ABSTRACT
Why are there Jews in the lives of the saints? Though the image of the Jews in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Christian literature has been studied from many points of view, this role has barely been noticed in modern scholarship. Was there a hagiographical perspective on the Jews? Was the Jew simply a rhetorical topos or an actual reflection of attitudes toward the Jews at the time the lives were written? The concern in this chapter is with the function of the Jews within the genre of saints’ lives, in particular in the most influential anthology of such vitae, the Golden Legend of the mid-thirteenth century.
