“Translating Jerusalem: Jewish authenticators of the cross”

Translating Jerusalem 155

TRANSLATING JERUSALEM: JEWISH AUTHENTICATORS OF THE CROSS*

Eva Frojmovic

Opening up the Space of Contemplation

When Giovanni Bellini painted his Crucifĳixion with Jewish Cemetery around 1503, he created a verisimilitude of Golgotha as a contemplative space in which Jews could only have a ghostly presence.1 While Jerusalem’s distant Temple is superseded by the superimposition of the Dome of the Rock and Saint Anthony’s in Padua, the Golgotha setting of the Crucifĳixion also car-ries a supersessionist connotation: Golgotha’s authenticity as an ancient Jewish cemetery is invoked by the depiction of a contemporary Jewish cemetery, with fĳifteenth-century tombstones (such as one can still fĳind in Jewish cemeteries in Italy) sinking into the soft ground beneath symboli-cally barren trees, which permit the gaze to stray into the distance. The barely legible Hebrew eulogies are answered in their own language by the superscriptio at the head of the cross, the Jewish skulls are juxtaposed to the dead Christ, who is yet alive. Silence and solitude destabilise the nar-rated order and invite contemplation. Despite Bellini’s investment in the verifĳiable authenticity of the narrated space, Padua’s then thriving Jewish community is a mere spectre, made invisible through Bellini’s subtle ma-nipulation of the axes of time and space.

The Renaissance painting serves as an introduction to a Jerusalem dominated and identifĳied by the cross, an identifĳication that, through the dispersal of relics, created a subtle web connecting Christian Jerusalem with the rest of the Christian world. Reliquaries embodied this topography either as “speaking reliquaries” or as objects covered with visual narratives. In this paper, I write about visual narratives of the Finding of the True Cross

* I wish to thank Barbara Baert, Thomas Head, Paul Hyams, and Alan Murray for their help and advice.

1 Oil on wood, 84 × 49 cm, 1501-1503, Prato, Palazzo degli Alberti. Image available on the museum website, http://www.galleriapalazzoalberti.it/palazzoalberti/jsp/dett_opera.jsp?operaid=9&collid=1, and http://www.po-net.prato.it/artestoria/galleria/eng/crocibel.htm. On Jewish spectrality, see Steven F. Kruger: The Spectral Jew. Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe, Minneapolis/London 2005.

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that open up a narrative space for a Jewish protagonist. The medieval and early modern iconography of Queen Helena’s Jerusalem adventure has been the subject of the magisterial study by Barbara Baert, A Heritage of Holy Wood.2 I see my paper as an extension of her enquiry. What interests me here is the temporary opening of a representational space for the Jewish authenticator of the cross in the Carolingian period, and his subsequent disavowal in the second half of the twelfth century.

Tropes of Judaism

In the mind of a medieval Christian viewer, the space of Jerusalem would already have been occupied by tropes (fĳigures of speech) of Judaism in literature and art. The trope that is my starting point here is that of the Jew as witness to the truth of Christianity, a trope that underwrote Church protection of the Jews from Augustine onwards.3 The idea was that living Jews, though temporally removed from the Passion, continued to testify to its historical truth. They were considered “bookbearers” (capsarii). According to this view, the Jews themselves could not decipher the Old Testament’s prophecy of truth, but this blindness—the blindness of Synagoga—paradoxically made them especially reliable witnesses, since their testimony could hardly be accused of intentionally favouring Christianity. In the twelfth century, Jeremy Cohen has argued, new dis-courses arose that challenged the traditional notion of the Jews as “living letters of the law”: in particular, during the heresy wars, some confusion developed over whether Jews should be classifĳied together with unbeliev-ers or heretics. But the status of Jews as witnesses to the truth of the Old Testament (whose prophecies in turn were seen to authenticate the Gospels) remained substantively unafffected until the thirteenth century, when Christian authorities trained their attention on the Talmud’s “New Law”.

Witnesses are essentially passive fĳigures. In judicial terms, the witness must be somebody who is not party to the event, an independent ob-server not implicated. In the case of the Jewish “living letters of the law”, the Jews were witnesses by virtue of their religious diffference. A special category of these Jewish witnesses can be called authenticators: ‘historical’

2 Barbara Baert: A Heritage of Holy Wood. The Legend of the True Cross in Text and Image, Leiden/ Boston 2004.

3 See Jeremy Cohen: Living Letters of the Law. Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity, Berkeley 1999.



personae who discursively guarantee the authenticity of its events and especially of the cult object. The authenticator does more than merely observe: he has to perform an authenticating act, which promotes him from the role of passive witness to that of a protagonist. I am interested in the authenticator as a limit case of witnessing. Where the Jewish witness to Christian truth becomes so important that he threatens to turn into a protagonist, his prominence has to be compensated for, his inferiority has to be restated, by what I call acts of disavowal. These acts take place at the discursive level, and unintentionally articulate the limits of unambiguous visual communication.

The Jewish authenticator par excellence is the Jewish man Judas, who, according to one version of the legend of Queen Helena, helped the queen to fĳind and authenticate the True Cross. This version, the Acts of Judas Cyriacus, was composed in Greek by an anonymous author in the early fĳifth century, soon after Augustine had developed his theory of the Jewish witness.4 According to the Acts of Judas Cyriacus, Helena, Emperor Con-stantine’s mother, travels to Jerusalem in pursuit of the cross and nails. In the Holy City, she interrogates the obvious informants, the Jews. When met with resistance to her quest, she threatens the Jews with fĳire unless they cooperate—a threat she does not need to carry out—and then imprisons their delegate, Judas, in a dry well until he agrees to reveal the location on Golgotha that had been secretly transmitted in his family. After uttering a prayer for success (which foreshadows his conversion), Judas excavates three crosses. The three crosses are tested and the True Cross revives a dead man being carried to his burial. With this miracle, Judas’s conversion to Christianity is set in motion, and he acquires the baptismal name Quiriacus or Cyriacus (Kyriakos, of the Lord), and later becomes bishop of Jerusalem.

Judas’s act of excavation is an act of authentication, because the authen-tic location on Golgotha is a secret that had been kept in Judas’s family since the time of the Crucifĳixion. Judas authenticates the True Cross by staging the miracle. Judas is able to become the authenticator of the cross

4 Anatole Frolow: La relique de la vraie croix. Recherches sur le developpement d’un culte, Paris 1961; Stephan Borgehammar: How the Holy Cross was Found. From Event to Medieval Legend, Stockholm 1991; Jan Willem Drijvers: Helena Augusta. The Mother of Constantine the Great and the Legend of her Finding of the True Cross, Leiden 1992. Gregory of Tours in the late sixth century summarises the Acts of Judas Cyriacus briefly: “Hujus tempore venerabile crucis Dominicae lignum per studium Helenae matris ejus repertum est, prodente Juda Hebraeo, qui post baptismum Quiriacus est vocitatus” (Historia Francorum, book 1 chap. 34, in: Patrologia Latina, 71, ed. by Jacques Paul Migne, Paris 1848, col. 179B).


