The Christian Polemic Against the Jews in the Middle Ages (review)

148 SHOFAR Summer 2000 Vol. 18, No.4 The Christian Polemic Against the Jews in the Middle Ages, by Gilbert Dahan, translated by Jody Gladding. Notre Dame, IN: University ofNotre Dame Press, 1998. 130 pp. $8.00. This relatively briefstudy can best be described as an attempt to correct the widespread notion that no genuine conversation transpired between Jews and Christians during the Middle Ages because of the huge power disequilibrium between the two religious communities. According to conventional wisdom, the so-called dialogues were staged events forcibly imposed by triumphalist Christians on vulnerable Jews with conversion as their intended end. Frequently, a converted Jew led the attack. After the thirteenth century, this was certainly the pattern, but prior to this time, according to Dahan, a different mood prevailed. "Free and spontaneous discussions" were surprisingly common. Various forces conspired to produce the change, including a missionary campaign to re-Christianize Europe led by zealous and often fanatical friars; a new wave ofanti-Judaism characterized by an assault on the Talmud (e.g., the Donin affair in Paris in 1240) made honest debate henceforth impossible. Until this occurred, however, "honest dialogue" existed, sometimes in the presence of medieval kings, sometimes on more humble levels. To illustrate this largely forgotten fact, the author summarizes various written accounts, showing that many Jewish-Christian encounters actually possessed a "serene and amicable character." A popular fictional genre involved a Muslim, a Jew, a Christian, each presenting their respective claims in a tolerant spirit. Raymond Uull's (Catalan) Book ofthe Gentile and the Three Sages is a good example; not only do the three sages seek pardon for any offensive words, but also they denounce war and ill-will! Dahan does not whitewash medieval Christendom; he is fully aware ofits shadows. But the long era of Christian power was not uniform in either thought or attitude. Today, as scholars rake the soil of western culture searching for the roots of the Holocaust, a tendency to see the past and past traditions in monolithic terms has asserted itselfwith a vengeance. A recent instance is Daniel Goldhagen'shighly publicizedbook Hitler's Willing Executioners, in which a "totalitarian" church is accused of having created a universal "pan-European cognition about Jews" so entirely evil that their modern extermination became a virtual certainty. On this account, Christians never saw and essentially could never have seen Jews in any other light, although degrees of intensity varied. Individual exceptions do not matter for Goldhagen, only the inner "logic" of Christianity matters. But such a monolithic approach brushes aside contravening evidence; history is simplified and only the most extreme expressions about Jews and Judaism in Christian rhetoric are regarded as normative. Even in the Middle Ages, the proverbial Jewish "vale of tears," there existed other less pejorative texts, revealing considerable diversity among Christians, at least in the earlier centuries. Indeed, according to Dahan, these "little known, often discredited texts have ... much to teach us," despite the vast span oftime that lies between their age and ours. Openness and the mutual sharing of "biblical, philosophic and scientific knowledge," etc., make Book Reviews 149 the Jewish-Christian dialogue in the twelfth and occasionally even in the thirteenth century perhaps not as different from Jewish-Christian dialogue today as one normally supposes. This discovery makes Dahan's little book interesting and important. It is not brilliantly written (does it lose something in the translation?) or otherwise remarkable, although it does include a good chapter on the art of the polemic. Alan Davies Department of Religious Studies University of Toronto Past Imperatives: Studies in the History and Theory of Jewish Ethics, by Louis E. Newman. Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 1998. 283 pp. $19.95. This work presents an insightful and rewarding exploration offundamental concerns in Jewish ethics. The links between Judaism's worldview and its ethos, between its fundamental understandings of facts and of values, provides a central theme of the book. Newman examines connections among Jewish religious thought, Jewish law, texts, and both the methodology and concepts of Jewish ethics. He clearly and persuasively develops an account of major forces within Jewish ethics (the proverbial "forest"), while remaining sensitive to diversity within (the "trees...