Jewish - Christian Relations

The seven branched lampstand within a church was thus a symbol of Christ and his Church. In theological terms, it had nothing to do with Jews – except to supersede them. This is a very important point in dealing with the Petersberg Lampstand, and all Christian lampstands.
— The biblical lampstand in Christian contexts was not a Jewish »menorah« as some today would call it, but the lampstand of Christ Jesus. It is a mistake, then, to refer to the Christian lampstand as
a menorah, as I myself did in The Menorah: From the Bible to Modern Israel. This use of Jewish terminology, drawn from the Hebrew Scriptures for Christian lampstands, wipes away what is distinctly Christian in these lamps and what is distinctly Jewish about the menorah. While such elision may be comforting in our own world,
it takes away from the history of both communities, asserting
false closeness between the majority and the minority in medieval (and modern) Europe. When adopted by contemporary Christians
– Evangelicals and sometimes Catholics and mainline Protestants –
it is for their own theological and cultural purposes in their own search for a »usable history«.19 In Germany it is all the more complex, a facet of the regrettably not-yet-complete postwar rapprochement between Christians and Jews. My sense is that the next steps require us to reassert and celebrate the distinctive in each community, even as we continue to seek out all that Jews and Christians share(d).

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed an explosion of Christian interest in the meaning and workings of the natural world—a "discovery of nature" that profoundly reshaped the intellectual currents and spiritual contours of European society—yet to all appearances, the Jews of medieval northern Europe (Ashkenaz) were oblivious to the shifts reshaping their surrounding culture. Scholars have long assumed that rather than exploring or contemplating the natural world, the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz were preoccupied solely with the supernatural and otherworldly: magic and mysticism, demonology and divination, as well as the zombies, werewolves, dragons, flying camels, and other monstrous and wondrous creatures that destabilized any pretense of a consistent and encompassing natural order.

In _A Remembrance of His Wonders_, David I. Shyovitz disputes this long-standing and far-reaching consensus. Analyzing a wide array of neglected Ashkenazic writings on the natural world in general, and the human body in particular, Shyovitz shows how Jews in Ashkenaz integrated regnant scientific, magical, and mystical currents into a sophisticated exploration of the boundaries between nature and the supernatural. Ashkenazic beliefs and practices that have often been seen as signs of credulity and superstition in fact mirrored—and drew upon—contemporaneous Christian debates over the relationship between God and the natural world. In charting these parallels between Jewish and Christian thought, Shyovitz focuses especially upon the mediating role of polemical texts and encounters, which served as mechanisms for the transmission of religious doctrines, scientific facts, and cultural mores. Medieval Jews' preoccupation with the apparently "supernatural" reflected neither ignorance nor intellectual isolation, but rather a determined effort to understand nature's inner workings and outer limits, and to integrate and interrogate the theologies and ideologies of the broader European Christian society.

This article explores the literary relationship between the Matthean tradition and
the Ascension of Isaiah, a second-century pseudepigraphon detailing Isaiah’s
visions of the ‘Beloved’ and his polemical (and fatal) engagement with the
‘false prophet’ Belkira. While the lexical affiliation between these texts has
been a point of interest, the discussion has oscillated between types of sources
utilised, whether gospel material mutually shared with Matthew or Matthew
itself. Though this paper details lexical contact, it pushes beyond philological
similarity and posits narrative imitations as well as shared polemical strategies.
The result is that Isaiah is more readily seen as a figure fashioned after the
Matthean Jesus, and the ‘martyred prophet’ motif that ripples throughout the
Gospel of Matthew as appropriated and narrativised by the Ascension of Isaiah
for a second-century conflict over prophetic practices.

