Cantigas

Jewish History (2008) 22: 139Y177
DOI: 10.1007/s10835-007-9056-1
·c Springer 2008
“Where are the Gothic Jewish women?

On the non-iconography of the Jewess
in the Cantigas de Santa Maria”
SARA LIPTON
Department of History, State University of New York at Stony Brook, N-301 Social and
Behavioral Sciences, Stony Brook, NY, 11794-4348, USA
E-mail: slipton@notes.cc.sunysb.edu
Abstract. No distinctive symbol, costume, or physiognomy was devised for Jewish

women in high medieval art, in sharp contrast to Jewish men, who from the late
eleventh century were endowed with increasingly graphic—and virulent—marks of
identity. This article attempts to explain this fact by comparing the outward
appearance, narrative role, and ideological import of Jewish men and women in the
Escorial Cantigas de Santa Maria. It argues that the caricatured male Jew epitomizes
crucial aspects of Jewish “testimony” as articulated by high medieval theologians: its
rigid obsolescence, its blind literalism, the severity and intractability of its law: qualities
that female flesh was considered ill-suited to convey. To recognize the inability of the
Jewish woman to embody Jewish ritual, exegesis, and law is not, however, to assert that
this figure has nothing to say about Judaism. The other component of the doctrine of
“Jewish witness”, which served to justify the continued presence of Jews within
Christendom, insisted on protecting Jews who respected Christian primacy, and held
out hope that they might ultimately turn to Christ. These are notions effectively
embodied in the sign of the Jewish woman, whose face and body encode receptivity to
dominance and potential for change. By mapping select aspects of Jewishness onto
hyper-gendered images, the illuminations of the Cantigas model the ideal—punishment
and conversion—while implicitly acknowledging the imperfect real, the necessary
compromises of mundane co-existence, reflecting Alfonso el Sabio_s meticulously
modulated Jewish policy*.
It may be that in Tolstoy_s Russia “every unhappy family is unhappy in

its own way,” but in the famous illuminated copy of the Cantigas de
Santa Maria (known as the Códice Rico), two Jewish families exhibit
apparently identical dysfunctions.1 These images constitute intriguing
* This essay is dedicated to Elka Klein_s family, in memory of a lovely day Elka and
I spent together looking at many of these images. Earlier versions were given at Tel
Aviv University and the 41st International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo. I thank
the organizers and participants at both venues for their comments and suggestions,
especially Simcha Goldin, Miri Rubin, Elisheva Baumgarten, Rebecca Winer, and
David Nirenberg. I am particularly indebted to David for an extremely helpful reading
of an earlier version of this essay, as well as for many stimulating discussions on the
topic of the “hermeneutic Jewess.”
140 SARA LIPTON
sources for the study of the role and representation of Jewish women in
medieval Iberia—a project to which Elka Klein contributed so much.2
Cantiga 4 recounts the story of the Jewish glassmaker of Bourges who
threw his son into a furnace for having received communion from the
Virgin Mary herself.3 Cantiga 108 tells a more obscure story about a
Jewish father who attempted to kill his deformed child. The central
panels of the illuminations (Figs. 1 and 2) to both these songs focus on the
tragic family drama, providing the artists with a rare opportunity to
Fig. 1. Cantiga 4. A Jewish glassmaker of Bourges tries to burn his son in a furnace for
having received communion from the Virgin Mary. The Virgin saves the boy. Cantigas
de Santa Maria. Biblioteca de San Lorenzo el Real, Escorial, ms. T.I.1, fol. 9v. After
Cantigas de Santa María. Edición facsímil del Códice T. I. l. de la Biblioteca de San
Lorenzo de El Escorial, Siglo XIII (Madrid: Edilán,1979). (Permission: Edilan-Ars Libris)
“WHERE ARE THE GOTHIC JEWISH WOMEN?” 141
Fig. 2. Cantiga 108. At the prayer of Merlin, the Virgin Mary causes the son of
“Cayphas,” a Jewish alfaquin, to be born with his head backwards. The father tries to
kill his son, but Merlin rescues the boy and uses him to convert Jews. Cantigas de Santa
Maria. Biblioteca de San Lorenzo el Real, Escorial, ms. T.I.1, fol. 155v. After Cantigas
de Santa María. Edición facsímil del Códice T. I. l. de la Biblioteca de San Lorenzo de El
Escorial, Siglo XIII (Madrid: Edilán, 1979). (Permission: Edilan-Ars Libris)
portray Jewish domestic life. They present us with strikingly incompat-

ible couples. In each, the villainous father immediately captures the eye:
he flaunts a dark and virulent visage, and displays a rich array of visual
signs (pointed hat, long beard, hooked nose, profile view) that in the
context of Gothic art unmistakably mark him as a Jew.4 The boys_
mothers, on the other hand, are far less distinct both graphically and
142 SARA LIPTON
symbolically. Their pale faces and headdresses practically fade into the
background, their features are small and regular, and their hair is fair.
Nothing in these women_s faces or clothing suggests Jewishness. Were
they not seated beside their hideous husbands, they could be mistaken
for Christian women.
These two women are hardly unique in this respect. In contrast to
many dozens of iconographically identifiable Jewish men in this manu-
script and beyond, there are almost no visually distinguishable Jewish
women in medieval Spanish art—or, for that matter, in high medieval art
as a whole.5 I do not mean to suggest that no Jewish women appear in
medieval Christian art. There are manifold depictions of Old Testament
heroines (such as Ruth, Judith, and Esther) and New Testament saints
and sinners (such as Mary Magdalene and Salome), not to mention the
near ubiquity of the Virgin Mary herself. Women are occasionally
included among the Israelite worshipers of the Golden Calf, the godless
crowds who distress Jesus by cluttering the Temple forecourt with profane
business, or the Jewish objects of Paul_s preaching.6 There are illus-
trations of anti-Jewish exempla that include such female Jewish char-
acters as the mothers of converts or the wives of host desecrators. Some
late medieval images portray Jewish women wearing identifying badges.7
But in all of these images, the Jewish women can be identified only by
context or very superficial external signs. Delete the setting, remove the
badges, eliminate the male companions, or efface the inscriptions, and
they could be Christian matrons or nuns. No distinctive symbol, costume,
or physiognomy was devised for Jewish women in high medieval art, in
sharp contrast to Jewish men, who from the late eleventh century were
endowed with increasingly graphic—and virulent—marks of identity.8
This contrast poses a fascinating challenge for any scholar committed to
the concept that representation matters, that the essence of an idea is
intimately, if not always obviously, related to the form in which it is
expressed.9 How is such iconographical divergence in the representation
of Jewish men and Jewish women to be understood? Were Jewish women
considered “less Jewish” than Jewish men, exempt from the sins heaped
iconographically upon the male Jew_s head? Or is another set of ideas
embedded in the anonymity of the visual Jewess?
In this essay I would like to explore the reasons why medieval Christian
artists never created an iconography of the Jewess. It is clearly not
because Jewish females are somehow inherently resistant to visual
“marking.” Women can be given hooked noses as easily as men, and the
variability of female hairstyles and clothing would seem to make them at
least as subject to iconographic manipulation as their male counterparts.
In fact, an array of visual cues did come to be associated with Jewish

women in later centuries. Diane Owen Hughes has shown that in quat-
trocento Italy the earring was used as a “sign” for Jewish women. The
Jewish women painted by Rembrandt and his contemporaries are
distinguished by their jewels and the deep, rich colors and luxurious
textures of their clothing. The exotic eastern Jewess of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century Orientalist painters inevitably combined lustrous
dark hair and eyes with seductive drapery and veils.10
Indeed, by the opening of the twentieth century, the symbol of the
Jewess had become such a staple of the western artistic vocabulary that
it could be used as a byword in art criticism. In the 1907 issue of The
Burlington Magazine, Lady St. John described a depiction of Queen
Esther in an eighteenth-century tapestry as “a beautiful example of the
Jewess type at its best.”11 In the previous issue of the same journal, the
critic Andrew Lang (author of the much-loved fairy tale collections)
displayed equal confidence in the transparency of the Jewess-type,
though his estimation of her looks was less positive. Bitterly criticizing
the restoration of a portrait of Mary Queen of Scots, he wrote: “To
Cripps the restorer we probably owe the aquiline hag with thick, arched
eyebrows, round eyes, and a Semitic beak, who does duty for the ever
unfortunate Queen of Scots .... not even five years of John Knox could
have converted her into [this] middle-aged Jewess....”12
The relative anonymity of the Jewish woman in medieval art is
likewise striking in light of her prominence in other contemporary media.
Whether as seductive femme fatale (ancestor of La Juive Fatale beloved
of romantic playwrights), virtuous Christian convert (prototype for
Shakespeare_s Jessica), or grieving mother of a tender, Marian-loving
son, the “Jewess” was a notably vivid figure in myriad medieval fictional
and historical texts. Caesarius of Heisterbach_s devout young Cistercian
convert who at the moment of her baptism suddenly notices her Jewish
father_s stench; the murderous siren of The Ballad of Sir Hugh, or The
Jew_s Daughter, who lures a Christian boy to his death; the promiscuous
hussy who convinces her gullible father that she is pregnant with the
Messiah until she gives birth to a girl; the Jewess of Toledo whose affair
with Alfonso VIII of Castile was (later) said to have brought rebellion and
disorder upon the kingdom; the “Estherke” of Polish legend with whom
King Casimir the Great (1310–1370) was obsessively in love—these are
but a handful of the dozens of Jewesses who haunted the medieval
Christian literary imagination.13 If Gothic art never created a visual
vocabulary for these readily recognizable literary prototypes, it cannot be
explained as either a lack of interest or a failure of artistic inventiveness.
144 SARA LIPTON
How, then, can it be explained? It is, of course, a tricky proposition at

best to argue from absence, to explain a non-event. Ideally, any attempt
to account for the non-appearance of the “Jewess” as a Gothic sign would
need to investigate, first, how the sign of the Jewish male functioned in
medieval art; second, how women in general functioned in Christian art
and thought; third, how the Jewess in particular functioned in Christian
texts; and, finally, how visual signification worked in Christian culture—
what Christian art was supposed to do.14 As a preface to that very large
project, in this article I will explore the outward appearance, narrative
role, and ideological import of the female Jew in the Escorial Cantigas,
one of the few surviving Gothic manuscripts with enough images of
Jewish men and women to allow for instructive comparison.15 I am
particularly interested in the relationship between representation and
meaning, form and content. I shall argue that in the Cantigas, gender
ideology, and more specifically the figure of the female Jew, is not
invoked in order to say something about either Jewish men or Jewish
women. Rather, the message, delivered in a specific historical frame-
work, serves very particular political purposes. That message thus helps
to illuminate both Alfonso_s approach to Jewish policy and the role that
art played in his exercise of kingship. To make this case, I shall begin by
looking more closely at the representation of the enigmatic Jewess_s
more vivid counterpart, the male Jew, then turn to an examination of
the female Jew, and finally explore what these gendered Jews mean in
their immediate and larger contexts.
Let us start by examining more closely the representation of the male
Jew in the Cantigas. The illustration to Cantiga 108 (Fig. 2), is entitled
“How Holy Mary caused the son of a Jew to be born with his head
backwards, as Merlin had asked of her.”16 The text of the song relates
that Merlin “happened to be discoursing” with a learned Jewish sage (in
Scotland, of all places!). When the Jew began to mock the doctrine of
the incarnation, asserting that it violates reason and the laws of nature,
Merlin became enraged, and prayed to the Virgin to punish the “false
believer.” Mary granted the request by causing the Jew_s pregnant wife
to give birth to a son with his head facing backwards. Upon seeing his
monstrous son, the horrified father, now called by the ominous name
“Cayphas,” tried to kill him. But Merlin saved the boy and from that
day forward used him to convert Jews.
The first two panels in the illustration depict the Jewish sage and
Merlin in the Jew_s shop. In both images, the Jew is the focal point. He
stands directly in the center of the composition and stares, glassy-eyed, in
the direction of Merlin, who is framed by a tower that seems to belong to a
Christian church. Like the Jewish glassmaker of Bourges in Cantiga 4,

