:::Proposal: Rough Draft 1:::

Prospectus: The Hebrew Anglo-Saxon: Judaism’s Influence on Anglo-Saxon England

Relative to the rest of Europe, Anglo-Saxons developed a unique and complex relationship with Judaism and Jewish people. This distinct relationship is particularly curious given the absence of Jewish communities in English kingdoms before the Norman Conquest. Despite the lack of actual Jewish people in England, Anglo-Saxons, more than any other nation in Europe, created religious texts, iconography, and legalese indicative of Jewish scriptural law. There were, for example, translations of the Hebrew Bible in English hundreds of years before French and German, and Anglo-Saxon kings looked to biblical Hebrew kings for advice and inspiration. Anglo-Saxon interest in Judaism and Hebrew law, literature, and poetry extended beyond mere typology or exegetical necessity. From the Psalters to Beowulf, Judaism influenced Anglo-Saxon identity and culture in remarkable ways. 

This dissertation will illuminate the intimate connection between Judaism and Anglo-Saxon exegesis, storytelling, and religious translation in five chapters. This, of course, is not the first time this connection between medieval England and the Hebrew Bible has been noted. Jeremy Cohen’s seminal Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (1999), for example, is “a threefold contribution to an understanding of the Jews in the cultural and intellectual history of medieval Christendom” (3). However, though Cohen’s text is undoubtedly helpful in the composition of this dissertation, his work, including his later work The Salvation of Israel: Jews in Christian Eschatology from Paul to the Puritans (2022), glaringly leaves out pre-Conquest England. 

Andrew Scheil, on the other hand, in his The Footsteps of Israel: Understanding Jews in Anglo-Saxon England (2004), begins with Bede and ends his analysis in the tenth century. Scheil argues, much like Cohen, that “Jews were a meditative vehicle for exegesis” (3). The purpose of The Footsteps of Israel, according to Scheil, is to “construct the ebb and flow” of “anti-judaic tradition,” which he also refers to as “that dark music,” in “Anglo-Saxon England” (20). Though there is undoubtedly an exegetical use of imaginary, or hermeneutical, Jews in Anglo-Saxon, which, in many cases, has led to anti-Judaic rhetoric, there is also an overwhelming amount of identity influence. For example, in addition to the textual evidence, many Anglo-Saxon Psalters feature illustrations of King David as an idealized king. 

Alternatively, there has been a tradition of addressing Anglo-Saxon hermeneutics like the rest of European Christendom. For example, despite its lack of explicit references to the Greek Bible, David Williams argues in Cain and Beowulf: A Study of Secular Allegory (1981) that “the ideological basis for the understanding of what [Beowulf] presents” is “the Christian vision of ideal society” (18). Williams writes, “the occasional use of Hebrew commentary and legend does not imply an assumption that Anglo-Saxons had access to Hebrew texts or the ability to read them” (14). Despite Williams' concessions for Tertullian’s and Augustine’s retelling of Hebrew legend and Apocrypha, he does not fully address the vast amount of comments, translations, and retellings of the Hebrew Bible and Hebrew legend extant in Anglo-Saxon England. 

The first chapter of the dissertation, “Chapter 1: Introduction & Creating the Anglo-Saxon Christian,” explores and explains how Anglo-Saxon Christianization occurred and why it is especially notable, especially when taking into consideration the rest of Western Europe. There were, for example, Christians in Gaul hundreds of years before the Christianization of Anglo-Saxon England, and Clovis I, the first king of the Franks, was baptized nearly one hundred years before Augustine of Canterbury arrived on the Isle of Thanet. The Christianization of the Heptarchy is described in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, and in his history, Bede presents two letters from Pope Gregory I to Æthelberht, the king of Kent. These letters, along with Pope Gregory I’s Libellus responsionum to Augustine of Canterbury, not only give insight into a pre-Christian England, but also into how little the rest of Europe knew of Anglo-Saxon England (Church 163-4).

