Creating an Unlike to Dislike: Constructions of Jewish Identity and Alterity in Christian Exempla Stories (original) (raw)

In this article, I follow Salo W. Baron’s notion of antisemitism derived from “dislike of the unlike” and explore constructions of Jewish identity and alterity in Christian exempla stories. Catholic clerical circles created exempla stories for insertion into the daily preaching in a time of theological instability. These stories fostered images of the Jews as inherently different from a good Catholic: erroneous in their belief, antisocial in their behaviour and deformed in their outward appearance. Exempla collections from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries include tales of Jewish ritual murders, of their supernatural practices surrounding festivals like Purim and Passover, of host desecration as well as of Jewish conversions to Christianity upon miraculous encounters with figures like the virgin Mary. In most of these stories, the image of blood plays an important role. Blood serves as an active force, revealing secrets and demonstrating religious power but also hinting at sin and shame. I investigate the figure of the so-called ‘men-struating Jew’ that symbolises notions of Jewish identity intersecting with constructions of femaleness and femininity within Christian religious and cultural thinking. Closely reading one tale from the famous thirteenth century Dialogue on Miracles, I demonstrate that exempla stories featuring genderqueer and cruel Jews supported a change in society and fostered notions of a general Jewish enmity towards Christianity. They transmitted antisemitic motifs, themes and narratives and reinforced images of Jewish ‘unlikeness’ to justify their dislike of Jews from the early modern until contemporary times.