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To Mike Davis, a stirring correspondent and cherished friend, whose enthusiasm for things medieval—even (or especially) dark ones—is the reason this book exists.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Illustrations

Epigraph

CHAPTERS

INTRODUCTION

In a Mirror, Darkly

CHAPTER ONE

Mirror of the Fathers:

The Birth of a Jewish Iconography, ca. 1015–1100

CHAPTER TWO

Blinding Light and Blinkered Witness, ca. 1100–1160

CHAPTER THREE

Jewish Eyes:

Loveless Looking and the Unlovely Christ, ca. 1160–1220

CHAPTER FOUR

All the World a Picture:

Jews and the Mirror of Society, ca. 1220–1300

CHAPTER FIVE

The Jew’s Face:

Flesh, Sight, and Sovereignty, ca. 1230–1350

CHAPTER SIX

Where Are the Jewish Women?

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Jew in the Crowd:

Surveillance and Civic Vision, ca. 1350–1500

Conclusion

Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

Index

About the Author

Copyright

ILLUSTRATIONS

Full-color, high-resolution versions of the images can be found at www.saralipton.com.

INTRODUCTION: IN A MIRROR, DARKLY

1. Unidentifiable early medieval Jews: Moses gives the law to the people of Israel. Moutiers-Grandval Bible, Tours, ca. 840. London, British Library Add. ms. 10546, fol. 25v. (Photo: © The British Library Board)

2. A hideous late medieval Jew: A Jew crucifies and stabs young Adam of Bristol. Narratio Legendaria, England, ca. 1320. London, BL ms. Harley 957, fol. 22. (Photo: © The British Library Board)

CHAPTER ONE: MIRROR OF THE FATHERS: THE BIRTH OF A JEWISH ICONOGRAPHY, CA. 1015–1100

1. The Jewish hat as identifying sign: Jewish elders look on and argue as Saint Matthew writes his gospel above them. The Moscow Gospels, Saxony, ca. 1180. Moscow, Russian State Archives of Old Acts Fonds 1607, Inv. 1, no. 23, fol. 1; formerly Dresden ms. A 94. (Photo: Russian State Archives)

2. The Prophet Abdias. Stavelot Bible, Belgium, 1097. London, BL Add. ms. 28106, fol. 221. (Photo: © The British Library Board)

3. The Prophet Sophonias. Lobbes Bible, Belgium, 1084. Tournai, Bibliothèque du seminaire diocésain ms. 1, fol. 270. (Photo: © KIK-IRPA, Brussels)

4. Saint John the Baptist preaching to Judean Elders. Second Gospel Book of Bernward, Hildesheim, ca. 1015. Dommuseum Hildesheim ms. 18, fol. 75. (Photo: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

5. The Last Supper and Judas’s Betrayal. Second Gospel Book of Bernward, Hildesheim, ca. 1015. Dommuseum Hildesheim ms. 18, fol. 118. (Photo: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

6. The Three Magi. Second Gospel Book of Bernward, Hildesheim, ca. 1015. Dommuseum Hildesheim, ms. 18, fol. 18. (Photo: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

7. King Cepheus in a Phrygian cap, from the Constellation Cepheus. Aratea, Aachen (?), ca. 816. Leiden, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit ms. Voss Latin Q 79, fol. 26v. (Photo: Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit)

8. Personifications of the Slavs, Germans, Gauls, and Romans pay tribute to Emperor Otto III. Evangeliary of Otto III, Reichenau, ca. 1000. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek clm 4453, fol. 23v. (Photo: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

9. An early rendering of a dying Christ. Bernward Crucifix, Hildesheim, ca. 1007–1022. Dommuseum Hildesheim, DS 6. (Photo: Frank Tomio)

10. The Glory of the Son. Second Gospel Book of Bernward, Hildesheim, ca. 1015. Dommuseum Hildesheim ms. 18, fol. 174. (Photo: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

11. Crucifixion with Ecclesia and Synagoga. Ivory plaque, Metz, ninth century. London, Victoria and Albert Museum, Inv. 250-1867. (Photo: V & A Images/The Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

12. Crucifixion with Sun, Ecclesia, and Life; and Moon, Synagoga, and Death. Uta Codex, Regensburg, ca. 1022. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliotek clm 13601, fol. 3v. (Photo: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

13. Princes of the priests and elders of the people. Reichenau Evangelistary, Reichenau, ca. 1056. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett ms. 78 A 2, fol. 26v. (Photo: Berlin/Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen/Volker-H. Schneider/Art Resource, New York)

CHAPTER TWO: BLINDING LIGHT AND BLINKERED WITNESS, CA. 1100–1160

1. Scroll-bearing bearded prophets. West façade central portal, Verona Cathedral, ca. 1139. (Photo: Scala/Art Resource, New York)

2. The prophet Hosea. South nave window, Augsburg Cathedral, after 1138. (Photo: SLUB Dresden/Deutsche Fotothek)

3. Synagoga unveiled (Jesse tree). Lambeth Palace Bible, London, ca. 1140. London, Lambeth Palace ms. 3, fol. 198. (Photo: The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Trustees of Lambeth Palace Library)

4. Eilbertus portable altar. Cologne, ca. 1130–50. Welfenschatz, Kunstgewerbemuseum, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, W11. (Photo: RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York)

5. Hebrew prophets and kings. Side detail, Eilbertus portable altar. Cologne, ca. 1130–50. Welfenschatz, Kunstgewerbemuseum, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, W11. (Photo: Berlin/Kunstgewerbemuseum, Staatliche Museen/Art Resource, New York)

6. The Road to Emmaus. Winchester Psalter, England, ca. 1121–60. London, BL ms. Cotton Nero C iv, fol. 25. (Photo: © The British Library Board)

7. Supper at Emmaus. Winchester Psalter, England, ca. 1121–60. London, BL ms. Cotton Nero C iv, fol. 26. (Photo: © The British Library Board)

8. Heribert shrine. Cologne, ca. 1150–60. Church of Saint Heribert, Deutz-Cologne. (Photo: Berlin/ Church of Saint Heribert/Hermann Buresch/Art Resource, New York)

9. A Jew and a midwife testify to Heribert’s miraculous birth. Detail, Heribert shrine. Cologne, ca. 1150–60. Church of Saint Heribert, Deutz-Cologne. (Photo: Berlin/Church of Saint Heribert/Hermann Buresch/Art Resource, New York)

10. Stavelot Triptych. Belgium, ca. 1155. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1910; AZ001. (Photo: Pierpont Morgan Library, New York)

11. Empress Helena compels Judas to reveal the site of the True Cross. Detail, Stavelot Triptych. Belgium, ca. 1155. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1910; AZ001. (Photo: Pierpont Morgan Library, New York)

12. Moses raises the Brazen Serpent. Stained glass roundel, choir, Paris, Basilica of Saint-Denis, ca. 1144–45. (Photo: Anne-Marie Boucher)

CHAPTER THREE: JEWISH EYES: LOVELESS LOOKING AND THE UNLOVELY CHRIST, CA. 1160–1220

1. Christ in Majesty. Apse fresco, Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, Reichenau-Niederzell, ca. 1120. (Photo: Erich Lessing)

2. A Jew mocks and slaps the cross-bearing Christ. Balfour ciborium, England, ca. 1150–75. London, Victoria and Albert Museum, Inv. M.1:1, 2-1981. (Photo: V & A Images/The Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

3. The crucifixion and brazen serpent. Initial to Psalm 68, Peter Lombard, Commentary on Psalms, Paris (?), 1166. Bremen, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek ms. a. 244, fol. 113v. (Photo: Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Bremen)

4. Christ nailed to the cross. Reliquary casket, Westphalia-North Rhine, ca. 1170. Paris, Louvre, OA 8096. (Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, New York)

5. Temptation of Christ. Stained glass panel, Champagne, ca. 1170–80. London, Victoria and Albert Museum, Inv. C.107-1919. (Photo: V & A Images/The Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

6. The Maccabees fight the Syrians. Bible of Bishop Hugh le Puiset, England, ca. 1153–75. Durham Dean and Chapter Library ms. A.II.1, vol. 3, fol. 131v. (Photo: Dean and Chapter, Durham Cathedral)

7. Presentation of Christ. Gospel of Henry the Lion, Helmarshausen, ca. 1185–1188. Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek cod. Guelph 105, noviss., fol. 111. (Photo: Herzog August Bibliothek)

8. Grieving men, one with veiled hand. Illumination to Psalm 6. Great Canterbury Psalter, England, ca. 1180–90. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale ms. lat. 8846, fol. 11v. (Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale)

9. Crucifix. Austria, late twelfth century. Museum of Melk Abbey. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons, User Uoaei1)

10. Crucifixion. Canon of the Mass, Stammheim Missal, Hildesheim, ca. 1170–75. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum ms. 64, fol. 86. (Photo: Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles)

11. Pharisees confront Jesus. Great Canterbury Psalter, England, ca. 1180–90. Paris, Bibiothèque Nationale ms. lat. 8846, fol. 3v. (Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale)

12. Saint Paul disputing with Jews and Greeks. England, ca. 1170–80. London, Victoria and Albert Museum, Inv. 223-1874. (Photo: V & A Images/The Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

13. Ham mocks his drunken father. Orosius, Historiarum Adversum Paganos Libri Septem, Zwiefalten Abbey, Weingarten, ca. 1160–80. Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek HB 410, V, fol. 1v. (Photo: Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart)

14. Jews attempt to stone Christ. Canon tables, leaf from Gospel manuscript, Belgium, ca. 1170–75. Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Inv. V.2912bis. (Photo: © KIK-IRPA, Brussels)

CHAPTER FOUR: ALL THE WORLD A PICTURE: JEWS AND THE MIRROR OF SOCIETY, CA. 1220–1300

1. Jews invite university students to turn to heresy and worship a cat. Commentary to III Kings 11:1–9, Bible moralisée, Paris, ca. 1220–25. Vienna ÖNB cod. 2554, fol. 50vd. (Photo: Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna)

2. Royal Portal, West façade, Chartres Cathedral, ca. 1145. (Photo: © Painton Cowan)

3. Prophet with cap. Detail, Royal Portal, West façade, Chartres Cathedral, ca. 1145. (Photo: © Painton Cowan)

4. Peering Hebrew elders. Lintel, north door, Royal Portal, West façade, Chartres Cathedral, ca. 1145. (Photo: © Painton Cowan)

5. The Prophet Amos with hat and scroll. North rose window, Chartres Cathedral, ca. 1235. (Photo: © Painton Cowan)

6. The Prophet Samuel. North porch central portal, Chartres Cathedral, ca. 1215–30. (Photo: © Painton Cowan)

7. The Prophet Ezechiel carrying John the Evangelist. South transept lancet, Chartres Cathedral, ca. 1221–30. (Photo: © Painton Cowan)

8. Job on the dunghill tormented by demons and lectured by three friends. North transept right portal tympanum, Chartres Cathedral, ca. 1194–1230. (Photo: © Painton Cowan)

9. Judgment of Solomon. North transept right portal lintel, Chartres Cathedral, ca. 1194–1230. (Photo: © Painton Cowan)

10. Joseph cast into the well and sold to slavers. Joseph window, Chartres Cathedral, ca. 1205–15. (Photo: © Painton Cowan)

11. The Prodigal Son asks for his inheritance. Prodigal Son window, Chartres Cathedral, ca. 1205–15. (Photo: © Painton Cowan)

12. The father of the Prodigal Son gives him coins and a cup. Prodigal Son window, Chartres Cathedral, ca. 1205–15. (Photo: © Painton Cowan)

13. The Prodigal Son with a courtesan and serving boy. Prodigal Son window, Chartres Cathedral, ca. 1205–15. (Photo: © Painton Cowan)

14. The Prodigal Son asks a landowner for work. Prodigal Son window, Chartres Cathedral, ca. 1205–15. (Photo: © Painton Cowan)

15. The brother of the Prodigal Son protests to his father. Prodigal Son window, Chartres Cathedral, ca. 1205–15. (Photo: © Painton Cowan)

16. The killing of the fatted calf. Prodigal Son window, Chartres Cathedral, ca. 1205–15. (Photo: © Painton Cowan)

17. Synagoga blindfolded by a snake. Symbolic Redemption (or Passion Typological) window, Chartres Cathedral, ca. 1205–15. (Photo: © Painton Cowan)

18. Jewish doctors of the law debate Saint Stephen. Saint Stephen window, Chartres Cathedral, ca. 1220–25. (Photo: © Painton Cowan)

19. Pagan magicians debate Saints Simon and Jude. Saints Simon and Jude window, Chartres Cathedral, ca. 1220–25. (Photo: © Painton Cowan)

20. Hermogenes sends a messenger to Saint James. Saint James the Greater window, Chartres Cathedral, ca. 1210–25. (Photo: © Painton Cowan)

21. Constantine orders sacrifices to an idol. Saint Sylvester window, Chartres Cathedral, ca. 1210–25. (Photo: © Painton Cowan)

22. A Jewish moneylender. Saint Nicholas pedagogical window, Bay 14, Chartres Cathedral, ca. 1215–25. (Photo: © Painton Cowan)

23. The Christian borrower swears a false oath. Saint Nicholas pedagogical window, Bay 14, Chartres Cathedral, ca. 1215–25. (Photo: © Painton Cowan)

24. A money changer and his client. Saint Joseph window, donor panel, Chartres Cathedral, ca. 1205–15. (Photo: © Painton Cowan)

25. The stoning of Saint Stephen. Saint Stephen window, Chartres Cathedral, ca. 1220–25. (Photo: © Painton Cowan)

26. Cain kills Abel. Good Samaritan window, Chartres Cathedral, ca. 1205–15. (Photo: © Painton Cowan)

27. A priest’s hand withers as he touches the coffin of Mary. Glorification of the Virgin window, Chartres Cathedral, ca. 1205–15. (Photo: © Painton Cowan)

CHAPTER FIVE: THE JEW’S FACE: FLESH, SIGHT, AND SOVEREIGNTY, CA. 1230–1350

1. The fool says in his heart, ‘there is no God.’ Psalm 52, Psalter and Hours of Bonne of Luxembourg, Paris, ca. 1340. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cloisters Collection 69.86, fol. 83v. (Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York)

2. The torture of Saint John. Paris Apocalypse, England, ca. 1245–55. Paris, BN ms. fr. 403, fol. 2. (Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale)

3. Isaac of Norwich, Mosse Mokke, and Avegaye. Receipt Roll of the Jews, Hilary and Easter terms, 1233. London, National Archives E 401/1565 M1 (Photo: National Archives)

4. The Jewish sage and Merlin in the Jew’s shop. Detail, Cantiga 108, Cantigas de Santa Maria, Spain, ca. 1280. Madrid, El Escorial, Biblioteca de San Lorenzo el Real ms. T.I.1, fol. 155v. (Photo: Edilan-Ars Libris)

5. A pious son, murderous father, and distressed wife. Detail, Cantiga 108, Cantigas de Santa Maria, Spain, ca. 1280. Madrid, El Escorial, Biblioteca de San Lorenzo el Real ms. T.I.1, fol. 155v. (Photo: Edilan-Ars Libris)

6. Merlin uses the deformed Jewish boy to convert Jews. Detail, Cantiga 108, Cantigas de Santa Maria, Spain, ca. 1280. Madrid, El Escorial, Biblioteca de San Lorenzo el Real ms. T.I.1, fol. 155v. (Photo: Edilan-Ars Libris)

7. The proper way to pray: Saint Bernard prays toward a crucifix. Psalter and Hours of Bonne of Luxembourg, Paris, ca. 1340. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cloisters Collection 69.86, fol. 295. (Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York)

8. The proper way to pray: two Christians pray toward the crucified Christ. Psalter and Hours of Bonne of Luxembourg, Paris, ca. 1340. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cloisters Collection 69.86, fol. 329. (Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York)

9. Janus. January calendar page, Psalter and Hours of Bonne of Luxembourg, Paris, ca. 1340. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cloisters Collection 69.86, fol. 1v. (Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York)

10. A monstrous grotesque wearing a miter. October calendar page, Psalter and Hours of Bonne of Luxembourg, Paris, ca. 1340. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cloisters Collection 69.86, fol. 11. (Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York)

11. “Why do you hide your face from me and consider me your enemy?” Maastricht Psalter, Netherlands, ca. 1320. London, BL ms. Stowe 17, fols. 205v–206. (Photo: © The British Library Board)

12. The wound of Christ. Psalter and Hours of Bonne of Luxembourg, Paris, ca. 1340. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cloisters Collection 69.86, fol. 331. (Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York)

13. Emperor Henry VII accepts a scroll of the law from a Roman Jew. Codex Trevirensis, Germany, 1341. Koblenz, Landeshauptarchiv Balduineum I, Best 1 C, Nr. 1, fol. 24r. (Photo: Foto Marburg/Art Resource, New York)

CHAPTER SIX: WHERE ARE THE JEWISH WOMEN?

1. A marked Jewish man and unmarked Jewish woman: Elkanan and Hannah. Bible, Paris, ca. 1275–1300. London, BL ms. Royal 1 C II, fol. 89. (Photo: © The British Library Board)

2. Charles Landelle, Jewish Girl in Tangiers, ca. 1860–1874. Reims, Musée des Beaux-Arts. (Photo: Musée des Beaux-Arts, Reims/ De Vleeschauwer)

3. The Jewish glassmaker of Bourges. Detail, Cantiga 4, Cantigas de Santa Maria, Spain, ca. 1280. Madrid, El Escorial, Biblioteca de San Lorenzo el Real ms. T.I.1, fol. 9v. (Photo: Edilan-Ars Libris)

4. The Jewish woman Marisalta sentenced to death. Cantiga 107, Cantigas de Santa Maria, Spain, ca. 1280. Madrid, El Escorial, Biblioteca de San Lorenzo el Real ms. T.I.1, fol. 154. (Photo: Edilan-Ars Libris)

5. Marisalta falling. Detail, Cantiga 107, Cantigas de Santa Maria, Spain, ca. 1280. Madrid, El Escorial, Biblioteca de San Lorenzo el Real ms. T.I.1, fol. 154. (Photo: Edilan-Ars Libris)

6. The Jewish woman who converted to Christianity after the Virgin Mary helped her through a difficult labor. Detail, Cantiga 89, Cantigas de Santa Maria, Spain, ca. 1280. Madrid, El Escorial, Biblioteca de San Lorenzo el Real ms. T.I.1, fol. 131. (Photo: Edilan-Ars Libris)

7. The dance of Salome. Petites Heures de Jean de Berry, Paris, ca. 1375. Paris, BN ms. lat. 18014, fol. 212v (Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale)

8. The blacksmith’s wife forging the nails for the cross. Holkham Bible, England, ca. 1330. London, BL Add. ms. 47680, fol. 31r. (Photo: © The British Library Board)

9. The blacksmith’s wife forging the nails for the cross. Queen Mary Psalter, England, ca. 1310. London, BL ms. Royal 2 B. VII, fol. 252v. (Photo: © The British Library Board)

10. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Purification and Presentation at the Temple, Siena, 1342. Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi. (Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, New York)

11. The circumcision of Christ by the Old Law. Pèlerinage de Jesu Crist, France, ca. 1400. Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale ms. 10178, fol. 222. (Photo: Bibliothèque Royale, Brussels)

12. Mass of Saint Gregory with instruments of the Passion. South Germany, 1420–30. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 200–201. (Photo: Berlin/Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen/Art Resource, NY)

13. The Blessed Simon of Trent. Woodcut, Germany (Nuremberg), 1479. Munich, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung 118 239 D. (Photo: Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich)

14. Jacques Daret, Nativity, Arras, ca. 1425–35. Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. (Photo: Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza/Scala/Art Resource, New York)

15. Jacques Daret, Purification and Presentation, Arras, 1425–30. Paris, Musée du Petit Palais. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York)

16. The ritual murder of Simon of Trent. Hartmann Schedel, Liber Chronicarum, fol. 254v, Nuremberg, 1493. (Photo: public domain)

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE JEW IN THE CROWD: SURVEILLANCE AND CIVIC VISION, CA. 1350–1500

1. Albert van Ouwater, The Raising of Lazarus, Haarlem, ca. 1450–60. Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. (Photo: Berlin/ Staatliche Museen/Jörg P. Anders/ Art Resource, New York)

2. Derick Baegert, Crucifixion, Dortmund, ca. 1475. Propsteikirche, Dortmund. (Photo: public domain)

3. Andrea da Firenze, Christ Carrying the Cross (Ascent to Calvary), detail, north wall fresco, Cappellone degli Spagnoli, Santa Maria Novella, Florence, ca. 1365. (Photo: Scala/Art Resource, New York)

4. Altichiero da Zevio, Crucifixion, central section fresco, Cappella di San Giacomo, Basilica di Sant’Antonio, Padua, 1374–78. (Photo: Alfredo Dagli Orti/Art Resource, New York)

5. Anonymous, Man of Sorrows, Verona, ca. 1500. Verona, Museo Castelvecchio, Inv. 84-1B375. (Photo: Museo Castelvecchio, Verona)

6. Andrea da Firenze, Via Veritatis (Way of Salvation, or The Militant Church), detail, east wall fresco, Cappellone degli Spagnoli, Santa Maria Novella, Florence, ca. 1365. (Photo: Scala/Art Resource, New York)

7. Pinturricchio, Christ Among the Doctors, detail, fresco, Collegiata di Santa Maria Maggiore, Spello, 1501. (Alinari/Art Resource, New York)

8. Derick Baegert, Christ Carrying the Cross, Germany, 1477. Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. (Photo: Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza/Scala/Art Resource, New York)

9. Quentin Massys, Ecce Homo, Flanders, 1515. Madrid, Museo del Prado. (Photo: Museo Nacional del Prado/Art Resource, New York)

10. Pietro Perugino, Baptism of Christ, fresco, Sistine Chapel, Vatican Palace, Vatican, 1482. (Photo: Scala/Art Resource, New York)

11. Petrus Christus, Saint Eligius as a Goldsmith, Bruges, 1449. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

12. Paolo Uccello, The Desecration of the Host, detail, predella for the Altarpiece of the Communion of the Apostles, Urbino, 1467. Urbino, Galleria Nazionale delle Marche (Palazzo Ducale). (Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York)

13. Leonardo da Vinci, Study of a Hanged Man (Bernardo di Bandino Baroncelli), Florence, 1479. Bayonne, Musée Bonnat, Collection Bonnat, NI 1777. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais/ René-Gabriel Ojéda/Art Resource, New York)

14. Unicorn Tapestry: The Unicorn is Killed, France or Belgium, ca. 1490–1500. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cloisters Collection. (Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

For now we see in a mirror, darkly; but then face to face. Now I know in part; but then shall I know fully, even as also I was fully known.

—Paul of Tarsus, I Corinthians 13:12 (American Standard Version)

INTRODUCTION

IN A MIRROR, DARKLY

Thus indeed appear the Jews regarding the Holy Scripture they carry: like the face of a blind man in a mirror. By others he is seen; by himself, he is not seen.

—Augustine of Hippo, Enarrationes in Psalmos 56, 9

For the first thousand years of the Christian era, there were no visible Jews in Western art. Manuscripts and monuments did depict Hebrew prophets, Israelite armies, and Judaic kings, but they were identifiable only by context, in no way singled out as different from other sages, soldiers, or kings. [Fig. 1] The descendants of these biblical figures—that is, medieval Jews—made no appearance at all. Then, quite suddenly, shortly after the year 1000, the Jew emerged from obscurity. Not only prophets and Pharisees but also contemporary Jews became common in Christian artworks, and a host of visual cues were developed to render them, first, recognizable, and, ultimately, despicable. By the close of the Middle Ages, the Jew had become one of the most powerful and poisonous symbols in all of Christian art. [Fig. 2]

This story is quite well known.[1] But it has yet to be explained. Indeed, some might think there is little need for explanation. The pervasive and steadily intensifying anti-Judaism of medieval Christendom is all too familiar—why should we not see both the relative neglect of the Jew in early medieval art and the almost compulsive attention given Jews in later medieval art as a natural outgrowth of this trend? For several reasons, however, this strikes me as unsatisfactory. While there is clearly a general pattern of increasing artistic anti-Jewishness, not all aspects of Jewish iconography were negative, nor did the neutral and even positive attributes assigned Jews at the beginning of our period—such as antique scrolls signifying the Jews’ mastery of ancient wisdom and guardianship of divine revelation—ever definitively drop away. Moreover, not all social and theological developments make their mark in art. Christian writers had for many centuries condemned the major tenets of Judaism without articulating that critique or expressing any hatred of Jews in art. Christians also managed to mightily disapprove of a host of other groups and concepts (schismatics, pagans, atheism, etc.) without ever devising for them a visual vocabulary of infamy. Further complicating the picture is the fact that several innovative anti-Jewish visual signs seem to predate the textual polemics and anticipate the attitudes they are said to reflect. Artists devised identifying clothing for Jews decades before such distinctive dress was decreed by law, for example; Jews are shown menacing Eucharistic wafers years before the first recorded accusation of Jewish host desecration; and Jews were given a characteristic physiognomy in art well before biological racism permeated European thought.[2] Finally, the vast majority of medieval Jewish images decorated artworks meant solely for Christian eyes, appeared in regions with few or no Jews, and were made by and for people (overwhelmingly monks, clerics, and secular leaders) who were far more interested in Christian society and worship than in Jewish people or practices. Simply labeling artists or patrons, or the general culture, as anti-Semitic tells us little about why these images were made or what they meant to the people who made and viewed them.

FIG. 1

FIG. 2

In this book, then, I take a different approach to medieval Christian depictions of Jews. My starting point is an observation I first made well over a decade ago: a remarkable number of these images highlight not only what the Jews look like but, even more, how—and whether—they see. It seemed clear that the new artistic emphasis on the Jew as viewer as well as image viewed was related to the traditional theological formulation of the Jews’ role in Christendom. Already in the letters of Saint Paul, who lamented that his recalcitrant coreligionists clung to the “letter” rather than the “spirit” of the law, the Jews were linked to the material, visible world and assumed to possess a purely carnal form of understanding.[3] Their flesh-bound thinking, their need for concrete signs, rendered them blind to spiritual truths. Even when God himself appeared before their very eyes, they could not look beyond the humble body of a crucified convict and see the divine glory enshrined within. Paul blamed this failure on the Jews’ overreliance on external symbols and tangible proofs: “For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a scandal to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.”[4] He contrasted the Jews’ sensory-driven approach to God with the pure faith of Christians: “we are always confident … for we walk by faith, not by sight.”[5]

The Jews’ sight would likewise preoccupy Augustine of Hippo (d. 430), the most influential of all early Christian writers on Jews and Judaism. For Augustine, Jewish-Christian difference was crystallized in their contrasting visual encounters with and reception of Christ: “For truly how glorious is it, that he ascends to heaven, that he sits on the right hand of the Father? But we do not see this with our eyes, nor have we seen him hanging on the tree, nor have we beheld him rising from the grave. All this we hold in faith, we perceive with the eyes of the heart. We are praised, for we did not see, yet we believed. For the Jews too saw Christ. It is no great thing to see Christ with the eyes of the flesh, but it is great to believe in Christ with the eyes of the heart.”[6] As we shall see in chapter 2, the contrast between the “eyes of the flesh” and the “eyes of the heart” will be a recurring theme in subsequent Christian writings about religious knowledge, revisited and sometimes reformulated as Christians modified their ideas about sensory perception.

Augustine added a significant new twist to Paul’s denigration of Jewish vision: a stress on the uses of Jewish blindness and also on the Jews’ own visibility, that is, their physical presence. In several works, most notably the City of God, he wrote that the Jews’ primary function—and the reason they should be allowed to remain in Christian lands—was to serve both as “witnesses to” and as “living signs of” Christian truth and triumph. The Jews did this in several ways. In preserving the ancient Hebrew text of scripture, Jews confirmed the authenticity of biblical prophesies about Christ (although they were blind to their true meaning). The Jews’ very bodies, sprung from the flesh of the ancient Judean deicides, were living proof of the historicity of the Crucifixion and their own people’s criminal role in it. The Jews’ defeat at the hands of the Romans and subsequent dispersal among the “nations” testified to their own error and to Christian triumph. Finally, at the end of days the Jews’ long-delayed conversion would herald Christ’s Second Coming.[7] That is, Christian history and Christian doctrine were made visible in Jewish bodies and Jewish books. Or as Augustine put it succinctly elsewhere: “[The Jews] still prove useful to the church in a particular condition of servitude, either in bearing witness, or in otherwise constituting proof.”[8]

According to Augustine, then, the Jews’ function in Christendom was to see (or rather, to see incompletely) and be seen; that is, to bear witness in word, flesh, and status. The Jews’ failure to perceive God in Christ and to understand their own prophets, combined with their visible presence as exiled relics of an ancient and fallen people, testified to the verity of Christian faith.

For six hundred years after Augustine’s death, this conception of Jewish witness remained metaphorical, a largely literary abstraction unconnected to Jews’ actual visual practices or visual presence within Christendom. When early medieval theologians lambasted the Jews’ blindness, they were referring to their inability to correctly interpret and understand scripture rather than to their ocular encounter with Christ. When they discussed the Jews’ “particular condition of servitude,” they were referring to a theoretical status that was not markedly visible in the real world: Jews in the early Middle Ages were legally free and their lives were considerably more prosperous, secure, and comfortable than those of most Christian peasants.[9] Jewish blindness and subjugation could not be seen in images either. The sole visual trace of another faith in early medieval art was likewise an abstraction: the female personification of Judaism known as Synagoga, a veiled and venerable woman standing opposite Ecclesia (Holy Church) in the shelter of the cross and gazing intently at Christ.[10] Only around the turn of the first millennium did Paul’s insistence on Jewish blindness and Augustine’s conception of Jewish witness finally make their way into art. What brought about this new artistic focus on Jews’ looks and looking? What “work” did images of Jews do for the culture that created them?

A closer look at the role of sight in the thought of Paul and Augustine suggests a possible path toward answering these questions. As we have seen, both Paul and Augustine insisted that true Christians, unlike Jews, could believe without seeing. But this exaltation of pure, image-less faith did not negate—indeed, it existed in some tension with—the fundamental fact of Christian history: Christ at one point took on flesh and walked the earth in full sight of his fellow men. God Incarnate was not an intangible Platonic form but a visible being. Throughout most of the New Testament there is consequently little denigration of bodily vision. Christ performed many visible miracles, and his disciples reveled in his physical presence. Though Paul decried the Jews’ carnal perception, he did not utterly dismiss bodily experience or the power of sight, glorying in having himself been granted a glimpse of the risen Christ.[11] When Paul wrote about God’s glory, he located it not in an abstract, formless void but “in the face of Jesus Christ.”[12] Likewise, though Augustine warned against the deceptive and seductive nature of physical vision, he conceded that physical sight could be religiously useful. Seeing suffering in the material world, for example, helped Christians to imagine the tortures of the Crucifixion and so to pity and love the crucified Christ.

For the remainder of the Middle Ages Christian epistemology would reverberate with this tension between deprecation of reliance on physical vision as inconsonant with faith and longing for direct, visual experience of the divine. In the early Middle Ages, for various reasons (including the relative scarcity of surplus wealth; unease about depicting divinity spurred by still powerful memories of antique paganism, the debate over icon worship raging in the Byzantine Empire, and Muslim hostility to divine images; loss of technical expertise; and the ascendancy of nonrepresentational Germanic and Celtic artistic traditions), art was only fitfully and hesitantly enlisted as a way to experience God.[13] This situation changed radically in the high Middle Ages, at just the time and in many of the same places where we first encounter a Jewish iconography. In the pages that follow I argue that in this intersection lies the answer to our questions. The augmented religious role afforded visual experience in high medieval Christianity largely explains the new visual prominence of the Jew. As the paradigmatic exemplar of physical vision and its misuse, the figure of the Jew became the primary medium through which Christians explored and expressed their changing ideas about knowledge, vision, and representation.

*   *   *

In this book I do not attempt to assemble a comprehensive catalog of Jewish iconography. Christian artists were remarkably creative when it came to anti-Jewish imagery, devising over the centuries numerous ways to give visual form to Jewish error and unbelief. The Jews’ mistaken adherence to the letter of scripture was displayed by showing Jews clutching round-topped tablets of the law, or knives with which to sacrifice animals, or sacrificial animals themselves. Jews’ clothing was assigned colors associated in Christian thought with evil, red and yellow in particular, or was striped, indicative of extravagance. Jewish avarice was indicated by such straightforward signs as coins or bags full of money; or via more oblique signs, such as ravens or crows, which were thought to hoard shiny objects; or frogs, whose swollen form mimicked the usurer, bloated with greed; or by depicting Jews worshipping idols. At various points in the Middle Ages the Jew’s affiliation with the devil might be signaled by placing him in hell, perching a demon on his shoulder, giving him subtly beast-like features, wrapping a snake around his eyes, having him give an obscene kiss to a cat, or depicting him with a goatee, tail, and/or horns.[14] Rather than surveying all of the many signs and symbols of Jewishness, then, I focus on moments that signal a significant new conceptual stance. The starting point for each chapter is the introduction of one or more new visual devices associated with Jews. I thus explore, in turn, the establishment of the hat and beard as identifying signs of Jewishness in the eleventh century (chapter 1); the proliferation in the first half of the twelfth century of images featuring Jewish witnesses, both prophetic and contemporary (chapter 2); the ascription to Jews of contorted and hostile facial expressions (chapter 3); the creation of new signs drawn from social life and the natural world and their deployment in new narrative genres (chapter 4); the development of the physiognomic caricature (chapter 5); the changing appearance and meaning of the figure of the Jewess (chapter 6); and the situating of Jews among large and diverse crowds (chapter 7).

In analyzing this imagery I cast my interpretive net wide, for many factors influenced the making and reading of images of Jews. The first issue to be considered is the artistic models and patterns that influenced, or found echo in, each artwork. Medieval art was by and large quite conservative: change happened slowly, and many motifs and compositions recur countless times in myriad media. For every image examined, we must investigate the visual models on which it relies, not because visual sources fix or dictate the meaning of their offspring but because each new use of an image, whether by artist or by viewer, necessarily draws upon and is informed by existing connotations, even when they are rejected or changed. Meaning often lies in the decision to retain or to modify, even minutely, received patterns. Such models and patterns are the primary subject of chapter 1, in which I explore the visual sources for the signs that came to identify Jewishness; these basic signs formed the background against which all subsequent changes in Jewish iconography were read.

The second domain informing the making and reading of an iconographical sign is the physical and social context in which the image appears. Each manuscript, monument, carving, or painting was used in one or more specific settings, for one or more specific occasions or purposes. A small-scale scene painted in a private book for a noble lady, for example, would be read in the light of the other images in that book, as well as of the lady’s own devotions, and might thus take on very different meaning from a similar image chiseled on the wall of a cathedral, viewed by a vastly broader audience and surrounded by utterly different scenes and sounds. The evolving patronage, media, styles, and uses of medieval artworks will be a major theme throughout this book. As images featuring Jews move from monastic biblical illustration to cathedral windows to royal picture books and tax accounts, the appearances and meanings of Jews evolve accordingly.

A third area that needs to be considered is contemporary Jewish behavior and appearance. The relation of Jews’ looks and habits to their representation in art was hardly straightforward: in almost no cases are images of Jews based on actual Jews, nor can the vast majority of images be considered accurate reflections of the looks or practices of living, breathing Jews. Nonetheless, medieval images of Jews were not wholly arbitrary; they drew upon some aspects of Jews’ communities, beliefs, lives, or reputations (as Christians understood them), albeit often in a distorted or highly schematic fashion. We must consequently cast our own gaze in that direction. As it turns out, Jewish life and looks often do linger under the surface of our images, though the details are so skewed as to provide an enigmatic picture indeed.

A further field to be considered, which may or may not be related to actual Jewish behavior and appearance, is Christian perceptions of contemporary Jewish behavior and appearance, as well as attitudes toward Jews as a historical people and toward Judaism as a faith. Throughout this book I examine Christian images of Jews in relation to Christian ideas about Jews as expressed in texts and as acted out in life (to the extent that we can access the latter through the documents left behind). Although as very different means of expression art and texts frequently voice their ideas in different keys, as products of the same culture they do not tell fundamentally different stories. Careful attention to the ideas underlying textual rhetoric can help illuminate the thoughts motivating visual signs.

Finally, but most importantly, I explore the purely internal Christian concerns, preoccupations, and ideology that might have been addressed through the use of Jewish iconography. In the vast majority of the images I examine, the most pressing and central message is only tangentially related to Jews and Judaism and the qualities they embody. They are driven, instead, by topics as apparently unconnected to Jews and Judaism as monastic reform, religious aesthetics, natural lore, royal monetary policy, philosophical speculation, gender relations, and civic morality. There is a unifying theme to these disparate subjects: each in its own way and at that moment touched upon the issue of vision and knowledge. The presence of the Jew helps us connect the dots and trace the path by which each new generation of Christians grappled anew with the vexed question of the relationship between physical perception and spiritual truth.

*   *   *

It is perhaps more than a little ironic that a book that often seeks to modulate the too-blackened canvas of medieval Jewish history with shades of gray should be entitled Dark Mirror. I have chosen this title, overworked metaphor and all, in part because it acknowledges that Christian images of Jews were indeed often dark and hostile. But it is also intended as a warning that these images provide only a distorted view of the period—that Christian art must not be seen as transparently “mirroring” either prevailing Christian attitudes or actual Jewish status. Indeed, I argue throughout this book that anti-Jewish imagery was a significant factor in the creation of the attitudes and conditions it is often held to reflect. Art can be a powerful force in shaping the way we see and think about the world. This has become dangerously clear in our own image-saturated, commercialized culture, where pictures teach us to despise bodily imperfections and crave glamorous pleasures we didn’t know existed until we were shown them. Much the same was true in the Middle Ages. Medieval people were exposed to far fewer pictures than we are, but art seemed to them all the more powerful for that—it was rare, precious, and mysterious and revealed unseen, perhaps unimagined things.[15] Images of Jews made Christians look at Jews with new curiosity and interest (and hostility), drew their attention to previously unnoticed aspects of Jewish life and looks, and in the process generated new ideas about Jews. No one seemed to notice that the hair of German Jews was, on the average, darker than the hair of their Christian neighbors until Jews’ coloring became a focal point in art, for example. And though Christian texts had long associated evil with darkness, it was art that made the linkage between perfectly normal dark hair and the darkness of evil.[16]

Finally, the title, following the Pauline verse from which it is drawn, signals one of the main themes of this book and a guiding principle of medieval Christian imagery: recognition of the simultaneous importance and imperfection of bodily vision. Christians worshipped the Word made flesh, a God once visible and tangible but now only discernible (except by the blessed few) through faint traces, pale comparisons, and indirect witness. Paul had contented himself with pointing out the gap between the dark and clouded “now” and the more perfect, illuminated future. In the high Middle Ages, though, Christians used art to try to narrow that gap and provide a glimpse of future glory and ineffable truth.[17] But they knew this was a risky business, that sensory experience, and especially physical vision, could lead one astray. An image could be mistaken for a deity, a beautiful face could hide a cankered heart, a broken body could induce scorn rather than compassion. Images of Jews graphically seeing and looking “wrong” vividly illustrated this point and so simultaneously demonstrated and helped contain the danger inherent in images themselves. Christians living in the high and later Middle Ages confronted a massive challenge: how to live spiritual lives and embrace spiritual values in an increasingly prosperous, inventive, complex, and vibrant secular society. It is this challenge—medieval Christians’ urgent need to reconcile age-old suspicion of the visible world with the beauty-filled and burgeoning civilization they themselves created and loved—that, more than anything else, explains the darkening depiction of the Jew in medieval Christian art.

CHAPTER ONE

MIRROR OF THE FATHERS

The Birth of a Jewish Iconography,

CA. 1015–1100

But man, proud man,

Drest in a little brief authority,

Most ignorant of what he’s most assured

—William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, act 2, scene 2

The world did not come to an end in the year 1000, as many clerics, if not huge masses of people, feared—or in some cases hoped.[1] Instead, in the decades around the turn of the first millennium an apparently rejuvenated Western Christendom experienced an unprecedented economic, cultural, and religious awakening. The fruit of this medieval spring included the rebirth of a great empire (the now-Holy Roman Empire), the revival of large-scale stone building and a related explosion of artistic creativity, and the emergence of new devotional foci and more vision- and art-oriented modes of worship.[2] These same years also saw the appearance of an entirely new figure in Christian art: the visually recognizable Jew. The simultaneous emergence of these historical and artistic changes is not coincidental. They are, rather, intimately related: the birth of new and increasingly image-based Christian practices led to the visual articulation of previously unillustrated abstract ideas about Jews. As Christians learned to give visible form to a range of themes associated with “that which is Christian,” they likewise began visually to mark “that which is not.”

1. A Jewish Hat?

When Christian artists finally began to single out Jews, they did so, somewhat anticlimactically, with a hat. As any handbook of medieval iconography will attest, and as any glance at an illuminated manuscript or stained glass window from the later twelfth or thirteenth century makes clear, Jews can be recognized in high medieval art by various versions of the pointed or peaked headgear known sometimes as the pileum cornutum (horned cap) or simply as the “Jewish hat.”[3] This hat first appeared on the heads of painted Jews in the eleventh century and by about 1150 had become the sign par excellence of the Jew.[4] [Fig. 1] What is less clear is why this came about. Why, after so many centuries of benign neglect, did artists suddenly begin to mark Jews in this way? Did Jews of the period change their dress, or did artists for some reason start paying novel attention to Jews’ clothing? Or was the pileum a purely artistic invention, an arbitrary identifying sign unrelated to actual practice? For that matter, why did Jews need to be identified at all? And most importantly, what did “Jewishness” mean when expressed through this symbol?

FIG. 1

The issue may not immediately seem momentous. There is, after all, nothing remarkable about using a hat as an identifying mark. In a period when portraiture was not practiced and when most people were classified according to rank, office, or function, clothing—particularly headgear—was the single most common means by which figures were distinguished in art. Popes were depicted with tiaras, kings with crowns, soldiers with helmets: objects that, if not worn every day, nevertheless constituted essential and conspicuous elements of their “professional” attire.[5] Why should we not see the “Jewish hat” as a straightforward corollary, a faithful representation of the garb adopted by the people of the Mosaic law in accordance with that law?[6]

One basic reason for looking more deeply into the sign is its sheer newness. Medieval artists tended to work from models and to replicate venerable traditions, none of which, before 1000, depicted Jews with hats. This is not to say that change never happened—indeed, the period we shall be examining was a time of markedly creative artistic change—but it does mean that each change represents a deliberate and potentially meaningful choice, which should be examined and understood. Moreover, even “straightforward” identifying marks still embody a point of view, convey a certain meaning. A king wasn’t painted wearing his crown simply because kings wore crowns—kings also wore gloves on cold days and hats or hoods in rainy weather, but we are rarely treated to pictures of them doing so. Rather, kings wore crowns on ritual occasions because they symbolized power and sovereignty, and images of crowned kings capture and fix those attributes.

The “Jewish hat” is just as ideological, and considerably more complicated, a sign. The first complication is that it is by no means certain that in the period and place where the iconography was developed—eleventh-century northwestern Europe—Jewish men regularly wore hats at all or regarded covering the head as a religious obligation. It is important at this point to consider the nature of early medieval Jewish life. There is a widespread tendency (evident especially though not exclusively in Hollywood productions) to picture medieval Franco-German Jewish communities as purer versions of the Polish shtetl or the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods of Brooklyn, teeming with black-hatted, heavy-coated scholars devoted night and day to intense study of the Talmud, splendidly isolated from and oblivious to the outside Christian world. This is a seriously inaccurate impression.[7] Like their forebears, eleventh-century Jews strove daily to maintain their religious traditions and to observe Jewish law, but living in the Latin West posed unique challenges.[8] Most Jewish communities in eleventh-century northern Europe were small and quite scattered. While one or two of the largest may have numbered as many as a thousand souls, the average size of a Jewish community was probably closer to one hundred, with the smallest consisting of just a handful of individuals.[9] Some Jews were the only members of their faith in their village. Many communities worshipped in private houses, as they could not afford (or felt no need for) a separate synagogue building, and no community boasted a full-time rabbi or religious teacher.[10] The great Jewish scholars of the period supplemented their incomes by working as merchants, vintners, or craftsmen; other Jews worked the land or possessed land worked by Christian peasants.[11] Scholars of any kind were a minority; the average Jewish male adult was supposed to know some Hebrew, but actual command of the language varied widely, and we have several texts attesting that some Jewish men knew no Hebrew at all.[12] Under such conditions Jews were of necessity economically and to a certain extent culturally and socially integrated into their Christian surroundings: they lived on the same streets and sometimes in the same buildings as Christians; they bought food and goods from, and sold them to, Christians; they entertained Christians at their tables and employed them in their homes; they attended Christian trade fairs, went on outings with Christian nobles, and (when it suited them) aired their grievances in Christian courts.[13] Jewish mothers suckled their Gentile neighbors’ babies when their own failed fully to drain their breasts, and they called on the same pagan goddess to protect their children as did their Christian counterparts.[14] The fact that, according to Rabbi Samson ben Abraham of Sens (d. ca. 1230), it was customary for young Jewish men to celebrate a friend’s wedding by conducting a rowdy joust on horseback shows vividly enough that even as late as the thirteenth century, when various restrictions had begun to socially distance Jews from Christians, we are dealing with a culture far from the shtetls of Poland.[15]

How did such communities approach the issue of covering the head? Jewish law and tradition are far less clear on the question than might be thought. The Hebrew scriptures say nothing about prescribed headgear for anyone other than the high priest and his sons, whose head coverings signified their priestly status.[16] Although the Talmud praises men for covering their heads, especially during prayer, apparently even in Babylonian academic centers only married scholars of consequence habitually did so; in Palestine even pious scholars seem not to have covered their heads.[17] If such vagueness and diversity of opinion prevailed among the Talmudic sages, one would hardly expect greater clarity or rigor from medieval authorities. And indeed, there was no consensus about the subject among medieval rabbis. In fact, they rarely discussed it—a strong signal that no great significance was invested in head coverings and also that no sharp change in practice was taking place. Most scholars apparently followed the Palestinian approach in not requiring that the head be covered during blessings, prayer, or study, much less during the course of daily business.[18] Abraham ben Nathan of Lunel, a well-regarded rabbi from late-twelfth-century France, recorded that he prayed bareheaded, and there is no reason to think that this was a daring departure or that he was alone.[19] Starting around the mid-thirteenth century, the wearing of hats did become more common among Jewish men (for reasons explored in chapter 4), but it was not until well after the end of the Middle Ages that covering the head both inside and outside the synagogue became standard practice for religious Jews.[20]

Finally, there is little reason to think that those eleventh-century Jews who did cover their heads—and some surely must have, whether out of piety, dignity, or simply to ward off the cold—would have sported pointed or otherwise distinctively “Jewish” hats. At various points in history Jews did seem to wear headgear not unlike the pileum cornutum: they are portrayed wearing pointed hats in Assyrian reliefs of the ninth century BCE (as are many other peoples) and probably wore the peaked Persian felt cap during their subjection to Persian rule.[21] But they did so because Jews generally conformed outwardly to the society in which they lived; it would strain credulity to assume that such ancient garb was worn in an unbroken tradition during the intervening millennium and a half, in lands far from Persian dominions, and leaving no further trace in the visual or textual record. The unchanging nature of Jewish customs and observances is a common trope, positively asserted by many Jews and negatively by many non-Jews, but it is a completely unhistorical one. Talmudic discussions of head coverings mention not hats or caps but the sudra, a wrapped kerchief or turban common in Babylon, while Greek and Roman texts indicate that Hellenized Jews wore no distinctive costume.[22] Jews in Muslim lands wore turbans identical to those of their Muslim neighbors.[23]

The few surviving early medieval references to Jewish clothing likewise suggest that Jews dressed no differently from their Gentile neighbors. The only aspect of their attire that attracted comment was the luxury displayed by wealthier Jews. Bishop Agobard of Lyons (d. 840), a notably dyspeptic cleric who bitterly resented the favor shown Jews by Carolingian rulers, complained about the ostentation of Jewish women’s dresses; to the bishop’s disgust, these dresses were gifts from the emperor’s female relatives and other palace noblewomen, and they presumably reflected the latest court fashions.[24] Another ninth-century text, a biography of Pope Gregory the Great by John the Deacon, associates Jews with a certain kind of hat, but one made of fur, and it does so in the context of scolding a Christian bishop for wearing a fur hat in preference to more customary clerical headgear.[25] In the tenth and eleventh centuries Jewish merchants are known to have traded in luxurious garments and textiles, including furs, gold-brocaded cloth, and silks, some of which were imported from Muslim lands; though the merchants and their families may well have worn such exotic clothing themselves, this would not have made them stand out in elite circles, as most of their customers were Christian noblemen and women.[26] Contemporary descriptions of the Christian cleric Bodo, who converted to Judaism in the ninth century, note that upon his conversion he “allowed his hair and beard to grow long” and started to wear a sword but say nothing about covering his head, much less adopting any special kind of hat.[27] In fact, the thrust of all accounts of Bodo’s conversion is to highlight not so much those changes that made him look more like a Jew but those that made him look less like a cleric. Conversely, when a certain (unnamed) Jew converted to Christianity in the early eleventh century, we are told that because he became a priest he shaved off his beard and “affected baldness on his head” (that is, adopted the clerical tonsure), but nothing is said of his abandoning any “Jewish” headgear.[28] The famous French rabbi Rashi (d. 1105) mentions in passing that when a person is warm he takes off his kumta (cap) or sudra (turban), but, again, nothing in the comment suggests that these were widespread, peculiarly Jewish, or religiously meaningful fashion items.[29] The earliest Jewish textual reference to Jewish headgear cited in the major modern study of Jewish costume dates to 1295; the earliest Christian reference is a 1267 ordinance from Breslau.[30]

In sum, we have no reason to think that in eleventh-century Europe the wearing of hats by Jews was either a new or a (newly noted) general custom, that covering the head was considered a central element of Jewish observance, or that those Jews who did wear hats wore characteristic or conspicuously pointed ones. The only evidence we really have for the wearing of pointed “Jewish hats” by medieval Jews prior to the thirteenth century is art.[31] And it hardly seems satisfactory to answer the question posed by our images by citing the very images we are trying to explain.

2. The Sign of the Hat

If it has proven fruitless to look to actual sartorial practice to explain the emergence of the “Jewish hat” in eleventh-century art, this should not come as a surprise. Medieval images served many purposes: they glorified God, embodied sanctity, told tales, radiated authority, and inspired miracles, but they did not seek to document their surroundings.[32] Even when images did reflect reality, it was because that particular reality was invested with special meaning, and its representation therefore expressed important religious or political ideas. And so we have come back to the questions I posed at the outset: Why did an identifying sign for Jews suddenly become necessary at the dawn of the high Middle Ages? And what was the sign of the pointed “Jewish hat” trying to say?[33]

For some time scholars believed they had an answer. In A History of Jewish Costume, Alfred Rubens claims that the very first appearance of the pointed “Jewish hat” in art was in the painted initials of the Stavelot Bible, a giant two-volume illustrated Bible made for the Abbey of Stavelot in the region known as Lotharingia, or Lorraine (now Belgium).[34] [Fig. 2] This Bible is conveniently signed by its scribe, a rather charming monk called Goderanus, who is humble about his virtues but tangibly (and justifiably) proud of his handiwork. At the end of the Bible Goderanus tells us not only his name and his hopes and dreams for himself and his brother monks but also the year of the manuscript’s completion: “I, Goderanus, a sinner, and Brother Ernesto, my helper and comrade in that labor, commit this and a companion volume to the Abbey of Stavelot.… We have written both these volumes constantly and most diligently for almost four years.… And it is now the 1097th year of the Incarnation of the Lord … in the Fifth Indiction, with Emperor Henry IV ruling and as an army of Christians is violently driving against the pagans.”[35] What a perfect context for the birth of anti-Jewish iconography: the Bible was made during the First Crusade in the very heartland of Godfrey of Bouillon, Duke of Lower Lorraine, first Latin ruler of Jerusalem, and allegedly one of the instigators of the terrible anti-Jewish attacks perpetrated by fanatical crusaders on their way to the Holy Land in the spring of 1096.[36] Is it any wonder that Bernhard Blumenkranz, the first great historian of anti-Jewish art, identified 1096 as the crucial turning point in the Christian representation of the Jew and found the inspiration for the new anti-Jewish imagery in the hatred and prejudice fanned by the First Crusade?[37]

FIG. 2

Unfortunately, there are several reasons why this theory does not convince. For one thing, it is hard to see how or why this iconographical sign might reflect or promote crusader anti-Judaism. There is nothing overtly anti-Jewish in Goderanus’s use of the “Jewish hat” in his biblical illustration. The hat appears on the heads of the prophets Joel, Abdias (Obadiah), and Zacharias—revered Old Testament figures whose writings were accepted by Goderanus and his Christian contemporaries as the true word of God and who were never denigrated in the medieval Christian tradition. And although Goderanus seems to endorse the idea of a holy war against the “pagans,” he doesn’t mention, much less praise, crusader attacks on Jews, which were certainly not part of the official Crusade program and which were roundly condemned by ecclesiastical authorities, the Emperor Henry IV (patron of Stavelot), and at least one monastic chronicler.[38] Nor should we be misled by the fact that the pointed “Jewish hat” looks somewhat odd to our eyes. In spite of its resemblance to the modern dunce cap, the shape of the hat would not have appeared ludicrous to medieval viewers, who were accustomed to seeing headgear of quite extreme sizes and shapes on a range of figures in art, and probably also in life. Indeed, the closest analogue to the pileum cornutum was the headgear of the pope—the papal tiara (to which, I argue below, it was in fact related).

FIG. 3

A more basic problem with Blumenkranz’s approach is the fact that Goderanus placed the same pointed hat on the heads of Hebrew prophets in an earlier manuscript, a Bible he made for the monastery of Lobbes (also in Belgium), which he completed in the year 1084.[39] [Fig. 3; see also color insert] Unless Goderanus was something of a prophet himself, able to foresee the First Crusade eleven years before it was preached (not to mention its unauthorized anti-Jewish digressions), we cannot look to crusader ideology to explain the introduction of the “Jewish hat.”

In fact, the “Jewish hat” was not invented for the Lobbes Bible either. Although the example of the Stavelot and Lobbes Bibles reveals how tricky it is to try to define a starting point for any artistic trend in so ill-documented a period as the Middle Ages, I have been able to trace the “Jewish hat” at least as far back as the year 1015. Nor is this the first appearance of the pointed hat, which has a long and complicated history in Christian art before it finally lands on the head of a Jew in the early eleventh century. In order to understand how and why it got there, and what it meant to the people who painted and viewed it, we need to examine the circumstances and concerns—artistic, social, and religious—of its moment of birth and explore the visual and social sources drawn upon by the artists.

3. Dressed in Authority

The earliest surviving appearance of the “Jewish hat” is in a manuscript known as the Second Gospel Book of Bishop Bernward of Hildesheim, which dates to about 1015.[40] Jewish figures wear distinctive pointed hats in two different illustrations in this manuscript. [Fig. 4] The first illustration shows, in its upper register, Saint John the Baptist preaching to a group of four men; below, Christ stands with four disciples.[41] In the preaching scene the Baptist, on the right, is young, beardless, and barefoot; his listeners on the left are bearded and dressed in elaborate gold-trimmed cloaks and red shoes. One of these figures carries a book, the foremost holds a long, thin staff, and all wear tallish, slightly backward-curved pointed hats.[42]

Who are these men? John’s audience is not specifically identified in the Gospel of Mark (the biblical book this image precedes), which says only “John was in the desert, baptizing and preaching the baptism of penance, unto remission of sins,” with the next verse noting that “all Judea went out to him … to be baptized.” In the Gospel of Matthew John’s auditors are called “Pharisees and Sadducees,” and in the Gospel of John, “priests and Levites.”[43] We can conclude, then, that these behatted figures are generally meant to be religious leaders of the Judean Jewish community.

In the second image, the figures can be identified more precisely. [Fig. 5] The Last Supper is depicted above and Judas’s betrayal below, as narrated in Luke 22:4–5: “And [Judas] went and discoursed with the chief priests and the magistrates, how he might betray him to them. And they were glad and covenanted to give him money.” In both scenes Judas, the greatest villain in Christian history, is visually distinguished only in that he wears greenish-bluish clothing, whereas the other disciples resemble a heavenly company, all in white.[44] By contrast, the “chief priest and magistrates” of the betrayal scene are clearly demarcated: they wear the same distinctive hats as the Judean elders listening to the Baptist’s sermon.

In this manuscript, then, the pointed hat is twice associated with “Jewish” New Testament figures. This is apparently the first time that any such association was made. But why? What does this association mean? The hat cannot possibly serve to identify the figures as Jews: as noted above, there is no evidence that Jews wore such headgear in Bernward’s day, the pointed hat had never been used as a Jewish artistic symbol before this moment, and, indeed, most Jewish figures in this manuscript wear no hats. Nor can the hat be seen as somehow acting as a vehicle for vilification. In the second scene the Jewish associates of Judas are of course unabashedly villainous. But it is less clear that the auditors of John the Baptist are equally depraved. Although the Gospel of Matthew is aggressively hostile toward the Pharisees and Sadducees against whom the Baptist rails, the Gospel of Luke, which the betrayal image prefaces, is far less so, and both texts claim that “all Judea” was eventually baptized, making these figures potential converts to Christianity. Indeed, practically the same hat appears in one more image in this manuscript: not on the heads of priests, Pharisees, or other opponents of Christ but on the heads of his first devotees: the Three Magi. [Fig. 6]

FIG. 4

FIG. 5

This third image provides the key to the meaning of the sign. For the hat that is habitually referred to as the “Jewish hat” is in fact primarily linked to the Three Magi in early medieval art.[45] Sometimes in the guise of the forward-falling Phrygian cap, but sometimes as straighter, tall, peaked caps or, as here, backward-falling pointed hats, the Magi’s pointed headgear appears as early as the third century on a Gallo-Syrian sarcophagus from southern France and can be found on objects as diverse as a Coptic ivory plaque from sixth-century Egypt, mosaics from sixth-century Ravenna, Italy, and a stone carving from eighth-century Spain.[46] The Magi and King Herod wear identical pointed caps in manuscripts almost exactly contemporary to the Bernward Gospels.[47]

Because the Gospels provide very little information about these “wise men” who traveled to Bethlehem to pay homage to the newborn king of the Jews, saying only that they came from the East and saw his birth written in a star, early Christians were free to develop a variety of ideas about their status and origin.[48] Tertullian (d. 220) assumed they were high-born Persian priests;[49] another early author known as Pseudo-Augustine believed that they came from the mysterious eastern land called Hevilath famed for its gold;[50] a third, anonymous text calls them Chaldeans.[51] Isidore of Seville, the great encyclopedist of the seventh century, sees them as astrologers,[52] while various other writers, inspired by Psalm 71:10–11 (“The kings of Tarshish and all the islands shall offer presents; the kings of the Arabians and of Saba shall bring gifts”), identify them as Arabian kings.[53] Accordingly, when Western artists imagined the garb of the Magi they dressed them in vaguely “Eastern” and “archaic” fashion, characterized especially by “Phrygian” tunics and leggings and by hats that recalled one of three kinds of antique Eastern headgear: [Fig. 7] the soft cap with a forward-falling peak known as the Phrygian cap (often shown on Persian characters or on classical personifications), the somewhat taller pointed cap said to have been worn by pagan priests, or the similar, though less soft, pointed tiaras that functioned as crowns on the heads of ancient kings.[54] Pointed caps were also adopted as court dress in the Byzantine Empire, perhaps as early as the tenth century.[55] The pointed hat or cap was thus associated in Christian thought and art with Easternness, antiquity, esoteric knowledge, priestly authority, and/or an exotic form of royalty—qualities eminently suited for the “wise men from the East” who came to pay homage to Christ, king of kings.[56]

FIG. 6

FIG. 7

If the painter of the Bernward Gospel Book drew on earlier sources for his depiction of the Magi, like any other creative artist he nevertheless used his models in his own way and modified inherited forms to suit his own needs and culture.[57] Here, the representation of the Magi is shaped by contemporary political ideology: the Ottonians, the new and ambitious Germanic imperial dynasty named for its founder, Otto I, sought in this period to solidify their position through ceremonial and artistic as well as military means. In this task they drew on ancient Roman rituals and forms—largely transmitted via the envied, revered, resented, and feared Byzantine Empire—to exalt themselves above all their rivals, even to the point of equating themselves with Christ himself.[58] Bernward’s manuscript echoes this conflation of emperor and savior, depicting the wise men standing not beside the infant Jesus, as was usual, but beneath him. They raise their hands to offer their gifts in a way directly analogous to the personifications of the subject peoples often depicted in Ottonian art paying tribute to the Holy Roman emperor.[59] [Fig. 8] Bernward’s image thus underscores the fact that though the Magi may be endowed with regal and/or priestly wisdom, power, and authority, they recognize and submit to a greater Lord above themselves. Just as the emperor demonstrated his imperial status by receiving the offerings of leaders beneath him, so the preeminence of Christ is confirmed by this act of tribute. Paradoxically, because the illustrations of this manuscript, unusually for Ottonian art, emphasize the humanity and humility of Christ (portraying him, for example, as a swaddled infant rather than an enthroned youth), the dignity and glory of those who bow to him have all the more to be highlighted; hence the Magi’s particularly fantastical and luxurious attire.[60] Their orientalized and stately clothing and headgear show simultaneously their wisdom in recognizing the supreme king and their worthiness to pay homage to him, while the archaic nature of their appearance underscores their supersession by his coming.

FIG. 8

If the pointed hat signifies antique or Eastern wisdom and authority, what are we to make of the fact that “Jewish” figures wear it as well? Why do John’s auditors and Judas’s paymasters share the headgear of ancient priests and Asiatic kings? One possible explanation is that the Judeans’ hats, like their gold-trimmed clothing and long golden staff, were primarily markers of rank, intended to single out these figures as eminent priests and leaders—at the 1014 coronation of Henry II as Holy Roman emperor, the king was surrounded by twelve senators carrying staffs of office.[61] In so hierarchical and status-conscious a culture as Ottonian Germany, a person was measured by the dignity of his enemies as much as of his friends—for a mere knight to slay a royal kinsman and prince was a particularly abhorrent offense.[62] Bishop Bernward or his artist may have felt that the men who heard but rejected the message of Christ’s forerunner and who engineered the death of Christ himself, though grievously culpable sinners, had to be endowed with a grandeur at least equal to those who served him if his dignity was to be preserved. The image may also seek to identify Jesus’s opponents with the “East,” reflecting the Ottonians’ vexed relationship with the far older and wealthier Byzantine Empire, whose status (and princesses) they coveted even as they denied its claims to precedence.[63] The hats of the Jewish priests and Pharisees, then, help to reconfigure the career of Christ as a (successful) contest for sovereignty and dominion, paralleling the Ottonians’ own struggle to dominate not Jews but rather their own imperial predecessors, their noble challengers, their clerical retainers, and their Greek rivals.

But I do not think this explanation fully satisfies; it is a bit too impoverishing to reduce the inventive images of this Gospel Book solely to a matter of rank and dignity, even when the king in question is Christ. Perhaps some Ottonian Christians did indeed view divinity through such a monochromatic lens, but for most human beings, then as now, religious imagination is more complex. The Bernward Gospels were made for a complex and sophisticated man indeed. Bernward of Hildesheim (d. 1022) was a powerful political player who at the very end of his life became a monk and who eventually came to be venerated as a saint. Born into a noble Saxon family, Bishop Bernward entered clerical orders as a young man and received a first-rate education in Christian literature and theology, as well as unusually extensive training in the “mechanical arts”—manuscript illumination and goldsmithing. After a brief stint in the service of the archbishop of Mainz, he became tutor and adviser to the young Emperor Otto III, by whom he was named bishop of Hildesheim in 993. Bernward understood as fully as any of his contemporaries the multifaceted nature of power, and throughout his career he creatively and effectively drew on personal, political, administrative, intellectual, and aesthetic resources to promote his chief interests, which included defending the prerogatives of the church of Hildesheim, promoting monastic and clerical reform in his diocese, and, most especially, adorning his cathedral and the monastery he founded nearby with the most splendid and innovative possible works of art. Bernward is credited with, among other things, reviving the art of bronze casting in Germany after a hiatus of almost two hundred years and helping to spark the reappearance of monumental sculpture across Europe. He is now known primarily as one of the greatest of all medieval artistic patrons.[64]

Bernward was also an innovator in another way: he was in the forefront of a new trend in Western Christianity to focus devotion on the vulnerable and human as well as on the divine and triumphant Christ.[65] The causes of this new interest in Christ’s humanity are the subject of considerable debate.[66] Some scholars have suggested that the approach of the thousandth anniversaries of Christ’s birth and crucifixion redirected attention to his human life and death. Others hypothesize that increasing agricultural returns and improved life expectancy following improvements in the weather may have rendered Christians less inclined to seek escape from the material world and more open to thinking about Christ’s earthly existence, rather than just his heavenly reign. The relief and optimism brought about by the cessation of Viking attacks and Otto I’s decisive victory over invading Magyars in 955 may have had a similar effect. Intensified contact with the Byzantine world, which had a deeper tradition of engagement with Christ’s humanity than the early medieval West, is also likely associated with the new religiosity. Whatever the causes of the new devotional emphasis, its effects are less in doubt: toward the end of the tenth century and in the first half of the eleventh, the mortal birth, fleshly body, and—especially—the corporeal death of Jesus Christ received increased emphasis in western Christian worship. With this trend grew a desire to touch and see tangible traces of Jesus’s earthly existence. The visual encounter with Jesus’s image consequently gained in religious import. Such physical contact and visual encounters took a variety of forms, including intensified collection and veneration of relics of the True Cross (among the only material fragments associated with Jesus’s physical body to remain in this world);[67] a surge of interest in pilgrimage to the Holy Land, site of Jesus’s birth, career, and death; the veneration (new in northern Europe) of freestanding religious images, especially images of the Virgin and Child;[68] the abandonment of the Carolingian reluctance to extensively illustrate the human life of Christ;[69] and a heightened liturgical role accorded crosses and crucifixes—including greater use of the altar cross, the addition of images of Jesus to processional crosses, and the introduction into churches of large-scale crucifixes suspended from the ceiling or choir arch.[70]

Few eleventh-century Christians were more devoted to the human Christ or eager to visually contemplate his bodily image than Bernward of Hildesheim. The sight of Christ was so central to Bernward’s faith that he enshrined it in the epitaph he chose for his own tombstone: “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that on the last day I will be raised up from the earth, and I will again be enveloped in my skin, and in my flesh I will see God my Savior, whom I myself shall see and my eyes shall perceive, and no other. This my hope is stored in my breast.”[71] While he was anticipating that final face-to-face encounter, Bernward meanwhile tried to approach God made man through images. As the historian Henry Mayr-Harting has remarked, “Bernward’s patronage of art seems almost in the nature of a mystical experience.”[72] The splendid works of art he commissioned were not simply designed to glorify Christianity through opulence, they were intended to move Christians through creative and stirring visual expression. The large wooden crucifix that he gave to the canonesses of Ringelheim sometime between 1000 and 1020 is an extraordinarily touching and human image, and the silver crucifix made for Bernward sometime after 1007, which shelters a True Cross relic in a cavity in the corpus of Christ, is among the first such objects in Latin Christendom to show a vulnerable and dying Jesus slumped on the cross.[73] [Fig. 9] This combination of an intense devotional focus on the human body of Christ, together with obviously potent aesthetic sensibilities, led Bernward to place visual experience at the center of his spirituality.

These two tendencies—to draw pious inspiration from Christ’s humanity and to exalt the spiritual importance of vision—come together in Bernward’s Second Gospel Book; they are also, I believe, directly related to the function of the pointed hat. A recent publication on the manuscript notes that in the Nativity/Adoration scene the Magi are posed strangely: not so as to give gifts but so that they can look at the star above them.[74] I would modify this observation slightly: their glances are actually trained on the Christ Child himself, lying in a crib illuminated by the light of the celestial star. There is, I think, considerable significance to this fact. One other depiction of Christ’s starlit crib appears in the manuscript—in the frontispiece to the Gospel of John, directly below a shining image of a beautiful young Christ in Majesty. This second image is a rare and creative illustration of John 1:14: “And we saw his glory, glory as of the only begotten Son of the Father, full of his grace and truth.”[75] [Fig. 10] The rays of starlight shining on the swaddled Child adored by the Magi, then, indicate that in token of and as reward for their faith, the Magi were granted heavenly illumination. When the wise men from the East pierce the frame of the image and gaze on the human infant Christ, they can simultaneously see the radiant, divine, glory-filled God—just what Bernward himself (like Saint Paul before him) so yearned for.

FIG. 9

This same vision of the divine and glorious Son of the Father is precisely what is being offered the Jewish elders in the Preaching of John the Baptist scene. Through the words and person of the prophet, and in the layout of the very page they are painted on—which depicts Christ standing just below them—the Judeans are offered a view of the God made man. However, the attitude of these elders contrasts markedly with that of the Magi whom they otherwise so resemble. Whereas the Magi look to the space above them, recognize the divinity in the newborn child, and submit with joy, the Judeans are poised in indecision: they stand stiff and frozen, clinging to a closed book and a staff that is slipping awkwardly out of its holder’s hand—signs indicative of lost wisdom and waning authority.[76] And though the elders look toward John, they are unable to follow his downward gaze and pierce the frame of the image as the Magi do to behold Christ, who is welcomed by humbler and more discerning souls in the scene directly below.

FIG. 10

The three “chief priests and magistrates” depicted in the Betrayal of Judas scene, who also fail to look at, much less to see and recognize, Christ (visible just above) contrast even more sharply with the Magi. The treasure they give in gift is not the tribute of acolytes but the blood money of executioners, and the grief they cause is movingly expressed in the tears pouring down the Virgin Mary’s face in the Crucifixion scene on the very next folio.

In these three images featuring pointed hats, then, Bernward’s manuscript starkly lays out three different possible reactions to the sight of Christ in the flesh. And this, I believe, is the primary function of the unusual and unprecedented sign of the pointed hat in this manuscript: to render the Magi and the Jewish elders commensurable, forcing the viewer to do exactly what I have just done—compare and contrast the two sets of figures, note their visual similarities, and meditate upon their spiritual differences.[77] Both groups wear hats, signs of knowledge and authority, and so can lay claim to antique learning and high religious office. Both groups are offered a glimpse of the truth, in the form of the sight of Christ. Yet each group wields its powers of perception to radically different ends. By looking so alike and reacting so differently, these behatted figures crystallize the choices facing anyone who contemplates the truth, who in the flesh or on the page comes face-to-face with Christ.

One can certainly read into this use of the pointed hat an anti-Jewish message, a visual concretization of the verbal critiques (of Pharisaic/Judaic blindness, arrogance, stagnancy) that inform so many Christian texts, including the Gospels themselves. But I suspect that contemporary Jews would not have been the only, or even the primary, people associated with the elders. It is surely no accident that just in this period imperial bishops, whose political, ecclesiastical, and liturgical importance was increasing in the decades around 1000 and who consequently began to display augmented signs of authority, were adopting a new form of headgear.[78] Whereas before the late tenth century bishops had worn circular bands as signs of temporal power, in Bernward’s lifetime they began to wear the conical cap known as the miter, a modified version of the papal tiara, which in turn was based on the same antique sources that inspired the hats of the Magi.[79] When Bernward of Hildesheim looked upon the headgear of the men who were offered his own heart’s desire—the chance to look upon the Son of God in the flesh—he saw not his Jewish subjects and neighbors but himself. Because the pointed hat signals not Jewishness but knowledge and authority, it functions not to distinguish Jews from Christians but to link the medieval Christian bishop to his ancient forerunners, Gentile and Judean. By tracing the path of the pointed hat from magus to elder to magistrate, he might contemplate in turn the great prize, the difficult test, and the terrible fate that faced a prelate of power and learning, pride and wealth. The images in this manuscript, and the innovative iconography they unveil, bring together ancient garb, timeless scripture, and contemporary culture to simultaneously challenge, taunt, and give hope to the deeply pious, politically powerful, and intensely visual man for whom they were made.

4. Beyond the Page: Painted Hats, Living Symbol, and Unseeing Jews

I do not think, then, that we can read Bernward’s manuscript in the first instance as an anti-Jewish work. Indeed, there is little reason to suspect that Bernward harbored any particular personal antagonism toward Jews. He left no comment on Jews in his works, though he surely must have known some, perhaps quite well—he was closely associated with two archbishops of Mainz during the years when the famous Rabbi Gershom was living and teaching there, and a Jew named Kalonymus was close to Bernward’s student Emperor Otto III. Relations between Jews and some Ottonian prelates seem to have been quite good. One well-known story emphasizes the intensity of the grief experienced by the Jewish community of Magdeburg at the death of the archbishop.[80]

Nevertheless, there is some evidence that even before the making of Bernward’s Second Gospel Book, both the religious sensibility underlying its artistic innovations and the artistic trends to which it belonged prompted some Christians to think anew about Jewish “blindness.” The question of Jewish vision was the subject of a vigorous textual debate between a Christian convert to Judaism named Wecelin and a Catholic cleric named Henry, who was attached to the court of Emperor Henry II (r. 1002–24).[81] At some point after his conversion Wecelin had disseminated a letter justifying his conversion and lambasting what he saw as the inconsistencies and errors of Christianity. The emperor, enraged by the attack, asked one of his priests to write a response. According to the chronicle in which both letters are recorded, the first subject debated in the exchange was Christ’s incarnation. Wecelin’s reason for rejecting the idea that God took on human flesh was that according to Exodus 33:20, “no man could see [God] and live.” In his response, the Christian cleric Henry reaffirmed both Jesus’s visibility during his time on earth and his continued visibility in medieval Christendom by quoting 1 Corinthians 1:23: “we preach Christ Crucified, an offense for Jews and foolishness to gentiles.” In this epistle Paul was referring to Jewish disgust at the idea of equating any man with God and to Gentile resistance to the idea of deifying a lowborn criminal executed in a humiliating fashion. But Henry changed the words of Paul’s declaration slightly: instead of calling the crucifixum a scandalum (offense) and stultitiam (foolishness), he added very concrete words, calling the crucifix a lapis offensionis et petra scandali, that is, “a stone of offense and a rock of scandal.”[82] The addition of these material terms recalls to the mind not just the historical fact of the Crucifixion but its representation in physical objects: the crucifixes that were increasingly visible in his day were often encrusted with gems, if not generally carved from stone. Moreover, Henry goes on to tell his Jewish opponent: “Through the preaching [that you call foolishness] the arrogance of the world has already been overthrown, and upon the foreheads of kings you will see the trophy of the cross.” This phrase, too, invokes a tangible contemporary object: in the early eleventh century, a filigree cross was added to the top of the crown of the Holy Roman emperor, Henry’s patron.[83] Henry spends the rest of the section criticizing Jewish “blindness,” by which he means their corrupted, corporeal way of looking. For perhaps the first time in Western Christendom, a diatribe against Jews’ inadequate vision and understanding cites not just the historical Christ or his scriptural prefiguring but also his artistic representation.

The images of unseeing Jews in Bernward’s Gospel Book echo such accusations. But they do much more than merely illustrate a theological position. Art can affect as well as reflect the culture that creates and views it. The combination of exalting the sight of the Christ while visually singling out those “blinded” Jews who could not properly contemplate it seems to have impelled some viewers to consider Jews in new and more negative ways. The new iconography lent immediacy and visceral force to a fairly traditional textual charge and so had significant repercussions for Christian attitudes toward real, living Jews. Though Bernward visually marked Christ’s Jewish interlocutors primarily as a spur for meditation on self rather than on Jewish “otherness,” not all his contemporaries were equally introspective. For them, shining a new spotlight on those ancient Jews who (in Christian thought) saw Christ in the flesh and yet didn’t believe seemed to highlight primarily the extent of Jewish “difference” and the depths of their iniquity. Thus, several contemporary texts and at least one contemporary image confirm that art was becoming a flashpoint for anti-Jewish animus in this period, often in the form of accusations of Jewish hostility and even violence toward Christ’s image. The monastic chronicler Adémar of Chabannes (fl. ca. 1025) asserted that an earthquake that struck Rome on Good Friday in the year 1020 was caused by Jews who mocked a crucifix, bringing God’s wrath on the entire city. According to Adémar, the city was secured only when the perpetrators were executed.[84] At about the same time, a responsum of Rabbi Joseph Tob-Elem (d. 1030) notes that the Jews of the ecclesiastical province of Sens experienced “untold calamities” (in fact, a stiff fine) because they were somehow blamed for the destruction of a statue or cross (or perhaps a church ornament or a religious image; the source is unclear) in the region.[85] Although there is reason to doubt the truth of both of these accusations, the very existence of such rumors, assumptions, or fictions suggests that Jews were increasingly regarded as “enemies” of Christian art and, most especially, of its most holy image, the crucifix.[86] It is probably for this reason that at just this time Western Christendom finally began to embrace a centuries-old Byzantine exemplum (moralizing anecdote) about a crucifix that bled when mocked and struck by Jews. First mentioned in a sermon at the pro-image, anti-iconoclast Seventh Council of Nicaea in 787, the tale was translated into Latin as early as the ninth century but for two hundred years remained largely unknown in western Europe. In the eleventh century, however, it entered the Latin liturgy and quickly spread throughout the continent.[87] The Jews’ antagonism toward the image of Christ had become an integral part of Catholic worship.

If Bernward’s Second Gospel Book cannot quite be considered a visual expression of hostility toward unseeing Jews, another image in a contemporary manuscript almost certainly can. From the very beginning of the popularity of Crucifixion imagery in the West, it had been traditional to include female personifications of Ecclesia (Church) and Synagoga (the Old Law) among the figures flanking the crucified Christ. In ninth- and tenth-century art, these two figures were generally identical to each other in dress and appearance, symbolizing the intimate connections between the Old Covenant and the New. The smooth and uncontested transition from the former to the latter was demonstrated by Synagoga’s actions: she usually walks calmly off to the right, while looking back to keep her gaze fixed on Jesus. [Fig. 11] However, a fundamental shift in the representation of Synagoga occurred in the later tenth century: Synagoga becomes increasingly deprived of her signs of respect: her once-intact staff is now shown as broken, and her crown as slipping off her head.[88] In the early eleventh century one more twist was added: Synagoga lost her sight. The earliest surviving representation of a blinded Synagoga dates to Bernward of Hildesheim’s period, appearing in a manuscript known as the Uta Codex, which was made in Regensburg for the abbess of Niedermünster around 1025.[89] In one of the Codex’s frontispieces, the Crucifixion is flanked on Christ’s right by three personifications: the Sun, Ecclesia (called Grace), and Life, as well as an image of the resurrection of the dead. On Christ’s left are likewise three personifications: the Moon, Synagoga (called Law), and Death, plus a depiction of the Torn Veil of the Temple. [Fig. 12] This complex program serves to underscore the importance of visual devotion. According to the art historian Adam Cohen, the chief function of the image was to demonstrate to the reader that the once unapproachable and cosmic God had not only become incarnate on earth but also was physically present for the nuns at Niedermünster.[90] Physically present, that is, in the Eucharist, but also visually present in this very image. But the Uta Codex does more than use manuscript illumination to instruct and inspire Christians. It is one of the first works of art to condemn Jews’ lack of sight. For as Synagoga walks off to the right, her eyes are entirely blocked by the frame of the page. This image graphically demonstrates not only that “The Law Brings Destruction,” as Synagoga’s scroll announces, but that the cause of that destructiveness is her refusal to do what Bishop Bernward, the nuns of Niedermünster, and so many of their fellow Christians longed to do: gaze reverently at the image of Christ.[91]

FIG. 11

FIG. 12

What do we learn from this look at the early-eleventh-century invention of the sign of the “Jewish hat”? First, it suggests that living medieval Jews were not the main inspiration for the first visually distinctive depictions of “Jewish” figures. Bernward’s artists based the basic shape of the hat not on Jewish apparel but on artistic precedents, and in deploying the hat in new ways they were influenced by internal—that is, wholly Christian—developments and imagery, both imperial and ecclesiastical. As Christians found themselves contemplating ever more visible and religiously significant images of Christ, they found it useful to consider, and to visually identify, other figures who also had been presented with the sight of Christ. A sign of high office, when applied to Pharisees and priests, drew attention to powerful and privileged viewers of Christ, so that those in similar positions of power and privilege might be forced to contemplate their own relative worth. At the same time, although contemporary Jews may not have inspired these images, the images may well have impelled Christians to regard contemporary Jews in a new, more suspicious light, just as the new prominence of the crucified God highlighted the Jews’ very different assessment of that image and figure.

Second, our inquiry indicates that the sign of the “Jewish hat” was not inescapably negative and did not necessarily enshrine a sense of utter difference. The pointed hat was associated with positive figures as well as nefarious ones, and if the comparison erected between the Magi and the Jewish elders was undoubtedly to the detriment of the latter, there is little sense in these Gospel images that the Jews’ failure lay in some inherent or inescapable “otherness” or iniquity. Even in the Uta Codex, Synagoga is blinded by her decision to turn away from Christ, and not by any inborn incapacity for faith or vision. If Christians came to hate and fear Jews (and I am not giving away any surprise ending by acknowledging that many, perhaps most, medieval Christians did eventually come to hate and fear Jews), it was not because they were seen as different from Gentiles in essence or ability.

Finally, it is surely no coincidence that the first specific iconography related to Jews—a hat resting on the foreheads of figures presented with a prospect of Christ, and a Synagoga blinded by her own refusal to look—appears just as the role of art in general, and images of the crucified Christ in particular, are beginning to take center stage in medieval Christian practice and to enter the hitherto text-bound realm of Jewish-Christian debate. But these ruminations did not lead to any single destination: the considerably more hostile reading of Jews’ relation to Christ’s image offered by some of Bernward’s contemporaries demonstrates the variability with which the subject of Jewish vision can be approached. Moreover, as the nature and role of Christian art evolved, so too did the depiction of the Jew.

