God’s Chosen Peoples: Christians and Jews in The Book of John Mandeville

Sir John Mandeville alternately admires and denigrates Jews. At some points, he pictures Jews as the irredeemable Other, torturers and murderers of Jesus, enemies of all Christians: “thanne schal other Iewis speke Ebrew to hem [the Jews of the ten tribes] and lede hem to cristendome for to destruye cristen men.”¹ At other points, he describes Jews who mirror Christians: “thithere come Iewes ofte in pilgrimage with grete deuocion,” just as Christians do (p. 44). The reader encounters in turn passages that create tendentious differences between the two faiths, and passages that insist on sameness. Given Mandeville’s contradictory attitudes toward Jews, his work is not best understood as either particularly tolerant or unequivocally anti-Jewish, though these are the terms typically employed in modern scholarly discussions. Some critics have applauded Mandeville’s tolerance toward religious differences, despite the fact that “tolerant” surely misrecognizes a writer who regularly expresses the hope that benighted others will convert to his faith.² Other scholars have called attention to notable anti-Jewish passages, often remarking that Jews are the exception to Mandeville’s usual tolerance.³ The polarized terms of the discussion—“tolerant,” “anti-Jewish”—fail, I think, to capture literary nuances, let alone the force of the whole. Representational unity is not a distinguishing characteristic of Mandeville’s encyclopedic Book, a compilation stitched together from many, not always compatible sources.⁴ Indeed, I propose that Mandeville does not set forth a single, coherent representation of either Christians or Jews. Instead, he repeatedly reinvents Jewish-Christian relations, writing and rewriting the relationship through multiple episodes, developing contradictory attitudes, alternating between dependence on and separation from Judaism, and ultimately revealing a profound ambivalence toward the Other that is also essential to the Christian self.

Some of Mandeville’s ambivalence follows from Christian supersessionism, a fourth-century theory that became dominant in medieval Christendom and that initially structures Mandeville’s notions about Christian-Jewish relations. This theory rests on several premises: Jews did not recognize the spiritual meaning of their scriptures; Jews lost their chosen status by not recognizing Jesus as the Messiah foretold in those scriptures; Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus; God therefore punished Jews with the loss of the Temple and their chosen status. This theory helped transform early Jesus-followers from a Jewish sect into a separate people, Christians, chosen by God to supersede the Jews.⁵ Kathleen Biddick emphasizes the linear temporal logic of supersession: Christians “posited a present (‘this is now’) exclusively as a Christian present. They cut off a Jewish ‘that was then’ from a Christian ‘this is now.’”⁶ According to this logic, Judaism could be represented as part of a world that had passed, as a former religion rather than a coeval one.

If Christians superseded Jews, however, they also depended on Judaism for their scripture, their Messiah. The Jewish past was not necessarily cut off from the present. Medieval writers often treated Judaism as a “spectral” presence within Christendom, as in Steven F. Kruger’s compelling formulation: the Jewish past was at once dead and threateningly alive, thus “spectral.” Kruger emphasizes the ambivalence embedded in supersessionary thinking: “[T]hough Judaism survives, the new temporal scheme that Christianity puts in place attempts to settle it as past, ‘conjuring’ it away. But the very act of conjuration suggests that the hoped-for effect of the performative [work of historical thinking] does not in fact pertain, that Jews and Judaism are not fully past, but rather still disturbing and disruptive—‘haunting’—enough to Christianity’s sense of its own hegemony to necessitate the act of conjuration. Further, the attempt to conjure Jews away also serves to conjure them up, into a certain presence: defining Jews as past involves simultaneously recognizing their (ongoing) role as Christianity’s ancestor.”⁷ Judaism was at once past and present, repudiated and depended upon, superseded and the source of Christian identity. Even the temporal logic of supersession was fraught with ambiguity. As Daniel Boyarin cogently remarks, “‘Supersession’ can … be understood in two ways. It means either that Israel has...