Living Letters of the Law. Jeremy Cohen
minimized the link between the Jews and their Bible; emphasizing the dissonance between the Judaism of Scripture and the Jews of his day, John constructed synagogue and church as mutually exclusive. He depicted the Jews as the bearers of evil intentions, insulting and dishonoring their biblical heritage, not misinterpreting it in ignorance. He demonized the Jews, elaborating their affinity with the devil, relegating them to the status of pagans, and at times, it would seem, even doubting their humanity. Though he called for Christians to abhor the Jews, not to attack them, he mapped out no place for Judaism in a properly ordered Christian world. Stroumsa has argued that the harsher, demonic anti-Judaism that I and other historians have deemed characteristic of the later Middle Ages thus had its origins in the fourth-century attitudes exemplified by Chrysostom.18 I would agree that the pattern of development in patristic perceptions of the Jews adumbrates that of our ensuing medieval story with strikingly suggestive similarities. I believe, however, that the medieval history related in this book constitutes more than just a repetition of a familiar tale.
No less than anything else, that which distinguished the medieval career of Christianity's hermeneutical Jew was the formative influence of Augustine of Hippo, who received Christian baptism within months after John Chrysostom began to deliver his sermons against Jews (and Judaizers) in Antioch.19 Augustine not only adopted a more moderate stance on the Jewish question than did his contemporary patristic colleagues like Chrysostom, Ambrose of Milan, and Cyril of Alexandria; his own Adversus ludaeos teaching, itself yet another explication of Paul, also endowed the Jews, their sacred texts, and their presence in Christendom with a new dimension to their purpose, one that has, in various ways, controlled the Western idea of the Jew ever since.
Augustine's teachings provide the third, most delimited sphere of contextual background to this study; but because of their formidable impact and authority among Christian theologians throughout the medieval period, the ideas of Augustine are an integral part of our story, and we must consider them at length. Part 1 of this book seeks to understand Augustine's acclaimed doctrine of Jewish witness in its Augustinian context. Part 2 considers how three prominent prelates of the early Middle Ages—Gregory the Great, Isidore of Seville, and Agobard of Lyons—construed the role of the Jew in a properly ordered Christendom: In markedly different ways, each of these men sought to adapt patristic theology and Roman legal precedent to the new Christian mentalities and environments of postclassical Europe. Each of them reacted outspokenly to the presence and proper function of the Jew in their society. To what extent did they adhere to or depart from established tradition? How can we appreciate them as complying with, modifying, or resisting the ideas of Augustine? The diversity of their ideas notwithstanding, I believe that the doctrine of Jewish witness and its postulates served them all as a pivotal point of departure. Part 3 treats changes in perceptions of the Jews during the twelfth century. I argue that the broadening cultural horizons of European civilization during the age of the Crusades served gradually to modify the prevailing Christian constructions of the Jew in a variety of ways. Even as Augustinian doctrine still found ample expression, Christendom's encounter with Islam, its new commitment to rational argument in matters theological, and its initial exposure to talmudic Judaism challenged hitherto prevalent assumptions. The presence of other infidels threatened the singularity of the contemporary Jew in Christian eyes, just as dialectic questioned his rationality and the Talmud raised doubts concerning his theological identity. Nevertheless, it took time for these processes to work significant change in the Christian mind-set, and outright condemnation of contemporary Judaism as unacceptable in Augustinian terms appeared only in the thirteenth century. Part 4 first reviews the thirteenth-century papal condemnations of rabbinic literature and the mendicant mission to the Jews in light of new and recently published documentary sources. It concludes with the notably ambivalent formulations of the Dominican friar Thomas Aquinas, whose writings testify both to a growing delegitimization of contemporary, postbiblical Judaism and to the lasting legacy of Augustine at one and the same time.
The ambivalent note on which this book closes comports well with the substance of its conclusions. The voices assembled here confirm that as the Middle Ages wore on, the culpability of the Jew steadily increased in Christian eyes. Medieval Christianity eventually demonized him; by the thirteenth century, some churchmen had come to view contemporary Judaism as a willful distortion of the biblical religion that the Jews should ideally have preserved and embodied. Yet at least two reservations are in order. As gradually as constructions of Jews and Judaism developed among Christian theologians, it could take longer—centuries longer, at times—for popes and canonists to translate the new ideas into the deliberate, official policy of the Catholic Church, or for the new ideas to alter the patterns of day-to-day relationships between Christians and Jews. Furthermore, the new ideas never displaced the old ones; rather, they took their place beside them. The teachings of Augustine, of the church fathers who preceded him, and, above all, of Paul the apostle have retained a critical influence in Christian theology. Straying far afield from the purview of this book, one notes that Christian churches today still view the Jews as a unique textual community, defined by its biblical hermeneutic, bearing directly on the meaning of the Christian covenant. In Christian theologies, “the Jew in our midst” still has an essential role to play as the drama of salvation history continues to unfold.20
1. See below, chapter 6.
2. Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982), “The Jews as the Killers of Christ in the Latin Tradition, from Augustine to the Friars,” Traditio 39 (1983), 1–27, and “Scholarship and Intolerance in the Medieval Academy: The Study and Evaluation of Judaism in European Christendom,” AHR 91 (1986), 592–613.
3. I first proposed the formulation of the “hermeneutical Jew” in papers on “Anti-Jewish Discourse and Its Function in Medieval Christian Theology,” presented to the New Chaucer Society in August 1992, and on “The Muslim Connection: On the Changing Role of the Jew in High Medieval Theology,” presented at the Herzog August Bib-liothek in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, in October 1993 and subsequently published in FWW, pp. 141–62. The term has since found explicit acceptance in Paula Fredriksen, “Excaecati occulta justitia Dei: Augustine on Jews and Judaism,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 3 (1995), 321 n. 61, and “Divine Justice and Human Freedom: Augustine on Jews and Judaism, 392–398,” in FWW, p. 52 n. 52. Cf. also the usage of :“theological Jew” in Gilbert Dahan, Les Intellectuels chrétiens et les Juifs au Moyen Âge (Paris, 1990), p. 585; the approach to seventh-century Byzantine texts proposed by David M. Olster, Roman Defeat, Christian Response, and the Literary Construction of the Jew (Philadelphia, 1994); and the new perspective on Gregory the Great offered by Robert A. Markus, “The Jew as a Hermeneutic Device: The Inner Life of a Gregorian Topos,” in Gregory the Great: A Symposium, ed. John C. Cavadini (Notre Dame, Ind., 1995), pp. 1–15. I am grateful to Professor Markus for sharing his paper with me in advance of its publication.
4. Frank E. Manuel, The Broken Staff: Judaism through Christian Eyes (Cambridge, Mass., 1992); pp. 13–29 concern the Middle Ages.
5. See the judicious overview of the state of the field in Heikki Räisänen, “Paul, God, and Israel: Romans 9–11 in Recent Research,” in The Social World of Formative Christianity and Judaism: Essays in Tribute to Howard Clark Lee, ed. Jacob Neusner et al. (Philadelphia, 1988), pp. 178–206.
6. Cf., for example, the views of Rosemary R. Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York, 1974), pp 95–107, with those of John G. Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism: Attitudes toward Judaism rn Pagan and Christian Antiquity (New York, 1983), esp. chaps. 11–15, and Lloyd Gaston, Paul and the Torah(Vancouver, B.C., 1987).
7. Owing to the avowedly cursory and selective nature of this overview, I have sought to keep the notes to a minimum. For instructive overviews and ample bibliography on patristic attitudes