Memories of the Maccabean Martyrs in the Christian Medieval West

Abstract

In the previous chapter, it was shown that late antique Christian appropriations of the Maccabean martyrs turned them into hybridized figures that represented the place of Jewish figures in rhetoric accompanying the Christianization of the late Roman Empire and the transformation of its cultural discourses. By attending to the reception of these late antique traditions of the Maccabean martyrs into the medieval period, it is possible to observe continuities and discontinuities in the use of these hybridized martyrs in new cultural contexts. As with late antique sermons, in medieval texts on the Maccabean martyrs one finds questions about the purpose of honoring Jewish martyrs for the Mosaic Law and the relevance of their witness for Christian life. Christian remembrance of the Maccabean martyrs was highly malleable and shaped according to specific contexts. At the same time, medieval Christian traditions of the Maccabean martyrs were ambivalent about their subjects. These qualities signify the allosemitic view of these Jewish figures by Christian authors.1 That is, the Maccabean martyrs were figures whose Jewish identity was neither unambiguously negative nor positive. Rather, the Maccabean martyrs’ status as Jews was a means by which Christian authors could articulate a totalizing identity for their own Christian communities while also ideologically colonizing Jewish narratives.