Debra Higgs Strickland's new book is a welcome and important contribution to a field that particularly in recent years has received increased scholarly attention. Several books have appeared since the early 1990s on the image of social and religious outsiders and outcasts--especially the Jews--in Christian art. Notable are Elisabeth Revel-Neher's Image of the Jew in Byzantine Art, Ruth Mellinkoff's Outcasts, Heinz Schreckenberg's The Jews in Christian Art, and Sara Lipton's Images of Intolerance. [1]
Saracens, Demons, and Jews. Making Monsters in Medieval Art presents and discusses a pictorial code of enemy images, and puts it into a broad context of religious, historical, and literary sources. Written in lively prose and thought-provoking language, among the greatest strengths of the book is the author's ability to integrate the images in other aspects of culture, and to provide a coherent picture of Christian anxieties regarding non-believers and non-Christian political enemies. This remarkably high degree of integration of the different materials and media--visual, literary, theological--enables the reader to grasp a variegated picture of medieval views of the alien and the other. Moreover, Strickland's text is efficient in showing how monstrosity and otherness are linked, how fuzzy the border line between the alien and the non-human could become, and how short the way towards a promotion of images of demonized non-Christians believed to conspire with the Devil.
The book discusses images of the Monstrous Races, black Africans ("Ethiopians"), Jews, Muslims ("Saracens"), and Mongols ("Tartars") between the eleventh and the early sixteenth centuries, mainly in France and England. Both these countries were intensively engaged in the Crusades and Crusader politics, and share thus similar views of Muslims and Mongols. On the other hand, they expelled the Jews almost simultaneously, shortly before and after 1300. Many of the anti-Jewish images were thus produced in a society that did not live with Jews.
The book opens with a chapter on Classical Greek theories of how natural causes affect physical appearance, character, and morality, or the lack of it, describing the climatic, astrological, humoral, and physiognomical theories which were later adopted by medieval Christian scholars. Regional stereotypes and ancient Greek strategies of describing and depicting non-Greek, "barbarian" enemies complement the impact that Greek attitudes to the other had on medieval thought. Traditions of the Monstrous Races "provided the ideological infrastructure for later medieval Christian portraits of living outcast groups." (42) Numerous traits associated with Barbarians were easily made applicable to imaginary monsters living in remote and unknown areas. They could, however, also be applied to Jews, Muslims and other contemporary enemies of the Christian world. This adoption of Greek scientific and pseudo-scientific theories on the one hand, and attitudes to Barbarians on the other, provided the grounds for medieval demonization and de-humanization of the other.
Chapter Two shows how darkness of the skin is linked to sin and the demonic. Spiritual darkness standing for the bad and the sinful appears as opposed to the spiritual light which comes from God. Medieval views of Ethiopians--as Africans are generally referred to by medieval Christians--are based mainly on Roman views arising from hostile political relationships with real-life Africans, whereas Greek sources refer to Ethiopians as brave and tall people respecting their gods. In the minds of medieval Christians who had only little contact with Ethiopians, these people often overlapped with the imaginary Monstrous Races.
Chapter Three describes a variety of visual strategies regarding the Jews. The strength of images as opposed to texts, consists, as Strickland writes, in their ability to "conflate biblical Jews with contemporary ones". (108) By depicting the tormentors and killers of Christ or the idolatrous worshippers of the Golden Calf as contemporary Jews, artists and patrons could promote a strong image of Christianity's stubborn arch-enemy, the adoration of the Golden Calf being a sign of damnation and demonic influence. Again, the way from the other to the demonic is a particularly short one. This image of anti-Jewish attitudes in visual culture is complemented by references to mystery plays. The identity of the Jews as Christ-killers and idol worshippers is underscored by physical deformity and distortion. Depictions of the murderers of Christ, however, go beyond physical distortion and place the Jews in the sphere of demons and monsters. The chapter discusses a variety of issues relevant to the history of the Jews in medieval Europe, such as religious debates, a context that shows the Jews as fools; conversion; forced baptism; accusations of usury creating an interesting link between the view of Jews as idol worshippers on the one hand and worshippers of money on the other. The great variety of such images provides the basic ground for the justification of physical violence, which increased significantly during the late twelfth and the thirteenth centuries. Again, the author shows clearly articulated links between anti-Jewish visual expressions, and attitudes to Barbarians and the Monstrous Races, and establishes a range of connecting lines between ancient views of enemies, imaginary enemies and real-life, non-Christian others living amidst medieval Christian societies.
