Figure 2. Bible moralisée, Vienna, ÖNB 2554. By permission of Österreichische Nationalbibliotek Vienna.
What has transpired graphically in these “moralized Bibles” resonates with observations made by Walter Benjamin in his study of later baroque allegory. He noted the tendency for allegorical writing to become visual and for history to become part of its setting or script. When this happened, he argued, history becomes a ruin.24 I think we can find a prehistory of this repetitive baroque process as the Glossa ordinaria mutated into moralized Bibles. The graphic machine of the mise-en-page rendered ruinous the Bible verses that occupied the central area of the glossed page. Not surprisingly, we find this ruined space invaded by the extensive visual programs of the Bibles moralisées. They mistake stereotype for typology. In other words in the twelfth century, typology, as a supersessionary epistemological process, becomes a graphic stereotype. Should we then interpret this new graphic operation just described as yet another example of the intensification of anti-Judaic feelings of the kind detected by medieval scholars who have studied theological polemic of the twelfth century?
This book poses anew the very terms of the question. It explores how graphics repetitiously enact the cut of the foreskin at the same time that graphic processes insist on the legibility of the circumcision of the heart. The collision of cutting and inscribing takes place not only in the rhetorical realm of identification (and therefore desire for self and other), where inclusion or exclusion is at stake, but also in the insistent realm of the mechanical, arbitrary in its principle. Such graphic mechanicity repeatedly reminds us that the foreskin is the disturbing remnant at the heart of Christian typology. Cutting into the surface of the page with pricking and ruling is in fact a repetitious graphic effort to ground Christian typology. The graphic technologies provide media through which fantasies organize the pleasures of the Christian typological imaginary.
I attempt to intervene in the typological imaginary in order to reopen this gap between typology and inscription once collapsed by Paul. Repetitions are the clues that I track. Chapter 1 shows how graphic technologies, in the form of scientific diagrams, begin to insinuate themselves even into polemical tracts in the twelfth century. I study how the scientific diagrams that interrupted the text of the widely disseminated polemic of Petrus Alfonsi cut graphic boundaries between Christian reason and Jewish unreason. These borders of reason and unreason also come to be drawn graphically on contemporary mappaemundi. Such realms of unreason do not disappear in the chastened spaces of the purportedly more scientific maps of the Ptolemaic tradition printed in the later fifteenth century. A careful study of the ways in which early printers exploited the modular mise-en-page to develop front matter (indexes) and back matter (re-presentation of medieval “marvels” literature) for their editions of Ptolemy actually links them with the medieval graphic tradition of mappaemundi. The repetition of such graphic projects graphed Jewish stereotypes in the always already failed project of materializing the foreskin that Christian supersession graphically supersedes.
In Chapter 2 I take up the well-established textbook genre of the medieval universal history. These histories conceived temporality in terms of six or seven ages of salvation history and used the holy city of Jerusalem as a kind of navel that bound together the vision of temporality. I show how the mechanicity of printing the well-established genre of medieval universal histories broke up and rendered incoherent the carefully delineated time lines used to illustrate universal histories. The graphic organization of the Nuremberg Chronicle, printed in 1493, exemplifies this process. I examine how the dissemination of so-called “realistic” city views in printed versions of universal history increasingly fragmented the time lines. By the time of the publication of the grandiose Chronicle, even Jerusalem, the “navel” of the universal history, had been excised from its customary central and binding place in the genre. Once Jerusalem had been cut out, supersessionary fantasies reorganized identifications both among Christians and between Christians and Jews. Out of the exploded temporality of the universal history falls graphic debris in the form of repeatedly featured woodcuts of fetishized historical synagogue furniture and aggressive renditions of “Talmud” Jews being burned to death in pogroms.
The third chapter takes up the problems of Christian graphic technologies at the level of the archive and architectural space. It relates an exemplary reading of Albrecht Altdorfer’s 1519 etching of the interior of the synagogue at Regensburg, drawn just before its destruction, to the famous trial of Baruch the Jew transcribed in Bishop Fournier’s trial register (1320). The carefully regulated transcripts of inquisitorial trials (their graphic supplement) expressed a graphic crisis regarding the legibility of baptism as the circumcision of the heart. Christians framed their anxieties in terms of questions about the sacramental efficacy of baptism for Jews.25 How could inquisitors “read” the converted, baptized hearts of circumcised Jews?26 The trial transcripts provided ways of forging further links in the chain of graphic repetition, thus disseminating the fantasy of graphic efficacy. The chapter raises questions about the aggressive and paradoxical Christian use of graphics to erase Jewish communities temporally in a fantasy-ridden effort to have them materialize as typological matter. It also shows that Christians not only sought to reoccupy the community space of the Jews that they had destroyed, but that they also sought to occupy that space metaphorically through graphic repetition. This is the graphic story of a Christian hermeneutic circle—how the corpus mysticum (the church on earth) becomes the fidelis synagoga (faithful synagogue). The chapter concludes, perhaps unexpectedly, with Foucault. It ponders how his efforts to rethink temporality and history foundered on the typological imaginary and uses that foundering as a way, once again, to intervene in the typological imaginary.
Typology never lets go; its repetitions, as I have already suggested, haunt some psychoanalytic approaches as well as compelling postcolonial histories that are attempting to rethink temporality without supersession in its theological or secular modalities. In Chapters 4 and 5 I return to the foreskin, the fantasized remnant of the Christian typological imaginary, in order to question the Lacanian argument that there can be no “pre-modern” uncanny. What supersessionary fantasies are at stake in the Lacanian claim that the uncanny is only constitutive of the modern? I argue that these Lacanian arguments mistake the uncanny for the foreskin. They cannot think that within the phallus there lodges the temporal kernel of the circumcised foreskin, of a temporality which is not one. I argue that the foreskin is the “unhistorical” (not ahistorical) remainder of the uncanny that is the unassimilable temporality that exceeds their Lacanian periodization of the uncanny. Chapter 4 opens with a discussion of the recent debate over lachrymose history in medieval studies. In 1928, Salo Wittmayer Baron, the first scholar to hold an academic chair in Jewish history and culture, labeled those nineteenth-century studies by Jewish scholars, which emphasized the desolate history of persecution of medieval Jews, as misleading “lachrymose history” or “Jammergeschichte,” his more abjecting designation of such history. Subsequently a younger generation of post-Holocaust medieval scholars has taken up his crusade against lachrymose history because of its perceived tendency to render antisemitism as some inevitable, ahistoric aspect of the Christian unconscious. This chapter on lachrymose history looks into the unconscious of lachrymose history in two ways. First, it examines the history of repressing medieval Ashkenazi lamentation in the Reform liturgy crafted by Jewish scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums. It then reads Moses and Monotheism (a belated text of that movement) for the return of repressed lamentation through the history of circumcision recounted by Sigmund Freud. I read Moses and Monotheism, in which Freud designates circumcision as “uncanny,” through his well-known essay on the uncanny published two decades earlier. My reading of Freud shows that circumcision poses the question of a temporality that is not one and that the historicist appeal to periodization cannot answer such a question.