Dear Tim,
I am afraid this is a very well-researched topic. The Jews are
expelled from England in 1290, so you will not find them being forced to
listen to sermons after that, but it is a feature of conversionary efforts
on the continent. Take a look at Jeremy Cohen's book The Friars & the Jews,
or Robert Chazan's Dagger of Faith for general studies. You could also
check the studies of Gavin Langmuir in the collected essays in A History of
AntiSemitism or Paul Hyam's article on "the Jewish Minority in England" in
the Journal of Jewish Studies 25 (1974). There are many studies on
antiJewish polemic in Christian theological and homiletical writing, and
also some on antiChristian polemic in Jewish writing, and you might sweep
the bibliographies to the above works, also Dahan on Jewish-Christian
relations and recent work on the mendicants -- there was a whole conference
on this topic at St. Louis Univ. a year and a half ago. Or you might just
try looking under "disputation" in the Encyclopedia Judaica, too -- this is
not exactly a sermon but a public debate between Jewish and Christian
exegetes in which the Jews were forced to participate. If you can read
Hebrew, you can still read the records of some of them (Yehiel of Paris,
Nahmanides at the disputation of Tortosa, Joseph haMeqanneh).
Susan Einbinder
Hebrew Union College
Cincinnati, OH
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|