Art historical looking is both a recursive and collective endeavor. It takes an individual scholar many encounters with a work over an extended period of time and many pairs of eyes to penetrate the multiple dimensions of thought, desire, and craft that have coalesced therein, to reactivate the making of meaning that transpires upon visual consumption and through aesthetic experience. Nowhere has this lesson proved more apt than in confrontations with the lone surviving monumental example of the mappa mundi genre created c. 1303-5 for display in Hereford Cathedral.
The most recent instance of how iterative engagement with the Hereford Map newly unlocks a cultural world is Asa Mittman’s Cartographies of Exclusion: Anti-Semitic Mapping in Medieval England. Long a scholar of the corpus of medieval maps and teratological images, Mittman showcases the process of recovering, that is, of coming to see, the Hereford’s core fixation on Jews. The groundbreaking investigation on which he builds is Debra Higgs Strickland’s compelling 2018 Speculum article (“Edward I, Exodus, and England on the Hereford World Map”), the first study to demonstrate the map’s iconographic resonance with royal anti-Jewish policies zealously embraced by Hereford bishops.
Mittman now exposes the full extent of Hereford’s singular cartographic anti-Semitism, intricately crafted through the relational emplacement of elements that have since lost their original coloristic or gilded definition. Details polemicizing against Jews are imbricated in the density of the pictorial whole where they form a kind of affective nervous system, a hate-filled relay, branching off the work’s theological and didactic backbone. To what end, he asks, such intense anti-Jewish animosity more than a decade after the 1290 Expulsion? In retrospect, the prior invisibility of the map’s interlinked supersessionist and racist discourses is itself clarifying. The occlusion unwittingly reproduces the exclusionary dynamics at play in the work, dynamics that to this day continue to underpin not only nativism but also, surprising as it may seem, universalist idealisms. The convergence of the two drives, macro and micro (40), ecumenically redemptive and providentially proto-nationalist, comes into the sharpest focus in medieval England.
Cartographies of Exclusion situates the Hereford Map and comparanda within several overlapping frames. Establishing this interpretive matrix is no less central to Mittman’s argument than his astute visual analysis. First, he shares a personal account of his coming to grips with medieval and modern anti-Semitisms in the preface and part of the introduction, returning to it in the coda. Mittman prefers the hyphenated anti-Semitism (x), pointing in an endnote to the usage of scholars who contend that racism, associated with the modern term, also informs the medieval Christian imaginary. (I happen to be among those who do not burden the subtle signage of the hyphenated form with so major a task; nevertheless, I shall here respect the author’s choice.) Mittman’s journey resonates with my own; I defer reflection on this aspect to the end of my review.
A historiographical frame fills out the introduction. Matters of the map’s dating, patronage, and installation in the cathedral segue into a critique (10-25) of the taxonomies that have governed the study of cartographic representation. The nomenclature conventionally used in the classification of medieval cartographic images divides “Europe” from “Arab,” relegated to an outside influence. At the same time, the religions that powered the dominant successor cultures of the old Roman Empire and inflected geographic knowledge inherited from Antiquity remain absent from the organizational schema; the markers Christian and Islamic are simply elided. Thus, the category “medieval European cartography” excludes material from Al-Andalus while presuming the conflation of “medieval Europe” with Christianity. When (with the exception of Strickland) Jews have entered into the discussion of particular maps, it is in the emic terms dictated by Christian salvation history, that is, as “Old Testament” signifiers. An unacknowledged Christian norm implicit in much of the scholarly literature on medieval cartography papers over the originary colonization of Jewish Scripture, not to mention the increasingly degraded status of Jews in “Europe” during the very period in which the mappa mundi genre achieved its fullest elaboration. Mere description of the maps’ truth claims has substituted for the proper articulation of embedded ideological operations. The turn away from the old positivist deprecation of cartographic infidelity toward greater appreciation of religious content has effectively re-enacted the alienation of Jews from the temporality of mapmakers/map readers and their banishment from real geographic space.
Mittman introduces a third frame in chapter one, that of critical race studies as adapted to premodern epistemologies. He follows Geraldine Heng among others in maintaining that race-craft, the construction of an inherited, indelible inferiority projected onto an excluded other, can indeed be predicated on religious difference. Out of Christian biblical exegesis, canon law, philosophy, and science came the raw materials for stereotypes that naturalized an invented reflexivity between exterior somatic features and interior moral characteristics. “Jews are but one of many racialized peoples on medieval Christian mappae mundi” (34). Mittman argues persuasively, however, that the fictitious “cartographical Jews” (31) of Christian sacred history and eschatology, unlike the fabulous Plinian populations inhabiting the southwestern fringe of the ecumene, cannot be dissociated from actually living Jews whose purported crimes were (and still are) continuously updated yet ever aligned with the hermeneutical functions assigned them by the church (or, I might add, Islamist political theology or secular liberatory discourses). The locative rhetoric of Christian maps spatializes both “the Jews’” enduring fossilized pastness and their future apocalyptic depravity. Frozen out of regions that Jews did inhabit in the present, their cartographic surrogates were instead “mislocated to regions they did not occupy” such as the Caspian enclosure of Gog and Magog (68).
