Postcolonial Chaucer and the Virtual Jew

In the Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer alludes to Jews more frequently and more explicitly than the almost exclusive critical attention paid to the Prioress's Tale would indicate. ¹ Chaucer's allusions, ranging from the faintly positive to the explicitly negative, present Jews as proto-Christian prophets, wandering exiles, blasphemers and torturers, and anti-Christian murderers—all familiar depictions in his time. Some medievalists have found Chaucer's reiteration of the sign “the Jew” puzzling, Jews having been expelled from England one hundred years earlier. In fact, it is perfectly consonant with the late-medieval circumstances that perpetuated the presence of the “virtual Jew” in the absence of actual Jews. Denise Despres puts the case for such simultaneous “absent presence” ² most cogently when she writes: “Despite the fact that no practicing Jews were permitted to reside in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, late-medieval English devotional culture is rife with images of Jews, from the Old Testament patriarchs in the Corpus Christi Plays to the blasphemous, terrifying Host desecrators dramatized in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament and legitimized in Middle English sermons.” ³ Although some scholars have tried to explain away “the paradoxical centrality of Jews to late-medieval English literature and art” by “asserting that Jews function in this literature to represent a generic ‘Other,’ or as a displacement for the Lollard sect,” Despres concludes that, to the contrary, “Jews were not merely symbols of alterity in English culture, whether generic or specific, but rather… their presence was a necessary element in the devotional world of the later medieval English laity.” ⁴