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because he is descended from a Jewish family who had witnessed the Crucifĳixion. His impartiality as a Jew is critical for the legend to be persua-sive. In the plot, the manifestation of the cross’s miraculous properties—after all, it is a relic—leads to Judas’s eventual conversion; this conversion is itself a manifestation of the relic’s miraculous ability to heal not just the body, but also the soul.

In the texts of the Helena legend, Judas’s inappropriate prominence as a Jewish protagonist is indeed compensated for by his eventual conversion to Christianity. In images, however, it is less easy to compensate for the Jewish autheticator’s centrality: for unlike in a text, where it was sufffĳicient that his Jewishness be explicitly stated once, in a visual narrative, his Jewishness had to be visually restated each time he made an appearance. The cumulative efffect of a visibly Jewish protagonist prompted acts of dis-avowal to compensate for his inappropriate prominence. Once the Jew’s particularity is indicated by visual markers, it intrudes into the narrative space in a way that necessitates visible acts of disavowal, either at the pre-conversion stage of the plot or in parallel plots—counter-narratives that cancel out the efffect of Judas’s prominence by means of juxtaposition. For example, tales of Jews who abuse holy images compensate for inappropri-ate Jewish centrality by displaying Jewish violence as a re-enactment of the Crucifĳixion. Such anticipations and juxtapositions open the narrative space of Jerusalem, and unfold it visually in ways that the linear text can-not.

There is a place in the Christian liturgical calendar for the Jewish au-thenticator to occupy a central position: the Feast of Inventio Crucis (the Finding of the True Cross, 3rd May). The legend of Judas Cyriacus was not part of the liturgy as such, but despite its apocryphal status, it was used in and disseminated by feast-day readings and sermons.5 Independently, il-lustrated versions were already circulating in Carolingian times. The legend had implications for how the liturgy was visualised.

5 Borgehammar (as in n. 4), pp. 188-194. More research is needed into the transmission of the Finding of the Cross legends in the twelfth century. For now, I can only indicate Berengosus’ early twelfth century treatise (Berengosus Trevirensis: De Laude et Inventione Sanctae Crucis, in: Patrologia Latina, 160, ed. by Jacques-Paul Migne, Paris 1854, coll. 935-982), the Inventio Crucis, a fragment in the Kriegsarchiv in Vienna, see Borgehammar (as in n. 4), p. 213, and the homiletical adaptation by Heiricus of Auxerre, written on behalf of abbot Gerhard of Oberalteich (tenure c. 1160-1180) in Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 9504, see Borgehammar ibid. and Katalog der illuminierten Handschriften der bayerischen Staatsbibliothek in München, vol. III: Die romanischen Handschriften der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek, part 1: Die Bistümer Regensburg, Passau und Salzburg, ed. by Elisabeth Klemm, Wiesbaden 1980, pp. 84-85 .



Acts of Authentication, Acts of Disavowal

Although the Judas Cyriacus legend had been illustrated in the West since Carolingian times, it was only in the twelfth century that Judas was fĳirst visually marked as Jewish. Once Judas, the Jewish man who excavates the cross for Helena, was marked out as Jewish, his anomalousness as pro-tagonist became visible. Judas became a protagonist under erasure, one whose visual characterisation amounts to a retraction of his status in the narrative. Occasionally, however, Jewish protagonists not visually marked as Jewish continued to be depicted well into the thirteenth century, espe-cially in work indebted to Byzantine tradition. To assess the twelfth cen-tury as a turning point in the representation of the depiction of Judas Cyriacus, let us fĳirst review the earliest depictions of his legend, and then contrast them with a group of twelfth-century works.

In what is probably the earliest representation of the Finding of the Cross, in the initial to the Inventio Crucis liturgy in the Gellone Sacramentary of c. 750-790, Judas is not marked as Jewish (fĳig. 1).6 A curly-haired, clean-shaven youth dressed in a short tunic, he raises a hoe to excavate the three diminutive crosses inscribed in the initial letter D of the rubric for the Mass on the Feast of Inventio Crucis. He is bareheaded, and he is in no way marked as religiously or ethnically Other. As Baert points out, the type occurs elsewhere in the manuscript, irrespective of religious or ethnic identity.7 As she also points out, if the excavator is to be identifĳied as Judas, then the historiated initial is not a text illustration as such, since the prayers nowhere mention Judas. Rather, the iconography imports narrative material from the legend that circulated independently.8

That an illustrated legend of Judas Cyriacus did indeed circulate in the Carolingian empire is indicated by the manuscript containing the oldest German vernacular prayer, the Wessobrunn Prayer.9 The Wessobrunn Prayer

6 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale (BN), ms. lat. 12048, fol. 76v; see Baert 2004 (as in n. 2), pp. 54-72, with the older literature.

7 Baert 2004 (as in n. 2), p. 67.8 This indirect text-image relation might also explain why in narrative terms, Judas’s

energetic action is curiously disconnected from its object: the three crosses are drawn to a much smaller scale and are enclosed in a medal- or coin-like shape hardly recognisable as a letter D, thus generating an emblematic space of commemorative contemplation.

9 Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 22053, fol. 1-20. A facsimile was published in 1922: Die Handschrift des Wessobrunner Gebets, ed. by Annette von Eckardt/Carl von Kraus, Munich 1922. Descriptions and analysis of the manuscript can be found in Bernhard Bischofff: Die südostdeutschen Schreibschulen und Bibliotheken in der Karolingerzeit, vol. I: Die bayrischen Diözesen, Wiesbaden 1960, pp. 18-22; Katharina Bierbrauer: Die vorkarolin-gischen und karolingischen Handschriften der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek, vol. I: Textband,


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is the only German text in a collection of Latin texts compiled in the south-ern part of the diocese of Augsburg during the period 800-814. The legend of Judas Cyriacus opens the manuscript (fol. 1v-21r). While the remaining Latin texts and the German prayer are devoid of illustrations, most of the Legend’s pages are illustrated, with eighteen (originally nineteen) tinted drawings altogether. It is widely assumed that a lost Byzantine model in-spired the drawings.10 The Jews are not marked out as diffferent in either

vol. II: Tafelband, Wiesbaden 1990, pp. 83sq, fĳig. 319-336 (available online on the Manuscripta mediaevalia site www.manuscripta-mediaevalia.de); Marcell Restle: EN TOYTß INIKA—IN HOC SIGNO VINCIS. Ein Beitrag zur Illustration des Clm 22053, in: Per assiduum studium scientiae adipisci margaritam. Festgabe für Ursula Nilgen zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. by Annelies Amberger, St. Ottilien 1997, pp. 27-42; Barbara Baert: New Observations on the Genesis of Girona (1050-1100). The Iconography of the Legend of the True Cross, in: Gesta, 38 (2), 1999, pp. 115-127; Baert 2004 (as in n. 2), p. 73.

