CONFERENCE: "Rabbinic Narrative in the Jewish-Christian Encounter: New Approaches"

The Yale Program in Jewish Studies is pleased to host a conference that examines how Christian Hebraists received and incorporated the wealth of narrative traditions scattered throughout the rabbinic texts they so meticulously studied. By bringing together specialists in Christian Hebraism, medieval narrative, Jewish-Christian polemic, and broader patterns of interfaith cultural transmission, we aim to develop a more comprehensive understanding of cultural transmission across religious boundaries in the medieval West.

Scholarship on Christian Hebraism has generated valuable insights about the evolution of Christian biblical interpretation, the movement of Hebrew manuscripts, and the borders of the Jewish and Christian scholarly spheres. This research has focused on the technical linguistic aspects of this exchange. Scholars have illuminated most notably how medieval Christian scholars utilized Jewish exegetical techniques as well as Hebrew lexical and grammatical works to interpret scripture’s literal meaning. Building on this foundation, our conference draws attention to the narrative dimensions of the Hebrew texts that Christian scholars incorporated into their tradition 

This approach is inspired by emerging understandings of Jewish-Christian entanglement and polemic, which has illuminated the complex dynamics of interfaith encounter, cultural transmission, and ritual practice in medieval society. Various scholars have traced how narratives and other cultural content moved across religious boundaries, particularly in popular and vernacular contexts. The present conference brings these insights into conversation with learned Hebrew and Latinate contexts, exploring how Jewish and Christian narrative traditions embedded themselves within one another’s theological and scholarly canons. 

This one-and-a-half-day conference brings together scholars from the United States and abroad to bridge methodological divides and encourage deeper understanding of inter-religious narrative exchange. It hopes to expand the methodological and evidentiary resources available for analyzing the breadth and depth of cultural interaction between Jewish and Christian textual communities via the movement of manuscripts, everyday interactions, and scholarly encounters.

The conference is organized by Dov Honick (Jewish Studies, Yale University) and Albert Kohn (History, Princeton University).