During our first 2½ years we established that many more polemical texts were written in Arabic by Christians against Judaism than was known and that these texts do not repeat late antique patterns. We investigated the circulation and impact of Christian anti-Jewish hagiographical material as well as polemic throughout the regions covered by JewsEast, and its interplay with Jewish anti-hagiographical traditions. We found that these were especially intense between Arabic-speaking lands, Ethiopia, Byzantium and Europe. In the Islamicate world, Christians shared polemical texts and tropes across denominations. Muslims were aware of such debates between Christians and Jews, thus this material also had impact on Muslim polemic against Judaism and/or Christianity. We hypothesize that the presence of Christian material in the Cairo Geniza, evidence of Christian-Jewish conversion in Egypt, and indications of Jews and Christians consulting one another on the exegesis and translation of scripture, all point to Jewish-Christian polemic as being, at least in part, an exchange between Jews and Christians, sometimes with the specific aim of encouraging conversion, rather than polemic functioning solely for internal consumption. We have shown that Jewish-Christian conversion functioned bilaterally under Islamic rule, and that such conversions are also discussed in Ethiopian literature. All of these findings for the Middle East are presented in publications by Roggema and Cuffel, and for Ethiopia by Dege-Müller and Kribus
While extant, Jewish-Christian polemic was less extensive in the Caucasus, Persianate lands, or India. Pogossian has found that even in locations in Armenia where archaeological evidence has confirmed the presence of a Jewish community, no ‘original’ polemical texts against Jews seem to have been composed. In those few instances where actual Jews were targeted in Armenian and/or Georgian, such Jews were not members of local communities. Apocalyptic themes which reflected inter-communal tensions, however, gained greater purchase and significance in the Caucasus, however, designations of Jewish identity whether in apocalyptic or polemical literature, were often used rhetorically to refer to Muslims or Christian “heretics” or as part of local dynastic legitimization. Our researchers have found that in Southern India, Latin Catholics introduced their traditions of both philosemitism and anti-Jewish polemic to local Christians, who in turn adapted these to reflect local inter-religious interactions.
The impact of trade, daily interactions, magic practices, religious spaces, and festivals, on Jewish-Christian relations in all of these regions have also been a major focus. Darabian’s research shows that there was considerable exchange between Jewish and Christian ritual specialists relating to magic bowls and healing. Gamliel has demonstrated the extent of Jewish integration into South Indian society, which affected marriage and linguistic as well as trading practices, and inter-communal tensions and interactions in the region. Shared saints and festivals among Jews and Christians have been identified and analyzed for the greater Mediterranean, showing that competing claims were a common feature of interreligious encounters at shared sites. Environmental crises created non-competitive shared religious rituals in the Middle East however. Kribus has demonstrated that strong similarities existed between the religious practices and physical structures of Betä Ǝsraʾel and Christian monasteries in Ethiopia, whereas Dege-Müller has shown that Betä Ǝsraʾel bought and used Christian manuscripts of religious texts, and removed Christian symbols and ideas from them, also creating their own liturgical books.