10 Baert 1999 (as in n. 9); Ulrich Montag: Deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters, Munich 2003, p. 18; Baert 2004 (as in n. 2), p. 73, n. 76. Voelkle by contrast notes the western

Fig. 1. Inventio Crucis initial with Judas excavating the crosses, Gellone Sacramentary,

c. 750-790. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms. lat. 12048, fol. 76v



dress or physiognomy. In the two scenes of Helena’s interrogation (fol. 6v, 7v), the Jews are depicted as young and beardless, and wear short tunics and mantles; Judas himself, as depicted during his interview with the queen and during his prayer (fol. 9v, 12v), is clean-shaven and wears a long gar-ment. The emperor Constantine, by contrast, is bearded (Constantine’s dream, fol. 2). No one wears a hat or head-covering of any kind, except for Helena with her veil. In the scene of the excavation of the crosses, it is quite difffĳicult to identify Judas, since the excavator has apparently changed into a short tunic for the task (fol. 13r, fĳig. 2). The test of the crosses (the mi-raculous raising of the dead man) is carried out by Helena and three beard-

iconography (no halo, simple dress) of Constantine, who was not regarded as a saint in the West, in this manuscript (the Eastern iconography calls for a halo and full imperial dress—even in bed). William Voekle: The Stavelot Triptych. Mosan Art and the Legend of the True Cross, exhibition catalogue, New York 1980.

Fig. 2. Judas excavating the crosses, illustration in the Wessobrunn Prayer book, 800-814.

Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 22053, fol. 13r


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less youths (fol. 14v); it is unclear which of them is Judas, or which of the three crosses is the true one. In short, the illustrations are not part of any visual discourse of Jewishness or Judaism.

A Judaic discourse might seem to be present, however, in an Italian image from this period, in the Vercelli Canones Conciliarum (fĳig. 3).11 This late eighth-century Milanese textual record of fourth- and fĳifth-century church councils is prefaced with three pages of tinted drawings. The fĳirst

11 Canones Conciliarum, Vercelli, Biblioteca Capitolare, ms. 165, fol. 2r, 2v, 3r, 4r, 4v, 5r; see Baert 1999 (as in n. 9) and 2004 (as in n. 2), pp. 76-80.

Fig. 3. Judas excavates the cross and presents it to Queen Helena, illustration in the Vercelli

Canones (Canones Conciliarum), late 8th century. Vercelli, Bibliotheca Capitulare, Ms. 165,

fol. 2r



page consists of a mini-cycle to be read from bottom to top. In the lower half, Judas is digging up three crosses with a hoe. The scene is clearly iden-tifĳied as “Ubi Iudas Sanctam Crucem invenit” (“Where Judas fĳinds [found] the holy cross”). At the top, Judas (again labelled “Iudas”) consigns the cross to the Empress Helena, who has risen from her throne to receive it. The empress is haloed as well as crowned, and attended by a lady in waiting. Judas is bearded, though bareheaded. One may at fĳirst be inclined to regard his features as Jewish, with the dark eyes and elongated nose. But one only has to turn the page for this fĳirst impression to be corrected. There, on the verso side (fĳig. 4, fol. 2v), the Emperor Constantine presides over the ecu-

Fig. 4. Constantine presides over the ecumenical council at Nicea, illustration in the Vercelli

Canones (Canones Conciliarum), late 8th century. Vercelli, Bibliotheca Capitulare, Ms. 165,

fol. 2v


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menical council at Nicea’s condemnation of Arianism, and he is charac-terised by the same features as Judas!12 Clearly then, we are to understand that the bare-headed Judas is not deliberately marked out as Jewish—that his religious diffference is not visualised. The Vercelli Canones images are really narrativised portraits of Constantine and Helena, to match the por-traits of Peter and Paul on subsequent pages that ‘Romanise’ the fĳirst Christian emperor and his saintly mother. In this context of ideologically charged portraits of authority fĳigures, Judas and the cross serve to charac-terise the queen. The visual narrative is about her, not about Judas.

Judas is still not visually marked as Jewish even as late as the eleventh century, when the narrative cycle of the Finding of the Cross was stitched onto the middle portion of the Girona Creation Embroidery (fĳig. 5 a-d). The legend was told in four scenes, arranged symmetrically around a central cross-bearing, crowned fĳigure (now all but lost): Helena’s interrogation of the Jews; Judas’s prayer at Golgotha; the excavation of the crosses; the test-ing of the crosses. These all visualise elements of the legal process of au-thentication of a miracle—inquisition, prayer for the miracle, Inventio (discovery of the relics) proper, and testing. Despite the tapestry’s poor state of preservation (only the upper portions survive), the fragments allow us to decipher the setting and the visual characterisation of the fĳigures—or rather the lack of characterisation, since the depiction of Judas is inconsis-tent. Judas is a bareheaded, youngish man, usually bearded—but once cleanshaven (possibly, an auxiliary fĳigure erroneously labelled “Iudas”)! As in the Vercelli Canones, identifĳication is ensured by labels: “IVDAS” identi-fĳies the Jewish excavator; “IVDEI” his fellow Jews. The Girona tapestry is clearly still indebted to Carolingian models—that is clear from the classi-cal, pedimented basilica in the tapestry’s Helena legend, and other visual evidence discussed in the literature.13 But something new emerges: Jerusalem now represents a stage for the quasi-judicial enquiry into and verifĳication of the holy relic. We can assess this development by pondering the terse, stage-set framing of the Girona narratives between the matching pedimented basilicas, as compared with the purely emblematic Golgotha in the Gellone sacramentary, the personalised spacelessness of the Vercelli Canones or the loquaciously slow narrative in the Wessobrunn prayer book.

12 On fol. 3r opposite, the apostles Peter and Paul confer with each other about that council. There are two further double pages, the council of Constantinople I; the council of Ephesus and Christ in Majesty with Helena and Constantine.

13 Thus also Baert 1999 (as in n. 9), who presents a detailed comparison with the Vercelli Canones and above all the Wessobrunn Prayerbook. This is elaborated in Baert 2004 (as in n. 2), pp. 76-80.



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But the visual representation of Judas as a protagonist not marked as “Other” remained unchanged. This long continuity came to an end in the mid-twelfth century, when the depiction of the Judas Cyriacus legend changed quite abruptly. In the Mosan enamels of this period, and in the Zwiefalten Martyrologium, a new norm emerged for visually marking out the Jew, and as a result, a new narrative space that linked Jerusalem with the West was created.

The earliest and fullest treatment of this new motif is found in the Stavelot Triptych from the Mosan monastery of Stavelot, datable c. 1156-1158 (fĳig. 6).14 As a winged reliquary housing two Byzantine cross reliquaries, it opens up a complex chronotope. In a gradual unfolding, the two Byzantine reliquaries, which are themselves elevated to relic status by their enfram-ing within the central panel of the triptych, display their contents: frag-ments of the True Cross and associated objects. In a zooming movement, the eye of the viewer is led from Stavelot to Rome and Constantinople, and thence to Jerusalem, and from the viewer’s own present (the viewing situa-

14 New York, Pierpont Morgan Library; Voelkle 1980 (as in n. 10).

Fig. 6. Stavelot Tryptich, Mosan c. 1156-1158. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library



tion and the memory of the making and dedication of the triptych) via the era of Constantine and Helena (the narrative wings; the lower Byzantine reliquary) to the time of Christ (the upper Byzantine reliquary and the two Byzantine reliquaries’ contents). When the triptych is open, its left wing tells the story of Constantine’s victory and baptism—a movement from Constantinople to Rome; its right wing tells the story of Helena’s discovery of the True Cross—a movement from Constantinople to Jerusalem. In narrative terms, the triptych works from the centre outward: from concrete relic to iconic narrative of the Crucifĳixion, and the narrativised portraits of Constantine and Helena to the actual multi-scene narratives of their lives. The narratives on both wings amplify the terse portraits of the two monarchs exhibiting the Cross in the lower Byzantine reliquary. But the six wing medallions do more than amplify these royal and saintly like-nesses: they overwrite their Eastern iconography in a Roman, papal vein. Unlike the haloed fĳigure in the lower Byzantine reliquary, the emperor is not marked as a saint in the left wing’s narrative medallions. In the Battle of the Milvian Bridge (left wing, central medallion), he is not marked out at all from his fellow knights. In the baptism scene at the top, it is Pope Sylvester, rather than the emperor, who bears the halo and is represented as the venerable saint—this was the very Roman pope whose legitimacy was, of course, denied in Constantinople.

