The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess

The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism

Adrienne Williams Boyarin, Ruth Mazo Karras

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780812252590, 9780812252590
• eBook ISBN: 9780812297508
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: European Medieval History

In the Plea Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, Trinity Term 1277, Adrienne Williams Boyarin finds the case of one Sampson son of Samuel, a Jew of Northampton, arrested for impersonating a Franciscan friar and preaching false Christianity. He was sentenced to walk for three days through the centers of London, Canterbury, Oxford, Lincoln, and Northampton carrying the entrails and flayed skin of a calf and exposing his naked, circumcised body to onlookers. Sampson's crime and sentence, Williams Boyarin argues, suggest that he made a convincing friar—when clothed. Indeed, many English texts of this era struggle with the similarities of Jews and Christians, but especially of Jewish and Christian women. Unlike men, Jewish women did not typically wear specific identifying clothing, nor were they represented as physiognomically distinct. Williams Boyarin observes that both before and after the periods in which art historians note a consistent visual repertoire of villainy and difference around Jewish men, English authors highlight and exploit Jewish women's indistinguishability from Christians. Exploring what she calls a "polemics of sameness, " she elucidates an essential part of the rhetoric employed by medieval anti-Jewish materials, which could assimilate the Jew into the Christian and, as a consequence, render the Jewess a dangerous but unseeable enemy or a sign of the always-convertible self. The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess considers realities and fantasies of indistinguishability. It focuses on how medieval Christians could identify with Jews and even think of themselves as Jewish—positively or negatively, historically or figurally. Williams Boyarin identifies and explores polemics of sameness through a broad range of theological, historical, and literary works from medieval England before turning more specifically to stereotypes of Jewish women and the ways in which rhetorical strategies that blur the line between "saming" and "othering" reveal gendered habits of representation.

PART I

THE POTENTIAL
OF SAMENESS

Mimicry is at once resemblance and menace.

—Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man”

HISTORIAE

The Friar and the Foundling

If one’s the type, all that’s needed is a little nerve.

—Nella Larsen, Passing

The Friar

For a long time I have been thinking about a Jewish man in medieval Northampton. His name was Sampson son of Samuel, and he was arrested, thirteen years before King Edward I’s expulsion of all Jews from England, for impersonating a Franciscan friar and preaching false Christianity. His case, recorded among the Memoranda for Trinity Term 1277 in the Plea Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, was set down in Latin by a Christian scribe. Little is known of the circumstances of the offense, nothing of the reasons for it. Sampson and his extraordinary con exist only in the legalistic narrative of an Anglo-Christian, state-sponsored economic apparatus. And what can this expose about a Jew? A man with the nerve to test the fragile boundaries of Jewish-Christian identity and speech, was Sampson a hero? An activist? A joker?

A unique penalty, emphatically supported by the king, was devised by the archbishop of Canterbury, at that time the Dominican Robert Kilwardby. Sampson was to walk naked through city streets with a flayed calf around his neck and the calf’s entrails in his hands. It is unlikely that this punishment was ever carried out—Sampson seems to have escaped, perhaps with the help of the Northampton sheriff—but the sentence is horrifying and inventive. It betrays a dialogue between medieval English Christians and Jews and permits us an astonishing view of Christian-Jewish identifications, assimilations, and anxieties over likeness. Sampson’s inhabiting of Christian clothing and speech was a transgression, and the prescribed punishment imagines correction for both Jewish and Christian observers. It does so not by reinstating a Jew/Christian dichotomy, but by reinterpreting the ability of the Jewish body to be seen and understood as Christian.

Here is part of Sampson’s case:¹

A certain Jew, Sampson son of Samuel, was seized and detained in prison at Northampton by the sheriff of Northampton…. And the sheriff sent word that he had seized Sampson son of Samuel because he assumed the habit of a Friar Minor, preaching certain things in contempt of the Christian faith and the aforesaid Order, of which he was recently convicted before the Archbishop of Canterbury, whereby it was adjudged as sentence that he should go naked for three days through the middle of five cities—namely London, Canterbury, Oxford, Lincoln, and Northampton—carrying in his hands the entrails of a certain calf and the calf flayed around his neck, which he [the sheriff], holding the same Jew in the castle until the king command something different on the matter, would not allow to be done without special order of the king, concerning which the archbishop wrote to the king.

