Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (41 page)

Jews seemed sensitive to the complexities of the cross as a symbol of a redemptive notion of suffering and death that seemed a violation of a primary commitment to life, as an ultimate religious value, and as a symbol of a totalitarian universalism, rooted in Constantine, that violated pluralism, which was for Jews an ultimate social value. Thus the Christian planting of the cross in that place overrode all possible good intentions, and even suggested other intentions: "Christianizing" the Holocaust, using Christian categories to "redeem" the genocide, using the cross to deny the role of ancient Christian Jew-hatred in preparing the soil for the Holocaust—as if the Nazis were sprung as Teutonic pagans from the primeval forest and not from the heart of Christian Europe. All of this could have no other effect than the demeaning of the overwhelmingly Jewish presence at Auschwitz.

Memory was at issue in the Stepinac case, too. There is evidence of his courage in opposing the Ustashi program of forced conversion of Orthodox Serbs and related brutalities. A U.S. State Department report re-leased in 1998 put the number of Ustashi victims at 700,000, "most of them Serbs." The report commented, "Croatian Catholic authorities condemned the atrocities committed by the Ustashi, but remained otherwise supportive of the regime."
³
That was true of Stepinac. He had welcomed the coming to power of the mini-Hitler Ante Pavelič in 1941, and he never overtly broke with the so-called Independent State of Croatia or its dictator.
⁴
Stepinac had supported Jews in Croatia. In 1937, he helped Jewish refugees from Germany. In 1941, he asked Pavelič "to treat the Jews as humanely as possible," and when the deportation of Croatian Jews began, he protested privately to the government.
⁵
In sermons, he denounced mistreatment of groups defined "by race or nation," but he did not preach openly about the fate of Jews. His defenders, like those of the even more reticent Pius XII, argue that the one resounding frontal assault by a Catholic hierarchy in defense of Jews, in the Netherlands in 1942, led to the rounding up even of the Jews who had converted to Catholicism. "The courage of Holland's Catholic bishops and clergy is undeniable," one defender of Pius XII wrote in 1998. "But their heroism came at a terrible price: 79% of Holland's Jews—110,000 men, women and children—were murdered, the highest percentage of any Nazi-occupied nation of Western Europe."
⁶
That qualifier "Western" is apt, since in Croatia, to the east, where the hierarchy, including Stepinac, was circumspect, 85 percent of the Jewish population—almost 39,000 out of 45,000—was annihilated.
⁷

None of this marks Cardinal Stepinac as a war criminal. Perhaps he did what he could. But sainthood? Croatia was not the Netherlands; in Croatia the Nazis were welcomed as friends and allies. The Roman Catholic Church of Croatia, over which Stepinac presided, was associated with the pro-Nazi regime's policies.
⁸
Catholic newspapers were among its strongest supporters, and Catholic priests were key to the postwar survival of some of the Ustashi's worst murderers. As a postwar fugitive, Pavelič himself was sheltered for two years in Rome, for most of that time in the College of San Girolamo, the residence of Croatian priests working at the Vatican. Croatian clergy in Rome were part of the infamous "Rat Line" through which numerous Nazi war criminals, with the collusion of the U.S. Army, escaped to Latin America. The priests helped Pavelič get to Argentina in 1947.
⁹
"Although no evidence has been found to directly implicate the Pope or his advisers in the post-war activities of the Ustashi in Italy"—this is the conclusion of the 1998 State Department report—"it seems unlikely that they were entirely unaware of what was going on."
¹⁰
This dark episode hangs over the Catholic Church, and one must wonder if the move to canonize Stepinac is intended, finally, to dispel it.