Cayphas is dark-haired and full-bearded, and wears a pointed hat. He is
drawn in profile, accentuating his large and hooked nose, a characteristic
especially prominent in the second panel. Like so many of the male Jews
in this manuscript, therefore, he displays the typical iconographical
attributes of the Gothic Jew. This particular constellation of visual
symbols had not previously appeared in Iberian art. It was almost
certainly inspired by contemporary French manuscript illumination,
perhaps by the Bible moralisée, which pioneered much Jewish iconogra-
phy and a version of which is believed to have been presented to Alfonso
by Louis IX.17 In order to understand why and to what effect such
iconography was adopted in the Cantigas, we must ask, first, what each
of these particular attributes signified in the artistic tradition from
which they were derived, and then proceed to consider how they are to
be read in this specific context.
The most conspicuous symbol associated with the Jew is his pointed
hat. The two most comprehensive discussions of Jews_ clothing in the
Cantigas manuscripts assume that such hats were the distinguishing
“sign” imposed upon Jews by Alfonso X_s own legal code, the Siete
Partidas. This, however, does not seem tenable.18 Although Partida
7.24.11 does specify that “Jews must wear some sort of mark upon their
heads,” it makes no mention of a specific, pointed Jewish hat, and there
is little reason to think that such a hat was the designated mark.19
Further, the provision was specifically directed toward both male and
female Jews. Its opening line asserts: “Many errors and offensive acts
occur between Christian men and Jewish women and between Christian
women and Jewish men as a consequence of their living together in cities
and dressing alike.” This suggests that the law envisioned a gender-
neutral badge or garment, rather than specifically masculine headgear.20
The text also indicates that, at least until the issuing of the code, there
was no Jewish headgear that was standard and distinctive enough for
the law to recognize it and cited it as such. I am not aware of any
Spanish text either from before or after the promulgation of the Partidas
that refers to a specific pointed “Jewish hat.” 21 At the beginning of his
reign Alfonso X ordered Jews to refrain from ostentatious dress, but said
nothing about characteristic Jewish costume or headgear.22 Various
Iberian texts do refer to a characteristic Jewish mantle, called in Latin a
capa rotunda. Apparently the mantle was at first worn voluntarily on
the Sabbath and only later enjoined by law. But this is clearly distinct
from the Gothic pointed hat.23 Finally, Jews are depicted wearing the
same headgear in art from northern France, Germany, and England,
146 SARA LIPTON
where Jews were so different in custom, and presumably costume, from

their Iberian co-religionists. This suggests that we should not turn to
Castilian practice for help in deciphering the sign.
Rather than reflecting the appearance, real or prescribed, of Iberian
Jews, the pointed hat came to be associated with Jews in the Cantigas for
the same reason that it appears elsewhere in Christian art: because of its
cultural meaning.24 The pointed hat is, in fact, closely related to, and
sometimes indistinguishable from, the episcopal miter, which until about
1100 took the form of a conical hat. 25 It can be traced ultimately to the
peaked crowns of Persian potentates, and thus connoted antiquity,
eastern-ness, and priestly and/or royal authority.26 It was first used in
Christian art in conjunction with the wise men from the East, who
brought gifts to the infant Jesus.27 The sign came to be applied to the
Jew in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries as way of visually
articulating Judaism_s affiliation with the distant past. By the thirteenth
century the “Jewish hat” was a venerable and readily recognizable
symbol.28 In each period, place, and artwork the sign continued to evoke
the same basic qualities of archaism and authority and to align Jews
with those attributes, though it was deployed to varying and even
contradictory effect, depending upon context. 29
The sign of the beard perhaps overlapped a bit more with some Jews_
actual appearances than did the hat. But even then, it was neither purely
mimetic nor absolutely distinctive. Many male Jews, but not all, wore
beards, and Jews were not the only ones in medieval Christendom to do
so.30 Like the hat, the beard only became consistently—and never
inevitably—depicted on Jewish males in medieval art in the twelfth
century. Again like the hat, this is probably due as much to its conno-
tations in Christian culture as to its role in Jewish life. Although the beard
could signify many things in medieval Christendom, it generally conveyed
age, masculinity, and authority.31 Again, though, such qualities could be
given very different valences. Abbot Burchard of Bellevaux was
obviously reflecting negatively on Judaism, when in his Apologia de
barbis he wrote, echoing Augustine: “the [superceded] law was under a
cover and hidden as by a beard; grace, however, removed the cover of the
letter and shaved the covering beard....”32 On the other hand, apostles,
saints, abbots, and holy men are regularly portrayed as bearded in the
Cantigas (as in most Christian art), as is Christ himself, of course. In
such cases, the beard serves to distinguish religious figures of particular
wisdom, asceticism, and/or discipline from the average layman.33
If the hat and the beard could bear widely disparate connotations, the
valence accorded our villainous Jew_s dark complexion and hooked nose in
Gothic artistic practice is somewhat less equivocal. These features were

added to the sign of the Jew in the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
In spite of their apparent naturalism, and perhaps occasional fortuitous
resemblance to an actual human being, they are based on artistic rather
than human models. As Debra Higgs Strickland and Ruth Mellinkoff have
shown, both the dark complexion and the long or distorted nose are
derived from bestial and devilish imagery, and are generally—though not
inevitably—hostile in import.34
To say that antipathy underlies the rendering of Cayphas_s face,
however, hardly exhausts its meaning. For one thing, the Iberian setting
to which this stereotypical “Jewish” physiognomy has been transposed
complicates the issue. Jewish communities in northern Europe may have
had a somewhat higher percentage of dark-haired members than the
overall surrounding population. If so, one could imagine that the
overwhelmingly negative attitude toward darkness (venerable symbol of
evil) might convincingly and negatively be projected upon Jews in
Frankish and Germanic lands.35 But such visual distinctions (if they
existed at all, and this is far from certain36) are unlikely to have been
significant in Iberia. The Gothic “Jewish nose,” while generally hooked
or crooked in some way, is far too variable in shape to constitute any
kind of ethnic or national marker. It thus would have been as difficult as
complexion to map onto any “real” population group.37 Rather than
merely accepting the iconography of the Jewish male as a straightfor-
ward and unproblematic assertion of “difference” or iniquity, then, we
must recognize the ambiguities inherent in its elements, and examine its
context carefully to determine what these ambiguous elements might be
intended to convey.38 What aspects of Jews and Judaism are brought to
the fore, and why? What issues and debates were Jews associated with,
and why? How would these images have been read and interpreted, and
with what themes and concerns would they have resonated? Why are
Jews given center stage in these images?
In the context of Cantiga 108, the Gothic sign of the Jew takes on a
fascinating and peculiarly Castilian coloring, which is characterized by a
series of anomalous crossings and juxtapositions. The text of the Cantiga
tells us that the Jew is an alfaqui[n]—an ambiguous “arabism” that
could mean either secular philosopher/sage or religious legal authority.39
The illustration suggests that Alfonso (or his iconographer) was aware of
the word_s double meaning and deliberately sought to exploit it. The
Jew_s hat takes on a particularly miter-like aspect: its ribs or ridges are
far more typical of clerical than of Jewish headgear in Gothic art.40
Together with his beard and the book he holds under his left hand, the
148 SARA LIPTON
Jew_s hat establishes him as a religious authority, an exalted expert in

his antique law. But the vials and jars arrayed on the shelves behind him
are the stuff of carnal, not spiritual, knowledge. They emphatically con-
nect his antiquated religious learning to his very “modern” medical
privileging of reason and nature.41 Cayphas—a Scottish Jew with a
Hellenistic name—is thus constructed in text and image as a kind of
anachronistic hybrid, straddling and claiming authority in disparate
times and scholarly realms. His mature, dark, and ungainly caricatured
face (itself a recent artistic import from the north) reinforces this
perception of—and imposes a negative reading on—anachronism and
hybridity. It contrasts starkly with that of Merlin, who is depicted as a
humble, fair, and handsome young man, in spite of his status as a demon-
spawned wizard and the fact that he wears the dress of a learned doctor.
The incongruity inherent in the Jew_s face, headgear, and intellectual
pretensions is echoed in his physical stance and setting. His shop is flanked
by two tall, upward-pointing structures: a crenellated tower with an
Islamicizing key-hole arch to the left, and a church-like tower with a
gabled roof and quatrefoil window to the right. Together, these towers
serve as twin signs of the unified Iberian culture (ideally) effected through
Christian conquest. They exemplify the triumphant synthesis of Iberian
past and present, Muslim and Christian, that formed the cornerstone of
Alfonso_s intellectual, cultural, and political policies. Indeed, the overall
style of the manuscript itself is a fusion of French Gothic, Iberian, and
Hispano-Arabic illumination; it embodies Alfonso_s adaptation to the
Iberian context of French patterns, as well as of the militant and
universalizing Christianity associated with Louis IX_s France.42 Cayphas
himself, however, is framed by quite different forms: low, multi-colored
Italianate Romanesque arches that curve downward. Arches of this kind
appear nowhere else in the manuscript, and consequently look distinctly
archaizing and alien in comparison with the two towers.43 The Jew
assumes a rather pugnacious stance, resting his elbow and book on the
arabesque-decorated fabric that drapes the table in front. As has been
convincingly argued, such textiles in Alfonsine Castile signified not
exoticism or infidelity but nobility and luxury, and they were frequently
used to decorate both royal chambers and Christian altars. (This is
evident in the last panel of this illustration, as well as almost every other
folio in the manuscript).44
Taken together, this series of anomalous juxtapositions suggests that,
for all the apparent essentialism of his caricatured face, Cayphas_s offense
is not one of unchanging essence or identity, but one of active
transgression, boundary crossing. The secular knowledge represented by
his jars and vials is not the exclusive province of Jews in this manuscript;
Christians, too, are depicted as physicians, philosophers, and/or apothe-
caries dispensing identical wares.45 In the Cantigas, secular knowledge is
not sinister in and of itself. A range of miracles merely underscore the
fact that “science” is inferior in efficacy to religious faith and must be
subordinated to it. Cayphas, then, is not condemned for pursuing secular
knowledge or for simply being Jewish. He is condemned for refusing to
accept the parameters assigned both philosophy and Jewishness in
medieval Christendom. In imposing carnal reasoning upon spiritual
mysteries, in aggressively displaying his archaic and alien allegiances in
his clothing and architecture, and even in placing on his shop counter
(and under his elbow) cloth better suited for palace and church interiors,
he has violated social hierarchies, abused his wealth and economic
privileges, and misused his learning. Worst of all, he has assumed
inappropriate religious authority: like his New Testament namesake, he
dares to raise his finger arrogantly in the face of a humble and pious
opponent.46 The failure of vision that underlies the Jew_s exaltation of
his retrograde law and misapplication of his scientific knowledge is
hinted at in his initial glassy stare. It is highlighted more explicitly in the
penultimate panel, where the standing Jew refuses to “see” God_s work
in the miracle right before his eyes. Even more blatantly, of course, the
boy_s deformity literally embodies the deluded backwardness of his
father_s gaze.
Similar patterns are evident in the preceding song in the collection, a
tale devoted, in fact, to a Jewish woman. Cantiga 107 tells the story of a
Jewish woman of Segovia sentenced to death for an unspecified crime.47
According to the song, just as the woman was about to be thrown from a
cliff to her death, she cried: “O misery! How can anyone live who falls
from here, unless God wills it? But you, Queen Mary, in whom
Christians have faith, if what I have heard is true, that you come to
the help of wretched women who commend themselves to you ... come to
my aid, for I am in great need! If I live and stay well, I shall immediately
make myself a Christian before tomorrow comes.”48 The Virgin did,
indeed, come to her aid, and the Jewess miraculously landed unharmed.
Praising God, she made her way to a church, told the assembled
Christians of the miracle, and asked to be baptized.
The first two panels of the illumination (Fig. 3) each show the Jewess
surrounded by a crowd of men, presumably Jews. The crowd is relatively
diverse: some of the men are young and clean-shaven, while one or two are
bearded. But at least two figures in each of the first three panels are
clearly marked as Jews: they are either very dark or elderly and grey-
150 SARA LIPTON
Fig. 3. Cantiga 107. A Jewish woman convicted of a crime is cast from a cliff and prays
to the Virgin Mary. The Virgin saves her, and she converts. Cantigas de Santa Maria.
Biblioteca de San Lorenzo el Real, Escorial, ms. T.I.1, fol. 154. After Cantigas de Santa
María. Edición facsímil del Códice T. I. l. de la Biblioteca de San Lorenzo de El Escorial,
Siglo XIII (Madrid: Edilán, 1979). (Permission: Edilan-Ars Libris)
bearded, wear pointed hoods or hats, are drawn in profile, and/or have
long or curved noses. As in the Cantiga 108 illumination, these imported
Gothic signs of Jewish antiquity and perfidy are juxtaposed with
specifically Iberian forms. The key-hole arches in the aqueduct behind
the crowd are a case in point. John Keller and Richard Kinkade were
perplexed by these arches because they bear no resemblance to the great
Roman aqueduct in Segovia. But, seen symbolically, the arches in the
illumination help mark the city as Alfonso_s ideal of a “modern” Castilian

