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CHAPTER 1

The Doctrine of

Jewish Witness

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) lived during an age of transitions. During his lifetime, the division between Eastern and Western capitals of the Roman Empire became a permanent one, as the imperial government in the city of Rome itself entered the last generations of its history. More than any later fifth-century event, like the deposition of the last Western emperor in 476, the sacking of Rome by the Germanic Visigoths in 410 signaled the decline of classical civilization in contemporary eyes. Political change, with its accompanying social ferment, induced many to question the presuppositions upon which their societies and worldviews rested, contributing roundly to the cultural anxiety that characterized this period, to experimentation with new notions of personal power and security that sought to allay such anxiety, and to the propagation of new value systems in keeping with these ideas. Where, ultimately, did personal fulfillment lie? How might one seek to achieve it?

As the Roman Empire stood on the brink of a new era, so did the Christian church. Augustine formally embraced Christianity soon after Theodosius the Great declared it the official religion of the empire. Although the imperial ban on the pagan cult capped the victory of the recently persecuted Christian church over its detractors, it confronted church and state alike with an array of new problems. Christianity had claimed to spurn the pleasures and powers of this world, sharply demarcating the realms of God and Caesar, looking forward to an apocalypse that would replace existing political institutions with the rule of Christ and his saints. A Christian empire might ensure the safety and supremacy of Christians and their church, but how did it bear on the Christian quest for salvation and its underlying philosophy of human history? Furthermore, if Constantine's conversion earlier in the fourth century and Theodosius's marriage of the empire to the church decades later appeared to vindicate the Christian revolution against classical pagan civilization, how did the sacking of imperial Rome by the “barbarians” figure in this equation? Did it, as the old pagan aristocracy suggested, manifest the gods' wrath over the conversion of the empire to Christianity? If not, precisely what significance attached to such events of political history in God's plan for the salvation of the world?

Like these and other issues of his day, the course of Augustine's life, itself rife with conversions, transitions, power struggles, and intense self-examination, has been studied exhaustively. Alongside the decline of Rome and the triumph of the Roman Catholic Church, it too heralded the approaching junction between classical antiquity and the ensuing Christian Middle Ages. The concerns of Augustine's career invariably informed his distinctive ideas of the Jew. To trace the history of those ideas properly, one must appreciate the chronology of their appearance during Augustine's life and their place in the Augustinian worldview.

AUGUSTINE ON THE JEWS AND JUDAISM

THE EARLY YEARS: ON THE AGES OF MAN

Between his conversion to Christianity in 386 and his arrival in the North African town of Hippo in 391, Augustine formulated his renowned sevenfold scheme for the periodization of human history. In the De Genesi contra Manichaeos (On Genesis against the Manicheans, 388–389), Augustine found a biblical foundation for his theory in the story of creation in six days, and in the nature of the seventh day, the Sabbath, in particular: “I think that the reason why this rest is ascribed to the seventh day should be considered more carefully. For I see throughout the entire text of the divine scriptures that six specific ages of work are distinguished by their palpable limits, so to speak, so that rest is expected in the seventh age. And these six ages are similar to the six days in which those things which Scripture records that God created were made.” On this basis Augustine proceeded through the six days of the Genesis cosmogony, linking them to the successive eras of terrestrial history, even linking the biblical refrain, “and there was evening and there was morning,” to specific developments within each historical period. When he reached the primordial Tuesday Augustine wrote:

It was therefore morning from the time of Abraham, and a third age like adolescence came to pass; and it is aptly compared to the third day, on which the land was separated from the waters…. For through Abraham the people of God was separated from the deception of the nations and the waves of this world…. Worshipping the one God, this people received the holy scriptures and prophets, like a land irrigated so that it might bear useful fruits…. The evening of this age was in the sins of the people, in which they neglected the divine commandments, up to the evil of the terrible king Saul.

Then in the morning was the kingdom of David…. It is aptly compared to the fourth day, on which the astral bodies were fashioned in the sky. For what more clearly signifies the glory of a kingdom than the excellence of the sun…? The evening of this age, so to speak, was in the sins of the kings, for which that people deserved captivity and slavery.

In the morning there was the migration to Babylonia…. This age extended to the advent of our lord Jesus Christ; it is the fifth age, that is, the decline from youth to old age…. And so, for the people of the Jews that age was, in fact, one of decline and destruction…. Afterwards those people began to live among the nations, as if in the sea, and, like the birds that fly, to have an uncertain, unstable dwelling…. God blessed those creatures, saying “Be fertile and increase…,” inasmuch as the Jewish people, from the time that it was dispersed among the nations, in fact increased significantly. The evening of this day—that is, of this age—was, so to speak, the multiplication of sins among the people of the Jews, since they were blinded so seriously that they could not even recognize the lord Jesus Christ.¹

Augustine's review of biblical history from Abraham to Jesus may appear to add little, if anything at all, to standard patristic doctrine concerning the Jews. Yet this early Augustinian text, whose subsequent influence in medieval historiography surpassed its importance even for Augustine himself,² already demonstrates how various other issues of pressing concern led Augustine to dwell upon' the Jews and Judaism. Here the characterization of the Jews somehow exemplifies his approach to biblical exegesis—in this case allegory, and the allegorical interpretation of Genesis in particular. Moreover, inasmuch as the Jews dominate much of the divine plan for human history, they assume significance in the exposition of Augustine's scheme of salvation history, a connection to which Augustine returned soon thereafter in his De vera religione (On the True Religion, 389–391). Here he reviewed the six or seven proverbial ages in the life of a human being as they apply both to the “old,” exterior or earthly man, and to the “new,” inward or heavenly man, a contrast that similarly bears on the totality of human history. Adumbrating his later theory of the two cities, Augustine thus proposed that

the entire human race, whose life extends from Adam to the end of this world, is—much like the life of a single person—administered under the laws of divine providence, so that it appears divided into two categories. In one of these is the mass of impious people bearing the image of the earthly man from the beginning of the world until the end; in the other is a class of people dedicated to the one God, but which from Adam until John the Baptist led the life of the earthly man while subject to a measure of righteousness [servili quadam iustitia]. Its history is called the Old Testament, which, while appearing to promise an earthly kingdom, is in its entirety nothing other than the image of the new people and the New Testament, promising a heavenly kingdom.³

Augustine's allegory of the six ages assumes both microcosmic and macrocosmic proportions, reflecting the experience of the individual and that of society at large. The Jews and their religion are again, in pre-Christian times, at center stage; here, in the De vera religione, they also bridge the chasm between the two species of human existence. Their Old Testament pertains to the life of earthly man, proffering the rewards of an earthly kingdom. Yet somehow this covenant of the Jews entails “a measure of righteousness,” complicating the evaluation of its character. If correctly interpreted, it embodies the image of the new man and the New Testament. Such interconnections between exegesis, philosophy of history, and the Jews will prove critical to an appreciation of Augustine's place in our story.

AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY

During the final decade of the fourth century, Augustine's ideas and career matured considerably. His polemic against the Manicheans continued to develop, with additional subtlety and with sustained vigor. His vehement opposition to the Donatists enhanced his leadership role in the African church and contributed to his notion of the coercive role of the state in a properly ordered Christian society. And his understanding of human will and divine grace in the process of an individual's salvation changed dramatically—a transformation we shall consider again below. The thirty-three books of the Contra Faustum (Against Faustus, 397–398) testify to much of this development and, not surprisingly, offer insight into the molding of Augustine's perspective on Jews and Judaism.

The Contra Faustum reiterates both the fundamental importance of the figurative interpretation of Scripture and, by way of example, the correspondence between the days of creation and the ages of world history;⁴ once again, exegesis and philosophy of history emerge as interdependent. Yet the persistent attacks of the dualist Faustus upon the Old Testament demanded that Augustine clarify his evaluation of the old law and of the people of the book with greater precision. He thus affirmed the accuracy and the authority of the books of Hebrew Scripture. He posited a perfect concord between the two testaments, inasmuch as everything in the Old Testament instructs concerning the New. “All that Moses wrote is of Christ—that is, it pertains completely to Christ—whether insofar as it foretells of him in figures of objects, deeds, and speech, or insofar as it extols his grace and glory.”⁵ Such prefiguration by word and event lies at the heart of the biblical typology with which Augustine responded to the Manichean polemic. All of the contents of the Old Testament were historically true (in the case of narrative) and/or valid (in the case of prophecy and precepts), and this accuracy underlay the truth of their prefigurative significance. At great length did Augustine therefore defend the stories and commandments of the Old Testament, seeking to demonstrate both their intrinsic coherence and their corresponding Christological value. To be sure, Augustine hardly deviated from accepted Pauline and patristic doctrine on the relative authority of the two covenants. Teachings of the Old Testament lost their worth as signifiers upon the inauguration of the New. The “true bride of Christ…understands what constitutes the difference between letter and spirit, which two terms are otherwise called law and grace; and, serving God no longer in the antiquity of the letter but in the novelty of the spirit [she] is no longer under the law but under grace.”⁶ Because Jesus fulfilled the law, Christians observe its precepts more thoroughly in their spiritual sense, while the Jews, over the course of time, have in fact neglected their literal observance—and still refuse to believe in Jesus and his church. Nevertheless, even in the wake of the crucifixion the Old Testament has not lost its value and function altogether. It continues to offer testimony to the truth of Christian history and theology.

What, then, of the Jews, those who continue to accept the Old Testament and persist in rejecting the New? How does their survival comport with the divine plan for human history, now that the symbolic, typological value of Judaism has outlived its necessity? Augustine's reply, bound to assert the triumph of the church over the synagogue and yet to subvert the Manichean rejection of biblical history, included strands of the Augustinian doctrine of Jewish witness so essential to the present inquiry. First, following established Christian tradition, Augustine perceived in Cain a type of the Jews and in Abel a figure of Jesus. Punished with an existence of exile and subjugation for the murder of their brother, the Cain-like Jews consequently bear a God-given mark of shame that ensures their miserable survival:

Now behold, who cannot see, who cannot recognize how, throughout the world, wherever that people has been scattered, it wails in sorrow for its lost kingdom and trembles in fear of the innumerable Christian peoples…? The nation of impious, carnal Jews will not die a bodily death. For whoever so destroys them will suffer a sevenfold punishment—that is, he will assume from them the sevenfold punishment with which they have been burdened for their guilt in the murder of Christ…. Every emperor or king who has found them in his domain, having discovered them with that mark [of Cain], has not killed them—that is, he has not made them cease to live as Jews, distinct from the community of other nations by this blatant and appropriate sign of their observance.⁷

Insofar as they are typified by Cain (Genesis 4:1–15), why need the Jews thus endure? Augustine made no mention of their scriptures in this regard but simply explained: “Throughout the present era (which proceeds to unfold in the manner of seven days), it will be readily apparent to believing Christians from the survival of the Jews, how those who killed the Lord when proudly empowered have merited subjection.”⁸ Owing to their punishment and guilt, the survival of the Jews in exile vindicates the claims of Christianity in the eyes of Christians themselves; for this reason has God ensured that none of the Gentile rulers obliterates them or the vestiges of their observance.