This article focuses on the precariousness of everyday life of half-Jews during the Nazi-regime in Vienna. Marriages between Jews and non-Jews as well as the presence of their half-Jewish children represented an antagonism that was a permanent threat to the integrity of the Nazi regime. According to the Nuremberg Laws, half-Jews were either defined as Mischlinge of the first degree or as Geltungsjuden, depending on their denomination. Even though they were in most cases exempt from deportation, the plans to include them in the Final solution were never fully given up. Particularly during the last years of the war – after the majority of the Austrian Jewish population had been deported – the protection of half-Jews became more precarious and even trivial infractions against Nazi laws could lead to imprisonment and deportation.

I have held this book back many years.  It is now time for it to see the light of day (being part of the larger work, A Great And Terrible Love:  A Visionary Journey from Woodstock’s Sorceries to God’s Paradise).  With the gained perspective of years it needed some adding to.

Of course for a Poet to stand among the people of Israel—that Israel which cleaves to its King, Messiah, as well the children of that apostate Jewry who spurned Him—and speak truly to both camps without fear of man, this must needs be—simultaneously—an act of war and of love.  The prophetic office in Israel closed when the last prophet, John son of Zebedee (Matthew 10:2), finished writing the apocalyptic vision and prophecy given him around 95 CE—the culmination of all Old and New Covenant prophecy—so what I write is not “immediate” prophecy given me, yet as a student of prophecies the prophetic word of those who came before us is in my mouth.  Paul the apostle of Messiah put it like this, “For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him?  But we have the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16), and John was instructed by the angel, “the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” (Revelation 19:10).  The word of our prophets is precious to us who heed them.

I say this is war because of the tearing down of spiritual/intellectual strong holds many have invested their lives building and defending.  To err in this area of theology and vision allows actual blood to be spilled, much blood, precious blood.  We Jews know this first hand, the Arabs also.  But the Christian—and some of the Jewish—West do not; it mostly just sits in its easy chairs in front of the TV and drinks in the fruit of its unseeing.  A storm coming will turn these chairs over.

I do not know how many of my own family have perished because of the blind and blinding rabbinate, and when I say “perished” I mean in the prophesied Gehenna of eternal Hell, so this is no idle theology with me, and I mean it to be war, that the falsity plaguing my people may be challenged on the world stage, what I call, “Apocalypse Field, global arena of consciousness”.  Will my opponents resort to the old tricks of murder, slander, and lies?  What do I care, for I am given a heart and tongue to speak by Him who is Lord of poets, and there could be no power against me were it not given from above, so I will bear this testimony and love not my life even if it be unto the death.  I mean to cut down the lies and hatred that have cost the eternal lives of so many Jews I cannot count them.

What I say is in accord with both the Old Covenant (Tanakh) and the New Covenant Scripture (B’rit Chadashah), despite the opposition of some, both Christians and Jews.  These things impact the wider world also, as Gentile believers in Yeshua (Jesus) our Messiah are grafted into the spiritual faith of Israel, from which flows the river of eternal life to all nations—the ancient promise to Abraham fulfilled.

Mark you, the poet’s pen is not filled with lifeless ink.  It is a sword of the Spirit of YHWH, and His vessel.  It is among the foremost weapons of the Apocalypse—if so be it have the wind of Heaven filling its sails, and speeding its missiles, even as Heaven’s power sped David’s stone into the brain of the giant.

This article presents the Masonic career of a kabbalistic lithograph in the United States in the middle of the 19th century, against the background of a sectarian debate that concerned the religious character of Freemasonry. In their struggle for equality, Jewish Freemasons took advantage of the Solomonic heritage of Masonic mythology and advocated a Jewish origin for the fraternity, in which Kabbalah assumed a role of providing esoteric underpinnings for this narrative. The article shows that within the wider historical framework of Jewish-Christian relations, the kabbalistic lithograph became a tool in the hands of Jewish Freemasons in a Masonic sectarian debate.

The Jewish community had been expelled from England in 1290 and was not readmitted until 1606, yet in the 1520s and 1530s Henry VIII initiated two important cultural exchanges with Venetian Jews. The first, Henry VIII’s consultation of Venetian rabbis about his divorce from Catherine of Aragon, is well known. The second was his invitation to the Venetian Jewish wind-instrument family, the Bassanos, to join his court in the 1530s. While the details of the event have been explored by scholars such as Roger Prior, David Lasocki, and Alessio Ruffatti, I propose that its significance has yet to be fully understood in its religious, political, cultural, and musical context.

