Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (4 page)

But by then many outside the university, thinking perhaps of all the Kissingers who'd stood at the front of those classrooms, had begun to take offense. The discovery in the same season of former Georgetown professor Madeleine Albright's secret Jewish background—she is an Episcopalian but was raised a Roman Catholic
³
—seemed an eerie counterpoint. What is coercion anyway? To an editorial writer of
Washington Jewish Week,
"Jesus on the cross is a repugnant symbol ... represent[ing] two millennia of bloody crusades and pogroms that directly led to the Holocaust."
⁴

The editorialist did not speak for all Jews. Leon Wieseltier, referring to a controversy over how Christian history is tied to the Holocaust, wrote in
The New Republic:
"No, 'Jesus on the cross' is not a repugnant symbol to me. But the sight of it does not warm my heart, either. It is the symbol of a great faith and a great culture whose affiliation with power almost destroyed my family and my people."
⁵

Power, not the cross. Affiliation, not identity. Perhaps such distinctions can be maintained when the point of controversy is the wall of a classroom. But what about the wall of Auschwitz? The cross there continues to spark fire between Catholics and Jews. Its shadow is pointed, piercing through the hard-won civility of "Christian-Jewish dialogue" to the question of violence—the violence of the Polish Catholics who dared to bring explosives into that field, and then be rewarded for it; the violence of the genocide, which to Jews can never be explained, understood, or redeemed; and ultimately the violence of the cross itself, that sadistic Roman execution device. Lenny Bruce, the Jewish shockmeister, used to send a naughty thrill up the spines of his audiences by professing relief that Jesus wasn't born in twentieth-century America, because then, Bruce would blithely aver, pious Christians would have to wear tiny electric chairs around their necks. In fact, the cross did not serve as a Christian icon until it ceased being a Roman execution device in the fourth century.

Despite these associations, it is blasphemy of another kind than Bruce's to lay responsibility for the Holocaust at the foot of the cross. The genocide of Jews was the work of Nazism, not Christianity. The individual and particular character of the killers—as opposed, say, to a faceless bureaucracy or an impersonal antisemitism—must always be insisted upon. But it is also important to emphasize that the perpetrators of the genocide were not a group apart from the broad population of Germans. It is true, as we shall see, that German Christians remained attached to their religion during the Nazi years and that Nazi ideology borrowed heavily from Christian eschatology—the subordination of the present to the expectation of a glorious End Time. But the Final Solution was a contradiction of everything Christianity stands for. If I did not believe that, I would not be bothering with any of this, and I certainly would not be a Christian.

It may seem a Christian's defensiveness to say so, but everything we know of Hitler suggests that, once finished with the Jews, he would have targeted for elimination, one way or another, those whose loyalty to Jesus competed with loyalty to the Third Reich. But the absolute priority given to Jews in Hitler's scheme; their place as the extreme negative in
volk
mythology, standing against everything the Third Reich was meant to be; their place, therefore, as the embodiment of an evil to be eliminated at all costs—all of this built upon the Jew hatred that, as the
Washington Jewish Week
editorial so baldly asserts, has been an unbroken thread of Christian history, not just since the Crusades, but beyond Constantine, almost back to the time of the crucifixion itself. One need not believe, with the editorialist, that such history "directly led" to the Holocaust in order to sense a connection that has not been fully faced.

What is the relationship of ancient Christian hatred of Jews to the twentieth century's murderous hatred that produced the death camps? The cross need not be labeled as the cause of the Holocaust for the link to be felt. When can that link be seen for what it is? What does it mean when Christians as well as Jews are jolted by the imposition, across two thousand years, of the name "Golgotha" on the place called Auschwitz? What is going on here? I asked myself that November day, standing before the cross. And I ask it still.

The questions force one into a reconsideration of a familiar history, an exploration of how, if not "directly," one thing led to another, a meditation on what else might have unfolded if certain key events had gone another way. In order to face as squarely as I could the questions posed by the cross at Auschwitz, I have undertaken this work of history. As is already evident, this is history refracted through one man's own experience, because antisemitism is never abstract. The objective record requires, of this writer at least, if not of every reader, an intensely subjective examination of conscience.