town: a culturally integrated but Christian-dominated space.49 The Jewish
sentence about to be executed is inappropriate in such a precinct because
it is the antithesis of Alfonso_s merciful, penitential, Marian Christian
ideal: a biblical or talmudic law that is antiquated, rigid, and unforgiving.
These are precisely the qualities encapsulated in the appearances of the
marked Jewish men.50 Jewish men again bear crucial, though negative,
witness. In the fourth panel, the dark and bearded Jewish male on the cliff
points in wonder at the miraculous survival of the woman, yet for all his
curiosity he sees not. Like the deformed boy in the previous Cantiga, he
can only look backward, remaining utterly blind to the Virgin emerging
behind him from the clouds. In spite of the marvel he has witnessed, he
is steadfast in his recalcitrance (there is no indication in the song that
any Jew other than the condemned woman converts).
Let us now compare the representation and role of the Jewish woman
in the same images. In contrast to her husband (and like the wife of the
glassmaker of Bourges), Cayphas_s wife shows no trace of age or antiquity,
eastern-ness or foreignness, pride or obstinacy. She exhibits no hybridity
or incongruity in costume, face, framing, or posture. Like the (presumably
Jewish) women attending her, she wears a simple veil of white—the color
of purity, or perhaps just of blankness. Her facial features are small and
even, indistinguishable from any of the hundreds of Christian women
depicted in the manuscript.51 The walls of her bedchamber are pale
white, and she is sheltered by pointed Gothic arches. The curtain behind
her is perhaps vaguely reminiscent of the veil concealing the Holy of
Holies in the Temple, but in the context of Gothic arches it is perhaps
more evocative of the choir divider in a Christian church, sometimes
explicitly called a veil.52 (On the other hand, since most beds depicted in
the Cantigas have some sort of hanging above or beside them, the
curtain may signify nothing at all beyond a desire to keep out drafts.)
Just as her appearance and setting differ from those of her husband, so
does her manner. She gazes upon her misshapen offspring with evident
shock, but her open-palmed gesture is one employed in medieval art to
express submission and acquiescence.53 In panel four of Cantiga 108
(which closely echoes panel four of Cantiga 4), we see the wife clutching
her face in horror and grief at the violence her husband is about to
commit. In spite of the child_s deformity, this mother loves and wishes to
nurture her son. In sum, there is nothing specifically antique or exotic,
aggressive or transgressive in the looks or behavior of this Jewish
woman. Rather, she fulfills familiar and arch-typically female roles: she
lies passively; she gives birth; like the patient Griselda of Chaucer_s
152 SARA LIPTON
Clerk_s Tale, she is a helpless and resigned victim of fate and her
husband_s will; she loves her child. And finally, in the last panel, she, or
one of her sister Jewish women, exercises the ultimate female
prerogative: she changes. Although the text of the Cantiga says only
that Merlin and the marvelous boy converted many Jews, the image
embodies these converts in the person of a single Jewish woman.54
The condemned Jewess of Cantiga 107 likewise shares none of her
male co-religionists_ exaggerated features or vivid coloring.55 The veil
wound around her head at first glance somewhat resembles a turban,
but it is identical to the head-dresses of the Christian women who stand
sponsor at her final conversion. The only distinctive aspect of this woman_s
appearance is the fact that she wears a simple white shift—a consequence of
her condemned status, presumably, but also a visual sign suggestive of
purity, passiveness, or, again, perhaps just blankness.56 Indeed, if there is
any unifying quality to the depictions of Jewish women in the Cantigas, it
is indeterminacy. Their faces are neutral, their clothing indistinct, their
gestures are listless, and their social positions are weak. There is something
particularly flat and lifeless in the portrayal of this woman. Aside from her
hand gestures, she is remarkably static: her shift hardly even flutters as
she falls, and she seems more akin to the vessel in which she is eventually
immersed than to the active, colorful, vibrant male Jews who menace her.
Like the blond heroines favored for that very reason by Alfred Hitchcock,
this pale woman is a blank slate, waiting to be written upon. And she is,
indeed, acted upon in the most violent imaginable way: she is turned
completely upside down, utterly reversed. It is this suffering, apparently,
that cures her “blindness.” In diametric opposition to the Jewish male
above her, who sees but does not believe, this Jewess believes without
having to see. She displays faith in the Mother of God without the
stimulus of any visual proof: it is not until after her prayer is completed
and the miracle effected that the Virgin materializes to bless her.
The same visual and conceptual qualities characterize the sole other
Cantiga featuring a female Jewish protagonist. Cantiga 89 tells the tale
of a Jewish woman who converted to Christianity after the Virgin Mary
helped her safely through a difficult labor.57 In the illumination (Fig. 4),
the Jewish woman is distinguished only by her swollen belly. As is the
case with her small daughter, the Jewish midwives (or neighbors) in the
second, third, and fourth panels, and the (presumably Christian) women
in the final panel, her skin and hair are fair, her costume is unremarkable,
and her features are small and even.58 Throughout the images, the Jewish
woman_s posture and gestures express passivity and weakness: she
throws her hands up in pain and despair, she leans helplessly upon her
Fig. 4. Cantiga 89. A Jewish woman experiences a difficult childbirth and prays to the
Virgin Mary. The Virgin Mary saves her, and she and her children convert. Cantigas de
Santa Maria. Biblioteca de San Lorenzo el Real, Escorial, ms. T.I.1, fol. 131. After
Cantigas de Santa María. Edición facsímil del Códice T. I. l. de la Biblioteca de San
Lorenzo de El Escorial, Siglo XIII (Madrid: Edilán,1979). (Permission: Edilan-Ars Libris)
attendants, she lies prone beside her newborn baby, she stands a
hesitant petitioner before the door of the church, she sits naked in a
baptismal font as the holy water flows over her head.
Image after image from this, as well as other Gothic manuscripts and
monuments, are formed in the same mold. There are crowds of nameless
Jewish men, with nary a female in sight. Alternately, there are dark and
distorted Jewish men, who contrast with pale or neutral Jewish
women.59 Nor is it just good Jewesses, the loving mothers or Jessica
154 SARA LIPTON
prototypes, whose looks are so much less distinctive and disturbing than
those of Jewish men. The obdurate Jewish midwives of Cantiga 89, who
flee in disgust at their neighbor_s invocation of the Virgin, are as fair as
she, or for that matter as the Virgin Mary herself. The Israelite women
in a Regensburg Bible manuscript of c. 1200 mimic their spouses in
engaging in misbegotten worship, but not in displaying distinctive
hairstyles or headgear.60 Even the truly notorious and evil Jewesses,
who very occasionally make an appearance in Gothic art, display no
distinctive visual traits. Salome, whose deadly dark beauty so inflamed
the imaginations of Romantic artists, in Gothic art is as pale and
delicate as any noble lady: lethal in act, but visually benign (Fig. 5).
Fig. 5. The Beheading of John the Baptist. Salome, who holds a bowl and looks on from
the left, displays the features and headdress of any elegant Christian lady. Livre
d_images de Madame Marie (Hainault, Belgium, c. 1285–90). Bibliothèque nationale,
Paris, ms. nouv. acq. fr. 16251, fol. 57v. (Permission: Bibiothèque nationale de France)
How, then, can we account for the contrasting approach taken by

Gothic artists to the Jewish man and the Jewish woman, and what does
each figure say in the context of the Cantigas? I hope even this very
brief survey has convincingly demonstrated that the caricatured Jewish
males in the images we have looked at, for all their vivid corporeality,
must be considered first and foremost symbols, iconographical expres-
sions of certain ideas about Judaism. Transformed into a visual sign,
the Gothic Jewish male becomes a visible embodiment of the doctrine of
“Jewish witness,” which is usually attributed to Saint Augustine. In
various different works Augustine argued that Jews were to be tolerated
in Christendom because in preserving the true ancient text of Scripture
they testified to the truth of prophecy (although they were blind to its
true meaning), because their flesh was living proof of the historicity of
the crucifixion and their own criminal role in it, because their defeat at
the hands of the Romans and current dispersal among the nations
testified to Christian triumph, and because they would convert at the end
of days.61 It is not Augustine, however, but high medieval theologians
and canonists who most directly influenced Alfonso_s approach to Jews.
In referring not just to the Jews_ dispersal but to their captivity, his law
code echoes the harsher rhetoric of such authors as Bernard of Clairvaux
and Thomas Aquinas.62
This more negative tone did not, however, negate the centrality of
Jewish witness in medieval Christian thought. In 1199 Pope Innocent
III confirmed the Christian policy of toleration, writing, “Although in
many ways the disbelief of the Jews must be reproved, since
nevertheless through them our own faith is truly proved, they must not
be oppressed grievously by the faithful as the prophet says: ‘Do not slay
them, lest these be forgetful of Thy Law,_ as if he were saying more
openly: ‘Do not wipe out the Jews completely, lest perhaps Christians
might be able to forget Thy Law, which the former, although not
understanding it, present in their books to those who do understand
it.”63 Aquinas concurred, asserting, “From the fact that the Jews
observe their ceremonies, in which the truth of the faith that we hold
was once prefigured, comes this good: that we have witness to our faith
from our enemies, and what we believe is represented to us as in a
figure.”64 And in the same letter in which he underscored the Jews_
deserved captivity Bernard of Clairvaux notes, “The Jews are indeed
for us living letters of Scripture, constantly representing the Lord_s
passion. They have been dispersed all over the world for this reason:
that in enduring just punishments for such a crime wherever they are,
they may be witnesses of our redemption.”65
156 SARA LIPTON
As Alfonso himself laments in the Siete Partidas,66 the actual Jews

living in Christendom by no means consistently looked or acted as
Christian theology held they should, all too often projecting neither
subordination nor stasis. In the idealized world of Christian imagery, by
contrast, the Jew could be restored to his proper role. Tokens of archaic
authority display the Jew_s affiliation with an obsolete law and the
outmoded past. Signs of ugliness proclaim his misunderstanding of that
law and consequent carnality and perfidy, even fiendishness. The male
Jew_s repeated failure to see demonstrates graphically his own
exegetical and spiritual blindness and the superiority of Christian
vision. By heightening visible distinctions and highlighting the impor-
tance of proper vision and visual response, the images of the Cantigas
present a “corrected” image of a recognizably erring Jew, who eternally
glares at and yet fails to recognize the truth and who is properly
punished for his presumption when he dares to challenge Christian
superiority. Dominated on the Gothic page as he could not always be in
life, the caricatured Jew—now passive object of the Christian viewer_s
controlling gaze—has indeed become a reliable figure of, and witness to,
Christian truth and triumph.
And this was not a part the Jewish woman was expected to play. This
is largely because of the nature of the issues at stake. From the Christian
perspective, Jewish “testimony”—both positive and negative—rested
upon Jewish scripture, law, and ceremony, which were seen as the unique
province of the Jewish male. Jewish women neither preserved nor
distorted the words of Scripture, they did not dispute about Christian
image-worship, they exercised no inappropriate religious or political
authority, and they did not inscribe the law_s superseded and bloody
ceremonies on their own bodies. Some aspects of medieval Jewish religious
practice may have reinforced this view among Christians. For example,
women were not expected to attend synagogue as regularly as men, in
contrast to Christian women, who were apparently considered more
regular churchgoers than men (note that no women are ever depicted in
synagogue interiors or participating in Jewish rites in the Cantigas,
whereas Christian women are frequently shown in church).67
And most importantly, unlike Jewish men, they looked exactly as they
were supposed to; that is, they looked like women. For there is an even
more basic reason why Jewish women could never embody the Jewish
relationship to law and scripture: medieval Christian gender ideology.68 In
the clerical imagination, at least, the true faith was most perfectly
enshrined in the Christian male, and especially the male cleric.69 Just as
Eve was subject to Adam, who was made in God_s image, the Christian
layman was subject to the Christian priest, Christ_s vicar on earth, a