In this paper, I consider the Bassanos’s move to England through the lens of an intriguing story of Jewish-Christian interfaith friendship in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, also known as the Book of Martyrs (1563). Stories of Jews are few and far between in Foxe’s compendium; stories that both encourage interfaith friendship and do not malign the Jew are all the more unusual. The story, which takes place in England in 1539, follows a Jewish child and a Christian child, “playfellow[s],” into a church and up to the altar. Set against the backdrop of transubstantiation, which, I argue, functions as an allegory for the Bassanos’ creative process, this story becomes a parable for the relationship between Henry VIII and the Bassanos, illuminating the musical, political, and religious significance of their partnership. Henry VIII, despite all his vain excesses, is identified with the Virgin Mary herself for his cultivation and protection of the arts and its creators. What kind of message could Henry VIII have sent by sidestepping religious differences and protocol in his desire to elevate the musical aspect of the court? Could his patronage of the Bassanos have been received as a message of tolerance, even if a self-serving one? I will analyze the story according to three senses of biblical exegesis—historical (literal), tropological (moral), and allegorical—in order to demonstrate how Foxe’s story became a parable for Henry VIII and the Bassanos.

Summary The article offers a new reading of two Jesus related narratives from the Babylonian Talmud. The first relates the encounter between Rabbi Eliezer and one of Jesus' disciples, Jacob, while the second deals with the flight to Alexandria of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Perahya and his disciple, Jesus. Instead of reading these stories as reflecting an already established dichotomy between Judaism and Christianity, I propose to read them as a reflection on the origin of this dichotomy. I suppose that at least some Babylonian rabbis read or heard about the Gospels and saw that their main hero was a proto-rabbinic figure. Since the dichotomy between the two textual corpora was not conceptually fixed, those rabbis could ask themselves : why do our sources never quote and almost never men- tion this particular rabbi? The Jesus stories analyzed here would be an attempt to discuss the question.

ערב רב: פנים וחוץ בוויכוח הפרנקיסטי הוא ספר מרתק וחדשני החושף את סיפורה הייחודי של התנועה הפרנקיסטית, תנועה יהודית אפיקורסית שצמחה בפולין והתפשטה במרכז אירופה במחצית השנייה של המאה ה-18.

בעיני רוב היהודים פרנק היה 'משיח שקר' ידוע לשמצה. בעיני נוצרים נאורים ומיסיונרים מילנריסטים היה יהודי-נוצרי ואדם חופשי בדעותיו, שלו קשרים מסתוריים והוא משתמש במגיה ובמאגרי עושר סודיים. עבור מאמיניו היה למבשר שחרור מן המסגרות המקובלות המדכאות של מגדר, הלכה, מעמד, משטר ודת.

התנועה הפרנקיסטית עוררה הדים והיתה סלע מחלוקת גם בקרב גורמים דתיים ופוליטיים לא יהודיים: יוזף השני, קתרינה הגדולה, גתה, קזנובה ואחרים. תורותיו של יעקב פרנק, מנהיג התנועה, הציבו אתגר בפני היהדות הנורמטיבית, אך גם בפני האסלאם וזרמים בנצרות. הספר מברר מחלוקות פנימיות ביהדות המודרנית אך דן גם ביחסים בין יהודים לסביבתם במאות ה-18–ה-19.