Second, Augustine also found in Ham, the rebellious son of Noah (Genesis 9:18–27), a figure of the Jewish people, now enslaved to the church of the apostles and to the Gentiles (prefigured in Noah's worthy sons, Shem and Jafeth, respectively):

The middle son—that is, the people of the Jews…—saw the nakedness of his father, since he consented to the death of Christ and related it to his brothers outside. Through its [that is, the Jewish people's] agency, that which was hidden in prophecy was made evident and publicized; and therefore it has been made the servant of its brethren. For what else is that nation today but the desks [scriniaria] of the Christians, bearing the law and the prophets as testimony to the tenets of the church, so that we honor through the sacrament what it announces through the letter?⁹

In the case of their likeness to Ham, Augustine beheld in the Jews “desks of the Christians,” that is, an implement for preserving, transmitting, and expounding the prophecies of Christianity inscribed in the Old Testament. The Jews authenticate these scriptures, demonstrating now to the enemies of the church that the biblical testimonies to its legitimacy and even to its victory over them have not been forged. By consequence, “in not comprehending the truth they offer additional testimony to the truth, since they do not understand those books by which it was foretold that they would not understand.”¹⁰

Third, the Contra Faustum links the substance of Augustine's anti-Jewish polemic with that of his attack upon. heretics in general, and the Manicheans in particular. Citing 1 Corinthians 11:19 (“there must be factions [hairéseis] among you in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized”), Augustine accorded both Jews and heretics the function of defining, albeit by contrast, the essential teachings of the church: “All who receive and read any books in our canon where it is demonstrated that Christ was born and suffered as a mortal, even though they do not respectfully clothe that mortality made bare in suffering with the harmonious sacrament of [Christian] unity…— although they may disagree among themselves, Jews with heretics or one sort of heretic with another—still prove useful to the church in a particular condition of servitude [; servitutis], either in bearing witness or [otherwise] in constituting proof.”¹¹ Like the Jews, the Manicheans err by understanding the Old Testament solely in its carnal sense; and they, too, although not completely excised from the cultivated olive tree of God's elect (Romans 11>), “have remained in the bitterness of the wiid olive.”¹² Yet in their rejection of biblical doctrine the Manicheans approximate pagans more than do the Jews;¹³ for, unlike the Jews, they seek “to break the commandments of the law, even in whose figures we recognize that Christ is prophesied.”¹⁴

THE OLDER AUGUSTINE

For an instructive example of Augustine's teaching on the Jews during the later stages of his career, we turn to his monumental De civitate Dei (On the City of God, ca. 414–25), composed in the wake of the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 and during years of controversy with the Pelagians. Again we encounter a work that Augustine neither addressed to the Jews nor wrote out of particular interest in them but that necessarily considered Jewish existence, Jewish books, and Judaism within the context of its central concerns. As Augustine traced the parallel histories of heavenly and earthly cities from creation until his own era, he continued to resort to typological oppositions between the church and the Jews that abounded in the patristic Adversus ludaeos tradition—Sarah versus Hagar, Jacob versus Esau, and so forth. He reaffirmed the correspondence between old and new covenants—the former hidden in the latter, the latter revealed in the former—such that the teachings of the Old Testament were true both in their proper, historical sense and in their prefigurative, typological sense. Yet the temporal validity of the Old Testament remained limited; with the temple in Jerusalem destroyed, continued literal observance of Mosaic law was meaningless and, with regard to God's plan for human salvation, essentially irrelevant.¹⁵

What, if anything, had changed in Augustine's teaching? Augustine had hinted in the De vera religione that the history of the heavenly city in pre-Christian times corresponded to that of the Jewish people. Anti-Christian fallout from the debacle of 410 now induced Augustine to highlight the superiority and independence of this sacred history, against the culture of its earthly counterpart; and, alongside the motifs of his earlier works, the De civitate Dei therefore blends several positive elements into its otherwise negative portrayal of the Jews. Especially during the period of the Old Testament, the Hebrews stood out as the first monotheists: Their prophets, their wisdom, and their written language were the most ancient; the contents of their Scripture were indisputably authentic and free of contradiction; and, contrary to charges that the Jews had falsified them, the textual traditions of the Hebrew Bible are reliable even now.¹⁶ Expanding upon the earlier suggestion of the De vera religione, Augustine instructed: “The adversaries of the City of God, belonging to Babylon,” may well include “the Israelites according to the flesh, the earth-born citizens of the earthly Jerusalem”;¹⁷ but earthly Israel and Jerusalem nonetheless symbolize the heavenly city.¹⁸ Through the Hebrew people, “through some who were knowledgeable and some who were ignorant, there was foretold what would occur from the advent of Christ until the present, as it continues to transpire.”¹⁹ Had the Jews not sinned repeatedly against God, and had they not, ultimately, put Jesus to death, independence, dominion, and Jerusalem would still be theirs.²⁰ And though the biblical Ishmael, the disinherited older son of the patriarch Abraham, typifies the synagogue in its relationship with God, Augustine did not disqualify the Jews from God's blessing of Abraham's children altogether:

Isaac is the law and prophecy; Christ is blessed in these even through the mouth of the Jews, just as if he were blessed by one who does not know him, since they do not understand the law and prophecy…. The nations serve him; the princes adore him. He is lord over his brother, since his people rules the Jews…. He who has cursed him is accursed; and he who has blessed him is blessed. Our Christ, I say, is blessed—that is, he is truly mentioned—even by the mouths of the Jews, who, although they err, nonetheless chant the law and the prophets. (They think they are blessing another [messiah], whom they await in their error.)²¹

Despite their misguided intentions and their outcast state, the Jews bless Christ and, almost despite themselves, they are thus recipients of divine blessing as well. For all their iniquity and misunderstanding, Augustine allotted the Jews a distinctive function and character in God's plan for human history and salvation, a role that extended from the period of the Old Testament into that of the New. This is his acclaimed doctrine of Jewish witness to the truth of Christianity, the innovative feature of Augustinian anti-Judaism par excellence, which the De civitate Dei elaborates with clarity and emphasis:

Yet the Jews who slew him and chose not to believe in him…, having been vanquished rather pathetically by the Romans, completely deprived of their kingdom (where foreigners were already ruling over them), and scattered throughout the world (so that they are not lacking anywhere), are testimony for us through their own scriptures that we have not contrived the prophecies concerning Christ…. Hence, when they do not believe our scriptures, their own, which they read blindly, are thus fulfilled in them…. For we realize that on account of this testimony, which they unwillingly provide for us by having and by preserving these books, they are scattered among all the nations, wherever the church of Christ extends itself.²²

Within the De civitate Dei's more nuanced exposition of the early stages in the history of salvation, and not simply in support of the figurative exegesis of the Bible that dominated the Contra Faustum, Augustine here reoriented and sharpened several ideas of his earlier, anti-Manichean treatise: The Jews survive as living testimony to the antiquity of the Christian promise, while their enslavement and dispersion confirm that the church has displaced them. Yet here, in the De civitate Dei, Augustine added significantly to the substance of his earlier formulation:

For there is a prophecy given previously in the Psalms (which they still read) concerning this, where it is written…: “Slay them not, lest at any time they forget your law [legem tuam]; scatter them in your might.”²³ God thus demonstrated to the church the grace of his mercy upon his enemies the Jews, because, as the Apostle says, “Their offense is the salvation of the Gentiles.” Therefore, he did not kill them—that is, he did not make them cease living as Jews, although conquered and oppressed by the Romans— lest, having forgotten the law of God, they not be able to provide testimony on our behalf in this matter of our present concern. Thus it was inadequate for him to say, “Slay them not, lest at any time they forget your law,” without adding “scatter them.” For if they were not everywhere, but solely in their own land with this testimony of the scriptures, the church, which is everywhere, could surely not have them among all the nations as witnesses to the prophecies given previously regarding Christ.²⁴

The De civitate Dei does not suffice with explicating the phenomenon of Jewish survival as the fulfillment of divine prophecy. It interprets the divine prophecy of Jewish survival as a mandate for the faithful: Slay them not, that is, ensure their survival and that of their Old Testament observance; and scatter them, guaranteeing that the conditions of their survival demonstrate the gravity of their error and the reality of their punishment.

We shall soon return to a review of Augustine's pronouncements concerning the benefits of continued Jewish survival and their proper implications for Christian policymakers. It remains for us first to consider Augustine's sole work dedicated explicitly to anti-Jewish polemic, the brief Tractatus adversus ludaeos (Treatise against the Jews), evidently composed during the final years of his life (ca. 429),²⁵ containing little that is new or distinctive. This sermon first discusses the Pauline doctrine of the inversion of Jews and Gentiles in the divine plan for salvation, noting that the Jews still refuse to acknowledge the Christological import of biblical testimonies. Despite the Jewish claim that Christianity has forsaken the teachings of the Old Testament, it has, in fact, fulfilled them; because Christians now obey the law in its spiritual sense, its literal observances have been rendered obsolete—“not because they have been damned but because they have been changed; not that the things, which themselves used to be signified, might perish, but in order that the signs of these things might suit their times.”²⁶ In support of these claims, the Tractatus presents a Christological interpretation of the three Psalms (45, 69, 80) entitled “for the things that shall be changed”— pro its quae immutabuntur or commutabuntur— a misreading of the Hebrew shoshannim (lit. lilies), perhaps for shinnuyim, changes.²⁷ Echoing earlier etymologies, Augustine concluded that the Jews are not “the true Israel, that is, that which will see the Lord face to face.”²⁸ These changes wrought in the economy of salvation, Augustine maintained, demand that the Jews be confronted with the more evident (apertioribus) biblical testimonies. “Why do the Jews not realize that they have stayed put in useless antiquity [in vetustate supervacaneo], rather than object to us, who hold the new promises, that we do not observe the old?”²⁹ The Tractatus then adduces an array of additional, oft-quoted biblical texts to present to the Jews, in the hope that they may see the light and convert, or that they may at least be convicted of their error.³⁰ Once again, Augustine instructed on the function of the Jew in a properly ordered Christian world—here in a rhetorical query addressed, as it were, to the Jews themselves: “Do you not rather belong to the enemies of him who states in the Psalm, ‘My God has shown me concerning my enemies, slay them not, lest at any time they forget your law; scatter them in your might’? Wherefore, not forgetting the law of God but transporting it as testimony for the Gentiles and a disgrace for yourselves, unknowingly you furnish it to that people called from the rising of the sun to its setting.”³¹

THE DOCTRINE OF WITNESS:

COMPONENTS AND CHRONOLOGY

This brief survey of Augustine's developing thought on the Jews yields several preliminary conclusions: First, Augustine deviated relatively little from previous apostolic and patristic teaching on the subject. Second, Augustine formulated that which distinguished him from his predecessors, his doctrine of Jewish witness, prior to and independently of his sole, specifically anti-Jewish work, the Tractatus adversus ludaeos. And third, Augustine's distinctive interpretation of Jewish history appeared to hinge upon more basic themes of Augustinian theology.

Owing to the impact of Augustine on subsequent generations in the history of Christian-Jewish relations, this doctrine of Jewish witness warrants careful review and analysis. One can profitably distinguish between six distinct arguments which typically fortify Augustine's view that the Jews have a valuable function in Christendom and that Christians must therefore permit them to live and to practice their Judaism.

1. The survival of the Jews, scattered in exile from their land and oppressed into servitude, testifies to their punishment for rejecting (and crucifying) Jesus and to the reward of faithful Christians by contrast. The image of the murderous, exiled Cain can serve as the prototype of the Jewish people in this respect.

2. Not only does the survival of the Jews thus confirm the truth of Christianity, but their blindness and disbelief also fulfill biblical predictions of their repudiation and replacement.

3. Prefigured by the biblical Ham, the Jews are enslaved within Christendom; carrying and preserving the books of the Old Testament wherever they go, they offer proof to all peoples that Christians have not forged biblical prophecies concerning Jesus. Jews accordingly serve Christians as guardians (custodes) of their books, librarians (librarii), desks (scriniaria), and servants who carry the books of their master's children to school (capsarii) but must wait outside during class.³² Much like those who helped to build Noah's ark but perished in the flood,³³ they “appear with regard to the Holy Scripture that they carry much as the face of a blind man appears in a mirror; by others it is seen, but by himself it is not seen.”³⁴ As history unfolds in its path toward salvation, “the Jews inform the traveler, like milestones along the route, while themselves remaining senseless and immobile.”³⁵

4. The Jews provide such corroborating testimony not only in their books but also in their continued compliance with biblical law. Their steadfast refusal to abandon their distinctive religious identity (forma ludaeorum)36 beneath the oppression of Gentile rulers, especially those of Rome, has proven admirable and valuable.

5. The words of Psalm 59:12., “Slay them not, lest at any time they forget your law; scatter them in your might,” constitute a prophetic policy-statement on the appropriate treatment of the Jews in Christendom. Slaying the Jews, thus prohibited, refers above all to preventing their observance of Judaism, and not simply to their physical liquidation.

6. Hand in hand with Jewish survival, the refutation of Judaism contributes directly to the vindication of Christianity. Paradoxically, such a mandate for anti-Jewish polemic hardly bespeaks an urgency for effective Christian missionizing among the Jews. In keeping with the teachings of Paul, their conversion will come in due course; meanwhile, the worth of their service as witness and foil outweighs the disadvantage of their living as infidels among believers.

These arguments are blatantly interconnected, but not all of them appear together in every formulation of the doctrine of witness. A chronological review of the Augustinian corpus³⁷ reveals that, despite the importance attributed to Jewish history in Augustine's early works, like the De Genesi contra Manichaeos and De vera religione, the doctrine of witness is absent. It made its earliest partial appearances at the end of the fourth century, first in Contra Faustum and then in De consensu evangelistarum (On the Agreement of the Evangelists, ca. 400);³⁸ these works include the first three of the six arguments listed above—the testimonial value of Jewish survival in exile, of Jewish disbelief, and of Jewish books—and they begin to hint at the fourth—the value of Jewish persistence in the practice of Judaism. Yet, although they note the loyalty of the Jews to their law, Augustine's works of this period do not evaluate Jewish behavior in the positive terms of his later writings; nor do they understand God's protection of the Jews from extinction metaphorically, in terms of observance of the biblical commandments. Albeit with approval, Jewish survival is described, within the framework of biblical typology (for example, Cain or Ham), rather than preached as a matter of policy. Significantly, these texts make no mention of Psalm 59:12. They shy away from acknowledging postponement of the hope for the conversion of the Jews. And they include no deliberate mandate for anti-Jewish polemic.

