The Doctor and the Wandering Jew
The ghosts of present and past Judaism in the Canterbury Tales
Now you might say: Jonny, what the hell is this? This looks like a real academic paper. It has, like, in-text citations and stuff. It has a thesis. What’s going on? Are you ill?
The answer is no, I’m not dying, but I did write this in my capacity as a university student, which is sort of similar. It’s a term paper I wrote for a class on the Canterbury Tales this past spring, so I figured I would share it here. Contains discussions of antisemitic tropes and hate crimes.
Geoffrey Chaucer wrote his Canterbury Tales between 1387 and 1400, a time when there were almost no Jews in England; they had been expelled by royal decree of Edward I in 1290, and would not be allowed to return until 1657, nearly four hundred years later. However, despite the expulsion, Judaism and all the cultural anxieties associated with it by the Christian populace loomed large in the medieval English imagination, and these echoes appear both writ small and large in the pages of the Canterbury Tales.
The most obvious and well-discussed example of this is found in The Prioress's Tale, which depicts an example of the blood libel – the lie that Jewish people slaughter Christian children for religious reasons – that has justified centuries of antisemitic violence up to the present day. However, antisemitic tropes and figures also appear, more subtly, elsewhere in Chaucer's pages, from the Physician's wealth gained in times of plague to the mysteriously deathless old man of The Pardoner's Tale, and by examining those ideas outside of the shadow of The Prioress's Tale, we can draw a more complete understanding of the image of the Jew that the Canterbury Tales lay out. Chaucer shows the Jew at once as a miserable specter of the past and as a wealthy and amoral scientist of the present, ideas that have characterized antisemitism into the present day.
It can be safely presumed that the frame narrative of the Canterbury Tales is set during roughly the same period the stories were written; that is to say, during the time of Jewish expulsion. None of the pilgrims are presented as being Jewish – they are brought together by their collective travel on a Christian pilgrimage – and indeed they could not have been. At most, the more well-traveled members of the party could have encountered Jewish communities outside of England. Despite that, there is a member of the party whose description, as given in the General Prologue, will draw the eye of anyone watching for tropes associated with Judaism, and that is the Physician.
At the Physician's introduction, we are given several pieces of information about him. He is extremely well-read, with a long list provided of the authors he is familiar with, but "his studie was but litle on the Bible (General Prologue, ll. 438)." He dresses richly, even flamboyantly, but is noted as a frugal spender. And, most importantly, he loves gold most of all. Regardless of whether the Physician is meant to be literally understood as a Jew, he fits the very definition of a stereotype especially active in medieval times: the Jewish doctor. Jewish doctors were broadly considered to be especially skilled, even supernaturally so, a reputation which was not without merit. Joshua Trachtenberg writes that "There was a fairly substantial basis for the tradition. Jewish physicians, though by no means altogether free from the general superstitious attitude, were among the foremost representatives of a scientific medicine in medieval Europe (Trachtenberg, 92)." This was due to multiple factors, among them that Jewish physicians followed in a tradition that "associated the practice of medicine with the best minds and the highest scholarship," and that Arabic and Greek medical texts, such as those the Physician is noted as being familiar with, were frequently available in Hebrew translation.
Perhaps the most notable evidence of this high reputation is the fact that, during the period of Jewish expulsion from England, both King Edward II and King Henry IV, when sick, granted special permission for specific Jewish doctors to enter the country and treat them, exempting them from the prohibition that was then otherwise still in full force (Trachtenberg, 95).
Despite this esteem, though, Jews as a whole, and Jewish doctors in particular due to the positions of trust they occupied and the arcane knowledge they were perceived as possessing, were also frequently accused of sorcery or poisoning, Trachtenberg writes. This fact becomes relevant when we note that it is also stated in the General Prologue that the Physician "kepte that he wan in pestilence (General Prologue, ll. 442)," meaning that he earned his riches when his services were in high demand in plague times.
