The late medieval English Christian female mystic and hermit known as Julian of Norwich is known only through her famous work ‘Revelations of Divine Love’, which she wrote in the late 14th century in her anchorite retreat attached to St. Julian’s Church in the English city of Norwich. In the course of her ‘Revelations of Divine Love’ she makes her views on jews very clear when she writes that:
‘For I had sight of the Passion of Christ in diverse Shewings, - the First, the Second, the Fifth, and the Eighth, - wherein I had in part I had a feeling of the sorrow of our Lady, and of His true friends that saw Him in pain; but I saw not so properly specified the Jews that did Him to death. Notwithstanding I knew in my Faith that they were accursed and condemned without end, saving those that converted, by grace. And I was strengthened and taught generally to keep me in the Faith in every point, and in all as I had before understood: hoping that I was therein with the mercy and grace of God; desiring and praying in my purpose that I might continue therein unto my life’s end.’ (1)
This is obviously a reiteration of the anti-Judaic Christian doctrine of Deicide – which to be fair is completely accurately based on the Gospels – but Julian makes it abundantly clear that she both completely subscribes to the idea that the jews are ‘Christ-Killers’, but also that this belief helps strengthen her own faith in Christianity and the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church.
Predictably however like most other Christian anti-Judaic writers Julian leaves room for ‘sincere conversion’ – much like Martin Luther and John Calvin did – among jews and baptism somehow renders a jew no longer a jew, but this is more a failure of the Christian frame of reference on the jewish question than anything more drastic.
References
(1) Grace Warwick, 1949, ‘Revelations of Divine Love recorded by Julian’, 13th Edition, Methuen: London, p. 68