At this juncture it should be briefly noted that debates over Christian figural thinking are not confined to the academy. The Catholic Church continues to grapple with the question of how to think about a theology of the “Old Testament” that is not grounded in supersession.6 Recent papal endeavors to open up Christian-Jewish relations show the difficulty of rethinking typology. In an address to the Jewish community of Mainz on November 17, 1980, Pope John Paul reemphasized that the “Old Covenant” had never been revoked by God. In 1985 a Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews had the following to say about typology:
From the unity of the divine plan derives the problem of the relations between the Old and New Testaments. The Church already from apostolic times (cf. 1 Cor. 10: 11; Heb. 10: 1) and then constantly in tradition resolved this problem by means of typology, which emphasizes the primordial value that the Old Testament must have in the Christian view. Typology however makes many people uneasy and is perhaps the sign of a problem unresolved. (224)
Nevertheless, in spite of good efforts, typology troubles Catholic catechisms, notably the recently authorized Catechism of the Catholic Church (United States Catholic Conference 1994). The catechism presents a typological understanding of the relations of the Jewish and Christian covenants. For instance, on the question of the constitution of the Bible, it asserts: “All Sacred Scripture is but one book, and that one book of Christ, because all divine Scripture speaks of Christ, and all divine Scripture is fulfilled in Christ” (141). Vatican studies have tried to exit typology by imagining both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament as anti-types for the coming or return of the Messiah. This strand of eschatology is actually reminiscent of medieval expectations of a third age which envisioned a new hybrid chosen people (commingled of Christians and Jews) who would replace contemporary Christians as the chosen people. In a recent study of such millenarian thought, medieval historian Robert E. Lerner has characterized this vision developed by Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135–1202) as a more benign “path not taken” in the formation of Europe as a persecuting society. Yet such a path, Lerner observes, aggravates typology by adding the notion of progress to supersession: “As the first theorist of incremental progress in the West (and probably anywhere), Joachim spoke in terms of steady betterment extending into the future.”7 The Old Testament scholar Joseph Blenkinsopp takes the measure of the problem when he comments that “we [Christians] are as yet nowhere close to knowing how to write an Old Testament theology.”8
Does the debate on typological thinking rehearsed so far seem to repeat, yet again, some version of the story of “timeless” enmity between Christians and Jews, even as scholars are working so hard to rethink these relations past and present? For example, late antique scholars now argue for the “twin birth” of rabbinical Judaism and Christianity and view the religions as siblings, thus sidestepping the question of theological imaginaries. Scholars of the medieval diaspora reject monolithic understandings of religious and ethnic essence and eschew accusatory historical modes of describing medieval Jewish-Christian relations. They attempt to cultivate complex understandings of local differences as solutions to particular cultural problems that are never one-sided.
This book begins with the intuition that such hopeful new historical models of Jewish-Christian coemergence and coexistence will not shift the ground of analysis unless they are accompanied by a thorough working through of the fantasy of supersession, or what I am calling the Christian typological imaginary. I will thus be making a cautionary argument in these pages about this promising new work.
The Typological Imaginary at Work
Let me open my argument with a reading of some current works of medieval scholarship that seek to rethink the historiography of Jewish-Christian relations. I wish to show how they stop short of being transformative, since they remain at what Eric Santner has called “the level of... mapping of more complex symbolic processes” (29) without reference to the repetitive and machine-like aspects of the Christian typological imaginary. As psychoanalysis teaches us, unconscious mental activity is not organized around systems of meanings, beliefs, purposes, or epistemologies, but rather around a kernel that is not assimilable to biology or history (which is not to say that the kernel is a-natural or ahistorical). My reading suggests that the typological imaginary has persisted in these studies in spite of themselves. Only a questioning of the typological imaginary in tandem with such studies can be, I believe, transformative.
Medieval historians have mostly modeled the study of medieval Jewish-Christian relations at the symbolic level as a question of self and other and concomitant processes of inclusion and exclusion. Robert Moore’s influential book, The Formation of a Persecuting Society (1987), remains paradigmatic.9 He claims that newly emergent clerical elites in late twelfth-century Europe, notably university scholars and administrators, secured their power by constructing and policing new forms of outcastness. Jews became the Other for these medieval Christians. A strong reading of Moore (one that he himself has offered) argues that antisemitism is constitutive of the very formation of Europe. In so claiming, Moore conflates medieval bureaucratic networks with fantasy, failing to realize that they are not historically identical. Moore provides his readers with a bleak but paradoxically comforting historical narrative. He offers a temporal origin and a bureaucratic structure for antisemitism without raising any questions about the group pleasures being forged in the emerging networks of bureaucratic elites he traces. How does fantasy work to organize such bureaucracies in mechanical, repetitive ways? Since the bureaucratic networks are historically dynamic, so too, unhistorically, is the work of fantasy. Moore’s thesis does not allow historians to think together these clerical, bureaucratic networks and the question of pleasure. Separating functionalism from fantasy, as Moore does, protects historians from thinking about the unhistorical, that which is troubling because it cannot be contained by the history of bureaucratic networks alone.
Moore’s conflations have strongly shaped subsequent historiography. Through the 1990s medievalists responded both creatively and anxiously to Moore’s paradigm of persecution.10 Gavin Langmuir and Anna Sapir Abulafia have looked more carefully at clerical strategies for “christianizing” reason as clerics redrew the boundaries between the rational and the irrational over the twelfth century. They are interested in how intellectuals innovated the media of textbooks, polemics, preaching, and visual display in order to map onto Christendom newly conceived forms of universalism. Hermeneutically, these clerics began to imagine Jews as the irrational effect of their rationalizing programs. For Langmuir, the transformations over the twelfth century mark a move from anti-Judaism to antisemitism, that is, from epistemological to ontological categories. Abulafia, who views her work as a critical extension and also a significant rethinking of Langmuir, avoids such binaries. Her analysis comes close to conceiving the problem as one of repetition, although she does not articulate that process explicitly. Jeremy Cohen, in an elaboration of his earlier study The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (1982), and in dialogue with the work of Amos Funkenstein’s Perceptions of Jewish History, traces the hermeneutic history of the textualized Jew in theological discourses and also detects a turning point in twelfth-century treatises. As Christian clerics subsequently mobilized their imperfect (at best)