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Thomas Aquinas on the Jews: Insights into His Commentary on Romans 9-11. By Steven C. Boguslawski, O.P. (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. 2008. Pp. xviii, 145. $18.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-809-14233-0.)
In the compelling dialogue today between Jews and Christians, the long and devastating tradition of contempt for Jews within Christianity is a persistent preoccupation. In recent decades, this has prompted historical reexaminations to understand more fully this onerous tradition, with special interest in those who challenged it. Commonly, such treatments have integrated social and theological analyses, but this has often meant modest theological analysis at best.
Boguslawski seeks to correct this problem in reference to the leading theological voice in the matter in the medieval period, St. Thomas Aquinas, and to do so on the basis of the central theological source for this relationship, St. Paul's Letter to the Romans. Through a close scrutiny of Aquinas 's seldom examined Commentary on Romans (Super epistolam ad romanos), Boguslawski develops a thesis against the grain - namely, that Aquinas did not in fact perpetuate the dominant adversos Judaeos tradition in presumed continuity with Augustine, but rather substantially corrected that tradition in a positive soteriological assessment of the covenantal role...