“Him Jesus, that Jew”!—Representing Jewishness in the York Plays

Abstract

In the varied and, ultimately, postcolonial representation of Jewish figures, the York Plays experiment with representing Jews as artifactual remembrances for a community that has touched Jews whether through the body of their God or through the memory of former neighbors. The York plays, articulating a complex fantasy of presence and absence, attempt to right the imbalances of 1190 and 1290. Jews haunt Yorkist history. More precisely, the York Jews had become a perceptible presence in the years between their initial appearance on and near the York territory (in the 1170s) and the date of their expulsion from medieval England. Twelfth and thirteenth-century Jewish bodies lived and worshiped among the Christians of York. The distinctions between Christian and Jewish identities and bodies are complicated when members of the community perform convincingly as Jewish characters who are outed identified as Jewish, such as Moses and Jesus, by the plays themselves. Keywords: Christian; Jesus; Jews; medieval England; York plays

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