Medieval Christian identity required Jews to be both absent and perpetually present

Evidence

The place of the Jews, in the end, is plural, both in terms of physical location and symbolic position. Physically, they belong nowhere, having “no proper land of their own,” as the author of Mandeville’s Travels puts it; yet they are found throughout Christendom, “in all lands.” They are even found, along with other ethnic and religious groups, in Jerusalem itself, but not because they belong there: their only home, such as it is, is in the prison of the northern mountains. Symbolically, the place of the Jew is in the past, providing a template for the foundation of Christian identity, a mold that, after use, must be broken. Simultaneously, however, the place of the Jew is perpetually in the present, whether in the reedification of Jerusalem by the Muslims or in the contemporary cities of western Europe. Jewish identity is thus at once tightly contained in a confined area (whether the besieged city or the enclosure within the mountains) and disseminated widely throughout time and space. This plural position generates the phenomenon of what Steven Kruger describes as the “spectral Jew,” a figure that haunts Christians: “the attempt to conjure Jews away also serves to conjure them up, into a certain presence.” Edward Said uses a similar metaphor when he characterizes the Arab as a kind of specter or “shadow that dogs the Jew.” In this hall of mirrors, it seems that identity is only provisional, and origins recede infinitely into the distance. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 304

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme in this volume of how Western self-definition requires an excluded yet constitutive other — parallels Said’s Orientalism and the logic of the ‘spectral’ other that must be suppressed and summoned at once.
• DEFINE: Introduces Kruger’s concept of the ‘spectral Jew’ — the attempt to expel Jews conjures them into presence — as a defined analytical term.