Living Letters of the Law. Jeremy Cohen
Relattons between Christians and Jews in the Rontan Empire (135–425), trans. H. Mc-Keating (New York, 1986), chaps. 5–6; A. Lukyn Williams, Adversus Judaeos: A Bird's-Eye View of Christian Apologiae until the Renaissance (Cambridge, England, 1935); Ruether, Faith and Fratricide, pp. 117–82; Miriam S. Taylor, Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity: A Critique of the Scholarly Consensus, Studia Post-biblica 46 (Leiden, Netherlands, 1995); Samuel Krauss, The Jewish-Christian Controversy from the Earliest Times to 1798, Volume I: History, ed. and rev. William Horbury, Texte und Studien zurn antiken Judentum 56 (Tübingen, Germany, 1995), chap. 1; and Guy G. Stroumsa, “From Anti-Judaism to Antisemitism in Early Christianity?” in Contra ludaeos: Ancient and Medieval Polemics between Christians and Jews, ed. Ora Limor and Guy G. Stroumsa, Texts and Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Judaism lo (Tübingen, Germany, 1996), pp. 1–26.
8. On alternative options for translating the title of this work, see Melito of Sardis, On Pascha and Fragments, ed. and trans. Stuart George Hall (Oxford, 1979), p. 3 n. I.
9. Melito, Peri Pascha 79–82, ibid., pp. 42–45.
10. Melito, Peri Pascha 43, ibid., pp. 20–21
11. Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem 3.7–8, ed and trans. Ernest Evans (Oxford, 1972), 1:188–91.
12. Justin Martyr, Dialogos 27.4, in Edgar J. Goodspeed, ed., Die ältesten Apologeten (Göttingen, Germany, 1914), p. 121; trans. in Justin Martyr, The Dialogue with Trypho, trans. A. Lukyn Williams (London, rgjo), pp. 54–55.
13. Justin Martyr, Dialogos 16.2, in Goodspeed, Die ältesten Apologeten, p. 109; trans. in Justin Martyr, Dialogue, pp. 32–33.
14. Justin Martyr, Dialogos 11.2, in Goodspeed, Die ältesten Apologeten, p. 102; trans. in Justin Martyr, Dialogue, p. 23, with slight modifications.
15. David Rokeah, “The Church Fathers and the Jews in Writings Designed for Internal and External Use,” in Antisemitism through the Ages ed. Shmuel Almog, trans. Nathan H. Reisner (Oxford, 1988), p. 64.
16. Stroumsa, “From Anti-Judaism to Antisemitism,” p. 23.
17. John Chrysostom, Logoi kata loudaín 1.6, PG 48:852; I have proposed but one modification of the translation in Wayne A. Meeks and Robert L. Wilken, Jews and Christians in Antioch in the First Four Centuries of the Common Era, Society for Biblical Literature, Sources for Biblical Study 13 (Missoula, Mont., 1978), p. 97.
18. Stroumsa, “From Anti-Judaism to Antisemitism,” passim. Although Chrysostom aired his outrage over respect showed by Christians for Jews and for Jewish ritual in Antioch in his own day-and as Robert Wilken has shown in John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late 4th Century (Berkeley, Calif., 1983), one must appreciate his sermons against the additional background of Emperor Julian's plan to rebuild the Jewish temple in Jerusalem—his portrayals of the Jew and Judaism are no less theologically crafted than those of other church fathers. For, as Wilken has observed, p. 159, John's vitriolic negation of Judaism was truly “an attempt to argue for the truth of the Christian religion.”
19. J.N.D. Kelly, Golden Mouth: The Story of ]ohn Chrysostom-Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop (Ithaca, N.Y., 1gg5), p. 62; Peter Brown, Augustine of Htppo: A Biography (London, 1967), p. 124.