ערב רב מבוסס על מקורות פנימיים שחיברו פרנק ומאמיניו, על מקורות יהודיים פולמוסיים אנטי פרנקיסטיים, ועל מקורות שכתבו גורמים לא יהודיים בני הזמן. דרכו המוקצנת של יעקב פרנק עוררה עניין רב בו ובתנועתו, ולקורא מוגש ניתוח מעמיק של פרשה היסטורית ייחודית זו.
המחבר, ד"ר פאבל מצ'ייקו מן האוניברסיטה העברית בירושלים, חוקר את תולדות היהודים בפולין-ליטא בעת החדשה. נולד בוורשה וקיבל תואר דוקטור מאוניברסיטת אוקספורד. פרסומיו הרבים זיכו אותו בפרסים, במלגות ובמענקי מחקר רבים. שימש מרצה אורח באוניברסיטאות שונות, בארצות הברית, בצרפת, בגרמניה ובפולין.

Since from the late Middle Ages to the Emancipation, Eastern European Jewry was spiritually, physically and linguistically isolated from the Christian society, we are inclined to believe that it had always been so ever since Judaism and Christianity turned their backs on each other in late antiquity, especially because rabbinical literature mentions Christianity by name only sporadical-ly. According to the traditional narrative, also represented by Paul Johnson in his History of the Jews, the destruction of the Temple, the failure of the Bar Kokhba revolt and the spread of Christianity caused Judaism to turn in on itself for hundreds of years and became oblivious of its richer past and untouched by the outside world, as if living in a hermetically sealed world. This paradigm has difficulties accommodating that four Midrashim (rabbinic exegeses) in a collection of Jewish homilies for Sabbath titled Pesiqta Rabbati, recorded in the seventh century but prob-ably composed earlier, features Ephraim son of Joseph, another Messiah apart from David’s son, whose description contains an amazingly large number of Christological features, which strikingly resemble the Gospels’ Passion account and the book of Revelation. The homilies also draw heavily from Psalm 22, understood by Christian tradition as describing Christ’s sufferings. Recent scholarly discourse defines the polemics in which Jews take over Christian cultural or religious ideas to build their own religious identity as “counterhistory” or “inward accultura-tion.” Its confrontational form denies the opponent’s identity by frontally attacking Christian religious symbols to deprive them of the sanctity attributed to them, such as the medieval Jewish Gospel parody titled Toledot Yeshu. The other strategy is internalization or “re-Judaization,” in which Jews appropriate and take control over Christian symbols as if saying: “what the Chris-tians talk about is really our Messiah because anything may they say, we are still the true Israel.” It reinstates into the Jewish tradition ideas that were inherent in pre- and para-Rabbinic Judaism but embraced by Christians, so deemed heresy by the rabbis, thus found only in traces in the Talmud. Concerning Jesus Christ, one of them is the binitarian theology of “two powers in heaven,” which elevates human figures to divine status such as in the Enoch/Metatron tradition, and the other one is the idea of “two messiahs” stemming from the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53. The Midrashim of Pesiqta Rabbati revive this latter in a seemingly traditional manner, but in fact they go far beyond the limits of Rabbinic messianism without precedent, among others by merging the Messiahs son of David and son of Joseph into the figure of a preexistent Ephraim, who undertakes suffering for the sins of humans at the time of the creation, which is unknown outside the New Testament. By wandering into such dangerous theological waters, the Midra-shim support the new scholarly narrative that the rabbis knew the Christian discourse, the Chris-tian interpretation of the Old Testament, and the New Testament more profoundly and relied on them to develop Jewish religious identity to a greater extent than we formerly thought, and that the spiritual and ideological borderline between the two sisters, Ecclesia and Synagoga, was far from so rigid and impermeable as it seems for the first sight.

Monday 11 January 2021, 19:00 Israel Time

Sword and Buckler in Hebrew Letters: Traces of Early Illuminated German Fight Books in Jewish Manuscripts
Prof. Sara Offenberg
Department of the Arts, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Two manuscripts produced in early fourteenth-century German lands reflect similar iconography of fighting with Sword and Buckler (small round shield); one is the well-known fencing manual, Leeds, Royal Armouries, MS I. 33, produced ca. 1320, and the other is a Hebrew manuscript of the Bible, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France héb. 9, made in 1304, that will be the focus of this paper. I wish to demonstrate that the iconography of the masorah figurata was adapted from German Fechtbücher (fencing manuals), which are books of instructions, usually with illustrations, detailing the fencing arts. First, I relate to the realia of Jews bearing arms and Jewish fencing masters. Afterward I discuss the iconography of the fighting figures; subsequently, after examining the texts that make up the micrography, I reach a broader conclusion regarding the reason the patron commissioned this work and the meaning of the scene. This lecture intends to demonstrate how Hebrew illuminated manuscripts can shed more light on the study of fight books iconography.

