Representations of Jews in Late Medieval German Literature

"The Passion and Easter plays are imminently concerned with the Christian conception of the Jew. From the St. Gall Passion play (1300's) to the Alsfeld Passion play (1500), the Passion plays present Jesus's Jewish enemies alongside his Jewish followers. The Halle Passion play (1490's) emphasizes the Jewishness of Jesus and his disciples. Easter plays, in contrast, attribute to Jews sole guilt for Jesus's Crucifixion and exclusively venal motives. In hagiography (legends of St. Silvester, ""Der Judenknabe,"" Theophilus, St. Basil) Jews are variously depicted as philosophers, sorcerers, filicides, loving fathers, and righteous physicians. These legends are extensively attested in collections, such as Der Heiligen Leben, and in Latin and German versions of the Legenda Aurea. The medieval fable collections, like the hagiographic anthologies, present a diverse image of Jews. While the Avianus and the Anonymous Neveleti collections contain a group of fables whose epimyths presented Jews as venal, they also contain a fable depicting a Jew as an allegorical figure of the faithful soul. This was preserved when Boner's Edelstein supplanted Latin collections in the late 1300's. ""The Parable of the Ring,"" found in the Gesta Romanorum and the Decameron, presents Jews as one group of ""God's children,"" a description also transmitted by Hugo von Trimberg in his Der Renner . In order to account for the representations of Jews in medieval German literature, modern interpretive models require multiple hermeneutic categories."

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Germanic Languages and Literatures

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2015

Author dc:creator

• Martin, John David

Contributors dc:contributor

• Kalinke, Marianne E.

• Literature, Germanic

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

(MiAaPQ)AAI3044168

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/86333