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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Did Race and Racism Exist in the Middle Ages?

by Geraldine Heng

For generations, race studies scholars—historians and literary critics alike—believed that race and its pernicious spawn racism were modern-day phenomena only. This is because race was originally defined in biological terms, and believed to be determined by skin color, physiognomy, and genetic inheritance. The more astute, however, came to realize race could also be a matter of cultural classification, as Ann Stoler’s study of the colonial Dutch East Indies makes plain:

“Race could never be a matter of physiology alone. Cultural competency in Dutch customs, a sense of ‘belonging’ in a Dutch cultural milieu…disaffiliation with things Javanese…domestic arrangements, parenting styles, and moral environment…were crucial to defining…who was to be considered European.”*

Yet even after we recognized that people could be racialized through cultural and social criteria—that race could be a social construction—the European Middle Ages was still seen as outside the history of race (I speak only of the European Middle Ages because I’m a euromedievalist—it’s up to others to discuss race in Islamic, Jewish, Asian, African, and American premodernities).

This meant that the atrocities of the medieval period—roughly 500-1500 CE—such as the periodic extermination of Jews in Europe, the demand that they mark their bodies and the bodies of their children with a large visible badge, the herding of Jews into specific towns in England, and the vilification of Jews for putatively possessing a fetid stench, a male menses, subhuman and bestial characteristics, and a congenital need to ingest the blood of Christian children whom they tortured and crucified to death — all these and more were considered to be just premodern “prejudice” and not acts of racism.

Duccio di Buoninsegna, Christ Accused by the Pharisees, c. 1308-11 (Wikimedia)

The exclusion of the medieval period from the history of race issues derives from an understanding of race that has been overly influenced by the era of scientific racism (in the so-called Age of Enlightenment), when science was the magisterial discourse of racial classification.

But today, in news media and public life, we see how religion also can function to classify people in absolute and fundamental ways. Muslims, for example, who hail from a diversity of ethno-races and national origins, have been talked about as if their religion somehow identified them as one homogenous people.

“Race” is one of the primary names we have for our repeating tendency to demarcate human beings through selected differences that are identified as absolute and fundamental, so as to distribute power differentially to human groups. In race-making, strategic essentialisms are posited and assigned through a variety of practices. Race is a structural relationship for the management of human differences.

Rather than oppose premodern “prejudice” to modern racisms, we can see the treatment of medieval Jews—including their legalized murder by the state on the basis of community rumors and lies—as racial acts, which today we might even call hate crimes, of a sanctioned and legalized kind. In this way, we would bear witness to the full meaning of actions and events in the medieval past, and understand that racial thinking, racial practices, and racial phenomena can occur before there’s a vocabulary to name them for what they are.

We can see medieval racial thinking in art and statuary, in maps, in saints’ lives, in state legislature, church laws, social institutions, popular beliefs, economic practices, war, settlement and colonization, religious treatises, and many kinds of literature, including travel accounts, ethnographies, romances, chronicles, letters, papal bulls, and more.

English Jew wearing the Jewish badge on his chest in the form of the tablets of the Old Testament (BL Cotton MS Nero, D2, fol.180, 13th century. British Library, UK, reproduced from The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages).

Accordingly, the treatment of Jews marks medieval England as the first racial state in the history of the West. Church and state laws produced surveillance, tagging, herding, incarceration, legal murder, and expulsion. A popular story of Jews killing Christian boys evolved over centuries, showing how changes in popular culture helped create the emerging communal identity of England. England’s 1275 Statute of Jewry even mandated residential segregation for Jews and Christians, inaugurating what would seem to be the beginning of the ghetto in Europe; and England’s expulsion of its Jews in 1290 marks the first permanent expulsion of Jews in Europe.

Similarly, Muslims in medieval Europe were transformed from military enemies into non-humans. The renowned theologian, Bernard of Clairvaux, who co-wrote the Rule for the Order of the Templars, announced that the killing of a Muslim wasn’t actually homicide, but malicide—the extermination of incarnated evil, not the killing of a person. Muslims, Islam, and the Prophet were vilified in numerous creative ways, and the extraterritorial incursions we call the Crusades coalesced into an indispensable template for Europe’s later colonial empires of the modern eras.

Even fellow Christians could be racialized. Literature justifying England’s colonization of Ireland in the twelfth century depicted the Irish as a quasi-human, savage, infantile, and bestial race—a racializing strategy in England’s colonial domination of Ireland that echoes from the medieval through the early modern period four centuries later.

