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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This publication has its origin in the international conference, “Medieval Exegesis: An Interfaith Discourse,” organized by this author in October 2011 at the University of Michigan. Various units at the University of Michigan offered their support for the conference, including the Romance Languages and Literatures Department, the History Department, the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies, the Rackham Graduate School, and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. In addition, the University of Michigan Office of Research also provided a publication subventions grant for this book, and I am grateful for this support.
Apart from these contributions, primary funding for both the conference and the book has been made possible by a Starting Grant from the European Research Council for the project “Inteleg: The Intellectual and Material Legacies of Late Medieval Sephardic Judaism: An Interdisciplinary Approach.” I wish to thank the ERC for its generous support and express my gratitude to my colleagues in the project: Javier del Barco (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, Madrid), Arturo Prats (Universidad Complutense, Madrid), Jonathan Decter (Brandeis University), and above all Esperanza Alfonso (CSIC, Madrid), who was also principal investigator. Marian Sdenz-Diez also provided invaluable administrative help at the CSIC as did April Caldwell at University of Michigan. I also wish to thank those colleagues who participated in the conference but have not contributed to this volume: Benjamin Braude, Catherine Brown, Piero Capelli, John Dagenais, Jonathan Decter, Noah Gardner, Ari Geiger, Luis Girén-Negroén, and Deeana Klepper. Iam also grateful to my colleagues at the University of Michigan and beyond who participated in the conference: Catherine Brown, Hussein Fancy, Eliot Ginsburg, Gottfried Hagan, Alexander Knysh, Peggy McCracken, Larry Simon (Western Michigan University), and Teresa Tinkle. A number of them also offered their help and council in bringing this collection to print. A special additional thanks goes to Eliot Ginsburg for his generous assistance in double-checking my transliterations, to Dwayne Carpenter at Boston University for his helpful comments as reader of the manuscript for Fordham, and to Edward Casey for kindly reading over the final text one last time.
At Fordham University Press, Helen Tartar, before her tragic and untimely death, and Thomas Lay both provided wonderful editorial assistance and I am sincerely grateful for their help. I deeply regret that Helen did not live to see the final book in print. I am also thankful to James Robinson of the University of Chicago for helping to make this book part of the Bordering Religions Series.
Permission for the cover image (from the Arragel Bible, fol. 1v) has been provided by the Palacio de Lira and the Fundacion Casa de Alba. Reproduction of the image in Chapter 5 (MS Clm 15956, fol. 94v) was provided by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich. I wish to thank both institutions for their helpful cooperation.
A number of eminent scholars of medieval Iberia passed away during the preparation of this book: Samuel Armistead (1927-2013), Yom-Tov Assis (1942-2013), Olivia Remie Constable (1960-2014), Francisco Marquez-Villanueva (1931-2013), Maria Rosa Menocal (1953-2012), Benzion Netanyahu (1910-2012), and Angel Sdéenz-Badillos (1940-2013), whose work is contained herein in Chapter 9. Although all have enriched our understanding of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim interaction and conflict in the Middle Ages, Maria Rosa and Angel in particular were beloved friends and admired mentors to various members of the Inteleg project. Through their wide-ranging research, their passionate teaching, and their kind generosity, they have touched the lives of many and have left a deep and lasting legacy for future scholars. It is with a grateful but heavy heart that I would like to dedicate this book to their memory.
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND REFERENCES
The essays gathered here refer to many Hebrew and Arabic titles and words. Transliteration of Hebrew has followed the style sheet offered by AJS Review, and transliteration of Arabic follows the system of the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (IJMES). Non-English phrases and words have been italicized within the text, and longer citations in Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin, when present, have been included in the notes. In the interest of economy, original texts have been referenced but generally not cited in the original, except in a few important cases. However, all foreign titles are listed as published. Arabic and Hebrew titles in the notes are given in transliterated form only, and in the general bibliography, these transliterated titles are followed by an approximate English translation or appropriate description in brackets. Primary sources in the bibliography are usually listed by first name rather than family name (e.g. “Judah Halevi” rather than “Halevi, Judah”) except when names are most commonly known in another form (e.g. “Ibn Tufayl, Aba Bakr”).
Introduction
Ryan Szpiech
In the third chapter of his anti-Muslim treatise Contra legem sarracenorum (Against the Law of the Saracens), written around 1300 after his return to Italy from Baghdad, Dominican Riccoldo da Monte di Croce (d. 1320) discusses the Muslim claim that Jews and Christians received a true revelation from God through Moses and Jesus, but then subsequently corrupted it. In order to argue against this accusation, Riccoldo turns to the Qur’an itself:
It says in the [Qur’anic] chapter about Johah [Q. 10:94], “If you are in doubt concerning what we have revealed to you, ask those who have read the Book before you.” However, those who read the Book before the Saracens were the Christians and Jews, who received the Pentateuch and the Gospel, as Muhammad himself sets out. Muhammad, therefore, tells the Saracens to make enquiries from Christians and Jews concerning ambiguous matters. However, how is it that Muhammad sent these people back to false testimonies, if he really was a genuine prophet, as they say?!
With these words, Riccoldo raises one of the central issues facing medieval Muslim, Christian, and Jewish writers alike in their confrontations with other religions—namely, how to evaluate the religious and legal status of foreign scriptures without undermining the validity or uniqueness of one’s own. Riccoldo is here attempting to affirm the integrity of the Bible against Muslim accusations of its corruption, and he is doing so by interpreting a passage that Muslims would consider valid and immutable as divine revelation. At the same time, however, this appeal forms part of Riccoldo’s attack on Islam, including an attack on the legitimacy of the Qur’an itself. In such exegetical maneuverings, Riccoldo was caught between affirming and denying the scriptures of the different religious traditions about which he wrote.
This double gesture was not unique to Riccoldo, nor was it uncommon among his contemporary exegetes, whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. In the Middle Ages, scriptural commentary constituted an essential aspect of the expression of belief in all three faiths, representing a multifaceted practice—at once social, devotional, intellectual, creative, and educational. At the same time, because it dealt with issues such as the nature of the canon, the limits of acceptable interpretation, and the meaning of salvation history from the perspective of faith, such commentary arose in the Middle Ages along the fault lines of interconfessional conflict and polemical disputation between religious communities. The establishment of a canon meant the deprecation of any rival one, and any interpretation or gloss that was accepted as authoritative also constituted an implicit rejection of the unorthodox and unknown. To read and interpret scriptures held to be authoritative only among one’s neighbors required a careful and often subtle evaluation of the boundaries between the familiar and the foreign. Within the multiconfessional world of the medieval Mediterranean, exegesis was always a double-valenced phenomenon that pressed against the boundaries between selfhood and otherness, community and outsider.
The thirteen essays in this volume explore the double nature of scriptural commentary in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, considering exegesis in all three religions as both a praxis of communal faith and a tool for demarcating the boundaries between religious communities and their rivals and neighbors. Adopting a broad view of medieval exegesis as a discourse, or cluster of discourses, of cross-cultural and interreligious conflict, the essays included here focus particularly on the exegetical genre in the western and southern Mediterranean during the High and especially the Late Middle Ages (roughly from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries).
