Christians, gentiles, and the Talmud: A Fourteenth-Century Jewish response to the attack on Rabbinic Judaism

Abstract

The Jewish-Christian debate underwent a momentous transfor1nation in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. From time immemorial, Jews and Christians had argued about the alleged Christological meaning of verses in the Hebrew Bible, and in the high middle ages Jews began to exhibit growing sophistication in their philosophical critique of the central dogmas of Christian faith. Since the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries mark the maturation of the philosophical debate, their centrality to the history of polemic could well be defended on this basis alone.1 Nonetheless, these centuries were also marked by the growth of another, more innovative approach, which was fraught with acute danger for medieval Jewry. Christian polemicists began to study the Talmud. (from Introduction)