Globalizing Jewish Communities: Mapping a Jewish Geography in Fragment VII of the Canterbury Tales

This essay moves beyond the bounds of the Prioress's Tale to explore alternative texts that Chaucer probably never consulted yet whose histories resonate in Chaucer's work in Fragment VII of the Canterbury Tales. These tales of Fragment VII (specifically, the Prioress's Tale, Sir Thopas, and the two tragedies, "De Petro Rege Ispannie" and "De Rege Antiocho illustri," from the Monk's Tale) form what I term the Jewish history cluster.¹ Reexamining the significance of Jewish presence in O/other texts than those traditionally documented as sources or analogues that "Chaucer knew" or was "acquainted with"—as W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster write—this essay reconsiders the texts that lie silently behind the Chaucerian tales.² Tracing the Jewish presence in the history embedded within the sources cited in but not charted by Bryan and Dempster's volume reveals that the displacement of Jewish presence haunts four tales in Fragment VII. At best, the texts I discuss can be construed as "soft analogues," what Peter Beidler takes to indicate "a work that . . . Chaucer could scarcely have known."³ Such a pursuit introduces some complexity to source study, inviting us to reflect on what Giuseppe Mazzotta characterizes as "the free, unbiased analysis of texts, and a different understanding of what 'influence' is."⁴ The stories this essay considers serve as silent reminders of other lingering histories of Jewish presence that exist alongside the traditional sources and analogues. Rather than limiting our discussion to an analysis of a source or an analogue in a Chaucerian tale whose relationship with a Chaucerian text is immediately apparent, I study texts that comprise the technology of the (in)visible. Kathleen Biddick's work with the technology of the visible helps us here because Jews (and Jewish things) are deployed simultaneously as "displaced and dead bodies" and presently absent echoes of a painful past.⁵ These (in)visible texts emerge in the Jewish history cluster that surfaces in and unites all four of the tales in Fragment VII of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

The link between Jewishness and Chaucer has long been observed, and most of us would agree with Theodore Steinberg: "if Langland's use of the Jews is the most complex among medieval English authors, Chaucer's is certainly the most famous, thanks to the 'Prioress' Tale.'"⁶ Not only the "most famous" depiction of Jews by a medieval English author, the Prioress's Tale also is best known for memorializing the representations of medieval Jews as vengeful and homicidal. As such, the Prioress's Tale, permanently embodying the impulses of medieval anti-Judaism, enables readers to dwell upon and linger over a vexed Christian fantasy in which Jews are imagined as well poisoners, Eucharist stabbers, and Christ killers.⁷ The Prioress's account, vile and problematic as it is, overshadows other Chaucerian representations of Jews that reflect the memory of medieval Jewries' participation in the culture of Christendom. Lisa Lampert-Weissig wishes to put an end to this tradition of allowing the Prioress's Tale to eclipse other representations of Jewishness in Chaucer's work; Lampert-Weissig reasons that Jewishness in Chaucer "is not limited to those moments when demonized Jews leap out from beyond the ghetto walls with murderous intent."⁸ Lampert Weissig's desire to complicate this Chaucerian representation is joined by Sheila Delany's similar concern in her edited volume, Chaucer and the Jews: Delany purposefully includes only one essay on the Prioress's Tale because this tale is "only one of Chaucer's works to animate Jews directly."⁹

What remains most interesting about the Prioress's depictions is that Jews are simultaneously present and absent, simultaneously now here and no where, simultaneously a living fantasy and a fading historical remembrance.¹⁰ Arguing for a Jewish history cluster in Fragment VII of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the following essay documents what emerges from a careful reading of Jewishness in four of Chaucer's tales. Admittedly, in the following essay I turn to the Prioress's Tale, but I do so in order to explicate the...