In spite of their different emphases, the narratives of Langmuir, Abulafia, and Cohen converge with Moore’s timing of a significant downturn in medieval Jewish-Christian relations. They diverge mostly in their rhetorical ambivalence about explicitly labeling such transformation over the twelfth century as “antisemitic” (Langmuir), or as a radically deepened, more virulent form of “anti-Jewish” intolerance (Abulafia, Cohen, and also Gilbert Dahan). What is of interest to my argument is how their ambivalent struggles rehearse the very indeterminateness of typological thinking: does ontology supersede epistemology; does antisemitism supersede anti-Judaism? The anxious strategies to periodize or not to periodize Jewish-Christian relations are, I argue, an anxiety about the supersessionary fantasy at the core of the typological imaginary. Julia Lupton reminds us of its pervasive effect on historical periodization: typological thinking, she writes, is one of the “foundational principles of modern periodization per se, and thus must be dialectically engaged rather than simply rejected or replaced.”12
A younger generation of medieval scholars, writing in the mid-1990s, turned to local studies as a way of questioning Moore’s thesis.13 David Nirenberg, in his award-winning book Communities of Violence, takes Moore to task for constructing a “structural” tale of antisemitism cast as a teleological inevitability rooted in the collective European unconsciousness. He seeks to refute “the widespread notion that we can best understand intolerance by stressing the fundamental continuity between collective systems of thought across historical time.” To counteract such teleology, he advocates the study of historical agency. Agency for Nirenberg is an ontological category, meaning that it grounds the “local” and thus enables Nirenberg to assume the local as an empirical given of geography and not as a cultural construct. The local forms the backdrop for his study of how Christians, Jews, and Muslims engaged in processes of barter and negotiation and how their choices shaped the local relations of violence and tolerance. He carefully circumscribes his research synchronically and thus does not analyze the reasons why relations did change and murderously so. So constructed, his study paradoxically produces its own ahistorical category, that of agency, analogous to the ahistorical category of antisemitism of which he accuses Moore and other so-called structuralists. What if both historic agency and local context are, indeed, discursive (then and now) and therefore subject to the binding of fantasy? How does leaving untouched the unhistoricity of fantasy trouble the arguments of both Moore and Nirenberg?
Miri Rubin is also very cautious about the Moore thesis in her discussion of the vicissitudes of host desecration narratives. She, too, foregrounds agency, context, and choice, but also implies a story of periodization not dissimilar to those of Moore and Cohen. The host desecration narrative, according to Rubin, is a “new” story that emerges over the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries and marks a transformation in how Christians came to regard the mission of the Jews. Their witness was no longer one of reminder of the incompleteness of redemption, but rather “of witness [that] was worked through his [the Jew’s] death, the erasure of the doubt and danger he represented.” Thus, murderous Christian narratives directed against Jews gain momentum through dissemination of these stories and their visual representation. The occasions when Christians chose not to act on such fantasies provide Rubin with her rare but redemptive proof that antisemitism is not historically essential or teleological. Choice functions for Rubin, too, as the ontological given of the historical subject. The repetitive pressures that fantasy exerted on agency at the visual and narrative edges of host desecration stories remain an unconsidered question in Gentile Narratives.
Perhaps the most ambivalent of the recent studies is that by Sara Lipton—Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée. 14 Her study of the powerful and disturbing depiction of Jews in these manuscripts of the early thirteenth century argues with Moore over the level of consciousness ascribed to such portrayals. On one page Lipton faults Moore for imputing too much consciousness to clerical elites in the process of producing denigrating stereotypes of Jews; on the next, she remarks that he has imputed too little consciousness to this process. Her careful construction of the provenance of these manuscripts also raises the question of agency. Lipton begins to acknowledge the discursive possibilities of agency when she observes that “the resonances of the new semantic practices were not always confined to the illustrated page or the spoken word.”
These recent studies are persuasive in their questioning of an ahistorical notion of antisemitism as a way of understanding the history of Jewish-Christian relations. At the same time, they also show the limits of relying on ontological notions of historical agency without considering fantasy and pleasure. My own study seeks to embrace the paradox of material network and fantasy. What follows does rely on psychoanalysis, not for the purpose of reintroducing some timeless notion of antisemitism, but to interrogate psychoanalytic thinking, too, for its own investments in the typological imaginary, even as psychoanalytic theory offers us ways of imagining new ways of relating, or what Eric Santner has called an ethics of singularity. My study is thus a percussive one in that it seeks to loosen the sediments and accretions of rigid fantasies that hold “Christian-ness” captive.
Mise-en-Page and the Foreskin
The crucial point of all this so far is that figural or typological thinking has at its core a fantasy of supersession that historians need to work through in order to transform the way we think about Jewish-Christian relations then and now. This book takes the typological imaginary as its central problem. It does so, however, not through the means of already well-studied texts of medieval exegesis and polemic against the Jews. Instead, I focus on the machine-like repetitions, the automaticity at the typological core of the Christian unconscious. From the moment in his epistles that he transferred the cut of circumcision to an inscription on the heart, Paul constituted typological thinking with and through graphic technologies with their attendant questions of legibility. In his new theology of circumcision, the circumcision of the heart, Paul severed a Christian “now” from a Jewish “then.” As he wrote in Romans 2: 28–29, “For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision which is outward in the flesh: But he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise not of men but of God.”
Typology and graphic technology are thus closely bound, and, I shall argue, historically constitutive of each other. There exists, however, no history of their imbrication. Such a history would be one precondition for working through the Christian fantasy of supersession. In advocating the transfer of circumcision from the cut foreskin to the inscribed heart, Paul incorporated fleshly excision into a space of inscription. In fabricating the heart as a space of inscription, Paul also inaugurated the typologization of the graphic machine, in that the act of cutting the foreskin becomes the figure for Christian inscription, or graphic technologies. Graphic technologies are thus the chief evidentiary source of my study.
Let me now exemplify what I mean by graphic technologies by returning us to the page of the Glossa ordinaria that opened this introduction. The standardized layout of the page illustrated in Figure 1 marked a major transition in Christian graphic technology in the mid-twelfth century. The concept of the page as a modular unit for the graphic organization of textual presentation emerged at that time as scribes and scholars devised a standardized layout for this schoolbook. No component of these textbooks—the Bible text, the interlinear gloss, or the marginal glosses—was itself an innovation. Indeed, each element has a complicated genealogy in early medieval biblical scholarship. What interests me for my study of the typological imaginary is how the page fabricated as a modular unit came to organize Bible text and glosses graphically and subordinate them to itself.
Christopher de Hamel has carefully analyzed the crucial scribal experiments involved in producing the standardized, modular form for the pages of the Glossa.15 Whereas once the Bible text had been the chief organizing vector for scribes,