Anti-Judaism

But the search for a Roman reality behind the charges very much misses the point of these texts: they are the product of an ideology that represented the struggle against tyranny in terms of a struggle against the Jews.

Many of his tracts were written in German rather than in the Latin of the learned. These, combined with his efforts to translate the Bible into a language intelligible across the wide variety of dialects that stretched from the Netherlands to Poland, accelerated the birth of a modern German capable of serving as a language of culture.

The specifics of Freud’s reconstruction have not found much favor with Egyptologists, but his arguments about memory and history have been very influential. Freud suggested that, much like individuals who have suffered trauma, societies repress the memory of horrific events in their past because these are too painful to confront or document directl

But this insistence on a bright contrast between the attitudes and practices of the spiritual Christian toward commerce, and those of the fleshy Jew, was becoming more difficult to maintain in a world in which the wheels of commerce were accelerating, and from which the Jews themselves had vanished.9

Writing in 1533, Rodrigo Manrique, himself the son of an inquisitor general, seems to have understood that the logic his father (and so many others) had championed, rather than freeing Spain from Judaism, had instead convicted vast areas of its thought and culture as Jewish. As he put it in a letter to his exiled friend, the humanist Luis Vives, in

Certainly the task of cutting is critical: the mid-twentieth century, for example, experienced the depth of horror that can be produced when nations fantasize their ancestry in the past. But no amount of cutting can eliminate the historian’s need to generalize, that is, to create connections and continuities between nonidentical things. And cutting

As far as her enemies were concerned, Spain’s unprecedented evangelical success had created a “Jewish” empire threatening the world with its tyranny.45

It is true that the characters in the Merchant make greater claims to sympathy and humanity than those in its influential predecessor, Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta (ca. 1589), in which not only the title character, but Christian and Muslim protagonists as well, are cynical distillations of villainy. But these claims are just one symptom of a

The royalists soon retook Toledo, and the bachelor was hanged in the public square. His treatise became a founding document of the Castilian ideology of “purity of blood,” hence of importance to anyone interested in the history of racial ideologies.