Sebastian Münster and his Sources: The Messiah in Rome and the Convergence of Christian-Jewish Polemic and Intra-Christian Conflict
-
Daniel Lehmann
Abstract
The Talmudic story of an encounter between Rabbi Joshua ben Levi and the Messiah at the gate of Rome served medieval Christians well in their polemics against the Jews. This was, it seemed, a Jewish affirmation of the truth of Christianity: not only did the legend indicate that the Messiah had already come, it also placed him in Rome, the epicenter of the Christian faith. For that very reason, however, later Protestant polemicists could hardly be expected to utilize the story correspondingly, not after rejecting the primacy of Rome.
This article considers a number of Protestant responses to the Jewish Messiah in Rome tradition. Its primary focus, though, is on two anti-Jewish treatises by Sebastian Münster. As Stephen G. Burnett has demonstrated, Münster’s texts draw heavily from pre-Reformation polemical works – in other words, works that accepted Rome’s preeminence; the present article argues that Münster managed to subtly convey his own Protestant sensitivities in discussing the Joshua b. Levi story, all the same. This close reading of Münster offers a unique perspective on the convergence of Christian-Jewish controversy and Protestant-Catholic tensions, and especially on the role and development of the former in light of the latter.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Prof. Ram Ben-Shalom and Dr. Aya Elyada, supervisors of my doctoral research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, from which this article stems. My thanks also to the members of the Forum for the Study of Christianity at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and to the anonymous reviewers at the Journal of Early Modern Christianity for their insightful comments.
© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Sebastian Münster and his Sources: The Messiah in Rome and the Convergence of Christian-Jewish Polemic and Intra-Christian Conflict
- Von Rossen und Wagen: Das Verhältnis von Stadt und Land in der Ulmer Reformation
- The Doctrine of Justification in the Neo-Latin Biblical Poetry of Silesian Reformation Poets and their Interpretation of the Biblical Theme of the Fall of the First Parents
- Teaching Romans 7 after Trent: Michael Baius and his Lecture Hall on Concupiscence and Original Sin in Early Modern Louvain (1552–1589)
- Maintaining the Common Peace: Security and the Religious Peace of 1578 during the Dutch Revolt
- Conciliar Infallibility and Error in the Thomistic Ecclesiology of St. Robert Bellarmine, S.J.
- Reforming the Holy Name: The Afterlife of the IHS in Early Modern England
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Sebastian Münster and his Sources: The Messiah in Rome and the Convergence of Christian-Jewish Polemic and Intra-Christian Conflict
- Von Rossen und Wagen: Das Verhältnis von Stadt und Land in der Ulmer Reformation
- The Doctrine of Justification in the Neo-Latin Biblical Poetry of Silesian Reformation Poets and their Interpretation of the Biblical Theme of the Fall of the First Parents
- Teaching Romans 7 after Trent: Michael Baius and his Lecture Hall on Concupiscence and Original Sin in Early Modern Louvain (1552–1589)
- Maintaining the Common Peace: Security and the Religious Peace of 1578 during the Dutch Revolt
- Conciliar Infallibility and Error in the Thomistic Ecclesiology of St. Robert Bellarmine, S.J.
- Reforming the Holy Name: The Afterlife of the IHS in Early Modern England