Only in the middle of the second decade of the fifth century did developments in Augustine's teaching begin to bring his doctrine of Jewish witness to its mature formulations, those that bore most dramatically on medieval Christian attitudes toward Jews and Judaism. In his exposition of Psalm 59 (ca. 414), Augustine included the fifth element of his doctrine on the list above, discerning in the psalm explicit instruction for the proper treatment of the Jewish people in a Christian world: “Slay them not, lest at any time they forget your law; scatter them in your might.” No longer was Jewish survival simply to be explained, after the fact, with reference to the typological significance of Cain and/or Ham. Augustine's later works present the continued existence of the Jews, given the service they perform, as the object of the psalmist's outspoken prophecy in its own right.³⁹ Curiously, Cain and Ham no longer figure in three such late considerations of the value of Jewish survival: in De civitate Dei 18 (420–425),⁴⁰ De fide rerum invisibilium (On Faith in Things Unseen, 420–425),⁴¹ and Tractatus adversus ludaeos (ca. 429).⁴² The De civitate Dei itself deals strictly with the historical sense of the story of Cain and Abel, not with its prophetic allegory, and it refers the reader seeking a typological exposition to the Contra Faustum,⁴³ As he explained in the De fide rerum invisibilium, Augustine beheld in the principle of “Slay them not,” not the allegorical fulfillment of the Old Testament, but practical guidelines for the implementation of the new order:

Therefore it was made to happen that they would not be eradicated so as to have their sect completely cease to exist. But it was dispersed throughout the world, so that, carrying the prophecies of grace bestowed upon us in order to convince the infidels more effectively, it would benefit us everywhere. And this very point which I am stating—accept [acapite] it, inasmuch as it had been prophesied: “Slay them not,” he said, “lest at any time they forget your law; scatter them in your might.” Therefore they have not been killed in this sense, namely, that they have not forgotten those things which used to be read and heard among them. For if they were to forget the holy scriptures entirely (even though they do not now understand them), they would be undone in the Jewish rite itself, because, if they would know nothing of the law and the prophets, the Jews could be of no benefit.⁴⁴

Beyond admonishing Christians to accept the dictates of Psalm 59, Augustine here clarified in unequivocal terms the fourth element in his doctrine of Jewish witness: that precisely their practice and knowledge of biblical law and prophecy afforded the Jews a valuable function in Christendom. Consequently, Augustine's later works interpret the mandate for Jewish survival to apply above all to the Jews' observance of their commandments—not merely to their physical protection, which had concerned Augustine in the Contra Faustum45 And, owing to this value of Jewish religious observance, Augustine now cast the Jews in somewhat praiseworthy terms, despite their grave theological error. As Augustine explained the prophecy of Psalm 59:12 to Bishop Paulinus of Nola in 414,

That same nation, even after being conquered and subjugated, would not participate in the pagan rites of the victorious people but persisted in the old law, so that within it [the Jewish people] there would be witness of the Scriptures throughout the world, wherever the church would be established. For by no clearer proof is it demonstrated to the nations what is observed most advantageously—that the name of Christ is distinguished by such great authority in the hope for eternal salvation, not as a sudden contrivance, conceived by the spirit of human presumption; rather, it had been prophesied and recorded previously…. Therefore “slay them not”; do not destroy the name of that nation, “lest at any time they forget your law”—which would surely happen if, having been forced to observe the rites and ceremonies of the gentiles, they would not retain their own religious identity at all.⁴⁶

Finally, only in these later works did Augustine enunciate the sixth element in his doctrine of Jewish witness: its implications for attracting the Jews to Christianity and for what might well be termed the “polemical imperative” of the patristic Adversus ludaeos tradition. Despite his call for the survival of Judaism, Augustine did not abandon the Pauline hope for the conversion of the Jews; instead, he was willing to postpone its fulfillment to the distant future. Expounding Psalm 59, he thus explained that only in the wake of their salutary dispersion (verse 12, disperge eos in virtute tua) would the Jews convert at the proverbial evening of time, suffering humiliation like dogs (verse 15, convertentur ad vesperam et famem patientur ut canes); joining ranks with the uncircumcised (illi de circumcisione, isti de praeputio), they would flock to the church—yielding exultation in God's mercy in the succeeding morning (verse 17, exsultabo mane misericordia tua) of salvation.⁴⁷ Augustine well understood the compromise that his policy entailed, and he could evenhandedly assess the resulting benefits and liabilities, as he did in the De fide rerum invisibilium: “Therefore they have not been killed but scattered, so that, although they lack the means to be saved through faith, they still keep in their memory that whereby we might profit—in their words our opponents, in their books our partisans, in their hearts our enemies, in their codices our witnesses.”⁴⁸ Notwithstanding such preservation of the Jews without faith or the means to salvation, their testimonial function mandated the citation of their own Bible against them, in order to validate the beliefs of Christianity. In the Tractatus adversus ludaeos, Augustine called repeatedly for anti-Jewish polemic independent of any mission to the Jews, entirely in the interest of Christendom: “But when these [biblical testimonies] are recited to the Jews, they despise the Gospel and the apostle; and they do not hear what we say, because they do not understand what they read…. Therefore [ergo], testimonies should be taken from the holy scriptures, whose authority is very great among them, too; if they refuse to be restored by the benefit which they offer, they can be convicted [convinci] by their blatant truth.”⁴⁹ Why ought Christians to cite Scripture to the Jews, knowing that their plaints will fall on deaf ears? The logic of Augustine's prescription may seem puzzling: The Jew does not heed the testimony of the Bible; therefore, read it to him! Yet construed and preserved as Augustine would have him, fixed “in useless antiquity,” the Jew served as a foil for Augustine's apologetic and as fuel for the discourse of his patristic theology. (See the chronology of Augustine's arguments as outlined in Table 1).

TABLE 1

ELEMENTS OF THE AUGUSTINIAN DOCTRINE OF JEWISH WITNESS: A CHRONOLOGY OF NOTEWORTHY TEXTS

JEW, TEXT, EVENT, AND BODY

Recognizing the contributions of other investigators to an appreciation of the doctrine of Jewish witness,⁵⁰ we can now move forward to a deeper appreciation of Augustine's constructions of Jews and Judaism. At the outset, one must refrain from attributing these Augustinian perceptions to direct, personal interaction between the bishop of Hippo and the Jews of his day. Evidence of Jewish settlement in northern Africa during the late imperial period allows only inconclusive estimations of the size and vitality of specific Jewish communities. Various studies of this question, in fact, reason circularly, relying predominantly on the limited evidence provided by Augustine himself.⁵¹ Jewish communities clearly existed in numerous North African locations, but no good indication of their size or significance exists; one highly doubts that Augustine beheld the sort of Jewry encountered by John Chrysostom in late-fourth-century Antioch or by Cyril of Alexandria in earlyfifth-century Egypt.⁵² Nor can one simply stipulate a direct link between the proselytizing activity of Jews and the Judaizing tendencies of Christians. The available data may suggest that Augustine should have known and dealt with practicing Jews,⁵³ but his dealings with them undoubtedly lacked the intensity and dangers experienced by John and Cyril. Augustine's own writings confirm this impression. Although they reveal some actual contact with contemporary Jews, much more clearly do they document the limitations of Augustine's familiarity with the Jewish community and with Judaism. Augustine knew an occasional word of Hebrew at most. His allusions to the particulars of Jewish religious practice are so few and so unimpressive that one cannot justifiably conclude that they derived from personal experience. Augustine acknowledged that his estimation of the reliability of the Jewish texts of Scripture stemmed from hearsay. If some of the unnamed individuals who assisted Augustine in understanding the Old Testament were Jewish, he owed the overwhelming preponderance of his knowledge of postbiblical Jewish tradition to other patristic writers, most notably Jerome.⁵⁴ Augustine's laments over the continued refusal of the Jews to accept Christianity—typically contrasted with the more successful attraction of Jews to the church in apostolic times—fail to indicate that they resulted from any personal disappointment in missionary activity.⁵⁵ Most of the strictures against Judaizing in the Augustinian corpus appear in lists of unacceptable practices in Christian life, hardly establishing that Augustine deemed such behavior a clear and present danger in his community.⁵⁶

Rather, the doctrine of Jewish witness took shape against the backdrop of several major themes in Augustine's theology and writings: the interpretation of the Old Testament, especially Genesis; the appraisal of terrestrial history; and the assessment of human sexuality.⁵⁷ Relating to the Jews in varying degrees, these central concerns of Augustine clearly overshadowed his inclination to anti-Jewish polemic. They ranked much higher on his theologian's agenda, and, to the extent that he did take an interest in the Jews and Judaism, they controlled the nature and the extent of that interest. I shall first consider these Augustinian concerns individually and then evaluate their significance for our story.

BIBLICAL EXEGESIS

Early in his career as a biblical commentator, in his De Genest contra Manichaeos, Augustine distinguished between the literal or carnal meaning of the sacred text and its spiritual or allegorical sense; the literal sense understands Scripture exactly as “the letter sounds”; the allegorical, the figures or enigmas the letter contains. Significantly, Augustine did not yet equate this contrast with another one: that between history, which relates events of the past, and prophecy, which foretells those of the future. In this early Augustinian schema, one may interpret both history and prophecy either literally or allegorically. History and prophecy, in other words, denote the chronological orientation—or orientations—perceived in the narrative, whether or not, in the case of history, the narrated events actually transpired. Literal and allegorical refer to disparate levels of meaning sought by the reader in the text—as in the Jews' literal or carnal observance of the Sabbath, which contrasts with its allegorical understanding by Christians.⁵⁸ Here, in his first Genesis commentary, Augustine interpreted the opening chapters of Scripture chiefly in their figurative, allegorical sense,⁵⁹ though he considered them both as history and as prophecy and, in retrospect, he later regretted his inability adequately to expound on their literal sense.⁶⁰

The independence of Augustine's distinctions between literal and allegorical, on one hand, and history and prophecy, on the other hand, was short-lived. Within several years of his first commentary on Genesis, Augustine returned to the interpretation of the biblical cosmogony in his De Genest ad litteram liber imperfectus (An Unfinished Book on the Literal Interpretation of Genesis, ca. 393), in which he listed a fourfold scheme of biblical interpretation: “according to history, according to allegory, according to analogy, according to etiology. It is history when past deeds (of God or of humans) are recorded; allegory, when statements are understood figuratively; analogy, when the congruence of old and new testaments is demonstrated; etiology, when the causes of statements and deeds are related.”⁶¹ The particulars of this passage and its context—an avowedly literal commentary on Scripture—appear to signal some change in Augustine's hermeneutic. One cannot help but infer a measure of opposition between history and allegory; although the definition of history—the narration of events— remains the same as in De Genesi contra Manichaeos, its differentiation from allegory suggests a link between the historical and the nonallegorical—namely, the literal. No longer did Augustine allow for the possibility of nonfactual history; that is, a narrative about the past relating events that never, in fact, occurred. And Augustine's inclusion of much figurative interpretation—that is, not exactly the “the letter sounds”—in a commentary he entitled On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis hints further that he wished to reevaluate the essence of the literal sense. Nevertheless, if Augustine harbored the intention of definitively identifying the historical with the literal in the early 390s, it remained unfulfilled for quite some time. This first rendition of his literal Genesis commentary was admittedly imperfectus, a failed attempt abandoned prior to its conclusion.

