Aquinas and the Jews

6. Aquinas and the Persecution of European Jews

6. Aquinas and the Persecution of European Jews Casum ludaeorum esse miserandum, quia ex ignorantia peccaverunt .. . [sed] casus non est excusabilis extoto, quia eorum ignorantia non fait invincibilis vel ex necessitate existens, sed quodammodo voluntaria . —Super Epistolam ad Romanes 10.3 At the outset of this study, we posed three questions: What was Aquinas's attitude toward Judaism and the Jews? What were its social and theological sources? How did Aquinas contribute to medieval hostility and violence toward Jews? Having dealt with the first two questions in considerable detail, we are now in a position to turn to the third. In true Thomistic fashion, we may begin with a distinction. First, to what extent did Aquinas's writings help entrench the hostility toward Jews that already existed?The answer should alreadybe clear: becauseof his skill in explicating and rationalizing the traditional theological and canonistic attitude toward Jews, and because of his subsequent influence within the Dominican Order and on medieval thought generally, Aquinas did much to reinforce a status quo in which Jews were tolerated and allowed to worship but were subjected to a variety of discriminatory laws. Second, how did Thomas contribute to innovative types of hostility toward Jews? Here the answer is more complex. Between 1096 and 1300, four fundamentally novel types of hostility toward Jews appeared: pogroms associated with the Crusades; violence stemming from paranoid beliefs that had little or no basis in fact, such as the myth that Jews crucified Christian children or desecrated the Eucharist; intrusive efforts to convert Jews to Christianity; and various fines, seizures of property, and expulsions based on the claim that all or most Jews in a given region were usurers. The first two categories can be dispensed with quickly. Aquinas had nothing to do with the anti-Jewish violence that accompanied the Cru- sades or with executions and lynchings based on paranoid fantasies. He never mentioned the killing or forced conversion of Jews by Crusaders, but he was very clear in his teaching on killing and forced conversion in general: Except in the context of a just war or ajudicialexecution, Thomas thought all killing was immoral and should be punished, and he believed conversion should "in no way" be coerced. There is nothing in his moral doctrine that could serve to justify mob violence. Similarly, Aquinas did not comment on the belief that Jews killed and ate Christian children. Like Pope Gregory IX, however, he was well aware that murder and cannibalism were violations of Mosaic Law, and, aswe have seen, he was convinced that medieval Jews generally observed the Law.The claim that Jewsabused consecrated hosts was not heard until after Thomas's death, but it seems doubtful he would have given it much credence either since he knew that Jews did not believe in the efficacy of Christian sacraments.In any case, he certainly made no direct contribution to the development of these myths. The relation of Aquinas's teaching to the innovative missionarytechniques of Pablo Christiani and others is more nuanced. Christian!, like Raymond Marti, the author of the Pugio Fidfi, was a memberof the Order of Preachers, as was Aquinas. By itself, however, this means little. The Dominicans were a large and disparate order, and there is no evidencethat Aquinas knew Christiani or Marti, though it seems likely he was at least aware of Christiani's presence in Paris in 1269, since he was there at the same time. More important, nothing in Aquinas's writings indicates that he thought the Talmud could be useful to Christian missionaries, and, as we have noted, when Raymond de Penafort asked Thomas to compose a guide for missionaries, the work he produced, the Summa ContraGentiles ,relied solely on rational arguments to persuade Jews and Moslems of Christian truth; there is only a single, disparaging reference to the Talmud in the entire book. Hence there is no direct link between Aquinas and the "new missionizing." Interestingly, however, some of the ideas about Judaism that underlie the Christiani/Marti approach are very similar to Thomistic doctrine. The project of using the Talmud to prove Jesus was the Messiah assumed that at least some of the Talmudic sages believed that Jesus was Christ.ToJews, of course, this notion was incomprehensible—as Nachmanides asked, if the sages believed this, why did they remain Jews?—but it docs mesh with Aquinas's "malicious theory" of the Crucifixion, which asserts the priests and Phariseesknew Jesuswas the Messiah but killedhim anyway. Christiani and Marti also collapsed...