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Author Lavezzo, Kathy, author.

Title The accommodated Jew : English antisemitism from Bede to Milton / Kathy Lavezzo.

Publication Info. Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2016.

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Description 1 online resource (xv, 374 pages) : illustrations
text file PDF rda
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents Sepulchral Jews and stony Christians : supersession in Bede and Cynewulf -- Medieval urban noir : the Jewish house, the Christian mob, and the city in post-conquest England -- The minster and the privy : Jews, lending and the making of Christian space in Chaucer's England -- In the shadow of Moyse's hall : Jews, the city, and commerce in the Croxton play of the sacrament -- Failures of fortification and the counting houses of The Jew of Malta -- Readmission and displacement : Menasseh ben Israel, William Prynne, John Milton.
Summary England during the Middle Ages was at the forefront of European antisemitism. It was in medieval Norwich that the notorious "blood libel" was first introduced when a resident accused the city's Jewish leaders of abducting and ritually murdering a local boy. England also enforced legislation demanding that Jews wear a badge of infamy, and in 1290, it became the first European nation to expel forcibly all of its Jewish residents. In 'The Accommodated Jew', Kathy Lavezzo rethinks the complex and contradictory relation between England?s rejection of?the Jew? and the centrality of Jews to classic English literature. Drawing on literary, historical, and cartographic texts, she charts an entangled Jewish imaginative presence in English culture. 00In a sweeping view that extends from the Anglo-Saxon period to the late seventeenth century, Lavezzo tracks how English writers from Bede to Milton imagine Jews via buildings?tombs, latrines and especially houses?that support fantasies of exile. Epitomizing this trope is the blood libel and its implication that Jews cannot be accommodated in England because of the anti-Christian violence they allegedly perform in their homes. In the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Marlowe?s The Jew of Malta, and Shakespeare?s The Merchant of Venice, the Jewish house not only serves as a lethal trap but also as the site of an emerging bourgeoisie incompatible with Christian pieties. Lavezzo reveals the central place of?the Jew? in the slow process by which a Christian?nation of shopkeepers? negotiated their relationship to the urban capitalist sensibility they came to embrace and embody. In the book?s epilogue, she advances her inquiry into Victorian England and the relationship between Charles Dickens (whose Fagin is the second most infamous Jew in English literature after Shylock) and the Jewish couple that purchased his London home, Tavistock House, showing how far relations between gentiles and Jews in England had (and had not) evolved.
Note Print version record.
Language In English.
Subject Jews in literature.
Antisemitism in literature.
English literature -- Old English, ca. 450-1100 -- History and criticism.
English literature -- Middle English, 1100-1500 -- History and criticism.
English literature -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism.
Antisemitism -- England -- History.
Jews -- England -- History.
HISTORY -- Europe -- Great Britain.
Antisemitism. (OCoLC)fst00810769
Antisemitism in literature. (OCoLC)fst00810783
English literature -- Early modern. (OCoLC)fst01710960
English literature -- Middle English. (OCoLC)fst01710961
English literature -- Old English. (OCoLC)fst01710962
Jews. (OCoLC)fst00983135
Jews in literature. (OCoLC)fst00983388
England. (OCoLC)fst01219920
Chronological Term 450-1700
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. (OCoLC)fst01411635
History. (OCoLC)fst01411628
Other Form: Print version: Lavezzo, Kathy. Accommodated Jew. Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2016 9781501703157 (DLC) 2016013027 (OCoLC)945804176
Standard No. 10.7591/9781501706158 doi
ISBN 9781501706158 (electronic bk.)
1501706152 (electronic bk.)
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