Judaism and the Shape of Power Examining the censorship of philosophical discourse in the medieval university from the perspective of Jewish-Christian relations

Abstract

The development of the medieval university, particularly in Paris, is inextricable from the surrounding Jewish-Christian relationships. This is because disputation, in all its forms, played a definitive role in shaping the investigational, educational, and evaluational functions of the university; and its development, too, is inextricably linked to the Jewish-Christian polemical tradition. Through its interactions with papal and monarchical authorities, the University of Paris, as the locus of medieval Latin intellectual culture, acted as the medium in which the consolidation of a papal-royal-academic censorial power unfolded. The narrative surrounding the development of the university, and the intellectual cultural of the High Middle Ages as a whole, has often been discussed from the perspective of Christian-Muslim interaction. This paper offers an alternative reading of this history by considering the development of the University of Paris from a perspective of Jewish-Christian relations. An examination of the events leading up to the Trial of the Talmud in Paris in 1240 from this vantage point offers a fresh perspective on the development of philosophical inquiry in the Latin west during the subsequent centuries.