Ephesians 2:11–22 is often thought to promote a tertium genus (“third race”) ecclesiology that entails the belief that the Torah has been abolished. If the Torah is abolished, this leads to the view that torah observance is rendered problematic for baptized Jews. I argue, however, that the assembly, the locus of participation in the Messiah’s salvation, should be understood as a dyadic unity (a nonhomogenous sociopolitical reality). Eph 2:11–22 renders the dissolution of torah-observant Jews within the assembly (church) soteriologically problematic. If baptized Jews are discouraged from remaining torah-observant (and therefore become functionally gentile), this leaves gentile believers in an ecclessial reality in which there is no genuine ongoing association with the torah-observant “circumcision,” thereby leaving them in the ironic state of being “estranged from the commonwealth of Israel” (2:12) yet again—the very condition the text claims Jesus overcomes by his blood (2:13).

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Podcast Interview with The Bible Project on this article here. I also talk about how my work intersects with Willie Jennings's work on the connections between White Supremacy and Christian supersessionsism: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bibleproject/id1050832450?i=1000509068152

How  Christian Zionism changes the New Covenant, with a focus on how Bible revisions since the 1537 Matthew Bible have allowed Zionist doctrine to be read into the Scriptures, and conversely have destroyed the Scripture's ability to refute Zionism. 

Looks at:
(1) How modern revisions to the New Testament about tribute payments to Rome have destroyed Jesus’ teaching that his kingdom is spiritual.
(2) How the Matthew Bible treatment of Isaiah’s prophecy of the New Covenant temple differs from John MacArthur’s Zionist treatment in his study Bible.
(3) How rebuilding the temple may bring the curse of Jericho on the builders.
(4) How Daniel 9, the prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem, has been changed to allow the idea that the city and temple might be rebuilt.
(5) How a modern revision to the book of Revelation suggests that time will continue after Jesus’ second coming, thus enabling the concept of a future millennium.

Alexander Barnard Davis, the esteemed leader of the Sydney Jewish community between 1862 and 1913, gave a series of lectures on the origin of the rites and worship of the Hebrews. A fascinating story emerges from the history of these lectures: They were given on a large Kabbalistic lithograph. The paper will trace the circuitous route of the artwork, which will shed light on the hitherto unknown affiliation of Davis with Freemasonry, and will elaborate on the content and the socio-cultural context of the lectures delivered for a multi-denominational audience in Sydney and Melbourne.

Researchers have long questioned how debunked myths such as the blood libel – the notion that Jews used Christian blood in their ceremonies – were able to persist for so long. This essay explains the social function of such myths in one context by presenting a public debate on Judaism carried out in the pages of the two leading Christian periodicals of the early eighteenth century in Germany. One journal put forth the orthodox Lutheran viewpoint, the other that of “Pietist” reformers. Through these journals, a battle took place for control of the Lutheran church, and thus for much of public life in Protestant Germany. Because Pietists believed Jews to hold a special place in God’s plan, they sought to rehabilitate Jews to their Christian readers and to argue for better conditions for Jewish communities. Orthodox Lutheran leaders quickly identified Pietists’ “Jew-friendly” policies as an Achilles’ heel. To attack Pietists, the orthodoxy dredged up and re-publicized centuries-old anti-Judaic propaganda, negative images that the orthodoxy linked to Pietists. Representatives of the Lutheran orthodoxy thus deployed anti-Judaic stereotypes in order to shore up their own church-political hegemony. Through this media manipulation, the Lutheran state church was able to seed fear among Christian readers and to argue that Pietist reformers and Jews were pollutants that needed to be cleansed from church and society.

