INCONSPICUOUS among the multitude and yet occasionally forcing men's
attention upon themselves, mysterious and omnipresent, there were
always the Jews. The bishop could not help being aware of them, for
there were many of them in Hippo, ¹ while in Carthage the numbers were very
large indeed.

Augustine knew their customs. He would speak of their festivals at Easter
and Whitsun, of the lighting of lamps on the eve of the Sabbath and of their
cena pura on Good Friday. ² He knew that there were many good Jews, and
that many Jews sought to govern their lives by God's commandments, and
though they were sometimes the occasion of violent outbursts on his part, he
could also speak of them with great tenderness. He could be angry, however,
about their excessive attention to business and their occasional brazenness.
They were regular patrons of the theatre ³ and made more noise there than
anybody else. They keep the Sabbath, he said, so that they can idle and eat
titbits, and their rest upon this day is only a fleshly one. It would be better
if they spent their Sabbath doing useful work upon the land, instead of creating
an uproar in the theatre, and it would be better if their women spent the
Sabbath at the spinning wheel, even though that occupation was forbidden,
"instead of dancing shamelessly on their roofs" to the rhythm of the tam-
bourine. ⁴ They were, he also complained, a querulous lot. If they incurred
some well-deserved punishment, they would sulk (or pretend to do so) as
though they were being blamed for everything that went wrong. ⁵

Augustine wrote a treatise on the claims of the Jews and made numerous
references to this subject elsewhere. Thus he asks, of what use to them is it to
be called Israel, for the name wanders around and their crime remains. ⁶ He
finds hard words for their blindness, and is continually reinterpreting the
Psalms to call attention to this characteristic. They are, he claims, worse than
the demons, who have at least recognized the Son of God. And yet they are
more to be excused than the heretics, for they allowed the inscription over the
Crucified One to remain, and if they have found a stumbling-block in the
smaller stone which is Christ in the lowliness of his earthly life, the heretics
bay against the mountain Christ which is the Church. ⁷ He shows us the rabbis

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