5. Antique Prophets and “Modern” Priests

In identifying Bernward’s Second Gospel Book as the birthplace, or at least the earliest surviving example, of the “Jewish hat,” I do not mean to suggest that this manuscript or Bernward’s preoccupations rigidly dictated the sign’s meaning or subsequent use. In fact, the iconography devised for Judean elders in Bernward’s Gospel Book did not immediately revolutionize the representation of Jews in art. Bernward himself employed it in no other work of art that we know of. [Fig. 13] Conical hats slightly different in appearance do show up on the heads of New Testament Jews identified as “princes of the priests and elders of the people who plot to take and kill Jesus” in at least one other eleventh-century manuscript—a liturgical book from Reichenau dating to about 1056.[92] Presumably they serve there to signal the figures’ status and high office. And a fresco of John the Baptist Preaching in the Danish church of Jelling dating to about 1100 seems fairly closely modeled on the corresponding image in Bernward’s Second Gospel Book, complete with pointed hats.[93] But there are few other surviving mid-eleventh-century uses of the peaked or pointed hat in association with Jewish figures; the sign continued to function primarily as a marker for Eastern learning, antiquity, and authority. Then, toward the end of the century, pointed hats reappear in association with Jews—this time not just New Testament Judaic elders and priests but Old Testament prophets, figures who had never before been endowed with such attributes. And so we come back, finally, to Goderanus, our innovative and allegedly anti-Semitic Belgian scribe and monk.

FIG. 13

Like the artworks commissioned by Bernward, the Lobbes Bible, completed by Goderanus in the year 1084, lays claim to a series of influential firsts.[94] It was one of the first illuminated Bible manuscripts made in the Holy Roman Empire to include the Hebrew scriptures (previously scribes and illuminators had focused on the Gospels and liturgical texts).[95] It is the earliest surviving manuscript whose decoration consists solely of historiated initials (that is, large initial letters with figures and scenes painted inside), and the number and variety of these initials is likewise without precedent. Many scenes and themes in the Lobbes initials, such as Daniel seated among the lions and the brazen serpent perched on top of a column (Numbers 21:4–9), are the first documented of their kind. Its style, too, is new, displaying a solidness of figure and color that will come to dominate Romanesque painting.[96] And if Goderanus was not the first to use the pointed hat as a Jewish sign, he seems to have been the first to transfer the hat from New Testament priests and Pharisees, communal leaders and office holders who might be expected to display signs of authority, to Hebrew prophets—spiritual advisers who had never before been endowed with such signs. What induced this transfer, and what, in this new context, did the pointed hat come to mean?

For reasons detailed above, I believe we can rule out anti-Judaism as a primary motivation. That is, in spite of the pointed hat’s previous (occasional) association with the Gospel opponents of Christ, it was not here intended to mark “Jews” as evil or different. In fact, I think it unlikely that Goderanus was thinking of figures we would consider “Jews” at all. Instead, to Goderanus and his contemporaries, these representations of Hebrew prophets would have suggested something very different.

As we have seen, the principal associations of the pointed hat were priestly or royal dignity, Eastern exoticism, and antique authority. Bernward drew on all of these qualities in his search to express his sense of episcopal status, privilege, and aspirations. In the Lobbes initials, Goderanus emphasizes only the last of these traits. Unlike the Magi and priests in Bernward’s manuscript, these prophets wear relatively simple clothing—colored cloaks over pale robes, displaying little in the way of luxury, rank, or exoticism. Also unlike Bernward’s priests and elders, these prophets carry no staffs or tokens of power or high office, nor do they sit on thrones. Indeed, one would not expect them to: the Hebrew prophets, many of whom were of modest birth, were distinguished not for high office or glorious lineage but for their spiritual insight and for the courage and righteousness with which they faced down power and privilege and championed the humble. Goderanus’s prophets, accordingly, display not staffs or scepters but emblems that had long been associated in Christian art with antique wisdom. Each carries the words of his own ancient prophecy inscribed on a scroll, the classical form of the book,[97] and, in contrast with the Jewish elders in Bernward’s manuscript, some of whom had beards and some of whom did not, all the Lobbes prophets are bearded (Jeremiah has a five o’clock shadow rather than a beard, but this is an exception that proves the rule: he is mourning in the initial, and according to his own prophetic book, shaving or plucking the beard was a sign of mourning: Jeremiah 41:5; 48:37). Thus, Goderanus combined the new sign of the pointed hat with two other symbols (the scroll and the beard), neither of which would have struck the eleventh-century viewer as particularly evocative of either contemporary Jews or the First Crusade, much less as conveying hatred of Jews.[98]

This assertion that the beard would not have been regarded—yet—as peculiarly Jewish may come as a surprise to those accustomed to considering beard wearing a central marker of Jewish religiosity. But in early medieval Jewish law and custom the status of the beard, like that of the head covering, is surprisingly indeterminate. The Hebrew Bible forbids the clipping or shaving of the corners or sides of the beard (so as to produce a pointed beard), but it does not require that Jewish males wear beards, nor does it ban the trimming of beards outright.[99] In the Mishnah (redacted ca. 220), only close shaving of the beard with a razor is forbidden; trimming with scissors and even the rough use of a razor seem to be permitted.[100] Some Babylonian Talmudic sages forbade the removal of the beard by any means; others were less strict.[101] Although the reception of the Talmud in the West probably did inspire European Jews to endow beard wearing with religious significance, and it is likely that pious Jewish men did begin to favor beards, medieval rabbinic texts do not provide clear information or guidance on the subject. For much of the Middle Ages it seems to have been quite common for Jewish men to remove their beards with scissors, and perhaps even with a razor.[102] Though pietists of the thirteenth century endorsed beards as signs of wisdom and piety and condemned shaving as a form of assimilation, we have no such texts from the eleventh century; moreover, the pietists’ frequent laments suggest that even in the thirteenth century a disturbing (to the reformers) number of Jewish men eschewed beards in spite of the strictures.[103]

Even if most Jewish men, or at least the most pious among them, were bearded in the eleventh century, beards could hardly have been seen by either Jews or Christians as distinctly Jewish features, since at that period beards were common among Christian men as well. There are frequent references to beards in Latin sources. To cite just a few: the Book of Miracles of Saint Faith (written ca. 1010) notes that a layman who became a cleric performed the ritual of shaving his beard and head.[104] An early-eleventh-century Count of Flanders (Baldwin IV, d. 1036) was nicknamed “Belle-Barbe” (“Beautiful Beard”). And early medieval law codes specify quite stringent penalties for the gross insult of pulling or plucking someone’s beard.[105] Beards feature prominently in many ruler portraits, and in genealogical trees emperors are shown with longer beards than kings, and kings with longer beards than dukes, etc.[106] This is due to their cultural significance: because beards can be grown only by mature males, they had long been regarded in medieval Europe, as in many other cultures and eras, as signs of virility, age, and wisdom.[107] So, for example, the reformer Peter Damian (d. 1072) interpreted David’s beard as a sign of strength and a prefiguring of Christ’s divine wisdom.[108]

However, in the mid-to-late eleventh century a subtle but detectable shift in beard practice was apparently taking place, and the beard began to acquire new and more fraught significance.[109] There had always been a divergence regarding shaving in the Eastern and Western churches: clerics were generally bearded in the East and clean-shaven in the West. With the exacerbation of tensions between the Latin and Greek churches in the eleventh century, the significance of this disparity between clerical beard customs intensified, and Roman Catholic authorities began to insist far more stringently than previously that clerics shave their beards.[110] At the same time, shaving was beginning to become more fashionable among laymen in the Holy Roman Empire. We know this because moralists, by nature conservative, disapproved of the change: Abbot Siegfried of Gorze, writing to his friend Abbot Poppo of Stavelot in 1043 (head of the same monastery where Goderanus worked fifty years later), called the cutting of beards “a shameful custom of the vulgar French.”[111] Around the same time, a man was deemed to have failed a judicial ordeal not because he had actually committed the crime of which he was accused but because he had “shaved like a cleric rather than letting his beard grow as a layman should.”[112] The fashion of shaving nevertheless spread; within a couple of decades it seems to have become fairly common across northern Europe, and the beard came to be viewed as a sign of senility, distance, or difference. By 1105 a monk could write disapprovingly not of shaving but of beards, which, he said, made Christians look like Saracens (not, it is worth noting, like Jews).[113] In Goderanus’s day, then, beards, though still common among Christians, and though still embodying age and wisdom, accrued some different and fairly exotic connotations: an aura of worldliness, a whiff of the outdated past, or a hint of Muslim or Greek “Easternness.” Bearded faces contrasted starkly with the clean-shaven visages of Latin priests, which consequently came across as modern, Western, and spartan.

It is this constellation of qualities, and this contrast, rather than Jewish religious practice, that was evoked by Goderanus’s employment of the conjoined signs of the beard, the scroll, and the antique cap and/or turban to embody Hebrew prophecy. The prophets’ overall appearances suggest a new approach to the biblical past. Bishop Bernward had viewed biblical history (and so represented biblical Jews) in relation to very timely questions of power, office, and sovereignty, and especially to his pressing desire to believe that the mighty could visualize God. He thus envisioned Judean elders as comparable to Ottonian bishops (even though they acted erroneously). By contrast, the Belgian monk Goderanus contemplated Hebrew scripture (and represented scriptural Hebrews) through the lens of distance, age, and time and saw Hebrew prophets as distinct from Western Christian clerics (even though they foretold the truth). The prophets’ appearance, like the overall presentation of scripture in the Lobbes Bible, thus underscores that Hebrew history is long past, and helps to visually conjure the dynamic nature of chronological progression.[114]

This emphasis on the linear movement of time is likewise apparent in Goderanus’s rendering of Old Testament events, both here and in his second great work, the Stavelot Bible of 1097.[115] As Wayne Dynes has shown, the Pentateuch initials in the Lobbes Bible are suffused with typology—that is, they present scenes from Hebrew scripture as “types” or “figures” for New Testament events.[116] Thus, the sacrifice of a bull in the Leviticus initial prefigures the Eucharist, the Raising of the Brazen Serpent in the Numbers initial prefigures the Crucifixion, and the depiction of Moses and Aaron in the Temple in the Deuteronomy initial prefigures the Church.

The practice of citing Old Testament events as figures for Christian history was not, of course, invented by Goderanus. It can be traced back to the New Testament itself. The epistles of Paul insist that God’s plan for the salvation of the world was foreshadowed in the Old Testament.[117] The Gospel of John systematically compares and contrasts Moses’s life and deeds with those of Christ (see John 1:17, 3:14, 5:46, 6:32, 8:5, 19:33–36). And the Epistle to the Hebrews lays out an extended typological theory in which the Old Testament is a base, earthly foreshadowing of the New. Typological exegesis quickly became standard among the Christian fathers.[118] But while all medieval Christian exegetes agreed on the essential truth and continued relevance of the Old Testament, they differed on its nature and status as a sign. Some early Christian theologians stressed the historicity of the Old Testament events, insisting that though they certainly served to herald a deeper Christian truth, they also actually happened and had meaning and validity in their own right. Others tended to subordinate history to allegory, seeing Old Testament figures as shadowy mysteries that had to be interpreted and the literal text as a “veil” that had to be lifted and whose surface meaning or outward appearance could obscure or mislead.

Goderanus’s wielding of visual typology balanced these two approaches. His employment of archaizing imagery and literalistic details drawn directly from the biblical text displays a noteworthy respect for literal fact, an insistence on the reality of Old Testament events, underscoring his highly developed chronological sense.[119] Hebrew history was real, the images suggest, and it had value in its own right. But at the same time Goderanus never fails to privilege the Christian allegorical reading of scripture over the literal sense. Via visual parallels between Old Testament and New Testament scenes, the initials highlight how Hebrew history served both to prefigure salvific history and to model Christian behavior. The iconography nonetheless clearly visually distinguishes Old Testament types from their Gospel parallels, underscoring the limitations, temporal as well as spiritual, of the Old Law.[120] Hebrew history was situated firmly in the past; its very age was confirmation of the unerring march of Christian time.

In emphasizing the linear movement of time, Goderanus was part of a larger contemporary tendency to regard the past as far distant. This tendency was evident in several realms, most notably biblical scholarship and ecclesiastical politics.[121] A host of new monastic foundations and cathedral schools were created in the eleventh century, all of which needed new Bible manuscripts. Production of these manuscripts created a heightened awareness of how error-ridden existing copies were. Scribes and scholars, therefore, sought a more correct and “authentic” scriptural text and looked to the Hebraica Veritas, the literal text of Hebrew scripture, to show the way. Some undertook study of the Hebrew language and even consulted with contemporary Jews.[122] So, for example, the monk and chronicler Sigebert of Gembloux is known to have consulted Jewish scholars about the text and even the interpretation of the Bible while he was teaching in Metz around the year 1070,[123] and Stephen Harding, prior and then abbot of the first Cistercian monastery, asked Jews about the proper wording of scripture when he sought to fix the Vulgate text in or around 1109.[124] But like Goderanus’s imagery, scholarly attention to the “original” biblical text had the paradoxical effect of emphasizing the antiquity and remoteness of the Hebrew scriptures. The consultations with Jewish scholars, while testifying to cordial and perhaps even close relations between Jews and Christians, thus may have helped to stamp Jews as antique and even fossilized in Christian minds.[125]

A sense of the passage of time likewise permeated ecclesiastical debates of pressing import to imperial monks and clerics.[126] New monastic reform groups claiming to be reinstituting original monastic practice began to appear in Lotharingia, eastern France, and western Germany in the later eleventh century. These new orders criticized the customs and costumes of more established monasteries as “novelties.” The criticisms were, naturally, rejected by the traditionalists, who portrayed the reformers as alarmingly radical.[127] A similar pattern accompanied the papal reform movement, which sought to purify the secular clergy. Papal reformers looked to ancient texts to sanction their innovations; critics turned to antiquity to condemn them.[128] Both sides claimed to be restoring the “true” practices of the ancient fathers, even (or especially) when promoting significant innovations.[129] But the more the authority of the past was invoked to justify reform, the more distant that past came to seem: the rapidity with which new events unfolded made it impossible to deny the processes of change. Pope Gregory VII famously noted in reply to the charge that he was introducing novelties into church practice: “Christ said, ‘I am the truth and the life.’ He did not say, ‘I am custom.’”[130] And even as the reformer Peter Damian cited Old Testament precedent as authority for new devotional practices, he also revealed the kind of nostalgia for a lost golden age of antiquity that can come only from a recognition of change: “The translation of relics is an occasion for joy because through it the things that happened long ago … somehow seem recent and new.”[131] The popularity of pilgrimages to the Holy Land in just this period testified to longing for the sacred past but also crystallized its temporal and geographical distance.

Historian John Van Engen has remarked of the intellectual and conceptual adjustments taking place in the years between 1050 and 1150: “Contemporaries sought words and images to distinguish their times and achievements from the world of ‘antiquity.’”[132] Among those distinguishing images were historical and genealogical charts that organized sequences of events and peoples,[133] illuminations that visualized Christ’s ancestry,[134] and, I would argue, painted biblical prophets who displayed ancient distinguishing signs. That is, Goderanus used consciously archaizing iconography and carefully constructed typological scenes to visually codify the transition from the Hebrew (and Eastern) past to the Christian (and Western) present. If the prophets’ hats, scrolls, and beards proclaim their antique authority, they also confirm the passing of their age and the advent of a new era.

As in the case of Bernward’s Second Gospel Book, it is hard to associate Goderanus’s iconographical move with any particular anti-Jewish intent. The antiquity of the Hebrew prophets was both taken for granted and positively assessed, and no new negative message is latent in Goderanus’s assignment to them of the antique hat. The new Jewish iconography was not a reflection of Crusader-inspired anti-Jewish hatred. Rather, the Crusades themselves were inspired (at least in part) by the same renewed interest in the human Christ who so moved Bernward and in the historical reality and geographical specificity of the biblical antiquity that underlay Goderanus’s new iconography. But in the decades following the making of the Lobbes and Stavelot Bibles, a significant change took place. The renewed importance of the historical “event” and the biblical “letter” spurred greater meditation on the relationship of the material to the spiritual, of the visible, tangible world to the ineffable heavenly realm. Old Testament “figures” became weapons in intra-Christian debates, and the iconographical signs designed for antique prophets came to be applied to post-antique Jews. Christendom had turned a corner, and in the Christian imagination, it will be seen, the Jews were left behind.

CHAPTER TWO

BLINDING LIGHT AND BLINKERED WITNESS, CA. 1100–1160

By [Job’s] example, we may now see as in a mirror, more bearably and with more certain understanding, than in the blinding light of the truth.

—Rupert of Deutz, De Trinitate

In the first decades of the twelfth century, images of Jews began to spread across Christian art. Hebrew prophets, only occasionally encountered in earlier imagery, became nearly ubiquitous. Their appearance was standardized, and their gestures and especially their gazes were accorded deep significance. These prophets were joined by a broad range of previously undepicted Jewish characters, often displaying the signs applied to Judean elders by Bishop Bernward and to Hebrew prophets by Brother Goderanus. By the middle of the century, these signs—the pointed hat and the beard—had become familiar and consistent enough to serve as identifying marks of Jewishness.

These developments were part of a larger trend: a new emphasis on the Jew as witness in Christian art. As we have seen, the theological concept of “Jewish witness” was age-old. Already in the late fourth century Augustine of Hippo had asserted that Jews bore witness to essential Christian truths: their books preserved the word of scripture (though they failed properly to understand it), their bodies confirmed the historicity of the Crucifixion, and their subjugation proved their own error and the triumph of Christianity.[1] So influential was Augustine’s articulation of Jews’ testimonial value that 750 years later it was echoed almost verbatim by Bernard of Clairvaux: “The Jews are indeed for us living letters of scripture, constantly representing the Lord’s Passion. They have been dispersed all over the world for this reason: that in enduring just punishments for such a crime wherever they are, they may be witnesses of our redemption.”[2] However, one aspect of the doctrine of “Jewish witness” underwent a fundamental reorientation in the first half of the twelfth century. Although the Jews traditionally had been characterized as “blind,” in the twelfth century Christian images began to highlight Jewish sight, and “seeing” Jews became central objects of the Christian gaze. By the second half of the century, the figure of the actively witnessing Jew had become a primary means through which Christian art and Christian thinkers sought to reveal Christian truths. Though this initially granted Hebraic and Jewish figures considerable authority, it also led to a new stress on the limits, misuse, and abuse of Jewish vision.

1. The Spread of a “Jewish” Iconography

The painters of the Lobbes Bible used archaizing depictions of Jewish prophets to organize and display the passage of time, to visually codify the relationship of the Old Testament to the New, and to distinguish the “apostolic” era of renewal (that is, both New Testament times and the reformers’ own day) from the pre-Christian past. This new Judaic iconography and the many other stylistic and iconographical innovations evident in the Lobbes Bible and related contemporary manuscripts were early blossoms of a major artistic flowering: in the first decades of the twelfth century, there was a veritable explosion of figural images. Large-scale sculpture returned to church facades and interiors after an absence of many hundreds of years, far more colorful and elaborate stained glass adorned church windows, the art of enamel making was revived and applied to a rich selection of liturgical objects, altars were faced with carved or painted figures and scenes, and a broader range of manuscripts than ever before received sumptuous and elaborate illustration.[3] Many of these artworks reflected and expanded Brother Goderanus’s interest in and representation of the Hebrew scriptures, with archaizing depictions of Hebrew prophets and patriarchs featuring prominently in their decorative programs.[4] Beards, scrolls, and pseudoclassical draperies were widely adopted as typical “prophetic” garb, rendering Old Testament figures readily recognizable. So, for example, the prophets on the western portal of the cathedral of Modena (consecrated 1106) are bearded and scroll-bearing, as are the famous sculpted prophets at the monastery of Moissac (ca. 1100), the nine prophets at Verona (1139) [Fig. 1], and many more.[5] Early-twelfth-century Hebrew prophets and Judaic elders often display, in addition, variations on the peaked and pointed caps assigned them by Bishop Bernward and Brother Goderanus. Wide-brimmed pointed hats appear, for example, on the heads of Hosea, Jonah, and Daniel in the earliest stained glass windows to survive intact, the south nave windows of Augsburg Cathedral (ca. 1100 or 1130) [Fig. 2],[6] scroll-bearing and bearded Old Testament prophets wearing peaked hats identical to episcopal miters gaze on Saint Paul in an early twelfth-century liturgical prayer collection from the reformist Benedictine Zwiefalten monastery in south Germany,[7] Abraham and various other Judaic figures wear pointed hats on the twelfth-century bronze doors at San Zeno, Verona (ca. 1100–35), and Jesse wears a peaked cap in the mid-twelfth-century stained glass Tree of Jesse window in the western wall of Chartres.[8] Examples of New Testament Judaic priests and elders displaying hats include Saint Joseph, Simon the Pharisee, Joseph of Arimathea, and Nicodemus in the Saint Albans Psalter (ca. 1120–30), all of whom wear knobbed or peaked caps.[9] As in the Lobbes Bible, the archaizing appearances of all the above-mentioned figures seem designed primarily to convey the dignity of priesthood and invoke the authority of Hebrew precedent, while also signaling the distance of that antique Hebraic history from the “modern” Christian present.[10]

FIG. 1

FIG. 2

Starting around 1130, however, these visual signs began to be applied to a broader range of Judaic figures than just Old Testament prophets and patriarchs and respected New Testament elders. The iconographically marked Jew, moreover, was often as important for what and how he saw as for how he appeared (I use the masculine pronoun advisedly; women were not similarly singled out).[11] The gazing Jew can be found in at least three guises in a range of innovative settings: as a nonprophetic ancient Israelite in the newly popular typological programs (that is, artworks that present scenes from Hebrew scripture as prefigurements of Christian history),[12] as a Gospel-era antagonist of Christ and the apostles, and as an entirely new figure in medieval art—the contemporary Jew who sees but only imperfectly perceives. (By and large before about 1160 Jews do not appear in the role one might assume to be most typically assigned them: killers of Christ. These executioners are typically bareheaded and dressed as yokels in short tunics. Though they occasionally wear pointed headgear that has been taken for Jewish hats, the form of that headgear is different from the hats assigned to antique Hebrews and would most likely have been read as Roman helmets.)[13]

Moreover, in an astonishing turn, in the mid-twelfth century Synagoga, that notoriously blind personification of Judaism whose veil-swathed visage adorns so many great Gothic cathedrals, regains her vision. As we have seen, in the eleventh century Synagoga had been deprived of her sight: in various images and objects her view is blocked, her eyes are closed, or her head is turned away from the sight of the crucified Christ.[14] Yet around the year 1140, a very different depiction of Synagoga emerged: Synagoga unveiled. [Fig. 3] She appears in two scenes in the stunning English manuscript known as the Lambeth Palace Bible (ca. 1140), in a window in the great Abbey Church of Saint-Denis (ca. 1145), in a sacramentary manuscript from Tours (ca. 1150–1200), and on a baptismal font from the church of Sélincourt in northern France (mid-twelfth century).[15]

The expanded Judaic presence in visual imagery parallels an expanded Judaic presence in contemporary Christian exegesis. The late-eleventh-century attempts to “fix” the text of Hebrew scripture discussed in chapter 1 led in the following decades to reconsideration of the meaning of this text.[16] Around the year 1100, biblical commentators began to devise sophisticated new methods for teasing out the relationship between Old Law and New, underscoring their status as embodying, respectively, matter and spirit, sign and meaning.[17] These scholars affirmed the ongoing value of the Old Testament but also increasingly emphasized the extent to which Jews, misled by their “carnal” attachment to the “letter” of scripture, though able to “see” the word of God, were “blind” to its true spiritual import.[18] Castigation of the Jews’ “superficial” and “material” understanding, linked to their alleged greed and carnality, thus intensified considerably, becoming a major component of twelfth-century Christian scholarship.[19]

FIG. 3

These intellectual developments are often cited to explain the new prominence of Old Testament visual imagery. Just as the Jews’ language, texts, and heritage were rendered ever more central to Christian study, scholars have assumed, so naturally their scriptures and persons figured more centrally in Christian art.[20] This is surely to a large extent correct; there can be no doubt that there is a linkage between contemporary exegesis and our imagery. Typological visual programs draw on typological biblical commentary, and verses from the so-called Quodvultdeus “Sermon against the Jews” (a collection of Old Testament texts that ostensibly prophesied Christ’s coming) were inscribed nearly verbatim on several twelfth-century monuments.[21] Nonetheless, simply pointing to parallels between exegesis and art does not satisfactorily explain why the new intellectual trends were so rapidly and widely reflected in visual imagery, much less account for the spread of a specific “Jewish” iconography or illuminate how it was understood. After all, Christian commentators had criticized Jewish literalism for centuries with no corresponding artistic expression of such sentiments. To begin to explain the new iconography we need to pay careful attention to the full range of issues addressed in text, image, and object and ask what work art and its representations of Jews were designed to do. A surprising story of a witnessing Jew penned around 1120 furnishes some clues.

2. Good Testimony from Those Who Are Outside

The story appears in a remarkable and largely overlooked text written by an art-loving monk and scholar named Robert de Liège, who was born and educated in Lotharingia, not far from Lobbes and Stavelot.[22] Robert moved to the Abbey of Deutz near Cologne in the Rhineland, and eventually became its abbot; he is thus now known by his German name, Rupert of Deutz (d. 1129). In addition to being a lifelong Benedictine monk (having been “donated” to a monastery in Liège when he was a small child), he was an intellectual, known for his biblical and liturgical commentaries; a controversialist who became embroiled in several doctrinal disputes; and a mystic whose visionary experiences were often stimulated by art.[23] Around the year 1120 Rupert was asked by his abbot to rewrite the hundred-year-old Vita (biography) of the abbey’s sainted founder, Archbishop Heribert of Cologne (d. 1021).[24] Though he remained largely faithful to his eleventh-century source, toward the beginning of the Vita Rupert added one novel and curious detail. In the original version, a miraculous heavenly light shone down on the birth chamber just as the future saint was being born, and was seen by Heribert’s mother and her midwives. In Rupert’s version, this miracle was witnessed by two additional people: Heribert’s father (Count Hugo of Worms) and a Jew. According to Rupert, the Jew happened to be visiting the household on the night of the saint’s birth. After the family went to bed, Rupert writes, “an immense heavenly light shone [in the birth chamber], which some sleeping people saw with the eyes of the heart, and some waking people saw with the eyes of the body.” The waking people who physically saw the light were Heribert’s mother and her midwives, while the eyes of the heart belonged to the Jew and Heribert’s father:

The father of the infant was sleeping, and with him a certain one of his friends (though a Jew), who had come to him for customary conversation or friendly business. Sleeping together at that hour in which in the light of the happy birth came forth, each saw the same dream. Awaking, they spoke immediately to one another, each … recounting his own dream.[25]

The Jew speaks first. He relates that in his dream the bed in which Heribert was born split open at the front and “a radiance bright as the midday sun” shone down upon it. The Jew then interprets the dream as an omen of Heribert’s glorious destiny, telling the boy’s father: “Surely [by this light] you may know that [he who] is born to you will fill you with joy, and he will make his family shine with the great splendor of his name.”[26]

This is a highly surprising, not to say confusing, passage. As I discussed in the introduction, Augustine had criticized the Jews’ materialist perception by noting that “it is no great thing to see Christ with the eyes of the flesh [i.e., the Jewish way], but it is great to believe in Christ with the eyes of the heart [i.e., with Christian faith].”[27] Yet here it is a Jew who sees with the eyes of the heart. Though the phrase has been given a downgraded meaning (seeing something in a dream rather than in person), it is still remarkable that Rupert would describe Jewish vision in such positive terms. In doing so, Rupert seems to disregard, or even invert, the standard Christian characterization of Jewish perception as mired in carnal error. The Jew is granted a share of the heavenly vision, if only in a dream, and although Heribert’s own father also saw the dream, the Jew is the first to relate it and to voice its meaning.

Why did Rupert invent this witnessing Jew? What purpose is served by introducing an infidel family friend into a Christian saint’s life? Why is he allowed to see a miracle in a dream and to foretell the saint’s future glory?

Rupert was well aware that such questions might arise and that his fellow monks would be startled by his casting of a Jew in such a pivotal role: “A Jew may well seem to be an unworthy sharer of the same luminous dream that the Christian father deserved to see.”[28] He therefore hastens to explain: without the Jew’s testimony, he claims, the miracle witnessed by the mother and midwives would have been doubted.[29] This assertion may seem somewhat surprising, but it was very much in accord with contemporary trends. In the later eleventh century, church reformers began to apply the evidentiary rules of ancient Roman law (which had only recently been rediscovered) and the newly revived discipline of dialectic to canonization procedures.[30] Standards of proof changed and tightened; both the type of testimony that could be adduced and the type of person that was allowed to testify were subject to more rigorous regulation.[31] In a significant procedural shift, mere rumor, secondhand testimony, and even written depositions were no longer deemed adequate forms of evidence. Witnesses had to be personally present at the hearing, there had to be at least two witnesses to any event, they had to have direct, sensory experience of the facts to which they were testifying, and they had to be of respectable social rank, unimpeachable character, and demonstrated impartiality.[32] Women were disparaged as unreliable, open to persuasion, and prone to fancy.[33] Personal visions were considered a particularly suspect source of knowledge. A report of the 1131 canonization of Saint Godehard of Hildesheim explains the reasons for such caution: “it was decreed at that time that on account of the illusions of demons which frequently happened … in these matters, no one should be canonized except by apostolic authority and after his life had been examined by duly qualified persons.”[34]

This, then, suggests one motivation for Rupert’s revision: the testimony regarding the miracle recorded in his early-eleventh-century source no longer satisfied twelfth-century legal requirements. As servants, members of the subject’s household or family, and, especially, as women, the midwives and even Heribert’s mother failed to meet the standards for suitable witnesses. (The fact that canonists’ disapproval of female testimony seems often to have been ignored in practice does not negate the basic point. Rupert would have wanted his account to reflect the ideal.) Only disinterested male witnesses could provide convincing testimony. Since men were generally excluded from birthing chambers, the miraculous light accompanying the birth could not be directly perceived by a male witness—hence its reception in dream form. Heribert’s aristocratic father could not be the sole male to receive the miraculous dream, however, because plural witnesses were needed, and in any case as a close relative he was an overly partisan and therefore less than ideal witness.[35] The best possible confirmation of the heavenly grace conferred upon Heribert was the simultaneous revelation of the dream to a figure with no such intimate ties. And who could be more disinterested on the subject of Christian sainthood than a Jew? The visitor may have been a friendly familiar of the household, but as a Jew he was still inevitably an outsider (as Rupert put it: amicus, Iudeus tamen—“a friend, though a Jew”). Hence his usefulness. As a canon law collection compiled in the 1070s stated, “it is necessary to have good testimony from those who are outside.”[36]

3. Truth through Material Things

The significance of the Jew in Rupert’s narrative goes beyond mere forensic convenience. There was another reason that the Jew was well suited to testify to Heribert’s glory. What the Jew saw with the eyes of the heart was a very worldly vision: “he will make his family shine with the great splendor of his name.” After conveying this prediction, Rupert comments:

Who, indeed, does not know the splendor of the great church of Cologne, how … it glittered also in temporal resources…? Since therefore [Heribert] was destined to be so preeminent in rank, and [to be] exalted upon so great a candelabrum … it ought not seem unworthy that a Jew, too, should have received the portent of his future brightness.[37]

Heribert’s status as the prince of a powerful and prosperous ecclesiastical province, of which Rupert is palpably proud, vindicated the Jew’s worldly interpretation of the miraculous light, as heralding future fame and fortune.

This, then, is the point of the Jew’s presence: to ratify the birth and testify to the worldly wealth and glory of Saint Heribert. That Rupert should have associated a Jew with material wealth is hardly surprising. From Christ’s ejection of the money changers from the temple forecourt, to Paul’s equation of Jewish literalistic reading with materialism, to the sermons of the fourth-century church father John Chrysostom, which accused the Jews of greed and ostentation, Christian texts had long associated Jews with wealth and worldliness.[38] In Rupert’s day, moreover, specific circumstances reinforced and gave particular resonance to this rhetoric. These were decades of rapid commercial expansion in Lotharingia, the Rhineland, and northern and northeastern France. Though Christians dominated this activity, including the nascent market for credit, Jews were also deeply, even disproportionately, involved. Jewish as well as Christian merchants transported foodstuffs, wine, textiles, furs, housewares, slaves, medicines, and luxury goods up and down the roads and rivers of northern Europe, and Jews as well as Christians acted as money changers, minters, lenders, and toll collectors.[39] But because Jewish merchants were (like any other minority) more conspicuous than members of the majority, because some ecclesiastical writers worried about the morality of the new monetized economy, and because Jews had long been polemically linked to lucre, a perception began to form that commerce and the money trade were characteristically “Jewish” and distinctly unsavory endeavors.[40] It is in this period (the first decades of the twelfth century) and for these reasons that the stereotype of the Jewish usurer first appears.[41]

That Rupert also associated his monastery’s sainted founder with worldly wealth and glory might seem harder to understand, given the traditional Christian, and especially monastic, commendation of poverty and humility. But as the career of Bishop Bernward of Hildesheim vividly demonstrates, in the eleventh century even the most devout prelates felt few qualms about enjoying—and displaying—power and prosperity. For many clerics, the commercial revolution of the early twelfth century simply provided augmented opportunity to amass and spend great sums in God’s honor. Even as some churchmen condemned commerce and finance, others—including many bishops and abbots—encouraged, engaged in, and profited from them.[42] The famous autobiographical work of Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis (r. 1122–51) was written, Suger tells us, because his monks asked him to record “the [story of] the riches which the munificence of almighty God had conferred on this church during our abbacy [namely]: the acquisition of new properties, the recovery of those which were lost, an increase in the number of those restored, the construction of buildings, the laying up of gold, silver, precious stones and the finest vestments.”[43]

Abbot Suger poured such energy into acquiring, creating, and displaying precious artworks because in his view most people, Christians included, were more easily moved and convinced by their senses than by abstract ideas. As he wrote in a verse inscribed on the door to his abbey church: “the dull mind rises to the truth through material things.”[44] Rupert agreed. The Jew’s usefulness thus was not solely due to his outsider status. He also served as a stand-in for ordinary Christians. After explaining why the Jew’s testimony was necessary, Rupert added, “For it would, perhaps rightly, have seemed unbelievable to anyone, if only the light of spiritual grace, which Judaic blindness knows not, had been fit to be conferred on [Saint Heribert].”[45] That is, people would have questioned the miraculous light had it remained a purely spiritual vision. A dream so vivid that it could even be experienced by a Jew was far more convincing. Apparently many Christians (even Rupert’s fellow monks, the main readers of Rupert’s text) were like Jews, blind to spiritual grace and in need of concrete signs.

Not all churchmen shared Suger’s and Rupert’s enthusiasm for wealth and display or their readiness to employ concrete signs, bodily vision, and luxurious artworks as spiritual aids. The benefits reaped by so many monasteries from the economic flourishing of the period generated a strong reaction, known as the “monastic crisis of prosperity.”[46] New monastic orders arose (particularly the Carthusians, founded in 1084, the Cistercians, founded in 1098, and the Premonstratensian canons regular, founded in 1120) that sought a return to the emphasis on poverty. These reformers promoted greater simplicity in lifestyle, liturgy, art, and architecture and decried the excesses of traditional monks. Their critiques often focused on just the kind of material display and ostentatious artistry so beloved of Rupert of Deutz and Abbot Suger and cast the reform project as a contest between the pure spirituality of the New Dispensation and the corrupt, overly ritualistic materiality of the Old.[47] In his Apologia of around 1125, for example, Bernard of Clairvaux, greatest of the Cistercian reformers, famously lamented: “Churches are decorated not simply with jeweled crowns but with jeweled wheels illuminated as much by their precious stones as by their lamps. We see candelabra like big bronze trees, marvelously wrought, their gems glowing no less than their flames.… [These things] seem to me in some sense a revival of ancient Jewish rites.”[48] Bernard went further still in decrying the “Jewishness” of church decoration. Rhetorically tying the penchant for ecclesiastical ornamentation to the new money economy, Bernard attributed the love of golden ornaments to “the service of idols” and regarded the desire to attract donations by means of artistic splendor as a form of usury, a term already by this time firmly, if not exclusively, associated with Jews.[49] The Cistercian Idung of Prüfening (fl. ca. 1155–65) echoed this strategy, saying of the temple ornaments: “Those things in Old Testament times were just the shadow of future things. All things happened to [the patriarchs] in figures.… Let us repudiate therefore gold with the rest of the Jewish superstitions; or if one loves gold, then one loves also the Jews.”[50] The new monks sought to discredit what were, after all, very traditional attitudes and practices by tarring them as “Jewish.”

How were the traditionalists to respond to this challenge and fend off accusations of “judaizing”? Not by disavowing the Hebraic past. To the contrary, defenders of ornament proudly embraced the same Hebrew models so disparaged by Bernard of Clairvaux. Rupert of Deutz, in his commentary On the Divine Offices, cited sacred history as a precedent for elaborate display, comparing ornate decoration of altars and churches to the decoration of the Jerusalem temple itself.[51] Abbot Suger’s writings are likewise crammed with parallels for and justifications of his artistic projects drawn from Hebrew scripture.[52] But this invocation of Hebrew history is not to be mistaken for philo-Judaism. Rather, the traditionalists threw accusations of “judaizing” back upon their critics, charging the new orders with excessive literalism and legalism.[53]

The debate over monastic practice and church ornament thus mutated into a debate over who could rightly claim ancient Hebrew heritage, while labeling the opposing parties “Jewish” (legalistic, literalistic)—in their manner of worship, in their interpretation of scripture, and in the way they used and understood art.[54] This is the context in which we can understand the Jew’s presence in Rupert’s version of Heribert’s Vita. Rupert was using this embodiment of ancient rites and the material world to uphold the validity of material splendor. The Jew’s participation in the miraculous dream vision heralds the temporal majesty rightly claimed by a great ecclesiastical lord and rightly displayed in a great monastic foundation.

This is not to say that Rupert (or Suger, for that matter) was either a secularist or a crass materialist. When he calls the church of Cologne a candelabrum on which Heribert was exalted, he clearly ranks the holiness of the saint above the luxury of his episcopal see. He also notes that while Heribert was indeed blessed with the worldly grandeur foreseen by the Jew, he had greater qualities that were invisible to the unbeliever. Rupert concludes his account of the Jew’s prophecy of Heribert’s future temporal splendor by noting, “This he could say by gazing at the light or glory only of the secular world.” And then he relates that twenty-four years later Heribert’s spiritual splendor was signaled by another wondrous light-related sign accompanying his consecration as a priest: the liturgy of the day included the verse “The light will shine today over us.” Rupert saw this fact as a miracle: “Who will doubt that this happened through providence or the same arrangement of God, with which care or grace he first sent out the aforementioned sign, when he was being born?”[55]

This second “miracle” contrasts starkly with the first. It involves no bodily sight, only proper spiritual understanding of sung words. As opposed to the first, well-attested event (the miraculously illuminated birth), we have here no mention of witnesses, proof, discussion, or interpretation. And yet no suspicion whatever is attached to this miracle; this time Rupert explicitly rules out the possibility of doubt (“who will doubt?”). And, finally, of course, this is a miracle in which the Jew plays no part. He is physically absent (at this point he drops entirely out of the narrative, never to return) and is explicitly associated only with the secular realm. The Jew, Rupert makes clear, cannot see beyond the gleam of worldly brass to perceive the heavenly glow. Though he is conceded some limited perception—a downgraded, dream-bound form of seeing with the eyes of the heart—and so is not fully blind, he is at best a blinkered witness. And so, by implication, is any Christian who emulates the Jew in failing to realize that earthly shine reflects, points to, and is a route toward a brighter spiritual truth. Rupert is here obliquely accusing monastic critics of church art of not knowing the difference between spurs to devotion and objects of devotion. That is, he is accusing them of reading the world in a superficial, Jewish way. Adopting and adapting the very label assigned to himself and his supporters by critics, he uses a Jew to demonstrate the difference between purely material ways of seeing and spiritual modes of perception.

In sum, Rupert’s tale uses the witnessing Jew to present a theory of knowledge—one, I should add, by no means unique to Rupert. There are two ways to know the truth: through sensory experience (which includes dreams and the enjoyment of art) and through spiritual enlightenment. Both are valid. Indeed, the former provides a helpful model and metaphor for, and offers a pathway to, the latter. Spiritual understanding is of course the higher form of knowledge. But Rupert’s Vita concedes that such enlightenment is inaccessible to most Christians: “For it would … have seemed unbelievable to anyone, if only the light of spiritual grace … had been fit to be conferred on [Heribert].” The human need for concrete signs is accepted, as it has been enshrined in canon law. For this reason the Jew, whose “vision” and understanding are traditionally—and notoriously—material and corporeal, can still provide valuable and valued witness, even to Christian truths. He and Heribert’s father start at the same place—they both see and value temporal glory. But a Christian can be guided to see more spiritually, as a Jew cannot: when knowledge is conveyed through purely spiritual illumination (as at Heribert’s consecration), the Jew can provide no testimony and so is absent.

4. Forged Witness

In Rupert’s Vita the testifying Jew remains a purely textual sign. But he would soon be given visible form, as the new Jewish iconography came to intervene in the debates we have just discussed. In a stunning work of art from Rupert’s adopted hometown, Old Testament figures are enlisted precisely in support of the value of sensory experience and visible shine.[56] [Fig. 4; see also color insert]

The artwork in question is a beautiful enamel and silver-gilt portable altar from Cologne attributed to a craftsman named Eilbertus, dating to approximately 1130–50.[57] On the top is an imposing image of Christ in Majesty, surrounded by the twelve apostles holding scrolls and seated on thrones, and scenes from the life, Passion, and Resurrection of Christ. These are all quite standard images for an altarpiece of the period. [Fig. 5] Around the sides of the object, however, we find an entirely new set of figures, not previously seen on portable altars: twelve Hebrew prophets, three Hebrew kings, and one Hebrew soothsayer, all standing and holding inscribed scrolls.[58] The Hebrews’ inscriptions are, in many cases, also unprecedented, and have never been fully explained.[59] These kings and prophets are framed above and below by a larger inscription. It reads:

FIG. 4

FIG. 5

Filled with the doctrine of faith, the twelve fathers bear witness that the prophetical words are not fictions [ficta non esse prophetica dicta]. Inspired by heaven, they prophesied about Christ; they foretold those things which were to come after.[60]

We might at first thought consider this a straightforward articulation of Christian exegesis: as far back as the recorded words of Jesus, and most powerfully in the epistles of Paul, the Old Testament was read as foretelling the coming of Christ. As presented here on the altar and embodied by the Hebrew prophets, this is powerful and positive witness indeed: the fathers’ testimony is described as “inspired by heaven,” and their portrayal is respectful and dignified. David is crowned and wears a chlamys (antique-type cloak) and robe, Solomon is crowned and cloaked, while the remaining Hebrews are identical in physiognomy and dress to the apostles themselves: bareheaded, bearded, and dressed in togas, but also (unusually) barefoot—a mark of asceticism that, together with the signs of wisdom, displays the purity and truth of their words, their dicta non ficta.

Yet for all the visual serenity and conceptual concordance between Old and New apparent here, there is a discordant note, a defensive tone embedded in that phrase ficta non esse prophetica dicta. Why should our altar feel the need to proclaim so forcefully that the Hebrew fathers prove the authenticity of biblical prophecy? Surely the Bible was not under attack in twelfth-century Cologne. In fact, the phrase did not originate in medieval Germany; it is a paraphrase of words penned by Augustine of Hippo in Contra Faustum, written in 387 to refute pagan charges that the Hebrew scriptures were blasphemous nonsense and that Catholics had forged the Old Testament prophecies relating to Christ. According to Augustine, the Jews’ scriptures disproved such accusations: “The Gentiles cannot suppose these testimonies to Christ to be recent forgeries [non possunt putare confictum]; for they find them in books held sacred for so many ages by those who crucified Christ.”[61] But it seems strange for our altar to revive this defense of scripture in the heart of the Holy Roman Empire, at the height of the age of faith. Why, and to whom, does our inscription feel the need to invoke Hebrew testimony regarding the authenticity of prophecy?

It is unlikely that the inscription was aimed in the first instance at Jews. Jews certainly disputed Christian interpretations of Hebrew scripture. But they did not as a rule allege that the prophetical books were forged by Christians. Another possible target is heretical groups, some of whom were said to reject the Old Testament. But they were a small voice in twelfth-century Cologne, unlikely to be a central concern of the cleric who commissioned this altar.[62] I think, rather, that the inscription’s defensive tone is inspired by a more powerful chorus: the very same, perfectly orthodox, critics of ecclesiastical ostentation who provoked Rupert’s revisions of the Vita Heriberti.[63] Let us look again at that word ficta. It is usually translated as “false” or “forged,” but it literally means formed, fashioned, sculpted. Medieval clerics were trained to look for multiple meanings in written words and to see significance in their juxtaposition. One can hardly fail to note that on this particular altar the inscribed and engraved prophecies are literally formed or fashioned. It is these “fashioned” words and works, I believe, that are being defended. They may be “forged” in the goldsmith’s fire, but they are not therefore false. The contested text whose validity is being upheld through Hebrew testimony is the art object itself.

And so the visible Jewish witness is born. Just as Rupert invented a Jew whose perception and presence attested to the truth of tangible signs and whose obliviousness and absence then affirmed the higher truth of invisible ones, so Eilbertus forged prophets whose looks, words, and bodies testify to Christian truth but who, as we will see, nevertheless remain behind.

The prophets witness in looks: their very visual similarity to the apostles, their haloed and hatless heads affirm that they have received divine revelation.

The prophets witness with words: the inscriptions that have so perplexed scholars almost all in some way relate light, sight, and shine to knowledge of God. In so doing, they echo a major aspect of the thought of Rupert of Deutz, who repeatedly equated light with grace and who passionately argued for the devotional value of vision, ornament, and images, when properly informed by faith. Thus Jeremiah’s scroll asserts: “He was seen on earth and conversed with men.”[64] Jacob’s verse proclaims: “I saw the Lord face to face.”[65] Zachariah announces: “He who will have touched you, touches the pupil of my eye.”[66] And so on.[67]

The prophets witness with gesture: each flourishes the truth (in the form of a scriptural scroll), points upward toward the ultimate truth, or holds objects that prefigure the Christian liturgy, especially as observed in traditional, ornament-laden churches. Isaiah gestures toward the Annunciation image enameled on the top of the golden altar as he foretells the Incarnation. Melchisedek displays a golden Eucharistic paten (plate) and a chalice, symbols of the body and blood of Christ consumed in the Mass, but also the type of luxury items so frequently criticized by reformers. David grasps his harp, indicative alike of the Hebrew psalms and of the music that played so central a role in Benedictine worship and was criticized by reformers. (The Cistercian Aelred of Rielvaulx, for example, railed against the use of musical instruments in church as overly Hebraic, exclaiming: “How is it, since [Old Testament] types and figures have already ceased,… that there are in church so many instruments, so many cymbals?”)[68]

But the prophets remain behind, or rather below: they function as supports for the altar table, but their view of the top is blocked and they cannot directly see either the painted image of Christ or the body that is daily sacrificed upon it.

And this last, visible act of negative witness—the prophets’ inability to see the body of Christ, which they nonetheless spiritually foresaw through heavenly inspiration—rounds out their usefulness to the Christian viewer. For he too cannot “see” the body of Christ, in the sense of perceiving flesh, limbs, etc. He needs to follow the example of the prophets and Augustine’s believers and look with the eyes of the heart—that is, with the help of faith, perceive an unseeable truth beneath or beyond surface appearance—if he is to recognize Christ in the consecrated bread. The central sacrament of medieval Christianity required the same ability to transcend mundane perception and “see spiritually” as did religious art. And it was subject to the same criticisms, by internal Christian critics as well as by external ones.[69] It is for this reason that a defense of the Eucharist written by the twelfth-century Cistercian Baldwin of Canterbury reads very much like defenses of religious art in general and the inscription on our portable altar in particular: “Nothing [in the sacrament] is false, feigned, counterfeit, or faked by magical manipulations. There is truth in that which is evident, and in that which is hidden.” And to provide a model for how the Christian can “see” what cannot be seen, he cites the prophets: “The law and prophets bear witness to future promise (in the shadows).” But he also indicts those who could not learn to see properly: “The Pharisees, who did not believe, were made more blind.”[70]

The images of the venerable, inspired, but subordinate prophets on the Eilbertus portable altar, then, embody Christian theology regarding Hebrew prophecy—its truth, its centrality, and its incompleteness. In doing so, they lend support to the contention of Rupert and Suger that artistic splendor and material shine can lead to understanding, if viewed properly. But the altar, like those monastic theologians, resolutely distinguishes between “types” and “figures” on the one hand (that is, visible, physical matter, represented by the Old Testament prophets and kings, and also by the art object itself) and the transcendent truth they herald on the other. Each time the celebrant leans over the gleaming surface of this portable altar, its words, images, composition, and very form instruct him in the correct path to knowledge of God. He is to move progressively upward from corporeal sight (the beauty of the object and the appearance of the prophets), through visual imagination (the inspired words of the prophets), to the climax of the Christian Mass: ingestion of the Eucharist, the unseeable body of Christ. This last act foreshadows the ultimate goal of the Christian believer: to come as close as is possible in this flawed, flesh-bound world to purely imageless understanding.

5. How Foolish You Are!

Bernward of Hildesheim used art to express his personal hope for a final, face-to-face vision of God. Twelfth-century makers of art went a step further: they awarded the artistic image an active, positive role in Christian devotion. Images could help to spiritually prepare the Christian viewer and train the Christian gaze. They served another purpose as well. By means of the new Jewish iconography, images could vividly expose the imperfections of the viewer who would not or could not see beyond the surface/flesh.

The Winchester Psalter (ca. 1121–60) belongs to a small group of English manuscripts that pioneered the inclusion of extensive prefatory pictorial cycles, most likely designed to serve Benedictine monks or nuns as the focus of pious meditation.[71] [Fig. 6] The lower half of the Psalter’s folio 25 illustrates an episode from Luke 24:13–35 set after the Crucifixion, in which the just-risen Christ meets two disciples traveling from Jerusalem to Emmaus.[72] Although these two disciples were followers of Jesus in his lifetime (and so had perhaps seen him only days before), in the Gospel text they are unable to recognize the resurrected Christ.[73] Jesus’s physical appearance in the miniature is, indeed, unusual: he is unwontedly dark and full-bearded and, stranger still, wears a Phrygian cap (soft, banded, with a tall, forward-falling peak). The production notes for a contemporary liturgical play about the Road to Emmaus, called the Officium Peregrinorum, might seem to explain this unaccustomed headgear—they specify that Christ be dressed as a pilgrim, “a pointed cap on his head, clothed in a furry cloak and a tunic, barefoot.”[74] Indeed, a partially effaced inscription in the margin of the Winchester illumination notes that Christ “here is in the likeness of a pilgrim.”[75] In the image, however, Christ, with his Phrygian cap and ankle-length robes, looks far less like a pilgrim than like an ancient Hebrew prophet. Christ’s odd appearance is explained by the words of the disciples: according to the Gospel text, when they meet Christ they tell him that they are mourning the death of “Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet, mighty in work and word before God and all the people” (Luke 24:19). That is, the disciples are still clinging to an incomplete, materialist, and Old Testament–driven conception of Christ’s nature, and the image portrays him as his imperfectly comprehending companions see him. Time-bound, literal-minded viewers can see no further than their antiquated assumptions allow. The disciples consequently also wear pointed hats—as much to signal that their perception is outdated and overly literalistic as to signal that they are “Jews.” One disciple carries a walking staff and wears the wide-brimmed, knobbed hat of the pilgrim or traveler; this may well reflect the influence of the Officium drama. The other disciple, however, like Jesus, looks far more like a prophet than a pilgrim—he has a long, flowing beard and wears a short, soft, peaked cap and long, draped robes as he touches his beard or cloak in perplexity. His antique, Hebraic appearance displays his affiliation with the words and wisdom of the Old Covenant, while his confused gesture indicates that he has not yet achieved the full enlightenment of the New.[76]

FIG. 6

The limited understanding of these disciples explains Christ’s appearance and headgear. In order to bring the travelers to the point where they can finally “see,” Christ meets them at their own level, appearing as an antique prophet. Like a Hebrew prophet he excoriates them for their lack of faith (Luke 24:25: “Then he said to them, ‘Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared!’”), and then invokes Old Testament testimony: “beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded to them in all the scriptures, the things that were concerning him.” (Luke 24:27) Only after Christ has gradually led them step by step, through teaching and in his demeanor and deeds on the road and at their shared meal, do the disciples finally recognize their Lord: “And their eyes were opened, and they knew him” (Luke 24:31). At that moment of enlightenment, they cease to regard Christ as merely a prophet; he is accordingly now portrayed as hatless and fair-haired and -bearded. [Fig. 7]

The entire sequence serves to demonstrate that spiritual truth can be perceived only by those who see spiritually. But it also establishes that visible images, whether Christ’s physical gestures or the illuminations themselves, can help bring the faithful to that level. Art can reveal to the medieval Christian viewer both what those who, like the Jews, are tied to the superficial letter see—an imperfect, outmoded conception of Christ—and also what such blinkered viewers cannot see—the divinity signaled by Christ’s nimbus, which evidently is initially invisible to his disciples. Once those disciples achieve spiritual vision, however, Christ’s material body is no longer needed: as soon as they came to recognize him, “he vanished out of their sight.” Here, too, art plays a role, showing the changed spiritual awareness of the disciples: in the Supper at Emmaus scene, the disciples are considerably less “Hebraic”-looking than in the previous folio (one is now beardless, the other has a shorter beard, and both their caps are smaller), presumably to signal that they are emerging from their imprisonment in the superseded material past. In no scenes subsequent to the supper do any followers of Christ wear pointed hats.

FIG. 7

The sign of the “Jewish” hat, then, does not serve as an indicator of a static or exclusive “Jewish” religious identity. It acts as an index of perception, signaling attachment to antiquated and literalistic conceptions of the law. Followers of Christ as well as Jews are liable to fall into such superficial ways of seeing. But the imperfect comprehension conveyed by the hat can be amended, by steering the very human reliance on sensory experience toward a higher end. Just as a combination of scriptural instruction and exemplary behavior helped the disciples shed their “Jewishness” and finally recognize the truth, so in this manuscript a combination of biblical text and iconographic signs helps the Christian viewer identify and, ideally, surpass the imperfect witness.

6. The Visionary Jew Made Visible

So far, the central concern of the images we have examined is religious knowledge, not the Jewish people. Hebrew prophets serve to affirm both the value and the limits of the material world and corporeal vision; New Testament Judeans underscore the fact that, though sensory experience and scriptural learning alone are inadequate, when carefully guided and allied with Christian faith, they can lead to illumination. And what of the descendants of those Hebrews and Judeans, the still stubborn “rest who are blinded”?[77] These, too, made their way into Christian art. Beginning in the mid-twelfth century a range of postantique Jewish figures joined their Hebraic elders and New Testament forerunners in Christian imagery. Although they lacked the prophets’ heavenly inspiration and showed little promise of the Emmaus disciples’ ultimate illumination, these Jews nonetheless also proved useful to Christian thinking about art, images, and vision.

It is surely no coincidence that one of the first iconographically identifiable nonbiblical Hebrews to be depicted in medieval art is none other than Rupert’s own invented character, our old friend the visionary German Jew. He appears on the great reliquary shrine of Heribert, created about 1150–60 to house the saint’s bones.[78] Constructed in the shape of a sarcophagus, the shrine features on its sides alternating standing Hebrew prophets in enamel and seated apostles in deep relief. On its roof appears a series of stunning enamel roundels illustrating the life of the saint. [Fig. 8] As on the Eilbertus altar, prophets and apostles share the same beards, draperies, haloes, and bare feet, but here the more limited vision and authority of the former is conveyed through their antique scrolls (the apostles carry “modern” codices, or books), smaller sizes, and failure to break the plane of the object. Further subtle gradations of spiritual status and perception become apparent when the Hebrew prophets are compared with the sole medieval Jew on the object, Count Hugo’s visiting friend, who appears in the roundel depicting Heribert’s birth.[79] [Fig. 9]

As in Rupert’s discussion of Heribert’s birth, the keynote of the entire roundel is worldliness and nobility. An inscription around the upper register announces: “The vision of the sun splendidly signals the sunrise of the offspring.”[80] In this upper scene, the Jew’s high social rank is stressed, in part by forging visual parallels with Heribert’s father: both father and Jew are clearly identified by name and title: above the father is written “Hugo Comes” (“Count Hugo”) and above the Jew “Aaron Judeus” (“Aaron the Jew”). (The name Aaron is apparently an invention of the artist or iconographer; Rupert did not name the Jew. It was probably designed to evoke priesthood.) Each lies with closed eyes on a commodious couch as a ray of light shines directly upon his head. Only one salient difference between the two is detectable: the count is bareheaded, while the Jew wears a rounded, bordered, knobbed cap. This difference is striking enough (and the image of someone sleeping while wearing a large, knobbed hat is peculiar enough) to call for explanation. It seems unlikely that the primary function of the hat is to identify Aaron as a Jew, for the word Judeus is written just above. Moreover, this rounded, knobbed, thick-brimmed cap is different from the soft, peaked caps or stiff, miter-like hats in which Hebrews and Israelites had typically been shown up to this point and which Aaron himself wears in the lower register. This cap is more akin to the head coverings shown on field-workers or travelers (including one of the two disciples on the Road to Emmaus in the Winchester Psalter).[81] I think it serves here to indicate that Aaron had recently arrived at the castle after a journey: it marks him as a visitor to rather than a member of the household, the “outsider” whose testimony was so key.

FIG. 8

FIG. 9

The scene in the lower register takes place in a canopied and pillared hall. Around the rim an inscription notes: “Thus his father foresees this, and also the Israelite.”[82] The count and the Jew are again dressed similarly—both wear dark ankle boots and hose, belted robes, pointed hats, and cloaks draped over their shoulders (though the robes of the count are, appropriately, more elaborate, decorated with an embroidered belt and border). Although in Rupert’s text the discussion between the two is presented as an impromptu morning conversation, here the scene has the aspect of a formal court. In spite of the fact that the count himself shared the Jew’s visionary dream, he is positioned as a judge on a central throne, with the Jew and a midwife, the primary witnesses to each form of miraculous light, arranged on either side. The Jew’s high rank is signaled by the fact that he, unlike the Christian midwife, is allowed to sit in the presence of his lord; his pointing finger, crossed legs, and the hand resting on his knee all display his authority.[83] And here he wears the by now familiar pointed headgear. The name Aaron assigned to him above and the designation Israhelita in the border inscription, as well as the hat, mark him as the heir of an ancient and exalted—if material and ceremonial—heritage and endorse his testimony as authoritative. He is, however, not bearded; he cannot claim the same degree of wisdom as the prophets (or as the adult Heribert, who is consistently shown bearded once he reaches maturity). The portrayal thus visually demonstrates the Jew’s fulfillment of all the legal requirements of a reliable witness but, like Rupert’s text, limits his testimonial value to a lower realm of knowledge.

But it is not, of course, the iconographic details associated with Aaron the Jew in this single enamel that constitute the shrine’s most powerful proof of Heribert’s sanctity. For many medieval Christian viewers, it was the sheer, glowing, monumental luxury and beauty of the object as a whole that best bore witness to the spiritual greatness of the saint. This reliquary shrine, then, embodies the paradox at the heart of Rupert’s narrative revisions. Let us recall Rupert’s words, that the miracle would “have seemed unbelievable to anyone, if only the light of spiritual grace, which Judaic blindness knows not, had been fit to be conferred.” The saving grace is invisible, but human beings are most powerfully swayed by their senses. This was a truth recognized, and lamented, by Bernard of Clairvaux himself: “The thoroughly beautiful image of some male or female saint is exhibited, and the saint is believed to be more holy the more highly colored the image is.”[84] Rupert acknowledged, but unlike Bernard did not disparage, this need for material witness, pointing out that materiality gloriously manifested itself in the saint’s own life and career. He also, however, insisted upon the greater value of the invisible, immaterial glory that was inaccessible to the Jew. The makers of this shrine similarly enlist visible, material beauty and visible, material Jewish witness to signal the greater glory of the unseen bones hidden within, and of the ineffable soul they once housed.

7. Judas Knows

Aaron the Jew, that friendly though outside witness to the power and validity of ecclesiastical splendor, was a benign exemplar of postbiblical Jewish witness. He was the offspring of an idiosyncratic art lover on the defensive in the face of sharp but ultimately short-lived critiques of luxurious church decoration. By the middle of the twelfth century, even Bernard of Clairvaux had relaxed most of his objections to religious art.[85] Discussion largely shifted from whether Christians could and should use material objects to seek the truth to how they might do so. And here, too, Jews were enlisted as witnesses, though as often as not, as reluctant ones. Starting around 1150, while Hebrew prophets continued to ratify the (preparatory) value of the literal and material, a range of nonprophetic Jews testify to Christian triumph with far less grace.

In an artwork known as the Stavelot Triptych we encounter just such a reluctant Jewish witness.[86] [Fig. 10] This object was made for Abbot Wibald of Stavelot, a major figure in the political and ecclesiastical life of the Holy Roman Empire. In his youth Wibald had studied at the cathedral school of Liège under Rupert of Deutz; he then went on to serve as schoolmaster at the imperial Abbey of Stavelot (the final home of Goderanus and owner of one of his two great illuminated Bibles). In 1130 he was elected abbot of Stavelot and was invested in office by Emperor Lothair himself. The emperor did not allow Wibald to devote himself solely to Stavelot, however. Wibald was asked to escort the imperial fleet to Italy in 1136; in 1147 he led an expedition against pagan Slavs during the Second Crusade (which was preached by Bernard of Clairvaux); and in the following years he was sent on no fewer than four diplomatic missions to Rome and two to Constantinople.[87] In addition to his political and ecclesiastical prominence, Wibald was also a major patron of the arts; indeed, he has been compared to Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis in the depth of his artistic interests and influence.[88] He is known to have commissioned several luxurious illuminated manuscripts as well as a range of enamel and metal liturgical objects, including a reliquary head of the sainted Pope Alexander II and a (now lost) massive retable dedicated to his monastery’s patron saint.[89] As scholar and monk, cleric and politician, soldier and diplomat, art lover and abbot, then, Wibald spent his life negotiating the boundaries between cloister and world, mind and body, spirit and matter.

FIG. 10

All these themes come into play in the beautiful triptych he had made to display his most precious relic. On Wibald’s first visit to Constantinople, in 1154, he obtained a piece of the True Cross and a nail from the Crucifixion; it is believed that he commissioned the Stavelot Triptych the following year to house these treasures. Wibald’s visit to the ancient Eastern capital, greatest center of Christian visual devotion and storehouse of holy artifacts, seems to have further stimulated his interest in the relationship between matter and spirit. In the triptych, Jewish figures show how material knowledge and visible objects can serve Christian faith but also demonstrate the limits of such “Jewish” ways of knowing.[90]

Like the Eilbertus portable altar, the Stavelot Triptych is a highly innovative piece. It consists of a central panel housing older Byzantine reliquaries and two folding wings, each decorated with three enamel roundels illustrating the legend of the finding of the True Cross. It is the earliest known reliquary triptych made in the West and the earliest known reliquary of the True Cross to depict scenes from the legend; it is also the only True Cross reliquary to combine actual Byzantine reliquaries and extensive narrative scenes in this way.[91] The thrust of the unique program is to certify the relics’ authenticity, while at the same time guiding the viewer’s devotional experience.

The story told in the enamels, the Judas Cyriacus variation of the legend of the finding of the True Cross, first appeared in Syriac in the fifth century.[92] It relates how the Empress Helena, mother of Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor (r. 306–37), journeyed to the Holy Land and forced a Jew named Judas to show her where the True Cross was buried. Judas was sometimes identified as a descendant of a witness to the Crucifixion and sometimes as a miraculously still living original witness. The text of the legend is redolent with the paradox of Jewish witness: “Because you rejected all his wisdom and cursed him who wanted to save you from the curse [of the law],” Helena says to the Jews, “and have harmed with unclean spit him who with his saliva illuminated your eyes, and you betrayed him who gave life to your dead ones, and because you regarded the light of the truth as darkness and false, the curse that is written in your law came over you.”[93] But then she signals her need for Jewish testimony, imperfect though it be: “Choose now therefore for me men from among your midst who know your law, so that they shall answer me everything that I ask them.”[94]

In fact, the Jews were asked to provide not textual or legal expertise but geographical and historical information about the Crucifixion. As early as the fifth century, and certainly by the twelfth, Christians felt distanced enough from their own history to seek the physical continuity, the informed material testimony that apparently only Jews could provide. Even the holiest of all Christian relics could not be located or venerated without Jewish knowledge and memory. One fifth-century Christian writer found this implication so distressing that he made a point of denying this version of the legend, claiming that Jews had nothing whatsoever to do with the finding of the True Cross, and insisting that Helena was informed solely through “divine signs and dreams.”[95] As we have seen, miraculous proofs and individual visions, especially those of females, were treated with caution in the twelfth-century West, which preferred whenever possible to confirm divine visions with reliable testimony and which privileged the Judas Cyriacus version of the story. In the Stavelot Triptych, both the Jew’s qualifications to serve as witness and the limitations of his perception are reinforced through visual signs.

One of the six roundels illustrating the finding of the True Cross shows the haloed and crowned Empress Helena seated on a raised throne and flourishing a scroll that commands, “Show the wood!” [Fig. 11, lower roundel; see also color insert] She is attempting to force a group of reluctant Jews (labeled Iudei), headed up by Judas (also labeled), to reveal the location of the True Cross. All of the seven Jews in the group are wearing soft, low, pointed white hats; of the four faces that are visible, three are bearded. Behind the Jews burns a tall, brightly colored mass of flames highlighted by the inscription Ignis: this is the punishment with which the Jews are threatened should they refuse to reveal their knowledge. Although most of the scenes on the triptych follow Byzantine pictorial models, these two iconographic elements are wholly original—hats were never shown on Jews in Byzantine versions of the legend, and no Eastern artworks include the fire that burns behind the Jews.[96] William Voelkle, who wrote the first extensive study of this object, confessed himself unable fully to account for these unique visual features.[97] He assumes that the pointed hats are inspired by headgear actually worn by twelfth-century Jews. As I have argued, there is little evidence for this. And his very tentative suggestion that the fire was somehow connected to forced conversions of Jews in the twelfth century is even more problematic, given the lack of evidence for any use of fire in the few recorded instances of such forced conversions before about 1160, which in any case were flagrant violations of both canon and imperial law—something Wibald would be unlikely to countenance.[98]

FIG. 11

If we consider the roundel in the light of Rupert’s rewriting of the Heribert Vita and the other images we have examined, we can begin to approach a clearer understanding of the signs. The entire episode, of course, hinges upon Jews’ knowledge of the antique past. The hats worn by all the Jews, by 1155 artistic signs solidly associated with ancient Israelites, confirm their authority to speak to that past, while also signaling the restriction of that authority to purely material matters. They likewise confirm the Jews’ outsider status. In this case, however, in contrast to Rupert’s Jewish witness, Judas is no compliant friend. Indeed, he displays a deep reluctance to reveal his knowledge—he hangs back and clutches his beard in consternation as the Jews behind him gesture vigorously and cry out, according to a scroll they hold in their hands, “Judas knows!”[99] The tendency for reluctant witnesses to commit perjury was recognized in Roman law, which recommended that torture be applied in such cases and prescribed severe punishments for forgery or lying under oath: either drowning or death by fire.[100] This, I believe, explains the visual highlighting of the fire, the second peculiarity of the roundel; it may also explain the river flowing in the foreground.[101] Helena, seated on a throne and wearing a crown, is represented as a queen and judge, rather than as a devout pilgrim. She (and the artist) assures that the Jews will provide reliable testimony by threatening them with the appropriate judicial penalties.

No Jew, however, witnesses the miracles that subsequently confirm Judas’s testimony. In the roundel in which he digs up the cross, which is just above the scene in which Helena threatens Judas, Judas’s head is bent downward. His gaze encompasses only the physical wooden cross itself, buried in the earth. Unlike Helena and the assistant behind her, he seems not to see the heavenly light or the divine hand that emerge from the sky above. And there are no Jews at all in a third roundel, in which the True Cross shows its authenticity and power by helping a bishop revive a dead youth, illuminated by rays. Although most textual versions of the legend identify the bishop who effected the miracle as Judas himself, now converted and promoted to the episcopacy, this image discourages any such identification. The bishop is young and beardless and labeled simply “the holy bishop.”[102] If he is the converted Judas, the image concedes no continuity of identity. If, like the disciples at Emmaus, he has been transformed, all visible traces of his previous self have been effaced. Once spiritual vision is attained, “Jewishness” by definition is left behind, utterly excluded.

8. The Jew as Enemy

All the above-mentioned kinds of witness—inspired, material, insufficient, reluctant, and conspicuously absent—come together in one of the most important monuments of the entire twelfth century: the Benedictine Abbey Church of Saint-Denis, constructed by Abbot Suger in 1144–45 and considered the progenitor of all Gothic churches. Much has been written about the stylistic and iconographic innovations of Suger’s church and its centrality in the twelfth-century debate over monastic splendor and ecclesiastical ornamentation.[103] The role played by images of Jews in the densely complex program of the abbey’s decoration and furnishings has not yet been fully explored—this is a vast project, which would require a book of its own. I would, however, like to focus on one image in which Jewish vision is a central theme, a stained glass medallion from the window devoted to the life of Moses located in the choir of the church. [Fig. 12] This image, more than any of the others we have seen, demonstrates how Jews’ vision, gestures, and signs were deployed to signal various gradations of perception and so to provide key witness concerning Christian faith and art.

FIG. 12

The medallion depicts a strange episode from the book of Numbers, known as the raising of the brazen serpent (21:4–9). According to this biblical account, after the Israelites had wandered for some time in the desert, they began to murmur against Moses, complaining about the lack of food and water. To punish them for their rebelliousness and faithlessness, God sent “fiery serpents” to bite and kill many of the Israelites. When the remaining Israelites repented and begged Moses for help, God told Moses to “make a brazen serpent, and set it up for a sign: whoever among the stricken shall look on it, shall live.”

In the Saint-Denis medallion, Moses points to the effigy high on a column (which looks more like a winged dragon than a serpent), while the creatures that had been afflicting the people flail at its base. Though the scene seems at first to be a literal rendering of Hebrew history, the artist has added an element not mentioned in Hebrew scripture: a crucifix that closely resembles several twelfth-century enamels rises out of the brazen serpent’s body. This is an unusually explicit rendering of a venerable typological reading: already in the Gospel of John Jesus himself presented the serpent as a figure for the Crucifixion.[104] In combining the brazen serpent that healed the stricken with an image of an enamel crucifix, this Saint-Denis image constitutes a clear and vivid manifesto for Christian visual devotion, enlisting the authority of Hebrew antiquity to proclaim the life-bringing powers of the sight of the cross.[105] We can extend that insight still further by noting how the Jews’ appearances evoke a spiritual hierarchy of vision and witness. Moses, the prophet who saves his people with the tangible object but also provides them with the biblical prophecies that (in the Christian reading) indicate its more transcendent meaning, is identical to the prophets on the Eilbertus altar, the Heribert shrine, and many other contemporary artworks: bareheaded, barefoot, bearded, and haloed. Indeed, he is distinctly Christlike in appearance. Unusually for a brazen serpent scene from this period, Moses has a considerable audience. The foremost figures among the Israelites who look on are bearded and wear cloaks and pointed hats similar to those worn by Aaron the German Jew, Judas Cyriacus, and the as yet unenlightened Emmaus disciple. Although these Israelites have seen the brazen serpent and so have been healed, it is not clear whether they can see the body of Christ on the crucifix above—their line of sight is blocked by the horizontal bar that extends above them.[106] The Israelites on the right, displaying their palms in obedient prayer, seem to be trying to discern the cross; two men on the left seem less moved. On the horizontal bar a third kind of witness is hinted at. For the inscription notes, “Just as the brazen serpent slays all serpents, so Christ raised on the cross slays his enemies.”[107] “Enemy” is an ominous word that makes no appearance in the Gospel accounts of the Crucifixion. Nor does the Bible say that the brazen serpent killed the poisonous serpents. Enmity did, of course, appear in Augustine, who cited the Jews’ outsider status and hostility to Christ as the most powerful possible confirmation of the truth of their testimony. Christ’s slain enemies are here portrayed not as Jews but as basilisk-like creatures lying dead at Moses’s feet. But the Jews’ enmity, and their consequent damnation, will soon make its way into art.

*   *   *

It is natural and tempting to link the proliferation of Jewish imagery examined in this chapter with contemporary anti-Jewish texts and to see these images as expressions of the intolerance that came to mark high medieval Christendom.[108] But although it is clear that these artworks are strongly influenced by debates over scriptural interpretation and reflect deep disapproval of Jewish literal understanding, intellectual trends alone cannot explain artistic innovation. Differences in medium and audience must be taken into account; the function of images and the material circumstances in which they were made must be considered. I have suggested that the most immediate and compelling context is the challenge posed by ecclesiastical reform to traditional ritual, ornament, and grandeur and, more generally, by the desire of many twelfth-century monks, priests, and prelates to make room within spirituality for opulent artworks. And that the primary realm in which these religious images must be understood is the realm in which religious imagery was used: Christian devotion. They were made for traditionalist clerics or Benedictine monks grappling with the implications of a burgeoning new commercial economy—the very economy that made lavish decoration possible, often through the medium of Jews.[109] Like Rupert of Deutz, these art patrons continued to be moved by ritual and grandeur and, though committed to reform and purification, spurned the more ascetic practices and ideals of the early Cistercians. By creating artworks that use Hebrew history to confirm the role of tangible objects in conveying spiritual knowledge but then portray Jews as seeing incompletely, they construct the idea of a Christian way of looking at and using art. The function of Jews in these images is not to rehabilitate Jews as spiritual witnesses but to rehabilitate the realm long rhetorically associated with Jews (the external, glorious, temporal world so inimical to early Cistercians) as a valid part of Christianity. These figures are then joined—never replaced—by other Jews who function as outside, reluctant, and uncomprehending, and hence all the more reliable and compelling, witnesses to the power of Christianity.

If we cannot see the artistic representation of the Jew as a straightforward reflection of contemporary attitudes toward Jews, the artistic trends we have examined here can help illuminate developments in contemporary Christian thought about the Jews. As Rupert of Deutz and his brethren asserted the testimonial value of matter and the spiritual uses of art, Augustine’s articulation of Jewish witness acquired new relevance and force. Ideas that had previously been exclusively textual and largely metaphorical were given visual expression and tangible form. And, in turn, these images subtly affected the realm of ideas. A (perhaps unintended) side effect of their representational strategy was graphically to demonstrate the Jews’ stagnancy, sterility, materiality, and subordination—themes that had always been present in Christian thought but that received new emphasis in twelfth-century texts. Until about the year 1160, the primary impetus for such images seems not to have been antagonism toward, or even a desire to say something about, contemporary Jews. But soon, for reasons related both to the history examined here and to further intra-Christian devotional developments, images that were more readily—and negatively—associated with contemporary Jews began to come very much to the fore.

CHAPTER THREE

JEWISH EYES

Loveless Looking and the Unlovely Christ, CA. 1160–1220

For truth has such a face and such a mien,

As to be lov’d, needs only to be seen.

—John Dryden (1631–1700), The Hind and the Panther

In the 1160s Christ was gazed upon by a new kind of Jew. As we have seen, Jews had become increasingly evident in Christian imagery over the course of the previous eighty or so years. Their presence sometimes served to legitimate the opulent artworks in which they appeared and sometimes to emphasize the outdated and insufficiently spiritual nature of Jewish ritual and understanding. But in either case, as relics of the biblical past and witnesses to Christian truth, Jews were represented with dignity, if not sympathy; they were unencumbered by any distinctive physical or facial features and unmoved by any strong emotion. Then, in the second half of the twelfth century, the depiction of Jews began to change. While venerable prophets continued to bear positive visual witness, many other Jews came to play more aggressive roles and to be endowed with ungainly, glowering, even distorted features and expressions. The vast majority of these Jews directed their scowls toward images of Christ. What inspired this new intensity of feeling? How can we explain this new artistic focus on Jews’ features and expressions?

1. One and the Same Man

To begin to answer these questions, let us consider a famous Latin monastic text of around 1170 purporting to be the autobiography of a Jewish convert to Christianity originally named Judah and subsequently known as Herman.[1] Early in the autobiography, the author describes the first time he walked, when still a young Jewish man, into a Christian church. [Fig. 1; see also color insert] Judah/Herman vividly relates his shocked reaction to the art all around him:

I was entering the basilica (which formerly I had dreaded as a kind of pagan temple) still not so much devout as curious. Most eagerly examining everything there, I see, among the skillfully wrought varieties of carvings and pictures, a certain monstrous idol. I discern, indeed, one and the same man humiliated and exalted, despised and raised up, ignominious and glorious. Below, he is miserably hanging on a cross. Above, in a deceiving picture, he is seated and most handsome, as if deified. I confess I was stupefied, suspecting that the images were idols of the type that paganism used to fashion for itself in deluded error.[2]

FIG. 1

In many respects this passage (written, it should be remembered, by a Christian monk) perfectly encapsulates the themes examined in chapter 2: the centrality of the image in Christian worship, the importance of Jewish witness to the Christian imagination, and the inadequacy of Jewish vision. Like Count Hugo’s Jewish friend, Judah/Herman can recognize glory when he sees it. But also like that other German Jew, he maintains a purely superficial conception of glory, noting only the external aspects (skillfully wrought, hanging and seated, monstrous and handsome) and social implications (humiliated and despised, exalted and glorious) of Christ’s presentation. And of course, he sees only the Man in the God/Man. Because Judah/Herman fails to perceive the spiritual reality underlying the material image, he mistakes a devotional aid for a pagan idol.

In other respects, this narrative of a Jew’s encounter with images is different from those we have met before. The testimonial value of our previous Jewish witnesses—whether Hebrew prophets, scriptural Israelites, New Testament Judeans, or postbiblical houseguests and scholars—hinged upon knowledge, perception, and comprehension: our attention was drawn to what they either knew or did not know, saw or did not see and highlighted their faulty understanding. This passage, however, by presenting Judah/Herman as an utterly naïve viewer, ostensibly unaware of the identity of the figure whose images he encounters (he refers only to “one and the same man,” without naming Christ, and expresses a very unconvincing surprise that Christians might regard their savior as a deity), shifts our focus from cognition to sensation. It opens and closes by detailing Judah/Herman’s state of mind (devout, curious, eager, stupefied) and emphasizes throughout his emotional reactions, vividly conveying what Judah/Herman felt and did not feel in the presence of art.[3] What we sense more than anything else, as this aging convert relates his first intimate encounter with church decoration, is the visceral intensity of his response—his awe at the craftsmanship, his fascination with the bright images, his disgust at the image of the hanging man, his shock at the temerity of painting a deity, of worshipping a carving. Although he is obviously deeply moved by the visual richness around him, he cannot channel his emotions appropriately, feeling neither delight in Christ’s beauty nor pity for Christ’s suffering.[4] Only much later, after Judah has entered a monastery and decided to accept baptism, is he able to reconcile the dualities in Christ’s representation and so respond with the proper ardor:

There [in a dream], I saw the Lord Jesus sitting on the highest throne in the most powerful and honorable Majesty of the Father. And in place of a scepter, he was holding the triumphant sign of the cross upon his right shoulder. As he appeared to me, ineffable, together with his most excellent friends [angels or saints], I was standing, delighting inestimably in the sweetness of contemplating him …

But then, once again, Jews are summoned to embody the failure of vision. The sentence continues:

… when, behold, two sons of my aunt, one named Nathan and the other Isaac, passed behind me walking quickly, so that from this rapid passage of theirs I understood that this blessedness had been shown to them, not for solace but in demonstration of their everlasting punishment, so that from it they might be tortured inwardly in the mind by the fact that that glory of the holy ones which they were seeing, they were not worthy fully to enjoy.[5]

Judah’s delight is thrown into sharp relief, as his faith has been confirmed, by the sight of his two Jewish cousins tortured by a glimpse of a party to which they are not invited.

Judah/Herman’s text thus presents in narrative form traditional Christian theory, which insists that a deeper spiritual meaning is hidden beneath the material surface of the word/image, but also something new: an emphasis on compassion and emotion. In this respect it is characteristic of contemporary devotional trends. From the time of Bernward of Hildesheim, the focus of Christian veneration had begun to shift from the triumphant divine judge to the suffering human savior. This trend accelerated considerably in the twelfth century. By the second half of the century, spurred especially by the tender and expressive writings of Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153), Christian devotions were increasingly characterized by deep emotionalism, attention to Christ’s humanity, and intensified stress on love and compassion.[6]

These changes also help illuminate developments in the representation of the Jew. Just as Judah/Herman’s shock at Christ’s abjection revealed his lack of empathy, so now the heartlessness of “Jewish” looking was displayed in art for all Christendom to see. No longer merely imperfect, ignorant, indifferent, or reluctant witnesses to Christian truth, Jews now take center stage as visibly and viscerally hostile enemies of the faith. Rather than simply failing to see or acknowledge the truth, they now either glare with active antipathy at Christ and Christians or deliberately and ostentatiously look away. [Fig. 2] More ominously still, Christ’s crucifiers are for the first time explicitly portrayed as Jews and endowed with unprecedentedly coarse, even grotesque faces.

Two north German images, both dating to around 1165–70, help explain this shift and elucidate why, after so many centuries in which Christians blamed Jews for the Crucifixion without expressing that blame in pictures, Jews were suddenly singled out as guilty and visually marked as evil. Both of these images juxtapose visually striking Jewish figures with a suffering and vulnerable Christ and enlist a range of techniques to underscore the Jews’ culpability in the Crucifixion.

