Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND
WILLIAM CHESTER IORDAN
,-=ost sophisticated Christian readers of religious texts in the European
Middle Ages recognized four levels of interpretation. The first was literal
and addressed the basic matters of physical reality. If the word
"Jerusalem" appeared in scripture, its literal interpretation evoked the biblical or
historical city in Israel. However, Jerusalem also connoted the Church allegorically,
the believing soul morally, and the heavenly City of God mystically. 1
Similarly, the words "Jew" (Latin Judeus or any of its vernacular forms) and
"Blackness" (nigredo with its vernacular synonyms) had various levels of meaning
in the texts in which we find them. "Jew" literally denoted a person who professed
the religion of Judaism either in biblical or contemporary times; "Blackness," the
absence of light. Yet, allegorically the words "Jew" and "Blackness" conjured the
Devil; morally they denoted evil; and mystically they evoked the Day of
Judgment. Although this negative cast given to the two terms was not entirely
unrelieved, derogatory and demeaning associations were those which predominated
in the Middle Ages.
Jews and dark-skinned people in Europe, therefore, suffered under the same or
similar symbolic and metaphorical impediments throughout the Middle Ages.
The difference, of course, is that these symbols and metaphors, often refigured as
stereotypes, had far more immediate and tragic consequences for the many Jews
than for the few Blacks who lived in medieval Europe. Only in the long term, as
a result of the colonization and enslavement of large numbers of dark-skinned
people in the post-medieval period, would the consequences be comparable.
Medieval Images of the jew
two
Before the eleventh century many Christian princes, like the Visigothic kings of
Spain of the sixth and seventh centuries, and many clerics, such as Agobard, the
ninth-century bishop of Lyons, himself an Iberian by birth, expressed and acted
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