The Venerable Bede was an English monastic author writing after the year 710 AD and of whose major works we have three: 'The Ecclesiastical History of the English People', 'The Greater Chronicle' and 'Bede's Letter to Egbert'. Bede's works are some of the few written sources we have of the period and as such are very valuable to both scholars and laymen in gauging and interpreting this period of British history. Less known and remarked on are the few comments that Bede makes on the subject of the jews, which are principally buried in his 'Greater Chronicle' among accounts of wars, treaties, miracles, the issue of computing dates in the liturgical calendar correctly and so on.

It is likely that Bede never met a jew in his life and as he had been placed in a monastic house since the age of 7 and never left: Bede probably never saw the outside world as such. However, in spite of his lack of worldly experience: Bede was a prodigious scholar even among his contemporaries and as such he weighed his opinions carefully and based them on the totality of the evidence available to him. So thus, despite this lack of encountering the jews: Bede is a reliable source regarding what the intellectual and educated opinions of his time were on the jewish question.

This is important as it gives us a sense of what people believed at that time and also allows us to cross the proverbial Rubicon by bridging anti-jewish sentiment held in the classical world with later Christian sentiment of a similar nature. Or to put it succinctly it gives us a piece of evidence towards arguing for the unbroken tradition of fighting against the jews in Western thought from the classical to the medieval epochs.

Bede's first mentions the jews in the 'Greater Chronicle'. To wit:

'In the forty-seventh year of Augustus, Herod died appropriately awfully: sick with water under the skin and with worms swarming throughout his body. In his place Augustus established his son Archelaus, who ruled for nine years, up till the end of the reign of Augustus. Then he was exiled to the city of Vienne in Gaul because of the accusations made against him to Augustus concerning his cruelty towards the Jews. To reduce the power of the Jewish kingdom and its insolent behaviour, his four brothers – Herod, Antipater, Lysias, and Philip – were set up as tetrarchs in his place; of these, Philip and Herod (previously called Antipas) had already been appointed as tetrarchs while Archelaus was still alive.' (1)

Here Bede is repeating what he knew of early jewish history under the civilizing yoke of Roman rule: the entry seems more or less banal and merely a repetition of what the sources tell us, but for the insertion of the word 'insolent' into Bede's description of the activities of the jews in the province of Judea.

What Bede is implying with this addition is that it isn't a case of the Romans occupying and ruling Judea, but rather it is a case of the jews provoking the Romans to do so and that the jews had - under Roman rule - constantly provoked their rulers with insolent behaviour. This correlates with what we know from our sources about jewish behaviour under Roman (and Greek) rule whereby jews were habitually the aggressor not the victim in acts of murder, theft, genocide, religious fanaticism and political sedition. (2)

Bede qualifies this later with another addition remark in his description of the reigns of Herod Agrippa and Herod Agrippa II when he adds that Herod Agrippa II reigned until 'the destruction of the jews.' (3) The reference is not to the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian (he does refer to them later in his chronicle and once again approves of the 'destruction of the jews') when the jews had finally annoyed the Romans to many times with numerous revolts and riots and were partially expunged in Mesopotamia and Egypt while being expelled from Palestine, but to the reign of Nero when the first jewish revolt began. That revolt being guided by political and religious fanaticism the rule of Herod Agrippa II came to an end in an ocean of blood as Rome moved several legions under the future Emperor Vespasian to pacify the rebellious jews with fire and the sword.

Thus, when Bede uses the phrase 'destruction of the jews' he is talking about the fact that the jews had once again 'insolently' risen up against their non-jewish overlords and had invited their own 'destruction' hence Bede's use of the phrase. This might seem trivial to the modern reader, but the combination of Bede's additions suggests that Bede was specifically quite opposed to jews as in essence he justifies and supports the brutal reprisals carried out by Rome in retaliation against them.

If Bede was merely seeking to comment on the affairs of the jews then it is odd that he should have chosen this way of doing so. After all there was little need to add these additional terms in to qualify his point unless there was an actual dislike for jews in Bede's mind as he wrote.

This is confirmed once again by Bede later when he writes that:

'In the ninth year of his reign the Jews were expelled from Rome for rioting.' (4)

Although Bede claims this to have come from the Gospel of Luke in fact it comes from Suetonius' life of Claudius. (5) That said its inclusion indicates that Bede simply did not like the jews as there was a very wide selection of information that Bede could have included in his Chronicle taken from the Gospels or classical writers, but yet he includes this otherwise unimportant event. I would argue that the reason this was included in Bede's Chronicle was simply because Bede wished to show the perfidy, lawlessness and presumption of the jews he was talking about and also what righteous justice would be meted out to them by the God of the New Testament.

Bede's anti-jewishness assumes a slightly more radical bent when he praises the killing of thousands - if not tens of thousands - of jews in Judea by the Romans for their 'insolence' stating that 'the jews, plotting a revolt through many lands, suffered a much deserved slaughter.' (6) This is hardly the language of an individual who is neutral or positive towards jews and nor is it the language of a simple religious bigot precisely because Bede did take into account the claims that the jews were 'provoked' by the Roman 'worship of idols' (7) and there may have been some Roman mis governance, (8) but yet Bede still found the jews wanting and deserving of the brutal Roman reprisal they suffered.

Bede also mentions the killing of Jesus' brother James and openly identifies the culprits as the jews writ large. (9) This suggests that Bede's opposition to the jews was primarily religious in nature in part because that was the only intellectual frame of reference available to him and as such Bede's work belongs in the long and honourable tradition of Christian anti-Judaism. (10)

However, Bede did understand jewishness to be beyond religious confession as he remarks that 'Mark was the first non-Jew to be made Bishop of Jerusalem' (11) and that fifteen jewish bishops had preceded his appointment: clearly indicating that for Bede jewishness was something more than a religious confession and more akin to being of a tribe or national group. This is complemented by Bede's assertion in his 'Ecclesiastical History' that the early Christian Church was a primarily jewish institution (12) and that as such was distinct from the gentile Christianity that came later and Bede himself believed in.

One therefore is brought to conclude that Bede's anti-Judaism was both quite strident and based on the best sources available to him at the time as well as being arrived at in a sober, reflective fashion and which cannot be dismissed as 'religious bigotry' as Bede had taken pains to record that there were very slight mitigating circumstances to some of the jewish activities, but that these did not absolve the jews of what they had done.

And as such we should place Bede in the more unusual class of a Christian scholar who - like Martin Luther in the early sixteenth century - was to wrestle with his intellectual opposition to jews and Judaism while believing in the universality of the Church. Such thought has a long history and as such should not be forgotten, dismissed or simply ignored by those on either side of the debate on the jewish question. As to do so ignores that Christians have for as long as anyone else also opposed jews on a practical and intellectual level as much as - if not more than - even the Emperors of Ancient Rome.

References

(1) Bede, Gr. Chron. 3952

(2) Tessa Rajak, 2002, 'Jewish Millenarian Expectations', pp. 164-165 in Andrea Berlin, J. Andrew Overman (Eds.), 2002, 'The First Jewish Revolt: Archaeology, History, and Ideology', 1^st Edition, Routledge: New York

(3) Bede, Gr. Chron. 3993; 4031

(4) Ibid., 4007

(5) Suet. Claud. 25

(6) Bede, Gr. Chron. 4069

(7) Ibid., 3993

(8) Ibid., 4021

(9) Ibid., 4021

(10) Ibid., 4144 (Which include Bede's remarks on how Christian bishops were trying to instruct Christians not to celebrate passover with the jews rather than Easter.)

(11) Ibid., 4090

(12) Bede, Ecc. Hist. 3:25