“The three-part structure of antisemitism [presented in the previous pages]

…accounts for contemporary antisemitism: Inverted hierarchy (Jews

refusing servility), the Jew perceived as inner enemy, and the Christian

belief that male (sic!) Jews were unable to convert. This structure...is

about Jews, not Judaism” (198).

Thus, Ivan Marcus climaxes his interpretation of antisemitism as a continuity, if an evolved one, in How the West Became Antisemitic. He sets out this structure at the end of the Introduction (19). However, in the intervening 170 pages, only short reassertions remind the reader where the book intends to go. Marcus concentrates on presenting materials that, in his mind, make the case. These materials, as in the book’s title, span the years 800-1500, although with introductory space given to the writings of Paul and Augustine. From there, he touches on early medieval settlements, the Crusades, and the age of libels and papal decrees, ending with a discussion of Jews in post-Expulsion literature, then swiftly recaps his arguments as presented above. This includes an examination of the use of the term “anti-Judaism” as opposed to “anti-Semitism.” The passage “From Medieval to Modern Antisemitisms” is compressed into three pages (196-199). The bibliography is enormous, taking 100 pages. Most of it, however, is there for further research (this is not mentioned); the 50 pages of notes rely mostly on well-known authors and essays.

The discussions in the book’s nine chapters offer little new information. The comparison of Jewish and Christian chroniclers on the First Crusade massacres of 1096 has been a staple of past discussions, for example, those by Robert Chazan and Jonathan Riley-Smith. Even the tantalizingly titled “Latrine Blasphemy” brings known materials, as does, too, the lengthy discussion of pejorative terms for Christianity and its symbols. The examples drawn from Sefer Hasidim, Marcus’s special realm of expertise, are new, as is the commendable synthesis of materials on Jewish physical characteristics. Of special note is his riveting interpretation of the confrontation of Rabbenu Tam with Crusaders as an inverted passion, although he then reads the chronicled report as representing a doubtful, or at least exaggerated, reality. At the same time, the sometimes meandering structure of the book, dwelling at length on origin stories, or overloading the reader with examples of Sefer Hasidim’s antagonism, however new they are, obscures its main thrust, which is to present a new thesis--and synthesis--of forces that created medieval antisemitism and have continued linearly into the modern word, indeed, allowing historians to eschew distinctions between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism.

I personally agree with this linearity. At the same time, it must be appreciated that this book, at least as I read it, is directed toward a general, not a scholarly audience. The former will moderately profit. Specialists less so. Marcus’s awareness of the Christian Middle Ages and Christian theology on Jews is thin. It is, for example, highly exaggerated to speak of “Paul’s insistence on Jewish servitude (in a real sense) to those who accept Christ” (7); Paul’s embryonic Christian theology has been conflated with later political programs, and, similarly, the Paul of Romans must be distinguished, as it is not here, from the Paul of Galatians and Corinthians. Likewise, as with so many others who study the medieval history of the Jews, the grasp of canon and Roman law is mostly non-existent. Marcus ignores centuries of legal thought and determinations to characterize the course of events by saying: “Jewish actions rubbed Christian authorities the wrong way, making them more resentful and antisemitic” (13). This matches: “These verbal and especially physical acts of physical assertiveness [suggesting that beyond polemically, Jews were actually doing that which was imputed them, including surreptitiously blaspheming images, which is asserted with no proof] prompted popes to rail against the Jews’ refusal to remain subordinate” (52). [1]

The book lacks precision: to wit, that: “One goal (of the later eleventh century Gregorian Reform) was to affirm ecclesiastical superiority over Christian kings by insisting that only the pope should be the ‘head’ of the Christian social ‘body.’ Right order [Tellenbach’s nearly century-old term, now superseded] also meant not allowing Jews to have power over Christians” (14). Papal superiority over kings, beyond the drive to control episcopal investiture, fits the thirteenth century, not the eleventh. More to the point, by that time, limiting Jewish power had been law for over 800 years, enunciated in canon after canon. To say that Gregory VII “advanced the idea already prominent in the Christian Roman Theodosian Code of 438, that the Jews needed to be politically subordinate” (45) vastly understates the point. Indeed, Gregory VII’s (cited) sole surviving letter concerning Jews, which berates their holding public office, was old hat. [2] As for Gregory VII himself, far more than an “early reform pope,” he was the anchor of a conceptual, structural revolution.

