Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (72 page)

When the Man on Horseback arrived in 1799 to draw order out of chaos, the first promise of Jewish equality seemed fulfilled. Napoleon I ruthlessly imposed a dictatorial political dominance, but he also protected and extended the principle of equality before the law. The Napoleonic Code eradicated old barriers of social rank, religious supremacy, and racial distinction. Wherever Napoleon's armies went across the continent, they broke down ghetto walls behind which Jews had been confined—even in Rome.
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The liberation of the Roman ghetto, within sight of the Vatican, was Napoleon's way of demonstrating to the Holy See that his power would not be turned back. As the Church, dating to the Fourth Lateran Council, had used laws requiring special badges and clothing to dramatize its authority over Jews, so now Napoleon, abolishing the yellow badge
(sciamanno)
of Roman Jews, dramatized his authority over the Church.
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Pope Pius VII (1800–1823) had humiliatingly traveled to Paris in 1804 to crown Napoleon emperor, only to be insulted when Napoleon placed the crown on his head himself. The pope would subsequently excommunicate the emperor, but the anathema was no Russian winter, and Napoleon weathered the Church's disapproval. Now he had taken Rome—the tricolor waved from a mast above Castel Sant Angelo—and he sent his engineers into Trastevere to batter down the gates of the ghetto, freeing its residents.

After 250 years, conditions in the ghetto had become deplorable beyond anything Paul IV, who established it, could have anticipated. Remember that his primary purpose in imposing the harsh, restrictive regime had been to force the mass conversion of Jews. The ghetto should have been temporary. Instead, extended over time, it had led to "the complete abasement of the Jews of Rome," in the words of the scholar Hermann Vogelstein.
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Ghetto Jews were the most degraded people in Europe. "Life in the ghetto," Kenneth Stow wrote, "was destined to degenerate on all levels, especially cultural and social ones." Not even the religious genius that had initially transformed ghetto exile into a new image of God survived the "irremediable stasis ... The closed physical space of the ghetto vanquished the open fictitious one of the original holy community."
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Illiteracy, the loss of the Italian language, multiple generations of chronic illness, grinding poverty, overcrowding, and regular inundations of the foul waters of an uncontrolled Tiber River had all ravaged the Roman Jew physically and mentally. To those who hated Jews, their condition confirmed the stereotype of their inferior status, while to the forces of the Enlightenment, their condition epitomized the irrational cruelty of the old order. Thus Jewish emancipation had become, even to the secularists who would have had contempt for the religion of Judaism, the most dramatic symbol of the end of the ancien régime. It would not be the last time that the Jewish enclave by the Tiber would be used to prove a point of absolute political and military control.

The Jews of Europe responded to this new situation in a variety of ways. Moses Mendelssohn's (1729–1786) earlier translations into German of the Hebrew Scriptures and rabbinic texts were harbingers of Jewish interest in a cultural rapprochement. Enlightenment Jews, like Mendelssohn, saw no contradiction between civic equality, cultural participation, and faithful religious observance. Some, like Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881), would leave religious observance behind, although accepting baptism. Others, like the lyric poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), would formally convert to Christianity, less from religious or even political reasons than for broadly aesthetic ones. Heine called baptism the "entrance ticket into the community of European culture."
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In the early days of Emancipation, with the grip of religion apparently broken, the pressure on Jews to convert seemed dissipated, and in fact relatively few Jews were, in Heine's word, "sprinkled." For example, between 1812 and 1846, fewer than 4,000 Jews out of Prussia's total of 123,000 formally embraced Christianity. Most of those were probably in Berlin, home of Mendelssohn, where a majority of Jews, apparently, were baptized.
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Mendelssohn's own grandson, the composer Felix Mendelssohn, was "sprinkled."

