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rfmcdonaldRecently, Andrew Reeves made a disturbing observation about medieval Christian anti-Jewish sentiment.
Last January, when I did a presentation on Miri Rubin's Corpus Christi for my medieval devotional literature course, I noticed this trend myself. Jewish man profanes eucharist, in the face of his wife's protests and his children's terror; Jewish man gets killed by righteous Christians, and his grateful nuclear family gets assimilated into the ranks of the true believers.
It's disturbing, to say the least.
Luther's treatment of the Jews [. . .] strikes me as being most similar to an abusive relationship. Like the husband/boyfriend who beats his partner, Luther cloyingly pleads that the Jews come into the Christian faith, that this time it is different, that this time, Things Have Changed. But then when the gentle pleading is rejected, the result is an explosion of violence and abuse that the abused party has nevertheless earned in the mind of the abuser for not having accepted his gentle entreaties.
In a way, such an analogy might in some ways encapsulate the relationship between Christendom and the Jews for a large part of the Middle Ages and Early Modern period--respectful treatment, entreaties to convert, and spasms of violence and abuse. What makes the gendered nature of the cycle more apparent is that outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence frequently saw the Jewish men killed, but the women and children converted and taken into the Christian fold.
Last January, when I did a presentation on Miri Rubin's Corpus Christi for my medieval devotional literature course, I noticed this trend myself. Jewish man profanes eucharist, in the face of his wife's protests and his children's terror; Jewish man gets killed by righteous Christians, and his grateful nuclear family gets assimilated into the ranks of the true believers.
It's disturbing, to say the least.
