In a message dated 12/21/00 11:01:18 AM Eastern Standard Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:
> And intriguing question is whether there was in Medieval literature any
> conception of Jesus as a Jew and if not, then why not? An equally strong
> popular tradition of such identification would have gone a long way to
> curbing the advent of modern anti-semitism. Does anyone know of any
> reasearch into this?
Br. Alexis,
You might be interested in the last two chapters of my recent book, _T. S.
Eliot's Bleistein Poems_. It's a first volume of three, and I'm essentially
arguing (an uphill battle all the way) that five of Eliot's poems, including
The Waste Land, are framed as an absurdist and unusually witty take-off on
the Commedia. A single protagonist, ultimately shown to be the reader, makes
a journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven. This hasn't been noticed
partly because one has to be familiar with the Commedia (many of Eliot's
readers aren't) and one has to have a sense of humor and at least minimal
tolerance for word play (no comment).
Here's the part that might be of interest to you. I've further argued that in
"modernizing" passages from the Commedia, Eliot seems to have focused on
passages in which Dante's annotators may have missed the point (Eliot used
the Temple Classics edition). If, say, there's some detail the TC annotators
inexplicably overlooked, Eliot will pick up and play with that very detail,
often through several poems. A good deal of the "overlooked" material has to
do with Jews (Dante's "Hebrews"). So one goes back to look again at the
passages in the Commedia, curious as to how they could be read had the
annotators _not_ "overlooked" all those small details that they indeed seem
to have missed.
To get to the bottom line quickly, I believe Eliot noticed that although we
all learned to read the Commedia as an allegory about Christians (Dante) and
pagans (Virgil), it may read more coherently as an allegory about Christians,
pagans, and Jews. The third poet-brother is David, the psalmist, who seems to
be present in the Commedia only through seven allusions, one of which is
sometimes misidentified as an allusion only to Saul (it consists of an
excerpt from David's words when he hears of the death of Saul). And of
course David is situated in the sky as the pupil of the eye of the hearaldic
eagle of justice. I find it mind-bogling for Singleton, the most exhaustive
of the annotators, to ask (1968) why David deserves the honor of serving as
the pupil of the eagle's eye. My guess is that it's an allusion to Ps. 17.8,
where David asks to be the pupil (apple) of God's eye, and Dante may have
decided to give David his wish to be the pupil of an eye. It may be that over
the centuries, Dante's annotators had too many expectations about what they
thought he would say about Jews, and how they thought he would say it. When
some small detail turns up that challenges their expectations, they skip over
that detail, the familiar phenomenon of selective reading.
I wanted to focus on Eliot, not Dante, and the Eliot poems are quite complex.
But in my last two chapters I give examples of passages in the Commedia that
may read quite differently if we collect and put back all those details
skipped over for so many centuries. Here's the most striking. I was taught
that God never speaks in the Commedia. But I think he does, as the Hebrew God
of the OT who Dante has speaking through David, whose words are transmitted
by the talking eagle in the sky. Dante may have been thinking of the passage
in Romans where Paul is asked whether Christians and Jews worship the same
God; he says they do, that there is only one God. Though theologians rarely
think of anything so simple, a poet or child might easily reason that the God
of the Hebrews would have to be a Hebrew God (who might reasonably transmit
what he has to say through the mouth of David, the OT Hebrew who expressly
identifies himself in 2 Sam. as a conduit for the words of God).
Although you asked for a representation of Christ as a Jew, I hope you'll
settle for a possible respresentation of, so to speak, God as a Jew, which
seems to me perfectly consistent with the words of Paul (above). Also,
although Ps. 17 is expressly captioned as a Psalm of David, Augustine says,
in his sermons on the Psalms, that the speaker (who wants to be the pupil of
God's eye) is actually Christ. If Dante meant to draw in Augustine's
identification, then the God in Paradiso who seems to be speaking through the
mouth of David may also, at one and the same time, be speaking though the
mouth of Christ. I'll leave it up to you as to whether David-as-Christ or
Christ-as-David (or Christ as a David) comes close to what you were looking
for.
I don't regard Dante as a proto-Protestant, still less as a Judaicizer. He
strikes me as an unusually pious Catholic who puzzled over a few somewhat
obscure Biblical passages and reasoned out what they meant to him. I don't
know any other poet or painter who thought of representing David as the pupil
of God's eye, although, oddly, Bosch has a painting in which he makes Christ
the pupil of God's eye. I think we have to remember that both Dante and Bosch
were working before the Council of Trent discouraged overly-original
interpretations of the Bible.
In any case, I've compressed many pages above, and none too elegantly. If you
get a chance to look at my last two chapters, I hope they'll speak to some of
your issues. Eliot was much ridiculed for saying that one couldn't be a
Christian and an antisemite at one and the same time. Yet these are almost
exactly the words that were used in the Prague declaration (1990). I think
you have exactly the right issue in seeing that antisemitism is deeply
inconsistent with Christianity. If anything were inherently or "racially"
wrong with Jews, then Christ would have shared this flaw, precisely because
Christ was a Jew. Too many people conveniently banish the recollection that
Christ was a Jew, and I've heard of a Protestant minister being shouted down
from his pulpit for mentioning it.
pat sloane
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