Jewish Dogs An Image and Its Interpreters [Hardcover]

Jewish Dogsis not a study of anti-Semitism or anti-Judaism. Instead, this book argues that to anchor claims of supersession, Catholics have viewed Jews as metaphoricand sometimes not so metaphoricdogs. The dog has for millennia been the focus of impurity, and Catholicism fosters doctrines of physical purity that go hand in hand with those of ritual purity. The purity is that of the one loaf spoken of by Paul in Corinthians that is, at once, the Eucharist and the collective Christian Corpus, the body of the faithful. Paul views this loaf as physically corruptible, and as John Chrysostom said at the close of the fourth century, the greatest threat to the loaf's purity are the Jews. They are the dogs who wish to steal the bread that belongs exclusively to the children. Eventually, Jews were said to attack the loaf through ritual murder and attempts to defile the Host itself; the victim of ritual murder is identified with the Host, as is common in Catholic martyrdom. Pope Pius IX still spoke of Jewish dogs barking throughout the streets of Rome in 1871. Other Catholic clergy were dismayed. This book is thus as much a study of Catholic doctrinal history as it is a study of Jews.

There is no question that we are in the hands of an accomplished historian who has enlarged the canvas and opened fresh questions and perspectives on this vexing subject. Kenneth Stow, now Emeritus, was Professor of Jewish History at the University of Haifa for nearly thirty years. He is author ofTheater of Acculturation: The Roman Ghetto in the Sixteen Century(2001),The Jews in Rome,Volumes I and II (1995, 1997), andAlienated Minority: The Jews in Medieval Latin Europe(1992), among others. Exploring the Catholic doctrine of physical purity, the purity of the 'one loaf' spoken of by Paul in Corinthians and its interpretation by John Chrysostom, Stow provides a framework to understand Spanish early modern anti-Jewish attitudes and utterances lÃÕ