Tag Archives: Christianity

Martin Luther & The Jews (pdfs)

Scholars and non-scholars, Jews and Christians, owe a great debt to the work of scholars working in the Lutheran tradition for preserving these texts by Luther that they recognize as odious. Given that they are hard to find in one … Continue reading

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(SCOTUS) Guns, Abortion, Religion (Subverting the Public Sphere)

Our moment of madness in the United States of America lies in the sudden massive churn against liberal-social order after a long pre-meditated buildup going back decades. Of a whole piece are the more recent Trump attempted-coup on January 6 … Continue reading

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(Christianity) The Trial of the Talmud (Documents)

What were the actual talmudic texts that Christians found so irksome? What do we actually learn about Talmud from its most caustic critics, the elite Christian accusers from the High Medieval Age? The Trial of the Talmud Paris 1240 is … Continue reading

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Monstrous Talmud & Christian Simulacra (Peter The Venerable)

Abbot of the Benedictine abbey of Cluny, Peter the Venerable (1092-1156) was a master hermeneut. He is generally recognized as one of the great Christian thinkers of the High Middle Ages. Also recognized is how he marks a new Church … Continue reading

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(Christianity) Talmud and the Impotence of God (Petrus Alfonsi)

Petrus Alfonsi was a Jewish convert to Christianity who grew up in an Iberian-Islamic milieu in Huesca, which became the capital of Aragon atthe time of the Christian reconquest. While it goes unnamed as such, his Dialogus contra Iudaeos (ca. … Continue reading

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Medieval Islam & The Dialogue Against the Jews (Peter Alfonsi)

Petrus Alphonsi (d. 1116) was a Jewish Spanish physician, writer, astronomer, and polemicist, who converted to Christianity in 1106. He is also known just as Alphonsi, and as Peter Alfonsi or Peter Alphonso and was born Moses Sephardi). Born in Islamic Spain, he mostly lived in England and France after his conversion (wiki). He … Continue reading

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(Still Lachrymose) The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom (Robert Chazan)

Invaluable for students of Jews and Jewish Studies is the focus Robert Chazan puts on Christians and Christendom in this neat little survey. The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom 1000-1500 is maybe the best one-stop-shop historical study explaining what happened … Continue reading

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Jewish Suffering Human Suffering The Suffering Jesus (Nitzahon Yashan)

I don’t want to dispute David Berger who in his introduction to his translation of the critical edition of the Nizzahon Vetus calls this Old Book of Polemic a “striking example of Jewish disputation in its most aggressive mode.”  Others … Continue reading

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Medieval Anti-Jewish Anti-Semitism (Source Reader)

Not for a quick read, this is a long working-post with primary source material in English translation for general interest and for use in the classroom. The original impetus for posting this was for my students in a course at … Continue reading

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(Paul) Toledot Yeshu (Parting of the Ways)

[The Wandering Jew, Samuel Hirszenberg, 1899] The scandalous and graphic lampooning of Jesus across the entire compendia of Toldeot Yeshu manuscripts gets the most attention. It is these set of images that tend to stick in the mind. But pulling … Continue reading

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