Modern Historiographical Methods and Jewish-Christian Rapprochement

The modern critical methods of the historical sciences have been serving Jewish and Christian communities in diverse contexts to overcome the traditional rivalries between them and to revise their traditions in light of conciliatory modern values. One prominent example is the manner in which the post-Holocaust Catholic doctrinal revolution regarding Jews and Judaism had been nourished by the new openness of the Catholic Church to biblical criticism.^{Footnote 3} As Hans Urs von Balthasar argued in 1958, it is by virtue of having pulled the carpet from under the traditional idea of Scripture’s divine origins that biblical studies showed Christians the depth of their debt to Jewish tradition.^{Footnote 4} Through the historical contextualization of Scripture, Catholic theologians have acknowledged the existence of intimate connections between the sacred texts and the people who put them in writing. These new scholarly insights led them to revise their concept of Jewish-Christian relations from one of break and replacement to one of continuity and a Judeo- Christian common heritage.^{Footnote 5}

The contextualization and the historicization of traditional Catholic sources also assisted Catholic theologians and church officials who sought reconciliation with the Jews in marginalizing the anti-Jewish aspects of the Christian tradition, and in regarding them as insubstantial and contingent, dependent on the cultural and social circumstances in which they were composed. This was the case in the composition of Nostra Aetate #4, the Second Vatican Council’s document on Jews and Judaism (1965): Cardinal Augustin Bea, president of the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity at Vatican II (and previously the rector of the Biblicum) who was responsible for formulating the Council’s schema, managed to exempt the Jews from the deicide accusation by distinguishing between the Gospels’ account of the passion, and later, postscriptural interpretations of the passion story that have burdened the sources with hostile, anachronistic interpretations.^{Footnote 6} The same methodology was at work in the 1985 document by the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, according to which: “Certain controversies [in the Gospels] reflect Christian-Jewish-relations long after the time of Jesus. To establish this is of capital importance if we wish to bring out the meaning of certain Gospel texts for the Christians of today.”^{Footnote 7} The modern historical-critical gaze—sorting tradition into different periods and layers—was thus crucial for uprooting anti-Jewish threads from Christian tradition and transforming the perception of “Judeo-Christian” relationship from one of conflict to one of closeness.

Yet, this conciliatory effect of the application of modern historical-critical methods to traditional texts in the realm of Jewish-Christian relations was not an innovation of Catholics in the post-Holocaust era but had other, earlier variations. Mutatis mutandis, the founders of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism) in the Jewish-German milieu of the nineteenth century had been using similar historiographical methods for similar purposes. By turning Judaism into an object of science, they sought to dissolve the alienation of the Jews from their European surroundings and to replace segregation with integration into the enlightened Christian society.^{Footnote 8} Applying historiographical methods to Jewish rabbinic literature,^{Footnote 9} they undermined the authority of the rabbis who interpreted the texts as containing ahistorical and immutable meanings and offered a reading that was more fitting to the values of Aufklärung and for supporting the cause of emancipation.^{Footnote 10} The contextualization and the historicization of rabbinic literature allowed the pioneers of Wissenschaft des Judentums to pick and choose from rabbinic tradition what they had deemed as still relevant, establishing a comprehensive synergy with the Protestant scholarship of their time, and ultimately deeming the traditional antagonism to Christianity as obsolete.^{Footnote 11}

Transcending Jewish-Christian mutual exclusion and hostility, on the one hand, and adopting, instead, the scientific, secularizing gaze on history, on the other, were two related aspects of the modernization of Judaism in the nineteenth century, as they became, more recently, two related aspects of Catholic aggiornamento.

Yet, as Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi argued in Zakhor, the replacement of the traditional approach to traditional texts with the modern, historicizing approach to them—even if it was meant for the preservation of Jewish literature and existence— implied, to a great extent, a radical break from the existential continuum of Judaism and a shift toward an entirely different Weltanschauung.^{Footnote 12} In the lamenting words of Baruch Kurtzweil:

Historians of modern Judaism differ as to where the roots of this radical transition to the modern, scientific perspective on Jewish history and literature lay. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin argued that the early origins of Judaic studies in the modern sense long antedated nineteenth-century Wissenschaft des Judentums, existing already in early modern European press shops that printed rabbinic literature under the scrutinizing gaze of the Christian censor. The censor and the Jews, who had to adapt their literature to the sensitivities of early modern Christians, worked shoulder to shoulder in “the establishment of a Judaism that is not based on the polemic with Christianity and that is devoid of elements that might be considered demonic or irrational.”^{Footnote 14} The elimination of anti-Christian notions was thus only a part of an encompassing adaptation of Jewish literature to the early modern European context, in such a way that Judaism would not blatantly contradict Christian values, while still maintaining its right to “an autonomous Jewish space, albeit marginal.”^{Footnote 15}

