Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity

Introduction

Some years ago, I offered a course on the history of Judaism at a Protestant seminary in the midwestern United States. Both as a Jew and as a historian committed to studying the interdependence of Christian and Jewish civilizations, I found it gratifying that my course fulfilled a distribution requirement in church history at the seminary; the genuine interest of Christian divinity students in my Judaic subject encouraged me no less. Surprisingly, however, my interaction with the president, the dean, and some faculty colleagues at the school proved less gratifying. Although I understood my role in their community primarily as an academic one, to teach about Jewish civilization, they took but a secondary interest in my instruction. Instead, they habitually focused on the satisfaction they derived from my presence at their seminary, from having, as they put it, a Jew in our midst. In their eyes, my Jewish identity—or what they believed that identity to be—somehow rounded out their picture of how their Christian community should properly appear. For these colleagues, who welcomed me onto their campus with genuine, memorable warmth, I functioned less as the historian I construed myself to be and more as a player on a theological stage set long before my arrival.

This book concerns that stage and its players. Throughout much of its history, in various manners and to differing extents, Christianity has accorded Jews and Judaism a singular place in a properly ordered Christian society. From the people who received God's Old Testament, to those who parented, nurtured, and, allegedly, murdered Jesus, to those whose conversion will signal the second coming of Christ, Jews have had distinctive tasks in Christian visions of salvation history. The idea that Christendom needs the Jews to fill these special roles has, in fact, contributed to the survival of the Jewish minority in a Christian world, with varying results. On one hand, the Christian idea of Jewish identity crystallized around the theological purpose the Jew served in Christendom; Christians perceived the Jews to be who they were supposed to be, not who they actually were, and related to them accordingly. As Bernard of Clairvaux, one of the most prominent Christian theologians of the Middle Ages, put it in the twelfth century, "the Jews are not to be persecuted, killed, or even put to flight…. Indeed, the Jews are for us the living letters (vivi…apices) of Scripture, constantly representing the Lord's passion."¹ For Bernard, as for many medieval churchmen, the Jews embodied a particular reading of Holy Scripture, one that established the truth of Christianity in its own right and illuminated the contrasting Christian exegesis of the Bible. As such, the Jews' nature, their personality, and their historical mission derived directly from essential dictates of Christian doctrine and hermeneutics. On the other hand, when Christian theologians awakened to the disparity between the Jew they had constructed and the real Jew of history, they could construe the latter's failure to serve the purposes allotted him as an abandonment of his Judaism. This, in turn, might render him less suited for the protection granted Jews who did function properly in Christian society.

In order to meet their particular needs, Christian theology and exegesis created a Jew of their own, and this book investigates the medieval history of such a hermeneutically and doctrinally 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 (2:15–16). Indeed, all who rely on works of the law are under a curse (3:10), and Paul seemed to suggest that the Jews' appreciation of Scripture had resulted in their rejection by God:

For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave and one by a free woman. But the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, the son of the free woman through promise. Now this is an allegory: These two women are two covenants* One is from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery; she is Hagar…. She corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother…. Now we, brethren, like Isaac, are children of promise. But as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the spirit, so it is now. But what does Scripture say? Cast out the slave and her son; for the son of the slave shall not inherit with the son of the free woman. So, brethren, we are not children of the slave but of the free woman. (4:22.-31)

Galatians reaches the conclusion (5:6) that in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is of any avail, for which Paul soon provided a more elaborate theological argument in his Epistle to the Romans. Romans echoes and develops some of Galatians' central themes: the futility of the law in the achievement of salvation, the sinfulness of the Jews, and God's covenant of grace with those who descended spiritually from Abraham by emulating his faith. Romans (9: 25) refers to the Gentiles who embrace Jesus with God's words to Hosea, Those who were not my people I will call my people, while invoking the prophecy of Isaiah to proclaim the repudiation of the Jews: Though the number of the sons of Israel be as the sand of the sea, only a remnant of them will be saved.

