Adventures in Jewish Studies

The Association for Jewish Studies Podcast

Medieval Antisemitism with Sara Lipton

About the Episode

Guest scholar Sara Lipton discusses antisemitism in medieval Europe. From the Nazis in the 20th century to current alt-right movements, many of history’s and modernity’s most prominent antisemitic groups have drawn on beliefs and motifs that first emerged during the Middle Ages. But conspiracies and caricatures didn’t emerge overnight – they were a product of centuries-long shifts in political and religious dynamics.

Transcript

Erin Phillips: Welcome to Adventures in Jewish Studies, the podcast of the Association for Jewish Studies. In every episode, we take you on an entertaining and intellectual journey about Jewish life, history and culture, with the help of some of the world’s leading Jewish studies scholars. I’m your host for this episode, Erin Phillips.

This episode is part of a special 4-part mini series of short episodes on antisemitism that the AJS has produced in response to rising numbers of antisemitic incidents and attacks around the world. Drawing on the expertise of AJS members, each episode  provides scholarly and informed insights into antisemitism from its origins and history to its complexities today around the war in Israel/Gaza. We’ll be releasing a new episode every week for the next 4 weeks and you can listen to the episodes in any order.

In this episode, we’re talking about antisemitism in medieval Europe. From the Nazis in the 20th century to current alt-right movements, many of history and modernity’s most prominent antisemitic groups have drawn on beliefs and motifs that first emerged during the Middle Ages. But conspiracies and caricatures didn’t emerge overnight – they were a product of centuries-long shifts in political and religious dynamics. Our guest is Sara Lipton, Professor and Chair of the Department of History at State University of New York at Stony Brook. I asked her to take us back to the beginning by telling us what Jewish life was like at the start of the medieval period.

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Sara Lipton: It varied from time to time and place to place. Jewish communities in Rome and in some other Italian cities were quite ancient and they seemed to be quite well embedded. And although obviously life was uncomfortable for almost everybody living in a war zone - and Italy was in a war zone after the fall of the centralized Roman government in the West - there doesn't seem to have been any anti-Jewish movement.

In other parts of the former Roman Empire, things were very different. Probably the most famous case of Jewish communities in what we call the early Middle Ages - the first centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire - were Jews in what we call Visigothic Spain, the Iberian regions ruled over by Germanic peoples, collectively known as the Visigoths. 

When the Visigothic kings decided to convert to Catholicism, they turned rather viciously against the apparently fairly large Jewish communities in their kingdom. They issued increasingly oppressive edicts against the Jews, as did councils of bishops who seemed to be whispering in the Visigothic Kings’ ears, culminating in the forced conversion of all Jews under Visigothic rule in Iberia. Now, Jews remained in Iberia until the expulsion of 1494. So, uh, it is not completely clear whether those edicts were fully enforced, whether some Jews converted and came back. Obviously, more Jews arrived later after Muslim rule.

So, it's very uneven. And in some cases, Jews negotiated that very successfully. They negotiated privileges for themselves. In other cases, they decided to leave. And in other cases, as I've mentioned, they were subject to some persecution. 

Erin Phillips: And it seems like a lot of that persecution - whether it was more or less overt - was driven by religious leaders, who were also, as you mentioned, political leaders at the time. Was it purely a matter of asserting Christian authority?

Sara Lipton: So a lot of the sources we have for anti-Jewish texts or for saying we need to separate Jews and Christians come from Bishops or other Christian authorities who are much less upset about what Jews are doing or thinking than about what their own very, very unsatisfactory Christian flocks were doing and thinking. And they think by trying to enforce some separation between Christians and Jews, they can heighten Christian consciousness

Even Bishops and Popes seemed to govern their policies towards and attitudes towards Jews much more on the basis of practicality than on the basis of religious ideology. 

So, there's one text I like to quote from the last decades of the Roman Empire. This is before the fall of the Roman government officially but after the Roman government had really lost control over the region that we now call France, that was then called Gall. And we have a bishop from a very, very elite family, a Catholic who had previously served in the Roman government. His name is Sidonius Apollinaris. And he's writing in the 480s. And he's sending a letter and he writes, “the bearer of this letter is Gozolas, a Jew - a man I should like if I could only overcome my contempt for his sect.” And the bottom line is it's clear that Sidonius does like Gosolos, he's using him as a messenger. As a bishop, he sort of feels like it's his job to say something negative about the Jews religion, but he honestly doesn't seem to care that much.

