Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christians and Jews in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance.
London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Pp. x, 196. £37.50.
The revival of Christian polemic against Jews produced about twenty Latin works from the late eleventh century through the twelfth. Some historians have used this literature to study the missionizing activities of a vigorously expansionist Church, or to gauge the frequency and sharpness of actual religious discussions between Christians and Jews. Anna Sapir Abulafia's purpose is somewhat different: situating the Jewish-Christian debate in the context of Gregorian reform and twelfth-century humanism, she uses it to explore certain theological developments which contributed to a fundamental shift in the way Christians perceived Jews. By Christianizing the classical concept of 'reason,' she argues, medieval scholars paved the way for the reclassification of Jews as sub-human and extraneous.
Eschewing the obfuscatory and jargon-ridden style currently fashionable in many academic circles, Anna Sapir Abulafia has produced a work of exceptional clarity, precision, and fluency, an admirable feat given the complexity of her subject. The book opens with a brief but balanced overview of the social, economic, spiritual, and intellectual matrix out of which the polemical literature grew and offers an assessment of Anselm's indirect but crucial contribution to the Jewish-Christian debate. But it is in the discussion which follows, based largely on a series of more detailed and technical studies she has published over the course of fifteen years, that the book's greatest value lies. Here, a thematic approach allows the author to juxtapose the works of ten polemicists, including such prominent thinkers as Gilbert Crispin, Guibert of Nogent, Rupert of Deutz, Peter Abelard, and Peter the Venerable, and to examine the common strands of thought running through them.
Her analysis pivots on medieval definitions of 'reason,' a concept which captivated the schoolmen and which, in their minds, had little to do with empiricism. Theologians of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries adopted the Stoic idea that reason was the common possession of man and God, the attribute which set human beings apart from animals. In their writings, though, this classical concept became so thoroughly Christianized that reason, understood to mean that faculty which allows men to set aside the misleading cloud of sensual perceptions in order to apprehend truth, could only lead to an understanding of Christian truth. To be a rational creature, therefore, was to be Christian. This dangerous logic might lead some to conclude that unconverted Jews were not only outside the communitas christi, but separated from the family of human beings as well. 'I do not know whether I am speaking to a man,' muses Peter the Venerable, 'I know not whether a Jew is a man because he does not cede to human reason, nor does he acquiesce to the divine authorities which are his own.' The alternative explanation for Jewish unbelief, that Jews recognized the truth of Christianity but continued to reject Christ out of sheer wickedness, was equally unpleasant.
What emerges in these debates, then, is a telling pattern of oppositions: the Jew is unreasonable and blindly literal; the Christian spiritual and able to understand the true Christological meaning of scripture. Additional dichotomies bring to mind the language of antisemitic myths which would take root in European culture by the thirteenth century and persist into the twentieth: Christian purity and health are set metaphorically against Jewish filth and illness, Christian universalism against Jewish particularism, Christian spirituality against Jewish carnality, Christian love against Jewish malice. In the most extreme writings, the 'Jew' becomes the antithesis of every quality the Christian wants to ascribe to himself: an irrational, perverse creature who hated humanity and preferred to dwell in stinking darkness rather than accept the obvious truth of Christianity.
The author acknowledges that Christian venom was nothing new and that its targets were not always Jewish; what is important, she argues, is the way invective coincided with and reinforced patterns of Jewish exclusion from other areas of a rapidly changing Christian society. The polemical literature lent philosophical support to the notion that Jews were enemies of the Christian community and, perhaps, credibility to antisemitic libels that were beginning to swirl about in the culture. To be sure, writers like Guibert and Odo did not formulate a policy on Jews, but they contributed a bias towards marginalization by articulating a theory of society in which non-Christians simply had no place.
Such a suggestive analysis naturally leaves one wishing that the echoes of this anti-Jewish rhetoric might be more fully explored and its practical consequences for Jewish-Christian relations further examined. Much more work will have to be done to answer remaining questions about the dissemination and influence of scholarly anti-Judaism. Understandably, though, the author has chosen to leave that task to others, noting that 'the history of the precise interaction between the work of the scholars...and popular attitudes demands a book in its own right.'
This study contains an important challenge to some aspects of Gavin Langmuir's theory about the origins of antisemitism, in particular his claim that irrational fantasies about Jews (host desecration charges, for instance) arose when Christians suppressed their own rational doubts in order to accept certain prescribed beliefs. The author finds that she cannot usefully apply Langmuir's conceptual categories of nonrational, irrational, and rational-empirical thought to medieval protagonists whose understanding of 'reason' was so fundamentally different from post-enlightenment definitions. She contends that when the greatest Christian minds of the day called the humanity of Jews into question, they made it easier for people to attribute all manner of preposterous and inhuman behavior to the increasingly marginalized Jewish community. Tracing these fantasies primarily to an irrational mindset obscures the role that 'reason,' as construed by twelfth-century scholars, played in developing the idea that Jews were less than fully human. This interesting line of argument is left largely implicit, however; less contentious than the polemicists she studies, the author limits herself to a few cautious remarks embedded in the middle of paragraphs, where they might easily pass unnoticed. Her reservations are grounded in a thorough knowledge of medieval theology, and readers outside the English academic establishment may wish that she had voiced them more forcefully so as to invite further discussion.
Abulafia has drawn attention to one of the darkest legacies of a brilliant, formative period in European history; the twelfth-century renaissance laid the intellectual foundations for the exclusionary policies and apparatus of persecution developed in the thirteenth. She reminds us, too, that the malignant stereotype of the Jew was largely the creation of a literate elite struggling with issues that lay at the very heart of Christian worship, and not the the result of a spontanous groundswell of ignorant hostility from peasants with pitchforks. Finally, a scattered body of difficult Latin material, traditionally the preserve of a handful of intellectual historians, has been drawn together, contextualized, and made accessible to students and non-specialists. This well written and carefully researched book will be welcomed not only as a complement to other works on the deterioration of Jewish status in medieval Europe, but as an important study of a frequently overlooked dimension of twelfth-century intellectual history.
Deborah Jo Miller
Cornell University
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