ABSTRACT
David Nirenberg’s work contends that the violent acting out of hatred and distrust of “others” within medieval Christian Spain was a complicated phenomenon, characterized by local activity rather than universal trends, ebbing and flowing according to local circumstances, rather than moving always toward ever more hateful violence. His account of activities against the Jews during Holy Week is that of ritualized activity. Such attacks on Jews also manifested conflict between civil and ecclesiastical authorities that might precede, or even act as a substitute for, violence between the community and the Jews. In this activity it was primarily clerics, but often very young ones-adolescent and prepubescent males, tonsured and in minor clerical orders-who created a virtual “office” of the stoning of the Jewish quarter in certain cities in the kingdom of Aragon. Such a ritualized drama was both a demarcation of the exclusion of Jews from Christian society and served to integrate young Christians into their community by allowing them to “prove themselves” in acting against a common “enemy.”
