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Books Reviewed:
Anthony Bale, Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages (London: Reaktion Books, 2010)
Yaacov Deutsch, Judaism in Christian Eyes: Ethnographic Descriptions of Jews and Judaism in Early Modern Europe, trans. Avi Aronsky (Oxford University Press, 2012)
Sarah Hammerschlag, The Figurai Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2010)
Sartre's well-known remark, "If the Jew did not exist, the antiSemite would invent him," speaks to a phenomenon that is broadly understood: anti-Semitism depends on fantastical constructions of Jews for which, as Robert Wistrich writes, "the actual presence of Jews is almost immaterial."1 Conversations about "the Jews" are typically understood to be conversations in code, referring to some deeper concern for which Jews are a metaphor or, worse, a scapegoat.2 The scare quotes themselves point to the shaky content of the phrase, and since the momentous events of the Holocaust, phrases like "the Jews" or "the Jewish Question" announce in advance their own deep relation to ideological fantasy. As a pedagogical and moral watershed visible in post-war scholarship, such an awareness of anti-Semitic invention is present not only in modern period historical studies, but in work on premodern cultural contexts as well. Indeed, the recent voluminous scholarship in medieval studies on negative images of Jews might be said to operate as a metonymy for historiographical work on antiSemitism more broadly conceived. In this context, medieval anti-Jewish reflexes often appear as a kind of origin point or distillation, standing in for a larger problematic of Western history, in which hostile representations of Jews are always somehow figurai-and pointedly detached from any context of real-world interaction. Throughout European history, so the familiar narrative goes, Jews have been depicted as variously virtual, metaphorical, fantastical, or grotesque, as the needs of the moment dictate.
Over the past few decades, this broad and productive deconstruction of hostile representations of Jews and the ideological work they perform has come to be expressed by some generally accepted claims about anti-Semitism and its operations. Most of these ideas are by now both unsurprising and familiar: anti-Semitic beliefs are rooted in fantasies of permanence, purity, and stable identity; the threatened identities such ideas work to preserve and protect also, paradoxically, depend on the imagined...