How the West Became Antisemitic: Jews and the Formation of Europe, 800–1500, Ivan G. Marcus, Princeton University Press, £35

In 1258, Ranulph Higden tells us in his Polychronicon, a Jew in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, fell into his toilet. As it was a Saturday, the sabbath, he would not permit himself to be extracted. As though to parody Jewish obstinacy, Richard de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, did not allow him to be rescued the following day, out of reverence for his sabbath. ‘And so’, Higden tells us – one can almost hear him licking his lips – ‘the Jew died.’

At first glance this anecdote is a straightforward Christian morality tale about the Jews’ stubborn and wrongheaded adherence to the Old Law. But might it also be of some significance that the Jew in the story falls into the toilet? The connection between Jews and toilets in the medieval Christian imagination may seem like a bizarre subject; but it crops up so often in the primary sources that Ivan Marcus, in his recent book on medieval antisemitism, devotes an entire chapter to it.

Here is another example, also drawn from England prior to Edward I’s Edict of Expulsion in 1290. The chronicler Matthew Paris describes a Jew named Abraham, resident in Berkhamstead, putting an image of the Virgin Mary into his toilet; he ‘inflicted a filthy and unmentionable thing on it, daily and nightly, and ordered his wife to do the same’. Abraham’s wife is the heroine of the piece: ‘by reason of her sex, she felt sorry and, going there secretly, washed the dirt from the face of the disgracefully defiled statue’. Abraham caught her in the act and suffocated her: more for his indecent blasphemy than for his femicide, it seems, he ended up in the Tower.

Christians associated Jews with filth and faeces, and Jews returned the favour. Jews like Abraham of Berkhamstead, Marcus tells us, ‘viewed Christianity as a bodily elimination’, and deployed ‘latrine blasphemy’ as a ‘social polemic against the Incarnation’. Defecating on Christian symbols was a way for those Jews of a more polemical bent to voice their disdain towards elements of Christian theology. The notion that Jesus was God was most offensive to Jewish sensibilities, and this, too, sometimes for scatological reasons: Odo of Cambrai put into the mouth of a Jew, Leo, an objection to the Virgin Birth on the grounds that a true deity could not have been gestated ‘in his mother’s womb, surrounded by a vile fluid’.

Marcus is at pains to emphasise that Jews in medieval Europe were ‘assertive agents’. ‘Medieval European history’, he complains in his introduction, ‘is sometimes written as though the Jews of Christian Europe were living on the moon instead of in the small towns of northern France, England, and Germany.’ They were, to varying degrees, active participants in medieval European society, sometimes in a co-operative spirit, and other times less so. There can be few acts more boldly assertive (and less cooperative) than relieving oneself on an icon, a book of the Gospels, or the eucharist.

Here is a further example of Jewish assertiveness. Having written, for this publication, about the role of Charlemagne in the national mythologies of France and Germany, I was gratified to learn that the Jews were also tussling over the great emperor’s mantle. Rabbi Eleazar of Worms, who died around 1230, wrote in his Sefer ha-Roqeah that the Jewish community in Lucca had been relocated by Charlemagne, after his conquest of Lombardy, to Mainz. Charlemagne abounds in the medieval Jewish sources – much as he abounds in the French and German sources – as a kind of father of the nation. Indeed, when völkisch German writers in the early 20th century launched their assault on Charlemagne, one of the charges they laid at his feet was precisely that he had allowed and encouraged Jewish settlement on German land.

Marcus paints quite an upbeat picture of Jewish life in Europe prior to the First Crusade. For him, 1096 was the turning-point. En route to the Holy Land the Crusaders, whipped into religious fervour, sought to set their own house in order by massacring the substantial Jewish community in the Rhineland. A later Crusader, Peter the Venerable, put the case succinctly to Louis VII of France: ‘What good is it to pursue and persecute the enemies of the Christian faith in far and distant lands if the Jews, vile blasphemers and far worse than the Saracens not far away from us but right in our midst, blaspheme, abuse, and trample on Christ and the Christian sacraments so freely and insolently and with impunity?’ During the Rhineland massacres, some Jews killed their own children to prevent them from being slain or forcibly converted by Crusaders (Marcus vehemently rejects Israel Yuval’s contentious hypothesis that this was the origin of the blood libel). This was not, however, wholly a story of Christian versus Jew. Jewish communities were often protected by the local bishop or potentate, and there were critical voices from within the church about the behaviour of Crusaders. Albert of Aachen, one of the chroniclers of the First Crusade, wrote that the ‘hand of the Lord is believed to have been against the pilgrims’, the Crusaders, ‘who had sinned by excessive impurity and fornication, and who had slaughtered the exiled Jews through greed of money’.

There is a conventional narrative, propounded for example by Hannah Arendt, that medieval antisemitism, the sort that reared its head in the Rhineland massacres and beyond, was religious, whereas modern antisemitism is racial. The dichotomy may not be quite so stark. Marcus finds elements of racial antisemitism in the medieval sources. Jews were believed to possess certain physical characteristics. Jewish men, intriguingly, were thought of as naturally ugly; Jewish women, on the other hand, were generally seen as beautiful. Marcus argues that the fateful notion of Jewishness as an immutable condition, a notion which was to be fixed upon so calamitously by Hitler, had medieval origins. This, in a sense, makes the phenomenon of modern antisemitism more explicable for historians, by resolving its central conundrum. ‘Had Christian antisemitism been about Judaism, and not Jews’, as Marcus puts it in his conclusion, ‘modern secularisation might have ended it. Instead it got worse.’

All this supports Marcus’s broader argument that ‘antisemitism’, a 19th-century German coinage, may in fact be used in the medieval context. The idea of a shift from religious ‘anti-Judaism’ to a racial ‘antisemitism’ wrongly suggests a ‘complete discontinuity between premodern and modern Jew hatred’. The continuities can be overstated; clearly modern science transformed the ways in which Jews were conceptualised as a distinct group. The continuities that Marcus finds between medieval and modern antisemitism have more to do with ‘structure’ than ‘substance’, but this can be stretched too loosely to be of much assistance, and the actual substance of antisemitism over the centuries must surely count for something. Still, his central argument, that historians are justified to use ‘antisemitism’ in the medieval context, is convincing: and it appeals to my own prejudices in favour of ordinary language and against pedantic quibbling.

The book closes, as such books are wont to do, with some reflections on the present: one need not really know much about the Jews of medieval Europe to understand contemporary antisemitism, whether in its left-wing, right-wing, or Islamist costume. As a political intervention in response to the present moment – the book was surely written prior to 7 October – it is unsatisfying, but as a work of history it is highly clarifying.