Odo of Tournai and the Dehumanization of Medieval Jews: A Reexamination

Over the past two decades, Odo of Tournai (d. 1113) has become better appreciated as an important thinker of the twelfth-century renaissance.¹ First a prominent teacher of philosophy and science at Tournai’s Notre-Dame cathedral school, Odo later withdrew to become abbot of the monastery of St. Martin of Tournai and ended his life as bishop of Cambrai. Among his many works Odo left one religious disputation: a Debate with the Jew, Leo, Concerning the Advent of Christ, the Son of God.² Like his contemporary Anselm of Canterbury,³ Odo sought to demonstrate the rational necessity of certain Christian beliefs. Perhaps with even greater consistency than Anselm, Odo’s polemic introduced rational proofs for the Incarnation, while largely eschewing traditional appeals to scriptural prooftexts.⁴

Although a polemic, the text maintains a remarkably irenic tone, unlike so many Christian “dialogues” with Jews. It appears all the more genuine as a historical account precisely because its conclusion must have been so unsatisfying to a Christian audience: rather than allowing Odo’s “proofs” to lead him to baptism, Leo—despite his admiration for some of the arguments—continues to embrace Judaism. By “genuine” I do not mean that Odo’s text is a transcript of a debate with Leo (although Odo gives the impression that such a debate actually occurred)⁵ but only that it successfully captures some of the theological issues and attitudes that separated Jews and Christians. Its conclusion, however, does reflect a historical reality: despite nearly a millennium of Christian polemics, relatively few Jews had voluntarily adopted Christianity. Does Leo’s refusal to follow Odo’s rational proofs to Christian baptism come to add verisimilitude, or, as some have proposed, does the conclusion to Odo’s Debate rather function as an anti-Jewish polemic that stigmatized Judaism as inherently irrational, and so exacerbated Christian anti-Judaism?⁶ I will review the evidence here.

The Virgin Birth, Pollution, and Incarnation

Despite a lengthy defense of the rational necessity of the Incarnation, for Odo the conditions of the God-Man’s birth remained troublesome, because Leo insisted that impurity attaches itself to all childbirth—even that of Jesus. Indeed, Lev 12.2–3 describes a parturient woman as unclean for seven days following the birth of a male child and fourteen days following the birth of a female. Christian theologians typically understood that it was because of his mother’s impurity that the boy’s ritual circumcision had to be delayed until the eighth day. In the fourth century Ambrose of Milan remarked that circumcision can be performed only “when the mother of the child begins to be in pure blood, who is said to sit in unclean blood before the eighth day.”⁷ Although Ambrose insisted that Jesus’s death on the Cross rendered circumcision of the flesh unnecessary for his followers,⁸ the fact that the infant Jesus had been circumcised and that Mary had undergone postpartum purification (Lk 2.22ff.) remained theologically problematic.

The standard medieval view held that Mary’s purification in the Temple was of spiritual and not carnal significance. The twelfth-century Aelred of Rievaulx acknowledged that Mary fulfilled the purificatory rituals prescribed for a parturient; hence, Christians celebrate the Feast of the Purification of Mary (February 2). But, he insisted, Mary did not have to fulfill these rituals, since she conceived miraculously from the Holy Spirit. She was herself clean, but willed to be perceived as unclean, and chose to perform these rituals out of humility.⁹ His contemporaries Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153), Guerric d’Igny (d. ca. 1157), and Hermanus de Runa (fl. ca. 1150) expressed substantially the same view.¹⁰

Twelfth-century Christian theologians, then, argued that the miraculous character of the Virgin Birth released Mary from the requirement of ritual purification, even though she performed it. Yet medieval Jewish critics raised disturbing questions...