Fashioning Jewish Identity in Medieval Western Christendom by Robert Chazan (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 208 cum the argument seems to beg for Carlo Ginzburg’s light touch in that 2001 (“Il catalogo è questo,” Quaderni storici 36.3) “conversation” with a search engine. But mostly Celenza is concerned with how intellectual history in this field brought us to where it is Celenza sees us standing now. Celenza’s argument seems to suggest that the diachronic tendencies of the former (looking as he did for antecedents to modernity) and the taxonomic, rather than analytical, tendencies of the latter, have brought meaningful conversation about Renaissance humanism to somewhat of a standstill. “Where have all the humanists gone (in North America)”? Celenza seems to sing. Yet perhaps the answer is perhaps more pedantic and less exotic than Celenza would have it. Perhaps we are not dealing with disillusioned scholars of humanism, turned cruelly away from their true passion. Yes, the trajectory of questions posed and not posed by Garin and Kristeller may have had a stunting effect on so many promising budding scholars of Renaissance Latin now lost forever to the world—to a degree. But what of the simple fact that, in order to be qualified for the job, one has to, by definition, be trained as a classicist? There may exist a much more (dull, it is true, but) compelling reason for the dearth of historians in this area of focus than the argument Celenza implicitly presents. Namely, that those in North Americans whose understanding of Greek and Latin is such that they could actually take on humanism may actually—not out of disillusionment but for myriad other reasons—have chosen to be classicists instead. In short, the scholars that Celenza argues are wanting for tragic historiographical reasons may actually be happily ensconced in classics departments across North America. Not disenchanted with what’s left of the trail blazed before them, per se, but merely having made different career decisions based on the cost-reward ratio of their skill sets. Celenza’s book is a timely and persuasive presentation which reassesses the field and turns much-needed attention to the negative space of the many “lost” works of Renaissance Latin. The happy ending, of course, is that these works really aren’t “lost,” but merely waiting to be translated, exposed, and thrown to the hungry masses of today through the very genius of accessible translation that kept them inaccessible then. And there is some poetic symmetry in that. But true to the lamento tradition so popular in the period he is fascinated by, Celenza sees in this historiographical tradition a noteworthy loss, and not only persuades us that there has been a historiographical tragedy of which we should be keenly aware, but also manages to make us reassess the way we think about the power of negative space in the intricate mechanics of historiography. JENNY JORDAN, Harvard University Robert Chazan, Fashioning Jewish Identity in Medieval Western Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004) xv + 379 pp. This, Robert Chazan’s most recent work, takes up where Daggers of Faith left off. Instead of focusing solely on Rabbi Moses ben Nahman (Nahmanides), Chazan looks at Nahmanides and four other medieval Jewish polemicists in southern France and northern Spain—Joseph Kimhi and his son David, Jacob be Reuben, and Rabbi Meir bar Simon—and their responses to the increasingly hostile Christian world in which they lived. He first lays out the early Christian positions against Judaism found in such writers as Justin Martyr and Augustine REVIEWS 209 of Hippo. The earliest anti-Jewish works focused not so much on the Jews themselves, but on how Jesus’s miracles were evidence of that he was the prophesied messiah of the Old Testament. In contrast to these very early Christian works (Justin Martyr comes out of the second century), the earliest Jewish texts dealing with Christianity come out of the Muslim world in the ninth century , and only one, the Quissa/Nestor, is formulated in such as way as to be labeled a polemic work. It is not until the twelfth century that Jewish writers, largely because of increased pressure from Christians, began to write overtly critical works dealing with Christianity’s truth claims. Even so, these works were not...