“It is a book for strong stomachs” (18). So concludes the introduction to Mo Pareles’s Nothing Pure: Jewish Law, Christian Supersession, and Bible Translation in Old English. As Pareles unflinchingly engages with topics ranging from blood to digestion and vomit to sex and sexual violence, the feeling of visceral disgust is evoked for the reader—mirroring medieval Christian attitudes toward Jewish bodies and Jewish religious practice. The book contributes to scholarship that engages with the language of bodily disgust as an element of medieval interfaith conflict. I first encountered this topic in Alexandra Cuffel’s Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic (2007), which explores how gendered language of bodily impurity—filth, blood, excrement—featured in the polemics of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the medieval Mediterranean. Pareles takes us to a very different geographical setting—England, specifically in the early Middle Ages—and a distinct assortment of texts, a set of biblical translations designed to craft Christian identity in part through expressing disgust toward Jews.
This context offers valuable insight for how we think about medieval anti-Judaism—including the question of whether it actually required Jews. As Pareles notes, England prior to the 1066 Norman Conquest did not, as far as we know, have any Jewish residents; the closest Jewish communities could be found across the Channel in France. Yet, the author argues, “in the final period before the Norman Conquest, English Christian cultural translation of Jewish law proved surprisingly central to religious and political thought” (4). Pareles’s work thus contributes to a growing body of scholarship on early medieval England that allows us to think through the meaning of Judeophobia without Jews: anti-Jewish hostility did not require the physical presence of living Jewish bodies to take on major cultural importance. Scholars have pointed to a similar dynamic in the literary culture of late medieval and early modern England, when Jews once again were absent from the island in the wake of the 1290 expulsion, yet maintained an outsize significance in English Christian identity. The omnipresence of the hermeneutic Jew, in combination with the exclusion or absence of the living, breathing Jew, illuminates the fact that medieval anti-Judaism in many ways was not about Jews at all—but rather a way for Christians to define themselves.
Anti-Judaism (or antisemitism, or Judeophobia, whichever term one prefers) takes myriad and varied forms, in both the premodern and modern world. Pareles’s book focuses specifically on the concept of supersession, the idea that Christians have both inherited Jews’ covenant with God and replaced Jews as participants in that covenant. Supersessionist ideology varyingly erases Jews, who have no reason to exist as a living faith in the Christian era, and/or denigrates them as now the foes of God, Christ, and Christians alike. The Hebrew Bible, which Christians call the Old Testament, takes on a particularly important position in the doctrine of supersession. It functions as a shared and thus contested text, which creates fertile ground for battles over interpretation. Medieval Christian readings of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament frequently centered the doctrine of supersession and privileged Christian readings as the only ones with spiritual and theological validity.
Pareles makes the intriguing move of focusing on translations of the Hebrew Bible into Old English as a way of communicating supersessionist ideology. The argument therefore is predicated on the idea that translations are fundamentally acts of interpretation. Even translations that aim for literal reproductions of the original text are still engaged in creative interpretive processes that work to make the text intelligible to an audience that differs not only linguistically but also culturally. The translations Pareles studies, moreover, make no pretense to literal reproduction: seemingly direct translations include some verses and exclude others; word choices function to create meaning; sermons, homilies, and letters that draw on the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament conceptually translate texts for their new Christian audience. Moreover, these translations are removed by multiple degrees from their Hebrew or Greek originals: the authors in question translated not from the original language but from the Latin Vulgate.
As interpretations, translations do important work beyond communication. In this case, they function as acts of cultural violence. Pareles takes the book’s title, Nothing Pure, from a homily by Origen, which employs the captive foreign woman as a metaphor for Christian appropriation of Jewish law. This metaphor positions Christian interpreters as wielding sexualized and gendered violence against inherited Jewish texts, as a means of ultimately purifying them and making them fit for Christians. As Pareles puts it, “The Christian exegete must violently purify his captive, the Jewish text” (139). The title thus foregrounds how Pareles’s sophisticated readings of texts invite readers to reckon with how theology, too, could function as a form of anti-Jewish violence.
Chapter 1, “Exsanguinating Leviticus: Supersessionary Translation in the Old English Heptateuch,” cleverly seeks to provide internal logic for seemingly arbitrary authorial choices. The chapter focuses on the Old English Heptateuch, a collaborative prose translation of the Five Books of Moses, Joshua, and Judges, with a particular emphasis on Leviticus, where the authors liberally excised extensive portions of the original text. Pareles compellingly demonstrates that the guiding principle around which Levitical laws were included and which omitted was not the laws’ obvious relevance for contemporary Christians. The erased sexual prohibitions, which largely remained applicable, offers sound evidence against that interpretation. Rather, the text centered Biblical prohibitions against the consumption of blood in order to communicate the idea of Jewish law as “Other,” and represent Christianity as superseding Old Testament sacrificial law.