The books of 1 and 2 Samuel offer a three-fold thematic scheme that supports the central claim of the Pentateuch, the claim found in Deuteronomy 6:4 and known to the Jews as “the Shema,” a verse that declares the God of Israel is one, true and living God, a theme that undergirds all of the historical books as well. Thus, the foundational theme of 1 and 2 Samuel is the central claim of the Pentateuch, a theme shared by all books of the Holy Scriptures. The secondary, structural theme of the book of 1 Samuel supports the primary theme of the historical books by offering the testimony that God has called out David to establish the Davidic lineage to bring about Israel’s redemption as supporting evidence that YHWH is the true and living God. The secondary, structural theme of the book of 2 Samuel supports the primary theme of the historical books by offering the testimony that God has justified David in his role as king. The third, imperative theme of the books of 1 and 2 Samuel states that Israel loved the Lord their God with all of their strength by accepting the one whom God called and justified as their king and redeemer. The application of this third theme for today’s reader is to believe that God has called and justification the Lord Jesus Christ as King of Kings in the establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven. The New Testament believer should trust in Jesus as the fulfillment of prophecies concerning the Messiah coming from the Davidic lineage who will reign eternally over all nations. As believers, we have been called to be a part of the Kingdom of Heaven, and we are justified as members of this Kingdom through faith in Jesus Christ.

The Syriac Clementine Recognitions and Homilies is the first ever complete translation into a modern language of this important historical document relating to the origins of Judaism and Christianity. Found within the pages of the world’s oldest-dated manuscript, in any language, The Syriac Clementine Recognitions and Homilies tells the first-century story of a young Roman philosopher, Clement. Leaving his native land, Clement travels to the Middle East to meet the Apostles and records details of the original teachings of Jesus’ earliest followers. Clement also relays the travels of the Apostle Peter in his attempt to stop a false version of Christianity from being spread throughout the Roman Empire by an insidious deceiver. The narrative concludes with an amazing life story retold by the author. This astonishing document, having been suppressed for nearly two millennia, contains revelations about the formative years leading up to the split between Jews and Christians, and has the potential to revolutionize modern understandings of religion and philosophy. The text is written in Syriac, a dialect of the Aramaic language spoken by Jesus and his Apostles. The Clementine Recognitions and Homilies has previously only been available through altered Greek and Latin recensions and has become a topic of great controversy among Biblical scholars for the past five centuries. Now, for the first time, the oldest form of the text is made accessible to the public in a complete English translation.

GEBHARDT, JOSEPH GLEN (2014). The Syriac Clementine Recognitions and Homilies: The First Complete Translation of the Text. Nashville, TN: Grave Distractions Publications. 174 pp. ISBN 978-0-9908685-3-8.

There is an ongoing scholarly debate on the origin, meaning, and use of the epithet Most High God (Theos Hypsistos) which is attested in ca. 400 inscriptions, mostly from the Eastern Mediterranean, ranging from the second century B.C. to the fourth century A.D. While the earlier research considered them as representations of a syncretic ‘pagan monotheism’ originating in Jewish religious concepts, latest  studies emphasize the competitive elements among the Jewish, Christian, and Greco-Roman religions from the second century A.D. onwards, and stress the direct influence of an oracle of the Clarian Apollo in the spread of this formula among the pagans. This ‘paganizing’ process of the Theos Hypsistos formula was coined as megatheismos by A. Chaniotis instead of the widely used monotheismos. In my lecture I endeavor to summarize the Forschungsgeschichte of this heavily debated topic and to take a step further forward in the research.

