STOW KENNETH RSCR 2007-1 Medieval Jews On Christianity

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Stow - Medieval Jews on christianity 71
KENNETH STOW
MEDIEVAL JEWS ON CHRISTIANITY
The problem
Whatever medieval Jews said, or thought, about Christianity, one may be

sure that very little of it was good. Even at the time of Christian origins, Jews
quickly understood that the new religion’s claim to have succeeded to the
title of the «True Israel» challenged Judaism at its heart. Moreover, Jews
may have been able to live with what they viewed as Christianity’s wayward
beliefs. However, they could only view as subversive Christianity’s rejection
of Jewish law. It was that law’s collective observance that guaranteed the
Jews’ free practice of their religion in the Roman Empire and exempted them
from participation in local (pagan) cults. Jews had to be even more con-
cerned when Christianity came to power in the fifth century. Various church-
men challenged Jewish privilege, and the Emperors, from the time of
Constantine, began to issue discriminatory laws detrimental to Jewish civic
rights. These same churchmen were also suspicious of Jewish acts, which
they saw as potential threats to Christian purity. Over time, these suspicions
grew and spread to lay circles. In the Middle Ages, they sometimes resulted
in violence.
It was not that Jews in medieval Europe lived in a state of perpetual ten-
sion or in fear of daily attack. The many known examples of peaceful con-
tact and interchange, including cultural interplay, do not admit an interpreta-
tion of medieval Jewish life as an unremitting vale of tears. At the same time,
underlying feelings and emotions, tell a different story. Christians of all
stripes accepted unfounded accusations. They were especially susceptible to
claims that Jews murdered Christians or defiled the Host; and these charges
led to hostility and even violence. In their writings, Jews never refuted these
charges head on, but they did speak of the circumstances that gave them
birth, especially anxious as they were about the support instigators received
from lay or ecclesiastical leaders, who sometimes themselves invented the
libels. Jews did speak of the Eucharist, and they spoke of it disparagingly;
they correctly understood, and this we shall see, that the Eucharist lay at the
heart of all the accusations that too often ended in the loss of Jewish life1.
By contrast Jews and Christians thought much alike about a second
source of friction. Both agreed that there was little, if any justification for
lending at interest. No matter how readily Jews engaged in this practice and
no matter how much they knew it was indispensable for earning a living –
by the twelfth century very little else was left them, especially in the
European north – Jews still were uneasy about lending2. Their reservations
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72 Cristiani, ebrei, musulmani nell’Occidente medievale
were halachic, derived from Jewish law itself. The eleventh century Joseph
Tov Elem spoke sharply against those who mocked the Torah, saying: «If
Moses had known that {lending} was profitable, his Torah would not have
prohibited it»3. No doubt, this was didactic exaggeration, but indeed the
halachah did forbid Jews to take interest, not only from each other, but also
from Gentiles.
Jewish scholars were left in a quandary; lending to Christians was an
economic necessity. If Jews take interest from Christians, explained Rabbi
Isaac of Dampierre in the twelfth century, they do so from fear of going hun-
gry, not by right4. Negative attitudes toward lending were thus not a Christian
monopoly. Christians, however, went further and turned lending, but espe-
cially by Jews, into a social cancer. Franciscan preachers ranting against
Jewish lending in fifteenth century Italy easily touched a responsive nerve,
although the effect of their preaching was often short lived. In England, two
centuries earlier, it was the will of the gentry, together with that of the cler-
gy, that Jews be dismissed from the realm; both perceived Jewish lending as
threatening social stability. And this was despite Pope Innocent III’s implicit
recognition of the legitimacy of Jewish lending at the Fourth Lateran Council
of 12155.
These attitudes and fears were not produced by economic ignorance.
Medievals well understood terms like liquidity, balance of trade, the com-
parative value of currencies, and the intricacies of devaluation.6 Yet the sub-
ject of interest – or usury, as it was always called – was governed by unique
rules; interest, by its nature, was considered repugnant. Its taking moved
even kings to excess. As the thirteenth century Meir b. Simeon put it, the
king exceeds the demands of the pope. In a letter he «would have liked to
send to [King Louis IX of France]», Meir charged Louis with paving the way
for his Counts to fleece their Jews. Jews were going hungry, and they had lost
the principal on their loans and the interest as well. Why, Meir asked, had the
king improperly annulled the oaths of repayment that lenders had sworn, a
step, Meir continued, that the pope would never take. The king was also vio-
lating the pacts his fathers had made with the Jews7.
The “sins” of lending at interest were multiple. In strictly canonical
terms, taking interest was considered akin to stealing time, which belonged
to God alone; it was also considered an act of war. In the case of the Jews,
lending was also seen as something more. It was to attack the Corpus
Christi, an image that medievals invoked in various guises. The Corpus
Christi was at once the memory of the real presence, the physical body of
Christ the person; it was the Eucharist, the sacrament itself, the corpus
verum; it was also the corpus mysticum, or the body of believers and the
Church; and it was the political body, most often the city, it, too, called the
Corpus Christi and sanctified through periodic holy processions called roga-
tions. That Jewish lending was perceived as an attack on all of these mani-
festations of the Corpus Christi is made clear by the accusation hurled at the
Jews in 1468 by the radical Franciscan Fortunato Coppoli. Through lending,
he said, the «Jewish dogs» are sucking dry the blood of the town.8 This
denunciation effectively transformed lending at interest into a – not so figu-
rative – accusation of ritual murder; the link between sucking the town’s
“blood” and attacking the Corpus Christi should be self-evident. But the
import is greater yet. By effectively viewing the taking of interest as an act
of ritual murder, Coppoli was calling the two prime sources of friction
between Jews and Christians one. To lend was identical to maligning the
Eucharist. But why did Coppoli not say this outright? Why did he rely on his
use of “dogs” to make his point, no doubt confident, moreover, that his
meaning would be grasped? Indeed, it is to the name, «Jewish dogs», that we
now must turn. By knowing this name’s source and how Jews responded to
it, we will be able to understand so much the better to what – and against
what – Jewish arguments and views of Christianity were being directed.
By 1468, calling Jews dogs had a long history, which began in the words
of Matthew 15:26. There, Christ tells a Canaanite woman who has appealed
to him for help that he has brought the bread (soon to be identified as the
Eucharist) for the children, not for the dogs. Matthew’s dogs, explained John
Chrysostom (about 387) were the Jews, whom the Christians had replaced as
God’s children and for whom Christ had reserved the (Eucharistic) bread,
that special bread which was also associated with blood (much as Paul’s says
in I Corinthians 10:16)9. Jewish lending, described as dogs sucking blood,
was thus unmistakably the theft of the «bread», indeed, an attack on the very
corpus verum that is the Eucharist, and indubitably a form of ritual murder.
The picture of the Jew as dog was also ubiquitous. In addition, the vision
of the Jewish dog stealing the bread personified the Jewish challenge to the
Christian claim to have replaced the Jews and Judaism as the Verus Israel (as
Paul argued in Romans 9-11); the idea that Christianity had superseded
Judaism and that the Jews stubbornly refused to accept «the truth» was at the
core of Christian depictions of Jews throughout the Middle Ages. There was
also the potential for violence in the Jews’ so-called hard-heartedness, their
refusal to accept Christ, which was linked inextricably to a vision of Jews
seeking to violate the Christian essence, namely, the Corpus Christi, which
was at once the Christian whole, as well as the individual Christian, again
following Paul in I Corinthians: «we are one bread, though we are many».
Fears about Jewish perversity electrified Crusaders setting out for the Holy
Land in 1096. It aroused the crusading nobility, especially at Mainz, to dec-
imate the city’s Jews; there, and elsewhere, too. The Jews of the Rhineland
were surrogates for the Muslims, who had «stolen the bread» by ending
Byzantine Christian hegemony in the Holy City of Jerusalem. No wonder
that later on, in 1298 and afterward, libels of host desecration sparked mur-
derous riots throughout Germany. Ritual murder accusations also stirred
rulers, like Henry III of England, who executed nineteen Jews on his hearing
of the death of Hugh of Lincoln in 1255. Earlier, in 1171, the Count of Blois
ordered had over thirty Jews burned to death on a charge in which no actual
body was ever discovered or a victim identified. In the 1180s, the young king
Philip Augustus expelled the Jews from his realm believing they were con-
suming the hearts of Christian children as though sacrificially inverting the
Eucharist10.
To be sure, Church doctrine explicitly made room for Jews to live among
Christians. St. Paul had clearly enunciated the rule that in the course of
Christian salvation, the eventual ingathering of the Jews (into the communi-
ty of the faithful) was vital; and the later Roman law, which was so inter-
twined with that of the Church, called Jews cives11. Yet there was also con-
stant anxiety about Judaizing, which grew (obliquely) out of Pauline teach-
ings. When he used this term, Paul meant Christians corrupting their own
salvation and that of other Christians through engaging in Jewish acts like
circumcision. Later, the term cam to mean Christians endangered by Jews
wiles: the idea of the “thieving Jewish dog” enlarged. Contact with Jews was
perilous. To dine at a Jews’ table caused imperfection. To have sexual con-
course with a Jew did the same. And should one accept the Eucharist in such
a state of impurity – much as Cyprian in the third century had said of priests
he called lapsi, who first participated in idolatrous imperial sacrifice in order
to avoid persecution, but then returned to offer the Eucharist – it was disas-
trous. Rather than receiving the Eucharist’s salutary effects, the result was
pollution. A priest who dined with Jews, or worse, would, like the lapsus,
pass his own infection on to others. The Jew was the Eucharist’s worst
enemy. At one point, it was said that Jewish vision, and even Jewish hearing,
let alone Jewish noise, might affect the sacrament adversely12.
It is this context which explains why the fifteenth century friars who con-
demned Jewish lending likened the interest taken by Jewish lenders to the
blood sucked by «dogs». It was against this background, too, that one Dr.
Tiberino, writing of the Jews’ alleged murder of Simon of Trent in 1475,
employed the same image. When Simon was brought before the Jews to be
tortured, said Tiberino, they began ululare, to bark. This same Latin word
was also used to describe the tenor of Jewish prayer. The Jews were barking
at the Eucharist they wished to destroy by devouring. And the Eucharist is
what ritual murder victims were. Werner of Oberwessel, in 1287, was called
at once a surrogate corpus verum, the Eucharist itself, the embodiment of the
corpus mysticum, the Church and the body of the faithful, and, to be sure, the
image of Christ’s real – corporeal – presence. In the case of Werner, it was
also said that Jews made ritual use of his blood. Viewed as an attack on a sur-
rogate corpus verum, Werner’s martyrdom was a libel of Host desecration as
well13.
Anxieties about purported Jewish insidiousness reached to the highest
circles. Pope Innocent III spoke of Jewish antagonism in a complaint filled
letter filled sent to the count of Nevers in 1208, At the time of the grape har-
vest, he wrote, Jews pressed the grapes wearing linen boots, took the best
quality wine for their own ritual and pleasure, and sloughed off the rest,
which they found virtually disgusting, to Christians. There was danger that
this bilge might later become the blood of Christ in the sacrament. A few
years earlier, at an episcopal synod held in Paris about the year 1200, Odo of
Sully ordered priests «to forbid Christians every Sunday during the grape
harvest from acquiring the residue of the grapes, which the Jews press in the
way they do to produce horrid filth in contempt of the eucharistic sacrament
that might be effected from this foul wine and somehow dirtied». And was
not Innocent III about to make the Eucharist an annual obligation in 1215?
Any threat to its sanctity or efficacy had to be staunched, including by keep-
ing Jews at a safe distance, and recognizable. Hence, Innocent imposed on
Jews a unique costume, an obligation that ended with Jews wearing a special
patch, or badge, or particularly colored hats, or even earrings for women14.
The overall Jewish Responsz
Yet as Jews absorbed the sense of this novel edict, they must have won-
dered. The Church’s drive to prevent corruption through contact seemed to
signal that it had adopted the Jews’ own teachings about purity, which, too,
were focused on avoiding polluting contact. Yet, if this was so, then the
Church and, principally, individual Christians were also using their version
of these teachings to stigmatize the Jews and call them impure. This Jews
may have sensed as early as the writings of the ninth century Agobard of
Lyons. Agobard fulminated against Jews and Christians dining together. In
the thirteenth century, Johannes Teutonicus imputed Jews with a desire to
corrupt, saying they «deceived between courses». Conversely – and indica-
tively – it was said of Bishop Battista de’ Giudice, who argued that the trial
of the Jews accused of murdering Simon of Trent in 1475 was a miscarriage
of justice, that surely the bishop was a good Christian. For it had never been
heard that the bishop had ever dined with a Jew15.
These arguments were common, and Jews must have heard them. They
may have also known the canon laws that virtually equated participating in
Jewish rituals with taking part in pagan, idolatrous rites, and they may have
identified in the writings of John Chrysostom, whose polemical purpose was
anything but literary, the claim that Jews had been stripped of the earlier
purity that had made them worthy participants in sacrifices offered at the
Temple altar16. They may even have recognized the adoption and adaptation
of Ezekiel 44:7, «the sacrifice, my bread, which is the fat and the blood», into
I Corinthians 10:16-18, with its references to «blood, bread, body, and
altar»17 Such reliance on Jewish ideas may have made some Jews consider,
beginning with the time of Paul himself, precisely what were Christian inten-
tions with respect to Jews and Judaism. Indeed, in the years when Paul was
writing, were not the Jerusalem Temple and its rites still an issue in the pres-
ent tense (the Temple was destroyed in the year 70 CE, well after Paul’s
death)? Already in the writings of Paul, accordingly, there is a hint of com-
petition over questions of election and purity. It does not matter whether the
exact Jewish and Christian definitions of ritual purity differ; it matters only
that in the argumentation – which we have seen and will now see especially
from the Jewish side – both Jews and Christians said that they were pure and
that this purity was a sign of having been chosen as God’s children. In the
same vein, Jews would insist that they were not, as Chrysostom had said,
polluting dogs, unfit to receive the divine bounty.
Jews differed from Christians, however, in that, unlike Agobard and his
ilk, they did not perceive of Christians as capable of transmitting impurity to
them as persons; they did prohibit Christians from touching their food and
especially wine, to guarantee that these items remained kosher – but, it was
only these items themselves that became disqualified, not the recipient. Jews,
furthermore, have never had an equivalent for the Eucharist, albeit, in the
Middle Ages, they were accused of using Christian blood eucharistically18.
Jewish sacrifice itself has been substituted for two thousand years by prayer,
and that alone, alongside the reading of the Torah. Jewish fear of Christians
thus focused not on Jews being polluted personally or their communities as
such ritually contaminated. What Jews feared for, and with justice, was their
physical well-being. Christian fears are better classified as anxieties, the
unfounded belief that Jews were forever seeking to assault the Eucharist, in
which Christians, again following Paul in Corinthians, saw embodied both
the whole of Christian society and their own, individual Christian selves.
As for the possibility of Jews acting out against Christians in fact, the
one-word reply of François Halkin, a Jesuit priest of the early twentieth cen-
tury and a major student of saints’ lives, should suffice, who said that the
very idea of Jews doing this was inanité. Responding, a few years later, to
his own question, whether there was any truth in the libels of ritual murder,
another Jesuit and a scholar of the Eucharist, Petrus Browe, echoed Halkin,
saying simply: Nein19. The Jewish response to these charges was strictly ver-
bal. The remark of one nineteenth century Anglican divine that it was a mir-
acle Jews did not lash out in response to Christian accusations was pure rhet-
oric. Had Jews responded violently, the results would have been disastrous.
Jews responded to Christian irrationality by launching biting literary sallies,
whose fiercest weapon was irony and black humor, achieved mostly by tak-
ing Christian arguments and turning them deftly on their heads. Through
humor, Jews might achieve a modicum of satisfaction. Indeed, Jewish irony
was so effective that Christians began to respond in kind.
Jewish Irony and Inversion
Perhaps the most ingenious – if perhaps the most unintentionally ironic–

