It has become a convention for reviews of Robert Lerner's books to open with expressions of appreciation for his profound scholarship, and I am happy to continue that tradition. This book, which traces one particular strand of later medieval millenarian thinking, represents years of research in dozens of manuscript collections, and brings to light intriguing and little known theological works spanning three centuries and five geographical regions. Although it is possible to question aspects of Lerner's analysis, few scholars interested in medieval religious or political thought will fail to find information of value in The Feast of Abraham.
In a brief Introduction, Lerner presents the millenarian idea that he will be tracking: an "irenic" vision of a future in which Jews and Gentiles would join as one flock. According to Lerner, this vision first appears in Joachim of Fiore's Concordance of the New and Old Testaments, which reads Jacob's return to the land of his fathers (Gen. 31) as prefiguring the sixth age of the world, during which there will be "a union of the gentile and the Hebrew people". Lerner characterizes this vision as a tolerant "path not taken", an alternative to the persecuting society propounded by R. I. Moore in his influential 1987 work, and hopes in this book to refute the "widespread assumption" that "all medieval millenarians were anti-Semites".
Chapter One introduces Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135-1202), the central figure in this story. Lerner is an acknowledged expert in the field, and his survey of Joachim's life and intellectual career is enormously helpful and informative; it should form the starting point for future studies of the Calabrian abbot. Chapter Two outlines the approach to the Jews embedded in Joachim's eschatology, usefully situating this approach within the totality of his thought. Each subsequent chapter focuses on one or more individuals who in some way perpetuated or developed Joachim's vision. After briefly tracing the birth of Franciscan Joachism, Chapter Three focuses on the Franciscan Gerardino of Borgo San Donnino, who flourished in Paris in the 1240s, and concludes with an examination of Bonaventure's eschatology. Gerardino propounded (and was eventually imprisoned for) the theologically outrageous idea that Joachim's work constituted a third Testament. In Lerner's view Gerardino represents a final transition from a political to an ecclesiological Joachism "even more radically philo-Judaic than Joachim". (48) Bonaventure appears here because he foresaw a Sabbath Age during which Jews and gentiles would come together; according to Lerner, this prediction shows that Franciscan Joachism was not exclusively a fringe phenomenon. Chapter Four examines Peter Olivi and a group of lay followers called "Beguins", while a fascinating Chapter Five builds on Lerner's previous study of the fourteenth-century Languedocian John of Rupescissa. Chapters Six, Seven, and Eight examine a trio of quite obscure late medieval millenarians: respectively, the fourteenth-century Saxon friar Frederick of Brunswick (this discussion is based on Lerner's own manuscript discovery); the late fourteenth-century Catalan Francesc Eiximenis; and the fifteenth-century German layman Nicholas of Buldesdorf, a self- proclaimed "Messiah of the Jews" who was burned by the rump of the Council of Basel in 1446. In each case Lerner extensively quotes the texts touching upon his subjects' views concerning the Jews' future and convincingly traces the relevant intellectual influences.
Lerner has done a great service in bringing these texts to light. Most are little known, and all are interesting. They touch upon a wide variety of issues, from Franciscan spirituality to lay learning, the 1391 anti-Jewish violence in Iberia, and imperial politics. Art historians should be fascinated by the discussion of Joachim's illustrated Book of Figures. Through the painstaking tracking of certain words and concepts, Lerner has successfully demonstrated one of his primary contentions--that a chain of ideas, a "thought family" (120), was constructed via the dissemination of Joachite writings; he thus offers a compelling demonstration that what one reads really does matter. But I confess to some reservations about Lerner's conclusions concerning the millenarian idea in question. In my view, he overstates both its "philo-Judaic" nature and its radicalness, in the process perpetuating just the kind of oversimplification he is seeking to counter.
Although Lerner explains (120) that by "philo-Judaic" he really means only "a relatively more benign attitude toward the Jews than the late medieval Christian norm", it is clear that he considers the "irenic vision" to be often, if not always, accompanied by sympathy for "the Jews". There are two problematic aspects to this assumption. The first concerns the object of this "sympathy". Because the eventual "coming together" of Jew and Gentile envisioned by these millenarians was to be under Christ, when these writers "exalt" the Jews, they are (with one possible exception) referring to Jewish converts. For example, on page 32 Lerner relates the interesting and genuinely significant fact that Joachim broke with all precedent in denying that the Antichrist would stem from the Hebrew tribe of Dan. He then offers as further proof of Joachim's positive attitude toward Jews the abbot's prediction that future Jewish converts would provide a "refuge" for Christians fleeing the Antichrist. But is a positive attitude toward "Jewish converts" tantamount to a positive attitude toward Jews? In other words, is a "Jewish convert" still a "Jew"? Lerner seems throughout the book to assume that medieval Christian conceptions of "Jewishness" were based primarily on "race", "nation", or "tribe". This is a daring (and to my mind, questionable) assumption, which would seem at the very least to require careful exploration of medieval Christian attitudes toward conversion and religious identity.
