The Story of the Fallen Jew and the Iconography of Jewish Unbelief

Abstract

“The Story of the Fallen Jew and the Iconography of Jewish Unbelief.” Medieval Christian thought on the Jews often took the form of popular tales, miniature allegories that drew on symbols of sin and corruption. This article discusses one such story, a tale of a Jew who falls in a sewer and refuses to be helped out. The tale circulated from the twelfth century to the seventeenth, in both verse and prose. In its trappings of historicity and use of symbols, it claims to represent a larger truth about Jewish corruption and backwardness. The symbolic system of this story, which highlights excrement as the earthly manifestation of sin, was shared with many other medieval stories about Jews, as well as with exegesis and the Bible. As a whole, the story presents Jews as the icons of earthly sinners, and seeks to express and define popular ideas about Jewish unrighteousness.