Dynamics of anti-Semitism Part 7

Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale: Oral Abuse and Privy Pollution

Scholarly recognition of the diverse ways and diverse areas in which Jewish-Muslim commensality can be detected also has an established history in Islamic-Jewish studies. Whether known as commensality or conviviencia or symbiosis or intertextuality, the scholarly attempt to transmit a sense of the variety of the interaction has resulted in many important volumes of collected essays penned by scholars across the fields.[1]

Though Chaucer’s tale is treated as a classical example of the Ritual Murder genre of a folk play or village festival, and as part of the extra-liturgical—but sometimes liturgical—celebration of a saint’s life, the fourteenth-century English poet does something very strange  with the normative pattern set out by scholars such as Miri Rubin.[2] In this genre, a group of Jews accused of killing a Christian child for ceremonial purposes, often draining the blood to make Passover matzoh, they are then caught in their crime by some miraculous event that ensures the child victim is venerated as a saint, with the perpetrators properly punished for their devilish acts. But the English poet seems to have recast the story for the Canterbury Tales in order to expose the hypocrisy and unchristian psyche of the woman narrator who sets out to entertain the pilgrims and justify her presence on the road to the shrine of St Thomas à Becket. Elsewhere[3] I have discussed in detail the delusions and contradictions in the Prioress’s narrative, using evidence from the introductory remarks in the Prologue to the whole collection and the hymn she sings in her own praise to prepare her listeners for the miracle tale of the little clergeon who is slaughtered by the Jews. I will not rehearse the argument used in those discussions to show how the nun projects her own fearful traumatic memories of sexual abuse on to the Jews or how she exposes her own misunderstandings of Christian charity and forgiveness, let alone how she immodestly boasts of her special dream of imitating the Virgin’s Mary’s maternal and erotic relationship with her divine son. More important here is to describe the way the Blood Libel is displaced and restructured so as to subvert the normal anti-Jewish intentions of the genre.

The tale is set in an Eastern Land, not in Christian Europe. Jews in Christian lands have an entirely different history, albeit one of mutual suspicion and rare periods of tolerance until well into the nineteenth century. The unnamed city where the action of The Prioress’s Tale takes plac in a region of Muslim conquest, dar el-Islam, and in it are to be found two Dhimmi or tolerated non-Muslim communities, one Christian and the other Jewish.[4] This is land overrun in a religious war, a jihad, and where the non-Muslim inhabitants who have not been killed, fled or converted, live in “a regime of extortions and humiliations.”[5] According to Ibn Taymia,

...the infidels forfeit their persons and their belongings which they do not use in Allah’s service to the faithful believers who serve Allah and unto whom Allah restitutes what is theirs; thus is restored to a man the inheritance of which he was deprived, even if he never before gained possession of it.[6]

           What else can we extrapolate from this setting?

First of all, this means that the Jews depicted by Chaucer are not Ashkenazic but Sephardic, and they are likely as well to be part of the exiles from the Iberian Peninsula during the period before the expulsions of the 1490s, a hundred to a hundred and fifty years after the Middle English poem was composed. Rather they would have been individuals and families who fled after the persecutions of the 1390s or earlier, and would have assimilated themselves into existing Oriental Jewish communities in the Mediterranean islands and in the Maghreb or North Africa, perhaps even in the Balkans, such as Bulgaria. Some of them might also have had experience as conversos, voluntary or forced, since Spanish kingdoms prior to their unification or the foundation of the Inquisition were already prone to victimization of both non-Christian and non-Muslim populations; and an inevitable consequence was always a distrust of those neophytes who did not depart the persecuting lands as soon as possible or return to their ancestral Jewish faith as soon as it was practical to do so. Moreover, these ambiguous conditions as early as Visigoth times produced Crypto-Jews and Marranos long before the whole of Portuguese Jewry were declared baptized in 1493 These would be the kind of Jews likely to be met in England as visiting sailors, merchants and diplomats. Chaucer’s family lived in the docklands of London, where the future poet listened to the stories of exotic places and peoples told by these foreigners.

