Chapter 1
Christians Mapping Jews: Cartography, Temporality, and the Typological Imaginary
It is the sorting out that makes the times, not the times that make the sorting.
—Bruno Latour
In a cogent essay critical of the ways in which “rationality” has become a mantra for dividing the pre-modern from the modern, Brian Stock has shown how the desire to push the boundaries of modernity either back to the Middle Ages, a modernizing tendency, or forward to later times, a medievalizing tendency, leaves untouched the multiple and syncopated linkages between rationality and its technologies—scientific instrumentation, textuality and subjectivity.1 Bruno Latour takes Stock’s critique even further, claiming that periodization itself is the problem of the modern.2 Using Boyle’s vacuum pump as an example, Latour shows how this “invention” can be considered as modern and revolutionary only if one starts periodizing—for example, by including certain events on a time line and excluding others (such as magic and religion) that would derail the invention’s teleology.3 Thus does Latour conclude that “time is not a general framework but a provisional result of the connection among entities.”4
In effect, Stock and Latour both work to derationalize rationality, thereby opening up possibilities for cultural studies of its technologies and drawing our attention, not to the question of power and rationality, but to the political power of rationality.5 How does “rationality” intervene to re-draw, to “re-cognize,” what counts as knowledge? Stock and Latour’s respective work is especially useful for interrogating medieval epistemologies, and has inspired my own interest in the tension between so-called traditional practices of medieval cartography—specifically, mappaemundi, the ubiquitous cartographic representation from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries—and purportedly rational and “modern” Ptolemaic cartographic practices, which became dominant in Western Europe in the fifteenth century and were notable for locating and representing objects in gridded space. The current textbook narrative of medieval cartography typifies this tension. Although such narratives are quite sophisticated and in fact eschew any notion of linear progression in medieval mapping, they nevertheless keep separate medieval mappaemundi from Ptolemaic maps: “whereas the didactic and symbolic mappaemundi served to present the faithful with moralized versions of Christian history from the Creation to the Last Judgment, Claudius Ptolemy’s instructions on how to compile a map of the known world were strictly practical.”6 Typically, the literature on medieval maps regards mappaemundi as encyclopedic, “unscientific,” whereas Ptolemaic cartography is considered a first step toward a “modern” practice. Mappaemundi get sorted out as “traditional” and Ptolemaic maps as “rational.” Supersession is at stake here.
This chapter attends to graphic details of these maps to tell a different story. Instead of sorting them out, it superimposes the “messy,” monster-infested, encyclopedic medieval mappaemundi on the gridded Ptolemaic maps. Indeed, as I show, the overlaps and misalignments of these two cartographic practices graph the Christian typological imaginary in ways that need to be better understood in medieval cartography in particular and medieval studies in general.7 To explain what is at stake in viewing the relationship between these cartographic practices as I do, I turn briefly to the work of anthropologist Johannes Fabian, who has studied early modern ethnography (a mapping practice in its own right) and its constructions of time and the other. Fabian claims that early modern ethnography came to deny what he calls the “coevalness,” or contemporaneity, of its encounter with the other. According to Fabian, such denial occurs when there is a “persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse.”8 In other words, rather than seeing itself as coeval with its referent, or part of the same time, anthropology tended instead to deny this coevalness and imagine itself as part of an allegedly more modern and rational time, and its referent part of a more primitive, irrational time.
Early modern ethnography did not, however, initiate such practices. When early Christians cut off Jews and their Hebrew scriptures from the “now” and placed them in a past superseded by the New Testament, they inaugurated the denial of coevalness. This chapter traces how the Christian typological imaginary extended itself to cartographic practices. Medieval maps helped to fabricate contemporary Jews as the first ethnographic “primitives,” since, as I shall show, medieval mapping practices denied coevalness to Jews, just as social scientists rendered primitive their anthropological “referents.” To rephrase Fabian and draw on the work of Jonathan Boyarin, there is a “persistent and systematic tendency” to place Jews in a time other than the supersessionary present of Christendom.
What follows is an attempt to delineate some of the ways medieval Christians used graphic technologies to inscribe supersession cartographically. Medieval maps became an important graphic surface for the Christian typological imaginary. Cartographic inscription was neither neutral nor insignificant, for, as we shall see, translating Jews from time into space was a way in which medieval Christians could colonize—by imagining that they exercised dominion over supersession.9 Although one of the goals of this chapter is to bring the typological imaginary of medieval mapping practices into view, medieval maps cannot be thought about in isolation, since the very notion of a map as an isolated stand-alone object is already an effect of modernist production of cartographic space. Both mappaemundi and Ptolemaic maps need to be studied as links in a chain of translations that graphically dispossessed medieval Jews of coevalness. This chapter, therefore, reads maps within a network of translations in order to discern their interacting imaginaries. The network includes diverse but relevant textual material, such as twelfth-century anti-Jewish polemic, fourteenth-century travel literature, and fifteenth-century Christian-Hebrew studies, as well as the instruments of translation, namely, astrolabes and alphabets.
The “Mother” of the Astrolabe: Dispossessing the Foreskin
I start with the dispossessions that take place in the most widely disseminated of medieval anti-Jewish polemics, Petrus Alfonsi’s Dialogue Against the Jews (1108–1110). In this Dialogue, Petrus Alfonsi, himself a converted Jew, educated in Arabic, learned in biblical Hebrew, an ambassador of Arabic science to France and England, disputes with his former Jewish self, which he enfolds in the persona of his interlocutor called Moses. He wields his Dialogue like a knife to excise this former self.10 His polemic is distinctive for deploying not only scientific arguments, but also, for the first time in this genre, scientific diagrams. He uses “science” to discredit talmudic knowledge for its irrationality.11 In the Dialogue’s longest scientific excursus, Alfonsi attacks the talmudic exegesis of Nehemiah 9: 6, “the hosts of heaven shall worship thee,” which locates the dwelling of God in the West. Only rabbinical ignorance of the concepts of time and longitude, according to Alfonsi, could allow such error to persist. After unveiling Moses’ ignorance, he then proceeds to teach him an astronomy lesson wherein he asserts the relativity of East and West, of dawn and sunset. Alfonsi’s astronomy lesson teaches the concept of longitude, whereby the contingent position of the observer using an astrolabe to take measurements determines relative timing and spacing. By marking such a difference between talmudic interpretation and the instrumentality of astronomy, Alfonsi implicitly constructs the rational observer as a Christian (male) and excludes Jews from this privileged position, the site of the one who knows. Alfonsi thus uses the “reason” of science in this excursus to deny his coevalness with Moses and to relegate him to a time other than the present of his scientific discourse. Science trumps or supersedes the Talmud.
The astronomy lesson of the Dialogue drew on knowledge of the astrolabe.12 Astronomy texts and astrolabes