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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 Nonetheless, it must be pointed out that his pro-Christian ideas took their shape in the context of a ferocious battle against internal Jewish heresy. To my mind, the real (if implicit) theme of Emden’s letter was not a tribute to the common Jewish and Christian values but the issue of religious legitimacy versus religious deviance. Legitimate religions such as Judaism and Christianity (and Islam) were juxtaposed with and set against sectarian and heretical religious formations. In Emden, the concept of heresy acquired a trans-confessional character and became the epitome of opposition to any legitimate religiosity, be it Jewish or not. Indeed, the author of the letter to the council did praise the Christian religion. Yet he praised Christianity not qua Christianity, but Christianity as opposed to Sabbatianism.

      For Emden, Christianity was a legitimate, true, and even noble religion, which—on the basis of its own theological tenets—should recognize Judaism’s legitimacy, truth, and nobility. What this meant in practice was the acknowledgment of Judaism’s total separateness. Judaism and Christianity were parallel paths to redemption: they did not intersect and should not attempt to do so. Jews and Christians should respect each other, but they had nothing substantial to offer each other. According to Emden, Jesus’ intention was to reinstate the Noahide Commandments, thereby creating a sustainable moral creed for Gentiles; the founder of Christianity had no message for his contemporary Jews, and Emden’s contemporary Jews had nothing to look for in their contemporary Christian religion.

      It is no coincidence that Emden’s account of Christianity drew so deeply on the Scriptures rather than on the works of later theologians or his own firsthand experience. Tolerant and open-minded as it was, this vision of Christianity was that of its early canonical texts, not of what he saw through his window: Emden had little to say about the Christianity of his own day but referred solely to the rather abstract and idealized vision of Christianity at the time of its inception. Despite the enlightened phraseology, the argument aimed at maintaining or even increasing the distance between the two religions; Emden wanted to preserve a utopian status quo, in which Jews and Christians deeply respected each other, but never met.

      The letter to the Council of Four Lands depicted the ideal scheme of things, in which the two legitimate religious establishments—the rabbis and the priests—recognized each other’s legitimacy without making attempts to interfere with each other’s business or to proselytize in any way. Jew and Christian were to join in condemnation of Jewish and Christian heretics. What is really striking in Emden’s letter is not his explicitly tolerant view of Christianity but his implicit understanding of Judaism. The true novelty of Emden’s position did not lie in the view that Christianity was based on the Noahide Commandments (which, by the mid-eighteenth century, had been generally accepted among the rabbis, though most of them based their argumentation on the Talmud rather than the Gospels).

      The true novelty was the idea that the theological and practical boundaries of Judaism could and should be unequivocally demarcated once and for all. What Emden proposed was a hard ontology of Judaism: the Jewish religion was eternal and immutable, like a Platonic idea; it had clearly defined boundaries, centralized structure, and well-defined dogmas. I believe that Emden imagined his ideal Judaism in clear—though probably unconscious—analogy to the Catholic theologians’ ideal vision of Christianity. In the rabbis, he saw a professional clerical caste, hierarchically organized, uniformly trained and disciplined, and controlling the minds and bodies of the wider Jewish community. In the herem, he saw not a localized and limited tool of social control employed within a specific community but a kind of universal ban of excommunication, condemning the excommunicated to eternal punishment and having validity everywhere and for everyone. In religious dissenters, he saw “heretics” who should be burned at the stake. He saw the Jewish religion as a set of systematic and systematized doctrines incumbent upon every Jew and believed that one could abandon Judaism not only by a formal conversion to another religion but through lack of correct understanding of theological tenets: a Jew who deviated from the right path was no longer a Jew in the proper sense of the term. He belonged to another religion entirely.

      As Judaism had always been a religion without clearly defined dogmas and lacking centralized religious authority, earlier rabbinic attacks on heresy were proscriptive rather than analytical. No attempt had been made to establish a contrastive taxonomy of different heretical positions or to demarcate unequivocally what distinguished one “sect” from another. Names of ancient groups, such as Sadducees or Boethusians, were routinely used to designate modern-day heretics; terms such as Karaism were utilized as a generic synonym for sectarianism. Pre-Emden rabbinic polemics against the followers of Sabbatai Tsevi habitually conflated Sabbatianism with other Jewish sects of the past and systematically obfuscated differences among various heretical groups.⁹¹

      Emden deeply internalized the Christian understanding of heresy as theological error and became a kind of Jewish Irenaeus or Hippolytus: a chief heresiologist. Such an understanding of heresy has no meaning if it is not relativized to some orthodoxy: a clear definition of deviance demands

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