FIG. 2

2. May Their Eyes Be Darkened

The first image is the illuminated initial to Psalm 68 (Vulgate) from a manuscript of Peter Lombard’s Commentary on the Psalms made for Hartwig I, archbishop of Bremen, in 1166.[7] [Fig. 3; see also color insert] This psalm, in which the psalmist bewails his own suffering and reproaches his persecutors, was understood by most medieval Christian commentators to refer to Christ’s suffering on the cross.[8] It opens with the cry “Save me, Oh God!” and includes verses (21–23) traditionally applied to the Crucifixion: “In thy sight are all they that afflict me.… And they gave me gall for my food, and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink. Let their table become as a snare before them, and a recompense, and an offense. Let their eyes be darkened that they see not; and their back bend Thou down always.” The initial, accordingly, presents an image of the Crucifixion. This scene is juxtaposed, as in the Saint-Denis stained glass roundel discussed in chapter 2, with Moses’s raising of the brazen serpent (see ch. 2, fig. 12). The illumination therefore draws attention to the foreshadowing of Christ’s sacrifice in Hebrew scripture. It also, again like the Saint-Denis roundel, dedicates considerable space to the Israelite viewers of the brazen serpent, highlighting the Jews’ failure to see that Christ’s death fulfilled the promise inherent in the earlier episode.

FIG. 3

In spite of their manifest similarities, the two renderings of the brazen serpent scene present striking contrasts. In the Saint-Denis window, it will be recalled, the Israelites were rendered as respected though imperfect witnesses, and they gazed at the brazen serpent—if not necessarily at Christ—with reverence. That image seemed to hold out hope that the Israelites’ physical recovery might presage their eventual salvation. Christ’s enemies, whose death was celebrated in the inscription, were not identified as Jews in the stained glass medallion but rather embodied in the fantastic creatures that fell dead at the Israelites’ feet. In the Bremen manuscript, by contrast, there is no hint of hope concerning the Jews’ salvation and no ambiguity concerning Christ’s enemies. The brazen serpent scene, the focal point of the Saint-Denis window, is here relegated to the bottom half of the initial. Although Moses, on the right, appears as we have come to expect him—bearded and bareheaded, wearing archaizing robes and making a gesture of blessing—the rest of the image breaks with precedent in a variety of ways. The brazen serpent is not a statue but a realistically rendered snake hanging limply from a string looped around its neck and attached to a stake planted in front of the shaft of the cross. This mortal creature is far less imposing than the column-mounted winged beast in Suger’s window and many other twelfth-century images. Its appearance suggests weakness and vulnerability rather than life-giving power, and its hanging, tethered position invokes captivity and death rather than triumph.[9] It also recalls Judah/Herman’s description of Christ as “miserably hanging,” which itself reflected the medieval Jewish habit of referring to Jesus as “the hanged one.”[10] With one exception—a bearded figure in the middle of the group—the men who look on from the left bear little resemblance to Moses, to the Israelites in the Saint-Denis medallion, or to any other earlier Hebrews, Israelites, or Jews. Their faces and clothing convey nothing in the way of antiquity, authority, or wisdom—most of these men are beardless and quite young-looking, and dressed in fashionable, close-fitting, open-necked tunics.[11] Their peaked hats are soft, broad-brimmed, and fairly short, quite unlike the miter-type headgear of the Saint-Denis Israelites. In this context, these hats, drawn down low over the Israelites’ foreheads so as to convey a sense of brutishness, seem here to signify not so much antique authority as presumptuous insolence, a defiant rejection of Moses’s life-giving guidance. The Israelites’ stances are certainly insolent: two of these Hebrews point aggressively, one toward his right and one upward toward the Crucifixion, as if to challenge the power and authority of both Moses and Christ.[12] But it is the faces of the three Israelites in the foreground that are most striking: they have conspicuously large, long, almost beak-like downward-sloping noses, thick lips, heavily lidded eyes, and ungainly projecting chins. The awkwardness of these features is accentuated by their profile presentation. Although these Israelites have evidently not succumbed to death (their eyes are wide open), there is no sign that they have been healed by the sight of the brazen serpent: the snakes they clutch in their hands continue to bite at their chins, necks, and faces. Indeed, an affiliation with, even a thirst for, blood and death is expressed on the scroll clutched by the foremost figure among these men, which reads—anticipating the cry of the murderous Jerusalem mob in Matthew 25:27—“His blood be upon us.”[13]

This ominous cry is literally realized in the Crucifixion scene. Christ—whose sorrowful expression, pale and naked torso, bent knees, and leaning head embody the new devotional and visual emphases on his humanity and vulnerability—bleeds directly from his hand wounds onto the heads of the figures tormenting him on either side. These two tormentors—one pierces Christ’s side with a lance and the other offers a sponge dipped in vinegar—are unmistakably marked as Jews: in addition to their very conspicuous beards (one is thick and dark and the other is long, pointed, and trailing across its owner’s shoulder), they wear pointed hats identical to those of the Israelites below. Such categorical association of these figures with Jewishness constitutes a noteworthy departure from artistic precedent. Following the lead of the Gospels, previous imagery had depicted the lance bearer (traditionally called Longinus) and sponge giver (known as Stephaton) as Roman soldiers.[14] Their faces, too, link these tormentors to their serpent-bitten ancestors and distinguish them from the other figures in the scene: they are drawn in sharp profile and have thick lips, heavily lidded eyes, and large, thick noses. The nose of the man on the right is, in addition, distinctly crooked or hooked. Their expressions contrast starkly with the sorrow and compassion evident in the faces of Mary, John, and Jesus himself: the lance bearer on the left, who has a notably dark complexion, stares blankly into the face of Jesus, while the sponge bearer pulls down his brow and mouth in a frown or scowl. Finally, their iniquity is crystallized in their physical intimacy with a venerable symbol of evil—a dragon. One tormentor straddles the leg of the reptilian winged creature whose body forms the letter S of Salvum me, and the other rides his wing. In sum, unlike the Saint-Denis roundel, which highlights the salvation of the faithful prefigured in Numbers and fulfilled in the Crucifixion, this commentary image stresses the looks, actions, and cruel vision of the unfaithful. Through word and symbol it marks these unfaithful as Jews, and through feature and expression, gesture and gaze it affiliates these Jews with coarseness, insolence, and death.

3. Misbegotten Flesh and Misdirected Gaze

Our second image, a reliquary casket from the Westphalia–north Rhine region, also dating to around 1170 and now displayed in the Louvre, shares many of the same characteristics.[15] [Fig. 4] On the lid of the casket is an engraved and enameled scene of Christ being nailed to the cross. This is a new subject for Christian art, very rare for the period, which was presumably inspired by the growing devotional focus on the human Christ: it serves to shift the emphasis of Crucifixion imagery from Christ’s triumph over death to his suffering and sacrifice.[16] Christ’s aspect, again, reflects the new trend toward greater vulnerability: he is uncrowned, his head falls awkwardly onto his right shoulder, very much like the head of a hanged man, his body dangles helplessly with no visible means of support (there is, unusually, no suppedaneum, or footrest), his hair is disheveled, and his exposed torso is pale and drawn, the straining of his skin across his ribs accented with striated lines (this imagery was probably inspired by Psalm 21:18, “They numbered all my bones”). Three figures look on from each side as four far smaller executioners busily affix Jesus to the cross in the center. The figures watching from the right, one of whom is bearded and two of whom are beardless with short, curly hair, are probably meant to be understood as Gentiles, while the three figures looking on from the left are clearly marked as Jews: all are bearded and wear broad-brimmed hats.

FIG. 4

Although the center of the image hums with activity, the bulk of the piece’s considerable drama resides in the attitudes and gestures of the side figures. One of the Gentiles holds a basket of nails and vigorously grabs Jesus’s wrist, while his two companions seem to be debating the nature of the event they are witnessing. The Jew closest to Jesus points aggressively upward toward Jesus as if to instruct the executioners; with his other hand he offers a nail. The Jew on the far left makes a gesture we have seen before: he pulls his beard, an action that expresses disturbance of mind, though it is unclear whether he feels rage, fear, consternation, or resentment toward Christ—or, alternately, grief at his death or awe in the presence of the divine.[17] But the most vivid visage of all belongs to the Jew in the center of the group. His stark profile flaunts a large, hooked nose, all out of proportion both to his own face and to the other noses on the casket, though strikingly similar to that of the sponge bearer in the Bremen Psalms commentary initial.[18] His oversized nose and sharp profile draw attention to the angle of his head, turned ostentatiously away from the sight of Christ, and so links the Jew’s misbegotten flesh to his misdirected gaze.

4. Goad of Love

Together, then, the Bremen Psalms initial and the Westphalian casket signal a significant shift in the representation of the Jew: they belong to the first generation of artworks that explicitly mark some or all of Christ’s crucifiers and tormentors as Jews, they endow these Jews with unprecedentedly coarse, even grotesque faces, and they use these distortions to call negative attention to the Jews’ reactions to the sight of Christ.

The visual sources for and fundamental meaning of these features are no mystery. Long or large, downward-curved, snout-like or beak-like noses, especially when combined with brutish expressions and shaggy beards, had long served as visual indicators of bestiality, brutality, irrationality, and evil.[19] So, for example, the devil was routinely portrayed with a beak-like or snout-like nose, as in a stained glass panel from Champagne dating to about 1170, where Satan’s folly in seeking to tempt Christ is embodied in his gross features. [Fig. 5] Similar bestial features appear in contemporary artworks in association with a range of historical and biblical villains, from enemies of the Israelites to pagan killers of the early saints and the Syrian opponents of the Maccabees.[20] [Fig. 6] But there is no reason to think that before the period in question (the 1160s and 1170s) these figures or their features would automatically have been “read” as Jewish. It is only now, in images such as the Bremen initial and the Westphalian casket, that art viewers were presented with bestial and demonic imagery unambiguously applied to Jews, and, especially, to Christ’s Jewish killers and tormentors.

FIG. 5

FIG. 6

It was not traditional Christian condemnation of Judaism or the Jews’ role in the Crucifixion that spurred this imagery. To repeat a point made earlier: in spite of ample allegations of Jewish deicide made over many centuries in Christian liturgy, commentary, and polemic, with very few exceptions Christ’s executioners had not before this period been explicitly portrayed as Jews in art. Nor had any Hebrews, Israelites, or Jews been assigned such strangely distorted features.

In spite of our images’ apparent invocation of Jewish physical difference, we can also rule out any intensifying sense of Jewish “racial” or ethnic “otherness” as the inspiration for the new iconography.[21] Although the largish, beak-like noses of the Israelites, and even more the hooked noses of the sponge bearer and the central Jew on the Westphalian casket, are reminiscent of those assigned Jews in modern racialist anti-Semitic caricature, they do not necessarily bear the same meaning.[22] No Christian texts written up to this point attribute any particular physical characteristics to Jews, much less refer to the existence of a peculiar “Jewish nose.” Christian invective of the period (and there was ample and fierce anti-Jewish invective) maligns Jews’ moral, spiritual, and intellectual qualities, historical crimes, and interpretive shortcomings, but not their bodies or faces.[23] No artworks before this period had depicted Jews with such noses, or for that matter with any specific facial characteristics at all, other than the beard, which could bear positive as well as negative connotations. For the rest of the century, and for several decades beyond, the shape of Jews’ noses in art would remain too varied to constitute markers of identity. That is, many different kinds of “bad” noses were shown on Jews, but the same noses were shown on many “bad” non-Jews as well, and there was no single, identifiable “Jewish” nose. There is, thus, no evidence that twelfth-century Christendom had yet formulated fixed physiognomic Jewish stereotypes.[24] (For that matter, it does not seem to have developed physiognomic stereotypes of any kind.[25] Though some twelfth-century thinkers were interested in physiognomy, the first Latin moralizing physiognomic treatises appeared only several decades after the Lombard commentary initial was painted, and they attributed an individual’s external appearance not to his or her “ethnicity” or group affiliation but to such factors as the movements of the planets or the humors of the body.[26] Medieval Christians did distinguish among various “peoples” and articulate concepts akin to “ethnicity,” but it was simply not twelfth-century practice to categorize human populations according to physiognomy, much less facial feature.[27] The earliest known medieval “ethnographic monograph,” written about 1194, focused primarily on differences in food, clothing, and customs.[28]) The ugly noses and coarse features undoubtedly marked their owners as bestial or evil, but they did not—at this point—serve to mark the Jewish people as inherently or irredeemably evil.

There were, however, other developments in contemporary Christian culture that shed light on the new imagery. The first is the appearance of a new kind of Passion narrative. It cannot be mere coincidence that the new anti-Jewish Passion imagery appeared in the same place and time as a work that has been identified as the first anti-Jewish Passion treatise: the Stimulus Amoris (“Goad of Love”) by a monk named Ekbert, from the Benedictine Abbey of Schönau in the Rhineland.[29] Ekbert’s treatise (dated ca. 1155–80) is in many ways strikingly similar to our two images: it blames Jews for the Crucifixion, dwells in sometimes horrific detail on their cruelty, describes their raging faces and open mouths, and labels them “bestial,” recalling the beak-like noses and coarse features of our glaring Jews.

A second noteworthy development is the composition of the first text in which Jews were accused of ritually murdering a Christian child—the Life and Miracles of Saint William of Norwich, whose final version was written around 1170 by an English Benedictine monk named Thomas of Monmouth.[30] Its description of the little boy’s death is eerily reminiscent of Ekbert’s account of Christ’s Passion—the Jews are said to have tortured William with knotted ropes and then tied him to a cross formed by a post and beams in their house, pierced his hands and feet with nails, wounded his side, and stabbed him in the head with thorns.[31] The emphasis throughout is on the Jews’ cruelty, bloodthirstiness, and malice, and their desire to mock Christ in the process of murdering his surrogate, the innocent Christian boy.

Thomas Bestul, the leading scholar of Latin Passion texts, has suggested that the vivid rhetoric of the Stimulus Amoris reflects growing social distance and hostility between Jews and Christians and an “evolving consciousness among Christians of the dominant classes that the Jew was the ‘Other.’”[32] However, there is little evidence for any significantly deepening social gulf between Jews and Christians in northern Germany in the 1160s and 1170s. The vicious attacks on Rhineland Jews during the First Crusade (1096) and the far more restricted attacks in the same region during the Second Crusade (1146) did not destroy the Rhenish Jewish communities. To the contrary, aided by an imperial decree that contravened canon law to allow forced converts to return to Judaism and others that placed Jews under the direct protection of the emperor, northern German Jewish communities expanded and flourished in the twelfth century.[33] Impossible though it was for German Jews ever to feel fully secure in the wake of those events, and though the challenges faced by Jews living in Crusade-era Christendom should not be minimized, Jewish-Christian relations do not seem to have been fatally poisoned. The relatively short-lived and localized (and largely Crusade-inspired) outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence must be weighed against the considerable evidence for ongoing economic contacts and tranquil if not intimate coexistence. Indeed, Judah/Herman’s own text testifies to considerable Jewish-Christian cooperation and even familiarity: his encounter with church art in Münster took place because he had traveled to that city in order to do business with its bishop, in whose house he stayed as a guest.

Similarly, Thomas of Monmouth’s horrific depiction of Jewish cruelty is not reflective of, and cannot be explained by, the state of Jewish-Christian relations in the England of the time. The 1170s were a period of peace and prosperity for English Jews.[34] No anti-Jewish violence had yet been recorded anywhere in the realm. In fact, the Life and Miracles of Saint William itself testifies to a noteworthy lack of general anti-Jewish animus—Thomas wrote it partly out of frustration with the sheriff of Norwich’s pointed refusal to prosecute any Jews for the boy’s death (which had occurred almost thirty years earlier) and with the fact that the cult of the “martyr,” which Thomas strongly promoted, had been very slow to take off. Moreover, in describing the boy’s interactions with the Jewish community of Norwich, the text draws a picture of considerable Jewish-Christian peaceful coexistence and even neighborliness.

Thus, although Ekbert’s treatise and Thomas of Monmouth’s narrative, like our artworks, offer an extremely negative view of Jews’ natures and of their relation to Jesus (and his stand-in, the Christian child), we must be cautious in attributing that negative view to either worsening Jewish-Christian relations or an intensified sense of inherent Jewish difference. We should, instead, look to the audience and function of the texts in question. The Stimulus Amoris was written in Latin, for a monastic readership—that is, for men (and perhaps women) trained not to look at and judge the world outside their monastery walls, much less the unbelievers who might reside there, but to seek out and eradicate the sin within their own hearts. And its explicit goal was to stimulate love for Christ, suggesting that the existence of such love could not be taken for granted, even among devout monks, nuns, and clerics. The Life and Miracles of Saint William was designed to arouse pity and reverence for, and encourage pilgrimage to the shrine of, a child whose “martyrdom” had so far failed to excite widespread religious enthusiasm. Both texts, then, underscored Jewish hatred and cruelty primarily in order to address perceived inadequacies in Christian piety. Even these most anti-Jewish of texts thus implicitly concede that Jews were by no means the only figures in medieval Europe lacking the requisite spiritual fervor or all too liable to descend into sin.

5. Whose Gaze? Jews Then and Sinners Today

Such a concern is detectable in our images as well. For the portrayals of these Jewish viewers, for all their hideousness and hostility, are not without ambiguities. In the Lombard commentary initial (fig. 3) there is an anomalous Israelite viewer—the bearded figure who resembles Moses and is depicted in three-quarter rather than profile view and yet wears a “Jewish” hat and, like his fellows, clutches a living snake. This figure undermines any easy dichotomies: he is neither condemned nor saved simply because he is Jewish; his fate seems to hang in the balance. Peter Lombard’s commentary, adjacent to the image, explicitly concedes that Jews had no monopoly on unbelief: “Therefore just as Jews then gave a bitter drink for drinking, so too now today do all who in evil living make a scandal in the Church.… ‘Let their eyes be darkened,’ that is, let [heretics’ and sinners’] minds [be darkened], because they refuse to understand … but rather think about lower things.”[35] This remark forces viewers to reconsider the apparent message of the anti-Jewish iconography. Rather than comfortably assigning evil solely to “Jews then,” they are encouraged to contemplate the evil that exists “now today” among Christians. The image helps its viewers appropriately respond to such evil by concretizing the repellent effects of darkened sight and by suggesting a superior form of seeing: compassionate contemplation of the image of Christ.[36] (It is worth noting that although these images undoubtedly implicate Jews in Christ’s death, their emphasis is less on the pain inflicted by the Jews than on their failure to perceive that pain or pity their victim. In each case Christ is pale and passive but hardly abject: he does not display the excessive suffering, wounds, or blood that will come to characterize later medieval Crucifixions.)

Ambiguities likewise mark the witnesses on the Westphalian casket (see fig. 4). The image envisions two sets of deicides, one Jewish and one non-Jewish. The presence of the young and curly-haired Gentile holding the basket of nails and conspicuously grabbing Christ’s wrist forcefully reminds the viewer that guilt did not accrue to Jews alone. Moreover, the artist has crafted subtle divisions within each group. The two Gentiles on the right seem to be debating between themselves, perhaps disagreeing about the identity of Christ or the justness of the Crucifixion. The Jews, too, are less uniform and united than their surface similarities would suggest. The figure on the far left pulling his beard in rage or contempt seems to be signaling hostility toward Christ. But his cloak is drawn down in such a way as to cover his hand. The veiling of the hands is an ancient custom expressing veneration in the presence of the sacred and/or respect in the presence of the dead; Christian artists, for example, often depicted the “just and devout” Simeon with covered hands in images of the Presentation, and Hebrew seers hold the scrolls of their Christological prophecies with veiled hands.[37] [Fig. 7] Veiled hands may also express grief, as on folio 11v of the Paris Psalter (Canterbury, ca. 1180), where a man lifts his sleeve-covered hand to his face in grief.[38] [Fig. 8] The gesture, then, may indicate that this Jew recognizes and reveres the divinity of Jesus and/or grieves at Jesus’s death. His pulling of his beard likewise may express grief. Alternately, it may serve to direct rage or contempt not toward Christ but toward the Jew’s coreligionists. The point is not that we must definitively decide but that we must ask.

FIG. 7

FIG. 8

Finally, let us consider the strangest features of the entire scene: the bizarre-looking vine branches growing out of the heads of the central figures in each group (at first glance they resemble antlers more than anything). These branches are explained by the words inscribed around the borders: “Oh my chosen vine, why have you turned to bitterness, and why do you crucify me?”[39] The words belong to a responsum from the Good Friday liturgy and seem tailor-made to indict the Jews; the antiphon that precedes this responsum contains a telling phrase: “And there rose up against me hostile witnesses.”[40] The “bitterness” of the central Jewish witness is, indeed, etched in the crass features of his left-looking face. Yet Christ’s reproach was frequently applied to Christians by preachers, who considered the faithful to be Christ’s “chosen vine” and who yet saw actual and potential sinners when they looked upon their flocks.[41] And, of course, the same bitter vine emerges from the head of the central Gentile, whose visage, while less crassly configured than that of the Jew, also turns away from the sight of the savior.

Through such diversity and ambiguity, the viewers of these artworks are encouraged to meditate less upon the group affiliations of those who contemplate Christ than upon their individual responses, as well as upon the nature and effects of improper contemplation.[42] Far from indicting only or even primarily Jews, the images generously spread sinful response across humanity. And they warn that all who regard Christ wrongly—who question the salvific power of his representation or who fail to gaze at his body and image with the requisite humility and love—embody brutishness and will ultimately see and receive only blood and death.

6. Neither Beauty nor Grace

Our images are not alone in expressing concern about how Christians might respond to the sight of Christ. The crucifix had, of course, been the central image of Christianity for many centuries.[43] Yet during the course of the twelfth century, devotional trends emphasizing personal prayer, individualized meditation, and contemplation of the human Jesus combined with the ongoing “image explosion” to render images of the Crucifixion far more prominent than ever before. In addition to the crosses now fixed permanently on church altars and the triumphal crucifixes hung high above the heads of congregants, small-scale crucifixes began to adorn individual monastic cells and private domestic spaces, and devotional manuscripts featuring intimate portrayals of the Crucifixion proliferated.[44] The appearance of the crucifix also changed substantially. Bernward of Hildesheim’s tender and intimate image of the crucified Christ (see ch. 1, fig. 9) had had relatively limited immediate influence: for more than a century after its creation, Christ on the cross generally continued to be depicted alive, erect, open-eyed, and unscathed, a serenely regal and triumphant king and victor.[45] In the second half of the twelfth century, as the new devotions spread across Western Europe, the more tender image prevailed. It was only very recently, then, that Christ had come to be portrayed as he appears in our two images: naked, slumped, weakened, and wounded—a humbled and vulnerable mortal victim. [Fig. 9]

Artistic developments certainly contributed to this change, most notably a trend toward greater naturalism in depicting the human form, spurred by the revival of interest in classical art and increased contact with Byzantium and its strong traditions of devotional imagery.[46] But the most important impetus was the changing devotional ethos of Latin Christendom. As Christian texts meditated on the loving sacrifice offered by Christ in becoming man, artists gave his humanity and mortality visual form. Christ’s humble appearance likewise dovetailed with the asceticism of the reformist orders, which were deeply suspicious of external glory. Indeed, a range of texts dating toward the middle of the century anticipated the new artistic trends by explicitly drawing inspiration from Christ’s unsightliness. Prior Guigo of Chartreuse (d. 1136), for example, insisted that Christ’s humiliation was a sign of divinity, and he vaunted Christ’s lack of beauty as a model for Carthusian austerity: “affixed to the cross without sightliness or beauty [cf. Isa. 53:2]: thus is the Truth to be adored.”[47] The reformers may have lost the battle against ornamentation, but they did not concede the aesthetic war, insisting that plainness conveyed authenticity, was the ultimate expression of the “unvarnished truth.” It was probably a new-style image of a naked and vulnerable Christ that so shocked and repelled Judah/Herman—remember the insistence with which he contrasted the richly clad and enthroned “seeming deity” with the humbled hanging man below. This contrast would have lost much edge had the crucified Jesus been triumphantly crowned, colored, and fully clothed.

FIG. 9

Jews were not the only ones discomfited by the unwonted sight of a naked and defeated deity. Mary and John also express shock and distress in crucifixion scenes, though in a different emotional register, serving as visual exemplars of empathy as they cover their eyes with weeping, clasp their breasts in mourning, and lean or sway in the pain of grief.[48] But their model was not an easy one to follow. The new tendency to represent Christ as naked, humbled, and dead or dying posed a challenge to some Christian viewers, who were used to revering an outwardly majestic Christ and who lived in a world that still very much valued power and beauty, status and victory. An iconographic note in a twelfth-century manuscript detailed Christ’s appearance for the artist, so that he might create an appropriate image: “Christ was tall and lofty in stature, and at the shoulders higher than those who preceded or followed him. He was handsomely dressed according to the habit of his religion, with black hair and a long beard.”[49] Even Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury, pioneer of the new, human-centered devotions, drew the line when it came to art: “I am wont to be incensed against sorry artists, when I see our Lord himself painted in an unseemly figure.”[50] Yet this was exactly what the new images presented for Christian contemplation.

The challenge posed by Christ’s inglorious appearance was sometimes directly addressed by the written word. So, for example, in an anonymous Cistercian or Carthusian Meditation on the crucifix dating to around 1170, almost certainly inspired by a new-style image of a dying Christ, Jesus on the cross implores the Christian gazing back at him not to be repelled by his outward ugliness:

“O my beloved! You who so often have desired to enjoy the kiss of my mouth, announcing to me through my companions, ‘he kissed me with the kiss of his mouth’ [Cant. 1.1], I am ready, I incline my head, I offer my mouth for a kiss, however many times it pleases. And do not say in your heart, ‘I do not seek that mouth, which is without beauty and loveliness [cf. Isa. 53.2], but rather that glorious one, which the angelic citizens always desire to enjoy.’ Do not, do not err thus, for unless first you will have kissed affectionately that [unlovely] mouth, you will not be able to reach that [glorious] one at all. Therefore, kiss that mouth which now I offer to you, since though it may be without beauty and loveliness, nevertheless, it is not without grace.”[51]

The author of this Meditation recognized the potential for aesthetic revulsion and, by inspiring guilt for such revulsion in his readers, harnessed the very intensity of their distaste to devotional ends. Judah/Herman’s “autobiography” does much the same but projects the revulsion onto an already religiously reviled figure. By presenting a Jew recoiling in disgust from Christ’s image, it provokes the reader (a Christian canon or monk) to distance himself from the Jew’s reaction. But the very need to do so implicitly acknowledges the potential for such recoil in every Christian reader.

7. Jewish Eyes

This, then, explains the hideous and hostile Jews in our images. They do not appear here because Jews iconographically marked as such must needs be included in Crucifixion scenes. Rather, when Christian makers of art sought to teach their viewers how properly to contemplate the image of Christ, they turned to the figures that, during the course of the previous seventy years and more, had been established in Christian art as the preeminent “witnesses” to the power and authority of the Christian image. In the time of Bernward of Hildesheim, Christian prelates had been encouraged by images to compare their own exercise of high office to that of the New Testament elders. Since the turn of the twelfth century, Christian viewers had been regaled with images of ancient Hebrews and their modern descendants, that they might attend to the testimony of the former and meditate on the myopia of the latter. When the new devotional and artistic emphasis on Christ’s vulnerability created a need for instruction in compassionate and empathetic response, then, the Jews were ready at hand.

Devotional literature from the middle decades of the century amply testifies to the Jews’ utility in this regard. In the aforementioned Meditation on the crucifix there is only a plea that the viewer/meditator not look disparagingly on Christ; there is no condemnation of those who do. But other texts explicitly invoke the Jews as exemplars of loveless looking. Bernard of Clairvaux made compassionate response to Christ’s suffering a touchstone for faith in terms clearly inspired by visual imagination: “Neither Jew nor pagan feels the pangs of love as Ecclesia does.… She sees the only-begotten Son of the Father bearing the burden of His Cross; she sees the Lord of Majesty bruised and spat upon, the Author of life and glory transfixed with nails, struck by the lance, flooded with mockery, and finally laying down His beloved soul for His friends. She sees this, and the sword of love pierces through her own soul too, and she says, ‘Support me with flowers, compass me about with apples, for I languish with love’ [Cant. 2:5].”[52] The Jews’ role in bringing about Christ’s sufferings here seems almost incidental; the thrust of the passage is to promote love among potentially coldhearted Christians by condemning the Jews’ pitiless response to the sight of those sufferings. Bernward’s contemporary Peter the Venerable, who saw reverential acknowledgment of Christ’s sacrifice as humankind’s primary obligation, was clearly defending less than luxurious and decidedly nontriumphant depictions of Christ when he bellowed at the Jews: “What do you expect to see, Jews: gold, silver, gems?! Your own prophets said he would come in humility.…”[53] Blunter still is the caution proffered by the Cistercian abbot Geoffrey of Auxerre to novices striving to live spiritually in a material world. “Do not be distracted by exterior light,” he warned, “for Christ himself would have neither beauty nor grace, were he viewed with Jewish eyes.”[54]

8. The Lethal Gaze

The most piercing Jewish gaze I know appears in an image from the Stammheim Missal, a north German prayer book from Bernward of Hildesheim’s own monastery of Saint Michael’s, dating to around 1170 to 1175.[55] It is an elaborately structured Crucifixion scene prefacing the Canon of the Mass, the most important prayer in the Eucharist, Christianity’s central sacrament. The image is filled with both familiar and unusual characters and symbols: the Virgin Mary and Saint John, the lance bearer and sponge giver, Sun and Moon, Life and Death, Ecclesia and Synagoga, and a young man trampling the grapes of wrath (Isa. 63:1–6) while flanked by the prophet Isaiah and a youthful figure in white. The treatment of Jewish vision here is striking. Through an act of bifurcation, the image implicitly acknowledges the simultaneous attraction and revulsion embedded in the “Jewish” way of looking: Christ is glared at from his left (sinister side) by not one personification but two: Synagoga and Death.[56] [Fig. 10] Synagoga’s presence beside Christ is perfectly conventional; she had appeared in Crucifixions at least since the ninth century. (See ch. 1, fig. 11.) But those earlier discreetly veiled or blindfolded spinsters can hardly be compared to this immodest young siren, whose lustrous, long, and thick dark hair and enticingly white neck are so brazenly exposed and who wears a hat properly belonging to a male priest or prophet. And who can see. For this Synagoga’s eyes are wide open, and she apparently both knows and hates what she is seeing: she carries a scroll saying “Cursed be he who hangs on the tree” as she contradicts Ecclesia and points malevolently at the dying figure beside her. The phrase (from Gal. 3:13, which in turn quotes Deut. 21:23) simultaneously evokes Old Testament law, Saint Paul’s condemnation of the harshness of that law, and, as is indicated by Herman/Judah’s reference to the hanging man, contemporary Jews’ disparagement of the crucifix. Earlier ambivalence about Synagoga’s embodiment of Jewish witness is here converted into an actively hostile rendering of her vision. The inspiration for her curse is made clear by her companion and coconspirator: Synagoga’s scroll seems to emerge from the dark, frowning brow of the dark-faced, curved-nosed devilish Mors (Death) just below, whose distorted profile and toothy grimace are all too reminiscent of those sported by Jews in contemporary images.

FIG. 10

But the primary function of this image is not to indict the Jews. It is to help Christians see Christ’s sacrifice in the proper spirit. It does this in two ways. First, by juxtaposing the hideously devilish Death with the deceptively young and beautiful Synagoga, it highlights moral qualities that are (as the image implicitly acknowledges) not as apparent in the real world as they might be. Synagoga’s dark companion “outs” the pitilessness hidden under her seductive appearance. The lovely but loveless looker is associated with visible ugliness, so that the Christian might see, recognize, and recoil from a similar error. Second, the image helps the viewer learn to see in the humble and human Jesus the spark of the divine. But it does not do so by exalting abjection. Rather, it codifies new aesthetic criteria, teaching the viewer to question his own preferences. The traditional attributes of divinity, as defined by both Judah/Herman and the monastic iconographic note—height, glow, color, preciousness, beauty, health—are here stood on their head, as we are prompted to spurn the gaudy figures that torment Christ and the falsely lovely and inappropriately attired Synagoga.[57] This most luxurious, complex, and non-Cistercian of manuscripts conveys Christ’s life-giving, love-deserving humility primarily through underscoring the extravagance, insolence, and rage of his deadly Jewish foes.

Yet it is worth noting that even the undoubtedly anti-Jewish elements in the Stammheim Missal focus not on the Jews’ deeds or historical crimes (the lance bearer, who wears a Phrygian cap, and the sponge giver, who is bareheaded and beardless, are not here marked as Jews) but on their contemptuous gaze. The great innovation of the “new theology” of which Lombard was a prominent exponent was to stress intention and motivation over action and effect. The famous philosopher and theologian Peter Abelard (d. 1142) tried to promote this shift when he lamented, “[God] sees there where no man sees, because in punishing sin he sees not the deed but the mind, whereas, conversely, we consider not the mind, which we do not know, but the deed.”[58] But this new emphasis on internal ethical positioning introduced complications. How, in the varied and confused world of twelfth-century society, was one to look beyond externals and distinguish among the perfect, the imperfect, and the outright evil? What Lombard and Abelard sought to do in their ethics, our artists sought to do in their art. As if to underscore the primacy of attitude over action, many of the glaring, hostile Jewish faces created between about 1165 and 1200 belong to Jews who are not inflicting bodily harm on Christ. The full repertory of graphic facial expressions, just coming into its own in the art of this period, was also applied to Jews who simply revile and mock Jesus, his followers, and his Old Testament prototypes.[59] Many new typological and biblical scenes that enter the visual and preaching repertoire around this time seem, in fact, designed primarily to give scope to manifestations of Jewish derision. Members of this hostile crowd include the Pharisee in grimacing profile in the Great Canterbury Psalter (fig. 11);[60] the grotesque-featured, sneering Jew who turns around to mock Jesus on the road to Calvary on the Balfour Ciborium (see fig. 2); the darkly scowling and aggressively pointing rabbi and bulbous-nosed recalcitrant auditors debating with Saint Paul on an enamel plaque of around 1175 (fig. 12); and Noah’s disrespectful son Ham (who is glossed in Christian texts as a figure for Jews) sneering through a gaping, toothy black smudge of a mouth at the exposed pudenda of his inadvertently drunken father in the Stuttgart Orosius (fig. 13).[61]

Even an image in which Jews are actively attacking Christ focuses primarily on their ferocious, yet clouded sight. [Fig. 14; see also color insert] In two different chapters in the Gospel of John, “the Jews,” enraged at Jesus’s perceived blasphemy, threaten to stone him.[62] The Gospel does not specify how Jesus escaped punishment, telling us only that “Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple” and “he escaped from their hands.”[63] A Belgian illumination from around 1175 supplies an answer: as four gaped-mouthed, low-browed Jews drawn in profile and with large, hooked noses raise their fists to hurl stones toward a tall, elegantly dressed Christ, a dark cloud descends from heaven to envelop his head and hide it from their view.[64] This miasmic haze would do little to save Jesus from the threatened stoning (his body—the lower, human half—remains fully exposed), but it serves admirably to shield his beautiful face from the Jews’ angry and lethal gaze.[65]

FIG. 11

FIG. 12

FIG. 13

FIG. 14

9. Beauty and the Eye of the Beholder

The glaring and coarse Jewish faces in devotional art of the last third of the twelfth century forced Christian viewers unused to gazing at a humble Christ to reconsider their own response and to seek to distance themselves from those ugly, angry figures. Precisely because so many Christians found it difficult to “see” beauty or glory in Christ’s humility, the Jews’ contempt for Christ’s sacrifice was rendered visually unsavory. But our images do more than simply externalize inner ugliness: they help reconfigure the Christian ideal of beauty, by pointedly contrasting simplicity with its reverse. Christ’s pale, slack, barely clad body might not radiate worldly glory, but in these images it has a gentle serenity and grace, especially when contrasted with the fashionably dressed, coarse-featured, confusedly busy figures that surround him. This new aesthetic, however, hardly constitutes an overturning of dominant values. Prevailing social mores—respect for power, regard for control—are not denied, just subtly reinterpreted. Moreover, we cannot forget that this aesthetic is manifested in expensive worldly objects and luxurious and colorful manuscripts. In this way the patrons of our images—wealthy clerics (mostly, it seems, Benedictine monks and secular prelates, influenced by Cistercian spirituality but not subject to Cistercian discipline)—got to have their cake and eat it too: they condemned loveless and materialistic looking, by glaring hostilely at luxurious and hostile material images. They used the art they loved to kindle love for Christ and teach themselves and the clerics under their care to “see” in the proper spirit.[66] Hence the images’ overwhelming focus on vision—on the viewers’ varied reactions to the saving signs of the brazen serpent and the crucifix.[67]

I do not wish to leave the impression that actual Jewish-Christian relations play no role in either the conception or reception of such apparently anti-Jewish artworks. Just as it is no coincidence that these texts and images all come from the same place and time—later-twelfth-century northeastern France and northern Germany (and in a case or two, England)—it is surely no coincidence that these areas were the center of the most flourishing Jewish communities in northern Europe. The new devotional emphases on poverty, humility, and simplicity arose in precisely these areas as a response to rapid urban growth and commercial prosperity. Jews contributed significantly to these economic developments. Some profited mightily, bringing them into close contact with members of the Christian elites, both lay and clerical—to the distress of pious writers such as Ekbert of Schönau, who sought through vituperative prose to inculcate in his readers greater social disdain. Jews also noted and reacted to the Christian devotional and artistic trends that arose in tandem with the new commercial activity and prosperity. A range of mid-twelfth-century texts suggest that Jews did indeed harbor, and sometimes outwardly expressed, contempt for the crucified Christ.[68] One Jew is even recorded as having understood but rejected the message of the new iconography: Nathan ben Joseph the Official of Sens (thirteenth century) is supposed to have said in reply to a Franciscan preacher’s assertion that the brazen serpent was a “type” for the Crucifixion, “That is true. The brazen serpent does indeed represent Christ crucified, and the sight of him in this situation is enough to cure us of a desire to believe in him!”[69] This Jewish contempt required Christian response for two reasons. Obviously Christians would not willingly tolerate the mocking of their most revered image by a people supposed to live in subjection. But as I have already argued, the evidence suggests that in the 1160s and 1170s an even more pressing need for response arose from the fact that some Christians shared, if not the Jews’ hostile reactions, then at least the aesthetic judgments and cultural assumptions underlying them: they, too, were discomfited by the representation of God as a humble victim. If our images can be said to reflect anti-Jewish hostility, it was not a hostility arising naturally from cultural difference and distance but a hostility that had to be incited, precisely in order to construct an otherwise incomplete difference and distance.

Thus, though our images were made for devotional ends, their effects were not restricted to the realm of devotion. It is impossible to prove a direct, causal relationship between any of our images and the anti-Jewish accusations and violent episodes that began to appear in Germany, England, and France in the 1170s and intensified in the following decades. But as we have seen, a convincing correlation can be drawn between the new devotional emphasis on Christ’s suffering, the composition of medieval anti-Jewish Passion treatises, the birth of the ritual murder accusation, and the appearance in art of the hostile and glaring Jew. Each of these genres sought first and foremost to promote Christian pity and piety. But at the same time, each also excited the opposite of compassion. Viewers may have more readily pitied the crucified Christ when they saw how hideous the lack of pity could render an infidel face. But they also more readily reviled those pitiless infidels. In giving visual form to loveless looking, medieval Christendom learned to look with hate.

CHAPTER FOUR

ALL THE WORLD A PICTURE

Jews and the Mirror of Society, CA. 1220–1300

Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art;

They draw but what they see, know not the heart.

—William Shakespeare, Sonnet 24, lines 13–14

Around the year 1200 the remarkable creative, artistic, and reforming energy that had animated the great monasteries and cathedral schools of twelfth-century Europe began to spill over into the wider world. In rapidly expanding cities across the continent, clerics paid new notice to lay behavior and mores, scholars paid new attention to natural and physical phenomena, rulers flaunted new powers and ambitions, and laymen displayed new piety and prosperity.[1] As Jews were attracted to the cities by the opportunities and protections they offered, Jewish life became even more thoroughly literate, commercialized, and urbanized than previously. Christian society followed suit, with a substantial merchant class and bourgeoisie developing for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire. These developments had significant impact on the visual life of medieval people: as cathedrals rose, courts flourished, markets burgeoned, and workshops multiplied, images suddenly seemed to be everywhere in Christendom.[2] And it sometimes can seem that Jews were everywhere in thirteenth-century Christian imagery. In contrast to the previous two centuries, when images of Jews, though steadily proliferating, had remained largely confined to biblical manuscripts and sculpture or liturgical objects evocative of the historical past, Jews now began to appear in a far wider variety of genres (illustrated apocrypha and apocalypses, biblical commentaries, bestiaries, miracles of the Virgin, lives of the saints, treatises on virtue and vice, histories of the world) and to be associated with a broadened range of objects or animals, many recognizable from everyday life. In moralizing imagery in various types of artworks, coins and coin-filled moneybags signified moneylending or avarice; cats, which were associated with hunting and nighttime and symbolized heresy, were shown with Jews; and crows, which collected shiny objects, and toads, which swelled themselves up, signaled greed and usury, the illicit amassing of wealth. Through these and other images, Jews, traditionally used to signify the outdated past, came to be identified with the most “modern” of activities and tendencies—moneylending, philosophy, heresy, curiosity. [Fig. 1] So, for example, an illustration of the end of the world depicts the followers of Antichrist as money-clutching Jews; a roundel condemning heresy shows Jews inviting university students to worship a demonic cat; an image of Hypocrisy portrays Jews worshipping an idol; and an entry in a bestiary describing the owl’s preference for darkness is illustrated with a blindfolded Jew engaged in a futile dispute.[3] Many of these artworks enlist and extend the visual strategies examined in the last chapter—assigning to Jews coarse features and cruel expressions. These new image collections are so striking, their use of physiognomy and expression is so powerful, and so many recent studies have been devoted to their analysis that one might well conclude that thirteenth-century artists were obsessed with Jews and that thirteenth-century art was obsessively anti-Jewish.[4]

FIG. 1

This impression is quite misleading. In spite of the undoubted deployment of innovative and often (to us) disturbing anti-Jewish imagery in the thirteenth century, most manuscripts of the period, whether Bibles, bestiaries, hagiographies, commentaries, or histories, still show few readily identifiable postbiblical Jews and even fewer denigrated or distorted ones. The same holds true for monumental sculpture, liturgical objects and vestments, and stained glass. Beyond the confines of a group of arresting but by no means typical works, the vast majority of figures construable as Jews continue to fall into a narrow range of standard characters: Hebrew prophets or New Testament Judeans, with the occasional addition of a single hell-bound unbeliever in the company of other sinners.[5] It is a considerable challenge to square this general visual reticence and conservatism regarding Jews with the intense anti-Judaism of a small number of objects and creative iconographic innovations. And yet in the best scholastic fashion we must try to reconcile these apparent contradictions, if we are to arrive at anything like a representative sense of the place of Jews in thirteenth-century art.

In this chapter I approach that task by surveying the full range of “Jewish” figures (that is, of figures whom viewers could and probably would have identified as Jewish or associated with Judaism because of their clothing, faces, actions, or attributes) in a single great multimedia monument: the cathedral of Chartres. Chartres is a useful test case for reasons both historical and practical. As an early example of the Gothic style that came to dominate thirteenth-century France and eventually much of the rest of Europe, Chartres was one of the most influential—and so is one of the most intensively studied—of all medieval buildings.[6] It contains the most complete surviving ensemble of thirteenth-century stained glass and sculpture;[7] its chapter and school were in close touch with prevailing intellectual trends;[8] its bishops were involved in the most important religious, military, and political developments of the day; it was patronized by the Capetian royal dynasty; and (not least) high-quality images of its sculpture and glass are readily available on the Web.[9] Moreover, several aspects of the cathedral of Chartres make it a likely locus for the working out of Jewish imagery: it was a major center of the growing cult of the Virgin, which generated wildly popular miracle tales that often featured Jewish scoundrels; its decoration is closely related to the earliest surviving manuscripts of the Bibles moralisées, probably the most relentlessly anti-Jewish of all thirteenth-century artworks; its stained glass program draws heavily from preaching exempla, a genre in which Jews often feature; and it has been singled out in a recent book on anti-Jewish art as the “supreme embodiment” of Christian triumphalism.[10] Few structures offer so rich a field for exploring what thirteenth-century Christians might glean about Jews from looking at art.

1. Venerable Signs, Venerable Prophets

The vast majority of “Judaic” figures encountered by visitors to Chartres are not despised infidels but revered forerunners. The prominence of Hebrew prophets, patriarchs, and monarchs in the sculptures and glass of Chartres, as of all other Gothic cathedrals, is striking. At least twenty-two large-scale Old Testament figures and countless small ones adorn the major entrance to the cathedral, the three doors that together comprise the Royal Portal of the west facade. Although this portal dates to about 1145—exactly contemporary to Suger’s Abbey Church of Saint-Denis—and so may have appeared old-fashioned to thirteenth-century viewers, it nevertheless remained a point of civic pride for residents of Chartres and a source of wonder and delight for visiting pilgrims. Its depiction of Hebrew figures inevitably influenced, and would have informed viewers’ reception of, subsequent depictions of Jews.[11] [Fig. 2] Their clothing, for example, appears on characters in a range of different scenes that eventually came to adorn the cathedral. This similarity helps to mark those other figures as “Judaic,” but it also draws attention to the differences in behavior and outlook between the prophets and elders on the Royal Portal and their less revered descendants. Much of what we find in the Royal Portal is familiar from earlier artworks. The standing prophets carved on either side of all three doorways perpetuate iconographic traditions that go back to the late eleventh century: their beards, hats, and scrolls embody antique authority, confirming the central role of Hebrew scripture in Christian thought while simultaneously ratifying the respectability of artistic innovation.[12] [Fig. 3] Other areas of the Royal Portal use traditional iconography to address more timely (that is, mid-twelfth-century) concerns. The Hebrew elders on the lintel of the northern door, for example, recall the debates examined in chapter 2, when depictions of Hebrews with blocked or partial vision helped distinguish spiritual ways of seeing from material ones.[13] Although these elders sit just below a glorious image of Christ in Majesty, he is not visible to them: they awkwardly crane their necks in a fruitless attempt to see the divinity hidden from them by their own framing and by a roiling cloud.[14] [Fig. 4] They are, however, not ridiculed for their incapacity: they are garbed and seated with dignity and endowed with the same beards and scrolls as the more prescient prophets.

FIG. 2

FIG. 3

FIG. 4

This basic approach to Hebraic heritage did not disappear: the thirteenth-century contributions to Chartres’s imagery continued to emphasize the authentic if archaic nature of Hebrew history and prophecy. Sometimes this message is conveyed via traditional iconographic signs, as in the cathedral’s two versions of the Jesse tree (visual genealogy of Christ in the form of a family tree), in which mantles or hats, scrolls, and beards endow Christ’s ancestors and the prophets who foretold his coming with an aura of wisdom and venerability.[15] [Fig. 5] The value of Hebrew antiquity can also be expressed through placement: the situating of Isaiah and Jeremiah alongside Saints Peter and John the Baptist in the north porch central portal, for example, underscores the continuity from the Old Law to the New.[16] New stylistic developments could be used to reinforce traditional themes: Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the other remarkably carved Hebrews on the same portal are often cited as examples of a new valuation of the physical, visible world.[17] [Fig. 6] The wonderfully wise and care-lined, compassionate faces of these kings and prophets wed human emotion and divine revelation, while their fleshly realism seems to concede value and beauty to the corporeal realm, traditionally associated with Judaism.[18]

FIG. 5

Of course this new regard for the human body by no means amounts to a wholesale embrace of materialism, much less of Hebraic literalism or ritual. Thirteenth-century artworks continued to declare the superiority of “spiritual Christian” over “material Hebrew” vision. The famous lancets depicting evangelists sitting on the shoulders of prophets transferred to the religious realm a metaphor for intellectual progress popularized at the Chartres cathedral school, where in the twelfth century a master declared (with deceptive humility) that he and his fellow scholars were “dwarves sitting on the shoulders of giants.”[19] [Fig. 7; see also color insert] All these images are inherently unsympathetic to ongoing observance of the Old Law, in that they either underscore the antiquity of Hebrew scripture or stress the incompleteness of Hebrew vision and the obsolescence of Hebrew law. Yet there is nothing condemnatory in the way they visualize those fundamental Christian tenets. The Hebrew prophets carrying evangelists on their shoulders look more like caring fathers than subjugated slaves; they also evoke images of Saint Christopher bearing Christ on his back. The funnel-shaped pointed hat worn by Isaiah in a window dating to around 1230 may look odd to modern eyes, and it is true that such hats appear on Jews in contemporary manuscripts that are indisputably hostile to Judaism.[20] But nothing at Chartres prompts the viewer to read this particular hat as denigrating: the flowering rod that Isaiah holds refers to the Virgin Mary, whose virginal conception he was believed to have foretold, and so emphasizes his foresight. Prophetic imagery such as this monumental Isaiah says nothing whatsoever about contemporary adherents of the superseded law (that is, living medieval Jews). Supersessionist theology was undoubtedly implicitly intolerant of Jewishness, but its visual expression at Chartres often does nothing to make intolerance explicit or to heighten anti-Judaism.

FIG. 6

FIG. 7

2. New Signs, Familiar Figures

In other contexts, particularly in the elaborate narrative ensembles pioneered in the thirteenth-century sculptural and stained glass programs, we see images that encourage new—and more visceral—readings of old episodes and texts. In some cases they do this by applying to (nonprophetic) Old Testament figures the stylistic and iconographic innovations developed in the 1170s and 1180s. These innovations include exaggerated or grotesque facial features, expressions of rage or despair, and emphatic or aggressive hand gestures; as we saw in chapter 3, they often serve to draw attention to the improper affective responses of Christ’s opponents, Jew and non-Jew alike. In other cases, new readings are prompted by the introduction of garments, gestures, and objects that evoke contemporary courtly/urban society or relate to current intellectual and economic trends.

Both types of sign accompany the three friends who counsel the suffering Job in the tympanum of the right portal of the north transept entrance, sometimes called the Portal of Wisdom.[21] [Fig. 8] On the left three men gaze upon Job, lying passively on a dung heap, covered with sores. Job’s sufferings prefigure those of Christ, just as Job’s body recalls that of Christ in Entombment scenes; the friends therefore exemplify various responses to the sight of Christ’s agony. Their symbolic identities, however, are not easy to establish. According to the Bible (Job 4–11), these friends give Job poor counsel, false friendship, and empty exhortation; in medieval biblical commentary they were held to signify a range of iniquitous characters, from heretics to unbelievers of various stripes to corrupt prelates.[22] The friends in this Chartres tympanum have been interpreted as representing the Old Law personified, a Muslim (portrayed as a pagan philosopher), and a hypocrite or heretic, though these attributions are not universally accepted.[23] But if the identity of these friends is uncertain, the image does give subtle but significant clues concerning their qualities. The foremost of the friends frowns and seems to lecture the afflicted sufferer, while fastidiously holding his robe away from Job in the manner of an aristocrat avoiding contact with a pauper (or perhaps a Jewish priest avoiding contact with a corpse, as specified in Lev. 21:1). This man’s entire aspect speaks of haughtiness, selfishness, and a lack of fellowship and compassion. The friend in the center, the sole beardless male in the scene, turns away from Job and toward the man on the left, presenting a distinct view of his prominent and bony nose.[24] The significance of this feature is not clear. As we have seen, in the late twelfth century distorted noses of various types generally signified moral turpitude. By around 1220, when this portal was made, this particular kind of large, hooked nose had been often though by no means exclusively depicted on Jews, especially in images of the Crucifixion, where it called attention to the Jews’ refusal to contemplate Christ. The lack of a beard may, however, weigh against identifying the figure as a Jew. Moreover, the seated Jeremiah on the left frame of the right doorway of the royal portal has a prominent, bony nose, which could not have been intended to denigrate the prophet. The third friend, on the far left, consults or debates with the second while anxiously pulling at his beard. This is also a familiar and ambiguous gesture: as we have seen, it can signify fear, fury, or consternation on the one hand or compassionate concern on the other.[25] In light of the overwhelmingly negative interpretations of these characters, it seems safe to assume that here the friend’s gesture is not caring but contemptuous, especially since the sole other figure at Chartres shown pulling his beard is a Jewish judge ordering the stoning of Saint Stephen.[26] Overall, then, Job’s three friends seem to be characterized by pride, recalcitrance, callousness, and intellectual arrogance. These are all qualities that were associated with Jews in contemporary religious polemic, and each figure has at least some visual cues associated with Jewishness.[27] None of the figures, though, is unambiguously depicted as Jewish, and these same negative qualities were also frequently linked in contemporary sermons and biblical commentary with heretics and corrupt Christians.

FIG. 8

The reading of Job’s friends as exemplars of a typically but not exclusively Jewish kind of intellectual arrogance is reinforced by the analogous figures in the lintel just below, which depicts the Judgment of Solomon, in which the king has to decide which of two women is the true mother of a child claimed by both (1 Kings 3:16–22).[28] [Fig. 9] Most medieval commentators on this episode highlighted its Christological (and so at least potentially anti-Jewish) significance: Augustine identified the two mothers as Ecclesia and Synagoga, who fight over Christ; Claudius of Turin, echoed by the Glossa Ordinaria, suggested that the false mother was either Synagoga or heretics.[29] Bernard of Clairvaux likewise scolded the false mother as “impious Synagoga.”[30] For our purposes, I am less concerned with the central theological struggle embodied in the two women than with the unprecedented representation of multiple peripheral observers. To the right of the mothers are six seated onlookers, all very diverse in both appearance and reaction. Two—one in the center background and one on the far right—are clean-shaven, sporting fashionable chin-length, bobbed hairstyles favored by courtly nobles.[31] The figure on the far right touches the cord of his cloak, also a gesture associated with high social status.[32] Both of these men gaze in the direction of King Solomon, whom they physically resemble. A third man, with shoulder-length hair and a short, trimmed beard, also looks toward the king; he too touches the cord of his cloak with one hand while resting his other hand peacefully on his knee. These three men, then, appear to be respected and respectful courtiers, listening with reverence and dignity to Solomon’s wise ruling. There is nothing “Jewish”-looking about them, though they presumably represent the discerning among Israel: their calm, contemplative gazes seem to epitomize verse 3:28: “Israel learned of the judgment of the king and revered the king because they saw that he had in him a divine wisdom.” The other three men do not look toward the king, and they seem confused, distracted, or agitated rather than prescient. The man on the far left, who has strong features and a long, pointed beard, stares out toward the viewer with an unfocused or preoccupied expression. The last two men are engaged in a heated academic or legal debate. On the right, a man with a dark, curly beard and bony nose and wearing the cap of a judge leans forward on his seat and gestures vigorously with both hands. His colleague has a long, curly, forked beard and wears a pointed hat, presumably to indicate that he is a priest. He turns away from Solomon as he stretches his right arm across his chest, as if to deny or contradict the king’s decree.[33] The full grouping, then, highlights the varying responses to the judgment displayed by Solomon’s people (Israel) and suggests that some at least—the elders among them—were led astray by rigidity, pride of office, intellectual arrogance, and/or the Old Law itself. Since the Bible states that Solomon’s wisdom came directly from God (1 Kings 3:28: “he possessed wisdom from God”), the image in effect proclaims the superiority of divine revelation over legalism, hieratic authority, high office, or book-based learning, here associated via the signs of the hat and the beard with Jewishness—though explicitly not with all Israel.

FIG. 9

The famous stained glass windows of Chartres likewise use gestures, expressions, features, and attire to shape our reading of biblical personnel.[34] As in the Job tympanum and the Solomon lintel, while some of these signs seem to align iniquity with Jewishness, the alignment is by no means consistent, exclusive, or totalizing. [Fig. 10] In the window dedicated to Joseph the Patriarch, two of the brothers who cast Joseph into the well are drawn in profile, accenting their pointed, goatee-type beards and bony, curved or hooked noses.[35] In the next scene these same features appear on the hooded brother who points aggressively toward (perhaps haggling with?) an Egyptian slave trader offering up a handful of coins. The Egyptian trader is almost the mirror image of Joseph’s brother—he is drawn in profile and has a forward-curving pointed beard. These two men, Judean shepherd and Egyptian merchant, thus resemble each other to a striking degree, presumably to highlight and indict the greed and hard-heartedness of both seller and purchaser. The second Egyptian in the scene of the selling of Joseph, who grabs Joseph’s hand, is bearded and wears a slightly peaked cap—a form of headgear displayed on both Jews and merchants. It is, then, certainly possible to see an anti-Jewish element in these scenes, especially in light of stereotypical allegations of Jewish avarice and lack of compassion (as well as of Joseph’s status as a “type” for Christ). But such a reading is by no means the only one. It is worth noting that the other brothers are all rendered in a neutral or nondistinctive fashion.[36]

FIG. 10

The same somewhat confusing deployment of (possibly) Jewish signs occurs in the window illustrating the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–32).[37] The visual narrative has, as noted by Wolfgang Kemp, “hardly anything to do with the biblical text,” instead using the parable as a springboard for criticizing contemporary mores and airing pressing concerns.[38] According to one recent interpretation, the window sets up a moral contest in which Everyman (the Prodigal Son) wavers between the spiritual transcendence of the church (the father’s home) and the materialism of urban commercial life (the town in which the son squanders his inheritance).[39] Given the conventional polemical association of Judaism with materialism and corruption, one might expect that the urban characters would display Jewish signs, and the father, Christian ones. But this is not the case. Instead, it is the father who is given signs associated with both Hebrew antiquity and Jewish prosperity.

In the first scene, in which the Prodigal Son asks for his inheritance, the father resembles a Hebrew patriarch: bearded, wearing a peaked cap, seated on a throne-like chair, one hand poised commandingly on his knee. [Fig. 11] The fashionably clad, clean-shaven, curly haired Prodigal Son refuses to take the advice of this venerable figure, pointing impudently into his father’s face. [Fig. 12] In the next scene, the father stands beside a golden treasure chest and hands a golden double cup to his son, who also cradles a pile of gold coins in his arm. Here the father seems to have changed personae. He wears a small skullcap and a midlength robe revealing his slightly bent legs; beside his active and energetic fur-cloaked son he looks less like a venerable patriarch than a somewhat obsequious merchant or shopkeeper catering to a young nobleman. Although in another context this scene could easily be read as a satire on Jewish commercialism, what is condemned here is not the father’s amassed wealth but the son’s pretension, arrogance, and disrespect. [Fig. 13] By contrast, in the town, that bastion of corrupt materialism, there are no Jewish-looking figures at all. Instead, the depravities of the “world” are embodied in women and youths: in yet another display of upended social hierarchy, our young heir is preyed upon by lowborn prostitutes, gamblers, and serving boys. [Fig. 14; see also color insert] The Prodigal Son does not encounter another Jewish-looking figure until, destitute, he hires himself out as a laborer to a bearded, seated man wearing a skullcap. As the labor in question is guarding swine in a wood, the employer must be a wealthy rural householder, as similar in status to the father as he is in appearance. This symbolic return to the paternal fold is followed by an actual return, as the Prodigal goes back to his father’s house.

FIG. 11

FIG. 12

FIG. 13

FIG. 14

In the final scenes, which show [Fig. 15] the older son protesting his brother’s favorable treatment, [Fig. 16] the father ordering the killing of the fatted calf, and the celebratory feast, order has been restored and the father has regained his vigor and authority. His beard, cap, and cloak again recall those of antique patriarchs, while in the feast scene his solid centrality echoes that of Christ presiding at the Last Supper. All this suggests that if the father’s home is the site of “spirituality,” that spirituality consists not of antimaterialistic asceticism but of tradition, stability, and venerable authority—qualities readily expressed through Hebraic signs. And while the sins of the Prodigal Son and the town dwellers are manifold, they are not in any way visually linked to the stereotypical materialism of the Jew. This window, then, does not use Jewish signs to envision virtue and vice along the lines of a “spirit-matter” dichotomy, as one might expect. Instead, it (somewhat surprisingly) enlists signs of the Old Law to promote old-fashioned values. As we shall see, it does this not in order to praise Jewishness but to critique aspects of Christian society.

FIG. 15

FIG. 16

3. New Genres, New Villains

In addition to such reimagined biblical scenes and characters, the sculpture and glass of Chartres also display many examples of elaborate narratives peopled by a wide range of new characters and a host of new iconographic signs.[40] Some of these undoubtedly articulate an intensified hostility toward Jewishness. [Fig. 17; see also color insert] In an elaborately symbolic window that combines tales of Christ’s Passion with Old Testament typologies, for example, Synagoga has a snake wrapped around her eyes instead of the traditional blindfold.[41] To further underscore the satanic source of her blindness, she is shot in the eye by a small bestial demon.[42]

FIG. 17

The villains of the cathedral’s extensive narrative hagiographical cycles are often endowed with Jewish attributes, apparently in order to link their sins to excessive literalism, lack of compassion, and/or excessive materialism. [Fig. 18] So, for example, the Saint Stephen window contains several scenes of the protomartyr debating Jewish doctors of the law.[43] Beard, mantle, and pointed hat recall the law they are misguidedly invoking, while the sources of their error are specified in their pointing, debating, and reckoning gestures, which bespeak arrogance and pedantry, and in the demon that flies down to join them.

However, characters who are explicitly not labeled Jewish in the texts but who lay false claim to knowledge, power, and authority are also endowed with Jewish signs. [Fig. 19] Such figures include the pagan magicians who gesticulate vigorously as they dispute with Saints Simon and Jude,[44] [Fig. 20] the Persian magician who sends his disciple to debate with Saint James the Greater,[45] [Fig. 21] and the Gentile in the Saint Sylvester window who at Constantine’s order worships a golden idol that is lifting up two bowls of coins.[46] All of these characters flaunt symbols associated with Jewishness—beards, pointy hats or mantles, pseudo-Hebrew scrolls or books, hooked noses. They are thus shown to combine stereotypical Jewish qualities—excessive attachment to the text, legal literalism, pride of position or attachment to ritual, bestiality or moral turpitude—with newer and perhaps more topical failings: intellectual arrogance, as represented by the disputing gesture, and commercial greed, as represented by coins.

FIG. 18

FIG. 19

FIG. 20

FIG. 21

Not surprisingly, many of these signs reoccur in a tale from the Legend of Saint Nicholas featuring a Jewish moneylender, recounted in two different windows at Chartres.[47] [Fig. 22]. In this tale, the Jew lends money to a Christian customer, who swears on a statue of Saint Nicholas that he will repay the loan by a certain date.[48] [Fig. 23; see also color insert] The Christian then cheats the Jew by falsely swearing on the same statue that he had already handed over the required amount to the Jew (in fact he had hidden the money in a staff he asked the Jew to hold for a brief moment). The perjurer is killed by an offended Saint Nicholas and then brought back to life, whereupon the Jew converts. A recent analysis of these images suggested that they expressed the discomfort felt by the clerics attached to the chapter of Chartres Cathedral at the new power and prominence in their city of finance and commerce, seen as dangerous and volatile, and crystallized in the figure of the Jew.[49] Certainly the centrality of money and exchange is very pronounced, but it is hard to agree that the primary theme of the tale is the evils of a money-based economy, much less of the Jew: the window was paid for by the proceeds of local commerce, on which the entire prosperity of Chartres was based. Nor is such a reading supported by the visual cues assigned these characters. Although the Jewish moneylender holds a moneybag, in the first panel his appearance speaks not of volatility and danger but of stability and authority, even generosity. In one window he wears a rounded cap and in the other a pointed hat with earflaps; in both he leans forward to offer the money with an open-palmed gesture. In beard, attire, and posture he resembles the father of the Prodigal Son and displays the same the kind of dignity and authority (see fig. 11). [Fig. 24] He also looks very much like the money changer’s client in the donor panel of the Joseph window. (In Chartres the customers of local money changers were either visiting merchants or pilgrims—both welcome classes of people. The money changers themselves were respected citizens of the town, permitted by the cathedral chapter to practice their trade even on Sundays, presumably for the convenience of pilgrims.)[50] The clothing and attitude of the false borrower, by contrast, convey instability (in his youth, the curve of his body, even the fluttering of his hem), arrogance (the pointing gesture), extravagance (in his gold-trimmed clothing), and deceit (in his posture: he seems to wear his double cross on his sleeve, crossing his arms as he swears the false oath). Nor are these contrasting appearances inapt—they enshrine the moral differences in the characters. The false borrower is the “infidel” in the story, breaking faith and practicing a very “Jewish” form of exegesis in clinging to the letter of the law: his oath was strictly—literally—true, though essentially false. And the Jewish moneylender is in many ways its faithful hero. Not only does he accept an oath on a Christian image as surety for the loan rather than insist on a signed contract, as any thirteenth-century moneylender would surely do, but according to many versions of the legend he asks Saint Nicholas to revive the dead borrower, displaying both pity and faith in the Christian saint well before his conversion. One is tempted to echo Portia in the courtroom scene of The Merchant of Venice and ask: “Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew?”[51]

FIG. 22

FIG. 23

FIG. 24

One final aspect of Jewish iconography at Chartres must be noted—the many “missed opportunities” for anti-Jewish imagery in the sculpture and glass of Chartres. [Fig. 25] In the same window that literally demonized the Jewish rabbis who opposed Saint Stephen in debate, the saint’s killers are clean-shaven and bareheaded, displaying no signs of Jewishness.[52] Almost none of the martyricides in the so-called Portal of the Martyrs on the south porch of the cathedral or in any of the dozens of stained glass martyrdom scenes are shown as Jews. [Fig. 26] Cain, so frequently both interpreted and depicted as a Jew in Christian exegesis and art, displays no signs of Jewishness, even in the scene in which he slays his brother.[53] In the window illustrating the Good Samaritan parable, the priest and the Levite, both traditionally glossed as exemplifying the harshness of the Old Law, are depicted as, respectively, a tonsured Catholic priest and a Catholic deacon.[54] [Fig. 27] The Jewish high priest of apocryphal legend whose hand withered when he impiously touched the coffin of the Virgin Mary is portrayed here as bareheaded and clean-shaven; no visual cues identify him as Jewish.[55] And I could go on and on.

FIG. 25

FIG. 26

FIG. 27

4. Who Is a Jew?

Who, then, is a Jew, and what is Jewishness in the imagery of Chartres Cathedral? Let us start with clothing, since medieval viewers seemed to pay particular attention to attire.[56] By the thirteenth century the “Jewish hat” had become a strong, if by no means required or inevitable, signifier of Jewishness. But at Chartres hunting for Jews’ hats does not get us very far. Both “good” and “bad” Hebrews and Jews wear pointed hats, peaked caps, mantles, funnel-shaped caps, and rounded skullcaps; there are also numerous Jews with uncovered heads. Nor is the meaning of the Jews’ headgear unambiguous. In some cases (such as the idol-worshipping subject of Constantine in the Saint Sylvester window) it serves to link the sterile Old Law to a broad range of trespasses, some apparently unrelated to Judaic practice; in other cases (the Prodigal’s father) it seems to summon the respect that the Old Law continued to enjoy throughout medieval Christendom. The same holds true for scrolls, beards, and even coins: they can be read negatively or positively, depending on the context of their use and the character of their possessor. At Chartres Jews can display greed or generosity, foresight or blindness, belief or unbelief.

There is, then, no single, unifying message about Jews conveyed by the glass and sculpture of Chartres. Nor should we expect one in a monument that was not coherently conceived, that was planned, built, and paid for by dozens, perhaps hundreds of different people, and that rose and was modified over the course of several decades.[57] Many of the variations in clothing, feature, and expression may be attributable primarily to workshop convention. But we can make one generalization about the iconography of Jewishness in these images. Without exception, every object, garment, feature, or facial expression attributed to a Judean or Jewish character can be found many more times on Gentile and Christian figures. Jews are not the only figures nor even the majority of figures in these images who wear peaked hats, pointed hoods, or rounded caps—all of these are customarily shown not only on ancient priests of various rites but on Christian merchants, burghers, artisans, and customers. Indeed, I cannot assert with any confidence that all the characters I have discussed here were considered Jewish or intended to evoke Jewishness. Some, such as Constantine’s mantle-wearing idol worshipper, are certainly not Jewish, though his attire looks distinctly Hebraic. The depiction of Jews at Chartres thus highlights a truth that many medieval texts tell us anyway: it was difficult to distinguish a Jew from a non-Jew in thirteenth-century western Europe. Canon 68 of the Fourth Lateran Council, convened in 1215 by Pope Innocent III to cleanse and organize Christendom according to an ambitious reform program, imposed distinctive clothing on Jews because, the decree explicitly states, Jews were visually indistinguishable from Christians throughout much of Europe.[58] In the following decades the policy was adopted, though often not enforced, by secular rulers in France, England, Spain, Sicily, Germany, and elsewhere.[59] We can conclude that in all these regions Jews and Christians were outwardly indistinguishable. Indeed, two thirteenth-century church councils complained that Jews dressed the same as, and could not be told apart from, Christian clerics![60]

Jewish texts also acknowledged the potential for identity confusion, and Jewish religious authorities echoed Christian ones in condemning outward resemblance and seeking to prevent it. Rabbinical synods in early-thirteenth-century Germany chastised young men for looking and dressing like Christians, and a Hebrew story collection narrates a tale about a Jew who went to hell because he refused to grow a beard.[61] Rabbi Meir of Rothenberg (d. 1293) reproved men who patronized Christian hat shops on Saturdays; although his main concern was that Jews might use items made on the Sabbath, the responsum confirms that Jews and Christians frequented the same hat shops and presumably wore similar hats.[62] The same rabbi was asked to respond to the case of a Jewish man who regularly posed as a Christian, calling him “one of those despicable creatures who wander from town to town and alternately appear as Jews or as fanatical Christians.”[63] This disjunction between Jews’ desired visual distinctiveness and their actual visual anonymity was emphasized all the more by recent artistic trends: just as Christians had become used to the sight of pointy-hatted Hebrews in their works of art, they began to notice that there were very few pointy-hatted Jews in their own world. The confusion and ambiguity plaguing so many images of Jews at Chartres (and, I must add, in almost all thirteenth-century artworks in which they appear) underscores the Jews’ disturbing lack of visual distinctiveness in life.

5. All the World a Picture

This cannot be the whole story. Although Jews were apparently not visually identifiable, most medieval town dwellers must have known who in their communities was Jewish and who was not. Jews were a tiny minority in thirteenth-century French cities and towns, as in most of the rest of Christendom. In spite of what seems to have been a considerable degree of cultural assimilation, they had their own communities, customs, and diets.[64] Jews were not geographically isolated or residentially segregated, but they tended for convenience’s sake to live close to one another in certain quarters. The vast majority of social services and networks were intrareligious. The primary fear expressed by the Lateran decree—that “through error Christians have [sexual] relations with the women of Jews or Saracens, and Jews and Saracens with Christian women”—is the one kind of mixing that seems least likely to result from identity confusion, as Jewish (and Muslim) male members were unambiguously different from uncircumcised Christian ones.[65] And even if some instances of identity confusion did arise in social or business situations, this need not be replicated in art: Gothic artists were perfectly able to devise signs with which to clearly identify their characters. Saints were known by their haloes, kings by their crowns, usurers by their moneybags, and Muslims by their turbans, though it is unlikely that any of these items regularly adorned such figures on the streets of medieval Chartres or, for that matter, Paris, London, or Rome. And of course, when artists wanted unambiguously to identify a Jew, they had means at their disposal with which to do so.

The ambiguity of religious identity at Chartres, then, was deliberate. And it extends to non-Jewish figures as well: Christian identity is hardly more straightforward. Saints are readily identified as such, but how was an artist to signal the less-than-saintly believer? As we have seen (fig. 24), the money changer’s client is iconographically indistinguishable from many Jews.

Far from being unique to the art of Chartres, awareness of the disjunction between socioreligious identity and outward appearance permeates thirteenth-century sermons, laws, letters, moral treatises, even fabliaux. In this rapidly urbanizing and increasingly commercialized and bureaucratized world, wealth began to replace descent as a source and marker of social status;[66] literacy and education began to replace rank and kinship as a source of governmental authority;[67] and written contracts began to replace personal ties and physical pledges as the basis for economic relations.[68] Old certainties were undermined, old correlations were ruptured.[69] Many texts testify to contemporary discomfort with these trends. A courtier complained that lowborn royal justices used their offices to “lord it” over their social superiors.[70] Reformers expended considerable intellectual energy trying to distinguish acceptable professional and economic activities from unacceptable ones.[71] Pastors struggled mightily, and usually ineffectively, to teach their flocks to reflect their inner spiritual state in outward behavior and appearance.[72] Authors mocked spiritual and social pretension by elaborately detailing their characters’ inappropriate dress.[73] Prelates fretted about how to comprehend (and control) new types of pious Christians, such as the lay devotees known as Beguines and Beghards, who failed to fit neatly into any categories, being neither secular nor monastic, fish nor fowl.[74] Both the trends themselves and the complaints they inspired recalled aspects of Jewish life, which had long been more thoroughly literate, more intensely textualized, more commercialized, and more urbanized than most Christian communities—qualities that had been reinforced in recent decades. Critics implied, and sometimes explicitly alleged, that Christians were turning into Jews.[75] The perceived “Jewishness” of the new urban culture reverberates throughout a sermon given by the abbot of one of the most respected religious houses in Paris, in which he reproaches his canons for unbecoming behavior. Not only did they exhibit such typically secular (or Jewish) vices as pride and luxury, he scolds, but they had even taken to wearing typically secular (or Jewish) clothing: sumptuous materials, bright colors, and even, he specifically laments, the pilleus—the cap now closely associated with both merchants and Jews.[76]

The threat posed by Jews, then, or rather by the qualities Jews embodied and the iconographic signs Jews displayed, was that in their undermining of traditional authority in favor of textuality and materiality, they encapsulated much wider trends. Coins and documents, like clothing, now seemed to create a new, alternate reality that threatened to supplant the deeper spiritual “reality” of Christian teaching—the superiority of faith and virtue. This is explicitly stated in a letter sent by Pope Innocent III to King Philip II of France in January 1205. The letter is a long litany of complaints about the perceived preferential treatment accorded Jews in France. After repeating some standard grievances concerning the pawning of precious ecclesiastical vessels (such as chalices) to Jews and the employment of Christian servants by Jews, Innocent moves on to lambast the privileging of Jewish witnesses in court: Jews, he says, “have to this day been given preference in the French realm to such an extent that Christian witnesses are not believed against them, while they are admitted to testimony against Christians. Thus, if the Christian witnesses to whom they have loaned money on usury bring Christian witnesses about the facts in the case, [the Jews] are given more credence because of the document (instrumento) which the indiscreet debtor has left with them through negligence or carelessness than are the Christians through the witnesses produced.”[77] In other words: how dare you accept the physical evidence of outsiders over the sworn testimony of friends!

Few modern readers would share Innocent’s outrage; our own courts would naturally privilege written documentation supplied by a creditor over the word of a defaulting debtor who could not produce proof of quittance. But this is because in our legal egalitarian, rationalist, and evidence-oriented society truth is considered autonomous, independent of the identity or status of its asserter. This was not the case in the corporate, hierarchical, and hieratic society of medieval Christendom, where virtue and legal standing had traditionally been very much tied up with identity and the word of members of some classes was valued over that of others.[78] Compare Innocent’s lament with an almost exactly contemporary text written by and for the clerics attached to Chartres, presumably to help finance the construction of the cathedral, the Miracles de Notre-Dame de Chartres. The second tale in the collection tells of the miraculous healing of a blind boy. The author adduces as proof of the Virgin’s divine intervention the testimony of “so many and such honest witnesses,” which (he claims) silenced “Jews, heretics, and all those who habitually deny and denigrate the miracles of saints.”[79] Both of these texts demonstrate the coexistence of clashing epistemologies. In the traditional world of faith, the word of a believer must always prevail over the rationalism, skepticism, and even hard evidence of the unbeliever.[80] In royal courts and urban markets, this assumption was quaint at best: written financial documents and legal instruments increasingly held sway.[81] That such innovations should violate venerable values and render the status and faith of competing witnesses irrelevant seemed to Pope Innocent to undermine the very foundations of Christian society.[82]

Innocent was, of course, fighting a losing battle against the authority of the written instrument, just as nobles were unsuccessfully resisting the encroachment of royal bureaucrats and wealthy burghers, prelates could not prevent their increasingly literate flocks from reading and thinking for themselves, and moralists were doomed never fully to stamp out greed and luxury.[83] But Christendom in the high Middle Ages was an energetic place, and its leaders did not despair. Instead, they harnessed all the creativity their world had to offer as they sought to reverse this chaotic situation. Clerics not only chastised Christian vice in their sermons, they regulated Christian behavior in their laws and insisted that transgressors—heretics and prostitutes in particular—be openly marked as such.[84] Nobles countered burghers’ appropriation of their economic and political influence by investing more in outward display, while also instituting sumptuary laws designed to preserve visual distinctions.[85] The town of Chartres itself proudly proclaimed its prosperity and well-being by parading gold and silver reliquaries, elaborate crosses, and jewels of great value through the town streets.[86]

Christians also paid intensified and highly hostile attention to previously neglected aspects of Jews’ lives. The decree ordering the imposition of the Jewish badge by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 was reissued in varying forms by church councils throughout the thirteenth century. New signs, too, were devised to make Jews’ appearances project their desired state of subjection. In a remarkable case of life imitating art, two church councils in 1267 ordered Jews to wear the pileum cornutum, the pointed cap, “as their ancestors used to do.”[87] (In the absence of centuries-old photo albums, we must assume that the primary evidence for how Jews “used to” dress was Christian art.) The imposition of the Jewish badge, like the sumptuary laws and the regulation of the clothing of prostitutes and other despised professions, attempted to restore social and moral clarity, to reestablish a correlation between identity and outward aspect. Though these attempts were largely vain in the case of sumptuous display, they were eventually more successful in affecting Jews’ appearances, as clerical pressure finally began to take effect and the badge regulations came to be enforced by key secular rulers.[88]

5. A Mirror of Society

Perhaps the most graphic, and ultimately the most powerful, of all the means by which the church tried simultaneously to caution against confusion and model heavenly hierarchy was art. If the images of Jews at Chartres (and so many other Gothic artworks) are confused, it was because the urban world with which Jews were conceptually, and often actually, associated was viewed as disturbingly confusing. That is, the visual illegibility of the Jew was a symptom of a perceived ill affecting society as a whole. So there is, after all, a unifying message to all the images of Jews at Chartres—not about Jews in particular but about high medieval Christendom in general: it was a confusing and often misleading place where one was hard-pressed to tell a friend from an enemy, a swindler from a sage.[89] This situation helps explain the proliferation of demons in the imagery of Chartres: demons have to be shown whispering into villains’ ears, because without them the villains could well be taken for the heroes. The artists responsible for the Chartres images need not have consciously set out to lament this situation. Rather, consciousness of it—of the disturbingly confusing nature of urban society—grew in tandem with the new artistic trends. As artists and their patrons began to look at and desire more realistically and minutely to replicate the world around them, its lack of visual clarity would have sprung into sharp relief.

It is by now a commonplace to call the art of the Gothic cathedral, and especially its stained glass, a mirror of medieval society.[90] And indeed the scenes we have looked at, whether biblical, apocryphal, or legendary, re-create the texture of contemporary life to a striking degree.[91] The sites, characters, and appurtenances of urban existence are replicated in profusion and detail: from the windows of Chartres we can learn what trades were practiced, how tables were set, and what games were played in the taverns, halls, and markets of thirteenth-century France. But for all its social realism, Gothic art offers neither an accurate nor even an idealized mirror of society. It is, rather, a selective, instrumental, and deeply opinionated reflection.[92] In that mirror, Jews recur in specific ways. If the images we have examined do not give us an easily intelligible “hermeneutical Jew,”[93] they nevertheless consistently align “Jewishness” with certain select themes and realms. In addition to highlighting the confusion of social life, the difficulty of telling who is who, and the instability of the category “Jew” (and so also “Christian”), depictions of Jews at Chartres repeatedly problematize three major sets of relations. First, in underscoring the textual errors of rabbis, judges, and magicians, the images challenge the assumption that legal, bookish learning conveys religious illumination.[94] Second, in assigning badges of office, postures of authority, and gestures of command to unsuitable or immoral figures, the images highlight the disjunction between merit (whether ethical or social) and power. Finally, in showing good usurers and bad heirs, idols with coins and patriarchs with coins, evil sellers and iniquitous buyers, the images sever any correlation between wealth or poverty on the one hand and vice or virtue on the other.[95] In other words, they express concern not only that the virtuous and the vicious, like the Jew and the Christian, are easily confused but that those who know most, who earn most, and who dominate most are not necessarily the people most deserving of knowledge, wealth, and power.

*   *   *

At the dawn of the thirteenth century, Christians trained their gaze on the world around them with new intensity. If in earlier centuries Christian teachers had looked primarily to a book—The Book—for moral instruction and spiritual guidance, they now looked to the material and social world to embody and display it.[96] But society did not offer a readily legible lesson. As sermon after sermon reminds us, Christians had to be taught how to appear and how to see.[97] We can find this new approach to self-presentation and visual training in a range of texts and actions: in a new desire to regulate people’s appearances and mark people’s identities, in treatises that teach people the proper position for prayer, and in the use of art to clarify and highlight moral and spiritual correspondences.[98] We can also see it, I believe, in the dizzying proliferation and striking variety of images of Jews at Chartres and beyond. Partly because of their age-old role as witnesses to Christian truth and signs of Christian triumph, partly because Jews had by now become recognizable artistic symbols, and partly because they dramatically underscored the illegibility of the real world, Jews were enlisted in high medieval art to expose the unreliability of what was visible (nature and society), while at the same time make manifest what was not (the all-too-obscured “truth”).[99] The Jew, in his manifold variation, became a visible figure for the complex and confusing nature of the rapidly changing urban world.

