Medieval Jews were imagined as belonging nowhere yet being everywhere

Evidence

In Mandeville’s Travels, the Jews inhabit a peculiar space in the world: they belong nowhere, yet are found everywhere. Their proper place is not Jerusalem and its environs, for the Holy Land is the rightful “heritage” (Prol.; 2.24, 29, 32) of Christians. If the Jews do have a proper place, it is in the confines of the northern mountains, the prison from which they will emerge only in the last days, with the advent of Antichrist. The Jews are simultaneously within Western Christendom, in the ghettoes or “jeweries” of the cities, and outside, banished to the remotest regions of the world map. The medieval prehistory of Orientalism is intertwined with the construction of Jewish identity, which functioned both as a typological prefiguration of Christian identity and as a template for other groups destined to be cut off from the body of the European, Christian community. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 301

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The doubled spatial logic — inside the cities yet banished to the world’s rim — is a dense analytical construction showing how a group is made simultaneously familiar and alien, a template for later Orientalist treatment of other groups.