“Let us Go and Burn Her Body”: The Image of the Jews in the Early Dormition Traditions

In his recent book,Mary through the Centuries, Jaroslav Pelikan notes that “one of the most profound and persistent roles of the Virgin Mary in history has been her function as a bridge builder to other traditions, other cultures, and other religions.” This is particularly true of the late ancient Near East, where Mary's significance frequently reached across various cultural and religious boundaries. But it is equally true that Mary often served to define boundaries between traditions, cultures, and religions. As Klaus Schreiner explains in his similarly recent book,Maria: Jungfrau, Mutter, Herrsherin, “Brücken, die Juden und Christen miteinander hätten verbinden können, schlug Maria im Mittelalter nicht… Maria trennte, grenzte aus.” In the rather substantial chapter that follows, Schreiner presents perhaps the best overview of Mary's role as a focus of Jewish/Christian conflict in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Scholars have long recognized the role played by the Virgin and her cult in the exclusion of Jews from Christian society during the Western Middle Ages, Marian piety being, along with eucharistic devotion, the most anti-Jewish aspect of medieval piety. Throughout the medieval period, and likewise continuing into the Renaissance and Reformation, the Virgin Mary figured prominently in Christian anti-Jewish literature, where the (alleged) Jewish disparagement of Virgin Mary “weighed heavier than thefts of the host, ritual murders, and … ell poisoning.”