But it is the right wing that is of particular interest here, since it creates a bridge between Stavelot and Jerusalem. The story is narrated from bottom to top. In the bottom medallion, Helena interrogates the Jewish elders of Jerusalem and threatens them with fĳire, a striking new narrative motif (plate VII, fĳig. 7a, b). The Jews, labelled “Judaei”, are visually identifĳied by their long beards and robes, and especially their white hats. Though more in the shape of pilgrims’ hats here, they are nevertheless fully within the range of twelfth-century depictions of the Pileum Cornutum, the pointed “Phrygian” or “Jewish” hat. The Jews, in response to Helena’s question about the whereabouts of the True Cross, assert, on a speech scroll, “Judas novit” (“Judas knows”). Another inscription identifĳies Judas as the Jewish elder at the front of the group, leaning on his walking stick. In the middle medallion follows the excavation of the Cross, with Judas digging it up, labelled and marked by his hat. Several crosses are found, but the True Cross is identifĳi-able to the viewer by virtue of its second cross arm, which is in the Byzantine style; should we miss this signifĳicant detail, the hand of God appears from the clouds and heavenly light falls onto the True Cross. Finally, in the top


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Plate VII. Stavelot Tryptich, wing with the story of the True cross, Mosan, c. 1160. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library



Fig. 7a, b. Stavelot Tryptich, details of the True Cross wing, Mosan, c. 1160. New York, The

Pierpont Morgan Library

a

b


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medallion, we are shown the healing miracle wrought by the True Cross, and the thieves’ crosses are discarded.

Whereas the Constantine wing represents the emperor’s journey to Rome—from the emperor’s army camp before the Milvian Bridge to the Lateran baptistery—the Helena wing presupposes her journey to Jerusalem and shows only its fĳinal stage, the pilgrimage to Golgotha—“Calvariae lo-cus” (“the site of Calvary”). Here, inscriptions render everything unam-biguous: “lignum domini absconditum” (“the Lord’s hidden wood”) and “patibula duorum latronum” (“the two thieves’ gallows”). The True Cross is consistently referred to as wood, with the connotation of a living tree, while the other two crosses are referred to as gallows—neither of them is labelled as a cross. The theological endpoint of the two journeys is rebirth: the emperor’s rebirth through baptism is juxtaposed to the rebirth through the healing power of the Cross—Judas’ implied, and the Jews’ hoped for, rebirth through baptism. The Helena wing’s narrative sequence follows the processes by which sanctity was conferred and controlled by the church, in parts against popular cults. The interrogation scene is an Inquisitio, dur-ing which witness reports were recorded. The witnesses’ truthfulness is enforced here by the threat of fĳire, to be discussed more fully below. The excavation scene is a classic scene of Inventio, the often miraculous fĳinding of long-lost relics. Finally, the testing and healing scene depicts the miracle required before any saint or relic could be elevated to the altar.15

Jews play a prominent role in the Helena wing of the Stavelot Triptych. Yet we can observe a gradual visual attenuation of the Jewish presence as the narrative progresses. A flock of “Jewish hats” dominates the interroga-tion scene at the bottom. In the excavation scene, the protagonist, Judas, and one of his assistants, wear the Pileum Cornutum. In the top medallion, however, a bishop, rather than Judas the Jew, carries out the miraculous healing—the Jewish hat has been replaced by the bishop’s mitre. This substitution is also, but not merely, an iconographic puzzle: to have a bishop test the crosses contradicts the wording of the Acts of Judas Cyriacus, which states that Judas converted only after the miracle and became a bishop later. That the authentication was carried out by bishop Macarius of Jerusalem is stated in Rufĳinus’s supplements to the translation of Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History (which lacks any reference to Judas or the fĳinding of the cross!), a text that was compiled c. 400, before the Acts of

15 André Vauchez: Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, Cambridge 1997.



Judas Cyriacus.16 If indeed two textual sources have been conflated—and as the testing bishop is not labelled in the Stavelot Triptych that is difffĳicult to ascertain—then one has to ask why such a conflation would have seemed desirable or necessary. Rufĳinus’s version of the miracle may have been introduced so that the bishop of Jerusalem would mirror the bishop of Rome on the opposite side of the triptych. Or, possibly, the search for textual sources can be complemented by looking at these scenes in terms of the visual problems brought to the fore by new modes of characterisa-tion. The introduction of the bishop, and his mitre’s substitution for the Pileum Cornutum, would then be a visual strategy compensating for a troubling prominence of Jewish protagonists. This troubling diffference is introduced by the novel insistence on visible Jewish particularity.

The Jews and their champion, Judas, now appear in a completely new garb. Not only are they emphatically bearded in a world in which clean-shavenness has become the norm for clerics and knights alike, but their long tunics are complemented by the Pileum Cornutum. These Jews are marked out as diffferent, and by introducing the Jews as a group, the impres-sion of Judas’s membership in a corporation, or even a secret society, is powerfully conveyed. The efffect is to create, for the fĳirst time, a protagonist marked explicitly as Jewish. This is not necessarily an iconographic change, but one of mode of representation. It seems that although the Pileum Cornutum was known in Carolingian times, it was deliberately not em-ployed for the post-biblical Jews of the Inventio Crucis legend until now. The Jewish authenticator, suddenly so prominent in his religious particu-larity, is already disavowed within the work. Even where he does appear prominently, the importance of Judas as protagonist is sidelined by super-

16 For ease of reference, here is a timeline:337 ce: Eusebius, Life of Constantine: no mention of Helena’s cross mission.351 ce: Cyril of Jerusalem writes that the Cross had been found during the reign of

Constantine.387 ce: John Chrysostom mentioned three crosses, the True one being identifĳied by its

titulus.395 ce: St. Ambrose of Milan mentions Helena’s involvement for the fĳirst time.395 ce: Sulpicius Severus of Gaul: True Cross verifĳied by resurrection miracle of dead man.400 ce: Rufĳinus, translation and supplements to Eusebius: Cross found by Helena at

unknown date, verifĳied by bishop Macarius through miracle of resurrection of dead woman.

Early 5th century: Acts of Judas Cyriacus mention Judas for the fĳirst time.595 ce: Gregory of Tours confĳirms Judas Cyriacus/Quiriacus’ role—probably its fĳirst

mention in the West.1112: Berengosus of Trier composes an extensive elaboration and allegorisation of the

cross legend, which dwells extensively on the depravity of the Jews (see n. 5).


