I spent much of shabbos reading a recounting of the Medieval Dispositions (when Christians would put Jewish texts literally on trial and have Jewish leaders defend them to prevent them from being burned/banned) (hot girl shit reading this on a Saturday night yeah I know) and wow this is the best summary I've seen for the differences between the two faiths. The full text is pasted after the read more
I just really love the "neither is better than the other, they are just different. Two people doing the same thing with different goals and values" vibe
But yeah no this book is so interesting, especially the few dispositions where the Jews won despite the nature and purpose of these trials lol
Jewish Christian Disputations of the Middle Ages by Hyam Maccoby
"But there is also here a more fundamental point, relating to the difference between Judaism and Christianity. In Judaism, the Aggadah is subordinate whereas in Christianity, the Aggadah, or what corresponds to the Aggadah, is central. Christianity is an Aggadic religion. This difference accounts for the basic lack of rapprochement and mutual understanding in the disputations.
In Judaism, the centre is occupied by the Law, which regulates the behaviour of the community and the individual. It is in the sphere of law that the serious effort towards definition and preci- sion occurs. Here it was that methods of formal logic and dialectic were developed in order to arrive at hard-and-fast solutions of any problems that arose. But there was no such logic or dialectic for dealing with matters which Christians would have called 'theologi- cal' (there is in fact no word for theology in Hebrew). Here the methods used by the Jews were literary, aphoristic, parabolic, intuitive. There was no real argument on such matters, for in this area contradictory propositions could both be true. Thus, in this poetic area, it could be true both that the Messiah was born at the time of the destruction of the Temple, and that he was yet to be born. Both statements could exist simultaneously in the yielding web of the Aggadah without arousing any pressing need for explanation
...
In Christianity, the situation was very different. To have correct, and precisely defined theological beliefs was a matter of the utmost urgency. Wars of theological factions could take place, on the question of whether the substance of the Son was similar (homoiousios) or identical (homoousios) to that of the Father. Heretics could be burnt at the stake for theological views which, in Judaism, would have been regarded as a matter of personal idiosyncrasy. In Judaism, on the other hand, someone might be excommunicated for holding the view that a particular kind of oven was not an object of ritual impurity (or rather, not for holding such a view but for refusing to bow to a majority decision of competent rabbis against it-see b BM, 59a). Such precisionism in matters of practice seemed to Christians ridiculous and unspiritual; but their own insistence on faith rather than works led to a precisionism in matters of belief which seemed equally ridiculous to the Jews. Jews might split hairs about 'the egg that was laid on a Festival', but Christians split hairs about the substance of the Son. People split hairs on things that they consider important: to Jews the important thing is how people act; to Christians, how they believe"