Editing Thirteenth-Century Polemical Texts. Questions of Method and the Status Quaestionis in Three Polemical Works.

Many Hebrew literary sources for both the history and the intellectual history of the Jews in the Middle Ages are still utilized, translated and interpreted based on 19th-century editions. In most cases, these are methodologically outdated and based on incomplete surveys of the manuscript evidence. This mars our understanding of the fortune and reuse of such literary documents by the Jews themselves during the late Middle Ages and throughout the modern era; it also prevents a full appreciation of the interpretive prisms through which the Jews read key historical events in their immediate aftermath. This essay will discuss three cases from the thirteenth century: Nahmanides’ account of the Barcelona disputation of 1263, the Hebrew account of the Paris trial against the Talmud of 1240, and the letter of Ya‘aqov ben Eliyyah to the convert Pablo Christiani.