H-France Review Vol. 7 (May 2007), No. 57
Steven F. Kruger, The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. xxx + 320 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $78.00 U.S. (hc). ISBN 0-8166-4061-0. $26.00 U.S. (pb). ISBN 0-8166-4062-9.
Review by Christine Caldwell Ames, University of South Carolina.
Jacques Berlinerblau recently observed that the scholarship on the Bible that today tends to receive most attention is not written by specialists on Biblical literature and languages, but rather by “professors of English and comparative literature.” [1] The medieval historian might add that those scholars’ gazes are likewise increasingly fixed on the representations, experience, and mentality of medieval authors who had no intention or claim to write fictional prose or poetry, and who wrote in Latin rather than in Old or Middle English. This is not merely the expansion of what used to be dogmatically defined as the canon of medieval-English literature (the usual suspects of Beowulf, Chaucer, Malory) by including “English” authors who wrote in Latin, but instead an expansion of vision to encompass the medieval world more generally, resulting in cultural studies with diverse source bases. Steven F. Kruger, a professor of English and medieval studies, positions The Spectral Jew within the territory of historiography, in the strictest sense that its source base largely consists of medieval genres utilized more often by historians than by literature scholars (theological treatises, polemic, chronicles, disputation texts). Generic and disciplinary distinctions are obviously problematic. But that historical appeal is also more substantive, as the book’s plainly stated intention is to tell us about the experience--the experience of fantasy, but also the experience of experience--of Christians and Jews in the Middle Ages.
The Spectral Jew examines one peculiarity of “interactions between…Christians and Jews” in medieval western Europe: Christians’ attempt to erase and destroy Jews and Judaism which, ironically, could not help but generate their persistent ghostly presence (p. xxv). This spectrality is then “the conjuring up of a Jewish presence in order to subject it to attack and a wished-for disappearance,” a process that Kruger witnesses in Europe from the twelfth century and beyond--and even before, as we will see (p. xxx). Kruger emphasizes then the mentalities and the manifestations of this desire and its paradoxical outcome, acknowledging that the outlines of Christian fantasies about Jews do not align precisely with reality. Nevertheless, he insists on the historical value of fantasy: “the lack of a clear correspondence between fantasy constructions of Jews and lived experience does not mean that these constructions do not themselves constitute a crucial part of lived experience” (p. xx).
Kruger’s notion of spectral Jews is chiefly inspired by Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx and, as he admits, resembles Kathleen Biddick’s “paper Jews” and Sylvia Tomasch’s “virtual Jews,” both interested in the paradox of presence and absence.[2] However, The Spectral Jew claims to contribute something more than its predecessors. Kruger acknowledges David Nirenberg’s critique of some scholarship on Jews in medieval Europe, including and following R. I. Moore’s The Formation of a Persecuting Society (1987), as unhelpfully structuralist and teleological, neglecting historical change after the calcification of anti-Jewish stereotypes in the high Middle Ages, stripping agency from the receptors of those stereotypes, and wrongly ignoring their suppleness (and that of the violence related to them) in specific moments and situations.[3] Kruger concedes that his book “will no doubt appear to belong to the ‘structuralist’ school that Nirenberg strongly critiques” (p. xxii). Yet Kruger contends that his organizing theme of spectrality in fact historicizes, eluding the risks of an airy study of representation unmoored to time or place: “spectrality might be particularly useful in thinking the overarching dynamics of medieval Jewish-Christian relations and in answering Nirenberg’s call for historical specificity” (p. xxiii). In part, this will be so because Kruger will delineate the differences among these specters, as “these constructions are also potentially ‘protean’ and complex, not reducible, despite their constructedness, to a single form or even a single (anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic) impulse” (p. xx). The Spectral Jew promises then not only to trace these conjurings, but also to do so with sensitivity to movement, nuance, and location.
