Jacques Basnage and the History of the Jews: Anti-Catholic Polemic and Historical Allegory in the Republic of Letters

Abstract

Since the first Christian communities sought to distance themselves from Judaism, Jews and their religion have haunted Christians. The medieval Christian exegetical tradition tried to exorcise the ghost of Judaism by appropriating the Hebrew Bible. Christians transformed it into a book that predicted the coming of Christ and God's rejection of the Jews. ' By thus neutralizing the internal validity of Judaism, Christians could take advantage of the rabbinical tradition as an aid in interpreting Christianized Scripture.2 For Christian exegetes of the Middle Ages from Andrew of St. Victor to Nicholas of Lyra, the rabbis and their commentaries increasingly became a repository of information that could assist in understanding the heavenly language of Moses. Their knowledge of Hebrew, however, did not generally deter Christian scholars from reading Christian sensibilities into the Hebrew Bible. Medieval exegetes were uniformly concerned that the Jews had corrupted the original Hebrew of the Old Testament either by ignorance or through self-conscious attempts to distort predictions about the Messiah.3 Humanist scholars of the Renaissance and Reformation continued to harp on the corrupted nature of the Hebrew text, but the advantages to be reaped from exploiting Jewish sources were too great