Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (38 page)

The tragic purity of Augustine's intentions—tragic because all too pure—was fully on display when he turned to the question of the Jews. Rampant violence, sanctioned by the Church and the state, was ubiquitous. Jews were increasingly targeted, ominously so, because of all misfit groups they still posed to univocal Christianity the most mortal threat. In the year of Augustine's baptism—the year of his mother's death—Saint John Chrysostom, bishop of Antioch, had delivered a series of sermons that ratcheted up homiletic attacks on Jews. Ruether calls them "easily the most violent and tasteless of the anti-Judaic literature of the period."
¹⁸

It is of secondary importance that Chrysostom's real targets were those Christians—"Judaizers"—who were drawn to Jewish cult and practice, because his assault carried beyond them to Jews as such. "I know that many people hold a high regard for the Jew, and consider their way of life worthy of respect at the present time. This is why I am hurrying to pull up this fatal notion by the roots ... A place where a whore stands on display is a whorehouse. What is more, the synagogue is not only a whorehouse and a theater; it is also a den of thieves and a haunt of wild animals ... No better disposed than pigs or goats, [the Jews] live by the rule of debauchery and inordinate gluttony. Only one thing they understand: to gorge themselves and to get drunk."
¹⁹
Ruether points out that nowhere in his sermons does Chrysostom directly order attacks on Jews, but did he need to? He said, "When animals have been fattened by having all they want to eat, they get stubborn and hard to manage ... When animals are unfit for work, they are marked for slaughter, and this is the very thing which the Jews have experienced. By making themselves unfit for work, they have become ready for slaughter. This is why Christ said, 'As for my enemies, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slay them before me.'"
²⁰

Should we be surprised that not long after these sermons were preached, there were several violent outbursts against Jews in Antioch, with its great synagogue demolished? Antioch is the site, in this period, of a first draft of the "ritual murder" charge brought against Jews.
²¹
Shall Jews be allowed to live as Jews? Increasingly, momentum built toward a new consensus: No. In 414, what might be termed history's first large-scale pogrom occurred, that savage assault, referred to earlier, on the large, ancient, and prestigious Jewish community in Alexandria. A historian of the time says the Jewish settlement there was destroyed.
²²

The abolition of the Jewish patriarchate in Palestine, tied as it was to the rediscovery by Christians of the Holy Land, emphasizes, like the fate of the community in Alexandria, that Jews living alongside Christians would from now on be at particular risk. One result of this would be the further flourishing of the rabbinic centers in relatively remote Babylonia, under Persian dominance, where a so-called exilarch was recognized as the head of the Jewish people. Jewish academies in Persia, building on the Mishnah, would bring to full flower Jewish literary and spiritual impulses in the masterly Babylonian Talmud. Here is an important difference between Jewish and Christian development: Jewish study of Torah and commentary, conducted at a remove from Christianity, led to a more or less independent self-understanding.

Beginning in this period, Jews stopped acting like sibling rivals in a contest over a shared legacy and began to see their own legacy as having nothing to do with the developing theology or opinions of Christians. Jewish sages, commenting on the commentaries, interpreting the interpretations, had entered an entirely new room of the religious imagination. The discourse of rabbis became multilayered. They derived meaning as much from the nuances of text as from its obvious significance. Exegesis became a way of recovering the past, and Midrash, from the Hebrew word for "interpretation," became a way of infusing the present with awe. The elusiveness of God came to be reflected in the circumspection of the esoteric elucidation of God's Word. "In the Jewish tradition," Moshe Halbertal comments, "the centrality of the text takes the place of theological consistency. Jews have had diverse and sometimes opposing ideas about God: the anthropomorphic God of the Midrash, the Aristotelian unmoved mover of Maimonides and his school, the Kabbalah's image of God as a dynamic organism manifested in the complexity of his varied aspects, the
sefirot.
These conceptions of God have little in common and they are specifically Jewish only insofar as each is a genuine interpretation of Jewish canonical texts."
²³
Israel, as the critic Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi put it, "was transfigured into texts-in-exile," and the "literacy of exile" would give shape to the Jewish religious imagination.
²⁴

The rabbinic method itself, in other words, was seen as a worshipful embodiment of the holy. Much of this was spoken in instruction, meditation, and prayer, as masters trained disciples, but nearly always there were disciples taking careful notes of what was said, and then editors compiling new texts, which themselves served as the touchstone of contemplation and, more prosaically, as instruction manuals in Jewish spirituality. Among this most literate people, an oral tradition quickly became a living sacred literature. At the heart of this enterprise, of course, remained the Pentateuch of Moses—the Torah. Mishnah, and ultimately Talmud, built a kind of moat around the Torah, as the study centers themselves served as a bulwark of the Jewish people.

