Interfaith Encounters between Jews and Christians in the Early Modern Period and Beyond: Toward a Framework

Abstract

THE STUDY OF JEWISH HISTORY has come a long way since Salo Baron, in a seminal 1928 essay, demanded a break with the “lachrymose conception” of the history of the Jews in premodern Europe.1 Today, pre-Enlightenment Jewish history is no longer depicted as an uninterrupted chain of conflict and oppression—although, of course, those aspects cannot and should not be overlooked. On the other hand, it has been rightly stated that Baron’s “challenge was not really taken up by scholars in any systematic fashion,” and there are significant lacunae in the study of JewishChristian encounters and relations.2 In particular, we lack a framework for surveying the entire spectrum. While conflict and persecution were on one end, what exactly was on the other? This issue can be explored by way of a simple but maybe unexpected question: Were there amicable relations and friendships between Jews and Christians in medieval and early modern Europe? And if so—leaving aside, for the moment, the question of their frequency—how do we integrate them into our understanding of Christian-Jewish relations? By raising these questions, we can begin to outline a framework for the historical study of interfaith relations. In the process, we can shed new light on the general nature, perception, and practice of friendship in premodern Europe. The issue is thus not only the fact of interfaith friendships, but also how these particular friendships, characterized as they were by religious difference, fitted into the spectrum of practices and expectations associated with friendship. The question of premodern Jewish-Christian friendship has been tackled by scholars only reluctantly; some have even rejected it outright. Nearly half a century ago, Jacob Katz declared sweepingly that “the outside world did not overly occupy the Jewish mind” during that period.3 In this “outside world,” according to Katz, interaction between Jews and Christians was almost entirely “governed by the im-