The Broken Staff

Frank E. Manuel was Kenan Professor, Emeritus, New York University, and Alfred and Viola Hart University Professor, Emeritus, Brandeis University.

[An] erudite and pioneering work on the Christian relationship to Judaism.

Manuel shows that the story of Europe's discovery of Judaism was as rich, as complex, and sometimes as paradoxical as the better-known story of the discovery of ancient Greece and Rome...Manuel tells his complicated story with clarity and panache...The Christian enterprise of understanding Judaism has been, and probably will remain, a torment as well as a stimulus to both parties. It is a situation that is not likely to change--except, perhaps, in Manuel's utopian future. But his learned and honest book exposes the twisted, bitter roots of error. A master historian has practiced his necessary craft.

Mr. Manuel's aim is to set Jewish and Hebrew scholarship against the background of Christian obsessions, in a sense to see it as an aspect of Christian ideas, a subject that the author of books on Isaac Newton and modern utopias, who has long taught history at Brandeis and New York University, is well qualified to present in grand perspective...[A] tightly packed and learned book.