In addition to Augustine of Canterbury’s and Pope Gregory I’s efforts to Christianize Anglo-Saxon England, Bede is in large part responsible for the creation of a uniquely Anglo-Saxon Christian identity, which is why, for example, Michael Lapidge references Bede nearly six hundred times in his The Anglo-Saxon Library (2006). As Lapidge notes, “Bede was very widely read…and the corpus of his writing–didactic, exegetical, historical, scientific, poetic–draws on a very substantial number of secular and ecclesiastical writings” (35). Therefore, not only was Augustine, who Bede was most certainly familiar with outside of Eugippius, reinterpreted through Bede, but so was a large portion of liturgical, exegetical, and secular writing in Anglo-Saxon England (Heisey 64). Bede’s De Tabernaculo, In Genesim, and Ezram et Neemiam, for example, are some of the first texts to create a uniquely Hebrew-interested Anglo-Saxon Christendom distinct from that of Europe. 

This interest in the Hebrew Bible directly led to the translations of Hebrew Scripture, which forms the basis of “Chapter 2: The Anglo-Saxon Psalter and Hebrew Translation.” “The Psalms,” as T. J. Toswell writes, “are at the heart of Christian devotion, in the Middle Ages and still today” (IX). Anglo-Saxon Psalters “are the largest surviving single group of manuscripts and also form a very significant percentage of the fragments of manuscripts extant from the period (Toswell IX). More than their religious significance, the psalms were teaching tools. As Shepherd notes in his “Scriptural Poetry”: 

The Psalter was undoubtedly the book of the Bible best known to individual Anglo-Saxons in religion. It served as their private prayer-book as well as their basic school-book for learning…There can be no surprise in finding that so many psalm passages were adapted into the vernacular. The influence is so pervasive, often in phrase but also in form. (13)

It should come as no surprise, then, that a Psalter, the Vespasian Psalter, contains the earliest example of an English translation of any part of the Hebrew or Christian Bible. The act of translation–to put something into one’s native language–is within itself a method of rhetorical manipulation and, by its very nature, exegetical hermeneutics. Therefore, because of the apparent importance of the psalms, which are, in fact, Hebrew poetry, and the willingness–and perhaps even necessity–to translate them, the psalters, in addition to being Hebrew poetry, are, as Toswell notes, also “Anglo-Saxon religious poetry” (9). In other words, the psalters, perhaps more than any other texts composed during the early Middle Ages, are the bridge between Christian, Hebrew, and Anglo-Saxon religious and political identity. 

We can see the direct influence of Hebrew poetry on Anglo-Saxon poetry in texts like Beowulf. The third chapter of the dissertation, “Chapter 3: ‘Caines cynne’: Genesis & Beowulf”, argues that Beowulf is more akin to Hebrew poetry than previously recognized. Despite being composed in Christian England, the poem takes place in sixth-century, pre-Christian Scandinavia, and though the poem takes place in a theoretically pagan place, it still contains biblical themes and references. However, Beowulf contains, at best, vague references to the Christian Bible; instead, the poem contains several direct references to the Hebrew Bible, which, as the chapter argues, even for a Christian audience, a pre-Christian world is a Hebrew world. 

It is textually obvious that the author of Beowulf was uncommonly familiar with Genesis and early sections of the Hebrew Bible. Superficially–perhaps even archetypally–Beowulf, as a young man, defeats Grendel. As an aged king, Beowulf faces a monstrous threat to his kingdom that ultimately leads to his death, and in his final moments, Beowulf is helped by his geongum gawigan Wiglaf (2675). Similarly, the Hebrew King David, as a young man, defeats the existential threat of Goliath. As an aged king, David went to war with the Philistines, and “David grew weary. Ishi-benob, one of the descendants of the giants, whose spear weighed 300 shekels of bronze and who was fitted out with new weapons, said he would kill David. But Abishai son of Zeriah came to his aid and attacked the Philistine and killed him” (2 Sam. 15-17). Similarly, Beowulf shares many superficial similarities with Samson. Beowulf, much like Samson, is a solitary hero, and they both share an affinity for unconventional weaponry. They both possess divine avenging strength, and whereas David does not die in battle, Beowulf, like Samson, dies fighting. However, it is Grendel’s lineage, as a descendant of Cain, that narratively links Beowulf to Hebrew scripture. 

More than narratively, Beowulf shares stylistic similarities with the Hebrew Bible, particularly with Genesis. As John D. Niles notes in his article “Ring Composition and the Structure of Beowulf,” “In organizing the narrative of Beowulf, the poet relied heavily on ring composition, a chiastic design in which the last element in a series in some way echoes the first” (924). Take, for example, the following sections of Beowulf: 

Ðæm eafera wæs æfter cenned,

geong in geardum, þone God sende

folce to frofre. Fyerenðearfe ongeat. 

