Jewish Suffering in Medieval Christian Drama Caitlin Anne Hamilton Toronto, Ontario, Canada MTS, Wycliffe College, 2012 MPhil, University of Cambridge, 2010 BA, University of Toronto, 2009 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Virginia May, 2017 For Catherine Sider Hamilton —a great scholar, a brave soul, and the best of all possible mothers. TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION..............................................................................................................1 2. CHAPTER ONE..............................................................................................................14 Who Are Rachel’s Children? Exegesis, Identity, and Suffering in the Fleury Interfectio Puerorum 3. CHAPTER TWO.............................................................................................................63 Synagoga’s Veil: Signs and Sight in the Tegernsee Ludus de Antichristo 4. CHAPTER THREE.........................................................................................................100 Conversion as Suffering in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament and the Digby Conversion of Saint Paul 5. APPENDIX......................................................................................................................144 The Mass of St. Gregory with the Arma Christi WORKS CONSULTED..............................................................................................................146 1 INTRODUCTION Colijn der Coter, “Christ as the Man of Sorrows” c. 1500 At the climax of the York Crucifixion, the crucified Christ—who has been silent for so long that an audience may well have forgotten that he, too, is a character in this drama—is invited to speak: “Say sir, howe likis you nowe, / This werke that we haue wrought?” (249-250).1 To this mocking query, Jesus responds with a colloquial, Middle English verse translation of the Holy Saturday responsory O vos omnes (Beckwith, Signifying God 66): Al men that walkis by waye or strete, Takes tente yoe schalle no trauayle tyne. Byholdes myn heede, myn handis, and my feete, And fully feele nowe, or yoe fyne, Yf any mournyng may be meete, Or myscheue mesured vnto myne. (253-258) 1 This and all subsequent quotations from the York Crucifixion are from Beagle’s edition. 2 Jesus’ use of the O vos omnes establishes an unbridgeable distance between speaker and audience. His question is rhetorical: there is no one whose mourning is like his—not among the audience, safely enjoying a play, and certainly not among the soldiers who have made such rough work of his crucifixion. Jesus’ fundamental otherness asserts itself on every level, from his prolonged silences to his liturgical speech patterns to his stripped, bleeding body. In another Middle English drama, the Jew Jonathas who, along with an entourage of fellow Jews, has been torturing a contraband Host, finds that his hand has adhered to the holy wafer. His friends, who had been deriving a fiendish enjoyment from their violent pastime, soon find themselves working in earnest to remove the Host from Jonathas’ hand. As they do, the scene devolves into an impromptu crucifixion—with Jonathas in the place of Christ: JASDON. Here is an hamer and naylys thre, I s[e]ye; Lyffte vp hys armys, felawe, [o]n hey, Whyll I dryue þes nayles, I yow praye, With strong strokys fast. (508-511)2 When an image of the abused Christ at last appears from the oven into which the Host has been thrust, he has much the same thing to say as his York counterpart: “O mirabiles Judei, attendite et videte / Si est dolor sicut dolor meus” (717-718). Yet this time, Jesus’ rebuke is not directed at omnes but at the mirabiles Judei—and it is not entirely clear that his question is rhetorical. It would seem that Jonathas’ sorrow is like Jesus’. This juxtaposition of Christ and Jonathas, the latter bleeding from the stump where his hand used to be, prompts a line of inquiry that leads into the heart of medieval drama. Did medieval audiences see Christ in the figure of Jonathas? When confronted with a dramatic representation of Christ, did they ever see a Jew? This study will look at moments in medieval 2 This and all subsequent quotations from the Croxton Play of the Sacrament are from Davis’ edition. 