Between Christian and Jew

by J J Cohen

So the abstract for my IMC Leeds plenary is due, an obligation complicated by the fact that grading and end of the semester student meltdowns have conspired to reduce my number of functional neurons to three (half the number I am used to working with).

Please let me know what you think of this first stab. As you will see, I am interested in an interrelated series of questions: how did medieval and how do contemporary interpreters use Jews to tell stories of Christian-Jewish separation? What spaces in between such narratives of segregation can be discerned in which keen division yields to messier interpenetrations? (Daniel Boyarin calls them "lines of influence and dialogue [that] go in both directions").

I don't want to assume in advance that we know what Christian or Jewish orthodoxy consists of: that is, orthodoxy tends to be a retroactive positing of some undifferentiated and homogenous identity that belies the mixed, impure realm of lived belief. Scholars have done quite a good job of emphasizing the diversity of Christian practice in medieval England, arguing against a monolithic orthodoxy ... but Judaism still tends to be defined as if it enters Europe unchanged by its surroundings, that lived Ashkenazic Jewishness in, say, thirteenth century Lincoln is rather similar to fourth century rabbinic Judaism, that medieval Jews don't acculturate. I'm following the line of thought established by Boyarin, Yuval, Ivan Marcus and others to postulate a more adaptive mode of Jewishness, a hybridity with counterparts in many contemporary formulations of Jewish identity. I'm attempting to do this by looking at Christian-Jewish interaction as glimpsed within texts that typically are analyzed for their strong separations: the Book of John Mandeville, Matthew Paris on the Hugh of Lincoln. Are there any texts (especially British ones) where glimpses of a Christian-Jewish middle space exist that I might not have thought of?

Between Christian and Jew:
Orthodoxy, Violence and Living Together in Medieval England

For medieval thinkers, Islam might constitute a heresy rather than a separate religion: Muhammad had deviated from a Christian path. Judaism, on the other hand, was the source from which Christianity traced its origin, and yet it was unthinkable that Christianity should be a Jewish heresy. Though possible for “Jew” to function as a synonym for “heretic” (as Margery Kempe learned during interrogation over her own orthodoxy), Jews were usually seen as temporally other to Christians: locked ever into an anterior time, long ago superceded by Latin Europe. Yet Ashkenazic Jewish communities came to cohabitate with Christians in cities across France, Germany, and England. Extant literary and historical texts suggest that these Jews offered through their rituals and their words a sharp challenge to Christian self-assurance. From the time they first begin to live among the English, they become a community intimately involved in deliberation over proof and religious belief.

Much scholarship on medieval Jews examines how they functioned in the Christian imagination, typically as unreal (spectral, hermeneutic or virtual) figures who enabled Christianity to envision itself as distinct from its Judaic source. The real life extension of such excision is physical and property-directed violence: negative representation cannot be divorced from the pogroms of 1190. Yet medieval texts provide ample evidence that Jews and Christians lived for long periods simply as neighbors. This paper will discuss what happens in the lived spaces between Christians and Jews, where there existed a potential for amity (beneath the story of Hugh of Lincoln is a tale of friendship across faiths) as well as complexity within hostility (a famous lapse in tolerance in The Book of John Mandeville might reveal more about Christian-Jewish interrelations, and the possibility of actually listening to contemporary Jews, than has previously been acknowledged).

This emphasis upon lived, middle space enabled the medieval Jew to cease to be a monster, an allegory, or a lachrymose martyr, becoming instead an embodied and culturally impure being whose temporality is not determined by the past (an Old Testament remnant) or future (as proto-Holocaust victim). The Jews of medieval England, I will argue, are so troubling to Christian orthodoxy for their very modernity.