writings echo numerous motifs of Augustine's anti-Jewish polemic—and his doctrine of Jewish witness—including the exegesis of Psalm 59:12 (“Slay them not”), the resistance of the Jews to religious assimilation in pagan (especially Roman) antiquity, and the Jews' function as the desks (scriniaria) of Christians in a properly ordered Christian world.3 A principal investigator of Isidore's anti-Judaism has rightly acknowledged his debt to Augustine, Jerome, and others, suggesting that “it is the great bishop of Hippo that was, indisputably, Isidore's model and inspiration” and that the De fide in particular demonstrates “this tendency of assimilation from the oeuvre of Augustine.”4
Nonetheless, although Isidore may have relied heavily on the works of his predecessors, the zeal with which he attacked the Jews and Judaism exceeded that of all earlier Latin fathers. Castigating the Jews more harshly than did Augustine, Isidore challenged the disingenuousness of the error that caused ancient Jewry to crucify Jesus,5 and that which led contemporary Jews to reject Christ and Christianity:
Denying Christ, the son of God, with nefarious disbelief, the Jews—impious, hardhearted, incredulous toward the prophets of old, and impervious toward those of late—prefer to ignore the advent of Christ rather than to acknowledge it, to deny it rather than to believe it. Him whom they accept as yet to come, they wish not to have come. Him who they read will rise from the dead, they do not believe to have arisen. Yet thus they feign not to understand these things, for they know that they have been fulfilled through their own sacrilege.6
Quicunque eos ita perdiderit, septem vindictas exsolvet, id est, auferet ab eis septem vindictas, quibus alligati sunt propter reatum occisi Christi, ut hoc toto tempore, quod septenario dierum numero volvitur, magis quia non interiit genus Judaeorum, satis appareat fidelibus Christianis, sed solam dispersionem meruerint, juxta quod ait Scriptura: “Ne occideris eos….” Hoc revera mirabile est, quemadmodum omnes gentes quae a Romanis subjugatae sunt, in ritum Romanorum sacrorum transierint…; gens autem Judaeorum sive sub paganis regibus, sive sub Christianis, non amiserit signum legis…. Sed et omnis imperator, vel rex, qui eos in suo regno invenit, cum ipso signo eos invenit, et non occidit; id est, non efficit ut non sint Judaei.
Unlike the mature Augustine, for whom the doctrine of Jewish witness went hand in hand with a literal—and deliberately not typological—reading of biblical history, Isidore has here interwoven the Augustinian interpretation of Psalm 59:12 with an allegorical/ typological understanding of the story of Cain. See also ibid. 8.7, col. 236: “Quid est enim hodie aliud gens ipsa, nisi quaedam scriniaria Christianorum, bajulans legem et prophetas ad testimonium assertionis Ecclesiae, ut nos honoremus per sacramentum, quod nuntiat illa per litteram?”
The Jews of Isidore's own day displayed malice toward Jesus “as if they emitted a fetid odor”; and, like the ignorance feigned by Cain concerning the whereabouts of his brother Abel, Isidore concluded that “the denial of the Jews is false.”7 Isidore considered the dispersion and subjugation of the Jews in exile not so much a means to facilitate their testimony on behalf of Christianity, but more a desideratum unto itself, at least until the Jews should convert to Christianity.8 Affirming the allegiance of the Jews to Antichrist,9 he joined Gregory the Great in applauding Christian efforts to expedite this conversion, and he expressed particular concern for the baptism and Christian upbringing of Jewish children. The conversion of the Jews, Isidore believed, would soon bring Christian history to its long-sought fulfillment.
