blogger seems to have declared himself as voting for Sverigedemokraterna (the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats). 65. Lennart Eriksson, ten articles about the Boström article and organ trafficking, available online at www.sapereaude.se/blog/?tag=organstold (accessed 23 November 2017). Lennart Eriksson was fired from his job at Migrationsverket (the Swedish Migration agency) due to the unconditional support he expressed in his blog for the State of Israel. 66. Skvitt, “Blunda i historieförfalskningens namn” (Closing Your Eyes in the Name of Falsifying History), 26 November 2012, available online at https:// skvitts.wordpress.com/2012/11/26/israelisk-organstold-far-man-inte-snackaom/ (accessed 23 November 2017). “Skvitt” runs a number of blogs dealing with computer-related issues, data storage and monitoring, and political issues. His blog had previously been hosted by Aftonbladet’s blog portal. 67. Bahlool, “Aftonbladet, organstöld och antisemitiska anklagelser” (Aftonbladet, Organ Theft and Antisemitic Allegations), 17 August 2010, available online at www.bahlool.se/2010/08/17/aftonbladet-organstold-antisemitism-judar/ (accessed 23 November 2017).

284  Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß 68. Stenberg politik, “Judisk humor” (Jewish Humour), 21 August 2009, available online at http://stenbergpolitik.blogspot.se/2009/08/judisk-humor.html (accessed 23 November 2017). According to the other links and featured blogs on the website, Stenberg is a male blogger with sympathies for the Green Party and Social Democrats. 69. Mats Skogkär, “Antisemitbladet” (Antisemite newspaper), Sydsvenskan, 17 August 2009, available online at http://blogg.sydsvenskan.se/snallposten/ 2009/08/17/antisemitbladet/ (accessed 23 November 2017). 70. Ulf Bjereld, “Aftonbladet och kampen mot antisemitismen” (Aftonbladet and the Fight against Antisemitism), 23 August 2009, available online at http:// ulfbjereld.blogspot.se/2009/08/aftonbladet-och-kampen-mot.html (accessed 23 November 2017). 71. “På medeltiden fanns allehanda antisemitiska föreställningar om att judarna exempelvis mördade kristna barn för att blanda offrens blod med det särskilda bröd som bakas till den judiska påsken. Anklagelsen om organstöld i modern tid är samma sak, alltså antisemitism. Vilket skulle bevisas. Det är en befängd analogi. Medeltida hokus pokus är fjärran från moderna njurtransplantationer. Det senare är en högst normal medicinsk verksamhet, i Israel som i Sverige. Skillnaden mellan länderna är att det finns en illegal organmarknad i Israel. De israeliska anklagelserna för antisemitism borde ha fallit på sin egen orimlighet.” Jan Guillou, “Liebermans medlöpare är svåra att förstå” (Lieberman’s Accomplices Are Difficult to Understand), Aftonbladet, 30 August 2009, available online at www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/kolumnister/janguillou/article11976847. ab (accessed 23 November 2017). 72. “Det finns de som menar att det är antisemitiskt, ja till och med ett uttryck för nazistiska böjelser, att ställa den frågan, eftersom det finns en (för mig okänd) uråldrig myt om att judar bakar bröd med fienders blod.” Åsa Linderborg, “Ni matar extremister” (You’re Feeding Extremists), Aftonbladet, 28 August 2009, available online at www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/article11974948.ab (accessed 23 November 2017).

Part VII

Neighbours

18 “. . . and order was upset” Easter, the Eucharist, and the Jews of Prague, 1389 Milan Žonca

The Attack During the 1389 Easter celebration, a violent Christian mob entered the Jewish quarter in Prague. They plundered, destroyed Jewish places of worship and private homes, and slaughtered most of the approximately 750 inhabitants. The attack, which occurred during a particularly sensitive liturgical season, was allegedly sparked by Jewish blasphemy—most Christian sources mention an earlier confrontation with a priest carrying a consecrated host through the Jewish quarter. It ended a period during which the Jewish community had flourished in the imperial capital thanks to favourable conditions created by the policies of Charles IV (1316–78) and his successor Wenceslas IV (1361–1419). While the riot did not completely obliterate the Jewish presence from Prague, it marked the beginning of a gradual decline that continued throughout the tumultuous fifteenth century.1 The attack occupied an important place in the communal memory of the inhabitants of Prague—Jews and Christians alike—as well as their contemporaries from elsewhere, as is indicated by the number of accounts of the anti-Jewish violence and the events leading up to it. Perhaps the best-known Latin narrative is the remarkable liturgical parody Passio Iudeorum Pragensium (The Passion of the Jews of Prague).2 It survives in three versions and is a playful rearrangement and adaptation of Easter liturgical texts that portrays the suffering of the Jews as a distorted mirror image of the Passion of Christ.3 According to the Passio, the unrest in Prague began when local Jews threw stones at a priest carrying a consecrated host through the Jewish quarter during Holy Week. When Christian preachers denounced the assault in their sermons, the Jews sensed the impending danger and gathered in the courtyard of their communal official Jonah. Municipal authorities attempted to prevent the violence by proclaiming that the Jews were under royal protection, but a Christian mob led by a peasant ringleader named Ješko, keen to avenge the injury to Christ, attacked after nightfall. They set houses on fire and killed the inhabitants, sparing only a handful of Jewish children, who were baptised and raised as Christians. “O, truly blessed the night, which despoiled the Jews and enriched the Christians,” declaimed the

288  Milan Žonca anonymous author, alluding to the hymn Exsultet, sung during the Easter Vigil.4 Following the attack, town officials pressured the looters, with limited success, to return the spoils, arguing that Jewish possessions were tainted by usury. The disastrous plague epidemic of 1380 was still a fresh memory, so the corpses of the Jews scattered in the streets were eventually burned, “lest the city be infected by air corrupt with the stench of usurious fat.”5 It is likely that the Passio emerged from the University of Prague milieu, where the attack clearly stirred up interest. Johannes Lange of Wetzlar (d. after 1430), a theologian and physician who studied in Prague from 1383 to 1389, incorporated a report on the riot into his Dialogus super Magnificat (Dialogue on the Magnificat).6 Immediately after the attack, a certain Master Matthias composed a short poem justifying the attack as a punishment for the Jewish crime of blasphemy.7 The motif of crime and punishment is also emphasised in a pithy Old Czech summary of Matthias’s verse, perhaps written by a diligent student and attached to the original: “[In the year] one thousand three hundred eighty-nine, the Jews were burned here, Jonah was killed in Prague. On the day of Christ’s resurrection they were given hard penance.”8 The most famous Jewish description of the attack is preserved in the Hebrew elegy (seliḥah) ’Et kol ha-tela’ah (All the Afflictions), composed by Avigdor Kara (Qara’; d. 1439), a local Jewish scholar and schoolteacher who survived the attack.9 Kara’s seliḥah emulates the style of elegies composed in earlier centuries to commemorate the martyrs of anti-Jewish persecutions, particularly the First Crusade. It describes the destruction inflicted upon the Jewish inhabitants of Prague on the last day of the joyful Passover festival, the eight days of which fell exactly on the Christian Holy Week that year, beginning on Palm Sunday. Paralleling the Passio, with its pastiche-like use of biblical quotations and allusions, the elegy singles out the martyrdom of an unnamed rabbi, the destruction of the two synagogues, the desecration of the Jewish cemetery and the Torah scrolls. Like the Christian narratives, Kara also mentions both the parents who chose to kill their children and commit suicide, rather than fall at the hands of Christian attackers, and the Jewish orphans who were later baptised and adopted by Christian townsfolk.10 The poem concludes with an invocation of God’s vengeance and a plea for the speedy advent of redemption. Kara’s elegy was later included in Prague’s early printed prayer books and incorporated into the liturgical rite of the Old-New Synagogue in Prague, thereby connecting the commemoration of this local event with the cyclical remembrance of catastrophes that had befallen the Jewish nation throughout history. The two famous narratives report the events of 1389 from opposing vantage points, but nonetheless share common traits, and even constitute a form of mutual dialogue.11 Both texts use sacred history remembered and re-enacted in religious ritual as a lens through which the violence is observed and ultimately endowed with meaning. While the anonymous

“. . . and order was upset”  289 Passio rearranges motifs and quotations from the Gospel narratives of Christ’s Passion and resurrection, creating a highly complex representation of the attack, its motivations, and its reverberations that is deeply embedded in Christian liturgical and devotional practices, Kara’s elegy employs the imagery of the Passover celebration to present models of Jewish-Christian confrontation and place the local attack within broader context of national and universal salvation. The complexity of the chosen narrative methods means that both texts are fraught with internal tensions. While the writer of the Passio ostensibly celebrates the slaughter of the Jews, his description of the looting and the utterances he attributes to the attackers also reveal uneasiness about their motivations. Framing the riot as a parody of Christ’s Passion places the Jews in a paradoxical position, presenting them as both the villains of the story and its sacrificial victims.12 As we shall see, Avigdor Kara’s use of biblical quotations also problematises the seemingly clear-cut schematisation of characters, as well as appearing to covertly criticise the leadership of the Jewish community.

Contested Time, Contested Space: Jewish-Christian Coexistence in Prague However complex and ambiguous the literary representations, the inescapable reality of the attack begs the question: why did the relatively unproblematic coexistence of Jews and Christians in Prague suddenly take a sinister turn on Easter 1389? Some contemporary writers seemed to think that the anti-Jewish violence was, paradoxically, the unavoidable outcome of the favourable conditions and stability enjoyed by the Jews, interpreting it as a way of restoring the social equilibrium that had been disrupted by Jewish expansion. In a laconic mid-fifteenth century commentary on the attack, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (1405–64), later Pope Pius II, wrote: The Jews living among Christians are a miserable human race. For wherever they are believed to prosper to the smallest extent, [it is perceived] as if they despised the majesty of our Lord, Jesus Christ, or the [Christian] religion, and lose not only their wealth, but also their lives.13 Contemporary clerical writers often blamed King Wenceslas IV and his courtiers’ favourable policies for the “scandalous” flourishing of the Jewish community in Prague. According to the Augustinian abbot Ludolf of Żagań (d. 1422), the King granted the Jews permission to protect their quarter by a system of gates; he also assigned them some houses that had originally belonged to Christians, “especially the house of the Christian Masters.”14 As a result, the Jews began to “behave recalcitrantly toward the [Christian] faith, blaspheme against the Saint of Israel and were eager to abuse our Saviour in various ways.”15

290  Milan Žonca The Archbishop of Prague, Jan of Jenštejn (1348–1400), who, beginning in 1384, was in conflict with Wenceslas over ecclesiastical privileges, also repeatedly claimed that the Jews enjoyed better conditions than Christians, especially clerics.16 In a Christmas sermon, he warned that Jewish prosperity was a sign of the coming of the Antichrist and complained that “one Jew has more power among the princes than a nobleman or a prelate.”17 According to Jenštejn, the toleration of usury was the clearest indication of Jewish prosperity and of Jews’ excessive social influence. The Archbishop was a fervent critic of usury, and synodal statutes from the 1380s reflect his repeated attempts to eradicate it.18 That the King not only chose to turn a blind eye to this sinful practice, but even benefited from it, was a source of scandal for the Christian faithful. Johannes Lange of Wetzlar formulated the issue poignantly: “When the Hebrews are baptised, they abandon usury, yet Christian kings anointed with chrism receive interest, and make the Jews freer than Christians.”19 For these writers, economic and social advantage based on sinful usury was at its most dangerous and problematic when manifested publicly. Lange criticised the King’s vice-chancellor Sigismund Huler for his deferential behaviour toward wealthy Jews: You have watched with proud heart how Jonah and Pinḥas and their fellows marched through the streets of the town and mocked Christians in an unsightly manner. But you, miserable counsellor, when meeting the Jews, manifestly took your hat off and addressed these wicked Jews as “masters” and “fathers.”20 On closer examination, it is possible to find traces of this discourse in Avigdor Kara’s seliḥah as well. The third stanza of the elegy situates the attack in time and space: Divine judgement hit crown-wearing Prague/in the year 5149 after creation [1389 CE]./The just tottered in front of the evil and “the natural order was upset.”21Alas, the strong rod is broken, the lordly staff!22 The city of Prague is described as “crown-wearing” (ha-ma‛aṭirah), highlighting its status as the Bohemian capital. The epithet is taken from the Book of Isaiah, where it is applied to Tyre, a city “whose merchants were nobles, whose traders the world honoured.”23 Kara seems to be signalling that honour and nobility produced by wealth provides no protection from God’s punishment. Indeed, Isaiah prophesied that God would punish Tyre “to shame all the honoured of the world.”24 Similarly, another image of destruction used by Kara, the broken “strong rod,” is taken from the prophecy of Jeremiah, where it refers to another pagan nation, Moab.25 Like Tyre, Moab was punished for its haughtiness and reliance on financial wealth.26 Kara’s biblical allusions suggest that the Jewish community of Prague might

“. . . and order was upset”  291 have been punished for its excessive reliance on wealth and honour. Kara’s exclusive focus in his elegy on the fate of rabbis and scholars contrasts with the central role played by Jewish communal leaders in the Christian narratives. Did he perhaps hold them responsible for “upsetting the natural order” and bringing Jewish-Christian relations into imbalance with misguided demonstrations of love and hate? Influential churchmen may have found it expedient to exploit anxieties about the economic role played by Jews in Christian society in late-medieval Prague in their political struggle with secular authority. However, the crucial role played by popular piety and local religion in laying the groundwork for the attack, and ultimately in providing it with meaning, cannot be overlooked.27 A closer examination of the surviving narratives, and the connection between the riot and the accusation of host desecration, in particular, suggests that the literary representations of the attack of 1389 may have been shaped by ideas and concerns tied to specific developments in Prague’s religious and devotional landscape during the late 1380s. At the time, the Bohemian Church was astir with debate about the laity’s access to the Eucharist. While not directly addressing the Jews, these arguments touched upon the definition and imposition of social and gender hierarchies, of control of public expressions of piety and of the uneasiness about hypocrisy and heresy. Churchmen and schoolmen discussed the danger posed by the unregulated contact of the faithful with the body of Christ, on the one hand, and the potential of the Eucharist to inspire spiritual and social reform, on the other. The Easter liturgical celebrations shaped by the Gospel narratives of Christ’s Passion and resurrection offered an opportunity for meditation, not only on salvific suffering of God incarnate, but also on the role of spiritual humility, the power of communion, and the economy of salvation and grace. Shortly before the attack, the King intervened in the debate, leading to a tense situation in which the Jews took on a key symbolic role as the archetype for “un-Christian” elements seeking to hinder spiritual reform and prevent or limit the faithful’s access to the Eucharist. Echoes of contemporary theological and pastoral debates could be heard in the paschal liturgical rhetoric, accentuating concerns about the balance of spiritual power in a society that many felt was ripe for radical reform and purification. According to Passio Iudeorum Pragensium, Jews triggered the riot by attacking a priest passing through the Jewish quarter with a consecrated host: On the evening of the Sabbath day, toward the dawn of the first day after the Sabbath, a priest entered the Jewish quarter with the body of Jesus. The Jews went forth to meet him, and, bearing stones in their hands, they shouted and said, “Let him be stoned, for he has made himself the Son of God.” Then the children of the Hebrews, taking stones from the streets, went to meet the priest, shouting and saying: “Cursed is he whom you bear in your hands.”28

292  Milan Žonca A different version has the priest being harangued by Jews while bringing a communion host to a sick person: “He, whom you carry, is not the Son of God, but an idol.”29 By the end of the fourteenth century, host desecration accusations, often accompanied by anti-Jewish violence, have become widespread in Europe, including in Bohemia and the neighbouring regions.30 However, unlike most desecration narratives, the Passio does not depict the Jews as attempting to torture and destroy the host in a vindictive re-enactment of Christ’s crucifixion. Rather, they assert the boundaries of their quarter, defend it from Christian intrusion and openly challenge Christian belief in Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist. The incident occurred during the Holy Week, a period marked by interreligious tension and concern about the Jewish presence in the Christian society. This liturgical season was an occasion for public demarcation of communal boundaries, often through controlled acts of ritual violence such as stone-throwing, noisemaking or mutual verbal abuse. Storming of the Jewish quarter played an important role in the ritual assertion of Christian superiority and the re-actualisation of divine vengeance, demonstrating the appropriate social order and hierarchy.31 The polemical pronouncement of Christian religious identity was accompanied by a heightened sensitivity to Jewish blasphemy; in many places, including Prague, the Jews were required by ecclesiastical and secular regulations to remain indoors on Good Friday, in order not to interfere with Christian celebrations.32 Unlike the Iberian Peninsula, there are no surviving records to suggest periodic recurrences of ritualised paschal violence in Prague, but the description of the incident in the Passio reflects a concern about the containment of Jews characteristic of Holy Week riots. The narrative describes a public assertion of boundaries, which were perhaps all too frequently challenged. By the last quarter of the fourteenth century, the Jewish community of Prague was protected by a system of six gates. The proximity of Jewish and Christian communities might nonetheless have been perceived as too immediate, with the boundaries between them seen as insufficient. The Jewish quarter was not a separate district; it was located within the city’s intricate network of no less than forty-five parishes. The areas inhabited by the Jews fell within the St. Valentine, St. Nicholas, and Holy Cross the Greater parishes. According to the visitation report of Archdeacon Pavel of Janovice, who visited these parishes in 1379–82, priests from both St. Valentine’s and Holy Cross churches complained that the Jews refused to compensate them for tithes they would otherwise have received from Christian inhabitants.33 In this sense, Jews and their homes occupied a socially and economically significant place within Christian sacred space. An enclave of Christian houses, including the Benedictine convent of the Holy Spirit, established in 1348, separated the eastern and western sections of the Jewish settlement, which was clustered around the community’s two principal synagogues: the Old and the New (today Old-New). Municipal

“. . . and order was upset”  293 tax records show that the core of the Jewish quarter was surrounded by several blocks of houses inhabited by a heterogeneous population, primarily made up of ordinary craftsmen and tradesmen, the most frequent recipients of small Jewish loans.34 It was a rough neighbourhood, notorious for gambling and prostitution.35 A St. Nicholas parishioner complained to Pavel of Janovice that the area was full of houses inhabited by students, who often accommodated prostitutes, “which is a source of scandal for many.” He further remarked, “often people die without having received the sacraments, because the priests refuse to visit them”—presumably out of fear for their own safety.36 However, there were also members of the elite living in the mixed areas neighbouring the Jewish settlement,37 and, in exceptional cases, Jews were allowed to acquire homes in Christian sections of the city.38 The spatial and social proximity of Jews and Christians of all classes concerned Prague theologians. At some point before 1400, Matthew of Cracow (c. 1345–1410), a master of theology at the University of Prague, wrote a response to a query sent by one of his close friends, possibly Archbishop Jan of Jenštejn, who was disturbed by the contact between Christian butchers and Jews. Matthew listed numerous established reasons why a good Christian should not do business with Jews and should avoid their company altogether, including both their negative influence on Christian morality and their enmity for the Christian faith.39 While Matthew did not mention the Jews in his treatise De contractibus, a comprehensive scholastic treatment of business ethics, the unambiguous anti-Jewish position he expressed in the letter seems to address the situation on the ground, which included uncomfortably intimate contact between Jews and Christians. The problematic nature of Jewish-Christian spatial coexistence, which both enabled and shaped the attack of 1389, was brought to the fore by the conflict over sacred time, with Jewish and Christian narratives of martyrdom and redemption challenging each other during the highly contested period of Passover and Easter. This was also a time when the body of Christ—both his suffering body on the cross and the Eucharistic body on the altar— stood at the centre of pious meditation and liturgical practices related to its spatial manipulation and relocation. On Palm Sunday, Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem was commemorated with a liturgical procession, sometimes involving a host.40 On Good Friday, a cross or a crucifix, or, less frequently, a consecrated host might be symbolically buried in a sepulchre, a special chapel or a structure outside of the sanctuary, and then taken up and carried back in again on Easter morning before matins.41 In some areas in Central Europe, Prague being one of them, special crucifixes with movable arms were used to provide a realistic visual image of Christ’s deposition and burial.42 These meditations and practices directed the attention of the faithful to the vulnerability of Christ’s body and the consequences of its exposure to inimical agents, fueling anxiety about the spatial proximity of religious communities, their hierarchy, and the dangers facing Christian society, both from within and from without.

294  Milan Žonca This anxiety is reflected in the depiction of the Jewish attack on the host in the Passio. Here, the entry of the host carried by the priest into the Jewish quarter is compared to Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. According to the Gospels, Jesus was welcomed by the Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem with the cry, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”43 As previously mentioned, Christ’s triumphant entry was re-enacted in processions accompanied by the singing of the processional antiphon Pueri Hebraeorum. In the Passio, this antiphon is parodically inverted and used to describe the attack of Jewish children on the host. The problematic nature of urban coexistence is emphasised as the paved streets of Prague supply the Jewish children with stones, their “weapons” against Christianity. It has been noted that liturgical processions, especially those including the host, were used to structure social space and provide “an ordered reading of existence in which dominance and subordination were acknowledged.”44 By introducing textual elements associated with the Palm Sunday procession, the author of the Passio fashioned the attack on the host as the attack on social hierarchy and its guardians, the clerics.45 This symbolism also underscored local clerical criticism of Jewish pride and social superiority by contrasting their behaviour with that of Christ. The narrative depiction and liturgical re-enactment of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem in the Gospels, associated with the prophecy of Zechariah and juxtaposed with the reading of the Passion, was interpreted as an opportunity for meditation on the virtue of humility.46 This tendency is reflected on a popular level in an early sixteenth-century antiphonary containing older, late-medieval Czech interpolations into liturgical texts. The Palm Sunday antiphons are accompanied by an exhortation to the faithful to emulate Christ’s meekness: He about whom the prophet David [sic] said: “Heaven is his throne, and the earth is his footstool,” [cf. Isaiah 66:1] is sitting humbly on a young donkey, teaching humility to those who fear you, saying: “Learn from me to be humble, if you wish to enter the Jerusalem of heavenly joy.”47 In the context of Prague’s discourse of reform, this meditation on humility, framed by liturgical processions, elicited criticism of social and religious abuse, including clerical corruption. In his collection of Czech sermons written in 1413, Jan Hus used the Gospel reading for Palm Sunday to contrast the “popes, archbishops, cardinals, bishops, canons and parish priests,” who often ride pompously on horses in adorned vestments, accompanied by a suite of sycophants, with a modest donkey that carries the Eucharist in the procession and is left behind unnoticed, eating grass.48 The image of the Palm Sunday procession, a liturgical representation of Christ’s gloriousyet-humble entry into Jerusalem, could thus be used to simultaneously symbolise and subvert established hierarchies, if they failed to conform to the ideal of authentic Christianity. As we have seen, arrogance and pride were

“. . . and order was upset”  295 the vices attributed to the Jews of Prague by contemporary clerical writers. By presenting the Jewish attack on the host as a distorted image of a Palm Sunday procession, with its construction of social hierarchy and denunciation of pride, the author of the Passio interpreted the resulting anti-Jewish violence as a part of a social and spiritual struggle against both individual and social vice.

Jews and Christian Spiritual Renewal: The Struggle over Frequent Communion By the late fourteenth century, the focus on social and religious hierarchies was part of a broader discussion about reforming Christian society and religious devotion. The attack on the Jews and its narrative representations can be interpreted as part of a lively debate about the laity frequently taking communion, which was one of the hallmarks of the local religion in Prague from the mid-fourteenth century onward. These debates about the role of sacraments in Christian life and their potential to induce both the spiritual and institutional reform of the Church culminated in the late 1380s and early 1390s. By that point, the King, the Archbishop, university masters and preachers of spiritual reform were all involved in efforts to delineate rules governing the laity’s access to the Eucharist, and public manifestations of piety in general. It is possible that the host desecration accusation that sparked the attack on the Jews of Prague was part of this effort. In what follows, I will look at these debates and indicate where they converged with anti-Jewish concerns. The role of the Eucharist in Christian religious life was a subject of debate throughout the Middle Ages.49 The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 established the obligation of all Christians to receive communion at least once a year. More frequent access to communion was not discouraged, but much emphasis was laid on necessary spiritual preparation for receiving the Eucharist in order to limit trivialisation or unworthy reception.50 Sensory contact with the Eucharist became the paramount spiritual aspiration, and new forms of devotion evolved to help the faithful prepare for and benefit from the salvific gaze upon the consecrated host. Frequent communion—the most intimate form of contact with Christ’s real presence, in the species of bread—remained the domain of the clergy and of religious virtuosi, but the latter category became more inclusive. The Eucharist played an important role in the spirituality of the beguines, a group made up primarily of upper-middle-class women and belonging to the wave of (semi-)heterodox religious movements that appeared over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.51 The beguines’ aspiration to live lives of ascetic piety and mystical experience, while remaining in the world, challenged institutional monasticism. Their mystical visions aroused suspicion and their unstructured and unregulated lifestyle was perceived as a hotbed of heresy. Information about their activities in Bohemia is scant,

296  Milan Žonca but surviving documents show that they were among the heretical groups targeted by Bohemian Inquisitors during the first half of the fourteenth century.52 Calls for the spiritual reform of the Church and debates about lay participation in sacramental life were an essential aspect of the “unique [. . .] combination of religious energies” characteristic of the vibrant local religion that emerged in Prague during the reign of Charles IV.53 Echoing some aspects of the Dutch devotio moderna movement, the promotion of frequent communion for the laity and other forms of Eucharistic devotion became emblematic of the many issues that reform was meant to address.54 The Bohemian proponents of this new spiritual emphasis saw the Eucharist as “spiritual medicine” and its frequent reception as the only way to limit or suppress sin in both personal and public life.55 Jan Milíč of Kroměříž (d. 1374), a cathedral canon turned ascetic and apocalyptic reform preacher, who established a lay religious community of reformed prostitutes in a former brothel named Venice in the New Town of Prague, presented frequent communion as an eschatological sign, a necessary precondition for the unification of the faithful with Christ and the cornerstone of a new reformed Christian community, in which the boundaries between clergy and laity would be relativised.56 Despite the support of Charles IV, Milíč’s eschatological ecclesiology and criticism of clerical corruption aroused the opposition of local clergy and mendicant orders, and he was forced to defend himself against an accusation of heresy at the papal court in Avignon. Milíč’s emphasis on frequent communion was taken up by his disciple Tomáš Štítný of Štítné (d. before 1409), who popularised it in his vernacular religious writings.57 Over the course of the 1380s, this once isolated devotional belief became a pastoral challenge, and, as a result, the debates concerning frequent communion spread to the parlours of Prague theological schools. Vojtěch Raňkův of Ježov (d. 1388), a Paris-educated scholasticus of the St. Vitus Cathedral chapter, offered a cautious defence of frequent lay communion in his treatise De frequenti communione ad plebanum Martinum.58 While acknowledging the importance of the Eucharist in Christian life, Vojtěch’s final verdict was that to avoid profanation of the sacrament the faithful should always take the counsel of their regular confessor and consider local church regulations when determining the frequency of its reception.59 The emphasis on personal discernment was more pronounced in a widely disseminated treatise, Dialogus rationis et conscientiae de crebra communione (The Dialogue between Reason and Conscience Concerning Frequent Communion) by Matthew of Cracow.60 Matthew presented rational arguments against most common scruples and obstacles to frequent communion and to enabling individuals to determine their own spiritual needs. Matthew put his pastoral approach based on individual discernment into practice at least once, in his capacity as the spiritual guide of a certain Elizabeth, the wife of a prominent Prague burgher. According to Jan

“. . . and order was upset”  297 of Jenštejn, frequent communion was an important aspect of this female mystic’s devotion: She drew this sweetness of exultation and joy from the reception of the Lord’s body and the most holy Eucharist, which she received as often as it was suited to her devotion, according to the counsel and with the permission of the venerable Master Matthew of Cracow, master in theology, her confessor and regular spiritual counsellor.61 By the late 1380s, such forms of devotion were causing the secular and ecclesiastical authorities misgivings. In spring 1388, King Wenceslas IV issued a decree expelling all “beghards and hypocrites” from Prague. In his reaction to the decree, Archbishop Jan of Jenštejn, while expressing approval for the King’s concern for the spiritual welfare of his realm, criticised the fact that the order was misused to persecute devout Christians and reminded the King that each accusation should be presented to Jenštejn himself or his representatives.62 Elizabeth seems to have been one of the victims targeted by the decree. Jenštejn claimed she, along with her husband, had “suffered great persecution, having been deprived of their property, house and possessions, by a royal decree.”63 Elsewhere, the Archbishop also alluded to the persecution of devout Christians who greeted each other using the name of Jesus—they were “driven away from Prague as beghards and heretics.”64 In these texts, Jenštejn presents Wenceslas as an enemy of the lay spiritual renewal, keen to use the struggle against heresy to his own economic advantage. The Archbishop, who had clashed with the King in the past, and who was in conflict with several of his courtiers at the time, had every reason to be suspicious of Wenceslas’s desire to persecute heresy and to assert his authority in matters of Church discipline.65 While Jenštejn seems to have been largely sympathetic to the frequent communion movement, a defensive measure was needed to slow down the King’s momentum. Thus, echoing the King’s concern about the spread of heresy, the diocesan synod of October 1388 decided to limit lay communion to once a month and to prohibit preachers from promoting frequent communion among the faithful.66 It is possible that the decree was intended to be temporary. Nonetheless, it clearly further aggravated tensions within the clergy.67 The university masters were consulted, and some of them, including Jenštejn’s close friend, the Dominican Heinrich of Bitterfeld (d. c. 1405), wrote academic treatises advocating frequent communion.68 Moreover, some proponents of Eucharistic devotion ignored the ban, or even ventured to challenge it. In his treatise Regulae veteris et novi testamenti (Rules of the Old and the New Testament),69 Matěj of Janov (d. 1393), a follower of Milíč and a protégé of Vojtěch Raňkův, who was educated at the University of Paris and was later a canon at the St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague, wrote that they “were not frightened or disturbed by the king’s prohibition, threateningly proclaimed in the

298  Milan Žonca streets and squares, nor repelled by the disarranged superstitions of some prelates.” In his comprehensive treatise, he presented his vision of Church renewal based on carefully distinguishing authentic from inauthentic Christianity on the basis of biblical “rules” and frequent communion. It seems that Matěj openly challenged the synodal decision in his sermons delivered at the St. Nicholas Church in the Old Town. At the synod in October 1389, he was forced to publicly recant a number of errors attributed to him, including the assertion that the faithful should be allowed to receive communion at will.70 Two of his fellow preachers at St. Nicholas Church, Jakub of Kaplice and Ondřej, were disciplined for even more radical ­proclamations—Jakub allegedly claimed that the faithful were allowed to snatch the host from a priest if he refused to hand it over.71 Prague clerics were aware that they had to walk a fine line between opening the door to accusations of heresy and stamping out the flourishing Eucharistic devotion. In October 1390, forty days of indulgence were granted to anyone who knelt during the elevation of the host or accompanied a priest visiting the sick with communion,72 steps that were clearly meant to promote forms of Eucharistic piety that were not seen as suspicious.73 In June 1391, the limitation placed on lay communion was revoked, and “true penitents” were allowed to receive communion whenever they wished.74 The attack on the Jews in April 1389 took place only a few months after the temporary suppression of frequent communion was announced. Moreover, it occurred during religious festivities that culminated in the nearly universal reception of the Eucharist, at a time when the beneficial effects of communion on ordinary Christians had become the focus of preaching and pious reflection. In this climate, access to the Eucharist and the reverence or irreverence shown for it were volatile issues laden with both interreligious and intra-religious significance. It is notable that the advocates of frequent communion preached at St. Nicholas Church, just outside of the Jewish quarter. Whether the accusation was based on an actual incident that occurred during the handling of the host in a contested shared space on Easter is of secondary importance. What is significant is that the accusation and the way the attack on host is presented in the Passio resonate with the concerns of the proponents of frequent communion and spiritual renewal. The symbolism of Easter liturgy and the references to the debates about frequent communion share a common theme with anti-Jewish concerns expressed in the Passio, namely, the condemnation of spiritual pride and the defence of established religious hierarchies. The potential inversion of the social status of the clergy and the laity was one of the primary concerns of the opponents of frequent communion. According to an anonymous Augustinian monk, who composed a short polemic with Matěj of Janov, lay adherents of frequent communion claimed that they were more sanctified than priests, having been anointed by the Holy Spirit.75 According to Matěj himself, the opponents of frequent communion were concerned

“. . . and order was upset”  299 that frequent access to Eucharist would blur the boundary separating the clergy from the laity: “These beghards and beguines already strive to be like priests. Which devil consecrated them for this?”76 Both camps claimed that their opponents were motivated by pride and haughtiness. The anonymous Augustinian decried the “proud stupidity and stupid pride” of laywomen who received communion thrice a day.77 Analogically, Matěj of Janov identified spiritual pride and hatred as the principal reason for clerical opposition to frequent communion.78 According to Matěj, pride and other vices associated with it—avarice, dishonesty, ­concupiscence—were rooted in hypocrisy, which was the first sign of the coming of the Antichrist.79 Using eschatological vocabulary to underline the urgency of his concerns, Matěj of Janov made a link between the opposition to frequent communion and social tensions expressed through the tropes of sinful arrogance and pride. As we have seen, these tropes were also used by the author of the Passio to frame the conflict between the Jews and the Christians of Prague that eventually led to the massacre of 1389. The link between clerical opponents of frequent communion and the Jews in the Passio is also suggested by references to unjustified accusations of heresy. The motif of Jews throwing stones at the host (“Let him be stoned, for he has made himself the Son of God”) alludes to an episode in the Gospel of John, read on the Fifth Sunday of Lent.80 Two decades later, Jan Hus used this episode to draw an analogy between Jewish aggression and the corruption of the Prague clergy. The Jews wanted to stone Jesus as a blaspheming heretic, “against their own law, without a charge, without witnesses, without a verdict, not outside of the city, but in the holy city ­[Jerusalem].” Similarly, Hus claimed that the clergy at the St. Vitus Cathedral once attacked Christians of good will, who had asked the priests not to lie in their sermons.81 The depiction of the Jews stoning the Eucharist on Easter could have brought all these allusions into play, creating an analogy between the Jews of Jerusalem accusing Christ of heresy, the Jews of Prague attacking the host and the corrupt clergy indiscriminately making accusations of heresy, and even resorting to violence to stifle the calls for the moral and spiritual reform of the Church. Like priests and monks who are full of spiritual pride, the proud Jews, with the support of secular authorities, attempt to limit the access of the faithful to the Eucharist by preventing the priest from passing through their neighbourhood. The attack on the Jewish community of Prague, led by a simple peasant rather than a secular or ecclesiastical authority, constitutes the realisation of the ideal proclaimed by the proponents of frequent communion, including Matěj of Janov. The attack, motivated by an infusion of the Holy Spirit during Easter communion, annihilated the Jews as symbols of the sins and vices troubling a corrupt Church.82 The attackers are portrayed as the precursors of a renewed Church rediscovering its lost unity: “[T]he Spirit of the Lord gathered them together, not just in an hour, but in an instant, from diverse and far distant places, in unity of wills and holy faith.”83

300  Milan Žonca To sum up, when the attack on the Jewish community of Prague in 1389 was commemorated, it was not represented simply as an outpouring of wrath against a marginalised God-killing people. In the Passio Iudeorum Pragensium, the inverted and distorted language of the Easter liturgy is used to depict the Jews as the tokens of the vices that need to be eradicated in the search for a renewed Christian community. The image of the Jews attacking a host is employed to stake out a position in the internal Christian dispute over the role of the Eucharist in revitalising the spiritual life of the Church. The concerns with intra-religious and interreligious hierarchies are conflated in the anonymous author’s emphatic message; those in positions of power who present obstacles to the regenerating power of the Eucharist must fall. Given their association with the King, usury and spiritual pride, the Jews become the epitome of the obstacles faced by Church reformers and devout Christians emulating Christ on their journey to “heavenly Jerusalem.” While certainly not unique in its tendency to assimilate the anxiety about Jewish-Christian coexistence into more wide-ranging social and religious debates, the Passio demonstrates the complex ways in which this could be achieved, none of which makes the riots of 1389 less gruesome or their textual representations less distressing. It does, however, help to locate the unique place of the attack on the Jews of Prague in the history of medieval anti-Jewish violence and its literary representations.

Abbreviations BRRP The Bohemian Reformation and Religious Practice PL Patrologia Latina RVNT Matthiae de Janov dicti Magister Parisiensis Regulae veteris et novi testamenti

Notes Note: The research for this article was supported by the Faculty of Arts (PROGRES Q07) and the University Centre for the Study of Ancient and Medieval Thought at Charles University, Prague (UNCE 204002/2012). 1. For an overview of the history of Jews in Prague in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, see František Šmahel, “Die Prager Judengemeinde im hussitischen Zeitalter,” in Jüdische Gemeinden und ihr christlicher Kontext in kulturräumlich vergleichender Betrachtung von der Spätantike bis zum 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Christoph Cluse, Alfred Haverkamp, and Israel Jacob Yuval (Hannover: Hahn, 2003), 341–63. On the approximate number of Jews living in Prague around 1389 and the number of possible casualties during the attack, see Alexandr Putík, “On the Topography and Demography of the Prague Jewish Town Prior to the Pogrom of 1389,” Judaica Bohemiae 30–31 (1994–95): 7–46 (here 42–45). 2. For the most recent discussion of this text, see Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 135–40; Eva Steinová, “Passio Iudeorum Pragensium: Kritická edícia Pašijí pražských Židov,” MA thesis (Brno: Masaryk University, 2010),

“. . . and order was upset”  301 available online at http://is.muni.cz/th/180028/ff_m/Steinova_diplomovapraca. pdf (accessed 23 November 2017); Eva Steinová, “Jews and Christ Interchanged: Discursive Strategies in the Passio Iudeorum Pragensium,” Graeco-Latina Brunensia 17 (2012): 73–86; Barbara Newman, “The Passion of the Jews of Prague: The Pogrom of 1389 and the Lessons of a Medieval Parody,” Church History 81 (2012): 1–26. For the English translation used below, see Barbara Newman, Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 264–71. 3. A critical edition was prepared by Steinová, Passio, 18–29. On the surviving versions and manuscripts, see Steinová, Passio, 10–17. 4. Steinová, Passio, 21; Newman, Medieval Crossover, 268. 5. Steinová, Passio, 22–23; Newman, Medieval Crossover, 270. 6. Ernst-Stephan Bauer, Frömmigkeit, Gelehrsamkeit und Zeitkritik an der Schwelle der großen Konzilien: Johannes von Wetzlar und sein Dialogus super Magnificat (1427) (Mainz: Selbstverlag der Gesellschaft für Mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte, 1981), 272–77. 7. Newman, “The Passion of the Jews of Prague,” 8 n. 37; Steinová, Passio, 11; Daniel Soukup, “Latinské a české verše o pražském pogromu roku 1389: Ke dvěma pozapomenutým žákovským skladbám,” Česká literatura 5 (2012): 711–26. 8. Soukup, “Latinské a české verše,” 714. 9. On Kara’s life, occupation, and intellectual profile, see Arye Maimon, Mordechai Breuer, and Yacov Guggenheim, eds., Germania Judaica, Bd. 3, 1350– 1519, vol. 2 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995), 1126–27; Milan Žonca, “Několik poznámek k intelektuálnímu profilu Avigdora Kary,” in Dvarim meatim: Studie pro Jiřinu Šedinovou, ed. Daniel Boušek, Magdalena Křížová, and Pavel Sládek (Prague: Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Karlovy, 2016), 35–56. In the following discussion, I quote from the earliest printed version of the elegy, as found in Seliḥot le-fi seder q[ehilah] q[edošah] Prag (Prague: Gershom Kohen, 1529), sec. 168. For an English translation, see Rubin, Gentile Tales, 196–98. I have used my own translation. 10. Steinová, Passio, 22; Newman, Medieval Crossover, 269. 11. For an analysis of the interaction between Jewish and Christian narratives, see Eva Steinová, “‘All That Suffering’: Hebrew Narratives About the Prague Easter Massacre of 1389 and Their Interaction with the Latin Material,” in Knaanic Language: Structure and Historical Background, ed. Ondřej Bláha, Robert Dittmann, and Lenka Uličná (Prague: Academia, 2013), 241–68. 12. Newman, “The Passion of the Jews of Prague,” 12–14. 13. Aeneas Silvius, Chronicon Bohemiae, ed. Josef Emler (Prague: Grégr & Dattel, s.d.), 125–26. 14. On the gates protecting the Jewish quarter on Sabbath and Jewish holidays and their location, see Putík, “On the Topography,” 40–41. In 1366, the house originally belonging to Lazar, a wealthy Jewish financier, was dedicated to the newly established Charles College. In 1386, the masters moved to a new location in the present-day Karolinum. It is possible that the house was later returned to the Jews. See Putík, “On the Topography,” 33–35. 15. Ludolf von Sagan, Tractatus de longevo schismate, ed. J. Loserth (Vienna: Carl Gerold’s Sohn, 1880), 419–20. 16. Ruben Ernest Weltsch, Archbishop John of Jenstein, 1348–1400: Papalism, Humanism and Reform in Pre-Hussite Prague (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1968), 40–78. 17. Weltsch, Archbishop John of Jenstein, 62 n. 89. 18. Ibid., 164–65; Rubin, Gentile Tales, 137. 19. Bauer, Frömmigkeit, Gelehrsamkeit und Zeitkritik, 274.

302  Milan Žonca 20. Ibid., 276. 21. This phrase is taken from midrash Bereshit Rabbah 55:8: “R. Simeon bar Yohai said: Love upsets the natural order, and hate upsets the natural order.” Cited in H. Freedman, trans., Genesis Rabbah, vol. 1 (London: Soncino Press, 1939), 488. 22. Seliḥot, sec. 168. 23. Isaiah 23:8. I have used the JPS Tanakh translation. 24. Isaiah 28:9. 25. Jeremiah 48:17. 26. Jeremiah 48:7. In this chapter, Moab is also associated with “arrogance,” “pride,” “haughtiness,” and “self-exaltation.” 27. I am inspired in particular by Natalie Zemon Davis’s analysis of the St. Bartholomew riots, which has shown that religious concerns can play a deeper and more significant role in motivating and structuring violent acts than simply providing a rhetorical facade. See “The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France,” Past and Present 59 (1973): 51–91. 28. Translated by Newman, Medieval Crossover, 264; cf. Steinová, Passio, 18. 29. Steinová, Passio, 28. 30. The wave of anti-Jewish violence following a host desecration accusation in Pulkau in Lower Austria in 1338 afflicted numerous communities in Moravia and Bohemia. Furthermore, there was a separate accusation that same year in the Bohemian town of Kouřim. See Rubin, Gentile Tales, 65–69; Daniel Soukup, “Forgotten Old Czech Source for the Events in Pulkau in 1338,” Judaica Olomucensia 1 (2013): 141–54; Birgit Wiedl, “Die angebliche Hostienschändung in Pulkau 1338 und ihre Rezeption in der christlichen und jüdischen Geschichtsschreibung,” Medaon 4, no. 6 (2010): 1–14. 31. David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 200–30. 32. Rubin, Gentile Tales, 29; Jaroslav V. Polc and Zdeňka Hledíková, Pražské synody a koncily předhusitské doby (Prague: Karolinum, 2002), 152–53. 33. Ivan Hlaváček and Zdeňka Hledíková, eds., Protocollum visitationis archidiaconatus Pragensis annis 1379–1382 per Paulum de Janowicz, archidiaconum Pragensem, factae (Prague: Academia, 1973), 82, 96. 34. Bedřich Mendl, “Z hospodářských dějin středověké Prahy,” in Sborník příspěvků k dějinám hlavního města Prahy, ed. Václav Vojtíšek (Prague: Obec hl. m. Prahy, 1932), 161–390 (here 180). 35. On Hampays, a brothel located in the Jewish quarter, see Putík, “On the Topography,” 24–26. 36. Hlaváček and Hledíková, Protocollum visitationis, 79. 37. Houses that were legally Christian and had been acquired by the Jews with royal consent could be repossessed by the King or handed down to him as an escheat. The ruler then put these houses to his own use, often donating or selling them to his courtiers. See Putík, “On the Topography,” 33–37. 38. Martin Musílek, “Juden und Christen in der Prager Altstadt während des Mittelalters: Koexistenz oder Konfrontation?” in Juden in der mittelalterlichen Stadt: Der städtische Raum im Mittelalter—Ort des Zusammenlebens und des Konflikts, ed. Eva Doležalová (Prague: Filosofia, 2015), 57–78 (here 62–63); Putík, “On the Topography,” 11–12. 39. Matthias Nuding, Matthäus von Krakau: Theologe, Politiker, Kirchenreformer in Krakau, Prag und Heidelberg zur Zeit des Großen Abendländischen Schismas (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 111–13. 40. Peter Browe, “Die Entstehung der Sakramentsprozessionen,” in Die Eucharistie im Mittelalter: Liturgiehistorische Forschungen in kulturwissenschaftlicher

“. . . and order was upset”  303 Absicht, ed. Hubertus Lutterbach and Thomas Flammer, 6th ed. (Münster: LIT, 2011), 459–74 (here 467–68); Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 245–46. 41. Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), 112–48; Browe, “Die Entstehung der Sakramentprozessionen,” 461–67; Justin E. A. Kroesen, The Sepulchrum Domini through the Ages: Its Form and Function (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), 153–69. 42. Amy Powell, Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum (New York: Zone Books, 2012), 81–90. The two surviving examples from Prague are the sculpture of Christ with movable arms from the Hradčany Carmelite monastery (mid-fourteenth century) and the cross with Christ from the Benedictine convent of St. George (mid-fifteenth century). Michaela Ottová, “Kristus s pohyblivými pažemi z Litovle—jeho forma a funkce,” in Kristus z Litovle: Restaurování 2007–2010, ed. Helena Zápalková and Antonín Basler (Olomouc: Muzeum umění Olomouc, 2011), 32–39. 43. Matthew 21:9, Mark 11:9–10, Luke 19:38, John 12:13. 44. Mary C. Erler, “Palm Sunday Prophets and Processions and Eucharistic Controversy,” Renaissance Quarterly 48, no. 1 (1995): 58–81 (here 78). 45. Charles Zika, “Hosts, Processions and Pilgrimages: Controlling the Sacred in Fifteenth-Century Germany,” Past and Present 118, no. 1 (1988): 25–64 (here 60–64). 46. See, for instance, the second sermon on Palm Sunday by Bernard of Clairvaux, in PL 183, col. 257d; translated into English in Sermons for Lent and the Easter Season, ed. John Leinenweber and Mark Alan Scott, trans. Irene Edmonds (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2013), 105; Zechariah 9:9. 47. Prague, National Library, MS XVII E 1, fol. 99r. 48. Jan Hus, Česká nedělní postila, ed. Jiří Daňhelka (Prague: Academia, 1992), 178. 49. For an overview, see Rubin, Corpus Christi. 50. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 57–59. 51. On the beguines, see most recently Tanya Stabler Miller, The Beguines of Medieval Paris: Gender, Patronage, and Spiritual Authority (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). 52. Alexander Patschovsky, Quellen zur böhmischen Inquisition im 14. Jahrhundert, Monumenta Germaniae historica, 11 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1979); Alexander Patschovsky, “Ketzer und Ketzerverfolgung in Böhmen im Jahrhundert vor Hus,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 32 (1981): 261–72. 53. David C. Mengel, “Emperor Charles IV (1346–1378) as the Architect of Local Religion in Prague,” Austrian History Yearbook 41 (2010): 15–29 (here 29). 54. Jaroslav V. Polc, “Vita coniugale e communione quotidiana dei laici: Questione disputata a Praga alla fine del sec. XIV,” Lateranum, n.s. 42 (1976): 203–38, reprinted in idem, Česká církev v dějinách (Prague: Akropolis, 1999), 169– 205; David R. Holeton, “The Bohemian Eucharistic Movement in its European Context,” BRRP 1 (1994): 23–48; Stanisław Bylina, “La dévotion nouvelle et le problème de la communion fréquente en Europe Centrale XIVe—XVe siècles,” BRRP 4 (2002): 31–42; Hana Pátková, “Die vorhussitischen Fronleichnamsbruderschaften in Böhmen,” in Die “neue Frömmigkeit” in Europa im Spätmittelalter, ed. Marek Derwich and Martial Staub (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 77–83; Olivier Marin, L’archevêque, le maître et le

304  Milan Žonca dévot: genèses du mouvement réformateur pragois, années 1360–1419 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2005), 457–534. 55. This view was articulated for the first time in Malogranatum, an anonymous treatise written at the Cistercian abbey of Zbraslav near Prague in the midfourteenth century. Marin, L’archevêque, 467–69. 56. Peter C. A. Morée, “The Eucharist in the Sermons on Corpus Christi of Milicius de Cremsir,” BRRP 5, no. 1 (2002): 65–76; Marin, L’archevêque, 470–73; Vilém Herold, “The Spiritual Background of the Czech Reformation: Precursors of Jan Hus,” in A Companion to Jan Hus, ed. František Šmahel and Ota Pavlíček (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 75–81. 57. Pavlína Rychterová, “Konzepte der religiösen Erziehung der Laien im spätmittelalterlichen Böhmen: Einige Überlegungen zur Debatte über die sog. böhmische Devotio moderna,” in Kirchliche Reformimpulse des 14./15. Jahrhunderts in Ostmitteleuropa, ed. Winfried Eberhard and Franz Machilek (Cologne: Böhlau, 2006), 219–37; David R. Holeton, “The Sacramental Theology of Tomáš Štítný of Štítné,” BRRP 4 (2002): 57–79; Polc, “Vita coniugale,” 182–85; Marin, L’archevêque, 474–76. 58. On Vojtěch, see Vilém Herold, “The University of Paris and the Foundations of the Bohemian Reformation,” BRRP 3 (1998): 15–24. 59. Marin, L’archevêque, 478–80. 60. Nuding, Matthäus von Krakau, 33–42; Marin, L’archevêque, 483–86. 61. Polc, “Vita coniugale,” 204 n. 125. 62. Weltsch, Archbishop John of Jenstein, 233–34. 63. Jaroslav V. Polc, Svatý Jan Nepomucký (Prague: Zvon, 1993), 382 n. 26. 64. Weltsch, Archbishop John of Jenstein, 220. 65. Ibid., 59–60. 66. While the synodal decrees do not survive, the details of this decision are repeatedly mentioned by Matěj of Janov, cited by Polc and Hledíková, Pražské synody, 243–45. According Matěj of Janov, the clergy attending the synod felt “that from such frequent communion of Christ’s body and blood come forth many heresies, in particular certain most wicked heretics known as beghards [. . .] and beguines.” Weltsch, Archbishop John of Jenstein, 244. 67. Polc and Hledíková, Pražské synody, 244. 68. Jindřich z Bitterfeldu, Eucharistické texty, ed. Pavel Černuška (Brno: L. Marek, 2006); Marin, L’archevêque, 500–3. 69. On Matěj, see Vlastimil Kybal, M. Matěj z Janova: Jeho život, spisy a učení (Prague: Královská česká společnost nauk, 1905); Herold, “The Spiritual Background of the Czech Reformation,” 81–89; Marin, L’archevêque, 490–500. For editions of Regulae, see Vlastimil Kybal, ed., Matthiae de Janov dicti Magister Parisiensis Regulae veteris et novi testamenti, 5 vols. (Innsbruck: Wagner/ Prague: Česká akademie věd a umění, 1908–26), henceforth cited as RVNT; Jana Nechutová and Helena Krmíčková, eds., Matthiae de Janov dicti Magistri Parisiensis Regularum veteris et novi Testamenti Liber V De corpore Cristi, vol. 6 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1993). For the quotation, see RVNT, vol. 1, 100. 70. Polc and Hledíková, Pražské synody, 246. 71. Ibid., 247. 72. Ibid., 251–52. 73. According to a summary of “beghard articles” of faith, written down by a late fourteenth-century Bohemian Inquisitor, beghards refused to show reverence during elevation in order not to “descend from the purity and elevation of their contemplation.” Similarly, Matěj of Janov claimed that all heretics and beghards held the Eucharist in contempt. Alexander Patschovsky, “Spuren böhmischer Ketzerverfolgung in Schlesien am Ende des 14. Jahrhunderts,” in Historia docet: Sborník prací k poctě šedesátých narozenin prof. PhDr. Ivana

“. . . and order was upset”  305

4. 7 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

83.

Hlaváčka, ed. Miloslav Polívka and Michal Svatoš (Prague: HÚ ČSAV, 1992), 368; RVNT, vol. 5, 202–5. Polc and Hledíková, Pražské synody, 254. Jan Sedlák, M. Jan Hus (Prague: Dědictví sv. Prokopa, 1915), 41*–42*. RVNT, vol. 5, 9. Sedlák, M. Jan Hus, 41*–42*. RVNT, vol. 5, 8–10. Kybal, M. Matěj z Janova, 129–42. John 10:31–33. Hus, Česká nedělní postila, 175. In the Passio, the Holy Spirit used the tongues of the town criers to proclaim that the Jews should be attacked. The attackers are also described as having been “moved by divine inspiration to destroy [the Jews].” Newman, Medieval Crossover, 266–67; Steinová, Passio, 19–20. Newman, Medieval Crossover, 269; Steinová, Passio, 21.