Some Jews, like Karl Marx's father, would enthusiastically embrace the Enlightenment of the philosophes, shedding religious practice and particular creed as easily as Thomas Jefferson had, abandoning Yahweh for the God of deism. When Napoleon took control of Trier in 1803, folding it into his Confederation of the Rhineland, the senior Marx resolved to become his family's first full citizen of their hometown. A "man of reason," he set out to become not a rabbi but a lawyer. I am referring to him rather awkwardly here because there is a confusion about his name. Isaiah Berlin says that Heinrich Marx was born with the surname Levi, and his given name was not Heinrich, but Herschel.
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Karl Marx's father's personal "emancipation" from
his
father, the rabbi Marx Levi, occurred when he rejected "Levi" in favor of the more neutral "Marx." As for "Herschel," that name would soon enough seem as much an obstacle to advancement as Levi would have been.

In 1808, Napoleon had surprised Jews by introducing anti-Jewish restrictions of his own—a sign of his devotion to the Enlightenment project of Jewish makeover. But Napoleon was still the continental emancipator of Jews, the demolisher of ghetto walls, Jews greeted his armies as liberators, an image Napoleon cultivated as he moved against Moscow. He hoped to draw support, in that campaign, from Polish and Russian Jews, and did. That is to say, Napoleon, even while attempting to suppress Jewish "nationhood" in the lands he controlled, was exploiting it in the territory he coveted. The strategy fell short, of course, and Napoleon failed.

The period of reaction that followed Waterloo was bad news for Jews. As obvious beneficiaries of the social and political revolutions dating to 1789, they could now be scapegoated for the negative consequences of those upheavals. This is the beginning (we will see its further development later) of the paranoid and near-permanent association in the popular mind of Jews and revolution. Rolling back the latter would mean roping in the former. The Emancipation suffered its biggest setback in 1815, as forces of the old order rallied. They dubbed themselves the Holy Alliance. In France and the Netherlands, the rights of Jews would be hedged, but would survive. In Germany, Austria, and Italy the Emancipation would collapse. In Rome, Pope Pius VII was restored as a temporal ruler by the Congress of Vienna, the conference of European powers that restored the monarchies with agreed-upon territorial adjustments. Pius VII celebrated the defeat of his mortal enemy—Napoleon had dared to take him prisoner—by reclaiming the Papal States, and by immediately reinstating the ghetto.

Ghettos were reestablished in other cities, but only in Rome and a handful of other places were the walls that Napoleon had demolished actually rebuilt.
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This pattern would repeat itself. When the anti-papal revolutionaries of 1848 declared a republic in Rome, the pope was forced to flee, afraid for his life. This pope, Pius IX (1846–1878), had begun his reign inclined to abolish the ghetto, but when the revolution was overthrown, so were such liberalizing impulses, especially regarding Jews, whom the Vatican now blamed for its ordeal. As Vogelstein writes, "A deputation of the Jewish community which called on Cardinal Savelli was told that Jews were responsible for the long duration of the revolutionary government."
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In Trier, meanwhile, events had been less tumultuous after the Congress of Vienna, but they had been equally transforming. The Rhineland had been taken from France and assigned to Prussia, the beginning of its effort to draw the states of Germany together into one nation. Almost immediately, in 1816, Prussia abrogated the Napoleonic Code in the Rhineland, and prepared new restrictions against Jews.
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Herschel Marx was informed that his chosen profession, the law, was no longer open to him because, deist or not, Marx or not, he was still a Jew.

Herschel Marx did not hesitate. In 1817, little more than a year before his son's birth, despite his family history and his brother Samuel's status as the chief rabbi of Trier, he renounced Judaism altogether and was baptized a Christian.
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Trier, then as now, was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, but its new Prussian overlords from east of the Rhine were Lutheran. The state religion was Lutheran. For a man of the Enlightenment, Roman Catholicism was an anachronism in any case. So when Marx, ne Levi, changed his first name from Herschel to Heinrich, he did so accepting baptism into Trier's small Lutheran congregation. Later, the Prussian government, to bolster Protestant prestige in the Catholic pilgrimage center, would convert the
Konstantin-basilika
into the Lutheran Church of Our Savior, as it remains today, with a congregation of fewer than three hundred. On the Sunday in 1998 that I joined them for worship, they seemed lost in the vast space of the former imperial audience hall. Constantine's spirit was effectively evoked, though, by the shimmering gold cross that hung above the altar, where the emperor's throne would once have stood.

