Jews and the historical imaginary of half the world’s peoples

Maybe it’s not (quite) half, perhaps a bit more. I don’t really know. But it’s a big chunk.

Historical imaginary? “Imaginary” as a noun showed up in the humanities sometime in the last half century or so when I wasn’t watching. Perhaps the usage can be traced back to Lacan? Anyhow, it’s something like the ongoing process and repository of fictive conceptualization that’s applied to events as they unfold and so shapes our apprehension of them. Historical? It just means that it stretches back in time.

The Israeli’s that Hamas slaughtered on October 7, 2023 were real people. But the slaughter has entanglements that stretch far beyond any real events in Israel and Palestine in the last 10, 20, 30, 50, or even 100 years. Those entanglements are anchored in that historical imaginary.

The reality of that historical imaginary was recently born to me as a mild shock while reading Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. That shock came near the beginning of Chapter 9: “Slaughter at the Scaffold.” Greenblatt works his way around to Marlow’s The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare’s response, The Merchant of Venice. While Shylock is not the title character, he is the center of the play. With those two plays in mind, Greenblatt observes that neither Marlow or Shakespeare “is ever likely to encountered a Jew.”

“Really,” I thought, “Really?”

Greenblatt goes on to explain (p. 258):

...in 1290, two hundred years before the momentous expulsion from Spain, the entire Jewish community of England had been expelled and forbidden on pain of death to return. The act of expulsion, in the reign of Edward I, was unprecedented; England was the first nation in medieval Christendom to rid itself by law of its entire Jewish population. There was no precipitating crisis, as far as is known, no state of emergency, not even any public explanation. No jurist seems to have thought it necessary to justify the deportations; no chronicler bothered to record the official reasons. Perhaps no one, Jew or Christian, thought reasons needed to be given. For decades the Jewish population in England had been in desperate trouble: accused of Host desecration and the ritual murder of Christian children, hated as moneylenders, reviled as Christ killers, beaten and lynched by mobs whipped into anti-Jewish frenzy by the incendiary sermons of itinerant friars.

There were no Jews in England in the late 16th century:

Yet in fact the Jews left traces far more difficult to eradicate than people, and the English brooded on these traces – stories circulated, reiterated, and elaborated – continually and virtually obsessively.

That’s the historical imaginary at work. It has a life of its own. This particular stream of the imaginary is about Jews but has only a fortuitous and contingent relationship to real Jews.

The fact that there were no Jews in Shakespeare’s England was thus no impediment to writing a play about a Jew, one who was a moneylender. Shakespeare had the cultural imaginary of Jews to draw upon and, in so doing, he gave it new force and energy. His moneylender was named “Shylock,” a name which has since served as a token and touchstone for usury.

Jews began returning to England in the middle of the seventeenth century, during the rule of Oliver Cromwell.

As for the Jews in the cultural imaginary, that exploded in Germany and Austria in the middle of the previous century. Those reverberations remain with us to this day.

Will they never dissolve, dissipate, and deliquesce into numinous spirit?