Throughout the history of Christian Europe, whenever there was a spread of illness and especially a plague, accusations of Jewish schemes of well-poisoning and curses followed close behind, and an accusation frequently leveled against Jewish doctors in specific was that they would poison their own patients. In this light, the connection of the Jewish-coded Physician with the then-recent Black Plague serves to cast some suspicion on the character's morality, especially when combined with the earlier note of his lack of study of the Bible. Certainly there are no tangible accusations cast against him, and we are, again, not meant to read the Physician literally as Jewish – but we are given to understand that he is greedy, motivated not by God but by gold earned from the sick and dying in plague times, that he is highly learned but not connected to the Lord – and it so happens that in the medieval mind, these were all Jewish traits.
Much scholarly conversation surrounding Judaism in the Canterbury Tales has focused on The Prioress's Tale. This is for understandable reasons; The Prioress's Tale is premised around the blood libel, one of the oldest and most malignant antisemitic tropes there is, and it's difficult to discuss the tale at all without discussing its stance on and portrayal of Jewish people. The question of Chaucer's intentions in writing it, and in giving its words to the social-climbing Prioress, is a compelling one. However, by focusing only on this most violent manifestation of antisemitism, the implications of subtler tropes and stereotypes associated with Jewish people in the Canterbury Tales can go largely undiscussed.
Much modern antisemitism comes in one way or another from medieval Christian roots, and it's important for us as present-day audiences to have a full understanding of the early uses of antisemitic tropes and the way they're framed, including those far less blatant and violent than the blood libel, so we can continue to recognize them in the media and narratives we consume today. In Carol Mason's study of the apocalyptic Christian nature of the anti-abortion movement, Killing for Life: The Apocalyptic Narrative of Pro-Life Politics, she discusses the presence of the 'Jewish doctor' trope in 20th- and 21st-century characterizations of doctors who perform abortions, stating that "The presumed Jewishness of abortion doctors is stressed in many pro-life circles (Mason, 172)," a characterization which has had horrifying real-life consequences. Mason discusses the case of Dr. Barnett Slepian, a Jewish physician and abortion provider who was murdered by a member of the anti-abortion movement in 1998: "Slepian had just returned to his home from synagogue; his picture was found with the words "killer" and "Jew" scrawled on his face." Tropes such as the malicious Jewish doctor are far from dead, and the harm they do is not limited to fiction.
A reading of the Physician as being coded Jewish can also color our understanding of his tale, and the moral lesson it is intended to impart. Samantha Katz Seale argues in "Reading Like a Jew: Chaucer's Physician's Tale and the Letter of the Law" that the depiction of both the Physician and the tale he later tells present "Jewishness," synonymous with greed, literalism, and a lack of Christian spirituality, as a character flaw for (Christian) men to be wary of. With the Physician, Seale focuses on the framing of his inability to perceive the true value of things, leading to an over-valuing of gold and an under-valuing of spirituality, as an expression of literalism as a Jewish trait.
The stereotype of Jews as literal (and therefore incorrect) readers comes from Jewish refusal to convert to Christianity, which, from a Christian perspective, was understood as a refusal to understand and admit the "true" meaning of the Jewish holy texts which were adopted as the Old Testament as a text prophesying the coming of Jesus. If the Jews could only understand the Bible in the way the Christians did, so the belief went, they would have no choice but to understand the truth of Christianity and convert; as such, the problem must be with their comprehension. In explaining this stereotype of legal literalism, Seale writes, "When medieval Christians thought of Jews, first and foremost they imagined them as flawed readers. The classic charges of anti-Jewish rhetoric—the killing of Christ, adherence to a supplanted doctrine, cruel usury, and corporeal immorality—can all arguably be rooted in the basic charge that early Christianity had lodged against its Jewish forefathers: the metaphorical misreading of Christ and the literal misreading of Scripture (Seale)."
This interpretation of the Physician as Jewish and therefore as an overly literal reader of the law can also be applied to the protagonist of the story he tells. In The Physician's Tale, the protagonist, Virginius, kills his own daughter rather than see her taken away by a perverse judge. The text of the tale draws an explicit comparison with the story of Jephthah, a figure from the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible who was a judge presiding over Israel; explicitly an inhabitant of the pre-Christian Jewish past and an authority of Jewish law. If we do understand Virginius as flawed – if we assume Chaucer's intention to be that he is wrong in killing his daughter – then his flaw is violent Jewish literalism. And if Virginius is flawed in this way, the Physician, also Jewish in his worldview, does not see it; to him, the crime is justified.
