THE DOCTRINE OF WITNESS:
COMPONENTS AND CHRONOLOGY
This brief survey of Augustine's developing thought on the Jews yields several preliminary conclusions: First, Augustine deviated relatively little from previous apostolic and patristic teaching on the subject. Second, Augustine formulated that which distinguished him from his predecessors, his doctrine of Jewish witness, prior to and independently of his sole, specifically anti-Jewish work, the Tractatus adversus ludaeos. And third, Augustine's distinctive interpretation of Jewish history appeared to hinge upon more basic themes of Augustinian theology.
Owing to the impact of Augustine on subsequent generations in the history of Christian-Jewish relations, this doctrine of Jewish witness warrants careful review and analysis. One can profitably distinguish between six distinct arguments which typically fortify Augustine's view that the Jews have a valuable function in Christendom and that Christians must therefore permit them to live and to practice their Judaism.
1. The survival of the Jews, scattered in exile from their land and oppressed into servitude, testifies to their punishment for rejecting (and crucifying) Jesus and to the reward of faithful Christians by contrast. The image of the murderous, exiled Cain can serve as the prototype of the Jewish people in this respect.
2. Not only does the survival of the Jews thus confirm the truth of Christianity, but their blindness and disbelief also fulfill biblical predictions of their repudiation and replacement.
3. Prefigured by the biblical Ham, the Jews are enslaved within Christendom; carrying and preserving the books of the Old Testament wherever they go, they offer proof to all peoples that Christians have not forged biblical prophecies concerning Jesus. Jews accordingly serve Christians as guardians (custodes) of their books, librarians (librarii), desks (scriniaria), and servants who carry the books of their master's children to school (capsarii) but must wait outside during class.32 Much like those who helped to build Noah's ark but perished in the flood,33 they “appear with regard to the Holy Scripture that they carry much as the face of a blind man appears in a mirror; by others it is seen, but by himself it is not seen.”34 As history unfolds in its path toward salvation, “the Jews inform the traveler, like milestones along the route, while themselves remaining senseless and immobile.”35
4. The Jews provide such corroborating testimony not only in their books but also in their continued compliance with biblical law. Their steadfast refusal to abandon their distinctive religious identity (forma ludaeorum)36 beneath the oppression of Gentile rulers, especially those of Rome, has proven admirable and valuable.
5. The words of Psalm 59:12., “Slay them not, lest at any time they forget your law; scatter them in your might,” constitute a prophetic policy-statement on the appropriate treatment of the Jews in Christendom. Slaying the Jews, thus prohibited, refers above all to preventing their observance of Judaism, and not simply to their physical liquidation.
6. Hand in hand with Jewish survival, the refutation of Judaism contributes directly to the vindication of Christianity. Paradoxically, such a mandate for anti-Jewish polemic hardly bespeaks an urgency for effective Christian missionizing among the Jews. In keeping with the teachings of Paul, their conversion will come in due course; meanwhile, the worth of their service as witness and foil outweighs the disadvantage of their living as infidels among believers.
These arguments are blatantly interconnected, but not all of them appear together in every formulation of the doctrine of witness. A chronological review of the Augustinian corpus37 reveals that, despite the importance attributed to Jewish history in Augustine's early works, like the De Genesi contra Manichaeos and De vera religione, the doctrine of witness is absent. It made its earliest partial appearances at the end of the fourth century, first in Contra Faustum and then in De consensu evangelistarum (On the Agreement of the Evangelists, ca. 400);38 these works include the first three of the six arguments listed above—the testimonial value of Jewish survival in exile, of Jewish disbelief, and of Jewish books—and they begin to hint at the fourth—the value of Jewish persistence in the practice of Judaism. Yet, although they note the loyalty of the Jews to their law, Augustine's works of this period do not evaluate Jewish behavior in the positive terms of his later writings; nor do they understand God's protection of the Jews from extinction metaphorically, in terms of observance of the biblical commandments. Albeit with approval, Jewish survival is described, within the framework of biblical typology (for example, Cain or Ham), rather than preached as a matter of policy. Significantly, these texts make no mention of Psalm 59:12. They shy away from acknowledging postponement of the hope for the conversion of the Jews. And they include no deliberate mandate for anti-Jewish polemic.
Only in the middle of the second decade of the fifth century did developments in Augustine's teaching begin to bring his doctrine of Jewish witness to its mature formulations, those that bore most dramatically on medieval Christian attitudes toward Jews and Judaism. In his exposition of Psalm 59 (ca. 414), Augustine included the fifth element of his doctrine on the list above, discerning in the psalm explicit instruction for the proper treatment of the Jewish people in a Christian world: “Slay them not, lest at any time they forget your law; scatter them in your might.” No longer was Jewish survival simply to be explained, after the fact, with reference to the typological significance of Cain and/or Ham. Augustine's later works present the continued existence of the Jews, given the service they perform, as the object of the psalmist's outspoken prophecy in its own right.39 Curiously, Cain and Ham no longer figure in three such late considerations of the value of Jewish survival: in De civitate Dei 18 (420–425),40 De fide rerum invisibilium (On Faith in Things Unseen, 420–425),41 and Tractatus adversus ludaeos (ca. 429).42 The De civitate Dei itself deals strictly with the historical sense of the story of Cain and Abel, not with its prophetic allegory, and it refers the reader seeking a typological exposition to the Contra Faustum,43 As he explained in the De fide rerum invisibilium, Augustine beheld in the principle of “Slay them not,” not the allegorical fulfillment of the Old Testament, but practical guidelines for the implementation of the new order:
Therefore it was made to happen that they would not be eradicated so as to have their sect completely cease to exist. But it was dispersed throughout the world, so that, carrying the prophecies of grace bestowed upon us in order to convince the infidels more effectively, it would benefit us everywhere. And this very point which I am stating—accept [acapite] it, inasmuch as it had been prophesied: “Slay them not,” he said, “lest at any time they forget your law; scatter them in your might.” Therefore they have not been killed in this sense, namely, that they have not forgotten those things which used to be read and heard among them. For if they were to forget the holy scriptures entirely (even though they do not now understand them), they would be undone in the Jewish rite itself, because, if they would know nothing of the law and the prophets, the Jews could be of no benefit.44
Beyond admonishing Christians to accept the dictates of Psalm 59, Augustine here clarified in unequivocal terms the fourth element in his doctrine of Jewish witness: that precisely their practice and knowledge of biblical law and prophecy afforded the Jews a valuable