Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (48 page)

A monk called Thomas of Monmouth wrote an account of that originating murder charge in
The Life and Passion of the Martyr St. William of Norwich.
Even the title, suggesting a Passion narrative, points to the first crucifixion, and Thomas's text makes the connection explicitly. The Jews declare their intention, as he interprets it, "to kill the Christian as we killed Christ." The monk relates the testimony of the informant Jew, an "apostate" named Theobald, who reported, "It was laid down by [the Jews] in ancient times that every year they must sacrifice a Christian in some part of the world to the Most High God in scorn and contempt of Christ ... Wherefore the leaders and Rabbis of the Jews who dwell in Spain assemble together at Narbonne ... and they cast lots for all the countries which the Jews inhabit ... and the place whose lot is drawn has to fulfill the duty imposed by authority."
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The scholar Marc Saperstein comments, "Thus the earliest recorded account of Jewish ritual murder ... is embellished with the suggestion of an international Jewish conspiracy, sanctioned by ancient Jewish texts, which Christians ought to fear." Saperstein adds, "A chilling conclusion is placed by the author in the mouths of the 'populace,' which cried out 'with one voice that all the Jews ought to be utterly destroyed as constant enemies of the Christian name and the Christian religion.' Such a sentence indicates that a 'Final Solution' was at least conceivable in the Middle Ages."
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As with crusader violence against Jews in the Rhineland, the Blood Libel was promptly and resoundingly rejected by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. (In our own time, a twist was given this tradition when, in 1999, a Vatican official denounced Jewish questions about Pius XII's "silence" during the Holocaust as themselves amounting to a "Blood Libel.")
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Pope Gregory X's "Letter on Jews" (1272) was typical of numerous papal repudiations: "Most falsely do these Christians claim that the Jews have secretly and furtively carried away these children and killed them ... We order that Jews seized under such a silly pretext be freed."
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The silliness, in the pope's word, of the Blood Libel is emphasized by those who distinguish between the "normal" Christian hatred of Jews, which originates in the Gospel portrait of Jews as killers of Christ, and abnormal hatred, which features "chimerical belief or fantasy," in Gavin Langmuir's phrase.
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Langmuir is a historian of antisemitism. He dates its beginning, as opposed to normal anti-Judaism, to the Blood Libel of Norwich: It is normal Christian anti-Jewishness to say that Jews murdered Jesus, and therefore to degrade them for it; it is abnormal antisemitism to say that Jews slay Christian babies, and therefore to kill them for it. There is a racial element in modern antisemitism, but we will come to that later. For now, the question is tied to the distinction between the "realities" of mainstream Christian tradition and the paranoid delusions of disapproved eccentrics. Antisemitism, for reasons having nothing to do with the real deeds or beliefs of actual Jewish persons, is usually regarded solely as a manifestation of the latter.

Most post-Holocaust Catholics honor the wall of separation between normal anti-Judaism, which traces itself, in Robert Chazan's summary, "back into the core disagreement between Christians and Jews," and abnormal antisemitism, which Chazan defines as "embellishments that are extremely harsh, that lack grounding in fundamental Christian texts and teachings, and that never gained the respectability of widespread ecclesiastical approbation."
²²
Many Catholic Scripture scholars insist, for example, that the Passion narratives of the Gospels, while anti-Jewish in varying degrees, are not in any sense antisemitic—not, that is, based on "chimerical fantasies" or libels of who Jews are and what they do. But this entire investigation follows from the conclusion that the Gospel accounts of who "the Jews" were and what they did, as understood by later generations, may themselves be said to be chimerical. One might say, indeed, that the first Blood Libel appears in the foundational Christian story of the death of Jesus. Thus the Church-absolving wall between anti-Judaism and antisemitism teeters at its base, just as the wall moves unsteadily between the sadism of Christian mobs and the nonviolent but contemptuous teaching of the Church establishment.