We shall return in due course to these Isidorean deviations from Augustinian precedent, but I mention them at the outset to illustrate the complexity of Isidore's role in our story. Well ensconced in patristic tradition, on one hand, Isidore's anti-Jewish polemic contained little (if any) argumentation or biblical exegesis that was new; one can appreciate its logic and significance only by situating it within the Augustinian tradition. His aforecited allegations of Jewish duplicity notwithstanding, Isidore agreed in the final analysis that the Jews crucified Jesus because they failed to recognize him for what he really was. Referring to Jeremiah 14:7, Isidore wrote, “For when he says, ‘we have sinned against you,’ he represents the persona of the Jews, who sinned against God when they crucified him as he came in human form…. Thinking that this was just as it seemed, they killed the man, as if he could not save them.”10 On the other hand, the unusual extent of Isidore's anti-Jewish hostility demonstrates how widely applications of that Augustinian tradition might vary. An evaluation of the Isidorean phase in the career of Christianity's hermeneutically crafted Jew thus depends heavily on an overall estimation of Isidore himself, his cultural program and ecclesiastical leadership, and the Isidorean Renaissance that bears his name.
Seldom does scholarly understanding of a historical period depend so heavily on like or dislike for its leading personage as it does in the case of Isidore and the cultural climate of seventh-century Spain. Many scholars of early medieval history have criticized Isidore for his rampant plagiarism, for the crudeness of his attempts to assimilate the teachings of classical literature into a Christian curriculum, or for the nai'veté with which he portrayed Visigothic Spain as the legitimate, more competent successor of imperial Rome. Theodore Mommsen, who edited Isidore's historiographical works for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, lamented the negligence and inexperience that characterized Isidore's treatment of historical sources.11 An early-twentieth-century biographer deemed Isidore's work as an encyclopedist “a mass of confusion and incoherence” and his scholarship a “pseudo-science” of subservience to religious authority.12 A generation later, M. L. W. Laistner noted that Isidore “made no original contributions either to theological thought or to secular learning.”13
More recent investigators, however, have evaluated Isidore's achievements with greater sympathy.14 They have praised his efforts not simply to compile but also to integrate and to unify the numerous, typically fragmented, and often contradictory strands of classical learning that a long-decadent Roman civilization had bequeathed to barbarian Europe. They have highlighted the thoroughness of Isidore's search for diverse sources of knowledge, the relative open-mindedness of his attempt to preserve ancient culture in an avidly Christian environment, the conciseness of his style, the constancy of his concern to transmit and apply received knowledge within an educational framework. Laistner's summary judgment to the contrary, one can, in fact, discern novelty and inspiration in Isidore's scholarly activity, especially during the reign of King Sisebut (612–620), no doubt the most cultured and perhaps the most capable of the Catholic Visigothic rulers. Consistent with his hope to free Catholic Spain from external and internal enemies alike, Sisebut warred against Byzantines and other groups with strongholds on the Iberian Peninsula; he maintained the battle of the church against heresy; and, critical for our story, he ordered that all Jews in his kingdom convert to Christianity.15 Significantly, these years of his rule brought Isidore's literary career to a climax.16 They saw the composition of his major encyclopedic works—the Etymologiae (Etymologies), De natura rerum (On the Nature of Things), and Sententiae (Sentences)—which he dedicated to Sisebut and/or wrote at the king's behest. These same years witnessed the initial completion (that is, in their original versions) of his historical treatises, including the Chronicon, a universal chronicle of world history, and the Historia Gothorum, a history of the Goths, Vandals, and Suevi in Spain.17 Such correspondence between Isidore's literary creativity and the Hispano-Catholic program of Sisebut's monarchy buttresses Judith Herrin's notably favorable appraisal of the “Isidorean inheritance”:
Isidore's immense productivity, which lay at the base of all later ecclesiastical thought in Visigothic Spain, was prepared by a training in the Late Antique curriculum barely studied elsewhere in the West. It was then moulded by and directed towards local needs and conditions specific to seventh-century Spain. In particular, it was put at the service of a monarchy only recently converted to the Catholic faith after a fratricidal conflict. In these circumstances, his theories, both political and ecclesiastical, developed in a tight symbiotic relationship with Visigothic practice, both in state and church. Yet from these thoroughly Iberian roots and focus, Isidore's works