These thought-provoking studies are based on a selection from papers read at the conference, “Medieval Exegesis: An Interfaith Discourse,” organized by this author in October 2011 at the University of Michigan. Bringing together scholars of Islamic, Christian, and Jewish exegesis from Spain, Austria, Italy, Israel, and across North America, this conference provided an intimate and productive setting to explore in depth the interplay of scriptural commentary, interreligious conflict, and translation.’ The variety of perspectives and topics represented by the conference participants—whose work is most often discussed in specialized contexts focusing on only one exegetical tradition or one core text—opened the door to unexpected and exciting discussions about the commonalities and differences in medieval exegetical practices among readers from different religions. It also underscored the importance of cross-cultural and interreligious comparison in the study of religious discourse in the medieval Mediterranean. While each of the essays included here incorporates new research in its area of specialty, together they also convey an exciting sense of the possibilities of new discoveries and insights that only a comparative dialogue can bring.
The comparative perspective of the conference and the essays embodies the best intentions of the conference’s primary sponsor, the European Research Council, which provided funding through an ERC Starting Grant. This grant supported a four-year research project (2008-12) led by Principal Investigator Esperanza Alfonso (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas), one of the contributors to this volume. The project, entitled “Inteleg: The Intellectual and Material Legacies of Late Medieval Sephardic Judaism. An Interdisciplinary Approach,” provided support for four public seminars and four academic conferences, all focusing on the Bible and its place in the intellectual, religious, artistic, and polemical activity in the western Mediterranean during the Late Middle Ages.’ While the principle focus of the Inteleg project dealt with Jewish cultural production, the conferences and research projects of the individual team members aimed to situate the study of the Bible within Sephardic culture in a wider cultural and religious setting. The multiconfessional perspective of this group of essays is a tangible outcome of the broad, eclectic impetus at the heart of the Inteleg project.
The comparative approach of this collection is partly modeled on a number of recent publications treating together Jewish, Christian, and Muslim exegesis, the most notable among which is With Reverence for the Word: Medieval Scriptural Exegesis in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Oxford, 2003).* Yet unlike that and similar comparative studies, Medieval Exegesis and Religious Difference does not set out to provide an exhaustive side-by-side description of scriptural commentary in the three religions. Instead, it limits itself to a more modest scope, focusing on the use of exegesis by writers in each tradition to mark out and clarify the boundaries of communal identity. Put differently, it does not survey the overall characteristics of scriptural commentary in each religion or try to compare exegetical trends in general, but instead examines the function of exegesis as a vehicle for both theological apology and social polemic.° Rather than offer an exhaustive and systematic presentation of the similarities and differences among Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions, Medieval Exegesis and Religious Difference poses specific questions about the interplay of these commentaries and the resulting intellectual disputation or religious conflict. In taking this thematic approach to exegesis, all the essays contained herein address, each in its own way, some of the same preliminary questions posed at the beginning of the Medieval Exegesis conference: Between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, who was reading exegesis from other faith traditions and in what contexts? How did individual exegetes negotiate their interest in alien scriptures and commentaries with their commitment to the communities to which they themselves belonged? How did the technical demands of reading and translating foreign languages affect the views and practices of these exegetes? How did writers employ an exegetical approach outside of the genre of scriptural interpretation, such as in philosophy, public disputation, or polemical treatises? In exploring these and related questions, the contributors analyze the connections among commentary, disputation, dialogue, and scholarship within and across Jewish, Christian, and Muslim cultural spheres in the Mediterranean.
Two other questions are critically important in explaining the structure and shape of this volume, and these are practical starting points from which to survey the individual chapters. First, on what basis can Jewish, Christian, and Muslim exegesis be meaningfully compared? This seemingly simple question is raised in the opening essay by Sarah Stroumsa, who considers the problematic origins of the category of the “Abrahamic” religions. Although ubiquitous in modern thinking and parlance, both popular and academic, the term “Abrahamic religions” did not emerge until only very recently. Even more problematically, the common heritage in the figure Abraham that is presumed by this terminology was almost never recognized as such among writers in any of the three religions before the twentieth century. It is, moreover, one that reflects a particularly Muslim view of prophetic history, in which Abraham is the founder of a tradition that includes Judaism and Christianity but that is completed and corrected only by the advent of Islam. Needless to say, such a view is not acceptable within a Jewish or Christian worldview, in which Islam is not the heir of the Abrahamic tradition but a late and theologically confused or unnecessary repetition. Far from being a theme of ecumenical inclusiveness, the term “Abrahamic” is an exclusive and conflictive one that tacitly underscores the theological divisions among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Yet how can we refer to these three as a group, if not as “Abrahamic” religions? On what basis do they form a coherent category? Other proposed terms involve even more signifi cant problems. Th e popu lar denomination of “the three cultures” (las tres culturas), common in discussions of medieval Iberia, is no less distorting in its implications because it fl attens diff erent historical periods (when two of the three religions experienced signifi cant contact in diff erent confi gurations) into a single artifi cial moment of three- way interaction that in reality rarely or never existed. As Sarah Stroumsa explains, “unlike the Muslim orient, where at times Muslims, Jews, and Christians were indeed active members of one intellectual community, in the Iberian Peninsula the three communities hardly ever formed a contemporaneous intellectual triangle.” For this reason, the expression las tres culturas might be likened to notions such as “Judeo- Christian tradition” or even the “Middle Ages” itself, expressions that represent a vast and imprecise grab- bag of ideas that persist for the sake of convention or con ve nience but that rely on extrahistorical foundations and ultimately reinforce the interpretive biases of their Christian and postmedieval origins. Another common alternative to “Abrahamic” is the term “religions of the Book,” an expression adapted as a calque of the Islamic phrase ahl al- kitāb (People of the Book). Th is latter expression is used in the Qurʾān (e.g., Q. 22:17, 98:1–2) to denote those who have received a true revelation from God, oft en in opposition to those guilty of polytheism (al- shirk). Although less obviously distorting, this option is no less problematic for various reasons. First, although the usage of this term in the Qurʾān and later Muslim tradition implies a certain connection among Jews, Christians, and Muslims as part of a single tradition of revelation and prophecy, such a view, like the notion of the Abrahamic, refl ects a particularly Muslim, supersessionist perspective, and was never commonly shared by medieval Jews or Christians, for whom Islam was an illegitimate imitation and not a fi nal fulfi llment. Moreover, neither the Qurʾān nor its later exegetes used the term “People of the Book” to refer to Muslims, who are instead referred to not only as the recipients of revealed truth but also a “community of believers” (muʾminūn) who have “submitted” to God (muslimūn).6 Indeed, even though the Qurʾān, as Riccoldo da Monte di Croce points out, urges Muslims to “ask those who have read the Book before you,” it also says explicitly (Q. 6:7) that the Qurʾān itself is not a kitāb, a book or “scripture on a page” (kitāban fī qirṭāsin), but is instead the oral recitation of an eternal and unchanging truth.’ Finally, although it is often used as a positive designation for Jews and Christians in the Qur’an (and sometimes for Zoroastrians and those called Sabians as well), it is not unambiguously positive, sometimes being used to denote with frustration those who resist believing in the truth of Islam.’ For these reasons, the modern usage of “religions of the Book” as an expression to refer to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam together is at best imprecise and at worst distorted and misleading.
This lack of acceptable terminology intimates a problem in the underlying concept itself. Lacking a convenient or accurate denomination for the three religions considered as a group, on what basis can Jewish, Christian, and Muslim exegetical traditions be viewed together through a single interpretive lens? Can we speak about each tradition as a separate thing—that is, as possessing a definite worldview different from that of its contemporaries? Setting aside the serious question of how we can even speak about any of the religions as a coherent entity with definite and essential characteristics—a problem I will turn to again below—we might venture an answer as to how such groups might be compared by considering the intention behind usage of the expression “religions of the Book,” which, despite its imprecision, seeks to identify a common heritage based on a foundation of monotheism, partly interwoven historical frameworks, and overlapping prophetic revelations preserved by each in the form of a sacred scripture. This apparent commonality, however, rather than simplifying the difficulty, instead points to a second basic question underlying the structure of this volume: Despite their somewhat homologous prophetic histories, how comparable are the notions of scripture and commentary in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam?
