Judaism on Trial: Jewish-Christian Disputations in the Middle Ages (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization)

Rating:
Summary: fascinating
Review: During the Middle Ages, kings and popes would sometimes force Jews to engage in "disputations" with Christian scholars, in the hope that the Jews would thereby be converted (or at least embarrassed). In some of these disputations, the Jews were treated somewhat fairly, in others less so.

Maccoby describes three separate disputations: one in Paris in 1240, a second in Barcelona in 1263 (perhaps the fairest, and the most notable from the Jewish point of view because of the involvement of Nachmanides, one of the more well-known Jewish scholars of the medieval period), a third in Tortosa in 1413-14. In addition, he provides more-or-less contemporary summaries of the latter two disputations.

After reading Jaccoby's book, I was surprised how sophisticated both sides were by modern standards. The Christian "debaters" (often converts from Judaism) were much more sophisticated about Judaism than today's missionary-on-the-street; while the latter focuses solely on a few Biblical passages that he or she alleges shows Jesus to be Messiah, the former focused on Talmud and Midrash as well.

Christians took two very different lines: first, that the Talmud was a corruption of Biblical Judaism, and later that the Talmud actually supported Christianity. As to the latter, Christians relied heavily on Midrashic stories - for example, one which suggested that at the time of the Temple's destruction, the Messiah had already been born.

In response to the latter claim, Nachmanides not only attacked the Christian interpretations of the Midrash - but bluntly pointed out that this story is "either not true, or has some other interpretation derived from the secrets of the Sages." (p. 110). In other words, such Midrashic stories are fables designed to make a theological point, rather than literal truth.