Two Short Posts of Interest (to me, and I hope you too)

Stephanie Trigg examines her appalled reaction to John Howard's joining the Order of the Garter. What happens when one's grotesque political contemporaries intrude upon one's field of study?

Dr. Virago on Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, mourning, and the recent mass murder at Northern Illinois University.

And now, off to the airport, and then, ultimately, to a weekend in Texas, where I'll spend some time with my brother, the Air Force cardiologist, before he's deployed to the (relative safety of a) large base in Iraq. Safe flying to all of us!

The Jewish Christian Middle Ages

Sometime in the early 80s, Barney Frank was suffering

during one of those interminable end-of-year round-the-clock sessions when junior Members were often dragooned into presiding in the wee hours. During a tedious speech by Republican Rep. Marjorie Holt on school prayer, Holt referred to America as "a Christian nation." Frank interrupted her to observe: "If this is a Christian nation, why does some poor Jew have to get up in the middle of the night to preside over the House of Representatives?"

In his chapter on Derrida in The Premodern Condition, Bruce Holsinger describes at length the "interventionist medievalism" (120) of the Radical Orthodoxy group, in particular, Catherine Pickstock's After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy. As Holsinger explains, Pickstock "aims at a wholesale dismantling of Derrida's critique of Western logocentrism through a 'recasting of the premodern' against what she sees as its pernicious recruitment by deconstruction" (121). After Writing presents a pretty easy target for a medievalist, at least so far as Holsinger summarizes it. This is despite Pickstock's erudition in Western philosophical traditions, in fact despite her insistence that the deconstructive critique of language inadequately accounts for the bodily presence necessary to produce language (a point I know I find attractive, even as I find the implied prediscursive body-as-presence argument suspicious). For Holsinger, Pickstock's work presents an easy target because she mourns the loss of the "liturgical civilization [that] existed in its purest form in the Western Middle Ages and achieved its most coherent expression as the liturgy of the Roman Rite" (125) and because she longs for something she calls "genuine liturgy" (qtd 127) to restore "real language" (qtd 127). Far from being a medieval artifact, the ideal(ized) liturgy from which Pickstock quotes dates from the Counter-Reformation, a period of intense religious longing, nostalgia, and reaction against Protestantism, and now, I suppose, recuperated for much the same purposes to inveigh against a secular "nihilistic" philosophy that suspects all promises of presence.

What leapt out at me, I suspect wholly uncharitably, was the Jewishness of two of Pickstock's bêtes noires, Lévinas and Derrida. Keeping this in mind renders Pickstock's "commitment to credal Christianity...to deploy this recovered vision systematically to criticise modern society" (qtd 119) a bit pernicious, at least to my eyes, right now. Heavy charges, but I suspect the deployment of "medieval Christianity" to critique a modern society that, in contradistinction to most late medieval dominant societies, is not systematically trying to extirpate or convert Jews. This is not to say that a secular state is necessarily better at preventing systematic extirpation. Lord knows it isn't. But neither anti-Judaism nor anti-Semitism are necessary features of post-religious states, which cannot be said for medieval Christianity.

The problem here is in part one of imagining the Middle Ages by default as a Christian Middle Ages, of forgetting, for example, that Hebrew numbered among the languages of textual production in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England, and of forgetting peculiar moments like the one I'm about to describe. Medieval Christians (clumsy placeholder) preferred Jews to be abject, as Jewish misery was a sign of Christianity's triumph. Keep that in mind when you read this:

In this year [1273], eight days before the Feast of Saint John the Baptist [24 June], because the Mayor was then absent on his journey to the King in the parts beyond the sea, the Sheriffs, together with certain discreet men of the City, appeared before the Council of his lordship the King at Westminster; whereupon, the members of the Council, before certain Jews there present, questioned them, thus saying--‘It is notorious that the Jews kill with their own hands all beasts and fowls, whose flesh they eat. But some beasts they consider of their law, and some not; the flesh of those which are of their law they eat, and not the flesh of others. What then do the Jews do with the flesh of those which are not of their law? Is it lawful for the Christians to buy and eat it?’ To which answer was made by the citizens, that if any Christian should buy any such flesh of a Jew, he would be immediately expelled; and that if he should be convicted thereof by the Sheriffs of the City or by any other person, he would lose such flesh, and it would be given to the lepers, or to the dogs, to eat; in addition to which, he would be heavily amerced by the Sheriffs.--‘But if it seems to you that this punishment is too light a one, let your discreetness make provision that such Christians shall be visited with a more severe punishment.’ Whereupon, the members of the King’s Council said--‘We will not have such persons visited with any more severe punishment, without his lordship the King; seeing that this matter concerns the Jews, who belong to his lordship the King. But we do strictly command you, in virtue of the fealty in which you are bound unto his lordship the King, that you cause this custom throughout the City rigidly to be observed.’ (Henry Thomas Riley, trans. Chronicles of the Mayor and Sheriffs of London, A.D. 1188-1274 and The French Chronicle of London, A.D. 1259-1343. London: Tübner and Co., 1863, 176-7)

