Beschrijving

Applying analytical strategies from linguistics, literature, and history, Kirsten Fudeman demonstrates that language played a central role in the formation, expression, and maintenance of medieval Jewish identity and that it brought Christians and Jews together even as it set them apart.

A thirteenth-century text purporting to represent a debate between a Jew and a Christian begins with the latter’s exposition of the virgin birth, something the Jew finds incomprehensible at the most basic level, for reasons other than theological: \