The Polish Catholics who defied every Jewish expectation by planting crosses at Auschwitz in the summer of 1998 had to have noticed the Vatican's similar defiance of expectation with the nearly simultaneous Stepinac announcement. What both incidents lay bare is the ambivalence at the center of Catholic attitudes toward Jews. There is ambivalence even in the obviously troubled Catholic conscience about the Holocaust: Stepinac's elevation to the threshold of sainthood follows the canonization of Maximilian Kolbe, the Franciscan friar who voluntarily took the place of another prisoner (not a Jew) in the starvation barracks, but who had also served as the editor of an antisemitic Catholic journal. The week after Stepinac was formally beatified in Rome, in October 1998, the convert Edith Stein—one of those rounded up in Holland after the bishops' protest—was canonized. "The canonization of Edith Stein," the novelist Mary Gordon commented in the Jewish periodical
Tikkun,
"is the wishful re-dreaming of Europeans who have a stake in believing that the Holocaust was something other than what it was: the determination to obliterate the Jewish people."
¹¹
We will return to the story of Edith Stein later.

The positive side of contemporary Catholic ambivalence is vivid. Since the end of World War II, there have been the theological revolution of Vatican II, with its rejection of the deicide charge and its affirmation of God's ongoing covenant with the Jewish people; the remarkable grass-roots flourishing of Jewish-Catholic dialogue; and the serious effort of the Polish pope to confront the legacy of Catholic antisemitism. But there remain rigid lines drawn around beliefs that may not be changed and around questions that may not be asked. Already we have seen the deeply problematic legacy of Jew hatred in foundational Christian texts, in the implicitly anti-Jewish Christian idea of revelation as prophecy fulfillment, and most damaging of all, in the dominant Christian theology of Jesus, not only as the enemy of the Jewish people but as the Son of God who obliterates the integrity of all other ways to God. Catholic ambivalence is nowhere more evident than in the way in which the Church now officially rejects supersessionism while firmly defending its scriptural and theological underpinnings.

Catholic ambivalence toward Judaism dates, as we have seen, to the beginning. Jewish followers of Jesus found consolation in their Scriptures; but then, forgetting how the crucifixion narrative was constructed in the weeks, months, and years after his death, successors began to use those same Scriptures against Jews who failed to recognize the crucified Jesus as the longed-for Messiah, or who failed even to long for a Messiah. Ambivalence is implied in the very name that came to be applied to those Jewish Scriptures—the "Old Testament," which was valued for being ancient but was superseded for not being "New."

The pattern of ambivalence became set as one generation's mistake was compounded by the next, and made more dangerous. Jewish-Christian conflict in the first century took on ominous new meanings in the fourth, by which time Christians had all but forgotten that those early conflicts had been among people
all of whom were Jews.
Jewish rejection became a source not just of feelings of being threatened, but of feelings of hatred. Even as they evolved, such reactions remained ambivalent because the Jewish enemy was still the intimate enemy; the Jew as other was still the brother, the sibling rival. Christians hardly noticed when, as the "parting of the ways" became dramatic and the centers of Jewish life shifted away from the centers of Roman and Christian life, Jews stopped thinking of the Church as competition. If one sibling opts out of the rivalry, the one remaining can feel it more intensely than ever. That, in effect, is what began to happen when Christianity tied permission for Jewish survival to the formal theological role of Jews as the permanent negative other.

All these manifestations of ambivalence became welded to the intellectual and political framework of the Church only with the Augustinian formulation: Jews may survive, but never thrive. A noble witness to the prophetic sources of Christian faith was also the witness of "bent backs" and "dispersal." That Jews suffered proved that Jews deserved to suffer. The circle of logic that began with Augustine was complete. In his time, the consequences of this position were benign compared to what befell heretics and pagans. But once again, following the now set pattern, a later generation—that "trail of pseudo-Augustinian anti-Jewish writings," in Fredriksen's phrase—applying the inherited principle in changed circumstances, would misunderstand its original meaning, and then the consequences would no longer be benign, not even relatively so.

"Theological negation, political toleration, and practical limitation" is the way one Jewish scholar, Robert Chazan, summed up the ancient legacy of Catholic ambivalence toward Jews. "These elements constituted a complex doctrine, and therein lay grave danger. In untroubled times, to negate Judaism while tolerating Jews was perhaps feasible; in periods of agitation and stress, the complex and contradictory doctrine was apt to disintegrate."
¹²
Disintegration, in this context, is another word for violence. It is no accident that this citation, elaborating the volatile inner meaning of the cross at Auschwitz and a Croatian cardinal's beatification, is from a book entitled
European Jewry and the First Crusade.
That the first organized murderers of Jews carried the cross of Jesus Christ on their shields has shamed the Christian conscience whenever it has learned the story. But the juxtaposition of symbol and deed was no coincidence. That the theological negation at the heart of ancient and respectable attitudes toward Judaism was bound to lead to violence against Jews becomes clear in the sequence of events that began in 1096.

