Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (117 page)

17. Saperstein,
Moments of Crisis,
29.

18. Quoted by Alice L. Eckardt, "The Reformation and the Jews," in Fisher,
Interwoven Destinies,
112.

19. Baron,
History of the Jews,
vol. 13, 269.

20. Ibid., 222.

21. Oberman,
Roots of Anti-Semitism,
46.

22. Quoted by Baron,
History of the Jews,
vol. 13, 227. In 1994, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America issued a declaration to the Jewish community acknowledging and repenting "Luther's anti-Judaic diatribes and the violent recommendations of his later writings against the Jews." See
http://jcrelations.com/stmnts/elca.htm.

23. "John Calvin and his colleagues developed a branch of Christianity that had a deep appreciation of Hebrew scripture and biblical law/'Teaching' (heretofore only regarded as 'Jewish legalism,' a 'dead letter,' or an instrument of condemnation). This positive attitude toward Torah and toward Israel would develop in the latter part of the sixteenth century among Dutch and English millenarians and English puritans into a genuine interest in Jews as persons (though still with conversion as a goal)." Eckardt, "The Reformation and the Jews," 127.

24. Quoted by Baron,
History of the Jews,
vol. 13, 277.

25. Ibid., 278–79.

26. Kamen,
Inquisition and Society in Spain,
22.

27. Quoted by Kamen,
Inquisition and Society in Spain,
120.

28. Bunson,
The Pope Encyclopedia,
6–7.

29. See R. Emmet McLaughlin, "Trent, Council of,"
HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism,
1267.

30. Quoted by Baron,
History of the Jews,
vol. 14, 24.

31. Bunson,
The Pope Encyclopedia,
262.

32. Baron,
History of the Jews,
vol. 14, 27.

33. Quoted by Bunson,
The Pope Encyclopedia,
264.

34. Baron,
History of the Jews,
vol. 14, 29. See also Flannery,
The Anguish of the Jews,
155. Flannery says that, as Pope Paul IV, Caraffa allowed sixty converted Jews to be burned.

35. Francisco de Torres,
De Sola Lectione,
quoted by Kenneth R. Stow, "The Burning of the Talmud in 1553, in Light of Sixteenth-Century Catholic Attitudes toward the Talmud," in Cohen,
Essential Papers,
405.

36. Frances Yates explains: "The intense religious feeling which had inspired Pico to welcome Magia and Cabala as aids to religious insight persists very strongly in Bruno, who pursues his philosophical religion, or his religious philosophy, or his philosophical-religious magic, with the deepest earnestness and believes that it can become the instrument of a universal religious reform ... He thus retains the word 'cabala' to describe his position." Yates,
Giordano Bruno,
262.

37. Bruno,
The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast,
4.

38. "There was in me," he wrote, in what his translator, Arthur Imerti, called a kind of epitaph, "whatever I was able to do, which no future century will deny to be mine, that which a victor could have for his own: Not to have feared to die, not to have yielded to any equal in firmness of nature, and to have preferred a courageous death to a noncombatant life." Ibid., 64.

39. Alessandra Stanley, "Italian Atheists Rally Round Philosopher Burned at Stake,"
International Herald Tribune,
February 19–20, 2000.

40. Kamen,
Inquisition and Society in Spain,
118.

41. Ibid., 120.

42.
Cum Nimis Absurdum,
quoted by Vogelstein,
Rome,
267.

43. Hay,
Roots of Christian Anti-Semitism,
164.

44. Quoted by Eugene ). Fisher in
National Catholic Register,
October 27, 1998. I heard Cardinal Cassidy repeat this statement, that the "Church-ordered ghetto was the antechamber to the Nazi death camps," at the Jewish-Catholic meeting on March 30, 1999, in Chicago.

