judaism without a temple 257
was the world created, as it is written ‘For, behold, that day is coming; it
burns like a furnace.’ (Malachi 3:19)^23
It would be wrong to read every biblical interpretation by Jews in a
Christian world in the light of such anti-Christian polemic, since (as we
have seen) rabbis had good reason to ponder the significance of scrip-
ture without any such incentive, but there can be no doubting the real
engagement with Christian thought required for the formal dispu-
tations imposed on Jews in parts of medieval Europe from the thirteenth
century. In the Disputation of Paris in 1240, which arose from a papal
order that Jewish books be examined, the Jewish delegation failed to
prevent the condemnation of the Talmud and cartloads of Jewish books
were burned in what is now the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville. In 1263 the
great rabbi Moses Nahmanides of Girona (see Chapter 13) confronted
an attempt by the friar Paul Christian, an apostate from Judaism, to
demonstrate that the rabbinic texts themselves revealed the truth of
Christianity, by rejecting the miraculous as contrary to reason:
The doctrine in which you believe, and which is the foundation of your
faith, cannot be accepted by reason, and nature affords no ground for it,
nor have the prophets ever expressed it. Nor can even the miraculous
stretch as far as this, as I shall explain with full proofs in the right time and
place, that the Creator of Heaven and earth resorted to the womb of a
certain Jewess and grew there for nine months and was born as an infant,
and afterwards grew up and was betrayed into the hands of his enemies
who sentenced him to death and executed him, and that afterwards, as you
say, he came to life and returned to his original place. The mind of a Jew,
or any other person, cannot tolerate this; and you speak your words
entirely in vain, for this is the root of our controversy.Away from the gaze of Christians, the tone of Jewish polemic against
Christianity was less cerebral. It is clear from the number of surviving
manuscripts that the scurrilous versions of the life of Jesus in the Tol-
edot Yeshu (see Chapter 7) were popular reading among Jews in the late
Middle Ages.^24
But, away from such confrontations, Jews also adopted religious
ideas and practices from their Christian neighbours. The structure of
Jewish communities in late antique Palestine as religious congregations
clustered around a synagogue may owe much to the tendency of the late
Roman Christian state to characterize its subjects in religious terms,
even if this form of Jewish life was not altogether modelled on Christian