Before turning to the eleventh century, however, here is one last note from the twentieth. The covert Croatian Rat Line, the escape route used by Nazis to flee Europe after the war, operating in Rome from a Vaticanrelated Catholic college, under the authority of Cardinal Stepinac, was put at the service of a fugitive from the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. He was the German who had headed up the Gestapo in Lyons, France—Klaus Barbie. Like Paveli^ before him, the "Butcher of Lyons" escaped to Latin America. In the 1980s, he would be captured, deported to France, convicted of crimes against humanity, and sentenced to prison, where he died in 1991. If Barbie has a place in this narrative, aside from the large debt he owed to the Roman Catholic ambivalence that had helped him escape, it is because of his place of origin. He was born, raised, and educated in the geographic and moral center of this story—Constantine's square one, Helena's hometown, the repository of the Seamless Robe, my mother's cherished pilgrimage site, the realm of my own awakening. And now we must recognize it as the place where crusaders first moved against Jews, launching a season of terror throughout the Rhineland, letting fly the exterminating angel that overshadowed the millennium. It is time to return to Trier.

PART FOUR

FROM CRUSADES TO CONVERSIONISM

24. The War of the Cross

I
T CAME TO PASS
in the year one thousand twenty-eight after the destruction of the Temple that this evil befell Israel." So begins "Mainz Anonymous," one of the surviving Hebrew chronicles that recount events of 1096 as they were experienced by Jews.

There first arose the princes and nobles and common folk in France, who took counsel and set plans to ascend, and "to rise up like eagles" and to do battle and "to clear a way" for journeying to Jerusalem, the Holy City, and for reaching the sepulcher of the Crucified, "a trampled corpse" "who cannot profit and cannot save, for he is worthless." They said to one another: "Behold we travel to a distant land to do battle with the kings of that land. 'We take our souls in our hands' in order to kill and subjugate all those kingdoms that do not believe in the Crucified. How much more so (should we kill and subjugate) the Jews, who killed and crucified him." They taunted us from every direction. They took counsel, ordering that either we turn to their abominable faith or they would destroy us "from infant to suckling." They—both princes and common folk—placed an evil sign upon their garments, a cross.
¹

This is a description of the so-called First Crusade, the military expedition that set out from northwestern Europe in the spring of 1096, bound for the Holy Land. But the cross-marked army's first act of belligerence took place in the Rhineland, not Jerusalem, and its target was not the Muslim infidel but the Jewish one. The story of the Crusades is familiar to every schoolchild, yet it is rarely told from the point of view of those first victims, what they saw when the horde came.

Another Jewish chronicler of the crusaders' rampage through the Rhineland, Solomon bar Simson, also fixed on the symbol of the cross: "They decorated themselves prominently with their signs, placing a profane symbol—a horizontal line over a vertical one—on the vestments of every man and woman whose heart yearned to go on the stray path to the grave of their Messiah. Their ranks swelled until the number of men, women, and children exceeded a locust horde covering the earth."
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This may have been no exaggeration. Medieval chroniclers put the number of first-wave crusaders as high as 600,ooo.
³
A more credible estimate still counts in six figures.
⁴
A multitude responded at once to Pope Urban IPs clarion call for an army to defend the besieged Christian empire in the East—and to liberate the Holy Land.

Muslims had occupied Jerusalem since the year 638, a conquest that occurred only six years after the death of Muhammad (570–632). Islam subsequently revered Jerusalem as the site from which Muhammad ascended into heaven. To Christians, Jerusalem was sacred, above all, as the site of the grave of Jesus, and on the eve of the First Crusade, an upsurge of millennial piety rekindled Europe's readiness to take offense at the Islamic occupation of the land on which the Lord had walked.