Living Letters of the Law. Jeremy Cohen
Читать онлайн книгу.
AHDL
Introduction
Some years ago, I offered a course on the history of Judaism at a Protestant seminary in the midwestern United States. Both as a Jew and as a historian committed to studying the interdependence of Christian and Jewish civilizations, I found it gratifying that my course fulfilled a distribution requirement in church history at the seminary; the genuine interest of Christian divinity students in my Judaic subject encouraged me no less. Surprisingly, however, my interaction with the president, the dean, and some faculty colleagues at the school proved less gratifying. Although I understood my role in their community primarily as an academic one, to teach about Jewish civilization, they took but a secondary interest in my instruction. Instead, they habitually focused on the satisfaction they derived from my presence at their seminary, from having, as they put it, “a Jew in our midst.” In their eyes, my Jewish identity—or what they believed that identity to be—somehow rounded out their picture of how their Christian community should properly appear. For these colleagues, who welcomed me onto their campus with genuine, memorable warmth, I functioned less as the historian I construed myself to be and more as a player on a theological stage set long before my arrival.
This book concerns that stage and its players. Throughout much of its history, in various manners and to differing extents, Christianity has accorded Jews and Judaism a singular place in a properly ordered Christian society. From the people who received God's Old Testament, to those who parented, nurtured, and, allegedly, murdered Jesus, to those whose conversion will signal the second coming of Christ, Jews have had distinctive tasks in Christian visions of salvation history. The idea that Christendom needs the Jews to fill these special roles has, in fact, contributed to the survival of the Jewish minority in a Christian world, with varying results. On one hand, the Christian idea of Jewish identity crystallized around the theological purpose the Jew served in Christendom; Christians perceived the Jews to be who they were supposed to be, not who they actually were, and related to them accordingly. As Bernard of Clairvaux, one of the most prominent Christian theologians of the Middle Ages, put it in the twelfth century, “the Jews are not to be persecuted, killed, or even put to flight…. Indeed, the Jews are for us the living letters (vivi…apices) of Scripture, constantly representing the Lord's passion.”1 For Bernard, as for many medieval churchmen, the Jews embodied a particular reading of Holy Scripture, one that established the truth of Christianity in its own right and illuminated the contrasting Christian exegesis of the Bible. As such, the Jews' nature, their personality, and their historical mission derived directly from essential dictates of Christian doctrine and hermeneutics. On the other hand, when Christian theologians awakened to the disparity between the Jew they had constructed and the real Jew of history, they could construe the latter's failure to serve the purposes allotted him as an abandonment of his Judaism. This, in turn, might render him less suited for the protection granted Jews who did function “properly” in Christian society.
In order to meet their particular needs, Christian theology and exegesis created a Jew of their own, and this book investigates the medieval