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  • The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History
  • Miriamne Ara Krummel
The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History. By Kathleen Biddick (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003) 160 pp.$34.95

Within the pages of The Typological Imaginary, Biddick examines the freighted technologies by which the medieval Christian typological impulse attempted to efface a vibrant Jewishness. Biddick uncovers multiple sites and various genres that, despite a proclaimed secularity, speak of, and are modeled after, the binary thinking common to typological hermeneutics, such as a belief in the oldness of the Old Testament (a Jewish "then") and the newness of the New Testament (a Christian "now").1 Biddick carefully pursues medieval typological technologies and "grapples with an unsettling historiographical problem: how to study the history of Jewish-Christian relations without reiterating the temporal practices through which early Christians, a heterogeneous group, fabricated an identity ("Christian-ness") both distinct from and superseding that of neighboring Jewish communities" (1). Biddick traces the impulse to view Jewishness as a superseded quantity in our present. She scrutinizes "passages, thresholds, gaps, intervals, inbetweenness" (2), exemplified in fifteen carefully selected images that model the devices deployed to render Jewish identity absent and irrelevant so that a relevant Christian identity could replace it.

Biddick's evidence is compelling, even chillingly so, as in the case of drawings of Albrecht Altdorfer, who in 1519 depicted a "then and now" view of the Regensburg Synagogue: Jews walk from the porch of the Synagogue into its interior; on the next page, the illustration of its interior is bereft of Jews (figures 14 and 15). This disappearance signifies the visual technology that "traumatically encrypts Jews within the tomb of the typological imaginary" (65).

Biddick's study looks further than the Christian typological impulse to erase Jewishness; the struggle between "a Christian 'now'" and "a Jewish 'then'" runs deeper than Altdorfer's 1519 drawings of the porch and interior of the Regensburg Synagogue. In her concluding chapters, Biddick complicates this typological encryption by mapping the vexed outcomes of the then/now binary onto the scholarship of Sigmund Freud and Salo Wittmayer Baron. In light of Freud's silences about his Yiddish/Hebrew voice and Baron's denial of the authenticity of pursuing Jammergeschichte (lachrymose history), Biddick concludes that "historians need a history of lachrymose history. . . . trapped as it is in the word Jammergeschichte" (79).2 [End Page 245]

In exploring the various ways that Hebrew was deployed, Biddick brings astrolabes to bear on her analysis of the "instruments of translation" (23). Of particular interest to Biddick is Mohammed ben Al-Saal's Toledo Astrolabe (1029) that provides an image to complement the discussion about Petrus Alfonsi's Dialogue Against the Jews (1108–1110). Surprisingly, the Hebrew word Cortoba (hbrfdwq) appears in the middle of ben Al-Saal's astrolabe (figures 3a and 3b). A little more needs to be said about careful inscriptions and Jewish memory as illustrated in ben Al-Saal's nearly centered Hebrew word, surrounded as it is by Arabic letters, and Alfonsi's own attempts to deploy science to "dispossess himself of his former Jewish self" (27).

Even so, The Typological Imaginary is a fine analysis of the technologies that bleach out Jewish contributions from the accounts of "now." An original and much-needed study of a deeply serious problem, The Typological Imaginary will change the parameters of our debates about, and perceptions of, religious, as well as secular, typologies. Biddick's research into the embeddedness of typology in our secular hermeneutics earns her work a rightful place in all medievalists' libraries.

Miriamne Ara Krummel
University of Dayton

Footnotes

1. In The Typological Imaginary, Biddick traces the then/now binary, as expressed herein, to Paul: "In his new theology of circumcision, the circumcision of the heart, Paul severed a Christian 'now' from a Jewish 'then'" (12).

2. As Biddick points out, the notion of Jammergeschichte, lachrymose history, was introduced to Jewish Studies by Salo Wittmayer Baron in "Ghetto and Emancipation: Shall We Revise the Traditional Views?" Menorah Journal, 14 ( June 1928), 515-526. See Biddick, The Typological Imaginary, 130, n.6.

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