tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post5897205946467156995..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: The Jewish Christian Middle AgesCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-53375712853887493902007-01-19T06:32:00.000-05:002007-01-19T06:32:00.000-05:00One more thing to add along these same lines: coul...One more thing to add along these same lines: could there have been a Hasidic movement without the Jewish experience of Christian rejection of the world?Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-62499249971439422232007-01-18T21:27:00.000-05:002007-01-18T21:27:00.000-05:00BD222:
Is this the same Celestina? Never heard of...BD222:<br /><br />Is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestina">this</a> the same Celestina? Never heard of it, which seems a pity. I know pretty much nothing about the experience of Iberian Jews apart from what I've read in <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-069105889x-1"><i>Communities of Violence</a></i> and Claudine Fabre-Vassas' <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-0231103670-2"><i>The Singular Beast</i></a> and, to a lesser extent, the <a href="http://libro.uca.edu/vcode/visigoths.htm">Visigothic Laws.</a><br /><br />But the thing to keep in mind that however liminal Jews are to dominant cultures in the Middle Ages, they're still centrally present (even if only "spectrally," see <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/72-0816640610-0">the Kruger</a> JJC cites above) because Christians rely upon their difference from Jews in order to define themselves as Christian. They're the abjected other, and so necessarily present (master/slave dynamic). <i>But</i> it's more complicated than that, since Xians and Jews get so mixed up in each other's business--including each other's intellectual business (see Jewish uses of non-Jewish literary genres, like the Jewish Alexander romance; note that the Xian exegetical explosion of the 12th century would have been impossible without conversations with rabbis)--that there are ways in which each group becomes indistinguishable on just the grounds that they imagine themselves most different. ... I'd be careful, though, with identifying anything as the bastardized remnants of pre-Christian paganisms: I tend to see a lot of medieval Christianities as pretty shockingly unChristian from a modern perspective. In other words, it's a great deal more expansive than we often give it credit for: e.g., <a href="http://gotmedieval.blogspot.com/2006/01/what-its-like-to-be-medievalist.html">the pilgrim badges</a> in the shape of genitalia. <br /><br />Thanks for recommending the Celestina! I'll definitely have a look at it.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-58325847886465748392007-01-18T10:10:00.000-05:002007-01-18T10:10:00.000-05:00btw, are you familiar with "La Celestina?" (speak...btw, are you familiar with "La Celestina?" (speaking of, more or less: the "converso" experience). <br /><br />interesting, the idea that deconstruction is a "Jewish Science." i've said things like, fans tend to analyze their favorite TV shows with "Talmudic subtlety." i was kidding, but...<br /><br />anyway, i need to come back to this and think about it, read more carefully; the "Judeo-Christian" business has always been a particular bug up my ass, and i'm fascinated with medieval Jewry, its...liminal space. <br /><br />i got about three quarters of the way through an adaptation of "Celestina" for my dramaturgy class. what i was interested in, besides the richness (the grotesqueness, the monstrosity you might say) of the witch, the language, the whole setting, was the intersections between the hidden Jewishness of the author (it doesn't overtly come up in the text at all, i don't think) and the other ways in which the colonial influences of the Church are present in the play--"patriarchy blamers" could have a field day, but that's not the only thing. the bastardised remains of a pre-Christian paganism(s), the monstrosity of the witch, the whore, the magic she does with womens' bodies (among other things, she sews into womens' genitals in a very early form of hymen resotration), and so on, and so on, and so on.belledame222https://www.blogger.com/profile/13947289856453172848noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1662446936235341392007-01-16T07:44:00.000-05:002007-01-16T07:44:00.000-05:00the hybridities that form even in the midst of exc...<i>the hybridities that form even in the midst of exclusion</i><br /><br />Right. It's more than a master/slave dialectic. There seems to be a way that 13th-century English persecutions ended up Judaizing the persecutors and Christianizing the victims. There's more where that came from, when I can get to it. There are several things I'd like to exploit further in this line for this future project:<br /><br />a) the peculiar form the badge took in England. It strikes me that compelling Jews to wear a cloth representation of the Tablets of the Law would further hybridize Christians and Jews <i>if</i> the Tablets represented the Decalogue in the 13th century as they do now;<br /><br />b) the <i>Cursor Mundi,</i> which moves the distinctively "Jewish" laws to God's words to Noah after the Flood while editing its account of the Mosaic Law so it includes only those laws followed by Christians. Since the Noachide laws are the laws for everyone and the Mosaic laws are, for the most part, the laws for the Jews, there's something peculiar going on here;<br /><br />c) Richard of Devizes' fascinating Chronicle. By troping the pogroms of 1189-90 as a "Holocaust" (a rare word in medieval Latin so far as I can tell), there's a sense in which Christians have become creatures of the