For Peter Haidu, Chrétien de Troyes’s Philomena “is demanding,” because it has immense “moral and philosophical implications” (109). It would be fair to describe Haidu’s final book, which Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner edited upon his passing, as difficult for similar reasons. It is difficult, at one level, because it makes us reckon with the horrific 1096 massacre of Jews in the Rhineland, the effects of which have not been taken on board by medievalists. It is difficult, too, because Haidu argues that the Old French adaptation of Ovid’s “Philomela” that is often attributed to Chrétien de Troyesis a complex meditation upon these events. It is no simple allegory but instead an intricate reflection on how universalism can emerge as a force of resistance to be mobilized by the dispossessed. The ambitious methodology of this volume--“a dialectical reading where philology, history, and theory meet” (8)--also makes things daunting. And finally, this book is difficult to respond to because at its heart lies what both author and editor freely acknowledge as a conjecture: that Chrétien de Troyes was “the son or grandson of forced converts from the ‘Holocaust of 1096’” (5). Here, the difficulty lies in grasping how this book sets out less to prove this conjecture than to show how it can foster valuable literary, ethical, and political work.

Bruckner’s “introduction” prepares the reader to engage with this original volume, by contextualizing Haidu’s project on multiple fronts. She explains how he situates Philomena in relation to Chrétien’s larger oeuvre. She also locates this project in relation to Haidu’s impressive academic career, stressing his persistent interest in “the link between rhetoric, aesthetic effect, and the political and historical dimensions of culture” (8). And in relation to Haidu’s personal history, too, as a child fleeing Nazi Europe without knowing he was Jewish--and later developing a particular understanding of Judaism and its relation to “standing up for what’s right” (6). Bruckner’s introduction prepares the reader, then, for an “approach...at once academic...and strongly emotional” (7). It also very usefully introduces the book’s complex take on, amongst other things, Jewish history and universalism.

Afterward, it’s Haidu’s show. The “Preface” spells out “the thesis of this book--or rather, its conjecture” about Chrétien’s identity as Jewish convert, which Haidu sees as behind the “attention to the claim of the dispossessed” everywhere in his oeuvre (19). It also previews what Haidu considers to be the tremendous--and tremendously overlooked--importance of the “Holocaust of 1096” for European history and culture more broadly. In the ensuing “Introduction,” Haidu goes into more detail about his conception of history, by thinking about its relation to potentiality. In his view, such paradigm-altering events as the antisemitic attacks of 1096 create all sorts of potentialities, which are actualized or non-actualized at later moments. In this zone, Haidu situates not only Chrétien de Troyes’s emergence several generations later but also both medieval “theories of anti-authoritarian self-determination” and more forms of modern “political experimentation” (26). In fact, as Haidu would have it, the long shadow of 1096 extends into the twentieth century and through the present day.

The core of the book is comprised of two parts. The first, “Identity and History,” is about Chrétien de Troyes and medieval Jewish history. Critics have long observed how we know nothing definitive about Chrétien: “what we think we know about him comes entirely from his works” (29). We are also not sure about the attribution of different texts to him, although the “Crestïens li gois” who claims, at the exact midpoint of Philomena, to have authored the tale may well be the famous author. Haidu proposes to resolve the enigma of what “li gois” means, which has long stumped scholars, by reading it as “the Goy.” This signature would then be playfully and seriously calling attention to the convert’s complex relation to his former religion; it is both logically redundant (Christians are goyim) and paradoxical, as it uses the Hebrew to assert that the convert is not Jewish, thus relying on what it purports to supersede. Haidu also considers how this signature raises issues about subjectivity and identity that resonate with the experiences of other twelfth-century Jewish converts, namely Hermann quondam Judeus (Judah renamed Hermann on conversion). He proposes, moreover, to imagine the experience of twelfth-century converts as the ugly underbelly of what is often referred to as the twelfth-century renaissance: a “twelfth-century à rebours” (43) in the wake of “the Holocaust of 1096.”

It is then time to confront this atrocity. Haidu initially looks to Albert of Aachen, a Christian writer who “recounts the massacres of Jews in the Rhineland of 1096 with a brevity that does not elude complexity and moral judgment” (45). Yet his principal focus is on the Hebrew Chronicles, which are “monuments of indomitable ideological resistance in the face of overwhelming, irrational hate and power” (45). These Chronicles tell, in particular, the story of Rachel of Mainz, who slaughtered her four children so that they would not be killed by Christian swords. For Haidu, Rachel “re-invented ideological warfare out of total weakness against absolute power” (53). Her actions were so powerful, and shocking, that later “Jews would argue passionately about her act” (53). Philomena is part of this debate. Yet, before turning to this text, Haidu concludes the first part by considering the use of the term “Holocaust” to describe these medieval horrors. By developing, and effectively inverting, Badiou’s notion of the Event, he argues that 1096 brought into existence something evil that it was impossible to foresee and then either to comprehend or to move past. It was traumatizing, but from this trauma would emerge spaces--such as that of Arthurian fiction--where the convert could explore both his identity and modes of resistance to authoritarianism and tyranny.

