ABSTRACT
It is not surprising that the central tenet of the Christian faith, the Incarnation, the embodiment of Christ, or God assuming flesh, was a subject of considerable anxiety among Christian thinkers. It had become rhetorically not just something that had happened in the past, but as represented in the sacrament of the Eucharist, a relic and a constantly reappearing miracle. Here Anna Abulafia considers how the notion of the Incarnation, of God becoming man, was of great concern to Christian intellectuals of the twelfth century because it was the central theological point on which they distinguished themselves as Christians from non-Christians, including from the Jews in their midst. The fact that Jews refused to accept the notion of the Incarnation despite sharing certain sacred texts with Christians, had become increasingly more frustrating to Christian thinkers at this time, particularly as they came to argue for more proofs of Christian belief based on “reason” rather than “revelation.” Here Abulafia traces ways in which Christian notions about Jewish bodies and Jewish notions about Christian bodies, not least of them the body of Christ, created insurmountable misapprehensions between the two. Even when honest debate was attempted it was doomed to failure because Jews and Christians were talking at cross purposes. The fact that Jews could not accept the Christian notion of God embodied as Christ caused Christian intellectuals to conclude that Jews were obstinate, irrational, and less than human. Abulafia summarizes the theological debate between Christians and Jews on bodies and embodiment, but also suggests how the social interactions of Christians with Jews created increased tension in the twelfth century. Abulafia’s ability to move back and forth between Jewish and Christian viewpoint is one of the hallmarks of her important work on how Christian notions of Jews became more intolerant in the twelfth-century and later. This chapter originally appeared in Framing Medieval Bodies, eds Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 123-37. It is also reproduced in Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christians and Jews in Dispute (Aldershot: Variorum, 1998).
