Living letters of the law : ideas of the Jew in medieval Christianity / Jeremy Cohen.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 401-435) and index.

In Living Letters of the Law, 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. Augustine'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.

Augustinian foundations. The doctrine of Jewish witness -- The Augustinian legacy in the early middle ages : adaptation, reinterpretation, resistance. Gregory the great : between sicut iudaeis and adversus iudaeos ; Isidore of Seville : anti-Judaism and the hermeneutics of integration ; Agobard of Lyons : battling the enemies of Christian unity -- Reconceptualizing Jewish disbelief in the twelfth century. Reason in defense of faith : from Anselm of Canterbury to Peter Alfonsi ; Against the backdrop of holy war : Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter the venerable ; Renaissance men and their dreams -- The friars reconsidered. Judaism as heresy : thirteenth-century churchmen and the Talmud ; Ambiguities of Thomistic synthesis.

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