It was the title of this little book (The Birth of Judaism from the Spirit of Christianity: Five Lectures Concerning the Origins of Rabbinic Judaism)Footnote ¹ that caught my immediate attention. Of course, that is the intent of any title. But this book's title, the published version of five lectures that Peter Schäfer presented at the University of Jena (in the series of annual lectures about Judaism, Antiquity, and Christianity) two years ago, did so not merely because of its Nietzschean ring, an aspect which may or may not have been intentional. More significantly, the title makes a rather daring claim, as to overturning the traditional genealogy of Judaism and Christianity. Now it is Christianity that is put in the place of the mother, who gives birth to her daughter Judaism.

A maternal kinship metaphor has reigned over scholarly discourse in religious and Jewish studies for so long. One might have thought, however, that at the latest, since Alan Segal's insightful study Rebecca's Children: Judaism and Christianity in the Roman World (1986),Footnote ² the maternal metaphor would have fallen by the wayside. Indeed, Segal only implemented for the scholarly imagination, what in early Christian and rabbinic typological exegesis had been more or less a commonplace, namely that Jews and Christians instantiate the twin birth of Jacob and Esau from their mother Rebecca, and like Jacob and Esau, develop a most complicated fraternal relationship. Most recently, Israel Yuval has summarized the history of this exegetical tradition and the use of the kinship metaphor in modern scholarly discourse.Footnote ³ Yuval, like Segal before him, suggested that the metaphorical relationship of mother (Judaism) and daughter (Christianity) is in urgent need of revision. Following Segal and Yuval, Daniel Boyarin has questioned the view that grants “Judaism” the status of mother religion, as if talmudic Judaism were simply a continuation of biblical Judaism, and not equally born from biblical Judaism and its centrifugal perspective on the Temple in Jerusalem.

Schäfer is of course aware of the trends in the field of the study of Judaism and Christianity in Late Antiquity that have pursued the ongoing engagement of rabbinic Judaism with Christianity—Christianity with Judaism in general and rabbinic Judaism in particular. He is among the scholars who helped give birth to these recent trends in the field, so wonderfully represented in the collection of papers published as The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Footnote ⁴ That book was the result of a conference that he helped enable at Princeton, and it features the work of senior scholars as well as the work of his students. In fact, the central proposition of the five lectures, as they are now introduced in the book under review, is that “the developing and dogmatically evolving Christianity” left some traces in rabbinic Judaism, and that “the borders between ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘heresy’ prove to remain fluid in late antique Judaism just as much as within evolving Christianity, and thereby the borders between ‘Judaism’ and ‘Christianity’ become porous in Late Antiquity” (x). In other words, clearly (to Schäfer) the relationship is not one that remains unilateral, and clearly “Judaism” (including rabbinic Judaism) is not the mother. Curiously, Schäfer still chose initially to entitle the lecture series “The Birth of Christianity from the Spirit of Judaism” (Die Geburt des Christentums aus dem Geist des Judentums). By the same token, he changed the title around for the publication, now foregrounding Christianity as the originator: “It is not only Christianity that defines itself by taking resort to the Judaism contemporary to it, and in its active engagement with it. Rabbinic Judaism as well figured out how to define itself (CEF: literally “find itself”) only in the exchange with Christianity” (x).

It is this claim that leads Schäfer to reverse the title. Read charitably, what he wishes the title to convey is that (rabbinic) Judaism and Christianity give birth to each other mutually, and because the lectures alias chapters in the book focus on rabbinic texts, the reversed title makes more sense. Both are mothers, and both are daughters. Who gives birth to whom in this constellation is simply interchangeable, it seems. And indeed, in his first chapter Schäfer refers to both as “sister religions” (Schwesterreligionen, 2, 30). Clearly, not many scholars in the field these days would have quarrels with the conceptual underpinnings that lead Schäfer to exchange mother and daughter for siblings. At the very least the exchangeability therefore does seem to demonstrate that the meaningful usefulness of the kinship metaphor has run its course.Footnote ⁵

However, if Schäfer did indeed intend to move beyond the mutuality in the shaping of each other's theological and exegetical discourse, captured more meaningfully in the “shared path(s)” metaphor, then some questions are bound to arise. This is what I had understood the title to indicate, namely that Schäfer was about to carry the recent propositions of the mutual birthing of “(rabbinic) Judaism” and “Christianity” one further step and suggest that it is time to consider Christianity the origin of all things rabbinic. What after all does it mean to say that “rabbinic Judaism finds itself only in the exchange with Christianity?” Is this to claim that the entire project of rabbinic Judaism is determined by its polemical and apologetic relationship with Christianity? We would have come a long way from the traditionalist view of rabbinic Judaism as the continuation of biblical Judaism, to which Christianity remained a mere epiphenomenon, and which was considered to remain mostly silent about the rise of Christianity, to such a view of rabbinic Judaism, according to which it is “born from the spirit of Christianity” altogether.