45. Rudavsky,
Emancipation and Adjustment,
28.

46. Vogelstein,
Rome,
269.

47. Isaiah 65:2.

48. Stow, "The Burning of the Talmud," 406.

49. Stow,
Catholic Thought,
10.

50. Oberman,
Roots of Anti-Semitism,
14.

51. Stow,
Catholic Thought,
267.

52. Letter to Bernardino Ochino, cited in Stow,
Catholic Thought,
270.

53. Romans 11:15, in
The Jerusalem Bible.

54. Stow,
Catholic Thought,
277.

55. Vogelstein,
Rome, 276–77.

56. Stow,
Catholic Thought,
xviii.

57. Ellen Knickmeyer, "John Paul Beatifies Scorned, Beloved Popes,"
Boston Globe,
September 4, 2000. In ceremonies in St. Peter's Square, )ohn Paul II said of the beatification of Pius IX, "Beatifying a son of the Church does not celebrate particular historic choices that he has made, but rather points him out for imitation and for veneration for his virtue."

58. Quoted by Baron,
History of the Jews,
vol. 14, 68–69.

59. Saperstein,
Moments of Crisis,
27. Eugene Fisher, a consistent advocate of the Church, while defending the New Testament from charges of antisemitism, clearly identifies the
limpieza
as the origin of racial antisemitism: "Racial antisemitism, as we know it today, does not seem to have made an appearance until the infamous 'purity of blood' laws of Spain in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries." Fisher,
Seminary Education,
37.

60. "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah," 3.4, 5.

61. Ruether,
Faith and Fratricide,
203.

62. Padberg et al.,
First Thirty Jesuit Congregations,
204.

63. Ibid., 232.

64. Ibid., 534.

65. Ibid., 625. The sentence continues: "...or his lack of Catholic education." For a discussion of the Jesuit blood purity regulations, see Arendt,
Origins of Totalitarianism,
102.

66. Bunson,
The Pope Encyclopedia,
352–53. For a dramatic rendition of the Galileo tragedy, see Goodwin,
Hinge of the World.

67. Carroll, "The Silence," 58.

68. Vogelstein,
Rome,
294–95. For more on the Catholic taking of children from Jews, see Kertzer,
Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara.

37. The Religious Response of the Jews

1. Stow,
Jews in Rome,
lvi.

2. Kenneth R. Stow, "Sanctity and the Construction of Space: The Roman Ghetto as Sacred Space," in Mor,
Jewish Assimilation,
54.

3. Ibid., 64. On the use of coffee, Stow comments, "First, one stimulated his body with this miraculous new beverage, and then he stimulated his soul by ritual devotion."

4. Ibid., 65.

5. Scholem,
Kabbalah,
74.

6. For a general introduction to Luria, see Armstrong,
History of God,
266–71.

7. Silberman,
Heavenly Powers,
137, 140.

8. Ibid., 169.

9. Bloom,
Kabbalah and Criticism,
41.

10. Silberman,
Heavenly Powers,
173.

11. Bloom,
Kabbalah and Criticism,
42–43.

12. Armstrong,
History of God,
270.

13. Ibid., 272.

14. Ibid., 271.

15. Silberman,
Heavenly Powers,
128.

16. Ibid., 211–12. Hasidism is a unique religious phenomenon, but it bears comparison to other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century movements, like Pietism in Germany, Jansenism in Ireland, Methodism in England, and the Great Awakening in the United States. All of these were reassertions of orthodox)', as I heard Krister Stendahl put it once, "but with heat."

17. Leon Wieseltier,
New Republic,
March 2, 1998, 5.

18. Ruether,
Faith and Fratricide,
203.

19. Arendt,
Origins of Totalitarianism,
10.

38. Shema Yisrael!

1. Deuteronomy 6:4, In the traditional translation, offered by Elie Wiesel. Wiesel described his first return to Birkenau this way: "Time is suspended. We remain silent, each with his or her own thoughts. And then, softly at first, then louder and louder, I recite the prayer of the Jewish martyrs; the others join in.
'Shema Israel...
' Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One. Once, five times ... Why? Because back then, the victims, knowing the end was near, had recited that prayer. We needed to show our solidarity with those we loved and still love. And then because, on the threshold of death, all words become prayers, and all prayers become one." Wiesel,
Sea Is Never Full,
193.

2. Deuteronomy 11:22.

3. Quoted by Carroll, "The Silence," 67.

4. Edward H. Fiannery, preface to Hay,
Roots of Christian Anti-Semitism,
xxii.

5. John Paul II, General Audience Discourse, September 1, 1999, in
L'Osservatore Romano,
English edition, September 8, 1999, cited in "Memory and Reconciliation," 4.2.

