Download Baldwin Late Medieval 2 Prejudice and

Late Medieval Culture, II
Persecution / Court Culture
Robert Baldwin
Associate Professor of Art History
Connecticut College
New London, CT 06320
[email protected]
12. The Middle Ages and the Rise of a Persecuting Society
The same growth of the city which produced the new urban preaching orders (Franciscans and
Dominicans) also produced new ethnic anxieties, economic resentments, and religious diversity.
The inevitable result was a new demonizing and persecution of groups seen as threatening to the
Christian social order, especially heretics, Jews, witches, Moslems, and lepers. 1
The Late Medieval Campaign Against Heresy
The problem of heresy – Christian belief deemed false by church officials - took on a new
urgency in the later eleventh century and twelfth centuries with the rapid spread of the Cathar or
Albigensian heresy from Germany to southern France and Northern Italy. Between 1170 and
1215, the Waldensian heresy spread through parts of Germany, Southern France, and Italy. It
denounced what it saw as church corruption, illegal authority, and false religious practices. These
heresies also spread because local lords used religious politics to strengthen their own power
against kings and local church officials tied to Rome.
Between 1145 and 1240, the church mounted an aggressive attack on heresy, forbidding new
religious groups, calling for secular authorities to assist in a crackdown, urging lay people to
isolate all heretics socially and economically, calling for heretics to suffer arrest, torture,
property confiscation, life imprisonment, and, in some cases, execution. In 1205, Pope Innocent
III sent Dominic and his new preaching order into Southern France to combat the various
heresies which by then were powerfully entrenched and protected by local feudal lords tied
politically to the Spanish house of Aragon.
In 1208, the king of France and Pope Innocent III began the Albigensian Crusade. Officially a
holy war against heresy, this crusade was more a secular power struggle over Southern France
between the France crown and the house of Aragon. As such, it shows how religious and secular
disputes were closely entwined and how charges of heresy served secular agendas. Four years
after French victory in 1229, Pope Gregory IV established the Inquisition, later named the
Roman Inquisition in 1545. The Inquisition should not be confused with the Spanish Inquisition.
Founded in 1478 by the Spanish crown, the Spanish Inquisition to persecute Jews and Moslems
secretly practicing their original faith after converting to Christianity to avoid banishment and
property confiscation.
Founded in 1233, the Roman Inquisition was initially centered in Southern France. Administered
by the Dominican order (whose name punned “hounds of the Lord- Domini cannes), it became
the institutional arm of a new Catholic persecution. This papal Inquisition became an important
tool for advancing religious and secular objectives and extend a more centralize church power
into localities, bypassing secular jurisdiction. Under new church laws, the Inquisition conducted
trials in secret, denied counsel to the accused, and concealed the names of accusers. Guilt was
often presumed at the start. The widespread use of torture, revived by the Inquisition in 1252
from ancient Roman law, guaranteed near universal conviction rates and confessions of guilt
along with the naming of additional heretics. In this way, the Inquisition legitimized its own
campaigns against heresy and silenced many critics contesting its authority. It was the Inquisition
which created the widespread, late medieval idea of heresy as a hidden but now revealed threat
pervasively rooted in the body politic. Despite the severity of the Inquisition, capital punishment
was rarely imposed. Most heretics were fined, imprisoned for a short time, and forced to do some
kind of penance.
The establishment of the Roman Inquisition also created enormous problems for institutional
abuse as persecutions fed on themselves or expanded to “unearth” new threats to the social order.
From the start, the Inquisition was used for all sorts of political, economic, and institutional
purposes unrelated to heresy. The charge of heresy was itself flexible and could accommodate
almost any situation, as seen in the persecution of the Knights Templar, a wealthy but corrupt
crusading order which had gone into banking. Heresy could also be turned against saints.
Seventy-five years after the death of St. Francis, the pope declared that the first rule of St.
Francis – to own nothing - was heresy. While reducing conflicts within the Franciscan order over
the accumulation of monastic wealth (at a time when the Franciscans were showered with huge
bequests), this rejection of Franciscan “holy poverty” legitimized the persecution of radical
Franciscans criticizing papal wealth and the rapid enrichment of the Francis Order. Charges of
heresy were also leveled at other religious leaders including fifteenth-century saints such as
Bernardino of Siena and sixteenth century saints such as Ignatius of Loyola and Teresa of Avila.
