Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography - Hardcover

Lipton, Sara

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9780805079104: Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805079106 ISBN 13: 9780805079104

Publisher: Metropolitan Books, 2014

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In Dark Mirror, Sara Lipton offers a fascinating examination of the emergence of anti-Semitic iconography in the Middle Ages

The straggly beard, the hooked nose, the bag of coins, and gaudy apparel―the religious artists of medieval Christendom had no shortage of virulent symbols for identifying Jews. Yet, hateful as these depictions were, the story they tell is not as simple as it first appears.

Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, Lipton argues that these visual stereotypes were neither an inevitable outgrowth of Christian theology nor a simple reflection of medieval prejudices. Instead, she maps out the complex relationship between medieval Christians' religious ideas, social experience, and developing artistic practices that drove their depiction of Jews from benign, if exoticized, figures connoting ancient wisdom to increasingly vicious portrayals inspired by (and designed to provoke) fear and hostility.

At the heart of this lushly illustrated and meticulously researched work are questions that have occupied scholars for ages―why did Jews becomes such powerful and poisonous symbols in medieval art? Why were Jews associated with certain objects, symbols, actions, and deficiencies? And what were the effects of such portrayals―not only in medieval society, but throughout Western history? What we find is that the image of the Jew in medieval art was not a portrait of actual neighbors or even imagined others, but a cloudy glass into which Christendom gazed to find a distorted, phantasmagoric rendering of itself.

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About the Author:

Sara Lipton is an Associate Professor of History at SUNY Stony Brook and the author of Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralis�e, which won the Medieval Academy of America's John Nicholas Brown prize. The recipient of fellowships from the New York Public Library's Cullman Center and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Huffington Post.

CHAPTER ONE

MIRROR OF THE FATHERS

The Birth of a Jewish Iconography,
CA. 1015–1100

But man, proud man,

Drest in a little brief authority,

Most ignorant of what he’s most assured

—William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, act 2, scene 2

The world did not come to an end in the year 1000, as many clerics, if not huge masses of people, feared—or in some cases hoped.1 Instead, in the decades around the turn of the first millennium an apparently rejuvenated Western Christendom experienced an unprecedented economic, cultural, and religious awakening. The fruit of this medieval spring included the rebirth of a great empire (the now-Holy Roman Empire), the revival of large-scale stone building and a related explosion of artistic creativity, and the emergence of new devotional foci and more vision- and art-oriented modes of worship.2 These same years also saw the appearance of an entirely new figure in Christian art: the visually recognizable Jew. The simultaneous emergence of these historical and artistic changes is not coincidental. They are, rather, intimately related: the birth of new and increasingly image-based Christian practices led to the visual articulation of previously unillustrated abstract ideas about Jews. As Christians learned to give visible form to a range of themes associated with “that which is Christian,” they likewise began visually to mark “that which is not.”

1. A Jewish Hat?

When Christian artists finally began to single out Jews, they did so, somewhat anticlimactically, with a hat. As any handbook of medieval iconography will attest, and as any glance at an illuminated manuscript or stained glass window from the later twelfth or thirteenth century makes clear, Jews can be recognized in high medieval art by various versions of the pointed or peaked headgear known sometimes as the pileum cornutum (horned cap) or simply as the “Jewish hat.”3 This hat first appeared on the heads of painted Jews in the eleventh century and by about 1150 had become the sign par excellence of the Jew.4 [Fig. 1] What is less clear is why this came about. Why, after so many centuries of benign neglect, did artists suddenly begin to mark Jews in this way? Did Jews of the period change their dress, or did artists for some reason start paying novel attention to Jews’ clothing? Or was the pileum a purely artistic invention, an arbitrary identifying sign unrelated to actual practice? For that matter, why did Jews need to be identified at all? And most importantly, what did “Jewishness” mean when expressed through this symbol?

The issue may not immediately seem momentous. There is, after all, nothing remarkable about using a hat as an identifying mark. In a period when portraiture was not practiced and when most people were classified according to rank, office, or function, clothing—particularly headgear—was the single most common means by which figures were distinguished in art. Popes were depicted with tiaras, kings with crowns, soldiers with helmets: objects that, if not worn every day, nevertheless constituted essential and conspicuous elements of their “professional” attire.5 Why should we not see the “Jewish hat” as a straightforward corollary, a faithful representation of the garb adopted by the people of the Mosaic law in accordance with that law?6

One basic reason for looking more deeply into the sign is its sheer newness. Medieval artists tended to work from models and to replicate venerable traditions, none of which, before 1000, depicted Jews with hats. This is not to say that change never happened—indeed, the period we shall be examining was a time of markedly creative artistic change—but it does mean that each change represents a deliberate and potentially meaningful choice, which should be examined and understood. Moreover, even “straightforward” identifying marks still embody a point of view, convey a certain meaning. A king wasn’t painted wearing his crown simply because kings wore crowns—kings also wore gloves on cold days and hats or hoods in rainy weather, but we are rarely treated to pictures of them doing so. Rather, kings wore crowns on ritual occasions because they symbolized power and sovereignty, and images of crowned kings capture and fix those attributes.

