This book aims to assess the views of significant Christian authors on the trajectory of Jewish history, or, in an alternative phrase that almost serves as a refrain, the Jewish past, present, and future. It is divided into two sections, each of which contains four chapters. The first section addresses the Synoptic Gospels, Paul, Eusebius, and Augustine. The second analyzes the stances of Peter the Venerable (and, as a foil, Bernard of Clairvaux), Raymond Martini, Alphonso de Espina, and Martin Luther.
The study is marked by Robert Chazan's signature qualities of erudition, insight, clarity, and balanced judgment. At the same time, the central theme of the book is beset by what strikes me as an element of artificiality. Thus, when one would normally say that someone was hostile to Jews, it becomes necessary to substitute or to add, at least periodically, that he had a negative assessment of the Jewish present. Moreover, the very classification of past and present is not entirely stable. One the one hand, there is a genuine Christian categorization distinguishing pre-Crucifixion Jews (who can be classified as the past) from post-Crucifixion Jews (who can be seen as the extended present), as well as a vision of an eschatological future where Jews will become (re)united with Christendom and hence saved. Chazan limns the contours of varying approaches to these transitions with great skill. However, his line between past and present sometimes adheres to this standard categorization and sometimes it does not. Thus, the Jewish past can refer not to pre-Crucifixion Jews but simply to a period like that of the Talmud, substantially earlier than that of the figure under discussion (130, 138–39). In a trivial sense, this shift reflects an ineluctable reality. When a medieval Christian figure writes about the Talmud, he is writing about the Jewish past. But since he himself does not classify the Talmud as the product of an earlier era in a conceptual sense, it becomes problematic to compare his attitude to the Talmud or its authors to the approaches of Eusebius and Augustine to the Jews before the time of Jesus.
As we examine the content of the book, its impressive qualities will emerge along with some challenges posed by its structure.
The overall characterization of the Gospels is subtle and largely convincing. It contains little that deals directly with the trajectory of Jewish history, but it is necessary to set the stage. Similarly, the discussion of Paul has relatively little to say about the book's theme, but a critical component does. Here Chazan introduces Paul's expectation that at the end of days all Israel will be saved, which will play a central role in every subsequent examination of expectations regarding Israel's future.
The analysis of Eusebius's approach presents a striking point about the Jewish past that was not characteristic, certainly not in its vigorous formulation, of most Christian writers through the ages. After the revelation at Sinai, Jews, he maintains, became the key civilizing force in the world. But once their punishment for the Crucifixion culminates in their exclusion from Jerusalem, Eusebius, unlike many Christian thinkers, loses interest in them. This is a refreshing and convincing presentation of an atypical approach, at least in tone, to the Jewish past. As to Augustine, Chazan formulates his theology in the language of the book's framework: the Jews had a great but increasingly flawed past, a present “flawed but rich with promise,” and a future that is unambiguously positive (102).
When we enter the Middle Ages, Chazan engages with three figures who are much less familiar to nonspecialists but whose work and environment he approaches with a command formed by years of impressive scholarship. Peter the Venerable's hostility to Jews is well known, as is the protection extended to Second Crusade–era Jews by his contemporary Bernard of Clairvaux. Chazan recognizes that both adhered to the Pauline/Augustinian position: the Jews are not to be killed, and at the end of days they will be saved. However, he says, Bernard saw present-day Jews as docile, while Peter saw them as blaspheming enemies of Christendom. Bernard saw their future salvation in benign terms; Peter, on the other hand, had to be dragged kicking and screaming into acknowledging that their “miserable remnants” will experience salvation (122). Chazan's depiction of Peter's grudging acknowledgment of that future salvation is convincing and contributes materially to the fine distinctions that he draws with respect to the process leading to the ultimate Jewish future. For the sake of the contrast, he oversimplifies Bernard's complex attitude toward the Jews, but the assertion of a significant difference remains entirely justified.
The following chapter on the Christian discovery of Jewish sources, its consequences in the Paris and Barcelona disputations, and most notably in Raymond Martini's Pugio fidei, draws on some of Chazan's major scholarly works: a masterful essay on the historical background and consequences of the Paris disputation, a book on Barcelona, and a key chapter of his Daggers of Faith: Thirteenth-Century Christian Missionizing and Jewish Response (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). It is thus hardly surprising that the presentation here is assured and convincing. Perhaps the most illuminating analysis—already present in Daggers of Faith—takes us through Martini's brilliant use of rabbinic sources on the Sanhedrin in the first century to counter a key Jewish argument regarding a classic Christian proof text (Genesis 49:10). In this instance, what we have is the use of a Jewish document of the past to illuminate the Jewish past for polemical purposes; it is not an assessment of the Jewish past, which is what the book's theme really requires. Much of this chapter, however, is directly on point, as it outlines Martini's detailed account of the sins of biblical Israel based in part on rabbinic texts.
Chazan then turns to Alphonso de Espina's Fortalitium fidei, with its virulent hostility to the Jews and its depiction of their dangerous criminality and consequent punishment in both past and present. What is most germane to the genuine thesis of the book is Alphonso's dark portrait of biblical Israel and his view that although Jews will ultimately convert, they will first accept the Antichrist, resisting their own salvation virtually to the very end.
Finally, we turn to Luther. We are presented with the known trajectory of his writings on the Jews. In an effort to invoke the framework of the book, Chazan asserts that in one of his early works, Luther was optimistic about converting Jews “to achieve the fulfillment of the Pauline vision” (212); in fact, Luther said only that his approach might convert “some” Jews (208) in an apparently noneschatological context. Needless to say, Chazan's judgment on the late Luther is that he provides a negative assessment of the “Jewish past, present, and future” (221).
This book provides a sweeping overview of a millennium and a half of Christian thought about the nature and role of the Jews, marked by depth, breadth, and a degree of accessibility that effectively disguises the massive learning that undergirds it. Whatever my reservations, it is the work of an extraordinary historian.