20. Throughout this book, full bibliographical citations appear at the first reference to a work in the footnotes to each chapter and in the bibliography. As frequently happens, the transliteration of Hebrew and the rendition of names in other languages present problems that defy an entirely consistent solution, especially if one seeks to avoid being overly awkward. I have tended to Anglicize personal names when referring to them discursively (e.g., Nachmanides, Yechiel of Paris, Raymond of Penyafort), but not when these names themselves appear in foreign-language phrases and titles (e.g., Wikkuah Rabbertu Yehiel, “Chronologia biographica s. Raimundi”). When a Hebrew work includes a romanized title, I have cited it as such, noting the language of the text in brackets. I have generally followed the new Jewish Publication Society translation of the Hebrew Bible and the Revised Standard Version of the New Testament. Although I have regularly consulted available translations of ancient and medieval sources, all other translations are my own unless noted otherwise.
PART ONE
Augustinian Foundations
From the earliest days of the history of the church, Christian ideas of Jews and Judaism responded to the imperatives of Christian theology and to the essential characteristics of the Christian interpretation of Scripture. The course of modern civilization has shown how such ideologically and hermeneutically derived constructions have continued to bear on the interaction of Christian and Jew, at times with cataclysmic results. Inasmuch as this book concerns the medieval history of those Christian ideas in the Latin West, it begins with Augustine of Hippo. From theology and philosophy to music and literary criticism, from his sexual obsessions to a penchant for autobiography and self-understanding, Augustine of Hippo bequeathed so much to Western civilization that one need hardly wonder if this bequest included his ideas on Jews and Judaism. Indeed, modern students of Jewish-Christian relations typically attribute the theological foundations of the medieval church's Jewish policy to Augustine, referring as a matter of course to the legacies and principles of Augustinian anti-Judaism. Chief among these ranks his doctrine of toleration for the Jews of Christendom inasmuch as they, subjugated and dispersed, bear living witness to the biblical roots and verities of Christianity.1
Despite limitless modern interest in Augustine, scholars have still not explicated much of the complexity in his teaching on the Jews and Judaism; above all, most have neglected the place of that teaching within the broader context of Augustine's life and work. As they typically do in the Adversas ludaeos traditions of the Catholic Church, inconsistency and ambivalence regarding Jews and Judaism abound in the Augustinian corpus. Notwithstanding Bernhard Blumenkranz's seminal study of Augustine's Tractatus adversus ludaeos (Treatise against the Jews), in which he cites more than eleven hundred pertinent passages in Augustine's other works,2 Augustine appears to have had relatively little concern with Jews or Judaism in his day. The overwhelming majority of his pronouncements merely echo the important themes of long-established Pauline and patristic traditions: spiritual/ Christological versus literal/carnal interpretation of the Bible; contrasts and continuities between the old, Mosaic covenant and the new, Christian testament; God's rejection of the Jews and election of the Gentiles, the true descendants of Abraham; Jewish blindness and guilt in the death of Jesus and rejection of Christianity; and the inappropriateness of Jewish life in the postcrucifixion era. As Louis Ginzberg observed nearly a century ago, Augustine's pronouncements concerning the Jews “belong to the weakest and least important productions of his pen.”3
Still, a distinctive Augustinian legacy does resonate sharply in the history of Jewish-Christian relations; and, given that the Jews per se did not figure prominently on the agenda of Augustine the bishop or Augustine the theologian, one rightly wonders, why this resonance? The Jewish question for Augustine surely deserves our attention, but chiefly insofar as it functioned within the broader framework of Augustinian thought and instruction. In the following chapter, we shall therefore review Augustine's noteworthy pronouncements concerning the Jews at key junctures in his career, and only then shall we turn to his sole overtly anti-Jewish treatise and its well-known call for preserving the Jews of Christendom.4 Next, we shall analyze Augustine's distinctive doctrine of Jewish witness, its components and the chronology of its development. Finally, against the background of several preeminent concerns of Augustinian theological discourse, we shall attempt to understand the significance of the doctrine for Augustine and the logic of its appearance at a particular stage in his life.
1. For example, see Bernhard Blumenkranz, Les Auteurs chrétiens latins du Moyen Age sur les Juifs et le Judaisme (Paris, 1963), and the articles collected in his Juifs et Chrétiens: Patristique et Moyen Age (London, 1977); Rosemary R. Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York, 1974), pp. 148–49; Kenneth R. Stow, “Hatred of the Jews or Love of the Church: Papal Policy toward the