And since this Sampson did not appear … nor was anything done after that, and also the presiding justices were made aware that the lord king through his writ under the Great Seal had ordered this sheriff that the aforementioned Jew should in the first place be made to undergo the previously noted punishment enjoined on him by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the sheriff was commanded to enforce the pending judgement in this matter according to the tenor of that order, such that the aforementioned Sampson should suffer the aforesaid punishment. In addition, because the same justices were made aware that the aforementioned Sampson was released from prison, even though the same sheriff previously indicated that he would not release him without special order of the king, likewise he was commanded that if this Jew should be absent he should attach the Jews Samuel and Isaac, who had previously mainperned the same Jew … so as to have their bodies present on the morrow of St James to stand to right and do for that Jew the penance enjoined on him.²

The contours of the event are clear enough from this summary of the case, but we can know nothing of the precise nature of what Sampson did beyond what the Exchequer scribe records. It is hard to tell if what he preached “in contemptum fidei christiane” (in contempt of the Christian faith) was satirical or blasphemous, or whether he actually made it difficult to distinguish Jew from Christian. Did Sampson go mendicant through city streets, costumed and undetected for some time? If his preaching had been openly blasphemous, the imposition of what is a relatively nonviolent punishment is hard to imagine. Around the same time, Northampton Jews were executed on coin-clipping charges and had been accused of the attempted murder of a Christian child; two years later, in 1279, the king would issue a proclamation warning Jews against blasphemy “under peril of life and limb,” and a Norwich Jew was burned at the stake for blasphemy.³ The punishment enjoined on Sampson is not of this sort. It is, rather, a grotesque performance of Jewish identity within Christian space. It expects a viewing audience, and it suggests that Sampson’s ruse was successful.

The punishment makes more sense if Sampson made a convincing friar. The requirement that he go naked, revealing his genitals and thus his circumcision, would have practical purpose in proving that he was Jewish, and it is tempting, then, to reason that the five cities named in the memorandum of his case correspond to cities in which he preached, where bodily demonstration of his Jewishness might matter most. The content of Jewish and Christian preaching may not be radically, or at all, different, and we need not imagine Sampson parading about cursing Christianity and Franciscans to conclude that he was speaking “in contemptum.” We might even consider Sampson’s religious cross-dressing as a complement to a moment in Judah HeHasid’s early thirteenth-century Sefer Hasidim, where the author advises that Jewish women disguise themselves as nuns to protect themselves while traveling.⁴ As Ivan Marcus notes, “The assumptions behind this prescription for ‘cross-dressing’ illuminate many aspects of intergroup relations”; it is evidence of “inward acculturation,” whereby “Jews who did not convert or flirt with converting retained a strong collective Jewish identity and sometimes expressed it by internalizing or transforming … Christian culture in polemical, parodic, or neutralized manners.”⁵ Sampson’s actions might be perceived as a challenge to the dominant culture in general and to mendicant orders and their attempts to convert Anglo-Jewish communities in particular—perhaps even one aimed at the archbishop of Canterbury himself.

Many have attributed a generalized increase in anti-Jewish sentiment in the second half of the thirteenth century to the rise of the mendicant orders and especially to Dominican and Franciscan preaching.⁶ By 1280, in line with Pope Nicholas III’s 1278 bull Vineam sorec, Edward I had charged his sheriffs and bailiffs with ensuring attendance of Jews at Dominican sermons, with the express purpose of converting them.⁷ This was probably not a new idea, and Kilwardby, once provincial prior of the Dominicans in England, would have been sympathetic to it. A Paris-educated grammarian and theologian, Kilwardby “favoured the conversion of Jews by theological argument and preaching.”⁸ On the one hand, he was apparently friendly with the prominent London rabbi Elijah Menahem, whom he found to be “of better disposition than any of the other Jews” (quem inter caeteros Judaeos melioris inveni voluntatis), and for whom he had interceded when secular officials denied the rabbi’s right to excommunicate a London Jew in 1275.⁹ On the other hand, Kilwardby worked closely with Robert Burnell, bishop of Bath and Wells and chancellor of England, a man involved in several cases of Jewish-Christian conversion in these decades,¹⁰ and the king had given him control of a case oddly similar to Sampson’s in 1275, when a Dominican friar and Hebraist called Robert of Reading had converted to Judaism and begun preaching “contra legem Christianam” (against Christian law).¹¹ With this context, we can surmise that Kilwardby was not a man prone to remarkably violent action but that he was, by predisposition or under the king’s orders, interested in such cases, and he may have found Sampson’s demonstration of the vulnerabilities of fraternal preaching particularly galling.

