Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (64 page)

That Jews, for their part, roundly rejected Luther's overture was part of what caused his bitter attack later, his version of the old pattern. Nothing generates Christian fury like the Jewish refusal, especially if what is refused is self-defined Christian kindness. But that rejection was only one factor in Luther's growing disenchantment with Jews, a disenchantment that would fester into a venomous hatred. "On the Jews and Their Lies" amounts to a homiletic massacre. In it, Luther advocated the burning of synagogues. Jews, he said, should be "forbidden on pain of death to praise God, to give thanks, to pray, and to teach publicly among us and in our country."
¹⁶

But another cause stood behind Luther's hatred of Jews. To Catholics, his readiness to take the Old Testament on its own terms was proof that he was a Judaizer.
¹⁷
As ever, Catholics were ready to blame Jews, and now Jews could be blamed for the outbreak of heresy. Through Talmud, and perhaps through the secrets of Kabbalah, Jews were thought to have spread the deadly spirit of skepticism—what had enabled Jews to reject Christian claims from the beginning, and to turn aside the new rationalism with which Christian missionaries had learned to cloak their apologetics. The virus of Jew-spawned skepticism was thought to have found niches in the monasteries and universities of Europe, where the likes of Luther had been infected. But when he was charged by allies of the pope with propounding a Jewish heresy, Luther reacted by lumping Jews and the pope together as his mortal enemies: "Because the Papists, like the Jews, insist that anyone wishing to be saved must observe their ceremonies, they will perish like the Jews."
¹⁸

The crisis of the peasant uprisings of 1524–1525 prompted Luther to throw in with the German princes, particularly his protector Frederick of Saxony, against peasants who were inspired by Luther's own attacks on authority, but whom he now perceived as a threatening rabble. The peasants had three targets, priests and lords—and also Jews.
¹⁹
In a savage war, the princes put the peasants down. Luther's die was cast. He supported the nascent regional nationalism of these German rulers not only against the universalist pope, but also against the transnational—and devoutly Catholic—Holy Roman Emperor. Thus, at the critical moment, Luther's religious purpose meshed with the political aims of the barons, and nothing symbolizes that juncture more powerfully than the role played by Luther's German translation of the Bible in the birth of German national consciousness. Luther's faith-versus-works reading of the Epistles of Paul, especially, would equate the dead legalisms of the papists with those of the Jews who rejected the Gospel. To oppose one was to oppose the other, and that dual opposition defined the core identity of his movement. In this process, as the great articulator of a new German self-understanding, Luther decisively influenced the creation of the "cognitive model of Jews," in Goldhagen's phrase, which would hold sway in Germany from then on. It was characterized by Luther's distinction between "ancient Israelites, whom he boundlessly admired, and the Jews of the Christian era, whom he hated with increasing venom."
²⁰
It is important to emphasize that Luther's position on the Jews, however hateful it became, was grounded in the theological heart of Christian proclamation. "The basis of Luther's anti-Judaism," as the historian Heiko Oberman sums it up, "was the conviction that ever since Christ's appearance on earth, the Jews have had no more future as Jews."
²¹

Because Jews were associated with their traditional protector the emperor, who was now defined as the political enemy, and because Jews involved in finance were even associated with the monies collected for indulgences for the hated pope, Jews became a catchall vessel for political hatred. Moreover, as the German culture began to define itself in terms of these enemies, Jews became the embodiment of enmity. "Know, my dear Christian," Luther said, "and do not doubt that next to the devil you have no enemy more cruel, more venomous and virulent, than a true Jew." Thus, as the new polities of what would become the regional states of Germany took shape, Jews were not only explicitly excluded from citizenship, but were cast in the role—more than the emperor, more than the pope—of the German people's negative other. The ambivalence that had mainly characterized Roman Catholicism's attitude toward Jews would not be a feature of politicized Lutheranism. Luther wanted Germany to be
judenrein.
"They are for us a heavy burden, the calamity of our being; they are a pest in the midst of our lands."
²²

Charles V (1500–1558) was already king of Spain when he was elected Holy Roman Emperor in 1519, two years after Luther's posting of his theses in Wittenberg. Charles presided at the Diet of Worms (1521), at which Luther was condemned, and he would later force the calling of the Council of Trent (1545) to deal with the catastrophe of the Reformation. But Charles was the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella, the expellers of Jews, and he was pleased with Spain's being
judenrein
in his time. He was therefore an unlikely friend to Jews. Catholic princes of Europe were not generally more tolerant of Jews than Protestants, and in Rome, as we shall see, the anti-Jewish current was growing swifter. But as his conflict with the Protestant princes of Germany progressed, Charles V joined this fight as well, ultimately defending Jews as vigorously as Luther attacked them—as if for him, too, Jews now functioned as a symbol around which to wage this war.

