Introduction 7
of Jews and gentiles with no power to make such prescriptions.^27 But medieval
popes had been conditioned by centuries of theological and canonical tradition to
read him through an Augustinian lens—as advocating Jewish subservience.
An important distinction must therefore be made between Paul’s words and
Augustine’s expansion of the Pauline argument.^28 According to St Augustine, the
Jews play a special role because they are a living, albeit unwitting, testimony to the
truth of Christianity.^29 In the De civitate Dei Augustine, citing Psalms 59: 12 ‘Kill
them not, lest my people forget’, argued that, as (unknowing) witnesses to Christ
whom God had spared, the Jews must be protected; God had not slain them nor
allowed the knowledge that they were Jews to be lost.^30 Since their acceptance of
the Old Testament was disinterested testimony to the truth and historical basis
of biblical Christological prophecy, Jews were a living witness to the divine origins of
Scripture.^31 As witnesses they had been granted a specific role in the divine plan for
human society, which was in its last days and awaiting the Final Judgement; and
their existence provided a useful set of arguments for preaching Christianity to
pagans.^32 Yet their suffering as a result of the destruction of the Temple and their
dispersion over Europe and the Near East also showed that God had punished
them for their rejection of Christ; their plight was testimony to the error of Judaism
and the truth of Christianity.^33 Citing Genesis 25: 23: ‘the elder shall serve the
younger’, Paul had argued that God had instituted a new covenant for Christians
to replace the old Jewish covenant. Augustine interpreted that passage to mean that
whereas Grace saved Christians who lived by Faith, living by the Torah had led the
Jews to perdition.^34 He saw the Jews rhetorically as a personification of carnality
and sin and so a constant warning to Christians that evil is a condition from which
man in this present life can never fully escape.^35
27 Pace, Stow: ‘Jews fulfilled in their daily lives the emblematic and subservient role first ordained
for them by Paul’ (my italics), in Stow, The ‘1007 Anonymous’ and Papal Sovereignty, p.2.
28 Stow, ‘The Church and the Jews: from St Paul to Paul IV’, p.119.
29 There is a great deal of recent literature on this subject. See, for example, Dahan, La Polémique
chrétienne contre le Judaisme, p.28; David Berger, ‘Mission to the Jews and Jewish-Christian Contacts
in the Polemical Literature of the High Middle Ages’, American Historical Review 91/3 (1986), 576;
see especially Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross, p.37.
30 For a relatively recent good edition, see St Augustine, De civitate Dei 2, ed. B. Dombart, A. Kalb
(Stuttgart 1981), Bk 18, Ch. 46, p.329. See Stow, Alienated Minority, p.18; Cohen, Living Letters of
the Law, pp.30–44.
31 St Augustine, Adversos Iudaeos, The Fathers of the Church, Vol. 27, ed. R. Deferrari (New York,
1955), pp.391–414; De civitate Dei 1, ed. Dombart, Kalb, Bk 4, Ch. 34, pp.188–9; Vol. 2, Bk 18, Ch.
46, pp.328–9. See Cohen, The Friars and the Jews, p.20.
32 St Augustine, Adversus Iudaeos, ed. Deferrari, pp.391–414, passim; De civitate Dei 1, ed.
Dombart, Kalb, Bk 4, Ch. 34, pp.188–9; Vol. 2, Bk 18, Ch. 46, pp.328–9. For the Jews as providing
useful arguments for preaching against Manichaean heretics (who rejected the Old Testament) and
Donatists, see also Augustine on the Jews in ‘Contra Faustum Manichaeum’, in Nicene and Post-Nicene
Fathers, Series 1, Vol. 4 (Grand Rapids, MI, 1974), pp.113–24. See Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and
the Jews. A Christian Defence of Jews and Judaism (New York, 2008), pp.290–352.
33 St Augustine, De civitate Dei 1, ed. Dombart, Kalb, Bk 4, Ch. 34, pp.188–9; Vol. 2, Bk 18,
Ch. 46, pp.328–9. See Chazan, Daggers of Faith. pp.10–11.
34 St Augustine, Adversus Iudaeos, ed. Deferrari, Ch. 5, p.398; Ch. 7, pp.402–13. See Stow,
Alienated Minority, p.10.
35 St Augustine, Adversus Iudaeos, ed. Deferrari, pp.391–414; Cohen, Living Letters of the Law,
p.325; Stow, Alienated Minority, p.20.