Part XXXI in our ongoing series on Race, Racism and the Middle Ages, by Richard Utz. You can find the rest of the special series here. 

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In 1968, the Bishop of Regensburg, Rudolf Graber, made a momentous decision. He found himself in the position to shape the future of the College of Catholic Theology at the newly founded University of Regensburg, in southeastern Germany. As one of his decisions, he changed the plan to create a professorship in Judaic Studies; instead, he created one in Dogmatic Theology. The call to fill this professorship was accepted by a brilliant theologian from the University of Tübingen: Joseph Ratzinger. Ratzinger would then become first Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the successor to the Roman Inquisition, in 1982. And, of course, he would become Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. However, Graber’s decision to change the professorship’s focus from Judaic Studies to Dogmatic Theology may also have had another, less-well-known consequence.

One year after his strategic appointment of Ratzinger, an article in Der Spiegel exposed two things about Graber. First, that he had been a supporter of national socialist ideology and Hitler’s leadership.

But the paper also pilloried his outspoken support for something called the “Deggendorfer Gnad” (“Deggendorf Grace”).

The Deggendorfer Gnad was an anti-Jewish pilgrimage tradition in the small city of Deggendorf (in Lower Bavaria), which originated in the first half of the fourteenth century.

Specifically, Graber objected to calls for the removal of a cycle of early eighteenth-century paintings in the small city’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher that memorialized a long disproven narrative about how the pilgrimage came about—as an anti-Jewish “miracle”.

A Massacre, an Exoneration Myth, and Opportunism

The 1710 paintings (the above print versions of them were published in 1749) tell a lurid story. The story goes something like this:

In 1337, the Jews of Deggendorf enticed a Christian woman to steal hosts (the bread that represents the body of Christ) during Holy Communion. They, according to this story, attempted to desecrate these hosts by driving nails into them, by cutting them, hammering them, and burning them. To their surprise, each attempt apparently made a youthful Jesus appear—who then soared over the host. Discouraged, the Jews then apparently tried to cover up their crime by throwing the hosts in a well. The Virgin Mary then appeared miraculously to the citizens, exposing the crime, and the citizens burned the Jews in their anger. Subsequently, the citizens walked in procession from the well to their church to place the saved hosts in a beautiful monstrance, where they were forever preserved in immaculate condition. The narrative ends by depicting additional miracles, making a claim that a papal bull approved the sacred nature of the site, and recording the beginnings of a tradition of pilgrims coming to the site.

The actual historical record offers a very different version of events. Scholars, especially church historian Manfred Eder’s publications on the topic, demonstrate that, in 1338, the citizens of Deggendorf settled an economic crisis, which had been caused by a series of catastrophic harvests, by murdering the town’s Jews and stealing their property. The myth about a pre-1338 Jewish desecration of the host was clearly invented to exonerate, after the fact, the city’s Christian citizens. Some of them might have felt guilt about killing their Jewish neighbors, or they might have come under criticism by their neighbors. This was a wholesale rewriting of their history.

The massacre in Deggendorf was widely known. It spurred similar murders of Jewish people in more than a dozen other towns in the region. One of those places, according to the 15^th-century Nuremberg Martyrologium, was Braunau, the birthplace of Adolf Hitler.

From Murderous Myth to Moneymaker

If the medieval mass-murder and property theft had “solved” a short-term economic problem for the Deggendorf citizens, the miracle myth, and the pilgrimages that it inspired, became a major source of recurring and reliable income for the town in the early modern and modern eras. Soon after 1338, sources began to claim that a host desecration had preceded, and thus justified, the citizens’ massacre of the Jews. By 1710, when the paintings were commissioned for the pilgrimage church, several conflicting local legends were consolidated and edited into one official narrative. In 1721, as many as 40,000 visitors are said to have traveled to Deggendorf; numerous religious rituals (processions, indulgences, litanies) and cultural practices (poems, plays, prose narratives, paintings) were created, and succeeded in (re)memorializing various aspects of the alleged host miracle over the subsequent several centuries. These practices successfully adapted to various new historical contexts. But the miracles surrounding the saved and miraculously preserved hosts (which have been proven to have been replaced with new ones several times when they showed visible decay) remained connected with their alleged cause: the desecration of the hosts by medieval Jews.

The Nazis, who were otherwise keen on suppressing Catholic pilgrimage traditions, permitted and even supported the Deggendorf pilgrimage because it easily connected with their own anti-Semitic agenda. In the 1980s, the priest of the Holy Sepulcher parish made a final attempt at revivifying the gradually waning tradition with a well-funded marketing campaign. But, when he removed the references to the false medieval accusations against the Jews, he found that the remaining (mostly conservative) supporters of the pilgrimage showed little enthusiasm for a ‘cleansed’ narrative. And so, finally, a full three decades after the Second Vatican Council—which officially condemned “hatred and persecutions of Jews, whether they arose in former or in our own days”—all official religious rituals and practices related to the pilgrimage were finally discontinued by the Bishop of Regensburg in 1992.

Projective Inversion

The genesis and reception of the Deggendorfer Gnad (numerous similar examples exist) show that there is an undeniable continuity between medieval and modern attitudes and actions toward members of the Jewish people in Europe. Fabricated, false accusations against Jews in the Middle Ages (of host desecrations, ritual murder, well-poisoning, usury, etc.), were a defining feature medieval Christian identity. Although accounts of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism (for example, if you can read French, see Léon Poliakov’s Histoire de l’antisémitisme, 4 vols, 1955-1977; rev. edn. 1991) claim that all this changed with the onset of scientific modernity, there is ample evidence to suggest that this is not true. For medieval Christians as well as for post-medieval Christians (and non-Christians), Jewish otherness offered an opportunity to accuse the Jewish people of falling back into pre-Christian or pre-modern stages of civilization.

For example, from 1213 to 1215, the Catholic Church held a council of much of its entire leadership to decide many of the rules that remain part of Catholic orthodoxy today. One of these was the doctrine of transubstantiation, claiming that the bread and wine of communion literally become Christ’s flesh and blood during mass. However, after this, medieval Christians began to project their own fears about falling back into archaic forms of sacrificial anthropophagism—consuming Christ’s actual flesh and blood—onto the Jews, accusing them of ritual murder and desecration of the host. It is classic psychological projection: taking what you fear most about yourself and projecting it onto a scapegoat, which you can then hate and persecute freely.

Modern Christians continued to believe in the deceptively timeless nature of anti-Semitic myths with medieval origins because they were sustained by powerful narratives and rituals like the ones that sustained the Deggendorf Gnad. Their continued beliefs were then easily coopted and exploited by other individuals and groups in need of political scapegoats during times of increased insecurity and fear. In many of these cases, public health officials, butchers, and animal protectionists played a role. For example, numerous participants of the International Congress on the Protection of Animals in Vienna, in 1929, condemned the traditional Jewish slaughtering of animals in accordance with the Kosher laws (without stunning or anesthetizing the animal first) as a regression into premodern cruelty and unhygienic filth. These toxic views entered into easy alliances with Christian prejudice.

The politically motivated ritual murder accusations of Jewish people like Tisza Eszlár (in Hungary in 1883) and Mendel Beilis (in Kiev, Russia, in 1913) reveal exactly this kind of scapegoating of Jewish beliefs and practices. So do the opportunistic hate campaigns seen during the Third Reich, which featured ritual murder narratives in Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer. So too did the Hungarian nationalist “Jobbik” party’s anti-Semitic slogans, which claimed, as recently as 2008, that the Jews had “desecrated our [country’s] Holy Crown, [and] ridiculed the [medieval Catholic relic] Holy Right Hand.”

Complicity, and Resistance to Change

Had Bishop Graber appointed a chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Regensburg, the Deggendorfer Gnad would very probably have lost the official support of the Catholic Church as early as the 1960s. A chair in Judaic Studies, together with the strong movement to finally reform the Church’s medievalist teachings about the Jewish people—which was codified in the Second Vatican Council—would have led much earlier to the good scholarship on regional Jewish-Christian relations that emerged in the early 1990s. It was this scholarship that provided the overwhelming documentary evidence that exonerated the Jews and forced the hands of the religious authorities.

With hindsight, Graber’s decision now seems to be an active attempt by him at slowing down, or even thwarting entirely, the Council’s far-reaching decision to accept responsibility for the Church’s role in the suffering and eventual destruction of the European Jewry that began in medieval times and helped enable the Holocaust during the Third Reich.

Graber’s own national-socialist sympathies provide a plausible explanation for his anti-Jewish thoughts and actions. But his successors’ decision to keep the pilgrimage in place until after Graber’s death is different. It must be seen as another way in which far too many Catholic dignitaries have been resisting any criticism of the church, its practices, and its leaders, through the lens of history. History, after all, reveals traditions and rituals as grown, constructed, and time-bound. History thus challenges many religious beliefs, which claim a timeless bridge between, let’s say, Christ’s supper and every remembrance and reenactment of that supper.

We should remind ourselves that the stigmatization, demonization, and killing of Jews cannot be linked to any of Christ’s actions or views in the Biblical texts. It is the responsibility of those humans who claim to act in his name years and centuries later. Their actions, including the ones of church leaders, can and should be exposed for what they are, not cloaked as religious or cultural practices.

Deggendorf, Post-pilgrimage

If your travels lead you anywhere close to the region where Austria, Germany, and the Czech Republic meet, a visit to Deggendorf (situated along the Autobahn A3 between Regensburg and Passau) is a good investment. The city that has managed to transform its historical past—from the Middle Ages through the modern era—into a thoughtful learning experience. The Stadtmuseum Deggendorf, and its permanent exhibit on the Deggendorfer Gnad (opened in 1993), is a great way to see some of the texts and artwork that was created to celebrate and sustain the pilgrimage. The printed guide offered there was authored by Manfred Eder, a scholar whose doctoral dissertation provided the final incentive to discontinue the religious pilgrimage. Sadly, it is currently only available in print.

Another public sign of change is the plaque added to the outside of the Holy Sepulcher Church, seen above. It reads:

Lord have mercy.

In the year 1338 the Jews of Deggendorf were murdered. A decade later, to justify this crime, a legend was created in which the Jews desecrated the host, which is false.

Over the centuries, the slander continued to damage not only the memory of the Jews of the Middle Ages, but also to create a caricature that damaged the name of their descendants all the way into the recent past.

We ask the Jews, “our older bretheren” per Pope John Paul II, for forgiveness for the injustice done to them.

Deggendorf, in Advent 1993

It is only by publicly accepting the wrongs of the past, asking forgiveness, and making amends for them, that we may truly be able to surmount the injustices of our ancestors.

Coda: There and Back Again

Deggendorf has successfully engaged with its gruesome heritage. But the myth of Jewish host desecration has reared its ugly head again elsewhere. In the Bavarian diocese of Eichstätt, the “Heiligenblut” pilgrimage, also based on an alleged desecration of the host, made a comeback in 2005, when the diocese attempted to increase tourism to its places of worship. In its official communication on the reawakened event the diocesan leaders simply hush up the tradition’s troubling origins.

We must do better.

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Part XXX in our ongoing series on Race, Racism and the Middle Ages, by Jeremy DeAngelo. You can find the rest of the special series here. 

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The horrific events in Charlottesville began as a dispute over the interpretation of history. The dispute itself began over what, exactly, monuments to Confederate leaders mean, what lessons they convey, and what their presence in our public spaces tell us about today.

The “story” told of the Civil War—at least that which rests in much of the public’s imagination—is, as Ta-Nehisi Coates rightly argued in The Atlantic, a sanitized version of history. That story struggles to erase slavery; it is designed to benefit certain Americans’ views of themselves and to justify Jim Crow and its legal and social descendants.

The call to remove Confederate statues is part of an effort to repeal that toxic narrative.

History, in all of its details, can rarely support simple interpretations—and given all we have seen in the past weeks, we can see how misinterpretations of the past can lead to—and prop up—bigotry, hatred, and violence.

By way of demonstrating how important it is to complicate the narrative, I want to look more closely at the historical event discussed in one of The Public Medievalist’s recent installments: the massacres of Jews in the Rhineland in 1096. My introduction as an undergraduate to the texts recording these events led to some self-reflection that I believe is useful in our current time. Yes, this essay is about a white guy learning a lesson from the suffering of others. But clearly, as we can see, white guys still have lessons they—we—need to learn.

