Telling Tales

After having written a whopping 13,000 words this week for my dissertation, I’ve decided to cheat on this week’s blog and just focus on what I’ve been writing academically.
     So my dissertation is about medieval anti-Semitism. The dictionary definition of this word simply says ‘hostility or prejudice towards Jews’. Everyone knows this term when used in the same sentence as ‘Hitler’ for example. After World War Two Christian historians tried to define anti-Semitism as a secular phenomenon that acted contrary to the faith. Thus anti-Semitism could be disapproved of, whilst anti-Judaism was theologically justified. Christians could believe that Jews were inferior because they did not believe in the divinity of Christ, because this was based upon the truth of Jewish practice. Anti-Semitism however was when Christians began to make stuff up about Jews that were not based upon actual Jewish behaviour. These have been rather snazzily termed ‘chimerical fantasies’. These fantasies included accusations of ritual murder, causing the plague by well-poisoning and attacking the Eucharist.
     Okay there are a bunch of different arguments for why anti-Semitism developed which I won’t bore you with. But the thing to take note is the almost general consensus that anti-Semitism actually originated in the eleventh or twelfth century, not the nineteenth century. My particular interest in this debate is trying to explain how anti-Semitism came about by looking at medieval Christian behaviour, rather than looking at Jewish practices. It was after all the Christians in the medieval west who created and told the various tales about ‘the Jews’. By telling fantastic tales about Jews medieval Christians were constructing their own identity as a unified faith.
     Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is one of those books that pretty much everyone had to study at some point during school. The chivalry of the Knight’s Tale is well known, as is the bawdy humour of the Miller’s Tale. But how about the lesser-known Prioress’ Tale? In the course of my research I found that this was a fictional version of some of the anti-Semitic tales that actually circulated in the Middle Ages. The Prioress’ Tale ends with “O Hugh of Lincoln, likewise murdered so / By cursed Jews, as notorious.” Hugh of Lincoln was a Christian child who was popularly believed to have been murdered by Jews in 1255. A hundred years later and this tale was still well known enough to be included by Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales…