ABSTRACT
When Abraham Abulafia was born in 1240 in Saragossa, Navarra, Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity had already been, for many centuries, not merely two distinct religions. They were, rather, in a state of somewhat permanent religious conflict in many parts of Europe. The hegemonic perspectives dominant in the elites of these two religions were nurtured by feelings of the exclusive validity of one of the two religions and, as a necessary corollary, the illegitimate status of the other religion. If, for the Christians, the Jews not only denied the main tenets of Christianity – the sonship of Jesus as Christ, his divinity, and his messianic task – but also stubbornly continued to practice what Paulinian Christianity considered to be an obsolete form of ritual religiosity, for the Jewish religious elites the Christians’ main tenets were considered to be theologically false, even ridiculous. As a widespread religion, Christianity ignored most of the biblical commandments and thus deserted what the Jews conceived to be the most important part of religion, namely, the performance of the will of God. The exclusivist tones are dominant in the medieval polemical writings, without any significant sign of a possible religious compromise.