illustration of purposeful Jewish irony is the long tract known as Yossipon,
written about 953. This tract, authored by the medieval Yosef ben Gurion
(not the ancient ben Mattityahu) is ostensibly a translation of Josephus
Flavius’ Jewish War20. Skillful additions, however, transform the Yossipon
into an original statement of political theory21. Yossipon’s high point is an
unorthodox history of the founding of Rome based on Latin historians. Its

tale is that the Kittim, one of the early biblical peoples, settled in the Roman
countryside, later to be joined by Zepho, a grandson of Esau, who was flee-
ing westward from Egypt, where Joseph had imprisoned him. Zepho had first
reached Carthage, and, then, together with the mythical Aeneas, he arrived at
Rome, where he married a local woman. His grandson, Latinus, founded
Roman culture. Roman myth in which Aeneas marries the daughter of
Latinus had neatly been conflated with the rabbinic midrash, or legend22
which says that Zepho wandered “West”23.
However, Yossipon then expanded on the midrash to argue that Zepho
was followed by others of Esau’s progeny, who, too, united with the
Etruscans, significantly turning all of Latin – read eventually Christian – cul-
ture into a derivative of that of Esau. This meant that the Christians were the
descendants of Esau, not, as they said, of the Kittim, the offspring of Noah’s
son Yefet. And Esau is precisely what Jews said Christians were. Jews even
used Esau’s second name, Edom (ruddy), referring to his complexion, as a
synonym for Christianity and Christian lands.
Yossipon was out to show that this Jewish interpretation was unim-
peachable. He began with his revised history, but he then moved on, to pro-
duce what in his day passed for airtight ethnography. The Arabs, he said,
called the Christians, the people of Rome (Ahl al-Rum), the Banu Asfar. In
cultured medieval Arabic, this name means sons of the Red One. Asfar, how-
ever, is also the Arabized form of the Greek translation of the name Zepho
as it appears in the Septuagint, a translation the Christians considered holy.
How then could the Christians deny Yossipon’s historical revisions? More,
how could they continue saying, as they had been since the time of Paul, that
not they, but the Jews, were Esau’s heirs?
This picture also followed God’s plan of four successive kingdoms,
those of Babylonia, Persia, Greece, and Rome, as set out in the Book of
Daniel. «Now», Yossipon therefore writes, (chap. 84), it is God’s will that
«the elder rules the younger, and there is no disgrace or shame... You now are
the younger who is bowed before the Roman ... But your time will come, ...
and then you will rule the Nations». The divinely ordered soteriological sce-
nario – God’s choice of the Jews – had not been altered. Paul’s claim in
Romans, followed by all Christian exegesis, which said the precise opposite,
that the Jews were now Esau and the Christians Jacob, the true Israel (Jacob’s
second name), was worthless.
Yossipon had worked a grand inversion of motifs. However, he was only
one of many to have done this. Jews, but, in fact, Christians as well, consis-
tently turned to literary inversions to make polemic points; and at times it is
not clear who was inverting whom. In a biography of the tenth century Wazo
Bishop of Liege, a debate between the bishop and a Jew rests on a wager,
which the Jew loses, who is obliged to convert. The reverse occurs in the so-
called Scroll of Ahimaaz, composed (apparently) in 1054, only shortly after
the story from Liege. A debate between one Hananel and the Bishop of Oria
also revolves around a wager. However, this time, thanks to divine interven-
tion, the Jew wins. But what Hananel wins is wine, not the bishop’s soul.
Ahimaaz did not think readers so credulous as to believe that might hap-
pen24.
The real interest in these stories – no doubt entirely, or nearly entirely,
literary invention– is their reciprocity. In one such “mirror” story, both Latin
and Hebrew versions attributed the Jews with fashioning an image of Christ
out of wax. According to the Latin Chronicle of Trier, Archbishop Eberhard
of that city: «initiated a persecution (in 1066) and then decreed that unless
the [Jews] became Christians on the following Sabbath, they would be
expelled from the city». In response, the Jews fashioned a waxen image,
which they had a renegade monk baptize and then burn. When it is half
burned, the bishop becomes ill and dies – which, of course, is at just the
moment the mass baptism was supposed to begin. The Hebrew counterpart
dates itself to about 992; its real date of composition is unknown. A renegade
accuses the other Jews of Limoge of placing a waxen image of the local
noble in the Ark in the synagogue and of crucifying it. The delation, howev-
er, fails, and the Jews are miraculously saved25.
Both sides needed these fictions. To Jews, they offered reassurance; to
the Christian clergy, they were a vehicle for expressing their radical will. But
these stories also convey Christian anxieties, as Jews well knew, and for
which finding a proper response was a challenge; and this was still the ear-
lier Middle Ages, when the libels of Jews murdering Christian children, or
abusing the Host, had not yet matured. Jews also had to fear conversionary
pressures, which were as equivocal as they were sometimes determined,
because they were invariably sheathed in the doubt that converts were sin-
cere. One such convert, from about the early thirteenth century, a certain
Maestro Andreas, wrote petulantly about the warnings converts received:
«You will look around you; people from every part will come before you. One will
say: “Take good care of your comings and goings,” and another: “May your coming
be a blessing.”A third, however, will say: “What you have begun, finish;” –a fourth:
“Be on guard for your soul”; –a fifth: “Be on the watch not to ruin your reputation
among us”; –a sixth: “Be strong and a man”; –a seventh: “If your are false to our
‘Torah’, you will pay with your life”; –an eighth: “Guard your tongue and what you
say, and keep yourself far from trouble”. There are also those among them who will
whisper, saying: “See how great is our wisdom and how clever we are; they have
brought us an ’Ish ’ivri (a Jewish man) to mock us. But [Jews like him] are the lowly
and the despised, the rash and the foolish. They are gluttons and drunkards, as we
can plainly see. And when they are naked, barefoot, and worked up into a lather, they
will go to a place where they are not recognized, and there they will return to their
Jewish origins»26.
The inconstancy or the disgrace of converts, as Christians and Jews