This Jewish presence-in-absence, and the constant underlying assumption of the Jew as dangerous, characterized the society in which Chaucer lived during the time of Jewish expulsion. In Steven F. Kruger's The Spectral Jew, the author writes about the position Jews and Judaism occupied in the medieval Christian mind, and the specific anxieties and insecurities the presence of a predecessor religion among a highly religious society elicited. Kruger writes that "despite all the pressure to disavow, indeed destroy Judaism, Christianity also expressed a certain need to preserve Jews (Kruger, 5)." In many ways, Judaism was inextricable from the Christian self-perception, as half of the Christian holy book was Jewish scripture and the entire Christian narrative centered around a 'before' and 'after', where the 'before' was, by its nature, Jewish. Judaism needed to persist in some way, even if that was only in fictional caricatures, so that the true (Christian) faith could be clearly seen to have come after and superceded it. Following this logic, it's easy to see why Jews, both stated and implied, haunt the written texts of England even during the period of expulsion.
Perhaps no figure embodies this fascination better than the Wandering Jew, an antisemitic character who made his first appearances in medieval works in the early thirteenth century, and whom we can also find, if we look carefully, in Chaucer's pages. According to Trachtenburg and other writers, the Wandering Jew was characterized as a Jewish man who had taunted Jesus on his way to be crucified, and had in turn been cursed to walk the Earth, unable to die, until Jesus's Second Coming, an eternal testament to the truth of Christian scripture. In this case, the Jew is literally preserved past his time of 'natural death' for the sole purpose of Christian propaganda, an eyewitness to the Resurrection.
One of the earliest codified versions of this story appears in Latin in the chronicle Flores Historiarum, compiled by Roger of Wendover, recorded around the year 1228. In this version of the story, the Wandering Jew was a doorman of Pontius Pilate who hit Jesus and urged him to go on faster, to which Jesus replied, "I shall stand and rest, but thou shalt go on till the last day." After Christ's death, as this version of the story goes, the Wandering Jew was baptized into Christianity and took the name Joseph, and now, more than a thousand years later, is a devout Christian. As the narrator of the story recounts, "He tells of the events of old times and of the events which occurred at the suffering and resurrection of our Lord [...] and all this he relates without smiling or levity of conversation, as one who is well practiced in sorrow and the fear of God, always looking forward with fear to the coming of Jesus Christ, lest at the last judgment he should find him in anger, whom, when on his way to death, he had provoked to just vengeance (Paris, 513)."
Sometimes, as in the Flores Historiarum version, the Wandering Jew was portrayed as having converted to Christianity, but even in stories where he remains a Jew his curse forces him to recognize the true supremacy of the Christian God, and the inevitability of Christian prophecy.
With this in mind, we can turn to The Pardoner's Tale, and the mysteriously deathless old man who appears before the story's three protagonists, lamenting his fate. Even before the story properly begins, Judaism is present in the tale, in the Pardoner's lengthy introduction recounting sin throughout Christian history: "Oure blissed Lordes body they totere -- Hem thoughte that Jewes rente hym noght ynough (The Pardoner's Tale, ll. 474-475)." Jews are invoked by name foremost as the violent murderers of Christ, setting up the appearance of the Wandering Jew, who witnessed and is continually punished for his part in this same act of violence.
