מקורבן לרוצח: יחסי יהודים-נוצרים בימי הביניים - היסטוגרפיה בראי מדינת ישראל

The traditional Jewish narrative of the encounter with Christians is that Jews were a persecuted minority who were oppressed, tortured, forcibly converted, massacred and eventually expelled from much of Medieval Christian Europe. This heritage of maltreatment led, on the one hand, to the Holocaust; it justified, on the other hand, the establishment of a Jewish state, Israel. The founding of Israel, including its on-going dispute with Muslim Arab states, has been the occasion of rethinking this traditional narrative, and of no longer presenting Jews as passive victims of Christian oppression. Although the founders and chief representatives of the 'Jerusalem school', such as Yitzhak Baer and Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, maintained the traditional narrative, other Israeli historians have offered other models for understanding the medieval Jewish-Christian encounter. The first sign of the new historiography was Jacob Katz's Exclusiveness and Tolerance (Hebrew version, 1960; English version, 1961) which demonstrated that Jews did not lag behind their Christian neighbors in holding negative views of members of the other religion. Most medieval Ashkenazi Jews were strongly hostile to Christianity, which they considered a form of idolatry. Only economic and social constraints prevented Jews from acting upon their negative feelings. Israel J. Yuval's Two Nations in your Womb (Hebrew version, 2000; English version, 2006) took Katz's thesis one step further and reviewed Ashkenazic Jewry's antipathy toward Christians as expressed in what he considered to be a belief in a 'redemption through vengeance' in which the Messiah would destroy Christians and Christianity. Christian anti-Jewish sentiments merely mirrored what Jews, themselves, had already said about Christians; in other words, Christian oppression of Jews was a result of Jewish hatred of Christians, not its cause. Furthermore, even the most outrageous Christian accusation, that Jews killed Christian children for ritual purposes, was nothing more than an extrapolation from the fact that Jewish parents murdered their children during the Crusades to keep them out of the hands of Christians. Thus, Jews were to be blamed not only for the fact of Christian persecution but even for the specific content of Christian accusations. Elliot Horowitz argued (Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence, 2006) that Jewish antagonism to Christianity did not remain theoretical but was actually translated into a series of Jewish murders of Christians, including a major Jewish massacre of Christians in Jerusalem in 614. Horowitz claims that Jewish historians once purposely hid or played down Jewish anti-Christian violence for apologetic reasons, but now Jews are obligated to discuss such 'painful subjects'. Most Israeli historians have vigorously rejected the new historiography which is apparently motivated by the new historians' political views concerning the State of Israel. Yuval and those who think like him object to the use of the traditional narrative as a justification for Israeli's existence and for some of its policies; hence, the new historiography is meant to play a role in the internal Israeli discourse. An appendix discusses other developments in the historiography of the medieval Jewish-Christian debate, developments that are not necessarily linked to the establishment of the State of Israel or political motivations.