Jewish-Christian Relations Research Articles

Christians and Jews: historical and theological perspectives of their relationship

The article analyses the subject of Christian-Jewish relations in historical and theological terms. In the historical part the following periods are briefly discussed: New Testament, patristic, medieval, modern and contemporary. In the theological part, the common elements of Judaism and Christianity were first presented: - Jews and Christians identify their faith and action through the interrelations between justice and love; they base their beliefs on the common “scripture” (the “Old Testament”); they understand each other as the people of God; they profess the one God, the Creator and the Redeemer; they express their faith in worship, in which there are many similarities; Jews and Christians also live in the expectation for the common history of God with his people, whose fulfillment they expect. Distinctive elements (The divergence of the ways) are: the belief in Jesus, the Christ; the interpretation of the Scriptures; a different understanding of what God’s people are; different developed piety. In conclusion, it was said that the rediscovery of a positive relationship with Judaism facilitates a positive formation of Christian identity and memory.

Book art as historical evidence: disputation and representation in late medieval Germany

ABSTRACTThe increase in the distribution and availability of images for personal use in the late Middle Ages raises the question of their potential historical value for understanding the societies that produced and made use of them. This paper exposes the effects and the historical meanings of some woodcut illustrations of disputations between Jews and Christians: the woodcuts were widespread during the 1470s and 1480s in Swabia and Bavaria and surrounding areas, and they are still familiar and continue to play a role in shaping perceptions of Jewish-Christian relations of that period. These images do not reflect actual events: rather they are misrepresentations of polemical anti-Jewish sermons, designed as fictitious scholarly discourses. Their historical value is not limited to their ability to expose hidden angles. They can guide us to a better understanding of the written sources and to find new meanings there.

Legacy of An Impassioned Plea: Franklin H. Littell’s The Crucifixion of the Jews by David Patterson and Marcia Sachs Littell

Reviewed by: Legacy of an Impassioned Plea: Franklin H. Littell's The Crucifixion of the Jews ed. by David Patterson and Marcia Sachs Littell James Carroll Legacy of an Impassioned Plea: Franklin H. Littell's The Crucifixion of the Jews. Edited by David Patterson and Marcia Sachs Littell. St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2018. 316 pages. $29.95 (paper). When Franklin H. Littell published The Crucifixion of the Jews in 1975, the book's title announced an unprecedented Christian cri de coeur against antisemitism. Littell was a prophet of Christian reckoning whose writings sparked a major confrontation with the dark history of antisemitism as embodied by the Annual Scholars' Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, which he co-founded in 1970 with Hubert G. Locke. The Conference has now sponsored this new volume of essays honoring the centenary of Littell's birth. [End Page 384] Franklin Littell's work as a writer, pastor, lecturer, and organizer extended across decades, but it was this book that defined his achievement, as the phrase on its cover defined the book's impact. One of the authors in this powerful collection of essays refers to "the full text of The Crucifixion of the Jews as mere commentary on its title" (Stephen D. Smith, 309). The title was sensational—Littell's book was a searing indictment of Christian theology and tradition for the way both defamed Jews and made savage violence against them inevitable, yet the entire argument was encapsulated in five words on the book's cover. It was in some way outrageous to depict the Jews as a crucified people. Christians could regard the image as a blasphemous twisting of history, especially if they were among the many who remembered the crucifixion as the work of Jews. Jesus was uniquely the innocent victim, and his battered body, splayed upon the execution device, was not to be relativized. And if the title's implication that the Jews had been hung on the cross by Christians was not clear enough, the book's subtitle made the charge explicit: The Failure of Christians to Understand the Jewish Experience. But then Jews, too, could take offense, since the title could be read as suggesting that the suffering of the Jewish people, up to and including the Holocaust, amounted to a redemptive sacrifice, and could therefore be considered meaningful. Crucifixion, after all, points to resurrection, which is why St. Paul could glory in the cross (Galatians 6:14). In that case, a decidedly Christian image was being used, according to the old pattern of supersessionism, to replace the actual experience of Jews whose victimhood was devoid of meaning. Once again, a Christian category was being used to falsify Jewish experience, and that it was done with patently good intentions only doubled the insult by showing how deeply supersessionism sunk into the structure of Christian thought. For that matter, "the crucifixion of the Jews" could be taken as yet one more reduction of Jewishness to victimhood. Never mind that the Jewish artist Marc Chagall repeatedly portrayed Jesus as a crucified Jewish martyr, or that the prolific Jewish scholar Dan Cohn-Sherbok entitled his own history of antisemitism "The Crucified Jew" (Dan [End Page 385] Cohn-Sherbok, The Crucified Jew: Twenty Centuries of Christian Anti-Semitism [Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdman's Publishing Co., 1992]). When Christians superimpose this explosive image over Jewish experience, as Pope John Paul II did when he called Auschwitz "the Golgotha of the Modern World," fingernails run down history's blackboard, which, in this case, bleeds. And no wonder—the cross marks the problematic dead center of Jewish-Christian relations. Obviously, to imagine the hanging of Jesus of Nazareth on the horizontal-vertical structure as the work of Jews, and not Romans, is the igniting incident of antisemitism, but the Christ-killer calumny is only part of the trouble. Jesus lives in the Christian imagination as the only victim of crucifixion. It is true that the Gospels tell of three crosses at Calvary, with Jesus flanked by a pair of thieves. Yet to emphasize that his suffering was unique and extreme—the infinite suffering required to atone for the infinite offense God took at...

