5 - Cultural Juxtapositions: Problematizing Scripture in Late Medieval Jewish and Christian Exegesis

Summary

Introduction

In Chapter 4 I discussed an example of the influence of Christian politics on Jewish intellectual culture of the high and late Middle Ages. In the present chapter I would like to explore an example of cultural contact, in which the interaction would seem to be undeniable, but the actual mechanism of influence remains elusive. The prior discussion concerned issues of content; here I will focus on matters of form—which may appear to be of less significance, but which may indeed have significant ramifications.

In other contexts I have addressed this issue with regard to late medieval Jewish preaching. For example, starting from the very end of the fourteenth century, and becoming more prevalent as the fifteenth century continued, the formal ‘disputed question’, a hallmark of Scholastic literature, appeared in Jewish sermons. The conventions of this form required that a question be raised that had a simple yes or no answer. One position—generally the one that would ultimately be rejected—was defended, using several arguments, then the antithesis was defended, also with several arguments. Finally, the arguments supporting the first answer, which at first had seemed compelling, were refuted point by point. The form was controversial among both Christians and Jews, as it required an apparently cogent defence of a position ultimately rejected, indeed even ‘heretical’, but it was apparently quite appealing. Similarly, I have shown how the Sephardi Jewish sermon took on a new form in the late fifteenth century, beginning with a verse from the Torah portion called by the technical term nosé, clearly a translation of the Latin term thema used in Scholastic preaching for the biblical verse on which the sermon is to be based. Yet why this style of preaching was adopted by Spanish Jews just at this time remains to be explained.

I propose to raise the question here of the influence of Christian religious culture on medieval Jewish biblical exegesis. Scholars of this topic have devoted considerable energy to various matters of content. Surprisingly little attention has been given to questions of form: how the content of the commentary is organized and presented; what formal innovations are discernible within the medieval tradition.