Christian Readings of Rabbinic Sources

in: Andreas Speer/David Wirmer (eds.), 1308. Eine Topographie historischer Gleichzeitigkeit [Miscelanea mediaevalia 35], Berlin–New York: W. de Gruyter, pp. 269 – 285

Sceptical aspects in this workshop will focus on Jewish-Christian polemics from three different points of view: philosophical controversies in Halevi’s Kuzari; conversion as it appears in Abner of Burgos’ Teshovat Apikoros; and confessionalization in the early modern period. Judah Halevi lived most of his life under Islamic rule, and yet he engaged in anti-Christian polemics in his Kuzari. Although the Jewish critique of Christianity is usually considered a reaction to a Christian mission, much evidence indicates that such polemics are not solely a defensive measure. Jewish rationalists engaged in polemics against Christianity as part of their self-definition of Judaism, while Jews who eschewed rationalism, especially those in Christian Northern and Eastern Europe, usually did not engage in such criticisms of Christianity even when there were Christian provocations. The issue to be addressed is to what extent does Halevi’s anti-Christian polemics fit this Jewish rationalist paradigm. Abner of Burgos, the famous Jewish convert to Christianity from the 14th century, wrote extensively, after his conversion, praising his new faith and claiming it to be the true religion, while rejecting his birth faith. In many of his works, Abner harshly criticizes “Jewish” ideas, while at the same time, he puts a great effort to show that the Jewish Rabbis, in fact, accepted the fundamental principles of Christianity, but had to conceal this acceptance for political reasons. What is the meaning of “public” and “private” theological controversies between Jews and a Christians, and how do these two types of controversies differ? These questions will be approached via an examination of the 17th century anti-Christian Latin polemical work, "Porta veritatis" (1634-1640). In a way, the polemics contained in this work were “staged” for a very limited public--or for no public at all. What, then, was this work's real purpose? Certainly, it sought not only to establish the “truth” of one religion, or rather some of this religion’s tenets, with respect to the other. But also, it sought to demonstrate that a Jew could “actively” defend his/her religion, and to be present as an intellectual on the philosophical scene, a scene that was quite lively and even frantic in the century of Spinoza and Descartes.

In 1944, my teacher Saul Lieberman published a classic essay in which he treated talmudic martyrology in the context of patristic literature. ' The article had been written under the inspiration of his meeting and friendship with Henri Gregoire, the great Belgian church historian, then a refugee from the Nazis in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in New York, where Lieberman, the great Lithuanian talmudist, had also found refuge and where the two met. Nearly a half-century later, this student of Lieberman' s met another church historian, Virginia Burrus, in Morningside Heights under happier circumstances, when both of us were participants at a conference on asceticism at Union Theological Seminary, and a similar intellectual interaction began. This paper represents some of the first fruits of that second encounter and aspires to modestly continue the enterprise begun by the first.

Mediterranea. International Journal on the Transfer of Knowledge, 2019

2019

This study looks anew at the interactions and possible influences between the monastic and cathedral school masters in Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the leading contemporary scholars of the Talmud in northern France and Germany known as the Tosafists. By focusing on significant commonalities in interpretational methods and institutional structures, as well as on the formulations of various critics, the contours of these interactions can be more precisely charted and assessed.

p hristian anti-Jewish polemics have a long and rich history, stretching t_ all the way back to the early stages of the new faith community. Anti-Jewish treatises dot the history of Christian literature from the third century onward. By contrast, Jews seem to have been much less concerned with combatting Christianity. It has been widely noted that the earliest Jewish compositions devoted to anti-Christian polemics stem from the twelfth century. While the twelfth-century provenance of the earliest Jewish anti-Christian tracts has long been recognized, little attention has been focused on the significance of this dating. The fact that sometime toward the end of the twelfth century, perhaps in the 1160s or 1170s, two anti-Christian works, the forerunners of a substantial body of Jewish anti-Christian polemical-apologetic works, were composed almost simultaneously begs interpetation.l What changes gave rise to a new Jewish sensitivity, to a need to present Jewish readers with formulation and rebuttal of Christian lTo be sure, earlier biblical commentaries and philosophical works show evidence of Christian thrusts and Jewish parries. The Milhamot ha-Shem and Sefer ha-Berit, however, are the earliest extant works that are specifically organized around the issues in the Christian-Jewish debate and that are clearly intended for polemical-apologetic purposes. For a valuable recent treatment of some of the earlier polemical thrusts in both biblical commentary and philosophical writings, see Daniel Lasker, "The Jewish Critique of Christianity under Islam in the Middle Ages," PAAJR 57 (1990-91) 121-53. HTR 85:4 (1992) 417-32 418 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW claims? The answer clearly lies in the enhanced agressiveness of western Christendom toward the Jews, as well as other non-Christians, a development that has been recognized and discussed extensively in modern scholarly literature.2 In the face of an increasingly aggressive Christendom, Jewish intellectual and spiritual leadership had to reassure the Jewish flock of the rectitude of the Jewish vision and the nullity of the Christian faith. This is precisely what the first two anti-Christian treatises, the Milhamot ha-Shem of Jacob ben Reuven and the Sefer ha-Berit of Joseph Kimhi, undertook to achieve.3 Given the pioneering nature of these works, it is striking that insufficient scholarly attention has been accorded to these two efforts. They surely have much to tell both of perceived Christian thrusts and of meaningful Jewish rebuttal of these challenges. The longer, fuller, and more influential of the two earliest examples of Jewish polemical-apologetic literature is the Milhamot ha-Shem of Jacob 2For the importance of the twelfth century in the evolution of Christian polemical stances and pressures upon the Jews of western Christendom, see the seminal study by Amos Funkenstein, "Changes in the Patterns of Christian Anti-Jewish Polemics in the Twelfth Century," Sion 33 (1968) 124-44 [Hebrew]. My recent work on medieval Christian missionizing in Daggers of Faith: Thirteenth Century Christian Missionizing and the Jewish Response (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) and Barcelona and Beyond: The Disputation of 1263 and lts Aftermath (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) has focused on the formalization of the missionizing pressure into a well-organized campaign. Such a focus is in no way intended to deny the twelfth-century roots of the new pressures or to mitigate their significance.