Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Reflecting on German-Jewish History
- Part I The Legacy of the Middle Ages: Jewish Cultural Identity and the Price of Exclusiveness
- Part II The Social and Economic Structure of German Jewry from the Fifteenth through the Eighteenth Centuries
- Part III Jewish-Gentile Contacts and Relations in the Pre-Emancipation Period
- Part IV Representations of German Jewry Images, Prejudices, and Ideas
- 12 The Usurious Jew: Economic Structure and Religious Representations in an Anti-Semitic Discourse
- 13 Imagining the Jew: The Late Medieval Eucharistic Discourse
- 14 Representations of German Jewry: Images, Prejudices, Ideas - A Comment
- Part V The Pattern of Authority and the Limits of Toleration: The Case of German Jewry
- Part VI Through the Looking Glass: Four Perspectives on German-Jewish History
- Index
14 - Representations of German Jewry: Images, Prejudices, Ideas - A Comment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
- Frontmatter
- Reflecting on German-Jewish History
- Part I The Legacy of the Middle Ages: Jewish Cultural Identity and the Price of Exclusiveness
- Part II The Social and Economic Structure of German Jewry from the Fifteenth through the Eighteenth Centuries
- Part III Jewish-Gentile Contacts and Relations in the Pre-Emancipation Period
- Part IV Representations of German Jewry Images, Prejudices, and Ideas
- 12 The Usurious Jew: Economic Structure and Religious Representations in an Anti-Semitic Discourse
- 13 Imagining the Jew: The Late Medieval Eucharistic Discourse
- 14 Representations of German Jewry: Images, Prejudices, Ideas - A Comment
- Part V The Pattern of Authority and the Limits of Toleration: The Case of German Jewry
- Part VI Through the Looking Glass: Four Perspectives on German-Jewish History
- Index
Summary
Commentators are usually asked to compare essays in order to stress convergences and divergences between them - an intellectual exercise that is sometimes a bit contrived, if not overtly artificial. This is certainly not the case with the two challenging essays I have been asked to comment on. They shed light upon each other and, in a very real sense, they supplement each other. The aim of my comment is to make explicit some of the suggestions resulting from reading the two essays side by side.
Miri Rubin's essay brilliantly explores the emergence and diffusion of a well-known anti-Jewish topos: the desecration of the sacred host. Rubin rightly remarks that in the early medieval story focusing on the Jewish boy, the host is not defiled. She says, however, that “the ambiguous feeling raised by the Jewish father has the potential to worry and unsettle or merely foretells other tales which will develop side by side but with very different consequences.” In those later tales, the Jews that have desecrated the host are finally put to death. I would suggest, however, that the Jewish boy story also points toward a different albeit related sequence centered on another notorious slander against the Jews: the ritual murder.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- In and out of the GhettoJewish-Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany, pp. 209 - 212Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995
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