Þæt hie ær drugon aldorlease

lange while. Him þæs Liffrea, 

wuldres wealdend, woroldare forgeaf.

Beowuld wæs breme, blæ wide sprang,

Scyldes eafera Scedelandum in. (l. 12-19)

Not only are specific moments in Beowulf, including the battles, indicative of a chiastic structure, but the entire poem is, at its highest level, written in a chiastic structure. There are several examples of similar structuring in Genesis and less so in the remaining Hebrew Bible. The Greek Bible, however, is absent of chiastic structuring. 

Hebrew scripture had such a great influence on Anglo-Saxon identity that even retellings of Hebrew stories combined Hebrew scripture with contemporary life. “Chapter 4: The Hebrew Anglo-Saxon: Exodus & Judith” argues that, rather than simple reimaginings of biblical stories, the Anglo-Saxon Exodus and Judith are the full coalescence of Hebrew storytelling and Germanic heroism into a unique form of literature that turns Jewish characters into contemporaneous Anglo-Saxon archetypes. Judith, for example, tells the story of a Jewish woman, whom the poem describes as ides ellenrof (l. 109). Judith beheads Holofornes, an Assyrian general, and with the folc Ebrea, they destroy the Assyrian army (l. 262).  Ælfric thought that Judith was a particularly good example for Anglo-Saxons, writing in a letter to Sigweard in 1005: 

ludith þeo wudewe, þe oferwan Holofernen ðone Syriscan hæfð hire agene boc betwyx ðissum bocum be hire agene sige; þeo is eac on English on ure wisan iset eow mannum to bisne, þet ge eower eard mid wrepnum beweriren wiþ onwinnende here. (qtd. in Nelson 47)

Here, Ælfric, because the poem is in English, which he writes is on ure wisan, writes that the poem, despite being about the triumph of a Jewish woman and the Hebrew people, is a model for those who speak English to bewerian eower eard. 

Andy Orchard argues in his Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-manuscript (1995) that Judith and Exodus exist within the same framework of “a more-or-less complete versification of the biblical book[s]” (4). As Malcolm Godden notes in his “Biblical literature: the Old Testament,” “the book of Exodus also interested the Anglo-Saxons…in several different ways” (224). Unlike the biblical Exodus, the Old English Exodus “is presented in a strongly heroic and military light” (Godden 225). Yet, despite this, the poem begins with: 

Hwæt we feor and neah gefrigen habbað

ofer middangeard Moyses domas

wrætlico wordriht wera cneorissum–

in uprodor eadigra gehwam

æfter bealusið bote lifes, 

lifigendra gehwam langsummne ræd–

Hæleðum secgan: gehyre se ðe wille! (l. 1-7)

The Old English Exodus begins by praising Moses as a lawgiver. Similarly, Ælfric begins his homily “De Populo Israhel. Quano Uolueris,” by writing that Moses was both part of a battle-ready army and the lawgiver (Pope 641-2). Furthermore, the prologue to the legal code of King Alfred gives a similar illustration of Moses as a contemporaneous lawgiver (Jurasinski and Oliver 224-65). Despite being aware that these Hebrew stories took place in the past, for Anglo-Saxons, they very much had merit in the present, even beyond allegory. 

Despite the Anglo-Saxon use of Hebrew scripture, there were no Jewish communities in England before 1066. In other words, Cecil Roth writes in his History of the Jews in England, “There can be no doubt that the Jews began to be associated with England the British Isles later than with any other country of western Europe that received them in the Middle Ages” (13). The final chapter of the dissertation, “Chapter 5: Conclusion & Beyond 1066,” will discuss the exegetical and hermeneutical changes after the inclusion of Jewish communities into a post-Anglo-Saxon England. After the successful Norman Conquest of England, “the absence of an English middle class and a scarcity of money,” Bernard Katz writes, “provided an opportunity for Jews then living in northern France to follow William to England” (18). Unfortunately, shortly after they arrived in England, the crusades began, and the first instance of blood libel was reported in England in 1144 (Katz 18). In 1190, at the behest of Richard I, English citizens massacred every Jewish person in York, and by 1290, Edward I dealt with his “Jewish problem” by expelling every Jew in England. Despite being the subject of nearly a third of all Anglo-Saxon writing for over three centuries, actual Jewish communities lasted only 224 years in England. However, despite their expulsion, Jewish people continued to be a part of this newfound anti-Judaism sweeping England. For instance, Geoffrey Chaucer included “The Prioress’s Tale” in The Canterbury Tales, which includes a heinous act of blood libel. 

