The Knight of the Green Slime
The young maidens, the brides,
and the bridegrooms looked out through the windows and cried out in a great
voice: “Look and behold, O Lord, what we are doing to sanctify Thy Great Name,
in order not to exchange You for a crucified scion who is despised, abominated,
and held in contempt in his own generation, a bastard son conceived by a
menstruating and wanton mother.”[i]
It is not hard to understand why
persecuted Jews, those being massacred in great numbers during the First and
Second Crusades, in the Rhennish cities, in northern France, and elsewhere in
Europe, spoke out with such vehemence against the God of the Christians, seeing
in Jesus a bastard conceived by a polluted woman, a mangled and slimy green
body hanging on the cross in every church and woven into the banners carried by
the violent mobs that broke into their homes and killed their families—and from
whom they sought to “Sanctify the Name” through acts of self-sacrifice. One only wonders how they managed to bite
their tongues and remain silent at all other times. In my Sir
Gawain and the Knight of the Green Chapel and in other works[ii] I
have gathered together the evidence of these imprecations and aspersions of the
murdered and martyred victims of this seemingly endless pogrom by the Church
and its military orders.
During the First and Second
Crusades, as the great armies marched through Europe towards the Holy Land, and
then later during the wave of persecutions at the end of the fourteenth century
in Spain, Jews, who found themselves in the impossible position of either
accepting baptism or being killed, would seek to break the impasse by doing
what was seen as horrible and unclean to an extreme. Killing their wives and
children and then delegating one among the remaining men to slay all the
others, and eventually the last man standing committing suicide. Though Kiddush
ha-Shem was an honourable last resort in times of crisis, this
Sanctification of the Name was understood to mean accepting passively, when all
else failed—bribing the enemy, fighting back, running away, hiding for long
periods—the death that was inevitable.
During the periods mentioned—and apparently once previously, amongst the
Zealots besieged by the Romans on Masada in Herod’s palace—the Jewish community
chose to kill themselves rather than face the alternative. In so doing, not only did they also attempt
two other goals—in one, taking over from the Christian majority the moral and
spiritual high ground accorded to Christ in the iconography of the Passion, in
the other transforming the sacramental Catholic discourses into mockery turned
against the Church and the Crusaders who played the role of tormentors, false
judges, and executioners of the now Christ-like Jews. The twisted and mangled corpse of Jesus on
the cross and brought down to be buried in Joseph of Aramithea’s cave-tomb was
seen in these defiant rabbinical texts after the fact as an abomination, ”the
crucified bastard”, with baptism called “evil water” and the church “an edifice
of idolatry.”[iii] The body of Christ, rather than being cleansed
and taken into heaven to be further purified so as to sit in heaven next to
God, in these Jewish visions of vengeance was a “putrid corpse,”[iv]
green and slimy as it rots away to poison the beliefs of the people who delude
themselves into thinking he is God.
Or if not being seen as Christ-like,
then the Jews see themselves, at least, as contemporary piyyutim (historical hymns) and midrashim in the chronicles and
memory books of the lost and scattered communities, depict them as the cast of
characters in the Akeda, the Binding
of Isaac, wherein, on the one side, Abraham refuses to accept the stopping of
his sacrifice on Mount Moriah and substitution of his son by a ram or goat,
instead trying again and again to cut the human victim’s throat, even after God
intervened to bring the beloved son back to life; and on the other side, Isaac,
unlike the quiet and dignified Jesus nailed to the cross and scorned by his
tormentors, eagerly seeks to have a reluctant and then an ineffective father
bring on the bloody climax of the ritual.
Through these midrashic
techniques of rewriting history and transforming the implications of the
violent events so as save the honor of all those men, women and children
brought to shameful ends—for that is how a Jewish perspective would have halachically
viewed these acts of self-murder and infanticide; to absolve the persons who
performed these deeds or who after so many killings had no nerve left to commit
suicide and accepted baptism for themselves; to resolve so many contradictions
and unknown aspects to the disappearance of whole urban communities of Jews,
whether through death, baptism or running away and losing faith, known as
“those who separated themselves” thereafter from Jewish life and wandered about
in a no-man’s land of intense ambiguity and hopelessness—the writers in
subsequent generations tried to put the best light on the events: they claimed
all those who died or disappeared had done so with pious intentions, and that
those who eventually drifted back, troubled, confused and insane, were holy
survivors of the holocaust. The language
used in these texts did not just draw on Scripture and Talmudic narratives:
they also grasped the symbols of oppression and tried to make them their own,
turning badges of shame into tokens of trawth. Goldin says, using somewhat anachronistic
terms to describe the process:
The symbols that
were used were not only specifically Jewish symbols those that competed,
opposed, and disputed Christian symbols.
The slogans that were recited were not just traditional mantras, hut had
rather taken on new meanings to befit the contemporary situation.[v]
The New Year’s Day in the Gawain
poem is also the Feast of the Circumcision, and the circumcision, as we have
argued previously, has been displaced to beheading-game and the nick on the
neck. This displacement reminds one of
the way in which Secret Jews, hiding from the Inquisition in Latin America,
displaced the circumcision from the penis to the back or shoulder.
The whole ceremony combines a rite
of naming, baptism, bar mitzvah—becoming an identifiable individual outside the
range of public group-names, a sanctification within the secret group, a
marking of acceptance of obligations and responsibility, and also, as indicated
in various liturgical formulae, poetic metonyms, and coded terms, a marriage, a
funeral and a memorial service. The
celebration of Jesus’ brit was
understood as the first shedding of his blood, anticipating the second in the
crucifixion, and symbolizing the real presence of that blood in the sacrament
of the Eucharist. It further indicated
his anointed status as the messianic successor to David and Solomon, the
emergence of the promised symbol into the physical textures of history, and the
anticipated reappearance in the broken flesh of the wafer during the Mass. For the Christian, this last efficacious and
valid circumcision of their Savior also marked his marriage to the Church, his
bride and mother, in this world and the next, and thus the removal of the ring
that binds him to this life.
For Sir Gawain, however, the
beheading-game marks an incomplete and unequal exchange of gifts, blows, and
promises. The nick on the neck, like the
green girdle, remains hidden and known only to the bearer, whereas the supposed
successful decapitation and restoration to life exists only in an empty
Christmas game and the memory of a false achievement of the quest. Gawain only seems to be the celebrated hero of
the Arthurian romances: his prowess is not tested properly, his courage and bravery
shown to be unacceptable, and his qualities of a lover reduced to childish
erotic teasing.
[i] Chronicles of the Crusades, cited by Simha Goldin, The Ways of Jewish Martyrdom, trans. Yigal Levin and trans ed. C.
Michael Copeland (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2008) p. 97.
[ii] Norman Simms, “The
Unspeakable Agony of Kiddush ha-Shem: Forced Jewish Infanticide during
the First and Second Crusades” The Medieval History Journal 3:2
(2000) 337-362; and “A Meditation on
Possible Images of Jewish Jesus in the Pre-Modern Period” in Zev Garber, ed., The
Jewish Jesus: Revelation, Reflection, Reclamation (Perdue University Press,
April 2011), a special supplement of Shofar, pp. 204-227.
[iii]Goldin, The Ways of Jewish Martyrdom, pp.
114-115.
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