respectively saw it, was a constant theme, it, too, expressed through “inver-
sions.” The late sixth century Gregory of Tours wrote that in 576, Avitus,
Bishop of Clermont, presided over the mass baptism of five hundred Jews.
This ceremony, with the Jews all dressed in white, took place only ten days
after the violent destruction of the Jews’ synagogue by the people of
Clermont. One Jew had agreed to convert, but during the procession to the
baptismal font, another threw rancid oil onto his head. At the first opportu-
nity, the populous rioted. Nevertheless, Avitus pressed on with his sermons
until nearly the whole of the Jewish community agreed to embrace
Christianity – admittedly miraculously, for Avitus persuaded the Jews to con-
vert simply by invoking the eschatological vision of John 10:16, which
speaks of mankind’s future union into a single flock under a single pastor.
More likely, to judge from the warning made by Pope Gregory the Great
only some years later, the miracle was worked through force27.
Our interest, though, is not the miracle, but the violence a rite of con-
version could produce, and its memory. Motifs like this one in the tale of
Gregory of Tours have a long life. Even four centuries later, Ahimaaz ben
Paltiel (in the “Scroll” mentioned above) could tell of a riot at just such an
occasion. What prompts Ahimaaz’s riot, however, is not the Jew attacking
the potential convert, but the reverse: reneging on a conversionary promise.
The story ends with the anti-hero, one Theophilo, «beloved of God», repent-
ing, to reaffirm his Judaism, on the eve of the Day of Atonement. Jewish
commitment triumphs, not mass conversion, as in the story told by Gregory
of Tours.
Ahimaaz’s tale is much, too, like the later one told about Rabbi Amon,
whose flirtation with conversion ends with Amnon dieing in order to reaffirm
his ancestral faith. Yet, in Amnon’s story, whose purpose is to explain myth-
ically the origin of the Unetaneh Toqef, the central prayer of the Day of
Atonement, there is an underlying moral. Amnon’s punishment for reneging
is decreed by neither the Emperor, nor any non-Jewish power, as happened
with Theophilo. It was ordained by God himself. The interweaving of themes
verges on genius. Amnon asks the Emperor for three days’ grace, to ponder
his choice, a period, which, in fact, is provided by Imperial law. Yet these
three days are also the period requested by the so-called Ten Martyrs exe-
cuted by the Romans during the Bar-Kochba revolt of the years 132-35, an
interlude these martyrs used to petition God, who ultimately pronounced
them guilty. The motif had been transferred to the story of Rabbi Amnon28.
Through inverted motifs, therefore, Christians played on the theme of
inconstancy: converts were as fickle in their allegiance to God as all Jews
were said to be. Jews, by contrast, stressed the heroism of their tempted, but
ultimately loyal brothers. Those unable to resist, like Andreas, ended their
days in deep regret. Those who overcame temptation, even at the price of
their lives, were rewarded with redemption. Both Amnon and Theophilo are
transfigured and taken into heaven. Christian tales of martyrdom are no dif-
ferent. Only here, the Virgin intervenes to carry martyrs heavenward. It is
surely no accident that the motive of transfiguration through the Virgin’s
agency is exceptionally clear in the story of a Christian Theophilo who had
been led into sin by none other than a Jewish magician29.