The book’s apparitions of spectrality rise from a venerable body of knowledge formed by historians of medieval Jews and Judaism, including Jeremy Cohen, Robert Chazan, Gilbert Dahan, and Joshua Trachtenberg. Its anchoring assertions will likely be familiar to historians already aware of the contours of Jewish-Christian interaction in the Middle Ages: the appropriation of Jewish texts and history by Christians who reinterpreted them as confirming Christianity and negating Judaism; Christians’ related identification of themselves as the verus Israel; the charge of Jewish blindness; the association of Jews with literalism, carnality, and filth; the polemics and disputation that took place on radically unequal ground; the anxious Christian problem of explaining the persistence of Jews and Judaism after the supposed arrival of the messiah; the thirteenth-century mendicant impulse to language study not for “understanding” but for conversion; the prominent role of converts to Christianity, especially in attacks upon rabbinic literature; the Christian charge that the Talmud was a blasphemous betrayal of Jews’ own history; the elision of “Jews” with “heretics,” “lepers,” and other groups in the persecuting imaginary. (Here ring clear echoes of Moore.) In five chapters, Kruger overlays the tissue of spectrality upon these realities of Jewish and Christian experiences in the Middle Ages. These identify well-known figures (Peter Damian, Hermann of Cologne, Pablo Christiani, Nicholas Donin), events (the burning of the Talmud, the disputations of Barcelona in 1263 and Tortosa in 1413-14, expulsions), and fantasies (ritual murder, host desecration, bodily perversion, conspiracy) specifically in terms of an attempt to conjure and to erase, offering a collective vision of a general medieval-Christian project.
This totalizing scope risks ahistoricity, and again, Kruger is sensitive that “spectrality potentially leaves itself open to the serious charge that it levels the differences among interreligious interactions as these existed at different points of time and in different locations” (p. xxi, italics original). Many historians may agree that The Spectral Jew is indeed vulnerable to that charge, seems to belong to that structuralist school, and is not quite successful in its hope for historical specificity. It evokes the chronology of Moore’s Persecuting Society, which identified a moment of origin of anti-semitic fantasy in what Kruger terms the “‘long’ twelfth century” (xxvi). And Kruger indeed notes developments, such as Christians’ new attention on rabbinic literature in the thirteenth. Yet these gestures are undercut by an energetic discussion that, in practice, elides and erases historical difference, flattening out time and situation. For a simple example, the Fourth Toledan Council in the Visigothic Iberia of 633, the twelfth-century Cistercian Bernard of Clairvaux’s anti-semitic rant against the antipope Anacletus II, and community discrimination against converted Jews in Iberia in 1437 are listed together as equal, undifferentiated proof that medieval “converts clearly occupied an uncomfortable position in relation to both their old and their new religions” (p. 105) Relatedly, as Nirenberg warned against the assumption that stereotypes always manifest themselves, and are received, identically regardless of time or place, Kruger recalls Lester Little’s observations of Christian anxiety over the rise of the money economy and the consequent unstable social status of merchants in the twelfth century, then locates that distaste similarly in authors from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, such as Langland, Chaucer, Gower, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and James Howell (pp. 142-144). Christian disparagements of circumcision as feminizing and perverted are perceived identically not only in three clerics skirting the twelfth century (Guibert of Nogent, Peter Abelard, Caesarius of Heisterbach), but in the “confessions” of Jews in Tyrnau in 1494 and in the eighteenth-century English author D’Blossiers Tovey (pp. 81-83). The Spectral Jew’s first and third chapters include discussions of modern examples--including Moby Dick, Marc Chagall, Michael Jackson, and Magic Johnson--to help illuminate medieval spectrality. This wide-ranging, and often conflated, chronology implies that despite slight cosmetic differences, spectrality--the Christian effort to erase Jews that produces their presence--is the same thing, with the same purpose, throughout Europe and over multiple centuries. Or, to look at it another way, any developments or changes that occurred in time, like that new interest in rabbinic literature, are equally evidence of the monochrome, monolithic European-Christian project of spectrality.