19 Towards 1391 The Anti-Jewish Preaching of Ferrán Martínez in Seville Maya Soifer Irish

On 11 February 1388, a large crowd gathered before the gates of the royal palace, the Alcázar, in Seville—one of the largest cities in the kingdom of Castile. The sombre towers of the Alcázar in the background lent an air of authority to the proceedings taking place only a stone’s throw away from the Cathedral of Santa María of Seville and within a short walk of the city’s Jewish quarter (judería). Located at the very heart of Seville, this was one of the most public and visible spaces in the city, where townsmen, clerics from the cathedral chapter, royal officials, and Jews regularly ran into each other. On this day, at about noon, the assembled crowd was particularly diverse: a representative sample of Seville’s multifarious population. A sizable group of Jews was visible in the crowd, led by a man whom the others deferentially addressed as don Hia. He was a wealthy cloth merchant and the putative leader of the city’s Jewish community. Hia ibn Ataben and his companions came here today, to the royal court known as the Tribunal del Alcázar, to publicly air their grievances against one of Seville’s most prominent citizens, Archdeacon Ferrán Martínez, a canon at the cathedral, whose incendiary sermons had been for years threatening the security of the Jewish community.1 Two important royal officials, alcaldes mayores Fernando González de Medina and Ruy Pérez de Esquivel, whose administrative duties included protecting the Jews, were also there and presided over the court proceedings.2 Once don Hia finished presenting his case against Martínez, the public scribe stepped forward and read the letters of protection that the royal chancery had sent to Seville on three separate occasions. In no uncertain terms, they ordered the archdeacon to cease his anti-Jewish agitation. From the legal standpoint, the Jews scored a clear victory. The letters reminded the assembled crowd that the Jewish aljama (community) belonged to the “royal chamber,” and no church official had the jurisdictional right to interfere in their affairs. But what happened next called the Jews’ strategy into question. The stern reprimands contained in the letters made no visible impact on the archdeacon’s demeanour. Undeterred, he began insulting don Hia and shouting that if it were in his power, he would have thrown him out “like a dog that he was [. . .] and all those Jew-dogs, his relatives, in

Towards 1391  307 the judería would not dare avenge him.”3 Turning the public setting to his advantage, the archdeacon ended up having the last word. Eight days later, on 19 February, Martínez came back to the Tribunal del Alcázar to deliver his response. He did not bother to defend himself against the Jews’ accusations. What the audience heard instead was another vigorous denunciation of the Jews’ alleged crimes against God and Christianity, vividly illustrated with biblical stories and modern examples of their supposed wickedness. The speech was like any other anti-Jewish sermon the archdeacon was famous for, except this time the message of hate was broadcast from the official pulpit of the royal court.4 It is not known whether the Jews of Seville persisted in their attempts to stop Martínez, but if they did, their efforts made little difference. In December 1390, after the archbishop of Seville and King Juan I of Castile had both died, Martínez took advantage of his appointment as the diocesan judge (provisor) of the archbishopric, sede vacante, and ordered the clergy of several towns in the diocese to demolish local synagogues. Some of them complied, and the synagogues in Écija, Alcalá de Guadaira, and a few other towns were destroyed.5 The ruins of the Jews’ houses of worship portended the destruction of their physical bodies. On 15 March 1391, a man was arrested and whipped for insulting Jews and inciting the people to attack them. Among the officials who tried to restrain the crowd were Ruy Pérez, the alcalde mayor from the 1388 proceedings, and Alvar Pérez de Guzmán, the alguacil mayor (a royal official responsible for maintaining public order), who barely escaped the irate mob. Only with great difficulty was peace temporarily restored.6 According to the chronicler Pero López de Ayala, “the people were very aroused, and did not fear anybody, and their eagerness to rob the Jews grew with each passing day.”7 On 6 June, the riot in Seville started anew, leaving hundreds of Jews dead and many more forcibly converted to Christianity. From Seville, the violence spread to Córdoba and Toledo, and then into the lands of the Crown of Aragon. On 9 July, an attack was launched against the Jews of Valencia. By August, pogroms raged in the city of Barcelona, on the Mediterranean island of Majorca, and in northern Spain. The deaths and forced conversions of so many Jews to Christianity during the pogroms of 1391 and their aftermath forever changed Jewish life in Spain.8 Contemporaries immediately drew a connection between Ferrán Martínez’s preaching and this violent outbreak of anti-Jewish hatred. Chronicler Pero López de Ayala stated unequivocally that the killing of Jews happened because of the “preaching and instigation made by the archdeacon of Écija in Seville” and called Martínez “the cause” of the uprising.9 The archdeacon’s influence was felt as far away as the City of Valencia, where on the day of their riot Christian youths went around shouting that the “archdeacon of Castile” was coming to give the Jews a choice between conversion and death.10 It was widely known that the Jewish aljama for years had been complaining to the king about Martínez, and in 1382, Juan I of Castile

308  Maya Soifer Irish predicted that the archdeacon’s mistreatment of Jews would eventually lead to violence.11 The strong interest in the archdeacon’s role continued in modern scholarship. Benzion Netanyahu, for instance, has argued that Martínez provoked the riots in pursuit of his “plan to destroy the Jews of Spain.”12 Although there is little doubt that the archdeacon played a crucial part in the tragic events of 1391, the exclusive focus on Martínez obscures the significance of the socio-political milieu that shaped his thinking and allowed his anti-Jewish ideas to spread and take root. Studies of medieval and modern Jew-hatred, including several essays in this volume, consistently show that enduring anti-Jewish discourses acquire potency and meaning in specific, local contexts.13 Milan Žonca argues that Christian anxieties about sharing urban space with Jews contributed to the outbreak of an anti-Jewish riot in Prague in 1389. Joanna Tokarska-Bakir shows that a similar dynamic was present during the 1946 pogrom in Kielce, Poland, where Catholics, recently traumatised by the Nazi occupation, reacted to the disruption of the political and social order by embracing a modernised version of the blood libel and attacking their Jewish neighbours. In both cases, local contingencies played a crucial role in translating anti-Jewish ideologies into violent antisemitic action directed against specific Jewish communities. In contrast, the most common explanation for the anti-Jewish riot in Seville is the supposed fanaticism of its instigator. Scholars have found little to say about Ferrán Martínez’s Jew-hatred, other than to note its unusual intensity. The scarcity of documentation, especially the lack of any extant sermons by Martínez, is the chief obstacle to constructing a more thorough account of the archdeacon’s activities in the years leading up to the 1391 riots.14 He is commonly and generically described as a fanatic, a skilful demagogue and a rabble-rouser whose visceral hatred of the Jews and passionate style struck a chord with the crowds.15 This characterisation of the archdeacon as an ill-educated, volatile, lowbrow priest is not new. In the fifteenth century, Pablo de Santa María, bishop of Burgos and a convert from Judaism, proclaimed him to be a man of “simple education though virtuous.”16 A seventeenth-century historian of Seville, Diego Ortiz de Zuñiga, complimented his “exemplary life,” but described the archdeacon’s zeal as less temperate than was necessary.17 In this essay, I intend to pivot away from such pseudo-psychological explanations and situate Martínez’s activities within the religious, social, and political context of late fourteenth-century Seville. The archdeacon was, first and foremost, a man of the local society. Contrary to Netanyahu’s claim that Martínez’s designs encompassed all of Spain, the extant evidence indicates that Martínez’s concerns and ambitions were chiefly local: administering the estates of the Cathedral of Seville, finding donors to support the hospital for the poor he had founded, and building up his charismatic authority among the laity. I argue that Ferrán Martínez was part of the new political elite that sought to establish its authority in the city’s reconfigured political landscape during the 1370s and 1380s. I also suggest that

Towards 1391  309 Martínez’s Jew-hatred originated in the specific context of late fourteenthcentury Sevillian religious culture and society, and the growing crisis of confidence in institutional authority. Inspired by new political ideas and a belief in the primacy of the Bible, Martínez wanted to empower the local clergy and even lay Christians to deal with the Jews as the Scripture commanded, instead of obeying the institutions traditionally entrusted with regulating Jewish affairs. By all indications, Jewish-Christian coexistence in Seville was largely peaceful until about the mid-fourteenth century, when economic and political crises made the Jews’ situation in the kingdom more precarious.18 After Seville was captured by the Christian forces from the Muslims in 1248, many Jews moved to the city and its environs from other parts of Castile, attracted by the new opportunities on the frontier and the generous royal grants of land. King Alfonso X the Wise (r. 1252–84) allocated a section of the city for a judería and allowed the Jews to convert three former mosques into synagogues.19 The Jewish aljama of Seville quickly grew in size, eclipsing older centres of Jewish life, and by the end of the century becoming the second largest Jewish community in Castile (after Toledo).20 However, the Sevillian aljama could not remain unaffected by the adverse economic trends and political instability that plagued the kingdom of Castile starting in the first half of the fourteenth century. The worsening economic situation, inflation, high taxation, widespread indebtedness, political violence, multiple royal minorities, and, to top it all, recurrent epidemics of bubonic plague, put the Christians’ tolerance for the Jews to a severe test. Collective petitions submitted to the king by the urban representatives at Castile’s representative assembly (cortes) attacked the Jews’ traditional privileges and argued that Jewish moneylending was ruining the kingdom.21 Isabel Montes Romero-Camacho points to the signs of growing “popular antisemitism” in Seville during the reign of King Alfonso XI. In 1347, the archbishop and the cathedral chapter complained to the king that Christian residents of Seville suffered oppression at the hands of Jewish usurers. The details are scarce, but it appears that in 1354, the aljama was nearly attacked after an accusation surfaced that several Jews had desecrated the Eucharistic host.22 The turning point for the fate of Jewish-Christian relations in Castile came in the 1360s, when the aspirant to the throne, Enrique de Trastámara, used antisemitism as one tool to gain advantage over his half-brother and lawful king of Castile, Pedro I. Enrique encouraged his troops to attack the Jews and issued proclamations that accused Jews and Muslims of unduly influencing the reigning monarch. The proclamations called Pedro “that wicked tyrant, enemy of God and of the Holy Mother Church,” who had enriched Jews and Muslims and debased the Christian faith.23 Popular animosity against Castile’s religious minorities helped him wrest the throne from Pedro in 1369.24 Once in power, Enrique II reverted to the practice of his predecessors and put Jews in charge of the royal finances, but by then the wartime propaganda had made anti-Jewish rhetoric a permanent part

310  Maya Soifer Irish of the kingdom’s political discourse. A petition submitted by the town representatives at the cortes of Toro in 1371 vilified the Jews, calling them “an insolent, wicked people, enemies of God and of all Christendom.”25 It is not a coincidence, I believe, that the appearance in the Sevillian records of Archdeacon Ferrán Martínez took place only a few years after the Trastámara revolution had put a new dynasty on the Castilian throne.26 Martínez’s rise to prominence in the 1370s and 1380s mirrors the careers of Trastámara’s men, that is, those men who received material rewards for their support of Enrique’s cause and who in turn used this bounty to build new centres of political, economic, and spiritual power in the city. The king promoted his loyalists from the knightly class (caballeros) to the highest positions in the municipal government. Four out of nine alcaldes mayores who served on the town council during this period had accompanied the future Enrique II into his exile in France, or, at least, had left Seville in the last years of Pedro I’s reign. Members of Seville’s high nobility (alta nobleza), while officially prohibited from participating in the municipal government, still exercised an enormous political influence in the city. Many noble families that established themselves in Seville in the aftermath of the war had impeccable Trastámaran credentials and enjoyed the king’s trust.27 The high likelihood that Ferrán Martínez was a native of Carmona, a town about twenty miles north-east of Seville, suggests even more strongly that the archdeacon personally benefitted from the reconfiguration of the political landscape after the wars of the 1360s.28 Carmona was one of the last bastions of resistance to Enrique’s rule. The defender of its castle, Martín López de Córdoba, Master of the Order of Calatrava and a staunch supporter of King Pedro, surrendered the town to Enrique’s troops in 1371, two years after Pedro was killed at Montiel. According to the testimony of Martín López’s daughter, Leonor López de Córdoba, Enrique II ordered her father beheaded and confiscated his goods as well as those of his relatives and servitors. The king then retaliated against the town by stripping it of its ancient privileges and distributing its lands and other properties among his supporters. Even to a greater extent than in Seville, the new political elite in Carmona owed their power to Enrique. Most of them were local men who proved their loyalty to the new dynasty and were rewarded for it with important positions on the municipal council.29 Did Ferrán Martínez belong to the cadre of Trastámara’s local supporters? His biographical details are very sketchy, but some indirect evidence suggests that this might have been the case. By the time he first appeared in the records, in mid-1370s, Martínez was a man of property holding one of the coveted canonries at the Cathedral Chapter of Seville. It is likely that Martínez was able to acquire a canonry at the cathedral by drawing on his family’s resources. In the last quarter of the fourteenth century, the cathedral accepted numerous donations of properties from its own clergy, especially canons. The chapter drew much of its prosperity during these years from the personal resources of its members, and perhaps even actively recruited

Towards 1391  311 canons from the ranks of the local landholding elites.30 Everything points to the conclusion that Ferrán Martínez was such a recruit. He brought considerable properties to the chapter. In 1376, Martínez purchased virtually the entire estate of Pulgar (2,000 acres of cereal lands) in La Campiña—a fertile agricultural region south of Carmona.31 He later donated it to the cathedral, along with several other properties. Documents from 1374 and 1376 indicate that he was then serving as a sub-collector of papal subsidies for Pope Gregory XI.32 In addition, the archbishop named him the archdeacon of Écija (an honorary title rather than a position with real administrative responsibility) and appointed him to the post of the diocesan judge (provisor).33 He was actively involved in administering the capitular estates, at one point worked as the chapter’s mayordomo, and served as an executor of wills for members of the Sevillian oligarchy.34 In short, his wealth, status, and influence place him at the top of Seville’s society during the first two decades of Enrique Trastámara’s rule. Even as he accumulated authority in the city, Martínez spent a considerable amount of time building a rapport with the ordinary citizens, known as pecheros or taxpayers, who were almost entirely excluded from power. His outspokenness and explosive rhetoric added to his charismatic authority, positioning him as a supposed outsider to the city’s power structures, even though in reality he remained firmly entrenched in them.35 Knowing full well that the Jews were considered to be the property of the royal chamber and subject to the king’s authority, Martínez called for their exclusion from the local communities, and repeatedly ignored the king’s warnings to tone down his language. He publicly claimed that the pope had no authority to give the Jews permission to construct new synagogues and questioned the pope’s right to release clergymen from religious vows, prompting an investigation by the archbishop’s commission on suspicions of heresy.36 Such public pronouncements only enhanced the archdeacon’s image as a champion of the ordinary faithful who was not afraid to speak the truth to those in power. The fact that Martínez was not in actuality an outsider, but a prominent member of Seville’s oligarchy with plenty of formal authority and powerful connections, ensured his enduring influence by protecting him from the worst of trouble. Many of the people who flocked to hear Martínez’s sermons experienced serious hardships in the years following the Trastámara revolution and were feeling increasingly frustrated by their inability to have any real say in the governance of their city and their kingdom. By the end of the fourteenth century, Seville was a city of stark socio-economic contrasts. According to the property census of 1384, the low-income pecheros—residents of the city who had to pay taxes—comprised about 47 per cent of the population, but owned only 13 per cent of all wealth in the city. There were also those with little or no property: too poor to even pay taxes. These groups were hit the hardest by economic depression, periodic famines (1302, 1311, 1343, 1355–56, 1375), and recurrent epidemics of bubonic plague (1350, 1364,

312  Maya Soifer Irish 1374, 1383).37 In response to the crises, several new hospitals were founded in Seville in the course of the fourteenth century, many of them under the auspices of confraternities. These charitable institutions, which combined the functions of hospitals, asylums, and temporary shelters, took care of those on the margins of the urban society: the destitute elderly, the sick, and the transients.38 Much of Ferrán Martínez’s popularity and authority as a preacher in Seville came from his work among the needy and the sick. In 1388, he recalled how during the last epidemic (mortandad), in 1383, he took the consecrated host through the city to the victims of the plague.39 While on the preaching circuit in the city and the diocese of Seville, Martínez likely encouraged his audiences to donate generously to the poor and reminded them that their salvation greatly depended on the intercession of pauperes Christi. Martínez thus expressed this sentiment in his will: all those who received [the poor] will be received in the Glory of our Saviour Jesus Christ, and will hear his words on Judgment Day, which he will say to those who performed the works of mercy in this world: “Come, the blessed ones of my Father, and receive the kingdom that was prepared for you since the beginning of the world.”40 In 1385, Martínez exchanged some of his houses near the cathedral for the chapter-owned buildings a short distance from there, and founded a hospital for the poor “to honour God and the Virgin Saint Martha.”41 The administration of this hospital would occupy the archdeacon for the rest of his life, and it would be named as his main beneficiary in his will.42 If the archdeacon’s charitable works made him popular among Seville’s poor and enhanced his charismatic power, his willingness to call upon the authorities to protect the community from the Jews cemented his reputation as a champion of the people. His speech at the Tribunal del Alcázar in 1388 shows just how much his ideas and rhetorical methods owed to the political program of the Trastámara revolution. Enrique Trastámara and his propagandists had argued that the “tyrant” Pedro deserved to lose the Castilian throne because he pursued personal gains at the expense of public welfare and failed to love and defend the kingdom.43 Likewise, Martínez’s opening statement at the Tribunal contained a thinly veiled criticism of the current king. The royal protection of the Jews, he charged, could not impede his anti-Jewish preaching because God’s Word trumped the king’s word: whoever has to read and preach any Gospel always speaks of what is said about the Jews in the Gospels and other Scriptures, and that he [Ferrán Martínez] will say and preach what Jesus Christ said and commanded in his Gospels, since Jesus Christ said to all his disciples: “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. Whoever believes and is baptised will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.” [Mark 16:15–16]44

Towards 1391  313 The rest of the archdeacon’s speech addressed King Juan I as if the king were present in court, pleading with him to adopt a policy towards the Jews that would be more in accordance with the biblical precepts. He suggested that the king and his father (Enrique II) had allowed themselves to be deceived by Jews, who always “rob, steal, and lie to the kings and princes of the lands where they live.”45 In other words, the king should extricate himself from their deceptions and see the Jews for what they are and have always been: a threat to the Christian community. Marshalling a long succession of biblical examples intended to demonstrate the Jews’ inveterate wickedness, Martínez aimed to unshackle the king from the constraints of his traditional protection of the Jews by urging him to use his authority to protect the kingdom from the Jews. The Bible had always been of paramount importance in medieval theology, spirituality, and anti-Jewish argumentation, but in the late thirteenth and especially in the fourteenth century, the renewed calls for organising Christian religious life in accordance with the biblical precepts of apostolic poverty led William of Ockham (c. 1280–1349) and other Christian thinkers to assign special importance to reading and interpreting the Scripture. In the words of the historian Antony Black, Ockham insisted that “[a]uthority which robbed people of the spiritual liberty given by Christ could not be legitimate; an authority which demanded that they believe or behave contrary to Scripture or reason was doing precisely that.”46 Such arguments had provided ideological justification for the Trastamaristas’ rebellion against Pedro I, and now the archdeacon was evoking the shadow of the disgraced monarch to tacitly warn the reigning king that the same fate would befall him if he failed to prevent the debasement of the Christian faith by the Jews. Some of Martínez’s biblical examples came not from the canonical text of the Christian Scriptures, but from the vernacular paraphrases that James H. Morey has termed “the medieval popular Bible.”47 They appear to have been selected because they graphically illustrated the Jews’ cruelty and callousness and typologically linked the persecution of the prophets to the agony inflicted by Jews on Christ during the crucifixion. For example, Martínez brought up the apocryphal story of Hur’s martyrdom at the hands of the idolatrous Israelites worshipping the Golden Calf: “They killed Hur, the brother of Aaron, because he had warned them not to construct the Golden Calf, and they killed him by spitting in his face until he suffocated and died.”48 The narrative of Hur’s gruesome death was widely disseminated in medieval Europe via Peter Comestor’s twelfth-century biblical paraphrase, Historia scholastica. Martínez also could have learned it from the vernacular General estoria, written by King Alfonso the Wise and his collaborators, which drew heavily on Historia scholastica.49 In late medieval devotional texts and images, Hur’s martyrdom and the mocking of Christ by Jews were often portrayed side-by-side, with the figure of a spitting Jew serving as the link between the Passion and its prefiguration in the Old Testament.50 Anthony Bale has shown that this trope occupied a prominent place in late

314  Maya Soifer Irish medieval popular devotion. Through verse and the accompanying images, the English Arma Christi (“Arms of Christ”) depicted the Jews’ spitting among the other Instruments of the Passion, even suggesting that it was Christ’s ultimate humiliation.51 The symbolism of the Jewish spittle would not have been lost on Martínez’s audience. As Pamela Patton has argued, Northern European polemical imagery of the Jews began to penetrate Iberia in the thirteenth century. In Cantiga 12 of the Cantigas de Santa María (a collection of poems about Virgin Mary written at Alfonso’s court), some Jews are killed after they are discovered beating and spitting on an image of Jesus.52 The focus on the victimhood of Hur and other biblical figures, and—by association—of Christ, and the use of disturbing, graphic verbal imagery were intended to elicit an emotional response from the listeners and remind them of the dangers associated with the Jews’ presence in their community. The speech at the Tribunal also gives a glimpse into Martínez’s preaching style and his predilection for telling exempla—vivid, entertaining stories intended to capture the audience’s attention and impart a specific moral lesson.53 Medieval Christian preachers typically used anti-Jewish exempla to strengthen the faith of their listeners.54 But if his speech at the Tribunal is any indication, Martínez went one step further to construct a metanarrative of victimised Christians and villainous Jews, deliberately conflating the treacherous protagonists of these stories with the Christian citizens’ own neighbours in the local aljama. To show that the Jews had not changed at all since the biblical times, he quoted from the Book of Jeremiah: “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? Then also you can do good who are accustomed to do evil” (Jeremiah 13:23).55 It is also likely that Martínez made use of hagiographic narratives to achieve this purpose. Popular collections of saints’ lives often portrayed Jews in a negative light. As Tokarska-Bakir’s article demonstrates, such tales later proved to be an effective channel for transmitting medieval antisemitic stereotypes to modern Europe. Among the possessions listed in the codicil to Martínez’s will was a copy of Flos Sanctorum, a Castilian translation of saints’ lives that the archdeacon bequeathed to his confessor.56 Based on the Golden Legend, an immensely popular work by an Italian Dominican, Jacobus de Voragine, the collection contained ample anti-Jewish material that the archdeacon could have utilised on his preaching circuit in the city of Seville.57 Inspired by the political rhetoric of the Trastámara revolution, Ferrán Martínez skilfully tapped into the anti-establishment sentiments of his audiences to cast doubt on the willingness and ability of the secular authorities to limit the Jews’ influence in the city. He dropped hints that the people had the right to defend themselves against the Jews if the authorities failed to do so. According to one of the complaints the aljama of Seville sent to the king, Martínez had been telling his listeners that the king and queen would be “pleased” if Christians killed the Jews and that he would help them secure pardon from the king.58 Moreover, he was willing to do as he

Towards 1391  315 preached and lead by personal example. In his speech at the Tribunal, Martínez recalled how, in 1383, he was taking a consecrated host to the victims of the plague, when some Jews, with their pack animals, started cutting through the procession. The archdeacon then ordered that sticks and stones be prepared to defend the “body of God” from the Jews.59 In Martínez’s hands, medieval doctrinal anti-Judaism absorbed the latest trends from the fourteenth-­century cultural and political milieu, becoming an antisemitic ideology capable of inciting violence on an unprecedented scale.

Abbreviations ACS Archivo Catedral de Sevilla AHN Archivo Histórico Nacional BNE Biblioteca Nacional de España

Notes 1. On the Tribunal del Alcázar, see Debora Kirschberg Schenck and Marcos Fernández Gómez, El Concejo de Sevilla en la Edad Media (1248–1454), vol. 1 (Seville: Ayuntamiento de Sevilla, 2002), 215. 2. Rafael Sánchez Saus, Las élites políticas bajo los Trastámara: poder y sociedad en la Sevilla del siglo XIV (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 2009), 56, 59. 3. “[S]y a poder lo tomase fuera de aquel lugar onde estaua que asy como a perro que era que por las palabras que avia dicho non verdaderas quel le faria que quantos perros judios sus parientes avia en la juderia que non le diesen vengança.” José Amador de los Ríos, Historia social, política y religiosa de los judíos de España y Portugal, vol. 2 (Madrid: Ediciones Turner, 1984), 586; Yitzhak Baer, ed., Die Juden im christlichen Spanien. Erster Teil: Urkunden und Regesten, vol. 2, Kastilien, Inquisitionsakten (Berlin: Schocken, 1936), 216. The original can be found at AHN, Sección Clero, Toledo, Catedral, legajo 7215. 4. AHN, Sección Clero, Toledo, Catedral, leg. 7215; Amador de los Ríos, Historia social, política y religiosa, 579–89; Baer, Die Juden, vol. 2, 211–18. 5. AHN, Sección Clero, Toledo, Catedral, leg. 7215; BNE, Burriel, 13089 (fol. 92); Amador de los Ríos, Historia social, política y religiosa, 610–14; Henry Charles Lea, “Acta Capitular del Cabildo de Sevilla,” The American Historical Review 1, no. 2 (1896): 220–25. 6. Pero López de Ayala, Crónicas, ed. José-Louis Martín (Barcelona: Planeta, 1991), 713; Cuarta crónica general, BNE mss. 1295, fol. 366r; Diego Ortiz de Zuñiga, Análes eclesiasticos y seculares, vol. 2 (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1795), 236 (year 1391); Sánchez Saus, Las élites políticas, 60, 63. 7. López de Ayala, Crónicas, 713. 8. On the pogroms of 1391, see, among others, Philippe Wolff, “The 1391 Pogrom in Spain. Social Crisis or Not?” Past & Present, 50 (1971): 4–18; Emilio Mitre Fernández, Los judíos de Castilla en tiempo de Enrique III: El pogrom de 1391 (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 1994); Isabel Montes Romero-­ Camacho, “Antisemitismo sevillano en la Baja Edad Media: el Pogrom de 1391 y sus Consecuencias,” in Actas del III colloquio de historia medieval andaluza. La sociedad medieval andaluza: grupos no privilegiados, ed. Manuel González Jiménez and José Rodríguez Molina (Jaén: Duputación Provincial de Jaén, 1984), 57–75; Jaume Riera Sans, “Los tumultos contra las juderias de la corona

316  Maya Soifer Irish de Aragon en 1391,” Cuadernos de Historia 8 (1977): 213–25; Benjamin R. Gampel, “‘Unless the Lord Watches Over the City . . .’: Joan of Aragon and His Jews, June-October 1391,” in New Perspectives on Jewish-Christian Relations: In Honor of David Berger, ed. Elisheva Carlebach and Jacob J. Schacter (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 65–89, and idem, Anti-Jewish Riots in the Crown of Aragon and the Royal Response, 1391–1392 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Benzion Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain (New York: Random House, 1995), 142–67; David Nirenberg, Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 75–88. 9. López de Ayala, Crónicas, 713: “E fue causa aquel arcediano de Écija deste levantamiento contra los judíos de Castilla.” López de Ayala, Crónicas, 739: “E el comienzo de todo este fecho e daño de los judíos vino por la predicación e inducimiento que el arcediano de Écija, que estaba en Sevilla, ficiera.” 10. Jose Hinojosa Montalvo, The Jews of the Kingdom of Valencia: From Persecution to Expulsion, 1391–1492 (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1993), 24, 328 (document no. 6). 11. Amador de los Ríos, Historia social, política y religiosa, vol. 2, 583–84; AHN, Sección Clero, Toledo, Catedral, leg. 7215. 12. Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition, 152. 13. As Miri Rubin observes in her study of the Eucharist desecration accusation in late medieval Europe, “even the most pervasive representations—visual or ­textual—can only be understood fully when observed embedded within the contexts that accredited them and gave them meaning.” Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press), 2. 14. The only extant documents that shed light on the possible style and content of Martínez’s sermons are the proceedings of the Tribunal, records of the investigation by the archbishop of Seville in August of 1389 (Amador de los Ríos, Historia social, política y religiosa, 592–94, 610–14), and the royal and ecclesiastical inquiries into the violence against the Jews of the archdiocese of Seville before and during the riots of 1391 (Lea, “Acta Capitular,” 220–25). Additional information can be garnered from a cache of documents preserved at the Cathedral Archive of Seville. It includes Martínez’s will (1403), and an addendum to it (1404). ACS, leg. 78, nos 9–10; leg. 23, nos 9–10; leg. 179, no. 49, leg. 181, no. 25. 15. Amador de los Ríos, Historia social, política y religiosa, vol. 2, 399; Fernando Suárez Bilbao, “Cristianos contra judíos y conversos,” in Conflictos sociales, políticos e intelectuales en la España de los siglos XIV—XV, ed. José Ignacio de la Iglesia Duarte (Logroño: Instituto de Estudios Riojanos, 2004), 454; Wolff, “The 1391 Pogrom,” 8. Norman Roth goes one step further and calls Martínez “the fanatic and perhaps insane archdeacon” in Medieval Jewish Civilization: An Encyclopedia, ed. N. Roth (New York: Routledge, 2003), 157. 16. Gampel, Anti-Jewish Riots, 17 n. 7. 17. Ortiz de Zuñiga, Análes, vol. 2, 136. 18. Wiebke Deimann, Christen, Juden und Muslime im mittelalterlichen Sevilla: Religiöse Minderheiten unter muslimischer und christlicher Dominanz (12. bis 14. Jahrhundert) (Berlin: Lit, 2012), 259–93. 19. Heather L. Ecker, “The Conversion of Mosques to Synagogues in Seville: The Case of the Mezquita de la Judería,” Gesta 36, no. 2 (1997): 190–207. 20. Jonathan Ray, The Sephardic Frontier: The Reconquista and the Jewish Community in Medieval Iberia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 12–13, 20; Isabel Montes Romero-Camacho, “La aljama judía de Sevilla en la baja

Towards 1391  317 edad media,” in El Patrimonio hebreo en la España medieval, ed. Alberto Villar Movellán and María del Rosario Castro Castillo (Córdoba: Universidad de Córdoba, 2004), 25–52 (here 25–29). 21. Teofilo Ruiz, Spain’s Centuries of Crisis: 1300–1474 (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 28; Maya Soifer Irish, Jews and Christians in Medieval Castile: Tradition, Coexistence, and Change (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2016). 22. Romero-Camacho, “La aljama judía de Sevilla en la baja edad media,” 33, 35. 23. “Aquel tiranno malo enemigo de Dios e de la su santa Madre Eglesia”; Fuentes para la historia de Castilla, vol. 2: Cartulario del Infantado de Covarrubias, ed. Luciano Serrano (Madrid: Gregorio del Amo, 1907), 217. 24. Ayala, Crónicas, 239; Valdeón Baruque, Los judíos de Castilla y la revolución Trastámara (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 1968), 39. On the cortes and the anti-Jewish discourse in Castile in the fourteenth century, see Soifer Irish, Jews and Christians in Medieval Castile, 221–61. 25. “[G]ente mala atreuida, enemigos de Dios e de toda la christiandat”; Cortes de los antiguos reinos de León y de Castilla, vol. 2 (Madrid: La Real Academia de la Historia, 1863), 203. 26. On the Trastámaran revolution, see Luis Suárez Fernández, Monarquía hispana y revolución Trastámara (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1994), 13–26. 27. Rafael Sánchez Saus, Las élites políticas bajo los Trastámara: poder y sociedad en la Sevilla del siglo XIV (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 2009), 152–55, 168. 28. Martínez’s will states that he inherited some houses in Carmona from his ­grandparents—an indication that his family had been established in the town for at least several generations. ACS, leg. 78, no. 10. He dictated his will in Carmona, where he retired after the riots of 1391. 29. Manuel González Jiménez, Carmona medieval (Seville: Fundación José Manuel Lara, 2006), 41–53. 30. Montes Romero-Camacho, Propiedad y explotación de la tierra en la Sevilla de la Baja Edad Media (Seville: Fundación Fondo de Cultura de Sevilla, 1988), 32–33, 178, 182, 187. Cf. Carolina Carl, A Bishopric between Three Kingdoms: Calahorra, 1045–1190 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 133. 31. ACS, leg. 23, nos 9, 10. Montes Romero-Camacho, Propiedad y explotación, 198. 32. ACS, leg. 181, no. 25, leg. 179, no. 49. 33. Carlos Ros, ed., Historia de la Iglesia de Sevilla (Seville: Editorial Castillejo, 1992), 138. 34. ACS, leg. 78, no. 10; Romero-Camacho, Propiedad y explotación, 198. 35. Max Weber, “The Nature of Charismatic Authority and Its Routinization,” in Max Weber on Charisma and Institution Building, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968), 48. See also Katherine L. Jansen and Miri Rubin, “Introduction,” in Charisma and Religious Authority: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Preaching, 1200–1500, ed. Katherine L. Jansen and Miri Rubin (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 1–12. 36. Amador de los Ríos, Historia social, política y religiosa, 593. 37. Manuel Álvarez, Manuel Ariza, and Josefa Mendoza, Un padrón de Sevilla del siglo XIV: Estudio filológico y edición (Seville: Ayuntamiento de Sevilla, 2001), 13–17; Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, Historia de Sevilla: La ciudad medieval (1248–1492), 3rd rev. ed. (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1989), 36, 67, 129; Mercedes Borrero, “El común de la Sevilla del siglo XIV,” in Sevilla, siglo XIV, ed. Rafael Valencia (Seville: Fundación José Manuel Lara, 2006), 113–33. 38. Ros, Historia de la Iglesia de Sevilla, 159, 192–93, 238–40; Quesada, Historia de Sevilla, 146.

318  Maya Soifer Irish 39. AHN, Sección Clero, Toledo, Catedral, leg. 7215; Amador de los Ríos, Historia social, política y religiosa, 588–89; Baer, Die Juden, vol. 2, 217–18. 40. “[T]odos los que los rreçibieren sean rreçibidos enla Gloria del nuestro saluador Jesu Christo e oyan la su palabra el dia del juysio que dira alos quelas obras de misiricordia obraren en este mundo venid los vendichos del mi padre e rreçebid el regno que vos esta aparejado del comienço del mundo.” ACS, leg. 78, no. 10.1. 41. Francisco Collantes de Teran, Los establecimientos de caridad de Sevilla (Seville: Colegio official de aparejadores y arquitectos tecnicos de Sevilla, 1980), 198–200. 42. ACS, leg. 78, no. 10. 43. Fernández, Monarquía hispana y revolución Trastámara, 19–20. 44. “[C]ada que tiene de leer e de pedricar qual quier evangelio que sienpre fabla en los evangelios e otras escripturas que diga de los judios, e que el que lo dira e pedricara aquello que Jesu Christo dixo en sus evangelios e mando, por que Jesu Christo dixo a todos sus diçipulos: id a pedricad a todas las cryaturas del mundo el mi evangelio, e el que creyere e fuer bautisado sera salvo, e el otro sera condenado a los ynfiernos.” AHN, Sección Clero, Toledo, Catedral, leg. 7215; Amador de los Ríos, Historia social, política y religiosa, 588; Baer, Die Juden, vol. 2, 217. Translations of the biblical passages are from the English Standard Version. 45. AHN, Sección Clero, Toledo, Catedral, leg. 7215; Amador de los Ríos, Historia social, política y religiosa, 586–88; Baer, Die Juden, vol. 2, 216–17. 46. Antony Black, Political Thought in Europe, 1250–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 77. 47. James H. Morey, “Peter Comestor, Biblical Paraphrase, and the Medieval Popular Bible,” Speculum 68 (1993): 6–35 (here 7). 48. Amador de los Ríos’s transcription erroneously renders the name as “Avi,” but Baer gets it right: AHN, Sección Clero, Toledo, Catedral, leg. 7215; Amador de los Ríos, Historia social, política y religiosa, 587; Baer, Die Juden, vol. 2, 217. 49. Alfonso X el Sabio, General estoria, ed. Pedro Sánchez-Prieto Borja (Madrid: Fundación José Antonio de Castro, 2009), vol. 1, LI, XCVII; vol. 2, 376. 50. Brett D. Hirsch, “The Taming of the Jew: Spit and the Civilizing Process in The Merchant of Venice,” in Staged Transgression in Shakespeare’s England, ed. Rory Loughnane (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 136–52 (here 143–45). 51. Anthony Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms, 1350– 1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 145–54. 52. Pamela Patton, Art of Estrangement: Redefining Jews in Reconquest Spain (University Park: Penn State Press, 2012), 149. 53. Franco Mormando, Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 20. 54. On medieval Christian preaching and the Jews, see Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982); Friars and Jews in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Steven J. McMichael and Susan E. Myers, The Medieval Franciscans, 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Preaching in Judaism and Christianity: Encounters and Developments from Biblical Times to Modernity, ed. Alexander Deeg, Walter Homolka, and Heinz-Günther Schöttler, Studia Judaica: Forschungen zur Wissenschaft des Judentums, 41 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008); Charisma and Religious Authority, ed. Katherine L. Jansen and Miri Rubin; Michael Hohlstein, Soziale Ausgrenzung im Medium der Predigt: Der franziskanische Antijudaismus im spätmittelalterlichen Italien, Norm und Struktur, no. 35 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2012); The Jewish-Christian Encounter in Medieval Preaching, ed. Jonathan Adams and Jussi Hanska, Routledge Research in Medieval Studies, no. 6

Towards 1391  319 (New York: Routledge, 2015); Robin Vose, Dominicans, Muslims and Jews in the Medieval Crown of Aragon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 133–61. 55. AHN, Sección Clero, Toledo, Catedral, leg. 7215; Amador de los Ríos, Historia social, política y religiosa, 588; Baer, Die Juden, vol. 2, 217. 56. ACS, leg. 78, no. 9. 57. Fernando Baños Vallejo and Isabel Uría Maqua, La Leyenda de los santos (Flos sanctorum del ms. 8 de la Biblioteca de Menéndez Pelayo) (Santander: Asociación Cultural Año Jubilar Lebaniego, Sociedad Menéndez Pelayo, 2000); Thomas Renna, “The Jews in the Golden Legend,” in Christian Attitudes Toward the Jews in the Middle Ages, ed. Michael Frassetto (New York: Routledge, 2007), 137–50. 58. AHN, Sección Clero, Toledo, Catedral, leg. 7215; Amador de los Ríos, Historia social, política y religiosa, 585; Baer, Die Juden, vol. 2, 215. 59. Amador de los Ríos, Historia, vol. 2, 585, 588–89. AHN, Sección Clero, Toledo, Catedral, leg. 7215. On Christian anxieties about the proximity of the Jews to the Eucharist, see Rubin, Gentile Tales.

20 “The present causes of past effects” The Background Beliefs of the Kielce Pogrom (4 July 1946) Joanna Tokarska-Bakir In 1946, the mathematician Jechiel Alpert was thirty-three years old. He had survived the Second World War in three Nazi labour camps: Pionki, Gusen, and Mauthausen. After returning to his hometown of Kielce in the summer of 1945, he became chairman of the “Ha’Ichud HaZioni” (The Zionist Union) kibbutz in Kielce. Together with his wife, he settled in the Jewish refuge house at 7A Planty Street, alongside other castaways who had survived the Shoah. Alpert remembered the morning of 4 July 1946 as follows: I had just gone down [. . .] when doctor Kahane1 said to me that they had arrested some Jew. The Jew was accused of catching a Polish boy and locking him down in a cellar [. . .] I said [to him]: “Listen up, go to the police right away and tell them to release the Jew, because otherwise we might see a tragedy, a provocation, a very nasty story.” Doctor Kahane went to the police office, came back after a few minutes and said: “Done. They will release him soon.” [. . .] Then I walked up to the window and saw militia officers surrounding the refuge house! It turned out that the militia came to search the building and check whether there were kids hidden inside . . . I called the UB2 and asked them to come to the refuge house. “Listen up, can’t you see what is going on here? You have to react, this might be a provocation . . .” Crowds had already started to gather back then. [Interviewer:] How did the UB react? [Alpert:] They could not give out any orders, because there were only four officers, who were not even dressed in uniform, but in plain clothes. They could not influence the police anyhow. The police treated us very coarsely.3

[Alpert:]

The Perspective of the Militia Franciszek Furman, a thirty-one-year-old policeman, interrogated five days after the Kielce pogrom, was at the police station when he received the critical report:

The Present Causes of Past Effects  321 [On 4 July 1946] at 8 a.m. a father together with his son [Walenty Błaszczyk with his eight-year-old son Henio] came to our headquarters [. . .] The father said that the Jews had held his son captive for three days and that he had managed to escape on the fourth day.4 In post-war Poland, news of a child disappearing awoke two kinds of ­associations—Gypsies and Jews. While the former were not said to do any harm to the abducted children, the latter were labelled with truly horrorlike intentions: letting them bleed to death and using their blood. Recruited from among the common people, the militiamen apparently shared this view, hence the report filed in by the Błaszczyks “was treated seriously.” This meant drawing upon a set of notions, procedures, and images, within which the case could be resolved. In practice, this was equal to launching the narrative of ritual murder. Platoon officer Furman, a member of the patrol, was supposed to determine who had held the boy captive and locate the place where had he been detained. On his way to the scene of the event, Henio Błaszczyk pointed at a man “with the green hat,”5 who was standing next to a house at 7A Planty Street, which was inhabited by Jews. This was [Henryk Kałman] Singer, an elderly and “extremely pious man,” who had just returned from the concentration camps.6 The militia agents arrested Singer in public and brought him to the militia station, where he was beaten up. Next, the “most gifted scouts” from the MO7 returned to Planty Street to continue the investigation. The militia agents searched two Jewish houses. Walking with Henio, they showed him different apartments, looking for the place where the boy had been held captive. The version, according to which the boy had been detained in a cellar was rejected since the Jewish houses at 7 and 7A Planty Street had no underground levels. The following testimony is that given by policeman Furman, who was later tried for shouting anti-Jewish slogans: The boy was unable to point at the place where he had been held captive. One time he said that he was held in a kennel and the other he claimed they had kept him in a pigpen [. . .] At the same time, crowds started flooding in and gathering next to the building. The crowd rammed the gate open, stormed into the yard, shouting that the Jews had murdered eighteen Polish children and that they would judge the Jews on their own.8

The Perspective of the Victims Let us see how the incident looked from the perspective of the Jewish inhabitants of the refuge house. The testimony below was given by the twenty-seven-year-old painter Chaim Latasz, who had returned from the concentration camp in Buchenwald: At 9 a.m. Franciszek Furman together with a few policemen arrived and blocked the front side of the house. Civilians started gathering in

322  Joanna Tokarska-Bakir the yard, and Furman was shouting at them, crying that Jews murdered Polish children and that they had hidden them somewhere in this house. Furman called upon the people to search for the children and to take revenge on the Jews. Hearing such stories, the people believed them and went on to search the house in and out, flinging insults at the Jews.9 Witnessing the events was Maria Welfman, who lived on the second floor of the refuge house: Somewhere around 10 a.m., people from the town came in and said that a Jew has been detained. Half an hour later, our house was surrounded by uniformed men. The crowd was shouting: “You Jews! Where are our children?! What have you done with our children?” I entered the [hardly legible, probably the kibbutz] situated on the same floor. The people, who lived there were all in panic, afraid of the crowd from the street, who had torn down the fence and forced their way into the schoolyard. I came down to the first floor to our Jewish neighbours. In the staircase, I saw a uniformed man, who threatened the Jews with his rifle, shouting: “Where are our murdered children?! Just you wait, we will teach you a lesson!”10 During the investigation, Ewa Szuchman subsequently recognised the man as the twenty-one-year-old policeman Władysław Błachut.11

The Perspective of the UB As soon as Maj. Władysław Sobczyński, commander of the Voivodship Office for Public Security (WUBP), found out that an MO patrol had been sent to Planty Street a dozen or so minutes after 9 a.m., he called Maj. Kazimierz Gwiazdowicz, Voivodship MO Commander for Political Affairs, asking him to explain what had happened. He said that the Błaszczyks filed a report at the MO station, saying that the boy had been held captive in the building of the Jewish Committee, and that “there is still a body of one more child left in the cellar.”12 Sobczyński testified: I told him this was an ordinary provocation and that the patrol searching the house should be withdrawn, because such circumstances together with the way the patrol behaved (pointing guns at the house, instead of protecting the house against the crowd) can lead to dangerous riots. Gwiazdowicz responded that it would turn out later whether this was a provocation. He also said he would carry out the search till the end.13 The conflict of competences that broke out between the MO and the UB was influenced by the disastrous relations between both institutions safeguarding public order in Poland. The MO consisted of former guerrillas, and had an opinion of being more of a “people’s” institution than the UB, which was

The Present Causes of Past Effects  323 directly associated with the Communist authorities and in turn perceived as alien. With the tensions in Planty escalating, Sobczyński called Gwiazdowicz once again. This time he demanded as many policemen as possible to be sent to the spot in order to secure the refuge house. He addressed similar requests to the fire department and the Internal Security Corps.14 Sobczyński’s requests were fulfilled, however not exactly according to his intentions. The soldiers sent to the spot (including military gendarmerie from the 2nd Division of the Polish People’s Army, Citizens Militia Officer School, and a group of soldiers from the Internal Security Corps)15 had no idea they were supposed to protect the Jews. On the contrary, they were convinced they were going to punish the Jews: “On our way to the spot, we heard the people shouting: ‘officers and soldiers are dying [. . .] being killed by the Jews.’”16 Witnesses testified that “as soon as the police arrived at the spot, they started to shoot at the building.”17 Let us add that during his talks with Warsaw, Sobczyński received a clear order forbidding him to use arms against the crowd. This order was also followed by the commanders of the security forces sent to Planty. Edmund Kwasek was one of the WUBP officers sent to the scene of the events early in the morning by an alarmed Sobczyński. He tried to convince his boss, who was busy calling for help, to take more vigorous action. However, the thing that astonished him even more was the attitude presented by Gwiazdowicz, commander of the Voivodship MO Office, who shook hands with a man shouting anti-Jewish slogans during an improvised rally staged next to the refuge house.18 Before the pogrom even managed to unfold, two jeeps with WUBP officers drove up to the building at Planty Street. The officers tried to prevent the militia agents from carrying out the search. The militia agent Antoni Kręglicki, recalling the event after several years, said: “The UB officers, who arrived at the spot, began using force to stop our MO officers. A brawl and scuffle broke out between both sides.”19 The mood among bystanders is reflected in the slogans they were shouting out: “Down with UB and JudeoCommunist rule!”, “Do not touch policeman, who want to track down those, who sucked our children’s blood!”,20 “UB agents! Jewish pushovers! They defend the Jews!”21

The Perspective of the Pogrom Perpetrators Tadeusz Seweryński, commander of the UB academy in Zgórsk, learned about the rumour when he was buying nails at Piotrkowska Street. Rushing the busy saleswoman, he heard: “Can’t you see what is going on here? The Jews have murdered eleven children.”22 On the other hand, the clerk Jan Mańturz heard the following rumour from the women talking on the street: Jews dwelling at 7 Planty Street had supposedly murdered thirteen Polish children. In order to prove these murders true, people quoted the

324  Joanna Tokarska-Bakir fact about a little Polish boy, who had been held captive by the Jews, managed to escape their cellar and alarm the people of Kielce.23 One of these women could have been Antonina Biskupska, a twenty-sixyear-old housewife, who was sentenced to ten years in prison for participating in the pogrom: I joined the crowd and learned that one child, who had escaped from the Jews, had informed the police that another child was still being held captive there. I also heard that the policemen were to go to the house and check if it was true that children had been murdered. Strangers first told me one child was still alive, that the murdered children were still in the cellar, and later said that they were in the square, and another time claimed they were all covered with quick lime so that no evidence was left. Then I started shouting: “Down with the Jews! They murder our children! We don’t need them!”24 A drastic picture of his own motives for the pogrom was presented by the forty-year-old musician Edward Jurkowski, who was visiting his wife in hospital: I saw a large crowd at Planty Street and heard cries saying the Jews had murdered some children. I went to the house, had a quarter of vodka, a snack, and then grabbed a lemonade and some rusks to give my wife in hospital. However, once I left my apartment, I could already see people from Ludwików [a district of Kielce where the steelworks were located] walking towards Planty Street. The crowd was shouting that the Jews needed to be beaten up and murdered. At that time, I still had no idea what was going on. Excited by those cries and somewhat tipsy, I joined the crowd and also started to cry that Jews needed to be murdered if they murder our people and also shouted: “Come on, men!”25 Having heard news of Jews being murdered, people from the neighbourhood started to come in to Kielce. The following testimony is that given by the seventeen-year-old worker Mieczysław Krasowski: The children selling [lemonade] at the railway station started to tell me that the Jews had murdered eleven children and that one boy managed to escape the Jewish cellar and told them the whole story. Having heard this story, I jumped onto the first car I saw heading towards the city to take part in murdering the Jews. The car was carrying iron rods. So I took one, approximately 75 cm in length.26

The Present Causes of Past Effects  325 According to the next testimony, the thing that proved to be the spark that triggered the pogrom in Kielce was the multiplied gossip about the kidnapping of Henio Błaszczyk. The testimony below was given by the thirty-sixyear-old corporal Ludwik Pustuła: On my way I met my wife, who told me that our daughter was missing. So I took my machine gun, I set out towards Planty Street, the place all the people were going to. Having reached Planty, which was at around 10 a.m., I started to shout towards the crowd that the Jews have killed a child. Having heard that, the people shouted: “That is the one, whose child has been killed” [. . .] As for my child, who as I shouted had been killed, I told the people that she, my ten-year-old daughter, was walking through the city selling lemonade.27 Pustuła was spotted by the UB officer Henryk Rybak. Rybak testified that: The militia agents from the MO Office at Sienkiewicza Street showed the worst kind of behaviour. Walking among the crowd of civilians, they said: “Poles—don’t you be afraid.” One of the soldiers cried that he had seen four bodies of children laying covered with quick lime, while a policeman standing at the door to the house shouted that his child had died and is still inside this house.28 Another spark of propaganda is described by Antoni Frankowski, officer of the 2nd Infantry Division in Kielce. Standing on the bridge on the river Sinica, he saw a little boy, whose hand was held by a woman, point at the house of the Jewish Community and say that: “He was in the cellar, in that building, where he saw heads of murdered children laying on a pile of coal.”29 News of the alleged harm done to little Henio Błaszczyk, spread by his uncle Andrzej and older brother Jan, mobilised around six hundred workers from the Steelworks Ludwików (both men worked there) and Lumber Mill No. 1 to take action. They used the tools they worked with as weapons against Jews.30 Their arrival to Planty at 12:30 p.m. marked the second, most bloody phase of the pogrom.

The Real Victims Jechiel Alpert spent the entire pogrom in the building at Planty Street. He tried several times to call the UB, the governor-voivod Eugeniusz WiśliczIwańczyk (he was ill), the local bishop Czesław Kaczmarek (he was not in Kielce at that time), and the commander of the Russian military unit, Nikolay Shpilyevoy, asking them for help. The last of these told Alpert, that “[he] has no Polish, but only Russian uniforms in his unit and, so that later the rioters could say that Russians were murdering Poles.”31

326  Joanna Tokarska-Bakir When the military, who had been called by Sobczyński from WUBP, finally arrived at the spot at 11 a.m., the people besieged in the building sighed with relief. Their relief did not last long. Alpert recounts: I went out of the house and heard a Polish woman shouting at me: “You’ve been drinking our blood! You killed Christ! We’ll teach you a lesson!” I wanted to take her outside, when two policemen standing nearby said: “Hey mister! You’d better watch out!” The shooting was probably triggered by a careless shot fired by one of the militia agents, who were carrying out the search, which immediately turned into a pillage. Alpert’s wife, Hanka, saw the moment when the police entered the refuge house: As soon as they entered the food and clothes stores, they started to pillage whatever they liked [. . .] when soldiers left the building, they made all men go out to [the yard in front of the building] and searched each and every one of them. They took these men’s watches, wedding rings, rings and things like that [. . .] A few of them were killed, a few were heavily wounded, while the rest who were not beaten up seriously, ran back into the building, as the soldiers were hitting them with rifle butts. There were also a few soldiers, who were hitting the men really hard and they had red bands on their caps and red badges on their uniforms.32 Alpert’s wife testified that she was most afraid when she recognised that the soldier, who was asking her questions, was wearing her husband’s shirt.33 The Jews, who managed to survive the pogrom just like the Alperts, were transported out of Kielce on trucks sent by military reinforcements commanded by Lt. Artur Pollak of the 2nd Infantry Regiment of the Polish Army that arrived in the city between 1:30 and 2:30 p.m. Jechiel recalled a characteristic incident that happened to him during the evacuation: “One of the soldiers said to me: ‘How did you like the taste of Polish blood? That serves you right!’”34 The Kielce pogrom resulted in forty-two people killed, and around eighty wounded;35 some of them died later on in the hospital. Reading through the patient cards and partially preserved protocols from forensic examinations36 proved quite difficult. The following passage comes from the inspection protocol of the pogrom site carried out the day after the pogrom by the Prosecutor’s Office in Kielce: Right in front of the staircase [. . .] there are traces of nineteen large spots of gore. Located at certain distances from each other, the spots were spread over an area of 150 m2. Next to these bloody stains lay the murder weapons: a 60-cm long iron crowbar, a blood-stained part of a radiator, stones and bricks of different sizes, broken rails torn out from a fence, used to inflict injuries upon the Jews. The bottom part of the left wing of the door to staircase No. 2 is starkly bloodstained. On the

The Present Causes of Past Effects  327 first floor of the same staircase, there is a large bloodstain and a piece of bloodstained brick. On the second floor, the investigators found two shells from a AKM rifle, two other shells, and one shell shot from a PPSh-41. All Jewish apartments have been sealed up with the seal and stamp of the MO Office in Kielce.37

The Alleged Victims The thirty-one-year-old platoon Militia officer Jan Rogoziński, who took part in “securing the area” at Planty Street early in the morning, recalls the hostility of the crowd that was gathering at the spot: “The people standing next to us, reproached us, saying that as policemen we were trying to efface the traces of the crime. Some of them said that the Jews had murdered ten, while the others claimed they had killed sixteen children.”38 The number of a dozen or so alleged casualties, recurring in the testimonies, was most likely popularised by a report compiled in the autumn of 1945 by one of the underground organisations, “Wolność i Niepodległość” (Freedom and Independence). The passage below describes the circumstances surrounding the first post-war pogrom committed in Rzeszów as follows: [Report compiled by WiN, autumn 1945] On 11 May [1945] in the Jewish cellar at Tannenbauma Street in Rzeszów, a rabbi dressed in a bloodstained, white smock was caught red handed standing next to a dead girl hanging upside down. Alarmed about the scene, an MO patrol passing by the house discovered body parts that belonged to sixteen children. Put under pressure, the rabbi admitted that the body parts were those of sixteen children. However, he claimed that even though these were no ritual murders, the Jewish nation suffered great losses and needed to be kept alive with human blood! This was exactly the way blood is drawn! Having heard what had happened, the people jumped at the Jews and started to beat them.39 The above fragment deals with the operation of modernising a legend (marked as V361 in Stith Thompson’s index of folklorist motives),40 in which elements that prove too archaic are replaced with new and more credible elements. The element modified in this case is the intention attributed to the kidnappers: now they do not kidnap children to turn them “into matzot,” but to “transfuse their blood.” Similar expressions appear in contexts preceding the Kielce pogrom: Cracow is seeing an anti-Jewish riot, rumours of Jews kidnapping little children and drawing their blood for other Jews, who are returning from concentration camps.41 In the Opatów district [. . .] they refused to send the children to summer camps, allegedly in fear of deportation to Siberia or blood transfusion.42

328  Joanna Tokarska-Bakir The stories that circulated in Rzeszów [. . .] very much resemble the Middle Ages. So for example, people would say [. . .] that thirty litres of filtered human blood and fresh bones of children were found in the apartment of the rabbi or that of the mohel and that new bodies and things alike were still being dug out.43 Figures of a dozen or so children murdered by Jews reverberate in the rumours preceding the pogroms of 1945–46. The testimony given by Henio Błaszczyk on 4 July in Kielce contains new recurring elements such as: the notice of a package the boy was to deliver somewhere and a mention of a twenty-złoty reward he was promised to receive. I  was approached by some unknown man, who said to me: “You boy, please deliver this package for me and I will give you twenty złoty.” [. . .] I noticed right away he was a Jew, because he had a large nose, black hair and was speaking just as if he had his nostrils glued [. . .] When we reached the large tenement house, the man said to me: “Come here and I will give you something nice to eat.” I followed the Jew, and he grabbed my hand and pushed me into the woodshed. Did you scream when the Jew pushed you into the [Interrogator:]  woodshed? [Błaszczyk:] No, I did not scream, because I was afraid that other Jews would hear me and would like to make matzot out of me. [Interrogator:] How did you know that Jews kill children? [Błaszczyk:] Our neighbour, Mr Pasowski [landlord of the house where the Błaszczyks lived] from Podwale told me that Jews murder Polish children, put them into a barrel, roll the barrel until they kill the child and then take their blood to bake matzot. [Interrogator:] What do you think [should] be done to the Jews, because they want to murder children to make their matzot? [Błaszczyk:] All the Jews should be slaughtered so that none is left and so that they would not kidnap children anymore.44 [Błaszczyk:]

Further into the testimony, the boy admits that he had made up the story of being kidnapped by Jews because he was afraid to tell his parents that when he was not home for three days without telling them, he went to his cousin’s to pick cherries.45 The Cracow pogrom (14 August 1945) that preceded the Kielce pogrom by one year was also triggered by an incident involving a little boy: Antoś Nijaki. The boy described the incident as follows: I was selling newspapers, when suddenly I was approached by some man, who asked me to deliver a package for him and promised to give

The Present Causes of Past Effects  329 me twenty złoty. The man followed me for a while and showed me another man and told me to follow him too. The other man was a Jew. I was following him. When walking past a synagogue, I saw lots of people gathering there. I walked closer to the synagogue, when a policeman approached me and told me to tell others that the Jews wanted to murder me. So I dropped the package and started to run away screaming: “Help, help! People, help me, because they want to kill me!”46 Judging from the letters stopped by the Military Censor in 1946, we know what dimension the situation described by Antoś Nijaki assumed in the eyes of the people in Cracow: Our city is witnessing clashes with Jews. Can you imagine that the Jews went as far as to kill Polish children to draw their blood? They trick them into delivering their bags to a synagogue and pay them a hundred złoty. You know how greedy for money children are and especially boys. It turned out that one boy was clever enough, because when he reached the synagogue and heard other children crying, he did not wait for his four friends and reported to the police right away. The militia found a few bodies in the cellar of the synagogue. A rumour spread momentarily that wherever Poles would come across a Jew, they would beat him up and smash his stalls in the market hall. There was even a shooting with a few casualties, but I do not know exactly who shot whom.47 The state archives in Kielce contain a report from nearby Częstochowa from 1946 indicating that the above scheme would also reoccur in other cities. The report tells of two eleven-year-old boys who first went missing in their homes, which they explained with: “being kidnapped by Jews.” Only during a cross-examination at the police station would they confess that by two strangers: they were given twenty złoty each and told to go to 28 Garibaldiego Street, where they should spend the night. The following day, they were supposed to tell the people that Jews gave them twenty złoty each, for going inside their cellars, but they managed to escape.48 We do not know whether the authorities investigated the address at 28 Garibaldiego. According to other testimonies, 1946 saw several other attempts to trigger a pogrom in Częstochowa and other locations.49

The Type of Legend and Its Reception in Poland According to Paul Brass’s theory of collective violence, the thing that proves necessary to trigger a pogrom is the coincidence of some elements, the most important of which are: the spark and the tinder.50 If the rumour of Henio

330  Joanna Tokarska-Bakir Błaszczyk’s kidnapping was the pogrom’s spark, we can imagine how explosive the tinder must have been. According to the catalogue of folklorist motives, the ritual murder legend appears as number V361: “Christian child killed to furnish blood for Jewish rite.” While the narration of a Christian boy crucified by Jews proves the first European manifestation of the legend, the oldest antecedent of the version that found its expression in Kielce in 1946, can be found in the German town of Fulda back in the year 1235. Fulda saw the first mention of Jews using blood for the purpose of baking matzot.51 The story passed on by Henio Błaszczyk reflects the fable about a Jew which he, just like Antoś Nijaki and other Polish children, was terrified by.52 In St. Paul’s church in Sandomierz, a city located a hundred kilometres from Kielce, one can still find a scene of six sequences that depicts a Jew kidnapping a child. A painting in the nearby cathedral shows the torturing of a child in a barrel, which illustrates the accusations directed against Jews for the crimes committed at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see Figure 20.1). Analysing the stance expressed by the Vatican after the Kielce pogrom in 1945–46, Arieh Kochavi proved that the faith in the “grain of truth” contained in the blood legend was not limited to Polish Catholicism.53 The view in Poland was shared by part of the intelligentsia (for example, officers of the anti-Communist underground and some of the Catholic clergy). Activists from Jewish organisations tried in vain to convince the church hierarchs to issue an address that would deny the rumours of Jews kidnapping children. When one of the bishops, Teodor Kubina, issued such an

Figure 20.1 Painting by Karol (Charles) de Prevot in Sandomierz Cathedral, which presents putting a child into a spiked barrel. The scene of the Jew, luring the child, is depicted in the lower right corner of the painting. Source: Wiki Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sandomierz_katedra_-_ mord_rytualny.jpg

The Present Causes of Past Effects  331 address, he was condemned by the Polish Bishops’ Conference. Asked to assess the causes of the Kielce pogrom, Bishop Stefan Wyszyński, who later became the Primate of Poland, enigmatically mentioned “old and new Jewish books” stocked in the Beilis process, in which “the issue of blood has not been finally settled.”54 The Communist authorities were perfectly aware of the danger posed by the cults of the so-called martyr children (that is, children worshipped as murdered by the Jews). Sometimes they forced the clergy to remove paintings and other objects recalling “ritual murders” from the churches. This was exactly the time when an eighteenth-century painting and a little coffin with a child’s skeleton, a remnant of the accusation of the crime from 1639 directed against Jews, were confiscated from the church in Łęczyca.55 However, the paintings in Kalwaria Zebrzydowska and Sandomierz did survive. The latter paintings can be seen in the churches of Sandomierz until this day.

