Jeremy Cohen has presented in Living Letters of the Law the Summa of his work on the place of "the Jew" in medieval theology. Paradoxically, "the Jew" emerges as quite central to the work of the great medieval theologians, while at the same time Jews (that is, real Jews) are seen as relegated to almost absolute marginality. That is to say: while "the Jew" is crucial to the construction and reconstruction of Augustinian and related Christian theological systems, these authors are not actually concerned with any kind of 'Jewish question' relating to real Jewish people. The two moves are intimately linked: Cohen shows that theological work on "the Jew" and Judaism in relation to Christianity is not some theological by- path. The construction of the non-Christian Other par excellence is a central part of the work of theological self- definition. But at the same time, Cohen makes clear that until the thirteenth century, most of the writers discussed were not very interested in the Jews of their time (there are some exceptions); when they wrote about Jews, they were really thinking about the great problems of their time, writing about them through a kind of Judaic discourse.
The concept which mediates between the centrality of "the Jew" and the marginality of Jews is Augustine's concept of Jewish witness, i.e. that Judaism preserves the truth of the Bible even though its preservers, the Jews, are unable to grasp the true, christological meaning of the Bible. In this context, Augustine speaks of the Jewish "scrinaria", which term Cohen translates as writing tables (not bookchests, i.e. as the dumb containers of precious books?). The Augustinian doctrine of Jewish witness is not exactly unknown. Here, Cohen's great merit is to have contextualised it within the development of Augustine's thought. That is to say, Cohen traces how Augustine gradually develops the core idea, not in a form of personal development, but in a prolonged engagement with the great theological problems and threats of his time: how to propose a figurative-christological interpretation of the Bible without falling prey to insinuations that the Bible may not be literally true. The doctrine of Jewish witness becomes the linchpin which holds together Augustine's dialectical strategies.
And what is more, Cohen has taken the same contextual approach to the other case studies he takes up in detail: Gregory the Great, Isidore of Seville, Agobard of Lyons in the early Middle Ages; Anselm of Canterbury, Gilbert Crispin, Odo of Chambray, Guibert of Nogent and Petrus Alfonsi, Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter the Venerable in the eleventh to early twelfth centuries; Peter Abelard, Judah/Hermann of Cologne, Alan of Lille (Alanus ab Insulis) in the twelfth-century Renaissance; finally, in "The Friars Reconsidered", the unequal team of Popes Gregory IX and Innocent IV, the apostates Nicholas Donin and Pablo Christiani, the theologians Raymond Martin and Thomas Aquinas. It emerges that Judaism is often not at the center of these writers' thought: they are concerned with large and momentous projects, be it the formation of catholic theology against the proliferation of sects in the catastrophic period of Barbarian invasion, or be it the consolidation of a Romanised Frankish empire, or be it the struggle for the Catholisation of Spain. In each of these projects, Judaism plays a special role: it serves as foil and contrast, as a crucial marker of difference in an ideological world in which unity (in the true sense of 'catholic') was the ultimate aim of a deeply divided present. Ultimately, all these strategies are unthinkable without the great sketch of religious unity in Christ sketched first by Paul, in which already Judaism served as a mark of differentiation. In this sense, while Cohen rightly points out the distance traveled from Paul to Augustine and beyond, the Pauline heritage remains of great moment for the continued redefinition of what Judaism means in a Catholic world. It seems important to insist on the literality of this relation: it is the catholic in the strict sense of the term which poses the challenge of exclusivity and all-embrace, through the strategies of supersession, etc.
The central concept introduced by Cohen is the "hermeneutically crafted Jew". Because of lack of evidence about authorial contacts with real Jews, Cohen insists on the artificiality of this construct. The Jew is a trope, a metaphor, for other concerns.