This problem of mob violence incited by elite denigration is restricted neither to the Middle Ages nor to anti-Judaism. In 1998, a young gay man, Matthew Shepard, was murdered in Wyoming. His killers had tortured him and, in effect, crucified him by hanging him on a fence. They smashed his skull. This incident occurred amid heated anti-gay campaigns, some conducted by Christian groups. The question poses itself: What is the relationship between violent attacks on homosexuals and open contempt for homosexuals expressed by respectable people and organizations? One answer was offered by the
New York Times
columnist Frank Rich: "It's a story as old as history. Once any group is successfully scapegoated as a subhuman threat to 'normal' values by a propaganda machine, emboldened thugs take over."
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That the medieval wall of separation between anti-Jewish thugs and the Jew-protecting hierarchy may not have been as stout as claimed is indicated by the fact that popes and bishops, beginning in 1096 and continuing thereafter, even while forbidding forced baptisms of Jews, held that such baptisms, once carried out, were nevertheless valid. These baptisms, it was said, even if conducted under the threat of death, were recognized by God. The souls of those baptized, whether they had assented or not, were indelibly marked with the seal of Christ.

Not all agreed. In the Crusades period, this was a point of dispute between emperor and pope, with the former insisting that Jews were free to return to their own religion, an impulse one monk derided as akin to a dog returning to his vomit.
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Popes held against the emperor simply that converted Jews were obliged to live as Christians, no matter the circumstances of their conversion. The pope was able to challenge the authority of the emperor in this matter because, even most of a century after the climactic, snow-bound encounter at Canossa between Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII, when the emperor yielded to the pope, if only temporarily, the balance of power between empire and papacy was still shifting. For example, Frederick I (1123–1190), also known as Frederick Barbarossa, was the avatar of the Germanic emperor. He was the first to emphatically claim the title Holy Roman Emperor, and he styled himself after Constantine. But when he sent his armies into the territory of the pope, he cut a breach between Italy and the rest of the empire that would never heal. What had begun to happen under Constantine between East and West began to happen under Frederick Barbarossa between North and South. The destiny of northern Europe would unfold independently from that of southern Europe. Among other outcomes, this development assured the relative permanence of the pope's political power, even if concentrated in a regional base. As earlier popes had fought off the East, now popes would fight off the North, and so what led to the Catholic-Orthodox split in 1054 would lead to the Reformation in 1517.

The political contest between empire and papacy continued to involve competing religious claims. The appointment of bishops and abbots remained at issue, but even matters of spirituality could be disputed. The emperor could reject forced baptisms of Jews out of a desire to win Jewish support in local struggles with the rising burgher class, but the emperor also could grasp the fundamental maliciousness of conversions won through threat of death. The pope, on the other hand, whatever he thought of forced baptisms of Jews—and we know that popes consistently forbade them—felt obliged, no doubt, to uphold the principle that sacraments that fulfilled the outward form remained valid, even if illicit. This fundamental tenet of Catholic sacramental theology, which sees the pitfall of a puritanism that links validity with interior purity of motive, would be tragically tied to the question of forced or ambiguous baptism of Jews even into the twentieth century.

Here is the perfect emblem of Church ambivalence at the highest level: Forced baptisms of Jews were forbidden, yet they were nonetheless, after the fact, canonically sanctioned. In this way, an impression in the mind of the "Christian mob" that God wills such baptisms seems not altogether surprising, especially in periods when an End Time psychology took over, for then the conversion of Jews, as a prelude to the return of the Messiah, could seem an urgent matter of apocalyptic fulfillment.

Nor is the appearance of the Blood Libel surprising. The slander that Jews were in the business of crucifying boys eloquently dramatized what had evolved into a core, if implicit, theological principle: People who once so fatefully murdered Jesus are still inclined to murder him. There is a line of causality, in other words, between the Gospel indictment of "the Jews" for the murder of Jesus—as if the Romans were bystanders, as if Jesus were not a Jew—and the medieval indictment of Jews for the murder of Jesus in the person of a Christian boy. In the twelfth century and after, Jews were held guilty not for the crime of their ancient ancestors but for their own present crime of a continuing rejection of Jesus. Not incidentally, that rejection had been made indelibly clear to twelfth-century Christians by the choices Rhineland Jews had made in such numbers during the spring and summer of 1096—choices to die, or even to kill themselves and their children, rather than to convert. If they would kill their own children, Christians reasoned, what would they not do to ours? Jews were still saying no to Jesus in the most passionate and at times violent ways imaginable. What else could such vital recalcitrance mean than that twelfth-century Jews affirmed in their hearts what first-century Jews had done: This is so even if it occurred a thousand years before—or rather,
because
it occurred a thousand years before. Affirming such a past meant Jews in the present were still prepared to murder Jesus. Logic was with the mob.

It was a small step in the Christian imagination from that newly sharpened sense of permanent Jewish culpability to a conviction that Jews were prepared to murder not only a surrogate Jesus, but "us." Jews were believed ready to poison wells, if they could, aiming to kill not just Christ, but Christians. Twenty-seven Jews were executed for well poisoning in Bohemia in 1163. The charges were repeated in Breslau in 1226, and in Vienna in 1267. In 1321, Jews were accused of a conspiracy to poison every well in France. Many Jews were burned at the stake as a result, and the Jews of Paris were expelled from the city. When the plagues struck, it was "logical" to think that the source of infection was poisoned wells. The 1348 Black Plague would result in anti-Jewish violence that far surpassed the First Crusade, with perhaps three hundred Jewish communities, including those in Mainz, Trier, and Cologne, being simply wiped out.
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The anti-Jewish mobs may have waved the banner of an insane rhetoric, making it seem they were irrationally avenging a long-dead Jesus or defending kidnapped children, but their very ferocity and the longevity of the Libel show that they were defending
themselves.

From what? Not from villains conjured by some chimerical fantasy based on nothing real, but from the threat logically deduced from a solemn doctrine of the Church, one dramatically reiterated—indeed, this liturgy was key to the development of Western drama—in every Holy Week of every year. Namely, that Jews are murderers. In a dozen ways, as we have seen, the cross itself had been conscripted into this campaign, which was as much self-defense as revenge. And now every cross in Western Christendom would become an infallible promulgation of that same doctrine. The crusaders who stormed the archbishop's palace in Mainz, and the urban mobs who lynched Jews, threw them in rivers, and burned them at stakes, were being rushed along in currents of meaning and belief that ran below the surface on which official ecclesiastical repudiations stood. These currents swept through theology and philosophy, through Church councils and papal convocations, erupting finally in an innovative Christian self-understanding at the same moment as the First Crusade. If the face of the man wearing the cross on his breast was cruel, so was the face of God, as defined then by the greatest Church council yet convened and as described by the greatest theologian of the age. This God was defined as a Father who revealed himself most fully by imposing the cross not only on his Son, but on all creation.

28. Anselm: Why God Became Man

T
HE CATHOLIC CHURCH
into which I was born, and with which I fell in love, came into existence in these years—the period of ferment and fervor that Church history calls the "twelfth-century renaissance." As the Crusades sought to impose a universalized Christian faith on those outside Christendom, so a simultaneous reform movement sought to impose a central control over doctrine, liturgy, piety, and politics within Western Christendom—and it worked. The feeling that Christians were now able to have about themselves—by belonging to a cohesive and sacred community, each one could draw close to God—was a feeling I knew well as a child. Kneeling beside my mother before the crucifix in St. Mary's Church fixed in me a certain kind of piety, and then my attachment to the monks at my prep school, St. Anselm's, rescued me from the fear that such piety could belong only to women.

I didn't know it then, but what appealed to me about the monastic life—the movement of the daily office through the marks of time, the order of authority, the rationality of faith, the simplicity embodied in monk's bread, the self-denial of the three vows, the veneration of beauty, whether in chant or carved choir stalls—the very sum and substance of what I loved was a product of the twelfth-century Cluniac and Cistercian re-forms. From my weekly bouts in the confessional, I knew that the Catholic Church, for all its moralizing obsessiveness, was trustworthy because its laws were rigorously defined and mercilessly enforced. Now I know that there were more Church legal pronouncements in the twelfth century than in all prior centuries put together.
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This was a humane program of legislation. Not each proscription was humane, but in rescuing Europe from the lawlessness of brigands and warrior barons, and the Church from the corruptions of simony, nepotism, and greed, the overall program laid the groundwork of Western civilization. Unfortunately, this success would atrophy in subsequent centuries around the laws themselves, and the Roman Catholic Church would settle into that same moralizing obsessiveness, which in truth could not be trusted.