Download PDF | Marcel Poorthuis, Joshua Schwartz, Joseph Turner - Interaction Between Judaism and Christianity in History, Religion, Art, and Literature (Jewish and Christian Perspectives Series (2008).
641 Pages
INTRODUCTION
Jewish–Christian dialogue has in some sense existed since the inception of Christianity. Recent historical research has shown that much in both Judaism and Christianity, particularly in the Middle Ages, is really but a result of the interaction between them. This, however, is by no means a conclusion accepted by all. From the Jewish side, particularly in Orthodox circles, there is the position maintaining the independence of Judaism from outside infl uences including Christianity. Traditional Christian theology, on the other hand, held to a supercessionist view in which Judaism was seen merely as a historical preparation for the later revelation of Christianity. Most contemporary scholars do in fact accept the principle of inter-action.
Some, hoping to overcome supercessionist theology, emphasized the continuing debt of Christianity to Judaism well into the second century c.e. Recently, the possibility of early Christian infl uence upon Jewish traditions gained momentum, assuming that even Jewish Bible interpretation originally developed in the context of a conscious polemic with Church Fathers. Inquiry into the matter of interaction and infl uence gives rise to the question as to when and how Judaism and Christianity became two distinct religions. Historically speaking, we know that very early on Christians in Palestine constituted a sect within Judaism. Understandably, scholars have been unable to give a precise date as to when and how the ‘parting of the ways’ took place. The split between Judaism and Christianity was pushed ahead further and further until recent works claimed that the ways never parted at all. It may of course be argued that interactions are of two kinds: conscious and unconscious. Quite often a conscious rejection may go hand in hand with unconscious appropriation and transformation.
The present volume takes a bold step forward by assuming that no historical period can be excluded from the interactive process between Judaism and Christianity, conscious or unconscious, as a polemical rejection or as tacit appropriation. Each period must be studied on its own merits to assess the exact nature of the interaction. Perhaps there is no need to determine the point when or where the ‘parting of the ways’ took place, nor is it necessary to assume that ‘the ways never parted’ at all, as the interactions between the two religions change and vary in each period. Even in the long periods during which both religions were not prepared to accept the possibility that they share aspects of a common heritage, the interactive process is at work both in conscious polemic and unconscious mutual infl uence.
The signifi cance of there having been an inter-active relationship between Judaism and Christianity throughout the ages has become even more pronounced as the concept of dialogue between religions became popular in the period following World War II. Jewish–Christian dialogue has become in the last half-century an institution of Western civilization. In this spirit, the editors of this volume have sought to bring before the public the following essays considering the complex relationships existing between Judaism and Christianity in a broad spectrum of historical periods and disciplines while making use of a wide variety of methodological orientations. The volume is divided into six sections. The fi rst is entitled Jews and Christians in the Roman-Byzantine Period. This section and the volume opens with an essay by Alon Goshen-Gottstein entitled, ‘Jewish–Christian Relations and Rabbinic Literature—Shifting Scholarly and Relational Paradigms:
The Case of Two Powers’. It contains a comprehensive and critical analysis of the models of investigation used in the study of Jewish rabbinic and early Christian texts, taking issue with the accepted presupposition that these can best be understood by presuming historical contact and mutual infl uence. While not denying the historicity of contact and infl uence, the author expresses his affi nity for the ‘parallel spiritual model’, arguing that it is best suited to bringing about an understanding of how rabbinic and early Christian texts serve the purpose of edifying the communities that produced them. Tamar Kadari’s contribution to this volume is entitled: ‘Rabbinic and Christian Models of Interaction on the Song of Songs’.
She suggests that a comparison between the Church Father Origen’s interpretation of the biblical Song of Songs and the rabbinic Song of Songs Rabbah may shed light on aspects of rabbinical exegesis that have heretofore gone unnoticed. Despite the radical difference in literary structure and historical development, particular statements attributed throughout Song of Songs Rabbah to the sage Rabbi Johanan betray a three tiered mode of interpretation very similar to those of Origen’s. As a result, Kadari maintains that the analysis of Origen’s interpretive endeavor may open the way for new considerations of organization, methods and levels of comprehension in other rabbinic works as well.