In short, the Inquisition opened up a potentially infinite universe of institutional and statesponsored persecution after 1233. This universe of persecution only expanded in the Renaissance
(1400-1700) with new campaigns against Jews, witches, and Protestants.
Because heresy was frequently compared to Judaism as another form of false belief, the term
“Judaize” became a common Christian metaphor for heresy by the 12th century. And because
Jews were seen as implacable enemies of Christianity working for the devil, they were frequently
accused of covertly aiding heretics. In this way, later medieval campaigns against heresy fueled
anti-Semitic rhetoric and helped fuel both legal forms of repression such as laws expelling Jews
from cities, and illegal acts of mob violence. 2
The Late Medieval Persecution of Jews
Like other prejudices, anti-Semitism had many roots and developed within a larger historical
dynamic, playing itself out in a variety of unpredictable ways. At the outset, one should
remember that medieval popes and most secular rulers condemned violence against Jews and in
many cases moved to protect them from mob actions. While some of this protection stemmed
from humanitarian impulses, rulers also had economic interests at stake. Jewish moneylenders
were heavily taxed – in some cases up to two thirds of their profits – and were a source of major
revenue for the crowns of Europe and for local towns. Their property and loans were also
claimed by monarchs and lords by the late twelfth century, capitalizing on the Jews lack of
normal citizen’s rights and legal protections. Paternally protected as the “property of the crown,”
Jews were easier to exploit and rob when expedient. Kings also used threats of royal expulsion
and confiscation of property and debts to intimidate Jews further and extract heavier taxes.
Although one can speak of a mainstream, Christian anti-Semitism in the middle ages, this did not
normally include violent persecution. One must also note that medieval anti-Semitism was
caught up in a variety of local issues and conflicts which varied from one location to another and
from one historical moment to another. The following two examples speak to the various ways
an underlying anti-Semitism could take shape in the later middle ages.
Because Jews often worked as financial agents for the rulers of Europe, royal or imperial
protection could work against them during popular uprisings and millennial movements when
Jews were attacked as the agents or allies of political elites. In early fourteenth-century France,
one terrible outbreak of anti-Semitic violence tied to the Shepherd’s Crusade (1320-21) was
actually a deflected attack of impoverished peasants on the corrupt and tyrannical French king
and his agents, including Jews. In 1321, nobles and clerics hostile to French royal authority
spread false reports of a conspiracy between Jews, lepers, and Moslems to conquer Europe and
destroy France. At first, the king of France refused to accept the false charges against the Jews.
Eventually, the false confessions of tortured Jews and the manufacturing of evidence “proving”
the conspiracy forced his hand. The king expelled all Jews and confiscated their property. A very
different dynamic played out at the same moment in Aragon, where the impoverished French
peasants known as “shepherds” were marching South from France into Aragon to start a new
crusade against Moslems and Jews. After the shepherds killed 337 Jews in Aragon in 1321, the
troops of the king of Aragon rushed in, arresting hundreds of French peasants. After torture and
trials, forty ringleaders were hung or decapitated in towns all over Aragon as an example to any
locals who might turn against Jews or Moslems. 3
These two examples should remind us that generalizations about a pervasive Christian hatred of
the Jews is reductive and over-simplistic, as is the idea that violence stemmed from irrational
mob anger spilling over. Ethnic hatred was invariably channeled and expressed in distinct ways
which deserve close historical analysis. Local factors were always primary in determining how
hatred was channeled and expressed, how it was controlled or encouraged to boil over. Since
anti-Semitic violence did not flare up in some parts of Europe after the Black Death, notably
Italy and England, it needs to be historically explained in ways which avoid generalizations
about medieval Christian hatred. It is also noteworthy that most popes condemned violence
against Jews, as did most religious and secular leaders. But at a time when central authority was
weak, such condemnations often had little effect, especially outside the ruler’s immediate lands.
Even in areas or periods free from large outbreaks of violence, Jews still suffered from lower
levels of “violence” and routine intimidation grounded in mainstream Christian hostility, fear,
and scapegoating. With a strong note of historical caution, I offer the following generalizations.
