"The Massacre of the Jews at York"
In 1839, the teenage Moss sisters, Celia and Marion, published Early Efforts, the first of their multiple collaborations. The publisher, Whittaker, sold it for 3s. 6d., which was at the lower end of the price spectrum. Although the collection is fairly miscellaneous, at least one of the poems, Celia's "The Massacre of the Jews at York," about the York Massacre of 1190, seems to have made an impression--at least, enough to be anthologized, in butchered format, in 1917 (see previous post). Although the sisters are probably better remembered as popular historians and short story writers, they continued writing poetry throughout their careers. In the USA, they were promoted by Isaac Leeser (whose patronage of their more famous contemporary Grace Aguilar had been rather rocky), who published them regularly in The Occident and American Jewish Advocate.
It is not clear how well acquainted Celia Moss was with the specifically Jewish tradition of writing about the massacre; the footnotes to the poem only cite Henry Hart Milman's History of the Jews and Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews. (It's quite possible, however, that this poem may have influenced Grace Aguilar's own account of the massacre in her pioneering "History of the Jews in England," which appeared eight years later in Chambers' Miscellany.) The core of the poem, Yom Tob (or Tov) of Joigny's speech calling the Jews to heroic suicide, ultimately derives from the speech invented by William of Newburgh (Latin here):
So, when at this conjuncture his advice was asked, he replied, "God, to whom we ought not to say. Why dost Thou this? commands us to die now for His law—and behold our death is at the doors, as ye see; unless, perchance, which be far from us, ye should think that the Holy Law ought to be deserted for the short span of this life, and should choose that which to good and manly minds is worse than any kind of death, that is to say, to live with the greatest disgrace, as apostates, through the mercy of our impious enemies. Since, therefore, we ought to prefer a glorious death to an infamous life, it is plain that we ought to choose the most honourable and easy kind of death: for if we should fall into the hands of the enemy, we should die according to their pleasure, and amidst their mockery. Therefore, let us willingly and devoutly, with our own hands, render up to Him that life which the Creator gave to us, since He now claims it, and let us not wait for the aid of a cruel enemy to give back that which He reclaims. For this, indeed, many of our people are known to have done laudably in divers tribulations, setting before us a precedent for that choice which is most fitting for us to make." (4.ii.569)
But again, Moss was almost certainly not working from the original, but from Milman's version:
"Men of Israel," he said, " the God of our Fathers, to whom none can say, 'What doest thou?' calls upon us to die for our Law. Death is inevitable; but we may yet choose whether we will die speedily and nobly, or ignominiously, after horrible torments and the most barbarous usage—my advice is, that we voluntarily render up our souls to our Creator, and fall by our own hands. The deed is both reasonable, and according to the Law, and is sanctioned by the example of our most illustrious ancestors." (III.335)
And here is Moss' rendition:
'' Men of Israel," he said,with a proud flashing eye,
" This night doth Jehovah command us to die
" The death of the brave, for the laws that he gave,
" Leave bondage and chains for the coward and slave!
" What is our crime, O what is the deed,
" For which so many are doom'd to bleed?
" Strangers—alike through every clime we are hurl'd,
" Through every land our seed is spread abroad—
" Scorn'd and despised, the outcasts of the world,
" Yet still the chosen people of our God!
" We asked these Britons for a home,
" A shelter from the inclement skies :
'' Have we despoiled a Christian dome,
" Or sought a Christian sacrifice ?
" We did but ask a dwelling place,
" And in return our wealth we gave;
" They spurn'd us as an outcast race,
" And brand us with the name of slave:
" They hate us, for we seek to tread
" The peaceful path our fathers trod,
" They hate us, for we bow our heads
" Before the shrine of Israel's God ;
" And now because we sought to bring
" A tribute to their new crown'd king,
" Like savage beasts they hunt us down,
" Their streets with Jewish dead are strewn ;
" And they who can boast of mercy and love,
" And picture their God in the form of a dove,
" Are athirst for our blood, our possessions they crave !
