Legends of Jewish Sorcery: Reputations and Representations in Late Antiquity and Medieval Europe

The portrayal of Jews as skilled magicians and malevolent sorcerers can be found throughout Christian writings of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. In this study, I evaluate the significance of these depictions in order to understand their implications for Jewish-Christian relations. My inquiry takes as point of departure the influential work of Joshua Trachtenberg, who argued that Jews' longstanding reputation for magic, which he called the "legend of Jewish sorcery," was a crucial factor in the increasing persecution of Jews in late medieval Europe. However, I challenge this theory by assessing the extent to which such representations were constructions, whether they reflected anti-Jewish sentiment, whether they constituted a widespread reputation, and whether they actually motivated the persecution of Jews.;This study is divided into two distinct parts, each of which treats a key period and context for understanding the significance of Jewish sorcery in Christian thought. The first part concerns the origins and development of Christian representations of Jewish sorcery. With careful attention to philological and historical contexts, I challenge the assumption that these depictions attest to knowledge of real Jewish practices, I argue against the existence of a widespread reputation of Jewish sorcery, and I demonstrate that Christian authors use such portrayals of Jews as narrative and hermeneutic devices for exploring internal concerns such as supersessionism, conversion, the role of the saints, heresy, eucharistic theology, ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and the proper boundaries between Christian society and outsiders. In the second part, I examine the relationship between representations of Jewish magic and actual cases of persecution in the Latin West, particularly during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. I argue that the depictions of Jews as sorcerers did not constitute the kind of shared reputation or narrative that could function as a motivation for widespread persecution. Yet precisely because this notion was not as dangerous or widespread as other antisemitic stereotypes, it serves as a useful research site for exploring the mechanisms of medieval persecution and reassessing key instances of violence in the late Middle Ages.