Debates between Christians and Jews over the proper interpretation of biblical texts were staples of medieval Christian religious discourse. For the most part, Jews participated unwillingly in these debates; sometimes they did not participate at all, the Jewish position being supplied by the Christian author simply as a foil for his own exhibition of exegetical ingenuity. Over the past half century, the texts of these debates, real and imagined, have been studied by a number of notable scholars. We have all learned much from their efforts. But while new discoveries may yet be made, one cannot help but feel that most of the gold in this particular vein has by now been extracted.
Ruth Nisse's extraordinary book, beautifully designed and produced by Cornell University Press, leads us in a new and altogether welcome direction in the study of the intellectual relationships between medieval Jews and Christians. Her focus is on England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, not generally regarded as a center of Jewish learning in this or any other time period. But evidence has been mounting in recent years that the Jewish scholars of medieval England were far more accomplished than we had previously realized, and that there are aspects of Jewish and Christian intellectual life in England that are both distinctive and important. This book pushes that discussion forward in exciting ways.
Nisse's particular contribution is to draw our attention to the ways in which Jewish and Christian scholars sought to appropriate extrabiblical texts for their own religious traditions through translation, interpretation, and the creative compilation of diverse texts into anthologies. In her first chapter, Nisse looks at the tangled history of Flavius Josephus's Jewish Antiquities and the Jewish War. Written in Greek in the first century of the Common Era, by the end of the fourth century Josephus's works had been epitomized by a patristic Latin author known as the Pseudo-Hegesippus, who presented the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE as God's punishment for the crucifixion of Jesus by the Jews. In the mid-tenth century, a Hebrew translation and rewriting of the Pseudo-Hegesippus had been composed in southern Italy, which circulated widely, together with several other ancient texts, in an anthology known as Sefer Yosippon. But Sefer Yosippon was no mere translation. As Nisse notes, “Yosippon … engages Hegesippus polemically and transforms this … Christian narrative about … the fate of Jerusalem into its own diasporic account of Jewish self-destruction and heroic sacrifice,” creating “a new kind of Jewish spiritualizing rhetoric of resistance that later became particularly influential following the persecutions of 1096 during the First Crusade” (22).
In twelfth-century England, these two competing versions of Josephus's work, one Latin and the other Hebrew, collided for the first time. Both versions laid explicit claim to present historical truth, a claim given additional weight by the fact that Yosippon was written in Hebrew, the sacred language of the Jews, but acknowledged by many twelfth-century Christian scholars to be essential to interpreting the Hebrew Bible and hence to establishing the truth of the prophecies that proved Jesus to be the messiah. Yosippon, however, was a problematic text for Christian intellectuals. Not only did it omit the testimony to Jesus's messiahship that the Christianized Latin versions of Josephus and Pseudo-Hegesippus featured, it also included the Toledot Yeshu, a Hebrew version of Jesus's life that in Christian eyes was nothing short of blasphemous. Nevertheless, in twelfth-century England, any resulting suspicion of Hebrew as a language of mendacity, such as was expressed by Gerald of Wales, remained a minority position among English Christian intellectuals. By the mid-thirteenth century, however, this had become the majority view, not only of intellectuals but of the English Christian population at large, with serious consequences for Jewish-Christian relations and for the continuance of Jewish life in England.
Among many other texts, the compiler of Yosippon also included in his anthology a short version of the Aeneid that applied “the epic themes of heroic journeys, wars, fateful marriages” (58) to a Jewish hero, while undermining the Roman and Angevin claims to descent from Troy by removing Troy entirely from its story line. By translating the Aeneid, together with an account of the Second Punic War, from Latin into Hebrew, and by including a distinctly chivalric account (avant la lettre) of The Wars of the Sons of Jacob (based on the book of Jubilees), Sefer Yosippon constituted a specifically Jewish counter-claim to some of the key historical self-perceptions of the twelfth-century Angevin Empire. Translatio studii (from Greece to Rome to the Angevins) and translatio imperii (from Rome to Charlemagne to the Angevins) were inextricably linked at the court of King Henry II of England: “A Hebrew Aeneid that erases all signs of Troy [was thus] an intervention into the theory of history at the heart of Anglo-Norman translation” (72).
In Berekhiah ha-Nakdan's Hebrew translations of Adelard of Bath's scientific works and of Aesop's fables, we see yet another example of the way in which Angevin Jewish intellectuals sought, through their translations, “to recover the inaccessible texts of Christian Europe in order to address an incomplete, fragmented knowledge among [diasporic] Jews” (84). But by replacing Latin with the holy language of Hebrew, Berekhiah did more than merely render these texts legible to a Jewish readership. He also erased Europe altogether as the source of this new knowledge, ascribing it instead to “the Arabs” and writing Adelard entirely out of the picture. Nisse's chapter on Berekhiah is a tour de force, by far the best synthetic account we have of this unjustly neglected exemplar of twelfth-century Renaissance learning.
