was to establish a faith based on Noahidism for pagans. In his commentary on Pirke avot (published in 1751), Emden had already stated that the “assembly” (a pun on the Hebrew word knesi’ah, which means “assembly” but also “the Church”) of the contemporary peoples could be adequately termed an “assembly for the sake of heaven” (knesi’ah le-shem shamayyim): its aim was to spread monotheism among “those who otherwise worshiped wood and stone, did not believe in the reward in afterlife, and had no idea of good and evil.”71 In the letter to the Council of Four Lands, he advanced the same argument. The main line of division did not lie here between Jews and Christians (or, more broadly, non-Jews) but between members of legitimate religious groups on the one hand and heretics on the other. From this perspective, Sabbatianism was a kind of universal heresy, denying general human moral principles and embodying the idea of reversion to paganism or even—along the lines of the mythology of the mixed multitude—the primeval “waste and void” and immorality that preceded God’s covenant with Noah: “O generation!72 Jews, Christians, and Muslims! The chief peoples, who uphold the fundamentals of the Torah of Moses and facilitate their proliferation in the world! Open your eyes and see . . . that there is no worse sect than the sect of Sabbatai Tsevi. . . . They are worse than all the ancient idolaters . . ., worse even than the generation of the Flood . . ., for they want to turn the world back to the state of waste and void [tohu va-vohu] . . . and they call good evil and evil they call good, they call light darkness and the sweet they call bitter. And such things are called heresy [minut].”73
To the Jews, Rabbi Jacob Sasportas had argued that for their faith, the nascent Sabbatian movement constituted a danger akin to that of early Christianity rising around Jesus and the apostles: he had viewed both Sabbatianism and Christianity as new, cancerous growths on the body of Judaism. Emden accepted Sasportas’s idea that Sabbatianism was a new (and hence illegitimate and dangerous) faith but claimed that, from the Jewish perspective, Christianity had never been a new religion: early Christianity was not an illicit sectarian offshoot of Judaism; rather, Judaism and Christianity stemmed from the same roots and were equally legitimate, since they were intended for different people. Thus, in Emden’s view, Christianity and Islam were elaborations of the fundamental Mosaic revelation, parallel to Judaism and sharing Judaism’s moral principles and its redemptive goal.
Rabbi Jacob Emden’s letter to the Council of Four Lands elicited substantial scholarly discussion. Jewish as well as Christian scholars were amazed by the rabbi’s great familiarity with Christian texts, for in his account of Christianity, he did not use Jewish sources but went directly to the text of the New Testament.74 The extensive citations from the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul drew special attention. While there existed several Hebrew translations of Christian Scriptures, Emden’s renderings seemed original, and his consistent usage of Latinized personal names and titles of the books of the New Testament would suggest that he relied on a Latin or German text.
Some argued that the quotations might have been translated into Hebrew by Emden himself.75 Such a possibility cannot be dismissed out of hand: there is no doubt that Emden knew some German, Dutch, and Latin and read numerous books in these languages in order—as he put it—to “know the views of different peoples in matters concerning their religions and customs and to understand their ideas about us and our holy faith.”76 It is entirely feasible that he had some firsthand knowledge of the New Testament. Nevertheless, it is clear that his command of foreign languages was superficial,77 and it is unlikely that he would have been able to undertake a sophisticated exegesis of the Gospels solely on the basis of his own study.
I submit that Emden’s ostensibly unmediated account of the New Testament’s theology was based on an earlier Jewish source, a little-known manuscript titled Hoda’at ba’al din.78 The work was supposedly written in 1430 by David Nasi of Candia, brother of the duke of Naxos, Joseph Nasi, and a factor in the service of Cardinal Francisco Bentivoglio. According to David, the cardinal became convinced of the falsity of his Christian belief through independent philosophical investigations and undertook to ponder the truth of Judaism. He therefore asked, in great secrecy, to be supplied with Jewish anti-Christian works. David Nasi lent the cardinal several polemical books and composed a short tract, Hoda’at ba’al din, for him. The title (“admission of the litigant”) alludes to the talmudic principle according to which the admission of guilt by a person charged with crime takes precedence over witnesses’ testimonies.79 In this case, the principle metaphorically referred to the writers of the New Testament: the tract aimed to demonstrate that the authors of the Gospels and the Epistles unwittingly affirmed the principles of Judaism and contradicted the dogmas of Christianity.
The impact and reception of Hoda’at ba’al din have not been studied. It is certain that in the mid-eighteenth century, a copy existed in Amsterdam. It belonged to the treasurer of the Sephardic community, David Franco Mendes; Mendes had numerous contacts with Emden’s father, Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi, and might have had contacts with Emden as well.80 Another manuscript might even have belonged to Emden himself.81 In his letter to the Council of Four Lands, Emden drew heavily upon Hoda’at ba’al din: the titles of the books of the New Testament and personal names have the same or very similar Hebrew forms in Hoda’at ba’al din and in Emden’s letter;82 the Hebrew translations of excerpts from the Gospels and the Epistles quoted in the latter exactly reproduce or closely paraphrase those in the former;83 and Emden’s entire argument that baptism did not seek to replace circumcision is structured along the lines of Hoda’at ba’al din.84 Moreover, the central thesis that Jesus and the Apostles never intended to abolish the Torah of Moses but wanted to perpetuate the fulfillment of the commandments of Judaism derives from the same source.85
The strategy of demonstrating the internal contradictions and incoherency of Christianity on the basis of the New Testament had antecedents in Jewish apologetics.86 Nevertheless, using the Gospel as a prooftext for the truth of Judaism was highly original, and possibly entirely unprecedented. In his forthcoming study, Hayyim Hames argues that Hoda’at ba’al din might be an eighteenth-century pseudepigraphic composition: neither of the names “David Nasi” or “Cardinal Bentivoglio” appear in any other source, and neither personality ever existed; the earliest extant manuscripts date from the eighteenth century; and there is no mention of the work in other medieval Jewish polemical tracts.87
If Hames’s conjectures are correct, Hoda’at ba’al din was composed not in the context of medieval Jewish-Christian polemics, but against the backdrop of the internal Jewish debate on Christianity spurred by Sabbatianism. The rise of Sabbatianism highlighted the need to make a clear distinction between the two religions, and this was the main aim of Hoda’at ba’al din. The work’s central argument is that, since all major Jewish articles of faith are already present in the New Testament, conversion is an act of folly, and this, too, might be anti-Sabbatian in nature.
Despite its anti-Christian thrust, Hoda’at ba’al din legitimized Christian Scriptures in a way absent in earlier Jewish sources.88 The same is true of Emden’s letter to the Council of Four Lands: Jewish and Christian academics have marveled at the rabbi’s “open-minded” or even “ecumenical” views of Christianity and other monotheistic religions. Emden has been portrayed as an “orthodox champion of religious tolerance,” “enlightened traditionalist” interested in comparative religion, or “rabbinic zealot” preaching openness to outsiders and their beliefs. However, this scholarly praise mostly missed the polemical context in which the letter was written (indeed, the existing translations of the excerpts from the letter into English and German conveniently left out most of the fragments devoted to Sabbatianism).89 Emden’s aim was not to eulogize Jesus and the Christians but to combat Jewish sectarianism.
To be sure, the rabbi himself emphasized that his sympathetic views of Christianity were not empty flattery but a consistent theological position, which he developed and expressed also in other—non-polemical—works.90
