Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings Lawrence Warner Delany, Sheila , ed., Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings ( The Multicultural Middle Ages), New York/London, Routledge, 2002; hardback; pp. xi, 258; 6 b/w illustrations; RRP £65; ISBN 0415938821. This collection of five previously-published essays and nine new contributions attempts to bring the category of 'the Jews' into the centre of medieval English cultural studies. The expulsion of 1290 has too easily put scholars of medieval culture into a position of silent complicity with the forces behind that event, yet 'the Jews' remained prominent in English historical consciousness and the construction of English identity. The major accomplishment of Chaucer and the Jews is to drive that point home, from a variety of viewpoints. The volume's title is extraordinarily misleading: Chaucer, whose name appears in the biggest font on the cover, is the primary focus of just five essays, with two others, by Gillian Steinberg and Judith Neaman, concerning the teaching of Chaucer to Jewish students. 'That is because I have sought to challenge the idea of "author per se"', its editor explains (p. x). If in the name of a progressive politics one can re-name the richness and variety of medieval English literature and history 'Chaucer', should we likewise subordinate all the varieties of medieval religious belief to the category 'Christianity'? Fortunately, such cynicism and audience-baiting is rare after the introduction. [End Page 153] The Chaucer materials are a motley collection. Christine Rose, in an essay from 1998, argues that the Man of Law's Tale, ostensibly about Muslims, 'represents a veiled evocation of that other threat to Christian hegemony, the Jew' (p. 19), while Delany's 1999 piece proposes 'that Islam is conspicuous by its absence from [the Prioress's Tale] …, and that the Asia setting is precisely the tell-tale sign of that effacement' (p. 48). Such arguments hearken back to the era of Robertsonianism, according to which Chaucer hid ('veiled', 'effaced') his meaning for others to uncover. The prominence of this Chaucerian poetics of the occult is particularly surprising given Delany's insistence that we read empirically and historically rather than allegorically (pp. 44-5). Two other Chaucer essays are rather slight notes. Jerome Mandel suggests that the status of Sir Thopas's hauberk as 'Jewes werk' adds to the tale's comedy. William Chester Jordan's chapter 'The Pardoner's "Holy Jew"', which seeks 'to explicate the Pardoner's character and the dramatic thrust of his performance' (p. 25), should have considered the tale's figure of the old man, so strongly affiliated with Jewish stereotypes such as St Paul's 'old man' and the Wandering Jew. By contrast, Sylvia Tomasch's 'Postcolonial Chaucer and the Virtual Jew', first published in 2000, is a much more sophisticated, if problematic, engagement with the topic at hand. She draws upon post-colonial theory to propose that 'the virtual Jew is an invented "reality" that does not depend on actual medieval Jews for its connotations, let alone its denotation' (p. 79). Yet I wondered whether her argument was pre-determined rather than being based on particular evidence, as suggested, for instance, by her odd description of the Canterbury Tales as constituting 'compulsive retellings' of the stereotype of 'the Jew' (p. 79). Such overstatements recur elsewhere in the collection as well. Colin Richmond's important 1992 essay 'Englishness and Medieval Anglo-Jewry' is quite effective in showing that historians have adopted the anti-Semitic mindset of their objects of study, but it goes too far by calling Thomas of Monmouth, who claimed William of Norwich to be victim of Jewish ritual murder, 'the sole begettor [sic] of a lie that … led to terrible and untold suffering' (p. 223; cf. Anthony Bale's similar remark on p. 185). John McCulloh has shown that 'Thomas did not invent the myth, and his literary representation of it remained without influence' (Speculum 72 [1997]: 740). Mary Dove's 'Chaucer and the Translation of the Jewish Scriptures' has little to do with Chaucer; instead, it helpfully explicates the theory and practice of the translators of the Wycliffite Bible. Timothy Jones surveys the 'rise of David' story in the...