Medieval anti-Semitism was partially rooted in Roman hostility toward the Jews and the legal
restrictions imposed on them after the conquest of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 A.D.
Medieval and Renaissance Christians visiting Rome admired the Triumphal Arch of Titus
erected after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and decorated with reliefs of pillage and Jewish
enslavement.
Inspired by numerous Biblical passages and by early Christian writing, medieval Christians
blamed Jews for Christ’s death. Matthew 27:25 went so far as put Christ’s blood on all Jews
through history when it had Jews urging Pilate to crucify Christ with these words, “His blood be
on us, and on our children”. Needless to say, the scapegoating of the Jews ignored the decisive
role of the Roman judicial system in arresting, convicting, and executing Christ. 4 In blaming the
Jews for Christ’s death, medieval Christian writers routinely interpreted the later, Roman
destruction of Jerusalem as divine punishment. 5 As Pope Innocent II noted in an official papal
bull issued in 1205, the Jews were condemned to eternal servitude as a punishment for the
crucifixion. 6 In Langland’s Piers Plowman (1370-95), we find a typical late medieval
expression of these ideas at a time when rising anti-Semitism fueled a new interest in the idea of
the Roman destruction of Jerusalem as divine vengeance and providence. Langland’s Christ
expels the Jewish moneychangers from the Temple in Jerusalem before denouncing all Jews and
prophesizing their destruction.
'Then you, and all your children, are slaves,' answered Jesus. 'Satan is your Saviour you have just admitted it yourselves. For it is I that have saved you and your children saved your bodies, saved your beasts, given sight to your blind, and fed you so well with
five loaves and two fishes that whole baskets-full were left for the scavengers' - And He
abused the Jews to their faces, fearlessly, and threatened them with a whip and lashed
them, knocking over the stalls of the money-changers and those who bought and sold in
the Temple. And openly, in the hearing of them all, He uttered these words: 'I shall dash
this Temple to the ground and destroy it entirely, and build it again completely in three
days, larger and more spacious than it was before. I command you therefore to call this
place a house of prayer and perfection: "My house shall be called a house of prayer."
'Then the Jews, filled with envy and malice, planned to destroy Him as soon as they got a
chance; and they waited day after day till at last, on the Friday before the Feast of the
Pass-over, they saw their opportunity. 7
The same scapegoating and demonizing was repeated in Franciscan and Dominican sermons and
in the Passion plays staged in city squares and churches on Easter weekend (These anti-Semitic
plays were performed in Germany into the 1980s before public pressure forced significant
changes.) 8 Jews also featured prominently in thousands of late Medieval depictions of the
Passion. If seeing was believing in late Medieval and Renaissance art, church paintings and
sculptures showing Jews tormenting Christ and demanding his death confirmed the view found
in Passion plays, devotional literature, and sermons. 9
Perhaps the most perverse of all anti-Semitic images was the new theme of the Living Cross
launched in the fourteenth century and continuing until the early sixteenth. Some thirty-six
examples survive from the Lower Rhine, Hungary, Poland, Westphalia, and Northern Italy.
Large examples include Giovanni da Modena’s mid-fourteenth century fresco in the Bologna
Duomo, a series of church frescoes by Garofalo in Bologna in the 1520s, and an altarpiece by
Hans Fries in Fribourg. In The Living Cross, the Crucified Christ was transformed from a passive
victim sacrificed to redeem mankind to a violent avenger, destroying the Jews blamed for his
murder and banishing them to Hell once and for all. In one of Garofalo’s four frescoes on the
theme in Bologna, the basic iconography appears with a few minor twists. A second set of
mystical hands emerge from both sides of the cross and on top and bottom as well, On Christ’s
bad, left side, the mystical hand wields a lance to stab Synagoga to death and to break the key to
heaven, pictured above against the dark, ominous sky. Riding an ass, Synagoga is blindfolded as
usual. Below her, Hell waits for the Jews. On the good right side against a sun-drenched
landscape, a divine hand emerges to crown Ecclesia and hold out the key to Salvation shown
above as the New Jerusalem. Below her stands a priest celebrating mass. Further below, Adam
peers out from Limbo, gazing at his imminent redemption.