Gerard P. Luttikhuizen’s contribution to this volume is found in his essay: ‘Monism and Dualism in Jewish-Mystical and Christian-Gnostic Ascent Texts’. He compares Jewish Hekhalot literature with early Christian Gnostic texts, both of which depict human beings escaping the constraints of their physical existence even before death and ascending to a supernal realm. Through his investigation, Luttikhuizen arrives at the conclusion that while there are many similarities in the mystical descriptions included in each type of text, they noticeably differ with regard to details that refl ect their respective biblical and Greek origins. Gerard Rouwhorst’s article, ‘A Remarkable Case of Religious Interaction: Water Baptisms in Judaism and Christianity’, questions the historical relationship between ancient Jewish ritual immersion and early Christian baptismal rites.
Through the chronological tracing of ritual developments and comparison of seemingly parallel phenomena the author arrives at the challenging conclusion that aspects of Jewish tradition in the realm of conversion rituals were infl uenced by early Christianity (rather than the other way around) and served as a response to the Christian alternative. In an essay entitled: ‘Learning and Practicing—Uses of an Early Jewish Discourse in Matthew (7:24–27) and Rabbinic Literature’, Eric Ottenheijm discusses the modes of interaction obtaining between the rabbinic and Christianized Judaism of the fi rst century. He argues that a proper comparison of early rabbinic and Jewish–Christian texts can demonstrate how the two communities shared a common discourse which was then developed in different ways. In this context he compares and contrasts the manner in which the values of ‘learning and practice’ are exhibited in the gospel of Matthew and the Tractate Avoth., fi nding that they presume a shared religious discourse , but that each applies to it its own distinct hermeneutic in accordance with its ideal model of community. In his essay entitled: ‘On Trees, Waves, and Cytokinesis: Shifting Paradigms in Early (and Modern) Jewish–Christian Relations’, Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra offers a critical survey of the various models used in the delineation of relationships between rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity. Its major contribution, however, is the author’s own original formulation of what he calls the ‘cytokinesis model’, in which the author draws an analogy between the developing relationship between Judaism and Christianity in the ancient period and the biological process by which a single cell becomes two cells.
The advantage of this model is that it acknowledges the split between Judaism and Christianity as a process that occurred over time, without having to determine the defi nite point at which the two became separate and distinct religions. Joshua Schwartz discusses the interaction between Judaism and Christianity in a more surprising context. In his study on the ‘Deserts of Palestine’ he shows that the sanctity of the Sinai Desert for both Jews and Christians resulted in a complex web of interaction between the two groups. Both groups indeed began at the same starting point regarding the Sinai. The Jews, however, only grudgingly developed a desert tradition, while the Christians not only developed such a tradition, but established a strong physical presence in this desert area. The negative Jewish reaction, he says, was apparently a reaction to the positive desert developments in the Christian world.
The second section if the book is entitled Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages, and opens with a contribution by Sandra Debenedetti Stow. Already in a previous work, Debenedetti Stow has proposed that kabbalistic theories can serve as a new interpretative key in the understanding of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri. Her present study, entitled ‘The Modality of Interaction between Jewish and Christian Thought in the Middle Ages: The Problem of Free Will and Divine Wisdom in Dante Alighieri and Menahem Recanati as a Case Study’, compares the work of Dante with those found in the work of Menahem Recanati, a Jewish Kabbalist active in Rome towards the end of the thirteenth century.
An examination of a few common points shows that that what appears as a distinctive trait both in Recanati’s thought and in Dante’s cannot be the result of parallel theories developed in total isolation. On the contrary; through her examination of the work of Recanati, Debenedetti Stow illustrates how one can read the developments in Dante’s thought in light of a particular kabbalistic key. Daniela Mueller’s essay, ‘Die Pariser Verfahren gegen den Talmud von 1240 und 1248 im Kontext von Papsttum und französischem Königtum’ offers a fresh approach to the notorious disputations over the Talmud in Paris, which ended in the burning of many manuscripts. Why were such acts not perpetrated in Spain, where the hostility against the Talmud had also increased? A meticulous analysis of the position of the French royal crown and its attempts at the consolidation of political power sheds new light upon this puzzle. Curiously, this same century witnessed a rise of Christian study of the Talmud.
