The Accommodated Jew: English Antisemitism from Bede to Milton by Kathy Lavezzo (review)

The title of this book does not mean what you might think it means. By "accommodated," Lavezzo does not mean, as the term usually does today, acceding to wishes or desires. Instead, Lavezzo returns the word to its original sense of "housed." In a sweeping analysis that ranges from the Anglo-Saxon period through the early Restoration, The Accommodated Jew looks at how English writers from Bede to Milton imagine Jews through buildings, e.g., houses and latrines. In her last chapter, for example, Lavezzo looks at how Menasseh ben Israel, the Dutch rabbi who came to England to argue for the readmission of the Jews, used his accommodations as a polemical tool.

The thing is, Jews are not supposed to have houses, to be "accommodated." Houses connote a long-term, if not permanent, residence, and Jews are supposed to be eternally in exile. Lavezzo, however, focuses on the necessarily tense and unstable relations that result when Jews "are accommodated, that is, [found] lodging in a host country," (4; emphasis in the original) in this case, England. The fascinating fact is that a recognized Jewish community existed in England for only a relatively short time. William the Conqueror brought with him Jews from Rouen in 1066, and in 1290, England had the dubious honor of being the first country to forcibly expel the Jews. But during their brief sojourn, "Jews in medieval England lived a life defined not by architectural and other kinds of geographical separation, bur rather spatial contiguity and intimacy." (17) Which is fancy way of saying, Jews and Christians lived next to each other.

But as Lavezzo shows, "spatial contiguity" did not lead to understanding and empathy. Instead, the popularity of antisemitic myths about Jews murdering Christian children in their homes revealed the deep suspicion attending Jewish structures: "Under the cover of a house or synagogue, the imagined Jews of [these myths] wage war against Christianity by reenacting Christ's death and violently defying Christian ritual." (66) Still, as Lavezzo shows in brilliant detail, the relations between Jews and Christians were more reciprocal than the antisemitic myths would allow, and they lasted long after the Jews' expulsion as she shows in chapters on Chaucer's The Prioresse's Tale and Marlowe's The Jew of Malta. Chaucer's tale repeats the myth of a Jew murdering a Christian boy and then throwing him into his privy. The body is then recovered and taken (still covered in Jewish excrement) to the nearest church. But by doing so, Chaucer emphasizes the "money trail" by which churches were built with the explicit aid of Jewish financiers. Similarly, Marlowe's play emphasizes the fragility of the structures meant to keep out the enemy, whether Jewish or Turkish.

My favorite chapter, however, is the one on Milton and the debate over the readmission of the Jews into England (which was left unresolved). I had not known that William Prynne's A short demurrer to the Jewes long discontinued barred remitter into England (which is anything but short), packed as it is with now-lost records, served as the "chief printed source" (214) for the history of medieval Anglo-Jewry well into the nineteenth century. Prynne, entirely unintentionally, "paradoxically created an archival space for Jews in English print culture." (230–31; emphasis in the original) His antagonist, Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, used space in a different way. By choosing to live in a fashionable house on the Strand, surrounded by townhouses owned by aristocrats and across the street from the New Exchange (essentially an early modern luxury shopping mall), Rabbi ben Israel wanted to make a point: "By living on such a prominent thoroughfare, the rabbi hazarded on a small scale the larger-scale project promised by readmission: ending the hidden nature of current Jewish habitation and allowing Jews to live openly as Jews among Christians." (220) Milton, however, did not support the rabbi's bid for readmission, and...