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natural interventions such as God’s hand appearing from the heavens, and by the heavenly shaft of light falling onto the True Cross. Judas is God’s instrument. Thus, the open narrative space of the Stavelot Triptych consists in the delicate and difffĳicult balance between the marking of Jewish difffer-ence and the disavowal of Jewish agency.

The Stavelot Triptych establishes a new norm, at least in Mosan art. In this corpus, the interrogation and excavation scenes become essential and occur in all works, complemented usually (but not always) by the testing of the crosses and Helena’s prayer (a scene not underwritten by textual sources, and which may relate to the local veneration of the saint). The interrogation scene is given a new dimension in the triptych: the Jews are physically threatened by fĳire if they do not give up the reliable informant Judas. Contrast the interrogation scene in the Wessobrunn prayerbook (fĳig. 8). The interrogation is a scene of conversation and its mood and direc-tion cannot easily be gauged from the image alone. In the Stavelot Triptych,

Fig. 8. Queen Helena interrogating the Jews, illustration in the Wesso brunn Prayer book,

800-814. Munich, Bayerische Staats biblio thek, Clm 22053, fol. 7v



however, the sequence of interrogation, excavation and testing is con-cisely articulated, and demonstrates clearly that the discovery of the True Cross was a process that fulfĳilled the legal requirements of Inventio, a procedure required before relics could be raised to the altar. The narrative sequence establishes a chain of authentication: the Jews authenticate Judas in the interrogation scene; Judas excavates and authenticates the Cross. During the interrogation, Queen Helena—in keeping with the familiar texts of the Judas Cyriacus legend—threatens the Jews with fĳire if they refuse to cooperate: “Show the wood!”, in the words of one speech scroll. In response, they reveal, in the words of the other speech scroll, that “Judas knows”. The threat of fĳire is never actually carried out in the texts; instead, Judas is imprisoned in a dry well in order to make him talk. Why then is the fĳire, and not the dry well, pictured? And not only depicted, but prom-inently depicted, since Mosan reliquaries picturing the Finding of the Cross invariably depict the fĳire, even in strongly condensed cycles.

The Ordeal of Fire

The Stavelot Triptych in fact inaugurated a wave of depictions of the Finding of the True Cross on reliquaries of all shapes and sizes, including a phylac-tery (four-lobed pendant containing a relic) from Lobbes abbey,17 an altar cross divided between the Berlin Kunstgewerbemuseum and the British Museum,18 and the Tongeren reliquary, another triptych, this time with a pair of doors hiding the relic.19 None of these works is dated or datable by external evidence, but Baert suggests that they all follow upon the Stavelot Triptych and range from c. 1160 to as late as the beginning of the thirteenth century. Despite their morphological and functional diffferences, they share an iconographic programme. All of them depict the three subjects of the Stavelot Triptych: Helena’s interrogation of the Jews, including the fĳire, the excavation of the crosses, and the testing. In two instances, the interroga-tion has been expanded into two panels. In the left lobe of the Lobbes phylactery, Helena is engaged with a group of Jewish men in a seemingly civil conversation (fĳig. 9). The right lobe, however, shows a group of armed

17 See Baert 2004 (as in n. 2), pp. 97-103.18 Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Kunstgewerbemuseum, Schloss Köpenick, Inv. 1973, 187-

189 and London, The British Museum, AN36230001.The left arm of the Berlin half has been lost since 1945, but is known from pre-WW II photographs; see Baert 2004 (as in n. 2), pp. 103-111.

19 Tongeren, Lieve Frouwe Basiliek, Treasury; see Baert 2004 (as in n. 2), pp. 111-119.


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and armoured soldiers pushing the “terrifĳied Judas” (in the words of the inscription) towards a flaming pit at the extreme right edge of the compo-sition, with other civilians watching. The soldiers’ helmets add a terrifying force to the threat of fĳire. In the Berlin/London altar cross, the interrogation of the Jews has also been split (or doubled) into two scenes (fĳig. 10). On the cross arm on the left of fĳigure 10, “Helena” and the “Iudei” (thus labelled) engage in a lively disputation. On the opposite cross arm, the fĳire (“ignis”) is interposed in the middle of the composition. The group of Jews appears to be pushing forward one of their number, an older bearded man, toward Helena (and, thus, toward the fĳire). He is likely to be Judas. In the somewhat later Tongeren reliquary, the interrogation has also been split in two, and has to be read across the hollowed-out space in which the relic is kept (fĳig. 11), but it is efffectively one scene. This time, the queen is accompanied by the fĳire on the left, while the Jews push Judas forward on the right. The queen’s words, “Fulfĳil my desire!”, are marked by the etiquette typical of polite courtly conversation, in marked contrast to the brutally explicit im-age of the fĳire. In a chiastic arrangement, the corresponding excavation scene has also been split, this time with the queen on the right. And, again,

Fig. 9. Helena legend on the Lobbes phylactery, Mosan, c. 1170-1180. Private collection



Fig. 10. Helena legend on the altar cross, Mosan, c. 1170-1180 (the left arm is a reconstruc-

tion based on pre-war photographs of the lost part). Berlin, SMPK, Kunstgewerbemuseum

it must be read across the relic compartment. Thus, the eye is made to trace a criss-crossing movement, efffectively framing the central compartment: the movement of the eye charts the box-like space of the reliquary.

Despite their similarities—iconographic as well as stylistic—these works are not copies of each other. Each re-imagines the interrogation of the Jews and the subsequent scenes in slightly diffferent terms. In their characterisation of the Jews and Judas, the works are far from consistent. In the Lobbes phylactery, the Jewish corporation fĳirst appears before Helena wearing pointed hats, while on the right, Judas (the only hatted fĳigure) is pushed toward the fĳire by a detachment of soldiers. In the Berlin/London altar cross, by contrast, no one wears the Jewish hat. In the Tongeren reli-quary, the interrogated Jews wear hats, but Judas is bareheaded while he excavates. The likelihood is that during the generation following the Stavelot Triptych, the Mosan workshops produced many cross reliquaries, and that the legend of the Finding of the Cross lost much of its icono-graphic fastidiousness.


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The narrative element that stands out because of its iconographic excess, and therefore most calls for explanation, is the motif of the fĳire at the inter-rogation. It is true that in the Acts of Judas Cyriacus, Helena’s threat of fĳire compels the Jews to give away Judas’s identity, but the threat is not carried out. It is a digression, not part of the main plot. Why then, do concise pic-ture cycles so insistently choose to represent the fĳire? Voelkle and Baert suggested that the fĳire should be linked to the rising anti-Judaism of the fĳirst and second Crusades,20 but when one studies the chronicles of the violence perpetrated by crusaders against Jews, it is the sword that appears to be the primary means of violence. Certainly, in the published Jewish Crusade chronicles, there is never any mention of fĳire.21 The crusaders did

20 Voelkle 1980 (as in n. 19), p. 16: “This sudden introduction of the threatening fĳire may be somehow connected with the forced conversion of Jews in the twelfth century”.

