Feeling Persecuted

Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages

Anthony Bale

• Verlag: Reaktion Books
• Jahr: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781780230016
• Thema: Historia
• Thema: Historia del mundo

In Feeling Persecuted, Anthony Bale explores the medieval Christian attitude toward Jews, which included a pervasive fear of persecution and an imagined fear of violence enacted against Christians. As a result, Christians retaliated with expulsions, riots, and murders that systematically denied Jews the right to religious freedom and peace. Through close readings of a wide range of sources, Bale exposes the perceived violence enacted by the Jews and how the images of this Christian suffering and persecution were central to medieval ideas of love, community, and home. The images and texts explored by Bale expose a surprising practice of recreational persecution and show that the violence perpetrated against medieval Jews was far from simple anti-Semitism and was in fact a complex part of medieval life and culture.

Bale's comprehensive look at medieval poetry, drama, visual culture, theology, and philosophy makes Feeling Persecuted an important read for anyone interested in the history of Christian-Jewish relations and the impact of this history on modern culture.

CHAPTER 1

‘He Who is in Pain is Alive’

How can we remember pain? What would an image of it be like? Augustine thought it absurd to assume that when we think about sadness or fear, we experience grief or terror. The problem is that if the image of pain is not painful, how can it resemble pain? It seems that Augustine did not have a good answer. He says that we remember the affections of the soul by having ‘notions’ of them.

––Simo Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy¹

An Art of Intimate Terror

A study of the Christian representation of Jews might fittingly open with a fairy-tale, a seemingly domestic but emphatically grisly fiction. The Grimm brothers’ ‘The Boy Who Had to Learn Fear’, written down in the early nineteenth century but based on medieval folktales, describes two sons. The elder son, though ‘smart and sensible’, is afraid: of dark places, of the graveyard, of night-time, of any ‘dismal’ place, which make him ‘shudder’.² The younger son, who is ‘stupid’, knows no fear and cannot shudder: ‘That, too, must be an art of which I understand nothing’. The younger son perceives his lack of shuddering fear to be a kind of knowledge he has not yet acquired. His brother’s maturity is marked by his performance of fear: once ‘fear’ is known and understood, it is no longer terrifying, but recreational and useful.

The boys’ father is concerned at his younger son’s lack of fear, convinced that he will never get on in life, so he commissions a sexton to teach the boy how to ‘shudder’ in fear. The sexton pretends to be a ghost, and meets the boy by night at the top of a belfry: the boy is unafraid and merely pushes the ‘ghost’ down the stairs. Disgraced, the boy is given fifty talers by his father and told to leave town: he goes on his way, exclaiming to himself ‘If I could but shudder! If I could but shudder!’ A passing man hears him saying this to himself and tells the boy to spend the night sitting by the gallows where seven corpses are hanging. But the hanged men cannot scare the boy; he merely feels cold, stokes his fire, and takes down the bodies because he pities them.

A passing waggoner tells the boy that whoever can free a haunted castle from evil spirits will marry the king’s daughter, ‘the most beautiful maiden the sun shone on’. So the boy goes to the haunted castle, where strange things happen: terrifying animals prowl about, a bed moves of its own accord, a hideous old man appears with bones and skulls (which the boy simply turns on his lathe and makes into skittles).

For the next few nights similar things happen, but the boy remains unafraid. When six men appear with a coffin containing the cold body of the boy’s dead cousin, the boy tries to revive the corpse, thinking to himself, ‘When two people lie in bed together, they warm each other’: he takes his dead cousin to bed, lies with him, soon the cousin revives, only to say ‘Now I will strangle you!’

After the third night, the king sees that the boy has survived and driven away the evil spirits, and gives him his daughter’s hand in marriage; thus the boy becomes king. The boy says ‘That is all very well . . . but still I do not know what it is to shudder!’

The wedding between the princess and the boy is celebrated, but the boy is still muttering to himself ‘If I could but shudder!’ The princess grows angry, and tells her waiting-maid to gather a bucket of fish:

At night when the young King was sleeping, his wife was to draw the clothes off him and empty the bucketful of cold water with the gudgeons in it over him, so that the little fishes would sprawl about him. Then he woke up and cried: ‘Oh what makes me shudder so? – what makes me shudder so, dear wife? Ah! now I know what it is to shudder!’

The boy has been taught how to shudder, in pleasurable fear, the art of fear: he’s not really afraid, but he can perform fearful shuddering correctly.