Farene dui: The separation of the Jewish and Christian universitates in fifteenth-century Apulia

This study aims to make a contribution to the understanding of municipal belonging and Jewish–Christian relations in Renaissance Italy through the analysis of charters granted by the Aragonese kings of Naples to the cities and the Jewish communities of Apulia. During the fifteenth century the Jewish and Christian communities of the Kingdom of Naples were neither administratively nor jurisdictionally independent from one another. It was through political action that the Jewish communities attempted and succeeded in loosening the ties with the municipal communities, accentuating the gap between two religiously distinct groups. This study suggests that the administrative and jurisdictional separation of the Jewish community from the Christian universitas was not sought by municipal governments: it constituted, rather, the ultimate political goal of the Jewish communal leaders.

The Portrayal of Jews in Modern Biełarusian Literature by Zina J. Gimpelevich (review)

SEER, 97, 2, APRIL 2019 344 preferred the Ruthenian variant to the Russian and the vernacular to the bookish (p. 131). Instrumental as it may look, this type of reconstruction does not allow us to say something definitive about the provenance of the respective translations and their language. Some comments, especially in reference to the Arabic original, are not convincing either, for instance, the explanation of the use of the preposition o in molitva w nawsobněišo(m) ‘a sermon to the Most Distinguished’ by the alleged influence of the underlying Arabic ‘alā ‘on, about’ (p. 430). The Slavic concordantial index (pp. 597–720) reflects shortcomings in the author’s interpretation of the Slavic language of the Logika. The orthographic variants are usually not alphabetized with a word’s main entry and are given separate entries. To give the most obvious examples, one should cite the vъ > u alternation as illustrated in vzęti and ouzęti ‘to take’ taken as separate entries, also vkazati next to oukazati ‘to guide’ (p. 605). Separate entries, according to the author, are vpasti and vъpasti ‘to fall’ (p. 607), though vinnyj is found in one entry next to such variants as vyn´no, vino and vinъno (n.sg.) ‘necessary, requiring’ (p. 605). The author does not provide any glossary of Slavic terms although the latter would benefit Taube’s research of the Ruthenian texts replete with numerous lexical and morphological innovations (p. 56). One comes across some obsolete spellings like Belorussian (p. 51) instead of Belarusian, Kiev (p. 9) rather than Kyiv. Despite these shortcomings, Taube’s critical edition is a ground-breaking contribution to the study of the literature of the Judaizers. Pace University, New York Andrii Danylenko Gimpelevich, Zina J. The Portrayal of Jews in Modern Biełarusian Literature. McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal and Kingston, London and Chicago, IL, 2018. xx + 479 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $95.00: £76.00. Belarus has been home to Jews for many centuries, and Professor Gimpelevich has provided a wide-ranging and comprehensive review of the relatively harmonious relationship of this substantial minority with their Christian neighbours, in sharp contrast to the situation in other Slav countries. Her ambitious monograph consists of eleven parts and two appendices. The first part is a thoroughly researched review of Jewish-Christian relations from the period of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to the present, quoting extensively from existing scholarship, as well as from writers and poets. Using earlier published research and statistics, the author paints a broad yet thorough REVIEWS 345 overview of the past, emphasizing, without idealization, the predominantly co-operative and equable position of Jews in a part of the world where they enjoyed both status and a degree of independence. The remaining ten chapters are illustrations of her thesis on the basis of the work by some prominent writers from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. The range of texts selected is admirably broad and includes works that are familiar to all educated Belarusians as well as some that have fallen into neglect and/or been suppressed. One of the appendixes is a note on transliteration, in which the author attempts to devise a transliteration system that will help her readers ‘experience the richness of Biełarusian phonetics’ (p. 369). In this notice, however, except in direct quotations, the forms that have now become standard in this country are used. The second chapter links one of the first plays in Belarusian to three works by Jakub Kolas (1882–1956), one of them his masterpiece, and the two others relatively unknown: ‘The Creation of Biełarusian Jewish Characters from Kaetan Marašeŭski’s Comedy and Jakub Kolas’s Anton Łata, Symon the Musician, and “Chajm Rybs”.’ It begins with an extensive discussion of the origins of Belarusian drama, including the work of Simiaon Polacki (1629–80) and the school dramas, followed by a thoroughgoing description of the eighteenth-century Comedy, its characters and plot. Kolas’s Anton Lata was closely modelled on the earlier play, and after a sketch of this writer’s achievements and status in the USSR, Gimpelevich describes in detail this ‘epigonic work’ (p. 71). In...

Book Review: Sefer Yeṣirah and Its Contexts: Other Jewish Voices by Tzahi Weiss

Tzahi Weiss. Sefer Yeṣirah and Its Contexts: Other Jewish Voices , Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. ix, 196. $59.95. ISBN: 9780812249903. The Hebrew text known as the Sefer Yeṣirah , or Book of Formation , has piqued the interest of scholars of early medieval Jewish philosophy and those of central- to late-medieval Jewish mysticism and magic for centuries. In Sefer Yeṣirah and Its Contexts: Other Jewish Voices , Tzahi Weiss extends interest in this text to scholars of early medieval Jewish mysticism, magical praxis, and Jewish-Christian relations. Through an exploration of Sefer Yeṣirah ’s specific methods of letter speculation, grammar, and textual reception, Weiss presents a two-pronged argument. First, he contends that the much-debated compositional context of the Sefer Yeṣirah was most likely 7th-century Christian Syria. And, second, that early readers of the Sefer Yeṣirah understood it as a mystical and magical treatise long before the late 12th century, as is commonly assumed. Weiss divides his slim volume into an introduction, five chapters, an epilogue, and two appendices. The first appendix addresses scholarly arguments that the Sefer Yeṣirah originated in the Abbasid world and was influenced by Arabic grammar; the second appendix provides a Hebrew transcription of an 11th-century recension of the Sefer Yeṣirah (Ms. Vatican 299/4) that Weiss bases his arguments on, accompanied by Peter A. Hayman’s English translation. Along with a review of scholarship treating the text and a statement of Weiss’ departure from, indebtedness to, and contributions to the field, the Introduction provides a quick summary of the contents of the Sefer Yeṣirah as a treatise describing God’s formation of the world from numbers …

Ruth Nisse. Jacob’s Shipwreck: Diaspora, Translation, and Jewish-Christian Relations in Medieval England.

R<scp>uth</scp> N<scp>isse</scp>. <i>Jacob’s Shipwreck: Diaspora, Translation, and Jewish-Christian Relations in Medieval England</i>.

Znaczenie judeochrześcijańskich korzeni i świadectwa chrześcijan o korzeniach żydowskich dla integralnego zrozumienia przesłania biblijnego

Punktem wyjścia artykułu są pierwotne napięcia pomiędzy wyznawcami judaizmu i chrześcijaństwa. Autor na ich tle ukazuje historyczny przełom we wzajemnych relacjach judeochrześcijańskich, który nastąpił po Soborze Watykańskim II. Umożliwił on wkroczenie judaizmu i chrześcijaństwa w drogę braterstwa i dialogu. W przekonaniu autora było to możliwe za sprawą wysiłków papieży (tj. Jana Pawła II, Benedykta XVI i Franciszka) oraz wspólnych instytucji i organizacji chrześcijańsko-żydowskich. Autor podkreśla również, że relacje chrześcijańsko-żydowskie cechuje wzajemne poszanowanie przy jednoczesnym zachowaniu własnej tożsamości i wierności swojej tradycji religijnej i duchowej. Na zakończenie artykułu zostały przedstawione osobiste doświadczenia autora w dialogu chrześcijańsko-żydowskim.

Jewish Scholarship on the Resurrection of Jesus by David Mishkin

Reviewed by: Jewish Scholarship on the Resurrection of Jesus by David Mishkin Glenn B. Siniscalchi david mishkin, Jewish Scholarship on the Resurrection of Jesus (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2017). Pp. xiv + 256. $33. One of the common objections to the reliability of the Gospels is that they were written by committed believers whose bias prevented them from telling us the truth about Jesus. Apparently, the weight of this objection is only compounded by the fact that most scholars of the historical Jesus are influenced by ecclesiastical presuppositions. This challenge is one of the main reasons why David Mishkin's newest book will illuminate current discussions on the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus: "It is certainly legitimate to raise the issue of objectivity among such scholars. Jewish scholars do not have a specific view of the resurrection of Jesus. It has been at best a secondary issue, hidden behind more pressing topics in the historic Jewish–Christian interaction" (p. 35; cf. 202). A major part of the book covers the history of Jewish responses to the resurrection (pp. 1-34, 118-57). Although most Jewish theologians have not offered much commentary, Mishkin notes that a shift is taking place, especially in the last several decades: "As Jewish interest in Jesus has continued, so has the documentation of this field of study. . . . The progress has been steady, based on the climate of both Jewish–Christian relations and the latest New Testament scholarship" (pp. 32, 34). Some Jews stay away from the resurrection because it was not of interest to them personally. Still others have not found it relevant to Judaism as a whole. More recently, there has been a slight interest in addressing the question of what happened to Jesus after the crucifixion. Concentrating on the resurrection of Jesus as a historical phenomenon, M. argues with consistency that Easter faith is not a matter of exploring the contents of faith alone. In the aftermath of the crucifixion (which was seen as a curse from God), something must have triggered the disciples' belief that God raised Jesus from the dead. He pointedly asks, "Why a resurrection (of one individual messiah) when there were other options regarding the afterlife which would have fit much more naturally?" (p. 172). This leads M. to highlight the biblical scholarship of Pinchas Lapide (The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective [Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2002]), Alan Segal (Life after Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion [New York: Doubleday, 2004]), and Geza Vermes (The Resurrection: History and Myth [New York: Doubleday, 2008]). While Lapide believed that the evidence pointed conclusively in favor of Jesus's resurrection, Segal and Vermes remained skeptical. [End Page 742] Other Jewish scholars have argued that the resurrection is indefensible because the Gospels are untrustworthy. When they turn to Paul's conversion experience, they often explain it away in terms of psychological categories. Nonetheless, M. observes that all of these Jewish NT studies are a promising sign for further developments. By the end of the book, one may conclude that almost all major contemporary Jewish scholars writing on the subject affirm the existence and Jewishness of Jesus, the crucifixion, the postmortem appearance to Paul (which resulted in his conversion to Christ), the origin of disciples' belief in the resurrection of Jesus despite having predispositions to the contrary, and the rapid dissemination of the Christian movement. Despite Christian scholarship on the credibility of the resurrection (which may appear biased and unreliable), "the main historical events that make up this discussion are virtually the same for both groups [i.e., Jewish and Christian historians]: crucifixion, burial, disciples' belief, empty tomb, and Paul's dramatic turnaround" (p. 210). After reading M.'s book, one is further convinced that the question concerning the historicity of the resurrection is not about establishing the NT evidence as much as it is about explaining that evidence in a convincing way. In an area of biblical scholarship in which it is often difficult to find new avenues of research, M. is to be commended for taking advantage of the opportunity to write a book on Jewish perspectives on the resurrection. This book will undoubtedly be of great use to specialists...

A Life in Dialogue: Building Bridges between Catholics and Jews—A Memoir by Eugene J. Fisher