Paraphrasing Carlo Ginzburg, Raz-Krakotzkin states that the Jewish historian— to this very day—stands, in a sense, behind the ear of the Christian censor—who was often a convert from Judaism. Jewish historians are the inheritors of the convert censor’s ambivalence toward rabbinic literature; the censor both legitimized the sources and castrated them, as he stood both within the Jewish tradition and outside of it. Similarly, modern Jewish historiography is also expropriating the texts from their faith-based readership and making them into an object of external curiosity:

The ambivalence of the censor, and by analogy of the Jewish historian, is closely associated with the overcoming of the polemical, anti-Christian components in rabbinic literature, which were at odds with the censor’s Christian sensitivities no less than they are at odds with the modern, liberal sensitivities of us academics integrated into an enlightened, egalitarian, and postpolemical world.

This gap between the polemical, premodern past and the conciliatory, emancipatory scientific historical present is also reflected in Israel Yaakov Yuval’s Two Nations in Your Womb. In a subchapter titled “The Conciliatory Approach of Modern Research,” Yuval justifies his historiographical project of surfacing subtle late-antique rabbinic polemics against Christianity by declaring the end of the actual polemic between Christians and Jews. Only when that mutual antagonism between Jews and Christians had finally been resolved (as witnessed, according to Yuval, in the fourth section of the Second Vatican Council’s Nostra Aetate), could historians enjoy “a certain remove” that allows us to cast a direct gaze on these sensitive issues “that were once discussed in whispers in private chambers or known only to a chosen few.” Modern Jewish historiography is defined here once more as linked to the overcoming of the Jewish-Christian polemic and is dedicated to the cause of neutralizing the polemical aspects of rabbinical tradition from any existential poignancy.^{Footnote 17}

In accordance with this perspective, it would have been reasonable to assume that those Jewish groups that still resist the modern historiographical gaze on Jewish history and literature, i.e., rabbis and Torah scholars who are invested in “orthodox history,” would also reject Jewish-Christian reconciliation and hold fast to premodern antagonistic perspectives on Christianity. Even if these communities are open—as not uncommon in fundamentalist communities—to using the fruits of modern science, they reject the humanities, which they identify as inseparable from the foreign set of modern values they strive to resist.^{Footnote 18} As Marc Shapiro has convincingly demonstrated, the historical perception of Orthodox rabbis and Torah scholars is still very much at odds with mainstream modern historical perceptions, and certainly with the work of professional historians; ultra-Orthodox circles often cultivate a different concept of historical truth, willing to manipulate historical facts to preserve and maintain their ideology and sense of identity.^{Footnote 19}

In these very same Orthodox circles, one also recognizes a general antagonism toward interreligious dialogue, and toward dialogue with Christianity in particular. Contemporary halakhic writings tend to consider Christians as idolaters, that is, they depict Christianity as a harmful religious phenomenon that should eventually disappear.^{Footnote 20} Scholars usually overlook this tendency, probably because a small group of Orthodox rabbis who favor Jewish-Christian dialogue tends to be much more visible on the international stage than the vast majority of their peers.^{Footnote 21} This pro-dialogue group is in fact a small community within the greater Orthodox congregation. As I show in this article, a close reading of theological and halakhic discussions within the ultra-Orthodox community points in a rather different direction.

When taken together, these phenomena—Orthodox resistance to critical historiographical methods and Orthodox resistance to Jewish-Christian rapprochement—might suggest that it is precisely the rejection of the modern attitude to history that allows Orthodox Torah scholars to ignore the historical fact of Jewish-Christian reconciliation, and to hold fast to the axiom that “It is a well known halakha that Esau hates Jacob”^{Footnote 22} as immutable truth. Thus, if (or when) Orthodox communities would have bothered to undergo aggiornamento of their historical perspectives like their Catholic counterparts, they would have understood that the rivalry between Christians and Jews is not a fixed, eternal truth but merely a historical phase—a phase that now, when Christianity no longer poses a threat to Judaism, has ceased to be relevant. In other words, one would expect that a grain of historical criticism would emancipate orthodox Jews from the haunting shadow of the past and hasten their jumping on the wagon of interfaith friendships.^{Footnote 23}

Yet, as we shall see, contemporary rabbinical writings on Christians and Christianity seem to defy these assumptions. Indeed, rabbis and Torah scholars of recent decades are strongly reclaiming the polemical, bringing back all those notions that both the censors and the Jewish authors and editors who lived under Christian hegemony took great care to eliminate. Yet the re-polemicization of Judaism is not achieved through a reactionary rejection of modern historiography and its scientific methods. While in other areas contemporary rabbis and Torah scholars may still resist the modern historiographical assessment of Jewish history and literature, whenever the issue of Jewish-Christian relations arises, one cannot but discern an unabashed adoption of a modern scientific attitude to rabbinic literature and to Jewish history. Not unlike professional historians, contemporary Orthodox scholars compare editions to reconstruct the censored texts; they read the texts in their historical contexts, accounting for interactions between Jewish communities and the cultures surrounding them as a formulating factor in the development of their literature, categorizing the sources, dating them, authenticating some and falsifying others. Moreover, this flourishing of critical historical thinking is not limited to a specific ultra-Orthodox group but appears throughout the entire scope of the Haredi scholarly elite, from Ashkenazi to Sephardi rabbinic journals, from Lithuanian to Hasidic new editions of rabbinic literature, from Israeli to European, from religious Zionist to anti-Zionist circles.

