Miriamne Ara Krummel

‘Him Jesus, That Jew!’—Representing Jewishness in the York Plays

In the varied and, ultimately, postcolonial representation of Jewish figures, the York Plays experiment with representing Jews as artifactual remembrances for a community that has touched Jews whether through the body of their God or through the memory of former neighbors. The York plays, articulating a complex fantasy of presence and absence, attempt to right the imbalances of 1190 and 1290. Jews haunt Yorkist history. More precisely, the York Jews had become a perceptible presence in the years between their initial appearance on and near the York territory (in the 1170s) and the date of their expulsion from medieval England. Twelfth and thirteenth-century Jewish bodies lived and worshiped among the Christians of York. The distinctions between Christian and Jewish identities and bodies are complicated when members of the community perform convincingly as Jewish characters who are outed identified as Jewish, such as Moses and Jesus, by the plays themselves. Keywords: Christian; Jesus; Jews; medieval England; York plays

Bringing Meir b. Elijah of Norwich into the Classroom: Discovering a Medieval Minority Poet

This chapter contextualizes the literary gestures made by a medieval English Jewish poet, Meir b. Elijah of Norwich, within a historical and cultural backdrop. Considering the 1275 Statute of Jewry and two medieval manuscript doodles in concert with Meir of Norwich’s poetry, “Bringing Meir of Norwich into the English Classroom” discusses in what ways three of Meir of Norwich’s piyyutim or liturgical poems—namely, “Put a Curse on My Enemy,” “On the Termination of Shabbat‚” and “Who Is Like You?”—resonate with the desire to be re-membered despite the 1290 Expulsion of the Jews of England. These piyyutim memorialize the (Jewish) self in a world of anti-Semitism, where all Jews—male and female, young and old—are subject to severe taxation and humiliating badging.

Introduction: Jews in Medieval England— A Temporal and Pedagogical Vision

In English history, the dates of 1071, 1144, 1190, 1290, and 1659 relate a narrative of settlement, libel, massacre, expulsion, and return, while also bespeaking resettlement, trauma, exile, and anti-Jewishness. Jews in Medieval England: Teaching Representations of the Other, a multidisciplinary effort, provides instructors with strategies for educating students about a people who were held hostage to myths about their violent nature—particularly in reference to the centuries-old libel of “Christ killers.” In our most optimistic—some might say naive—moments, we teachers of the humanities believe we can change parochial and xenophobic mindsets by introducing and questioning inequality that has prevailed across millennia. This objective illuminates this volume, which offers a variety of pedagogical strategies for addressing the place of Jewish culture in medieval England.