Saintly Subversions: The Role of Speech in the Polemics Between the Judas Kyriakos Legends and Toledot Yeshu’s Rabbi Yehuda

In hagiographic accounts, the fictitious Christian saint Judas Kyriakos is made to speak Hebrew-like words. In both his inventio and passio narratives, Judas Kyriakos’ voice is made to transverse the fraught landscape of Jewish conversion, and highlights his indelible Jewishness even long after his conversion to Christianity. Despite not being actual Hebrew, his pseudo-Hebrew gibberish has been labelled as Hebrew across sources for a millennium. The present essay examines how Judas Kyriakos’ speech is challenged and subverted by a parallel figure, Rabbi Yehuda, composed as his foil in the Jewish Toledot Yeshu tradition; and the ways in which doctrine, magic, polemic, and identity are all entangled within saintly speech in both legends. Specific case studies of Judas Kyriakos’ cult in the medieval trade cities of Provins and Ancona are analyzed to illustrate how his public veneration posed direct polemical threats to local Jewish communities, further necessitating the counter-narrative.