Siege of Jerusalem is the title commonly given to an anonymous Middle English epic poem created in the second half of the 14th century (possibly ca.
The destruction of Jerusalem is ahistorically portrayed as divinely ordained vengeance by the Romans Vespasian and Titus for the death of Jesus Christ.
The poem also describes the tumultuous succession of emperors in Rome in the late 60s, when rulers Nero, Galba, Otho and Vitellius met violent deaths.
Although technically excellent and linguistically interesting, the poem has rarely been presented to students of Middle English verse because of its sadistic indulgence in gory details and extreme anti-Semitic sentiment.
[3] Such a generic mixture may have augmented the poem's readership at the height of its circulation, since the multitude of contexts, complications, and conventions through which it can be interpreted alerted a broad scope of audiences to its relevance.
When also considering the absence of the question of conversion in connection with the described deterioration of the Jews, critics have argued that the author of ‘’Siege of Jerusalem’’ was not actually writing with antisemitic intentions, but rather using cultural anxieties about the Jewish other when shaping their narrative into a critique of Roman expansionism.
He writes that through analysis of the age of the oldest manuscript, scholars were able to locate a terminus ad quem, meaning the latest point at which the poem could have been authored, of the late 1390s.