CONTRA MUNDUM

CONTRA MUNDUM is an occasional Blog committed to the theological reflection on the present situation with a special focus on the religious establishment. CM seeks to summon persons to theological awareness and religious obedience. Raymond J Lawrence Jr. Raymondlawrence@cpsp.org

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

A review of James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword:The Church and the Jews


In the public mind anti-semitism is a problem that fulminated with Nazis rule in the 1930s, and has diminished subsequently. James Carroll, distinguished historian and former Catholic priest, lays out in gruesome detail in Constantine’s Sword how Hitler was simply the culmination of a long, relentless, and pervasive anti-semitism that was cultivated by Christianity beginning in the New Testament itself. (Even the moniker ‘new,’ Carroll points out, is a slur against Jewish scripture.)

The attempt to separate Jesus from his Judaism has been a continuing theme in Christianity from its early days. Many of the early Christians were eager to commend themselves and their cult to the Roman Imperial powers. This became easier when Christians could distinguish themselves from Jews. Opinion makers of the Roman Empire were largely anti-semitic.

The contempt for Jews ran deep in the Empire. Jewish refusal to pay homage to Roman gods, and Jewish affirmation of sexual pleasure were the two principal roots of such contempt. Romans were willing to add new gods to their pantheon on the slightest pretext, and the moralists of Rome were very negative toward sexual pleasure. It was thought to disrupt the mind. Jews were contemptuous of idolatry and unabashedly affirming of sexual pleasure, as their religious texts show.

The first Christians were all Jews---Jews who followed Jesus. Some of their seriously observant fellow Jews held the first Christians in contempt. The apostle Paul (or Saul, as he was at the time) actually persecuted them. As the Church grew, it took in increasing numbers of non-Jews. As the decades passed, Christians became increasingly interested in appealing to the Romans. To further this appeal Christians presented themselves increasingly as distinct from Jews, and even as victims of Jews. This led gradually to Christianity’s emergence as a new and distinct religion. It pulled away from Judaism until finally Jesus was understood no longer as a Palestinian rabbi, but, in the Roman manner, as a god who visited earth in mufti.

It was an ingenious move politically. Thus the gospel of John, written probably more than a century after the death of Jesus, and the last of the canonical gospels to be written, is brutally explicit about the culpability of the Jews in the death of Jesus. Jesus himself is quoted denouncing the Jews as the offspring of Satan. (John 8) Such vitriol did not come from Jesus, but from later Christians as they battled Judaism. Seventy-one times ‘the Jews’ are castigated in John’s gospel. In the three other gospels, written only decades after Jesus’ death, reference to ‘the Jews’ appears a total of only seventeen times.

In the New Testament as a whole, Jesus is portrayed either as a thoroughgoing Jewish rabbi who meant to call Jews back to obedience to God, or an ethereal being dropped down mysteriously into human history to excoriate Jews and Judaism. The latter is the revision that Christianity developed and promoted---and continues to promote. Thus anti-semitism became an intrinsic and continuing part of Christianity. When the philosopher Johann Fichte (1762-1814), carried the Christian position to its logical conclusion, proposing that Jesus was not even a Jew at all, other European philosophers and thinkers concurred without even a debate.

About the same time the anti-semitic Gospel of John was written, all Jews were expelled from Jerusalem by order of the Emperor. Even later Christian emperors did not show the Jews any mercy. (The anti-Christian Julian the Apostate, an historical exception, rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem as a gesture of contempt toward Christians, but it was torn down as soon as he was gone.) When the parvenu Muslims conquered Jerusalem from the Roman Empire in the 7th century, Jews were then allowed to return. Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived together in relative harmony for another five hundred years. When the Christian crusaders first arrived, in 1099, with cross and sword in hand, they murdered every Jew in Jerusalem, burning them alive in their synagogue. Only when the Muslims reconquered the city a century later were the Jews once again allowed to return.

