Saint Bishop of Hippo. Augustine - Augustine and the Jews : a Christian defense of Jews and Judaism

AUGUSTINE AND THE JEWS

Saint Augustine, Contra Faustum Manichaeum. Incipit, B.M. Avranches, MS 90, Mont S. Michel, eleventh century.

A CHRISTIAN DEFENSE OF JEWS AND JUDAISM

With a New Postscript

PAULA FREDRIKSEN

Yale
UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Haven and London

First published in paperback in 2010 by Yale University Press.

First published in hardcover in 2008 by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

Copyright 2008 by Paula Fredriksen.
Postscript copyright 2010 by Paula Fredriksen.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2010926077
ISBN 978-0-300-16628-6 (paperback : alk. paper)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Indexes

AUGUSTINE AND THE JEWS

Whoever saves the life of a single person, it is as if he saved the entire world.

MISHNAH SANHEDRIN 4.6

In 1146, for the second time in fifty years, Christians in the Rhine Valley responded to the call to liberate the Holy Land from Muslims by first laying waste to communities of European Jews. The earlier slaughters of 1096, the bloody prelude to the First Crusade, had startled contemporaries. This time, however, a learned churchman was prepared, and he preached against those inciting anti-Jewish violence. His good deed was gratefully noted by a Jewish contemporary, Rabbi Ephraim of Bonn:

The Lord heard our outcry, and he turned to us and had pity on us. In his great mercy and grace, he sent a decent priest... named Abbot Bernard, of Clairvaux in France.... Bernard said to them: It is good to go against the Ishmaelites [Muslims]. But who-soever touches a Jew to take his life is like one who harms Jesus himself..., for in the book of Psalms it is written of them, Slay them not, lest my people forget. All the Gentiles regarded this priest as one of their saints.... When our enemies heard his words, many of them ceased plotting to kill us.

Reading Psalm 59:12 in this wayas an injunction addressed to Christians on how to treat Jews (Slay them not)was not Bernards own idea. The Abbot of Clairvaux had drawn his instruction from one of the greatest authorities of the Latin church, Augustine of Hippo.

Some seven centuries before Bernards day, in what turned out to be the twilight of the Western Roman Empire, Augustine presented his interpretation of Psalm 59 in his great masterwork, City of God. He argued there that the Jews, alone of all the religious minorities within the (newly) Christian state, should be unimpeded in their religious practice. Why did the Jews merit this unique exemption? Because, said Augustine, their religious practices devolved from a unique author: God the Father. The same god whom Christians worshiped was himself the source of Jewish scripture, Jewish tradition, and Jewish practice. Thus God himself, Augustine insisted, wanted the Jews to remain Jews. Let them preserve their ancient books, he urged; let them live openly according to their ancestral practices while scattered among the Christian majority. In so doing, Augustine taught, the Jews performed a valuable service of testimony for the church.

By the evidence of their own scriptures they bear witness for us that we have not fabricated the prophecies about Christ.... It follows that when the Jews do not believe in our scriptures, their scriptures are fulfilled in them, while they read them with blind eyes.... It is in order to give this testimony which, in spite of themselves, they supply for our benefit by their possession and preservation of those books [of the Old Testament] that they are themselves dispersed among all nations, wherever the Christian church spreads.... Hence the prophecy in the Book of Psalms: Slay them not, lest they forget your law; scatter them by your might.

CITY OF GOD 18.46

This paragraph sums up Augustines justly famous witness doctrine. His teaching on the Jews special status, and on the special service that their presence and their religious visibility rendered to the church, remained a singular aspect of his great theological legacy. With the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, this legacy passed into the traditions of medieval Christian Europe. In that more violent society, Augustines witness doctrine provided authority for later learned churchmen, who used itas Bernard, in the bleak days of the Second Crusadeto deflect and defuse Christian violence against Jews.

Augustine and the Jews tells the story of how Augustine came to conceive this unique teaching, which was original to him. Thanks to the happy survival of so many of his writings, whose sequence we know, we can see the development of his thought on this topic in an astonishing degree of detail: philosophically oriented treatises and commentaries just after his conversion in Italy in 386, his failed commentary on Genesis once back in North Africa, short essays and attempted bigger projects on the Pauline epistles, transcripts of debates with heretical opponents, sermons, letters. And then, suddenly, dazzlingly, four brilliant and original works, produced in overlapping, rapid succession, beginning in 396To Simplicianus (on Paul), Christian Teaching (on reading the Bible), Confessions (on knowing God), and Against Faustus (on the Bible, against the Manichees). We have them all. These works chart the way to his teaching on Jews and Judaism. Augustines writing is so vivid, his intellectual energy so fierce, the force of his personality so present, that we can practically hear him thinking. Tracing his thought through these closely dated works is like viewing time-lapse photography. We can watchphrase by phrase, problem by problem, insight by insighthow he gets to where he goes.

Prior to this question of Augustines teaching on Jews and Judaism, however, and in a sense framing it, stands the more fundamental one already put to us by our glance at the Crusades: Why and how did relations between Christians and Jews ever become so terrible in the first place?

THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN OR IGINS makes this distressing question that much more difficult to answer. Christianity had been born and nurtured within Judaism. Its message of bodily resurrection, divine judgment, and messianic redemption is quintessentially Jewish. The earliest Christians, themselves Jews, had proclaimed the good news of this impending redemption in terms drawn entirely from Jewish scripture. Fanning out from Jerusalem, the Christian movement in its first generation, and indefinitely thereafter, incubated within diaspora synagogue communities. In brief, ancient Christianity was itself a type of Judaism. Nonetheless, by Augustines dayin fact, well beforean important shift had occurred. Even though Christianitys past was incontrovertibly Jewish, its future was resoundingly gentile.