In the Middle English romance The King of Tars, a Muslim sultan’s skin color famously transforms upon his conversion to Christianity. “His hide that blac and lothely was / Al white bicom thurth Godes gras.”1 Much has been written about the racial fantasy thus enacted within the poem, but in the contexts of this essay, I’m particularly struck not by the transformation itself but rather by its utility as a visual sign. For when the Sultan’s Christian wife beholds his new appearance, “wist sche wele in hir thought / on Mahoun leved he nought / For chaunged was his hewe.”2 In other words, the Sultan’s skin color becomes a semiotic display of the authenticity of his personal faith, a surety for that which remains internal and occluded.3 This is particularly important for a poem in which one individual, the Sultan’s Christian wife, has already faked a conversion to Islam, and been betrayed in her lie by the subsequently monstrous state of the child produced from their marriage. And yet, one cannot help but wonder: what happens if the Sultan once again begins to love Mohammed in his heart? Will his skin color now function as a monitor of his faith?The modern reader also tends to expect race to function as a visual sign. In this way, The King of Tars acts to confirm contemporary assumptions about what race looks like: the poem is about skin color, anti-Blackness, the public consumption of human difference. Yet it is important not to lose sight of how the primary racial distinction in the poem is first and foremost a religious one, between Christians and Muslims, with phenotypical difference reinforcing (or rather revealing) a far more comprehensive system of human categorization. Indeed, a princess of Tarsus and a sultan of Damascus might appear far more similar to one another than one would expect; as Sierra Lomuto has argued, the princess may very well have been of Mongol descent.4 The racial fantasy here is not only that the Sultan’s skin color can be transformed from black to white but also, and perhaps significantly, that the Sultan’s skin color would be so markedly different in the first place, that the racial difference between all Muslims and Christians—between all non-Christians and Christians—might be so clearly written and read upon the body, reduced to a binary of “black” and “white.”5This is the same racial fantasy that we see in the medieval Christian depictions of Jews, as Christians sought to write racial difference upon Jewish bodies that might otherwise be indistinguishable from their own. The bitter irony of the anti-Jewish statuary laws, for example, is that by forcing Jews to wear distinguishing clothing and legislating their segregation from their Christian neighbors, medieval Christian authorities were testifying to the invisibility of the very racial difference that they were so desperate to invoke.6 The history of medieval Christians’ racialization of Jews has therefore become an integral part of how scholars understand the development of racial systems of discrimination across time, and an important exemplar of how race is about social narrative rather than biological reality.7 As Geraldine Heng writes in her groundbreaking 2018 book The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, “in the medieval period, Jews functioned as the benchmark by which racial others were defined, measured, scaled, and assessed.”8 For medieval Christians, Jews offered the ultimate opportunity to transform the discomfort of human similarity into indelible human difference. And because these anti-Jewish racial constructions could at times operate outside of the kind of phenotypical color line so dominant in the history of race, for example, in the United States, the medieval Jew’s racialized identity also reminds contemporary scholars that visual signifiers of race (like the Sultan’s black skin) are not necessary for the enforcement of systems of racial stratification.The language of a dangerous similarity between peoples, requiring intellectual or social intervention, is the explicit focus of Adrienne Williams Boyarin’s brilliant work on what she terms “the polemics of sameness”; these polemics “argue for the indistinguishability of Jew and Christian—to erase, assimilate, or embody, Jewishness—and they function most effectively in concert with political and historical modes of oppression and alongside the possibility of real or performed visible similarity” (1). From this definition, one could argue that “the polemics of sameness” are also a fundamental (if nonexplicit) component of the books by Lauren Fogle and Robert Jutte as well. In Fogle’s study of London’s Domus Conversorum and its inhabitants and in Jutte’s stunningly comprehensive collection of narratives about Jewish bodies in both Christian and Jewish sources, we can identify the urgency of the medieval texts’ desire to know what makes Jews different from Christians in the absence of a clear visual semiotics. In other words, if Jews were to be racialized by medieval Christians that racialization had to rely upon something that appeared manifestly biological, upon a supposed corporeality capable of lasting (for generations) in the flesh, even after a potential conversion. The history of conversion from Judaism to Christianity therefore offers a critical opportunity for scholars to look at the intersection of those “political and historical modes of oppression” with the ideologies (including race) that reinforced them. For, as scholars of medieval Spain’s blood purity laws in particular have observed, resistance to the integration of converts into Christianity is the resistance of racial narratives to be dislodged, the refusal of the dominant population to acknowledge human sameness when that sameness necessitates no longer legislating difference.9 In this revew essay, I therefore wish to read Fogle, Boyarin, and Jutte as part of the same intellectual conversation, to read their three excellent works of scholarship as circling around the same question, a question that is inherently about race and racialization: what do medieval texts do when human difference does (or