Jewish Ideas about the Papacy 47
in such polemical literature the issue of protection often arises in the context of
particularly papal concerns about the talmud. Although the talmud had been
known about in the west for centuries, it was the flourishing of rabbinic studies in
Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries which led to its wider circulation
among Christians and to a consequent disquiet over its contents. in the twelfth
century both the influential peter Alfonsi, a Jewish convert from Spain, and peter
the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny, attacked it, claiming it contained passages pre-
senting an anthropomorphic and therefore blasphemous view of god.100 in the
thirteenth century, anti-Jewish polemic against it was more direct and aggressive,101
the talmud becoming a dominant theme in polemical literature: either attacked
directly, or used to corroborate Christian arguments against Jewish refusal to rec-
ognize Jesus as the Messiah.102 The Disputation of paris (1240) was the first of
many such ‘disputations’ between Christians and Jews intended by the Christians
to prove from the talmud and other writings that the Messiah had already come.103
The Sefer Nisahon Yashan, otherwise known as the Nizzahon Vetus, a contem-
porary polemical anthology, likely intended as a handbook for Jews wanting to
dispute with Christians and probably to be dated to the late thirteenth or early
fourteenth century, but deriving the bulk of its material from an earlier period,
offers a good example of the animosity between Christians and Jews aroused by the
talmud.104 Thus:
the infidels (Christians) say that the talmud distorts and spoils all of our torah, and
causes us not to grasp the truth, because it diverts us into erroneous ways105the Milhemet Misvah in relation to the papacy, see Stow, The ‘1007 Anonymous’ and Papal Sovereignty,
p.3; p.22; p.24; p.26; p.34; p.38; p.40; p.46.
100 Abulafia, ‘Christians and Jews in the High Middle Ages’, p.23.
101 Jeremy Cohen, ‘Scholarship and intolerance in the Medieval Academy: The Study and
Evaluation of Judaism in European Christendom’, in Essential Papers on Judaism and Christianity in
Conflict, ed. J. Cohen, p.324.
102 Funkenstein, Rethinking Jewish History, pp.189–98.
103 Cecil roth, ‘The Medieval Conception of the Jew: A New interpretation’, in Essential Papers on
Judaism and Christianity in Conflict, ed. J. Cohen, pp.298–9. For an excellent recent edition of the
Hebrew and Latin texts of the trial, see The Trial of the Talmud: Paris, 1240. Hebrew Texts translated by
John Friedman, Latin Texts translated by Jean Cornell Hoff; Historical Essay by Robert Chazan (toronto,
2012), pp.93–172.
104 For seminal discussion of the Sefer Nisahon Yashan/Nizzahon Vetus, see, for example, Berger,
The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages, pp.32–7 and more recently, for example, Anna
Abulafia, ‘invectives against Christianity in the Hebrew Chronicles of the First Crusade’, in Crusade
and Settlement. Papers Read at the First Conference of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the
Latin East and Presented to R.C. Smail, ed. p. w. Edbury (Cardiff, 1985), p.70; Chazan, Daggers of
Faith, p.51; p.54; David Berger, ‘on the Uses of History in Medieval Jewish polemic against
Christianity: The Quest for the Historical Jesus’, in Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honour
of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, ed. E. Carlebach, J. M. Efron, D. N. Myers, pp.27–9; israel Yuval, Two
Nations in Your Womb. Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Berkeley,
Los Angeles, London, 2006), p.257.
105 For an older edition, see ‘Liber nizzachon vetus’, in Tela ignea satanae, ed. J. Ch. wagenseil
(Frankfurt am Main, 1861), Vol. 1, col. 259; for modern editions, see Sefer Nizzahon Yashan (Nizzahon
Vetus). A Book of Jewish-Christian Polemic. A Critical Edition, ed. M. Breuer (ramat gan, 1978),
p.194; ‘Nizzahon Vetus’, in The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages, ed. Berger, pp.163–4;
for an English translation, see Berger, The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages, p.230.