Statue of the Black African St. Maurice of Magdeburg, at Magdeburg Cathedral, Germany, 1220-1250 (The Menil Foundation, Houston; Hickey and Robertson, Houston; and Harvard University’s Image of the Black Project, reproduced from The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages)

The treatment of Africans in medieval Europe tracks the pathways by which whiteness ascended to primacy in defining Christian European identity from the mid-thirteenth century onward. Sub-Saharan Africans were grimly depicted as killers of John the Baptist and torturers of Christ in medieval art. Africa also allowed European literature to fantasize the outside world, and imagine what the world outside could offer—treasure, sex, wealth, supremacy—and consider how to make the rest of the world into something that better resembled Latin Christendom itself.

After Greenlanders and Icelanders encountered Native Americans in the early eleventh century, when the Norse founded settlements in North America, Icelandic sagas gleefully show the new colonists cheating Native Americans in exploitative trade relations half a millennium before Columbus. The colonists also kidnap two native boys and abduct them back to northern Europe, where the children are Christianized and taught Norse—an account of forced migration that may help explain why, among the races of the world today, the C1e DNA gene element is shared only by Icelanders and Native Americans.

Europe’s evolving relationship with the Mongol race is traced in Franciscan missionary accounts, the famous narrative of Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa, Franciscan letters from China, the journey of a monk of the Church of the East from Beijing to Europe, and other travel narratives, that transform Mongols from a terrifying alien race into an object of desire for the West, once the Mongol imperium’s wealth, power, and resources became known. Mongols even offered a vision of modernity, of what that future might look like—with a postal express, disaster relief, social welfare, populace-maintained census data collection, independent women leaders, and universal paper money. Unlike the other races encountered by Latin Christendom—Jews, Muslims, Africans, Native Americans, and the Romani—Mongols were the only race representing absolute power to a fearful West.

Detail from the Catalan Atlas showing Marco Polo traveling the Silk Road (Wikipedia)

Slavery in the medieval period was also configured by race: Caucasian slave women in Islamic Spain birthed sons and heirs for Arab Muslim rulers, including the famed Caliphs of Cordoba; the ranks of the slave dynasties of Turkic and Caucasian sultans and military elites in Mamluk Egypt were regularly resupplied by European, especially Italian slavers; and the Romani (“Gypsies”) in southeastern Europe became enslaved by religious houses and landowning elites who used Romani slaves as labor well into the modern era, making “Gypsy” the name of a slave race.

In the Middle Ages and today, it is the Romani—who consider themselves an ethnoracial group, despite considerable internal heterogeneity among their peoples—who best personify the paradox of race and racial identification. Romani self-identification as a race, despite substantial differences in the composition of their populations, suggests to us that racialization—by those outside, as well as by those who self-racialize—remains tenacious, well into the twenty-first century.

* Ann Laura Stoler, “Racial Histories and Their Regimes of Truth.” Political Power and Social Theory 11 (1997): 183-206

Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages

Recommended reading:

Madeline Caviness, “From the Self-Invention of the Whiteman in the Thirteenth Century to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art 1 (2008).
A key study on the ascension of whiteness to centrality in European identity, as depicted in medieval art, with fifty-nine full-color images.

Jean Devisse, The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the Early Christian Era to the “Age of Discovery.” Trans. William G. Ryan. Vol. 2 Pt. 1: From the Demonic Threat to the Incarnation of Sainthood (2010).
An extraordinary, indispensable volume, with a vast collection of images of objects, illustrations, and architectural features depicting blackness and Africans in medieval European art. Part of an invaluable multi-volume series on blackness and Africans in art history, that ranges from antiquity to the modern period.

Ian Hancock, We are the Romani People  (2002). A major study on the Romani, and Romani slavery, by a distinguished Romani studies scholar at the University of Texas in Austin.

Debra Higgs Strickland,  Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (2003).
An important study showing us the implications of the iconography that visualized Jews, Muslims, Mongols, and monstrous humans for medieval audiences. Strickland reminds us that the human freaks depicted in art, cartography, and literature—often celebrated as wondrous and marvelous—shouldn’t teach us that medieval pleasure is pleasure of a simply and wholly innocent kind.

John V. Tolan,  Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (2002) and Sons of Ishmael: Muslims through European Eyes in the Middle Ages (2008).
Two indispensable studies on portrayals of Muslims in medieval Christian Europe.

Header image: Alexander encounters the headless people —Historia de preliis in French, BL Royal MS 15 E vi, c. 1445.

Virtual Auschwitz

By David Crew

Document1

Ralf Breker wearing the VR headset in front of his VR view of Auschwitz (via BBC News).

