Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (66 page)

While Paul IV was bringing the mind of the Inquisition fully into the papacy, he was also rejecting reconciling overtures from Elizabeth I of England (1533–1603), an element in what made her father's split with Rome permanent. Obviously, the culture-wide trauma of the Reformation was part of what prompted the shift in papal strategy toward Jews. For centuries the conversion of Jews had certainly been on the Catholic agenda, but never exclusively so, mainly because the insecurity that resulted from Jewish denial of Christian claims had been only subliminally felt. From the first generation of the Jesus movement, Jewish rejection of Jesus as Messiah had posed a mortal threat, but perhaps for that very reason, it had been repressed. As an anxiety denied, it had served all the more efficiently as the fuel of anti-Jewish hatred. Yet within the Catholic Church, prior to this shift, as the historian Heiko Oberman puts it, "hatred of the Jews did not exist apart from protection of the Jews; these were two sides of the same coin."
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But now, with a papal-enforced ghettoization, which would be imitated in cities across Europe, the balance of the age-old ambivalence was upset. It could not be maintained in a Church under siege.

On the surface, it appeared that the Roman Catholic Church had been essentially unchallenged in the West since Constantine. Even the quake of the great East-West schism in the eleventh century had been shaken off by the triumph of the First Crusade and the subsequent twelfth-century renaissance, the coming of age of Christendom. Church contests with kings and emperors, and even between rival claimants to the Chair of Peter, had sent aftershocks jolting through Europe, but it seemed the Church always emerged from such struggles stronger, rescued in one age after another by great-souled mystics and thinkers whose loyalties to God and the Church were the same thing. But the Protestants were something else. So were the continent-wide forces of social tumult and class conflict, of scientific revolution—Copernicus!—and nascent capitalism. The feudal age, in which the Church had beheld its own ideal, was clearly dead. What was replacing it? The Reformation, with attendant new nationalisms and economies, had by now gravely shaken the confidence the Church felt in itself as the inerrant Body of Christ. Perhaps for the first time since the conversion of Constantine, the Church was in need of reassurance. Was that the clue? As a conversion had provided the rescue before, so now. But not the conversion of one man only. Nothing could have assuaged the Reformation-era insecurity of the Roman Catholic Church like the mass conversion, at long last, of the Jewish people.