The book is written from what must be called a fatally Jewish viewpoint. And there is a tendency, as said, to take chronicles at face value; comparing Jewish and Christian texts on the same subject that seem to corroborate each other does not mean we may tease out “what really happened.” Disregarding this caveat, the Blois events of 1171, including the letters attached to the story of a ritual murder libel, are retold as the chronicles report them, with no reference to a recent analysis of these letters as satire. [3] Einbinder’s discussion of Pucellina as a lender, not a lover, as has been the norm, is also ignored. [4] Equally simplifying is to say: “The removal of Jewish communities from Christian states, an example of European medieval group exclusion [whatever this means], was the result of efforts to protect an ideal Christian society from perceived harmful Jewish influences” (177). Such a statement might--might--apply to the Church, which did not expel Jews; the motives of Kings, the direct agents of expulsion, were far more complicated. In the event, royal and ecclesiastical policies are blended as though the two were seamlessly intertwined, which they were not.

There are difficult assertions: for one, that the Kalonimides went back and forth from Lucca to Mainz (35), which should anticipate discussing them as merchants. The about 700-mile journey, all overland, including two major mountain passes--the sea was full of pirates--was not the kind of travel that one undertook more than once in a lifetime without commercial incentive. [5] No less puzzling is the statement that the Jews who left England for Normandy, in 1290, continued to use a Norman dialect, as though the well-preserved English Parliamentary records throughout the fourteenth century were kept in anything other than this tongue. Finally, the erroneous statement that: “as usury became the opposite of the growing ideal [emphasis added] of apostolic poverty, the definition of the Jews as the dangerous enemy within expanded once again” (177). Apostolic poverty (the term appears twice more) was not a growing ideal. It was the teaching of the radical Spiritual Franciscans saying that the Order could own nothing, which brought about an earthquake in papal mendicant relations and was declared heretical by Pope John XXII, in 1322. The popes, furthermore, limited, but never outlawed, Jews taking interest--until 1682; outlawry was the province of kings.

Let me now turn to major issues.

I begin with the discussion of terms. I myself am on record decrying as a matter of principle the use of either anti-Judaism or anti-Semitism. Resort to these terms, as Marcus reveals with his arabesque attempt in chapter 9 to sort out their various interpretations--he does not challenge these terms’ actual use--leads nowhere, except, as I have argued, to ending investigation before it begins by invoking a deus ex machina solution, i.e., “the action was anti-Jewish,” without further explanation. It is no less perilous to couch medieval Christian motivations in modern categories like “inverted hierarchy” or “enemy within,” or to exchange the precise societas fidei with the nebulous “right order,” as is done here. Medievals spoke of protecting favor and quashing odium; the latter meaning not “hatred,” as the term is regularly translated, but that which denigrates the Church and the faith, whose essence is found infavor, a term and concept that go back to the early Middle Ages. [6] And what must be favored is the sanctity and, more, the unity and purity of the Christian body, as called by St. Paul, unis panis, multi sumus.The Church was bound to yoke itself to the defence of favor and the defeat of odium, whether in its own body, the State, the broader society, or all of these at once. Admittedly, this approach turns the Christian polity into a reactive, defensive entity, including when it turns on Jews. Yet it is only by examining events from this perspective that one can research accurately what happened. Likewise, the Christian body must be perceived not alone as a unified whole, but also--and interchangeably--as embodied by, and in, the individual believer, most exemplarily in the libel of the Good Werner (1244), whom the Jews are said to kill in order to disgorge a recently ingested host, but who is also said to represent Christ, indeed, to take the place of Christ. [7]