Ways of Transmitting the European Legend to Poland What proves conspicuous in the testimony given by Henio Błaszczyk, is the fragment about Baba Yaga, characteristic for a fable very popular in Poland, who lures Hansel and Gretel with sweets. Departing from the above detail, let us recall that thread V361 was known to Polish Catholics primarily in the Trent version—named after the accusation of ritual murder directed against the Jews in 1475 in Trent. Providing evidence for this thesis are the paintings spread throughout Polish churches, which recreate the iconographic system popularised by the well-known woodcut from the Weltchronik encyclopaedia by Hartmann Schedel (1493).56 The description of the incident in Trent was brought from Italy to Poland by the Jesuit preacher Piotr Skarga (1536–1612). The passage below comes from the hagiography of Simon in Żywoty Świętych (Lives of the Saints; 1579) rewritten directly from the brochure by Tabarin (1476), a doctor, who performed an autopsy of the body of Little Simon of Trent: [The Jew Tobias] gave him money, berries and other childish sweets, so the child remained silent until he reached Samuel’s door, and he pushed the child inside the house.57 Now let us compare the above sentence with the narration by Henio Błaszczyk we quoted earlier: When we reached the large tenement house, [the Jew] said to me: “Come here, and I’ll give you something good to eat.” I followed the Jew and then he grabbed my hand and pushed me into the woodshed. Could Henio or his neighbour Antoni Pasowski have known the work by Piotr Skarga? Did the perpetrators of the pogrom know the work too?

332  Joanna Tokarska-Bakir Żywoty Świętych by Piotr Skarga constituted a fundamental transmission channel of thread V361 to Poland. The last reprint of the hagiography of Simon of Trent in Skarga’s work was published by the Polish Jesuits in Cracow in the years 1933–35. The reprint contained not a word of reservation suggesting that perhaps it was not the Jews who had murdered the child. Apart from the Bible, the collection of hagiographies by Skarga had the greatest number of re-editions, remained the basic religion handbook and pillar of Jesuit education, and was popular reading in student lodgings until the end of the nineteenth century. In the period of partitions, throughout the entire nineteenth century, when Poland was divided between Germany, Russia, and Austria, Skarga’s work experienced a revival. The book remained on the reading list in Polish homes until the outbreak of the Second World War. In the memoirs written down by the historian and ethnographer Franciszek Bujak, we can find the following image of reading Żywoty Świętych: I used to spend several hours at the apartment of my neighbour—an elderly lady, taking care of my younger siblings, listening to how she would read aloud Lives of the Saints by Skarga. This reading has made an immensely strong impression on me. The book became the fundament of my mentality with respect to faith, morality and knowledge. The fundament was the source of my further development. Sometimes when I read the hagiographies, I still wonder why I would devour this book so greedily, why I would try to understand it, especially the moralising part, being a five- and six-year-old child. What was particularly deeply engraved in my memory were the names of cruel Roman ­ emperors—Nero, Domitian, Diocletian, and others. When I fell ill in wintertime, I would get delirious and mumble out that they were about to torture me, just like they tortured Christian martyrs from Skarga’s work.58

Feeling Persecuted The above depiction of religious exaltation fits the spiritual exercises described in Anthony Bale’s book Feeling Persecuted (2010) surprisingly well. In the book, the author deals with the rhetoric of the Passion accounts, by means of which European, primarily English, Christians imagined the executioners of Christ. Although there was no trace of Jews in England up until the seventeenth century, their alleged horror-like deeds were still contemplated in Psalters and prayer books. Bale writes that medieval texts and images we term as antisemitic are equipped with their own rhetoric and aesthetic of violence. They can be read out and they can move the readers allowing them to live the sense of being persecuted themselves,59 according to the Second Epistle to Timothy 3:12, “Whoever will live piously in Christ shall suffer persecution.”60 Fantasies

The Present Causes of Past Effects  333 of persecution do not necessarily have to be reduced to sadomasochism. Bale claims that they can be “viewed in terms of a well-developed Christian culture of clementia et mansuetudine (clemency and gentleness), which actively seeks images of cruelty in order to confirm its own mildness [of the subject].”61 The rhetoric of fear, the author proves further on, is not always connected with experiencing the fragmentation of the self, as interpreted by Elaine Scarry in her famous book on tortures, Body in Pain.62 The rhetoric can even reverse the dynamics of dominance. Assuming the position of the victim or identifying oneself with the martyr constituted one of the most efficient modes of constructing subjectivity in medieval culture.63 A similar phenomenon is present in the use of the blood libel in the Polish pogroms of 1945 and 1946. The rumour circulated among the tortured people, who had just left the horror of Nazi occupation and wanted to define themselves. The post-war chaos certainly contributed to the fame of the rumour of Jews kidnapping children; however, even the people who believed the rumour was true were not entirely separated from reality. Since they believed that having left concentration camps, Jews needed blood transfusions, it might seem that they had registered the Shoah. Like the medieval English, the postwar Poles, while “highly valuing weakness and martyrdom were unable to break with the things they imagined as a constant and symbolic dominance of the Jews over themselves.”64 Regardless of how real the situation of the Jews was, both the medieval English and the post-war Polish versions of Christianity, drawing infanticidum from deicidum,65 only assigned Jews the role of the persecutor. A situation when the symbolic persecutor, decimated by the Shoah, suddenly required help, triggered incredulity and disorientation. It was only the modernisation of the ritual murder legend—explaining how enemies, weakened by the war, adapted to a new situation (transfusions)—that restored the shaken symbolic order. Travestying the term by George Eliot, what can be seen in the modernisation of the blood legend in the times of the Kielce pogrom is the basic manifestation of the myth at work: the constant search for “present causes of past effects.”66 The “past effect” in the form of the idea of the Jew as the God-killer was updated in Europe in form of the idea, according to which Jews showed a liking for killing Christian children. In post-war Poland, in a dictionary dominated by modern nationalism, the causes of Jewish murders were not the only elements that were revised by replacing “kidnapping children to bake matzot” with “transfusions.” The victims of Jewish murders were also termed “Polish” instead of “Christian” as they had been referred to before. Some scholars are willing to regard the change in phraseology as a sign of a nationalism-inspired modern antisemitism and the exhaustion of its older, religious background. Registering these changes, the scholars should also consider what this transformation preserves. However, what proves the

334  Joanna Tokarska-Bakir pivotal issue is how one understands the processes of secularisation. Sander L. Gilman and Steven T. Katz write that: The view that the racial or scientific 19th century anti-Semitism, due to its atheist inclinations, stood for a radical break with “medieval” religious tradition of hatred towards Jews, results from the incomprehension of the nature of the secularisation of this model, taking place in 19th century life sciences. The primary model of the Jew becomes secularised as late as in the 18th and 19th century. The blindness and inability of the Jews to convert to Christianity, become their “psychological limitation,” preventing their full acculturation in the Western society. In-born Jewish perfidy, expressed in the constantly betraying Christ across centuries, becomes a biologically-determined feature of Jews, which predisposes them to play a heartless role in the establishment of capitalism (or Communism). The destructive role of Jews expressed in literally taking the life of Christians, committing blood murders or poisoning wells, which leads to the outbreak of an epidemic of Black Death, is transformed into the Jews’ biological participation of transmitting diseases such as syphilis [or typhus in Nazi propaganda—JTB].67 In this context, the dispute over the “eternity of anti-Semitism,” which once again has become intensified due to David Nirenberg’s book AntiJudaism (2013),68 can be interpreted as a conflict of two perspectives of studying the past: as myth and as history. Instead of fighting each other, the perspectives could exchange experiences. Advocates of the former perspective could take into consideration the fact that the impression of continuity consists of a series of updates, wherein the historical context should be carefully reconstructed each time. Historians, on the other hand, would consider the suggestion that as a rule, the posterior is reconstructed upon an old substratum, the components of which become bearers of new ideas. When stigmatising the modern, often political, use of persecutions from the past—the present causes of past effects—one can ignore neither the question about their genealogy nor the question what they might become in the future.

Abbreviations AIPN Archiwum Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej (Archives of the Institute of National Remembrance) BU Biuro Udostępniania (Office of Dissemination of Archival Documents) KBW Korpus Bezpieczeństwa Wewnętrznego (Internal Security Corps) MO Milicja Obywatelska (Citizens’ Millitia) UB Urząd Bezpieczeństwa (Office for Security; same as WUBP) WiN Wolność i Niezawisłość (Freedom and Independence) WUBP Wojewódzki Urząd Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego (Voivodship Office for Public Security)

The Present Causes of Past Effects  335

Notes 1. Dr. Seweryn Kahane, one of the victims of the Kielce pogrom, was chairman of the Jewish Committee in Kielce in 1946. 2. Voivodship Office for Public Security, a political police institution. 3. Testimony by Jechiel Alpert, born in 1913 in Kielce, edited by Ida Fink (hereafter: Alpert/Fink), AIPN Ki 53/5145, scan from 20140325_171310 onwards. 4. Interrogation of Ryszard Furman, Kielce, 9 July 1946, AIPN Ki 53/5145. Furman was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment in 1947; Bożena Szaynok, Pogrom Żydów w Kielcach, 4 lipca 1946 (Warsaw: Bellona, 1992), 85 (hereafter Szaynok). 5. Interrogation of Antoni Kręglicki, Lublin, 4 October 1995; Wokół pogromu kieleckiego, vol. 1, ed. Jan Żaryn and Łukasz Kamiński (Kielce: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, Komisja Ścigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu, 2006), 300 (hereafter Wokół I). 6. Jechiel Alpert in Szaynok, 35. 7. Edmund Zagórski from the headquarters; Szaynok, 35 n. 27. 8. Interrogation of Ryszard Furman, Kielce, 9 July 1946, AIPN Ki 53/5145. 9. Interrogation of Chaim Latasz, Kielce, 9 July 1946, AIPN Ki 53/5145. 10. Interrogation of Maria Welfman, Kielce, 6 July 1946, Investigation records, vol. 8, c. 1537; Wokół I, 161. 11. Błachut was recognised by Mojżesz Cukier and other witnesses and was sentenced to death; Szaynok, 82. 12. Interrogation of Władysław Sobczyński, Warsaw, 11 July 1946, AIPN BU 0143/ 2/Jacket, 9. 13. Ibid. 14. Interrogation of Władysław Sobczyński, Warsaw, 11 July 1946, AIPN BU 0143/ 2/Jacket, 10. 15. Wokół I, 156–57. 16. Interrogation of Władysław Krześniak, Kielce, 19 July 1946, AIPN Ki 53/5145. 17. Interrogation of Stefan Nabiałczyk, Kielce, 2 August 1946, AIPN BU 0143/2/ Jacket, 40. 18. Interrogation of Edmund Kwasek, Warsaw, 1 August 1946, AIPN BU 0143/2/ Jacket, 29. 19. Interrogation of Antoni Kręglicki, Lublin, 4 October 1995; Wokół I, 301. 20. Ibid. 21. Interrogation of Jana Mucha, Kielce, 3 August 1946, AIPN BU 0143/2/Jacket, 55. 22. Interrogation of Tadeusz Seweryński, Kielce, 15 August 1946, AIPN BU 0143/2/ Jacket, 99. 23. Interrogation of Jan Mańturz, Kielce, 7 July 1946; Meducki I, 115–16. 24. Interrogation of Antonina Biskupska, Kielce, 5 July 1946, BU 01413/1/ Jacket, 57. 25. Interrogation of Edward Jurkowski, Kielce, 5 July 1946; Meducki I, 122. 26. Interrogation of Mieczysław Krasowski, Kielce, 12 July 1946, AIPN Ki 53/5145. 27. Interrogation of Ludwik Pustuła, Kielce, 4 July 1946, AIPN Ki 53/5145. 28. Report by Henryk Rybak, a PUBP officer from Kielce, to the commander of PUBP, 4 July 1946; Wokół I, 151. 29. Interrogation of Antoni Frankowski, Bydgoszcz, 1 July 1997; Wokół I, 415. 30. Final report, AIPN Ki 53/4753. 31. Alpert/Fink, AIPN Ki 53/5145. 32. Interrogation of Hanka Alpert, AIPN Kr, 0258/342; Wokół II, 491–92. 33. Ibid. 34. Alpert/Fink, AIPN Ki 53/5145. 35. According to Jechiel Alpert (Alpert/Fink, AIPN Ki 53/5145); other sources present different estimates, see Szaynok, 60–61.

336  Joanna Tokarska-Bakir 6. AIPN Ki 53/475. 3 37. Inspection report [scene of the crime], Kielce 6 July 1946, deputy public prosecutor from Andrzej Wilkoszyński, District Public Prosecutor’s Office in the District Public Prosecutor’s Office in Kielce, AIPN Ki 53/5145. 38. Interrogation of Jan Rogoziński, Kielce, 12 July 1946, AIPN Ki 53/5145. 39. In Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Okrzyki pogromowe: Szkice z antropologii historycznej Polski lat 1939–1946 (Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2012), 126 n. 55 (in English as Pogrom Cries: Essays in Polish-Jewish History, 1939–1946 [Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2017]). 40. Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: A Classification of the Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-Books, and Local Legends, vol. 5 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989 [reprint]), 471 (ref. no. V361). 41. Letter stopped by the Military Censor, AIPN, MBP 3378, c. 87; Marcin Zaremba, Wielka trwoga: Polska 1944–1947 (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Znak, 2012), 599. 42. State Archive in Kielce, Voivodship Office of Information and Propaganda, 10; Szaynok, 65. 43. Incident in Rzeszów. Report by Diana Grünbaum, Łódź, 16 June 1945, Ghetto Fighters’ House Archive [AGFH], Holdings Registry 1990. 44. Interrogation of Henryk Błaszczyk, Kielce, 4 July 1946; Wokół II, 490–94. 45. Ibid. 46. Wokół II, 361, highlighted fragments JTB. 47. Letter stopped by Military Censor, AIPN, MBP 3378, c. 87; Zaremba, Wielka trwoga, 599, highlighted fragments JTB. 48. Archiwum Państwowe w Kielcach, KW PZPR, 36, c. 166; Wokół II, 365. 49. See Zaremba, Wielka trwoga, 605–6, 609–10. 50. Paul R. Brass, ed., Riots and Pogroms (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 6. 51. “In Fulda, in 1235, the libel of ritual murder was enhanced by a further accusation: the use of Christian blood for ritual purposes, usually for the purpose of baking matzot, the unleavened bread of Passover”: Ora Limor, “Christians and Jews,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 4, Christianity in Western Europe c. 1100–c. 1500, ed. Miri Rubin and Walter Simons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 133–48 (here 147). 52. See Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Légendes du sang: Pour une anthropologie de l’antisémitisme chrétien, trans. Małgorzata Maliszewska (Paris: Albin Michel, 2015), 367–409. 53. Arieh Kochavi, Post-Holocaust Politics: Britain, the United States & Jewish Refugees, 1945–1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 174–82. 54. Antyżydowskie wydarzenia kieleckie 4 lipca 1946 roku: Dokumenty i materiały, vol. 2, ed. Stanisław Meducki and Zenon Wrona (Kielce: Kieleckie Tow. Nauk., 1994), 116–17. See also Tokarska-Bakir, Okrzyki pogromowe, 123 n. 37. 55. Alina Cała, Ochrona bezpieczeństwa fizycznego Żydow w Polsce powojennej: Komisje Specjalne przy Centralnym Komitecie Żydow w Polsce (Warsaw: Zydowski Instytut Historyczny im. Emanuela Ringelbluma, 2014), 196–97. This painting most likely ended up in the District Museum in Jarosław. See Tokarska-Bakir, Okrzyki pogromowe, 390. 56. See Tokarska-Bakir, Okrzyki pogromowe, 390; Tokarska-Bakir, Légendes du sang, 269. 57. Piotr Skarga, Żywoty Swiętych Starego y Nowego Zakonu, na każdy dzień przez cały rok (Cracow: Andrzej Piotrkowczyk, 1610), 262, entry as of 30

The Present Causes of Past Effects  337 March (24 March): “Męczeństwo pacholęcia Szymona Trydenckiego od Żydów umęczonego pisane od Doktora Jana Macieja Tybaryna do Senatu Brygji.” 58. Henryk Barycz, “Z dziejów jednej książki,” in Henryk Barycz, Z epoki renesansu, reformacji i baroku: Prądy, idee, ludzie, książki (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1971), 652. 59. Anthony Bale, Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), 18. 60. “Whoever will live piously in Christ shall suffer persecution”; Bale, Feeling Persecuted, 25. 61. Ibid. 62. Elaine Scarry, Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). See also the discussion in Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 80. 63. Bale, Feeling Persecuted, 24. 64. Ibid. 65. Narrations of kidnapping children in order to turn them into matzot were always modelled on the Passion scheme. See Tokarska-Bakir, Légendes du sang, 208–24. 66. “Present causes of past effects”: George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (London: Wordsworth Editions, 1996 [first print 1876]), 531. 67. Sander L. Gilman and Steven T. Katz, “Preface,” in Anti-Semitism in Times of Crisis, ed. Sander L. Gilman and Steven T. Katz (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 1. 68. David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The History of a Way of Thinking (London: Head of Zeus, 2013), 9.

Part VIII

Economy and Finance

21 Jewish Usurers, Blood Libel, and the Second-Hand Economy The Medieval Origins of a Stereotype (from the Thirteenth to the Fifteenth Century) Giacomo Todeschini Beginning in the fourteenth century, many medieval anti-Jewish narratives portray a close relationship between Jewish usury and the Jewish profanation of the consecrated host associated with blood libel. Moreover, in these stories, Jewish moneylending for interest is portrayed as the starting point of an economy of scrap collecting and recycling—a second-hand economy rooted in moneylending secured by a pledge of repayment. This link between Jewish usury and the Jewish scrap collecting economy is often present in tales of Jewish usurers as host desecrators. The Fortalitium fidei by the Spanish Franciscan friar Alphonso de Spina (Alonso de Espina) provides a salient example. The ninth Consideratio of the third book of the Fortalitium,1 written between 1458 and 1480, tells the story of a Christian woman offering a Parisian Jewish moneylender a host as collateral for a dress she had previously pledged. The Jewish usurer is subsequently portrayed as an extremely hostile infidel who desecrates the host by boiling it and then tries to kill Christ when he miraculously appears in the host’s place. A well-known image that presents the connection between Jewish usury, pledges of repayment, and the desecration of host in the context of a blood miracle is the Miracle of the Desecrated Host, painted in Urbino by Paolo Uccello between 1465 and 1469.2 What is it that links Jews, usury, and rags—which is to say, the second-hand and scrap economy—to blood accusations? Another way to pose this question would be: what links ­ the medieval portrayal of Jews as moneylenders for interest and murderers of Christians (especially Christian children) to their portrayal as scrap merchants? To begin with, we should consider the fact that Christians were specifically forbidden from engaging in usury. Beyond the ethical and theological implications of this prohibition, however, it should be kept in mind that from the mid-thirteenth century until the early fifteenth century, for reasons related to the financial restructuring of the economy and markets, a new legal understanding of contracts based on lending and borrowing for interest was primarily to be found in Italy, England, Spain, and France.3 During

342  Giacomo Todeschini this period, recognised public usurers began to be depicted as aggressive enemies of the “common good,” who were guilty of an economic and civic crime which both by canonists and civic legislators began to describe as indisputably dishonest and unlawful, violent and disturbing,4 and absolutely at odds with the credit activities ordinarily performed by merchant bankers and public money-changers. Historians often forget that in late medieval and Renaissance Italy it was presumed that merchant bankers and money-changers were Christian, not only because of the stereotypical identification of Jews as enemies of the Church, intent on seizing its wealth by mortgaging ecclesiastical ­properties— as was established in canon 67 the Fourth Lateran Council, which began in November 12155—but also because many credit options (for example, rents, public debt, and public bonds) were exclusively reserved for “real” citizens6—Christians. On the whole, this very clear distinction between usurers and merchant bankers had its parallel in the exclusive right of Christian citizens to be members of the powerful corporations of merchants and money-changers. In this light, it is easier to understand that from the late twelfth century, the construction of the stereotype of Jews as usurers depended on both the recodification of the very ancient theological image of Jewish religious stubbornness, with an updated economic portrayal of Jews as greedy and rapacious hoarders of wealth, and the gradual exclusion of Jews, as noncitizens, from a number of important aspects of the so-called commercial and financial revolution then occurring in Christian Italy and northwestern Europe. Both the transformation of the ancient theological notion of tenacia Judaeorum, the obstinate resistance of Jews to conversion, metaphorically presented as avarice since Patristic times, into the economic image of the Jews as misers and hoarders and the close link between Christian citizenship and the public dimension of credit coincided during the thirteenth century to create and broadly diffuse a theological and economic portrayal of Jewish wealth as entirely shaped by money and goods that had been maliciously snatched out of what economists today call stable economic circular flow.7 In other words, the stereotypical presentation of Jews as typical usurers that began to circulate in the early thirteenth century,8 primarily in legal documents, such as conciliar canons and papal letters, coincided with the onset of a portrayal of profit dynamics market games and wealth that clearly differentiated the formal and publicly useful strategies of enrichment available to those who belonged to the sacred body of the “State” (both in cities and kingdoms and in the respublica Christianorum overall) from the informal, surreptitious, and harmful techniques for accumulating wealth that was the designated terrain of outsiders and outcasts. The very notion of money and of the value of things was deeply reshaped by this process. Money and the value of tradable goods began to be viewed by Christians as features and fundaments of the so-called common good (bonum commune)9 or, more precisely, as basic components of a stable community.10

Jewish Usurers, Blood Libel  343 The increase in the portrayal of Christian cities and kingdoms as sanctified bodies during the thirteenth century can, in a similar way, be linked to a new notion of the “health” of these public entities: a “health” directly dependant on the equilibrium established as valid by the new mercantile and accounting techniques that developed during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.11 It is also important to keep in mind that in consequence of the so-called Gregorian Reform, Christian liturgists and theologians had been metaphorically describing the host as a sort of spiritual coin since the late eleventh century. This sacred object, consecrated at the altar and transubstantiated into the genuine Body of Christ, was fashioned in modum denarii.12 In other words, after the turning point shaped, on the one hand, by the Gregorian Reform and, on the other, by the so-called “commercial revolution” that spanned the eleventh to the thirteenth century, money and objects handled and exchanged by infidels, and especially by Jews, the “familiar strangers” and the outsiders par excellence, became something alien and distinct from money and objects administered, invested in, and distributed by Christian rulers and merchants. Beginning in the mid-twelfth century, but picking up speed in the early thirteenth century with the Fourth Lateran Council, the primary impact of this political and theological recasting of wealth and profit was the wide circulation of an image of Jewish wealth as, first and foremost, derived from many different kinds of economic subterfuge and deceitful contracts, moneylending for interest first among them.13 Consequently, in cases where kings and landlords either routinely or exceptionally taxed Jews and Jewish communities, they could now rationalise their fiscal claims on Jewish wealth, because it had presumably been earned through usury and was therefore illegitimate. At the same time, the acquisition by Jews of hypothecated ecclesiastical lands posed Christian jurists and canonists with the problem of tithes applied to subjects who were not full members of a Christian jurisdiction, which is to say, subjects who were not citizens. Several papal and episcopal letters and the aforementioned canon 67 (Quanto amplius) underline the crucial importance of this issue.14 Indeed, the problem posed to Christian culture by non-Christian, or more precisely, Jewish, moneylending secured by a pledge of repayment began to be addressed in the early thirteenth century by a close expert analysis of canon and Roman law regarding pledges of repayment, which is to say, the transfer of possessions and property covered by contracts. Moneylending contracts, for example, were explicitly formulated differently than purchase and sales contracts.15 The initial analysis conducted by jurists and canonists between 1215 and 1250 resulted in an explicit condemnation of moneylending for interest secured by pledging movable or immovable assets. It was perceived as a means of making money that could not be considered productive or fruitful. This marked a new approach that differed from the various previous bans of late antiquity and the high medieval period, which had flat-out forbidden moneylending for profit in generic terms (plus requiritur

344  Giacomo Todeschini quam datur).16 In other words, after the twelfth century, canonistic clarifications of the notion of credit clearly differentiated between legitimate forms of Christian credit and usury. The proscription on moneylending for interest was specifically described as forbidding lending in exchange for a pledge of repayment that was characterised by a strict and clearly formulated statement regarding a fixed amount of interest. Moneylending secured by a pledge of repayment became something absolutely distinct from the many other credit strategies, for example, buying and selling of rents, an increase in price in the event of delayed payment, investing money in public bonds, money changing—in short, any sort of credit contract permitting interest as compensation for the economic loss presumably caused to the lender by the act of lending (the so-called lucrum cessans or damnum emergens). In many cases, simply not specifying the amount of interest due in the contract was sufficient to establish the legitimacy of a credit transaction. This was also the case when debt repayment was gradual, as in the case of rent. In this spirit, moneylending secured by a pledge of repayment became a very specific kind of economic transaction. Theologians, canonists, and experts in Roman law began to play close attention to these pledges of repayment, and the guarantee of restitution in the form of a mobile or immobile object came to be the distinguishing mark and stigma of public usurers, the so-called usurarii manifesti.17 The thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries was a crucial economic phase in the transition of the European Christian economy into a political economy that was the specific purview of kingdoms and city states (and their “public good”)18 and that was ruled by the fiscal policies of the Christian powers. This served to make crystal clear the distinction between the international credit economy controlled by Christian commercial companies, bankers, and money-changers and the local economies that encompassed Jews and their communities. “Consumer lending” gradually assumed the specific shape of contract moneylending secured by a pledge of repayment, a form totally different from commercial and international credit. This new kind of contract was ordinarily the purview of local entrepreneurs, shopkeepers and small merchants, as well as of “common people” who managed informal, small-scale economies.19 The involvement of these groups of small businessmen and businesswomen in local forms of credit was now explicitly recast as disguised usury, with their contracts portrayed as suspect transactions. Jews in Italy, as well as in Spain, France, and Germany, who were simultaneously members of local kinships and members of Jewish communities, aljamas or universitates judaeorum, were directly targeted by this market restructuring, particularly in the case of credit markets.20 Nevertheless, they played an odd role in this reorganisation of market relations. On the one hand, as merchants, shopkeepers, and farmers, they participated in local markets in the same way as their Christian counterparts, and, like their Christian counterparts, they were deeply involved in local credit issues; on

Jewish Usurers, Blood Libel  345 the other hand, their imperfect citizenship,21 namely, their religious and juridical, or more correctly, political, otherness (very often underestimated by economic historians) meant that, from the point of view of Christian jurists, theologians, and rulers, their participation in specific credit markets connected to moneylending secured by an pledge of repayment was a blatant manifestation of usury. Jewish credit practices were, in fact, portrayed and perceived differently than moneylending for interest on the part of local Christian merchants and shopkeepers. Jewish credit practices were seen as a specific form of speculative moneylending secured by a pledge of repayment that resulted from the ambiguous relationship of Jews to civic communities. In fact, the specific juridical link between religious/cultural identity and economic/civic trustworthiness characterising the Christian legal system, particularly after 1215, corresponded to notions of “credit” that shifted meaning on the basis of the position of people in market systems based on reputation and trust. While the international economy was organised and managed by political leaders and commercial companies, the small-scale, localised economy, the local credit market in particular, was subdivided, in its turn, into two distinct, contractual areas. The first was shaped by moneylending for interest that was secured by notarial instruments,22 specifically, by written and authenticated guarantees of restitution based on a publicly recognised reciprocal trust between Christian lenders and borrowers. The second one, on the other hand, encompassed Jewish moneylending for interest, which was secured by questionable written documents of dubious public validity, for the most part, pledges that had a value proportional to the borrowed sum, and this came to be the distinguishing mark of credit transactions involving Jewish moneylenders. The pledging of everything, from daily articles, such as garments and domestic tools, to precious books, jewellery, parcels of land, and sacred objects, meant these items could be viewed as losing their primary nature, their specific (and political) use value, and becoming second-hand goods whose use value was perceived as both concretely and symbolically reduced and, thereby, was very difficult to calculate from the point of view of putatively Christian market relations. First, from this point of view, Jewish moneylenders as usurers—moneylenders who received a pledge of repayment—were described in conciliar canons and economic treatises ­ as disguised thieves and infidels actively devaluing Christian wealth. The ancient economic metaphor presented in the writings of Ambrose of Milan, namely, the metaphoric image of the Jews possessing a coin (the Holy Scripture) that was devalued by their incapacity to understand its actual worth, evolved during the thirteenth century into an economic portrayal of Jews as usurers who exploited Christians and as economic enemies whose aim was to depreciate Christian wealth so that they could more easily seize it.23 It is important to understand that this transition from the theological to the economic was made possible by the specific import of blood as a symbol

346  Giacomo Todeschini and a metaphor in Christian late medieval narratives. As noted by Carolyn Walker Bynum, in reference to ritual murder libels, “Christians stereotyped Jews as especially associated with blood” and “needed Jews to produce miraculous blood,” particularly, “the wonderful blood of God made visible in matter by Jewish desecration.”24 At the same time, the idea that Christian wealth—as something like the blood coursing through the human body25— was the natural heat of the civic body, whose well-being depended on a wellregulated flow of wealth, became crucial. From the late thirteenth century onward, this idea was complemented by an increase in organic metaphors that portrayed the Christian economic common good.26 A well-known antiJewish synthesis of these two strains of metaphor would be summed up in the early fifteenth century in a sermon of Bernardino of Siena. Bernardino explicitly compared Jewish moneylending secured by a pledge of repayment to the confluence of the city state’s “natural heat,” the system’s blood, its wealth, at a single point in the civic body. In other words, Bernardino, the leader of the Observant Franciscans portrayed Jewish usury in the form of moneylending secured by a pledge as a mortal disease assailing the civic body by causing a detrimental interruption of its blood circulation. In short, Jewish usury effectively blocked the healthy flow of Christian wealth. The same passage in the text metaphorically presents the economic presence of Jews and Jewish moneylending secured by a pledge as the kind of tumour or abscess (apostema) that medieval manuals of medicine suggested should be “surgically” removed.27 As a result, Jewish moneylending secured by a pledge might be considered the worst kind of usury, and was often symbolically perceived as a sort of economic bloodsucking, with certain analogies to ritual murder.28 Beginning in the late fourteenth century, theologians and jurists perceived and portrayed this kind of Jewish aggression against the Christian economy as causing a significant devaluation of the pledged goods: a transformation of both the economic and the mystical value of Christian goods, reducing them to what was, in effect, the dross of a scrap economy. With the campaigns for the foundation of the Monti di Pietà in Italy after 1450, moneylending on interest by Jews came to be described as flagrant waste and the devaluation of the local aggregate Christian wealth—in short, as a kind of annihilation of the Christian civic common good.29 The main consequence of this polemical presentation of Jewish moneylending for interest was that usury, in particular, Jewish usury, came to be portrayed as a bottomless pit devouring Christian wealth, conceived of as the totality of “true economic goods” in a strict sense. To put it another way, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Jewish moneylending secured by a pledge was increasingly perceived, both from an economic perspective and from a symbolic theological point of view, as a radical altering of the inherent value of the items that changed hands. Seen in this light, Jewish moneylenders appeared to be the wicked inventors and perverted initiators

Jewish Usurers, Blood Libel  347 of a new economic alchemy, able to depreciate Christian value and remove it from the sacred economic space shaped by Christian markets and cities.30 The common fifteenth-century allegation advanced by Franciscan preachers that Jews involved in moneylending31 removed and exported pledged goods from Christian countries should be interpreted not so much as fact, but as the culmination of the theological-economic portrayal of the Jewish economic presence in Christian territories in terms of devaluation, obliteration, waste, and the deterioration of local Christian wealth. The wealth in question was conceived of and understood to be the birthright epitomised by the holy Christian patrimony incarnate in the Body of Christ portrayed on the doors and banners of the Monti di Pietà.32 The growth of the customary Jewish specialisation of pawnbroking, along with the concentration of Jewish institutions in a professional ghetto shaped by the trade in rags and second-hand goods that was found in Italy and France after the mid-fifteenth century, was, in part, the result of both Christian legislation that excluded Jews from commerce and of certain businesses being reserved for leading Christian economic groups.33 However, this specialisation was also the outcome of the Christian political intent (openly displayed in Venice, Vicenza, and Avignon) to make concrete the stereotyped portrayal of Jews as protagonists of a devalued economy and to expose the substance of this degraded condition by forcing Jewish entrepreneurs to play the role of marginal and uncompetitive economic actors. The recurrent allegation that Jews hid a trade in textiles and precious garments behind a spurious commerce in second-hand clothing, a specious but common charge in the Italian cities where the textile industry was central during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, sheds light on the specific economic reality behind the stereotype of Jews as the specialists of the second-hand trade. In 1911, Werner Sombart would use the term Väter des ­Surrogats—the inventors of surrogates, cheap imitations of valuable goods—to designate Jews.34 The reality is that the Christian fear of Jewish commercial competition and the possible existence of politically non-hierarchal markets not only led to the exclusion of Jews from numerous areas of production and trade during the fifteenth century, but also meant that the Christian economic and political monopolisation of market interplay games was rhetorically supported by stressing the stereotype of Jews as dealers in second-hand goods. This description of Jews and the Jewish economy came to be the most repeated and widespread of stereotypes. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, this stereotype was advanced to support the allegation that Jews used their involvement in the scrap trade to obscure their deceitful (and forbidden) involvement in the Christian economy. The sixteenth-century ghettoisation of the Jews in Italy35 was, from this perspective, the institutional embodiment and practical realisation of the stereotype that depicted Jewish entrepreneurs as scrap merchants or as

348  Giacomo Todeschini traders whose main goal was the transformation of Christian wealth into a congeries of devalued materials, with the goal of impoverishing Christian society. From a theological, symbolic and political point of view, Christian preachers and polemists increasingly presented this impoverishment as an economic approach used by Jews, both as usurers and ritual murderers, to despoil the mystical Christian social body. In this light, the mythology of the desecration of the host could finally assume a broader meaning and could be used to portray the Jew’s wicked economic ability to depreciate precious Christian items by moneylending secured by a pledge and thereafter acquiring, recycling, exporting, and selling the pledged items as devalued and vilified objects. In this sense, both the tale by Alfonso de Spina about the pledged host and the Paolo Uccello’s portrayal of the miracle of the host in the 1460s can be seen as the beginning of the ideological and paradigmatic process of merging the description of the Jews as dangerous and menacing usurers who transformed Christian goods into scrap with the portrayal of the Jews draining the blood of Christians. From this point of view, the tales of pledged hosts and their desecration by Jewish usurers recast the transmission of a complex stereotype, dehumanising Jews both from a socioeconomic and a religious point of view.

Notes 1. Alfonso de Spina, Fortalitium fidei, 3:9 (Nuremberg: Koberger, 1494), fols. 167r–68v; Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late-Medieval Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 2. Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, “The Altar of Corpus Domini in Urbino: Paolo Uccello, Joos Van Ghent, Piero della Francesca,” The Art Bulletin 49, no. 1 (1967): 1–24; Diana Katz, “The Contours of Tolerance: Jews and the Corpus Domini Altarpiece in Urbino,” The Art Bulletin 85, no. 4 (2003): 646–61; Sara Lipton, Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014). 3. Odd Langholm, Economics in Medieval Schools: Wealth, Exchange, Value, Money and Usury According to the Paris Theological Tradition, 1200–1350 (Leiden: Brill, 1992); Giacomo Todeschini, I mercanti e il tempio: La società cristiana e il circolo virtuoso della ricchezza fra medioevo ed età moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002), and in French with an introduction by Thomas Piketty as Les Marchands et le Temple (Paris: Albin Michel, 2017). 4. Giacomo Todeschini, “Christian Perceptions of Jewish Economic Activity in the Middle Ages,” in Wirtschaftsgeschichte der mittelalterlichen Juden: Fragen und Einschätzungen, ed. Michael Toch, Schriften des Historisches Kolleg, no. 71 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008), 1–16; Giacomo Todeschini, “The Incivility of Judas: ‘Manifest’ Usury as a Metaphor for the ‘Infamy of Fact’ (infamia facti),” in Money, Morality and Culture in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Juliann Vitullo and Diane Wolfthal (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 33–52. 5. Conciliorum Oecumenicorum generaliumque Decreta. The General Councils of Latin Christendom: From Constantinople IV (869/870) to Lateran V

Jewish Usurers, Blood Libel  349 (1512–1517), vol. 2.1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 198; Giacomo Todeschini, “Gli Ebrei e l’antigiudaismo nelle costituzioni del quarto Concilio Lateranense: una ricapitolazione e un inizio,” in Il Lateranense IV: Le ragioni di un Concilio (Spoleto: Centro di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 2017), 351–66. 6. On the problem of Jewish citizenship from the point of view of medieval Italian jurists, see Julius Kirshner and Osvaldo Cavallar, “Jews as Citizens in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy: The Case of Isacco da Pisa,” Jewish History 25 (2011): 269–318; Giacomo Todeschini, “I diritti di cittadinanza degli ebrei italiani nel discorso dottrinale degli Osservanti,” in I frati osservanti e la società in Italia nel sec. XV (Spoleto: Fondazione Centro Italiano di Studi sull’alto Medioevo, 2013), 253–77. 7. Todeschini, “Christian Perceptions of Jewish Economic Activity in the Middle Ages”; Giacomo Todeschini, “Usury in Christian Middle Ages: A Reconsideration of the Historiographical Tradition (1949–2010),” in Religion and Religious Institutions in the European Economy, 1000–1800, ed. Francesco Ammannati (Prato-Florence: Firenze University Press, 2012), 119–30. 8. Robert Chazan, Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Robert Chazan, Reassessing Jewish Life in Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Julie L. Mell, The Myth of the Jewish Moneylender (New York: Palgrave, 2017). 9. Matthew S. Kempshall, The Common Good in Late Medieval Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Élodie Lecuppre-Desjardin and AnneLaure Van Bruaene, eds., De Bono Communi: The Discourse and Practice of the Common Good in the European City (13th–16th c.) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009). 10. Joel Kaye, A History of Balance, 1250–1375: The Emergence of a New Model of Equilibrium and Its Impact on Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 11. Joel Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Kaye, A History of Balance. 12. Giacomo Todeschini, “Linguaggi economici ed ecclesiologia fra XI e XII secolo: dai Libelli de lite al Decretum Gratiani,” in Medioevo, Mezzogiorno, Mediterraneo: Studi in onore di Mario del Treppo, vol. 1, ed. Gabriella Rossetti and Giovanni Vitolo (Naples: Liguori, 2000), 59–87; Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Brigitte M. Bedos-Rezak, “Medieval Identity: A Sign and a Concept,” American Historical Review 105, no. 5 (2000): 1489–533; Aden Kumler, “The Multiplication of the Species: Eucharistic Morphology in the Middle Ages,” RES 59/60 (2011): 179–91. 13. Solomon Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the Thirteenth Century: A Study of their Relations during the Years 1198–1254, Based on the Papal Letters and the Conciliar Decrees of the Period (Philadelphia: Dropsie College, 1933); Yvonne Friedman, “An Anatomy of Anti-Semitism: Peter the Venerable’s Letter to Louis VII, King of France (1146),” Bar-Ilan Studies in History 1 (1978): 87–102. 14. Amnon Linder, Jews in the Legal Sources of the Early Middle Ages (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997); Giacomo Todeschini, “Franciscan Economics and Jews in the Middle Ages: From a Theological to an Economic Lexicon,” in Friars and Jews in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Steven McMichael and Susan E. Myers (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 99–117. 15. Langholm, Economics in Medieval Schools. 16. Decretum Gratiani XIV 3, c. 4, 9, in Corpus Iuris Canonici, vol. 1, ed. Emil Friedberg (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1879), 735, 737.

350  Giacomo Todeschini 17. Todeschini, The Incivility of Judas. 18. Andrea Gamberini, Jean-Philippe Genet, and Andrea Zorzi, eds., The Languages of Political Society: Western Europe, 14th–17th Centuries (Rome: Viella, 2011). 19. Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998); Mauro Carboni and Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, eds., Reti di credito: Circuiti informali, impropri, nascosti (secoli XIII–XIX) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2014). 20. Joseph Shatzmiller, Shylock Reconsidered: Jews, Moneylending and Medieval Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Claude Denjean, La loi du lucre: L’usure en procès dans la Couronne d’Aragon à la fin du Moyen Âge (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2011). 21. Kirshner and Cavallar, Jews as Citizens in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy. 22. Petra Schulte, Scripturae publicae creditur: Das Vertrauen in Notariatsurkunden im kommunalen Italien des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2003). 23. Ambrosius Mediolanensis, “De Tobia,” in S. Ambrosii De Tobia: A Commentary, with an Introduction and Translation, ed. Lois M. Zucker (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1933), 4, 12, 19, 64; Todeschini, Christian Perceptions of Jewish Economic Activity in the Middle Ages. 24. Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 242, 81. 25. Marc Shell, Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophic Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993); Jerah Johnson, “The Money = Blood Metaphor, 1300–1800,” The Journal of Finance 21, no. 1 (1966): 119–22. 26. Gianluca Briguglia, Il corpo vivente dello Stato: Una metafora politica (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2006); Lecuppre-Desjardin and Van Bruaene, eds., De Bono Communi. 27. Bernardinus Senensis, “Quadragesimale de evangelio aeterno. Sermones XXXII–XLV = De contractibus et usuris,” in Bernardini Senensis Opera, vol. 4 (Florence: Quaracchi, 1956), 383–84: “Et si haec ad paucos reductio divitiarum periculosa est statui civitatis, multo gravius periculum imminet cum reducuntur et coadunantur hae divitiae et denarii in manibus iudaeorum; quia tunc naturalis civitatis calor, qui eius divitiae dici potest, non recurrit ad cor neque subvenit ei, sed per fluxum pestiferum currit ad apostema, cum omnes iudaei, et maxime faenerantes, sint capitales inimici christianorum.” 28. Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible Moralisée (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, “The Usurious Jew: Economic Structure and Religious Representations in an AntiSemitic Discourse,” in In and Out of the Ghetto: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany, ed. Ronnie Po-chia Hsia and Harmut Lehmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 161–72. 29. Rosa Maria Dessì, “Usura, Caritas e Monti di Pietà. Le prediche antiusurarie e antiebraiche di Marco da Bologna e di Michele Carcano,” in I Frati osservanti e la società in Italia nel sec. XV, 169–226. 30. Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, “Pawn Broking between Theory and Practice in Observant Socio-Economic Thought,” in A Companion to Observant Reform in the Late Middle Ages and Beyond, ed. James Mixson and Bert Roes (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 204–29. 31. Todeschini, Franciscan Economics and Jews in the Middle Ages. 32. Mauro Carboni and Maria Giusepina Muzzarelli, eds., L’iconografia della solidarietà: La mediazione delle immagini (secoli XIII–XVIII) (Venice: Marsilio, 2011).

Jewish Usurers, Blood Libel  351 33. Rachele Scuro, “Il credito gestito dai non-cittadini: i banchieri ebrei a Vicenza e Bassano nel Quattrocento,” in Identità cittadina e comportamenti socio-­ economici tra Medioevo ed Età Moderna, ed. Paolo Prodi, Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, and Stefano Simonetta (Bologna: Clueb, 2007), 53–72. 34. Werner Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1911, 1920), 173; Natalie Zemon Davis, “Religion and Capitalism Once Again? Jewish Merchant Culture in the Seventeenth Century,” Representations 59 Special Issue: The Fate of “Culture”: Geertz and Beyond (1997): 56–84; Giacomo Todeschini, “Les historiens juifs en Allemagne et le débat sur l’origine du capitalisme avant 1914,” in Écriture de l’histoire et identité juive: L’Europe Ashkenaze XIXe–XXe siécle, ed. Delphine Bechtel et al. (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2003), 209–28; Jonathan Karp, The Politics of Jewish Commerce: Economic Thought and Emancipation in Europe, 1638–1848 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 35. On Italian ghettos and ghettoisation, see Benjamin Ravid, “Every Ghetto was a Jewish Quarter But Not Every Jewish Quarter Was a Ghetto,” Jewish Culture and History 20 (2009): 5–34; Una lunga presenza: Studi sulla popolazione ebraica italiana, ed. Luciano Allegra (Turin: Zamorani, 2009); Stefanie Siegmund, The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence: The Construction of an Early Modern Jewish Community (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); Serena Di Nepi, Sopravvivere al ghetto: Per una storia sociale della comunità ebraica nella Roma del Cinquecento (Rome: Viella, 2013); Giacomo Todeschini, La banca e il ghetto: Una storia italiana (Rome: Laterza, 2016).

22 The Deeper the Roots, the Deadlier the Antisemitism? Comparing Images of Jewish Financial Control in Modern Germany and the United States Richard E. Frankel At the dawn of the twentieth century, a newspaper editorial entitled “Conquest of the World by the Jews” claimed that Jewish power in the form of an “iron girdle” was “drawn across the wealth of the nations, [and] is already fixed so closely and unbreakable, that we may say without exaggeration, that the Jews hold even now in their hands the financial power from one end of the world to another.”1 Some thirty years later, one of the country’s leading radical nationalists wrote, “That there exists an international circle of Jews working together for the ultimate purpose of enslaving all Gentiles is a well attested fact. This conspiracy is being carried on in the name of Communism. Laboring men need to understand that behind Communism there stands the dragon of Jewish Capitalism.”2 Such rhetoric could easily lead one to believe that these sentiments were the expressions of antisemites in modern Germany. But one would search the pages of the Alldeutsche Blätter in vain for the above editorial and an examination of the speeches of Adolf Hitler would not produce the latter quote. They were not the product of an exceptionally antisemitic, authoritarian Germany. Instead, these warnings regarding the “Jewish financier” and the danger of “Jewish Capitalism” were issued in the liberal, democratic United States of America. While the association of Jews with money and finance has its origins in medieval Europe, the idea of Jews as the financial masterminds behind an international conspiracy to control the world has played a significant role in modern Europe.3 In Germany, it inspired the Nazis and other radical nationalist groups. It also, however, made its mark in “the new world.” In the United States, it animated the likes of Henry Ford and the Ku Klux Klan. Scholars tend to juxtapose a benign American antisemitism with a murderous German variety. One reason they give for this has to do with the newness of America—that Jews in the United States did not have to go through the process of emancipation that marked a transition from various restrictions and handicaps under which they had lived since medieval times.4 So in this sense, there was no direct connection between America and Europe’s medieval past. But does that mean that the Middle Ages played no role in American antisemitism? Of course not. What I would argue, though, is that

The Deeper the Roots  353 the connections that did exist were tenuous. Ultimately, they consisted of echoes of medieval Europe in the form of imagery and associations that would resonate in American society and culture, at least in part through religion, and for quite different purposes. What were these images and what were their implications? Does a medieval past make antisemitism in the modern world more dangerous? Using images of Jewish financial manipulation and conspiracy, this paper aims to probe this supposed link between a medieval history of anti-Jewish hostility and the presence of a dangerous antisemitism in modern times. To do so, I will compare Germany and America—I will place a country with a medieval past alongside a country with an indirect one; a country that sought to murder all Jews and a country that did not. Despite the strikingly different outcomes, I argue that the role of a medieval past has little significance in terms of the antisemitic potential of a modern nation-state. The emergence of modern antisemitism is closely related to the transformations of the “Dual Revolution,” which left some groups in society, namely artisans, shopkeepers, and better-off peasants, struggling to maintain their traditional livelihoods. They proved quite receptive to political entrepreneurs such as Adolf Stoecker and Otto Böckel who pointed to “the Jews” as the main beneficiaries and therefore the cause of the bewildering changes they were experiencing. Organisations representing the interests of these and other affected groups would emerge in Germany over the coming decades—including the Agrarian League (Bund der Landwirte) and the German National Association of Commercial Employees (Deutsch-Nationaler Handlungsgehilfen-Verband) disseminating an increasingly radical antisemitic message. In Germany the euphoria of unification in 1871 lasted only as long as the bubble that resulted from a combination of liberal financial reforms and the flood of gold that swept over the country thanks to the unexpectedly quick payment of France’s war indemnity. The Crash of 1873 and the Jewish names of some of the speculators provided a focus for antisemitic entrepreneurs. The journalist Otto Glagau’s response to the crisis—a year-long series of articles in the Gartenlaube, and then a series of books published in the years that followed—placed Jews squarely behind the machinations that led to the crash. In fact, he wrote, “They dominate us; they possess a dangerous super power and they exert an unholy influence.”5 The Jews constituted a worldwide network. “From the baptised minister to the Polish schnorrer they build a chain; at every opportunity they make a firm front against Christians.”6 As it had in Germany, the economic crisis that began in the 1870s led many Americans to look for a scapegoat. For some, it was Jews, and the result was a series of attacks on Jewish shopkeepers in southern states, including Georgia and Louisiana, and on Jewish farmhouses in Mississippi in 1893.7 Political figures, prominent intellectuals, and journalists warned of international Jewish financiers directing a global conspiracy aimed at the subjugation, if not the destruction, of the United States. In the Saturday

354  Richard E. Frankel Evening Post in 1909, the journalist E. Alexander Powell wrote of the big Jewish banking families “who all work together when there is need” forming “the Invisible Empire of Finance.”8 No less a figure than David Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford University, believed in an international conspiracy of Jews, as did the United States Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. He believed, among other things, that “very rich Jews in Europe” were leading the fight against the US in the Spanish-American War. He continued with the theme of international Jewish banking power at both the outbreak and the close of the First World War.9 Only a few years before America’s entry into that conflict, the well-known Southern Populist Tom Watson railed against what he described in his newspaper as Northern Jewish bankers financing Leo Frank’s legal defence as he stood trial for the rape and murder of the young Mary Phagan in Atlanta. Such imagery of powerful Jews and international financial machinations animated not only individuals, but a modern political movement as well in the form of Populism. By the 1880s and into the 1890s, Populists increasingly focused their ire on Jews, describing them as “Shylocks” and “Rothschilds” with too much influence over American finance. While there remains debate about the relationship between antisemitism and Populism, there is no question that its rhetoric and imagery contained a good dose of hostility towards Jews as “money kings” involved in an international financial conspiracy.10 In 1896, an Associated Press reporter wrote about “the extraordinary hatred of the Jewish race” that he witnessed at the Populist Party Convention in St. Louis. “It is not possible,” he continued, “to go into any hotel in the city without hearing the most bitter denunciation of the Jewish race as a class and of particular Jews who happen to have prospered in the world.”11 Perhaps the most public expression of this aspect of Populist politics appeared in the religious antisemitic imagery of William Jennings Bryan’s famous “Cross of Gold” speech delivered during the debate over the Democratic Party platform in 1896. Challenging the supporters of the gold standard, the man who would soon become the party’s presidential nominee warned of a bitter fight. “Having behind us the producing classes of this nation and the world,” he thundered, “supported by commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”12 Though he never specifically mentioned Jews, some in the audience got the message loud and clear, shouting, “Down with gold! Down with the hook-nosed Shylocks of Wall Street! Down with the Christ-killing gold bugs.”13 Populists, it turns out, were not the only ones voicing such concerns in public. The images put forth by Bryan and those in the Populist movement, linking Jews with financial manipulation and secretive efforts to subjugate their non-Jewish neighbours, have their origins in medieval Europe—specifically in medieval Christianity. And even in turn-of-the-century America we see the lingering impact of such cultural

The Deeper the Roots  355 holdovers. In churches across the country we find no shortage of statements calling attention to the Jews’ allegedly nefarious role in the economy. In 1890, for example, Baltimore’s Katholische Volkszeitung described capitalism at its heart as being “a vastly expanded multiplication of Jewish blood-sucking.”14 In September of 1900, Charles C. Starbuck, writing in the Catholic World, one of the most respected Catholic journals in America, claimed that Europe’s Jews were “laying a web which entangles all gentile business and prosperity in a subordination to itself.”15 American Protestants of the time used strikingly similar rhetoric and imagery. In 1893, for example, the Reverend A. H. Tuttle described the Jews as “greedy, merciless, tricky, vengeful—a veritable Shylock who loses every sentiment of humanity in his greed. Of all the creatures that have befouled the earth, the Jew is the slimiest.”16 A Baptist minister in New York put it simply, “The Jew is the financial master of the world.”17 Those who read church newspapers or sat in the pews even semi-regularly would have easily recognised the rhetoric of Populists and others in the political arena who sought to pin their hard luck on the Jews. The cultural ground, in other words, was already prepared. Concern over the dangers allegedly posed by international Jewish financiers found a fertile environment in which to grow following the outbreak of the First World War. The image of the Jew as profiteer could be found in most of the belligerent powers, including Germany and the United States. Food shortages, particularly acute in Germany by 1916, led to growing anger directed at Jews, who increasingly came to be viewed as the source of the problem for more and more Germans. In August 1916, German official Heinrich von Oppen observed that “[t]he blame for the present food relations is directed primarily against the producers and the middlemen, who are all of them designated as speculators and war usurers, among which one supposes they are predominantly Jews.”18 In Freiburg, Roger Chickering describes a situation in which “[f]rustrations over inflation and shortage fixed easily onto the figures of the usurer and shady manipulator, now in the guise of war-profiteers, ‘blood suckers’ (Volksaussauger), or, as a municipal official noted in 1916, ‘financially powerful men behind the scenes.’”19 As the war continued to drag on, particularly in rural Catholic areas, “these hoary tropes dropped all disguise to reveal the Wucherjude, the profiteering Jew.”20 For many, the trope was made real in the person of Walther Rathenau, head of the War Raw Materials Board. Here was a wealthy, Jewish industrialist playing a leading role in directing the war economy—and completely in the open! For some, this was simply too much.21 The notion of Jewish financial might likewise have played a role in wartime America, despite its significantly shorter period of involvement. In the lead-up to American entry, for example, President Wilson faced a regional divide over the question of war or continued neutrality. The Northeast favoured involvement, while the Midwest stood opposed.22 With echoes of the Populist campaigns of the late nineteenth century, many Midwesterners saw a conspiracy of eastern plutocrats to once again exploit the common

356  Richard E. Frankel man for the benefit of big capital. Following American entry into the war, Jews found themselves accused of shirking their patriotic duty by either evading the draft or, if that proved impossible, getting themselves assigned to safer work behind the lines—both paths made possible, it was alleged, through money and influence.23 In Germany, the years immediately following the war proved particularly favourable for the further spread of images involving Jewish finance and conspiracy. With inflation, financial scandal, reparations, immigration, and ultimately hyper-inflation marking the early post-war period, economic issues remained front and centre for most Germans. Notions of financial manipulation figured prominently in nationalist and antisemitic fantasies involving a global Jewish conspiracy seeking the destruction of Germany. Already before the war, Germany “saw itself facing a world of enemies that wanted to destroy it; above all this was the goal of international Jewry with its banks and stock markets, the inner-sanctum of its trader spirit, and which, as a body, undermines the German Volk from behind as it fights for its existence and freedom.”24 Manoeuvring Europe into the conflict enabled Jews to make billions in profit.25 But not only did they start the war, they ended it too through the undermining of the home front. And through the revolution they established a “Jewish dictatorship.”26 The result was “complete political and economic power.”27 And considering events in Russia and Munich, the image of the “Jewish Bolshevik” was to play a prominent role in post-war antisemitism. Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg made the link between Bolshevism and Jewish finance explicit in 1921 when he wrote, “The truth is that the Bolsheviks were the emissaries of the stock-market Jews from all countries, and it was Jewish gold that paid for the machine of destruction.”28 We see a similar phenomenon in the United States during the chaotic and violent years immediately following the war thanks to the simultaneous efforts of one of America’s wealthiest and most famous industrialists and the country’s premier nationalist organisation of the interwar period. In 1919, automobile magnate Henry Ford purchased a small local newspaper called the Dearborn Independent. On 22 May 1920, there appeared a front-page article entitled, “The International Jew: The World’s Problem.” It marked the start of one of the most intense, widespread, and long-lasting antisemitic campaigns in American history, during which the Independent’s circulation would grow from 70,000 copies to 700,000, making it the nation’s second largest newspaper. In that first article, the paper described “the Jew” as “the only and original international capitalist.”29 It went on to warn of “a super-capitalism which is supported wholly by the fiction that gold is wealth [. . .] a super-government which is allied to no government, which is free from them all, and yet which has its hand in them all [. . .] a race, a part of humanity, which has never yet been received as a welcome part, and which has succeeded in raising itself to a power that the proudest Gentile race has never claimed.”30 While Henry Ford’s broadsheets warned the country of

The Deeper the Roots  357 greedy, manipulative, criminal Jews, nearly five million Americans spread a similar message from under the white sheets of the Ku Klux Klan. Reborn in 1915, it grew dramatically after the war, both in terms of members and geographical reach as it spread well beyond its original base in the South. The objects of its wrath also expanded to include both Catholics and Jews. While the Klan is typically characterised as an extremist organisation, it is important to remember that its message, if not its manner, appealed to many millions who did not go so far as to don its notorious white sheets. As journalist H. L. Mencken put it, “the Klan was just what it pretended to be, an order devoted to the ideals most Americans held sacred.”31 And at that time, “the Jew” had come to represent the opposite of many of those American ideals. This is certainly true when it came to the purported relationship between Jews and financial manipulation. According to Klansman Leroy Curry, “The Jew has a monopoly on the monetary system of the commercial world,” and he follows the “doctrine that money is more powerful than the character of the nation.”32 Members of the Klan in Athens, Georgia, heard about how Jews “get rich and prosper off of what they make by cheating and swindling the Americans.”33 This opposition between “Jew” and “American” they made still more concrete by linking Jewish finance with Bolshevism. “Bolshevism,” warned the Imperial Night Hawk, “is a Jewish-controlled and Jewish-financed movement in its entirety.”34 Probably none summed it up better than Reuben Sawyer, a leading figure in the Oregon Klan during the early 1920s, when he declared, “Jews are either bolshevists, undermining our government, or are shylocks in finance or commerce who gain control and command of Christians as borrowers or employers.”35 The crisis environment that marked both countries following the First World War would ease by the second half of the 1920s, and with it, the intensity of the antisemitism that it helped produce. Certainly Germany experienced a level of anti-Jewish violence in those immediate post-war years that would not be matched in the US. And with the common tendency to view German history back through the lens of the Holocaust, such violence appears truly ominous. But the history of antisemitism unfolded forwards, not backwards. From that perspective, the gaping chasm that many assume separates the story of antisemitism in Germany from that of the United States looks far less daunting. Antisemitic entrepreneurs in both Germany and the United States blamed Jews for most of the problems they associated with the modern developments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Of these, their connection to modern, liberal capitalism and financial speculation played a particularly prominent role. But while the phenomena to which the antisemites were reacting were very new, the images and tropes they employed were anything but. The association of Jews with money and with conspiracy has its origins in medieval Europe. The images remained a part of Western culture, propagated through the arts and through religion. That they would

358  Richard E. Frankel re-appear in Germany, where the medieval world played a prominent role in the imaginary of so many German nationalists, is not terribly surprising. That these same images and tropes would appear with nearly equal strength in a country where the national self-image involved a conscious break with the “old world” is an issue worth pondering. Of course, the “break” with Europe’s medieval past was never as complete as American patriots would have liked. Their culture sprang from the one across the Atlantic. In the churches and on the stages of the US, these echoes of a distant past were felt. But the purposes to which they were put were anything but medieval. Facing the challenges of modern global commerce, complex monetary policy, mass migrations, and the dramatic transformations brought about by industrialisation and urbanisation, political entrepreneurs poured the old wine of medieval anti-Jewish imagery into the new bottles of modern mass political and social movements. And so a nation with a self-understanding that broke with the old world proved just as capable of instrumentalising medieval tropes for modern purposes as the Germans who believed themselves descendants of the Emperor Barbarossa.

