Medieval English texts depicted Jewish bodies as ending in dismemberment and disintegration

Evidence

Yet while the city of Jerusalem can be rebuilt and reconstituted, the Jewish body is doomed to remain in a state of fragmentation, a symbol of the diasporic community sold into exile by the Romans. In the Siege of Jerusalem, Jewish bodies are repeatedly shown in the act of being torn to pieces: in the bodies that fly apart as they are struck by hurled stones (822–28), in the bodies of Jewish prisoners that are cut open by Christian soldiers eager to find the gold coins concealed in their “gottes” (1163), in the bodies of the Jewish priests flayed into “rede peces” (702). This is not only a fragmented community, but a community that is in the act of eating itself up, as is powerfully symbolized in the mother who eats the body of her child, ordering him to “turn around, and go back in where you came out” (1083–84). Steven Kruger has shown that several other late medieval English texts, including the Croxton Play of the Sacrament and Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale, depict Jewish bodies as ending, inevitably, in “dismemberment and disintegration.” Kruger argues that Jewish bodies are presented in this way in order to symbolize the fragmentation of the diasporic Jewish community, which functions as a mirror image of the Christian community whose integrity is reaffirmed daily in the sacrifice of the Mass. Christian wholeness, then, is necessarily built on the ground of Jewish fragmentation. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 292 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Medieval writers represented Jewish and Muslim bodies as jointly diseased and degenerate; Medieval English texts depicted Jewish bodies as fragmented to define Christian wholeness. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 292; Medieval Christian narrative required Jews both annihilated and preserved as authentic model — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 275 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Medieval English texts depicted Jewish bodies as fragmented to define Christian wholeness. #corroborates (0.93) — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 292