This question, like that of the basis of comparison among the three religions, is likewise thornier than it might at first seem. As William A. Graham has shown, a precise and single definition of “scripture” is very difficult, if not impossible, to establish, and even the simplest definitions can easily impose a conceptual framework inherited from a modern, Christian notion of “holy scripture.” With this caveat in mind, we can, following Graham, tentatively define scripture here as a written text defined as holy by its community. “A text only becomes a ‘scripture’ when a group of persons value it as sacred, powerful and meaningful, possessed of an exalted authority, and in some fashion transcendent of, and hence distinct from other speech and writing.”? Although a single, homogeneous idea of sacred text is not shared among the three predominant religions of the medieval Mediterranean—indeed, such an idea is exceedingly difficult to establish even within the individual religious traditions themselves, which cannot be taken as monolithic or uniform in any sense—we might argue that there did exist (and still does) a belief among the communities of the three faiths that their individual scriptural corpora—the Hebrew Tanakh, the Christian Bible (comprising the recollated Hebrew Bible and the New Testament), and the Qur’an—reflected and recorded an ultimate truth not found in any other texts. As Jane Dammen McAuliffe explains, “these three religions profess a mutual belief in divinehuman communication as expressed and encoded in written form. Each of these three canonized a core set of documents as the repository of this revelation. Each, in other words, reveres a ‘scripture’ as a central component of its self-understanding.””
For this reason, all three religions similarly can be said to have developed comparable—although still very different—traditions of interpretation and commentary in which those exclusive textual representations of truth were interpreted and expounded according to their own understanding and faith. Even more, all three faiths might be likened in their particular approach to sacred texts, and comparisons can be drawn between Jewish and Christian ideas of the four levels of scriptural meaning (peshat, ‘literal’ or ‘historical’; remez, ‘allegorical’ or ‘philosophical’; derash, ‘homiletical’ or ‘rabbinic’; and sod, ‘mystical’ or ‘esoteric’ in Judaism; or ‘literal-historical’, ‘allegorical-figurative’, ‘tropological-moral’, ‘anagogical-eschatological’ in Christianity) or between these notions and the Islamic terms for the levels of meaning in the Qur’an (such as alTustari’s four levels zahir, ‘literal’; batin, “symbolic; hadd, ‘prescriptive’; and matla‘, ‘anagogical’; or the more common distinctions between only two broad levels of meaning or interpretation such as tafsir, ‘exoteric and ta°wil, ‘esoteric; zahir, ‘outer’ and batin, ‘inner’; or muhkam, ‘clear’ and mutashabih, ‘ambiguous’)."' Other equally logical comparisons are also possible and all of them underscore the significant similarities among practices of scriptural commentary among medieval Jews, Christians, and Muslims. One might, for example, note the common attitude of mutual exclusivity held by each with regard to its own sacred text—that only its own textual witness represents the truest and most faithful account of God’s revelation to humans, and that the exegesis of its own sacred text is by definition more authoritative than the interpretations of alien texts.
Such a foundation for comparing Jewish, Christian, and Muslim exegesis, while methodologically suggestive and didactically useful, remains rather tenuous. Although such common claims about prophetic tradition or a scripturally based, shared monotheism might prove sufficient to stimulate interfaith dialogue or ecumenical good will, these generalizations are not adequate as a basis for deeper historical analysis. As Aaron Hughes has recently pointed out, not only do “definitions of ‘Abrahamic religions’ tend to rely on a series of qualifiers that amount to little more than a string of vague caricatures,” but the category that the term is meant to describe “is predicated on essences” that are “theologically and not historically imagined.”” It would be too easy to assume without question that Jewish, Christian, and Muslim exegesis bear obvious comparison because they are bound together in what seem like analogous traditions and beliefs.
In this book we attempt to avoid the pitfalls of such unexamined factitious categories and plausible but probably unsubstantiated connections. Rather than focusing on superficial similarities or appealing to a notion of a shared theological foundation or even to a shared understanding of the revelation of prophecy or the nature of scripture, the comparison of exegetical sources in the three religions is based here on the historical facts of proximate and sometimes overlapping social and cultural milieus and a common practice of confronting the beliefs of other religions with exegetical writing. The opening example cited from Riccoldo da Monte di Croce’s attack on the Qur’an is a concrete example of such confrontation in practice. Other similar examples show that thinkers from all three religions wrote about their own holy writ, as well as about the books of other religions to which they did not accord the status of scripture, in order to compare and contrast their beliefs with those of their neighbors and rivals. In short, these essays are not collected on the basis of a shared theological or transhistorical foundation or an idea of the uniform nature of scripture or medieval exegesis among different religious communities. Rather, the comparison of these texts by Jews, Christians, and Muslims is justified here by the simple fact that their authors all read and wrote about each other’s sources and ideas.
This comparative approach aims to avoid another analytical pitfall as well, that of considering medieval polemical texts according to overly rigid postmedieval categories that ignore the genres and forms of medieval writing itself. This issue is especially pressing in the study of interconfessional discourse because “polemic” (polemicus, polemica) was not a term in common use in the Middle Ages but only appears with frequency in the late sixteenth century, when it became a named genre of writing (later to be contrasted to the less common genre of irenics, which does not appear until a few centuries later). In the early modern period, “polemics” (<Fr. polémique <Gr. polemikos, ‘warlike’) came to denote a particular literary form of religious and philosophical writing structured as an intellectual or religious debate between competing ideas. While “debate” and “disputational” literature is of course older than Christianity and Rabbinical Judaism, such writing developed within both religions from very early on and took a variety of forms in the Middle Ages. While we might accurately speak of a medieval work as expressing a polemical tone or intention—medieval writers did craft defenses (apologiae) of faith directed against rival groups or ideas, and argumentation Contra Iudaeos was abundant and constant—the genre of “polemics” itself did not exist as such in the Middle Ages, and one might well affirm that “medieval polemic” is a largely artificial category based on postmedieval divisions. For this reason, it is critical to approach this writing through the medieval forms in which it appeared—the disputatio, the refutatio, the dialogus, as well as other genres of writing such as the philosophical and religious tractatus and, above all, the exegetical commentary. By studying interreligious discourse through its uniquely medieval forms, paying particular attention to exegesis, gloss, treatise, and commentary, this collection avoids imposing modern categories of study onto medieval ideas."
At the same time, these studies do not limit themselves only to discussions of glosses on scripture, but also look at commentaries on and interpretations of a wide variety of texts including extrascriptural works of religious authority (such as the Mishnah, Talmud, midrash, hadith, Sira—biographies and traditions about Muhammad—and Patristic commentary), philosophical and mystical tracts, and disputational treatises. We are here presented with Jews reading both Muslim texts (Sarah Stroumsa on Maimonides’s ideas of the Sabians) and Christian sources (Angel Sdenz-Badillos on the Castilian Bible of Moses Arragel, Nina Caputo on Nahmanides’s response to Christian readings of Genesis), as well as Jews engaging in interreligious arguments (Alexandra Cuffel on polemical biographies of Jesus modeled on Arabic stories). We learn of Christians critically engaging with the Talmud and Jewish exegeses of the Bible (Ursula Ragacs on Ramon Marti, Harvey J. Hames on the Dominican disputations of the thirteenth century) and of Christians reading the Quran and hadith (Thomas E. Burman on Marti and Riccoldo da Monte di Croce), and even sometimes through the fictional guise of an imaginary Jew (Antoni Biosca i Bas on the epistles forged by Alfonso Buenhombre).