One reason for this may be Kruger’s (inadvertent?) identification of spectrality as not, in fact, a distinctly medieval phenomenon, but rather as inherent in Christianity from its inception. The Spectral Jew’s ostensible adoption of Moore’s chronology and perspective is complicated by its intimation that Jewish and Christian identities and relations were identical from the origin of Christianity in the first century to the expulsion of Jews from Spain in the late fifteenth--contrary to Moore’s own interrogating historicization of the origin of persecutory stereotypes. For instance, it is common knowledge that medieval-Christian thinkers on Judaism leaned cumbrously on Paul’s depiction in Acts and own letters. But just as their glosses do not equal the original source, the contexts and characters of religious identities in the Middle Ages do not equal those of the first decades of “the Way,” when the status of Jesus and his followers, and their ramifications for Judaism, were in contentious flux. Paul, emphasizing that “I myself am an Israelite,” distinguished not between “Jews” and “Christians” (a word never used in his writings) but rather between Jews and Gentiles (whose relation to the now-fulfilled law was a practical concern) who believed in the risen Christ, and those who did not.[4] Paul changed his name and his thinking on the messiah. But did he and the Italian monk Peter Damian, obsessed with church reform a thousand years later, identically see Jews as “infidels” with a dead history and wish to “kill off” Judaism? Does Paul, just like Nicholas Donin, “[embody] a Jewish self transformed into a Christian?” Was Judaism equally to Paul, as to the twelfth-century polemicist Petrus Alfonsi, the “religion he has left behind?” (pp. 3-4, 77-79, 108, 164-166). It is not always clear in Kruger’s discussion that there is a difference between “Paul” as interpreted and depicted by medieval Christians and Paul himself, writing in the first-century Roman Empire, who did not understand binary, conflicting identities of “Jews” and “Christians” precisely as Guibert of Nogent did in early-twelfth-century France or Geoffrey Chaucer did in fourteenth-century England. [5]
This intimation that Jewish absence/presence was a Christian, rather than a medieval-Christian, project produces, perhaps, another dynamic in which the historian desires more discrimination and nuance. As here Christian attitudes and actions towards Jews indicate an attempt to erase seemingly embedded in the very genius of Christianity--rather than this interaction a polysemous mass of choices made in particular moments by both Christians and Jews with multiple motivations--so then are all those actions and attitudes identical, equipollent instances of spectrality. Both demonization and neglect occupy the same space in this project of disappearance, as we see in Kruger’s extended discussion of Guibert of Nogent’s Memoirs.[6] Kruger observes that Guibert carefully lists the associations that corrupt Christians (a necromantic monk; the debauched Jean, Count of Soissons) had with Jewish figures and with Judaism. However, he also acknowledges that Guibert is interested chiefly in attacking Christian perversity, and the Jews are marginal figures in his horrified accounts. To Kruger, that neglect (“the decision not to represent Jewish individuals in any detail”), just as demonization does, indicates spectrality (pp. 41-49).
Guibert’s omissions are, of course, an absence. Yet if permission and interdiction, slander and silence alike prove the attempt to defame and to “disappear” Jews, we might ask how we can and should discern among various actions. For example, Kruger offers the fact that the Jew in Peter Abelard’s Dialogue between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian speaks only in his dialogue with the philosopher, and is then silent, as one of the “moments when Jews are, fictionally and in real life, decorporealized, rendered shadowy or invisible” (xxiv, italics original). But the Christian is similarly silent during the philosopher’s dialogue with the Jew. Although the philosopher indeed poses his initial question to both, the Jew claims the right to speak first, “for we came first to the worship of God and received the first discipline of the Law.” The Christian never speaks during their exchange. The text appears to be unfinished, so we do not know whether Abelard intended the Jew to return to a summary discussion. Are all silences equally instances of erasure? If so, what moral and intellectual valences do we assign to the Christian’s silence and invisibility imposed by Abelard?[7] This risks circularity: since its inception and due to its character as outgrowth of Judaism, Christianity has conjured Jews in order to erase them; therefore, all Christian actions vis-à-vis Jews can be evidence of erasure.
More seriously, it may not help us best understand the “erasure” of violence. At its conclusion, The Spectral Jew returns to the introduction’s promise to historicize: “of course, [post-1492] specters are different from those of 1413-14 or those that inhabit texts of the long twelfth century” (p. 206). However, the specific distinctions among these centuries-apart specters are unclear amid the in-practice elided chronology, association of the spectral project with Christianity, and identification of a radical range of behavior as identical instances of that project. This approach, ironically, may mask the power of medieval-Christian anti-semitism. If Christianity is doomed to erase because of the religion’s inherent needs to alleviate anxiety and doubt, and to form identity through “others,” and if Paul futilely erases like Peter the Venerable who erases like Isabella of Castile, how can we analyze fully one Christian’s choice to dislike, to impugn, or even to ignore versus another’s to expel, to attack, or to kill? In a sense, Christian agency is erased. Christianity appears as a transhistorical theological body, and not as another historical phenomenon vulnerable to change, or, more specifically, not as a creed adhered to by individual followers who have, diachronically and even synchronically, interpreted variously its supposed message and mandates. We learn more about anti-semitic reality and fantasy, and about Christianity’s ability to generate them, if we focus not on a religion structurally determined to produce intolerance and trapping its adherents into a project of opposition, but on delineating why and in what contexts individual Christians chose to understand its texts, traditions, and revelation as permitting persecution.