A.J. Deus’s paper investigates the historicity of Prophet Muhammad and the Koran as well as the Prophet’s possible relationship with the Umayyads. By limiting the evidence to pre-692 documents and artifacts, Deus brings forth a hypothesis that Prophet Muhammad did not appear in the primary evidence until after 631 AD. He is connected to a sermon based on Mosaic Law that cannot be identified in the Koran. His first and isolated sign of having passed away appears in 691 AD in Egypt. He may indeed have still been alive in the 650s, if not in the 680s, and no evidence exists of a prophet Muhammad that died in 632 AD. In that timeframe, a shift from a MHMT institution to an individual MHMD can be observed, and the two could be distinct. There seems to have been a progression from Elijah bar Kabsha, the chief of the Tayyi’ MHMT, to Muhammad being the spiritual leader of the Mhaggraye, and later to the Tayyi’ Mhaggraye, through the MHMD Mahdi, and finally to Islam.

Nevertheless, in the 680s, the ‘adversaries’ of the Byzantine Orthodox Church were viewed as a like-Arian form of Judaic thought that reintroduced Jewish Messiahnism from an expanding territory of the Tayyi’. The Byzantines neither recognized Muhammad nor Islam.

The earlier Saracen and Ishmaelite incursions must have been unaware of Islam and the Koran. It appears that the Jews from Edessa carried the seed (Sebeos), and the Tayyi’ represent the sprout of what eventually evolved into Muhammadeans. Their goal seems to have been to occupy Jerusalem, as was of other groups, certainly also in the first wave of attacks. However, the temple building activities in Jerusalem were attributed first to Saracens from the Caspian Sea in the Caucasus region, or in Sebeos to Jews who were driven away by the Ishmaelites. The next temple that went up was in Fusted under Amr, but from Mecca there was no sign of activity.

The traditional narratives might contain several parallel “histories” and perhaps more than one Muhammad or a chain of Muhammads.

The primary evidence also suggests, according to Deus, that the Muslim timescale may be connected to Heraclius’s advances and later alliance with three Persian rebel factions, establishing a growing confederation in competition with the Persian Empire.

Deus makes a case that primary evidence should not be incorporated into traditions since the latter may have been inserted into real history with an agenda. In order to avoid circular arguments, contemporary primary evidence must take precedence, and tradition can only help to support it or clarify certain aspects.

Yohanan ben Isaac Alemanno (1435-1505?) was an Italian kabbalist, philosopher and physician. In his less known autograph, Paris, BnF héb. 849, he incorporated contemporary Christian magic sources with kabbalah, providing a practical method to ascend to the upper worlds for gaining prophecy. This article brings together Alemanno’s autograph and contemporary magical works, in order to demonstrate a radical change in Alemanno’s approach towards demonic magic, and the way he interpreted it using a cosmology he developed. Then, Alemanno’s cosmology will be used for reconsidering a concept of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494): The Triplex Merkabah.

בשם האהבה והאחריות:
דברים לזכרו של האב פרופסור מרסל דיבואה במלאת שלושים למותו
מאת נפתלי רוטנברג
דברים שנאמרו ביום עיון שנערך במכון ון ליר בירושלים בסוף יולי 2007 במלאת שלושים לפטירתו  של האב פרופ' מרסל דיבואה.
* פורסם במוסף הספרים של עיתון "הארץ ב- 3.8.07 תחת השם: "פרק חשוב בקבלת האחר" בקישור הזה: https://www.haaretz.co.il/literature/1.1431183
Lecture given at a conference held at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute in late July 2007, marking the thirtieth day of the passing of Father Professor Marcel-Jacques Dubois by Naftali Rothenberg
* Published in the book supplement of the newspaper "Haaretz" on August 3, 2007 under the name: "An important chapter in the acceptance of the other" at this link: https://www.haaretz.co.il/literature/1.1431183

This essay explores the persistent scholarly desires and motivations that structure the historical study of conversion in religious studies. Most “conversion studies” take a phenomenological approach, which acknowledges the diverse processes, contexts, and meanings of conversion but nonetheless sees the phenomenon as a way to access the contours of global religion. Phenomenology of conversion reveals a desire for bounded religions arranged in a comparable system, “religion.” A hermeneutical approach to conversion does not seek to access a stable phenomenon but asks why conversion as a discourse is deployed. This form of narrative interpretation can open up new possibilities in what we think the study of religion can, and should, do. The specific examples of Jewish conversion to Christianity in late antiquity act as case studies.