physically perfect and intact version of man.70 The Christian woman
needed to be controlled because, though a receptacle of grace, she was at
best a weak and leaky vessel. She was mutable and fluid, open and
vulnerable, and her faith was feared to be no firmer than her flesh. Thus,
as Jocelyn Wogan-Browne points out, much of the thirteenth-century
Rule for Women Recluses “focuses on entry and impermeability,
enclosure and leakage, sealing and opening.... The recluse_s bodily
experience in the cell is represented as a constant struggle for regulation
of these permeabilities.”71 Or as Andreas Capellanus put it in De Amore:
“Woman is regularly found inconstant, because no woman is strength-
ened by so much firmness regarding any matter, that her conviction
cannot be changed by anyone_s light sweet-talk in a short space of time.
Woman is indeed like melting wax, always ready to assume fresh shape
and to be molded to the imprint of anyone_s seal.”72 If she is changeable
herself, still more ominous is her ability to change men. As an abbot of
the monastery of Saint Victor-de-Paris warned, “a woman_s beauty can
make even a wise man apostatize.” This warning is concretized in an
image in the Rothschild Canticles (c. 1320) that depicts a beautiful
woman enticing a man away from veneration of the crucifix.73
If the carnality of the Christian woman was inimical to spiritual
fortitude (whether her own or that of her male viewer), this was even more
true of the Jewish woman, who could not escape her sexuality through
celibacy. Although the murderously seductive Juive Fatale of preachers_
nightmares might seem the moral obverse of the innocent and impres-
sionable Jewess of the missionary_s dreams, these two Jewess-types
share an essential feature: each in her own way signals religious
instability. The sexual and/or romantic liaisons into which Jewesses
draw their Christian lovers sometimes end in the corruption of the
Christian men, and sometimes in the salvation of the Jewish women. In
either case, however, the Jewess is a powerful and disruptive force for
change. The mothers of the impressionable young Jewish boys in the
miracle tales, too, exist only to transform, either through conversion or
through death. This is even true for one of the most notorious Jewish
women in literature: the woman, who suffering from hunger during
Titus_s siege of Jerusalem, kills, roasts, and eats her own child.
According to Josephus, she was motivated not by active evil but by
bodily weakness and uncontrollable impulse, and was as false to her own
people and her maternal duty as she was to God. As Josephus put it:
“she consulted only her passion and the necessity she was in....Snatching
up her son, who was a child sucking at her breast, she said, “O thou
158 SARA LIPTON
miserable infant! For whom shall I preserve thee in this war, this famine,
and this sedition?”74 In their inconstancy, then, these literary Jewesses
embody the quality most frequently assigned to women in medieval
anti-feminist literature. Of course, this sexual identity could also work to
their favor: Anna Abulafia has noted that “pliable Jewish women ...
were considered an easier prospect for conversion than men.”75 Matthew
Paris wrote that, when a Jew had slimed feces on an image of Mary, his
wife rescued it “out of pity for another woman,” and the condemned
criminal Jewess of Cantiga 107 explicitly spoke to the Virgin Mary
“woman to woman.”76 In the Christian imagination, for better or for
worse, the Jewess_s female-ness trumped her Jewishness, just as the
Christian woman_s sex was often feared to engulf her faith.
This, I believe, is why Gothic art had no need to invent an “idealized”
or “corrected” sign for the Jewish woman. Carnal she might be, yet hers
was not the carnality of materialistic literalism and bloody ritual, but of
pliability and passion (when Gothic artists did, very occasionally, attempt
to express the seductive carnality of Jewishness in gendered terms, they
did so by means, not of the Jewish female, but of the female
personification of Judaism, Synagoga77). And Christian artists already
had a venerable sign with which to signify these qualities: the female
body. From the eleventh century on, artists conveyed seduction and
temptation by highlighting through posture the softness and flexibility
of the female body, by emphasizing through line the curved roundness of
women_s breasts and buttocks, by emphasizing through color the
delicacy of woman_s skin and succulence of woman_s lips, and by
drawing attention (through either veiling or unveiling) to the luxurious
beauty of women_s long hair.78 Unlike the literary female, who required
verbal modifiers and narrative context to clarify her nature, this visual
symbol had such power—the unmediated impact of woman_s outward
beauty—that the painted woman needed no further embellishment.
When the author/s of The Ballad of Sir Hugh, or the Jew_s Daughter
wanted to underscore the Jewess_s dangerous allure, it was not enough
to simply call her a woman. He had to enlist words evocative of the
iconography of the Fall, describing her as brandishing “an apple red and
green,” or alternately as dressed in [serpent-like] green.79 Conversely,
when Gothic artists wanted to comprehensibly characterize Satan_s
treachery, all they had to do was endow him with a female face.80 The
Gothic Jewess_s very hair, face, and limbs proclaimed that she was
lustful and deceptive, and/or vulnerable and changeable. Her head-
covering was a sign of her subordination. And if she masked her evil with
beauty, well, beauty was already assumed to be a veil for female vice. As
Proverbs 31:30 tells us in relation to woman, “Charm is deceptive and

beauty is fleeting.” There was thus no need to “out” or “mark” the
Jewish woman iconographically, as the male Jew had to be “marked.”
The Jewish woman paradoxically wore her disguise on her sleeve. Nor
does depicting the subordination of the Jewish woman perform the same
restorative religious function as depicting the subordination of the
Jewish man. Since the visually assertive Jewish woman would be seen as
breaking gender boundaries more than religious ones, her subordination
would be read as a restoration of gender hierarchies. Art, after all, had
long been accustomed to taming female beauty with the viewer_s
controlling gaze.81 Gender ideology, so often detrimental to Christian
women, thus works in the Jewish woman_s favor, and goes a long way
toward explaining the hyper-feminized and strangely sympathetic
representation of Jewish women in the texts and images of the Cantigas,
as in so many other Marian miracle tales.
I do not think we can leave our analysis there, however. A complicating
factor is the fact that Muslim women are not shown as visually
indeterminate, nor are they more likely to convert than Muslim men in
the Cantigas. If femaleness was regarded as inevitably tantamount to
religious instability and missionary susceptibility, one would expect that
Moorish women would share the female Jew_s neutral appearance, and
also serve as powerful models for positive religious change. But this is
not the case. Three Muslim men convert to Christianity in the Cantigas,
as compared to only two Muslim women, and one of these female
conversions is only implied. In the illustration to Cantiga 46, the wife of
one of the male converts stands beside the font in which her husband is
baptized, but her conversion is not shown.82 Moreover, Muslim women,
unlike Jewish women, are often visually marked, by unique and char-
acteristic veils.83 Indeed, in the sole image of a Muslim woman con-
verting (Cantiga 167), she is endowed with notably dark and luxurious
hair: just the kind of visual distinction that would in later art be used to
characterize the female Jew and that is so conspicuously absent here.
How, then, we can explain the visual neutrality of our Jewish women? I
have suggested above that in the Cantigas, as in other Gothic monu-
ments, the caricatured male Jew epitomizes crucial aspects of Jewish
“testimony” as Bernard, Innocent, Aquinas, and others articulated it: its
rigid obsolescence, its blind literalism, the severity and intractability of
its law: qualities that female flesh was considered ill-suited to convey. To
recognize that the figure of the Jewish woman is unable to embody
Jewish ritual, exegesis, and law is not, however, to assert that in the
Cantigas (or beyond) this figure has nothing to say about Judaism. The
160 SARA LIPTON
negative qualities associated with the caricatured male encompass only

