Fifteen Eighty Four

Twenty years ago Neil Wenborn and I celebrated the launch of our Dictionary of Jewish–Christian Relations, which comprised more than 700 entries, from ‘Aaron’ to ‘Zola’.  At the time, I felt that a Dictionary would need to be complemented by an Introduction and a History. The former was published in 2010 and we are delighted that the third in this trilogy, A Documentary History of Jewish–Christian Relations: from Antiquity to the Present Day has now come off the press – all published by Cambridge University Press.  

The Documentary History fills a long-felt gap. Ever since 1996, when Rev Dr Martin Forward and I started teaching the subject at the Cambridge Theological Federation, I have wanted my students to be able to read a comprehensive single-volume history of Jewish–Christian relations. Now, with the publication of the Documentary History, such a book is available for the first time: to students and teachers, scholars, clerics and lay people, and anyone interested in the history of religion.

The history of the relationship between Jews and Christians stretches over two millennia, but it is still a relatively young subject of academic study. Although the distinctiveness, even uniqueness, of the relationship has long been noted, historical studies have tended to focus on particular moments or brief periods, individual figures or geographical regions. The Documentary History is the first book to cover the whole 2,000-year history of Jewish–Christian relations worldwide, and offers a chronological and thematic approach to developments in that history through a collection of some 200 primary documents, each accompanied by a detailed commentary.

Neil and I were privileged to work with leading scholars in the UK, Europe, the USA and Israel, each responsible for one historical period and tasked with selecting no more than 20 documents, to be chosen for their significance to the encounter between Jews and Christians, rather than simply to the understanding of Jews and Judaism or Christians and Christianity. These documents include a wide range of different types of writing – biblical texts, theological writings, political tracts, newspaper articles, diaries, sermons and speeches, letters, novels and plays, a trial record, as well as conference proceedings and scholarly works – and cover the entire history of the Jewish–Christian encounter from Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians in the 40s CE – probably the earliest text in the New Testament – to the statement on Jewish–Christian relations released jointly by the Office of the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth and the Church of Scotland in 2023. Each chapter also includes an introduction outlining the particularities and significance of the historical period for the Jewish–Christian encounter and drawing together the key themes arising from the documents that follow.

It is striking how many of these themes remain as relevant today as they ever have been. These include the significance of the land of Israel, the problem of polemic, and minority–majority relations. For example, at the Cambridge launch, hosted by the Woolf Institute, Neil read a passage from the Enlightenment philosopher John Toland:

The vulgar, I confess, are seldom pleas’d in any country with the coming in of Foreners among ’em: which proceeds, first, from their ignorance, that at the beginning they were such themselves; secondly, from their grudging at more persons sharing the same trades or business with them, which they call taking the bread out of their mouths; and thirdly, from their being deluded to this aversion by the artifice of those who design any change in the Government. But as wise Magistrates will prevent the last, and are sensible of the first, so they know the second cause of the people’s hatred, to be the true cause of the land’s felicity; and therfore, not minding those, who mind nothing but their selfish projects, they’ll ever highly encourage a confluence of strangers. (John Toland, Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews in Great Britain and Ireland, On the Same Foot with All Other Nations (Dublin: The Manuscript Publisher, 2013)).

There have been huge changes and improvements in the Jewish–Christian relationship in more recent times. Toland’s words, published in 1714, nonetheless address a challenge still very much at the forefront of debate.