Living Letters of the Law. Jeremy Cohen

works interpret the mandate for Jewish survival to apply above all to the Jews' observance of their commandments—not merely to their physical protection, which had concerned Augustine in the Contra Faustum45 And, owing to this value of Jewish religious observance, Augustine now cast the Jews in somewhat praiseworthy terms, despite their grave theological error. As Augustine explained the prophecy of Psalm 59:12 to Bishop Paulinus of Nola in 414,

      That same nation, even after being conquered and subjugated, would not participate in the pagan rites of the victorious people but persisted in the old law, so that within it [the Jewish people] there would be witness of the Scriptures throughout the world, wherever the church would be established. For by no clearer proof is it demonstrated to the nations what is observed most advantageously—that the name of Christ is distinguished by such great authority in the hope for eternal salvation, not as a sudden contrivance, conceived by the spirit of human presumption; rather, it had been prophesied and recorded previously…. Therefore “slay them not”; do not destroy the name of that nation, “lest at any time they forget your law”—which would surely happen if, having been forced to observe the rites and ceremonies of the gentiles, they would not retain their own religious identity at all.⁴⁶

      Finally, only in these later works did Augustine enunciate the sixth element in his doctrine of Jewish witness: its implications for attracting the Jews to Christianity and for what might well be termed the “polemical imperative” of the patristic Adversus ludaeos tradition. Despite his call for the survival of Judaism, Augustine did not abandon the Pauline hope for the conversion of the Jews; instead, he was willing to postpone its fulfillment to the distant future. Expounding Psalm 59, he thus explained that only in the wake of their salutary dispersion (verse 12, disperge eos in virtute tua) would the Jews convert at the proverbial evening of time, suffering humiliation like dogs (verse 15, convertentur ad vesperam et famem patientur ut canes); joining ranks with the uncircumcised (illi de circumcisione, isti de praeputio), they would flock to the church—yielding exultation in God's mercy in the succeeding morning (verse 17, exsultabo mane misericordia tua) of salvation.⁴⁷ Augustine well understood the compromise that his policy entailed, and he could evenhandedly assess the resulting benefits and liabilities, as he did in the De fide rerum invisibilium: “Therefore they have not been killed but scattered, so that, although they lack the means to be saved through faith, they still keep in their memory that whereby we might profit—in their words our opponents, in their books our partisans, in their hearts our enemies, in their codices our witnesses.”⁴⁸ Notwithstanding such preservation of the Jews without faith or the means to salvation, their testimonial function mandated the citation of their own Bible against them, in order to validate the beliefs of Christianity. In the Tractatus adversus ludaeos, Augustine called repeatedly for anti-Jewish polemic independent of any mission to the Jews, entirely in the interest of Christendom: “But when these [biblical testimonies] are recited to the Jews, they despise the Gospel and the apostle; and they do not hear what we say, because they do not understand what they read…. Therefore [ergo], testimonies should be taken from the holy scriptures, whose authority is very great among them, too; if they refuse to be restored by the benefit which they offer, they can be convicted [convinci] by their blatant truth.”⁴⁹ Why ought Christians to cite Scripture to the Jews, knowing that their plaints will fall on deaf ears? The logic of Augustine's prescription may seem puzzling: The Jew does not heed the testimony of the Bible; therefore, read it to him! Yet construed and preserved as Augustine would have him, fixed “in useless antiquity,” the Jew served as a foil for Augustine's apologetic and as fuel for the discourse of his patristic theology. (See the chronology of Augustine's arguments as outlined in Table 1).

TABLE 1

       ELEMENTS OF THE AUGUSTINIAN DOCTRINE OF JEWISH WITNESS: A CHRONOLOGY OF NOTEWORTHY TEXTS

      JEW, TEXT, EVENT, AND BODY

      Recognizing the contributions of other investigators to an appreciation of the doctrine of Jewish witness,⁵⁰ we can now move forward to a deeper appreciation of Augustine's constructions of Jews and Judaism. At the outset, one must refrain from attributing these Augustinian perceptions to direct, personal interaction between the bishop of Hippo and the Jews of his day. Evidence of Jewish settlement in northern Africa during the late imperial period allows only inconclusive estimations of the size and vitality of specific Jewish communities. Various studies of this question, in fact, reason circularly, relying predominantly on the limited evidence provided by Augustine himself.⁵¹ Jewish communities clearly existed in numerous North African locations, but no good indication of their size or significance exists; one highly doubts that Augustine beheld the sort of Jewry encountered by John Chrysostom in late-fourth-century Antioch or by Cyril of Alexandria in earlyfifth-century Egypt.⁵² Nor can one simply stipulate a direct link between the proselytizing activity of Jews and the Judaizing tendencies of Christians. The available data may suggest that Augustine should have known and dealt with practicing Jews,⁵³ but his dealings with them undoubtedly lacked the intensity and dangers experienced by John and Cyril. Augustine's own writings confirm this impression. Although they reveal some actual contact with contemporary Jews, much more clearly do they document the limitations of Augustine's familiarity with the Jewish community and with Judaism. Augustine knew an occasional word of Hebrew at most. His allusions to the particulars of Jewish religious practice are so few and so unimpressive that one cannot justifiably conclude that they derived from personal experience. Augustine acknowledged that his estimation of the reliability of the Jewish texts of Scripture stemmed from hearsay. If some of the unnamed individuals who assisted Augustine in understanding the Old Testament were Jewish, he owed the overwhelming preponderance of his knowledge of postbiblical Jewish tradition to other patristic writers, most notably Jerome.⁵⁴ Augustine's laments over the continued refusal of the Jews to accept Christianity—typically contrasted with the more successful attraction of Jews to the church in apostolic times—fail to indicate that they resulted from any personal disappointment in missionary activity.⁵⁵ Most of the strictures against Judaizing in the Augustinian corpus appear in lists of unacceptable practices in Christian life, hardly establishing that Augustine deemed such behavior a clear and present danger in his community.⁵⁶

      Rather, the doctrine of Jewish witness took shape against the backdrop of several major themes in Augustine's theology and writings: the interpretation of the Old Testament, especially Genesis; the appraisal of terrestrial history; and the assessment of human sexuality.⁵⁷ Relating to the Jews in varying degrees, these central concerns of Augustine clearly overshadowed his inclination to anti-Jewish polemic. They ranked much higher on his theologian's agenda, and, to the extent that he did take an interest in the Jews and Judaism, they controlled the nature and the extent of that interest. I shall first consider these Augustinian concerns individually and then evaluate their significance for our story.

      BIBLICAL EXEGESIS

      Early in his career as a biblical commentator, in his De Genest contra Manichaeos, Augustine distinguished between the literal or carnal meaning of the sacred text and its spiritual or allegorical sense; the literal sense understands Scripture exactly as “the letter sounds”; the allegorical, the figures or enigmas the letter contains. Significantly, Augustine did not yet equate this contrast with another one: that between history, which relates events of the past, and prophecy, which foretells those of the future. In this early Augustinian schema, one may interpret both history and prophecy either literally or allegorically. History and prophecy, in other words, denote the chronological orientation—or orientations—perceived in the narrative, whether or not, in the case of history, the narrated events actually transpired. Literal and allegorical refer to disparate levels of meaning sought by the reader in the text—as in the Jews' literal or carnal observance of the Sabbath, which contrasts with its allegorical understanding by Christians.⁵⁸ Here, in his first Genesis commentary, Augustine interpreted the opening chapters of Scripture chiefly in their figurative, allegorical sense,⁵⁹ though he considered them both as history and as prophecy and, in retrospect,