In his monologue, the old man suggests that he is somehow condemned by God to remain alive despite wishing to die; he will live "As longe tyme as it is Goddes wille (Pardoner's Tale, ll. 726)." His portrayal is fully consistent with the common understanding of the Wandering Jew: in addition to his inability to die, he is meek and pious; he goes about wrapped in bandages; he is a wanderer by obligation rather than by choice; he is the possessor of a mysterious chest or lockbox. Nelson S. Bushnell, summarizing the evidence for this reading, writes that "Returning now to the story of the Wandering Jew, we find almost every individual peculiarity of our old man duplicated in that legend as it was known in Chaucer's day (Bushnell, 454)." If we do view this character as an appearance of the Wandering Jew, a new dimension is granted to what is otherwise a straightforward moral fable about greed. The question of why should there be a Jew in a story about the dangers of greed, when the Wandering Jew's primary crime was to disrespect Jesus, and nothing to do with greed, is easily reconciled if we assume that in the medieval Christian view, any given Jew was guilty of both crimes. To be Jewish was both be greedy and to disrespect (or, indeed, murder) Christ merely through one's continued existence, the same synonymous portrayal we see in the Physician's love of gold and ignorance of the Bible.
It must be noted that this Jew, too, appears during a plague, reinforcing the same underlying associations with sickness and poison we see in the Physician's introduction. The plague, in fact, prompts the events of The Pardoner's Tale when it causes the death of a friend of the three rioters. They go out seeking vengeance, and who should they come across but the Wandering Jew? This is not to say that the Wandering Jew is literally responsible for the plague, but there is a correlation present in his appearance. Both Kruger and Trachtenberg, in their respective works, note associations of Judaism as a whole with illness, and Trachtenberg lists several pages worth of illustrative incidents of Jews being burned alive, Jewish communities being destroyed in riots, and Jewish property being seized in misplaced retribution for having 'caused' the Black Death. This is another type of antisemitism that persists to the present day; one does not need to look hard at all to find conspiracy theories calling COVID-19, for example, a Jewish plot. The specter of Judaism, as embodied in the Wandering Jew, is the specter of plague.
In The Prioress's Tale, Chaucer invokes the Jews, placing them front and center in the tale, with obvious intentionality. He is making a point, or several – on the Jews, on the church, on the relationship between the two – by not only telling the story he does but by placing its words in the Prioress's mouth. Perhaps especially in contrast, it's easy for the Physician and the Old Man, who go unnamed as Jews, visible as such only in their descriptions and associations, to speak only to subtler biases, perhaps totally unconscious ones.
It's impossible to say to what degree Chaucer, as a man sharply critical of his social surroundings but also firmly of his time and entrenched in a heavily Christian society, was conscious of the coding these characters were written with. However, we do have a clear example of what it looked like when Chaucer set out to portray the Jews, through his frame narrator, negatively. Perhaps these more understated characterizations, not necessarily blatantly hostile but built around harmful antisemitic stereotypes just the same, are a better representation of his truest point of view.
If that's the case, between the Physician of the General Prologue and the Old Man of The Pardoner's Tale, we can assemble a picture of Chaucer's understanding of Jewish people, past and contemporary. With the 'present day' of the frame narrative, we have a wealthy doctor, condemned for greed and a lack of study of the Bible, profiting from sickness and lacking Christian morality. Within one of the mythologized tales, we have the penitent ghost of a distant past, unable to die with dignity, wandering the land forever, plague following in his wake. We have, to the medieval Englishman, the modern Jew and the mythological Jew.
Sources:
Bushnell, Nelson Sherwin. “The Wandering Jew and ‘The Pardoner’s Tale.’” Studies in Philology, vol. 28, no. 3, 1931, pp. 450–60. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4172104. Accessed 10 Apr. 2023.
David, Alfred. “Criticism and the Old Man in Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale.” College English, vol. 27, no. 1, 1965, pp. 39–44. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/373708. Accessed 23 Mar. 2023.
Kruger, Steven F. The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe. University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Mason, Carol. Killing for Life: The apocalyptic narrative of pro-life politics. Cornell University Press, 2002.
Roger (of Wendover) and Matthew Paris. Roger of Wendover's Flowers of History. H. G. Bohn, 1849.
Seal, Samantha Katz. "Reading Like a Jew: Chaucer's Physician's Tale and the Letter of the Law." The Chaucer Review, vol. 52 no. 3, 2017, p. 298-317. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/664184.
Trachtenberg, Joshua. The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Antisemitism. The World Publishing Company, 1961.
Great read, Jonny!