Reviewed by: A Life in Dialogue: Building Bridges between Catholics and Jews—A Memoir by Eugene J. Fisher Martin Pion Eugene J. Fisher, A Life in Dialogue: Building Bridges between Catholics and Jews—A Memoir. St. Petersburg, FL: Mr. Media Books, 2017. Pp. 143. $12.95, paper. Memoir is not generally the primary vehicle of the theologian, yet it serves the discipline extremely well time and again. Fisher's memoir is a gentle narrative filled with scholarship, yet it is the remarkable anecdotes that fill in the details and make this an important contribution to the history of the development of specifically Catholic-Jewish dialogue in the post-Vatican II era. It is not designed as a showcase for Fisher's own contribution, but, given his professional involvement from the earliest years of this post-conciliar development, it is inevitable that his memoir will offer a true and detailed history of the dialogue almost from its genesis. The recounting and analysis of events is revealing is a unique way. Fisher contextualizes many of the controversies that developed as the dialogue itself was growing and deepening. Those who recall the tense events surrounding the establishment of a Carmelite convent adjacent to Auschwitz will find the analysis of the larger contextual questions that were at the heart of the disagreement enlightening and sensitively presented by Fisher, who participated in the dialogues relevant to the reactions of both Jews and Christians. He wants his readers to understand what people are thinking and what their [End Page 620] motivation is before they reach conclusions. His balance is gentle and respectful on all sides. Given his roles as Director of the Office of Catholic-Jewish relations for the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, as well as Consultor to the Holy See and member of the International Catholic-Jewish Liaison Committee, his handling of the issues surrounding the request to expedite the opening of the Vatican Archives relevant to the Shoah is eye-opening. There are a significant number of helpful summary statements regarding the Shoah. At times, Fisher's analysis of these documents is spotty, and there is a felt need for more, but the purpose of this writing is the larger narrative, not textual analysis of documents. This is, after all, a memoir. Fisher is clear on the message that the covenantal call of God to the Jews is irrevocable and must be honored and treasured by all. His narrative of the dialogues and collaborations showcases both the relationships that make much of this work even possible and that friendship is an invaluable outcome of respectful dialogue. Despite a below-the-surface sense of occasional disappointment over the tentative response of some in the Curia, this work also shows more of the value of an expansive hierarchical institution such as the Catholic Church in making change on such a sensitive and powerful topic as Christian-Jewish relations in the future. [End Page 621] Martin Pion Elms College, Chicopee, MA Copyright © 2019 Journal of Ecumenical Studies

Elie Wiesel: Teacher, Mentor, and Friend ed. by Alan L. Berger

Reviewed by: Elie Wiesel: Teacher, Mentor, and Friend ed. by Alan L. Berger Eugene J. Fisher Elie Wiesel: Teacher, Mentor, and Friend. Edited by Alan L. Berger. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock/Cascade, 2018. Pp. 107. $18.00, paper. When Elie Wiesel, whom Alan Berger aptly describes as “Holocaust survivor, author, teacher, advisor to presidents of both parties, human rights activist” (p. xvii), won the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, he and his wife Marion set up the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. One of the foundation’s first acts was the Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics, an essay competition for college juniors and seniors, which has received more than 6,500 essays on the moral challenges facing the world. The authors in this deeply moving and enlightening book have served as the judges of the contest. Their articles reflect on what they have learned from the essays, each other, and especially from Wiesel, whom they consider their teacher, mentor, and friend. This is a book for both scholars and the general reader, especially for those interested in ecumenical and Jewish-Christian relations, since the authors are Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic scholars who are deeply involved in Holocaust studies and the dialogue that began with the liberation of the death camps. Rabbi Irving Greenberg, long a leader in the dialogue, describes Wiesel— famous for his works such as Night (a memoir of his time in the camps)—as a tzaddik (righteous one), a rebbe (mentor/pastor/guide) to his students and fellow university teachers, and lamed-vovnik, one of the saintly thirty-six humans in every generation, according to rabbinic tradition, whose lives and deeds uplift all humanity and help to bring about tikkun olam, healing the world in preparation for the coming (for Jews) or return (for Christians) of the Messiah who will usher in the Messianic Age, when all humanity will live in peace and harmony, justice, and well-being. [End Page 467] Judith Ginsberg, executive director of the Nash Family Foundation, which supports Jewish welfare organizations in New York and Israel, focuses on what she has learned from reading the students’ essays. Barbara Helfgott Hyett (who has taught poetry and literature at Boston University, MIT, Harvard, and Holy Cross) and Caroline Johnston (professor of history and American studies at Eckerd College) consider what they have learned from Wiesel on how to think and act ethically and how to teach students to do so. John K. Roth (Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College) and Henry Knight (professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Keene State College) have furthered Wiesel’s probing questions about our religious traditions and Christian history of the teaching of contempt for Jews and Judaism over the centuries, which paved the way for the Shoah. They embody Wiesel’s challenge to Christians to repent and renew Christian teaching about Jesus the Jew and the Jewish people. Alan Rosen and David Patterson delve into the writings and teachings of Wiesel as a profoundly Jewish visionary (some would say a prophet), who challenged and enlightened Jews and all other humans who read his works or were influenced by him, helping them to focus on caring for those in need or those persecuted anywhere for their beliefs, race, or disabilities. The editor (Eminent Scholar Chair for Holocaust Studies at Florida Atlantic University) worked closely with Wiesel over the years. Berger shows how in his novels and other writings Wiesel took readers deeply into Jewish-Christian history and challenged Christians to reflect, repent, and work to redeem our broken world, while also honoring the small number of Christians (the Righteous among the Nations) who helped European Jews to survive the Nazi attempt to exterminate Jews and many other “sub-humans.” Berger centers on Wiesel as one who participated in and greatly furthered the Jewish-Christian dialogue, spurring the development of numerous ongoing centers connected with universities around the U.S. He also details the profound dialogue between Wiesel and noted Catholic author, Francois Mauriac, and how their meeting and subsequent dialogues deeply influenced the work of both. Carol Rittner, RSM, writes a stirring Afterword. A major leader in...

