Abstract
The thirteenth century has marked a turn in the relations between Jewish and Christian communities, shifting the focus of inter-religious polemic towards Jewish post-biblical literature and the internal development of Jewish religion after the rise of Christianity. As Jeremy Cohen and others have shown in detail, thirteenth-century Christian theologians and preachers, especially those associated with mendicant religious orders, tend to conceptualize contemporary Judaism as a specific form of heresy.
Rather than representatives of an old, fossilized religion, the Jews are perceived as disseminators of novel and dangerous errors. In this paper, I will examine late-medieval Jewish polemical reactions to this shift.
Focusing on the writings of two nearly contemporary Jewish authors, the Catalan scholar Profayt Duran (d. ca 1433) and the Ashkenazic rabbi Yom Tov Lipmann Mühlhausen (d. 1421), I explore how they sought to challenge the re-evaluation of 'old' and 'new' in Christian perception of the Jewish 'other'. While Profayt Duran's polemical text Kelimat ha-goyim (The Reproach of the Gentiles), written under pseudonym after his conversion to Christianity, examines the evolution of Christian doctrine in a manner echoing Christian explorations of Jewish post-biblical history, Yom Tov Lipmann Mühlhausen's widely disseminated Sefer nizahon (The Book of Polemic), portrays Christians as one of several heretical groups that compete with philosophically and mystically informed rabbinic Judaism.
Furthermore, both authors identify the social phenomenon of Jewish conversion to Christianity as the focal point where the tensions within the temporalities of personal and communal histories stand out most clearly and propose how to resolve them.