TNR has an interesting piece (here is a cache version of the first page) about Jewish-Christian polemics (in both directions). It is mostly a review of Peter Shaeffer’s Jesus in the Talmud; a scholarly work which predictably appeals to anti-Semites. My comment on Noah Feldman and his perceptions of Orthodox Judaism elicited a lot of response. Most of it was interesting, though of course some individuals across the web became convinced that I was an anti-Semite who was a Muslim working against Jews. This missed the whole greater thrust of my point: it isn’t always about you, context and situation are not only critical, but often they are determinative. In the TNR piece the author notes now anti-Christian invective was much more pronounced in the Babylonian Jewish literature than in the Palestinian equivalents. Is this because Babylonian Jews were naturally more anti-Christian than Palestinians? As a matter of fact the Palestinian Jews were under the rule of a Christian Empire which was just initiating a long history of focused anti-Jewish persecutions and forced conversions. In contrast, Babylonian Jews were numerically preponderant across broad swaths of southern Mesopotamia, and though under the rule of the Zoroastrian Sassanids, there was no great threat of being forcibly converted or oppressed for religious reasons. Rather, under the Sassanids both the Christians and the Jews were at parity, and Schaefer suggests apparently that Jews had an advantage, unlike Christians they had no notional affiliation with a foreign empire (Rome). I think the TNR piece has to be careful here, because it is important to remember that the Christians within the Sassanid Empire were generally of the Church of the East, whose intellectual and institutional origins were are sharp variance with both the Jacobite (anti-Imperial) sects across the border in Syria as well as the Chalcedonian orthodoxy promoted by Constantinople. There was a reason that these eastern groups were sometimes termed the Persian Church.
In any case, the primary point is that when Jews had power their behavior was less than meek or supplicant. In 6th century Mesopotamia one could make a good argument that the Jews were in a less precarious position than the Christians, so it makes sense that they were more assertive and forceful in laying out their position, which was by its nature contradicted the truth claims of Christianity. In contrast Jews within the Christian Roman Empire had to be more circumspect, their relative mildness and respectability in the eyes of pluralistic moderns may not necessarily be a function of Jewish virtue, but Jewish circumstance. Similarly, the Babylonian Jewish community’s jarring polemics against the figure of Jesus Christ does not reflect the demonic anti-Christian nature of the Jew, rather, it is the sort of reaction one would expect from a community whose fundamental beliefs are being challenged. Today Judaism is a religion which generally enforces a high bar to conversion; and yet as I have pointed to some readers during the time of the Macabees Jewish temporal power resulted in the forced conversion of gentile peoples. Obviously the situation was different, and religious scholars tend to be aware that one must interpret events through a historical lens. Unfortunately contemporary social demands often diminish or attenuate historical parameters in explaining howpeoples and individuals behaved, and there is a natural tension that arises when systems of thought which arose during the early Iron Age are forced to accede to the rules of the modern period. Elite cant tends to enforce the implicit dictum that all religions are manifestations of the same ancient core truth, despite the central planks of some sects that this is absolutely false. In a peculiar turnabout more conservative Christians and Jews are in the same boat as they were in the ancient pagan world, facing an amorphous and vaguely pious elite which is uncomfortable with their exclusive and strident claims. As a non-believer I have to keep in mind that while I conceive of religion as a man-made construct which is strongly conditioned by situation and contingent events, the vast majority of humans tend to hold to the belief that their faith is out of time and essential in its characteristics. Teasing apart and untangling these various strands can often be quite difficult. Some of the conundrums posed by research on the historical arc of religious dynamics is probably due to the fact that most people in the modern world believe in a timeless truths as the heart of their faith, but must grapple with the elasticity and change on record.
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