This book is the history of an imaginary people -- the Red Jews -- in vernacular sources from medieval and early modern Germany. From the twelfth to the seventeenth century, German-language texts repeated and embroidered on an antisemitic tale concerning an epochal threat to Christianity, the Red Jews. This term, which expresses a medieval conflation of three separate traditions (the biblical destroyers Gog and Magog, the 'unclean peoples' enclosed by Alexander, and the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel), is a hostile designation of wickedness. The Red Jews played a major role in late medieval...

Art history, literary history, film history, social history, micro-history, economic history, women's history, postcolonial history and other hyphenated histories have introduced elements of discontinuity, rupture and plurality into hegemonic historical narratives by initiating interdisciplinary encounters that have not only redefined and rewritten debates over the terrain of the past, but have shared a common problematic with, and thus have left indelible traces in, the global syntax of theory itself. Rather than focusing on 'Grand Theory', we have explored some of these issues in our own...