Few Jews, historically speaking, have engaged with the first-century Apostle to the Gentiles. The modern period has witnessed a burgeoning interest, however, with treatments reflecting profound concerns about the nature of Jewish authenticity and the developing intercourse between Jews and Christians. In exploring these issues, Jewish commentators have presented Paul in a number of apparently contradictory ways. He is both a bridge and a barrier to interfaith harmony; both the founder of Christianity and a convert to it; both an anti-Jewish apostate and a fellow traveller on the path to Jewish self-understanding; and both the chief architect of the Judeo-Christian foundations of Western thought and their destroyer. The goal of the present volume is to outline and explain these aspects of the Jewish debate about Paul, as represented in the works of individual Jewish theologians, religious leaders, biblical scholars, artists, musicians, playwrights, novelists, philosophers, and psychoanalysts of the last 150 years.

We will begin with an account of the popular Jewish view of Paul, which is often understood to be derived from a premodern tradition of hostility towards the apostle and which regards him as the damnable inventor of Christianity and the ultimate cause of centuries of Jewish suffering. Here it will be argued that claims for an ancient origin of this hostility have been exaggerated and that the real roots of modern popular Jewish antipathy lie in the apostle's association with much more recent sociocultural developments (Chapter one).