In Christian Images and Their Jewish Desecrators, historian Katherine Aron-Beller analyzes the common Christian charge that Jews habitually and compulsively violated Christian images, identifying this allegation as one that functioned alongside other anti-Jewish allegations such as ritual murder, blood libel, and host desecration to ultimately inform dangerous and long-lasting prejudices in medieval and early modern Europe. Through an analysis of folk tales, myths, legal proceedings, and religious art, Aron-Beller finds that narratives alleging that Jews committed violence against images of Christ, Mary, and the disciples flourished in Europe between the fifth and seventeenth centuries. She then explores how these narratives manifested differently across the continent and the centuries, finding that their potency reflected not Jewish actions per se, but Christians' own concerns about slipping into idolatry when viewing depictions of religious figures. In addition, Aron-Beller considers Jews' own attitudes toward Christian imagery and the ways in which they responded to and rejected-or embraced-such allegations. By examining how desecration allegations affected Jewish individuals and communities spanning Byzantium, medieval England, France, Germany, and early modern Spain and Italy, Aron-Beller demonstrates that this charge was a powerful expression of the Christian majority's anxiety around committing idolatry and their eagerness to participate in practices of veneration that revolved around visual images-an anxiety that evolved through the centuries and persists to this day.
Katherine Aron-Beller is a lecturer in Jewish History at the Rothberg International School of the Hebrew University and at Tel Aviv University. She is the author of Jews on Trial: The Papal Inquisition in Modena 1598-1638 and the co-editor of The Roman Inquisition: Centre versus Peripheries. Since 2020 she has been a Visiting Scholar of the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism.
"There are books that experts in a field of research will welcome because they fill a glaring gap in the existing scholarly literature. Katherine Aron-Beller's excellent Christian Images and their Jewish Desecrators is just such a work. Building on her previous research on inquisitorial trials of Jews in Italy, Aron-Beller offers readers an authoritative examination of the origin and development of the allegation that individual Jews and Jewish communities deliberately sought to desecrate Christian sacred images...Aron-Beller's book is a scholarly tour de force [and] it will become an essential reference work for researchers and students studying the allegation of sacrilegious desecration in Christian-Jewish relations." (Journal of Religious History) "This is the first thorough survey of the alleged Jewish desecration of Christian images-a must-read for scholars of medieval and early modern history." (Carlos Espi Forcen, Universidad de Murcia)