How and whether this lesson was read and understood depended on many factors: the identity of the viewer, the moment and context of viewing, the angle from which the images were viewed. The overwhelming preponderance of “Jewish” signs at Chartres appear on venerated prophetic Hebrews, as will continue to be the case for the remainder of the Middle Ages. A devout pilgrim could easily enter the Royal Portal, wander the aisles, and wonder at the glass without once thinking censoriously of his or her Jewish neighbors or blaming his or her ills on infidels. To see the images of Jews at Chartres as powerfully anti-Jewish requires very selective reading indeed, a willful disregard of the visual similarity between Jewish moneylender and generously forgiving father. Without strong additional anti-Jewish fanning these images alone were highly unlikely to ignite an anti-Jewish fire. But in thirteenth-century France, of course, such fanning was all too frequent. Had our same devout pilgrim just returned from a Crusade, heard a Good Friday sermon imprecating the Jews, heard rumors or read reports of a ritual murder, enjoyed an anti-Jewish Marian song, been treated to a mystery play, scanned the pages of an anti-Jewish illuminated manuscript, quarreled with a Jewish neighbor, or failed to balance the family books, his or her gaze may well have been arrested by—and his or her resentment fed by—images of hooded usurers or hook-nosed rabbis.

Sparking such resentment was certainly not the aim of the designers of Chartres. Though the images we have seen here paralleled and perhaps encouraged legislation that sought to make Jews look more like their artistic renderings, there is little evidence that the clerics involved in designing thirteenth-century artworks supported anti-Jewish violence or promoted expulsion.[100] Yet such violence, both judicial and extrajudicial, did begin to characterize Jewish-Christian relations by the end of the century, and a series of large-scale expulsions was inaugurated in 1290. A particular kind of image introduced in the mid-thirteenth century helps explain and also helped facilitate this development.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE JEW’S FACE

Flesh, Sight, and Sovereignty, CA. 1230–1350

The study of [a person’s] nature is more subtle … than is shown in the superficial lineaments of the exterior.

—De Physiognomia libellus[1]

Around the year 1340 an illustrated prayer book was made for Bonne of Luxembourg, daughter-in-law of the king of France. It contains thirteen illuminations of remarkable beauty, delicacy, and charm … and one equally adept but thoroughly nasty image.[2] [Fig. 1; see also color insert] On the folio illustrating the first verse of Psalm 52 (“The fool [insipiens] says in his heart, ‘there is no God’”), one man is about to bludgeon another. The attacker is a familiar kind of fool: he carries a club made out of bundled twigs and belongs to a long line of medieval illustrations depicting insipiens as a yokel, madman, or jester holding a flail or cudgel.[3] His victim also holds an object often assigned to the fool—a chalice, signifying drunkenness—but this is not what arrests our attention or specifies his sin.[4] It is his face. Although this second fool has alternately been identified in scholarship as a monk, a drunkard, and even Archbishop Baldwin of Trier, any fourteenth-century viewer would immediately classify this second fool as a Jew.[5] For over the course of the preceding decades, Christian art had developed what would come to be the longest lasting of all anti-Jewish signs: the simultaneously grotesque and naturalistic caricatured Jewish face. By 1340, the Jew needed no other visual cue than his distorted visage to signify his utter estrangement from God. We have come a long way from the clean-shaven, miracle-seeing, hat-wearing, and helpfully labeled Aaron Judeus of the Heribert shrine. By what path did we get here? And what does the fool’s face tell us?

FIG. 1

1. The Development of the Jewish Caricature

The artistic development of the stereotypical “Jewish face” is surprisingly understudied. Although Eduard Fuchs, the first scholar to address anti-Jewish caricature, dated the beginnings of the genre to the fourteenth century, his own work treats no caricature earlier than the fifteenth century, and most studies of anti-Jewish caricature open at, or well after, the end of the Middle Ages.[6] Several very fine recent art historical discussions of medieval anti-Jewish imagery offer important observations about individual examples and select aspects of caricature but do not attempt systematic surveys of the genre.[7] Nonetheless, it is possible to reconstruct the stages by which Jews came to be assigned characteristic facial features in medieval Christian imagery.

As we have seen, before the eleventh century there were no visually distinctive Jews in Western art. The later-twelfth-century images examined in chapter 3 began to inscribe moral meaning in Jews’ faces, depicting these “enemies of Christ and Christianity” with fierce and scowling expressions, heavy brows, squinting or staring eyes, and a variety of distorted, beast-like noses. Although the hooked nose gradually came to be particularly favored, Jews’ features for several decades remained too unstable to unambiguously signal their Jewish identity, which was still primarily conveyed via the signs of the hat and the beard. Toward the middle of the thirteenth century, a distinct shift occurred. In a growing number of artworks, the range of features assigned iniquitous Jews was condensed into one fairly narrowly construed and easily recognizable Gothic “Jewish” face, characterized by a bony hooked nose and a pointed beard.[8] Moreover, in spite of its somewhat exaggerated physiognomy, this face was either so realistically rendered or endowed with such specificity of detail as to seem to belong to an actual, individualized human being.[9] In an illustration from the life of Saint John in an English manuscript known as the Paris Apocalypse (ca. 1245–55), for example, the caricatured Jew on the right with the hooked nose, dark pointed beard, prominent brow, and red skullcap who pushes Saint John off to the right has a far more vivid, textured, and fully formed face than any other figure on the page. [Fig. 2] As the Bonne illumination indicates, the sign of the Gothic “Jew’s face” soon became stable and familiar enough that its features alone could serve to signify “Jewishness”; the hat was no longer needed and was often eschewed.

The broader context for this novel approach to the Jew’s face is clear enough. In the first half of the thirteenth century, Western Christendom displayed new interest in nature and the human body. Several developments prompted reengagement with the physical world, which for centuries had been scorned by Christian thinkers as lacking spiritual significance. Between roughly 1200 and 1230, previously unknown works on natural science by Aristotle were translated into Latin and incorporated into the university curriculum; these works endorsed sensory perception as a source of knowledge and promoted empirical investigation.[10] The devotional emphasis on Christ’s humanity, as well as the increased prosperity and comfort of life in general, also contributed to greater openness to and curiosity about bodily experience.[11] Moralizing “natural philosophers” such as the Parisian professor Alain de Lille argued that God’s plan could, with the proper instruction, be read in the visible, material world.[12] The expansion of an affluent and literate lay bourgeoisie created a market for texts on secular and “practical” topics, and increasingly ambitious rulers sought out new ways to comprehend, exploit, and control their territories and subjects. More empirically oriented intellectuals such as the Franciscan Roger Bacon and the Dominican Albertus Magnus composed studies of plants, animals, and minerals based on their own observations.[13] Physiognomic treatises promoting the “scientific” study of the human form proliferated, and high Gothic artworks reproduced the proportions and anatomical details of the human face and body, as well as of flora and fauna, with new accuracy and care.[14]

FIG. 2

Against this background, some scholars began to look more closely at the physical characteristics of Jews. In the mid-thirteenth century we find for the first time assertions that Jews have distinctive looks. A treatise on the Virgin Mary that has been wrongly attributed to Albertus Magnus postulates that the mother of God had black hair, because “we see that in many cases the race [genus] of Jews has black hair. Therefore, also Our Lady, since she was the progeny of Jews.”[15] Pseudo-Albert’s assertion may well have been prompted by actual observation: the relatively small, genetically limited Jewish communities of northern Germany apparently originated in more southern lands and so probably did have a somewhat higher percentage of dark-haired individuals than the overall surrounding population.[16] (Interestingly, some German Jews apparently made the same observations as Pseudo-Albert. A thirteenth-century German Jewish text states that “most Gentiles are fair-skinned and handsome and most Jews are dark and ugly”—an intriguing internalization of cultural preferences regarding beauty.)[17] Artists, too, seem to have scrutinized Jews, as well as other minority populations, with fresh attention.[18] Although the “Jewish caricature,” for all its apparent realism, was patently not a faithful portrait of any single Jew, its features may have been arrived at because they evoked the appearance of at least some actual Jews—just as dark hair may have predominated among Jews in northern Europe, so too could a somewhat distinctive set of features probably be found among members of Ashkenazi Jewish families, once there was impetus to seek it.

2. Jewishness in Body and Blood?

We can, then, with little difficulty trace the general intellectual, devotional, and artistic trends undergirding the creation of the Gothic Jew’s face. But what is the meaning and what are the implications of laying such stress on Jews’ bodies and looks? What does the caricature say about Jewish appearance and identity? As we saw in chapter 4, in the first half of the thirteenth century clerical authorities complained that Jews were visually indistinguishable from Christians, and Christian artworks underscored the confusing nature of urban society. Was the assigning of fixed facial features to Jews merely a new way to express and address this problem, enrolling the innovative language of artistic naturalism to outwardly embody invisible spiritual flaws? If so, then its purpose would be to engender revulsion toward vices endemic among Christians as well as Jews, by giving sin an imaginary and constructed but nonetheless convincing “Jewish” face. Or, rather, does the development of the Jewish caricature reveal new thinking about Jewish bodies? Is the naturalistic “Jew’s face” in effect an assertion that substantial Jewish-Christian physical differences did exist, that Jewishness was indelibly rooted in the flesh, its traces visible in many if not all members of the tribe, grounded in “ethnicity” (or even “race”) rather than simply in faith, and so not fully eradicable even by the cleansing waters of baptism? This would represent a sea change indeed, an assertion of fixed, somatic identity at odds with Paul’s famous proclamation in Galatians 3:28 that “in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile.” It could also potentially signal a new approach to spiritual knowledge, implying that virtue and vice, good and evil can be detected through study of physical bodies and things. This, in turn, would bear implications for art, suggesting that images could serve as guides to looking at the world rather than merely as warnings that the world in its external aspect was not to be trusted.

Contemporary texts offer at best ambiguous evidence concerning these questions. Thirteenth-century scholars made several new “discoveries” about Jews’ bodies (above and beyond the prevalence of dark hair) that seem to assert a kind of biological Jewishness.[19] Albertus Magnus wrote that Jews were particularly susceptible to hemorrhoids; a master of arts who taught at the University of Paris in around 1300 agreed: “The flux of blood abounds more in Jews because for the most part they are melancholics.”[20] Jewish converts, even voluntary ones, were treated with considerable suspicion and often continued to be regarded as Jews years or even decades after their adoption of Christianity, suggesting that “Jewishness” did not reside in religion alone.[21] On the other hand, a closer look at these and other texts takes us somewhat further from biological determinism. Medical discussions attributed the Jews’ “melancholy”—the underlying cause of their alleged “flux of blood”—to their history and habits rather than to some immutable essence. Albertus Magnus believed Jews’ “gross blood” stemmed from their salty diet.[22] Other medical experts blamed the Jews’ preference for roasted over boiled meats, their relative abstemiousness from wine, the fear and anxiety in which they lived, and the fact that many “healthy foods” were forbidden to them by their law. Others still attributed the Jews’ physical debilities to divine punishment, which would cease when they embraced the true faith. The new science thus existed in tandem with traditional theology, which it generally was used to confirm rather than overturn. In spite of formidable social barriers to the absorption of converts—ultimately unsurprising in a world where family and communal affiliation conditioned so many aspects of life—many Christian authorities were adamant that conversion effected radical physical as well as spiritual change. So, for example, Thomas of Cantimpré states in his thirteenth-century Book of Miracles that Jews suffered from a constant flow of blood because of the curse of their ancestors but that, upon conversion to Christianity, the Jew “is healed from that paternal curse.”[23] Uncomplimentary as such remarks may be regarding Jewishness, they do not seem to amount to a wholesale shift in conceptions of Jewish identity.

Similar ambiguity characterizes thirteenth-century general discussions of the significance of facial features. In spite of the vogue for physiognomy, contemporary physiognomic treatises did not in fact argue that the face was an “open book.” Rather, they insisted that knowledge of invisible, esoteric facts (such as the subject’s birth and the movement of the stars) was necessary for proper decipherment: the author of the Little Book of Physiognomy warned that the study of the body “is more subtle … than is shown in the superficial lineaments of the exterior.”[24] No physiognomic treatise so much as mentions Jews’ noses, much less assigns them meaning. And proponents of artistic and literary naturalism argued that the skillfully executed verbal or visual “portrait” drew out otherwise hidden qualities undetectable by the senses.[25]

Neither scientific, epistemological, nor artistic theory, then, fully illuminates the meaning and implications of the Gothic “Jew’s face.” We must consider therefore what can be learned from the artworks themselves. Do the images containing caricatured Jewish faces seem to locate the Jews’ failings in their flesh? Do they suggest that information of value can be gleaned from scanning bodies and faces? Or do they concede and attempt to offset the inadequacy of physical observation and physiognomic analysis? With those questions in mind, let us turn now to close examination of three high medieval anti-Jewish caricatures in context.

3. A Three-Faced Jew

The earliest surviving explicitly anti-Jewish caricature appears in a cartoon doodled in the upper margin of an English exchequer tax receipt roll dating to 1233.[26] [Fig. 3] The cartoon, which is generally read as a straightforward indictment of Jewish moneylending, contains “portraits” of three different Jews.[27] A three-faced, fur-coated, pointy-bearded figure at the top is labeled “Isaac of Norwich.” He was a real, and fairly well documented, person—a prominent Jewish financier, merchant, rabbi, physician, and property owner who lived in Norwich and London.[28] In giving Isaac three faces, the scribe-doodler evidently sought to equate him with the Antichrist, who was portrayed as a three-faced crowned and enthroned figure in contemporary manuscripts.[29] The pointy-helmeted, long-nosed man below him is also conveniently labeled; his name is Mosse Mokke, and he, too, was a well-known Jew active in the Norwich money trade.[30] Although we cannot firmly identify the elegantly dressed though bizarrely beak-nosed woman labeled “Avegaye,” she was presumably an actual, identifiable individual as well.[31] A long-nosed, horned, and bearded devil in the center is tweaking the noses of both Mosse and Avegaye, as if to underscore the resemblance between their profiles and his own.

Although none of these Jews’ faces display the vividly fleshly naturalism of the fool in the Bonne of Luxembourg prayer book (the distorted noses of Mosse Mokke and Avegaye are patently artificial, more akin to the bestial features shown on Jews in late-twelfth-century artworks), the cartoon exhibits a kind of artistic “realism” that anticipates aspects of later caricature.[32] It is the first medieval image to apply the visual vocabulary of infamy to specific, individual, nonbiblical, nonfictional Jews. It also contains an unprecedented specificity of detail. The characters are situated in an actual, recognizable setting. The governmental bureau in Westminster where the cartoon was made was divided into two sections: the lower exchequer, in which receipt rolls were drawn up, was so called because it was on the ground floor, while the upper exchequer, where the barons of the exchequer met, was on a floor above, an arrangement corresponding with the levels of our cartoon castle.[33] The utensils and procedures of the exchequer, too, are accurately replicated. Coins brought into the lower exchequer were poured into vasa (bowls) for weighing identical to those held by the hooded, unlabeled figure on the far left, and the crisscross design visible in front of the three central figures evokes the checkered fabric on which coins were counted in the upper exchequer and which gave the bureau its name.[34] And though the Jews’ faces are not highly individualized, at least one may recall a personal attribute. We cannot know whether Mosse had the distinctive profile assigned him, but he is called “Mosse cum naso” (“Moses with the nose”) in several financial and judicial documents. This was a fairly common nickname among both Christians and Jews; it could refer either to someone’s actual profile or to a tendency to be “nosy.” It is possible, then, that the cartoon gives visual form to some aspect of Mosse’s face, personality, or reputation.[35]

FIG. 3

For all its replication of the “real world” and its singling out of Jews’ looks, the cartoon does not seem to be claiming either that Jews are physically different or that in the real world external appearance was a reliable guide to internal value. In fact, various aspects of image considerably complicate the question of Jewish-Christian difference and highlight the existence of visual, social, and moral complexity.

The first complication lies in Mosse’s appearance. Although his long nose, so similar to that of the central demon, presumably was meant to evoke iniquity and infidelity, other aspects of his physiognomy defy the stereotype of the demonic, bestial Jew. His hair is blond (at least, the cartoonist has not shaded it in in any way) and cut in a fashionable bob favored by noblemen and courtiers, and he is clean-shaven, following contemporary Christian style. The cartoon thus suggests that the wickedness signaled by Mosse’s nose was hidden under a fair and fashionable exterior.[36] Avegaye’s appearance likewise raises a red flag for the careful viewer. Far from reflecting widespread stereotypes, her longish and devilishly bent nose violates all visual precedent: the beauty of the Jewess was something of a byword in medieval literature, and no distorted features or distinguishing signs of any kind had yet been applied to Jewish women in Christian imagery.[37] Moreover, though Avegaye has an unusually ugly facial feature, her stylish wimple and luxuriously long, fair hair are those of a fashionable lady. The jarring juxtaposition of elegant accoutrements and demonic proboscis calls to mind the incessant warnings made by preachers against the infernal falsity of female adornment and the devilishly deceptive beauty of women, Christian as well as Jewish.[38] So even as he gives Mosse and Avegaye outlandishly grotesque features, our cartoonist implicitly acknowledges that in life Jews might appear both culturally assimilated and physically attractive and also that Christians too can harbor hidden sin.

A similar lack of clarity characterizes a fourth figure, the hooded man on the far left shown holding a scale and weighing coins. Every scholar who has written on this cartoon has identified him as yet another Jewish usurer. Yet it is far from clear that this figure is a Jew at all. Nothing in the image makes such an identification certain. His hood may well be, as it is so often called, “the typical clothing of the medieval Jew,” but it was also the typical clothing of almost any middle-class town dweller.[39] Like various Jews we have seen before, he has a downward sloping nose and a fierce scowl, but non-Jews can display these attributes as well. This figure’s situation and actions distinguish him from the known Jews in the image. They are located in the central court of the crenellated structure, while he is lower down and off to the side. They are labeled by name, he is left unnamed. And while Mosse and Avegaye are mocked, manhandled, and threatened by the demons and show distress, he is left alone. Or rather, he joins the demons in mocking them: as he holds up the scales he tucks his thumb between his middle fingers in a venerable gesture of contempt called “giving the fig.”[40] Moreover, it was not Jewish moneylenders but royal clerks who were charged with weighing the coins brought into the exchequer. I would identify this man, then, as an exchequer official, whose previous mislabeling highlights how poor a guide to identity appearance can be.[41]

Finally, what of the conflation of Isaac with the three-faced Antichrist? This strange image might seem the ultimate embodiment of Jewish iniquity and difference. But though Jews had indeed long been associated in Christian literature with Antichrist (a range of apocalyptic texts allege that Antichrist arose from the Hebrew tribe of Daniel and that the Jews would at least initially revere him as their Messiah),[42] it is important to note that Antichrist was not just any generically nasty, Jew-loving villain. He was, rather, the ultimate embodiment of deceit, duplicity, and disguise. In Christian art he is portrayed with three faces in parody of the Trinity, to signal that at least for a while he would successfully feign sanctity.[43] It was believed that when he came he would masquerade as Christ himself and fool many Christian believers into following him. In fact, early-thirteenth-century versions of the legend focused especially on his appeal to Christian sinners—castigating those hypocrites, tyrants, and fools whose folly, avarice, and ambition would drive them to join the forces of Antichrist.[44] In conflating Isaac with Antichrist, then, the cartoonist is not only indicting the wickedness of a Jewish usurer but also hinting at a possible cohort of tyrannical, corrupt, avaricious, and foolish Christians. Indeed, such coconspirators make an appearance in the cartoon, where the central demon and his devilish company are rendered not as terrifying fiends but as costumed actors, whose horned and hooded attire resembles nothing so much as the dress of the court fool or jester.[45] Jewish usurers are thus not the only targets of the cartoonist’s satire. Courtly life itself is presented as a corrupt and chaotic realm of iniquity and disguise. This charge, in fact, echoes the criticisms of contemporary moralists, who were bitterly critical of the secular authorities that facilitated and profited from Jewish moneylending. They accused Christian princes of being “thieves’ accomplices” in using Jews as their “leeches,” surrogate greedy mouths with which they sucked up the goods of the poor and vomited them into the royal coffers.[46]

In spite of its caricatured Jewish faces, then, this cartoon does not forward an argument about an essentialist, somatically grounded, or outwardly visible Jewish perfidy or difference. Instead, the sketch acknowledges that Christians and Jews are considerably less different from one another than the Jews’ exaggerated profiles initially seemed to suggest and that appearance is a guide to very little. Jews might look the same as, and appear attractive to, Christians; Christians might mask their corruption and greed. In suggesting that the crookedness of a Mosse or an Avegaye is hidden under a fair exterior and that a powerful Jewish financier like Isaac might, like Antichrist, attract Christian supporters and facilitate Christian sin, the cartoon is echoing contemporary anxiety about Christian as well as Jewish moral identity.

4. Face Full of Rage

Our next example of a Gothic Jew’s face appears in the illustration of a rather bizarre miracle of the Virgin from the famous Escorial manuscript of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, made for King Alfonso X of Castile (r. 1252–84).[47] [see color insert] Cantiga 108 is entitled “How Holy Mary caused the son of a Jew to be born with his head backwards, as Merlin had asked of her.”[48] The text of the song relates that Merlin (presumably the Celtic wizard, though he is not identified as such)[49] “happened to be discoursing”—in Scotland of all places!—with a learned Jewish sage. When the Jew began to insult the mother of Jesus and mock the idea of the Incarnation as violating both reason and nature, Merlin became enraged and prayed to the Virgin to punish the blasphemer. Mary granted the request by causing the Jew’s pregnant wife to give birth to a son with his head affixed backwards on his body. Upon seeing his monstrous son, the horrified father, now called by the ominous name Cayphas, tried to kill him. But Merlin saved the boy and from that day forward used him to convert Jews.

The first two panels in the illustration depict the Jewish sage and Merlin in the Jew’s well-appointed shop. [Fig. 4] In both images the Jew is the focal point, standing directly in the center of the composition and staring, glassy-eyed, in the direction of Merlin, who is framed by a tower that seems to belong to a Christian church. The text of the cantiga tells us that the Jew is an alfaquin—an ambiguous Arabism that could mean either secular philosopher/sage or religious legal authority.[50] Both senses are incorporated into the imagery, suggesting that the artist or iconographer was aware of, and deliberately sought to exploit, the word’s double meaning. The particularly miter-like aspect of the Jew’s hat, together with the book he holds under his left hand, establishes Cayphas as a religious authority, an exalted expert in his antique law. His coarsely physical face draws on the repertoire of anti-Jewish caricature—his dense, dark, and curly beard and large, hooked nose (accentuated especially in the second panel) embody his materialist carnality and so are visual counterparts to his reliance on reason and nature. The point is further underscored by the vials and jars arrayed on the shelves behind him—they are the stuff of carnal, not spiritual, knowledge and emphatically connect his infidelity to his philosophical-medical privileging of reason and nature.

FIG. 4

Having used iconography to signal the Jew’s carnal nature, the artist then displays the consequences of carnal understanding: cruelty, hatred, and moral and spiritual blindness. [Fig. 5] In panel 4, the would-be murderous father sees neither his wife’s distress, his son’s humanity, nor the amazement of the Christian onlookers as he stares at Merlin, face full of rage. In the penultimate panel [Fig. 6], in which Merlin shows the boy to Jews gathered in a synagogue, the spiritual blindness of the standing, argumentatively gesticulating Jewish sage is likewise evident, as he refuses to “see” God’s work in the miracle right before his eyes. By contrast, his more respectful, docilely seated (and uncaricatured) coreligionists are apparently convinced by the sight of the grotesquely deformed child. And of course the boy’s deformity literally embodies the deluded backwardness of the Jewish gaze.

FIG. 5

FIG. 6

In sum, this illustration seems to visually enshrine Jewish difference in Cayphas’s dark, ungainly visage and crooked profile and so confidently to assert that inner truths can effectively be inscribed on the body, detected by the eye, and displayed through art. But as in the case of the exchequer cartoon, various aspects of the image reveal a much more complex dynamic. For one thing, although the cantiga is set in Scotland, Cayphas’s shop is given a distinctly Iberian flavor, its architectural and ornamental elements displaying a fusion of Romanesque, Iberian, and Hispano-Arabic influences. And, of course, the manuscript itself is Castilian. This Iberian context considerably complicates the reading of the Jew’s caricatured face. My very hesitant suggestions offered at the beginning of this chapter about Jews in northern Germany being somewhat darker-haired on the average than their Christian neighbors cannot apply to Iberia, where Jewish communities were considerably more ancient and numerous, where there was a substantial Muslim population, many of North African origin, and where Christian communities were themselves of ethnically and geographically diverse backgrounds. In mobilizing a dark/light dichotomy for moral effect, then, the Cantigas manuscript was wielding a visual tool that did not map cleanly onto social experience.

Second, I am struck by the fact that the Virgin to whom Merlin prays at the outset of the story is not visible. Rather than looking at any image, Merlin kneels in humble devotion before a blank white wall, seemingly oblivious to the insolent gestures of the frowning Jew, who is pointing aggressively with his right hand and making some kind of rude gesture with his left (he is either “giving the fig” or counting off points of argument, as in a debate). Is this contrast in mood and gaze intended to valorize internal, imageless devotion over the Jew’s proud reliance on physical knowledge, logical reasoning, and ostentatious display? That is, is the manuscript complicating the idea that Jews’ looks are different from those of Christians, only to forward the idea that Jews see differently from—more carnally than—Christians? One might detect such an idea in the synagogue scene, in which the Jewish audience needed to see the miraculous effects of Merlin’s prayer before they would turn to the Virgin. The scene would then implicitly indict the need for visible proof as “Jewish,” though there is considerable tension in imparting such a message in a luxurious manuscript that exalts image-based devotion on almost every folio.[51]

Finally, multiple ambiguities and contradictions are condensed in the figure of the deformed boy. His reversed head embodies the deluded backwardness of the Jewish gaze and seems to enshrine the idea of the Jew as mired in misleading flesh and the mistaken past. Yet this golden-haired boy is his father’s son. Not only does his appearance gainsay the heritability of his father’s physical traits, but his very existence reminds us that the caricatured older Jew was once an innocent—and unidentifiable—boy. The Jewish father’s physical coarseness now seems not a symbol of stasis but a product of deterioration, a reminder that far from being essentialized, flesh is entirely contingent, eternally subject to change. And, of course, change is the keynote of the last image on the folio, which depicts a religious conversion: a Jewish woman is immersed in the waters of baptism, from which she will emerge fully Christian.

5. The Fool’s Many Faces

Let me return now to the image with which I opened, the fool from the Bonne of Luxembourg prayer book (fig. 1). The dark and scowling profile, large hooked nose, and pointed beard were by the mid-fourteenth century familiar visual signs. They mark this fool as no generic atheist but a very particular kind of unbeliever, suggesting that the “Non est Deus” of Psalm 52 should be translated not as “There is no God” but rather as “He is not God.”[52] One of the functions of this Jew’s face, then, is to call attention to an absent “he,” an invisible face: the face of Christ himself. And so we see, once again, that the direction of the figure’s gaze is as important as his features: like the beak-nosed Jew on the Westphalian casket (ch. 3, fig. 4), or the scowling Jew on the road to Calvary from the Balfour ciborium (ch. 3, fig. 2), or the deformed boy in cantiga 108 (fig. 6), this fool looks to the left, that is, toward the side traditionally known as “sinister” and identified with error, and so in the wrong direction, away from the (implied) body of Christ, which is typically displayed in either the center or on the right side of an image. The staff he grasps, too thin and nondescript to be the clublike weapon, symbol of office, or scepter of power normally held by insipiens, recalls the staff with which the blind feel out their path, although here it only meets an unyielding frame.[53] That the fool’s error consists of useless, misdirected vision is, moreover, implicitly signaled by two other miniatures in the Bonne manuscript, in which praying Christians devoutly contemplate Christ’s image on the right of the page, modeling the correct object and direction of the righteous gaze. [Fig. 7 and Fig. 8]

But before we conclude that this startlingly vivid caricature serves exclusively to indict Jewish vision and embody Jewish error, it is important to consider the other figure on the page. Given that he is in the process of thrashing the Jewish fool, he might be taken for a kind of righteous corrector of error. However, his long, pointed hood and trailing sleeves, short tunic, somewhat protruding belly, and rather foolish expression, as well as the cudgel he wields, are all typical attributes of a traditional Psalm 52 fool, who, as noted above, was generally portrayed as an idiot, sinner, churl, jester, or madman. This suggests that the cudgel wielder is a second insipiens. Moreover, in the company of our caricatured Jew, and in light of his very different (that is, perfectly generic) features, we are forced to read him as a “Christian”—an idiot, sinner, churl, or madman, of course, but a Christian (or at least Gentile) one. The Jew’s face, taken together with the other fool, thus serves paradoxically to highlight the existence of Christian sin.[54] And it does so more than once, for it turns out that the Jewish fool’s face is not unique: the same unmistakable visage appears on two other folios in the manuscript. [Fig. 9] The first is on the January calendar page, in the guise of the two-faced Janus—a figure who frequently ushers in the year in medieval manuscripts, though rarely so graphically.[55] It is surely no coincidence that his left-looking profile echoes the “Jewish” fool in drinking from a large goblet, suggesting that his vision too is impaired by carnal indulgence. But what are we to make of the conjoined profile? Is he looking right, that is, correctly, toward an invisible truth? Is he, as one commentator holds, eating stale bread in an act of ascetic devotion?[56] If so, why does he sport the same hook-nosed, pointy-bearded, “carnal” profile as his gluttonous conjoined twin? Janus’s two faces thus echo the insipiens image in implying that both religious identity and physical appearance may be more ambiguous than the starkly anti-Jewish caricature would seem to indicate.[57]

FIG. 7

FIG. 8

FIG. 9

The next occurrence of the distinctive face is more ambiguous still: it appears on the body of a monstrous grotesque. [Fig. 10] He also looks to the left, and his gaze is the most uselessly flesh-bound of them all, falling only on his own rear end. But the hat that he wears is, to say the least, unexpected: it is clearly a bishop’s miter. Is this a Jew disguised as a bishop? Or a bishop being tarred as a “Jew” in the flesh? Either way, Jewish-Christian difference is effectively blurred, suggesting that members of both groups were subject to carnality and blindness.

In its concern with shared Jewish-Christian failings and blurred Jewish-Christian distinctions, this grotesque image finds uncanny echo in two marginal illustrations on a bi-folio of an early-fourteenth-century Lowlandish psalter illustrating a text from the Office for the Dead—“Why do you hide your face from me and consider me your enemy?” (Job 13:24). [Fig. 11] In the upper left margin, the torso of a pointy-bearded man in profile wearing a knobbed cap and emerging from a dragonish body (that is, a figure liable to be read as a Jew or as Jew-like) screens his face with one hand, while with his other hand he points accusingly toward God, whose face in turn is hidden from him by a cloud. This “Jew” is being threatened by a naked, hairy ape-man with a sword and shield—a mocking motif symbolizing bestial folly and infidelity and signaling the existence of the same in his target.[58] In the lower right margin of the next folio there is a hybrid grotesque with two faces. His primary face, set on his shoulders, has normal features and is crowned with a bishop’s miter. His second face is on his rump and has squinting eyes and the long, scraggly pointed beard typically seen on a Gothic “Jew’s face.” The grotesque flourishes his staff like a weapon in the direction of the bearded “Jew” on the opposite page, while hiding his own bishop’s face behind a shield doubling as a mask.[59] As the mask is a symbol of hypocrisy, this gesture invokes another verse from Job 13: “no hypocrite shall come before his presence” (Job 13:16). Thomas Aquinas explained this text to mean that no vision or knowledge of God would be granted to those who hide their sins under a fair exterior.[60] The multiple faces and face- and vision-blocking gestures in this image thus implicitly equate Jewish unbelief and Christian deceitful hypocrisy. Both obscure vision and falsify appearance; both distance the soul from God.

FIG. 10

The easily identifiable, vividly caricatured Jew’s face that links our three Bonne of Luxembourg characters together, then, seems to evade any single interpretation. Rather than conveying one fixed, immutable identity, the Jewish caricature forces comparisons between very different figures and highlights the choices faced by every soul. An image so often read as endorsing moralizing physiognomy, or even racialism, actually serves to undermine any smug assumption of absolute difference or safe distance. If the Jew’s gaze is backward and his appearance is deceiving, so are those of many Christians. If the Jew’s flesh is corruptible and his morals are questionable, the same is true of many Christians.

FIG. 11

The illuminations indicate that art can help address the problems posed by the confusing and deceptive nature of the visible world—it can unveil the carnality of unbelievers and the falseness of hypocrites and reveal the folly of the misdirected gaze. Contemplation of the image of Christ can direct the imperfect believer on the proper path, as we have seen in two miniatures that exalt the reverent Christian gaze. But our illuminations also indicate that even the image of Christ, that most perfect of images, must eventually be left behind. Theologians from Pseudo-Dionysius through Abbot Suger, Aquinas, Bonaventure, and beyond all agreed that visual perception was to have only an initiatory role in religious devotion.[61] The ideal devotee was to pass from sight to internal imagination, and finally to an utterly image-less intellectus, or understanding. It is surely for this reason that in cantiga 108 Merlin prayed to a blank wall (see fig. 4) and that on Folio 329 of the Bonne prayer book the crucified Christ points to his own wound, an orifice that ruptures the shell of the body and leads the way to unseen depths (see fig. 8). And even as the recipients of this glorious manuscript revel in its beauty, its very last image encourages them to look beyond the flesh and beneath the surface and to gaze not on a body or a face but into a pure and formless void. [Fig. 12]

FIG. 12

*   *   *

We can, then, provisionally conclude that our physiognomic caricatures, for all their vivid naturalism, stop short of assigning to Jews an essentialized and meaningful physical difference. Each of the images we have looked at implicitly concedes that looks can be deceiving (among Christians as well as Jews), that carnal sin resides within Christians as well as Jews, and that identity can be fluid. In doing so, they instruct Christians to look at the world with caution and to privilege the invisible spiritual realm over visible things. These images thus play a familiar role. No less than its obviously symbolic eleventh-century ancestor, the Gothic Jewish face rehearsed the Jew’s role as original and eternal blind witness to Christian truth and helped its viewer explore that truth. In the early twelfth century, Jewish materialism had been understood primarily in exegetical and liturgical terms, and the iconography of Judaism drew upon classical, biblical, and clerical imagery. By the mid-thirteenth century, the growing interest in nature and science, in optics and vision, and in the study and classification of human difference led to a “somaticization” and naturalizing of symbols of carnality and blindness.

Each of these images implicitly admits that not all Jews were physically different or visually distinct, but they also complicate assumptions that Jews were Christians’ moral “other,” by endowing non-Jewish figures with so-called Jewish features, by associating the Jews’ materialism and duplicity with explicitly non-Jewish figures, and/or by emphasizing the flawed nature of both Jewish and Christian vision. Just as the Jews failed to see Christ properly, doubting his divinity because blinded by his outward humanity and humility, so medieval Christians too risked mistaking appearance for truth. Infidels do not wear their perfidy on their faces, nor are they the only ones who fail to see correctly or who hide a foul soul under a fair skin. These images in their aggregate, then, testify that the “natural” turn did not lay to rest Christian suspicion of corporeal perception and distrust of outward appearances. Even as they direct the viewer’s attention to nature and the body, these “naturalistic” images demonstrate the failure of nature and the material world (in all its contingency, confusion, and instability) to unambiguously convey spiritual truth, while claiming for themselves the ability to present a higher truth than nature and its observation provide.

I am not quite ready to leave my analysis there. I have, so far, pursued fairly limited, self-contained, close visual readings of the images and their religious import. But we still need to consider the people for whom the artworks were made and the uses to which they were put. The cultural documents we have looked at are material objects and technical artifacts as well as images, produced by and for a broader section of medieval society than just scholastic theologians. The spiritual counselors who helped create Bonne of Luxembourg’s prayer book and who guided the piety of Alfonso X were, I am convinced, deeply wary of the deceptions of vision and the seductions of matter and committed to a more purely spiritual understanding of value and identity. But the very fact that they delivered their message by means of realistically rendered bodies and distinctive faces painted in highly luxurious commoditized artworks—and that this visual language was first employed in governmental financial documents—signals the extent to which their spiritual ideas coexisted with conflicting ones. The manuscripts were produced by lay artists working for a prosperous and self-confident secular elite living in an urban and courtly world. In that world, appearance and body mattered intensely.[62]

Jews’ bodies mattered more intensely than most. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the ambitions of the increasingly centralized governments in England, France, and Iberia to exploit and control their subjects outstripped their abilities to do so. The clergy, the aristocracy, and the bourgeoisie all used their collective power to resist taxation.[63] Rulers often struggled to enforce justice on these populations. By contrast, secular authorities claimed a “special relationship” with Jews that afforded them unique power over Jewish communities, which needed the protection of powerful overlords and which had little ability to evade princely exploitation.[64] It was thus on Jews’ bodies that governments most successfully exercised and displayed their sovereignty.[65] The English exchequer had an entire separate bureau dedicated to the proceeds of Jewish taxation because Jews were the only population from which the king could consistently and reliably extract surplus wealth. A papal council may have been the first to decree that distinguishing clothing be imposed on Jews, but it was secular rulers who decided on the form of the badge and who controlled (and profited from) the enforcement (or disregard) of the order. When English barons rebelled against King Henry III, they displayed their disapproval of his rule by violently attacking “his” Jews; when Henry wished to demonstrate his reform, he judicially and legislatively attacked them in turn.[66] The pattern repeated itself in France in the fourteenth century, when disgruntled crusaders angry at royal exactions targeted Jewish communities along their route.[67] Alfonso X of Castile initiated his reign by regulating Jews’ clothing; in the middle of his reign he staked his claim to universal Christian kingship by reissuing on his own authority various ecclesiastical restrictions on Jews; and he closed his reign by executing his Jewish tax farmer.[68] And, of course, in the ultimate flexing of sovereign muscles, Edward I expelled the Jews from England in 1290. Bonne of Luxembourg’s Paris was likewise empty of Jews, the community having been definitively expelled in 1327, barely a decade before the painting of her prayer book.[69]

It is, then, no coincidence that the earliest “realistic” caricatures purporting to portray specific Jews appear in an administrative document: it was in such documents, and for very concrete, material purposes, that the practice of identifying specific individuals through name, profession, and physiognomic detail first evolved. The business of government is the business of classifying and controlling human bodies. Artworks that highlighted the fleshly reality of the bodies they most successfully controlled—Jews’ bodies—reflected this new way of seeing and thinking. They did more than just reflect it, though. In their dazzling technical mastery they ratified valuation of the physical and so helped further promote it. Images featuring the Gothic Jew’s face proclaimed their owners’ power over those conceptually central bodies and over the realm in which they lived and which they had long symbolized—the secular, material world. This explains why, when Archbishop Baldwin of Trier wished to vaunt the authority and legitimacy of his brother, the German emperor Henry VII, he had him painted accepting a scroll of the law from a physiognomically caricatured Jew.[70] [Fig. 13] The fact that rivalries were fought out, and dominance was displayed, over the Jew’s body also explains why so many caricatured Jews are threatened with violence or are violently acted upon, sometimes by righteous avengers and sometimes by demons, apes, grotesques, or wizards.[71] It is likely for this reason that, uniquely among Psalm 52 illustrations, the “Jewish” fool in the Bonne of Luxembourg prayer book is assaulted from behind. The action may be inspired by words from a subsequent Psalm: “And he smote his enemies on the hinder parts: he put them to an everlasting reproach.”[72] But it also serves as a reminder that bodily sin was subject to correction, even if such correction would inevitably fall short of perfection, because the corrector himself was an imperfect sinner.

I think, then, that we need to modify our initial conclusion about the meaning and function of our images. The owners of our two luxury manuscripts and the sovereign who commanded the English exchequer may have been told that flesh deceives and vision is incomplete, but they were also told that it was their duty as Christian rulers to strive to make the visible world approximate as nearly as possible the City of God. And the Gothic Jew’s face showed them the way, in directing their attention toward a visible population ripe for correction or punishment. For we can recognize the fundamentally symbolic role of the Jewish face without necessarily asserting that symbol to be utterly arbitrary.[73] Not even the most baldly “racial” Nazi anti-Semite would have alleged that all or even most Jews looked like their stereotype.[74] Almost every existing medieval anti-Jewish caricature implicitly admits that not all Jews were physically different or visually distinct, by surrounding the caricatured Jew with generic faces. But some small percentage of Jews, then as now, surely did have distinctive profiles; the persuasive rhetorical force of the caricature was predicated on a putative relation to at least some “real” faces. Viewers thus came to be trained to look to Jews’ bodies and faces for confirmation of their difference; to rulers, they were ready foci for resentment and targets for action. When authorities gazed on the sign of the “Jew’s face,” they saw a figure whom, above all others, they could and should identify, mark, and control.[75]

FIG. 13

The images we have looked at thus reveal a culture balancing two competing drives—to transcend the material world and to command it. High medieval Christendom waged a tug of war over truth and vision, matter and spirit, knowledge and faith, all fought over the body and via the face of the Jew. It was not a contest that would ever definitively be resolved in favor of one side or the other. Some medieval Christians, when confronted with images that skillfully undermined easy assumptions, probably did question their attachment to nature, body, world, and self and turn instead to the ineffable God. But the fact that across western Europe authorities began to see punishing, segregating, and expelling Jews as a necessary prelude to (if not an outright substitute for) reforming their subjects and themselves, suggests that more often the power of the images—the vividly “real,” fleshy difference of the Gothic Jew’s face—overwhelmed their subtle spiritual message.[76] Christian attitudes toward self, truth, and the world changed less noticeably toward the end of the Middle Ages than did Christian attitudes toward Jews. Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century kings, clerics, burghers, and princesses continued to flourish their piety by commissioning beautiful books and meditating over their images. But they did so in a Western Christendom largely devoid of living Jewish faces.[77]

CHAPTER SIX

WHERE ARE THE JEWISH WOMEN?

Woman is indeed like melting wax, always ready to assume fresh shape and to be molded to the imprint of anyone’s seal.

—Andreas Capellanus, De Amore, 3.83

In the preceding chapters we have seen a dizzying array of images of Hebrews, Jews, and Jew-like figures. They are hatted and hatless, hostile and friendly, foolish and wise. They grieve, they teach, they witness, they mock, they murder, they die. But for all this diversity, they have one thing in common: they are all men.[1] My illustrations are not unique in this respect. In contrast to the thousands of iconographically identifiable Jewish men in medieval manuscripts, objects, and monuments, there are almost no visually distinguishable Jewish women in high medieval art.[2] This is not to say that no female Jewish characters feature in the imagery of the period. There are manifold depictions of Old Testament heroines such as Ruth, Judith, and Esther; New Testament saints and sinners such as Mary Magdalene and Salome; and of course the nearly ubiquitous Virgin Mary herself. Women are occasionally included among the Israelite worshippers of the Golden Calf, the godless crowds who distress Jesus by cluttering the temple forecourt with profane business, or the Jewish auditors of Paul’s preaching.[3] Illustrations of miracle tales include such female Jewish characters as the mothers of converts or the wives of host desecrators.[4] But in all these images, the Jewish women can be identified only by context or by very superficial external cues: delete the setting, eliminate the male companions, or efface the inscriptions, and they could be Christian matrons or nuns. [Fig. 1] No distinctive symbol, costume, gesture, or physiognomy was devised for Jewish women in high medieval art. (There are one or two apparent exceptions to this general rule, but they do not hold up upon close inspection. I cannot agree with Bernhard Blumenkranz that the Jewish woman in the late-fourteenth-century book of hours now in Copenhagen is “lightly caricatured.” Her face seems to me to express only grief, not difference, her head is far less outsized than the heads of the Jewish men, her complexion is fairer, and her body, unlike their bodies, is not in any way distorted. And an essay ostensibly about Jewish women in medieval “anti-Semitic” art and caricature discusses no iconographically identifiable medieval Jewish women. Of the images analyzed there, one from the fourteenth century depicts a visually unmarked Jewish woman; the rest either depict the abstract personification Synagoga or are postmedieval.)[5]

FIG. 1

The failure of high medieval Christian artists to create a visually distinct Jewess is clearly not because Jewish females are somehow inherently resistant to visual “marking.” Women can be given hooked noses as easily as men, and the variability of female hairstyles, headdresses, and clothing would seem to make them at least as suited to iconographic manipulation as their male counterparts. In fact, an array of visual cues did come to be associated with Jewish women in later centuries. In quattrocento Italy the earring was used as a “sign” for Jewish women; the Jewish women painted by Rembrandt and his contemporaries are distinguished by their jewels and the deep, rich colors and luxurious textures of their clothing; and the exotic eastern Jewess of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Orientalist painters was a well-known and very recognizable type, combining lustrous thick, curly dark hair and eyes with pale skin, full red lips, gleaming jewels, and richly colored burnished or diaphanous drapery and veils; she is also often endowed, in addition, with a come-hither look or an enticing décolletage.[6] [Fig. 2]

FIG. 2

Indeed, by the opening of the twentieth century, the symbol of the Jewess had become such a staple of the Western artistic vocabulary that it could be used as a byword in art criticism. In the 1907 issue of the Burlington Magazine, Lady Saint John described a depiction of Queen Esther in an eighteenth-century tapestry as “a beautiful example of the Jewess type at its best.”[7] In the previous issue of the same journal, the critic Andrew Lang (author of the much-loved fairy tale collections) displayed equal confidence in the transparency of the Jewess type, though his estimation of her looks was less positive. Bitterly criticizing the restoration of a portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots, he wrote: “To Cripps the restorer we probably owe the aquiline hag with thick, arched eyebrows, round eyes, and a Semitic beak, who does duty for the ever unfortunate Queen of Scots.… Not even five years of [the Protestant reformer] John Knox could have converted her into [this] middle-aged Jewess.”[8]

The relative anonymity of the Jewish woman in medieval art is likewise striking in light of her prominence in other media. Whether as seductive femme fatale (ancestor of la juive fatale beloved of Romantic playwrights), virtuous Christian convert (prototype for Shakespeare’s Jessica), or grieving mother of a tender, Marian-loving son, the “Jewess” was a familiar and vivid figure in myriad medieval fictional and historical texts. The devout young Cistercian convert featured in a thirteenth-century collection of moralizing tales who at the moment of her baptism suddenly notices her Jewish father’s stench; the murderous siren of The Ballad of Sir Hugh, or, The Jew’s Daughter, who lures a Christian boy to his death (Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale” draws in part from this ballad but omits the villainous Jewess); the promiscuous hussy who convinces her gullible father that she is pregnant with the Messiah until she gives birth to a girl; the Jewess of Toledo whose affair with Alfonso VIII of Castile was (much later) said to have brought rebellion and disorder upon the kingdom; the “Estherke” of Polish legend with whom King Casimir the Great (1310–70) was obsessively in love—these are but a handful of the dozens of Jewesses who haunted the medieval Christian literary imagination.[9] If high medieval art never created a visual vocabulary for these readily recognizable literary prototypes, it was not through lack of interest.

How, then, can it be explained? It is, of course, a tricky proposition at best to argue from absence, to account for a nonevent. One way to approach the problem is to carefully examine an artwork with enough images of (marked) Jewish men and (unmarked) Jewish women. The great luxury codex of the Cantigas de Santa Maria made for King Alfonso X of Castile is just such an artwork.[10] Of the 195 songs in praise of the Virgin Mary in this manuscript, several dozen contain textual references to Jewish characters.[11] Two different songs in the collection recount a drama that takes place in the heart of a Jewish family, providing the artists with a rare opportunity to portray Jewish domestic life; two others focus on Jewish women.[12] By comparing the depiction and function of the male and female figures in their illuminations, we can begin to think about the larger issue of the contrasting representation of the Jew and Jewess in medieval art.

1. Unhappy Families

The two cantigas centered on Jewish families present two strikingly incompatible couples. In each, the villainous father immediately captures the eye. [Fig. 3] In cantiga 4, one of the oldest and best known of all Marian tales, a Jewish glassmaker from the French town of Bourges, enraged with his son for having joined his Christian classmates in church and received Communion from the Virgin Mary herself, throws him into the furnace.[13] The boy is miraculously shielded by the Virgin from all harm and is rescued by the townspeople, who cast the evil father into the furnace in his place. In the illustrations, the father flaunts a dark and virulent visage and displays a rich array of visual signs (pointed hat, dark hair, long and pointed beard, large and ostentatiously hooked nose, profile view) that by the year 1280, when the manuscript was made, would unmistakably mark him as a Jew. Our second iniquitous father is the Jewish alfaquin Cayphas, who likewise displays the typical features of the Jewish caricature (see ch. 5, figs. 4–6).

FIG. 3

The wives of these men bear no resemblance to their dark and ungainly husbands. In the third panel of cantiga 4, the glassmaker and his wife are seated side by side at the dinner table as their son comes home from church. In contrast to her husband (and like the wife of Cayphas in cantiga 108), the wife displays no signs of Jewishness, iniquity, or aggression. Her hair is fair and her facial features are small and even, indistinguishable from those of any of the hundreds of Christian women depicted in the manuscript.[14] She wears an elegant, scalloped headdress of white—the color of purity, or perhaps just of blankness. And just as her appearance differs from that of her husband, so does her manner. She hears about her son’s reception of the sacrament with evident shock, but her open-palmed gesture is employed in medieval art to express submission and acquiescence.[15] The father, by contrast, stretches his arm out, palm down, signaling rejection and disapproval. In the next panel, in which the boy is cast into the furnace, the contrast between husband and wife is even starker. The husband is a portrait of aggression, cruelty, indecency, and fury. He has hiked up his robe and tucked it into his belt, revealing his black laced or striped hose and providing a glimpse of his undershift. He is bending so far forward as to appear almost hunchbacked as he shoves his son into the fire with iron tools grasped tightly in his hands. Two women look on. One, presumably a relative or domestic, wearing a scalloped headdress but also a white kerchief that modestly covers her neck, wrings her hands in a gesture redolent of helplessness and distress. The second, most likely the mother, inflicts pain not on her child but on herself, as she tears at her own blond locks with both hands—a vivid and time-honored expression of grief. In sum, there is nothing antique or alien, aggressive or transgressive in the looks or behavior of this Jewish woman. Rather, she fulfills familiar and archetypically female roles: she sits or stands while watching passively; like the patient Griselda of Chaucer’s “Clerk’s Tale” she is a helpless victim of fate and her husband’s will; she loves her child. And finally, at the end of the song, she exercises the ultimate female prerogative: she changes. For although the artist eschewed this scene in favor of the more dramatic image of the father thrust into the fire, the last stanza of cantiga 4 tells us that the mother believed in Mary and was baptized. An analogous episode does appear in the illustration to cantiga 108, whose final panel embodies the “many Jews” said to have been converted by the sight of the deformed boy in the person of a single Jewish woman immersed in a baptismal font; this is almost certainly the child’s mother (see ch. 5, fig. 6).

Similar gendered differences appear in another song in the collection, a tale devoted to a Jewish woman. Cantiga 107 tells the story of a Jewish woman of Segovia sentenced to death for an unspecified crime.[16] According to the song, just as the woman was about to be thrown from a cliff to her death, she cried, “O misery! How can anyone live who falls from here, unless God wills it? But you, Queen Mary, in whom Christians have faith, if what I have heard is true, that you come to the help of wretched women who commend themselves to you,… come to my aid, for I am in great need! If I live and stay well, I shall immediately make myself a Christian before tomorrow comes.” The Virgin did, indeed, come to her aid, and the Jewess miraculously landed unharmed. Praising God, she made her way to a church, told the assembled Christians of the miracle, and asked to be baptized.

[Fig. 4] In each of the first two panels of the illumination, the Jewess is surrounded by a crowd of men, presumably the Jews who decreed the harsh sentence of death. The crowd is relatively diverse: some of the men are young and clean-shaven, while one or two are bearded. But at least two figures in each of the first three panels are clearly marked as Jews: they are either very dark or elderly and gray-bearded, wear pointed hoods or hats, are drawn in profile, and/or have long or curved noses. The punishment they are about to inflict follows neither medieval Jewish nor Christian practice but is modeled on biblical and perhaps Talmudic texts.[17] The poem censures this death sentence not because of its brutality (there are many instances of Christian judicial brutality in the manuscript, not to mention in medieval life) but because (as Christians understood it) the Jewish judges allowed no scope for penance and forgiveness, the chief concern of the Cantigas. Judaism is thus presented as the antithesis of Alfonso’s merciful, penitential, Marian Christian ideal: antiquated, rigid, and unforgiving—precisely the qualities encapsulated in the appearances of the marked Jewish men. Jewish men again bear crucial, though negative, witness. In the fourth panel, the dark and bearded Jewish male on the cliff points in wonder at the miraculous survival of the woman, yet for all his curiosity he sees not. Like the deformed boy in cantiga 108, he can only look backward, remaining utterly blind to the Virgin emerging behind him from the clouds. In spite of the marvel he has witnessed, he is steadfast in his recalcitrance: there is no indication in the song that any Jew other than the condemned woman converts.

FIG. 4

The condemned Jewess shares none of her male coreligionists’ exaggerated features or vivid coloring.[18] The veil wound around her head, which at first glance may seem somewhat to resemble a turban, is identical to the headdresses of the Christian women who stand sponsor at her final conversion. The only distinctive aspect of this woman’s appearance is the fact that she wears a simple white shift—a consequence of her condemned status, presumably, but also a visual sign suggestive of purity or passiveness or, again, perhaps just blankness. (Although it has been suggested that the shift serves to reveal the woman’s “voluptuous nude body” and is intended to signal her sexuality, I do not see this image as embodying Jewish seduction.[19] The outline of the woman’s legs is visible but her breasts and pudenda are not, and her body remains modestly covered even when she is completely upside down. By contrast, the breasts and belly of the abbess accused of fornication in cantiga 7 are very blatantly exposed. Moreover, the German Christian woman who in cantiga 136 is condemned to be dragged through the streets for abusing a statue of the Virgin is similarly dressed in a white shift. A more salient analogy for both these women is the white, lightly clad, suffering body of Christ himself, surrounded by tormenters. As Caroline Bynum and others have argued, women were thought able to approximate Christ through passive suffering.)[20] Indeed, if there is any unifying quality to the depictions of Jewish women in the cantigas, it is indeterminacy. Their faces are neutral, their clothing is indistinct, their gestures are listless, and their social positions are weak. [Fig. 5] There is something particularly flat and lifeless in the portrayal of this woman: aside from her hand gestures, she is remarkably static—her shift hardly even flutters as she falls, and she seems more akin to the baptismal vessel in which she is eventually immersed than to the active, colorful, vibrant male Jews who menace her. Like the blond heroines favored for that very reason by Alfred Hitchcock, this pale woman is a blank slate, waiting to be written upon. And she is, indeed, acted upon in the most violent imaginable way: she is turned completely upside down, utterly reversed. It is this passive, Christ-like suffering that cures her “blindness.” Moreover, if the appearances of Jewish males and Jewish females contrast, so does their vision. In diametric opposition to the Jewish male above her, who sees but does not believe, this Jewess believes without having to see. That is, she displays faith in the mother of God without the stimulus of any visual proof: it is not until after her prayer is completed and the miracle effected that the Virgin materializes to bless her.

FIG. 5

FIG. 6

The same visual and conceptual qualities characterize the sole other cantiga featuring a female Jewish protagonist. Cantiga 89 tells the tale of a Jewish woman who converted to Christianity after the Virgin Mary helped her safely through a difficult labor.[21] [Fig. 6] The Jewish woman is distinguished only by her swollen belly; her skin and hair are fair, her veil is white, her costume is unremarkable, and her features are small and even.[22] The same is true of her small daughter, the Jewish midwives or neighbors in the middle panels, and the (presumably Christian) women who observe the baptism in the final panel. Throughout the visual narrative, the Jewish woman’s posture and gestures express passivity and weakness: she throws her hands up in pain and despair, she leans helplessly upon her attendants, she lies prone beside her newborn baby, she stands a hesitant petitioner before the door of the church, she sits naked in a baptismal font as the holy water flows over her head.

Image after image from this manuscript and other high medieval manuscripts and monuments is formed in the same mold: crowds of nameless Jewish men, with nary a female in sight, or, alternately, dark and distorted Jewish men, contrasted with pale or neutral Jewish women. A particularly vivid example is Jaime Serra’s altarpiece for the monastery of Sijena, Catalonia (ca. 1400) depicting the first recorded accusation of host desecration, which allegedly occurred in Paris in 1290. The husband, shown stabbing the host, is elderly and bearded, has a downward sloping nose, and wears a dark cloak and hood, whereas his wife is young and has a straight nose. Her round, golden headdress and bright, light eyes—like her young son’s golden hair and bright eyes—echo the shining hair, halo, and eyes of the Christ Child rising from the cauldron, whom both mother and son see and wonder at. The husband/father, by contrast, keeps his eyes resolutely fixed on the bloody table before him, utterly oblivious to the miraculous apparition.[23] Nor is it just good Jewesses, the loving mothers or Jessica prototypes, whose looks are so much less distinctive and disturbing than those of Jewish men. The obdurate Jewish midwives of cantiga 89 who flee in disgust at their neighbor’s invocation of the Virgin are as fair as she or, for that matter, as the Virgin Mary herself. The Israelite women in a Regensburg Bible manuscript of around 1200 mimic their spouses in engaging in misbegotten worship, but not in displaying distinctive hairstyles or headgear.[24] Even the truly notoriously evil Jewesses who very occasionally make an appearance in high medieval art display no distinctive visual traits. Salome, whose deadly dark beauty so inflamed the imaginations of Romantic artists, is in Gothic art as pale and delicate as any noble lady: lethal in act but visually benign. [Fig. 7]

The illuminated tales of the glassmaker of Bourges and of Cayphas the alfaquin in the Cantigas de Santa Maria can help us understand this contrasting high medieval artistic approach to the Jewish man and the Jewish woman. I argued in chapter 5 that the caricatured Jewish males in the images we have looked at, for all their vivid corporeality, must be considered first and foremost symbols, iconographical expressions of certain ideas about Judaism and about the physical world. Transformed into a visual sign, the Jewish male becomes a visible, fleshly embodiment both of the Augustinian doctrine of “Jewish witness” and of royal sovereignty. Augustine of Hippo explained that Jews were allowed to continue to reside in Christendom because in preserving the true ancient text of scripture they testified to the truth of prophecy (although they were blind to its true meaning), because their flesh was living proof of the historicity of the Crucifixion and their own criminal role in it, because their defeat at the hands of the Romans and current dispersal among the nations testified to Christian triumph, and because they would convert at the end of days.[25] Alfonso X’s own law code, the Siete Partidas, acknowledged that the actual Jews living in Christendom by no means consistently looked or acted as this doctrine held they should, all too often projecting neither subordination nor stasis. So, for example, partida 7.24.2 laments that “we heard that in some places the Jews reenacted derisively—and continue to do so—on Good Friday the Passion of Our Lord”; partida 7.24.8 implies that an unacceptable amount of social mixing takes place (“no Jew shall dare to have in his house Christian servants … to bathe together with Christians”); partida 7.24.9 proclaims that “Jews who lie with Christian women are guilty of great insolence and presumption”; and partida 7.24.11 notes that “many errors and offensive acts occur.” But though the king apparently could not fully eradicate Jewish trespasses from his realm, in the idealized world of Christian imagery, in this manuscript made at the king’s command and according to his own design, the Jew could be forced back into his proper role.[26] Headgear indicative of archaic authority displays the Jewish glassmaker’s affiliation with an obsolete law and the outmoded past; his coarse and ugly visage proclaims his misunderstanding of that law and consequent carnality and perfidy, even fiendishness. The failure of the glassmaker of Bourges and the judges of the Segovian Jewess to see the miracles worked by the Virgin graphically demonstrates the male Jew’s exegetical and spiritual blindness. By heightening visible distinctions and highlighting the importance of proper vision and visual response, the illustrations of the Cantigas present a “corrected” image of a recognizably erring Jew who, when daring to challenge Christian superiority, to insult Christian sacraments, or to question Christian truth, is properly punished for his presumption—cast into his own fiery oven. Dominated on the Gothic page as he was not always in life, the caricatured Jew, now passive object of the Christian viewer’s controlling gaze, indeed became a reliable figure of and witness to Christian truth and triumph and to royal power.

FIG. 7

This was not a part the Jewish woman was expected to play. This is in large part because of the nature of the issues at stake: from the Christian perspective, Jewish “testimony” rested upon Jewish scripture, law, and ceremony, which were seen as the unique province of the Jewish male. Jewish women neither preserved nor distorted the words of scripture, they did not dispute about Christian image worship, they exercised no inappropriate religious or political authority, and they did not inscribe the law’s superseded and bloody ceremonies on their own bodies. Some aspects of medieval Jewish religious practice may have reinforced this view among Christians. A thirteenth-century Jewish anti-Christian polemical text stated that Christians did not believe that female converts could really enter the Jewish faith, as women couldn’t be circumcised.[27] Jewish women were not required to fulfill all the religious obligations imposed on men.[28] Women were in some situations exempt from fasting and were not always expected to fast as rigorously as men,[29] to enforce Jewish law as strenuously as men,[30] or to attend synagogue as regularly as men (in contrast to Christian women, who were apparently considered more regular churchgoers than men—note that no women are ever depicted in synagogue interiors or participating in Jewish rites in the Cantigas, whereas Christian women are frequently shown in church).[31]

2. A Leaky Vessel

But there is an even more basic reason why Jewish women could not embody the Jewish relationship to law and scripture: the hierarchically gendered nature of medieval Christian religious and social thought. In the clerical imagination, at least, the true faith was most perfectly enshrined in the Christian male, and especially the male cleric.[32] Although all human souls were potentially equal, women were handicapped by their bodies. The Christian woman needed to be subordinated to and controlled by men because, though a receptacle of grace, she was at best a weak and leaky vessel.[33] She was mutable and fluid, open and vulnerable, and her faith was feared to be no firmer than her flesh. Thus, much of the thirteenth-century Rule for Women Recluses “focuses on entry and impermeability, enclosure and leakage, sealing and opening.… The recluse’s bodily experience in the cell is represented as a constant struggle for regulation of these permeabilities.”[34] Female weakness was feared to make Christian women susceptible to Jewish manipulation, as is suggested by all the many later medieval host desecration tales depicting Jewish men successfully convincing Christian women to bring them consecrated hosts.[35] A similar assumption led a monastic chronicler to explain that a powerful French countess punished Christian debtors for defaulting on loans from Jewish moneylenders not because it was financially beneficial to her (which it was) but out of “female lightness.”[36] Or as the priest Andreas Capellanus put it in a treatise about love: “Woman is regularly found inconstant, because no woman is strengthened by so much firmness regarding any matter, that her conviction cannot be changed by anyone’s light sweet talk in a short space of time. Woman is indeed like melting wax, always ready to assume fresh shape and to be molded to the imprint of anyone’s seal.”[37] If she is changeable herself, still more ominous is her ability to change men. As an abbot of the monastery of Saint-Victor de Paris warned, “a woman’s beauty can make even a wise man apostatize”; this warning is embodied in an image in a Christian devotional manuscript known as the Rothschild Canticles (ca. 1320) depicting a beautiful woman enticing a man away from veneration of the crucifix.[38] (Jews shared many of these gendered assumptions. They, too, worried about their women’s susceptibility to sexual seduction and saw them as vulnerable soft spots in the Jewish communal body, chinks in the armor of Jewish purity and solidarity.)[39]

If the carnality of the Christian woman was inimical to spiritual fortitude (whether her own or that of her male viewer), this was even more true of the Jewish woman, who could not escape her sexuality through celibacy. Perception of female fluidity could work in Jewish women’s favor (from the Christian perspective): Steven Kruger has observed that “Jewish women, unlike the obdurate men of their ‘race,’ seem particularly susceptible to Christianity’s truth.”[40] Anna Abulafia has noted that “pliable Jewish women … were considered an easier prospect for conversion than men.”[41] (Note, however, that this assumption seems to have been based on gender stereotypes rather than actual experience—a study of twelfth-century Jewish conversions to Christianity concluded that “males appear to have constituted the vast majority of voluntary and individual converts.”[42] And the great twelfth-century Talmudic commentator Rabbi Jacob Tam wrote that “it happens every day” that apostates divorce their Jewish wives, suggesting that in his experience the typical voluntary convert to Christianity was male.)[43]

Missionaries saw hope in female solidarity as well as female susceptibility: the thirteenth-century monastic chronicler Matthew Paris wrote that the wife of a Jew who had slimed feces on an image of Mary rescued it “out of pity for another woman,” and the condemned criminal Jewess of cantiga 107 explicitly spoke to the Virgin Mary “woman to woman.” But in other cases the femaleness of the Jewess exacerbated her threat, as in The Ballad of Sir Hugh; or, The Jew’s Daughter, which tells the tale of a little Christian boy murdered by a young female Jewish neighbor who lured him into her father’s house by offering him an apple—an echo of Eve’s original sin that connects her crime less to her Jewish faith than to her fallen female state.[44]

Thus, although the murderously seductive juive fatale of preachers’ nightmares might seem the moral obverse of the innocent and impressionable Jewess of the missionary’s dreams, both Jewess types share an essential feature: each in her own way signals religious instability. The sexual and/or romantic liaisons into which Jewesses draw their Christian lovers sometimes end in the corruption of the Christian men and sometimes in the salvation of the Jewish women, but in either case the Jewess is a powerful and disruptive force for change. The Jewish wives and mothers in the Cantigas de Santa Maria and other miracle tales exist only to transform, usually through conversion, sometimes through death. Even one of the most notorious Jewish women in literature, a woman suffering from hunger during Titus’s siege of Jerusalem who kills, roasts, and eats her own child, was, according to the ancient Jewish historian Josephus, motivated by bodily weakness and uncontrollable impulse, and she was as false to her own people as she was to God and her maternal duty. As Josephus put it: “She consulted only her passion and the necessity she was in.… Snatching up her son, who was a child sucking at her breast, she said, ‘O thou miserable infant! for whom shall I preserve thee in this war, this famine, and this sedition?’”[45] In their inconstancy, then, these literary Jewesses embody the quality most frequently assigned to women in medieval antifeminist literature. Gender ideology, so often detrimental to Christian women, thus worked in the Jewish woman’s favor. In the Christian imagination, for better or for worse, the Jewess’s femaleness trumped her Jewishness, just as the Christian woman’s sex was often feared to engulf her faith.

This, I believe, is why high medieval art had no need to invent a sign for the Jewish woman. Carnal she might be, yet hers was not the carnality of Jewish materialistic literalism and bloody ritual but the pliant, susceptible, and (when unbridled) dangerous carnality of all women. (On the rare occasions when high medieval artists attempted to express the more obdurate and dynamic carnality of Jewish law in gendered terms, they did so by means not of the Jewish female but of the female personification of Judaism, Synagoga. Though this figure is generally shown as an elderly female holding round-topped tablets of the law and/or a sacrificial knife to indicate her embodiment of outdated “materialistic” Jewish law and “bloody” Jewish rites, in a few cases she is depicted in a sexualized manner, as if to concede the attraction that some Christians nevertheless might feel for Judaism.)[46] And Christian artists already had a venerable sign with which to signify the pliant, unstable female form of carnality: the female body. From the eleventh century on, artists conveyed the softness and flexibility of a woman’s body by means of curving lines and soft shading, and they underscored her freshness and fragility through delicately colored skin and long, wavy hair. These visual signs could then be endowed with either positive or negative force—when a woman’s stance is passive, her glance is downcast, her body is modestly clothed, and her hair is veiled, she embodies appropriate submission; when she appears active and her hair or skin is flagrantly bared, she projects unbridled passion.[47]

There is one other facet to the religiously unmarked representation of Jewish women in the Cantigas and across high medieval art. I suggested above that in the Cantigas, as in other artworks examined throughout this book, the iconographically marked male Jew epitomizes crucial aspects of Jewish “testimony”: its rigid obsolescence, its blind literalism, the severity and intractability of its law, its carnal culpability crying out for subjugation—all qualities that female flesh was ill-suited to convey. But to recognize the inability of the figure of the Jewess to embody Jewish ritual, exegesis, and law is not to assert that in the Cantigas (or beyond) this figure has nothing to say about Judaism. The negative qualities associated with the marked male Jew encompass only one dimension of the Christian theological and legal approach to Judaism. The other component of the doctrine of “Jewish witness,” which after all served to justify the continued presence of Jews within Christendom, insisted on protecting Jews who respected Christian primacy, and it held out hope that they might ultimately turn to Christ. These are notions effectively embodied in the sign of the Jewish woman, whose face and body encode weakness and pliability, receptivity to dominance, and potential for change. The apparently divided Jewish family that inhabits the pages of the Cantigas is, in fact, a prerequisite for the continued toleration of the Jewish minority. In Christian theology the particularized, exclusive obstinacy represented by the father had to be balanced by the universalized, fluid compliancy of the mother.

3. Becoming Visible

The benign visual neglect of the Jewess did not last. Around the turn of the fifteenth century, artists began to direct their attention and apply their visual imagination to female Jews. (This process paralleled civic legislation. In 1443 the senate of Venice realized that, while Jewish men had long been forced to wear a distinguishing mark on their clothing, Jewish women had not been subject to any such regulation and ordered that the situation be rectified.)[48] They inserted female Jews into scenes in which they had not previously appeared, gave visual form to Jewesses who had formerly existed only in texts, and endowed these Jewesses with faces, costumes, and poses that clearly distinguish them from their Christian sisters and graphically proclaim their religious difference. (Their inclusion and marking in this way was part of a broader trend of focusing on female power and iniquity: Judith, Eve, and witches take the place of Simon Magus in depictions of harmful sorcery, Saint Anthony’s demons become women, and femmes fatales of many sorts feature more prominently in fifteenth-century art.)[49]

The first hint of this trend may already manifest itself as early as the 1330s. [Fig. 8] An English manuscript known as the Holkham Bible (ca. 1327–40) contains a very unusual image: an illustration of the apocryphal legend of the smith’s wife.[50] According to the story, the Jewish blacksmith assigned the task of forging the nails for the crucifixion of Jesus was reluctant to do so and falsely claimed to have an injured hand. When the smith was forced to show his hand to the executioners, it miraculously became truly incapacitated, whereupon the smith’s wife immediately volunteered to take his place and proceeded to forge the nails. Although this maleficent Jewess first emerged in literature in an Old French vernacular Passion dating to about 1200, she did not make an appearance in art until the fourteenth century.[51] [Fig. 9] In the Queen Mary Psalter of around 1310, she looks much like the other high Gothic Jewish women we have encountered: graceful, fair, small-featured, and utterly bland, indistinguishable from any Christian lady, even as she forges the instruments of the savior’s death. (By way of contrast, note that even within the confines of the manuscript’s very courtly style there is an attempt to visually mark the more nefarious Jewish men: the man kneeling to the right of Christ in the crowning of thorns scenes has a scraggly, pointy beard and displays a toothy grimace; the Jew holding the book while supervising the seizing of Simon the Cyrene is drawn in profile and has a bulbous nose.) Twenty years later, in the Holkham Bible, the blacksmith’s wife looks very different. Although her clothing is still in no way distinctive, her face now reflects her iniquity: in the dark brows, which she pulls down furiously over glowering eyes; in the full lips, curved downward in a fierce grimace; and, above all, in the crooked and bulbous nose, drawn in sharp profile, a grotesque deformity indicative of her inner ugliness.[52] I hesitate to label this figure a full-fledged feminized anti-Jewish caricature, because her most distinctive mark—the bulbous nose—cannot be labeled a specifically “Jewish” feature: it does not conform to the shape that had by 1300 become the distinctive “Jewish nose,” and it is shared by many nefarious characters in the manuscript, Romans and yokels as well as Jews. But I nonetheless see this hideous Jewess as significant, in that she is the first painted Jewess not to look utterly generic, even in the midst of villainy. This suggests that some Christians, at least, were beginning to see Jewish women as sharing the negative religious valence of their menfolk. I shall postpone consideration of the possible reasons for this until later, but for now it is worth noting that this first-ever visually distinctive Jewess appears in one of the earliest extant examples of manuscript illumination intended for middle-class consumption.[53]

FIG. 8

FIG. 9

A few years later, far to the south, a very different Jewish woman, diametrically opposed in spiritual status to the blacksmith’s wife, is also visually singled out in a new way. [Fig. 10] As Diane Owen Hughes has shown, in 1342, in an altarpiece of the Purification of the Virgin, the Italian artist Ambrogio Lorenzetti endowed the Virgin Mary with new and innovative distinguishing signs.[54] Up to this point, Mary and also the women accompanying her had been portrayed as Christian matrons or nuns. In this painting, however, Mary and her attendants wear embroidered Byzantine or Islamic silk head coverings and dangling golden earrings. Since Christian women in the new populist communes of central and northern Italy had apparently given up the wearing of earrings in the twelfth century (perhaps because of their association with the aristocratic past and imperial Byzantine East), only Jewish women in these regions continued to wear earrings (as did Christian women in more southern, Byzantine-influenced areas).[55] These items, like the Eastern textiles, would thus have looked old-fashioned and exotic, even “Jewish” to contemporary Sienese viewers. Here then, for the first time, an artist visually associates the Virgin Mary and her sisters with qualities (antiquity, Easternness, luxury, materialism) traditionally assigned the Old Law. There is, of course, no derogatory intent: Lorenzetti was using these signs to display the Virgin’s humble obedience to the Old Law, following accepted theological rationales for her performance of this Hebrew rite. But the use of iconographic signs to grant these Judean women qualities previously associated only with male Hebrew prophets and their male Jewish descendants nevertheless signals a clear change in how female roles and identities were imagined. Women were apparently now seen as more closely affiliated with, and identified by, religious law and practice.

FIG. 10

If the Lorenzetti altarpiece uses Orientalized, feminized signs to highlight the antiquity and alienness of Hebraic law, an image from about six decades later conveys these same qualities with far more negative imagery. [Fig. 11] A folio from an illuminated manuscript of the Pèlerinage de Jésus-Crist by Guillaume de Deguileville (a vernacular verse retelling of the life of Jesus) illustrates the circumcision of Jesus.[56] The circumcision was a rare subject in medieval art, though it began to be more popular in the fourteenth and, especially, the fifteenth centuries, due largely to the increased devotional emphasis on the humanity of Christ.[57] It was rarer still (though not unprecedented) for the circumciser (the mohel [m.] or in this case, mohelet [f.]) to be depicted as a woman (though, interestingly, the circumcision is also performed by a woman in the Holkham Bible).[58] But this is what we see here. In the center of the image the naked Christ Child is laid out awkwardly on a hard wooden table. He seems to strain his torso upward as a darkly scowling woman in profile fully swathed in a white kerchief roughly grasps his right thigh with one hand and snips the foreskin off with clippers held in the other. Who is this elderly, veiled, grim-faced woman?

FIG. 11

The poem provides an explanation: “Before the kings arrived, and while the child slept, an old woman in a mantle, all withered and wrinkled, carrying large tablets [of the law] in her hand, showing a knife to all, approached the child, and grasped him, and put her hand to him, and circumcised him, so roughly and rudely that his blood flowed copiously and spread on the ground, so that the place was reddened.”[59] When the Virgin Mary cries out at this cruel treatment of her son, the woman responds, “I am the Old Law, and I have a commandment from the King [of Heaven] to circumcise boys on the eighth day. It is a sign of God’s alliance with man, a sacred sacrifice. You should rejoice at this mark, for it is that of the Sovereign King, who should never be disobeyed.” Mary continues to object that such a mark is not necessary for the Son of God, but, remarkably, the Old Law has the last word: “I know that this newborn is the Son of God. But good woman, consider that God has made the child, the perfect man, to show the way to his brothers, in keeping the commandments of the Father. Obedience is the reason that it leads to freedom.”

The veiled woman, then, is the Old Law. The presence of the law is in perfect accordance with Catholic theology, which explained Christ’s circumcision in terms similar to those of Mary’s purification: as a sign of the holy figure’s humility, obedience, and humanity.[60] But if the text of the Pèlerinage provides ample explanation for the crone’s presence, it explains rather less well her appearance. The veil rolled above her brow and gathered under her chin is not the “great mantle” or cloak mentioned in the text and worn by the Virgin Mary and also frequently depicted in art on Synagoga or on male circumcisers.[61] It resembles instead the headdress of serving women.[62] Her instrument, moreover, is all wrong: it is not the knife mentioned in the text, generally seen in circumcision images, or traditionally associated with Synagoga. It is, rather, a set of clippers, pincers, or pliers, tools much more typically associated with instruments of the Passion than with the circumcision. [Fig. 12] Or, I might add, with ritual murder.[63] [Fig. 13] And what are we to make of the other two grim-faced women standing to the right of the mohelet? There is no precedent for the Old Law to be accompanied by female attendants. They serve, therefore, to move our image from the realm of religious abstraction or personification to the realm of community; as attendants of the Old Law, they presumably are to be understood as Jewish women.[64] Like the law they accompany, their faces and clothing bespeak age and servility. But they also express, even more than the mohelet and far more than is authorized by the text, hostility; the face of the last woman to the right, in particular, is gruesome and distorted, glowering with hatred. If the furrowed brow, dark scowl, and distorted nose of the Holkham blacksmith’s wife may signal only generalized evil, there can be no doubt that this woman’s ugliness relates to her perfidious law. These Jewish women have joined their brothers in embodying the recalcitrance and enmity of Judaism. Their grotesque faces emanate in part from the style of the manuscript, but that is largely the point: a culture that has begun to use faces and bodies to express value feels the need to impart value to faces and bodies and develops the artistic means by which it might do so.

FIG. 12

FIG. 13

The two forms of difference associated with Judaism and displayed by Jewish women that we have encountered so far—exotic luxury and carnal deformity—come together in a series of panels painted in 1435 by Jacques Daret for the altarpiece of the Benedictine monastery of Saint-Vaast in Arras. [Fig. 14; see also color insert] In the foreground of the panel of the Nativity, we see a woman who, like the blacksmith’s wife, is an apocryphal figure rarely seen in Western art before the late Middle Ages. She is the midwife Salome (Zebel in the thirteenth-century Legenda Aurea), who, according to the Protoevangelium of James, refused to believe in the virgin birth and insisted on examining Mary’s body herself. As soon as she laid her hand upon the Virgin, however, it withered. An angel instructed her to touch the Christ Child and be healed; she did so and believed.[65]

This painting focuses on the moment just before the miraculous healing and accordingly endows the still-doubting midwife with signs of materiality and infidelity. Her red and gold brocaded dress is encrusted with gems and surmounted by a scalloped, fur-trimmed mantle—odd attire indeed for an attendant at a birth. Her hair hangs down her back in a single long braid—a hairstyle not attested in fifteenth-century Flanders and probably conspicuously alien.[66] On her head is an equally foreign-looking turban, and a golden earring dangles from her ear. The connotations of this latter, feminized sign of Jewishness had shifted since it was (apparently) first used by Lorenzetti in 1342, following a trajectory similar to that of the masculine sign of the Jewish hat. Just as the hat had originally signified neutral or even positive qualities (antiquity and authority) but eventually, by virtue of its association with Jews, had become a negative sign, so the earring’s association with Jewish women came to contour its cultural meaning. A fifteenth-century preacher endowed earrings with near-religious significance, telling his audience that Jewish women “wear them in place of circumcision.”[67] Franciscan moralists insisted that Jewish women (who began to eschew earrings in imitation of their Christian neighbors and perhaps in order to avoid being visually distinctive) be forced to wear earrings as signs of Jewish difference; they also began to associate the adornments with luxury, lust, and prostitution. Indeed, in early-fifteenth-century Umbria, ring-shaped earrings (as well as a cape “in the antique fashion”) were the form of distinguishing clothing imposed on Jewish women.[68] A copy of Lorenzetti’s painting made in around 1447–49 omitted the Virgin’s earrings, presumably because they were by that time considered inappropriate for such a holy figure.[69] The earring, then, marks Salome not merely as an adherent of an outdated law but as morally corrupt. And, of course, the midwife’s face is the most alien accoutrement of all: drawn in sharp profile, it displays the same strangely sloping nose, full lips, and heavy-lidded eyes seen on de Deguileville’s distorted Jewesses. That is, in her antique and grotesque otherness, Salome the midwife, the first Jew reluctantly to testify to the divinity of Christ, has finally acquired visual attributes analogous to those of the glassmaker of Bourges and Cayphas the alfaquin, and appropriate to the more negative dimension of the doctrine of Jewish witness.

FIG. 14

The spiritual significance of these signs is amply confirmed in the panel of the Purification and Presentation [Fig. 15], which includes a remarkable number of female participants—four women in addition to the Virgin Mary. As Penny Howell Jolly has noted, these women embody in their dress and hairstyles the contrast between the Old Law and the New.[70] Indeed, one can trace the passing of the old dispensation in the gradual dropping of the signs of the law, from the outlandish dress of the turbaned, earring-wearing young woman on the far right; to the more sedate, Hebrew-inscribed garb of the elderly prophetess Anna; through the bareheaded, red-robed woman in the center; to the left of the altar, where the Virgin Mary and a second woman appear as respectable Christian matrons, dressed in sober, conservative Flemish garb.[71]

Finally, I turn to one of the most notorious of all late medieval images: the famous 1493 print of the ritual murder of Simon of Trent (or Simonino) included in Hartmann Schedel’s Weltchronik, or World Chronicle. [Fig. 16] On Easter Sunday in 1475, a Jewish cook in the northern Italian city of Trent found the body of a small child in the sewer that flowed through the basement of his Jewish employer’s house. In hope of staving off suspicion, the tiny Jewish community of the town immediately informed the authorities but to no avail. Caught up in a complicated struggle for power between the German-speaking bishop and the Italian-speaking regional authorities and exposed to the heightened religious sensibilities that characterized the Easter season, all twenty-two members of the Jewish community were arrested and accused of murdering the boy and using his blood in their Passover observances. After extensive torture during which some of the Jews confessed and at the conclusion of a trial that lasted a little over two months, the male Jews were executed.[72] Posthumous miracles were immediately attributed to Simon, and the bishop moved swiftly to declare him a martyr. Over the objections of both the pope and the Doge of Venice (the secular authority of the region), both of whom disavowed the accusation and deplored the cult, narrative and devotional images of Simon’s “martyrdom” were quickly distributed. The 1493 Weltchronik print is based on a woodcut made in Nuremberg in around 1475–76, testifying to the rapid spread of interest in the tale and the cult. The print has been much studied; many scholars have examined its artistic resonances, noted its devotional aspects, and traced its nefarious influence.[73] But so far, no one has fully explained one of its most significant features: the inclusion of a woman in the scene.[74] This is, to my knowledge, the first time a woman has been shown participating in a ritual murder. Why is this woman here, and what does her appearance tell us?