The second problematic aspect concerns the effects of this "sympathy". Lerner seems to assume that a positive attitude toward potential "Jewish converts" is likely to engender a positive attitude toward contemporary Jews. He concludes the chapter on Joachim by presenting a detailed case for seeing Part Two of the work that is usually called Contra Judeos as a compassionate conversionary treatise written, in love, "for" rather than "against" the Jews. (33-35) The discussion is as usual erudite, but it is not completely persuasive. The treatise closes with a retelling of the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32). It is difficult to imagine that Joachim would use a gospel parable as a prooftext in a work directed to Jews, or, indeed, that a Jewish audience would need to be convinced to have compassion for Jews, as the work's preamble urges. Similarly, in Chapter Four Lerner situates Olivi's vision of Jews and gentiles dwelling together in the "third status" against the background of contemporary conditions: "Thus at a time when Jews were desperately trying to reestablish themselves [after expulsion from and readmission to France]..., the millennial vision of the persecuted Beguins led them to see these afflicted neighbors as potential comrades..." (71) I think, however, that one must ask whether these "Beguin" followers of Olivi really did look at their Jewish neighbors in that way. History shows that people are quite capable of separating flesh and blood Jews from Jew-qua-abstraction, what Jeremy Cohen in Living Letters of the Law (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1999) calls "the hermeneutic Jew". Lerner seems to regularly subsume Old Testament Hebrews, descendants of David, medieval Jews, future converts, and denizens of an imagined millennial kingdom under the rubric "Jew", and yet in discussions of religious value and salvific potential surely these groups should be kept analytically distinct. One must applaud Lerner's desire to connect theology to the social context, but a more fruitful line of inquiry might have been to ask: what was happening in Christian culture to change Joachim's or the Beguins' views of future society? How and why were these people re-conceptualizing what it was to be Christian, and rethinking the nature of the community of Christians itself?
Finally, in seeking to "show that not all medieval Christians thought alike about Jews", Lerner may sometimes overestimate his authors' radicalness vis-a-vis the Jews, and underestimate the diversity of "general" Catholic approaches. Certainly some of his authors were, indeed, original and revolutionary in their approach to Jews: Gerardino believed (at least according to his persecutors' list of his errors) that Jews would be freed even while remaining in Judaism; Rupescissa did seem obsessed with the urgency of converting Jews; and Nicholas of Buldesdorf, the self-proclaimed "Messiah of the Jews", was indeed a renegade and a fanatic. Others seem less radical: Bonaventure's thinking on the Jews is quite traditional, as well as incidental to his main interests; the Jews seem rather peripheral to the ideas of Olivi and his followers; and the same prooftext cited by Lerner as an example of Joachim's originality concerning the Jews (Luke 15) was used in a sermon by Augustine to predict the eventual return of the Jews to the fold. Of greater concern than whether the adjective "radical" properly applies to these millenarians is the underlying assumption about the uniformly hostile nature of more "mainstream" Christian thought (and the persecutory teleology implicit in such an assumption). In the Introduction Lerner sets up a contrast between Joachim's view of a "fecund" Jewry and Bernard of Clairvaux's characterization of Jews as condemned to perpetual sterility. (2) Yet was Bernard's statement the last and only word on the subject? Gavin Langmuir demonstrated in a 1992 article that perfectly orthodox theologians of similar training and background like Bernard and Peter the Venerable could take quite different approaches to the Jewish question. Nor did Bernard's theological hostility lead him to persecute Jews; he wrote eloquently in their protection. As Lerner acknowledges, standard medieval Catholic doctrine conceded that a remnant of Jews would be saved. A survey of high medieval theological works reveals considerable variation concerning the timing of the Jews' eventual conversion, the percentage of Jews who would ultimately be saved, and the tone in which the events are described. Hugh of St. Victor, Stephen Langton, Peter the Chanter, and Alexander of Hales, for example, echoed Augustine's serene confidence in the Jews' conversion; many other writers, of course, were pessimistic and very hostile. Lerner's goal to "show that not all medieval Christians thought alike about Jews" might have been better served by locating his millenarians along a continuum of possible approaches, rather than by constructing a rather artificial divide between "Joachite philo-Judaism" and a Jew-hating and persecuting majority.
It is clear that I take issue with many of the interpretations offered in this book. Yet I do not wish to end on a negative note. This is a provocative and stimulating work of immense learning by one of the major U.S. scholars in the field. It will be of interest and value to anyone interested in Jews and Christian thought.