Christian Theology and Anti Jewish Violence in the Middle Ages: Connections and Disjunctions

Abstract

The linkage between theology — or the ideology of any regnant establishment or intellectual elite, for that matter — and the infliction of physical violence may often appear indirect and questionable, perhaps even tenuous and misleading. In the late ancient and medieval history of Christian-Jewish relations, counter-examples abound. On the one hand, in numerous instances of harshly anti-Jewish preaching — as in John Chrysostom’s late fourth-century Antioch, Isidore of Seville and Julian of Toledo’s seventh-century Visigothic Spain, and Lyons of the ninth-century Bishops Agobard and Amulo — little concrete evidence attests to increased physical attacks on Jews or an overall decline in Jewish wellbeing. On the other hand, notwithstanding the vociferous protestations of popes and emperors, late medieval Jewish communities frequently suffered serious losses of life and property as a result of libels of ritual murder, ritual cannibalism (blood libel) and host desecration. Moreover, as we learn from recent studies like David Nirenberg’s Communities of Violence, the place of violent behaviour — sporadic, widespread or ritualised — in a given socio-cultural context is often multivalent, serving not only to harm and destroy its targets but perhaps even to stabilize and protect them.1