Attitudes toward Judaism and Jews under the reign of Augustine were, while in hindsight, still quite unsettling to modern readers, in context of what would later come in the middle ages, were quite tame. Augustine saw Jews as what we may today call a ‘necessary evil.’ In similar style to writers like Justin, Christianity needed to further establish itself by claiming the Jewish scriptures for their own. While Justin was quick to condemn the Jews for their clear lack of mental capacity to understand their own scriptures, Augustine was more generous. In the Augustinian model, the Jews were necessary because their existence, proved the truthfulness of Christianity. Over time however, Christians departed from that model which lead to incredibly harsh diatribes against the Jews, accusing them of cannibalism, murder, and a host of other things. The following pages will briefly describe the gradual shift from the Augustinian model to the rampant lies and anti-Jewish sentiments of the middle ages.
The Augustinian Model
The Augustinian view towards Jews and Judaism can be simplistically understood as a continuation of the “long established Pauline and patristic ideas,” cloaked in a graciously condescending smile, passive aggressively killing them with kindness. It was the view of Augustine that while they Jews were; lame, uninformed losers, vastly unaware of their own scriptures and how ‘so last century’ they were, they still had an important role and a special place in a post-easter world. Essentially, though the Jews were wrong and their existence was only proof that Christianity was true. From there it was a matter of quote-mining scripture to establish their usefulness. Psalm 59.11 was central to Augustine’s witness doctrine, stating; “But do not kill them, Lord our shield, or my people will forget. In your might uproot them and bring them down.”
Augustine recognized however, that the Jews need to preserved, for it was their awfulness that bore witness to the truth of Christianity. This also goes back to the idea that the Jews, being scattered, is a result of their unbelief (even though they were scattered before any of that occurred). By this model, Jews are preservers of scripture, and witnesses to the fulfillment of prophecy. Augustine wrote, “All that Moses wrote is of Christ––that is, it pertains completely to Christ––whether insofar as it foretells of him […]” The scriptures predicted their would be those who rejected Jesus, and the Jews fulfill that portion as well.
Christianity vs Everybody
One of the primary purposes this line of thinking evolved, was to answer the perplexing question that early Christians faced, why are there still Jews in the empire? What Augustine developed is in many ways a post-rationalization to try to explain away why Jews persist to exist. This makes it so that Jews are now needed for political purposes. As Cohen puts it, “the Old Testament […] continues to offer testimony to the truth of Christian history and theology.” (Cohen, 28) Otherwise they could have simply been eliminated. The model essentially is saying, ‘we really could kill you, but we need you in order to score some political points and that’s why we’re keeping you around.’ Again, this is a reinforcement of what earlier Christians already thought of the Jews, in that they are suffering because of their unbelief, but instead of jumping to the conclusion that they should be converted or gotten rid of, it holds that their suffering is essential to their existence, for without it, the reality of Christianity is called into question. This operates from the central question, why has God given them an entire empire, and yet allowed the Jews to continue to exist? Augustine felt that there must have then been a reason for that, and whatever it was, it was worth continuing for the sake of the empire.
By the time the early middle-ages rolled around, the grey area surrounding Jews and ‘the others,’ propped up by the witness doctrine began to disappear. Instead, a more ‘Christianity vs. everybody’ mentality began to arise. Theoretically people still would adhere to the witness doctrine but would say things that contradict it. During this time, Christian unity became a big priority for Christians. The ‘sameness’ of Christianity was stressed and the need for people to be united in their Christian beliefs. This lead people to begin to question whether or not there would be room for Jews in this new Christian unity. Cohen notes, “For all that diversity increased, and for all that they themselves gave expression to it, they never abandoned the ideal of Christian unity or their program for fostering it in their society.” (Cohen, 148) Ideally then, there would be no need to Jews to bear witness anymore because everyone would be uber Christian together. The need for conversion began to take place and the quest for discovering the “right” Christian beliefs begins to reemerge just as it did centuries before. This lead to an obsession with stamping out heresy and threats to Christendom, which included the Jews. Eventually the Church becomes so OCD with the heresy that it authorizes specific tools to weed out and combat heresy. Prior to however, the Vatican declared that local diocese should actively try to suppress heresies in their localities. The diocese however claimed they did not have adequate resources to deal with the problem. The Church then gave them the proper resources. These “resources,” are better known today as; the inquisition. Because they wanted so badly to get rid of heretics, they use it as a means of breaking away from the Augustinian model.