Yet these ultra-Orthodox scholars’ aims are different from those of historians. To use Raz-Krakotzkin’s metaphor again, Orthodox rabbis and Torah scholars adopt the censor’s distance and ambivalence to the Jewish past and to rabbinic literature, not in order to obliterate the anti-Christian statements in the Talmud and halakha, but to the contrary—in order to obliterate any tolerance, respect, or approval of Christianity, which is construed as a redundant apologetic that was aimed only at appeasing the censor or the political powers under which the censor labored.

Purging Halakha of False Tolerance

As Jacob Katz showed in his classic Exclusiveness and Tolerance, despite the default halakhic definition of Christianity as idolatry, halakhists from the Middle Ages on found more and more reasons to exempt Christians from the accusation of idolatry. This was initially done to enable Jews to engage in commercial relations with Christians, and later on a theological level that categorically changed Christian believers’ halakhic and theological status. Whether this development of tolerance was a pragmatic concession to social necessities or a profound theological transformation is debatable, but it is nevertheless evident that rabbinic literature of the modern period abounds in statements that clearly distinguish between the Christians of their time and the pagans of the Bible and the Talmud, exempting Christians from the accusation of idolatry, and granting them relative tolerance.^{Footnote 24} However, contemporary halakhists choose almost unanimously, from among the various traditional halakhic approaches to Christianity, the view that holds Christianity to be wholly idolatrous, often based on the halakhic writings of Maimonides.^{Footnote 25} How do these rabbinic authorities justify their rejection of the more moderate positions—some of which have enjoyed a wide acceptance in the past? If Christians are and always were idolaters, how does one then contend with the contrary rulings, such as the Tosafists’ idea of “association” (Šituf, which classifies Christianity as an intermediate category between idolatry and pure monotheism)?^{Footnote 26}

How does one approach Menachem Meiri’s (1249–1315) unique category for Christians and Muslims as moral “nations who are bound by the manners of religion,”^{Footnote 27} or the many prologues to halakhic works, according to which any offensive remarks about gentiles do not refer to contemporary Christians but to the seven Canaanite nations?^{Footnote 28}

Most contemporary rabbis do not reflect on the halakhic transition that they are performing, other than expressing perplexity over their predecessors’ more lenient positions.^{Footnote 29} Others, however, reveal an interesting rationale. One argument, reoccurring in many contemporary rabbinical works, is that the more lenient positions of halakhists and Torah scholars of previous generations were affected by forms of religious coercion and do not reflect the true spirit of Judaism.

Rabbi Yosef Pinḥasi, a contemporary Sephardic rabbi and a chief judge at the rabbinic court of the Haredi city Modi‘in ‘Ilit (also known as Qiryat Sepher), writes on this issue in his book Yefeh to’ar:

Pinḥasi thus raises the possibility that traditional positive attitudes toward Christianity are inauthentic. As far as Pinḥasi is concerned, modern halakhists who defined Christianity as a legitimate faith for gentiles (based on the Tosafists’ “association” rule, which was later developed into the view that Christianity is a deficient monotheistic faith permitted to gentiles and forbidden to Jews) have done so because they were not aware of Maimonides’s uncensored ruling (which defines Christianity as full-fledged idolatry):^{Footnote 31}

For Pinḥasi, the reason for the moderate rabbinic treatment of Christianity in the modern age was either the fear of censorship, in which case the authors were fully aware of the distortion and were forced to accept it, or, at a later stage, ignorance; for as the generations passed, the rabbis lost access to the omitted passages or to the texts in their uncorrupted form, so that “the penetrating gaze of the … modern rabbis never fell upon Maimonides’s uncensored statement.”

Similar explanations often recur in rabbinic literature.^{Footnote 33} Rabbi David Avitan (a current Jerusalem-based Sephardic halakhist) wrote in the Haredi journal ’or torah that the lenient Ashkenazi tradition results from unfamiliarity with Maimonides’s original, uncensored text;^{Footnote 34} Rabbi Moshe Sternbuch, a prominent Ashkenazi leader in the Haredi world (and head of the rabbinic court ‘Edah Haḥaredit in Jerusalem), also attributes the distinction made by the halakhists of past generations between pagan idolaters and contemporary Christians to censorship, claiming that an uncensored reading of Maimonides clearly indicates that “there cannot be a more outright form of idolatry than Christianity” and that “no one may be more justly referred to as gods of the gentiles [’elohey haggoyim] than him [Jesus].”^{Footnote 35} According to Sternbuch, the distinctions between ancient pagans and contemporary Christians were made with an eye to the censor: “Although the works of many halakhists include statements affirming that it is always the ancient pagans to whom the texts refer, and not the nations among which we presently dwell, these statements were written out of fear of censorship; tradition has it that [the Christians’] idolatry is actually the worst and most dangerous.”^{Footnote 36}