Thomas von Villach’s early sixteenth-century painting in the Pfarrkirche St. Andra in
Engelschören (Thörl) is even more violent with Christ’s mystical hand stabbing Synagoga with a
giant sword passing through her skull, emerging at her neck, passing back through her breasts,
emerging once again to disappear into her thigh. The donkey she rides has each of its hind legs
broken with a deep slash and two deep slashes breaking each front leg (recalling the breaking of
the thieves legs). To add insult to injury and introduce more violence, Synagoga holds the
severed head of a Goat, symbol of the executed Jew. Behind Synagoga, a naked Eve holds out
death in the form of a skull to a prostrate group of anguished, cringing Jews while further below
a triumphant Christ liberates good Christians from Hell.
In short, the Living Cross offered an anti-Semitic fusion of the Crucifixion and Last Judgment
with Jews replacing sinners.10
(These and a few other examples are included in a slide show, “Jews. Christ Destroys Judaism”
on my web site,www.socialhistoryofart.com under the page “Art by Subject”.)
In some parts of Europe, ritualized expressions of violence against Jews were built into Holy
Week celebrations, though such acts may have deflected real violence by limiting anti-Semitism
to the realm of ideas, images, and ceremonies. 11 In any case, Christian anger at Jews frequently
peaked, and sometimes boiled over, around Easter.
Anti-Semitic violence borrowed from anti-Moslem feelings and the Crusades (1096-) which
undertook to wrest control of the Holy Lands from the Moslem infidel. Since Jews had
controlled Jerusalem until the first century when they were massacred and dispersed by the
Romans, later medieval thinking made easy analogies between Jews and Moslems as twin
enemies of Christianity with ruling ties to the Holy Land. 12 During the first crusade of 1096,
several thousand Jews were massacred in French and German towns along the Rhine, this despite
intervention by high church officials to protect local Jewish populations. 13 Hundreds of men,
women, and children were killed in Rouen alone, with smaller massacres reported a dozen other
towns. 14 In 1146, the apocalyptic preaching of a Cistercian monk incited another outbreak of
anti-Semitic violence in towns along the Rhine until Bernard of Clairvaux intervened. In 1189,
the coronation of the crusader, Richard I as king of England led to the burning of some thirty
Jews from London. This triggered similar outbreaks in other English cities culminating in the
massacre, by fire and suicide, of the Jewish community in York in 1190. 15 The anti-Semitic
violence of the Shepherd’s Crusade presumed a conspiracy in 1321 between Jews, Moslems, and
lepers to poison wells and deliver Jerusalem to the Jews and Europe to the Moslems. Jews were
massacred again in Normandy and Picardy during the Second Crusade in 1146. 16
Other outbreaks of violence had nothing to do with the Crusades. To assert his authority in 1171,
the Count of Blois hung thirty-one Jews for a murder even though no one was missing nor was
there a body. 17 To display royal power in the frontier stronghold of Bray-sur-Seine, the antiSemite King Philip Augustus of France massacred ninety Jews in 1191. While the pretext was
the supposed murder of a vassal by a Jew, the purpose of such violence was to intimidate
Christians as well as Jews.
Philip Augustus went further by making Jews an important and lucrative example in his
campaign to expand the power of a weakened French monarchy beyond its territorial dominion.
Immediately after accession to the throne, Philip Augustus began a two year campaign of
arresting hundreds of wealthy Jews and confiscating their property. 18 In 1182, he expelled all
Jews from French royal lands, readmitting them only in 1198 when he realized he could make
more money from taxing Jewish businesses and property than from confiscation and expulsion.
The privilege to return to royal lands came with heavy fees. This dynamic of expulsion and
returned continued in France through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries with another
expulsion in 1306, a return in 1315 and a final expulsion in 1394.
After a long period of tolerance and protection, the Jews of England entered a period of ruthless
taxation by the English crown in the thirteenth century, culminating in their expulsion from that
country in 1291. 19 By the end of the fifteenth century, Jews had been expelled from most
countries in Western Europe. Their concentration in Eastern European lands had tragic
consequences later when these regions were overrun by the Nazis.
