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Introduction
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Chapter
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In 1965, the Catholic Church revised its traditional teachingon the Jews and their place in history. In their "Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions" (Nostm Aetate) the bishops of the Second Vatican Council rejected the idea that allJews were guiltyof the Crucifixion of Jesus, declared persecution of Jews to be immoral, and informed catechists and other religious educators that "the Jews should not be spoken of as rejected or accursed."1 These statements were brief and undramatic; the section on Jews in Nostm Aetate is only two pages long. The bishops did not overtly acknowledge that they were altering traditional doctrine, nor did they strike a penitential note. When the decree was promulgated, however, it was immediately recognized that the Church had repudiated more than fifteen hundred years of theory andpractice. Prior to Vatican II, no theologian was more closely identified with traditional Catholic teaching than Saint Thomas Aquinas (1224—1274). A controversial figure during his lifetime,Aquinas was accepted asthe official philosopher of the Dominican Order within a generation of his death, and by the end of the Middle Ages he had eclipsed such rivals as Duns Scotus to become the Church's most influentialtheologian. At the Council of Trent his Summa Theologiae layon the altar next to the Bible.Over the next three centuries, Aquinas's popularity waxed and waned, and the Church did not follow his teaching on every issue (the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which was promulgated by Pope Pius IX in 1854, despite the fact that Thomas had denied it, is a case in point), but his theological method and many of his substantive ideas remained regnant. His star shone even more brightly after 1879, when Pope Leo XIII promulgated the encyclicalAeterni Pcitris, which lavished praise on Aquinas and called for a greater emphasis on the Angelic Doctor's teaching. Catholic philosophers, theologians, and historians enthusiastically responded to Leo's challenge and made the period from 1880 to 1960 a golden age of Thomism. Aquinas became virtually the Church's official philosopher and theologian, and countless books, articles, and dissertations were published on every aspect of his thought. Introduction Significantly, very few of these works dealt with Aquinas's attitude toward Jews. In the aftermath of the Dreyfus affair, two French pamphlets were published on Aquinas and the Jews, one accusing him of being an "antisemite," the other defending him from the charge.2 In 1935 another brief, apologetic treatment appeared.3 Even in theyears sinceWorld War II, when a debate has raged over the allegedly Christian roots of modern antisemitism , only a handful of articles on Aquinas's attitude toward Jewshave been published.4 This is the first book-length treatment of the topic. Since Aquinas wrote widely on both Judaism and the status of Jews in a Christian society, this neglect cannot be explained by a lack of source material. Rather, its causes must be sought in the attitudes and interests of Aquinas scholars. Most of these scholars have been eitherself-proclaimed "Thomists" who have looked to Aquinas as a source of philosophical and religious truth, or else historians of medieval thought. It is not difficult to surmise why Thomists have largely ignored Aquinas's teachings on the Jews. These scholars arc primarily interested in aspects of Thomas's work which have continuing relevance. Since Aquinas's ideas about Jews seem outdated and intolerant in a modern context, there has been little incentive for Thomists to explore this area of his thought. In addition, most Thomists are conservative Catholics who no doubt are disinclined to deal with issues that could make Aquinas—and, by implication, the Church— appear in a bad light. For them, perhaps, some things are better left unsaid. The case of medieval historians is more puzzling, but it is of a piece with a broader lack of interest in Jews and Jewish-Christian relations. Medievalists traditionally have been content to leave such topics to specialists in Jewish studies, who, for their part, are neither trained for nor especially interested in studying medieval Christian thought. Over the past decade, however, a handful of scholars have begun to examine the nexus between Christian theology and the status of Jews in medieval society. Much of the impetus for this work has been provided by Jeremy Cohen's The Friars and the Jews.5 In this book Cohen sought to supplement traditional explanations of the persecution of western European Jews in the thirteenth century, persecutions which culminated in...