Chapter Four treats Muslims and Mongols, the external enemies of medieval Christianity, and discusses numerous references to the association of Muslims with the Monstrous Races living in remote and exotic regions to be conquered by the Crusaders. This imagery provided a proper ideological ground for Crusader politics and related violence. Like the Jews Muslims figure in literature and art as diabolical creatures and sons of Satan. Again as the Jews, they are shown as physically distorted, ugly, dark-skinned, horned, and often demonic. By means of this characterization the Crusades were presented not simply as any war, but as a struggle against the agents of the Devil. Similarly to the Jews, the Muslims were linked with the Monstrous Races. Unlike the Jews, however, the Muslims are often shown as forceful and fierce fighters, thus underscoring the heroic achievements of Christian knights.
Images of the Mongols, considered the greatest danger to European Christendom, present similar demonic features, notwithstanding Marco Polo's reports about his life at the court of Khubilai Khan, where he remained through the 1270s and 1280s. Strickland's observation that text and image diverge in later manuscripts of Marco Polo's account is particularly interesting in showing the power and independence of the visual in the range of medieval media.
How all these enemies will conspire against Christianity towards the world to come is shown in manuscripts of the Apocalypse and the medieval commentaries discussed in the fifth chapter. All of these antagonists were considered worshipping associates of the Antichrist; and they were all expected to play a significant part in the apocalyptic war against Gog and Magog. Here Strickland observes some degree of differentiation between Jews as interior enemies, and Muslims as remote, external adversaries. The fear that the Jews would attempt to gain a stronghold in Christian society--an apprehension that justified pogroms and social subordination--and the anxiety that the Muslims might defeat the Christians in the Holy Land, were both explained in terms of eschatology.
In the concluding chapter Strickland presents a group of images which "contradict" the conclusions of the previous chapters and stand out among the images previously discussed. Here she presents depictions of positive monsters (as the three-headed Trinity), or positive imagery of Jews, Muslims, and Ethiopians, and points out the ambivalence of the medieval mind regarding non-Christian outsiders, and the complexity of the social situation.
The book will interest a wide range of audiences in various fields: medieval art historians, readers attracted to the power of the visual as such--not necessarily medievalists, as Strickland frequently addresses issues of viewing (not only the circumstances and the actual pictorial contents are analyzed, but also the effects the images must have had on contemporary viewers). Historians will appreciate her subtle discussions of the place of religious outcasts in medieval Christian society; social and cultural historians will enjoy the way Strickland integrates the different materials she uses.
Strickland's presentation of the pictorial code that governed medieval views of the non-Christian alien will undoubtedly stimulate further studies. Her method of integrative consideration of a variety of media while underscoring the power of the visual can be applied to questions which go beyond the framework of Strickland's book. How, for example, did this imagery develop? How and why did it take these particular paths during the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries? These questions are closely linked to the debate among historians as to how and why the situation of the Jews deteriorated during this period. Another question of great interest concerns the differing ways in which the medieval art of Iberia showed Muslims and Jews. In Iberian society, where the Muslims were real-life enemies of the general population--and not only of crusading knights at a distance--Islamic culture still had an important impact on the lives of Iberian Christians. This was also a society in which Islamic attitudes towards the Jews to some degree influenced those of the later Christian rulers. Also of interest is the question why Italian art apparently did not adhere to the described pictorial code. Also, did Jews and Muslims react to the pictorial code, and how?
The structure of the study, one might add, could perhaps have been defined with somewhat more focus: the historical context might be, in this reviewer's view, more solidly linked to the Crusades rather than to the somewhat arbitrarily chosen dates between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. This would have enabled the author to differentiate more clearly between the effects of the cultural flowering of the twelfth century (the so-called "twelfth-century renaissance"), on the one hand, and the deterioration in the situation of the Jews during the thirteenth, on the other. The role played by Crusader ideology in developing the pictorial code seems to be treated as obvious, but could, in my view, be somewhat more clearly elucidated. In many cases the specific imagery's context is Crusader ideology and direct links are established to political, Crusader-related events, but the reviewer feels that the book could and should focus more explicitly on the Crusader context. Similarly, a clear focus on France and England exclusively, and these countries' policy towards non-Christians, would have contributed a sharper definition. Some readers may thus wonder why the author did not limit herself to this specific framework, but occasionally extended the discussion to other areas, which in this form, however, could not receive sufficient attention and left the reader with unanswered questions. This is particularly felt in the account of host desecration libels in association with the Rintfleisch and Armleder massacres in southern Germany. (116-117)
Notwithstanding these minor comments, Strickland's book is not only an important step towards the understanding of this pictorial code, and of the power of the visual in general; it will also determine future studies in the field by its high methodological standards.
NOTES
[1] Elisabeth Revel-Neher, The Image of the Jew in Byzantine Art, Oxford 1992; Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages, Los Angeles 1994; Heinz Schreckenberg, The Jews in Christian Art: An Illustrated History, New York 1996; Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance. The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible Moralisee, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1999.