This presentation suggests that reciprocal spectatorship — Christian public seeing of Jews and Jewish public seeing of Christians — can inform a more nuanced reading of Jewish-Christian public interaction than the standard narrative of persecution and mutual ill-will would indicate. An examination of primary sources on distinctive clothing, the role of Jews in major civic events, and rules and rituals of daily seeing and being seen demonstrates the importance of vision and visuality within the greater medieval sensory landscape. Both Jews and Christians conceived of vision as a profoundly active sense that could literally touch the object of sight, a notion that had serious consequences for spectators on both sides.

Dr. Emilie Amar-Zifkin is the Flegg Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at McGill University, where she works on medieval history, disability studies, and ghosts. She just finished a year at the University of Toronto, where she was the Kaplan Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish-Christian Relations, and where she explored sensory studies as a pedagogical framework for the study of medieval Jewish history. She holds a Ph.D. in Jewish Studies from Yale University, an M.A. in the History of Judaism from the University of Chicago Divinity School, and a B.A in from Fordham University in Theology and Stage Management. She is currently working on her first monograph, called Acting out in Ashkenaz, which offers an analysis of Jewish-Christian relations in medieval towns that conceptualizes both the history and the primary sources as texts with their own theatrical components.

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