A generation of scholarship on Jewish-Christian interaction in the Medieval World

Abstract

To what extent has research in the past three decades changed our understanding of Jewish-Christian interaction in the pre-modern period? To what degree has the assumption that Jewish-Christian relations were dominated by the facts of irreconcilable theological differences, legal discrimination, and outbreaks of violence obscured the complexities of these relations? How have insights from other disciplines shed new light on Jewish- Christian interactions? In particular, how has the scholarly awareness of differences between “high” and “low” culture contributed to interpretation of these relations? How have the Holocaust, on the one hand, and the founding of the State of Israel, on the other, affected modern historiography of Jewish- Christian relations? Which aspects of Jewish-Christian relations remain least understood?