A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-Five-Hundred-And-Forty-Two

I was reading that passage from Stoker's Famous Impostors on the Wandering Jew and there is a great deal in it that is very relevant for what I am working on.  There is one part that I am wanting to do a bit more research into, as there is a detail of it which I am wondering about.  In the chapter, Stoker tells a different story in which Jesus turns a baker's daughter into an owl after she refuses to give him bread.  Stoker raises the tale because of the similarity of Jesus cursing someone who refuses him a small kindness.  What strikes me, though, and I am aware it may be a coincidence, is that the owl was often used as an anti-Semitic symbol in medieval Europe: "Owls, who are day-blind and live in darkness, were used to represent Jews in medieval England, who were said to have rejected the light of Christ and live in the uncleanliness of religious blasphemy. This accounts for the anthropomorphic appearance of some manuscript drawings of owls: they were sometimes given hooked noses to resemble Jews, and their horns represent the horned hats Jews were forced to wear."(https://sites.nd.edu/manuscript-studies/2016/03/17/owls-always-a-hoot/).  Of course, it may be that this connection is coincidental, but it seems worth exploring.  I find it a bit odd, really, that I feel like I need to defend noticing the potential anti-Semitic nature of a story that is referenced in a chapter that is explicitly focused on another anti-Semitic story.  It feels like it should be a bit more of a gimme.

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