Jewish Anti-Christian Polemics in the Early Modern Period: Change or Continuity?

I The Jewish-Christian debate goes back to the origins of Christianity. Jews are portrayed in the New Testament as questioning both Jesus’ messianic status as well as the claim that he was resurrected from the dead. As adherers to a religion which emerged from Judaism, early Christians found it necessary to write polemical treatises attacking Judaism, probably more for purposes of self-definition than in the hope of converting Jews. As Christians developed a genre of Adversus Judaeos literature, attacking Jewish interpretations of the Hebrew Bible and accusing Jews of willful blindness, Jews generally did not react. Although there are anti-Christian statements in the Talmud and some midrashim, supplemented by the anti-Christian parody Toledot Yeshu (‘The Story of Jesus’), in the first eight centuries of Christianity, there was no sustained and comprehensive Jewish critique of this religion. The situation changed in the ninth century, when Jewish authors, writing in Arabic in Islamic countries, began to compose treatises specifically intended to refute the claims of Christianity. As the centers of Jewish life moved from the realm of Islam to the realm of Christianity, and as the pressure on Jews in those countries to convert to Christianity became more pronounced, a genre of Hebrew polemics was developed.