The “fear” argument has been applied with particular vigor to the halakhic views of Menachem Meiri, a medieval halakhist who is unique in his lenient attitude toward Christianity. Rabbinic authors currently debate whether Meiri’s statements were “due to censorship or the author’s own fear of Christian retribution, or he actually believed what he wrote.”^{Footnote 37} With few exceptions,^{Footnote 38} the prevailing assumption is that Meiri was forced to adapt himself to circumstances, lest he “receive a blow from the glove of the local landowner [pariṣ] … and in those days the gloves were not made of leather, but of iron.”^{Footnote 39} Only the writings of the rabbis who wrote in Muslim countries reflect the true position of the Jewish tradition on the issue of Christianity, since Ashkenazi rabbis authored their texts while crushed under Christendom’s heel.^{Footnote 40}

This kind of historical reasoning makes use of historicist methods close to those applied in the academic discipline of the historical sciences: the rabbis attack the authenticity of traditional sources by placing them within specific historical contexts, thereby relativizing them. Identifying diverse voices and trajectories within tradition and raising conjectures as to the political and social motivations of various past halakhists and Torah scholars, these contemporary rabbis undermine their predecessors’ authority.^{Footnote 41} Paradoxically, the quest for stable, pure, and authentic truth has actually driven Haredi rabbis to adopt the very methods of Wissenschaft des Judentums that ultra-Orthodoxy so deeply reviles. In order to purify Judaism of the pollution caused by contact with the evil kingdom of “Edom” (the typological designation of Christendom), rabbis make use of methods that were originally cultivated in the “enemy’s” flower beds—the historical sciences that originated with Protestant, and later secularized, critique.

Purging the Bible of Christian Influence

The Pentateuch according to the Tradition of Chazal (ḥumaš kfi haḥaluqa ‘al-pi masoret ḥazal) was first published in 1990 by R’ Eliezer Posen, a Haredi Torah scholar based in London.^{Footnote 42} This new edition of the Pentateuch had purported to cleanse the Torah of Christian chapter divisions, which, according to Posen, were “rooted in idolatry.”^{Footnote 43} Posen’s Pentateuch includes a detailed historical introduction on the Christian division of the Pentateuch into chapters, encompassing the Jewish- Christian disputations of the Middle Ages, as well as the history of Hebrew printing up to the late modern period. According to Posen, the Christian chapter divisions penetrated deeply into Jewish tradition because the printing houses were always subject to Christian censorship (often under the administration of Jewish converts to Christianity), and they left their mark on all of the Bibles that were printed. Posen notes that the rabbinic literature remained subject to censorship up until World War I, “and the [Christian chapter-based] division thus remained, Heaven help us, an inseparable part of our Pentateuch, as is written … : ‘The foe has laid hands On everything dear to her. She has seen her Sanctuary Invaded by nations Which You have denied admission Into Your community [Lam 1:10; JPS].’ ”^{Footnote 44} Thus, the traditional Bible’s division into chapters is perceived as disingenuous and as motivated by evil, “twisted” intentions: “wickedness and heresy with regard to the core beliefs of [our] religion.” The objective of “the evil ones, the accursed gentiles,” was “to weaken our faith in our Creator”;^{Footnote 45} to cause the Jewish people “to imitate the wicked and ugly acts of the idolaters”; “to undermine and reject the interpretations of our Sages, or to introduce their fallacious method into our holy Torah”; “to stir up among Jews a sense of grievance toward Heaven”; and so on.^{Footnote 46} The damage perpetrated by the Christian chapter division is portrayed as enormous: “there is no need to describe at length the great suffering (ṣa‘ar) of the Shekinah that is experienced each and every day, and the profound injury that is inflicted on the supernal worlds (‘olamot ha‘elyonim), when students of our holy Torah immerse themselves in books that are permeated and rife with hints of heresy regarding our faith, and in denial of that which is sacred and dear to us.”^{Footnote 47} Posen seeks to turn the clock back on Bible printing traditions and to institute a “numbering of verses that corresponds to the division that has been passed down to us through the generations(!), in accordance with the tradition of the Sages, per the law communicated by God to Moses in Sinai (kehalaḵa leMoše miSinai).”^{Footnote 48} Although it has long become part of Jewish tradition, the chapter division of the Bible that prevailed for centuries nevertheless strikes Posen as “external” to Judaism and as something to be repudiated.

