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Dante and the Jews

Jay Ruud

The first reaction of many to the title “Dante and the Jews” may well be an incredulous “Who and the what?” For truth be told, the fact is there simply are no post-biblical Jews in Dante. There are, to be sure, a fairly good number of Old Testament Jews, like Abraham and Sarah, Rachel and Joshua—enough, in fact, to fill half of the seating capacity of the Mystic Rose in the Empyrean ( 32. 22–24). In addition, there are a few New Testament Jews as well, but, with the exception of those who became Christians, these are only those absolutely necessary to tell the Christian story—Caiaphas and Judas in , John the Baptist in heaven. Beyond this, not a single individual post-biblical Jew appears in the Comedy. This is no doubt the reason why, in nearly seven centuries of commentary and scholarship dealing with the , there had been no assessments of Dante’s attitude toward Jews, or his treatment of Jews in his works. Quite recently, however, some critics have suggested that there may in fact be profound significance in Dante’s silence regarding the Jews. Sylvia Tomasch in 1998 and Catherine S. Cox in 2005 (apparently unaware of Tomasch’s previous article) have both considered the implications of the absence of Jewish figures in Dante, and both have regarded this absence in a highly negative light, interpreting a number of other aspects of the Comedy as oblique and disapproving references to Jews.1 While their arguments are intricate and carefully constructed, they seem to me to be ultimately contrived and I find them unconvincing. I intend to deal with these two arguments at more length below, but I think a better place to begin this study is with a summary of what Dante does have to say about Jews, both biblical and post-biblical. Dante, like most medieval Christians, distinguishes very clearly between Old Testament Jews and Jews born after the birth of Jesus. Old Testament

1 See Catherine S. Cox, The Judaic Other in Dante, the Gawain Poet, and Chaucer (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005) and Sylvia Tomasch, “Judecca, Dante’s Satan, and the -placed Jew,” in Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, ed. by Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 247–66. 148 jay ruud

Jews are for him the root and heirs of the promised salvation through Christ. Thus in he uses the story of Mordecai and Haman as an exemplum of the evils of wrath ( 17. 25–30) and that of Daniel as an exemplum of the virtue of temperance (Purgatorio 22. 146). He includes Joshua and Judas Maccabeus among the great warriors of in the Paradiso (18. 37–40), and names and Hezekiah among the just rulers in the brow of the eagle in Paradiso 20. 37–51. In the Empyrean heaven, as mentioned above, the Jews of the Old Testament make up half of the Mystic Rose—the collection of God’s saved. And their half is complete. While this may suggest that no more Jews are to be saved, it is important to remember that the Old Testament half of the Rose is com- posed of those who believed in the Christ to come. This does not preclude Jews making up part of the other half, but they would need to believe in the Christ who has come. Dante is also quite orthodox in using Old Testament Jews typologi- cally, again following conventional medieval interpretation. In Purgatorio 33. 1–3, where seven nymphs mourn the loss of the chariot representing the destruction of the Church by France’s King Philip IV, they mourn by chanting the words of Psalm 79, Deus venerunt gentes (“O God, the nations have come”), which is a lament for the Babylonian destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem—a conventional allegorical figure. Later, in Paradiso 23. 133–135, Dante praises the souls who have found rest in after shunning the treasures of Babylon, suggesting through conventional alle- gorical associations that the soul in this world is like the Old Testament exiles in Babylon awaiting their return to their true home. The Jews of the New Testament and later, however, do not fare so well in Dante’s text. Like most of his contemporaries, he blames Jesus’s death on the Jews: “ch’a Dio e a’ Giudei piacque una morte” (“God and the Jews [were] both pleased by this one death”)—i.e., the death of Jesus, Dante has Justinian say in Paradiso 7. 47.2 Caiaphas and Annas, who argued that Jesus must die for the sake of the Jewish nation, are the chief sinners of 23 (ll. 115–123), the circle of the hypocrites. And the Jews who mar- tyred Saint Stephen are presented as an evil example contrasting with the saint’s meekness in Purgatorio 15. 106–115. Most importantly, both in purgatory (21. 82–84) and Justinian in paradise (6. 91–93) consider the

2 Citations of Dante in my text are to Charles S. Singleton, trans., the Divine Comedy, 3 vols., Bolingen Series 80 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). The translations are from Mark Musa, ed. and trans. The Portable Dante (New York: Penguin, 1995).