YOURE GONNA MISS ME WHEN IM GONE - EARLY-MODERN COMMON-LAW DISCOURSE AND THE CASE OF THE JEWS

This Article explores the significance of a strange legal discourse ab out nonexistent persons. It describes the ways in which the legal stat us of Jews, and the di-abilities assigned to them by medieval English law, continued to play a role in the common law for many centuries aft er the Expulsion of the Jews in 1290. After the Expulsion, from 1290 t o 1656, no indigenous Jews and virtually no foreign Jews lived in Engl and. And yet, as this Article identifies, Jews were included in sixtee nth- and early seventeenth-century legal expositions, despite the abse nce of circumstances in which the status of Jews would be directly rel evant or even legally possible. Jews and Jewish status were deployed i n a wide variety of legal genres, ranging from treatises and handbooks , to cases and academic lectures discussing such doctrines as benefit of clergy, usury, and alienage-sometimes alone, other times in conjunc tion with such stock figures as hermaphrodites, Turks, felonious monks , and blind Italians. In part, this reliance upon the absent Jews can be credited to the newly-invigorated sixteenth-century tradition of Ch ristian hebraism, which itself was part of a larger renaissance of sch olarship; in some measure, it also reflects the conservatism and histo ricism of the legal imagination. However, this Article also asserts th at, more important than the use of Jews (and others) for pedagogy or a dvocacy, was the need of the lawyers to identify ''outsiders''-legal p laceholders-in the formulation of law and the law merchant. The Jew th us came to be used as an important element in defining and delimiting membership and commercial privileges in the emerging British Empire. T he Author has argued elsewhere that early modem common law said almost nothing about plantation slaves-the enormously valuable ''new propert y'' of the seventeenth century. Instead, the jurists and practitioners kept their eyes focused firmly backward, formulating rules around suc h problems as the status of medieval Jews. To an extent, the focus on unrealistic legal persons and the almost-complete silence regarding ne w forms of persons and relationships were twin sides of the same coin- the historicist cast of common law discourse.