The following three chapters all explore how the prolific abbot and writer Ælfric of Eynsham (c. 955-1010) employed supersessionary translation practices throughout his writings as a means of making broader statements about English Christian identity. In Chapter 2, “Men as Meat: Jewish Law and Orders of Being in Ælfric’sTranslations of Maccabees and Job,” Pareles employs the lens of critical animal studies to interrogate English understandings of the Jewish dietary laws (kashrut). Ælfric’s Old English translation of Maccabees must engage with Eleazar’s choice to accept martyrdom rather than eat pork, a fully acceptable food for English Christians. By reading the Maccabees translation alongside Ælfric’s translation of Job, Pareles argues that Ælfric uses the disjunct between biblical dietary laws and English Christian food taboos as a way of mapping Christian-Jewish difference onto human-animal difference.
The third chapter, “The Benedictine Invention of Heterosexuality: Jewish (Law’s) Sexual Difference in Time,” moves from food to sex, as Pareles traces a contrast between the Jewish, reproductive, heterosexual family of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and the celibate, non-reproductive family of the English monastery. For Ælfric, the latter has superseded the former: in his translations of biblical laws on marriage, he treats Jews as “model heterosexuals whose way of live is superseded by a more perfect Christian chastity” (66). This chapter allows Pareles to engage with queer/Jewish scholarship that explored Jewish difference as “queer” within Christian society, even while tracing a very different set of sexual politics, that weaponize and reject Jewish heterosexuality in favor of the homosocial Christian monastery. When taken in tandem, Pareles’s reading and those of scholars such as Steven F. Kruger, Daniel Boyarin, and Susanna Drake can offer a multifaceted and complex set of queer readings of Jewish difference.
In the last chapter, focused on Ælfric, “Ænlic Wimman: Judith and the Exception,” Pareles turns toward Aelfric’s translation of the Book of Judith, with a particular focus on how it rereads Judith’s observance of Jewish law as her adherence to Christian concepts of chastity. This translation connects theories of sexuality with those of sacral concepts of sovereignty. Judith’s exceptionality proves a key element: she differs in myriad ways from other women, but also from Christian saints through her Jewishness. Ælfric both places Judith within the framework of hagiography and emphasizes how her behavior departs strikingly from other saints, in both her adornment and beautification (practices undertaken to attract Holofernes and render him vulnerable) and her participation in an act of physical violence (beheading Holofernes). By making her Jewish and therefore distinct, she can function as a figure of sovereignty without becoming a model for Christian women.
The final chapter, “Like Dogs and Wolves: Wulfstan as Biblical Translator,” turns to another figure, Wulfstan, Archbishop of York (d. 1023). Pareles offers a new reading of a text already subject to extensive analysis: Wulfstan’s well-known sermon Sermo Lupi ad Anglos. The sermon, Pareles argues, incorporates creative translations of biblical passages, which combine outright forgery and transformative re-readings. Over the course of the chapter, Pareles interrogates Wulfstan’s metaphors. Pareles once again engages with animal studies in the exploration of how dogs function as symbols for both supersession and failed pastorship. This chapter also allows Pareles to return to the “captive woman” metaphor introduced via Origen, who appears in Wulfstan’s text in reference to both the real bodies of enslaved women and the metaphorical body of the conquered biblical text.
The book does have a few minor issues. Pareles briefly introduces the relevant texts and authors in the introduction (4), but the book would benefit a great deal from a somewhat more detailed and extensive effort to situate these works in their historical and historiographical context. While such introductions might seem unnecessary to Old English specialists, they would make the work substantially more accessible to readers (myself included) who come to the book through an interest in medieval anti-Judaism and have only passing familiarity with the central authors of early English Christianity. Relatedly, Pareles could more effectively communicate with that wider audience by engaging with a wider body of scholarship on medieval anti-Judaism outside England. The thematic connections with Cuffel’s book were so striking that it was surprising to see it omitted from the bibliography. While the intensely local focus is in some ways a strength, connections and comparisons to broader polemic traditions would nonetheless enrich the book further. Pareles does attempt in the conclusion to connect the dynamics of pre-Conquest England to the anti-Jewish violence of the twelfth century and the expulsion of 1290, but the sudden leap forward appears slightly jarring given the otherwise narrow focus of the work.
Nevertheless, this book represents a valuable contribution to a growing field that examines medieval Judeophobia and supersessionist theology through varied theoretical lenses: gender studies; queer studies; animal studies. The work is complex, perhaps best-suited for a traditional academic audience, but also a pleasure to read: clever, erudite, and often humorous. It will be of interest not only to scholars of early medieval England, but also to those working in medieval anti-Judaism and polemic.