Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (82 page)

THE CHURCH AND HITLER

47. From Christian Anti-Judaism to Eliminationist Antisemitism

T
HIS STORY REACHES
its climax in Germany, where, in the twentieth century, the last act of Europe's hatred of Jews was played out. The Catholic Church is faulted for its silence in the face of the Final Solution, even for its tacit sponsorship of the virulent Nazi antisemitism that drove the machinery of genocide. But our inquiry must go deeper, to ask how the Church's choices led to consequences that put Jews
as Jews
at risk, and to what further Church choices did those consequences lead, and how did they affect the fate of ... Jews
as Jews?

Thinking of the care with which social scientists distinguish between "strong causality" and "weak causality," with which philosophers distinguish between "necessary causes" and "sufficient causes," I have assumed all along in this book that it would be simplistic to argue that Hitler was "caused" by Christianity. There was nothing deterministic in the coming of Nazism, as if it were the inevitable and preordained result of factors beginning with the deicide charge and proceeding through the Crusades, the Inquisition, and finally the intermingling of antimodernism and antisemitism. Without this strain in Europe's past, Nazism, a fascist movement organized around Jew hatred, would not have occurred, of course, but history is not dominoes in a line, and we have seen repeatedly how this story could have gone another way.

The peculiar evil of Adolf Hitler was not predictable, nor was Christianity his only antecedent. He was as much a creature of the racist, secular, colonizing empire builders who preceded him on the world stage as he was of the religion into which he was born, and which he parodied. But in truth, the racist colonizers, before advancing behind the standards of nations and companies, had marched behind the cross.

When "the Church as such," as opposed to its "sinful members," is absolved of any guilt in relation to Nazism, and when what Christian failures there were are reduced to sins of omission, as if the only crime were silence, then the real meaning of this history is being deflected. However modern Nazism was, it planted its roots in the soil of age-old Church attitudes and a nearly unbroken chain of Church-sponsored acts of Jew hatred. However pagan Nazism was, it drew its sustenance from groundwater poisoned by the Church's most solemnly held ideology—its
theology.

In this narrative, we have watched as the ambivalence that followed Augustine was transformed into a murderous paranoia, a fear of Jewish blood invisibly corrupting a host society. That society's attempt to purge itself of "foreign" but parasitic elements, as happened with the
conversos,
involves a different—and far more lethal—kind of hatred than hatred of the mere other, which is how Christian anti-Judaism is more often discussed. That this diabolical hatred of Jews ran mostly below the surface of "normal" hatred does not change the fact that it was essential to what Nazism inherited from the Church. That is why attempts to exonerate "the Church as such," or even to reduce the Church's failure to what it did not do between 1933 and 1945, are so evasive and, finally, immoral.

To imagine that the Catholic Church was craven in the face of the challenge posed by Adolf Hitler, that it failed to oppose him out of cowardice, is to ignore, as we shall see, the brave history of Church resistance in the not too distant past—this Church was not cowardly. Nor does the Church's anxiety about Bolshevism adequately account for its relatively more benign stance toward Nazism. Not even the other usual explanation, that the Church was too concerned with its own power and prerogatives to risk defending the Jews, is enough to account for what happened. No: Nazism, by tapping into a deep, ever-fresh reservoir of Christian hatred of Jews, was able to make an accomplice of the Catholic Church in history's worst crime, even though, by then, it was the last thing the Church consciously wanted to be.

Obviously, there were precedents to Hitler's attempted genocide of the Jews—Stalin's terror-famine aimed, in 1932–1933, at the people of Ukraine
¹
; the extermination of Armenians by Turkey during World War I
²
; the brutal reductions of native peoples in remote lands colonized by Europeans, beginning with the Canary Islands in 1478 and continuing in the Americas, Australia, Asia, and finally Africa at the turn of the twentieth century.
³
That an effectively genocidal exploitation of the New World was launched around the time of Ferdinand and Isabella's expulsion of Jews from Iberia is not lacking in significance, to put it mildly. A religious assumption underlies both events. The record of European imperialism from the fifteenth century on is the record of the movement from aliens defined as condemned in the afterlife to aliens defined as condemned in this life, from aliens defined as less than worthy to aliens defined as less than human. The Church, at the onset of the colonial era, was conditioned, and was conditioning others, to see unbaptized strangers as belonging to the company of devils.
⁴

And the scientific Enlightenment, pursuing its decidedly nonreligious agenda, added its own twist to this legacy, especially in the figure of Charles Darwin (1809–1882). He applied his own idea of the survival of the fittest to racial, ethnic, and national groups of human beings. Like certain species of grass, some racial groups are destined to survive and thrive, while others, like less hardy grasses in the scorched savanna, are destined to wither and disappear. "At some future period not very distant as measured in centuries," Darwin wrote in
The Descent of Man,
"the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races."
⁵

The Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist, reflecting on this legacy of European colonialism, commented, "We want genocide to have begun and ended with Nazism."
⁶
But it didn't. Hitler was less the beneficiary than the product of religious and racial assumptions that had their origins, perhaps, in the Jew-hating sermons of Saint John Chrysostom or Saint Ambrose, and certainly in the blood purity obsession of Torquemada. The line between these two phenomena carves the narrative arc that achieves its apogee with the "Germanizing" of Darwin, especially in Nietzsche,
⁷
at least as he was caricatured by the Nazis. Hitler's all-encompassing ideology of race was "a vulgarized version," in one scholar's phrase,
⁸
of the social Darwinism that held sway in the imperial age among both intellectuals and the crowd. It was the dominant cultural and political idea of the day. "The air he [Hitler] and all other Western people in his childhood breathed was soaked in the conviction that imperialism is a biologically necessary process, which, according to the laws of nature, leads to the inevitable destruction of the lower races. It was a conviction which had already cost millions of human lives before Hitler provided his highly personal application."
⁹

