During the High Middle Ages, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, primarily in Ashkenaz, there was a growing Jewish interest in patristic biblical exegesis, as is reflected in the emerging Jewish polemical anti-Christian works of the time. 1 In this article, I would like to suggest that traces of this

* Some of the ideas in this article were presented on several occasions: a lecture at the conference on the Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, at Oxford University, February 2017; a seminar lecture at the Department of Religion, at Princeton University, October 2017 (sponsored by the Program in Judaic Studies); a seminar lecture at the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, at Stanford University, October 2018; a lecture presented at the Medieval Studies Colloquium, at Yale University, October 2018; and a seminar lecture at the Rhetoric Department, at University of California, Berkeley, December, 2018. I would like to thank all the participants of these conferences and seminars for their valuable remarks. In particular, I would like to express my deep gratitude to Daniel Boyarin, Lesley Smith, Ayelet Even-Ezra, Martha Himmelfarb, Ra ‘anan Boustan, Ariel Mayse, and Micha Perry for their valuable comments following my lectures. Finally, I want to thank the anonymous readers of this article and to Yehuda Liebes, Gideon Bohak, Israel Yuval, Yosef Schwartz, and Joel Hecker for their numerous suggestions and comments, which are incorporated in this final version of the article. This article was made possible thanks to the generous support of the Lady Davis Fellowship Trust at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.