About: Sara Lipton

Sara Lipton is a medieval historian; she is a professor of history at Stony Brook University. Lipton is noted for her work on the medieval origins of the iconography of antisemitism. According to Howard Jacobson, Lipton argues that the medieval artistic convention of depicting Jews with a Roman nose, dark skin, and scraggly or pointy beard originated in the 1200s, and were commissioned by Christian authorities as works of art depicting the sinfulness of greed in order to set the pious on a righteous (non-greedy) path to heaven. Jacobson notes that even if the Church's motivation was to discourage sin rather than to promote Jew-hatred, it was "a hard distinction to maintain."