Anxiety about a Jewish assault on the societas fidei--Marcus’s “right order”--does not, moreover, begin with the Crusades, as he says when presenting his concept of an “internal enemy.” Nor is it limited to outrageous charges of murder or desecration. Rather, one sees it in embryo in Augustine’s view of the carnal Jew (odium) as opposed to the spiritual Christian (favor). Augustine’s citation of Psalm 59, so readily pounced upon by modern historians, was not reprised in full before Innocent III, who, in the event, cited it only as a proof text. Augustine also referred to the Jews as capsarii, the older slave carrying the young master’s books. But he did not mean Jews were literally slaves. Nor, as said, did St. Paul, whose vision of the “elder serving younger” was made concrete, as Capucine Nemo-Pekelmanhas demonstrated, by those third and fourth century bishops who induced Roman emperors legislatively to forbid Jews to hold public office, first in the Theodosian and then, the Justinianic Code. [8] That prohibition, reiterated (as mentioned above) by Gregory VII, resonates explicitly through endless medieval commentators; and it was still being echoed by the tolerant William Penn, in 1682, who insisted that only the faithful of Christ might exercise political power. That which, far greater than an “idea” (45), had become a fundamental principle, may, even today, be the unknowing source of denying Jews a state of their own, regardless of the circumstances. [9] Indeed, the cancellation of this prohibition--alongside the Jews’ acquisition of full equality in the non-confessional state initiated by Napoleon’s 1804 Code Civil--may have led many to sense that the new civic body was being corrupted by what they deemed Jewish pseudo-assimilation followed by the assumption of civil power. This was much as earlier generations had feared corruption from those forcibly converted in 1096, 1391, 1492, and, especially, 1497, when even legal luminaries like Philip Decius said the conversions were voidable, because they were false and illegal, stimulating betrayal on the part of the victimized.

But nobody was listening, and, however created, these “false” converts were cast in the mold of the second-century Cyprian’s lapsi, priests who had first officiated at pagan altars then to return and offer the Eucharist, corrupting the sacrament, as well as those who received the Host at their hands; the ninth century Council of Meaux prohibited anyone dining with Jews, let alone false converts, to subsequently “eat bread with any cleric” for just this reason. [10] What, therefore, caused the apprehension that medieval and early moderns, too, harbored were Decius-like fears of baptism’s rejection and inconstancy, together with the utmost worrisome duplicity of those dissimulators, who, in sixteenth century terms, were known as Marranos: that pessimum genus hominum, the “ships with two rudders,” indeed, the alleged bearers of syphilis, who polluted both the Eucharist, which they accepted in sin (as imagined by Cyprian), and also the Christian body. [11] These fears of dissimulation never flagged, and they were the background, together with Jewish resistance to the large-scale, and ongoing, missionizing that began in the sixteenth century (as opposed to more fitful medieval projects), for not only lay radicalism, but, so too, the extremism that incensed late nineteenth century popes. Prompted in part by the fall of the Papal State, in 1870, the papacy viewed itself as beset everywhere by demons, leading it to revive blood libels, refuse to relent concerning the kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, and block the republication of Innocent IV’s thirteenth century castigation of those who said Jews annually killed a Christian child and communicabant, took communion, with its body. [12]

