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Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999). xiii + 266 pp.; 4 maps, 25 illustrations, 16 in colour. ISBN 0-300-07612-6. $30.00.
Anti-Semitism was, without any doubt, the most powerful and persistent form of racism present in the late medieval period, and any account of western Christianity which does not deal with it in some depth is more or less obviously incomplete. Few do. Still, it is surprising how little its forms, details, and history have even been noted in traditional histories of religion, which, when they do remark its appearance, tend to focus on the violent brutality and social unrest which it both sprang from and brought about, not its persistence in orthodox Christian thought. It is by now quite clear that these practices were in no sense an aberration, and that, in many instances, they were encouraged by narratives and other texts which were sanctioned by those secular and ecclesiastical authorities who subsequently disavowed their effects. Sadly, some of these texts were informed deeply by certain patterns of Christian devotion, particularly those which acted by identifying and deprecating anything that was perceived to be in any sense 'other', and which asserted a degree of personal certainty and security which left little room for doubt or, paradoxically, for compassion for anyone other than a human and suffering Christ.
To this sensitive but often neglected area, Miri Rubin's powerful and important Gentile Tales comes with real effect. Throughout, she has had the advantage of the work she had undertaken for her 1991 book Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture, to which, however, she refers only once, and one obvious...