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REVIEWS 209 Robert E. Lerner, The Feast of Saint Abraham: Medieval Millenarians and the Jews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2001) viii + 186 pp., ill. In his introduction to The Feast of Saint Abraham: Medieval Millenarians and the Jews Robert Lerner explicitly connects the persecutions of Jews in the Middle Ages to the Third Reich’s attempted genocide. “The culture of persecution that came into place by the about 1250 is connected seamlessly to Treblinka,” Lerner writes (1). While this bold claim opens Lerner’s introduction, it turns out to be more of a historical “head nod” than an important element in Lerner’s book. What Lerner is really attempting to take on is “a wide spread assumption, associated primarily with the work of Norman Cohn, that all medieval millenarians are anti-Semites …” (3). In order to disprove this “wide spread assumption ” Lerner looks to the works of Joachim of Fiore, an Italian Benedictine monk and visionary. Unfortunately, Lerner’s claim for what he refers to as Joachim’s “philo-Judaism” is undercut by one constant that Lerner seems to ignore: central to Joachim’s vision is the conversion of the Jews. Lerner provides a fairly detailed, albeit brief, history of Joachim’s life, focusing on three revelatory visions which result in “the big three ideas” that serve as the foundation for Joachim’s prophetic statements. Joachim’s hermeneutic requires a “concordance” of the New and Old Testaments (his first “big idea”) which he uses in order to explicate the Book of Revelations. Joachim’s second “big idea” involves the realization that this hermeneutic concordance reveals “the expectation of a new status of salvation on earth” (17). Finally, Joachim’s third “big idea” involves a Pentecostal vision that allows him to understand fully the mystery of the Trinity and allows him to realize exactly how the prophecies of Revelations will unfold through time. This “earthly Sabbath ” will, as Lerner writes, “entail a return to the Jews” (22). But as Lerner explains in the following chapter, this “return to the Jews” involves the conversion of the Jews, as Lerner states explicitly, “… Joachim’s conception of the conversion of the Jews was integral to his millennialism” (31). Although Lerner goes on to explain how Joachim’s ideas were disseminated and augmented over the course of the next three hundred years, he never grapples with a serious inconsistency inherent in his project. To state it simply, a converted Jew is not a Jew. A converted Jew is a Christian. Or, if a converted Jew is still a Jew, then Lerner must be considering the designation “Jew” as a racial or national identification, something that conversion to Christianity cannot effect. (This type of definition would make the reference to Treblinka in the introduction of profound concern.) To make matters worse, it seems as though Lerner does not even recognize the problem since he repeats the formula over and over again. For example, commenting upon Joachim’s conception of the final stages of salvific history Lerner writes, “The striking concept here [in Joachim’s plan] is not the final conversion of the Jews, an article of Christian belief ever since Paul’s proclamation … What is novel is the proposition that at the end of time the world will be transformed in a mutually beneficial union of Christians and Jews” (24). After the “final conversion” which Jews are left? If the primary topic of this book had been a history of the transmission of Joachim of Fiore’s prophetic works, their emendation and reception by the laity, the monastic orders, and church authorities, the designation of converted REVIEWS 210 Jews as “Jews” might be cause for a moment’s hesitation and a passing comment . But, the distinctive role of Jews in Joachite millennialism is central to Lerner’s thesis. Given that this is the case, it would be of paramount importance to understand what the term “Jew” means, both to Joachim of Fiore for the purposes of his vision and to Lerner for the purposes of his historical analysis . Perhaps of greater concern is the revelation of the ongoing transparency of the Jews’ ambiguous status, by this I mean the question of the idea of an...

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