El arte de la subversión en la España inquisitorial: Fernando de Rojas y Francisco Delicado (con dos notas de Cervantes) by Manuel da Costa Fontes

Reviewed by: El arte de la subversión en la España inquisitorial: Fernando de Rojas y Francisco Delicado (con dos notas de Cervantes) by Manuel da Costa Fontes Patricia W. Manning Manuel da Costa Fontes. El arte de la subversión en la España inquisitorial: Fernando de Rojas y Francisco Delicado (con dos notas de Cervantes). iberoamericana / vervuert, 2018. 470 pp. in the preface to this translation and update of his study of literary modes of subversion (originally published in 2005 as The Art of Subversion in Inquisitorial Spain: Rojas and Delicado [Purdue UP]), Manuel da Costa Fontes affirms: "traté de poner el libro al día, incorporando la crítica pertinente que ha aparecido durante los últimos años" (15). While the Spanish-language version represents a solid contribution to the field, it would have benefited from deeper engagement with scholarship published since 2005. This is not to suggest that no changes have been made. In this new edition, Costa Fontes cites from the Spanish translation of Henry Kamen's now classic book on the Spanish Inquisition (La Inquisición española: mito e historia, translated by Juan Rabasseda and Teófilo de Lozoya, Crítica, 2013). And the bibliography relating to the literary works that Costa Fontes analyzes generally has been updated; however, gaps become more apparent in the volume's underpinning arguments. For example, chapter 1 ("El problema converso") characterizes the first centuries after the Muslim conquest of 711 as a "período de tolerancia en el que cristianos, musulmanes y judíos vivían juntos, en coexistencia pacífica" and "convivencia" that came to an end as Christians came to control more territory (17–18). This notion of medieval convivencia overlooks recent work that offers a more complex picture of coexistence among the three religious communities in Iberia. To mention only one example, David Nirenberg's assertion "that violence was a central and systemic aspect of the coexistence of majority and minorities in medieval Spain" (Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages, Princeton UP, 1996, p. 9) offers an important counterpoint to the picture of amicable cohabitation that should have been taken into consideration. Moreover, this and Nirenberg's other books, along with Patricia E. Grieve's monograph (The Eve of Spain: Myths of Origins in the History of Christian, Muslim and Jewish Conflict, Johns Hopkins UP, 2009), could have enriched [End Page 251] an argument that at times seems overly focused on Christian-Jewish (or -converso) relations. Another shortcoming is that Costa Fontes includes relatively few references to Muslims (or Moriscos) in Iberia and only considers the Mediterranean settings of the Retrato de la Lozana andaluza (hereafter La Lozana) in appendix 2, which discusses Moriscos in Don Quijote. Also in chapter 1, Costa Fontes alludes to rumors about Jewish residents' purported murders of children in Spain without referencing Grieve's analysis of devotion to El Niño de la Guardia, a folk saint whose popular devotion fanned the flames of anti-Semitism (Grieve 98–104). Another issue emerges when Costa Fontes draws attention to the tendency to encode erotic language in the guise of less sexualized content (195n158, 255); on such occasions, his arguments would have been enhanced by reference to Adrienne Laskier Martin's study (An Erotic Philology of Golden Age Spain, Vanderbilt UP, 2008). An important addition Costa Fontes makes to his study of subversion with this Spanish translation relates to the two appendices concerning works by Miguel de Cervantes. Appendix 1 ("El poder nivelador del amor en La española inglesa") examines the role love plays in the exemplary novel. Beyond the redeeming value of love, the analysis of this novella also concerns the converso community. Isabela's status as a Catholic Spanish woman in England not only analogously references the status of the converso community in Spain, but also the case of María Nunes, a Portuguese Jewish resident of Amsterdam kidnapped by English forces, "la cual, sin duda, sirvió de inspiración a Cervantes" (375). While it is certainly possible that a reader interested in converso culture would make these connections, it also seems equally likely that readers, especially those residing in Spanish communities that...

