This letter-like tract by Amulo (Amolo, (H)amulus), archbishop of Lyons (841–52) in succession to Agobard, forms a document of Jewish as well as ecclesiastical history. Noted as Amulo's work in Trithemius’ ecclesiastical bibliography (1494), it was first edited as Epistola seu Liber contra Iudaeos by P. F. Chifflet in his collection Scriptorum veterum de fide catholica opuscula quinque (Dijon 1656). Chifflet assigned it to Rabanus Maurus, but the case for Amulo's authorship prevailed, supported by the writer's claim (chapter xliii) to be following the example of his teacher and predecessor (Agobard). The tract was reprinted under Amulo's name by Migne (PL cxvi.141–84). It was discussed but not presented in the edition of Amulo's letters made for the MGH by E. Dümmler (1899). Cornelia Herbers-Rauhut now provides a fresh edition, with German translation en face and a substantial introduction. The book is dedicated to her Doktorvater, the late Klaus Zechiel-Eckes, and represents (with shortening, as the foreword notes) a Cologne dissertation accepted in winter 2008–9.

Amulo, like Agobard, sought to separate Christians from contact with Jews and their opinions. He deals here with Jewish teachings and with measures for the restriction of contact. Urging his episcopal brethren that Jews should be shunned in the same way as heretics (chapters i–ix), he notes and refutes Jewish errors and blasphemies (chapters x–xlii), using the testimony of Jews who have accepted baptism (chapter xlii). The chief topics are Jewish references to two messiahs (these find some correspondence in rabbinic literature), and to Christ's nativity, passion and burial (comparable accounts are found in Aramaic and Hebrew texts of Toledoth Jeshu), with related anti-Christian polemic. Finally, the influence of Jewish teaching is linked with the recent adoption of Judaism by the court deacon Bodo. In a second part of the text (chapters xliii–lx) Amulo advocates the separative measures which, like Agobard, he has sought to enforce and claims precedent for them in imperial, royal and ecclesiastical ordinances from the later Roman Empire onwards. Both parts of the work have engaged historians, in recent times perhaps above all Bernhard Blumenkranz.

The introduction discusses Amulo and his authorship, the manuscript tradition and the relation of the tract to the work of the deacon Florus of Lyons, who in modern times was suggested as the true author by C. Charlier. After consideration of surviving juristic and patristic manuscripts which were probably available to Amulo, and in some cases are marked by Florus, and of further argument for Florus’ responsibility by Zechiel-Eckes, Florus is seen here, with Blumenkranz, not as author of the tract but as the maker of juristic compilations used by both Agobard and Amulo. A long section studies sources, biblical, patristic, juristic and Jewish; the work was finished before recent publications on Toledoth Jeshu by Peter Schäfer, Yaacov Deutsch and Michael Meerson, but makes good use of the analysis by G. Schlichting (1982). Treatment of ecclesiastical historians used includes discussion of the background of the distinctive report on Bodo. Finally, the date and purposes of the treatise are reviewed with regard to the use made of Agobard, De iudaicis superstitionibus, and to the influence of the tract on canon 73 of the Council of Meaux–Paris, 845–6 (chapter xix gives the current year as 846). A two-stage origin from 845 onwards is envisaged, and after consideration of the impact of Jewish commerce on ecclesiastical property (not taken to be a central concern) the chief aim is presented as regulation of Jewish-Christian relations, following Agobard.

The edition is based on two fully-described early manuscripts: Bibliothèque interuniversitaire, Montpellier, Section Médecine, H 237 (ninth-tenth century), and Biblioteca Antoniana, Padua, 73 Scaff. IV (tenth century). In the passages reprinted directly from Chifflet by H. L. Strack in Jesus, die Häretiker und die Christen nach den ältesten jüdischen Angaben (Leipzig 1910), 15*–17* (this book might well have been cited) Herbers-Rauhut's text agrees verbally with Chifflet's. Through her new edition, however, we now have confirmed access to a form of the text current within a century of its composition. The translation in passages examined by this reviewer is close and careful; so, where (chapter xl) Jesus is said to be called the offspring nesciocuius ethnici, the exact ‘eines Heiden’ is preferred to any phrase like the vaguer ‘of uncertain origin’ found in some translations of this passage into English.

The textual, interpretative and historical help given here is sometimes offered with a frustrating degree of detachment from earlier presentation and discussion of the text. Thus nothing is said expressly to place the new text in relation to Chifflet or to Migne's reprint, which has formed the basis of modern discussion; is the new edition as close to the first edition as the comparison of selected passages above might suggest? The rare first edition is cited in the introduction, but simply by author's name and short title, without date or place or comment on its text, and it does not appear in the bibliography (as is also true of cited work by Trithemius and others). Has shortening robbed us of fuller information, and is the consequent editing incomplete? Similarly, however, discussion of the textual tradition, including a statement that the two manuscripts just noted are the only known manuscripts, seems to take no account of the author's earlier statement, following Dümmler, that a seventeenth-century copy of the lost manuscript used by Chifflet has been thought to survive in BN, Paris, Lat. 12128; this manuscript, like Chifflet's printed text, remains a silent witness. To move to literary-historical questions raised by Chifflet's work, the debate on authorship is illuminated through discussion of probably seventeenth-century notes in the manuscripts used, but Dümmler and Strack are still needed if one seeks fuller reference to scholars who participated in print. Again, since the manuscripts used do not attest it, there is no discussion here of the form of the title including the phrase ‘ad Carolum’ (suggesting address to Charles the Bald) which is already reflected in Trithemius, and has suggested direct linkage between this tract and Carolingian rulers as well as bishops.

Final emphasis should fall, however, on the wide-ranging benefit conferred by this edition, translation and historical interpretation. The labours devoted to it help, as the author suggests, to bring Amulo out from the shadow of Agobard; and they recall and facilitate attention to a document of many-sided interest.