The Virgin’s intervention is most spectacular in the story of the Jew of
Bourges. There she saves a young Jewish boy from a fiery death, whose
father had thrown him into a furnace upon learning that his son intended to
receive the Eucharist30. This tale was retold many times, over the centuries,
and in many formats, and needless to add, the lad is often depicted as the
Host itself. To this kind of story, as we shall see, Jews responded by calling
the Eucharist simply food and an idolatrous sacrifice. They negated other
Christian beliefs, too. The prayer known as Alenu leshabeah, which empha-
sizes Jewish election and is said to have originated in the singing of Jewish
martyrs burned to death at Blois in 1171, concludes with a paragraph that
one scholar has said emphasizes repeatedly God’s unity as opposed to
Trinitarianism31. Christian behavior was also made the butt of rebuke. The
late twelfth century Ephraim of Bonn mocked the Ordeal, admittedly at
about the same time as Christians began to denounce it themselves.
However, they denounced it, since the practice seemed to bind God by
magic. Ephraim denounced it through ironic inversion. The innocent, he
said, float rather than sink, as the actual Ordeal stipulates32.
Christians responded by accusing the Jews of creating a surrogate Jewish
Eucharist. This they did in the form of the paste of fruit and nuts known as
haroseth eaten at Passover along with a bitter herb (often lettuce in Sefardi
communities). This mixture was said to contain the blood of ritual murder
victims, and it was also said that by eating it, Jews thought they acquired sal-
vation, much as Christians receiving the Host forwarded their own redemp-
tion33.
It has also been argued that some Christians viewed a well-known
Jewish initiation ceremony of children into study as a eucharistic inversion.
This is based on the words of Rigord, the biographer of King Philip II
Augustus of France in the later twelfth century, who said that Jews eat dough
balls in Eucharistic chalices that had illegally been pawned. In the actual cer-
emony, children were given cakes with honey, or an apple, or an egg simi-
larly sweetened. Yet it is doubtful Jews would be so foolish as to use a
eucharistic chalice in a ceremony parts of which may have been public.
Moreover, if true, this accusation would suggest that Jews had partially
adopted a eucharistic concept, which, as just said, seems unlikely. What is
most probable is that Rigord’s words convey his impression of what went on
in this ceremony, not what really took place; he had transformed it (erro-
neously) into a realization of his worst fears34.
Jews, too, restructured reality. They were especially fond of fictions that
allowed them to express themselves through innuendo and to avoid direct
confrontation with unpalatable ideas, but also with potentially angered
rulers. To depict the Jewish political plight and to emphasize what was per-
ceived as papal obedience to the law, as opposed to willful royal violation,
one text, commonly known as The 1007 Anonymous, inverts the story (this
time an internal inversion) of the biblical Judge Ehud ben Gerah. Unlike
Ehud, who tricked the dangerous King Eglon of Moab into an attic so that he
can murder him, the hero in the 1007 story invites the pope into a secret room
in order to tell him that the latter is (literally) the Vicar of God35. The Ehud
motif reappears in letters found in the unique manuscript that retells the story
of the executions in Blois in 1171. Here, however, it is the king who refuses
the invitation to talk in private; the words ascribed to him ominously cite the
critical passage of the Ehud story, Judges 3:19, also cited by The 1007
Anonymous. The black humor and bitter irony that inspired these letters
attributes the king with knowing better. He will not be a victim – like Eglon
– with whom, of course, he is being identified. He (the he being most likely
Phillip Augustus, although readers have often thought the reference is to
Louis VII) correctly perceives that those he considered his tanquam servi (as
the Jews came to be called in thirteenth century France) were really tanquam
assassini36.
It is pragmatism, however, that replaces humor in the rabbinic interpre-
tations of the Talmudic passage (tractate) Avodah Zarah 2a, which pro-
pounds that three days before and after idolatrous festivals, no commerce
with idolaters is permitted. Had this rule been applied, dealings with
Christians – considered idolators and having a festival at least once in seven
days – would have been impossible. But this rule had never been put into
effect. Jews freely traded with Christians, lent money, and sold wine. How
then was the contradiction to be justified, and, more, how could this be done
while preserving the time-honored Jewish principle of Christian idolatry
(Christian laws like Christianorum ad aras returned the compliment)?
Indeed, the dialogue that occurs at this point in commentaries on the
Talmudic text rejects the opinion of those who want to say that the rule does
not apply to Christians since Christianity is not idolatry. The solution was
proffered by the towering authority R. Jacob Tam (d. 1171), who said that the
Talmud only prohibited trade in items to be used exclusively in idolatrous
sacrifice; and this, a later writer added, exempted even the sale of wine.
Christian sacrificial offerings, it was said, are in the form of money, and their
«offerings [of food, goods, etc.]» are «for the pleasure» of the «priests and
monks». Pragmatic necessity had triumphed without trampling on hallowed
theory37.
Jews could not speak so openly when they were forced to defend them-
selves in true debate. What actually happened in these debates nonetheless
remains hidden, for the records of the proceedings have survived highly edit-
ed, just like those of purely literary creations; they were also composed well
after the fact. The subject of debate, whether the debate was literary or real,
was often the alleged Christological content of verses in the Hebrew Bible,
for instance, as in the encounter, about the time of Agobard of Lyons,
between the Spanish convert Petrus Alphonsi and the sometime priest and
convert to Judaism, Bodo-Eliezer. By contrast, the need, beginning sometime
in the later twelfth century, to defend rabbinic literature led to open alterca-
tion and, sometimes, to surprises. The thirteenth century Moses ben
Nahman, in the text of the so-called Dispute of Barecelona of 1263, said that
Jews were bound to the text of the Talmud, but not the midrash. The distinc-
tion was artificial; so much of the Talmud is itself allegorical midrashic
explanation. Nahmanides, as Rabbi Moses is known, was writing out of
fear38.
A deadly attack on rabbinic literature had begun about 1236, when the
convert Nicholas Donin composed and sent to Pope Gregory IX a tract con-
taining over thirty charges against the Talmud, in whose aggadic (midrashic)
sections in particular, Donin claimed to have found blasphemies such as the
malediction of non-Jews and the attribution to God of human emotions. The
Talmud was also said to view Jesus as the son of a whore39. Later, the Do-
minican Raymundus Martinus would later say that contemporary Talmudic
Judaism was a perverse set of false practices given the Jews by the demonic
Bentalamion40, supporting these charges with ample midrashic citations41.
Donin’s further charge, that the Talmud constituted a nova lex, a new and
perverse version of biblical Judaism, was not unprecedented.
As early as about 135, Justin Martyr had accused Jews of falsifying the
biblical text. Jews certainly had taken the Gospel story and revised it, in fact,
to the point of burlesque. The uncomplimentary story of Jesus’ origins found
in a small tract known as the Toledoth yeshu (The Life of Jesus) was known
from the time of Agobard of Lyons. The Jewish sallies were biting. In this
and other texts, later censored by Christian Hebraists, Jesus was pictured as
a magician who had dealings with Satan. Jesus was described as a bastard,
the son of a harlot and a procurer, or as a rebel who deserved to be hanged.
The Apostles were all found guilty of capital offenses. The name Gospel,
evangelion in Greek, was made the butt of a Hebrew pun: Aven Gilayon or
Avon Gilayon, the blank or sinful page; Christian places or worship were
considered more despicable than the temples of idolaters. A benediction call-
ing for the destruction of sectaries was introduced into daily Jewish prayers.
It was also said that the sectaries (a constant circumlocution for Christians
by the second or third century) were worse than all other “factions” or
pagans (a claim, it is worth noting, that appears – with reference to Jews –in
Gratian’s 1140 textbook of canon law, the Decretum, in the canon peiores).
Jewish midrash also responded frontally to Pauline teachings. It insisted that
repentance comes through deeds, not faith, and it scoffed at Paul’s notion
that God «had replaced the Jews with a new people»42.
These negative images were no doubt encouraged by Emperor
Heraclius’s edict of 634 that outlawed the practice of Judaism (likely only in
the East or in parts of the Land of Israel); Heraclius may have been imitat-
ing the lead of the Visigothic kings, who ordered all Jews in the Iberian
Peninsula baptized in 61343. Jewish polemic at this time became furtive and
esoteric. The Antitrinitarian verses of Yosi ben Yosi stress God’s unity: There
was “none after” and “none before [Him]”44. Myths, too, like that of Sefer
Zerubbabel made their appearance. Zerubbabel, the descendant of the House
of David, is guided to the gates of Rome by the angel Michael, also known
as Metatron. There, from the lips of the messiah, who is sitting at the gates
binding his wounds, Zerubbabel hears a marvelous tale of two messiahs. The
first, the Messiah ben Yosef, would perish in battle; the second, the Messiah
ben David, would defeat the arch-enemy, Armilus, who is Christ and Caesar
combined – perhaps to be identified with Heraclius45. The feeling that kings
were nefarious, so forcefully expressed by Jews in the thirteenth century, had
originated quite early.
But did the Jews know Christianity other than from outside as a perpet-
ual adversary? And how conversant were they in Christianity’s inner work-
ings, as well as in Christian culture? Christian intellectual influences on
Jews, in the strict sense of the direct absorption of high culture, are hard to
measure. Meir b. Samuel, for one, in the thirteenth century, knew at least
parts of the Vulgate, and he responded on more than one occasion to its text
and to specific interpretations46. Much earlier, Jews had sought out
Christians to study “science”. The tenth century southern Italian Shabbetai
Donnolo tells of his non-Jewish teachers, although he argues that what they
are teaching is really present in Jewish lore, too, when properly read47.
Donnolo was not alone. Jacob Anatoli in the thirteenth century made fre-
quent use of the works of Michael Scot, an enigmatic figure Anatoli knew
personally from their meetings at the court of Frederick II in Sicily. A few
decades later Judah Romano translated Latin works into Hebrew, including
those of Boethius, Albertus Magnus, Alexander of Hales, and the political
theorizing of Giles of Rome48. Notably, Hebrew translations often appeared
within a few years of the Latin original. However, if Jews did participate in
mainstream culture, they expressed themselves through Hebrew. In addition,
their borrowing of forms, motifs, and even content from Christian culture did
not prevent them from rejecting Christian religious interpretations out of
hand.
Christians were clearly influenced by the writings of Jews, although they
may not have known these writings at first hand until sometime in the later
twelfth century. Christian interest in rabbinic literature began no later than
the ninth century, as the unflattering comments of Agobard and Rabanus
Maurus attest. This knowledge through hearsay led to unfortunate error.
Christian savants were unaware that the attack on several Talmudic passages
by the early twelfth century convert Peter Alfonsi had removed these texts
from their original midrashic setting, which disparaged only pagans49.
Alfonsi’s false readings also endured, to be revived about forty years later by
the Cluniac Abbot, Peter the Venerable.
Matters changed in the thirteenth century. Christian study of the Bible,
Hebrew, and Aramaic formed a natural gateway to the Talmud. Those who
taught Christians Hebrew were often converts, but Christians also studied
directly with Jews. Christians were also reading Jewish works in translation.
Thomas Aquinas cited the philosophic learning of one Rabbi Moise
Aegyticus, namely, Maimonides50. But it was for the study of the Bible that
Christians specially relied on Jews. From the middle to the end of the twelfth
century, the school at the Abbey St. Victor in Paris was noted for employing
Jewish teachers to teach Hebrew and Jewish exegetical methods51. Christian
Biblicists were most interested in the peshat. This, the so called “literal”
interpretation, was the Jews’ prime polemical weapon, and it had to be
known before it could be opposed. Yet Christians also saw peshat as a means
to defend Christological interpretation, which provided all the more reason
for Christians to imbibe the critical glosses of the late eleventh century
Solomon Yitzhaki, known by his acronym Rashi. Andrew of St. Victor may
also have been familiar with the writings of Rashi’s disciples and followers,
Samuel b. Meir, Joseph Kara, and Joseph Bekhor Shor. The commentary on
the Christian biblical Glossa Ordinaria composed by the Franciscan
Nicholas of Lyra about 1340 often cites Rashi – in order to refute him52.
The culmination of Christian Hebraism in the Middle Ages (in the
Renaissance, it was Christian Kabbalism that flourished) was the Pugio fidei
(Dagger of Faith), composed about 1278 by the Dominican Ramon Martí,
who was aided by other Dominican Hebraists53. This massive work first pur-
ports to demonstrate Christian truth on the basis of ancient pagan philoso-
phy, then condemns contemporary Judaism by attacking a body of little
known (but apparently legitimate) midrashim, only to conclude by demon-
strating Christian truths, yet once again through invoking rabbinic texts.
Looking backward from the Pugio fidei, it is possible to understand why the
Spanish Dominican school that produced it had called, a decade earlier, for
the Talmud’s censorship rather than its destruction; the Talmud’s blasphe-
mous texts were to be erased, its Christological ones exploited.
It was to this latter end that at a grandiose inquest, held before King
Jaime I at Barcelona in 1263, another convert, the Dominican Pablo
Christiani, debated midrashic texts and their purported Christological con-
tent with Rabbi Moses ben Nahman (Nahmanides)54. So well prepared was
Pablo Christiani, that the otherwise illustrious rabbinic scholar was forced to
make the inventive distinction noted above between the binding nature of the
Talmud as opposed to the supposedly voluntary one of Midrash.
Nachmanides fabrication was so transparent – including in his own version
of the debate written later – that he was forced to flee Spain55. No less suc-
cessful, although we do not know whether he personally suffered, was Rabbi
Yehiel of Paris, who, in what was most likely a quasi-Inquisitorial proceed-
ing in 1242 (in the presence of royalty), failed to “prove” the Talmud’s inno-
cence. Found blasphemous, twenty four cartloads of the work were publicly
burned. Ultimately, in 1247 a Jewish delegation sent to Innocent IV appears
successfully to have prevented what would have been a third conflagration.
Innocent indicated that the Jews enjoyed certain unimpeachable privileges,
one of which was to retain the books necessary for interpreting their reli-
gion56.
It was this kind of papal behavior that spurred on Hebrew texts, like
those mentioned above, which distinguish papal legal propriety from royal
capriciousness. We might well call these texts medieval Jewish political sci-
ence. As put in traditional terms by the author of the 1007 Anonymous, the
popes exercise memshelet reshut (lawful authority); kings represent
memshelet zadon (unlawful rule). Yet, the lauds are qualified. Although the
pope observes the law, he is difficult. The Jews have to accept papal head-
ship, as well as submit their literature to papal lectors for examination. What
the popes alone guarantee is canonical rectitude: both the privileges the
canons concede Jews, especially physical protection, but also the application
of canonical rigor. And that was daunting, like the obligation to wear (after
1215, as noted) a distinguishing sign on one’s clothing57.
This was no optimistic conclusion. Yet it provided solace at a time when
Jewish fortunes, especially in Northern Europe, were fast waning. The 1007
text, in particular, makes it clear that Jews were wholly conversant in the
ways of Christian law. Jews also knew recent developments in papal theory,
and they knew Christian belle letters as well. The 1007 seems to have lifted
the image it employs of a sword with a golden pommel directly from the
Grail stories of Chretien de Troyes58. The tale our (surely) mid-thirteenth
century author tells is, indeed, the product of an exquisite, but also an high-
ly acculturated, imagination.
Yet with regard to papal responses to a Jewish appeal, the 1007 author
seems to have been building on a probably true precedent. This was not the
supposed persecution his story details; that never occurred at all. What alerts
us rather to this precedent are the eighteen consecutive words the 1007 cites
verbatim from the papal bull Sicut iudaeis non, a text that was not issued (in
the form we know it) until about 1150, a fact that helps provide the terminus
ante quem for the 1007 itself. According to the 1007, the bull Sicut iudaeis
was prepared in response to the appeal of its hero, Jacob ben Yekutiel. But
what the 1007 likely knew as fact was that an antecedent of the Sicut iudaeis
had been issued in the mid-eleventh century thanks to a real intervention on
behalf of the embattled Jewries of the Iberian peninsula by the Jews of
Rome. The efforts of these Roman Jews, with the help of the Pierleoni fam-
ily, with whom both they and the current pope, Alexander II, had close rela-
tions, had resulted in Alexander issuing the protective declaration that even-
tually became the canon Dispar nimirum est. Jews, this canon says, are obe-
dient servants of the pope and must not be harmed. This text then mutated
into the (actually classically structured) charter of protection called today by
its incipit, or opening words, Sicut iudaeis non59. This charter, which verbal-
ly embodied, and enhanced both canons and Pauline theology on the pres-
ence of Jews in Christian lands, was repeated many times over the centuries.
And it seems to have given Jews some courage. It was most likely its exis-
tence and that of similar writings that in 1354 emboldened the Jews of
Barcelona to insist that King Pere IV of Aragon write to the pope, asking him
to define the Inquisition’s legitimate sphere of activities in its dealings with
Jews. This request was accompanied by the somewhat daring provision that
should the king hesitate to write, the Jews themselves would do so, so appar-
ently sure were they of the outcome. They were correct, as the words of the
Inquisitor Nicholas Eymerich that set precise limits on Inquisitorial inter-