Notes 1. Quoted in Michael Dobkowski, The Tarnished Dream: The Basis of American Anti-Semitism (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1979), 187. 2. Gerald Winrod, The Present International Crisis (Wichita: Defender Publishers, 1939), 61. 3. On the emergence in the twelfth century of the association of Jews with money and the stereotype of the evil financial manipulator, see Robert Chazan, Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 4. See, for example, Gerald Sorin, A Time for Building: The Third Migration, 1880–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 52. 5. Glagau quoted in Massimo Ferrari Zumbini, Die Wurzeln des Bösen. Gründerjahre des Antisemitismus: Von der Bismarckzeit bis Hitler (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klosterman, 2003), 141. 6. Zumbini, Die Wurzeln des Bösen, 141. 7. Sorin, A Time for Building, 9. 8. Powell quoted in Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 188. 9. Cabot Lodge quoted in Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, 190–91. 10. David Peal notes that the latest debate on the question ended decades ago and in a less than satisfying manner, with those arguing against the importance of antisemitism either comparing the rhetoric to that of Hitler and (naturally) finding it wanting, or looking only for religious intent behind the use of epithets like “Rothschild” and “money power” and not finding it. He argues, and I agree, that the issue needs to be revisited. David Peal, “The Politics of Populism: Germany and the American South in the 1890s,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31, no. 2 (1989): 340–62 (here 361). 11. Quoted in Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, 49–50. 12. William Jennings Bryan quoted in William Jennings Bryan: Selections, ed. Ray Granger (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967). 13. Paolo E. Coletta, William Jennings Bryan, vol. 1: Political Evangelist, 1860– 1908 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 141.

The Deeper the Roots  359 14. Till van Rahden, “Beyond Ambivalence: Variations of Catholic Anti-Semitism in Turn-of-the-Century Baltimore,” American Jewish History 82, no. 4 (1994): 7–42 (here 25). 15. Starbuck quoted in Egal Feldman, Catholics and Jews in Twentieth-Century America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 24. 16. Quoted in Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, 42. 17. Ibid. 18. Oppen quoted in Belinda Joy Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 133. 19. Roger Chickering, The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914– 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 498. 20. Ibid. 21. Unfortunately, Rathenau inadvertently made things worse still when, in an essay published in 1911 he wrote, “Three hundred men, who all know each other, hold in their hands the economic fortunes of the continent and seek their successors from their own milieu.” For antisemites, this was confirmation of their greatest fears, and after the war, “proof” that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—the notorious forgery purporting to be the minutes of a meeting of the leaders of an alleged international Jewish conspiracy—were genuine. Shulamit Volkov, Walther Rathenau: Weimar’s Fallen Statesman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 104. 22. Prior to the Congressional vote over the question of war, for example, the people of Monroe, Wisconsin, held a referendum in which 954 voted against war, while only ninety-five voted to enter the conflict. William H. Thomas Jr., Unsafe for Democracy: World War I and the U.S. Justice Department’s Covert Campaign to Suppress Dissent (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 21. 23. Zosa Szajkowski, Jews, Wars, and Communism, vol. 1: The Attitude of American Jews to World War I, the Russian Revolutions of 1917, and Communism (1914–1945) (New York: Ktav Publishing House, Inc., 1972), 343. 24. “Die internationale Solidarität ein jüdischer Weltbetrug,” Völkischer Beobachter, 1 September 1921. 25. Bundesarchiv Berlin (BARCH): R8034II 1483, Bd. 13, S. 25: DNVP Flugblatt, “Die Partei des Judentums” (1919). 26. Walter Liek, “Der Anteil des Judentums an dem Zusammenbruch Deutschlands,” Deutschlands Erneuerung 1 (1919): 29–41. 27. Bundesarchiv Berlin (BARCH): R8034II 1483, Bd. 13, 69: Flugblatt, “Deutschland in Judennot!” (1919). 28. Alfred Rosenberg, “Der jüdische Bolschewismus,” Völkischer Beobachter, 26 November 1921. 29. “The International Jew: The World’s Problem,” Dearborn Independent, 22 May 1920. 30. Ibid. 31. Mencken quoted in Henry L. Feingold, A Time for Searching: Entering the Mainstream, 1920–1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 3. 32. Curry quoted in Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 136. 33. MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry, 136. 34. Ibid., 137. 35. Sawyer quoted in Michael Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 25.

Part IX

Land and Home

23 The Theology of the Land in Jewish-Christian Relations and Its Role in Misunderstandings between Jews and Christians Jesper Svartvik Without sufficient knowledge of the painful history of Jewish-Christian apologetics and polemics, which have their origins in late antiquity and continued on into the medieval period, it is easy to fail to recognise the complexities of current Christian approaches to the Land that is now known as Israel and/or Palestine. My objective here is to examine the interplay of theology and politics and, in particular, to reflect upon the theology of religions, by which I mean the discipline that seeks to consider the meaning and value of other religious traditions theologically, not only as a problem, as has often been the case, but also as the promise and the possibility of a renewed self-understanding.1 Specifically, I will seek to identify the formative theological patterns underlying Christian interpretations of the Holy Land.

Christian Anti-Judaism in Late Antiquity What are the major building blocks of anti-Jewish discourse and practice in the Christian world? Three factors seem to be particularly important: a) a supersessionist Christian theology; b) which takes the form of a delegitimisation of the Jewish people quae people, and c) the fact that the Roman Empire became a Christian empire so rapidly that after only a few centuries Christian supersessionists had the political power necessary to subjugate the Jews. Let us examine these three factors: (a)  The Christian movement arose within Judaism as one interpretation among others. However, it only took a few generations for Christians to begin to describe their movement as existing in opposition to Judaism. The Epistle of Barnabas (c. 100–30 CE, approximately one century after the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth) is emblematic of this theological stance: Now let us see whether this people or the former people is the heir, and whether the covenant is for us or for them. [ . . . L]et us see whether the covenant which he sware to the fathers to give to the people—whether he has given it. He has given it. But they were not worthy to receive it because of their sins.2

364  Jesper Svartvik This is the beginning of a trajectory that would prove to be extraordinarily influential and extremely detrimental in Christian polemics vis-à-vis Judaism, the idea that Christendom has superseded Judaism as heir to the covenant and the assertion that the Church is the rightful owner of the epithets “the true Israel,” “the new Israel,” or, quite simply, “Israel.” The Jewish people are not portrayed as the mother that gave birth to the Christian movement; instead, Israel’s defects are evoked as the very raison d’être for Christianity. Judaism is not described as the historical context from which Christianity arose, but as its theological adversary. (b)  The second key motif is the connection between the Jewish religion, the Jewish people (‛am Yiśra’el) and the Land of Israel (’ereẓ Yiśra’el). In order to be able to claim that Christian scriptural hermeneutics, Christian covenantal claims and Christian soteriology were correct (whereas Jewish claims were not), Christian apologetics delegitimised not only Judaism as a faith, but also the Jewish people as a nation and, as a consequence, all Jewish claims on the Land of Israel. We find an early example of this in Tertullian’s Apology (Latin: Apologeticum; probably written in 197 CE). The dispersion of the Jewish people is a just punishment for having rejected and killed Christ: Scattered, wandering about, deprived of land and sky of their own, they roam the earth without man or God as king, a race to whom there is not accorded the right granted to foreigners to set foot upon and greet one land as home.3 (c)  Finally, and of tremendous importance for the topic discussed in this section, is the fact that within a few centuries not only was Christianity permitted (in 313), but it would become a state religion (in 380).4 Hence, Jews lived as a tiny minority in a Christian empire. However, the fact that even in pre-Christendom times the Romans had expelled Jews from Jerusalem and Judea was crucial; this paved the way for the so-called “witness people” theology, which is to say, the conviction that the deplorable fate of Israel was the result of the nation’s deficient faith.5 In the words of Michael B. McGarry, anti-Jewish measures in the Christian empire had “a self-fulfilling dimension to them,” proving that God had abandoned the landless Jews in favour of the Christians.6 Augustine (354–430) is known to have turned to the message of Psalm 59:11 as a guideline for the treatment of Jews in the Christian empire: “Slay them not, lest my people forget.” Several centuries later, this idea was taken up by Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153).7 This meant that Jews were safe to a certain degree, but they were always at the mercy of their Christian neighbours and rulers; like the biblical character Cain in the book of Genesis, they were both cursed and, to some extent, protected. Whenever they found themselves no longer safeguarded, they were deported, or even ­massacred— and they were always despised and subjected to extreme duress.

The Theology of the Land in Jewish-Christian Relations  365 This theological understanding of Judaism as a disinherited religion— with a glorious past, but no future—was so pervasive that it even found its way into theological handbooks. One of the most astonishing examples is that for generations Judaism at the time of Jesus (late Second Temple Judaism) was referred to as “Late Judaism” (German: Spätjudentum), as if Judaism expired when Christianity rose to power. Other examples include the accepted term for the early part of the Christian Bible (the Old Testament), suggesting that it cannot be read on its own terms, the name of the Western Wall in Jerusalem where Jews “lament” the fact that God has forsaken them (hence, the Wailing Wall) and, obviously, the two chronological terms “Before Christ” and “Anno Domini,” which both proclaim the centrality of Jesus of Nazareth to all history. In his recently published tome Anti-Judaism, David Nirenberg argues that anti-Judaism does not require flesh-and-blood Jews, since they are purely rhetorical figures—dramatis personae in a polemical play. This poses a challenge to the entire act-react paradigm, the idea that anti-Jewish polemics and politics are reactions to the statements and the behaviour of real Jews. Nirenberg argues that in Christian theology, Jews are simultaneously exemplary and exceptional, as well as both paradigmatic and extraordinary.8 In short, anti-Judaism had already become an integral part of Christian theology by late antiquity.

The Vale of Tears of the Middle Ages9 Christian self-understanding at the expense of Judaism and far-reaching Christian dominance have been decisive factors in the development of ­Jewish-Christian relations in the part of the world where Christians make up the majority of the population. The particulars of the sad and desolate history of Jewish-Christian relations have been described elsewhere, and are not a central concern here.10 As is indicated above, the specific topic here is both broader and more focused. In the following discussion, I seek to identify some of the aspects of “Land,” or rather the opposite of “Land,” i.e., the permanent homelessness and profound vulnerability of Jews in Christian countries. At times, this homelessness was motivated theologically, e.g., the fall of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE was interpreted and described as a sign of divine denunciation of Jews and Judaism, and Jews were collectively portrayed as a new Cain, “the Wandering Jew,” “the Eternal Jew,” etc. The present discussion will be limited in scope to four aspects that all have demographic and territorial implications and consequences: (a) A first and quite obvious phenomenon is the Crusades, which commenced in 1096 and targeted non-Christian territory. Although the key focus was Muslim territory, numerous Jews were massacred both in the Holy Land and on the way to the Land, for example, in Worms, Trier, and Metz.11

366  Jesper Svartvik (b) A second issue would be the many mass expulsions from Christian territories: from England in 1290, from France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, from Germany in the 1350s, from Spain in 1492, from Portugal in 1496–97, from Provence in 1512, and from the Papal States in 1569. Nirenberg writes that between 1388 (Strasbourg) and 1520 (Weißenburg), approximately ninety major jurisdictions expelled their Jews.12 The expulsion from Spain is the most well known and the one with the most far-reaching historical consequences. For our purposes, it will suffice to mention two of these consequences: (i) Given the vast number of Jews living in Spain, its demography changed drastically when, in 1492, Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile expelled all non-baptised Jews; many Jews left the Iberian Peninsula and moved to Turkey and the Netherlands, among other places, with a good number of Jews eventually also moving to Poland and Russia.13 (ii) A second consequence was that a number of Jews remained in Spain and sought to live a Jewish life, in spite of being baptised. Nirenberg writes about “the flood of baptism that swept over Spain.”14 Although the relapse of converts to Judaism was punishable, it still occurred. To be a “Judaiser” had previously been a Christian vice, but now it was an accusation that baptised Jews also faced. Nirenberg gives examples of suspiciously Jewish behaviour, for example, wearing clean clothes on Shabbat or refusing to buy an apple on Shabbat, “shockeling” or nodding one’s head during prayer, ­eschewing religious images and studying the Bible in Hebrew and Greek (!).15 Hence, in post-1492 Spain, we find the first examples of racist antisemitism, an anti-Judaism that claims that it is not enough for a Jew to be baptised. The legislation based on limpieza de sangre (“the purity of blood”) was a form of anti-Jewish discrimination that was more racist than religious.

In the article “Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities,” ­Nirenberg explores the complex interplay between Jews and Christians emphasising a lineage that unfolded in Spain at that time.16 He refutes precedence or priority of invention of the interest in ancestry, i.e., the notion that an alleged older and therefore “original” tradition influences an assumed younger tradition, so that impact only can be detected going in one direction from a source to a recipient. Instead, he argues that the migration of large numbers of Jews into the Christian ­community—the result of mass conversions—catalysed a series of complex and dynamic reactions similar to those that characterised the debates between Jewish and gentile followers of Jesus in antiquity. Notwithstanding the complex origin of the Spanish legislation, we have here an early example of the concept that “racial” blood is thicker than baptismal water.17

The Theology of the Land in Jewish-Christian Relations  367 (c) The third example of anti-Jewish measures with territorial implications is the establishment of ghettos. The first was established in Venice in 1516, and the walls of the last were torn down in Rome in 1888; as is well known, the Nazis reintroduced the ghettos in 1939–45, starting in Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland.18 (d) A fourth and final example of anti-Jewish action is the many massacres that took place on the basis of blood libels, the most well known being those involving William of Norwich (d. 1144), Hugh of Lincoln (d. 1255), and Simon of Trent (d. 1475). In the wake of the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century, a pandemic that may well have resulted in the deaths of as many as 200 million people, Jews were accused of causing it by poisoning wells. This idea resonates in Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, in which Barabbas infamously confesses: “As for myself, I walk abroad o’ nights, And kill sick people groaning under walls: Sometimes I go about and poison wells.”19 It is difficult to assess the consequences of the numerous anti-Jewish church paintings and reliefs. It seems that we do not find the motif of die Judensau (Jews sucking the teats of a pig or even eating its excrement) before the thirteenth century.20 The Ecclesia et Synagoga motif (the two r­ eligions— the Church and Judaism—represented by two women, one triumphant and one defeated and blindfolded) is most often found on the façades of thirteenth-century German churches, although there are examples of this motif in ninth-century books.21 This short exposé shows that medieval antisemitism resulted in marginalisation, stigmatisation, imprisonment in ghettos, mass expulsions, and, at times, even massacres. However, a key issue is whether medieval Christian antisemitism was a transformation or an escalation of the antisemitism of late antiquity. Is there a substantial difference between the writings of, say, John Chrysostom (344–407) and Martin Luther (1483–1546)? In his work Against the Jews (Greek: Κατὰ Ἰουδαῖων; Latin: Adversus Iudaeos), the former reproached Jews as follows: The synagogue is worse that a brothel [. . .] It is the den of scoundrels and the repair of wild beasts [. . .] the temple of demons devoted to idolatrous cults [. . .] the cavern of devils [. . .] a criminal assembly of Jews [. . .] a place of meetings for the assassins of Christ [. . .] the refuge of devils.22 The latter wrote in his infamous Von den Jüden und jren Lügen (1543) that “next to the devil,” a Christian has “no more bitter, venomous, and vehement foe” than the Jew.23 Luther’s book consists of two parts; after a lengthy slanderous section, it recommends a comprehensive pogrom, ending with the exclamation “Weg mit jnen!” (Away with them!).24 Is there such a vast difference between these two assertions that we can talk about a radical

368  Jesper Svartvik shift occurring in anti-Judaism from late antiquity to the medieval period? Many readers would likely respond in the negative. The difference between late antiquity and the Middle Ages is one of political power, which makes it possible to accomplish what one hopes for and writes about. A growing number of scholars argue that Christendom’s anti-Jewish teachings and legislation constituted a necessary condition for the Shoah committed by the Nazis and their allies during the Second World War, a genocide which in English is often is called the “Holocaust.”25 In the words of Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin: Christianity did not create the Holocaust; indeed Nazism was antiChristian, but it made it possible. Without Christian antisemitism, the Holocaust would have been inconceivable.26 As Raul Hilberg famously stated: The Nazi destruction process did not come out of a void; it was the culmination of a cyclical trend. We have observed the trend in the three successive goals of anti-Jewish administrators. The missionaries of Christianity had said in effect: You have no right to live among us as Jews. The secular rulers who followed had proclaimed: You have no right to live among us. The Nazis at last decreed: You have no right to live.27 Arguably, we have no more abhorrent example of the interrelation between ideology, its rise to power, and the consequences of the unity of ideology and political power than the outcome of the Nazis singling out Jews. The first, last, and only Nazi Party Platform—issued in 1920 and in place until the end of the Second World War in 1945—stated in the fourth, fifth, and sixth paragraphs that: Only Nationals [German: Volksgenossen] can be Citizens of the State. Only persons of German blood can be Nationals, regardless of religious affiliation. No Jew can therefore be a German National. Any person who is not a Citizen will be able to live in Germany only as a guest and must be subject to legislation for Aliens. Only a Citizen is entitled to decide the leadership and laws of the State. We therefore demand that only Citizens may hold public office, regardless of whether it is a national, state or local office.28 On 30 January 1933, the Nazis came to power with approximately fortythree per cent of the votes (in 1924 they had some four [!] per cent of the votes), and on 20 January 1942, the Wannsee Conference on the final solution to “the Jewish Question” took place. The Nazis’ political power made

The Theology of the Land in Jewish-Christian Relations  369 the Shoah possible, but the stigmatising and lethal ideology had already been in place from the outset, as the 1920 Party Platform indicates. One is reminded of Mark Twain’s aphorism: “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” If it merely repeated itself, it would be much easier for us to identify problematic ideologies. To sum up, Christian delegitimisation of the Jewish religion and the disinheritance of the Jewish people have their roots in late antiquity. Consequently, the evolution of the teaching of contempt from antiquity to medieval times is one of gradual escalation rather than of essential transformation. The main difference between the two periods is that during the Middle Ages Christians had ample opportunity to act on their agenda and to practise what they preached.

A Jewish State as a Theological Challenge We now turn our attention to post-war developments. People may have different opinions about the splitting of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia and different political reactions to the founding of the state of South Sudan, for example. However, anything that happens in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, or Hebron has a completely different sounding board, not only for those with a theological background, but also among those who live in a context where Christendom has been influential for generations, perhaps even for as long as two millennia, as is the case in Europe. The Israeli-­ Palestinian conflict is the best-known intractable conflict in the world. Some Christians interpret the founding of a Jewish state as a prophecy fulfilled, and others think of it as a theologically problematic enterprise. In theological discourse, some Christians interpret the birth of the State of Israel as an immaculate conception, and other Christians think of it as the offspring of original sin. These two extremes highlight the degree to which the Israeli-Palestinian controversy is constantly fuelled by and fuels theological discourse. The founding of the State of Israel in 1948 means we now have three “Israels” to consider: the Jewish people (‛am Yiśra’el) and the Land of Israel (’ereẓ Yiśra’el) are now joined by the State of Israel (medinat Yiśra’el). The previously described building blocks (Christian self-understanding at the expense of Jews and Judaism and Christian supremacy) have been affected by both theological and historical developments during recent decades. Theologically, a growing number of Christians have reconsidered or even refuted a supersessionist understanding of Judaism, the most well-known example being the Second Vatican Council document Nostra Aetate. After 1948, and even more so after 1967, the State of Israel gained control over territory, creating an extraordinary situation; for the first time in more than two millennia, there is a territory where there is not only a Jewish majority (west of the so-called Green Line, or armistice line of 1949), but also Jewish

370  Jesper Svartvik governance (both west and east of the Green Line). Christians are not only a minority; they are a Christian minority—on both sides of the Green Line— within the Muslim minority. While Evangelical Christian enthrallment with Israel—in all three senses of the word (People, Land, and State)—is notorious and undeniable, liberal Christians, too, show a remarkable interest in Israel, in particular in a metadiscussion of the imperfections of the State of Israel. However, their respective foci are quite different: liberal Christians are primarily concerned with the predicament of the Palestinians, whom they rightfully perceive as the underdog; conservative Christians are more often than not fascinated by the victor, the David of Israel who fought and defeated the Goliath of the surrounding Arab nations in six days. What these two Christian groups have in common, however, is an extraordinary interest in the Holy Land, Israel, Palestine, Israelis, Palestinians, and so on. This particular geographical region has become integral and indispensible to the Christian universe. Not only do we find among Christians a valid critique of either the Palestinian Authority or the Israeli government, depending on their theological persuasion, but also an almost ritualised condemnation of their chosen whipping boy, be it the Israelis or the Palestinians. A few examples will suffice. On the one hand, we find among modern Christians those who identify with Pope Pius X’s Non possumus of 26 January 1904 to Theodor Herzl: We cannot [Latin: non possumus] give approval to this movement. We cannot prevent the Jews from going to Jerusalem—but we could never sanction it. The soil of Jerusalem, if it was not always sacred, has been sanctified by the life of Jesus Christ. As the head of the Church I cannot tell you anything different. The Jews have not recognised our Lord, therefore we cannot recognise the Jewish people.29 On the other hand, we also easily find contemporary Christians who, like Daniel Deronda, dispatched by George Eliot at the end of her novel to the Land of his newly rediscovered patriarchs and matriarchs, encourage and provide funding for Jews to make ‛aliyah.30 Hence, we encounter the widest possible spectrum, spanning non possumus to potest et debet (“he [Daniel Deronda] can and should”). One should, however, note that the theological landscape has changed; today, we find non possumus theology predominantly in the Reformed tradition (especially Presbyterians, some Anglican factions, and Lutherans), while potest and debet theology is, of course, found among those Evangelical Christians referred to as Christian Zionists.31 Contemporary Roman Catholic documents tend to speak less about the Land. The most recent example is “The Gifts and the Calling of God are Irrevocable” (Rom 11:29), issued on 10 December 2015: In Jewish-Christian dialogue the situation of Christian communities in the state of Israel is of great relevance, since there—as nowhere else in

The Theology of the Land in Jewish-Christian Relations  371 the world—a Christian minority faces a Jewish majority. Peace in the Holy Land—lacking and constantly prayed for—plays a major role in dialogue between Jews and Christians.32 To return to the Reformed tradition, one cannot but be struck by the fact that some of these Christian Zionists seem to be ignorant of or nonchalant about the plight of their sisters and brothers in Christ in the Land. A few words should therefore be said about Palestinian Christians and ways of interpreting the Old Testament (called the Tanach by Jews) in general, and the Exodus motif in particular, the latter of which poses a distinct challenge. Contextual theology in the Holy Land is different from most other liberation theologies; whereas the Exodus motif in Latin American, African, and Asian Christian theology has been a truly liberating paradigm, it is difficult for many Palestinians to perceive and apply this motif in a similar way, because it is the master narrative of their political adversary, the Israeli Jews. In short, we must take into consideration the fact that this motif is of limited benefit to Palestinian Christians; rather, it is part of their plight. Nonetheless, a word of caution is in order. Some of those who sympathise with the cause of Palestinian Christians underestimate a number of the achievements in Jewish-Christian relations after the war by dismissing this as “post-Shoah theology,” which they interpret as awkward and guilt-ridden. This, however, is to misunderstand both its soul-searching agenda and its remarkable achievements. Post-Shoah theology is an historical fact that cannot be ignored. Its existence is not a question, but to what extent one would choose to integrate it into one’s theology is. In other words, the prefix “post” is a chronological marker, not a matter of choice or, even worse, some odd point of pride. One could compare it with what is sometimes called postDarwinian theology. The concern is not whether Darwin has contributed to our understanding of life and evolution, but to what extent we consider these scientific achievements when articulating our various theologies. Some texts seek to uphold the distinction between anti-Judaism and antisemitism, with the former being contempt for the Jewish religion and the latter being the racist ideology of the last two or three centuries. One example of this distinction is the Roman-Catholic document We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah: Thus we cannot ignore the difference which exists between anti-­ Semitism, based on theories contrary to the constant teaching of the Church on the unity of the human race and on the equal dignity of all races and peoples, and the long-standing sentiments of mistrust and hostility that we call anti-Judaism, of which, unfortunately, Christians also have been guilty.33 Another distinction differentiates between the Christian anti-Judaism of late antiquity and that of the medieval period. The invitation to write this

372  Jesper Svartvik chapter provided an opportunity to reflect on whether such distinctions are valid. As I argued above, just as is the case in terms of substance, in terms of territoriality, it is more a question of gradual escalation than of an essential transformation. In the words of Walter Laqueur: Hostility became sharper with every generation of early Christian interpreters: God rejected the people he had originally selected; the Torah was no longer legitimate; the Jews had sinned and fallen; in brief, God hated them.34 In this chapter, I argue that the idea of a clear distinction between late antiquity and the Middle Ages cannot be maintained. The nucleus (Christian supersessionism at the expense not only of Judaism as religion, but also the Jewish people as Israel) is already apparent in late antiquity. The crucial difference is that Christendom was never more powerful than during the Middle Ages. Consequently, in the case of this chapter, the idea of investigating the medieval roots of antisemitism is simply not radical enough in the strictest and most literal sense of the word—the Greek and Latin word radix meaning “root.” The roots of Christian anti-Judaism go all the way back to antiquity. We find the Christian discourse of disinheritance in the writings of the Church Fathers. It is true that the dehumanisation and demonisation of the Jews evolved over the centuries, but a nucleus can be found in early readings of the Johannine texts (especially the implications of John 8:44: “You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires”) and, as has already been noted, in the writings of John Chrysostom, to give but one example.35

Conclusion By way of conclusion, two points in particular should be underscored, both of which Michael B. McGarry addresses: (a) First, the centrality of the Land in Jewish self-understanding is not up for debate. The fact that many Christians seek to downplay the territorial dimension in Jewish thought makes this statement imperative. Arguments for disinheriting Judaism are certainly not the way forward, if one seeks to engage in dialogue based on knowledge, respect, and trust. Supersessionist theology will not help to ease political tensions. (b) Secondly, and this is no less important, one should not equate this central element of Jewish self-understanding with support for the views of one party or another in the current political landscape in Israel: Christians must not confuse a support of the Jewish return to the land with an unquestioning support of a particular political expression of Zionism or of particular borders of that land [. . .] Christians should neither delegitimise nor sacralise the State of Israel.36

The Theology of the Land in Jewish-Christian Relations  373 Any approach to the much-debated issue of the theology of the Land in the Jewish and Christian traditions should reflect the complexity of the hermeneutical issues and recognise that, given that theological supersessionism survived secularisation, there is an appropriate role for identifying supersessionist models, even outside of strictly theological discussions. Nirenberg has emphasised the unique position of Judaism in the history of ideas: “Anti-Judaism” is not simply an attitude toward the actions of real Jews and their religion, but a way of critically engaging the world [. . .] Because critical thought in the Western tradition has so often imagined itself as an overcoming of Judaism, it has the capacity to introduce Judaism in whatever it criticises.37 We have reason to believe that as a vehicle for something else this understanding of Judaism also arises in some discussions about the State of Israel. What is called punitive supersessionism, the idea that God abrogated His covenant with Israel because Israel rejected Christ and the Gospel, can also be detected in secular contexts far removed from the preachers in the pulpits and the people in the pews.38 All in all, it is indeed difficult to find a language and hermeneutics that are adequate to an engagement in this arena that will move us beyond the impasse of the more isolated approaches that have characterised so much of the past work in various contexts. Although much of supersessionism has been identified and suppressed, a considerable amount still endures. Therefore, as Lord Tennyson so eloquently put it, we must “strive, to seek, to find [it], and not to yield.”39

Notes Note: Heartfelt thanks are due to the editors—Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß— and also to Steven Englund, Jan Hermanson, Göran Larsson, Inger Nebel, and Emma O’Donnell for constructive comments and stimulating discussions. 1. Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, An Introduction to the Theology of Religions: Biblical, Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2003), 20: “Theology of religions is that discipline of theological studies which attempts to account theologically for the meaning and value of other religions. Christian theology of religions attempts to think theologically about what it means for Christians to live with people of other faiths and about the relationship of Christianity with other religions.” See also Paul F. Knitter, Introducing Theology of Religions (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2002), 1–15. 2. The Apostolic Fathers, vol. 1, trans. Kirsopp Lake (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 13:1 and 14:1. 3. Tertullian, Apology, trans. T. R. Glover (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 21:5. For further comments, see Alain Marchadour and David Neuhaus, The Land, the Bible, and History: Toward the Land That I Will Show You (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 110–11.

374  Jesper Svartvik 4. For a critique of the conventional historiography of the constant persecution of Christians in pre-Constantinian times, see Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2013). 5. Walter Laqueur, The Changing Face of Antisemitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3: “the destruction of their temple, their country, and their dispersal among the nations was the just punishment.” 6. Michael B. McGarry, “The Land of Israel in the Cauldron of the Middle East: A Challenge to Christian-Jewish Relations,” in Seeing Judaism Anew: Christianity’s Sacred Obligation, ed. Mary C. Boys (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 213–25 (here 218). 7. Jonathan Phillips, The Second Crusade: Extending the Frontiers of Christendom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 85. 8. David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: Norton, 2013), 316. 9. “The Vale of Tears” is the title of chapter 5 in Edward H. Flannery, The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of Antisemitism, rev. ed. (New York: Stimulus, 1995); also of a book written by the sixteenth-century Jewish historian Joseph ha-Cohen: ‛Emeq ha-Bacha. Drawing attention to this is not necessarily a way to subscribe to, in the famous words of Salo W. Baron, “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history.” Strictly speaking, “tear” in Hebrew is spelt with a heh (‫ )בכה‬in word-final position, and the valley of Baka with an ’alef (‫)עמק הבכא‬. 10. On the history of Christian anti-Judaism, see Flannery, The Anguish of the Jews; James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews. A History (Boston: Houghton Miflin, 2001), Robert Michael, A History of Catholic Antisemitism: The Dark Side of the Church (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1993); John Connelly, From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 11. For example, see Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusaders, 1095–1131 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 25–26 and 41–42. 12. Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 210. 13. There are famous puns for Poland in the Jewish tradition: Polin is interpreted as poh lin (dwell here) and Polonia as poh lan Yah (here dwells God), the reason being that this country was a relatively safe refuge for Jews. At the outbreak of the Second World War, there were more than three million Jews in Poland, the largest population in Europe. After the war there were only some 45,000 Jews in Poland. 14. Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 227. 15. Ibid., 242. 16. David Nirenberg, “Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities: Jews and Christians in Fifteenth-Century Spain,” Past and Present 174 (2002): 3–41. 17. George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 41. 18. For example, see Ferdinand Gregorovius, Ghettot och judarna i Rom: Med ett förord av Leo Baeck, trans. Ulf Claësson (Varberg: Kongressförlaget, 2004) [German 1935]. 19. Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta (Newburyport: Dover Publications, 2014), 27. 20. Three Judensäue are found in the vicinity of Uppsala, Sweden: in the Cathedral of Uppsala, in Husby-Sjultoft, and in Härkeberga. For a study of this motif, see

The Theology of the Land in Jewish-Christian Relations  375 Isaiah Shachar, The Judensau: A Medieval Anti-Jewish Motif and Its History (London: Warburg Institute, 1974). 21. Nina Rowe, The Jew, the Cathedral and the Medieval City: Synagoga and Ecclesia in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). It is also worth noting that the woman symbolising Judaism is often young and beautiful. For the interplay of sexuality and anti-Judaism, see Susanna Drake, Slandering the Jews: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). The so-called Living Cross is a particularly violent version of two persons respectively representing Judaism and Christianity; see Achim Timmermann, “Frau Venus, the Eucharist, and the Jews of Landshut,” in Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism, ed. Herbert L. Kessler and David Nirenberg (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 183–202. 22. John Chrysostom, Discourses against Judaizing Christians (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1979), 1:3. 23. Martin Luther, Von den Jüden und jren Lügen (LW, vol. 47, 217; WA, vol. 53, 530 [ll. 31–32]), quoted in Hans-Martin Barth, The Theology of Martin Luther: A Critical Assessment (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), 33. 24. Luther strove for the expulsion of Jews from Christian territories. He even stated: “We are at fault for not slaying them!” See Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 266. 25. This word comes from the Greek holókauston (hólos, “entirely”; kaustós from kaíein, “to burn”]. The Septuagint (the most influential translation from Hebrew into Greek of the Tanakh/Old Testament) refers to the burnt offering (Hebrew: ‛olah), hence, a ritual commanded by God; many have therefore decided not to use the term the “Holocaust” for the genocide committed by the Nazis and their allies during the Second World War. 26. Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin, Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism (New York: Touchstone, 1985), 104. For a comparison of anti-Jewish Church laws and Nazi legislation, see p. 105, where they quote Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 4–6. 27. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 8. 28. Yitzhak Arad, Yisrael Gutman, and Abraham Margaliot, eds., Documents on the Holocaust: Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland, and the Soviet Union, trans. Lea Ben Dor and intro. Steven T. Katz, 8th ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 15. 29. Raphael Patai, ed., The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, vol. 4 (New York: Herzl Press, 1960), 1602–3. 30. This is not to say that Eliot articulated a Christian understanding, but rather that her novel Daniel Deronda, first published in 1876, influenced a number of thinkers, both Christian and Jewish (in the latter case, Eliezer Ben-Yehudah and David Ben Gurion are examples); for examples, see Shalom Goldman, Zeal for Zion: Christians, Jews & the Idea of the Promised Land (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 20, 22, 96, and 100. On her theological point of view, for example, see Bernard J. Paris, “George Eliot’s Religion of Humanity,” English Literary History 29, no. 4 (1962): 418–43. He argues that the real crisis in her life came not when she distanced herself from Christianity, but when she broke with pantheism. 31. Christian Zionism is notoriously difficult to define. For a broad definition, see Stephen Sizer, “The Origins of Christian Zionism,” Cornerstone 31 (2003): 4–8 (here 4): “Christian Zionism is a political form of philo-Semitism, and can be defined as ‘Christian support of Zionism.’” However, on p. 5, apparently approvingly, he quotes Grace Halsell who claims that the message of the

376  Jesper Svartvik Christian Zionists is that “every act taken by Israel is orchestrated by God, and should be condoned, supported, and even praised by the rest of us,” which undoubtedly narrows it down to a smaller group of people. Göran Gunner defines it as “in its contemporary form, faith-based Christian support for the State of Israel,” see “Christian Zionism in Comparative Perspective,” in Comprehending Christian Zionism: Perspectives in Comparison, ed. Göran Gunner and Robert O. Smith (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014), 1–14 (here 2). For a narrow definition, see Donald Wagner, “A Christian Zionist Primer: (Part II) Defining Christian Zionism,” Cornerstone 31 (2003): 12–13 (here 12): “Christian Zionism is a movement within Protestant fundamentalism that understands the modern State of Israel as the fulfilment of biblical prophecy and thus deserving of political, financial, and religious support.” Apart from reducing it to merely Protestantism, what is lacking in this definition is the fundamental fact that whereas Jewish Zionism is a matter of Jewish self-understanding, Christian Zionism is about “other-standing,” a spectrum of reflections about “the theological Other.” For further comments, see Jesper Svartvik, “Våra svåraste ord: Religionsteologi i Jerusalem i Krister Stendahls anda,” in På spaning . . . Från Svenska kyrkans forskardagar 2009, ed. Hanna Stenström (Stockholm: Verbum, 2010), 17–41 (here 25–26). Faidra Shapiro has recently argued that it is “a general label for a specific orientation and emphasis within evangelicalism that ascribes vital theological, and often eschatological, importance to the Jews living in Israel,” see Christian Zionism: Navigating the Jewish-Christian Border (Eugene: Cascade, 2015), 6. 32. Commission of the Holy See for Religious Relations with the Jews, “‘The Gifts and the Calling of God are Irrevocable’ (Rom 11:29): A Reflection on Theological Questions Pertaining to Catholic-Jewish Relations on the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of ‘Nostra Aetate,’” 4 (2015), no. 46. Cf. David Rosen, “Reflections from Israel,” Dialogika, 10 December 1995, available online at www.ccjr.us/dialogika-resources/documents-and-statements/analysis/crrj2015dec10/1365-rosen-2015dec10 (accessed 23 November 2017): “Perhaps [. . .] I may be permitted in the spirit of our mutual respect and friendship to point out that to fully respect Jewish self-understanding, it is also necessary to appreciate the centrality that the Land of Israel plays in the historic and contemporary religious life of the Jewish People, and that appears to be missing.” 33. Commission of the Holy See for Religious Relations with the Jews, “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah [1998],” available online at www.­ vatican. va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/chrstuni/documents/rc_pc_­c hrstuni_ doc_16031998_shoah_en.html (accessed 23 November 2017). 34. Laqueur, The Changing Face of Antisemitism, 47. 35. On various Jewish readings of John 8:44 in particular and the Gospel of John in general, see Adele Reinhartz, Befriending the Beloved Disciple: A Jewish Reading of the Gospel of John (New York: Continuum, 2001). 36. McGarry, “The Land of Israel in the Cauldron of the Middle East,” 214 and 219. 37. David Nirenberg, “Anti-Judaism as a Critical Theory,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 28 January 2013; David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: Norton, 2013), 3–4. 38. R. Kendall Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 30. 39. Alfred Tennyson, “Ulysses,” in Poems of Tennyson (London: Humphrey Milford, 1917), 165: “Tho’ much is taken, much abides [. . .] To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

24 Yearning for Zion in Jewish Tradition Ruth Langer

The “Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel” begins: ERETZ-ISRAEL [Hebrew: the Land of Israel, Palestine] was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books. After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.1 Signed by the leadership of the incipient state, both secular and religious, these opening words emphasise many of the most important elements of the age-old Jewish attachment with this particular narrow strip of earth along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. It highlights the perpetual theological interconnectedness of all three meanings of the word “Israel” in Jewish thought: the people, the place itself, and the political-social structures governing them.2 While Jews over the centuries negotiated in various ways with acting on the ideal of taking up residence in the Land of Israel, the ideal itself (with few exceptions) remained central, expressed daily in the  liturgical life of the community and reinforced by Jewish exclusion from the gentile societies among whom they lived. The “eternal Book of Books,” the Bible and especially its first five books, was and is the central text of Judaism. Judaism developed from serious study and interpretation of this received text, applying it to new circumstances as they emerged, and reading its narratives as national history. This means that the contemporary biblical critical rereading of this text creates a fundamental misunderstanding of the traditions of Judaism through the centuries (and is a significant source of miscommunications about theologies of the land). The Bible establishes that the divine ideal is for the people of Israel to be living in the Land of Israel under their own just governance. The destination of the exodus from Egypt was the restoration of the children of Israel

378  Ruth Langer to the land promised to their ancestors, as part of the covenantal promises recorded in Genesis and referred to many more times before their entrance into the land.3 In the instruction given at Sinai, recorded in the latter parts of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, and reiterated by Moses in Deuteronomy, God provided the Israelites with instructions on how to establish right living in their home: how to treat the land itself, how to interact properly with one another, how to govern themselves, and how to worship. In the course of this, God threatened renewed exile for egregious failure to meet these norms, but also promised renewed life in the land once the sinners repent.4 Thus, Jews came to understand life in the land to express divine blessing and famine5 or military defeat leading to exile to express divine punishment for their sinfulness. The prophets themselves closely linked the Babylonian exile to punishment for the sin of idolatry, a sin that defiles the land itself.6 The return from that exile proved God’s covenantal faithfulness in spite of Israel’s sin; the prayer recorded in Nehemiah 9, read daily in traditional Jewish liturgy, casts this return in the context of biblical history, interpreting it as a second exodus. The Roman destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE and exile of Jews from Jerusalem in 135 were understood within this context by the emerging rabbinic class, those whose teachings came to shape subsequent Jewish thought.7 Themselves residing in Roman Palestine in a period of economic, political, and theological devastation after the defeats, these rabbis taught that the fullest Jewish life was nevertheless possible only in the Land of Israel, even without political autonomy or the biblically commanded sacrificial worship permissible only in Jerusalem. They codified this concept in their collected teachings that became the foundation of the rabbinic intellectual enterprise for subsequent millennia.8 Because later generations of rabbis, both in the Land and outside it, developed their own teachings in conversation around this early core, this ideal of Jewish life in the Land became normative. However, from the third century, a significant rabbinic community developed in the Babylonian diaspora, proud of its own rootedness there and largely unwilling to diminish the significance of their own community. While their official theology preserved the centrality of the Land as an ideal, close reading of their texts suggests a significant degree of diffidence about the need actively to leave the diaspora.9 Resuming independent national life in the land, a third exodus, became the driving element of the Jewish eschatological dream, expressed ubiquitously in rabbinic literature, in daily prayer and as “words of comfort” to mark the conclusion of a sermon or other discourse. Communal liturgical life is generally one of the best communicators of theology. There is much we do not know about how and when rabbinic liturgy developed and spread outside of rabbinic circles. However, as still practised today, the rabbinic liturgical system definitely developed in response to the destruction of the Second Temple and its consequences.10 The earliest rabbinic texts, from the third century, presume the structure of

Yearning for Zion  379 these prayers, and at least some significant elements of their thematic content. However, our earliest preserved full prayer texts are medieval; these, like all subsequent Jewish liturgies until modernity, respond significantly to the loss of Jewish sovereignty and Temple worship and anticipate a resumed full Jewish life in the land. The clearest example of this is the central element of every Jewish service, the concatenation of “blessings” often called the ‛amidah because it is recited standing, facing the Jewish world’s enduring focal point of holiness: the site of the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem Temple. In other words, the rabbinic direction of prayer itself places the Land at the centre.11 On weekdays, this prayer consists of nineteen blessings, thirteen of which are petitions for personal and communal needs. These communal needs are all elements necessary for the messianic reconstitution of the Jewish state in the Land of Israel: ingathering the exiles, establishing right governance, eliminating those who would undermine the community, blessing for those who uphold the community, rebuilding Jerusalem, and re-establishing Davidic (messianic) rule. In addition, other ‛amidah blessings include messianic elements: cries to God to return to Zion and rebuild the Temple, to send the messiah, and to resurrect the dead. These other blessings are recited on the Sabbath and holy days as well. For those who attend communal prayer at all times (the rabbinic expectation for all men), these last sentiments find expression five times a day on weekdays, seven on Sabbaths and holy days, and nine on the Day of Atonement. The land-centredness of Jewish liturgy finds expression in many additional ways. Prayers for rain, even those simply acknowledging God’s ability to bring rain, may be recited only during the winter rainy season in the Land of Israel, even by those living in climates with other needs. The intercalation of the lunar calendar to keep it in sync with the solar calendar12 is determined by the timing of the grain harvests in the Land, important in Temple times for the offerings of the first sheaves at Passover. The anniversary of the destruction of the First and Second Temples, on the Ninth of ’Av (July– August) is observed as a day-long total fast of national mourning, complete with chanting the biblical Lamentations to an appropriate trope and reciting poetic elaborations on it. God’s redemptive powers appear in many prayers, interjected in petitionary lines at seemingly every possible occasion, including weddings and funerals.13 Messianic dreams centred around the reconstitution of Jewish life in Zion thus profoundly shape the traditional Jewish mind, finding expression in multiple forms, subtle and overt, through the centuries. All these traditions formed the heritage of Jews living in the medieval diaspora, either as second-class residents under Islamic rule or as residents with restrictions, sometimes severe, in Christendom—in neither case as full participants in society.14 This created a yearning for life in the Land that often lurked quietly beneath the surface but at other times bubbled up into messianic activism. The renowned poet and theologian, Judah Halevi (c.

380  Ruth Langer 1085 Toledo?–1141 Land of Israel), very much participated in his community’s hope for messianic redemption and a return to Zion, even in the midst of their cultural flowering in Muslim Spain.15 His poetry, written in Spain, includes an extensive collection of “Songs of Zion,” one of which made its way into the liturgy of the Ninth of ’Av and inspired many imitators.16 A shorter one epitomises his dreams: My heart is in the East, and I in the West, as far in the West as west can be! How can I enjoy my food? What flavor can it have for me? How can I fulfill my vows or do the things I’ve sworn to do,17 While Zion is in Christian hands and I am trapped in Arab lands? Easily I could leave behind this Spain and all her luxuries!— As easy to leave as dear the sight of the Temple’s rubble would be to me.18 As an old man, Halevi did leave Spain on pilgrimage to the Holy Land to assuage this yearning and to lessen his mourning, dying there (under unknown circumstances) within a few months of his arrival.19 Contemporary scholars distinguish between two types of Jewish messianists: “quietists” who believe that God has commanded them to wait patiently for the divine implementation of the drama and its components; and “activists” who, instead of waiting for divine initiative, or believing that God had begun the process, direct their energies towards actualising messianic conditions.20 Both share the same dream, but see the human role in it differently. Even though he voluntarily travelled to the yearned-for Holy Land, it is not obvious that Halevi was a “messianic activist,” seeking to create the conditions for the eschaton. Raymond Scheindlin labels him instead a “messianic quietist,” who made his journey for personal spiritual purposes.21 “Quietism” also characterises much of the deeply messianic mystical teachings of kabbalah that became more and more influential in the early modern period. According to this school, the Jewish task is to live according to the Torah, performing God’s commandments. Performed with proper intent, this will generate inner flows and unifications in the divine realm, ultimately but indirectly making the messianic advent more likely. This is not to say that messianic quietists avoided going to live in the Land—but they did not understand their life there to have any messianic dimension. It was a life in semi-exile: commandments applicable only in the Land did apply to them, like those connected to agriculture or the calendar.22 Life, in general, though, was unredeemed. There was as yet no messiah to rule them, no ingathering of the exiles, no resurrection of the dead, and no rebuilt Temple in which properly to worship God. “Messianic activism” is often very much in tension with the “quietist” elements. Most obviously, this includes a number of movements that emerged around medieval and pre-modern messianic figures. The most famous of these was Shabbetai Zvi (1626 Smyrna–1676 in Turkish exile), who began proclaiming himself messiah in 1648 but only began to gain

Yearning for Zion  381 widespread attention in 1665. Jews in cities throughout Europe sold their possessions and prepared to return with him to the Holy Land; they followed his guidance in abolishing observance of commandments. About a year later, though, Shabbetai Zvi converted to Islam, and the movement gradually fell apart.23 There are many factors that scholars adduce for this and other messi­ anic movements. Messianic activism arises from other sources as well, some even more closely related to issues of the Land. Rabbi Moses Nahmanides (1194 Gerona–1270 Land of Israel), the leading rabbi of his Catalan community, was a talmudic sage, a mystic, and a Bible commentator whose extensive writings still carry great weight. After winning the 1263 Barcelona Disputation where he had been forced to dispute Christian doctrine with a baptised Jew, Pablo Christiani, he was forced to flee, eventually coming to Jerusalem in 1267. There, he re-established the Jewish community that the Crusaders had destroyed, before moving to teach in Acre, where he died. In this, Nahmanides acted consistently with his teaching that the biblical commandment to conquer and take possession of the Land of Israel was not simply a commandment for the time of Joshua, or a generalised objection to idolatry, but it was instead incumbent on all Jews at all times, “even during the Exile.” However, fulfilling this commandment need not be through military conquest, something impossible for Jews in his day; settling the land, which early rabbis considered equivalent to fulfilling all the commandments of the Torah, also fulfils God’s will.24 Nahmanides, and many after him, did “conquer” the Land by settling in it, associated for many with initiating the messianic ingathering of the exiles. What has been sketched out so far is necessarily an overview, illuminating a few points along an arc stretching from the Bible to the early modern period of Jewish relatedness to and eschatological yearning for the homeland promised in God’s covenants with the patriarchs. It is to this that the opening words of Israel’s Declaration of Independence refer. One caveat must be mentioned, though. Although rabbinic liturgy fairly uniformly expresses this yearning, we know that Jews were often very rooted in their places of residence. Byzantine, Arab, and Ottoman Palestine frequently offered little by the way of economic allure; it was, with few exceptions, a place of great poverty. Thus, as with the rabbis of the thriving Babylonian talmudic community, the official theological yearning for Zion was often in tension with other more practical factors, encouraging messianic quietism. While there was, except for during the Crusader period, a continuous Jewish presence in the Land, there were not large-scale migrations to it until modernity.25 While Jewish life had greater potential to flourish under Islam than Christianity, it was still restricted, and the general economic and cultural level of the Islamic world did not make it a consistently attractive destination. At the same time, because of these restrictions on them, Jews were not ideologically “at home” in the countries of their diaspora residence. They remained a people apart from their neighbours, marked by such things as language,

382  Ruth Langer calendar, education, permitted trades, places of residence, and often clothing. Home remained the dreamed-for, often messianically defined, Land of Israel. This situation became even more complex as Jews encountered the Western European Enlightenment. Only a few times had at least some European Jewish elite been able to achieve a degree of parity with their neighbours, most notably in the so-called “Golden Age” of Muslim Spain and the Italian Renaissance. The humanism of the modern Enlightenment resulted in a series of tentative moves to open social and intellectual doors to Jews, welcomed by significant segments of the Jewish community.26 This meant that when revolutionary France offered Jews citizenship and apparently removed the remaining barriers to full participation in European society, many Jews eagerly assented. The French condition for this assent from the beginning of this process was a rethinking of what it meant to be Israel. Throughout the history we have traced, the name carried the overlapping identities of people, place, and hoped-for state. However, when the question first arose in 1789 of whether Jews should be granted citizenship, a Christian advocate for Jewish rights argued at the French National Assembly that Jews must function in France only as individuals, not as a nation, for “the existence of a nation within a nation is unacceptable to our country.” An opponent to Jewish citizenship objected because Jews are “a tribe [. . .] that constantly turns its eyes toward [another] homeland.”27 Nothing was resolved then, but the issue of Jewish peoplehood and yearning for Zion arose again in 1806–7 when Napoleon convened first an Assembly of Jewish Notables to investigate Jewish suitability for citizenship and then a Paris Sanhedrin to sanction their decisions. The latter decreed the issues solved, as “Israel no longer forms a nation.”28 This element of Jewish identity had caused relatively little concern as long as the Jews of Europe were a sub-community at best tolerated, usually with their legal status corporately negotiated with local rulers; for Jews to be fully part of European societies required its renegotiation.29 This affected not only the Jews of France, for as Napoleon conquered Europe, he emancipated Jews elsewhere. Even after his defeat, significant elements of this transformation persisted in many countries, energising Jews to push for their own emancipation. The consequences for Jewish identity were significant. Many Jews sought to become worthy of their new status. Assimilation became a widespread goal, and Jewishness was privatised. By the 1840s, some German Jews sought to formulate an expression of Judaism suitable to these new circumstances. Inspired by the Christian Reformation, they called it “Reform Judaism.” As early as 1842, a group issued a formal statement that adamantly denied Jewish nationhood; Israel was instead a religious community, parallel to Catholics and Protestants. Along with this, they denied any yearning for Zion and any hope for the restoration of a Jewish state there. Reform Jews explicitly yearned for a universal messianic age of peace and prosperity

Yearning for Zion  383 wherever they might live.30 This becomes one thread in the tapestry of contemporary understandings of “Israel,” one that is not reflected in the Israeli Declaration of Independence.31 Indeed, this new version of Jewish self-understanding never found universal acceptance, even among western Jews, and especially not among the huge Jewish community of Eastern Europe, where the historical processes of modern intellectual enlightenment and political emancipation operated differently, if at all. Jews of Arab lands were also culturally cut off from these transformations. For the vast majority of nineteenth-century Jews, then, their connection with the biblical promise of the land (as interpreted by rabbinic traditions), sense of exile from it, and messianic yearning for it remained intact. In the late nineteenth century, even secularising eastern European Jews tended to turn, not to Western-style Reform, but to the intellectual currents more common in their vicinity: socialism and/or (Jewish) nationalism, both of which fed emerging Zionism. Jewish emancipation did not lead to widespread acceptance of Jewish individuals into western societies, as we know. However much some Jews might have wished to privatise their Jewishness and blend in, European societies with their “scientific” racist ideologies still identified them as Jews, discriminated against them, and sometimes persecuted them. Conditions for Jews deteriorated in Russia’s Pale of Settlement, particularly with regular government-sponsored pogroms (riots) from 1881 on; in the west, the infamous French conviction of Alfred Dreyfus on trumped up charges of treason in 1894 spurred even some assimilated western Jews to recognise their vulnerability. These factors all contributed to the formal emergence of the modern Zionist movement, energised by Theodor Herzl, an assimilated journalist with little embeddedness in traditional Jewish thinking but with immense passion and organisational talent. For him and many other secular Zionists, their movement was a practical one; it sought a solution to the external problems imposed on Jews by European antisemitism and a way to enable Jews to flourish as modern individuals. Herzl himself was somewhat deaf to the connection of Jews to the Land of Israel, famously accepting a British offer of Uganda as a place of temporary and immediate settlement in the wake of Russian pogroms in 1903. While some early Zionists pursued this and even sought out other alternative places of refuge around the world, Herzl’s proposal created a storm of opposition, primarily from eastern-European Jews; the next Zionist Congress (1905) rejected the British offer.32 Like most Jews through history, in the words of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, even these secular Jews “never ceased to [. . .] hope for their return to [the Land of Israel] and for the restoration in it of their political freedom,” significant elements of the traditional messianic dream. Indeed, the anthem of the Zionist Movement, Ha-Tiqṿah (The Hope), today the anthem of the State of Israel, expresses this yearning. Modified from a much longer and more mournful poem written in Galicia in 1878 by

384  Ruth Langer Naftali Herz Imber and first sung at the same 1905 Zionist Congress that had rejected the Uganda proposal, its text today reads: As long as in the innermost heart the Jewish soul is longing, And towards the east, its eye is searching for Zion— Then our hope has not yet been lost, the hope of two thousand years To be a free people in our land, the land of Israel and Jerusalem.33 In other words, what sustained (most) Jews in the diaspora, through its trials and tribulations, including those caused by antisemitism, was the eschatological hope for a restored national life in the ancestral homeland. The enlightenment attempt to cast off this particularist hope never achieved universal success, although it remained and remains an element of the Jewish tapestry. The diversity of that tapestry in the pre-1948 era before the formation of the State of Israel, even just among those advocating a Jewish return, finds expression in Arthur Hertzberg’s The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader.34 This volume requires over 500 pages to provide relatively short excerpts from the writings of thirty-seven thinkers, divided into ten categories mostly defined by ideology. Like Herzl, the vast majority of these thinkers were secular, that is to say, traditional theological categories did not consciously motivate them. Thus, traditional messianic yearnings, whether activist or quietist, drove them much less than the need to escape antisemitism and reconstitute a Jewish nation on a par with all other nations—although these are important elements in traditional Jewish eschatology as well. Jewish emigration from Europe to Ottoman and then British Mandatory Palestine grew exponentially in the period preceding the Second World War, driven by a combination of inherited hopes, modern antisemitism, and the growing economic opportunities there as the country developed. By 1948, the Jewish population had grown from miniscule numbers a century before to just over 600,000, a number that doubled within the next five years as the new state opened its doors to refugees from Europe and Arab lands.35 Israel’s Declaration of Independence also speaks to this purpose when it asserts that the state will address the urgent problem of Jewish “homelessness by re-establishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish State, which would open the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew.” Lying behind this statement are several deeply embedded Jewish ethics: that all of the people of Israel have corporate responsibility for each individual Jew,36 and that Jews have a communal responsibility to free captive Jews.37 This drives a substantial element of the identity of the modern State of Israel, often stated in secular terms, but fundamentally Jewish. Its 1950 Law of Return guarantees immediate refuge with citizenship to any Jew. As amended officially in 1970, this law defines “Jew” as one meeting Hitler’s racial definition—i.e., one Jewish grandparent—but excludes anyone

Yearning for Zion  385 who has voluntarily converted to another religion.38 In this, it responds to racial antisemitism, ironically perpetuating its categories, for the purpose of preserving a different set of Jewish values. These values led to the 1990s absorption of over a million citizens of the former Soviet Union, not all of them technically Jews or married to Jews, and to the regular invitations today to Jews subject to growing expressions of antisemitism especially in Europe to become Israelis.39 Much of the overt antisemitism of our times is at least voiced in terms of issues surrounding the protracted Arab-Israeli conflict, particularly as it affects the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza. This seemingly unre­ solvable political conflict spills over into general hatred of Jews among both Muslims and Christians (and some Jews) whose sympathies lie with the Palestinians. I leave the analysis of this from the Muslim and Christian perspectives to others, including Jesper Svartvik’s discussion in this volume, but I will endeavour here to provide an overview of the spectrum of voices shaping Jewish thinking and the complexity of the inner-Jewish discussion. There are elements in today’s world that have never granted the State of Israel any legitimacy—and some remain a real and constant existential threat to it both politically and militarily. This lurks in most Jews’ thinking about Israel. Preserving life, living at all costs, is a highest Jewish value to the point that almost all of God’s commandments must be transgressed in order to save a life. The potential of another Holocaust, whether by Iranian nuclear bombs, Hizballah rockets, or massive terrorist attacks instigated by Hamas cannot be accepted and must be prevented. Israel felt no guilt for its pre-emptive attack that prevented its threatened annihilation in 1967; it castigated its government for ignoring similar warnings and allowing the country to be caught unprepared by the much more disastrous attacks of 1973. A significant element of the internal tension in Israel today between the ultra-orthodox and the rest of the Jewish population arises because of the ultra-orthodox avoidance of the military service that potentially puts every other young adult’s life on the front lines of the country. This existential threat is felt only in a slightly diminished way in the rash of knifings and small-scale terror that erupted in the autumn of 2015. Contemporary Jewish theological understandings of Israel do not map in any simplistic way onto its complex heritage from previous millennia. Does the contemporary state, with all its problems, serve to answer the traditional eschatological yearning for Zion? If so, how? No one claims that the Messiah has come, but is the messianic drama in process? Differing answers to these questions lie behind many of the internal tensions and dilemmas in Israel today, particularly regarding relationships with the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Jews in the diaspora echo these tensions as well. Yossi Klein Halevi’s volume, Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation,40 is a particularly effective illustration of them. Tracing the stories of seven of

386  Ruth Langer these paratroopers (four secular kibbutzniks and three religious Zionists), he provides a nuanced portrait of a spectrum of Israeli responses to the 1967 conquests of Arab territories and their aftermath to about 2004. The secular kibbutzniks all grow up imbued with variants of Marxist ideology with which they dialogue as adults while the kibbutz movement itself, so central to Zionist ideology and the formation of the state, largely loses its direction. These collective farms originated as a way for pioneering Zionists to make the desert bloom and to return Jews to a close physical relationship with their homeland. The ethos of self-sacrifice and hard labour involved also transformed Jews into pillars of strength and heroism for the community, a far cry from the Eastern European ideal of the Talmud scholar bent over dusty books. This ideology is an activist one, seeking to redeem Jews and the land through human initiatives but without divine intervention or a Messiah. Klein Halevi’s secular paratroopers each negotiate differently with their heritage. Udi Adiv, after a stint in gaol as a spy for Syria, ultimately ends up as an anti-Zionist academic actively objecting to Israel’s identity as a Jewish state.41 Avital Geva, an activist artist tending to the outrageous, remains mostly true to kibbutz communal values and becomes a leader in the Peace Now movement advocating a two-state solution. Meir Ariel, a poet/­songwriter whose personal search ultimately leads him to gravitate to personalised forms of traditional Jewish spirituality and learning, is deeply critical of the religious Zionist settlement movement.42 Arik Achmon’s search for modernisation and normalisation of Israeli life leads him to reject kibbutz ideology, become a capitalist, and reject the settler movement as morally corrupting because it insists on retaining ghetto values rather than fostering an independent, self-reliant Jewish rootedness in the land, something that will only be possible if Israel makes compromises for peace.43 Klein Halevi’s other main characters represent a range of leading Religious Zionists. In contrast to the ultra-orthodox who largely insist on messianic quietism, rejecting as contraventions of God’s will any human actions that might attempt to speed the hoped-for messianic advent,44 Religious Zionism is decidedly a form of activist messianism. It developed from the teachings of the first chief rabbi of mandatory Palestine, Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935), particularly as this theology was applied to the actual state after its birth by his son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook (1891–1982). This school understands itself to be living in the midst of and contributing to the messianic drama; even the secular state is God’s tool for redeeming Israel. Israel’s compromise boundaries in 1948–49 were a source of angst for Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook; the 1967 conquest of territory that brought the state closer to approximating its most expansive biblical boundaries, from the Nile to the Euphrates (Genesis 15:18), including the holy cities of Jerusalem (especially) and Hebron, were cause for intense joy.45 Re-establishing a Jewish presence on this land—all of it—thus became a profoundly religious and covenantal act for the students of these rabbis.

