Dionysius Bar alībī’s Treatise Against the Jews. Edited and Translated with Notes and Commentary, ed. Rifaat Y. Ebied, Malatius M. Malki, and Lionel R. Wickham †. Texts and Studies in Eastern Christianity, 15. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2020, XVIII, 169 pp.

Abstract

Abstract: This volume is part of “a major research project of publishing a comprehensive corpus of the Polemical Treatises of Bar alībī” (X) which “have only been published in a partial and piecemeal fashion” and “have never been translated as an entirety nor have they received systematic comment” (XI), as the editors state in their preface. Dionysius bar alībī (d. 1171) was a scholar and prolific writer of the period of the so-called Syriac Renaissance (11th–13th centuries). He first became the Syriac Orthodox bishop of Marash and later, in 1167, the metropolitan of Amid (Diyarbakır in Turkey). The vol­ume offers an edition and English translation of Bar alībī’s Treatise Against the Jews (37–141), with a few short introductory chapters (1–36). The treatise was prob­ably composed between 1165 and 1168 C.E. (12). It is part of a series of polemical treatises authored by Bar alībī that are directed also against Muslims (ed. and trans. Joseph P. Amar, Dionysius Bar alībī: A Response to the Arabs. CSCO 614–15. Louvain: Éditions Peeters, 2005), differing Christian traditions, and idolaters.