one dimension of the Christian theological and legal approach to
Judaism. The other component of the doctrine of “Jewish witness,”
which after all served to justify the continued presence of Jews within
Christendom, insisted on protecting Jews who respected Christian
primacy, and held out hope that they might ultimately turn to Christ.
These are notions effectively embodied in the sign of the Jewish woman,
whose face and body encode weakness and pliability, receptivity to
dominance and potential for change. The apparently dysfunctional
Jewish family that inhabits the pages of the Cantigas is, in fact, a
prerequisite for the continued functioning of the Jewish minority within
Christendom. In Christian theology the particularized, exclusive obsti-
nacy represented by the father had to be balanced by the universalized,
fluid humanity of the mother.
It is thus important not to confuse the iconographical signs of the
caricatured “Jewish man” and the blandly comely “Jewish woman”
with actual medieval Jewish men and women. Rather, each sign is an
exaggerated abstraction, representing the extreme poles of a theological
approach that has been explicitly labeled “bi-polar.”84 When, as in the
Bible moralisée, the more eschatologically hopeful of the signs (the
figure of the female Jew) is absent, the effect is to focus attention on
the Jews_ past and current religious trespasses, as well as the social and
economic crimes they were believed to inspire. This strategy perfectly
suits the Bible moralisée, which was designed by reformist clerics in
part in order to goad the king of France into adopting more stringent
anti-Jewish measures.85 When, as in the illustrations to Cantigas 4, 107,
and 108, these bifurcated figures of Jewishness are presented in close
juxtaposition, the effect is quite different. These illustrations present a
nuanced view of the full breadth of the Christian theological approach
to Judaism. In mapping select aspects of Jewishness onto hyper-
gendered images, they model the ideal—punishment and conversion—
while implicitly acknowledging the imperfect present, the necessary
compromises of mundane co-existence.86 Two aggressively violent and
willfully blind fathers are destroyed and three humbly supplicant women
are “saved.” But let us not be so dazzled by the central players in this
redemptive drama that we fail to note the “extras” in the background—
the Jewish neighbors, attendants, congregants, and observers who
neither die nor are born again, and whose appearances hover midway
between dark grotesqueness and fair gentility. The tendency of the
artists to restrict “stereotypical” Jewish features to only one or two Jews
in any given image—a commonplace in Gothic art—serves here to
deflect guilt away from the Jews_ religious/communal identity and to-
wards specific, and fairly narrowly construed, transgressions of their
assigned role and subordinate status. The implicit message is that Jews
who do not perform such actions are not tainted in a similar way. The
Jews in the penultimate panel of Cantiga 108, who sit and listen re-
spectfully to Merlin, behave according to prescription, and so share
neither Cayphas_s distorted features, his arrogant posture, his miter-like
headgear, nor his fiery fate. But neither do they partake of the salvific
climax, which is condensed in the body of a single convert.
The effect of this meticulous charting of a middle way between
idealized extremes is to endorse a meticulously modulated Jewish policy,
implemented only partially in Alfonso_s realm but fully realized in his art.
The images of the Cantigas graphically demonstrate Alfonso_s commit-
ment to suppressing insolence, eradicating blasphemy, and repressing
perfidy. Alfonso at the same time was confidently asserting his right and
ability to safely exploit Jewish knowledge and expertise, and to incor-
porate such knowledge into a thoroughly Christian framework. Just as
much of the rhetoric and imagery aimed against the Jews and usury
paradoxically helped facilitate the creation of a Christian credit
economy, by limiting and focusing the financial practices identified as
evil, so too did these images of punishment and conversion paradoxically
create space for the continued residence (and exploitation) of Jews in
Castile.87
Alfonso X had ample reason for wanting to emphasize in his art (and to
reassert in his law code) the delicate balance inherent in the doctrine of
witness, and his determination to maintain that balance. Alfonso in fact
spent no detectible energy or resources trying to convert Jews, much to
the annoyance of his son-in-law King James I of Aragon.88 A creative
ruler with lofty imperial and intellectual ambitions, Alfonso worked
energetically to reconcile Christian theological and legal traditions with
the complex realities of Castilian society. Jews were central to his royal
program in a variety of ways: they served at Alfonso_s court, collected
his taxes, ministered to his health, and translated the Arabic scientific
works with which he was so captivated, and through which he sought to
create a specifically Iberian intellectual system.89 The king_s expansion-
ist and centralizing policies exposed him—and the Jews who worked for
him—to criticism on the part of clerics, resentment on the part of his
subjects, and, eventually, rebellion on the part of his son and nobles.90
By about the year 1280, when the Cantigas Escorial manuscript was
begun, Alfonso was stymied in almost all areas of rule: he had to retract
the general fuero he had tried to impose on the entire kingdom, revoke a
162 SARA LIPTON
series of innovative taxes and tolls, give up his imperial ambitions, and,
finally, surrender royal power to his son.91 In one area alone did Alfonso
continue to display the ambition and creativity that had marked the
early years of his reign—in cultural production, especially literature and
art. Creating the Cantigas was a form of exercising sovereignty: he
“painted” his ideal realm as God “colored” the world.92 In lieu of actually
converting or persecuting Jews, Alfonso regulated the colors of their
clothing and synagogues in life, and exercised the ultimate power to save
or condemn on the parchment page, engulfing the vivid, criminal male
Jew in even brighter red flames, and immersing the pale and pliant
female Jew in even clearer baptismal waters. David Nirenberg has
recently read Sancho IV_s re-telling of the story of Alfonso VIII and the
Jewess of Toledo in his Castigos e documentos para bien vivir as veiled
criticism of Sancho_s own father, Alfonso X.93 The images of the
Cantigas we have examined here suggest that this rhetorical strategy
was actually echoing and subverting a representational strategy adopted
by Alfonso X himself—that the association of the figure of the Jewess
with Castilian kingship originated in Alfonso_s own art. The selfsame
gendered sign that Alfonso X deployed to demonstrate his mastery and
orthodoxy was eventually enlisted to proclaim his subservience and
deviance. The Gothic Jewess, enigmatic and unmarked as she may be,
was a potent and flexible figure indeed.
Notes
1. Biblioteca de San Lorenzo el Real, El Escorial palace, near Madrid, MS T.I.1. The
manuscript was made in c. 1280 for King Alfonso X of Castile and Leon (r. 1252-
84). A closely related manuscript is Biblioteca Nazionale, Florence, MS Banco Rari
20 (formerly MS II.I.213). The fundamental tool for study of the Escorial
manuscript is: Alfonso X el Sabio, Cantigas de Santa Maria: Edición facsímil del
Códice T. I. l. de la Biblioteca de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Siglo XIII (Madrid:
Edilán, 1979); and its companion study volume: El ‘Códice Rico_ de las “Cantigas”
de Alfonso X el Sabio, T. I. l. de la Biblioteca El Escorial (Madrid: Edilán, 1979).
For a comprehensive survey of art historical studies of the manuscript (at least up
to 1985), see Ana Dominguez Rodriguez, “La miniatura del ‘scriptorium_ alfonsi,”
in Jose Mondejar and Jesus Montoya, eds., Estudios alfonsíes: Lexicografía, lírica,
estética y política de Alfonso el Sabio (Granada: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras,
Instituto de Ciencias de la Educación, 1985), 127-61. This can now be supple-
mented by the works cited in John C. Ellis, “Textual-pictorial Convention as
Politics in the ‘Cantigas de Santa Maria_ (Ms. Escorial T.I.1) of Alfonso X el Sabio
(Spain),” (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachussetts at Amherst, 2003). Francisco
Prado-Vilar has written a thoughtful and interesting study of representation,
praxis, and nation-building in depictions of Muslims in the Cantigas, though its
observations apply less comfortably to Jews: “The Gothic Anamorphic Gaze:
Regarding the Worth of Others,” in Cynthia Robinson and Leyla Rouhi, eds.,
Under the Influence: Questioning the Comparative in Medieval Castile (Leiden: E.
J. Brill, 2004), 67-100.
2. See Elka Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power in Barcelona (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2006). For Klein_s work on Jewish women, see
“Public Activities of Catalan Jewish Women,” Medieval Encounters 12 (2006): 48-
61; “Splitting Heirs: Patterns of Inheritance among Barcelona_s Jews,” Jewish
History 16 (2002): 49-71; “The Widow_s Portion: Law, Custom, and Marital
Property among Medieval Catalan Jews,” Viator 31 (2000): 147-63.
3. “Esta é como Santa Maria guardou ao fillo do judeu que non ardesse, que seu padre
deitara no forno:” Cantigas de Santa Maria, ed. Walter Mettmann (Vigo: Edicións
Xerais de Galicia, 1981), 1:111-14. This miracle is one of the more popular of all
Marian tales. It appears in Gregory of Tours, Vincent of Beauvais, and myriad
miracle collections, and it is illustrated in numerous manuscripts and monuments,
including Bourges Cathedral. Miri Rubin discusses the tale and its illustration:
Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1999), 7-28. For a list of manuscripts containing the tale, see the
Oxford Cantigas database: http://csm.mml.ox.ac.uk (accessed 4 September 2007).
4. I am aware of the debates over the use of the word “Gothic,” but do not wish to
engage them here. In this essay, I use the term simply to denote artworks created in
Western Europe between 1200 and 1400.
5. For example, not a single figure among the tens of thousands of people that crowd
the pages of the Bible moralisée can confidently be identified as a female Jew. This
is in contrast to roughly 550 depictions of Jewish men: Sara Lipton, Images of
Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). It has thus been almost ten years
since I began to ask the question that forms the title of this essay: “Where are the
Jewish Women?”
6. See, among other examples, Heinz Schreckenburg, Die Juden in der Kunst Europas:
Ein historischer Bildatlas (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1996), 116, fig.
2; 117, fig. 5; 118, fig. 7; 155, fig. 1 (where one figure may be a woman); 222, fig. 5;
and 228, fig. 6.
7. For images of the exemplum of the Jewish Boy and of host desecration, see Rubin,
Gentile Tales. For images of Jewish women wearing badges, see Schreckenburg,
Juden in der Kunst Europas, 347 and 349. See too the famous sixteenth-century
drawing of the Jewish woman holding a goose in the Hessische Landes-und-
Hochschulbibliothek, Darmstadt.
8. There are one or two apparent exceptions to this general rule, but they do not hold
up to close inspection. The Holkham Picture Bible (British Library, London, Add.
Ms. 47680), for example, shows the wicked wife of the Jewish blacksmith with a
distorted nose. But there are so many different kinds of distorted noses in this
manuscript, used on so many different types of iniquitous characters, including
peasants, artisans, and soldiers, as well as Jews, that I do not think the
blacksmith_s wife_s nose can be said to constitute a “Jewish” nose. And I cannot
agree with Bernhard Blumenkranz that the Jewish woman in the late fourteenth-
century Book of Hours [Kongelige Bibliothek, Copenhagen, Thott 574, fol. 14v
(Blumenkranz erroneously cites fol. 13v)] is “lightly caricatured:” Le juif médiéval
au miroir de l_art chrétien (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1966), 22, fig. 11. Her face
164 SARA LIPTON
seems to me only to express grief, not difference. Her head is far less outsized than
those of the men; her complexion is fairer; her body, unlike theirs, is not distorted in
any way. Her knotted veil, however, is similar to those often shown on Synagoga
personified, and may be a rare attempt to create a “Jewish” female headdress.
Blumenkranz does note that a Jewish woman in a Joshua initial is “less
caricatured” than the Jewish men: Juif médiéval, 31. The woman labeled “Avegaye”
in the 1233 English Exchequer receipt roll (Public Records Office, London, E401/
1565 M1) is a more complicated case, which so far as I can tell had no artistic
repercussions. In spite of the title of his article, Henry Abramson discusses no
iconographically identifiable Jewish women in medieval imagery: “A Ready Hatred:
Depictions of the Jewish Woman in Medieval Antisemitic Art and Caricature,”
Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 62 (1996): 1-18. Of the
images Abramson analyzes, one from the fourteenth century depicts a visually
unmarked Jewish woman, and the rest either depict the abstract personification
Synagoga, or are post-medieval.
9. Louis Marin_s articulation of this concept in relation to painting is still stimulating:
see his articles collected in On Representation, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2004).
10. Diane Owen Hughes, “Distinguishing Signs: Ear-rings, Jews, and Franciscan
Rhetoric in the Italian Renaissance City,” Past and Present 112 (1986): 3-59.
Stephen Nadler points out that there is little firm evidence concerning the identity
of sitters often labeled “Jews” in Rembrandt scholarship: Rembrandt_s Jews
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 51. The fact remains, however, that
a “Jewess” type seems to have existed in the minds of the art-viewing public. On
the Jewess in Orientalist art, see Carol Ockman, “ ‘Two Large Eyebrows à
l_Orientale:_ Ethnic Stereotyping in Ingres_s Baronne de Rothschild,” Art History 14
(1991): 521-39; Judith Lewin, “Legends of Rebecca: Ivanhoe, Dynamic Identifica-
tion, and Portraits of Rebecca Gratz,” Nashim 10 (2005): 178-212; and the brief but
trenchant remarks of Roger Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism, and
French North Africa, 1880-1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003),
121 and 171-72. A classic example of the genre is Charles Landelle_s Jewish Girl in
Tangiers (undated) in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Reims.
11. Lady St. John, “The Gobelin Factory and Some of Its Work,” The Burlington
Magazine for Connoisseurs 10, 47 (1907): 278-89, here 289. The tapestry was one of
six depicting the Life of Esther designed by F. de Troy for Gobelins around 1739.
12. Andrew Lang, “Portraits of Mary Stuart,” The Burlington Magazine for Con-
noisseurs 10, 45 (1906):184-85, here 184. In general, though, when women in post-
medieval art exhibit the visual attributes assigned to Jewish men–hooked nose,
dark hair, pointed hats, even beards–they are not Jewish women, but witches. See,
for example, “The Witch Runs Away with Wildrose,” an illustration by H.J. Ford
for The Crimson Fairy Book, ed. Andrew Lang (New York: Longmans, Green,
1903), 106.
13. Caesarius, in fact, recounts four exempla with female Jewish protagonists: Dist. II:
De Contritione, caps. 23, 24, 25, and 26, in Dialogus Miraculorum, ed. Joseph
Strange (Cologne: J.M. Heberle, 1851), 1:92-99. For discussion of the latter two of
these, as well as a handful of similar tales, see Beatrice D. Brown, “Medieval
Prototypes of Lorenzo and Jessica,” Modern Language Notes 44 (1929): 227-32. See,
too, Ivan Marcus, “Images of the Jews in the Exempla of Caesarius of Heisterbach,”
