Dov Honick, “How Christians Invented the Talmud: Jewish Stories and the Making of Medieval Anti-Judaism,” October 22 at 6 PM EST, to register: http://tiny.utk.edu/honick26

Dov Honick is a postdoctoral researcher at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris, where he works with MiDRASH, an ERC Synergy project on digital Hebrew paleography and the transmission of rabbinic literature. His research explores intellectual exchange between Jews and Christians in the medieval world, with particular interests in Christian Hebraism, rabbinic narrative and midrash, Hebrew manuscript culture, and the movement of Jewish stories across religious and communal boundaries. He received his Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from the University of Notre Dame in 2024 and has held fellowships and research appointments at the American Academy in Rome, the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, and, most recently, Yale University.

In the twelfth century, Christian writers began to describe the Talmud as a dangerous Jewish book filled with secrets, errors, and blasphemies. But what did these writers actually know when they claimed to know the Talmud? Both medieval polemicists and many modern historians have taken these references at face value, treating them as evidence of direct Christian engagement with the Talmud. This talk revisits some of the earliest Latin Christian encounters with rabbinic tradition and argues that their “Talmud” was not simply the Babylonian Talmud as a book. It was a constructed object, assembled from Jewish stories, homilies, liturgical traditions, and manuscript collections that circulated across medieval Jewish communities.

By following rabbinic tales as they moved from Jewish narrative culture into Christian polemic, this talk shows how Christians transformed Jewish sages into witnesses against Judaism itself. At stake is not only a revision to the history of Christian Hebraism, but a broader question: what happens when one religious community learns about another through fragments, translations, rumors, and hostile interpretation?