Jews as Bloody Snakes: An Entanglement of Religion, Gender, and Race
- Autor(en)
- Kerstin Mayerhofer
- Abstrakt
In 1350, German Catholic scholar Konrad of Megenberg (1309–1374) included a short paragraph in his widely read work Buch der Natur (Book of Nature), claiming that Jews resembled the emorois snake species, bleeding profusely and sucking their fellow Christians’ blood. This seemingly tenuous connection evoked a significant imagery canon established over the preceding two centuries.
Konrad built on the motif of Jewish ‘male menstruation,’ a notion established in the late twelfth century accusing Jewish men of menstruating like women. This rare claim combined medieval notions of gender, sexuality, and proclamations of religious, bodily, and racial inferiority, portraying Jews as transgressors of the boundaries of Christian society and identity. The motif has a complex history, evolving from a symbolic bloody mark reflecting Jews’ alleged liability for Christ’s death, to a pathological affliction from their imbalanced humoral makeup, to an inherited characteristic reinforcing their religious and racial inferiority, justifying marginalisation, discrimination, and persecution.
Konrad’s portrayal of the ‘men-struating’ Jew illustrates how entrenched this motif had become by the late fourteenth century. The characterisation of the “Jewish flux” evolved with contemporary discussions of gender and sexuality. Jewish ‘male menstruation’ increasingly served as a shaming device, associated with filth, disgust, femininity, and later, genderqueerness, marking a distinct Jewish identity. The ‘men-struating’ Jew, in Konrad’s texts and others, entangled sexist and antisemitic ideas, exceeding religious polemics. Menstruation is deeply embodied and genuinely associated with the female gender. Konrad of Megenberg’s association of the ‘men-struating’ Jew with a “strength-sucking” snake makes his accusation of the Jew not only highly gendered, but clearly racialised: He connected a somatic feature to a social behaviour, that, in turn, is explained to be the grounds for a bodily makeup. In a vicious circle, the bleeding Jewish man symbolised a group of people considered inferior to the ideal Christian masculine identity.
In this proposed paper, I investigate Konrad of Megenberg’s accusation, situate it historically, and connect it to the history of the Jewish ‘male menstruation’ motif, enhancing our understanding of medieval culture as “thoroughly raced,” as Cord J. Whitaker asserts (Whitaker 2015). Ideas of Jewish ‘male menstruation’ and related themes, like Blackness, originate “in material reality but quickly move[s] into the realms of imagination and interpretation” (Whitaker 2019). Menstruation, like Blackness, ties into numerous religio-cultural and socially constructed stereotypes. Rooted in both reality and imagination, it signified a clear difference between two accepted genders, easily projected onto the archetypal Other, such as the Jew. The “cross-cultural usefulness and stability” of race and racism, that Thomas Hahn first highlighted (Hahn 2001), is evident in differing ideas of marked identity attributed to Jews, with the ‘men-struating’ Jew being one notable, and often overlooked, example brought to the forefront in this paper.- Organisation(en)
- Institut für Judaistik
- Journal
- Seminar. A Journal of Germanic Studies
- ISSN
- 0037-1939
- Publikationsdatum
- 2025
- Peer-reviewed
- Ja
- ÖFOS 2012
- 603906 Jüdische Religion, 601012 Mittelalterliche Geschichte
- Link zum Portal
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/d54fa52d-61cc-459c-b783-c9130597d8df