Naroditsky, Daniel

11.29.18
History 115D
Professor Griffiths

Christian-Jewish Relations in the High Middle Ages: Annotated Bibliography

Introductory Paragraph

In this paper, I offer an analysis of the complex relationship between Christians and Jews
in Europe during the High Middle Ages. I contend that the relationship was defined by, and
evolved according to, the fundamental difference between the Christian-Jewish dynamic at a
theological level, and Christian-Jewish relations at the grassroots level. Whereas the latter was
characterized by relatively civil debate, Christians at the communal level were driven to commit
unspeakable acts of violence by the perpetuation of several myths and rumors that centered on
the belief that Jews were responsible for the death of Christ.

Annotated Bibliography

Abulafia, Anna Sapir. “Bodies in the Jewish-Christian Debate.” Framing Medieval Bodies,
edited by Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin, New York: Manchester University Press, 1994, pp.
123-137.

Anna Sapir Abulafia is an eminent British academic who specializes in religious history. In this
essay, Abulafia examines an aspect of the Christian-Jewish debate that has received scant
treatment in literary scholarship. According to Abulafia, the root of corporeal disagreement “was
the question how [sic] an ineffable, transcendent, majestic God could take on the body of a man”
(123). Abulafia goes on to show that most Christian theologians of the twelfth century cast
aspersions on the perceived inability of Jews to “understand the spiritual dimensions of the
doctrine [of Incarnation]” (124). Put another way, the prevailing theological opinion was that
Jews did not possess sufficient intelligence and reason to understand the Bible through an
allegorical lens. For instance, the eminent author and theologian Peter the Venerable argued that
“Jews reject metaphors and allegories which make it possible to use anthropomorphic language
when speaking about God” (128). Abulafia concludes that this mentality vitiated an informed
debate between Christians and Jews, since Christians literally believed their opponents to be
more animalistic than human in nature. I found Abulafia’s analysis to be both succinct and
penetrating, although it should be noted that she draws primary evidence exclusively from
theological and elite sources (i.e. monks and eminent social critics such as Peter Abelard). This
somewhat circumscribes the scope of her analysis, because the Christian-Jewish debate took on
entirely different contours at the grassroots level, between Christians who were illiterate and
whose conception of the two religions was decidedly less nuanced. Nonetheless, Abulafia’s
paper is a valuable source of information regarding a seldom-discussed aspect of the Christian-
Jewish relationship.

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Berger, David. “Mission to the Jews and Jewish-Christian Contacts in the Polemical Literature of
the High Middle Ages.” The American Historical Review, vol. 91, no. 3, 1986, pp. 576-
591.

David Berger is an eminent scholar of Jewish history who currently serves as the Dean of
Yeshiva College’s Graduate School of Jewish Studies. In this essay, he discusses the various
attitudes that medieval Christian scholars and theologians held in relation to the possibility of
converting Jews to Christianity. He argues that the historical and literary record does not entirely
lend credence to the notion that prior to the thirteenth century, Christian theologians held out
hope of bringing Jews to their side. He references the eleventh-century theologian Adam of
Perseigne, who refused a friend’s request to write an anti-Jewish polemic on the grounds that
“the Jews would remain blind and hard-hearted ‘until the fullness of the nations will come in’”
(579). Even during the eleventh century, a time commonly considered to represent a relatively
tolerant Christian populace, vitriolic statements that stressed the futility of arguing with Jews
were relatively common. One such statement, penned by Peter Damian, admonishes the pious
Christian not to take up arms against the Jews, “who will soon be virtually destroyed from the
face of the Earth” (Damian in Berger 580). Berger claims that with a few exceptions, Christian
theologians may have largely considered missionary work and religious debate to be a somewhat
lost cause from the beginning. To this end, Berger clarifies that works such as Peter Abelard’s
dialogue and Guibert de Nogent’s anti-Jewish treaties were likely the exception rather than the
rule. Although I found the essay’s organization to lack a great deal of structural cohesion,
Berger’s meticulous research and concrete arguments are tremendously valuable and furnish a
natural antecedent against a superficial view of the Jewish-Christian dynamic.

Funkenstein, Amos. “Basic Types of Christian Anti-Jewish Polemics in the Later Middle Ages.”
Viator, vol. 2, 1971: pp. 373-382.

