Ivan G.Marcus<scp>:</scp>How the West Became Antisemitic: Jews and the Formation of Europe, 800–1500. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024; pp. xiii +364.

The topic posed by Ivan G. Marcus's latest book, How the West Became Antisemitic: Jews and the Formation of Europe, 800–1500, is a considerable one. He approaches it first by noting that many histories of the European Middle Ages largely ignore the presence of communities of Jews in Europe. For Marcus, any history that treats Europe's Jewish communities as marginal to “the formation of Europe” will not adequately be able to describe its subject because of the outsized role that Jews played in the formation of the medieval Christian sense of cultural and political identity. The book takes the presence of Jewish communities in Europe seriously by integrating a discussion of their actions and reactions to their Christian neighbours, particularly as Christian intolerance develops over the course of the Middle Ages. A key theme of this book, then, is Jewish “assertiveness.” Indeed, the book opens with a provocative thesis: “This book re-examines not only how the Christian majority understandably affected the Jewish minority but also surprisingly how the Jews — real and imagined — so challenged the Christian majority that it became a society that was religiously and culturally antisemitic in new ways between 800–1500. That new self-understanding remained part of European cultural identity down to the time of the Holocaust and beyond” (p. 2). In understanding this process, Marcus asks us to turn our attention away from stereotypes to structures: that is, away from the formation of anti-Jewish stereotypes by Christian society to a consideration of the ideological structures underpinning the relationship between these two communities. The structural scheme that Marcus describes is threefold. The first has to do with power: neither Christians nor Jews wished to be subordinate to the other. The second is the identification of Jews as an inner threat to Christian society. The third is the process by which Jewish identity came to be seen as immutable and resistant to full conversion, which is to say, the racialization of Jewish identity. It is the availability of these structures, the book argues, that enables the transformation of medieval antisemitism into modern antisemitism. The chapters proceed chronologically and are organized around pressure points in the Jewish/Christian relationship over the course of the Middle Ages. The first, introductory, chapter lays out the central claims of the book alongside a description of both Judaism and Christianity's theological claim to be God's chosen people. A second chapter discusses the earliest Jewish communities in what would become Western Europe, describing how they articulated their place in a dominant Christian culture to themselves. Chapter Three introduces the first great clash between Christian and Jewish communities in the massacres of Jews in the Rhineland that accompanied the First Crusade. Chapter Four takes up the topic of anti-Jewish polemic in the early Middle Ages, noting that it was matched by an anti-Christian polemic in Hebrew texts. Chapters Five and Six address two of the primary medieval Christian libels against Jews: what Marcus calls “latrine blasphemy,” or the association of the reviled party with excrement in some way, ritual murder, and blood libel. Chapter Seven discusses “cultural aesthetics,” or markers of identity that might differentiate Jews and Christians, both sartorial and biological, and describes the shift in understanding of whether full conversion, particularly for Jewish men, was possible. The final two chapters take the reader into modernity. Chapter Eight takes a comparative approach to the expulsion of the Jews from England and from France, and it considers the continued importance of the figure of the “imagined Jew” into the early modern period. A final chapter, which rehearses the debates around the continuity of medieval antisemitism into modernity, comes back to the book's initial claim about the threefold structure that enables the transmission of medieval antisemitism into the modern period. The attention given here to Jewish response and assertiveness in the face of Christian ideology produces some provocative new pairings of texts, not only in the juxtaposition of Latin and Hebrew chroniclers of the Rhineland massacres, which have been much discussed, but also Thomas of Monmouth's The Life and Passion of William of Norwich with the story of Rabbi Jacob, which shows, Marcus argues, Jewish appropriation of the symbolism of the ritual murder accusation. The chapters are somewhat uneven in their discussion of Jewish assertiveness, with this aspect coming through most clearly in the opening chapters, although perhaps this simply shows how the possibilities for Jewish counter response were slowly foreclosed over time. In a study this wide-ranging and capacious there were inevitably moments where I wanted more explication. In the discussion of “latrine blasphemy” in chapter five, for example, the tenor of the argument leaves it somewhat unclear whether Marcus is arguing that Jews did indeed perform the actions that Christians were accusing them of (only towards the end of the chapter does he remark that “it is unclear” (p. 101)). And in the discussion of the representation of the Jew in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice in chapter eight I was curious to know what difference the introduction of Protestantism, a new “chosen people,” to the Jewish-Christian dichotomy might make. Nevertheless, How the West Became Antisemitic: Jews and the Formation of Europe, 800–1500 offers much food for thought, and it is particularly valuable for its integration of Jewish voices as active participants in the shaping of Europe. On a final note, sometimes medieval Jewish studies and medieval studies of Christian antisemitism operate at a remove from one another, in different spheres. In this regard, the rich bibliography, which indexes both, will be an invaluable resource to all scholars of medieval Europe.