David Shyovitz from Northwestern University's Department of History presents his faculty seminar "O Beastly Jew!" Jews, Animals, and Jewish Animals in the Middle Ages.
In the high Middle Ages, northern European Christians and Jews increasingly equated Jews with animals.For Christians, the linkage was meant disparagingly—claims that Jews were fundamentally animalisticserved to “de-humanize” them by highlighting their inferiority and irrationality. But a wide range ofmedieval Jewish authors and artists self-consciously celebrated their “beastly” identity, and sought to effacethe conceptual and theological boundaries between humans and animals altogether. In this presentation,David Shyovitz will explore several manifestations of this paradoxical convergence between Christian andJewish discourses of animality, and trace the shifting and contested status of “Jewish animals” in medievalEuropean culture.
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