Yearning for Zion  387 The most moderate of Klein Halevi’s Religious Zionists is Yisrael Harel, a pragmatic journalist who seeks to renew Israel’s faltering pioneering kibbutz spirit through the formation of West Bank settlements but who desires coexistence with the local Arab population there, resulting ultimately in his marginalisation in the movement.46 The more theologically oriented Rabbi Yoel bin Nun, a student of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, believes that messianic redemption is currently unfolding and could be furthered by Jewish actions. This shapes his decisions and interpretations of the events around him, including his understanding that the secular state is a divine instrument through which the divine plan is slowly being revealed. He therefore criticises his compatriots who work against the state, resulting ultimately in his marginalisation in the Religious Zionist settler movement as well. Bin Nun’s sense of living an imminent eschatology dims over the course of time, though especially as Israel returns the Sinai to Egypt (the book does not cover Israel’s 2005 disengagement from Gaza).47 The third religious Zionist paratrooper is Hanan Porat, also a student of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, and the political brains and energy behind the founding of the first settlements and their organisation into the Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) movement. He too understands God to be acting through human hands and Israel to be experiencing the messianic redemption, a situation that calls for a renewed pioneering Zionism, now expressed in settlements.48 Finally, Klein Halevi includes one non-paratrooper in some detail, Yehudah Etzion, the mastermind behind the Jewish Underground, a group that sought in the early 1980s even more directly to bring the messianic age by blowing up the Dome of the Rock and committing various other acts of violence against Palestinians. Yoel bin Nun and Yisrael Harel, especially, were publicly critical of his group.49 Thus, even the path of messianic activism remains complex. What is one to conclude from this? Anything simplistic would be wrong. When Jacob returns to his homeland from exile in Paddam Aram, he struggles all night with a “man” who proves to be a divine manifestation. In the morning, Jacob refuses to let the combatant go until he receives a blessing. The blessing he receives is a new name that reflects this struggle, Israel, meaning “for you have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed” (Genesis 32:29). The people who carry this name, Israel, and whose homeland is Israel continue to struggle with God and with each other to discern right from wrong. Judaism has no centralised hierarchy that imposes absolute answers, especially to new and ambiguous questions. The people Israel were in exile for almost 1900 years, and in some critical ways, theologically, they are still in exile. Discerning correct paths on critical questions creates gut-wrenching struggles, struggles in which different communities in Israel often struggle with God. Even those who choose not to struggle with God, struggle with each other. This struggle itself is the blessing that God gave Jacob and his children. It results in a community of creative thinkers and questioners; it results in mistakes, but also has the potential for greatness.

388  Ruth Langer It is this very diversity in the paths by which Jews seek to live the right life that those outside of Israel struggle to understand and appreciate. As a member of the Jewish community, I have an obligation to enter this fray, to seek the truth to the best of my ability in consultation with those I respect. But I also have a responsibility to understand, to the best of my ability, the factors motivating those with whom I disagree. I cannot silence them; neither do I wish to, for the most part. But I can seek to name error. In addition, as a Jew who is in constant dialogue with those outside my insular Jewish community, as a Jew who lives in the diaspora, I have a responsibility to represent this struggle fairly and honestly, to endeavour to present these aspects integral to Jewish theology and culture in such a way that will help the world understand my people and my theological homeland. That has been the goal of this essay.

Notes Much of the material included in this essay was discussed in much greater detail in a course first taught at Boston College in 2015 entitled “Israel in Jewish Theologies.” In many ways, this essay is a reflection on that course. A version of this essay will appear in the forthcoming volume Enabling Dialogue about the Land: A Resource Book for Jews and Christians edited by Philip A. Cunningham, Ruth Langer, and Jesper Svartvik. 1. Issued 14 May 1948. Translation from the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, www. mfa.gov.il/mfa/foreignpolicy/peace/guide/pages/declaration%20of%20establish ment%20of%20state%20of%20israel.aspx (accessed 23 November 2017). 2. The first two meanings are explicitly biblical and find continual usage in Jewish discussion: the people are bnei Yiśra’el (children of Israel) or ‛am Yiśra’el (people of Israel); the land is ’ereẓ Yiśra’el. The third has a biblical history too, as the Northern Kingdom from the death of Solomon to its fall in 722 BCE was called Israel. 3. Genesis 12:7, 15:7, 15:18–21, 17:8 (to Abraham); 26:3 (to Isaac); 28:13, 35:12 (God to Jacob); 48:4, 50:24 (Jacob and Joseph’s recollections of this in their deathbed scenes, pointing to the return from Egypt). For examples of later references, see Exodus 6:8, 33:1, Numbers 22:11, Deuteronomy 1:8, 6:10, 9:8, 30:20, 34:4. 4. Leviticus 26:16 f, especially vv. 33–40 (exile) and 41–45 (God’s faithfulness to the covenant); compare Deuteronomy 4:25–40, and 27–28, especially 28:62–68. 5. Deuteronomy 11:13–17, recited twice daily in rabbinic prayers. 6. Jeremiah 2, for example. 7. When, how, and where the rabbinic class actually gained authority over other Jews are matters of current scholarly discussion. For examples, see Hayim Lapin, “The Origins and Development of the Rabbinic Movement in the Land of Israel,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 4, The Late RomanRabbinic Period, ed. Steven T. Katz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 209–26 (and other works by this author); and Talya Fishman, Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Fishman, somewhat controversially, pushes the success of rabbinisation into the twelfth century, which certainly represents a terminus ad quem for the process.

Yearning for Zion  389 8. Much of the earliest rabbinic text, the Mishnah, records teachings applicable only to life in the Land of Israel, including especially its discussions of agricultural laws in its first order and laws pertaining to the operations of the Jerusalem Temple in its second, fifth, and sixth orders. Much of the civil law discussed in the fourth order requires the judicial autonomy of an independent state. 9. Isaiah Gafni, Land, Center and Diaspora: Jewish Constructs in Late Antiquity (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), passim. For a key example from the Babylonian Talmud, see Ketubot 110b—11a (discussed by Gafni), which expresses this tension by interspersing traditions from the Land of Israel with those from Babylonia extolling that community’s own virtues. 10. The synagogue, as a place of gathering for study of Scripture, already existed. The Temple was primarily a place of sacrificial worship, though the rabbis report that some aspects of its ritual included synagogue-like practices. This may well be a retrojection rather than history. See Naftali S. Cohn, The Memory of the Temple and the Making of the Rabbis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 11. Tosefta Berakhot 3:15–16. 12. The twelve-month lunar calendar is eleven days shorter than the solar calendar and requires correction with the addition of a second month of Adar (early spring) in seven of nineteen years. For details and history, see Sacha Stern, Calendar and Community: A History of the Jewish Calendar Second Century BCE—Tenth Century CE (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 13. On this, see my article, “Turning to Jerusalem from the Exile: Jewish Liturgy’s Engagement with the Diaspora,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Jewish Diaspora, ed. Hasia Diner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 14. See Jesper Svartvik’s summary in this volume. 15. Raymond P. Scheindlin, The Song of the Distant Dove: Judah Halevi’s Pilgrimage (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) explores Halevi’s relationship to the Land in depth through his relevant writings. 16. Scheindlin, Song, 172–81, including the poem. 17. This is an allusion to the fact that the destruction of the Temple left Jews without a mechanism for release from solemn vows made to God. 18. Scheindlin, Song, 169–71 (his translation). 19. Ibid., 150–51. 20. See the discussion in Aviezer Ravitzky, Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism, trans. Michael Swirsky and Jonathan Chipman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996 [1993 in Hebrew]), ch. 1, “Messianism, Zionism, and Orthodoxy: Historical and Conceptual Background,” and “Appendix: The Impact of the Three Oaths in Jewish History.” 21. Scheindlin, Song, 60, 158–59. 22. The agricultural laws of the Torah, as elaborated upon by the rabbis, apply only within the biblical boundaries of the land (there are multiple methods of determining that). This includes various tithes and restrictions tied to the sabbatical year of rest for the land. The rabbinic calendar requires that Jews outside the land observe a second day for each day of pilgrimage festival on which work is restricted. The origins of this are in the ancient difficulties of communicating the calendation. Today, they are one of the starkest regular reminders of the difference between diaspora life and life in the Land. 23. The classic biography is Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Ṣevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973). 24. In his critique of Maimonides’s Book of Commandments no. 4, printed in standard editions with Maimonides’s Positive Commandment no. 187. For an ­English translation and discussion, see Reuven Firestone, Holy War in

390  Ruth Langer Judaism: The Fall and Rise of a Controversial Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 127–34. 25. There was a substantial influx of Jews into the Land in the aftermath of the expulsions from Spain and Portugal in 1492 and 1497 and the Ottoman conquest of the Land in 1516, largely because the Ottoman sultans welcomed Jews and created conditions favourable to economic development. However, these communities remained small in comparison to those elsewhere in the empire, and the favourable conditions did not persist into the seventeenth century. See Yaacov Geller et al., “Ottoman Empire,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 15, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), 522–24. 26. See Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment, trans. Chaya Naor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); and Leora Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 27. In Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, The Jew in the Medieval World: A Documentary History, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 115. 28. Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, 130–35. 29. Under the first amendment in the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution, ratified in 1791, religion ceased to determine one’s status under American law. The last state to adjust its laws to allow Jews to hold public office was Maryland in 1826. 30. Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 122. Compare the Central Conference of American Rabbis’ 1885 “Declaration of Principles” (Pittsburgh Platform) 5, available online at http://ccarnet.org/rabbis-speak/­ platforms/declaration-principles/ (accessed 23 November 2017). 31. The Central Conference of American Rabbis modified this stance already in their 1937 “The Guiding Principles of Reform Judaism” (Columbus Platform) 5, accepting the necessity of a Jewish homeland for the suffering Jews of Europe. Their first full official Zionist statement was issued only in 1997, “Reform Judaism and Zionism: A Centenary Platform” (Miami Platform). See http://ccarnet.org/rabbis-speak/platforms/ (accessed 23 November 2017). 32. “Zionist Congress: The Uganda Proposal (26 August 1903),” Jewish Virtual Library, available online at www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Zionism/ Uganda.html (accessed 23 November 2017). 33. For a brief history, including of the transformations of the text, see my “Zion,” in Take Heart: Catholic Writers on Hope in Our Time, ed. Ben Birnbaum (New York: Crossroad, 2007), 207–12, available online at www.academia. edu/19802419/Zion (accessed 23 November 2017). Today, some suggest further modifications to the anthem to address its euro-centeredness (“east” ignores Jews of Asia) and the fact that it excludes the 25 per cent of Israeli citizens who are not Jews. 34. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1997; original publication 1959. 35. For statistics, see the pages linked from “Israel: Immigration to Israel,” Jewish Virtual Library, available online at www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/­ Immigration/immigtoc.html (accessed 23 November 2017). 36. Sifra, Beḥuqotai, Pereq 7:5, originally referring to corporate responsibility for each other’s obligations and sins, but extended later in the moral context. 37. B. Bava Batra 8b and, after it, the medieval codes present this as a commandment of greatest importance because it prevents death at the hands of the captors. 38. “Israel’s Basic Laws: The Law of Return,” Jewish Virtual Library, available online at www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Politics/Other_Law_Law_of_Return.html

Yearning for Zion  391 (accessed 23 November 2017). Note, though, that this is not a “basic law,” a category that carries virtual constitutional force. The 1970 amendment largely reflects codification of actual practice of the law, but responds to the 1962 challenge to it brought by a baptised Jew, a Carmelite Brother Daniel who sought citizenship. 39. One today hears noticeably more French in Jerusalem than ever previously. In some new French restaurants, waiters speak neither Hebrew nor English. See “France Is Israel’s Largest Source of Aliyah for 2nd Straight Year,” Times of Israel, 22 December 2015, available online at www.timesofisrael.com/ france-is-israels-largest-source-of-aliyah-for-2nd-straight-year/ (accessed 23 November 2017). 40. Yossi Klein Halevi, Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation (New York: HarperCollins, 2013). 41. Ibid., 208–9, 284, 520–21. 42. Ibid., 443. 43. Ibid., 7, 328, 360, 528. 44. The one ultra-orthodox figure in the book is Sarah Harel, who marries into the Religious Zionist world. Her husband voices criticism of ultra-orthodox exemption in the defence of the state: Klein Halevi, Like Dreamers, 125. Halevi’s omission is generated by the fact that the ultra-orthodox did not serve in the 1967 war. 45. Ravitzky, Messianism, provides discussions of varieties of Religious Zionist ideology in comparison to the ultra-orthodox. 46. Klein Halevi, Like Dreamers, 186, 316, 356, 517. Halevi also traces Harel’s disappointments with the settler movement in his critiques of the Jewish Underground (417, 421, 424). 47. The discussions of his views are particularly rich. Some points of particular interest appear in Klein Halevi, Like Dreamers, 89, 94, 120–21, 203–5, 338– 39, 370, 418, 446–50, 492, 535–37. 48. Klein Halevi, Like Dreamers, 123, 264–65, 267, 311, 322, 373. 49. This dynamic recurred in 2015–16, with extreme Religious Zionist youth murdering Palestinians and firebombing Christian and Muslim religious sites, all condemned by leading figures of the movement. Searches for “hilltop youth” and “Jewish terrorists” on the websites of Israeli news sources yield plentiful information.

25 Between Eternity and Wandering The Anti-Jewish Discourse on the Wandering Jew in the Long Nineteenth Century in Germany and Austria Tuvia Singer The legend of the Wandering Jew or the Eternal Jew took shape in ­seventeenth-century Protestant circles in Germany. In a chapbook entitled Kurtze Beschreibung und Erzehlung von einem Juden mit Namen Ahaßverus (Short Description and Account of a Jew Named Ahasuerus), published in German in 1602, the anonymous author describes a meeting between Paulus von Eitzen—among Hamburg’s most important Protestant theologians—and the Wandering Jew. Based on a sweeping reading of the New Testament, the legend concerned a Jew named Ahasuerus, who was condemned to perpetual wandering after refusing to let Jesus rest on the walls of his home on his way to the crucifixion. Over the course of the following centuries, the legend spread throughout Europe in dozens of different adaptations and translations. It appears that in 1717, the theologian Johann Schudt became the first person to identify Ahasuerus explicitly as a symbol for the Jewish people.1 This identification became increasingly common over the course of the nineteenth century in German-speaking lands, playing a role in controversies and struggles around both equal rights for Jews and their cultural and social integration into majority society. Nineteenth-century anti-Jewish discourse attributed to the figure of the Wandering Jew (also known as the “Eternal Jew”) the contradictory and complementary characteristics of “ossification,” “detachment,” and “elasticity.” While these characteristics were occasionally simultaneously attributed to the Jews, the emphasis of the discourse shifted over time; from an initial focus on “ossification” and the inability to change, it shifted toward one centred on “detachment,” eventually settling on “elasticity” and a capacity for constant change. The meaning of “land” and “home” in this discourse also changed throughout the nineteenth century; in the “detachment” discourse, land and home were specifically German, while in the “elasticity” discourse, the meaning of the land from which the Jews were disconnected was generalised and was not necessarily associated with any specific nation or culture.

Between Eternity and Wandering  393 I would argue that the complex and seemingly contradictory use of the “Wandering Jew” image in modern anti-Jewish discourse is the heritage of the development of this legend and image in medieval and early modern times and is, therefore, an inherent part of its every use. Space limitations prevent me from addressing in detail another important medieval ­throwback—the use of religious language and symbols in a modern and allegedly secular discourse. These medieval legacies undermine the historiographical distinction between “religious/medieval anti-Judaism” and ­“secular/modern anti-Judaism.”

Eternality, Detachment, and the Jews’ Predictable Failure to Change The issue of Jewish change and “self-improvement” meant that the process of emancipation was accompanied, among other things, by disagreements about the ability of the “Eternal Jews” to change and integrate into majority society. Within this discourse, “eternality” was less the Jew’s punishment than it was his sin. In response to a 1781 book by the senior Prussian official Christian Wilhelm von Dohm—who supported granting equal rights to the Jews—the Hebraist Johann David Michaelis published an article in 1782, arguing that granting equal rights to an unassimilable group would undermine the state’s stability. Michaelis believed that both the Jews’ consciousness of themselves as the chosen people and the laws of the Torah (rules of kashrut, for example—the very intent of which were to engender separation) prevented their assimilation into majority society. Moreover, Michaelis argued that the Jews lacked patriotic attachment to the countries hosting them, since their messianic hope was to return to their land.2 Jewish particularism and belief in the Messiah as a political redeemer stood at the centre of author and journalist Karl Gutzkow’s attack on emancipation as he felt it was understood by a number of Jewish writers. Gutzkow was among the leaders of the Junges Deutschland (Young Germany) writer’s movement, which supported granting equal rights to Jews as part of its liberal worldview. In 1838, the Ahasver-Streit (Ahasuerus Dispute) over the modern significance of the legend of the Wandering Jew broke out between Gutzkow and Ludwig Phillipson, founder and editor of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums. Gutzkow insisted that any contemporary interpretation of the legend had to be true to its Christian origins: “The Ahasuerus legend is a Christian legend, not a Jewish one. If it is to remain pure and authentic, then it must remain Christian, otherwise one should drop it altogether as the fruit of dark times.”3 As such, modern interpretations had to place emphasis on the Wandering Jew’s sin: “But I ask: Is Ahasuerus’ crime committed solely against Christianity? [. . .] The possibility of a modern Ahasuerus lies in this (question).”4 Gutzkow’s response to this question was unequivocal. Ahasuerus, in mocking Jesus on his way to

394  Tuvia Singer the Cross, sinned in belittling the weak and in glorifying power and egoistic material success. This in turn was the sin of Judaism (or a portion of it, as Gutzkow formulated it, with uncharacteristic restraint) throughout history up to his own day. Jewish separatism and the messianic aspiration for everlasting life were manifestations of the Jews’ feelings of superiority, for which they had been accordingly punished—an eternally marginal existence as “living corpses, dead men, who are not yet dead,” bearing constant witness to the successes and works of other young nations throughout history, while themselves remaining on the sidelines.5 The modern significance of this sin was a reductionism among certain Jews, some Jewish writers among them, regarding the process of emancipation. For these Jews, emancipation was a purely political matter of equal rights and had only material consequences; they denied the moral significance of emancipation—a journey of self-release from a sense of isolation and superiority.6 Alongside this polemic concerning eternal Jewishness, which emphasised the Jews’ lack of desire to integrate, there also developed a discourse around their inability to integrate, whether they wanted to or not. At the centre of this discourse lay the motif of wandering and its consequences—­ detachment, foreignness, and placelessness. In the late eighteenth century, voices warned that the Jews’ detachment would prevent any possibility of true assimilation. Since these warnings were limited to the early years of German Jewish acculturation, they did not attract wide attention. As it happens, the term Judenfrage (the Jewish question), a product of the 1820s, was initially directed not at traditional Jews, but at those who had already integrated or were in the process of integrating. Although twothirds of these Jews converted to Christianity, attacks against them continued to increase.7 In 1832, the philologist and literary scholar Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen, writing under the pseudonym Cruciger, published a pamphlet entitled Neueste Wanderungen, Umtriebe und Abenteuer des Ewigen Juden unter dem Namen Börne, Heine, Saphir u.a. (Most Recent Wanderings, Activities and Adventures of the Eternal Jew under the Names of Börne, Heine, Saphir, et al.)—the title is a paraphrase of the original 1602 legend of the Wandering Jew. Von der Hagen claimed that the Jewish poets and writers Moritz Gottlieb Saphir, Ludwig Börne and Heinrich Heine were mere names and masks of the same itinerant cosmopolitans (kosmopolitisch umwandernden) and “unheimlichen Vaterlandslosen.”8 The words unheimlich and vaterlandslos are especially significant for their double meanings; the literal translation of unheimlich is unhomely, and it means strange, uncomfortable, frightening and insecure.9 While the literal meaning of vaterlandslos is without a fatherland, it also signifies a lack of patriotism. In this way, von der Hagen made sophisticated use of the wandering motif to signify the eternality motif—the Jews’ secret and threatening foreignness concealed behind masks of assimilation. The composer Richard Wagner made similar use of the wandering motif to indicate Jewish foreignness in one of the most influential texts in

Between Eternity and Wandering  395 anti-Jewish discourse: in the 1850 (republished in 1869) article Das Judenthum in der Musik (Judaism in Music). Wagner began by attempting to explain German feelings of repulsion (Abneigung) for the Jews. The importance of this feeling for Wagner is evident from the article’s recurring use (over fifteen times) of words like Abneigung, Abstoßen, unwillkürlich, and Widerwillen—meaning rejection, revulsion, and instinctive recoiling. This was a product of the traditional Jews’ “uncomfortable strangeness” (fremdartig und unangenehm), manifest in his voice and appearance.10 Wagner saw emotions of identification and rejection as the fundamental psychological elements of every work of art. Only those who shared the artist’s spiritual essence could receive the spiritual message embodied in his art. Since the Jew is completely foreign to the German, in whom he arouses strong feelings of revulsion, an artistic or spiritual “shared language” between them is impossible.11 While Wagner first attacks the traditional Jew, the lion’s share of his venom is directed at the “enlightened (literally: educated) Jew” (der gebildete Jude), whom he describes as “foreign and detached” (fremd und theilnahmlos], and who has wandered away from his society of origin, but remains unabsorbed by the new society. This is a situation of double ­foreignness—alienation from his Jewish brothers, on the one hand, and exclusion from German society, on the other.12 This double foreignness adds to the fundamental foreignness of the Jew (including the traditional Jew), who “has stood outside any such communality, lonely with his Jehovah in a shattered, landless tribe.”13 Thus, Wagner used the motif of physical wandering due to absence of earthly territory and cultural wandering due to a lack of metaphorical territory to create the image of the Jew as foreign. The final paragraph of his article reads: We have to name yet another Jew, who appeared among us as a writer. Based on his special position as a Jew, he came among us seeking redemption; he did not find it, and had to learn that only with our redemption, too, into genuine humanity, would he ever find it. To become human together with us, however, first of all means the Jew effectively ceasing to be a Jew. Börne had fulfilled this. Yet, Börne, of all people, teaches us that this redemption cannot be achieved with ease in cold, indifferent complacency, but costs—as it does for us—sweat, anguish, want and a plethora of suffering and sorrow. Participate unrestrainedly in this work of redemption, which is reborn through self-destruction, then we are united and undivided! However, remember that only one thing can redeem you from the curse burdening you: the redemption of ­Ahasuerus—the downfall!14 Why did Wagner turn specifically to the figure of the Wandering Jew in his analysis of Judaism in German culture? He addressed this figure in his operas and in his personal writings as well, so the article must be understood within the context of his diverse uses of and references to the Wandering Jew.

396  Tuvia Singer Wagner’s opera Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) premiered in 1843. It followed a Dutch sailor condemned to eternally wander the seas in his ship in search of redemption (and death), thanks to the loyal love of a woman. Wagner, following Heinrich Heine, referred to the Flying Dutchman as “Ahasuerus of the Sea” (Ahasverus des Ozeans).15 Despite its association with the legend of the Wandering Jew, the opera did not deal with Jewish themes and was far from anti-Jewish. According to various interpretations of the opera, its central concern is with redemption from self- or social alienation.16 As a consummate artist, Wagner actually identified with the Wandering Jew (in 1859) and with the Flying Dutchman (in 1879)—two characters without homes who suffer from Weltschmerz (world weariness), and who, therefore, signify the tribulations of the modern artist, whose sensitivity, genius, and refusal to accept social norms condemn him to social foreignness. The redemption of the Wandering Jew and the Flying Dutchman from their Weltschmerz is to be found only through the negation of restless “Will,” which comes only with death. The sin of alienation and foreignness is the theme that ties together the roles of the wandering characters in the opera The Flying Dutchman and the article “Judaism in Music.”17 The Jew, and especially the Jewish artist, attempts the impossible task of creating within the confines of a German culture, which he is outside of and whose soil he is detached from: “his overall inability, as one who does not stand on our soil, to communicate with us on that soil.”18 Redemption for the foreign Jew, who is dithering between two options that are foreign and detached from the land, can come only through “submersion”—­Untergang—total absorption and erasure of the Jewish identity from within the German one: the metaphoric death of Ahasuerus as a foreign entity and his rebirth as an organic part of humanity.19 A year after the publication of “Judaism in Music,” Arthur Schopenhauer published his article “Ahasver und die Winkelnation” (Ahasuerus and the Marginalised Nation), which opened thus: Ahasuerus, the Eternal Jew, is nothing but the personification of the whole Jewish people. Since he has sinned grievously against the Saviour and Redeemer of the world, he shall never be delivered from earthly existence and its burden, and shall wander homeless in foreign lands [. . .] and so even today, this gens extorris, this John Lackland among the nations, is to be found all over the globe, nowhere at home and nowhere a foreigner, while asserting his nationality with unprecedented obstinacy [. . .] The other Jews are the fatherland of the Jew [. . .] and no community on earth sticks so firmly together as does this one [. . .] They are and remain a foreign oriental people, and thus must always be regarded merely as domiciled foreigners.20 Schopenhauer understood Jewish foreignness as arising from the Jews being a gens extorris—a nation out of place. Wandering and detachment make

Between Eternity and Wandering  397 the Jews foreign in two ways: first, the very fact of being out of place inherently implies foreignness; second, unable to latch on to territory—without which every nation is “a ball in the air” (ein Ball in der Luft)—the Jews seize hold of each other and of their foreign and Oriental ethnic identity, which serves as compensation and as their homeland.21 Schopenhauer’s solution to this tragicomic situation is physical absorption: “and soon the ghost will be exorcised. Ahasuerus will be buried, and the chosen people will not know where their abode was.”22 Unlike Wagner (and Gutzkow), who saw absorption primarily as a psychological journey, Schopenhauer focused on physical absorption. Yet, both Wagner and Schopenhauer describe the death of alien Jewish identity as the only possibility for the Wandering Jew’s redemption— or, to be more precise: for the Germans’ internal expulsion of demons and their self-redemption from the Wandering Jew. Thus, the character of Ahasuerus was employed in a complex manner— both contradictory and complementary—within the discourse surrounding the emancipation of the Jews and the sincerity of their assimilation. On the one hand, when the issue was equal rights, the Jews were accused of eternality and inability to change. When, on the other hand, it came to the question of integration, the Jews who had undergone processes of change were accused of detachment. Yet, in truth, the distinct anti-Jewish claims made within these two discourses were part of a single argument; the Jew is foreign, whether due to his permanence and his stubborn preservation of his identity or thanks to his wandering and detachment from solid cultural ground. Marking the Jews as foreign was among those characteristics of anti-Jewish discourse in Germany that were interwoven into the formation of a unified German nation.23

Nomadism, Elasticity, and the Jews’ Unexpected Ability to Change Throughout the second half of the long nineteenth century, anti-Jewish discourse dealt with an additional aspect of the motif of Ahasuerus’ wandering: the attribute of cultural flexibility or elasticity. As we have seen, the first interpretation of wandering focused on the absence of home, fatherland, and soil. The expressions heimatlos and bodenlos—as well as vaterlandslos and unheimlich, with their double meanings—were applied to the Wandering Jew by the philologist von der Hagen in 1832, by Wagner in 1850 and by Schopenhauer in 1851. This interpretation emphasised the consequence of wandering—detachment and disconnection from (German) soil, society, and culture. The second interpretation, on the other hand, emphasises the act of wandering itself—that is, nomadism, mobility, and elasticity of both body and spirit. The characteristics of fluidity and shape shifting were already being attributed to the Jew by mid-century, but not until the fin de siècle did their usage become sweeping and achieve full intellectual and ideological maturity.

398  Tuvia Singer During the fin de siècle, the Jews of Germany and Austria became familiar strangers within German society: no longer exceptional individuals, they became a group. This amounted to a form of social and cultural mobility that failed to ripen into full assimilation, creating an identity that fluctuated between Germanity and Jewish identities, ultimately undermining their distinctiveness. The flexibility attributed to the Jewish character or identity was part and parcel of the “age of mobility” of the fin de siècle. The compression of space created by communication and transportation, the speed of train travel, the constant flow of information through the media, the frenetic pace of urban life, mass migration, social mobility, and cultural adaptability—all these were perceived as mutually sustaining elements of a single phenomenon. Jewish nomadism and mobility became the central tenet of pseudoscientific theories that purported to decipher the firm connection of the Jews and Judaism to the modern era in all its aspects—cultural, economic, social, and technological.24 Alongside the rise of the Jews as “familiar strangers” within German society, the image of the elastic Jew was also established. This image expressed fear of the Verjudung (Judaisation) of German society, but in the same breath created a new tactic for alienating Jews; paradoxically, it was precisely the Jew’s familiarity that came to symbolise his continuing foreignness. Accordingly, it was the acculturated rather than the traditional Jew who was seen as evidence of the authentic and foreign character of the Jew. A leading figure in the Bayreuth Circle (Bayreuther Kreis), Houston Stewart Chamberlain, expressed fear about Jews successfully infiltrating German society and culture. The “phenomenal elasticity” (phänomenale Elasticität) of the Jews, Chamberlain claimed, was based on their unique willpower, which enabled them to quickly transition between professions as radically opposed as soap making and writing poetry.25 Chamberlain’s views of the Jews served as a central source for the young Austrian-Jewish philosopher Otto Weininger in his 1903 book Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character), although, above all others, he cited Wagner, whom he idolised and whose music he admired.26 Weininger thought modern Viennese culture was stamped with the dual marks of femininity and Judaism. As part of his critique of the ostentation, decorativeness, eroticism, aesthetic blurring, and the dissolution of borders between the self and the world that characterised fin-de-siècle Viennese culture, Weininger found mobility to be the defining characteristic of Judaism and femininity: the fluid borders of identity enabling the creation of a mask or parodic mimicry of true fixed identity. According to Weininger, Kundry, “the Wandering Jewess” and the main figure in Wagner’s opera Parsifal, was the character who represented the optimal incorporation of the essence of both the Jew and the woman: I might also invoke Wagner [. . .] the shadow of Ahasverus unmistakeably also falls on his Kundry, the most profound female figure in all art

Between Eternity and Wandering  399 [. . .] The congruency between Judaism and femininity seems to become total, as soon as one reflects upon the Jews’ infinite capacity for change [. . .] the “agility” of the Jewish mind, the lack of any deeply rooted and original convictions—Do these things not prove that both the Jews and women are nothing and therefore can become anything?27 Referring to Chamberlain’s writings, Weininger argues that Jewish mobility is also expressed in the fact that “long before the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem, [the Jews] had chosen the Diaspora in part as their natural life, the life of creeping forth over the whole earth.”28 The anti-Jewish, pseudo-scientific literature of the fin de siècle repeatedly presents the Jews as a Semitic desert tribe for which dispersion was no anomaly, but rather their natural state. Among the most prominent instances of this was the 1911 publication of the sociologist Werner Sombart’s Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (The Jews and Economic Life). As one of the primary formative influences on the discipline of Nationalökonomie (national economy)—which strived for a comprehensive cultural critique—Sombart attempted to explain the cultural and sociological connection between Judaism and all the phenomena of modernity, including urbanism, liberalism, and, in particular, capitalism. Sombart saw in nomadism both an archetype (Urbild) or ancestor of capitalism (Vater des Kapitalismus) and the origin of three interlocking Jewish and modern traits: mobility, abstract intellectualism, and purposeful thinking.29 Sombart wrote that Jewish Beweglichkeit (mobility) was a product not only of desert life, but also of repeated exile, as manifested in the legend of the Wandering Jew: This nation, rushing from place to place throughout the centuries, whose fate had found its touching expression in the Legend of the Eternal Jew, would never have attained a feeling of earthliness due to its eternal restlessness, even if it had tried, in the interval between two persecutions, to grow roots in the soil.30 According to Sombart, the Jews, as a “restless itinerant Bedouin tribe” (ruhelos umherirrender Beduinenstamm) began “their eternal wandering” (ihrem ewigen Wandern) as early as their invasion of the Land of Canaan.31 Exile and detachment from the land are the natural state of the Jews; even settling down was nothing more than an episode in a series of exiles. For Sombart, survival in the desert was tied up with a mobile personality—rapid reactions, rationality, and purposefulness of thought that could shift like the desert sand, in keeping with the necessities of survival.32 Two contradictory yet complementary elements coexist in the nomadic Jew: eternality—the achievement of the goal to which the Jews aspire through tenacious willpower, making them “purposeful, persistent, rigid, stubborn people” (zielstrebigen, ausdauernden, zähen, hartnäckigen Menschen); nomadism—a

400  Tuvia Singer quick understanding, a “versatility of mind” (Versatilität des Geistes); and “an agitated, active spirit” (der Aufgeregtheit handelnde Geist).33 The meaning folded into this cultural flexibility included not only the capacity to impersonate and the ability to infiltrate, but also a stubborn return, following this metamorphosis, “back to the initial form” (widerstandsfähig). Paradoxically, the process of Jewish mimicry was seen as an expression of the authentic Jewish traditional-nomadic character, while “religious conversion” (Austrittsbewegung) was understood as a tactic for preserving identity. In this way, the Jewish nation combined the eternal ­element—stubborn rebellion and opposition—with the nomadic element— surrender and adaptation to the circumstances.34 To conclude, in the elasticity discourse, “Land” is not associated with a specific nation or culture, but encompasses the overall concept within a sociological framework that contrasts the peasant with nomadic societies. As shown in Jesper Svartvik’s article in this volume, Christian theology in antiquity used the destruction of the Temple and the Jewish exile from Jerusalem and Judea as an anti-Jewish propaganda tool. The exile was portrayed in the writings of the Church Fathers as a punishment for killing Jesus and rejecting Christianity, simultaneously serving as a testimony to Christian truth. The Ahaßverus chapbook presents that same concept of punishment and testimony, taking the punishment of exile to its extreme, i.e. eternal wandering. I would argue that the ancient image of the Jews as detached from their land has gone through a process of generalisation in modern times, particularly during the nineteenth century. While in antiquity, exile was depicted as a punishment, and the land from which the exile took place was identified with the Land of Israel, in the detachment discourse, the exile, more than being a punishment, is the sin itself. In this discourse, the land from which the Jews are detached is not only the Land of Israel, but also the German soil (substantively and metaphorically). During the second half of the nineteenth century, in the context of the elasticity discourse, the land from which the Jews were detached was generalised and was no longer primarily identified with a specific geographical location or national culture.

The Legend of the Wandering Jew: From Medieval Times to the Modern Era In a complex and integrated fashion, Sombart simultaneously used two contradictory motifs—eternality and wandering—with the wandering motif being central and the eternality motif being complementary. This was not unique; it can also be found in the writings of other fin-de-siècle writers, such as Chamberlain and Weininger. Generally speaking, over the course of the nineteenth century, the emphasis of anti-Jewish uses of the Wandering Jew image gradually transitioned from the eternality motif to the wandering motif. The tension between the static nature of eternality and the mobility of wandering had been an integral part of the development of the legend of the

Between Eternity and Wandering  401 Wandering Jew in the Middle Ages, and, as such, the complex nineteenthcentury use of the motifs simply continued earlier trends of alternating back and forth between the two. According to the Ahaßverus chapbook (1602), Jesus punished Ahasuerus with the words: “I will stand and rest, but you shall walk” (Ich wil stehen vnd ruhen, du aber solt gehen).35 However, in the telling of Roger of Wendover—a thirteenth-century English chronicler whom the author of Ahaßverus drew upon—Jesus said: “I am going, and you will wait till I return.”36 This shows that the Ahaßverus chapbook completely inverted the key sentence spoken by Jesus, transforming the punishment from eternality to wandering. In the vast majority of pre-Ahaßverus versions, the punishment is not wandering, but instead, eternal life without the possibility of redemption—which can only come after death. Insofar as wandering is mentioned at all, it is not considered a punishment, but rather the lot of a permanent pilgrim or missionary who lives an eternal life, simply wandering from place to place. In early versions of the legend, originating in Jerusalem or among returning pilgrims, the punishment was eternal imprisonment in a small room or a secret dungeon awaiting, tormented and restless, the second coming of Jesus.37 The transition from eternality to wandering in the German tradition of the legend was only the first in a series of transformations. For instance, the thirty-first printing of the Volksbuch in1694 coined the term Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), in contrast to the Wandering Jew in English and in the Romance languages that had influenced the English term—for example, the French Le Juif errant.38 The transition in nineteenth-century anti-Jewish discourse from eternality to wandering is, therefore, in keeping with the long tradition of the legend’s ambivalent development between the two poles. Moreover, Sombart’s (and others’) complex use of the two motifs simultaneously echoes the manner in which, in earlier and medieval versions of the legend, stasis results in mobility, while mobility brings stasis; eternality awakens restlessness, while endless wandering encompasses the static situation of eternal life without redemption. Alongside the continuous tradition of dual—contradictory and complementary—uses of the eternality and wandering motifs stretching ­ from the medieval to the modern era, the nineteenth century also saw a significant interpretive shift; while in the Ahaßverus chapbook and earlier editions, wandering and eternality are described as punishments for the sin against Jesus, by the nineteenth century, they themselves had become the sin. This shift reflects the flattening of the anti-Jewish discourse of the Wandering Jew figure—from a reverberating tension between positive and negative and between sin and redemption, to an image of sin and negativity alone. In Roger of Wendover’s version, the central figure is not a Jew, but a Roman soldier named Cartaphilus, who struck Jesus’ back and ordered him to make haste to the Crucifixion. Cartaphilus’ character is based on the New Testament account and combines the figures of Malchus, the slave of the high priest who struck Jesus during his interrogation (John 18:4–10, 20–22),

402  Tuvia Singer and John, the beloved disciple of Jesus, who according to legend (based on ­Matthew 16:28 and John 21:20–23), granted him eternal life. Like Cartaphilus (meaning dearly beloved), John is described as a withdrawn ascetic who, while awaiting Jesus’ return, lives as a wandering missionary in the East. As such, this amalgamation expresses an internal tension in the figure of Cartaphilus between the positive (John) and the negative (Malchus). Various medieval versions of the legend include different degrees of each, but most use both simultaneously. The versions in the Mediterranean countries provide clear examples: Cartaphilus became Buttadeus (Latin), Boutedieu (French) and Botadeo (Italian), all meaning “God-beater,” which in turn became Votadeo (devoted to God), translated into Spanish as Juan Espera en Dios (John waiting for God).39 As opposed to some Latin versions in which the figure appears as a pleasure-seeking hedonist, Roger of Wendover and the Ahaßverus chapbook portray him as a stoic and solemn character, shocked by false oaths and curses, and as a generous and ascetic personality devoted to the missionary task of bearing living witness to Christian belief. Repentant as he may be, the Ahaßverus chapbook nevertheless emphasises the Wandering Jew’s lack of faith and his violent behaviour toward Jesus.40 The legend’s inherent tension between the positive and the negative highlights the irony of Gutzkow’s argument that the positive representation of Ahasuerus by Jewish authors was unfaithful to the Christian origins of the legend; Gutzkow’s singular focus on the negative aspects of the legend was itself a distortion.41 Gutzkow, as one of the first nineteenth-century writers to employ the figure of the Wandering Jew as a way of confronting the German Jewry, makes for an interesting case study on the “secularisation” of the legend in nineteenth-century anti-Jewish discourse, one which gets at the roots of questions about both the continuity and the break between modern and medieval anti-Jewish discourses. I will limit myself to several questions and considerations, all of which require ongoing comprehensive research. On Ahasuerus’ sin, Gutzkow writes: Ahasuerus’ crime was the basest lack of love. He committed his crime not as a Jew, but as an egoist and opportunist who values things based on their success and who shouted scornful jokes at Christ [. . .] O, and it was not for not being Christians that the Jews were cursed to roam the earth, but rather it was because of their lack of the moral, noble, beautiful, human stirring of emotion, because they lacked love, and because they mocked, with disdainful wisecracking particularism, the misfortune and committed a crime (not against Christianity, but) against humanity!42 To what degree is Gutzkow’s hostile rhetorical claim that Ahasuerus had sinned not against God, but against humanity, actually distinct from a

Between Eternity and Wandering  403 contemporary Christian religious discourse made relevant to the modern period? Is Gutzkow’s implication that Jesus represents all of humanity a secular contention or a religious one? Gutzkow claimed that emancipation was not a religious or metaphysical question, but rather a moral and political one.43 Yet, he writes that “Christ does not desire divine worship for Himself, but only recognition of humanity and loving devotion, which even if the Jews were emancipated would not seize hold of them, unless they emancipated themselves.”44 In line with the argument that Wagner and the Bayreuth Circle in general would later develop, Gutzkow saw emancipation primarily as an individual psychological journey of self-release that Jews had to undergo, and scorned Jews who understood the question of emancipation as nothing more than a political matter of equal rights. Can either this lack of distinction between the ethical and the political or the necessity of a psychological journey and an internal transformation as a condition for emancipation actually be part of a secular worldview? Broad swathes of the anti-Jewish discourse are awash with religious language and symbols. Should a discourse that attests to its own a-religiosity, but nonetheless utilises the religious legend of the “Wandering Jew” and the rhetoric of “sin” and “redemption,” be considered a secular discourse? On the implications of the pseudoscientific use of the legend, the historian George Mosse wrote that “an anti-Jewish image rooted in religion was secularised and given new credence by means of a pseudo-scientific environmentalism.”45 Mosse is correct, insofar as there is no use of the religious terminology of “sin” and “redemption” in Sombart’s writings; to take one example, he exclusively uses the legend of the Wandering Jew to illustrate sociological arguments. Yet, it is difficult to disregard the wider context of secular discourse within a broader, protracted anti-Jewish discourse in which similar claims were made—albeit, in an undeniably non-secular framework. For example, the claim of Jewish elasticity is also present in the work of Chamberlain and Weininger; in fact, its roots can be traced to the Ahaßverus chapbook itself, where Ahasuerus is described as a man able to speak the Saxon dialect—or any other language, for that matter— like a native.46This is not to say, of course, that the argument about Jewish elasticity is a religious one, but it is difficult to ignore the religious context in which it is rooted. Therefore, we may find that it is reasonable to dis­ tinguish between the terms “secular” and “secularised.” The Wandering Jew figure in nineteenth-century anti-Jewish discourse was not “secular” but “secularised”—a term that incorporates a religious point of departure, but, unlike “secular,” describes a process, rather than a static situation. Secularisation as a process of language loss is an attempt to produce a new language, which, lacking any other option and without any other vocabulary to turn to, reincorporates the religious language from which it is being extricated and within which it is trapped.

404  Tuvia Singer

Notes 1. For the full Schudt citation, see Mona Körte, Die Uneinholbarkeit des Verfolgten: Der ewige Jude in der literarischen Phantastik (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2000), 32. 2. Johann David Michaelis, “Arguments against Dohm (1782),” trans. L. Sachs, in The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, ed. Paul R. MendesFlohr and Jehuda Reinharz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 42–44. 3. Karl Gutzkow, Vermittelungen, Kritiken und Charakteristiken (Leipzig: J. J. Weber, 1842), 175: “Die Ahasversage ist eine christliche, keine jüdische. Soll sie ächt und rein bleiben, so muß sie es als christliche oder man läßt sie, als Ausgeburt sinistrer Zeiten, gänzlich fallen.” All translations from German are mine, unless otherwise indicated. For more about Gutzkow and Ahasuerus, see Alfred D. Low, Jews in the Eyes of the Germans: From the Enlightenment to Imperial Germany (Philadelphia: ISHI, 1979), 260–68; Jonathan Skolnik, Jewish Pasts, German Fictions: History, Memory, and Minority Culture in Germany, 1824–1955 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 33–34. 4. Gutzkow, Vermittelungen, 156–57: “Ich frage aber, ist Ahasvers Verbrechen nur eines gegen das Christenthum? [. . .] in ihr liegt die Möglichkeit eines modernen Ahasver.” Emphasis in the original. 5. Gutzkow, Vermittelungen, 165–66: “eine lebendige Leiche, ein Todter, der noch nicht gestorben ist.” 6. Gutzkow, Vermittelungen, 157–61. 7. Steven E. Ascheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 62–67; Jefferson S. Chase, Inciting Laughter: The Development of “Jewish Humor” in 19th Century German Culture (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2000), 108–12. 8. Cruciger, “Neueste Wanderungen, Umtriebe und Abenteuer des Ewigen Juden unter den Namen Börne, Heine, Saphir u.a.,” in Ahasvers Spur: Dichtungen und Dokumente vom “Ewigen Juden,” ed. Mona Körte and Robert Stockhammer (Leipzig: Reclam, 1995), 176. 9. The definition of “unheimlich” is taken from a nineteenth-century German dictionary: Joachim Heinrich Campe, Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache, vol. 5 (Braunschweig: Schulbuchhandlung, 1811), 171. The translation of unheimlich as “uncanny”—with all its theoretical and psychological implications outlined in Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay Das Unheimliche—should be used carefully in nineteenth-century texts, as it risks falling into anachronism. 10. Richard Wagner, Das Judenthum in der Musik (Leipzig: J. J. Weber, 1869), 15. 11. Ruth HaCohen, The Music Libel against Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 246–48. 12. Wagner, Judenthum, 18–19. 13. Ibid., 15: “stand aber außerhalb einer solchen Gemeinsamkeit, einsam mit seinem Jehova in einem zersplitterten, bodenlosen Volksstamme.” 14. Wagner, Judenthum, 32: “Noch einen Juden haben wir zu nennen, der unter uns als Schriftsteller auftrat. Aus seiner Sonderstellung als Jude trat er Erlösung suchend unter uns: er fand sie nicht und mußte sich bewußt werden, daß er sie nur mit auch unsrer Erlösung zu wahrhaften Menschen finden können würde. Gemeinschaftlich mit uns Mensch werden, heißt für den Juden aber zu allernächst so viel als: aufhören, Jude zu sein. Börne hatte dies erfüllt. Aber gerade Börne lehrt auch, wie diese Erlösung nicht in Behagen und gleichgültig kalter Bequemlichkeit erreicht werden kann, sondern daß sie, wie uns, Schweiß, Noth, Aengste und Fülle des Leidens und Schmerzes kostet. Nehmt rücksichtslos an diesem, durch Selbstvernichtung wiedergebärenden Erlösungswerke theil, so sind wir einig und ununterschieden! Aber bedenkt, daß nur Eines eure Erlösung

Between Eternity and Wandering  405 von dem auf euch lastenden Fluche sein kann: die Erlösung ­Ahasvers,—der Untergang!” Emphasis in the original. 15. Dieter Borchmeyer, Drama and the World of Richard Wagner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 79–82. 16. On the Flying Dutchman as the symbol of modern social crisis, see Andrew Cusack, The Wanderer in 19th-Century German Literature: Intellectual History and Cultural Criticism (New York: Camden House, 2008), 92–94, 133–34. On The Flying Dutchman as dealing with the struggles of the modern artist, see Frank Halbach, Ahasvers Erlösung: Der Mythos vom Ewigen Juden im Opernlibretto des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Utz, 2009), 126, 130–31. Borchmeyer provides both explanations, see Borchmeyer, Drama, 96. 17. Borchmeyer and Halbach suggest the motifs of the Wandering Jew’s redemption and death as well as the Romantic adaptation of these motifs as the reason and the context for the use of the figure in an article concerning the redemption and (metaphoric) death of the Jew, see Borchmeyer, Drama, 93, 96–100; Halbach, Ahasvers, 126, 142. This explanation appears incomplete to me, as it grants insufficient weight to the motif of sin, which is opposite and complementary to redemption in “Judaism in Musik.” I would argue that Wagner employs the Wandering Jew not only in the framework of redemption, but also in the context of sin, which, for Wagner, meant foreignness and alienation. 18. Wagner, Judenthum, 25: “alle Unfähigkeit desselben, außerhalb unseres Bodens stehend, dennoch auf diesem Boden mit uns zu verkehren.” 19. On the problematic translation of Untergang as “destruction,” see Halbach, Ahasvers, 118–20; Borchmeyer, Drama, 99. 20. Arthur Schopenhauer, “Ahasver und die Winkelnation,” in Ahasvers Spur: Dichtungen und Dokumente vom “Ewigen Juden,” ed. Mona Körte and Robert Stockhammer (Leipzig: Reclam, 1995), 189–91: “Der ewige Jude Ahasverus ist nichts Anderes, als die Personifikation des ganzen jüdischen Volks. Weil er an dem Heiland und Welterlöser schwer gefrevelt hat, soll er von dem Erdenleben und seiner Last nie erlöst werden und dabei heimathlos in der Fremde umherirren [. . .] So ist denn noch heute diese gens extorris, dieser Johann ohne Land unter den Völkern, auf dem ganzen Erdboden zu finden, nirgends zu Hause und nirgends fremd, behauptet dabei mit beispielloser Hartnäckigkeit seine Nationalität [. . .] Das Vaterland des Juden sind die übrigen Juden [. . .] und keine Gemeinschaft auf Erden hält so fest zusammen, wie diese [. . .] sie sind und bleiben ein fremdes, orientalisches Volk, müssen daher stets nur als ansässige Fremde gelten.” Emphasis in the original. 21. Schopenhauer, “Ahasver,” 189. 22. Schopenhauer, Parerga, 264; Schopenhauer, “Ahasver,” 191: “bald darauf das Gespenst ganz gebannt, der Ahasverus begraben seyn, und das auserwählte Volk wird selbst nicht wissen, wo es geblieben ist.” 23. See Adolf D. Leschnitzer, “The Wandering Jew: The Alienation of the Jewish Image in Christian Consciousness,” in The Wandering Jew: Essays in the Interpretation of a Christian Legend, ed. Galit Hasan-Rokem and Alan Dundes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 227–35, which surveys the changes that have accompanied the secularisation of the eternality motif in the modern era. The traditional Christian interpretation justified Jewish ­eternality— whether to reinforce the Jew as witness (the Catholic interpretation) or to indicate his punishment (the Protestant interpretation)—and saw it as part of the natural order. However, in light of new, secular nineteenth-century perceptions of the birth and death of nations, Jewish eternality was seen as unnatural, alien, and threatening. 24. On the failure of the full integration of the Jews in Germany and their distinct “subculture,” see Shulamit Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 202–23.

