INTRODUCTION Mitchell B. Merback I This Collection of Essays Takes Its

INTRODUCTION Mitchell B. Merback I This collection of essays takes its title from the yellow Star of David that Jews in Germany and in German-dominated territories were forced to wear during the Nazi era as a badge of infamy—a visual sign that worked as a quarantine for Jews and an ominous warning to non-Jews as well.1 In making the yellow badge compulsory the Nazis were reviving one of the notorious regulations of medieval Jewry law, rst decreed on November 11, 1215 by an illustrious assembly of 412 bishops, 800 abbotts and priors, numerous and sundry prelates and representatives of cathedral chapters, as well as deputies of virtually every prince in Christendom, convened inside the Church of San Giovanni Laterano in Rome. Canon 68 of this assembly, the Fourth Lateran Council, famously ordained that, “Jews and Saracens of both sexes in every Christian province and at all times shall be marked off in the eyes of the public from other peoples through the character of their dress.”2 Ostensibly 1 Citations for this essay are limited to what is necessary for documenting my own discussion and supplementing the sources provided by the contributors where I thought this necessary. Aside from those cited below, works that I found helpful in preparing this overview include: Amos Funkenstein, “Basic Types of Christian Anti- Jewish Polemics in the Later Middle Ages,” Viator 2 (1971): 373–82; Jeremy Cohen, “Scholarship and Intolerance in the Academy: The Study and Evaluation of Judaism in European Christendom,” and the comment by Gavin Langmuir, both in American Historical Review 91, no. 3 (1986): 592–613 and 614–24 respectively; David Berger, “From Crusades to Blood Libels to Expulsions: Some New Approaches to Medieval Antisemitism,” Second Annual Lecture of the Victor J. Selmanowitz Chair of Jewish History (New York: Touro College, Graduate School of Jewish Studies, 1997), 1–29; Johannes Heil, “‘Antijudaismus’ und ‘Antisemitismus’: Begriffe als Bedeutungsträger,” Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 6 (1997): 92–114; Zygmunt Baumann, “Allosemitism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern,” in Modernity, Culture and ‘the Jew’, ed. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marius (Stanford: University Press, 1998), 143–56; and Ivan G. Marcus, “Medieval Jewish Studies: Toward an Anthropological History of the Jews,” in The State of Jewish Studies, ed. Shaye J. D. Cohen and Edward L. Greenstein (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 113–27. 2 Guido Kisch, “The Yellow Badge in History,” Historia Judaica 19, no. 2 (October 1957): 89–146, at 102; and Shlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews: History MERBACK_f2_1-29.indd 1 10/24/2007 5:51:35 PM 2 mitchell b. merback adopted to prevent sexual promiscuity across religious boundaries, the measure went much further, as popes long after Innocent III’s reign continued to request its enforcement by Christian rulers. Its effects are captured in the phrase in the eyes of the public, which made clear the badge’s double function in medieval society. For Jews it meant restric- tion and repression, a visual token of their reprobate status within the Christian world order, a humiliation writ large across the body of every living member of the community. For Christians, especially those who might waver in their faith, potentially “backsliding” toward Judaism, or consort too brazenly with their Jewish neighbors, the badge was a warning and a reproach, a glimpse of their own potential misfortune outside the saving benefactions of the Roman Church. One may also take this phrase, in the eyes of the public, as a modern academic allegory. It evokes a peculiar disciplinary stance on the ques- tion of how the visual arts registered anti-Jewish perceptions, attitudes, ideas and doctrines during the long era stretching from the Middle Ages to the Emancipation of European Jewry (the period covered by the present volume). For just as the implementation of the badge after Fourth Lateran allowed for a more precise social labelling and tracking of Jews within a society already organized hierarchically, the special recognition given by art historians to those forms of pictorial labelling that rst emerged in the High Middle Ages—not only the circular badge but the conical hat, the hooked nose and bulbous eyes, pseudo- Hebrew letters, Mosaic Tablets, and so on—offered an earlier generation of scholars the promise of being able to track Jews, Judaism, and the image of “the Jew” through every relevant pathway of Christian art. In both instances, medieval and modern, “the Jew” becomes a special object of the gaze, the negative centerpiece of an entire regime of representation, the very image of alterity, or “Otherness.” There is no need to wonder at the initial timing of the scholarly discovery of Christian art’s stereotyped image of “the Jew” and Juda- ism. In 1942 Joseph Reider completed a short pioneering study of Jews in medieval art. With sharp rhetoric and a sense of moral indignation that seems restrained given the historical emergency swirling around, Reider opened his short survey with these words: (Toronto: Ponti cal Institute of Medieval Studies, 1991), 135–37. Still useful is Joseph Jacobs, “Badge,” in The Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 2 (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1902), 425–27. MERBACK_f2_1-29.indd 2 10/24/2007 5:51:35 PM.

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