Living Letters of the Law. Jeremy Cohen
attributed the guilt of the Jews to error, rather than deliberate intention; for, as he alluded to the mystery of the incarnation in 1 Corinthians 2:8, had they known it, “they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”24 Presented with the goods of their redemption, the promises made to their forefathers, the signs of Jesus' miracles, and the bountiful testimony of Scripture, these Jews nonetheless displayed no will to believe:
For Judea “awaited the light but did not see,” because she persisted in prophesying that the redeemer of humankind would come but did not recognize him upon his coming; and the eyes of the mind, which she opened to hope, she closed to the light's actual presence. She did not see the beginning of daybreak, inasmuch as she unreliably neglected to acknowledge the birth of the holy church, and although she believed that it was weakened by the deaths of its members, she did not know what power it was achieving.25
The Jews' blindness and rejection of their own salvation proceeded from their immersion in worldly affairs and pleasures, much as the Hebrew patriarch Isaac craved the meat prepared by his son Esau and unwittingly transmitted the true, spiritual blessing of God's covenant to Jacob. The Jews could respond only to the outward significance of Jesus' miracles; they lacked the ability to understand the Bible spiritually as one must, and, crippled by their own self-reliance, they worried too much over the sins of others to tend to their own.26 Throughout their wicked designs and behavior, Gregory saw the handiwork of the devil: “Armed, the enemy of old ravished the Jewish people, because he extinguished the life of faith among them with darts of fraudulent advice, so that precisely in the conviction that they cleaved to God, they may oppose his rule.”27 God consequently deprived the Jews of the prophecies, miracles, and virtues they had enjoyed under the Old Testament before Jesus, transferring them all to the previously despised Gentiles, with whom he now inaugurated a new, superior covenant:
While the people of the Jews remained under the rule of the Law, and the whole Gentile world knew none of God's precepts, the former appeared to rule through their faith, and the latter lay deeply suppressed because of their disbelief. But when Judea denied the mystery of the Lord's incarnation, the Gentile world believed, and the rulers sank into disfavor, and they who had been suppressed in the guilt of their perfidy were raised in the liberty of the true faith…. For when He removed the spoils of virtue from the Jews, He housed the splendor of his gifts in the heart of the Gentiles, wherein, on account of its faith, he considered it fitting to reside. This in fact occurred when the people of the Jews accepted the words of God only according to the letter, which kills, and the Gentile world, having been converted, penetrated them with the spirit, which gives life.28
Just as he did to the house of Eli and to Samuel, respectively, God disowned the Jews and adopted the Gentiles, but he also transformed the nature of his covenant: Letter gave way to spirit, law to grace, harshness to mildness, divine vengeance to salvation, and death to life. No wonder the Israelites at Sinai received their laws standing beneath the mountain, whereas Jesus preached his gospel directly from the mountain itself.29
“Her appearance having been altered,” wrote Gregory, Judea still “is tortured by grief” over her plight,30 and the Jews, like Eli's sons, remain in an impiety from which there is no return.31 Turning from the Jews of first-century Palestine to those of his own day, Gregory followed Augustine and reckoned the Jews' disbelief, which construes the loss of light as advantageous, an integral part of their punishment.32 Though contemporary Jews encounter the Christological testimonies of Scripture and receive exhortation from Christian preachers on a daily basis, they continue to insult God in their self-inflicted blindness, incurring divine wrath still further and compounding their misery.33 And yet, as long as the Jews mingle with other peoples, their condemnation by God serves a didactic purpose; Job, Gregory explained in the Moralia, thus “trains the mind's eyes directly on the singular misfortune of the Israelite people, and, with the destruction of one people, he demonstrates what punishment awaits all those that are arrogant.”34 Moreover, on numerous occasions in his writings, Gregory anticipated the final conversion of Israel, which will ultimately redress the frustrations and failures now experienced by Christian missionaries in preaching to the Jews. Just as Job finally received true consolation from his brethren, so will Christ and his church take comfort in the spiritual faith of carnal Israel:
The holy Church now is troubled by the aversion of the Hebrews and then is restored by their conversion…. That is, those who recover from the error of their earlier disbelief and forsake the perverse life on account of which they had resisted the teachers of righteousness console Christ and console the Church. Is it not an awful shame to preach futilely to hard hearts, to take the trouble to demonstrate the truth, but to find no compensation for one's efforts—in the conversion of one's listeners? Nevertheless, the ensuing progress of their listeners is a great comfort for preachers.
Why, then, did Job's brethren approach him only after all of his suffering had passed? “Truly because the Hebrews at the time of his [that is, Christ's] passion, rejecting the proclamation of the faith, refused to believe that he whom they had established by his death to be a man was God…. But at the end of time all Israelites shall join together in the faith…and go back to the protection of him whom they had fled.” Only then will the salvific efforts of Christ, prefigured by the suffering Job, be fully rewarded. Hence Gregory's resonant call to the Jewish people: “Thus let the believing Hebrews gather at the end of the world and redeem their pledges of offerings to the savior of humankind in the power of his divinity, as if to the healed Job.”35
Gregory's Christian reading of Jewish history may have forecast the happy ending that Paul had envisioned, but major obstacles remained. The devil still abides among the Jews, maintained Gregory, and through the agency of Antichrist he continues to enlist their support. “The synagogue opposes its founder, not out of fear as previously, but now in outright resistance. Being transformed into the limbs of the devil and believing that the man of lies is God, the more it is raised up high against the faithful, the more it prides itself that it is the body of God.”36 As Gregory noted in his correspondence,37 the bonds between Antichrist and Judaism continue to undermine the integrity of Christendom,38 and he expected more blatant cooperation between the two powers in advance of the final redemption. Even as Jews will flock to the church at the end of days, some of their coreligionists will continue to persecute them for doing so.39 In sum, the enmity of the synagogue toward Christianity endures and intensifies. “The wounds it inflicted on the believers upon the advent of the savior are clearly less than those with which it seeks, even now, to strike the Church with the advent of the Antichrist. For it makes itself ready for that time, in order to encumber the lives of the faithful with its collected strength.”40
THE LOGIC OF GREGORIAN ANTI-JUDAISM
Although medieval historians consistently accord Gregory an important role in the evolution of public policy toward the Jews of European Christendom, the specific characterization of his attitudes has varied considerably. Some scholars have written of Gregory's “deep-seated aversion” and his “deepest horror and loathing” for the Jews;41 others have praised his “scrupulous concern for justice and humanity,” labeling him the Jews' intransigent protector.42 Meanwhile, some investigators have highlighted the disparity between the Jewish policy of Gregory's papal bulls and the outlook expressed in his doctrinal-exegetical works, perhaps attributing greater significance to one or the other,43 whereas others have viewed Gregory's attitude toward the Jews as essentially coherent.44 Yet nearly all Gregorian scholars acknowledge Gregory's tremendous debt to the doctrine of Augustine, and the ensuing appraisal of Gregory proceeds from a comparison of the ideas of the two churchmen—both their specific formulations on Jews and Judaism and the more fundamental doctrinal principles in which these formulations were grounded.
On one hand, even though Gregory never cited Augustine's exegesis of Psalm 59:12, his dependence on Augustinian teaching concerning the Jews is evident. We recall that Augustine grounded the doctrine of Jewish witness, as elaborated in the De civitate Dei and elsewhere, in the historical reality of the Jews' survival and, in particular, in their subjugated status under Roman rule: “Yet the Jews who killed him [Jesus] and chose not to believe in him…, having been vanquished