Wiliam C. McDonald (Ph.D., Ohio State), Professor of German, has taught language and literature at the University of Virginia since 1975. In the graduate program, he taught courses on the Middle Ages and supervised dissertations, especially, on the Tristan of Gottfried von Strassburg. His current undergraduate teaching centers on Arthurian literature. McDonald holds the distinction of teaching at both Virginia Tech and Virginia.  He was recruited for Virginia by the then departmental chair, Professor Ruth Klüger, Holocaust survivor and eminent scholar and teacher who is best known for her essential memoir “Still Alive,” taught widely in university courses of many disciplines.

McDonald, animated by early experiences in the Jewish community of his youth in the spa city of Mount Clemens, Michigan, has devoted significant scholarship to the interactions of Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages and Early Modern period. He hopes, by casting light on forms of interchange, to illuminate patterns of encounter. Influence was not a one-way street, he has discovered, but reciprocal in nature, affecting both cultures. Surprisingly, perhaps, the most educated group of Christians harbored and promoted virulent anti-Jewish tropes, motivated in no small measure by the desire to rank their cultural values as superior. Fascinating to trace, says McDonald, are the seeds of European developments in our era.

        Here follow his publications on Jewish Studies over the past decade:

The "Jew in the Latrine": Exploring the Transmission of an Early German Anti-Jewish Narrative (2022) - In: Medieval Encounters vol. 28 (2022) p. 33-71;  

Early Modern Anti-Jewish Invective in Germany: The ‘Judenfeind' (1570; 1605) of Pastor Georg Nigrinus, Roots and Reaction - In: Aschkenas vol. 31 (2021) p. 79-121;

Abraham in Wonderland: On Judeisapta and Imaginary Jewish Sovereignty in the Fourteenth-Century Austrian Chronicle (Österreichische Chronik von den 95 Herrschaften) (2020) - In: The Jewish Quarterly Review vol. 110 (2020) p. 412-433;

Le Comte de Gabalis: Concerning Sedechias, ‘le fameux Cabaliste'- In: Comparatio vol. 10 (2018) p. 1-13;

Leopoldus Iudaeus necromanticus: Concerning an Unpublished, 16th-Century Day-Book Entry on the Execution of Lippold Ben Chluchim in Berlin, 1573. (2017) - In: Revue des études juives vol. 176 (2017) p. 371-391;

A Certain Sedechias, a Jew by Religion and a Physician by Profession. On the Long Life of an Anti-Jewish Myth  (2015 - 2016) - In: Korot vol. 23 (2015/16) p. 197-235;

Cain, Originator of Murder and Rapine: Michel Beheim's Song-Poem Von Caÿn, with a Translation. (2015) - In: Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte vol. 67 (2015) p. 43-63;

Red Jews and the Antichrist as the Jewish Messiah: Michel Beheim's Endicrist (c. 1455). With a Translation- In: Mediaevistik vol. 28 (2015) p. 195-215;

Michel Beheim's Fifteenth-Century Polemical Song-Poem against a Converted Jew (2014) - In: Judaica Bohemiae vol. 49 (2014) p. 5-26.

Seeking Sedechias: Faustus, Trithemius, and the Path from Murder to Magic (2016) - In: Wolfenbütteler Renaissancemitteilungen vol. 38 (2016) p. 3-26.