Robert
E. Lerner.
The Feast of Saint Abraham: Medieval Millennarians and
the
Jews.
Philadelphia:
Pennsylvania U.P.,
2001.
The Middle Ages
series.
viii,186pp.
Hardback ISBN
0812235673.
Publisher's
recommended price £28.50
Robert E.
Lerner
uncovers a strain of medieval millennial thought that conceived of a
peaceful
place for Jews at the end of time. Its proponents maintained that "the
candelabra of the Church would return to the Synagogue" and that the
millennial
Church would celebrate the feasts of "Saint Abraham" and "Saint David".
Rejecting the common assumption that all millenarians were of necessity
anti-Jewish, Lerner reveals a Christian prophetic tradition that
foresaw
a world in which Jews and Gentiles would come together to mutual
benefit.
At the
head of
this tradition was the twelfth-century Calabrian Abbot Joachim of
Fiore.
Joachim thought of himself as an inspired biblical exegete, but he also
concerned himself with formulating certainties about the unfolding of
history.
He believed that he had mastered the inevitablity of God's plan, which
entailed a march of progress from Abraham until the wondrous
transformation
of human life upon the defeat of the Antichrist. The progress in
question
transpired on earth, but it was a spiritual movement that impelled
God's
chosen ones to heaven by phases, on a stairway to paradise. The divine
plan had first entrusted the Jews with adherence to the letter of the
Old
Testament; then it had entrusted the Gentiles with the more spiritual
New
Testament. Soon, God would bring earthly transformation to both Jews
and
Gentiles by endowing them with full understanding of both Testaments.
At
the culmination of history, the Jews would not be damned, but would be
converted peacefully. The word of God would return to the people from
whence
it came.
Joachim's
irenic
vision in which Jews and Gentiles would join as one flock in the
millennium
was perpetuated in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries throughout
Western
Europe by members of the Franciscan Order, and finally played itself
out
in the careers of several late medieval heretics, the last of whom was
burned at stake in 1446. Drawing heavily on new evidence, much of which
remains in manuscript, Lerner offers an unexpected angle on the study
of
Western European intolerance and the complicated relationship between
Christians
and Jews.
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