At 03:00 PM 7/14/97 -0400, John Mundy wrote:
>
>About Norwich, should not one read Gavin Langmuir who has written at
>length on it? If one wants to see how a modern scholar can imply
>Norwich's event was possible, one might read Scott's entry in the
>Dictionary of the Christian Church. Also is not "anti-semite" a secular,
>mid-nineteenth century coinage designed to describe scientific
>(pseudo-scientific) racism as that developed to replace religious and (as
>in the case of the nobility) order conceptions as these weakened
>drastically? That there was racism in medieval anti-Jewish belief is
>undeniable, however. It surfaced in all sorts of sources, as, for example,
>in Caesarius of Heisterbach's manual for Cistercian novices. Still, the
>main formal language in the middle ages was religion, and, although many
>doubted it, the converted were often thought washed clean of their stench.
One certainly ought to read Gavin Langmuir on Norwich and many other such
incidents (e.g. Fulda, 1235), as well as their broader context: "chimeric
beliefs", etc. Langmuir adopted the originally secular, 19th-century term
'anti-Semitism', which he deliberately writes "antisemitism", to describe
the larger-than-religious phenomena he encountered in the Middle Ages--a set
of beliefs in which religious elements generally dominate, but which
incorporate and depend on 'racist' or 'ethnicist' stereotyping,
demonization, hatred. I have used Langmuir's term in my own work (_The Red
Jews. Antisemitism in an Apocalyptic Age, 1200-1600_, Brill: Leiden, 1995)
to describe phenomena similar to those Langmuir studies. Since then,
scholars of Jewish history and Jewish-Christian relations, e.g. Ben Braude
at Boston College, have suggested that 'Jew-hatred' or just plain hatred of
Jews would be a better term. The main point, however, is that something more
than religious 'anti-Judaism' was at work in medieval Christian views of and
relations with Jews. Proving this smallish point has cost a lot of ink and
occasioned a good deal of invective, though it has not spilled over into
mainstream publications very often. Historians of religion have been
especially unwilling to allow extra-religious categories to play in the
study of Jewish-Christian relations--out of professional interest? However,
neither Langmuir nor anyone else writing on these topics in recent years is
interested in denying that religion was the "main formal language" of the
time--only in adding to that crucial insight the evidence from the sources
that there were other important elements in the Jewish-Christian tangle.
>Again let me ask you whether, given the tendency to think in terms of
>progress, expanding revelation, etc., one can expect a really convinced
>Christian or Muslim to believe that Judaism equals their revelations or,
>given the desire to everywhere find the traces of sin and degeneration,
>Jews to think of Christianity or Islam as equal to their faith? John
>Mundy
Concerning the last points: a student recently asked in class (History of
Christianity) how Jews could possibly believe that they would be saved,
given that "it says in the Bible that only those who believe in Jesus will
be saved". When supercession of the Hebrew Bible by the NT defines
Christianity, this will always be the attitude. But this student does not
believe that Jews are inherently evil, subhuman, or stink, or slaughter
Christian babies. There is a crucial difference between her anti-Judaism and
medieval "Jew-hatred".
Andrew Gow
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