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Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. By Israel Jacob Yuval. Translated by Barbara Horshav and Jonathan Chipman. (Berkeley: University of California Press. 2006. Pp. xxii, 313. $49.95.)
Yisrael Yuval's provocative study of the polemical interaction of Judaism and Christianity grows out of his determination to re-imagine the nature of medieval European Judaism. Yuval's book promises a lively exploration of Jewish-Christian interaction, but the book's structure and topics make it difficult to appreciate fully this polemical dynamic between two religious cultures. That Judaism was affected by other cultures does not really seem shocking, but Yuval is arguing against what had been, or what he imagined was, an entrenched traditional attempt to sanctify the uniqueness of Jewish history. Even if he has created something of a straw man with this dichotomy, his book would have been useful if it had elucidated ways in which this history of influence between the religions had functioned. Unfortunately, the book's structure makes it difficult to explore and appreciate fully this polemical dynamic between the two religious cultures.
First, Yuval confuses competition with influence. His discussion of how early Judaism...