The second part, “Philomena and the Semiotics of Evil,” brings the huge issues discussed in the first section to bear on the adaptation of Ovid’s tale signed by “Crestïens li gois.” Haidu divides the twelfth-century text into three segments. The first goes from the opening through Philomena’s rape. Looking at the descriptions of “love” that occupy much of the initial sequences, Haidu argues that, far from being instances of “courtly love,” they demystify amor by (violently) reducing it to the carnal and the base. The point is, moreover, to show how “beauty, an unquestioned value, can inspire evil. It is that men, lusting for beauty, can lust for evil passionately, and fundamentally” (77). Haidu also stresses the political nature of this sequence; he suggests that Tereus’s comportment toward Philomena is a persistent meditation on tyranny (which Chrétien is of course not endorsing). This section’s connection to Judaism seems to be principally threefold. One, Haidu sees the stress on Philomena’s learning as reflective of how “intellectual women in Judaism were a source of pride and admiration in their community” (76). Two, there are parallels between Tereus’s tyranny and the persecution of Jews by Christians. For example, Tereus’s “passing attempt to get the victim to consent” is “not unlike a forced conversion to ‘being fucked’” (78). Three, this opening section initiates reflection on issues of cultural relativism. Is Tereus evil because he is a barbarian? No, responds Haidu, as the Old French text carefully dismantles any neat opposition between “us” and “them,” in a move replete with political (and ethical and philosophical) significance.

Haidu prepares discussion of the aftermath of Philomena’s rape by doing something he is known for: focusing on a minor detail, here the question of why, in the Old French but not the Latin, Tereus only removes half of Philomena’s tongue. This appears tied to Chrétien’s particular interest in her ensuing “resubjectification,” which “will entail an alliance with the two wordless weavers left as jailers, an alliance that transcends class difference. It entails the invention by Philomena of a new mode of semiosis for the speechless that is a model for the oppressed by radical dispossession” (96). It is in this section, therefore, that Haidu is interested in how “mutilation may be constitutive of subjectivity, a formative desubjectification” (98) that both resonates with the condition of the convert and has political ramifications beyond it. Here lurks, in fact, a truly revolutionary potential, into which Philomena taps.

Yet, in the final section--where, after Philomena escapes, she and her sister Procné murder the latter’s son, feeding him to his father Tereus--things go terribly wrong. This section is, of course, about revenge; yet Haidu understands it as more concerned with how, despite cultural relativism, some actions are always and universally wrong. Chrétien is saying “no” to Rachel of Mainz’s actions in a judgment that lacks the ambiguity and nuance so associated with his work. Philomena thus emerges as an extremely complex meditation on evil, difference (or alterity), and the universal. The initial section explores man’s capacity for evil and tyranny, his barbarity within. The second, how evil and trauma can pave the way for a solidarity among the dispossessed that transcends particular groups. And the third, how there is an absolute standard for what is just wrong, a universal justice beyond moral or cultural relativism.

It is therefore appropriate for Haidu to conclude by reflecting further on what he means by the universal. In the conclusion, he looks to French theory--Badiou, Balibar, Levinas, Sartre--to explain what, following Naomi Schor, he calls the “singular universal.” In a nutshell, it is the potential, embodied by Philomena, for an experience particular to an individual or group to allow it both to transcend the particular and to foster revolutionary forms of solidarity. This is the timeless and universal import of the work of “Crestïens li gois,” which is deeply rooted in his particular experience as convert several generations after the “Holocaust of 1096.”

If, in the prologue to Erec et Enide, Chrétien brags that his romance will live as long as Christianity does, Haidu therefore explores how Chrétien’s legacy is intimately bound up with Judaism. This is something that “Crestïens li gois” could have bragged about: if, like Philomena, the convert didn’t have to speak indirectly. It is something that Haidu could brag about. Indeed, it seems to me that this book succeeds, to a remarkable extent, insofar as the audacity, brilliance, and curiosity of the Old French adaptation of Ovid is matched by such audacity, brilliance, and curiosity on Haidu’s part. For Haidu, that is, the Old French Philomena

“is a radical re-appropriation of Ovidian narrative materials, in a new language, a new culture, a new history, and a new intellectual framework, and with radically different effects. It differences from Ovid are major, operating by addition, subtraction, and transformation.” (63)

One could say much the same thing about what Haidu’s volume’s does to the Old French Philomena.

This also, of course, introduces an issue: that of whether, as what is most interesting in Philomena is arguably what Chrétien does to Ovid’s text, what is interesting here is what Haidu does to Chrétien’s. This is unquestionably Haidu’s “singular” reading of Chrétien’s “singular universalism.” The volume can also seem sometimes to cloud the implications of this; for--if I am permitted an abusive comparison--it performs a gesture both defensive and offensive not entirely unlike that of Rachel of Mainz, insofar as repeatedly reminding us that it is based on conjecture takes away the critic’s prerogative to delve into the ramifications of staking an argument on such conjecture. The radicalness of Haidu’s proposal should also not detract from some issues. I would note, for instance, how the insistence that rape is political here seems to imply that it transcends the realm of gender politics, which is not how feminist theory generally understands the politics of rape. It is also a bit off-putting how emphasis on the “sorority” formed by Philomena and her jailors is not reflected in much of an alliance--or engagement--either with feminist theory or feminist criticism of Philomena. Yet, in a project so original and radical, the shortcomingsgo hand-in-hand with the strengths, which surely outweigh them. Yes, this book is conjectural, but this enables crucial literary and ethico-political work. Yes, Haidu’s emphasis on the “singular universal,” and his determination to situate it so squarely in the experience of Jewish converts, may risk glossing over the singularity of the experiences of other oppressed groups. But it is not only fair but also imperative to shine light on something particular that has been extremely, and extremely unjustly, overlooked: the experience of twelfth-century Jews converts, who were grappling with the horror of the Holocaust of 1096--and the enduring contributions they made to European culture.