Purging the Talmud of Apologetics

Contemporary Haredi scholars have also begun redacting the Talmud and its commentators, not hesitating to apply scientific methods when seeking to rectify what they perceive as instances of pandering to the Christian powers that be.^{Footnote 49} The edition of the Talmud that has been subjected to the harshest criticism is actually the Vilna edition (Dfus Vilna)—still the most commonly used in the yeshiva world. The Vilna edition of the Talmud is regarded as the “traditional” edition; yet, since tradition is itself suspicious of internalized censorship, more recent reconstructions (based on comparison with older versions, etc.) have, paradoxically, come to be seen as more faithful to tradition than the prevalent texts employed by that tradition. For example, the popular Steinsaltz Talmud, edited by the Chabad Hasidic rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, recovers many censored excerpts that do not appear in the Vilna edition.

It is even more surprising to see that Steinsaltz’s opponents, the Lithuanianaffiliated Haredi publishing house Shabtai Frankel (of whom one would have expected to show even more “traditionalistic” tendencies), also follow similar trajectories. A salient example is how the treatment of a particularly sensitive talmudic passage is altered between the Vilna and the Frankel editions. Bava Qamma 38a is a difficult passage in terms of Jewish-gentile relations, as it exempts a Jew whose ox gores the ox of a gentile (a “Canaanite” in the Vilna edition) from liability, while in the obverse case of a gentile’s ox goring that of a Jew, the gentile is held liable—thus reflecting a clear pro-Jewish bias. The Vilna edition softens this indelicate passage by citing (on the left side of the page at the bottom) the šitta mequbeṣet (by R’ Bezalel Ashkenazi [ca. 1520–ca. 1592], also called the ’asifat zeqenim) in an excerpt referring to R. Menachem Meiri and to the Tosafist Jonathan ben David haCohen of Lunel (ca. 1135–after 1210), who distinguished between contemporary gentiles and the seven Canaanite nations, thereby shifting the critique away from Christians:

In the Shabtai Frankel edition, however, these conciliatory words were deleted and the editors replaced them with the following passage (on the upper right corner of the page):

As seen, the editors of the Shabtai Frankel edition have ruled that Meiri does not reflect Judaism’s “authentic” stance, and that his “nations bound by the manners of religion” be expunged from rabbinic literature (while making sure, however, to note the fact of the deletion). Meiri, according to the Shabtai Frankel editors, wrote the passage out of fear of censorship, and Rabbi Jonathan of Lunel similarly differentiated between the Christians and the “seven nations” of the Talmud only as a rhetorical means of placating Christians.^{Footnote 52} Their redaction of the Talmud leads the Shabtai Frankel editors to question the historical circumstances under which sages issue their rulings, inquire about the audiences they were addressing, and postulate possible ulterior motives for halakhic rulings. All these standard historical-critical methodologies serve the Shabtai Frankel editors in assessing the extent to which the statements at issue are authentic and faithful to the halakhic truth. In most cases, it turns out that the position regarded as more authentic is the one that expresses greater firmness vis-à-vis the gentiles in general and versus Christians in particular, while the more tolerant positions are viewed as contingent on circumstances and the result of Christian pressure.^{Footnote 53}

These trends are clearly and forcefully manifested in the book Seder Yaakoḇ on the Tractate of Idolatry and Its Issues (seder ya‘aqoḇ ‘al maseḵet ‘aḇodah zarah ve‘inyaneyihah) by Rabbi Yaaqov Yerucham Wreschner, a Zurich-based Haredi Torah scholar, published in several editions from 1988 to 1995. According to Wreschner, he decided to write about this topic in order to provide a crucial and urgent service to Torah scholars. Wreschner argues that the tractate Avodah Zarah (i.e., idolatry) “is the most severely affected by censorship” of all the tractates of the Talmud.^{Footnote 54} “Because they discuss gentiles and idolatry in [it], they feared [the censors] and were forced to omit many things.”^{Footnote 55} Wreschner argues that tractate Avodah Zarah was so heavily censored that the text was distorted beyond recognition. Even now, the vast majority of Torah scholars study censored Talmud editions such as the Vilna edition, which Wreschner regards as the most severely affected by censorship.

Similar to Posen’s biblical approach, Wreschner regards the removal of censorship from rabbinical literature as a “sacred duty.”^{Footnote 56} In his view, a corrupted talmudic text should disturb us even more than the Torah’s translation into Greek, for in the latter case, the Torah remains untouched by the kind of alien influence perpetrated by the censorship of the Talmud. According to Wreschner, the importance of restoring the suppressed passages and correcting the altered texts is so great that those who have studied tractate Avodah Zarah using the corrupted editions may be considered as never having completed the tractate, and those who have celebrated their completion of the tractate, according to custom, have in fact rejoiced in vain.^{Footnote 57} Wreschner argues that the “ ‘censored version’ is not, properly speaking, a version at all, but rather an idol placed in the temple [ṣelem šehu‘amad baheyḵal],^{Footnote 58} which should not be legitimized nor given the benefit of the doubt, but must in fact be removed with all possible speed.”^{Footnote 59}

