The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, Vol. 5, pp. 245-279 Reprintsavailabledirectlyfrom the publisher Photocopyingpermitted by license only © 1996 "Israel Has No Messiah" in Late Medieval Spain Eric Lawee Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, Canada Rabbinic messianic dicta presented medieval Jewish scholars with unique problems and special opportunities. Like other nonlegal exegetical (mid- rashic) and non-exegetical (aggadic) rabbinic pronouncements, these dicta could seem bizarre or irrational when taken literally. And like these others, messianic midrashim and aggadot were open to textual manipulations which could transmute their meanings and point them in new directions. 1 Unlike other such sayings, however, messianic midrashic and aggadic dicta were, from around the mid-thirteenth century, invoked by Christian missionaries to prove the truth of teachings of Christianity.2 At the same time, they served as a basis upon which various post-rabbinic Jewish savants tried to "calculate" the time of the (in their mind) true Messiah's coming. 3 Finally, a 1 For a survey through the mid-thirteenth century, see Marc Saperstein, Decoding the Rabbis: A Thirteenth-Century Commentary on the Aggadah (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 1-20. For an overview which takes in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century developments and offers relatively up-to-date bibliography, see my "'Inheritance of the Fathers': Aspects of Isaac Abarbanel's Stance Towards Tradition," (ph. D. diss., Harvard University, 1993), pp. 124-50. Rabbinic legal interpreta- tions of Scripture (mid,.ash halakhah) also posed challenges to medieval scholars but largely of a dif- ferent sort. See Jay M. Harris, How Do IlVe Know This? Mid,.ash and the F,.agmentation of Modern Judaism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 73-10l. 2 This innovation in Christian anti-Jewish polemic has been traced to the twelfth-century Alan of Lille (Amos Funkenstein, "Ha-temurot ba-viqquaI;1she-ben yehudim le-no~erim ba-me'ah ha-shtem esrei," ?j:yyon 33 [1968]: 141-42). For a similar tendency in an early thirteenth-century Spanish anti- Jewish polemicist seemingly influenced hy Alan, see Lucy Kristina Pick, "Christians and Jews in Thir- teenth-Century Castile: The Career and Writings of Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada, Archbishop of Toledo (1209-1247);' (ph. D. diss., University of Toronto, 1995), p. 214 (and for Alan's likely influence on Roderigo pp. 167-70, 184). These precursors notwithstanding, it was not until the mid-thirteenth century that argumentation using christological interpretations of rabbinic texts became a staple of the Christian attack, the most famous case being Pablo Christiani's deployment thereof at the 1263 "disputation of Barcelona." See on this and related developments Jeremy Cohen, The Fria,.s and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval AntiJudaism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982); Robert Chazan, Daggm of Faith: thirteenth-century Chmtian missionizing and Jewish "esponse (Berkeley: University of Califor- nia Press, 1989); idem, Ba,.celona and Bryond' The Disputation of 1263 and Its Aftermath (Berkeley: Univer- sity of California Press, 1992). 3 For various medieval efforts in this direction, see Abba Hillel Silver, A History of Messianic Speculation in Israel: From the Fi,.st th,.ough the Seventeenth Centuries (1927; reptint with a new preface by the author, New York: Beacon Press, 1959), pp. 36--150.