in Jeremy Cohen, ed., From Witness to Witchcraft: Jews and Judaism in Medieval
Christian Thought (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1996), 247-56. On the “Ballad of Sir
Hugh, or the Jew_s Daughter,” which dates back to at least 1259, see Francis J.
Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, vol. 3 (reprint New York: The
Folklore Press, 1957), 233-54, #155; and Bertrand Bronson, The Singing Tradition
of Child_s Popular Ballads (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 294-98.
Chaucer_s Prioress_s Tale draws in part from this ballad (or an analogue), but
omits the villainous Jewess. For a sensitive reading of this tale, as well as of
Shakespeare_s Jessica, see Lisa Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul
to Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Matthew
Paris mentions the Jewish wife of an image desecrator: Chronica Majora: ed. Henry
Richards Luard (London: Longman, 1880), 5:114-15. On Alfonso VIII_s alleged
paramour and other sexualized female Jewish figures, see Edna Aizenberg, “Una
judía muy fermosa: the Jewess as Sex Object in Medieval Spanish Literature and
Lore,” La corónica 12 (1984): 187-94; and David Nirenberg, “Deviant Politics and
Jewish Love: Alfonso VIII and the Jewess of Toledo,” Jewish History 21 (2007): 15-
41. On the Jewish woman “Pucellina” of twelfth-century Blois who had either
romantic, or more likely financial, relations with the Count of Blois, see Susan
Einbinder, Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 45-49; and Robert Chazan,
“Representation of Events in the Middle Ages,” History and Theory 27 (1988):
40-55, here 52. As Einbinder notes, the fact that many commentators long assumed
that this source addresses a sexual liaison speaks to the power of the Jewess-as-
seductress stereotype: “Pucellina of Blois: Romantic Myths and Narrative
Conventions,” Jewish History 12 (1998): 29-46. For modern elaborations of the
type, see Sander Gilman, “Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt, and the ‘Modern
Jewess_,” German Quarterly 66 (1993):195-211; Lisa Lampert, “O My Daughter!
‘Die schöne Jüdin_ and ‘Der neue Jude_ in Hermann Sinsheimer_s Maria Nunnez,”
German Quarterly 71 (1998): 254-70; Martha B. Helfer, “Framing the Jew:
Grillparzer_s Die Jüdin von Toledo,” German Quarterly 75 (2002): 160-80; Livia
Bitton Jackson, Madonna or Courtesan? The Jewish Woman in Christian
Literature (New York: Seabury Press, 1982); Michael Ragussis, “The Birth of a
Nation in Victorian Culture: The Spanish Inquisition, the Converted Daughter, and
the ‘Secret Race_,” Critical Inquiry 20 (1994): 477-508; and Barbara
Hahn. The Jewess Pallas Athena: This Too a Theory of Modernity (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2005). Jean-Paul Sartre offers a sophisticated analysis
of the figure of “la belle juive:” Réflexions sur la question juive (Paris: P. Morihien,
1946), 58-61.
14. This is the task I tackle in a forthcoming work: Jews, Vision, and Witness in
Medieval Christian Art, to be published by Metropolitan Books, New York in 2009.
15. Of the 195 songs in praise of the Virgin Mary in this manuscript, several dozen
contain textual references to Jewish characters; four explicitly mention Jewish
women. Tallies of the number of Cantigas treating Jews vary according to differing
criteria. By including incidental and implicit references to Jews and excluding Old
Testament references, Dwayne E. Carpenter arrives at a count of 40: “The
Portrayal of the Jew in Alfonso the Learned_s Cantigas de Santa Maria,” in
Bernard Dov Cooperman, ed., In Iberia and Beyond: Hispanic Jews between
Cultures (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 15-42. Albert I. Bagby,
Jr. lists 30 Cantigas that refer to Jews: “The Jew in the Cantigas of Alfonso X, El
Sabio,” Speculum 46 (1971): 670–88; and “The Figure of the Jew in the Cantigas of
166 SARA LIPTON
Alfonso X,” in Israel J. Katz and John E. Keller, eds., Studies on the Cantigas de
Santa Maria: Art, Music, and Poetry: Proceedings of the International Symposium
on the Cantigas de Santa Maria of Alfonso X, el Sabio (1221-1284) in
commemoration of its 700th anniversary year – 1981, New York, November 19-21
(Madison, WI: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1987), 235-45. A keyword
search for “Jews” in the Oxford Cantigas de Santa Maria database yields a still
different tally: 23 poems. The Cantigas that feature female Jewish characters (other
than the Virgin Mary, of course) are 4, 89, 107, and 108. On Jews in the Cantigas,
see also Vikki Hatton and Angus Mackay, “Anti-Semitism in the Cantigas de Santa
Maria,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 61 (1983): 189-99; and José Filgueria
Valverde, “Os xudeus nas Cantigas de Santa Maria,” in Carlos Barros, ed.,
Xudeus e conversos na historia: Actas do Congresso Internacional, Ribadavia, 14-17
Outubro 1991 (Santiago de Compostela: Editorial de la Historia, 1994), 1:245-64.
None of these studies clearly distinguishes between textual and visual Jews,
discusses images of Jews unmentioned in the text, or explores the visual strategies
employed to represent Jews. Most primarily seek to assess the relative hostility or
tolerance of Alfonso toward the Jews, largely on the basis of textual references.
None of them specifically examines the figure of the Jewess. Carpenter does note,
without further comment, that four out of six Jews converted in Cantiga narratives
are “either women or children:” “Portrayal of the Jew,” 23. When the manuscript_s
images are taken into account, references to Jews are considerably more numerous
and even more complex than previously attested.
16. “[C]omo Santa Maria fez que nacesse o fillo do judeu o rostro atras, como llo Merlin
rogara:” Cantigas, ed. Mettmann, 1:408-10. For a discussion of the poem_s sources
and its relationship to Jewish-Christian disputation, see Dwayne E. Carpenter, “A
Sorcerer Defends the Virgin: Merlin in the Cantigas de Santa Maria,” Bulletin of the
Cantigueros de Santa Maria 5 (1993): 3-24.
17. A three-volumed Bible moralisée, now in the treasury of the Cathedral of Toledo, is
thought to be the “three historiated Bible volumes given to us by King Louis of
France” mentioned in Alfonso X_s will of 1284: transcribed in Jules Piccus, “The
Meaning of ‘Estoria_ in Juan Manuel_s ‘El Conde Lucanor_,” Hispania 61 (1978):
459-65, here 464. The manuscript is certainly Parisian, and was probably given to
Louis by his mother, Blanche of Castile. Its last eight leaves, which include a
depiction of a woman offering a volume to a young king, are in the Morgan Library,
New York, MS. M.240. On this manuscript, see a luxurious facsimile with
companion volume recently created for the Toledo Chapter: La Biblia de San Luis:
Biblia Rica de Toledo (Barcelona: M. Moleiro Editor, 2006); and John Lowden, The
Making of the Bibles moralisées, Vol. I: The Manuscripts (State University, PA:
Penn State University Press, 2000). On the Jewish iconography in earlier versions:
Lipton, Images of Intolerance.
18. José Guerrero Lovillo, Las Cantigas: Estudio arqueológico de sus miniaturas
(Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1949), 186-88; and the
companion volume now in Florence, studied by Amparo Garcia Cuadrado, Las
Cantigas: El Códice de Florencia (Murcia: Universidad de Murcia, 1993), 164.
19. Trans. in Dwayne E. Carpenter, Alfonso X and the Jews: An Edition of and
Commentary on Siete Partidas 7.24 ‘De los Judíos._ (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1986), 36-37. Carpenter notes in his commentary on the law (pp.
99-101) that the provision was, at best, fitfully observed, and there is considerable
debate about the extent to which the Jewish provisions of the Partidas were
enforced during Alfonso_s reign. For further discussion of Jews in Spain under
Alfonso, see David Romano, “Los judíos y Alfonso X,” Revista de Occidente 43
(1984): 203-17; and Robert I. Burns, “Jews and Moors in the Siete Partidas: A
Background Perspective,” in Roger Collins and Anthony Goodman, ed., Medieval
Spain: Culture, Conflict, and Coexistence: Studies in Honour of Angus MacKay
(London: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2002), 46-62, with further bibliography.
20. Later legislation often specifically imposed such badges. In 1325, for example,
Alfonso IV ordered Jews to attach yellow stars to their hats: cited in Carpenter,
Alfonso X and the Jews, 133 n. 18. In 1268 Jaime I of Aragon excused Jews from
wearing a round badge or any other distinctive sign, but stipulated that they
continue to wear capas rotundas when in city streets: Jean Regné, History of the
Jews in Aragon: Regesta and Documents 1213-1327 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press,
Hebrew University, 1978), #390, #392, #394, #395; see also #2967, #3100,
#3272, #3275, #3317, #3318.
21. There is, in fact, scant evidence for the pointed Jewish hat in non-Spanish texts as
well. Alfred Rubens asserts that the Judenhut was “the outstanding characteristic
of Jewish costume in mediaeval times:” A History of Jewish Costume (New York:
Funk & Wagnalls, 1967), 106. But the earliest Jewish textual reference to Jewish
headgear that Rubens cites dates to 1295 (p. 94, where he gives no date or reference
for the Majorcan statute to which he also refers). Like so many others, Rubens
bases his assumptions about Jewish costume almost entirely on artistic evidence. A
few Christian communities in central and eastern Europe, probably influenced by
anti-Jewish art, did specify that the pointed hat be imposed on Jews as a sign. See,
for example, the ordinance from a synod in Breslau (Poland) dating to 1267: Julius
Aronius, Regesten zur Geschichte der Juden im fränkischen und deutschen Reiche
bis zum Jahre 1273 (Berlin: L. Simion, 1902), #724.
22. Fritz [Yitchak] Baer, Die Juden im christlichen Spanien: Urkunden und Regesten,
Vol. 2: Kastilien und Inquisitionsakten (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1936), #65, #72,
#78. The primary thrust of the provisions was to prevent Jews from wearing bright
colors and expensive fabrics. The clothing of various Christian social groups was
also regulated, as was Muslim clothing: Joseph F. O_Callaghan, The Learned King:
The Reign of Alfonso X of Castile (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1993), 102.
23. See Regné, History of the Jews in Aragon, as in note 20 above; Jonathan Ray, The
Sephardic Frontier: The Reconquista and the Jewish Community in Medieval Iberia
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 156-58; and Yom Tov Assis, The
Golden Age of Aragonese Jewry: Community and Society in the Crown of Aragon,
1213-1327 (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1997), 283-85. Art is by no means
documentary, and I am always deeply cautious about taking images for reality.
But it is worth noting that unlike the Escorial Cantigas, which portrays both
Christians and Jews in hooded capes, later Spanish art fairly regularly shows Jews,
and Jews only, in hooded capes. Susan L. Einbinder reports that Spanish refugees
to Algeria insisted on continuing to wear “Spanish clothing” in order to maintain
their separate identity from north African Jews: “A Hebrew Troubadour and his
Scribe: MS Munich Cod. Heb. 128,” a paper delivered at the 40th International
Medieval Congress at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, 5-8 May 2005. It
would be most interesting to know what that clothing was.
24. This paragraph summarizes chapter one, “Mirror of the Fathers,” of Jews, Vision,
and Witness, which will provide elaboration and full documentation.
168 SARA LIPTON
25. Michele Beaulieu is one of the few scholars who has made the connection (and
noticed the resulting confusion) between Jewish and clerical headgear: “Commu-
nication sur le prétendu bonnet juif,” Bulletin de la société nationale des antiquaires
de France (January, 1972): 29-44. According to Beaulieu, many of the pointed caps
in twelfth-century sculpture that scholars have identified as Jews_ hats, are really
episcopal miters. On the early form of the miter, see Joseph Braun, Die liturgische
Gewandung im Occident und Orient (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1907), 431-48.
26. Isidore of Seville mentions no fewer than three types of ancient pointed headgear
(the apex; the miter, or Phrygian cap; and the tiara, either straight or curved) in
his enormously popular encyclopedia: “Apex est pilleum sutile quod sacerdotes
gentiles utebantur, appellatus ab apiendo, id est adligando;” “Mitra est pilleum
Phrygium, caput protegens, quale est ornamentum capitis devotarum;” “Persae
tiaras gerunt; sed reges rectas, satrapae incurvas:” Etymologies, Book 19, caps. 30
and 31, in Etymologiarum sive originum libri XX, ed. W.M. Lindsay (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1911), Vol. 2 (no page numbers). On the ancient origins of the miter, see
Percy Ernst Schramm, Herrschaftszeichen und Staatssymbolik: Beiträge zu ihrer
Geschichte vom Dritten bis zum sechzehnten Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Hiersemann,
1954), 1:51-62.
27. See Robert Deshman,“Christus rex et magi reges: Kingship and Christology in
Ottonian and Anglo-Saxon Art,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 10 (1976): 367-405.
For an Iberian example, see the Gerona Beatus: Gerona Cathedral, ms. 7, fol. 15v,
published in Mireille Mentré, Illuminated Manuscripts of Medieval Spain (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1996), fig. 131.
28. Augustine gives a typical and influential articulation of the Christian assumption of
Jewish stagnancy/antiquity: “Cum ergo in illo veteri testamento praecepta sint
ista, quae nos ad novum pertinentes observare non cogimur, cur non Judaei se
potius in vetustate supervacanea remansisse cognoscunt, quam nobis nova promissa
tenentibus; quod vetera non observemus, objiciunt?” (“Since therefore in that Old
Testament there are those precepts, which we who belong to the new [covenant] do
not intend to observe, why do the Jews not recognize rather that they themselves
have stayed behind in useless antiquity, than protest to us, who hold the new
promises, that we do not observe the old?”) in Tractatus adversus Judaeos 6.8,
Patrologia latina 42:56. Alfonso X expresses an ambivalent attitude toward antique
Jewish history, in Siete Partidas 7.24.1, “A Jew is said to be one who believes in and
observes literally the law of Moses .... And this name [judio] is derived from the
tribe of Judah, which was more noble and valiant than any of the other tribes:”
Alfonso then adds, however, that Jews were permitted to live in Christendom “to
serve as a reminder that they are descended from those who crucified Our Lord
Jesus Christ:” trans. in Carpenter, Alfonso X and the Jews, 28.
29. The hat, for example, was depicted on the heads of revered Old Testament
prophets, as well as nefarious New Testament priests. In the case of the former, it
underscored the authority bestowed by their antiquity; in the case of the latter, it
highlighted their misapplication of authority and their adherence to an outdated
law. For the hat in the thirteenth-century Bibles moralisées: Lipton, Images of
Intolerance, 15-19. For manifold further examples: Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs
of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Later Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994).
30. On the variability of Jewish beard practice in the Middle Ages, see Louis Ginzburg,
“Beard,” Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1902) 2:611-15, here
613; and Elliott Horowitz, “Visages du Judaïsme: De la barbe en monde juif et de
l_élaboration de ses significations,” Annales: histoire, sciences sociales 49
(1994):1065-90. German Jewish pietists of the thirteenth century endorsed beards
as signs of wisdom and piety, and they condemned shaving as a form of
assimilation. Their frequent laments on the topic suggest, however, that a
