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BOOK REVIEWS

David Klinghoffer, Why the Jews Rejected : The Turning Point in Western History (New York: Doubleday, 2005).1

David Klinghoffer contributes to the history of religion while also inspiring reflections on the impact of the sociology of religion on the way in which the history of religion is told. To begin with the his- torical contribution, Why the Jews Rejected Jesus aims to tell, “for the first time from a Jewish perspective, the story of the two-thousand- year Jewish-Christian debate about Jesus” (p. 5). The book tells this story chronologically, working its way from the time of Jesus’ life through late antiquity and the Middle Ages into modern times. As Klinghoffer makes clear, notwithstanding the controversy evoked by the release of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the , the Jewish- Christian debate over Jesus does not or at least should not focus on responsibility for Jesus’ death. It is not anti-Semitic to say that some of Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries were in part responsible for his death. He notes that canonical Jewish sources like the and Maimonides openly and unapologetically declare that Jewish leaders were complicit in Jesus’ death; according to the Talmud, Jesus was thought to have “led astray [the people] Israel” (p. 73). The central question is not who killed Jesus but whether Jesus was the messiah. The Jewish response has been that Jesus cannot have been the messiah, since he failed to achieve the political successes that would testify to a claimant’s messianic status. The messiah was supposed to gather Jewish exiles back to Judea, to overthrow the Roman oppressors, and to establish a just kingdom on earth. Jesus did none of these things, so in the estimation of the twelfth-century Jewish sage Joseph Kimchi (with whom, we will see, Klinghoffer himself disagrees), Jesus “accomplished nothing which can actually be seen” (p. 161). Related to whether or not Jesus was the messiah is the question of how belief in Jesus should affect one’s attitude towards the com-

1 An earlier version of this review appeared in the Fall 2005 issue of the Claremont Review of Books.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2006 Review of Rabbinic 9 RRJ 9_f13-19_207-234 5/12/06 1:28 PM Page 208

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mandments Jews are obliged to fulfill. Here Klinghoffer’s focus shifts from Jesus to Paul, and he makes it clear that his book’s title is actually misleading. It is not so much the rejection of Jesus as “the rejection of Paul, or rather of Paul’s conception of Jesus Christ, [that] was the very turning point of Western history” (p. 97). Klinghoffer claims that the Jewish rejection of Jesus as Paul understood him made possible the Christianization of Europe, hence the creation of Western civilization. It was Paul, not Jesus, who clearly separated belief in Jesus from the continued observance of Jewish law. Henceforth the one was no longer compatible with the other. Non-Jews who accepted Jesus as their savior were freed from observing the burdensome commandments imposed on Jews: circumcision, not working on the Sabbath, fol- lowing the dietary restrictions, etc. More broadly, salvation could not be obtained by keeping the commandments but was instead avail- able only to those with faith in Jesus. As Paul stated in Gal. 2:21, “If righteousness could come through the law, Christ died in vain.” To accept Jesus was thus to concede that Jewish law was obsolete, that it had been countermanded by a new covenant with God; and believing Jews, who thought that theirs was an eternal law, were of course unwilling to do this. Klinghoffer claims that it was precisely the jettisoning of Jewish law that made possible ’s success in converting pagans. In this respect he echoes a contention of Edward Gibbon’s: “Chris- tianity offered itself to the world, armed with the strength of the Mosaic law, and delivered from the weight of its fetters.” That is to say, Christianity (like Judaism) offered “an exclusive zeal for the truth of religion, and the unity of God;” but unlike Judaism, Christianity did not demand that its adherents take upon themselves a “variety of trivial though burdensome observances” that were “so many objects of disgust and aversion for... other nations.”2 In this context Klinghoffer argues the historical significance of the Jewish rejection of Jesus and Paul. He conducts a thought experi- ment: had the Jews accepted Jesus, the Jesus movement would have remained a small Jewish sect, because belief in Jesus would have been added onto continued observance of the Jewish law instead of

2 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York, n.d. [1776–1788]), vol. I, p. 387.