Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (review)

Jeremy Cohen, professor at Tel Aviv University, the leading scholar in explicating Christian views of Jews in medieval western Europe and a prominent specialist in the history of the Jews during the later Middle Ages, has written an important book that repays careful study. It is Cohen’s primary aim to examine the views of a selection of Christian writers during the Middle Ages concerning the way in which they “constructed” the Jew and Judaism. (Careful distinctions need to be made between construction and attitude.) Some of these writers are of the first order as intellects, e.g. Augustine, Anselm of Bec, Abelard, Bernard of Clairvaux (?) and Thomas Aquinas, while others are men of considerably less intellectual power, e.g. Isidore of Seville, Agobard of Lyons, Petrus Alfonsi (?), Guibert of Nogent, and Raymond Martin. Indeed, it is not clear why some writers were selected and others neglected. For example, during the first half of the eleventh century both Raoul Glaber and Ademar of Chabannes construct the Jew in interesting ways but are not mentioned by Cohen, while men such as Rupert of Deutz and Joachim of Fiore are mentioned but not discussed in detail. Finally, it seems to me that Jews who converted to Christianity, e.g. Petrus Alfonsi, Judah ben David ha-Levi, and Nicholas Donin, should be treated as a group to identify what they share and how they differ.

When dealing with the thought of men such as Augustine and Isidore among others, Cohen undertakes a tri-partite agenda. First, he proceeds on the plane of the history of ideas tracing, for example, the manner in which the construction of the Jew by Paul of Tarsus influenced the thinking of Augustine of Hippo and how the ideas of both men influenced their posterity. In this process, Cohen shows how a matrix of ideas, e.g. the Jew as witness, is dealt with by later writers who give this intellectual inheritance different values and add their own new views to the mix. At the second level, Cohen’s method is that of intellectual history insofar as he tries to place the “construction” of the Jew with in the framework of the personal intellectual development and interests of a particular author, e.g. the importance of logic and “rationality” in the thought of Anselm and how this had an impact on the way he constructed the Jew. This process, however, touches on the third level of approach, also intellectual history, in which Cohen tries to relate the impact of the author’s real-world experience, e.g. Isidore as bishop and royal adviser, to the development of the author’s construction of the Jew.

When Cohen develops the history of ideas track, he is particularly successful. In addition, when he works within the framework of the development of a particular individual’s intellectual development, he is generally successful, although not all thinkers discussed are given as full a treatment as Augustine or Isidore or Agobard. In this context, Cohen’s treatment of Jews who convert to Christianity is carried out within the framework of their apparent rejection of the Talmud or perhaps more broadly their distaste for rabbinic Judaism, but this background is not developed. Here the long history of Karaite thought and practice as well as its construction by non-Karaites certainly must be approached if only to be dismissed. In addition, Cohen is not particularly forthcoming in adumbrating the individual intellectual development of one or another friar in regard to his construction of the Jew. Indeed, the section dealing with the friars, despite Cohen’s assertions to the contrary, reads much like a defense of his previous stimulating views on this topic.

To my way of thinking, however, the most problematic aspect of Cohen’s effort concerns his attempt to examine how contemporary mundane affairs impinged upon the manner in which one or another Christian thinker constructed the Jew. For...