Conflict and Religious Conversation in Latin Christendom: Studies in Honour of Ora Limor ed. by Israel Jacob Yuval and Ram Ben-Shalom (review)

This volume provides both a worthy tribute to Ora Limor, a scholar deeply concerned with Jewish–Christian interaction across the centuries, and a significant set of essays exploring the complexity of mutual attitudes between Jews and Christians from the formation of the New Testament to the early modern period. The volume may serve to introduce readers to the sophistication of debate on these matters from scholars active within, as well as outside Israel. Too frequently, this is a topic that generates swift assertions, often from limited and selective use of certain familiar texts.

Many of the essays in this volume introduce new perspectives and voices, including an opening essay by the editors which looks at the creativity of medieval Jewish polemic against Christians. Paula Frederiksen offers a helpful overview of how Christian rhetoric against the Jews actually shaped social reality in the late antique period, while Miri Rubin examines how Ecclesia and Synagoga became so much more sharply defined in medieval art during the thirteenth century. The volume also offers more specific studies, such as Benjamin Kedar’s contribution which considers whether Emicho of Flonheim perceived himself as King of the Last Days in the massacres of 1096 (warning that this may be a historiographical fancy). Other important scholars represented here include Harvey H. Hames on the debated ‘conversion’ account of Herman the Jew, in which he agrees with Jean-Claude Schmitt that it was a propaganda victory for the Premonstratensians, while conceding that it did draw on his own experience. Alexander Patchovsky reflects on the surprisingly detailed knowledge of Muslims, provided by Joachim of Fiore, as among those who could still potentially be saved, even if he saw them as enemies of Christendom. Sarit Shalev-Eyni considers Christian influences on Jewish memory of their saints, while Jeremy Cohen reflects on the subtleties of the anti-Christian polemic in Shevet Yehuda by Ibn Verga in the late fifteenth century. There is similar awareness of the complexity of Jewish attitudes in papers by Nadia Zeldes on Hebrew books in fifteenth-century Sicily and by Ram Ben-Shalom on an anonymous Jewish account of Christian history from the early sixteenth century (edited in Hebrew in an Appendix). Two papers – Claude B. Stuczynski’s on Christian converso reflection on the ‘Mystical Body’ and Yosef Kaplan’s on Jewish–Calvinist debate in seventeenth-century Amsterdam – close a volume to be commended for its breadth and subtlety.