Ambrose, the esteemed fourth century Christian theologian who was Augustine’s mentor, referred to Jews as “Satan’s surviving agents,” and urged violence against them for their denial of Christian claims. He declared himself ready to burn synagogues “that there might not be a place where Christ was denied.” Augustine was more gentle. “Let them survive, but not thrive,” he said. About the same time St. Chrysostom, bishop of Antioch, preached that “the synagogue is not only a whorehouse and a theater; it its also a den of thieves…[where the Jews] live by the rule of debauchery and inordinate gluttony.” Inspired by such preaching, the year 414 saw the first pogrom in history, when the Jewish community in Alexandria was destroyed.

In the famous twelfth century stand-off between Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux, as one might guess, Abelard was sympathetic to Jews, and Bernard, inspirer of the crusades, was contemptuous of them. The Pope made Abelard an outcast, and Bernard a saint.

In the Fourth Lateran Council of the Catholic Church, in 1215, Jews and
Saracens in every Christian province were ordered to wear identifying markers on their clothing to indicate their religion, a practice revived by Hitler in the 1930s.

In 1304, in Florence, a certain Giordano da Rivalto rallied the citizenry, charging that Jews were still murdering Christ. Twenty-four thousand Jews were slaughtered.

When the Black Plague arrived in Trier in 1349, the entire Jewish community was taken to be responsible, and murdered.

1391 is a date of terror for Spanish Jews. The preaching of Ferrant Martinez incited widespread massacres of Jews and the conversion of synagogues to churches. Jews were given the choice of converting or being killed. Many converted and became known as ‘Conversos.’ (Both Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross were descendants of Conversos. And each was dragged before the Inquisition for allegations of sexual activity. Teresa eluded the charges, but John did not.)

Among the Christian leadership there were those who actually defended and protected Jews from persecution, Pope Boniface IX (1389-1404) being one of them. Pope Sixtus IV (1471-1484), who left us the Sistine Chapel, personally favored Jews, but political pressures made him cautious. His humanitarianism did not prevent him from inaugurating the Spanish Inquisition. He personally appointed the infamous Torquemada (1420-1498), who as the first Grand Inquisitor made his name synonymous with torture. Jews and dissenters of any sort fell victim to his police methods, a practice that persisted for 300 years. (Joseph Ratzinger, the current Pope Benedict XVI, held the same Vatican position as Torquemada in the pontificate of John Paul II, though his methods of enforcement were toned down.)

Pope Alexander VI (1492-1503) welcomed in Rome some of those Jews who were fleeing Spain during the persecutions of Ferdinand and Isabella. But that same Pope had bestowed on the anti-semitic king and queen the honorific, “Catholic Monarchs.” His humanitarianism was at least ambiguous.

The fate of the Jews could not be separated from the crackdown on dissent in the Catholic Church. An organization that executes dissenters in its own ranks is not going to be able to offer Jews, the consummate dissenters, much grace in the long run.

Jan Hus, who was a forerunner of the Reformation, was condemned as one who “counseled with the Jews.” He was burned at the stake in 1415.

Carroll is not quite even-handed with Martin Luther’s anti-semitism. In his early years Luther was a stout defender of Jews, as rightly he should have been since he, more than anyone, restored part of Christianity to its Jewish origins. However, Luther turned against the Jews later in life for two reasons. Jews failed to come to his support, as he thought they should, in his death struggle against the Catholic authorities. And worse, from Luther’s perspective, Jews allied themselves with Luther’s two betes noires, the Pope and Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, king of Spain, grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella. Charles was committed more to suppressing Protestantism than in protecting Jews. He made an alliance of convenience with the Jews. With the support of the Emperor, Jews during that time actually assisted Rome in collecting monies from the infamous indulgences, further alienating Luther.

