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Abstract

The Jewish scholar Yom Ṭov Lipman Mühlhausen, who was active in Prague around the turn of the fifteenth century, is known above all as a religious polemicist, thanks to his widely disseminated work Sefer Niẓaḥon. The present article argues that inter-religious polemic – notwithstanding the considerable weight the Sefer Niẓaḥon places on arguments against Christianity – constitutes only one facet of a broader project that finds expression in both the structure and the content of the book. This project is closely bound up with Lipman’s interest in integrating philosophical and Kabbalistic knowledge, an interest that is also evident in his other works.

The primary aim Lipman pursued in the Sefer Niẓaḥon was to popularise, drawing on the writings of Maimonides, a rationalistic interpretation of the Jewish faith among wider strata of Ashkenazic society. He explicitly responded to what he perceived as the shortcomings of late-medieval Ashkenazic religiosity – in particular the widespread use of anthropomorphic language in prayer and literal readings of the Talmudic Haggadah – by grounding Jewish identity primarily in a set of beliefs resting on carefully delineated theological principles. To reinforce this vision of the Jewish community, Lipman invokes in his book various groups of Jewish dissenters as rhetorical adversaries.

Through the medium of literary polemic, Lipman addressed the intellectual challenges of his time by imagining communities of ‘others’ while simultaneously fashioning a new image of his own community. This project cannot, however, be viewed in isolation from its intellectual surroundings. Lipman’s repeated criticism of the sceptics (meharherim) shows that he was aware of the dangers inherent in unbridled philosophical speculation; this awareness may well have converged with that of his Christian contemporaries, as expressed in debates about academic heterodoxy and heresy and their influence on the community of believers. Parallels to Lipman’s views on authorship and literary practice can likewise be found in the approaches of several late-medieval Christian theologians. In this respect, he was a participant in a broader literary culture.

Citation

Milan Žonca, ‘The “Imagined Communities” of Yom Tov Lipman Mühlhausen: Heresy and Communal Boundaries in Sefer Niẓẓaḥon’, in The Jews of Europe Around 1400: Disruption, Crisis, and Resilience, ed. Christoph Cluse and Lukas Clemens (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2018), 119–43.

@incollection{zonca2018a,
    author    = {Žonca, Milan},
    editor    = {Cluse, Christoph and Clemens, Lukas},
    year      = {2018},
    title     = {The '{Imagined} {Communities}' of {Yom} {Tov} {Lipman} {Mühlhausen}: {Heresy} and {Communal} {Boundaries} in {Sefer} {Niẓẓaḥon}},
    booktitle = {The {Jews} of {Europe} {Around} 1400: {Disruption}, {Crisis}, and {Resilience}},
    publisher = {Harrassowitz},
    address   = {Wiesbaden},
    pages     = {119--143},
}