Blood Libel and Host Desecration
One of the more interesting and also one of the most frustrating things to come out of this whole anti-Jewish sentiment that had been brewing during the middle ages as the witness doctrine went the way of the flip phone, were the accusations of blood libel, cannibalism, and host desecration targeted at Jews. These accusations led to great persecution of the Jews and ultimately in many ways provided the framework and snowballing for the holocaust. Of this Langmuir writes, “the blood libel they initiated would pursue Jews to the twentieth century.” (Langmuir, 266)
One of the most notorious of these accusations comes from Thomas on Monmouth, who wrote The Life and Passion of Saint William the Martyr of Norwich. In his account, Jews of Norwich took a young boy, tortured him, and then hung him on a cross, mimicking of course what they did to Jesus, and finally buried him. Though all was not totally lost as the Lord made it quite evident that the boy was a martyr and later on he worked miracles and became St. William. This, as Langmuir documents, is important for the study of Jewish and Christian relations because it is, “our most direct evidence for the first medieval accusation that Jews were guilty of ritual murders.” (Langmuir, 210)
Though there are other reports of Jews crucifying young boys such as in 415, when a group of Jews from Inmestar got hammered and then proceeded to drunkenly take a Christian boy and hung him on a cross in place of an effigy, resulting in this boys death. Langmuir points out though that these accusations are unrelated, as are the case of William and other accusations, and furthermore, he adds that, most “historians have disagreed about the truth of the report.” Essentially this medieval case is a pretty rare find, and is independent of other similar texts. Motives for this bizarre episode could possibly be that Thomas simply wanted there for be another saint. He essentially started with the conclusion and went from there. “The Life tells us what he wanted to believe happened, but not necessarily what really did happen. […] if we establish the sequence of events we can be fairly sure happened, a very different picture from that of Thomas’s reconstruction appears.” So Thomas clearly was not the most honest person of his day. Yet these accusations against the Jews persisted, as the Augustine model was basically like KU’s football team at this point; beaten, broken, and irrelevant.
The host desecration accusation is one of the most strange accusations to emerge from this. Bizarre stories began to appear involving Jews participating in actives such as torturing a cracker which bled profusely and then flew around the house (the cracker did). The motive behind these stories was in large part to draw parallel between the current times and actual crucifixion where the Jews, and not the Romans (*eye roll*) killed Jesus. At this time the eucharist played a very important role in Christian tradition and the ‘host’ was viewed as literally being the body of Christ via transubstantiation. By accusing the Jews of stealing and desecrating the host, it draws parallels to the fact that they continue to hurt and kill Christ over and over again. That, along with the sense of Christian unity that had emerged and the idea that Christians are all, “the body of Christ,” allows them to assert that they are persecuting Christians. As Langmuir points out, the real irony in this is that as a result of the heat that the Jews take for these charges, they end up “suffering much of the agony that they had purportedly inflicted.” (Langmuir, 112)
What truly makes cases like William frustrating is that even the Church leadership acknowledged that they were complete fabrications. They discovered that actually, such behavior is completely contrary to Jewish practice (go figure). These charges of blood libel and all the other rectum derived edicts were manufactured for political purposes designed to smear the Jews. At the time the deck was so severely stacked against the Jews with everyone being so paranoid and ready to flippantly believe anything about the Jews and other heretics that if one wanted to prove that the Jews sucked, it didn’t take much. The simple mindedness from this time period is much sadder and far more infuriating when one considers the ramifications these mentalities had further down the road in the 20th century.
–M
References:
Cohen, Jeremy. Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen Oxford University Press, 2007.
Cohen, Jeremy. Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity. United States: University of California Press, 1999.
Gavin, Langmuir I. Toward A Definition of Antisemitism. United States: University of California Press, 1996.
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