Perhaps this failure derived directly from Augustine's inability to define and to capture the literal, nonfigurative understanding of the Bible that he had hoped to convey; and, until the turn of the century, at least, his interpretation of the Old Testament remained overwhelmingly figurative.⁶² The first books of the De doctrina Christiana (On Christian Doctrine), which Augustine wrote in 397, boldly subordinate the literal meaning of Scripture to its allegorical sense, inasmuch as “there is no reason for us to signify, that is, to give a sign, if not to draw forth and transmit to the mind of another that which transpires in the mind which gives the sign.”⁶³ Provided that one interprets Scripture so as to enhance his Catholic faith, the grounding of the interpretation in the concrete reality of the sign—that is, the dependence of a figurative reading upon the literal meaning of the text— matters relatively little. In fact, “a person supported by faith, hope, and charity so that he retains them resolutely does not need the scriptures except for teaching others,”⁶⁴ whereas “he who honors or venerates some signifier while ignorant of what it signifies is enslaved to the sign.”⁶⁵ Not the plain meaning of the biblical text but the doctrine—and unity—of the church serves as ultimate arbiter in the reconciliation of ambiguities,⁶⁶ because the Bible “asserts only the Catholic faith in matters past, future, and present.”⁶⁷ Despite the attribution of value to Mosaic law in the historicizing typology of the Contra Faustum,, it too belittles the value of the literal sense in its own right. Many provisions of the law—for instance, the uncleanliness of nonkosher animals—can be understood only figuratively;⁶⁸ Augustine pointed out that Philo the Jew himself recognized that much in the Old Testament, when understood literally, casts “the disgrace of ridiculous fables” on books of divine authorship, and he resorted to allegory as a result.⁶⁹ Therefore,

one should not believe that there is anything narrated in the prophetical books which does not signify something in the future—except things placed so as to explain those matters which foretell of that king [Christ] and his people, whether through literal or figurative speech and deeds. For, just as in harps and other such musical instruments, not all things which are touched resonate with sounds, only the strings; the other parts of the entire body of the harp have been fashioned in such a way that those [strings], which the musician will strike to create a pleasant sound, may be appropriately fastened and stretched. So too in these prophetic narratives, those matters of human history selected by the prophetic spirit either relate things of the past because they signify the future or, if they signify no such thing, are interspersed so as to connect those matters which do resound with such significance.⁷⁰

The predetermined doctrinal lessons of Scripture's allegorical sense, which may not contradict Catholic belief, impose limits on the literal, although the literal sense hardly controls the use of the allegorical.

Scholars have noted instructive links and parallels between the educationally oriented hermeneutic of the De doctrina christiana and the introspective account of Augustine's conversion related in the Confessiones (Confessions, 397–400). In Peter Brown's words, “Augustine's attitude to allegory summed up a whole attitude to knowledge” in the De doctrina christiana; in the Confessiones, this attitude to allegory provided Augustine with the basis for knowledge of himself.⁷¹ Composed in the immediate aftermath of the De doctrina christiana and the Contra Faustum, the Confessiones thus continues to employ the nonliteralist, figurative hermeneutic that dominates Augustine's fourth-century compositions. Contrasting well with statements of Augustine's later career, it follows the lead of the earlier Genesis commentaries in its symbolic interpretation of the creation story. As Augustine wrote in the final pages of the Confessiones, the opening verses of Genesis, in their instruction to man and woman to “be fertile and increase,” justified the very principle of allegorical exegesis: “I perceive in this blessing the capacity and power granted us by you, both to express in numerous ways what we may have understood in a single way, and to understand in numerous ways that which we may have read, expressed only in one obscure fashion.”⁷²

Only as he approached the second decade of the fifth century,⁷³ with the account of his own spiritual awakening behind him, did Augustine finally nurture the literal dimension of his hermeneutic to its maturity— again with regard to the opening chapters of Genesis—in his massive De Genesi ad litteram (On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis). Early in this commentary, Augustine explained his new exegetical approach by rejecting an allegorical understanding of Genesis 1:5 (in its Old Latin translation: “evening was made, and morning was made, one day”); namely, “that in ‘evening was made’ is signified the sin of the rational creature and that in ‘morning was made’ is signified its restoration. But this is an argument of prophetic allegory—which we have not undertaken in this treatise. For we have now endeavored to speak of the scriptures according to the proper sense of past events, not according to the mysteries of future ones.”⁷⁴ In this programmatic statement, Augustine has overcome the distance between the two contrasts—literal versus allegorical, on one hand, and history versus prophecy, on the other—that characterized his earlier work. The literal interpretation of the biblical past, the goal of the De Genesi ad litteram, is now equated with the historical truth of the biblical narrative and concerns “the proper sense of past events”; allegorical or prophetic interpretation alludes to “the mysteries of future ones.” Yet if literal and allegorical also refer to chronological orientation in the interpretation of biblical narrative, not merely to the degree that such interpretation focuses either on the sign (exactly as “the letter sounds”) or on what it signifies (“figuratively and in enigmas”),⁷⁵ how is the “literal” sense genuinely plain or literal? Augustine responded that the literal meaning of Scripture denotes first and foremost the intention of the “writer of the sacred books”;⁷⁶ accordingly, “when we read the divine books amidst so great a number of true interpretations, which are…fortified with the sanity of the Catholic faith, let us emphatically choose that one which clearly manifests what he (whom we are reading) intended.”⁷⁷ One must immediately take note that this criterion of authorial intention hardly precludes the “literal” understanding of the Bible's language as metaphorical. For example: The first light of creation, understood literally, refers simultaneously to earthly light and spiritual light;⁷⁸ God made man, but had Scripture related that he formed him with bodily hands, “we ought sooner to believe that the writer used a metaphor”;⁷⁹ even though Scripture's report that the eyes of Adam and Eve were opened (Genesis 3:7) after their sin does not mean that they were previously closed, these words “we ought not to consider an allegorical narrative.”⁸⁰ Such metaphoric interpretations of past events fall well within the realm of the literal sense, because the author clearly intended them. “The narrative in these books [like Genesis] is certainly not of the genre of figurative speech like that in the Song of Songs, but of a completely historical genre, like that in the books of Kings and others of this sort.”⁸¹

The precise change that the De Genesi ad litteram marked in Augustine's hermeneutical outlook warrants further qualification. Despite the allegorical emphasis of his earlier Old Testament exegesis, Augustine had already affirmed the reality and importance both of the literal sense and of the exposition of biblical narrative as history. Yet the unabashed identification of the literal with the historical that one encounters in the De Genesi ad litteram underscores the priority of the “literal” sense for Augustine. Although “no Christian will dare say that events should not be interpreted figuratively,”⁸² literal interpretation now takes precedence. It commandeers the lion's share of Augustine's exegetical energy, and it engages him well beyond his previously acknowledged need to establish the historical reality upon which Christological allegory and typology depend. Even in the case of the paschal lamb, so critically important a prefiguration of the crucified Jesus, Augustine acknowledged the exegete's mandate first to accept and to define Scripture's literal, historical meaning:

He [Christ] is the sheep which is sacrificed on the Passover; yet that was prefigured not only in speech but also in action. For it is not that that sheep was not a sheep; it clearly was a sheep, and it was killed and eaten. Something else was prefigured in this actual fact, though not like that fattened calf which was slain for the banquet of the younger son when he returned [Luke 15:11–32]. In that latter case the narrative itself consists of figures, not of events with figurative significance. For the Lord himself, not the evangelist, narrated this…. The narrative of the Lord himself was a parable, in which it is never required that the things conveyed in speech be shown to have literally occurred.⁸³

In the case of narrative intended by the biblical writer as history, however, the factual event must be expounded first, and, as John Hammond Taylor has observed, its exposition commands Augustine's definite preference. When considering the account of Adam and Eve in Paradise, the De Genesi ad litteram first contrasts the figurative discourse of Scripture (locutio figuratarum rerum) with its exposition in a literal sense (ad litteram), then such a figurative exposition (figurate) with a rightful or proper one (proprie), and finally the allegorical understanding of the text (secundum allegoricam locutionem) with its rightful one (secundum propriam). In short, figurative and allegorical contrast with literal and proper.⁸⁴ Gone is the license that Augustine had previously allowed the Catholic reader of the Bible in the early books of the De doctrina christiana; there, as long as an interpretation accords with the doctrine of the church, anything goes.⁸⁵ Here, in the De Genesi ad litteram, the objectively determined historical facts take precedence, and only when the intention of the author remains indeterminable may the exegete reach a conclusion based on faith alone. A Christian must believe that Christian faith will comport with the literal meaning of Scripture:

If those irrationally impelled by reason of a stubborn or dull mind refuse to believe these things [in Genesis], they still can find no reason to prove that they are false…. Clearly, if those things rendered here in a material sense could in no way be accepted in a material sense and the true faith yet preserved, what other option would remain but that we understand those things as spoken figuratively, rather than impiously to condemn Holy Scripture? Yet if these things understood in a material sense not only do not impede but defend the narrative of divine eloquence more effectively, there will be no one, I think, so unfaithfully stubborn as to see those things expounded in their proper sense according to the rule of faith and yet prefer to remain in his former opinion (if perchance they had seemed to him open to figurative interpretation alone).⁸⁶

In direct contrast to the De Genesi ad Manichaeos, Augustine's literal commentary accordingly seeks to show how everything in Genesis is to be understood primarily not in the figurative but in the proper sense.⁸⁷ Owing to Christianity's axiomatic identification of Judaism with the literal interpretation of the Bible, I shall argue below, Augustine's increasingly positive inclination to a literalist hermeneutic undoubtedly nourished the development of his conception of the Jews.

TERRESTRIAL HISTORY

The social historian Robert Nisbet has deemed the historical ideas of the De civitate Dei a veritable cornerstone of the Western idea of progress: “Reality for Augustine lay in the unitary human race and its progress toward fulfillment of all that was good in its being.”⁸⁸ Like his biblical hermeneutic, however, Augustine's valuation of thisworldly human experience developed over time; the two concerns influenced one another considerably.

Although commonly agreeing that Augustine's philosophy of history changed considerably during the course of his adult life, scholars of the last half-century have struggled to define precisely when, how, and why. Some forty years ago, F. Edward Cranz linked a major shift in this dimension of Augustine's doctrine to his changing ideas on divine justice and human freedom, on grace and human will.⁸⁹ Late in the 380s, in the De Genesi contra Manichaeos and the De vera religione, Augustine translated Platonic notions of the gradual process whereby the human soul achieves philosophical perfection into his sevenfold schema of humanity's spiritual development throughout earthly history. During the next decade, however, as Augustine retreated from his belief in a human's ability to will faith in God, he replaced the seven ages of history with a fourfold division that emphasized the radical disjunction between epochs and the absolute dependence on divine grace: before the law, under the law, under grace, and the perfect peace of the final redemption (ante legem, sub lege, sub gratia, in pace). Especially in the wake of the Ad Simplicianum (To Simplicianus, 396), Augustine's earlier sense of innate progress in human spiritual history gave way to a quintessential contrast between the damned and the saved, which ruled out the possibility for any secular or political experience, even the Christianization of Rome, to serve as the vehicle for salvation. This comported well, Cranz maintained, with Tyconius's assertion of identity between Old and New Testaments, which Augustine now adopted: There is a single principle of salvation, not a series of grades that an individual—or the entire human race—ascends in turn. A stark opposition between unredeemed and redeemed, which deprived the Jewish past of the significance that it had had in Augustine's earlier notion of seven ages, now facilitated his two-tiered interpretation of human history in the De civitate Dei.90

Much in Cranz's argument may prove correct, but his claim that Augustine's new understanding of the human condition devalued the historical importance of the Jews hardly comports with a careful review of the Augustinian corpus. Only at the end of the 390s did Augustine begin to elaborate the unique, testimonial function of the Jews in sacred history, and only in his later works—the De civitate Dei, for example— did the doctrine of Jewish witness achieve its full expression.⁹¹ I therefore believe that an alternative appraisal of Augustine's historical thought by the historian Robert Markus proves more instructive for the present discussion.

Focusing above all on the De civitate Dei, Markus has singled out two key features of the older Augustine's philosophy of history: On one hand, Augustine posited a sharp, qualitative distinction between sacred and profane history, which emerged after years of contemplating the human condition, from a limitation of sacred history to that recounted by the divinely inspired authors of Scripture, and in the wake of the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths in 410. The Augustinian theology of disjunction between the realms of sacred and profane, Markus has demonstrated, first received clear-cut expression during the second decade of the fifth century. On the other hand, although Augustine denied Christian Rome ultimate significance in his scheme of salvation history, he likewise rejected the apocalyptic equation of Rome with the evil Babylon. Rather, he reconciled the contemporary alliance of church and empire as reflecting the imperfections of the saeculum, the locus of interpenetration of heavenly and earthly cities—none other than the present, pre-eschatological world that enshrines the essential ambiguities of human experience:

At the most fundamental level, that of their ultimate allegiance, men were starkly divided between the two cities. But the saeculum, and the societies, groups and institutions whose careers constitute it, embraced both poles of the dichotomy…. To speak of the saeculum as the region of overlap between the heavenly and earthly cities, while true, is misleading if understood in terms of the logical notion of an overlap between two mutually not exclusive classes. For in their eschatological reality the two cities are, of course, mutually exclusive, while in their temporal reality they are indistinct: here the primary datum for Augustine is the integrity of the saeculum, or, more precisely, of the social structures and historical forms in which it is embodied…. All we can know is that the two cities are always present in any historical society; but we can never…identify the locus of either.⁹²

Augustine thus refused to view even the Christian church of his age as perfect or to identify it with the heavenly city. By the same token, however, he could hardly dismiss the structures of society and the events of terrestrial history as profane and worthless. Inasmuch as the eschaton has yet to materialize, these social structures and historical events constitute the framework for the experiences of both cities. They are, in a word, all there is. Citizens of the heavenly city must therefore work to uphold the institutions of the saeculum, their imperfection notwithstanding, just as they yearn for liberation from them.

Markus's model of the saeculum as a key to the older Augustine's understanding of history informs an appreciation of the doctrine of Jewish witness on several grounds. Augustine elaborated both ideas during the last two decades of his life, and the chronology hints at further parallels between the two. Among these, the paradoxical ambiguity that characterizes the institutions of the saeculum, and the resulting responsibility of God's saints to function at once in two contradictory realms,⁹³ will prove helpful in understanding the distinctive historical mission that Augustine assigned to the Jews. No less important, first expressions of the ideas of the saeculum coincided with the completion of the De Genesi ad litteram. For as Augustine had fallen back from allegorical and typological exegesis to embrace a more literalist hermeneutic, he necessarily took increased interest in the history of this world; indeed, the proper, literal truth of biblical narrative and the historical events of biblical antiquity were one and the same. When the De civitate Dei portrayed Cain as the founder of the earthly city, it deliberately avoided his typological prefiguration of the Jews that had allowed the younger Augustine to explain their survival; in the midst of a lengthy historical assessment of the primordial fratricide, Augustine now wrote: “Such was the founder of the earthly city—in which manner he also prefigured the Jews, by whom Christ the shepherd of humans (whom Abel the shepherd of livestock prefigured) was killed. Yet because this concerns prophetic allegory, I refrain from expounding it now; and I remember that in this regard I argued certain things against Faustus the Manichean.”⁹⁴ The contrast between the standard patristic Cain of the Contra Faustum and the realistic portrayal he receives in the De civitate Dei is striking; as Peter Brown has suggested, “it is like coming from the unearthly symbolic figures of Type and Antetype that face each other in the stained-glass windows along the walls of a Gothic cathedral, to the charged humanity of a religious painting by Rembrandt.”⁹⁵ Augustine's exegesis and historical philosophy evidently developed in tandem, endowing his writing with new life and conviction. Not by happenstance did a retreat from the typology of Cain in rationalizing the doctrine of Jewish witness accompany the emergence of Augustine's unconventional exegesis of Psalm 59:12 (“Slay them not”).⁹⁶

HUMAN SEXUALITY

Augustine's new regard for the concrete realities of human experience surfaced in yet another cluster of his favorite subjects: the human body, sex, and sinful concupiscence. It is most instructive to note the convergence of scriptural exegesis, chiefly that of Genesis, and the investigation of human history within the evolving Augustinian doctrine on the sexual nature of human beings.

In an earlier study I analyzed Augustine's maturing interpretation of God's primordial blessing to human beings (Genesis 1:28), “Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it,” as an index of developments in his estimation of human sexuality, noting the correspondence between these developments and the changing character of his biblical hermeneutic.⁹⁷ The De Genesi contra Manichaeos asks of this verse, “Should it be construed in a physical sense [carnaliter] or in a spiritual sense [spiritualiter]?”; and it responds straightforwardly, “Indeed, we can rightly understand it in a spiritual sense.”⁹⁸ Not only does the Confessiones maintain an allegorical interpretation of Genesis 1:28, but, as I noted above, it views this primordial blessing of human sexuality as scriptural support for the entire enterprise of figurative exegesis.⁹⁹ As Verna Harrison has argued in another context, ascetic renunciation—which figures so prominently in the Confessiones—and allegorical exegesis truly go hand in hand: “The interpretive move from letter to spiritual meaning directly parallels the ascetic's transfer of attention and desire from material to spiritual realities.”¹⁰⁰ But when, in his final years, Augustine reflected upon the shortcomings of the De Genesi contra Manichaeos, he turned directly to “Be fertile and increase” to demonstrate the inadequacies of this avowedly allegorical hermeneutic. To his earlier refusal to allow that God had intended a mandate for sexual reproduction in Paradise, he now replied, “I do not at all agree.”¹⁰¹ Corresponding to crossroads in the unfolding of his exegetical and historical ideas, this reversal in Augustine's appreciation of human sexuality began to appear in the aftermath of the Confessiones, and it received its first clear-cut expression in the ninth book of the De Genesi ad litteram. Only toward the end of his commentary, in one of the last chapters to be written, did Augustine proceed with absolute certainty, daring to label as ridiculous (ridiculum istuc est) the earlier patristic view that Adam and Eve were not yet ready for sexual activity and that their unauthorized sexual union amounted to theft from the symbolic fruit of the tree of knowledge.¹⁰² Once again, the new outlook found its place in the great synthesis of De civitate Dei:

We have no doubt whatsoever that, in accordance with the blessing of God, to be fertile and increase and fill the earth is the gift of marriage, which God established originally, prior to human sin, creating male and female, which sexual quality is indeed evident in the flesh…. Although all of these things can appropriately be given a spiritual meaning, masculine and feminine cannot be understood [as Augustine had understood them in the De Genesi contra Manichaeos]103 as a simile for characteristics of the same individual human being, one of whose attributes being that which rules, another that which is ruled. But inasmuch as it is most clearly evident in the different sexual characteristics of the body, it would be very absurd to deny that male and female were created for the purpose of producing offspring, that they might be fertile and increase and fill the earth.¹⁰⁴

Sexual desire and reproductive activity, held Augustine, pertain to human nature not only after the fall from Paradise but also in the state of grace that preceded the fall.

If dramatic shifts in Augustine's opinions on exegesis and sexuality occurred at the same stage of his career and bore directly upon one another¹⁰⁵ so too must one appreciate the appropriateness of human sexual relationships within the historical-theoretical framework of the saeculum. Peter Brown thus appraised these first years of the fifth century as a critical transitional period in Augustine's career:

A man whose own conversion had been prompted, in part, by the call of the desert, Augustine had come, within only ten years, to think about the Catholic Church from a viewing point deep within the structures of the settled world…. If the Catholic church was to remain united, it could do so only by validating Roman society. The bonds that held subjects to emperors, slaves to masters, wives to husbands, and children to parents could not be ignored, still less could they be abruptly abandoned in order to recover an “angelic” mode of life. They must, rather, be made to serve the Catholic cause.¹⁰⁶

Other scholars have similarly analyzed Augustinian ideas on sexuality against the backdrop of the status of terrestrial history and institutions. Margaret Miles advocated “the thesis that Augustine's development in these areas moves from the tendency to view the body as the ground of existential alienation to affirmation of the whole person.”¹⁰⁷ She concluded that Augustine's later writings, “while apparently focusing on sexuality, actually use the issue as the testing ground for other issues: the power and the authority of the church and the question of whether the church will be the bastion of intellectual specialists or a layman's church.”¹⁰⁸ More recently, Robert Markus concurred that human sexuality afforded Augustine singular insight into both the glory and the misery of the fallen human condition. Genesis commentary proved a benchmark for the progress of Augustine's thought on all of these issues; in keeping with Augustine's distinctive notion of the saeculum, “a rehabilitation of the flesh” stood at the foundation of “a defence of Christian mediocrity.”¹⁰⁹ No doubt the best evidence for this argument remains Augustine himself, who paid tribute to the divine blessing of human sexuality as the De civitate Dei neared the crescendo of its conclusion: “That blessing which he had conveyed before the sin, stating ‘Be fertile and increase and fill the earth,’ he did not wish to withhold even after the sin, and the fecundity thereby granted has remained in the condemned species. The guilt of sin could not remove the wonderful power of the seed—and even more wondrous, the power by which the seed is produced—instilled and somehow ingrained in human bodies.”¹¹⁰ The younger Augustine, the Augustine of the late 380s and the 390s could never have reached such a judgment. These words characterize the viewpoint of an older, more experienced Augustine, who formulated his doctrine of Jewish witness during the same stage of his life.

THE AUGUSTINIAN SENSE OF THE JEW

I have reviewed these preeminent themes in Augustinian thought at some length, because their intersection—the meeting of text, body, and concrete historical event—offers the most enlightening framework for appreciating Augustine's construction of Jews and Judaism. Not by coincidence did his most thorough formulation of this doctrine, earmarked by its appeal to Psalm 59:12, take shape during the same years as his resolute commitment to literalist exegesis, his enhanced appreciation of terrestrial history, and his more sympathetic attitude to human sexuality. How, then, did each of these trajectories in Augustinian thought intersect the doctrine of Jewish witness?

The link between Judaism and the literal interpretation of Scripture hardly requires additional demonstration. Augustine explained, repeatedly and pointedly: The Jews preserve the literal sense, they represent it, and they actually embody it—as book bearers, librarians, living signposts, and desks, who validate a Christological interpretation of the Old Testament. Unlike the “true bride of Christ,” the Jew knows not the difference between letter and spirit. While precisely this blindness obviates his salvation, it simultaneously facilitates his role as witness.¹¹¹ From such a perspective, the more important the literal—that is, the original, historical—meaning of biblical narrative in the instruction of Christianity, the more valuable the Jewish presence in a properly ordered Christian society.

Like the saeculum in the Augustinian philosophy of history, Augustine's Jew constitutes a paradox, a set of living contradictions. He survived the crucifixion, though he deserved to die in punishment for it; he somehow belongs in Christendom, though he eschews Christianity; he accompanies the church on its march through history and in its expansion throughout the world, though he remains fixed “in useless antiquity.” This Jew pertains, at one and the same time, to two opposing realms. The De vera religione, recall, identifies the promise of the Old Testament with an earthly kingdom, not a heavenly one, but states that believers in the one God before Jesus “led the life of the earthly man while subject to a measure of righteousness.”¹¹² Augustine's literalist Jew exemplified the folly that the De doctrina christiana terms “a miserable enslavement of the spirit: to take signs for things [of consequence in themselves], to be unable to lift the eye of the mind above the physical creature to see the eternal light”; but such error among biblical Jews was different, Augustine noted, “since they were subjugated to temporal things in such a way that the one God was commended by them in everything.”¹¹³ Identifying the earthly Jerusalem prefigured by Sarah's handmaid Hagar (compare Galatians 4:21 and following) with the synagogue, the De civitate Dei likewise demonstrates what Gerard Caspary has termed the parameter of “concentric structures” in the Pauline and patristic exegesis of classic biblical pairs: Granted that Hagar and Sarah, or the two cities they signify, are opposites; yet, “a certain part of the earthly city has been rendered an image of the heavenly city, by symbolizing not itself but the other city, and therefore a servant [. serviens].”114

Although the three Augustinian texts just cited refer primarily to pre-Christian times, the De civitate Dei proceeds to extend the enigmatic status of the Jews into the present age of the church. Suggestively, Augustine's account of the annals of the heavenly city on earth breaks off with the establishment of Christianity. Inasmuch as “since the coming of Christ, until the end of the world, all history is homogeneous,”¹¹⁵ one may not construe contemporary political events as the essence of God's plan for human redemption, and they command minimal attention in the Augustinian review of sacred history. In this vein, the passage of the De civitate Dei that records the life and death of Jesus and elaborates the doctrine of Jewish witness at length makes mere mention of Augustus Caesar, that “by him the world was pacified.”¹¹⁶ The pax romana may well have endowed the saeculum of the Christian era with its defining political character; but neither its agents nor its institutions, before or after the conversion of Constantine, could claim membership ex officio in the heavenly city. As a result, Augustine's magnum opus pays less attention to Roman imperial history than to the history of the Jews in their dispersion! Although they themselves were damned, their unique, testificatory role in the divine economy of salvation contributes to the ultimate victory of Christianity, and their history, before and after Jesus, more closely adumbrates the direction of the earthly history of the heavenly city. Rooted in and defined by membership in the earthly kingdom, the Jews—in their servile and testimonial capacity—nevertheless benefit the church and retain some connection to the heavenly kingdom too. Forging a link between otherwise conflicting realms, Augustine's Jews thus share in the functional value of the saeculum, that temporary, ambiguous domain of intersection between earthly and heavenly cities so critical to the Augustinian worldview. Just as the sacking of Rome in 410 moved Augustine to define Rome's purpose in Christian salvation history, perhaps the continued existence of the Jews in a Christian age demanded rationalization—rationalization provided by the doctrine of witness. Like the concrete events of terrestrial experience through and from which the Christian church yearns for its final redemption, the Jews belong to history, and yet, as signposts along the road to salvation, they point to its culmination.¹¹⁷

The same Jew who embodied—for better or for worse—the literal sense of the Bible and the material reality of earthly experience also represented a straightforward and positive appreciation of human sexuality. Biblical and rabbinic Judaism construed the divine instruction of the first parents to “be fertile and increase” not only as an obligation but also as evidence of divine election. Along with their creation in the image of God, the sexual nature of human beings situated them on a cosmic frontier of sorts, midway between angels and beasts, blessed with unique opportunity and yet encumbered by singular responsibility. In most strains of ancient Judaism, marriage, sexual reproduction, and family life constituted norms of foundational importance; they pertained directly to the rationale for all human existence on earth and, in particular, to the place of the chosen people within the divine economy of salvation.¹¹⁸

Augustine's allegorical exegesis of “Be fertile and increase” in the De Genesi contra Manichaeos, throughout the Contra Faustum, and near the end of the Confessiones thus comported well with disparaging references to the carnality of the Jews. Despite their presumptions to ascetic and spiritual perfection, Augustine contended that the Manicheans emulated the “impious nation of carnal Jews” and shared in the Jewish life of “carnal disorder.”¹¹⁹ Yet when Augustine subsequently responded to the anti-ascetic convictions of Jovinian and the Pelagians, he encountered ideas much more akin to a Jewish understanding of human nature and sexuality. Paradoxically, against these “views of a silent majority that believed as firmly as did their Jewish neighbors that God had created humanity for marriage and childbirth,”¹²⁰ Augustine evinced a more favorable appraisal of human sexuality, and he tempered his attack upon the Jews. The stereotype of the carnal Jew admittedly did not disappear,¹²¹ but anti-Jewish polemic in general—and this stereotype in particular—figure much less prominently in Augustine's later, anti-Pelagian writings than one might otherwise expect. In their focus on original sin, on the resulting impossibility of meriting salvation through the observance of the law, on the correspondingly all-important character of divine grace, and on the essential differences between old and new covenants, these treatises forego numerous opportunities to liken Pelagian error to Jewish error; the Jews are notably absent from much of the discussion. Where Augustine did allude to them more extensively, as in the De spiritu et littera (On the Spirit and the Letter, 412) and the Contra duas epistulas Pelagianorum (Against Two Letters of the Pelagians, 420–421), he avoided an overly explicit equation of that carnal mind which Paul deemed hostile to God (Romans 8:7) with the mentality of the Jews.¹²² On one occasion, Augustine openly rejected the conclusion that “the law of works was in Judaism but the law of faith in Christianity” as fallacious (fallat ista discretio).¹²³ Rather than contrast Christians with Jews and heretics, as he had done repeatedly in the anti-Manichean treatises considered above, he now consistently preferred to distinguish between varieties of precepts and, more importantly, between manners of responding to God's commandments.

Why this curious shift in Augustine's appraisal of human sexuality, when, in view of the Pelagians, one might have expected a change of heart in the opposite direction? Augustine, I believe, had previously recognized that the dualistic Manicheans' strength derived in large measure from their deprecation of worldly pursuits, especially those of marriage and procreation, and he therefore interpreted “Be fertile and increase” figuratively to defend the unity of Scripture and its deity, effectively devaluing sexual reproduction. So too, to the extent that Catholic doctrine permitted, Augustine now agreed with his Pelagian opponents concerning the primordial sanctity of marriage and untainted sexual desire, reading the biblical mandate for procreation literally and thereby attempting to co-opt the appeal in the stance of his enemies.¹²⁴ Surely, one cannot write off such development in Augustinian thought to polemical opportunism; it, too, derived from a more literalist reading of Genesis and a more positive appreciation of this-worldly existence. It also informed the doctrine of Jewish witness. Like sex in the aftermath of the fall, the Jew exemplifies the imperfection of the contemporary Christian world, but somehow he retains a place within that world. He and his observance serve as living testimony— to God's original intentions for human life and to his future plans; to the Jews' own error and, by contrast, to the truth of the Christian faith.

In the wake of the previous patristic Adversus ludaeos polemic, Augustine's doctrine of Jewish witness marked a singular development in the history of Christian perceptions of Jews and Judaism. Contrary to prevailing scholarly opinion, I have endeavored to demonstrate that one should not attribute this doctrine to actual contacts that may have transpired between Augustine and the Jews of his day. Proof of such an explanation simply does not exist; moreover, that line of argument exaggerates the importance of the Jews among the diverse issues that engaged Augustine, who evidenced no deliberate intention of departing from the consensus of his patristic predecessors in this regard. Rather, one must appreciate the distinctive features of Augustinian anti-Judaism as emerging from within the heart of Augustinian thought. Changing considerations of exegesis, philosophy of history, and anthropology gradually converged, especially during the last two decades of Augustine's career, to yield a new construction of the Jews in his theological discourse—one that reflected and responded to the needs of that discourse. The injunction to “slay them not, lest at any time they forget your law,” presupposed a Jew very different from the Jews of the Roman Empire: a Jew who had remained stationary in useless antiquity, a Jew who, in fact, never was.

Augustinian hermeneutic fashioned such a Jew nonetheless, and this construction had a long and colorful career. I have suggested elsewhere¹²⁵ that Augustine made a fourfold contribution to Christian anti-Judaism in the medieval West: the recognition of a definite need for the Jews (appropriately dispersed and subjugated) within Christian society; the focus of Christian anti-Jewish polemic on the interpretation of the Old Testament; the direction of such polemic to Christian and pagan— but not to Jewish—audiences; and a lack of concern with postbiblical Judaism. Why polemicize and missionize among the Jews if Christendom required their presence? Why concern oneself with postbiblical Judaism if the Jews, as Augustine construed them, preserved and embodied the law of Moses and if the development of Judaism effectively stopped on the day of Jesus' crucifixion, when the Old Testament gave way to the New? I would now add two qualifications to this assessment of Augustine. First, earlier Christian theologians, those mentioned in the introduction to this book along with others, may have anticipated certain aspects of this “Augustinian” outlook on the Jews. Yet the doctrine of Jewish witness was new, and it conditioned the transmission of “standard” patristic Adversus ludaeos doctrine to Augustine's medieval successors. Second, just as Augustine had reformulated the ideas of the earlier fathers, so too did churchmen who followed him develop new applications and understandings for the doctrine of witness, which quickly assumed an independent life of its own.

With this in mind, the time has come to study the history of the medieval Christian perception of the Jew more thoroughly. If one tends to remember the medieval Christian posture toward the Jews and Judaism as Augustinian, that hardly means that Augustine himself would have concurred. His profound impact on and authority among his successors meant that few could reject his teaching, but many reinterpreted it in keeping with changing ideas and historical circumstances. The history of the idea of the Jew as witness has much to teach us concerning the medieval Christian thinkers who inherited it—and concerning their Christianity. Although the idea unavoidably bore on the realia of Christian-Jewish relations, my primary interest remains with the fate of Christianity's hermeneutical Jew himself. What happened to him as the Augustinian mind-set and historical context that had spawned him receded into the past?

An earlier version of this chapter, entitled “Augustine on Judaism Reconsidered,” was presented to the annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America in 1991. I subsequently reformulated my conclusions in a paper on “Anti-Jewish Discourse and Its Function in Medieval Christian Theology” delivered to the New Chaucer Society in 1992.

1. Augustine, De Genest contra Manichaeos 1.23, PL 34:190–93.

2. On the sevenfold periodization of history, see, among others, Auguste Luneau, L'Histoire du salut chez les pères de l'Église: La Doctrine des âges du monde, Théologie historique 2 (Paris, 1964); and Paul Archambault, “Ages of Man and Ages of the World,” REA 12 (1966), 193–228. See also below, chapter 3, on Isidore of Seville.

3. Augustine, De Vera religione 26.49–27.50, CCSL 32:218–19.

4. See below, n. 8.

5. Augustine, Contra Faustum 16.9, CSEL 31:447.

6. Ibid. 15.8, p. 432.

7. Ibid. 12.12–13, pp. 341–42 On medieval traditions concerning Cain and their ancient sources, see Oliver F. Emerson, “Legends of Cain, Especially in Old and Middle English,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 21 (1906), 831–929; Ruth Mellirlkoff, The Mark of Cairl (Berkeley, Calif., 1981), esp. pp. 92–98; and Gilbert Dahan, “L'Exégèse de l'histoire de Caïin et Abel du xii^e au xiv^e siècle en Occident,” RTAM 49 (1982), 21–89, 50 (1983), 5–68

8. Augustine, Contra Faustum, 12.12, pp. 341–42 (emphasis mine).

9. Ibid. 12.23, p. 351.

10. Ibld. 16.21, p. 464.

11. Ibid. 12.24, pp. 352–53; cf. also 15.2. Augustine rendered the Latin of Paul's epistle as “oportet et haereses esse, ut probati manifesti fiant inter vos.” On the importance of this theme for Augustine, see Anne-Marie la Bonnardière, “Bible et polémiques,” in Saint Augustin et la Bible, ed. Anne-Marie la Bonnardière, Bible de tous les temps 3 (Paris, 1986), pp. 329–31; and also below, n. 124.

12. Augustine, Contra Fartstum 9.2, p. 309.

13. Ibid. 16.10.

14. Ibid. 16.25, p. 470.

15. For instance, Augustine, De civitate Dei 15.2, 16.26, 16.37, 17.18.

16. Ibid. 15. 11ff., 18.38ff. This stance, however, did not obviate Augustine's general preference for the readings of the Septuagint; see Bernhard Blumenkranz, Die Judenpredigt Augustrns (Basel, 1946), pp. 74–84, esp. pp. 79–82, and the many citations adduced therein. See also the more recent study of William Adler, “The Jews as Falsifiers: Charges of Tendentiou Emendation in Anti-Jewish Christian Polemic,” in Translation of Scripture (Philadelphia, 1990), pp. 1–27.

17. Augustine, De civitate Dei 17.4, CCSL 48:557.

18. Ibid. 15.2; and see the important analysis of F. Edward Cranz, “De civitate Dei, XV, 2, and Augustine's Idea of the Christian Society,” Speculum 25 (1950), 215–25.

19. Augustine, De civitate Dei 7.32, CCSL 47:213.

20. Ibid. 4.34.

21. Ibid. 16.37, CCSL 48:542 (emphasis mine).

22. Ibid. 18.46, p. 644.

23. Psalm 59:1z, according to the numeration of the Masoretic Text, which I have followed throughout in direct references to the Bible. The reading of legem tuam follows some Greek versions (nomoû tou), which evidently underlay the Old Latin version of Augustine; the Masoretic Text, the received versions of the Septuagint, and the Vulgate all read “my people [‘ammi, laû mou, populi mei].” Jerome also encountered a Latin reading of populi tui; see his Epistula 106.33, CSEL 55:z63–64: “Ne occidas eos, nequando obliviscantur populi tui. Pro quo in Graeco scriptum est: legis tuae; sed in Septuagintaet in Hebraeo non habet populi tui, sed populi mei; et a nobis ita versum est.” Cf. also Origen, Hexapla, ed. Fridericus Field (1875; reprint Hildesheim, Germany, 1964), 2:187; and the various Latin readings reviewed by Amnon Linder, review [in Hebrew] of Shlomo Simonsohn, Ha-Kes ha-Qadosh veha-Yehudim, in Zion, n.s. 61 (1996), 484–85.

24. Augustme, De civitate Dei 18.46, CCSL 48:644–45.

25. The Tractatus receives no mention in Augustine's Retractationes, composed during the last years of his life.

26. Augustine, Tractatus adversus Iudaeos 3.4, PL 42:s 3.

27. Or perhaps, as Ivan Marcus has suggested to me, for sheshonim, referring to those that differ, and also from the same verbal root, sh-n-h. Cf. the Septuagint's hypèr tn alloithsoménn.

28. Augustine, Tractatus adversus Iudaeos 5.6, col. 55. On Philonic, early Christian, and rabbinic use of this motif, see Gerhard Delling, “The ‘One Who Sees God’ in Philo,” in Nourished with Peace: Studies in Hellenistic Judaism in Memory of Samuel Sandmel, ed. Frederick E. Greenspahn et al., Scholars Press Homage Series 9 (Chico, Calif., 1984), pp. 27–41; Jonathan Z. Smith, “The Prayer of Joseph,” in Religions in Antiquity: Essays in Memory of Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough, ed. Jacob Neusner, Studies in the History of Religions (Supplements to Numen) zo (Leiden, Netherlands, 1968), pp. 265–68 with nn.; and Elliot R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval lewish Mysticism (Princeton, N.J., 1994), esp. chap. I.

29. Augustine, Tractatus adversus Iudaeos 6.8, col. 56.

30. Ibid. 1.2, 6.8, 10.15

31. Ibid. 7.9, col. 57.

32. For Augustine's various similes, see: “custodes librorum nostrorum,” Sermo 5.5, CCSL 41:56; “librarii nostri,” Enarrationes in Psalmos 56.9, CCSL 39:700; and “capsarii nostri,” ibid. 40.14, 38:459 See also Augustine's explanation that “servi, quando eunt in auditorium domini ipsorum, portant post illos codices et foris sedent” (Sermo 5.5, CCSL 41:56).

33. Augustine, Sermo 373.4.4, admittedly of doubtful authorship.

34. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 56.9, CCSL 39:700. On the mirror and mirror images in Augustinian thought, see Karl F. Morrison, “'From Form into Form': Mimesis and Personality in Augustine's Historical Thought,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124 (1980), esp. p. 292.

35. Augustine, Sermo 199.1.2, PL 38:1027.

36. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 58.2.2, CCSL 39:746.

37. On the chronology of Augustine's works, in both the discussion and the table that follow, see, among others, Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (London, 1967); Johannes Quasten et al., Patrology (Westminster, Md., 1986), 4:355ff.; A. Kunzelmann, “Die Chronologie der Sermones des hl. Augustinus,” in Miscellanea agostiniana (Rome, 1930–31), 2:417–520; and Henri Rondet, “Essais sur la chronologie des 'Enarrationes in Psalmos' de Saint Augustin,” Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique 61 (1960), 111–27; 65 (1964), 120–36; 68 (1967), 180–202; 71 (1970), 174–200; 77 (1976), 99–118.

38. See Augustine, Contra Faustum, cited above, nn. 8ff., and De consensu evangelistarum 1.14.22, 1.26.40.

39. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 58, esp. 58.1. 15–58.2.11, CCSL 39:740–753. 58.1.19 ends with the exhortation, “Quid hic respondebit infelix Pelagius,” indicating that the commentary could not date from much before 414, when Augustine became actively involved in the Pelagian controversy. See Rondet, “Essais sur la chronologie,” pp. 180–82; and Elizabeth A. Clark, The Origenist Controversy: The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate (Princeton, N.J., 19gz), p. 232 and n. 307.

40. See above, at nn. 22, 24.

41. On the dating of this work, see the comments of M. P. J. Van den Hout, CCSL q6:lx-lxi, who finds distinctive parallels between the De fide rerum invisibilrum and De ciuitate Dei 18.

42. See above, n. 31.

43. See below, n. 94.

44. Augustine, De fde rerum invisibilium 6.9, CCSL 46:16.

45. See also Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 58.1.21, CSEL 39:744; and contrast Contra Fausturn 12.12, CSEL z5:341: “non corporali morte interibit genus inpium carnalium Iudaeorum.”

46. Augustine, Epistula 149.9, CSEL 44:356; cf. De ctvitate Dei 7.32, and Enarrationes in Psalmos 58.2.2.

47. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 58.2.2–10, CCSL jg:746–52. See also De civitate Dei 20.29–30, and Tractatus adversus Iudaeos 5.6.

48. Augustine, De fide rerum invisibilium 6.9, CCSL 46:16.

49. Augustine, Tractatus adversus ludaeos 1.2, PL 4251–52; see also 6.8 (col. 56), “sive consentiant sive dissentiant,” and 10.15 (cols. 63–64), “sive gratanter, sive indignanter audiant Judaei.”

50. Above all, see Bernhard Blumenkranz, Die Judenpredigt, and “Augustin et les Juifs, Augustin et le Judai'sme,” Recherches augustiniennes 1 (1958), 225–41; Marcel Dubois, “Jews, Judaism and Israel in the Theology of Saint Augustine: How He Links the Jewish People and the Land of Zion,” lmmanuel 22/23 (1989), 162–214; and Paula Fredriksen, “Excaecati occulta justitia Dei: Augustine on Jews and Judaism,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 3 (1995), 299–324, and “Divine Justice and Human Freedom: Augustine on Jews and Judaism, 392–398,” in FWW, pp. 29–54. I have discussed the contributions of these three scholars at greater length in Jeremy Cohen, “'Slay Them Not': Augustine and the Jews in Modern Scholarship,” Medieval Encounters 4 (1998), 78–92.

51. See, among others, Paul Monceaux, “Les Colonies juives dans I'Afrique romaine,” REJ 44 (1902), 1–28; Jean Juster, Les lztifs duns ['Empire romain: Leur condition juridique, économique et sociale (Paris, 1914), 1: 207–9; H. Z. Hirschberg, A History of the ]ews in North Africa: From Antiquity to Our Time [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1965), I:51–54; a nd Marcel Simon, Verus Israel: A Study of the Relatrons between Christians andlews in the Roman Empire (135–425). trans. H. McKeating (New York, 1986) 13 pp. 331–33.

52. See Yann le Bohec, “Inscriptions juives et judalsantes de I'Afrique romaine,” Antiquités africaines 17 (1981), 165–207, and “Juifs et judaïsants dans I'Afrique romaine: Remarques onomastiques,” ibid., pp. 209–29. And cf. Robert L. Wilken, judaism and the Early Christian Mind: A Study of Cyril of Alexandria's Exegesis and Theology (New Ilaven, Conn., 1971), and John Chrysostom and the Jews:. Rhetoric and Reality in the Late 4th Century (Berkeley, Calif., 1983); and Wayne A. Meeks and Robert L. Wilken, Jews and Christians in Antioch in the First Fotrr Centuries of the Common Era, Society for Biblical Literature, Sources for Biblical Study 13 (Missoula, Mont., 1978).

53. Recently, see Helmut Castritius, “Seid weder den luden noch den Heiden noch der Gemeinde Gottes ein Ärgernis (I. Kor., 1032): Zur sozialen und rechtlichen Stellen der Juden im spätrömischen Nordafrika,” in Antisemitismus und jüdischen Geschichte: Studien zu Ehren won Herbert A. Strauss, ed. Rainer Erb et al. (Berlin, 1987)pp. 47–67; and le Bohec, “Inscriptions juives,” p. 203.

54. See Blumenkranz, Die Judenpredtgt, pp. 59–74, with nn. to numerous passages in the Augustinian corpus.

55. See the passages cited ibid., pp. 110–12.

56. Even Augustine's frequently cited Epistula 196 to Bishop Asellicus, which contains Augustine's most extensive attack on Judaizing Christians, manifests little sense of urgency. The letter notes at the outset that it originated at the insistence of a third bishop, Donatian, that Augustine formulate such a position. And until its concluding paragraph (16, CSEL 57:229), the letter makes no mention of a specific threat to the contemporary church; only then does it refer to one Aptus (otherwise unknown to Augustine) who, Asellicus wrote, “is teaching Christians to Judaize and thus…calls himself Jew and Israelite so that he might forbid them [non-kosher] foods.” Nowhere does Augustine's letter inveigh against the Jews of his day as the root of such evil within the church. Recent scholarly investigations minimize the extent to which Jews of the imperial period engaged in missionary activity; see Shaye J. D. Cohen, “Was Judaism in Antiquity a Missionary Religion?” in jewish Assimilation, Acculturation, and Accommodation: Past Traditions, Current Issues, and Future Prospects, ed. Menachem Mor, Creighton University Studies in Jewish Civilization 2 (Lanham, Md., 1992), pp. 14–23; and Martin Goodman, Mission and Conversion: Proselytizing in the Religious History of the Roman Entpire (Oxford, 1994), chap. 6. Cf., however, the differing views of Louis H. Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World (Princeton, N.J., 1993), esp chap, 11.

57. Karl F. Morrison has drawn a similar connection in “I Am You”: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology, and Art (Princeton, N.J., 1988), pp. 81–97; see also his “'From Form into Form.'”

58. Augustine, De Genesi contra Manichaeos 2.2.3, PL 34:197: “Secundum litteram accipere, id est non aliter intelligere quam littera sonat.” Augustine alludes to a carnal understanding of Sabbath observance in 1.22.33, col. 189; cf. G. Folliet, “L.a Typologie du Sabbat chez Saint Augustin: Son interprétation millénariste entre 389 et 400,” REA 2 (19561, 371–90.

59. See Augustine, Retractrones 1.9.

60. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram 8.2, CSEL 28, 1:232–33, citing De Genesi contra Manichaeos 2.2.3.

61. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram liher imperfectus 2, CSEL, 281:461. To avoidunnecessary confusion, I have relegated an intervening development in Augustine's exegetical theory to this note. In De utilitate credendi (On the Utility of Believing, 391) 3.5, CSEL IS:?-8, Augustine distinguished between history, a record of things past-whether or not they have actually occurred-and allegory, a figurative, rather than literal, exegesis. To these he added two other modes of interpreting the Old Testament: etiology, that which explains the cause of an event or statement; and analogy, that which clarifies the correspondence between Old and New Testaments. At this point, however, even though history and allegory appear in the same list, they are not yet cast as opposites; for a historical passage may well relate that which never happened, “quid non gestum, sed tantummodo scriptum quasi gestum sit.” See also Robert A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St Augustine (1970; reprint, Cambridge, England, 1988), pp. 188–89 with nn., who argus that Augustine, at this early stage in his career, differentiated both between history and prophecy as “two kinds of texts” and between historical and prophetic “kinds of exposition” (as in the De Genesi contra Manichaeos above). According to Markus, within two years the De Genesi ad litteram lzber imperfectus manifested a convergence of these two distinctions.

62. The steadfastness of this Augustinian orientation has been instructively considered by Joanne McWilliam, “Weaving the Strands Together: A Decade in Augustine's Eucharistic Theology,” in Collectanea augustiniana: Mélanges T. 1. van Bavel, ed. Bernard Brunig et al., Bibliotheca Ephemeridum theologiarum lovaniensium 92 (Louvain, Belgium, 1990), 2:497–506.

63. Augustine, De doctrina christiana 2.2.3, ed. and trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford, 1995), pp. 56–59 (with departures from Green's translations).

64. Ibid. 1.39.43, pp. 52–53.

65. Ibid. 3.9.13, pp. 144–47. In 3.6.10, Augustine explained that the Jews were somewhat better off than pagans in this regard; though the Jews were so enslaved, their servitude was to God, and thus pleasing to him whom they could not behold.

66. Ibid. 3.2.2, p. 132: “Cum ergo adhibita intentio incertum esse perviderit quomodo distinguendum aut quomodo pronuntiandum sit, consulat regulam fidei, quam de scripturarum planioribus locis et ecclesiae auctoritate percepit.” See also the insightful analysis of Michael A. Signer, “From Theory to Practice: The De doctrina christiana and the Exegesis of Andrew of St. Victor,” in Reading and Wisdom: The De doctrina christiana of Augustine in the Middle Ages, ed. Edward D. English (Notre Dame, Ind., 1995), esp. pp. 85–89.

67. Augustine, De doctrina christiana 3.10.15, pp. 148–49.

68. Augustine, Contra Fattstum 6.7.

69. Ibid. 12.39, CSEL 25:365.

70. Ibid. 22.94, p. 701.

71. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, pp. 253, zhoff. Among many other works, see also James J. O'Donnell, Augustine (Boston, 1985), pp. 81ff.; and Robert W. Bernard, “The Rhetoric of God in the Figurative Exegesis of Augustine,” in Biblical Hermeneutics in Historical Perspective: Studies in Honor of Karlfried Froelich on His Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Mark S. Burrows and Paul Rorem (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1991), pp. 88–99.

72. Augustine, Confessiones 13.24, CCSL z7:263–64.

73. As Signer, “From Theory to Practice,” pp. 88–89, has observed, the exegetical orientation of books 2 and 3 of De doctrrna christiana found additional expression in Augustine's Epistula 71 of 403 to Jerome, criticizing the latter's reliance on the Hebrew original of the Old Testament. In Signer's words, “Augustine's basis for interpreting Scripture is ecclesiastical unity and consensus. Part of this process seems to be the exclusion of the Jews from the process of consultation. From the perspective of the DDC the Jews are restricted to a single language and are ignorant of appropriate hermeneutical rules. Within the perspective of Augustine's letter, they are perverse and sow confusion in Christian communities”-a far cry, it would seem, from Augustine's subsequent portrayal of the Jew as valuable witness wherever Christianity might spread.

74. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram 1.17, CSEL, 281:24–25. Augustine renders the Latin of Genesis: “et facta est vespera, et factum est mane dies unus.” On the dating of this work, see below, n. 102.

75. Cf. Augustine, De Genesi ad Manichaeos 2.2.3, cited above, n.58.

76. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram 1.19, CSEL, 281:28.

77. Ibid. 1.21, p. 31.

78. Ibid. 4.28.

79. Ibid. 6.12, p. 185; cf the similar argument of Moses Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed 2.25.

80. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram 11.31, p. 364.

81. Ibid. 8.1, p. 229. See Bertrand de Margerie, Introduction à l'histoire de l'exégèse, 3: Saint Augustin (Paris, 1983), chap. 2, on Augustine's allowance for multiple meanings within the literal sense itself, which, however, ought not to be confused with the coexistence of literal and figurative meanings in the same biblical passage (e.g., De Genesi ad litteram 8.4, 8.7).

82. Ibid. 1.1, p. I.

83. Ibid. 8.4, p, 236. It is instructive to compare these comments of Augustine with those of Nicholas of Lyra centuries later, who identified the Christological significance of the paschal lamb as primary within the intention of the biblical author. See Nicholas's Postilla litteralis ad Exodus 12:1, 13:10, in Biblia sacra cum glossis, interlineari, et ordinaria, Nicolai Lyrani postilla, ac moralitatibus, Burgensis additionibus, et Thoringi replicis (Venice, 1588), 1:145F-146B, ISOGH. See also Jeremy Cohen, “Scholarship and Intolerance in the Medieval Academy: The Study and Evaluation of Judaism in European Christendom,” AHR 91 (1986), 610 and n. 49; and Herman Hailperin, Rashi and the Christian Scholars (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1963), esp. pp. 184–91.

84. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram 8.1–8.2, pp. 231–33; Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. John Hammond Taylor, Ancient Christian Writers 41–42 (New York, 1982), 2:253–54 n. 9.

85. 1 would argue that Augustine's treatment of Tyconius's rules and the subject of curriculum late in the third (30.42–37.56) and fourth books of the De doctrina christiana-those portions of the work composed ca. 426–427-bespeaks increased recognition of a need for systematic regimen in Christian hermeneutic and accords well with the exegetical shift I am delineating. Cf. Augustine's Retractiones 2.4.1, CSEL 36:136; and, for a survey of the major issues and scholarly viewpoints, Eugene Kevane, “Augustine's De doctrina christiana: A Treatise on Christian Education,” Recherches augustiniennes 4 (1966), esp. 103–12.

86. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram 8.1, pp. 231–32; cf. 1.21, and, again, the parallel argument of Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed 2.25, 2.30.

87. Augustine, De Genesi ad lttteram 8.2, p. 233; see also above, n. 84.

88. Robert Nisbet, Hitstory of the Idea of Progress (New York, 1980), p. 64.

89. F. Edward Cranz, “The Development of Augustine's Ideas on Society before the Donatist Controversy,” HTR 47 (1954), 255–316.

90. Cf. Johannes van Oort, Jerusalem and Babylon: A Study into Augustine's City of God and the Sources of His Doctrine of the Two Cities, Supplements to Vigiliae christianae 14 (Leiden, Netherlands, 1991), esp. pp. 108ff., 159–60, who argues—contra both Cranz and Markus, discussed below—that the opposition between the two cities pervaded Augustine's historical thought from early in his career and underwent little essential change. See also the helpful study of A. Lauras and Henri Rondet, “Le Theme des deux cités dans l'oeuvre de Saint Augustin,” in Etudes augustiniennes, Theologie 28 (Paris, 1953), pp. 99–160.

91. See Cranz's “De civitate Dei, XV, 2.” Cranz's theory presents additional difficulties as well. First, Augustine did not completely discard his sevenfold periodization of history in the wake of the Ad Simplicianum, but he invoked it even in later works which Cranz adduced as exemplifying his new outlook on grace—from the Contra Faustum 12.8 and De catechizandis rudibus (On Catechizing the Uninstructed, 399–400) 22.39, to the De civitate Dei 22.30. Cf. additional citations in Luneau, L'Histoire du salut, pp. 289–90, Archambault, “Ages of Man,” pp. 205–6, and van Oort, Jerusalem and Babylon, pp. 94ff. Regarding the passages cited here, I find it difficult to agree completely with Cranz, “Development of Augustine's Ideas,” p. 279 (cf. also Luneau, L'Histoire du salut, p. 380), that “the context of gradual progress is dropped, and while Augustine continues to make use of the six ages, the Old Testament periods serve merely as convenient chronological divisions.” On the idea of historical progress, see also Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, pp. 54ff. Second, the historical-philosophical ramifications of this new outlook on grace do not appear to have pointed directly toward the ideas of the De civitate Dei, which refuses to associate the conversion of Rome's emperors with the fulfillment of Christian history. On the contrary, the Contra Faustum, which Cranz deemed particularly indicative of Augustine's changed perceptions, finds vindication for the doctrine of the church in “these very kings of the earth, now gainfully subjected to the rule of Christ” (13.7, CSEL 25:385; and cf. 22.60). Indeed, according to the Contra Faustum, actualizing the psalmist's messianic prophecy that “‘all kings of the earth shall bow to him, all nations shall serve him’ (Psalm 72:11), Christian emperors, placing the complete trust of their piety in Christ, have triumphed most gloriously over his sacrilegious enemies, who placed their hope in the worship of idols and demons” (22.76, p. 676).

92. Markus, Saeculum, pp. 101–2. Cf, also the insightfully nuanced discussion in John M. Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge, England, 1yy4), chap. 6.

93. See the more recent-and compelling-discussion in Robert A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, England, 1990), chaps. 4–5.

94. Augustine, De civitate Dei 15.7, CCSL 48:462.

95. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, p. 3 21.

96. See also above, n. 43; and Peter Brown, “St. Augustine's Attitude to Religious Coercion.” Journal of Roman Studies 54 (ry64), 107–16, on connections in Augustinian doctrine between exegesis, historiosophy, and those outside the Catholic Church.

97. Jeremy Cohen, “Be Fertile and Increase, Fill the Earth and Master It”: The Ancient and Medieval Career of a Biblical Text (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989), pp. 245–59 with nn.;cf. also Elizabeth A. Clark, “Heresy, Asceticism, Adam, and Eve: Interpretations of Genesis 1–3 in the Later Latin Fathers,” in Ascetic Piety and Women's Faith: Essays on Late Ancient Christianity, by Elizabeth A. Clark, Studies in Women and Religion 20 (Lewiston, N.Y., 1986), pp. 363–73, David G. Hunter, “Resistance to the Virginal Ideal in Late-Fourth-Century Rome: The Case of Jovinian,” Theological Studies 48 (1987), 45–64, Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York, 1988), chap. 19, and Markus, End of Ancient Christianity, pp. 57–62.

98. Augustine, De Genesi contra Manichaeos I. 19.30, PL 34:187.

99. See above, n. 72.

100. Verna F. Harrison, “Allegory and Asceticism in Gregory of Nyssa,” Semeia 57 (1992), 113–30.

101. Augustine, Retractiones 1.9.3, CSEL 36:48–49.

102. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram 11.41.57, CSEL, 281:376. P. Agaésse and A. Solignac, in their edition of Augustine, La Genese au sens littéral, Oeuvres de Saint Augustin 48–49 (Paris, 1972), 1:28–31, contend that Augustine probably wrote books 1–9 of De Genesi ad litteram by 410, and almost certainly by 412; that he composed books 10–12 between 412 and 415; and that he hastily wrote the final chapters of book ii just prior to the publication of the entire work. On the dating of the De Genesi, see also Clark, “Heresy, Asceticism, Adam, and Eve,” pp. 368ff.

103. See above, n. 98.

104. Augustine, De civitate Dei 14.22, CCSL 48:444.

105. The intriguing view that Augustine identified rhetoric with fornication, advanced by Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle, “Augustine in the Garden of Zeus: Lust, Love, and Language,” HTR 83 (1990), 117–39, depends primarily on citations from his earlier works (i.e., Confessiones and prior); this comports with my earlier suggestion (above, n. 85) that the guidelines for Christian rhetoric and eloquence outlined in the fourth book of De doctrina christiana befit a later stage in the development of Augustinian doctrine, when human speech, history, and sexuality are valued more highly than previously. On similar issues, cf. also Eugene Vance, “Saint Augustine: Language as Temporality,” in Mimesis: From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes, ed. John D. Lyons and Stephen G. Nichols Jr. (Hanover, N.H., 1982), pp, 20–35, 251–52, and “Augustine's Confessions and the Poetics of the Law,” Modern Language Notes 93 (1978), 618–34.

106. Brown, Body and Society, pp. 398–99. See also the interesting study of Hunter, “Resistance to the Virginal Ideal,” esp, p. 64.

107. Margaret Ruth Miles, Augustine on the Body, American Academy of Religion Dissertation Series 31 (Missoula, Mont., 1979), p. 7.

108. Ibid. pp. 76–77.

109. Markus, End of Ancient Christianity, chap. 4, esp. pp. 45, 57–62.

110. Augustine, De civitate Dei 22.24, CCSL 48:846.

111. For further consideration of Augustine on Jewish blindness, see Jeremy Cohen, “The Jews as the Killers of Christ in the Latin Tradition, from Augustine to the Friars,” Traditio 39 (1983), 8–10, 22.

112. See above, n. 3 (emphasis mine). Admittedly, one may question how many Israelites Augustine would have actually included in this description.

113. Augustine, De doctrina christiana 3.5.9–3.6.10, ed. Green, pp. 140–43.

114. Augustine, De civitate Dei 15.2, CCSL 48:455. And see Cranz, “De civitate Dei, XV, 2”; and Gerard E. Caspary, Politics and Exegesis: Origen and the Two Swords (Berkeley, Calif., 1979), chap. 3 (esp. pp. rrzff., on the parameters of “ethical polarization,” “hierarchical subordination,” “concentric structures,” and “temporal precedence” in Christian hermeneutic-all of which function to “insure directionality and at the same time protect the dialectical pair” on the Pauline exegetical circle). On the singularity of Hagar's dual status as image of the earthly Jerusalem, which, in imaging the heavenly city, renders her the image of an image as well, see also Jill Robbins, Prodigal Son/Elder Brother: Interpretation and Alterity in Augustine, Petrarch, Kafka, and Levinas (Chicago, 1991), pp. 8ff.

115. Markus, Saeculum, pp. 20–21.

116. Augustine, De cruitate Dei 18.46, CCSL 48:643. See Markus, Saeculum, p. 52, and van Oort, Jerusalem and Babylon, pp. 158–59 and n. 711.

117. Van Oort, Jerusalem and Babylon, esp. pp. 274ff. and 365ff., situates Jewish-Christian traditions at the root of Augustine's doctrine of the two cities.

118. Among others, see Cohen, “Be Fertile,” and Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley, Calif., 1993).

119. Augustiile, Contra Fausturn 12.12–13, CSEL 25:341–43; cf. also 9.2, 12.4, 12.24, 15.2, 16.13, 16.19. AS Vance, “Augustine's Confessions,” p. 627, has observed, figurative exegesis entailed for Augustine “the repression of that obscure, lust-begetting, uncanny, killingle tter of the Old Law and its re-vision in the New.” According to Vance, pp. 631ff., the commentary on Genesis in the Confessiones signified for Augustine a personal re-creation and a ritual of liberation from sin. “Since the Old Law had come to dominate Augustine through the intimately related forms of an idolatrous love of letters and a passionate attachment to creation, especially to women, who, through Eve, had wreaked so much havoc in the creation, obviously only through new experiences of language and love may Augustine be redeemed from the Letter and the Law of Sin.”

120. Brown, Body and Society, p. 401. See also Brown's enlightening discussion in “Late Antiquity,” in A History of Private Life, I: From Pagan Rome to Byzantrum, ed. Paul Veyne (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), esp. pp. 266–67.

121. E.g., Augustine, Tractatus adversus Iudaeos 7.9, PL 42:57:“:Is turn autern Israel scimus esse carnalem, de quo idem dicit [Apostolus], 'Videte Israel secundum carnem.' Sed ista isti non capiunt, et eo se ipsos carnales esse convincunt.” Robbins, Prodigal Son, provides a most interesting discussion of this motif in Augustine's works in particular (esp. pp. 37ff.) and in Western literary tradition in general.

122. For example, Augustine, De spiritu et littera 17.29, 19:34. Augustine's closest approximation of such an equation appears in Contra duas epistulas Pelagianorum 3.4.9, CSEL 60:495, where faith and love are contrasted with the Jews' “earthly cupidity and carnal fear [terrena cupiditas metusque carnalis].”

123. Augustine, De spiritu et littera 13.21, CSEL 60:173.

124. I have argued this at length in “Be Fertile,” pp. 252ff. This conclusion militates against that of Fredriksen, “Excaecatio occulta justitra Dei,” pp. 323–24, who rejected Blumenkranz's contention (“Augustin et les Juifs,” p. 237) that “la polémique antijuive est intimement liée a la polémique antihérétique.” While the connection between the two polemics may have been other than what Blumenkranz maintained, the fact remains that Augustine's anti-Manichean and anti-Pelagian agenda had an impact on his attitude to the Jews and that Augustine attributed to heretics a historical function not dissimilar to that of the Jews. See the citations above, nn. 11–12.

125. Cohen, Friars and the Jews, pp. 20–22.