Medieval anti-Semitism also fueled itself with the libel that Jews kidnapped and murdered
Christian children to use their blood in baking matzoh bread. Despite regular denials by the
papacy, this popular belief continued through the Renaissance. While the libel of ritual murder
doesn’t explain why acts of violence occurred at a particular time and place, it was often used as
a pretext and contributed to Christian hatred. In 1255, Jews in Lincoln were blamed for the death
of a boy found in a well. One hundred and nine Jews were taken off to London, tried, and
convicted, with nineteen hung before the monarchy intervened. 20 One scholar estimates a
hundred and fifty such trials of Jews accused of ritual murder in the later middle ages. 21
Another libel against the Jews was the accusation that Jews regularly desecrated the Eucharist or
sacred images and relics. Some one hundred trials are recorded in the later middle ages. Most
date from the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries after the inauguration of the official
Catholic Feast of Corpus Christi in 1264. Instituted to combat heresy and to make Eucharistic
worship and belief central to Christian practice, the rise of Eucharistic piety provided the
materials for a new, deadly libel against Jews, especially in Northern Europe. After accusations
of host desecration, Jews were massacred near Berlin in 1263 and in Brussels in 1320.
In the regulations published by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), the Roman Catholic church
dramatically isolated, stigmatized, and targeted Jews by requiring them to wear special
identifying clothing. Fear of interethnic sexual pollution weighed heavily in the decision, alerting
us to another element in medieval anti-Semitism.
“in the countries where Christians do not distinguish themselves from Jews and Saracens
[Moslems] by their garments [sexual] relations are maintained between Christians and
Jews and Saracens. … In order that such wickedness in future be not excused by error it
is decreed that Jews of both sexes will henceforth be distinguished from other people by
their garments.” 22
Conditions deteriorated further for Jews in the early thirteenth century with the rise of the new
preaching orders, the Dominicans and the Franciscans. With their devotion to holy poverty and
to strengthening the community through aggressive preaching, the Franciscans and the
Dominicans led the way in scapegoating Jews as wealthy, greedy moneylenders bleeding the
Christian community dry, as demonic assailants of Christian images and consecrated Eucharists,
as kidnappers and murderers of Christian babies, and as the cause of epidemics and plagues
through the poisoning of wells. Abetted by the policies of anti-Semitic rulers and fomented by
mendicant preachers and by anti-Semitic miracle stories, 23 religious plays, and devotional
literature, anti-Semitic thinking and violence grew steadily, if unevenly, through the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries, with a sharp rise after the Black Death of 1348. Despite denials by
kings and popes, the plague was blamed at the local level on Jews poisoning wells, accusations
fanned by arrests and confessions secured through torture. On February 14, 1348, nine hundred
Jews were burned to death in the Jewish cemetery of Strasbourg. In the next year, thousands
more were killed in mob riots in Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, and Poland. The Jews were
only safe in the papal territories in central Italy and Avignon.
A Brief Summary of the Later Impact of Medieval Persecution
Renaissance Europe continued the persecution of heretics, Jews, and Moslems and went after
two relatively new threats to the social order: homosexuals and witches. With the revival and
dramatic expansion of slavery, Renaissance Europe also laid the groundwork for another set of
prejudices. Slavery, of course, was itself an institutionalized form of persecution practiced by all
Western countries until the late 18th century when it was outlawed in republican France. Its
eventual outlawing elsewhere came much later. It is still practiced in some Moslem parts of the
world today.
Heretics
The threat of heresy took on a new magnitude with the Reformation (1517-) and the religious
violence, wars, and persecution which engulfed parts of Northern Europe in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. In 1478, the king of Spain created a Spanish Inquisition to root out
converted Jews and Moslems secretly practicing their religions. When Spain emerged as a great
empire in the sixteenth century, the Spanish Inquisition served a broad, imperial agenda, though
its powers were greatly exaggerated by anti-Spanish propaganda.
Jews
Jews were scapegoated with new ferocity in Renaissance Europe as economic expansion and
religious conflicts fueled the need for scapegoats close at hand. After an aggressive but
unsuccessful Dominican campaign to convert all Jews (and Moslems) in fifteenth century Spain,
the monarchy solved the problem by expelling all Jews in 1492. This only drove Judaism
underground for the many Jews who chose to remain in their homes, fueling Christian paranoia
about secret threats concealed in the body politic and adding to the persecution of Jews, heretics,
and other hidden threats to the social order. At a more local level, Jews were expelled from
numerous cities in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century including Prague (1400), Vienna
(1421), Cologne (1424), Mayence (1438), Augsburg (1440), the Tyrol (1493), Nuremberg
(1499), Provence (1498-1506), and Regensburg (1519).