406  Tuvia Singer A comprehensive study on the anti-Jewish discourse in fin de siècle that identified Judaism with Modernity, emphasising their alleged common features of mobility and nomadism, is beyond the scope of this article and will be published separately. 25. Huston Stewart Chamberlain, Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1912; originally published in 1899), 287–88, 406, 690–91; Huston Stewart Chamberlain, “‘Katholische’ Universitäten,” Die Fackel 92, no. 1 (1902): 1–32 (here 24). 26. Chandak Sengoopta, Otto Weininger: Sex, Science, and Self in Imperial Vienna (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 14–15, 17, 38. 27. Otto Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter: Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1905), 435–36: “Auch darf ich hier wohl auf Wagner mich berufen [. . .] auch über seiner Kundry, der tiefsten Frauengestalt der Kunst, schwebt unverkennbar der Schatten des Ahasverus [. . .] Die Kongruenz zwischen Judentum und Weiblichkeit scheint eine völlige zu werden, sobald auf die unendliche Veränderungsfähigkeit des Juden zu reflektieren begonnen wird [. . .] die ‘Beweglichkeit’ des jüdischen Geistes, der Mangel an einer wurzelhaften und ursprünglichen Gesinnung—lassen sie nicht von den Juden wie von den Frauen es gelten: sie sind nichts, und können eben darum alles werden?” Emphasis in the original. 28. Weininger, Sex, 281; Weininger, Geschlecht, 424: “längst vor der Zerstörung des jerusalemitischen Tempels zum Teile die Diaspora als ihr natürliches Leben, das Leben des über die ganze Erde fortkriechenden [gewählt haben].” 29. Werner Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1911), 426. On Sombart and Nationalökonomie, see Nicolas Berg, “Ökonomie und Kollektivität: Fragen zur Metaphorisierung von Judentum in nationalökonomischen Schriften um 1900,” in Jüdische Geschichte als Allgemeine Geschichte, ed. Raphael Gross and Yfaat Weiss (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 49–75. 30. Sombart, Juden, 414: “Dies durch die Jahrhunderte von Ort zu Ort gehetzte Volk, dessen Schicksal in der Sage vom ewigen Juden seinen ergreifenden Ausdruck gefunden hat, wäre schon der ewigen Unruhe wegen niemals zu einem Gefühl der Bodenständigkeit gekommen, selbst wenn es in den Zwischenpausen zwischen zwei Verfolgungen versucht hätte, in der Scholle zu wurzeln.” 31. Sombart, Juden, 405. 32. Ibid., 421. 33. Ibid., 321–27. 34. Ibid., 354–58. 35. “Kurtze Beschreibung und Erzehlung von einem Juden mit Namen Ahaßverus,” in Ahasvers Spur: Dichtungen und Dokumente vom “Ewigen Juden,” ed. Mona Körte and Robert Stockhammer (Leipzig: Reclam, 1995), 11. Emphasis in the original. 36. Roger of Wendover, Flowers of History, vol. 2, trans. John Allen Giles (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1849), 513; Roger of Wendover, Rogeri de Wendower Chronica, sive Flores Historiarum, vol. 4, ed. Henry Octavius Coxe (Londinium: Sumptibus Societatis, 1842), 177: “‘Ego,’ inquit, ‘vado, et tu exspectabis donec redeam.’” 37. George L. Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew (Providence: Brown University Press, 1965), 11–37, 47–48. 38. Körte, Uneinholbarkeit des Verfolgten, 31–32. 39. Anderson, Legend, 11–15, 19, 21–22, 28. 40. On aspects of the duality of the positive and the negative in the punishment of eternality, see Rafael Edelmann, “Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew—Origin and Background,” in The Wandering Jew: Essays in the Interpretation of a Christian Legend, ed. Galit Hasan-Rokem and Alan Dundes (Bloomington: Indiana

Between Eternity and Wandering  407 University Press, 1986), 1–10 (here 7). On Ahasuerus as a mirror image of Jesus and on his wandering as both opposition to and a reflection of Jesus’ via dolorosa, see Galit Hasan-Rokem, “Homo Viator et Narrans—Medieval Jewish Voices in the European Narrative of the Wandering Jew,” in Europäische Ethnologie und Folklore im internationalen Kontext: Festschrift für Leander Petzoldt zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Ingo Schneider (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999), 93–102 (here 95). 41. On a possible Jewish contribution to the formation of the legend, see Galit Hasan-Rokem, “The Wandering Jew—a Jewish Perspective,” in Proceedings of the Ninth World Congress of Jewish Studies, Division D, Vol. 2 (Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies, 1986), 189–96. On exile, wandering, and journeys in medieval and modern Jewish thought and literature, see Sidra ­DeKoven-Ezrahi, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 42. Gutzkow, Vermittelungen, 157: “Ahasver’s Verbrechen war die niedrigste Lieblosigkeit. Was er verbrach, verbrach er nicht als Jude, sondern als Egoist und Eventualitätsmensch, der die Dinge nach dem Erfolge taxirt und Christus mit höhnischem Witze nachrief [. . .] O und nicht darum wurden die Juden verdammt, zu irren auf der Erde, weil sie nicht Christen waren, sondern weil ihnen die moralische, edle, schöne, menschliche Regung des Gefühls, weil ihnen die Liebe abging und sie im schnöden, witzelnden Partikularismus sich über das Unglück moquirten und ein Verbrechen (nicht am Christenthum, sondern) an der Menschheit begingen!” 43. Gutzkow, Vermittelungen, 177. On this issue, Gutzkow apparently differs from the political philosopher Constantin Frantz, who used the legend of the Wandering Jew in his religious argument against Jewish participation in the future German Christian state, see Constantin Frantz, Ahasverus oder die Judenfrage (Berlin: W. Hermes, 1844). 44. Gutzkow, Vermittelungen, 161: “Christus verlangt keine göttliche Verehrung von ihm, sondern nur Anerkennung des Menschlichen und jene liebevolle Hingebung, die, selbst wenn die Juden emanzipirt würden, sie nicht überkommen dürfte, es sei denn, daß sie sich selbst emanzipirten.” 45. George Lachmann Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 116. 46. Körte, “Beschreibung und Erzehlung,” 12.

Part X

Medieval Roots and Anti-Judaism

26 Europe, Christianity, Violence, and Jew-Hatred Victor Seidler

Christian Europe What did it mean that Europe was to be claimed as “Christian Europe” and as a space in which Christians could only truly belong? It was because Jews had been given a definite part to play in the Christian imaginaries of the future second coming of Christ that they were to be protected by the authorities. They were to be preserved as a community so that they could act as witnesses of the singular truth of the Christian revelation. In his article “The Role of Medieval Northern Europe in Generating Virulent Anti-Jewish Imagery” in this volume, Robert Chazan writes: “As racial antisemitism gained strength across late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, its spokesmen and adherents claimed that they were offering a thoroughly innovative explanation of an age-old and widespread phenomenon. The allegedly ubiquitous phenomenon was universal fear and hatred of the Jews, which, according to antisemites, was documented across the globe from antiquity to modernity” (p. 97). As Chazan explains, “According to the antisemites, prior grappling with the ‘Jewish problem’ had misperceived and misguidedly explained fear and hatred of Jews as rooted in their religious distinctiveness. This widely shared view was—according to the antisemites—utterly misleading. For the antisemites, the ‘Jewish problem’ was clarified by the newly emerging and exciting science of racial anthropology” (p. 97). But as Chazan notes, “In the wake of the genocidal destruction of European Jewry triggered by antisemitic thinking and resultant governmental actions in Nazi Germany and Nazi-controlled areas of Europe, the tables were turned, and the focus of investigation and analysis has been reversed” (p. 97). Rather than thinking in the universal terms of racial science, it became important to focus upon why these terrible events were taking place in Europe and what this showed about the complex interrelated sources of the modern European phenomenon of antisemitism. This was also a tacit challenge to the secular terms of the social sciences that had often assumed that European modernities would be accompanied by a turn away from religion towards science, from faith towards reason in linear historical terms. As the Italian Marxist theorist

412  Victor Seidler Antonio Gramsci recognised, implicit in the human sciences was often a tacit notion of historical progress that saw earlier forms of religiously based racism and antisemitism somehow replaced by these new theoretical forms. It has only been with the return of religion evidenced in the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the later events around 9/11 that social theorists felt a need to engage religious traditions more directly and learn to think across the traditional boundaries of the religious and the secular. There were also attempts in my own work to show how secular visions of European modernities were often framed through secularised visions of Christianity, leaving many of the structures of thought and feeling in place while challenging forms of clerical power.

Making Connections But Chazan also notes that while scholars such as James Parkes in Britain and Jules Isaac, a post-Holocaust voice in France, have been very important in drawing attention to the part that traditional Christian thinking plays in modern antisemitism, “a number of more recent scholars have noted the enormous distance that separates the traditional Christian view of the Jews as an errant religious community responsible for the death of Jesus and the vicious antisemitic imagery of Jews killing Christian youngsters to utilise their blood for ritual purposes and poisoning the wells of Europe in order to spread disease and death among their neighbours” (p. 98). While the traditional imagery may have contributed, the newer medieval scholars have sought sources closer in themes and in time than medieval Europe. Chazan seems to follow Gavin Langmuir in his search for more proximate sources for the modern antisemitic imagery. For my part, I feel uneasy about the distinction Langmuir makes between rational and non-rational and his notion that it was in medieval Christendom that new irrational Christian anti-Jewish imagery evolved into the virulent stereotypes. Langmuir frames it thus: the irrational anti-Jewish imagery involved attributing to Jews behaviours that had never been observed, for example the groundless murder of Christian children in a ritualistic manner.1 Chazan also tends to agree with Langmuir that the emergence and proliferation of radical anti-Jewish imagery in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Western Christendom originated in and originally spread across northern Europe, only slowly making its way southwards into the Mediterranean lands. Jews moved beyond traditional places of settlement under Islamic rule and took risks associated with migration into what would eventually become the new centres of the West. From c. 1000, “What had long been a backward hinterland to the more advanced Mediterranean areas began a slow climb towards what was to become domination of the modern West” (p. 102). While in southern Europe, Jews were a well-established reality, in the north there was no tradition of Jewish settlement and accommodations to Jews and Jewish mores. Rather, as Chazan notes, Jews “were quintessentially Other, both as a separate religious

Violence and Jew-Hatred  413 community and a separate ethnic community” (p. 103). General hostility in northern Europe towards the newcomers resulted in a restricted range of economic activities, meaning largely trade. During the twelfth century as the Church campaigned against what it projected as the Christian sin of usury, a new, lucrative, and problematic economic activity was opened for the Jews.

Authority and Antisemitism Another issue—finance capital domination of the modern West—as Chazan explores it in medieval times in northern Europe might have more contemporary resonance. He notes how it created close ties between Jews and the authorities and also that it is precisely periods of rapid change (e.g., in Northern Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries) “that tend to result in disorienting insecurities and societal polarisation [ . . . which] created a broad environment that fostered the increasingly radical negative imagery of northern-European Jews” (p. 105). It was this imagery that gradually made its way to Mediterranean lands absorbed and disseminated by a number of major medieval Christian thinkers. It was also transmitted through widely known European folklore and influential literary works. The late nineteenth and twentieth centuries were also periods of rapid economic change and transformation as well as massive disorientations, produced through the multiple deaths in the First World War, and, as Chazan notes, “For these later disoriented Europeans, there was an available and rich fund of anti-Jewish images readily at hand, bequeathed to them by their medieval northern European ancestors” (p. 105). There were also images that could make their way into new Islamist movements that had somehow come to identify Jews with the European modernities they sought to break with. Somehow, it was Jews that had become a particular target, not helped by strong feelings of identification with the fate of Palestinians who were deemed to be so unjustly treated with the overwhelming military means of the Israeli army. Young Islamist converts were encouraged to identify with the sufferings of their brothers and sisters, and if they could not fight in the Middle East, they were encouraged to take their own actions in Europe where they were living. Somehow, in the post-9/11 world, it seems as if Jewish populations have become a specific target especially for those militants who identify with the Islamic State. Writing “A Letter from Europe” that was shared on BBC Radio 4, French novelist Lydie Salvayre writes from Paris about the recent attacks in the city on the offices of the magazine Charlie Hebdo and a few days later on the kosher supermarket that together saw the deaths of seventeen people.2 She admits being as perplexed as anyone else about the events of 7 January 2015 and as filled with anxiety and worry. She refuses to think that things will inevitably get worse or that everything will work out well with a bit of love. She is aware that many in France ignored what was happening in the urban suburbs and that many stigmatised the largely Muslim communities living

414  Victor Seidler there. Although people gathered in enormous protests to declare “Je suis Charlie,” what was apparent was that a lethal hatred had taken over our young men, as Salvayre frames it. As she said, it was a hatred that felt new to most of us: a hatred that few individuals are capable of, a hatred that carries terror within it, feeding off a destruction it brings. People were anxious about where the next strike might come but also at some level realised that it was a hatred that the French people must urgently address and think about. We learnt that it was a hatred that was carried by young people who had been born and had grown up in France. They were no different to other young people of their generation except that they had no fear of death. Somehow, they had come to prefer death to the lives they were obliged to live, as unemployed young people in the suburbs. She asks from what kind of forsaken childhood did this hatred emerge—from what kind of neglect, abandonment, and loneliness. How had politicians across Europe, who were only concerned about the short-term continuation of their jobs, succumbed to such blindness? How had these politicians left the suburbs to rot through their own disengagement from the world—from their own irresponsibility? Why had the politicians been so indifferent and cynical about what was emerging as a danger that on some level after 9/11 citizens were well aware of? But also as citizens, what had we pretended to share with these young people? What deceits had we colluded with making these young people feel that they were cared for by other French citizens when we had simply turned our backs on what was going on? The words of the French republic that citizens proudly declared—liberté, egalité, fraternité—seemed to have no connection to the lives these young people were living in a world that had become a vast corporate marketplace in which they felt they had no part to play. How had we left them thinking that we obeyed these noble principles ourselves when they seem to have become empty words given the intensity of social inequalities and the separate world that the political elites in France seem to inhabit? Salvayre asks helpfully, “What irreversible violence had these young people been subjected to for them to feel the need to reproduce it with such cruelty?” The young men declared that their actions were somehow directly proportional to the depth of their faith—they were fanatics capable of sacrificing their lives in the name of faith and capable of sacrificing others’ lives too. Somehow, it reminded her of the terrible deeds that Franco’s soldiers were prepared to do in Republican Spain in the 1930s from which her own family had been forced to flee. This was another form of religious fanaticism that led to terrible deeds of violence against the poor who identified with the aspirations of the Republic. She asks whether the depths of the heart can be educated and whether it is possible to reach these young men and women who have committed themselves to what they have imagined to be a righteous cause that they are willing to sacrifice their lives for. They have learnt that there is a thin boundary separating this world from the next and

Violence and Jew-Hatred  415 that if they die as martyrs for their religious beliefs, they will be welcomed into paradise. She wonders whether the denial of their own barbarity can somehow be educated away and what we understand as the possibilities and limits of education. If people have learnt to live in denial about the inhumanity of their actions and they see the enemy—the journalists at the magazine office or the shoppers assumed to be Jewish in the supermarket—as something that has to be destroyed so that their religion can be liberated, is this also, in part at least, an expression of a new form of antisemitism that has to be traced back through Islamic sources?3 She recalls the French novelist Georges Bernanos, a writer also influential on Simone Weil, who studied after the horrors of the Spanish Civil War the resistance to all knowledge that can be a feature of fanaticism. He lived through the war on the island of Minorca and was struck by how intellectuals refused to see the crimes committed by Franco’s forces with the blessings of the Catholic clergy. He struggled to understand the resistance to knowledge that did not stem from stupidity or from any lack of information, as he had first been tempted to believe. Rather, it was a passion for ignorance, as Jacques Lacan might frame it. It was a way of protecting people against their own moral and intellectual intuitions. Bernanos wondered how you could nurture knowledge in such circumstances of overwhelming denial. In a world that is individualistic and organised through a neoliberal market society we are often concerned not to be disturbed by the Other who can distract us from the tasks of individual success and achievement. People can easily adopt Islamophobic responses thinking that these young people who have been brought up and educated in France somehow do not belong here. Possibly this also feeds a certain contemporary Islamist resentment against Jews—why do they seem to belong when they are Other, while we can make no such claims for ourselves? So it is that the Jews in an Islamist imaginary can both be identified with the French elite and thus targeted in ways that the diffuse French elite cannot be targeted, and at the same time, they are considered to be a vulnerable target because they are also an Other, and, what is more, they are an Other that can be blamed for the sufferings of sisters and brothers in Palestine.

Memories of Violence It is important to explore in detail the different histories through which neighbours have been turned into enemies and also the different situations in relation to mass violence when we think about Western European liberal democracies that gave way to Nazism and Fascism and the situation of countries in Eastern Europe and the Baltic States where the Catholic Church was more significant and where there were different levels of collaboration with Nazi occupying forces. The work of Jan T. Gross in Poland has shown that

416  Victor Seidler the Nazi occupation forces could not be exclusively blamed for the mass violence against the Jews, initially in his crucial study Neigbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community at Jedwabne, Poland.4 It tells, in unbearable detail, of the humiliation, torture, and burning alive of 1,600 Jewish men, women, and children on 10 July 1941. The atrocity was perpetrated by their Polish neighbours who had since June begun to starve out their Jewish neighbours. Jewish men were forced to enact grotesque rituals before they were butchered; women were raped and beheaded, while babies were trampled to death. Finally, more than 1,000 tortured Jews were herded into a barn, drenched with kerosene, and torched. The Poles played raucous music in order to muffle their screams. The massacre at Jedwabne had been preceded by similar atrocities in the surrounding region. At Radziłów, some 1,500 were massacred while 1,200 were murdered in nearby Wąsosz. As Gross records after the liberation of Poland, there was a long period of systematic falsehood and amnesia. The brutal pogroms carried out by Poles at Cracow and Kielce in 1946, during which 600–1,500 Jews were killed,5 were either denied or unmentioned.6 Before long, the German military archive made available films showing Poles in Warsaw cheering and laughing at the spectacle of the last defenders of the ghetto who leapt into the flames rather than surrender. These were not shown in Poland. Crimes against the Jews were supposedly the doing of the Nazi occupier alone. This version of history served the interests both of the communist regime and of Polish nationalism. Of course, there were those heroic individuals who had strived to help Jews and post-war voices seeking to speak the truth, but they were not many and fellow Poles often turned on them in fury. For years, they rejected the careful scholarship of Gross, who has shown in works such as Neighbors (2001), Fear (2006), and Golden Harvest (2012)7 how widespread the trade in Jewish goods and property seized by their former neighbours was. As George Steiner has commented, “After the Middle Ages, Jew-hatred in Germany was sporadic and assimilation seemed plausible. It is in Austria and Poland that antisemitism has been visceral, venomous and, it would appear, ineradicable. The Catholic Church has played a seminar role in this plague. As Gross points out, it is not only in the benighted Polish countryside that priests and bishops breach Jewish deicide and keep alive the blood-libel whereby Jews kidnap and sacrifice Christian children for ritual purposes.”8 February 2015 marked just seventy years since the “liberation” of ­Auschwitz—the Holocaust is recent history. Living in the shadows of the Shoah, European countries still have to come to terms with traumatic histories of mass violence and extermination—the ways they colluded with the Nazi regime and the ways they attacked their own Jewish populations. There are ways that memories can get entangled, and it is possible to argue that the anti-Zionism that has been a strong feature in recent European history—in part encouraged by opposition to the policies of the Israeli government in their struggles with the Palestinians and their claim for a just settlement that would involve a state of their own—has also reflected

Violence and Jew-Hatred  417 difficulties that Europe has had in coming to terms with the painful histories of the Holocaust. The idea that “the Jews are as bad, just look at what they are doing to the Palestinians” is a projection that can somehow make it easier for people to deal with their own historical feelings of guilt and unease. There are also long memories that Jews carry of their violent persecution within a Christian Europe that make it possible for them to feel at some unconscious level that as victims of such terrible violence and mass murder within the Shoah, they could not be perpetrators of violence against the Palestinians. Whatever actions they take are in their own self-defence as it is known that the “Arabs, given a chance, would always want to drive the Israelis into the sea.” We need to take seriously the realities of Jewish vulnerability and insecurity even as we recognise the overwhelming military power they have in the region. We need to be able to understand both sides and not think that good is always on the side of the oppressed and that the Palestinians can do no wrong for the violence against innocent Israeli citizens can somehow be morally justified because they are the oppressed in that particular historical moment. The complex relationships between power and vulnerability is also a theme we can learn from histories of Europe as Milan Žonca explored in his article in this volume on “Jewish-Christian Polemic and Violence in Fourteenth-Century Prague.” By placing the attack in the context of Easter celebrations and its liturgy, Žonca not only helps us think about ways that people are shaped through the everyday liturgies that help to form a particular imagination of the Other. He also shows both the differences between medieval and modern conceptualisations of antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence and also what we can learn from historical reflections. He explores the few surviving sources that carry the memories of what happened in the two communities in the Latin parodic account, Passio Judaeorum Pragensium, on the one hand and the Hebrew elegy of the local rabbi Avigdor Kara, All the Afflictions, on the other. By looking at the textual history of Kara’s elegy, Milan Žonca shows that these polemical motifs were smoothed over in the course of its transmission. The memories of the attack live on in different ways within the different cultural memories that that these accounts help to shape. The communities lived according to their own temporalities and visions of sacred time marked through festivals. At the same time, they were living “together apart” in a predominantly Christian space in which Jews were tolerated as a distinct and separate community. At some level, they had more authority over their affairs, and even if they were restricted in the spaces they could occupy, there was a sense of religious freedom and autonomy that was undermined in some ways when religion was framed as an individual matter of personal belief within modernity. Reflecting upon their pre-modern experience can still help us think about how different communities can live “together apart” within multicultural societies that are hoping that in time, there will be greater levels of integration.

418  Victor Seidler As Christians in Prague were celebrating Easter, the priest carried the host through streets where Jews were living, and this could have been regarded as a kind of provocation. Somehow in the Christian narrative, Jews were positioned both as persecutors and as persecuted. Christians might have wondered why Jews were living in Christian lands and heard stories of how Jews celebrate Passover and rumours of how they need the blood of Christian children to make Passover matzah—unleavened bread. These narratives are remembered and it is as if they are being re-enacted on the streets of Prague and the story insists that we already know what Jews are like and what we can expect from them. There is a vision of cyclical time in which people are constantly living in a Christian present whose terms are set by the stories of the birth, life, and death of Jesus. At times of social and economic crisis, the Christian community might question why the Jews were to be protected by religious and political authorities and whether they could be benefiting at the cost of Christians who alone could claim that they belonged in these spaces. There was a feeling that Jews were moving into streets that Christians should rightly occupy and that they had no business being there in these spaces. Kara insists that it was the Jews who were being sacrificed when they were burnt alive in the synagogue—they were the true sacrificial victims. They were suffering and afflicted with thorns—thus alluding to the thorns of Christ and claiming that it was the Jews in Prague who were the victims of murderous Christian violence. They had done no wrong yet they were being made to suffer so many deaths. It was the Jews who had been stripped naked and tacitly speaking back to a dominant Christian narrative—it was the Jews that were being mocked by their Christian neighbours. It was the passion of the Jews of Prague who were suffering at Easter time. In this Jewish narrative it was the Jews who were being afflicted and not allowed to live in peace with their neighbours. The Jews were living in spaces of their own and they rejected the images that a dominant Christian narrative was framing of them as Christ-killers or as needing the blood of Christian children. But these anti-Jewish tropes were available with Catholic theologies and they circulated widely within the spaces of “Christian Europe.” Anti-Jewish violence could spread as priests took it on themselves to spread these stories that framed Jews as cruel and doing the devil’s work. Often, they looked to gospel stories as sources that could so easily be read in ways that made antiJewish violence legitimate.9 These narratives help shape Christian experiences of themselves and their relationships with Jews in ways that make us rethink their interrelation with social and economic crisis as triggers of mass violence against the Jews. We can so easily be misled by an orthodox Marxism that talks too rigidly about relations between base and superstructure that were supposed to illuminate longer-term transitions from a feudal to a capitalist mode of production. There are ways that liturgies are material in that they help to shape lives

Violence and Jew-Hatred  419 and relationships to bodies, sexualities, and emotional responses towards despised Others. Jews remain as potential targets of Christian anger, anxiety, and frustration, and they exist as the racialised Other within Christian communities in which they are condemned for having no land of their own but eternally punished for their deed against Jesus to wander eternally as strangers in a foreign land. Preaching is a material practice with consequences for how people behave towards themselves and others and how they grasp their responsibilities in this world as a preparation for an eternity in another world—be they condemned to an eternity in hell or saved through their good deeds. In Seville towards the end of the fourteenth century, twenty-five synagogues were razed to the ground as a result of anti-Jewish violence and a few generations later Jews were to be expelled from Spain and the country could be declared as “free” of its Jewish population. Muslims were also to be expelled as Spain was to declare itself a Christian country through the force of a militarised Christianity that was to recapture Christian lands. I had not realised when I was growing up in post-war Britain that England was the first country to expel its Jewish population. This was a history that I was not taught in school where I was instead taught to recite by heart a long list of kings and queens. The Jews were not to return until Cromwell’s time and then they were to exist as a tolerated minority. But I was growing up within the terms of an Enlightenment modernity within the shadows of the Shoah, and I was hardly going to question the kind of history that we were being taught at school as “our history.” I did not think about who was included in this history and on whose terms. I did not think about who had the power to write these histories and who was to be hidden from history until the 1970s when women, gays, and lesbians reclaimed space and time for themselves and learnt how to write themselves into these histories. There were images that I had absorbed—but could hardly speak about—of German soldiers tormenting Jews who they had stopped in the streets: they were laughing as a soldier was cutting off the elderly Jew’s beard. But how were these images also to be written into history—whose national story did these images belong to? It was not until the 1990s that serious consideration was given to how the Holocaust—the Shoah—could be taught in schools, and I wonder what difference it would have made to me if I had understood the journeys that my own family had been obliged to make as Jewish refugees from Nazi-controlled Europe. Jews had been burned alive in a synagogue in medieval Prague and they were to be burned again in synagogues across Nazi-controlled Europe often with the active co-operation of church-going Christians. We might think about the social and economic causes of this Jew-hatred and anti-Jewish violence in the fraught settlement after the First World War and the uncertainties and fears sparked by the Great Depression, but we need also to rethink distinctions we have been encouraged to make between the “material”

420  Victor Seidler and the “ideal”—between material factors that are somehow assumed to be deeper and more entrenched and ideologies that are somehow, at least within orthodox Marxism, assumed to be factors that need to be explained. Of course, we have to be careful to define particular historical and cultural conjunctions and how different factors come together to create a particular eruption of mass violence. But rather than assume that antisemitism exists as “the longest hatred,” as Robert Wistrich frames it, we need to engage the echoes of a Christian anti-Judaism and its formative power when it is taught to children in the catechism. Even if it is not taught so explicitly as it was before the Second Vatican Council and the publication of Nostra Aetate, there are ways it is still conveyed through the teaching of the gospels that have not been radically revised and more subtly in relationships to sinful bodies and ideas of “Carnal Israel.”10 However, this also means questioning a distinction often made between symbolic and real forms of violence as if they can be neatly separated from each other. The teaching of contempt for the Jews and its long history call for a much more nuanced understanding of the interrelation between different forms of violence and the ways that abusive thoughts in which you might show contempt for the weakness of others can lead to violent behaviours that you do not really understand yourself. It has taken time for schools to recognise how bullying behaviours can leave their marks years later. A man might feel haunted by having bullied a boy at school and knowingly made his life a misery. Rather than put it in his past, he might find it impossible to do so without seeking the person out and somehow asking for forgiveness for what he has done. I recently watched a TV programme that followed such a meeting and showed how both men had been haunted in different ways by their childhood experience. It was a telling challenge to a liberal moral culture that too readily assumes that we can put the past behind us. But if this is something we can learn about becoming human, it is also something we need to learn about cultural memories and histories. It is striking how the histories of the Crusade and the mass violence they brought in their wake still echo as part of the lived present within the Middle East. Cultures learn to carry their histories in different ways and often it is those who have been victorious that find it easier to forget or insist on telling the histories in their own terms as if their victory somehow proves the moral integrity of their own values. As Simone Weil explores, this is very much part of the legacy of Roman power and greatness that taught that victory in battle somehow affirms the strength of your moral values. We still learn to admire power as I was reminded when my son Daniel came back in his first year in a Jewish school proudly carrying a model of himself as Caesar—showing a certain continuity across generations of Roman ideals of power. Caesar was a person who I also learnt to admire in school—learning to identify with the “victors,” while it was the Anglo-Saxons that had been defeated. They were regarded as “primitive,” and so our connection with them was disavowed—at some

Violence and Jew-Hatred  421 level generating surely its own feelings of guilt and uncertainty—as we learnt to identify with the victorious Romans. There was also a way that Christianity was to sanctify in its own time the ideal of a Holy Roman Empire in ways that would eradicate from the texts any responsibility that the Romans had over the death of Jesus—as responsibility was to be projected onto the Jews who were to be demonised as “Christ-killers” and who were supposedly to be punished by God and their Covenant with God replaced when the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem. At some level, it seemed as if within the dominant Christian narrative, it was the Romans who were doing God’s work and the Jews who were firmly positioned as Carnal Israel to be identified with the anti-Christ and the work of the devil. In the school histories, we did not learn that in England, it was difficult to take on the Normans who had established their rule after 1066 but much easier for the authorities to deflect anger towards the small Jewish communities. We also did not learn about the blood libels that could have seemed irrational to modern ears but were left with a linear vision of historical progress that travelled from 1066 to the present. This helped shape the vision of the nation state within European modernities and the dominant historical narratives were framed within what German sociologist Ulrich Beck identified as a “methodological nationalism” that became the common sense of historiographies and the social sciences, which were largely framed within national terms.11 There was a dominant culture of assimilation that within Western Europe shaped notions of democratic citizenship where it was as individual citizens that people were the bearer of legal and political rights. But within European modernities so often shaped through a secularised Christian tradition, Jews were often framed as Other who did their best to become “like everyone else” within a wider culture of modernity that felt threatened by difference. As Zygmunt Bauman explores in Modernity and Ambivalence, Jewishness was often tacitly shamed, and it was treated as a matter of individual religious belief that could be put aside if you no longer believed in God, even if this left feelings of guilt about the denial of ancestral legacies.12 This meant in the post-war world that as students we often absorbed a linear vision of time as progressive that made it difficult to engage with the Holocaust as anything other than an aberration that did not fit into the histories that we were learning. We did not know how to create a dialogue with the past because in the school histories we were learning facts within an empiricist historiography that could not really be questioned. The notion that there could be competing interpretations of what happened was not made available within the Whig interpretations of history that were being taken for granted. But we also lived within the time of nations where there was a taken-for-granted narrative of the nation state that we learnt to identify with through learning its history as our own. There was a way that the nation state had somehow replaced religion that had been rendered individualised within a vision of Enlightenment modernity—as the source of

422  Victor Seidler symbolic meaning that worked on a wider cultural basis that could absorb “minorities,” as they were called, into its embrace through helping to create a sense of ambivalent belonging. But we were not expected to place ourselves in relation to these histories, but simply to accept the historical narratives as they were presented to us, at least until we were doing A Levels13 at school. Nor with these linear visions of historical progress did we have any sense that people were living different temporalities before clock time was invented. During the medieval period, people were living in a Christian time that was symbolically framed through the re-enactments of Christ’s life that tended to fuse the present with the past to shape a spiritual future. It was as spiritual selves who had transcended their animal natures that people could live as human beings. Jews lived according to a different calendar and marked time in a different way, and so within Christian time, Jews somehow did not exist because they had outlived their historical purpose. They were shadows of themselves because their Covenant with God had been replaced so that their lives could have no meaning and they were destined to wander without substance— as Luftmensch—as the Nazis were to figure them. For Christians, Jews existed as “Carnal Israel” and so in a time that had passed so they could not speak relevantly into the present. They lived in an empty time in which nothing could really happen but they were trapped into a narrative that God had rejected and which had been rendered false by the new Covenant created with Christians. It was the Christian narrative alone that could be constantly re-enacted because it alone was able to declare a singular truth. Christians alone could live in real time. Jews were somehow not allowed to tell their own story, and the only reality they could claim was the position they had been assigned within the dominant Christian narrative. Christian symbolic time was the only time that carried a truth into the present. It was the Christian story that was being constantly rehearsed, as Miri Rubin notes, when Thomas of Monmouth tells the story accusing the Jews of the murder of the young boy William of Norwich, showing how the placing of the knots imitated what had been supposedly done to the suffering body of Christ. It was the cruelties of the torturers that could never be satisfied in this re-enactment of Christ’s passion. It is difficult to know how these false accusations from pre-modern times lived on in Christian imaginaries in the post-Second World War era. Though Britain had become largely a secular country, how did these narratives still frame secular relationships with Jews? How did these stories of supposed Jewish cruelty and murder somehow justify what had happened to the Jews during the Holocaust? Some of these connections could no longer be made, as they were not considered speakable within a largely secular society. I was called “Victor” as a way of my family identifying with the allied victories in the Second World War, though it was at the same time a catastrophic moment for our Jewish family and European Jewry more generally. Again,

Violence and Jew-Hatred  423 my naming was a bid to belong and a desperate attempt to put the recent Holocaust histories aside even though they had wrought such destruction on our family with my father’s large Warsaw family—my uncles, aunt, and cousins—having been murdered in Treblinka. But these were traumatic histories that as a second generation we had to be protected from, learning that they belonged to our parents’ generation alone and had nothing to do with us. As children born in London, we had a different sense of nationhood and belonging that was to be affirmed through the British stories of nation state and Empire, we were to learn at school and the identifications we were encouraged to make with the pink of the British Empire that still stretched across the globe. This allowed us to escape from the mass deaths of the Shoah that, at least in relation to Warsaw, were still hidden behind an “iron curtain.” But at the same time, there was a fear that violence could erupt again, and even in the 1950s, there were antisemitic daubings on synagogues, and I can remember people sitting in our dining room watching the local synagogue lest it be attacked. Antisemitisms had not disappeared, but they were taking new forms that we also need to engage. After the attacks in Paris on 7 January 2015, something seemed to have changed in the ways that Jews were being picked out by young Islamists seeking a form of revenge. There was a way that one minority was turning on another, possibly with the young French Muslims somehow identifying the Jews with an establishment they felt excluded from and had little hope of accessing given their marginalisation with French society. But even though attacks on a Jewish school in Toulouse (2012) and an attack on the Jewish Museum in Brussels (2014), both from young men who had returned from fighting with ISIS in the Middle East, should have alerted us to something that had changed, it was finally the events in Paris that struck a chord of danger and made Jews in other countries beside France ask questions about their safety and sense of belonging that they had not asked since before the Second World War. These had been our parents’ questions, but they had not been ours. ­ uslim Suddenly, we found ourselves positioned as targets by young M extremists possibly having thought that the mass migration of Afro-­ Caribbeans and Asians into Britain might have deflected attention away from the Jewish minority. There were other targets for racism, and for decades, sociologists had thought of racism as an issue of black-white relations that somehow excluded questions of antisemitism. It was only when the Holocaust found its way into popular consciousness that antisemitism was addressed, but then often historically in relation to the Shoah. Again, we seem to be living in dangerous times for a whole range of different reasons facing questions we had not thought we would ever have to ask again. But there are also new questions to do with the place of Israel and the Middle East conflict that have helped to shape what many have called new antisemitisms that are also part of the difficult conversations that we need to have.

424  Victor Seidler

Shifting Grounds While it is vital to understand the relationship between secular modernities and nation states and ways that this mediates complex relationships between pre-modern and modern forms of antisemitism, we also need to engage with the failure of secular projects in the Middle East that had to do with the promises of secular modernity, including capitalist and state socialist forms of development. Similarly, in Poland, as Grzegorz Krzywiec points out, “whenever the Church had no religious rivals and its principal antagonist was not the heretics but secular civil society, it was inclined to support absolute authority” (p. 107). The Church also continued beyond its support for the Habsburg Monarchy to do this in the contemporary world—supporting many of the dictatorial regimes in Latin America. As Krzywiec also notes, it was no coincidence that the group that evoked the strongest “antimodernist” sentiment was the modern Jewry. The Jews were the most easily identified symbol of foreign values, standing in opposition to every aspect of the traditional way of life. At the extreme, the Jews became a metaphor for “false” and “nasty” modernity, with all its disastrous consequences. He quotes the respected early twentieth-century Catholic writer, a former progressive who turned into a die-hard conservative, Teodor Jeske-Choiński, for whom “the Jew was first and foremost a symbol of the modern age, with all its horrors, including capitalism, atheism, materialism, and socialism [. . .] From his point of view, the only hope for regeneration was to stop the imperative disintegration of the ‘modern’ world by embracing militant Roman Catholicism” (p. 109). For many Central and Eastern European Catholics, neither German Catholicism nor any other European country offers a model for the revitalisation of Catholic public life. It was Habsburg Austria and particularly the Vienna of Lueger that was to help redefine political Catholicism as an ideology for the Catholic middle class, for whom liberalism meant capitalism and capitalism meant Jews. As Krzywiec notes, “Jews constantly recurred as a metaphor for ‘false’ modernity in this narrative: love of money and the subversion of Christian order, the domination of the press and the spread of socialism, propagating various types of moral—especially sexual abnormality—were intermingled with ‘Jewish’ traits” (p. 111). There are long shadows of the identification of Jews with sexuality and “Carnal Israel” that echoed the disdain of bodies identified with sexuality and the “sins of the flesh.” This reflected a supposed inability to transcend an animal nature and live a disembodied ethic as spiritual selves later to transpose in European modernities as Kantian rational moral selves. This was the source of the author of Sex and Character Otto Weininger’s famous suicide in Beethoven’s house in Vienna, who acknowledged that as a Jewish homosexual, there was no way that he could aspire to the civilised moral ideal of Kantian ethics and that therefore his life was not worth living. This was a suicide that shocked early twentieth-century Vienna and had a profound impact upon both Freud and Wittgenstein.

Violence and Jew-Hatred  425 There are uneasy echoes with the disembodied universalisms that have characterised the murderous actions of the far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, responsible for the killing of seventy-seven people in Norway in July 2011, including many young people in a summer camp. In his paranoid vision, Breivik identified a cosmopolitan multiculturalism as weakening traditional Western European culture in its “demographic warfare” and argued in his manifesto against Muslim immigrants. Wanting to break with the biological racism that characterised the nationalism of Nazi antisemitism, as Daniel Wollenberg explores in “Defending the West: Cultural racism and Pan-Europeanism on the Far Right,”14 how Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilisations” thesis has allowed the far right to promote itself as the genuine defender of secularism, democracy, and Western values in general so attempting to co-opt the Enlightenment ideal as it its own, against those who in their adoption of multicultural values would readily forsake them. As I argued in Urban Fears and Global Terrors: Citizenship, Multiculture and Belongings,15 after the 7/7 London bombings in 2005 there has been a widespread questioning of multiculturalisms in the wake of 9/11 in 2001 that have seemed to encourage different communities to make claims on resources on the basis of their differences so seeming to undermine sources of social solidarity and integration. This is an argument that the far right has sought to intervene in through framing a transhistorical struggle between the West and Islam. As Wollenberg notes, there have been “seismic changes in post-Holocaust racist discourse, especially in the European far right of the last two decades: first the locus of post-Holocaust racist discourse has become cultural racism rather than biological racism [. . .] second, that the permeation of a clash of civilisations theory in far-right rhetoric has invited extremists to propose a fundamental divide between ‘us’ (a Judeo-Christian West) and ‘them’ (a Muslim East) and to look to the past, especially the medieval past, as an archetype of militant action.”16 This involves a continual reference to the Muslim desire for missionising expansionism that many contemporary Islamist groups readily espouse. Wollenberg argues for the far right that the clash is “ultimately between an atavistic Islam and the ‘secular present,’” also with “our Judeo-Christian heritage.” But even if this brings Judaism firmly into the transnational tent so that it is no longer exposed as the Other that threatens the coherence of the nation state within nationalist discourses, the very notion of “JudeoChristian,” as I argued in Jewish Philosophy and Western Culture, is a gross simplification of Jewish history and culture, not only in its antagonist appropriations at the hands of dominant Christian churches, but also in its complex historical and cultural interactions with Islamic civilisations.17 Lyotard and Gruber in The Hyphen: Between Judaism and Christianity, also offered an influential critique of the term “Judeo-Christian” itself as marking a signification of Jewish death and Christian life, within a supersessionist narrative in which “the truth of the Jew is in the Christian” and that which “is Jewish must be forgotten.”18 Within European secular modernities that

426  Victor Seidler frame Judaism as a religion and so a matter of individual belief, it is forgotten as a way of living and as a philosophy that can talk back as a counterdiscourse to European modernities, that along with feminisms and sexual politics more generally, can call for embodied forms of knowledge and insist upon discovering a new balance between Athens and Jerusalem that can allow the Jewishness of Jesus and a recovery of the vital Hebraic sources of historical Christianities. But in the same way that Hitler’s racial antisemitism frames Jews as a threat to the health of the German nation and its racial growth and development so that they had to be systematically excluded, so Breivik argues that Muslims are necessarily external to a deeply rooted Western culture. But there are complex entanglements, for as Omer Bartov reminds us in “The New Anti-Semitism: Genealogy and Implications”19 even if Hitler planned a Nazi-ruled global empire, he denounced internationalism as a Jewish conspiracy for global domination. Hitler explicitly opposed his “völkisch worldview” to a Marxist internationalist worldview that he also identified with the Jews, as he did with global capitalism. So it was that the Jews represented a universalism and cosmopolitanism that was somehow identified with Jewish rootlessness while at the same time it was their inability to transcend their everyday embodied experience that somehow proved the moral inadequacy of Jewish spiritualities that were deemed to be “tribal” and “particularistic” when contrasted with the Christian universalism of Paul. This has been a significant marker within the disturbing anti-Jewish sentiments of some contemporary continental philosophy that has insisted upon escaping the supposed limits of an identity politics before really appreciating the significance of feminisms and queer politics. As Wollenberg helpfully notes, “Much contemporary anti-Islamic rhetoric in Europe is not rooted in ultra-nationalism so much as ‘Europeanism,’ the sense that Europe, especially Western Europe, is united by its common cultural and political identity.”20 Within the EU there has been much talk about shared European values while as historian Tony Judt recognised in the early 1990s, the development of the ideas of Europe after the revolutions of 1989 had been a way of repressing memories about violent nationalistic paths and so forgetting the mass deaths of the Shoah and high levels of collaboration with the Nazis. There was a way that creating Holocaust museums and memorials, outside Germany, was a way of achieving membership of the EU while being able to forget and not work through at a family level these difficult familial and wider historical and cultural memories. In some way, these forgettings in the light of day has made it easier, not harder, for right-wing popular movements to develop in different parts of Europe. However, in vital ways, Islamic history, philosophy, science, and culture have been integral to the development of Europe, and in Spain it was important in restoring to Europe, often in co-operation with Jewish translators, the possibilities of reading classical Greek texts. The idea of a homogenised Christian Europe with its own unchanging history and culture is a historical

Violence and Jew-Hatred  427 invention that fails to appreciate the important lessons of how people can live together in their differences that is provided in the long years of Andalusian convivencia. Rather than treat everyday multiculture as a threat, it presents opportunities for human growth and development as we learn how to listen to others and acknowledge how our historical and cultural memories and legacies have long moved beyond the narrow borders of the nation state and how they have been enriched through the cultural and religious conversations of humanity as we struggle to make sense of what it means to be alive and what responsibilities this leaves us with for human beings and nature on this precarious planet too long disfigured by injustice, hatred, and mass murder.

Notes 1. Gavin Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 2. Lydie Salvayre, “Letters from Europe,” BBC Radio 4, 13 February 2015, available online at www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05289wh (accessed 23 November 2017). 3. For a historical overview of the situation of Jews in the Muslim world, see the essays by Esther Webman and Tahir Abbas and Behruz Davletov in this volume. 4. Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (New York: Penguin Books, 2001). 5. Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz. An Essay in Historical Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 35. 6. See the essay by Joanna Tokarska-Bakir regarding the Kielce pogrom in this volume. 7. Jan T. Gross, Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 8. George Steiner, “Poland’s Willing Executioners,” The Observer, Sunday 8 April 2001. 9. See also the essay by Maya Soifer Irish in this volume. 10. See also the discussion of supersessionism in Jesper Svartvik’s essay in this volume. 11. Ulrich Beck, “The Cosmopolitan Condition. Why Methodological Nationalism Fails,” Theory, Culture & Society 24, no. 7–8 (2007): 286–90. 12. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). 13. “A Levels” are advanced level school-leaving examinations for students usually aged eighteen years. 14. Daniel Wollenberg, “Defending the West: Cultural Racism and Pan-­Europeanism on the Far-Right,” Postmedieval 5, no. 3 (2014): 308–19. 15. Victor J. Seidler, Urban Fears and Global Terrors: Citizenship, Multicultures and Belongings after 7/7 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007). 16. Wollenberg, “Defending the West,” 309. 17. Victor J. Seidler, Jewish Philosophy and Western Culture: A Modern Introduction (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007). 18. Jean-François Lyotard and Eberhard Gruber, The Hyphen: Between Judaism and Christianity, Philosophy and Literary Theory (Atlantic Highlands: Humanity Books, 1999), 15. 19. Omer Bartov, “The New Anti-Semitism: Genealogy and Implications,” in Old Demons, New Debates: Anti-Semitism in the West, ed. David I. Kertzer (Teaneck: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 2005), 9–26. 20. Wollenberg, “Defending the West,” 312.

27 Postface Carlo Ginzburg

Anybody looking for a single, coherent, unanimously shared approach will be disappointed by this collection of essays. Each of them involves different (and sometimes conflicting) assumptions, different methodologies, different conclusions. We are asked to reflect, to evaluate, to take sides. I will take advantage, within the scope of my limited competence, of this challenging intellectual undertaking, to put forward my own arguments, without seeking to conceal their polemical edge. 1. The title of the volume—The Medieval Roots of Antisemitism—seems to connect, through a metaphor, “antisemitism” to a distant past.1 But the subtitle—Continuities and Discontinuities from the Middle Ages to the Present Day—suggests a more complex perspective. I would provisionally translate it as follows: secular, pseudo-scientific antisemitism was rooted in religious (Christian) anti-Judaism. The two phenomena were not identical (hence discontinuities) but the former would have been impossible without the latter (hence continuities). The relationship between the two dimensions, secular and religious, is subject to debate. It may be noted that discontinuities are not mentioned in the title of David Nirenberg’s recent, widely praised Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013). In their introduction, the editors of the present volume suggest that Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism “is an example of the reconstruction of an archive of historical knowledge about ‘Jews.’” I will say something on this notion of “archive” later. But first, some comments on Nirenberg’s book are called for, since nearly all the essays included in this collection either refer to it or engage themselves in a silent dialogue with it. David Nirenberg’s learning is so vast that to stress a missing element in his argument may seem absurd. But the absence I am going to mention is clearly deliberate, and therefore significant. In a 600-page book devoted to the Western tradition of anti-Judaism, the inclusion of the Hebrew Bible in the sacred Christian book is evoked only once, in a ten-word simile.2 This dismissal is striking, since Nirenberg duly focused on the opposite attitude, exemplified by Marcion’s rejection of the Hebrew Bible. But Marcion was defeated. The physical contiguity, and continuity, of the two Testaments,

Postface  429 the Old and the New—the outcome of the Christian appropriation of the Hebrew Bible—nourished a deep ambivalence towards the Jews: a troubling theme which is absent from Nirenberg’s book, although the word “ambivalent” surfaces in it several times.3 In commenting on Luther’s attitude towards the Jews, Nirenberg points out that the explanation for this should be looked for in exegesis, not in sociology.4 Luther’s case was not exceptional. Exegesis, followed by p ­ reaching— its translation in everyday life—shaped the attitude towards the Jews: first of all, towards the imaginary “Jews” who are at the heart of Nirenberg’s book.5 Ambivalent feelings towards the Judaic roots of Christian religion did not prevent the persecution of real Jews: a nexus that would deserve closer analysis, possibly focusing on specific case studies.6 In Nirenberg’s book, the absence of any in-depth analysis of the Christian ambivalence towards the Jews has generated a silent shift from “Judaism” to “Anti-­ Judaism”—the latter being conceived as “a powerful theoretical framework for making sense of the world.”7 But if the analytic model is overly selective, the result may turn out to be overly simple. Nirenberg seems to have realised this. Towards the end of his book, he commented on Erich Auerbach’s great essay “Figura” (1938), stressing his own intellectual indebtedness towards it. A rather convoluted footnote suggests that the author himself looked with some bewilderment at this conclusion: “We may find the arguments in ‘Figura’ about the place of the Hebrew Bible in Early Christian interpretive practices a more congenial potential within early Christianity than say, Marcion’s, but we should not treat it as normative, or as the ‘correct interpretation of Christian orthodoxy.’”8 To label either “correct” or “normative” Augustine’s figural approach to the relationship between the New and the Old Testament would, of course, be ludicrous. David Nirenberg commented at length on Augustine’s work and insisted on its long-term impact—but refrained from analysing Augustine’s ambivalent attitude towards the “Jews” and its far-fetched implications.9 Addressing this issue would, presumably, have led Nirenberg to write a different book. 2. If I am not mistaken, the essays collected in the present volume do not explicitly discuss the Christian ambivalence towards the Jews. I will refrain from saying that this theme “should be included in our archive,” since the notion of “archive,” as put forward by Michel Foucault (“the law that determines what can be said”) is tautological and therefore devoid of any analytical value. But I will argue that a reflection on the alleged medieval roots of antisemitism should take into account that ambivalence (which is quite the opposite of the Judeo-Christian cliché, which Brian Klug rightly dismissed). The reason is self-evident: the contiguity of the two Testaments deeply affected the way in which Christians read their sacred book—and ultimately the way in which everybody, both Christian and non-Christian, read books. But how did medieval Christians read their Bible? And, first of all, which Bible?

430  Carlo Ginzburg Among the comments on the Bible which circulated between the early fourteenth and the early sixteenth century, the most learned and influential was undoubtedly the Postilla super Bibliam by Nicholas of Lyra (1270– 1349), the Franciscan friar.10 This huge work had a long and complex reception, displayed in the early printed editions. The one published in Venice in 1489 (one of the very earliest) amounted to four in-folio volumes, printed in two columns, in a small font, occasionally accompanied by engravings.11 The biblical text was surrounded by Nicholas of Lyra’s comments, interspersed by two series of remarks. On the one hand, the marginal notes (Annotationes), often lengthy and polemical, written by “Burgensis,” i.e. the former Rabbi Shlomo Halevi (1351–1435), who, having converted to Christianity with all his family (including, after much resistance, his wife), took the name of Pablo de Santa María, studied philosophy in Paris, and concluded his oustanding career as royal chancellor and bishop of Burgos.12 On the other, the comments written by Matthias Döring (1390—c. 1469), also a Franciscan friar, who defended Nicholas of Lyra from Pablo de Burgos’s criticism. All in all, three conflicting interpretations of the sacred text, addressed to a highly selected audience (the four volumes of the Postilla, besides being written in Latin, were obviously very expensive). This most authoritative Bible was reprinted innumerable times, either in its entirety, or as separate books.13 Nicholas of Lyra knew Hebrew, and in his comments repeatedly referred to Rashi’s commentary.14 Pablo de Burgos, who had of course a much better Hebrew, repeatedly criticised Nicholas of Lyra for having ignored Maimonides and other Jewish commentators. Readers of the Postilla, at a time when Jews were either expelled or murdered in several parts of Europe, were confronted with a series of dissonant, sometimes contentious comments on passages of the sacred text which more often than not had important theological implications and demanded a serious linguistic competence. All this seems to confirm the point made by David Nirenberg on the contrast between “Jews” and real Jews—although in this case a real (albeit converted) Jew was involved. Much work has been devoted to Pablo de Burgos and his writings; yet he still deserves to be looked at more closely.15 Besides the lengthy comments he jotted down, during his stay in Paris as a student, in the margins of a six-volume manuscript of Nicholas of Lyra’s Postilla, in his old age (he was 81) Pablo de Burgos wrote a Scrutinium Scripturarum in two parts: each of them staged a dialogue between “Saulus” and “Paulus,” “Discipulus,” and “Magister.” The work ostensibly belongs to the genre of anti-Jewish polemical writings.16 The Scrutinium circulated widely in manuscript form; it was later reprinted five times. In 1608 a copy of it fell into the hands of an eighteen-year-old youth, Francisco Maldonado da Silva, who was living in Concepción, Chile, with his father, a physician from Portugal. As Maldonado explained many years later to the Inquisitors, who had put him on trial, the Scrutinium

Postface  431 converted him to Judaism. He spoke to his father, who revealed that he came from a Jewish background and had been put in gaol some years before by the Inquisition as a Judaiser. Francisco had been rediscovering the religion of his father for himself. To be converted to Judaism by a “violent anti-Judaic pamphlet” like the Scrutinium seems paradoxical, but it was, Nathan Wachtel remarked, a rather common Marrano practice.17 A young man fascinated by the Hebrew Bible could find precious information in Pablo de Burgos’s Scrutinium—as well as in the Postilla to the Bible by Nicholas of Lyra, which Maldonado had also read, along with other, mostly medical literature (he was in fact a surgeon). But to what extent did Maldonado’s reading of the Scrutinium go against Pablo de Burgos’s intentions?18 And what kind of Judaism did ­Maldonado discover in reading the Scrutinium Scripturarum? 3. In 1639, at the end of an auto-da-fé staged in Lima, Francisco Maldonado da Silva was put to the death. His courage in declaring his faith to the God of Israel became legendary. But from his debates with the Inquisitors, in a trial that lasted for years, something else emerges. Maldonado argued, for instance, that Jesus could not have been the son of God, since “there is nothing like this in the Scriptures; moreover, this kind of generation is impossible and completely absurd from the point of view of rational reason.”19 On both issues, Francisco Maldonado may have drawn inspiration in the combined reading of two different works by Pablo de Burgos: his Scrutinium scripturarum and his earlier additions to Nicholas of Lyra’s Postilla. “Filius meus es tu/ego hodie genui te”: Nicholas interpreted Psalm 2 as a prefiguration of the generation of Christ, arguing that the past tense (genui), incompatible with God’s eternity, was corrected by the adverb (hodie) which referred to the present. Through a series of textual comparisons, “Burgensis” rejected this interpretation as untenable and remarked that Nicholas’s references to passages from the New Testament (Hebrews 1; Acts 4) would have been insufficient to convince the “Jewish lack of faith” (Hebraicam infi­ delitatem).20 This debate on Psalm 2 re-emerged, in the same terms, in Scrutinium Scripturarum—although, unexpectedly, “Saulus,” the Jew, advanced “Burgensis”’s criticism; “Paulus,” the Christian, Nicholas’s arguments. As a result, the Christian refutation seemed (or, at least, was meant to seem) much weaker than the Jewish thesis. In another passage of the Scrutinium the same effect was reached by means of a different strategy. In commenting on Genesis 1:1 “Burgensis” remarked that in the Scripture “Elohim,” as the name of God, is plural, but is always accompanied by a verb in the singular. In the Scrutinium “Burgensis”’s argument re-emerged, but in a split form: “Paulus” argued that in Genesis 1:1 “Elohim,” being plural, prefigures the Trinity; “Saulus” objected that the unity of God is invariably stressed by the accompanying verb in the singular.21 The conclusion is clear: sometimes in the Scrutinium the character embodying Pablo de Burgos’s point of view is not “Paulus,” as one would have expected, but “Saulus”—his unconverted

432  Carlo Ginzburg alter ego.22 Scrutinium Scripturarum, ostensibly an anti-Judaic work, turns out to be a subtle apology for Judaism, written by a Marrano (Pablo de Burgos) who addressed himself to Marrano readers, able to read between the lines, like—two centuries later—Francisco de Maldonado. This belated reception helps us to identify the Scrutinium as an example of the devious strategies described in Leo Strauss’s famous essay “Persecution and the Art of Writing.”23 4. In other passages of the Scrutinium “Paulus” used a different, more straightforward argument. Commenting on the Decalogue, he made a ­distinction—introduced by a reference to Aristotle’s Ethics, the first book— between lasting moral precepts, related to “natural law, which is eternal” (cum pertineant ad legem nature, quae perpetua est), and ceremonial and judicial precepts, whose limited validity coincided with the Mosaic law.24 The prohibition of theft, for instance, is based on natural law (de iure nature), but the amount of retribution varies according to times and places, because it is conventional (de institutione). To venerate God is “natural,” like the external expression of inner concepts and passions, mentioned in Aristotle’s Peri hermeneias; but its most important element, i.e. inner cult (adoratio mentalis), takes different forms: leaning forward, kneeling, and so forth.25 A reader being able to read between the lines would have concluded from all this that conversion to Christianity did not affect inner religious attitude: an implicit Marrano message. In a similar vein, in the second part of Scrutinium Scripturarum “Magister” explains to “Discipulus” the trajectory from the Mosaic Law to the New Law, through an analogy: as Aristotle said in his Metaphysics, true philosophers benefited from the mistakes of the ancients, since there were elements of truth in them.26 But was this an analogy—or a way of suggesting that the aim of inner cult (adoratio mentalis) and the aim of philosophy are ultimately identical? This was apparently the conclusion reached by some Marrano readers of Scrutinium Scripturarum, like Francisco de Maldonado.27 5. Only a deeper and broader analysis could tell how countless readers reacted to the cacophonous voices embodied in the printed editions of Nicholas of Lyra’s Postilla. Undoubtedly, Nicholas of Lyra’s extensive use of Rashi’s commentary can be regarded as an outstanding example of the Christian ambivalence towards the Jews. The same ambivalence can be detected in some of the Postilla’s most distinguished readers—starting from Martin Luther, who before writing his hate-filled tracts against Jews had expressed his admiration for Nicholas of Lyra. But the case of Pablo de Santa María, bishop of Burgos, suggests that a Marrano attitude could imply not only duplicity, but also a Jewish ambivalence towards Christianity. As Pablo used to say, his conversion was the outcome of his encounter with St. Thomas’s writings.28 In other words, Pablo’s conversion took place

Postface  433 after an encounter with a Christianised Aristotle, followed by an immersion in Aristotle’s works at the University of Paris.29 With Nicholas of Lyra’s Postilla and its long-term reception, we are definitely far removed from the widespread image of Christian and Jews as self-enclosed worlds. 6. We are also far removed from modern, secular antisemitism. But to what extent can we project this phenomenon into the past? This would amount to the teleological approach that David Nirenberg put at the heart of his own book Anti-Judaism: “It is written, as it were, with an eye on the rearview mirror; a history of roads heavily traveled, not of might-have-beens.”30 Far from being a might-have-been, religious ambivalence towards the Jews was a widespread phenomenon—once again, not incompatible with persecution. (Ambivalence—psychological, religious, and so forth—can, of course, imply hatred). If we would like to pursue the road metaphor we could say: there was not a single trajectory; there were junctions and intersections. We are now back to the crucial question that runs through the essays collected in this volume: to what extent did religious anti-Judaism survive within manifestations of secular antisemitism? Ulrich Wyrwa approvingly quotes Amos Funkenstein’s remark: “Anti-Semitism seems to be worlds apart from Christian anti-Jewish attitudes.”31 But hybrids indeed existed— and persisted. In 1884–85, the Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica published a series of articles attacking a recent book by Corrado Guidetti (i.e. Giacomo Treves): Pro Judaeis (1884).32 The book rejected racial antisemitism as an expression of political “radicalism,” stressing, on the contrary, the Jews’ allegiance to the principle of nationality, based on language, not on religion or race; moreover, it argued that Jews could not be regarded as a special race.33 In his articles, the anonymous Jesuit referred with slight embarrassment to “antisemitism,” as well as the violence associated with it, but he did not hesitate to mix the old Christian arguments against the Jews (including ritual murder accusations) with a new emphasis on race.34 One of the Civiltà Cattolica articles included an appendix devoted to a recent meeting of the Royal Anthropological Institute, in which the chairman, Francis Galton, relied upon his work on composite photography to compare pictures of Jewish children and images of Jews in Assyrian art, as evidence of the persistence of a racial “Jewish type.”35 Secular antisemitism and religious anti-Judaism could very well coexist, occasionally reinforcing each other. 7. “Secularisation,” Amos Funkenstein wrote, “is not a movement that starts against the realm of the sacred but rather within a religious tradition itself.”36 I would add: within it and against it. Secularisation (as I argued in a different context) invades the religious sphere: it is a phenomenon born in Europe “which then spread around the world, but which is far from having won its battle. Secular authority appropriates for itself, when it can, the aura (which is also a weapon) of religion.”37

434  Carlo Ginzburg In a rather similar perspective, Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß wrote in their introduction: “scholars of modern history seem to define secularisation as the primary sign of modernity, and do not accept the survival of ­religious patterns of thought in modern, secular societies. But does this really hold true?” This is, if I am not mistaken, a real, not a rhetorical question: the answer will be different in different cases. In their own contribution to this volume Adams and Heß forcefully reject an article written a few years ago by a Swedish journalist, who argued, on the grounds of no evidence whatsoever, that Israeli soldiers were involved in the trafficking of the body parts of Palestinian citizens: a contemporary echo of the old ritual murder accusation launched against the Jews. But the question I quoted above, from the introduction to this volume, is followed by another (this time, rhetorical) question: “But does this really hold true? When protesters against the Israeli military intervention in Gaza screamed ‘Kindermörder Israel,’ does this accusation not contain traces of a much older figure of thought?” Perhaps it does. But in that wail of protest the child victims of the Israeli bombings had a much greater weight. The death toll in Gaza spoke for itself: it was a slaughter, not a war. Past and present are intertwined. The old, murderous antisemitic myth must be endlessly rejected; but that rejection cannot justify a present, homicidal reality.