doesn’t) disappear? Thus, while none of the three scholars explicitly claim to be writing to the field of premodern critical race studies, I would argue that their scholarship makes a powerful and vital contribution to that discourse.10Fogle’s book, The King’s Converts: Jewish Conversion in Medieval London, is the first detailed historical study of London’s Domus Conversorum, the royal institution established by King Henry III in 1232 to house and support Jews who had converted (whether willingly or unwillingly) to Christianity. Often dispossessed of their property upon conversion, converts were forced to beg for sustenance from religious houses to save themselves from abject poverty and starvation. And the integration of converts into Christian lay communities was limited, even in the supposedly less anti-Jewish twelfth century. Fogle quotes Bernard of Clairvaux, for example, sneering about Christian usurers, “of whom he said, ‘if it is fit to call them Christians and not rather baptized Jews’” (5–6). The very category of “baptized Jew” as its own distinct religious/racial entity testifies to longstanding doubts even among Christian theologians as to whether conversion alone might fully erase the difference between themselves and the Jews.One of the enormous achievements of Fogle’s book is its collection and presentation of historical data on the Domus and its inhabitants. In the book’s first appendix (a full nineteen pages), Fogle documents every single convert who was resident in the Domus between 1232 and 1481 (187–205). This is an incredible document, with both enormous historical utility and an emotional poignance. It is one thing to read of the judicial massacre of eighteen Jews of Lincoln after they were accused of murdering the so-called Little Saint Hugh; it is another thing entirely to see the tidal wave of names in Fogle’s appendix of Jews who converted to Christianity in the wake of that violence. There are no records of Domus converts in 1254, 3 records for 1253. In contrast, Fogle records 110 for the year 1255 (190–95). I can easily imagine showing Fogle’s list of names to my Chaucer seminar when we read “The Prioress’s Tale” to witness for my students a small accounting of the real suffering and human upheaval that the lies of the blood libel have inflicted.The Jews who entered the Domus as new Christians were some of the few Jews to enter the English historical record as individuals for reasons other than moneylending, lawsuits, massacres, and criminal prosecution. Their Jewish names and lives, though, are lost; they enter history as Christians only. Or, perhaps, as almost Christians. For as Fogle’s records show, it was not only the converts themselves who were supported by the royal purse. As she writes, over time “[the Domus] was transformed perhaps from a religious house with a mission to instruct converts in their new faith, to a quasi-hospital or alms-house for people who were already Christians (though the descendants of converts) and their offspring” (156). For if the records of the Domus Conversorum bear testimony to the waves of violence that afflicted England’s Jews, they also bear witness to the refusal of England’s other Christians to assimilate former Jews into their communities, to an English racialization of Judaism that made conversion insufficient as transformative process. As Fogle notes, it is not only the converts themselves who gained successful admission to the Domus but also their children, who were born as Christians but with “Jewish blood.” Medieval Spain may have been the first to legislate racial blood purity for Christians, but it is hard to read Fogle’s history of the Domus and its occasional generations of Christian inhabitants and not to see here a microcosmic version of such racial practice.Boyarin too writes about the complexities of conversion in medieval English society without directly invoking the language of race and racialization. Noting that most scholarship on medieval anti-Judaism has focused on the elucidation of difference in anti-Jewish texts, Boyarin argues instead that we should turn our eyes to these “realities and fantasies of sameness” (1). These polemics, Boyarin writes, “argue for the indistinguishability of Jew and Christian—to erase, assimilate, or embody Jewishness—and they function most effectively in concert with political and historical modes of oppression and alongside the possibility of real or performed visible similarity” (1). For Boyarin, the story of medieval anti-Judaism thus becomes one of ambivalence and ambiguity, with medieval Christians sometimes exploiting, and sometimes fearing, “the Jew or Jewess as the ever-present alternative to self” (3). As Boyarin is careful to note, the polemics of sameness are not incompatible with a language of alterity; rather her analysis provides a crucial missing component of the nature of medieval anti-Judaism.Any engagement with Boyarin’s book must, of necessity, pay tribute to the intellectual brilliance here displayed. It is rare to read a book on such a well-studied subject that nevertheless feels so vitally new, so provocatively urgent. Boyarin’s readings are superb, and I know I will not be the only scholar wishing that I could go back and alter a previous article to take into account the complexities of the medieval Christian conception of the Jew that Boyarin offers in this book. Her readings are also highly diverse. From the homilies of Orrm, a twelfth-century Augustinian, whose engagement with orthography used Jews as a metaphor of doubling and repetition so that, as Boyarin argues, “Christians are Jews written right,” to the judicial records of frustrated investigations into individual women’s “suspect” conversions to Christianity, Boyarin’s intellectual creativity offers a uniquely interdisciplinary perspective on how likeness could be as much (or more) of a crisis than difference for medieval Christians living in close proximity to Jews (69). In some cases, like in miracle stories, similarity allowed fictional Jewish mothers to slip seamlessly into Christianity as doubles of Mary (another Jewish mother), but the ease of