Hurling Spears of Blasphemy: Constructing Jewish Violence in Sixth-Century Gaul

Abstract: In sixth-century Gaul, while the most frequent accusation directed by ecclesiastical elites toward the Jews was that the latter's determined obstinacy made them unreceptive to Christian preaching, a second—and rarely noted—charge was that Jewish-inflicted violence posed an ongoing threat to Christians. Rather than simply dismissing these ostensibly violent Jews as hermeneutical phantasms, it is constructive to consider the objectives underlying the accusations. A survey of these condemnations of harm inflicted by Jews on Christian bodies suggests that Christian elites were concerned less with protecting their coreligionists from bodily injury than with averting damage to the religious unity supposedly underlying both communal and political identities in post-Roman Gaul. Thus, Jewish violence was more than a mere literary or theological construct; it rather was a lens that reconfigured and reinterpreted both real and imagined acts of violence alike into a veritably monocausal phenomenon.