Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (44 page)

By the Jews of Trier, Peter may have been remembered as relatively benign, but there are accounts of his Good Friday sermon that same spring transforming the Cologne Cathedral congregation into an anti-Jewish mob. The present cathedral dates to the thirteenth century, when its foundation stone was laid, but it replaced a ninth-century cathedral on the same site. There Peter preached his Crusade, tying it to the death of Jesus. His listeners stormed out into the street at once, looking for Jews, and finding them. Despite protective efforts of the archbishop, whose name was Hermann, many Cologne Jews were murdered.
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The
Jewish Encyclopedia
says they were dispersed, and that, in one instance, three hundred Jews were encircled and given the choice of baptism or death. With an echo of the ancient story of Masada, the encyclopedia says that they refused to convert, and instead "selected five men to slay the rest."'
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Jewish mass suicide reenters history.

I stood in the Cologne Cathedral not long ago, contemplating these events. I thought of Archbishop Hermann, who, like the bishop of Trier, tried and failed to protect Jews. In the cathedral, I saw on the wall beside the tomb of a thirteenth-century bishop, Englebert, a stone tablet engraved, in Latin, with a proclamation known as the "Jewish Privilege." Though that word "privilege" reminds us that Jews were without rights, it also recalls the more or less consistent effort of bishops to protect Jews from the consequences of what Christians heard in their cathedrals. The Latin translates: "We, Englebert, Archbishop of Cologne, assure you, the Jewish community of Cologne, that you have certain rights ... You need not pay taxes in excess of what others pay. If we find a Christian doing money exchange, he must leave the city: that business is yours. You no longer must pay a tax to bury your dead. You do not have to bury your dead near the place of execution."
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Near the "Jewish Privilege" is a shrine to the Christian "place of execution," the so-called Cross Chapel, which is named for the crucifix of Gero, a tenth-century bishop. The cross he commissioned survives as the oldest rendering of the crucifix in the West, and hangs above a Baroque altar. Its dark wood embodies a life-size corpus whose collapsed muscles and sagging torso capture the body's expiration. To stand in that chapel is to sense the motes in the air stirring with the last breath Jesus took only seconds ago. Yet this same cross very likely hung in the air through which Peter's deadly words resounded more than a thousand years ago. The tradition in which Peter the Hermit stood has yet to die, as this commentary on the Gero cross in the recently published
Cologne Cathedral and City Guide
indicates: "The work depicts exactly that moment in which Christ, the Son of God, has just died. From the point of view of Christianity, this instant in time is the decisive turning point in the history of the world. Prior to this, mankind lived under the strict laws which God gave Moses on Mt. Sinai; thereafter, in the age of mercy inaugurated by Christ's Death on the Cross."
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What mercy? Peter the Hermit, too, saw Christ's death on the cross as pivotal. Moreover, the entire crusading impulse begins, according to the Christian chroniclers, with Peter's prior pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and with his fury at the fact that the holy places associated with the cross were being blasphemed by the occupying infidels.
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Recall that, after Helena, the mystique of the cross had transformed the implement of Jesus' execution into a new kind of Incarnation—as if Jesus
were
his cross. The "discovery" of the True Cross, the fourth-century rescue of the Cross from the sly, perfidious Jews, had completed the work of salvation history and vanquished the Jews once and for all. Or so it had seemed in the Age of Constantine.

Once the Muslims took over Jerusalem in 638, both Christians and Jews survived in the city as tolerated minorities. When Jerusalem emerged as an Islamic pilgrimage site, the fervor of Muslims increased, and, at times, so did their intolerance. By the tenth century, for example, Jews were no longer admitted to the Temple Mount, and in the early eleventh century, all Jewish and Christian places of worship in Jerusalem, including the Holy Sepulcher, were ordered destroyed by the ruling caliph.
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Jews were not allowed to reconstruct their synagogues, although Christians were able, in 1048, to rebuild an unimpressive remnant of the Holy Sepulcher.

By the time Peter the Hermit visited Jerusalem as a pious pilgrim in the late eleventh century, "some years before the beginning of the Way [Crusades]," the site of Jesus' death was regarded in Europe as having been defiled by its infidel occupiers. But the incarnational spirituality that saw the Word of God made flesh in a man and saw the crucified Jesus "made wood" in the True Cross, still saw the place of Jesus' death as consubstantial—to use a word applied to the Eucharist—with Jesus himself. The religious meaning of Jerusalem had by now been distilled into this one event, this one place, this knot of the Passion and death. Peter the Hermit was a mystic at the mercy of the ethos of the cross, which in his time was the ethos of the cross desecrated.

