Ruth Nisse's book gains its title from The Testament of Nephtali, one of the sources of the Jewish Greek Pseudepigrapha, The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, a work that peppers this book. It is therefore a fitting title, although the subtitle proves very informative for a non-specialist reader. It is notable that existing works on medieval Anglo-Jewry do not include the Testaments, and thus this works adds an important contribution to the field of medieval Anglo-Jewish study.
Nisse's work deals with the interplay between Jews and Christians as related to the translations and interpretations of ancient noncanonical and classical texts that emerged and circulated in medieval England, and beyond. Nisse focuses her study on twelfth- and thirteenth- centuries England and Northern France, areas intimately connected through the Angevin sphere of influence. More specifically, her work examines the theological differences in the “translation, rewriting, and circulation” of a range of texts, and these are covered in five chapters, which incorporate the well-known works of Flavius Josephus, as well as lesser-known Jewish texts based on Aesop's Fables, and the Aeneid (3). And as clearly politics played a crucial role in Jewish-Christian relations in this era, the literary sources chosen by Nisse are viewed in the light of the persecutions of the Jews in the wake of the Crusades and more general Christian polemics. Chapter 1, “Josephus, Jerusalem, and the martyrs of Medieval England,” brings these strands together well. The chapter opens with allegations by several Christian clerics and scholars over what they see as the Jews perceived corruption of Hebrew texts that remove accounts of the Christ and their refusal to accept Christianity. These texts include the Hebrew version of Josephus's Antiquities and Jewish Wars and pick up on the 1190 massacre/martyrdom of the Jews in York which was encouraged by Rabbi Yom Tov of Joigny, France, who made links with contemporary European murders and martyrdoms.
Chapter 2, “Diaspora Without End and the Renewal of Epic,” deals with medieval Jewish diasporic living. It opens with part of a poem by Yaakov ben Yehuda, a late-thirteenth-century London Jewish poet, who pleads to God for compassion in exile. Written shortly before the 1290 expulsion of Jews from England, he had witnessed the increased economic restrictions on Jews, and even executions of Jews, and believed that Edom (the name for the Christian world in rabbinic literature) would be eradicated after the vengeance of God was exercised. The reference to Edom is important as Sefer Yosippon, a chronicle of Jewish history ultimately taken from Josephus, defined it as stemming from the defeat of a sinful Jerusalem; and the notion of sin in exile is a theme in Nisse's book. This chapter also deals with the circulation of a version of the Aeneid and notes the multilingualism of Angevin zone Jews. This linguistic ability enables the circulation and translation of multiple texts. However, according to Robert of Criclade, prior of St. Frideswide Priory in Oxford, such translation enabled Hebrew versions of the circulated texts to alter and misrepresent them; this, he argued, was especially dangerous when it happened with a Hebrew version of the Bible.
Chapter 3, “A Fox among Fish?,” picks up on two late-twelfth-century texts: a Hebrew version of Aesopic fables by Anglo-Norman scholar, Berekhiah ha-Nakdan, who had also translated a medical treatise by Adelard of Bath called Natural Treatise. The first of these works, Fox Fables, deals harshly with England's Jews, who are described as corrupt, shameful, ignorant, proud, unjust, and idolatrous, and who deserve the punishment they are getting from their host community (91). The second translation, titled Uncle and Nephew, deals with the first medieval translation into Hebrew of a scientific/medical text. It took the form of a dialogue between an ignorant nephew and his wise uncle that includes the enlightening point that men go bald from the front of their head because of the fumes rising from their stomach! This is a moment of levity in what is essentially a dense, although fascinating, book.
Chapter 4, “Pleasure and Dangers of Conversion,” deals with conversation and rather than examining how medieval Jewish readers and writers reconceived texts, explores Christian responses to translated texts. It notes, for instance, how Bishop Robert Gosseteste of Lincoln had Jewish scribes copying texts for Christian students, and how this sheds light on not only Jewish-Christian relations more generally but also how Bishop Grosseteste treated Jews. Following Pope Gregory IX's ordering of the Talmud to be burnt as blasphemous and the explosion from Leicester of Jews by Simon de Montfort, Grosseteste stated that unless Jews started working the land and stopped engaging in usury, they should be expelled. The relationship between the church and the Jews in relation to financing loans peppers Nisse's book, as this, along with conversion/non-conversion, were topics of particular interest the Church, the King, and the Anglo-Jewish community. Whilst only a few Jews did convert, for the Church non-conversion was a somewhat ambiguous topic since Jews were needed as witnesses to what Christians understood to be a Deicide. However, non-conversion was an issue through concerns over the return of the Lost Tribe.
Chapter 5, “The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs in the Shadow of the Ten Lost Tribes,” focuses on The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, which according to Grosseteste had been mistranslated into Latin by Jews. The problem with this translation was that the original Greek provided information on the Messiah because it had been translated directly from Hebrew. Somewhat bizarrely at this time, it appears that the Mongols, who were laying waste to parts of Europe, were understood to be one of the Twelve Tribes. This connection, combined with Grosseteste's translation of the Twelve Patriarchs, cast the Jews as increasingly sinister and an increasing threat to Christendom.
Overall, this work deals with a complex set of texts in a manageable way. It has extensive notes and a small glossary, but a reader less familiar with medieval Anglo-Jewry may well need to look up terms and people, and therefore this is more aimed at postgraduate students and academics.
