Living Letters of the Law. Jeremy Cohen
would dictate [annuente iustitia]” and not to oppress the Jews—like any other rightful component of Roman society—“in unreasonable fashion [contra rationis ordinem].”79
Alongside Roman law, Gregory also inherited from his predecessors long-established theological and exegetical traditions of Adversus ludaeos, most of which he incorporated unquestioningly into his own writings. And yet, as we have seen, the very monistic impulse that collapsed the barriers between Romanitas and Christianitas in his Catholic worldview—thus impelling him to enforce the statutory protection of the Jews—detracted in his thought from the doctrinal considerations that had undergirded Augustine's doctrine of Jewish witness. Augustine had accorded the Jews a distinct, constructive testimonial function in a properly ordered Christian society, precisely because of those intermediate categories, imperfect but valuable nonetheless, that distinguished his biblical hermeneutic, his reading of terrestrial history, and his anthropology. Gregory, however, true to his postclassical “grammar of reconciliation and complementarity,” devalued the literal meaning of Holy Scripture, rejected the secular neutrality of historical events, and saw little redeeming social worth in the sexuality of the human body. From his exegetical vantage point, the Jews surely pursued and embodied the literal sense of the Bible, denying the reciprocity and continuity between Old Testament and New, thwarting the interests of the church.80 Now that Christianity had spread as far as England, what pagans still required Jewish testimony to validate the scriptural evidence for Christianity?81 Gregory's reading of history similarly depreciated the Jewish contribution to Christendom. Set against his allegorical interest in the old dispensation, his historical concern focused on the new, Christian order, that which mediated the distance between this world and the other, extending from Christ's first appearance on earth until the second. Whereas Augustine likened the periods in a human life to the divisions of all of terrestrial history, Gregory posited the correspondence of the ages of a human being to those of the post-crucifixion church!82 This historical perspective invariably defined the Jew as obstructing the ministry of the incarnate Christ, even to the point of violent persecution and deicide. Christians are members of Christ, Jews of Antichrist.83 Moreover, inasmuch as the church's victory over paganism and heresy, coupled with its having outlived the empire, suggested that the end of history was near, the conversion of the Jews loomed large and urgent as a final obstacle to be surmounted in advance of the second coming.84 Finally, from the anti-terrestrial orientation of Gregorian anthropology, Judaism and Christianity could well appear antithetical. For the Jews, well recognized in late antiquity for their commitment to a life of marriage and sexual reproduction,85 exemplified an ungodly dedication to the pursuits and pleasures of the material world. If Augustine in his later years proved less eager to designate the Jewish people as carnal, Gregory did so repeatedly and without reservation. In the days of Jesus, “the disbelieving people perceived the body of the Lord carnally [infidelis populus carnem Domini carnaliter intellexit], because they believed him to be completely human.”86 So too in his own day, Gregory identified the Jews with Antichrist, and thus with the members of the body of the beast (membra carnium eius) of Job 41:14: “All the wicked, who do not arise in desire to understand their spiritual homeland, are the flesh [carnes] of this Leviathan.”87
Whereas the Jew had provided exegetical and historical continuity in Augustinian thought, he now signified disunity and discontinuity in Gregory's Christian scheme of things. This pope's meticulous, perhaps obsessive concern for proper order, coupled with his veneration of tradition, perpetuated and institutionalized the right of Jews to live as Jews in Christendom. Yet the Jew of Christendom, whose survival Augustine had considered effectively harmless and instructive, endures as the enemy in Gregorian doctrine. The demeaning but otherwise restrained Augustinian descriptions of the Jews as book-bearing slaves, desks, librarians, and “guardians of our books” (capsarii, scriniaria, librarii, custodes librorum nostrorum) simply do not appear in Gregory's writings. His Jews serve the interests of Antichrist and the devil. To perfect Christian unity, the church must work vigorously to convert them, albeit while observing the practical dictates of “Slay them not.”
Augustine had constructed the Jew as a fossilized relic of antiquity, a Jew who, in fact, had never existed. Doctrinal and hermeneutical factors may have caused Pope Gregory the Great to retreat from the logic of these Augustinian constructions, but hardly in order to abandon the policy they had spawned. Ambivalence and contradiction continued to characterize constructions of Jews and Judaism in Christian theology; the constructions themselves, embedded in the dictates of Christian theology and hermeneutics, continued to enjoy a life of their own.
1. Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale: Les Quatre Sens de l'écriture, Théologie 41–42, 59 (Paris, 1959–64), I, 2:537–48 (quotation on 538). See also René Wasselynck, “L'Influence del' exégèse de S. Grégoire le Grand sur les commentaires bibliques médiévaux (viie-xiie s.),” RTAM 32 (1965), 157–204.
2. Walter Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages, 2d ed. (New York, 1962), p. 37.
3. Edward A. Synan, The Popes and the Jews in the Middle Ages New York, 1965), P. 35.
4. Kenneth R. Stow, Catholic Thought and Papal lewry Policy, 1555–1593, Moreshet:Studies in Jewish History, Literature and Thought 5 (New York, 1976), p. xix and n. 12; Walter Pakter, Medreval Canon Law and the Jews, Münchener Universitätsschriften—Juristiche Fakulät—Abhandlungen zur Rechtswissenschaftlichen Grundlagenforschung68 (Ebelsbach, Germany 1g88), pp. 62 n.75, 91ff.; and Gilbert Dahan, Les Intellectuels chrétiens et les luifs au Moyen Age (Paris, rggo), pp. 137ff. (esp. withn. 4). For a revisionist view of Gregory's Jewish policy, to be cited agaln below, see ErnstBaltrusch, “Gregor der Grosse und sein Verhältnis zum römischen Recht am Beispiel seiner Politik gegenüber den Juden,” Histortsche Zeitschrift 2591994), 39–58.
5. Previous treatments of Gregory and the Jews include Solomon Katz, “Pope Gregory the Great and the Jews,” JQR, n.s. 24 (1933–34), III-36; James Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue: A Study in the Origins of Antisemitism (London, 1934), pp. 210–21; Salo Wittmayer Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, zd ed. (New York, 195–83), j:zgff., zqzff.; and Bernard S. Bachrach, Early Medieval Jewish Policy in Western Europe (Minneapolis, Minn., 1977), pp 35–39.
6. Gregory, Epistulae 1.34, CCSL 140:42 (Shlomo Simonsohn, ed., ASJD, 492–1404, Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies: Studies and Texts 94 [Toronto, 19881, p. 3). Here and throughout, I have followed the numeration of Dag Norberg, ed., Sancti Gregorii Magni Registrum Epistularum, CCSL 140–14oA; discrepancies from the numeration of the MGH are noted in 140 A:1182–83.
7. Gregory, Epistulae 2.45, CCSL 140:137 (Simonsohn, ASJD, 492–1404, p. 7); cf. Codex theodosianus 16.8.9, in Amnon Linder, ed., The Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation(Detroit, Mich., 1987), pp 189–91.
8. Gregory, Epistulae 1.45, CCSL 140:59 (Simonsohn, ASJD, 492–1404 pp. 4–5).
9. Ibid. 9.196, CCSL 140 A:750–52 (Simonsohn, ASJD, 492–1404, pp. 19–20), Cf. Linder, Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation, pp. 287–89, 398–402; and see also Bachrach, Early Medieval Jewish Policy, pp. 153–56 n. 5, and Jean Juster, Les Iuifs dans l’Empire romain: Leur condrtion juridique, économique et sociale(Paris, 1914), 1:3 53–390.
10. Gregory, Epistulae 13.13, CCSL 140 A:1013–14(Simonsohn, ASJD, 492–1404, pp. 23–24).
11. Ibid. 8.25, CCSL 140 A:546–47 (Simonsohn, ASJD, 492–1404, pp 15–16). On the subsequent history of the Sicut ludaeis bull and formula, see Solomon Grayzel, “The Papal Bull Sicut Judaeis,” in Studies and Essays in Honor of Abraham A. Neuman, ed. Meir Ben-Horin et al. (Leiden, Netherlands, 1962), pp. 243–80; and Shlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews: History, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies: Studies and Texts 109 (Toronto, 1991), pp. 39–94.
12. Gregory, Epistulae 1.34, 1.45, 13.13, cited above, in nn. 6, 8, 10. On Gregory's conversionist policy toward the Jews, see Bernhard Blumenkranz, Juifs et Chrétiens dunsle monde