Preaching to the Choir Fantastic: Conversion and Racial Liminality in Elene

Abstract

ABSTRACT In Cynewulf’s Elene — an Old English verse narrative in the Inventio Crucis tradition, which survives in the Vercelli Book — the figure of Judas stands out among the Jews of Jerusalem as the only person present who can answer Helena’s questions about the location of the True Cross. Although critical consensus has considered Judas to be an archetypal representative of the Jewish population of the city, this article argues that the poem actually constructs the religious race of Judas as a strangely liminal one, shifting him back and forth between the categories of Jew and Christian. Drawing upon concepts from medieval critical race studies and work on Jewish-Christian relations, it examines how Judas’s racial liminality lays the groundwork for the narrative’s culminating anti-Semitic fantasy of effortless universal conversion; furthermore, it offers a critique of allegorical reading practices in medievalist scholarship, and underscores the need for deliberate distancing between the medieval text and the modern reader.