England during the Middle Ages was at the forefront of European antisemitism. It was in medieval Norwich that the notorious "blood libel" was first introduced when a resident accused the city’s Jewish leaders of abducting and ritually murdering a local boy. England also enforced legislation demanding that Jews wear a badge of infamy, and in 1290, it became the first European nation to expel forcibly all of its Jewish residents. In The Accommodated Jew, Kathy Lavezzo rethinks the complex and contradictory relation between England’s rejection of "the Jew" and the centrality of Jews to classic English literature. Drawing on literary, historical, and cartographic texts, she charts an entangled Jewish imaginative presence in English culture.
In a sweeping view that extends from the Anglo-Saxon period to the late seventeenth century, Lavezzo tracks how English writers from Bede to Milton imagine Jews via buildings—tombs, latrines and especially houses—that support fantasies of exile. Epitomizing this trope is the blood libel and its implication that Jews cannot be accommodated in England because of the anti-Christian violence they allegedly perform in their homes. In the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the Jewish house not only serves as a lethal trap but also as the site of an emerging bourgeoisie incompatible with Christian pieties. Lavezzo reveals the central place of "the Jew" in the slow process by which a Christian "nation of shopkeepers" negotiated their relationship to the urban capitalist sensibility they came to embrace and embody. In the book’s epilogue, she advances her inquiry into Victorian England and the relationship between Charles Dickens (whose Fagin is the second most infamous Jew in English literature after Shylock) and the Jewish couple that purchased his London home, Tavistock House, showing how far relations between gentiles and Jews in England had (and had not) evolved.
Kathy Lavezzo is Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa. She is the author of Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community, 1000–1534, also from Cornell, and editor of Imagining a Medieval English Nation.
What People are Saying About This
Andrew Galloway
In The Accommodated Jew, Kathy Lavezzo argues that in English literature, history writing, and culture, Jewishness is associated with geographical materiality and location, including geographical rootedness in England, but is also denied and denounced on the same basis. The expulsion of the Jews from England in the late thirteenth century is central to that paradox. Lavezzo intriguingly elucidates how, long after the Jews were expelled, historical, poetic, and dramatic works continued to associate Jews with English places and buildings, rendering the bad faith in Christian treatments of Jewish rootedness all the more palpable. This inquiry is as notable for its chronological range as it is for its incisive textual, geographical, and ideological scrutiny.
Jeffrey Shoulson
Between the seventh and the seventeenth century, Jews were considered legal residents of England for a little over two hundred years. And yet, as Kathy Lavezzo's brilliant study shows, the paradox of the displaced Jew—uprooted for his failure to accept Christ and the bogeyman of closed, threatening spaces—sits at the heart of English anxieties about boundaries, urbanization, and the growth of commerce. Filled with surprising historical revelations, fascinating accounts of geography and architecture, and insightful readings of a broad range of literary texts, The Accommodated Jew marks a crucial contribution to the ongoing puzzle of Jews in English literary history.
Lawrence Besserman
Kathy Lavezzo's important new book, The Accommodated Jew, demonstrates complete mastery of the relevant scholarship and, applying sophisticated theoretical approaches, provides new and illuminating insights on her theme.
Sylvia Tomasch
Crossing the medieval-early modern divide with erudition and subtlety, Kathy Lavezzo accomplishes what few others could. By focusing on 'the spatial unconscious' of texts from Bede to Milton, The Accommodated Jew convincingly presents a complex, heterogeneous, and contingent literary history of antisemitism in England over the course of one thousand years.
Lisa Lampert-Weissig
The Accommodated Jew is a very significant contribution to the discussion of antisemitism in English literature. The focus on space and place over so many centuries of canonical literature is unique, and this project will shift the way we consider the figure of the Jew in English literature. I find Kathy Lavezzo's readings brilliant.
James Shapiro
Focusing on space and place, Kathy Lavezzo powerfully illuminates how English writers wrestled with 'accommodating' Jews and Jewishness. This is an ambitious, closely argued, historically informed, and deeply engaging study, one that traverses almost a thousand years of English cultural and literary history, from Bede and Chaucer through Marlowe and Milton.
Sarah Rees Jones
The Accommodated Jew is an important new analysis of the nature of antisemitism and its roots in pre-modern England. It argues that attitudes towards Jews were deeply enmeshed in ambiguous sentiments towards the increasing commercialism and materialism of English society from the commercial revolution of the twelfth century to that of the seventeenth. As such this is a thesis that does more than illuminate antisemitism. It explores an essence of what it meant to be English throughout this period and beyond. The powerfully nuanced readings of canonical literary texts set against a reappraisal of historical and archaeological scholarship will appeal to many audiences and provides strong foundations for reconceptualizing the study of Anglo-Jewry in many disciplines.
Suzanne Conklin Akbari
The Accommodated Jew is an ambitious book that provides a synoptic overview of almost a millennium of antisemitic—and, at time, accommodating—discourse concerning the ongoing presence of religious alterity, actual and imagined, in medieval and early modern England. Punctuating chapters on key figures of English literary history—Bede, Cynewulf, Chaucer, Marlowe, Milton—with intricate studies of less well known histories and plays, Kathy Lavezzo provides a nuanced and engaging account of how deeply intertwined depictions of Jewish identity were with emergent English nationalism, especially in the context of religious heterodoxy and reform. The book is at its most brilliant in its careful juxtaposition of urban histories and cartographic evidence with literary texts, situating the place of 'the Jew' within both local and global topographies. This book is sure to be widely read by students, scholars, and general audiences for a long time to come.
