Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England: Legally Absent, Virtually Present (review)

Long in gestation, this study has more strengths than weaknesses. The principal strength of Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England is that it surveys an impressive variety of texts and images from the twelfth century through the fifteenth and illuminates the theme of Jewish otherness in medieval England and the theme of the “Other” in medieval Christian Europe in general. Using postcolonial insights (via the work of Foucault, Homi Bhabha, and others), Miriamne Krummel starts out by linking the mimicry and displacement of Judaism in a contemporary anti-Judaic cartoon with the same ambivalent movement of mimicry and displacement in medieval anti-Judaic supersessionism. Setting the stage, Krummel writes: “Reading Jewishness through the intersection of imaginative and archival works enables me to see that English Jews were not at all absent from medieval English society as was commonly believed—a belief that is ever losing currency among contemporary medievalists” (8). This is promising, but in fact Krummel’s “spectral” Jews receive most of the attention. To be sure, the Rolls are helpfully scanned for the “presence” of absent Jews in place-names that refer to “superseded” Jewish ownership. But for Krummel (following Biddick, Fradenburg, Kruger, and others), Jews are either “absent” or “erased,” or present mainly in archival memory.

Fortunately, Krummel also sees past the specters and adduces evidence of actual Jews present after the 1290 expulsion, citing records in the Patent Rolls that prove that “the English land [sic] and its Court probably welcomed Jews so long as the King desired their presence” (12). Acknowledging that England was not entirely Judenrein or “Jew-clean” after 1290, Krummel’s thesis is that “neither the 1290 Expulsion nor scriptural typology completely prevented living Jewishness from appearing on the medieval English landscape” (14). How could that happen? Their lands had been expropriated, their presence outlawed—Where was “living Jewishness” to be found? Krummel suggests answers to these questions that will enliven the scholarly conversation.

In Chapter 1, Krummel explicates Edward I’s Statute of Jewry (1275) and the “racialist impulses in eight thirteenth-century English pictorials [i.e., manuscript illustrations] and one fourteenth-century doodle” (23). As previous scholars have noted, these and similar images and statutes all coincide in defining Jews as bestial, the quintessential, less-than-human “Other.” Krummel’s contribution is to introduce a postmodern perspective on these familiar anti-Semitic stereotypes by way of theories of agency, the body, the gaze, the panopticon, hybridity, and essentialism.

Chapter 2 treats the liturgical poetry (Heb. piyyutim) of Meir, son of Elijah of Norwich (fl. c. 1290), focusing especially on Meir’s “Put a Curse on My Enemy.” This text reflects Meir’s “attempt to reclaim agency and to become a witness to his own experiences” (63). Catastrophes call up memories of earlier catastrophes. As Krummel says, “[r]e-seeing and re-membering the 1290 English Expulsion of the Jews through the enormity of the twentieth-century Holocaust are not so much myopic as they are inevitable” (65). Juxtaposing these two Jewish traumatic events may indeed “complicate our understanding of both periods,” but the awkwardly expressed claim that it does so “by giving us a glimpse of a medieval Jews’ [sic] internalization of invisibility and trauma in Meir’s piyyut” (66) falls flat. In this chapter, page after page repeats large portions of Krummel’s 2009 article on Meir of Norwich, partially revised but often cited word for word, and not listed in the bibliography (see Miriamne Ara Krummel, “Meir b. Elijah of Norwich and the Margins of Memory,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 27.4 [2009]: 1–23).

In Chapter 3, on Mandeville’s Travels and the “postcolonial moment” (Tomasch), Krummel provides a sensitive reading of a uniquely intriguing text, “in which Jewishness appears only as deeply buried within the Caspian Mountains” (69). Throughout his travelogue, Mandeville expresses, as Krummel shrewdly says, “a simultaneous fascination with and a repulsion to difference” (69). If this chapter errs on the...