For Christians attuned to their own Scriptures and to the intellectual concept of "fulfillment," such a prospect necessarily evoked an image of the Last Days. Stow argues that Pope Paul IV was at the mercy of just such an eschatological hope.
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The sweep of heresy through Europe was taken as a sign of the Antichrist's coming, the climax of salvation history. To the inquisitor pope, the Christian's duty at such a moment was clear—the personal and institutional embrace of an absolute discipline. "Let there be one faith," he declared, "and there will be one peace; let there be one confession in the Church, and one path of brotherhood. Remove the golden calves; remove the haughty; let there not be Rehoboam and Jeroboam, Jerusalem and Samaria; let there be one flock and one pastor."
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Nothing better captures the spirit of the Counter-Reformation than Paul IV's urgent effort to bring about the purification of the Church at once, immediately. For an extreme ascetic like him, the swift conversion of the Jews was central to such a plan. In the face of the collapse of everything he believed in, there was only one thing to do, which was to impose order in every way he could, by whatever means were required. Therefore, oppose Protestants outside the Church, impose discipline within the Church. But especially,
convert the Jews.
Only that would close the fault line that had cracked the rock of the Church from the very beginning. It would not just signal but would accomplish the completion of salvation history, as foretold in Paul's Epistle to the Romans, where it is written that the conversion of the Jews will mean "nothing less than a resurrection from the dead!"
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As Stow writes, "The conversion of the Jews would also establish order. But this order would possess a special virtue. With it would come an end to all anxiety about the validity of Catholic truth and the stability of the Catholic world. For the order which their conversion would establish was the millennium. The attempt to convert the Jews thus suggests that the desire for order as a solution predisposed men to seek the ultimate order."
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Paul IV's successors would make adjustments to the "discipline" he imposed, with one pope doing away with restrictions and another reimposing them. When Jews refused this new and ultimate "invitation" to convert, popes would react with a bitterness that recalls Luther's, although lacking his invective. Pius V (1566–1572) would expel Jews from the Papal States, all but Rome and Anconia, where they continued to be useful points of contact with trade. Gregory XIII (1572–1585) would send missionaries into the ghetto, requiring Jews to listen to conversionist sermons in the one synagogue left to them. Some popes would ease up on Jews—Clement IX (1667—1669) would do away with the carnival foot race of Jews—and others would crack down again. But for more than three hundred years, no pope, "not even the most humane and beneficent," in Hermann Vogelstein's phrase,
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would act to dismantle the squalid ghetto at the foot of Vatican Hill. It would take the "godless" soldiers of the French Republic to do that in 1796. After the defeat of Napoleon, Pope Pius VII (1800–1823) would order the walls of the ghetto rebuilt. It was not finally abolished until the popes lost control of Rome to the "secular" forces of Italian nationalism in 1870,
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an event to which we will return. Suffice to note here that on September 3, 2000, the last pope to maintain the Roman ghetto, Pius IX (1846–1878), a pope who referred to Jews as "dogs," was beatified by John Paul II. Beatification marks the penultimate step to sainthood.
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Long before losing control of the Roman ghetto, however, the popes had lost control of anti-Jewish conversionism and what it led to. Not even Paul IV's imposition of "discipline" and "order" had bent the ancient stiff-necks. In the next chapter, we will try to understand what went into the Jewish refusal, and what it meant. Meanwhile, the Church itself was undercutting the conversionist program with the inexorable spread from the Iberian fringe of
limpieza de sangre,
the new idea of blood purity. When Paul IV, in violation of tradition and the near-unanimous policies of his predecessors, ratified the 1547 Statute of Toledo, forbidding the appointment to that city's cathedral of any Christian descended from Jews, he was participating in the destruction of the one motive a self-interested, if not necessarily religiously pure, Jew might have had to convert. If accepting baptism did not enable Jews to escape pariah status within the Catholic culture, why would most convert? This may not have been a question for the eschatologically minded Paul IV—the Jew would convert because he had seen the light—but it had to be a question for those increasingly desperate Jews who were no more exempt than anyone from the demoralization and doubt of the era. In effect, the arrival of blood purity regulations spelled the end of the Church's anti-Jewish missionary effort that had begun in the thirteenth century.

But the arrival of
limpieza
regulations in the heart of the Church marked the beginning of something too. More and more of the central institutions of the Roman Catholic Church, from religious orders to Catholic guilds to dioceses, began to imitate the Toledo Cathedral in discriminating against those of Jewish blood. At bottom, this phenomenon represented a radicalizing of the mistrust of Jews, and an institutionalizing of it. As the embattled sixteenth century wore on, with the Reformation split widening instead of closing, and with the newly "disciplined" Jews still refusing to convert, resentful suspicion of Jews sank its taproot deeper than ever. A fatal paranoia about "Jewish blood" was next.

