From Anti-Judaism to Anti-Semitism: Ancient and Medieval Christian Constructions of Jewish History by Robert Chazan (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: From Anti-Judaism to Anti-Semitism: Ancient and Medieval Christian Constructions of Jewish History by Robert Chazan David Berger Robert Chazan. From Anti-Judaism to Anti-Semitism: Ancient and Medieval Christian Constructions of Jewish History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. xvi + 253 pp. doi:10.1017/S036400941900062X 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. [End Page 454] 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...