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Luther referred to, which he himself knew only because a Christian friend, the Hebraist Wolfgang Capito, had shown him a manuscript of the work, which he had received along with other Hebrew books from Constantinople. Citing Capi- to’s opinion that similar things were found in no other Jewish book, he argued that the work had likely been written “in ancient times” by some unknown au- thor and hardly reflected the opinion of “the community as a whole”.26 Despite these claims, there is ample evidence that Toledot Yeshu did circulate among Jews, and that the latter did not regard it a peripheral tradition. As a matter of fact, early modern Jewish scribes were no less eager than Christian Hebraists to copy the work when they got hold of it – even if their purpose was obviously different. In certain cases, they could even turn to the printed edi- tions. All the extant manuscripts of the Huldreich version, for instance, depend on the printed text, witnessing to the Jews’ interest in reclaiming the narra- tive in contexts where original Hebrew manuscripts were perhaps difficult to find.27 In the Netherlands, it seems the Huldreich and the Wagenseil Toledot texts were combined and translated into Yiddish along with whatever material was available in manuscript in order to produce a more coherent version of the story.28 It was likely also from the Netherlands that the so-called Slavic or Tam u-Muad versions, which expanded on the earlier tradition and turned the story of Mary’s adultery into full-fledged novel, started to spread.29 Both the Netherlands and the Italian peninsula witness to an intense revival of polemical activity in the 17th and 18th centuries – presumably under the in- fluence of Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had imported the longstanding Iberian tradition of engaging in fierce scriptural polemics with Christianity.30 In 26 Fraenkel-Goldschmidt 2006, 411–413. That Toledot Yeshu was seen as apocryphal by the Jews them- selves had been argued just a few years earlier by the Humanist scholar Johannes Reuchlin (1999, 29), referring to Paul of Burgos, Scrutinum scriptuarum II, 6 (Burgos 1591, 384). 27 Meerson/Schäfer 2014, vol. 1, 25, vol. 2, 238–240; see Yoffie 2011. See especially Ms. Frankfurt-am-Main, Universitätsbibliothek, Heb 249 (dated 1812), f. 2r: “I already lost hope to find a (single) word written by our people concerning the story of Yeshu ha-Notsri, since all the nation is wandering in darkness, and there is no one who knows a thing about it, little or big, and who can testify against the Christians and against their numerous books full of all the virtues and greatness of Yeshu. But when my friend Green- berg returned from Leipzig, he showed me a copy from a booklet that he had found in the local library; the name of the book is ‘The Generation of Yeshu ha-Notsri’ I was very happy to find some (evidence), and I asked him to make a copy for me too. Thus, here is the book, published in the year 1705, and kept in the National Library of Leipzig under the number G336” (quoted in Meerson/Schäfer 2014, vol. 2, 240). 28 See Michels 2017 and forthcoming. This seems to have been the case for Leib ben Oser, whose Yiddish text of Toledot Yeshu is followed by a biography of Sabbatai Zvi and Yosef della Reina, as if to underline the link between the three pseudo-messianic figures. For an edition and translation of that text, see Rosenzweig, forthcoming. For the legend of Yosef della Reina as preserved in this manuscript, see now Baumgarten 2018. 29 Schlichting 1982. 30 For the Netherlands, see Popkin 1992, 1994. For Italy, see Lasker 1993; Horbury 1993. On Jewish anti- Christian polemics in early modern Italy, see the research project directed by Prof. Károly Dániel Dobos at the University of Budapest, http://www.jcrpolemicsinitaly.at. Some Remarks on Toledot Yeshu | 35www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/1