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So far as we can tell, Jews did not settle in England until after the Norman Conquest. Therefore, Jews were known in Anglo-Saxon England only by hearsay, imaginations were fed from the writings and teachings of the Christian Church, and opinions were generally second-hand and often unthinking. Dr Scheil has done us the service of probing the evidence extant in Latin and English for how Anglo-Saxons understood Jews, and he demonstrates, in a four-part structure with two chapters in each part, differing and changing perceptions of what he terms, in his general introduction, ‘one element in the vast system of assumptions about the world and humanity's place in it’ (p. 4). Acknowledging that his subject-matter is ‘politically charged’, he nonetheless signals that he is exploring ‘an important “pre-history” and context to later persecutions in England’ (p. 9).

Part 1, focused on ‘Bede, the Jews, and the Exegetical Imagination’, examines the ‘competing and often contradictory interpretations of the Jews’ (p. 29) to be found in Bede's writings. Here the paired chapters ‘Bede and Hate’ and ‘Bede and Love’ show how Bede's attitudes varied ‘in response to the source-texts at hand’ (p. 96). The division is ultimately false, because for Bede ‘the Jews are the deicidal criminals of the Christian tradition’ (p. 55), awaiting conversion on Judgement Day. Yet Bede does not always condemn all Jews, but is careful ‘quite often … to assign culpability to a specific portion’ (p. 75), and he is shown to have had a deep interest in ‘the early church as a Jewish institution’ (p. 86). But for him ‘it is the Gentiles who are important’ (p. 92); they are the believers in the New Testament, and among them, on ‘the edges of the world’, the English follow in the footsteps of Israel (p. 94). The introduction to part 2, an ‘Excursus on Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica’, shows how ‘broadly speaking two related figural motifs rise to the surface: the “epic” discourse of the Christian New Israel and the discourse of the “elegiac” Israel’ (p. 106). In the following third chapter Scheil first traces the elaboration and appropriation of the populus Israel mythos in writings of the late antique world and among the Carolingians, with its ‘lachrymose textures … a powerful series of patterns in the Western apprehension of history’ (p. 125). His fourth chapter turns to the populus Israel tradition in Britain, as deployed by Gildas, Alcuin, and the Old English poets of the Junius 11 Old Testament group and of Judith and Beowulf.

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