The “Jewish hat” is just as ideological, and considerably more complicated, a sign. The first complication is that it is by no means certain that in the period and place where the iconography was developed—eleventh-century northwestern Europe—Jewish men regularly wore hats at all or regarded covering the head as a religious obligation. It is important at this point to consider the nature of early medieval Jewish life. There is a widespread tendency (evident especially though not exclusively in Hollywood productions) to picture medieval Franco-German Jewish communities as purer versions of the Polish shtetl or the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods of Brooklyn, teeming with black-hatted, heavy-coated scholars devoted night and day to intense study of the Talmud, splendidly isolated from and oblivious to the outside Christian world. This is a seriously inaccurate impression.7 Like their forebears, eleventh-century Jews strove daily to maintain their religious traditions and to observe Jewish law, but living in the Latin West posed unique challenges.8 Most Jewish communities in eleventh-century northern Europe were small and quite scattered. While one or two of the largest may have numbered as many as a thousand souls, the average size of a Jewish community was probably closer to one hundred, with the smallest consisting of just a handful of individuals.9 Some Jews were the only members of their faith in their village. Many communities worshipped in private houses, as they could not afford (or felt no need for) a separate synagogue building, and no community boasted a full-time rabbi or religious teacher.10 The great Jewish scholars of the period supplemented their incomes by working as merchants, vintners, or craftsmen; other Jews worked the land or possessed land worked by Christian peasants.11 Scholars of any kind were a minority; the average Jewish male adult was supposed to know some Hebrew, but actual command of the language varied widely, and we have several texts attesting that some Jewish men knew no Hebrew at all.12 Under such conditions Jews were of necessity economically and to a certain extent culturally and socially integrated into their Christian surroundings: they lived on the same streets and sometimes in the same buildings as Christians; they bought food and goods from, and sold them to, Christians; they entertained Christians at their tables and employed them in their homes; they attended Christian trade fairs, went on outings with Christian nobles, and (when it suited them) aired their grievances in Christian courts.13 Jewish mothers suckled their Gentile neighbors’ babies when their own failed fully to drain their breasts, and they called on the same pagan goddess to protect their children as did their Christian counterparts.14 The fact that, according to Rabbi Samson ben Abraham of Sens (d. ca. 1230), it was customary for young Jewish men to celebrate a friend’s wedding by conducting a rowdy joust on horseback shows vividly enough that even as late as the thirteenth century, when various restrictions had begun to socially distance Jews from Christians, we are dealing with a culture far from the shtetls of Poland.15

How did such communities approach the issue of covering the head? Jewish law and tradition are far less clear on the question than might be thought. The Hebrew scriptures say nothing about prescribed headgear for anyone other than the high priest and his sons, whose head coverings signified their priestly status.16 Although the Talmud praises men for covering their heads, especially during prayer, apparently even in Babylonian academic centers only married scholars of consequence habitually did so; in Palestine even pious scholars seem not to have covered their heads.17 If such vagueness and diversity of opinion prevailed among the Talmudic sages, one would hardly expect greater clarity or rigor from medieval authorities. And indeed, there was no consensus about the subject among medieval rabbis. In fact, they rarely discussed it—a strong signal that no great significance was invested in head coverings and also that no sharp change in practice was taking place. Most scholars apparently followed the Palestinian approach in not requiring that the head be covered during blessings, prayer, or study, much less during the course of daily business.18 Abraham ben Nathan of Lunel, a well-regarded rabbi from late-twelfth-century France, recorded that he prayed bareheaded, and there is no reason to think that this was a daring departure or that he was alone.19 Starting around the mid-thirteenth century, the wearing of hats did become more common among Jewish men (for reasons explored in chapter 4), but it was not until well after the end of the Middle Ages that covering the head both inside and outside the synagogue became standard practice for religious Jews.20

Finally, there is little reason to think that those eleventh-century Jews who did cover their heads—and some surely must have, whether out of piety, dignity, or simply to ward off the cold—would have sported pointed or otherwise distinctively “Jewish” hats. At various points in history Jews did seem to wear headgear not unlike the pileum cornutum: they are portrayed wearing pointed hats in Assyrian reliefs of the ninth century BCE (as are many other peoples) and probably wore the peaked Persian felt cap during their subjection to Persian rule.21 But they did so because Jews generally conformed outwardly to the society in which they lived; it would strain credulity to assume that such ancient garb was worn in an unbroken tradition during the intervening millennium and a half, in lands far from Persian dominions, and leaving no further trace in the visual or textual record. The unchanging nature of Jewish customs and observances is a common trope, positively asserted by many Jews and negatively by many non-Jews, but it is a completely unhistorical one. Talmudic discussions of head coverings mention not hats or caps but the sudra, a wrapped kerchief or turban common in Babylon, while Greek and Roman texts indicate that Hellenized Jews wore no distinctive costume.22 Jews in Muslim lands wore turbans identical to those of their Muslim neighbors.23