In her first three chapters, Nisse describes compellingly “how medieval Jewish readers and writers reconceived ancient texts in order to negotiate the place of Jews within a Christian European society. … By reappropriating … or subverting …, the Jewish translators claimed these uncanonical texts for a medieval Hebrew tradition that used them to engage their Latin counterparts over some of the crucial ideas of their time” (102), by arguing for the linguistic superiority and the “priority of the translation over the translated ‘original’” (103). It is a masterly performance by Nisse, based on great linguistic range and a deep knowledge of both Jewish and Christian sources. A few small points are no doubt debatable. But the larger argument I find entirely convincing.
In her final two chapters, Nisse moves from a Jewish perspective to a Christian one, to look at two Christian translations, from Greek into Latin, of materials that were presumed to have been originally written in Hebrew: the story of Joseph and Aseneth, in which the pharaoh's daughter Aseneth converts to Judaism in order to marry Joseph the patriarch; and Robert Grosseteste's famous translation of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, which contains, among much else, the story of Jacob's shipwreck, from which Nisse derives the title of her book. We thus move from the twelfth century to the mid-thirteenth, and into a world in which the relationship between Christians and Jews in England had changed profoundly.
Like Sefer Yosippon, the manuscript in which Aseneth survives to us is an anthology, composed at Canterbury in the 1250s or early 1260s. In its selection of texts, the anthology reflects the concerns of its era, especially those arising from the significantly larger number of English Jews who were converting to Christianity as a result of the ruinous taxation and outright violence perpetrated by the king and his baronial opponents during these years. Aseneth in particular probes what Nisse calls “the phenomenology of conversion” (120), that is to say, how can one determine whether a conversion is sincere, especially if that conversion is coerced through violence or poverty? As Nisse observes, “Jews reacted to the problem of apostasy with new narratives of martyrdom that stressed a continuity from the fall of the Second Temple to Rabbi Akiva to the current day” (107). At the same time, Christians came increasingly to believe in “the absolute continuity of the Jews of Jesus's day with current-day Jews as eternal misreaders of their own scripture who stubbornly resist conversion—and who will continue to do so until the end of days” (107–8).
Behind these hardening attitudes on both sides lay a gathering Christian conviction that Jewish texts, the Hebrew language, and the Jews themselves all posed an immediate and malevolent threat to Christian society. In the later twelfth century, Jewish and Christian scholars in England had both worked (not always harmoniously, to be sure, and not always together) on a common project to understand the Hebraica veritas of the Hebrew Bible. By the mid-thirteenth century, however, English Christian intellectuals like Robert Grosseteste and Matthew Paris had become convinced that the Mongols were in league with the ten lost tribes of Israel; that the alliance between the ten lost tribes and the Mongols was enhanced by the “fact” that both spoke Hebrew; and that English Jews were thus “part of an international conspiracy [against Christendom] connected by Hebrew writing” (134). Meanwhile, Grosseteste's translation of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs convinced him that “the patriarchs themselves, even as they exhorted their children to adhere to the practices of Jewish Law, recognized the eventual supersession of the Torah and prophesied the coming of Jesus as the awaited Messiah” (142). In the face of this sort of deliberate mendacity, Jewish conversion to Christianity could only occur at the end of days; until that time, the rabbis’ command of Hebrew would ensure that their people never learned the truth about the messiah. Matthew Paris was more overtly eschatological than Grosseteste, but he saw the same threat as did Grosseteste in Jewish textual exegesis. Matthew believed that “the underlying threat of the Mongol armies [was] really a world conquest of Jewish exegesis, a supplanting of the Christian eschatological narrative with that of the Jewish conspirators” (145). From this point on, the expulsion of the entire Jewish community from England in 1290 becomes, if not inevitable, at the very least comprehensible.
Yet even the expulsion was not sufficient to protect England from the threat that the Jews and their “secret” language was perceived to pose to England and to Christendom. As Nisse notes in her conclusion, for the fourteenth-century author of Mandeville's Travels, Hebrew remained “a spoken language that existed almost solely to destroy Christians by uniting Europe's Jews with the vicious ten tribes” (153). A tradition once shared by both Christians and Jews, of translation as an effort to appropriate the other's culture, had thus come decisively to an end.
