So I saw in my dream that the man began to run. Now he had not run far from his own door, but his wife and children perceiving it began to cry after him to return: but the man put his fingers in his ears, and ran on crying, “Life, life, eternal life.” So he looked not behind him, but fled towards the middle of the plain. —JOHN BUNYAN, The Pilgrim’s Progress (Location 1318)
Note: the old story. man gauges himself - always has gauged himself - by power. post Foucault revisions of power, including the praxes of feminist and race theory, do much to revise that power, but perhaps also something to deny the power of power, or at least deny the idea that power has meaning as value.
Which had nothing to do with Jews; it was named partly after its location in a part of the city where Jews had lived before they had been kicked out of England in 1290 by Edward I. For Jews to exist in a Catholic or Anglican country was theoretically impossible because the entire country was divided into parishes, and every person who lived in a given parish, by definition, was a member of the parish church, which collected tithes, recorded births and deaths, and enforced regular attendance at services. This general sort of arrangement was called the Established Church and was why dissidents like Drake had no logical choice but to espouse the concept of the Gathered Church, which drew like-minded persons from an arbitrary geographical territory. In making it legally possible for Gathered Churches to exist, Cromwell had, in effect, re-admitted Jews to England. (Location 2143)