6. A. I. Heschel,
Moral Grandeur,
8–10.

7. George Steiner, the Tillich Lecture, Harvard University, April 8, 1999. I rely on notes I took at the lecture.

8. See Dewart,
Future of Belief

9. Denby,
Great Books,
182–3.

10. In his homily at Auschwitz, June 7, 1979, John Paul II said, "I have come and 1 kneel on this Golgotha of the modern world, on these tombs." See John Paul II,
Spiritual Pilgrimage,
7.

11. Psalm 104:29.

12. Allison P. Coudert, "Leibnitz, Locke, Newton, and the Kabbalah," in Dan,
The Christian Kabbalah,
163.

39. Karl Marx, Second Son of Trier

1. Psalm 22:18.

2. Blumenberg,
Portrait of Marx,
5.

3. Ibid., 7–8.

4. Lamentations 1:1–2.

5. For a discussion of the meaning of the Shema, see A. J. Heschel,
Man Is Not Alone,
114–16.

6. For a discussion of the marginalization of the Jew, see Sachar,
Modern Jewish History,
3–16.

7. Karl Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," in
The Marx-Engels Reader,
595.

40. Spinoza: From Rabbis to Revolution

1. Spinoza, Marx, and, eventually, Sigmund Freud would be lumped together as the Jews who did most to create modern consciousness, yet their relationships both to Judaism and to antisemitism would be inadequately understood. "The bulk of the Jewish community, and certainly the representatives of the Jewish religion, opposed all three of these heretics, but these names continue to be cited as a kind of litany of great 'Jewish contributions to Western culture' by people who do not know much about either Judaism or Jewish history—but there is nonetheless some truth in the proposition that these thinkers arose in part out of the Jewish situation in the pre-modern world. All three were reacting to the persistence of Jew-hatred, and each was trying to find a cure to this disease of Western culture." Arthur Hertzberg, "The Enlightenment and Western Religion," in Fisher,
Interwoven Destinies,
138.

2. Gullan-Whur,
Life of Spinoza,
5.

3. Ibid., 7.

4. O'Malley,
Trent and All That,
40. Some see the Counter-Reformation as having lasted until the French Revolution (52), or even until Vatican II (50).

5. Ibid., 52–53.

6. Scruton,
Spinoza,
4.

7. Nadler,
Spinoza,
6.

8. Ibid., 114.

9. Scruton,
Spinoza,
50–53.

10. His dictum is, "It is the nature of reason to perceive things under a certain aspect of eternity (
sub quadam aeternitatis specie).
Quoted by Scruton,
Spinoza,
70.

11. Quoted by Nadler,
Spinoza,
280.

12. Ibid., 341.

13. Quoted by Gullan-Whur,
Life of Spinoza,
91.

14. Ibid., 70.

15. In 1706, the German lexicographer Johann Georg Wachter wrote a treatise comparing Spinoza's philosophical framework to the ideational system of Kabbalah, a work to which Leibniz had reference. See Dan,
The Christian Kabbalah,
224.

16. Quoted by Gullan-Whur,
Life of Spinoza,
71.

17. Ibid., 305.

18. Scruton,
Spinoza,
52. Scruton associates the phrase with Goethe.

19. Quoted by Gullan-Whur,
Life of Spinoza,
304–5.

20. It was Goethe, finally, who honored "as the first of Spinoza's achievements," in Scruton's words, "the attack on superstition in the name of God." Scruton,
Spinoza,
112.

21. Quoted by Scruton,
Spinoza,
12.

22. Quoted by Gullan–Whur,
Life of Spinoza,
306–7.

41. Voltaire and the False Promise of Emancipation

1. The full paragraph reads, "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can be based only on public utility." See "Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen," in Ravitch and Thernstrom,
Democracy Reader,
55.

2. For a discussion of the Enlightenment idea of virtue, see MacIntyre,
After Virtue,
49–59.

3. Count Clermont-Tonnerre, quoted by Rudavsky,
Emancipation and Adjustment,
81. Clermont-Tonnerre added that Jews who refused to surrender the things that kept them apart should be shipped off to Palestine. Hertzberg, "The Enlightenment and Western Religion," in Fisher,
Interwoven Destinies,
139.

4. Quoted in Michael Burns,
Dreyfus,
u.