epilogue 193

Epilogue

Herbert of Bosham composed his Psalterium cum commento at a time when Jews of his native country and country of exile experienced violence and expulsion. They had been expelled from the French royal domains since 1182, and would not be allowed to return until some seventeen years later. Riots in English towns in the wake of Richard I’s coronation and departure on Crusade in 1189, included attacks on Jewish neigbourhoods in London, Lincoln, Bury St Edmunds, King’s Lynn and Stamford. In the case of York, 1190 saw a massacre which seriously diminished the Jewish population. Tallages levied upon the English Jews had started to squeeze them finan- cially, and would further impoverish Jewish communities in the decades to come.1 It fell to William of Longchamp, bishop of Ely and then chancellor to Richard I, to administer justice to the culprits of the 1190 attacks. Having just entered de Longchamp’s patronage at that time it is inconceivable that Herbert was unaware of these events. Nevertheless, his views on the polit- ical and social status of his Jewish contemporaries remain obscure. Whilst his scholarly interactions with them have been proven to be real and appar- ently amicable, his sentiments about them as a people are more difficult to tease out of the text and do not seem to leave the theological realm. True to the Augustinian tradition he shows some commiseration with the Jews about their diaspora and expresses the hopeful confidence that they will be converted at the Time of Redemption. Yet his explicit condemnation of the pashtanim’s anti-messianism and, in his view, barren literalism as a deliberate attempt to distort scripture, reflects to some extent the intensi- fied polemical climate in Jewish-Christian intellectual relations at the time. Whether or not his general attitude towards contemporary Jews as human beings was aligned to his hermeneutical or teleological stance is never explicitly stated. What can be noted is an undercurrent of genuine respect for his Jewish sources and tolerance towards Jews in general.

1 Joe Hillaby, “Prelude and Postscript to the York Massacre: Attacks in East Anglia and Lincolnshire 1190”, in English Society and the Jews in the Middle Ages: the York massacre of 1190 in context, edited by Sarah Rees Jones et al. (Woodbridge, 2013); Dahan, Intellectuels chrétiens, 53-55; William Chester Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews: From Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians (Philadelphia, 1989), 30-37. 194 epilogue In the course of this book we have seen the emergence of a network linking the Psalterium with a staggering number of Jewish and Christian texts, some virtually unresearched, some very well-known indeed. Apart from we find, on the Christian side, many of the hebraized glosses of Theodulf’s recension of the Hebraica. This Carolingian recension circu- lated in Kent no later than the mid-tenth century and was copied into the Eadwine , which, produced at Christ Church, Canterbury, pre-dates the Psalterium by twenty to thirty years. Since Herbert visited the town in the early 1180s, it is not impossible that he consulted the Eadwine Psalter for his own scholarship on the . Sharing variant readings with the Hebraica of the Eadwine Psalter and the Psalterium, and indebted to the same hebraized Theodulfian recension, are at least four Hebrew-Latin glossed from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and Gregory of Huntingdon’s Hebrew-Latin-French dictionary, copied at Ramsey Abbey c. 1250-75. As well as using the Eadwine Psalter, Herbert may have had access to a glossed psalter of the same type as the Hebrew- still extant, and to an earlier version of the Ramsey dictionary. The discovery that this hebraized Theodulfian recension not just under- lies the Eadwine Psalter, but also influenced at least seven Christian Hebraist works of either English provenance (in the case of the Hebrew- Latin psalters and dictionary), or English authorship (in the case of the arrangement of the Magna Glosatura and the Psalterium), forces us to rethink the traditional view of Paris as the closest centre of Christian hebra- ist activity for scholars from the British Isles. Canterbury now comes to the fore as a possible seat of Hebrew scholarship, and its tradition may go back to late Anglo-Saxon times. Glosses feature heavily, too, among the Jewish sources Herbert consulted. He absorbed into the Psalterium several of Rashi’s le‘azim, as well as glosses also present in two thirteenth-century Hebrew-Hebraico-French glossaries, one of which, the so-called Leipzig Glossary, was probably produced in Rouen. While Paris seems the obvious place where Herbert would have familiarised himself with the works of Rashi and the Hebraico-French glossary tradition we have to consider the possibility that a twelfth-century version of the Leipzig Glossary, brought along by Norman Jews, could have been available to him in England. Herbert’s careful and selective adoption of glosses is but one illustration of his text-critical awarenenss, evident in the Psalterium’s discussions of majority and minority readings in the Latin recensions, and in the identi- fication of kethib qere in the Masoretic text.