Figure 3a. Andalusian astrolabe by Mohammed ben Al-Saal, 1029. As reproduced in Robert T. Gunther, The Eastern Astrolabes, vol. 1 of Astrolabes of the World, 3rd ed. (London: William Holland Press, 1972), no. 116.
This historical evidence for such close intertwining of Arabic and Jewish astronomical studies and instruments makes Alfonsi’s dispossession of Jews from astronomical discourse all the more stunning. Alfonsi stripped Jews of their coeval contribution to Andalusian astronomy and then infantilized and feminized their talmudic learning as the “verba jocantium in scholis puerorum, vel nentium in plateis mulierum” (“joking words of schoolboys and gossip of women in the streets”).15 Alfonsi could imagine the “universal” rational principles of the astrolabe as a means to purify him of his “pre-conversion”self, of the talmudic Jew, whom he abjects in the Dialogue. Since the astrolabe relativizes time by linking it to the circuits of the sun and stars, Petrus Alfonsi, with astrolabe in hand, need no longer remain incarnated temporally, ontologically, in that abject place from which Moses is said to come in the Dialogue. Alfonsi literally diagrams for himself a new place in the sun. The astrolabe thus becomes the instrumental means by which Alfonsi can both dispossess himself of his former Jewish self and through its possession ward off the shattering aspects of the dispossession he effects; in a word, the astrolabe is, for Alfonsi, a fetish.16
Figure 3b. Detail of the Hebrew equivalent of the engraved Arabic star names on Mohammed ben Al-Saal’s 1029 astrolabe.
Theological Telephones
At the very time Alfonsi was writing his anti-Jewish polemic, Christian biblical scholars of the Victorine school in Paris engaged local Jewish intellectuals in ways that Beryl Smalley and her students have thought of as cooperative, respectful, curious. Could it be that the Victorine interaction with local Jewish intellectuals fostered a sense of coevalness that might counteract Alfonsi’s denial to his Jewish interlocutor? These same Victorines knew Alfonsi’s Dialogue. In eight instances of the sixty-eight manuscripts in which the Dialogue was bound together with other texts, it traveled with Victorine texts. Two volumes of the Alfonsi text were also to be found in their Paris library. Thus the Victorines could consult local rabbis and read anti-Jewish polemic at the same time. To explore this paradox, I investigated the dissemination of cartographic interests among the Victorines. The early twelfth century marks a turning point for the production of mappaemundi. An important text, Imago mundi, written in 1110 by Honorius Augustodunensis, precipitated renewed interest in maps. His cosmography treated celestial and terrestrial geography, the measurement of time, and the six ages of universal history.17 Largely conservative and deeply derivative, its simplicity and clarity nevertheless guaranteed its wide circulation and broad influence. During the twelfth century Honorius’s text can be found traveling bound with Hugh of St. Victor’s De Arca Noe (1128–29) as well as with Petrus Alfonsi’s Dialogue Against the Jews. The library of St. Victor possessed two copies of this Imago mundi, and, when Hugh of St. Victor wrote his Descriptio mappe mundi in 1128 or 1129, he drew on Honorius’s treatise.
Victorines promoted the fabrication and study of maps. Knowledge of place-names and locations was crucial to Victorine innovations in biblical exegesis. The cartographic texts and maps they introduced into their schoolrooms also inspired their meditations on temporality and history. Hugh of St. Victor viewed history as a narrative sequence, a series narrationis: “if we investigate things carefully according to the sequence of time, the succession of generations and the arrangement of truths taught, we can claim confidently to have reached all leaves of divine scripture.”18 He desired that this temporal “sorting out” be drawn graphically (depingere), because things cannot show themselves without such aids (“res ipsas non possunt presentare”).19 His insistence on representing the “visibility” of series narrationis through graphic media thus marks a fresh direction in the mappaemundi tradition. What once functioned pedagogically came to be joined among the Victorines to emerging theological notions of the visible and sacramental—that is, mappaemundi could now be deployed as a graphic technology of the visible, not unlike the sacraments themselves, especially the Eucharist.20
To refine their literal studies of the Bible, Hugh of St. Victor and his students consulted with Jewish rabbis about Hebrew philology and interpretation. In effect they approached local rabbis as intimate artifacts of the Old Testament. The question of their coevalness was a vexed one—in Beryl Smalley’s compelling words: “the Jew appealed to him [the student of the Bible] as a kind of telephone to the Old Testament.”21 Like the astrolabe, the theological telephone, another technological device, paradoxically interrupted coevalness between Christian and Jewish scholars in the early twelfth century. A consideration of Victorine mapping of Jews in their apocalyptic thought can help us understand the fantasy of supersession that is intrinsic to such intellectual exchanges, in which contemporary Jews were called upon to perform as relics.
Literal readings of the Bible among Victorines not only inspired their interest in history, geography, and maps but also prompted apocalyptic speculations. The apocalyptic mapping of the enclosed peoples of Gog and Magog onto mappaemundi can help to track ways in which such maps troubled the coevalness of Jews. Pedagogical texts such as Hugh’s Descriptio are a case in point.22 Early patristic, rabbinical, and Qur’anic scholars speculated on the identity of Gog and Magog. To this commentary attached different versions of the enclosure of peoples and their eruption as a sign of the Last Days. Not mapped as a locus on late Roman maps from which prototypes of the mappaemundi borrowed, nor for that matter depicted on the early mappaemundi of the Beatus Apocalypse group, Gog and Magog begin to appear as entries on twelfth-century maps drawn under the influence of Victorine biblical studies.23 Increasingly over the twelfth-century, texts and maps link the Jews with stories of the enclosed peoples of Gog and Magog. As early as Orosius in the fifth century, links in this chain of associations of Gog and Magog with the Jews begin to be forged. He attached to the story of the birth of Alexander the Great, builder of Alexander’s Gate to enclose Gog and Magog, a tale of the deportation of Jews to the area of the Gate from which they will eventually erupt in the last days.24 Importantly, in his Descriptio, Hugh of St. Victor textually maps Gog and Magog with the apocalyptic tradition: “contra has regiones, in oceano septrionali, sunt insule in quibus habitant gentes ille Gog Magog, de quibus in Apocalypsi legitur” (“abutting this region, in the western ocean are islands in which live that people, Gog Magog, about which it is written in the Apocalypse”).25 In his widely disseminated canonical encyclopedia of biblical history, Historia scholastica, Peter Comestor (d. 1179), a member of the Victorine circle who retired to St. Victor in his last years, further forged the links in the chain between apocalypse, Gog and Magog, and Jews by specifically identifying the ten lost tribes of Israel as the peoples enclosed behind Alexander’s Gate.26 Victorines thus inscribed Jews on mappaemundi when they marked