Christian Hebraism

The secular interest of the Christians for Jewish literature, known under the name of Christian Hebraism, shaped in many ways not only the Christian attitude towards Jewish books but also the perception of the Jews themselves of their own literary and religious tradition. The best way to appreciate how deep the impact of the sustained efforts of the Christians – often dominated by polemical preoccupations, to appropriate the heritage of Judaism, especially in the form of books – has been, is to survey the long and complex history of Christian Hebraism from late antiquity to the present. The article offers such a survey, devoting special attention to continuities and epochal ruptures in the polemical and scholarly processing of Jewish, particularly, Hebrew books by a Christian readership. A long-standing ambivalence, a fundamental trait of the general Christian attitude towards the Jews, is also the most striking character of Christian Hebraism involved as it was in the destruction of Hebrew books as well as in in their dissemination and preservation.