Art of Estrangement: Redefining Jews in Reconquest Spain by Pamela A. Patton (review)

The study of medieval and early modern polemical writing has flourished in recent years, receiving attention as a kind of window onto the medieval discourse of identity fashioning and the conceptualization of religious difference. While much work has been done (by scholars such as Heinz Schreckenberg, Jeremy Cohen, and Robert Chazan, among others) in charting the evolution of medieval Christian polemical writing, scholars have only recently begun the work of combining this history with a consideration of similarly polemical iconographic and pictorial evidence. Although such evidence tells us much about the wider circumstances and cultural movements in which polemical writing was produced, its study has often been undertaken only by art historians, being sketchily treated by other scholars working only with textual material.

This important and elegant book by Pamela Patton, professor of art history at Southern Methodist University, attempts to address this lacuna by combining a wide survey of polemical imagery from medieval Iberia with an informed discussion of the trends in late-medieval polemical treatises and argumentation. In bringing these two lines of inquiry together, Patton provides a vital new intervention into the history of religious interaction in medieval Iberia. Offering both a wealth of primary source material (including over eighty image reproductions, most in color, and many not studied before), as well as a learned and careful reading that thoughtfully unpacks the symbolism and context of its examples, Patton's well-written study will surely become a standard resource for future work in the history of religious interaction in the Middle Ages.

Patton begins by noting this imbalance in the study of late medieval religious interaction. Looking at a variety of Christian representations of Jews between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, she argues that “the scrutiny of such imagery can expand and refine, to an extent impossible through study of texts alone, modern understanding of the ways in which Jews figured in the Iberian Christian imagination, and of the ways in which these ideas were expressed and reinforced during the central and late Middle Ages” (6). One of the strengths of her approach is that although she does deal with familiar sources and examples such as the abundant imagery in the Cantigas de Santa Marì of King Alfonso X of Castile (reg. 1252-84), she does not limit her study to these sources, instead bringing them into a productive dialogue with heretofore unknown iconography such as overlooked initials, doodles, marginalia, and sculpted capitals. She links these new and known sources within a suggestive narrative about the evolution of anti-Jewish sentiment both within and beyond the Iberian Peninsula.

After making the case for this approach in her introduction, the second chapter,” Topos and Narrative: New Signs and Stories for Iberian Jews,” examines the visual motifs used to identify Jews in Christian iconography. Cataloguing familiar markers such as the beard, the pointed cap, the badge, yellow clothing, the blindfold, and the oversized nose, Patton notes that despite the recurrence of these images, their meaning was rarely exactly the same and was not universally polemical. She stresses “the rarity with which specific visual motifs or formulae traditionally considered to be 'anti-Jewish' bore fixed or formulaic meanings ... their symbolic implications varied along with each work's physical, conceptual, and ideological context” (23). Even more importantly, she notes that when such images do appear in the Iberian Peninsula, they often are imports from beyond the Pyrenees and may have carried a different significance in the peninsula. While several themes that were common in Europe “found little footing in Spain,” those anti-Jewish arguments that did take root were transformed in important ways by Iberian artists. “When Jewish stereotypes did find expression in Iberian visual culture, it was, above all, on Iberian terms” (65).

Chapter three, “Shaping the Jewish Body in Medieval Iberia,” looks at these “Iberian terms” in more detail, focusing...