[Philip]

Originally Posted by shayde78

A dark side of this book is that the level of antisemitism is stunning. If, as you postulate, the curved sword indicates a figure with a disreputable backstory, this would be consistent with the ways in which Jews are portrayed in the Chronicle. Although, Abraham, the patriarch of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, is portrayed with such a blade. While possible even this figure wasn't spared disparagement, it is also possible the curved blade was just meant to represent the 'exotic' (much like Remnant's use of the keris.

The Jewish patriarchs of the OT were given something of a free pass in the worldview of the times because they were part of the lineage of prophets that led up to the appearance of Jesus and thus the foundation of the True Faith. More problematic were the Jews who remained such after that time, who didn't go over to Christianity.

Keep in mind that ever since Rome's conversion thanks to Constantine, the Christian world has experienced sectarian tribalism from then until modern times. Highlights include the heated dispute between unitarian and trinitarian theologies that led to the Council of Nicaea's declaring the latter to be the correct version. But the Roman Catholic (Latin) and the various Eastern Orthodox (Greek liturgy) churches continued to bicker until the Great Schism formalized the acrimonious split in 1054, and the two principal wings of Christendom have not yet fully reconciled. And then came the Protestant Reformation which led to a century of disastrous religious wars over much of Western Europe and some pretty frightful goings-on in the British Isles as well... The upshot of all this was that Western Christendom had honed a pretty militant edge to its world-view even before the Middle Ages morphed into the Renaissance.

Amid all this, there was enough vitriol left over for the Jews as well. During the Crusades, the Franks made it a point to plunder and ravage Jewish communities, mainly in the German lands, on their way to the Holy Land to fight the Saracens. (And during the Fourth Crusade, these Catholic warriors committed the unspeakable against Orthodox Christians during the so-called Rape of Constantinople in 1204. Gibbon, ch 60, contains a dramatic and graphic description of the siege and its barbaric aftermath).

A lot of the anti-semitic feeling was fueled by economics. It wasn't just dogma and ideology. The Catholic Church, like Islam, banned the charging of interest, so Jews became the moneylenders by default. The prosperity and influence of many Jewish communities fueled resentment. For instance, during the late Middle Ages over 10% of the real estate around present-day Barcelona was in Jewish hands. In some countries, Jews represented a far greater share of the population than today -- some historians estimate that before the forced conversions and the voluntary exile of the unconverted in the 16th cent., up to 20% of Portugal's people were Jewish.

The Jews also suffered the fallout from the Christian-Islamic conflict in the medieval Iberian Peninsula. The feudal states that were to become Portugal and a united Spain fought their on-off-on Reconquistas since the Arab invasions of the 8th cent. Over time, the rather tolerant attitudes of early Moslem caliphs in Andalucía (the Iberian was called the Ornament of the World in the eyes of medieval Jewry) hardened with growing fundamentalism under dynasties like the Almoravides, and it was met with increasing Catholic militarism. The Jew was regarded as the infidel brethren of the Mohammedan, and traveling preachers preached fiery anti-semitic sermons in Spain in the same century that the Nürnberg Chronicle was written. Jews were required to accept Catholic baptism beginning in the mid-1400s, or be forced into exile. (Ferdinand and Isabella issued a formal expulsion order to Jews and Moors in 1492). Converted Jews were required to adopt surnames, be recorded on church baptismal records, and subject to surveillance, arrest, and punishment by the Inquisition if suspected of heresy. Portugal followed suit in the 16th cent. as a condition of one of its princes marrying into the Spanish royal lineage, and the persecution in both countries became a global institution: tribunals operated in Lima and Mexico City, crypto-Jews fled to Protestant countries and even to the frontier in today's New Mexico; a suspected heretic could be "fingered" by spies in Manila or Nagasaki, shipped to Goa (India) to be tried, interrogated, and burned at the stake there. Quite an operation... And these Inquisitions, which were really Crown-instigated institutions created for political ends with legitimacy granted by the Church with oversight by monastic orders, were not abolished until the early 1800s.

So, the graphics and text of the Chronicles were no anomaly, rather, they were part of a recognizable cultural matrix that had evolved in the West since the decline and fall of Rome.