Various claims of blood libel crept through Europe before the eleventh century. Even the earliest theologians and Christian commentators had various opinions on the violence of Judaism and the legitimacy of Hebrew scripture, especially when considering Matthew 27:25 and the Gospel of John. However, after the death of William of Norwich, rumors of blood libel spread through England faster than anywhere else in Europe. Just after William’s death, “Theobold of Cambridge made the general charge that Jews killed a Christian every year before Passover as a sacrifice” (Margolis & Marx 384). When William the Conqueror took control of England, he gave a large portion of English land to the pope, who supported his conquest, and he seized a large portion of the land for himself and the Norman nobility. Shortly after Norman rule, Anglo-Saxons owned less than 5% of the land in England (“The Domesday Book”). As Max Margolis notes in his A History of Jewish People, “the influence of the Church became increasingly marked in the repressive measures against the Jews” (388). In other words, as papal influence expanded, reaching its height in the thirteenth century, so did the spread of anti-Judaic canards and violence; a violence that did not exist in Anglo-Saxon England. 

Much of the research on Judaism and Hebrew scripture in England only considers a post-Anglo-Saxon England. Hebrew Scripture, perhaps even more than the Greek Bible, captured the imagination of the Anglo-Saxons in unique ways, and many Anglo-Saxon writers, poets, and theologians, either through hermeneutics or rhetorical manipulation, formulated a distinct place for Hebrew Scripture in Anglo-Saxon society.  From the Anglo-Saxon psalters to Beowulf and Judith, Hebrew poetry, iconography, and legalese helped shape a unique Anglo-Saxon identity. 

Works Cited

Church, S. D. “Paganism in Conversion‐Age Anglo‐Saxon England: The Evidence of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History Reconsidered.” History, vol. 93, no. 310, Apr. 2008, pp. 162–80. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-229X.2008.00420.x.

Cohen, Jeremy. Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity. University of California Press, 1999.

—. The Salvation of Israel: Jews in Christian Eschatology from Paul to the Puritans. Cornell University Press, 2022.

Godden, Malcolm. “Biblical literature: the Old Testament.” The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, Cambridge UP, 2013, pp. 214-33. 

Heisey, Daniel J. “Bede, Augustine, and Paul.” American Benedictine Review, vol. 75, no. 1, Mar. 2024, pp. 58–66. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1353/ben.2024.a922913.

“Judith.” Old English Aerobics, https://www.oldenglishaerobics.net/judith.php. Accessed 30 Apr. 2025. 

Jurasinski, Stefan, and Lisi Oliver. The Laws of Alfred: The Domboc and the Making of Anglo-Saxon Law. Cambridge UP, 2021.

Katz, Bernard. “A Brief Journey Through English Jewish History.” Jewish Affairs, vol. 68, no. 3, July 2013, pp. 18–24.

Nelson, Marie. Judith, Juliana, and Elene: Three Fighting Saints. International Academic Publishers, 2012. 

Niles, John D. “Ring Composition and the Structure of Beowulf.” PMLA, vol. 94, no. 5, 1994, pp. 924-35. 

Roth, Cecil. A History of Jews in England. Oxford UP, 1942. 

Shepherd, Geoffrey. “Scriptural Poetry.” Continuations and Beginnings: Studies in Old English Literature, Nelson, 1966. 

Scheil, Andrew P. The Footsteps of Israel: Understanding Jews in Anglo-Saxon England. U of Michigan P, 2004. 

Tolkien, J. R. R. The Old English Exodus. Oxford UP, 1981. 

Toswell, M. J. The Anglo-Saxon Psalter. Brepols, 2014. Williams, David. 

Williams, David. Beowulf: A Study in Secular Allegory. U of Toronto P, 1982.

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