The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess: The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism by Adrienne Williams Boyarin

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess: The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism by Adrienne Williams Boyarin Heather Blurton adrienne williams boyarin, The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess: The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Pp. 352. isbn: 978–0–8122–5259–0. $75.95. It has long been recognized that the Fourth Lateran Council’s decree that Jews should wear items of clothing that would distinguish them from their Christian neighbors contains an implicit acknowledgement that it is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish Jewish people from their Christian neighbors. In The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess: The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism, Adrienne Williams Boyarin takes this issue seriously. Instead of focusing on how Christians tried to assert Jewish difference, Williams Boyarin looks at how they appropriated Jewish ‘sameness.’ The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess argues that ‘sameness’ is as important a category as ‘difference’ for understanding medieval Christian anti-Judaism, and that the figure of the Jewish woman is a privileged locus for the representation of this ‘sameness’ across archival and literary documents. ‘Sameness,’ however, Williams Boyarin asserts, is nevertheless an ideological aspect [End Page 107] of anti-Judaism insofar as it functions to ‘occupy and redefine’ Jewish bodies (p. 2). Williams Boyarin writes: ‘I am insisting that taking note of sameness as its own polemical category—and of saming as exegetical processes that can be analyzed like processes of othering—allows us to interrogate evocations of Jewish similarity or ambiguity as they co-exist with, and interact with, uses and evocations of contrast and difference. We should not forget sameness because it is (by design) difficult to see, nor because it seems somehow more humane than otherness, lest we unwittingly perpetrate its polemical goals. Wherever mimicry and uncertainty about the line between Christian and Jew exist, that uncertainty itself can be mobilized—legally, didactically, historically, politically—in rhetorical challenge to Jewishness, or in redefinition of both Jewishness and Christianness’ (pp. 92–93). In focusing on sameness and presence, Williams Boyarin seeks to reorient the terms of the debate around medieval English anti-Judaism, which, for a long time, has focused on tropes of alterity and absence. This reorientation is welcome, and it will open new avenues of inquiry not only for the Middle Ages, but for antisemitism studies in general. As the title implies, the book falls into two parts, dealing respectively with ‘The Christian Jew’ and ‘The Unmarked Jewess.’ The first half of the book ‘focuses on the means by which medieval Christians could identify with Jews and even think of themselves as Jewish’ (p. 1). The second half of the book is interested in medieval representations of Jewish women more generally. It addresses the argument that Jewish women were not ‘raced,’ or ‘marked,’ as Jewish men were. Williams Boyarin sees the ‘unmarked’ representation of the Jewess as doing the work of ‘sameness.’ The book blends literary and archival sources, and where it introduces stories from archival sources, four appendices offer original editions and translations of these texts. As well as addressing texts that normally appear in studies of medieval English anti-Judaism, such as the story of Hugh of Lincoln and the Middle English romance The Siege of Jerusalem, the book discusses texts that do not, such as Ancrene Wisse and the Ormulum. This treatment of works not usually considered in the context of medieval anti-Judaism is an implicit support of the book’s assertion of the ubiquity of ‘sameness,’ and it demonstrates the extent to which to talk about medieval anti-Judaism is simply to talk about medieval culture. Heather Blurton University of California, Santa Barbara Copyright © 2021 Arthuriana