The Bavarian State criminal office (LKA) in Munich, Germany has developed a 3D virtual reality model of the infamous Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp to be used in trials of Nazi era war criminals who still remain alive. Drawing upon original blue prints, laser scans of remaining buildings and contemporary photographs, this VR model allows prosecutors, judges and lawyers to view Auschwitz from almost any angle.  The digital imaging expert, Ralf Breker, who developed this technology says that it can be used, for example, to determine whether someone who was a guard in Auschwitz in  a specific  watchtower could or could not see crimes committed in another part of the camp. Breker thinks the technology he developed will soon be used in other types of  criminal proceedings because it allows investigators to re-create crime scenes that no longer exist as they were when the crime was committed.  He hopes, however, that when the German legal system no longer needs his 3D model of Auschwitz, it will be given to a museum so that it does not fall into the hands of anyone wanting to turn it into a computer game.

For further details and an interview with Ralf Breker, see

Marc Cieslak, “Virtual reality to aid Auschwitz war trials of concentration camp guards”
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Also by David Crew on Not Even Past:

The Normandy Scholar Program on World War II.
The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 by Saul Friedländer (2007).
Normal Pictures in Abnormal Times.
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History Revealed in a Very Small Place

This is the first article we posted about Texas on Not Even Past. Historian, photographer, and Professor Bob Abzug takes us on a short tour of the intersection of Jewish and African American History in one small town in Texas

by Robert Abzug

Our family knew Luling as a town one passed through quickly on trips from Austin to the Gulf coast, noticing only banners for the next “watermelon thump” and gaily decorated oil pump jacks. Recently it became my unlikely entry point into a visual appreciation of Texas Jewish history and more. I have taken photographs for about fifty years and, for the past twenty-five years have recorded signs of sacred life on the landscape, a project I call “religion by the side of the road.” Mostly, my writing and photography have engaged Protestantism in its myriad forms, though I myself am a Jew. However, in the spring of 2007, Dean Randy Diehl of the College of Liberal Arts asked me to become founding director of the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies, and the private project took on a form more integrated with my new task. I decided to learn more about Texas Jews.

Jews in Luling? It is hardly Vilna on the San Marcos–there is no synagogue and perhaps no longer any Jews among its 5500 inhabitants. Yet, an online listing of a small Jewish Cemetery (80 graves) in the town piqued my curiosity. My wife and I set out one weekend morning in search of the site and found ourselves amid an old, modest, almost rural African-American neighborhood. Some of the small houses looked as if they had been built in the late nineteenth century. We couldn’t find the cemetery and searched an open lot, thinking–a romantic notion–that its graves had crumbled from neglect, lost under the leaves and dirt.

Instead of Jewish headstones, however, I found a concrete marker commemorating what was once the location of the community’s Bethel A.M.E. Church. At about the same time, a large man in his 50s and his aged mother noticed us and came by. We told them what we were looking for, shared the discovery of the plaque, and learned a bit about the history of the black community. It turns out Jews and African-Americans came to Luling in the 1880s, soon after the town was founded (1874) as a railroad junction for cotton growers. The mother was part of one of the founding families, as were many who still lived there. The Jewish families had since moved to San Antonio, Houston, and other big cities, following a well-worn pattern across the state. We asked after the Jewish Cemetery, and the man noted that just down the street there was a “white graveyard.” I thanked them, and asked them if I could take their picture at the site of the church. We warmly said our goodbyes and walked down the road. (Illustration 1)

Photograph of an African American couple standing next to a marker showing where the Bethel A.M.E. church used to be

We found a small, well-tended cemetery filled with stones from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, all bearing the signs of tradition–Hebrew texts and Jewish names–and of acculturation. (Illustration 2)

Grave stones from a "white" graveyard in Luling, Texas

Places of origin varied from Germany to Poland to Russia, as well as some noting Texas birthplaces (sadly, numerous infant deaths were marked as well). Anglicized names abounded as well, and one was quite striking in its noting the departed as a member of Woodmen of the World fraternal organization. My favorite stone was that of Harris Rednick, just one letter shy of redneck, whose stone featured what almost certainly was a Texas Star. (Illustration 3)

Gravestone of Harris Rednick from a graveyard in Luling, Texas

We hoped to top off the day with BBQ at the City Market, but alas they had unexpectedly sold out all their brisket and ribs to a passing tour bus! Still, this half-day in Luling became a short course in Texas, Jewish, and African-American history in one place.

all photographs by Robert Abzug


The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Normal Pictures in Abnormal Times

by David F. Crew

Private family photographs document events, such as births, marriages, and reunions, that are important in the history of individual families, but they can also teach us about the events we think of as real history. Jewish wedding photographs taken during the Second World War and the Holocaust take us into a world of private family events but also give us new ways to understand the big questions of the twentieth century.

