Difference and Identity in Francia and Medieval France

Meredith Cohen, Justine Firnhaber-Baker, Meredith Cohen, Justine Firnhaber-Baker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754667575
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351944236
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Difference in medieval France was not solely a marker for social exclusion, provoking feelings of disgust and disaffection, but it could also create solidarity and sympathy among groups. Contributors to this volume address inclusion and exclusion from a variety of perspectives, ranging from ethnic and linguistic difference in Charlemagne's court, to lewd sculpture in Béarn, to prostitution and destitution in Paris. Arranged thematically, the sections progress from the discussion of tolerance and intolerance, through the clearly defined notion of foreignness, to the complex study of stranger identity in the medieval period. As a whole the volume presents a fresh, intriguing perspective on questions of exclusion and belonging in the medieval world.

Part I
Marginalization and Persecution

Chapter 1
Exclusion and the Yearning to Belong:
Evidence from the History of
Thirteenth-Century France

William Chester Jordan

Introduction

Exclusion and the yearning to belong—the phenomenon is well known. A state, a "folk," an ethnic group, and other smaller constellations of people often define themselves—perhaps, necessarily define themselves—in relation to other groups. To say that they define themselves in opposition to these other groups is probably a synonymous way of putting it, although the confrontational nuances of the word opposition may be too strong. For it evokes conflict and hostility, possibly mild, but often dangerous and physical. To define one's group affiliation, rather, in terms of its relationship, a neutral, not to say banal sounding word, to other groups carries much less baggage—or perhaps hides it better. The identity formation of two sororities at the same college makes the point nicely. They may deliberately differ in reputation (one more community-work oriented, the other more party-oriented; one Christian, the other secular; one noted for sports, like rowing, the other for non-athletic pursuits, like drama, and so on). None of these differences, relational and/or contrasting, is likely to have its consequence in violence.

This being said, it remains the case that the more interesting or, rather, the far more frequently studied aspect of identity formation is that rooted in psychologically and physically traumatic forms of exclusion. One can think of the posturing of cliques and gangs in high schools, the racial separations of the Old and Jim Crow south in the United States, the nationalist/patriotic exclusions that led to Japanese internment in the United States during World War II. and the racial purity movement that stimulated the segregation, expulsion and, ultimately, attempted extermination of the Jews of Germany and of Europe more widely in the Nazi era. It is recognized, nonetheless, that some of those excluded longed to be part either of the group that excluded them or of a new and more inclusively constituted group. Take the racial example in the United States. A few light-skinned blacks (Negroes by then current legal definitions) but with straight-ish hair and sharp facial features had the opportunity to and did "pass" into white southern society in the era of Jim Crow. They have tended to be blamed by self-identifying progressives for doing so. Other African-Americans, whether dark-skinned or light-skinned or having any number of somatic characteristics that might place them in one group (black) or the other (white), chose rather to articulate and work for a vision of a racially inclusive society. Still others, however, chose defiantly to articulate a cultural negritude or blackness in strident, sometimes violent opposition to whiteness. The phenomenon is known among sociologists as "double negation: the rejection of rejection, through the proud, self-conscious union of those who have been defined as belonging to an excluded group." (Orlando Patterson has tried to popularize the terminology in the serious press.¹) The catchphrases are still with us, though somewhat less frequently heard since the 1970s: black is beautiful, black power, Black Nationalism, afrocentrism.

Mutatis mutandis: these words could apply to Japanese-Americans in the 1940s. Some among those who did not share the somatic stereotype of Japaneseness (possibly because of exogamy) tried to pass out of or to repudiate those aspects of their selfhood that might otherwise have typed them as Japanese. Of course, they were criticized for it both by those who might have exercised the option but chose not to and by those obviously Japanese by language, accent or somatic characteristics who could not. At the other extreme were those who. to varying degrees, affirmed their Japaneseness, their difference—double negation—in response to the internment. In the middle were men and women who yearned for a new kind of polity and society that would both tolerate their difference and articulate a stronger and more expansive group identity as Americans. Fred Korematsu, who challenged the internment of the Japanese in the United States and whose case came before the United States Supreme Court during World War II, makes an interesting example of this last sort of person. His immigrant parents reported for internment in early 1942, but he was in love with an Italian-American woman and tried to avoid the camps. He went into hiding and had his eyes "fixed" to look less Japanese, but the latter only got him into trouble. The attempt, when he was discovered in May 1942, raised the possibility that he was trying to be inconspicuous for seditious reasons, for espionage perhaps. In any case, the Supreme Court ruled against him and in support of the legality of internment in May 1942 in a 6–3 decision. Forty-one years later he went back to court, decades after being released, and helped begin the legal process that culminated in the repudiation of the internment. Later, in 2004, he filed an amicus curiae brief protesting the internment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay without trial; it was as un-American in his view as his own and his parents' internment in the 1940s. Korematsu yearned to belong to a reconstituted polity that rose above racial and ethnic exclusion and, as his legal brief suggests, above exclusion based on unsubstantiated illegal actions against the state. He died in 2005 with (at this date) his hope still unfulfilled.²

