Supersession and Conversion: The Adversus Judaeos Liturgical Dramas of Saint-Martial de Limoges

abstract:The adversus Judaeos tropes deeply embedded in the Saint-Martial de Limoges liturgical dramas in BN lat.1139 recommend radical ways of rethinking the organizing concepts that might inform this collection of devotional performances. Early eleventh-century liturgical records from Saint-Martial de Limoges demonstrate profound tensions between apocalyptic and eschatological thinking. Millenarian anxieties combine with news of the 1009 ce Muslim destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem to inspire unusual levels of antagonism toward the contemporary Jewish community in Limoges, including retrospective historical narratives by Christian clerics Rodulfus Glaber and Ademar of Chabannes of forced conversions, exile, and death as tools used to disperse Limoges’s Jewish community after purported exegetical debates in 1010 ce. The Limoges liturgical dramas manifest these tensions between Christian apocalyptic and eschatological thinking, collectively reflecting a shared Christian cultural commitment to supersessionist representations of Jews and Judaism as end-of-time witnesses at the Christian Eschaton.