Amos Funkenstein was a renowned Professor of History at U.C. Berkeley and the winner, in
1995, of the coveted Israel Prize in History. In this highly influential essay, Funkenstein
develops a taxonomy of anti-Jewish polemics that takes into account both historical events and
exegesis at every level of society. To this end, Funkenstein observes that while anti-Jewish
criticism retained surface-level similarities across the Middle Ages, the twelfth century
inaugurated a shift in the motivation behind, and implications of, the polemics. In the first place,
Funkenstein notes that economic and societal transformations played a central role in this shift,
as “from one minority among many, in the Carolingian (or even Ottonian) empire, possessing
privileges similar to other comparable minorities, they became conspicuous, a minority par
excellence” (377). Hence, what was once a diluted form of aggression, spread out among
countless minorities, became a focused stream of vitriol, exacerbated by Jews’ relatively stable
economic standing. This shift was paralleled by a “growing awareness among Christian
theologians of the existence of an extensive body of postbiblical Jewish literature besides mere
exegesis” (377). The Talmud and the Midrashim came to be seen as damning indications of the
extent to which Jewish scholars had abandoned logical thought, and as a sign that tolerance was
no longer a prudent strategy. In fact, the Talmud was frequently interpreted as forming the heart
of a secret and evil tradition that was put into action through the accumulation of Christian
blood. It follows that this fear, which undoubtedly spread to the masses, perhaps in even more
skewed and dramatized form, played a central role in the Blood Libel cases which began in the

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mid-twelfth century. Funkenstein’s analysis takes up only a dozen pages, yet it is replete with
peerless analysis supported by a basinful of primary evidence from both Christian and Jewish
theologians. Although it was written over 45 years ago, it has lost none of its relevance and
luster.

Kruger, Steven F. “Medieval Jewish/Christian Debate and the Question of Gender: Gilbert
Crispin’s Disputatio Iudei et Christiani.” Intersections of Gender, Religion and Ethnicity
in the Middle Ages, edited by Cordelia Beattie and Kirsten A. Fenton, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011.

In this essay, Steven F. Kruger puts under the microscope a seminal text authored c. 1092-3 by
Gilbert Crispin, the Norman Abbot of Westminster. Gilbert’s Disputatio presents an imagined
debate between a Christian and a Jew that is predictably aimed at upholding the rectitude of
various Christian beliefs and reinforcing the manifold faults attendant to the Jewish religion.
Kruger points out that imagined debates were a relatively common literary trope in medieval
times. However, Gilbert’s Disputatio stands in a category of its own “due to the intransigence
shown by the Jewish disputant in Gilbert’s text: he never gives in to the Christian argument”
(92). Indeed, Kruger’s central argument is that Gilbert accords a certain degree of respect to the
Jewish standpoint, refusing to make him a “yes-man for Christian positions” (93), yet the
disputation reinforces “the sense of how great the distance separating Jewish and Christian
positions is” (93). Though Kruger’s essay is oddly titled — gender seems to play at most a
tangential role in Kruger’s analysis — it furnishes an incredibly nuanced reading of a text that
may be said to mark the beginning of a systematic deterioration in Christian-Jewish relations. As
long as Christians believed that Jews could be converted into yes-men, a certain degree of mutual
understanding and tolerance persisted. Once this belief was extinguished, the chasm between
Jews and Christians grew wide enough to allow for vicious rumors and generalizations to
permanently distort one side’s view of the other.

Lasker, Daniel T. “The Impact of the Crusades on the Jewish-Christian Debate.” Jewish History,
vol. 13, no. 2, 1999, pp. 23-36.

Daniel T. Lasker is a professor of Jewish History at Brandeis University. He has authored several
books and dozens of articles on various aspects within the Christian-Jewish polemic. In this
concise yet comprehensive paper, he examines the ways in which the Crusades influenced the
Christian-Jewish dynamic in medieval Europe. To operationalize and quantify the impact, he
analyzes contemporary Jewish and Christian literary references to the Crusades with an eye
toward determining how the Crusades shifted attitudes on both sides. Lasker disputes the
commonly-held and outwardly self-evident assertion that the Crusades, which heralded the
“initial widespread massacre of Jews in western Europe” (23), set the tone for the subsequent
rapid deterioration of Christian-Jewish relations. To this end, Lasker argues that the Crusades, by
dint of the unspeakable plight that Crusaders visited upon Muslims, actually made Jewish
theologians even more confident in their rectitude of their religious philosophy. He quotes the
author and theologian Meir ben Simeon of Narbonne, who in a 1270 treatise argued that “The
Christians say the Muslims do not have a religion and are not saved by their faith…and the
Muslims say the same things about the Christians” (Meier in Lasker 27). “God,” Meier
continues, “exiled us among the two nations, so that neither one would have a pretext against us”

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(Meier in Lasker 27-8). Lasker concludes that the Crusades widened the chasm between
Christians and Jews, but were certainly not a sine qua non of the conflict. Christians and Jews at
both the theological and grassroots level had been fulminating at every aspect of the other’s
religion and worldview long before the Crusades, which did relatively little to change the nature
and tone of the hatred and mistrust. Lasker’s article, while somewhat polemical in its assertions,
is an indispensable tool for any scholar wishing to acquire a nuanced and fact-based
comprehension of the Christian-Jewish conflict in medieval Europe.

