Jacob's Shipwreck: Diaspora, Translation, and Jewish-Christian Relations in Medieval England

by Ruth Nisse

Overview

Jewish and Christian authors of the High Middle Ages not infrequently came into dialogue or conflict with each other over traditions drawn from ancient writings outside of the bible. Circulating in Latin and Hebrew adaptations and translations, these included the two independent versions of the Testament of Naphtali in which the patriarch has a vision of the Diaspora, a shipwreck that scatters the twelve tribes. The Christian narrative is linear and ends in salvation; the Jewish narrative is circular and pessimistic. For Ruth Nisse, this is an emblematic text that illuminates relationships between interpretation, translation, and survival.

In Nisse’s account, extrabiblical literature encompasses not only the historical works of Flavius Josephus but also, in some of the more ingenious medieval Hebrew imaginative texts, Aesop’s fables and the Aeneid. While Christian-Jewish relations in medieval England and Northern France are most often associated with Christian polemics against Judaism and persecutions of Jews in the wake of the Crusades, the period also saw a growing interest in language study and translation in both communities. These noncanonical texts and their afterlives provided Jews and Christians alike with resources of fiction that they used to reconsider boundaries of doctrine and interpretation. Among the works that Nisse takes as exemplary of this intersection are the Book of Yosippon, a tenth-century Hebrew adaptation of Josephus with a wide circulation and influence in the later middle ages, and the second-century romance of Aseneth about the religious conversion of Joseph’s Egyptian wife. Yosippon gave Jews a new discourse of martyrdom in its narrative of the fall of Jerusalem, and at the same time it offered access to the classical historical models being used by their Christian contemporaries. Aseneth provided its new audience of medieval monks with a way to reimagine the troubling consequences of unwilling Jewish converts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501708312
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	04/18/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	248
File size:	716 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Ruth Nisse is Associate Professor of English and Jewish Studies at Wesleyan University. She is the author of Defining Acts.

Table of Contents

Introduction1. Josephus, Jerusalem, and the Martyrs of Medieval England2. Diaspora without End and the Renewal of Epic3. A Fox among Fish? Berekhiah ha-Nakdan's Translations4. Pleasures and Dangers of Conversion: Joseph and Aseneth5. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs in the Shadow of the Ten Lost Tribes Conclusion

What People are Saying About This

Kathy Lavezzo

Ruth Nisse's brilliant analysis not only tells a new story about Christian-Jewish interaction; it also makes a bold intervention in received notions of the literary. Anyone interested in rethinking the medieval literary canon—its languages, producers and influences—should read Jacob’s Shipwreck.

Steven Kruger

Jacob's Shipwreck contributes in very significant ways to scholarly work on Jewish-Christian relations. Ruth Nisse makes a body of abstruse material accessible to the academic reader. She also develops a cogent argument about that material and what it suggests about medieval Jewish-Christian relationships, and specifically about the way in which a number of projects of translation—both Christian projects that take Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew texts and bring them into Latin, and Jewish projects that work primarily from Latin to Hebrew—reflect the nuances of those relationships and the distinct ways of conceiving the history of both political power and intellectual work. Jacob’s Shipwreck will be required reading for anyone interested in the complex exchanges between medieval Christian and Jewish communities.

Editorial Reviews

With this book, Nisse adds to the understanding of how Jews resisted and absorbed Christian culture and how Christians, in turn, responded to Jews. Anyone interested in the complexities of medieval Christian-Jewish relations and how to study them could benefit from this book.

Choice

Jacob's Shipwreck is a learned volume that carries significant repercussions.... [Her] well-made argument that Christians and Jews shared quite a bit in terms of the texts and ideas that are the focus of her study apparently applies to Jewish biblical interpreters, certain liturgical poets and scholars, polemicists, and sui generis polyglots such as Berekhiah. She has produced a first-rate study that will likely engender further discussion, as well as new avenues of research.

Reading Religion

Jacob's Shipwreck is an important contribution to our understanding of Latin Christendom as home to both Christians and Jews. Examining a group of post-biblical Jewish texts that scholars of both religions translated, adapted and eventually anthologized during the Central Middle Ages, Ruth Nisse deepens our understanding and stimulates new questions.... The vast array of scholarship obvious in the sixty-five pages of notes and bibliography will interest medievalists of many disciplines.... It is not possible to give the reader [of this review] more than a taste of the richness of this book but it deserves to be read by scholars of history, religion, language, and literature.

