Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity / Edition 1

by Jeremy Cohen

Overview

In Living Letters of the Law, Jeremy Cohen investigates the images of Jews and Judaism in the works of medieval Christian theologians from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas. He reveals how—and why—medieval Christianity fashioned a Jew on the basis of its reading of the Bible, and how this hermeneutically crafted Jew assumed distinctive character and power in Christian thought and culture.

Augustine's doctrine of Jewish witness, which constructed the Jews so as to mandate their survival in a properly ordered Christian world, is the starting point for this illuminating study. Cohen demonstrates how adaptations of this doctrine reflected change in the self-consciousness of early medieval civilization. After exploring the effect of twelfth-century Europe's encounter with Islam on the value of Augustine's Jewish witnesses, he concludes with a new assessment of the reception of Augustine's ideas among thirteenth-century popes and friars.

Consistently linking the medieval idea of the Jew with broader issues of textual criticism, anthropology, and the philosophy of history, this book demonstrates the complex significance of Christianity's "hermeneutical Jew" not only in the history of antisemitism but also in the broad scope of Western intellectual history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520218703
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	11/11/1999
Series:	S. Mark Taper Foundation Imprint in Jewish Studies Series
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	461
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Jeremy Cohen, Professor of Medieval Jewish History at Tel Aviv University, has written two prize-winning books, The Friars and the Jews (1982), and "Be Fertile and Increase, Fill the Earth and Master It" (1989). He is the editor ofEssential Papers on Judaism and Christianity in Conflict (1991), and From Witness to Witchcraft: Jews and Judaism in Medieval Christian Thought (1996).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 
List of Abbreviations 
Introduction 
PART ONE: AUGUSTINIAN FOUNDATIONS 
I. The Doctrine of Jewish Witness 
PART TWO: THE AUGUSTINIAN LEGACY IN THE
EARLY MIDDLE AGES: ADAPTATION, REINTERPRETATION, RESISTANCE 
2. Gregory the Great: Between Sicut Iudaeis and Adversus Iudaeos 
3· Isidore of Seville: Anti-Judaism and the Hermeneutics of Integration 
4· Agobard of Lyons: Battling the Enemies of Christian Unity 
PART THREE: RECONCEPTUALIZING JEWISH DISBELIEF IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY 
5· Reason in Defense of the Faith: From Anselm of Canterbury to Peter Alfonsi 
6. Against the Backdrop of Holy War: Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter the Venerable 
7· Renaissance Men and Their Dreams 
PART FOUR: THE FRIARS RECONSIDERED 
8. Judaism as Heresy: Thirteenth-Century Churchmen and the Talmud 
9· Ambiguities of Thomistic Synthesis 
Afterword 
References 
Index