Nevertheless, in an apparent about-face that has long perplexed New Testament scholars,⁵ Paul proceeded immediately to endow his Jewish coreligionists with a critical role in the divine economy of salvation. For having deduced that a Gentile fares no worse than a Jew in the eyes of God, and having castigated the Jews for their rejection of Jesus, the Christological portion of Paul's epistle to the Gentile Christians of Rome concludes on a note of qualification regarding the nation of Israel:

I ask, then, has God rejected his people? By no means!…So I ask, have they stumbled so as to fall? By no means! But through their trespass salvation has come to the Gentiles, so as to make Israel jealous…. For if their rejection means the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance mean but life from the dead? If the dough offered as first fruits is holy, so is the whole lump; and if the root is holy, so are the branches. But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, a wild olive shoot, were grafted in their place to share the richness of the olive tree, do not boast over the branches….

For if you have been cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree and grafted, contrary to nature, into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these natural branches be grafted back into their own olive tree. Lest you be wise in your own conceits, I want you to understand this mystery, brethren: A hardening has come upon part of Israel, until the full number of Gentiles come in, and so all Israel will be saved…. As regards the gospel they are enemies of God, for your sake; but as regards election they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. (11:1–28)

No matter how one might ultimately choose to define Paul's intentions, our present interests would underscore several key aspects of this message. Presenting the Jews so as to facilitate his doctrinal instruction of Gentile Christians, Paul attributed momentous importance to the people of Israel. This importance bespoke a divinely ordained mission that found expression over the course of human history: before Jesus, during his lifetime, and subsequent to his death. Precisely in their identification with the sacred text of Scripture—the Jews are entrusted with the oracles of God (Romans 3:2); they are the adherents of the law (Romans 4:14)—the Jews had contributed to the salvation of the world and would continue to do so. God gave them the law to increase the trespass, with the result that where sin increased, grace abounded all the more (Romans 5:20). The Jews' rejection of Jesus constituted the ultimate trespass and allowed the Gentiles to enter into God's covenant. Upon the completion of this process, the Jews will regain God's favor, and their conversion will signal the final redemption, life from the dead and all. The Jews have not entirely forfeited their election. They still serve a vital purpose, pedagogic and eschatological, which demands their survival until the end, when "all Israel [pâs Israél] will be saved."

Struggling to find consistency in Paul's attitudes regarding the Jews, modern Christian writers continue to debate the ramifications of these texts. Some have discerned a Pauline stratum at the base of Christian antisemitism; others have found his ideas virtually free of hostility toward Judaism, which they instead attribute to Paul's later interpreters.⁶ For our purposes, Paul's undeniable ambivalence retains a primary importance, as does his retention of Israel and Israel's relationship with Scripture within the divine economy of salvation. During the decades after Paul, these issues continued to exercise key voices in the formulation of primitive Christianity, including those of the evangelists, the author of Hebrews, and the apostolic fathers. Over the course of the centuries that followed, their ideas underwent further development and received more systematic expression in the Adversus ludaeos polemic (arguments against the Jews) of many church fathers—Justin Martyr, Melito of Sardis, Tertullian, Origen, Eusebius of Caesarea, Ephrem the Syrian, Aphrahat, John Chrysostom, Ambrose of Milan, and others—which gave rise to a genre of Christian literary expression unto itself. Patristic concern with the Jew and his Judaism constitutes the second contextual sphere within which our story took shape.⁷

Paul's view of the error of the Jews as the obverse of the truth of Christianity lived on, encasing all subsequent reflection on Judaism in Christian theology. Yet as the Gentile constituencies of Christian churches increased and the intensity of direct interaction between Jews and Christians subsided, the teachings of Adversus ludaeos shifted their emphasis. They now served chiefly to fuel attacks by Gentile Christians, who had never converted to Judaism, against Christians who still observed Jewish law. Seeking to justify the departure of the church from the synagogue, Christian preachers tried to demonstrate not only that observance of the old law without belief in Jesus was insufficient but that it was inherently wrong. The New Testament had replaced the Old; and just as the Gentile church had replaced the Jewish people as the community of God's elect, so too had the inauguration of a new gospel rendered the old law at least counterproductive if not thoroughly sinful.

Beyond Jews and Jewish Christians, Christian Adversus ludaeos polemic soon found additional targets. Clamoring for acceptance in a hostile Roman world, early Christian teachers proclaimed both to their pagan detractors and to prospective pagan converts that Christianity was not a recently contrived distortion of biblical Judaism but the genuine continuation and fulfillment thereof. Ancients placed the highest value on antiquity, and Greco-Roman civilization typically respected the Jews as one of the oldest peoples of all. From an ancient Mediterranean perspective, why convert to Christianity if its novelty, perhaps the very source of its attraction, constituted prima facie evidence of its invalidity? The discourse of Adversus ludaeos supplied the answer: Despite their literal observance of biblical law, the Jews had forsaken God's covenant of old, whereas the Christians, interpreting that law figuratively, had maintained it. Inverting the biblical typology of Israel's redemption from Egyptian bondage, commemorated in the very season of Passover during which Jesus was crucified, the second-century bishop Melito of Sardis reassigned the roles of oppressor and oppressed, damned and saved, in his Peri Pascha (On the Paschal Sacrifice),⁸ presumably a liturgical poem for the celebration of Easter:

You killed your Lord at the great feast.

And you were making merry,

while he was starving;

you had wine to drink and bread to eat,

he had vinegar and gall;

your face was bright,

his was downcast;

you were triumphant,

he was afflicted;

you were making music,

he was being judged;

you were giving the beat,

he was being nailed up;

you were dancing,

he was being buried;

you were reclining on a soft couch,

he in grave and coffin.

O lawless Israel, what is this unprecedented crime you committed,

thrusting your Lord among unprecedented sufferings,

your sovereign

who formed you,

who made you,

who honored you,

who called you ‘Israel’;

But you did not turn out to be ‘Israel’;

you did not ‘see God,’

you did not recognize the Lord.⁹

God had therefore disowned the Jews, annulled their ritual law, and transferred their inheritance to the church, which now constituted the only true Israel, not a recently arrived impostor.

Even after pagans had undergone Christian baptism, an incentive to preach to them against the Jews remained. Especially in the large metropolitan centers of the Eastern empire, where sizable Jewish and Christian communities intermingled freely, Christians frequently emulated Paul's Galatian correspondents and looked upon Judaism and its biblical rituals as the real thing. Christianity might be a watered-down Gentile's Judaism in their eyes, whereas the truly authentic biblical religion belonged to the Jews; for rituals that surely mattered— a holy day like Passover or the New Year, a familial rite of passage, an oath to cement a major business transaction—a visit to a Jewish home or synagogue could make perfect sense. Alarmed by such Judaizing tendencies, churchmen disparaged the Jews in order to bolster Christian self-confidence: Christianity and Judaism did not lie on the same continuum, such that the former naturally directed its adherents toward the latter. On the contrary, as Melito explained to his parishioners, in the same way as the model is made void, conceding the image to the truly real…, the [Jewish] people was made void when the church arose.¹⁰ The rites of the Jews, once precious, have been rendered worthless, and the hermeneutical downfall of Israel has caused its disinheritance.

Casting old and new covenants as contradictory, however, may smack of dualism. The heretic Marcion and others like him argued that the savior-God of the New Testament could not possibly have created—or entered—the material world of the Old Testament or authored its inferior law. There were actually two cosmic powers, one supremely good and the other inferior if not utterly evil, who ruled over two worlds, one spiritual and the other material; the struggle between these powers and their respective realms determined the fate of the cosmos at large and that of every individual. In defense of their monotheism and in opposition to the dualists, orthodox fathers of the church sought to establish the divine authorship of the Old Testament on one hand and the incontrovertible superiority of Christianity over Judaism on the other. And once again, polemic against the Jews nourished the patristic argument. The deficiencies of the old law reflected not upon its divine legislator but upon its Jewish practitioners, and the guilt of the latter should not devolve onto the former. Jew and dualist heretic, ran the argument, thereby had much in common. Each understood—in fact, misunderstood—the old law entirely in its literal sense: One accepted it wholeheartedly on that basis; the other rejected it outright. Of the heretic who denied the incarnation of God in the body of Jesus, the North African Tertullian pleaded that he now give up borrowing poison from the Jew—the asp, as they say, from the viper.¹¹ As for the Jews, Justin Martyr declared to his Jewish interlocutor Trypho in his famous Dialogos (Dialogue) of the second century, you are a people hard of heart, and without understanding, and blind, and lame, and sons in whom there is no faith.¹² The precepts of the old law had no salvific value, but they constituted God's resulting punishment for Jewish sin, which ranged from their idolatry to their crucifixion of Jesus and to their persistent hatred of Christians. Circumcision, argued Justin, was given for a sign, that you should be separated from the other nations and us, and that you alone should suffer the things that you are rightly suffering now, and that your lands should be desolate and your cities burned with fire, and that foreigners should eat up the fruits before your face, and none of you go up to Jerusalem.¹³ So, too, the Sabbath, the sacrifices in the temple, and other cultic rites of ancient Israel condemn the Jews for their misdeeds. And, now that Jesus had proffered an entirely different sort of legislation, "the law given at Horeb is already antiquated…. A law set over against a law has made the one before it to cease, and a testament [diath k ] coming into existence later has limited any previous one."¹⁴ Only a genuinely Christian hermeneutic allowed for enjoying the true value of the law without suffering from its drawbacks. Interpreted properly in its Christological sense, the law was intrinsically good; those who misunderstood it were sinful.

