Alterity and Self-Legitimation: The Jew as Other in Classical and Medieval Christianity

Reflecting on the Augustinian notion of Jewish witness and its historical legacy, Cohen reviews and expands upon the findings of his earlier studies and reacts to developments in subsequent scholarly research. This essay first summarizes Augustine’s singular contribution to the classical Christian Adversus Judaeos tradition: his doctrine of Jewish witness, the metaphors he and later churchmen used to elucidate that doctrine, its novelty when compared to the teachings of Paul and earlier church fathers, and, by way of example, their impact as expressed visually in a late ninth-century ivory representation of the crucifixion. The essay then considers how reverberations of the Augustinian doctrine occasionally extended into Jewish sources as well. Finally, Cohen relates selectively to the work of other investigators who have contributed to this discussion since the publication of his previous studies.