disturbing (to the reformers) number of Jewish men nonetheless eschewed beards:
Louis Finkelstein, Jewish Self-Government in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (New York:
P. Feldheim, 1964), 59. On Christian beard-wearing and beard symbolism, see Giles
Constable, “Introduction,” in Apologiae Duae: Gozechini Epistola ad Walcherum.
Burchardi, ut videtur, Abbatis Bellevallis, Apologia de Barbis, ed. Robert B.C.
Huygens, Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio Mediaevalis, 62 (Turnhout: Brepols,
1985), 47-129.
31. See Constable, “Introduction,” in Apologiae Duae, ed. Huygens, 47-129; and Robert
Bartlett, “Symbolic Meanings of Hair in the Middle Ages,” Transactions of the
Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 4 (1994): 43-59. Although the iconographical use
of the beard as a “Jewish sign” is not based primarily on Jewish practice, the fact
that the more pious (and conspicuous) Jewish males were most likely to wear
beards would presumably have strengthened the association, and helped to
“naturalize” the sign. For the beard in the Bibles moralisées, see Lipton, Images
of Intolerance, 20-21.
32. Burchard of Belleville, Apologia de Barbis, 2, “Lex sub velamento erat et quasi
barba tegebatur, gratia autem velamen litterae tulit et barbam velantem rasit ... :”
Apologiae Duae, ed. Huygens, 165. Burchard is echoing Augustine, De Opere
Monachorum, 31, in Sancti Aureli Augustini De fide et symbolo..., ed. Joseph
Zycha, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, 41 (1900; repr. New York:
Johnson Reprint, 1969), 590-91. Note, though, that Burchard_s negative reading of
Hebrew beards was designed to exalt clean-shaven monks over unshaven Christian
lay brothers (conversi).
33. See, among many others, the illustrations to Cantigas 26, 42, 65, 95, 115, 140, 141
(where an old monk is distinguished from younger ones by his beard), and 155.
34. Systematic study of the development and deployment of medieval anti-Jewish
caricature is surprisingly lacking, perhaps because the classic works on caricature
by Ernst Hans Gombrich date the genre back only to the seventeenth century, and
have little to say about the Middle Ages. Eduard Fuchs discusses only two images
that pre-date the fifteenth century, and then only briefly: Die Juden in der
Karikatur (Munich: A. Langen, 1921). I will grapple with this issue further in Jews,
Vision, and Witness. For now, see Lipton, Images of Intolerance, 20-21;
Blumenkranz, Juif médiéval, 15-39; Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons,
and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2003), 77-78; Mellinkoff, Outcasts, 121-44; Cecil Roth, “Portraits and
Caricatures of Medieval English Jews,” in his Essays and Portraits in Anglo-Jewish
History (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1962), 22-25; Eric
Zafran, “The Iconography of Antisemitism: A Study of the Representation of the
Jews in the Visual Arts of Europe 1400-1600,” (Ph.D. diss., New York University
Institute of Fine Arts, 1973), 20-24; Anton J. Run, “Bene Barbatus. Over de oudste
Eeuwige Jood in de beeldende Kunst,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 38
(1987): 292-301. Frank Felsenstein says little about visual imagery: Anti-Semitic
Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). Sander Gilman examines modern con-
170 SARA LIPTON
ceptions of Jewish physiognomy: The Jew_s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991).
There are images in which the caricatured Jew_s face seems not to express hostility,
as for example the fourteenth-century Codex Trevirensis: Landeshauptarchiv,
Koblenz, Balduineum I, Best. 1 C, Nr. 1, folio 24r. Hatton and Mackay point out
that “caricatured” Jewish faces also appear in Hebrew illuminated manuscripts,
presumably without hostile intent: “Anti-Semitism.” The subject of representing
Jews in medieval Jewish art (indeed, even the existence of such a thing as medieval
Jewish art) is a vast and highly controversial topic, which I cannot adequately
address here. For an introduction to some of the issues, see the articles collected in
Eva Frojmovic, ed., Imagining the Self, Imagining the Other: Visual Representa-
tions and Jewish-Christian Dynamics in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period
(Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002); and Katrin Kogman-Appel, Illuminated Haggadot from
Medieval Spain: Biblical Imagery and the Passover Holiday (State University, PA:
Penn State University Press, 2006).
35. Pseudo-Albert hypothesized that the Virgin Mary had dark hair, since “videmus
quod genus Judeorum ut in pluribus habet nigros capillos...:” Mariale, 19.2.5,
quoted in Irven M. Resnick, “Ps.-Albert the Great on the Physiognomy of Jesus
and Mary,” Mediaeval Studies 64 (2002): 217-40, here 239. A thirteenth-century
German-Jewish text concedes that “most gentiles are fair-skinned and handsome
and most Jews are dark and ugly”–an intriguing internalization of cultural
preferences regarding beauty. The Jewish author, however, then stands the
assessment on its head from a moral point of view. He uses the comparison to
critique Christians_ habit of making love during daylight hours and their fondness
for looking at beautiful images, which their babies then resemble: The Jewish-
Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages: A Critical Edition of the ‘Nizzahon
Vetus,_ ed. and trans. David Berger (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of
America, 1979), 340, par. 238. On the myth of “parental imprinting,” see Wendy
Doniger and Gregory Spinner, “Misconceptions: Female Imaginations and Male
Fantasies in Parental Imprinting,” Daedalus 127 (1998): 97-130.
36. I am by no means suggesting that visual difference in either life or art was clear-cut
even in Frankish and German lands. There were undoubtedly blond Jews in
England, France, and Germany. See, for example, the 1233 entry in the English
Exchequer of the Jews Receipt Roll for “Aaron le Blond,” in National Archives,
London, E 401/1565 M1. Further, Jews are frequently depicted in northern
European artworks as fair and un-caricatured.
37. As with the beard and the dark complexion, the occasional coincidence of painted
and living Jewish profiles may have helped strengthen the sign of the “Jewish nose,”
but such overlap would not have been consistent or exclusive enough to inspire it.
38. I intentionally use the term “difference” rather than “otherness” here, because I do
not see the Gothic representation of the Jew as enshrining the stark binaries that
are so often associated (overly simplistically) with the latter term. For elaboration
of this point: Sara Lipton, “The Temple is My Body: Gender, Carnality, and
Synagoga in the Bible moralisée,” in Frojmovic, ed., Imagining the Self, 129-63. As I
note above, although the Gothic iconography of the male Jew generally serves to
render him distinctive, its individual elements all can be associated with Christians
as well.
39. Carpenter notes that two different etymologies have been proposed for the word: al-
hakim, meaning philosopher or medical doctor, and al-faqih, meaning a specialist in
religious law: “Sorcerer Defends the Virgin,” 7 n. 4. In a grant of protection dating
to 1220, Honorius III referred to Issac Benveniste, physician of James I of Aragon,
as an “alfakimus:” The Apostolic See and the Jews. Vol. I. Documents: 492-1404, ed.
Shlomo Simonsohn (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1988), 108,
#105. On “arabisms” in the Cantigas, see Federico Corriente, “Los arabismos en las
Cantigas de Santa Maria,” in Estudios alfonsíes, ed. Mondejar and Montoya, 59-65.
40. Beaulieu, “Prétendu bonnet juif,” 30.
41. Prof. Kenneth Stow has helpfully suggested to me that the Jew_s vials are intended
to link him with magic. This is very likely, but the fact that his customer, Merlin, is
portrayed as a Christian and in a positive light considerably complicates the
question of magical knowledge and separates it from negative necromancy. The sole
figure in the Cantigas explicitly shown performing necromancy is a Christian cleric
(Cantiga 125).
42. In thirteenth-century Castile, “Moorish” motifs did not clash with French Gothic
forms, but rather complemented them. Together they demonstrated Christian
triumph. See Jerrilyn Dodds, “Mudéjar Tradition and the Synagogues of Medieval
Spain: Cultural Identity and Cultural Hegemony,” in Vivian B. Mann, Thomas F.
Glick, and Jerrilyn Dodds, eds., Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in
Medieval Spain (New York: G. Braziller, 1992), 113-32; D. Fairchild Ruggles, “The
Alcazar of Seville and Mudejar Architecture,” Gesta 43 (2004): 87-98; and David
Raizman, “The Church of Santa Cruz and the Beginnings of Mudejar Architecture
in Toledo,” Gesta (1999): 128-41. On Alfonso_s cultural policy, see Francisco
Márquez-Villanueva, “The Alfonsine Cultural Concept,” in Francisco Márquez-
Villanueva and Carlos Alberto Vega, eds., Alfonso X of Castile, the Learned King
(1221-1284): An International Symposium, Harvard University, 17 November 1984
(Cambridge, MA: Dept. of Romance Languages and Literatures of Harvard
University, 1990), 76-109; Francisco Márquez-Villanueva, El Concepto Cultural
Alfonsi (Madrid: Editorial MAPFRE, 1984); the essays collected in Robert I.
Burns, ed., Emperor of Culture: Alfonso X the Learned of Castile and His
Thirteenth-Century Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1990); and John V. Tolan, Saracens: Muslims in the Medieval European
Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 186-93. On the style
of the manuscript, see the works cited above in note 1.
43. There are hundreds of rounded arches depicted in the manuscript, but none has the
same marble patterning. On the Romanesque arch as a sign of the past, see Reiner
Haussherr, “Templum Salamonis und Ecclesia Christi: Zu einem Bildvergleich der
Bible moralisée,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 31 (1968): 101-21. Raizman
hypothesizes that rounded Romanesque arches were replaced by “Moorish” key-
hole arches in the Church of Santa Cruz in part to exemplify the new cultural
synthesis brought by Christian conquest: “Church of Santa Cruz,” 129.
44. María Judith Feliciano, “Muslim Shrouds for Christians Kings? A Reassessment of
Andalusi Textiles in Thirteenth-century Castilian Life and Ritual,” in Robinson
and Rouhi, eds., Under the Influence, 101-31.
45. See the illustrations to Cantigas 88, 123, 157, 173, 177, 209, 321, and 385.
46. Cayphas has, in fact, violated law 7.24.2 of the Siete Partidas: “Jews ought to
conduct themselves meekly and without disorder among Christians, observing their
own law and not speaking ill of the faith of Our Lord Jesus Christ....:” trans. in
Carpenter, in Alfonso X and the Jews, 29.
47. “Como Santa Maria guardou de morte hua judea que espenaron en Segovia; [e]
porque sse acomendou a ela non morreu nen se firiu:” ed. Mettmann, 1:405-7. On
172 SARA LIPTON
the sources for this cantiga, see Anita Benaim de Lasry, “Marisaltos: Artificial
Purification in Alfonso el Sabio_s Cantiga 107,” in Katz and Keller, ed., Studies on
the Cantigas, 299-311. Louise Mirrer offers a somewhat unpersuasive reading of this
cantiga and its illustration, emphasizing the woman_s role as sexualized temptress:
Women, Jews, and Muslims in the Texts of Reconquest Castile (Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press, 1996), 31-44.
48. “Ai, cativa, como pode ficar viva quen daqui a caer á, Senon se Deus xe querria!
Mast u, Reya Maria, u crischãydade fia, se tale s com_ oý ja, Que acorre las
coytadas qui ti son acomendadas, ontre toda-las culpadas val a mi, ca mester m_á.
E sse ficar viv_ e sãa, logo me fare[i] crischãa ante que seja mannãa cras…:” ed.
Mettmann, 1:405-6.
49. John E. Keller and Richard P. Kinkade, Iconography in Medieval Spanish
Literature (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky 1984), 38. On architecture
as cultural signifier in Alfonsine Castile, see note 42 above. According to Raizman,
the Historia de Rebus Hispaniae cites the presence of “subjected Moors” in Toledo
as a sign of royal authority: “Church of Santa Cruz,” 137. These “Moorish” arches
might do the same.
50. Benaim de Lasry notes that the punishment depicted in the illustration follows
neither medieval Jewish nor Christian practice: “Marisaltos.” Most likely it is
modeled on biblical and talmudic texts, with which Alfonso may have been
familiar. Jewish law is censured here not for its brutality (there are myriad
instances of Christian judicial brutality in the manuscript, not to mention in
medieval life), but because (as Christians understood it) it gave no scope for
penance and forgiveness, the chief concern of the Cantigas. Note that the section
[Dist. II] in Caesarius of Heisterbach_s Dialogus Miraculorum that contains the four
exempla about Jewesses is entitled “On Contrition” [De Contritione]: Dialogus
Miraculorum, ed. Strange, 1:92-99. In the chronicle version of the tale, the sentence
is imposed and carried out by Christians: Benaim de Lasry, “Marisaltos;” and
Mirrer, Women, Jews, and Muslims, 42-43.
51. Guerrero Lovillo noted that throughout the manuscript the attire of Jewish women
is indistinguishable from that of Christian women: Cantigas, 188; Garcia Cuadrado
repeats this observation: Cantigas, 165.
52. Prévostin de Cremona, quoted in Craig Wright, Music and Ceremony at Notre
Dame of Paris, 500-1550 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 14.
53. See Lipton, “Temple is My Body,” 151 and figs. 14, 15, and 16.
54. The convert_s face and hair mark her as a female, as does the fact that women
stand sponsor for the conversion. By analogy with other miracle tales, she is almost
certainly the child_s mother.
55. As also noted by Mirrer, Women, Jews, and Muslims, 38.
56. Mirrer writes that the woman_s “voluptuous nude body [is] clearly visible
underneath the sheerness of her slip:” Women, Jews, and Muslims, 39. Later (p.
42) she refers to her “plainly [disclosed] nudity.” Of course, voluptuousness is in the
eye of the beholder, but I cannot agree that the image embodies Jewish seduction.
Although the outline of the condemned woman_s legs is visible, her breasts and
pudenda are not. Her body remains modestly covered even when she is completely
upside-down. By contrast, the breasts and belly of the abbess accused of fornication
in Cantiga 7 are very blatantly exposed. Moreover, the German Christian woman
who in Cantiga 136 is condemned to be dragged through the streets for abusing a
statue of the Virgin, is similarly dressed in a white shift. A more salient analogy for
both these women is the white, lightly clad, suffering body of Christ himself,
surrounded by tormenters. As Caroline Walker Bynum and others have argued,
women were thought able to approximate Christ through passive suffering. See in
particular Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to
Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), passim,
especially 260-76.
57. “Esta é como hua judea estava de parto en coita de morte, e chamou Santa Maria e
logo a aquela ora foi libre:” ed. Mettmann, 1:357-59.
58. Connie L. Scarborough identifies the standing figure in panel two as the woman_s
husband: Women in Thirteenth-century Spain as Portrayed in Alfonso X_s Cantigas
de Santa Maria (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen, 1993), 83. But it seems clear that she is a
midwife, from her headgear and robes, her resemblance to the fleeing midwife in
panel four, and the fact that her right hand is thrust under the bedcovers.
59. A particularly vivid example from Iberian Gothic art is Jaime Serra_s altarpiece for
the monastery of Sijena, Catalonia (c. 1400), which depicts the Paris Host
Desecration of 1290: now in the Museum of Catalan Art (Barcelona), published
in Rubin, Gentile Tales, fig. 21. The husband stabbing the host is elderly and
bearded, has a downward sloping nose, and wears a dark cloak and hood. His wife is
young and has a straight nose. Her round, golden headdress and bright, light eyes–
