The Study of Anti-Jewish Representation in Medieval Christian Europe (Latin West and Greek East): a Critical Historiographical Overview

Notwithstanding some eighty years of debate from multiple angles, how to approach and delimit the significance of anti-Judaism to Christian visualities remains unresolved. I provide a snapshot of a multi-faceted debate on anti-Jewish iconography in the Christian art of the medieval West and Byzantium, supplementing and updating the overview with which Mitchell Merback introduced his 2008 edited volume, Beyond the Yellow Badge. My essay is organized according to “generations” of research, that is, publications in twenty-five- to thirty-year increments. Historians of medieval art are noticeably absent from the earliest literature on the pictorial degradation of Jews. During the 1940s–1960s, the topic fell to academics and non-academics who had no prior interest or training in writing about the visual arts. Points of intersection with the struggle against anti-Black racism have heretofore gone unnoticed. For example, a long-forgotten intervention by W. E. B. Du Bois from 1942 anticipates the importance of critical race theory in the historical study of anti-Judaism. If the first generation of scholarship made anti-Jewish representation visible as a subject of inquiry, the second (1970s–1990s) cataloged the iconographic repertory and began to undertake historically contextualized and ideological analyses. Byzantinists, too, made crucial contributions that deserve greater recognition. During the third phase, 2000s–2020s, scholars pivoted to explaining the purpose and function of anti-Jewish imagery in terms of Christian self-fashioning. I argue that such a move can be problematic to the extent that it gives the religious motivations of the hegemon and, by extension, the “good intentions” of any idealism the last word.