The Middle Ages

The sentiment then, is a common one and also a common medieval one, this yearning to belong. It may be expressed in one's personal repudiation of the characteristics that the excluding group identifies as incompatible with its solidarity and purity. Or it may be expressed by affirming a higher solidarity (Korematsu's version of Americanism, in his case) which, if effective, overcomes the excluding group's moral and/or legal right to exclude. Modern societies, particularly those with strong traditions of civil society and their democratic sloganeering, have presumably seen far more of the latter than have premodern societies. But it was not entirely impossible for the most despised out-groups to appeal against their exclusion to a higher solidarity even in the Middle Ages. Jews in Languedoc, for example, argued through their legends that they were and ought to remain an integral part of society and not disadvantaged, say, with regard to property holding, because they had proved themselves loyal and valuable in war.

As the story went, Charlemagne would have been killed in battle against the Saracens in Narbonne, if Jews had not intervened for him. The grateful ruler gave them the property rights of Christians as a consequence. This was an etiological myth, as Aryeh Graboïs showed 40 years ago, intended to explain why southern French Jews had greater property rights than Jews in neighboring lands.³ But it was also a legend that could be trotted out when high medieval rulers—northerners—tried to take away those rights in the thirteenth century in the process of articulating and putting in place a new. more aggressive and more exclusive sense of Frenchness. In hindsight it may seem obvious that this Jewish effort was doomed from the start, and most Jews at the time, feeling the pressures of hatred and scorn, ultimately dug their heels in and reaffirmed their Jewishness in highly strident terms in their own discourse in the largely inaccessible language of Hebrew—inaccessible to Christians—even as they still yearned to belong. (The poetry and prose reflections they wrote as exiles after their periodic expulsions from France show this yearning very well, and they are the subject of a brilliant study by Professor Susan Einbinder.⁴) That southern French Jews' efforts in the Middle Ages to deflect exclusion by appeal to a higher form of unity failed, however, should not detract from their effort, anymore than Korematsu's initial failure takes away from the heroic nature of his.

Nevertheless, a common way that one sees this yearning to belong expressed in medieval records is by the repudiation of markers of an imputed selfhood. Almost always modern commentators, pretending, one could say, a moral superiority (fed by retrospection and the lack of experiencing exclusion) condemn this repudiation as cowardice. Yet, consider. Distant immigrants to the great towns of medieval northern Europe periodically suffered at the hands of the "native" majority (itself constituted mostly of more local immigrants), as a large number of historians have documented, including J.-C. Cassard, Sharon Farmer, Marjorie McIntosh, and Derek Pearsall.⁵ On the one hand, the rare member of the violently targeted group (say, a Fleming in London or a Breton in Paris) who could affect the language and style of the natives and then joined the natives in their violence in order to crystallize his or her own identity with the oppressors is an extreme case and deserving of condemnation, moralists in the Middle Ages and now might agree. On the other, most of those who tried to hide their foreignness or their difference did not become oppressors. They became quietists—fearful that they would be found out and injured or killed in the riots or police brutality that sometimes seared the towns. The same was both true and untrue for Jews: renunciation of Judaism (even the pro forma renunciation that created crypto-Jews) usually required baptism, public acknowledgement, to join—to fulfill the expressed and perhaps genuine yearning to belong to—the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I: MARGINALIZATION AND PERSECUTION
• PART II: FOREIGNERS AND OUTSIDERS
• PART III: STRANGERS AND NEIGHBORS
• Afterword
• Index