Introduction: Combating Christian Pressures

Medieval W. Christendom
Medieval western Christendom was aggressively committed to missionizing among its Jews.
This aggressive posture began to manifest itself by the twelfth century, and by the thirteenth century
it had generated a well-organized campaign to force Jews into confrontation with a range of new
arguments. In the face of this aggressiveness, Jewish leaders had to provide guidance to their
followers, and they did so. Once again, the style of argumentation varied widely in the different
sets of Jewish communities.

Common to Jewish argumentation in all sectors of Europe was a focus on the Hebrew Bible,
with identification of major Christian arguments grounded in biblical verses and repudiation of
these Christian arguments. There were a number of broad Jewish methodological positions that
undermined in general ways Christian readings of Scripture. They included insistence that
Christian views were misled by erroneous translation of the Hebrew text and that Christian exegesis
was regularly decontextualized, obscuring the simple and straightforward meaning of the biblical
text. Beyond these broad stances, Jewish polemicists challenged the particulars of Christian
readings on hundreds of verses. These challenges are sometimes found in the general commentaries
of such luminaries as David Kimhi; sometimes entire works of polemically-oriented biblical
commentary were composed.

While Christian missionizing argumentation and Jewish rebuttal was grounded in divergent
understandings of the Hebrew Bible, both extended into other arenas as well. With the growing
place of philosophic thinking within both communities, Christians advanced arguments for the
philosophic truth of Christianity, while Jews vigorously denounced such key Christian doctrines as
Incarnation and Trinity as obviously irrational. Another basis of disagreement involved the moral
stances of the two communities. Christians pointed to heavy Jewish involvement in money-lending
as evidence of lower moral standards; Jews attacked many facets of Christian behavior, focusing
heavily on the bellicosity of medieval Christian society and what Jews perceived as sexual
licentiousness.

The most uncomfortable Christian attacks were those that focused on the disparity in
material circumstances of the two faith communities. Jewish polemical works regularly portray
Christian thrusts drawn from the successes of the Christian world and the debased circumstances of
the Jews. This disparity is taken to reflect divine favor of the Christian camp and divine
abandonment of the Jews. Hearing Christians advance this line of polemical argumentation was
difficult for medieval Jews, but their leaders pondered the issue deeply and provided lines of
response. Jews argued that Christian successes did not meet the criteria of messianic redemption,
suggesting that Jesus was in fact not the promised Messiah. More important, they denied that
Jewish suffering was a sign of abandonment by God; they claimed, rather, that the tribulations
suffered by the Jews were a divinely imposed test. Steadfastness in the face of a divinely imposed
test had won rich promises by God to the patriarch Abraham; subsequent Jewish steadfastness
would win similar rewards for his descendants.