Educational Media Reviews Online

Accomplished Judaica scholar, the late Hyam Maccoby, translated the transcripts of several infamous medieval disputations between leading Jewish and Christian scholars of Catholic Europe in a book titled, Judaism on Trial: Jewish-Christian Disputations in the Middle Ages (Littman, 1982). This groundbreaking work was dramatized in a made-for-TV movie of the same name that aired in December 1986. This DVD is a reissue of that television docudrama, which counts Maccoby himself as one of the screenwriters for this dramatic recreation of these public debates, which occurred in Spain.

Christopher Lee plays King James of Aragon, who in 1263 convenes a public disputation to prove the truth of Christianity to Spain’s significant Jewish population. Bob Peck plays Dominican Priest Fr. Pablo Christiani, a Jewish convert to Catholicism who will use arguments from the Talmud and scripture against his learned opponent. This is Rabbi Moses ben Nachman, or Nachmanides, whose serene and erudite presence and artful rhetoric wins the day, but ultimately causes his exile from his family in Spain.

This dramatic reenactment is polemic as apologia and, as such, will find a limited audience. While the points of argument are interesting to those with intellectual curiosity about the theology of messianism, the presentation leaves much to be desired. There are dramatic reimaginings of the good king James in bed with his paramour, praising the erudite Nachmanides, while the evil queen plots the downfall of the Jews as a way to get back at her more ecumenical husband. In this, the good guys—King James and Nachmanides—are very good. The bad guys—Fr. Pablo and his mentor, Fr. Raymund de Penjaforte (Bernard Hepton) as well as the vicious Queen Yolande (Helen Lindsay)—are straw men whose seething hatred of the Jews comes across as pathology. The acting is stiff at best. Furthermore, this is a poorly reproduced, grainy print that is also jumpy in places, requiring any audience to look past these limitations to the ham-fisted strength of the message.

Recommended only where interest in these arcane areas of medieval history and institutionalized anti-Semitism have exhausted all other resources.