The profanator Jew: Investigation of Christian Anti -Judaism

This learned book, of an original and almost confusing construction, is a voluminous file of disparate documents collected, arranged and commented on by Jean-Louis Schefer, art philosopher, theorist of cinema and image. Its apparently unusual object is as elusive as securely implanted in the Western imagination, and almost insensibly conveyed for centuries by all kinds of more or less expected supports. Reading this strong volume is a long -term journey, a wander in the history of mentalities, a vast investigation between images and texts in the smallest corners of Christian anti -Judaism acculturated in Western anti -Semitism.

Paolo Ucello and The Miracle of the Host

The book opens onto the predelle in six wooden panels, painted with the detrempe by Paolo Ucello, between 1467 and 1469, on behalf of the Congregation of the Corpus Domini-a secular and ancient foundation, but which had recently received the burden of the Mont-de-Piété and the organization of banking loans intended to stem the Jewish wear, against which then fulled Saint Bernardin. This polyptic, now kept at the Ducal Palace of Urbino, belongs to the works, still rare to the Quattrocento, whose sequences form a real story. Under the title The Miracle of the Hostthe predelle of Ucello tells a story: a Jewish usurier lends money to a miserable woman who puts his coat in pledge. At the end of the loan, the poor man who is unable to repay her debt, the lender offers to return his property to him in exchange for a consecrated host. The borrower accepts this market and provides him with a holy species, which the usurier stabbed to try to destroy it, and which bleeds abundantly. Warned by this desecration, men in arms come to arrest the usurier and his family. A procession led by the Pope brings the host back to an altar, in order to re-conscreate it. Sin is preparing to be hanged, but it is saved in extremis by an angel. The Jewish usurier and his family are burned alive in public places.

Throughout his study, with erudition and acuity, Jean-Louis Schefer endeavors to document the apparent simplicity of the effective images of one of these “ business “Flight or desecration of hosts ¬¬” A symbolic murder on the sacrificial species of Christianity -, countless in the Middle Ages, which are repeated in Christian Europe, with their recurrences and their variants. To meet the religious, cultural and economic requirements of its sponsors, Ucello drew its subject from a Parisian history known by the name of “ Billet miracle ». In 1290, a lender on wages of Jewish confession, responding to the name of Jonathas and remaining on rue des Jardins, managed to convince a woman to give him a host (in return for a debt he would balance), to which he decided to inflict torture mimicking those of the passion of Christ. But the host, who turned out to be indestructible, began to bleed under the violent assaults of her possessor – she was successively pierced, cut, burned, boiled … denounced, the profane was tried and condemned to the stake ; His house was transformed into a church. Schefer describes this “ diverse “Prototypical of” First full scenario », Of which we find echoes in other stories, notably in Brussels (1369) or Passau (1477).

Designate the enemy

This Parisian legend of the utmost host, of which no archive bears the direct trace, and which has undoubtedly been composed purposely According to the black imagination of biblical parables and Christian sermons, is the dark reverse of the Eucharistic celebration and its series miracles, which the Catholic Church seeks to impose against the Greco-Byzantine Church of the Eastern Christians, held at a good distance since the schism of 1054, and its liturgical practices. Indeed, since the Lateran Council Iv (1215), the Church officially adopted the doctrine of the transubstantiation of the body and blood of Christ in bread and wine, as manifestations of the real presence of the Son of God. Against the icons of Orthodox worship, Western worship erects the sign that is the host and, to achieve its ends, the Catholic Church has fixed the rules of the doctrine, at the same time as that of their transgression, by the development of an anti -Judaic imagination. She can thus affirm her identity, while designating her enemy and her profound or blasphemous practices. This is the whole sense of “ Eucharistic theater What defines Schefer, where the Jew comes to play a doctrinal role against his will: that of perpetual deicide, through the sacrament attacks. The pioneering works of Léon Poliakov had shown how was established and disseminated through Europe, throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the imaginaries and the stereotypes of anti -Judaism: the wandering and usurier Jew, the secular Jew of the sepulcher, the infanticide Jew preparing the blood with the blood of young Christians to perpetuate murder of Christ, the eternal Jew regenerating by consumption of human blood … Christian Europe has not ceased to legislate, believing to protect himself from “ Jewish peril »: From the Synod of Clermont (535), Jews have been prohibited from exercising any public charge ; They are forced to wear a distinctive sign, rolle or infamy coat of arms (1215) ; They must live in circumscribed and controlled ghettos (1555) … The desecration of the host, painted by Ucello, according to the Parisian miracle of billets clearly belongs to this social and religious environment of fears and repression, as evidenced by the data summoned by this episode, binding the body and blood, sacrifice and money. Because it goes without saying that desecration lies as much in the attempt to destroy the host, as in the transmutation of the host into “ repurchase », Curred by a strictly material value.

The posterity of an imaginary

Jean-Louis Schefer is not interested in the aesthetic or plastic value of Ucello’s work, to which Pierre Francastel had once devoted a study): he does not seek to study it as a production of art or a milestone in the history of art, but as a place of crystallization, relays and dissemination of Christian antijudaism, then of the Western figures. To give to follow and understand this journey, Schefer draws up a sort of genealogy, unbushing in texts (Latin, Italians, French, Germans …) generally unknown and which had for the most part never been translated into French, but also in plays, stained glass and tapestries, currencies and insignia, paintings and gravings or popular images, the sources or the origins of this “ theological fiction As well as its continuities and its avatars. Because, to show its effectiveness and deep imprint on secularized mentalities, the historian also lists the extensions – he recalls as well as at the end of the XVIII^e century, in its Paris TablesLouis-Sébastien Mercier still mentions the billet church which, in the following century, will become the Protestant temple of the current rue des Archives-, even in the character of Shylock (from the Merchant of Shakespeare) or in Malta’s Jew by Christopher Marlowe, under the pen of Balzac (in The mass of the atheist), Proust or Anatole France (in The Pedauque Queen Rotisserie), or in the characters of Dracula by Bram Stoker.

This book is essential to understand the ways by which the imaginations are built and transmitted ; He is also an exciting case study on the path of stereotypes, from Christian antijudaism to modern anti -Semitism, on their unsuspected roots and on their inalienable power. There is no doubt that this work will join the work of Joshua Trachtenberg, Bernhard Blumenkranz, Gavin Langmuir or Helmut Walser Smith.