Aquinas and the Jews

4. Gravissimum Peccatum: The Crucifixion of Christ and the Guilt of the Jews

4. Gravissimum Peccatum: The Crucifixion of Christ and the Guilt of the Jews Sanguis Christ! expetitur ab eis usque hodie. —Super EvangelismMatthaei 27.25 Like all medieval theologians, Aquinas believed the death of Christ meant the end of Judaism as a legitimate religion. Judaism had been designed by God to prefigure Christ and make it possible for people to recognize him as the Messiah; the entire history of the Jewish people had been apmepamtio Christi. Now the Crucifixion had lowered the curtain on this act of the sacred drama. Practices that had once been virtuous and salvific—circumcision , sacrifice, keeping the Sabbath—would henceforth be blasphemous and loathsome in the sight of God. In Christ, the Jews were offered a choice: accept the salvation offered by the Crucified One, or incur exile and spiritual death. Those Jews who put their faith in Jesus would be counted among the elect, the verusIsrael; those who rejected him were condemned to homelessness and degradation in this life and damnation in the world to come. But Aquinas could not completely sever the ties between Christian and Jew. For him, as for other medieval theologians, the Jews were infidels, dangerous unbelievers unworthy of toleration. Yet there was alwaysPaul: Paul who had testified to the Jews' zeal for God and their primacyover the Gentiles; Paul, who had defended himself before the Sanhedrin by allying himself with the Pharisees, and who proclaimed that the rejection of the Jews was only temporary, that God still loved them and would save them in the end. Aquinas believed the participation of first-century Jewsin Jesus' crucifixion was the defining act of Jewish history, and that henceforth all Jews were cursed, but Paul's authority made it impossible for him to adopt a wholly negative attitude toward the Jews who continued to exist in the The Crucifixion and the Guilt of the Jews 63 Christian era. Instead, he developed a position characterizedby the same antinomies that shaped his view of Jewish history before Christ: the Jews as holy and sinful, rejected and beloved. There is a wealth of material in Aquinas's writings pertaining to firstcentury Jews, their role in the crucifixion of Christ, and the guilt they incurred by their actions, but it is diffuse, scattered throughout the Summa Theolqgiae and various Bible commentaries. One approach to reconstructing Aquinas's thought would be to analyze these sources piecemeal, perhaps by placing them in chronological order and examining them one at a time. Fortunately, however, such a cumbersome process is not necessary , since Aquinas's most important writings on the Jews at the time of Christ—the third part of the Summa Theolqgiae, the Lecturae on John and Matthew, and the commentaries on Romans and Psalms—were all written in the period 1268—1273, while he was in Paris and Naples.1 This means Thomas dealt with these issues repeatedly during his most mature and productive years as a writer and theologian. In these various works Aquinas develops and clarifies his ideas, but there are no fundamental changes in his position. For this reason I will take a synthetic approach, freely juxtaposing passages from various texts in an effort to reconstruct the totality of Aquinas's thought. Aquinas's portrayal of first-century Jewish society was, of course, shaped primarily by the biblical text. The Gospels provided the basic information that he had to integrate and explain. Thomas learned from all four Gospels that Jesus was followed by a core of disciples who—with the exception of Judas Iscariot—remained faithful to the end, as well as by a larger crowd that eventually turned against him. He also knew from these texts that the Pharisees and priests sawJesus' popularity as a threat to their power. They repeatedly tried to discredit and trick Jesus, and in the end conspired against him to secure his arrest and execution. The Gospel of John provided the additional information that the Pharisees, aswell as the Jews as a whole, were divided over Jesus: most condemned him, but others suspected he was a good man and possibly a prophet or even the Messiah. In his exegesis, Aquinas attempted to dovetail these facts with hisconception of the history of the Jews and their understanding of the Mosaic Law. Given the tensions and elisions of that conception, this was no mean task. His view of history demanded that he portray the Jews as simultaneously corrupt in morals and religion yet somehow also prepared to receive the Messiah. Similarly, his...