(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)I thank Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Eva Steinova, Jesse Njus, the members of the Newberry Library Seminar on Medieval Intellectual History, and two anonymous readers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.Outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence in late medieval cities were hardly rare. For that reason, among others, surviving records are often frustratingly brief and formulaic. Yet, in the case of the pogrom that devastated Prague's Jewish community on Easter 1389, we have an extraordinary source that has yet to receive a close reading. This account, supplementing numerous chronicle entries and a Hebrew poem of lament, is the Passio Iudeorum Pragensium , or Passion of the Jews of Prague --a polished literary text that parodies the gospel of Christ's Passion to celebrate the atrocity.1 In this article I will first reconstruct the history, background, and aftermath of the pogrom as far as possible, then interrogate the Passio as a scriptural and liturgical parody, for it has a great deal to teach us about the inner workings of medieval anti-Judaism.2 By "parody" I mean not a humorous work, but a virtuosic pastiche of authoritative texts, such as the Gospels and the Easter liturgy, that would have been known by heart to much of the intended audience.3 We may like to think of religious parodies as "daring" or "audacious," seeing in them a progressive ideological force that challenges corrupt institutions, ridicules absurd beliefs, and pokes holes in the pious and the pompous. But The Passion of the Jews of Prague shows that this was by no means always the case.According to the Passio and the chronicle sources, the trouble began on Holy Saturday (April 17), when a priest, bringing communion to a sick person, passed down a Jewish street and a disturbance occurred. It was said that some Jews had either thrown stones at a monstrance or mocked the priest; in one account, a pyx was broken and hosts spilled on the ground. Charges of host desecration with their violent sequels were so common that, on the face of it, it may seem unlikely that any sane Jew would have issued such an overt provocation, least of all during Holy Week.4 Until recently, therefore, historians have taken this and similar charges as self-evident slander. Yet some revisionists now argue that such incidents did occur, given the intensity of Jewish revulsion against Christian "idolatry" toward the cross and the host.5 In any case, there was a brawl, and the Jews deemed responsible were hauled into the town hall for punishment. There the matter might have ended, except that Prague was in a highly inflamed mood at the time because of simmering discontent with the king, and more specifically with his use of Jewish moneylenders as an instrument of royal finance.The reigning Wenceslas IV, like most European rulers, protected "his" Jews as "serfs of the royal chamber," granting them exemptions and privileges so that, whenever he needed ready cash, he could tax them or confiscate their assets.6 His father Charles IV had done the same, even speculating on future pogroms in order to profit from them.7 Though such policies were commonplace, they were also deeply unpopular, not because ordinary Christians pitied the Jews but because they resented the profits of usury, which theologians and church councils repeatedly condemned as sinful.8 It did not help that Wenceslas was a weak and unpopular king, unlike his father Charles. According to the abbot Ludolf of Sagan (d. 1422), he was disliked by "clergy and people, the nobles, the burghers, and the peasants--and acceptable only to the Jews."9 So, by attacking this resented and vulnerable minority, the people could also voice their displeasure with the king. As David Nirenberg has written in a different context, "attacks upon the king's Jews were attacks on royal majesty, and time after time the Crown condemned them as such."10 Moreover, the clergy and especially theologians at the University of Prague (founded by Charles in 1348) had been engaged in a long-standing dispute with the Crown over usury. …