vention in Jewish affairs suggest60.
But in fact, and as we saw above, in response to growing anxieties about
the integrity of the Eucharist, Jewish rights were coming ever more into
question. Papal protection might also be fickle, as Natan Officiel observed in
his tract known as the Debate of Rabbi Yehiel, which narrates the events pre-
ceding the burning of the Talmud in Paris. At the beginning of the “debate,”
the Queen of France tells Yehiel that the pope has ordered the Talmud
burned. Toward its close, the pope is proclaimed a sure protector61. Which
obligation, that of protecting Jews or that of defending Christian teachings
moved the pope more? Natan was unsure.
The 1007 would not have disagreed, nor would the Jews of Barcelona in
1354. They asked only about the Inquisition’s limits; they never questioned
its legitimacy. The Jews must have also known – they could not have failed
to intuit – that the Eucharist and its personification as (the various manifes-
tations of) the Corpus Christi were at the core of their problems. Their fear
was great. Not only were they concerned that preoccupations about defend-
ing the sacrament would deflect the pope from protecting them. They were
apprehensive that the same concern, unbridled, would stimulate rulers to
expel them and others physically to attack, both of which occurred. It should
be self-understood that Jews would speak badly of the Eucharist, of
Christianity itself, and, of course, of Christianity’s claim to have superseded
Judaism.
The Eucharist and Christian Purity
As put by Sefer Yosef HaMekane and the Nizzahon Yashan, in the middle
and later thirteenth (or early fourteenth) century, respectively, the Eucharist
was polluted and polluting. In their opinion, the impure dogs spoken of by
Chrysostom were still the Christians. It is they who “bark,” says the
Nizzahon Yashan, not us62. The author of the Nizzahon Yashan understood
well medieval Catholicism’s worries about physical purity and about that of
its holy places, but he was also puzzled. Churchmen, perhaps beginning with
Cyprian, he noted, had made frequent reference to the words of Hosea (9:4)
and Numbers (19:13) prohibiting impure contact with the dead. How, then,
«could it be that Christians know and care that a dead man is impure and defiles all
who carry or touch the body and everything ‘in the tent where it is found’ (Num
19:13)63, yet priests constantly defile themselves by bringing [dead bodies] into their
houses of idolatry [the churches]? This makes of Christians corrupt in all its words
and deeds; its affairs are vain and exceedingly evil».
The author of the Nizzahon must have known that his readers would
grasp the biting irony. For Jews, avoiding contact with the dead was funda-
mental. Moreover, he was not alone in spotting contradictions between pro-
claimed and actual Christian behavior.

Jewish writings reveal an exquisite awareness of Christian ritual’s fixa-
tion on maintaining the purity of objects that Jews viewed as polluting.
Eucharistic rites, said Rabbi Yosef Official, were pernicious64. With their
impure rituals, Christians have become impure themselves. By partaking of
the (idolatrous) table of Christ, he added, they have truck with idolatry itself.
The (eucharistic) sacrifice pollutes communicants like the “bread of mourn-
ing” (once again citing Hosea 9:4). The inversion of Christian teachings
about sharing the table of the Jews is surely intentional. It was not, as
Christians said, the Jewish altar, or ritual, that might be likened to the pol-
luting touch of the dead, but the altar and ritual of Christians. Citing Hosea
verbatim, Yosef Official, like the author of the Nizzahon, certainly knew that
he was responding to the Christian understanding of this passage; Official
was particularly well versed in Christian teachings.
Figuratively speaking, Official’s interpretation also answers the satiric
query of the (slightly later) Nizzahon Yashan. The reason the dead do not pol-
lute the Church, the to’evah (the abomination), as church buildings are so
often called, is because of the polluted rituals that take place in them. The
buildings themselves are polluted from the start, idolatrous in nature, and
they perpetually pollute all who enter, whether dead or alive. They cannot be
contaminated any more than they already are. In the same spirit, the mid
eleventh-century Italian Scroll of Ahimaaz refers to the Church of Hagia
Sofia in Constantinople as binyan ha-tu‘mah (the house of impurity)65.
Beyond the polemical scorn, Christian practice itself might encourage
Jews to picture Christian ritual as neither spiritual nor transcendental. The
physical eucharistic wafer is carefully guarded and prepared of the wheat to
which Christ had compared himself66. This is much as the purity of the wheat
from which the Passover matzoh is baked is rigorously controlled and the
baking perfectly supervised, lest the matzoh be rendered unfit by leavening.
These two breads, therefore, both ritually prepared, are nevertheless real.
The wafer and the matzoh, so alike in appearance and so often contrasted,
became figuratively the standards of two opposing camps. By the same
token, the specific prohibition on Christians eating Jewish matzoh, viewed as
a counter-sacrifice, must have brought some Jews to ask, as some Christians
did, too, how the essence (in the Eucharist) could become accident and the
accident substance. In simple terms, how could bread and wine become God,
as though the bread and wine had physically ceased to exist?67 For Jews, the
idea was preposterous. The irony is that the episodes of Host desecration
foisted onto Jews in order to prove the Eucharist’s efficacy attributed them
with subscribing to a belief they totally rejected. Perhaps in response, Jews,
like the Nizzahon Yashan and Yosef Official, made this belief into the butt of
ironic satire. At their most generous, Jews in the Middle Ages might credit
Christianity with being a mundane sacrificial system that did its best to make
life miserable for Jews. They unquestionably resented its attempt – through
supersession and doctrines of ritual bodily purity – to compete with Judaism
on Judaism’s own terms.

These were, as the Jews depicted them, two systems of contact purity
battling it out with each other, yet hardly as equals. As the author of
Nizzahon Yashan once more demonstrates, it was really competing claims to
the ritual purity of the physical this-worldly altar, not its (possibly) tran-
scendental counterpart, that were at stake. Christians must have been spe-
cially bothered by Jewish remarks that brought the Eucharist “down to earth”
and stripped the sacrament of all spiritual content and legitimacy:
«They abuse us» the Nizzahon says, «by saying that they do not have sacrifices and
burnt offerings of the kind that once existed among Jews [saying their sacrifice, as
all their faith, is spiritual]. But they do have sacrifices and burnt offerings in that they
sacrifice the flesh of the hanged one and eat it. Respond [too] by pointing out that
sacrifices and burnt offerings should not be brought here [in France] but only in
Jerusalem. So it is written in Deuteronomy (12:1-14)»68.
In Deuteronomic terms, this is to say that what Christians do is (virtual-

