Mission to the Jews and Jewish-Christian Contacts in the Polemical Literature of the High Middle Ages

Abstract

SPREADING THE GOOD NEWS has been a principal objective of Christianity since its infancy. Nevertheless, after the initial Jewish rejection of the Christian message, the expansionism of the church was directed mainly toward the pagan world, and it is by no means clear that even those patristic works that were directed adversus Judaeos were marked by realistic missionary objectives.Jews, moreover, were granted unique toleration in Christian Europe on the theological grounds that they served, however unwillingly, as living testimony to Christian truth and that their conversion at the end of days was required by biblical prophecy. At the same time, no one doubted that the acceptance of Christianity by individualJews was devoutly to be wished. Thus, at its core, the fundamental theory governing Jewish status in early medieval Europe was marked by tension and ambivalence-a result of the contradiction between the theoretical goals of a universal Christian mission and an argument for toleration that came close to discouraging Jewish conversion. Christian polemic against Jews is a crucial genre for the study of missionary intentions, and the theoretical tension that I noted is clearly reflected in the assessment of that literature in the standard study of Jewish-Christian relations before the First Crusade. Bernhard Blumenkranz devoted much of his Juifs et Chretiens dans le monde occidental, 430-1096, to the issues of polemic and mission.2 On the one hand, he indicated that pre-crusade polemic againstJews was intended for Christian disputants in a context that did not involve a direct and immediate mission.3 On the other hand, he stressed the persistence of the missionary ideal as a motive for polemical activity: Christians were impelled by a natural desire to persuade others of the truth, by the aspirations of believers in a majority faith to make that faith the exclusive one, and by the great Christian expectation of seeing all humanity "assembled under the scepter of Christ." To a significant degree,