July 30, 2024

Judith, Jezebel, Justina

The longer medieval history of a slur, deployed once again

Modern Medieval

by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele

Shortly after it became clear that Vice President Kamala Harris will be the next Democratic nominee for president, a major white evangelical leader called her a “Jezebel.”

It’s a term with a specific racist and sexist history, which you can read about in this excellent piece from Melissa Gira Grant in The New Republic:

The most atavistic, horrifying attack on Harris came from a comparatively lesser-known figure who is a prominent voice within a Christian nationalist movement that has been elevating Trump, who has met with the former president, and who mobilized his supporters to “stop the steal” on January 6 — Lance Wallnau, a leading prophet in the New Apostolic Reformation. Harris, said Wallnau on Monday, represents “the spirit of Jezebel, and in a way that’ll be even much more ominous than Hillary because she’ll bring a racial component and she’s younger.”

To call a Black woman a “Jezebel” hearkens back to America’s racist and misogynistic history of casting Black women as insatiably sexual, which served to justify slaveholding men’s systematic sexual assault of enslaved women. But for right-wing white Christians of the sort Wallnau is addressing, to say a woman has a “Jezebel spirit” is also to say she is a danger to them, a barely human being hell-bent on seducing men to their destruction and assuming their power.

Grant then talks a number of experts in religious traditions to get more context, specifically focused on how the term is used to evoke violence.

For those unfamiliar, Jezebel is a figure from the Hebrew Bible - specifically from 1 Kings. The wife of King Ahab of Israel, she’s supposedly responsible for turning the Israelites towards worship of other gods, using her sexuality to corrupt the hearts of men. She faces off against the Prophet Elijah and is eventually killed after Ahab’s death. Jezebel, as an image, then reappears in the Book of Revelation as a false prophetess leading good people astray.

This slur continued through the European Middle Ages as well. A good chunk of the middle of Oathbreakers, our forthcoming book, focuses on the troubled reign of Louis the Pious (the son of Charlemagne). In the final decade of his reign, during the early 830s, the emperor faced several serious rebellions in which his sons took the lead against him. One justification: Louis’ wife was a Jezebel in cahoots (and possibly in bed) with Louis’ chamberlain, Bernard of Septimania.

We write:

Writing later from the 850s, the monk Paschasius Radbertus… was unrelenting against Judith, whom he referred to as “Justina.”^[i]

Here is a moment where we modern readers must pause and learn to read critiques with the understanding of ninth-century learned individuals. It wasn’t enough to say something was bad in the present moment, in the late 820s. Instead, one needed to locate current events within patterns set down by history, ideally sacred history. In this way referring to Judith as “Justina” functions, in such learned circles, as a devastating double recursive critique. The Justina to whom Paschasius was referring was a fourth-century empress who almost led the Roman Empire to ruin in part by persecuting Ambrose of Milan, one of the Fathers of the Church. But such a name also conjured into his contemporaries’ minds the Old Testament Jezebel who had done the same to ancient Israel. Jezebel had been the wife of the Israelite King Ahab and had convinced him to worship Baal instead of the Israelite’s god, even murdering many of the prophets who warned them against doing so.

Through these arguments, intellectuals supporting the rebels and providing the justifications for breaking oaths of loyalty, bound Judith rhetorically to Jezebel and Justina. Not only had such women been, in this misogynistic view of history, disastrous for their realms, but Judith’s supposedly sudden rise to the center of power could be attributed to the use of dark (sex) magic… Judith, as “Justina,” was a whore who conspired with Bernard [of Septimania, the imperial chamberlain] to poison Louis the Pious, then kill his sons and the leading nobles of the realm. Bernard and Judith would rule together among the ashes.

The court itself had been turned over, said Paschasius, “to the delusions and divinations of sorcerers… all of which had converged on the palace from every corner of the world, as if the Antichrist had appeared with his witchcraft.” It was therefore, according to this logic, not only justified but necessary, even holy, for the emperor’s children and the realm’s most faithful nobles to act.

And none of this was mere rhetoric. At one point in our story, during the first rebellion in 830, as her husband is confronted by the rebels led by his middle son, a cohort was sent to seize the empress. They arrive, and over the protestations of the assembled churchmen, Judith is dragged from a church sanctuary, likely tortured, and forced to renounce her crown. She’s sent to a nunnery to live out her days. The rebellion is (eventually) put down and Judith restored, but the scars of that violence haunt her for the rest of her life.

At this moment of medieval civil war, many of the critiques of the king were couched in metaphor, in history, in dream vision, in miracle story. One of our jobs in Oathbreakers is to convince the modern reader that there were real violent consequences to this kind of writing.

And indeed there were. Paschasius knew this when he wrote it in the 850s, partisans knew it when they dragged Judith out of her church to torture her in 830, and modern ideologues know it as well. Jezebel is a slur that carries the accreted weight of thousands of years of tradition, and it also carries with it a direct threat of violence - both then and now.

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[i] Paschasius Radbertus, “Epitaph for Arsenius,” in Confronting Crisis in the Carolingian Empire: Paschasius Radbertus' Funeral Oration for Wala of Corbie, trans. Mayke de Jon and Justin Lake (Manchester University Press, 2020).

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