" But the wealth we have toiled for, they never shall have
" While there's fire on the hearthstone or sword in the hall,
" By the hand of each other 'tis better to fall:
" There have been times, and this is such a time,
" When even suicide is not a crime :
" Behold how your wives and your children are clinging
" Around ye, and pray for a morsel of bread,
" While the cold heartless wretches beneath have been flinging
" Profusion away, and they carelessly tread
" On the food that your wives and your children would save
" From the pangs of starvation—the jaws of the grave!
" Then shall such monsters triumph o'er us ?
" They think that yield to them we must,
" Where'er we turn there's death before us;
" We cannot to their mercy trust,
" We cannot on their faith rely,
" Then let us see our dear ones die;
" Thus, thus will we defy our foes,
" By our own hands they all shall bleed,
" Their blood be on the heads of those
" Who goaded us to such a deed.
" The husband turneth to his wife,
" The lover to his lov'd doth cling—
" To raise an arm against the life
" Of woman, is a fearful thing!
" Aye, so it is: but I have here
" A stake that is to me as dear,
" The solace of my widow'd years,
" The object of my fondest cares." (12-14)
Beyond the obvious--that Moss counters Milman's compressed and almost affectless rendition of the original with a swinging, metrically varied call to action--what does Moss' revision set out to accomplish? Milman's own summary of William of Newburgh eliminates the source material's anti-Jewish reading of the ritual suicide (William dismisses it as the sort of insanity to which Jews are prone, citing Masada as an example), and reserves its criticism for both the king and the men who besieged the castle. Moreover, his deliberately flattened prose, which erases the Latin's more rhetorical flourishes, seems intended to reinforce his own implied critique of William: Milman's thoroughly rational and deliberative rabbi is rather uninspiring, but his rationality is entirely the point.
Moss, however, starts off by deliberately echoing the ur-version of this speech, delivered by Elazar ben Yar at Masada, and proceeds to recast the event so that it celebrates Jewish heroic masculinity. Although the poem opens by noting the weaponry displayed on the castle walls (11), it immediately points out the discrepancy between the Jews ("no warrior band" [12]) and their surroundings; the assembly of elderly men, young women, and younger children at first indexes Judaism's lost power, rather than its potential. But the rabbi's call to a righteous death empowers his listeners--at least some of them--by reminding them of other narratives about Jewish deaths, in which apparent defeat turns into defense of the Law. The vampiric Christians thirst for Jewish "blood"; the Jews instead should offer themselves up as ritual sacrifices, and, in a reworking of 3 Kings 2.37, burden the Christians with the weight of guilt, the figurative blood. As David Biale puts it, "[i]n a kind of circular argument, the amrtyrs must shed their blood in order for God iin the future to shed the blood of their enemies; vengeance requires a crime and only then can it be requited" [1]. The poem's emphasis on blood and bloodthirstiness is in line with both Jewish and Christian traditions, but it also flips the blood libel around--it's the Christians who yearn for Jewish blood.
Moreover, unlike either William of Newburgh or Milman, Moss interpolates a sharp critique of English anti-Semitism [2]. Emphasizing the tragedy of the diaspora, which leaves Jews simultaneously homeless and yet omnipresent, the rabbi contemptuously transforms Christian England into an undomesticated space, filled with "savage beasts," "cold heartless wretches," "monsters," and (later) "wolves" (18), ogres who seek to literally and figuratively devour their guests. There's an echo here, I think, of Ezekiel 16.49: "Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy." Given that these dehumanized Englishmen also lust for Jewish property, the rabbi's denunciation essentially turns classical anti-Semitic tropes back on their Christian persecutors: the Christians are bloodsuckers, the Christians are greedy materialists, and so forth.
The difference between Christian bloodthirstiness and Jewish blood sacrifice preoccupies the rest of the poem. The Christian priest shrieking outside the castle walls is a "man of blood"; York is "blood-stained"; the Christians "wash'd out their [the Jews'] religion in their blood" (15). Christian blood-letting parodies and degrades Christ's sacrifice, butchering Jewish bodies instead of enacting the miracle of the bread and wine. By contrast, the Jews' ritual sacrifice testifies to their ongoing covenant with God, as the rabbi quite explicitly says:"'For the laws which our God to his prophet reveal'd,/Yes! our faith in their truth, with our blood must be seal'd" (16). This is, as Jewish chroniclers of the time understood it, Kiddush Ha-Shem, the "sanctification of the [Divine] Name." The Jews' ritual sacrifice harks back not only to Masada, but also to Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac--a conventional analogy in Jewish martyrologies, as Lee Patterson notes [3].
