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Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity
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Islamic LawJudaismJewish WitnessesChristian SymbolismJewish StudiesChristian PracticeJewish ThoughtJeremy CohenJewish WitnessMedieval ChristianityCultural HistoryLanguage StudiesArtsComparative ReligionBiblical StudyClassicsIntellectual History
The book examines how medieval Christian theologians, from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas, portrayed Jews and Judaism, using Augustine’s doctrine of Jewish witness as its foundational framework. It aims to reassess how Augustine’s Jewish witness ideas were received by 13th‑century popes and friars after exploring the impact of 12th‑century European encounters with Islam. The author investigates the influence of 12th‑century European encounters with Islam on Augustine’s doctrine and then evaluates its reception among 13th‑century ecclesiastical authorities. Cohen demonstrates that medieval Christianity fashioned a “hermeneutical Jew” whose biblical interpretation endowed Jews with distinctive character and power, and that changes in this portrayal reflected broader shifts in medieval self‑consciousness, textual criticism, anthropology, and history, thereby shaping antisemitism and Western intellectual thought.
In Living Letters of the Law, Jeremy Cohen investigates the images of Jews and Judaism in the works of medieval Christian theologians from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas. He reveals how - and why - medieval Christianity fashioned a Jew on the basis of its reading of the Bible, and how this hermeneutically crafted Jew assumed distinctive character and power in Christian thought and culture. Augustine's doctrine of Jewish witness, which constructed the Jews so as to mandate their survival in a properly ordered Christian world, is the starting point for this illuminating study. Cohen demonstrates how adaptations of this doctrine reflected change in the self-consciousness of early medieval civilization. After exploring the effect of twelfth-century Europe's encounter with Islam on the value of Augustine's Jewish witnesses, he concludes with a new assessment of the reception of Augustine's ideas among thirteenth-century popes and friars. Consistently linking the medieval idea of the Jew with broader issues of textual criticism, anthropology, and the philosophy of history, this book demonstrates the complex significance of Christianity's 'hermeneutical Jew' not only in the history of antisemitism but also in the broad scope of Western intellectual history.