Why "Race"?

What is the purpose of giving the name race to a set of descriptors (language, law, customs, and lineage) that medieval writers attributed to contemporary social groups? ¹ What payoff is there in regarding medieval attitudes toward people of different "races" as "racist"? Medieval Catholic writers who labelled various groups did frequently use biological terminology (gens, for example, and natio), as is made clear in the essays offered in this collection. This labelling can be called racial, if one chooses to use the adjective as a synonym for ethnic or biological or as a substitute for a clumsy and old-fashioned phrase, like "related by blood."

But does the use of such labelling conjure racism as most people--scholars and nonscholars--understand it now? ² In the Middle Ages, after all, not only was each race perceived or constructed as having other characteristics than its biological "unity," but also racial characteristics changed over time. Twelfth-century writers, as Robert Bartlett documents, often celebrated the Norman gens. Contemporary writers noted, among many characteristics, that the Normans spoke French as their mother tongue, were free, not servile, were bold not cowardly, and so on. These markers were part of their racial makeup. Yet, the Norman gens, as even its idolizers would have confessed, had once spoken Norse and been pagan; and it strained credibility to regard Northmen's attacks on unarmed monks in the Viking Age as a particularly bold kind of boldness. Norman racial characteristics were, therefore, fluid. The Norman race had "improved" over time, but not, it seems, primarily because of exogamy, sexual mixture with other races. To modern racists who believe race is innate and immutable this last statement must seem like nonsense.

Although the characteristics of race, as far as medieval historians understand and apply the concept, were not fixed forever, racial categorization did have the potential for and often resulted in stereotyping. Moreover, stereotypes by definition resist change. Perhaps it is reasonable to conclude that whenever medieval racialist discourse becomes marked by invariable stereotypes, scholars can call the discourse by the name racism. Depending on the group stereotyped, the consequences of this form of racism, medieval racism, despite the ethical restraints of Catholic universalism, have been more or less pernicious. What do these essays have to say about this? Perhaps not enough.

Jews, for example, would seem to be a group on which these articles would focus considerable attention. A people (gens) par excellence, indeed a Chosen People and one distinguished by endogamy, they were a people different from the Catholic population in language (at least the language of their worship), law (the Old Law), and customs (like their insistence on kosher foods). Curiously, however, no single article in this collection is devoted to Catholic attitudes toward the Jews, despite an occasional brief reference to these attitudes. Nor is there very much if anything on the attitudes of self-acknowledged "racial" superiors to other politically disadvantaged gentes, like those of the French toward Bretons in Paris, of English toward Flemings in London, of Muslims toward Copts in Cairo, or of Flemings toward Italians in Bruges.

Of course, the Jews could accept baptism. Did they remain essentially Jews? This vexing question continues to occupy medieval historians. For a long time a traditional view prevailed which I have not entirely abandoned, namely, that baptism, as understood by its medieval interpreters in their normative texts, fully obliterated Jewishness as a religious marker of the convert and largely negated it in terms of social relations. ³ Converts did not remain essentially Jews, a fact that differentiates medieval antijudaism or antisemitism from its modern variety. ⁴ Many scholars, however, regard Robert Stacey's study of the so-called House of Converts (Domus Conversorum) in medieval England as decisively reopening this issue, since he raised serious questions about the integration of converts who dwelt in the House. ⁵ He himself was supremely careful to note the strangeness of his source...