Language:
English
Year of publication:
1994
Titel der Quelle:
Shofar; an Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies
Angaben zur Quelle:
12,3 (1994) 17-30
Keywords:
Alfonso
;
Cantar de mio Cid
;
Jews
;
Judaism Relations
;
Christianity
;
Christianity and other religions Judaism
;
Jewish literature History and criticism
;
Antisemitism History To 1500
;
Human body in literature
;
Jews in literature
;
Judaism in literature
Abstract:
Analyzes the image of the Jew in late medieval Spanish literature and accompanying miniature drawings to indicate the crucial role that Jewish otherness (and especially the Jew's body) played in establishing Christian identity and the male culture's superiority through denigration and feminization of the Jewish male. In the "Cantar de mío Cid" (c. 1207), the Jewish moneylenders Rachel and Vidas bear women's names and act feminine, while described as sedentary, submissive, and cowardly in a male warriors' society. In Alfonso X's "Cantigas de Santa María" (1252-84), the Jewish woman Marisaltos embodies the Jewess's eroticism and sexual promiscuity (enticing male Christians), but is redeemable through baptism, as opposed to the male Jew who is womanlike and a cuckold, accused of greed, and fathering deformed children. This relationship between antisemitism and anti-feminist discourse served to make the Jews' difference concrete, formulating their exclusion from society.
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