Persecution, Polemic, and Dialogue

David Berger (Ph.D. Columbia University, 1970) is a former President of the Association for Jewish Studies and the Ruth and I. Lewis Professor and Dean at the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Yeshiva University.

• Introduction; Anti-Semitism: An Overview; From Cursades to Blood Libels to Expulsions: Some New Approaches to Medieval Anti-Semitism; A Generation of Scholarship on Jewish-Christian Interaction in the Medieval World; Jacob Katz on Jews & Christians in the Middle Ages; Introduction to The Jewish Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages: A Critical Edition of the Nizzahon Vetus with an Introduction, Translation & Commentary; On the Image & Destiny of Gentiles in Ashkenazic Polemical Literature; On the Uses of History in Medieval Jewish Polemic Against Christianity: The Quest for the Historical Jesus; Christians, Gentiles, & the Talmud: A Fourteenth-Century Jewish Response to the Attack on Rabbinic Judaism; Mission to the Jews & Jewish-Christian Contacts in the Polemical Literature of the High Middle Ages; The Barcelona Disputation: Review Essay; Christian Heresy & Jewish Polemic in the Twelfth & Thirteenth Centuries; Gilbert Crispin, Alan of Lille, & Jacob Ben Reuben: A Study in the Transmission of Medieval Polemic; The Attitude of St. Bernard of Clairvaux toward the Jews; St. Peter Damian: His Attitude toward the Jews & the Old Testament; Religion, Nationalism & Historiography: Yehezkel Kaufmann's Account of Jesus & Early Christianity; The "Jewish Contribution" to Christianity; Jewish-Christian Relations: A Jewish Perspective; Reflections on Conversion & Proselytizing in Judaism & Christianity; On Dominus Iesus & the Jews; Revisiting 'Confrontation' after Forty Years: A Response to Rabbi Eugene Korn; Dabru Emet: Some Reservations about a Jewish Statement on Christians & Christianity; Jews, Christians, & The Passion; Index.

“Few bring to the subject of Jewish-Christian relations the singular blend of insight, erudition, and passion that characterizes David Berger’s Persecution, Polemic, and Dialogue; and few collections of essays constitute as coherent and accessible an introduction to a difficult subject as this volume certainly does. Professor Berger’s studies of the major issues in the encounter between Jews and Christians during the Middle Ages, in the way that modern writers have understood that encounter, and in that encounter’s enduring impact on Jewish-Christian interaction today reflect keen critical scholarship on the one hand, and a resolute commitment to Jewish tradition on the other. Without compromising either, Berger boldly addresses the thorniest, most sensitive of issues – from the Crusades to the blood libels to the supersessionism of the present pope – with candor, fairness, and wit. No reader, of whatever faith or critical disposition, will leave this book unrewarded.”