It is a well-established fact that medieval anti-Jewish narratives have served as anchors for modern and contemporary antisemitic propaganda and actions.The social, political, and cultural consequences of medieval Christianity’s ill-fated conflict with its own Jewish origins survived or were all too easily rekindled across centuries and continents in multiple layers of interconnected reception. For this “update” on the continuities between medieval Jew-hatred and contemporary antisemitism, I am not interested in the specific causes that led to medieval Christians’ creation of anti-Judaism as a constitutive element of their identity. Similarly, I am not interested in the specific conditions that brought back to life medieval narratives to substantiate early modern and modern examples of religiocentric and ethnocentric accusations and attacks. Rather, I will claim that the advent of digital and social media since the 1990s has foundationally changed the conditions according to which medieval narratives are used to spread contemporary antisemitic views. Two recent investigations into the history and development of medievalism provide the framework for my claim.

Residual Antisemitisms

Arguing mostly on the basis of evidence from literature, architecture, and the arts, David Matthews has demonstrated how medievalism held a central position during Britain’s Victorian and America’s pre- and post-Civil War eras.Medievalist influences abounded in the canonical cultural production of the time, for example in the works of Walter Scott, John Ruskin, and Thomas Carlyle. After this period, the excitement about medieval ideals and practices waned and found a new habitat in the institutionalized forms of inquiry in the academic subjects of medieval history, literature, and art history of the modern university. Medievalist themes and ideas, so Matthews claims, became marginal at the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, increasingly making appearances as substrates, implications, and references, as tropes in twentieth-century genre fiction, and in translations and adaptations.

Ironically, this reduction of medievalism to one of numerous other cultural influences on modern Anglo-American societies also rendered it omnipresent, albeit in less significant doses. Matthews terms this kind of medievalism “residual,” pointing to J. R. R. Tolkien’s “infantilized” version of the Middle Ages, often “on the edge of bathos” and “about the lives of satirically small people” in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.Similarly, Matthews observes the end of medievalism’s centrality in T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land, which, while indebted to the Arthurian legend, is also beholden to Baudelaire, the Bible, Donne, Ovid, Shakespeare, and Verlaine.