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Winner of the President's Prize 2020

Rashi had three primary objectives, to which he devoted his diverse literary enterprise: interpretation of the Bible and the Talmud, fortification of the Jewish community, and polemicizing against Christianity. While the scholarly literature has dealt extensively with these first two objectives, the third has received little attention. Rashi and the Jewish-Christian Polemic fills this void. A broad historical perspective informs this book, as well as an inclusive consideration of Rashi’s many and variegated writings related directly or indirectly to the Jewish-Christian polemic, which gained momentum in his lifetime.

The Church in the thirteenth century saw Rashi as its main antagonist, and claimed that he had tarnished the image of Christian saints and undermined the efforts of the Church to convert Jews to their religion. Rashi emerges in this work as a religious leader who bore the weighty responsibility for the fate of the Jewish people, particularly in Europe, exiled as they were from their land. Contrary to popular conceptions, Rashi, here appears as resolute and robust. This counter-image arises from the numerous polemical passages penned by Rashi that had been expunged by Christian censorship, deletions that persist to this very day in most printed editions of Rashi’s commentaries. Yet these polemical passages were preserved in manuscripts, and come to the fore throughout this book.