Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

56 // WILLIAM CHESTER JORDAN
in the late Middle Ages than in some earlier periods, they were still frequent and
often mutually beneficial. 14 Moreover, there was always a less unsavory view of
biblical (Old Testament) Jews than of New Testament and contemporary Jews.
Christian intellectuals read of the failings of the ancient Hebrews to live up to
God's selection of them as His Chosen Ones, but they also had a consistently deep
admiration of the patriarchs, prophets, and many of the kings of ancient Israel like
David, Solomon, and Josiah. Something attracted Christian thinkers to the contemporary
keepers of this heritage. Not that contemporary Jews were considered
the Verus Israel or "True Israel" any longer, but they did have direct access to the
Hebrew scriptures and associated Hebrew lore such as that found in the mystical
writings of so-called cabalists. This "philo-Semitic" interest in contemporary Jews
and their knowledge—linguistic and esoteric—was always a minor counterpoint
to the grosser stereotypes that circulated among Christians, but it was genuine. 15
If Christians expressed violent hatreds and mentally and literally painted distorted
pictures of the Jews, a somewhat similar phenomenon is documented in
polemical texts that reveal Jewish attitudes toward Christians and their religion.
Many of these texts were of the highest order intellectually. Indeed, from the
twelfth century on, a fully developed philosophical rebuttal to Christian theological
positions was in place, largely in response to an increasingly strong tendency
among Christian intellectuals to ridicule post-biblical Judaism and to try to win
converts. 16
There was a cruder reaction to Christian domination and attempts at humiliation
as well. Among the oldest and most common charges was that Christianity
was the religion of a people who worshiped wood or a wooden idol or a rotting
corpse ("for they prostrate themselves," the medieval A/enu, the closing prayer of
the daily liturgy among Jews, said, "before vanity and emptiness, and pray to a
god who cannot save"). Yosef Yerushalmi has shown that there probably existed a
set of prayers recited on Yom Kippur which, adapting material from the Toledot
Yesu or Jewish counter-Gospel of Late Antiquity, slurred the founder of
Christianity and his mother. By the fourteenth century the precise content of
these prayers appears to have been known to Christian polemicists and inquisitors,
probably through the medium of converts from Judaism. The prayers were
said to "make...Christ an illegitimate son of a prostitute,. ..Mary a woman of
voluptuousness and luxury, and they [the Jews] curse both of them together with
the Roman faith and its adherents." 17
It would not be difficult to assemble other such pieces of information. One
thirteenth-century polemic routinely refers to Jesus' mother (Latin, Maria) by a
nearly homonymic Aramaic word (Haria) which, properly translated, should be
rendered in English as "Shit." 18 The great twelfth-century Jewish thinker, Joseph
Kimhi, contrasted the proper deportment of Jewish girls with his stereotype of
shameless gentile girls (that is to say, Christians) who, he alleged, stood around
on every streetcorner courting disaster, as it were, and, by implication, opening
themselves up to becoming latter-day women of "voluptuousness and luxury" 19