The second thing we can extrapolate from Chaucer’s setting is that the Islamic city in which the Blood Libel played itself out was one in which the Christians were also a minority religion along with the Jews, the government and judicial system run by a qaadi or Islamic judge.[7] The two tolerated minorities were permitted to live, work and worship under the rules of Dhimmitude because of their status as People of the Book. Dhimmi communities were allowed under severe restrictions to their economic, social, legal, religious and physical rights; at any time, they could revert to enemy status and lose all civil and spiritual rights, that is, they could be killed and all their goods and chattels forfeit to the Muslim rulers.

Thus in the city Chaucer imagines the Prioress’ Tale to unfold, there are three separate but unequal communities: the Muslim rulers and population, making up the largest and most powerful group, with Koranic law supervening; a smaller Christian group, with their own ecclesiastical officials, living on sufferance beneath the dominant community, maintaining closer relationships with the Islamic state than the Jewish officials; and a much smaller Jewish population in a judería made up of a single street and pressed in by the two other religious groups. These three collections of people may be seen as living in a series of concentric circles. This geometrical pattern probably is more metaphorical than a historical representation of an Eastern town, particularly one in a border region where the civil authorities were always suspicious of the minorities. Though the Koranic laws and their interpretation considered both Christians and Jews as equally contemptible beings, practicalities required a differential attitude by the rulers. Since Christians could be allied to powerful enemy states in the vicinity, the local officials would not seek to antagonize them beyond the basic principles of Dhimmitude.

The outside and densest circle is that of the Muslims, the smaller circle that of Christians, and the smallest the Jewish area. Even were the reality to be that dhimmis outnumbered Muslims in a particular city, the legal status would see the non-Muslims as minorities, and these groups would be considered as being smaller in regard to political and juridical power and in social space. The dhimmi should be humble, never build structures taller than Muslim buildings, and remain silent in public spaces.[8] At its most extreme, Dhimmitude created a mentality that viewed non-Muslim peoples as subhuman:

Language, culture, history—evidence of the civilization of the dhimmi peoples—were proscribed, effaced from memory, dismissed into nothingness everywhere.[9]

But local realities meant that more often than not, Jews were considered as lower and less worthy than Christians, especially in parts of the Ottoman Empire where Islamized Christians governed on behalf of the Sultan. Because the tale told by the Prioress celebrates a Christian miracle and the sympathies of the narrator and her audience are fixed on the child victim, his mother and the ecclesiastical functionaries who become devoted to him, the Muslim figures play a virtually quiet and passive role, as though they too were sympathetic to the victim and his community, while the Jews are seen as essentially at one with the murderer and his demonic intentions. In a sense, the Christians collude with the Muslims against the Jews, whereas the criminal and sinning judería have no allies at all, unless it is Satan himself, all Jews being rejected even by God: they are beyond the pale of humanity and of forgiveness.

Thus Chaucer’s literary version of the traditional miracle tale in which a child victim is sanctified by the interference of the Virgin Mary shows the Christian community living on better terms with the ruling Muslims than are the Jews. Jews are presented as a dangerous, demonic power in the heart of the city. The little boy who goes to the elementary choir school must, like some but not all other young scholars or clergeons, pass from his home on one side of the judería to the other to reach the church where his classes are held. This penetration through the Jewish quarter cannot be normal, but the child has the supposed protection of the two other powers, at least during the daylight hours. It would be a foolish Jew who attempted to harm such a child for a crime like that would redound collectively on the entire Jewish population, so that rabbinical authorities would council avoidance of any suspicion of untoward gestures.

     When the child is murdered, first Christian authorities and then Muslim enter the Jewish quarter to investigate, with the murder victim taken outside the inner circle to the next area for a funeral and then burial in the Christian section of the city. Under Muslim law, there is no trust in dhimmi witnesses. As late as 1877, in Bosnia, a British vice-consul wrote:

The present Cadi of Travnik resolutely refuses to admit all Christian evidence before the Tribunals, and though the Mussulman witnesses are always...,it is true, to be found for money, nothing but a miscarriage of justice can be expected where such practices prevail.[10]

Bat Ye’or reports that “in Turkish Bulgaria...Muslim judges refused to accept testimony given by Christians against Muslims.”[11] If there were any historical basis to the legend of the little clergeon, the cards were stacked against any accusation being made against a Muslim perpetrator of the crime, and the assumption of guilt would fall, not on a Christian murderer, but inevitably on a Jew. Above all, in this context of a literary narrative, genre trumps reality.

