Jews and Others
them, and (more rarely) by extensive critiques of paganism. Augustine’sCity
of Godof course displays both features: in books – a devastating analysis
of the internal contradictions of Roman paganism, and in – an obsessive
demonstration of the underlying Christian message of the Old Testament.
Christian critiques of paganism are not our concern here, though actual
Christian measures against paganism certainly are, for the evolving position
of the Jews can be best seen in relation to them. But the central problem
is how to use the vast mass of Christian writing as historical evidence for
the Judaism and the Jewish communities of the period. For this problem to
be addressed properly, it would be necessary to consider the whole of the
Christian literature of the period, and its relation to Jews and Judaism, distin-
guishing (a) confrontations with Judaism as a timeless system whose features
are determined by the Old Testament; (b) apparent attributions of beliefs and
attitudes to contemporary Jews; (c) apparent reports of contemporary Jew-
ish customs; (d) reports or descriptions of actual episodes, dated and located
in space. These last, while they may well still retain highly tendentious fea-
tures, must inevitably be the most promising material on which a historian
can work. They may be considered along with the legislation of the Chris-
tian emperors relating to Jews and Judaism, all of it collected, translated, and
discussed in exemplary fashion by Linder.^72 For it was, paradoxically, in the
shape of legislation of an increasingly repressive kind that Christians of the
period most fully revealed a detailed attention to the realities of contempo-
rary Jewish life, of a sort which it is a major labour to find in their theological
literature.
What follows is not claimed to be the result of the type of systematic
analysis of Christian literature adumbrated above, an enterprise from time
to time attempted in part,^73 but never carried through in full. It merely offers
some examples of the types of material which Christian literature presents,
and of the problems to which it gives rise. I ignore here, of course, all of
the general and timeless characterisations of Judaism as a religion, which are
integral to Christian writing, and turn instead to apparent attributions of be-
lief to contemporary Jews. For instance, two extraordinarily powerful evo-
cations of Jewish messianic and apocalyptic beliefs are presented by Jerome
in his commentaries on the minor prophets. Firstly, writing in the s on
Zephaniah:–, he says:
. Above n. .
. S. Krauss, ‘‘The Jews in the Works of the Church Fathers,’’JQR (): ; see also
especially S. J. D. Cohen, ‘‘Pagan and Christian Evidence on the Ancient Synagogue,’’ in
L. I. Levine, ed.,The Synagogue in Late Antiquity(), .