Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (27 page)

In addition to being a Harvard professor and world-renowned Scripture scholar, Helmut Koester is a Lutheran pastor who has devoted his life to the study of, and worship through, the Gospels and the Pauline letters. Yet he quotes with approval a statement by a Harvard colleague that the New Testament is "a tragic historical mistake." With the Mishnah on one side and this new canon of all too human—if still somehow sacred—Scriptures on the other, the "reconciliation of the two heirs of the tradition of Israel was no longer possible."
¹⁴

For one thing, from now on it would be impossible for a believing Jew to accept a Jesus whose meaning, by definition, involved a demeaning of the Jewish Scriptures, the Jewish cult, the Jewish covenant with God. The intellectual and moral structure of the kerygma could now be seen as inherently dismissive of Judaism. Matthew had Jesus assert that he had come "not to abolish the Law and the prophets, but to fulfill them."
¹⁵
Jews were accustomed to reading their Scriptures with an eye on the patterns of what Stendahl calls "benevolent typology,"
¹⁶
appreciating how similarities of event and symbol from one era to another reinforce the continuity of tradition, but "fulfillment" goes beyond typology, using the events of one era to "trump and trounce," in Stendahl's phrase, those of another. Fulfillment like this was abolition itself. For all the talk of wanting Jews to accept Jesus as the Messiah—and as we shall see, there has been a lot of such talk down through the centuries—it was clear early on that a Jew could accept Jesus only by rejecting—betraying—everything Jesus himself believed. Thus the early-second-century rabbis sent the word out from Judea and Galilee to have nothing further to do with Christians, whose attitude, in turn, given the threat posed by such firm Jewish rejection, was necessarily even more antagonistic.
¹⁷
The siblings had moved from mere rivalry to open hostility—a fight over the vision that, in such a trying world, could have united them. Instead of realizing the vision of either the prophets or Jesus, it was Rome's vision—divisive, violent, totalitarian—that the relationship of Jews and Christians would embody.

On the Christian side (and I assert this as a Christian), the canonization of this dispute—putting into the mouth of Jesus, say, a sweeping characterization of the Pharisees as a "brood of vipers"
¹⁸
—was a profound betrayal of the life and message of that same Jesus. As I declared at the outset, one of my purposes is to mark the decisive turns in this story, points where things might have gone in a different, better way. Surely here is the primordial one. Given all that led to this split between Christians and Jews—Nero's scapegoating of the Jesus movement, the savage Roman war, the consequent dispersal of Israel, the disappointment of Christian apocalyptic hope, the stresses within Israel between Hellenizers and Palestine-bound rabbis, the disappearance of the Jewish Christians of Jerusalem, the pressures of a Gentile slave society's attraction to the kerygma—we can hardly imagine that the story might have gone another way.

Yet it could have. A Christian must assert that the story could have gone in a way more consonant with the message of Jesus, toward its realization instead of its betrayal. That I am unable to say precisely how that might have happened—Jesus recognized within Judaism? his movement understood by both Jews and Christians as belonging firmly within the one Israel under the one covenant?—does not mean that an alternative outcome was impossible. That it came to seem so set in motion the chain of consequences we are following here, until the betrayal becomes irrefutably clear in the twentieth century. The triumphal planting of the cross at Auschwitz, which gave us our starting point, now reveals its meaning: the displacement of Jews by Christians as the true Israel requires displacement there too. Even the Shoah must yield before the inexorable supersessionism.

15. The Lachrymose Tradition: A Cautionary Note

C
LARE BOOTHE LUCE
is said by the novelist Herbert Gold to have complained to a Jewish friend that she found all the talk about the Holocaust insufferably boring. Her friend said he knew just what she was talking about. "In fact," Gold writes, "he had the same sense of repetitiousness and fatigue, hearing so often about the crucifixion."
¹

At this point in the narrative, it may be useful to note a warning that certain Jewish historians register. One of them, the great Salo Wittmayer Baron of Columbia University, author of a definitive social and religious history of Jews, decries what he calls "the lachrymose conception of Jewish history,"
²
the seemingly endless litany of disasters that, starting with the New Testament anti-Jewish libel we have just observed, leads to attacks on Jews by early Church fathers and moves through the Crusades, the Blood Libels, the expulsions, the restrictions on choice of occupation and place of residence, and on to the modern nightmare of the Shoah.