We also find Christians responding to Jewish interpretations of Islam (Sidney Griffith on Ibn al-Mahramah’s glosses to Ibn Kammunah) or discussing other Jewish sources from the perspective of conversion (Yosi Yisraeli on Pablo de Santa Maria, Steven F. Kruger on Guillaume de Bourges). We likewise see Muslims absorbing ideas from Jewish texts (Sarah Stroumsa on Ibn Masarra’s possible knowledge of the Sefer Yezira, or The Book of Creation), as well as (on rare occasions) reading and even admiring the Bible (Walid Saleh on al-Biqa‘i).
In looking together at these many different authors and texts, we can see that the two key questions posed above—Can Jews, Christians, and Muslims be considered as parts of a coherent category of investigation? And can each religion’s notions of scripture and exegesis be legitimately compared?—may be answered in the affirmative on the basis of the research presented in these wide-ranging individual essays. These provide ample evidence that writers from each of the three religions were reading and engaging with, most often but not always in a contentional vein, authors and texts from the other two. They were doing so, moreover, not from the detached vantage point of analytical observation valued in modern social scientific research and sometimes laid claim to (however dubiously) in the historiography about the Middle Ages. Rather, writers from different backgrounds read each other’s texts and commentaries through their own interpretive lenses and in terms of their own sacred histories. In this way, the subject of these essays might be said to be how exegesis, commentary on sacred text, was regularly a form of eisegesis, a manner of reading that inserts one’s own assumptions and bias into the process of interpretation. Medieval polemical writers practiced exegesis eisegetically by “reading into” the text their own theological and historical assumptions. Certainly, one might rightly insist that all interpretive reading is in fact eisogetic, insofar as all reading is conditioned by the reader’s worldview and prejudices, or as Hans-Georg Gadamer suggests: “all understanding is interpretation” and “interpretation always involves a relation to the question that is asked of the interpreter.”'> Medieval disputational writing was undoubtedly more explicit and unapologetic about its own agenda and more strident in imposing its own interpretive frame in the act of reading than the process Gadamer has in mind, yet it was, nevertheless, like all textual interpretation, contextualized, was always a situated social act, and as such was also an act made and understood in light of the shared assumptions of a community.
The meaning of this assertion must be further explained, given that the subjects of these essays extend far beyond any single area or group. The sources considered here in fact cover a wide geographical range, involving authors working in the Iberian Peninsula (Ibn Masarra in Cordoba; Pablo de Santa Maria and Moses Arragel in Castile; Ramon Marti and Nahmanides in Aragon), western North Africa (Alfonso Buenhombre in Marrakech), southern France (Jacob ben Reuben in Gascony, Gersonides in Languedoc), northern France (Nicholas Donin and Nicholas of Lyra in Paris, Rashi in Troyes, Joseph ben Nathan Official in Sens), the Upper Rhine region (Reuchlin in Baden), the Italian peninsula (Jacob Anatoli and Isaac ben Moses Arama in Naples, Riccoldo da Monte di Croce in Florence), eastern Turkey (Ibn al-Mahrimah in Mardin), and eastern North Africa (Maimonides and al-Biqa‘i in Cairo, as well as the anonymous documents in the Cairo Genizah). Although a few of these essays involve material from Northern Europe, a majority concentrate on texts and authors clustering around and crisscrossing the Mediterranean Sea, from Iberia to Egypt, Turkey to Morocco, Naples to Provence. As such, we have subsumed all of the essays gathered here under the broad banner of the “premodern Mediterranean” while at the same time recognizing that a number of studies necessarily escape this loose, informal description.
Among the various authors and texts treated here, what is more unifying than geography is the congruence of their apologetic and exegetical foci, the defense of the boundaries and integrity of their communities through the interpretation of their authoritative texts. In this, all of them offer examples of textual commentaries that express, both implicitly and explicitly, the understanding of their authors and readers that they are members of distinct communities of faith. At the same time, these essays also highlight the inherent conflicts generated by the defense of those communities’ boundaries and integrity precisely as a result of this interpretation. Taking account of Jocelyn Wogan-Browne’s warning that “community’ is a bad word for medievalists, especially, to be careless with” because “it too readily assimilates to the construction of the Middle Ages as the period of an organic and static society chiefly important as the passive and narrativeless Other against which post-medieval history can be written,” I propose the term here not as a general historiographical shorthand for a “social group,” but in a more restricted way as a name for a group whose members understood themselves to be united by a common holy text.'® Each exegetical tradition explored here might be taken to represent a “textual community” akin to the sort proposed by Brian Stock: a group unified not by social or geographical origins or by cultural norms, but by “a parallel use of texts, both to structure the internal behavior of the groups’ members and to provide solidarity against the outside world.”!” While this seems to be a fitting description of the task of polemical writing, my intended sense is different from that of Stock, who uses the term to denote groups bound by the direct, often oral, sharing of acommon text. I invoke it here to mean a group bound by a common, although not usually collaborative, practice of textual interpretation and a shared set of assumptions about the nature of those texts. What characterizes the similarities and differences among the writers examined here is their acceptance or rejection of certain writings as sacred and authoritative and their beliefs about the role of those writings in the unfolding of a common salvation history.
Taken even more broadly, this acceptance or rejection is itself a factor that links these authors in a coherent way despite their wide temporal and geographical separation and religious differences. Put differently, while the authors from each religious tradition can be said to make up separate “textual communities” that are defined by their shared acceptance of text and shared interpretive norms, we might also venture—pace Stroumsa’s introductory remarks-to look at all of the authors and texts, irrespective of their religious differences and distance across time and space, as part of one larger “textual network” linked through a shared polemical discourse expressed in a variety of genres and forms. Though it would seem that this could not legitimately be called a “community” in any sense (for surely such a group would not have been experienced or recognized as a community by its members), it would, nevertheless, be marked by a shared participation in a common textual practice, that of using commentary on authoritative texts to define orthodox belief and to delineate the boundaries of identity, often in response or opposition to other, rival commentaries. It is ironic that expressions such as “People of the Book,” “Abrahamic religions,” and “the three cultures,” which were coined and are deployed in a modern spirit of multicultural ecumenism, may actually serve better, with the proper caveats, to describe medieval writing about rival traditions of revelation, sacred text, and salvation. Polemical exegesis was, in fact, probably one realm in which “the three religions” actually were brought together in a mutually recognizable, theologically based, triangular relationship, albeit an imaginary and ex-trahistorical one. Thus even though Christians in tenth- and eleventhcentury al-Andalus were a social minority of relatively little consequence (in comparison with Jews) just as Muslims were in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Christian kingdoms in Iberia, each of the three religions played a persistent role in the tangled sacred histories and apologetic discourse of the others at both periods, while Abraham stood at the heart of the theological competition between imagined sacred histories rather than serving as a symbol of their unity.
The history of a “polemical community,” such as any of these are, need not, in any case, be limited to actual demographics or real social or intellectual interaction, and can just as well be the history of “imaginary” constructs of belief and ideology. As Benedict Anderson has famously suggested in reference to the history of modern nationalism, “communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity / genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.”® Thus while it is true that terms such as “Jewish,” “Christian,” and “Muslim” all represent essentializing and reductive generalizations that overly simplify the diversity of each community of believers—just as “polemic” might be said to essentialize the variety of medieval forms into an artificial whole—the usage of such terms here is justified as a way of making more patent the intersection of categories and discourses used within disputational writing itself. In analyzing polemically motivated exegesis, Stock’s “textual communities” might be fruitfully refracted through the lens of Anderson’s imaginary ones, and provide a conceptual space in which writers in “the three religions” did see themselves as interacting, albeit from an exclusive rather than inclusive perspective.
