Men as Meat: Exploiting Jewish Law in Ælfric’s Translation of Maccabees

Abstract

Ælfric’s Old English homiletic-hagiographical translation of Maccabees, “Passio Machabeorum,” manifests the unique problems and opportunities presented by Old Testament food taboos to early medieval English Christianity. Taking up Giorgio Agamben’s observation that the division between human and animal life occurs within the human as a condition of human possibility (an observation he extends analogously to Christians and Jews) and Kenneth R. Stow’s documentation of the association between Jews and dogs as a primary channel of Christian supersession over Judaism, I argue that Ælfric exploits an unlikely similarity between Jewish dietary law and his own program of Christian orthodoxy: the centrality to each system of the classification and separation of orders of being, particularly animal orders. This shared investment provides an irresistible opportunity for Ælfric, in whose hands Jewish food and sacrifice laws first appear as anthropologically curious aspects of the radical difference between Christians and nonbelievers, but quickly become the very index of that difference. Ælfric appropriates Jewish food laws to create interlinked hierarchical distinctions between humans and animals, Christians and non-Christians. Written at the height of the Viking invasions, Ælfric’s homily on Maccabees shores up Christian humanity against its human and animal others in a time of crisis.