“To Defend the Citadel of its Faith from All Assaults”: Hermann Adler and the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews

This article employs sermons as a lens through which to examine Jewish-Christian relations in Victorian England. It focuses primarily upon discourses preached by clergy affiliated with the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews, and on rebuttals delivered by Hermann Adler, a London rabbi who would go on to become Chief Rabbi of the British Empire. Attention is also given to reviews of Adler's work, and to responses to those reviews. These reviews and reviews-of-reviews are evidence that there was an active conversation taking place in the pulpit and the press; the article seeks to show that preaching is one aspect of the interfaith landscape that can be much more fully explored.

The New Testament: Jewish or Gentile?

The Jewish Annotated New Testament, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Brettler, has recently been republished in a second edition. It performs the vital task of correcting Christian misunderstandings, distortions, stereotypes and calumnies to recover the various Jewish contexts of Jesus, Paul, and the early Christian movement. This is a welcome development in the painful history of Jewish–Christian relations. There is a danger, however, in the book’s Christian reception, of a kind of nostalgia for ‘Jewish roots’—an expectation that by returning to Jesus’ original message, and an ‘authentic’ Jewish form of Christianity, one can bypass centuries of mistrust and worse. Matters are not that simple. Christianity grew out of a complex dual heritage, already reflected in the New Testament. The Christian message quickly spread into the Greek-speaking world, and its adherents soon became majority Gentile. This paper explores the implications of that process, which was begun by Paul, who presented Jewish messianic ideas to a Gentile audience, assigning universal significance to the traditions of his own particular community. It examines how Jesus’ teachings acquired new meanings, often reflecting a Christian movement at odds with the majority of Jews. And it unearths the subtext beneath the New Testament’s defamatory polemic. Doing so involves negotiating the complex relationship between theology and sociology: between ideals (Jewish and/or Christian) and the lived experiences of Jewish and Gentile communities.

Ruth Nisse. Jacob's Shipwreck: Diaspora, Translation, and Jewish-Christian Relations in Medieval England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017. xiii + 235 pp.

Reviewed by: Jacob's Shipwreck: Diaspora, Translation, and Jewish-Christian Relations in Medieval England by Ruth Nisse Robert Stacey Ruth Nisse. Jacob's Shipwreck: Diaspora, Translation, and Jewish-Christian Relations in Medieval England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017. xiii + 235 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009418000661 Debates between Christians and Jews over the proper interpretation of biblical texts were staples of medieval Christian religious discourse. For the most part, Jews participated unwillingly in these debates; sometimes they did not participate at all, the Jewish position being supplied by the Christian author simply as a foil for his own exhibition of exegetical ingenuity. Over the past half century, the texts of these debates, real and imagined, have been studied by a number of notable scholars. We have all learned much from their efforts. But while new discoveries may yet be made, one cannot help but feel that most of the gold in this particular vein has by now been extracted. Ruth Nisse's extraordinary book, beautifully designed and produced by Cornell University Press, leads us in a new and altogether welcome direction in the study of the intellectual relationships between medieval Jews and Christians. Her focus is on England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, not generally regarded as a center of Jewish learning in this or any other time period. But evidence has been mounting in recent years that the Jewish scholars of medieval England were far more accomplished than we had previously realized, and that there are aspects of Jewish and Christian intellectual life in England that are both distinctive and important. This book pushes that discussion forward in exciting ways. Nisse's particular contribution is to draw our attention to the ways in which Jewish and Christian scholars sought to appropriate extrabiblical texts for their own religious traditions through translation, interpretation, and the creative compilation of diverse texts into anthologies. In her first chapter, Nisse looks at the tangled history of Flavius Josephus's Jewish Antiquities and the Jewish War. Written in Greek in the first century of the Common Era, by the end of the fourth century Josephus's works had been epitomized by a patristic Latin author known as the Pseudo-Hegesippus, who presented the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE as God's punishment for the crucifixion of Jesus by the Jews. In the mid-tenth century, a Hebrew translation and rewriting of the Pseudo-Hegesippus had been composed in southern Italy, which circulated widely, together with several other ancient texts, in an anthology known as Sefer Yosippon. But Sefer Yosippon was no mere translation. As Nisse notes, "Yosippon … engages Hegesippus polemically and transforms this … Christian narrative about … the fate of Jerusalem into its own diasporic account of Jewish self-destruction and heroic sacrifice," creating "a new kind of Jewish spiritualizing rhetoric of resistance that later became particularly influential following the persecutions of 1096 during the First Crusade" (22). In twelfth-century England, these two competing versions of Josephus's work, one Latin and the other Hebrew, collided for the first time. Both versions laid explicit claim to present historical truth, a claim given additional weight by the fact that Yosippon was written in Hebrew, the sacred language of the Jews, [End Page 468] but acknowledged by many twelfth-century Christian scholars to be essential to interpreting the Hebrew Bible and hence to establishing the truth of the prophecies that proved Jesus to be the messiah. Yosippon, however, was a problematic text for Christian intellectuals. Not only did it omit the testimony to Jesus's messiahship that the Christianized Latin versions of Josephus and Pseudo-Hegesippus featured, it also included the Toledot Yeshu, a Hebrew version of Jesus's life that in Christian eyes was nothing short of blasphemous. Nevertheless, in twelfth-century England, any resulting suspicion of Hebrew as a language of mendacity, such as was expressed by Gerald of Wales, remained a minority position among English Christian intellectuals. By the mid-thirteenth century, however, this had become the majority view, not only of intellectuals but of the English Christian population at large, with serious consequences for Jewish-Christian relations and for the continuance of Jewish life in England. Among many other...

