Talks by Miriamne Krummel
Papers by Miriamne Krummel
Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 2020
Church History, Mar 1, 2011
Alexandra Cuff el's highly original and enlightening study of medieval Jewish, Christian, and Mus... more Alexandra Cuff el's highly original and enlightening study of medieval Jewish, Christian, and Muslim uses of gendered bodily metaphors of impurity shows how these religious traditions all agreed on viewing corporality as distasteful and largely incompatible with divinity. In particular the female body was seen as polluted and antithetical to holiness. Th e focus of the book is on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but Cuff el's study traces medieval views on the body, sickness, and pollution back to late antiquity, where they formed a strategy for establishing boundaries between pagans, Jews, and Christians. By describing the religion of their opponents as disgusting and polluted, polemicists evoked emotional antipathy: contempt, fear, and repulsion, so as to prevent anybody from crossing the religious divide. Th e consequences of polemic based on bodily images changed from late antiquity to the Middle Ages, as images of fi lth increasingly became an incitement to verbal or physical violence. During the Middle Ages western Christians and Muslims used such imagery to convince listeners to join in holy war. In that case, metaphors of pollution were meant to provoke violent action. Interestingly, Jews used similar tactics to demonstrate their superiority, but as a minority religion they had to disguise the negative portrayals of their opponents. When medieval Christian authors suggested that Jews suff ered from diseases that required a Christian child's blood or the host to cure them, this often resulted in the death or injury of Jews. Jews, on the other hand, who accused Christians of being worshippers of a putrid corpse, endangered themselves and their entire local community. Similar dangers faced Jews and Christian who openly criticized Islam while living under Muslim rule (pp. 6-9). In her book Cuff el investigates how such polemics functioned within each group, but one of the main themes of the book is that Muslims, Christians, and Jews used similar tactics, and that all three traditions were drawing from a shared pool of beliefs about the body, pollution, and sickness. Traditionally the superiority of Muslims' treatment of their religious minorities has been seen in contrast to the status of Jews and Muslims in medieval Christendom. Cuff el, however, shows that much the same kind of social and cultural sharing that was previously thought peculiar to the eastern Mediterranean and the Iberian Peninsula also took place in northern Europe, and that cultural sharing and friendly relations in the Mediterranean coexisted with outbreaks of physical and verbal violence against Jews and other minority religions. Cuff el's central focus, however, is the perception of the female body, especially of the womb and menstrual blood. She argues that the "dirt, waste, and rot" (p. 26) of the female body was an integral part of the polemic between Jews,
This lecture queries the survival of three of the four surviving Marian lyrics in the fifteenth-c... more This lecture queries the survival of three of the four surviving Marian lyrics in the fifteenth-century Vernon Manuscript (Eng. poet a. 1): “Child Slain by Jews,” “Jewish Boy,” and “Merchant’s Surety.” These three narratives perform a usefulness in two otherwise unrelated—if not downright antagonistic—cultural economies. In the medieval culture in which these narratives were born, the sacred Marian narratives frame Jews as secularized outsiders, concerned with material objects rather than perpetual sanctity. In the Early Modern culture in which they were preserved, these three Marian legends immortalize antisemitism as the perfect refrain in sacred Christian temporality and, perhaps more importantly, as essential narratives in the growth of a nation
Amsterdam University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2023
Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations
The subject of medieval Norse studies can invoke fantasies about the legendary Norse gods. Popula... more The subject of medieval Norse studies can invoke fantasies about the legendary Norse gods. Popularized by the Marvel comics that Stan Lee had a hand in creating, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology (2017), stories of Thor and his hammer and Loki, Thor's adopted brother and the trickster god, have become the subjects of many American households. As one might suspect, there is a lot more to the medieval Norse world than what Marvel and Gaiman have delivered to us. Fortunately, we now have Jews in East Norse Literature from Jonathan Adams, an established scholar of medieval Danish and Swedish texts and manuscripts. I strongly recommend Adams's masterful two-volume set for those interested in medieval, early modern, modern, or contemporary periods. It is a text filled with priceless gems likely to fascinate scholars and students of Jewish Studies, Religious Studies, Holocaust Studies, Postcolonial Studies, as well as Norse Studies. In particular, Adams unpacks antisemitic "stereotypes. .. in the East Norse material" (I:20), and readers are likely to gain a deeper understanding of the antisemitism introduced by the forms of Christianity that filled the spaces vacated by the cherished Norse gods. Adams's two-volume work is the fourth volume in the De Gruyter series, "Religious Minorities in the North: History, Politics, and Culture." He offers a complex text in readable prose with accessible translations. The first volume, "A Cultural Investigation," attempts to situate the reader in "the sequence of absence following presence" (I:12) or a state of "absent presence" (I:550) that Adams describes as "the impulse to write about Jews in an environment where there are notand never have beenany Jews. Even though there were no Jews in Denmark and Sweden during the Middle Ages, they were apparently everywhere" in the Christian conscience (I:550). This Christian phenomenon of inventing Jewish presence is a topic that has been explored by Lisa Lampert-Wiessig, Steven Kruger, Sylvia Tomasch, and myself, but despite these analyses, Adams has found new ways of looking at
Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, Nov 8, 2013
Shuttling back and forth from medieval to modern texts, this essay proposes an alternative vision... more Shuttling back and forth from medieval to modern texts, this essay proposes an alternative vision of temporality and, in doing so, offers a glimpse into a queer (or non-normative) temporality. The purpose of this temporal travel is to reveal the systems deployed in constructing an outcast, a thing of hate and derision. This essay discusses a select number of medieval texts as the starting point for reflecting on the process involved in inventing a temporal outcast. The conversation about normative temporality mostly builds from The Passion of the Christ, which in this essay represents the end point in meditating on the making of a fantastical Other who materializes from fantasy as a thing outside time and humanity.
Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, May 1, 2021
In English history, the dates of 1071, 1144, 1190, 1290, and 1659 relate a narrative of settlemen... more In English history, the dates of 1071, 1144, 1190, 1290, and 1659 relate a narrative of settlement, libel, massacre, expulsion, and return, while also bespeaking resettlement, trauma, exile, and anti-Jewishness. Jews in Medieval England: Teaching Representations of the Other, a multidisciplinary effort, provides instructors with strategies for educating students about a people who were held hostage to myths about their violent nature—particularly in reference to the centuries-old libel of “Christ killers.” In our most optimistic—some might say naive—moments, we teachers of the humanities believe we can change parochial and xenophobic mindsets by introducing and questioning inequality that has prevailed across millennia. This objective illuminates this volume, which offers a variety of pedagogical strategies for addressing the place of Jewish culture in medieval England.
This chapter brings us to visit a "Survey of Early English Literature" classroom. None of the sur... more This chapter brings us to visit a "Survey of Early English Literature" classroom. None of the survey anthologies is ideal, but I always feel the need to include an anthology, so I do. For the sake of full disclosure, I want to begin with a confession. I had been teaching a version of "The Survey of Early English Literature" for a bit before it hit me that the many available anthologies that stretched from Anglo-Saxon times to the Enlightenment lacked either a Jewish voice or a Jewish presence. What leads to my confession is that as a scholar of the Middle Ages, especially the English Middle Ages, I knew that Jews were physically present on-and certainly writing in-the "English" territory after the Normans arrived in 1066. As a scholar, I knew this. In fact, in my role as a scholar, I was both invested in researching and writing about medieval English Jews and publicizing the historical oversights concomitant with Jewish presence. As a teacher, I had yet to intertwine my scholarly discoveries with my classroom work, but once I did make that link, I had new struggles with issues of space and allotment on my syllabus. There is much to tell students about the Jewish presence between 1066 and 1659, and I desired to tell it all. Bandying about two larger concerns regarding the logistics of addressing the Jewish presence in medieval England, I found myself caught in a state of fear that sprung from worries over an anti-Semitic backlash that might surface either implicitly or explicitly in the classroom. I was also reluctant to add more material to an already packed syllabus. Desirous of encouraging
Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2022
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Oct 1, 2005
Within the pages of The Typological Imaginary, Biddick examines the freighted technologies by whi... more Within the pages of The Typological Imaginary, Biddick examines the freighted technologies by which the medieval Christian typological impulse attempted to efface a vibrant Jewishness. Biddick uncovers multiple sites and various genres that, despite a proclaimed secularity, speak of, and are modeled after, the binary thinking common to typological hermeneutics, such as a belief in the oldness of the Old Testament (a Jewish "then") and the newness of the New Testament (a Christian "now"). 1 Biddick carefully pursues medieval typological technologies and "grapples with an unsettling historiographical problem: how to study the history of Jewish-Christian relations without reiterating the temporal practices through which early Christians, a heterogeneous group, fabricated an identity ("Christian-ness") both distinct from and superseding that of neighboring Jewish communities" (1). Biddick traces the impulse to view Jewishness as a superseded quantity in our present. She scrutinizes "passages, thresholds, gaps, intervals, inbetweenness" (2), exempliªed in ªfteen carefully selected images that model the devices deployed to render Jewish identity absent and irrelevant so that a relevant Christian identity could replace it. Biddick's evidence is compelling, even chillingly so, as in the case of drawings of Albrecht Altdorfer, who in 1519 depicted a "then and now" view of the Regensburg Synagogue: Jews walk from the porch of the Synagogue into its interior; on the next page, the illustration of its interior is bereft of Jews (ªgures 14 and 15). This disappearance signiªes the visual technology that "traumatically encrypts Jews within the tomb of the typological imaginary" (65). Biddick's study looks further than the Christian typological impulse to erase Jewishness; the struggle between "a Christian 'now'" and "a Jewish 'then'" runs deeper than Altdorfer's 1519 drawings of the porch and interior of the Regensburg Synagogue. In her concluding chapters, Biddick complicates this typological encryption by mapping the vexed outcomes of the then/now binary onto the scholarship of Sigmund Freud and Salo Wittmayer Baron. In light of Freud's silences about his Yiddish/Hebrew voice and Baron's denial of the authenticity of pursuing Jammergeschichte (lachrymose history), Biddick concludes that "historians need a history of lachrymose history.. .. trapped as it is in the word Jammergeschichte" (79). 2 REVIEWS | 245
Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Jul 1, 2006
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Talks by Miriamne Krummel
Papers by Miriamne Krummel