A Jewish Reclamation of Paul? The Confrontation with Paul in Early Modern Jewish Polemical Writings

In his book (The Apostle Paul in the Jewish Imagination) Daniel Langton wrote as follows: “The truth is that until relatively recent times Jewish treatments of Christianity have very rarely mentioned Paul...the paucity of ancient, medieval, and early modern writing on this subject...is striking.” In his latest publications (The Rehabilitation of Paul in Jewish Tradition, and Who made early Christianity?) John Gager countered this commonly held view, depicting the early medieval Toledot Yeshu tradition, the polemical magnum opus of the late medieval polemicist, Profiat Duran, entitled Kelimat ha-Goyim, and an apology of an early modern German rabbi, Jacob Emden as possible exceptions.

In my lecture, an attempt will be made to go some steps further than Gager did. I will try to show that, at the latest after the dissemination of the seminal polemical work of Profiat Duran a confrontation with the doctrines of Paul became an essential task for every subsequent Jewish polemicists. My lecture aims at analyzing how the Jewish awareness of Paul increased among Jewish intellectuals in the early modern period, culminating in a voluminous refutation of all the letters written by, or attributed to Paul in the New Testament, composed rabbi Yehuda Briel (1643–1722).

Having illustrated with abundant examples the Jewish awareness of the apostle Paul in the early modern period, the most important question I shall address in my lecture reads as follows: whether existed a Jewish reclamation of Paul, parallel to that of Jesus, before the modernity?