Book Review
Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians
Israel Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians [in Hebrew] (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 2000), 318 pp.
Social history, sadly, needs to be more than a chronicle of human cooperation. Neither can intellectual history afford the luxury of recording only the ideas that have enhanced human comprehension. Both seek to glimpse a fuller reality, one that is riddled with misunderstanding, injustice, and wasted opportunities. Yuval's book is a tale of such woes: a tale of two siblings born of the same calamity (the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 C.E.) and destined to journey through medieval history in continual rivalry. Yuval reaches into the beliefs, myths, traditions, apocalyptic visions, and injustices that fill the family album of Synagoga [End Page 213] and Ecclesia. He lines up Esau and Jacob, the hostia and the matza, the passio and the martyr, the sacrifice and the libel, the curse and the blessing, the blood of redemption and the blood of death. His documentation is impressive and his style sensational. But his message is tragic. In Yuval's eyes, familiarity is a well of contempt. The twin sons of Rebecca remain locked in a perpetual feud.
Alick Isaacs
Alick Isaacs is associate editor for history, religion, and special projects of Common Knowledge. He has taught medieval history and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Haifa, and is currently writing on the shared milieu of synagogue and church in the European Middle Ages.