Let us leave aside the potential polemics inherent in such a view, just as it had been inherent in making Judaism the mother and Christianity the daughter, often considered a problem child at best. The lectures themselves do not fulfill my perhaps false expectation raised by the title. Each of the lectures is built around a rabbinic text that Schäfer considers to be a “key text” (Schlüsseltext, 1), selected from various rabbinic anthologies. The first chapter (“Why did the Messiah Baby disappear?: The Birth of Christianity from the Spirit of Judaism”) displays an extensive interpretation of a famous and highly encoded and much discussed narrative text from the Palestinian Talmud,Footnote ⁶ about the birth of the messianic baby that promptly disappears. Schäfer proposes to read this as a “complete and ironic reversal of the New Testament,” as a “parody of the birth story in the New Testament.” I am not going to argue with any of the particular readings here, since space does not allow me to do so. Suffice it to say that I find it somewhat bizarre to read a narrative character, that is, the mother of the messianic baby who does not quite fit romanticized Christian ideas of motherhood incorporated in the figure of Mary, as an expression of collective Jewish feelings of guilt (28). The mother in the talmudic story expresses an ambiguous feeling about her baby son, as his birth is somehow connected with the destruction of the Temple, although the text here is obscure. Schäfer ends up with a typological reading of the aggadic narrative that toys with formulations that more or less deliberately push the proverbial envelope. Thus he formulates: “in her desire to kill the child the mother (Judaism) attempts to kill nascent Christianity” (29). What does Schäfer imply when he himself admits that this is a “drastic” formulation (29)? He immediately follows this by asserting that of course “she does not kill her child” (in the story the mother claims that winds carried the baby away). To my mind, the typological reading that first of all overemphasizes the narrative character of the mother as tortured, guilt-ridden, and hateful (all overly psychologizing a mother whom we Westerners apparently generally expect to be unambiguously loving), and then turns her into (rabbinic) Judaism with those self-same “feelings” toward Christianity is at the very least an over-reading of the talmudic story. All the more so, if now the story is moved into the center of rabbinic theology, as Schäfer claims at the end, namely: “basically, I am arguing that Judaism, at the very moment that the idea of the Christian messiah was set free, could not remain the same anymore. Now Judaism adopts a mother for the Messiah, and even weighs the option that that messiah could be killed” (30). Of course, “Judaism” could not remain the same, but why would it have remained the same? Why these typological generalizations?

The second chapter (“Rabbi Simlai and the Heretics: One God or Many Gods?”) takes up another well-known rabbinic text,Footnote ⁷ about a midrashic debate between a rabbinic sage and the minim or heretics. Here Schäfer presents an interesting and extensive reading. The only question to be raised here is why this particular chapter that deals with the early theological proposition of a duality in the Godhead, both in Christian and rabbinic texts, does not engage Daniel Boyarin's work in any meaningful way.Footnote ⁸ This may be considered a potentially petty complaint, as the lecture format does not allow for an extensive discussion of the scholarly literature. But the conclusion of the lecture, namely, that Judaism and Christianity for the longest time shared the notion of some duality in the godhead, and that rabbinic Judaism in light of Christian dogmatic development shed that tenet, could have been taken straight out of Boyarin's Border Lines.

The third chapter (“The Old and the Young God”) draws a number of texts together, ranging from the early midrashic to the Babylonian Talmud, including the Enochic literature, all concerned about the diversity of biblical representations of the divinity and the underlying unity of these representations. This lecture shows Schäfer at his best, with some interesting hints at reading the political context of rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity, namely, the hierarchical structure of the Roman Empire, as one that contributed to shaping the respective theological discourses. This applies to the fourth lecture as well, “God and Metatron,” which is devoted to texts mostly from the Babylonian Talmud and the Hekhalot literature, the latter being Schäfer's field of expertise. Here Schäfer offers an interesting reading of the images of the Dura-Europos synagogue. Again, he pursues a reading, this time of the Metatron texts, which reads them in relationship to early Christian, and mostly New Testament, texts. He suggests that the elevation of Metatron to the level of “little God” can be read as a “dramatic reversal of the message of the New Testament” (131), by which he means Paul's citation of the Hymn to Christ (Philippians 2:6–11). It is highly plausible that the Metatron traditions do reflect some engagement with Christian theologizing or, better, christologizing.

Finally, Schäfer adds a chapter to the lectures for the purposes of the book, on “The Suffering Messiah Ephraim.” Here he turns to a late midrashic text, the Pesikta Rabbati, and in particular three homilies (34, 36, and 37), and posits their radical uniqueness within the classical rabbinic library, in that the parallels with the teachings of Christianity (and here as in most other places that means “the” New Testament to Schäfer) are up-front, and center. Schäfer diagnoses an “eminently Christian coloration of the homilies,” which he takes to indicate “the (relatively late) self-conscious Jewish reception or, more precisely, reception of ideas that had been usurped by Christianity and had for the longest time been considered as exclusively Christian ideas” (177). At the conclusion of this chapter which is at the same time the conclusion of the book, he reminds us one more time that the explanatory model of “Christian influence” may unnecessarily narrow the possibility for explaining and interpreting rabbinic theological texts, but that against any insistence on seeking the origin of rabbinic theology in Jewish sources we should not forget that “Judaism developed and changed together with developing Christianity” (178, author's emphasis).

In the end, much can be learned from this little volume about not only the texts that Schäfer makes the center of his chapters, but also about the larger, mutually engaged evolution of rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity. Given my qualms with the misleading title to these lectures, one would hope that the title would be changed should these lectures be translated into English. One may also in the end remain uneasy with the question of how much and how deeply rabbinic Judaism is defined by Christian theological discourses, and here one would have wished that Christianity is not so narrowly represented only by “the New Testament,” as it mostly is in this volume. Schäfer selects interesting and enigmatic texts, texts that are clearly concerned with theological tenets, such as the duality in the godhead, and the nature of the Messiah, as well as with some fundamental exegetical issues. However, in how far these texts are to be read as key texts (Schlüsseltexte) that define rabbinic Judaism as a whole, such that he can formulate that “Judaism is fascinated in its innermost being/essence (Wesen) by Christianity” (29) remains an open question, at least to this reader, and proposes an unnecessarily essentialist model of Judaism. Here the claims seem often a bit overly dramatic. But the general sentiment of these lectures, that rabbinic Judaism had much more to say about the evolving Christian discourse than we have assumed till only recently, is quite persuasive and shared by a number of scholars that have contributed to reshaping the study of rabbinic Judaism in American universities.