Erin Phillips: Even in places where Jews enjoyed better treatment, you've written that there's a sort of turning point during the Middle Ages, a shift that happens in large part because of images and art. Can you talk about that shift and the role depictions of Jews play?

Sara Lipton: Images were a major way that people in the Middle Ages - when of course the majority of the population were not literate and the majority of texts we have comes from a tiny, tiny, tiny sliver of society - to convey what they felt, but also to try and make other people feel or know or believe what they wanted them to believe. Images were argument and not just illustration. In a book I wrote 10 years ago or more now, I think, I tried to trace all the changing ways that Jews were shown in Christian art by Christians to other Christians. And some, I think,  quite important observations came through from looking at hundreds and thousands of images. One is that really up until the late 11th century, Christian artists didn't come up with any way to show that a Jewish person was Jewish.

Jews’ faces, Jews’ hair, Jews’ clothing, Jews’ complexions looked just like everybody else if they wanted to show that somebody was Jewish. In New Testament illustration, for example, if you have a picture of John the Baptist, debating the Jewish elders, you write down in words, “this is John the Baptist, and these are the Jewish elders.”

Um, so the first thing I see is that Christian artists started to use various symbols to make Jews look very, very old fashioned. And my explanation was that this is a period of Christian reform when Christians were trying to renew themselves and there was a lot of anxiety in the Middle Ages which didn't always like new things. Well, is it okay to be new? 

And so the reformers, the thinkers, and the writers, and the preachers were trying to find ways to say, it is okay in some ways to be new. So the Pope started quoting an early Christian writer who said, “Christ did not say, I am tradition. Christ said I am truth.” Um, and to show that Jews are stuck in the past, that's why they don't accept our reinterpretation of their scriptures. Our reinterpretation is the better one. 

But of course, images have a lot of power. Anybody who looks at social media today understands that one short video or picture is much, much better than writing a long paragraph in terms of making people's emotions be triggered.

Erin Phillips: And what did those depictions actually look like? What are medieval Christians seeing at this point when they look at Jews in art?

That's really what the development of the Jewish caricature was like. People complained you can't tell a Jew by looking at one. So, artists’ solution was, well, let's make it possible to tell a Jew by looking at one in art. And then people started looking at Jews and saying, oh, wait a minute, maybe I think I see that Jew looks different now that I know what I'm supposed to look for. So, images make people see things they wouldn't have seen before, and they change the way people feel about them. The more and more ugly or hostile or exaggerated or different you make Jews look, the more and more people look around and start to say, oh, wait a minute, I think I recognize that guy. He looks very Jewish. And whether that person is Jewish or not, doesn't matter. Sometimes they're not Jewish, but it just reinforces the stereotype. And then if you look at someone who's Jewish and they don't look the way you think they're supposed to look, then the answer given by medieval authors and later by Nazi authors is, oh, that's because Jews are good at disguise. They're good at hiding themselves.

They're conspirators and they’re secret. So, of course at that point you can't win. But this idea of Jews looking a certain way comes straight out of religious art.

Erin Philips: During this inflection point, around 1100, how did these shifts in how Jews were represented actually translate to social and political treatment? 

Sara Lipton: I think the most obvious line that I can draw between art and policy and reality is that the first means that artists used to make Jews look old fashioned was to show them in an old fashioned looking pointed cap, and it was old fashioned looking because it was known that's what ancient Persians used to wear.

This was a cap often shown on the head of the three Magi in Christian art because the three Magi were thought to be Ancient Persian astrologers or kings or something like that. And they started showing them on select, um, heads of Jewish priests or prophets to show they’re old fashioned and eastern, like the Persians.

And then people started thinking, wait a minute. How come I don't see Jews wearing pointed caps? And so we start having laws saying Jews need to wear distinctive clothing.  

Erin Phillips: Besides garments, what are some of the motifs we see in medieval depictions of Jews that we might recognize from antisemitic movements today?

Sara Lipton: The very fact that there is a huge continuity to Jewish communities, at least going back to the time of the Talmud means that Jews feel connected to each other and have an idea of their own common roots. And this has certainly led a lot of people to say things along the lines of, Jews stick together. 

