The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms, 1350-1500 (review)

Recent years have seen a proliferation of works showing that Jewish and Christian leaders mobilized figures and images borrowed from each other's symbolic lexicon to service explicitly polemical arguments. Bale's The Jew in the Medieval Book is an important contribution to a discussion about the ways in which medieval Christianity constructed the "rhetorical Jew." Using a variety of sources, both textual and representational, Bale demonstrates that a fictional production of "the Jew" played a significant role in defining Christian values—producing a Christian ideal—in medieval England.

In contrast to Cohen, Kruger, Rubin, and others, who have examined the "rhetorical Jew" in texts that either deal with Jews specifically or engage broader theological issues, Bale focuses on texts in which the Jewish exemplar is incidental to the document as a whole.¹ He traces the changing and multivalent symbolic figure of "the Jew" in medieval British literature through four generic examples that reappear in various forms during the course of the later Middle Ages—a historical exemplum, a miracle story concerning the murder of a Christian boy by Jews, narratives forming the basis for a cult centered around the victim of a ritual murder, and visual representations of Jews as active culprits in the passion of Jesus. Following the textual transmission and transformation of these narratives in their various formulations, Bale shows that the authors and consumers of such antisemitic images and discourse in late medieval England were members of the literary and intellectual elite. This argument destabilizes the widely circulated assumption that antisemitic stereotypes found life among the uneducated "masses" who were guided by ignorance or social and political frustration.

Among the many strengths of this book is the acute attention that Bale pays to every layer of textuality, from the way that words and prose are arranged on the page to the subtle interplay between stock narratives (exempla) or images and the greater text into which medieval authors fit them. Antisemitic images continued to transform and mutate in English culture well into the sixteenth century, 200 years after Jews and Judaism were expelled from English society. Bale shows how caricatures of Jews and Judaism served as highly effective tools for defining and controlling Christian behavior and mores in late medieval England. Jews were used in medieval literature to signal false or misguided Christian devotion or royal weakness, as well as to highlight Jewish deviance and the general malignant effect of Jews and Judaism on Christian society.

Moving between arguments rooted in textual and symbolic criticism and historical contextualization, Bale illustrates that well into the early modern period, Christian culture manipulated available images of the Jew to reinforce both positive and negative representations of Christian traits. In The Jew in the Medieval Book, he aptly demonstrates that Christian values and political mores invested symbolic Jews with significant cultural currency, quite apart from the availability of models of Jewish behavior or attitudes.