Marginalia -- The Journal of the Medieval Reading Group at Cambridge


Contents

Catherine S. Cox
The Judaic Other in Dante, the Gawain Poet and Chaucer
256 pages. University Press of Florida, 2005. £48.95 ($65.00)
ISBN: 0813028558

 
Sarah Beckwith recently included the following anecdote in her discussion of the York Mystery Cycle: “In 1190 the York Jews rushed to Clifford’s Tower, where, besieged by local people who were incited by Robert Malebrisse, they committed mass suicide. The next day besiegers gathered around the tower and persuaded those who had survived to come out under a promise of clemency – if they converted. It is thought that 150 were massacred on exit.”1 In her footnote, she cites R.B. Dobson, who reports that the York massacre is ‘virtually the only episode in the history of the medieval English Jewry to have been recorded in some detail by contemporary or near-contemporary Hebrew sources.’2

The absence of such sources renders medieval Judaism silent; yet in this silence, an experience can be articulated which too many scholars have hitherto neglected. Critical readings of medieval art and literature have long been informed by an understanding of Christianity and its centrality to life in Europe in the Middle Ages. In The Judaic Other, Catherine S. Cox argues that this Christianity must, in turn, be viewed in terms of its appropriation of the Hebrew scriptures.

Cox delineates the progress of this supersessionism from the relationship between Old and New Testaments through to the work of Dante, Chaucer and the Gawain-poet. She chooses these three authors because ‘each is a monumental, canonical figure in literary history, with particular significance for the later Middle Ages’ (p. 2). Cox’s reading is original and redresses the imbalance which has allowed the Christianity of these authors to remain largely unchallenged in terms of medieval Judaism. However, she does not fully account for the different extents to which these poets wrote Christian work. It would have been illuminating to discuss the qualitative difference in, for example, Cleanness and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and to pose the question of whether Canterbury Tales can be classified as a Christian poem simply by virtue of being composed in a Christian country.

Cox acknowledges that her analysis of the significant ‘absence of Jews in Dante’s otherworldly realms […] entails a measure of speculation’ (p.35). However, she points out that ‘the dialectics of absence and presence with regard to Jews and Judaism can contribute markedly to our appreciation of the intellectual and aesthetic achievement of Dante’s poem’ (p. 35). Particularly interesting is her suggestion that the Medusa sequence (Inferno 9) parallels the iconography of blindfolded Synagoga in this period: the Old Law has imperfect sight until Christian revelation occurs. Dante’s portrayal of a self-proclaimed hermaphrodite (Guido Guinizzelli, Purgatorio 26) leads Cox to her eponymous theory of the Judaic Other. As in her later chapter on Chaucer’s Pardoner, Cox suggests that the Other of heteronormativity can be grouped with anything that is measured against straight, masculine Christianity. Thus by virtue of the chronological accident of Virgil’s pre-Christianity, he is aligned with ‘the patristic hermeneutic Jew trope’ (p. 71). Furthermore, Cox asserts that Beatrice herself ‘serves as a trope of supersessionist authority’ (p. 62) since she cannot help but evoke Otherness. Her ‘gender ambiguity’ (p. 60), which places her outside the comfortable christological norms, provides added potency to the question of the laughing Jew. Cox concludes that with her words Beatrice hints to both the problems of supersessionism and the possibility of ‘an unsettling simultaneity of normative and Other’ (p. 74).

Occasionally Cox’s application of the term Judaic Other can seem stretched. Critics have long acknowledged the questions of sexuality raised by Chaucer’s portrayal of his Pardoner. I was not convinced that this, along with his citation of ‘thilke hooly Jew’, allows him to be classified as Judaic. There is, after all, a rich seam to be mined for Judaic criticism in Canterbury Tales: how do the Jews of the Prioress’ Tale relate to Cox’s theory? and how does the potential destabilisation of the tale’s message by the narrative framework affect our reading of this anti-Judaic material?

Cox reads Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as ‘a biblical paradigm of material and figurative exile’ (p. 78). At this point, it would perhaps have been useful to acknowledge that Gawain’s journey can also be read in terms of romance genre conventions. The specific figure, the Judaic Other, to whom Cox directly compares Gawain is Cain. This argument prompts the reader to revise the image of Cain as ‘the original evil murderer’ received through Christian tradition to become aware of the ‘penitential nuances of the original language’ (p. 78). Cox’s discussion of this point provides the reader with an extensive account of Jerome’s reception of the episode from Hebrew source texts into his Vulgate translation of the Bible. She suggests that the Latin text irons out ‘the ambiguous polysemy of the Hebrew’s interconnected semantic options’ (p. 80) and proposes that, in contrast, the ‘multifaceted and ambiguously penitent Cain’ present in the Hebrew is at the foundation of the Gawain-poet’s exploration of sin and repentance. The process of transmission have usefully been more clearly articulated here: Cox does not fully account for the poet’s direct access to the Hebrew tradition.

However, the chapter’s concluding treatment of the accounting between Gawain and the Green Knight at the chapel provides an apposite reminder that this episode fulfils the expectations of the talion.3 Just as Christian thought frequently misrepresents the concept of ‘eye for eye’ as brutal justice (as opposed to the mercy supposed to predominate in Christian law), the Green Knight’s original proposition is understood too literally in Arthur’s court, leading to a misplaced fear of vengeance which is dissipated when the true symbolic nature of talion is revealed: ‘no life is forfeited [at Arthur’s court so] no life is taken’ (p. 99); Gawain’s stroke requires only a stroke of the axe in return. Cox goes on to explain how the effects of the ‘gomen’ (the game that the Green Knight proposes in Camelot 272-74; 283-84), so carefully woven into this scene, similarly fit into the concept of talion.

In the epilogue to her book, Cox stresses the importance of her work to the world today. She cites the events of September 11th 2001 and the cinematic release of The Passion of the Christ as examples of manifestations of the ‘bigotry’ (p. 153) which can be dangerous if left unchallenged. The Jews of twelfth-century York may have suffered for want of a voice; scholars such as Catherine S. Cox are determined to find the message in their silence.
 

Linda Bates, U. of Cambridge

 

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NOTES


1.Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 16.

2.Richard B. Dobson, The Jews of Medieval York and the Massacre of March 1190 (Borthwick Institute of Historical Research: Borthwick Papers 45, 1974), p. 21.

3.lex taliionis, "law of retaliation", derived from Genesis 9.6: ‘quicumque effuderit humanum sanguinem fundetur sanguis illius ad imaginem quippe Dei factus est homo’ [‘Whosoever shall shed man's blood, his blood shall be shed: for man was made to the image of God’].




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