Living Letters of the Law. Jeremy Cohen

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, СКАЧАТЬ