Living Letters of the Law. Jeremy Cohen

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СКАЧАТЬ hermeneutic fashioned such a Jew nonetheless, and this construction had a long and colorful career. I have suggested elsewhere¹²⁵ that Augustine made a fourfold contribution to Christian anti-Judaism in the medieval West: the recognition of a definite need for the Jews (appropriately dispersed and subjugated) within Christian society; the focus of Christian anti-Jewish polemic on the interpretation of the Old Testament; the direction of such polemic to Christian and pagan— but not to Jewish—audiences; and a lack of concern with postbiblical Judaism. Why polemicize and missionize among the Jews if Christendom required their presence? Why concern oneself with postbiblical Judaism if the Jews, as Augustine construed them, preserved and embodied the law of Moses and if the development of Judaism effectively stopped on the day of Jesus' crucifixion, when the Old Testament gave way to the New? I would now add two qualifications to this assessment of Augustine. First, earlier Christian theologians, those mentioned in the introduction to this book along with others, may have anticipated certain aspects of this “Augustinian” outlook on the Jews. Yet the doctrine of Jewish witness was new, and it conditioned the transmission of “standard” patristic Adversus ludaeos doctrine to Augustine's medieval successors. Second, just as Augustine had reformulated the ideas of the earlier fathers, so too did churchmen who followed him develop new applications and understandings for the doctrine of witness, which quickly assumed an independent life of its own.

      With this in mind, the time has come to study the history of the medieval Christian perception of the Jew more thoroughly. If one tends to remember the medieval Christian posture toward the Jews and Judaism as Augustinian, that hardly means that Augustine himself would have concurred. His profound impact on and authority among his successors meant that few could reject his teaching, but many reinterpreted it in keeping with changing ideas and historical circumstances. The history of the idea of the Jew as witness has much to teach us concerning the medieval Christian thinkers who inherited it—and concerning their Christianity. Although the idea unavoidably bore on the realia of Christian-Jewish relations, my primary interest remains with the fate of Christianity's hermeneutical Jew himself. What happened to him as the Augustinian mind-set and historical context that had spawned him receded into the past?

      An earlier version of this chapter, entitled “Augustine on Judaism Reconsidered,” was presented to the annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America in 1991. I subsequently reformulated my conclusions in a paper on “Anti-Jewish Discourse and Its Function in Medieval Christian Theology” delivered to the New Chaucer Society in 1992.

      1. Augustine, De Genest contra Manichaeos 1.23, PL 34:190–93.

      2. On the sevenfold periodization of history, see, among others, Auguste Luneau, L'Histoire du salut chez les pères de l'Église: La Doctrine des âges du monde, Théologie historique 2 (Paris, 1964); and Paul Archambault, “Ages of Man and Ages of the World,” REA 12 (1966), 193–228. See also below, chapter 3, on Isidore of Seville.

      3. Augustine, De Vera religione 26.49–27.50, CCSL 32:218–19.

      4. See below, n. 8.

      5. Augustine, Contra Faustum 16.9, CSEL 31:447.

      6. Ibid. 15.8, p. 432.

      7. Ibid. 12.12–13, pp. 341–42 On medieval traditions concerning Cain and their ancient sources, see Oliver F. Emerson, “Legends of Cain, Especially in Old and Middle English,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 21 (1906), 831–929; Ruth Mellirlkoff, The Mark of Cairl (Berkeley, Calif., 1981), esp. pp. 92–98; and Gilbert Dahan, “L'Exégèse de l'histoire de Caïin et Abel du xii^e au xiv^e siècle en Occident,” RTAM 49 (1982), 21–89, 50 (1983), 5–68

      8. Augustine, Contra Faustum, 12.12, pp. 341–42 (emphasis mine).

      9. Ibid. 12.23, p. 351.

      10. Ibld. 16.21, p. 464.

      11. Ibid. 12.24, pp. 352–53; cf. also 15.2. Augustine rendered the Latin of Paul's epistle as “oportet et haereses esse, ut probati manifesti fiant inter vos.” On the importance of this theme for Augustine, see Anne-Marie la Bonnardière, “Bible et polémiques,” in Saint Augustin et la Bible, ed. Anne-Marie la Bonnardière, Bible de tous les temps 3 (Paris, 1986), pp. 329–31; and also below, n. 124.

      12. Augustine, Contra Fartstum 9.2, p. 309.

      13. Ibid. 16.10.

      14. Ibid. 16.25, p. 470.

      15. For instance, Augustine, De civitate Dei 15.2, 16.26, 16.37, 17.18.

      16. Ibid. 15. 11ff., 18.38ff. This stance, however, did not obviate Augustine's general preference for the readings of the Septuagint; see Bernhard Blumenkranz, Die Judenpredigt Augustrns (Basel, 1946), pp. 74–84, esp. pp. 79–82, and the many citations adduced therein. See also the more recent study of William Adler, “The Jews as Falsifiers: Charges of Tendentiou Emendation in Anti-Jewish Christian Polemic,” in Translation of Scripture (Philadelphia, 1990), pp. 1–27.

      17. Augustine, De civitate Dei 17.4, CCSL 48:557.

      18. Ibid. 15.2; and see the important analysis of F. Edward Cranz, “De civitate Dei, XV, 2, and Augustine's Idea of the Christian Society,” Speculum 25 (1950), 215–25.

      19. Augustine, De civitate Dei 7.32, CCSL 47:213.

      20. Ibid. 4.34.

      21. Ibid. 16.37, CCSL 48:542 (emphasis mine).

      22. Ibid. 18.46, p. 644.

      23. Psalm 59:1z, according to the numeration of the Masoretic Text, which I have followed throughout in direct references to the Bible. The reading of legem tuam follows some Greek versions (nomoû tou), which evidently underlay the Old Latin version of Augustine; the Masoretic Text, the received versions of the Septuagint, and the Vulgate all read “my people [‘ammi, laû mou, populi mei].” Jerome also encountered a Latin reading of populi tui; see his Epistula 106.33, CSEL 55:z63–64: “Ne occidas eos, nequando obliviscantur populi tui. Pro quo in Graeco scriptum est: legis tuae; sed in Septuagintaet in Hebraeo non habet populi tui, sed populi mei; et a nobis ita versum est.” Cf. also Origen, Hexapla, ed. Fridericus Field (1875; reprint Hildesheim, Germany, 1964), 2:187; and the various Latin readings reviewed by Amnon Linder, review [in Hebrew] of Shlomo Simonsohn, Ha-Kes ha-Qadosh veha-Yehudim, in Zion, n.s. 61 (1996), 484–85.

      24. Augustme, De civitate Dei 18.46, CCSL 48:644–45.

      25. The Tractatus receives no mention in Augustine's Retractationes, composed during the last years of his life.

      26. Augustine, Tractatus adversus Iudaeos 3.4, PL 42:s 3.

      27. Or perhaps, as Ivan Marcus has suggested to me, for sheshonim, referring to those that differ, and also from the same verbal root, sh-n-h. Cf. the Septuagint's hypèr t

n alloithn.

      28. Augustine, Tractatus adversus Iudaeos 5.6, col. 55. On Philonic, early Christian, and rabbinic use of СКАЧАТЬ