Marcus’s discussion of this last is revealing. Rather than “communicabant,” he uses Jacob R. Marcus’s translation, based on Rigord, “as a sort of sacrifice,”quasi pro sacrificio (21). Rigord’s continuator, Guillaume le Breton, wrote: eius corde se communicabant, “they took Communion with the boy’s heart,” precisely as this phrase was later quoted verbatim by Innocent IV and Gregory X. [13] To prefer Rigord distracts the reader from grasping the fear of a frontal attack on the societas fidei expressed by Guillaume’s cannibalistic, counter-Eucharistic image, which would resurface in later tales like that of the Good Werner that were composed for internal reassurance. As I have written: for Christians, “so glorious was the martyrological ideal that there was reason to maintain it even in the absence of persecution. This might be accomplished by creating martyrs (and martyrdom) out of whole cloth--and superfluo dictu, in the Middle Ages and into the modern period, those most regularly accused of creating (Eucharistic) martyrs were Jews.” [14] This was far more than, as put here, striking an “internal enemy” or responding to an attempt to invert a hierarchy. The inflation of libelous martyrological imagery by the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century papacy speaks for itself about evolution and continuity.

There should be no surprise that, in response to Christian accusations, Jews defensively claimed superiority for themselves--however, not, as Marcus strongly implies, by actions, but in writing and in what for most was inaccessible Hebrew. Inversion-tales abound, to wit, competing Jewish and Christian stories of waxen images leading to attacks or divine intervention. The divine intervenes again in tales of wagers between rabbis and bishops. But these stories are the obvious product of literary imagination. [15] Hierarchical reality resides in the words of Alexander II, in 1063, that Jews were semper parati servire. Unlike Saracens, Jews were not active enemies. Rather, they accepted the dominance of the canons, and of course, they had little choice.

Asserting dominance was also the intent of Innocent III, when he spoke of Jews living in perpetuo servitude. However, just as Alexander II, Innocent meant obedience, not actual slavery or something close to it, as Marcus suggests; the lay servi camerae nostrae as well refers not to servitude but to a subjection to lay rulers, who could, however, be arbitrary. [16] Thomas Aquinas, as many other commentators, is explicit that Jews are not bound by civil servitude. Not to mention, as Marcus does not point out, that ius commune, following its Roman law origins, made the Jews cives in civic affairs. Kings of England and France, living under “customary law,” were not restricted by this status. But the popes were, and, hence, as in the case above of imputed cannibalism, the latter defended Jews. Nor, as said, did they expel them; the expulsion of 1569 was into, not out of the papal state. The canons might, indeed, be protective. It was centuries of legal and canonical limits that persuaded--indeed, constrained--Innocent IV, in 1246, to return to the Jews some previously sequestered books.

The street of restriction and protection, nonetheless, was stop and start. The latter stopped with the emergence of anxieties about warding off social pollution and challenges to Eucharistic ritual. The canons blunting (so-called) pollution are consistent--not, however, from 1096, as one assumes from Marcus, but from no later (and really earlier) than the ninth century Agobard of Lyons; the much earlier Roman law Christianorum ad aras forbids Christians to participate in Jewish rites. Agobard rants hysterically about Jews distinguishing foods and sharing a Christian table; he had been preceded in the fifth century by Caesarius of Arles, who said Jews poisoned food they shared with Christians. Close contact might soil the Eucharist, which, not in the thirteenth century, as again Marcus, but by no later than 1059, was said to embody thecorpus verum of Christ.

Canons from the earlier Middle Ages warn over and again about Jewish-Christian contact, whether social, commercial, or sexual; and, in this context, Innocent III’s Fourth Lateran decree on distinct Jewish dress (the infamous “badge” came later) is the culmination of a centuries-long legal process, not, as Marcus, a novelty. (17) The fear of mixed sexuality expressed in this decree, alongside its report of Jews sporting fancy dress during Holy Week, must also be taken with reserve. Laws and canons had long forbidden Jews to be present at processions, often restricting them to a Jewish quarter when they took place; one can see this prohibition from no later than the ninth century Council of Meaux. Trotting out anxieties about ornate clothing and sexual miscegenation thus were rationales for a decree Innocent himself knew, once again from the canons, to be in violation of those “good customs” of the Jews that the law obligated him to protect. This also explains why he further justified the decree by pointing (by implication) to the fringes on Jewish prayer-shawls. How often Jews flaunted their dress, regardless of how easy or difficult it was otherwise physically to identify somebody as a Jew, is purely speculative. The same for sexual encounters. Other than with prostitutes--and, most particularly, Christian women in the domestic service to Jews that the Third Lateran condemned, again following centuries of canonical precedent--sexual encounters between Jews and Christians must have been the exception, not the rule, and certainly not a “common” event, as said here (185, 361).

