6 x 9. 384 pgs. 2 B&W photographs. (2004) Cloth 978-0-472-11408-5 $80.00S  Available Add to Cart Search this Book's Content About the Book Praise Look Inside Subjects History / Medieval and Renaissance Studies / Religion

The Footsteps of Israel
Understanding Jews in Anglo-Saxon England

Andrew P. Scheil

Winner: The Medieval Academy of America's 2008 John Nicholas Brown Prize

Winner: ISAS Best First Book Award

Illuminates the previously unrecognized role of Jews and Judaism in early English writing and society

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About the Book

Jews are the omnipresent border-dwellers of medieval culture, a source of powerful metaphors active in the margins of medieval Christianity. This book outlines an important prehistory to later persecutions in England and beyond, yet it also provides a new understanding of the previously unrecognized roles Jews and Judaism played in the construction of social identity in early England.

Andrew P. Scheil approaches the Anglo-Saxon understanding of Jews from a variety of directions, including a survey of the lengthy history of the ideology of England as the New Israel, its sources in late antique texts and its manifestation in both Old English and Latin texts from Anglo-Saxon England. In tandem with this perhaps more sympathetic understanding of the Jews is a darker vision of anti-Judaism, associating the Jews in an emotional fashion with the materiality of the body.

In exploring the complex ramifications of this history, the author is the first to assemble and study references to Jews in Anglo-Saxon culture. For this reason, The Footsteps of Israel will be an important source for Anglo-Saxonists, scholars of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, scholars of medieval antisemitism in general, students of Jewish history, and medievalists interested in cultural studies.

Andrew P. Scheil is Associate Professor of English at the University of Minnesota.