41845358-Antisemitism

40 ANTISEMITISM
In the fifth century, St. Augustine argued, on the basis of these governing
New Testament texts, that it was the Jews’ ignorance and blindness that led
them to reject Christ; they did not knowingly kill God. Augustine resolved the
issue of why the Jews continued to exist. In the Augustinian tradition medieval
theologians saw the Jews as bearing witness to the truth of Christianity by
their holy scriptures—appropriated as the Old Testament and conferring a
venerable antiquity on Christianity—and by their exile and degradation for
spurning Jesus. Thus the Jews continued to serve a providential purpose in
history and were therefore to be preserved and tolerated in Christendom; or,
as this idea was expressed by a fifteenth-century writer, “To be a Jew is an offense,
though one that is nonpunishable by the Christian.” 62 And even though
the Jews blindly and perversely adhered to it, Judaism was still recognized as
biblical in origin and character, as was Jewish law, obsolete and nonsalvific
though it was. At the end of time, Jews and Christians alike would be gathered
together into the one fold, and, in the words of Paul, there would be neither
Greek nor Jew, male nor female, slave nor free, and so forth.
In the centuries after Augustine, a corollary developed that the Jewish
leaders recognized Jesus as the messiah promised to them in scripture but that
they did not recognize his divinity. In this view, it was the ignorant masses who
shouted for his crucifixion, because they rejected his messiahship and took his
claim to divinity to be that of an imposter and blasphemer. In the eleventh and
twelfth centuries, that line of theological reasoning weakened the Augustinian
foundations that supported toleration of Judaism, but no clear inference of an
extreme kind was drawn. By the thirteenth century, however, Franciscan and
Dominican theologians provided a biblical basis for intolerance and forced
conversions. They invoked other New Testament passages to conclude that
the Jews knew the truth of Jesus’ divinity but stubbornly refused to accept and
act on it, and it was this deliberate and willful perfidiousness that inspired the
knowing rejection of the divine messiah. The New Testament texts they singled
out included the parable of the vineyard in the synoptic gospels; John
9:39–41, where Jesus tells Pharisees that they see and are not blind and are
therefore “guilty”; and John 15:22–24, where Jesus says he has come and spoken,
and Jews therefore have no excuse and are “guilty of sin.” The Dominican
St. Thomas Aquinas attributed more willfulness than ignorance to the Jews in
committing deicide; they acted, he said, out of envy and hatred. More extreme
were Duns Scotus and Nicholas of Lyra in stating that Jesus’ divinity was manifest,
that the Jews had the proof texts in their own scriptures, but that they
acted willfully out of malice. Raymond Martini’s Dagger of Faith (1278) concluded
that the Jews were wicked and perverse in persisting knowingly in the