The Accommodated Jew: English Antisemitism from Bede to Milton by Kathy Lavezzo

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Accommodated Jew: English Antisemitism from Bede to Milton by Kathy Lavezzo Chris Vinsonhaler (bio) The Accommodated Jew: English Antisemitism from Bede to Milton Kathy Lavezzo Cornell University Press, 2016. 374 pp. $65.00 hardcover. In The Accommodated Jew, Kathy Lavezzo aligns textual rhetoric with the visual rhetoric produced in mapping structures of Jewish habitation, both real and imagined. This alignment is fruitful, as it reveals the ways in which English writers “accommodated” Jewish communities only within the context of their own concerns, and also how their conceptions of Jewish accommodations sparked destabilizing effects (4). With the first chapter, Lavezzo demonstrates the foundational role of supersessionism in constructions of English identity via her review of the Old English poem Elene and the works of Bede in their various presentations of materiality and architecture. The second chapter considers the cultural span from the Norman Conquest to the year 1290, with a focus on Thomas of Monmouth’s Life of St. William of Norwich, the text in which the blood libel first takes written form. The analysis here demonstrates a paradoxical effect, in which tropes of anti-Jewish paranoia simultaneously form a critique against the abuses of urban commerce as practiced by Christians. This pattern, in which antisemitic tropes effectively critique Christian economies, also informs the third chapter, with its examination of Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale. As [End Page 205] Lavezzo demonstrates, Chaucer mobilizes the image of the latrine not only to condemn Jewish money-lending but also to implicate Christian lending practices. The fourth chapter examines The Croxton Play of the Sacrament to reveal a similar dynamic—as the staging of mercantilism in both Christian and Jewish iterations points to the negative impacts of England’s emerging mercantile culture. The fifth chapter likewise shows how Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta ultimately dramatizes the destabilizing effects of greed, in a critique of European mercantilism writ large. Accordingly, Barabas’s counting house, ostensibly condemned as the habitation of the Jewish other, nevertheless presents a valued point of dispersal within Christian economies, so that eventually, “every locale…emerges as yet another version of the Jew’s counting house” (177). The book’s final chapter considers Milton’s Samson Agonistes as a work asserting Milton’s veiled opposition to Jewish readmission to England. Although Lavezzo’s argument is somewhat speculative, she makes a persuasive argument that Samson’s destruction of the temple at the end of the play functions as an allegory for Milton’s unstated conviction that the exile of the Jews from England should be maintained. Within this project, I found the most important theological critique in the analysis of Bede’s oeuvre. The work of this eighth-century English cleric is important first because it defines the conceptual bedrock for subsequent centuries—laying the groundwork not only for pogrom and expulsion, but also for antisemitic iterations found in such works as Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and Milton’s Samson Agonistes (31). Moreover, because Bede writes in a milieu wholly uninflected by the influence of actual Jewish communities, his attempts both to appropriate and to excise Judaism are cut entirely from the theological cloth of supersessionism. Bede’s homily on Christ’s tomb, for example, observes that “the rolling away of the stone implies the disclosure of the divine sacraments, which were formerly hidden and closed up by the letter of the law. For the law was written on stone” (33). As Lavezzo observes, this allegory negatively appropriates the physical stone of Moses’s tablet to define Jewish law as a figural stone, which, in the manner of a tomb, conceals Christ’s law. Moreover, Bede expands the allegory by asserting that Jews “continue to be like a tomb still closed by a stone. They are not capable of entering to see that the body of the Lord has disappeared by his rising, because by the hardness of their infidelity they are prevented from becoming aware that a dead person, who has destroyed death’s right of entry and has already passed into the heights of the heavens, cannot be found on earth” (33). Accordingly, Bede’s construction of what Lavezzo aptly names “the sepulchral Jew” produces a...