Narratives: Historical and Modern

It is easy, as human beings in the present, to create moral narratives out of past events. This is especially true when all we know about a historical event is from a simplified account in a textbook, a summary in a secondary source, or—increasingly—a movie, a TV show, or another piece of media. Such bare-bones accounts usually present conflicts as simple binaries, with easily identifiable villains and heroes. This allows us, or even requires us, to fill in the gaps with our own assumptions about the past and its people. A common quality of these narratives, consequently, is a kind of condescension toward the past. They promote the belief that we modern people are better than those who came before—more moral, more ethical, less prejudiced. “Oh, can you believe what used to be acceptable back then? Such a shame that bigotry and superstition held such sway. Thank goodness we know better!” This attitude is so common that I have found it to be many people’s default attitude when confronted by the past.

Such certainty evaporates when we face today’s controversies, however. If we were to encounter a rash of officer-involved shootings in the historical record, for example, we would likely not hesitate to diagnose it as an abuse of authority, or an imbalance between security and freedom in American society. I sincerely hope that people fifty years from now can smugly say of us: “Can you believe what used to be acceptable back then?”

Likewise, knowing the identities of those lost—Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, and others—we would likely conclude that race, including personal as well as structural and institutional racisms, is a significant factor. (“Such a shame that bigotry and superstition held such sway. Thank goodness we know better!”) In reality, of course, these conclusions are frequently deeply politicized and disputed. If the old aphorism, that “journalism is the first rough draft of history” is true, the New York Times and Breitbart are drafting entirely different histories. The disparity between the two accounts crafted by these outlets is due, in part, to outlets like Breitbart telling a story that is more easily digestible for those drawn to simple narratives of good and evil in such circumstances—assumptions which are frequently self-serving. Identifying racism as the cause behind contemporary events casts blame upon a portion of the population—the police specifically, or white people more generally—and many are not willing to accept that explanation. Despite its obvious truth, they will go to great pains to reject it.

As a professor of medieval literature and culture it is my job to bring the past and present together. I do it in order to help us bridge this gap; to better understand our own prejudices by examining those of the past. It is even possible for us to better understand incidents of racial injustice today by looking at medieval examples. One of my profoundest moments of this sort of epiphany was when reading about the events of 1096.

The First Pogroms

The events of the Rhineland Massacres have already been recounted in this series, so I will only give some basic facts. On November 27, 1095, Pope Urban II gave a speech at the Council of Claremont which inspired the First Crusade. Caught up in the furor of reclaiming Jerusalem from the infidel, groups of armed pilgrims made their way to the Holy Land. Several of those traveling through the Rhineland attacked Jews in multiple German cities. Many were killed, many martyred themselves, and many others were forced to convert or die.

The most detailed accounts of these attacks come from Jewish writers, such as the anonymous author of The Narrative of the Old Persecutions (also known as the Mainz Anonymous) and the author (or authors) of the Chronicle of Solomon bar Simson. Christian accounts of the First Crusade, if they mention the events in Germany at all, do so briefly. And they are not typically sympathetic to the Jews.

The attacks spread along the route of the advancing armies, hitting the cities of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz. In both Worms and Mainz, the bishops gave the Jews shelter within their own buildings. But in both cases, their protection proved ineffective: the attackers gained access and slaughtered those inside. The perpetrators of the massacres—or at least those among them who were Crusaders and not local agitators—never made it to Jerusalem, and never even joined bulk of the Crusading army. As they travelled east, they continued to attack Jewish communities in Regensburg, and in Prague. But when they got to the Kingdom of Hungary, they found their way barred. The authorities were prepared for them, and clearly had no desire for the Crusaders to bring their chaos within Hungarian borders. The bands were compelled to pillage for supplies, and when local forces mustered a defense, the Crusaders were defeated and dispersed.

“Difficult” Victims

This broad sketch of the massacres offers a straightforward story of good and evil. While many people may not be familiar with this specific moment in history, its telling conforms to an expected pattern of evil oppressors and noble victims. But when reading the primary sources, we encounter details that may trouble our expectations. What do we do when the actors in our historical dramas refuse to play their roles? And seeing this, how do we understand them as people, rather than one-dimensional characters?

This was the dilemma I faced as an undergraduate when I first read the primary sources that describe the massacres of 1096. I was prepared, when I started my reading for a history class, to encounter a simple narrative that reinforced my assumptions about the past, about the nature of prejudice, about the conduct of persecuted minorities. I did not expect to be intellectually challenged. Instead, once I finished reading the Jewish accounts of the massacres, I was unsettled. This was because the people who I instinctively labelled “heroes” in these stories were not acting the way I expected.

One of the troubling aspects of the massacres was, for me, the willingness of the Jews to kill themselves pre-emptively. In this, these narratives differ from Christian accounts of martyrdom, which do not encourage suicide—quite the opposite. In stories of Christian martyrdom, the atrocities committed against the saint’s body and their willingness to endure them are typically the longest and most graphically detailed portions of those works. In contrast, many of the assaulted Jews in 1096 killed themselves instead of allowing the Crusaders to murder or convert them. Some of those unwilling or unable to do so, such as children, were killed by their family or community members. The acts are understandable. They were efforts by the Jews to retain control over their fates rather than relinquish it to their persecutors, as well as to save their souls from forced conversion. It was also part of a long tradition of Jewish martyrdom that goes at least as far back as the siege of Masada in the first century CE. Nevertheless, it is one thing to accept something intellectually and another not to react viscerally to passages such as this one from Anonymous of Mainz:

There was a notable lady, Rachel the daughter of R. Isaac ben R. Asher. She said to her companions: “I have four children. On them as well have no mercy, lest these uncircumcised come and seize them and they remain in their pseudo-faith. With them as well you must sanctify the holy Name.”[…] She took Isaac her small son—indeed he was very lovely—and slaughtered him. She…said to her companions: “Wait! Do not slaughter Isaac before Aaron.” But the lad Aaron, when he saw that his brother had been slaughtered, cried out, “Mother, Mother, do not slaughter me!” He then went and hid himself under a bureau. She took her two daughters, Bella and Matrona, and sacrificed them to the Lord God of Hosts, who commanded us not to abandon pure awe of him and to remain loyal to him. When the saintly one finished sacrificing her three children before our Creator, she then lifted her voice and called out to her son: “Aaron, Aaron, where are you? I shall not have pity or mercy on you either.” She pulled him by the leg from under the bureau, where he had hidden, and sacrificed him before the sublime and exalted God. She then put them under her two sleeves, two on one side and two on the other, near her heart. They convulsed near her, until the Crusaders seized the chamber.

This episode is written to create a dramatic and emotional narrative of Jewish martyrdom. And it is not alone: that parents killed their children to spare them from the Crusaders was widely reported in these chronicles. In the context of these chronicles, for these medieval Jewish people (and many other medieval societies) the integrity of one’s faith and the faith of their children—even at the cost of their lives—was paramount. And they may have feared that their fates at the hands of the Crusaders would have been much worse, that death in this manner was merciful. Such actions which to us at first might seem heartless—possibly even fanatical—make perfect sense in the context of their time, and the horror of the moment.

Another aspect of the martyrdom stories that caught me off guard was much less lurid. Probably it is because I was both Catholic and familiar with medieval Christian texts; I was accustomed to a particular type of rhetoric surrounding descriptions of the Christian faith—almost always complimentary. In contrast, The Narrative of the Old Persecutions and the Chronicle of Solomon bar Simson are defiantly anti-Christian texts. You can see, in the passage above, where the author describes Christianity as a “pseudo-faith.” Elsewhere, Christ is referred to as “a bastard and a product of sin and menstruation,” and that he is not a god and so “cannot profit and cannot save for he is worthless.”

My initial reaction to this was something that deserves introspective examination. I was prepared for the violence and anti-Semitism that I found in the texts; they fit a narrative that I was prepared to accept. But I was not prepared to have my own identity attacked. I had assumed, with no reason to do so, that medieval religious minorities would respect the beliefs of the majority—even when dying at the hand of sectarian violence. But why should they? But even upon thinking through that, I remained disturbed at the anti-Christian words in these Chronicles—which disturbed me anew.

Bringing the Past to Today

As a (white, Christian, straight, male, cisgender) undergraduate in the early 2000s I did not have this terminology at the time, but it is clear to me now that I was reading from a place of privilege. Even while reading about people whose beliefs and lives were attacked in ways that mine never would be, I was offended at even the smallest expression of disapproval on their part. I was upset that they were not living up to my expectations of how the targets of persecution conduct themselves. I was shocked by their anger.

Even then, I knew that this expectation was deeply unfair. But I didn’t know what to do with that knowledge. I knew I was foolish to expect anything else from historical texts that detail oppression. And medieval Jews, of course, would not (and do not) believe in Christ. Furthermore, these particular Jewish writers were recounting Christian mass-murders, inspired by Christianity, upon their community, their loved ones, and their religion. To expect anything other than rage and scorn for Christianity is a monstrous double-standard, an attitude which perpetuates injustice as much then as it does today.

It is a position of privilege, as well, that allows us to take a step back and think critically about accounts of other people’s suffering. My introduction to the massacres—and the way I initially reacted to them—has never been far from my mind. This is likely why I have applied it to my own understanding of public reaction to prejudice today—particularly in the case of the police shootings of African-Americans. It may seem awkward to transition from medieval anti-Semitism to the rights of African-Americans today, but in truth prejudices against both these groups have often intertwined. Now, 2017 is not 1096; but, we bring our expectations of today to our reading of the past. Many of the expectations we have for minorities are the same both for then and now.

When, in 2014, the killing of young black men began to bring more open scrutiny to policing standards, the persistence of racism in America, and the role of governmental institutions in perpetuating it, many sought to pre-empt criticism by attacking the characters of those who had been killed. Conservative commentators argued that they didn’t dress right; that they had criminal records; that they were “no angels.” The implication was that these individuals did not deserve sympathy, and, by extension, rights. This of course goes against the principle of equal protection under the law; we do not need to find someone sympathetic for them to be eligible for human rights. But it remains a constant tactic to describe someone at the center of an incident like these as someone who is, or is not, a good person. Our ability to identify with them becomes the standard by which we decide whether we should care.

Respectability Politics

This has been one of the key strengths of nonviolent resistance. During the Civil Rights Movement, for example, the optics of peaceful protest were considered extremely important for bringing public opinion over to the side of African-Americans. As Richard Cohen of the Southern Poverty Law Center explains,

The violence was being perpetrated by the oppressors, not the oppressed and that was an incredibly powerful message and an incredibly important tool during the movement.

They presented people on the fence with images of peaceful protesters who were less-easily dismissed as violent, uncivilized troublemakers. The attempt to smear present-day targets of racism and brutality is a mirror image of this tactic—instead of presenting a picture of someone with whom the general public can sympathize, they provide them with a person they can despise and fear.

We see in this the trap of respectability politics. The American public, as a whole, has developed an archetype of the deserving victim: their suffering is silent, and noble, and they are manifestly better people than those who persecute them. Our images of great civil rights leaders of the past conform to these expectations, even when reality was much more complicated—and this is why threats to undermine these images are seen as effective countermeasures. Any deviation from the expectation of respectability is grounds for the rescinding of sympathy. But this is a trap: if rights are contingent upon being sympathetic, they are not rights. And I fell into this trap. That is why, when I encountered the Jews of 1096 in my class texts, I responded how I did. They were not conforming to my unfair expectations.

Such an attitude becomes a mockery, however, when faced with the insurmountable cruelty, violence, and outrage of the massacres. Clearly, many of the Jews of the Rhineland were deeply angry at the way they had been treated. They hated the religion of the people that persecuted them and were not afraid to write it. And some believed so strongly in their faith that they were willing to destroy their lives and those of their children rather than give it up. Such sentiments might appear outrageous to us today, at least when we see them put into practice. But the price paid by the Jews was far too high to let our squeamishness stand in the way of recognizing where the real wrong lies in this event.

Difficult Histories for a Difficult Present

This is the value of historical study. It is one of the reasons that professors like me present difficult texts to our students—so that they might come to grips with the actuality of the past, rather than our popular narratives. Being able to confront one’s unexamined assumptions in the classroom, as I did, with an event safely in the past, empowers us to do the riskier and more necessary work of confronting them in our present. After all, if we cannot be brave enough to interpret the past fairly, what hope can there be for the present?

