Jacob's Shipwreck: Diaspora, Translation, and Jewish-Christian Relations in Medieval England

Ruth Nisse

Published by Cornell University Press 2017

Jacob's Shipwreck

Diaspora, Translation, and Jewish-Christian Relations in Medieval England

Ruth Nisse

https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501708329

Overview
Contents

About this book

Jewish and Christian authors of the High Middle Ages not infrequently came into dialogue or conflict with each other over traditions drawn from ancient writings outside of the bible. Circulating in Latin and Hebrew adaptations and translations, these included the two independent versions of the Testament of Naphtali in which the patriarch has a vision of the Diaspora, a shipwreck that scatters the twelve tribes. The Christian narrative is linear and ends in salvation; the Jewish narrative is circular and pessimistic. For Ruth Nisse, this is an emblematic text that illuminates relationships between interpretation, translation, and survival.

In Nisse’s account, extrabiblical literature encompasses not only the historical works of Flavius Josephus but also, in some of the more ingenious medieval Hebrew imaginative texts, Aesop’s fables and the Aeneid. While Christian-Jewish relations in medieval England and Northern France are most often associated with Christian polemics against Judaism and persecutions of Jews in the wake of the Crusades, the period also saw a growing interest in language study and translation in both communities. These noncanonical texts and their afterlives provided Jews and Christians alike with resources of fiction that they used to reconsider boundaries of doctrine and interpretation. Among the works that Nisse takes as exemplary of this intersection are the Book of Yosippon, a tenth-century Hebrew adaptation of Josephus with a wide circulation and influence in the later middle ages, and the second-century romance of Aseneth about the religious conversion of Joseph’s Egyptian wife. Yosippon gave Jews a new discourse of martyrdom in its narrative of the fall of Jerusalem, and at the same time it offered access to the classical historical models being used by their Christian contemporaries. Aseneth provided its new audience of medieval monks with a way to reimagine the troubling consequences of unwilling Jewish converts.

Author / Editor information

Ruth Nisse is Associate Professor of English and Jewish Studies at Wesleyan University. She is the author of Defining Acts.

Reviews

Kathy Lavezzo, University of Iowa, author of The Accommodated Jew:

Ruth Nisse's brilliant analysis not only tells a new story about Christian-Jewish interaction; it also makes a bold intervention in received notions of the literary. Anyone interested in rethinking the medieval literary canon—its languages, producers and influences—should read Jacob’s Shipwreck.

Steven Kruger, Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, author of The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe:

Jacob's Shipwreck contributes in very significant ways to scholarly work on Jewish-Christian relations. Ruth Nisse makes a body of abstruse material accessible to the academic reader. She also develops a cogent argument about that material and what it suggests about medieval Jewish-Christian relationships, and specifically about the way in which a number of projects of translation—both Christian projects that take Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew texts and bring them into Latin, and Jewish projects that work primarily from Latin to Hebrew—reflect the nuances of those relationships and the distinct ways of conceiving the history of both political power and intellectual work. Jacob’s Shipwreck will be required reading for anyone interested in the complex exchanges between medieval Christian and Jewish communities.

Nisse's book directly addresses the absence of references in the standard scholarship on the Hebrew language and Jewish literature in England.... She proves that French, English, and Latin tongues were not the only languages being spoken and used in medieval England.... Seeking to establish presence where there was once absence, each chapter of Jacob's Shipwreck illustrates to what extent a Jewish author or a Hebrew text influenced the surrounding Christian culture.

Ambitious and erudite, Jacob's Shipwreck explores texts that circulated in Jewish and Christian communities of medieval England [and] exemplify long-standing tensions between the two... This review can only gesture at the intricacies of Nisse's arguments... This dissection of the labyrinthine intercultural negotiations of medieval Jews and Christians stimulates and provokes, and will bear repeated reading and reflection.

Jacob's Shipwreck is an important contribution to our understanding of Latin Christendom as home to both Christians and Jews. Examining a group of post-biblical Jewish texts that scholars of both religions translated, adapted and eventually anthologized during the Central Middle Ages, Ruth Nisse deepens our understanding and stimulates new questions.... The vast array of scholarship obvious in the sixty-five pages of notes and bibliography will interest medievalists of many disciplines.... It is not possible to give the reader [of this review] more than a taste of the richness of this book but it deserves to be read by scholars of history, religion, language, and literature.

Ruth Nisse's extraordinary book, beautifully designed and produced by Cornell University Press, leads us in a new and altogether welcome direction in the study of the intellectual relationships between medieval Jews and Christians.

With this book, Nisse adds to the understanding of how Jews resisted and absorbed Christian culture and how Christians, in turn, responded to Jews. Anyone interested in the complexities of medieval Christian-Jewish relations and how to study them could benefit from this book.

Jacob's Shipwreck is a learned volume that carries significant repercussions.... [Her] well-made argument that Christians and Jews shared quite a bit in terms of the texts and ideas that are the focus of her study apparently applies to Jewish biblical interpreters, certain liturgical poets and scholars, polemicists, and sui generis polyglots such as Berekhiah. She has produced a first-rate study that will likely engender further discussion, as well as new avenues of research.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
Abbreviations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xi
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Josephus, Jerusalem, and the Martyrs of Medieval England Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	19
2. Diaspora without End and the Renewal of Epic Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	49
3. A Fox among Fish? Berekhiah ha-Nakdan’s Translations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	75
4. Pleasures and Dangers of Conversion: Joseph and Aseneth Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	102
5. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs in the Shadow of the Ten Lost Tribes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	127
Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	148
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	155
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	197
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	221

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 248
Keywords: Christian; Jew; Christian culture; Christian-Jewish relations; Christian-Jewish interaction; medieval England; Latin Christendom; history; religion; language; literature

eBook

Published: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 9781501708329