England and the Jews
How Religion and Violence Created the First Racial State in the West

Explores how religion and violence visited on Jewish bodies and lives created the first racial state in the history of the West.

Geraldine Heng (Author)

9781108740456, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 29 November 2018

118 pages
17.6 x 12.6 x 0.7 cm, 0.12 kg

For three centuries, a mixture of religion, violence, and economic conditions created a fertile matrix in Western Europe that racialized an entire diasporic population who lived in the urban centers of the Latin West: Jews. This Element explores how religion and violence, visited on Jewish bodies and Jewish lives, coalesced to create the first racial state in the history of the West. It is an example of how the methods and conceptual frames of postcolonial and race studies, when applied to the study of religion, can be productive of scholarship that rewrites the foundational history of the past.

1. Religious race: racializing Jews in the twelfth and thirteenth century European west
2. Church and state, law, learning, governmentality: architectures of racial formation, thirteenth–fifteenth centuries
3. England's Jews: a case study of the first racial state in the West
4. The English panopticon: from fiscal control to segregation powers
5. Religion, money, and violence in the creation of the raced subject
6. Church and state collusion in the constitution of the racial subaltern
7. Conversion as racial passing: the politics of sensory race
8. Stories of England's dead boys, and a sequel: how a new race, and its home are formed, post-Jewish expulsion.

Subject Areas: Judaism [HRJ], Religion: general [HRA], Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], British & Irish history [HBJD1], History [HB]