FIG. 15

FIG. 16

There is nothing “documentary” about the inclusion of a woman in this scene. Although many aspects of the print faithfully replicate the “crime” as it was understood by Christians, the presence of “Brunetta” (her name is Brunetta, not Gruneta: the printer has mistakenly replaced the B with a G) is not among them. Some women, including one named Brunetta, were implicated in the “conspiracy,” but even after considerable torture none of the accused Jews, male or female, would concede that women were present at the murder.[75] The worst that was ever alleged of the women in the community was that after the child’s death they used his blood in the preparation of Passover matzoh. We must assume, then, that Brunetta is here for a specific reason, and most likely for an ideological, artistic, even devotional one rather than a historical or documentary one. And that reason is clear enough when her figure is viewed in light of the later medieval images of Jewish women we have just seen. In this one figure is condensed all the signs of Jewishness elsewhere dispersed among various disparate figures. Her age and veil invoke the obsolescence of the Old Law. Her scowl, full lips, and beaked nose, now identical to those previously displayed only by Jewish men, signify her perfidious carnality. The bag and keys hanging from her belt associate that carnality with material greed. The nails she offers with her left hand signify her eagerness to participate in this re-creation of the original Crucifixion and remind us that that crime, too, was facilitated by a Jewish woman—the notorious wife of the blacksmith. And the candle in her right hand, which recalls the candles held by the Virgin Mary and her attendants in scenes of her postpartum purification in the temple (see fig. 15), highlights the extent to which this crime, like the Crucifixion, reenacts and distorts every important ritual of the law that Jews claim to follow: sacrifice, circumcision, purification, and presentation. We see a similar pattern, though visually manifested in a different way, in a painting in the provincial museum of art in Trent (ca. 1520), where a Jewess holding a goblet in which she catches the blood of Simonino has the single braid and wrapped cloth of the exotic siren-like midwife Salome, but also the hooked nose of the fleshly Jew. In such images, the Jewess is a weak and leaky vessel no longer. Into the capacious visual sign of the murderous Jewess has now been poured all the eternal, unchanging, ever-repeated carnality and perfidy of the Jews.

*   *   *

At the close of the Middle Ages the Jewish woman finally began to display visual tokens connoting antiquity and perfidy, very much like her male counterpart and unlike her high medieval predecessor.[76] These images suggest that, in a startling reversal of earlier ideas, the Jewess’s religion was beginning to overshadow her femaleness. And, indeed, contemporary texts echo this trend. Whereas thirteenth-century preachers had seen the Jewess as ripe for conversion, the sixteenth-century Jesuit Philip Nerius warned that Jewish women were much more difficult to convert than men.[77] Although Nerius did not specify the source of the Jewess’s stubbornness, Inquisition interrogations of suspected crypto-Jews help point the way: they locate Jewishness not in texts, teaching, and public ritual—as high medieval scholastics had—but in diet, daily habit, and the rites associated with birth, marriage, and death.[78] “Did you eat pork, did you light candles, did you wear clean clothes on Saturdays?” the inquisitors repeatedly wanted to know. Neighbors were asked about suspects’ attendance in church, but even more obsessively about how they acted at home. In other words, the site of Jewish expression and the source of Jewish recalcitrance were now located in the domestic realm: the realm of women. An early-sixteenth-century Iberian chronicler is quite explicit. Referring to the (alleged) crypto-Jews of fifteenth-century Spain, he says, “They had Jews who preached to them in their houses, in secret, especially to the women.”[79] Likewise, in the images we have looked at, Jewish women serve to unite two disparate realms: family and household on the one hand and religious ritual on the other. The blacksmith’s wife injects a strangely homely, domestic note into an otherwise solemn judicial ritual. The three old crones in the de Deguileville illumination offer an ugly counterimage to the Holy Family, whose domestic peace they shatter with their bloody and outdated rite. The introduction of the two midwives into Daret’s Nativity and of the four female onlookers into his Purification and Presentation serve to “feminize” both events. It has been suggested that this feminization reflects the importance and the concerns of the altarpiece’s lay female viewership and also the Church’s desire to control and regulate the behavior of those viewers.[80] This explanation helps us understand the changing iconography of the Jewess.

By the opening of the fifteenth century, the shape and practice of Western Christianity had changed. Learning was no longer the monopoly of priests, or even of men. Sanctity could be found in city streets, urban courtyards, and family homes as well as in monastery cloisters. Art was made by and for laypersons and hung in living rooms as well as churches. Devotional texts in the vernacular, many of which were owned by women, were read aloud in the family sitting room.[81] Later medieval lay-oriented Christianity highlighted the spiritual role of household and father, and so naturally also of wife and mother.[82] A host of devotional and artistic developments testify to the new religious significance accorded household, women, and families. Writers became increasingly interested in the domestic life of the Holy Family, while artists began to depict sacred scenes in domestic settings, such as in the famous altarpiece of the Annunciation by Robert Campin (ca. 1425) in which the Virgin is shown seated in a middle-class living room.[83] The Master of the Hours of Catherine of Cleves (fl. ca. 1440) likewise stressed the domesticity of the Holy Family, which he depicted as “the ultimate hard-working nuclear family.”[84] Also related to this trend are the rise of the cults of Saint Anne and Saint Joseph, the explosion of devotions to female saints, and the elaboration of the iconographic theme of the Holy Kinship.[85] The clerical compilers of the “household books” that guided domestic practice in Brabant saw women as their most important partners in fostering a Catholic and moral civic culture and considered the “good housewife” to be the primary personification of Christian morality.[86] Women’s augmented symbolic significance made them the main targets of the hundreds of sumptuary laws issued in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and a major preoccupation of urban governments, which saw it as their duty to safeguard the honor of resident women.[87] It likewise explains why Christian legislators began to take more care to impose and/or enforce distinctive clothing regulations on Jewish women as well as Jewish men. In 1450, for example, the town of Viterbo imposed a red badge on Jewish men but ordered Jewish women to cover their heads with a yellow veil, at risk of being publicly stripped.[88] As we have already seen, in Venice in 1443 the government revised earlier instructions regarding distinctive Jewish signs to make it clear that women as well as men were to wear the yellow badges.[89] In 1499 Jewish women were ordered by the town of Recanati to wear yellow bands around their heads, a feminine version of the yellow hat that was imposed on Jewish men.[90] Women’s symbolic significance endowed their actions with considerable political, even international, import.[91] The images examined in this chapter, illustrations of vernacular devotional texts and depictions of such female-centered rituals as purification and presentation, grow out of these trends. So does the new iconography of the Jewish woman. As the spiritual and moral significance of the Christian wife rose (thereby rendering Christian society more similar to Jewish society: home and family, even more than the synagogue, had always been the center of Jewish tradition and ritual),[92] the significance of the Jewish wife rose as well. The “marked” Jewess may be exotically seductive, carnally extravagant, or hideously decrepit, but in all cases she now fully partakes of the rites and crimes of her husband and presents a dark counterpart to the ideal Christian woman, sober, modest, obedient, and chaste.

This reading of the sign of Jewess bears implications for our understanding of how medieval Christendom imagined Jewish “otherness.” It has become common to define the “other” as “that which I am not.” So, we are frequently told, Jews, as the stereotypical other, are rendered dark, ugly, literal, material, etc., because these qualities constitute the opposite of what Christians claimed to be. The later medieval images of visibly marked Jewesses seem to be in accord with that usual formulation, insofar as these Jewesses are manifestly different from the Christian ideal of woman. But “different” is not quite the same thing as “opposite,” and the signs used to signify Jewish difference are by no means arbitrarily chosen indicators of otherness. Throughout this book I have argued that Jews serve a central function in medieval Christian art and thought not solely because they are “not Christian” but because they and their law, rituals, lives, and, increasingly, households were powerfully related in specific ways to Christian law, ritual, society, and identity. Similarly, specific historical developments led to the creation of the “Jewess” as an iconographic sign. Jewish women came to be marked with extravagant and ostentatious clothing and jewels at just the time when, and in just those places where, Christian moralists were most concerned with condemning extravagance and ostentation among Christian women. Jewish wives and mothers become significant religious symbols at just the time when, and in just those places where, Christian wives and mothers were claiming a religious status alongside that of their celibate sisters.[93] We later generations of viewers of medieval art must keep in mind the historically contingent and culturally constructed nature of the distance between Jew and Christian. Jewish difference had to be concretized, magnified, and given meaning by continuous repetition and reiteration, before the perfidy of the Jew, or of the Jewess, could become visible. Andrew Lang was right about one thing: it was not five years of Protestant haranguing by John Knox that made Mary, Queen of Scots “look like” a middle-aged Jewess. It was six centuries of Christian art, as seen by all too effectively indoctrinated viewers’ eyes.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE JEW IN THE CROWD

Surveillance and Civic Vision, CA. 1350-1500

Watch, watch well, watch!

—Bernardino of Siena[1]

In a painting of the Raising of Lazarus (ca. 1445) by the Dutch artist Albert van Ouwater, we meet two starkly differing sets of people.[2] [Fig. 1; see also color insert] They are grouped on either side of Saint Peter, symbol of the institutional church, who stands in the exact center of the canvas and gestures toward the resurrected Lazarus emerging from a tomb in the floor. Christ stands to the left of Peter; directly behind him two demurely elegant women and three simply dressed male disciples look upon the miracle with awe, concern, and compassion, their faces radiating humility and faith.[3] On the right side of the picture, strongly contrasting with the calmly authoritative Christ and his reverent followers, huddle six gaudily dressed and apparently agitated Judeans.[4] A Levitical priest in a blue and gold miter and liturgical robes turns his back on Saint Peter and draws away as if to avoid contact with the resuscitated corpse;[5] two youngish men, each wearing pointed red hats swathed in white scarves, ostentatiously cover their noses in disgust;[6] a dark-bearded figure in a brocaded gold hat looks on with a weary (or perhaps grim) expression; a round-faced, double-chinned, bald-headed man, dressed more simply than the others in a loose blue tunic, wrinkles his forehead in perplexity; and the last, the most elaborately attired of all, stands with his back to the viewer and his hand on his hip, turning his face from the savior as he points toward the risen Lazarus.[7] Collectively, these figures vividly embody Jewish blindness, materialism, literalism, and recalcitrance, drawing the eye far more powerfully than the quietly contemplative Christians, or even the miracle-working Christ. This painting, then, seems a classic embodiment of one of the more troubling aspects of late medieval art: a sharply intensified, almost obsessive anti-Judaism. As many scholars have noted, even as Jews disappeared from view in cities across western Europe—either hidden behind ghetto walls or expelled en masse from towns, regions, entire countries—they became more prominent, and more vilified, than ever in Christian imagery, standing in for all that is evil and alien, utterly incompatible with an ideal Christendom.

FIG. 1

The visual vilification of the Jew is not the only subject of this painting. To leave our analysis of Ouwater’s canvas here would be to offer a very incomplete reading indeed. For though the anti-Jewish implications of the Raising of Lazarus, as of so much later medieval art, are indisputable, it concerns itself with more than condemnation of Jewish unbelief. Anti-Judaism alone cannot account for another striking characteristic of this painting and of much other fifteenth-century religious imagery: the inclusion in the sacred scene of a sizable and by no means starkly dichotomous onlooking crowd, consisting of almost every imaginable kind of person responding to events in almost every possible way. In the Ouwater painting, such spectators occupy the exact center of the work, behind Saint Peter, where we see a diverse gathering of laity peering through the grille into the choir. Unlike the groups flanking Saint Peter, these figures are neither obviously good nor bad, skeptical nor saved, and they display both exotic and perfectly ordinary garb.[8] This gazing crowd has analogues in a wide range of religious paintings created across western Europe in the late Middle Ages.[9] From crowded Calvaries, to face-filled Arma Christi (that is, icons of the instruments of the Passion), highly public martyrdoms, and biblical scenes presented as urban pageants, myriad artworks include in addition to obvious saints and sinners numerous “in-between” figures, visually identifiable neither as Christian nor Jew, dressed according to local fashion and practice, and apparently extraneous to the central event.[10]

My question in this chapter, then, is: What is the role of the Jew in the context of these dynamic and diffuse but also deeply ambiguous witnessing crowds?[11] What was the impact of including figures of “obvious” or vilified Jews among or alongside so many and such diverse onlookers? We have already seen (in chapters 4 and 5) the extent to which high medieval art expressed concern about faulty sight and deceptive appearance. Similar concerns permeate the art of the fifteenth century as well.[12] But in addition to such general moral and theological considerations, late medieval religious tableaux—many of which were highly visible public commissions as well as statements of faith—bear social and civic meaning.[13] In forcing art viewers to consider how members of a crowd look and act in the face of sanctity and sin, in reminding viewers that many people who lack the requisite faith and virtue—not just Jews but similarly flawed Gentiles—reside in the medieval town, and, above all, in highlighting the extent to which observing crowds (and also art observers) are themselves the objects of observation, such paintings prompted late medieval urban dwellers to become witnesses to their own appearances and behavior, to be attentive to those of their neighbors, and to be conscious that their neighbors may likewise be attending to them.[14] The ultimate end was not merely to reform individual Christian souls (though this was certainly desired) but to train citizens to police one another and themselves. Just as art helped turn an entire city into a visible sign, an outward manifestation of internal civic Christian virtue,[15] so art helped turn city residents into vigilant monitors of that virtue.[16] But I do not want to underplay the anti-Jewish implications of this strategy. In investing so much in the act and art of surveillance, the new urban approach to perception, observation, and appearance redounded upon actual Jewish existence in tangible (and harmful) ways.

1. Background: Late Medieval Anti-Jewish Art

The virulent anti-Judaism of late medieval imagery has often been remarked. This trend is especially, though not exclusively, evident in images of the Passion. The number and ferocity of Christ’s tormentors increase, and they display multiple and vivid signs of Jewishness, deviance, otherness, and sin. Costume, physiognomy, gesture, color, facial expression, hairstyle, objects, and animals are all enlisted to single out and defame Jewish characters.[17] Sometimes late medieval artworks perpetuate familiar and long-established anti-Jewish symbols. The toad or frog used in thirteenth-century art to symbolize the rapaciousness of Jewish usurers, for example, appears in a fifteenth-century painting on the shield of a turbaned figure leading Christ toward Calvary, its gaping mouth pointing toward a Jewish figure nearby.[18] The dogs that appeared in one or two early medieval symbolic illustrations of the Crucifixion to symbolize Christ’s enemies become the regular companions of Christ’s Jewish tormentors, whose features and expressions rival those of their beasts in ferocity and brutality.[19] In other cases late medieval artworks update anti-Jewish symbols or invent new ones—blindness is displayed through eyeglasses, Easternness through Turkish-looking attire, and evil via the scorpion. Pilate is replaced by the Jewish high priest or the Sanhedrin as the main mover in the Crucifixion, and enemies shown spitting at Christ in Arma Christi images are explicitly labeled Jews.[20] Such images elaborate many of the functions we have encountered throughout this book: they model blindness and heartlessness, the wrong way to see; they demonstrate the confusion, hypocrisy, and deception of the City of Man; they embody the fallen, fleshly world that needs to be corrected. It is important to add that the more positive aspects of Jewish witness do not disappear from later medieval art: Jewish villains are as often as not balanced by protagonists also identifiable as Jews, or at least Hebrews and Judeans: scroll-wielding prophets, the Pharisee who proclaims Christ the Son of God, the Jewish elders who lovingly cradle Jesus’s dead body all play prominent roles in later medieval art.[21] In spite of the frequent presence of these “believing/witnessing” Jews, however, scholars who study this imagery tend (understandably) to downplay the bifurcated nature of Jewish representation in favor of the ever darker and more hostile, often citing the exaggerated distortions of Christ’s tormentors and executioners as evidence for a late medieval propensity for the cruel and the macabre.[22]

Various explanations have been offered for this intensification of anti-Jewish imagery. Art historians have, not surprisingly, tended to look to artistic developments, citing the growing artistic interest in portraiture, physiognomy, human types, and the portrayal of emotions.[23] Other scholars point to devotional trends, arguing that the more personal, vocal, affective religiosity of the later Middle Ages created an intense desire for more detailed and emotionally charged pictures of the Passion and martyrdoms.[24] Others still relate the violence of late medieval religious imagery to the brutality, chaos, and anxiety generated by contemporary political and demographic crises.[25] All these suggestions are valuable and in many ways convincing. But none directly addresses the fact that demonized and caricatured Jews appear in the midst of large and often ambiguous crowds in late medieval religious tableaux.

2. Lots of Looking

Let us start with the explosion of onlookers in religious scenes. Van Ouwater’s gazing layfolk are hardly unique: in picture after picture of Christ carrying the cross, raising the dead, giving up the ghost, mocked by the mob, showing his wounds, or rising from the grave, he is surrounded by a large and diverse crowd.[26] Saints, too, increasingly work their miracles and suffer their tribulations before many onlookers. In some cases groups of two or three persons stand debating on the margins of the main action.[27] In other cases spectators peek over ramparts and battlements,[28] look up from the streets,[29] or gaze down from high towers.[30] At times the central actor is all but overwhelmed by peripheral viewers. And for every exotically attired or grotesquely caricatured (and so implicitly Jewish) tormentor or mocker shown glaring sadistically at Christ or the central saint, there are several or even dozens of others quite mundane in aspect, who gaze blankly or turn away, seemingly oblivious to the drama or pain before them. [Fig. 2]

The complications posed by the onlooking crowd are crystallized in an early example of a densely populated religious scene: the fresco of Christ Carrying the Cross (The Road to Calvary) in the lower left corner of the vast Passion narrative decorating the chapter house of the Dominican priory of Santa Maria Novella in Florence.[31] [Fig. 3] Hunters of Judaicized villains will have no trouble finding their quarry here: the skullcap-wearing dark-bearded man in profile carrying a rolled-up scroll and gesturing toward Christ on the left edge, the figure on horseback with a beard exotically divided into two pointed braids who is seemingly directing the proceedings; the sword-wielding man in profile with the dark, pointed beard stalking purposely forward to the right of Christ, the woman (or perhaps effeminate man?) shown in dorsal view in the midst of the marchers wearing a turban with a single braid trailing down her back;[32] the man in the tall, pointed hat and dark, pointed beard hovering above the city so that he seems to lead the procession—all of these figures display stereotypical Jewish signs and in this context may presumably be regarded as Jewish deicides. But the fresco hardly promotes the notion that Christ’s death can be entirely displaced onto alien “others,” for these “marked” characters constitute a small minority of the crowd. Surrounding them are many more figures displaying no signs of iniquity or otherness. The man holding the hammer and nail, for example, is clean-shaven; the veiled female face nestled just above the S of the SPQR is fair and elegant; the man in red just below and to the left of the small, pointing figure on the right is young and golden-haired.

FIG. 2

FIG. 3

A second interesting feature of the crowd is the fact that, while the majority of people peering and pointing from the city ramparts or walking behind Christ are focused on the soon-to-be-executed savior, other figures very conspicuously look elsewhere. One woman on a balcony is more interested in her potted plant than in the drama unfolding below. A man in a turban at the city entrance turns to look at an unseen distraction behind him. The woman in the veil seems engrossed by the figure to her right. An elderly man toward the front of the procession has turned around as if to retrace his steps for some reason; a man in a striped headdress likewise faces the oncoming crowd; and above him an older man with a covered head looks off to his right.

A similar mixture of apparently Jewish, presumably non-Jewish, quite ambiguous, and evidently distracted characters likewise characterizes the figures peering through the grate at the back of the choir in Ouwater’s Raising of Lazarus (see fig. 1). The spiky-turbaned curly-bearded man in the center of the group is exotic enough (the colors of his hat echo the blue and gold headdress of the Jewish priest), but the curly-haired rustic and the white-veiled woman who flank him could have walked the streets of Haarlem, Albert van Ouwater’s hometown.[33] The onlookers’ gazes are notably diffuse: some glance down toward the seated Lazarus; one—a man wearing a white headband—looks right and upward toward window, sky, or heaven; one—the turbaned man—seems to regard the priest he so resembles; and one—a brown-bearded man on the left wearing a yellow cap and red tunic—gazes straight out toward the viewer. Is this an unbelieving Jew, a foil to the downward-peering balding elder on the right?[34] Is he perhaps to be construed as a potential convert? Or are we to see him as Everyman, any resident of the city, poised uncertainly between the Jewish priests’ disgust and the reverence of the Christian saints?[35]

The expansion of the observing crowd in later medieval art has long been remarked. The Renaissance artist and art historian Giorgio Vasari (d. 1574) traced a steady increase in the number and significance of attentive figures over his three phases of painting, dubbing Raphael (d. 1520) the “maestro” of attention.[36] Contemporaries offered both artistic and religious explanations for the practice. Leonardo advised artists carefully to observe the behavior of people on the streets (talking, quarreling, laughing, or fighting together), including bystanders who in turn look on at the action, in order to perfect mastery of gesture and expression.[37] Attentiveness, at least to spiritual scenes, was also a religious virtue: the fourteenth-century Meditations on the Life of Christ advised the reader to “look” (in his or her imagination, but probably also in regard to a picture) “at the disciples as they gaze on Him [Christ] with reverence, humility, and all intentness of mind.”[38]

But spectating crowds do not serve merely to commend spiritual attentiveness: as noted above, quite a few painted onlookers fail to gaze with uninterrupted attention. The art historian Robert Gaston likewise remarks that the bystanders in many quattrocento images are often not looking at the sacred figures at all but rather seem to be looking elsewhere. [Fig. 4] Gaston compares such behavior to that of courtiers who were allowed to chat while the lord was conducting business; he concludes that this practice added naturalness to artworks, helping to make the entourage of the Magi, for example, that much more convincing.[39] But in the context of highly charged (and by no means courtly) settings such as the road to Calvary or the raising of Lazarus, such distractedness, not to say determined inattention, no matter how “natural,” must surely bear further meaning.

FIG. 4

The issue of inattention is very vividly raised in one of the stranger images to survive from the late Middle Ages, a so-called Man of Sorrows from Verona. [Fig. 5] Here we see a dead and bloodied Christ perched on the edge of his tomb and surrounded by a gallery of disembodied faces.[40] Together with the hammer, nails, pincers, bucket, etc., these faces constitute the Arma Christi, the tools of Christ’s torment, frequently shown in later medieval art surrounding the suffering savior. Most of the figures in the image are characters associated with the Passion—we can recognize the white-bearded Saint Peter; Malchus, whose ear was cut off by Peter; the woman who pointed Peter out as a follower of Christ; and Herod in his crown, among many others who cannot precisely be identified. But though the theme itself is not new, its treatment here is striking. Whereas in the previous century comparable images had surrounded the Man of Sorrows with material objects and at most one or two tormentors glaring or spitting at him, here we have well over a dozen faces, friend and foe alike, overlapping one another in a weird and jostling human tapestry.[41] Although all but one of the male faces are bearded, with the exception of the crowned Herod none of the men are endowed with signs that convey any kind of exoticism or social specificity.[42] Far from being marked by evil or difference, much less identified as Jews, they resemble almost any resident of the city.[43]

FIG. 5

Oddest of all, though, is the fact that these “instruments of the Passion” are not tormenting Christ: in contrast to most versions of this theme, none of the faces is spitting at or in any way abusing Christ. In fact, not one of these faces is paying the savior the slightest heed—with the sole exception of the Virgin Mary, all the figures in the painting glance away from his corpus and look instead toward the heavens, the earth, or one another. Many of them conduct an apparently animated dialogue with their immediate neighbors. One figure (Saint John), stares straight out at the viewer, wielding the most piercing gaze of all.

How then are we to understand this lack of attentiveness among so many painted viewers? One function of their distraction is, it seems clear, to signal a spiritual lack. Together, the unfocused gazes of Christ’s tormentors in the Verona Man of Sorrows graphically realize not the first, more commonly quoted half of the Man of Sorrows biblical verse (Isaiah 53:3), “He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain,” but rather the second half, which indicts the arrogance and indifference of his fellow humans: “Like one from whom people hide their faces, he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.” Our diverse, disembodied, and distracted heads thus suggest that the instruments of Christ’s suffering are not just those who inflicted upon him bodily pain but also all who saw and did nothing … or who simply preferred not to see. But there is a civic meaning as well as a moral one in the variously focused, crisscrossed trajectories of these gazes. It has been noted that the interlocking eyes of two conversing figures show those persons’ consciousness that they are in a mutual relationship.[44] I would add that the Verona painting’s elaborate multiplication of such interlocked pairs vividly conveys the fact that civic life consists of countless such relationships, all conducted under the gaze of others. The overlapping interactions of these human “instruments” of cruelty and indifference, like the people peering down from the Florentine ramparts at the distracted marchers in the Road to Calvary and the jostling gawkers viewing the viewers in Ouwater’s Haarlem choir, remind the residents of the late medieval town that no individual functions in isolation, that the choices and actions of each person are observed by others, and that these watchers in turn are themselves subject to being seen and judged.

3. Portrait of a City

Various visual cues helped impress this message on the audience, instill a sense of immediacy, and provoke art viewers to relate the painted spectators to themselves. Perhaps the most obvious such cue was the practice of locating ancient or even timeless religious events in the contemporary city, in the shadow of familiar buildings and under the eyes of familiar figures, rendered as contemporaries rather than as historical actors.[45] In the Low Countries, Germany, and Italy fifteenth-century artists included “portraits” of actual buildings in their works.[46] So, for example, Andrea da Firenze’s Road to Calvary directly faced another work by the same artist known as the Via Veritatis (the Way of Truth or Salvation). The fresco, which is located in a Dominican church and underscores the central role played by the friars in leading their fellow Christians to salvation, boasts a detailed and highly accurate portrait of the Duomo, then under construction. [Fig. 6] The knots of people collected alongside the building include a wide range of recognizable figures and types. Some are exalted personages wearing badges of office (pope, emperor, cardinal, king, bishop), some are identified as infidels by their dark complexions and exotic headgear (turbans and pointed hats), but most are characters commonly seen on the streets of Florence (knights, monks, clerics, civic officials, learned academics, mendicant friars, listening laymen and -women, wretched beggars and cripples). The portrayal of so many and such different people displaying so many and such differing reactions to Dominican preaching—and the linking of these reactions to ultimate salvation—presumably served to encourage personal penitence, a key goal of the Dominican order. But in launching salvific history from the most prominent site in central Florence, the image also reminds its viewers that the way to salvation and the road to Calvary both begin at home, on the city street, and that inner virtue is embodied and displayed in public and civic comportment. Christ’s gaze may be able to penetrate the individual human heart, but no figure in either painting stands alone before his God. Each is a member of a group, and each is exposed to the scrutiny of Christ’s and of many other eyes.[47]

FIG. 6

Second, many of the gazing faces in fifteenth-century religious artworks belong to actual, identifiable people.[48] The Via Veritatis contains portraits of Brigitte of Sweden, Queen Joan of Naples, and other well-known figures. At least seven prominent citizens appear in Masaccio’s Raising of the Son of Theophilus in the Brancacci Chapel (ca. 1425). In Domenico Ghirlandaio’s frescoes in the Tornabuoni Chapel of Santa Maria Novella, the Annunciation to Zacharias, the Birth of the Virgin, the Visitation, and the Birth of the Baptist are observed by famous Florentines, distinguished from the biblical/historical characters by their fashionable dress.[49] Filippo Lippi’s Funeral of Saint Stephen (1460) in the Prato Cathedral includes almost two dozen portraits. John Pope-Hennessy calls the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel a veritable “Who’s Who of 1482” and notes that the choirs of many churches were “in effect a civic portrait gallery.”[50] In northern Europe, Geertgen tot Sint Jans, a younger Haarlem contemporary of Albert van Ouwater, featured collective portraits of local notables in two of his surviving works, and Petrus Christus, Rogier van der Weyden, Hugo Van der Goes, and Nicolas Froment all included portraits in their works.[51] In Iberia, the various panels of the Altarpiece of Saint Vincent by Nuno Gonçalves (1467–69) show the saint surrounded by members of the Portuguese court.[52]

This inclusion of known figures and structures in biblical and other religious scenes served a variety of artistic and spiritual purposes. It was, of course, and perhaps above all, a form of flattery and advertisement on the part of the artists, and of self-promotion and family or institutional aggrandizement on the part of the patrons. Nevertheless the quattrocento artist and intellectual Leon Battista Alberti, while no doubt recognizing these functions, preferred to emphasize affective and devotional benefits, writing in his treatise On Painting (1435) that the viewer was more likely to contemplate a religious scene deeply when it included a known face: “The face that is known draws the eye of all spectators” and “can best move the emotions.”[53] Aby Warburg explained that this form of portraiture expressed and promoted a sense of connection between the people shown and the sacred figures. Eckart Marchand likewise noted that the practice helped draw the history beholder into the religious narrative, adding that it was a way for patrons to express in visual terms the values and social identity of their city.[54] I would extend the civic implications of inserting secular figures into sacred scenes further still. These paintings achieve in art what was not fully realized in life: in laying so much stress on the appearance and behavior of urban residents and highlighting the importance of well-ordered space, they model a method of governance. They visualize, and so offer a way to think about, what city life is actually like and how it might be improved.[55]

What has not yet been considered is how this aspect of later medieval art gives entirely new meaning to the images of Judeans and Jews appearing in the midst of these Christian cities and citizens. Whether Jews are grossly caricatured (as in much northern painting), singled out as “other” through exotic costume (as with the infidel auditors of Peter Martyr and Thomas Aquinas in the Via Veritatis), only subtly identified by a beard or cap, or identifiable as Jews only from context (as is often the case in Italian painting), their appearance among recognizable crowds in familiar city scenes significantly lessens the physical, social, and conceptual distance between Jew and Gentile. For all their differentiated complexions and headgear, the infidels peopling the streets of Florence in the Via Veritatis of Andrea da Firenze mix easily with their orthodox neighbors, and they display the same broad range of reactions to Dominican preaching as the Gentiles among whom they mingle—members of both groups display piety and humility, as well as pride and rejection. [Fig. 7] It is tempting to see the luxurious attire of the rabbis in Pinturricchio’s fresco of Christ among the Doctors as signaling their materialism, and so literalism, but in fact their outfits are no more opulent or exotic than those of the dignitaries depicted by the same artist attending the coronation of Pope Pius III.[56] The fur hat, pointed beard, profile presentation, orb, and scepter with which the Duke of Milan is endowed in Masaccio’s Raising of the Son of Theophilus, manifestly without negative implication, could easily appear on Herod, Pilate, or any hard-hearted Judean authority. (It is worth repeating that the existence of putative “Jewish” clothing, in art and in life, hardly served definitively to identify Jews or to distinguish them from Gentiles—again, in art or in life.)[57] So rather than simply encourage viewers to compare themselves morally, spiritually, affectively with unbelievers, as earlier artworks had, these crowded scenes force viewers to imagine themselves as Jews’ neighbors, sharing the same streets and squares. The images concede that Christians are tested by the same challenges as the Jews of Christ’s generation and that Christians too might display qualities so often labeled “Jewish.”[58] Once they have been prompted to recognize their own possible kinship with the New Testament–era Jews upon whom they gaze, and whom they are urged to condemn, viewers must also face the fact that they too may be gazed upon, and condemned, by others.[59]

FIG. 7

4. The Viewer Espied

It is not just the painted spectator who is visibly exposed to the gaze of others. In picture after picture, a face is depicted staring straight out toward the viewer of the image. In van Ouwater’s Lazarus it is the gold-turbaned man on the left edge of the peering group whose eyes directly engage the viewer. Similar figures appear in (to cite just a few examples) Rogier van der Weyden’s St. Columba altarpiece (1455), where a member of the Magi’s entourage engages our gaze while pointing to his right (our left); Derick Baegert’s Christ Carrying the Cross (ca. 1477), where the woman pointing at the shroud with Christ’s image looks straight out toward the viewer [Fig. 8]; in the Ecce Homo of Quentin Massys (ca. 1515), where a man in the lower right corner slides his eyes left and outward [Fig. 9]; and in Piero Perugino’s 1492 fresco of the Baptism of Christ, in which a young man in a red cap stands sharply out from the surrounding figures in directly facing the viewer.[60] [Fig. 10] Sometimes the staring figure is an unknown bystander, sometimes a shadowy figure in the background, sometimes the artist himself, sometimes a holy figure (such as the Virgin in Masaccio’s Holy Trinity fresco), and sometimes even Christ himself.[61] Perhaps the most startling such character is the soldier who aims his crossbow directly at the viewer in a mid-fifteenth-century Bavarian Calvary.[62]

FIG. 8

FIG. 9

FIG. 10

Alberti, again, discussed this practice, recommending it as a powerful way to engage the viewer and intensify the emotional impact of the image: “In an istoria [that is, a narrative painting] I like to see someone who admonishes and points out to us what is happening there, or beckons with his hand to see, or menaces [us] with an angry face and flashing eyes, so that no one should come near, or shows some danger or marvelous thing there, or invites us to weep or to laugh together with them.”[63] Indeed, in at least one case the invitation is explicitly articulated by the image itself: an inscription on a predella to a Man of Sorrows image in Florence exhorts the viewer: “O! All you who pass by, consider and see whether there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow!” Millard Meiss cites this inscription as an example of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century tendency to draw together image and spectator, divine and human realms.[64] Patricia Rubin describes the effect of a figure who stares straight out at the viewer as calling attention to the viewer’s own act of looking, “reminding the viewers … of their positions as witnesses.”[65] I would add that the staring faces remind viewers of their positions as witnessed as well. In directly addressing the viewer, the direct gaze, like the inscription, instills self-consciousness, creates a sense of being seen, and reminds the viewer that he or she, too, is visible and legible to others.[66]

Moralists explicitly exploited this potential power of art in their attempts to instill such self-consciousness. When the puritanical preacher Savonarola condemned the wearing of extravagant dress and cosmetics in church, he warned the women of Florence: “I tell you that [the image of the Virgin of the Annunciation] doesn’t want to see [you] dressed like that!”[67] Bernardino of Siena instructed women to imagine that a picture of the Virgin was watching their behavior when they were in their bedrooms.[68] During urban crises the Virgin of Impruneta was marched through the streets of Florence that she might be seen by all but was then set up on a dais so she could in turn “watch” the townspeople marching before her.[69] Many of our painted gazes seem more challenging than inviting: in the deeply strange Man of Sorrows/Arma Christi image from Verona, Saint John seems to demand of the viewer: “Which of these characters are you—tormentor, denier, questioner, or believer?!” Through such stares the viewer is made aware that he or she is being watched and warned to police him- or herself accordingly.

5. Behind Closed Doors

The final visual element expressing a new concern with visibility and surveillance is the multitude of partially effaced walls, open windows, agape doors, arcaded loggias, and pierced barriers through which spectators peer and/or into which the viewer can gaze (see fig. 1). The barred window at the back of the choir in van Ouwater’s Lazarus is an unusually central and prominent example of such unexpected or oblique viewpoints, but it is by no means rare. In such paintings as Dieric Bouts’s 1464 Altarpiece of the Blessed Sacrament, Hans Memling’s 1471 Scenes from the Passion, Nicolas Froment’s Martyrdom of Saint Mitre, Rogier van der Weyden’s St. Columba altarpiece, and the anonymous northern French Presentation in the Temple now in the Musée de Cluny, walls fall away or gaps open up at improbable places.

Of course, such architectural elements serve a clear painterly function: they were the primary mechanisms by which artists achieved visual perspective and conveyed an illusion of three-dimensional space.[70] But artistic technique (perspectival arrangements included) cannot be divorced from ideological import.[71] Alberti wrote that in creating a sense of “the picture as window,” perspective helps connect the viewer to depicted space; this, in turn, helps promote the self-reflexivity I have been suggesting.[72] Moreover, in many artworks the primary purpose of including these pierced and porous structures seems to be to highlight the act of viewing[73] and to draw attention to—often literally to “frame”—these spectators so that they in effect become subjects of their own image. They also would have recalled to the urban viewer the collective experience of watching urban drama, as theatrical stages were often divided by curtains into a series of compartments reminiscent of our painted spaces. At the same time, the oblique, blocked, or partial nature of their viewing perforce suggests both the limits of visibility and the possibility of concealment. [Fig. 11] So, for example, the voyeuristic quality of Petrus Christus’s Saint Eligius as a Goldsmith has often been noted: the fascination of the image comes from the fact that both the passersby reflected in the mirror and the viewer of the painting are allowed glimpses into intimate, interior space.

FIG. 11

These many pierced walls and apparently extraneous and excluded pairs or groups of peering viewers thus highlight what was considered a deeply problematic aspect of late medieval urban life: the disjunction between inside and outside, private and public, internal morality and outward appearance.[74] Christian theologians had long been preoccupied by this dangerous disjunction, of course,[75] but it was rendered considerably more pressing by late medieval social and political developments. In particular, the rise of the domestic household as a political unit and a site of spirituality magnified both interest in what went on within newly significant private spaces and concern about their inaccessibility.[76] In various Italian cities, for example, the civic government tried (often unsuccessfully) to prevent or reverse the privatization of space by elite families, who closed off streets in order to turn their neighborhoods into family compounds.[77] The dissolution of walls and barriers in late medieval painting helped acknowledge and address such anxieties. Art became a key tool in signaling the need to consider what was hidden from view. It also, interestingly enough, helped sanctify interior (hidden) space: the presence or absence of religious art in a private home became a primary marker of family piety.[78]

6. Sight of the City: Pageantry and Public Ritual

The artistic strategies outlined above underscore the visibility and emphasize the visual significance of the city and its residents. They therefore also express a need for social legibility—allied to considerable apprehension regarding how easily external appearance, allotted so much importance in civic life, could be manipulated to mask and mislead—and promote surveillance of neighbor and of self. The same concerns permeate contemporary urban laws and mores: the increasingly centralized and ambitious polities of the later Middle Ages harbored a powerful desire to make the appearance of the city display its honor and piety and to make the dress of its residents align with their inner qualities, whether virtuous or shameful.[79]

The most obvious manifestation of this late medieval urban concern with outward display is the heavy investment of civic governments and urban confraternities in pageantry, art patronage, and ceremony.[80] Religious processions were choreographed so as to present in visual form the urban social structure.[81] Urban saints were ostentatiously displayed to residents and visitors in theatrical settings and with carefully choreographed gestures on major feast (and fair) days.[82] Florence addressed adolescent violence by channeling youths’ energy into civic-sponsored theatrical and processional spectacles.[83] The fourteenth-century Venetian jurist Jacopo Bertaldo wrote that the doge displayed himself to the people in precious and splendid trappings and ornaments so that the people of the city might learn to “shun evil” and “strive for good.”[84] Town officials adopted distinctive garb with which to proclaim their status and authority, as in the red gowns reserved for Exeter councillors and urban officers and the liveries listed in the expense accounts of the town of Bristol.[85] Chambers of Rhetoric charged with mounting theatrical productions spread across cities in the Lowlands, northern France, and northern Germany.[86] In some cities in the Lowlands almost the entire urban community participated in the preparation and staging of civic dramatic festivals, which involved decorating the city itself.[87] Various historians have applied the anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s term theater state to fifteenth-century Burgundy, the Habsburg realm, Florence, and elsewhere, and early modern Venice has been dubbed a “republic of processions.”[88] Not all the civic dramas were happy ones, of course. Executions became more public and spectacular (that is, visually striking).[89] Public penance returned with a vengeance, in Iberia in the form of the rituals of humiliation known as autos-da-fé.

This concern with appearance was not restricted to rulers and municipal leaders: a host of rules and practices invested the outward aspect of common citizens and the urban fabric itself with meaning. The humanist Leonardo Bruni opened his Laudatio Florentinae Urbis (ca. 1430) by extolling the physical beauty of the city, and Leon Battista Alberti regarded the city as an “object of aesthetic contemplation by an educated elite.”[90] Urban processions incorporated all levels of society; tableaux vivants turned average people into extraordinary pictures.[91] Religious confraternities created their own costumes and insignia and commissioned renowned painters to design portable banners with which they might proclaim their particular piety when beyond the confines of their own precincts.[92] Private citizens proudly displayed family, guild, and personal emblems on their clothing, which painters then faithfully replicated in their portraits.[93] Members of political factions in northern as well as Italian cities adopted badges and signs by which they could identify one another.[94] Respectable professions voluntarily adopted distinctive uniforms and markings, and artisan groups commissioned special livery to wear on feast days.[95] As fourteenth- and fifteenth-century newlywed Italian women were publicly paraded to their new conjugal homes, they were accompanied by dowry chests painted with scenes of virtue, marital accord, or civic triumph for well-wishers, gapers, and passersby to see and scrutinize.[96] A Florentine father advised his son to “make himself visible” by strolling the streets “day and night” to parade his qualities and attract the attention of potential patrons.[97] When Michel de Montaigne traveled to Rome in 1580–81, he was struck by the theatrical nature of Mediterranean urban life, writing that Romans “displayed themselves to each other, both from balconies and when strolling,” adding that they seemed to go out walking for no other purpose than to see and be seen.[98] Across urban society there was a consensus that the outward aspect of cities and citizens generally was, and ideally should be, an important indicator of inner worth. Savonarola acknowledged and lambasted precisely this situation and sought to stigmatize it as un-Christian, when during his brief rule he warned Florentines that “the demon of idolatry always seduced citizens into mistaking the form for the substance, into following the external law of the Jews rather than the internal law of Christ.”[99]

Appearance, therefore, was too important to leave to chance, and few municipal authorities were willing to do so. From the late thirteenth century, the behavior, attire, rituals, and emblems of Christian urban residents, both respectable and vilified, were subjected to notice, regulation, and control.[100] Although distinguishing clothing and other visible markings were most notoriously imposed on Jews, most of the laws relating to clothing were aimed at Christians (especially Christian women), not Jews or conversos.[101] Prostitutes, former heretics, and members of various vilified professions were forced to wear many of the same conspicuous and humiliating signs and fashions assigned to Jews.[102] In fifteenth-century Venice, for example, prostitutes, pimps, and Jews were all ordered to wear the color yellow, that they might be clearly visible.[103] In fifteenth-century Italy the wearing of earrings was restricted to Jewish women and prostitutes.[104] A late-fourteenth-century set of rules for Bristol ordered that “no common woman wander about the town without a striped hood.”[105] The Spanish Inquisition required convicted heretics to wear special smocks marked with crosses known as sanbenitos.[106] But it was not just marginal figures that civic government sought to mark and control. The clothing and comportment of mainstream and elite men and women were also regulated. Cities throughout Europe passed sumptuary laws intended to limit excessive or otherwise inappropriate display.[107] Sumptuary laws sought to ensure not only that God, taste, hierarchy, and/or economy were not offended by excessive luxury but also that the outward appearance—of individual persons and of the entire city—projected strong inner morality.[108] In fourteenth-century Flanders and Artois, aldermen withdrew clerical status from anyone who didn’t maintain his tonsure or who wore frivolous clothing (stripes, for example).[109] Manners and gestures, too, were regulated. In many Italian towns proper behavior for weddings, betrothals, and funerals was prescribed and enforced.[110] The city council of sixteenth-century Augsburg came to see itself as a “watchful father” of the community, issuing manifold instructions for the ordering of the sober household.[111]

Nor was this concern with appearance limited to town authorities; it was internalized by a wide swath of urban society, which also awarded great significance to external looks. The residents of fifteenth-century Florence and many other cities expected and encouraged their government to scrutinize comportment and ensure public embodiment of the civic ideal.[112] The biographer Vespasiano da Bisticci made a point of describing in detail what his subjects looked like, as, he said, looks revealed the qualities of their city as much as of themselves.[113] In Barcelona, Jesuit teachers instructed their students how to “walk with visible circumspection,” recommending a moderate pace and condemning close physical contact, laughing and horseplay, or looking too intently at windows and balconies.[114] Comments on prospective brides in family letters show how closely women’s clothes, bodies, and manners were scrutinized and how important were their physical appearance and public deportment.[115]

7. Behind Closed Doors

This concern with appearance and deportment introduced a newly pressing problem: what of those places that were out of sight? As I noted in regard to the artistic practice of peeling away walls, fear of the hidden and concern to reveal what was indoors are detectable everywhere in the late medieval city. Privacy was a source of power, and so also of danger. Whereas moralists and authorities initially had focused their attention on public comportment (most especially in church), from the later fourteenth century we see increased worry about how residents behaved in their own homes, in what we would call private spaces. Sumptuary prosecutions lament the fact that people accosted by public officials for violating the law fled into their own or friends’ houses to avoid giving their names and getting fined.[116] Legislators tried to reduce the conducting of affairs in private. A statute from fifteenth-century Ala, situated between Trent and Verona in northern Italy, insisted that if underage heirs wanted to sell property they had inherited, the transactions had to be done “openly and not secretly [palam et non occulte] … or else they will be presumed to be fraudulent.”[117] The term palam (openly) became a byword for legitimate and trustworthy; deeds done behind closed doors were by that very fact suspect.

Because doors had the potential to shield all kinds of vice, they became major focal points of anxiety and anger: attacks on and defacement of the doors of people targeted for abuse, reproach, or revenge became familiar urban rituals.[118] Horns and phallic images were fixed on the doors of alleged adulterers and cuckolds, giving form to the unseen outrages committed behind them.[119] In Bologna the house of a man accused of resorting to pimping in order to redeem a cloak he had pawned to a Jew was decorated with pornographic drawings, horns (symbolic of lust), and red sand (presumably, like the mud or earth that was also sometimes smeared on doors, a reference to filth and perhaps to blood).[120] Nor could fleeing the city or even dying save one’s domicile from defacement: executed prisoners and escaped criminals had their pictures painted on their own houses.[121] All these acts were designed to achieve precisely what artists effected by the visual dissolving of walls: to make visible the invisible and to nullify the dangerous power of disguise and dissemblance by proclaiming the penetrating power of artistic (or civic) vision.

8. A Culture of Surveillance

The ordering of appearance and behavior both within doors and without was too important to be left to chance. Perhaps the most striking effect of this heightened visual significance was an increase in governmental surveillance, which became one of the most important characteristics of late medieval urban society.[122] The first permanent secret police in Europe was founded in 1378 in Florence.[123] The Venetian Council of Ten employed over three hundred officers to patrol the streets; according to David Nicolas, these patrols “amounted to a secret police.”[124] Other towns relied on existing public officers. In Perugia a statute ordered that a notary be sent to all funerals “ad videndum et scribendum”—to watch for and record infractions of the laws guiding behavior.[125] Notaries’ documents began to include careful physical descriptions of the increasingly numerous slaves, presumably so that they might be captured if they tried to escape, perhaps also to preemptively discourage any escape attempts.[126] Florentine court officers boasted that they were “watching with unceasing diligence” for evidence of sodomy and in 1432 set up a special governmental bureau for the policing of sodomy called the Office of the Night.[127] In Florence the wool guild set up its own spy network to enforce its statutes and regulate the behavior of workers.[128]

But the most common and effective means found to promote the probity of a city was to enlist urban residents to examine, surveil, and police one another.[129] The main method for enforcing sumptuary laws, for example, was secret denunciation by neighbors, servants, and other witnesses.[130] In Perugia boxes were set up around the city into which citizens could anonymously place pieces of paper accusing another of sodomy.[131] Urban statutes insisted that citizens were required to denounce to the authorities any crime of which they were aware and punished the failure to do so.[132] A law code from Bologna dating to 1288 ends with the statute “We order that whoever is inclined, can and ought to accuse and denounce everyone and anyone who acts against the aforesaid ordinances and statutes.”[133] Nuremberg required citizens to inform authorities of anyone who cursed; innkeepers had to inform on the activities of their guests.[134] The preacher Bernardino of Siena warned his hearers that “if anybody had information on any man or woman who practices [witchcraft] and did not report them to the authorities, he or she would be guilty of the same sin.”[135] The list of “six men who have come out of your house” flourished by a man who accused a woman of prostitution demonstrates the nature and uses of “neighborhood watchfulness.”[136] Across Europe, as countless court documents affirm, the main forms of testimony in all criminal cases were eyewitness reports and public opinion; in Italy prosecutions came to be based on fama (reputation) and “unanimous clamour.”[137] Municipalities rewarded people who informed on their neighbors by awarding them a portion of any fines subsequently levied.[138] Confraternities and guilds required their members to oversee the actions and appearances of their fellows and to report any derelictions.[139] Residents were enrolled to spy on their neighbors.[140] Nor could one count on privacy within the bosom of the family: Bernardino of Siena exhorted mothers of daughters to “watch, watch well, watch! Watch over her with her brother, watch over her with her brother-in-law and her cousin; watch over her with however many relatives you have; even with your father you should watch over her.”[141]

In some cities urban space was reorganized to facilitate such mutual scrutiny.[142] Beginning in the thirteenth century Florence supervised the construction of outdoor benches, often in shapes that echoed theatrical seating, helping to turn the city into a stage and residents into a vast and permanent audience.[143] Alberti praised the erection of open porticos, claiming that the presence of elders strolling in the portico would restrain wild youths, making them aware that they were being watched.[144] And Bernardino made his public sermons occasions for mutual scrutiny, telling a Perugian audience, “I will show you many devils. Turn and look at each other, and then you will see the Devil, for you who do the work of the Devil are yourselves devils.”[145] Italian civic processions were organized so that viewers would understand that they too were being viewed.[146] In the Lowlands urban dramas often included characters offering sardonic commentary on the dramatic events, reminding the audience of the artificial nature of the spectacle and also of their susceptibility to similar critical scrutiny.[147]

In sum, in the later medieval city visibility and legibility were all-important: internal spiritual states and moral status were to be externally displayed, and the invisible—whether absent, hidden, or immaterial—was to be visually conjured.[148] Urban law sought to regulate and discipline appearance, and urban residents were required to participate in this “scopic regime” by surveilling themselves and one another.

9. Training the Gaze

Art played a powerful role in this scrutinizing society. Medieval urban laws have been described as creating “pictures of order and disorder, virtue and vice, reasonableness and craziness.”[149] Later medieval religious art quite literally does the same.[150] If all urban residents were to participate in the great endeavor of ordering their city, if they were successfully to observe, judge, and control themselves and others, their gazes as well as their behavior had to be directed and trained. We have seen many tools used in this program: preaching and exhortation, spectacle and pageantry, denunciation and prosecution, humiliation and defacement, even urban planning and architectural design. Images were among the most useful of all tools in promoting proper discernment.[151] Jan van Eyck’s painting The Lamb of God took center stage in the tableau vivant created by the town of Ghent to celebrate the entry of Philip the Good in 1458, drawing and schooling the eye even as its perfectly symmetrical groups of rapt worshippers modeled ideal comportment for the townspeople and proclaimed the town’s devotion to the duke.[152] The Confraternity of the Holy Blood in Bruges expressed its dedication to Christ’s lineage by commissioning a painting of the Tree of Jesse from Petrus Christus and then annually parading it through the city.[153] Sculptures and paintings were placed strategically along town streets, and the reactions of passersby to these images were taken as gauges of piety.[154] Altars and images were erected on battlefields to reorder the moral horizon of conquered territory and hung on city walls to sanctify them and the city they enclosed.[155] Images of saints taught what was beautiful; depictions of sinners, criminals, infidels, and enemies showed what was to be despised.[156] Florentine parents were advised to hang pictures in their homes and teach their children how to look at and pay reverence to them.[157] A fifteenth-century Florentine preacher explicitly credited frescoes with expressing and forwarding civic morality.[158]

Artists were naturally attuned to this urban investment in display. As already noted, they played a central role in its creation—indeed, their livelihoods depended on it. Our images of onlooking (or not-looking) crowds suggest that artists were equally aware—perhaps only intuitively, but more probably, I think, on a conscious level—of the moral and civic importance assigned urban observers. The artistic techniques surveyed in this chapter strongly contribute to the overall project of highlighting and training the moral gaze. Familiar costumes, buildings, and landscapes reminded urban audiences that their own streets and bodies were the objects of scrutiny. Diverse observing crowds underscored the social and public nature of urban life. Direct stares provided startling reminders that the art viewer, too, was watched—by other viewers, by unseen spies, by urban authorities, by overseeing saints, by God. Symbols of iniquity embodied, and so warned against, disorder, vice, and madness; their presence in familiar scenes brought such dangers very close to home. The porousness of painted structures called attention to the possibility of hidden sin and reminded of the presence of hidden watchers.

It is impossible to document the extent to which art viewers registered these artistic techniques or the functions or lessons I have envisioned for them.[159] But we can certainly document widespread awareness of the extent to which the behavior of urban viewers was in turn observed and weighed by others and taken as a measure of the city’s worth. Boy actors in confraternal dramas playfully linked audiences’ spiritual quality to their attentiveness: “Be devout and don’t make any noise!”[160] The late-fourteenth-century Florentine chronicler Naddo di Ser Nepo di Ser Gallo was vaunting the piety of his city when he noted that twenty-five thousand children, men, and women crowded the streets of Florence and gazed from their houses “in devotion” to see the painted image called “Our Lady of Impruneta” pass by.[161] An artistic expression of this concept is Sano di Pietro’s painting of San Bernardino preaching in Siena’s Campo: the impressiveness of the scene derives not from the appearance of the saint himself, who is small, pale, and even insignificant looking, but from the comportment of the crowd, which is preternaturally still, uniform, and attentive.[162] In a letter sent to the Emperor Maximilian in 1519, Jan van Coudenberghe lauded the high spiritual level of the city of Mechelen by describing the comportment of residents during a play of the Seven Sorrows of Mary presented in the town’s marketplace. “And although the play lasted five hours,” he wrote, “no one, not adult or child, fidgeted or was unruly or tried to leave, but rather pitied and grieved … and indeed the citizens compelled the actors to perform the spectacle a second time!”[163] That is, the idealized residents of Mechelen (for I beg leave to be skeptical about the devoutly undivided attention of the children over the course of five-plus hours) knew how to look; their gazes matched those of the group on the left of Albert van Ouwater’s Raising of Lazarus, not the group on the right. And, I would add, pictures of diverse and distracted crowds, looking at one another looking at—or failing to look at—Christ, saints, infidels, and fellow lookers, not only taught art viewers how to look at one another but also and above all, in a process that anticipated the discipline-inducing self-consciousness instilled by Bentham’s panopticon, reminded them that just as Jan van Coudenberghe observed and assessed the play-viewing residents of Mechelen and Naddo observed and assessed the art-viewing residents of Florence, so various other watchers—neighbors, spies, saints, even artists—were looking at and judging them.[164]

10. The Jew in the Crowd

This brings us back, finally, to the Jew in the crowd. Readers may have been wondering for some time now: how do Jews figure into this picture of an obsessively surveilling city that I have been painting?[165] In this way: just as rulers first and most effectively practiced “modern” methods of governance—the imposition of direct royal law, the extraction of direct taxation, the regulation of residence—on Jews,[166] so almost every technique discussed here for ordering external appearance, and teaching subjects how properly to assess it, was also first or at least most effectively tried out on the Jew. The first identifying clothing in European history was (notoriously) imposed on Jews by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215; this provision was reissued by royal authorities in England, France, and Spain in the thirteenth century and then adopted and elaborated by Italian, Netherlandish, Flemish, and German cities in the fourteenth and, especially, fifteenth century.[167] The first medieval physiognomic caricature of an identified individual was a cartoon of a Jew drawn in 1233.[168] The participation of Jews in public processions and festivities was from very early on a carefully choreographed aspect of civic ceremony; their pointed and highly “visible” exclusion from some ceremonies beginning in the later fourteenth century were harbingers of more severe and ostentatious forms of exclusion to come.[169] The most intensely surveilled people in the late medieval world were Jews who had been forcibly converted to Christianity—faced with a set of people whose commitment to the faith must, in light of its origins, be suspect, church authorities were determined to seek out and eradicate any deviance from prescribed ritual and behavior.[170]

Just as Jewish policy anticipated broader urban policies of control, marking, and surveillance, so anxieties attached to Jews crystallized and concentrated broader anxieties. The fear of secrecy and hiddenness was most obsessively expressed in regard to Jews.[171] As we saw in chapter 5, the very fact that Jews’ outward appearances were not distinct generated accusations of duplicity. The near-countless anti-Jewish libels and allegations of ritual crimes hurled against Jews in the later Middle Ages conjured nightmares of secret conspiracies and clandestine councils. We saw in chapter 6 that the “sanctification” of family and household generated gender-related anxieties; it also directed attention toward (and heightened fear of) Jews, whose religious practices were overwhelmingly household-based and who were increasingly construed as “aliens” in the midst of the Christian community. So, for example, in sixteenth-century Modena the Inquisition gained unannounced access to Jews’ homes in order to check on their domestic conduct.[172] [Fig. 12] In fact, the most vivid example I know of an artist using architecture to highlight concern about hidden harm is—not coincidentally—one of the most famous of all anti-Jewish artworks: Paolo Uccello’s 1468 depiction of an alleged host desecration by a Jewish pawnbroker, in which the darkened doorway, windowless chamber, and closed entry underscore a fear of what Jews (and others) do indoors and out of sight.[173] (The miracles and acts of devotion all take place out of doors.)

FIG. 12

Indeed, Jewish secrecy became something of a byword. Jews were feared to possess occult knowledge and to practice occult rites, to wield a secret language, to read secret texts, to communicate through secret channels, and to hide their wealth in secret places.[174] A French royal ordinance of around 1360 ordered Jews to wear the pointed hat “according to the custom of Montpellier … that their secrets might be heard and seen.”[175] The Hebrew—or more typically, pseudo-Hebrew—lettering decorating the garb of many Jewish characters in Passion images evokes these “occult” aspects of Judaism. Of course, in places like fifteenth-century Iberia, where forced conversions created the phenomenon of the crypto-Jew, or sixteenth-century Italy, where Jews were herded into locked and walled quarters, fear of Jewish secrecy and hypocrisy was intensified by Christians’ own actions and policies. The walls within which Jews were enclosed, beginning with the establishment of the first Jewish ghetto in Venice in 1516, were not just the boundaries to their area of residence. They were explicit expressions of anxiety about unseen deeds: the order establishing the ghetto insisted that its high gates be locked at sunset to prevent the Jews from “going around all night” and presumably committing outrages under the cover of darkness.[176] By the later Middle Ages, then, the most tightly regulated and readily identifiable, but paradoxically most feared and suspected, urban residents in many parts of Europe were Jews. Likewise, the artistic characters endowed with the largest and most vivid assembly of iconographic identifiers were Jews. Christians knew what Jews looked like—or what they were supposed to look like—and were determined to keep watch over them. And to watch themselves keeping watch: the sermons that some Italian and Spanish authorities forced Jews to listen to and the humiliating public rituals they were forced to undergo (such as being ritually stoned by an orchestrated mob as part of Holy Week celebrations) were less conversionary tools than theatrical performances through which the city’s Christian character was displayed to spectating Christians.[177]

This long history of fearing, enforcing, and then policing Jewish appearances explains why, when authorities sought more intensively to regulate Christian appearances, Jews provided visual cues and served as visual touchstones.[178] In both art and life Christian renegades were marked with Jewish signs. As we have seen, the clothing imposed on prostitutes, heretics, and other notorious characters, licit and illicit (such as yellow-colored veils, earrings, striped hoods or hose, etc.), was modeled on clothing worn by or at least associated with Jewish women and men. Bernardino of Siena likened the insignia adopted by political factions to the badges imposed on Jews.[179] The sumptuary laws regulating behavior at funerals banned the tearing of beards, a practice that was long associated with heroic grief but that in Christian art, and so in the Christian visual imagination, was a gesture particularly associated with Jews.[180] Hangmen were required to wear pointed headgear similar to the pointed hats of Jews.[181] Particularly nefarious criminals were marked as Jews.[182] In 1377 the painting of a treacherous condottiero displayed on the Bargello in Florence depicted him wearing a large miter: Samuel Edgerton calls this a foolscap, but it is more familiar to art historians (and probably to medieval viewers) as a “Jew’s hat.”[183] A man accused of treachery in Avignon in 1401 was “mitered” before he was paraded through town on horseback, and in Florence in 1472 a convicted sodomite was likewise made to wear a “miter” as he was marched through the streets.[184] A woman charged with witchcraft in Todi in 1428 was led through town “on a donkey with a paper hat on her head”; one strongly suspects that the hat was pointed.[185] Leonardo da Vinci records in a contemporary drawing that Bernardo di Bandino Baroncelli, the attempted assassin of Lorenzo de’ Medici, was hanged in the clothes he had worn in Constantinople in order to affiliate his treason with infidelity. [Fig. 13] Although Baroncelli’s wardrobe came from a Muslim land, to late medieval viewers the skull cap, hooked nose, and long robe would have appeared equally Jewish, and in fact Lorenzo appended to a different painting of the assassin the inscription “I am Bernardo Bandini, a new Judas.”[186]

FIG. 13

At least one late medieval Christian explicitly articulated how central was the sight of the Jew to his city. In April 1487 a resident of Carpentras, Antonio Arboris, gave a public speech exhorting the pope (the lord of the region) to reverse an order issued earlier that year confining the Jews to a chained-off area on the outskirts of town. He argued that, far from being pushed out of sight, the Jews of Carpentras should mingle among Christians and even accompany them to the Good Friday feast. His reason? He desired that Jews be made visible in the heart of the city so that the “memories of [and emotions spurred by] the Passion of the Redeemer should be sharpened.”[187] Whereas for 250 years it had been held essential to Christian honor for the Jews to be hidden during Holy Week festivities, here, at the end of the Middle Ages, for at least one man, the holiest week of the year was incomplete without the sight of the Jews.[188]

FIG. 14

This, then, helps explain the role played by the Jew in the painted crowd. If urban residents were to be taught to observe and judge themselves and their neighbors, they needed a standard by which to measure virtue and vice. And they needed regularly to be reminded of the constant process of looking, judging, and being judged that civic life entailed. Including flamboyantly clad Jews and humbly devout saints among the throngs of onlookers in painted tableaux provided the two extreme poles of that standard of measure. But situating such sinners and saints among diverse and ambiguous crowds offers a more pointed lesson, reminding the viewer that such extremes are the exception rather than the rule. And these onlookers’ own often ambiguous gazes, appearances, attitudes, and reactions underscored the wavering and uncertain nature of most human beings. If the hard-hearted and exotically attired Jewish figures on the right of Albert van Ouwater’s Raising of Lazarus represent the far end of a spectrum of vision, sin, and faith, then the peering figures in the center, some of whose garb and gazes echo those of the iniquitous Judeans and one of whom stares directly out toward the viewer, constitute vivid reminders that marking, segregating, and expelling Jews is not tantamount to marking, segregating, and expelling sin. [Fig. 14] This truth is vividly conveyed in the Killing of the Unicorn tapestry of around 1500, a thinly veiled allegory of the Crucifixion of Christ. The rough-faced, grimacing, presumably Jewish killer in striped hose shown in profile view in the upper left clearly embodies evil. But other, presumably non-Jewish figures display many of the same attributes: the purse-lipped woman with the jeweled veil whose profile exactly echoes that of the Christ killer, the heavy-lidded tower watcher whose glance mimics that of the woman who betrayed the unicorn in the previous tapestry, and the scepter-bearing, expressionless lord with the glazed eyes in the center, whose striped hose are identical to those of the Christ killer … all observed by the semiobscured but oddly outsized faces gazing from the tower. Such mixed and peering crowds warn viewers that they must be ever vigilant for the sinners in their midst—and for the evil in their own habits and their hearts. And that their neighbors, like their patron saints and ruling authorities, surely will be watching too.

*   *   *

Patricia Rubin has written that quattrocento Italian paintings “worked to fashion the ideal viewer through a process of invitation and identification.”[189] To that I would add that “Jewish” figures in religious paintings worked on the imperfect (i.e., human) viewer by creating a parallel process of recognition and rejection. For four centuries, Jews had helped train the Christian gaze. By looking at Jews in art, Christians had successively learned to value matter, then to look beyond the material world, to recognize sin, to pity suffering, to question outer appearance, to suspect deceit. At the dusk of the Middle Ages and the dawn of modernity, they now helped inculcate in late medieval Christians a heightened self-consciousness, a sharpened sense of their own visibility. Even as they became such significant actors in Christian art, however, Jews had become expendable in Christian life: in the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in city after city across western Europe, living Jews were either concealed behind ghetto walls or forcibly expelled.[190] But presumably it mattered little that they could no longer be seen in life, for they could always be seen, and Christians could be seen to see them, in art.[191]

CONCLUSION

It is all too easy to read the path I have traced in this book—from the introduction of a Jewish iconography, to the proliferation of Hebrew and prophetic imagery, through the elaboration of inescapably anti-Jewish visual devices—as a steady progression from positive to neutral to negative portrayals of Jews, spurred by and reflecting growing intolerance in high medieval Christendom. This is far too simple a narrative. We can draw no straight line from young to old, fair to ugly, or good to bad in the medieval representation of the Jew. There are always exceptions, reverses, and even contradictions, and these, too, are part of the tale: an observer at the end of the Middle Ages looking for a portrait of Hebrew wisdom and dignity would have no trouble finding one. I have repeatedly suggested that rather than view depictions of Jews simply through the lens of Jewish-Christian relations, much less of anti-Judaism, we need to situate the medieval artworks examined here within the devotional, intellectual, political, and even legal cultures of medieval Christendom. And that the primary realm in which these images must be understood is, simply, the realm of religious imagery. At almost no point, I believe, did medieval Christian clerics or artists consciously set out to create an anti-Jewish visual repertoire, much less to inspire anti-Jewish violence or retribution. Rather, when they needed to think about how to see and understand the material world, they turned to a figure that had long stood for materialism and fleshly ritual. Artworks that are often read as reflecting a heightened and even “racialized” anti-Judaism are, in the first instance, a byproduct of Christian thinking about whether and how the visible world could be used to learn about and come closer to an invisible God.

But the meaning and power of an artwork does not end with its original inspiration. The images we have seen appeared on material objects and in physical monuments made in and for a complex society. Though created to serve specific purposes, they were viewed, internalized, reimagined, and reused by a dynamic public. This process eventually affected broader Christian ideas, including perceptions of actual Jews, and influenced the subsequent history of Jewish-Christian relations: many of the representational changes anticipate later attitudes and restrictions. Distinguishing clothing appeared on Jews in art many decades before it was finally imposed in law. The assignment of specific features to the hostile Jew preceded and may well have encouraged the development of a science of physiognomy. The stereotyping in art of Jewish men and, eventually, Jewish women paved the way for the visual stigmatization of another despised group—witches.[1] And by the end of the Middle Ages the punishing judicial fire depicted on the Stavelot Triptych became all too real. These pictures, then, became part of the history of the medieval West—they acted upon their makers and viewers as much as, or perhaps more than, they reflected preexisting ideas of their makers and viewers.[2] The irony, or perhaps tragedy, of this story is that images made specifically to condemn imperfect sight were themselves misunderstood by their viewers. Although the main goal of Christian art was to help sharpen Christians’ moral perception and cleanse Christians of sin, this, of course, was never fully achieved. Instead, the gradual emergence of the Jew as sign and witness in medieval Christian art paralleled—even helped cause—the gradual disappearance of the Jew as sign and witness from the medieval Christian West.

Does recovering the largely internal theological and pastoral concerns underlying images that, intentionally or not, came to be seen as indicting Jews somehow mitigate their damaging effects? Obviously not. But that does not mean that the task is not worth doing. Like any other scholar, I cling tenaciously to the belief that knowledge leads to understanding. The processes that led to the formation of anti-Jewish stereotypes, as of most forms of visual ethnic categorization, are extremely complex. It is not good enough to dismiss the troubling images by saying “they were always like that.” They have not always been like that. So if this journey through the history of the medieval representation of the Jew will do little to absolve medieval Christendom of the charge of anti-Semitism, perhaps it will help lay to rest a few other persistent idées fixes—that anti-Semitism, “the longest hatred,” was somehow static and unchanging, that religious or ethnic hatred is inevitable, and that pictures merely reflect the world around them. None of these assertions is true. Neighborliness can turn to toleration, toleration to suspicion, and suspicion to hatred … or, in the right circumstances and with a little luck, suspicion and hatred can even transform back into toleration or even friendship again. And pictures have a powerful role to play in that process. Whenever we create images of a stranger, alien, foreigner, or even the unknown person across the street, we should bear in mind that we are also creating an image of ourselves. Let us hope that we will like what we see when we look in that mirror.

ABBREVIATIONS

AASS

Acta Sanctorum

BL

British Library

BN

Bibliothèque Nationale

CCCM

Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis

CCSL

Corpus Christianorum Series Latina

CSEL

Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum

EJ

Encyclopedia Judaica

MGH

Monumenta Germaniae Historica

ÖNB

Österreichische Nationalbibliothek

PL

Patrologia Latina

RTAM

Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thought I could write this book in four years; it has taken nine. I can hardly regret the length of the process, though. It has given me the chance to travel to beautiful places, see stunning works of art, and, most important of all, benefit from the advice, help, and generosity of many people.

I am very grateful to the friends and colleagues who read and commented on chapter drafts, heard and responded to talks, answered questions, provided information, or otherwise enriched this work and my professional life with their knowledge and wisdom, especially David Nirenberg, Miri Rubin, Bob Stacey, Magda Teter, Gary Marker, Joel Rosenthal, Gene Lebovics, Herb Kessler, Jeffrey Hamburger, Steven Kruger, Nick Vincent, David Stern, Daniel Smail, Eva Frojmovic, Jeremy Cohen, Simcha Goldin, Effie Shoham Steiner, Elisheva Baumgarten, Gervase Rossner, Rachel Furst, Nina Caputo, Irven Resnick, Camille Serchuk, Sigrid Goldiner, Nancy Wu, Anne-Marie Boucher, Adam Cohen, Linda Safran, Gerhard Lutz, Olga Kosheleva, Carmen Caballero Navas, Esperanza Alfonso, Rebecca Winer, and Ken Stow.

I first conceived of the project while a visiting researcher at the Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center of Tel Aviv University; I am grateful to Jeremy Cohen for hosting me and inviting me to speak. The research was begun during a fellowship year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; I thank the Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters, and especially Peter Barnett, Chuck Little, Barbara Boehm, and Tim Husband for their help and hospitality. A year at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library offered the ideal setting for reading, thinking, and writing; I deeply value the conversation and collegiality furnished by my fellow Fellows and by Jean Strouse and Marie d’Origny. I completed the book while a visiting fellow at Oxford University; I cannot imagine a more magical academic home, or more stimulating colleagues than the faculty of the Oriental Institute and the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, the members of the “Word of a Jew” Seminar, and the Oxford medievalist community. I likewise thank the Howard Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities for research funding.

My work would not have been possible without the assistance of librarians and curators at libraries and museums too numerous to name. I especially thank the staffs of the New York Public Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the Louvre, the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, the Stony Brook University Interlibrary Loan Department, and the Seminary of the Diocese of Tournai.

Sara Bershtel is the most careful and perceptive editor one could hope for; this book is immeasurably better for her guidance. I am likewise lucky to have benefited from Connor Guy’s attentive reading and wise editorial suggestions, while his efficiency eased the publication process during the complicated final stages. Roslyn Schloss’s copyediting was thoughtful and thorough. It is impossible to quantify the aid provided by Julia Monk. Writing would be but a dim pleasure without the light she brings into my life every day. (She also provided most welcome help with the Bibliography.)

It is common to lament the state of higher education. I am sure that many of the complaints are amply justified. But in my sixteen years at Stony Brook University, and in spite of many challenges and some frustrations, I have consistently felt stimulated, encouraged, and enlightened by my colleagues and students. It is a privilege to work with them.

Parts of ch. 2 previously appeared as “Unfeigned Witness: Jews, Matter, and Vision in Twelfth-Century Christian Art,” Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism, ed. Herbert L. Kessler and David Nirenberg (Philadelphia and Oxford: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), pp. 45–73. Parts of ch. 5 previously appeared as “The Jew’s Face: Vision, Knowledge, and Identity in Medieval Anti-Jewish Caricature,” in Late Medieval Jewish Identities: Iberia and Beyond, ed. Carmen Caballero-Navas and Esperanza Alfonso (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 259–87. Parts of ch. 6 previously appeared as “Where are the Jewish Women? On the Non-Iconography of the Jewess in the Cantigas de Santa Maria,” Jewish History 22 (2008): 139–77. I am grateful to the editors and publishers of those publications for permission to reprint.

INDEX

The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

Aaron the Jew

Abdias (prophet Obadiah)

Abelard, Peter

Abraham, San Zeno bronze doors and

Abraham ben Nathan of Lunel

Abulafia, Anna

Adémar of Chabannes

adulterers

Agobard of Lyons

Alain De Lille

Alberti, Leon Battista

Albertus Magnus

Alexander II (Pope)

alfaquin

Alfonso VIII (king of Castile)

Alfonso X (king of Castile)

Altarpiece of Saint Vincent (Gonçalves)

Altarpiece of the Blessed Sacrament (Memling)

ambiguity, visual

Andrea da Firenze

Andreas Capellanus

Anna (prophetess)

Anne, Saint, cult of

Annunciation altarpiece (Campin)

Annunciation to Zacharias (Ghirlandaio)

Anselm of Canterbury (archbishop)

Antichrist

as embodiment of deceit, duplicity, and disguise

three-faced Jew and

anti-Jewish art, late medieval

Apologia ad Guillelmum Abbatem (Bernard of Clairvaux)

apostles. See also specific apostles

apples

Aquinas, Thomas

Arabian kings

Arboris, Antonio

archaizing appearances

Aristotle

Arma Christi

arrogance

Artois

Assyrian reliefs

astrologers

attentiveness

audience, interpretation and

Augsburg Cathedral

Augustine of Hippo

on Jewish scriptures

on Jews’ enmity

on Judgment of Solomon

on reason Jews were allowed to remain in Christendom

sight, witness and

autos-da-fé

avarice

and Antichrist

Chartres cathedral and

representations of

symbols of

Avegaye

Bacon, Roger

badges. See also Jewish badge

Baegert, Derick

Baldwin of Canterbury (archbishop)

Baldwin of Trier (archbishop)

Balfour Ciborium

The Ballad of Sir Hugh

Bandino Baroncelli, Bernardo di

baptism

Baptism of Christ fresco (Perugino)

Barcelona, Spain

barefootedness

Baroncelli, Bernardo di Bandino

Bavarian Calvary

beards

beauty

Beghards

Beguines

benches

Bernardino of Siena

Bernardo di Bandino Baroncelli

Bernard of Clairvaux

emotionalism and

on Judgment of Solomon

on ostentatiousness in religious art

on testimonial value of Jews

Bernward of Hildesheim

focus on vulnerable and human Christ by

hope for final face-to-face vision of God and

intimate image of crucified Christ by

power, prosperity and

Second Gospel Book of

Bertaldo, Jacopo

bestiality

Bestul, Thomas

betrayal of Judas

betrothals

Bible citations

Genesis 32:20

Exodus 33:20

Leviticus 21:1

Numbers 21:4–9

Deuteronomy 21:23

1 Kings (Vulgate)

3:16–22

3:28

Job

4–11

13:16

13:24

Psalms (Vulgate)

21:18

52:1

68:1

68:21–23

71:10–11

Canticles

1:1

2:5

Isaiah

53:2

63:1–6

Baruch (Vulgate) 3:38

Zachariah 2:8

Jeremiah

41:5

48:37

Matthew

3:7

25:27

Mark 1:4–5

Luke

15:11–32

22:4–5

24:13–35

John

1:14

1:17

1:19

3:14

5:46

6:32

8:5

19:33–36

1 Corinthians

1:21–23

13:12

15:3–8

2 Corinthians

4:6

5:6–7

Galatians

3:13

3:28

Bibles moralisées

birds

Birth of the Baptist (Ghirlandaio)

Birth of the Virgin (Ghirlandaio)

blacksmith’s wife

blankness

blindness. See also sight

Chartres cathedral and

eyeglasses and

inability to interpret and understand scripture and

Jewish hat and

naturalizing symbols of

in Raising of Lazarus painting

suffering of women and

uses of

Wecelin-Henry debate and

blood

of Christ

flowing from Eucharist

Jewish flux of

Jews linked to

Blumenkranz, Bernhard

Bodo

body, human, new regard for

Bologna

Bonne of Luxembourg prayer book

Book of Miracles (Thomas of Cantimpré)

Bourges, France

Bouts, Dieric

braids

Brancacci Chapel (Florence)

brazen serpent, raising of

Bremen Psalms initial. See Psalm 68 (Vulgate)

Brigitte of Sweden

Brunetta

Bruni, Leonardo

Burgundy, France

Burlington Magazine

Bynum, Caroline

bystanders. See crowds, witnessing; witnesses

Byzantine Empire

Cain

calendar pages in prayer books

Campin, Robert

candles

cannibalism

canon 68 of Fourth Lateran Council

Cantigas de Santa Maria

backwards boy (Cantiga 108)

Jewish caricature in

Jewish glassmaker (Cantiga 4)

Jewish women in

Marisalta (Cantiga 107)

overview of

penance, forgiveness and

pregnant Jewess (Cantiga 89)

transformation and

unhappy families in

Capellanus, Andreas

capes

caricature, physiognomic. See also Bonne of Luxembourg prayer book

in 1493 print of ritual murder of Simon of Trent

development of

earliest

fool’s many faces and

in late medieval anti-Jewish art

meaning and implications of emphasis on

rage and

realism in

three-faced Jew and

of women

carnality

Cantigas de Santa Maria manuscript and

fool and

of Jews

naturalizing symbols of

Old Law vs. New and

women and

Carpentras

Carthusians

cartoons

Casimir the Great (king of Poland)

caskets. See reliquary caskets

Cathedral of Chartres. See Chartres

cats

Cayphas

celibacy

Celtic artistic traditions

ceremony

Chaldeans

chalices

Chambers of Rhetoric

change, women and

Chartres

Good Samaritan parable and

Legend of Saint Nicholas and

lintel of

as mirror of society at time

missed opportunities for anti-Jewish imagery in

new villains in

Old Testament figures in

overview of

Parable of the Prodigal Son and

Portal of the Martyrs

Portal of Wisdom

revered forerunners figures in

Royal Portal of west facade of

Tree of Jesse window of

Chaucer, Geoffrey

children, ritual murders of

choreography

Christ. See also Crucifixion

circumcision of

humility of

interest in humanity of

looking at viewer by

in Man of Sorrows image

Second Coming of

in Winchester Psalter

women and

Christ among the Doctors fresco (Pinturricchio)

Christ Carrying the Cross (Baegert)

Christ Carrying the Cross (The Road to Calvary) (Andrea da Firenze), fresco of

Christopher, Saint

Christ’s Passion

Christus, Petrus

church decoration, Jewishness of

circumcision

Cistercians

cities

concern with appearance and

culture of surveillance and

expansion of

location of art in

privacy and

in year 1000

City of God (Augustine of Hippo)

Claudius of Turin

“Clerk’s Tale” (Chaucer)

clothing, identifying. See also earrings; hats

Chartres cathedral and

of Christians

colors of

earliest

Lateran decree and

of medieval Jews

on Royal Portal of west facade of Chartres cathedral

similarities in

for town officials and families

for women

cognition, sensation vs.

Cohen, Adam

coins

Chartres cathedral and

as representation of avarice and greed

significance of

Cologne

colors

Commentary on the Psalms (Lombard)

commercial expansion

commercialism

communities

Jewish, in year 1000

in thirteenth-century Europe

in twelfth-century Europe

compassion, emphasis on

conformity, head coverings and

Constantinople

contemporary Jewish behavior and appearance

context, importance of

contracts, written

Contra Faustum (Augustine of Hippo)

control, transcendence vs.

conversion and converts

in cantiga 89 of Cantigas de Santa Maria

forced

women and

courtly life, three-faced Jew and

cribs

criminals

crosses, increasing importance of

crowds, situating of Jews among large and diverse

crowds, witnessing

contemporary cities and

increasing numbers of onlookers

Jews in

role of Jews in

training the gaze and

watching viewer and

crowns

crows

crucifixes

Bernward of Hildesheim and

Henry (cleric) and

increasing importance of

increasing prominence of images of

Saint-Denis medallion and

that bled when mocked and struck by Jews

Crucifixion

changing appearance of

Commentary on the Psalms image and

earliest depictions of Jews as responsible for

Ekbert’s treatise and

Jewish contempt for

Jewish testimony on

Killing of the Unicorn tapestry and

nails for

proof of historicity of

serpent as figure for

in Stammheim Missal

Westphalia-north Rhine region reliquary casket and

Crusaders

Crusades

cuckolds

cudgel wielder

cult of Saint Anne

cult of Saint Joseph

cult of the Virgin

curiosity

cursing

daily life, in year 1000

Daniel (prophet)

Daret, Jacques

darkness, of hair

David (prophet)

Da Vinci, Leonardo

Death, allegorical figure of

deformed boy

demons

Chartres cathedral and

as symbol of affiliation with devil

three-faced Jew and

women and

despair, Chartres cathedral and

Deutz, Abbey of

devil

nose of

representation of affiliation with

dialectic

disciples

distractedness

divinity, attributes or recognition of

Doge of Venice

dogs

doors

dowry chests

dragons

draperies, prophets and

Duomo (Florence)

dwarves sitting on shoulders of giants

Dynes, Wayne

earrings

earthquakes

Easternness

Ecce Homo (Massys)

Ecclesia. See also Synagoga

economic developments

Edgerton, Samuel

education

Edward I (king of England)

Egyptian traders

Eilbertus

Ekbert of Schönau

emblems

Emmaus

emotionalism

enamel-making

enemies

of Christ

of the crucifix

England

expulsion of Jews from

Epistle to the Hebrews

esoteric knowledge

Esther (queen)

Estherke

ethnicity

Eucharist

Eve

Everyman

evidence, rules of

evil

exchequer of the Jews

executioners

executions

exegesis

exotic royalty, pointed hats and

extravagance

eyeglasses

eyes, of flesh vs. of heart

facial features and expressions. See also caricature, physiognomic

association with heresy and avarice and

Chartres cathedral and

contorted and hostile

in twelfth-century art

fama

families

family trees

fasting, women and

fatted calf

femmes fatales

festivals

“ficta non esse prophetica dicta”

fig, giving the

figural images, increase in

fines

fire, Stavelot Triptych and

First Crusade

Flanders

Florence

foods

fools

forgiveness

fornication

Fourth Lateran Council. See also Lateran decree

France

expulsion of Jews from

frescoes. See also specific frescoes

frogs

Froment, Nicolas

Fuchs, Eduard

Funeral of Saint Stephen (Lippi)

funerals

Gaston, Robert

gazes

backwards

importance of direction of

training of, surveillance and

gazing Jews

crowds and

lethal

loveless

three guises of

Geertgen tot Sint Jans

Geertz, Clifford

Gentiles, on Westphalia-north Rhine region reliquary casket

Geoffrey of Auxerre

German Jew. See Aaron the Jew

Gershom of Mainz (rabbi)

gestures

ghettos

Ghirlandaio, Domenico

giants, dwarves sitting on shoulders of

giving the fig

glassmaker, tales of

glory, superficial conception of

goatees

Godehard of Hildesheim, Saint

Goderanus

Godfrey of Bouillon

God Incarnate, as visible being

Golden Calf, worshippers of

Gonçalves, Nuno

Good Samaritan

Gospel of John

Gospel of Luke

Gospel of Mark

Gospel of Matthew

Gothic style

government

Great Canterbury Psalter

greed. See also avarice

Gregory I the Great (pope)

Gregory VII (pope)

grief, veiled hands and

grimacing

grotesque

Gruneta. See Brunetta

Guigo of Chartreuse

guilds

Guillaume de Deguileville

Habsburg realm

hair. See also darkness, of hair

braiding of

in fresco of Christ Carrying the Cross

Jewish women and

haloes

ham

hangmen

Harding, Stephen

Hartwig I (archbishop)

hats

Chartres cathedral and

criminals and

in fresco of Christ Carrying the Cross

in historiography

as Jewish sign

Goderanus and

imposed on Jews by church councils

prophets and

in Second Gospel Book of Bishop Bernward of Hidlesheim

Stavelot and Lobbes Bibles and

Winchester Psalter and

worn by medieval Jews

head coverings. See also hats; miters; Phrygian caps

in Jewish law

of Jewish women

of Magi

of medieval Jews

of pilgrims and travelers

pointed, varieties of

of urban Christians

healing

Hebraica Veritas

Hebrew language

Helena (empress)

hemorrhoids

Henry (Catholic cleric)

Henry II (emperor)

Henry III (king of England)

Henry IV (emperor)

Henry VII (emperor)

heresy

heretics

Heribert of Cologne

birth of

reliquary shrine of

Rupert’s biography of

heritage, claiming of

Herman. See Judah/Herman

hermeneutical Jews

Herod

Hevilath

Hildesheim. See also Bernward of Hildesheim

Hippo, Augustine of. See Augustine of Hippo

A History of Jewish Costume (Rubens)

Hitchcock, Alfred

Holkham Bible

Holy Trinity fresco (Masaccio)

horned cap. See hats, pileum

horns

Hosea (prophet)

host desecration

Hours of Catherine of Cleves (Master of Catherine of Cleves)

households

housewives, good

Hughes, Diane Owen

Hugo, Count of Worms

humanity of Christ

humiliation

humility

of Christ

in worship

hypocrisy

Iberia. See also Spain

icon worship

idolatry

idols

Idung of Prüfening

inattention. See distractedness

Innocent III (Pope)

Inquisition

insipiens. See fools

intellectus

irrationality

Isaac of Norwich

Isaiah (prophet)

Isidore of Seville

Israelites

Jacob (prophet)

Jacob Tam (rabbi)

Janus

Jan van Coudenberghe

Jeremiah (prophet)

Jerusalem

Jesse trees

Jesus. See also Christ

jewels

Jewesses. See also women

as artistic sign

unmarked in high Gothic art

in Cantigas de Santa Maria

in later medieval art

Jewess of Toledo

Jewish badge

Jewish hat. See hats

The Jew’s Daughter

Joan (queen of Naples)

Job

Joel (prophet)

John, Gospel of. See Gospel of John

John, Saint (apostle)

John Chrysostom

John the Baptist, Saint

John the Deacon

Jolly, Penny Howell

Jonah (prophet)

Joseph, Saint

Joseph of Arimathea

Joseph the Patriarch

Joseph Tob-Elem (rabbi)

Josephus

Judah/Herman

emphasis on compassion and emotion and

crucified Christ and

relationships between Jews and Christians and

revulsion and

traditional attributes of divinity and

walking into Christian church for first time

Judas

Judas Cyriacus

Judgment of Solomon

Judith

Kalonymus

Kemp, Wolfgang

Killing of the Unicorn tapestry

knives (sacrificial)

circumcision of Christ and

as representation of Jewish error and unbelief

Synagoga and

Knox, John

Kruger, Steven

kumta (cap)

Lambeth Palace Bible

The Lamb of God (van Eyck)

lance bearer

Lang, Andrew

The Last Supper

Lateran decree

Laudatio Florentinae Urbis (Bruni)

Lazarus. See also Raising of Lazarus painting

leftward gazing

Legenda Aurea (Jacobus de Voragine)

Leonardo da Vinci

lettering, pseudo-Hebrew

Life and Miracles of Saint William of Norwich (Thomas of Monmouth)

Lippi, Filippo

literacy

literalism

Little Book of Physiognomy (De Physiognomia libellus)

Lobbes, Abbey of

Lobbes Bible

Loggias

Lombard, Peter

Lombard commentary initial. See Commentary on the Psalms (Lombard)

Longinus. See also lance bearer

Lorenzetti, Ambrogio

Lorenzo de’ Medici

Lorraine. See also Lotharingia

Lothair (emperor)

Lotharingia. See also Lorraine

Lowlandish psalter

Luke, Gospel of. See Gospel of Luke

Maccabees

Magdalene, Mary

Magdeburg

Magi

magicians

Malchus

Man of Sorrows biblical verse

Man of Sorrows image

manuscripts

Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett ms. 78 A 2 (Reichenau Evangelistary)

Bremen, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek ms. a. 244 (Lombard, Commentary on Psalms)

Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale ms. 10178 (Pèlerinage de Jesu Crist)

Durham, Dean and Chapter Library ms. A.II.l (Bible of Bishop Hugh le Puiset)

Hildesheim, Dommuseum ms. 18 (Second Gospel Book of Bernward)

Koblenz, Landeshauptarchiv Balduineum I, Best 1 C, Nr.1 (Codex Trevirensis)

Leiden, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit ms. Voss Latin Q 79 (Aratea)

London

British Library

Add. ms. 10546 (Moutiers-Grandval Bible)

Add. ms. 28106 (Stavelot Bible)

Add. ms. 47680 (Holkham Bible)

Cotton Nero C iv (Winchester Psalter)

Harley 957 (Narratio Legendaria)

Royal 1 C II (Bible)

Royal 2 B. VII (Queen Mary Psalter)

Stowe 17 (Maastricht Psalter)

Lambeth Palace ms. 3 (Lambeth Palace Bible)

Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum ms. 64 (Stammheim Missal)

Madrid, El Escorial, Biblioteca de San Lorenzo el Real ms. T.I.1 (Cantigas de Santa Maria)

Moscow, Russian State Archives of Old Acts Fonds 1607, Inv. 1, no. 23 (Moscow Gospels)

Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek

clm 4453 (Evangeliary of Otto III)

clm. 13601 (Uta Codex)

New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cloisters Collection 69.86 (Psalter and Hours of Bonne of Luxembourg)

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale

fr. 403 (Paris Apocalypse)

lat. 8846 (Great Canterbury Psalter)

lat. 18014 (Petites Heures de Jean de Berry)

Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek HB 410 (Zwiefalten Orosius)

Tournai, Bibliothèque du seminaire diocésain ms. 1 (Lobbes Bible)

Vienna, ÖNB cod. 2554 (Bible moralisée)

Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek cod. Guelph 105, noviss. (Gospel of Henry the Lion)

Marchand, Eckart

Marian tales. See also Cantigas de Santa Maria

Mark, Gospel of. See Gospel of Mark

Martyrdom of Saint Mitre (Froment)

martyrs. See also Portal of the Martyrs

Mary, Queen of Scots

Masaccio

masks, hypocrisy and

Massys, Quentin

materialism

Matthew, Gospel of. See Gospel of Matthew

Maximilian (emperor)

Mayr-Harting, Henry

Mechelen

Meditation (anonymous Cistercian or Carthusian)

Meditations on the Life of Christ (Pseudo-Bonaventura)

Meir of Rothenberg (rabbi)

Meiss, Millard

melancholy

Melchisedek

Memling, Hans

Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare)

merchants

Merlin

Milan (Ludovico Sforza, Duke of)

miracles

Rupert of Deutz on

Simon of Trent and

Miracles de Notre-Dame de Chartres

miracle tales. See also Marian tales, Cantigas d Santa Maria

mirrors, rationale for selecting title and

miters

Modena

Moissac, Abbey of

monarchs, in Chartres cathedral. See also specific monarchs

monastic crisis of prosperity

moneybags

money changers

moneylending. See also usury

Montaigne, Michel de

moon

Moses

Mosse Mokke

murders, ritual, accusations of

Muslims

Naddo di Ser Nepo di Ser Gallo

nails

narrative genres, and new signs

Nativity (Daret)

Nativity

naturalism

neighborhood watchfulness

Nerius, Philip

New Law

New Testament

Nicholas, Saint

Nicodemus

Nicolas, David

noses

notaries

observers, observation of

Office for the Dead

Office of the Night

Officium Peregrinorium (play)

Old Law

women and

Old Testament

On painting (Alberti)

On the Divine Offices (Rupert of Deutz)

ornaments, in the Temple

“Otherness”

Otto I (emperor)

Otto III (emperor)

Ottonians

“Our Lady of Impruneta” image

paganism

pageantry

palam

Parable of the Prodigal Son

Paris, Matthew

Paris Apocalypse manuscript

Paris Psalter

Passion narratives

Passover

Paul, Saint

Pèlerinage de Jésus-Crist (Guillaume de Deguileville), women in

penance

Persia

perspective, linear

Perugino, Piero

Peter, Saint

Peer Abelard

Peter Damian

Peter Lombard

Peter Martyr, Saint

Peter the Venerable

Philip the Good

philosophy, association of Jews with

Phrygian caps

physiognomy. See also caricature, physiognomic

pietists, Jewish

piety, art as marker of

Pilate

pileum. See also hats

pilgrim, Christ as

pilgrimage

pimps

Pinturricchio

police, secret

Pope-Hennessy, John

popes. See also specific popes

Poppo of Stavelot

Portal of the Martyrs (Chartres)

portraiture

poverty, return to monastic emphasis on

preaching

Premonstratensian canons

Presentation in the Temple (anonymous)

pride

priestly authority, pointed hats and

priests

“Prioress’s Tale” (Chaucer)

privacy

Prodigal Son. See Parable of the Prodigal Son

proof, standards of. See also evidence, rules of

property sales

prophesies

prophets. See also specific prophets

on altar from Cologne

in Chartres cathedral

in late medieval anti-Jewish art

on reliquary shrine of Heribert

standardizing appearance of

Winchester Psalter and

women

prostitutes

prostitution

Protoevangelium of James

Psalm 52 (Vulgate)

Psalm 68 (Vulgate)

Pseudo-Augustine

public, private vs.

Purification and Presentation panel (Daret)

Purification of the Virgin (Lorenzetti)

Queen Mary Psalter

Quodvultdeus “Sermon against the Jews”

Raising of Lazarus (van Ouwater)

Raising of the Son of Theophilus (Masaccio)

Raphael

Rashi

Ravenna

ravens

realism

recluses

red

Regensburg Bible

relic

reliquaries

Rembrandt

renegades

reputation

Ringelheim

ritual murders, See murders, ritual, accusations of

Road to Calvary (Andrea da Firenze)

Road to Emmaus

Robert de Liège. See Rupert of Deutz

Roman law

Rome

Rothschild Canticles

Rubens, Alfred

Rubin, Patricia

Rules for Women Recluses

rumor

Rupert of Deutz

Jews as witnesses and

reliquary shrine of Heribert and

on value of vision, ornament, and images

wealth and glory and

Ruth

sacrifice

of Christ

sages

Saint Albans Psalter

Saint Columbia altarpiece

Saint-Denis, Abbey Church of

Saint-Denis stained glass medallion

Saint Eligius as a Goldsmith (Christus)

Saint John (Lady)

saints. See also specific saints

female

haloes and

images of, as training tool

onlookers and

ostentatious display of

Saint Stephen window (Chartres)

Saint Sylvester window (Chartres)

Saint-Vaast, Abbey of

Saint-Victor de Paris, Abbey of

Salome

Samson ben Abraham of Sens (rabbi)

sanbenitos

sand, red

Sanhedrin

Sano Di Pietro

Santa Maria Novella, Priory of

San Zeno, Verona, Church of

Savonarola, Girolamo

Scenes from the Passion (Memling)

Schedel, Hartmann

scholars

Christian

Jewish

scholarship, biblical

Schönau, Abbey of

Scopic regime

scorpions

scowling

scrolls

Second Coming of Christ

Second Crusade

Second Gospel Book of Bishop Bernward of Hildesheim

secrecy

secret police

seduction

seeing. See sight

self-consciousness

Sélincourt, church of

senses, physical, and perception

sensory experience. See senses

“Sermon against the Jews”

serpents. See also snakes; brazen serpent, raising of

Serra, Jaime

servitude, Jewish

Seven Sorrows of Mary

Seventh Council of Nicaea

shaving. See beards

Shrine of Heribert

Siegfried of Gorze

Siete Partidas

Sigebert of Gembloux

sight. See also blindness; senses; witnesses

importance and imperfection of bodily vision and

Jews and

of Christ

of the Cross

of Jews

prophets and

Synagoga and

Sijena, Abbey of, altarpiece

Simonio. See Simon of Trent

Simon Magus

Simon of Trent

Simon the Cyrene

Simon the Pharisee

sin

Sistine Chapel

slaves

snakes. See also serpents

sneering

sodomy

Solomon. See also Judgment of Solomon

soothsayers

sorcery

sovereignty

Spain

spitting

sponge giver. See also Stephaton

spurs to devotion

spying

stained glass windows

Stammheim Missal

Stavelot, Abbey of

Stavelot Bible

Stavelot Triptych

Stephaton

Stephen, Saint

Stephen Harding, See Harding, Stephen

Stimulus Amoris (Ekbert)

stone building, revival of

stoning

stripes

Stuttgart Orosius

sudra. See turbans

Suger of Saint-Denis

sumptuary laws

sun

suppedaneum

surveillance

Sylvester, Saint

Synagoga

Chartres cathedral and

as female personification of Judaism

Judgment of Solomon and

loss of vision of

regained vision of

in Stammheim Missal

tablets of the law

tails

Tam, Jacob (rabbi)

taxation

Tertullian

testimony. See also evidence, rules of; witnesses

Augustinian concept of

culture of surveillance and

iconographically marked male as

in criminal cases

from Jews

of prophets

to miracles

women and

textual errors

theater states

theatrical productions

Thomas Aquinas

Thomas of Cantimpré

Thomas of Monmouth

three-faced Jew

Three Magi, See Magi

time, passage of

toads

Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Simone. See Masaccio

tonsures

Tornabuoni Chapel

Torn Veil of the Temple

torture

Tree of Jesse. See Jesse trees

Trent

triumphalism, Christian

True Cross

turbans

Uccello, Paolo

usurers

usury

Uta Codex. See also moneylending

Van Coudenberghe, Jan

Van der Goes, Hugo

Van der Weyden, Rogier

Van Engen, John

Van Eyck, Jan

Van Ouwater, Albert

Vasari, Giorgio

veiled hands

veils

Venice

Venetian Council of Ten

Verona. See also Man of Sorrows image

Vespasiano Da Bisticci

vessels

ecclesiastical

leaky, women as

Via Veritatis (Andrea da Firenze)

viewer, Jew as. See sight

villains

in Chartres cathedral

fathers as

in fresco of Christ Carrying the Cross

in late medieval anti-Jewish art

vine branches

violence

Virgin, Cult of

Virgin and Child, veneration of

Virgin Mary

circumcision of Christ and

in altarpiece of Purification of the Virgin

in Annunciation altarpiece

in Cantigas de Santa Maria

in Daret Nativity

in high medieval art

in Holy Trinity fresco

in Man of Sorrows image

in Stammheim Missal

Virgin of Impruneta

vision. See sight

Visitation (Ghirlandaio)

Vita of Heribert of Cologne

Voelkle, William

wafers. See Eucharist

walls

Warburg, Aby

weakness, women and

wealth

Wecelin

weddings

Weltchronik (Schedel)

Westphalia–north Rhine region reliquary casket

Wibald of Stavelot

William of Norwich, Saint

Winchester Psalter

windows. See also stained glass windows

wisdom

witchcraft

witches

witnesses. See also crowds, witnessing; testimony

Aaron the Jew as

altar from Cologne and

of birth of Heribert of Cologne in Vita

Cantigas de Santa Maria and

evidentiary rules of ancient Roman law and

forged

in Cantigas of Santa Maria

Jews as

Pope Innocent III on

proliferation of images featuring

protection of Jews respecting Christian primacy and

Stavelot Triptych and

Synagoga and

viewers of art as

women. See also Jewesses; Synagoga

carnality of

increased symbolic significance of

in medieval Christian thought

imposition of clothing regulations on

Jewish “otherness” and

lack of requirement for wearing of distinguishing mark by

as witnesses

wool guild

World Chronicle (Schedel). See Weltchronik

yellow

Zacharias (prophet)

Zebel

Zwiefalten, Abbey of

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

SARA LIPTON teaches medieval history at SUNY Stony Brook and is the author of Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée, which won the Medieval Academy of America’s John Nicholas Brown prize. The recipient of fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Oxford University, her writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Huffington Post.

DARK MIRROR. Copyright © 2014 by Sara Lipton. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.henryholt.com

eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Lipton, Sara, 1962–

Dark mirror: the medieval origins of anti-Jewish iconography / Sara Lipton.

pages cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-8050-7910-4 (hardback)—ISBN 978-0-8050-9601-9 (electronic book)   1.  Jews in art.   2.  Antisemitism in art.   3.  Art, Medieval.   4.  Art and society—Europe—History—To 1500.   I.  Title.

N8219.J49L57 2014

704.9’49305892404—dc23                                            2014015899

e-ISBN 978-0-8050-9601-9

First Edition: November 2014

NOTES

Please note that some of the links referenced in this work are no longer active.

INTRODUCTION: IN A MIRROR, DARKLY

1. See Bernhard Blumenkranz, Le Juif médiéval au miroir de l’art chrétien (Paris, 1966); Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art, 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993); Heinz Schreckenberg, Die Juden in der Kunst Europas: Ein historischer Bildatlas (Göttingen and Freiburg, 1996), translated as The Jews in Christian Art: An Illustrated History (New York, 1996).

2. For the identifying clothing, see ch. 1. For Jewish physiognomy, see ch. 5. For the Eucharistic wafer, see Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1999), pp. 103–05.

3. For a wide-ranging, insightful, and erudite exploration of this theme through Western intellectual history, see David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York, 2013), esp. pp. 53–68.

4. 1 Cor. 1:21-23. Paul is quoting Isa. 29:14.

5. 2 Cor. 5:6-7. See also 2 Cor. 4:18.

6. Augustine of Hippo, Sermo 263 (http://www.augustinus.it/latino/discorsi/index2.htm). PL 38:1209–12 omits some of this text.

7. Augustine of Hippo, De civitate dei 18.46, ed. B. Dombart and A. Kalb (Stuttgart, 1981), p. 325. See also Augustine’s sermon on Psalm 40: Enarrationes in Psalmos, ed. E. Dekkers and J. Fraipont, CCSL 38 (Turnhout, 1956), p. 459. See Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (New York, 2008 and Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity [Los Angeles and Berkeley, 1999], pp. 19–65).

8. Contra Faustum 12.24, ed. J. Zycha, CSEL 25 (Vienna, 1891–92), p. 353.

9. On Jews in the early medieval West, and the elite status and high social circles of the most prominent and visible among them, see Michael Toch, “The Jews in Europe, 500–1050,” in The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 1, ca. 500–700, ed. Paul Fouracre (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 545–70.

10. I discuss Synagoga in greater depth in chs. 1 and 2.

11. 1 Cor. 15:3–8 (where Paul lists himself as the last person to whom Christ appeared). See also Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, p. 61.

12. 2 Cor. 4:6.

13. The Carolingian period (ca. 770–900) is an exception to this general rule. See Celia Chazelle, The Crucified God in the Carolingian Era: Theology and Art of Christ’s Passion (Cambridge, 2001). This brief flowering did not last. For an overview of early medieval art, see Ian Wood, “Art and Architecture of Western Europe,” in The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 1, ca. 500–700, ed. Paul Fouracre (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 760–75, and Lawrence Nees, “Art and Architecture,” in The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 2, ca. 700–900, ed. Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 809–44.

14. For most of the signs listed here, see Mellinkoff, Outcasts; Schreckenberg, Die Juden in der Kunst Europas; Blumenkranz, Le Juif médiéval. See also Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, 2003), and Lipton, Images of Intolerance, pp. 54–81 (on signs of literalism), pp. 30–53 (on signs of avarice), and pp. 88–95 (on cats).

15. I document lay and clerical reactions to medieval art in a forthcoming study, The Vulgate of Experience.

16. See ch. 5.

17. See the comments of Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge, 1989), p. xxvi. See also Henry Mayr-Harting, Ottonian Book Illumination, 2nd ed. (London, 1999), p. 1.

CHAPTER ONE: MIRROR OF THE FATHERS: THE BIRTH OF A JEWISH ICONOGRAPHY, CA. 1015–1100

1. On the religious atmosphere around (and perhaps related to) the year 1000, see The Apocalyptic Year 1000: Religious Expectation and Social Change, 950–1050, ed. Richard A. Landes, David C. Van Meter, and Andrew Gow (Oxford, 2003).

2. Ralph Glaber’s remark (ca. 1035) that the whole world seemed to be “cladding itself everywhere in a white mantle of churches” is the most famous contemporary comment on these changes. Rodulfus Glaber, Historiarum libri quinque (The Five Books of the Histories), ed. and trans. John France (Oxford, 1989), 3.4.13, pp. 114–17. On the revival of stone building, see Guilym Peredur Jones, “Building in Stone in Medieval Europe,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe from the Decline of the Roman Empire, Vol. 2: Trade and Industry in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1987), p. 767. On changes in devotion, see especially Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York, 2002). On the rise of visuality in Christian worship, see J.-C. Schmitt, “L’Occident, Nicée II et les images du VIIIe au XIIIe siècle,” in Nicée II, 987–1987, ed. F. Boespflug and N. Lossky (Paris, 1988), pp. 271–301; Jean Wirth, L’Image à l’époque romane (Paris, 1999).

3. See, e.g., Engelbert Kirschbaum, “Juden, Judentum,” in Lexikon der Christlichen Ikonographie, vol. 2 (Vienna, 1970), p. 450. See also Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art, 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993), vol. 1, pp. 59–94.

4. For a striking demonstration of the signifying centrality of the hat starting in the mid-twelfth century, compare its use in Carolingian and late-twelfth-century copies of the Utrecht Psalter: C. F. Kaufmann, Biblical Imagery in Medieval England 700–1550 (London, 2003), pp. 107–12.

5. As pointed out by Ruth Mellinkoff, “The Round, Cap-Shaped Hats on Jews in BM Cotton Claudius B.iv,” Anglo-Saxon England 2 (1973): 155–65.

6. This is essentially the approach of Blumenkranz, Le Juif médiéval, p. 14; R. Straus, “The ‘Jewish Hat’ as an Aspect of Social History,” Jewish Social Studies 4 (1942): 59–72; Alfred Rubens, A History of Jewish Costume (New York, 1967), p. 106.

7. See, e.g., the 1982 production of Ivanhoe, in which the Jewish figure played by James Mason flourishes the long sidelocks and Yiddish accent of a Hasidic rabbi. In actuality, twelfth-century English Jews spoke French and probably dressed like upper-class Normans.

8. Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Studies in Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times (Oxford, 1961), pp. 28–31, stresses that the main goal of halakhists from the tenth through the twelfth centuries was to reconcile contemporary customs and ancient texts. See also Israel M. Ta-Shma, The Literature of Talmudic Exegesis in Europe and North Africa. Part One (Jerusalem, 1999) (Hebrew), pp. 16, 32, 76; Talya Fishman, Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures (Philadelphia, 2011); Louis Finkelstein, Jewish Self-Government in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (New York, 1964). Friedrich Lotter, “Die Juden zwischen Rhein und Elbe im Zeitalter Bernwards von Hildesheim,” in Bernward von Hildesheim und das Zeitalter der Ottonen. Katalog der Ausstellung Hildesheim 1993, ed. Michael Brandt and Arne Eggebrecht (Hildesheim and Mainz, 1993), p. 226, stresses the independence of Rhenish rabbis.

9. On the origins and nature of northern European Jewish communities, see Ivan Marcus, “A Jewish-Christian Symbiosis: The Culture of Early Ashkenaz,” in Cultures of the Jews: A New History, ed. David Biale (New York, 2002), pp. 449–516, with further bibliography; the introduction to The Responsa of Rabbenu Gershom Meor HaGolah, ed. Shlomo Eidelberg (New York, 1955); and Avraham Grossman, Rashi, trans. Joel Linsider (Oxford, 2012), pp. 3–70. Grossman acknowledges differences and tensions between Jews and Christians but nonetheless stresses the “intensity of socio-cultural ties” (p. 10).

10. Irving A. Agus, Urban Civilization in Pre-Crusade Europe: A Study of Organized Town-Life in Northwestern Europe during the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries, 2 vols. (New York, 1965), pp. 355, 530; Marcus, “A Jewish-Christian Symbiosis,” p. 455. Indeed, rabbis were forbidden to take payment for their scholarly and legal activities.

11. See Agus, Urban Civilization, pp. 119–20, 256–309, 349, 380–86. On Jewish economic activities in the eleventh century, see Jean-Pierre Devroey and Christian Brouwer, “La participation des Juifs au commerce dans le monde franc (VIe–Xe siècles),” in Voyages et voyageurs à Byzance et en Occident du VIe au XIe siècle: Actes du colloque international organisé par la Section d’histoire de l’Université libre de Bruxelles en collaboration avec le Département des sciences historiques de l’Université, ed. Alain Dierkens, Jean-Marie Sansterre, and Jean-Louis Küpper (Geneva, 2000), pp. 339–74.

12. Ephraim Kanarfogel, “Prayer, Literacy, and Literary Memory in the Jewish Communities of Medieval Europe,” in Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology and History: Authority, Diaspora, Tradition, ed. Ra’anan S. Boustan, Oren Kosansky, and Marina Rustow (Philadelphia, 2011), p. 404n90. I thank Prof. Kanarforgel and Prof. Effie Shoham-Seiner for sending me the article.

13. On Jewish acculturation, see Ivan G. Marcus, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe (New Haven and London, 1996), esp. pp. 8–13; Avraham Grossman, Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe, trans. Jonathan Chipman (Hanover, 2004), pp. 1–3. For a thoughtful recent discussion of degrees of acculturation versus insularity, see David Malkiel, Reconstructing Ashkenaz: The Human Face of Franco-German Jewry, 1000–1250 (Stanford, 2009), and Malkiel, “Jews and Apostates in Medieval Europe,” Past and Present 194 (2007): 3–34. Israel Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Barbara Harshav and Jonathan Chipman (Berkeley, 2006), pp. 29–30, argues for cultural closeness (if not warm feelings) between Jews and Christians in medieval cities. For Jews using Christian courts, see the takkanot (ordinances) of Rabbi Tam in Finkelstein, Jewish Self-Government, p. 156. Fritz Reuter, Warmaisa: 1000 Jahre Juden in Worms (Worms, 1984), p. 57, notes that until the fourteenth century Jews were full-fledged citizens of Worms and enjoyed bürgerliche privileges.

14. Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton, 2004), pp. 143–44, 92–100.

15. R. Samson ben Abraham of Sens in Tosafot Succah 45a, Mordechai Succah 2, 743, quoted in Finkelstein, Jewish Self-Government, p. 240.

16. See Exod. 28:40 and 39:27–28 and Lev. 8:9.

17. Eric Zimmer, “Men’s Headcovering: The Metamorphosis of This Practice,” in Reverence, Righteousness, and “Rahamanut”: Essays in Memory of Rabbi Dr. Leo Jung, ed. Jacob J. Schacter (Northvale, N.J., 1992), pp. 326–27; I thank Dr. Effie Shoham-Steiner for bringing this article to my attention. The relevant Talmudic passages are Shabbat 156b (which says that covering the head increases one’s awareness and awe of Heaven), Berakhot 51a and 60b, Pesahim 111b, Kiddushin 8a, 29b, and 31a, and Nedarim 30b; Jerusalem Talmud Moed Katan III 24a and 82c (which note that covering the head was a sign of mourning and therefore inappropriate for shabbat). See also “Head, Covering of the” in Encyclopedia Judaica, vol. 8 (Jerusalem, 1971), cols. 1–6, and the article on “Clothing” in Norman Roth, ed., Medieval Jewish Civilization: An Encyclopedia (New York, 2003), pp. 173–74.

18. EJ 8:1–6.

19. Abraham ben Nathan of Lunel, Sefer Ha-Manhig, ed. Yitzhak Raphael (Jerusalem, 1978), 15b. Although Abraham was born in southern France and eventually moved to Toledo, he studied in Dampierre, in northern France, and Ha-Manhig describes customs common in Ashkenazi communities.

20. EJ 8:5–6.

21. Rubens, History of Jewish Costume, pp. 6–12.

22. Steven Fine, “How Do You Know a Jew When You See One? Reflections on Jewish Costume in the Roman World,” in Fashioning Jews: Clothing, Culture, and Commerce, ed. Leonard Greenspoon (West Lafayette, Ind., 2013), pp. 19–27; Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley, 1999), pp. 25–68; Zimmer, “Men’s Headcovering,” p. 326; Rubens, History of Jewish Costume, pp. 13–20.

23. See Norman A. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book (Philadelphia, 1979), pp. 68–71; texts on pp. 157–58, 167, 251, 269–70, 273–74.

24. Agobard, De insolentia Judaeorum, PL 104:74. I here differ from Guido Kisch, “The Yellow Badge in Jewish History,” Historia Judaica 19 (1957): 93.

25. John the Deacon, Sancti Gregorii Magni Vita, in PL 75:207. Here again Kisch, “The Yellow Badge,” p. 92, offers a different interpretation. See also Straus, “The ‘Jewish Hat,’” p. 61.

26. See Agus, Urban Civilization, pp. 65–66, 75–77.

27. Annals of Saint Bertin, trans. Janet Nelson (Manchester, 1991), p. 42 (Anno 839). Neither Prudence of Troyes nor pseudo-Amulo of Lyons says anything about Bodo donning a hat: Constable, “Introduction,” in Apologiae Duae. Gozechini Epistola ad Walcherum. Burchardi, ut videtur, Abbatis Bellevallis, Apologia de Barbis, ed. R. B. C. Huygens, CCCM 62 (Turnhout, 1985), pp. 110–11. I discuss the question of the beard below. On Bodo, see A. Cabaniss, “Bodo-Eleazar: A Famous Jewish Convert,” Jewish Quarterly Review n.s. 43 (1952–53): 313–28, and Frank Riess, “From Aachen to Al-Andalus: The Journey of Deacon Bodo (823–76),” Early Medieval Europe 13 (2005): 131–58.

28. Responsum of R. Eliezar the Great (d. 1050), in Agus, Urban Civilization, pp. 801–02.

29. Eruvin 84b, cited in Moshé Catane, “Le vêtement en France au XIe siècle d’après les écrits de Rashi,” in Rashi et la Culture Juive en France du Nord au Moyen Âge, ed. Gilbert Dahan, Gérard Nahon, and Elie Nicolas (Paris-Louvain, 1997), p. 131.

30. Rubens, History of Jewish Costume, p. 94; Julius Aronius, ed., Regesten zur Geschichte der Juden im fränkischen und deutschen Reiche bis zum Jahre 1273 (Berlin, 1902), no. 724.

31. In Guido Kisch’s otherwise admirably documented The Jews in Medieval Germany: A Study of Their Legal and Social Status (Chicago, 1949), there is not a single footnote in the entire paragraph discussing the “Jewish hat” (p. 296). His confident description of the changes in form of this hat can be based only on Christian art.

32. Danièle Sansy, “Marquer la différence: L’imposition de la rouelle aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles,” Médiévales 41 (2001): 17, notes that in the few late medieval French images depicting Jews wearing distinguishing badges, the badges do not conform to local laws concerning their size, color, or shape.

33. For a similar approach, see the fine survey by Danièle Sansy, “Chapeau juif ou chapeau pointu? Esquisse d’un signe d’infamie,” in Symbole des Alltags. Alltag der Symbole. Festschrift für Harry Kühnel zum 65. Geburtstag (Graz, 1992), pp. 349–75.

34. Rubens, History of Jewish Costume, p. 106. Both volumes of the Stavelot Bible are now in the British Library (London, BL Add. mss. 28106–28107). On this manuscript, see Wayne Dynes, The Illuminations of the Stavelot Bible (New York and London, 1978) and the entry in Rhein und Maas. Kunst und Kultur 800–1400, 2 vols. (Cologne, 1973), 1.232 (F27). Though it is not known if Goderanus was one of the artists as well as the main scribe, for purposes of convenience I refer to him as the maker of the manuscript. Mellinkoff, “The Round, Cap-Shaped Hats,” discusses depictions of a different kind of hat in an earlier Anglo-Saxon manuscript.

35. “Tibi domine deus ego peccator Goderanus et frater Ernesto in labore isto adiutor et socius abbatis nostri permissu hunc codicem cum parili in domo tua quae in coenobio Stabulaus tuo nomine consecrata est delegavimus.… Codices hi ambo quia continuatum et tamen morosius scripti sunt per annos ferme quatuor.… Et ipse est annus ab incarnatione domini m.xcvii, indictione v., Henrico iiii. imperante, christianorum exercitu super paganos violenter agente.” London, BL Add. ms. 28107, fol. 228.

36. On the attacks that took place in the Rhineland region, see Shlomo Eidelberg, ed., The Jews and the Crusaders: The Hebrew Chronicles of the First and Second Crusades (Madison, 1977); Robert Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade (Berkeley, 1987); Jeremy Cohen, Sanctifying the Name of God: Jewish Martyrs and Jewish Memories of the First Crusade (Philadelphia, 2004). Interestingly, Stavelot and Lobbes, the other monastery at which Goderanus worked, indirectly helped finance Godfrey’s journey to the Holy Land: Godfrey raised the cash by selling his castle to the Bishop of Liège, who covered the cost by demanding levies from the monasteries in his diocese, including Lobbes and Stavelot. Joseph Warichez, L’Abbaye de Lobbes depuis ses origines jusqu’en 1200 (Louvain and Paris, 1909), pp. 81 and 301.

37. Blumenkranz, Le Juif médiéval, pp. 13 and 19–20. For an overview of the historiographical tradition identifying the First Crusade as the moment and cause of the assumed “downturn” in Jewish-Christian relations, see Lester K. Little, “The Role of the Jews in the Commercial Revolution,” Povertà e ricchezza nella spiritualità dei secoli XI e XII (Todi, 1969), pp. 271–87.

38. Albert of Aachen, Albert of Aachen’s History of the Journey to Jerusalem: Books 1–6, trans. and ed. Susan B. Edgington (Burlington, Vt., 2013), pp. 37–39.

39. Ms. 1 of the Library of the Seminary of the Diocese of Tournai. On this manuscript, see Don Denny, “The Historiated Initials of the Lobbes Bible,” Revue Belge 45 (1976): 3–26; Walter Cahn, Romanesque Bible Illumination (Ithaca, 1982), pp. 126–30, cat. no. 48; C. R. Dodwell, The Pictorial Arts of the West, 800–1200 (New Haven, 1993), p. 269.

40. Hildesheim Cathedral Treasury ms. 18 (Dom- and Diozesanmuseum DS 18).

41. Hildesheim Cathedral Treasury ms. 18, fol. 75r. The image accompanies the Gospel of Mark, which begins with an account of John’s mission.

42. This image is innovative in another way: it is the earliest surviving, perhaps the first ever, artistic rendering of this episode. Michael Brandt, Das Kostbare Evangeliar des Heiligen Bernward (Munich, 1993), p. 42.

43. Mark 1:4–5. For Pharisees and Sadducees, see Matt. 3:7. For priests and Levites, see John 1:19.

44. Mayr-Harting, Ottonian Book Illumination, p. 104.

45. Francis Joseph Tschan, Saint Bernward of Hildesheim, 3 vols. (Notre Dame, 1942–52), 2.48 calls the Magi’s hats “Jewish headgear.” There is no evidence to support his contention on p. 61n26 that the hat was derived from ninth-century Andalusian legislation; no statutes dictating pointed hats were passed in this period and in any case it is unlikely that Bernward and his artists knew about Muslim law in Iberia.

46. On the Magi in art, see Robert Deshman, “Christus Rex et Magi Reges: Kingship and Christology in Ottonian and Anglo-Saxon Art,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 10 (1976): 378. See also Brandt, Das Kostbare Evangeliar, pp. 30–31.

47. See, e.g., the Prüm Troper, ca. 986–1001 (Paris, BN ms. lat. 9448, fol. 28v), and the Sacramentary of Robert of Jumièges, England, ca. 1020 (Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale ms. Y 6, fol. 36v), which is discussed in Mellinkoff, Outcasts, vol. 1, p. 90, and illustrated in vol. 2, fig. 3.117.

48. Matt. 2:1–12. On medieval interpretations of these figures, see Richard C. Trexler, The Journey of the Magi: Meanings in History of a Christian Story (Princeton, 1997).

49. Tertullian Adversus Marcionem, book 1, ch. 13, CCSL 1 (Turnhout, 1954), p. 454.

50. Pseudo-Augustine, De mirabilibus sacrae scripturae 3.4, PL 35:2194.

51. Quaestiones ex novo testamento, PL 35:2258.

52. Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof (Cambridge, 2006), p. 183 (VIII.ix.25).

53. E.g., Justin Martyr, The Dialogue with Trypho, trans. A. Lukyn Williams (London, 1930), pp. 162–63 (chs. 77, 78). Christian authors were also influenced by Isa. 60:6.

54. These types of headgear were all known to early medieval people through the enormously popular encyclopedia of Isidore of Seville: Etymologies, trans. Stephen A. Barney et al., pp. 386, 390–91 (XIX.23; XIX.30; XIX.31).

55. Dimiter Angelov, Ruth Macrides, and J. A. Munitiz, Pseudo-Kodinos and the Constantinopolitan Court: Offices and Ceremonies (Farnham, Surrey, 2013). I thank Professor Angelov for this reference.

56. See also Mellinkoff, Outcasts, vol. 1, p. 90; Heinz Schreckenberg, Die christlichen Adversus-Judaeos-Texte und ihr literarisches und historisches Umfeld (11.–13.Jh) (Frankfurt, 1988), p. 701.

57. Trexler, Journey of the Magi, pp. 54–60, explores the political and diplomatic nature of Ottonian treatments of the Magi.

58. See Percy Ernst Schramm, Kaiser, Rom, und Renovatio: Studien zur Geschichte des römischen Erneuerungsgedankens vom Ende des karolingischen Reiches bis zum Investiturstreit, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (Darmstadt, 1962); Josef Fleckenstein, “Das Kaiserhaus der Ottonen,” in Bernward von Hildesheim und das Zeitalter, ed. Brandt and Eggebrecht, pp. 47–62; Karl Leyser, Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society: Ottonian Saxony (London, 1979); Deshman, “Christus Rex et Magi Reges,” pp. 372–73; Peter K. Klein, “L’Art et idéologie impériale des Ottoniens vers l’an mil: L’Évangeliaire d’Henri II et l’Apocalypse de Bamberg,” Cahiers de Saint-Michel de Cuxa 16 (1985): 177–220.

59. Bamberg Apocalypse, Bamberg Staatsbibliothek ms. AII 42, which was made for Henry II, who was crowned emperor in 1014. The connection between the Magi and tributary personifications is noted by Susan E. von Daum Tholl, “Visualizing the Millennium: Eschatological Rhetoric for the Ottonian Court,” in The Apocalyptic Year 1000, p. 235. See also Gérard Cames, “Otton III et ses hauts dignitaires sur les miniatures de Bamberg et de Munich,” Scriptorium 16 (1962): 231–38. As used by art historians, the term “Ottonian” includes art made not only under the three Ottos but also under their immediate successors, Henry II (1002–24), Conrad II (1024–39), and Henry III (1039–56).

60. “Fantastical” is the word used in Brandt, Kostbare Evangeliar, p. 31. On the Last Supper image in this manuscript see Mayr-Harting, Ottonian Book Illumination, p. 103.

61. Thietmar of Merseberg, Chronicon, ed. Robert Holtzmann, MGH Scriptores Rerum Germanicum in usum scholarum, n.s. 9 (Berlin, 1935), pp. 396–97 (book 7, ch. 1).

62. Leyser, Rule and Conflict, pp. 87, 92.

63. On Ottonian relations with Byzantium, see Frederick P. Pickering, “The Western Image of Byzantium in the Middle Ages,” in Essays on Medieval German Literature and Iconography (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 146–63.

64. The main medieval source for Bernward’s life is Thangmar, Vita Bernwardi episcopi Hildesheimensis in MGH Scriptores IV, ed. G. Pertz (Hannover, 1841), pp. 754–82. See also Tschan, Saint Bernward of Hildesheim; Hans Jakob Schoffels, “Bernward Bischof von Hildesheim. Eine biographische Skizze,” in Bernward von Hildesheim und das Zeitalter, ed. Brandt and Eggebrecht, vol. 2, pp. 29–43; and Medieval Treasures from Hildesheim, ed. Peter Barnet, Michael Brandt, and Gerhard Lutz (New Haven and London, 2013). The Bernward Bible is Hildesheim, Dommuseum DS 61. On Bernward’s tendency to incorporate contemporary concerns into biblical imagery, see Adam S. Cohen and Anne Derbes, “Bernward and Eve at Hildesheim,” Gesta 40 (2001): 19–38.

65. Reiner Haussherr, “Der tote Christus am Kreuz zur Ikonographie des Gerokreuzes,” PhD diss., Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn, 1963.

66. See Johannes Fried, “Awaiting the End of Time around the Turn of the Year 1000,” in The Apocalyptic Year 1000, pp. 18–63.

67. See A. Frolow, La relique de la vraie croix: Recherches sur le développement d’un culte (Paris, 1961); Kelly M. Holbert, “Relics and Reliquaries of the True Cross,” in Sarah Blick and Rita Tekippe, eds., Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage in Northern Europe and the British Isles (Leiden and Boston, 2004), pp. 337–64. The other relics associated with Christ include his foreskin and his blood. On the latter, see Caroline Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia, 2007).

68. The oldest known sculpture of the Virgin and Child, which is also the oldest surviving freestanding sculpture north of the Alps, is the Golden Madonna of Essen, near Cologne, which dates to ca. 980. See Beate Fricke, Ecce fides. Die Statue von Conques, Götzendienst und Bildkultur im Westen (Munich, 2007); Arnold Angenendt, “‘In meinem Fleisch werde ich Gott sehen.’ Bernward und die Reliquien,” in Bernward von Hildesheim und das Zeitalter, ed. Brandt and Eggebrecht, vol. 1, pp. 361–68.

69. Mayr-Harting, Ottonian Book Illumination, p. 105.

70. See George Henderson, “De laudibus Sanctae Crucis,” in Early Medieval (London, 1972), pp. 201–38.

71. Thangmar, Vita Bernwardi, p. 781. Emphasis mine. This epitaph is drawn from Job 19:25–27, with slight modifications, and appears as a responsorium in the Mass for the Dead.

72. Mayr-Harting, Ottonian Book Illustration, p. 96.

73. Bernward von Hildesheim und das Zeitalter, ed. Brandt and Eggebrecht, vol. 1, pp. 33–39 and vol. 2, no. VIII–31; Medieval Treasures from Hildesheim, no. 8, pp. 44–45, and no. 10, pp. 48–49. On the fragment of the Holy Cross given to Bernward by Otto III, see Thangmar, Vita Bernwardi, ch. 8. On Bernward’s cross, see also Christof L. Diedrichs, Vom Glauben zum Sehen. Die Sichtbarkeit der Reliquie im Reliquiar. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Sehens (Berlin, 2001), ch. 1.

74. Brandt, Das Kostbare Evangeliar, p. 31.

75. For a contemporary parallel, see Adam S. Cohen, The Uta Codex: Art, Philosophy, and Reform in Eleventh-Century Germany (University Park, Pa., 2000), pp. 123ff.

76. The staff held here so awkwardly by one of the elders may relate to Gen. 49:10, a central text in Jewish-Christian exegetical polemics. Contrast this with the suggestion of Tschan, Saint Bernward of Hildesheim, vol. 2, p. 66.

77. This echoes a tactic first employed by Saint Augustine, who in a sermon on the Epiphany (the Feast of the Magi) asserted that “this enlightening [vision] of the Magi constitutes great testimony of the blindness of the Jews.” Sermo 200, In Epiphania Domini, II, cap. II.3 (PL 38:1029).

78. Ernst Schubert, “Der Reichsepiskopat,” in Bernward von Hildesheim und das Zeitalter, ed. Brandt and Eggebrecht, pp. 98–100. See also Robert M. Stein, Reality Fictions: Romance, History, and Governmental Authority, 1025–1180 (Notre Dame, 2006), pp. 13–21; Michel Parisse, “L’évêque d’empire au Xe siècle: L’exemple Lorrain,” Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 27 (1984): 95–105.

79. The earliest surviving illustration of the pointed bishop’s miter dates to 976 (the Codex Albendense in the Escorial Library, Madrid); the earliest to survive from the Holy Roman Empire is in an early-eleventh-century Exultet Roll from Bari (Bari, Cathedral Archives 1), which has been dated anywhere from ca. 1000 to ca. 1030. See A. Kingsley Porter, “The Tomb of Hincmar and Carolingian Sculpture in France,” Burlington Magazine 50 (1927): 75–91; Myrtilla Avery, The Exultet Rolls of South Italy (Princeton, 1936); Percy Ernst Schramm, Herrschaftszeichen und Staatssymbolik (Stuttgart, 1954): 1.51–62; Ruth Mellinkoff, The Horned Moses in Medieval Art and Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1970), pp. 94ff; Joseph Braun, Die liturgische Gewandung im Occident und Orient (Freiburg, 1907), pp. 431–38. Michele Beaulieu, “Communication sur le prétendu bonnet juif,” Bulletin de la Société nationale des antiquaires de France (Jan. 1972): 29–44, is one of the few scholars who have made the connection (and noticed the resulting confusion) between Jewish and episcopal headgear.

80. Thietmar of Merseberg, Chronicon 7.73. See Lotter, “Die Juden zwischen Rhein und Elbe,” p. 228.

81. The conversion and subsequent epistolary debate are recorded in Alpert of Metz, De Diversitate Temporum, Lib. II, caps. 22–24, in MGH Scriptores IV, ed. G. Pertz (Hannover, 1841), pp. 720–23. The debate is translated and analyzed in Anna Abulafia, “An Eleventh-Century Exchange of Letters between a Christian and a Jew,” Journal of Medieval History 7 (1981): 153–74.

82. Alpert of Metz, De Diversitate Temporum, Lib. II, cap. 24, in Pertz, p. 721.

83. See Mechtild Schulze-Dörrlamm, Die Kaiserkrone Konrads II (1024–1039): Eine archäologische Untersuchung zu Alter und Herkunft der Reichskrone (Sigmaringen, 1991).

84. Adémar of Chabanne, Chronicon III.52, ed. P. Bourgain, CCCM 129 (Turnhout, 1999), p. 171. See also Daniel F. Callahan, “The Cross, the Jews, and the Destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in the Writings of Ademar of Chabannes,” in Michael Frassetto, ed., Christian Attitudes toward the Jews in the Middle Ages: A Casebook (New York, 2007), pp. 15–23.

85. Agus, Urban Civilization, p. 174; Techuvot Ba’alei ha-Tosafot, ed. I. Agus (New York, 1954), no. 1, p. 40; discussed in David Malkiel, “Historiographical Essay: Jewish-Christian Relations in Europe, 840–1096,” Journal of Medieval History 29 (2003): 63–64.

86. See Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton, 2006), pp. 160–62.

87. Sixten Ringbom, “Devotional Images and Imaginative Devotions: Notes on the Place of Art in Late Medieval Private Piety,” Gazette des Beaux Arts, ser. 6, vol. 73, alt. no. 1202 (1969), p. 160. On the liturgical development, see Michele Bacci, “The Berardenga Antependium and the Passio Ymaginis Office,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 61 (1998): 1–16.

88. Wolfgang S. Seiferth, Synagogue and Church in the Middle Ages: Two Symbols in Art and Literature, trans. Lee Chadeayne and Paul Gottwald (New York, 1970), pp. 7–11.

89. Cohen, The Uta Codex.

90. Cohen, The Uta Codex, p. 190.

91. Synagoga’s vision is also at least partially blocked in an image in the sacramentary of Abbot Ellinger of Tegernsee (Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, cod. Ross 204, fol. 10r), dating to ca. 1030–60. See also the early-eleventh-century ivory plaque of the crucifixion in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (Inv. 252-1867).

92. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett ms. 78 A 2, fol. 26v. See Dorothy Miner, “A Late Reichenau Evangeliary in the Walters Gallery Library,” Art Bulletin 18 (1936): 168–85.

93. Illustrated in Schreckenberg, Die Juden in der Kunst Europas, p. 220.

94. Tournai, Bibliothèque du séminaire diocésain ms. 1.

95. Larry M. Ayres, “A Fragment of a Romanesque Bible in Vienna (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. Ser. Nov. 4236) and Its Salzburg Affiliations,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte (1982): 130.

96. Cahn, Romanesque Bible Illumination, pp. 126–30.

97. On the scroll, see François Garnier, Le Langage de l’image au Moyen Âge. Signification et symbolique, 2 vols. (Paris, 1982), 2.229–44; Theodor Birt, Die Buchrolle und der Kunst (Leipzig, 1907). For the scroll in the third-century Dura-Europos synagogue, see Herbert L. Kessler, “Prophetic Portraits in the Dura Synagogue,” Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 30 (1987): 152.

98. David Stern of the University of Pennsylvania has reminded me (in private correspondence) that an allegorical interpretation by Gregory the Great contrasted the Christian codex, which can be read on both sides of the folio (= carnally and spiritually) with the Jewish scroll, which can be read on only one side (= Jewish literalism). But I do not detect any condemnation of Jewish interpretation in Goderanus’s depictions of the prophets.

99. Lev. 19:27 and 21:5. Much of the information that follows comes from the article “Beard” by Cyrus Adler, Max Muller, and Louis Ginzburg in the Jewish Encyclopedia (New York and London, 1903). See also Elliott Horowitz, “Visages du Judaisme: De la barbe en monde juif et de l’élaboration de ses significations,” Annales HSS 49 (1994): 1065–90.

100. Mishnah Makkot 3:5; Sifra, Kedoshim, vi, cited in the Jewish Encyclopedia, “Beard.” See also Elliott S. Horowitz, “The Early Eighteenth Century Confronts the Beard: Kabbalah and Jewish Self-Fashioning,” Jewish History 8 (1994): 95–115.

101. See Kiddushin 35b, Makkot 20a and 21a.

102. Finkelstein, Jewish Self-Government, p. 235n2, notes that shaving was not uncommon and that even the revered fifteenth-century rabbi Maharil would shave on festive occasions.

103. Finkelstein, Jewish Self-Government, p. 59; Hebrew text, p. 225. The fact that in the Constitutions of Melfi (1231) Emperor Frederick II ordered the Jews of Sicily to grow beards indicates that at that time Sicilian Jews, at least, were not regularly bearded. Shlomo Simonsohn, “Sicily: A Millennium of Convivenza (or Almost),” in The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages (Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries), ed. Christoph Cluse (Turnhout, 2004) pp. 105–21.

104. Liber Miraculorum Sancte Fidis I.1, ed. A. Bouillet (Paris, 1897), p. 14.

105. The above examples are from Constable, “Introduction,” pp. 63, 91–99.

106. On the representation of rulers, see Gerard Burian Ladner, “The ‘Portraits’ of Emperors in Southern Italian Exultet Rolls and the Liturgical Commemoration of the Emperor,” Speculum (1942): 184; Schramm, Kaiser, Rom, und Renovatio, pp. 42–50; Constable, “Introduction,” p. 91; Klein, “L’Art et idéologie impériale,” p. 198; Hans-Werner Goetz, “The Concept of Time in the Historiography of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” in Medieval Concepts of the Past: Ritual, Memory, History, ed. Gerd Althoff, Johannes Fried, and Patrick J. Geary (Washington, D.C., and Cambridge, 2002), p. 157.

107. See Garnier, Le Langage de l’image, 2.88–94. For further discussion of hair and beards as social markers, see Robert Bartlett, “Symbolic Meanings of Hair in the Middle Ages,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser. 4 (1994): 43–60. The distinction I am making here follows Ernst H. Gombrich’s distinction between “sign as code” and “symbol as flexible metaphor” in “Visual Metaphors of Value in Art,” in Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art (London and New York, 1978), pp. 12–29, 163–65.

108. Quoted in Constable, “Introduction,” p. 79.

109. Much of the following comes from Constable, “Introduction,” pp. 94–97.

110. See The Correspondence of Pope Gregory VII: Selected Letters from the Registrum, trans. Ephraim Emerton (New York, 1969), p. 164.

111. Quoted in Constable, “Introduction,” p. 94.

112. Robert Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water: The Medieval Judicial Ordeal (New York and Oxford, 1986), p. 78n32.

113. Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, 6: Books XI, XII, and XIII, ed. and trans. Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford, 1973), pp. 60ff.

114. On historical progression in the illuminations, see also Denny, “The Historiated Initials of the Lobbes Bible,” p. 4.

115. See also Diane J. Reilly, The Art of Reform in Eleventh-Century Flanders: Gerard of Cambrai, Richard of St.-Vanne, and the St.-Vaast Bible (Leiden, 2006).

116. Dynes, The Illuminations of the Stavelot Bible, pp. 153–61.

117. See, e.g., 1 Cor. 10:6–11 and Gal. 4:21–31.

118. Classic works on typological exegesis include J. Daniélou, Sacramentum futuri. Études sur les origines de la typologie biblique (Études de théologie historique) (Paris, 1950); G. W. H. Lampe and K. J. Woollcombe, Essays on Typology (London, 1957); G. von Rad, “Typological Interpretation of the Old Testament,” Interpretation 15 (1961): 174–92; Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Mannheim (rpt. New York, 1965); Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiéval, vol. 1 (Paris, 1959); The Cambridge History of the Bible, Vol. 2, The West from the Fathers to the Reformation, ed. G. W. H. Lampe (Cambridge, 1969); F. P. Pickering, Literature and Art in the Middle Ages (Coral Gables, 1970), pp. 253–73; D. L. Baker, “Typology and the Christian Use of the Old Testament,” Scottish Journal of Theology, 29 (1976): 137–57; M.-D. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century (Chicago, 1968), pp. 147–61; Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1983). For some newer, literary-inflected studies, see Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge, 1991); Seth Lerer, ed., Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach (Stanford, 1996). On Carolingian biblical interpretation, see Celia Chazelle and Burton Van Name Edwards, eds., The Study of the Bible in the Carolingian Era (Turnhout, 2003).

119. Denny, “The Historiated Initials of the Lobbes Bible,” p. 16.

120. Dynes, The Illuminations of the Stavelot Bible, pp. 176–81.

121. A third realm was the intellectual culture of the monastery in which he worked. Lobbes harbored a particular interest in history and was a center of historical writing. Warichez, L’Abbaye de Lobbes, pp. 251–86; Suzanne Collon-Gevaert, Jean Lejeune, and Jacques Stiennon, Art Roman dans la Vallée de la Meuse aux Xe et XIIe siècles (Brussels, 1962), p. 40; Fidel Rädle, “Zur Bewertung der Antike in den hagiographischen Werken des Heriger von Lobbes,” in Gli umanesimi medievali: Atti del II congresso dell’Internationales Mittellateinerkomitee (Florence, 1993), pp. 539–50.

122. Jean Leclerq, “The Exposition and Exegesis of Scripture: from Gregory the Great to St. Bernard,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible, ed. G. W. H. Lampe (Cambridge, 1969), p. 188; Aryeh Grabois, “The Hebraica Veritas and Jewish-Christian Intellectual Relations in the Twelfth Century,” Speculum 50 (1975): 613–34.

123. Bernhard Blumenkranz, Juifs et chrétiens dans le monde occidental, 430–1096 (Paris and La Haye, 1960), p. 50.

124. See William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum iv.334 in PL 179:1287–89; Yolanta Zaluska, L’Enluminure et le scriptorium de Cîteaux au XIIe siècle (Citeaux, 1989).

125. Gilbert Crispin, Abbot of Westminster (d. 1117), e.g., called the Jews’ literal reading “a fossil of useless antiquity.” Quoted in Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Los Angeles and Berkeley, 1999), p. 183. Beryl Smalley wrote that when exegetes consulted Jews it was almost like “telephoning to the Old Testament”: Hebrew Scholarship among Christians in XIIIth Century England as Illustrated by Some Hebrew-Latin Psalters, Lectiones in Vetere Testamento et in rebus judaicis 6 (London, 1939), p. 1.

126. See Giles Constable, “Past and Present in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries: Perceptions of Time and Change,” in L’Europa dei secoli XI e XII fra novità e tradizione: Sviluppi di una cultura. Atti della decima Settimana internazionale di studio, Mendola, 25–29 agosto 1986 (Milan, 1989), pp. 135–70; Bernard Guenée, “Temps de l’histoire et temps de la mémoire au Moyen Âge,” Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de France 487 (1976–77): 25–36.

127. John Van Engen, “The ‘Crisis in Cenobitism’ Reconsidered: Benedictine Monasticism in the Years 1050–1150,” Speculum 61 (1986): 269–304.

128. See Goetz, “The Concept of Time”; Beryl Smalley, “The Bible in the Medieval Schools,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible, p. 204.

129. Karl F. Morrison, Tradition and Authority in the Western Church, 300–1140 (Princeton, 1969), p. 345.

130. The Epistolae Vagantes of Pope Gregory VII, ed. H. E. J. Cowdrey (Oxford, 1972), p. 151, discussed in I. S. Robinson, “Reform and the Church, 1073–1122,” in The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 4, c. 1024–c. 1198, Part I, ed. David Luscomb and Jonathan Riley-Smith (Cambridge, 2005), p. 313. Gregory was paraphrasing Tertullian, De Virginibus velandis, I.1 Opera, CCSL 2 (Turnhout, 1954), p. 1209.

131. Sermo II, PL 144:515.

132. John Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz (Berkeley, 1983), p. 1.

133. On historical charts, see Goetz, “The Concept of Time,” pp. 148–53. On p. 157 Goetz notes that in the new genealogical trees that began to illustrate dynastic chronicles hair, beard, and headgear were the major individual distinctions.

134. The earliest surviving visual Tree of Jesse (displaying Christ’s genealogy) dates to 1086. See Jean Anne Hayes Williams, “The Earliest Dated Tree of Jesse Image: Thematically Reconsidered,” Athanor 18 (2000): 17–23.

CHAPTER TWO: BLINDING LIGHT AND BLINKERED WITNESS, CA. 1100–1160

1. Augustine of Hippo, De civitate dei 18.46, ed. B. Dombart and A. Kalb (Stuttgart, 1981), p. 325; see the introduction.

2. Epistola 363 in S. Bernardi Opera, ed. J. Leclercq, C. H. Talbot, and H. M. Rochais (Rome, 1977), vol. 8, p. 316.

3. This “image explosion” can be explained as part of the ecclesiastical reform program. See Sara Lipton, “Images and Their Uses, c. 1100–1500,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol. 4: Christianity in Western Europe, c. 1100–c. 1500, ed. Miri Rubin and Walter Simons (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 254–82. On the culture of reform, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982), introduction.

4. See Jean-Pierre Caillet, “La Réappropriation du prophétisme par les imagiers chrétiens du XIIe siècle,” Le Monde de la Bible 131 (2000): 47–53; Robert Favreau, “Controverses judéo-chrétiennes et l’iconographie. L’apport des inscriptions,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres (July–Oct. 2001): 1267–1303.

5. See Dorothy F. Glass, “Revisiting the ‘Gregorian Reform,’” in Romanesque Art and Thought in the Twelfth Century: Essays in Honor of Walter Cahn, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton, 2008), pp. 200–18; Glass, “Pseudo-Augustine, Prophets, and Pulpits in Campania,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers (1987): 215–26; Christine Verzar Bornstein, Portals and Politics in the Early Italian City State: The Sculpture of Nicholaus in Context (Parma, 1986); and the still useful Arthur Kingsley Porter, Lombard Architecture, vol. 1 (New Haven, 1917).

6. For various dating suggestions, see C. R. Dodwell, The Pictorial Arts of the West, 800–1200 (New Haven, 1993), p. 391; J. L. Fischer, Handbuch der Glasmalerei (Leipzig, 1914); Alfred Boeckler, “Die romanischen Fenster des Augsburger Doms und die Stilwende vom 11. zum 12. Jahrhundert,” Zeitschrift des Deutschen Vereins für Kunstwissenschaft 10 (1943): 153–82; Gottfried Frenzel, “Glasmalerei in Schwaben,” in Suevia Sacra: Frühe Kunst in Schwaben, ed. Bruno Bushart (Augsburg, 1973), pp. 217–24; Louis Grodecki, Le Vitrail Roman (Freiburg, 1977), pp. 50–54.

7. Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek ms. Brev. 128, fol. 10v. The manuscript dates from the first half of the twelfth century, probably 1125–50. See Karl Löffler, Schwäbische Buchmalerei in Romanischer Zeit (Augsburg, 1928), pp. 35–39.

8. The San Zeno image of Abraham meeting the three angels is illustrated in John Williams, “Generationes Abrahae: Reconquest Iconography in Leon,” Gesta 16 (1977): 8. On San Zeno, see Alfred Boeckler, Die Bronzetür von Verona (Leipzig-Giessen, 1931); Ursula Mende, Die Bronzetüren des Mittelalters 800–1200 (Munich, 1994); Gian Lorenzo Mellini, I Maestri dei Bronzi di San Zeno (Bergamo, 1992). On the Chartres window, see James R. Johnson, “The Tree of Jesse Window of Chartres: Laudes Regiae,” Speculum (1961): 1–22. One of the earliest and most interesting uses of the pointed hat as an unambiguously “Jewish” hat is in the Essen Missal (Düsseldorf Landesbibliothek ms. D.4, fol. 8v, dated ca. 1100), where it appears on the head of Synagoga. Discussed in Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art, 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993), Vol. 1, pp. 64–65 and p. 217.

9. Dombibliothek Hildesheim ms. St. Godehard 1. See Jane Geddes, The Saint Albans Psalter: A Book for Christina of Markyate (London, 2005), plates 12, 20, 22, 27, 38, and 39. Saint Joseph, the Jewish elder in the Presentation, an onlooker to the raising of Lazarus, and three figures who lay Jesus in his tomb all wear pointed hats in the Winchester Psalter: London, BL ms. Cotton Nero C iv, fols. 14, 15, 16, 19, and 22.

10. On the twelfth-century understanding of history as a sequential succession of events, see M.-D. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century (Chicago, 1968), pp. 168–70.

11. I discuss this further in ch. 6.

12. On the spread of typological programs in the twelfth century, see Nigel Morgan, “The Iconography of Twelfth-Century Mosan Enamels,” in Rhein und Maas: Kunst und Kultur 800–1400, 2 vols. (Cologne, 1973), vol. 2, pp. 263–75; Louis Grodecki, “À propos des vitraux de Châlons-sur-Marne. Deux points d’iconographie mosane,” in L’Art Mosane (Paris, 1952), pp. 161–70; F. Röhrig, “Rota in medio Rotae,” Jahrbuch des Stiftes Klosterneuburg n.f. 5 (1965): 7–12; Herbert L. Kessler, “Corporeal Texts, Spiritual Paintings, and the Mind’s Eye,” in Reading Images and Texts: Medieval Images and Texts as Forms of Communication. Papers from the Third Utrecht Symposium on Medieval Literacy, ed. M. Hageman and M. Mostert (Utrecht, 2000), pp. 9–27; Christopher G. Hughes, “Visual Typology in Early Gothic Art, 1140–1240,” PhD diss. (University of California at Berkeley, 2000); T. A. Heslop, “Worcester Cathedral Chapter House and the Harmony of the Testaments,” in New Offerings, Ancient Treasures: Essays in Medieval Art for George Henderson, ed. Paul Binski and W. Noel (Stroud, 2001), pp. 281–311.

13. For a different view, see Stefan Rohrbacher, “The Charge of Deicide: An Anti-Jewish Motif in Medieval Christian Art,” Journal of Medieval History 17 (1991): 297–321. Though I differ with Rohrbacher regarding most of his examples (he generally offers an anachronistic reading of the Phrygian cap), his fig. 2 does seem to be a compelling early example of Jewish hats on the heads of Christ’s executioners.

14. See ch. 1 above.

15. London, Lambeth Palace ms. 3 (a related, poorly preserved volume is in the Maidstone Museum of Art, Kent). The Jesse tree (fol. 198) prefaces the book of Isaiah; the other image is the initial O to Habbakuk, on fol. 307. See C. R. Dodwell, The Canterbury School of Illumination, 1066–1200 (Cambridge, 1954), pp. 88ff; Dodwell, The Great Lambeth Bible with an Introduction and Notes (London, 1959); Kaufmann, Biblical Imagery in Medieval England, pp. 86–87; Don Denny, “Notes on the Lambeth Bible,” Gesta 16 (1977): 51–64; Arthur Watson, The Early Iconography of the Tree of Jesse (Oxford, 1934), pp. 99–102. On the Saint-Denis window, see Conrad Rudolph, Artistic Change at St-Denis: Abbot Suger’s Program and the Early Twelfth-Century Controversy over Art (Princeton, 1990); Louis Grodecki, Les Vitraux de Saint-Denis. Études sur les vitraux de Suger à Saint-Denis (XIIe siècle) (Paris, 1976); Jacqueline A. Frank, “The Quadrige Aminadab Medallion in the ‘Anagogical’ Window at the Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 133 (1999): 219–34. On the Tours sacramentary (Paris, BN ms. lat. 193, fol. 71r), see Heinz Schreckenberg, Die Juden in der Kunst Europas: Ein historischer Bildatlas (Göttingen and Freiburg, 1996), p. 550. On the baptismal font, see Jean-François Faü, L’image des Juifs dans l’art chrétien médiéval (Paris, 2005), p. 35 (image on p. 37). For more unveiled Synagogas, see Philippe Verdier, “Suger, a-t’-il été en France le créateur du thème iconographique du couronnement de la Vierge?” Gesta 15 (1976): 227–36.

16. See Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1952); Nikolaus M. Häring, “Commentary and Hermeneutics,” in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 173–200.

17. In particular, the heavily typological Glossa Ordinaria, created at the Laon cathedral school (ca. 1100–40), the even more insistently typological readings of Rupert of Deutz, and the literal-historical approach pioneered by Hugh of Saint-Victor (d. 1141) and his School of Saint-Victor at Paris. On typological exegesis in general, see the works cited in chapter 1, note 118 (p. 298). On the Glossa Ordinaria, see Lesley Smith, The Glossa Ordinaria: The Making of a Medieval Bible Commentary (Leiden and Boston, 2009); Smalley, Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, pp. 46–66; Ermenegildo Bertola, “La ‘Glossa Ordinaria’ ed i suoi problemi,” RTAM 45 (1978): 34–78; Robert Wielockx, “Autour de la Glossa Ordinaria,” RTAM 49 (1982): 222–28; Biblia latina cum glossa ordinaria: Facsimile reprint of the Editio Princeps (Adolph Rusch of Strassburg, 1480–81), 4 vols., ed. Karlfried Froehlich and Margaret T. Gibson (Turnhout, 1992). On Rupert, see John Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz (Berkeley, 1983). On Saint-Victor, see Jean Chatillon, “La Culture de l’école de Saint-Victor au 12e siècle,” in Entretiens sur la Renaissance du 12e siècle, ed. M. de Gandillac and E. Jeauneau (Paris and The Hague, 1968), pp. 156–58, and several articles on the Victorines and their legacy in Franklin T. Harkins, ed., Transforming Relations: Essays on Jews and Christians throughout History in Honor of Michael A. Signer (Notre Dame, 2010).

18. On the connections between Bible study and anti-Judaism, see Jeremy Cohen, “Scholarship and Intolerance in the Medieval Academy: The Study and Evaluation of Judaism in European Christendom,” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 592–613. On Rupert of Deutz’s anti-Jewish exegesis, see Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz, pp. 241–48; David E. Timmer, “Biblical Exegesis and the Jewish-Christian Controversy in the Early Twelfth Century,” Church History 58 (1989): 309–21; and Maria Lodovica Arduini, Ruperto di Deutz e la controversia tra cristiani ed ebrei nel secolo XII (Rome, 1979). On Victorine exegesis and the Jews, see Rebecca Moore, Jews and Christians in the Life and Thought of Hugh of St.-Victor (Atlanta, 1998). In spite of the fine article by Michael A. Signer, “The Glossa Ordinaria and the Transmission of Medieval Anti-Judaism,” in A Distinct Voice: Medieval Studies in Honor of Leonard E. Boyle, O.P., ed. Jaqueline Brown and William P. Stoneman (Notre Dame, 1997), pp. 591–605, and the analysis of the Glossa on Genesis 22 in Devorah Schoenfeld, Isaac on Jewish and Christian Altars: Polemic and Exegesis in Rashi and the Glossa Ordinaria (New York, 2013), the role of Jews in the Glossa still needs further examination.

19. See Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christians and Jews in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance (London and New York, 1995), pp. 107–23.

20. See, e.g., Morgan, “The Iconography of Twelfth-Century Mosan Enamels,” p. 263; Anna C. Esmeijer, “The Open Doors and the Heavenly Vision: Political and Spiritual Elements in the Programme of Decoration of Schwarzrheindorf,” in Polyanthea: Essays on Art and Literature in Honor of William Sebastian Hecksher (The Hague, 1993), pp. 43–56; and Michael Curschmann, “Imagined Exegesis: Text and Picture in the Exegetical Works of Rupert of Deutz, Honorius Augustodunensis, and Gerhoh of Reichersberg,” Traditio 44 (1988): 145–69.

21. Glass, “Pseudo-Augustine, Prophets, and Pulpits in Campania.”

22. See Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz.

23. See Sara Lipton, “The Sweet Lean of His Head: Writing about Looking at the Crucifix in the High Middle Ages,” Speculum 80 (2005): 1172–1208. Rupert’s devotional inclinations are discussed in Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York, 2002).

24. Rupert of Deutz, Vita Heriberti: Kritische Edition mit Kommentar und Untersuchungen, ed. Peter Dinter (Bonn, 1976). Discussed in Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz, pp. 225–26. Heribert had founded the Abbey of Deutz ca. 1003. The original Vita had been written ca. 1045–56 by a Deutz monk named Lambert: Lantbert vom Deutz, Vita Heriberti, Miracula Heriberti, Gedichte, Liturgische Texte, ed. Berhard Vogel, MGH Scriptores 73 (Hannover, 2001), pp. 135–201. This discussion is a revised version of Sara Lipton, “Unfeigned Witness: Jews, Matter, and Vision in Twelfth-Century Christian Art,” in Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism, ed. Herbert L. Kessler and David Nirenberg (Philadelphia and Oxford, 2011), pp. 45–73.

25. Vita Heriberti 1.4–8, ed. Dinter, pp. 33–35. In the original version (Lantbert vom Deutz, Vita Heriberti), the miracle appears on pp. 141–42.

26. Vita Heriberti 1.4–8, ed. Dinter, p. 34. The italicized phrases are biblical quotes, from Luke 1:35 and Acts 2:28.

27. Augustine of Hippo, Sermo 263 (http://www.augustinus.it/latino/discorsi/index2.htm). PL 38:1209–12 omits some of this text. See the introduction.

28. Vita Heriberti 1.4–8, ed. Dinter, p. 34.

29. Vita Heriberti 1.4–8, ed. Dinter, p. 34.

30. Elisabeth van Houts, “Gender and Authority of Oral Witnesses in Europe (800–1300),” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 9 (1999): 203. Canonization procedures had been introduced only in the late tenth century—the first formal canonization was in 993.

31. See W. Ullman, “Medieval Principles of Evidence,” Law Quarterly Review 62 (1946): 77–87; H. L. Ho, “The Legitimacy of Medieval Proof,” Journal of Law and Religion 19 (2003): 259–98; K. W. Nörr, “Institutional Foundations of the New Jurisprudence,” in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. R. L. Benson and G. Constable (Oxford, 1982), pp. 324–37; James A. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law (London, 1995), pp. 120–53.

32. E. W. Kemp, “Pope Alexander III and the Canonization of Saints: The Alexander Prize Essay,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th ser., 27 (1945): 14. See also Jay Rubenstein, “Liturgy against History: The Competing Visions of Lanfranc and Eadmer of Canterbury,” Speculum 74 (1999): 297; William Hamilton Bryson, “Witnesses: A Canonist’s View,” American Journal of Legal History 13 (1969): 57–67.

33. James A. Brundage, “Juridical Space: Female Witnesses in Canon Law,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 52 (1998): 147–56; van Houts, “Gender and Authority.”

34. Quoted in Kemp, “Pope Alexander III and the Canonization of Saints,” p. 15.

35. John T. Gilchrist, ed. and trans., The Collection in Seventy-Four Titles: A Canon Law Manual of the Gregorian Reform (Toronto, 1980), p. 99 (Titulus 5, Capitula 48, attributed to Pope Callixtus).

36. Gilchrist, The Collection in Seventy-Four Titles, p. 163 (Titulus 20, Capitula 169). The canon is quoting 1 Tim. 3:7. Compare the analysis of the Jew as privileged testimonial “outsider” in Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. and trans. Kurt Wolff (Glencoe, 1950), pp. 402–08.

37. Vita Heriberti 2.2–6, ed. Dinter, pp. 34–35.

38. See Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1999), ch. 2.

39. On the commercial revolution, see Michael Postan, “Trade,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe from the Decline of the Roman Empire, Vol. 2, Trade and Industry in the Middle Ages, ed. Edward Miller, Cynthia Postan, and M. M. Postan (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 234–36; Peter Spufford, “Coins and Coinage,” in the same volume, pp. 805–07; and, still useful, Raymond de Roover, “The Organization of Trade,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, Vol. 3, Organization and Policies in the Middle Ages, ed. M. M. Postan, E. E. Rich, and Edward Miller (Cambridge, 1963), pp. 66–70. On Jewish economic activities, see Michael Toch, “Economic Activities of German Jews in the Middle Ages,” in Wirtschaftsgeschichte der mittelalterlichen Juden, ed. Michael Toch (Munich, 2008), pp. 181–210; Markus J. Wenninger, “Juden als Münzmeister, Zollpächter und fürstliche Finanzbeamte im mittelalterlichen Aschkenas,” in Wirtschaftsgeschichte der mittelalterlichen Juden, pp. 121–38; Jean-Pierre Devroey and Christian Brouwer, “La Participation des Juifs au commerce dans le monde franc (VIe–Xe siècles),” in Voyages et voyageurs à Byzance et en Occident du VIe au XIe siècle: Actes du colloque international organisé par la Section d’histoire de l’Université libre de Bruxelles en collaboration avec le Département des sciences historiques de l’Université, ed. Alain Dierkens, Jean-Marie Sansterre, and Jean-Louis Küpper (Geneva, 2000), pp. 339–74. Contrary to the frequent assertion that Jews were landless, some Jews were landholders in these regions, and Jews also worked as servants, artisans, innkeepers, physicians, teachers, etc. See Toch, “Economic Activities,” pp. 204–07.

40. See Lipton, Images of Intolerance, pp. 31–53; Giacomo Todeschini, “Christian Perceptions of Jewish Economic Activity in the Middle Ages,” in Wirtschaftsgeschichte der mittelalterlichen Juden, pp. 1–16; Lester K. Little, “The Function of the Jews in the Commercial Revolution,” in Povertà e ricchezza nella spiritualità dei secoli XII e XIII (Todi, 1969), pp. 271–87.

41. Bernard of Clairvaux used the term “judaizare” as a synonym for charging interest on a loan: Epistola 363.7, in Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. J. Leclercq, C. H. Talbot, and H. M. Rochais (Rome, 1977), vol. 8, p. 316. See Todeschini, “Christian Perceptions of Jewish Economic Activity in the Middle Ages,” pp. 1–16.

42. See R. Génestal, Le Role des monastères comme établissements de crédit, étudié en Normandie du XIe à la fin du XIIIe siècle (Paris, 1901), and Todeschini, “Christian Perceptions of Jewish Economic Activity in the Middle Ages,” pp. 11–13.

43. Suger, De rebus in administratione sua gestis, in Oeuvres complètes de Suger, ed. A. Lecoy de la Marche (Paris, 1867), pp. 155–57. The text was written ca. 1145–48. For a more recent edition, see Suger, Oeuvres, ed. Françoise Gasparri (Paris, 1996), vol. 1, pp. 54ff. The first part of this work relates how Suger put the abbey’s finances back on a sound footing; the second part describes the design and construction of the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis.

44. Suger, De rebus in administratione sua gestis, p. 189.

45. Vita Heriberti 1.4–8, ed. Dinter, p. 34. The phrase Iudaica cecitas (“Judaic blindness”) is from Rom. 11:25.

46. A term coined by Jean Leclerq, “La Crise du monachisme aux XIe et XIIe siècles,” Bulletino dell’Instituto storico italiano per il medio evo 70 (1958): 24. See also John Van Engen, “The ‘Crisis of Cenobitism’ Reconsidered,” Speculum 61 (1986): 269–304.

47. See Conrad Rudolph, Artistic Change at St-Denis, and Rudolph, The “Things of Greater Importance”: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia and the Medieval Attitude toward Art (Philadelphia, 1990); Jean-Claude Schmitt, Le Corps des images: Essais sur la culture visuelle au moyen âge (Paris, 2002); Herbert L. Kessler, Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art (Philadelphia, 2000); Adriaan H. Bredero, Cluny et Cîteaux au douzième siècle: L’histoire d’une controverse monastique (Amsterdam, 1987); Christopher Norton, “Bernard, Suger, and Henry I’s Crown Jewels,” Gesta 45 (2006): 1–14. On canons’ invocation of Aaron and the Levites as their forerunners, see Bynum, Jesus as Mother, p. 29.

48. Apologia XII.28, in Rudolph, Things of Greater Importance, p. 10. See also Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. Leclercq and Rochais, vol. 3, p. 222.

49. Apologia XII.28, in Rudolph, Things of Greater Importance, pp. 10–11.

50. Idung, Dialogus 1.6 and 1.36, in R. B. C. Huygens, ed., “Le Moine Idung et ses deux ouvrages,” Studi medievali 13 (1972): 291–470. Idung was quoting Saint Jerome, Letter to Nepotian, Ep. 52:10, Sancti Eusebii Hieronymi Epistulae, Pars I, Epistulae I–LXX, ed. Isidore Hilberg, CSEL 54 (Vienna and Leipzig, 1910), p. 433.

51. Liber de divinis officiis 2.23, ed. Rhabanus Haacke, CCCM 7 (Turnhout, 1967), pp. 10–12, discussed in Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz, p. 60. See also John Van Engen, “Theophilus Presbyter and Rupert of Deutz: Arts and Benedictine Theology,” Viator 11 (1980): 147–64.

52. See Suger, De rebus in administratione sua gestis; Rudolph, Artistic Change at St-Denis and “Things of Greater Importance.”

53. See Stanislaus Ceglar, “Guillaume de Saint-Thierry et son rôle directeur aux premiers chapitres des abbés bénédictins, Reims 1131 et Soissons 1132,” in Saint-Thierry: Une abbaye du VIe au XXe siècle. Actes du Colloque international d’histoire monastique, Reims-Saint-Thierry, 11 au 14 octobre 1976 (Saint Thierry, 1979), p. 324.

54. See Herbert L. Kessler, “‘They Preach Not by Speaking Out Loud but by Signifying’: Vitreous Arts as Typology,” Gesta 51 (2012): 55–70; Kessler, Spiritual Seeing; Bruno Reudenbach, “‘Ornatus materialis domus dei’: Die theologische Legitimation handwerklicher Künste bei Theophilus,” in Studien zur Geschichte der europäischen Skulptur im 12./13. Jahrhundert, ed. Herbert Beck and Kerstin Hengevoss-Dürkopp (Frankfurt, 1994), 1.1–16.

55. Vita Heriberti 2.9, ed. Dinter, p. 35.

56. See Kessler, “‘They Preach Not by Speaking Out Loud but by Signifying.’”

57. Welfenschatz, Kunstgewerbemuseum, Berlin, W11. On this object, see Anton Legner, Romanische Kunst im Deutschland (Munich, 1982), p. 185; Otto von Falke, R. Schmidt, and G. Swarzenski, Der Welfenschatz (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1930), no. 17; Dietrich Kötzsche, “Zur Stand der Forschung der Goldschmiedekunst des 12. Jahrhunderts im Rhein-Maas-Gebiet,” in Rhein und Maas, vol. 2, pp. 191–236 (color images between pp. 212 and 213 and 220 and 221); Peter E. Lasko, Ars Sacra: 800–1200 (Harmondsworth, 1972), pp. 173–74; Dietrich Kötzsche, “Goldschmiedekunst,” in Die Zeit der Staufer. Geschichte-Kunst-Kultur, ed. Reiner Haussherr (Stuttgart, 1977), vol. 1, pp. 391–93; Stefan Soltek, “Kölner romanische Tragaltäre,” in Ornamenta ecclesiae. Kunst und Künstler der Romanik, ed. Anton Legner (Cologne, 1985), vol. 2, p. 403.

