Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

The Medieval Background \\ 61
So, although similarities in the interpretation of the symbolic significance of
Judaism and Jews and Blackness and Black people were strong and sometimes
even precisely homologous, we must also remain aware of the important differences,
at least with regard to the medieval economy of salvation and the still relatively
weak authority of arguments about the immutable biological nature of
Jews. We must also remain alert to a point made at the outset of this essay, namely,
the differential impact of medieval ideas about Jews and Blacks, however negative
they were, on social relations in the Middle Ages. Jews were living among
people whose mental universe was profoundly shaped, if not absolutely conditioned,
by the symbolic system described above. Few Blacks had to endure living
in this environment. Only when the power and authority of western European
norms expanded around the globe did "people of color" feel the weight of a symbolic
system that derided Blackness and Black people as much, if in different
ways, as it derided Judaism and its adherents. Sharing this burden as well as the
burden of racist pseudoscience of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
Jews and people of color, one might hope, can actively share in the mission to
overcome them.
Notes
1. The fourfold method of interpretation was common to Christian authors who
wrote in many genres, even those as dry and apparently straightforward as chronicles;
see The Chronicle of Salimbene de Adam, trans. Joseph Baird and others (Binghamton,
New York, 1986), p. 680 (where the editors use the same Jerusalem example to highlight
the method).
2. The focus of this essay is on western or Catholic Europe in the Middle Ages.
Although there existed a strong current of anti-Judaism in the Byzantine East from
Antiquity through the Middle Ages, it was on the whole less virulent than in the
West. Its artistic expression was also different. Byzantine images of the Jew, according
to one scholar, were "illustrative and not moralizing, descriptive and not accusatory";
Elisabeth Revel-Neher, The Image of the Jew in Byzantine Art (Oxford, 1992), p.
107.
3. This general, but not uncontested, view of the situation in western Europe is
summed up in Gavin Langmuir, History, Religion, and Antisemitism (Berkeley, 1990),
pp. 289-90.
4. Mark Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton,
1994), pp. 82-87, sums up the scholarship nicely.
5. For the comments in this paragraph I am drawing from an earlier work of my
own, The French Monarchy and the jews from Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians
(Philadelphia, 1989), pp. 15-17, 27-29, 45-46, 68, 181, etc.