Whether we choose to see all those engaged in disputational writing as forming part of a multifaceted community of dialogic textual practice, or we more strictly limit the notion of community to refer to each separate faith group and its network of exegetes and their readers, the idea of a textual community can nevertheless borrow some insight from the abundant work on medieval communities in the realm of social history. The textual community of medieval exegetes and polemically motivated writers might appropriately be linked with the kind of community studied by Susan Reynolds, “which defines itself by engaging in collective activities—activities which are characteristically determined and controlled less by formal regulations than by shared values and norms.”” In the cases examined here, the values and norms are those defining authoritative texts and their acceptable and orthodox interpretation. The resulting “polemical community,” although it is textually based rather than physical or social, is nevertheless similar to that described by Miri Ruben in her accounts of host-desecration accusations in the later Middle Ages, in which anti-Jewish hostility could “produce a sense of ‘community’ through action, and then memory of past action,” or like that described in detail by David Nirenberg, in which the provocation of anti-Jewish hostility through dramatic reenactment of the Passion “assigned the Jews a fundamental place in the Christian community.””° Although it was part of an evolving discourse of theological meaning, medieval exegesis was also a form of social practice that carried with it real consequences in the world of interreligious encounters.
By comparing the complex configurations of readers and texts studied in these essays according to the model of a “textual community,” we can thus reach a number of conclusions—that in the later Middle Ages, Jews, Christians, and Muslims did engage with each other’s books and arguments, drawing from one another’s traditions and expertise almost as often as they engaged in controversy and disputation; that exegesis, as a common practice, became the main medium by which writers of each group came in contact with each other’s ideas and debated scripture, prophecy, sacred history, and truth; and that scriptural commentary itself provided a common and recurrent means by which these writers defined and defended their similarities and differences, and thus functioned as the foundation for a communal sense of textual understanding.
At the same time, it should be obvious that these essays also all address the implicit questions so persistent in modern attempts to compare Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions: Can medieval examples of interreligious contact and conflict provide a model or inspiration for modern efforts at interfaith dialogue, multicultural community building, and cross-confessional relations? Put in terms of this volume’s focus: Was the discourse of medieval exegetes always a polemical discourse, or was there also a countertradition of “irenical” exegesis? Despite the wide differences among the particular texts and subject matter treated in these essays, one commonality is the deeply agonistic and frequently divisive nature of medieval scriptural commentary. Taken together, the essays demonstrate repeatedly that among the religions of the medieval Mediterranean, exegesis functioned as a foundation for collaboration, cooperation, or mutual understanding between rival groups only in the rarest of circumstances. As Walid Saleh points out in his essay, knowledge of the other did not often lead to acceptance, and familiarity did not automatically encourage tol-erance. It would represent a misreading based on an ahistorical and theologically biased presentism to search through these examples for the use of exegesis as a forum for “ecumenism” or interfaith collaboration. The discourse of exegesis, when commenting on unacceptable religious beliefs or scriptures, most often employed an exclusive language of apology and polemic.
Nevertheless, the essays here also make clear that scriptural commentary in these different traditions was not simply a broken record of argumentative formulas expressing a fixed and limited set of ideas. They show us that exegesis, especially when combined with disputational writing, often raises cultural, philosophical, and linguistic issues that are of vital concern to literary critics and historians of ideas. This does not come as a surprise: As exegesis was, whatever its context, a venture in symbols and words, it was never immune to the critical questions of literary and even poetic significance that inhere in all manifestations of language. One such issue central to attacks on the authority of foreign religious books is the evaluation of authenticity and originality, of authorship and authority. The belief in the validity and authority of scripture is inseparable from belief in its authenticity as a singular, revealed truth. To interpret scripture is to treat it as an authoritative source of truth, or rather, as the authoritative source par excellence. In Christian culture (and in comparable evaluations of authority found in Jewish and Muslim commentaries), medieval texts were recognized as authoritative on the basis of their auctoritas, their derivation from a known auctor, or true source. As Alastair Minnis has shown, an auctor was by definition an authentic, verifiable, and venerable source, and the text with the oldest and greatest authority, the Bible, was considered the word of the ultimate auctor, God.”' Thus, it does not come as a surprise that medieval commentaries on the Bible were one of the places that writers began to challenge traditional notions of textual authority and to expand the definition of authorship itself.”
Because to recognize authority was also to recognize authenticity, charges of scriptural forgery or inauthenticity—of “false authorship”— were common in medieval disputational writing. As we considered in the opening example from Riccoldo da Monte di Croce, Islamic refutations regularly charged Christianity and Judaism with “falsification” of God’s true revelation. This charge, known as tahrif in Islamic sources, hinged on a distinction between authentic and inauthentic scriptures. As Thomas Burman shows in his essay, Riccoldo turned the tables on these accusers by attacking Muhammad’s legitimacy as a prophet at the same time as he offered some close readings of the Qur’an itself in order to counter Muslim claims of Christian and Jewish tahrif. When foreign sources could be exploited as useful proof texts, such as the use of the Qur’an to support belief in Jesus and Mary (e.g., Q. 3:45) or readings of Jesus’s mention of a “paraclete” or “advocate” in the New Testament (e.g., John 14:16) as proof of the truth of Muhammad’s prophecy, authors would commonly introduce them by pointing to their alleged authenticity among rival groups.’ Riccoldo’s contemporary, the Catalan Dominican Ramon Marti, also considered by Burman, repeatedly attacked both Muslim and Jewish beliefs by referring to those books considered “authentic among them.” Similarly, in the disputation that took place in Barcelona in 1263 between Catalan Rabbi Moses ben Nahman (Nahmanides) and the converted Dominican Fra Pau Cristia (Friar Paul Christian), the two sides argued about the authoritative status of halakhic (legal) and aggadic (homiletic-narrative) rabbinic sources. According to the Christian account of the events, Nahmanides “said publicly that he did not believe in the authorities that were cited against him, though they were in ancient, authoritative books of the Jews.”