There is something almost postmodern about this insistence on 'Jew' as trope, although Cohen hardly classes himself as a postmodern thinker. Augustine is not discussing real Jews (though his theology had real policy implications for real Jews); he constructs them out of his biblical hermeneutics. They are a trope. Cohen's main argument remains that during the latter part of the Middle Ages the Augustinian doctrine of Jewish witness was undermined by, firstly, the classing of Jews with (Muslim) un-believers in the period of the crusades, and with heretics in the twelfth century. In this the book offers a reconsideration of Cohen's previous suggestion, made in The Friars and the Jews, that the Augustinian doctrine was undermined only in the thirteenth century. In the present book, Cohen has modified his thesis: this Augustinian doctrine is first undermined in the twelfth century, but further demolished in the thirteenth through the widespread denunciation of the Talmud as the Jews' "Nova Lex": that is to say, during the Paris disputation and its inquisitorial inquiry, it is discovered that Augustine, so to speak, was wrong: the Jews were no longer just inert "scrinaria"--they had had the temerity of developing a "new law", the Talmud, in the face of Christian truth. This, so Cohen, was not just unbelief, it was heresy.
There are some great detailed analyses of individual writers' works in which Cohen is able to capture some thinkers' complexity and conclusively shows the need for a contextual analysis, i.e. for knowing everything about the intellectual and political context of the writer concerned. The analysis of the development of Augustine's theory of Jewish witness is one such cameo.
Another powerful analysis is devoted to a text which is both Christian and Jewish: Judah/Hermann's Opusculum de conversione sua. Cohen shows how a Jewish rhetoric and the Christian "hermeneutically crafted Jew" are indissolubly interwoven to produce the inimitable ambiguity and powerful confusion of identity which is so characteristic of this text. In this way, Cohen is able to account for the curiously hybrid character of Hermann/Judah's Opusculum, a quality which has led scholars to suspect it a fake.
This latter example (and one might adduce also Petrus Alfonsi, Nicholas Donin and Pablo Christiani) lead me to question the univocality of this 'Christian tradition', given that we are dealing here with converts from Judaism. Certainly in the case of Petrus Alfonsi the argumentation leading to his rejection of Judaism is ultimately Maimonidean. The submerged Jewishness of this voice remains marginalised. And Petrus Alfonsi's obsession with anthropomorphisms points to another absent line of tradition: Islam appears in this book only as an object of Christian knowledge, as a 'hermeneutically crafted Muslim', so to speak. But what would happen if one related the flowering of polemical dialogues around 1100 with the much greater age of this genre in Islamic writing? Then, Judah ha-Levi's Book in Defence of the Despised Faith (The Kuzari) could be seen as a mediator between East and West, transmitting impulses to Christian writers to revive the dialogue form in a polemic setting in Latin.
Somewhere in this book there are two books (as if Cohen was not a sufficiently prolific writer): the second of them is a revision, after almost 20 years, of The Friars and the Jews. In this part, Cohen engages principally with the critique by Robert Chazan, which has aimed at weakening the argument originally put forward in The Friars and the Jews. Some of Cohen's painstaking defense is somewhat redundant, and will undoubtedly not be the last word in the dynamic between the two scholar-antagonists.
Cohen's analysis remains avowedly on the level of intellectual history. Cohen's "hermeneutically crafted Jew" allows him to avoid the debate about medieval anti-Semitism vs. anti-Judaism. His work makes it clear that discourses in the highly mediated theological writing ought not to be read as reflections of historical processes. What remains unclear is the relationship between the hermeneutically crafted Jew and other historical structures affecting Jews. I am thinking not just of the complex tradition of Jewry laws and the resulting social situation of medieval Jews, but also of the realm which Trachtenberg called superstition and which he traced in The Devil and the Jews. Next to theology, there is also a medieval culture which imputes medicinal properties to body parts, and thus makes blood accusations against Jews credible. One would wish to know how the hermeneutically crafted Jew relates to the Jew of 'popular culture'. Concrete social struggles also remain under emphasized. For example, Agobard of Lyons, to whom Jeremy Cohen devotes a chapter, not only wrote about Jews, but he also sustained real conflicts with them; these are downplayed in Cohen's overall argument.
In his afterword Jeremy Cohen makes a tantalising suggestion. In speculating about the mentality which gave rise to the hermeneutically crafted Jew, Cohen discusses the concept of incarnation. Beyond its specific Christian theological meaning (Incarnation with a capital I), he suggests that thinking in terms of incarnation (enfleshment) was not just confined to Christian culture, but that Jews also know about forms of embodiment of abstract concepts. Was this, Cohen, speculates, a shared medieval mentality? I hope someone will pick up this thread.