A short book I’m writing with the somewhat forbidding title, Book History Is Not the History of the Book: Four Essays from Fifteenth-Century England, is founded on the simple premise that the traditional, linear formulas that have structured the field of book history (from orality to literacy, from roll to codex, from manuscript to print, and from print to digital) represent a technologically deterministic and teleological view that belies the complexities of the history of the book.
The introduction to this book takes as its starting point the moment when the idea that “the book” has a history came to be codified, politicized, and racialized in thirteenth-century England. It is, as I argue, no coincidence that in this moment, Europe’s first mandates to visibly tag a minority population was first enacted by law and that the form of that badge was what was seen as an obsolete technology—namely, the tablets of the Ten Commandments.
Publication pipelines are long (and I’m trying to finish another book first!), and scholarship demands patience that is often ill-suited to the urgencies of the moment. So I post here the introduction and the conclusion to the essay that opens my book.
INTRODUCTION TO BOOK HISTORY IS NOT THE HISTORY OF BOOKS
In May of 2024, Apple aired a commercial that aspired to showcase the revolutionary power of their latest gadget by crushing within the gargantuan plates of an industrial press the implements and artifacts of creative culture: a trumpet, an arcade game, cans of paint, a piano with sheet music, a metronome, a sculpted bust in clay, cameras, a television, a guitar, notebooks, and bizarrely a toy emoji. And when that press releases its clench, all that remains on its bed is an antiseptic tablet, vapid in its gleaming sterility. It is a violent declaration of techno-utopian independence, convinced of the creativity of its own destruction. It is no wonder the ad was unanimously reviled and retracted; no wonder, because it lays bare in celebratory tones the technochauvinist vision that is a hallmark of our age. This is the legacy of uncritical arguments about the liberating novelty of the press to supersede the bounding conditions of history, the springboard required to launch humanity out of the Middle Ages into modernity.
While arguments against the role assigned to the printing press in birthing western liberal democracy have been voiced for a long time now, these criticisms tend not to take into account the broader historiographical model on which this idea is premised: specifically, a Christological paradigm of book history. This is a supersessionist one with Pauline origins that periodizes the history of the book into four phases: from orality to literacy; from scroll to codex; from manuscript to print; from print to digital. In what follows, I want to hone in on one important moment in this history when arguments about the obsolescence of certain textual technologies were yoked to Jews, forever racializing the history of the book. In her 2019 monograph, Race after Technology Ruha Benjamin implored us to scrutinize the kinds of assumptions that underwrote Apple's ad, asking "what is hidden by an idealistic vision of technology. How is technology already raced?” For Benjamin that means interrogating the racist assumptions written into modern computer technology. But long before those assumptions were inextricably woven into code, it was the codex itself that encoded hegemonic ideals. The case that I'll be making is that a landmark instance of the racing of the book as technology occurred in England between 1218 and 1290 and that the impact of this racing continues to be felt today.
[…. my essay then recounts the history of the Jewish badges, why the shape of the Ten Commandments was chosen, and the ideological legacies of this history]
CONCLUSION
Supersession, replacement, a progressive movement away from the material: these ideas are so entrenched in conventional book history, are so naturalized that it has been impossible both to see its Christological origins and orientation and to comprehend the narratives that it continues to underwrite. I have often told people that I am a medievalist for the same reason that I read dystopian novels: nothing makes me think better than to see my own world reflected back at me with enough difference to make me question that which I take for granted. In Gary Shteyngart's 2010 novel Super Sad True Love Story our protagonists inhabit a near future in which America, on the brink of economic collapse, has only three main industries: media, credit, and retail. The social media website that dominates public discourse has promoted the idea that paper books are, in a word, gross. In one text message to her friend, our narrator Eunice Park describes her budding love interest, the nebbish Lenny Abramov,
Anyway, what kind of freaked me out was that I saw Len reading a book. (No, it didn't SMELL. He uses Pine-Sol on them.) And I don't mean scanning a text like we did in Euro Classics with that Chatterhouse of Parma I mean seriously READING. He had this ruler out and he was moving it down the page very slowly and just like whispering little things to himself, like trying to understand every little part of it.... I thought Ben was really brain-smart because I saw him streaming Chronicles of Narnia in that cafe in Rome, but this Tolstoy was a thousand pages long BOOK, not a stream, and Lenny was on page 930, almost finished.
Later in the same message to her friend Eunice describes going to Tompkins Square Park where she sees
all these Low Net Worth Individuals there and they're camped out with all their dirty things... and they have all these really old computers they try to boot up but really they have no Images or streams. So after Sally left I ran home and got all my old äppäräti and I gave them out... They were so happy to have my old ghetto stuff that it made me sad because this is what their lives have become and just last year some of them worked in Credit or were engineers.
I was reminded of this novel when I was re-reading Sara Lipton's Images of Intolerance. Speaking more generally of the trope of the Old Law's obsolescence, Lipton points to an aesthetic attached to this idea, writing "In text after text, the Law's obsolescence is attributed not to its honorable expiration or to an orderly passing of the baton but to its own inherent aridity, deformity, and ugliness." There is a violence to casting the obsolete off the page, not unlike the brute force committed by the industrial press crushing the notebooks of the past, all to make way for the shiny, the new, ever striving to reach the immaterial. Long ago Kathleen Biddick argued that "the purported 'secularization' of modernity... has never overtaken this core Christian conception of supersession." What I hope to have shown in capsule form that is state-imposed signs of Jewish identity, mapped on to books and bodies reveal technology's place in this history. If the funding of far right wing figures like J.D. Vance by tech billionaires like Peter Thiel seems perplexing, it is because we have completely forgotten the supersessionism that makes such an unholy alliance ideologically coherent: it is not surprising that when Vance followed Thiel's advice and converted to Catholicism he chose the committed supersessionist Augustine as his patron saint; Thiel's less-subtle approach was to tout Rene Girard's Catholic anthropology and the socially redemptive role of the scapegoat.