Hostile Witness, Holy Men: Rabbinic Stories in Medieval Christian Polemic
Dr. Dov Honick, Yale University, US
12:00-14:00 | July 15, 2026
Directors Room, First Floor
Medieval Christian writers often claimed to know “the Talmud,” but what they encountered was frequently a messier world of rabbinic stories, liturgy, festival traditions, and manuscript miscellanies. This lecture follows the twelfth-century convert Petrus Alfonsi as he transforms Jewish stories of miracle-working sages, Temple omens, martyrdom, and messianic hope into an argument against Judaism. Rather than treating these materials simply as Talmudic citations or inherited polemical commonplaces, the lecture asks how hostile Christian texts can preserve traces of the Jewish narrative worlds from which they drew.
With support from the Stewart and Lynda Resnick Foundation