The Medieval Review

Nisse's book directly addresses the absence of references in the standard scholarship on the Hebrew language and Jewish literature in England.... She proves that French, English, and Latin tongues were not the only languages being spoken and used in medieval England.... Seeking to establish presence where there was once absence, each chapter of Jacob's Shipwreck illustrates to what extent a Jewish author or a Hebrew text influenced the surrounding Christian culture.

SPECULUM

Ruth Nisse's extraordinary book, beautifully designed and produced by Cornell University Press, leads us in a new and altogether welcome direction in the study of the intellectual relationships between medieval Jews and Christians.

AJS Review

Ambitious and erudite, Jacob's Shipwreck explores texts that circulated in Jewish and Christian communities of medieval England [and] exemplify long-standing tensions between the two... This review can only gesture at the intricacies of Nisse's arguments... This dissection of the labyrinthine intercultural negotiations of medieval Jews and Christians stimulates and provokes, and will bear repeated reading and reflection.

American Historical Review

"Ruth Nisse's brilliant analysis not only tells a new story about Christian-Jewish interaction; it also makes a bold intervention in received notions of the literary. Anyone interested in rethinking the medieval literary canon—its languages, producers and influences—should read Jacob’s Shipwreck."

Kathy Lavezzo

"Jacob's Shipwreck contributes in very significant ways to scholarly work on Jewish-Christian relations. Ruth Nisse makes a body of abstruse material accessible to the academic reader. She also develops a cogent argument about that material and what it suggests about medieval Jewish-Christian relationships, and specifically about the way in which a number of projects of translation—both Christian projects that take Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew texts and bring them into Latin, and Jewish projects that work primarily from Latin to Hebrew—reflect the nuances of those relationships and the distinct ways of conceiving the history of both political power and intellectual work. Jacob’s Shipwreck will be required reading for anyone interested in the complex exchanges between medieval Christian and Jewish communities."

Steven Kruger

"Ambitious and erudite, Jacob's Shipwreck explores texts that circulated in Jewish and Christian communities of medieval England [and] exemplify long-standing tensions between the two... This review can only gesture at the intricacies of Nisse's arguments... This dissection of the labyrinthine intercultural negotiations of medieval Jews and Christians stimulates and provokes, and will bear repeated reading and reflection."

American Historical Review - Deborah L. Goodwin

"Nisse’s well-made argument that Christians and Jews shared quite a bit in terms of the texts and ideas that are the focus of her study apparently applies to Jewish biblical interpreters, certain liturgical poets and scholars, polemicists, and sui generis polyglots such as Berekhiah. She has produced a first-rate study that will likely engender further discussion, as well as new avenues of research."

READING RELIGION

"Jacob's Shipwreck contributes in very significant ways to scholarly work on Jewish-Christian relations. Ruth Nisse makes a body of abstruse material accessible to the academic reader. She also develops a cogent argument about that material and what it suggests about medieval Jewish-Christian relationships, and specifically about the way in which a number of projects of translation—both Christian projects that take Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew texts and bring them into Latin, and Jewish projects that work primarily from Latin to Hebrew—reflect the nuances of those relationships and the distinct ways of conceiving the history of both political power and intellectual work. Jacob’s Shipwreck will be required reading for anyone interested in the complex exchanges between medieval Christian and Jewish communities."—Steven Kruger, Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, author of The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe

"Jacob's Shipwreck is radical in its synthesis of Jewish and Christian texts and authors, and of 'literary’ and historiographical texts with scholastic and theological ones. Ruth Nisse gets at the deep entanglements of scholars, libraries, genres, and languages across religions, and she exposes new polemics that are, counterintuitively, evidence of Jewish-Christian collaboration and cooperation. This book is an erudite and significant contribution to scholarship, specifically to thinking about how texts and narratives were transmitted between Christians and Jews, and especially before 1290 in England."—Adrienne Williams Boyarin, University of Victoria, author of Miracles of the Virgin in Medieval England: Law and Jewishness in Marian Legends

"Ruth Nisse's brilliant analysis not only tells a new story about Christian-Jewish interaction; it also makes a bold intervention in received notions of the literary. Anyone interested in rethinking the medieval literary canon—its languages, producers and influences—should read Jacob’s Shipwreck."—Kathy Lavezzo, University of Iowa, author of The Accommodated Jew

From the Publisher