The few surviving early medieval references to Jewish clothing likewise suggest that Jews dressed no differently from their Gentile neighbors. The only aspect of their attire that attracted comment was the luxury displayed by wealthier Jews. Bishop Agobard of Lyons (d. 840), a notably dyspeptic cleric who bitterly resented the favor shown Jews by Carolingian rulers, complained about the ostentation of Jewish women’s dresses; to the bishop’s disgust, these dresses were gifts from the emperor’s female relatives and other palace noblewomen, and they presumably reflected the latest court fashions.24 Another ninth-century text, a biography of Pope Gregory the Great by John the Deacon, associates Jews with a certain kind of hat, but one made of fur, and it does so in the context of scolding a Christian bishop for wearing a fur hat in preference to more customary clerical headgear.25 In the tenth and eleventh centuries Jewish merchants are known to have traded in luxurious garments and textiles, including furs, gold-brocaded cloth, and silks, some of which were imported from Muslim lands; though the merchants and their families may well have worn such exotic clothing themselves, this would not have made them stand out in elite circles, as most of their customers were Christian noblemen and women.26 Contemporary descriptions of the Christian cleric Bodo, who converted to Judaism in the ninth century, note that upon his conversion he “allowed his hair and beard to grow long” and started to wear a sword but say nothing about covering his head, much less adopting any special kind of hat.27 In fact, the thrust of all accounts of Bodo’s conversion is to highlight not so much those changes that made him look more like a Jew but those that made him look less like a cleric. Conversely, when a certain (unnamed) Jew converted to Christianity in the early eleventh century, we are told that because he became a priest he shaved off his beard and “affected baldness on his head” (that is, adopted the clerical tonsure), but nothing is said of his abandoning any “Jewish” headgear.28 The famous French rabbi Rashi (d. 1105) mentions in passing that when a person is warm he takes off his kumta (cap) or sudra (turban), but, again, nothing in the comment suggests that these were widespread, peculiarly Jewish, or religiously meaningful fashion items.29 The earliest Jewish textual reference to Jewish headgear cited in the major modern study of Jewish costume dates to 1295; the earliest Christian reference is a 1267 ordinance from Breslau.30

In sum, we have no reason to think that in eleventh-century Europe the wearing of hats by Jews was either a new or a (newly noted) general custom, that covering the head was considered a central element of Jewish observance, or that those Jews who did wear hats wore characteristic or conspicuously pointed ones. The only evidence we really have for the wearing of pointed “Jewish hats” by medieval Jews prior to the thirteenth century is art.31 And it hardly seems satisfactory to answer the question posed by our images by citing the very images we are trying to explain.

2. The Sign of the Hat

If it has proven fruitless to look to actual sartorial practice to explain the emergence of the “Jewish hat” in eleventh-century art, this should not come as a surprise. Medieval images served many purposes: they glorified God, embodied sanctity, told tales, radiated authority, and inspired miracles, but they did not seek to document their surroundings.32 Even when images did reflect reality, it was because that particular reality was invested with special meaning, and its representation therefore expressed important religious or political ideas. And so we have come back to the questions I posed at the outset: Why did an identifying sign for Jews suddenly become necessary at the dawn of the high Middle Ages? And what was the sign of the pointed “Jewish hat” trying to say?33

For some time scholars believed they had an answer. In A History of Jewish Costume, Alfred Rubens claims that the very first appearance of the pointed “Jewish hat” in art was in the painted initials of the Stavelot Bible, a giant two-volume illustrated Bible made for the Abbey of Stavelot in the region known as Lotharingia, or Lorraine (now Belgium).34 [Fig. 2] This Bible is conveniently signed by its scribe, a rather charming monk called Goderanus, who is humble about his virtues but tangibly (and justifiably) proud of his handiwork. At the end of the Bible Goderanus tells us not only his name and his hopes and dreams for himself and his brother monks but also the year of the manuscript’s completion: “I, Goderanus, a sinner, and Brother Ernesto, my helper and comrade in that labor, commit this and a companion volume to the Abbey of Stavelot.… We have written both these volumes constantly and most diligently for almost four years.… And it is now the 1097th year of the Incarnation of the Lord … in the Fifth Indiction, with Emperor Henry IV ruling and as an army of Christians is violently driving against the pagans.”35 What a perfect context for the birth of anti-Jewish iconography: the Bible was made during the First Crusade in the very heartland of Godfrey of Bouillon, Duke of Lower Lorraine, first Latin...

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