3 plays that, I argue, invite such double sight, pushing back against the antisemitic norms of medieval culture—and, often, their own source material (as in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, a play based on the Host desecration libel). The catalysts for these moments of revelation are portrayals of Jewish suffering, which recall both a deep theological history and a contemporary medieval situation in which the persecution of Jews was an all too common phenomenon. In staging Jewish suffering, these plays confront their own shaping influences, laying bare the consequences of an antisemitic cultural ideology and revealing alternatives that were not chosen, but that might have been. The theological crossover between Christ and Jonathas can be traced to Jesus himself, who made a point of coding his suffering and death as paradigmatically Jewish. Matthew and Mark record the crucified Jesus crying out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (“Eloi Eloi lama sabachtani?”),3 a verse from Psalm 22—one that, devastating enough in its original context, is even starker in Matthew and Mark’s stripped-down quotation. At the moment of his death, Jesus situates himself within one of the darkest places in the Hebrew Scriptures, suggesting—as he had throughout his ministry—that these Scriptures refer to him, and especially to his Passion. Jesus makes this point more explicitly after his resurrection, on the road to Emmaus: “‘How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?’ And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself” (Luke 24:25-27). 3 This is Mark’s version, in Aramaic (Mark 15:34). Matthew keeps most of the Aramaic but replaces “Eloi” with the Hebrew “Eli” (Matt. 27:46) (Lenski 1117). Jesus would have spoken Aramaic; however, he would have heard and read the Tanakh in Hebrew. His use of Aramaic here (there are some grounds for believing that it is his use, as the evangelists record phrases in Aramaic only rarely) may reflect his personalizing of the psalm (my thanks to Catherine Sider Hamilton for this suggestion). 4 Later Christian theologians embraced the interconnectedness of Jesus’ suffering with those passages in the Hebrew Bible that seemed to predict it. The preeminent method of explaining these connections, however, gave a clear precedence to the man foretold over the tradition that foretold him. Within the typological schema of allegoresis, Christ did not so much echo the Hebrew Scriptures as fulfill them, such that (in spite of a supposed harmony between typological and literal interpretation) Jesus became the primary referent of certain key passages in what had become, for Christians, the “Old Testament.”4 So it was with Isaiah’s Man of Sorrows: He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. (Isa. 53:3) For medieval Christians this poem described the thorn-crowned Christ, who was so portrayed— blood streaming down his forehead and exposed chest, “like one from whom people hide their faces”—in much medieval art. Thus the Hebrew Scriptures helped to furnish the devotional imagination of medieval Christendom, while at the same time the “type” upon whom this imagination depended—Israel herself—was relegated to the shadowy sidelines of Christianity’s “literal” history. Not so for medieval Jews, for whom Isaiah’s Suffering Servant was not Jesus, but the people of Israel enduring captivity and oppression under the Gentiles. Rashi comments, “[s]o is the custom of this prophet: he mentions all Israel as one man, e.g., (44:2), ‘Fear not, My servant Jacob’; (44:1) ‘And now, hearken, Jacob, My servant.’ Here too (52:13), ‘Behold My servant 4 On the senses of scripture, see Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis. I discuss allegoresis at greater length in my first chapter. 5 shall prosper,’ he said concerning the house of Jacob” (Commentary on Isaiah 53:3). According to Jewish exegesis, Israel is united in affliction to the extent that it is as one man, whose suffering is redemptive; but that man is not Christ. Rather, it is Israel, who—in spite of the vanishing act of Christian typology—had not ceased to exist after Christ had allegedly made the “old” covenant obsolete. As the evangelists claimed of Jesus’ Passion, Israel’s suffering is here inextricably connected to its election and ultimate vindication by God: “Therefore, I will allot him a portion in public, and with the strong he shall share plunder, because he poured out his soul to death, and with transgressors he was counted; and he bore the sin of many, and interceded for the transgressors” (Isa. 53:12). The centrality of suffering to the Jewish covenant can be traced to Judaism’s foundational narratives. Esther Benbassa argues that in the Akedah, Abraham’s binding of his son Isaac, Scripture establishes a fundamental connection between suffering and election: Suffering…was at the foundations of Judaism, which concluded an alliance with God by consenting to a sacrifice: Abraham proved willing to sacrifice his son Isaac in an act of obedience to God. Thus a father suffered unjustly in order to submit to God… Indeed, acceptance of suffering here leads on to the enduring existence of the Jewish people and its election by God. (Suffering as Identity 3) The individual experience of suffering—that is, the suffering of the faithful Jewish person in relationship with God—is explored in various places in the Scriptures, particularly in Job and the Psalms, where the most anguished depths of doubt and despair find expression: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22).