Graduate Student Spotlight: Asher Gladstone
Graduate Student Spotlight: Asher Gladstone
My name is Asher Gladstone and I’m a first-year PhD student in the History department. I study intellectual history and Jewish-Christian relations in early modern Europe (c. 1500-1800). I am particularly interested in intellectual exchange across communal borders. Early modern Christian scholars, known as Christian Hebraists, studied Jewish texts in their original languages for various reasons. Some wanted to read the Old Testament in the Holy Tongue, others used ancient Jewish sources to contextualize the Gospels historically, and others appropriated Jewish mystical traditions to affirm Christian theology. These scholars not only read Jewish books but also learned from Jewish teachers. Jews and converts from Judaism sold books to Christians, worked alongside them in printshops, taught them Hebrew, and shared exegetical insight.
One such Christian fascinated by Jewish books and history was Johann Wülfer (1651-1724), the subject of my first-year research paper. Wülfer spent most of his life in Nuremberg, serving as a pastor and a teacher at a secondary school. As a young man, he spent a year at Oxford University, studying rabbinic literature under the renowned Isaac Abendana, the only Jew then employed at an English university. Throughout his career, Wülfer befriended more learned Jews in cities from Amsterdam to Prague. But Wülfer’s interest in Judaism, like that of his fellow Christian scholars, did not derive from intellectual curiosity alone. He was fundamentally motivated by his religious convictions. For example, in 1680, he published an annotated Latin translation of a second-century Hebrew text (Mishnah tractate Shekalim) in order to flesh out the ancient cultural context in which Jesus had lived and taught. He clarified obscure passages in his translation with cross-references to rabbinic literature and other ancient sources. Jewish texts thus provided Wülfer the means to better understand the Gospels historically and theologically.
My current research project focuses on Wülfer’s 1681 book Theriaca Judaica, ad examen revocata. Here Wülfer deployed the tools of Hebraist erudition to examine contemporary Jewish life rather than biblical history. He compiled a critical edition of a recent polemical exchange between a Jew (Zalman Tsvi of Aufhausen) and a convert from Judaism (Samuel Friedrich Brenz). As he had previously done for second-century rabbinic texts, Wülfer translated Zalman Tsvi’s seventeenth-century Yiddish defense of Judaism into Latin and annotated it with insight culled from a diverse constellation of Jewish literature. Wülfer’s commentary drew on a variety of sources such as the Talmud, rabbinic authorities like Maimonides, medieval books of Jewish liturgy, his Jewish correspondents, and his own observations of Jewish communities in various European cities. Again, Wülfer’s effort did not derive merely from curiosity. He conceived of his book as a contribution to the conversion of the Jews to Christianity. He judged most of Brenz’s anti-Jewish accusations to be ungrounded and implored his Christian readers to engage with Jews more charitably. Jews would be more willing to accept Christ, Wülfer argued, if Christians treated them better. To do this, Christians needed a fair-minded understanding of how Jews lived and worshipped. Wülfer intended for his annotations to fill this gap.
Many intellectual histories of Jewish-Christian relations have primarily focused on the abstract theological ideas each group held about the other. I, however, am interested in reconstructing how knowledge was produced in concrete encounters between individuals across communities. My ongoing research on Wülfer’s Theriaca Judaica is only my most recent project to study Christian knowledge of contemporary Jewish life. My master’s thesis tackled the work of Johann Christoph Wagenseil (1633-1705), a Christian scholar at the University of Altdorf who relied on his knowledge of and correspondence with contemporary Jews to study Jewish antiquity and divine law. I also have an article forthcoming in the journal Erudition and the Republic of Letters which examines the various ways English Christians learned about Jewish customs as their government debated whether to permit Jewish immigrants to settle in England. My dissertation will continue to explore early modern Christian knowledge of postbiblical Jewish life and the interreligious interactions that facilitated such knowledge. Jewish and Christian history are deeply entangled in each other. It is important for historians to narrate it as a shared story—one of both collaboration and contestation.