Abstract
This article examines how late medieval Christian approaches to Jewish dance within antisemitic moralistic discourse and legal codes contributed to Jewish subjugation within Christian hegemony in the Holy Roman Empire. Analysing polemical debates, moralistic literature, and artworks, I demonstrate how Christians used the ancient Israelites’ dance around the golden calf in Exodus to vilify Jewish dance as an embodiment of ancient and contemporary Jews’ inherent immorality. Through this theological discourse, Jewish dancing, I argue, became symbolic of Jews’ spiritual inferiority to Christians. Antisemitic attitudes towards Jewish dance permeated into legal codes, which marginalized Jewish dance practices by subordinating them to Christian moral codes. I trace the documented and possible effects of antisemitic measures on the medieval Ashkenazi Jewish community’s wedding dance practices. Dance served as a significant medium for Christians to construct racist, antisemitic ideas about Jewish identity and project those ideas onto Jewish bodies, real and imagined.
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Notes
In this article, Israelites refer to the ancient Hebrews in Exodus while Jews refer to both the Jewish people living in the medieval period and those contemporary with Jesus in the New Testament scriptures.
Judensau statues mock Judaism by depicting Jews engaging in obscene acts with a female pig, which is considered an unclean animal in Judaism. In 1519 immediately following Emperor Maximilian I’s death, Christian residents of Regensburg took drastic measures to expel Jewish residents and razed the Jewish quarter to the ground.
Augustine’s doctrine of Jewish Witness appears in City of God, Book 18, Chapter 46 through his commentary on Psalm 59.
Dance houses were communal halls used by the Ashkenazi Jewish community for festivals and religious rituals from the late thirteenth century onwards. Urban Christians adapted this practice in the Holy Roman Empire in the later fourteenth century. See my discussion of Jewish dance houses below and Salmen (1995).
See Smolar and Aberbach (1968) for more on the various, and sometimes conflicting, Jewish responses to this polemical debate.
See Kathryn Dickason (2020) for the Christian reception of King David’s dance.
This decision was recorded in the city’s lawbook (Stadtbuch) on the rights of Jewish residents. The Stadtbuch codified Augsburg’s municipal law in 1276, just one year after the Schwabenspiegel was completed in Augsburg. Augsburg’s Jewry-Law repeats the prohibition on bathing and sexual relations with Christians.
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Acknowledgments
My heartfelt thanks to Kathryn Dickason for organizing and editing this special issue focused on medieval dance. Many thanks to her, the postmedieval editors, and my peer reviewers for their thoughtful feedback and support over the course of this article’s development. Thank you, too, to Fen Kennedy and Clint Morrison Jr. for your insights and feedback during the writing process. This work is an outgrowth of my dissertation research, which has been generously supported by The Ohio State University (OSU), the OSU Department of Dance, the OSU Melton Center for Jewish Studies, as well as the American Academy for Jewish Research. I am eternally grateful for the guidance of my advisor, Hannah Kosstrin.
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McCarty, T. Antisemitism, dance, and the law in the late medieval Holy Roman Empire. Postmedieval 14, 291–314 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-023-00278-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-023-00278-y