Imagining the Jew in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Culture ed. by Samantha Zacher (review)

In the centuries just before the Norman Conquest of 1066, England was, as Cornell University medievalist Samantha Zacher notes in this volume's introduction, "a land without Jews." Thanks to Zacher and others, some of whom are collected in Imagining the Jew in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Culture, now may be a good time for the Jews of preConquest England. To say this is to acknowledge that the "time" of these non-historic Jews is phantasmic and mobile, which is precisely why the study of their absent presence can reveal helpful things about early English concepts of temporality, nationhood, and identity. The twelve articles collected in this volume, which emerged from a 2008 conference, take as their starting point the importance not of Jews themselves, but, rather, of the idea of Jews, in early medieval England.

These imaginary Jews were crucial to early English thought for the Anglo-Saxons saw themselves as heirs to Israel's privileged mission and, thus, advanced a doctrine of supersession that, as Steven F. Kruger and others have demonstrated in influential theoretical work, requires continual recourse to the Jews one imagines one is supplanting. The collection advances our understanding of the ingenuity with which early English church and state actors deployed the borrowed authority of the Hebrew Bible. Damian Fleming demonstrates that Bede, although not Hebrew "literate in any modern sense, wrote about the language with a skill that establish[ed him] as a scholar of Hebrew comparable to Jerome." Adam S. Cohen convincingly reinterprets a puzzling image of King Edgar as a politically and theologically savvy reference to King David "leaping and dancing before the Lord." Supersessionism is a theory of time, and, as Kathleen Davis and others have suggested, Jewishness thus proves central to Anglo-Saxon temporality. Andrew P. Scheil's examination of anti-Judaism in the early English liturgical calendar argues for a "sublimated logic that links Jews and the passage of Christian time at moments of historical and temporal transition," including the ordinary transitions of annual time. In one chapter, Kathy Lavezzo argues that Bede's architectural descriptions encode not only supersessionary temporal logic but also its potential failure.

Both introduction and epilogue build bridges to later centuries. Heide Estes's final chapter compellingly describes the twelfth-century context of rising anti-Jewish violence to which Ælfric's anti-Jewish writings, written in a more insular era and popular for many decades after his death, may have unintentionally contributed. The essayists are also interested in the lessons of Anglo-Saxon England for the study of contemporary anti-Judaism, particularly appropriate since, as Zacher notes, "the condition of Jewish absence in Anglo-Saxon England only brings further into relief the essential idea … that the rhetorical figure of 'the Jew' is fundamentally disconnected from actual Jews." Several scholars invoke the Holocaust comparatively or causally: Zacher describes "the fantasy of a judenrein England" in the late medieval and early modern period, while Scheil draws a connection to the global Jewish conspiracies Hitler alleges in Mein Kampf. In 2018, these are suggestive remarks since, by linking early English anti-Judaism to Nazism, these scholars inevitably imply that the study of early medieval England can help to explain – and perhaps to combat – the very recent rehabilitation of Nazi imagery, slogans, and ideology in North America.

As many of these scholars have shown here and elsewhere, there is much fresh and original research to be done by questioning the biases and exclusions that have previously shaped early English studies, including the romance with Germanic paganism that shielded earlier scholars from recognizing Jewish, and indeed Muslim, traces in Old English culture. Catherine E. Karkov's standout chapter traces how visual and textual occlusions of the Biblical Hagar encode sexual and ethnic "internal exiles," which are, in fact, internal colonizations, and makes Islam a crucial third term in the negotiation between English Christianity and its Jewish other. This accords with trends in Jewish studies that have...