Nearly every historical text has some surprise in it for the uninitiated. It is this surprise that I try to include in all of my syllabi and class discussions today. Didn’t the women of the past “know their place” and acquiesce to their husbands? Meet Margery Kempe. Were the people of the Middle Ages completely in awe of the Catholic Church and dare not criticize it? Read The Pardoner’s Prologue (or numerous other portions of The Canterbury Tales). Was the Middle Ages a period in which people of racial, religious, or national difference were completely segregated? What do you think? Confronting all of these contradictions to our lazy assumptions about the past teaches us how infrequently gross generalizations about groups of people prove to be true. And it is a principle which should be carried over into our conduct today. How often do we read things from the perspective of someone unlike us in the present day? It has the potential to be as unfamiliar as anything written far in the past, and it carries the same lessons.

Critiquing prejudice today is hard. It is especially hard because it involves critiquing yourself. Yet it takes quite a bit of lying to yourself to see a world of clear-cut heroes and villains in most of our world today. Those sinned against almost always have messy, complicated lives, and have made mistakes; no one should expect that their persecutors have no redeeming qualities. This is precisely what we find when we examine nearly all of the incidents of racism, police brutality, or institutional blindness raised by the Black Lives Matter movement. We want heroes, we want villains, but what we get are people. A too-easy reading of history can lead us to believe that this is something we can expect. But the Jews of the Rhineland put the lie to that narrative. They may not meet our expectations. But they deserve our sympathy nonetheless. And if we can identify this problem in the past, we should be able to apply the lesson to the present. We only need be courageous enough to act.

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Part XXIX in our ongoing series on Race, Racism and the Middle Ages, by Paul B. Sturtevant. You can find the rest of the special series here. 

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At the beginning of this series, I cited an article in The Atlantic that exposed, for their readers, a link that medievalists have understood for years: white nationalists, white supremacists, anti-Semites, and neo-Nazis seem to love the Middle Ages. Or, more accurately, they love their race-fueled fantasies of the Middle Ages, which have nothing to do with the actual Middle Ages. Their version though does have something to do with the ways in which medievalists have studied the past and represented it to the public (with several medievalists recently arguing, with significant merit, that white supremacy is infused into the very bones of this academic discipline). But today, I want to focus on those of us—like me—who engage in medievalisms for fun in their spare time.

This is a call to action. It goes out to those who participate in re-enactment societies, in live-action role-playing games, or who play medieval games online. We know a love of the Middle Ages doesn’t inherently breed white supremacist sentiment, but we do know that they sometimes travel together. You have the opportunity to banish it from the circles in which you travel and the medievalisms you enjoy. You have a responsibility to ensure that the Middle Ages the white supremacists cling to is not the one you revel in.

White supremacists laying claim to the Middle Ages is a fantastical appropriation by a group desperately seeking an origin myth—and naturally, they found it in the period most often used for fantasies both benign and toxic.

In Charlottesville, white supremacists’ vile love affair with the Middle Ages was on full, horrifying display.

I don’t know where my own love for the Middle Ages came from. By elementary school I was building castles out of balsa wood and canisters of Crystal Light. For fun. As you do. In high school I joined the Society for Creative Anachronism for the first time. Since then, I sewed costumes in order to attend countless Renaissance Festivals in full regalia, participated in a wide range of Live Action Role Playing games to blow off steam, went to Medieval Times restaurants, read and re-read Tolkien and his descendents, and lost a fair bit of my life to World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, Crusader Kings II, Medieval: Total Warfare and many other video game medievalisms. My love affair with the Middle Ages has been lifelong.

I look at the faces of those people pictured at Charlottesville, and I wonder whether I’d met any of them. And I wonder how their love of the Middle Ages could manifest so disgustingly differently.

I wonder whether I did meet those charismatic bigots in my travels in medievalism. I probably did. The vast majority of the people I met, and the friends I made, were, like me, delightful nerds. But I remember more than one occasion around a campfire where someone made a racist joke. I know several people in these groups who had confederate flags on their trucks. I remember hearing that a couple of them had some weird politics, said with eye rolls and in hushed tones. I also remember how overwhelmingly white almost all of these activities were. The armor worn in Charlottesville looks ever so slightly familiar, the symbols on the shields ring a bell.

I do not share these personal reflections to elicit compassion for the white supremacists, the white nationalists, the neo-Nazis. They deserve none.

I share this to speak to those of you in our audience who, like me, swim in the rich and joyful waters that playful medievalisms can offer. We know that white supremacists love the Middle Ages. It is now on us to understand this, recognize it at home, and banish it from our ranks, regardless of whether we are medievalists professionally or personally. This series has been about highlighting a different vision of the Middle Ages, one based in the best contemporary scholarship, that shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that a whites-only, white-supremacist Middle Ages is a ludicrous, childish fantasy on so many levels.

I would call upon you to encourage the adoption of this more-inclusive, more-historically accurate vision of the Middle Ages into even your playful medievalisms. As Wajahat Ali recently said, now is the time to “stand up and be the hero.”

Find ways of expanding your, and your group’s, repertoire and purview. Look beyond medieval England, and beyond medieval Europe. Be vigilant; look out for racist interpretations of the medieval past, and push back against them. Do not accept it if your compatriots push back; their sources and interpretations are undoubtedly incomplete, ridiculously out-of-date, or just bunk. They may call our Middle Ages “presentist”, or “revisionist history.” It is only “presentist” in that it is up-to date. It is only “revisionist” because it is cutting-edge. Accept the smears with a smile.

If you are in charge of one of these groups, or have voting rights within them, institute zero-tolerance policies for racism and racist abuse. I know several who already do. And don’t accept the usual excuse—that it’s just a “reflection of the Middle Ages.” It’s not. It’s modern, it’s toxic, and it doesn’t deserve a safe harbour in your community.

Take this more-inclusive, more-accurate vision of the Middle Ages into your heart as well. Read the stories of people who you might not before have read—read A Thousand and One Nights, read the story of Ser Morien, pick up a biography of Maimonides or Mansa Musa. Imagine yourself, empathetically, in their story. Realize that their history is your history too, that you do not need to have the same skin color as them to see their past as yours.

We know that white supremacists love the Middle Ages—at least, their toxic misinterpretation of the Middle Ages. And the fantastical Middle Ages have provided an ample breeding ground for white supremacists. It is on us now to take the medieval world back from those who use it to support their hate, their violence. It is on us to ensure that the people in our groups, who play our games, or who craft garb alongside us don’t become tomorrow’s torch-wielding bigots.

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Part XXVIII in our ongoing series on Race, Racism and the Middle Ages, by Paul B. Sturtevant. You can find the rest of the special series here. 

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The year was 1096, and the drumbeats of war were echoing all throughout the Rhine valley. This wasn’t, on its face, that unusual; small wars among petty landowners were part of the cultural landscape of the high Middle Ages. But this time, it was different. It was different because only a few months before, in November of 1095, Pope Urban II had held a council in the center of France, and given a speech. Everyone’s account of the speech differed; nobody (as far as we know), wrote it down at the time. And afterwards so many different preachers carpeted the countryside—each spreading their version of the Pope’s message—that the Pope’s exact words didn’t matter all that much, even then. But the core message was clear: take up arms, go East, conquer Jerusalem, and all your sins will be forgiven.

The results of the Pope’s speech were immediate, and shocking: thousands of people from all walks of life armed themselves and went East toward Constantinople, and then (those who survived) to the Holy Land. They went seeking salvation, and they were spoiling for a fight. Only centuries later was this given a name: The First Crusade. And the Jews of Germany suddenly had good reason to be very afraid.

The Rhineland Massacres

Anti-Jewish violence had sprung up occasionally in Western Europe for the previous three hundred years. But these anti-Jewish attacks were all fairly localized and small-scale (not to downplay the horror of any violence of this kind, of course).

The First Crusade changed that.

The anti-Jewish violence that erupted in 1096 in response to Pope Urban II’s call has been given several names by historians. But largely, they are called “The Rhineland Massacres.” The broad brushstrokes are this: as clergymen travelled from place to place preaching the Crusade, several of them went off-script. Instead of (or perhaps in addition to) preaching the Crusade, they starting preaching violence against the Jews. One of them, a fanatic Cistercian monk named Rudolf, was particularly effective at whipping would-be crusaders into an anti-Semitic frenzy.

And so mobs of crusaders swept over France and Germany travelling from city to city looking to murder Jews. Three particularly large gangs—two led by priests named Folkmar and Gottschalk, and another led by a particularly nasty person named Count Emicho of Leiningen—spread across the country and massacred all the Jews they could find.

This wasn’t part of Urban II’s call. But neither did he condemn the violence against the Jews. And to some degree, you might think that the Pope should have anticipated that this might occur. When calling the Crusade, the Pope issued a “plenary indulgence”—total forgiveness of all sins (probably familiar to fans of the film Dogma)—to those who went to fight:

Whoever for devotion only, not for the acquirement of honor or of wealth, shall proceed to Jerusalem to free the Church of God, to him let that expedition be accounted in lieu of all penance.

Those people who took the Pope at his word had been offered, essentially, a religious clean slate. And some may have taken this as leave to commit any sins they wanted along the way. And more, the Pope had just represented an inherently violent venture against non-Christians as a holy one. So, for some, this gave the structural anti-Semitism and lingering anti-Semitic resentments teeth and a blind eye from none other than the Pope himself, speaking, ostensibly, on God’s behalf.

As a side note, to some degree, this is why “anti-Semitism” is a good word to use here, since the word puts Muslims and Jews in the same hate-filled basket. Not to be glib, but we actually have several accounts of Crusaders’ outlooks roughly being “why should I have to walk thousands of miles to kill God’s enemies when I’ve got plenty of them right here? And I owe these ones money!”

Shifting Focus

Thus far in our series we’ve explored the details of terrible anti-Semitic prejudice, rhetoric, and violence. So, I’m not going to go into yet another description of those horrors. I’m not going to give you a biography of Rudolf or Count Emicho; frankly, they don’t deserve our time. I’m going to tell you about the resistance.

It’s important, in moments of great tragedy, not just to focus on the perpetrators or the victims. In Nazi Germany, it is of course appropriate to talk about the evil of the Nazis and the millions of lives they took. But to leave the story there would do a great disservice to those heroes who resisted—from the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto who fought back against their oppressors, to the non-Jews who opened their homes and, in so doing, risked—and sometimes gave—their lives protecting their Jewish friends, neighbors and fellow people.

The nation of Israel gives a special honorific to those people. They are the “Righteous among the Nations.” So, who were the medieval Righteous Among the Nations?

Finding them isn’t easy. Little is written about some of them—and for a great many of them, nothing is written at all. The Crusader chronicles that cover the German pogroms don’t spend much time on them. And even the chronicles written by the Jewish survivors and their descendants often don’t focus on them, since their core purpose was to preserve the tales of the heroic Jewish martyrs who had died in the onslaught. Neither of them were especially interested in telling the stories of either the Jewish survivors, or the Righteous Among the Nations who stood against the tide.

But they’re there.

Reading a Chronicle against the Grain

Finding these stories as a reader sometimes means reading history “against the grain”—intentionally interpreting an historical text in a way that’s different from what the original writer would have expected.

Literature scholars are very good at this. They’ve been disregarding the intentions of the author at least since French Philosopher Roland Barthes declared the proverbial “Death of the Author” in his essay of that name in 1967. But this is somewhat newer and a bit more fraught for historians.

Reading history against the grain can be fairly dangerous to do if you’re not very, very careful; at an extreme, reading historical texts in such a contrarian manner can give rise to all manner of historical misinterpretations, which can give (and have given) rise to wild conspiracy theories. But if done carefully, sometimes you can reanimate just a few of those people who their contemporaries didn’t particularly care to record, or who they actively tried to erase from history.

For one example, let’s turn to the city of Cologne.

One chronicle of the events of 1096 has this passage:

It was on the fifth of Sivan, the eve of Pentecost, when the news came to Cologne […] The enemy began to slay them from Pentecost until the eighth of Tammuz. Upon learning of the annihilation of the communities, each Jew fled to a Gentile acquaintance and remained there during the two days of the festival. On the morning of the third day, there was a great clamor; and the enemy arose against them and broke into the houses, looting and plundering. They destroyed the synagogue and removed the Torah Scrolls, desecrating them and casting them into the streets to be trodden underfoot. […]

That very day they found a pious man, named Issac, son of Elyakim, who had gone out of his house; the enemy seized him and brought him to their house of idolatry [note: probably a Church]. He spat at them and at the object of their idolatry and he reviled and ridiculed them. And they slew him then and there in sanctification of the Name of God, because he did not desire to flee, out of respect for the festival, and also because he was happy to accept the judgement of Heaven.

