Today's faith issues are shot through the modernity and relativism, ecumenism and cross‐culturalism, and growing politicization. These have provoked us to look afresh at “givens” like the Judaeo‐Christian tradition. The Cambridge Centre for the study of Jewish‐Christian Relations is one body of several in the field, and Edward Kessler, director of the centre, has contributed formative works to knowledge in the field. We think particularly of books like Jews and Christians in Conversation (Kessler et al., 2002) and the very recent Challenges in Jewish‐Christian Relations (Aitken and Kessler, 2006).
These form part of that wide bibliography on Jewish‐Christian relations (authors like Braybrooke and Fry, Korn and Novak, Holwerda and Wyschogrod) which is generously represented in the dictionary (over 50 pages of well‐chosen works under the themes of bible, theology, history by period up to modern, documents like that from Vatican II, journals, and earlier dictionaries like that of Cohn‐Sherbok (1991), and of Klenicki and Wigoder (1995), which the work under review is intended to update and replace). Braybrooke and Magonet, Boys and Pawlikowski, Bar‐Yosef and Melanie Wright are included in the some hundred international contributors to this new dictionary. Titles like Comparing Spiritualities; Abraham: Sign of Hope for Jews, Christians, and Muslims, Jews and Christians in Dialogue, Who Killed Jesus? and Two Covenants reveal some of the issues, which have both bound Judaism and Christianity together through the centuries, and broken them apart. The dictionary sure‐footedly identifies these common concerns – of covenant and salvation, atonement and being a chosen people.
For all that they share, there are many points of difference – over Christ/Jesus, for example, where the special relationship with God claimed by Christians in the New Testament is, for some what supersedes the special relationship with God claimed by Jews in the Talmud and Targum. This “supersession” argument is central to an understanding of relations between Jews and Christians over faith, with implications for how key ideas and beliefs like the Messiah, the Holy Spirit, creation, apocalypse, and eschatology are interpreted. Recognition theology shows how attempts to move on have been made. Yet history tells us how much “adversus Judaeos” sentiment has existed and still exists, in stereotypes in art and representations in literature and cinema, in polemic and politics, in general (like anti‐Semitism) and particular (like the Edith Stein and Jews for Jesus episodes). Some suggest that the two faiths have come together to resist the secularism of modernity and the relativism of postmodernity (on which Melanie Wright in the dictionary is exemplary). Biblically and exegetically, there are long‐standing debates about the “fifth gospel” in the book of Isaiah and the “suffering servant” (is it Israel or Jesus or neither?), about Jesus as a Jew, Judaising Christians, and, of course, the concept of covenant and the Holocaust or Shoah. Wider political and cultural resonances pick up on nationalism and Zionism and much else, and the historical context is filled out expertly, supported by that bibliography.
Jewish‐Christian relations have built up a historiography of their own, and the dictionary is good in mapping this out for readers familiar and unfamiliar with the terrain. Kessler's own entry on Jewish‐Christian Relations rightly notes the publication of Nostra Aetate in 1965 and the experience of the Holocaust as transformational in Christian writing about Judaism and Jewish writing about Christianity. Roy Eckardt, Paul van Buren, Karl Rahner and Martin Buber, are among those who shifted perspectives. The dictionary is strong, too, in identifying players in this cross‐faith territory – the Tantur Ecumenical Institute and the ICCJ or International Council of Christians and Jews, the Dabru Emet (“speak truth”) statement in 2000 and the Leo Baeck College in London.
There is an authoritative historical context, too, taking us back through to early disputes and interpretations and institutional decisions in the churches. A series of clear and relevant black and white maps is provided early on, and an index helps to pin down names – like John Chrysostom and Origen, Bonhoeffer and Rosenzweig, Tertullian and Adolf Hitler – which appear in many places. The dictionary takes no overt line on advocacy, although some will see implied positions in it, inevitably. Its coverage, content, and theological position, and editorial standards all make this work an attractive addition to any specialized theological collection in college and study, and there are many threads here which merit further – and international – study.
