The Medieval Afterlife of Hellenistic Judaism: Reception & Reinvention in Western Europe

The relationship between the Christian tradition and Hellenistic Judaism is deeply ambivalent: The earliest Jesus followers were Hellenistic Jews, yet Jews came to be identified as a contaminating force in Christian intellectual history. Late antique and medieval Christians drew deeply on the writings of Hellenistic Jews, like Philo and Josephus, but they identified them as members of a foreign and inferior religious group. The relationship between rabbinic Judaism and Hellenistic Judaism is equally complicated, because Hellenistic Jewish texts were transmitted exclusively by Christians and hence deeply embedded in anti-Jewish discourses. Hellenistic Judaism was thus an inheritance which, at a rhetorical level, was left unclaimed by both Jews and Christians during the Middle Ages. Through a series of case studies, this volume shows how Hellenistic Jews and the literature they produced came to be woven into the fabric of medieval Christian and Jewish traditions.