12. Kyn / Fólk / Þjóð / Ætt: Proto-Racial Thinking and its Application to Jews in Old Norse Literature

Abstract

Cole 12 Kyn / Fólk / Þjóð / Ætt: Proto-Racial Thinking and its Application to Jews in Old Norse LiteratureIt was at this time [after the fifteenth century] that Jews, without any outside interference, began to think "that the difference between Jewry and the nations was fundamentally not one of creed and faith, but one of inner nature" and that the ancient dichotomy between Jews and Gentiles was "more likely to be racial in origin than a matter of doctrinal dissension".This shift in evaluating the alien character of the Jewish people, which became common among non-Jews only much later in the Age of Enlightenment, is clearly the condition sine qua non for the birth of antisemitism.(Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism) 1First published in 1951, in Arendt's own words, "against a backdrop of both reckless optimism and reckless despair", 2 The Origins of Totalitarianism was an avowed response to the horrors of the twentieth century.It was a book which intended to expose the innate flaws in modern thought, particularly the intellectual currents which led to, or were fuelled by, anti-Semitism.But for a work which was so open about its focus on modernity, it often resonates with a debate of key importance to our understanding of pre-modern thinking.Arendt, the modernist writing about twentieth-century totalitarianism, is frequently in agreement with scholars, such as Miri Rubin, Jeremy Cohen, or Amos Funkenstein, medievalists writing about twelfth-to fourteenth-century Jew-hatred.What these four voices have in common is that, in their view, consideration of the 'inner nature' of the Jew did not occur until after the Middle Ages.Rather, the medieval mind apprehended Jewish difference in purely religious terms.In the view of these scholars, until the Enlightenment -the sparks from which Arendt's subject of modernity would ultimately emerge -there was no thought in which notions of race or genetics took precedence over religion.Ergo, one cannot speak of medieval anti-Semitism: During this period, there was only anti-Judaism.3 Medieval thinkers may have criticized the Jews, medie-1 Arendt 1973, xi-xii. 2 Arendt 1973, vii. 3 Consider Rubin's criticism of Gavin Langmuir: "All too often, narratives of abuse, particularly those about Christians and Jews, are taken as eternal, unchanging."Rubin 2004, 1. Rubin eschews the word "anti-Semitism" in her œuvre.Cohen speaks of "the harsher, demonic anti-Judaism that I and other historians have deemed characteristic of the later Middle Ages" and

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