“Where are the Gothic Jewish women? On the non-iconography of the Jewess in the Cantigas de Santa Maria”

Abstract

No distinctive symbol, costume, or physiognomy was devised for Jewish women in high medieval art, in sharp contrast to Jewish men, who from the late eleventh century were endowed with increasingly graphic—and virulent—marks of identity. This article attempts to explain this fact by comparing the outward appearance, narrative role, and ideological import of Jewish men and women in the Escorial Cantigas de Santa Maria. It argues that the caricatured male Jew epitomizes crucial aspects of Jewish “testimony” as articulated by high medieval theologians: its rigid obsolescence, its blind literalism, the severity and intractability of its law: qualities that female flesh was considered ill-suited to convey. To recognize the inability of the Jewish woman to embody Jewish ritual, exegesis, and law is not, however, to assert that this figure has nothing to say about Judaism. The other component of the doctrine of “Jewish witness”, which served to justify the continued presence of Jews within Christendom, insisted on protecting Jews who respected Christian primacy, and held out hope that they might ultimately turn to Christ. These are notions effectively embodied in the sign of the Jewish woman, whose face and body encode receptivity to dominance and potential for change. By mapping select aspects of Jewishness onto hyper-gendered images, the illuminations of the Cantigas model the ideal—punishment and conversion—while implicitly acknowledging the imperfect real, the necessary compromises of mundane co-existence, reflecting Alfonso el Sabio’s meticulously modulated Jewish policy*.