Marcus’s discussion, drawing on the work of M. Lindsay Kaplan and Steven Kruger, of male (sic) Jews’ “inability” to convert, an irreversible “physical inability,” is challenging. [18] He recalls, for instance, the myth of Jewish male menses (162-167). Yet these imaginings are symptoms, even syndromes, not causes, and they were unquestionably generated by fears of pollution. Medieval imagery--like portraying Jews as “stinking, thieving dogs,” which dates back to the fourth century--may point to Jewish physical, as well as spiritual, inferiority. Yet true, complete conversion was said to alter physical states; incomplete conversion, accompanied by duplicity, and subsequent corruption, which are constantly suspected, leaves them intact. [19] We best hesitate, then, to speak of proto-racism or an essential Jewish perversity. Indeed, swarthy Jews may populate scenes of the passion, but the dark-skinned Jews with hooked noses that one sees in the portraits (not mentioned) of the Last Supper hanging in Colmar’s Unter den Linden Museum, even while Jesus is a lily-white Aryan, are, after all, the Apostles. Besides, imputed Jewish physical difference, ultimately, is an extension to concrete reality of Augustine’s duality in his Adversus Judaeos of “spiritual Christians” and “carnal Jews,” a structure again derived from Paul and which insinuated itself as a cornerstone of Jewish-Christian relations.

In this light, Jewish behavior, all Jewish behavior, forbode attacks on the favorthat Innocent III was bent on ensuring and about whose violation he raged. His imagination was fertile, for instance, in his reference to ornate dress. He was even more incensed about illegal Christian wet nurses allegedly expressing milk during three days prior to being allowed to feed Jewish babies. Were this claim accurate, Jews would have been symbolically denigrating the Eucharist, which, he knew, and much to his ire, they perceived as idolatrous magic; not to mention that mother’s milk was then called a product of blood, and the pope’s description may also reflect Christian Eucharistic angst. In the same vein, Innocent denounced Jews selling Christians foul wine, and he blustered about Jews furnishing Christians with rancid meat. Living amid Rome’s ancient Jewish community, he had to know that this last, in particular, was false. Certain parts of otherwise kosher animals are out of bounds, and from no later than the 1084 charter of Rüdiger of Speyer, Jews received permission to sell these parts to Christians, actually, the choicest fillets, not dregs. I suggest that in his fervor to protect the newly doctrinal, annual Eucharistic reception, Innocent was willing to go to extremes and intentionally invent, perhaps fantasize, all these above charges. Needless to add, he was further incensed by Jews holding, as he said, public office.

It was the meat, however, that was most revealing, motivated as Innocent, no doubt, was by the canons in Gratian’s essential 1149 canonical textbook, theDecretum (C.28, q.1, cc. 12-14) that spoke of the danger of the shared table, of the inferiority Christians thereby acquired, and admonished that contact with evil corrupts. Indeed, kosher meat, we said, had been called poisonous from the time of Caesarius of Arles; much later, the Protestant Buxtorf said Jews urinated on the meat they sold to Christians. It was not coincidental that, mockingly dismissing these charges, the late thirteenth century Nizzahon Yashan says that Jews graciously sell Christian meat--as to the “stranger in the gates; ...the Torah tells us to sell such meat to Gentiles, because they will serve us.” The inversion of the Church’s teaching of Jewish servitude, Jewish submission to the canons, as in the other instances mentioned earlier, was, of course, literary; in reality, Gentiles provided Jews with no such service. In fact, the Nizzahon may have feared the popes would stop such sales, and the Jews would go hungry--as they did in the eighteenth century when there were two such stoppages in Rome. [20]

