This edited volume comprises fourteen essays on the historical dynamics of reliability and trust in Jewish Studies, organized into four sections. The volume focuses on how Jews—both in the figure of the Jew as metaphor and in encounters with actual Jews or Jewish communities—were trusted or mistrusted in the context of Jewish-Christian relations. The essays in the book's first section consider oath-swearing and the mechanisms through which Jewish testimony was made trustworthy; the second group of essays examines the relationship between trust and commerce; the third group addresses how questions of trust and religious affiliation shaped personal and communal relationships; and the final section discusses how ideas about Jewish trustworthiness have shaped political movements and events.

The majority of the essays deal with Jewish-Christian relations in the medieval and early modern periods, with some exceptions: the first essay, which examines oaths and vows in biblical literature (in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament) and the final essay, which explores the tensions of self-representation and perception in the work of the American Jewish comedian and news host Jon Stewart. Like all similar collections, each chapter is a self-contained case which may relate to the others only in general theme; one minor, although particularly distracting, issue is the different standards of Hebrew transliteration used in different essays. The introduction, however, cogently pulls these studies together, wondering whether “the retreat of religion—that is, Christianity—into the realm of the personal and private [means] that religious difference—that is, Judaism—no longer mattered in the ways it had before?” (9). At a time when questions of Jewish “(dis)loyalty” are once again appearing in headlines, this timely volume offers directions to begin untangling the historical roots and trajectories of the dynamics of trust.