The charge of deicide. An anti- Jewish motif in medieval Christian art

Abstract

To the mind of the antique and medieval Christian expositors, the ‘self-execration’ of the Jews (Matt. 27:25) proved their collective complicity in the crucifixion. The everlasting guilt of the Jews was underlined by many authors throughout the centuries, and in medieval Passion plays it was often emphasized in the most drastic and inflammatory manner. While such renderings, however, did not openly contradict the gospels, the unvarnished pictorial representation of the Jews as the murderers of Jesus, and thus a blatant misrepresentation of the Passion narrative, constituted a veritable tradition in Christian art. In this article a first attempt is made to outline this pictorial tradition from the highly stylized and symbolical representations of the crucifixion in the early Middle Ages to the calvaries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to describe its development as well as its disappearance toward the end of the Middle Ages against the background of general tendencies in Christian art, and to assess its significance in regard to the relations between Christians and Jews.