Reading Biblical Outlaws: The “Rise of David” Story in the Fourteenth Century

From Edward I's expulsion of the Jews in 1290 until the late sixteenth century, Jews in England were few and far between. ¹ But if flesh and blood Jews were absent, imagined Jews were not. They appear as the antagonists of Christ—in illustrations of the Crucifixion, the drama cycles, and narratives such as the Siege of Jerusalem—and as the antagonists of Christians in saints' lives, miracle tales, the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, stories of the finding of the True Cross, and Chaucer's Prioress's Tale. Despite the centuries between them, these two groups are often imaginatively collapsed into a sin-gle type, the stereotyped and demonized Jew who undermines the identity of Christian society through his unbelief and is stigmatized with a distinct iconography of otherness. ² But there is another Jew in fourteenth-century England: the Jew of Hebrew Scripture. These men and women of the writings which Christians came to call the Old Testament presented a more complex challenge for medieval Christianity.