They also found a distinguished woman, Mistress Rebecca. The enemy encountered her as she left her house bearing gold and silver vessels concealed in her sleeves, intending to bring them to her husband, Solomon, who had left his house and was now in the home of a Gentile friend. They took the money from her and slew her, and there the righteous woman died in sanctity.

At the same time another woman, Mistress Matrona, and the rest of the community were saved in the homes of acquaintances to which they had fled. They remained there until the bishop went to his villages on the tenth day of Sivan and dispersed them amongst his seven villages, in order to save them.

That was from the Chronicle attributed to Samson son of Simon, written in Hebrew around the year CE 1140. There’s a lot loaded in this passage, even though this covers just a few small episodes.

A little background: mobs of crusaders had already begun attacking Jews in the area. At this point, two cities, Worms and Mainz, had already seen brutal massacres. That’s what the author is referring to when he says “Upon learning of the annihilation of the communities.” The Jews had heard what was going on. Then the attacks came to Cologne, and the mob desecrated the synagogue there.

But thankfully, unlike in the other cities, in Cologne there are only two deaths reported: that of Issac bar Elyakim and of Mistress Rebecca. This is, presumably, because the attackers couldn’t find the rest of the Jews. The remainder saved themselves by taking refuge within the community of Christian friends and neighbors—people who clearly stood in opposition to the violence. The resistance was real. Allies put their homes and lives on the line stepped up; the Jews and their allies, almost entirely, managed to outwit the mob.

It is clear that this represents longstanding relationships between the Jews and Christians of Cologne. In the accounts we have of other cities, we know that Jews often paid Christians to protect them. There is no indication of that here.

The bishop named in the chronicle—who we know to have been Archbishop Hermann III—had a good enough relationship with the Jews who lived there that he was able to find those hiding in the city, even when the mob could not. And the Jews trusted him with their safety; they agreed to spread out among several of the fortified villages under his control. Clearly, within those villages, there were people who the Archbishop could be confident would be willing, and able, to hide the Jews of Cologne. In short, it shows that anti-Semitism—especially the violent anti-Semitism preached by Rudolf and enacted by Emicho—was far from universal. We have no way of knowing what proportion of people fell to each side, but we do know that there were enough dissenters to the violence to carry out the Archbishop’s plan.

Sadly, the plan didn’t work. The chronicle then goes on to describe how six of the seven villages were attacked by the mob, with many of the Jews hiding there either being killed, forced to convert to Christianity, or martyring themselves as a final act of resistance.

We don’t know exactly how they were found out; the chronicles don’t tell us. Maybe they were ratted out by someone in Cologne. Maybe they were sold out by someone in the villages, or someone in the Bishop’s employ. Maybe the Crusaders just went looking from village to village. I’ll leave that to a novelist’s imagination.

But the faintest of silver linings is that, for some Jews, the plan did work. Unlike in Mainz or Worms, one-seventh did survive. And while the Hebrew chronicle takes great pains to commemorate the lost, it also unintentionally honors their ability to survive, and those among the Christians who helped.

What This Means

We tend to think of people in the past—especially in the medieval past—as being intellectually and culturally monolithic; all believing the same thing, and thinking the same way. When we do, that’s a failure of empathy on our part. Racists and demagogues often try to paint the world in terms of a monolithic “us” versus a monolithic “them”, but no matter the age, there is always complexity, disagreement, and resistance.

Throughout our series, we’ve shown that over the Middle Ages, pervasive and recurring anti-Semitism became knit into much of the fabric European culture—especially in the later Middle Ages. But then, as now, it would be a mistake to assume that every European Christian subscribed to that idea.

For example, at this point in history, the Catholic Church’s hierarchy—which obviously has a very spotty reputation when it comes to anti-Semitism—was actually staunchly against the anti-Jewish violence. There were Archbishops and priests who worked against the Crusading mobs just as there were clergymen who led them. Until the end of the thirteenth century, the Papacy was typically a supporter of the Jewish people (with a few notable exceptions). But at the lower echelons, Church officials often tolerated or encouraged the abuse of Jewish people. It’s complicated.

As such, the Middle Ages should not be regarded as a time of universal, un-challenged anti-Semitism, but as a time of vast intractable disagreement among Europe’s Christians over the Jews living in their midst. This does not mean that anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages was not as bad as scholars have described. As many members of marginalized groups today will attest, it is deeply oppressive to live in a society that is openly debating whether you have a right to exist. What this does mean is that the Middle Ages may have, in some ways, been more like our current era than we wish to believe. Those among us who strive for a better, more just world can look there and find not just villains, but heroes too.

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The Public Medievalist does not pay to promote these articles, so we would love it if you shared this with your history-loving friends! Click to share with your friends on Facebook, or on Twitter. 

Part XXVII in our ongoing series on Race, Racism and the Middle Ages, by Bianca Lopez. You can find the rest of the special series here. 

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On the sixth of July, 1475, Cristoforo di Leonardo journeyed southward from his town of Termeno, in Northern Italy. He was going to the cathedral of Trent, because Cristoforo thought he was going to die, and was seeking help. Cristoforo had gotten into a fight with two of his neighbors. They stabbed him, threw him on the ground, hit him with a chunk of wrought iron, and left him for dead. The doctor had amputated three of his fingers, but the wound never fully recovered.

Cristoforo, like many medieval people in dire circumstances, prayed for help. He prayed to the little martyr Simon of Trent, and made a pilgrimage to Simon’s home town. Once there, Cristoforo bought an enormous candle, as heavy and tall as Cristoforo himself, to be given to the little saint. And as it turns out, Cristoforo did not die; after making his supplication to Simon, he emerged from his bed completely healed. Everyone who saw him proclaimed his sudden recovery a miracle, attributed to the little boy who had been murdered by the Jews.

Let’s rewind a bit. In 1475, in the city of Trent, located in a southern Alpine region in modern-day Italy, the body of a two-year-old Christian boy was allegedly found in the cellar of a local Jewish elder. Within hours, authorities under the command of the city’s bishop-prince, Johannes Hinderbach, arrested twenty-three Jewish men and women. They constituted almost half of the Trentine Jewish community. While the Jewish prisoners awaited sentencing, the little boy who was found dead, known as Simon, almost instantaneously became venerated as a Christian martyr. Trent’s residents became convinced that their Jewish neighbors killed Simon and used his blood to make Passover matzot—what we now call the “blood libel”. In the end, eight of those convicted were executed by hanging, despite a written warning from Pope Sixtus IV himself to Bishop Hinderbach ordering him to cease all legal proceedings against the city’s Jewish community. And it only got worse from there.

The Anti-Semitic Template

To twenty-first-century observers, this story seems to be a tragic example of typical medieval anti-Semitism. However, accusations of ritual murder directed towards Europe’s Jews did not appear out of nowhere. Preachers and princes fanned the fire of anti-Semitism in the later Middle Ages, causing relatively peaceful relationships between Christians and Jews to turn deadly. By doing so, Christian religious and civic leaders created a template for hatred Jews and encouraged ordinary people to participate in the spread of hate. This template belonged to a very deliberate project to turn people against minorities. Cultural historians have revealed the motifs of the ritual murder accusation narrative. Indeed, the narrative appears again and again across Europe at the end of the fifteenth century, with only slight variations. But how could a narrative inspire Christians to accuse their neighbors of murder? What convinced the Christians of Trent that Simon died as a holy martyr—not just the victim of an unfortunate accident, whose body was planted in the cellar of a Jewish resident?

The answers to these questions can be found in the ways that Christianity was practiced at the end of the European Middle Ages. Between 1300 and 1500, cities became increasingly socially fragmented and chaotic places. This had devastating consequences for European Jews. The bubonic plague continued to kill urban dwellers after 1348, and warfare and rebellion became the norm. Economic competition between those who had resources and those who did not turned people against each other. Through it all, many city mayors and magistrates forced Jewish communities into a serf-like role; Jewish householders were forced to pay exorbitant taxes to fund wars and to make up for local economic losses accrued through the labor force dying off from plague or war.

Not only that, but Jews also had financial obligations to the Holy Roman Emperors and the popes, who promised to “protect” Jewish communities from local persecution. Jews were forced into undesirable occupations that Christians either could or would not perform, such as money lending. This, as we explored in a previous article, naturally led to accusations of usury and violence.

In northern Italy and southern Germany, Christians regularly turned on their Jewish neighbors. Many of these incidents can be traced to the people being whipped into a frenzy by traveling preachers. As a result, over this time, Christian practices such as celebration of feast days, devotions to saints, pilgrimages, and fulfillment of sacraments like baptism and confession began to incorporate anti-Jewish elements. In certain locales, anti-Judaism even came to define what it meant to be Christian.

An Anti-Jewish Saint

Trent’s Christian residents directed an overwhelming amount of religious devotion towards Simon because they were convinced that he had been ritually murdered by Jews. After his death, supporters of the little martyr treated him as a saint, a soul that had ascended immediately to heaven after death. Local church officials accommodated, and even encouraged, the enthusiastic supporters that greeted those who venerated him (which historians typically call a “cult”). When the city’s priests prepared Simon’s body for the grave, they dressed the deceased in ornate funerary clothes and surrounded his body with sweet-smelling herbs. Most importantly, they made it accessible for city dwellers to visit and pray over in the local cathedral. As a result, the cathedral where his body was placed quickly became a site of local pilgrimage. In the months following his death, church notaries recorded hundreds of miracles—out of which over 200 survive—giving testimony to the enthusiasm for Simon’s worship that spread through Trent, and beyond to its mountainous hinterland.

However, Simon did not appeal to all local Christians in equal numbers. According to the miracle accounts, devotees of Simon tended to be male and Italian-speaking, even though Trent was primarily German-speaking. For instance, out of the first thirty-eight miracles recorded, Italian men from as far away as southern Italy reported the first twenty-eight. So for news of Simon’s saintly power to have that reach, it must have travelled through male networks: merchant affiliations and lay religious brotherhoods. This is the epidemiology of anti-Jewish hatred.

Pilgrimage and Religious Enthusiasm

Many of the men—and the fewer women—who travelled to Trent did so to try to get relief from a myriad of physical maladies. Some had been injured and feared imminent death, like Cristoforo at the beginning of this article. Others were paralyzed and hoped to miraculously walk. Some were blind. Some had broken bones. All of them came seeking help from a boy who had allegedly been murdered by the Jews.

Spontaneous healing attributed to a saint’s intercession was common in late-medieval Europe. Often a sick person’s last recourse was a prayer and some sort of material offering to a beloved, and usually long-dead, patron saint of one’s family or town. If the supplicant were healed, naturally, it would then be conserved a miracle attributed to the saint. This is a sort of a holy quid pro quo—pilgrims would give saints, like Simon of Trent, a gift in the hopes that those saints would intercede on the pilgrims’ behalf.  If a pilgrim was healed, that only helped further cement a saint’s reputation.

In one example, Margherita, a woman from a town near Verona, travelled to Trent by foot in the hopes that Simon would heal her hernia. Fighting through immense physical pain, she made the overnight journey northward to the Alps and slept at Trent cathedral. One morning she awoke and her hernia was gone. She left her crutches behind as a sign of thanks, and returned home.

Interactions with the Simon even took place unconsciously, while the supplicant was deep in prayer or asleep. One military doctor from southern Italy came to Trent suffering from immense pain. He described the miraculous intervention:

“Sleeping, [the doctor] saw in a dream a boy that touched him on the right side and removed his pain and waking he found that he was cured. Thanking the martyr, he made his way to Trent…” [My translation. Unedited sources, state archives, Trent.]

Such accounts were repeated again and again. Bishop Hinderbach’s officials carefully recorded every word.

Intercessory healing was not the only heavenly quid pro quo—and so pilgrimages and saints became big business in the Middle Ages. Pilgrims frequently would give a saint’s church expensive candles, oils, food, or money. By giving a gift, people felt they were entering into a relationship with a saint—one which, of course, they believed to be two-sided. In turn, the saint was believed to listen to prayers and requests and grant them. By the late Middle Ages, the church, especially in urban areas, was heavily bound up in the “saint relationship” economy.