Since I can't imagine that they killed pigs, certainly the Jews did not kill "all beasts and fowls." If we may judge by similar laws on the Continent, what the law references are the clean beasts judged by the Jews to be unsuitable because of some taint discovered during slaughter. The Jews would sell these carcasses (cows and sheep presumably) or portions of carcasses to Christians, whose religious alimentary qualms tended to be focused more around pleasure than around pollution. Everyone was happy: the Jews didn't have to throw away useless meat, and savvy Christians bypassed their "own" butchers to get meat at a discount. "Discreet men of the City" (no doubt Christian butchers who wanted to secure a monopoly) aimed to put a stop to this practice. Whatever the mercenary reasons were, the public logic likely ran as follows: because Jews must be thought abject, Christians cannot be seen to eat something that the Jews had rejected as repulsive. It'd be like eating something a leper had spurned! Yet in their rejection, Christians are also rejecting what the Jews reject. This is what fascinates me, and what trips up Pickstock's Middle Ages and the "Christian" Middle Ages more generally. Christians end up, after a fashion, keeping kosher, and doing so amidst some of the worst persecutions of Jews in England's history. I need hardly say it, but what marvelous irony!

(image above: "The Mikveh, or ritual bath dug up on Milk Street close to St Paul's Cathedral. Courtesy of the Museum of London Archeology Service," from here. Also see JJC's post on Jewish Architecture in England and, below, on the second-oldest synagogue in the Western World.)

The shrunken head upon my Christmas tree

Eileen gave us her holiday-inspired ruminations yesterday. Today I offer a few of my own.

Last week, just as Hanukkah was revving up, I mentioned the syncretism that haunts the various celebrations occurring at this time of year: both Christmas and Hanukkah have quietly absorbed rituals that don't have all that much to do with the historic events they commemorate. The birth of a child in a Bethlehem manger and the miracle of eight nights of oil are not innately connected to fir trees festooned with electric bulbs, holly and berries, gift giving, lighting candles against long nights, the celebration of winter's advent and the dwindling of the year. The present has a way of not forgetting what is ancient in human history: the impulse to joy at winter solstice, for example. Eileen was wondering about where god might be in all this end of the year activity, or in the command that sent Abraham with a knife to a mountaintop. Right now I'm wondering why it is that, even in the absence of gods, the short days and the long darkness here in the northern hemisphere move us not to gloom but to hope. I also wonder (following Eileen's train of thought again) if hope isn't really what we mean, in the end, by love.

Back to syncretism. The great historian of Anglo-Saxon England, Bede, wrote of a king of East Anglia who couldn't completely commit to the New World Order instigated by Christianity's advent. Rædwald kept two altars in his temple, one for sacrifices to the parvenu God, "and another small altar on which to offer victims to devils [that is, the pagan gods]" (Ecclesiastical History 2.15). Here we see vividly the syncretism for which the period is now renowned: a commingling of traditions without synthesis and (at least for people like Rædwald) without much cognitive dissonance. A contemporary analogue of Rædwald's dual altars might be the Easter Bunny: clearly this furry little fertility symbol, striding into houses to deliver more fertility symbols (eggs), has little to do with the person whose resurrection is being commemorated on that day. Easter silently gathered to itself primordial celebrations of spring, procreation, fecundity.

As you can guess, I have no problems with syncretism. We can be as purist as we like, declaring that randy rabbits shall have no part in our paschal solemnities, or that having a Tanenbaum in a Jewish home is like hanging a cross instead of a mezuzah, but we are thereby denying a part of what makes us creatures of history: our reluctance to abandon the ancient when asked to replace old celebrations with novel ones, our inability to forge wholly new identities, our intractable gravitation towards the cycles of birth, death, light and dark that provided humanity's first glimmer of an awesome and endless exteriority, of what might be the divine.

This is a long way of explaining why the Cohen family of Bethesda, Maryland -- who do in fact have a mezuzah on their door and a hanukkiah blazing away each night at their window -- also have a Frasier fir in their living room so decked with lights it can barely support itself. Yes, it is a Christmas tree, and it is topped with what looks to be an angel ... but on closer examination that Seraphim on the topmost branch is actually a dachshund in a white robe with a halo, a saintly version of our dog Scooby. You won't find a nativity scene beneath the Christmas tree, nor "small altar on which to offer victims to devils ," but on its boughs you will spot the following objects dangling: ornaments shaped like disco balls; two toucans; Sponge Bob Square Pants in a Santa hat; a pickle; some cows; a flamingo in a hula skirt; and a shrunken head. In our family we have a saying: "It isn't a Christmas tree without a shrunken head."

Happy holidays, everyone. May the year ahead bring peace, love ... and hope.