52 Open Access Dorothy Kim Abstract This article evaluates Jewish-Christian diference in the constantly shifting terrain of thirteenth-century medieval England. It reframes this diference in relation to theories of embodiment, feminist materialism, and entanglement theory. To conceptualize how Jews can be marked by race vis-à-vis the body, the article uses the example of Christian Hebraists discussing the Hebrew alphabet and its place in thirteenth-century English bilingual manuscripts. Keywords entanglement theory, feminist materialism, medieval race, Roger Bacon, medieval grammar, medieval Hebrew alphabet, linguistics, vowel sounds, Jewish translation. Received 19 January 2015 Accepted 7 February 2015 In the last twenty years, numerous monographs, articles, and book collections have discussed the concept of race in the Middle Ages. 1 In relation to Jewish-Christian diference, this discussion has turned to difering methodologies, approaches, defnitions, and theoretical frames. Geraldine Heng, in her 2011 articles on race in the Middle Ages, takes up the topic by pointing to recent critical work done on medieval race, especially related to Jewish-Christian diference as primarily focused on the body. 2 Her ongoing work will be a histoire longue durée on this topic that encompasses current critical race theory as well as long institutional histories and capacious geographic zones. This article reconsiders the reframing of Jewish/Christian diference and addresses race through an analysis of the body, but from the point of view of methods that counterbalance each other: the theoretical and the microhistorical. First, this article is a theoretical consideration of Jewish/Christian diference in relation to theories of embodiment and especially feminist materialism. The theoretical frame allows us to consider the second methodology: microhistory and how this method helps us conceptualize how Jews can be marked by race vis-à-vis the body. This article evaluates Jewish/Christian diference in the constantly shifting terrain of thirteenth-century medieval England. In particular, I will consider the complex evidence of thirteenth-century bilingual Hebrew-Latin manuscripts, especially the way Christian scholars understood the Hebrew alphabet. 1 See Andrew Colin Gow, The Red Jews: Antisemitism in an Apocalyptic Age 1200-1600 (Leiden: Brill, 1995). Robert Bartlett, “Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 (2001): 38-56. Thomas Hahn, “The Diference the Middle Ages Makes: Color and Race Before the Modern World,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 (2001): 1-37. William Chester Jordan, “Why Race?” in Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31.1 (2001): 165-173. Geraldine Heng, Empires of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). Lisa Lampert[-Weissig], “Race, Periodicity, and the (Neo)-Middle Ages,” Modern Language Quarterly 65 (2004): 392-421. Denise K. Buell, Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia UP, 2005). Steven F. Kruger, The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Robert Bartlett, “Illustrating Ethnicity in the Middle Ages,” in The Origins of Racism in the West. Eds. Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 132-56. Denise K. Buell, “Early Christian Universalism and Modern Racism,” in The Origins of Racism in the West. eds. Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Zieger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 109-31. David Goldenberg, “Racism, Color Symbolism, and Color Prejudice,” in The Origins of Racism in the West. eds. Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 88-108. Joseph Zieger, “Physiogomy, Science, and Proto-racism 1200-1500,” in The Origins of Racism in the West. eds. Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac and Joseph Ziegler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 181-199. Anthony Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book; English Antisemitisms 1350-1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Anthony Bale, Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages (London: Reaktion Books, 2012). Cord Whitaker, ed. Making Race Matter in the Middle Ages (special issue of postmedieval) 6:1 (Spring, 2015). 2 Geraldine Heng, “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages I: Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages,” Literature Compass 8/5 (2011): 258-274. Geraldine Heng, “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages II: Locations of Medieval Race,” Literature Compass 8/5 (2011): 275-293. Reframing Race and Jewish/Christian Relations in the Middle Ages 2015; 13: 52–64, DOI: 10.1515/tra-2015-0007