The idea that a people who have been spread since the diaspora of Hellenistic times are somehow or other an incredibly organized clump who can all get it together and work their wills secretly across time and space, uh, is something that we can trace I'd say at least to the 12th century. It wasn't constant, but the idea was first floated in the 12th century that groups of rabbis got together in a city in southern France called Narbonne and plotted which Christian boy they would kill. That was first floated to our knowledge in the 12th century. So that, of course, we can certainly say, um, is taken from the medieval toolbox that's been left to us. 

Probably the most prevalent idea is the idea of Jewish money grubbing or greed or materialism. I argue in one of my books that the original charge that Jews were materialistic was actually a philosophical term used by St. Paul, who knowingly or not, was somewhat influenced by Platonic philosophy to think that invisible spiritual things were more important than tangible, physical things.

And he, of course, was a Jew. He said he was trained in the Pharisaic tradition, but he was trying to distinguish his new community of followers of Jesus from his fellow Jews. And so he said, “we walk in the spirit and they walk in the flesh.” And that fleshly materialism, as soon as there began to be anxiety in medieval Christian Europe about a growing money economy and about prosperity that seemed to corrupt morals, that kind of Jews walk in the flesh, or Jews are materialistic, got turned into, Jews are money grubbing and greedy.

Erin Phillips: So, after this turning point, as these images start to take hold of the medieval consciousness, how do they alter the reality of everyday life for Jewish communities?

Sara Lipton: The really, really normal parts of life don't make it into the documentation. So, normal everyday relations, boy, it's very hard to know. I think it would be incredibly naive to say that on the ground relations between Jews and Christians as neighbors were not affected by the increasingly hostile texts and images that we start seeing in more numbers in the 12th century, kind of in explosive numbers in the 13th and 14th centuries.

Surely that strained relations and we do see evidence of it: the famous Chronicles written in Hebrew about the attacks on Jewish communities along the Rhine River Valley in Germany in 1096. As Christian crusaders began to coalesce into larger groups and march slowly and painfully along the river valleys from Northwestern Europe to Jerusalem, their ultimate destination. And various Jewish communities were attacked along the way. 

The crusaders attacked and massacred at first dozens and then hundreds of Jews. They said horrible things about Jewish people as they did so. They used horrible names. It was a traumatic event for Jewish communities, not just in that region, but anywhere in Europe that heard about it. So, you could certainly say this was a horrendous beginning of anti-Semitic violence.

Erin Phillips: And how did their Christian neighbors react to these attacks? Did they join in, were they part of the violence? Or did Jews have some sense of broader community?

You could also - and there has been a historian who did this - kind of read the Chronicles very carefully and note all the time Jews said, well, we heard the Crusaders were coming and we ran to our Christian friends and said, hide our children, hide our goods. So, they had Christian friends. And then you see some of the Christian friends said, no. But did they say no because they were scared or because they wanted the Jews to die? The Chronicles don't tell us that.

Other Christians. Did hide them. Some bishops said to all of the Jews in their city, come into our fortified palace or castle and we will protect you. Later, as the crusaders got more and more angry and maybe as members of the Christian communities in these cities saw that there might be something to gain from not protecting the Jews, the attacks got more and more brutal and effective. 

Anti-Jewish violence and anti-Jewish rhetoric and anti-Jewish imagery got more and more virulent between 1150 straight through the end of the Middle Ages. And I think the rhetoric and the images and the precedent for violence all contributed to the increasing uncertainty of Jewish life and Western Europe until after 1500. There were very few places where Jews were allowed to live. 

Erin Phillips: As we get to the end of the medieval period, this antisemitism doesn't go away, and in fact many of the themes we've talked about come up again and again in later examples of anti-Jewish hatred. Do you think it's fair to say that many common antisemitic tropes have their roots in this time period?

Sara Lipton: I mean, certainly, it's silly to quibble with the idea that the roots are in medieval times because certainly they are drawing on tropes and images and words and ideas from the Middle Ages. But I sort of hate to say “roots” because that makes it sound like the growth has been continuous.

None of these texts and none of these images mean that it's inevitable that a person or a polity or a society will be antisemitic or anti-Jewish, but it does mean that if people are looking for somewhere to blame, boy have they got a big, rich, familiar toolbox to draw from in antisemitic imagery and rhetoric and stereotypes.

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Erin Phillips: “Adventures in Jewish Studies” is made possible with generous support from The Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Foundation and from the Diane and Guilford Glazer Foundation. The executive producer of the podcast is Warren Hoffman. I’m the lead producer for this episode.

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Executive Producer: Warren Hoffman, PhD

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