Part of the medieval argument over authority and authenticity naturally involved reflection on the nature of translation. One of the Qur’an’s claims to be true prophecy was based on its own miraculous nature. Muslim belief in the i9az, ‘inimitability’, of the Qur’an, formulated as literary doctrine by the tenth century, was likewise a belief that its authenticity was both deeply tied to the Arabic language and was at the same time extralinguistic, and that its true nature was ultimately untranslatable.”° At the same time, thirteenth-century writers such as Riccoldo and Marti, deeply concerned with the authority of their arguments, likewise took great care in considering the accuracy of their translations of the scriptural texts they cited. Riccoldo made extensive use of Mark of Toledo’s rather literal Latin Quran translation, preferring it to Robert of Ketton’s more poetic rendering. Ramon Marti, similarly, took great care in his Pugio fidei (Dagger of Faith) to provide original texts of Talmud, midrash, Quran and hadith in original languages alongside his punctilious Latin translations, often interspersed with his attempts at devising a transliteration of Hebrew and Arabic phrases.”’ In the same way, participants in the Disputation of Barcelona, which Marti may have attended, debated the proper translation of individual words from the Hebrew Bible (such as almah, ‘maider’ in Isaiah 7:14 or yom, ‘day’ in Daniel 12:11). In the fifteenth century, as Saénz-Badillos shows us, Moses Arragel based his Cas- tilian translation of the Bible directly on the Hebrew original, making ample use of Hebrew syntax and idiom in his translation choices and of Jewish exegetical commentaries in his explanatory notes. As Kruger and Yisraeli show, the question of “versions” and authentic translations is directly tied to that of conversion. The Jewish convert Pablo de Santa Maria (Solomon Halevi) not only cited extensively from Jewish exegetical and philosophical sources in his Additiones (Additions) to Nicholas of Lyra’s biblical commentary (which itself made ample use of Jewish exegetes such as Rashi)—often deprecating Lyra’s knowledge of Hebrew and his consequent inability to translate it accurately into Latin—he also prefaced his acerbic commentary with a poetic narrative of his own conversion. Apart from ideas about language and theoretical issues related to authenticity, translation, and conversion, a final common theme explored in this volume is that of the intersection of gender and exegesis. This topic might well seem out of place at first, for it has been one largely excluded from studies of medieval exegesis and even more overlooked in analysis of interreligious debate. However, as the essays in the final part of this collection all demonstrate, the representation of gender was not an extraneous or unrelated issue appended to the study of more central issues, but was instead a central part of the metaphoric structures and vocabulary used by exegetes in affirming their different theological perspectives. As Lisa Lampert has shown in her recent consideration of “an exegetical tradition that links the spiritual, masculine, and Christian and defines them in opposition to the carnal, feminine, and Jewish,” the representation of sexual difference served throughout the Middle Ages and early modern period as a powerful metaphor for the construction of religious difference.”* Kruger takes up a specific case of such gendered metaphors in the writing of the convert Guillaume de Bourges, and Caputo and Alfonso further show in detail that such deployment of gendered language and imagery was not limited to Christian exegesis or interreligious discourse. The essays in the final part—positioned there as a kind of comprehensive review of all the essays in the first three parts—point back in some way to earlier themes (Cuffel on Jewish readers in Islamic lands, Caputo on Jewish-Christian debate, Alfonso on intra-Jewish exegesis, Kruger on conversion). At the same time, there are many arguments in the first three parts that point ahead to the explicit discussion of gender in the final part. For example, Stroumsa’s exploration of the image of Abraham being chosen, while still in his mother’s womb, to be the “father” of all nations, or Burman’s evidence of Riccoldo reading the Quranic expression (Q. 4:1) “Lord who created you from a single soul” (min nafsin wahidatin) as “God who created you from one man” (ex uno homine), further underscore the centrality of gender in the exegetical vocabulary of both Islamic writers and Christian writers on Islam as well. As Katherine Allen Smith and Scott Wells have argued elsewhere, “exclusion and inclusion, violence and harmony, patriarchy and gender partnership are intertwined processes most fruitfully considered in conjunction with one another...one cannot understand medieval processes of negotiating community without understanding concurrent processes of negotiating difference.”””
The analyses presented here show us that exegetical and disputational texts were rhetorically complex, thematically rich, and intellectually provocative, much more so than they are often recognized to be. More significantly, these essays show us the importance of exegesis as a common intellectual and spiritual practice among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Whether they approach exegesis from the perspective of religious questions, such as the theological rivalries among medieval Jews, Christians, and Muslims, or from a historical perspective, such as that of the work of medieval Dominicans in confronting non-Christians, or from a thematic perspective, such as that of the use of gender as a marker of identity and exclusion in medieval commentaries, the essays collected in this volume all attest to the profound importance of exegesis as a discourse on identity and a tool of thought in the later Middle Ages.
Because of the variety of perspectives and the comparative nature of these essays, the volume is not organized strictly by chronology, language, or religious tradition. Rather, it presents chapters in four conceptual clusters, with some material spanning a range of several centuries. Despite this breadth, each part approaches exegesis in terms of its expression of religious difference, be it by looking at the borders between religions (Parts 1 and 3), at the institutionalization of controversial reading and disputation (Part 2), or through adoption of vocabularies of distinction and power (Part 4). While these divisions are meant to help organize the essays into meaningful clusters that potentiate their arguments and conclusions, the clusters have been ordered in an attempt to highlight connections between each. Thus the first essay of each cluster after the first is meant to point back to the thematic focus of the previous cluster at the same time as it opens the new focus of the cluster of essays that follow it. This organization is meant to help bind the essays and clusters into a coherent volume with a shared purview, but it must also be reiter- ated that these essays are not meant to provide a comprehensive picture of medieval exegetical or polemical traditions.
Part 1, entitled “Strategies of Reading on the Borders of Islam,” considers a number of examples of commentary and interaction between Muslim writers and those living in or near predominantly Muslim lands. Sarah Stroumsa’s essay provides a conceptual introduction to the volume by considering the figure of the Patriarch Abraham as developed by Jewish and Muslim philosophers in al-Andalus. In particular, she compares two specific cases, one Muslim and the other Jewish: that of the Cordoban Neoplatonist philosopher Ibn Masarra (d. 931) and that of Cordobanborn Aristotelian philosopher and rabbi Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides, d. 1204). After questioning the appropriateness of the term “Abrahamic religions” in comparing Judaism and Islam in the Iberian Peninsula, she shows that both writers evoke the figure of Abraham in parallel, albeit idiosyncratic, ways. Stroumsa compares Ibn Masarra’s unconventional discussion of Abraham as “ascending” to God through deductive contemplation of creation to traditional Muslim and Jewish characterizations of Abraham, noting the similarity of the ideas of both authors. She proposes a possible influence on Ibn Masarra’s thinking from Jewish mystical texts such as the Sefer Yezira and from contemporary Jewish philosophers such as Isaac Israeli. She then shows that Maimonides, in similar fashion, seems to have drawn his ideas about Abraham’s contemplative departure from Sabian polytheism in part from contemporary Muslim interpretations of the Sabians. Her analysis problematizes the theological appeal to Abraham as a common father figure at the same time as it traces a rich commerce of reading and interpreting across religious borders.
Sidney Griffith presents us with a similar picture of reading and commenting across religious lines, but among writers with a much more aggressive intention. His analysis treats the notes (al-hawashi) made by one Ibn al-Mahramah in the fourteenth century, written as glosses to the Tangih al-abhath li-I-milal al-thalath (An Overview of Investigations into the Views of the Three Faiths) by thirteenth-century Baghdadi Jew Ibn Kammunah. This well-known text was a comparison of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, probably written in response to the anti-Jewish refutation Ifham al-yahud (Silencing the Jews) by the twelfth-century convert from Judaism to Islam Samaw’al al-Maghribi. In his notes, written only for the parts on Judaism and Christianity, Ibn al-Mahramah discusses in detail the Islamic notion of abrogation, focusing in particular on the abrogation of the shari‘ah (law) of Moses. By adopting Islamic views of Judaism such as those espoused by Samaw’al al-Maghribi and by attacking and rejecting Ibn Kammunah’s arguments, Ibn al-Mahrimah is able to make use of the Muslim belief in the abrogation of Mosaic law as an implicit support for Christian claims of supersession. As Griffith explains, “Ibn al-Mahramah used the current popularity of Ibn Kammunah’s Tangqih as the occasion to promote an idea elaborated earlier by scholars in his own Jacobite community about the abrogation of Jewish law as a reasonable shari‘ah for the human community after the coming of the Messiah.” He argues that Ibn al-Mahrimah’s discussion shows signs of an “Islamicization of Christian apologetics,” which makes use of Islamic beliefs and anti-Jewish writing (based largely on exegetical arguments) to support his own views on Judaism. Griffith’s analysis of a Christian critique of a Jewish critique of Islam that was undertaken as a defense of Christian ideas vis-a-vis Judaism offers a rich and complex example of the mutual interactions between exegesis and polemical writing in the early fourteenth century.
