Pirqe Abot and Biblical Wisdom (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Insight of Unbelievers: Nicholas of Lyra and Christian Reading of Jewish Text in the Later Middle Ages, 2007
In the year 1309, Nicholas of Lyra, an important Franciscan Bible commentator, put forth a question at the University of Paris, asking whether it was possible to prove the advent of Christ from scriptures received by the Jews. This question reflects the challenges he faced as a Christian exegete determined to value Jewish literature during an era of increasing hostility toward Jews in western Europe. Nicholas's literal commentary on the Bible became one of the most widely copied and disseminated of all medieval Bible commentaries. Jewish commentary was, as a result, more widely read in Latin Christendom than ever before, while at the same moment Jews were being pushed farther and farther to the margins of European society. His writings depict Jews as stubborn unbelievers who also held indispensable keys to understanding Christian Scripture. In The Insight of Unbelievers, Deeana Copeland Klepper examines late medieval Christian use of the Hebrew Bible and Jewish interpretation of Scripture, focusing on Nicholas of Lyra as the most important mediator of Hebrew traditions. Klepper highlights the important impact of both Jewish literature and Jewish unbelief on Nicholas of Lyra and on Christian culture more generally. By carefully examining the place of Hebrew and rabbinic traditions in the Christian study of the Bible, The Insight of Unbelievers elaborates in new ways on the relationship between Christian and Jewish scholarship and polemic in late medieval Europe. https://www.pennpress.org/9780812220216/the-insight-of-unbelievers/
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 2011
This paper revisits the question of the influence of Jewish biblical exegesis on Christian scholars in twelfth-century France, by focusing in particular on Abelard's response to a question of Heloise in her Problemata about questions raised by 1 Samuel ii.35-6 (=1 Regum ii.35-6) concerning ' the faithful priest' prophesied as Eli's successor, the meaning of 'will walk before my anointed ' and the nature of the offering his household should make. Abelard's discussion of the views of an unnamed Jewish scholar illustrates a consistent movement evident in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries for certain Christian exegetes to approach Jewish scholars to resolve problems posed by the text of the Old Testament. While the passage in 1 Samuel was traditionally interpreted in a Christocentric fashion, Heloise implicitly supports a more historical reading of the text in the question she puts to Abelard. The Jewish scholar's interpretation reported by Abelard is very close to that of Rashi's twelfth-century disciples.
Ephraim ben Jacob of Bonn, the author of our only extant Hebrew account of the fate of Jews during the Second Crusade, has left us a related text-a collection of reports on a series of anti-Jewish actions that stretched in time from 1171 to 1196. Since narrative accounts of events penned by Jewish contemporaries and near contemporaries are both extremely valuable and relatively rare for the Middle Ages, close scrutiny of Ephraim's compilation is rewarding. Issues addressed in this study include: the curious organizational pattern of the compilation; the sources available to Ephraim and his stance toward these materials; and patterns of late twelfth-century Jewish life reflected in these narratives. At the close of the paper, the innovative nature of a compilation organized around the theme of anti-Jewish violence is noted, raising the question whether Ephraim's collection is, in and of itself useful testimony to declining Jewish circumstances in late twelfth-century Ashkenazic Jewry.