ABSTRACT

For almost two thousand years, various images of Jesus accompanied Jewish thought and imagination: a flesh-and-blood Jew, a demon, a spoiled student, an idol, a brother, a (failed) Messiah, a nationalist rebel, a Greek god in Jewish garb, and more.

This volume charts for the first time the different ways that Jesus has been represented and understood in Jewish culture and thought. Chapters from many of the leading scholars in the field cover the topic from a variety of disciplinary perspectives - Talmud, Midrash, Rabbinics, Kabbalah, Jewish Magic, Messianism, Hagiography, Modern Jewish Literature, Thought, Philosophy, and Art – to address the ways in which representations of Jesus contribute to and change Jewish self-understanding throughout the last two millennia. Beginning with the question of how we know that Jesus was a Jew, the book then moves through meticulous analyses of Jewish and Christian scripture and literature to provide a rounded and comprehensive analysis of Jesus in Jewish Culture.

This multidisciplinary study will be of great interest not only to students of Jewish history and philosophy, but also to scholars of religious studies, Christianity, intellectual history, literature and cultural studies.

chapter |5 pages

Introduction

chapter 1|12 pages

A Jewish reader of Jesus

Mark, the evangelist

chapter 3|10 pages

Where is Jonah from?

chapter 5|34 pages

Abraham Abulafia

A Kabbalist “Son of God” on Jesus and Christianity

chapter 6|12 pages

From Joshua through Jesus to Simeon bar Yohai

Towards a typology of Galilean heroes

chapter 9|12 pages

“Christus secundum spiritum”

Spinoza, Jesus and the infinite intellect

chapter 11|12 pages

Jesus in modern Jewish thought

chapter 12|16 pages

The crucified brother

Uri Zvi Greenberg and Jesus

chapter 13|16 pages

We left Yeshu

On three twentieth-century Hebrew poets' longing for Jesus

chapter 14|13 pages

Jesus of the Sabra Thorns

The figure of Jesus in Israeli art