Scholarship and Intolerance in the Medieval Academy: The Study and Evaluation of Judaism in European Christendom

Abstract

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN THE FIELD of literary criticism have emphasized the influence of texts and textual traditions in shaping the world views of individuals and the cultures of societies. Perceptions of meaning, structure, and authority in literature, as well as the extent of its accessibility, reflect and contribute to manifold components of a community's ethos, ranging from the political and socioeconomic to the religious and intellectual. It follows that new methods for studying particular texts, or any alteration in the prevailing level of familiarity with them, may ultimately affect existing patterns of interpersonal relations and hitherto regnant ideologies in a given culture. Viewed within the context of the rise of urban schools and universities in.lhigh medieval Europe, the orientation of Christian scholars to the biblical and rabbinic literature of the Jews offers a fascinating case in point. Christianity had always acknowledged its debt to the Old Testament,' but the medieval church could not forget that a community of unbelievers-a people unique in its ability to withstand Christianity's conquest of the Roman world and to secure legal standing in Western Christendom nonetheless-served as the guardian of the original Hebrew text of the Old Testament and maintained the most literal observance of its precepts. Modern scholars have long recognized that, as the focus of medieval intellectual creativity shifted from monastery to urban school, Christian concern for the Hebraica veritas and rabbinic exegesis of the Bible increased markedly. This process had several implications for scholarly method and religious ideology. As their interest in Hebraic texts rose, Christian scholars of the period came to espouse the view that these texts, to serve as a valid source of religious and historical knowledge, had to be measured against the beliefs and instruction of contemporary Jews. Yet when influential churchmen, true to the Scholastic spirit of their age, turned to these beliefs as a subject for academic scrutiny in their own right, they perceived that such a comparison threatened to