Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England: Legally Absent, Virtually Present by Miriamne Ara Krummel (review)

Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England adds to the now steadily growing body of historical and literary scholarship that takes as its subject the short-lived medieval Anglo-Jewish community, and particularly the issue of representation of Jews in the art and literature of medieval England. Such inquiry is inevitably focused on Edward I’s 1290 expulsion of the Jews from England and therefore on the notion of what Krummel (after Tomasch) calls “Jewish absent presence,” the crafted, figural likeness of the absent that continues to signify as present. Because of the English expulsion—a mostly successful attempt to render actual Jews absent—inquiry into Christian fashioning of Jews in this period is, as Krummel highlights, loaded. It resonates with twentieth-century anti-Semitism and with (as it must) post-Holocaust historiography and postcolonial explications of the processes and effects of othering. Krummel is explicitly interested in positioning her work in this way. She urges historical and critical dialogue between medieval studies and Shoah studies in her section “Medieval Massacres and the Shoah: Difference(s)” (pp. 65–67), as well as throughout Chapter 2 and her introductory and concluding material; she invokes Amos Oz’s fiction and the biographical conditions of Auerbach’s Mimesis as imaginative lenses through which to view medieval Anglo-Jewish trauma (pp. 49–51, 160); and she is heavily influenced by postcolonial theories and scholars. Though Anthony Bale has argued that “the punctum of 1290 is of little importance in terms of representation” (The Jew in the Medieval Book, 2006), Krummel magnifies the expulsion, as a culmination of persistent racialized representations of Jews and as a turning point in “medieval English colonizing impulses to fashion homogeneous identities” (p. 45).

Organizing her study chronologically, so that pre-expulsion representations and postexpulsion Jewish lament (the piyyut of Meir of Norwich) function dialogically, Krummel ultimately reads later Middle English literature (Mandeville, Chaucer, Hoccleve, Croxton) as a set of shifting responses to the cultural pressures that created and reiterated the expulsion. Mandeville’s retelling of the enclosure of the lost tribes by Alexander the Great, for example, figures here as a “ghettoization” that sounds “echoes of monarchical extortion of Jewish communities in England” because Gog and Magog are financially beholden to the Queen of the Amazons (pp. 81, 87). Or, Hoccleve’s omission of a villainous Jewish presence at the crucifixion from his Complaint of the Virgin (an omission because he is otherwise translating more or less faithfully from Deguileville) can be read as “an act of silent subversion” by a “socially Jewish” poet; this subversion, Krummel argues, arises from Hoccleve’s self-identification with the English Jew, from “his social alienation to a site of exile (an exilic condition like that of the Jews, who no longer occupy space in England)” (pp. 119, 127).

There are provocative hypotheses and claims here. There are also cogent over-arching arguments and conclusions. Krummel (following Kruger, Biddick, Bale, Cohen, Tomasch, Despres, et al.) hopes to show that “Jews were neither ever really in England nor ever really gone” (p. 17), that “Jewish and Christian identities are not only intertwined but porous” (p.154), that “furious repetitions of Jewish failure” are concomitant with Anglo-Christian community making (p. 155), and that associated representations of Jews are not monolithic but rather “the embodiment of facts and fantasies in multiple places” and simultaneously expressions of a powerful typology (p.158–59). Beyond this, Krummel suggests—winningly, I think—that there is personal and contemporary urgency to any project that seeks to understand the “psychic distress” that causes the historical and imaginative ruptures of “semitisms” (p. 7). As Krummel puts it (following Trachtenberg), “we are the ‘heirs’ of the Christian anti-Jewish fantasies in the Middle Ages” (p. 159); “we in our postmodern present are still witnesses to the freighted act of Othering what is different” (p. 158). The analyses that are within this compelling frame, however, are...