21 Abraham Meir Haberman: Sefer Gezerot Ashkenaz ve-Tsorfat. Divre zikhronot mi-bene ha-dorot shebi-tekufat mas‘e ha-tselav u-mivhar piyutehem (The Book of Calamities of German

Fig. 11. Cross reliquary (central portion, open), Mosan, c. fĳirst quarter of the 13th century.

Tongeren, Cathedral of St. Mary



not use fĳire to violate their Jewish victims—fĳire being an uncontrollable element at the best of times, especially in the crowded cities where Jews lived without separation from their Christian neighbours. Only later, once Jews were put on trial in a manner similar to heretics, would fĳire become the preferred method of execution. The fĳirst time that Jews were judicially burned to death was in Blois in 1171, some time after the Stavelot Triptych had fĳirst pictured Jews as threatened by fĳire.22 The Blois pogrom was not related to crusading. The judicial methods adopted in Blois were related to, and possibly modelled on, heresy trials. Later on, anti-Jewish violence did come to involve burnings at the stake. But on none of the cross reliquar-ies are Jews actually depicted as condemned to the stake. The fĳire is a threat, related to torture as a method of inquisition. To understand the motif of the fĳire, we have to look beyond vague references to crusader violence against Jews. My suggestion is that the fĳire is less a reflection of the real history of Jewish persecution, and has more to do with the tropes and methods of inquisition. Rather than place the motif of the fĳire into the context of heresy trials, we can invoke the less well-known context of au-thentication trials of relics.

As relics multiplied, thanks to increased imports from the East, the need for verifĳication became more and more urgent. As Thomas Head has shown, a process for the verifĳication of relics by ordeal is known to have existed since at least the end of the tenth century.23 Disputed relics, or parts of relics, were placed in contact with specially consecrated coals in or front of a censer. The ritual was preceded by fasting and accompanied by prayer. In 1125, a fragment of the True Cross, brought back by crusaders from the Holy Land, was tested in this way in Schafffhausen.24 It is true that in the interrogation scenes of the Inventio Crucis legends, the fĳire does not test

and French Jewry. Accounts and selected liturgical poems by Crusade period authors) , Jerusalem 1945 [in Hebrew]; English translation: Shlomo Eidelberg: The Jews and the Crusaders. The Hebrew chronicles of the First and Second Crusades, Madison 1977; as an introduction to the subject, which continues to attract much scholarly work, see Robert Chazan: God, Humanity, and History. The Hebrew First-Crusade Narratives, Berkeley/Los Angeles 2000. The exceptions are two cases where Jews start fĳires with suicidal intent.

22 The authoritative analysis of the textual web surrounding the Blois incident is that of Susan Einbinder: Beautiful Death. Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France, Princeton (New Jersey) 2002.

23 Thomas Head: Saints, Heretics and Fire. Finding Meaning through the Ordeal, in: Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts. Religion in Medieval Society. Essays in Honor of Lester K. Little, ed. by Sharon Farmer/Barbara Rosenwein, Ithaca (New York) 2000, pp. 220-238. I am indebted to Thomas Head for generously sharing his unpublished notes with me.

24 Narratio de reliquiis in monasterium Scafhusense, in: Monumenta Germaniae Historica Series Scriptores, vol. XV, pp. 954-959; see Head 2000 (as in n. 23), p. 237.


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the Cross, but rather the Jewish authenticators—Judas and his fellow Jews. So, in these images, the reference is probably to the judicial ordeal, where the proband, or champion or witness, was exposed to the fĳire. This testing of witnesses to authenticate relics was rarer than the testing of relics, but it was not unprecedented. The most famous precedent was that of the Holy Lance. During the second siege of Antioch, in 1098, Peter Bartholomew discovered what he claimed to be the Holy Lance. It was tested not by be-ing exposed to fĳire, but by exposing its champion to the ordeal of fĳire. Thus Peter acquired the sobriquet Igneus—“the Fiery”.25

Thomas Head alerted me to another case that is directly relevant, and which indicates that the ordeal of relic witnesses was both familiar and in crisis. At the end of the eleventh century, Abbot Notker of Hautvillers (near Rheims) recorded the translation and authentication of the relics of Saint Helena.26 According to Notker, these relics were authenticated twice: once by an ordeal of hot water during the translation to the abbey at the time of Charles the Bald and Archbishop Hincmar, and once by a column of fĳire during a test at the 1095 church council at Clermont-Ferrand—the very one at which Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade. Interestingly, the hot-water ordeal was not applied to the relic itself, but rather to the monk who had procured the relics—it was his trustworthiness that was thus proved. The 1095 authentication of the relics at Clermont-Ferrand involved a miracle and a piece of hard evidence: during the night preceding the actual authentication ritual, a column of fĳire, recalling God’s presence dur-ing the Exodus, marked the place of the relics. In the morning, when the relics were “unpacked”, an Epistola (an authenticating inscription) was found. The double nature of this second authentication suggests strongly that at the end of the eleventh century, doubt was not easily quelled by the intervention of the divine. The movement between divine fĳire and written record articulates changes in the understanding of ‘evidence’. The visibil-ity of evidence fĳinds a permanent record in textuality—the inscription is

25 Colin Morris: Policy and Visions. The Case of the Holy Lance at Antioch, in: War and Government in the Middle Ages. Essays in Honour of J.O. Prestwich, ed. by John Gillingham/James Clarke Holt, Woodbridge-Totowa/NJ 1984, pp. 33-45; Thomas S. Asbridge: The Holy Lance of Antioch. Power, Devotion and Memory on the First Crusade, in: Reading Medieval Studies, 33, 2007, pp. 3-36.

26 Notker abbatus: Epistola de translatione s. Heleni (Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina 3787); Acta Sanctorum ordinis Sancti Benedicti, ed. by Luc d’Archèry/Jean Mabillon, vol. IV.2, Paris 1668-1701, pp. 154-55 and (less full) Acta Sanctorum, August III, 603; cf. Nicole Hermann-Mascard: Les reliques des saints. Formation coutumière d’un droit, Paris 1975, p. 135 asserts that Notker records an actual ordeal. I owe knowledge of the entire episode to Thomas Head.



recorded in the Epistola, and the ephemeral fĳire, too, is made permanent by Notker’s recording of it. True, the credibility of the ordeal in criminal proceedings was in question during the twelfth century, and was in full crisis by 1215, when one of the canons of the Lateran council banned clergy from cooperating.27 But regardless of its disrepute in criminal proceedings, the ordeal retained a powerful hold on the imagination as a custom from time immemorial, and its use in the verifĳication of relics was still accepted to some degree.

The reliability of the Jewish witnesses and Judas the authenticator was of paramount importance—and how better to test the reliability of wit-nesses long dead than by an ordeal read in the context of high medieval judicial procedures? The Stavelot Triptych, the Lobbes phylactery, the Berlin/London altar cross and the Tongeren reliquary can all be said to achieve something similar, though at the level of visuality, not textuality. They use the ancient legend of Judas Cyriacus to articulate contemporary anxieties about the trafffĳic in relics and about the changing theological role of Judaism in the Christian economy of belief. The fĳire motif in the depictions of Helena’s interrogation of the Jews makes sense against the background of the verifĳication of relics by ordeal, an idea projected by its twelfth-century interpreters into the brief mention of the fĳire in the ancient Acts of Judas Cyriacus. If this is correct, then the Jews in these visual narratives are to be understood as the champions of the relic’s authenticity, and the allusion to the ordeal recreates Jerusalem as a quasi-judicial space of authentication.

