Dr. Miriamne Krummel

New book by University of Dayton’s Miriamne Krummel shows Jews as objects of hate long after their official exile

Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England: Legally Absent, Virtually Present by Miriamne Ara Krummel • Palgrave Macmillan • 243 Pages • $69.54

By Marshall Weiss, The Dayton Jewish Observer

In 1290, King Edward I expelled the Jews of England. In 1659, Richard Cromwell saw to it that the Jews were allowed to return as part of his negotiations to restore the monarchy to England.

In college, you may have been told there were no Jews in England during this period, that Shakespeare would never have met a Jew in his lifetime.

Wrong, says Dr. Miriamne Krummel,  an associate professor of English literature at the University of Dayton.

“It wasn’t until the ‘90s that anyone was saying anything else but that,” she says. “No one was really looking at the Jews in the Middle Ages until about 1992-93, when I went back to graduate school, and then it all started. And we were all speaking at the same time, all of us to each other.”

Krummel’s new book, Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England: Legally Absent, Virtually Present, goes beyond the recent scholarly evidence that Jews lived in England during the Middle Ages: it shows that Jews were represented in English literature and manuscripts from the 13th to 15th century as “racially different,” as animals.

This representation, stoked by the belief that Christianity superseded Judaism and that the Jews killed Jesus, “was a fabricated fantasy of evil and it was based on hate and fear,” Krummel says. “In order to have a strong, defined nation without any error, they had to have an other, the Jew.”

Krummel is a native of New York who attended a Solomon Schechter Jewish day school.

One example in Crafting Jewishness, which is drawn from her doctoral dissertation, is a manuscript image of the biblical Cain with animal attributes, including horns.

“Ambrose started that in the fourth century,” Krummel says, “that Cain was Jewish and Abel was Christian. Cain, like Jews, forsakes God.”

In another manuscript illustration, Caiaphas Questions Christ, Caiaphas and Annas (Roman-appointed Jewish high priests) are yellow in color, have large bird-like noses and resemble beasts.

“This makes the Jews racially different as a sort of barbaric other,” Krummel says. “There’s an obsession with the nose.”

Last year, at Wright State University’s Kristallnacht commemoration, Krummel presented slides comparing images of the noses in these manuscripts with Nazi images measuring Jews’ noses.

“Everyone thinks that Hitler sort of imagined all these things,” she says. “He just resuscitated the Middle Ages.”

Krummel explains that scholars and critics presume that Jews expelled from England in 1290 went to France, crossing the English channel, sometimes at their own peril. Jews who remained in England after the expulsion had to go underground.

“But just like we know now about the (Spanish) conversos, many of them didn’t stop being Jews.”

She adds that the English still thought of those Jews who had converted to Christianity as Jews.

The English of this period of expulsion, Krummel also points out in her book, were fixated with formerly Jewish property.

“Jewish property, which was stolen from them, was always remembered as Jewish property, not as that of the other owners who lived there after them. I’ve got records from property sales.

“They’re still mentioning them as the owners of this property after five or six different people have lived in there since then. They were fascinated with the Jews.”

Krummel believes the English held on to the Jews in this way because of the human need for an enemy.

“It’s just a fantasy that’s needed for a human being to feel better,” she says. “Even those of us who think that we’re beyond enemies or the need for that, we all have to have something.”

But in this era of fixation on the Jews, Krummel found some positive streams.

“I talk about something that’s been overlooked in Chaucer,” she says. “All these sides of Jewishness have emerged in his work that nobody sees because they stop with the Prioress’s Tale.”

Krummel’s next book, The Medieval Postcolonial Jew, will have a chapter about Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ — “It’s very medieval” — and a chapter about changes to the Prioress’s Tale.