Polemical Language: Hebrew and Latin in Medieval and Early Modern Jewish-Christian Debate

Abstract

This article explores medieval and early modern Jewish-Christian polemic rooted in the specific properties of the Hebrew and Latin languages and argues that such discourse constitutes a neglected and significant aspect of the polemical literature of these time periods. The discussion focuses on two particular classes of “linguistic” polemic. The first, introduced here as the “directionality trope,” involves discourse concerning the contrasting directions of Hebrew and Latin writing—a feature of these languages that was much discussed between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries. The second concerns polemics rooted in the grammatical differences between Hebrew and Latin—specifically, the absence in Hebrew of a case system and the presence therein of final forms for certain letters. In showcasing the prominence of such discussions in Christian and Jewish texts spanning the medieval and early modern periods, this article introduces a new linguistic frontier to scholarship on the rich, albeit acrimonious, history of Jewish-Christian debate.