Marcus, Ivan G. “Jews and Christians Imagining the Other in Medieval Europe.” Prooftexts vol.
15, no. 3, 1995, pp. 209-226.

Ivan G. Marcus is a historian and a longtime professor of history at Yale University. In this
essay, he contributes to the discussion about the nature of anti-Jewish rhetoric at both a
theological and communal level. More specifically, he argues that the blood libels do not tell the
whole story of Christian-Jewish relations in the twelfth century. In fact, Marcus brings to bear
several historical events that indicated mutual understanding and measured dialogue between the
two sides. The early 1100’s saw numerous instances of Jews renouncing their faith and
converting to Christianity, the most prominent being the conversion of a prepubescent Jewish
boy from Cologne named Judah ben David Halevi, who “had a dream that the emperor brought
him to his palace and gave him many gifts” (216). He subsequently took on the name Hermannus
and ultimately rose to the position of Abbot in an eminent German monastery. At a theological
level, influential Jewish thinkers such as Ephraim of Bonn concentrated their efforts on
unearthing similarities between Christian and Jewish thought. In Ephraim’s Sefer zekhirah (Book
of Remembrance), written in the late twelfth century, the Rabbi uses “Christian symbols and
images, including the Passion” (210). To be sure, Marcus is unambiguous in his claim that
allegations of deicide and widespread mistrust dominated the Christian-Jewish dynamic, but he
makes a convincing case to show that “a hint of openness across the religious divide”
nonetheless persisted in the eleventh century and beyond.

Nirenberg, David. Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages.

Princeton University Press, 1996.

Dr. Nirenberg is a distinguished Professor of Medieval History at Princeton University. In this

monograph, he examines the systemic Christian persecution of Jews in the Middle Ages through
several innovative prisms. Though the utility of his work is slightly circumscribed by the
relatively late starting point (early fourteenth century), Nirenberg’s analysis is tremendously
useful because he considers anti-Jewish violence primarily from a grassroots standpoint, rather
than from a heavy-handed theological perspective. To this end, Nirenberg begins by recounting
the Shepherds’ Crusade of 1320, a movement that originated in Spain and led to the murder of
hundreds of Jews. Nirenberg theorizes that the titular shepherds were driven not by some
religiously-motivated thirst for Jewish blood, but for the concrete reason that they “saw the Jews
as fiscal agents of the state, which some Jews were” (48). He explains that heavy taxation on
Jews was an indirect financial imposition on Christians, many of whom lent money from Jews
and now faced higher interest payments. Furthermore, Christian townspeople knew that “Jews
were under the king’s protection and would be defended by him” (48-9), a privileged status that
built up jealousy and resentment. The Shepherds’ Crusade is one of several incidents in which a

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one-size-fits-all approach, particularly one that emphasizes religious underpinnings, fails to
explain the zeal and ostensible randomness attendant to these incidents. Nirenberg’s analysis
stands as an indispensable counterweight to scholarly works that examine the Jewish-Christian
debate from a more theological perspective.

O’Brien, Darren. The Pinnacle of Hatred: The Blood Libel and the Jews. Jerusalem, The Hebrew
University Magnes Press, 2011.

In The Pinnacle of Hatred, Dr. O’Brien, a senior research fellow at the University of Queensland
in Australia, brings to bear extensive statistical and exegetical analysis in an effort to trace the
origins, causes, and implications of the Blood Libel cases, accusations of ritual murder that
numbered over 100 were levelled by Christians against Jews between the early twelfth and mid-
fifteenth centuries. At the outset, O’Brien offers a useful taxonomy that identifies five distinct
types of murder accusations. The first level is that of a plain murder, with no signs of ritualistic
behavior. The fifth level is that of true blood libel cases, which involve a murder “conducted in a
prescribed order for religious or devotional purposes” (usually crucifixion), and which
necessarily involve the collection of the victim’s blood for subsequent use in religious rituals.
O’Brien claims that “in the period between 1137 and 1235, Jewish individuals or groups were
accused of committing 16 plain murders and seven crucifixion murders” (80). On the basis of the
extant documentation surrounding these cases, O’Brien hypothesizes that “the most influential
charge leveled against Jews by early Christian writers was that they and their descendants were
responsible for the murder of Jesus of Nazareth” (83). Although monks and other Christians in
positions of relative power evinced a more nuanced and theologically-based (though no less
acerbic) attitude toward Judaism, O’Brien convincingly argues that the locus of Anti-Semitism at
the communal level was squarely contained in the widespread belief that Jews effected the death
of Christ. To this end, O’Brien offers an extensive chronological and geographical analysis
through which he demonstrates that accusations or reaffirmations of Jewish deicide almost
invariably corresponded with a cluster of blood libel cases (and/or pogroms) in the region from
whence the accusation stemmed. For instance, the famous 1144 case of William of Norwich was
preceded, earlier that year, by the Cistercian monk Radulph’s exhortation for Crusaders to
“avenge themselves on ‘those who had crucified Jesus’” (Radulph in O’Brien 96). Although
O’Brien dedicates about a half of his volume to an at times speculative investigation of the ways
in which the Blood Libel cases influenced Nazi practices, his work on the Blood Libel cases
themselves is tremendously useful and well-researched.

