Jewish Ideas about the Papacy 53
examinations of the New testament, identifying what they saw as its internal
contradictions and playing off one text against another in an attempt to show dis-
crepancies between Scripture and later Church dogma.138 Such methods proved a
simple and highly effective way of challenging Christian doctrine and the literature
reveals not only a Jewish desire to engage with Christian arguments but a consid-
erable awareness of Christian theology.139 The main aim of such polemical writing
was to combat the threat of Jews converting to Christianity, not to convert
Christians.140 Although there was an element of disinterested intellectual search
for truth in Jewish religious polemic, which might on occasion be used to proselytize,
the priority was to discourage Jewish apostasy; similarly, of course, Christians
wished to prevent conversions to Judaism.141 Learned Jews frequently came into
contact with Christian polemicists and missionaries and it seems that their know-
ledge of Christian beliefs derived from the arguments of Christian polemicists
rather than from an in-depth knowledge of Christian theology and philosophy in
their most developed and sophisticated forms.142 to combat Christianity and the
threat of conversion, Jews deployed arguments that were rarely original; sometimes
they may have been derived from heretical groups seeking to undermine the
Catholic faith, or from Muslims, or even on occasion from orthodox Christian
writers whose aim was to reply to heterodox objections.143
The thirteenth-century ‘Edut Adonai Ne‘emena is an excellent example of the
polemical genre: it expounds Christian doctrines and shows how to refute them.144
Yet, despite its expectable dismissal of Christian theology, it refers to papal aid and
protection, albeit cryptically,145 recording, for example, an answer in the form of a
parable supposedly sent by an (unnamed) pope to the king of France ‘to preserve
the Jews for they have not committed the sin of killing Jesus’.146 According to this
parable there was:
138 The method of playing one text off another was a mark of medieval disputational literature
where the goal was to find discordancies in texts and to reconcile them. it was not until the nineteenth
century that we see historical imagination and the idea of an historical critical method which under-
stood the ideas of cultural change and development in texts; for discussion of the criticism and evalu-
ation of medieval authorities, see Colish, Peter Lombard, Vol. 1, pp.44–7; Berger, The Jewish-Christian
Debate in the High Middle Ages, p.31; Chazan, Daggers of Faith, pp.50–1; p.54.
139 Berger, The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages, p.15. Jewish authorities used their
commentaries as a medium for refuting the Christological interpretations of the passages of the Bible
which they shared with Christians; see Anna Abulafia, Christians and Jews in the Twelfth-Century
Renaissance (London, New York, 1995), p.69; Berger, The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle
Ages, pp.9–13.
140 Daniel Lasker, ‘Jewish philosophical polemics in Ashkenaz’, in Contra Iudaeos. Ancient and
Medieval Polemics between Christians and Jews, ed. o. Limor, g. g. Stroumsa (tübingen, 1996),
p.165; p.168.
141 For Jewish proselytizing, see Blumenkranz, ‘The roman Church and the Jews’, p.209; p.214.
142 Lasker, ‘Jewish philosophical polemics in Ashkenaz’, pp.161–4.
143 Lasker, ‘Jewish philosophical polemics in Ashkenaz’, pp.164–5.
144 ‘Edut adonai ne‘emena’, in Mehqarim u-meqorot, ed. J. rosenthal, 2 vols (Jerusalem, 1967),
Vol. 1, pp.420–1.
145 ‘Edut adonai ne‘emena’, in Mehqarim u-meqorot, ed. rosenthal, Vol. 1, p.420; Stow, The ‘1007
Anonymous’ and Papal Sovereignty, p.23.
146 ‘Edut adonai ne‘emena’, in Mehqarim u-meqorot, ed. rosenthal, Vol. 1, p.420.