Jeremy Cohen, “Christian Theology and Papal Policy in the Middle Ages,” in Steven T. Katz, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Antisemitism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 176-193 (original) (raw)
Related papers
This essay lays the historiographical foundation for a forthcoming book on ideas of the Jew in medieval Christianity, ideas which depended considerably on Augustine's doctrine of 'Jewish witness": the notion that the Jews served a vital testimonial function in a properly ordered Christian society. Following a brief explanation of the doctrine and its historical significance, attention turns to its treatment by its three most important investigators of the last half century: Bernhard Blumenkranz, a medieval historian; Marcel Dubois, an authority on medieval scholastic philosophy; and Paula Fredriksen, a scholar of patristics. In each case, the essay discusses the writer's contribution to the field, exploring his/her presuppositions and methodology and assessing the need for still further research.
Augustine and the Jews : a Christian defense of Jews and Judaism
Doubleday eBooks, 2008
Augustine and the Jews is a work of great subtlety, richness, and finally almost equal lucidity. Augustine came to find the Jews indispensable. The Church would need their continuing witness until the end of time. Meanwhile, he himself needed them to help him resolve his sharpest dilemmas. "Where Augustine's thought is most characteristically 'augustinian,'" Fredriksen avers, "we finding him thinking with 'Jews'" (353). "Jews," not Jews. Whatever real Jewish company he may occasionally have kept, the Jews Augustine thought with were not of the flesh-and-blood variety that shared Torah scrolls and rabbinic exegesis with his rival Jerome. (Jerome's familiarity with Jews, his strident appeals to the pristine Hebrew of their scriptures, and his matching nervousness about Christian Judaizing supply an intermittent but vital counterpoint to Fredriksen's discussion of Augustine.) The fleshliness of Augustine's Jews was that of an ideal but evolving type. Their manner of existence in former times, disclosed in the books of the Church's Old Testament, prophesied the Incarnation. In the present "sixth age" announced by Jesus' birth, scattered as they then were after the destruction of the Second Temple, the Jews were ubiquitous pledges of the authenticity of those books, and hence of the validity of the Christian view of history deduced from them. The subtitle of Augustine and the Jews is perhaps slightly over-emphatic. Augustine, master dialectician and rhetorician, never mounted a formal Christian defense of the Jews, let alone of Judaism, against their actual attackers; such projects lay in the future that his writings partly prepared. At best, he kept silent when he might have joined a common cry against certain Jews of his time. What he did offer was more in the nature of a demonstration of the Jews, of an entirely different temper from Eusebius of Caesarea's Demonstration of the Gospel, a work in the central tradition of Christian anti-Jewish polemic that Augustine inherited, transmitted, and, as we can now see as never before, daringly outdistanced. In an afterword, the author tells a story of herself preparing to give a paper on Christian anti-Judaism at a conference in Jerusalem, looking to ransack
Jews in Medieval Christendom: Slay Them Not
2013
In Jews in Medieval Christendom: Slay Them Not, an international group of scholars from numerous disciplines examines the manifold ways that medieval Christians coped with the presence of Jews in their midst. The collection's touchstone comes from St. Augustine's interpretation of Psalm 59:11: "Slay them not, lest my people forget: scatter them by thy power; and bring them down," as it applied to Jews in Christendom, an interpretation that deeply affected medieval Christian strategies for dealing with Jews in Europe. This collection analyzes how medieval writers and artists, often explicitly invoking Augustine, employed his teachings on these strangers within Christian Europe. Contributors include: Nancy Bishop, Kate McGrath, Irven Resnick, Ephraim Shoham-Steiner, K.M. Kletter, Robert Stacey, Jennifer Hart Weed, Jay Ruud, Kristine T. Utterback, Merrall LLewelyn Price, Eveline Brugger, Birgit Wiedl, Carlee A. Bradbury, Judy Schaaf, Barbara Stevenson, Miriamne Ara Kr...
Excommunicating the Faithful: Jewish Christianity in the Early Church
Originally a Masters of Divinity Thesis for which the author was awarded Honors in Church History, this book traces the development of Jewish Christianity from its beginnings in the earliest Christian communities through its apparent disappearance in the fourth or fifth century. The author’s thesis is that within the diversity which characterized the Jewish Christianity of the early Church, there existed at least one Jewish Christian sect whose theology stood within the acceptable boundaries of orthodoxy of the greater Church, that this sect existed through at least the fifth century, at which point it was declared heretical by the Church Fathers and eventually died out despite the fact that it remained within the bounds of orthodoxy and considered itself a part of the greater Church. The thesis also suggests that the increasing antipathy of the Church toward Jewish Christianity was the result of a variety of interrelated influences operating over several centuries. Some of these influences included the changing demographics of the Church and the accompanying clash of cultures; the increasing isolation of Jewish Christianity from the predominantly Gentile Church; power struggles between competing Christian communities in Palestine, as well as Rome’s interest in asserting its primacy; theological and pastoral concerns, which were well-intentioned but which resulted in increasingly narrow views of orthodoxy and orthopraxis; as well as outright anti-Jewish feelings.
Study of Jewish and Christian polemical literature from medieval western Christendom has progressed considerably over the past few decades. Students of medieval polemics have posed increasingly sophisticated questions, involv ing authorial context, authorial objectives, intended audience, techniques of argumentation, and grounds of argumentation. Despite the seeming simplicity of medieval Jewish and Christian polemical writings, scholars have identified complex issues embedded in this literature. Students of Jewish polemics have long recognized that medieval Jewish polemical works were essentially defensive, addressed to Jewish audiences, since medieval ecclesiastical and secular law prohibited Jews from proselyt izing Christians. Medieval Jews, on the other hand, regularly encountered both informally and increasingly formally Christian anti-Jewish arguments. Thus, Jewish polemicists-conscious of the exposure and vulnerability of their co religionists-sought to identify Christian claims and to provide convincing rebuttals of these anti-Jewish arguments. In addition, medieval Jewish polemi cists regularly went on the offensive as well. They mounted diverse and wideranging anti-Christian arguments, grounded in Christian religious literature, Christian beliefs, and Christian behaviors. They addressed these anti-Christian thrusts to their Jewish audiences, in an effort to show the obvious inferiority of the majority religion and-implicitly or more often explicitlythe equally obvious superiority of Judaism". Students of medieval Christian polemical literature have come to real ize that much of this literature likewise addressed an internal audience. The anti-Jewish arguments in medieval Christian polemical literature seem to be directed at Jews, and often the format employed by Christian polemicists was the dialogue, with a Jew and Christian disputing and the latter emerging vic torious. In fact, however, recent study has emphasized that by and large this literature was directed internally at Christians and not really at Jews. While Jews were by no means in a position to proselytize Christians in medieval western Christendom, Judaism and Jews remained nonetheless an ongoing threat. The Hebrew Bible-viewed by Christians as the Old Testamentwas an integral part of Christian Scripture, and Jesus and his followers were part of ' Daniel Lasker has provided a valuable overview of Jewish polemical writings in medieval western Christendom for the forthcoming vol. 6 of the Cambridge Huilory of Judaism. Iberia Judaica H (2010) * * ♦ Book I of the Pugio fidei is philosophic, addressed to a very broad and inclusive audience. The rest of the Pugio fidei is more focused, intended to ' Pugio fidei, 261. The Rashi comment is in fact a citation of Rabbi Simon bar Yohai. Ibid., pp. 261-262. Interestingly but not surprisingly, this passage does not appear in the stand ard editions of Deuteronomy Rabbah or in the critical edition prepared by Saul Lieberman {2nd ed.; IBERIA JUDAICA
AUGUSTINE AND THE JEWS. OVERVIEW AND OPEN QUESTIONS
CHURCH HISTORY AND RELIGIOUS CULTURE, 2023
The essay discusses the main topics of ‘Augustine and the Jews’. It opens with the question where, according to Augustine, the name ‘Jew’ comes from. It then proceeds to his use of the designations ‘Hebrew’ and ‘Israelite’ parallel (and partly in contrast) to ‘Jew’. Mainly according to The City of God a brief biblical history of the Jews is outlined. Augustine’s theological valuation of the Jews turns out to be partly positive, but mainly negative. The same applies to the (rather often discussed, but frequently misunderstood) ‘sign of Cain’. The analysis of Aduersus Iudaeos shows Augustine’s ‘provocation’ of the Jews. By and then in the course of the overview, the question of Augustine’s (likely) ‘anti-Judaism’ is briefly dealt with. Finally the essay discusses Augustine’s acquaintance with ‘real’ i.e. contemporary Jews, draws some conclusions, and presents a concise overview of subjects requiring further research.