Jeremy Cohen brings his expertise as one of the premier historians of medieval Jewish-Christian relations to an analysis of Solomon ibn Verga's Shevet Yehudah, an idiosyncratic reflection on the tragic history of the Jews, penned most likely in the early sixteenth century in the wake of the expulsion from Iberia. Many of the themes at the core of Shevet Yehudah are those Jeremy Cohen has studied and written about. Indeed, in discreet articles, Cohen has already demonstrated how Ibn Verga utilized raw materials and his fecund imagination to ruminate on Christian-Jewish disputations, on Christian attitudes towards the Talmud, on anti-Jewish libels, and on martyrdom.
But while Cohen is vitally interested in all these subjects, Shevet Yehudah ultimately is not. For Ibn Verga, these themes simply furnish a useful backdrop to demonstrate why social relations between Christians and Jews have turned for the worse in Christian Europe, and how the Jews' political, economic, and social behavior—and rabbinic teachings—have exacerbated this enmity. As essays, Jeremy Cohen's analyses of Shevet Yehudah’s dramatic use of these subjects worked wonderfully. As elements of a book that explicates Shevet Yehudah, they don't work as well.
It may be that Cohen did not originally intend his observations on Shevet Yehudah to constitute a stand-alone volume, but rather to accompany an edition of Shevet Yehudah itself. In the first endnote, Cohen informs the reader of a soon-to-be-published translation of the book from its original Hebrew, and indicates that his translations in this volume are similar but not the same as in the forthcoming edition. I cannot help but imagine that this present volume was intended to accompany this translation, which Cohen reports was begun by the late Yosef Yerushalmi, and then further edited from Yerushalmi's papers by Cohen himself.
The absence of this text of Shevet Yehudah presents a problem that haunts this volume throughout. It is not clear how a reader who does not possess the Hebrew edition or the language skills to reference the work can read Cohen's book except sporadically. Charts indicating when certain themes appear in Shevet Yehudah, which Cohen distributes throughout the work, would be useful if the reader could consult the text of Shevet Yehudah. But I can easily visualize how Cohen's insights—and there are many—could have been inserted within a translated volume. The reader then would also not have needed the brief summaries of many of Shevet Yehudah’s chapters that appear throughout this book.
Nevertheless, Cohen's observations demand close reading. In his wonderful analysis of Ibn Verga's retelling of the Tortosa debate (chap. 2), Cohen demonstrates how Ibn Verga reworked a previously extant Hebrew summary of the disputation. As I read the chapter, I had the Shochat Hebrew edition in front of me so I could appreciate Cohen's comments. Cohen skillfully reveals how Ibn Verga was far less interested in offering a factual account of the disputation, but rather used this well-known historical event pedagogically, to argue that Jewish behavior during the debate was at times inept, contentious, and rude. Additionally, Ibn Verga took advantage of this opportunity to remind his audience that the good will of the non-Jewish leader was crucial to Jewish survival. While Cohen is surprised that Ibn Verga did not confront the theological arguments in the disputation, Ibn Verga's attitude may have indeed reflected what medieval Jews knew and cared about such confrontations, with but little interest in the theological matters that occupied the disputants then and scholars now.
Similarly, Cohen observes that when Shevet Yehudah portrayed the Talmud and talmudists (chap. 3), Ibn Verga did not respond—as did medieval Jewish polemicists—to Christian arguments against the legitimacy of the Oral Torah or to Christian views of the messianic advent. Rather, he was concerned with the difficulty of Christians and Jews trying to live together. Consequently, Ibn Verga criticized the medieval talmudists for restricting the Jews' ability to mix with the gentiles, which he believed would have advantaged the Jews both politically and socially.
In the section on blood libels (chap. 4), Cohen furnishes a chart of the location, characters, plot, and resolution of each of the accusations mentioned in the volume. He notes that the accounts do not possess many typical medieval elements. Instead, Ibn Verga populated these stories with stereotypical Christian and Jewish characters; he described a situation where no one in power actually believed the charges and these officials were aware that the evidence was fabricated. In Ibn Verga's mind, blood libels did not result in harm to Jews if the king intervened strongly on their behalf. While Cohen wonders about the lack of substance in these stories, it may be that the medieval purveyors of the stories and the contemporary scholars who analyze them were more interested in the details of the accusations than either the Jews or their protectors, who were both more focused on the safety of those accused.
Ibn Verga veered away from depictions of violence and death in his chapters on martyrdom (examined in chap. 5) and avoided the theological polemic embedded within medieval Jewish accounts of such acts. Apparently, our sixteenth-century author was far more interested in the political and social realities of the Jews' situation postexpulsion, and in finding a means for Jews to make their way in gentile society, than in martyrdom itself.
Lastly, in the chapter on converts and conversion (chap. 6), Cohen explores the historiographical thickets in which writers in the past century have found themselves as they attempted to understand whether the conversos should be viewed as Jewish or Christian. Although Ibn Verga distinguished between forced and voluntary converts, he regarded most conversos as Jewish victims of Christian hatred. As Cohen argues, Ibn Verga may have believed that these converts possessed an innate Jewishness. Work remains to be done to clarify the authorship of some of the later chapters of Shevet Yehudah (Cohen declares early on that he will treat the work as a whole) in order to determine if the various comments about converts reflect the work of one author and the product of one sensibility.
Cohen does not adequately explore questions of authorship, and of the relationship between this work and general sixteenth-century historiography by Jews and others, and other contemporary literary works. Because the sixteenth century, and Iberian Jewries generally, are admittedly not Cohen's fields of expertise, at times it seems that Cohen does not stand on secure ground, an unexpected experience for those who have enjoyed and admired Cohen's previous investigations.
In the introduction, Cohen telegraphs Ibn Verga's originality in bullet points: a critique of theologically based anti-Judaism, an argument that religion is a product of human imagination, and an exhortation that Christians and Jews learn to live together. Cohen holds that Shevet Yehudah’s most significant contribution is an investigation of Jewish history, especially of the decline of the Jews, primarily through an exploration of economic and sociological factors, “ha-sibah ha-tiv‘it.” As Cohen notes, Ibn Verga severely criticized Jewish courtier leadership for its contribution to the sad state of his people. Ibn Verga reasoned that if Jews avoided behaving in an ostentatious and domineering manner, they might not have to repeat their endlessly tragic history. Reflecting on the actions of Jews, as did many in the wake of the Iberian expulsions, Ibn Verga did not focus, as per tradition, on their sins against God and the Torah, but stressed how the Jews' own behavior undermined their social and political standing. While Cohen acknowledges that his book is hardly the last word on Shevet Yehudah, this volume—despite its structural peculiarities—is indispensable for those who will continue to write about Shevet Yehudah’s startling ideas.
