The Jewishness of Jesus in an Early Modern Jewish Text: Between History and Polemical Discourse

The Sefer Hizzuq ‘Emunah (rendered in English as ‘Strengthening of the Faith’) has been one

of the best-known Jewish polemical works and has influenced eminent thinkers and philosophers as

Pierre Bayle, Jacques Basnage, Anthony Collins, Voltaire, Hermann Samuel Reimarus and others.

The work was written at the end of the XVIth century in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, by

the Karaite apologetical writer Isaac ben Abraham Troki. This text present a representation of Jesus

based on the analysis of the Gospels and the New Testament by a particular Jewish prospective. The

exegetical and historical method of the author concerns some central Christian issues, that also affects

the Jewishness of Jesus. The aim of the paper is meant to present some aspects of the ‘Historical

Jesus’ that comes out from Sefer Hizzuq ‘Emunah, his relation to the rise of historical consciousness

and to the previous Jesus’ representations of the Jewish polemical literature in the Middle-Ages.