The Un-Moralized Bible
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Footnotes
Although not specified in the 1215 edict, the French would soon require a circle to be sewn onto Jews’ clothing, while the English required a badge in the shape of tablets. Later in the 13th century, Germany imposed a “traditional” Jewish hat—which seemed to derive from art rather than the other way around.
The stimulating and provocative rereading of Paul offered by John G. Gager in “Paul’s Contradictions: Can They Be Resolved?” BR 14:06, was not shared by medieval Christian exegetes.
Endnotes
For a fuller examination of the themes discussed in this article, see my recent book: Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1999).
For these events, see William Chester Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews: From Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians (Philadelphia, PA: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1989); or Robert Chazan, Medieval Jewry in Northern France (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973).
An excellent recent discussion of Jews in medieval Christian thought is Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1999). For population estimates, which range between .05 and 5 percent of the population, see Jordan, The French Monarchy, pp. 5–10.
See chap. 1 of Lipton, Images of Intolerance; and Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Later Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1993).