EDWARD KESSLER and Neil Wenborn have edited A Documentary History of Jewish-Christian Relations: From antiquity to the present day (Cambridge University Press, £95 (£85.50); 978-1-009-29216-0), with contributions by Philip Alexander, Victoria Barnett, Karma Ben-Johanan, Mary C. Boys, James Carleton Page, Paul Kerry, Matthew V. Novenson, and Marc Saperstein.
Divided into three parts (to 900 CE; 900-1800; 1800 to the present), the format of this weighty academic paperback is that of a reader in which, in each contributor’s chapter, extracts from texts are introduced as a group, reproduced, and followed individually by commentary. The passages range from the epistles, the writings of church Fathers and Jewish rabbis, conciliar decrees, and later philosophers and theologians, to an appendix of institutional statements (1947-2023), but also more widely.
In Chapter 6, “The Rise of Antisemitism to Early Zionism”, for example, Napoleon and the Assembly of Jewish Notables feature, as do, among others, Mendelssohn and Wagner, Lord Shaftesbury, George Eliot, Blood Libel allegations in the Jesuit periodical La Civiltà Cattolica, and texts pertaining to the Mendel Beilis ritual-murder trial (1911-13) in what The Times then spelt “Kieff”.