Every pilgrim who came to the cathedral in Trent left something in thanks. Most gifts were inexpensive. But some of Simon’s patrons orchestrated grander gestures, such as public works of art and altarpieces for churches. One example, a monumental stone carving was commissioned depicting Simon’s supposed martyrdom; it was sculpted by Andreas Caranti and placed in the middle of the city in Piazza Salvadori, on a crowded residential street, where it hangs today. The carving dates to 1476, while the Jews of Trent still sat in jail awaiting their fate a year after the boy’s death. The carving depicts the story of the moment of Simon’s death. Obviously, this is not how it actually happened—the depiction is clearly meant to draw a link between Simon’s death and the old anti-Semitic chestnut that the Jews killed Christ.

The Tinderbox Ignites

Accusations against Jews of ritually murdering Christians also occurred in other parts of the Alps; these were often linked to the events in Trent. For example, under torture, a Jewish painter named Israel broke down and “confessed” to Trent’s mayor that that Jews from Regensburg, Bavaria, also used blood from Christian boys to make matzoh. Upon hearing this, Bishop Hinderbach wrote to the Bishop of Regensburg, who promptly rounded up the Jewish community of that city. The men and women of the Jewish community of Regensburg were tortured and executed in 1476.

The accusation in Regensburg had extra force since not only were ordinary Christians convinced

of supposed Jewish evil (as happened in Trent), it was actively promoted by the religious and imperial authorities of that city. The Christians of Regensburg embraced the anti-Semitic narrative as part of their local devotions. Spontaneous pilgrimages to the cathedral occurred; word spread to nearby valleys. Votive gifts were given to the cathedral, and paintings of the—completely fictional—little Christian martyrs of Regensburg were given as tokens of devotion and to incur favor from these new saints.

And then another domino fell: the Jews of Regensburg “confessed” under torture that the Jews of Passau, another Bavarian town, stole the host from the city’s cathedral, desecrated it for their amusement, and plotted to kill Christian boys. The story metastasized, and accusations across the Alps led to the persecution of one urban Jewish community after another, all within a twenty-year time frame.

Resisting the Spread of Hate

But not all cities in the region were convinced by the ritual murder narrative, or even by the story of Simon of Trent. Christian Venetians, for example, did not venerate Simon; anti-Judiasm in general does not seem to have infected their local Christianity. The Doge of Venice condemned Simon’s cult and forbade any resident to construct a shrine to him within the city, or in any of Venice’s tributary towns. In the city of Rovereto, the doge’s officials outlawed devotions to Simon with the following decree:

“Under the protection of the most illustrious lordship of the doge of Venice, where justice was and would always be dispensed, where innocent people are not killed, where Christians do not plunder Jews, as it was in Trent.” [translation by historian Ronnie Po-chia Hsia]

Venetian ducal leadership successfully quelled the cult’s spread and prohibited the institutionalization of anti-Jewish saints. In so doing, they protected their local Jewish communities. The Jews of Venice remained under the protection of the doge while those to the north faced the torture chamber and the hangman’s noose.

In the end, what warped the minds of late medieval Christians to the point where ordinary Jewish people became a monolithic enemy of Christ? Some of it can be attributed to the distrust of others that came after the onslaught of plagues, fears about the end of the world fueled by itinerant preachers, and increased population density in central European cities. Yet, the rise of the ritual murder narrative, which began as a rumor and developed into a parable used by preachers, ended up as a legally-binding accusation. The accusation, in its final form, had enormous influence on Christian devotional practice, which made the narrative so compelling to ordinary people. And it linked neatly with the powerful economic interests of the Church by establishing lucrative local saints.

Trent’s Jews, a minority group that practiced a different faith, but who celebrated marriages and funerals with their Christian neighbors were transformed into an abstract evil presence poisoning European cities. In this case, the wheels of “progress” did not save Trent’s Jews. In the age of the Renaissance, Christian rulers and their subjects targeted minorities more than in earlier medieval centuries. Acting on false righteousness, the Christian majority spread hate and justified it through religious means, destroying lives and creating a system that perpetuated a cycle of violence for the next hundred years.

Epilogue: Rejecting the Project of Hate

Ordinary Christians in Trent did not initially hate their Jewish neighbors. That result only came after many years of anti-Jewish preaching and political machinations on the part of the Bishop of Trent and his advisers. When the authorities found little Simon stabbed to death in a Jewish man’s cellar, all of the groundwork had already been laid to immediately accuse the Jews of ritual murder.

We can learn something from this horrifying episode. We need to better recognize the signs of a template that might turn us against each other. Persecutions and pogroms do not come out of nowhere: politicians, religious leaders, and other hate-peddling zealots set the stage for persecutory violence through propaganda and cultural dogwhistles. Unlike Trent’s Christians, we can say no to those who might provoke animosities by refusing to accept the project of hate. We must.

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The Public Medievalist does not pay to promote these articles, so we would love it if you shared this with your history-loving friends! Click to share with your friends on Facebook, or on Twitter. 

Part XXVI in our ongoing series on Race, Racism and the Middle Ages, by Helen Young. You can find the rest of the special series here. 

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Game of Thrones doesn’t just have a “diversity problem,” it has a racism problem. The casting and the lack of well-developed characters of colour that attract most critical attention are the visible tip of the iceberg of racism that lies under the surface of the show. That iceberg doesn’t just reflect the race problems of modern-day America, it reflects white privilege and a racist Eurocentric way of thinking about the world that goes back to the Middle Ages.

The tip of the racism-berg is important, and it’s a good place to start. Game of Thrones doesn’t even pass what Manohla Dargis called the “DuVernay test” (modelled on the Bechdel test). The Bechdel test offers a simple way to gauge whether women are represented as full and complete characters; the DuVernay test (named after Selma director Ava DuVernay) does the same for characters from racial minorities.

Although they didn’t call it “the DuVernay test,” Nadia and Leila Latif outlined what such a test might look like in an article for The Guardian during the #OscarsSoWhite controversy:

Are there two named characters of colour? Do they have dialogue? Are they not romantically involved with one another? Do they have any dialogue that isn’t comforting or supporting a white character? Is one of them definitely not magic?

After six seasons, Game of Thrones has yet to pass. Missandei and Grey Worm, the only remaining notable characters of color (who were called “really deep characters” by casting director Nina Gold recently), are not “deep” enough to cause the series to cross the basic threshold that the Latifs offered. And change does not seem to be coming; they didn’t have so much as a line between them in the first episode of season 7.

Grey Worm, Missandei—and before them Khal Drogo—are some of the most developed characters of colour in the show. But they exist as bit-players in the story of Daenerys Targaryen, the (possibly) last member of a family that Nina Gold, the Game of Thrones casting director, described as “in the books [they are] these white, white people.”

Daenerys’ travels in Essos are the main vehicle for characters of colour to be included in either the show or the books (the Dornish story arc is the other, and it has its own problems). The problem is that her narrative is essentially a “white saviour” plot, a common trope where a white outsider saves a community of colour from some sort of terrible plight, gaining prestige, power, and self-awareness in the process; think the movies Lawrence of Arabia, Dances with Wolves, and Avatar.

Although Daenerys’ problems governing in Slavers’ bay have been taken as a subversion of the white saviour plot, by the end of season six she had established at least a gesture towards resolution and sailed for Westeros with her dragons and army. It’s here that the structural racism—the part of the ice-berg that’s under water—comes in. Everything that Daenerys has done in Essos is in the service of her goal: claiming the throne in Westeros. The people of color of Essos become her army—a tool to be used in achieving her ends.

The white saviour plot device goes back to at least the crusading romances which emerged in the late twelfth-century. In just one of them, the legendary English knight Guy of Warwick (or Gui de Warewic as he was called in the original Anglo-Norman poem) saved the Christian kingdom of Constantinople from a Saracen army (the real crusaders sacked it).

This is where some white savior narratives might end. But Guy’s story goes on, just like Daenerys’ does once she’s freed the people of Slavers Bay. Guy defeats a dragon and a giant, gaining power in the Middle East before returning home to England to save the nation from invaders from the north (Vikings) and found a dynasty. He begins life as an archetypal ‘squire of low degree,’ unable to win his lady or have any real power in England, but gains both through his adventures overseas.

Is this sounding familiar? Daenerys hasn’t actually saved Westeros from the white walkers (yet), but in the latest episode we found out that she’s literally sitting on top of a mountain of dragon-glass, the only weapon we know of that works against them. Her attention, like Guy’s in the medieval romance, was always focused on “home.” Everything else that happened, and everyone else they encountered on the way, is a tool for getting back there and accumulating power.

I’m not suggesting that Daenerys is deliberately modelled on Guy of Warwick or any other specific medieval figure fictional or historical. The point is that western culture has seen “Other” places and people as a source of power to be used for its own ends for centuries—in the case of Guy, going on a millennium. That perspective is what underpinned European colonisation and imperialism for centuries, with devastating effects that are still ongoing around the globe.

The idea that Game of Thrones and George R. R. Martin’s novels depict “the real Middle Ages” is often used to try to deflect criticism for the lack of racial diversity (and high levels of violence, especially against women). But as we have been exploring throughout this series, the idea that the “real Middle Ages” was an all-white affair has more to do with modern fantasies about racial purity than it does with historical reality. If we’re going to look to the Middle Ages to explain race relations in Game of Thrones, it’s medieval literature not medieval history that we should read.

Game of Thrones and Martin’s novels aren’t aberrations, they reflect a way of thinking about the world that centres on Europe and Europeans and sees Others as either tools to serve the needs of a white person and their power, or irrelevant. It’s a way of thinking that is at least as old as the Middle Ages. Game of Thrones has racism problems because the world has racism problems.

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Part XXV in our ongoing series on Race, Racism and the Middle Ages, by Matthew Chalmers. You can find the rest of the special series here. 

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“It’s anti-Judaism!” they barked. “There is no “anti-Semitism” until 1879.” The seminar at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies in Philadelphia had taken a gladiatorial turn. The cause? A terminological concern—something fairly common among Jewish Studies specialists. The critic’s objection? An offhand reference by the speaker to “anti-Semitism” in the sixteenth century.

True enough, prior to its emergence in late nineteenth-century Germany, no term with the root “Antisemit-” existed in common use (this is a complicated topic, so for more see chapter 2 of the book Rethinking European Jewish History). Even the term “semites” only emerges in the eighteenth century. “Semites” were defined (according to the best linguistic science of the time) by grouping together those who spoke languages such as Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic—as opposed to those languages called “Indo-European” (or sometimes, even more problematically, those with cultures designated as “Aryan”).

Many therefore argue that talking about “anti-Semitism” in the Middle Ages is anachronistic. So, what is it doing in a series dealing with medieval Jews and Jewishness? How helpful is it to talk of “anti-Semitism” before, as far as we know, anyone discriminated against Jews as semites—or even knew what a “semite” was? And how can thinking about that question let us think more deeply about the larger issues this series has concerned itself with—that is, race, racism, and the Middle Ages?

“There’s No ‘anti-Semitism’ Before 1879”

There are two main schools of thought about the term “anti-Semitism.” Those in the first camp tie “anti-Semitism” to its linguistic occurrences—namely, when ordinary people used the words. They (correctly) note that the neologism “anti-Semitism” emerges onto the German literary scene around the 1870s and 1880s. To my knowledge, the first recorded use is in the Jewish newspaper Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums (2 Sep. 1879, p.564), which deployed it to criticize friends of a certain Wilhelm Marr, who planned to produce an “anti-Semitic weekly.”

Some, moreover, argue that while anti-Judaism has a long history, it wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that racism—and hence “anti-Semitism”—became a primary principle of social organization. This, they suggest, was catalysed by internal European nationalism and the so-called scramble for Africa. For example, historian David Engel writes:

…no necessary relation among particular instances of violence, hostile depiction, agitation, discrimination, and private unfriendly feeling can be assumed. Indeed, none has ever been demonstrated. Historians who, by treating some or all instances as part of a general ‘history of antisemitism’ and theorizing about how the subject of that ostensible history should be defined, have nevertheless made such an assumption have done so on the basis not of empirical observation but of a socio-semantic convention created in the nineteenth century and sustained throughout the twentieth for communal and political ends, not scholarly ones.

