Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (77 page)

Yet Pius IX represented to Catholic liberals of my generation the Church's great stumble. We associated him with old battles that would never need to be refought, or so we thought. We had a first hint that we were wrong when the Vatican revoked Hans Küng's
missio canonica,
his right to teach as a Catholic, in 1979. Kung was the dominant theological model of our generation, and what brought the wrath of the Vatican down on him, revealingly, was his book
Infallible? An Inquiry.
Published in 1970, the work drew the Vatican's full fire only once John Paul II had come to the throne in 1978, and it soon became clear that he took Küng's challenge personally.

John Paul II, holding back a second tidal wave of liberalism, had reason to identify with Pius IX's resistance to the first wave. Both men were shaped by early traumas, both saw the very existence of the Church as at stake, and both, for that reason, when their authority to defend the Church was challenged, responded by claiming that authority more resolutely than ever. It was with survival in mind that Pius IX demanded the ultimate gesture of support fom the bishops of his Vatican Council. Their solemn definition of the doctrine of papal infallibility, to be exercised outside the context of conciliar collegiality, makes sense only as an act of spiritual resistance against the direst of worldly threats.

To those bishops, many of whom had been targeted by revolutionaries, many driven from their palaces by mobs, modernism was no mere school of thought. It was an assault in every sense, and often it was an armed assault. And it was worldly indeed, as in worldwide, seeming to sweep from one nation—one diocese, one city—to another. With the collapse of Catholic France, with Otto von Bismarck's anti-Catholic Kulturkampf coming within the year in Germany, followed soon after by a democratizing movement within the Church itself (to be condemned as the heresy "Americanism") and then Great Britain's support for anticlerical nationalism,
²⁵
it could feel as if the world itself were turning against the barque of Peter. And not only the world, but now Italy. The pope and the bishops were braced.

Within days of the French defeat at Sedan, Italian nationalist forces mustered at the city limits of Rome. The French withdrew without a fight, but the pope's own soldiers vowed to hold the city. After a brief siege, however, the pope ordered the white flag of surrender flown. The fathers of the First Vatican Council dispersed, leaving their agenda to be picked up again ninety years later. On September 20, 1870, the soldiers of Giuseppe Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel entered Rome.
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That date is enshrined in the name of the proud boulevard, Via Venti Settembre, that runs past the Quirinale, the palace that since the sixteenth century had served as the summer residence of popes, but that—a further indignity—now became the residence of the new constitutional monarch. (Since 1947, the Quirinale has been the residence of Italy's president.) Pius IX became a self-styled "prisoner of the Vatican," where the popes would remain until Pius XI came to terms with Mussolini in the Lateran Treaty of 1929. The treaty's most important provision recognized papal sovereignty over the ninety-acre enclave of Vatican City.

What did all this mean for Jews? We have seen how the nineteenth-century ebb and flow of Risorgimento had a way of leaving Jews high and dry. In 1796, the ghetto of Rome was liberated, then quickly restored. That pattern repeated itself in 1808 and 1816, in 1830 and 1831, in 1848 and 1849. We have seen how authority over "the pope's Jews" became a potent emblem of the power struggle between the Church and the liberalism it opposed. The Jew was a familiar figure of opposition. The catch phrase used to describe the Church's mortal enemies became the triad "Freemasons, Protestants, and Jews." To a great majority of Catholics, the emancipated and resurgent Jew had become a symbol of all who despised the Church. Thus the politics of reaction in an age of revolution was indeed a factor in the unapologetic Catholic determination to keep the Jews subservient. Catholic ultramontanism, "a movement which sought to marginalize liberal tendencies within the Church," as the historian Jacques Romberg put it, "mobilized antisemitism for its campaign against liberalism."
²⁷

