In Christian Images and Their Jewish Desecrators, historian Katherine Aron-Beller analyzes the common Christian charge that Jews habitually and compulsively violated Christian images, identifying this allegation as one that functioned alongside other anti-Jewish allegations such as ritual murder, blood libel, and host desecration to ultimately inform dangerous and long-lasting prejudices in medieval and early modern Europe. Through an analysis of folk tales, myths, legal proceedings, and religious art, Aron-Beller finds that narratives alleging that Jews committed violence against images of Christ, Mary, and the disciples flourished in Europe between the fifth and seventeenth centuries. She then explores how these narratives manifested differently across the continent and the centuries, finding that their potency reflected not Jewish actions per se, but Christians’ own concerns about slipping into idolatry when viewing depictions of religious figures. In addition, Aron-Beller considers Jews’ own attitudes toward Christian imagery and the ways in which they responded to and rejected—or embraced—such allegations. By examining how desecration allegations affected Jewish individuals and communities spanning Byzantium, medieval England, France, Germany, and early modern Spain and Italy, Aron-Beller demonstrates that this charge was a powerful expression of the Christian majority’s anxiety around committing idolatry and their eagerness to participate in practices of veneration that revolved around visual images—an anxiety that evolved through the centuries and persists to this day.

Judith Lieu examines the rhetorical function of Jews in the early texts of the second century and seeks to acknowledge the complex nature of an issue which is too easily proclaimed 'Christian anti-Semitism'.

Around the year 1225, an illuminated Bible was made for the king of France. That work and a companion volume, the two earliest surviving manuscripts of the Bible moralisée, are remarkable in a number of ways: they are massive in scope; they combine text and image to an unprecedented extent; and their illustrations, almost unique among medieval images in depicting contemporary figures and situations, comprise a vehement visual polemic against the Jews. In Images of Intolerance, Sara Lipton offers a nuanced and insightful reading of these extraordinary sources. Lipton investigates representations of Jews' economic activities, the depiction of Jews' scriptures in relation to Christian learning, the alleged association of Jews with heretics and other malefactors in Christian society, and their position in Christian eschatology. Jews are portrayed as threatening the purity of the Body of Christ, the integrity of the text of scripture, the faith, mores, and study habits of students, and the spiritual health of Christendom itself. Most interesting, however, is that the menacing themes in the Bible moralisée are represented in text and images as aspects of Jewish "perfidy" that are rampant among Christians as well. This innovative interdisciplinary study brings new understanding to the nature and development of social intolerance, and to the role art can play in that development.

This book is a collaborative contribution that expands our understanding of how interfaith relations, both real and imagined, developed across medieval Iberia and the Mediterranean. The volume pays homage to the late Olivia Remie Constable’s scholarship and presents innovative, thought-provoking, interdisciplinary investigations of cross-cultural exchange, ranging widely across time and geography. Divided into two parts, “Perceptions of the ‘Other’” and “Interfaith relations,” this volume features scholars engaging with church art, literature, historiography, scientific treatises, and polemics, in order to study how the religious “Other” was depicted to serve different purposes and audiences. There are also microhistories that examine the experiences of individual families, classes, and communities as they interacted with one another in their own specific contexts. Several of these studies draw their source material from church and state archives as well as jurisprudential texts, and span the centuries from the late medieval to early modern periods.

"Beginning in the Third Century with frescoes in the catacombs of Rome, public art began to illustrate the doctrine of supersessionism. This analysis of a millennium of Christian art outlines the path by which Christians reinterpreted the Hebrew Scriptures to prove they foretold the ascendancy of Christianity. Starting with a solid introduction to the origins of Christianity and the beginnings of Christian art in the catacombs of Rome, Henry Claman skillfully demonstrates the development of the anti-Jewish message of Christian art. The study culminates with analyses of the majestic cathedral at Chartres, the public burning of the Talmud in Paris in 1248, and the expulsion of the Jews from France and England."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Demonstrates how Jewish texts serve as a witness to the formation of image discourse in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

The point of this book is simple: to make Christians aware of a story that they have not been told--the story of relations between Christians and Jews. This involves tracing the church's anti-Judaism to its source in the gospels and the Book of Acts and describing the development of the church's displacement-replacement theology according to which we new Gentiles, spiritual, universal, inclusive Christians replace the old, carnal, ethnocentric legalist and works-righteous Jews in the favor of God. The story also details the actions of the churches, specifically a long chain of canons (laws) governing relations between Jews and Christians, all the way from banning Christians for socializing or dining with Jews, marrying Jews, and asking rabbis for blessings, to requiring all Jews to live in ghettos. This history of actions comes down to the present and its consequences in the Holocaust in which all the killers were Christians and in the Nazi laws governing Jewish behavior. Each such law took its precedent from a canon law passed by a council of the church. The recent rash of bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers and synagogues reminds us of how deeply this bigotry is embedded in people. The point of making people aware of anti-Judaism is to prompt them not to shrug if off when scripture readings regularly teach contempt for Jews with the rhetoric of vilification. Words are important. Teaching contempt should be called out and rejected. This can be done pastorally and gently, but it should be done. Otherwise the church's language reinforces a deeply embedded bigotry. Most Christian pastors are unaware of this reality and prone to thinking that anti-Judaism is not a serious problem for the church. Hence most anti-Judaism in Christian preaching is unintentional. Awareness of the story of Christian anti-Judaism prods us to move from unintentional anti-Judaism to intentional teaching of respect for Jews and Judaism.