Torah and the Messianic Age: The polemical and exegetical history of a rabbinic text

Abstract

It was taught in the school of Elijah: The world will endure six thousand years: two thousand desolation, two thousand Torah, two thousand the messianic age, but because of our many sins some of [those final two thousand years] have already passed.1 ¶

It is no accident that this is the first Talmudic passage adduced by a medieval polemicist as a direct demonstration of a specific Christian doctrine.2 The citation, which appears in a polemic written by Alan of Lille in the 1190’s, was surely not discovered by the author, who evinces no other familiarity with rabbinic texts and who composed the brief anti-Jewish chapter of his work “against the heretics” largely on the basis of a compilation that had already been used by Jacob ben Reuben in 1170. Consequently, although we cannot know if that particular compilation contained this argument, we can be quite confident that the passage from what Alan calls “Scola Helye,” or the school of Elijah, had embarked on its polemical career well before the final decade of the twelfth century.3 (from Introduction)