Abstract
Place matters, and this essay explores how living and studying at Yarnton Manor, Oxford, has impacted my teaching. The (obscured) history of Oxford Jews becomes real when one lives in the history of the Jews. For instance, medieval Jews are both present and absent in modern Oxford: the Oxford Jewish cemetery was established in the twelfth century, but its memory is marked only by a plaque on the Botanic Garden’s gates. The story of this site mirrors others in England and throughout Europe. The importance of place and on-the-ground experiences are important to identity and collective memory both in the Middle Ages and in the now. Identity and collective memory are important themes not only in medieval courses but also in courses addressing modern topics.
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Notes
- 1.
I had originally considered writing this essay in the form of a letter to United States Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, whose attacks on seminars like the one I attended appear to have led to their discontinuation. See David Perry, “Save the Overseas Seminar” and Sessions’s letter to the National Endowment for the Humanities, at http://www.budget.senate.gov/republican/public/index.cfm/2014/4/sessions-questions-national-endowment-for-the-humanities-over-dubious-expenditures.
- 2.
Bill Ashcroft, Post-colonial Transformation (London: Routledge, 2001), 156.
- 3.
On this memorial, see Ian Johnson, “Jews Aren’t Allowed to Use Phones: Berlin’s Most Unsettling Memorial,” New York Review of Books Daily 15 Jun. 2013; Web.
- 4.
Elisa Narin Van Court, “Invisible in Oxford: Medieval Jewish History in Modern England,” Shofar 26 (2008): 1–20.
- 5.
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, ed., The Post-colonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1995), 392.
- 6.
Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). For a useful overview of the field of memory studies, including the concept of collective memory, I sometimes assign the introduction to Jeffrey Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy, eds., The Collective Memory Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), esp. 16–18, as well as the selections by Halbwachs (139–49) and Yerushalmi (201–8).
- 7.
Yosef Hayyim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982).
- 8.
Juan Goytisolo, Cuaderno de Sarajevo: anotaciones de un viaje a la barbarie (Madrid: El País/Aguilar, 1993); translated by Peter Bush as Landscapes of War: From Sarajevo to Chechnya (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2000).
- 9.
UCSD has a Department of Literature that encompasses a wide range of literary and linguistic traditions.
- 10.
Susan Einbinder, “Meir b. Elijah of Norwich: Persecution and Poetry among Medieval English Jews,” Journal of Medieval History 2 (2000): 145–62, and Miriamne Ara Krummel, “Meir b. Elijah of Norwich and the Margins of Memory,” Shofar 27 (2009): 1–23.
- 11.
Susan Einbinder, “Meir b. Elijah,” 147–49.
- 12.
Anthony Bale, “Afterword: Violence, Memory, and the Traumatic Middle Ages,”Christians and Jews in Angevin England: The York Massacre of 1190, Narratives and Contexts, ed. Sarah Rees-Jones and Sethina Watson (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2013), 294–304; and James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
- 13.
Sites we have considered have included the “Jewbury” cemetery in York, referenced below as well as “Jacob’s Well” in Bristol. I have found useful the following references: David Hinton, “Medieval Anglo-Jewry: The Archaeological Evidence,” Jews in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary, and Archaeological Perspectives, ed. Patricia Skinner (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2003), 97–113; Joe Hillaby and Richard Sermon “Jacob’s Well, Bristol: Mikveh or Bet Tohorah?” Transactions: Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 122 (2004): 127–52, as well as the sections on cemeteries, mikva’ot, and other sites in Joe and Caroline Hillaby, The Palgrave Dictionary of Medieval Anglo-Jewish History (New York: Palgrave, 2013).
- 14.
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
- 15.
Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (1820; New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005).
- 16.
Hyam Maccoby, “The Delectable Daughter,” Midstream 16.9 (1970): 50–60.
- 17.
On the York massacre see Sethina Watson, “The Moment and Memory of the York Massacre of 1190,” Christians and Jews in Angevin England, 1–14, as well as Barrie Dobson, The Jews of Medieval York and the Massacre of March 1190, rev. ed. (1974; York: Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, University of York, 1996), and Barrie Dobson, “The Medieval York Jewry Reconsidered,” Jews in Medieval Britain, 145–56.
- 18.
Lisa Lampert-Weissig, Medieval Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 56–64.
- 19.
Sharon Turner, The History of England from the Norman Conquest to the Accession of Edward the First (London: 1814), 326.
- 20.
See Fig. 1.2 for a picture of the plaque. On the York excavation, see J.M. Lilley, The Jewish Burial Ground at Jewbury (York: Council for British Archaeology, 1994); a picture of the plaque can be found on 301.
- 21.
On the Stolpersteine, see my “The Vanished Stumbling Stones of Villingen,” Tablet Magazine 3 Jun. 2015; Web.
- 22.
In addition to the novels mentioned in the body of the essay we read Isaac Bashevis Singer, Enemies, a Love Story (1972); Octavia Butler, Kindred (1979); August Wilson, The Piano Lesson (1990); Art Spiegelman, Maus I and II (1991); and lê thi diem thúy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003).
- 23.
“Rememory” is found in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987; New York: Vintage, 2004) demonstrating that “literary theory” can be found in fiction as well as criticism; for post-memory , see Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Post-Memory,” Poetics Today 29.1 (2008): 103–28.
- 24.
Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002); cited parenthetically.
- 25.
Louis Owens, Bone Game: A Novel (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996); cited parenthetically.
- 26.
For an introduction to the controversy, see Matt Potter, “Native Americans Sue,” San Diego Reader 17 Apr. 2012; Web.
- 27.
Amos Oz, How to Cure a Fanatic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 13–14.
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Lampert-Weissig, L. (2017). “You Had to Have Been There”: The Importance of Place in Teaching Jewish History and Literature. In: Krummel, M., Pugh, T. (eds) Jews in Medieval England. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63748-8_15
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