So however much Hitler twisted what preceded him, it is also the case that he emerged from it. Nowhere is this more true than in the way Jews served him in that "highly personal" way. When Nazism defined Jews as the negative other, in opposition to which it defined itselfc, it was building on a structure of the European mind that was firmly in place before Hitler was born. If nothing else is clear by now, it is that that structure of mind had its foundation in Christianity, and moreover, that defining the Jew as the negative other had served as a self-protecting Church's modus operandi down the centuries, from the Gospel of John to the sermons of Luther, from Saint Ambrose to the anti-Dreyfusards. Antisemitism was a consistently exploited organizing principle, a pillar of Protestant and Catholic identity. Individual Jews and whole Jewish communities were periodically sacrificed to this principle. We have seen that again and again. And we have seen, too, the even more pathological turn in the European imagination when the Jew went from being the hated other to being the attached parasite that was attacking society from within.

Now we must ask the question that has run beneath the surface of this entire narrative. Since we are tracking not the flow of an impersonal force of fate but a sequence of freely made, if conditioned, human choices, how, finally, did such choices culminate in the abyss in which, among millions of others, Madeleine Dreyfus Levy was lost? In order to answer that, we must stay in the nineteenth century a little longer, to see how, at the pivotal moment and in the decisive place, the ancient hatred of Jews combined with a newly vulnerable Church's desperate effort to survive, and to see how the choices forced by that combination directly led to the most terrible consequences.

48. Setting a Standard: The Church Against Bismarck

K
ARL MARX DIED
in 1883, at age sixty-four. By then he was an icon of the social conflict that had preceded him throughout the century of revolutions and that was widely feared to follow. "Men make their own history"—to repeat what he wrote—"but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The traditions of all dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the minds of the living."
¹
We saw earlier how the dead generations of Marx's rabbinic ancestors may have weighed on him, but, equally, he could have been talking here about the weight of the—to him—anachronistic religious forces that had rallied to oppose everything he hoped to bring about. What appalled Marx was the way that forces loyal to the past could conjure up the "names, battle slogans and costumes"
²
of the old ways, using them as new centers to rally around. What must have seemed his worst nightmare at the end of his life, if he allowed himself to grasp it, was the success with which his nemesis, the Roman Catholic Church, had done just that.

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature," he had written in 1844, "the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the
opium
of the people."
³
Subsequent generations of revolutionaries would reduce this acute observation to a slogan with which to denigrate otherworldly faith as worse than useless in bringing about political change. But like, say, the Polish Communist regime that would condescendingly dismiss the significance of the million-strong congregation that gathered in a field outside Kraków to hear Karol Wojtyla celebrate Mass as John Paul II in 1979, those revolutionaries failed to grasp the real-world impact of unleashed religious hope.

The nineteenth century was the century of nationalism, and usually the Catholic Church is defined as its great enemy. But it is perhaps more accurate to say that the Catholic Church, in fiercely opposing nationalism, simultaneously reinvented itself around the nationalist idea. Beginning almost exactly when Marx offered his religion-as-opium nostrum, the Catholic religion launched a counterrevolution that cloaked itself in surface devotions of prayer, cult, and superstition, but that also involved an ingenious use of potent symbols, banners, rallies, and demonstrations—its own version of the "names, battle slogans and costumes" that energized the new national movements of France, Italy, and Germany. What Marx derided as otherworldly escapism—those prayer rallies and miracle celebrations and a state-defying medievalism—would, in the Catholic case, prove over the rest of the century to be a spectacularly successful exercise of wily politics, the genius of which involved a steady denial that the movement was at all political.

We have seen some of this already in the career of Pius IX, who, upon election in 1846, was regarded as the pope of progress. But in 1848, he was forced to flee from Rome when revolutionary Italian nationalists took the city. He could return in 1850 only when French and Austrian forces routed the Roman republicans, which made him the permanent enemy of Italian nationalism and, by extension, of the spirit of modernity that underwrote it. Pius IX is remembered for his two salvos fired at the age: the "Syllabus of Errors," in 1864, which condemned all of the ideas most precious to democratic pluralism, from freedom of conscience to the very idea of tolerance; and the doctrine of papal infallibility, defined by the Vatican Council in 1870. The effect of these two pronouncements was to make the pope the central figure of an unbowed Roman Catholic identity, much in the way that nationalist movements were defining themselves around strong leaders, from Napoleon to Garibaldi to Bismarck. Ironically, as the state-inventing forces hostile to the Church had, over the decades, confiscated church property in various nations, disenfranchising abbots and bishops, they contributed to the growing power of the pope
⁴
and the strengthening of ultramontanism, as more and more Catholics in France, Germany, and Austria looked "beyond the mountains" toward Rome for support and guidance. The broad, although not universal, acceptance by Catholics of the doctrine of papal infallibility cannot be understood apart from its character as a defensive, and essentially political, act to shore up a besieged figurehead.

The "Syllabus of Errors" and the dogma of infallibility would draw quick, even violent reaction from the enemies of the Church in France, as we saw, but also in Germany. "How many divisions has the pope got?" Joseph Stalin would mockingly ask, but as the Soviet leader's successors would learn, especially beginning in that field near Krakow, the pope has other ways of wielding power. (One might have said, Don't underestimate the Legion of Mary.) Thus, well before the "Syllabus" and infallibility, Pius IX had fired an earlier salvo, perhaps a more potent one, even if his antagonists did not recognize it as such. In 1854, he had defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception as an article of Catholic faith, an act widely regarded as his first formal invocation of infallibility, but in any case it was the first time a pope had presumed to make a declaration of dogma apart from his fellow bishops meeting in General Council. Not all Catholics welcomed the pope's claiming such authority.