A Judas in a Fifteenth-Century Biblia Pauperum and the Intersecting Histories of Money, Sexuality, and Anti-Semitism

by Diane Wolfthal (Rice University)

A fascinating image of Judas appears in a Biblia pauperum (Bible of the Poor), produced in Regensburg or Vienna around 1435 and today in the Morgan Library and Museum in New York (Fig. 1). It was featured in the exhibition that I guest curated there this year, Medieval Money, Merchants, and Morality and in the accompanying volume of the same name.[i] As an art historian with an interest in little-known images as well as the intersecting histories of money, sexuality, and anti-Semitism, I was immediately drawn to this image. The exhibition explored how the rise of the monetary economy transformed European life and culture. One thread of the show examined how Christians displaced onto Jews their anxiety about committing economic practices that they deemed immoral.   The image of Judas formed part of that thread.

Fig. 1. Judas Receiving Silver, from a Biblia pauperum (Bible of the Poor), Austria, perhaps Vienna, or Germany, Regensburg, ca. 1435. The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, MS M.230, fol. 10v (det.)

Probably originally composed by a Benedictine monk in mid-thirteenth-century Austria, the Biblia pauperum was a popular medieval picture book.[ii] It shows a complex typological schema (Fig. 2). A subject from the Gospels appears at the top center of each folio flanked by four busts of prophets holding scrolls. Below are two comparative scenes from Hebrew scripture. The version under discussion, begun around 1435, was never finished; a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century hand added explanatory titles and descriptions to the preliminary pen-and-ink drawings.

Fig. 2.  Judas Receiving Silver, with Prophets and Prefigurations and The Betrayal, with Prophets and Prefigurations, from a Biblia pauperum (Bible of the Poor), Austria, perhaps Vienna, or Germany, Regensburg, ca. 1435. The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, MS M.230, fols. 10v–11r (dets.)

Three consecutive folios relate the tale of Judas’s betrayal of Christ. The image under discussion here shows the high priest paying Judas, while beside him stands a large, frightening, and sinister devil (Fig. 1). The devil is not simply bestial with his tail, wings, and drooping dog’s ear, but also predatory. Many of the animal parts that comprise his body are those that are used in acts of aggression: raptor talon feet, grasping clawed hand, long canine teeth, and the single antler that issues from the top of his head. He is also monstrous: part human, part animal, with a second face on his abdomen. On one level, the devil illustrates Luke 22:3 and John 13:27, who relate that after Judas took the sop (morsel of bread) from Christ at the Last Supper, “Satan entered into Judas.” Two fifteenth-century Passion plays, one by the French dramatist and poet Jean Michel, the other by someone deeply influenced by him, have Satan position a little devil on Judas’s shoulder at this point in the narrative.[iii] (More generally when a devil appears on the shoulders of men it serves to mark them as evildoers: criminals, for example, are shown this way.)[iv]

But the pose of the devil here also makes clear that he is goading Judas to accept the high priest’s payment. As François Garnier has shown, a set of features collectively signify bad counsel: one figure stands behind the other, murmurs in his ear, and places his hand on the other’s shoulder.[v] But this example shows some unsettling modifications. Not only is the devil as large as Judas and, with his enormous powerful claw, grasps his shoulder, but also, and most disturbingly, he inserts his long tongue into the betrayer’s ear. This transformation of the devil into a large, powerful, and repulsive character suggests that Judas, by contrast, is passive, under the devil’s control, or at least his influence. Judas and the devil form a tight unit, standing close together and facing the same way, towards members of the Jewish community, including the high priest, identifiable by his ceremonial headgear, resembling a bishop’s miter. The presence of two men in pointed hats (garb associated with ordinary medieval Jewry) suggests that Jewish money paid for Judas’s treachery.[vi]

In an unusual gesture, one Jew touches Judas’s beard. Is this a chin chuck, which usually connotes love, often of an erotic nature?[vii] Is the Jew, in short, showing his affection for Judas? The facing folio offers the key to unlocking the meaning of this gesture: it is repeated at the lower left (Fig. 2). The Bible relates that Joab planned to murder his cousin Amasa, who had replaced him as David’s military commander. As Joab approached his target, he first greeted him, and then “took Amasa by the chin with his right hand to kiss him” (2 Samuel 20:9). Thus disarmed, Amasa did not notice Joab’s sword, and Joab was easily able to kill him. Similarly, Judas, who is not visually identified as a Jew, is shown beguiled by a Jew, leading to his death and damnation. This, too, constructs Judas as passive. Could the artist also be denigrating Judas by constructing him as an object of homoerotic desire? Not only does a Jew stroke Judas’s beard in a gesture of love, but the devil also inserts his tongue into the traitor’s ear.

