Content area
Full Text
Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. By David Nirenberg. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013. 610 pp. $35.00 (cloth).
The study of the history of Jewish-Christian relations has continued to diversify and deepen since the moral impetus for it was felt in the wake of the Shoah. The approaches to this field have included in-depth analysis of prominent theologians (such as Paula Fredriksen on Augustine of Hippo), investigation of the development of theology over centuries (such as Jeremy Cohen's Living Letters of the Law), or analysis of institutional stances (like that done by Kenneth Stowe on the medieval papacy and the Jews of Rome). Scholars have uncovered evidence of Jewish-Christian collaboration in areas such as biblical exegesis, pictorial illustrations, and economic exchanges among Jewish and Christian women. And, of course, there has been continued scholarly work on the fraught issues of violence and polemics, most usually directed by Christians toward Jews. But one continued desiderata has been a single volume overview of Jewish-Christian relations from Christian origins to the modem era. Although some attempts do exist, they often have fallen short in terms of scholarly rigor or a too obviously polemical edge (attempts by Edward Flannery and James Carroll in particular stand out in the case of the latter).
David Nirenberg has written a volume that, while not...