The Spectral Jew, with its sensibility of theoretical overlay (Derrida’s spectrality) upon familiar texts, events, figures, and stereotypes from the history of Christian anti-Jewish and anti-semitic ideology and practice, raises a question about analyses of Jews (or Muslims) as the “other.” Such critique of medieval-Christian rhetoric can unfortunately, if unwittingly, replicate its erasures, as the reality of “others” is overshadowed by Christian ideas about them. Kruger observes about Guibert of Nogent’s memoirs that “the Jews...remain largely unrepresented, shadowy figures on the margins...the Jewish figures...occupy a certain ‘beyond’ that Guibert chooses never really to represent...what it means actually to be a Jew is never imagined.” The memoir is “notable for its lack of attention to any real communal or social life” of Guibert’s Jewish contemporaries (pp. 47-48, 59, italics original). Yet The Spectral Jew evinces its own “lack of attention” to the “real life” of medieval Jews. Other than a few murmurs in the discussions of disputations, Jewish voices are barely heard in this text, drowned out once again by cacophonous Christian ones (pp. 181-182, 201-205). Kruger might respond, and do so reasonably, that imagining “what it means actually to be a Jew” is not the point of his book. Would Guibert of Nogent say the same? This comments not only upon the limits of necessarily identifying a “decision not to represent…in any detail” as a psychologically febrile and spiritually anxious “erasure,” but also upon the adumbrating risk run by any study of Jews as direct objects (the targets of persecution, illuminating Christian mentality) rather than as subjects (religious and social actors in their own right, illuminating Jewish mentality). What is the present balance in historiography on medieval Jews’ ghostly appearances as “others,” on the one hand, and their realities of daily life, religious practice, and culture (like that produced by scholars like Chazan, Susan L. Einbender, Ivan Marcus, and Elisheva Baumgarten), on the other?
Kruger’s energy and excitement--one can almost see his connecting epiphany that Derrida’s model of spectrality might suit our medieval evidence--are palpable. Yet this reviewer wished for tighter historical locations: less force from “spectrality” as a transhistorical engine powering Christian attitudes towards Jews identically throughout centuries, and more sensitivity to medieval evolution, difference, context, choice, and situation. Historians do not dully shun fantasy in favor of “events.” But it is not necessarily the case that medieval and modern persons fantasize in exactly the same way, and about the same things. Nor was this so for all Christians in the Middle Ages.
NOTES
[1] Jacques Berlinerblau, “What’s Wrong With the Society of Biblical Literature?,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 2006. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i12/12b01201.htm.
[2] Kathleen Biddick, “Paper Jews: Inscription/Ethnicity/Ethnography,” Art Bulletin 78(1996): 594-599; Sylvia Tomasch, “Postcolonial Chaucer and the Virtual Jew,” in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen ed., The Postcolonial Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 243-260.
[3] R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987; 2nd ed. 2007); David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
[4] "Christian" (understood either as adjective or substantive noun) appears only three times in the entire New Testament: not a semantic accident, but rather a reflection of the peculiar identity of Paul and its other authors in an unsettled atmosphere or composition. Warren C. Trenchard, The Student's Complete Vocabulary Guide to the Greek New Testament (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1992, p. 181. These appearances are in Acts 11:26, where the author says that the disciples were first given this name in Antioch; Acts 26:28, where Agrippa uses it in conversation with Paul, and 1 Peter 4:16, where the author warns congregations undergoing persecution that one should not be ashamed to suffer "as a Christian." Interestingly, then, at least one or probably two of the three appearances are accounts of outsiders bestowing the name. Another good indication of this identity-flux, where the opposition is not yet "Jews" and "Christian", is Acts 16:1, which describes Timothy as "the son of a Jewish woman who was a believer." Novum Testamentum Graece, 27th ed., Eberhard and Erwin Nestle and Kurt and Barbara Aland, eds., (Stuttgarg: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1993) pp. 354, 368, 401-402, 606. Paul's reference to himself as an "Israelite" is in Roman 11:1, Novum Testamentum Graece, p. 428.
[5] Identifications of Paul's ideas not only as germ of medieval anti-semitism through exegesis, but also as instance of a Christian's belief in dead, carnal, literal, blind Jews and in an abandoned Judaism, [e.g., p. 3] presumably depend upon the original Greek texts and not their translations into Latin in the Vulgate.
[6] According to Guibert, the local Jews themselves "consider [Jean] insane, since he approved of their religion in word and publicity practiced ours." It was apparently, then, not only Christians like Guibert who identified Jean as "monstrous neuter" (pp. 44-45).
[7] Peter Abelard, Ethical Writings: Ethics and Dialogue Between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian, trans, Paul Vincent Spade (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publishing, 1995), pp. 63-89.
Christine Caldwell Ames
University of South Carolina
amesc@sc.edu
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H-France Review Vol. 7 (May 2007), No. 57
ISSN 1553-9172