Judas in Manuscripts from the Diocese of Constance

There is evidence that the promotion of Judas to the status of a Jewish protagonist in Christian hagiography was not a local phenomenon confĳined to the Mosan area. That evidence comes in the form of several liturgical manuscripts of the second half of the twelfth and fĳirst quarter of the thir-teenth centuries: the Zwiefalten Martyrology, an illustrated saints’ calendar from a mid-twelfth century Benedictine monastery in Bavaria;28 a sacra-

27 Finbarr McAuley: Canon Law and the End of the Ordeal, in: Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 26 (3), 2006, pp. 473-513. Robert Bartlett: Trial by Fire and Water. The Medieval Judicial Ordeal, Oxford 1986. Colin Morris: Judicium Dei. The Social and Political Signifĳicance of the Ordeal in the Eleventh Century, in: Studies in Church History, 12, 1975, pp. 95-111. My thanks to Paul Hyams for discussing the ordeal with me.

28 Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Cod. hist. 415, fol. 39r; Katalog der illuminierten Handschriften der Württembergischen Landesbibliothek Stuttgart, vol. II: Die romanischen Handschriften, part 1: Provenienz Zwiefalten, ed. by Sigrid von Borries-Schulten,


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mentary and abbot Berthold’s Missal, two prayerbooks from Weingarten abbey, and the Grand Passionaire of Weissenau monastery—all datable to the fĳirst two decades of the thirteenth century.29 Eschewing iconographic conformity, each of these works treats the narrative in a diffferent way, and there is little evidence that they were concerned with the formal pro-cesses for authenticating relics (Inquisitio, Inventio). Equally, their repre-sentations of Judas vary considerably. The interrogation hardly plays a role, and the fĳire is absent throughout.

I shall start with the May page in the Zwiefalten Martyrologium; as in most of the martyrology’s highly patterned and symmetrically laid-out pages, the narrative scenes are here organised in and between fĳive medal-lions (fĳig. 12). The central medallion is labelled “Inventio Crucis”, referring both to the feast day that was one of the titular feasts of Zwiefalten abbey, and to the narrative of the fĳinding of the Cross. Indirectly, it connotes once more the judicial process of the Inventio (discovery) of relics, though the central medallion actually pictures the stage of Ostentatio (the ritual display of the relic). In the medallion, the new-found Cross is exhibited by the crowned Helena (on the right) and the Jew, Judas (on the left), wearing the Pileum Cornutum and additionally identifĳied by his spade. The actual Inventio happens to the left of the central medallion, in an undefĳined, spandrel-like space left over from the arrangement of the fĳive medallions, where the hieratic presentation scene is expanded into a narrative: Judas is unearthing the Cross.30 By this act he authenticates the status of the cross

Stuttgart 1987, pp. 97-111, in particular p. 104 and fĳig. 249; Sigrid von Borries-Schulten: Zur romanischen Buchmalerei in Zwiefalten. Zwei Illustrationsfolgen zu den Heiligenfesten des Jahres und ihre Vorlagen, in: Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 52 (4), 1989, pp. 445-471; Zuzana Haefeli-Sonin: Auftraggeber und Entwurfskonzept im Zwiefaltener Martyrolog des 12. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Cod. hist. 415, Bern 1992; Wolfgang Kemp: The Narratives of Gothic Stained Glass, Cambridge 1997, pp. 53-57 and fĳig. 25-29.

29 Helena interrogating the Jews, Berthold Missal, New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, M. 710, fol. 89r: no Jews hats; Judas digging up the cross, Initial “Deus qui” for feast of Inventio Crucis. Sacramentary from Weingarten, Fulda, Landesbibliothek, Cod. Aa 32, fol. 137v: Judas excavates the cross: Pileum cornutum and stereotypical drooping bearded profĳile, reproduced in Heinz Schreckenberg: The Jews in Christian Art: An Illustrated History, New York 1996, p. 251, fĳig. 2; Christine Jakobi-Mirwald/Herbert Köllner: Die illuminierten Handschriften der Hessischen Landesbibliothek Fulda, Fulda 1976, fĳig. 624; Hanns Swarzenski: The Berthold Missal, the Pierpont Morgan Library Ms 710 and the Scriptorium of Weingarten Abbey, vol. II, New York 1943, fĳig. 114; Solange Michon: Le Grand Passionnaire enluminé de Weissenau et son scriptorium autour de 1200, Geneva 1990.

30 The corresponding fĳield on the right is occupied by a fĳigure with a club that appears to be turning toward the central medallion but is actually an accessory to the martyrdom of the Apostle Phillip, mostly transacted in the top right medallion above.



as the True Cross, because the secret of its location had been preserved in his Jewish family.

So far, so familiar. The central medallion—central to the page as a whole—is both part of the narrative sequence and an iconic image of the feastday. Uniquely though, Helena here displays the Cross not together with Constantine (as on the lower Byzantine cross reliquary in the Stavelot Triptych, and on so many other depictions of the ritual display of the cross), but partnered by Judas. As Baert has pointed out, the composition is closely related to the traditional Byzantine composition of Constantine and Helena exhibiting the Cross. This iconography was known in the West through the importation of Byzantine reliquaries, icons and manuscripts. Among the examples of this importation are the small Byzantine reliquar-ies embedded in the Stavelot Triptych. The Byzantine composition was also known in the diocese of Salzburg, south of Zwiefalten, where it was twice copied in manuscripts of the twelfth century. But in the Zwiefalten

Fig. 12. Inventio Crucis in the Martyrologium Zwiefaltense. Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Cod. Hist. 415, fol. 39


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Martyrologium, it is Judas, and not Constantine, who is positioned on the dexter side of the Cross. As the humble Jew with his spade occupies the royal side of the Cross, the formal requirements of the image clash with the requirements of the supersessionist message (according to which the Cross has rendered obsolete the Old Law). There is no indication of the happy ending we know from texts: that Judas converted to Christianity in the end, after he had seen the miracles wrought by the Cross. Judas’s Pileum Cornutum marks him as an unambiguous embodiment of Old Testament Judaism. Despite the narrative coherence achieved by repeating the pro-tagonist across a narrative sequence, the medallion is scandalous because the Jewish excavator and the Christian queen-saint are given near-equal status. The only sign of the disavowal of this Jewish protagonist is the fact that Judas is slightly smaller than the queen. Very oddly, Helena is not distinguished by a halo. In the May page of the Zwiefalten Martyrologium, the Jewish authenticator occupies a problematic, ambiguous position.

