Klappentext

"Early English culture depended on a Judaism translated away from Jews. 'Nothing Pure: Jewish Law, Christian Supersession, and Bible Translation in Old English' illuminates the paradoxical process by which the dehumanization and othering of Jews, now recognized as the beginning of European racial thinking, was first articulated in the cultural translation of Jewish literature itself. Prior to the Norman Conquest (1066), Britain had no known Jewish population and was geographically removed from the periodically anti-Jewish ferment of the Continent, but Jewish law nonetheless provided a frame for the construction of sexual, religious / racial, and species difference in Christian England. This book demonstrates the surprisingly central role of Jewish law in translation to Christian identity in late Old English (tenth- and eleventh-century) ecclesiastical and monastic writings, particularly those by the prolific homilist-translator 2lfric, Abbot of Eynsham (ca. 955-1010), and the legal and political thinker Wulfstan, Archbishop of York (d. 1023). Focusing on 2lfric's homilies, saints' lives, and Biblical translations, on Wulfstan's homiletic and legal uses of the Hebrew Bible, and on related prose literature, the author argues that Jewish law paradoxically was both a basis for early English Christian sexual norms and a foil for monastic chastity, that the Old Testament heroine Judith anchored a political theology that undergirded ecclesiastical sovereignty, and that Jewish distinctions between unclean and clean animals structured early English ideas of purity and difference."--