At this point, Wreschner carefully addresses the implications his endeavor may have for the stability of tradition. He mentions a critique against the recovery of censored texts that appeared in a letter to the editor in the ultra-Orthodox quarterly ṣefunot (of which many of the articles were dedicated to de-censoring rabbinic literature, similar to Wreschner’s project) in 1990/1991, in order to rebut it. Wreschner deals with this critique only in passing, but since this critique is important for my analysis, I will cite a lengthy paragraph from it here. The writer of the letter to the editor, Rabbi Yosef Menachem Zvi Halevi Manen, complains against the nitpicky search for uncensored versions of prayers, since they

This criticism directly targets the subversive character of the de-censoring effort, acknowledging that the deconstruction of tradition in search of the undisrupted origin can go on ad infinitum and endanger the entire orthodox standing. Wreschner responds to this paradigmatic criticism against applying historical-critical methods to sacred tradition by applying historical-critical methods to the Belzer rebbe’s alleged resistance to the de-censoring process:

Wreschner dismisses the connection, insinuated in Manen’s criticism, between the project of de-censoring traditional texts and the secularizing forces of the Haskalah. In his eyes, the subversive critical methods gain legitimacy when they are employed to “decolonize” Jewish tradition and snatch it back from Christian hands. However—contra the intentions of Wreschner and his colleagues—the decensoring effort reveals how deep that Christian hand had indeed penetrated into the formation of Judaism, in a way that cannot be uprooted without cutting through the flesh of Jewish tradition.

Through painstaking comparative work, Wreschner reconstructed broad swaths of the Avodah Zarah tractate, along with many other traditions regarding idolatry that were touched by censorship.^{Footnote 62} In the process of attempting to cleanse rabbinic literature of Christian censorship, Wreschner also reawakened a substantial, though hitherto dormant, rabbinic tradition of hostility toward Christianity. In his book, he quotes the talmudic sources on Christianity and the popular tradition that is rooted in these sources—surveying the entire spectrum from nittel naḵt (Christmas Eve) customs to versions of the anti-Christian text toledot YeŠu;^{Footnote 63} he reconstructs the arguments of the medieval Jewish polemicists, from criticism of the New Testament (which he claims he never read, due to the “Torah prohibition”),^{Footnote 64} to the long list of derogatory appellations for Christian beliefs that appears in Rabbi Yom- Tov Muhlhausen’s anti-Christian polemic sefer niṣaḥon;^{Footnote 65} he quotes midrashim, letters, and liturgical passages that predict Christianity’s ultimate downfall in the messianic future; he reconstructs popular tales (such as that of Jesus’s oppressed spirit appearing smeared with excrement,^{Footnote 66} or that of a disciple of Rabbeinu Tam to whom an eternal stench adhered because he had laughed at Jesus’s punishment when Rabbeinu Tam brought him down from heaven).^{Footnote 67} Wreschner reconstructs numerous etymologies that mock the names of Jesus and the Christian saints. For example, he reads the Hebrew letters nun-tsadi-resh, which form the root of the word naṣrut (Christianity), as an acronym for nidon be-ṣo’ah rotaḥat (condemned in boiling excrement). He constructs the letters of noṣri (Christian) as noṣar (i.e., produced), as refutation of the doctrine of virgin birth by indicating production from the coupling of a man and a woman, “like all other people in the world.” He reads YeŠu (the Hebrew letters yod-shin-vav, spelling the name Jesus) as an acronym of yemaḥ šemo ve-ziḵro (may his name and memory be obliterated). He calculates that the numerological (gematria) value of YeŠu is equivalent to that of the word ‘arum (cunning and deceitful) kenaḥaš (as a snake), thereby alluding to the Fall: “for the intention of both the serpent and Yešu was the world’s destruction.” He emphasizes that YeŠu is a truncation of the word yešu‘a (salvation) and indicates that “he did not bring salvation even to himself.” He points out that the letters of Jesus’s name—yod-shin-vav-‘ayin—are also in the letters of the name ‘Esav (Esau), “for he was Esau reincarnated.” He derives the name Mariya (Mary) from the same Hebrew root as marah (bitter), quoting Naomi’s lament in Ruth 1:20: “… for Shaddai has made my lot very bitter” (JPS). He proposes that šeti va‘ereḇ (warp and woof)—the traditional Jewish term for the cross—hints that, by gaining many converts, Jesus had in fact “cleansed” the Jewish people of the blight of the ‘ereḇ raḇ, a heathen mob purported to have intermingled with the Jews due to the many who had falsely converted (out of fear rather than faith) during the time of Mordechai and Esther; and so on.^{Footnote 68} Wreschner also stresses the halakhic importance of mocking Christianity in accordance with the commandment to “destroy their names,”^{Footnote 69} and he prays for the speedy eradication of the Christian “abomination” from the holy city of Jerusalem.^{Footnote 70}

