“Jews and ‘Africans’: Illuminating the Crusade Context of the Winchester Psalter”

• In Event: Jews and Muslims in medieval Christian law and thought

Abstract

My analysis of the illuminations in the mid-twelfth-century English Winchester Psalter advances a new explanation for the appearance of “Africans” alongside Jews in representations of the Passion. The scholarly consensus on medieval visual images of the “black” tormenter of Jesus and Christian martyrs adduces derogatory patristic readings of the “Ethiopian” to explain his presence (Devisse, Mellinkoff, Strickland, Morrow). However, this argument explains neither the relevance of these readings for the twelfth century onward nor their introduction into depictions of Jewish violence against Jesus and his antitypes. Peter of Cluny’s writings on Jews and Muslims, composed around the time when this illustrated psalm collection was produced, offer a better explanatory context. His friendship with Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester and fellow Cluniac, included an exchange of visits during this period. The Winchester priory where the psalter was produced almost certainly had exposure to Peter’s opinions. When viewed through the lens of Peter’s Crusade polemic, the “African” tormentors in the scenes of Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents and the flagellation before a “Jewish” Pilate come into focus as Muslims, enemies of the faith akin to but operating under the instructions of Jews, “nequam blasphemi, longeque Sarracenis deteriores” (Constable 1:328, Jestice 25-7). Medieval conflations of “Ethiopes” and Muslims help explain why the latter are represented with features associated with the former (Devisse 117). Additionally, context clues such as the wearing of the TORTIL, an iconographic headdress employed in representations of Muslims, clarify the identification with Islam (Strickland 173-4). Interpellated into the category of enemy of the faith, originally constructed with regard to Jews, Muslims anachronistically appear as antagonists of Jesus, even as medieval Jews continue to be viewed as guilty of deicide. As the passion context of the image makes clear, the criminal behavior of the Jews derogates the image of the “African” Muslim, rather than the reverse. However, as Jeremy Cohen has argued, the grouping of Muslims as infidels along with Jews conversely contributes to the erosion of the protected status of the latter in subsequent centuries.

Author

• M. Lindsay Kaplan, Georgetown University