In other words, as Engel argues, mashing together instances of anti-Jewish behaviour into “anti-Semitism” is misleading. It fails to reflect the situation on the ground in terms that those involved would have recognized. Thus, it forces often very different events into an artificially connected series, which inflates—and maybe even distorts—the significance of such events. The category of “anti-Semitism” ends up driving the history, not the other way around.

These scholars also suggest that it makes little sense to import a chronologically foreign term, “Semitic,” into any time or space in which its partner term, “Aryan,” was not used. This pair resonated in a specific political context. “Anti-Semitism” as a term became meaningful in debates about the assimilation and emancipation of Jewish communities throughout the developing democracies of nineteenth-century European nations—especially Germany. How, therefore, could the word have comparable meaning prior to those political and social settings which give it its documented, traceable historical content?

From anti-Judaism to “anti-Semitism” in the Middle Ages

Other scholars, in the second camp, trace the origins of anti-Semitic behaviour to the Middle Ages. Some scholars even trace the origins of anti-Semitism back to ancient Greece and Rome. That said, in general, specialists have been wary to extrapolate “Jewish” as a stable religious identity back before the collation and editing of rabbinic literature; the Mishnah (c.200CE) and the Talmud (c.600CE). After all, many of the characteristic practices of Jews that their opponents targeted (such as synagogue liturgy, festival observance, and halakha) rely on this literature and its interpretation.

Many scholars therefore follow a timeline similar to the one laid out in the 1960s and 1970s by historian Leon Poliakov in his monumental four-volume History of Anti-Semitism and explored by historian of Judaism Gavin Langmuir over the course of his thirty year career. This timeline argues that “anti-Semitism” kicked into high gear in the twelfth century, riding the wave of anti-Jewish violence in the wake of the First Crusade (1095-99). The medieval transformation of anti-Jewish imagery into a “staple” of European thinking vis-à-vis Jews then, as Professor Robert Chazan has talked about at length, results in modern “anti-Semitism.”

This transformation goes hand in hand with various arguments that the eleventh to thirteenth centuries saw the emergence of what R.I. Moore called a “persecuting society.” That “persecuting society” organized itself by grouping together those perceived as deviant (heretics, Jews, lepers) under a shared set of idioms for exclusion. It also more and more consistently portrayed the demonic in feminine form. It increasingly contrasted its own Christian identity to an imagined enemy of Christendom that sometimes took the form of a Jew and sometimes that of a Muslim.

By the convergence of these factors, Jews came to feature heavily in European Christian imaginings, both about contemporary Christendom and its future decline and fall. One of the most fascinating stories which the period produced is that of the ferocious Jewish lost tribes, becoming in Germany the “red Jews.” This race of monstrous destroyers would, it was feared, burst from behind the mountains of the far east and crash down onto Christian Europe. The Book of John Mandeville from the middle of the fourteenth century provides the Sparknotes version:

Men say that they will issue forth in the time of Antichrist, and that they will carry out great slaughter of Christian people. And for this reason, all the Jews that dwell in all lands always learn to speak Hebrew, in the hope that, when those of the Caspian mountains issue forth, the other Jews will know how to speak with them, and will conduct them into Christian lands, to destroy Christian people.

Such a story departed from the Christian scriptures and from the history of scholastic exegesis, the interpretation of the Bible as taught in universities like Paris, Bologna, or Oxford. Rather, it constituted a durable “extra-Biblical system,” combining three sets of old stories into a fresh anti-Jewish cocktail. First, old stories around Alexander the Great, in the traditions of the Alexander Romance, told of how the conqueror had imprisoned monstrous races behind a massive mountain chain in the east. This then merged with legends of the ten tribes of Israel lost after the conquest of the northern Kingdom by the Assyrians in 722BCE. Third, the biblical motif of Gog and Magog, the destroyers at the end of time, was added to the mix, tinged with viciously anti-Jewish rumors about ritual murder and child sacrifice.

Faced with such a sophisticated set of interlocking hostile attitudes and consequent pogroms, scholars from this camp have argued that such narratives are symptoms of a systemic fear of Jewishness: monstrous bodies, social threat, wielded as a weapon against the European Christian. This looks rather like an equation of blood, body, ethnicity, and religion. Doesn’t it thus make sense to include such systematic prejudice along with the “anti-Semitism” of later periods?

Medieval “anti-Semitism”: A Useful Tool?

The key point turns, in part, on whether “anti-Semitism” is more appropriately thought of as a linguistic term—as the first academic camp holds—or a concept—as the second does. This academic debate is ongoing; there’s no chance of us resolving it here. Instead, steering away from the debate for a moment, what are the stakes of approaching pre-modern Jews with “anti-Semitism” in mind? Is it helpful to do so? What are the problems inherent in doing so?

On the one hand, there are some benefits to using “anti-Semitism” to refer to medieval anti-Judaism. Extending “anti-Semitism” back to the Middle Ages helps short-circuit arguments that modern anti-Semitism emerges without any causal or ideological precedent. It shows, in other words, anti-Semitism’s history.

Doing so also helps avoid overly rigid divisions between religious anti-Judaism and racial anti-Semitism. This type of division relies too much on separating the pre-modern from the modern, or the religious from the political, or the sociological from the psychological. People in the past, and the sources they left behind, do not chop these things up in the same way as we do—we should be careful in assuming they did. There was nothing inevitable about modern “anti-Semitism.” It resulted from specific, contingent ways of thinking, behaving, and fearing. And nor can it be bundled away as reliant on the religious past, or outdated racial thinking. It is a much more pervasive ideology; it conflates race and religion, and draws on both.

Moreover, “anti-Semitism” is admittedly an anachronistic term. But deploying tactical anachronism, as professor of Medieval Literature Kathy Lavezzo points out, can help us understand what type of ideas we are dealing with. In this case, it helps signal that the history of Jews (and their identities) relies in equal measure on historical sources, their present-day relevance, and our own habits of language and conceptualization. In other words, it isn’t just about what really happened. Our histories of Jewishness work best when they account for the effects of Christian anti-Judaism If they don’t, then they underestimate the effects of the past on our present ways of thinking about history.

Paying attention to this is particularly important when it comes to Jewishness. As Jewish Studies scholar Cynthia Baker has recently argued in her book Jew, to talk more generally about identity in America or Europe uses a vocabulary of difference reliant on past interactions with Jewishness. Professor of Religious Studies Annette Yoshiko Reed teases out the ramifications in a recent Marginalia forum addressing Baker’s book:

Jewishness functions for Christianness perhaps akin to what Frank B. Wilderson III notes of blackness with respect to “the racial labor that Whiteness depends on for its unracialized ‘normality’”: it is the particularity without which a claim to universality cannot be articulated.

In other words, whiteness—and white supremacy—can behave as it does because it has learned to point away from itself, and instead point at black people as particular, different, as things worth pointing at. Without this act, whiteness could not function as a universal default; it might come to be seen itself as a thing worth pointing at.

In the same way, Reed suggests, it matters that Christians could point at Jews. Without that act of pointing, Christianity might never have become capable of being the assumed default position of many Europeans and Americans. This all implies that past interactions with Jewishness lurk semi-submerged under many of our assumptions about the European Christian past—and our own identities in the present.

So, the question is not just whether such concepts and the terms relating to them are accurate. The issue at stake runs deeper than utility. Rather, how and to what degree, if used carelessly, do terms like “anti-Semitism,” “Jewishness” or “whiteness” have the power to quietly rewrite our histories? How much can these words veil, rather than reveal, the details? And how much do we care?

Drawing attention to the negative treatment of Jews in European history using a term that jars us, that stands out as anachronistic (i.e. “anti-Semitism”), rather than a more general term (i.e. “anti-Judaism”) can, perhaps, help train us to continually question which words we use, and consider how anachronistic they may or may not be. Such attention also helps us take a long hard look at what, therefore, we want to get out of the past.

Medieval “anti-Semitism”: Obscuring the Past?

On the other hand, interpreting all anti-Jewish activities as signs of “anti-Semitism” has its dangers. We have developed a robust rule-of-thumb for what “anti-Semitism” means: discrimination against Jews as a whole group. But stretching this “anti-Semitism” back into the Middle Ages risks implying that the story of those later classified as “semites” is a story only about Jews. This spurs us on to scrutinize the darker parts of the European Christian past—not a bad thing in itself. But narrowing our view leaves out another piece of the puzzle: it threatens to obscure Islam from discussion, when European Christian identity formation cannot be understood without examining the ways that both Jews and Muslims were treated and imagined. As Edward Said writes, Arab and Jew were inseparable in constructing the category of “semitic”:

the transference of a popular anti-Semitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target was made smoothly, since the figure was essentially the same.

Often, as Dorothy Kim (and others) argue, Muslims were even fundamentally connected with Jews in fraught relationships with medieval Christians. In his Dialogue of Peter and Moses, the twelfth-century Jewish convert Petrus Alphonsi inserted a heretical Jew into the backstory of the prophet Muhammad. The dress code “recommendations” in Canon 68 of the Fourth Lateran Council (another large church council, this time in 1215) targeted both Jews and Saracens. It notes that they could blend and become, to Christians, threateningly indistinguishable both from one another and from Christians themselves—even mistakenly resulting in prohibited sex:

In some provinces a difference in dress distinguishes the Jews or Saracens from the Christians, but in certain others such a confusion has grown up that they cannot be distinguished by any difference. Thus it happens at times that through error Christians have relations with the women of Jews or Saracens, and Jews and Saracens with Christian women. Therefore, that they may not, under pretext of error of this sort, excuse themselves in the future for the excesses of such prohibited intercourse, we decree that such Jews and Saracens of both sexes in every Christian province and at all times shall be marked off in the eyes of the public from other peoples through the character of their dress.

Furthermore, detaching “anti-Semitism” from its modern race-scientific core and its specific Euro-American history risks reintroducing an “eternal Jewish victim,” a character that slips out of our historical control. Anti-Semitic ideology often relies—like other modes of racial thought—on a hyper-realized Jew, whose characteristics are frozen in time. By losing the modern core of the ideology, we risk letting Jews become a stable constant around which history changes, and thus permitting this ideology in the back door.

In a review essay of three recent monographs on early modern Jewishness and race, scholar of religion Gil Anidjar makes a similar point. By stretching race—and racial “anti-Semitism”—back in time:

…the seat of progress, the center of this newfound and militant search for racism everywhere, is thereby washed clean of one of its most striking specificities: “the formation of a scientifically buttressed system of racial hierarchy,” the invention of a juridical and scientific mode of government which by way of military and bureaucratic (and scholarly)  measures, transformed the populations of the world into mere instances of a narrow series of political categories: race or religion, caste or class, culture or gender.

Anidjar here reminds us that racism and thus “anti-Semitism” have their own concrete historical past. “Anti-Semitism” depended for its meaning on specific scientific and academic developments. Stripping away that concrete history implies that there is something about Jews in and of themselves, in any place and at any time, that solicits hatred. It freezes a fixed object, Judaism, as if what is important about Judaism when discussing “anti-Semitism” is that Christians victimize Jews—rather than giving any complex agency to Jews in history—and as if Judaism has been the same type of thing for over a thousand years. As Albert Lindemann writes, this can turn the Jew into a universalizable moral fable, turning both Jews and their antagonists into one-dimensional moral tales resistant to the more cautious tools of the historian—and even erasing any specific reference to their Jewishness:

Violent episodes against Jews burst forth like natural calamities or acts of God, incomprehensible disasters, having nothing to do with Jewish actions or developments within the Jewish world but only with the corrupt characters or societies of the enemies of the Jews. Even Jewish victims themselves in these accounts are implicitly denied their full humanity and often appear one-dimensional, passive and blameless, or heroic in a way that lacks a sense of human frailty and corruptibility under stress. Rather than tragedies, with often confused, inscrutable mixtures of motivations, conflicts between Jew and non-Jew emerge as simple stories of good and evil, innocence and guilt, powerless and powerful, heroes and villains.

