The purpose of this research is to examine the theological and theoretical treatment by St. Augustine of Judaism. The plan of the research will be to set forth the historical and cultural context in which Augustine's analysis of Judaism emerged in the history of Christian doctrine, and then to discuss the importance of the so-called Augustinian tolerance of the Jewish minority living in urban Europe from the ancient period to the time of the early Renaissance, as well as the scope, limit, and effect of this species of tolerance on the shape of the Diaspora and on strands of Jewish and Christian thought throughout the period.
In the background of the formulation of the Augustinian articulation and analysis of Judaism is Fremantle's characterization of the medieval philosophical period as an age of belief. The doctrines of institutional Catholicism of that age were most systematically articulated in the post-apostolic period by Augustine of Hippo, whose philosophy and theology functions very much as an introduction to the intellectual history of Christian Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, from Augustine (354-430) to William of Ockham (1300-1349). The central fact of intellectual discourse is that throughout that period, despite many disputes about theology, ethics, morality, and politics, the world as a whole shared a vision of the world predicated on the Christian and specifically Catholic thought. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, spoke with the strongest doctrinal authority. After Paul the Apostle and before Thomas Aquinas, he was the chief theologian of the Roman church, which in the Middle Ages became the chief locus of European institutional stability. The most prominent minority religious group with a presence in medieval Christian Europe was comprised of Jews, and Jews were also a minority presence in the part of the world controlled by Islam, from the latter seventh century A.D. onward.
Although Christianity as an ins...