ly, if not actually) idolatrous, the term “Deuteronomy” applies to any sacri-
fice performed outside the Jerusalem Temple.
It was strictly flesh, real flesh, moreover, that Christians consumed at
their altars. The sacrifice Christians performed was human, cannibalistic,
and pagan. It was also to the Molekh (again in the context of Deuteronomy),
the most rapacious of the Bible’s despised pagan deities, who also demand-
ed human sacrifice. Did not Christians, according to their own interpretation
of the Eucharist, consume the blood, whose consumption Deuteronomy
12:16 strictly forbids? All Jews heard this verse read annually in the syna-
gogue, and none would have missed the Nizzahon’s implied allusion to the
continuation of the previous verses 12:1-14. Deuteronomy 12:16 is also the
verse that Emperor Frederick II and Pope Innocent IV cited to say Jews did
not use Christian blood. This the Nizzahon likely would have known; Jews
themselves had petitioned both pope and emperor to issue protective texts69.
Was the Nizzahon then accusing Christians of foisting their own blood-guilt
onto Jews through propagating the blood libel?
As though to complete the Nizzahon Yashan’s claim that the true
eucharistic essence was carnal, although changing the tone notably, Yosef
Official chided: «Do you not know that all that man puts in his mouth enters
the stomach, and from there it descends [to the drain]; so what you eat on
Easter goes down to the drain?»70. But Official did not invent this response
out of whole cloth. The first half (up to my semi-colon) is an enormously
clever citation of Matthew 15:17, verbatim, which is the prelude, although it
is not directly connected, to the story, in Matthew 15:26, of the Canaanite
woman, the children, their food, and the dogs. The food your children get,
Official is tacitly asking, their “bread,” is it God? No, it is ordure71.
Regrettably (for us), Official does not comment on the so-called “bread”
(eucharistic) section of Matthew 15 itself, verses 22-29. Perhaps he realized
he had said more than enough, that the conclusion I have just drawn, other
readers in his day might draw too, including Christians. What he had written
was already scandalous enough. It was perhaps too dangerous to say any-
thing more aloud.
The Nizzahon Yashan does refer to Matthew’s story of the Canaanite
woman, and with some aplomb. His approach, as it was with his reference to
proper Jerusalemite sacrifice, rests on a penchant for peshat, the simple
meaning of the text, which destroys all transferred or allegorical meaning.
For Christian exegetes, allegory was indispensable. The Nizzahon simply
retells Matthew’s story, adding but a single comment: «It is not right», he
says, «to steal the kindness which I have come to perform for the Jews and
give it to other nations. He means to the Canaanite, whom Matthew calls a
dog». It is as though the Nizzahon is sustaining Christ, saying that Christ, the
speaker in the story, was correct. It was, and still is «this Canaanite who is
called a dog»; nobody else, no allegories allowed. Had the author of the
Nizzahon been able to read the Greek-speaking Chrysostom, who said: «We,
who were dogs, received the strength, [while] the [Jews] fell to kinship with
dogs», he would have replied, «You have received nothing». The Jews
remain God’s elect.
That by “Canaanites” the Nizzahon understands Christians we learn a bit
further on, when, for once, the Nizzahon indulges in a bit of midrash; he him-
self may have considered it peshat.
«They [the Christians]», he says, «bark their assertion that it is improper for the
uncircumcised and impure to serve Jews. Tell them: On the contrary, the Torah [com-
mands us to give the meat we will not eat to the “stranger in the gates” (always a pos-
itive image, especially in the prophetical books, referring to one who deserves com-
passion), and that we] sell such meat to Gentiles, because they will serve us, and God
does not withhold the reward of any creature»72.
These were strong words. With them, the Nizzahon Yashan writer has
flipped on its head the entire Christian theological structure. He has upend-
ed the Christian view of supersessionism, resolved the question of divine
choice, and clarified who is the elder serving the younger (Gen 25:23 and
Rom 9:13, a verse he also cites here). The Christians, the Canaanites, are still
the dogs. The generosity of the “true children,” the Jews, also requires men-
tion, for the Jews feed the Christian “dogs”. In turn, and as is proper with
dogs, the Christians should faithfully serve their (Jewish) masters. Perhaps it
was in this same vein that the thirteenth-century Moshe of Coucy noted that
«we are obligated to feed dogs and Christians [but not pigs, which we may
not raise]; the obligation is out of propriety [literally, the “ways of peace”],
which demands that we care for the poor goy as we care for the poor of
Israel»73.
By implication, the eucharistic sacrifice is bread that fails to nourish. It
leaves even the dogs hungry, whining for the “true meat” (graciously given
them by the Jewish “children”). Disparagingly, but revealing a complete
understanding that only enhances the dig, Yosef Official calls the Eucharist
the «redemption of the Christian soul»74. This was much – and I suspect he
knew it – as the twelfth-century Rupert of Deutz called the Eucharist the sin-
gle road to salvation. Except that for Official, Rupert’s “redemption” was
damnation. For Official, as for the Nizzahon Yahan, the Eucharist redeems
nothing at all.
Inversions like this one – once again, inversions – are the key to inter-
preting Midrash Tannaim to Deuteronomy 12:31, which Official and the
Nizzahon Yashan indubitably knew well. The midrash queries what the word
beneihem (their offspring) means in the context of a verse warning against
human sacrifice75. This midrash dates from a time (about the mid third cen-
tury at the earliest) when eucharistic ideas were being refined. «Their off-
spring», says the midrash, means sons, daughters, fathers, and mothers. And
it continues: Did not «Rabbi Akiva [second century] say: “I saw a goy who
tied up his father and stuck him before his [the goy’s] dog, and the dog ate
him”». It is hard to escape wondering whether it is not Matthew 15:26 that
this midrash reflects. Jews, we have seen in the Nizzahon Yashan, were aware
of the eucharistic meaning imputed to Matthew; and the context of both
Deuteronomy 12:31 and Midrash Tannaim is human sacrifice. The father (in
the midrash) thus is God (incarnate), the goy and the dog rapacious
Christians, who devour the Father (the bread, the Christian God, the corpus
verum). In addition to presuming to claim God from the Jews, therefore, the
Christians have also anthropomorphized and cannibalized Him. The
Eucharist is idolatry at its worst.
However speculative, perhaps far-fetched, something in this reading
rings true. Jews saw Christianity and Christians – the goyim – as earthly, if
not brutal, their nature worldly and spiritually wanting, and their rituals can-
nibalistic. Jewish commentaries, including the commentary of Rashi on
Deuteronomy 18:9, which also forbids sacrificing children to pagan gods,
say that the human sacrifice this verse forbids is the way of the nokhrim, the
Christians. To which, Rashi adds: “learn not to do” these things. For Rashi,
Christians sacrifice and eat their (idolatrous) God. This no Jew should ever
think of doing. Rashi also represented the norm, and Jews took him at his
word. To avoid anything even remotely linked to the Eucharist, Jews (most
Jews, anyway) put special emphasis on the age-old halachic precept to avoid
wine simply touched by non-Jews. Similarly, Jewish mothers made Christian
wet nurses pour their milk into the latrine for three days following the
Eucharist’s reception. Though a chimera in their eyes, nonetheless, Jews
ascribed a magical aura to the Eucharist. Certainly it smacked (literally, had
the “dust”) of idolatry, against which rabbinical literature constantly envies.
One kept the Eucharist as distant as possible. Even commerce with
Christians was permitted, as we saw, with the proviso that nothing be bought
or sold that might be used in the «idolatrous sacrifice»76. All unnecessary
contact with the goy was to be avoided – at least in principle.
Between the goy and the dog, moreover, there was little, if any, distinc-
tion. Eleazar the Rokeah, an important figure in early thirteenth-century
German Jewish Pietism is explicit. A «boy», he said, «should be covered so

that he will not see a goy or a dog on the day he is consecrated, mehankhim
otho, to the study of the holy letters»77. Describing this same consecration
ceremony (the one mentioned above when discussing Rigord), a slightly
later, anonymous German text phrased it in reverse: The child is to be cov-
ered and brought home following the ceremony, so that it should not «be
seen by a ‘dog, pig, ass, or goy»78. Just as the Eucharist seen by a Jew might
somehow be slighted, or worse,37 being seen by the goy = dog would do the
same for the consecrated Jewish child. And such concerns endured beyond
the Middle Ages. The mystical Shnei Luhot ha-brit of Isaiah Hurvitz, from
the early seventeenth century, warned not to frighten a child by invoking the
impure, namely, by threatening that «a cat, or a dog, or a goy might come to
take the child away»79.
The metaphor of the «Christian dog» could be particularly unkind.
Shades of Sicard of Cremona’s prohibition of sexual relations between a
baptized husband and his not yet baptized Jewish wife, Eleazar the Rokeah
writes that a post-menstruate Jewish woman who has purified herself in the
ritual bath must avoid contact with a dog. By implication, the ritual impuri-
ty from which the bath had just cleansed her would be renewed. «Should she
have relations with her husband [without repurifying herself], her children
would be ugly, and their faces would resemble those of a dog». The Rokeah
was citing an ancient text80. But considering his remark about protecting the
child in the consecration ceremony, when this time, too, the Rokeah wrote
dog, he surely heard “goy”. This was one system of physical purity avoiding
pollution by the other. And this was the repeated point of Jewish discourse.
The Christian claim to truth, the Christian claim to have superseded the Jews,
and the Christian claim to purity are totally false. Christians may be making
our lives miserable, but the last laugh will be ours. With such self-justifica-
tion, emotional survival under difficult circumstances became possible.
What Jews could not – would not – do, as we have already said, was act
anything out. They could only speak their mind, and even that sometimes
guardedly. Drawing cleverly on the Latin Crusade chronicles, which them-
selves spoke badly of Count Emicho of Flonheim and his wanton attacked
on the Jews of Mainz in 1096, the Hebrew chronicle ascribed to Solomon
ben Shimshon gleefully reported the story of a goose the Crusaders were said
to have revered, and he exulted in the massacre of Emicho’s army by the
Hungarian king, half of which had sunk in the swamps. For Solomon, these
swamps symbolized the nature of baptism itself. It was the damning inverse!
of the saving grace Christians said it worked. As for the Crusaders, who in
their own minds were out to pursue sanctity, they were a bunch of “locusts”
devouring all that lay in their path81.
Jews recorded these losses. They set them down in Memory Books, espe-
cially in Germany, following the various attacks they suffered from the
eleventh through the fifteenth century. By strange fortune, these books,
which list the victims by family, are a source of family reconstruction, where
we see that the majority of Jewish families were two generational, with no
more than two to three children (if that many)82. Was this intentional family
limitation, pursued to allow greater mobility, since, for Jews, mobility was
all too often a necessity? To answer firmly would be to speculate. But it is
no speculation to say that the Jewish family in so many of its aspects, per-
haps including its very size, stood in frontal opposition to the Christian fam-
ily as it was ideally pictured in the preaching of the clergy. Judaism’s fami-
ly centeredness, its emphasis on the universal obligation to marry, alongside
its unambiguous approval of marital sexuality, which it called a source of
holiness, stands so strikingly counter to clerical urgings, like that of Gratian,
to limit sexual intercourse to a “minimal frequency” or Gratian’s argument
that nothing is filthier than the «excessive love of one’s wife»83.
No rabbi or other Jewish authority would have agreed either with the fif-
teenth century Franciscan, Bernardino da Siena, who viewed sexuality as
defilement and urged prayer and meditation prior to indulgence. Bernardino
never would have argued, as did Abraham ben David of Posquierres, a rough
contemporary of Gratian, that the limits of sexual activity must be the fruit
of spousal understanding: «He must act with her knowledge, endearing him-
self to her until she is willing». Unlike priests, who were instructed to avoid
women completely, for they corrupted, rabbis married, they had to marry, for
marriage completed a man’s maturation (as the aphorism went: a man, ’ish,
without a wife, ’ishah, is fire, ’esh)84. In this context, it is surprising that we
have no direct clerical response or observations about the Jewish family as
such.
Christians did react to Jewish sexuality, or what they perceived – fanta-
sized would be a better word – to be Jewish sexual practice. William of
Tornay said that Jews took second wives while their first ones were pregnant,
in order to provide for sexual release85. Guibert de Nogent associated Jews
with sexual perversion, telling of a Jew who encouraged a priest to mastur-
bate on the consecrated Eucharistic wafer. To such imaginings, Jews were
quick to respond, and derisively. Perhaps thinking of the above cited apho-
rism, the Nizzahon Yashan opined that «priests and nuns must burn up in
their unconsummated desires»86.
Indeed, as we saw with the Eucharist itself, there was no limit to the
irony with which Jews might invoke with respect to Christianity. They were
able to be ironic even about Innocent III’s order for special clothing, as well
as manipulative, in order to minimize the impact of the despised edict. The
sole reference I have seen to the special clothing, or patch, Innocent III
ordered Jews to wear defuses the edict’s unsavory implication of negative
Jewish distinction. What do we do about this patch, it is asked, on the
Sabbath? One cannot carry objects on the Sabbath, only wear them. Yet that,
in itself, is the question’s answer: We sew that patch onto our cloaks, mak-
ing it part of our garb. Translated into anthropological terms, the patch has
been diffused of its ugly mystery; it had been made subject to halachic,
Jewish legal, discourse. In which case, it was no foreign imposition, but attire
that was the Jews’ own. From a sign of distinction, it had been turned into a
symbol of pride, or at least of normality87.
This kind of inversion, of turning disdain into a marker of self-esteem,
was ultimately the hallmark of the entire medieval Jewish response to the
difficulties that Christendom insistently put in Judaism’s way. With respect
to Christianity, Jews could be most inventive. Yet their most inventive
achievement was, eventually, to reevaluate Christianity itself, which they did
beginning in the thirteenth century. For the Meiri, in Provence, Christianity
was no longer idolatry, and in seventeenth century Italy, Yehudah Aryeh
Modena wrote understandingly. Though it was built on a chain of errors,
Christian doctrine conformed to monotheistic criteria88.
This change in attitudes has not been properly reciprocated. Until recent-
ly, only a very few within the (Catholic) Church have viewed Judaism as
independently legitimate89. For too many, including members of the higher
clergy, it seems that Judaism remains even today no more than a vestige, wit-
ness to an old dispensation that still exists primarily to adumbrate ultimate
Christian triumph.
ABSTRACT
L’atteggiamento degli Ebrei nei confronti dei cristiani durante il medio

