Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (45 page)

Crusading fever meshed with millennial fever, and soon enough the present moment was widely experienced as nothing less than the dawn of the apocalyptic age. Christ, ransomed by the sacrifice of his army, would return in triumph for the Last Day. Those embarked upon the rescue of Jerusalem were thus ushering in the End of Time. But this spirit impinged directly on the Jews, who could all too easily be tagged as "the beasts and false prophets" deserving of a long-overdue damnation. Jews were those for whom time, literally, was up.

The year 1000 had come and gone, but the millennial mindset it spawned, if only in a literate minority, continued to shape European thought patterns. The millennial understanding of time, as laid out by a twelfth-century monk, Joachim of Fiore (c. 1132–1202), involved three ages: that of the Father, which was the era belonging to the Jews; that of the Son, the era belonging to the Church; and that of the Spirit—the time before the End of Time.
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It was this trinitarian schema that gave Adolf Hitler his motif. The Third Reich succeeded the First, the Holy Roman Empire (962–1806), and the Second, the Hohenzollern Empire (1871–1918), but below this literal chronology, Nazi mythology exploited the idea of the dawning of the messianic era. The Third Reich corresponded to the Third Age of the millennium.
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It was expected to endure, as Hitler said repeatedly, for a thousand years. Hitler worked to undermine the principles of Christian religion and targeted those who openly defended them, he perverted biblical hope by proclaiming himself the Messiah, but he also echoed the medieval Christian conviction that the obstacle to the inauguration of the glorious thousand-year reign, was the stiff-necked Jewish people. That conviction was based on a particular reading—given the use made of it, one could surely say misreading—of the Pauline forecast that the conversion of the Jews would herald the return of the Messiah: "A hardening has come upon part of Israel, until the full number of the Gentiles come in, and so all Israel will be saved; as it is written, 'The Deliverer will come from Zion, he will banish ungodliness from Jacob.'"
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Jews who defended their "ungodliness" by refusing to convert—never mind that they did so in the name of God—were a threat to the ultimate fulfillment of salvation history, a threat that had no precedent, a threat that could not be tolerated. Savage violence? Hadn't Revelation predicted exactly that? "I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator." Christians would later dismiss these words as ingenuous, since their speaker cared nothing for any will but his own, but they remain rooted in the sacred tradition. "By defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord." Such is the true expression of the millennialist mindset of the marauding crusader, although the statement was made by the later millennialist Adolf Hitler.
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26. Mainz Anonymous

F
ROM TRIER,
where my mother and I found ourselves on opposite sides of piety, to Cologne, where I knelt, dubious, before the Three Kings; from Kespen, near Maria Laach, where I learned the timeless vernacular of plainchant, to Rüdesheim, where I drank my first hock—in these sacred places of my youth, Jews were savagely assaulted during the spring of 1096. A map of the Rhine region published in the
Jewish Encyclopedia
¹
shows fourteen "Sites, with Dates, of Anti-Jewish Outbreaks During the First Crusade, 1096." The dates range from April 17 to July 1. The number of Jews murdered or forced to suicide in those weeks is estimated by scholars to have been as low as 5,000
²
or as high as 10,000,
³
perhaps a full third of the Jews living in northern Europe. When adjusted for demographics, an equivalent number of victims in our century would exceed 130,000.

This rampage fell on the Jews like "a thunderclap out of the blue."
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So, perhaps, does this history fall on a modern Christian. In my case, the blue sky it shatters was stretched like a film of innocence above the place where I came into self-awareness—that golden city of my father's headquarters on the Rhine. My innocence was decidedly American: "This war was a holy war," General Eisenhower had said of his crusade, "more than any other in history this war has been an array of the forces of evil against those of righteousness."
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One of the forces of righteousness, the Soviet Union (later to be known as the "evil empire"), had switched sides by the time I was at my station as a crusader's son, which made our war holy too. And my innocence was Catholic, since, as everyone knew in the anti-Red heyday of Pius XII, the Church militant was the custodian of the martial holiness Ike had prized. Cardinal Francis Spellman, known as the military vicar, embodied the union of our ideals:
Pro Deo et Patria.
My mother's work for Spellman, in her role as president of the Military Council of Catholic Women and organizer of those Rhineland pilgrimages, was the perfect expression of our triumphant religious nationalism.

From the hill above Wiesbaden—in the American enclave of Hainerberg, which we took to mean "Higher City," or more resonantly, "City on a Hill"—the blue sky was like a shielding canopy over a postwar population center that had not been brought to ruin. The pristine steeples below—Protestant, not Catholic—were sharp against the green hills that cut off our view of the mighty river and of Mainz on its opposite shore. Mayence is what that city is called in older sources, reflecting its pull toward the Romance culture of Catholic Europe; in fact, in the Napoleonic era, Mainz was annexed by France. Today the skyline is dominated by the proud Romanesque tower of the cathedral—dominated literally, since the German word for cathedral is
Dorti.
Part of the church dates to the eleventh century, and that was built on the site of an older cathedral, which had been erected during the reign of Constantine. In my time there, however, the cathedral was unremarked upon, and there was no skyline of Mainz. In adjacent Wiesbaden, we knew nothing of that city, nor of its past, neither recent nor distant.