To Think with “anti-Semitism”—or Not

So, on the one hand, it can be unhelpful to think in terms of medieval “anti-Semitism.” An “anti-Semitic” Middle Ages massages the medieval past into the shape—and limits—of our present concerns. An “anti-Semitic” Middle Ages dangerously risks ironing the Islam out of “anti-Semitism.”  And an “anti-Semitic” Middle Ages risks letting modernity—and its specific racial and scientific attack on Jewishness— off the hook by tracing genuine “anti-Semitism” into times and places before the consequences of modernity were felt. As the infamous Nazi image of “Der ewige Jude” demonstrates, much of the imagery of anti-Semitism relies on collapsing anti-Jewishness into other forms of political anxiety at which we tend to look less askance, such as fear of communism or capitalist conspiracy.

On the other hand, thinking about the Middle Ages through the lens of “anti-Semitism” can be a good thing. Scrutinizing how the term “anti-Semitic” strays back in time similarly provides an opportunity to light up a different path through the mazes of the past. By making the process of concept-formation visible, we see more clearly what affects our own assumptions—and the behaviours helpful to us in making sure we write our histories, rather than letting our inherited assumptions speak for us. And it acts as an easily recognizable shorthand, a hook on which our thoughts can wriggle around.

In short, whether we want to use “anti-Semitism” or not, thinking about what is at stake in our choices can concentrate our attention on what we want to get out of the past. We—all of us spending time with the past, not just professional historians—remind ourselves of a somewhat awkward fact: our main historical challenges often come not from anachronism, which we are often rather good at spotting, but from taking for granted that we know exactly what’s at stake in the concepts and questions with which we approach history. Paying attention, instead, to how concepts like “anti-Semitism” distort or describe the past helps equip us to sensibly and sensitively negotiate our shared and contested pasts—especially on topics as fraught and urgent as “anti-Semitism” and race.

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Part XXIV in our ongoing series on Race, Racism and the Middle Ages, by Richard Cole.

You can find the rest of the special series here. This article is split into two parts; you can find the first half, “The Importance of Being Absent”, here.

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Imaginary Enemies, Then and Now

One way to understand the medieval Scandinavian interest in stories about Jews, and how a total lack of Jewish immigration might have shaped that interest, is to turn to similar situations from other times and places. Medieval Scandinavia had no Jews. Yet its art and literature display every indication that Christians were very attracted to and emotionally affected by anti-Semitic images.

This might sound a little strange, but as an Englishman, I can’t help but think about the town of Clacton-on-sea.

In 2015 Clacton-on-Sea was one of the economically challenged towns in Britain where there was phenomenal support for right-wing (arguably even far-right) populism. Different aspects of the right-wing worldview appeal to different people. Some may appreciate its economic arguments and dislike its racist obsessions. Others may feel the opposite way. But it still seems largely uncontroversial to say that serious hostility to immigration—particularly non-white immigration, particularly immigration by Muslims—is integral to the sort of politics which was (and likely still is) popular in Clacton-on-sea.

Mona Chalabi, a data journalist, analysed figures from the Office for National Statistics and professional polling companies (www.Electionforecast.co.uk) to suggest what might indicate that a place is more likely to vote for the right-wing populist party, UKIP. Chalabi found that, as ever, there were lots of factors at play. But, there was a significant correlation between a lack of non-white people and a support for strongly anti-immigrant politics.

There is an Olympic-swimming-pool-sized amount of caveats to be made here, of course. Note the cluster of constituencies (British electoral districts) in the bottom left corner of Chalabi’s graph, where the non-white population was minuscule and so was UKIP support. There are also places where the ethnic-minority population was as high as 20%, and support for UKIP was nearly as high as in largely mono-cultural Clacton. So we absolutely cannot say that a lack of immigration automatically makes people excessively worried about immigrants they’ve never met. But we can say that it sometimes does. In multicultural communities, frictions can intermittently arise when two cultures live alongside one another. But in monocultural societies, people’s fantasies about other cultures can run riot, with prejudice and folklore undisturbed by actual experiences of foreigners who, it turns out, aren’t fundamentally all that different from ourselves. It is much easier to believe that all Jews are greedy or all Muslims are scroungers if your only experiences of Jews or Muslims come from distorted fables.

Something similar may occasionally have played a role in the recent elections in America. The victorious candidate promised many things, but one palpable theme in his campaign was hostility to Mexican (read: Hispanic) immigration. He won the state of North Dakota with 64.1% of the vote, even though only 3.5% of the state’s population identified as Hispanic at the last census. Similarly, he took the state of Montana with 56.5% of the vote, even though only 3.6% of the state identified as Hispanic. Perhaps voters in North Dakota and Montana were uninterested in his anti-immigration rhetoric and voted entirely on economic grounds. Just as Chalabi carefully noted with Clacton, there must have been a number of other factors at play, including fears about the decline of manufacturing, traditional voting patterns, dislike of the opposing candidate, etc. But if there was a portion of the populace swayed by anti-Mexican sentiment, those voters must have had very little experience—if any—of actual Mexicans. The point is worth repeating: in the aforementioned states, most of the people whose vote was decided on account of their dislike of persons of Hispanic descent did not actually live anywhere near Hispanic people.

A Medieval Clacton Effect

Was something like the “Clacton effect” also going on in medieval Scandinavia? Were images of Jews more compelling because the overwhelming majority of people had never met one? The brief miracle stories that arrived in “booklings” (Old Norse: bæklingar) are usually understood to have been objects for spiritual meditation. But, in remote Iceland in particular, when they were being read aloud to congregations by preachers, they may have also functioned like news bulletins. They are concise reports of things happening in the wider world, far from the frozen north.

Indeed, Old Norse miracle tales which tell of the latest supposed misdeeds of medieval Jews almost always begin by making clear the setting is some foreign metropolis, as in:

The events inspiring this festival are those which happened in Constantinople […] In that town in Germany which is called Güstrow […] This Lord, the crowned one, is your namesake William, whom the Jews crucified in Norwich in England on Good Friday.

When the city is left unnamed, it is often introduced with the formula: “In a city” or “In a certain populous city” (í nǫkkuri fjǫlmennri borg). It feels almost as though the Old Norse translators of these tales are stressing to their audience: “we’re lucky, it couldn’t happen here in nice, quiet, rural Iceland—yet”.

Fantasy becomes Nightmare: The Death of Tidericus

Unfortunately, anti-Semitism in medieval Scandinavia was not bloodless. Even though, so far as we know, no Jews came to any harm in the Nordic region during the entire Middle Ages. In the summer of 1350, in the city of Visby on Gotland, nine men were burnt at the stake. We know that two claimed to be Christian priests (they may have been properly ordained, or they may have been wandering lay preachers). We only know the name of one of the men: Tidericus the Organist.

In Europe as a whole, burnings like these were fairly common. The Black Death was ravaging the continent, and in many cities the local Jewish population was being accused of causing the sickness by, allegedly, poisoning wells. But Visby had no Jews to get the blame.

So instead, they burned Christians on the charge of being agents for an imaginary Jewish conspiracy. In fact, the details of the Visby accusations were eerily close to modern global conspiracy theories—the sort of unhinged anti-Semitism which thrives across the world (particularly in certain corners of the internet) to this day:

What’s more, at the same time he [Tidericus] admitted that there are many who belong to a certain society which consisted of rich merchants and all the kinds of people who hold office all over the world, as many people know they do, and each of them goes around with silver belts, and they are all half mad or crazed in some other way. Also, they are all marked with a letter written in Greek or Hebrew. In his last moment he said “Need I say more? All Christendom has been poisoned by us villains and the Jews”. [My translation]

According to the accusations preserved in two letters, Tidericus was supposedly given his poisoning equipment by a Jew in Dassel, Germany, called Aaron, son of Solomon the Wealthy. A Jew by the name of Moses is said to have given him even more poison while he was in Lübeck. Of the two letters, one is clearly aimed at a German-speaking audience; let’s call it Letter A. Letter A claims that Tidericus had poisoned the cities of Hanover, Baden, Gronau, Berne, Bockenem, Serstadt, and Hildesheim—all cities in Germany. The other letter, Letter B, appears to be aimed at a Scandinavian audience. In the latter letter, Tidericus is said to have planned to poison “Stockholm, Västerås and Arboga, and every lake, fresh water source, and various wells as he travelled around Sweden”.

If Letter A is an example of Hanseatic administrators telling familiar lies, then Letter B is arguably an example of Scandinavians participating in the fantasy of a Jewish war against Christianity.

A Glimmer of Hope?

The absence of Jews across Scandinavia during the Middle Ages did not mean that they were universally regarded as monsters. Perhaps the Clacton Effect was no more reliable then than it is today. The Icelandic bishop Brandr Jónsson (d. 1264), who also visited Norway and possibly France, wrote a saga which narrates Jewish history from the Maccabees up until the fall of Jerusalem in the year CE 70.

The work is largely sympathetic to its Jewish characters, especially to the parents of Judas Iscariot. As folklorist Thomas DuBois puts it, this Saga of the Jews (its post-medieval title) stands out against a backdrop of European anti-Semitism as “a strange expression of Nordic curiosity”. Perhaps Brandr had particular liberty to be positive about Jews; unlike in England, where the Jewish population could even be “mortgaged” as though it were a commodity, the absence of Jewish people from Norway and Iceland meant that nobody in Brandr’s audience would be personally invested in penalising Jews through taxes or physically attacking them. Brandr’s understanding of Jewish history is free of the bilious and bawdy stereotypes of anti-Semitism. Consider, for example, these stories of derring-do, adapted from 1 Maccabees:

There was a man called Eleazar, the son of Saura; he was a great champion in the army of Judas.  He sees that one elephant was better arrayed than the others, and he thought that the [Seleucid] king himself must be there in the tower … He goes forward boldly and leaps into the enemy’s battle-line and hews on both sides with no pause, and clears himself a path up to the elephant. The elephant was all armored, and Eleazar finds no place to cut him. Then he leaps under him and stabs the elephant in the belly with this sword, because there the elephant was bare. With the stab the elephant falls on him, and both he and the elephant die … and now the greatest portion of Judas’ army falls. When Judas sees this, he rushes forward in the midst of his enemies, as fierce as a wild beast, hewing with both hands both men and horses. But since no one can stand against many, and no man is more than a man, Judas Maccabeus falls along with most of his army [find the original here]

There were limits to Brandr’s sympathy, of course. He was still a medieval person. Respectful interfaith-dialogue was not commonly practised in his age. For example, his account of the siege of Jerusalem has a few clumsily anti-Jewish overtones, where the destruction of the city is posited as divine punishment for the Crucifixion (a staple of medieval Christian belief). But, in the overwhelming majority of the saga, Brandr does something that even a minority of contemporary Christians still fail to do: he understands Jews to be human beings living their own lives, rather than being servants of his own theological preoccupations.

Tragedy and Hope

The tragic case of Tidericus is one instance where people accepted an idea, given to them by their social superiors, that a group of people they’ve never met is their enemy. The people of Visby in 1350 were scared and demoralised. The German-speaking half of the population was probably already used to the proposition that Jews employed Christians to perform well-poisonings. When the Scandinavian-speaking half of the population was sold the same lie, they do not appear to have questioned it. Innocent people were murdered as a result.

The case of Brandr is, for me, a more uplifting story. He was a man who refused to accept strangers as scapegoats, despite the prevailing ideological climate of his age. We have been offered the same choice. We  told that we are under attack by a particular religion, and that only through cruelty can we be made safe. In the face of calls from our rulers for religious war, I hope we have the brains and the heart of Brandr Jónsson.

 

Recommended Reading (restricted to English language scholarship)

Adams, Jonathan. Lessons in Contempt. Poul Ræff’s Translation and Publication in 1516 of Johannes Pfefferkorn’s The Confessions of the Jews. (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2013)

Ashurst, David. “Kings, Bishops, and Laws: The Old Norse-Icelandic Version of 1 Maccabees” in Myths, Legends, and Heroes: Essays on Old Norse and Old English Literature in Honour of John McKinnell . Ed. by Daniel Anlezark. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011) pp. 133–147.

Fersch, Annabelle. “Gythinga Saga: A Translation and Source Study”, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Tulane (1982)

Heß, Cordelia & Adams, Jonathan (eds.). Fear and Loathing in the North: Jews and Muslims in Medieval Scandinavia and the Baltic region. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015) [freely available here]

Wolf, Kirsten. “An Old Norse Record of Jewish History”, The Jewish Quarterly Review 77, 1 (1986) pp. 45–54.

Wolf, Kirsten. “The Judas Legend in Scandinavia”, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 88, 4 (Oct 1989), pp. 463–476.