If that was the situation in the Balkans at the end of the nineteenth century, it was surely true too in the fourteenth-century city of The Prioress’s Tale. However, what prevails in the whole context of the Canterbury Tales is not the assertion totally within the nun’s imagination. In Chaucer’s tale, then, despite the fantasized intervention of supernatural help, there is something else than respect for historical realities or the integrity of the generic contours of the legend of Ritual Murder. Chaucer the poet, standing outside and manipulating the voice of the Prioress—and already introducing her as a hypocrite and delusional victim of sexual abuse—directs the reader, if not the fictional audience on the road to Canterbury, to question the Christian motives and personal motivations of a teller-of-tales who cannot control her animus against Jews, loses focus of the saint’s life she believes she is reciting by confusing the age, gender and religious apprehensions of the victim of the crime, and misconstrues her own pious intentions. Compared to the many typical examples of the genre studied by Miri Rubens, the persons, events, motivations and consequences of the scenario in the Chaucerian tale do not fit, and the discrepancies transcend comic ironies to subvert the very legitimacy of the genre as a celebration of the Mother of Mercy. On the one hand, the child-killing assassin is a lone, rogue individual, not a party to a communal action associated with Jewish ritual. On the other hand, the single murderer is motivated by quite other desires than the draining of Christian blood to make matzoh, and indeed hides the corpse both from his own people and the two outside communities.

So why does the murderer kill the sweet little clergeon? If it is not out of an innate evil in him as a Jew, then there is something in the situation that causes his rage. Similarly, if the Prioress does not tell the tale to express her Christian compassion and urge to emulate the maternal instincts of the Virgin Mary and show compassion for the child victim’s mother, then something else is going on that swerves away from the expected circumstances of a comical entertainment. It may be that Chaucer had, if not an inherited Jewish sensibility, (I believe that he was within two or three generations of his family’s conversion from Judaism to Christianity in the late twelfth century on the Continent) had at least an understanding and sympathy for the Jewishness of the victim, and could intuit, however anachronistically as it may seem, that the twisted soul of the Prioress, unable to find consolation for her own traumatic abuse as a young girl, created a fantasized version of her pains in the murder of the little boy, punished her abusive father or other male relative in the person of the Jew, and longed for comfort in the care of Mother Church.

As the Prioress narrates the tale, she observes that the child is very young and naive, and perhaps a little slow as a scholar. He is a beginning student who does not understand the Latin hymn, Alma Redemptoris, he is required to memorize, but when an older boy, a fellow chorister, explains that it is a song in praise of the Virgin Mary as the redeemer of sins, the child is enthusiastic and chants the hymn aloud as he walks through the Street of the Jews. This singing provokes one Jew to a rage. There are, of course, no background reasons given to explain why this single Jew should lose control and perform such an outrageous deed. So far as the Prioress is concerned, all Jews are agents of the devil, if not devils themselves. But she does not assign any other collective or religious motivation to him other than an essential evil.

After the murder, the enraged Jew buries the little innocent child in a sewer on a side street where no one else can see or eventually smell the rotting corpse. The boy’s mother does not seem to notice that he has not returned home after school or notify any of her neighbours, at least to inquire where he might be. She is a single mother, presumably a widow, with probably other worries on her mind.[12] The body is discovered because the dead boy continues to chant Alma Redemptoris, and the sound of his voice leads one of the Muslim searchers to find the source. It is then that the ecclesiastical authorities arrive and carry the singing body to their church, where it is installed for public viewing and hearing. Only when the child’s mouth is opened and a “greyn”[13] is removed from under his tongue does the miraculous chant stop, so that the body may be interred. This miracle is not specifically attributed to the Virgin Mary, and the emphasis on the song, the mouth, the tongue, and the ambiguous “greyn” turn the structure of the tale even further from the normal shape of a Blood Libel or Ritual Murder. If there is any motivation for the murder of the child it resides in the provocative singing of a Latin hymn in the middle of the Jewish Street, as we have only the Prioress’s narrative voice-over to assert the devilish propensities of the entire Jewish people.