Such a narrow recounting of Jewish history, as if only evil befell this people, can be exacerbated by the way that even individual episodes are recalled. Norman Roth points out that medieval Jewish chroniclers took as a model the Book of Lamentations, which "tended to portray every calamity which befell the Jews in apocalyptic terms."
³
A spirit of exaggeration does infect some of the sources: Communities that were "utterly destroyed" by one tragedy or another could be discovered in other sources to have survived more or less intact.

Reacting especially to the overwhelming shock of the Holocaust, and perhaps to the realization of how close Hitler had actually come to achieving the Final Solution, some Jewish observers have become impatient with narratives that, beginning as far back as late antiquity, emphasize victimhood as the enduring note of Jewish identity. Has the extreme suffering of the Shoah become the lens through which all things Jewish must be seen? Does Clare Boothe Luce speak for more than narrow-minded bigots in complaining, in effect, that such relentless tales of woe can be subtly dehumanizing? Does the perennially highlighted misery of Jews in fact slyly fulfill what we will see later as the Augustine-inspired prophecy that Jewish misery as a punishment for the deicide doubles as proof of Jewish guilt? In the hands of Christian interpreters, Jewish suffering thus becomes a new law of social organization, if not of nature.

That is why it is so important to emphasize that Jewish history includes the triumphs of the rabbinic communities in Palestine and in the Diaspora during late antiquity; the early urban settlements of northern Europe; the sages who, during the early Middle Ages, reclaimed the Hebrew language, which was all but dead for half a millennium;
⁴
the intellectual and linguistic inventiveness of the Jewish translation centers in Iberia during the period of Christian-Islamic-Jewish amity; the active Jewish participation in the coming of the Renaissance; the extraordinary enlivening of Jewish spirituality in eastern Europe at the dawn of the modern era; the profound impact of Kabbalah, not only on Jewish religion but on Enlightenment philosophy and science, and on the coming of democracy.
⁵
In each of these cases, and others, Jewish thought, culture, religion, and life took shape independent of the pressures exerted by the broader world of an empowered Christendom.

There are, to be sure, important aspects of this story that have nothing to do with theology or Church attitudes as such. The fate of the Jews has been shaped by numerous factors besides religion. The movement from a feudal economy to a mercantile one, with the arrival of a large Christian merchant class, set up conflicts with Jews whose ties to commerce were long established. Demographic shifts, urbanization, increased literacy and mobility all reshaped European culture—and had an impact on Jews. My ongoing focus on religious factors in this book is not a claim that other factors were not decisive. Yet I assume throughout that anti-Jewish religious ideology provides the central and motivating through-line of the narrative I am obliged to pursue.

And how is that through-line embodied? When the story of Judaism is recounted expressly in relation to the Christian world, it is inevitably, and at times overwhelmingly, negative. From one epoch to another, as we shall see, this narrative is embodied in the symbol of the cross. Jews, like Clare Boothe Luce's friend, can tire of hearing of the cross, and so can some Christians, perhaps. But tensions surrounding the cross—at once a sign of compassionate love and of sacred violence—form the heart of this story. Compassionate love, including that exercised toward Jews in the name of Jesus, will be a part of it—and so will violence inflicted on Jews in the name of God. That Christians today may have difficulty imagining the cross as a symbol of hatred, and that many Jews cannot imagine it otherwise, is at the crux, so to speak, of the ongoing conflict over the cross at Auschwitz.

Martin Gilbert, the distinguished Churchill biographer, compiled
The Atlas of Jewish History.
In its preface he wrote:

My original concern was to avoid undue emphasis upon the many horrific aspects of Jewish history. I wished to portray with equal force the construction, achievements, and normalities of Jewish life through almost four thousand years. In part, I believe that I have succeeded; for there are many maps of traders, philosophers, financiers, settlers, and sages. But as my research into Jewish history progressed, I was surprised, depressed, and, to some extent, overwhelmed by the perpetual and irrational violence which pursued the Jews in every century and to almost every corner of the Globe. If, therefore, persecution, expulsion, torture, humiliation, and mass murder haunt these pages, it is because they also haunt the Jewish story.
⁶

From the Holocaust, of which Mrs. Luce complained, back through history to the crucifixion, of which her Jewish friend complained—on a hundred hinges in between hangs the indispensable question: How are the two related? The story takes a turn now in which an answer begins to assert itself, when the cross of Jesus is wielded as a sword by the Roman convert Constantine.