58. The prophets are: Daniel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezechiel, Osee (Hosea), Malachias, Jonas, Nahum, Joel, Abdias (Obadiah), Zachariah, and Sophonias (Zephaniah). The kings are David, Melchisedech, and Solomon. The soothsayer is Balaam. On the lack of Old Testament imagery on earlier portable altars, see Robert Favreau, “Les Autels portatifs et leurs inscriptions,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 46 (2003): 327 and 337. For a comprehensive catalog of portable altars, see Michael Budde, Altare portatile: Kompendium der Tragaltäre des Mittelalters 600–1600 (Münster, 1998). For a study of portable altars in their liturgical contexts, see Eric Palazzo, L’Espace rituel et le sacré dans le christianisme: La liturgie de l’autel portative dans l’antiquité et au moyen âge (Turnhout, 2008). I thank Professor Herb Kessler for this reference.

59. Favreau, “Les Autels portatifs et leurs inscriptions,” p. 340.

60. “Doctrina pleni fidei patres duodeni testantur, ficta non esse prophetica dicta / Celitus afflati de christo vaticinati / hi predixerunt que post ventura fuerunt.” The “twelve fathers” presumably refers to Daniel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Malachi, Jonah, Nahum, Joel, Obadiah, Zechariah, and Zephaniah—all true prophets. Balaam was considered a false prophet although he predicted the rising star, and the other three are kings.

61. Contra Faustum 16.21, ed. J. Zycha, CSEL 25 (Vienna, 1891–92), p. 463.

62. See Uwe Brunn, Des Contestaires aux cathares. Discours de réforme et propagande antihérétique dans les pays du Rhin et de la Meuse avant l’Inquisition (Paris, 2006), pp. 39–160, which now largely supersedes R. I. Moore, The Birth of Popular Heresy (London, 1975), pp. 72–75, and Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 2002), pp. 62–64.

63. Rupert of Deutz seems to have been the first high medieval biblical scholar to revive the exact wording of the Contra Faustum passage paraphrased in the altar: In Genesim 4.6, in De Sancta Trinitate et operibus eius, ed. Hrabanus Haacke, CCCM 21 (Turnhout, 1971), p. 288.

64. This is in fact a verse not from Jeremiah but from Baruch 3:38. The verse features prominently in the section of Rupert’s Anulus devoted to defending veneration of the crucifix (ed. Haacke, in Arduini, Ruperto di Deutz, pp. 232–36).

65. Gen. 32:30.

66. Zach. 2:8.

67. For a complete analysis of all the inscriptions, see Lipton, “Unfeigned Witness.”

68. De Speculo Caritatis II.xxiii.67, in Opera Omnia, ed. A. Hoste and C.H. Talbot, CCCM 1 (Turnhout, 1971), pp. 97–98.

69. See Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1991), esp. pp. 98–129.

70. Baldwin of Canterbury, Spiritual Tractates, trans. David N. Bell, 2 vols. (Kalamazoo, 1986), vol. 1, pp. 43–54.

71. See Francis Wormald, The Winchester Psalter (London, 1973), and Kristine Edmonson Haney, The Winchester Psalter: An Iconographical Study (Leicester, 1986). The other manuscripts are the St. Albans Psalter (Dombibliothek Hildesheim ms. St. Godehard 1) and the Bury St. Edmunds Gospel Book (Cambridge, Pembroke ms. 120).

72. London, BL ms. Cotton Nero C iv, fol. 25.

73. R. W. L. Moberly, The Bible, Theology, and Faith: A Study of Abraham and Jesus (Cambridge, 2000), p. 46, notes that the “key issue” in the Road to Emmaus episode is “How does one discern the risen Christ?”

74. Otto Pächt, The Rise of Pictorial Narrative in Twelfth-Century England (Oxford, 1962), p. 34. The text of the drama may be found in Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1933), vol. 1, pp. 453–83, 691–93.

75. Noted by Haney, The Winchester Psalter, p. 121.

76. On this gesture, see n. 99, below.

77. Rom. 11:7–10.

78. The shrine is in the Church of Saint Heribert in Deutz-Cologne. It dates to ca. 1150–70. In this chapter I am not proposing a tight, sequential chronology of the different kinds of Jewish witness discussed. The dating of the objects and images in question is too uncertain to allow for more than a general location of these developments to the years 1130–70. On the shrine, see Rhein und Maas, vol. 1, pp. 277–78, and vol. 2, pp. 221–23; Martin Seidler, “Studium zum Reliquienschrein des Heiligen Heriberts in Deutz (Stadt Köln). Rekonstruktion einer Entstehung,” PhD diss. (University of Bonn, 1992); Ornamenta Ecclesiae, nr. E91 and vol. 2, pp. 314–23; Suzanne Collon-Gevaert and Jacques Stiennon, A Treasury of Romanesque Art: Metalwork, Illuminations, and Sculpture from the Valley of the Meuse, trans. S. Waterston (London and New York, 1972); Lasko, Ars Sacra, p. 204; Suzanne Collon-Gevaert, “Les Médaillons émaillés de la châsse de Saint Héribert, à Deutz” Annales de la Fédération archéologique et historique de Belgique, Congrès de Liège (1932): 142–48.

79. For a discussion of the roundel, see Carolyn M. Carty, “The Role of Medieval Dream Images in Authenticating Ecclesiastical Construction,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 62 (1999): 45–90; Carty, “Dream Images, Memoria, and the Heribert Shrine,” in Memory and the Medieval Tomb, ed. Elizabeth Valdez del Alamo, with Carol Stamatis Pendergast (Aldershot and Brookfield, Vt., 2000), pp. 227–47.

80. “Magnifice prolis notat ortum visio solis.”

81. For other figures wearing such hats outdoors, see Paris, BN ms. lat. 11535, fol. 6v, illustrated in Mellinkoff, Outcasts, vol. 2, fig. III.8; London, BL ms. Landesdown 383, fol. 6v; and Stuttgart Württembergische Landesbibliothek Cod. hist. fol. 415, fol. 17v.

82. “Hoc previdit ita pater eius et Israhelita.”

83. Meyer Schapiro, “An Illuminated English Psalter of the Early Thirteenth Century,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23 (1960): 183; Judith K. Golden, “Images of Instruction, Marie de Bretagne, and the Life of St. Eustace as Illustrated in British Library ms. Egerton 745,” in Between the Picture and the Word: Essays in Commemoration of John Plummer, ed. Colum Hourihane, Index of Christian Art Occasional Papers, no. 8 (University Park, Pa., 2005), pp. 70–84.

84. Rudolph, Things of Greater Importance, English text, p. 11; Latin text, pp. 280–81.

85. Johnson, “Tree of Jesse.”

86. On the triptych, see William Voelkle, The Stavelot Triptych: Mosan Art and the Legend of the True Cross (New York, 1980); Joyce Brodsky, “The Stavelot Triptych: Notes on a Mosan Work,” Gesta 11 (1972): 19–33; Kelly M. Holbert, “Mosan Reliquary Triptychs and the Cult of the True Cross in the 12th Century,” PhD diss. (Yale University, 1995), esp. pp. 7–71; Holger A. Klein, “Eastern Objects and Western Desires: Relics and Reliquaries between Byzantium and the West,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 58 (2004): 283–314; A. Frolow, La Relique de la Vraie Croix: Recherches sur le développement d’un culte (Paris, 1961), pp. 335–36; Lasko, Ars Sacra, pp. 194–96.

87. Ursmer Berlière, Monasticon Belge, Vol. 2: Province de Liège (Liège, 1962), pp. 82–85.

88. Suzanne Wittekind, Altar-Reliquiar-Retabel: Kunst und Liturgie bei Wibald von Stablo (Cologne, 2004).

89. See Wittekind, Altar-Reliquiar-Retabel; H. P. Mitchell, “Some Enamels of the School of Godefroid de Claire,” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 36 (1920): 11–18.

90. On sight, light, and the related anti-Jewish polemic in the Stavelot program, see Wittekind, Altar-Reliquiar-Retabel, esp. pp. 74–82 and 98–102.

91. Voelkle, Stavelot Triptych, pp. 7 and 11; Holbert, “Mosan Reliquary Triptychs,” p. 184; Klein, “Eastern Objects and Western Desires,” p. 299.

92. The Judas Cyriacus legend, the version favored in the West from the time of Gregory of Tours (d. 594), is an amplification of an earlier version (found in Sozomen and the Historia Ecclesiastica of Socrates Scholasticus), which did not mention Judas (or Judah) the Jew. An edition of the oldest known Latin version is Inventio Sanctae Crucis, ed. Alfred Holder (Leipzig, 1889). A less reliable but more accessible edition is AASS May 1:445–48 (Antwerp, 1680). See also Johannes Straubinger, Die Kreuzauffindungslegende: Untersuchungen über ihre altchristlichen Fassungen mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der syrischen Texte (Paderborn, 1912); Stephan Borgehammar, How the Holy Cross Was Found: From Event to Medieval Legend. With an Appendix of Texts (Stockholm, 1991), pp. 255–72; and Jan Willem Drijvers, Helena Augusta: The Mother of Constantine the Great and the Legend of Her Finding of the True Cross (Boston and Leiden, 1992).

93. Inventio Sanctae Crucis, ed. Holder, p. 3, ll. 74–83. I have emended “spirit” (spiritum) to “spit” (sputum) as more logical in this context, and as authorized by Isa. 50:6 and Matt. 26:67.

94. Drijvers, Helena Augusta, p. 166.

95. Sozomen, Historia Ecclesiastica II 1.4; quoted in Drijvers, Helena Augusta, p. 105.

96. Although the fire is mentioned in several versions of the legend, including the Inventio Sanctae Crucis (see Inventio Sanctae Crucis, ed. Holder, pp. 6–7), it had only once before been depicted in art. See Holbert, “Mosan Reliquary Triptychs,” pp. 50–51 and fig. 59.

97. Voelkle, The Stavelot Triptych, pp. 16–18.

98. Voelkle, The Stavelot Triptych, p. 16. Fire became a major topos in Hebrew martyrdom literature only after thirty-two Jews were burned at the stake in Blois in 1171: Susan L. Einbinder, Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France (Princeton, 2002), pp. 45–69.

99. On clutching the beard, see François Garnier, Le Langage de l’image au Moyen Âge. II. Grammaire des Gestes (Paris, 1982), pp. 88–94; Christa Sütterlin, “Universals in Apotropaic Symbolism: A Behavioral and Comparative Approach to Some Medieval Sculptures,” Leonardo 22 (1989): 65–74; Giles Constable, “Introduction,” in Apologiae Duae. Gozechini Epistola ad Walcherum. Burchardi, ut videtur, Abbatis Bellevallis, Apologia de Barbis, ed. R. B. C. Huygens, CCCM 62 (Turnhout, 1985), pp. 64–65.

100. Lex Cornelia de falsis (81 BC), incorporated into the Institutes of Justinian, Lib. IV, Tit. XVIII, in The Institutes of Justinian, ed. Thomas Collett Sandars (London, 1853), pp. 606–07.

101. I thank William Voelkle for this suggestion.

102. Holbert, “Mosan Reliquary Triptychs,” p. 56, believes that the bishop is Macarius, who baptized Judas.

103. The bibliography on Saint-Denis is extensive and ever growing. See especially Suger’s own description of the building of the abbey church: De rebus in administratione sua gestis (as in n. 43, above), trans. and abr. in On the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Treasures, ed. and trans. Erwin Panofsky, 2nd ed. (Princeton, 1979); Abbot Suger and Saint-Denis, a Symposium, ed. Paula Gerson (New York, 1986); Sumner McKnight Crosby and Pamela Blum, The Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis in the Time of Abbot Suger (1122–1151) (New Haven, 1981); Lindy Grant, Abbot Suger of St.-Denis: Church and State in Early Twelfth-Century France (London and New York, 1998). On Suger’s artistic influence, see Peter Kidson, “Panofsky, Suger, and St Denis,” in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 50 (1987): 1–17. On the stained glass windows, see Grodecki, Les Vitraux de Saint-Denis. On the controversy over art, see Rudolph, Artistic Change at Saint-Denis, and Kessler, Spiritual Seeing, pp. 190–205.

104. John 3:14. On this iconography, see Herbert L. Kessler, “Evil Eye(ing): Romanesque Art as a Shield of Faith,” in Romanesque Art and Thought in the Twelfth Century, ed. Colum Hourihane (University Park, Pa., 2008), pp. 107–35.

105. Kessler, Spiritual Seeing, pp. 195–97.

106. Margot Fassler, “Liturgy and Sacred History in the Twelfth-Century Tympana at Chartres,” Art Bulletin 75 (1993): 499–520, offers a similar reading of the elders on the lintel of the north door of the Royal Portal of Chartres. My reading of the Israelites on the left, behind Moses, differs from that in Kessler, “Evil Eye(ing),” p. 131.

107. “Sicut serpentes serpens necat aeneus omnes, / Sic exaltatus hostes necat in cruce Christus.”

108. See R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2007).

109. The images and objects were thus created by and for what might be called representational networks, comparable to the intellectual networks analyzed in Constant J. Mews and John N. Crossley, eds., Communities of Learning: Networks and the Shaping of Intellectual Identity in Europe, 1100–1500, Europa Sacra (Turnhout, 2011).

CHAPTER THREE: JEWISH EYES: LOVELESS LOOKING AND THE UNLOVELY CHRIST, CA. 1160–1220

1. Herman of Cappenberg, Hermannus quondam Iudaeus: Opusculum de Conversione Sua, MGH Quellen zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 4, ed. Gerlinde Niemeyer (Weimar, 1963). See Anna Sapir Abulafia, “The Ideology of Reform and Changing Ideas Concerning Jews in the Works of Rupert of Deutz and Hermannus Quondam Iudeus,” Jewish History 7 (1993): 43–63, and Jean-Claude Schmitt, La Conversion d’Hermann le Juif: Autobiographie, histoire et fiction (Paris, 2003), now translated as The Conversion of Herman the Jew: Autobiography, History, and Fiction in the Twelfth Century, trans. Alex J. Novikoff (Philadelphia, 2010). The authenticity of the work has been challenged by A. Saltman, “Hermann’s Opusculum de conversione sua: Truth or Fiction?,” Revue des Études Juives 147 (1988): 31–56.

2. Opusculum, ed. Niemeyer, p. 75. For a slightly different translation and further discussion, see Karl F. Morrison, Conversion and Text: The Cases of Augustine of Hippo, Herman-Judah, and Constantine Tsatsos (Charlottesville and London, 1992), pp. 80 and 105–06. I discuss this text in “The Sweet Lean of His Head: Writing about Looking at the Crucifix in the High Middle Ages,” Speculum 80 (2005): 1172–1208.

3. Note that in entering the church out of curiositas Judah/Herman explicitly violates Cistercian aesthetics, which condemn artworks made for curiositas: Władysław Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics, vol. 2, ed. Cyril Barrett (The Hague, 1971), p. 186.

4. In his Anulus, or Dialogue between a Christian and a Jew, Rupert of Deutz defended the Christian practice of venerating the crucifix by citing the image’s ability to kindle love. Anulus sive dialogus inter Christianum et Iudaeum, ed. Rhabanus Haacke, in Maria Lodovica Arduini, Ruperto di Deutz e la controversia tra cristiani ed ebrei nel secolo XII (Roma, 1979), pp. 183–242; it also appears in PL 170:560–610. The Jew in Rupert’s text is presumed to be Judah/Herman himself, who relates elsewhere in his “autobiography” that while still a Jew he engaged in a religious debate with Rupert.

5. Opusculum, ed. Niemeyer, pp. 116–17.

6. See Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York, 2002), and Karl F. Morrison, “I Am You”: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology, and Art (Princeton, 1988).

7. Bremen, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek ms. a. 244, fol. 113v; now in the Focke Museum, Bremen. See Christopher de Hamel, Glossed Books of the Bible and the Origins of the Paris Book Trade (Woodbridge, Suffolk, and Dover, N.H., 1984), p. 59; Heinrich der Löwe und seine Zeit: Herrschaft und Repräsentation der Welfen 1125–1235: Katalog der Ausstellung, Braunschweig 1995, ed. Jochen Luckhardt and Franz Niehoff, 3 vols. (Munich, 1995), vol. 1, pp. 488–90, no. G11; Walter Cahn, “Illuminated Psalter Commentaries,” in Psalms in Community: Jewish and Christian Textual, Liturgical, and Artistic Traditions, ed. Harold W. Attridge and Margot E. Fassler (Atlanta, 2003), pp. 241–64. On Lombard’s Psalms commentary, written sometime before 1138, see Marcia Colish, “Psalterium Scholasticorum: Peter Lombard and the Emergence of Scholastic Psalms Exegesis,” Speculum 67 (1992): 531–48.

8. See Romans 11:7–10; Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmum 68, Sermo 2, and many others. See also Alexa Sand, “Vision, Devotion, and Difficulty in the Psalter Hours of Yolande of Soissons,” Art Bulletin 87 (2005): 14, and Cahn, “Illuminated Psalter Commentaries,” p. 258.

9. On the form of the brazen serpent, see Frederick P. Pickering, Literature and Art in the Middle Ages (London, 1970), pp. 261–70; Suzanne Wittekind, Altar-Reliquiar-Retabel: Kunst und Liturgie bei Wibald von Stablo (Cologne, 2004), p. 100; Herbert L. Kessler, “Evil Eye(ing): Romanesque Art as a Shield of Faith,” in Romanesque Art and Thought in the Twelfth Century, Essays in Honor of Walter Cahn, ed. Colum Hourihane (University Park, Pa., 2008), pp. 107–35.

10. See Israel Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Barbara Harshav and Jonathan Chipman (Berkeley, 2006), p. 117. As we shall see, Christians adopted this phrase to underscore Jews’ hard-hearted response to the image of Christ crucified.

11. These figures’ looks were probably meant to associate them with wealthy and allegedly corrupt youths, whose “effeminate,” tight-fitting fashions and preference for close shaving were much criticized by moralists (Jewish and Christian) in the mid-twelfth century.

12. On pointing as a gesture of debate and sign of aggression, see Jean-Claude Schmitt, La Raison des gestes dans l’Occident médiévale (Paris, 1990); François Garnier, Le Langage de l’image au Moyen Âge, 2 vols. (Paris, 1982); O. Chomentovskaja, “Le Comput digital: Histoire d’un geste dans l’art de la Renaissance italienne,” Gazette des Beaux Arts 20 (1938): 157–72.

13. See Wittekind, Altar-Reliquiar-Retabel, p. 101n185, on the use of this verse in a portable altar from Stavelot and on links between Archbishop Hartwig and Abbot Wibald of Stavelot.

14. See Luke 23:36 and John 19:34. One or two isolated examples in earlier art mark Christ’s killers and tormentors in a way that could have been read as “Jewish”: the doors of San Zeno, Verona (ca. 1100–30), and a late-eleventh-century manuscript reproduced in Stefan Rohrbacher, “The Charge of Deicide: An Anti-Jewish Motif in Medieval Christian Art,” Journal of Medieval History 17 (1991): 297–321, fig. 2. Rohrbacher’s other pre-twelfth-century images are less convincing as examples of anti-Jewish iconography. On the iconography of Longinus and Stephaton, see William Chester Jordan, “The Last Tormentor of Christ: An Image of the Jew in Ancient and Medieval Exegesis, Art, and Drama,” Jewish Quarterly Review n.s. 78 (1987): 21–47; R. J. Peebles, The Legend of Longinus in Ecclesiastical Tradition and in English Literature, and Its Connections with the Grail, Bryn Mawr College Monographs 9 (Baltimore, 1911); and Konrad Burdach, Der Gral: Forschungen über seinen Ursprung und seinen Zusammenhang mit der Longinuslegende (rpt. Darmstadt, 1974). The anti-Jewish thrust of the Bremen initial is noted by Cahn, “Illuminated Psalter Commentaries,” p. 258.

15. Paris, Musée du Louvre, OA 8096. See Marie-Madeleine Gauthier, Les Émaux de Moyen Âge occidental (Paris, 1972), pp. 154–55 and catalog no. 110, p. 360. I am grateful to Elisabeth Antoine and Marie-Cecile Bardo of the Louvre for their generous response to my request for information and photographs.

16. The Index of Christian Art lists no earlier and only two other twelfth-century versions of the scene from the Latin West: an ivory casket from Cologne, ca. 1150–1200 (Stuttgart, Württembergisches Landesmuseum, KK blau 125), and a font from Skåne, Sweden. Not listed in the index is the Pieterskirk in Utrecht, mentioned in Elizabeth den Hartog, “The Iconography of the Choir Capitals in the Church of Our Lady in Maastricht,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 62 (1999): 320–65, and an initial from a French Bible, ca. 1175–1200: London, BL ms. Harley 2895, fol. 17. See also “Kreuzennagelung,” in Lexikon der Christlichen Ikonographie, ed. Engelbert Kirschbaum, 8 vols. (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1971).

17. On this gesture, see ch. 2, n. 99; Carol Lansing, Passion and Order: Restraint of Grief in the Medieval Italian Communes (Ithaca, 2008), pp. 77–81.

18. Gauthier, Les Émaux de Moyen Âge occidental, pp. 154–55, attributes his awkward profile to a lack of artistic skill. It seems strange, though, that the draftsman’s sense of proportion should have failed him only in this sole instance.

19. Ruth Mellinkoff and Debra Higgs Strickland both rightly highlight the influence of bestial, monstrous, and diabolical visual models on portrayals of Jews, though neither periodizes the phenomenon. Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art, 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993), vol. 1, pp. 127–35, and Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, 2003), pp. 77–78.

20. The initial on top depicts the Maccabees fighting their Syrian occupiers. On this manuscript, see Dominic Marner, “The Bible of Hugh le Puiset (Durham Dean and Chapter Library, MS A.II.l),” in Anglo-Norman Durham, 1093–1193, ed. David Rollason, Margaret Harvey, and Michael Prestwich (Rochester, N.Y., 1998), pp. 471–84. See also the Roman killer in the Innocents scene in the Martyrology dating to ca. 1180 (Stuttgart, Württembergisches Landesmuseum Cod. Hist. 415, fol. 83v).

21. Here I very much agree with Anthony Bale, Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews, and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages (London, 2009).

22. On the evolution of anti-Jewish caricature, see ch. 5.

23. Early- and mid-twelfth-century anti-Jewish philosophical polemics accused Jews of an irrationality amounting to a kind of bestiality. See Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christians and Jews in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance (London and New York, 1995); Dominique Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam, 1000–1150, trans. Graham Robert Edwards (Ithaca, 2002); Irven M. Resnick, Marks of Distinction: Christian Perceptions of Jews in the High Middle Ages (Washington, D.C., 2012), pp. 34–44. See, however, Irven M. Resnick, “Odo of Tournai and the Dehumanization of Medieval Jews: A Reexamination,” Jewish Quarterly Review 98 (2008): 471–84, and William Chester Jordan, review of Iogna-Prat in Jewish Quarterly Review 95 (2005): 721–23, which caution against taking polemical rhetoric overly literally.

24. See Resnick, Marks of Distinction, pp. 249–319.

25. Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (Princeton, 1994), p. 53.

26. None of the surviving treatises attribute any particular characteristics to this kind of nose, and they say nothing about Jewish noses. For editions, see Richard Foerster, ed., Scriptores Physiognomonici Graeci et Latini, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1893), and Roger A. Pack, ed., “Auctoris Incerti de Physiognomia Libellus,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 41 (1975): 113–38. Fine studies include D. Jacquart, “La Physiognomie à l’époque de Frédéric II: Le traité de Michel Scot,” Micrologus 2 (1994): 19–37; Jole Agrimi, “Fisiognomica: Nature alla specchio ovvero luce e ombre,” Micrologus 4 (1996): 129–78; and Yossi Ziegler, “Text and Context: On the Rise of Physiognomic Thought in the Later Middle Ages,” in De Sion Exibit Lex et Verbum Domini de Hierusalem: Essays on Medieval Law, Liturgy and Literature in Honour of Amnon Linder, ed. Y. Hen (Turnhout, 2001), pp. 159–82.

27. Bartlett, The Making of Europe, p. 197; Bartlett, “Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 (2001): 39–56. For further discussion, see ch. 5.

28. Gerald of Wales, The Journey through Wales and The Description of Wales, trans. L. Thorpe (London, 1978), written ca. 1194, discussed in Robert Bartlett, “Gerald of Wales (c. 1146–1220x23),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, Oct. 2006. http://www.oxforddnb.com.libproxy.cc.stonybrook.edu/view/article/10769 (accessed March 3, 2014).

29. Thomas Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (Philadelphia, 1996), pp. 79–90.

30. The sole surviving manuscript of this text is Cambridge University Library ms. Add. 3037, fols. 1–77. A full transcription appears on the Queen Mary College, University of London, Web site: http://yvc.history.qmul.ac.uk/WN-joined-17–08–09.pdf (accessed March 16, 2014). A forthcoming Penguin Classics translation (Thomas of Monmouth, The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, ed. Miri Rubin) should supersede the incomplete and inadequate nineteenth-century edition and translation: Miracles of St William of Norwich (Latin Text with English Translation) by Thomas of Monmouth, ed. and trans. Augustus Jessop and M. R. James (Cambridge, 1896). The similarities between this text and Passion narratives have been noted by Bestul, Texts of the Passion, p. 69, and Bale, Feeling Persecuted, pp. 50–58.

31. Miracles of St William of Norwich, book 1, ch. 5 (Cambridge University Library ms. Add. 3037, fols. 6–7).

32. Bestul, Texts of the Passion, pp. 79 and 85–88.

33. On the ongoing vitality of twelfth-century German Jewry, see Guido Kisch, The Jews in Medieval Germany: A Study of Their Legal and Social Status (Chicago, 1949); Ephraim Kanarfogel, The Intellectual History and Rabbinic Culture of Medieval Ashkenaz (Detroit, 2013); Avraham Grossman, Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe, trans. Jonathan Chipman (Hanover, 2004); Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton, 2004); Ivan G. Marcus, “A Jewish-Christian Symbiosis: The Culture of Early Ashkenaz,” in Cultures of the Jews: A New History, ed. David Biale (New York, 2002), pp. 449–516; Marcus, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe (New Haven and London, 1996); Haym Soloveitchik, “Catastrophe and Halakhic Creativity: Ashkenaz: 1096, 1242, 1306, and 1298,” Jewish History 12 (1998): 71–85.

34. See Robert C. Stacey, “Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century England: Some Dynamics of a Changing Relationship,” in Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe, ed. Michael A. Signer and John van Engen (Notre Dame, 2001), pp. 340–53; H. G. Richardson, The English Jewry under Angevin Kings (London, 1960).

35. PL 191:636ff., quoted in Wittekind, Altar-Reliquiar-Retabel, p. 102. The Lombard comment replicates verbatim Augustine, Enarratione in Psalmum 68, Sermo 2.

36. See Jean-Pierre Bordier, Le Jeu de la Passion: Le message chrétien et le théâtre français (XIIIe–XVIe s). (Paris, 1998), p. 364.

37. See Albrecht Dieterich, “Der Ritus der verhüllten Hände,” in Kleine Schriften (Leipzig, 1911), pp. 440–49; Henry Maguire, “The Iconography of Symeon with the Christ Child in Byzantine Art,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 34 (1980): 265. Prophets holding scrolls with veiled hands appear in the Royal Portal of Chartres cathedral, dated to ca. 1145: Jean Villette, Les Portails de la cathédrale de Chartres (Paris, 1994), p. 66.

38. Paris, BN ms. lat. 8846, fol. 11v. See C. R. Dodwell, The Canterbury School of Illumination, 1066–1200 (Cambridge, 1954), pl. 70c. The man behind is grabbing his beard in another gesture of grief.

39. Feria 6 in Parasceve: Gregory the Great, Romani Pontificis Liber Responsalis sive Antiphonae per anni circulum (PL 78:766), found in slightly different form in the Improperia. The exclamation comes ultimately from Jer. 2:21. The reference to “bitterness,” not found in the patristic sources that inspired the liturgy, recalls the bitter vinegar offered to Christ on the cross as well as the vinegar into which the heady wine of the patriarchs degenerated: Jordan, “Last Tormentor,” p. 29.

40. This antiphon is quoting Ps. 26:12.

41. See Lipton, “Sweet Lean of His Head.”

42. See Edward S. Casey, The World at a Glance (Bloomington, 2007), pp. xv, 5–6.

43. The crucifix first appeared in the fifth century and became common from the seventh or eighth century. See Celia Chazelle, The Crucified God in the Carolingian Era: Theology and Art of Christ’s Passion (Cambridge, 2001), and the articles on “Kreuz” and “Kreuzigung Christi” in Kirschbaum, Lexikon der Christlichen Ikonographie.

44. See Joseph Braun, Der Christliche Altar in seiner Geschichtlichen Entwicklung (Munich, 1924), p. 468; Peter Springer, Kreuzfüsse: Ikonographie und Typologie eines Hochmittelalterlichen Gerätes (Berlin, 1981); and H. Silvestre, “Trois témoignages mosans du début du XIIe siècle sur le crucifix de l’arc triomphal,” Revue des archaéologues et historiens d’art de Louvain 9 (1976): 225–31.

45. Although a few artworks from eleventh-century Germany (Cologne especially) portrayed Christ as vulnerable and dying, this approach became common and widespread only from the second half of the twelfth century. See Erich Pattis, Christus Dominator: Vorgotische Grosskreuze (Innsbruck, 1964); Edgar Hürkey, Das Bild des Gekreuzigten im Mittelalter (Worms, 1983); Ernst Grube, “Majestas und Crucifix: Zum Motiv des Suppedaneums,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 20 (1957): 268–87; and Paul Thoby, Le Crucifix: Des origines au Concile de Trente (Nantes, 1959), pp. 124–25.

46. See Hans Belting, The Image and Its Public in the Middle Ages: Form and Function of Early Paintings of the Passion, trans. Mark Bartusis and Raymond Meyer (New Rochelle, N.Y., 1990); Paul Binski, Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England, 1170–1300 (New Haven, 2004).

47. Guigues 1er, Prieur de Charteuse, Les Méditations. Sources Chrétiennes 308 (Paris, 1983), meditation 5, p. 104. In spite of the writings of Guigo and others, as recently as 1910 an article in the Catholic Encyclopedia felt a need to insist that Christ was beautiful in form: Walter Drum, “The Incarnation,” Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7 (New York, 1910), New Advent: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07706b.htm (accessed March 3, 2014).

48. See Amy Neff, “The Pain of Compassio: Mary’s Labor at the Foot of the Cross,” Art Bulletin 80 (1998): 254–73; Otto von Simson, “Compassio and Co-Redemptio in Roger van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross,” Art Bulletin 35 (1953): 11. On emotion as an integral part of art viewing, see Morrison, “I Am You.”

49. Published by J. Leclercq in Revue bénédictine 56 (1945–46): 216–17.

50. Cur Deus Homo, book 1, ch. 2, in Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogium; Monologium; An Appendix on Behalf of the Fool by Gaunilon; and Cur Deus Homo, trans. Sidney Norton Deane (rpt. Chicago, 1926), p. 181. Such images continued to disturb more than a half century after their initial introduction: see Lipton, “Sweet Lean of His Head,” and Paul Binski, “The Crucifixion and the Censorship of Art around 1300,” in The Medieval World, ed. P. Linehan and J. Nelson (London and New York, 2001), pp. 342–60.

51. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale ms. 5246–52, fol. 18vb. For a transcription, translation, and analysis of this text, see Lipton, “Sweet Lean of His Head.”

52. De Diligendo Deo, III.7, in Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. J. Leclercq, C. H. Talbot, and H. M. Rochais (Rome, 1977), vol. 3, p. 124. Although Bernard condemned frivolous cloister carvings and extravagant church ornamentation, he was by no means an implacable enemy of visual stimuli and even promoted veneration of images of Christ crucified. On Bernard’s visual sensitivity, see Lipton, “Sweet Lean of His Head.”

53. Peter the Venerable, Petri Venerabilis Adversus Iudeorum inveteratam duritiem, ed. Y. Friedman, CCCM 58 (Turnhout, 1985), ch. 3, pp. 45–46, 54–55.

54. De colloquio Simonis et Iesu Super Evangelium 48:29, in Entretien de Simon-Pierre avec Jésus, ed. Henri Rochais (Paris, 1990), p. 252.

55. Los Angeles, Getty ms. 64, fol. 86.

56. For an introduction to and further bibliography on the Stammheim Missal, see Elizabeth C. Teviotdale, The Stammheim Missal (Los Angeles, 2001).

57. Traditional aesthetic criteria are discussed in E. H. Gombrich, “Visual Metaphors of Value in Art,” in Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art (London and New York, 1978), pp. 16–19.

58. Peter Abelard’s Ethics, ed. and trans. David Luscombe (Oxford, 1971), p. 43.

59. On a new expressivity in late-twelfth-century art, see T. A. Heslop, “The Implication of the Utrecht Psalter in English Romanesque Art,” in Romanesque: Art and Thought in the Twelfth Century, Essays in Honor of Walter Cahn, ed. Colum Hourihane (University Park, Pa., 2008), pp. 267–90; Binski, Becket’s Crown, pp. 262–63. Many non-Jewish characters were also given extreme facial expressions.

60. Paris, BN ms. lat. 8846, fol. 3v.

61. While this figure is not visually marked as Jewish, he was glossed as a Jew in many contemporary texts. See, e.g., Augustine, City of God 16.2, in Augustine of Hippo, De civitate dei, ed. B. Dombart and A. Kalb, CCSL 47, 48 (Turnhout, 1955), pp. 498–500, and the comment on Gen. 9:20–27 in the Glossa Ordinaria, PL 177:694.

62. John 8:31 and 10:31–40.

63. John 8:59 and 10:39.

64. Brussels, Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Inv. V.2912bis. The attempted stoning of Christ featured prominently in Eckbert’s Stimulus Amoris but was only rarely treated in Christian art: Emma Maayan-Fanar, “Silenus among the Jews? Anti-Jewish Polemics in Ninth-Century Byzantine Marginal Psalters,” in Between Judaism and Christianity: Art Historical Essays in Honor of Elisheva (Elisabeth) Revel-Neher, ed. Katrin Kogman-Appel and Mati Meyer (Leiden and Boston, 2009), p. 269. The foremost of these Jews is spitting at Christ, echoing the Stimulus Amoris and underscoring the contempt directed by Jews at Christ.

65. On the body as a hierarchical system, with the lower half figuring Christ’s human nature and the head and torso his divinity, see Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (London, 1983), pp. 143–44.

66. See the discussion of the uses of art in Ruperto of Deutz, Anulus sive dialogus inter Christianum et Iudaeum, ed. Haacke, in Arduini, Ruperto di Deutz, pp. 232–35.

67. On the links between pastoral care and devotional art, see Binski, Becket’s Crown, ch. 8.

68. Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton, 2006), pp. 149–85.

69. “Nathan ben Joseph Official,” in The Jewish Encyclopedia (1906), (http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/11361-nathan-ben-joseph-official) (accessed March 5, 2014).

CHAPTER FOUR: ALL THE WORLD A PICTURE: JEWS AND THE MIRROR OF SOCIETY, CA. 1220–1300

1. For an overview of these changes, see The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 5, c. 1198–c. 1300, ed. David Abulafia (Cambridge, 1999). On the thirteenth-century pastoral revolution, see R. N. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe, c. 1215–c. 1515 (Cambridge, 1995), and the articles collected in A Companion to Pastoral Care in the Late Middle Ages (1200–1500), ed. Ronald J. Stansbury (Leiden and Boston, 2010).

2. For clear recent overviews of the art of the period, see A Companion to Romanesque and Gothic Art, ed. Rudolph Conrad (Malden, Mass., 2006). Especially relevant to Chartres are Anne D. Hedeman, “Gothic Manuscript Illumination: The Case of France,” pp. 421–42; Martin Büchsel, “Gothic Sculpture, 1150–1250,” pp. 403–20; and Elizabeth Carson Pastan, “Glazing Medieval Buildings,” pp. 443–65. Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge, 1989), discusses the “vision explosion” of the high and later Middle Ages.

3. See, respectively: Suzanne Lewis, “Tractatus adversus Judaeos in the Gulbenkian Apocalypse,” Art Bulletin 68 (1986): 543–66; Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1999); Camille, The Gothic Idol; Paris, BN ms. fr. 14969, fol. 12; Debra Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries: Text, Image, Ideology (Cambridge, 1995).

4. In addition to the works cited in n. 3, above, important studies include Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993); Elizabeth Carson Pastan, “Tam haereticos quam Judaeos: Shifting Symbols in the Glazing of Troyes Cathedral,” Word and Image 10 (1994): 66–83; Heinz Schreckenberg, Die Juden in der Kunst Europas: Ein Historischer Bildatlas (Göttingen and Freiburg, 1996); Imagining the Self, Imagining the Other: Visual Representation and Jewish-Christian Dynamics in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, ed. Eva Frojmovic (Leiden and Boston, 2002); Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, 2003); Beyond the Yellow Badge: Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism in Medieval and Early Modern Visual Culture, ed. Mitchell B. Merback (Leiden and Boston, 2008); and Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism, ed. Herbert L. Kessler and David Nirenberg (Philadelphia and Oxford, 2011).

5. The most notable artworks that express intense concern with Jews are the Bible moralisée; the Cantigas de Santa Maria; an illuminated Bestiary of Guillaume le Clerc (Paris, BN ms. fr. 14969), analyzed by Nigel Morgan, “Pictured Sermons in Thirteenth-Century England,” in Tributes to Jonathan J. G. Alexander: The Making and Meaning of Illuminated Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, Art and Architecture, ed. Susan L’Engle and Gerald B. Guest (Turnhout, 2006), pp. 323–40; and the thirteenth-century English illuminated apocalypses studied by Suzanne Lewis (see n. 3, above).

6. The bibliography on Chartres is vast. See Chartres: Sources and Literary Interpretation. A Critical Bibliography, ed. Jan van der Meulen with Rudiger Hoyer and Deborah Cole (Boston, 1989). For a more recent and regularly updated list, see the Web site based at the University of Pittsburgh: http://www.medart.pitt.edu/image/France/Chartres/Chartres-Cathedral/Bibliography/FC-General-bib.htm. The erection of Chartres has been called “the single most important event in the history of Gothic architecture”: George Henderson, Chartres (New York, 1968), p. 111.

7. On the value of Chartres as “test case,” see the comments of Paul Crossley, “The Integrated Cathedral: Thoughts on ‘Holism’ and Gothic Architecture,” in The Four Modes of Seeing: Approaches to Medieval Imagery in Honour of Madeline Harrison Caviness, ed. Evelyn Staudinger Lane, Elizabeth Carson Pastan, and Ellen M. Shortel (Burlington, Vt., 2009), p. 166.

8. R. W. Southern, “Humanism and the School of Chartres,” in Medieval Humanism and Other Studies (Oxford, 1970), pp. 61–85, argued that several of the important figures traditionally associated with the School of Chartres, though they were later associated with Chartres Cathedral in some way, actually taught at Paris, suggesting that the twelfth-century Chartres School was less exalted than once thought. But this point only underscores the close intellectual ties between Chartres and the capital.

9. The Capetian connection is stressed by Lindy Grant, “Representing Dynasty: The Transept Windows at Chartres Cathedral,” in Representing History, 900–1300: Art, Music, History, ed. Robert A. Maxwell (University Park, Pa., 2010), pp. 109–14. The Web images may be found at http://www.medart.pitt.edu/image/France/Chartres/Chartres-Cathedral/chartres-main.html.

10. The quote is from Henry N. Claman, Jewish Images in the Christian Church: Art as the Mirror of the Jewish-Christian Conflict, 200–1250 C.E. (Macon, 2000), p. 183. Adolf Katzenellenbogen, The Sculptural Programs of Chartres Cathedral: Christ, Mary, Ecclesia (Baltimore, 1959), p. vi, stresses how strongly bound the cathedral sculpture was to the cult of the Virgin. The anti-Jewish potential of the cult of the Virgin has been explored by Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (New Haven, 2009), pp. 228–39, and William Chester Jordan, “Marian Devotion and the Talmud Trial of 1240,” in Religionsgespräche im Mittelalter, ed. Bernard Lewis and Friedrich Niewöhner (Wiesbaden, 1992), pp. 61–76. For the Chartres glass, see Anne F. Harris, “The Performative Terms of Jewish Iconoclasm and Conversion in Two Saint Nicholas Windows at Chartres Cathedral,” in Beyond the Yellow Badge, pp. 119–41. The connections between Chartres glass and the Bible moralisée are sketched in Jane Williams, Bread, Wine, and Money: The Windows of the Trades at Chartres Cathedral (Chicago, 1993). On anti-Judaism in those manuscripts, see Lipton, Images of Intolerance.

11. On this portal, see Whitney S. Stoddard, Sculptors of the West Portals of Chartres Cathedral (New York and London, 1952); Jean Villette, Les Portails de la Cathédrale de Chartres (Paris, 1994), pp. 13–117; and Margot Fassler, “Liturgy and Sacred History in the Twelfth-Century Tympana at Chartres,” Art Bulletin 75 (1993): 499–520. See also John James, “An Examination of Some Anomalies in the Ascension and Incarnation Portals of Chartres Cathedral,” Gesta 25 (1986): 101–08.

12. See ch. 1. The figure with a rounded, ridged cap between the queen and Isaiah on the left embrasure is called “a Jew” by Villette, Les Portails, p. 66, presumably because of the cap. The usage is somewhat odd, as all the kings, queens, and prophets on this portal were Hebrews.

13. See ch. 2.

14. Fassler, “Liturgy and Sacred History.” I find this reading more convincing than that of Villette, Les Portails, p. 57.

15. One of these Jesse trees is carved above the central door of the North Portal, and one is painted in the North Rose window. The former is described and partially illustrated in Villette, Les Portails, pp. 144–45.

16. For an analysis of the style of the transept sculpture, see Katzenellenbogen, The Sculptural Programs, pp. 92–93.

17. Anne Prache, Chartres, le portail de la Sagesse (Paris, 1994), p. 47, and Villette, Les Portails, pp. 133–34.

18. Paul Binski, Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England, 1170–1300 (New Haven and London, 2004), and Binski, “The Angel Choir at Lincoln and the Poetics of the Gothic Smile,” Art History 20 (1997): 350–74, link the new “naturalism” to the growing devotional emphasis on Christ’s humanity. See also Hans Belting, The Image and Its Public in the Middle Ages: Form and Function of Early Paintings of the Passion, trans. Mark Bartusis and Raymond Meyer (New Rochelle, N.Y., 1990), and Carol Schuler, “The Seven Sorrows of the Virgin: Popular Culture and Cultic Imagery in Pre-Reformation Europe,” Simiolus 21 (1992): 5–28.

19. The comment is attributed to Bernard of Chartres in John of Salisbury, Metalogicon 3.4, ed. C. C. J. Webb (Oxford, 1929), p. 136, ll. 23–27. It was repeated by Alain de Lille and Alexander Neckam. See Robert K. Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript (New York, 1965), and Edouard Jeauneau, “‘Nani gigantum humeris insidentes.’ Essai d’interprétation de Bernard de Chartres,” Vivarium 5 (1967): 79–99.

20. See, e.g., Oxford, Bodleian ms. Auct. D.4.17, fol. 2 (Bodleian Apocalypse). Isaiah appears in the south choir clerestory (bay 119, ca. 1230).

21. The north transept is largely dedicated to Old Testament figures and events. On this portal, see Katzenellenbogen, The Sculptural Programs; Nicole Lévis-Godechot, “Essai d’interprétation de l’iconographie des sculptures du portail nord de la cathédrale de Chartres,” Bulletin da la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de Senlis (1977): 31–47; and Prache, Chartres, le portail de la Sagesse, pp. 7–15.

22. Pierre de Roissy wrote that the friends of Job were false friends, “in whom allegorically are understood heretics, who call themselves the [false] friends of simple Christians.” Avranches, Bibliothèque de la Ville ms. 16, fol. 65r, quoted in Katzenellenbogen, The Sculptural Programs, p. 135n129 (my translation). See also Stephan Kuttner, “Pierre de Roissy and Robert of Flamborough,” Traditio 2 (1944): 492–99; Paul Williamson, Gothic Sculpture, 1140–1300 (New Haven and London, 1995), p. 39.

23. Lévis-Godechot, “Essai d’interprétation,” pp. 37–40.

24. Prache, Chartres, le portail de la Sagesse, p. 66, calls him “coarse-faced.” For the nose, see chs. 3 and 5.

25. See ch. 2, n. 99.

26. On the lintel of the south transept, see Katzenellenbogen, The Sculptural Programs, pp. 80–88.

27. A contemporary Parisian abbot, John of Saint-Victor, automatically thought of Jewishness when he critiqued Christian pride: “It is clear,” he states in a sermon warning his canons against various vices, “that pride of mind blinds the eye. Whence Synagoga is fittingly depicted blind … [and thus] is shown to have endured in her perfidy in proud darkness.” Sermo in Adventu Domini in Paris, BN ms. lat. 14525, fols. 32vb–35vb. On the rhetoric of pride and intellectual arrogance in thirteenth-century texts, see Lipton, Images of Intolerance, pp. 92–93.

28. This is an unusual subject for a cathedral lintel. A small, telescoped version appears in the archivolts of the south-faced portal of Amiens. Other examples include a wall carving at Auxerre, the archivolts of a rose window at Reims, a Cologne carving, and a transept buttress at Rouen. The lintel is briefly described by Villette, Les Portails, p. 147, who, neglecting the hints of discord, misleadingly writes that the palace figures, young and old, all marvel at Solomon’s wisdom.

29. See C. M. Kaufmann, “The Iconography of the Judgment of Solomon in the Middle Ages,” in Tributes to Jonathan J. G. Alexander, pp. 297–306. Claudius of Turin (PL 50:1103) and Glossa (PL 113:582) are cited on p. 300.

30. Sermo 6 on the Vigil of the Nativity, PL 183:115ff, quoted in Katzenellenbogen, The Sculptural Programs, p. 69. The French language version of the Bible moralisée identifies the false mother as Synagoga, with whom all “Jews, infidels, heretics, and bad people” will remain in death. Vienna, ÖNB cod. 2554, fol. 50a.

31. On the chin-length, wavy bob as an aristocratic hair style, see Joachim Bumke, Courtly Culture: Literature and Society in the High Middle Ages, trans. Thomas Dunlop (Berkeley, 1991), p. 149, as cited in Nina Rowe, The Jew, the Cathedral, and the Medieval City: Synagoga and Ecclesia in the Thirteenth Century (New York, 2011), p. 280n104.

32. On touching the cord of a cloak, see Nina Rowe, The Jew, the Cathedral, p. 106, and Jacqueline E. Jung, “The Passion, the Jews, and the Crisis of the Individual on the Naumburg West Choir Screen,” in Beyond the Yellow Badge, pp. 145–77. With his other hand the man is gathering the folds of his cloak, like the first friend of Job above. These same gestures appear on the sculptures of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba in the left embrasure of this portal.

33. The scene is reminiscent of the courtroom-type atmosphere analyzed by Jung, “The Passion, the Jews, and the Crisis of the Individual.”

34. Wolfgang Kemp, The Narratives of Gothic Stained Glass, trans. Caroline Dobson Saltzwedel (Cambridge, 1997), p. 147, notes the significance of the language of clothes beginning in the twelfth century. On the glass, see Colette Manhès-Deremble, Vitraux narratifs de la cathédrale de Chartres: Étude iconographique, avec la collaboration de Jean-Paul Deremble (Paris, 1993), and Jean-Paul Deremble and Colette Manhès-Deremble, Les vitraux légendaires de Chartres: Des récits en images (Paris, 1988).

35. Bay 41, north transept. The “donor,” or trade, panels at the bottom of this window depict money changers. Deremble and Manhès-Deremble, Vitraux de Chartres, p. 41, suggest that these scenes carry two meanings: in underscoring the need for authenticity in coinage they recall the fraud of Joseph’s brothers and they remind the viewer of the bishop’s authority to regulate monetary exchange.

36. The outsized head of the brother on the left may be a product of faulty restoration.

37. Bay 35, north transept. On this window, see Kemp, The Narratives of Gothic Stained Glass, pp. 98–101, and Gerald B. Guest, “The Prodigal’s Journey: Ideologies of Self and City in the Gothic Cathedral,” Speculum 81 (2006): 35–75.

38. Kemp, The Narratives of Gothic Stained Glass, p. 11.

39. Guest, “The Prodigal’s Journey.”

40. On the new narrative, often vernacular artistic and literary genres introduced in the thirteenth century, see Lewis, “Tractatus adversus Judaeos”; Kemp, The Narratives of Gothic Stained Glass; and Parisian Confraternity Drama of the Fourteenth Century: The “Miracles de Nostre Dame par personages,” ed. Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox (Turnhout, 2008).

41. On the serpent as a sign for evil in general and associated with Synagoga in particular, see Lipton, Images of Intolerance, pp. 22–24, 195, and Nona C. Flores, “‘Effigies amicitiae … veritas inimicitiae’: Anti-feminism in the Iconography of the Woman-Headed Serpent in Medieval and Renaissance Art and Literature,” in Animals in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays, ed. Nona C. Flores (New York, 1996), pp. 167–95.

42. Noted by Claman, Jewish Images in the Christian Church, p. 186. See also Lipton, Images of Intolerance, p. 195n71.

43. Bay 13.

44. Bay 1. The textual source for this legend is the Passio Simonis et Judae.

45. Bay 5. The Legend of James the Great is found in The Golden Legend, among many other locations.

46. Bay 8. The Life of Saint Sylvester.

47. Bay 14 (the Saint Nicholas pedagogical window) and Bay 39 (the Life of Saint Nicholas window).

48. On the sources for this tale, see Harris, “The Performative Terms.” For an analysis of the social and cultural resonances of the tale in its dramatic form, see Carol Symes, A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras (Ithaca, 2007).

49. Harris, “The Performative Terms.” A second Nicholas legend, featuring a Jew who beats a statue of Saint Nicholas for failing to protect his wealth (thereby demonstrating his faith in the saint, which the saint immediately rewards), is discussed in André Vauchez, “L’Image vivante: Quelques réflexions sur les fonctions des représentations iconographiques dans le domaine religieux en Occident aux derniers siècles du Moyen Âge,” in Pauvres et riches. Société et culture du Moyen Âge aux Temps Modernes. Mélanges offerts à Bronislaw Geremek à l’occasion de son soixantième anniversaire (Warsaw, 1992), p. 234, and in Symes, A Common Stage.

50. André Chedeville, Chartres et ses campagnes (XIe–XIIIe siècles). Publications de l’Université de Haute-Bretagne (Paris, 1973), pp. 476–78.

51. Act 4, scene 1.

52. Whereas in many other artworks Stephen’s killers are shown as Jews. See, e.g., Vienna, ÖNB cod. Ser. Nova 2700, fol. 186 (antiphoner from Benedictine Abbey of Saint Peter, Salzburg, ca. 1160).

53. Ruth Mellinkoff, The Mark of Cain (Berkeley, 1981).

54. Bay 44.

55. The Death and Assumption of Mary window, also called the Glorification of Mary. Bay 42.

56. Kemp, The Narratives of Gothic Stained Glass, p. 171, cites texts by Gilbert of Tournai (d. 1270) and Eudes of Chateauroux (d. 1273) suggesting that medieval viewers paid particular attention to clothing.

57. This point was made by Madeline Caviness in a review of Kemp and Manhès-Deremble in Speculum 65 (1990): 974.

58. Constitutiones Concilii quarti Lateranensis una cum commentaries glossatorum, ed. Antonio Garcia y Garcia, Monumenta Iuris Canonici, A; Corpus Glossatorum 2 (Vatican City, 1981), p. 107.

59. See Danièle Sansy, “Marquer la différence: L’imposition de la rouelle au XIIIe et XIVe siècles,” Médiévales 44 (2001):15–36; Guido Kisch, “The Yellow Badge in History,” Historia Judaica 19 (1957): 89–146; Nicholas Vincent, “Two Papal Letters on the Wearing of the Jewish Badge, 1221 and 1229,” Jewish Historical Studies: Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 34 (1997): 209–24; Solomon Grayzel, ed., The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century (New York, 1966), p. 65n112; Dwayne E. Carpenter, Alfonso X and the Jews: An Edition of and Commentary on Siete Partidas 7.24 “De los Judíos,” University of California Publications in Modern Philology, vol. 115 (Berkeley, 1986), pp. 36–37. On Sicilian legislation, see the report of the Assizes of Messina in Richard of San Germano’s Chronicon, ed. C. A. Garufi, in L. A. Muratori, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores (Bologna, 1938), vol. 7, part 2, p. 96.

60. The Council of Valladolid (1228), cap. 16, and the Council of Albi (1254), cap. 17, both declared that Jews were not to wear round or wide capes or cloaks because these garments were too similar to the vestments of the clergy. Johannes Dominicus Mansi, ed., Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova et Amplissima Collection (Graz, 1960–61), 23: 701, 850. See also the letter dated July 7, 1248, from Pope Innocent IV to the Bishop of Maguelonne in Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, pp. 280–81.

61. See the ordinances of the German synods of ca. 1200–23 that chastise young men for looking and dressing too much like Christians, edited and discussed in Louis Finkelstein, Jewish Self-Government in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (New York, 1964), pp. 59, 225 (Hebrew text), pp. 233–34 (English translation). The Sicilian legislation cited in n. 59, above, required Jewish men of appropriate age to “cultivate a beard and walk about bearded.”

62. Irving A. Agus, Rabbi Meir of Rothenberg: His Life and His Works as a Source for the Religious, Legal, and Social History of the Jews of Germany in the Thirteenth Century, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1947), vol. 1, p. 185, Orah Hayyim, no. 50.

63. Agus, Rabbi Meir of Rothenberg, vol. 1, p. 290, Eben ha-Ezer, no. 253. I would guess that the “fanatical Christians” were mendicants or wandering ascetics of some kind.

64. There is considerable scholarly discussion about whether they had their own accents and dialects. See Kirsten A. Fudeman, Vernacular Voices: Language and Identity in Medieval French Jewish Communities (Philadelphia, 2010).

65. The canon implicitly acknowledges this, adding: “Therefore, that they may not, under pretext of error of this sort, excuse themselves in the future for the excesses of such prohibited intercourse” (my emphasis). Constitutiones Concilii quarti Lateranensis, vol. 2, p. 107.

66. See Symes, A Common Stage, pp. 71–80, and Monica L. Wright, Weaving Narrative: Clothing in Twelfth-Century French Romance (University Park, Pa., 2009), pp. 17–19.

67. C. Warren Hollister and John W. Baldwin, “The Rise of Administrative Kingship: Henry I and Philip Augustus,” American Historical Review 83 (1978): 867–905.

68. Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1993); Martin Aurell, Le Chevalier lettré: Savior et conduite de l’aristocratie aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles (Paris, 2011); Alain Saint-Denis, “L’Apparition d’une identité urbaine dans les villes de commune de France du Nord au XIIe et XIIIe siècles,” in Shaping Urban Identity in Later Medieval Europe, ed. Marc Boone and Peter Stabel (Louvain, 2000), pp. 65–87.

69. See Alexander Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford and New York, 1978), pp. 59–71. The situation was long ago brought to light—and misleadingly pinned on Jewish economic activities—by F. W. Maitland, History of English Law, 1.475, cited in R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250, 2nd ed. (Malden, Mass., 2007), p. 99.

70. Walter Map to Ranulph Glanvill, quoted in Michael T. Clanchy, “Moderni in Education and Government in England,” Speculum 50 (1975): 674. See also Ralph V. Turner, “Changing Perceptions of the New Administrative Class in Anglo-Norman and Angevin England: The Curiales and Their Conservative Critics,” Journal of British Studies 29 (1990): 93–117. Though these two works deal with the Plantagenet realms, there is little reason to think that similar complaints did not exist in France. Moore, Persecuting Society, pp. 128–31, eloquently describes the unsettling effect of the triumph of the literate class and the cash economy.

71. John W. Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and Merchants: The Social Views of Peter the Chanter and His Circle, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1970).

72. Dallas G. Denery II, Seeing and Being Seen in the Late Medieval World: Optics, Theology, and the Religious Life (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 7, 19–74.

73. Laura F. Hodges, Chaucer and Costume: The Secular Pilgrims in the General Prologue (Cambridge, 2000) and Hodges, Chaucer and Clothing: Clerical and Academic Costume in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales (Cambridge, 2005).

74. Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200–1565 (Philadelphia, 2001), pp. 118–32. Katherine Zieman, Singing the New Song: Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, 2008), pp. 92–105, records anxieties caused by the fact that some clerics “rented out” their liturgical services for money, making literacy and clerical status seem like commodities.

75. See the remark of Gerhard of Cologne that Christians of his day were “new Jews,” quoted and discussed in Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Blood of Christ in the Later Middle Ages,” Church History 71 (2002): 702. See also Lipton, Images of Intolerance. Ironically, Jewish authorities noted the potentially disruptive effects of professionalization and textualization as well: Talya Fishman, Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures (Philadelphia, 2011), p. 149.

76. John the Teutonic, Abbot of Saint-Victor, Sermo in generali capitulo, Paris, BN ms. lat. 14525, fol. 56b.

77. Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, p. 107 (Latin text on p. 106).

78. Although, in fact, Innocent’s alleged preference for oaths over written evidence was out of date. Already in the twelfth century, canon and civil courts had begun to privilege textual over oral evidence. See Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record; Harold Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, 1983).

79. Antoine Thomas, ed., “Les Miracles de Notre-Dame de Chartres,” Bibliothèque de l’École des chartres 42 (1881): 512–13. The work is dated ca. 1210.

80. I am reminded of the comment by an aide to President George W. Bush mocking the journalist Ron Suskind for being a member of the “reality-based community”: Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty, and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” New York Times Magazine, Oct. 17, 2004.

81. See Kemp, The Narratives of Gothic Stained Glass, pp. xi, 131–35.

82. See also Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia, 1999).

83. For the consolidation of the central administration and the introduction of writing in practical matters, see Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record.

84. Leah Lydia Otis, Prostitution in Medieval Society: The History of an Urban Institution in Languedoc (Chicago, 1985), esp. p. 200; Bronislaw Geremak, The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge and Paris, 1987), pp. 222–24; Ulysse Robert, Les Signes d’infamie au moyen âge: Juifs, Sarrasins, hérétiques, lépreux, cagots et filles publiques (Paris, 1891). On criminals and hangmen, see Hannele Klemettilä, Epitomes of Evil: Representation of Executioners in Northern France and the Low Countries in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2006); Trevor Dean, Crime and Justice in Late Medieval Italy (Cambridge and New York, 2007), p. 153.

85. Timothy Reuter, “Nobles and Others: The Social and Cultural Expression of Power Relations in the Middle Ages,” in Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities, ed. Janet L. Nelson (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 111–26. See also Howard Kaminsky, “Estate, Nobility, and the Exhibition of Estate in the Later Middle Ages,” Speculum 68 (1993): 684–709.

86. Margot Fassler, “Adventus at Chartres: Ritual Models for Major Processions,” in Ceremonial Culture in Pre-Modern Europe, ed. Nicholas Howe (Notre Dame, 2007), p. 22.

87. Julius Aronius, Regesten zur Geschichte der Juden im Fränkischen und Deutschen Reiche bis 1273 (Berlin, 1887–1902; rpt. Hildesheim, 1970), pp. 301ff., no. 724 (Synod of Breslau), and Kisch, The Jews in Medieval Germany, p. 297 (Vienna).

88. Most notably by the French king Louis IX in 1269 and the English king Edward I in 1279: Sansy, “Marquer la différence.”

89. John H. Arnold, Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc (Philadelphia, 2001), p. 68, analyzes this problem in relation to heretics.

90. See, e.g., the chapter headings in Émile Mâle, The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century, trans. Dora Nussey (New York, 1958), and Deremble and Manhès-Deremble, Vitraux de Chartres, p. 11.

91. Kemp, The Narratives of Gothic Stained Glass.

92. A point made by many scholars, including Harris, “The Performative Terms,” and Kemp, The Narratives of Gothic Stained Glass, p. xi.

93. The term is from Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Los Angeles and Berkeley, 1999), p. 5.

94. See the tensions between “charismatic culture” and “intellectual culture” sketched by C. Stephen Jaeger, Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950–1200 (Philadelphia, 1994), pp. 4–5.

95. See Carlo Ginzburg, “Prejudices, Ideas—A Comment,” in In and Out of the Ghetto: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany, ed. R. Po-chia Hsia and Hartmut Lehmann (Washington, D.C., 1995), pp. 209–12; Giacomo Todeschini, “Franciscan Economics and Jews in the Middle Ages,” in Friars and Jews in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Steven J. MacMichael and Susan E. Myers (Leiden, 2004), pp. 99–117.

96. This epistemological attitude is usually associated with the sixteenth century, but it is already apparent in the work of Alain de Lille (d. 1202), as noted by Jan C. Westerhof, “A World of Signs: Baroque Pansemioticism, the Polyhistor, and the Early Modern Wunderkammer,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001): 634.

97. This is the subject of my forthcoming book, The Vulgate of Experience: Preaching and Art in the High Middle Ages.

98. Richard C. Trexler, “Legitimating Prayer Gestures in the Twelfth Century: The De Penitentia of Peter the Chanter,” History and Anthropology 1 (1984): 97–126.

99. Bridget K. Balint, Ordering Chaos: The Self and the Cosmos in Twelfth-Century Prosimetrum (Leiden, 2009), notes that Alain de Lille’s De Planctu Naturae expresses deep pessimism regarding the truthfulness and reliability of signs and language.

100. William Chester Jordan, Unceasing Strife, Unending Fear: Jacques de Thérines and the Freedom of the Church in the Age of the Last Capetians (Princeton, 2005).

CHAPTER FIVE: THE JEW’S FACE: FLESH, SIGHT, AND SOVEREIGNTY, CA. 1230–1350

1. Roger A. Pack, ed., “Auctoris Incerti de Physiognomia Libellus,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 41 (1975): 113–38.

2. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cloisters Collection 69.86, fol. 83v. For an introduction to the manuscript, see Florens Deuchler, “Looking at Bonne of Luxembourg’s Prayerbook,” MMA Bulletin n.s. 29 (1971): 267–78; for a survey of the literature and an examination of its program, see Annette Ingebretson Lermack, “Fit for a Queen: The Psalter of Bonne of Luxembourg at the Cloisters,” PhD diss., University of Iowa, 1999. The Psalm 52 image is discussed in Annette Lermack, “The Pivotal Role of the Two Fools Miniature in the Psalter of Bonne of Luxembourg,” Gesta 47 (2008): 79–98; Deuchler, “Looking at Bonne of Luxembourg’s Prayerbook,” p. 272; Lermack, “Fit for a Queen,” pp. 87–97. See also Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages, 2 vols., (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993), vol. 1, p. 136; and Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, 2003), p. 138.

3. On the iconography of the fool, see D. J. Gifford, “Iconographical Notes towards a Definition of the Medieval Fool,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 37 (1974): 336–42; R. A. Neale, “The Fool and His Loaf,” Medium Aevum 54 (1985): 104–09; Ahuva Belkin, “Antichrist as the Embodiment of the Insipiens in Thirteenth-Century French Psalters,” Florilegium 10 (1988–91): 65–82; V. A. Kolve, “God-Denying Fools and the Medieval ‘Religion of Love,’” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 19 (1997): 3–59; and Yona Pinson, “Folly and Childishness Go Hand in Hand: Hans Holbein’s Dixit Insipiens,” Source 22.3 (2003): 1–7. It was not common for a Psalm 52 illustration to depict one fool attacking another; I discuss this further below.

4. See, e.g., the chalice held by the seated figure in the Dixit Insipiens image in London, BL Add. ms. 44874, fol. 75 (Evesham Psalter, England, ca. 1250). Lermack, “The Pivotal Role,” discusses the chalice further.

5. The identification of the fool as a monk appears in the Jérome Pichon (formerly Didot Fermin) sales catalog of 1897, pp. 6–10. William G. Land, “The Prayer Book of Bonne of Luxembourg: A Personal Document” (unpublished ms., 1980), proposed Archbishop Baldwin as an identification. I am grateful to the chair and the curatorial and administrative staff of The Cloisters for allowing me access to their files on the manuscript. The figure is identified as a Jew in Mellinkoff, Outcasts, vol. 1, p. 136. François Avril, Manuscript Painting at the Court of France: The Fourteenth Century (New York, 1978), p. 74, and Charles Sterling, La Peinture médiévale à Paris, 1300–1500, vol. 2 (Paris, 1990), p. 110, also read the figure as a Jew, or at least as an expression of anti-Judaism.

6. Eduard Fuchs, Die Juden in Der Karikatur: Ein Beitrag Zur Kulturgeschichte (Munich, 1921), p. 1. The sole pre-fifteenth-century images illustrated in Fuchs’s work are two carvings of the so-called Judensau (figs. 6 and 15). In these carvings, the Jews’ faces, which are tiny and often obscured, are not caricatured, and they are neither the foci nor the mechanisms of the satire. On Fuchs, see Liliane Weissberg, “Eduard Fuchs und die Ökonomie der Karikatur,” Babylon 20 (2002): 113–28. On premodern caricature, see also Judith Vogt, Historien om et Image: Antisemitisme og Antizionisme i Karikaturer (Copenhagen and Oslo, 1978). For more recent imagery, see Joel Kotek and Dan Kotek, Au Nom de l’antisionisme. L’image des Juifs et d’Israël dans la caricature depuis la seconde Intifada (Brussels, 2003); Jüdische Figuren in Film und Karikatur. Die Rothschilds und Joseph Süß Oppenheimer, ed. Cilly Kugelmann and Fritz Backhaus (Stuttgart, 1996); and Pierre André Taguieff, La Nouvelle Judéophobie (Paris, 2002).

7. See especially Mellinkoff, Outcasts; Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews; Heinz Shreckenberg, Die Juden in der Kunst Europas: Ein historischer Bildaltas (Göttingen and Freiburg, 1996).

8. I use the term “Gothic Jew’s face” to refer to depictions of Jews with stereotypical features made ca. 1250–1400. They may display varying degrees of stylistic naturalism.

9. Such faces thus fit the OED definition of caricature: “grotesque or ludicrous representation of persons or things by exaggeration of their most characteristic and striking features.”

10. See Bernard G. Dod, “Aristoteles Latinus,” and C. H. Lohr, “The Medieval Interpretation of Aristotle,” both in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of Scholasticism, 1100–1600, ed. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 45–79 and 80–98, respectively.

11. See Paul Binski, Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England, 1170–1300 (New Haven, 2004).

12. See Jan C. Westerhof, “A World of Signs: Baroque Pansemioticism, the Polyhistor, and the Early Modern Wunderkammer,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001): 634.

13. Karen Meier Reeds and Tomomi Kinukawa, “Medieval Natural History,” in The Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 2: Science, ed. David C. Lindberg and David H. Shank (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 569–89.

14. On medieval physiognomical study, see Pack, “Auctoris Incerti”; D. Jacquart, “La Physiognomie à l’époque de Frédéric II: Le traité de Michel Scot,” Micrologus 2 (1994): 19–37; Jole Agrimi, “Fisiognomica: Nature alla specchio ovvero luce e ombre,” Micrologus 4 (1996): 129–78; Irven M. Resnick, “Ps.-Albert the Great on the Physiognomy of Jesus and Mary,” Mediaeval Studies 64 (2002): 217–40; and Resnick, Marks of Distinction: Christian Perceptions of Jews in the High Middle Ages (Washington, D.C., 2012). On the influence of scientific study on art, see Michael Camille, “Illustrations in Harley ms. 3487 and the Perception of Aristotle’s Libri Naturales in Thirteenth-Century England,” in England in the Thirteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1984 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. W. M. Ormand (Woodbridge, 1986), pp. 31–44; Madeline H. Caviness, “‘The Simple Perception of Matter’ and the Representation of Narrative, ca. 1180–1280,” Gesta 30 (1991): 48–64; and Antonia Gransden, “Realistic Observation in Twelfth-Century England,” Speculum 47 (1972): 29–51. Michael Camille, “Before the Gaze: The Internal Senses and Late-Medieval Practices of Seeing,” in Visuality before and after the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw, ed. Robert S. Nelson (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 197–223, argues that Aristotelian ideas of vision explain Gothic naturalism. The realistic rendering of nature in the Bonne of Luxembourg manuscript is noted by Charles Vaurie, “Birds in the Prayer Book of Bonne of Luxembourg,” MMA Bulletin n.s. 29 (1971): 279–83.

15. The Pseudo-Albertian Mariale (19.2.5), quoted in Resnick, Marks of Distinction, p. 239.

16. For evidence of a historical genetic bottleneck among Ashkenazi Jewish populations, see Gil Atzmon et al., “Abraham’s Children in the Genome Era: Major Jewish Diaspora Populations Comprise Distinct Genetic Clusters with Shared Middle Eastern Ancestry,” American Journal of Human Genetics 86 (2010): 850–59.

17. David Berger, ed. and trans., The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages: A Critical Edition of the “Nizzahon Vetus” (Philadelphia, 1979), par. 238, p. 340. On the myth of “parental imprinting,” see Wendy Doniger and Gregory Spinner, “Misconceptions: Female Imaginations and Male Fantasies in Parental Imprinting,” Daedalus 127 (1998): 97–130. On the near universality of the equation of darkness with evil (which Albert nonetheless did not make), see Ernst Gombrich, “Visual Metaphors of Value,” in Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art (Oxford, 1963), pp. 12–29.

18. Caviness, “‘The Simple Perception of Matter,’” p. 55.

19. On the vexed question of the possible “racialism” of medieval anti-Judaism, see Resnick, Marks of Distinction; David Nirenberg, “‘Race’ and ‘Racism’ in Late Medieval Spain,” in Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires, ed. Walter D. Mignolo, Maureen Quilligan, and Margaret R. Greer (Chicago, 2007), pp. 71–87, 335–45, which offers a nuanced analysis, calling attention to the power of lineage in Christian thought; Michael Banton, Racial Theories (Cambridge, 1987); Christian Delacampagne, L’Invention du racisme: Antiquité et Moyen Âge (Paris, 1983); Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Assimilation and Racial Anti-Semitism: The Iberian and German Models (New York, 1982); and the articles collected in Léon Poliakov, ed., Ni Juif ni grec: Entretiens sur le racisme (Paris, 1978).

20. For Albert, see Resnick, Marks of Distinction, p. 183; for the Paris master, see Peter Biller, “Views of Jews from Paris around 1300: Christian or ‘Scientific’?” in Christianity and Judaism, ed. D. Wood, Studies in Church History 29 (Cambridge, 1992), p. 192.

21. Robert C. Stacey, “The Conversion of Jews to Christianity in Thirteenth-Century England,” Speculum 67 (1992): 276–78; Resnick, Marks of Distinction, pp. 288–90.

22. Resnick, Marks of Distinction, pp. 183–94.

23. Resnick. Marks of Distinction, p. 200.

24. Pack, “Auctoris Incerti,” p. 126.

25. Stephen Perkinson, “Portraits and Counterfeits: Villard de Honnecourt and Thirteenth-Century Theories of Representation,” in Excavating the Medieval Image: Manuscripts, Artists, Audiences—Essays in Honor of Sandra Hindman, ed. Nina A. Rowe and David Areford (Aldershot and Burlington, Vt., 2004), pp. 17–18.

26. London, National Archives, E 401/1565 M1 (Hilary and Easter Terms). The text of the receipt roll remains unpublished; it is an incomplete record of payments collected from Jews in eight counties and London during the Hilary and Easter terms. The cartoon was first published by Cecil Roth, “Portraits and Caricatures of Medieval English Jews,” Jewish Monthly 4 (1950) supplement, pp. i–viii; rpt. in Essays and Portraits in Anglo-Jewish History (Philadelphia, 1962), pp. 22–25. Roth’s brief remarks have formed the basis for all subsequent scholarship on the cartoon. It has most recently been discussed in Frank Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660–1830 (Baltimore, 1995), p. 29; Anthony Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms 1350–1500 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 2–3; Robert Bartlett, “Illustrating Ethnicity in the Middle Ages,” in The Origins of Racism in the West, ed. Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler (Cambridge, 2009), p. 133; and Robin R. Mundill, The King’s Jews: Money, Massacre, and Exodus in Medieval England (London, 2010), pp. 70–71, who follows Roth and Bale throughout.

27. For a full discussion and analysis of the cartoon and its political context and implications, see Sara Lipton, “Isaac and Antichrist in the Archives,” forthcoming.

28. See Robert C. Stacey, “Norwich, Isaac of (c. 1170–1235/6),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004); online ed., Jan. 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/37588, accessed Oct. 7, 2010, with further bibliography.

29. See, e.g., Vienna, ÖNB cod. 1179, fol. 101b (Bible moralisée), reproduced in Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1999), p. 122, fig. 96. On the origins of tricephalic imagery, see R. Pettazzoni, “The Pagan Origins of the Three-Headed Representation of the Christian Trinity,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 9 (1946): 135–51. On Antichrist iconography, see Richard K. Emmerson, Antichrist in the Middle Ages: A Study of Medieval Apocalypticism, Art, and Literature (Seattle, 1981), pp. 18–145, and Rosemary Muir Wright, Art and Antichrist in Medieval Europe (Manchester, 1995). The two-faced Roman god Janus, who traditionally was depicted on the January calendar pages, was shown with three faces in at least one English manuscript of ca. 1110–40 (London, BL ms. Harley 624, fol. 141v), reproduced in C. R. Dodwell, The Canterbury School of Illumination 1066–1200 (Cambridge, 1954), pl. 37h.

30. Mosse appears in numerous financial and legal records; see Vivian D. Lipman, The Jews of Medieval Norwich (London, 1967), pp. 59, 60–61, 78, 89, 106, 107, 174.

31. Roth, “Portraits and Caricatures,” p. 23, writes that Avegaye is “possibly” the wife of Mosse; this is presumably the source of the more confident assertions of a marital relationship between the two in Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book, p. 3, and Mundill, The King’s Jews, p. 70, which is echoed on the National Archives Web site. As the statements are undocumented I do not know what evidence exists for the claim. The cautions of Susan Einbinder, who analyzes scholars’ assumptions of a sexual relationship between the Count of Blois and the Jewess Pulcellina, are worth keeping in mind here: “Pulcellina of Blois: Romantic Myths and Narrative Conventions,” Jewish History 12 (1998): 29–46.

32. See Eleazar Gutwirth, “Face to Face: History, Physiognomy, and Pictorialism in Solomon Bonafed,” in Encuentros and Desencuestros: Spanish Jewish Cultural Interaction throughout History, ed. Carlos Carrete Parrondo et al. (Tel Aviv, 2000), pp. 327–41. Gutwirth builds on the insights of V. A. Kolve, “Chaucer and the Visual Arts,” in Derek S. Brewer, ed., Geoffrey Chaucer: The Writer and His Background (London, 1974), pp. 290–320.

33. Robert C. Stacey, “Introduction,” in Receipt and Issue Rolls for the Twenty-Sixth Year of the Reign of King Henry III, 1241–2: Now First Printed from the Originals in the Public Record Office, ed. Robert C. Stacey (London, 1992), p. xvi.

34. Richard fitz Nigel, Dialogus de Scaccario, ed. Charles Johnson, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1983), p. 6. David A. Hinton offers a similar reading in suggesting that the structure was Henry III’s castle infiltrated by Jews and devils; he also notes the similarity of the cloth to an accounting board: “Medieval Anglo-Jewry: The Archaeological Evidence,” in Jews in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary, and Archaeological Perspectives, ed. Patricia Skinner (Woodbridge and Rochester, N.Y., 2003), p. 101n26.

35. Lipman, The Jews of Medieval Norwich, pp. 61, 95. Mosse may have been given this nickname because he did, indeed, have a big nose or alternately because he was a notorious busybody: “Cum naso tibi quid meo negoti est?” (“What does your nose have to do with my business?” or, more colloquially, “Why stick your nose into my business?”) was a common medieval epigram. Jews were by no means the only people to be given the nickname “cum naso.” There is a Christian labeled “Naso” and shown with a large, curved nose in an exchequer roll discussed and illustrated in Z. Rokeach, “Drawings of Jewish Interest in Some Thirteen-Century English Public Records,” Scriptorum 26 (1972): 55–62. The nickname also appears in numerous other documents.

36. In 1221, Mosse paid for the privilege of not wearing the “tabula,” the prescribed Jewish badge: Receipt Rolls for the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Years of the Reign of Henry III, ed. Nicholas Barratt (London, 2003), p. 98. This suggests that he strove to dress according to majority fashions.

37. See ch. 6 and Sara Lipton, “Where Are the Gothic Jewish Women? On the Non-Iconography of the Jewess in the Cantigas de Santa Maria,” Jewish History 22 (2008): 139–77.

38. Prov. 31:30 remarks in relation to woman that “charm is deceptive and beauty is fleeting,” a warning echoed by moralists from Tertullian through Nietzsche. See Herbert L. Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago and London, 1992), and Madeline H. Caviness, Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle, and Scopic Economy (Philadelphia, 2001). For a selection of medieval misogynist texts, see Alcuin Blamires, Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford, 1992).

39. See ch. 4, pp. 158–60. The quote is from Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes, p. 29.

40. See definition 2 for “fig” in the OED. The term appears in Dante’s Inferno, canto 25, lines 1–3.

41. The fundamental source for exchequer procedure is Richard fitz Nigel, Dialogus de Scaccario, updated, expanded on, and supplemented with a discussion of exchequer record keeping in Stacey, “Introduction,” Receipt and Issue Rolls, pp. v–xxxiv. See also H. G. Richardson, The English Jewry under Angevin Kings (London, 1960), and Reva Berman Brown and Sean McCartney, “The Exchequer of the Jews Revisited: The Operation and Effect of the Scaccarium Judeorum,” Medieval History Journal 8 (2005): 303–22.

42. See Suzanne Lewis, “Tractatus adversus Judaeos in the Gulbenkian Apocalypse,” Art Bulletin 68 (1986): 554–59.

43. Rosemary Muir Wright, Art and Antichrist in Medieval Europe (Manchester, 1995), p. 99, and Robert Mills, “Jesus as Monster,” in The Monstrous Middle Ages, ed. Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills (Toronto and Buffalo, 2003), pp. 28–54.

44. See David Burr, “Antichrist and the Jews in Four Thirteenth-Century Apocalypse Commentaries,” in Friars and Jews in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Steven J. McMichael and Susan E. Myers (Leiden and Boston, 2004), pp. 23–38, and Judith Weiss, “Emperors and Antichrists: Reflections of Empire in Insular Narrative, 1130–1250,” in The Matter of Identity in Medieval Romance, ed. Philippa Hardman (Rochester, N.Y., 2002), pp. 87–102. Emmerson, Antichrist in the Middle Ages, also notes (pp. 166–72) that in the Ludus de Antichristo (ca. 1160), Antichrist’s feigned goodness successively deceived the greatest kings of Christendom.

45. On the costume of the fool or jester, see n. 3, above. Erica Gelser, “Crucible to the Antichrist: Early Medieval Depictions of the Fool in Commentaries on Proverbs,” in Komik und Sakralität: Aspekte einer Ästhetischen Paradoxie in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Nikolaus Staubach and Anje Grege (Frankfurt, 2005), pp. 32–40, notes that by the thirteenth century Antichrist was often linked to mimics or jesters, “artificial fools” affiliated with the devil and functioning as “truth tellers” through feigned stupidity. The job of the “fool” was to mock all vice, but especially among the mighty and at court.

46. Jacques de Vitry, Sermo, and Peter the Chanter, Verbum Abbreviatum, quoted in Lipton, Images of Intolerance, pp. 47–48.

47. Ms. T.I.1 of the Biblioteca de San Lorenzo el Real at the El Escorial palace, near Madrid. For a facsimile edition, see Alfonso X el Sabio, Cantigas de Santa Maria. Edición facsímil del Códice T. I. l. de la Biblioteca de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Siglo XIII (Madrid, 1979) and its companion study volume, El “Códice Rico” de las “Cantigas” de Alfonso X el Sabio, T. I. l. de la Biblioteca El Escorial (Madrid, 1979).

48. For the text of the cantiga, see Cantigas de Santa Maria, ed. Walter Mettmann, 2 vols. (Vigo, 1981), vol. 1, pp. 408–10. For a discussion of the poem’s sources and relationship to Jewish-Christian disputation, see Dwayne E. Carpenter, “A Sorcerer Defends the Virgin: Merlin in the Cantigas de Santa Maria,” Bulletin of the Cantigueros de Santa Maria 5 (1993): 3–24. See also Pamela Patton, “Constructing the Inimical Jew in the Cantigas de Santa Maria: Theophilus’ Magician in Text and Image,” in Beyond the Yellow Badge: Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism in Medieval and Early Modern Visual Culture, ed. Mitchell Merback (Leiden and Boston, 2007), pp. 233–56, 506–14; Dwayne E. Carpenter, “The Portrayal of the Jew in Alfonso the Learned’s Cantigas de Santa Maria,” in In Iberia and Beyond: Hispanic Jews between Cultures, ed. Bernard Dov Cooperman (Newark, Del., 1998), pp. 15–42; Albert I. Bagby Jr., “The Jew in the Cantigas of Alfonso X, el Sabio,” Speculum 46 (1971): 670–88; Bagby, “The Figure of the Jew in the Cantigas of Alfonso X,” in Studies on the Cantigas de Santa Maria: Art, Music, and Poetry. Proceedings of the International Symposium on the Cantigas de Santa Maria of Alfonso X, el Sabio (1221–1284) in Commemoration of Its 700th Anniversary Year–1981 (New York, November 19–21), ed. Israel J. Katz and John E. Keller (Madison, 1987), pp. 235–45; and Vikki Hatton and Angus Mackay, “Anti-Semitism in the Cantigas de Santa Maria,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 61 (1983): 189–99.