Moslems (and Moors)
Moslems were demonized by the thirteenth century. In one popular devotional handbook of
1328, one terrified soul envisions hell as a place of hideous beasts, demons and black Moors.
The light of this world begins to vanish from me. I begin to see into the next world. O
God, my God, what a sight! The horrible forms of black Moors assemble together; the
wild beasts of hell surround me. They gloat over my poor soul to see if it will be theirs. 24
The most urgent threat to Europe after 1375 was the westward expansion of a seemingly
invincible Ottoman Turkish empire. (The Turks also battled other empires in or near Asia Minor
including Mongols to the North and Persians to the East.) In 1389, the Turks defeated a large
Western force of Serbs, Bosnians, Bulgarians, Rumanians and Magyars at the Battle of Kosovo.
By 1396, the Ottoman Empire included the Holy Lands South of Turkey and most of the Balkan
peninsula to the West. In 1453, the Turks ended the thousand-year old Byzantine Empire by
capturing Constantinople (now Istanbul), the last major eastern stronghold of the Christian West.
Anxieties about “the Turk” were particularly high in the later fifteenth century where a double
campaign was conducted, one against Ottoman forces pushing West from Asia Minor, the other
against African Moslems who had conquered most of the Iberian peninsula (Spain/Portugal) in
the 8th century and were only expelled from that part of Europe in 1492.
Homosexuals
Homosexuals were occasionally condemned by medieval writers, especially monastic writers
concerned about the sexual improprieties flourishing in all-male communities sworn to chastity.
Citing early Christian authorities, Jacobus da Voragine’s Golden Legend (1270-90) described the
annihilation of all “sodomites” on the night of Christ’s birth as one of a series of miraculous
announcements of Christ’s birth.
“To these shepherds, then, an angel appeared, and announced to them the birth of the
Savior, telling them also how they might find their way to Him. And they heard a
multitude of angels singing, 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of
good will!' In yet another way, the Nativity was revealed through the Sodomites, who that
night perished throughout the world. In this regard Saint Jerome tells us: 'So great a
light arose that night that it extinguished all those who were given to this vice.' And Saint
Augustine says that God could not take flesh in the nature of man as long as there
existed, in this nature, an unnatural vice.” 25
Thanks largely to the late medieval preaching orders, the medieval monastic hostility to
homosexuality entered the Renaissance city where it took on a new urgency in the fiery sermons
of the influential Franciscan preacher, St. Bernardino of Siena. Renaissance cities enacted new
ordinances against homosexuality, created new urban institutions to police sexual activity, and
occasionally mounted crackdowns and intervals of persecution. Despite periodic episodes of
persecution, Renaissance court culture showed a certain tolerance for homosexual activity and
even more for homoerotic artistic imagery which burst forth in the art of Donatello, Signorelli,
Pollaiuolo, Perugino, Mantegna, Antico, Michelangelo, Giambologna, Cellini, and Caravaggio,
among others.
Witches
While occasionally persecuted in the middle ages, the witch also took on new importance as a
social threat in the Renaissance. Whereas accusations of witchcraft were relatively rare in the
middle ages and more common as a pretext in courtly political intrigues, sorcery was redefined
in the Renaissance as widespread contagion of the body politic and a threat to all Christians.
Accusations of witchcraft moved into a much wider social environment and joined with both
anti-Semitism and heresy as a trio of related threats orchestrated by the Devil. With some notable
exceptions, the persecution of witchcraft emerged as a mass hysteria only in the late
Renaissance, in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. None of that violence was possible
without the gradual emergence of a popular Renaissance discourse on witchcraft.
1
See R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society. Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 9501250, London: Basil Blackwell, 1987 and David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence. Persecution of
Minorities in the Middle Ages, Princeton, 1996
2
Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism, Ithaca and London:
Cornell University Press, 1982, pp. 77-102; Joel Carmichael, The Satanizing of the Jews, New York:
Fromm, 1992, 64-66.
3
Nirenberg, op. cit., 43-76.
