Fulfilling the Law: Medieval Intellectuals and the Christian Making of Jewish Identity

Project Information

FULFIL

Grant agreement ID: 794206

DOI

10.3030/794206

Project closed

EC signature date 26 February 2018

Start date 1 September 2018

End date 31 August 2020

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 195 454,80

EU contribution

€ 195 454,80

Coordinated by

QUEEN MARY UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - FULFIL (Fulfilling the Law: Medieval Intellectuals and the Christian Making of Jewish Identity)

Reporting period: 2018-09-01 to 2020-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Considering the cultural construction of minority identities in medieval Europe, and designed to include the history of Jews and Judaism into history of Europe as a whole, FULFIL has interrogated the impact that the Christian perceptions, conceptions and uses of the Hebrew Bible had on the religious identification of Jews as a distinctive group, mainly in the thirteenth century. Given that Christianity was understood as fulfilling, not abolishing, the Old Law, the Jews’ purported misreading of their own sacred text affected ideas about their intellectual abilities, and moral and social qualities. FULFIL has investigated the intellectual forms, cultural processes and social effects of Christian ideas, as these emerged in a world with living Jews and Jewish practice.
The close study of scholastic, narrative and iconographic sources has shown that theological thinking was not disconnected from common beliefs and representations.
By putting the religious diversity into a historical perspective, FULFIL has contributed to current debats on the place and role of religious minorities in Europe, at a time when understanding European identity is more pressing than ever before. It has allowed for a better understanding of how history has shaped our ways of perceiving and conceiving religious differences. Above all it contributed to demonstrate the constructedness of minority identities, and the role of ideas and scholars in making it happen. As it highlighted the cultural making of Jewish identity in later medieval Europe, by showing how Christian theologians built up Jewish otherness, FULFIL has contributed to a broader understanding of the European history, identity, and relationships to religious minorities.
In order to show how Christian understandings of the "Old Law" have contributed to building up Jewish otherness, the main objective was to build an extensive network of sources, including the edition and translation of the unpublished Latin texts on the Old Law written in the 1290s by the Franciscan theologian Peter of John Olivi; to broaden the corpus of sources and set their intellectual, religious and social contexts; to assess the impacts of theological ideas.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Olivi's Questions on the laws of the Old Testament have been transcribed from the manuscript kept at the National Library of Naples (XII.A.23). The second text contained in the manuscript under the title “Treatise on the ceremonial precepts”, which is in fact a dossier of four texts, has also been transcribed. All the texts from the manuscript have thus been edited: the four Questions on the Laws of the Old Testament, the Treatise on the Ceremonial Precepts, nine short developments on the judicial precepts, and the “Mystery of the course of the Law and the Synagogue”. The texts have been translated from Latin into French for their bilingual publication by the Belles Lettres. The Questions have been translated into English. A digital edition of the English version has been prepared. The corpus of theological sources has been developed in parallel, through the reading of Thomas Aquinas’ texts on the Old Law from the Summa theologiae; of John of La Rochelle’s questions on the mosaic Law from the Franciscan Summa Halensis; of Robert Grosseteste’s treatise On the Cessation of the Laws; of William of Auvergne’s Treatise On the Laws. The issue of impacts required in-depth research into Olivi’s intellectual and teaching environment, the context of the dissemination of his works, and the homiletic literature conveying ideas on the Old Law.

The research work has resulted in a forthcoming book (1), an article submitted to a peer-reviewed journal (2), papers presented at seminars (3), and the organisation of an international conference (4):
(1) Pierre de Jean Olivi, Sur les lois de l’Ancien Testament, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, “Bibliothèque scolastique” (to be published).
(2) “Olivi on the Hebrew Bible and the Jews: Scholastic Texts from Languedoc in the 1290s”, to be published in Speculum. A journal of Medieval Studies.
(3) Conference and seminar presentations:
- 29/04/19: UCL Interdisciplinary Medieval and Renaissance Seminar: “Peter of John Olivi on the Old Law: Two Unedited Texts”
. 7/11/2019: QMUL international conference “Thinking with and against the Jews”: “Presence and Role of Maimonides in Olivi’s Texts on the Old Law, c. 1292-1294”
. 9/01/20: Institute of Historical Research Seminar “European History, 1150-1550”: “The Social Impacts of Intellectual Authority. Views on Jews and Christians Understandings of the Hebrew Scriptures in the Thirteenth Century”
. 5/02/20: EHESS, Paris (“Histoire intellectuelle et sociale du Moyen Age”): “Discours chrétiens sur la Loi ancienne et construction de l’identité juive: deux textes inédits d’Olivi”
. 11/03/20: Cambridge, St Catherine’s College (Seminar “Medieval Encounters”): “Olivi on the Hebrew Bible and the Jews: Scholastic Texts from Languedoc in the 1290s”.
(4) An international conference was organised at QMUL on the 7-8 Nov. 2019, on the topic “Thinking with and against the Jews. Christian Understandings of the Old Law. 1100-1500”: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/history/news-and-events/items/thinking-with-and-against-the-jews-christian-understandings-of-the-old-law.html

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

FULFIL contributed to broaden and deepen the knowledge on scholastic thinking about Jews and Judaism, by making new texts available, by highlighting the relationships between the prominent theological works which addressed the topic, by investigating their use of Jewish sources and their potential contacts with real Jews. The editions of Olivi’s unpublished texts represent a major contribution to the state of art.The publication of the Latin texts will make them available to the research community. Their French and English translations will make them accessible to a wider audience. The close study of Olivi’s works and the reconstruction of their doctrinal context has shown that they were dependent on previous works, and above all on Thomas Aquinas’ Summa theologiae. FULFIL has contributed to the discussion of this dependence on the Dominican master that much of Olivi’s other works demonstrate. The presence of the Jewish philosopher Maimonides (d. 1204) in a number of important texts on the Old Law represents one of the most interesting results of the research. While contributing to the history of the scientific relations between Jews and Christians, this Christian use of a Jewish source is of particular relevance for the study of the Christian understandings of the Hebrew Bible. Far from using Jewish sources against Jews and Judaism, Olivi used Maimonides both as a reference and as a target, and borrowed most of his Maimonidean material from Aquinas. This made sense in Languedoc, where Olivi spent most of his teaching life, where the Guide of the Perplexed was first received by Jewish scholars, where the Maimonidean controversies broke out, and where scientific relations existed between Jewish and Christian scholars. FULFIL represents a significant contribution to intellectual history, as it closely links the study of texts and the conditions of their production and dissemination.

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