The Accommodated Jew: English Antisemitism from Bede to Milton
The Accommodated Jew: English Antisemitism from Bede to Milton
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Abstract
England during the Middle Ages was at the forefront of European antisemitism. It was in medieval Norwich that the notorious “blood libel” was first introduced when a resident accused the city's Jewish leaders of abducting and ritually murdering a local boy. This book rethinks the complex and contradictory relation between England's rejection of “the Jew” and the centrality of Jews to classic English literature. Drawing on literary, historical, and cartographic texts, the book charts an entangled Jewish imaginative presence in English culture. It tracks how English writers from Bede to John Milton imagine Jews via buildings—tombs, latrines and especially houses—that support fantasies of exile. Epitomizing this trope is the blood libel and its implication that Jews cannot be accommodated in England because of the anti-Christian violence they allegedly perform in their homes. In the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, and Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, the Jewish house not only serves as a lethal trap but also as the site of an emerging bourgeoisie incompatible with Christian pieties. In the book's epilogue, the chapters advance the inquiry into Victorian England and the relationship between Charles Dickens (whose Fagin is the second most infamous Jew in English literature after Shylock) and the Jewish couple that purchased his London home, Tavistock House, showing how far relations between gentiles and Jews in England had (and had not) evolved.
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Front Matter
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Introduction
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1
Sepulchral Jews and Stony Christians: Supersession in Bede and Cynewulf
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2
Medieval Urban Noir: The Jewish House, the Christian Mob, and the City in Postconquest England
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3
The Minster and the Privy: Jews, Lending, and the Making of Christian Space in Chaucer’s England
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4
In the Shadow of Moyse’s Hall: Jews, the City, and Commerce in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament
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5
Failures of Fortification and the Counting Houses of The Jew of Malta
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6
Readmission and Displacement: Menasseh ben Israel, William Prynne, John Milton
- Coda
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End Matter
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