Living Letters of the Law

In <i>Living Letters of the Law</i>, Jeremy Cohen investigates the images of Jews and Judaism in the works of medieval Christian theologians from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas. He reveals how—and why—medieval Christianity fashioned a Jew on the basis of its reading of the Bible, and how this hermeneutically crafted Jew assumed distinctive character and power in Christian thought and culture.<br /><br />Augustine&apos;s doctrine of Jewish witness, which constructed the Jews so as to mandate their survival in a properly ordered Christian world, is the starting point for this illuminating study. Cohen demonstrates how adaptations of this doctrine reflected change in the self-consciousness of early medieval civilization. After exploring the effect of twelfth-century Europe&apos;s encounter with Islam on the value of Augustine&apos;s Jewish witnesses, he concludes with a new assessment of the reception of Augustine&apos;s ideas among thirteenth-century popes and friars.<br /><br />Consistently linking the medieval idea of the Jew with broader issues of textual criticism, anthropology, and the philosophy of history, this book demonstrates the complex significance of Christianity&apos;s «hermeneutical Jew» not only in the history of antisemitism but also in the broad scope of Western intellectual history.