Journal Article

Chosen Peoples and New Israels in the Early Medieval West

O’Brien, Conor

2020

Overview

The Carolingians did nor think that the Franks were the chosen people or had replaced Old Testament Israel at least not in any straightforward sense. They were not alone in that. Although within the limits of this article I have not been able to survey all the relevant evidence, when one sets comparable material from elsewhere in the early medieval West alongside Carolingian texts, similar patterns emerge. The prologue to Alfred the Great's Law Code, for example, begins with the Law of Moses but historicizes it in a similar fashion to how the emperor's speech in Ermoldus's \"In Praise of Louis\" puts Christian distance between the Franks and Israel. For Alfred, Mosaic Law was the starting point of a tradition of legislative activity, which extended, with the coming of Christ, to the apostles providing rules for gentile converts and then to the receipt of Christianity by many peoples (the English among them) who established divinely inspired laws through the holding of synods.95 Alfred's laws claimed authority from participation within this universal process, not from any ideology of the English as \"a new Chosen People\" succeeding Israel. A common framework underlay how early medieval writers utilized ideas of chosenness or identification with Israel, and it was not one that supported the \"idea that God might single out a distinct culture for His special favour.\"97 If historians continue to use the language of chosen peoples and New Israels, they run the risk of misleading their readers about the degree to which claims to exclusive election or divine favor were made by the elite of early medieval ethnic groups. Some scholars have already begun the process of trying to nuance this problematic language, but it must be asked whether it serves any useful purpose at all.98 We need to speak more clearly about the function that references to election and to Israel served in early medieval texts.

• Publisher: The University of Chicago Press,Medieval Academy of America
• Subject: Christianity / Early Middle Ages / Elections / Jewish people / Medieval period / Risk factors / Writers