Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages.

In the hands of the connoisseur of the "ugly Jew," the amateur of the "bestial black face," and the authority on the "effeminate ass," these two red-bound volumes spell danger. The seven hundred illustrations in the plates volume might be construed as fuel for the arsenal of hatred that is building up once again in those very parts of Europe whence many of these images come. The earnest neo-Nazi neophyte could find them on the shelves of the well-stocked public libraries of France and Germany and use the highly detailed and beautifully reproduced illustrations for ideas, sources, and documents, just as the racist graffitist who drew a hideously anti-Semitic drawing on a wall I saw in Cracow last summer was following a venerable tradition traced by Ruth Mellinkoff; that of the hooked- or bulbous-nosed Jew. This capacity for misuse and appropriation is the curse as well as the creative possibility of all image collections. Fortunately, most perpetrators of hate are not that interested in history; indeed, they are often blindly ignorant of it. It is the victims of hate who most often have to remember. In this respect it is crucial that the meaning and power of past images be explored and understood and their tactics used to teach tolerance through the understanding of difference. Armed with this book young people might instead start to understand the historical roots of the visual denigration and ethnic stereotyping which they witness every day in the classroom and in the mass media. I can imagine whole courses being structured around Mellinkoff's magnificently organized material, whole semesters of discussion about costume, body, and gestural stereotyping. Useful questions might be asked as to why red-haired kids are thought to be different from others, or how more subtle signals, such as color of clothing, shape attitudes toward specific individuals and groups on campus and in society more generally. Students can then decide for themselves, for example, if the recent, controversial …