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 Miriamne Ara Krummel Adrienne Williams Boyarin. The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess: The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. iii, 325. $79.95 cloth. Built on nearly two centuries of Jewish studies scholarship, Adrienne Williams Boyarin's The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess: The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism brings nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century scholars into conversation with each other to explore her observations about the distressing practice of "saming the Jew." Closing with a discussion of Grace Aguilar's 1847 essay "The Story of the Jews in England," Boyarin deploys the work of this "first author to attempt a history of medieval English Jewry" (222) to conclude her study of the misogynistic and antisemitic agenda that lingers in and fuels the veritable landmine that Boyarin terms the "politics of sameness" throughout her book. Boyarin's ideas are new, and her vision of sameness, especially in the production of the female Jewish characters, investigates how the viewer and reader are made to feel comfortable with Jewish proximity at the same time that "Judaism and living Jews" (224) are being erased. The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess follows a somewhat unique structure that complements Boyarin's claims about sameness. The book opens in the usual way with a comprehensive introduction, aptly entitled "Saming the Jew," which announces how the monograph's larger project departs from the scholarship that has preceded hers: "Many studies of medieval anti-Jewish texts and images in recent decades have discussed difference. This book is concerned, instead, with realities and fantasies of sameness" (1). The note to this point clarifies the departure from recent criticism: a number of the works that have preceded The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess, Boyarin explains, "have discussed issues of Jewish–Christian contact and sameness in sensitive ways, though none has presented sameness as a primary frame of analysis for understanding anti-Jewish polemics" (245 n. 1). After the introduction The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess unfolds in two parts: Part 1, "The Potential of Sameness," and Part 2, "The Unmarked Jewess." Both parts 1 and 2 open with "Historiae" that provide intimate glances into the temporal liminalities that inhere in the lives of select pre-1290 Expulsion Jews who changed their Jewish identities into Christian ones. The dangers that inhere in desires for sameness are then enlarged upon in all five chapters of Boyarin's book. Throughout, the book traces the idea that medieval Jews—and all Jewish [End Page 376] difference associated with these Jews—were eliminated from English Christian society through the process of "saming the Jew." Part I's "Historiae," entitled "The Friar and the Foundling," opens the study of the intersection between sameness and Jewishness by pondering the thirteenth-century Jewish man Sampson, son of Samuel, who disguises himself as a "fratris minoris" or "Friar Minor" (The National Archives, Kew, E 9/24, m. 5d; cited in Appendix 1, 228, 229). Sampson, son of Samuel—a Jew who pretends to be a Franciscan—embodies the fraught intersections, imperiled boundaries, and close proximities of real and invented Christian and Jewish bodies. Along with a brief look into the narrative of Sampson's identity, Part 1's "Historiae" also considers the strange tale of the Jewished—that is, "recently circumcised" (23)—body of the Christian foundling Jurnepin/Odard. After the opening "Historiae," Part 1 theorizes the category of "sameness" in Chapters 1 and 2. The title of Chapter 1, "The Same, but Not Quite," intentionally echoes a line in Homi Bhabha's Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994) when Bhabha refers to postcolonial identities as "almost the same, but not quite" (35; italics also Bhabha's). Boyarin also invokes Bhabha's notions of "partial presence" and the "incomplete" and "virtual" identities that are produced in her studies of the partly erased medieval English Jew. Chapter 2, "English 'Jews,'" presents typology as deploying "'Jewish' features" to design "the correct Christian self" (77), thereby...