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5 Profiting from Precursors in The Siege ofJerusalem IN THE LAST QUARTER OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY a poem was written in a modest monastic establishment, Bolton Priory, in a remote and infertile area of the West Riding of Yorkshire.1 The scope of the poem, however, is neither modest nor provincial; it essays nothing less than a foundation for Christian imperialism. The alliterative Siege ofJerusalem tells the tale of the conquest ofJerusalem by recently converted provincial Roman leaders who decide to launch a crusade to avenge Christ's death.2 The siege culminates in the destruction ofthe temple, the subjection ofthe Jews, and the liquidation of their assets. Subjecting Jerusalem to the fierce pressures of siege, the poem reforges the city, the Jews, and the Orient, beating them down from religious and imperial rivals ofthe new Christian Roman Empire into pure, moveable wealth. It thus solves the dilemma of whether to destroy the Jews or to exploit them by doing both in one protracted campaign. And it does so with an unflinching acknowledgment of Christian violence which is perplexed by an enjoyment of the supremely fitting shapes that violence takes. The poem thus enacts the ambiguities of the Augustinian doctrines ofJewish witness and tolerance which inform its probable milieu but shadows these doctrines with later-medieval anti-Judaic narratives dramatizing harsher responses to this threatening precursor.3 By revisiting the historical origin of Jewish dispersal with such exploitative relentlessness, the poem also explores the genealogical anxieties stemming from Christianity's supersession of its Jewish predecessor and works to transform them into imperial and economic certainties. In so doing the poem fantasizes remedies for some of the driving historical and contemporary anxieties of a late medieval Augustinian clergy during a period of economic depression: concerns about the crusades, the bullion shortage, and the continuity, unity, and identity of Christendom.4 Even when the poem seems most to indulge in genocidal fantasies, it stresses the desirability of continued and profitable attachments between the Christians and the Jews-that is, attachments that are profitable to the Christians. In the poem, the Christians are bound to the Jews by three Chapter 5 needs. The first is the need to immure Jews into the past that keeps them predecessors to Christianity and not rivals. The poem literally besieges the Jews within their own walls and thus destroys at one blow both Jewish control of the Holy Land and the Jews' potential power over the newly appropiated "Christian" tradition-a power which comes from the Jews' command oftheir own history, religious texts, and scholarship. The second need that binds the Christians to the Jews is the need for a holy war to draw together the scattered energies of the nascent Christian/Roman Empire and cure its physical and spiritual malaise. The third is the Christian /imperial need for profit. As it constructs a relationship that increasingly enriches the Christians and desolates the Jews, the poem indulges the fantasy of a revenge that for the Christian Romans is socially productive in every sense: morally justified, militarily successful, both spiritually and physically salutary, and extremely lucrative. Most significant of all, the Christians gain a communal identity. By defining, confining, and liquidating the Jewish enemy, these newly converted provincial Romans are able to heal their bodily and body-political maladies and consolidate their own disparate forces into a powerful and unified Christian empire. Theologizing Supersession: The Augustinian Doctrines of Jewish Witness and Tolerance As it recounts the ferocious battles between the Christians and the Jews, the poem dramatizes a confrontation with a threatening past whose ambiguous legacy required particularly attentive supervision for medieval Christian writers. The Jews are the revered first recipients of God's election; they presage Christian identity, power, and prophetic authority, but then linger to call them into question. The poem's battles, like those of other alliterative romances, become at once generational and fraternal. The poem performs a preemptive strike on Jewish sovereignty at the moment it threatens to secede from Rome and become a self-perpetuating rival empire to Christendom; it works to abort that sovereignty and place it firmly into a dead past from which it can be rendered for Christian use. The poem's Christendom needs the generational relationship to justify its own sovereignty, needs to show that the Roman Christians are the true heirs of Christ and the Judaism that he crowns. Jews give birth to Christianity even as they kill Christ; the poem imbues their continued existence with the threat...

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