Polemical and Exegetical Polarities in Medieval Jewish Cultures by Ehud Krinis Nabih Bashir Sara Offenberg Shalom Sadik

Author:Ehud Krinis, Nabih Bashir, Sara Offenberg, Shalom Sadik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2021-09-10T09:48:44.368000+00:00

The Finding of the “True Cross” in Judah Hadassi’s Eškol ha-Kofer and the Polemical Parody Toledot Yešu

Miriam Goldstein

Preface

In the following pages, I would like to pay tribute to my mentor and friend Daniel J. Lasker by drawing attention to a contribution made to the field of research on Toledot Yešu (TY) by a recent project of his, an ambitious edition and translation of a large section of Eškol ha-Kofer (EK), the encyclopedic work authored by the mid-twelfth-century Byzantine Karaite Judah Hadassi, which was produced in collaboration with David Sklare and Johannes Niehoff-Panagiotidis.1 I have been enlightened, challenged, and spurred forward by countless conversations and correspondences with Danny on the topics of Jewish-Christian polemic and Karaite literature, and a combination of these two fields in his honor seems most fitting.

Judah Hadassi’s lengthy work demonstrates a broad knowledge and awareness of both Christian sources and concepts and a wide variety of Jewish ­sources.2 The parodical nature and specific details of Hadassi’s brief mention of the account of the finding of the “true cross” (inventio crucis) in EK point to the possibility that Hadassi was familiar with this narrative as rendered in TY rather than with the varieties of this story that are found in Christian sources. Interestingly, the parallel between EK and TY suggests that TY was circulating in Byzantium during Hadassi’s time which can provide one of the earliest pieces of evidence of the work’s circulation, possibly in Hebrew, on the edges of the Near East, as well as suggesting a possible gateway to circulation further west in European Jewish communities. In what follows, I will provide a short introduction to the TY literature, after which I will sketch the lines of the true cross account as found in EK and will cite and discuss the sections of the relevant text of TY that I have identified, edited, and translated from Judeo-Arabic. I will conclude with observations about the contribution of these similarities to the study of TY and its diffusion among Jewish communities.

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