Jewish texts themselves served Christians as testimony to Jewish destruction

Evidence

What does remain, however, is portable property: not just the treasures of gold coin, jewels, and silks carried away to Rome, but also the crowning glory of Jewish learning, for the poem notes in closing that “Josophus, the gentile clerke, ; a-jorneyd was to Rome: / Ther of this mater and mo ; he made fayr bokes” [Josephus, the noble cleric, journeyed to Rome, where he made great books about this topic and others] (1321–22). Here, Josephus’s Bellum Judaicum, the primary source for the alliterative poem, appears as part of the booty of Jerusalem, both priceless treasure and authenticating document. Josephus thus functions as a witness to the victory of the Roman Christians and the destruction of the Jews; he is what Ora Limor identifies as the “knowing Jew,” who “continually affirms, against his will, the truth of the Christian beliefs,” and thereby acts as “the constitutor of the Christian identity.” However, while Limor discusses the phenomenon of the “knowing Jew” in connection with Christian sacred spaces of the Holy Land, Josephus serves as authenticator not of a specific holy place, but precisely the absence of one. He testifies to the state of Jerusalem as a tabula rasa, a blank slate upon which the history of Christian Jerusalem can be inscribed. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 291

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces Ora Limor’s concept of the ‘knowing Jew’ who affirms Christian truth against his own will, and extends it to Josephus as authenticator of absence.