Anxieties like Innocent’s version of Agobard’s “table corruption” were passed on from the Middle Ages to the modern world, internalized, laicized, and even racialized Here was the link to the future: the need to protect the Eucharistic body, societas fidei, the corpus verum itself, or its surrogate, the individual Christian, from contamination, which so easily morphed into fears for the blood of the new non-confessional state. It was in this light that the uneasiness about the transformation of converts into true believers, whose frequent backsliding into Judaism and heresy required regulation by bulls like the 1267 Turbato corde, evolved into apprehension about Jewish assimilation. Social qualities, too, it was said, could not be erased. Thus the twelfth century Benzo of Alba, speaking of Anacletus II’s Jewish ancestry three generations after a paternal grandfather’s conversion, said not that he “looked Jewish” (Marcus, 168), but that “He was a Jew and spoke like a Jew.” Bishops named Arnulf and Manfred went further, saying: “No longer a Jew in fact, but worse than a Jew.” [21] The irradicability of Jewish behavioral characteristics, real or supposed, was medieval, not a new idea in the twentieth century. There was neither then, nor in the modern world, a distinction, which Marcus seeks to make, between Judaism and Jews as dangers, however real or imaginary these Jews were; “mythical,” as I myself called them in 1992. What threatened was the Judaism borne by Jews; and what it, and they, threatened was the corpus fidei.

As put by the Cardinal Secretary of State Gasparri, in 1919, “There is no doubt that all these measures [against Jews in earlier times], even those concerning race and commerce, were aimed to protect the Christian faith from the destructive Jewish influence. But the popes well understood that it is impossible to dissociate the Faith from the entirety of social life...[and so they legislated] not only in religious matters, but in all that touch the life of the family, the professions, and civic life.” [22] More starkly, the late-nineteenth-century Frenchman Roger Gougenot des Mousseaux, validating what was said above about the non-confessional state, wrote of “the man of Talmudic faith, whose fanaticism and implacable malice stirred him up against Christian civilization.” [23] It is in these stark theologically-corporal images, not in their secularized, if unintentionally sanitized, presentation as “hierarchy and internal enemy” that the continuity from centuries past is revealed. Nor, as said, does the well-noted image of the “unchangeability of Jewish male physical features” (170), while indeed present in medieval literary and even plastic representations, account for the ubiquitous alarm about convert inconsistency and its nefariously corrupting effects--although, as with all coins, there is a heads and a tails. For all the disappointments and frustrations, Paul’s vision of ingathering remained vivid. Conversions were celebrated with pomp, in the presence of high prelates, and conversion was the underlying justification for the early modern Roman ghetto. [24] Suspicion and doubt did not win without resistance; they did not move along an unobstructed route. But they did win. There is serious logic in David Nirenbereg’s statement, whose tenor Marcus debates, that: “Anti Judaism (464) is a powerful theoretical framework for making sense of the world.” Modern anti-Semitism does, indeed, evolve from the past. [25] But we must also understand this evolution within its correct historical--and terminological--framework. That fears for the health of Eucharistic body, of both society and the individual, would morph into fears for the blood of the denizens of the modern state seems almost self-understood. But without perceiving the medieval origins of the modern fears--in medieval terms--we will be led astray.

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Notes:

1. On image desecration as time and again a product of imagination, at least through the sixteenth century, see the penetrating analyses in Katherine Aron-Beller, Christian Images and their Jewish Desecrators: The History of an Allegation, 400–1700 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024).

2. These laws are listed in John Gilchrist’s fundamental, “The perception of the Jews in Canon Law in the Period of the First Two Crusades,” Jewish History 3, no.1 (1988): 9-24; see also Amnon Linder, The Jews in the Legal Sources of the Early Middle Ages (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997).