Syds Wiersma also considers the topic of Christian Jewish disputation in the Middle Ages, but from a different vantage point. His contribution, entitled: ‘The Dynamic of Religious Polemics: The Case of Raymond Martin (Ca. 1220–Ca.1285)’ considers the manner in which the famous disputation between the Dominican friar Paul Christian and Rabbi Moses ben Nahman in 1263 is reported in two study and teaching manuals that were authored by one Raymond Martin, a member of the royal Aragonese committee for the censorship of Jewish literature. The paper demonstrates, through a comparative analysis of the manner in which the disputation is presented in each manual that what starts out as a polemic intended to weaken a religious opponent acquires in the process a dialogical quality through which the dominant position enriches itself by taking into account its opponent’s response.
Lily Glasner’s contribution, ‘The Jewish Pardes Metaphor as Refl ected in the Magical Garden of a Christian Knight’, focuses on a reading of the fi nal quest in the medieval romance by Chrétien de Troyes, the Erec et Enide. During the late Middle Ages, just as their Jewish counterparts did, Christian interpreters of the Holy Text identifi ed multiple layers of meaning in the biblical text. In line with this general theoretical tenet, Glasner attempts to prove how the hidden message of Erec of Enide exploits the metaphor of the Jewish Pardes. The reading of a Christian romance in light of Jewish tradition raises a number of questions concerning the modalities of interaction between Jewish and Christian thought and tradition in the late Middle Ages, and may prove to be a useful interpretive tool for the study of both literatures and the interactions between peoples and literature. The third section of the book deals with The Problems of Modernity. This section opens with the contribution of Gert van Klinken who discusses Jewish Christian relations on the backdrop of their most tragic episode. In his essay on ‘Calvinist Resistance and Dutch Jewry:
The ‘Pillarized’ Background’, van Klinken asks how it is that in the fi nal years of World War II, the Reformed Churches in Holland worked closely with the remains of the Jewish community with its members risking their lives in order to hide Jewish children from the Nazi’s, and yet subsequently tried to prevent the return of responsibility for raising and educating these children to the Jewish community; preferring to leave their upbringing to the Christian families that hid them. The author shows that in order to understand the motivations of the Reformed Church in both instances, it is necessary to take into account the role assigned to the Jews in traditional Calvinist eschatology and doctrine, and view it on the backdrop of twentieth century events and attitudes. Staf Hellemans turns his attention to the connection between religious groups and the society that surrounds them in the modern period, focusing on the changes in strategies used by Catholicism. In his essay ‘Religious Insulation as a Mode of Interdependence: Relating Catholicism and Modernity’, Hellemans traces four stages in Catholicism’s changing relationship with modernity. Only the fi rst, he says, is characterized by outright rejection.
The others involve deep involvement with modern society in which attempts at ‘insular self-interpretation’ are but part of a web of relations maintained with modernity, some of which are positive. Attitudes toward Christians and Christianity in Jewish thought in the modern period constitute the topic discussed in Judith Frishman’s ‘Good Enough for the Goyim? Samuel Hirsch and Samuel Holdheim on Christianity’. Hirsch and Holdheim were two of the most important theologians of nineteenth century Jewish reform. Frishman demonstrates that while they both founded their perceptions of Judaism on the universal humanism of such monumental fi gures as Kant, Hegel, Bauer and Marx, they differed from them by proposing that the essence of religion rather than the essence of the human being is the ultimate source of human ethics. As a result the two developed a concept of the Jewish religion that no longer views Christianity as an imperfect form of Judaism suitable to the gentiles, but rather approaches the non-Jew with a sense of love and belonging aimed at establishing a common messianic society.