Notes Note: Many thanks to Henry Monaco for his linguistic revision. 1. See, in a different perspective, Catherine Brice and Giovanni Miccoli, eds., Les racines chrétiennes de l’antisémitisme politique (fin XIX–—XXe siècle) (Rome: École française de Rome, 2003). 2. David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W. W. ­Norton, 2013), 133–34: “[. . .] in order to articulate God’s sovereignty, the laws of ‘emperor or monarch’ had to contain Judaism within themselves, much as Christian Scripture needed to contain the Hebrew Bible.” 3. Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 64–65, 165, 169–70, 188, 273. I may have missed a few occurrences. 4. Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 255–56. 5. See Michael Walzer’s review, “Imaginary Jews,” The New York Review of Books, 20 March 2014. 6. The chapter on Spain, which goes back to Nirenberg’s previous, impressive book (Communities of Violence) is a partial exception. 7. Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 464, to be compared with 301 (for instance): “basic ideas in a divinely ordered world had long been conceptualised in terms of Judaism.” 8. Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 578 n. 13. 9. See especially Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 507 n. 119, on his divergences from Paula Frederiksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (New York: Doubleday, 2008). On Augustine’s ambivalent impact, see Jeremy Cohen, “The Jews as the Killers of Christ in the Latin Tradition from Augustine to the Friars,” Traditio 39 (1983): 1–27. I dealt with this issue in the following essays: “Distance and Perspective: Reflections on Two Metaphors,” in my Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance (New York: Columbia

Postface  435 University Press, 2001), 139–56, 234–43; “The Letter Kills: On Some Implications of 2 Corinthians 3, 6,” History and Theory 49 (2010): 71–89. 10. Arthur Skevington Wood, “Nicholas of Lyra,” The Evangelical Quarterly 33 (1961): 196–206; Deeana Copeland Klepper, The Insight of Unbelievers: Nicholas of Lyra and Christian Reading of the Jewish Text in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 11. Biblia latina cum postillis Nicholai de Lyra et expositionibus Guilielmi Britonis in omnes prologos S. Hieronymi et additionibus Pauli Burgensis replicisque Matthiae Doering (Venice: [Bonetus Locatellus] per Octavianum Scotum, 1489). 12. Nicolás López Martínez, “Nota sobre la conversión de Pablo de Santa María, el ‘Burgense,’” Burgense 13, no. 2 (1972): 581–87. 13. Edward A. Gosselin, “A Listing of the Printed Editions of Nicolaus de Lyra,” Traditio 26 (1970): 399–426. 14. Copeland Klepper, The Insight of Unbelievers. 15. Chen Merchavia, “The Talmud in the Additiones of Paul de Burgos,” Journal of Jewish Studies 16 (1965): 115–34; Maurice Kriegel, “Autour de Pablo de Santa María et Alfonso de Cartagena: alignement culturel et originalité ‘converso,’” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 41 (1994): 197–205; Ryan W. Szpiech, “Scrutinizing History: Polemic and Exegesis in Pablo de Santa María’s Siete edades del mundo,” Medieval Encounters 16 (2010): 96–142. 16. I consulted the edition printed in Mantua 1475 (Bologna, Biblioteca dell’Archiginnasio, 16. A. V. 1), as well as a later edition (Burgos 1591) which includes the earliest biography of Pablo de Burgos (Bologna, Biblioteca dei Frati Minori dell’Osservanza; many thanks to Franco Bacchelli for sending me a reproduction of this book). 17. Nathan Wachtel, La foi du souvenir: Labyrinthes marranes (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 51–76, esp. 54 (echoing Cecil Roth, Storia dei marrani, intro. H. P. Salomon [Milan: Serra e Riva, 1991], 135) and 59. 18. Wachtel, La foi du souvenir, 59: “le fameux Scrutinium Scripturarum qui contrairement à son objectif avait éveillé ses doutes et suscité sa conversion à la loi de Moïse.” 19. Wachtel, La foi du souvenir, 67, 394 n. 53. 20. Nicholaus de Lyra, Postilla, I (ad psalmum 2): “Unde non obstante ratione predicta possunt adversarii intelligere illud ‘hodie genui te’ de promotione David ad regnum quod licet sit preterita non tamen tam magnum transiverat tempus.” 21. Paulus de Sancta Maria, Scrutinium, fol. m8v: [“Paulus”]: “Ex quibus habes manifeste quod in Sacra Scriptura Deus nominatur sub nominibus pluralis numeri tam in substantivis quam in appellativis.” [“Saulus”]: “Ex his quo allegas non habes intentum. Nam in auctoritatibus de hiis per te allegatis reperies que illa nomina divina tam substantiva quam appellativa sequuntur per verba singularis numeri in quo manifeste evacuatur tua probatio.” Nicolas of Lyra analysed this issue in a quaestio, which I consulted in the following edition: Elegantissime questiones disputate per excellentissimum artium et sacre theologye [!] magistrum dominum Nicolaum de Lira contra Hebreos (Naples, c. 1477?). The quaestio was written in 1309: “usque nunc fluxerunt 1309 anni ad minus, quia tali anno incarnationis coeptum est hoc opus”; according to Henri Labrosse, it was then revised between 1331 and 1334 (“Oeuvres de Nicolas de Lyre,” Etudes franciscaines 35 [1923]: 171–87, esp. 178–80). The existence of a revision has been denied by Deeana Copeland Klepper (“The Dating of Nicholas of Lyra’s Quaestio de Adventu Cristi,” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 86 [1993]: 297–312). However, the edition I consulted (in a copy owned by Biblioteca Vallicelliana, Rome) has, after a passage on the slaughter of the innocents, the following comment: “ab illo tempore fluxerunt mille trecenti sedecim anni ad minus quia tali anno incarnacionis Domini est scriptum hoc opus”

436  Carlo Ginzburg (Elegantissime questiones, fol. 25r). It seems, therefore, that the quaestio was indeed revised, but in 1316. 22. Those contradictions have been perceived but, in my view, misinterpreted by Jean Sconza, History and Literature in Fifteenth Century Spain: An Edition and Study of Pablo de Santa María’s Siete Edades del Mundo (Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1991), 11: “Saulus, who initially appears as a Jew and later as a converso.” 23. Leo Strauss, “Persecution and the Art of Writing [1941],” in Persecution and the Art of Writing, ed. Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 22–37. 24. Paulus de Sancta Maria, Scrutinium, dist. 8, cap. 11. 25. Paulus de Sancta Maria, Scrutinium, dist. 8, cap. 11: fol. l9v: “talis enim adoratio mentalis cum timore Dei sancto qui permanet in seculum seculi fit et in hac principaliter consistit vera adoratio. Et quia naturale est hominum significare conceptus suos interiores per aliqua signa exteriora unde Philosophus in primo Peri armenias [!] voces sunt eorum que sunt in anima passionum note ideo oportuit ut adoratio mentalis que principalis est per aliqua signa exteriora manifestaretur utpote inclinationes corporales vel genuflexiones et huiusmodi. Que quidam signa exteriora non eadem sunt apud omnes nec ubique et semper sed diversa secundum diversitatem temporum et regionum. Voces enim seu locutiones diverse secundum diversitatem linguarum in diversis temporibus seu regionibus similes conceptus seu idem significant.” 26. Paulus de Sancta Maria, Scrutinium: [“Magister”]: “Secundum philosophum in Metaphisica [!] veri philosophi in cognitione veritatis profecerunt ex opinionibus antiquorum etiam a veritate deviantium in quantum in talibus erroribus aliquid veritatis continebatur cujus simile in proposito contingit.” 27. See Wachtel, La foi du souvenir, 70: “Les traits originaux d’un rationalisme certainement novateur dans son contexte” (on Francisco de Maldonado). On Orobio de Castro’s reading of Scrutinium Scripturarum, see Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto. Isaac Cardoso: A Study in Seventeenth Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics (Seattle: University of Seattle Press, 1981 [1st ed. 1971]), 289; Yosef Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism: The Story of Isaac Orobio de Castro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004 [1982, 1989]), 114–15, 246. 28. Paulus de Sancta Maria, Scrutinium Scripturarum (Burgos: Philippus Iunta, 1591), 21: “Haec et alia quamplurima circa legis veteris, ac novae differentiam, mente noster Paulus volvebat. Et cum sancti Thomae quaestiones de hac legum differentia studiose perlegeret, mirum in modum (ut ipse testatus est) animo fuit permotus, quo, lege Judaica, quam instantissime profitebatur, demissa, ad Evangelicam, vitam in se continentem, mentis et affectus alas pervolaret.” According to his will, Pablo was buried in a chapel dedicated to St. Thomas. Pablo de Santa María often used Thomas to correct Nicholas of Lyra’s comment; see Philip D. W. Krey, “‘The Old Law Prohibits the Hand and Not the Spirit’: The Law and the Jews in Nicholas of Lyra’s Romans Commentary of 1329,” in Nicholas of Lyra: The Senses of Scripture, ed. Philip D. W. Krey and Lesley Smith (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 251–66. 29. See Pablo’s addition on John 1:1: “Licet Aristoteles non demonstraverit mundi novitatem non tamen concludit contrarium, sed secundum mentem eius hoc tamquam problema neutrum reliquit ut patet per rationes ejus in de celo et mundo [. . .] Similiter circa felicitatem non videtur a veritate deviasse. Nam in primo et ultimo Eth. ubi de felicitate tractat non loquitur nisi de felicitate politica seu de felicitate speculativa que in hac vita per naturam haberi potest, non autem de felicitate supernaturali.” See also Matthias Döring’s strong reaction to this comment.

Postface  437 30. Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 91. 31. Amos Funkenstein, “Theological Responses to the Holocaust,” in Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 324. 32. See Tullia Catalan, “Le reazioni dell’ebraismo italiano all’antisemitismo europeo (1880–1914),” in Les racines chrétiennes, 137–62, esp. 146–47; Valerio De Cesaris, Pro Judaeis: Il filogiudaismo cattolico in Italia (1789–1938) (Milan: Guerini, 2006), 74 n. 56. 33. Corrado Guidetti, Pro Judaeis: Riflessioni e documenti (Turin: Tip. Roux e Favale, 1884). On p. 35 note the author argued that the Jewish type (in a cultural, not racial sense) persisted in less civilised countries like Hungary or Poland, in which “contacts and assimilation” were more difficult. 34. See Ruggero Taradel and Barbara Raggi, La segregazione amichevole: La Civiltà Cattolica e la questione ebraica, 1850–1945, intro. Riccardo Di Segni (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2000), 27, 170 n. 43, 175 n. 71; Francesco Crepaldi, “L’omicidio rituale nella ‘moderna’ polemica antigiudaica di Civiltà Cattolica nella seconda metà del XIX secolo,” in Les racines chrétiennes, 61–78. 35. “Di un recente libro Pro Iudaeis,” in La Civiltà Cattolica, s. 12, vol. 10, fasc. 835 (March 1885), 60–61; Carlo Ginzburg, “Family Resemblances and Family Trees: Two Cognitive Metaphors,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 537–56. 36. Amos Funkenstein, “Medieval Exegesis and Historical Consciousness,” in Perceptions of Jewish History, 98. 37. Carlo Ginzburg, “David, Marat. Arte politica religione,” in Carlo Ginzburg, Fear, Reverence, Terror: Five Essays in Political Iconography, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2017), 109. Readers will find both similarities and divergences between this remark and the conclusion of Tuvia Singer’s essay on the legend of the Wandering Jew.

28 Which Past for Which Present? A Reply to Carlo Ginzburg’s “Postface” on Anti-Judaism David Nirenberg

Under the printed pages of any volume such as this there murmurs that subterranean flow of intellectual engagements from which there occasionally wells up in the collective intellect the shared sense of a question worth asking. So although I could not be in Stockholm in 2015 for the wintry conventicle of scholars whose conversations animate The Medieval Roots of Antisemitism, reading these pages now (even the many that are by authors I have never met), I feel as if I am among familiar interlocutors. All of us share a common concern with the persistent power of prejudice across time: in this case, of prejudices (in the sense of pre-judgments, of transmitted ideas that shape our possibilities of thought) about Judaism. In some cases, the feeling of familiarity is not only metaphorical, for with a number of the authors in this volume I have been in conversation, whether in person or on paper, for almost thirty years. Among those authors is Carlo Ginzburg, whose Postface the editors have asked me to respond to, and whose ideas I have encountered not only in print but also at table. Indeed, it was over lunch two years ago that he first expressed to me the general arguments he advances here with more “polemical edge.” Hence I take in the chivalric sense his opening declaration that he comes with sword drawn and sharpened, and hear in it the collegial as well as the martial: with every joust a banquet. Still, it must be granted that if Ginzburg is engaged in conversation here, it is a lopsided one. His “Postface” scarcely alludes to any of the pages of the volume in which it appears, focusing instead on an absent interlocutor with which those pages are imagined to be in “dialogue,” namely, my book Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. Here too the engagement is distinctive, in the sense that Ginzburg chooses once more to focus on what he calls an absence—on what he claims that book is not about (ambivalence)—and ignore what he recognises the book is concerned with (anti-Judaism). His argument at its most general: because Christianity includes the Hebrew Bible in its sacred book, Christianity is ambivalent about Judaism, and therefore we cannot speak of Christian anti-Judaism, much less study it as a phenomenon across time, as some of the authors of this volume and I have each in our own ways tried to do.

Which Past for Which Present?  439 To keep that “therefore” from seeming arbitrary or dogmatic he chooses a past, a historical example: the “ambivalent” biblical hermeneutics of Solomon ha-Levi/Pablo de Santa María (1351–1435), a rabbi who converted and became bishop of Burgos, in the lands we now call Spain. And to give this logic the urgency of contemporary morality he chooses a present as well. Thus, he concludes his essay with a passion in Palestine, attempts to balance the burdens of the past with those of the present, and finds that “in that wail of protest the child victims of the Israeli bombings had a much greater weight.” These moves may surprise connoisseurs of Carlo Ginzburg’s work, but they will be familiar to anyone who has tilled the fields of our particular subject. We are often told, for example, that because there exists Christian Philo- as well as Anti-Semitism we cannot focus on the latter. Over and over again in studies of relations between Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, examples from their long and rich history of coexistence and cultural exchange are trotted out as if the mere fact of that coexistence and exchange were enough to negate the possibility of powerful and enduring prejudices. And many discussions of history are today cut off with allusion to the Palestinian present, with any attempt to study anti-Judaism in the past or posit some form of its persistence in the present cast as a form of special pleading, an apologetics for abuses of Israeli power. It is because these moves are so familiar that a response to Ginzburg’s “Postface” may (I hope) still be considered a form of tribute to the collective efforts of this volume’s authors, even if that response too often articulates or defends my own arguments, rather than theirs. My response will focus on a basic question that confronts all historians. How do we decide which of the uncountable potentials of the past—potentials so massively plural that the concept of ambivalence does not begin to do them justice—is most relevant to the questions we are interested in asking in the present? (By relevant, I mean both in helping us answer our questions, and in helping us become self-conscious of why it is that we are interested in asking these particular questions, rather than any of infinitely many possible other ones we might have asked.) Ginzburg does not so much ask this question as simply assert through a historical example that those of us who would write a history of anti-Judaism have got the answer wrong. So by way of a response, let us ask this question of his arguments as well as of ours. 1. Ginzburg begins by creating a straw man, so we must first wrestle with straw. Every author represented in this volume, and presumably every reader of Christian scripture, knows full well that already in their earliest texts the followers of Jesus “nourished a deep ambivalence towards the Jews.” We might say with the Apostle Paul that the Jews are simultaneously hated and loved. “As far as the gospel is concerned they are enemies for your sake,” he wrote to the Romans, “but [. . .] they are loved on account of the patriarchs” (11:28). This ambivalence is certainly noted in Anti-­Judaism: The Western Tradition. Looking now I see that in quoting this very passage

440  David Nirenberg I wrote “both sides of this doubly ambivalent formulation would receive much attention across the ages, and both remain mysterious” (65).1 “Loved on account of the patriarchs”: Ginzburg is right to put “the inclusion of the Hebrew Bible in the sacred Christian book” at the heart of our question, as did Anti-Judaism. Far from referring to this fact only once, “in a ten-word simile,” that book devotes entire chapters to the question of how many different types of Christians (from Paul to the twentieth century), Muslims, and even atheists, thought and re-thought the implications of the relationship between the Hebrew Bible and later prophecies.2 Not only Luther but Paul and the gospel authors, Augustine and many other Church Fathers, even Shakespeare, Hegel, and Marx, all emerge as ambivalent exegetes in my reading. Indeed, I could just as easily be charged with being too much engaged with the relationship between Old Testament and New, rather than too little. For one way of understanding my account is that it puts at the centre of Western thought the constant efforts by which Christianity and Islam sought to understand their relationships to the ostensible tradents and rival claimants of the Hebrew Bible and tries to show some few of the ways in which those efforts channelled the possibilities for Christian and Muslim (and later secular) thinking about Judaism in certain powerful directions. I could have made other choices. The point is simultaneously crucial and banal: crucial because it means we must become critically aware of how and why we choose to attend as we do; and banal because barring some Borgesian historian, it will always be the case that our choices produce radical simplifications of the cosmos’ complexity. One way to convert such a point into critique would be to claim that the strands of thought and life that I chose to focus on are not as historically important as some other, for example, “love” of Jews or “ambivalence.” But even that would not in itself be sufficient critique. Such a judgment remains dogmatic unless it also interrogates its own perspective and asks, as Collingwood might have exhorted: important for understanding what question? Ginzburg seems to be taking the first step in this type of critique when he reminds us that “Marcion was defeated,” implying that with this defeat certain potentials of anti-Judaism ceased to be important. But what he chooses to ignore is that this defeat was achieved by deploying powerful new figures of Judaism to contain the tension between letter and spirit, “Old” Testament and “New,” the world and its transcendence, that Marcion had tried to address. These figures themselves generated new tensions and new figures of Judaism and anti-Judaism along the course of history, and each new tension and new figure itself changed the way in which people at any place and point in time could make sense of their past and their future, as well as their present.3 In short, the questions Paul, the gospel authors, Marcion, and many others asked about the relationship between the material world and the transcendent, between slavery and freedom, the literal and the spiritual, Jews

Which Past for Which Present?  441 and followers of Jesus, did not disappear with Marcion. Nor did “Judaism” cease to be a powerful tool for exploring those questions, and for discovering new answers to them. Those answers often represented the passage between these antinomies as a movement toward or away from “Judaism,” with figures of Judaism representing what should be overcome in the name of freedom, transcendence, and the good (it is in this sense that I use the word anti-Judaism). The question that interested me in Anti-Judaism was: as these tools and answers developed and changed over historical time and space, how (if at all) did they shape the ideas with which people could understand the world at any given place or moment? 2. This is, in Ginzburg’s terms, a question of continuity/discontinuity. “It may be noted that discontinuities are not mentioned in the title of [. . .] Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition,” he writes. Books can rarely be meaningfully encapsulated by their titles, and mine did not telegraph the full contents of the pages it was stamped upon. But those pages are often and explicitly engaged with the question of how and why we as historians choose between continuity and discontinuity, between similarity and difference. This engagement begins in the Introduction, which details the book’s methodological commitments and warns that the 3,000-year sweep of my history “may wrongly suggest to some readers either that I take ideas to be eternal and unchanging or that I am engaged in a genealogy, an evolutionary history, a quest for the origin of the species” (7). Ginzburg seems to be one of those readers, and this despite the fact that every chapter of the book re-explores the question of how each new text, event, or period of history transformed the possibilities of interpretation and of life, which is also to say, transformed the continuities and discontinuities that can be perceived between past, present, and future. Or as I put it, again in my Introduction, the teachings of a Goebbels are not necessarily implied in the gospels (nor those of a Bin Laden in the Qur’an). Nor is the relation causal, clear, evolutionary, or unidirectional. “The past,” as T. S. Eliot put it, may be “altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.” But if there is any relation, we need to be able to recognise it in order to understand ourselves as well as the past.4 “Past and present are intertwined,” writes Ginzburg. Indeed. And the question before us, the question that I and all the authors of this volume explicitly pose, is: what historical method can best reveal to us the density of the fibres that weave together past and present, while at the same time increasing our resistance to the fevered delirium (the image is Walter Benjamin’s) with which the “present age seizes on the manifestations of past or distant spiritual worlds, in order to take possession of them and unfeelingly incorporate them into its own self-absorbed fantasizing”? What method enables us to choose—as we must!—between emphasising the sameness or the

442  David Nirenberg difference of one moment, idea, or thing with another, while also making us critically self-conscious about the commitments that drove us to make one choice when we could also have made another? What method—to return to Ginzburg’s example—can help us simultaneously imagine the possible imbrications of the past with protests about Palestine today, while at the same time protecting us from the powerful tendency to reduce the past to the needs of our particular political imperatives? Ginzburg does not ask these questions, perhaps because he is so convinced of the political imperative with which he concludes.5 Instead, he explores at length a specific historical example that does not appear in The Medieval Roots of Antisemitism or in Anti-Judaism, suggesting that this example demonstrates why a focus on anti-Judaism cannot make sense of the complexity of the world in the way that attention to what he is calling ambivalence can. We may assume that he is offering this particular historical argument to us as a heuristic example of a methodology he takes to be appropriate to the task. So let us focus, for a moment, on the example provided and the method applied. Does Ginzburg’s focus on ambivalence as he pursues it through this example help us to become more critically aware of the central question we confront as historians: how and why we choose to perceive similarities or differences between our words and worlds and those of our sources and subjects from the past? Or does it itself depend on and deepen un-declared dogma? 3. In Solomon/Paul/Pablo of Burgos, Carlo Ginzburg has found, as he so often does, a figure through whom we can dive into any number of worlds. It is therefore all the more remarkable that his approach to that figure’s thought shuts down our access to so many of those worlds. For the sake of brevity, I will reduce Ginzburg’s steps to two inter-related moves: the choice of one future as meaningful when there are in fact many, and the repression of possibilities in the past in order to make the past point toward one future. Since this is more or less precisely the misleading over-­ simplification with which Ginzburg charges my Anti-Judaism, it may illuminate our debate to spend a little more time seeing how his argument produces it, before returning to mine, and to that of this volume, to see whether ours does so as well. First, the repression of possibilities in the past: Ginzburg’s approach is animated by what he perceives to be differences (which become “contradiction” at note 22) between a few passages (primarily comments on Psalm 2) plucked from Pablo’s two extremely lengthy commentaries and interpretations of the scriptures, his Additiones to Nicholas of Lyra’s Postilla super Bibliam, and his Scrutinium Scripturarum. In the differences between these passages, Ginzburg finds “clear” evidence that the “Christian” is made to speak in the “Jewish” voice. The Scrutinium, “an anti-Judaic work, turns out to be a subtle apology for Judaism, written by a Marrano (Pablo de Burgos) who addressed himself to Marrano readers.”

Which Past for Which Present?  443 I do not myself see the differences that Ginzburg finds between these two texts, but let us accept them as stipulated for the purposes of examining instead the structure of the general argument.6 And here, more context and a few facts will be helpful. To begin with, it is not the case that the Additiones were written at one time, in the margins of one six-volume manuscript, during Pablo’s student days in Paris during the early 1390s. Some of the circa 1,090 comments were probably written then, others as much as 40 years later (one comment on the Apocalypse refers to events that took place in 1431). We know that Pablo worked to gather, edit, and add to his comments on Lyra across the 1420s. The Prologue he wrote in 1429 dedicating the project to his son informs us that even in his old age, he was still struggling to complete it.7 Why do such details matter? Ginzburg’s reading discovers insincerity in contradiction. That method is old indeed: Aristotle, for example, applied it to Heraclitus: “for it is impossible for anyone to believe that the same thing is and is not, as some think that Heraclitus says: for it is not necessary that what someone says is the same as what he believes.” But Aristotle had made (in the preceding lines) the detection of such contradictions dependent upon constraints of time and context (“at the same time,” “in the same respect,” etc.), constraints that Ginzburg here ignores.8 As readers we are entitled to interrogate the coherence of our sources, but if we impose upon them historically (or psychologically or logically) inappropriate rules of consistency, the contradictions we find within them are more likely to be the products of our logics than theirs. 4. The Scrutinium’s composition was more compressed in time than that of the Additiones, but it too is a massive work, roughly 500 pages in the incunabula editions. Nor is it a project separate from or opposed to the Additiones. Rather, it is intimately related to them, and to the debate they had set off as they circulated in earlier versions. This inter-dependence is evident in the title Scrutinium Scripturarum itself: the phrase is drawn from Jesus’ exhortation to the Jews at John 5:39 to “search the scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life.” The passage had been invoked in a letter from an anonymous Franciscan friar who accused the Additiones of over-emphasising the literal reading of scripture, and Pablo of mounting a “Jewish” attack on Lyra.9 Pablo published that letter and his response to it in the edition of the Additiones that he dedicated in 1429 and continued the defence in the Scrutinium he wrote in the years following (1431–34). In this sense, the project can itself be understood as a response to “anti-Judaism.” Yet one more note: the Scrutinium’s defence against the charge that Pablo’s hermeneutics was Judaising does not take bi-partite form. It cannot be reduced to either Anti-Jewish tract or Apology for Judaism. Jew and Christian were crucial categories for Pablo, but just as important was the category that had developed so explosively in his own lifetime, that of convert, or converso. This importance is reflected in the very structure of the Scrutinium, which is explicitly presented not as one dialogue (of a Christian with

444  David Nirenberg a Jew) but as two: the first that of Pablo with a Jew, the second, of Pablo with a convert. The Scrutinium makes clear that with conversion comes a monumental shift in the foundations of truth. In the first part of the work arguments with the Jew must be restricted to those stemming either from natural reason, or from scriptures the Jews accept (leaving the key Christian mysteries such as the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, etc. unprovable to Jews, since they cannot be reached by reason alone without the aid of faith). In the second, the convert is committed to accepting with faith as well as with reason, that is: accepting through faith the authority not only the New Testament, but also the saints, whose teachings are “proven in the fire of love” (charitatis).10 And here is what is perhaps most important in Pablo’s thought: he insists that the very mysteries of faith that the Jews so strenuously reject in his day had themselves been understood through faith not only by the Hebrew prophets (a position with which many Christians both early and late would have agreed), but also by the great rabbis who composed the Talmud and other foundational rabbinic texts. Pablo maintained that the Talmud had contained and taught these mysteries.11 The problem was that the vast majority of its Jewish readers across history, misled by their intellects, had proved incapable of recognising them. Now, thanks to conversions like his, these texts could provide an additional resource, not only for Christians converted from Judaism, but for any Christian who wished to better understand the meaning of the scriptures, Old and New. Hence the importance for Christianity of projects like the Additiones, that would put this learning, concealed for centuries by the faithlessness of the Jews and the ignorance (of Hebrew and Aramaic) of the Christians, to salvific use for all humanity. We could then, choose to see Pablo de Burgos’ Additiones and Scrutinium together not as an anti-Judaic treatise nor as an apology for Judaism, but as the foundations of a “converso theology,” as other historians have done. We could suggest that, within Pauline floodplains of faith re-shaped and transformed by the rushing baptismal waters that had hurtled so many Iberian Jews to Christianity beginning in 1391, Pablo discovered a topography in which converts from Judaism could play new (albeit quite Pauline) roles in revealing to Christianity the fulfilment of its mysteries. In such a context, Pablo’s ever more intensive efforts to convert Jews from their anti-Christian errors should be seen as entirely consonant with his efforts to convert his fellow Christians from anti-Jewish prejudices (such as their demonisation of the Talmud and their suspicion of literalising interpretations of scripture such as the Additiones). From this perspective, we should see both “sides” of Pablo’s activities as in the service of a new vision of Pauline plenitude catalysed by the re-grafting of so many Jews onto the stock of Christ.12 We could, if we wished, within this particular place and time, discover an exhilarating world of emergent possibilities for Christian and Jew, old convert and new: possibilities entirely missing from Ginzburg’s reading of Pablo’s words.

Which Past for Which Present?  445 5. Why spend so much time thickening the dossier that Ginzburg opened on Pablo? First, to remind us that his deployment of Pablo is quite partial, eliminating from Pablo’s world and moment many potential subjectivities and possibilities of thought. And second, to convince you that it is not only partial but polarising, reducing those possibilities of thought that it does recognise to polemically poised anti-thesis held together only by Straussian dissimulation. In other words, this thickening of detail was necessary in order to demonstrate what I meant when I suggested that one step of Ginzburg’s method is the repression of possibilities in the past. Now I should (more briefly) explain my suggestion that this repression of the past is furthered and enabled by the choice of future. Perhaps the most obvious way to do so is simply to point to the one bit of evidence Ginzburg offers in support of his own interpretation of Pablo’s Scrutinium, namely the interpretations of another reader, one situated some two centuries later than Pablo in historical time, and indeed in a “New World” unknown to our medieval author. Francisco de Maldonado was executed as a relapsed Judaiser in Lima, Peru, in 1639, convinced that Jesus’ divinity “is impossible and completely absurd from the point of view of rational reason.” Ginzburg first hypothesises that Maldonado may have read the Scrutinium and extracted this idea from it, and then slides from hypothesis to certainty, using Maldonado’s (presumed) reading c. 1639 as proof of Pablo’s authorial intentions in the 1430s. “This belated reception helps us to identify the Scrutinium as an example of the devious strategies described in Leo Strauss’s famous essay ‘Persecution and the Art of Writing.’”13 One (possible) reading in some far future reveals an author’s intention in a distant past. This is an odd method to find a historian deploying, and above all Carlo Ginzburg, who has taught so many of us to think about the distinction between the “emic” and the “etic.” It is all the odder given that Pablo’s books found so many readers, futures, and fates. As Yossi Yisraeli puts it in his invaluable dissertation, “Marsilio Ficino, Denis the Carthusian, Johannes Reuchlin, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Thomas More, Martin Luther, Jacques Lefèvre, Konrad Pelikan, Jean Bodin, Luis de Leon and many others all referred at certain points to the works of the converted bishop from Burgos. Even a Jewish commentator of the stature of Isaac Abarbanel consulted his work.”14 A few more facts: when Pablo’s son and successor Alonso de Cartagena took his father’s freshly finished autographs of the Additiones and the Scrutinium with him to the ecumenical Council of Basel (1431–37), they found immediate favour and were widely copied on site. This was at least in part because they were understood by the assembled prelates as highly relevant to the increasingly heated debates taking place in the Iberian Peninsula over the civil and religious status of Christian converts from Judaism, a controversy to which the Council dedicated an important ruling.15 The resulting manuscripts not only serve us as our earliest witnesses to the work (any autographs have been lost), but were rapidly disseminated across the

446  David Nirenberg continent, with the result that we have something like a hundred surviving fifteenth-century manuscripts of the Scrutinium, with nine (not five) printed editions, six of them published between 1470 and 1478. Johannes Mantelin’s precocious marketing campaign for the Strasbourg editions of the 1470s may in fact make the Scrutinium the first publicly advertised book in the history of printing.16 Given this astoundingly wide reception, it is obviously true that “only a deeper and broader analysis could tell how countless readers reacted to the cacophonous voices embodied” in Pablo’s work. But no deep analysis is required in order to recognise that, unlike Maldonado or Ginzburg, many of these voices celebrated the “anti-Jewish” potential of the Scrutinium and understood it as a primer in the truths of Christianity. For this, one need read no further than the introductory epistle to the 1591 edition used by Ginzburg, where the work is said to have been celebrated at the Council of Trent (1545–63) as a powerful weapon in the combat against “Judaising converts” (evangelicos iudaizantes). In this at least the Tridentine princes of the Church agreed with their arch-enemy Martin Luther, who cited Pablo on various occasions in his writings, but with most frequency in his own most explicitly anti-Jewish writings, above all in On the Jews and Their Lies. In short, on all sides of sectarian divides, we can find extremely influential future readers who had no difficulty understanding the Scrutinium as an anti-Jewish text.17 6. God may know the fate of every sparrow, the future of every thought, but humans can attend to only a few personages and posterities at once. With every act of attention and every narrative gesture, historians ignore many more worlds than they know. For this, we cannot be faulted. But we should demand of ourselves that we make an effort to explain why we chose to direct our attention as we did, so that others may judge the appropriateness of that choice. I take this self-consciousness to be an important part of whatever it means to be a critical historian. In Anti-Judaism, I tried to be explicit about the principles of my choices (insofar as I was conscious of them) as I made them. Thus, for example, after a discussion of some of the many different attitudes toward Judaism in a text (the Didache) produced by the early followers of Jesus, I wrote: On the subject of Judaism (as on every other) early Christianity had many possible futures, and there is real relief in knowing that there was nothing inevitable about the paths it eventually trod. But this book does not seek such relief. It is written, as it were, with an eye on the rearview mirror: a history of roads heavily traveled, not of might-have-beens. Over the next three centuries Christianity rose to become the religion of emperors, and the Didache fell along with many other “teachings” to the cutting-room floor. (91)

Which Past for Which Present?  447 Ginzburg sees in the mirror metaphor a “teleological approach” that projects the future into the past. “Teleological” is not a compliment in the modern historian’s dictionary, and the choice of word is here presumably meant to short-circuit our attention to the critical question actually at stake. The passage is not a teleological manifesto. It is rather a public confession as historian that my choice of attention to the many possibilities on offer at any given moment in the long history I am studying will not be innocent of my knowledge of the vast differences in influence that would accrue to these possibilities across their many futures. If some of the potentials available at any given historical moment become more compelling than others over the course of time, if some come to exert greater pressure than others upon future possibilities of thought and existence, then we as historians may want to take those differences into account, depending on the questions we are interested in asking. The example of the Didache was meant to stress the importance of being open to the multiple possibilities available at each point in history (here at the origins of Christianity) and of at the same time recognising that these possibilities had vastly varying fates, some with rich futures, some with (as of yet) virtually none at all. It is not teleology but a form of interpretive responsibility I was advocating: namely, that we should pay attention to vast differences in power. 7. It is presumably not the influence of Maldonado’s thought or its power to move others that justifies Ginzburg’s choice of his martyrdom as Pablo’s most meaningful future, rather than, say Luther or Reuchlin. So what does? So far as I can see, only the suggestion that Francisco’s reading reveals and is true to Pablo’s authorial intent as Ginzburg has determined it from his detection of contradictions. The claim asserts some identity, some sort of sameness, between the writer and a reader, the future and the past, the historian’s interpretation of the one confirming the same historian’s interpretation of the other. What in this circle holds future and past together except the will of the historian, and what methodology can protect that will from charges of caprice, dogma, or un-falsifiability? Consider, for example, a final detail. Ginzburg has Francisco confirming a view in Pablo—“there is nothing like this in the Scriptures; moreover, this kind of generation is impossible and completely absurd from the point of view of rational reason”—that goes explicitly against one of the most consistent and fascinating strands of Pablo’s thought. From his very earliest surviving writings as a convert (in Hebrew) to the (Latin) Scrutinium produced at the very end of his long life, Pablo maintained the highly original idea (so beautifully excavated by Yosi Yisraeli) that the Jews had failed to recognise the many mysteries of faith contained in the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud—mysteries then generalised and perfected in Christianity—­ precisely because they had mistakenly learned to prefer intellect and reason over faith.

448  David Nirenberg This conviction is already fully in evidence in the famous exchange of letters that the newly converted Pablo had in the early 1390s with a young Jewish physician named Joshua ha-Lorki. Joshua would later (c. 1412) convert, assume the name of Gerónimo de Santa Fe, and become one of the principal protagonists (probably in close collaboration with Pablo) at the Disputation at Tortosa that would produce the conversion of so many more Iberian Jews to Christianity in 1413–14. But for now, in the 1390s, ha-Lorki is a Jew and a defender of Judaism, and chief among his defences (judging from the length he devotes to it in the letter he sent to Pablo) is the irrationality of Christian accounts of Jesus’ conception and divinity. Pablo responds as he will in the Scrutinium some forty years later, with the argument that this insistence on intellect and reason is precisely the basic error that has over the ages misled the Jews from the truths of their faith, an error that Pablo felt was especially acute in his own times. In his insistence on intellectual reason, writes Pablo provocatively, ha-Lorki is betraying his allegiance to the (Muslim) philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes). Contra Ginzburg, I suspect that had Pablo foreseen Francisco de Maldonado, he would have diagnosed him with the same Averroistic hyper-rationalist disease that he believed had led so many Jews across history to perdition. How should you judge which of these interpretations is truer to Pablo’s intentions?18 8. I am not demanding an answer to that question. I pose it only to make clear that Ginzburg’s heuristic example has not addressed the key questions at stake. In writing of “rear-view mirrors,” I was admitting to the partiality of my attention to particular possibilities in the past and justifying that partiality in terms of the differential power of those possibilities in the future. This methodological and ethical commitment (if we may call it that) allows one to note a plurality of possible futures in the past, while at the same time to recognise that some of those futures became powerful and others unimaginable. We can thus (switching now to the example of Pablo) discover a plurality of potential worlds in Pablo’s writing, such as his vision of a Pauline pleroma of Christian hermeneutics achieved through the conversion of the Jews. But we can also notice how, for example, this particular vision became quickly less and less thinkable (witness the Castilian civil war of 1449 with its attendant “purity of blood” statutes issued against the conversos), so that Pablo’s work came to serve many as a powerful anti-Jewish treatise, and a few Marranos as a source of information about a Judaism they yearned to recover. We can choose to reduce the rich possibilities of Pablo’s thought to polarity, repressing the “anti-Jewish” futures of that thought in order to favour “pro-Jewish” apologetic ones. We can choose to ignore the massive asymmetries of power that were accruing to these possibilities already in Pablo’s own lifetime. We might want to make such choices if our eyes are set on a different asymmetry of power, such as the comparative power of children and bombs in Gaza. In that case it would be concern with Israel’s power over Palestine in the present that governs our reading of Pablo and that of

Which Past for Which Present?  449 Pablo’s future readers, rather than concern for the complexity of Pablo’s ideas, or attention to the relative power of those ideas in their own context, or in any of the many future contexts through which they were encountered across time. Such choices can—indeed must—be argued, even legitimated. But that legitimation needs to be in terms of the questions they are meant to answer. Carlo Ginzburg’s critique of Anti-Judaism is posed as a defence of the past’s ambivalence and complexity, when, as I have tried to demonstrate, it achieves quite the opposite. If in fact his critique is motivated less by a concern with the past and more by what he perceives to be massive asymmetries of power in the present, then we should expect him to justify both his evaluation of those asymmetries in the present, and his decision to have them dictate terms to the past. In both cases, that justification will not be trivial, if it is to remain critical. Certainly the bombs that fell on Gaza were more powerful than any child who fell before them, and there may be some questions for which this horrific asymmetry is all that matters. But for other questions—for example, questions about the contemporary fields of force in which both the child victims and their bombers gain broader meaning, mobilising geopolitical power; or questions about how the history of thought has shaped the possibilities of existence for a Jewish state and its Muslim and Christian ­neighbours—we cannot rest there. Which is merely to say: the present is not simpler than the past. We too, like all of our ancestors, live in a pathless hour, uncertain of which of the many potentials with which our age is pregnant will quicken into the futures we yearn for or dread. If we do not strive to hear the polyphony of powers composing the present, how can we hope to nourish those futures or claim to preserve the complexity of the past? A historian is a prophet facing backwards, in that visions of the future often animate attention to the past.19 Time therefore judges historians not only as antiquarians, but also as visionaries. It is not only the quality of their philology, the cleverness of their causalities, or the depth of their archives that produces a historian’s posterity (if we dare dream of such a thing), but also the acuity, as seen “in the rear view mirror,” of their fears for the future, and of their attempts to address those fears by marrying their vision of the present to their version of a past. My pages on Eric Auerbach’s “Figura” of 1938 in the concluding pages of Anti-Judaism were an engagement of this sort, and not, as Ginzburg suggests, the result of my “bewildered” realisation, at the end of a very long book, that I had wasted so many years and so much ink over-simplifying the world.20 Auerbach provided me with an example of a thinker searching (as we know he was doing from his correspondence) for a past to put to the purpose of averting the evil he saw unfolding about him. In “Figura,” he focused upon one of the many ways in which early Christians came to think of their relationship to the Jewish past and scripture (figura being the Latin name for this interpretive device), one that preserved an important role for

450  David Nirenberg both in the Christian interpretation of the world. Auerbach offered this history of thought to his contemporaries, with the goal of recalling them to its forgotten potentials. At the same time, he overlooked other more “antiJewish” ways in which early Christians had learned to think about their relationship to that past and scripture, ways whose power had never disappeared, and was in fact everywhere exploding around him. Auerbach chose to combat the anti-Judaism he feared in his present in part by silencing the anti-Judaism of the past. I invoked his example by way of contrast with my own approach, which was to combat the possibilities of anti-Judaism that concern me in my present by illuminating a past that might animate them. Ginzburg seems to have a very different sense than I of what the future might hold, and a very different sense of how that future might relate to the past. Who is right? In some sense it is always too early to tell. Historians, like prophets, are hostage to what will be. Interpretive decisions that might appear to be critical, prescient, and true at one point in the flow of time may come to seem wrong or even disastrously short-sighted at another. As I put it in the concluding lines of Anti-Judaism: I may be wrong about the risk, wrong in my sense of where the greater danger lies, and therefore wrong in how I have chosen to approach the past [. . .] My sense of the future’s dangers, like every other historian’s, may well turn out to be untrue. But in such matters of prophecy, as God explained to Jonah, we should take joy in being proved wrong.21 9. It is always too early to tell, but in the meantime we can cultivate methodology and argument as criteria for judgment. And here I think that this collection, The Medieval Roots of Antisemitism, is exemplary in ways that its “Postface” does not adequately celebrate. For over and over again this collection addresses our problem of sameness and difference, continuity and change in prejudices about Judaism. It does so from multiple perspectives, across diverse genres, and in pursuit of varied questions, thereby performing the kinds of comparisons and arguments out of which any critical approach to our problem must emerge. There are, to be sure, a few absolute declarations of difference between the medieval and the modern (such as Wyrwa’s) that fail to ask “same or different in regard to what?” But much more common are explorations of specific strands of similarity, such as Singer’s study of the “Wandering Jew.” Or pages dedicated to innovations that seem discontinuous with what came before, but powerfully influence what comes later. I think here of Rubin’s study of the first ritual murder accusations, or the line drawn by Lipton from Bertrand Russell’s epistolary caricatures of Semitic noses to the iconographic inventiveness of the twelfth century. There are even illuminating meditations—such as Klug’s and Seidler’s Wittgensteinian investigations— on why comparison and analogy are necessary for the historian, which is also to say, on the necessity of evaluating claims of sameness or difference

Which Past for Which Present?  451 in terms of their adequacy to different questions. “It comes to this,” Klug tells us: In a given historical or political context, the question to ask is [. . .] “What is the analogy worth?” Is it worth asserting or better to deny it? The value of the analogy lies in the light it sheds on the empirical context within which we consider it. If it illuminates more than it obscures, embrace it. If the opposite, reject it. These things are a matter of judgment.22 Almost every essay in this collection asks that question of the relationship between anti-Judaisms past and present. Frankel’s comparison of American and European antisemitism; Tokarska-Bakir on “The Present Causes of Past Effects”; Adams and Heß’s comparisons of blood libels across the ages; Svartvik’s Twainian sense that “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme”; Webman’s reading of modern Islamist “recycling” of early Islamic motifs: these voices and others take seriously the task of asking aloud, so to speak, whether and how a particular past is illuminating for a particular present and vice-versa. In their willingness to ask these questions, and in the varied, often fascinating, “sometimes contradictory” answers they produce to them, we have a powerful antidote to that widespread and potentially deadly dogmatism which would forbid us to inquire, on this one topic of antisemitism, into the relevance of the past to the present. We should all be grateful for the gift.

Notes Note: My thanks to Ryan Szpiech and Yosi Yisraeli for sharing with me their thoughts and writings, and to Daniel Watling for his comments and editorial assistance. 1. Since Ginzburg found it meaningful to provide a note listing the number of times I use the word “ambivalent,” I should note that it occurs more than double the times he lists, indeed in virtually every chapter, in formulations like “it is important to insist on this ambivalence.” Some of the “few” occurrences Ginzburg overlooks: pp. 98, 162, 347, 351, 352, 363, 407, 408, and 511. 2. Or, as I put it in an article that served as a preparation for the book, “‘the Jewish question’ became the key issue in Christian hermeneutics and in the elaboration of Christian theology, ontology, and sociology,” because Christianity endorsed the Jewish Scripture as its own. “The Birth of the Pariah: Jews, Christian Dualism, and Social Science,” Social Research 70, no. 1 (2003): 201–36 (here 211). 3. One might even understand the Church’s inclusion of the Hebrew Bible as generating a greater potential for violence than Marcionism, in that orthodox Christian appropriation of these scriptures allows for, perhaps even demands, a never-ending indictment of Jewish exegesis and Jewish life. Had Marcion been victorious, perhaps Judaism would simply have become irrelevant for the Christian. 4. Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 10. 5. Ginzburg has, however, often engaged explicitly with the question, always as a powerful advocate for not reducing the past to the will of the present. See,

452  David Nirenberg among his many works touching on this subject, “Our Words, and Theirs: A Reflection on the Historian’s Craft, Today,” in Historical Knowledge: In Quest of Theory, Method and Evidence, ed. Susanna Fellman and Marjatta Rahikainen (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 97–119. 6. For example, in the Additiones Pablo criticises Lyra’s explanation of hodie in the Hebrew of Psalm 2, but then provides his own even more extensive explanation for why the Psalm is entirely Christological in its literal sense. The Jewish Saul of the Scrutinium (book I, dist. 9 cap. 9) does echo the Additiones’ critique of Lyra (namely, that grammatically the Psalm verse could refer to the birth of David), but the Christian Paulus then responds by repeating the more extensive Christological reading that Pablo had given in the Additiones. I see no repudiation or contradiction here, nor in the treatment of the plurality of the Hebrew word Elohim. 7. Scholars have long suggested that Pablo may have begun the project as a student in Paris. For an early example, see Luciano Serrano, Los conversos D. Pablo de Santa María y D. Alfonso de Cartagena: Obispos de Burgos, gobernantes, diplomáticos y escritores (Madrid: Bermejo, 1942), 110. But it is clear from Pablo’s own prologue, from stylistic evidence, and from reception history that the project was a long and sporadic one. On Pablo’s Prologue, see most recently Ryan Szpiech, “A Father’s Bequest: Augustinian Typology and Personal Testimony in the Conversion Narrative of Solomon HaLevi/Pablo De Santa María,” in The Hebrew Bible in Fifteenth-Century Spain: Exegesis, Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts, ed. Jonathan Decter and Arturo Prats (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 177–98, and idem, Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 41–51. For any discussion of the Additiones or the Scrutinium the point of reference must now be Yosi Yisraeli’s masterful work, “Between Jewish and Christian Scholarship in the Fifteenth Century: The Consolidation of a ‘Converso Doctrine’ in the Theological Writings of Pablo de Santa María,” PhD Dissertation (Tel Aviv University, 2014). Yisraeli discusses the composition of the Additiones at pp. 70–75. 8. Aristotle, Metaphysics IV 3 1005b, 23–26; and 1005b, 19–20: “It is impossible for the same thing to belong and not to belong at the same time to the same thing and in the same respect.” 9. John 5:39 had been invoked by an anonymous Franciscan critic of early versions of Pablo’s Additiones that circulated before the edited 1429 manuscript was compiled. The friar used the phrase to denounce as false (and Judaising) what he characterised as Pablo’s privileging of the literal sense of scripture in his commentaries on Lyra. The friar’s letter, along with Pablo’s initial response, was included in the Prologue to the 1429 manuscript of the Additiones that Pablo dedicated to his son Alonso de Cartagena. Pablo and the anonymous friar were, in other words, engaged in a debate like ours, about “ambivalence,” that is, about the proper place of “Judaism” in “Christianity.” The Scrutinium is in this sense explicitly presented as an expansion of that debate. 10. Saul accepts Christianity at the end of the first book. Paul then explains to him how his conversion has shifted the terms of the debate: henceforth, the New Testament will serve along with the Old as authoritative ground for their discussion, as will the example of the Christian saints: “quod in sequentibus autoritates novi testamenti accipias, sicut & antiquas accipiebas. Utrumque enim est a deo datum seu revelatum. Similiter & auctoritates sanctorum nostrorum quorum eloquia sunt igne charitatis examinata recipias, qui primo talmudica dicta quae in multis igne infernali succensa, ut forte in sequentibus apparebit temerarie recipiebas. Et sic ad vota tua implenda Deo duce procedemus” (Scrutinium,

Which Past for Which Present?  453 1.10.9, p. 358). In the Additiones, Pablo had characterised Thomas Aquinas as “igne charitatis examinata et naturalis rationis dictamine multipliciter purgata” (Additiones, prol. ii, p. 1:6). (Compare the use of the phrase in Psalm 11:7.) Throughout the Scrutinium Pablo often marks certain Christian mysteries as beyond proof by reason. See, for example, his treatment of the sacrament of the Eucharist at 2.3.6, p. 413: “quod manifeste contingit in hoc sacramento, in quo per nullum sensum, nec etiam intellectum naturalem humanum cognosci possunt ea quae miraculose in eo continentur, nisi solum per cognitionem supernaturalem a Deo infusam, scilicet per fidem.” 11. In this, his position is similar to that of late thirteenth-century Dominicans such as Raymond Martini (Ramon Martí), whose Pugio fidei (1287) frequently cited rabbinic literature to establish articles of Christian faith. See Chen Merchavia, “Pugio Fidei—an Index of Citations,” [Hebrew] in Exile and Diaspora: Studies in the History of the People of Israel Presented to Professor Haim Beinart on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Aharon Mirsky, Avraham Grossman and Yosef Kaplan (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute, 1988), 203–34. See in general Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 122–70. 12. There is plenty of evidence for such a contextual interpretation of Pablo’s thought, not only in his own voluminous writings, but also in those of his son Alonso de Cartagena, and in the works of other influential and powerful theologians (such as Cardinal Juan de Torquemada). “Converso theology” is the formulation of Bruce Rosenstock, who argued strongly for a position like this one in his New Men: Conversos, Christian Theology, and Society in FifteenthCentury Castile (London: Queen Mary, University of London, 2002). (For my reservations, see my review in Speculum 80, no. 1 [2005]: 315–17.) Yisraeli makes the most powerful case for interpreting Pablo in this light. 13. I should point out that we have famous cases of “Marrano re-conversion” to Judaism in which the converts testify to more or less the opposite: that the arguments of the Scrutinium were perhaps the greatest obstacle to their accepting the truth of Judaism. See Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto. Isaac Cardoso: A Study in Seventeenth Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 288; and especially Yosef Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism: The Study of Isaac Orobio de Castro [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1982), English trans. Raphael Loewe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), with page references here to the Hebrew original: 77, 98 n. 2, 102–4, 112 n. 55, 215, 310 n. 98. Orobio makes clear that in his own case, Pablo’s Scrutinium was the key work whose arguments he had to overcome in order to turn toward Judaism, not the other way around. His testimony to the Inquisition to that effect is at p. 77 (86 of the English), and his writings frequently take up the problem posed by Pablo’s work. 14. Yisraeli, “Between Jewish and Christian Scholarship,” 95. Though the dissertation remains unpublished, see by the same author: “Constructing and Undermining Converso Jewishness: Profiat Duran and Pablo de Santa María,” in Religious Conversion: History, Experience, and Meaning, ed. Ira Katznelson and Miri Rubin (London: Routledge, 2016), 185–215; and “A Christianized Sephardic Critique of Rashi’s Peshaṭ in Pablo de Santa María’s Additiones ad Postillam Nicolai de Lyra,” in Medieval Exegesis and Religious Difference: Commentary, Conflict, and Community in the Premodern Mediterranean, ed. Ryan Szpiech (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 128–41. Ryan Szpiech takes the contrasting ways in which Pablo’s work was deployed in the early sixteenth-century Reuchlin–Pfefferkorn debate as a starting point for an important study on multiple late medieval and early modern attitudes toward

454  David Nirenberg Jewish sources in Christian history: “From Convert to Convert: Two Opposed Trends in Late Medieval and Early Modern Anti-Jewish Polemic,” in Revealing the Secrets of the Jews: Johannes Pfefferkorn and Christian Writings About Jewish Life and Literature in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 219–43. 15. “Et quoniam per gratiam baptismi cives sanctorum & domestici Dei efficiuntur, longeque dignius sit regenerari spiritu, quam nasci carne, hac edictali lege statuimus, ut civitatum & locorum, in quibus sacro baptismate regenerantur, privilegiis, libertatibus & immunitatibus gaudeant, quae ratione duntaxat nativitatis & originis alii consequuntur.” Giovanni Domenico Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio, vol. 29 (Florence: Zatta, 1759 f./ reprint Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1961), 100; Norman P. Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (London and Washington, DC: Sheed & Ward; Georgetown University Press, 1990), 484. On the evolving roles of genealogy in Iberian culture at this time, see David Nirenberg, “Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities: Jews and Christians in Fifteenth-Century Spain,” Past and Present 174 (2002): 3–41. 16. Yisraeli, “Between Jewish and Christian Scholarship,” 100 f. On the advertisement, see Victor Scholderer, “Two Unrecorded Early Book Advertisements,” The Library, 5th ser., 11 (1956): 114–15. The advertisement is reproduced in The Distribution of Books by Catalogue from the Invention of Printing to A.D. 1800, ed. Graham Pollard and Albert Ehrman (Cambridge: Ehrman, 1965), 41, fig. 14. Both sources cited by Yisraeli, “Between Jewish and Christian Scholarship,” 102 n. 181. 17. If we want to find some proxy for the relative resonance of the various voices in Pablo’s work (of which, so far as I can see, Ginzburg has stressed only one, the Marrano apologist), it might be useful to start with noticing the reactions of such influential readers. For the prelates at Trent, see the “Epistola ad D.D Christophorum Vella et Acuña Archiepiscopum Burgensem terdignissimo” that is printed in the 1591 Burgos edition of the Scrutinium, 1–6. 18. Joshua ha-Lorki, Letter to Shlomo ha-Levi, and the reply, A Letter to Joshua ha-Lorki, were printed in Leo Landau, Das apologetische Schreiben des Josua Lorki an den Abtrünnigen Don Salomon ha-Lewi (Paulus de Santa Maria) (Antwerp: Teitelbaum & Boxelbaum, 1906). In addition to Yisraeli’s illuminating pages (50–55), recent literature on the exchange includes Michael Glatzer, “Between Yehoshua Halorki and Shelomo Halevi: Towards an Examination of the Causes of Conversion among Jews in the Fourteenth Century,” [Hebrew] Pe‛amim 54 (1993): 103–16; Maurice Kriegel, “Autour de Pablo de Santa María et d’Alfonso de Cartagena: alignement culturel et originalité converso,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 41, no. 2 (1994): 197–205 (cited also by Ginzburg); idem, “Paul de Burgos et Profiat Duran déchiffrent 1391,” Atalaya: Revue d’études médiévales romanes 14 (2014), available online at http:// atalaya.revues.org/1232 (accessed 23 November 2017); Benjamin R. Gampel, “A Letter to a Wayward Teacher: The Transformations of Sephardic Culture,” in Cultures of the Jews: A New History, ed. David Biale (New York: Schocken, 2002), 389–447. Additional references in Yisraeli, “Between Jewish and Christian Scholarship,” 50 n. 45. 19. The allusion is to a sentence in Friedrich Schlegel’s Fragmente of 1798, “Der Historiker ist ein rückwärts gekehrter Prophet” (Friedrich Schlegel, Der Historiker als rückwärts gekehrter Prophet: Aufsätze und Vorlesungen zur Literatur [Leipzig: Reclam, 1991], 161), though in our own time, the idea is almost inseparable from Walter Benjamin’s commentary upon it. 20. Which is not to say that I am entirely satisfied with the book, or that its writing was not marked by choices about what to attend to and what to ignore that I might today make otherwise.