After Charles abdicated in 1556, his son and successor Philip II voided all the support that his father had provided the Jews. Philip announced: “All the heresies which have occurred in Germany and France have been sown by descendants of Jews, as we have seen and still see daily in Spain.” He was referring to the Conversos in Spain. Even the descendants of Jews who converted to save their lives were in constant danger, simply because of their Jewish ancestry. Eventually, anyone who sought leadership or status in Spain had to prove limpieza de sangre ('purity of blood'), which is to say that they had no Jewish blood back to the fifth degree of family lineage. Only in 1946 did the Jesuits abolish the prohibition against accepting men into the order unless they could prove limpieza de sangre.

The Jews in Rome had little time to relax. By 1553 they were being burned selectively. Pope Paul IV (1555-1559), issued the bull, Cum Nimis Absurdum. It called for Jews to live in ghettoes. It claimed that God had condemned them to eternal slavery because of the killing of Jesus. It called for Jews, again, to wear distinctive badges to identify themselves, and forbade them from owning property or attending Christian universities. It called for them to be subject to higher taxes than Christians. This encyclical was the most detailed anti-semitic document until the Nazis in the 20th century.

The squalid Jewish ghetto at the foot of Vatican Hill remained in place until the godless soldiers of Napoleon dismantled it in 1796. After Napoleon’s defeat, Pope Paul VII (1800-1823) rebuilt it. The ghetto was enforced through the papacy of Pius IX (1846-1878) who referred to Jews as ‘dogs.’ Pius IX was infamous as well for kidnapping and keeping a six-year-old Jewish boy, Edgardo Mortara, for pederastic purposes.

It is noteworthy that in 1781, in Revolutionary France, the Jews were granted full citizenship for the first time in the entire history of Christian West.

Most people already know of the mid-20th century pope, Pius XII, who temporized while the Jews were exterminated, and who was silent while the Jewish ghetto within earshot of the Vatican was attacked, its residents shipped to extermination camps. Pius XII managed to excommunicate all Catholics who considered themselves Communists. But he could not manage any such judgment on Catholic Nazis. Goebbels, Himmler, Bormann, and Hitler remained at least nominal Catholics throughout the Holocaust. If anyone had any doubt, they were reminded by the Cardinal Archbishop of Berlin who ordered a requiem mass to be celebrated in all churches to commemorate Hitler after his suicide in April, 1945.

Most everyone knows too, of Pope John Paul II’s rapproachment with the Jews, praying at the temple wall in Jerusalem, for example. As encouraging as such gestures were, they were cancelled out by the beatification (the first step toward sainthood) of Pius IX and Pius XII, and of the Croatian Cardinal Stepinac who was a fierce foe of Communists, but who looked the other way when Nazis-allied Ustashi occupied his country and rounded up Jews.

Catholic leaders have demonstrated a pattern of ambiguity in their references to Jews. Cardinal Augustyn Hlond, the Primate of Poland, is a case in point. In 1939, alluding to the Germans, he declared that Catholics should not hate Jews or do violence against them. In the next breath he added: “There will be a Jewish problem as long as the Jews remain. It is a fact that the Jews are fighting against the Catholic Church, persisting in free thinking, and are the vanguard of godlessness…” He also endorsed the Nazi boycott of Jewish business in Poland. Hlond staked out both positions for himself, but his net effect was of no benefit to Jews who were exterminated mostly on his turf.

James Carroll has written an astonishing book in Constantine’s Sword. It should make anyone who considers herself Christian feel the need to go take a long bath. The dogged and relentless Christian history of repeated assaults on Jews because they are Jews cannot fail to leave any Christian with a sense of shame. In the shadow of Carroll’s mountain of historical evidence, even such a despicable person as Adolf Hitler seems little more than an all too typical Christian, a little on the fanatical side.

The notion is often bandied about that the Pope, or some other Christian authority, should apologize to the Jews for the Holocaust and the Church’s failure to stand against it. In light of Carroll’s book this is a facile proposal. How can one apologize for twenty sordid centuries of anti-semitism? Rather we should all rethink the whole theological and philosophical foundation of Christendom itself. As Harvard New Testament scholar Helmut Koester put it, the New Testament itself, in placing itself in opposition to Judaism, was ‘a tragic historical mistake.’