The Confessions of Saint Augustine, here translated into Hebrew from Latin by Paul Philip Levertoff, is considered one of the most influential masterpieces of European literature, modern philosophy, and Western culture in general. Before us lies the spiritual autobiography of Augustine, the hedonist in pursuit of pleasure who became a visionary saint. It is an expression of the man in search of God who did not find what he sought in the world of philosophy or the academy. The estranged and wandering Augustine, yearning after tranquility and rest, finally finds his place of repose in God – not through critical contemplation but through an existential-mystical experience. The first Hebrew translation, by the convert Paul Philip Levertoff (1878-1954), was composed under the influence of the early writings of Martin Buber. Levertoff, a quintessential Hebrew author, could be seen as one of the younger members of the circle of Yosef Hayyim Brenner, Uri Nissan Gnessin, and Gershon Shoffman. However, after he converted to Christianity, he was rejected and forgotten. Nevertheless, his influence on Jewish thinkers like Hillel Zeitlin, Brenner, and Rabbi Binyamin was significant. In his translation, Levertoff wanted to present the modern Jew with a way to search after God in places which were invisible to philosophers, as well as to influence the formation of a new Jew; a Jew who, alongside the Hasidic tsaddik, could receive religious inspiration even from a Christian saint. The introduction to the book locates the translation in its historical and literary contexts, and views it as an expression of contemporary intellectual trends related to Orientalism and mysticism. The tension in the text between the Christian original and the Jewish translation give it a unique literary potential and opens a fascinating window onto the world of Jewish thought at the beginning of the 20th century.


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Jews and Christians in Medieval Castile examines the changes in Jewish-Christian relations in the Iberian kingdom of Castile during the pivotal period of the reconquest and the hundred years that followed the end of its most active phase (eleventh to mid-fourteenth century). The study's focus on the Christian heartland north of the Duero River, known as Old Castile, allows for a detailed investigation of the Jews' changing relations with the area's main power players―the monarchy, the church, and the towns. In a departure from previous assessments, Soifer Irish shows that the institutional and legal norms of toleration for the Jewish minority were forged not along the military frontier with Islam, but in the north of Castile. She argues that the Jews' relationship with the Castilian monarchy was by far the most significant factor that influenced their situation in the kingdom, but also demonstrates that this relationship was inherently problematic. Although during the early centuries of Christian expansion the Jewish communities benefited from a strong royal power, after about 1250 helping maintain it proved to be costly to the Jewish communities in economic and human terms. Soifer Irish demonstrates that while some Castilian clergymen were vehemently anti-Jewish, the Castilian Church as a whole never developed a coordinated strategy on the Jews, or even showed much interest in the issue. The opposite is true about the townsmen, whose relations with their Jewish neighbors vacillated between cooperation and conflict. In the late thirteenth century, the Crown's heavy-handed tactics in enforcing the collection of outstanding debts to Jewish moneylenders led to the breakdown in the negotiations between the Jewish and Christian communities, creating a fertile ground for the formation of an anti-Jewish discourse in Castilian towns. Soifer Irish also examines the Jews' attitudes toward the various powers in the Christian society and shows that they were active players in the kingdom's politics. Jews and Christians in Medieval Castile breaks new ground in helping us understand more fully the tensions, and commonalities, between groups of different faiths in the late medieval period.

Yakov Leshchinsky’s 1928 essay, here translated from the Yiddish, provides the first cross-national analysis of the migration and class transformation of world Jewry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It draws on diverse and widely scattered official and historical sources in German, Polish, Russian, Yiddish and other languages. A careful, complex and empirically grounded work, it helped to boost Leschinsky’s scholarly reputation. Before long, its author was routinely referred to as “the father of Jewish demography” and “the dean of Jewish sociologists.”