In addition to the obvious negative trends, the Reformation also set loose forces that favored Jews, and that would contribute to their liberation—not least of which was the idea of individual rights. The positive side of the Protestant revolution for Jews would become clear particularly in places where the legacy of John Calvin outweighed that of Luther.
²³
Born in France, ensconced in Geneva, Calvin presided over a movement that, unlike Luther's, did not get so swept up in the new spirit of nationalism. Calvinism's embrace of economic enterprise as a work of religion would lay the ideological groundwork for modern capitalism, and in that context Jewish collaboration in financial matters would be welcomed. Where Calvinist Huguenots and dissenters prevailed, especially in parts of France, the Low Countries, and North America, Jews would do far better than they would in most of Germany, with the important exception of banking families in the free cities of Frankfurt and Cologne.

These trends favoring Jews were already in evidence in the energy with which the emperor Charles V finally went to their defense. In 1544, not long before his armies and the Protestant princes went violently to war, Charles issued a new privilege for Jews, one that perhaps went further in establishing Jewish freedoms (not rights) than any previous decree. He outlawed the expulsion of Jews from imperial cities, forbade the forcing of Jews to wear distinctive badges in public, discouraged the charges of ritual murder, and proscribed the shutting down of synagogues. And, as Baron puts it, "the emperor quite bluntly stated here for the first time that '...they shall be allowed to invest and make use of their funds by lending them on interest ... at much higher rates and greater profit than is permitted to Christians.'"
²⁴

That Christians now defined their opposition to each other, in addition to everything else, around Judaism was a new turn in the old story. The tale is usually told as if Jews were passive participants in this conflict, like an inanimate club with which Catholics and Protestants, peasants and burghers, prelates and princes, slugged each other. In fact, Jewish leaders continually found ways to manipulate their ever more dangerous situation, subtly navigating through these separate power centers. And if the emperor used his considerable power in defense of Jews, one reason was the traditional notion of Jews as the emperor's own serfs, but another was that Jews gave this embattled emperor every reason to do so.

The Christian pattern is to highlight the stories of Christian defenders of Jews, when they appear, as if Jews were as passive as beneficiaries as they were as victims. This shows up today in the book-and-movie saga of Oscar Schindler, the Nazi-era German Catholic who is given complete credit for the survival of the Jews on his "list"—as if his Jewish collaborator, the accountant Itzhak Stern, could not equally be remembered as shrewdly using Schindler to save his fellow Jews. The Itzhak Stern of Charles V was Josel of Rosheim, who, Baron says, was elected by German Jewry to represent them to the emperor. "A contributory cause of Charles' firm attitude was the great impression Josel of Rosheim had made on him," Baron writes. "Endowed with a quiet, tactful, and yet magnetic personality, Josel was well-versed in religious as well as political matters and was, at the same time, a realistic statesman ... A most remarkable aspect of Charles' Jewish policies was that he issued his privileges without the customary special compensations ... Exceptionally, the emperor's policy toward his Jewish 'serfs of the Chamber' was thus dictated less by purely fiscal considerations than by the desire to strengthen the declining power of his imperial office."
²⁵
Josel helped the emperor to see how an alliance with Jews could help him, tilting the balance in cities, for example, where barons sought the support of the up-and-coming merchant class. Unfortunately, all of this was too little too late—for Charles V and for his Jews. Charles V would be the last emperor to be crowned by the pope, and though the designation Holy Roman Emperor would continue into the nineteenth century, the Constantinian ideal of a transcending imperial throne, established by Frederick Barbarossa in the twelfth century, would effectively end here. Exhausted by a succession of wars, the interminable Council of Trent (it would drag on until 1563), and the futility of efforts to turn back Protestantism, Charles abdicated in 1556. He took refuge in a monastery, where he died two years later.