It is significant then that the Exchequer scribe describes the sentence against Sampson as a “penance enjoined on him” (penitenciam sibi iniunctam). The word penitencia, which in the full record is deployed twice to describe Kilwardby’s imposed punishment, suggests that the judgment could be understood as a performance of religious repentance and reconciliation, and there are several plausible religious allegorical readings of the naked Jew and the slain calf that might be applied to support such an understanding. For Christians, the most familiar scriptural description of a slain calf comes in the parable of the prodigal son, wherein the unworthy and absent son is welcomed home with the slain fatted calf (“vitulum saginatum”). The calf is mentioned three times in the parable, and the father, as is well known, insists that the calf is for the son who “was lost and is found” (Luke 15:24). The other easily recognizable biblical calf (“vitulum” in the Vulgate, as in the description of Sampson’s punishment) is the Golden Calf of Exodus 32. The vitulum in this instance is the sign of Israel’s inconstancy, and, mirroring Kilwardby’s punishment, Israel goes naked as evidence of its sin. In the Vulgate, the Hebrew paru’a (untamed, wild) is rendered nudatus (naked), and thus Moses’s imposition of violent punishment on Israel is preceded by his awareness that Israel is naked: “Moses saw that the people were naked [nudatus] … [Aaron] had set them naked among their enemies [inter hostes nudum constituerat]” (Exod. 32:25). The nudity here is both the proof and the shame of apostasy, the calf the material evidence of it. When Kilwardby decided he wanted to send Sampson of Northampton “inter hostes nudum,” carrying a calf, the connection cannot have been far from the theologian’s mind.

In light of the parable of the prodigal son and Kilwardby’s Dominican allegiances, however, display of a slain calf must also call up the eschatological hope—so near and dear to thirteenth-century mendicants’ hearts—that Jewish conversion was imminent. The “finding” of Sampson, the son turned from God, symbolic of Israel turned from God, allows the archbishop to display his Jewish body as both sinful and prodigal, and to enforce his return. The flayed and disemboweled calf, from this perspective, can also be linked to the vision of the new Temple in Ezekiel 43, wherein the shame of Israel is expiated first by a “calf that is offered for sin” (vitulum qui oblatus fuerit pro peccato), and perhaps more generally to the descriptions of animal offerings and their entrails in Leviticus 1–7. The flayed calf thus sets on Sampson’s shoulders both the old bloody sacrifice and the hope of atonement for Israel’s sins, among which are profanation and disbelief (Ezek. 43:8).¹² This is an extraordinary burden to place on the stripped body of one man among few in the then-dwindling Jewish community of Northampton, but it found support among most of the relevant officials and the king himself. Sheriffs were bound to protect “the king’s Jews” and ensure separation of ecclesiastical and civil authority—as it seems the Northampton sheriff attempted to do—but demonstration of Sampson’s penitencia evidently had utility to both church and state.¹³ Sampson transgressed in a way that achieved restricted power (the power to preach, to travel unmolested, to demand Christian hospitality), and the urgency was not to kill him but forcefully to resituate him within the majority Christian understanding.

At issue in Kilwardby’s imposition of a Jewish penitencia is the attempt to correct a problematic Jewish-Christian identification by creating a kind of Christian identification with the Jew that was acceptable. While the punishment would shame Sampson before other Jews and confirm his Jewishness for Christians through viewing of his circumcision, it also seeks to make of him a biblical Israelite and the always potentially Christian Jew of the New Testament. Sampson’s attempt to pass as Christian—whatever its tone—had troublingly reinforced mechanisms of assimilation and fear, and the punishment for it was not only about Sampson. As the Exchequer of the Jews memorandum makes clear, it could make its theological point and accomplish its civil goals even if forced on other Jewish men: if Sampson could not be found, the penance was to be performed by his two mainpernors.

It appears that all three men escaped. Gilbert de Kirkeby, the Northampton sheriff at that time, was amerced for lying about Sampson’s whereabouts and ultimately admitted that the Jewish friar and his mainpernors “non fuerunt inuenti in balliua sua” (were not found in his bailiwick) any longer.¹⁴ Gilbert had a history of protecting Jews from punishment and imprisonment, beyond the scope of his responsibility, either by conveniently losing or freeing those he was supposed to have imprisoned or by employing delay and confusion tactics like those he exhi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• A Note on the Text
• Introduction. Saming the Jew
• Part I. The Potential of Sameness
• Part II. The Unmarked Jewess
• Conclusion. Sameness and Sympathy
• Appendix 1. Sampson Son of Samuel of Northampton
• Appendix 2. Jurnepin/Odard of Norwich
• Appendix 3. Alice the Convert of Worcester
• Appendix 4. The Jewess and the Priest
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments