THOMAS AND HIS OUTSIDERS

If what is said about the Jews ... is true, no punishment would be sufficiently great or sufficiently worthy of their crime.... We herewith order ... that on the first Saturday of the Lent to come, in the morning, while the Jews are gathered in the synagogues, you shall ... seize all the books of the Jews who live in your districts, and have these books carefully guarded in the possession of the Dominican and Franciscan Friars.

So wrote Gregory IX in June of 1239 in a letter sent throughout Roman territories in concern that Jewish devotion to Talmud was corrupting their loyalty to Torah—and by extension their identity as proto-Christians (TAJ, 25).

Understandably, the idea that we could learn something about navigating difference from a medieval theologian is bound to strike some as odd or even pernicious. After all, weren't medieval Christians—especially Dominicans—notoriously intolerant of Jews? And doesn't Thomas bear some responsibility for that?

Consider Jeremy Cohen. In several influential books, he has argued that Thomas's period saw not only a marked rise in the persecution of Jews but the birth of a new brand of anti-Judaism—one aimed at nothing less than the annihilation of Judaism and culminating in the expulsion of Jews from various European realms. During Thomas's era, "ecclesiastical authorities took concerted steps to proselytize among the Jews en masse, persecuting the Talmud ..., exploiting inquisitorial jurisdiction to harass entire Jewish communities, invading synagogues to preach to Jewish worshipers, and coercing leading rabbis to participate in public, officially sanctioned disputations." In sum, "the very legitimacy of the European Jewish community [was] called into question." Leading this charge, he contends, were the Dominicans and Franciscans who "developed, refined, and sought to implement a new Christian ideology ... that allotted the Jews no legitimate right to exist in European society" (FJ, 14). "By the end of the early fourteenth century," he continues, "[they] openly advocated that Latin Christendom rid itself of its Jewish population, whether through missionizing, forced expulsions, or physical harassment that would induce conversion or flight" (14).

In all this, Cohen claims, Thomas Aquinas plays a central role. He does first through his alleged association with Raymond de Peñafort, whom Cohen identifies as central to the upsurge in medieval anti-Judaism and its horrors. Declaring that "Raymond prevailed upon Thomas to compose his Summa contra gentiles as a means of attracting converts to Christianity" (105), he suggests that Thomas shared, shaped, and helped legitimate Raymond's attack (106, 124). On another level, Thomas is culpable in a far weightier and more direct sense. "In contrast to ... theologians from Augustine through the end of the twelfth century," Cohen contends, "Aquinas taught that [the Jewish] sages knew that Jesus was the messiah and crucified him in spite of that knowledge. The disbelief of the Jews derived, therefore not from ignorance but from a deliberate defiance of the truth" (124–25). Until the thirteenth century, Cohen claims, Jews had been given a right to exist and worship amidst Christians thanks to Augustine's vision of their ongoing role in salvation history. Thomas, however, departs radically from Augustine's understanding of the Jews. His teaching is an invitation—even a goading—to their abuse. In Cohen's story, then, Thomas may not have been at the forefront of Jewish persecution but, especially through his treatment of Jewish culpability for the Crucifixion, he did as much as anyone to foster it.

To be sure, even if Cohen were right, we could still learn from Thomas on pagan virtue—aware, perhaps, of the irony. Still, for many, willingness to listen to Thomas on our topic requires considering claims like Cohen's. More importantly, between us and Thomas stand a millennium's distance and interpretive cacophony. Understanding Thomas thus requires situating him in relation to the dominant ethos and practices of his day in regard to nonChristians—above all, his world's most important living unbelievers: Jews and Muslims. While such contextualization does assuage worries that he's a distasteful teacher, more to the point, it equips us to read him rightly—as one who, in his era, leaned toward justice and advocated toleration, opposing what he rightly judged as evil, especially when it came to the treatment of outsiders. Perhaps most suggestive in this regard is the fact that three centuries later, Dominicans nourished on and drawing from his thought would number among the only Europeans to oppose the conquest of the Americas.

Thomas's teachings on the treatment of outsiders is vitally distinct from his vision of their moral capacities. Yet, by focusing on the former, this chapter represents our first step toward grasping the latter. The story it tells is meant to take us to the point where we are not merely willing but able to give Thomas our ear on pagan virtue. Neither fully righteous nor altogether unjust, Thomas is, for us, an outsider—but one from whom, if we imitate his own forbearance and charity, we can learn.

Thomas and His Outsiders

At the time Gregory issued his letter, Thomas would have been about fourteen, a recent arrival at the university in Naples. Only in Paris were the orders followed. And, after notorious public examination and disputations in which the Talmud was put "on trial," in 1242 roughly ten thousand seized manuscripts were burned (FJ, 63). Thomas meanwhile was busy studying Aristotelian philosophy, Ibn Rushd's commentaries, and the Jew, Maimonides. Paris, where Jews were persecuted in the street and study of Aristotle's natural philosophy and metaphysics was officially forbidden, was, in more than one sense, a long way away (Torrell, STA, 7).

In 1244, shortly after arriving in Naples, Thomas joined the Dominicans—a young, austere, intellectually serious order in which "everything else—organization, studies, rules about poverty and liturgy—was subordinated to [the] one purpose" of preaching the Gospel. The decision was radical enough to cause his family to kidnap him, holding him under "house arrest" in an effort to return him to the respectable, prestigious path they had charted for him when they had first placed their little five-year-old as an oblate at Monte Cassino, the nearby Benedictine monastery. It was a path that would almost certainly terminate in his installment as abbot. Temporarily "imprisoned," surely...