Gershon Greenberg asks to what extent parallels that have been noted in the past between rabbinic and patristic concepts of sacred death allude to a common spiritual universe that could inform discussions on martyrdom during the Holocaust. This study focuses on the problem of ‘Sacred Death for Orthodox Jewish Thought during the Holocaust: With a Preliminary Inquiry into Christian Parallels.’ Greenberg concludes that while secondary characteristics such as suffering-love and abnegation of the will do exist for both Jewish and Christian thinkers, the central reality of the atoning passion of Christ precludes substantive identifi cation. The fourth section of the book is Ritual and Theology in the Modern, Post-Modern and New Ages. In his essay, ‘From Monologue to Possible Dialogue: Judaism’s Attitude towards Christianity According to the Philosophy of R. Yéhouda Léon Askénazi (Manitou)’, Yossef Charvit explores the attitude expressed toward Christianity in the Jewish thought of R. Yéhouda Léon Askénazi, a renowned twentieth century Algerian rabbi who combined Kabbalistic tendencies and a sense for group typologies with a modern historiosophic approach. He applied this method as a means for making sense of the radical changes that the relations between Judaism, Islam and Christianity underwent following the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel. Charvit shows that R. Askénazi attributed a redemptive quality to Christianity, provided that it take seriously Judaism’s return to history and re-interpret its traditions and beliefs in light of Judaism, as a mother religion returning to its ancient homeland, in a way that parallels its own earlier interpretations of exile Judaism in light of Christian dogma. Alexander Even-Chen’s paper is entitled: ‘Faith and the Courage to Be: Heschel and Tillich’.
Focusing upon a question of ‘greatest concern’, Even Chen compares Paul Tillich’s Christian existentialism with Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Jewish one. He shows that there is a strong common denominator and probably even a mutual infl uence in the work of these two twentieth century giants, but that there are also signifi cant differences between their religious outlooks. Heschel sees religious language as the means through which the human being can experience the transcendent God as present and thinks religion should be dedicated to God’s greatest concern which is the fate of humanity. Tillich understands the notion of God to be symbolic of man’s greatest concern without regard to His actual existence. In Paul Post’s contribution, ‘‘A Symbolic Bridge Between Faiths’: Holy Ground for Liquid Ritual’, the question of inter and multi-religiosity is discussed in the context of a dispute on Church architecture.
The church in question is the Tor Tre Teste Jubilee Church in Rome, designed by the Jewish-American architect Richard Meier. The design of the Church was criticized by many for ignoring traditional modes of Church structure; apparently intended to serve more as ‘general sacred place’ than a specifi cally Catholic house of worship. In practice the Tor Tre Teste Church has indeed come to be such a place, attracting not only traditional Catholic worshipers but a wide variety of guests and visitors who come to enjoy its unique architecture and the unique aesthetic and cultural experience it offers. The author shows that the unique qualities of this church refl ect the fl uid character of religiosity and ritual that is prevalent in the post-modern era.
In an essay entitled ‘Kabbalah on the Internet: Transcending Denominational Boundaries in Confl icting Ideologies’, Frank Bosman and Marcel Poorthuis set out to determine how Jewish, fundamentalist Protestant and esoteric/New Age sites depict various images of Kabbalah. They fi nd the political impact on Jewish Christian interaction on the internet to be considerable. Many Jewish sites, while claiming to offer a pure unadulterated Kabbalah, often engage in polemics against other Jewish and Christian perspectives. Fundamentalist tendencies are strongest on American Protestant sites that condemn involvement in Kabbalah together with ‘related occult currents’ that may be associated with such diverse phenomena as Catholicism, New Age religion and hard rock. Simon Schoon’s essay, ‘‘An Indissoluble Bond between the Church and the People of Israel’.
Historical Fact or Theological Conviction?’ returns to the question of Jewish Christian relations in light of the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel. Schoon notes that following these events Christian theology has changed its rhetoric in regard to the Jews and Judaism and began to view them as partners in religious endeavor. But he also notes that in the fi nal decades of the twentieth century there has been a noticeable decline in the popularity of this stance.