I found it necessary to return to the original cross of Jesus of Nazareth, tracing through the generations of his followers who interpreted that cross as a sign of God's favor, who put it on their martial banners and at the center of their creed, who wore it on their breasts, attacking Jews. I have traced the story through the advent of conversionism, to the Inquisition, to the Enlightenment, when the organized hatred of Jews served the Church's purpose in new ways. In the journey through time that ended at the platform at Birkenau, "whose flames touched, must have touched," in Elie Wiesel's words, "the celestial throne,"
⁶
what were the roads not taken?
⁷
And where were the chapels of sanctuary in which the hatred of Jews was forbidden entrance? Only by imagining what else might have happened than those "two millennia of bloody crusades and pogroms" can we fully take the measure of what did happen. The study of history always implies a study of its alternative. To ask what was the alternative to European Christianity's hatred of Jews in the past is to assert that such hatred is not necessary in the future.

Because I am a Catholic, I approach this history with a focus on the Roman Catholic Church. The story unfolds over the course of two millennia, but decisive turns come in the eleventh century with the East-West schism and in the sixteenth century with the Protestant Reformation. Because the twentieth-century climax occurs in Germany, with its connection to the Reformation—occurs, that is, in the rise of Nazi antisemitism, with its taproot planted, perhaps, in a particularly Lutheran hatred of Jews—an exclusive focus on the history of Jewish-Catholic conflict would be misleading, and might seem to overemphasize Roman Catholic antecedents of Nazism.

Therefore, at appropriate points in the history that follows, the relationship of German Protestantism to lethal antisemitism will be explored, as will the secular ideologies of the Enlightenment and the racism of colonial imperialism. This will be done not only to show that the Holocaust had its origins in more than Catholic anti-Judaism, but to assert that the Holocaust resulted not from some abstract Christian ideology (as the editorialist in
Washington Jewish Week
implies) but from a complicated convergence of particular ideas and choices. Hannah Arendt warned of the danger of seeing the Holocaust as the inevitable outcome of what she called "eternal antisemitism,"
⁸
a force operating outside normal causality. Removed from history, the Holocaust becomes a kind of universal manifestation, the mass murder of Jews a mere instance of an already written script. Only by emphasizing the broad but always specific historical context, continually shaped by political forces, religious ideas, economic necessity, and human freedom, only by proclaiming the connection between Europe's fantasy of "the jews" and the true condition of real Jews, can one emerge with the sense that the Holocaust did not have to happen. Jews did not have to be defined by Christian culture as the demonic other, nor did their status as such have to be transformed in Nazi Germany into the cause for elimination.

Having said that, it is important to acknowledge that my concentration on the Roman Catholic Church as a locus of anti-Judaism—inevitably so before the Reformation, and, to a large extent, since then—is a consequence not only of my personal preoccupation. Eastern Christianity has its own history of religion-based Jew hatred, and the Russian Orthodox Church, in particular, has been implicated in the sad history of the pogroms, but it is in the West that antisemitism became genocidal. Roman Catholicism remains the central institution of Christianity, not only because of the vast numbers of people—more than a billion—who identify themselves as Catholics, but because its dominant institutions—universal governance, uniform cult—give it an influence, especially in the West, that no other form of Christianity can approach. Therefore, an inquiry into the origins of the Holocaust in the tortured past of Western civilization is necessarily an inquiry into the history of Catholicism. In addition, the absolute character of Catholic universalism has meant that Catholicism has stood as the counterpoint to a Judaism that understands itself as a people apart. It is as if the Jewish people and the Roman Catholic Church are knotted together in the same snarl of history. The Catholic Church and the Jews are tied together, in effect, by what separates them.