Wreschner is aware of his project’s potential for problematic—even dangerous— repercussions. Nevertheless, he feels that the time is ripe for such an endeavor:

Wreschner is referring here to a gradual weakening of the Christian religion— thanks to which one may now cautiously loosen the reins and restore those censored portions of rabbinic literature: the passages expressing Judaism’s aversion to the gentile world and to idolatry, especially Christian idolatry.^{Footnote 73} He himself is clearly unsure just how far one may go, and to what degree one should still be wary of the penetrating gentile gaze: “We must not deceive ourselves that there is a dearth of Jew-haters, either in the land of Israel or abroad, who wish to blacken our name.” On the contrary, “Jew-hatred is growing from day to day, … since Mount Sinai from which hatred [of Jews] has descended to the nations, and it is a halakhic axiom that Esau hates Jacob, today as always….”^{Footnote 74}

How, then, does Wreschner suggest removing the stain of censorship from rabbinic literature without awakening the wrath of the nations? “For this,” says Wreschner, “one needs a pretext, and the matter must be carefully studied to ensure that one does not, Heaven forbid, create an obstacle, or endanger even a single Jewish person.”^{Footnote 75} Wreschner proposes several stratagems for addressing the problem. First, publish one’s writings in Rashi script so as to deter readers who do not belong to the yeshiva world. Second, cover one’s tracks. For example, rather than expressing himself unequivocally in halakhic matters, Wreschner employs allusive language: “but with regard to the laws currently in effect regarding presentday ‘idolaters,’ although I wrote about it in a readily understandable manner, I was nevertheless careful to do so allusively, and usually also employed the acronym for idolaters ‘akum [‘ovdei koḵavim umazalot], for who knows who might get hold of the book, and there is no need to elaborate.”^{Footnote 76} Third, publish a traditional apologetic prologue on the first page of the book,^{Footnote 77} affirming that all references to ‘akum refer solely to the ancient nations “who were untouched by the light of faith in the Creator and his unity,” and not to “the nations among whom we live and are bound by the manners of religion.”^{Footnote 78}

Such a notice indeed introduces the first edition of Wreschner’s work. But Wreschner omitted it from subsequent editions. The distinction between the ancient nations and contemporary gentiles, he maintained, misled the public and, in effect, undermined the project’s purpose. “If, Heaven forbid, it should be necessary,” that is, if the book should fall into the wrong hands, one might show the gentile readers the first edition, and “that is the correct way [to handle the matter], to [have] an explanation prepared in advance.”^{Footnote 79} Wreschner’s policy is, in fact, a strange one: admitting that he is covering his tracks—on the assumption, perhaps, that the later editions would not reach the hands of knowledgeable gentiles.

This internal dialogue within the seder ya‘akoḇ is a clear example of the dynamic of the rabbinic stand on Christianity in recent decades: The ultra-Orthodox author wants to be loyal to age-old Jewish tradition, yet the kind of fidelity to tradition that he proposes is in itself a subversion of a longstanding tradition. Wreschner makes an effort to expunge all expressions of tolerance toward Christianity—starting with the apologetic statement at the beginning of the book, continuing with the moderate laws that he invalidates as reflections of Jewish fear of the surrounding Christian world and ending with passages altered by censorship hundreds of years ago that have since become an integral part of the rabbinic canon. Throughout the work, he apologizes repeatedly for invalidating the apologetic approach to Christianity. Has the time come to leave fear of Christianity behind and to give expression to Judaism’s hard-line stance? Wreschner has trouble deciding. On the one hand, “the Christian faith is experiencing a decline.” On the other hand, “it is a halakhic axiom that Esau hates Jacob, today as always.” Ultimately, Wreschner feels that the time is ripe for Judaism to express its animosity toward Christianity—an animosity that he considers part and parcel of an authentic Jewish identity. This choice constitutes an abandonment of the relatively moderate attitudes toward Christianity that prevailed for over three centuries and a gradual return to earlier traditions that held sway from antiquity to the Middle Ages—traditions that reflect a deep hostility toward the Christian faith.

Tradition and the Quest for Authenticity

In their treatment of the history of Jewish-Christian relations in rabbinic literature, contemporary Torah scholars use the Christian censor’s heritage against itself. With the very same careful attention applied by Christian censors to rabbinic literature, in their effort to purge the literature of any trace of anti-Christian sentiment, today’s rabbis are invested not only in the hairsplitting project of reintroducing these censored texts but also in amending—if not obliterating—parts of the literary tradition that seem to coincide too closely with the censor’s claims, that is, that refrain from expressing negative views on Christianity.