PART THREE

CONSTANTINE, AUGUSTINE, AND THE JEWS

16. The Heart of This Story Is a Place

D
RAW A MAP OF
Europe in your mind. Picture the boot of Italy, the rolled cuff of the Alps, and that country's western coastline curving around to the south of France. Cutting northward from Marseilles is the Rhone River, which in Roman times was a highway through the wilds of Gaul. Above Lyons, the river peters out, but not many miles away, another, the Saone, begins, leading on to the Meuse, which leads to yet another, the Moselle. Crossing into Germany as the Mosel, it intersects the mighty Rhine at Koblenz, a Roman city named for the
confluentes
of the two great rivers. More efficient as transport than the touted Roman roads, the network of rivers was the key to the expansion of the empire north—especially the Rhine, flowing from the Alps to the North Sea. Bisecting the continent, the river made it possible for the caesars to conquer as far north as England, even before the birth of Christ.

But the Rhine also marked the permanent eastern limit of the Roman sway. Caesar Augustus, who ruled at the time Jesus was born, proposed the expansion of the empire into the northern wilderness. He decreed that the River Elbe, jutting down from the Scandinavian peninsula, was to be the far boundary of Rome, but it wasn't to be. In the year 9
C.E.,
the Roman legions, pushing into the heart of what we think of as eastern Germany, were routed at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest, a clash that left twenty thousand legionnaires dead. The defeat kept the Roman line at the Rhine. That frontier hardened into Europe's cultural fault line, with Latin-derived Romance languages to its west and south, Germanic-Slavic languages east and north. If the Battle of Teutoburg Forest had gone the other way, citizens of present-day Berlin might be speaking French.

The Rhine was the defining boundary of the Reformation too, the front line of every major war fought in Europe, and the
casus belli
of the worst of them. Such history was foretold, perhaps, by the fact that the first Roman settlements on that river, among them Mainz (at the confluence of the Main), Koblenz, and Cologne, a city whose earlier name, Colonus, meant "colony," began as fortified military outposts. A civilian supply settlement to support those and other outposts was established safely back from the Rhine frontier, about seventy miles up the Moselle from Koblenz. Taking its name, Augusta Treverorum, from a local Celtic tribe, the Treveri—the name would evolve into today's Trier—this settlement became the capital of the empire's western territories (Gaul, Spain, Germania, and Britain). As such, it was the first real city north of the Alps. Early in the Common Era, mail routinely went from Trier to Rome in little more than a week, an efficiency that would be lost, after the empire's decline, for more than a thousand years.

Today Trier has a population of under a hundred thousand, and is known, if for anything, for the modest house on Bruckenstrasse in which Karl Marx was born. Marx graduated from the local gymnasium, or high school—as did, most of a century later, a lad named Klaus Barbie, who grew up to be a notorius SS officer. In the thread that binds together Catholics and Jews, Marx and that Nazi form separate knots. But the point here is what goes unnoticed in Trier. Karl Marx's house is now a museum devoted to what he did and what he meant. A few blocks away stand the stunning but less noted remains of the palace of the Roman emperor Constantine (288?~337). It is a hauntingly mammoth hall, stark bricks setting off the rounded arches of Roman windows, with a coffered oak ceiling. The structure is huge, like a hangar for the
Hindenburg,
but today it serves as a sparsely attended Lutheran church, the Church of our Savior. In guidebooks it is referred to as the
Konstantin-basilika.
In Constantine's time it was known as
Aula Palatina.
Like the city that grows out from it, the
Basilika
is far removed from today's beaten tourist trail; Michelin gives it no star. And so it was in the late 1950s, when as a teenage boy I came by chance to Trier with my mother. I did not see Constantine's palace then, although a postwar restoration was completed in 1956. For us Americans, the story of ancient Rome belonged in Italy. I would not know of Trier even now but for that accidental pilgrimage with my mother. I will explain below what brought us to Trier, and how that city returns us repeatedly to this book's great question of Catholics and Jews, providing an unlikely but certain geographical touchstone throughout the centuries. But for the moment, it is enough to say that what brought my mother and me to Trier was not Karl Marx.