The Typological Imaginary
The Typological Imaginary
Circumcision, Technology, History
Kathleen Biddick
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
Copyright © 2003 University of Pennsylvania Press
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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Biddick, Kathleen.
The typological imaginary : circumcision, technology, history / Kathleen Biddick.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-8122-3740-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Christianity and other religions—Judaism. 2. Judaism—Relations—Christianity. 3. Judaism (Christian theology)—History of doctrines—Middle Ages, 600–1500. 4. Typology (Theology)—History of doctrines—Middle Ages, 600–1500. 5. Graphic arts—History—To 1500. 6. Antisemitism—Psychological aspects—History—To 1500. 7. Circumcision—Religious aspects. 8. Judaism in art. 9. Jews—Historiography.
I. Title
BM535 .B487 2003
| 261.2'6'09—dc21 | 2003050714 |
In memory of Bob Franklin, dear companion
Contents
Introduction: Typology Never Lets Go
1.Christians Mapping Jews: Cartography, Temporality, and the Typological Imaginary
2.Printing Excision: The Graphic Afterlife of Medieval Universal Histories
3.Graphic Reoccupation, the Faithful Synagogue, and Foucault’s Genealogy
4.Lachrymose History, the Typological Imaginary, and the Lacanian Enlightenment
5.Translating the Foreskin
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
Illustrations
1.Genesis 17, Glossa ordinaria Walafrida Strabonis
2.Bible moralisée, Vienna, ÖNB 2554
3a.Andalusian astrolabe by Mohammed ben Al-Saal
3b.Detail, Hebrew star names, ben Al-Saal astrolabe
4.Chaucer’s lesson on telling time with astrolabe
5.Letter M, Marie de Bourgogne’s alphabet
6.Letter A, Damianus Moyllus alphabet
7.Alphabetical register, Ptolemy
8.Ritual Murder of S. Simon of Trent
9.“Slide rule” of universal history, Rolevinck
10.Nuremberg city view, Schedel
11.Dürer, Self-Portrait
12.Nuremberg city view, Braun and Hogenberg
13.Regensburg city view, Schedel
14.Porch, Regensburg Synagogue, Altdorfer
15.Interior, Regensburg Synagogue, Altdorfer
Introduction: Typology Never Lets Go
This study grapples with an unsettling historiographical problem: how to study the history of Jewish-Christian relations without reiterating the temporal practices through which early Christians, a heterogeneous group, fabricated an identity (“Christian-ness”) both distinct from and superseding that of neighboring Jewish communities. These Christian temporal practices insisted on identitary time, by which I mean the assumption that time can be culturally identical with itself. Early Christians straightened out the unfolding of temporality (with its gaps and vicissitudes) into a theological timeline fantastically based on two distinct but related notions. First, they posited a present (“this is now”) exclusively as a Christian present. They cut off a Jewish “that was then” from a Christian “this is now.” They also imagined a specific direction to Christian time. They believed that the Christian new time—a “this is now”—superseded a “that was then” of Israel. Such a temporal logic also enabled early Christians to divide up a shared scriptural tradition. Christians subsumed the Hebrew Bible into an “Old Testament” and conceived of this Old Testament as a text anterior to their New Testament. “Christian-ness” was thus affirmed by the repetitive cutting off of the old Jewish time from the new Christian time. Even though Christians shared literary genres and rhetorical conventions with pagan and Jewish contemporaries, their notion of supersession came to distinguish their reading and writing.1 This book explores the stakes of this temporal model of Christian supersession.
The purported “secularization” of modernity, I contend here, has never overtaken this core Christian conception of supersession. Supersessionary thinking and notions of modernity are closely bound, and, I would argue, shape even the very terms of current debate among medievalists over the existence or nonexistence of antisemitism in the Middle Ages. At stake for me in this book is the belief that we cannot change the grounds of our historical narratives or ethically transform encounters with our neighbors unless we acknowledge and engage with the temporal fantasies and their supportive practices at the core of such “Christian-ness.” Supersessionary notions, I posit, have rigidly bound the contexts in which Christians have encountered Jews, then and now. I term this captivating bundle of supersessionary fantasies about temporality the Christian typological imaginary. What follows analyzes the material vicissitudes of this Christian reduction of temporality into a binary of past and present. Put another way, by what technological means did “Christian-ness” fabricate itself and at what cost? And how does repetition of the Christian temporal imaginary fantastically shape historical contexts of encounter?
I explore supersessionary thinking from the relatively unfamiliar vantage point of the graphic technologies used in medieval texts and print sources from theological polemics to maps, trial transcripts, and universal histories. I seek to question how graphic technologies both embody and materialize supersessionary fantasies of cutting off the old Israel from