"Slay them not": Twelfth-Century Christian-Jewish Relations and the Glossed Psalms

Linda Stone’s analysis of the anti-Jewish polemic present in three closely-linked twelfth-century Psalms glosses brings a new source to the study of medieval Christian-Jewish relations. She reveals how its presence, within the parva, media and magna glosses compiled respectively, by Anselm of Laon, Gilbert of Poitiers and Peter Lombard, illuminates the various societal challenges facing the twelfth-century Church. She shows that, rather than a twelfth-century phenomenon, using such anti-Jewish terminology in Christian Psalms exegesis was a long-standing reflection of Christianity’s ambivalence towards Judaism. Moreover, demonstrating how her analysis of anti-Jewish terminology unravelled the Psalm glosses’ textual relationships, she suggests that analysis of its presence in other glossed books of the Bible could offer a further resource for uncovering their complexities.

"...Stone’s book sheds light upon the uses of anti-Jewish motifs outside traditional Adversus Iudaeos literature. In so doing, she helps to explain the wider dissemination of these motifs via the twelfth-century Psalms’ glosses". Irven M. R esnick in the Journal of Jewish Studies, 2021

Linda Stone, Ph.D. (2014), University of Cambridge is an Associate of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. Her research was supervised by Professor Anna Sapir Abulafia, and has focussed primarily on the presence of anti-Jewish polemic in the Glossa Ordinaria.