A medieval English poem used imagined Jews to define Christian community

Evidence

The Siege of Jerusalem, which was written in a northern dialect of Middle English in the last decade of the fourteenth century, has memorably been called by Ralph Hanna the “chocolate-covered tarantula” of its genre. It is a horrific poem, full of bodily mutilations and wholesale slaughter carried out in the name of God; at the same time, the Siege contains many passages notable for their poetic beauty, including some of the most horrific scenes of carnage. Recent readers of the poem have tended to take one of two positions regarding the depiction of Jews in the poem. Some, recognizing the very evident resemblance of the Siege of Jerusalem to contemporary chansons de geste and Crusade romances, suggest that the Jews of the poem are to be equated with Muslims, and that the poem as a whole functions as Crusade propaganda. Others argue that to interpret the Jews simply as coded terms for Muslims is to fail to do justice to the depiction of Jews in the poem: in spite of the fact that Jews had been expelled from England in 1290, and therefore that the poem’s writer and its readers were unlikely to have met any living Jewish people, the virtual presence of Jews must be recognized. The romance’s treatment of Jewish bodies, ranging from the horrific cannibalism practiced by the besieged Jews to the complete immolation of the Jewish priests at the hands of the Romans, offers insight into how medieval Christians used Jewish identity in order to define the borders of the Christian community. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 236

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘virtual presence of Jews’ in a community that had expelled them 100 years earlier parallels the concept of Islamophobia operating on a virtual/reified Islam that need not match real Muslims.
• CANDY: A fourteenth-century English poem that features cannibalistic besieged Jews and is nicknamed the ‘chocolate-covered tarantula’ of the genre is a genuinely fun, tweetable literary oddity.
• SEED: Article angle: how a community expels a people and then builds its entire self-understanding on the imagined version of them — the template functions in multiple 18-19th century cultural settings (cf. how Americans imagined Indians post-removal).