Bénédicte Sère (Université Paris-Nanterre) presents, "Imposing Faith, Questioning Belief: Jewish Responses to Christian Pressure in Fifteenth-Century Sefarad"

With a response from Prof. Menachem Lorberbaum (Tel Aviv University). See the abstract below: 

"This paper examines how fifteenth-century Sephardic Jewish thinkers confronted the Christian Late Medieval definition of faith as obedience, confession, and institutional control. Rather than revisiting Jewish–Christian polemics, I ask what the Latin Ecclesia—as a regime of authority—did to Judaism, and what Jewish responses reveal about the inner logic of Christian fides itself. 

Under the pressure of conversion and coercion, belief (emunah) became a problem for Judaism. Forced to engage a Christian grammar of faith as normative assent, Jewish authors momentarily align with fides, treating belief as a criterion of religious identity. This alignment, however, generates acute anxiety: if faith rests on inquiry and choice, it becomes unstable, reversible, and detached from inherited tradition.

Jewish thinkers respond by structurally undoing faith as an object of command. Through a radical reconfiguration of belief—as inward, non-coercible, and affective—they neutralize its governability. Faith is relocated from confession to conscience, from obedience to inner necessity, from dogma to non-obligatory belief. These strategies produce a powerful resonance effect: they expose the limits of Christian faith as a technology of governance (cf. M. Foucault). By insisting that belief cannot be commanded, Jewish thought articulates a critique of fides as domination—and, in doing so, preserves faith precisely by rendering it ungovernable."

Bénédicte Sère is a historian of medieval Christianity and Judaism. She is Senior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France, Professor at Université Paris-Nanterre and EHESS-Paris (Centre d’études en Sciences du religieux). She works on late-medieval Ecclesiology, Jewish–Christian relations, and the history of belief, authority, and dogma. She is the author of Inventing the Church: The Pull of the Past in Ecclesial Politics (Columbia University Press, 2025) and has held visiting appointments at several U.S. institutions, including Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary.