Living Letters of the Law. Jeremy Cohen

AHDL Archives d'histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age AHR American Historical Review AJSR Association for Jewish Studies Review ASJD The Apostolic See and the Jews: Documents CCCM Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio mediaevalis CCM Cahiers de civilisation médiévale CCSL Corpus Christianorum, Series latina CJ The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century CSEL Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum FWW From Witness to Witchcraft: Jews and Judaism in Medieval Christian Thought, ed. Jeremy Cohen, Wolfenbütteler Mittelalter-Studien 11 (Wiesbaden, Germany, 1996) GCS Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller HTR Harvard Theological Review ICM Islam et Chrétiens du Midi (xiie-xive s.), Cahiers de Fanjeaux 18 (Toulouse, France, 1983) JIM Judentum im Mittelalter: Beiträge zur christlich-jüdischen Gespräch, ed. Paul Wilpert, Miscellanea mediaevalia 4 (Berlin, 1966) JJS Journal of Jewish Studies JMH Journal of Medieval History JQR Jewish Quarterly Review MGH Monumenta Germaniae historica MSC Les Mutations socio-culturelles au tournant des xie-xiie siècles, ed. Raymonde Foreville, Études anselmiennes 4 = Spicilegium beccense 2 (Paris, 1984) PAPV Pierre Abélard, Pierre le Vénérable: Les Courants philo-sophiques, littéraires et artistiques en Occident au milieu du xiie siecle, Colloques internationaux du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique 546 (Paris, 1975) PG Patrologia graeca PL Patrologia latina RB Revue bénédictine REA Revue des études augustiniennes REJ Revue des études juives RIM Religionsgespräche im Mittelalter, ed. Bernard Lewis and Friedrich Niewöhner, Wolfenbiitteler Mittelalter-Studien 4 (Wiesbaden, Germany, 1992) RMAL Revue du Moyen Age latin RT Revue thomiste RTAM Rech er ches de théologie ancienne et médiévale SC Sources chrétiennes SCH Studies in Church History ST Summa theologiae

      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