There are, tragically, too many reasons to justify the conclusion that the Christian attitude toward Jews and Judaism during the Middle Ages—especially after the fourth Lateran Council of 1215—was one of unremitting hostility, including persecutions, expulsions, forced conversions, scapegoating, and death. Less known, however, is the dramatic increase in Christian interest in Jewish and rabbinic writings that took place during the same period. From as early as the twelfth century, it is clear that Rashi’s commentary was being studied by Christian scholars. As early as the thirteenth century, Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed was translated into Latin, and by the fifteenth, into Spanish. By the end of that century, with the establishment of the Soncino Press in northern Italy, Christian interest in Jewish writings had become something akin to an explosion. To be sure, this enthusiastic display of interest among Christians should not necessarily be interpreted as an expression of Judeophilia, or even tolerance: Often Christian investigation into the Talmud and rabbinic commentaries was undertaken solely for the purpose of marshaling additional polemics against Judaism. Nonetheless, scholarly examination by Christians of Jewish texts—particularly if buttressed by an occasionally impressive knowledge of Hebrew—sometimes led to the challenging of previous Christian understandings of Judaism and the Hebrew Bible, including the locus classicus of the putative foreshadowing of Jesus in Isaiah 52-53 and 7:14. Clearly, a more tolerant, even sympathetic appreciation of Judaism was also emerging during the Middle Ages, a good example of which is the sixteenth-century Catholic Jean Bodin’s Colloquium of the Seven About Secrets of the Sublime.
During these four to five centuries, the more important among numerous Christian scholars who had devoted themselves to the study of Jewish writings were, in addition to Bodin: Hugo Grotius (who used Maimonides’ discussion of the Noahide laws in the Mishneh Tora to establish a minimal set of universal moral laws); Petrus Cunaeus (author of The Hebrew Republic, recently published in English translation by Shalem Press) in Leiden; the two Buxtorfs, father (editor of a Hebrew-Aramaic Lexicon and the Bomberg Bible with rabbinic commentary) and son (translator of Judah Halevi’s Kuzari into Latin), in Basel; Edward Pococke in Oxford; John Lightfoot in Cambridge; and Willem Surenhuis (responsible for the translation of the entire Mishna into Latin) in Amsterdam. In fact, Christian interest in rabbinic writings during this period was found throughout the European continent. In his evaluation of this “Christian Hebraism” in The Broken Staff: Judaism Through Christian Eyes, Frank Manuel was right to conclude that the Hebraic, or “third” culture, which alongside the Greek and the Latin was once an ornament of the trilingual gentleman-scholar, deserves a more prominent place in the history of Western thought than has been accorded to it.
Towering above even such impressive Christian Hebraists as the two Buxtorfs was surely the English lawyer John Selden (1584-1654). We are indebted to Jason Rosenblatt and Oxford University Press for bringing renewed and wider attention to the remarkable Selden through the publication of this learned book, Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi. With Selden, as Rosenblatt has correctly observed, we have a scholar who “in his coolly analytical historical approach to the laws and institutions of the Jews, eschews dogma. Selden wants neither to convert nor refute the rabbis, whom he calls ‘Magistri,’ and Christology is absent from his scholarship…. In the midst of an age of prejudice, John Selden transmitted an uncommonly generous view of Judaism.”
Just how remarkable a Hebraist the prolific Selden was will be obvious from the titles of his later works. His earlier books (The Duel; The Laws of Pre-Christian Britain and Early Common Law; History of Tithes; and Of the Dominion and Ownership of the Sea—the last of which was a response to Grotius) do not, for the most part, rely upon rabbinic writings. Even so, as early as 1617 Selden had written a historical, philological study of the gods condemned in the Hebrew Bible, The Fabulous Gods, in which he displayed familiarity with the works of Philo, Josephus, Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and, of course, Maimonides. This work, characterized by Rosenblatt as “a pioneering study of cultural anthropology and comparative religion,” is a noteworthy example of scholarship for its own sake, as would be the case for many of Selden’s later works. After all, the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake requires a recognition of, and fidelity to, freedom of thought. Throughout his life, Selden affirmed his commitment to such a liberty, such as when he ran afoul of King Charles I for opposing the king’s decision to prevent the publication of certain books in England-a decision representing, in Selden’s words, “a great invasion on the liberty of the subject”—and when he argued for the right of Catholics to public worship, even though he had always been sharply critical of Roman Catholicism.
As a member of Parliament who opposed Charles I’s claim to collect taxes without its approval, Selden was arrested and briefly imprisoned in 1629. His study of the Talmud during this imprisonment served as the preparation for his important Hebraic works. Between 1631 and his death in 1654, Selden wrote six works of profound and wide-ranging Hebraic scholarship. The first of these works, published in 1631, was a detailed study of the Jewish laws of inheritance, On Inheritance, According to the Hebrew Law, in the Case of Good Death. The second work, published five years later, was On the Succession of the Hebrew Priesthood, which dealt with the succession of the priesthood. Finally, in 1640, he published his important work on the seven Noahide precepts as a kind of natural law, On the Natural and Gentile Law in Comparison with Hebrew Teachings, about which more below. Next, in 1644, was a study of rabbinic methods of chronological calculation, On the Civil Year, which was followed two years later by The Hebrew Wife, an examination of the Jewish laws of marriage and divorce with a long digression on the views of the Karaites. The sixth work, On the Councils, consisting of three volumes, dealt with Jewish assemblies, above all the Sanhedrin.
Such impressive historical works, all of which required vast philological expertise, could only have been written out of a humanistic fascination with the past. Rosenblatt gives us a good indication of the extent of this fascination when we learn that Selden’s library contained 8,000 volumes. However, Rosenblatt makes clear that the political disputes of Selden’s time likely had a bearing on his choice of subjects, as well. His work on the Jewish laws of inheritance, for example, was probably directed against the clerical power of his time, as was his work on Jewish laws of marriage and divorce, the intention of which was surely to reform English law. Indeed, as Selden maintained, “marriage is nothing but a civil contract”; so, too, should inheritance, believed Selden, be governed by the laws of contract, thereby freeing it from ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Rosenblatt also makes clear the influence of Selden’s scholarship on numerous individuals, such as James Harrington, Thomas Hobbes, and especially John Milton.
Perhaps the most political of Selden’s works is his last, On the Councils, the first volume of which appeared in 1650, one year after the execution of Charles I. In this work, as Rosenblatt remarks, Selden “sees the Sanhedrin as the model of a parliament that represents the laity, protecting it from clerical oppression by maintaining the supremacy of civil power, but also from an unrestrained monarchy.” As Selden put the matter in his posthumously published Table Talk, “there is no such thing as spiritual jurisdiction; all is civil….” Thus, only the Sanhedrin had the authority to excommunicate. Furthermore, the king not only had no seat in the Sanhedrin, he could also be tried by it (here Selden points to Josephus’ account of the trial of Herod). Surely Selden had the tumultuous events in England from 1640-1649 in mind when writing On the Councils. But even in this work, we find a Selden deeply immersed in the historical details of philological and legal clarification, including over the sentencing of Jesus. Given Selden’s elliptical style, in which his conclusions are sometimes left unstated, it is likely significant that, in On the Councils, he offers detailed arguments for why the Sanhedrin might have given up the right to judge capital cases several years before the crucifixion.
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