Walid Saleh’s essay, “Al-Biqa‘i Seen through Reuchlin: Reflections on the Islamic Relationship with the Bible,” begins with a comparison of alBiqa‘l (d. 1480), a Mamluk scholar interested in the Hebrew Bible, and his younger contemporary Johannes Reuchlin (d. 1522), a Christian humanist and Hebraist who played a key role in introducing Hebrew study to many European universities. Provoked by the profound differences between these contemporary personages, Saleh provides a perceptive and elegant series of reflections on the differences between Muslim and Christian engagement with the Hebrew Bible. Beginning with a discussion of what he calls a “difference of emotionality” between their approaches to the Hebrew Bible, Saleh considers the notable Jack of engagement with or interest in Christian and especially Jewish scriptures among many Muslim exegetes and intellectuals. Arguing that Islamic exegesis generally avoided explicit confrontation and discussion of the Bible for both theological and linguistic reasons—it neither made theological sense nor was it an important part of early Arabic philological studies—Saleh concludes that this ignorance or indifference was the basis of a practical acceptance of Jews within Islamic societies. In contrast to the polemical origins of Christian Hebraism, in which “the more Europe knew, the more the Jews would suffer,” the lack of research or interest in the Hebrew language and the Jewish religion among Muslim exegetes proved to be a bulwark against vilification and attack. “In this case, ignorance was a blessing.”
The second part of this book, entitled “Dominicans and Their Disputations,” looks at the efforts of the Dominican Order as it confronted Jewish and Muslim scriptural and exegetical texts in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Thomas Burman’s essay, “Iwo Dominicans, a Lost Manuscript, and Medieval Christian Thought on Islam,” provides a transition between the first and second parts, looking back to the examples of reading and exegesis undertaken “on the borders of Islam” and looking ahead to the disputations and treatises of the Dominican Order. Burman considers the lost source of a surviving sixteenth-century manuscript (Paris, BnF MS lat. 3394), which brings together Mark of Toledo’s Latin translation of the Quran; the fifth chapter of Petrus Alfonsi’s Dialogus contra Iudaeos (Dialogue against the Jews), written against Islam; and the only known copy of the Liber denudationis siue ostensionis aut patefaciens (Book of Denuding or Exposing, or the Discloser), a Latin translation of an eleventh-century Arabic anti-Muslim treatise. Burman shows how two Dominican friars, Riccoldo da Monte di Croce and Ramon Marti, used or knew this manuscript, and then contrasts their approaches to Islamic sources. According to Burman, the different ways in which they read the Qur’an and its exegesis and wrote about them in Latin texts explain to some extent the divergent fates of each writer among later Christian readers. Whereas Marti’s approach to Islamic sources, which would have limited impact on subsequent writers, included extensive consideration of Muslim exegetical literature and other writing, Riccoldo’s characterization, which would become widely influential, approached Islamic belief more narrowly by taking a literal understanding of the Qur'an as its only basis. Burman also reminds us that the intersection of medieval disputational writing and exegesis was not an abstract affair, but was grounded in the concrete manuscript matrix through which originals and translations were read, interpreted, glossed, and copied.
The importance of Dominican representations of Islam on subsequent Christian understanding is further evident in Antoni Biosca i Bas’s essay on “The Anti-Muslim Discourse of Alfonso Buenhombre.” Buenhombre, a fourteenth-century Dominican, was the author of two anti-Jewish texts, including the Epistola Rabbi Samuelis (Epistle of Rabbi Samuel), which would end up being among the most widely copied and printed anti-Jewish tracts of the later Middle Ages. Numerous copies of this text, which takes the form of letters between two rabbis discussing Christian belief, contain a final chapter dedicated to Islam. Material for this final chapter in the Epistola was drawn from Buenhombre’s later work, the Disputatio Abutalib (Dispute of Abu Talib), which similarly comprises letters, though between a Muslim anda Jew. As Biosca i Bas shows, Buenhombre falsely claimed to have translated the texts from Arabic and passed off as Muslim certain ideas about Islam drawn from Ramon Marti, Nicholas of Lyra, and other Christian writers. His analysis points to the importance among medieval Dominican exegetes of the appeal to “authentic” Jewish and Muslim sources, even to the extent of creating fictional characters and texts to offer “testimony” in support of Christian interpretations.
Ursula Ragacs considers how the writing of Ramon Marti might shed light on the Disputation of Barcelona in 1263 between Nahmanides and Friar Paul. This disputation, organized by James I of Aragon at the urging of Paul and the Dominicans in the circle of Ramon de Penyafort, was the first attempt by the friars to argue that some Jewish sources, especially postbiblical authorities such as the Talmud and the major exegetical midrashim, actually support Christian arguments in favor of accepting Jesus as the Messiah. After introducing the two sources by which the Barcelona Disputation is known—a Hebrew account by Nahmanides himself and a Latin protocol written by a Christian, probably for the Crown of Aragon—Ragacs compares their arguments with Ramon Marti’s writing, in particular his Capistrum Iudaeorum (Muzzle of the Jews) finished in 1267. By tracing the significant commonalities between the Capistrum and the arguments from the Latin and Hebrew accounts of the disputation, she proposes that Marti’s text might provide a means of inferring the existence of arguments that were not explicitly mentioned in either account. Her work offers a suggestive new approach to the historiography of the disputation by connecting it more directly with the texts produced by the Dominicans in its wake.
The next part of this book, “Authority and Scripture between Jewish and Christian Readers,” continues to focus on Jewish-Christian disputation but broadens the scope to consider the importance of other figures beyond the Dominican order and throughout the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Harvey Hames’s essay, “Reconstructing Thirteenth-Century Jewish—Christian Polemic: From Paris 1240 to Barcelona 1263 and Back Again,” connects with the theme of the previous part by considering the historiography of Dominican engagement with the Talmud and other postbiblical Hebrew sources while also going on to consider Jewish-Christian arguments more generally. Hames sees Nahmanides’s Hebrew account of the 1263 debate as a starting point for discussing similar documents from other thirteenth-century Jewish-Christian disputations and conflicts, above all the “Talmud Trial” of the 1240s that took place in Paris after charges of blasphemy were brought against the Talmud by the converted Jew and Dominican Nicholas Donin. Hames compares the Hebrew account of the events in the 1240s (written, in the opinion of most scholars, soon afterwards by Joseph ben Nathan Official, author of the Hebrew Sefer Yosef ha-Meqanne’, or Book of Joseph the Zealot), with Nahmanides’s account of the Barcelona Disputation and with an anonymous Hebrew account of Friar Paul’s later harangue to the Jews of Paris in the early 1270s. By noting the parallels between the various Hebrew accounts, Hames suggests that the account of Joseph ben Nathan Official was actually written much later “to give succor and encouragement to a Jewish community under attack from different quarters” and was modeled on the earlier texts from Paris and Barcelona. His bold and original argument offers a new perspective for reading the Hebrew accounts of Dominican activity in the thirteenth century; it also shows that Christian exegesis and anti-Jewish argumentation were topics of constant concern among Jewish intellectuals and religious leaders in France and Spain.