Law. Also, by eating (and "expelling") Jews, Christians appear every bit as anthropophagous as the Jews of Lincoln would be in Richard's peculiar ritual murder story;<br /><br />d) following on that, and looking ahead to several 14th-century texts, there's the popularity of the apocryphal story of the young Jesus turning Jewish children into pigs. Jews don't eat pigs because they're <i>not</i> anthropophagous (at least, not against their own; but see Adam of Bristol, etc.), whereas Christians, who want to feel themselves, and especially their children, threatened by Jews, enthusiastically consume animals they consider to be descended from Jewish children (JJC saw a version of this argument in Leeds);<br /><br />e) compelling Jews to follow Christian holidays and fast days (Jews should not be seen eating meat on Fridays and they should exhibit solemnity during Christian processions).<br /><br />===<br /><br /><i>Butler, Edelman, Sedgwick, Goldberg are all Jews who argue for a messianic openness to an unanticipatable or unforegraspable future (117).</i><br /><br />Benjamin too, right?<br /><br />That's a lovely, hopeful piece from O'Rourke, a nice counterpart to <a href="http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2007/01/we_are_the_othe.html">this,</a> which is a better representative of how I normally think. I do wonder, however, about identifying certain textual and/or ethical approaches as <i>particularly</i> Jewish. I can see the value of doing this--discovering that "Western" philosophy derives from a group often thought irredeemably non-Western, placeless, discovering that something so present, so oriented to the future, derives from a group that for so long was thought anachronism incarnate--but I want to resist compartmentalizing any approach along ethnic/cultural lines (the "Gallic" mindset that led to continental philosophy vs. the clarity of mind that characterizes English philosophy). <br /><br />==<br /><br />The origins of this post, by the way, are in my efforts to designate what it is I study. It's usual to see book titles in our field end with "...in medieval literature" or "...in the Middle Ages" or "...in medieval Europe." But given the content of these books, there's clearly a silent "Christian" that perhaps should be expressed, since, after all, they've often left out--we might even say "erased"--Jews (and, if we get out of Northern Europe, Muslims too perhaps). On the one hand, I number among those scholars who study the "Christian" middle Ages. I'm not considering Jewish approaches to animals in the Middle Ages at all, not yet, and even when I do turn my attention to this, I'll be hampered by the fact that I don't read Hebrew. On the other hand, I don't want to reify Christian Europe as separate from non-Christian Europe, which is what I'd do if I wanted to acknowledge the Christian content of my study by saying I do "the Christian Middle Ages." There's intermingling (see above). With all that in mind, how do I designate my field of study? More to come on this later perhaps.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-40788944611700143892007-01-15T14:15:00.000-05:002007-01-15T14:15:00.000-05:00Thought provoking stuff. Some excellent scholarshi...Thought provoking stuff. Some excellent scholarship has lately made the western Middle Ages less Christiancentric (Steve Kruger, Sylvia Tomasch, Kathleen Biddick, Miriamne Krummel [who is also doing sensitive work on Meir of Norwich and Hebrew writing in England]). What I like about your own piece is that it gets at the the hybridities that form even in the midst of exclusion, leaving categories like "Christian" and "Jew" impure.<br /><br />Your post also brought to mind a perceptive essay composed by <a href="http://www.rhizomes.net/issue10/orourke.htm#_ednref116">Michael O'Rourke on queer theory and the death of Derrida</a>. In it he writes:<br /><br /><em>Now, according to Tony Purvis, Judith Butler claims that her textual method relies on Talmudic exegetical methods (114). Derrida in Archive Fever argues that psychoanalysis is a Jewish Science; John Caputo asserts in The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida that deconstruction, after Saint Jacques, is also a Jewish science (115); so, might we not argue that Queer Theory, with its indebtedness to Freud and Derrida, is a Jewish science too (116)? Butler, Edelman, Sedgwick, Goldberg are all Jews who argue for a messianic openness to an unanticipatable or unforegraspable future (117). Close readers of queer theory (and Butler in particular) will have noted this prophetico-messianic strain all along. Recent converts will surely have noticed a Levinasian turn in her recent work: Precarious Life and Undoing Gender are relentlessly ethical and political in their concerns with and faith in a reimagined futurity. In her most recent book Undoing Gender, >Butler concludes with an autobiographical, almost Derridean Circonfession/Circumfession (118). From this we can conclude that Judith Butler is someone who prays, like Derrida with his “weeping eyes and seeing tears” (119). for the justice to-come and the democracy to-come. Undoing Gender rather than seeing the assimilation of queer theory, continues, and begins again to make trouble. And Butler will continue to make trouble for the (un)foreseeable future and that is what queer theory (in Butler, Halperin, Edelman) is supposed to be, namely the coming of the impossible and unforeseeable, preferably what Derrida calls the tout autre.</em><br /><br />Sorry for the length of that, but I do find suggestive that deconstruction and its neighbor queer theory can be thought of us Jewish sciences. I think your post, Karl, suggests the same.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.com