Olszowy-Schlanger, Judith. “‘Meet you in Court’: Legal Practices and Christian-Jewish

Relations in the Middle Ages.” Jews and Christians in Medieval Europe, edited by John
Tolan, Turnhout, Belgium, Brepols Publishers, 2015, pp 333-347.

Historian Judith Olszowy-Schlanger offers a fascinating analysis of interactions between

Christians and Jews in courts across Medieval Europe. Most pertinent for my own paper is
Olszowy-Schlanger’s observation that “neither the knowledge nor the official recognition of the
other party’s legal language is self-explanatory” (343). Hence, it is far from a bygone conclusion
that Jews who inhabited closed-off communities and spoke Hebrew knew enough Latin to
properly acquit themselves in Christian courts. However, Olszowy-Schlanger argues that the
legal profession constituted one of the few areas in which Jews and Christians cooperated in an

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atmosphere of mutual understanding. To this end, Olszowy-Schlanger references several legal
documents — including a series of moneylending receipts, known as licentiae – which were
translated from Hebrew to Latin, and vice-versa. In fact, specialized legal workers known as
chirographers were tasked with the facilitation of mutual understanding in legal affairs.
Olszowy-Schlanger demonstrates that both Christian and Jewish chirographers were appointed,
working in close and relatively peaceful collaboration to maintain legal archives and translate
necessary documents. Although Olszowy-Schlanger’s paper is rather specialized, featuring
several long discussions about the nature of legal bureaucracy in Medieval Europe, it was still
instrumental in nuancing my understanding of the Jewish-Christian relationship. That there were
pockets of workplace collaboration, and perhaps even of friendship, calls into question any
designation of Jewish-Christian relations as entirely acrimonious.

Timmer, David E. “Biblical Exegesis and the Jewish-Christian Controversy in the Early Twelfth
Century.” Church History, vol. 58, no. 3, 1989: pp. 309-321.

In this paper, Timmer lays out a chronology and detailed analysis of hermeneutic criticism
leveled by Christian and Jewish twelfth-century theologians at the opposing religion. Timmer
argues that a fascinating transformation in the nature of Christian attitude toward Jewish
scripture can be observed in the Middle Ages. Anti-Jewish criticism in the eleventh century, even
if penned by otherwise learned monks or well-educated aristocratic figures, the locus of criticism
seldom diverging from the refrain that Jews did not believe in the deific status of Jesus Christ.
For instance, the Benedictine abbot Rupert of Deutz, writing in the late eleventh century, claimed
that Jews, when confronted when the role of Christ, are “full of clamor…for they do not want to
hear, but rather to counterpose words to words, and to shout senselessly, as if by shouting they
may seem to have prevailed, and to have reasons why they should not yield to the Gospel”
(Rupert in Timmer, 314). As Timmer points out, it is noteworthy that Rupert’s so-called
exegeses focused not the content of Jewish scripture, but on the tone in which it was delivered.
However, the mid-twelfth century heralded what Timmer calls a transition from the Augustine to
the mendicant school of Anti-Judaism, which held that the Talmud and the Midrashim
“contained material so offensive to Christianity that its confiscation, censorship, and even
destruction were warranted” (311). Whereas theologians who espoused the Augustine school
typically encouraged tolerance, sometimes viewing themselves as parental figures whose task
was to set the ignorant Jews on the right path, mendicant theologians perceived Jews to be an
incorrigible and malicious peoples who were intent on effecting the disrepute and ultimate
destruction of Christianity. Though I found Timmer’s analysis indispensable, and his chronology
deeply rooted in the literary record, he does not match the chronology with historical record,
making it somewhat difficult to conceptualize the role of the Crusades and the economic
downturn in engendering the transformation of Anti-Judaism. Though Timmer observes that the
newly-unified Papacy may have been a contributing factor, I believe that a far more extensive
discussion of the reasons behind the shift would strengthen the essay’s influence.

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