AJS Review: The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies

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...