Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews by Miri Rubin (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 287 “Law and Gospel,” which are heavily loaded terms in Lutheran theology. This however is not a short-coming of the book; only a warning to the casual reader to come prepared to a well-documented and thoroughly grounded discussion of a key moment in the development of Lutheran theology. ERIC G. CASTEEL, History, UCLA and University of North Carolina Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2004) 266 pp. In this extraordinary and detailed book, published here in a new paperback edition, Miri Rubin traces the development over several centuries of the medieval anti-Semitic narrative of host-desecration by Jews, and the frequently horrifying real-life effects it engendered. Her choice of title underscores the fact that she is dealing in the stories people tell to make sense of their past and structure their present, and that those stories reveal more about those who tell them than those about whom they are told (or indeed about what really happened): these are “Gentile tales,” not Jewish ones. The symbolic universe within which the narrative of host-desecration has meaning is a specifically Christian one, and, as Rubin shows here, that meaning is contextually bound in each telling. Drawing on religious documents, local and court records, contemporary narrative and the forced confessions of some of the Jews involved, as well as literary, folkloric and visual representations of host-desecration, Rubin situates this tale—one of the most persistent medieval anti-Jewish narratives—in the varied contexts of its telling and performance. After an introduction discussing the power of narrative to influence action, Rubin begins with a consideration of the tale of the Jewish Boy, a narrative that has its roots in late antiquity and its flowering in medieval collections of Marian tales. The story concerns a young Jewish boy who partakes of the Eucharist with his Christian schoolmates, and is thrown into a heated oven by his father as punishment. The child, miraculously, is unburned, and emerges from the oven describing the vision of Mary and the Christ child he has had within; the story ends with the conversion of the Jewish boy and his mother, and the death of the father in the same oven. As Rubin points out, even in its most benign form (focusing more on Mary’s miracle and the boy’s conversion than the brutal revenge inflicted upon the Jewish father), this is a story that “allowed the conflation of violence and compassion, powerful and contradictory sentiments which cannot but stir unease” (24). In chapter 2, Rubin traces in successive versions of the tale an increasing emphasis on both the centrality of the Eucharist to the miracle, and the positioning of the Jewish father as a threat to the holiness it represents. She situates these shifts in emphasis historically and legally, noting that the narrative move towards a greater focus on the Eucharist parallels the increasing centrality of the rituals surrounding the Eucharist in the thirteenth century. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 had established transubstantiation as an article of faith, and public rituals and processions involving the Eucharist were becoming more important. This, in turn, is tied to Christian anxieties about Jews in the public sphere, and Rubin astutely notes that the Fourth Lateran also placed strict limits on Jewish-Christian interaction, and specifically banned Jews from the streets during Holy Week, “so that they would have no occasion to deride Christ and REVIEWS 288 Christian grief at His Crucifixion”(29). Chapter 3 introduces the full-blown host-desecration narrative as it was enacted in Paris in 1290. Here, the Jew is depicted attempting a kind of reenactment of the crucifixion upon the consecrated host (which he has extorted from a Christian woman), apparently in an attempt to test the truth of Christian belief, although it must be admitted that the motivation of the Jews in these stories is never entirely clear. The standard features of the narrative (as it was performed in Paris in 1290 and elsewhere in subsequent years) are as follows: a Jewish man procures a consecrated host from a Christian, usually a woman. He then abuses the host (this generally...