The age-old pattern was repeating itself: Fresh Christian initiatives toward Jews—rational apologetics, say, or Talmud-based argumentation—leads to fresh Jewish refusal—few converts, or converts who can't be trusted—which leads to a new level of Christian hatred—the violent Inquisition, the punitive
limpieza.
Finally, the Catholic Church went further than merely ratifying such regulations enacted by its subsidiary organizations. In 1611, Pope Paul V (1605–1621) decreed that the blood purity standard would apply in Rome too, that "persons of Jewish descent shall not be admitted to canonicates of cathedrals, dignities in brotherhoods, and offices entrusted with the care of souls."
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This violation of the essential openness of the Christian message to all, and of the equality before God of all the baptized, did not take. No Catholic would affirm it today. Blood purity regulations were eventually revoked, even in Spain, where they were made irrelevant by the passage of time and the complete absence of Jews. Nevertheless, this introduction of a distinction by race into the central institutions of Christianity—a distinction assuming not mere racial "diversity" but a biological divide of racial superiority and racial inferiority—stands as a watershed not just in Church history but in human history. "Nineteenth-century racial anti-Semites never claimed this as a precedent," Marc Saperstein comments, "but the Spanish 'purity of blood' legislation was an ominous venture into new conceptions of Jewishness."
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We noted this earlier. The point here is that, for a crucial period, a time that served as the incubator of modernity, this narrowly "Spanish" idea—a heresy if ever there was one—became a Catholic idea.

When Cardinal Cassidy forthrightly acknowledged the connection between the Church-enforced ghettos of Europe and the death camps of the Nazi era, in May 1998 and again, in my presence, in March 1999, he was addressing groups of Jewish and Catholic scholars on the subject of the Vatican declaration "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah," of which he was the principal author. Having revisited the era in which violent anti-Judaism moved from the streets of the Christian mobs into the sanctuary of the Church, we should return to the Vatican's present-day assessment of this history. "We Remember," eleven years in the making, was promulgated as a definitive Catholic examination of conscience on the Church's relationship to the crimes of the Holocaust.

Regarding Cardinal Cassidy's stark acknowledgment, as he put it to me, of the Church-enforced ghetto as the "antechamber of Nazi death camps," it must be noted that the official statement itself makes no such direct connection. "We Remember" denies the causal link between the admitted history of Catholic anti-Judaism and the Nazi hatred of Jews. The document speaks of modern racial antisemitism as if it were unrelated to what had gone before. "By the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century ... theories began to appear," the text states, and the impersonal, agentless diction seems full of implication, "which denied the unity of the human race, affirming an original diversity of races. In the twentieth century, National Socialism used these ideas as a pseudoscientific basis for a distinction between so-called Nordic-Aryan races and supposedly inferior races."
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The statement firmly attaches such a racial distinction to unnamed sources outside the Church. "The Shoah was the work of a thoroughly modern neo-pagan regime. Its anti-Semitism had its roots outside of Christianity." The text goes on to cite "the difference which exists between anti-Semitism based on theories contrary to the constant teaching of the Church on the unity of the human race and on the equal dignity of all races and peoples, and the longstanding sentiment of mistrust and hostility that we call anti-Judaism, of which, unfortunately, Christians have also been guilty."

"We Remember" was followed up with "Memory and Reconciliation," the Vatican statement that appeared in March 2000. In a short passage of that document, entitled "Christians and Jews," the points of "We Remember" are simply repeated, with emphasis given again to the distinction between the Church and its members, and to the non-Christian nature of "the pagan ideology that was Nazism."

These assertions in the Church's most solemn attempts at self-examination raise numerous questions, including, again, that of the apparently exonerating distinction between "the Church as such" and "Christians." The point here, however, concerns the claim to a "constant teaching of the Church on the unity of the human race and on the equal dignity of all races and peoples." It is hard to see how the history of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries upholds such "constant teaching." The Inquisition-inspired adoption by "the Church as such" of the blood purity standard, in particular, would seem to undercut this central claim of "We Remember." Doesn't the
limpieza
legacy suggest that the Church itself was part of what enabled the movement from a religion-based hatred of Jews to a race-based hatred? The seventeenth century is a long time ago, but even in the twentieth, Catholics up for appointment to "offices entrusted with the care of souls" were at times required to "display their genealogical charts," as Rosemary Radford Ruether puts it, to show that there were no Jews among their ancestors. Blood purity regulations, Ruether asserts, "remained on the books in Catholic religious orders, such as the Jesuits, until the twentieth century. They are the ancestor of the Nazi Nuremberg Laws."
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