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dislocation. 39 For example, in the N-Town Assumption , the one Jew who refuses to ‘forsake oure lawe’ is dragged to hell by demons, while the Croxton Play of the Sacrament stages a physical movement from Jewish to ecclesiastical spaces when its antagonists move from their home to the church, before being sent to wander the world in penance. 40 These kinds of supersessionary narratives therefore tended physically and often violently to over-write Jewish scripture, narratives, spaces and histories. The ‘shattering’ force of supersession also directs the plot of Joseph
. Performances of Hebrew narratives for an audience whose faith was primarily informed by the Christian Testament were rooted in an endless quest for good time management. The plays’ negotiation of events from the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, and the complex typologies and acts of supersession they produce, calls for a re-evaluation of the representation of Jews, Judaism and the Hebrew Bible in medieval drama. Portrayals of Judaism in obviously anti-Semitic plays such as the Croxton Play of the Sacrament and the assumption of the Virgin pageants have received a great deal
Jewishness was frequently emphasised in medieval texts which sought to moralise his actions. 47 The violence of the hatred with which the Towneley Herod pursues the prophesied child-king holds much in common with other contemporary constructions of Jewish antagonism towards Christ’s body in the sacrament and on the Cross. 48 In fantasising about what he intends to do with Jesus’ body, ‘I shuld with this steyyl brand / Byrkyn all his bonys’, Herod plays into a number of tropes figuring Jews both as child-murderers and as the specific enemies of Christ. 49 Like his York