The natural response of the Roman Catholic Church to this political and religious chaos was an urgent effort to impose a new uniformity of belief and practice. Despite the ways in which such uniformity had been held up as an ideal in the past, from Nicaea to
Unam Sanctam,
there was an unprecedented totalism—as in totalitarianism—in the Church's response to this crisis. And that had to impact Jews. Despite Charles V's practical alliance with Jews, the long-established Iberian conclusion had come to seem irrefutable among most who fought the heretics: Jews were the source of the corruption. It was a small step for Catholics to assume that, somehow, the Protestant Reformation itself was a result of Jewish influence, and many did. Rational arguments were attached to this deeply irrational fear. In Rome, Spanish clergy who were officials in the papal bureaucracy now came under suspicion of having Jewish ancestry. As Jews had been thought to have poisoned wells in the fourteenth century,
conversos
were now thought to have infiltrated the inner circles of the Church.
²⁶
In 1556, the year of Charles V's abdication, his own son, Philip II, in one of his first acts as his father's successor as king of Spain, could already write that "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."
²⁷

These stresses are reflected in the record of the popes who came after Alexander VI, who had welcomed the exiled Iberian Jews to Rome. They were a succession of pontiffs who, in effect, badgered each other and themselves over what to do about—among so much else—the Jews. In 1520, Pope Leo X (1513–1521) condemned the works of Luther, which were fed to bonfires across Europe. Adrian VI (1522–1523), a Dutchman and the last non-Italian pope until Karol Wojtyla became John Paul II in 1978, had served as regent in converso-hunting Spain. He failed in his main project, to launch a new Crusade against the Turks. When Adrian died, the news was greeted with joy by factions that hated him as a "northern barbarian" and by Romans who hated the work of his Inquisition. Upon Adrian's death, his doctor was honored for having failed to keep him alive.
²⁸

Yet nothing demonstrates the insecurity of the papal position in this chaotic period more than the sack of Rome in 1527. Pope Clement VII (1523–1534) had angered the emperor Charles V by entering into an alliance with King Francis I of France, prompting even the devoutly Catholic Charles to send an army into Rome. Those forces kept the pope prisoner in Castel Sant'Angelo, the former tomb of Hadrian, for seven months. As we saw, the emperor forced a General Council of the Church on the next pope, Paul III (1534–1549). The Council of Trent, named for the small city in the north of Italy where it met, convened in three sessions (1545–48, 1551–52, 1562–63). It was preoccupied throughout with matters of Church reform and doctrinal definition. After all, with Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) cosmology itself was being overturned, an intellectual equivalent, if not a cause, of upheavals in theology to which the council fathers had to respond. Politically, the council was dominated by prelates and rulers from north of the Alps. The pontiff rarely held the initiative at the council, but in any case, its first enemy was clearly defined as the Protestant movement.
²⁹

Jews were referred to dismissively at Trent, or hardly discussed. But the council fathers made one solemn statement on another subject that, over the centuries, would have a direct bearing on Catholic-Jewish relations. A remarkable demonstration of the complexity of Catholic attitudes toward Jews, the statement concerned the crucifixion of Jesus, which had so consistently been laid at the feet of Jews. That was never the whole story, however. The Gospels, and especially Paul, had made an equally emphatic point, which kept getting lost. But now it surfaced with unusual clarity, for Trent affirmed that responsibility for the death of Jesus belonged to sinners—to all persons, that is, in their having sinned. The old question Who killed Jesus? was explicitly answered: Human sinners did. And
our
sins, these Christians declared, mark
us
as responsible. And more than that. "This guilt," the fathers of Trent declared, "seems the more enormous in us than in the Jews, since according to the testimony of the same Apostle [Paul]: 'If they had known it, they would never have crucified the Lord of glory' [1 Corinthians 2:8], while we, on the contrary, professing to know Him, yet denying Him by our actions, seem in some sort to lay violent hands on Him."
³⁰
If this perception had maintained its firm hold on the moral imagination of Christians, the history of Jews would be different. That something else happened, beginning with the Gospels' own scapegoating of Jews, only proves Trent's point, that "we" are sinners.