Anti-Semitism, surrogacy, and the invocation of Mohammed in the Play of the Sacrament

Comparative Drama, Spring, 2007 by Michael Mark Chemers

A heretic, then, has only an official existence within Christianity as defined by the boundaries of the corpus mysticum, existing by the authoritative decree of a prelate only, while an infidel is, like a leper, an accident of the circumstances of existence, circumstances specifically outside ecclesiastical control. Moore's observation demonstrates that a Jew, whose existence in Europe in the early modern period is almost universally unofficial, cannot be a heretic until he first becomes visible to political and ecclesiastical authorities, converts to Christianity, adopts a certain branch of Christian thought, and then refuses to renounce that doctrine after it is publicly, officially denounced by a bishop. This distinction was not likely to have been lost even on the least theologically savvy members of early modern English society, who most certainly would have understood the importance of classifying the various enemies of Christ. As perfidious, sacrilegious, dangerous, corrupted, and damned as Jews may have been understood to be, one thing they certainly were not understood to be was errant Christians. (32) Thus, the Play of the Sacrament cannot reasonably be understood to have employed its Jewish characters as surrogates for heretical thought on the Eucharist.

III. Infidelity and the Infidel

The conundrum as it stands, then, is how we might understand the meaning of the Jew on the early modern English stage, if not as a stand-in for a heretic. A tradition of imaginative mythmaking in medieval Europe suggests that the stage Jew possessed the particular and specific power to signify the Muslim (who, unlike the Jew, presented a serious, though distant, threat) and yet could remain explicitly, incontestably, and undeniably Jewish.

At the roots of this signifying power is the widespread medieval understanding of time and space as fluid. Far more important to the medieval worldview than the measurable material world by distance, national boundary, and historical period was the theological abstraction of space-time, which put a far greater emphasis on the difference between eternality on the one hand and mortal constructions of time and space on the other. Such eternality recognizes only the boundaries of the corpus mysticum, the Body of Christ co-extant (and coterminous) with the souls and bodies of all Christians from all times (through the sacramental act of coniunctio of which the Eucharist wafer is the key signifier). We might recall Albert of Saxony's paradigmatic assertion that God could cause the world to be the size of a millet seed and its more usual size at once. (33) If God is indeed omnipotent this makes perfect sense. And yet the imagination must certainly have been troubled by the fact that, in the face of God's omnipotence, so much of the material world remained in the hands of the infidel. Lawton observes that the Play of the Sacrament seems very interested in tracing the boundaries of those parts of the material world that illustrate the limits of the corpus mysticum; both of the major players in this drama, Aristorius and Jonathas, introduce themselves by giving an inventory of their respective wealth and the widths of their geographic influences, effectively providing a map of the world. He writes: