Battling with Jesus: Remarks on Christian and Jewish Representations in the Early Modern Period

Anti-Christian polemical literature has played a quite pivotal role in European

intellectual history. Although it appeared during the Middle Ages under circumstances

that clearly indicated a widening theological and religious conflict between Jews,

Christians, and Muslims, its impact varied greatly after the Renaissance. There are

numerous reasons that indicate a change of function in this literature, whose relevance

increased during the seventeenth century.

My paper aims to present few different discourses about Jesus and early Christianity

according to a number of different texts that were circulating both through

manuscripts and printed material. I will use as a case of study the city of Venice, which

was in the early modern period an important port city and trading hub that connected

North Europe with the Ottoman empire. Venice was also a printing capital of Europe,

where allegedly forbidden literature circulated. I will try to assess the role of Leon

Modena’s anti-Christian polemical work against the background of Christian and Jewish

narratives stemming from archival sources and other types of texts. In doing so, I hope

to unearth a plurality of narratives, gathering material from Spanish, Hebrew and Latin

texts, and combining them with data from the Inquisition archives. I will try therefore

to detect which stories circulated among Jews, which ones were known to Christians,

and how they had any impact on European culture in the seventeenth century.