Christianity and Judaism - 9780631184973

The thirty-two highly original essays in this collection, by both Christian and Jewish scholars, stretch chronologically from the ideas of Origen in the third century to the Holocaust, the Gulf War, American fundamentalist attitudes, and the problems of Croatia in the twentieth. They cover a stimulating range of topics, focusing both on the practical ways in which Christians and Jews lived or failed to live together in diverse social contexts, and the theoretical reasons which underpinned this. Many discuss Christian attitudes to the Jews - both philo-Semitism, stemming from the role of the Jews as guardians of the Old Testament, whose culture was fundamental to Christianity, and anti-Semitism, stemming from Jewish responsibility for the Crucifixion of Christ, and the ensuing 'myth of the Jew', which depicted him as the devil, as anti-Christ, as the poisoner of wells, and as the fountain of all evil. This resulted not only in persecution and pogroms, but more subtly in attempts to desecrate the consecrated Host. The position of the Jew according to Christian law - both the canon law of the Church and the civil law, as manifested in the oath taken by Jewish deponents in court, also feature. There are also some pioneering essays on Christian-Jewish culture, dealing with subjects as varied as the Jew in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice as a reflection of Elizabethan Christian attitudes to Judaism, the introduction of so-called 'Christian' organs into the synagogues of Victorian England, and the anti-Jewish attitudes of Wagner as depicted in the Ring and Parsifal.