The Grimms’ story seems ripe for Freudian analysis, the setting in the haunted house the epitome of the unheimlich, the uncanny. The story gathers images of obviously psychosexual neuroses and desires: the rejection by the father, the homoerotic, incestuous and morbid encounter with the dead cousin, the crazy bed with a life of its own, the boy’s masturbatory nocturnal turning of his lathe, the fishy conjunction of sex and terror in the final scene of the wriggling gudgeons in the marital bed. Freudian horror is inherently sexual; Freud described emotions, like fear and terror, as a chain of repressions, displacements and negations, interrelating pleasure and pain. The Grimms’ story is exactly about what Freud called ‘that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar’.³

Such a Freudian reading, though illuminating, has its limits, and would certainly fail to do justice to the story’s complicated notion of edifying ‘fear’. This fear is socially and culturally determined; it is a key part of ‘becoming’ a civilized adult; fear has its own pleasures, fear itself being precious and wished for; acquiring fear is what makes the protagonist of the story heroic; and fear is itself a learned art, a performance of shuddering, to use the boy’s own terms, not the eruption of a thing repressed. Between learned fear and learned pleasure is an intimate and personally involved place, but it is also culturally constructed and socially contingent; the boy cannot perceive fear or terror, because these things do not inhere in, for instance, a black cat or an old castle – he must learn how to read with fear, to imagine terror, and to enjoy this painful kind of interpretation.

The thing that finally makes the boy shudder turns out to be a thinly veiled metaphor for sex, feminine intelligence and masculine vulnerability: the fishy slithering concocted by his wife and her maid, in bed, when he is naked. As he becomes king and becomes a man, the boy finally learns what it is to shudder. This is also a metaphor for pleasure, maturity and, finally, the intimately gratifying, sensual and aesthetic preciousness of being afraid. It is incorrect to see in this story a kind of subjection to fear and terror, of the subject’s disabling ‘passionate attachment’ to his own subordination to fear:⁴ through affect – by successfully linking ideas and cues to emotions and physical sensations – the boy performs recreational terror, and so fear can take its correct place in building character. The boy’s reaction to the fish in his bed is itself childish and playful, but in being taught how to ‘shudder’ he learns how to master his performance of fear, pain rethought as its aesthetic assumption.

The Gothic setting of the story also demonstrates how the nineteenth-century craze for the Gothic returned to medieval forms and images – the haunted castle being the most obvious metonym – helping us to step back from the modern understanding of fear and terror to begin a more meaningful analysis of the medieval resonance of persecution. Enlightenment thought perceives fear to be inimical to civilization and knowledge (liberty, reason, law, order); psychoanalysis views fear as a kind of anxiety which reflects some anomie or repressed experience. Michel Foucault’s influential theory of punishment and pain suggests that torture, ordeal and punishment are forced upon the individual’s body by institutions, to effect a depersonalizing conformity, in which pain destroys the individual.⁵ Likewise, René Girard’s theory of the relationship between terror and the sacred, whilst rightly stressing the importance of communal celebrations of past violence, supposes that the audience identifies with the perpetrator, not the victim, of such sacred violence.⁶ Elaine Scarry has influentially argued that pain effects the ‘unmaking’ of subjectivity, but, as Talal Asad argues against Scarry, ‘thinking about pain’ is not, in religious culture, ‘necessarily a private, thought-destroying event’.⁷

Medieval culture (like the nineteenth-century sublime and Gothic) valorized fear and pain. Consider the Platonic emphasis on ‘holy terror’ (theos phobos), a kind of awesome effect religious objects can have on us, or Augustine’s declaration that ‘he who is in pain is alive’, or the beautiful ode by Judah Halevi (d. c. 1141) on what it is to tremble ‘with holy fear’:

Can a body
be a room
to hold a heart
attached to eagle’s wings,
when a man
detests his life, only wants
to roll his cheeks
in the earth’s
best soil;
trembles with holy fear,
always weeping . . .⁸

