Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare

Lampert, Lisa

doi:10.9783/9780812202557

Cited by 134 publications

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“…And Chaim, the Nobel Prize–winning scientist, here represents the secular Jew, who demonstrates the damaging influence of the “secular humanism” that LaHaye despises ( The Battle for the Mind 2). Chaim is a renowned botanist whose innovations have brought prosperity to Israel, but he is locked in a secular permutation of the Jew's traditional “hermeneutical handicap” (Copeland 257; Lampert 43). He must become a Messianic Jew to fulfill his appointed role and lead his people to theirs.…”

Section: Tracing the Antisemitic Tradition In Left Behindmentioning

confidence: 99%

Left Behind, the Holocaust, and that Old Time Antisemitism

Lampert‐Weissig¹

2012

The J of Popular Culture

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Section: Tracing the Antisemitic Tradition In Left Behindmentioning

confidence: 99%

Left Behind, the Holocaust, and that Old Time Antisemitism

Lampert‐Weissig¹

2012

The J of Popular Culture

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“…She focuses on the analogizing of Jews and women as "hermeneutically handicapped," incapable of reading spiritually, "blinded by the veil of the letter." 61 Regarding the little clergeon's movement away from his mother's feminized piety as he grows in understanding, she asserts that Chaucer "averts attention from the potential conflict between masculine and feminine styles of worship by deflecting any possible anxieties over female agency and power onto the tale's murderous Jews," 62 but this is quite different from representing a mother as a Jew, as I have argued Vegas does. Whereas Chaucer sentimentalizes childhood, underscores the nostalgia for the mother, and finally partially restores the mother-child bond through the intercession of the pure mother, the Virgin Mary, Vegas's Memoria marks motherhood as variously calculating, indifferent, and blind to the suffering of the son.…”

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confidence: 94%

Motherhood and Ritual Murder in Medieval Spain and England

Weissberger¹

2009

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

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Anti-Semitic myths of ritual murder are less developed and more belated in medieval Spain than in northern Europe, where they flourished since the twelfth century. This essay suggests one reason for this difference: the presence and increasing importance in late medieval Spain of the converso, a hybrid who blurs the boundaries between Christian and Jew. Using recent psychoanalytic criticism of the Prioress's Tale, Chaucer's sentimentalized representation of the murdered child's mother is contrasted with the very different one in Damián de Vegas's Memoria del Santo Niño de La Guardia (1544), an account of a 1489-90 alleged ritual murder that was instrumental in the Catholic Monarchs' decision to expel the Spanish Jews in 1492. Vegas characterizes the two mother figures in his tale as being deceitful, indifferent, and blind, all traits traditionally used to stigmatize Jews. This conflation of mother and Jew is a striking literary marker of the crisis of categories that contributed to the discrimination against conversos in medieval and early modern Spain.

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“…The laws of patrimony are broken only by Jessica, the Jew's prodigal daughter, who has symbolically emasculated the Jew by stealing his euphemistic "stones" (2.8.20-21; 2.9.22) (Lampert, 2004). Jessica has become one flesh with the Christian in a supersession of the Christian body over the Jewish threat to it, of grace over law, of music over usury, of luxurious contentment over barren breeding.…”

Section: Lorenzomentioning

confidence: 99%

Teaching Jessica: race, religion, and gender inThe Merchant of Venice

Sicher

2016

Journal of Language and Cultural Education

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The Jew's "fair daughter" in Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice converts and marries a Christian, Lorenzo. Recent attention, however, to changing ideas of race and identity in the early modern period has brought into question the divisions of Christian/Jew/Moor. Can Jessica convert and no longer be considered the Jew's daughter? As "gentle" and "fair" is she to be considered gentile and in no way dark (spiritually or racially)? Jessica's conversion has apparently little religious meaning, but rather she is saved from the Jew her father by marriage to Lorenzo, who becomes Shylock's heir. Is Jessica's conversion to be considered a matter of convenience that might, as Launcelot quips, raise the price of hogs, or is it also to be counted as an ideological and racial conversion that reveals underlying anxieties about gender, sexuality, and religious identity? This essay attempts to argue against the grain of the performance history of The Merchant History, which often downplays the role of Jessica or revises the text of the play, and returns to the text in order to contextualize the conversion of Jessica in contemporary discourses of gender, race, and religion in England's expansionist colonialism and proto-capitalist commerce. The conversion of Jessica can be seen in that context as an exchange of monetary and ethical value, in which women's sexuality also had a price-tag. These questions have implications for the teaching of the play and for the understanding of its concerns with unstable sexual, religious, and national identities.

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Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare

Cited by 134 publications

References 0 publications

Left Behind, the Holocaust, and that Old Time Antisemitism

Left Behind, the Holocaust, and that Old Time Antisemitism

Motherhood and Ritual Murder in Medieval Spain and England

Teaching Jessica: race, religion, and gender inThe Merchant of Venice

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