A Jewish Knight in Shining Armor: Messianic Narrative and Imagination in Ashkenazic Illuminated Manuscripts

The artistic and textual evidence of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Ashkenaz reveals animagined reality from which we learn that some Jews imagined themselves as aristocratsand knights, despite the fact that the actuality of their everyday lives in medieval Ashkenazwas far from noble or chivalric.
In recent years, the imagined identity of Jews portrayingthemselves as knights has received the attention of scholars, most recently Ivan G. Marcus,whose study focuses on the self-representation of Jews as knights, mainly in written sources.
Marcus discusses the dissonance between actual Christian knights in the Middle Ages,whom he identifies with the crusaders, and the fact that Jews considered themselves knights