Call for Papers: Erasing Jewish Community in Christian Time (or Replacement Theory Gets Medieval)

International Medieval Conference, Leeds (UK), 5-8 July 2027

When Renaud Camus’s 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement compared France’s modern nonwhite, non-Christian immigrant population to Europe’s militaristic colonial conquests of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, his xenophobic claims seemed too extreme and not sufficiently substantiated to be taken seriously. In the decade and a half since, these ideas have been adopted by various Western majority populations and applied to whatever minority communities the majority populations despise. These ideas, for example, have galvanized violent white supremacist outbursts in such high-profile tragedies as the vehicular homicide at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA (USA), the 2019 mass shooting at a mosque in Christchurch, NZ, and the 2022 mass shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo, NY (USA). In each case, the perpetrators borrowed language—often direct quotes—from Camus’s writings to support their actions. Perhaps more insidiously, Camus’s ideas are echoed in various policy initiatives that have been passed by populist administrations throughout the developed Western world. Take, for example, the consistent characterization of migrants from Mexico and Central and South America as “invaders” in USA’s Executive Order 14159: “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.” The conspiracy has become policy.

The purpose of this session will be to explore the ways that this Christian-coded conspiracy must forget the medieval Christian replacement of Jews known as supersessionism. By decontextualizing passages from New Testament epistles about Christ’s rejection, the doctrine of supersessionism turns St. Paul’s invitations that gentiles might be “ingrafted” into the blessing of Yahweh (Rom. 11:17) into a racial/political replacement whereby Jews and then Muslims are actively excluded from the social benefits of community with Christian-coded political entities. This process began as an imagined replacement, with various medieval proto-nations and proto-races constructing identities for themselves that characterized them as a New Israel (such as in Bede’s description of England in his Historia), but eventually became all too practical in the expulsions of Jews from medieval nations and in the militaristic efforts to perform the role of New Israel in confrontations with Islam.

This session seeks proposals of approximately 250 words for papers that place medieval supersessionism in direct conversation with modern Replacement Theory. We are particularly keen to see proposals that push beyond medieval efforts to conceive of Christian communities as participants in Jewish identity, focusing instead on the ways that medieval Christian communities essentialized their own dynastic, racial, geographical, etc. distinctives as indicative of an exclusive claim to the status of the New Israel. Such papers might explore

-        ways that medieval histories or narratives present the local history as a worthy replacement to the histories recounted in the Hebrew Scriptures,

-        ways that medieval ecological and geographical descriptions seek to claim the right to the status afforded to the Holy Land in the Hebrew Scriptures,

-        ways that medieval political prophecies claim a unique and exclusive telos that replaces that uttered by the Hebrew prophets,

-        ways that confrontations between Christians and Muslims characterize Western European Christians as ideal protectors of “Judeo-Christian” identity against “Ishmaelite” or “Saracen” imposters,

-        ways that depictions of medieval racial/proto-national communities present themselves as exclusive inheritors of divine blessing in a Christian context,

-        or any other topic that places medieval supersessionism in conversation with modern Replacement Theory.

Please indicate in your proposal whether you will be able to attend in person, remotely, or either.

We expect to invite selected participants from this and other panels over the next two years to submit longer versions of their arguments to an edited volume to be proposed to ACMRS Press’s Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies series.

Please submit paper proposals to Dr. David Pedersen at dpedersen@cofo.edu by noon (GMT -5) on September 1, 2026.