'Li anemis meismes: Satan and Synagogue in La Queste del Saint Graal'

The identification of the Jewish people with ‘serpens antiquus qui vocatur Diabolus et Satanas’[1] is a cherished theme of medieval polemicists, and a close examination of the Queste del Saint Graal (c. 1220) reveals evidence of such an association on the part of the author.  While reference is explicitly made to ‘la grant durté des Gyeus’,[2] a topos of the adversus Judaeos tradition associated with the hardness (duritia) of their hearts, which Christ referred to in Matthew xix.8,[3] the three knights of Arthur’s court who are proved worthy of attaining an open vision of the Grail, Perceval, Boort and Galaad, also encounter diabolical foes in the course of their spiritual peregrination towards the Holy Vessel.  The depiction of some of these foes, namely the allegorization of Synagoga and the inhabitants of Château Carcelois and the Château de la Lépreuse, would seem to reflect the inimical cultural identification of populus Israel with Satan which, as Trachtenberg pointed out, ‘was implicit in the medieval point of view’,[4] and firmly grounded in patristic apologetics.  In the words of Chaucer’s Parson, the ‘cursede Jewes or elles the devel’.[5] 

[1]Revelations xii.9: ‘that old serpent, who is called the devil and Satan’.  All Bible quotations in Latin are taken from Biblia sacra iuxta vulgata versionem, ed. R. Weber et al., 3rd edn (Struttgart, 1983).  All Bible quotations in English are taken from the Douay-Challoner translation of the Vulgate. 

[2]La Queste del Saint Graal, ed. A. Pauphilet, Les Classiques français du moyen âge 33 (Paris, 1923; repr. Paris, 1984), p. 39, 13.  All references are to this edition. 

[3]‘Ait illis | quoniam Moses ad duritiam cordis vestri permisit vobis dimittere uxores vestras | ab initio autem non sic fuit’; cf. Ezekiel iii.7.  See Queste, p. 38, 2-7.  P. Matarasso, The Redemption of Chivalry: A Study of the Queste del Saint Graal (Geneva, 1979), p. 249, cites Ezekiel xi.19 cor lapideum and Zechariah vii.12 cor suum posuerunt adamantem in this connection, but durté echoes duritiam.  II Chronicles xxxvi.13 associates the cor lapideum with the populus durae cervicis of Exodus xxxiii.3, 5; xxxiv.9; Deuteronomy ix.6, 13; x.16; Acts of the Apostles vii.51.  See also Exodus xxxii.9; Deuteronomy xxxi.27; Jeremiah xvii.23. 

[4]J. Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Antisemitism (New Haven, 1943), p. 22. 

[5]Parson’s Tale, X. 599, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. D. Benson et al. (Boston, Mass., 1987), p. 307.  See also Prioress’s Tale, VII. 492; 558-60; 570; 573-7; 599; 631-2; 685, ibid., pp. 209-12.