This month, Mosaic has offered a series of essays on Christian attitudes toward Judaism and the Jewish state. David Berger, the foremost authority on Jewish-Christian polemic in the Middle Ages, tackles Jews’ attitudes towards Christians in this interview with Elliot Resnick—among many other topics. He begins with the opinions of Rabbi Yeḥiel of Paris, whose disputation with a Catholic clergyman in 1240 was followed by the mass burning of Jewish religious texts:
Jews [involved in disputations] may have said things they didn’t mean in order to avoid persecution. . . . In Rabbi Yeḥiel’s disputation, he says the Talmud’s laws [prohibiting certain forms of intercourse with] non-Jews don’t apply to Christians. They only apply to the [pagan] nations of antiquity. [As in other cases], the question of Yeḥiel’s sincerity has been raised.
But Rabbi Menaḥem Meiri of Perpignan (1249-1315), who did not have a disputation with Christians, actually says the same thing even more vigorously and systematically. He says these laws don’t apply to umot g’durot b’darkhey ha-datot, which literally means “nations who are limited by the ways of religions”—that is, nations that have decent moral codes and believe in one God. So that means Christians and Muslims are exempted.
Read more on Jewish Press: https://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/interviews-and-profiles/rav-ahron-soloveichik-medieval-christianity-and-academic-ignorance-an-interview-with-eminent-historian-dr-david-berger/2020/07/16/