Article of the Month - October 2020
“The Inquisitor and the Moseret: The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages and the New English Colonialism in Jewish Historiography”
(SJ Pearce: Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, New York University)
SJ Pearce, “The Inquisitor and the Moseret: The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages and the New English Colonialism in Jewish Historiography.” Medieval Encounters 26 (2020): 145—90.
[Free access generously provided by EJ Brill]
Article Abstract:
Review article of Heng, Geraldine, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (New York: Cambridge University Press.2019).
Nomination Statement:
Pearce's intervention (a word not to be taken lightly) is a brilliant and pointed critique of the methodologically strained book by Geraldine Heng, which mishandles medieval Jewish and Islamic history. Heng’s argumentative trajectory moves toward framing all difference between peoples and religions as racial, thereby displacing other modes for constructing difference and flattening both religion and ethnicity as subjects and categories of analysis. Heng does not argue or write in the manner of historians, but her work is being received as medieval history. Whereas many premodern historians have taken the literary turn, Heng has not taken the historical turn that informs the work of many literature scholars. Pearce, a literature scholar and medievalist, has written a necessary and efficacious response.
Author’s Comment:
I decided to write an in-depth review essay of Geraldine Heng’s The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages not just because the mistakes that the book makes in medieval Jewish and Islamic history and in in its approach to religious history more generally, but because the book and its reception in the field represent two current trends in Medieval Studies that I think require some urgent reconsideration: first, that critique and intellectual disagreement are by their very existence inappropriate and harmful; and second, that the “global turn” in medieval studies as it currently constructed is truly global and a real reform of the Anglocentric Medieval Studies that has traditionally prevailed in the English-speaking academy.
As for the central place of England and the Anglophone in the new global Medieval Studies, Heng’s book is as good an illustration as any that this newly and nominally globalized field requires neither attention to language nor any kind of sensitivity to the differing contexts from which literature and thought emerge. This is not to say that the book’s ambitions are too small. In fact, Heng writes about the need for collaboration and varied sets of expertise in order to do global history, but doesn’t manage to follow through. And that lack of follow-through is, as I argue in the review essay, grounded in both colonial and Orientalist attitudes that are foundational to and inherent in Medieval Studies theory and praxis.
The response to the review essay has largely been a bifurcated one: Colleagues in Jewish and Islamic studies have offered praise, encouragement, and even gratitude, with scattered critiques grounded in specific disagreements of readings, while the response has been much more mixed in English, where the review essay has alternately been affirmed publicly for bringing a needed disciplinary critique to an overbroad book with a lot of mistakes and misrepresentations of both medieval and modern texts, to being commended privately for fear of crossing the wrong people in public, to, at the far extreme, being pointedly ignored by colleagues saying they refused to read critique written by a white or white-passing, depending on how one wants to categorize Jews racially at this particular moment in American public life) woman of work on race written by a woman of color. I very much expected the personalized nature of some of the responses; and, in fact, I took what is for me an unusually personal perspective in writing the review essay in order to try to get out ahead of some of the criticism I correctly anticipated. One very powerful vein of thought holds that scholars ought to have more than an intellectual investment in their material and that thrives upon the disclosure of those connections — a kind of autoethnography embedded in all academic writing. In general terms I do not agree with the absolute necessity of this approach, but it is one that I adopted in the hopes of being heard by scholars who might not otherwise value my assessment of this book; I was partially successful.
And this brings me to the broader question of the nature of and necessity for critique as a part of academic discourse. Following the publication of my review essay, Monica Green pointed me to two essays that I have found useful as I continue to think about the review and its reception. The two essays are Natalie Zemon Davis’ “On Reviewing” and and Donna J. Haraway’s “In the Beginning Was the Word”; each of them contends that critique from an allied perspective is a kind of support, a way of taking work extremely seriously, and an important mode for pushing discussion forward. Although it may seem counterintuitive, that is what I hoped to accomplish in writing this piece. Global history and the study of race-making in the Middle Ages are supremely important; but equally important is doing them carefully and well.
Works Cited:
Karen Brodkin. How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1998.
Donna J. Haraway, “In the Beginning Was the Word: The Genesis of Biological Theory,” Signs 6:3 (1981): 469-81.
Natalie Zemon Davis, “On Reviewing,” Feminist Studies 14:3 (1988): 602-606.
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