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doi: 10.1 01 7/S000964071 0000107
Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism. By Paula Fredriksen. New York: Doubleday, 2008. xxiv+488 pp. $35.00 cloth.
Augustine and the Jews is a work of great subtlety, richness, and finally almost equal lucidity. Augustine came to find the Jews indispensable. The Church would need their continuing witness until the end of time. Meanwhile, he himself needed them to help him resolve his sharpest dilemmas. "Where Augustine's thought is most characteristically 'augustinian,'" Fredriksen avers, "we finding him thinking with 'Jews'" (353). "Jews," not Jews. Whatever real Jewish company he may occasionally have kept, the Jews Augustine thought with were not of the flesh-and-blood variety that shared Torah scrolls and rabbinic exegesis with his rival Jerome. (Jerome's familiarity with Jews, his strident appeals to the pristine Hebrew of their scriptures, and his matching nervousness about Christian Judaizing supply an intermittent but vital counterpoint to Fredriksen 's discussion of Augustine.) The fleshliness of Augustine's Jews was that of an ideal but evolving type. Their manner of existence in former times, disclosed in tbe books of the Church's Old Testament, prophesied the Incarnation. In the present "sixth age" announced by Jesus' birth, scattered as they then were after the destruction of the Second Temple, the Jews were ubiquitous pledges of the authenticity of those books, and hence of the validity of the Christian view of history deduced from them. The subtitle of Augustine and the Jews is perhaps slightly over-emphatic. Augustine, master dialectician and rhetorician, never mounted a formal Christian defense of the Jews, let alone of Judaism, against their actual attackers; such projects lay in the future that his writings partly prepared. At best, he kept silent when he might have joined a common cry against certain Jews of his time. What he did offer was more in the nature of a demonstration of the Jews, of an entirely different temper from Eusebius of Caesarea 's Demonstration of the Gospel, a work in the central tradition of Christian anti-Jewish polemic that Augustine inherited, transmitted, and, as we can now see as never before, daringly outdistanced.
In an afterword, the author tells a story of herself preparing to give a paper on Christian anti-Judaism at a...