Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages by Anthony Bale (review)

REVIEWS 225 bulky—it doesn’t have the zippiness that a teacher might feel is needed to draw in her students—but it rewards investment. If what one needs is simply a translation of the Disputed Questions, I would recommend going with whichever volume is most easily available. For teaching undergraduates I would recommend Hause and Murphy, and for teaching graduates, Atkins and Williams. THOMAS WARD, Philosophy, UCLA Anthony Bale, Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages (London: Reaktion 2010) 254 pp., 37 ill. In chapter 6 of this useful but problematic study, Anthony Bale relates the discovery of the True Cross by St. Helena, mother of the emperor Constantine. The story, which “casts Helena as intrepid, lone explorer, facing a hostile, threatening community of Jews” (145), tells how Helena overcame Jewish hostility , discovered the relic she was seeking, and thus set the True Cross on the path to becoming an object of devotion throughout Christendom. The cross, Jerusalem , and Helena’s story—each in its own way—function as aesthetic objects whose purpose is to inspire edifying, instructive emotions. By close analysis of such aesthetic objects, Bale seeks to explore “the various imaginative ways in which persecution and pain were welcomed into the everyday worlds and cultural lives of medieval people” (11). As seen in the story of Helena, often these representations of “persecution and pain” include Jews as the perpetrators . Bale’s approach to the problematic historical relationship between Jews and Christians is to examine artifacts of that relationship—whether textual, visual, or architectural—as aesthetic objects, divorced from any historical violence that might be associated with them. The book seeks to “reject a strictly historicist reading of Christian-Jewish relations, which sees in an image of violence the report or potential for actual violence, in order to rediscover, to recover, an aesthetic world in [which] things are understood because they are felt” (128– 129). Feelings of fear and revulsion were thought to be instructive, and edifying fear led to repentance: the point was not simply to read or to see, but to experience by means of reading and seeing. Thus, images of Christ’s suffering at the hands of wicked oppressors, reenactment of the passion through the Stations of the Cross, pilgrimage to Jerusalem’s holy places, and recreation of those places at shrines throughout Europe were all meant to engage the emotions. In medieval culture, Bale writes, “fear and related extreme feelings were actively cultivated as part of a serious and sustained set of ideas about what it was to be an intellectual subject, to be moved ardently, properly and constructively, interlinking behaviour, emotion and morality” (11). Imagining themselves as persecuted by Jews enabled Christians to feel that edifying fear. Understood this way, rather than an early example of anti-Semitism, the recalcitrant Jews in the story of St. Helena can be seen to function as her foils in order to highlight the miraculous character of her mission. As Bale notes, “medieval people often welcomed pain, violence, terror and disgust into their own worlds, via the Jewish image, because to experience these things was, in one way or another, edifying” (25). Further, this was not an exclusively Christian mindset. As Bale notes, “Jews too had an agency in the production of images which were designed to help REVIEWS 226 them feel persecuted; such images have subsequently been labeled “anti-Semitic ,” thus showing the inadequacy and totalizing force of a critical debate focused around ‘anti-Semitism’ and ‘Jew-hatred’” (170). For example, two anecdotes reveal Jewish fears of pollution over having their holy books bound by Christian monks. In another, more deadly, episode, Bale notes that Christian and Jewish accounts of the massacre of Jews in York in 1190, in which besieged Jews opted to commit mass suicide, tend to agree that “the Jews’ leader encouraged the martyrdom and the Jews carried it out. For both Jews and Christians, this was a shared way of making a ‘religious’ sense—via martyrdom —of the event at York” (171). Thus, Christians use imagined persecution by Jews for aesthetic effect, and to some extent Jews did the same thing. If, as Bale writes, “the primary...