Evo, come pure quello dei cristiani nei confronti degli Ebrei, si basano sul
principio di reciprocità: chi è puro, chi impuro, chi dimostra attraverso la
sua purità la sua scelta e chi sulla base dell’impurità il suo rifiuto. Questo
tema è continuamente dibattuto. I cristiani dichiararono di essere “i figli”,
per i quali il Cristo di Mt 15,26 ha spezzato “il pane”, che in quel caso è
l’Eucaristia, laddove gli Ebrei dallo stesso punto di vista furono “i cani” a
cui “il pane” non doveva essere gettato. Gli Ebrei ricambiarono dicendo che
sono i cristiani che abbaiano. Fu definito “impuro” pranzare con gli ebrei
o, peggio, avere relazioni sessuali con loro. Chi faceva queste cose, in spe-
cial modo se era un prete, e poi distribuiva l’Eucaristia – l’origine dell’idea
è in Cipriano e nella sua dottrina dei lapsi –, trasmetteva la propria impuri-
tà agli altri e comprometteva gli effetti dell’Eucaristia. In aggiunta il con-
cetto di sacrificio come pane comincia in Ez 44,7. Quando gli Ebrei videro
questa idea riecheggiata in Paolo, I Cor 10,16-18, con il suo riferimento a
«sangue, pane, corpo e altare», essi provarono la sensazione che la loro tra-
dizione fosse stata espropriata e risposero chiamando l’Eucaristia impura,
ugualmente spaventosa come il sacrificio umano. Essi misero in dubbio con-
cetti cristiani di purità, stigmatizzando l’uso della sepoltura nelle chiese che,
in ottica giudaica, renderebbe il santuario intero impuro. I Cristiani rac-
contarono storie di uomini la cui santità fu dimostrata perché confutarono
gli Ebrei nei loro argomenti. Gli Ebrei volsero queste storie, proprio le stes-
se storie, a loro favore, per dimostrare che Dio sceglie l’Ebreo come vinci-
tore. Capovolgimenti di storie come queste abbondano. In ultima analisi, gli
atteggiamenti da entrambe le parti divennero più moderati, anche se non

sono ancora del tutto scomparsi.
Jewish attitudes toward Christians during the Middle Ages, much as