This destabilization of established, accepted tradition is done out of a positivistic, even romantic assumption that an authentic position, an “original” stance, of Jewish tradition vis-à-vis Christianity actually exists. The modern critical approach to history thus functions here precisely in the service of a fundamentalist return to the “pure” source, in a way that should complicate our perception of Haredi scholarship. In other words, the fundamentalist attempt to recover the purity of tradition and to return to its immaculate source seems to be in harmony with the allegedly antitraditionalistic method of modern critical thinking, and not against it.^{Footnote 80} The appearance of such historiographical reasoning among the Haredi elite is even more surprising, as scholars usually identify the penetration of modern currents and discourses into the ultra-Orthodox world through the more popular layers of society, while the elite is charged with protecting the pure core of tradition—that is, it is assumed to be the model for an uncompromised fundamentalist behavior.^{Footnote 81} In the encompassing critical project discussed here, one can discern a process of deep modernization, not only in terms of utilizing modern technologies while maintaining a traditionalistic worldview, but in terms of integrating one of the core components of the modern Weltanschauung—the critical approach to tradition and to history—into the beating heart of Haredi Judaism: the circle of rabbinic scholars (talmidey ḥaḵamim). This elite co-opts the very power of critical historiography to undermine prevalent beliefs, in order to pave the way to a more fundamentalist position, which is further bolstered by a patina of historiographical “truth.”

Ultra-Orthodox scholars seem to assume that the “original” position of the Jewish tradition vis-à-vis Christianity can be traced if one neutralizes power considerations in the Jewish-Christian relationship, inspecting only the isolated theological aspects of the issue through a controlled experiment. Paradoxically, it is precisely the political conditions of a sovereign Jewish state, on the one hand, and of Jewish existence within secular, liberal states, on the other, that are supposed to produce this politics-free (and, to some extent, Christians-free) environment, in which Jews are liberated to excavate the original attitude of their tradition to Christianity. Needless to say, the Jewish-Christian relationship was both political and theological from the outset, in its better moments as in its worse. The attempt to return to a source in which these elements are purified from each other is, as Daniel Boyarin recently reminded us, already saturated with anachronistic Protestant assumptions.^{Footnote 82}

It is worth noting that this set of assumptions is not at all far from that of Catholic pro-rapprochement theologians who seek to restore an original Judeo-Christian fraternity from beneath generations of power struggle. Similar to the rabbis and Orthodox authors at the center of this article who seek to restore the authentic Jewish attitude to Christianity, Catholic theologians and historians are suspicious of postbiblical Christian traditions for having digressed from, to quote Nostra Aetate #4, “the truth of the Gospel and the spirit of Christ”—that is, from the authentic brotherly love of the first Christians to their Jewish kinsmen. Catholics and Torah scholars alike identify the long history of Jewish life under Christendom as one that had dire consequences for the development of their traditions, consequences that are fundamentally at odds with these traditions’ true “spirit.” Therefore, both communities regard these “consequences” not as part of tradition but as digression from it, striving to undermine their authority by making use of critical tools. While the ultra-Orthodox philological project of de-censoring the sources is one that leans heavily on the current circumstances of Jewish power, the Catholic project has much to do with the consciousness of secularization, and with the Church’s loss of power in the Western world. The difference between aggiornamento Catholics and de-censoring rabbis is not one of historical reasoning, nor one of method, but one of ideology: whereas Catholics are attempting to restore a lost paradise of Judeo- Christian brotherly symbiosis, the Orthodox Jewish nostalgia is for the Jewish people’s dwelling alone, not reckoned among the nations. Both these “traditionalist” societies have been going through a very similar process of modernization of their approach to their traditions.

Yet the application of modern-historical methods to rabbinic tradition in order to purge it of Christian influence (or to Christian tradition to purge it of anti-Judaism) is in itself heavily influenced by Christianity. Modern exegesis has its origins in the Protestant tradition, which formed its separation from Catholic tradition precisely by purging Scripture of the polluting mediation of Rome’s teaching. The rabbinical quest for an unmediated access to tradition, beneath the compromised layers of power relations and history, is bound to be part of the Judeo-Christian drama. Both Jewish history, and the options available for Jews to reinvent this history, are thus Judeo-Christian beyond revocation, so that even the struggle against the Judeo- Christian symbiosis is saturated with Judeo-Christian symbiosis.

However, this historiographical problem of deconstructing tradition and cultural memory, while seeking the lost immaculate source, is one that all modern scholars struggle with and does not pertain uniquely to Orthodox Jews (and Catholic Christians) who are going through a process of modernization. The impossibility of stripping the simple, original units of tradition from the history of their reception is one that both historians and theologians carry with them from the first early modern attempts to reconstruct the original versions of the Hebrew Bible to Albert Schweitzer’s famous twentieth-century dictum on the quest for the historical Jesus, as one in which the scholar always ends up staring into the mirror. The one impassable source that all these quests seem to end up retrieving is the Reformation’s deep suspicion of postbiblical (both Catholic and Jewish) traditions as contingent distortions that must be superseded.