According to a history by Albert of Aachen, composed within four decades of the event, Peter found himself swept up in a mystical summons from the Lord. While asleep in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, he had a vision of Christ, who ordered him "to rouse the hearts of the faithful to come out and purge the holy places at Jerusalem, and restore the holy offices. For through dangers and diverse trials the gates of Paradise shall now be opened to those who have been called and chosen." As a proof of the validity of this vision, Peter was led to "discover" the holy lance, the weapon that had been plunged into Jesus' side.
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With this authority, Peter went to Rome and, so Albert of Aachen says, successfully roused the martial ardor of Urban II, who agreed to preach Peter's Crusade. "For this reason," Albert asserts, "the Pope crossed the Alps" to Clermont, where "bishops of all France and the dukes and counts and the great princes of every order and rank, after hearing the divine commission and the Pope's appeal, agreed to God's request for an expedition at their own expense to the sepulcher itself."
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What the True Cross was to the Constantinian wars of conformity, the Holy Sepulcher was to the Crusades. The two "visions"—Constantine's of the cross above Milvian Bridge, and Peter's of Christ on the site where the cross had stood—like the two "discoveries"—Helena's of the True Cross, and Peter's of the holy lance—stand in the same place in relation to the larger dynamics they simultaneously resulted from and unleashed. And as the cross had become the incarnational focus of God's presence in Constantine's world, Jerusalem itself, in the European imagination, became the incarnational locus in the crusaders' world. As the cross and Jesus were identified—to revere one was to revere the other—so with the holy place. To rescue "captive Jerusalem" was to rescue a kidnapped Jesus. And just as the fourth-century worship of the cross sparked immediate violence against Jews, as we saw in Ambrose, so this passionate renewal of obsessive concern for the crucifixion and its paraphernalia sparked attacks on Jews, as if their synagogues in Jerusalem had not also been desecrated during the Islamic occupation. In the Christian millennial fantasy, Jews instantly joined, or even replaced, Muslims as the defiling enemy. "We desire to combat the enemies of God in the East," the Christian chronicler Guibert of Nogent (1053–1124) wrote, "but we have under our eyes the Jews, a race more inimical to God than all the others. We are doing this whole thing backwards."
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The Christian fantasy, turned forward, gave pride of place to Jews, especially when it came to the
holy
place, which the Christian imagination still tied far more firmly to Jewish perfidy than Muslim. Recall that a central tenet of Augustine's theology of Jewish "witness" was the Diaspora, the idea that Jews were never to return to Jerusalem. That they had been allowed to do so under the Muslims was essential to the Muslim desecration of the Holy Land.

Thus the True Cross involved a progression of beliefs that had run together by now with the idea of Jerusalem. God had become a person, who became a place, which became an object, before which every Christian believer could bow in the form of a locally revered relic. It all fit together almost too neatly, even to the Rhineland piety that depended on relics traced to Helena: the Seamless Robe in Trier, the corpses of the Three Kings in Cologne, the splinters of the True Cross in gilded reliquaries all over northern Europe.

Aside from levels of violence, there was another difference between what the preaching of Ambrose and John Chrysostom started and what Peter the Hermit's preaching unleashed. Crusader attacks in the eleventh century were not on Jews as they really existed by then, but on the imaginary Jews who, in the permanent present tense of the liturgical cycle, were still murdering Jesus in Jerusalem. This is a mystery not only of place, in other words, but of time. As Christianity had imposed its categories on Roman and then on Germanic cultures, the supersessionist understanding of history as a process of "fulfillment" took root. This was perfectly symbolized by the change in the calendar according to which the passage of time was measured against the birth of Christ instead of the founding of Rome, or instead of the Germanic system tied to the reigns of kings. When years were numbered as
armo Domini
, a usage popularized by the Church historian Saint Bede (c. 673–735) and observed throughout Christendom by the tenth century, it was not just the past that was being defined, but the present.
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The "year of the Lord" means that the Lord, with dominion over time, is as present now as he was when he walked the earth.

And the Lord's presence was celebrated at the altar of those cathedrals, proclaimed from their pulpits. That the first violent outbursts against Jews were associated with Holy Week observances is the large and foreboding clue. Yes, the crusaders' main enemy was identified by Urban II as the "Turk" or "Saracen," but, the only infidel enemy of whom people in northern Europe had knowledge were Jews. The point to emphasize here is that their knowledge was
liturgical
knowledge, gained in the mysterious realm of the great churches to which Christians brought their inmost fears. That there was thus something fundamentally irrational about assaults on Rhineland Jews did not make the consequences of those assaults imaginary. "If you prick us," Shylock asks, "do we not bleed?...If you poison us, do we not die?"
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Shakespeare put those words in the Jew's mouth four centuries later, by which time the fantastic figment of the Christian imagination had become a central thread in Western consciousness.

And so with Jerusalem. Beginning with the crusaders' fervor, that city took on an elusive mystical aura, captured eventually by William Blake and by the classic hymn sung in the Gothic chapels of British public schools as a way of praising not God but England. So Jerusalem would feed the fantasies of English settlers in the New World. When John Winthrop decreed in 1630, from the deck of a ship in what would become Boston harbor, "that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are upon us," he was envisioning the American self-image as a new Jerusalem. As history shows, that has, in turn, been shadowed by the image of America as, in Walter McDougall's phrase, the "crusader state."
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Not for nothing did Dwight Eisenhower entitle his memoir of World War II
Crusade in Europe.

The shimmering idea of Jerusalem, the holy city to die and kill for, planted itself in the Western mind with the summons, in the words of the medieval chronicler Anna Comnena, of "a certain Kelt, Peter by name ... that they should all leave their homes and set out to worship at the Holy Sepulchre and to endeavor with heart and mind wholeheartedly to deliver Jerusalem."
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The holy city seemed suddenly very close: "Is this Jerusalem?" the accompanying children would ask breathlessly at every town. That was not because the crusading hordes were so ignorant of geography, but, again, because their sense of urgency was rooted in liturgy, not history. Just as the mystery of religious proclamation broke down barriers of time, identifying "the Jews" of the Passion narratives with Jews of the Middle Ages, bringing the suffering of Jesus from the deep past into the eternal now—so with space. Jesus, held captive in the Holy Land, could be encountered at every altar, with its IHS, as in mortal jeopardy
here.
Every believer on his knees at the altar rail was a putative conscript.

So the mystery of sacred time played with the minds of Christians. The great contemporary symbol of that mystery was the millennium. In the tenth century, the literal-minded pious were bound to read chapter 20 of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse, with a fevered chill:

Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain. And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him onto the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years were ended. After that he must be loosed for a little while ... And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be loosed from his prison and come out to deceive the nations which are at the four corners of the earth, that is Gog and Magog, to gather them for battle; their number is like the sand of the sea. And they marched up over the broad earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city; but fire came down from heaven and consumed them, and the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and brimstone where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night for ever and ever.
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