Christian attitudes toward Jews, rest on the principle of reciprocity: who is
pure, who impure, who proves by his purity his chosenness, and by his impu-
rity his rejection. This theme is the constant of debate. Christians claimed to
be “the children,” for whom the Christ of Matthew 15:26 brought “the
bread,” that is, the Eucharist, in which case, the Jews were the “dogs” of the
same verse, to whom “the bread” was not to be thrown. Jews countered by
saying it is the Christians who “bark.” Jews were called “impure” to dine
with, or worse, with whom to have sexual intercourse. One who did these
things, especially a priest, and then distributed the Eucharist – the origin of
the idea is Cyprian and his doctrine of lapsi – transmitted his own impurity
to others, vitiating the Eucharist’s effects. Yet the concept of sacrifice as
bread begins in Ezekiel 44:7. When Jews saw this idea echoed in Paul, I
Corinthians 10:16-18, with its references to “blood, bread, body, and altar”,
they sensed their tradition was being expropriated and responded by calling
the Eucharist impure, even fearsome human sacrifice. They queried
Christian concepts of purity, pointing to the custom of burial in churches,
which, in Jewish terms, would make the entire sanctuary itself impure.
Christians told stories of those whose sanctity was demonstrated by defeat-
ing Jews in arguments. Jews turned these same stories on their head – the
very same stories – to show God choosing the Jew as victor. Inversion sto-
ries like these abound. Ultimately, attitudes on both sides moderated. They
have yet to disappear in full.
1 On these issues see Kenneth Stow, Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin
Europe, Cambridge, MA 1994, and K. Stow, Jewish Dogs: An Image and Its Interpreters,
Stanford 2006.
2 See Haym Soloveitchik Pawnbroking: A Study in Ribbit and of the Halakhah in Exile,
in «Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research» 38/39(1972), pp. 203-268.
3 H. Soloveitchik, Pawnbroking, p. 228.
4 Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, New York 1961, p. 30, citing Tosafot on
Babylonian Talmud, Baba Mezia 70b.
5 See K. Stow, Alienated Minority, chapters 10-12.
6 Harry Miskimin, Money, Prices, and Foreign Exchange in Fourteenth Century France,
New Haven 1963, pp. 12-14.
7 Meir ben Simeon, Milhemet Mizvah, Msk. Parma, 2749, fols. 78v,33v.
8 On Coppoli, see K. Stow, Jewish Dogs, 28, and see below on Werner.
9 I Cor 10:16: «The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of
Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?». Paul clearly
was building on Ezekiel 44:7, where the prophet speaks of the «sacrifice, my bread, which is
the fat and the blood». Note also verses 17 and 18. Because there is one loaf, we, who are
many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf. Consider the people of Israel: Do not
those who eat the sacrifices participate in the altar?
10 For Henry III, see Jewish Dogs, 96, and Blois, Jewish Dogs, passim, esp. ch. 4. On the
Crusade, see K. Stow, Conversion, Apostasy, and Apprehensiveness: Emicho of Flonheim and
the Fear of Jews in the Twelfth Century, in «Speculum» 76 (2001), pp. 911-33.
11 A recent survey of this subject is Kenneth Stow, The Church and the Jews, in Roberto
Rusconi (ed.), Atlante del Cristianesimo, UTET, Torino2006.
12 K. Stow, Jewish Dogs, 137.
13 On Werner, Jewish Dogs, 60-63, and Dr. Tiberino, Jewish Dogs, 29.
14 See Solomon Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the Thirteenth Century, New York
1966, vol. 1, pp. 128–29.
15 For Agobard, Jewish Dogs, 20-23, and Johannes Teutonicus, 21.
16 John Chrysostom in Jewish Dogs, 31, 35, 54.
17 See above, n. 9.
18 On this episode, see Mario Esposito, Un Procès contre les Juifs de la Savoie en 1329,
in «Revue d’histoire ecclesiastique» 34(1938), pp. 785-801.
19 On Halkin and Browe, Jewish Dogs, pp. 40-41.
20 See David Flusser, ed. Sefer Yossipon, 2 vols., Jerusalem, 1979, and on the author, the
so-called Yossipon, Flusser, Mehaber Sefer Yossipon, Demuto u-tequfato, in «Zion» 18(1953),
pp. 109-26 (in Hebrew).
21 On this see Yitzhak Baer, Sefer Yossipon ha-’Ivri, in Studies in the History of the Jewish
People, Jerusalem 1985, pp. 101-27.
22 Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sota 13a.
23 G.D. Cohen, «Esau as Symbol». Jewish Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed.A.
Altman, Cambridge, Mass. 1967, pp. 40-44.
24 On Wazo of Liège, see Bernhard Blumenkranz, Les Auteurs Chrétièns Latins du Moyen
Ages sur les Juifs e le Judaisme, Paris 1963, p. 260; and the story of Hananel in The Scroll of
Ahimaaz, ed. Benjamin Klar, reprint, Jerusalem 1974), pp. 23-24 (in Hebrew). And see K.
Stow, Alienated Minority, pp. 36, 81, 85, for various reflection-inversion stories,
25 The 1066 incident is reported by the Gesta Treverorum, for whose text, see Julius
Aronius, Regesten zur Geschichte der Juden im Fränkischen and Deutschen Reiche bis zum
Jahre 1273, Berlin 1902, no. 160; and see, for the events of the year 992, Abraham Haberman,
Sefer gezerot ashkenaz ve-zarfat, Jerusalem 1945; repr. 1971, pp. 11-15, and the comments of
Israel Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb (in Hebrew), Jerusalem 2000, pp. 185, 197-98.
26 On Andreas, and for a translation of his letter, see Kenneth Stow, Jacob of Venice and
the Jewish Settlements in Venice in the Thirteenth Century, in Nahum Waldman (ed.),
Community and Culture, Philadelphia 1987.
27 For Gregory of Tours on Avitus, see Gregory’s History of the Franks, O.M. Dalton,
trans., Oxford 1927: 6:11, 6:10; also 4:8, 5:6.
28 On R. Amnon and the Jewish Theophilo, see Susan Einbinder, Signs of Romance:
Hebrew Prose and the Twelfth Century Renaissance, in Michael Signer-John Van Engen, Jews
and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe, ed. Notre Dame, Ind. 2001.
29 For the Chrisitan Theophilo, see Valerie Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Modern
Europe, Princeton 1991, pp. 344-47.
30 On the Jew of Bourges story, see Peter Schaefer, Mirror of His Beauty: Feminine
Images of God From the Bible to the Early Kabbalah, Princeton 2002, pp. 206-07 and Miri
Rubin, Gentile Tales, The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews, New Haven 1999, pp. 25-
26.
31 Oral communication by Moshe Idel.
32 Ephraim of Bonn, in A. Haberman, Sefer gezerot, 128; and see Robert Bartlett, Trial by
Fire and Water: The Medieval Judicial Ordeal, Oxford 1986, p. 23.
33K. Stow, Jewish Dogs, 122-23.
34See Ivan Marcus, The Jewish Life Cycle, Seattle 2004, pp. 70-71.
35 K. Stow, The 1007 Anonymous and Papal Sovereignty: Jewish Perceptions of the
Papacy and Papal Policy in the High Middle Ages, Cincinnati 1984), p. 47; so that readers bet-
ter understand the inversion, the 1007 cites Judges 3:19, the site of the original story, verbatim:
«I have a secret to tell you».
36 A. Haberman, Sefer gezerot, pp. 142–146; and see Gavin Langmuir, Tanquam Servi:
The Change in Jewish Status in French Law About 1200, in Toward a Definition of Anti-
semitism, Berkeley, 1990, p. 184.
37 J. Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, pp. 24-27; for Christianorum ad aras, see Amnon
Linder (ed.), The Jews in Legal Sources of the Early Middle Ages, Detroit and Jerusalem, 1997,
no. 502.
38 B. Blumenkranz,Auteurs, pp. 184-85, and see David Berger, The Jewish Christian
Debate in the High MiddleAges, Philadelphia David 1969.
39 See Judah Rosenthal, The Talmud on Trial, «Jewish Quarterly Review» 47(1956), pp.
58-76, 145-169.
40 See Robert Bonfil, The Nature of Judaism in Raymundus Martini’s Pugio Fidei, in
«Tarbiz» 40 (1971), pp. 360-375.
41 On these, see Saul Leiberman, Shkiin, Jerusalem, 1939 (in Hebrew).
42On Gratian and Jewish attitudes to early Christianity as here, see Alienated Minority,
chap. 1 at n. 12
43 See Amnon Linder, The Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation, Detroit, 1987: no. 338,
n.10; Michael Avi Yonah, The Jews of Palestine A Political History from the Bar Kokhba War
to the Arab Conquest, Oxford, 1976, pp. 270-75; Andrew Scharf, Byzantine Jewry, New York
1971, pp. 47-57.
44 Found in Yefim Schirman, Studies in the History of Hebrew Poetry and Drama,
Jerusalem 1979, I, pp. 22-36 (in Hebrew).
45 Israel Levi, L’Apocalypse de Zorobabel et le roi de Perse Siroes, in «Revue des Etudes
Juives» 71(1914), 131-144,144-160, and Joseph Dan, The Hebrew Story in the Middle Ages,
Jerusalem 1974, pp. 35-46 (in Hebrew).
46 Jehuda Wistinetzki, Das Buch der Frommen, Frankfurt a.M. 1924, pars. 949,950.
47 Shabbetai Donnolo, Sefer Hakhmoni, in Sefer Yezirah, Jerusalem, 1968, pp. 123-148;
Collette Sirat, Jewish Philosophical Thought in the Middle Ages, Jerusalem 1975, p. 378 (in
Hebrew).
48 Haym Soloveitchik, Three Themes in “Sefer Hasidim”, «AJS Review» (please, the
review must be cited in extenso) 1 (1976), pp. 311-357, esp. 324, 332. K. Stow, Jacob of
Venice, pp. 1105; Ivan Marcus, Piety and Society, Leiden 1981, pp. 42-43, 46-47, 79.
49 Ch. M. Merchavia, The Church versus Talmudic and Midrashic Literature, Jerusalem
1973, pp. 93-127.
50 J. Wistinetzki, Das Buch der Frommen, pars. 930, 951.
51 Monford Harris, The Concept of Love in Sepher Hassidim, in «Jewish Quarterly
Review» 50(1959), pp. 13-44.
52 Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, Notre Dame 1964, pp. 83-
195.
53 Raymundus Martinus, Pugio fidei adversus Mauros et Judaeos, ed. J.B. Carpzov,
Leipzig 1687.
54 Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews, Ithaca 1982, pp. 108-22.
55 Marvin Fox, Nahmanides on the Status of Aggadot: Perspectives on the Disputation at
Barcelona, 1263, in «Journal of Jewish Studies» 40(1989), pp. 95-109.
56 Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, trans. L. Schoffman, 2 vols.,
Philadelphia 1961, I, pp. 155-156, 168.
57 Solomon Grayzel, The Popes and the Jews in the Thirteenth Century, New York 1966,
revised 1933, I, 275.
58 See Jewish Dogs, p. 258; and William Roach (ed.), Le Roman de Perceval ou le conte
du Graal, Geneva, 1959, verses 3654-85 (107-8).
59 See Kenneth Stow, Jewish Approaches to the Papacy and the Papal Doctrine of Jewish
Protection, 1050-1150, in «Studies in the History of the Jewish People and the Land of Israel»
5 (1981), pp. 75-90 (in Hebrew).
60 On 1354, see Louis Finkelstein, Jewish Self Government in the Middle Ages, New York,
1972, pp. 330-331 and S. Grayzel, Church and the Jews, New York 1989), vol. 2, p. 21.
61 Shmuel Greenbaum (ed.), Vikuah R. Yehiel, Thorn 1873, p. 12; K. Stow, 1007
Anonymous, p. 42.
62 Rabbi Yosef Official, Sepher Joseph Hamekane, ed. Judah Rosenthal, Jerusalem 1970
(in Hebrew), par. 91.
63 The text of Nizzahon Yashan in David Berger, The Jewish Christian Debate in the High
Middle Ages, Philadelphia 1969; here, p. 206, no. 210, on Num 19:13.
64 Sepher Joseph Hamekane, ed. J. Rosenthal, no. 91a.
65 See Babylonian Talmud, Abodah zarah 47a-b, 48b, 54b. For Ahimaaz’s remark, see B.
Klar, Megillat Ahimaaz, 18.
66 See Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture, Cambridge,
1992, p. 38, 313.
67 See M. Rubin, Gentile Tales, pp. 93-10.
68Nizzahon Yashan, no. 213, p. 207.
69 S. Grayzel, Church and the Jews, 1: no. 116, and see, too, no. 113.
70 Sepher Joseph Hamekane, no. 14; and see also M. Rubin, Gentile Tales, p. 97.
71 Robert Stacey has told me that Christian anti-clericals were also linking excrement to
bread, in particular, the fifteenth-century Lollards.
72 Sepher Joseph Hamekane, no. 174, page 184, and no. 212, page 207.
73 Moses of Coucy, Sefer mitzvot hagadol, Jerusalem 1973, p. 65.
74 Sepher Joseph Hamekane, no. 91a.
75 Cited also by midrash Sifrei to Deuteronomy, par. 81, 4: 5, trans. (from Hebrew) Reuven
Hammer, New Haven 1986.
76 See Babylonian Talmud, Avodah zarah, 2a.
77 Sefer ha-roqeah ha-gadol, Jerusalem, 1967, par. 296, p. 164; mehankhim, means «to
educate», as well as «to consecrate». Cited in I. Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, p. 26.
78 Ivan Marcus, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe (New
Haven, 1996), p. 31.
79Sefer selah ha-qodesh, Jerusalem, 1993, sha’ar ha’oti’ot, daled, derekh’eretz.
80 Sefer ha-roqeah, par. 317, p. 202, and see I., Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, 69-71, cit-
ing the original source in Baraita ha-Niddah
81 The text is in A. Haberman, Sefer gezerot, 24-27, and see, too, K. Stow, Conversion,
Apostasy, and Apprehensiveness.
82 Sigmund Salfeld, Das Martyrologium des Nuernberger Memorbuches, Berlin 1898).
83 27. Gratian cited in David Herlihy, The Making of the Medieval Family: Symmetry,
Structure, and Sentiment, in «Journal of Family History» 8, p. 127.
84 Abraham ben David of Posquierres, Sefer Ba’alei ha-Nefesh, ed. J. Kafah, Jerusalem
1964, pp. 122-126; Bernardino da Siena, Le Prediche Volgari, ed. Ciro Cannarozzi, Florence
1958, Sermons 19,20,21.
85A. Dalvray-M.Tausche, Marriage Sermons in ad status Collections of the Central
Middle Ages, in «Archives d’histoire doctrinale et litteraire du Moyen Age» 47(1980), pp. 71-
119, esp. 100.
86 D. Berger, The Jewish Christian Debate, p. 69.
87 Roger Kohn, Royal Power and Rabbinical Authority in 14th Century France, in D.
Blumenthal (ed.), Approaches to Judaism in Medieval Times, Chico, California 1984, vol. 2,
pp. 234-240.
88 Talya Fishman, Changing Early Modern Jewish Discourse about Christianity: The
Efforts of Rabbi Leon Modena, in David Malkiel (ed.), The Lion Shall Roar: Leon Modena and
His World, Jerusalem 2003; and see Jacob Kaltz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, pp. 24-27.
89 See Jewish Dogs, pp. 166-74.

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Stow - Medieval Jews on christianity 71

Whatever medieval Jews said, or thought, about Christianity, one may be

The overall Jewish Responsz

Jewish Irony and Inversion

Perhaps the most ingenious – if perhaps the most unintentionally ironic–

unorthodox history of the founding of Rome based on Latin historians. Its

The inconstancy or the disgrace of converts, as Christians and Jews

been led into sin by none other than a Jewish magician29.

Inquisitor Nicholas Eymerich that set precise limits on Inquisitorial inter-

The Eucharist and Christian Purity

claimed and actual Christian behavior.

on Judaism’s own terms.

In Deuteronomic terms, this is to say that what Christians do is (virtual-

German Jewish Pietism is explicit. A «boy», he said, «should be covered so

L’atteggiamento degli Ebrei nei confronti dei cristiani durante il medio

atteggiamenti da entrambe le parti divennero più moderati, anche se non

Jewish attitudes toward Christians during the Middle Ages, much as

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