The Papal Inquisition of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries cannot be assigned so prominent a position in the history of French Jewry as that which the “New” Inquisition later occupied in the destinies of the Jews of Spain. It is perhaps for this reason that the Jewish aspects of the Inquisition in France have attracted comparatively little attention from scholars. The paucity of original documents relating to the subject may also have been a contributing factor. Still, though it can be understood, this neglect remains unfortunate. In addition to its intrinsic interest for the study of Franco-Jewish history and of Jewish relations with the medieval Church, research into the treatment of the Jews by the French Inquisition can shed much light on the later development in Spain. For all the difference in the historical situations, the Papal Inquisition adumbrated, in its dealings with the Jews, the institution which was to play such a formidable role in the Iberian Peninsula. There is surprisingly little in the theoretical, procedural, and even the practical approach of the Spanish Inquisition to Jewish affairs for which one cannot find the archetype in the earlier Inquisition.

There is a large and growing number of people, both Catholic and Protestant, who are coming to recognize Karl Rahner, S.J., as the most important Roman Catholic theologian of the present period. While a number of books and articles on Rahner are beginning to appear, most of them are limited simply to expositing his position. What has yet to be done in a satisfactory way is to think through critically his relationship to and significance for the wider theological enterprise, that is, in terms of the interconfessional discussion (as well as in terms of current secular reflection upon general human experience). Rahner's work deserves such consideration, although, because of the fact that since the Reformation and Vatican I Protestant and Catholic thought have tended to develop independently of each other, it is difficult for one schooled sufficiently in Rahner's tradition to understand his work to understand Protestant thought sufficiently well to make a discussion meaningful, and the opposite situation is also the case. Without claiming exemption from this handicap, I should like to make a beginning at the sort of clarification and critical analysis that seems to me to be needed.

In The Country Parson or the Priest to the Temple George Herbert portrays his ideal parish priest not only as a man learned in the works of the Church Fathers and contemporary theology but as one who “greatly esteems also of cases of conscience, wherein he is much versed,” because “herein is the greatest ability of a parson to lead his people exactly in the wayes of Truth.” The case of conscience which the pastor of Bemerton praised so highly was, in the seventeenth century, the characteristic form of casuistry, the branch of theology which attempts to provide the perplexed human conscience with a means of reconciling the obligations of religious faith with the demands of particular human situations. In the case of conscience, the casuist poses, or is posed with, a difficult moral problem and solves it, often with a startling display of erudition and logical ingenuity.

The literature of the rabbis in its many volumes stands before the student of the rabbinic period as a resource of enlightenment and a source of frustration. A vast treasure of haggadic materials which would be invaluable to the historian of the period is too often rendered inaccessible by difficulties in dating and localizing traditions. Even when traditions are associated with particular rabbis, multiple attributions and major variants engender extreme caution if not despair in the literary critic and historian. When traditions are unattributed in a literature which has developed over centuries as is the case with the Targums, the problems are magnified.