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Part XXIII in our ongoing series on Race, Racism and the Middle Ages, by Richard Cole.

You can find the rest of the special series here. This article is split into two parts; return on Thursday for part II: “How to Hate Someone You’ve Never Met”.

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If you visit Uppsala Cathedral in Sweden, keep your eyes aimed at the tops of the pilasters—the flat, decorative columns in the walls. If you do, you will be confronted with a ghastly sight: A sow is greedily shoveling food from a trough into her mouth with her front trotters. Under her belly, two crude caricatures of Jewish faces (you can tell they’re supposed to be Jews because of their pointy hats) are sucking at her teats. Behind the tail, an emaciated body protrudes. Does it belong to one of the faces? Or is this body a third Jewish man, his face buried in the sow’s nether regions? Another Jew tugs on the pig’s tail, pulling on it with a frenzied grimace. In his apparent delirium, his hat has fallen off.

This hateful stone carving belongs to the type known as a Judensau “Jews’ sow”. It was particularly popular in the German lands during the Middle Ages. The typical Judensau displays cartoonish Jews worshipping, and being as physically intimate as possible, with pigs. Sometimes, as in the case of Uppsala, they are inside religious buildings. Sometimes they are found on the exterior of those buildings, or even on bridges and gates. In other words, they were placed  in public places. As such, they are intentionally designed to cause as much offense and humiliation as possible to any Jewish person who would encounter them.

But the strange thing is, there were no Jews in Uppsala for this to offend.

Jews in the Medieval North

Even if the Uppsala Judensau had been on the outside of the cathedral, there is virtually no possibility that it would have upset any Jewish observers, because everything indicates that neither Sweden nor any other Scandinavian nation had a single, settled Jewish inhabitant before the sixteenth century.

That is not to say that there were no occasional adventurers who may have passed through. Around 962, one Ibrāhīm ibn Yaʻqūb al-Ṭurṭūšī visited Hedeby in Denmark (and wrote rather unflattering things about the Danes’ singing). Scholars have speculated that he was either a Muslim person with a Jewish background, or an Arabic-speaking Spanish Jew—who would have gone by the name Abraham, son of Jacob, of Tortosa (a city in Catalonia, Spain).

In 1340, a man named Moses appears to have visited Bergen in Norway, and attempted to rent lodging for the princely sum of “eighty English pounds and one mark of burnt gold”. Despite offering very good money, it appears that Moses was denied by a local official, Ole Hælghason, who instead insisted on payment in  “dried fish, flounder jerky, amber, white furs, grey furs, martens’ furs, and falcons” (we’ve all been there, right?).

Moses does appear to have been a foreigner. He carried a foreign currency, and he lacked the “son of”/“daughter of” surname which were usually used by Scandinavians at the time. Moses was not an unheard of name for medieval Scandinavians, though it was more proportionally popular amongst European Jews. Was Moses a Jewish visitor, and was Moses’s Judaism the real reason for Ole’s bureaucratic intransigence? We cannot be certain.

Medieval Red Tape

But despite these travelers, the main reason we can be quite confident that there were not indigenous, multi-generational Jewish communities in medieval Scandinavia is that such communities, whenever they did exist, left behind a significant paper-trail. Firstly, the medieval Christian imagination was very much excited by the idea of the presence of non-Christians. Therefore chroniclers and authors often left multiple records of actual (and imagined) interactions with the Jewish community. Only one such “interaction” is preserved from medieval Scandinavia: the Historia Norwegie (c. 1150-1200) contains the following vignette, which is sufficiently fantastical that we can discount it as evidence of a real Jewish settlement:

[The Orkney Islands] were first inhabited by the Picts and the Papar […] the Papar got their name from the albs they wore, like clerics, for all clergy are called papæ in the German tongue. There is moreover an island still today called Papey after them. It is seen, however, from the character and script of the books they left behind them that they were Africans who practised Judaism. When Haraldr hárfagri ruled in Norway some vikings of the kin of a very mighty prince, Rǫgnvaldr, crossed the Sólund Sea with a large fleet, drove the Papar from their long-established homes, destroyed them utterly and subdued the islands under their own rule.

Secondly, unlike migrants today, medieval Jews could not apply for visas or refugee status and then migrate as private citizens. Many Christian kingdoms did not, officially, tolerate Jews at all, unless there were a special role which it was felt that Jews could fulfil. As non-Christians in countries with a Christian legal identity, Jews required a dedicated governmental effort to invite them into the kingdom, to offer them suitable protection, and to arbitrate in legal matters concerning Christians.

While medieval Jews often lived in peace with their Christian neighbours, this extreme degree of control which the state held over them meant that if the authorities turned against them, the results were disastrous. In medieval England, a ministry was established called the “Exchequer of the Jews”. Its surviving documents are an important source for our understanding of Jewish life in medieval England. No such documents survive from anywhere in Scandinavia.

It is probable that no Scandinavian state during the Middle Ages had sufficient power to organise and oversee Jewish migration. For example, as the historian Sverre Bagge has pointed out, all of the surviving correspondence generated in medieval Norway across five hundred years is equal in size to the amount generated in medieval England across just a few decades in the 1200s. It would appear that Scandinavian rulers lacked the bureaucratic sophistication necessary to establish Jewish communities.

One might protest that there was nothing stopping Jews migrating to Scandinavia on their own initiative, but this seems unlikely: if, as a non-Christian in medieval Europe, you’re looking to move from one Christian country to another, you’re more likely to choose a place where the state can offer a degree of protection (or perhaps even incentives, as King Bolesław the Pious of Poland did in 1264). The place that barely has a state at all by contemporary standards will probably be a lot further down your list.

Moreover, by the middle of the 1300s, the sort of technological, administrative, and mercantile roles which were elsewhere sometimes filled by Jews were instead being filled by Northern Germans. These Germans arrived as part of the increasing domination of Scandinavia by the Hanseatic League—the Northern German trading confederation that controlled trade routes in the North and Baltic seas in the late Middle Ages.

These Hansa men (the term for people from the Hanseatic League) not only substituted Jewish migration—they may have actively sought to prevent it. Anti-Semitism thrived in the Northern German cities; Hansa men did not permit Jews to join their trading organisation (by the way, for the purposes of this article I am not distinguishing between anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism, although it’s a distinction that I otherwise agree with). All of these factors combined explain why Scandinavia was surrounded by areas that did have Jewish communities (England to the West, Germany to the South, the Baltic Coast to the East), but apparently never had any Jewish settlement of its own.

Prejudice on the Periphery

Despite not having any native Jewish population to persecute, Scandinavians eagerly reproduced anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish images and stories. The Uppsala Judensau is not the only sculpture of its kind in Sweden. There are plenty of anti-Jewish church paintings of Jews to be found in neighbouring Denmark too. Some of these cases (probably including the Uppsala Judensau) can be attributed to travelling German artists so one might protest that these are unfortunate, accidental imports, and not really indicative of any native interest in anti-Semitism.

But in the case of medieval Iceland you cannot really use that excuse. Depending on how one counts such things, there are 53 distinct episodes in Old Norse-Icelandic literature which discuss Jews in medieval Europe (as opposed to Jews in the Bible, of which there are many, many more). They are not complimentary.

References to Jews typically are included in short miracle stories, or sometimes in sagas, which were written in Old Norse and, copied out again and again by Icelandic scribes across the Middle Ages. You can’t pin that on the Germans. One episode in the Icelandic Saga of Bishop Jón the Holy (c. 1320-1340) contains the following spitefully anti-Semitic episode:

Once when the saintly Jón had laid down to sleep one night a vision occurred before him. He appeared to be at his prayers before a great crucifix. And the next thing he knew, the figure on the cross bowed down to him and said some words in his ear, and we don’t know what those words were. He told this vision to the priest Rikini, and there was nobody who could interpret this. But the next day some men came to meet the saintly Jón who had just arrived from Norway, bringing him a little ‘bookling’ [i.e. booklet, Old Norse: bæklingr], in whose pages was written this event of which men were most ignorant: how the Jews mocked the crucified, tortured likeness of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the same way their forefathers had done to Himself. These accursed Jews struck the likeness with grievous slaps, spitting on it and giving it great punches, and a hateful decapitation. After that they crucified it, walking around the cross and its head with a great mockery, trembling hatefully … And when the saintly Jón and Rikini the Priest had read over the aforementioned event, the priest said to the saintly Jón: “Look at this now, sweet father, [here is] the vision and the wisdom which God showed you last night!”. They praised God for this marvellous event. [note—the original can be found here in old Icelandic, but the translation to English is my own]

What purpose did gruesome stories like these serve? It was not to justify the persecution of native Jews, since there were none. To be sure, the answer is to be found, in part, in the nature of medieval Christianity.

Medieval Christian Structural Anti-Semitism

By the year 1000, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland had all adopted the Christian faith as their official religion. By 1100, Sweden in the east and Greenland in the west were Christian too. By the 1200s, nobody would have thought of Scandinavians as “Baby Christians”. Young men from all the Scandinavian nations were reading Latin, writing Latin, and even attending the University of Paris—the Harvard or Oxford of its day. In other words, Scandinavians were fully plugged into the machinery of medieval Christian culture. Meditating on the significance of the alleged cruelty of the Jews during Christ’s crucifixion, for example, was simply what a good Christian did—regardless of whether one had ever met an actual, contemporary Jew or not. In this way, stories involving Jews did not necessarily have to be about Jews.

But this explanation can only account for part of the Scandinavian interest in anti-Semitic images and stories. As Freud is famously supposed to have said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Sometimes a spiteful caricature of a Jew is just a spiteful caricature of a Jew.

No doubt, educated Scandinavians seem to have thought of Jews as symbols more than as actual people. But there are only so many times a story can be told about how hateful and deranged Jews supposedly are—and how it might be a good idea to kill them—before somebody starts to take the story at face value. One of the Old Norse stories which communicates precisely these ideas can be read below. From the sound of its deliriously anti-Semitic content, particularly the theme of Jews supposedly attacking an effigy of Christ, it’s probably very close to the story that Bishop Jón heard above:

It is said that in Toledo, which Scandinavians call Tolhús (this city is in Spain and a third of the town’s population are Christians, the second third Jews, the third heathens [i.e. Muslims]) … a voice was heard in the sky […] which thus spoke with a piteous tone: “Ha! Ha! An affliction, what an affliction, that Jews with such cunning and evil should live so near to God’s flock and these sheep which are marked with the protecting symbol of the Holy Cross, because now the Jews wish to scorn and mock and crucify my son for a second time”. This prompted much fear and concern amongst the Christians. And after the mass the Archbishop consulted with the common people what course should be taken, and everyone agreed to go to the houses and homes of the Jews as search them as carefully as possible for whatever might be going on. First they went to the hall which the rabbi owned and searched there. And when the archbishop came to their synagogue there was found a statue made of wax, in the likeness of a living man. It was battered and spit-drenched, and there were many people of the Jewish race falling on their knees before the statue, some slapped it on the cheek. Also, there stood a cross nearby, and the Jews had intended to nail that statue to the cross for the mockery and insult of Our Lord Jesus Christ and all who believed in Him. And when the Christians saw this, then they destroyed that statue and killed all the Jews who were present. Now, because of this event and all the others which the Blessed Queen Mary does for her honour and glory, and our joy, we have to give praise to Our Lord and His mother, who live and rule forever and ever. [note: as above, here is the original, the above is my translation]

Miracle tales like these (not all of them quote so hateful as this) appear to have been used in preaching in Scandinavia. Some Old Swedish collections of such stories have notes in the margins recommending the appropriate times for reading them aloud to congregations of monks. One Icelandic miracle tale even explicitly states that “Bishop Páll had the habit of telling this miracle when he was presiding over the Assumption, and he said it was told to him by Archbishop Absalon”.

So we know that there was mass consumption of these stories, by at least some major clergy members. They weren’t curiosities to be squirrelled away in manuscripts. It would be hopelessly optimistic to assume that an ordinary Icelander who had never met a Jew for themselves would always be able to separate rhetoric from reality. When the only images you have ever seen of a Jew are of frenzied pig-sucklers, or snouted canine monsters such as the example from Ål church in Norway which forms the cover to this article, how long before the mind’s eye automatically imagines that this is how Jews really look?

In Part Two, we’ll be looking at how Jews came to be imaginary enemies, and how we are still falling for the trick of hating those people who we don’t encounter.

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