Chapter two then frames the Hereford Map within the particular history of anti-Semitic policies, legislation, and violence in England. Mittman masterfully synthesizes primary sources, including little-known images, with the scholarly consensus that has emerged from an abundant medieval studies literature on the topic. Far from dissipating an obsessional anti-Semitism, the Expulsion consolidated it as a tool for the ongoing cultural production of English identity. The Hereford Map marshals Christian universalism, grounded in supersessionist triumph over a deicidal people and their obsolete Judaism, on behalf of an Englishness forged through the righteous extirpation of Jews and Jewishness from the realm.
The third and fourth chapters delve into the nitty gritty of the Hereford Map’s representation of Jews. The most salient anti-Semitic elements unique to Hereford occur in the depiction of the Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt and circuitous desert wanderings. Originally gilded and thrice looping around itself, the work’s only graphically delineated route gained added visibility from its location with respect to the eye-popping Red Sea, brilliantly colored and enormous (nearly half the size of the Mediterranean). At the point of passage through the split waters, a rubricated inscription refers to the transitus filiorum Israel. But in the Sinai episode of the Golden Calf, the rubricated medieval term Iudei pejoratively attaches to the idol-worshipers; the foreground figure in profile sports a hooked nose and wears contemporary dress. Substituting for a golden statue, a dark brown bovid labeled Mahū for either “Mahun” or “Mahumet” squats and defecates atop the altar. Just above, a horned Moses kneels to receive the tablets of the Law already superseded by the cross on his coffin. The demonic idol and Moses feature rhyming poses and cranial protuberances. Mittman decodes this extraordinarily dense cluster of signs in the context of heretofore unnoticed pictorial reverberations across the entirety of the Map, from the hook-nosed figure among the damned and likewise depicted demons in the crowning scene of the Last Judgment above the world circle to the symbolism of the specific bestiary animals set alongside the itinerary from Egypt to the Promised Land. Sightlines for multiple visual pathways between key points (e.g., St. Augustine at Hippo, Hereford) thereby reveal a salvific Christianness and Englishness in opposition to a spiritually futile, idolatrous Judaism, doomed to perdition. Not only does the biblical story of Exodus fail to redeem the Jews. It prefigures, commemoratively, their exodus from England as ratification of their perpetual exile.
In the fifth and sixth chapters, Mittman expertly tracks anti-Semitic strategies and motifs that the Hereford Map has in common with other English works and with the Ebstorf Map of c. 1300. Hereford’s Golden Calf episode associates Jews with Muhammad and Islam. A second series of elements that does analogous work lies along the northeastern perimeter and inland into Scythia between the Caspian and Black Seas. Texts filling and abutting land formations propagate the association of Jews with Gog and Magog, a tradition overlaid with ancient lore of anthropophagic peoples and applied in the mid-thirteenth century to the Mongols. Although a terrifying scourge destined for the end-time, the Caspian hordes have, on the Hereford Map, already established outposts beyond their walled enclosure. The cartographic treatment of the cold northern wilderness and its legendary inhabitants varies from work to work. On the Hereford and Ebstorf Maps, however, images of cannibals feasting on severed limbs are meant to provoke horror and disgust. Ebstorf goes so far as to conjoin this repulsive iconography with a pair of figures apparently illustrating the ritual murder libel. I would add to Mittman’s suggestion that the couplet, an elder male wearing the orientalizing Phrygian cap about to slit the throat of a boy, alludes to and perverts the biblical narrative of the Akedah, or sacrifice of Isaac. The pictorial conflation of “cartographical Jews” with Muslims, Mongols, Scythians, and even the Plinian races (“Jewish monstrous peoples,” 153) is a hallmark of anti-Semitic rhetoric.
Mittman did not undertake this project in a vacuum. The book is a cri de coeur for our time, like the thirteenth-century poetry of Meir ben Elijah of Norwich whom he quotes (xi). In weaving back and forth between medieval and contemporary anti-Semitisms, Mittman homes in on the toxic brew of nativism, white supremacy, and Christian nationalism espoused by what at the time of the violent 2017 Charlottesville Rally was called the “alt-right.” While these rightwing agendas have since been mainstreamed and amplified, especially under the second Trump administration, reaction to the shocking tragedy of 7 October 2023 across Western academic, professional, and activist sectors radically transformed the profile of anti-Semitism. We witnessed the communal agony of the Jewish people dismissively belittled, when not vociferously celebrated, and, by early 2024, the expulsion of Jews from cultural precincts that had long benefitted from their contributions. As Cartographies of Exclusion was likely already in press during this traumatic period for Jews, Mittman could not there address the emergent landscape of an anti-Semitism now identified with progressive social causes and thereby elevated in moral stature. Someday, when historians tackle the discursive mutations and ideological realignments ushered in by enthusiasm for and rationalization of the October 7th massacres, their analyses will lay bare operations akin to the old theologically-based anti-Semitism that Mittman has characterized so well: the criminalization of Jewish identity, the supersessionist counter-formation of virtuous societies, and the permanence of Jewish exile as a necessary condition for the redemption of the world.