It is at this point that our anthologist apparently became queasy. As the censored version stands, we have the rabbi's heroic call to action and the "Halleluyah" (16) of the Jews who have decided to choose ritualized martyrdom over the cruelties of the Christians outside (while also keeping children free from the danger of conversion). What happens next, though, foregrounds the terror of the act. The tormented rabbi begins the act of ritual slaughter with his own daughter, who, even though she elected to remain, resists once death is upon her:
" O, spare me! spare me!" Rachael cried,
And turn'd the glittering blade aside.
" Think! think upon my mother's death,
" When she rais'd her eye so mild
" And bade thee with her dying breath,
" Protect her orphan child."
" And so I will," the father said,
" Protect thee with this trusty blade,
" Think'st thou the rabble crowd without
"Shall raise the exulting laugh, and shout
" To see Ben Israel's hope and pride
" A christian's?—No! not even his bride.' (16-17)
Both Rachael and the mother whose child is next to be sacrificed--or would be, if it were not already dead from starvation--immediately turn to the sentimental figure of the mother in order to stave off death. Even though the poem numbers the women among the heroic martyrs, it nevertheless represents them as incapable of understanding the religious and historical narratives in play; these are not the "heroic warriors of God" Biale finds in medieval Jewish martyrologies (121), although such expressions of fear from children were hardly unknown in the literature (e.g., the example qtd. in Patterson 522). If anything, the daughter's or mother's fear of martyrdom turns out to highlight masculine heroism, since the man must fight against his usual emotional response to such requests for protection. As with the story of Abraham and Isaac, much of this poem's force derives from its violent transgression of familial ties: the rabbi executes his daughter, the new husband his "youthful bride" (17), and so on. Instead of celebrating the martyrs' stoicism, Moss instead heightens their emotional agonies, finally cutting off the anguish by declaring "what avails the pen to tell/The horrors of that awful night" (18). Far from being an exemplary spectacle, the sufferings of the martyrs are finally cordoned off from the narrative. Instead, the reader encounters the measly few who rejected martyrdom:
Some coldly murder'd them where they stood
While others more hardened in deeds of blood
Would plunge them back into the flame,
From whence so recently they came;
And loudly shouted th'exulting foe,
As they saw them rushing to and fro
In the blaze, till the halls with their shrieking rung,
And the hissing fires their death dirge sung... (18-19)
The "shrieking" echoes the "shriek" (17) of the bereaved mother and the dying bride, but here, the deaths are rendered even more traumatic by their emptiness. The cowards, gender unspecified, seek "mercy" (18) from the Christians, volunteering to be their "vassals and slaves" (18) rather than die; in the poem's logic, they opt to abandon their God to save their own skins--in fact, as Milman puts it, "they offered to submit to baptism" (III.244)--and their death in "hissing fires" has a decidedly hellish sound to it. The difference between the terrified martyrs and the terrified cowards lies in the mode of death itself. The agony is all the worse because, unlike the kiddush ha-Shem, it means and affirms nothing.
(ETA the Valman reference, which I found after I first posted this.)
[1] David Biale, Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol between Jews and Christians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 77.
[2] Nadia Valman reads this moment, with its "strong indictment of British prejudice," alongside others in the Moss' poetry as "bring[ing] the biblical dispossession of the Jews and their dispossession in medieval England into the compass of radical-liberal politics, claimed as a peculiarly British inheritance." The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 119, 120. Unlike Valman, who interprets Aguilar's revision of Milman's revision of William of Newburgh's account of the rabbi's speech in terms of her "Evangelical sensibility" (96), I'd argue that Aguilar is working straight from Moss.
[3] Lee Patterson, "'The Living Witnesses of Our Redemption'": Martyrdom and Imitation in Chaucer's Prioress' Tale," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31.3 (2001): 521-28.