i was holding off on this response until i got word from andrew gow, to
whom i forwarded the postings. but he hasn't responded, and the discussion
is going all over the map, often following what i think are mistaken
trails, based on misconceptions of gow's argument. so here goes, and if
andrew sends me his reactions, i'll be happy to forward them. by the way,
when we first set up the journal online, i had imagined such discussion
being appended to the article as a corrective and a way to continue the
conversation. so thank you for the postings, they restore my faith in
e-journals.

At 09:20 PM 12/20/00 -0500, you wrote:
>Dear List Members,
>
>Regading the discussion of the first millenium, I found a few extraordinary
>statements in Andrew Gow's "Jewish Shock-Troops of the Apocalypse:
>Antichrist and the End, 1200-1600, [Journal of Millennial Studies, Sprint
>1998] http://www.mille.org/publications/summer98/agow.pdf ,
>
>1) where in fn. 2 he writes that the Lollard theory that identified "the
>papacy with the Antichrist was not merely a political move, but also a
>fundamentally theological, Bible-centered exegesis."
>
>Does he really mean this objectively,

there is, esp in these matters, no such thing as objective.

>or is he saying that "to the Lollards it was so"?

of course. and to the catholics it was not so. on the contrary, to the
latter, the former were the antichrist. one of the basic rules of
cataclysmic apocalyptic dynamics: one person's messiah is another's antichrist.

>Since if there were a scriptural basis, I find it amazing that
>it would have taken 13th centuries for the Lollards to come along and find
>it.

it didn't. the waldensians already did, and there is good evidence to
suggest that millennialists of the demotic kind (anti-hierarchy) in all
periods saw the marriage of imperialism and xnty as a devil's bargain --
donatists saw the xn emperors of the 4th cn as antichrists.

>And since no one had found it in 13 centuries, then I supposed it would
>be reasonable to assume that they had a political motive, rather than a
>theological one.

it's not an either or. that's like saying that eusebius and his colleagues
had a theological and not a political motive for converting constantine and
the roman empire. moreover, the distinction gow's working with here is
btwn a given pope as antichrist and the papacy as corporate antichrist.

>2) where Gow holds that the identification of the Antichrist with the one
>who many Jews would accept as their Christ as opposed to Jesus Christ was a
>Medieval, largely anti-semitic invention (pp. 2-3). I guess he has never
>read Scripture (John 5:43; Mt 24:24; 2 Thes 2:1ff.)

this is a bizarre list which reminds me, unfortunately, of the "proofs"
that Jerry Falwell posted last year that the antichrist will be a
jew. there's nothing in any of these texts that compels the
interepretation that the antichrist will be a jewish messiah.

>or St. Chrysostom, St.
>Augustine, St. Cyrill, who are hardly described as medievals.

i know that chrysostom demonized the jews; augustine, hv, did not, and i'm
unaware that he developed this notion of a jewish messiah as
antichrist. what are you thinking of? and is cyrill the cyrill of
jerusalem of the mid-4th cn? cd you cite a passage for this?

>3) Throughout he manifests an anachronistic reinterpretation of texts,
>reading a classification of the descendents of Abraham based on their
>religious beliefs concerning the Messiah as if it were simply a racial
>category that had nothing to do with personal choices.
>The texts he cites pp. 3-13, in as much as he quotes them, seem to agree
>entirely that racial categories are not being used, but rather religious
>categories; to read anti-semitism back into them is to be decidely
>anachronistic.

i'm not sure where you get the racial notion. he never uses it, certainly
not the word racial. are you assuming that his use of antisemitism is
racial? i think he's using gavin langmuir's notion that the move from
anti-judaism to anti-semitism occurs when you move from disliking jews for
who they are (rejectors of the xn message) to disliking them for chimerical
notions, for what you imagine they are (minions of the devil, international
conspirators, secret ritual murderers and cannibals of xn youths).

>What value is there in attacking anti-semitism when it is your own
>reinterpretation of texts which accuses authors of the distant past of the
>prejudice of the last century?

as i said, i think you misread him. he's actually discussing some critical
transformations in xn views of the jews that occurred in the medieval
period which historians (possibly for anachronistic or apologetic reasons)
have paid little attention to.

>It seems rather that the communication of the Patristic and Scholastic
>traditions on the Antichrist into a popular form coincided with a
>transformation of the quality of the relationship between the Antichrist
>and the Jew in the Medieval mind.

i'm not sure what you mean. could you explain? and why is this a mutually
exclusive to gow's interpretation of the role of apocalyptic expectation in
this process of jumping from elite to popular beliefs?

>I think a study of the changing nature of
>the identity of the Jew in the Western European popluar mind might have
>more to do with the iconification of the role of Jews in Western society
>and the reinterpretation of scriptural and patristic traditions on the
>Antichrist and the Jew, than with a medieval invention of such a
>relationship or a latent Christian anti-semitism.

again, why are these two formulations mutually exclusive rather than two
different aspects of the same process? what leads to the "iconification"
of the jews in this period, and the particular demonizing icons that become
tropes for the jews? there is, after all, a difference btwn the jew as
blind synagogue with broken spear, and jew as devil -- among other things a
shift from self-confidence (jew as impotent) to self-doubt and anxiety (jew
as [all-] powerful). that's one of langmuir's point about the sources of
antisemitism.

>One must remember to the
>medieval the context of the dominant Christian terminology, forged from a
>classical and patristic experience, was a medieval one and not a classical
>or patristic one, and that therefore there was an inherent preponderance to
>understand patristic and even scholastic discussion in a medieval context
>rather than one governed by the canons of strict Christian theology.

i don't understand this statement at all. sorry. can you explain?

>To the medieval the Jew was more a unique minority with a foreign culture
>than a people which shared the same religious tradition from which their
>own Christianity was based.

this is a strange and far too sweeping a generalization. all
medievals? when xn clerics consulted jewish rabbis on the textual validity
of their biblical mss, were they thinking of them as a unique minority with
no relationship with to their own religion? when people claim to have the
relic of the holy foreskin, are they ignorant of jesus' identity as a jew?

>Thus it was not surprising that they were
>demonized in the popular mind, just as foreigners and minorities have
>always been.

this is a-historical trivialization. foreigners and minorities have rarely
undergone the kind of systematic demonization that the jews experienced at
the hands of european xns in the MA (that's langmuir's point). to
attribute things like the blood libel and the "red jews" and other beliefs
about the jews as merely forms of prejudice against "the other" seems a bit
superficial..

>With that, the discussions of the Antichrist and the role of
>the Jews at the end of time in Christian theology were ripe targets for the
>truly novel invention of anti-semitism as a racial hatred of the descendents
>of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

i'm not sure i understand what you are saying here: regular prejudice plus
antichrist traditions leads to racial antisemitism? if so, how does that
differ at the simplest level, from what gow is arguing (ie that the
antichrist tradition is the key to the transformation into a virulent
anti-semitism).

richard


Richard Landes
Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University Department of History
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