But Jews in the crumbling Roman Empire remained at risk because their very presence challenged the integrity of both a transformed Church membership and a radically new Christian self-understanding to which Jews remained important. Augustine's treatment of the question must be seen against this backdrop. Among Church fathers, Augustine is remarkable for his sensitivity to the Jewish character of Christian faith, which derived from his close reading of Paul. Augustine was far less polemical in his reading of the Old Testament than other Christian thinkers. "Augustine forbears derogatory comparison," Paula Fredriksen has written. "If the Old Testament is a concealed form of the New and vice versa, then each is alike in dignity and religious value." Fredriksen also makes the point that Augustine argued "against Jerome that both Jesus and the first generation of Jewish apostles, Paul emphatically included, were, as Christians, also Torah-observant Jews."
²⁵

But Augustine's writing about Jews of his own time, especially his treatise in the
Adversus Judaeos
genre and in book 4 of
The City of God,
both of which date to about the year 425, is marked by a typical expression of Christian contempt. In one place, denouncing them for their rejection of the "obvious testimonies" of the prophets, he declares Jews to be "the House of Israel which [God] has cast off ... They, however, whom He cast off ... are themselves the builders of destruction and rejecters of the corner-stone."
²⁶
In another, he asserts that "the Lord Christ distinguished between His faithful ones and His Jewish enemies, as between light and darkness." Jews were "those on whose closed eyes He shed His light."
²⁷

Augustine calls on Jews to repent and come into the Church. But if they refuse? The danger to Jews was that, in a brutal age in which the Church was finally in a dominant position, key Christian thinkers were openly concluding that the Jews' continued existence could no longer be justified. Whether out of an essential humanitarianism or not—and one would like to think he came to his position as a result of a firm attachment to God as a God of love—Augustine met that argument head-on, and rejected it. That is, he rejected not only Chrysostom but his mentor, Ambrose. Against those arguing that Jews were the enemies of Jesus, Augustine would insist, in effect, on considering the question in the light of Jesus' own Jewishness. And even if such enmity was to be established, he could ask, Where in Jesus does one find an execution order?

Ruether writes, "The difference between the treatise of Augustine and the sermons of John Chrysostom does not lie in any difference of basic doctrines about the status of the Jews, but in the fact that Augustine writes in the detachment of his study with no Jewish threat in sight, while Chrysostom speaks in the heat of battle."
²⁸
But is that so? Nothing in Chrysostom wants the survival of Jews as Jews, while in Augustine that very thing comes to be seen as "part of the providence of our true God."
²⁹
At a crucial moment, writing at the height of his prestige, Augustine offers a new rationale for a limited Christian version of the long tradition of Roman tolerance of Judaism. This lengthy passage, a whole chapter in
The City of God,
summarizes the history of Jewish-Christian conflict. It includes a description of how this prophecy-fulfillment dynamic condemns the Jews and, in Augustine's momentous innovation, how that same dynamic requires, in a murderous age, that Jews be spared:

When Herod was on the throne of Judea, and when Caesar Augustus was emperor, after a change in the Roman constitution, and when the emperor's rule had established a world-wide peace, Christ was born, in accordance with a prophecy of earlier times, in Bethlehem of Judah (Micha 5:2). He was shown in outward appearance as a human being, from a human virgin; in hidden reality he was God, from God the Father. For this is what the prophet foretold: "See, a virgin will conceive in her womb and will bear a son, and they will call his name Emmanuel, which is translated, 'God with us'" (Isaiah 7:14). Then, in order to make known the godhead in his person, he did many miracles, of which the gospel Scriptures contain as many as seemed enough to proclaim his divinity. The first of these is the great miracle of his birth; the last, his ascension into heaven with his body which had been brought to life again from the dead. But the Jews who killed him and refused to believe in him, to believe that he had to die and rise again, suffered a more wretched devastation at the hands of the Romans, and were utterly uprooted from their kingdom, where they had already been under the dominion of foreigners. They were dispersed all over the world—for indeed there is no part of the earth where they are not to be found—and thus by evidence of their own Scriptures they bear witness for us that we have not fabricated the prophecies about Christ. In fact, very many of the Jews, thinking over those prophecies both before his passion and more particularly after his resurrection, have come to believe in him. About them this prediction was made: "Even if the number of the sons of Israel be like the sand of the sea, it is only a remnant that will be saved" (Isaiah 10:20). But the rest of them were blinded; and of them it was predicted: "Let their own table prove a snare in their presence, and a retribution and a stumbling block. Let their eyes be darkened, so that they may not see. Bend down their backs always" (Psalm 69:22). It follows that when Jews do not believe in our Scriptures, their own Scriptures are fulfilled in them, while they read them with blind eyes. Unless, perhaps, someone is going to say that the Christians fabricated the prophecies of Christ which are published under the name of Sibyl, or any prophecies that there may be which are ascribed to others, which have no connection with the Jewish people. As for us, we find those prophecies sufficient which are produced from the books of our opponents; for we recognize that it is in order to give this testimony, which, in spite of themselves, they supply for our benefit by their possession and preservation of those books, that they themselves are dispersed among all nations, in whatever direction the Christian Church spreads.

In fact, there is a prophecy given before the event on this very point in the book of Psalms, which they also read. It comes in this passage, "As for my God, his mercy will go before me; my God has shown me this in the case of my enemies. Do not slay them, lest at some time they forget your Law," without adding, "Scatter them." For if they lived with that testimony of the Scriptures only in their own land, and not everywhere, the obvious result would be that the Church, which is everywhere, would not have them available among all nations as witnesses to the prophecies which were given beforehand concerning Christ.
³⁰

The impact of this passage on those who read
The City of God
boiled down to that admonition ingeniously culled from the Psalms: Do not slay them! Augustine made it seem like the very voice of God. This was a direct contradiction of the imperative—Slay them before me!—that Chrysostom attributed to a brutal Christ. Subsequent history resounds with the cry of Augustine here: Do not slay them!

Why not? Because the Jews (unlike pagans, unlike Christian heretics) still had a role in the salvific plan of God. They were to be "as witnesses to the prophecies which were given beforehand concerning Christ." Fredriksen argues that Augustine saw Jewish devotion to the Law as a kind of sacrament, and because it was out of that devotion that Jews rejected Jesus, their "continuing 'fleshly' allegiance to their Law made Israel, even after the establishment of the church, uniquely witness to Christ. Thus God himself protects them from the duress of religious coercion."
³¹

But the excerpt just given, perhaps reflecting the darkness of the later Augustine, nevertheless points to the precarious position in which Jews now found themselves. The irony in this passage is heartbreaking, as the entire misbegotten pattern of the Jewish-Christian disconnect is recapitulated. Those first, grief-struck followers of Jesus had created a narrative of his Passion and death in part out of reports of what had happened, but more out of the consoling Scriptures of their Jewish religion. All too soon, that creative narration had come to be understood as "history remembered" instead of "prophecy historicized." Later Christians, especially those not Jewish, could only misread the details of the narrative that had been gleaned from the Psalms and the Prophets as referring to things that had actually happened. Then, in generation after generation, such "fulfilled prophecies" were used against the Jews as "proofs." Augustine, as we saw, was disinclined to a polemical pairing of Old and New Testaments, and he saw the tradition of Jewish Law observance as a positive witness to Christ, yet here the meaning of Judaism was reduced to Jews' "witnessing ... in spite of themselves" to those selfsame prophecies. A continuing Judaism would serve as a source of authentication for the prophecy-based claims of Christianity. As long as Jews existed, with their ancient texts, the ancient—and therefore noble—character of Christianity was apparent, because those texts "foretold" Christ. The dispersion of Jews helps with this, and so it is God's will—Scatter them!—that they be allowed to live as exiles everywhere. By this schema, they would be allowed to be at home, "at their own table," nowhere.