3. On this, and many other issues discussed by Marcus, see Kenneth Stow, Jewish Dogs: An Image and Its Interpreters (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006)

4. Susan Einbinder, “Pucellina of Blois: Romantic Myths and Narrative Conventions,” Jewish History 12 (1998): 29-46, which appears in the bibliography, but is not exploited.

5. On the travel of merchants and Kalonymos from Lucca to Mainz, see Kenneth Stow, “By Land or By Sea: The Passage of the Kalonymides to the Rhineland in the Tenth Century,” reprint in Kenneth Stow, Popes, Church, and Jews in the Middle Ages (Farnham: Ashgate Variorum, 2007).

6. On favor and odium, see Kenneth Stow, “Favor et odium fidei: Conversioninvitis parentibus in historical perspective,” Archivio Italiano per la storia della pietà 25 (2012): 55-86.

7. Stow, Jewish Dogs, 62-63 on Werner and his multiple significances.

8. Capucine Nemo-Pekelman, Iudaeorum Querelle (Paris, 2005).

9. See Kenneth Stow, “An Illicit Community: Some Stories Don’t Change,” in John Christopoulos and John M. Hunt, Making Stories in Early Modern Italy and Beyond: Essays in Honour of Elizabeth S. Cohen and Thomas V. Cohen(Toronto: University of Toronto, 2024).

10. Linder, The Jews in the Legal Sources of the Early Middle Ages, 544.

11. The term is Marquardus de Susannis, De Iudaeis et Aliis Infidelibus (Venice, 1558), part 1, chapter 2; and see Brian Pullan, “A Ship with Two Rudders,” The Historical Journal 20 (1977), 25-58. and Anna Foa, “The Old and the New, The Growth of Syphilis 1494-1530, in E. Muir and G. Ruggiero, eds. Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990)

12. Jewish Dogs, 121.

13. Jewish Dogs, 86.

14. Jewish Dogs, 24; on Jews murdering children with the Virgin’s subsequent intervention, see Kenneth Stow, The Cruel Jewish father: from miracle to murder,” in eds. David Engel, Lawrence H. Schiffman, and Eliot R. Wolfson,Studies in Medieval Jewish Intellectual and Social History (Leiden: Brill, 2012).

15. Kenneth Stow, “Medieval Jews on Christianity,” Rivista di Storia del Cristianesmo 4, no. 1 (2007): 71-97, discussing all of the above and much more.

16. See also Anna Sapir Abulafia, Jewish-Christian Relations, 1000-1300 (London: Routledge, 2011).

17. Linder, The Jews in the Legal Sources of the Early Middle Ages, a fundamental source book, again in the bibliography, but unexploited.

18. M. Lindsay Kaplan, Figuring Racism in Medieval Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). Marcus concentrates on the physical aspects Kaplan describes. However well argued, Kaplan’s linkage of perceived physical inferiority to perpetuo servitudo leaves me a bit uneasy, if only because I differ with Kaplan about the nature of Jewish servitude.

19. Steven F. Kruger, “Conversion and Medieval, Sexual, Religious, and Racial Categories,” in Constructing Medieval Sexuality,eds. Karma Lochrie, Peggy McKracken, et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), esp. 172.

20. David Berger, The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979), no. 212, p. 207, and Kenneth Stow, Feeding the Eternal City: Jewish and Christian Butchers in the Roman Ghetto (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2024), 162-164.

21. Kenneth Stow, Levi’s Vindication (Cincinnati and Pittsburgh: Hebrew Union College Press, 2017), 147.

22. Jewish Dogs, 166-167

23. Jewish Dogs, 51.

24. Kenneth Stow, “Church, conversion, and tradition: the problem of Jewish conversion in sixteenth century Italy, repr. In Stow, Jewish Life, essay V; on pomp see Emily Michelson, Catholic Spectacle and Rome’s Jews, Early Modern Conversion and Resistance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022).

25. David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W.W. Norton, 2014), 464.