Jacob's Shipwreck: Diaspora, Translation, and Jewish-Christian Relations in Medieval England by Ruth Nisse (review)

Jacob's Shipwreck: Diaspora, Translation, and Jewish-Christian Relations in Medieval England by Ruth Nisse (review)

Jacob's Shipwreck: Diaspora, Translation, and Jewish-Christian Relations in Medieval England. By Ruth Nisse. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2017. ix + 235 pp. $65 cloth.

Jacob's Shipwreck: Diaspora, Translation, and Jewish-Christian Relations in Medieval England. By Ruth Nisse. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2017. ix + 235 pp. $65 cloth. - Volume 87 Issue 3

Les Juifs vus par un prêtre français en exil: l’antijudaïsme dans les Mémoires de l’abbé Pochard (1796-1830)

The article is an attempt to show the leading elements of the attitude towards Jews, the attitude of Father Claude-Antoine Pochard (1766-1833), tutor in the family of a Gniezno governor Joseph Skórzewski. Numerous trips across Polish territories and neighboring countries enabled him to come into direct contact with Jewish issues in Central and Eastern Europe, and his up till now unpublished memoirs shed light on some interesting aspects of the history of European Jews.The article consists of three parts. The first part presents direct or indirect contacts of Father Pochard with Jews during his trip to Bavaria, Saxony, Prussia, Wielkopolska, the land annexed by Russia and Lithuania. The second part shows Fr. Pochard’s reactions to the presence of Jews – dislike and avoiding closer contacts. There is also an attempt to show the difference in the positions of both the Catholic side, represented by Fr. Pochard, and the Jewish side, the climate of hostility and mutual prejudices. The third and last part shows cases where Fr. Pochard revises his views in contact with professionalism and honesty encountered in traveling Jewish innkeepers and merchants, and also other specific moments when there was escalation of tension in his relations with the Jews. The whole article is an interesting panorama of Christian-Jewish relations in the first half of the nineteenth century, when there were economic contacts but no cultural exchange.

Jews in Church: Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in Nineteenth-Century America

Studies of Jewish-Christian relations in the nineteenth century have largely centered on anti-Semitism, missionary endeavors, and processes of Protestantization. In this literature, Jews and Judaism are presented as radically separate from Christians and Christianity, which threaten them, either by reinforcing their difference or by diminishing it, whether as a deliberate project or as an unconscious outcome of pressure or attraction. And yet, Jews and Christians interacted with one another’s religious traditions not only through literature and discussion, but also within worship spaces. This paper will focus on the practice of churchgoing by Jewish individuals, with some attention to Christian synagogue-going. Most Jews went to church because of curiosity, sociability, or experimentation. Within churches, they became familiar with their neighbors and with Christian beliefs but also further clarified and even strengthened their own understandings and identities. For Jews, as for other Americans, the relationship between identification and spatial presence, belief and knowledge, worship and entertainment, were complicated and religious boundaries often unclear. The forgotten practice of Jewish churchgoing sheds light on the intimacies and complexities of Jewish-Christian relations in American history.

Mapping Jewish-Christian Relations from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (600-1800) - An Introduction to JCR-MIO

This brief article describes how the research team of the ERC-project JewsEast is preparing a major inventory of sources from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean that address Jewish-Christian relations in these regions. In it is explained what types of source material will be treated in the survey.