So far, we have seen compensatory strategies both in the Stavelot Triptych and in the Zwiefalten Martyrologium. Minor representational adjustments include the substitution of a bishop for the Jew in the upper medallion of the Stavelot Triptych, or the slight reduction in scale of Judas in the central medallion of the Zwiefalten Martyrologium. These are probably neither errors nor coincidences, but rather symptoms betraying uneasiness about the Jewish protagonist of the hagiographical narrative. Conspicuously absent from the Zwiefalten Martyrologium is any depiction of the inter-rogation and the miracle of healing. The absence of the fĳire motif here, and from other works from the diocese of Constance, suggests that the motif was either of particular local importance in the Mosan region, or was spe-cifĳic to the reliquary genre (but not liturgical manuscripts).

Whereas the Zwiefalten Martyrology features a (however minimal) nar-rative sequence, the other manuscripts from the region evoke the Finding of the True Cross in a single scene each. The Berthold Sacramentary shows a seated Helena in disputation with a group of Jews. The motif of the fĳire is absent, and only one of the Jewish men is marked by the Pileum Cornutum. The Weingarten Sacramentary only shows the excavation scene. I will only discuss the Grand Passionaire from Weissenau here (fĳig. 13). The passionary is a collection of hagiographies, of which one concerns Queen Helena. Its initial letter T has been interpreted by the artist (the monk-painter Rufĳillus) as a Tau cross, which is presented by its Jewish excavators to the Queen. The narrative of the Finding of the Cross is referenced via the spade lying on the ground, which defĳines the place and time as Golgotha just after the



successful excavation. Loose earth clods in the foreground let the viewer divine the Finding proper, which is not shown. The Jews are not only marked by their conical hats, but also by the ritual and expressive relation-ship with the queen who is enthroned on her faldistorium and accompanied by a courtier. The faldistorium here becomes a reference to court etiquette, where the Jews appear as subservient tribute-bearers, their tribute being that greatest of treasures, the Cross. Looking at their expressions, one is struck by the open mouth of the kneeling older fĳigure (presumably Judas himself), indicating speech. Judas’s role as protagonist has been retained, and also disavowed, through the quasi-courtly scene of tribute and subjec-tion.

Fig. 13. Initial T for the Feast of Inventio Crucis, Grand Passionaire from Weissenau, Brother Rufĳillus, Weissenau (diocese Con stance), c. 1200. Zurich, Fondation Martin Bodmer, Ms.

127 fol. 53v


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Narrative and Ideological Mirroring in the Berardenga Antependium

The Berardenga Antependium (Tuscan, dated 1215) features yet a diffferent method of disavowing the prominence of the Jewish protagonist (fĳig. 14 a, b).31 The work juxtaposes a Jewish attack against a crucifĳix against the vi-sual narrative of the Finding of the Cross. The panels to the right of the central, enthroned Christ depict the excavation of the Cross and the testing of the crosses, respectively. The third panel represents the martyrdom of Saint Alexander. The panels to the left of the central Christ narrate the Passio Imaginis, a legend concerning a Christian icon of Beirut (though of

31 Siena, Pinacoteca Nazionale; see Michele Bacci: The Berardenga Antependium and the Passio Ymaginis Offfĳice, in: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 61, 1998, pp. 1-16.

Fig. 14 a,b. Master of Tressa, Helena interrogating the Jews, The testing of the cross, 1215,

Antependium from Berardenga Abbey. Siena, Pinacoteca Nazionale

a

b



Jerusalem origin) abused by Jews. The Passio Imaginis, like the Acts of Judas Cyriacus, is of eastern origin, and is set in the Christian East. Both wings thematise holy objects from Jerusalem, and imply an equality of status between miraculous images and relics.

Michele Bacci (see n. 48) has outlined the connections between the antependium and the liturgy of the Passio Imaginis (celebrated on the ninth of November and of local liturgical signifĳicance at the abbey of Berardenga). Beyond the liturgical iconography, the systematic relationship between the two narrative sequences is worth pursuing further. The narrative of a Jewish attack on the Cross functions as a narrative of disavowal, since it cancels out the “positive” Jewish protagonists in the Helena legend. One cancels out the other, and both work together to dislodge from a position of centrality the Jewish authenticator in the story of the True Cross. The two wings of the antependium, although not altogether symmetrical, com-plement each other like a question and answer. On the left, the Jewish attack on the crucifĳix is depicted, an attack thwarted by Christian exposure of the Jewish plot; on the right, the Jews fĳind and verify the Cross for Helena. Healing miracles and conversions conclude both sequences.

Where the Stavelot Triptych created what could be read as an overarch-ing narrative sequence, leading from Constantine’s dream to the verifĳica-tion of the Cross, the Berardenga Antependium creates more contrast by deploying the Passio Imaginis legend in place of the Constantine legend. The narrative of the True Cross has been contracted to only two scenes to make space for the Passion of the church’s titular saint, Saint Alexander, whose feast day fell on the same day as the Inventio Crucis. The legend of the abused image extends over the three scenes. The parallelism between the discovery of the True Cross and the attack against the icon is empha-sized by the way in which the abused image is depicted. Whereas the church father Athanasius, author of the oldest known Greek source text for the Passio Imaginis legend, would have envisaged a half-length portrait icon of Christ in the manner of the early icons from Sinai, in the Berardenga Antependium the miraculous, bleeding image is pictured as a crucifĳix (a type of devotional image not known in the fourth century). The crucifĳix shape reinforces the parallelism between icon and True Cross (and confĳirms the status of miraculous images as relics). Jewish authenticators have a role to play in both narratives. The negative acts of the Jews in the Passio Imaginis frame and cancel out the positive and central role played by the Jews in the Inventio Crucis narrative, and the Jews in the Inventio Crucis atone and compensate for the outrage committed by the Jews in the Passio


Eva Frojmovic186

Imaginis. In both, authentication is efffected through miracles of healing that can only be set in motion by Jewish catalysts: the therapeutic blood is extracted from the crucifĳix by Jews, and the therapeutic Cross is identifĳied and extracted from the earth by Jews. The parallel is driven home by the presence of prostrate patients stretched out at the foot of the Cross/cruci-fĳix on both “wings” of the antependium. Curiously, there are no specifĳic visual signs that enable the viewer to identify as Jewish either Judas or the icon’s owner. They and their fellows are unmarked. Once again, the narra-tive space has been opened up, not just by mutual mirroring between the wings, but also by the need for interpretation or prior knowledge on the viewer’s part.

To sum up: in the mid-twelfth century, works such as the Stavelot Triptych and the Zwiefalten Martyrologium make use of a recently crystal-lized visual marking of the Jew, and apply it to an ancient Jewish actor of the Helena legend. In doing so, they unavoidably create a Jewish protago-nist in a Christian story of salvation. This was probably not a premeditated move, but rather the result of a particular historical and cultural constel-lation. Judas Cyriacus as a hero of Christian salvation history proved im-mediately problematic, and various strategies of disavowal were duly adopted to compensate for, or offfset, his somehow scandalous prominence. The images are given a further level of complexity, thanks to the reading of ordeal imagery into the ancient text—a reading that indirectly casts Jews as champions of the relic. The dialogue with the viewer could take on diffferent levels of intensity. In all the works discussed, the narrative space identifĳied as Jerusalem is opened up by multiple mirrorings, dialogues and intertextualities.


“Translating Jerusalem: Jewish authenticators of the cross”

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Transcript of “Translating Jerusalem: Jewish authenticators of the cross”