What is it about?
This chapter examines how late medieval Christian authors interpreted Jewish and Islamic rituals within the diverse and interconnected world of the Mediterranean. Drawing on Auerbach’s distinction between figure and allegory and on Biddick’s analysis of typological imagery, it argues that Christian writers did not treat the rites of other religions as mere targets of polemic. Instead, they approached them through sophisticated interpretive frameworks that mirrored the plurality of Christian theological debate. Practices such as circumcision and funerary rites were not simply condemned; they were re-read through a figural lens that acknowledged their material reality while stripping them of their original meanings and reinserting them into a Christian symbolic system. The aim was not destruction but transformation: a gradual process of cultural and religious assimilation intended to guide Jews and Muslims toward conversion.
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Why is it important?
By shifting attention away from purely moral or doctrinal readings that have dominated scholarship since Norman Daniel, this study highlights the complexity of anti-Jewish and anti-Islamic polemics. It shows that these texts constitute a dynamic literary genre that equipped Christian writers with a powerful hermeneutical tool for systematic assimilation, substitution, and conversion.
Perspectives
Noble as it may appear, the historian’s existential desire to construct a future different from a past that appears limited and outdated compared to the urgencies of the present, is scientifically invalidating. If the past is viewed – without distinction between individual authors, biographies, works, and contexts – as a monolithic boulder to be pulverized, then historical research abdicates its task and becomes, as Henri-Irénée Marrou warned in his masterpiece from 1954, “an anguished conversation in which the historian, engaged in the contrasts of present life, tries, in the ardor of action, to obtain from the past some indication that may help him in his effort to impose a form on the future.” But this is, or should be, the task of prophets or statesmen, rather than historians.
Davide Scotto
Universita degli Studi di Pavia
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This page is a summary of: Figural Readings of Jewish and Muslim Rites: a Christian Device from the 12th to 14th Centuries, December 2025, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004726840_016.
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