Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (75 page)

There would be irony enough in this turn in the long story—the Jew despised for his degradation becomes despised for his privilege—but the irony is redoubled by the other turn the story takes at almost the same time. Just as some Jews played leading roles in the invention of modern investment capitalism, others happened to play important parts in the intellectual and political opposition to it. Most socialists were not Jews, but some were, especially in Germany. Of the sixty Jews elected to the German Reichstag between 1871 and 1930, for example, thirty-five were socialists.
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There were few Jews in the early stages of Russian revolutionary activity, but as Marxist socialism spread toward the end of the nineteenth century, more Jews joined the movement against the czar.
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But antisemitism would stamp the culture of socialism too. Karl Marx's rival in the International, the Russian Mikhail Bakunin, supported Marx's theories, but referred to him as "that Jew," an ominous precursor—but in reverse—of the later Soviet policy of never referring to Marx's Jewish roots. Indeed, under Stalin, Marx would be cited against Jews as justification for state-sponsored antisemitism, while the anti-Stalinist Russian Orthodox Church would be stoking hatred of Jews as a way of opposing the state.

By the end of the twentieth century, Russian Communism, such as it was, distinguished itself in nothing so much as its antisemitism. Victor Ilyukhin, a leading Communist legislator in the Russian parliament, attacked Boris Yeltsin in December 1998 by characterizing the post-Soviet economic collapse as a "genocide." He said, "The large-scale genocide wouldn't have been possible if Yeltsin's inner circle had consisted of the main ethnic groups, and not exclusively one group, the Jews." As a
Boston Globe
writer said, Ilyukhin "used one big lie to explain another." There had been no post-Soviet genocide in Russia, and the vast majority of Yeltsin's much-rotated inner circle were never Jews.
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The revolutionary movements of the nineteenth century included socialists, Marxists, Communists, anarchists, and radicals of a dozen different stripes, yet increasingly, to those who felt threatened by them, these figures all began to transmogrify into a shape at once alien and familiar. If the "financiers" violated a basic tenet of the new nationalism by being "internationalists," lo and behold, so did the "socialists." If the word "cabal" applied to Jewish bankers secretly manipulating rates of exchange and interest, it applied equally to the surreptitious network of revolutionary cells. "Materialism" was the spiritual indictment brought against both kinds of Jews—simple greed in one case, "historical materialism" in the other. Each variant echoes the ancient charge, attributed to Paul, that Jewish "law" is opposed to Christian "spirit."

There were major revolutionary outbreaks across the continent in 1830, 1848, and 1871. With each one, masses of Europeans saw ever more sharply who the enemy was. At one extreme or the other, the enemy was the Jew. This dynamic ran diametrically against that of emancipation. Ironically, such omnidirectional hatred was fueled by emancipation. It was predictable, perhaps, that society would find a good reason to resist the authentic liberation of Jews. What could not have been predicted was that society would find two.

The 1871 conflict in Paris dramatized the mortal nature of the threat posed by revolution, and it solidified the image of the Jew as revolutionary. Both happened, in part, because Karl Marx, for whom the Jew was still the financier, celebrated the Paris Communard uprising with rare eloquence. In 1870, the forces of Napoleon III (1808–1873), a self-anointed defender of Catholicism, had been decisively defeated by the Prussian army. The chaos of the Franco-Prussian War's denouement was centered in Paris, which had suffered through a brutal starvation siege. When a settlement was imposed on Napoleon by the victorious Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), the Iron Chancellor and creator of the modern German nation, the citizen army rebelled, joining forces with workers, liberal politicians, so-called bohemians, intellectuals, and others who feared a final return of the ancien régime. Thus the Paris Commune was declared, a revolutionary organization that was to control the city for barely three months. The Commune, in one Communard's words, "proclaimed death to all tyrants, priests and Prussians."
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The regular army, operating from Versailles, cut the city off, and once again starvation and terror stalked Paris, with familiar results. The Communards gave themselves over to a frenzy of executions and murders, to the horror even of liberals elsewhere in Europe, who had begun by supporting them. But Marx was not horrified. At this time he was an obscure haunter of the British Museum in London, where he had lived since being expelled from Germany and France after the failed risings of 1848. He had published a book on economic theory
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and written numerous articles, many appearing in the
New York Herald Tribune.
He had worked with the International Working Men's Association, an organization in the vanguard of the trade union movement. But it was his articulation of the meaning of events in Paris that would make him famous.

After the Commune was crushed by the army on May 30, 1871, Marx delivered, from the safety of London, an address that would be much reprinted. It was a celebration of the Communards entitled "The Civil War in France." Marx said, "Working men's Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not avail to redeem them."
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This romantic defense of the Commune brought Marx his first international fame. Even from London, he became a lion of the European revolution, which would now have its scripture in
Das Kapital.
Marx became the living embodiment of revolution. To European reactionaries—monarchists, the military, Catholics (especially clerics), the landed gentry, the industrial nouveau riche, and much of the burgeoning middle class—one thing soon dominated the perception of Karl Marx, and it was not his fulsome beard. He was "that Jew."

The Roman Catholic Church, as the most tenacious element of the ancien régime, had been a special target of the violence of the Communards. They had taken hostage the archbishop of Paris, and in a frenzy of retribution they murdered him.
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This was a blow that Catholics all over the world felt as something deeply personal. In Rome, where the Italian civil wars were reaching a climax, the killing of the French prelate could only have exacerbated an already monstrous paranoia. After this pivotal year, revolution would be seen as the greatest enemy the Church had ever faced.
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And indeed, from the violence of the Communards to the blood-lust cruelties that followed wherever political economy was restructured according to the theories of Marx, revolution as defined by the international Communist movement would prove itself to be the enemy of the human. Yet now, in part because of the way Marx was perceived, this radical new threat was defined in the oldest, narrowest terms of all.