that slippage between the two religions also prevented Jewish women who had converted to Christianity from stably inhabiting their new identity in a way that felt permanent to Christian authorities.Jewish women play an important role in medieval anti-Jewish texts, according to Boyarin, because of the inherent “malleability and uncertainty” of their gendered similarity to Christian women; in Anglo-Christian literature, the Jewish woman’s “polemical function is to appear to be Christian” (147). For Jewish men, however, the inverse was true; it was almost impossible to be racialized as Jewish and fully sexed as male within Christian texts. Jutte points to medieval Christian “scientific” beliefs—such as that Jewish men experienced a monthly menstrual flow like women—to show “that a deeply Christian society clearly had serious difficulty in trying to reconcile both the social and biological components of the expression ‘male sex’ with the category ‘Jew’” (113). And yet because Jutte takes such a long historical view of narratives of the Jewish body, he is also able to contrast the supposedly shameful and feminized Jewish male of Christian polemic with deliberate Jewish strategies of response across time, from what he argues “began as a consciously constructed antithesis to the hegemonic masculinity of the environment in which Jews lived in the Diaspora” to its transformation “into its very opposite by Zionism,” with the latter’s embrace of a muscular hypermasculinity for Jewish men (114).Jutte accepts change and inconsistency in Jewish representation as an inherent part of the story that he is telling and, more significantly, of the compendium that he is building. Unlike Fogle and Boyarin’s books, which are organized around chronology and argumentation, Jutte’s book is organized around different categories of the Jewish body, with chapter titles such as “The Sex of the Body,” “The Intact Body,” and “The Ailing Body.” Moreover, it is impossible to describe or adequately praise the breadth and depth of Jutte’s scholarship and erudition. He has collected data and examples from the widest possible number of sources, with Hasidic legends and Yiddish proverbs nestling comfortably next to quotes from Josephus and advertisements from nineteenth-century German newspapers.Remarkably, however, the central premise of Jutte’s book appears quite similar to those of both Fogle and Boyarin; like them, he too is writing about the history of how one can tell a Christian from a Jew (and vice versa). Jutte begins the introduction to the book with a humorous Yiddish story meant to underscore the difference between a goy and a Jew, made “most clearly visible in their bodily practices” (2). And yet, as Jutte notes, “if we ‘neutralize’ both texts by removing the religious shading, we discover that the daily life of the Jew is hardly any different from that of the non-Jew, including their bodily practice” (2). In a sense, Jutte’s book therefore can be seen to continue the argument begun in Boyarin’s, that this similarity, this indistinguishability in the flesh, represented an intellectual problem for social systems built upon the legislation of human difference. He notes, for example, the writings of an early seventeenth-century Englishman, who, when visiting the Venetian ghetto, was “astonished to find that here the English expression ‘to look like a Jew’ has no relation to reality” (2–3). Moreover, like both Boyarin and Fogle, Jutte points to the unstable status of Jewish converts to Christianity as evidence for the ambiguous faith that Christians placed in the efficacy of their own baptismal sacrament when it came to Jews. In the absence of a “clear physical ‘proof’” that an individual had transitioned irrevocably from Jew to Christian, Jutte notes that some Christians sought to create new corporeal signs, such as the cessation of the foetor Judaicus, the Jewish stench, that might reveal which new Christians’ conversions were sincere (3).If race, to employ Heng’s definition, is a “structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences,” it is also simultaneously a paradigm created for the articulation and management of human similarities.11 That doubling between Christian and Jew, which Boyarin identifies in so many medieval anti-Jewish polemics, is far from merely metaphorical; it is a way of thinking about the world that encourages the construction of racial categories while simultaneously accommodating the insufficiency of categories to mark truly indelible lines between human beings. For as Jutte observes in his opening Yiddish story of the supposed difference between the bodies of goy and Jew, once one removes all the coded language, one is left with only sameness and indistinguishability. In this sense, the “miracle” of the Sultan in The King of Tars is not only that he is able to proffer a stable visual sign of his personal transformation to his bride, but also that within that act of transformation, his flesh can testify to the persistence and reality of human difference, in a poem that otherwise would dance perilously close to bearing witness to the similarities between Muslims and Christians instead.The problem with medieval Jewish converts to Christianity (and indeed with medieval Muslim converts to Christianity as well) is that their skin color didn’t change, their flesh didn’t offer some accessible sign of a natural division between the races. When Jews and Muslims converted to Christianity, they remained precisely the same people whom they had been before, just with different names and religious rituals. It was the “sameness” of other people that drove medieval Christians toward racialization, toward the desire to enforce difference where none might otherwise be observed. And, thus, while none of these three books claim the history of medieval race as their primary subject, the interwoven nature of Boyarin, Fogle, and Jutte’s insights into the medieval fear of similarity and of indistinguishable difference cannot help but contribute to and nuance scholarly understandings of how race developed as an epistemological category within medieval Europe.