But Catholic theology, stuck in its first groove, was an equally important factor. Saint Augustine's notion that the Jews were to be allowed to survive, but not to thrive assumed the continuance of Judaism as a distinct and restricted entity within the larger Christian culture. Emancipation was a negation of this theology, and the idea of assimilation without conversion was theologically unthinkable. Distinction, restriction, and palpable inferiority defined the Jews as "the witness people." Popes had taken this notion for granted as the ground of Church policy since the
Sicut Judaeis
was promulgated by Callixtus II after the First Crusade.
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Then, and at other times, as we saw, popes made crucial interventions against murderous Christian mobs, although without ever confronting the relationship of the "official" theological denigration to the "unofficial" massacre. Nevertheless, most popes came to think of themselves as the protectors of Jews, and so it often appeared to Jews as well. But some popes, especially since Paul IV's
Cum Nimis Absurdum,
which established the Roman ghetto in 1555, had applied the theologically sanctioned restrictions so ruthlessly as to make any idea of papal protection absurd.

By 1870, when all this came to a climax, Jews took for granted "the violence of the Church's regime," in Vogelstein's phrase.
²⁹
In fact, the papal policy of enforced ghettoization of Jews, whether its violence was overt or implicit, was an inevitable consequence of Catholic theology. That the ghetto seemed only more and more anomalous to non-Catholics as the modern era progressed did nothing to show Church authorities why, in this new age, with the Church in full retreat to the ninety-acre enclave of the Vatican, the ghetto did not make more religious sense than ever. The more besieged the papacy, the stouter the ghetto walls. Hence the Roman ghetto, practically alone of the urban Jewish concentrations in Europe, kept being restored in this period, its gates rebuilt after every destruction. This was so not despite the ghetto's cruel restrictions but because of them. The way to Jewish "emancipation" had always been clear in the eyes of the Church, and indeed the ghetto had initially been established to hurry Jews along that way. And the way, of course, was baptism.

"The pope's Jews" were still required to attend conversionist sermons. Jewish children were constantly at risk of surreptitious baptism, being claimed for Christ in Church-sanctioned kidnappings.
³⁰
It should be noted that this dogged emphasis on conversion indicates that by now the Church had pulled back from the temptation represented by the blood purity laws of the Inquisition. A Catholic theology that still presumed a goal of Jewish conversion assumed the religious inferiority of Judaism, but decidedly not the biological or racial inferiority of individual Jews. Judaism, as a religion of the radical rejection of Jesus, might be defined as innately evil, but Jews, taken as persons, were not. This position had come to dominate nineteenth-century Catholicism, although not universally so, as we saw in relation to the blood purity requirements of the Jesuit constitutions, which were maintained into the twentieth century.

Still, a recovered conversionism separated the Church from the growing racial antisemitism of the era, even if that could trace at least one of its roots back to the Inquisition's blood purity idea that the Church had by now mainly rejected. Some of the new anti-Semites were themselves Catholic, but the movement was more secular than religious. The new "racialism" would not hesitate to apply the pseudoscience of biogenics to Jews, a rejection of any method of bringing "Semites" into the social or national mainstream. The word "antisemitism" was coined in 1879 by one of its proponents, Wilhelm Marr, a German journalist who warned that Jews were not only a threat to the superior Aryan race, but would take over the world if they could.
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Such paranoia would be a hallmark of racial antisemitism. Another would be—and we saw it in relation to Karl Marx, and Spinoza before him—the belief that religious conversion did nothing to alter a Jew's identity.

As much as the Catholic Church had rejected that idea, it had rejected emancipation, which earned it the further enmity of Jews and liberal critics. The liberals argued that the degradation of Jews—what "proved" the inferiority of Judaism, making Jews "the witness people"—had been caused by the way Christians had treated them, instead of by the "blindness" of the Jewish religion. Some Catholic theologians advanced this "liberal" argument, as Abelard had done centuries before. Thus, in the words of Jacques Kornberg, characterizing the nineteenth-century opponents of papal absolutism, "Jews and liberal Catholics had a common enemy. Hatred of Jews was nourished by the same survivals of the Middle Ages that had produced the triumphs of Ultramontanism, the Syllabus of Errors (1864), and the decree on Papal Infallibility (1870), namely the belief that 'we alone are in possession of the full saving truth.'"
³²

For the Church establishment, the still valid—because ancient—proof of that saving truth could be seen in the deserved fate of Jews. Jewish emancipation untied to a prior renunciation of Jewish error was a violation of the order with which God, in Christ, had redeemed the world. That was why, every time the nineteenth-century popes retook control of Rome, the first thing they did was to reinstate the ghetto.

