Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism (review)

128 SHOFAR Summer 1998 Vol. 16, No.4 later ethnic politics ofHerod's successors. Clearly, Richardson's main interest is not in questions about the social order. Had Richardson wished to enter into questions about the ethos or structure of Israel during this period, he might well have noted in more detail the role of crowds and of apparitions of the dead. Certainly Josephus often calls attention to the role of such apparitions, especially in the guilty dreams of the living, and he speaks of the peculiarly volatile and intense imagination of gatherings ofpeople. No wonder, then, that Antipas would have been worried about Jesus and the crowds, and might have feared the return of John the Baptist. That part of the narrative calls for an anthropological interest, at the very least, in the subject matter. Instead, Richardson's attention is drawn there, as elsewhere, to the possible existence of two traditions that can be discerned within the texts, and he teases them apart in the interest ofrecovering a coherent and simple story line. In the hands of a textual analyst as skilled as Richardson, it may be possible to reconstruct a reliable narrative, but the need remains for another sort of historiography that owes at least as much to anthropological insight as it does to the historian's interest in a plausible story. While one is left feeling indebted to Richardson for his extraordinary effort in pulling together the very scattered and fragmented pieces of evidence on these topics into a coherent account, one is also left little the wiser as to what sort ofsociety he is discussing and what it may have been like to live within it, to suffer its weight, or to make sacrifices for it. Richard Fenn Department of Church History Princeton Theological Seminary Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism, by Robert Chazan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. 197 pp. $35.00. Many great empires, Babylonian, Persian, Egyptian, and Roman, have seen it as politically viable policy to deport, slaughter, enslave, or disperse Yisrael. All this, of course, was done well before a small Jewish sect led by a carpenter came to be the arbiter of morality in the West. Indeed, recent Arab propaganda in Japan has been surprisingly effective in creating sin 'at Yisra 'el, while a cornerstone of Chinese communist policy has been continuing support for the enemies of Israel. Thus, it is surely curious that of all the peoples who were introduced onto the stage of history in the Hebrew Bible, few if any have endured for so long and prospered as well as the Jews. Book Reviews 129 While some who specialize in the history of the Jews focus upon trying to understand why the gens Judaeorom, as the Romans put it, not only survived but earned such great success for so long, many are preoccupied with trying to explain why greater and lesser powers have pursued initiatives that ultimately would bring the history of the Jews into line with the other failed peoples of the world. It is in this vein that Robert Chazan, Scheuer Professor at New York University and America's leading scholar of the Jews in medieval France, tries to identify the processes by which a stereotype of the Jew was developed in twelfth-century Europe that would provide considerable ammunition for "modem antisemitism." The information available to support this effort is very well known, in no small part due to Chazan's previous work, and has been massaged by a plethora of other scholars from numerous perspectives. Chazan's unquestionable control ofthe sources, his often sophisticated deployment ofWeber and Durkheim, and his incisive critique ofthe seriously flawed views ofscholars with whom he is at odds, such as Gavin Langmuir, makes Medieval Stereotypes a book that must be read carefully and with respect. Nevertheless, as the remainder of this review will illustrate, I am in profound disagreement with his fmdings. Chazan marshals in a comprehensive manner the few bits and pieces of information that survive from twelfth- and thirteenth-century northern France and England which he believes mark a special kind of hostility to Jews as a people. He argues from these data that Jews, who were...