When churchmen addressed their anti-Jewish polemic to non-Jewish audiences—to undercut the credibility of Jewish Christians, to legitimate Christianity in the eyes of pagans (whether hostile or sympathetic), to combat reverence for Jews and Judaism among Christians, and to counter the dualist biblical exegesis of heretics—they naturally depicted Jews in a fashion that would advance their own theological agenda. As one historian of this early period has written, at the root of the matter lies, then, not the actual condition or behavior of the Jews, but rather the image of the Jews required for the purposes of Christian theology.¹⁵ But note well: Throughout this process of self-definition and propagation, Christianity never dispensed with this hermeneutically crafted Jew. From the first stages in its development, the Jew served a purpose—or a mélange of purposes—in the new religion, purposes that rendered Adversus ludaeos a basic medium for Christian self-expression, whose applications far exceeded direct confrontations between Christian and Jews. Simply put, the Jew had a particular role to play in a divinely ordained historical drama. His role stemmed from his failure to embrace Christianity when Jesus, his own kinsman, came to redeem him and his people before all others. This failure, in turn, had a chiefly hermeneutical basis; it derived from a deficient reading of the biblical covenant that God had revealed to him, an inability to discern the fulfillment of the Old Testament in the New.

As the church fathers of the second, third, and fourth centuries formulated some of the vital presuppositions for medieval Christian constructions of Jews and Judaism, their work revealed a developmental trend that also set a precedent for things to come. Guy Stroumsa has recently highlighted the process whereby Christian anti-Judaism intensified, growing increasingly harsh and more intolerant, between the second and fourth centuries. In the wake of Constantine's conversion, churchmen envisioned a new Christian identity that would integrate the Roman polity and society, an identity the Jews did not share; it followed that the Jews, together with the pagans and heretics, had to be publicly vanquished and humiliated.¹⁶ Adversus ludaeos polemic grew more ad hominem, casting slurs on contemporary Jews, depicting them in demonic terms, and displaying less concern for the nexus between the Jew, his Scripture, and his literalist interpretation of it. Bewailing the attraction that contemporary Judaism still exerted upon Christians in Antioch, for example, John Chrysostom focused his Adversus ludaeos sermons much less on the didactic and eschatological role of the Jew than his predecessors had, and he emphasized the radical disjunction of Judaism and Christianity much more:

Where Christ-killers gather, the cross is ridiculed, God blasphemed, the father unacknowledged, the son insulted, the grace of the Spirit rejected. Indeed, is not the harm even greater than where demons are present? In a pagan temple the impiety is open and obvious and can hardly seduce or deceive one who has wits about him and is soberminded. But in the synagogue they say that they worship God and abhor idols. They read and admire the prophets and use their words as bait, tricking the simple and foolish to fall into their snares. The result is that their impiety is equal to that of the Greeks, but their deception is much worse. They have an altar of deception in their midst which is invisible and on which they sacrifice not sheep and calves but the souls of men. In a word, if you admire the Jewish way of life, what do you have in common with us? If the Jewish rites are holy and venerable, our way of life must be false. But if our way is true, as indeed it is, theirs is fraudulent. I am not speaking of the Scriptures. Far from it! For they lead one to Christ. I am speaking of their present impiety and madness.¹⁷

Chrysostom 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 toward the Jews, see Marcel Simon, Verus Israel: A Study of the 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 loudaí n 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 Jews in the Middle Ages, in Antisemttism through the Ages, ed. Shmuel Almog, trans. Nathan H. Reisner (Oxford, 1988), pp. 73ff., and Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), pp. 17–20; Gilbert Dahan, "L' Article Iudei de la Summa Abel de Pierre le Chantre," REA 27 (1981), 105–126; Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the lews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982), pp. 91ff.; and Shlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolrc See and the Jews: History, Pontifical Instltute of Mediaeval Studies: Studies and Texts 109 (Toronto, 1991), pp. 4–6, 29off.