At each of these reversals, the situation of the Jews in the dank enclave by the Tiber worsened. In 1867, they were hard hit by cholera. Once the ghetto population had exceeded ten thousand, but now less than half that remained, and nearly half of those were supported by charity.
³³
"The economic situation of the Jews of Rome was perhaps never so desperate" as on September 20, 1870. "Though the joy that greeted the Italian troops as liberators was general," Vogelstein writes, "no class of the population had better ground for gratitude and happiness than did the Jews. They had been held in the deepest degradation, with no liberty and in miserable poverty, not even protected against having their children stolen for baptism. Now they knew that the day of freedom had dawned, that it would bring them human rights and human dignity, that it would give them home and country along with the other inhabitants of Rome. For the new Kingdom of Italy recognized no differences in rights among its subjects. The hour of emancipation had now finally struck for the Jews, who had been longest and hardest pressed in the oldest community of the West."
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From 1555 until 1870, the popes of the Church, including saints, forced a rigid and at times brutal imprisonment on the Jews of Rome. Only forces hostile to religion and to the Church brought about the final destruction of that system. The impious Garibaldi's action raised an immediate question about the universalist moral claim a Vatican Council had just made for the papacy weeks before. There is no question of official doctrinal formulation—ex cathedra—in the record of the Church's relations with Jews, but how can the claim to an essential spiritual endowment implied by the doctrine of papal infallibility stand before this history? How could the Vicar of Christ, acting in his capacity as such, have enforced such policies over generations? These are questions put by the Roman ghetto to a Church that attributes fallibility to its "sinful sons and daughters," never to itself.

The pope's power to enforce the witness misery of Jews at the foot of Vatican Hill was taken away. But the powerful example of the Roman Catholic Church's will to degrade Jews would continue to have its effect across Europe. That effect would be both immediate and remote. It is enough to note here that on October 13, 1870, the new government of a unified Italy issued a decree abolishing all restrictions against Jews. Sometimes students of history wonder why Europeans, little more than a generation later, did not protest, or at least grasp its full significance, when fascist governments in Germany, Italy, and then France issued decrees restricting Jews—what they wore, where they lived, what jobs they could have, what they could read, with whom they could have children, and on and on. Many such citizens of Europe, observing the introduction of these restrictions in the 1920s and 1930s, had been alive in 1870, or were the children of those who had been. Europeans knew firsthand, that is, of a time when the harshest imaginable restriction of Jews had been imposed in the name not of Der Fuhrer or II Duce, but of Jesus Christ. The fascist/Nazi campaign of restrictions against Jews had been directly anticipated by the Catholic Church, not in the Middle Ages but recently. Indeed, even in 1933, Europeans knew very well that the Church had abandoned its anti-Jewish campaign only because forced to. In addition, the twentieth-century acquiescence before, and cooperation in, the fascist/Nazi campaign of Jewish degradation by the vast majority of non-Jews had equally been prepared for by the Church. That is what it meant, finally, that for three hundred years, the keeper of the keys of the Jews' first and, until modern times, last and most squalid concentration camp was the keeper of the keys of Peter.

But twentieth-century consequences of the papal policies toward Jews in Rome were remote compared to what happened more immediately, particularly in France, where Catholics had been as traumatized by the Communards in 1871 as the pope was by Garibaldi in 1870. Not surprisingly, as the next act of this tragedy unfolded, the chief victim of the traumatic denouement would be not only the one Jew whose name is permanently attached to the tragedy, but the whole community of his fellow Jews who had thought themselves, through all of this, set free.