Where Curse, Refrain, and Identity Intersect: The Poetry of Meir B. Elijah of Norwich

Abstract

I open this chapter, which discusses the work of the thirteenth-century poet Meir b. Elijah of Norwich, with an epigraph from Amos Oz’s “Crusade” in an attempt to evoke the power of a Jewish curse and to prepare us for Meir’s representation of the medieval English Jewish experience as represented in his thirteenth composition, in particular his piyyut [liturgical poem] אוֹיְבִי בִּמְאֵירָה תִ קֺּב (hereafter, “Put a curse on my enemy”).² Alleged to be one of the surviving Jewish accounts of the 1290 Expulsion of the Jews from England, “Put a curse on my enemy,” perhaps composed by Meir of Norwich while “on this exile,” comes to us through the centuries as an expression of hostility and a record of injustice.³ For this reason Chapter Two simultaneously builds on, leaves behind, and is haunted by the view of the putative Jew, explored in Chapter One through the 1275 Statute of Jewry and thirteenth-century English pictorials. The fictionalized account of Oz’s crusade chronicler, Claude Crookback, extracted above, adds to this picture of a Jew’s experience in Latin Christendom by providing us with another lens through which to view the Jewish response to the fantasies invented about them. The absent voice of Oz’s character, imagined as a “violent Jewish curse,” epitomizes the anguish of Meir’s present words.

In the early days of summer, in the course of the barley harvest, the Jewish agent fell under suspicion. He was put to death in consequence of his fervent protestations of innocence. The spectacle of the burning of the Jew might have served to dispel somewhat the anxiety and depression which had caught hold of us since the spring, but it so happened that the Jew, as he was being burnt, succeeded in upsetting everything by pronouncing a violent Jewish curse on Count Guillaume from the pyre.… Obviously it was impossible to punish the wretch for his curses: it is in the nature of these Jews to burn only once.¹

— “Crusade,” Amos Oz