The Broken Staff: Judaism Through Christian Eyes. - book reviews

Among the many things that have been written about the Jews by Christians in the last several decades one passage from the decree Nostra aetate of Vatican 11 stands out in my mind: "The Church...cannot forget that she received the revelation of the Old Testament through the people with whom God in his inexpressible mercy deigned to establish the Ancient Covenant. Nor can she forget that she draws sustenance from the root of that good olive tree onto which have been grafted the wild olive branches of the Gentiles." What is remarkable about this passage is the use of the present tense in the phrase "she draws sustenance" from the domesticated olive tree. Of course the words are from Paul's letter to the Romans, "remember that it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you" (Rom. 11. 18), but the use of the present tense in 1965 carries quite different overtones than it did in Paul's day almost two thousand years ago. What may appear to be an uncontroversial citation of a familiar biblical text, appears on closer examination to be a profound and, one might add, quite untraditional theological claim: Judaism, living Judaism, not simply the history of ancient Israel or the Old Testament, is a continuing source of sustenance for the Christian church.

The history of Christian attitudes toward the Jews in antiquity and in the Middle Ages has been carefully studied in the last several decades, and it is now possible to trace, with some care, the influence of the Bible, or theological conceptions, or social setting on Christian perceptions of the Jews, and to chronicle what changes took place as Christians related to Jews in different places and in varying political circumstances. But there is another chapter in Christian views of the Jews, and that is the scholarly study of Judaism, what is sometimes called Christian Hebraism, and its role in shaping Christian understanding of the Jews. For learned perceptions of the Jews have not only shaped Christian theology, they have also helped form popular attitudes and prejudices.

In antiquity few Christians knew Hebrew and it was not until the early fifth century that Saint Jerome, the great biblical scholar, translated the Hebrew Bible into Latin. Prior to that time Christians, if they spoke Greek, had to rely on the Septuagint, a translation into Greek made by Jews before the beginning of Christianity, or Latin translations based on the Septuagint. In the Middle Ages Hebrew learning was rare, but not absent, and there were a number of distinguished Christian Hebraists, for example, Andrew of St. Victor, Roger Bacon, or Nicholas of Lyra. But it was not until the Renaissance that Hebrew scholarship established itself firmly within the Christian intellectual tradition.

Unfortunately the early modern period when Hebrew Christian scholarship flourished is almost wholly ignored in general histories and is little known to contemporary Christian scholars. This new book by Frank Manuel, university professor emeritus at Brandeis University, is an account of Christian scholarship on Jews and Judaism from the Renaissance up to the present time. It is a book about books, not a history of popular attitudes, but that does not make it any less interesting or significant. For it is apparent that even the most erudite scholars who not only knew Greek and Latin but Hebrew and Aramaic, and often Arabic and Syriac, men who were well traveled and conversant with the latest ideas, shared conventional views of the Jews that are deeply rooted in Christian piety. Like other Christians they had difficulty seeing Judaism as anything more than an inferior forerunner to Christianity. As Manuel shows, great learning was often put at the service of extravagant ideas of Jewish beliefs and practice or deployed to expose the errors of the Jews and demonstrate the superiority of Christianity.

Yet that is only one side of the story. Scholarship which sometimes began from polemical motives took on a life of its own. Manuel begins his account in the fifteenth century with the writings of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Johannes Reuchlin, both of whom were humanists who used their knowledge of Hebrew and Aramaic to explore Jewish Kabbala and to draw from it a fresh source of illumination to fructify Christian philosophy and mysticism. Others such as Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609), a French humanist, were driven by a desire to master arcane languages and saw in the study of Hebrew a way of recovering another ancient tradition just as the Renaissance had reappropriated the inheritance of Greek and Latin antiquity.

To learn Hebrew and to have access to Jewish sources these scholars and the generations that followed had to turn to Jewish scholars and publishers (without the great Jewish publishing families in Italy, at Soncino for example, there would have been no books to study), and as they had closer contact with Jews they discovered that Jewish practices and institutions of the day helped illuminate the ancient sources.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries religious and theological as well as historical and philological interests inform the work of scholars. No other period in Christian history was as well informed about the Talmud and the Midrashim as the seventeenth century. And though Christian scholars subjected Jewish beliefs to criticism, they displayed "an inquisitiveness about the Jews themselves." With the coming of the Enlightenment, however, scholarship and writing on the Jews took a new turn. Voltaire, for example, was notorious in his contempt of the Jews, and as one critic observed, his writings on the Jews were not only filled with malicious errors but were designed to "render this nation odious and despicable."

What comes clear from Manuel's survey is that the Enlightenment is a primary source of modern prejudices toward the Jews. As scholarship became more secular, it found the particularity of Judaism and the form of Jewish life inimical to the enlightened ideals that now were supposed to mark bourgeois society. "Both Kant and Herder agreed that the ritual rabbinic code alienated Jews from their fellows in society and made coexistence unfeasible. Yet, when Solomon Maimon, the refugee from the ghetto whose philosophical acumen Kant esteemed, broke with ritual Judaism, he became so isolated that Kant advised him to return to the fold. Kant had not appreciated the predicament of the Enlightenment Jews when he stated ex cathedra that Judaism in its rabbinic form had to be abandoned; the philosopher of the absolute moral way could envisage no mixed solutions. The loftiest authority of the Germanic world left his fellow citizens and their progeny a poisoned heritage. In rendering their judgments on Judaism, Kant and Voltaire may have infected a continent with a rampant virus that ran out of control for nearly two hundred years."

Secularism is no friend of the Jews, for it has no way of conceiving of the Jew as Jew. In spite of all that Christianity has done to Jews over the centuries, and the persistence of anti-Jewish attitudes among Christians today, Christians alone have the spiritual and theological resources to see on their own terms and to discern the intimate bond between Christians and Jews. "The Jews," in the words of Vatican II, "still remain most dear to God." Without the ongoing sustenance of the Jewish people, Christian life and faith would be impoverished. Manuel would not put things this way, but in his final pages he suggests that even the maligned phrase "Judeo-Christian" has promise as a way of speaking about the unique bond between Christians and Jews. Whatever one's view on that matter, his book opens up an unexplored avenue to continue a long-standing discussion within the Christian communities.

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