3. The Journey

T
HE SURPRISE IN THE
tangle of feelings and questions, when I was first snagged by it at the foot of the papal cross in sight of the starvation bunker, was that it mattered so much to me. I had arrived at Auschwitz as anyone of my age, background, and temperament would—braced for ovens, mounds of shoes and human hair, railroad tracks, chimneys. But I'd thought of the place as "theirs." No one had told me about the cross at the wall, or warned me about memories of my brother's legs, or reminded me to leave behind the old longing for the consolation of knowing that Jesus died for me. The cross. A pole planted in the fracture at the heart not only of the West, or of the Church, or of "Jewish-Catholic relations," but—here was the surprise—of myself.

So first, this must be a journey across the geography of conscience. For that reason, I presume to measure the sweep of history against the scope of my own memory. By definition, therefore, the boundaries here are narrow, and my vision is limited. The permanent question is whether I can escape the constraints of my own experience and of the way people like me have addressed these questions in the past. For example, it must be acknowledged at the outset that the Catholic anti-Judaism that is my subject carried down the centuries a double insult, for it was largely a response to an imagined Judaism. There was little authentic interaction between Jewish communities and the Church. From early on, as we shall see, "the jews" were defined by Christians far more in terms of the anachronistic categories of the Old Testament than of the living and changing traditions of Jewish culture, understood as more than religion, as it developed in the Mediterranean, in Iberia, in eastern Europe, and later in the cities of modern Europe.

Nevertheless, the history of Jewish-Catholic conflict did involve a dynamic interaction of two parties, whether they knew each other well or not, and as I set out to render that history, I must acknowledge my limited ability to represent the Jewish side of it. Before any Roman Catholic attempting to tell the long story of mutual miscomprehension between Judaism and Christianity lies the danger that once again the Judaism discussed will be constructed more out of fantasy than reality. Therefore, at decisive moments in the history of this interaction—for example, in Iberia when Jewish translators helped prepare the ground for medieval rationalism, or during the Italian Renaissance when Kabbalah helped spark the new humanism, or when Spinoza proposed the idea of religious tolerance—I will lift up the thread of Judaism's independent evolution. Yet mostly that thread will weave below the surface of the story I am telling.

A reader might be wary of the work of a Catholic, because my kind have often gotten it wrong. Either the Jews are the absolute other in relation to whom we Christians define ourselves by opposition and rejection, or they are "anonymous Christians"
¹
whose faithful expectation of the Messiah is an implicit harbinger of the Second Coming of Jesus; or they are the faceless victims of a terrible history that belongs less to them than to a haunted Christendom. When Jews are defined as crypto-Christians, Christianity is understood as a branch of Judaism, and when Jews are assigned the victim's role in the Church's own Passion play, "repentance" becomes denial. Jewish-Christian reconciliation then becomes a matter not of honoring differences but of assuming that differences are illusory. Whether we come at the question as antagonists or as would-be healers, in other words, we Christians have difficulty recognizing Jews as truly distinct without turning them into our polar opposites. Obviously, these dense questions out of the past boil down to the ever more urgent question of the Church's relationship to Judaism, and nothing focuses it more dramatically, for the past and the future both, than the cross at Auschwitz.

I referred to the cross earlier as a kind of sighting device, like the crosshairs of a rifle scope. If one were to look back in history through the juncture of the cross at Auschwitz, what would one see? As I said, the narrative form is my métier, and it offers me a structure. The story unfolds with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The end is the cross at Auschwitz. As is so with every story, once the end reveals itself, the beginning and the middle can be understood anew.

In the story of Oedipus, for example, the moment of revelation comes when the king blinds himself, an act that redresses the moral imbalance that had caused the plague in Thebes and that lays bare the meaning of everything that went before. In the climax of the narrative, the moral links that join the elements of the story are revealed. At last we see how the beginning led to the middle, which led to the end. In laying out the history of conflict between the Church and the Jews, I am less concerned with the episodes themselves—from Constantine's conversion to Augustine's, from the Inquisition to the Dreyfus case—than I am with the underlying narrative arc that joins them in a coherent whole.