Money occupies the center of the composition and serves to join the two groups. With his left hand Judas clutches his purse. With his right he accepts the high priest’s coins. This affirms Thomas Aquinas’s judgment that “Judas fell into the betrayal because he did not restrain his cupidity.”[viii] The thirteenth-century Franciscan St. Bonaventure agreed that Judas sold his soul because of avarice, and fell “into the snare of the devil.”[ix]

Judas’s monetary transaction was taken as proof that he was a poor merchant. Because his payment of thirty silver coins vastly underestimated the value of Christ, he was called Judas mercator pessimus (Judas the worst possible merchant). This term would have been well known. It appears in the liturgy of the Passion (in the Divine Office it occurs in a responsory in the second nocturn for Holy Thursday), in Herrad of Landsberg’s Hortus deliciarum, and in the popular fourteenth-century devotional treatise Meditationes vitae Christi (Meditations on the Life of Christ).[x] By assigning a material or monetary value to a spiritual good (Christ), Judas placed a specific price on something of immeasurable value‚ a poor moral as well as economic judgment.[xi]  

Unfortunately images such as this, which reinforced Christians’ association of Jews with ill-gotten gains and the death of Christ, contributed to the expulsions, exorbitant taxes, and deaths that European Jews sometimes endured.

Diane Wolfthal is David and Caroline Minter Chair Emerita in the Humanities and Professor Emerita of Art History, Rice University.  She has authored books on technical studies, the history of sexuality, images of servants and slaves, and illustrated Yiddish books of sixteenth-century Italy.  Recent articles have explored illustrated Yiddish manuscripts as well as a Mahzor in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.  This year she guest curated an exhibition at the Morgan Library on Medieval Money, Merchants, and Morality.


[i] Diane Wolfthal, Medieval Money, Merchants, and Morality, with contributions by Steven A. Epstein and David Yoon and introduction by Deirdre Jackson (New York: The Morgan Library and Museum and Lewes, S. Giles Ltd., 2023), pp. 96-101.  For a review of the exhibition, see
https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2024/03/08/gray-market-medieval-money-morgan-library.

[ii] For the Biblia pauperum, see Jeffrey F. Hamburger, “Biblia pauperum,” in The Splendor of the Word: Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts at the New York Public Library, ed. by Jonathan J. G. Alexander, James H. Marrow, and Lucy Freeman Sandler (New York: New York Public Library, 2005), pp. 128-32/

[iii] Lynette Muir, The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 129.

[iv] Christoph Hinckeldey, Strafjustiz in alter Zeit: Schriftenreihe des Mittelalterlichen Kriminalmuseums Rothenburg ob der Tauber, vol. 3 (Rothenburg ob der Tauber: Mittelalterliches Kriminalmuseum, 1980), pp. 119, 245.

[v] François Garnier, Le langage de l’image au moyen âge: signification et symbolique (Paris: Le Léopard d’Or, 1982), pp. 107, 109, figs. E, F, I.

[vi] For the Jews’ hat, see Andreas Lehnertz and Hannah Teddy Schachter, “The Jews’ Hat in Medieval Ashkenaz: Formal Attire for Everyday Men?” Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture 16 (2023): 52-70.

[vii] Will Fisher, “The Erotics of Chin Chucking in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Sex before Sex: Figuring the Act in Early Modern England, ed. by James M. Bromley and Will Stockton (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), pp. 141-69; Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, 2nd ed (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 5-6, 110-118.

[viii] Thomas Aquinas, Super evangelium s. Mattaei lectura, ed. by Raffaele Cai (Turin: Marietti, 1951), Mt. 26:15, par. 2146; Janet Robson, “Judas and the Franciscans: Perfidy Pictures in Lorenzetti’s Passion Cycle at Assisi,” Art Bulletin 86, no. 1 (2004), p. 40.

[ix] Bonaventure, Opera omnia, vol. 11, ed. by A. C. Peltier (Paris: Ludovicua Vives, 1867), pp. 172-74.

[x] Janet Robson, “Speculum imperfectionis: The Image of Judas in Late Medieval Italy,” Ph. D. diss., vol. 1, The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 2001, pp. 131, 149.

[xi] See, among others, Giacomo Todeschini, “The Incivility of Judas: ‘Manifest’ Usury as a Metaphor,” in Money, Morality, and Culture in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by Juliann Vitullo and Diane Wolfthal (Farnham, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 33-52.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Hannah Teddy Schachter (May 22, 2024). A Judas in a Fifteenth-Century Biblia Pauperum and the Intersecting Histories of Money, Sexuality, and Anti-Semitism. medievalJewishStudiesNow! Retrieved April 18, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/11pft


About Hannah Teddy Schachter

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Doctoral Fellow of the Israel Science Foundation-funded research group "Contending with Crises: Jews in Fourteenth-Century Europe" led by Prof. Elisheva Baumgarten. While my doctoral research explores the relationships between Jews and royal women--specifically queens--in 13th-century France, my other research projects consider Jewish-Christian encounters in medieval processions, dance and song, as well as costume in France and the German Kingdom during the Middle Ages.