1389.6 Holocaust A

The newly married couple, Herman de Leeuw and Annie Pais, pose with members of the wedding party shortly after the ceremony. [Photograph #08725]

The first photograph here shows a perfectly normal wedding scene. Visually, it is no different than thousands of other wedding pictures of both Jewish and non-Jewish couples taken all over Europe before the war—except for one crucial detail. At least four members of this wedding party are wearing Jewish stars. They, and presumably all the other Jews in this picture, have already become the victims of Nazi racial persecution and most, if not all, of them will not survive the war. The single detail of the Jewish star injects a chilling note into the private happiness recorded here.

I was surprised to find this photograph. Until I saw it, I did not know that Jews were still getting married in Nazi-occupied Europe or that they were having photographs taken to commemorate the event. I found this picture in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s photographic archive and it is not an isolated example. A search in the museum’s online data base for photographs of Jewish weddings produced 496 responses.  The Holocaust Museum archive has photographs of Jewish couples getting married in many different occupied European countries, in foreign exile in Shanghai and Kenya, and in transit camps such as Westerbork, the Dutch way station on the deportation route to Auschwitz, and even in the Warsaw ghetto.

Crew 2 fig 2

Portrait of a Jewish couple in the Warsaw ghetto taken at the time of their wedding. Pictured are Pawel Tabaczynski and Bela Szrut. The couple married in the Warsaw ghetto in November 1941.

The fact that these Jewish wedding photographs exist at all is quite remarkable. We would probably not expect Jews to be getting married despite Nazi occupation, and the threat of deportation and annihilation. Marriage presupposes an expectation of some kind of future, even in the darkest times. We know that many of the people in these pictures would not survive. Did they have no idea what might soon happen to them? Were they deluding themselves that they would survive? The caption attached to the second photograph here, which shows a couple in the Warsaw ghetto, certainly supports such a reading; “During the suppression of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, they were both deported to the Poniatowa concentration camp, where they perished.” Another picture of a wedding party in Salonika, Greece, taken in 1942-43, tells us that the couple’s  “marriage was hastily arranged two months before their deportation so that they might be able to stay together. The couple perished in Auschwitz.” The caption of yet another wedding photograph tells us that no one in the picture survived.

Yet, knowing what happened after these photographs were taken makes it difficult for us to understand what the pictures originally showed. When we look at photographs of Holocaust victims who are still alive in a Polish ghetto we already know that they will soon be murdered, but most of the victims probably did not know their fate. Life in the ghetto was seen as a gamble with the future, a desperate attempt to stay alive long enough for the war to end.  We know that this gamble would not succeed.  The Jews in these photographs did not.

Recognition of the distance between our “now” and  their “then” can allow us to understand why these Jewish couples and their relatives are smiling and why they devoted so much effort and ingenuity to finding the wedding gowns and all the other accoutrements of a “proper” wedding under the extreme conditions  of wartime scarcity and Nazi persecution. These Jewish wedding photographs can be seen not as attempts to deny the horrible reality of the Holocaust but as conscious efforts to defy its grotesque abnormality by claiming a small scrap of normality, a tiny hope for the future.

Crew2 fig 3

The bride and groom, Victoria Sarfati and Yehuda (Leon) Beraha, pose with family members at their wedding.

Pictures of Jewish weddings might also suggest that Jews could sometimes use photography to challenge the vicious anti-Semitic images produced by Nazi propaganda. In these private photographs, Jews showed themselves as they wanted to be seen, not as the Nazis portrayed them. This does not mean that we should see these wartime wedding photographs as a previously undiscovered form of resistance to Nazi tyranny, but it does mean that we can see attempts to claim private happiness as something more than irrelevant, futile or misguided gestures.

If you want to learn more about these photographs, you can start at The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; or you can read, The Years of Extermination. Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (2008) by Saul Friedländer.

Photo info and credits:

Figure 1.
Date: 1942
Locale: Amsterdam, [North Holland] The Netherlands
Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Samuel (Schrijver) Schryver
Copyright: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Figure 2.
Date: Nov 1941
Locale: Warsaw, Poland; Varshava; Warschau
Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Eugenia Tabaczynska Shrut
Copyright: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Figure 3.
Date: 1942 – 1943
Locale: Salonika, [Macedonia] Greece; Saloniki; Salonica; Solun
Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Mary Beraha Rouben
Copyright: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 

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