Christians and Jews in dispute : disputational literature and the rise of anti-Judaism in the West (c. 1000-1150)

The articles brought together here use anti-Jewish disputational literature to shed light on the rise of anti-Judaism in the West. Christian theologians at this time were particularly interested to work out the relationship between Christianity and Judaism because they were in the process of clarifying their own doctrines under the influence of classical material which had not been fully utilised since late Antiquity. In this context a response to the continued and vociferous Jewish rejection of Christianity seemed all the more urgent. It is not for nothing that the output of anti-Jewish polemics rose sharply towards the end of the 11th century and simultaneously became more and more sophisticated. Many of the anti-Jewish ideas of later centuries go back to what was formulated in the 11th and 12th centuries.