Karl Marx's mother, Henriette, would be baptized a Lutheran too, although not for eight years, in 1825, when her own father had died.
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Thus Karl Marx, the son of a Protestant lawyer, was born to a woman still a Jew. According to Jewish tradition, Hitler would be technically correct in referring to him, a century later, as "that Jew Marx."
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Of course, Marx was never any such thing to himself or, despite their poignant genealogy, to his parents. Heinrich Marx saw to the christening of Karl in 1824, at age six, when admission to the public school in Prussian Trier presumed it. The weight of the past pressing "like a nightmare"
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on the young Marx was a distant past—those fiercely resistant rabbis—and an immediate one. His father was a "timorous lawyer," in Isaiah Berlin's phrase, "whose life was spent in social and personal compromise."
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One needn't stretch Karl Marx on the psychoanalytic couch of his Freudian critics to see that his insight into the "contradictory"
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character of human progress—the inevitability, for example, of class conflict—arose from the contradictions of his own condition.

But it was his sensitivity to the conditions of the dispossessed that made Karl Marx a historic figure. He was born at the dawn of a period of massive social change, and he became the voice of those who would be displaced by it. In the nineteenth century, the population of Europe would more than double. That increase alone would have accounted for the pressures of scarcity, not only of resources and land but of opportunity, that would make life miserable for the great majority. Adding in the economic shifts of industrialization, the cultural shifts of urbanization, and the deracination of secularism—why should a huge underclass not have felt abandoned? Why should they not have recognized their champion in a man who could write, as Marx did in the famous close of
The Communist Manifesto,
"Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!
"
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In a society divided into three estates—the clergy, the nobility, and all the others—it was the first two, of course, that had a world to lose. At the time of the 1789 Revolution, France was a nation of 25 million. The first estate, consisting of 100,000 clerics, owned 10 percent of the land. The second estate, including 400,000 aristocrats, owned 25 percent of the land.
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The gross inequity of this division of resources, exemplifying the inequity that cut through every aspect of life, was underwritten by a religious claim of divine right. God himself—God would continue to be "he"; not even the most radical of revolutionaries challenged the idea of male dominance—was seen to have ordained the social structure. A challenge to its order, and this is implied in the identification of church and state, was sacrilege. If the Catholic Church was to be attacked, it had to be attacked not only for its property and privilege but, more importantly, for the theology that sustained both.

License to launch that attack came from those who followed the trail of Spinoza and Leibnitz, the eighteenth-century philosophers who addressed themselves not to the peasantry or the poor of cities but to the urban middle classes and marginal aristocrats. The epitome of Enlightenment philosophy was François Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire (1694–1778). After being imprisoned at age twenty-four, and then exiled for insulting the Crown, he devoted himself to justice, as the relatively privileged Enlightenment culture would define it. "It is the man who sways our minds by the prevalence of reason and the native force of truth," he wrote, "not they who reduce mankind to a state of slavery by force and downright violence ... that claims our reverence and admiration."
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Voltaire made everything of the "force and downright violence" that had been used by the Inquisition against the Jews. For him, the Inquisition defined the Church as the venal opposite of all that he and the other advocates of reason stood for.
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He focused on the Catholic Church because of its dominance, but his true target was religion as such. In an essay in the
Philosophical Dictionary,
Voltaire describes a vision in which, like a latter-day Ezekiel, he is transported to a "desert all covered with piles of bones." His guide, a genie, tells him what he is looking at. "He began with the first pile. 'These,' he said, 'are the twenty-three thousand Jews who danced before a calf, together with the twenty-four thousand who were killed while fornicating with Midianitish women ... In the other piles are the bones of the Christians slaughtered by each other because of metaphysical disputes. They are divided into several heaps of four centuries each ... Here,' said the spirit, 'are the twelve million native Americans killed in their own land because they had not been baptized.'"
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