Birkat haMinim

[18] Some 24 "kinds" or sects are mentioned classically as falling within this category, a calculation attributed to the Palestinian Amora Yohanan ben haNapah, in a context where it was claimed their existence was the cause of Israel's exile.

[27] In 1898 Solomon Schechter, with Israel Abrahams, published a 9-10th century CE version of a Hebrew prayer which had been recovered from the Cairo Geniza,[28][29] and his subsequent findings would revolutionize the study of Jewish liturgy.

[40] The addition of Nazarenes to the standard reading suggested that, were the Talmudic accounts of the formulation of the prayer historically grounded, a Jewish consensus that Christians in their fold were heretical had consolidated itself already by the first decades after the destruction of the Second Temple.

[47] On one hand it is argued that backdating later practices and liturgy to the early post-destruction period suited the vested interest of rabbis in securing their authority by appeal to an earlier foundational moment, such as at Yavne.

[53][54][55][56]According to this standard account of the formulation ("fixing" i.e. tiqqen),[57][ak] the prayer emerged after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70CE, when Yohanan ben Zakkai and his disciples were permitted to settle in Yavne,[58] where they are said to have constituted a Torah academy for halakhic study, a bet din (court) to try capital cases,[59] with the issuing of nine enactments (taqqanoth).

At Yavne, the Pharisees interdicted sectarianism, expelled all those who did not belong to their group, excommunicated Jews of Christian observance, and expunged the biblical canon of all works written in Greek and having an apocalyptic tone, in order to establish an exclusivist orthodoxy.

[68] There is one instance in the Talmud of min being used specifically of Christians,[16] and it concerns one of the Yavne sages in the early period, excommunicated, like Akabia ben Mahalalel, for failing to accept the will of the rabbinic majority.

[69] This locus classicus concerns Talmudic accounts of the fate of Eliezer ben Hyrcanus who was arrested on suspicion of minut[am] and subsequently brought to trial on a heresy charge before a Roman judge.

He had had a casual encounter with a certain Yaakov of Kfar Sikhnin, calling himself a disciple of Jesus, where he experienced pleasure on hearing an halakhic judgment[ap] given in the name of Yeshua ben Pantiri/Yeshu ha-notsri.

However, David Flusser, emphasizing as a key piece of evidence a passage in the third "gate" or chapter of the very early Seder Olam, thought the reading conserved the earliest form, rooted in the Second Temple period, and that the Birkat haMinim as we now know it was the synthesizing handiwork of Shmuel ha-Katan.

[ar] Both the Gospel of Matthew and the Didache appear to date to approximately this period of Gamaliel's ascendency, and parts of them can be read as registering a similar paleo-Jewish Christian opposition to these stipulations.

[82] For the Jews/Judaeans have already agreed that if anyone should confess him to be Messiah he would become an excommunicate from the synagogue (aposunágōgos)[as][at]This, and other passages, for Martyn, reflected not events in Jesus's time, but in the environment of the Johannine community (c.70-100)[83] and the effect of the Birkat haMinim on them.

[90] Neither the Samaria-born Justin nor the figure depicted[au] as his Jewish interlocutor of gentile education, were familiar with Hebrew, something which strongly undermines the hypothesis that Trypho is to be identified with the bitterly anti-Christian[av] contemporary Yavne rabbi, Tarphon.

The scant evidence in the extant corpus of his huge output consists of three brief comments: (a) a remark in his commentary on the Psalms where he notes that the Jews still anathematize Christ, where the passage is too general to allow any such inference, and may merely echo Justin;[99] and two remarks in his Homilies on Jeremiah, one regarding Jewish cursing of Jesus and plotting against his followers (10.8.2), the other stating: "Enter the synagogue of the Jews and see Jesus flagellated by those with the language of blasphemy" (19.12.31)) These pieces of ostensible evidence likewise fail as testimony, Kimelman argues, because it is Christ, not Christians, who are cursed and no connection is made to prayers.

[100] Likewise Tertullian (155-ca.240) shows an awareness that the Jewish epithet for Christians is Nazareni, – which could be taken as an echo of some form of the Birkat haMinim mentioning noṣrim -and that among them there are those who dismiss him as the son of a prostitute (quaesturariae filius).

[108] Pirqoi ben Baboi does mention a prohibition on the benediction in Palestine, which some think might reflect censure of this particular prayer in an assumed ordinance laid down by Heraclius,[109] but the one exception is Agobard of Lyons who in 826/7 cites Jerome on synagogue maledictions and states Jews he interviewed confirmed the point.

[110] It may reflect peculiarities in the local Lyon liturgy prior to the spread of Babylonian geonic authority to Europe marked by the revision of prayer books according to the model formed in the Seder Rav 'Amram Gaon.

[112] For Israel Yuval, vengeance on Gentiles as part of a messianic process came to play a key role in Ashkenazi thought as the cursing of non-Jews crystallised into a unique ritual.

[114] Much of this was not simply defensive, or inframural, but arose from genuine attempts to engage with Christian theologians over issues involving the correct interpretation of biblical texts in Hebrew cited in the Greek Gospels.

[99] Within the Jewish fold in this period, Maimonides explained the prayer as arising from exceptional circumstances that required a community response to the emergence of numerous minim who turned Jews away from God.

[bb] In the late 1230s, a convert from Judaism, Nicholas Donin brought to the notice of Pope Gregory IX a list of 35 passages in the Talmud that might form the ground for questioning that material.

[118]The result flowing from this information was that the Pope issued apostolic letters in 1239 to many European countries ordering a crackdown and seizure of Jewish books through England, France, Aragon, Navarre, Castile, León and Portugal.

[129] It was composed in the immediate aftermath of the execution of 80 Jews who had languished a year in jail on a charge brought by a convert, Peter, that Jewish rituals and prayers were derogatory of Christians and asked God that the latter be destroyed.

[130] Lipmann-Mühlhausen brushed off the interpretation given, claiming that minim simply meant zweifelte Ketzer[bg] heretics whose doubts left them wavering between Judaism and Christianity, and who, having neither religion, deserved death.

This was to have an important influence on Martin Luther, who quoted extensively from it in his vehemently anti-Judaic excoriation On the Jews and Their Lies (Von den Jüden und iren Lügen) of 1543.

[136] Pope Clement VIII's promulgation in 1596 of the Index of Prohibited Books, one of which was the Talmud, rules were set out for how Hebrew texts published within the ambit of the Catholic world were to be edited with regard to passages deemed hostile to Christians or blasphemous of their faith.

[bi] By the 17th century, the Cistercian Hebraist Giulio Bartolocci anticipated the modern view of the primitive text, arguing that the benediction, while targeting Christians, was mainly directed at others, whom both Jews and paleo-Christians would consider heretics, such as Theudas at Acts 5: 36.

Johann Christoph Wagenseil's Tela ignea Satanae ("The Flaming Arrows of Satan", 1681) deployed extensive quotes from Jewish writings in an attempt to skewer Judaism on a charge of enmity against Christianity.

Rabbinical tradition, unable to alter the sacred text, adds a dotted superscript over the verb, indicating the given reading was to be cancelled, and glossed it with a pun, suggesting that what was actually meant was that Esau had bitten (nashakh) his brother Jacob, who became the patriarch of the forefathers of the Jews, the Israelites.

In the prewar writings of Abraham Isaac Kook, the Ashkenazi chief rabbi in Mandatory Palestine and founder of the influential Mercaz HaRav yeshiva, Christianity is usually described as minut (heresy).