The Historiographies of Premodern Critical Race Studies and Jewish Studies

In recent discussions of Geraldine Heng’s foundational book, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, one chapter has received much critical attention: chapter 2, “State/Nation: A Case Study of the Racial State: Jews as Internal Minority in England.” This chapter and her separate book, England and the Jews: How Religion and Violence Created the First Racial State in the West, delineate how England, over 400 years, created the blueprint for an almost complete racialized state and continued to use Jewish racialization after Jewish expulsion in 1290.1 She uses medieval England’s situation as a “case study of medieval race that concentrates on one country ...” and in so doing tracks how structural racism is attached to medieval English Jews. Heng explains her method and approach— microhistory and case study—as well as how this methodology reinforces her main argument about race in themedieval European past in The Invention of Race: