Moral Pandemic: Jocelin’s Narrative

Embedded in this portrayal of an abbey breaking free from corruption under the leadership of Abbot Samson is a deeply hostile and intolerant attitude toward the mere presence of Jews in a Christian community. First, it is worth noting that Jocelin was himself the author of an anti-Semitic blood libel about the murder of a boy named Robert by the local Jewish community in Suffolk. Second, within the pages of the Chronicle, Jocelin connects the relationship of Jewish moneylenders to royal authority, to insubordinates within the abbey, and to the Christian community at Suffolk, by suggesting that Jews and Jewish communities have an evil essence that allow them to infect, abuse, and tempt Christians away from the life of virtue and of the good to form Jewish-Christian confederacies of evil