Yosi Yisraeli also takes up the convert Pablo de Santa Maria’s responses to Nicholas of Lyra in his chapter, “A Christianized Sephardic Critique of Rashi’s Peshat in Pablo de Santa Maria’s Additiones ad Postillam Nicolai de Lyra.” Although many critics have tried to summarize Santa Maria’s exegetical theory on the basis of his prologue to the Additiones, in which he draws together a variety of scholastic and exegetical positions, Yisraeli is the first scholar to provide an extensive consideration of Pablo’s biblical hermeneutics based on his actual glosses on Lyra’s biblical commentary. He shows that Santa Maria is very critical of Lyra’s use of Rashi, above all because it constitutes a weakness in Christian arguments against Judaism. As he explains, “Lyra pretended to provide Christian readers with literal explanations that would benefit from the famous Jewish adherence to the letter, grammar, and historical context of the scripture, but Pablo recognized that Lyra was in fact drawing, via Rashi, on midrashic fables which even the Jews did not follow.” By showing how Santa Maria’s commentary was critical of Lyra’s uninformed reliance on Jewish sources without concern for their authoritative status, Yisraeli provides a valuable analysis of Santa Maria’s central importance in the exegetical contests of Jews and Christians in the fifteenth century and beyond.
Angel Sdenz-Badillos discusses a unique exegetical project that was undertaken near Toledo only a few years before Santa Maria finished his Additiones. The Castilian translation of the Hebrew Bible by Rabbi Moses Arragel of Guadalajara (a translation known to some as the Biblia de Alba because it was later acquired by the House of Alba, where it still resides among the holdings of the Fundacién Casa de Alba), includes Christian and Jewish exegetical glosses together with a complete Castilian Bible based directly on the Hebrew text. As Saenz-Badillos shows, Arragel attempted to be impartial in his presentation of Jewish and Christian exegetical views, allowing that “each person should believe what his religious community (egleja) said.” Arragel’s text, however, was glossed and “corrected” by Franciscan friars who oversaw the production of the final text. Thus, even if Arragel himself refrained from using his exegesis for polemical purposes, his Christian correctors did not, and Arragel’s stance can be seen as an anomaly in the world of dueling interreligious exegesis and translation.
The final part of this book, “Exegesis and Gender: Vocabularies of Difference,” reprises the historical and theological foci of the previous parts and takes them up in turn by addressing the theme of gender imagery in exegetical commentaries, polemical and otherwise. Alexandra Cuffel, looking back to the first part on texts from Islamic lands, addresses explicitly disputational writing in “Between Epic Entertainment and Polemical Exegesis: Jesus as Antihero in Toledot Yeshu.” Cuffel here considers the dissemination of the anti-Christian text known as the Life of Jesus (Toledot Yeshu). Although much has been written about the text, the primary impetus of previous studies has been to uncover the origins and early history of the work, and less attention has been paid to tracing its later medieval dissemination. Cuffel shows that recent discoveries of many more versions of the Life of Jesus in Judeo-Arabic in the Cairo Genizah and elsewhere have enabled such research to include the Islamic world ina significant way. In this light, Cuffel suggests interpreting the text in terms of oral epic tradition in the Muslim world. Comparing the text to other well-known oral story cycles such as Alf laylah wa-laylah (1001 Nights), she shows that the Life of Jesus shares certain elements with these works, which were circulating in oral and written forms among both Muslims and Jews, and was transformed in its Jewish versions according to the vagaries of circumstance and taste. “Such polemical stories,” she notes, “had meaning in the Muslim community for much the same reasons that they did in the Jewish one.” Focusing on the figure of Jesus, Cuffel explores the ways in which various versions of the text commented upon and played with Christian, Muslim, and Jewish notions of humanity, proph- ecy, divinity, and magic to create a gendered attack in which Jesus was the ultimate religious rebel, doomed by the circumstances of his illegitimate, “menstrual” conception to turn against religious truth and actively work against God and all believers. Her analysis connects the notion of gender as a tool of religious argumentation with the analysis of interreligious and interlinguistic exegesis elaborated in earlier essays in this volume.
Nina Caputo, in her essay “Sons of God, Daughters of Man, and the Formation of Human Society in Nahmanides’s Exegesis,” looks back to the second section on the disputations with the Dominicans. She provides a useful link between the focus on Jewish-Christian engagement, the influence of Nahmanides in particular, and the place of gender as a theme in exegetical commentary. She considers Nahmanides’s exegesis of the charged scriptural verses at Genesis 6:1-4 (describing the coupling of the “sons of God” with the “daughters of men”), showing how he diverged from both Jewish and Christian interpretations by affirming that the “sons of God” were to be understood literally. Similarly, his unconventional interpretation of this gendered image from Genesis was a means of addressing a cardinal point of divergence in Jewish—-Christian debate, viz. the character of antediluvian humans and the nature and effects of human sin. Her discussion unites the historical discussion of Jewish— Christian disputation in the late thirteenth century with a broader thematic analysis of the place of gender in exegetical interpretations of identity and individual difference.
The final two essays return to the third part on Jewish and Christian exegetical strategies, reviewing them with respect to their use of gendered language. Esperanza Alfonso’s essay analyzes the exegetical treatment of one recurrent image from the book of Proverbs (2:16-19, 5:1-23, 6:20-31, and most significantly Chapter 7), that of the ishshah zarah, ‘strange woman’. After repeated warnings against her dangers, she is described as an alien who ensnares and deceives young men through wily tricks. Considered as the countertype of Wisdom (portrayed as a woman in Proverbs 1-9) and the eshet hayil, ‘woman of strength’, of Proverbs 31:1031, the strange woman provoked abundant commentary among postbiblical Jewish exegetes who interpreted her as a symbol of heresy, idolatry, the study of secular rather than religious sciences, or primal matter itself. Alfonso focuses on a little-known group of biblical commentaries written between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries to explore the ways in which Jewish exegetes in a post-Maimonidean era used the image not only to convey changing and conflicting views on gender, but also to identify and protect purity from pollution, the sacred from the secular, orthodoxy from heterodoxy, and ultimately, the community from the Other. These writers “portray the community’s fight against radical allegorists among its own, who are perceived and portrayed as a threat to the integrity of the community’s boundaries.” Alfonso’s analysis shows how images of gender and sexuality could be used as a touchstone for revealing changing intellectual trends in exegesis, philosophy, and even disputational writing.
The final essay, by Steven Kruger, “Exegesis as Autobiography: The Case of Guillaume de Bourges,” weaves together a number of the different themes raised in previous essays, such as exegesis, Jewish-Christian controversy, conversion, and gender, by looking at the biblical commentaries of the thirteenth-century Jew Guillaume de Bourges, converted to Christianity under the aegis of the archbishop of Bourges, Guillaume de Dongeon. By examining the identification of Guillaume de Bourges with the woman taken in adultery (from John 8:1-11), Kruger shows how the author worked to subvert the authority of his critics by embracing rather than resisting their imposed identity. In exploring this strategy, Kruger also links Guillaume with other convert-writers such as Pablo de Santa Maria and the fourteenth-century Hebrew author Abner of Burgos/ Alfonso of Valladolid, all of whom pertain to a single tradition of blending polemical writing, exegesis, and autobiography. The example of Guillaume de Bourges represents, for Kruger, “one otherwise unknown convert’s attempt to write himself into a secure position within the Christian community he has recently joined,” and his work calls us to question “when precisely medieval exegesis might function as autobiography, just as medieval autobiography so often depends upon the exegetical.”
Although the essays presented in this volume are diverse in their historical, linguistic, and religious foci, they all share the implicit argument that commentary on scripture was, in the Middle Ages, a gesture bound up with the definition of community identity and the limits of orthodoxy, and that commentary on the scriptures of other, rival communities was inherently a means of limning the contours of difference between faiths. Although these essays pursue only a few of the many possible approaches that might be taken in exploring the deep connections between medieval exegesis and interreligious disputation, they offer together a new and exciting body of work, serving at once as the tangible results of the 2011 conference on Medieval Exegesis and a provocative invitation to further inquiry.
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