2. Bernhard Blumenkranz, Die Judenpredigt Augustins (Basel, 1946); see also his Augustin et les Juifs, Augustin et le Judai' sme, Recherches augustiniennes I (1958); 225–41.

3. Louis Ginzberg, Augustine, The Jewish Encyclopedia (New York, 1902), 2:3 14.

4. Jesús Alvarez, Teologia del pueblo judio (Madrid, 1970), p. 15, noted that Augustine dedicated four treatises to the subject of the Jews: Sermo 96 on the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32); Epistula 196 to Bishop Asellicus (see below, chapter 1, at n. 56); the Tractatus adversus ludaeos; and another sermon no longer extant.

CHAPTER 1

The Doctrine of

Jewish Witness

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) lived during an age of transitions. During his lifetime, the division between Eastern and Western capitals of the Roman Empire became a permanent one, as the imperial government in the city of Rome itself entered the last generations of its history. More than any later fifth-century event, like the deposition of the last Western emperor in 476, the sacking of Rome by the Germanic Visigoths in 410 signaled the decline of classical civilization in contemporary eyes. Political change, with its accompanying social ferment, induced many to question the presuppositions upon which their societies and worldviews rested, contributing roundly to the cultural anxiety that characterized this period, to experimentation with new notions of personal power and security that sought to allay such anxiety, and to the propagation of new value systems in keeping with these ideas. Where, ultimately, did personal fulfillment lie? How might one seek to achieve it?

As the Roman Empire stood on the brink of a new era, so did the Christian church. Augustine formally embraced Christianity soon after Theodosius the Great declared it the official religion of the empire. Although the imperial ban on the pagan cult capped the victory of the recently persecuted Christian church over its detractors, it confronted church and state alike with an array of new problems. Christianity had claimed to spurn the pleasures and powers of this world, sharply demarcating the realms of God and Caesar, looking forward to an apocalypse that would replace existing political institutions with the rule of Christ and his saints. A Christian empire might ensure the safety and supremacy of Christians and their church, but how did it bear on the Christian quest for salvation and its underlying philosophy of human history? Furthermore, if Constantine's conversion earlier in the fourth century and Theodosius's marriage of the empire to the church decades later appeared to vindicate the Christian revolution against classical pagan civilization, how did the sacking of imperial Rome by the barbarians figure in this equation? Did it, as the old pagan aristocracy suggested, manifest the gods' wrath over the conversion of the empire to Christianity? If not, precisely what significance attached to such events of political history in God's plan for the salvation of the world?

Like these and other issues of his day, the course of Augustine's life, itself rife with conversions, transitions, power struggles, and intense self-examination, has been studied exhaustively. Alongside the decline of Rome and the triumph of the Roman Catholic Church, it too heralded the approaching junction between classical antiquity and the ensuing Christian Middle Ages. The concerns of Augustine's career invariably informed his distinctive ideas of the Jew. To trace the history of those ideas properly, one must appreciate the chronology of their appearance during Augustine's life and their place in the Augustinian worldview.

AUGUSTINE ON THE JEWS AND JUDAISM

THE EARLY YEARS: ON THE AGES OF MAN

Between his conversion to Christianity in 386 and his arrival in the North African town of Hippo in 391, Augustine formulated his renowned sevenfold scheme for the periodization of human history. In the De Genesi contra Manichaeos (On Genesis against the Manicheans, 388–389), Augustine found a biblical foundation for his theory in the story of creation in six days, and in the nature of the seventh day, the Sabbath, in particular: I think that the reason why this rest is ascribed to the seventh day should be considered more carefully. For I see throughout the entire text of the divine scriptures that six specific ages of work are distinguished by their palpable limits, so to speak, so that rest is expected in the seventh age. And these six ages are similar to the six days in which those things which Scripture records that God created were made. On this basis Augustine proceeded through the six days of the Genesis cosmogony, linking them to the successive eras of terrestrial history, even linking the biblical refrain, and there was evening and there was morning, to specific developments within each historical period. When he reached the primordial Tuesday Augustine wrote:

It was therefore morning from the time of Abraham, and a third age like adolescence came to pass; and it is aptly compared to the third day, on which the land was separated from the waters…. For through Abraham the people of God was separated from the deception of the nations and the waves of this world…. Worshipping the one God, this people received the holy scriptures and prophets, like a land irrigated so that it might bear useful fruits…. The evening of this age was in the sins of the people, in which they neglected the divine commandments, up to the evil of the terrible king Saul.

Then in the morning was the kingdom of David…. It is aptly compared to the fourth day, on which the astral bodies were fashioned in the sky. For what more clearly signifies the glory of a kingdom than the excellence of the sun…? The evening of this age, so to speak, was in the sins of the kings, for which that people deserved captivity and slavery.

In the morning there was the migration to Babylonia…. This age extended to the advent of our lord Jesus Christ; it is the fifth age, that is, the decline from youth to old age…. And so, for the people of the Jews that age was, in fact, one of decline and destruction…. Afterwards those people began to live among the nations, as if in the sea, and, like the birds that fly, to have an uncertain, unstable dwelling…. God blessed those creatures, saying Be fertile and increase…, inasmuch as the Jewish people, from the time that it was dispersed among the nations, in fact increased significantly. The evening of this day—that is, of this age—was, so to speak, the multiplication of sins among the people of the Jews, since they were blinded so seriously that they could not even recognize the lord Jesus Christ.¹

Augustine's review of biblical history from Abraham to Jesus may appear to add little, if anything at all, to standard patristic doctrine concerning the Jews. Yet this early Augustinian text, whose subsequent influence in medieval historiography surpassed its importance even for Augustine himself,² already demonstrates how various other issues of pressing concern led Augustine to dwell upon' the Jews and Judaism. Here the characterization of the Jews somehow exemplifies his approach to biblical exegesis—in this case allegory, and the allegorical interpretation of Genesis in particular. Moreover, inasmuch as the Jews dominate much of the divine plan for human history, they assume significance in the exposition of Augustine's scheme of salvation history, a connection to which Augustine returned soon thereafter in his De vera religione (On the True Religion, 389–391). Here he reviewed the six or seven proverbial ages in the life of a human being as they apply both to the old, exterior or earthly man, and to the new, inward or heavenly man, a contrast that similarly bears on the totality of human history. Adumbrating his later theory of the two cities, Augustine thus proposed that

the entire human race, whose life extends from Adam to the end of this world, is—much like the life of a single person—administered under the laws of divine providence, so that it appears divided into two categories. In one of these is the mass of impious people bearing the image of the earthly man from the beginning of the world until the end; in the other is a class of people dedicated to the one God, but which from Adam until John the Baptist led the life of the earthly man while subject to a measure of righteousness [servili quadam iustitia]. Its history is called the Old Testament, which, while appearing to promise an earthly kingdom, is in its entirety nothing other than the image of the new people and the New Testament, promising a heavenly kingdom.³

Augustine's allegory of the six ages assumes both microcosmic and macrocosmic proportions, reflecting the experience of the individual and that of society at large. The Jews and their religion are again, in pre-Christian times, at center stage; here, in the De vera religione, they also bridge the chasm between the two species of human existence. Their Old Testament pertains to the life of earthly man, proffering the rewards of an earthly kingdom. Yet somehow this covenant of the Jews entails a measure of righteousness, complicating the evaluation of its character. If correctly interpreted, it embodies the image of the new man and the New Testament. Such interconnections between exegesis, philosophy of history, and the Jews will prove critical to an appreciation of Augustine's place in our story.

AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY

During the final decade of the fourth century, Augustine's ideas and career matured considerably. His polemic against the Manicheans continued to develop, with additional subtlety and with sustained vigor. His vehement opposition to the Donatists enhanced his leadership role in the African church and contributed to his notion of the coercive role of the state in a properly ordered Christian society. And his understanding of human will and divine grace in the process of an individual's salvation changed dramatically—a transformation