Jewish and Christian selfhood starts with fear – with Adam declaring ‘I was afraid’ (Genesis 3:10) – and the first biblical stories give fear a key role in the acquisition of individual, social and divine knowledge (the words ‘fear’ and ‘afraid’ feature some thirty times in the book of Genesis alone); similarly, we might think of the much-repeated medieval liturgical motto taken from the Office of the Dead, ‘the terror of death upsets me’ (‘Timor mortis conturbat me’), or that ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ (Psalm 110:1), or the famous opening line of St Anselm’s first meditation: ‘I am afraid of my life’ (‘Terret me vita mea’).⁹ In the words of Richard of St Victor (d. 1173), ‘Great fear must be followed by pain’: ‘a prayer which comes out of a contrite and humiliated heart is more likely to be heard; humiliated by fear, broken by repentance.’¹⁰ For Tertullian (150–222 CE), a founding father of Latin Christianity, Christians are ‘a race of men ever ready for death’.¹¹ To act piously from fear is, according to the Talmud, almost as good as acting from love.¹² Edmund Burke’s description of the ‘delightful horror’, rousing us to ‘the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling’, strongly recalls medieval ideas of edifying fear.¹³ This is one of Søren Kierkegaard’s points in his discussion of the story of Abraham and Isaac; ‘only one who knows anguish finds rest’, and fear and terror help us to make our moral and ethical choices and so become moral citizens.¹⁴

Enlightenment thought holds ‘conduct’ to be separate from and valued more than ‘feeling’; but in the Middle Ages as in the Gothic fear and related extreme feelings were actively cultivated as part of a serious and sustained set of ideas about what it was to be an intellectual subject, to be moved ardently, properly and constructively, interlinking behaviour, emotion and morality. Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) makes very clear that an emotionally and aesthetically valuable kind of fear should not become an actual violence because, as with a phobia, by making a thing feared we make it precious and intimate and yet removed from ourselves. Horror is only ‘delightful’, to use Burke’s term, if it builds, rather than destroys, one’s character; likewise, Augustine and others proposed that fear and terror should be welcomed into one’s intellectual development but should also be mastered and controlled, to be turned to a constructive empathy and rhetorical force.¹⁵ Medieval clerical thinkers returned time and again to gaining the right kind of religious experience of imaginative persecution, arguing for the importance of humble fear in causing the soul to repent.¹⁶ Such recreational pious persecution is quite different to the socially destructive and personally catastrophic ‘sweet violence’ of the tragic.¹⁷

If we wish to uncover how medieval people thought, we must take seriously how they felt; for the very idea of knowing, reading, viewing or retaining something was considered an engagement of the physical senses and the emotions. This book explores the various imaginative ways in which persecution and pain were welcomed into the everyday worlds and cultural lives of medieval people; I explore how medieval people placed their most precious symbols and themselves in positions of persecution, subject to violence. I trace the rela tionship between feeling and persecution, from cognition to actualization: that is, from the intellectual processes associated with pain, terror, fear, to the performances and rituals in which these feelings were engendered and made material. My working definition of what it is to ‘feel persecuted’ follows Aristotle’s definition of fear as ‘a pain ful or troubled feeling caused by the impression of an imminent evil that causes destruction or pain’.¹⁸ This study considers culture, and cultural production, in terms of meaning, feeling, aesthetics, emotion and affect – which might apply to Jews and Christians equally. What follows is a discontinuous account of emotions, styles, fears and cultures, with material drawn from medieval English literary and visual sources, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Low Countries; I do not assume a homogenous ‘Christian’ or ‘Jewish’ experience of the Middle Ages. This study puts interdisciplinarity into practice, necessarily leading the scholar into unfamiliar and daunting places, aiming to explore the experience of medieval people whose lives and culture did not always know or respect disciplinary boundaries.

In contemporary culture, the ‘power of nightmares’ and paranoid fantasies animate our media with rolling news, loudly warning of imminent violence and chaos. We have our own characters and narratives – terrorist cells, apocalyptic global warming, AIDS, SARS, MRSA, swine flu – which teach us, in part, about Islam, weather-patterns and epidemics. But they also teach us about ourselves, about how we remember. We willingly subject ourselves to narratives of terror, religious fear and valorized images of suffering, of identity under attack; just such precious, even pleasurable, work was done by the medieval material considered in what follows.¹⁹

Ne Timueris: Devotional Violence

In the lovely pages of the early fourteenth-century Luttrell Psalter, one of the most richly illustrated books made in medieval England, is the injunction ne timueris: don’t be afraid.²⁰ Directly beneath these words is a vivid scene of torture (illus. 1). Two Jews, crudely profiled with misshapen faces, whip Christ, who is bound, nearly naked, to a column. This seems to be a paradigmatic example of medieval ‘anti-Semitism’: vulgar and pervasive, flagrantly untruthful and unfairly violent. Such artefacts from late medieval England offer a unique opportunity to think about the aesthetic rather than politico-social construction of Judaism, as England had no Jewish community between 1290 and c. 1650. Jews were comprehensively expelled from Englan...