like her young son_s golden hair and bright eyes–echo the shining hair, halo, and
eyes of the Christ Child rising from the cauldron, whom both mother and son see
and at whom they marvel. The husband/father, by contrast, keeps his eyes
resolutely fixed on the bloody table before him and is utterly oblivious to the
miraculous apparition.
60. Stadtbibliothek, Munich, Clm 3901, fol. 28r: published in Schreckenburg, Juden in
der Kunst Europas, 116, fig. 2; see also 104, fig. 29 (the Passover feast); and 106, fig.
35 (collection of manna).
61. Augustine_s approach to Jews is articulated throughout his writings, but especially
important are De Civitate Dei (in particular books 18.46 and 20.29), Contra
Faustum, and Enarrationes in Psalmos. See especially Jeremy Cohen, Living
Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1999), 23-66; and Paula Fredrikson, “Augustine and Israel:
Interpretatio ad litteram, Jews, and Judaism in Augustine_s Theology of History,”
Studia Patristica 38 (2001): 119-35.
62. Partida 7.24.1, “E la razon por que la eglesia e los emperadores e los reyes e los otros
principes sofrieron a los judios beuir entre los cristianos es esta: por que ellos
biuiessen como en catiuiero pora siempre e fuesse remembrance a los omnes que
ellos vienen del linaje daquellos que crucificaron a Nuetro Sennor Jhesu Christo:”
Carpenter, Alfonso X and the Jews, 28. Compare to Bernard of Clairvaux, Letter
363, 6, “duram sustinent captivitatem sub principibus christianis:” S. Bernardi
Opera Omnia, ed. Jean Leclerq (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1977), 8:316. This
letter is discussed in Cohen, Living Letters, 234-45. For Aquinas, “Judaei sint servi
Ecclesiae:” Summa Theologiae, 2a2ae.10.10, ed. Thomas Gilpy (Cambridge:
Blackfriars, 1981), 32:71. By contrast to Aquinas, Augustine had characterized
Jews_ servitude as owed to God, and as pleasing to Him: Cohen, Living Letters, 46
n. 65.
63. Innocent III, “Licet perfidia Iudeorum sit multipliciter improbanda, quia tamen per
eos fides nostra veraciter comprobatur, non sunt a fidelibus graviter opprimendi,
dicente propheta: ne occideris eos ne quando obliviscantur legis tue, ac si diceretur
174 SARA LIPTON
appertius, ne deleveris omnino Iudeos, ne forte Christiani legis tue valeant oblivisci,
quam ipsi non intelligentes, in libris suis intelligentibus representant:” Constitutio
pro Judaeis, Rome, 15 September 1199, Apostolic See, ed. Simonsohn, 1:74-75, #71.
My emphasis.
64. “Ex hoc autem quod Judaei ritus suos observant, in quibus olim praefigurabatur
veritas fidei quam tenemus, hoc bonum provenit quod testimonium fidei nostrae
habemus ab hostibus; et quasi in figura nobis repraesentatur quod credimus:” Summa
Theologica, 2a2ae.10.11, ed. Gilpy, 32:72. My emphasis. See Cohen, Living Letters,
367.
65. “Vivi quidam apices nobis sunt, repraesentantes iugiter Dominicam passionem.
Propter hoc et in omnes dispersi sunt regiones, ut dum iustas tanti facinoris luunt
ubique, testes sint nostrae redemptionis:” Letter 363, 6, Opera Omnia, ed. LeClerq,
8:311-17. My emphasis.
66. See especially Partidas 7.24.2, “we heard that in some places the Jews reenacted
derisively–and continue to do so–on Good Friday the Passion of Our Lord”;
Partidas 7.24.8, “no Jew shall dare to have in his house Christian servants...to
bathe together with Christians,” etc.; Partidas 7.24.9, “Jews who lie with Christian
women are guilty of great insolence and presumption;” and Partidas 7.24.11, “Many
errors and offensive acts occur...:” all translated in Carpenter, Alfonso X and the
Jews, 29, 34, 35, 36. Countless other Christian texts of the High Middle Ages–
including (but not limited to) papal letters, scholastic sermons, conciliar decrees,
and royal law codes–similarly complain about Jews_ inappropriate power,
prosperity, and arrogance, and about the fact that they were visually indistin-
guishable from Christians, even clerics. See, among many other works, Jeremy
Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1982); further texts and bibliography in Lipton,
Images of Intolerance.
67. See, in addition to Fig. 2 of this study, the illustrations to Cantiga 2 (Saint Ildefonso
preaches to a crowd of exclusively male Jews), Cantiga 12 (a group of exclusively
male Jews crucify a waxen image), and Cantiga 27 (a crowd of exclusively male
Jews stand outside a former synagogue and try to reclaim the building). On
women_s attendance in church, see Nicole Bériou, L_avènement des maîtres de la
Parole: La prédication à Paris au XIIIe siècle (Paris: Institut d_études augusti-
niennes, 1998), 1:302.
68. The literature on this topic is extensive. A fine exploration is Margaret R. Miles,
Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1989). Miles notes that women could only become fully
spiritualized by “becoming male,” through suppressing or escaping their carnality
and sexuality. Although medieval Judaism did not accord the same value to
virginity, it did share many, though not all, anti-feminist attitudes with
Christianity. See Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life
in Medieval Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
69. Alexander Nequam foregrounded sex and gender when he wrote that it was
permissible to no one to touch the Eucharist “nisi mari [unless male]:” cited in
Richard W. Hunt, The Schools and the Cloister: The Life and Writings of Alexander
Nequam (1157-1217), ed. and revised Margaret Gibson (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1984), 90.
70. See I Corinthians 11:7, where Paul calls man the “image and glory of God,” and
goes on to note that “woman is the glory of man.” Augustine cites this verse to
argue that clerics must be tonsured, contrasting their tonsured heads explicitly
with the untonsured hair of the Old Testament prophets and implicitly with the
un-cut hair of both laymen and women: De opere monachorum 31, in Sancti Aureli
Augustini, De fide et symbolo..., ed. Zycha, 590-91. The crooked, deformed, and
often effeminized Jew of much later medieval discourse was thus a negative
counterpart of the “perfect” Christian cleric. This image is explored in Steven F.
Kruger, The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
71. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, “Chaste Bodies: Frames and Experiences,” in Sarah Kay
and Miri Rubin, eds., Framing Medieval Bodies (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1994), 24–42.
72. Andreas Capellanus, “Inconstans etiam mulier regulariter invenitur, quia nulla
mulier tanta super aliquo negotio soliditate firmatur, cuius fides modica suasione
cuiusque non efficiatur in brevi spatio alterata. Est etenim mulier tamquam cera
liquescens, quae semper est formam novam parata suscipere et ad sigilli cuiuslibet
impositionem mutari:” De Amore, III, in On Love, ed. and trans. Patrick G. Walsh
(London: Duckworth, 1982), 312; my translation. The examples could be multiplied
ad infinitum. See also Alcuin Blamires, Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An
Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 48, 61, 62, 101, 117,
120, 125, 138, 146, 158, 163, 188, and 224; and Marie-Thérèse d_Alverny, “Comment
les théologiens et les philosophes voient la femme,” Cahiers de civilisation 20 (1977):
105-29.
73. Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, ms. lat. 14,525, fol. 77v : “Sed que est ista corporis
pulcritudo? Numquid illa que stultorum mentis illaquat, et oculos depredatur, et
apostotare facit frequenter etiam sapientes?” The abbot is distinguishing the Virgin
Mary_s beauty from that of ordinary women. The image from the Rothschild
Canticles is published in Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-
making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 302, fig.
163.
74. Jewish Wars, Book VI, Ch. 3.4: The Works of Flavius Josephus, trans. William
Whiston (Halifax: William Milner, 1850), 603. Giovanni Boccaccio gives a
truncated version of this tale and conveys the woman_s weakness more econom-
ically, by narrating her actions entirely in the passive voice, “Mulier operta sit fame
coacta occisi filii comedere carnes:” De casibus illustrorum virorum: A Facsimile
Reproduction of the Paris Edition of 1520, introduction by Louis Brewer Hall
(Gainesville, FL: Scholars_ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1962), 184-85. Boccaccio_s
version is illustrated in an early fifteenth-century manuscript of Laurent de
Premierfait_s French translation, entitled Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes:
Getty Museum, Los Angeles, MS. 63, fol. 241. The image may be viewed on the
Getty website at http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?
artobj=112369 (accessed 4 September 2007). As in the Cantigas, this image marks
the male Jews iconographically, but not the Jewess. For similar illustrations and a
discussion of their style, see Millard Meiss, French Painting in the Time of Jean de
Berry: The Boucicaut Master (London: Phaidon, 1968), 50, 103, and figs. 384, 385,
387.
75. See Rubin, Gentile Tales, 36-37, 41, and 84. Anna S. Abulafia repeats this point in
her review of Gentile Tales, but adds that, in contrast, Hebrew Chronicles of the
First Crusade tended to portray Jewish women as particularly steadfast in their
faith: History Today 49 (1999): 56. I think it likely that Christian assumptions
176 SARA LIPTON
about Jewish women_s pliability derive from gender ideology and the literature it
generated, rather than from actual experience. William Chester Jordan notes that
“males appear to have constituted the vast majority of voluntary and individual
converts:” in “Adolescence and Conversion in the Middle Ages: A Research
Agenda,” in Michael A. Signer and John van Engen, eds., Jews and Christians in
Twelfth-century Europe (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001),
77-93, here 77. I am not aware of any studies proving that women were more likely
to convert than men. It is possible that in cases of mass violence, these very
assumptions might have inclined persecutors to offer the option of conversion more
readily to women than to men. Note, too, that pagan and Arian women were
likewise portrayed as more receptive of Catholic missionizing than men: Cordula
Nolte, “Gender and Conversion in the Merovingian Era,” in James Muldoon, ed.,
Varieties of Religious Conversion in the Middle Ages (Gainesville, FL: University of
Florida Press, 1997), 81-99. Women were also considered more susceptible to
heresy.
76. Matthew Paris, “Quod cum mulier post aliquot dies videret, ratione sexus
condoluit, et transiens clam sordes abstersit a facie imagines enormiter deturpatae:”
Chronica Majora, ed. Luard, 5:115.
77. See Lipton, “Temple is My Body.”
78. The scholarly literature exploring the iconography of women is vast. For a
discussion of these features in a very early portrayal of seductive womanhood, see
Adam S. Cohen and Anne Derbes, “Bernward and Eve at Hildesheim,” Gesta 40
(2001): 19-38. For Gothic art, see especially Madeline H. Caviness, Visualizing
Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle, and Scopic Economy (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), with further bibliography; Camille, Gothic
Idol, 220-41 and 298-337; and Susan L. Smith, The Power of Women: A Topos in
Medieval Art and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1995).
79. Child, English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 3:243, #155; and Bronson, Singing
Tradition, 294-98.
80. See Nona C. Flores, “‘Effigies amicitiae...veritas inimicitiae_: Anti-feminism in the
Iconography of the Woman-headed Serpent in Medieval and Renaissance Art and
Literature,” in Nona C. Flores, ed., Animals in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays
(New York: Garland, 1996), 167-95.
81. On the role of art in containing female danger, see, among many other works,
Caviness, Visualizing Women; and Camille, Gothic Idol.
82. See Cantigas 46, 167, and 192. For a discussion of the representation of Muslims in
the Cantigas, see Prado-Vilar, “Gothic Anamorphic Gaze.”
83. See Guerrero Lovillo, Cantigas, 212-14.
84. Gilbert Dahan, Les intellectuels chrétiens et les juifs au moyen âge (Paris: Éditions
du Cerf, 1990), 584-85.
85. See Lipton, Images of Intolerance.
86. I use “co-existence” rather than “convivencia” because of the sometimes overly-
idyllic connotations assigned the latter term. For some thirteenth-century Iberian
Christians, co-existence, whether peaceful or agonistic, was a desideratum; for
others, it was a regrettable necessity. As David Nirenberg forcefully argues,
toleration and hostility were by no means mutually exclusive: Communities of
Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1996). In light of this, the extended debate (recapped in
Carpenter, “Sorcerer Defends the Virgin”), which has centered on how the images of
Jews in the Cantigas reflected Alfonso_s “tolerance” versus “hostility,” seems to me
inexpedient. The issue–at this stage–was not whether but how Jews were to live in
Christian Iberia.
87. On anti-usury imagery and rhetoric in the context of a politics of toleration, see
Dana E. Katz, “The Contours of Tolerance: Jews and the Corpus Domini
Altarpiece in Urbino,” Art Bulletin 85 (2003): 646-61.
88. O_Callaghan, Learned King, 112.
89. See especially Márquez-Villanueva, “Alfonsine Cultural Concept;” and Burns, ed.,
Emperor of Culture. On Alfonso_s Jewish policy, see the works cited in note 19
above; and also Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, “Castile: An Overview (Thirteenth
to Fifteenth Centuries),” in Christoph Cluse, ed., The Jews of Europe in the Middle
Ages (Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries): Proceedings of the International Symposium
held at Speyer, 20-25 October 2002 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 151-162; Norman
Roth, “Jewish Collaborators in Alfonso_s Scientific Work,” in Burns, ed., Emperor
of Culture, 59-71.
90. I am grateful to David Nirenberg for suggesting this line of thought.
91. On these developments, see O_Callaghan, Learned King, 217-81; and Cayetano J.
Socarras, Alfonso X of Castile: A Study on Imperialistic Frustration (Barcelona:
Ediciones Hispam, 1976).
92. Cantiga 342 sings of God: “E porende, se nas pedras faz feguras parecer, non deve
aquesto null_ome por maravilla t͂eer, nen outrossi enas ervas, ca el x[e] as faz nacer
e dá-lles muitas coores por a nos ben semallar” (“If He causes images to appear on
stones, no one should be amazed at this, nor likewise in plants, for He causes them
to grow and gives them many colors to appear beautiful to us”), ed. Mettmann
2:236.
93. Nirenberg, “Deviant Politics and Jewish Love.”

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Jewish History (2008) 22: 139Y177

“Where are the Gothic Jewish women?

Abstract. No distinctive symbol, costume, or physiognomy was devised for Jewish

It may be that in Tolstoy_s Russia “every unhappy family is unhappy in

portray Jewish domestic life. They present us with strikingly incompat-

In fact, an array of visual cues did come to be associated with Jewish

How, then, can it be explained? It is, of course, a tricky proposition at

Christian church. Like the Jewish glassmaker of Bourges in Cantiga 4,

where Jews were so different in custom, and presumably costume, from

Gothic artistic practice is somewhat less equivocal. These features were

Jew_s hat establishes him as a religious authority, an exalted expert in

illumination help mark the city as Alfonso_s ideal of a “modern” Castilian

How, then, can we account for the contrasting approach taken by

As Alfonso himself laments in the Siete Partidas,66 the actual Jews

layman was subject to the Christian priest, Christ_s vicar on earth, a

Proverbs 31:30 tells us in relation to woman, “Charm is deceptive and

negative qualities associated with the caricatured male encompass only

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