This section provides examples for a number of different kinds of documents associated with the courts, with crime and punishment, namely Curia Regis Rolls (published for the early thirteenth century in a fascinating series of volumes), Ecclesiastical suit rolls, relating to questions of adultery and fornication, Gaol Delivery rolls recording the pleas of those who were then freed from prison, and the Assize of Bread, concerned with maintaining standards in the production of bread and ale.

Richard of Devizes was a Benedictine monk who wrote a rather satirical chronicle of the reign of Richard I, somewhat in the vein of Walter Map and Gerald of Wales. It has a secular slant and often blends fact and fiction for the purpose of entertainment. Richard often makes reference to classical literature.

Joyce subjected race to comic treatment without lessening its seriousness. He does this by broadening his perspective and deferring judgment about differences (“prejudice” literally means prejudgment). Human racial competition takes the form of a car race (in “After the Race”) and a horse race (in Ulysses). This play on different meanings of “race” allows Joyce to make fun of racism while simultaneously belittling it. People “pre-judge” the results of racial competition by betting. Racial hatred is no longer comic in Finnegans Wake, where Shem the Penman is excoriated as black, Jewish, and oriental. Joyce exposes the superficiality of race prejudice by suggesting that darkness is internal to everyone, and it can be transformed into a form of communication that is communal instead of being driven by self-interest and greed.

Chapter 2 exposes a subtle yet thoroughgoing aspect of De Excidio’s anti-Jewish rhetoric at the crossroads of language and identity. It shows how Pseudo-Hegesippus creates a conceptual distinction between the Jews (Iudaei), who are ignoble, and their ancient ancestors, the Hebrews (Hebraei), who are noble, as a way of couching the work’s historical narrative within a framework of Christian supersessionism.

An iconoclast in religion and marriage in 1854–5, Marian Evans, later George Eliot, was a more conventional female traveller than her precursors in Chapters 2 and 3 due to her limited listening and speaking skills and her reliance on her partner George Henry Lewes for travel arrangements and social contacts. Her potential for cultural exchange was also limited by her desire to avoid encountering scandalous gossip that had followed her from England. Evans’s discernibly greater interest in German intellectual men than women additionally meant that she neither had nor took the opportunity to form a female friendship network in the mid-1850s. Thus, unlike Jameson or Howitt, she never met Goethe or Goethe’s friends (aside from Fanny Lewald). Eliot’s limited ethnoexocentrism also manifested itself in her public and private writing about German Jews, most notably Heinrich Heine. The chapter analyses in detail one of Evans/Eliot’s best-known essays, ‘German Wit’, in which Evans erases Heine’s Jewish identity to posit him as a German writer qualified to succeed Johann von Goethe in greatness. Though she would later have known about Heine’s Jewish origins, they remained erased when she revised her 1855 anonymous essay into George Eliot’s posthumously published essay of 1884.

The final chapter provides a brief summary of the conclusions that can be drawn from the study, explaining the relationships between the concepts and terms Israelite, Jew, and Hebrew as they were used in the Second Temple period. The chapter concludes that the concept of Israel was inextricably linked with the concepts of covenant and restoration eschatology established in the Torah and other biblical literature. Nevertheless, within those larger bounds, Israel was then variously understood and the boundaries of Israel variously defined as different groups laid claim to the historical and theological heritage embedded in the name Israel.

This chapter provides an overview of the development of Hungary’s operetta scene and analyses the contrasts between shows written for a Hungarian audience and those created with an international public in mind. In Budapest, operetta shared the Hungarian lyric stage with the népszínmű (‘folk plays’ with music), a genre descended from the Austrian Volksstück, usually featuring more rural plots and simpler music. As time went on, operetta increasingly displaced népszínmű but continued to support shows with local plots. The latter did not serve composers well if they wished to expand their horizons beyond Hungary. I discuss Kálmán’s use of contrasting character types, such as the sophisticated European and exotic Hungarian and Gipsy, and contrast his approach with that of other Hungarian composers who wrote shows that were popular in Hungary but did not travel well. An example of a Hungarian work that draws on the operetta and népszínmű traditions is Zoltán Kodály’s Háry János. Generally labelled as a singspiel ‘symbolizing the poetic power of folklore’, using ‘genuine’ Hungarian folksong materials, it was, in fact, written and performed for the opera house rather than the commercial theatre. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of Hungarian operetta since World War II.