Creating an Unlike to Dislike: Constructions of Jewish Identity and Alterity in Christian Exempla Stories (original) (raw)
Related papers
Passio Iudeorum Pragensium, a late fourteenth-century pogrom narrative from Bohemia, provides us with many unique insights into the medieval tradition of pogrom narratives. It is preserved in the form of a number of related but distinct textual units that allow us to examine the discursive nature of texts such as these. This discursiveness is illustrated in this article by the transformations that the narrative material underwent, temporally and spatially, as well as with respect to different language communities and audiences. Furthermore, I discuss some models of relationship between the Passio material and the historical reality of a pogrom that led to the formation of this material, as well as to alternative accounts of the event preserved in some of the contemporary chronicles. Most important in this respect are three prosaic texts that seem to fall into the oldest layer of formation of Passio Iudeorum Pragensium. All three are elaborate compositions which employ traditional modes of narration with distinct new purposes and functions and which voice different, even conflicting perspectives on the significance of pogrom violence and its causes. This is particularly obvious when the representation of bodies - of the massacred Jews as well as of the supposedly desecrated Corpus Christi - is contrasted, particularly as the three narratives make a point of blurring the boundaries between the two entities.
Beyond Stereotypes. Jewish Ritual influencing Christian Liturgical Imagery
LUCSoR Annual Conference, Leiden 29-31 Oct. 2018 - Interpreting Rituals: Historiographical Perspectives and Pluralistic Contexts - Organizers: LUCSoR, NGG and NOSTER
A main topic in the study of circumcision is the increasing importance of blood mixed with wine in the liturgy of circumcision starting from rabbinic Judaism. As is well known, Lawrence A. Hoffman interprets its relevance as a response to the christian ritual of Eucharist, while David Biale reads it as a sign of the conflation of the blood of the circumcised with that of covenant in respect of the heart of Judaism. What is sure is that the cup of wine in which the mohel used to add a few drops of the circumcised blood became a feature of jewish liturgy. With the help of two case studies, the present paper aims to show how the peculiar stress on blood in western circumcision liturgy at the beginning of the Modern Age had a surprising influence on christian liturgical imagery, overturning, in a sense, the idea that only Christianty played a role in the development of Jewish ritual but not the opposite. We will see how, in contexts of strong, even if conflictual, Jewish-Christian negotiation as were late XV century Nuremberg and XVI century Ferrara, both Albrecht Durer and Ludovico Mazzolino produced original representations of the Circumcision of Christ painting a great amount of details concerning Jewish circumcision rite (the sandak holding the child on his knees, the chair of Elijah, the so called Jüdischkerze in the shammash’s hands...), with a main focus on the cup of wine. Far from being sort of folklorical cameos or just a form of anti-Jewish manifesto, these images, as grounded on a knowledge of the sacrifical meaning attributed to blood and wine in circumcision rite by rabbinic tradition, hint at how, in the studied peculiar contexts, the Jewish ritual stimulated a new way of thinking the child Christ’s blood in christian groups.