Marian Malowist Seminar. “Polemical Parodies about Jesus: Current Research on the “Life of Jesus” in the Near East”
Please join us for a lecture as part of the Marian Malowist Global History Seminar entitled: “Polemical Parodies about Jesus: Current Research on the “Life of Jesus” (Toledot Yeshu) in the Near East”.
The lecture will be given by Prof. Miriam Goldstein, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The event will take place on 15 May, at 17.00, in Room A. You are cordially invited to attend.
Broadcast link: meet.google.com/jes-vvnp-qxu
Abstract:
The history of Jewish-Christian relations is frequently considered in European contexts alone, overlooking the vibrant, and at times downright aggressive, Jewish-Christian dialogue that occurred in Arabic in the medieval Near East. I will present a key tradition in the Near Eastern context: the Judeo-Arabic versions of the “Life of Jesus,” a notorious parody of Christian narratives about Jesus, composed by Jews at some point in Late Antiquity. This incisive parody, arguably the best-known Jewish response to Christianity to date, became extremely popular in Arabic, among Jews living in the Islamic milieu. For Jews, the work was humorous – for Christians and Muslims, it would have been insulting and even heretical. Nonetheless, Arabic-speaking Jews read the work, copied it, and perhaps even performed it in communal contexts, and it stands as important evidence of competition between religious minorities under Islamic governance.
I will retell the history of this long-lived polemical narrative with the critical inclusion of the significant Judeo-Arabic material I have discovered. My retelling will consider the functions of the narrative in the religiously diverse Near Eastern milieu and will contextualize the Judeo-Arabic versions of the “Life of Jesus” amid the polemical Jewish-Christian-Muslim discourse. In conclusion, I will discuss how new awareness of the “Life” in Judeo-Arabic transforms our understandings of the development of the narrative, and how major turning points in its creation actually occurred in Judeo-Arabic.
Bio:
Miriam Goldstein was trained at Harvard, Cambridge and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and is professor in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This year she is Jacob Perlow Visiting Professor at Yale University and Visiting Scholar in Medieval Studies at Harvard University. A specialist in medieval Judeo-Arabic texts, Goldstein focuses on interreligious relations in the medieval Arabic-speaking world as well as Judeo-Arabic Bible exegesis.
She is author of A Judeo-Arabic Parody of the Life of Jesus: The Toledot Yeshu Helene Narrative (2023) and Karaite Exegesis in Medieval Jerusalem (2011), as well as numerous articles on Arabic and Judeo-Arabic literature, and is co-editor of Beyond Religious Borders: Interaction and Intellectual Exchange in the Medieval Islamic World (2011) and Authorship in Mediaeval Arabic and Persian Literatures (2019). Her work has been supported by the Israel Science Foundation, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Minerva Stiftung, and the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development. Her current project is a critical edition and translation of the Judeo-Arabic Genesis commentary of the tenth-century Karaite scholar Ya‘qub al-Qirqisani.