PESHAT OR POLEMICS: THE CASE OF GENESIS 36

Martin I. Lockshin*

For medieval , defending the Jewish faith against the intellectual onslaughts of Christianity was a crucial task and a sacred duty. Some scholars have suggested that the hesitant Jewish movement towards peshat (“plain” or context-based exegesis of the Bible) that arose in Christian countries at the end of the eleventh century and flourished during the twelfth may have been a direct result of rabbis striving to become better polemicists.1 The connection between peshat and polemics makes sense. When medieval Jews and Christians argued about the meaning of a bibli- cal verse, neither of them could effectively cite proofs from a work respected by members of one religious group and not the other: a Jew could not convince a Christian by citing the or , nor could a Christian convince a Jew by citing the New Testament or one of the church fathers. The playing field was level only if the discus- sion centered around the Scripture they shared.2 As a result, interest in religious polemics may well have attracted both Jews and Christians to the enterprise of peshat. Scholarly approaches to the connection between peshat and polem- ics in medieval Christian Europe have fallen into two camps. Schol- ars such as Elazar Touitou and Avraham Grossman have claimed that there is a strong link and that polemic was a crucial factor in the growth of peshat.3 Others such as Daniel Lasker and Shaye Cohen have

* This essay is dedicated to Prof. David Berger, who first taught me thirty-six years ago, who inspired me to choose a career in academic Jewish Studies, and from whom I have learned so much over the years about polemics and interpreting texts. The research for this article was funded by a generous grant from the Social Sci- ences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am grateful for their support. 1 See, e.g., Avraham Grossman, Hakhmey Tzarefat ha- (Jerusalem, 2001), 475–497. 2 Personal communication from David Berger in class in 1974. 3 Touitou developed this argument in a series of articles that were later revised and incorporated into his book, Ha-peshatot ha-mithaddeshim be-kol yom: ‘Iyyunim be- perush ha-Rashbam la- (Ramat-Gan, 2003). Grossman has offered this argument in many articles and books. See, e.g., in /Old Testament: The History of Its 438 martin i. lockshin expressed doubts and have argued that too many peshat comments have been identified as polemical.4 In fact, establishing the real con- nection between peshat and polemics is doubly difficult, since whether a scriptural interpretation is peshat and whether it is polemical are two separate questions about which reasonable people may differ.5 It is even more difficult to answer another question: did peshat exe- getes at times give precedence to polemics and abandon their commit- ment to peshat in order to defend the faith? Which factor was more important to them, peshat or polemics? Consider, for instance, Rash- bam, who stated a number of times that an interpretation that he was offering for a specific biblical verse was both peshat and a useful rebut- tal of Christian polemical claims.6 Scholars have disputed whether in cases like that (and in other cases where Rashbam or another exegete did not own up to polemical goals), the exegete was really primarily looking for the plain, contextual meaning of the Bible or primarily trying to defend the Jewish religion, even if he had to twist the peshat to do so. A telling example is Rashbam’s suggestion that the Israelites in Egypt did not “borrow” ornaments of gold, silver, and other such items from the Egyptians, but “asked for” these items as outright gifts (Exod 3:22). Some modern scholars have argued that this interpreta- tion is so farfetched that it proves that polemics trumps peshat for Rashbam; other have disagreed, arguing that Rashbam was right and that he actually offered the true peshat explanation of that text.7 In this essay I will survey classical Jewish exegesis on one chapter of the Torah: Genesis 36. I will categorize the exegesis on that chapter

Interpretation, ed. Magne Saebo, vol. 1, part 2 (Göttingen, 2000), 206–207, 263–288, 327–328; and ’Emunot ve-de‘ot be-‘olamo shel (Alon Shvut, 2008), esp. 34–42. 4 Daniel Lasker, “Rashi and on Christianity,” in Themes in Medieval Jewish Law, History and Thought, ed. Ephraim Kanarfogel and Moshe Sokolow (New York, 2010), 3–21; Shaye J. D. Cohen, “Does Rashi’s Torah Commentary Respond to Christianity? A Comparison of Rashi with Rashbam and Bekhor Shor,” in The Idea of Biblical Interpretation: Essays in Honor of James L. Kugel, ed. Hindy Najman and Judith H. Newman (Leiden, 2004), 449–472. I have previously expressed doubts about the strength of the peshat-polemics connection and I will not rehearse those argu- ments here. See my Rashbam’s Commentary on Deuteronomy: An Annotated Transla- tion (Providence, 2004), 19–25, and my Perush ha-Torah le-Rabbenu Shemuʾel ben Meʾir (Jerusalem, 2009), xxv–xxix. 5 See David Berger, Persecution, Polemic, and Dialogue: Essays in Jewish-Christian Relations (Boston, 2010), 46: “In matters of exegetical detail, polemical motives are occasionally obvious, occasionally likely, and occasionally asserted implausibly.” 6 See, e.g., his commentary to Exodus 3:22 and Leviticus 11:3. 7 See my Rashbam’s Commentary to Exodus: An Annotated Translation (Atlanta, 1997), 40, n. 35.