Issue Editor’s Preface—Nina Caputo and Hannah Johnson

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 When the respected historian Salo Baron testified at the trial of Adolph Eichmann in 1963, he did so as an expert in Jewish history, but also, crucially, as a medievalist. In being called upon in his professional capacity to account for the long and tragic history of Western antisemitism, he acted as but one scholar in a formidable tradition that has sought to understand phenomena which are at once temporally specific, and united by uncanny features of continuity and repetition. The medieval blood libel finds its echo in modern translations of the infamous forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Contemporary rhetorics of exclusion recall, inevitably, earlier moments of oppression, violence, and victimization. In the past decade, scholarship has sought to re-evaluate the representation of the figure of the Jew in medieval and early modern literature, as well as to disrupt the linearity of the narrative that leads seamlessly from early libels through an increasingly escalating rhetoric of violence against Jews that culminates in the events of the Holocaust. The present volume, ‘The Middle Ages and the Holocaust,’ seeks to reframe the history of Western antisemitism as a multi-layered problem of narrative and representation, in which deeply interested anti-Jewish narratives from the premodern world form points of explosive contact with modern literary and historical modes of analysis.

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 1 Part of our work is to examine how later historical lenses, such as the consuming spectre of the Holocaust, have substantially dictated the terms of modern understanding of Jewish-Christian relations, often with distorting effects. At the same time, medieval paradigms of religious conflict continue to operate as the unacknowledged foundations for contemporary efforts to think about problems of political conflict rooted in religious difference. The writings selected for this volume offer a variety of disciplinary perspectives, thematic foci, and theoretical commitments. The first cluster of essays (Shichtman and Finke, Hart, Wollenberg) navigates the perilous terrain of historicized politics (and politicized history). The second cluster (Kawashima [Milner], Blurton, Cole) touches upon the challenges of expression and perception that create significant static in the conversation about past and present instances of Western antisemitism. Philosophical reflections on the names and voices embedded in this ongoing dialogue remind us of the stakes of all such efforts at historical accounting. Each is a contribution to an ongoing dialectic between past and present, scholarship and politics, memory and history.