Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism, by Paula Fredriksen, Doubleday, 488 pages, $40
“Remember the Sabbath Day, to keep it lazy.”
This is the Roman poet Juvenal in his Fourteenth Satire , mocking Jewish law. “Since their fathers abstained from pork, they'd be cannibals sooner/ Than violate that taboo. Circumcised, not as the Gentiles,/ They despise Roman law, but learn and observe and revere/ Israel's code, and all from the sacred volume of Moses/ Where the way is not shown to any but true believers,/ Where the uncircumcised are never led to the fountain.”
Juvenal denigrated Judaism to exalt Roman custom. But he lived in a Roman society that tolerated and respected Jewish ancestral custom, as it did all ancestral custom. Paula Fredriksen of Boston University, a specialist in ancient Christianity's social and intellectual history, knows this well.
Although she recently wrote two award-winning books on the historical Jesus, many decades ago, Fredriksen studied and translated the Latin commentaries of St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) on the Apostle Paul's Letter to the Romans.
She now returns in Augustine and the Jews to explore where Augustine differed from the mindset Juvenal typifies.
Fredriksen teaches us that the real complaint of such Romans was not with regular, affable Roman Jews, because their synagogues were open to pagan participation (and vice versa, as Jews enjoyed pagan urban culture).
The complaint, rather, was with newfangled Christian Jews creating social instability. Early Roman emperors persecuted Christians, not traditional Jews, because – by turning synagogue-friendly, born-pagan Gentiles away from their ancestral gods, into becoming proselytes “led to the [Christian baptismal] fountain” – Christians were visibly disrupting the Roman social order of ancestral piety. As Juvenal indicates, what a Roman did was what mattered; “true belief” was an idle question. As that Roman Pontius Pilate famously said, “What is truth?”
Fredriksen's brilliant and persuasive book highlights this unique cultural context, one counterintuitive to us because of later Jewish history. Accordingly, she demands that scholars rethink their picture of Augustine. Augustine is at his most Augustinian, she argues, whenever he is thinking about Jews. Especially as Augustine thinks about them in the way I call, with French religious philosopher Rémi Brague, “the Roman way.”
Augustine did so within the cultural matrix Rome inherited from the husk of Alexander's universal empire: a diversity of peoples, with a practical tolerance for the plurality of gods and local cults. Here, the daily index of piety was ethnic loyalty to ancestral practice. Sure, Juvenal needles Jews, but precisely because their flourishing under Rome testifies to the beneficial tolerance of universal Roman law.
So too with Augustine, Fredriksen writes, and the (for us) counterintuitive gap that existed between anti-Judaic rhetoric and the Roman reality of his day. Gentile and Jew were both members of the same pagan society, ruled by the same Roman law. Augustine rebuked a fellow bishop who was trying to cheat a Jew out of his property. Roman law would have none of that. Jews owned property. They sat on city councils. The idle rhetoric of “anti-Judaism,” trickling down from the educated class, was not to be taken literally.
Such rhetoric can be traced back to educated Hellenistic Jews, who invented biblical theology. They learned how Greeks subjected literature (Homer and Greek tragedies) to rational analysis. With similar allegorical interpretations, Jews aimed to make philosophical sense of their scriptures. There, Moses and the prophets rhetorically rebuked fellow Jews for various failings. Interpreting this “anti-Jew” rhetoric was an intra-Jewish heritage, its tropes analyzed in the context of debates interpreting Jewish texts and traditions.
