On the uses of history in Medieval Jewish Polemic against Christianity: The quest for the historical Jesus

Abstract

Within a Jewish context, critical comments by biblical exegetes, debates about the antiquity of kabbalistic works, historical reasons proposed for the commandments, and halakhic approaches to changing conditions have sharpened our awareness of medieval sensitivity to textual, theological, and social change. Jewish polemic against Christianity is a particularly promising field for the pursuit of this inquiry. Christianity emerged out of Judaism in historical times; its founder was a Jew; its sacred text is largely a collection of purportedly historical narratives about that Jew and his immediate successors; its fundamental claim speaks of the end of one age and the birth of another; it pointed to the historical condition of contemporary Jews as a confirmation of that claim, while Jews pointed to the unfolding of history in a patently unredeemed world as its most effective refutation. We usually identify exegesis and philosophy -as the core of the Jewish-Christian debate, but the role of history was no less central. (from Introduction)