Book contents
- Lives, Identities and Histories in the Central Middle Ages
- Lives, Identities and Histories in the Central Middle Ages
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Entwined Lives and Multiple Identities
- Part II Historians, Lawyers and Exegetes: Writing Lives and Identities
- 9 Ademar of Chabannes and the Normans:
- 10 Lives, Identities and the Historians of the Normans
- 11 Ruth in the Twelfth Century:
- 12 Jacob and Esau and the Interplay of Jewish and Christian Identities in the Middle Ages
- 13 Identity, Gender and History in Wace’s Roman de Rou and Roman de Brut
- 14 Glanvill:
- 15 Dunstan, Edgar and the History of Not-So-Recent Events
- Index
12 - Jacob and Esau and the Interplay of Jewish and Christian Identities in the Middle Ages
from Part II - Historians, Lawyers and Exegetes: Writing Lives and Identities
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2021
- Lives, Identities and Histories in the Central Middle Ages
- Lives, Identities and Histories in the Central Middle Ages
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Entwined Lives and Multiple Identities
- Part II Historians, Lawyers and Exegetes: Writing Lives and Identities
- 9 Ademar of Chabannes and the Normans:
- 10 Lives, Identities and the Historians of the Normans
- 11 Ruth in the Twelfth Century:
- 12 Jacob and Esau and the Interplay of Jewish and Christian Identities in the Middle Ages
- 13 Identity, Gender and History in Wace’s Roman de Rou and Roman de Brut
- 14 Glanvill:
- 15 Dunstan, Edgar and the History of Not-So-Recent Events
- Index
Summary
References to Jacob and Esau proliferate in Jewish and Christian late antique and medieval texts.Recent scholarship has focused on this material to present Christian–Jewish relations through the prism of sibling rivalry. This chapter focuses on the Glossa ordinaria and the commentary of Rashi on Genesis chapters 25 and 27 to explore how exegetes used the story of the struggle between Jacob and Esau to express their own collective religious identity and how they employed the shared material to characterise the religious other. It examines how the narrative was used by commentators to pass judgement on members of their own religious communities and how these internal evaluations interacted with external assessments. The purpose of the chapter is to gain a deeper understanding of how medieval Jews and Christians internalised the claims made by their respective religious traditions as well as to explore whether the image of fraternal rivalry adequately encapsulates the ambiguous and paradoxical relationship between medieval Christianity and Judaism.
- Type
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- Information
- Lives, Identities and Histories in the Central Middle Ages , pp. 227 - 245Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021