The Accommodated Jew

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.

Kathy Lavezzo is Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa. She is the author of Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community, 1000–1534, also from Cornell, and editor of Imagining a Medieval English Nation.

Lavezzo has made a strong case for her focus on the habituations of Jews, with copious details that relate to anti-Jewish bigotry. Each chapter is well documented in recent scholarship and the bibliography and index are aids to further study.

This intricate, thorough, and wide-ranging analysis introduces the locations and spaces allegedly occupied by Jews from circa the eight to tenth through the seventeenth centuries.... Another quieter... part of Lavezzo's project involves intervening in the way that medievalists think through what constitutes 'the Jew'.... Lavezzo builds a strong argument for her reading of an 'accommodated Jaw' in six richly-detailed chapters and through twenty-four valuable images (maps, pictorials, and pictures) that complement her claims.

Lavezzo takes a completely novel approach by examining premodern English depictions of Jews in terms of spatial and geographic relations.

The Accommodated Jew addresses multiple audiences gracefully, offering new readings of familiar texts alongside explication of social and economic structures for those unfamiliar with the period in question. It will be of interest to medievalists, early modernists, and Jewish studies scholars alike.

Lavezzo is always illuminating, and her rich individual readings of the works of Bede, the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Chaucer's Prioress's Tale, The Jew of Malta, and Samson Agonistes reconceptualize our thinking on each of these works and, by extension, the presence of the figure of the Jew in English culture.

Vivid anaylsis of well-known texts by the Venerable Bede, Chaucer, John Marlowe, and John Milton, coupled with authors less well known to non-specialists but important in substantiating and contextualizing the cultural concept.... Lavezzo's book reminds us of the importance of humanistic inquiry and the ways it can help us understand or at least ask pressing questions of the cultural artifacts we produce and consume.

In her sustained and deeply nuanced examination of the geographical tropes Lavezzo offers novel and perceptive readings that ought to be of genuine interest to scholars seeking to understand both anti-Semitism and early modern English culture.... Lavezzo's work provides a highly successful model for pursuing the program of cognitive mapping as a way to understand how spaces inform our sense of life.

The Accommodated Jew represents literary criticism at its best. Lavezzo examines a topic of enduring relevance—anti-Semitism—and she demonstrates in perfectly clear, at times even witty, prose the complications and long reach of how the English literary imagination conceived of Jews and their homes. Lavezzo shows how ancient texts remain deeply relevant today even as she carefully situates them in their various historical contexts. I learned a great deal from this book, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. That’s not something I can say very often.

Sarah Rees Jones, University of York, editor of Christians and Jews in Angevin England: The York Massacre of 1190, Narratives and Contexts:

The Accommodated Jew is an important new analysis of the nature of antisemitism and its roots in pre-modern England. It argues that attitudes towards Jews were deeply enmeshed in ambiguous sentiments towards the increasing commercialism and materialism of English society from the commercial revolution of the twelfth century to that of the seventeenth. As such this is a thesis that does more than illuminate antisemitism. It explores an essence of what it meant to be English throughout this period and beyond. The powerfully nuanced readings of canonical literary texts set against a reappraisal of historical and archaeological scholarship will appeal to many audiences and provides strong foundations for reconceptualizing the study of Anglo-Jewry in many disciplines.

Lisa Lampert-Weissig, Katzin Endowed Chair of Jewish Civilizations, University of California, San Diego, author of Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare:

The Accommodated Jew is a very significant contribution to the discussion of antisemitism in English literature. The focus on space and place over so many centuries of canonical literature is unique, and this project will shift the way we consider the figure of the Jew in English literature. I find Kathy Lavezzo's readings brilliant.

Lawrence Besserman, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, author of Chaucer's Biblical Poetics:

Kathy Lavezzo's important new book, The Accommodated Jew, demonstrates complete mastery of the relevant scholarship and, applying sophisticated theoretical approaches, provides new and illuminating insights on her theme.

Andrew Galloway, Cornell University, author of Medieval Literature and Culture: A Student Guide:

In The Accommodated Jew, Kathy Lavezzo argues that in English literature, history writing, and culture, Jewishness is associated with geographical materiality and location, including geographical rootedness in England, but is also denied and denounced on the same basis. The expulsion of the Jews from England in the late thirteenth century is central to that paradox. Lavezzo intriguingly elucidates how, long after the Jews were expelled, historical, poetic, and dramatic works continued to associate Jews with English places and buildings, rendering the bad faith in Christian treatments of Jewish rootedness all the more palpable. This inquiry is as notable for its chronological range as it is for its incisive textual, geographical, and ideological scrutiny.

James Shapiro, Columbia University, author of Shakespeare and the Jews:

Focusing on space and place, Kathy Lavezzo powerfully illuminates how English writers wrestled with 'accommodating' Jews and Jewishness. This is an ambitious, closely argued, historically informed, and deeply engaging study, one that traverses almost a thousand years of English cultural and literary history, from Bede and Chaucer through Marlowe and Milton.

Sylvia Tomasch, Hunter College (CUNY):

Crossing the medieval-early modern divide with erudition and subtlety, Kathy Lavezzo accomplishes what few others could. By focusing on 'the spatial unconscious' of texts from Bede to Milton, The Accommodated Jew convincingly presents a complex, heterogeneous, and contingent literary history of antisemitism in England over the course of one thousand years.

Jeffrey Shoulson, Doris and Simon Konover Chair of Judaic Studies, University of Connecticut:

Between the seventh and the seventeenth century, Jews were considered legal residents of England for a little over two hundred years. And yet, as Kathy Lavezzo's brilliant study shows, the paradox of the displaced Jew—uprooted for his failure to accept Christ and the bogeyman of closed, threatening spaces—sits at the heart of English anxieties about boundaries, urbanization, and the growth of commerce. Filled with surprising historical revelations, fascinating accounts of geography and architecture, and insightful readings of a broad range of literary texts, The Accommodated Jew marks a crucial contribution to the ongoing puzzle of Jews in English literary history.

Suzanne Conklin Akbari, University of Toronto, author of author of Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient:

The Accommodated Jew is an ambitious book that provides a synoptic overview of almost a millennium of antisemitic—and, at time, accommodating—discourse concerning the ongoing presence of religious alterity, actual and imagined, in medieval and early modern England. Punctuating chapters on key figures of English literary history—Bede, Cynewulf, Chaucer, Marlowe, Milton—with intricate studies of less well known histories and plays, Kathy Lavezzo provides a nuanced and engaging account of how deeply intertwined depictions of Jewish identity were with emergent English nationalism, especially in the context of religious heterodoxy and reform. The book is at its most brilliant in its careful juxtaposition of urban histories and cartographic evidence with literary texts, situating the place of 'the Jew' within both local and global topographies. This book is sure to be widely read by students, scholars, and general audiences for a long time to come.