Jewish Dogs: An Image and Its Interpreters (review)

Kenneth Stow remains one of the best interpreters of medieval Christian attitudes toward the Jews. In this magnificent contribution of the representation of the Jews in Catholic (Christian) theology from the early Church through the late Middle Ages, Stow takes a theme: that of "Jewish dogs" (the Jews as dogs) as a means of exploring the dehumanization of the Jews as a collective in Western Christendom. Stow uses this theme to discuss everything from the history of the "irrationality" of the Jews to their status as social pariahs. Centrally, he is concerned with how and why such images lead to specific actions against the Jewish collective.

Focusing on the period of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and on the Belgian Jesuit Bollandists and then specifically on Richard of Pontoise and Philip Augustus, Stow spins a complex and intricate tale of how Judaism is constructed as the antithesis not only of Christianity, but as a product of a sub-human group defined as much by their "essence" as by their religious practice. The theories of supersession, of how Christianity replaced Judaism in the Divine Order, so well articulated by Augustine in De Doctrina Christiana, comes to be understood as a concept of natural law.

If the Jews had to vanish, their refusal to do so, which so puzzled Hegel in the early nineteenth century, can only be explained by the blindness (to use Paul's word) of the Jews. Stow carefully and purposefully shows how this moral stubbornness is represented as the result of the impurity of the Jews and how such attitudes inexorably led to the claims of the "child martyrs" and blood libel.

Stow contributes a piece of a puzzle of European anti-Semitism, as he argues for a continuity of such views across the Reformation and Counter-Reformation to the "reappearance" of blood libel (in slightly distorted form) in the nineteenth century. The continuities rest within the tradition of Catholic (specifically Bollandist) theology and its representation of the Jews. Not the accusation itself, but the demonization of the Jews as dogs remains constant across time. From Philip Augustus, the son of Louis VII, to the Russian Pale in the nineteenth century, such beliefs rest on the sense that Jews are inherently different from Christians and such differences enable them to act in horrific ways. By examining the medieval Jewish responses to such charges and to the burnings of Jews based on these accusations (such as at Blois), Stow is able to provide a view of Jews representing Christians representing Jews.

This book is a tour-de-force on the level of the last great work of the original Warburg group, Isaiah Shachar's study of the Judensau (1974) as well as Ronnie Hsia's The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (1988). It is a book that every serious student of the history of anti-Semitism and the Jewish response will use again and again.