Which Past for Which Present?  455 21. Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 472. 22. Compare Seidler, “For we can avoid ineptness or emptiness in our assertions only by presenting the model as what it is, as an object of comparison—as, so to speak, a measuring-rod; not as a preconceived idea to which reality must correspond. (The dogmatism into which we fall so easily in doing philosophy.)”

Contributors

Tahir Abbas is currently a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Department of Government, London School of Economics. He has been researching and writing on ethnic relations, radicalisation, and violent extremism in a political and sociological context for two decades. His latest books are Contemporary Turkey in Conflict: Ethnicity, Islam and Politics (2017), Muslim Diasporas in the West (4 volumes, 2017), and Political Muslims: Understanding Youth Resistance in the Global Context (Syracuse University Press, 2018), co-ed., with S. Hamid. Jonathan Adams is a researcher for the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, and a docent in the Department of Scandinavian Languages at Uppsala University. His research focuses on medieval East Norse philology, Birgittine literature, and the portrayal of Jews and Muslims in Old Danish and Old Swedish texts. Recent books include The Revelations of St Birgitta (2015), and Lessons in Contempt (2013), as well as the edited volumes Beyond the Piraeus Lion (2017), with Massimiliano Bampi; Revealing the Secrets of the Jews (2017) and Fear and Loathing in the North (2015), both with Cordelia Heß; Østnordisk filologi (2015); and The Jewish-Christian Encounter in Medieval Preaching (2014), with Jussi Hanska. He is co-editor of Medieval Sermon Studies. Robert Chazan is the S. H. and Helen R. Scheuer Professor of Jewish History in the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. His research focus has been Jewish life in medieval western Christendom. His most recent publications are The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom (2006), Reassessing Jewish Life in Medieval Europe (2010), and From Anti-Judaism to Anti-Semitism (2016). He is currently completing a study of Jewish migrations over the ages. Behruz Davletov is currently an MA student in European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at Carleton University, Canada. He researches and publishes on nationalism, ethnicity, and minorities in the Middle East and Central Asia. Steven Englund is a retired historian living in upstate New York. Until the end of 2016, he was a visiting fellow at the Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung,

Contributors  457 Technische Universität Berlin; and from 2012 to 2015, he co-taught a seminar with Vincent Duclert at L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is currently writing a comparative history of political antisemitism in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and France, 1870–1918. Isabel Enzenbach is a research assistant at the Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung, Technische Universität Berlin and until 2017 was a post-doc at the Zentrum Jüdische Studien Berlin-Brandenburg. Her research focuses on antisemitism from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, racism and hatred of Muslims, Alltagsgeschichte, and educational projects. She is currently curating the exhibition “Angezettelt. Antisemitische und rassistische Aufkleber von 1880 bis heute” (Sticky messages. Antisemitic and racist stickers from 1880 to the present). Her publications include Angezettelt: Antisemitische und rassistische Aufkleber von 1880 bis heute (2017); “Aufstand der Zeichen? Rechtsextreme Sticker in H ­ oyerswerda— Alltagskultur und Medienereignis,” in Medien und Kulturen des Konflikts: Pluralität und Dynamik von Generationen, Gewalt und Politik (2017), and Alltagskultur des Antisemitismus im Kleinformat: Vignetten der Sammlung Haney ab 1880 (2012) with Wolfgang Haney. Richard E. Frankel is an Associate Professor of modern German history and the holder of the Richard G. Neiheisel Professorship in European History at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His research interests centre on nationalism, antisemitism, and political culture. His first book was Bismarck’s Shadow: The Crisis of German Leadership and the Transformation of the German Right, 1898–1945. He has published articles that take a comparative approach to the study of antisemitism, including “One Crisis Behind? Rethinking Antisemitic Exceptionalism in the United States and Germany,” in American Jewish History in 2013. Frankel is now seeking to understand antisemitism from an even broader perspective. He is currently at work on a new book-length project that will explore the relationship between antisemitism and globalisation from 1880 to 1914, with a focus on Germany and the United States. Yvonne Friedman is a historian and Professor of History and Land of Israel Studies at Bar-Ilan University. She currently chairs the Board of the Israel Antiquities Authority. Her research foci include interreligious historical contacts and twelfth- and thirteenth-century Muslim-Crusader peace processes in the Levant. Her book Encounter between Enemies: Captivity and Ransom in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (2002) treated medieval ransom in the Middle East and a volume of essays under her editorship, Religion and Peace: Historical Aspects, has recently been published (2018). Other fields of interest include medieval antisemitism, women in a fighting society, and medieval pilgrimage. Carlo Ginzburg has taught at the University of Bologna, at UCLA, at the Scuola Normale of Pisa. His books, translated into more than twenty

458 Contributors languages, include The Night Battles; The Cheese and the Worms; Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method; The Enigma of Piero della Francesca; History, Rhetoric, and Proof; The Judge and the Historian; Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance; No Island is an Island; Threads and Traces; and Fear Reverence Terror: Five Essays in Political Iconography. He has received the Aby Warburg Prize (1992), the HumboldtForschungs Prize (2007), and the Balzan Prize for the History of Europe, 1400–1700 (2010). Cordelia Heß is Professor of Nordic History, University of Greifswald. Her research areas include religion, language, and politics in the late medieval Baltic Sea region, interreligious contacts, and antisemitism. She has been a research fellow at the Royal Academy of Literature, History and Antiquities in Stockholm, the Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung at TU Berlin, and at the Department of History and the Kantor Center at Tel Aviv University. Her latest book is The Absent Jews: Kurt Forstreuter and the Historiography of Medieval Prussia (2017). With Jonathan Adams, she has co-edited Revealing the Secrets of the Jews (2017) and Fear and Loathing in the North (2015). Together they are currently working on the project “The Archives of Antisemitism in Scandinavia. Knowledge Production and Stereotyping in a Long-Term Perspective” at the University of Gothenburg. Brian Klug is a Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy, St Benet’s Hall, University of Oxford, and an Hon. Fellow of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton. He has published extensively on antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism, and aspects of Jewish philosophy. Among his books are Words of Fire: Selected Essays of Ahad Ha’am (2015); Being Jewish and Doing Justice: Bringing Argument to Life (2011), and Offence: The Jewish Case (2009). He is the Associate Editor of Patterns of Prejudice and a member of the International Advisory Boards of Islamophobia Studies Yearbook and ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies. Rotem Kowner is a Professor of Japanese History and Culture at the University of Haifa, Israel. His research has focused on the social and racial nexus between Japan and the West since the sixteenth century, wartime behaviour in modern Japan, and Japanese attitudes toward Jews. Among his recent books are From White to Yellow: The Japanese in European Racial Thought, 1300–1735 (2014), the co-edited volumes Race and Racism in Modern East Asia: Western and Eastern Constructions (2013), and Race and Racism in Modern East Asia: Interactions, Nationalism, Gender and Lineage (2015), and the expanded edition of his lexicon Historical Dictionary of the Russo-Japanese War (2017). Miriamne Ara Krummel is an Associate Professor of Medieval Literature in the Department of English at the University of Dayton. Her first book,

Contributors  459 Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England: Legally Absent, Virtually Present (2011), inaugurated her interest in ontologically and psychically present medieval Jews. This passion to excavate the Jews’ contributions to English medieval culture has brought her to co-edit (with Tison Pugh), Jews in Medieval England: Teaching Representations of the Other (2017). The subject of Krummel’s second monograph, Medieval Jews, In and Out of Time, brings us to see how medieval Jews and Christians lived in and responded to the restrictions of sacred time, specifically Annus Domini temporality. Her chapter in this volume reflects part of the conversation in Medieval Jews, In and Out of Time. Krummel’s articles have appeared in Exemplaria, Shofar, TSLL, Postmedieval, and edited volumes. Grzegorz Krzywiec is a researcher at the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Polska Akademia Nauk). He has published largely on Polish antisemitism, Polish-Jewish relations, rightwing politics, and fascism in Poland in the Central and East European context. His publications include Chauvinism, Polish Style: The Case of Roman Dmowski. Beginnings (1886–1905) (2016) and Polska bez Żydów: Studia z dziejów idei, wyobrażeń i praktyk antysemickich na ziemiach polskich początku XX wieku (2017). With Kamil Kijek, he is co-editor of the special volume of Kwartalnik Historii Żydów · Jewish History Quarterly 2 (2016) on Polish antisemitism 1905–39. He is currently conducting a research project on the cultural history of Polish fascism. Ruth Langer is a Professor of Jewish Studies in the Comparative Theology Area of the Theology Department at Boston College. Her research and writing focuses on two areas: Jewish liturgy and Jewish-Christian relations. Her most recent monograph, Cursing the Christians? A History of the Birkat HaMinim (2012) combines these two, as do a number of recent articles on the censorship of the aleynu prayer. She is co-editor of and a contributor to a forthcoming dialogic volume on Jewish theologies of Israel and Christian theologies of land and the Holy Land. Sara Lipton is a Professor of History at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She is the author of Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée (1999), which was awarded the John Nicholas Brown Prize for Best First Book by the Medieval Academy of America, and Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography (2014), which won the Association for Jewish Studies’ Jordan Schnitzer Book Award. Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Review of Books, and The Huffington Post. She has held fellowships from the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Howard Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Oxford Centre for Jewish Studies, and she has been a visiting scholar at Tel Aviv University, Oxford

460 Contributors University, and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris). Her current projects include an article examining the representation of circumcision in Christian thought, literature, and art; and a book that asks: “When medieval people looked at art, what were they supposed to see?” David Nirenberg is the Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Distinguished Service Professor of Medieval History and Social Thought at the University of Chicago, where he is also Executive Vice Provost. His books have focused on how Jewish, Christian, and Islamic societies have interacted with and thought about each other. These include Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (1996), Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013); Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism Medieval and Modern (2014), and Aesthetic Theology and its Enemies: Judaism in Christian Painting, Poetry, and Politics (2015). Miri Rubin is a Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary University of London. Her research has explored aspects of the religious cultures of Europe in books such as Charity and Community in Late Medieval Cambridge (1987), Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (1991), Gentile Tales: the Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (1999), and Mother of God (2005). She recently translated and edited the work discussed in her article for this volume, The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, published by Penguin Classics in 2014. In 2017, she delivered the Wiles Lecture on the treatment of strangers in late medieval cities, and these will be worked into a book to be published by Cambridge University Press. Victor J. Seidler is a Professor Emeritus of Social Theory in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and teaches Jewish Philosophy and Jewish Thought at Leo Baeck College, London. He is the author of many key texts on sexuality and masculinity, including Rediscovering Masculinity; Unreasonable Men; Recovering the Self, and Men, Sex and Relationships, as well as Jewish-related topics, including Shadows of the Shoah: Jewish Identity and Belonging and Jewish Philosophy and Western Culture. His many research interests include Marxism and critical theory; masculinity and sexual politics; the body and emotional life; the Holocaust and modernity, and identity and ethnicities. He is on the Editorial Board of European Judaism. Tuvia Singer is a PhD student at the history department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His fields of interest are German-Jewish relations, ideology and folk beliefs, historiography, and folklore. The title of his dissertation is Nationalism, Regionalism and Cosmology: Minorities and Foreigners in German Folk-Narratives in the Nineteenth Century.

Contributors  461 Maya Soifer Irish is an Assistant Professor of History at Rice University. She works on the history of interfaith relations in medieval Spain and the Mediterranean. Her first book, Jews and Christians in Medieval Castile: Tradition, Coexistence, and Change, was published in 2016 and explores the changes in Jewish-Christian relations in the Iberian kingdom of Castile between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries. Her other publications include “Beyond Convivencia: Critical Reflections on the Historiography of Interfaith Relations in Christian Spain” in the Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies (2009). She is currently working on a monograph about power and society in fourteenth-century Seville. Jesper Svartvik is the first holder of the Krister Stendahl Chair of Theology of Religions at Lund University and at the Swedish Theological Institute in Jerusalem. His teaching and research include interreligious studies, especially Jewish-Christian relations, and biblical studies, especially the New Testament in its contemporary Jewish contexts. He is the author of nine books and the co-editor of several others, among them Christ Jesus and the Jewish People Today: New Explorations of Theological Interrelationships (2011; Italian translation 2012). Giacomo Todeschini was a Professor of Medieval History at the University of Trieste (1979–2016). His studies focus on the development of medieval/modern economics, exclusion from citizenship and market ­ games, and the economic/political meaning of Jews in Christian society. He did research work and lectured as a fellow or member at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris), Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish ­Studies, Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), Beijing University, and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Joanna Tokarska-Bakir is a cultural anthropologist, religious studies scholar, and professor at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences at Warsaw, Poland. She specialises in the anthropology of violence and is the author of, among other publications, a monograph on blood libel Légendes du sang: Une anthropologie du préjugé antisémite en Europe (2015) and Pogrom Cries: Essays on Polish-Jewish History, 1939–1946 (2017). She is currently preparing a monograph The Kielce Pogrom: A Social Portrait. Esther Webman is the academic adviser of the Program for the Study of Jews in Arab Lands, head of the Zeev Vered Desk for the Study of Tolerance and Intolerance in the Middle East, and a senior research fellow at the Dayan Center and the Stephen Roth Institute at Tel Aviv University. Her research focuses on Arab discourse analysis, mainly Arab Antisemitism and Arab perceptions of the Holocaust. She has published extensively on these topics and participated in numerous conferences. Her book, From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust, co-authored with

462 Contributors Meir Litvak, won the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Gold book prize for 2010 and was published in Hebrew in 2015. Ulrich Wyrwa is a Professor of Modern History at Universität Potsdam and currently interim professor at the Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung, Technische Universität Berlin. His research interests include the history of antisemitism and Jewish history in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe with special focus on Italy. His publications include the books Gesellschaftliche Konfliktfelder und die Entstehung des Antisemitismus: Das Deutsche Kaiserreich und das Liberale Italien im Vergleich (2015) and Juden in der Toskana und in Preußen im Vergleich: Aufklärung und Emanzipation in Florenz, Livorno, Berlin und Königsberg i. Pr. (2003), as well as articles in Chidushim 18 (2016), Quest 9 (2016), Church History and Religious Culture 96 (2016), and “Antisemitism” (together with Werner Bergmann) in 1914–1918-online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War. He is currently working on the project “The Making of Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century Europe: A Comparative European Overview.” Milan Žonca is a lecturer in Hebrew Studies at the Institute of Near Eastern and African Studies, Faculty of Arts, Charles University (Univerzita Karlova) in Prague. He is also a member of the Academic Board of Prague Centre for Jewish Studies. Previously he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Department for the Study of Ancient and Medieval Thought, Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. His research focuses on Jewish cultural and intellectual history in medieval Christian Europe and Jewish-Christian polemics. He is also interested in medieval practices connected with religious learning and prayer. He is currently working on a book project examining Jewish intellectual life in late-medieval Bohemia and the surrounding regions.

Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures.

Persons Abbas ibn Firnas 244 ‘Abbas, Muhammad 163 Abdulhamid II 151 Abdülmecid I 147 Abraham Pinche 267 Abu al-Subh, ‘Atallah 165 Abū Walīd Muḥammad ibn Rushd see Averroes Achcar, Gilbert 174 Adams, Jonathan 13, 243, 434 Adler, Ellen 185 Adorno, Theodor W. 37 Ágreda, María de Jesús de 127 Ahlwardt, Hermann 27 al-Banna, Hassan 156 Alfonso X of Castile 309 Alfonso XI of Castile 309 al-Jundi, Yusri 164 Alonso de Cartagena 445 Alonso de Espina 341 Alpert, Jechiel 320, 325 – 26 al-Qa’id, Shaykh Bassam 164 al-Tayyib, Shaykh Ahmad 164 Ambrose of Milan 245, 345 ‘Amru, Samir 163 Anne of Bohemia 247 Anthonius Margaritha 9 Arafat, Yasser 133 Arendt, Hannah 37 Aristotle 432 – 33 Aslak Bolt 60 Assmann, Aleida 5 Ataben, Hia ibn 306 Atilhan, Cevat Rıfat 148 Auerbach, Erich 429, 449 – 50

Augustine of Hippo 232, 257, 364, 420, 429 Averroes 448 Avigdor Kara 288 – 90, 417 Ayalon, Danny 265 Bach, Johann Sebastian 124 Bacon, Roger 244 Badiʽ, Muhammad 164 Balcı, Kerim 153 Bale, Anthony 67, 262, 313, 332 – 33 Banister, Joseph 51 Barabbas 129, 136, 367 Bargisi, Amr 174 Baron, Salo Wittmayer 27, 30 – 33, 37 Baum, Gregory 232, 234 Bayar, Celal 148 Bede the Venerable 245, 252 Belaset (daughter of Benedict fil’ Moses) 251 Bellucci, Monica 130, 136 Bembaron, Lola 225 Ben-Dasan, Isaiah see Yamamoto Shichihei Benedict fil’ Moses 251 Benjamin, Walter 441 Berding, Helmut 26 Bergman, Ronen 266 Berlin, Isaiah 66 Bernanos, Georges 415 Bernard of Clairvaux 364 Bernard, Jami 121 Bernardino of Siena 346 Bernward of Hildesheim 189, 191 Berulfsen, Bjarne 59

464 Index Bildt, Carl 266 Bishara, ‘Azmi 170 Biskupska, Antonina 324 Bjereld, Ulf 275 – 76 Błachut, Władysław 322 Blaschke, Olaf 20 Błaszczyk, Henio 321, 325, 328 – 31 Błaszczyk, Walenty 321 Böckel, Otto 353 Bohr, Margrethe 183, 185 Bohr, Niels 183, 185, 188 Bonnier, Elisabet Borsiin 266 Börne, Ludwig 394 – 95 Bostom, Andrew 172 Boström, Donald 265 – 66, 271 – 78 Boyarin, Daniel 229 Boys, Mary C. 132 Bramly, Sophie 226 Breivik, Anders Behring 425 – 26 Brentano, Clemens Maria 126 – 27 Bryan, William Jennings 354 Buchen, Tim 23, 112 Bulgakov, Mikhail 128 Bunzl, Matti 42 – 43, 48, 50 – 52 Burgensis see Pablo de Santa María Caesar see Julius Caesar Caiaphas 123, 128 – 30, 136 Camille, Michael 186 – 87 Caviezel, James 130, 136 Cayat, Elsa 225 – 26 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart 398 – 400, 403 Chazan, Robert 12, 59, 411 Christ see Jesus of Nazareth Christiani, Pablo 381 Clegg, Nick 274 Cohn, Norman 161 Cohn-Sherbok, Dan 271 Coudenhove-Kalergi, Heinrich von 27, 32 – 33 Cromwell, Oliver 419 Cruciger see Hagen, Friedrich Heinrich von der Dagenais, John 228 Derakhshi, Ali 272 Derrida, Jacques 5 Dionysius Exiguus 245 Dmowski, Roman 114 Dohm, Christian Wilhelm von 393 Doležalová, Lucie 260 Dominguito de Val 268 Dubnow, Simon 30

Dühring, Eugen 20, 25 – 27 Dziwisz, Stanisław 125 Edward I 35 Eitzen, Paulus von 392 Ekbert von Schönau 195 Elias, Prior 252, 260 Eliot, George 333, 370 Emmerich, Anne Catherine 126 – 27 Engh, Jan 59 Enrique II de Trastámara 309 – 10, 313 Enzenbach, Isabel 13, 199 Erasmus of Rotterdam 233, 445 Erbakan, Necmettin 155 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip 152, 154 – 56 Everard of Calne (bishop of Norwich) 261 Falayfil, Shaykh Ishaq 163 Falwell, Jerry 133 Fazıl, Necip 156 Febvre, Lucien 31 Ferdinand II of Aragon 366 Fisher, Eugene 131 Ford, Henry 352, 356 Foucault, Michel 4, 5, 429 Francisco Maldonado da Silva 430 – 32, 445 – 48 Francis Wolf 269 Franco, Francisco 414 – 15 Frank, Anne 83, 88 Frank, Leo 354 Frankel, Richard E. 14, 451 Frankowski, Antoni 325 Fraser, Giles 226, 228, 233 Fredriksen, Paula 124 Freud, Sigmund 230, 424 Fritsch, Theodor 20, 25 – 26, 36 Funkenstein, Amos 19, 37, 433 Furman, Franciszek 320 – 22 Galton, Francis 433 Gavra, Gai 266 Gavriil Byelostokskiy 270 Geertz, Clifford 26 Geoffrey Chaucer 243 – 44, 247, 251 – 52 Gerónimo de Santa Fe see Joshua ha-Lorki Gibson, Hutton 121, 134 Gibson, Mel 13, 121 – 22, 124 – 36 Gilman, Sander L. 48, 334 Ginzburg, Carlo 14, 438 – 50 Glagau, Otto 353

Index  465 Godric of Finchale 262 Gökçek, Melih 154 Goldstein, Julius 33 González de Medina, Fernando 306 Graetz, Heinrich 30, 32 Graham, Billy 133 Gramsci, Antonio 412 Green, James 169 Gross, Jan T. 270, 415 – 16 Gudin, Vyacheslav 274 Guidetti, Corrado 433 Guillou, Jan 276 Gülen, Fethullah 152 Güngör, Erol 156 Gutzkow, Karl 393 – 94, 397, 402 – 3 Gwiazdowicz, Kazimierz 322 – 23 Hagen, Friedrich Heinrich von der 394, 397 Halevi, Judah 379 – 80 Halevi, Yossi Klein 385 – 87 Haney, Wolfgang 207, 209 – 16 Harkabi, Yehoshafat 172 Harold of Gloucester 267 Heil, Johannes 36 Helena (empress) 191, 193 Helin, Jan 274 Helinand of Froidmont 262 Henry III 262 Heraclitus 443 Herbert de Losinga 248, 260 Herder, Johann Gottfried 48 Herod Antipas 126, 129, 136 Hertzberg, Arthur 384 Herzl, Theodor 151, 370, 383 – 84 Heß, Cordelia 13, 243, 433 – 34, 451 Higuchi Tsuyanosuke 76 Hilberg, Raul 368 Hiss, Yehuda 266 Hitler, Adolf 34, 78, 79, 148, 151, 153 – 54, 216, 230, 232, 235 – 36, 352, 384, 426 Hobsbawm, Eric 36 Hoffmann, Christhard 21, 23, 34 Hökmark, Gunnar 276 Horkheimer, Max 37 Horowitz, Donald 23 Hrůzová, Anežka 268 Hudson, Deal 132 Hugh of Lincoln 243 – 44, 247 – 51, 268, 367 ibn Rushd see Averroes Idris, Muhammad Gala’ 163

Imber, Naftali Herz 384 Ingham, Patricia Clare 244 Inuzuka Koreshige 78, 83 Isaac, Jules 98 – 99, 412 Isaac of Stella 262 Isabella I of Castile 366 Jacobs, Steven 134 Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī see Rumi James, M. R. 261 Jan Hus 294, 299 Jan of Jenštejn 290, 293, 297 Jeleński, Jan 108, 110, 112 – 16 Jeske-Choiński, Teodor 109, 111, 114 Jessopp, Augustus 260 Jesus of Nazareth 8, 11, 21, 23 – 24, 35, 48 – 49, 61 – 67, 98, 122 – 33, 135 – 36, 189 – 91, 190, 191, 193 – 96, 229, 232 – 36, 243, 245 – 47, 249 – 51, 257, 259 – 60, 267 – 68, 270, 287 – 89, 291 – 97, 299 – 300, 312 – 14, 326, 332, 334, 341, 343, 347, 354, 363 – 67, 370 – 71, 373, 400 – 3, 411 – 12, 418 – 19, 421 – 22, 426, 426, 431, 439, 441, 443 – 46, 448 Jochmann, Werner 34 Johannes Lange of Wetzlar 288, 290 John Chrysostom 122, 129, 232, 367, 372 John of Canterbury 262 John of Forde 262 John Paul II 124 – 25 Jordan, David Starr 354 Joseph Caiaphas see Caiaphas Joseph of Arimathea 127 Josephus 128 Joshua ha-Lorki 448 Juan I of Castile 307, 313 Judas 123, 128 – 29, 190 – 93, 191, 193 Julius Caesar 420 Jurkowski, Edward 324 Justin, Eric T. 175 Kaci, Rachid 165 Kaczmarek, Czesław 325 Kahane, Seweryn 320 Kant, Immanuel 229 – 30, 424 Karsh, Efraim 172 Kertzer, David 20 Kieval, Hillel 36 Kille, D. Andrew 135 Kłopotowski, Ignacy 114 Klug, Brian 12, 151, 429, 450 – 51

466 Index Konoe, Fumimaro 79 Kook, Abraham Isaac 386 Kook, Zvi Yehuda 386 – 87 Korn, Eugene 131 Krasowski, Mieczysław 324 Kręglicki, Antoni 323 Kressel, Neil 173 Kubina, Teodor 330 Kunert, Günter 3 Kwasek, Edmund 323 Laass, Herrmann 207 Lacan, Jacques 415 Langmuir, Gavin I. 99 – 100, 247, 249, 412 Laqueur, Walter 3, 372 Latasz, Chaim 321 Levine, Amy-Jill 130 Lévy, Richard S. 22 Lewis, Bernard 146, 165, 169 Ley, Michael 34 Linderborg, Åsa 274, 276 – 77 Linehan, Thomas 48 – 49 Lipton, Sara 8, 13, 207, 450 Little Anderl 270 López de Ayala, Pero 307 Louis-Philippe I 198 – 99, 199 Löwith, Kurt 79 Lueger, Karl 111 – 12, 424 Luther, Martin 9, 24, 235, 367, 429, 432, 440, 445 – 47 Magnus the Law Mender 60 Mahmud II 147 Maimonides 430 Malik, Maleiha 52 Mansur, Salim 174 Mańturz, Jan 323 Marcion of Sinope 428 – 29, 440 – 41 Marlowe, Christopher 367 Marmaralı, Samuel Abravaya 148 Marr, Wilhelm 49, 108 Martínez, Ferrán 306 – 15 Mary, the Virgin 62 – 64, 126, 128, 133, 136, 247, 249 – 50, 260, 314 Mary Magdalene 126, 128, 130, 136 Massing, Paul 37 Matěj of Janov 297 – 300 Matthew of Cracow 293, 296 – 97 Matthew Paris 243 – 52 Matthias Döring 430 Maududi, Abul Ala 156 McClure, Julia 228 – 29 McGarry, Michael B. 364, 372

Meer, Nasar 49 Meiji (emperor) 75 Meisinger, Josef 83 Mencken, H. L. 357 Mensah-Schramm, Irmela 220 – 21 Michaelis, Johann David 393 Miller, Vincent 126 Morawski, Marian 113 Morgan, David 132 Mosse, George 403 Motoya Toshio 88 Muhammad 170, 173 – 74 Müller-Claudius, Michael 34 Nahmanides, Moses 381 Nakada Jūji 75 Nasr, Seyyid Hossein 152, 174 Nathan of Gaza 146 – 47 Nedkvitne, Arnved 61, 63 Netanyahu, Binyamin 265 Nicholas of Lyra 9, 430 – 32, 442 Niemöller, Martin 235 Nierob, Alan 131 Nijaki, Antoś 328 – 30 Nirenberg, David 4, 14, 19, 21, 25 – 26, 34, 173, 334, 365 – 66, 373, 428 – 30, 433 Nonguet, Lucien 123 Noonan, Peggy 121 Noorani, Tehsen 49 Nursi, Said 152 Nussbaum, Martha 49 Olaf (saint) 60 Origen 122 Ortiz de Zuñiga, Diego 308 Ōshima Hiroshi 83 Pablo de Burgos see Pablo de Santa María Pablo de Santa María 308, 430 – 32, 439, 442, 444 Pagels, Elaine 128 Palmar, Yigal 265 Paolo Uccello 341, 348 Parkes, James 34, 98 – 99, 236, 412 Paul (saint) 248, 257, 426, 439 – 40 Paumgartten, Karl 205 Pawlikowski, John T. 131 Pedro I of Castile 131, 309 – 10 Pérez de Esquivel, Ruy 306 Peter Comestor 313 Peter the Venerable 66, 258 Pettit, Peter A. 132

Index  467 Philip IV 35 Philipon, Charles 198 – 99, 199 Philippson, Martin 30, 33 Philo of Alexandria 128 Pipes, Daniel 165 Pius X 370 Pius XII 121 Poliakov, Léon 34 Pollak, Artur 326 Pontius Pilate 125 – 26, 128 – 31, 136, 189 – 90, 190 Porter-Szűcs, Brian 116 Prager, Dennis 232, 368 Prioress, the (Chaucer) 243 – 45, 247 – 52 Pustuła, Ludwik 325 Qutb, Sayyid 156, 164 – 65, 174 Ramon Martí 269 Rashi 430, 432 Rathenau, Walther 355 Raymond Martin see Ramon Martí Rich, Dave 52 Richard II 247 Richard of Pontoise 267 Riqab, Salih 165 Robert of Bury 261, 267 – 68 Roger of Wendover 401 – 2 Rogoziński, Jan 327 Rosenberg, Alfred 79, 83, 356 Rosenberg, Hans 36 Rubin, Miri 13, 62, 244, 246, 422, 450 Rumi 152 Rürup, Reinhard 34 Russell, Bertrand 183 – 85, 188, 450 Rybak, Henryk 325 Saeki Yoshirō 75 Said, Edward 47 Sakai Shōgun 76 Salvayre, Lydie 413 – 14 Sartre, Jean-Paul 10 – 11 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy 266, 274 Schiff, Jacob 75, 88 Schopenhauer, Arthur 396 – 97 Seidler, Victor 13 – 14, 450 Seraphia see Veronica Servi, Flaminio 32 Seweryński, Tadeusz 323 Shabbetai Zvi 146 – 47, 380 – 81 Shapira, Moses 185 – 87, 186, 187 Sheriff John 252, 261 – 62

Shlomo Halevi see Pablo de Santa María Shylock (Shakespeare) 75, 184, 355 Silverstein, Paul 51 Simon of Trent 269, 331 – 32, 367 Singer, Henryk Kałman 321 Singer, Tuvia 14, 450 Skinner, B. F. 20, 22 Smith, David Norman 161, 169 Sobczyński, Władysław 322 – 23, 326 Soifer Irish, Maya 14, 22, 27 Solomon ha-Levi see Pablo de Santa María Sombart, Werner 347, 399, 400 – 1, 403 Stillman, Norman 172 Stoecker, Adolf 353 Strauss, Leo 432, 445 Streicher, Julius 148, 189 Sugihara Chiune 79 Suwaydan, Tariq 163 Svartvik, Jesper 14, 276, 385, 400, 451 Szuchman, Ewa 322 Tadros, Samuel 174 Taji-Farouki, Suha 170 Tal, Uriel 34 Tayyar, Şamil 154 Telushkin, Joseph 232, 368 Tennyson, Alfred 373 Tertullian 364 Tessler, Gloria 225 – 26 Thomas (saint) 432 Thomas of Monmouth 243 – 52, 258 – 63, 269, 422 Thomas, William Luson 184 Todeschini, Giacomo 5, 14, 25 Tokarska-Bakir, Joanna 14, 24, 308, 314, 451 Tonge, Jenny 274 Topçu, Nurettin 156 Treves, Giacomo 433 Uchimura Kanzō 75 Uno Masami 85 – 86, 86 Unowsky, Daniel 23 Urban II 103 Utz, Richard 243 Vanier, Jean 226 Varga, Lucie 31, 37 Vaughn, Richard 250 Veronica (saint) 126, 136 Vojtěch Raňkův of Ježov 296 – 97

468 Index Wachtel, Nathan 431 Wagner, Richard 95 – 98, 394, 403 Watson, Tom 354 Webman, Esther 13, 451 Weil, Simone 236, 415, 420 Weininger, Otto 398 – 99, 400, 403, 424 Welfman, Maria 322 Wenceslas IV 287, 289, 297 Weyand, Jan 8 Wieseltier, Leon 130 Wieviorka, Michel 47 William of Malmesbury 244 William of Norwich 244 – 52, 258 – 62, 267 – 69, 367, 422 William of Ockham 313 Wilson, Woodrow 355 Winter, Georg 33 Wistrich, Robert S. 3, 166, 175 – 76, 420 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 44, 46, 229 – 32, 234, 424 Wolinski, Elsa 225 Wolinski, Georges David 225 Wolinski, Maryse 225 Wolinski, Siegfried 225 Wulfric of Haselbury 262 Wyrwa, Ulrich 12, 433, 450 Yamamoto Shichihei 85 Yasawi, Khoja Akhmed 152 Yasue Norihiro 78 Yerushalmi, Yosef 19 Yisraeli, Yossi 445, 447 Zaleski, Antoni 109 – 10 Zecca, Ferdinand 123 Żeromski, Stefan 110 Zibib, Firas 176 Zvi, Shabbetai see Shabbetai Zvi

Places Afghanistan 166 Alcalá de Guadaira 307 Algeria 273 – 74 America, United States of 74 – 75, 79 – 80, 83, 85, 87 – 89, 124, 131 – 32, 134, 151, 154, 185, 200, 352 – 58, 451 Anatolia 149 Andalusia 427 Ankara 148 – 49, 154 Antep see Gaziantep Aragon, Kingdom of 307, 366 Årdal 63 – 67

Ashkenaz 63, 197 Asia 51, 74, 78 – 80, 82, 145, 371 Asia Minor 148 Assyrian Empire 101, 433 Athens (Georgia) 357 Athens (Greece) 426 Atlanta 354 Auschwitz concentration camp 33, 37, 88, 234, 236, 416 Austria 21, 27, 32, 79, 111, 332, 392, 398, 416, 424 Avignon 296, 347 Baghdad 82, 146 Baltimore 69, 355 Barcelona 307, 381 Bazin 269 Belarus 270 Bergen 62 – 65, 63, 65, 67 Berlin 21, 32, 78, 83, 217, 220 – 21 Bethlehem 369 Blois 267 Bohemia 111, 290 – 92, 295 – 96 Bray 267 – 68 Brie see Bray British Empire 423 Brooklyn 265, 273 Brussels 10, 32, 423 Budapest 24 Bukovina 111 Bulgaria 21, 32, 149 Burgos 308, 430, 432, 439, 445 Bury St. Edmunds 261 – 62 Buskerud 64 Byzantine Empire 102, 381 Cambridge 183, 261 Canaan 101, 399 Çanakkale 148 Carmona 310 – 11 Castile, Kingdom of 13, 22, 197, 306 – 9, 366 Catalonia 13 Chile 430 Chişinău 32 Concepción 413 Constantinople 62, 146 Copenhagen 10, 268 Córdoba 307, 310 Çorlu 148 Cracow 112, 113, 327 – 29, 332, 416 Czechoslovakia 369 Czech Republic 369 Częstochowa 329

Index  469 Damascus 147, 268, 271 Denmark 64 Diyarbakır 148 Düsseldorf 152 Écija 307, 311 Egypt 163 – 64, 166, 167 – 68, 172, 174 – 75, 245, 267, 377, 387 England 35 – 36, 51, 64, 67, 184, 198, 252, 258, 262, 332, 341, 366, 419, 421 Forde 262 France 13, 35 – 36, 51, 102, 107, 145, 192, 197 – 98, 225, 262, 310, 341, 344, 347, 353, 366, 382, 412 – 15, 423 Frankfurt am Main 27, 207 – 8 Freiburg 355 Fulda 268 – 69, 277, 330 Galicia 23, 111 – 13, 116, 383 Gallipoli 146 – 48 Gaza 8, 147, 154, 156, 166, 171, 385, 387, 434, 448 – 49 Gaziantep 148 Georgia (USA) 353, 357 Germany 8 – 10, 14, 21, 31 – 33, 37, 45, 49, 76, 78 – 79, 82, 97, 107, 152 – 53, 175, 185, 192, 195, 206, 208 – 9, 217, 220, 232, 235, 270, 332, 344, 352 – 53, 355 – 58, 366, 368, 392, 397 – 98, 411, 416, 426 Gethsemane 126, 132 Gloucester 261, 267 Golgotha 127, 132, 135 Great Britain see United Kingdom Greece 149 – 50 Haiti 274 Hallingdal 64 Hamburg 392 Hebron 369, 386 Hildesheim 189, 191 Holy Land 7, 10, 363, 365, 370 – 71, 380 – 81 Hungary 21, 145 Iberian Peninsula 102, 292, 366, 445 Inmestar 267 Iran 171, 175, 272, 278, 385, 412 Iraq 166, 171 Israel 8, 9, 13 – 14, 20, 83 – 85, 84, 88 – 89, 101 – 2, 129, 132 – 33, 145,

147, 150 – 56, 161 – 63, 165 – 76, 221, 225, 229 – 31, 233, 265 – 66, 271 – 78, 289, 363 – 64, 369 – 73, 377 – 88, 400, 413, 416 – 17, 420 – 24, 431, 434, 439, 448 Istanbul 146 – 48, 154 Italy 102, 107, 123, 125, 135, 145, 331, 341 – 42, 344, 346 – 47 Izmir 147 – 48, 154 Jerusalem 31, 85, 123, 129, 132, 227, 232, 293 – 94, 299, 300, 364 – 65, 369 – 70, 378 – 79, 381, 384 – 86, 399 – 401, 421, 426 Jordan 133, 175 Judea 101, 128, 135, 364, 400 Kalwaria Zebrzydowska 331 Kasaba 148 Keşani 148 Khaybar 164 Kielce 14, 270, 308, 320, 324 – 31, 333, 416 Kinsarvik 65 Kırklareli 148 Kishinev see Chişinău Kraków see Cracow Krasnoyarsk 270 Kutaisi 268 La Guardia 268 Latin America 371, 424 Lausanne 149 Lebanon 133, 163 – 64, 171, 175 Łęczyca 331 Lima 431, 445 Lincoln 243 – 44, 247 – 49, 251 – 52, 262, 268, 367 London 45, 170, 174, 216, 423, 425 Louisiana 353 Lublin 268 Majorca 307 Massena 268 Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp 320 Mediterranean 100 – 3, 125, 257, 307, 377, 402, 412 – 13 Menemen 148 Mesopotamia 101 – 2 Metz 68, 365 Middle East 8, 9, 10, 73, 82, 86, 151, 155, 161 – 62, 165, 170 – 72, 174 – 75, 206, 271 – 74, 277, 413, 420, 423 – 24

470 Index Minorca 415 Mississippi 353 Montecassino 123 Moravia 111 Morocco 169 Munich 356 Nagyszombat 268 – 69 Narbonne 258, 269 Near East 102 Netherlands 366 Neustettin 22 New Jerusalem see Frankfurt am Main New York 193, 355 Norderney 212 – 13, 214 Norfolk 261 North Africa 102, 198 North America 121, 123, 148 Northern Europe 12, 59, 97, 100, 102 – 5, 196, 314, 411 – 13 Norway 12, 59 – 64, 66 – 69, 425 Norwich 13, 248, 257 – 63, 268, 367 Notting Hill 45 Oberammergau 123, 124, 270 Opatów 327 Oregon 357 Ottoman Empire 13, 145 – 47, 149, 157 Palestine 20, 101 – 2, 125, 133, 163 – 67, 169 – 72, 174, 176, 265 – 66, 271 – 75, 277 – 78, 363, 369 – 71, 377 – 78, 381, 385, 387, 413, 415 – 17, 434, 439, 442, 448 Palestine, British Mandate of 148, 384, 386 Palestinian National Authority 151, 153, 161, 163, 171, 175, 266, 370 Papal States 366 Paris 10, 31, 76, 183, 185, 197, 199, 200, 225 – 27, 296 – 97, 341, 382, 413, 423, 430, 432, 443 Pershore 262 Pezinok see Bazin Pforzheim 268 – 69 Pionki concentration camp 320 Piotrków Trybunalski 367 Poland 12, 24, 107 – 8, 110, 113 – 16, 225, 308, 321 – 22, 329 – 33, 366 – 67, 415 – 16, 424 Polish lands 108, 111 – 13, 115 Polná 268 Portugal 145, 366, 430 Prague 14, 287 – 300, 308, 417 – 19 Provence 366

Radziłów 416 Rhineland 257 Rinn 270 Roman Empire 363, 421 Romania 21, 271 Rome 102, 128 – 9, 131, 366 Russia 13, 21 – 22, 75 – 76, 78, 80, 82, 108, 110, 113 – 15, 148, 172, 269 – 70, 325, 332, 356, 366, 383 Rzeszów 327 – 28 Sachkheri 268 Salonica see Thessaloniki Sandomierz 330 – 31, 330 Saragossa 268 Scotland 262 Seville 14, 306 – 12, 314, 419 Shiraz 271 Siberia 76, 327 Sibton 262 Silesia 111 Silivri 148 Slovakia 369 Sogn 64 South Sudan 369 Spain 102, 145 – 46, 257, 307 – 8, 341, 344, 354, 366, 380, 382, 414, 419, 426, 439 St. Louis 354 Strasbourg 366, 446 Suffolk 261 – 62 Sweden 13, 274 – 77 Syria 133, 271, 386 Szczenik see Neustettin Thessaloniki 146 – 47, 149 Thrace 148 – 50 Tiszaeszlár 24, 32, 268 Toledo 307, 309, 380 Tønsberg 60 Toulouse 10, 423 Trent 270, 277, 331, 446 Trier 190, 365 Trnava see Nagyszombat Tunisia 225 – 26 Turkey 10, 13, 145 – 57, 175, 366 Tyre 148, 290 Ukraine 13, 23, 274 United Kingdom 79, 412, 419, 422 – 23 United States see America, United States of Urbino 341 Urfa 148 Uzunköprü 148

Index  471 Valencia 307 Venice 146, 347, 367, 430 Vicenza 347 Vienna 31, 111 – 12, 424 Vincennes 226 Warsaw 108 – 9, 111, 113, 323, 416, 423 Wąsosz 416 Weißenburg 366 West Bank 265, 278, 385, 387 Western Europe 145, 148, 190, 382, 415, 421, 425 – 26 Winchester 267 – 68 Woolwich 45 – 46, 48 Worcestershire 262 Worms 365 Zaragoza see Saragossa

Maríu saga (Mary’s Saga) 62, 65 Nostra Aetate (In Our Time) 124 – 25, 133, 369, 420 Notes on the Correct Way to Present the Jews and Judaism in Preaching and Catechesis in the Roman Catholic Church 124 Passio Judaeorum Pragensium (The Passion of the Jews of Prague) 287, 291, 300, 417 Protocols of the Elders of Zion 11, 49, 76, 88, 128, 148, 150, 162 – 63, 165 – 68, 167, 168, 170, 172, 271 “The Gifts and the Calling of God are Irrevocable” (Rom. 11:29) 370

Works

Yudaya mondai [ユダヤ問題] (The “Jewish problem”) 76

Anonymous Works

Authors and Works

Arma Christi (Weapons of Christ) 314

Ágreda, María de Jesús de: Mística Ciudad de Dios (The Mystical City of God) 127 Alfonso the Wise: General estoria (Universal History) 313 Alonso de Espina: Fortalitium fidei (Fortress of Faith) 341 Ambrose of Milan: Hexameron, Paradise, and Cain and Abel 245 Aristotle: Ethics 432; De Interpretatione/Περὶ Ἑρμηνείας (On Interpretation) 432; Metaphysics 432 Aslak Bolt: Provinsialstatut (Provincial statute) 60 Auerbach, Erich: “Figura” 429, 449 Avigdor Kara: ’Et kol ha-tela’ah [‫( ]את כל התלאה‬All the Afflictions) 288

Bible moralisée (Moralised Bible) 187 Biblia pauperum (Paupers’ Bible) 59, 61, 66 Books of Hours 65 Cantigas de Santa María (Canticles of Holy Mary) 197, 314 Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel 377 Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew) 401 Der Giftpilz (The Poisonous Mushroom) 189 Didache (The Teaching) 446 – 47 Die Judenfrage im Unterricht (The Jewish Question in Education) 188 Epistle of Barnabas 363 Flos Sanctorum (Flower of the Saints) 314 Kurtze Beschreibung und Erzehlung von einem Juden mit Namen Ahaßverus (Short Description and Account of a Jew Named Ahasuerus) 392 Le Juif errant see Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew) 401

Banister, Joseph: England under the Jews 51 Baron, Salo Wittmayer: “Ghetto and Emancipation” 30 – 31; A Social and Religious History of the Jews 30 Bauman, Zygmunt: Modernity and Ambivalence 421 Bede the Venerable: Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People) 245 Berenbaum, Michael: The World Must Know 232

472 Index Bergen, Doris L.: Collusion, Resistance, Silence: Protestants and the Holocaust 235; Twisted Cross 235 Brentano, Clemens Maria: Das bittere Leiden unsers Herrn Jesu Christi (The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ) 126 Brink-Danan, Marcy: Jewish Life in Twenty-First-Century Turkey: The Other Side of Tolerance 153 Bunzl, Matti: Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia 43, 50 Coudenhove-Kalergi, Heinrich von: Das Wesen des Antisemitismus (The Essence of Antisemitism) 32 Ekbert von Schönau: Stimulus Amoris (Pricking of Love) 195 Fabian, Johannes: Time and the Other 227 Funkenstein, Amos: Perceptions of Jewish History 37 Geoffrey Chaucer: The Prioress’s Tale 247 – 52 Göktürk, Oğuz Hakan: Türkiye’de kim kimdir (Who’s Who in Turkey) 154 Gross, Jan T.: Sąsiedzi: Historia zagłady żydowskiego miasteczka (Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community at Jedwabne, Poland) 416; Strach: Antysemityzm w Polsce tuż po wojnie. Historia moralnej zapaści (Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz) 416; Złote żniwa: Rzecz o tym, co się działo na obreżach zagłady Żydów (Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust) 416 Guidetti, Corrado: Pro Judaeis (For the Jews) 433 Hagen, Heinrich von der: Neueste Wanderungen, Umtriebe und Abenteuer des Ewigen Juden unter dem Namen Börne, Heine, Saphir u.a. (Most Recent Wanderings, Activities and Adventures of the Eternal Jew under the Names of Börne, Heine, Saphir, et al.) 394 Hartmann Schedel: Weltchronik (World Chronicle) 331

Hitler, Adolf: Mein Kampf (My Struggle) 78, 79, 151 Huntington, Samuel: Clash of Civilisations 425 Isaac of Stella: Letter on the Office of the Mass 262 Jacobus de Voragine: Legenda aurea (Golden Legend) 314 Johannes Lange: Dialogus super Magnificat (Dialogue on the Magnificat) 288 John Chrysostom: Adversus Iudaeos/ Κατὰ Ἰουδαῖων (Against the Jews) 367 John of Forde: Life of St. Wulfric of Haselbury 262 Judah Halevi: Songs of Zion 380 Karski, Jan: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust 237 Klein Halevi, Yossi: Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation 385 Langmuir, Gavin I.: Toward a Definition of Antisemitism 99 – 100, 247, 249, 412 Luther, Martin: Disputatio pro declaratione virtutis indulgentiarum (Ninety-Five Theses) 9; Von den Jüden und jren Lügen (On the Jews and their Lies) 235, 367, 446 Marlowe, Christopher: The Jew of Malta 367 Marr, Wilhelm: Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum (The Victory of Judaism over Germandom) 49 Matěj of Janov: Regulae veteris et novi testamenti (Rules of the Old and New Testament) 297, 300 Matthew of Cracow: Dialogus rationis et conscientiae de crebra communione (The Dialogue between Reason and Conscience concerning Frequent Communion) 296 Matthew Paris: Chronica majora (Greater Chronicle) 247 – 48, 252 May, Werner: Deutscher NationalKatechismus (German National Catechism) 188

Index  473 Nicholas of Lyra: Postilla super totam Bibliam (Postil on the Entire Bible) 430 – 32, 442 Nirenberg, David: Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition 25, 173, 334, 365, 428, 433, 438 – 42, 446, 449 – 50; “Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities: Jews and Christians in Fifteenth-Century Spain” 366 Pablo de Santa María: Additiones (Additions) 442 – 45; Scrutinium Scripturarum (Investigation of the Scriptures) 430 – 32, 442 – 48 Peter Comestor: Historia scholastica (Scholastic History) 313 Pius X: Non possumus (We Cannot) 370 Poliakov, Léon: Histoire de l’antisémitisme (History of Antisemitism) 34 Ramon Martí: Pugio fidei (The Dagger of Faith) 269 Rosenberg, Alfred: The Myth of the Twentieth Century 79 Sartre, Jean-Paul: “Réflexions sur la question juive” (Reflections on the Jewish Question) 10 Schopenhauer, Arthur: Ahasver und die Winkelnation (Ahasuerus and the Marginalised Nation) 396 Shakespeare, William: The Merchant of Venice 75 Skarga, Piotr: Żywoty Świętych (Lives of the Saints) 331 – 32 Sombart, Werner: Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (The Jews and Economic Life) 399 Strauss, Leo: “Persecution and the Art of Writing” 432, 445 Streicher, Julius: Der Stürmer (The Stormer) 148, 189, 269 – 79 Tertullian: Apologeticum (Apology) 364 Thomas of Monmouth: Vita et passio Willelmi Norwicensis (The Life and Passion of William of Norwich) 247, 258, 260 – 62 United States Conference of Catholic Bishops: Criteria for the Evaluation of Dramatizations of the Passion 124

Utz, Richard: Medievalism: A Manifesto 243 Vojtěch Raňkův of Ježov: De frequenti communione ad plebanum Martinum (On the Frequent Communion of the Laity) 296 Wagner, Richard: Das Judenthum in der Musik (Judaism in Music) 395 Walter: Life and Miracles of Blessed Godric of Finchale 262 Weber, Max: Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) 230 Weininger, Otto: Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character) 398, 424 Wittgenstein, Ludwig: Philosophische Untersuchungen (Philosophical Investigations) 231 Yamamoto Shichihei: Nihonjin to Yudayajin [日本人とユダヤ人] (The Japanese and the Jews) 85 Films, Television Series, and Music Ash-Shatat [‫( ]الشتات‬The Diaspora) 271 Češmhāye ābi Zahrā [‫]چشمهاي آبي زهرا‬ (Zahra’s Blue Eyes) 272 Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) [Richard Wagner] 396 Fiddler on the Roof [Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, and Joseph Stein] 130 Johannes-Passion (St. John Passion) [Johann Sebastian Bach] 124 Kurtlar Vadisi (Valley of the Wolves) 155 La vie et la passion de Jésus Christ (The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ) [Lucien Nonguet and Ferdinand Zecca] 123 Life of Brian [Monty Python] 123 Parsifal [Richard Wagner] 398

474 Index Passion of the Christ, The [Mel Gibson] 13, 121 – 22, 124 – 27, 129 – 35 Üst Akıl (The Mastermind) 155 Newspapers, Journals, Magazines, and Printed Series Adevărul (The Truth) 271 Aftonbladet (The Evening Paper) 243, 265 – 66, 271, 273 – 77 al-Hayat al-Jadida [‫الحياة الجديدة‬‎] (The New Life) 163, 176 Alldeutsche Blätter (All German Pages) 352 Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums (General Newspaper of Judaism) 32, 393 Baricada (The Barricade) 271 Carkounaye slova [Царкоўнае слова] (Words of the Church) 270 Catholic World 355 Charlie Hebdo (Charlie Weekly) 225 – 27, 413 Čoveški prava [Човешки права] (Human Rights) 32 Daily Telegraph 46, 48 Dearborn Independent 356 Die Gartenlaube (Garden Arbour) 353 Diplomatarium Norwegicum 60 Dziennik Powszechny (Popular Daily) 113 El-Khabar [‫( ]الخبر‬The News) 273 Expressen (The Express) 274 Freies Blatt: Organ zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus (Free Page: Organ to Ward off Antisemitism) 32 Gazette 32 Głos Narodu (Voice of the Nation) 112 Grzmot (Thunder) 112 Guardian 226, 234 Jewish Chronicle 32 Katholische Volkszeitung (Catholic People’s Paper) 355

La Civiltà Cattolica (Catholic Civilisation) 433 Le Petit Parisien (Small Parisian) 32 Marco Polo 88 Millî İnkılâb (National Revolution) 148 Niwa Polska (Poland’s Cornfield) 113 Polak-Katolik (Pole-Catholic) 114 Posiew (Seed) 114 Postęp (Progress) 116 Prawda (Truth) 112 Przegląd Katolicki (Catholic Review) 109, 113 Przegląd Powszechny (Universal Review) 113 Punch 185, 186 Regesta norvegica 60 Rola (Soil) 108 – 10, 112 – 13 Saturday Evening Post 353 Słowo (Voice) 109 Svenska Dagbladet (Swedish Daily) 274 Sydsvenska Dagbladet (South Swedish Daily) 274 TIME Magazine 20 Times 32 Yedioth Ahronoth [‫( ]ידיעות אחרונות‬Latest News) 266 Ziua (The Day) 271 Scripture New Testament 13, 48, 75, 100, 122, 124 – 26, 131 – 32, 247, 297, 332, 392, 401 – 2, 431, 444 Old Testament 48, 125 – 26, 236 – 37, 313, 364 – 65, 371, 378, 386 – 87, 431 – 32, 442; see also Tanach Qur’an 13, 48, 133, 147, 152, 161 – 62, 167 – 68, 170, 174, 271, 441 Tanach 371 Torah 128, 164, 288, 372, 380 – 81, 393