He subsequently asks whether support for Jewish and Christian cooperation will continue in the future, and goes on to suggest an agenda for study and scholarship that may encourage its growth. In his essay, ‘The Anomaly of Jewish Ethnicity as a Consideration in Contemporary Inter-Religious Dialogue’, Yossi Turner criticizes the prevailing presupposition that there can be any sort of symmetry in discussions comparing Christian and Jewish literature, noting that the religious sources of Judaism serve not only as religious texts but as an expression of Jewish ethnicity as well. After focusing on the tension between the various visions of the Jewish people as a religious and ethnic group in the modern era, he concludes that in order for Jewish Christian dialogue to be fruitful it must take into account the aspect of ethnicity as a factor which historically distinguishes Judaism from Christianity. The fi fth section is entitled Art. Artistic creation provides yet another realm for the investigation of interaction between ancient Judaism and early Christianity. In an extremely well researched paper entitled ‘Jewish and Christian Imaging of the ‘House of God’ as an Expression of Religious and Historical Polemics’, Shulamit Laderman and Yair Furstenberg discuss the use of symbols referring to the ‘House of God’ in fourth century Jewish and Christian works of art.
They show that in Jewish art these symbols stress the importance of preserving the memory of the Temple after its destruction and refl ect the eschatological hope for the restoration of the Temple in the future, while in the Christian art of the same period they served as a pictorial expression of the Christian victory over both paganism and Judaism. In a similar vein, Ilia Rodov discusses artistic allusions to kingship and majesty in the design of European synagogues and in Christian allegoric imagery at the end of the Middle Ages and the early Modern Period. The issue at stake in his paper on ‘The King of the King of Kings: Images of Rulership in Late Medieval and Early Modern Christian Art and Synagogue Design’ is the claim of divine majesty attributed to Christ by Christian theology on the one hand, and Judaism’s rejection of that claim while having to acknowledge the sovereignty of contemporary Christian monarchs on the other. Whereas both Christianity and Judaism emphasized kingship as God-given, Ilia Rodov argues that Jewish symbolism of crowns did not emphasize existing power as Christian art did, but rather pointed to a messianic future when God would be King. In her contribution entitled: ‘The Sun Rays on Top of the Torah Ark. A Dialogue with the Aureole, the Christian Symbol of the Divinity on Top of the Altarpiece’, Bracha Yaniv shows us how inter-religious dialogue is manifest in the architecture of church and synagogue.
The earliest depiction of the sun ray motif in Jewish synagogues was in the east European synagogues of the eighteenth century. But these sun rays remind us of the aureole, the Christian symbol of divinity on the top of the altarpiece. Yaniv traces what she believes to be a process of interreligious dialogue in order to discover its early manifestations and to understand how such a Christian was accepted by halakhic authorities for use in the synagogue. Did this dialogue and interaction result in the sunrays on top of the ark? While the answers are not conclusive, they give new direction to the possibility of dialogue between the two religions in the realm of esthetics. Mirjam Rajner comments on the subject of the Holy Family in the drawings and paintings of Marc Chagall. In ‘The Iconography of the Holy Family in Chagall’s 1909–1910 Works’, Rajner shows that by the second half of the nineteenth century, a number of Jewish artists had already studied in European art academies, from Rome and Munich to Krakow and St. Petersburg. Increasingly aware of their own Jewish identity, these artists had to focus during their studies on classical and Christian models of European fi ne art through the centuries.
As a result, when they came to create a different iconography refl ecting their Jewish identity, they used such known models but gave them new interpre tations. The fi nal section of the work is devoted to Literature. Hillel Weiss’s paper, ‘Notes on Christians and Christianity in Agnon’s Writings’, delves into the complex fabric of Agnon’s story-telling taking up the question as to how it depicts Christianity. This winner of the Nobel prize in literature demonstrates a fascination for Christianity, though often veiled and subdued. In this case, one can hardly speak of overt polemics nor of conscious adaptation of Christian elements. Still the work of Agnon is replete with interaction between Jewish and Christian elements, especially from the vanished world of Eastern Europe.
Yaffa Wolfman shows us that not all Jewish Christian interaction was direct. In her article on ‘Gide and Sartre on Jews and Judaism’ she shows that this is certainly the case with these two thinkers. Both felt the need to address ‘the Jewish question’, since the Jews, in their opinion, were an important component of Western culture, society, and history. But their interaction was less with people and more with a concept. Gide argued that a solution to the Jewish question—a question which he considered deep-rooted and serious—must be found urgently. Sartre believed that a change in the attitude towards the Jews in France would improve the lot of the French people as well.
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