Embarrassment and Riches

Abstract

Embarrassment and Riches Galit Hasan-Rokem (bio) Keywords Galit Hasan-Rokem, Peter Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud, Jesus of Nazareth, Talmud, Babylonia Peter Schäfer . Jesus in the Talmud. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007. Pp. xv + 210. The historical information that Jesus of Nazareth, born in Bethlehem, was a Jew has caused considerable embarrassment to both Jews and Christians. The latter's embarrassment is rooted in their evolving negative relationship towards the group in whose midst their Savior was born but who rejected his messianic mission and claim for divinity. The theological condemnation of the Jews was coupled with sensations of disgust from impurity and contamination and had formidable, often fateful, ramifications. The embarrassment was reinforced by the fact that God's own words—the Hebrew Bible—hailed the Jews as God's chosen people. All the theological sophistication invested in this intrinsic paradox could also not conceal the awkward implications of the idea that if the Jews were the seed of Satan this obviously somehow pertained also to the identity of Christ. The Jews' embarrassment was rooted in the unconditional and only minimally interfering adaptation of their sacred text—which they saw as the affidavit of their absolutely particular covenant with God—by uncircumcised gentiles toward whom they held contempt and aversion. Jewish embarrassment was further enhanced by the fact that visible historical developments, above all the Christianization of the late Roman empire, seemed to favor those who had affirmed Jesus's divinity rather than those who had rejected it. A considerable amount of Jewish intellectual creativity was devoted to bridging the cognitive and moral gap thus inherent in their historical experience. The study of the treatment of Jesus by rabbinic authors, especially those of the authoritative Babylonian Talmud, involves recognizing the immense cultural productivity of this mutual and twin embarrassment. Few, if any, scholars are better equipped to study that embarrassment and its cultural expression than Peter Schäfer with his solid and substantial [End Page 113] scholarly record, not the least because studying each half of the troubled equation of embarrassments demands a good knowledge of the other. But above all, in his most recent book Schäfer has proven himself not only a formidable scholar of ancient and medieval Jewish texts—that has already been amply demonstrated—but also a talented author from whose hands the text flows like the water to which the rabbis likened the Torah. Reading Jesus and the Talmud I was impressed not only by the text's great readability—somewhat foreign to the academic traditions in which Schäfer and I were educated—but also by the fact that the author was apparently quite amused while writing this book, displaying the aesthetic pleasure of creating an accessible text and of providing elegant solutions to long-standing textual riddles. Since Schäfer openly lays out his extensive intellectual debt to the Hebrew University historian Israel J. Yuval, both in the introduction and in many footnotes, it is only natural that throughout the reading one is indeed reminded of the central theses of Yuval's Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.1 Those of us who are privileged to be Yuval's colleagues have already heard some of the most brilliant and provocative suggestions displayed in the book under review during various stages of their gestation. It may thus, at least partly, be the more than tacit presence of Yuval in this book that has shaped its approach to talmudic discourse on Jesus, viewing it somewhat monolithically as a single counterhistorical narrative, which is otherwise uncharacteristic of Schäfer's own method in his previous talmudic studies. The term "counterhistory" has indeed been associated with the Jewish Jesus narratives at least since Amos Funkenstein's discussion of Toldot Yeshu' as a prime exponent of that genre.2 The flavor of Schäfer's interpretation is, however, sometimes more characteristic of medieval studies than the study of Late Antiquity, as if the author is reading the clearly dichotomous opposition characteristic of Christian Europe, especially after the First Crusade, back into an earlier context. Another, more appropriate [End Page 114] reason...