Jewish Bodies in Divine Form: Jewish Difference and Historical Consciousness in Medieval Kabbalah

Introduction

The struggle over the place of Jews in Christian society, especially as it developed between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, was a negotiation over the religious meaning and political place of the Jewish body within the body politic. This cultural tension created the space and the need for the development of a religious discourse of Jewish bodily otherness by both Jews and Christians. The first section of this article considers how kabbalistic discourses of the Jewish male body constructed in the late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth century were inversions of Christian depictions of Jewish maleness. Kabbalistic constructions of Jewish male identity are in this sense counter-theologies formulated in light of Christian anti-Jewish arguments. The second section explores the counter-histories found in two kabbalistic texts written in the wake of calamitous historical events that took place in Spain in 1391 and 1492. Each of the texts addressed in both sections advance, in their own way, a notion of Jewish distinctiveness that responded to challenges faced by Jews. By claiming secret knowledge about the hidden power of Jewish male bodies and Jewish ritual observance, and about the salvific role of the Jewish historical experience, kabbalists made an important contribution to the ongoing redefinition of the Jewish self in relation to, and in terms of, the Christian other.

Redefining Boundaries and Bodies

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed an important shift in the way that Jewish difference was articulated in Christian discourse in Western Europe. While Christian men, and especially Christian male clergy, were frequently described as rarefied spiritual beings in Christian texts, Jewish men were often characterized as overly carnal, sensual, and feminine. Christian art in the High Middle Ages depicted increasingly grotesque images of male Jews who, through their attachment to the physical practice of the law, refuse to see the spiritual message of the Hebrew Bible revealed by Christ. As Sara Lipton points out, male Jewish ugliness in medieval Christian art is constructed to "proclaim his [the Jew's] misunderstanding of the law and consequent carnality and perfidy, even fiendishness."¹ And while Jewish women were rarely depicted as being physically different from Christian women, Jewish men were often described in polemical as well as medical literature as somatically distinct from Christian men, suffering a monthly bloody flux similar to menstruation as punishment for shedding the blood of Christ.²

The strategy of feminizing Jewish men in Christian polemical and medical literature signifies more than a denigration of Jewish masculinity. The association of Jewish men with feminine characteristics,³ especially that of menstruation, was connected to a broader demonization of Jews.⁴ The introduction of scientific medical ideas and terminology into the Latin West during this period contributed to the characterization of women's bodies as a site of danger and impurity. This in turn contributed to a new discourse regarding Jews, according to which the punishments they suffer for rejecting Christ entail feminization. Take, for instance, Jacques de Vitry's comment in the early-thirteenth century that the Jews are those:

… whose fathers cried, as the Gospel says, "The blood of Jesus Christ be on us and on our children," who are scattered throughout the world, serfs and vassals, and so it is as the prophet says, "Their strength has turned to ash." And so they do not make use of arms and also like women every month they suffer, and for this it is written, "The Lord struck them in [their] posteriors and gave them eternal opprobrium"—which is to say God struck them in [their] shameful parts and gave them perpetual reproach—because since they killed their brother, the true Abel, Jesus Christ, they are made vagabond and broken throughout the lands like the cursed Cain, they have a trembling head, which is to say, a fearful heart, shaking night and day, and they do not believe at all in their own lives.⁵

In this passage de Vitry brings together well-worn notions regarding the collective bloodguilt of the Jews for the death of Christ and their subsequent suffering as part of their...