Living Letters of the Law. Jeremy Cohen
crafted Jew, from Augustine of Hippo to Thomas Aquinas. In prior publications I have studied the contribution of Dominican and Franciscan friars to Christian perceptions of Jews and Judaism in the High Middle Ages;2 here I examine key chapters in the earlier history of the “hermeneutical Jew”—that is, the Jew as constructed in the discourse of Christian theology, and above all in Christian theologians' interpretation of Scripture.3 On what basis did a Bernard of Clairvaux come to identify the Jews as the living letters of biblical law, whose survival, not whose destruction, best served God's plan for the triumph of the Catholic Church? How did this idea take shape in the thought of Augustine, and how did early medieval churchmen adapt the Augustinian idea to the changing world of European Christendom? What happened in the twelfth century to undermine, however gradually, the presuppositions of Augustine's idea, even as theologians like Bernard did not hesitate to reaffirm it, and where, set against this background, do the thirteenth-century friars and their attack on rabbinic literature fit into our story?
In addressing these questions, this book does not survey the oftstudied policies of the Catholic Church and of secular rulers toward European Jewish communities, nor does its focus fall primarily on the interactions of medieval Jews and Christians. Beyond demonstrating the phenomenon of the hermeneutically crafted Jew in Christian theology of the Middle Ages, I have not dedicated my book to advancing any particular thesis concerning the chronology or the key figures of the Jewish-Christian dispute. Rather, I attempt a threefold contribution to an understanding of the place of the Jews in the cultural and intellectual history of medieval Christendom. First, by analyzing the developing ideas of the Jew in medieval Christian thought, I hope to add to our appreciation of the theologians responsible for these ideas; in some cases, existing scholarly treatments of their doctrine concerning the Jews remain incomplete. Second, as a whole, my book maps evolving attitudes toward Jews and Judaism among Christian intellectuals from late antiquity until the High Middle Ages. Although I have made no attempt to provide an all-inclusive survey, I have endeavored to highlight the most interesting and influential patterns in the theological mentality of the period. Third, I elaborate a new basis for dealing with these issues that will, I believe, allow us to advance beyond the conclusions of previous scholarship.
That Christianity accorded the Jews theological importance is hardly a recent discovery; as we shall see, medieval Jews themselves recognized that importance and occasionally pointed it out to their Christian overlords. With the growth of medieval and Jewish studies at modern universities, many investigators of the past century have identified, catalogued, edited, annotated, summarized, and described the literature of medieval religious polemic. Some have moved beyond avowedly polemical texts and authors to mine large collections of Christian sources for all of their comments on Jews and Judaism. Still others have written valuable monographic studies of particular polemical texts or of actual disputations. As this book proceeds, students of the field will readily discern my indebtedness to the efforts of numerous predecessors and colleagues. Yet I believe that much of this prior research has stopped short of a sufficiently comprehensive analysis of the Christian thought in which Jews and Judaism figure significantly, an analysis which accurately gauges the depth and complexity of that significance. Specifically, it does not suffice to comb through the works of a Christian theologian, to amass all of his comments concerning Jews and Judaism, to organize the citations according to their ostensive subjects, and then to assess these data relative to the statements of other theologians— prior, contemporary, and later. Although such a procedure may track the impact of the Christian doctrine on the Jews that one author may have bequeathed to his successors, it is incapable of elaborating the meaning of a given text or attitude within its own historical setting. For it unfairly assumes that Christian writers and readers of the past shared the concerns of the modern historian—that is, the topical categories of anti-Judaism used to classify the data amassed—and deliberately formulated their respective attitudes accordingly. This method of study typically overlooks the broader matrix of theological issues in which that of the Jews assuredly took its place, but only as one cog in a larger wheel. One ought not simply to ask how the intellectual background of a particular writer, the events of his life, and the climate of his times may have resulted in his contribution to our story. Where the data permit, one must struggle to analyze that contribution against the referential system defined by the larger corpus of the theologian's writings and by related texts that afford them an instructive cultural context.
I therefore proceed from the premise that the origins, the character, and the role of the hermeneutical Jew derive from a theological agenda encompassing much more than the Jews themselves; and I devote my energies here to pinpointing the place of the Jews within that agenda. New Testament and patristic scholars have already recognized the value of such an approach, which has also figured in Frank Manuel's recent study of Judaism in postmedieval Christian eyes. Yet the important advances made by recent historians, literary critics, and historians of art notwithstanding, a systematic study of the function of the Jew in medieval Christianity remains a desideratum. Regrettably, in his book Manuel merely devoted a brief introductory chapter to the subject—with not a single footnote!—and hastily discounted the Middle Ages as “a thousand-year estrangement” that severed any meaningful connection between Christian theological scholarship and Judaism.4 Although the connections between medieval churchmen and the Jews (hermeneutically crafted or not) may not have struck Manuel as interesting or consequential, they deserve the historian's attention nonetheless. Even if, in his inception, in his function, and in his veritable power in the Christian mind-set, the hermeneutical Jew of late antique or medieval times had relatively little to do with the Jewish civilization of his day, his career certainly influenced the Christian treatment of the Jewish minority, the sole consistently tolerated religious minority, of medieval Christendom. Medieval Christian perceptions of this Jew's personality contributed amply to the significance of Judaism and anti-Judaism in Western intellectual and cultural history. Viewed more broadly, these perceptions shed light on the place and purpose of the “other” in the collective mentality of the medieval Christian majority.
Although my interest lies with the hermeneutically crafted Jew of the Middle Ages and his distinguishing characteristics, the medieval churchmen I discuss were clearly not the first—or the last—Christians to construct a Jew in accordance with the needs of their theology. Undeniably, our story begins in medias res; and, seeking an instructive context for it, one might well situate it at the center of three concentric spheres of late ancient theological concern with the Jew. In two cases, considerations of time and space will allow neither for a comprehensive overview of the extant sources nor even for a hasty survey of recent scholarship. Still, these expressions of early Christianity's interest in Judaism constitute the foundation of the medieval intellectual history I relate, and they justly demand attention, however selective and limited.
First, the books of the New Testament—above all the Gospels and Acts, several of the Pauline epistles, and Hebrews—abound with representations of the Jews and Judaism, many of them hostile. Together, these characterizations in Christian Scripture attest to a process whereby first-century Christians began to assert the validity of their beliefs by negating those of “mainstream” Jews. Owing to the origins of Christianity within the Jewish community, much of this anti-Jewish discourse undoubtedly stemmed from disputes over biblical messianic prophecy between the earliest Christians—themselves Jews—and other Jews who refused to countenance their Christological convictions. Although countless passages throughout the New Testament give expression to such processes then at work, we shall here dwell briefly on the earliest and foremost of these Jewish Christians whose ideas have survived: Paul, Christianity's presumably first and self-proclaimed apostle to the Gentiles.
As Paul sought converts for the church from outside the Jewish community, he portrayed the Jews and Judaism with an ambivalence that would have far-reaching theological consequences, both in the very fact of its ambiguity and in the wide array of conflicting interpretations it invited. Whether its real opponents were Jewish Christians who required circumcision of Gentile proselytes entering the church or Jews with no Christian leanings, Paul's Epistle to the Galatians distinguishes sharply between faith in Jesus and the observance of the Torah. “We ourselves, who are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners, yet who know that a man is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Christ Jesus…, because by works of the law shall no one be justified”