So deeply ingrained in the Catholic imagination is the identification of the revolutionary and the Jew that it keeps resurfacing. In November 1998, a Catholic priest attached to the Vatican Congregation for the Causes of the Saints responded to negative reactions by some Jews to the news that the "cause" of Pius XII had been progressing toward canonization by evoking this old canard. The priest—the relator, or official advocate—for the controversial pope's canonization was a Jesuit named Peter Gumpel. When Aaron Lopez, Israel's ambassador to the Holy See, asked that the canonization be delayed until the Vatican's full wartime archives were opened, Father Gumpel bristled. He was reported by the Austrian newspaper
Der Standard
as saying that such criticism "makes one wonder what the Jewish faction has against Catholics." Jews who criticize Pius XII, he was quoted as saying, may be "massive accomplices in the destruction of the Catholic Church." Father Gumpel was referring to the history of Jews in anti-Catholic Communism, from its origins to its flowering under Stalin. "The
Communist Manifesto
of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels has Jewish origins, as well as the assertion that religion is the opiate of the masses. Eighty per cent of the initial Soviet regime was Jewish, so Jews were the managers of Communism."
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Putting Father Gumpel's statements together with the nearly simultaneous charges of Victor Ilyukhin in the Russian Duma, we have a contemporary replay of the full range of the tradition: Jews being blasted in Rome as Communists while being branded in Moscow by Communists as agents of anti-Russian genocide. In a subsequent interview with the
National Catholic Reporter,
Father Gumpel insisted his remarks had been taken out of context. "I have many Jewish friends," he said. He had not addressed his criticism "to Jews in general. That would be false and unfair. But since the Catholic Church is making an examination of conscience, what I said is that we would appreciate it if that would happen on the other side as well. Some Jews have greatly damaged the Catholic Church."

In the clarifying interview, Father Gumpel insisted on the relevance of his basic point. "It is a historical fact that many of the Bolsheviks who persecuted the Catholic Church, as well as the Orthodox Church in Russia, were Jews. That is the simple truth." It is also reminiscent of the Vatican's having characterized the Galileo affair as one of "mutual miscomprehension," as if there were errors on both sides. Thus, Father Gumpel said, "it would be a good idea for both parties, Jews as well as Catholics, to admit guilt."

Gerhard Bodendorfer, the chief of the coordinating body for Christian-Jewish dialogue in Austria, protested Father Gumpel's remarks in a letter to the Jesuits and the apostolic nuncio in Austria: "I am amazed that an official collaborator in a highly responsible Vatican position could hold these old, obviously undistilled prejudices that are still hawked today. Conspiracy theories about world Judaism, combined with anti-Communist polemics, come out of the lowest drawer of antisemitism. Gumpel's behavior shows that he obviously did not find in the body of actual Church doctrine that such antisemitism is clearly and completely condemned."
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Father Gumpel's defensiveness for Pius XII is understandable, perhaps. What is instructive is that this pope's canonically appointed advocate should have such visceral convictions about Communism as a Jewish crime. Pius XII's defenders argue that, in all prudence, there was no overt action that he could have taken against the Nazis or against Hitler. He was limited to discreet, behind-the-scenes diplomacy. But the question arises: Why could he not have responded to the Nazis with the uncompromising ferocity of his responses to Communism? We referred in passing to this earlier: No Catholic-born Nazi—not Goebbels, Himmler, or Bormann; not even Adolf Hitler, who died with his name still on the rolls of the Catholic Church, and for whom the Catholic primate of Germany ordered the Requiem sung after his suicide—was ever excommunicated for being a Nazi. But, as Hans Küng observed, Pius XII "did not show the slightest inhibitions after the war, in 1949, about excommunicating all Communist members throughout the world at a stroke."
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That decisive act, taken as a matter of moral absolutism, without regard for the consequences to the privileges of the Church, or even to the safety of Catholics behind the Iron Curtain, remains an unrefuted measure of what Pius XII could have done in 1943. The Catholic Church's strong opposition to Communism has never been in doubt.

The most important point of contact between Nazism and the Church was that twin identification of the Jew as financier and as Communist. On the Catholic side, the identification was given expression, to cite an example familiar to American readers, by Father Charles Coughlin (1891–1979), the radio priest who had an enormous following in the United States in the 1930s. In the threshold year of 1938, his newspaper,
Social Justice,
published
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
a forged document that first appeared in Russia in 1905, and that purported to be transcripts from a secret World Zionist Congress. Often characterized as a blueprint for world domination by Jews, the
Protocols
is a mishmash of commentary on the press, finance, government, and history. Its usefulness to anti-Semites—particularly in Germany during the 1930s—consisted more in the much-touted
idea
of proven conspiracy than in proof of anything real. The diabolical center of the plot, of course, was the international cabal of Jewish financiers, and world domination would be achieved by Jewish control of money. The
Protocols
was useful to Coughlin as part of his campaign of opposition to the gold standard. He preferred what he called "Gentile silver." The worship of gold had come from Jews, who believed, as the priest said in a broadcast sermon, "gold is sacred, gold is wealth, gold is more precious than men and the homes in which they live." That was, he said, "the theory of the European Jew." Closer to home, bankers on Wall Street were "modern Shylocks ... grown fat and wealthy."
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Coughlin was a switch-hitting anti-Semite who also regularly denounced what he called "communistic Jews." In one
Social Justice
editorial, again in 1938, the priest wrote, "Almost without exception, the intellectual leaders—if not the foot and hand leaders—of Marxist atheism in Germany were Jews." The historian Alan Brinldey points out that this and other slanders in the editorial were in fact plagiarized by Coughlin from a speech given by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief.
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