14 - Representations of German Jewry: Images, Prejudices, Ideas - A Comment

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.