There is then at the very heart of the literary and historical narratives of Jewish persecution through the genres of ritual murder and the blood libel an alternative, not secret but usually unperceived counter-text. Sometimes it runs through the channels that usually carry the pernicious flood of abuse and slander, poisonous enough to cause the death of individuals or whole Jewish communities, but when seen from the proper angle or interpreted by means of midrashic exegesis reveal a self-delusional and self-incriminating agenda. Sometimes, though, as in the cases at Rusçek or in the Settlements in Israel, the criminals are youths who misunderstand the contours of the crimes they set out to commit, and by their rage and naiveté expose the absurdity of the charges laid against their Jewish victims. Transferred to a Muslim setting, the medieval Christian folk play makes no sense and the performers get the whole scenario wrong. They perform something that articulates the unconscious and inarticulate pains within themselves but the pattern makes no sense. They dig up Jewish corpses instead of burying them or they invade Jewish homes and murder children in a frenzy of blood-letting instead of dragging them through the streets.  Nevertheless, even without much surface sense, the fragments of the original myth retain the energies of the trauma that likes behind all these pains, humiliations and fears—the rage for revenge—and ensure that whatever the shape or appearance of the narrative in its Nachleben it continues to move audiences.

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NOTES

[1] Sharin Lowin, review of Laskier, Michael M., Levm Yaacov, eds., The Convergence of Judaism and Islam: Religious, Scientific and Cultural Dimensions on H-Judaic Reviews, February, online at http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=33890 (seen 24/02/2012). The importance of this online review is that it not only summarizes and evaluates the essays in this particular volume but it provides an overview of important scholarship in the field in the past two decades.

[2] Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1999).  There is a related type of genre called the Blood Libel that emphases the ritual uses of Christian blood by Jews, but this can have to do with stealing or poisoning the Eucharist liquid, desecrating the wafer, or some other phenomenon related to the miracle that occurs to punish the malefactors.

[3] Norman Simms, A New Midrashic Reading of Geoffrey Chaucer: His Life and Works (Lewiston, NY, Queenston, Ont. and Lampeter, UK: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004).

[4] “The realm of Dhimmitude is actually situated in a political ideology of permanent war which ruined entire regions, justified massacres, slavery, usurpation of land, and deportations” (Bat Yeo’or 2002: 54).

[5] Bat Ye’or Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide, trans. Miriam Kochan and David Litman. (Madison, Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002) p.58.

[6] Bat Yeo’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, p. 59.

[7] Except in regard to religious laws within a dhimmi community, Muslim rule placed the conquered peoples under the obligation “to buy Muslim witnesses and bribe the kadis, but it removed any possibility for them to defend themselves against usurpations, accusations, theft or abuse, and in particular the abduction of women and children. More than any other measure, the excessive vulnerability inflicted by the law branded fear and servility on the dhimmi mentality” (Bat Ye’or Islam and Dhimmitude, p. 74).

[8] Bat Ye’or Islam and Dhimmitude p. 104.

[9] Bat Ye’or Islam and Dhimmitude p. 106.

10] Bat Ye’or,  The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude, Secventh-Twentieth Century, trans. Miriam Kochan and David Littman (Madison, Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. 1996) p. 82.

[11] Bat Ye’or,  The Decline of Eastern Christianity , p. 97.

[x12 In discussions in A New Midrashic Reading of Chaucer, I suggest that the Prioress has suffered neglect and abuse as a child, and that she projects much of her rage against her own parents on to this Christian woman in the tale. As will be evident, the abuse of the future Madame Eglantyne probably involved sexual violation and oral rape, hinting that her obsession with orality—such as the singing of her own hymn to the Virgin and the clergeon’s continuous singing after death—may derive from a need to relive and correct the sexual crime committed against her.

[13] The meaning of this word remains unclear and disputed. Some scholars have taken it literally to be a seed or grain, and hence a metonym for the Holy Wafer of the Eucharist. Others have seen it as a metaphor of the Virgin Mary’s grace and love, the seed of redemption celebrated in the Latin hymn. I have argued that it is related to the complex of concepts in the “green” of Sir Gawain and the Knight of the Green Chapel (commonly known as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), where it has the meanings others have accepted but moreover notions of freshness and vigour, as in the season of springtime (primavera) but also its opposite in terms of sickliness and slime, especially of putrescence in relation to the covert Jewish view of the crucified Christ rotting in his tomb—and not resurrected or risen into heaven. In my previous studies of The Prioress’s Tale I have also suggested that this grain or seed, semen, alludes to the oral rape of the young girl who would become Madam Eglantyne.