Like many anthologies of essays, Jewish-Christian Disputations in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Fictions and Realities emerged from a conference—or, in this case, two conferences, each of which yielded a book. The purview of this volume is quite focused. Following an introductory survey and analysis of mid-twentieth-century historiography on Jewish-Christian disputation literature by William Horbury, Part I contains six essays presenting a variety of approaches to the fifth century polemical text, Dialogue of Timothy and Aquila. The three essays in Part II turn to the manuscript tradition, generic models, and literary strategy of Petrus Alfonsi's Dialogus contra Judaeos. The two essays comprising Part III turn the tables to examine late antique and medieval anti-Christian polemical tracts written by Jews.
Engaging with assumptions in the dominant scholarship about the reality and purpose of late antique and medieval polemics, this volume offers a broad spectrum of approaches and conclusions. Several essays frame their questions about whether the texts in question aimed to represent reality with helpful overviews of recent scholarship in the field. Two essays stand out in presenting novel arguments or material. Mark Sapperstein introduces two relatively unknown Jewish polemical works as evidence that Jews were actively involved in developing the genre. Yannis Papadogiannakis's essay examines the role of emotions in polemical literature. The theoretical framework of this piece is fundamentally different than most essays in the volume, but this is a highly innovative approach that would yield very interesting results were its purview systematically expanded to include medieval polemics.
This volume brings together an important collection of essays on the literary and structural form of premodern religious polemics; however, it might have benefitted from a more deliberate curatorial hand. Some of the essays read as lightly revised conference papers, while others are more fully developed; there is a notable imbalance between Part I, which comprises half of the book and largely focuses on scholarly debates around the text of Timothy and Aquila, and the two remaining sections, which together comprise fewer total chapters on more varied themes. Still, both in the aggregate and in its constituent parts, Jewish-Christian Disputations is an important contribution to the scholarship on the intersection between texts representing interfaith disputations and the nuances of Jewish-Christian relations on the ground.