Mainz, with Trier and Cologne, had long been one of three ancient seats of the bishop electors who helped choose the Holy Roman Emperor. For most of the Middle Ages, Mainz, strategically situated at the confluence of the Rhine and Main Rivers, was the most powerful of the three. As we saw, it was known as "the Rome of the North," and like Rome it carried the title of Holy See. In the
Dorri
s apse, which predates the First Crusade, the emperors were anointed. Yet my pilgrim mother never took us there. Why? For the simple reason, I see now, that in the late 1950s, war damage from American bombardment was still evident. The market square adjacent to the cathedral had not been completely cleared of rubble, and the cathedral would not be fully restored until 1989. Allied air bombardment killed 600,000 Germans during World War II,
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almost all of them civilians, and the majority in the last months of the war when the Nazi machine was all but defeated. In one city, Dresden, with more than 100,000 killed,
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there were not enough survivors to bury the dead. For Jews, as we saw, the crusaders' Holy Week assault in 1096 was like a "thunderclap out of the blue." The Allied air offensive against Dresden, carried out on Shrove Tuesday into Ash Wednesday in 1945, was called Operation Thunderclap. Such a coincidence of language invites a conflating of anti-Jewish violence in this region with the later anti-civilian violence, yet that is not what I intend. Clearly anti-Jewish violence has its own demonic relentlessness. The point of comparison is tied more to the inner logic of the crusading impulse, and it seems impossible to ignore that it was unleashed in separate episodes nearly a thousand years apart over this same territory.

The German military positions along the Rhine were the fabled "West Wall" of the Third Reich. In the final months of the war, they were subject to massive Allied carpet bombing—but so were population centers on the river, strategically placed or not. When the Germans had first targeted cities early in the war, especially Coventry and Rotterdam, Franklin Roosevelt denounced an "inhuman barbarism that has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity."
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But near war's end, the Allied conscience had changed. The commander in chief of the British Bomber Command said, "I would not regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British grenadier."
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Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, Essen, Nuremberg, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, all were "bombed to rubble."
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As we saw, the Cologne Cathedral was spared as a monument to Allied humaneness, but no such restraint was imposed on the thunderclaps from the blue above Mainz. A guidebook I obtained there recently refers to the bombing that Mainz endured as "the apocalypse of the Second World War," an eerie, if incidental, rebuttal to Ike's use of the term "crusade." In fact, the crusading mindset was given more apt expression by the new technology of aerial bombing. Commenting on the British and American campaign against German cities, when no such assault was necessary to win the war, the historian Paul Johnson wrote, "The bombing offensive appealed strongly to the moralistic impulse of both nations: What the British atomic scientist P.S.M. Blackett called 'The Jupiter Complex'—the notion of the Allies as righteous gods, raining retributive thunderbolts on their wicked enemies." In that final paroxysm of violence, 80 percent of Mainz was, in a phrase of the guidebook, "reduced to debris."

When Allied ground forces moved into Germany in September 1944, they retraced the route of Peter the Hermit. At the heart of the first territory they took was Trier.
¹¹
On March 22, 1945, George Patton led his Third Army across the Rhine south of Mainz, beating out Bernard Montgomery, who would cross the river later, to the north. Upon learning of Patton's thrust, Hitler ordered an immediate counteroffensive, but he was told that nothing was left with which to resist.
¹²
And that was why, finally, our lovely spa city of Wiesbaden, on the eastern bank, was spared, and why, little more than a decade later, my youthful American conscience could also be spared—spared its confrontation with these complexities. The map of the gratuitous Allied air war against Rhineland cities was as unknown to me then as the First Crusade map in the
Jewish Encyclopedia.
Undertaking this book terminates a lifetime's sparing of conscience. Without drawing a moral equation between these thunderclaps of crusader violence, medieval and modern, I must still observe that at the center of each stands Mainz, a mere two and a half miles away from where I lived, prayed, and learned to be a man and a son, an American and a Catholic.

"When the saints, the pious ones of the Most High, the holy community of Mainz, whose merit served as shield and protection for all the communities and whose fame had spread throughout the many provinces, heard that some of the community of Speyer had been slain and that the community of Worms had been attacked a second time, and that the sword would soon reach them, their hands became faint and their hearts melted and became as water. They cried out to the Lord with all their hearts, saying: 'O Lord, God of Israel, will You completely annihilate the remnant of Israel?'"
¹³
These words are taken from the "Chronicle of Solomon bar Simson," which is one of four Hebrew chronicles ("Mainz Anonymous," cited earlier, is another) that tell what happened to Jews during the Crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Solomon bar Simson's account was composed within a few decades of the attack in Mainz, which took place in late May 1096, coming to a staggering climax on May 27. "Then, the [Jewish] community leaders who were respected by the local bishop approached him and his officers and servants to negotiate this matter. They asked: 'What shall we do about the news we have received regarding the slaughter of our brethren in Speyer and Worms?' They [the Gentiles] replied, 'Heed our advice and bring all your money into our treasury. You, your wives, and your children, and all your belongings shall come into the courtyard of the bishop until the hordes have passed by. Thus will you be saved from the errant ones."

The archbishop of Mainz who offered this protection to the Jews of his city was named Ruthard. The chronicler is ambivalent about this figure, asserting at one place that the bishop only wanted the Jews' money, and at another that he solemnly promised, "We shall die with you or remain alive with you."
¹⁴
Robert Chazan concludes from his study of the First Crusade that Ruthard was sincerely determined to protect the Jews.
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But his effort was doomed. His force consisted of three hundred soldiers, while the besieging crusaders numbered some twelve thousand. For two days, that force was kept out of Mainz by the city wall, but then the gates "were opened by sympathetic burghers."
¹⁶
A self-interested bishop might protect Jews because they were a useful counterweight to the rising merchant class. But Ruthard's support of the Jews of Mainz went beyond self-interest. He risked his own life, since the crusaders, as the chronicler says, "wanted to kill him, too, because he had spoken in favor of the Jews."
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Once the city was overrun, however, the archbishop fled, taking refuge across the Rhine in Rüdesheim (where I, sitting in the wine garden of a half-timbered inn nearly a millennium later, would have my first legal drink).