49. Merlin is called “fillo de Sathanas” in line 73.

50. See Carpenter, “A Sorcerer Defends the Virgin,” p. 7n4, who notes that two different etymologies have been proposed for the word: al-hakim, meaning philosopher or medical doctor, and al-faqih, meaning a specialist in religious law. In a grant of protection dating to 1220, Honorius III refers to Issac Benveniste, physician of James I of Aragon, as an “alfakimus”; he also calls Isaac “karissimi in Christo filii nostri”: Shlomo Simonsohn, ed., The Apostolic See and the Jews. Vol. 1: Documents: 492–1404 (Toronto, 1988), no. 105, p. 108.

51. This is a common theme in Christian preaching and polemic. See the exemplum from John Bromyard’s Summa Praedicantium about the Jewish woman who pretended to be a Christian and who regularly saw a “pretty little boy” in the hand of the consecrating priest until she was actually baptized. A priest explained to the disappointed woman that Christians, unlike Jews, did not need visual proof. Cited and discussed in Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven and London, 1999), p. 36.

52. This is the substance of a comment by Cassiodorus, Expositio Psalmorum I-LXX, ed. M. Adriaen, CCSL 97 (Turnhout, 1958), p. 126.

53. Eadmer, The Life of St. Anselm Archbishop of Canterbury by Eadmer, ed. and trans. R. W. Southern (London and Edinburgh, 1962), book 2.53, p. 131. On blindness in the Middle Ages, see Moshe Barasch, Blindness: The History of a Mental Image in Western Thought (New York, 2001). This rod cannot be the bladder stick of the fifteenth-century jester-fool, as it lacks the hanging bladder.

54. Lermack, “The Pivotal Role,” sees this figure’s hood as signaling his deceit: he is a masked or disguised hypocrite and unbeliever, in contrast to the fool on the left, whose unbelief is inscribed in his face.

55. See Dodwell, The Canterbury School, pl. 37. Lermack, “The Pivotal Role,” suggests that this two-faced eating and drinking figure recalls the “Feast of Fools” carnivalesque celebration, much condemned by clerical moralists; she also sees the caricatured, miter-wearing grotesque discussed below as signifying hypocrisy.

56. Land, The Prayer Book of Bonne of Luxembourg.

57. Sander Gilman, interestingly, refers to anti-Semitic stereotypes as inherently “Janus-faced”: Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca and London, 1985), p. 29.

58. See H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London, 1952).

59. London, BL ms. Stowe 17, fols. 205v–206, dating to ca. 1300–25.

60. Expositio super Iob ad litteram in Opera Omnia (Rome, 1965), vol. 26, ch. 13, Second Lesson, line 235.

61. See Sara Lipton, “The Sweet Lean of His Head: Writing about Looking at the Crucifix in the High Middle Ages,” Speculum 80 (2005): 1172–208, and the works cited there, pp. 1176n13, 1179n18.

62. See Howard Kaminsky, “Estate, Nobility, and the Exhibition of Estate in the Later Middle Ages,” Speculum 68 (1993): 684–709; Louise O. Fradenburg, “Spectacular Fictions: The Body Politic in Chaucer and Dunbar,” Poetics Today 5 (1984): 493–517. Gerald of Wales’s Descriptio Cambriae explicitly practices ethnographic observation for practical political ends: one of the last chapters is entitled “How This People May Be Conquered.”

63. On state formation and the goals and mechanisms of governance in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, see John Watts, The Making of Polities: Europe, 1300–1500 (Cambridge, 2009); Albert Rigaudière, “The Theory and Practice of Government in Western Europe in the Fourteenth Century,” in The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 6, c. 1300–c. 1415, ed. Michael Jones (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 17–41.

64. See William Chester Jordan, “Jews, Regalian Rights, and the Constitution in Medieval France,” AJS Review 23 (1998): 1–16; Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews from Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians (Philadelphia, 1989); J. A. Watt, “The Jews, the Law, and the Church: The Concept of Jewish Serfdom in Thirteenth-Century England,” in The Church and Sovereignty, ca. 590–1918: Essays in Honour of Michael Wilks, ed. Diana Wood (Oxford, 1991), pp. 153–72; Joe Hillaby, “Jewish Colonisation in the Twelfth Century,” in The Jews in Medieval Britain, ed. Skinner, pp. 15–40, esp. 18; David Abulafia, “The King and the Jews: The Jews in the Ruler’s Service,” in The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages, ed. Christoph Cluse (Turnhout, 2004), pp. 43–53; Alexander Patschovsky, “The Relationship between the Jews of Germany and the King (11th–14th Centuries): A European Comparison,” in England and Germany in the High Middle Ages, ed. Alfred Haverkamp and Hanna Vollrath (Oxford and London, 1996), pp. 193–218.

65. See the remarks of David Nirenberg, “Deviant Politics and Jewish Love: Alfonso VIII and the Jewess of Toledo,” in Jewish History 21 (2007): 15–41, and Nirenberg, “Christian Sovereignty and Jewish Flesh,” in Rethinking the Medieval Senses, ed. S. Nichols, A. Kablitz, and A. Calhoun (Baltimore, 2008), pp. 154–85.

66. Robert C. Stacey, Politics, Policy, and Finance under Henry III, 1216–1245 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 132–57, and Nicholas Vincent, Peter des Roches: An Alien in English Politics, 1205–1238 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 177–80, 363–99, 429–45.

67. David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1996), pp. 43–68.

68. For the sumptuary legislation, see Fritz [Yitzchak] Baer, ed., Die Juden im christlichen Spanien: Urkunden und Regesten, Vol. 2: Kastilien und Inquisitionsakten (Berlin, 1936), nos. 65, 72, 78. On Alfonso’s Jewish policy, see David Romano, “Los judíos y Alfonso X,” Revista de Occidente 43 (1984): 203–17; Dwayne E. Carpenter, Alfonso X and the Jews: An Edition of and Commentary on Siete Partidas 7.24 “De los Judíos” (Berkeley, 1986); and Robert I. Burns, “Jews and Moors in the Siete Partidas: A Background Perspective,” in Medieval Spain: Culture, Conflict, and Coexistence, ed. Roger Collins and Anthony Goodman (London, 2002), pp. 46–62.

69. On the expulsion from England, see Robin R. Mundill, England’s Jewish Solution: Experiment and Expulsion, 1262–1290 (Cambridge, 2002); on the expulsion from France, see R. Kohn, Les Juifs de la France du Nord dans le seconde moitié du XIVe siècle (Louvain and Paris, 1988), p. 265; Simon R. Schwarzfuchs, “The Expulsion of the Jews from France (1306),” Jewish Quarterly Review n.s. 57 (1967): 482–89; Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews, pp. 200–13, 324–48; Elizabeth A. R. Brown, “Philip V, Charles IV, and the Jews of France: The Alleged Expulsion of 1322,” Speculum 66 (1991): 294–329.

70. The image is discussed in Noël Coulet, “De l’intégration à l’exclusion: La place des juifs dans les cérémonies d’entrée solennelle au Moyen Âge,” Annales 34 (1979): 676.

71. See the stimulating discussion of violent defacement in Valentin Groebner, Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages, trans. Pamela Selwyn (New York, 2004). Groebner concludes ch. 3 (p. 86) by asking in relation to Jewish noses, “How are disfiguring violence and the invisible connected?”

72. Psalm 77:66.

73. In this I differ from Sander Gilman, who sees the features of the Jew’s body as arbitrary symbols: Seeing the Insane (New York, 1982), p. xi.

74. A large number of Nazi texts that discuss Jews’ looks, including physiognomic studies and children’s books, may be found at http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/ (accessed April 3, 2014).

75. See Laura H. Hollengreen, “The Politics and Poetics of Possession: Saint Louis, the Jews, and Old Testament Violence,” in Between the Picture and the Word: Essays in Commemoration of John Plummer, ed. Colum Hourihane (University Park, Pa., 2005), pp. 51–71, which reads the images of the Morgan Picture Bible as aligning sacred kingship with repression of Jews.

76. See Yerushalmi, Assimilation and Racial Anti-Semitism, p. 22, on art’s role in shaping attitudes.

77. See n. 69, above, for the expulsions from England and France. Expulsion from Spain followed in 1492, and from various German cities beginning around 1400 and continuing through about 1580, by which time most significant German Jewish communities had disappeared. See Haim Beinart, The Expulsion of Jews from Spain (Oxford and Portland, 2002); M. Wenninger, Man bedarf keiner Juden mehr: Ursachen und Hintergründe ihrer Vertreibung aus den deutschen Reichsstädten im 15. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 1981); Alfred Haverkamp, “The Jewish Quarters in German Towns during the Late Middle Ages,” in In and Out of the Ghetto: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany, ed. R. Po-chia Hsia and Hartmut Lehmann (Washington, D.C., 1995), pp. 13–28; and Christopher R. Friedrichs, “Jews in the Imperial Cities: A Political Perspective,” in In and Out of the Ghetto, pp. 275–88.

CHAPTER SIX: WHERE ARE THE JEWISH WOMEN?

1. A rare exception is Avegaye in the National Archives Receipt Roll cartoon (E 401/1565 M1). See ch. 5 and my forthcoming article, “Isaac and Antichrist in the Archives.”

2. Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1999).

3. See, among other examples, Heinz Schreckenberg, Die Juden in der Kunst Europas: Ein historischer Bildatlas (Göttingen and Freiburg, 1996), fig. 2, p. 116; fig. 5, p. 117; fig. 7, p. 118; fig. 1, p. 155 (where one figure may be a woman); fig. 5, p. 222; and fig. 6, p. 228.

4. For images of the miracle tales, see Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven, 1999). For images of Jewish women wearing badges, see Danièle Sansy, “Signe distinctif et judéité dans l’image,” Micrologus 15 (2007): 87–105, and Schreckenberg, Die Juden in der Kunst Europas, pp. 347, 349.

5. Bernhard Blumenkranz, Le Juif médiéval au miroir de l’art chrétien (Paris, 1966), p. 22, fig. 11, discussing Copenhagen KB Thott 574, fol. 14v (Blumenkranz erroneously cites fol. 13v); Henry Abramson, “A Ready Hatred: Depictions of the Jewish Woman in Medieval Antisemitic Art and Caricature,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 62 (1996): 1–18.

6. Diane Owen Hughes, “Distinguishing Signs: Ear-Rings, Jews, and Franciscan Rhetoric in the Italian Renaissance City,” Past and Present 112 (1986): 3–59. On the Jewess in Orientalist art, see Carol Ockman, “‘Two Large Eyebrows à l’Orientale’: Ethnic Stereotyping in Ingres’s Baronne de Rothschild,” Art History 14 (1991): 521–39; Judith Lewin, “Legends of Rebecca: Ivanhoe, Dynamic Identification, and Portraits of Rebecca Gratz,” Nashim 10 (2005): 178–212; and the brief but trenchant remarks of Roger Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880–1930 (Berkeley, 2003), pp. 121, 171–72.

7. Lady Saint John, “The Gobelin Factory and Some of Its Work,” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 10.47 (1907): 289. The tapestry was one of six depicting the life of Esther designed by F. de Troy for Gobelins around 1739.

8. Andrew Lang, “Portraits of Mary Stuart,” Burlington Magazine 10.45 (1906): 184.

9. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum, ed. Joseph Strange (Cologne, 1851), vol. 1, pp. 95–98 (Dist. II: De Contritione, cap. 25). Dist. II, caps. 23, 24, and 26 also feature female Jewish protagonists. See Beatrice D. Brown, “Medieval Prototypes of Lorenzo and Jessica,” Modern Language Notes 44 (1929): 227–32, and Ivan Marcus, “Images of the Jews in the Exempla of Caesarius of Heisterbach,” in From Witness to Witchcraft: Jews and Judaism in Medieval Christian Thought, ed. Jeremy Cohen (Wiesbaden, 1996), pp. 247–56. On the “Ballad of Sir Hugh, or the Jew’s Daughter,” which dates back to at least 1259, see Francis James Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 10 vols. (Boston and New York, 1882–98), vol. 3, part 1, pp. 236–43 (no. 155), and Bertrand Bronson, The Singing Tradition of Child’s Popular Ballads (Princeton, 1976), pp. 294–98. For a sensitive reading of Shakespeare’s Jessica, see Lisa Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare (Philadelphia, 2004). Matthew Paris mentions the Jewish wife of an image desecrator in Chronica Majora, ed. H. R. Luard (London, 1872–83), vol. 5, 114–15. On Alfonso VIII’s alleged paramour, see Edna Aizenberg, “Una judía muy fermosa: The Jewess as Sex Object in Medieval Spanish Literature and Lore,” La corónica 12 (1984): 187–94, and David Nirenberg, “Deviant Politics and Jewish Love: Alfonso VIII and the Jewess of Toledo,” Jewish History 21 (2007): 15–41. On the Jewish woman “Pulcellina” of twelfth-century Blois who had either romantic or, more likely, financial relations with the Count of Blois, see Susan Einbinder, Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France (Princeton, 2002), pp. 45–49, and Robert Chazan, “Representation of Events in the Middle Ages,” History and Theory 27 (1988): 52. For modern elaborations of the “Jewess” type, see Sander Gilman, “Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt, and the ‘Modern Jewess,’” German Quarterly 66 (1993): 195–211; Lisa Lampert, “O My Daughter!: ‘Die schöne Jüdin’ and ‘Der neue Jude’ in Hermann Sinsheimer’s Maria Nunnez,” German Quarterly 71 (1998): 254–70; Martha B. Helfer, “Framing the Jew: Grillparzer’s Die Jüdin von Toledo,” German Quarterly 75 (2002): 160–80; Michael Ragussis, “The Birth of a Nation in Victorian Culture: The Spanish Inquisition, the Converted Daughter, and the ‘Secret Race,’” Critical Inquiry 20 (1994): 477–508; and Barbara Hahn, The Jewess Pallas Athena: This Too a Theory of Modernity (Princeton, 2005). Jean-Paul Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive (Paris, 1946), pp. 58–61, offers a sophisticated analysis of the figure of “la belle juive.”

10. See ch. 5, pp. 182–87.

11. Tallies of the number of cantigas treating Jews vary according to differing criteria. Dwayne E. Carpenter, “The Portrayal of the Jew in Alfonso the Learned’s Cantigas de Santa Maria,” in In Iberia and Beyond: Hispanic Jews between Cultures, ed. Bernard Dov Cooperman (Newark, Del., 1998), pp. 15–42, arrives at a count of forty; he includes incidental and implicit references to Jews but excludes Old Testament references. Albert I. Bagby Jr., “The Jew in the Cantigas of Alfonso X, El Sabio,” Speculum 46 (1971): 670–88, and Bagby, “The Figure of the Jew in the Cantigas of Alfonso X,” in Studies on the Cantigas de Santa Maria: Art, Music, and Poetry. Proceedings of the International Symposium on the Cantigas de Santa Maria of Alfonso X, el Sabio (1221–1284) in Commemoration of Its 700th Anniversary Year–1981 (New York, November 19–21), ed. Israel J. Katz and John E. Keller (Madison, 1987), pp. 235–45, list thirty cantigas that refer to Jews. A keyword search for “Jews” in the Oxford Cantigas de Santa Maria database yields still a different tally: twenty-three poems. On Jews in the cantigas, see also Vikki Hatton and Angus Mackay, “Anti-Semitism in the Cantigas de Santa Maria,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 61 (1983): 189–99, and José Filgueria Valverde, “Os xudeus nas Cantigas de Santa Maria,” in Xudeus e conversos na historia. Actas do Congresso Internacional (Ribadavia, 14–17 Outubro 1991), ed. Carlos Barros (Santiago de Compostela, 1994), vol. 1, pp. 245–64.

12. Cantigas 4, 89, 107, and 108.

13. Text in Walter Mettmann, Alfonso X el Sabio: Cantigas de Santa Maria (Madrid 1986–89), vol. 1, pp. 111–14. This miracle appears in Gregory of Tours, Vincent of Beauvais, and myriad miracle collections and is illustrated in numerous manuscripts and monuments, including Bourges Cathedral. See Rubin, Gentile Tales, pp. 7–28, for discussion of the tale and its illustration. For a list of manuscripts containing the tale, see the Oxford Cantigas database (http://csm.mml.ox.ac.uk).

14. José Guerrero Lovillo, Las cántigas: Estudio arqueológico de sus miniaturas y arqueología (Madrid, 1949), p. 188, notes that the attire of Jewish women in the manuscript is indistinguishable from that of Christian women.

15. See Sara Lipton, “The Temple Is My Body: Gender, Carnality, and Synagoga in the Bible moralisée,” in Imagining the Self, Imagining the Other: Visual Representation and Jewish-Christian Dynamics in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Periods, ed. Eva Frojmovic (Leiden, 2002), p. 151 and figs. 14, 15, and 16.

16. Text in Mettmann, vol. 1, pp. 405–07. On the sources for this cantiga, see Anita Benaim de Lasry, “Marisaltos: Artificial Purification in Alfonso el Sabio’s Cantiga 107,” in Studies on the Cantigas de Santa Maria: Art, Music, and Poetry. Proceedings of the International Symposium on the Cantigas de Santa Maria of Alfonso X, ed. Israel J. Katz and John E. Keller (Madison, 1986), pp. 299–311.

17. Benaim de Lasry, “Marisaltos.” In the chronicle version of the tale, the sentence is imposed and carried out by Christians; see Benaim de Lasry, “Marisaltos,” and Louise Mirrer, Women, Jews, and Muslims in the Texts of Reconquest Castile (Ann Arbor, 1996), pp. 42–43.

18. As noted by Mirrer, Women, Jews, and Muslims, p. 38.

19. Mirrer, Women, Jews, and Muslims, p. 39.

20. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987), passim, esp. pp. 260–76.

21. Text in Mettmann, vol. 1, pp. 357–59.

22. Connie L. Scarborough, Women in Thirteenth-Century Spain as Portrayed in Alfonso X’s Cantigas de Santa Maria (Lewiston, N.Y., 1993), p. 83, identifies the standing figure in panel 2 as the woman’s husband, but it seems clear from her headgear and robes, her resemblance to the fleeing midwife in panel 4, and the fact that her right hand is thrust under the bedcovers that she is a midwife.

23. See Rubin, Gentile Tales, fig. 21.

24. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek clm 3901, fol. 28r; illustrated in Schreckenberg, Die Juden in der Kunst Europas, fig. 2, p. 116; see also fig. 29, p. 104 (the Passover feast) and fig. 35, p. 106 (collection of manna).

25. Augustine’s approach to Jews appears throughout his writings, but especially important are De Civitate Dei (esp. books 18.46 and 20.29), Contra Faustum, and Enarrationes in Psalmos. See the introduction above; Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Los Angeles and Berkeley, 1999), pp. 23–66; Paula Fredriksen, “Augustine and Israel: Interpretatio ad litteram, Jews, and Judaism in Augustine’s Theology of History,” Studia Patristica 38 (2001): 119–35; Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (New York, 2008).

26. Dwayne E. Carpenter, Alfonso X and the Jews: An Edition of and Commentary on Siete Partidas 7.24—“De los judíos” (Berkeley, 1986), pp. 29, 34, 35, 36. Countless other high medieval Christian texts, including but not limited to papal letters, scholastic sermons, conciliar decrees, and royal law codes, similarly complain about Jews’ inappropriate power, prosperity, and arrogance and about the fact that they were visually indistinguishable from Christians, even clerics. See ch. 4, pp. 159–60 and, among many other works, Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca, 1982); Lipton, Images of Intolerance.

27. David Berger, ed., The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages: A Critical Edition of the Nizzahon Vetus (Philadelphia, 1979), p. 224.

28. Avraham Grossman, Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe, trans. Jonathan Chipman (Waltham, 2004), pp. 25–27.

29. Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton, 2004), pp. 123, 176.

30. Irving A. Agus, Rabbi Meir of Rothenberg, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1947), vol. 1, p. 209, Yoreh Deah, no. 110: “A father must restrain a child from eating forbidden food, if eaten in his presence. This law does not apply to the mother.”

31. See the illustrations to cantigas 2 (Saint Ildefonso preaches to a crowd of exclusively male Jews), 12 (a group of exclusively male Jews crucify a waxen image), and 27 (a crowd of exclusively male Jews stand outside a former synagogue and try to reclaim the building). On Christian women’s more regular attendance in church, see Nicole Bériou, L’Avènement des maîtres de la Parole: La prédication à Paris au XIIIe siècle, 2 vols. (Paris, 1998), vol. 1, p. 302.

32. Alexander Nequam foregrounded sex and gender when he wrote that it was permissible to no one to touch the Eucharist “nisi mari” (“unless male”). Cited in R. W. Hunt, The Schools and the Cloister: The Life and Writings of Alexander Nequam (1157–1217), ed. and rev. Margaret Gibson (Oxford, 1984), p. 90.

33. See 1 Cor. 11:7, where Paul calls man the “image and glory of God” and goes on to note that “woman is the glory of man.”

34. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, “Chaste Bodies: Frames and Experiences,” in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester, 1994), pp. 24–42.

35. See Rubin, Gentile Tales.

36. Guillaume le Breton, Philippidos libri duodecim I.754, in Oeuvres de Rigord et de Guillaume le Breton, ed. H. François Delaborde, 2 vols. (Paris, 1885), vol. 2, p. 37.

37. Andreas Capellanus, De Amore, book 3, par. 83 (http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/capellanus/capellanus3.html). See also Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum, trans. Montague Summers (rpt. New York, 1971), p. 28; Alcuin Blamires, Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford, 1992), pp. 48, 61, 62, 101, 117, 120, 125, 138, 146, 158, 163, 188, 224; Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny, “Comment les théologiens et les philosophes voient la femme,” Cahiers de civilisation 20 (1977): 105–29.

38. Paris, BN ms. lat. 14525, fol. 77vb. For the image, see Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge, 1989), p. 302, fig. 163.

39. Rachel Furst, “Captivity, Conversion, and Communal Identity: Sexual Angst and Religious Crisis in Frankfurt, 1241,” Jewish History 22 (2008): 179–221.

40. Steven Kruger, The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe, Medieval Cultures 40 (Minneapolis, 2006), esp. pp. 80–85. M. Lindsay Kaplan has likewise traced the uses of the female Jewish convert to confirm Christian superiority: “Jessica’s Mother: Medieval Constructions of Jewish Race and Gender in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 58 (2007): 1–30.

41. See Rubin, Gentile Tales, pp. 36–37, 41, 84; Anna S. Abulafia repeats this point in her review of Gentile Tales in History Today 49 (1999): 56, but adds that, by way of contrast, Hebrew chronicles of the First Crusade tended to portray Jewish women as particularly steadfast in their faith. Pagan and Arian women were also portrayed as more receptive of Catholic missionizing than men; see Cordula Nolte, “Gender and Conversion in the Merovingian Era,” in Varieties of Religious Conversion in the Middle Ages, ed. James Muldoon (Gainesville, 1997), pp. 81–99.

42. William Chester Jordan, “Adolescence and Conversion in the Middle Ages: A Research Agenda,” in Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe, ed. Michael A. Signer and John van Engen (Notre Dame, 2001), p. 77.

43. Sefer ha-Yashar, ed. Sheraga Faish Rozenthal (Berlin, 1898), p. 45, par. 25, quoted in David Malkiel, “Jews and Apostates in Medieval Europe,” Past and Present 194 (2007): 8–9.

44. Child, English and Scottish Popular Ballads, vol. 3, part 1, pp. 236–43 (no. 155).

45. Jewish Wars, 6.3.4, trans. William Whiston (http://www.ccel.org/j/josephus/works/war-6.htm). Boccaccio, who gives a more truncated version of this tale in his De Casibus Illustrorum Virorum, conveys the woman’s weakness more economically, by narrating her actions entirely in the passive voice. See Giovanni Boccaccio, De Casibus Illustrorum Virorum: A Facsimile Reproduction of the Paris Edition of 1520, introd. Louis Brewer Hall (Gainesville, 1962), pp. 184–85.

46. See Lipton, “The Temple Is My Body,” pp. 129–63. See also the Synagoga in the Stammheim Missal, ch. 3, fig. 10.

47. The field of the iconography of women is vast. See esp. Adam S. Cohen and Anne Derbes, “Bernward and Eve at Hildesheim,” Gesta 40 (2001): 19–38; Madeline H. Caviness, Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle, and Scopic Economy (Philadelphia, 2001), with further bibliography; Camille, Gothic Idol, pp. 220–41, 298–337; and Susan L. Smith, The Power of Women: A Topos in Medieval Art and Literature (Philadelphia, 1995). Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, p. 106, makes it clear that Jewish women in Christian Europe did not veil their faces. Married women, did, however, like their Christian counterparts, wear some form of headdress, though often more for display than out of modesty (see Grossman, p. 116).

48. Benjamin Ravid, “From Yellow to Red: On the Distinguishing Head-Covering of the Jews of Venice,” Jewish History 6 (1992): 183.

49. Zina Amishai-Maisels, “The Demonization of the Other in the Visual Arts,” in Demonizing the Other: Antisemitism, Racism, and Xenophobia, ed. Robert S. Wistrich (Amsterdam, 1999), p. 57.

50. London, BL Add. ms. 47682. For the text, see The Anglo-Norman Text of the Holkham Bible Picture Book, ed. Frederick P. Pickering (Oxford, 1971), p. 52; Pickering, Literature and Art in the Middle Ages (London, 1970), pp. 270–73. On the manuscript, see John Lowden, “The Holkham Bible Picture Book and the Bible Moralisée,” in The Medieval Book: Glosses from Friends and Colleagues of Christopher de Hamel, ed. James H. Marrow, Richard A. Linenthal, and William Noel (’t Goy-Houten, 2010), pp. 75–83; Michelle P. Brown, The Holkham Bible Picture Book: A Facsimile (London, 2007).

51. Frances A. Foster, ed., The Northern Passion: Four Parallel Texts and the French Original, with Specimens of Additional Manuscripts (London, 1916), pp. 64–65.

52. On the image of the Jew in the Holkham Bible, see Sylvia Tomasch, “Chaucer and the Virtual Jew,” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York, 2000), pp. 243–60.

53. O. S. Pickering, “Some Similarities between Queen Mary’s Psalter and the Northern Passion,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 35 (1972): 135–44.

54. Hughes, “Distinguishing Signs.”

55. Hughes, “Distinguishing Signs,” p. 22.

56. Brussels, BR ms. 10178, fol. 222. See Michael Camille, “The Illustrated Manuscripts of Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pélerinages, 1330–1426,” PhD diss. (University of Cambridge, 1985); L. M. J. Delaissé, Medieval Miniatures from the Library of Burgundy to the Department of Manuscripts of the Royal Library of Belgium (Brussels, 1958). For the text, see Guillaume de Deguileville, Le Pèlerinage de Jésus-Crist, ed. J. J. Stürzinger, Roxburghe Club 133 (London, 1897). See also Suzanne M. Yeager, Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative (Cambridge and New York, 2008).

57. On the circumcision of Christ in art, see Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (New York, 1983), pp. 50–65, 157–59; Eva Frojmovic, “Christian Travelers to the Circumcision: Early Modern Representations,” in The Covenant of Circumcision, ed. Elizabeth Wyner Mark (Hanover, 2003), pp. 128–41. See also Gertrud Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, trans. Janet Seligman, 2 vols. (Greenwich, 1971–72), vol. 1, p. 89, who relates it to the cult of Mary and to renewed interest in Old Testament typology.

58. The urban procession known as the Leuven Ommegang featured a character dressed as Sephora, wife of Moses, whose identifying symbol was a sharp stone with which she circumcised the Israelite boys. Meg Twycross, “Worthy Women of the Old Testament: The Ambachtsvrouwen of the Leuven Ommegang,” in Urban Theatre in the Low Countries, 1400–1625, ed. Elsa Strietman and Peter Happé (Turnhout, 2006), p. 228. She was not portrayed as an old woman, however, but as a gracious biblical heroine.

59. Lines 2385–494, ed. J. J. Stürzinger, pp. 79–82.

60. An influential medieval discussion is Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, part 3, question 37, art. 1, responsio. For more on the theology of Christ’s circumcision, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia, 2007), pp. 37, 107, 180.

61. See, e.g., Michael Pacher’s Sankt Wolfgang altarpiece, 1471–81, in the parish church, Sankt Wolfgang, Austria, which depicts the circumcision.

62. See also the woman holding the lantern in the arrest of Christ in the Très Belles Heures (Paris, BN ms. nouv. acq. lat. 3093, fol. 181, dated ca. 1380–1413).

63. For another image that likens the circumcision of Jesus to ritual murder, see London, BL ms. Stowe 17, fol. 125. I am preparing an essay on this disturbing image.

64. On the slippage between female personifications and women, see Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 2003).

65. The tale appears in a French vernacular play, Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages, ed. Gaston Paris and Ulysse Robert (Paris, 1876), pp. 203–48.

66. For other such braids, see the woman in profile—one of only two characters in profile—in the left panel of the Adoration of the Magi altarpiece by Stefan Lochner dated to ca. 1440–45 in the Cologne cathedral; the richly dressed female figure in dorsal view in Robert Campin’s Marriage of the Virgin; a similarly dressed midwife in Campin’s Nativity; the turbaned figure seen only from the back in the 1365 fresco by Andrea da Firenze in the Spagnuola Capella, Santa Maria Novella, Florence; the scowling turbaned man behind the bier of the Virgin in Taddeo di Bartolo’s Sienese fresco of the Funeral of the Virgin; and a blond female in the Nardo Strozzi chapel. The braid may have been constructed as a “Jewish” hairstyle because of its use in earlier Old Testament sculpture, such as the queen in the Royal Portal of Chartres or the seated figure in the voussoirs of the Senlis cathedral central portal, tentatively identified as the Queen of Sheba. In 1 Tim. 2:9–11, Saint Paul exhorts women to dress “quietly and modestly, without braided hair [tortis crinibus] or gold and jewelry or expensive clothes.” A single braid likewise appears on Veronica in Albert van Outwater’s Christ Bearing the Cross (Netherlands, perhaps Utrecht, ca. 1470) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Here the braid is obviously not pejorative but signals exoticism and/or antiquity.

67. Hughes, “Distinguishing Signs,” p. 24; Katherine Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, 2001), p. 176n.

68. Ariel Toaff, “The Jewish Badge in Italy during the Fifteenth Century,” in Die Juden in Ihrer Mittelalterlichen Umwelt, ed. Alfred Ebenbauer and Klaus Zatloukal (Vienna and Cologne, 1991), pp. 275–76.

69. Hughes, “Distinguishing Signs.”

70. Penny Howell Jolly, “Learned Reading, Vernacular Seeing: Jacques Daret’s Presentation in the Temple,” Art Bulletin 82 (2000): 428–52.

71. Jolly, “Learned Reading, Vernacular Seeing.”

72. See R. Po-chia Hsia, Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial (New Haven and London, 1992).

73. See esp. David S. Areford, The Viewer and the Printed Image in Late Medieval Europe (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, Vt., 2010), pp. 164–227; Dana E. Katz, The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance (Philadelphia, 2008), pp. 119–57.

74. Areford, The Viewer and the Printed Image, pp. 186–87, recognizes the unprecedented nature of the inclusion of the woman and adds, “Its message is clear—all Jews, male and female, are greedy predators and bloodthirsty child murderers.” But Areford does not explore the reasons this message appears at this time.

75. For a detailed study of the trial and its texts, see Hsia, Trent 1475.

76. Likewise, the mid-fifteenth-century predella paintings of the miracle of the host made by Paolo Uccello for the Corpus Christi confraternity are the first to depict the wife being burned for the crime together with her husband. Miri Rubin, “Imagining the Jew: The Late Medieval Eucharistic Discourse,” in In and Out of the Ghetto, p. 188.

77. AASS May 6:535c.

78. See the documents in LuAnn Homza, ed., The Spanish Inquisition, 1478–1614: An Anthology of Sources (Indianapolis, 2006), pp. 14–49, and the discussion in Gretchen Starr-LeBeau, In the Shadow of the Virgin: Inquisitors, Friars, and Conversos in Guadalupe, Spain (Princeton, 2003), pp. 145–79.

79. Homza, The Spanish Inquisition, p. 4.

80. Jolly, “Learned Reading, Vernacular Seeing.”

81. See Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker, “The Household as a Site of Civic and Religious Instruction: Two Household Books from Late Medieval Brabant,” in Household, Women, and Christianity in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ed. Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker and Jocelyn Wogan-Brown (Turnhout, 2005), pp. 191–214; Diana M. Webb, “Women and Home: The Domestic Setting of Late Medieval Spirituality,” in Women in the Church, ed. W. J. Sheils and D. Wood, Studies in Church History 27 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 159–73. See also the manuscripts analyzed in Anthony Bale, “‘House Devil, Town Saint’: Anti-Semitism and Hagiography in Medieval Suffolk,” in Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings, ed. Sheila Delaney (New York, 2002), pp. 185–209.

82. Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford and New York, 1989), vividly demonstrates this process in Protestant Augsburg but somewhat underestimates the extent to which it had already begun in late medieval Catholic urban centers.

83. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cloisters Collection, 1956 (56.70). See Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (Princeton, 1951), p. 127.

84. Kathryn M. Rudy, “Children and Domestic Interiors in the Miniatures by the Master of Catherine of Cleves,” in From the Hand of the Master: The Hours of Catherine of Cleves, ed. Anne Margreet W. As-Vijvers (Antwerp, 2009), pp. 63–65.

85. Meyer Schapiro notes the rise of the cult of Joseph from ca. 1400 in “‘Muscipula Diaboli,’ the Symbolism of the Mérode Altarpiece,” Art Bulletin 27 (1945): 184. On Saint Anne and the Holy Kinship, see Pamela Sheingorn, “Appropriating the Holy Kinship: Gender and Family History,” in Medieval Families: Perspectives on Marriage, Household, and Children, ed. Carol Neel (Toronto, 2004), pp. 273–301.

86. Mulder-Bakker, “The Household as a Site of Civic and Religious Instruction.”

87. Catherine Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy, 1200–1500 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 111–13; Eric Dursteler, Renegade Women: Gender, Identity, and Boundaries in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore, 2011), p. 93.

88. Hughes, “Distinguishing Signs,” p. 30.

89. See n. 48, above.

90. Hughes, “Distinguishing Signs,” p. 30.

91. See the remarks of Dursteler, Renegade Women, pp. 102, 113, 114.

92. Anna Foa, The Jews of Europe after the Black Death, trans. Andrea Grover (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2000), pp. 55, 70.

93. Shannon McSheffrey, “Place, Space, and Situation: Public and Private in the Making of Marriage in Late-Medieval London,” Speculum 79 (2004): 986, emphasizes the public nature and civic and religious significance of marriage.

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE JEW IN THE CROWD: SURVEILLANCE AND CIVIC VISION, CA. 1350–1500

1. Bernardino da Siena, Le prediche volgari inedite, ed. P. Dionisio Pacetti (Siena, 1935), p. 252.

2. On van Ouwater, see Charles D. Cuttler, Northern Painting (New York, 1973), pp. 134–35; Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character (New York, 1971), pp. 242–43; James E. Snyder, “The Early Haarlem School of Painting: I. Ouwater and the Master of the Tiburtine Sibyl,” Art Bulletin 42 (1960): 39–55; W. M. Conway, “Albert van Ouwater,” Burlington Magazine 40 (1922): 106–21; S. Kemperdick, “Albert van Ouwater: ‘The Raising of Lazarus,’” Oud Holland 123 (2010): 235–50; A. Châtelet, “Early Dutch Painting: Thirty Years On,” Oud Holland 123 (2010): 314–29.

3. See John 11:1–46 for the narrative and list of characters.

4. Briefly discussed in Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art, 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993), vol. 1, p. 92. A. Châtelet, Les Primitifs hollandais: La peinture dans les Pays-Bas du Nord au XVe siècle (Paris, 1980), p. 49, notes that it is characteristic of Westphalian art to separately group believers and unbelievers, but less typical in Italian art.

5. In avoiding Lazarus, the priest is reflecting the scriptural injunction against priestly contact with dead bodies (Lev. 21:1).

6. See John 11:38. On this gesture, see Arthur Coleman Danto, “Giotto and the Stench of Lazarus,” in Philosophizing Art: Selected Essays (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1999), pp. 106–22.

7. There were few direct visual models for any of these characters: Ruth Wilkins Sullivan, “Duccio’s Raising of Lazarus Reexamined,” Art Bulletin 70 (1988): 374. The bald man with the round, ruddy face recalls Le Compost et kalendrier des bergiers, a late-fifteenth-century encyclopedia whose chapter on De phyzionomie des bergiers asserts that a fat and swollen face signifies gluttony, negligence, a lack of reason, or depravity. Quoted in Hannele Klemettilä, Epitomes of Evil: Representation of Executioners in Northern France and the Low Countries in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2006), p. 171; see also p. 185.

8. Snyder, “The Early Haarlem School of Painting,” p. 41, notes that in this painting “Good and Evil are … clearly contrasted,” but does not discuss these more ambiguous figures.

9. Such crowds can be seen in both northern and southern artworks, primarily those from the densely urbanized regions of the Lowlands, the Rhineland, Italy, and Iberia. On geographical continuities, see Larry Silver, “Arts and Minds: Northern European Art History,” Renaissance Quarterly 59 (2006): 351–73.

10. Elisabeth Roth, Der Volkreiche Kalvarienberg in Literatur und Kunst des Spätmittelalters (Berlin, 1958).

11. See Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago, 1999), p. 47.

12. Larry Silver, “God in the Details: Bosch and Judgment(s),” Art Bulletin 83 (2001): 626–50, points out the prominence of the theme of faulty sight in Bosch’s work. Patricia Lee Rubin, Images and Identity in Fifteenth-Century Florence (New Haven and London, 2007), pp. 5–6, discusses fickle appearances. Late medieval cautions about the image are numerous: see Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York and Cambridge, 1998); Sixten Ringbom, Icon to Narrative: The Rise of the Dramatic Close-Up in Fifteenth-Century Devotional Painting, 2nd ed. (Dornspijk, 1984).

13. Most of these images were commissioned by confraternities, guilds, collegiate chapters, or wealthy individuals and were located in public chapels, chapels to which visitors were frequently invited, or other accessible places of worship. The self-consciously civic nature of late medieval Italian art has long been recognized; see the fourteenth-century conversation about Florentine painting recorded in Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (Princeton, 1951), pp. 3, 52–53, and Rubin, Images and Identity, p. xiii. Much northern European painting was likewise civically oriented. See Gerhard Jaritz, “Images, Urban Space, and the Language and Grammar of Elite Dress (Central Europe, Fifteenth Century),” in Le Verbe, l’image, et les représentations de la société urbaine au Moyen Âge, ed. Marc Boone, Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin, and Jean-Pierre Sosson (Antwerp, 2003), pp. 219–25.

14. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1980), p. 45, made a similar argument long ago, regarding public rituals rather than art. See also Patricia Lee Rubin, “Domenico Ghirlandaio and the Meaning of History in Fifteenth-Century Florence,” in Domenico Ghirlandaio 1449–1494. Atti del Convegno Internazionale, Firenze, 16–18 ottobre 1994, ed. W. Prinz and M. Seidel (Florence, 1996), p. 107.

15. Marvin Trachtenberg, Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art, and Power in Early Modern Florence (Cambridge, 1997), passim, esp. p. 246, argues that urban design practices turned streets and squares—and the people in them and viewing them—into artistic tableaux, making them expressions and enforcers of civic power. See also Fabrizio Nevola, “Civic Identity and Private Patrons in Renaissance Siena,” in Renaissance Siena: Art for a City, ed. Luke Syson et al. (London, 2007), pp. 17–29; Michael Camille, “Signs on Medieval Street Corners,” in Die Strasse. Zur Funktion und Rezeption öffentlichen Raums im späten Mittelalter (Vienna, 2001), pp. 91–117; Felipe Pereda, “Through a Glass Darkly: Paths to Salvation in Spanish Painting at the Outset of the Inquisition,” in Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism, ed. Herbert L. Kessler and David Nirenberg (Philadelphia and Oxford, 2011), p. 275.

16. Trachtenberg, Dominion of the Eye; Lauro Martines, Strong Words: Writing and Social Strain in the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore, 2001), p. 271.

17. See esp. the nearly exhaustive catalogs of Mellinkoff, Outcasts, and Heinz Schreckenberg, The Jews in Christian Art: An Illustrated History (New York, 1996). Other fine studies include James H. Marrow, Passion Iconography in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance (Kortrijk, 1979); Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, 2003); Merback, The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel; Michel Pastoureau, Symboles du Moyen Âge: Animaux, végétaux, couleurs, objets (Paris, 2012).

18. Hieronymus Bosch, Christ Carrying the Cross, 1480s, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

19. James H. Marrow, “Circumdederunt me canes multi: Christ’s Tormentors in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance,” Art Bulletin 59 (1977): 167–81.

20. Colum Hourihane, Pontius Pilate, Anti-Semitism, and the Passion in Medieval Art (Princeton, 2009). On the Arma Christi, see R. Berliner, “Arma Christi,” in Münchner Jahrbuch für Bildende Kunst 6 (1955): 35–152, and John C. Hirsch, The Boundaries of Faith: The Development and Transmission of Medieval Spirituality (Leiden and New York, 1996), pp. 124–43, esp. p. 138.

21. See Jean-Pierre Bordier, Le Jeu de la Passion: Le message chrétien et le théâtre français (XIIIe–XVIe s). (Paris, 1998). Petra Schöner, “Visual Representations of Jews and Judaism in Sixteenth-Century Germany,” in Jews, Judaism, and the Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Germany, ed. Dean Phillip Bell and Stephen G. Burnett (Leiden and Boston, 2006), pp. 357–91, recognizes the bipolar quality of representations of Jews, though she is somewhat naïve in her treatment of images.

22. For a more nuanced and deeply erudite exposition of late medieval imagery, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia, 2007).

23. Roth, Der Volkreiche Kalvarienberg.

24. Anne Derbes, Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy: Narrative Painting, Franciscan Ideologies, and the Levant (New York, 1996), has attributed the intense emotionalism of this imagery to the influence of Franciscan spirituality, to the Franciscans’ sense of their own persecution. Marrow, Passion Iconography, meticulously maps correspondences between Passion imagery and devotional texts.

25. Helen Adolf, in a review of Roth, Der Volkreiche Kalvarienberg, in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology 60 (1961): 128–31, relates the seething crowds to late medieval violence and brutality. Bynum, Wonderful Blood, surveys and critiques this approach.

26. Such crowds are textually justified by Luke 23:27, but their artistic depiction is hardly dictated by this verse, as earlier images of the Via Crucis and Crucifixion had not included crowds.

27. This is especially common in quattrocento Italian painting: E. Marchand, “The Representation of Citizens in Religious Fresco Cycles in Tuscany,” in With and Without the Medici, ed. E. Marchand and A. Wright (Aldershot, 1998), p. 118. See, e.g., Vittore Carpaccio’s 1514 Saint Stephen Preaching in the Louvre, in which a Jew tugs at his beard while conversing with another.

28. Andrea da Firenze, Christ Carrying the Cross, 1365–68, Cappellone degli Spagnoli, Santa Maria Novella, Florence.

29. Andrea da Firenze, Pentecost, 1365–68, Cappellone degli Spagnoli, Santa Maria Novella, Florence.

30. For a startling example, see the Ecce Homo of the Braunschweig Master, ca. 1506: Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum (Braunschweig), inv. GG 33.

31. By Andrea di Bonaiuto, called “da Firenze,” dating to 1365–68. This room is now called the Spanish Chapel. It was funded by a legacy of the merchant Buonamico Guidalotti and doubled as a reception room for visitors and guests of the priory. The frescoes would therefore have been seen by a broad swath of Florentine society. On the frescoes, see Joseph Polzer, “Andrea di Bonaiuto’s Via Veritatis and Dominican Thought in Late Medieval Italy,” Art Bulletin 77 (1995): 262–89; Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena, pp. 94–104; Nirit Ben-Arye Debby, “Visual Rhetoric: Images of Saracens in Florentine Churches,” Annuario de Estudios Medievales 42 (2012): 7–28; Julian Gardner, “Andrea di Bonaiuto and the Chapterhouse Frescoes in Santa Maria Novella,” Art History 2 (1979): 107–38. The crowded Calvary first appeared in the first quarter of the fourteenth century in Italian art.

32. On the single braid, see ch. 6.

33. There is no record of any Jewish community in Haarlem in the fifteenth century, though a 1461 treasurer’s account records that some converted Jews were paid twenty pence by the city council: M. Wolff, De Geschiedenis der Joden te Haarlem, 1600–1815 (Haarlem, 1917), p. 7n1. On Jews in the Lowlands, see Jean Stengers, Les Juifs dans les Pays-Bas au Moyen Âge (Brussels, 1950), and Christoph Cluse, Studien zur Geschichte der Juden in den mittelalterlichen Niederlanden (Hannover, 2000).

34. On red and yellow as colors associated with Jews, see Mellinkoff, Outcasts, and Pastouroux, Symboles du Moyen Âge.

35. See Bryson Burroughs, “A Fifteenth-Century Madonna,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1922): 176–77.

36. Robert W. Gaston, “Attention and Inattention in Religious Painting of the Renaissance: Some Preliminary Observations,” in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hugh Craig Smyth, ed. A. Morrogh, F. Superbi Gioffredi, P. Morselli, and E. Borssok (Florence, 1985), vol. 2, pp. 260–61.

37. Rubin, Images and Identity, pp. 94–95.

38. Meditations on the Life of Christ: An Illustrated Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century, ed. Rosalie B. Green and Isa Ragusa (Princeton, 1961), quoted in Gaston, “Attention and Inattention,” p. 256. Gaston calls this form of attentiveness, which directs the viewer’s gaze, the “chorus effect.”

39. Gaston, “Attention and Inattention,” p. 263.

40. The painting dates to ca. 1500 and is now in the Museo Castelvecchio in Verona, Italy.

41. I count eighteen faces, including Mary and John. To compare, see the Arma Christi by the Master of Flemalle (ca. 1420) in the Musée des Beaux Arts, Brussels, which features only two faces, one to either side of Christ, or the 1354 version by Roberto Oderisi in the Fogg Museum, or the panel by the Cologne Master (ca. 1350) now in the Hamburg Kunsthalle, which has one spitting Jew in profile.

42. On the renewed popularity of beards in Italy ca. 1500, see Douglas Biow, “Manly Matters: The Theatricality and Sociability of Beards in Giordano Bruno’s Candelaio and Sixteenth-Century Italy,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40 (2010): 325–46.

43. On Jews in late-fifteenth-century Verona, see Brian Pullen, “Jewish Banks and the Monti di Pietà,” in The Jews of Early Modern Venice, ed. Robert C. Davis and Benjamin Ravid (Baltimore and London, 2001), pp. 53–72.

44. Alois Riegl, quoted in Gaston, “Attention and Inattention,” p. 265.

45. See John Shearman, Only Connect…: Art and the Spectator in Renaissance Italy (Princeton, 1992); Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (Cambridge, 1983).

46. See Pierre Lavedan, Représentation des villes dans l’art du Moyen Âge (Paris, 1954); Craig Harbison, “Fact, Symbol, Ideal: Roles for Realism in Early Netherlandish Painting,” in Petrus Christus in Renaissance Bruges: An Interdisciplinary Approach, ed. Maryan Wynn Ainsworth (New York and Turnhout, 1995), pp. 22–30; Felicity Ratté, Picturing the City in Medieval Italian Painting (Jefferson, N.C. and London, 2006).

47. Dallas G. Denery, Seeing and Being Seen in the Late Medieval World: Optics, Theology, and the Religious Life (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 19–38, discusses the Dominican project of generating awareness that the self is always visible to others.

48. See John Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance (New York, 1966); Marchand, “The Representation of Citizens,” p. 107; and Charles M. Rosenberg, “Virtue, Piety, and Affection,” in Il Ritratto e la memoria: Materiali, ed. A. Gentili, P. Morel, and C. Ciera Via (Rome, 1993), vol. 2, p. 173.

49. See Rubin, Images and Identity, p. 3; Rosenberg, “Virtue, Piety, and Affection,” p. 182.

50. Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance, pp. 17–18. See also Joseph Polzer, “Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s ‘War and Peace’ Murals Revisited: Contributions to the Meaning of the Good Government Allegory,” Artibus et Historiae (2002): 83.

51. Ingrid Falque, “Entre traditions flamande et ibérique. Les oeuvres religieuses flamandes comportant des portraits d’Espagnols (1400–1550),” in Publications du Centre Européen d’Études Bourguignonnes (XIVe–XVIe s). Rencontre de Madrid (23 au 26 septembre 2010). Diplomates, voyageurs, pèlerins, marchands entre pays bourguignons et Espagne aux XVe et XVIe siècles (Neuchâtel, 2011), pp. 275–301.

52. Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon.

53. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven, 1966), p. 93.

54. Marchand, “The Representation of Citizens,” pp. 119, 124.

55. See the similar function assigned the Despenser Retable in Norwich Cathedral in Sarah Stanbury, The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, 2008), pp. 76–94.

56. 1501, Collegiata di Santa Maria Maggiore, Spello.

57. Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli cites the example of a very well-dressed elite citizen of Ravenna who in 1449 was mistaken for a Jew (and was deeply offended): “Il Vestito degli ebrei,” Zakhor 4 (2000): 162. Such confusion prevailed across Europe; it was this situation that prompted repeated calls for, and reissuances of, the Jewish badge statutes, which, however, were rarely enforced and so by no means solved the “problem.” See Ariel Toaff, “The Jewish Badge in Italy during the 15th Century,” in Die Juden in ihrer mittelalterlichen Umwelt, ed. Alfred Ebenbauer and Klaus Zatloukal (Vienna, 1991), pp. 275–80.

58. Moralizing sermons echoed this process, excoriating merchants and other urban residents for precisely those sins stereotypically associated with Jews: avarice, usury, luxury, pride, most especially. See Peter Howard, “‘Doctrine, When Preached, Is Entirely Civic’: The Generation of Public Theology and the Role of the Studia in Renaissance Florence,” in Communities of Learning, Religious Diversity, and the Written Record, 1085–1453, ed. Constant J. Mews and John Crossle (Turnhout, 2011), p. 302. The Tuscan preacher Bernardino of Siena chastised Christians for engaging in the “evil” money trade as often as he chastised Jews: Franco Mormando, The Preacher’s Demons: Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance Italy (Chicago and London, 1999), pp. 167, 182–91.

59. This reaction I am postulating parallels the documented reaction of Gianozzo Manetti to an antiusury sermon of Bernardino of Siena: “You have sent us all to damnation!” Quoted in Mormando, The Preacher’s Demons, p. 185, who thereby rightly corrects Bonfil’s assertion that any condemnation of usury would have been understood as a condemnation of Jews alone.

60. The van der Weyden figure is discussed in Alfred Acres, “The Columba Altarpiece and the Time of the World,” Art Bulletin 80 (1998): 443, where he is identified as an Old Testament prophet. I thank Stephen Perkinson for this reference.

61. The following are a few examples of each type. Shadowy background figures: the young man in the white turban beside Christ in Cima de Coneglione’s Christ among the Doctors (1504, Warsaw, National Library of Poland) or the balding man to Christ’s left in Albrecht Dürer’s Christ among the Doctors (1506, Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza). The artists themselves: Luca Signorelli in his Triumph of Antichrist (ca. 1499–1504, Orvieto, Chapel of San Brizio, Duomo) or Masaccio in his Raising of the Son of Theophilus (ca. 1425, Florence, Cappella Brancacci, Santa Maria del Carmine). Holy figures: Saint John in the Verona Arma Christi and Man of Sorrows (ca. 1500), Gregory the Great in the Mass of Gregory the Great by the Master of the Holy Kinship (1486, Utrecht, Museum Catherijneconvent), and the angels in the Altarpiece of the Councillors by Lluis Dalmau of Valencia (1445, Barcelona, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya). Christ himself: Hieronymus Bosch’s Crowning Christ with Thorns (ca. 1490–1500, London, National Gallery). Jean K. Cadogan, Domenico Ghirlandaio: Artist and Artisan (New Haven, 2000), p. 90, notes that there is a figure staring out at the viewer in every one of the donor groups in Ghirlandaio’s Santa Maria Novella frescoes.

62. The figure is pointed out by Merback, The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel, p. 64; image and detail reproduced on pp. 40 and 65.

63. On Painting, ed. Spencer, p. 78; quoted in Gaston, “Attention and Inattention,” p. 259.

64. Meiss, Painting in Siena and Florence, pp. 122, 148. The line is from a trecento Sienese poem, Passione di Nostro Signore Gesu Cristo (1365), echoing a verse from Lamentations.

65. Rubin, Images and Identity, pp. 100–01, 125–28.

66. For similar exhortations embedded in devotional literature and in urban festivals, see Jennifer Bryan, Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private Self in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, 2008); Deanna Shemek, “Circular Definitions: Configuring Gender in Italian Renaissance Festival,” Renaissance Quarterly 48 (1995): 1–40.

67. Girolamo Savonarola, Prediche sopra Amos e Zaccaria, 3 vols., ed. P. Ghiglieri (Rome, 1971), vol. 3, p. 233; quoted in Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, p. 69.

68. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, p. 71 (no citation).

69. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, p. 355.

70. See Lavedan, Représentation des villes, p. 31; Peter Ainsworth, “A Passion for Townscape: Depictions of the City in a Burgundian Manuscript of Froissart’s Chroniques,” in Regions and Landscapes: Reality and Imagination in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Peter Ainsworth and Tom Scott (Oxford and New York, 2000), pp. 69–111.

71. See Trachtenberg, Dominion of the Eye, p. 261.

72. Quoted in Tom Nichols, “The Cultural Dynamics of the Representation of Space in Venetian Renaissance Painting,” in Mediterranean Urban Culture, ed. Alexander Cowen (Exeter, 2000), p. 171.

73. See, e.g., Michael Pacher’s Stoning of Christ (ca. 1480, St. Wolfgang im Salzkammergut, Sankt Wolfgang Parish Church) or Giovanni Mansueti’s Miracle of the Relic of the Holy Cross (1494, Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia).

74. Noted as well in Ratté, Picturing the City, pp. 59–90.

75. Bernard of Clairvaux discouraged a nun from living alone as an anchoress because doing so could tarnish her reputation: “For anyone wishing to lead a bad life the desert supplies ample opportunity. The woods afford cover, and solitude assures silence. No one can censure the evil no one sees.” Bernard of Clairvaux, “Letter 118: To a Nun of the Convent of St. Mary of Troyes,” in The Letters of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, trans. Bruno Scott James (Kalamazoo, 1998), pp. 179–80.

76. See ch. 6.

77. James Amelang, “The Myth of the Mediterranean City: Perceptions of Sociability,” in Mediterranean Urban Culture, 1400–1700, ed. Alexander Cowen (Exeter, 2000), p. 27.

78. See Pereda, “Through a Glass Darkly,” p. 264; LuAnn Homza, ed., The Spanish Inquisition, 1478–1614: An Anthology of Sources (Indianapolis, 2006), p. 30.

79. Rubin, Images and Identity, p. 42. It is for this reason that, as is noted by Mormando, The Preacher’s Demons, p. 5, moralizing public preachers were invited and sponsored by civic governments rather than religious authorities.

80. The bibliography on this topic is large and ever growing. See esp. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence; Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton, 1981); Guido Ruggiero, “Constructing Civic Morality, Deconstructing the Body: Civic Rituals of Punishment in Renaissance Venice,” in Riti e Rituali nell societa medievali, ed. Jacques Chiffoleau, Lauro Martines, and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani (Spoleto, 1994), pp. 174–90; and the studies collected in City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Kathryn L. Reyerson (Minneapolis, 1994), and Ceremonial Culture in Pre-Modern Europe, ed. Nicholas Howe (Notre Dame, 2007).

81. Mervyn James, “Ritual, Drama, and Social Body in the Late Medieval English Town,” Past and Present 98 (1983): 3–29.

82. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, p. 3.

83. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, pp. 375–76.

84. Splendor venetorum civitatis consuetudinum, ed. F. Schupfer, Bibliotheca Iuridica Medii Aevi, vol. 3 (Bologna, 1901), pp. 104–05, quoted in Guido Ruggiero, “Constructing Civic Morality,” in Riti e Rituali, p. 188. A judge was likewise displayed to the people, that they might fear being judged, and the doge’s sword, that they might fear punishment (Ruggiero).

85. Hannes Kleineke, “Civic Ritual, Space, and Conflict in Fifteenth-Century Exeter,” in Ritual and Space in the Middle Ages, ed. Frances Andrews (Donington, Lincolnshire, 2011), p. 178; The Little Red Book of Bristol, ed. Francis B. Bickley, 2 vols. (Bristol, 1900), vol. 1, pp. 10–12.

86. Elsa Streiman and Peter Happé, “Introduction,” in Urban Theatre in the Low Countries, ed. Elsa Streiman and Peter Happé (Turnhout, 2006), pp. 23–24.

87. Elsa Streitman, “A Tale of Two Cities: Drama and Community in the Low Countries,” in Drama and Community: People and Plays in Medieval Europe, ed. Alan Hindley (Turnhout, 1999), p. 135.

88. Roger Chartrier, “From Court Festivity to City Spectators,” in Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer (Philadelphia, 1995), p. 60, notes that in courtly entertainments power is demonstrated through expenditure, appearances are taken for reality, and distinctions are “made highly visible by the distributions of ranks and roles.” See also The Stage as Mirror: Civic Theatre in Late Medieval Europe, ed. A. E. Knight (Cambridge, 1997); David Nicholas, “In the Pit of the Burgundian Theater State,” in City and Spectacle, ed. Hanawalt and Reyerson, pp. 271–95; Anne-Laure van Bruaene, “The Habsburg Theatre State: Court, City, and the Performance of Identity in the Early Modern Southern Low Countries,” in City and Spectacle, ed. Hanawalt and Reyerson, pp. 131–49; Gerard Nijsten, “The Duke and His Towns: The Power of Ceremonies, Feasts, and Public Amusements in the Duchy of Guelders (East Netherlands) in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” in City and Spectacle, ed. Hanawalt and Reyerson, pp. 235–70; Peter J. Arnade, Realms of Ritual: Burgundian Ceremony and Civic Life in Late Medieval Ghent (Ithaca, 1996); and Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice, pp. 185ff.

89. Merback, The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel, esp. pp. 126–57; Paul Friedland, Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Punishment in France (Oxford, 2012). Andrea Zorzi, “Rituali e Ceremoniali penali nelle città italiane (secc. XIII–XVI),” in Riti e Rituali, pp. 141–57, examines penal ceremonies as forms of “social control of behavior.”

90. Leonardo Bruni, Laudatio Florentinae Urbis, ed. Stefano U. Baldassarri (Florence, 2000), sect. 1. Alberti is quoted in Amelang, “The Myth of the Mediterranean City,” p. 18.

91. Robert Stein, “Introduction,” in Networks, Regions, and Nations: Shaping Identities in the Low Countries, 1300–1650, ed. Robert Stein and Judith Pollman (Leiden, 2010), p. 1.

92. Cadogan, Domenico Ghirlandaio, p. 19; Lavedan, Représentation des villes, p. 22.

93. Christine Göttler, “Is Seeing Believing? The Use of Evidence in Representations of the Miraculous Mass of Saint Gregory,” Germanic Review 76 (2001): 121–42.

94. David Nicholas, The Later Medieval City, 1300–1500 (London and New York, 1997), p. 313.

95. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, p. 220.

96. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “Les Femmes dans les rituels de l’alliance et de la naissance à Florence,” in Riti e rituali, p. 6. According to Klapisch-Zuber, this practice seems to have declined in the second half of the fifteenth century.

97. Giovanni di Pagolo Morelli, Ricordi, in Mercanti Scrittori: Ricordi nella Firenze tra Medioevo e Rinascimento, ed. Vittore Branca (Florence, 1986), pp. 200–201.

98. Montaigne’s Travel Journal, trans. and ed. D. M. Frame (San Francisco, 1983), p. 93, quoted in Amelang, “The Myth of the Mediterranean City,” p. 25. Amelang elsewhere (p. 21) notes the “highly theatrical quality of social interactions” in many Mediterranean cities. Although climate precluded quite as much outside self-exhibiting in northern cities as in Italy, the works referred to in n. 88, above, confirm that display was also important in the North.

99. Girolamo Savonarola, Prediche sopra Giobbe, ed. Roberto Ridolfi, 2 vols. (Rome, 1957), vol. 1, p. 381, cited in Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, p. 350.

100. Amelang, “The Myth of the Mediterranean City,” p. 20, underscores the ubiquity of the public marking and spatial segregation of rich and poor, young and old, men and women, sinful and respectable.

101. For the Jewish badge, see note 167, below.

102. See ch. 4, n. 88.

103. Benjamin Ravid, “The Venetian Government and the Jews,” in The Jews of Early Modern Venice, ed. Robert C. Davis and Benjamin Ravid (Baltimore and London, 2001), p. 21, and Ravid, “From Yellow to Red: On the Distinguishing Head-Covering of the Jews of Venice,” Jewish History 6 (1992): 179–210.

104. Diane Owen Hughes, “Distinguishing Signs: Ear-Rings, Jews, and Franciscan Rhetoric in the Italian Renaissance City,” Past and Present 112 (1986): 3–59.

105. Little Red Book of Bristol, ed. Bickley, vol. 2, pp. 228–29.

106. Sentence of Andrés Benáldez in Homza, The Spanish Inquisition, p. 7.

107. The literature on sumptuary legislation is vast. For a general overview, see Alan Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law (Basingstoke, 1996). For Italy, see Catherine Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy, 1200–1500 (Oxford, 2002); Susan Mosher Stuard, Gilding the Market: Luxury and Fashion in Fourteenth-Century Italy (Philadelphia, 2006); and Carol Lansing, Passion and Order: Restraint of Grief in the Medieval Italian Communes (Ithaca, 2008). For France, see Odile Blanc, “Vêtement féminin, vêtement masculin à la fin du Moyen Âge. Le point de vue des moralistes,” in Le Vêtement: Histoire, Archéologie, et Symbolique au Moyen Âge, ed. Michel Pastoureau (Paris, 1989), pp. 243–86. For an early Iberian law, see Anon., “A Thirteenth-Century Castilian Sumptuary Law,” Business History Review 37 (1963): 98–100. For German-speaking lands, which began to pass sumptuary legislation in the fourteenth century, see Fremde in der Stadt: Ordnungen, Repräsentationen und soziale Praktiken (13.–15. Jahrhundert), Inklusion/Exklusion, ed. Peter Bell, Dirk Suckow, and Gerhard Wolf (Frankfurt and Berlin, 2010), and Liselotte Constanze Eisenbart, Kleiderordnungen der deutschen Städte zwischen 1350 und 1700: Ein Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Burgertums (Gottingen, 1962). For the Lowlands, see Martha C. Howell, Commerce before Capitalism in Europe, 1300–1600 (Cambridge, 2010), ch. 4. On England, see Frances Elizabeth Baldwin, Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Regulation in England (Baltimore, 1926); N. B. Harte, “State Control of Dress and Social Change in Pre-Industrial England,” in Trade, Government, and Economy in Pre-Industrial England: Essays Presented to F. J. Fisher, ed. D. C. Coleman and A. H. Johns (London, 1976), pp. 132–65. Jewish communal authorities also enacted sumptuary regulations, often identical to those passed by Christians, such as in Forli in 1428: Howard Adelman, “Rabbis and Reality: Public Activities of Jewish Women in Italy during the Renaissance and the Catholic Restoration,” Jewish History 5:1 (1991): 29–30.

108. Objections to sumptuary legislation also invoked civic honor, claiming that fine dress was necessary to display the power and prestige of the city: Killerby, Sumptuary Law, p. 124.

109. Alain Derville, Les Villes de Flandres et d’Artois (900–1500) (Villeneuve d’Ascq, 2002), p. 126.

110. Lansing, Passion and Order.

111. Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford and New York, 1989).

112. Samuel Cohn Jr., “Criminality and the State in Renaissance Florence, 1344–1466,” Journal of Social History 14 (1980): 211–33; Gene Brucker, “Civic Traditions in Premodern Italy,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29 (1999): 357–77; John Henderson, Piety and Charity in Late Medieval Florence (Oxford, 1994).

113. Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance, p. 9. It has been noted that the rise of portraiture shows a desire to look at oneself, but it also exposes oneself to the gaze of others. It is, then, an assertion of virtue (as well as an act of courage).

114. Amelang, “The Myth of the Mediterranean City,” p. 28.

115. Rubin, Images and Identity, pp. 240–41: women were supposed to be beautiful, well dressed, modest, pious, healthy, and “big”—the better to bear children.

116. Killerby, Sumptuary Law, p. 148. Jewish sumptuary laws explicitly allowed the wearing of banned clothing indoors: Adelman, “Rabbis and Reality,” p. 30.

117. Statuti di Ala e di Avio del secolo XV, ed. Bruno Andreollo, Stefania Manente, Ermanno Orlando, and Alessandra Princivalli (Rome, 1990), p. 52 (Ala 1.3). The concern was that guardians of minors would pressure children into going against their own interests.

118. Elizabeth S. Cohen, “Honor and Gender in the Streets of Early Modern Rome,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 22 (1992): 597–625; Trevor Dean, Crime and Justice in Late Medieval Italy (Cambridge and New York, 2007), pp. 122–23. See also David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1996), on the ritual defacing of the Jewish calle in fourteenth-century Aragon.

119. Trevor Dean, “Gender and Insult in an Italian City: Bologna in the Later Middle Ages,” Social History 29 (2004): 228. Dean notes, in Crime and Justice, p. 123, that in the mid-fifteenth century urban governments began to criminalize the practice of door scorning: the culture of surveillance and behavioral modification that permeated the city was a double-edged sword, which authorities increasingly felt the need to control more fully.

120. Dean, “Gender and Insult,” p. 228.

121. Samuel Y. Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine Renaissance (Ithaca, 1984).

122. Andrea Zorzi and Josiane Tourres, “Contrôle social, ordre public et répression judiciaire à Florence à l’époque communale: Éléments et problèmes,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 45 (1990): 1169. On the darker manifestations of the trend, in the form of regulation, marking, and surveillance, see Valentin Groebner, Who Are You? (New York, 2007).

123. Trachtenberg, Dominion of the Eye, p. 6.

124. Nicholas, The Later Medieval City, p. 308.

125. Lansing, Passion and Order, p. 53.

126. Christoph Cluse, “Zur Repräsentation von Sklaven und Sklavinnen in Statuten und Notariatsinstrumenten italienische Städte um 1400,” in Fremde in der Stadt, ed. Bell, Suckow, and Wolf, pp. 383–408.

127. Rubin, Images and Identity, pp. 94–95; Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1986). A similar office was established in Lucca in 1448: Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, p. 46.

128. Trachtenberg, Dominion of the Eye, p. 4.

129. Klemettilä, Epitomes of Evil, p. 29, emphasizes the weakness of policing.

130. Killerby, Sumptuary Law, p. 148.

131. Dean, Crime and Justice, p. 142.

132. See, e.g., Statuti di Rovereto del 1425: Con le aggiunte dal 1434 al 1538, ed. Federica Parcianello (Venice, 1991), p. 94 (1.10).

133. La Legislazione Suntuaria Secoli XIII–XVI: Emilia-Romagna, ed. Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli (Rome, 2002), pp. 55, 58. According to Trevor Dean, Crime and Punishment, p. 18, obliging citizens to denounce crimes became a general trend in Italian cities starting from the later thirteenth century, with mechanisms for denunciation being further developed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

134. Nicholas, The Later Medieval City, p. 307.

135. Quoted in Mormando, The Preacher’s Demons, p. 56.

136. Dean, Crime and Justice, p. 114. The location is the coastal town of Savona.

137. Rubin, Images and Identity, p. 115; Dean, Crime and Justice, p. 18.

138. Statuti di Ala e di Avio, p. 118 (Ala 2.1 and 2.2). A similar provision from 1376 grants half the fine obtained from a denunciation to the denouncer: La Legislazione Suntuaria, ed. Muzzarelli, p. 110.

139. Ben R. McRee, “Religious Gilds and Civil Order: The Case of Norwich in the Late Middle Ages,” Speculum 67 (1992): 69–97.

140. Derek G. Neal, The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England (Chicago and London, 2008), p. 19. La Legislazione Suntuaria, ed. Muzzarelli, pp. 49, 61–69, provides interesting evidence for some residents’ attempts to resist urban authorities’ efforts to make them spy on and inform against one another.

141. Bernardino da Siena, Prediche volgari, ed. Pacetti, p. 252, quoted in Catherine Lawless, “Representation, Religion, Gender, and Space in Medieval Florence,” in Ritual and Space in the Middle Ages: Proceedings of the 2009 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Frances Andrews (Donington, Lincolnshire, 2011), p. 242.

142. Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, “Sopra le acque salse”: Espaces, pouvoir et société à Venise à la fin du Moyen Âge, 2 vols. (Rome, 1992); Keith D. Lilley, City and Cosmos: The Medieval World in Urban Form (London, 2009), pp. 150–57.

143. Yvonne Elet, “Seats of Power: The Outdoor Benches of Early Modern Florence,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 61 (2002): 444–69.

144. De Re Aedificatoria 6.6, in Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert with Neil Leach and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, 1988), p. 263.

145. Mormando, The Preacher’s Demons, p. 91.

146. Edward Muir, “The Eye of the Procession: Ritual Ways of Seeing in the Renaissance,” in Ceremonial Culture in Pre-Modern Europe, ed. Howe, pp. 130–31, 141.

147. Streitman and Happé, “Introduction,” in Urban Theatre in the Lowlands, p. 22.

148. For the weight put on visual appearance by civic moralists, see Ulinka Rublack, Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford, 2010), esp. pp. 10–28.

149. Robert W. Gordon, “Critical Legal Histories,” Stanford Law Review 36 (1984): 109, quoted in Lansing, Passion and Order, p. 16.

150. See the praise lavished by a contemporary on a fourteenth-century painted cycle of Roman illustri viri: “you have given [the virtues] outward expression in the form of most excellent pictures”; quoted in Randolph Starn, “Reinventing Heroes in Renaissance Italy,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17 (1986): 75–76.

151. As art historians have long pointed out. See Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr., “Icons of Justice,” Past and Present 89 (1980): 23–38; Bronwen Wilson, The World in Venice: Print, the City, and Early Modern Identity (Toronto and Buffalo, 2005); Nichols, “The Cultural Dynamics,” p. 165.

152. Streitman, “A Tale of Two Cities,” p. 128.

153. Mark Trowbridge, “Jerusalem Transposed: A Fifteenth-Century Panel for the Bruges Market,” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art (2009): 1–17.

154. Edward Muir, “The Virgin on the Street Corner: The Place of the Sacred in Italian Cities,” in Religion and Culture in the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. S. Ozment (Kirksville, Mo., 1989), pp. 25–40. Richard C. Trexler, “Florentine Religious Experience: The Sacred Image,” Studies in the Renaissance 19 (1972): 7–41, discusses cases in which Florentine authorities ordered an image to be carried in procession in order to calm the populace. For the case of a man who in 1501 was executed for throwing dung at an image of the Virgin, see William J. Connell and Giles Constable, “Sacrilege and Redemption in Renaissance Florence: The Case of Antonio Rinaldeschi,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 61 (1998): 53–92.

155. Richard C. Trexler, “The Construction of Regional Solidarities in Traditional Europe,” in Riti e rituali, p. 265.

156. See Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, pp. 122–23, on the defamatory paintings of urban enemies displayed in judicial palaces; p. 48 on images affixed to the city walls.

157. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, p. 377.

158. Peter Howard, “Doctrine, When Preached,” p. 304, and Howard, “‘The Womb of Memory’: Carmelite Liturgy and the Frescoes of the Brancacci Chapel,” in The Brancacci Chapel: Form, Function, and Setting, ed. Nicholas A. Eckstein (Florence, 2007), pp. 177–206.

159. For a compelling and insightful discussion of the reception of fifteenth-century art, see Acres, “The Columba Altarpiece and the Time of the World,” pp. 446–47.

160. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, p. 386.

161. Naddo di Ser Nepo di Ser Gallo, Memorie Storiche, in Delizie degli eruditi toscani (Florence, 1784), vol. 18, p. 107, discussed (though not quoted) in Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, pp. 66, 357. See also the comments of an anonymous Florentine poet regarding the honorable behavior of the audience watching a public dance in 1459: Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, p. 238.

162. Ca. 1445. Siena, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo.

163. Jan van Coudenberghe, Ortus, progressus, et impedimenta fraternitatis Beatissimae Virginis Mariae de Passione quae dicitur de Septem Doloribus (Antwerp, 1519), C 1 sqq., discussed in van Bruaene, “Habsburg,” p. 139.

164. Trachtenberg, Dominion of the Eye, p. 256, compares the Palazzo Vecchio to Bentham’s panopticon. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1979), pp. 200–201, on the panopticon, especially his observation that the main function of the structure was to instill in the inmate a consciousness of his visibility and of the existence of unseen watchers. On the role of “internalization” in late medieval social formation, see Thierry Dutour, Une société de l’honneur: Les notables et leur monde à Dijon à la fin du Moyen Âge (Paris, 1998).

165. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, p. 552, notes with regret that his [textual] sources “rarely mention the Jews of Florence in a formal behavioral context.” In my reading, visual imagery somewhat fills this gap, not in portraying the actual behavior of Jews but in imagining and exploring how Jewish characters might intersect with, and/or affect readings of, civic behavior.

166. See ch. 5, pp. 196–97. On the regulation of Jewish residence in later medieval Italy, see Donatella Calibi, “Les Quartiers juifs en Italie entre 15e et 17e siècle: Quelques hypothèses de travail,” Annales ESC 52 (1997): 777–97; Michele Luzzati, Il ghetto ebraico. Storia di un popolo rinchiuso (Florence, 1987). For German lands, see A. Haverkamp, “The Jewish Quarters in German Towns during the Late Middle Ages,” in In and Out of the Ghetto: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany, ed. R. Po-chia Hsia and Hartmut Lehmann (New York, 1995), pp. 13–28. On the confinement or expulsion of Christian groups such as foreign merchants, pimps, prostitutes, butchers, gambling cheats, and sodomites, see Dennis Romano, “Gender and the Urban Geography of Renaissance Venice,” Journal of Social History 23 (1989): 339–53; Shemek, “Circular Definitions,” p. 15n37; and Dean, Crime and Justice, pp. 15, 88.

167. For the thirteenth century, see ch. 4, nn. 58, 59, 60. For the later period, see Toaff, “The Jewish Badge in Italy during the 15th Century”; Flora Cassen, “The Jewish Badge in Early Modern Italy: A Social and Political Study of Anti-Jewish Discrimination,” PhD diss., New York University, 2008 (forthcoming as Identity or Control: The Jewish Badge in Renaissance Italy).

168. London, National Archives, E 401/1565 M1. On this cartoon, see ch. 5.

169. Jews contributed the float of Moses to Florence’s massive feast of Saint John the Baptist: Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, p. 256n129. On the exclusion of Jews from civic ceremony, see Noël Coulet, “De l’intégration à l’exclusion: La place des juifs dans les cérémonies d’entrée solennelle au Moyen Âge,” Annales HSS 34 (1979): 672–83.

170. Anna Foa, The Jews of Europe after the Black Death, trans. Andrea Grover (Berkeley, 2000), p. 4, notes that unwilling converts were subject to “continuous surveillance.” For documentation of the surveillance to which even the descendants of converts were exposed in Iberia, see Homza, ed., The Spanish Inquisition.

171. The following discussion is indebted to Elisheva Carlebach, “Attribution of Secrecy and Perceptions of Jewry,” Jewish Social Studies, n.s. 2 (1996): 115–36. See also Daniel Jütte, Das Zeitalter des Geheimnisses: Juden, Christen, und die Ökonomie des Geheimen (1400–1800) (Göttingen, 2011).

172. Katherine Aron-Beller, Jews on Trial: The Papal Inquisition in Modena, 1598–1638 (Manchester and New York, 2011).

173. On this predella, see Dana E. Katz, The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance (Philadelphia, 2008), pp. 1, 16–32.

174. Jews were thought to have such secret, esoteric magical and healing skills that con artists peddling magical cures often pretended to be converted Jews: Dean, Crime and Justice, pp. 162–63. This further confirms that Jews were by and large not physically distinguishable from Christians.

175. M. Jusselin, “Projet d’ordonnance concernant la situation des juifs sous Jean II le Bon,” Revue des Études Juives 54 (1907): p. 145, quoted in Danièle Sansy, “Marquer la différence: L’imposition de la rouelle aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles,” Médiévales: Langue, textes, histoire 41 (2001): 22.

176. Ravid, “The Venetian Government,” p. 9.

177. Ariel Toaff, Il Vino e la carne. Una communità ebraica nel Medioevo (Bologna, 1989), p. 220; Barbara Wisch, “Violent Passions: Plays, Pawnbrokers, and the Jews of Rome,” in Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Allie Terry-Fritsch and Erin Felicia Labbie (Burlington, Vt., 2012), pp. 203–04; Foa, The Jews of Europe after the Black Death, pp. 45–46, 87–89.

178. Verbal touchstones as well: the fear of “becoming Jewish” that we saw expressed as early as the twelfth century remained alive and well in the fifteenth. In 1425, e.g., Bernardino of Siena scolded a Florentine audience: “You have given [the Jews] so much arrogance in your territory, and nowadays you’re becoming just like them” (Mormando, The Preacher’s Demons, p. 181). Florentine ambassadors not greeted with appropriate courtesy complained that they had been made to feel “like Jews” (Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, p. 296).

179. Mormando, The Preacher’s Demons, pp. 181–82.

180. See ch. 2.

181. Klemettilä, Epitomes of Evil, p. 75. She explains this with reference to the hats forced upon convicted heretics, including Joan of Arc; these were, of course, inspired by the hats associated with Jews. On Joan of Arc’s cap, which was inscribed with the words “Heretica, Relapsa, Apostata, Idolater,” see Susan Schibanoff, “True Lies: Transvestism and Idolatry in the Trial of Joan of Arc,” in Fresh Verdicts on Joan of Arc, ed. Bonnie Wheeler and Charles T. Wood (New York, 1996), pp. 31–60.

182. On the subjection of Christian criminals to punishments previously reserved for Jews, see Rudolf Glanz, “The ‘Jewish Execution’ in Medieval Germany,” Jewish Social Studies 5 (1943): 23–26.

183. Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment, p. 65. Lauro Martines, “Ritual Language in Renaissance Italy,” Riti e rituali, p. 61, notes that the insult traditore (traitor), a common term of opprobrium in trecento and quattrocento Italy, is “often associated with Judas, Jews, and Christ’s betrayal.”

184. Joëlle Rollo-Koster, “The Politics of Body Parts: Contested Topographies in Late-Medieval Avignon,” Speculum 78 (2003): 92, and Zorzi, “Rituali e Ceremoniali penali,” p. 143. The practice was enshrined in canon law by the Fifth Lateran Council (1514), which instructed that repeat offenders be made to wear the mitra infamiae: Connell and Constable, “Sacrilege and Redemption,” p. 75.

185. Mormando, The Preacher’s Demons, p. 72. The iconography of witchcraft was deeply indebted to both anti-Jewish iconography (the pointed hat and the hooked nose, dark complexion, and pointy chin) and antiheretical iconography (the association with the cat).

186. Rubin, Images and Identity, pp. 118, 285n64.

187. ADV B 3334 fol. 33v, April 2, 1487 (Fisc. c. Arboris), transcribed, cited, and discussed in Elizabeth Hardman, “Justice, Jurisdiction, and Choice: The Fifteenth-Century Church Courts of Carpentras,” PhD diss., Fordham University, 2010. See her appendix 3, part 3. I am grateful to Dr. Hardman for generously responding to my queries and sending me this section of her dissertation.

188. Canon law mandated curfews for Jews during Holy Week as early as the Synod of Macon in 581: Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova et Amplissima Collection, ed. Johannes Dominicus Mansi (Graz, 1960–61), vol. 9, p. 934; repeated in canon 68 of the Fourth Lateran Council. These laws were invoked by Bernardino of Siena in a sermon delivered in Padua in 1424: Mormando, The Preacher’s Demons, p. 170. See Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, pp. 205–24, for Holy Week violence.

189. Rubin, Images and Identity, pp. 236–38, on the insertion of sacred events into civic space and time.

190. See M. J. Wenninger, Man bedarf keiner Juden mehr: Ursachen und Hintergründe ihrer Vertreibung aus den deutschen Reichstädten im 15. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 1981).

191. On former Jewish spaces and buildings, see Bynum, Wondrous Blood; Kathleen Biddick, “Paper Jews: Inscription/Ethnicity/Ethnography,” Art Bulletin 78 (1996): 594–99; and Mitchell B. Merback, “Cleansing the Temple: The Munich Gruftkirche as Converted Synagogue,” in Beyond the Yellow Badge: Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism in Medieval and Early Modern Visual Culture, ed. Merback (Leiden and Boston, 2007), pp. 305–45. Marleen Hein-Dunne, “Jews in the Cathedral,” German Quarterly 74 (2001): 80–82, discusses images of Jews in Cologne Cathedral that were created shortly after the expulsion of Jews from Cologne in 1423. See also Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven, 1999).

CONCLUSION

1. When the visual attributes associated with Jewish men—hooked nose, dark hair, pointed hats, even beards and cats—appeared on or with women in postmedieval art, the women were as liable to be witches as Jewish. See, e.g., The Witch Runs Away with Wildrose, an illustration by H. J. Ford for The Crimson Fairy Book, ed. Andrew Lang (New York, 1903), p. 106.

2. See Horst Bredekamp, “Bild-Akt-Geschichte,” in Geschichtsbilder, 46. Deutscher Historikertag vom 19.–22. September 2006 in Konstanz. Berichtsband, ed. Clemens Wischermann et al. (Constance, 2007), pp. 289–309: “the visual can produce what it represents.”