Jews as Bloody Snakes: Race-Making in Konrad of Megenberg’s Buch der Natur

Focusing on Konrad of Megenberg’s Buch der Natur (c. 1350), a vernacular encyclopaedia that fuses scholastic learning with natural philosophy, this article shows how species description can be mobilized to produce and stabilize racializing knowledge. Through a close reading of Konrad’s zoological chapters alongside contemporaneous pastoral, medical, and visual sources, it traces how Konrad aligns “bloodsucking” serpents with bleeding Jews, letting poison, blood, and slander crystallize around the motif of Jewish male menstruation to mark Jews as of doubtful humanity. Engaging established work in pre-modern race studies and critical race theory, the article clarifies how imagination and textual habit refashion materially observable phenomena into social knowledge. Grounded in a German-language case central to late-medieval intellectual culture, it shows how metaphor, moralization, and encyclopaedic citation have paved the way for naturalized race thinking.