4
Moore, op. cit., p. 35, cites two influential anti-Semitic texts in the New Testament. In John 8:42-44,
Christ says to the Jews, “If God were your father ye would love me … Ye are of your father the devil, and
the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning…” In Revelations 2:9, we read,
“I know the blasphemy of them that say they are Jews and are not but a synagogue of Satan.” One can also
add Matthew 27:24-25 where the Jews urge Pilate to crucify Christ, saying “His blood be on us, and on our
children”.
5
Stephen Wright, The Vengeance of Our Lord. Medieval Dramatizations of the Destruction of Jerusalem,
Toronto, 1989
6
7
Langland, Piers Plowman, trans. J. F. Goodridge, Penguin Classics, 1959, pp. 240-241
8
James Schapiro, The Oberammergau Passion Play, (title??), 1999
9
Hundreds of later medieval and Renaissance anti-Semitic images are reproduced in Heinz Schreckenberg,
The Jews in Christian Art. An Illustrated History, New York: Continuum, 1996.
For the Living Cross, see Achim Timmermann, “The Avenging Crucifix: Some Observations on the
Iconography of the Living Cross," in Gesta, 40 (2001), 141-160 ,” and Dana Katz, The Jew in the Art of the
Italian Renaissance, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008, ch, 3.
10
11
Moore, p. 32, cites the early eleventh century French custom of striking a Jew in the face outside church
on Easter Sunday. See Nirenberg for an extended discussion of ritual violence against Jews in the Good
Friday service.
12
See Moore, op. cit., p. 29-30, a part of a larger discussion of anti-Semitism in later medieval Europe (pp.
45). Moore cites J. Riley Smith, “The First Crusade and the Persecution of the Jews,” in W. J. Shiels, ed.,
Persecution and Toleration Studies in Church History, vol. 21, 1984. Also see Allan Cutler and H. Cutler,
The Jew as Ally of the Muslim: Medieval Roots of Anti-Semitism, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame
Press, 1986. This book goes too far in seeing anti-Muslim feeling as the basis of medieval anti-Semitism.
Also see Nirenberg, op. cit. and Mary Hamel, The Siege of Jerusalem as a Crusading Poem,” Journeys
Toward God: Pilgrimage and Crusade, ed. Barbara Sargent-Baur, Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute
Publications, 1992, 177-194
13
Schlomo Eidelberg, The Jews and the Crusaders, Madison, 1977 (with three Jewish accounts of the
massacres); and Robert Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade, Berkeley, 1987
14
Moore, Formation, op. cit, pp.29-30, blames the violence on the crusaders themselves. Carmichael,
Satanizing, op. cit., pp.57-64, argues that most of the anti-Semitic violence in 1096 was carried out by
popular millennial groups who assembled with the crusaders to celebrate the start of their voyage. These
millennial groups directed their wrath against “the pillars of the social order – the Church, the aristocracy,
the emerging bourgeoisie” and were in turn violently suppressed by the church. While recognizing the
critical importance of the crusades in legitimizing sacred violence against the enemies of Christianity,
Carmichael sees most of the massacres of 1096 as carried out by millennial mobs who found in Jews a safer
target for their anger.
15
See R. B. Dobson, The Jews of Medieval York and the Massacre of March 1190, Borthwick Papers no.
45, York, 1974, cited in Moore, p. 31
16
Carmichael, op. cit., p. 58. The scholarly value of this work is severely undermined by the lack of any
footnotes and documentation.
17
Moore, p. 43
Moore, pp. 42-43. . It was around this time that rulers all over Europe insisted on a new legal principle
that all Jews and their wealth belonged to the crown or to the local feudal lord.
18
19
Moore, pp. 43-44.
20
Moore, pp. 36-37.
21
22
Moore, p. 37, citing J. Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews, New Haven, 1943, p. 125
Moore, op. cit., p. 45 and Nirenberg, op. cit., p. 133.
23
See, for example, the miracles of St. William of Norwich, a boy whose murder in 1144 was blamed on
Jews in 1150, and whose tomb became an important pilgrimage site. This is discussed in G. I. Langmuir,
“Thomas of Monmouth: Detector of Ritual Murder,” Speculum, 59, 1984, 820-846, cited in Moore, p. 36.
24
25
Heinrich Suso, The Little Book of Eternal Wisdom, ch. 21
Ibid, “Nativity,” p, 50