Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (46 page)

The crusaders were unleashed, storming through the city, looking for "the circumcised." Jews who had eluded crusaders, or bribed them during the early phase of the Rhineland incursion, had been succeeded, especially in Speyer and Worms, by Jews who were murdered in cold blood. By the time of Mainz, crusader ferocity was at its peak, fueled by a cross-inspired righteousness, for, as the chronicler recounts it, they declared of their Jewish prey, "You are the children of those who killed our object of veneration, hanging him on a tree; and he himself had said: 'There will yet come a day when my children will come and avenge my blood.' We are his children and it is ... therefore obligatory for us to avenge him since you are the ones who rebel and disbelieve him."
¹⁸

The theology of anti-Jewish hatred could not be more clearly stated. Its meaning could not have been more firmly grasped than it was then by the Jews of Mainz. More than one thousand men, women, and children huddled in the courtyard of the archbishop's palace. They knew very well what had happened elsewhere in the preceding weeks, how bribes and flight had failed, finally, to protect even children. In Mainz, Jews had time to reflect on what was coming, and they knew that the only possible escape was through apostasy. Some few took that way out, but to most conversion to Christianity was more unthinkable than ever.

There is an ancient arcaded courtyard beside the cathedral that dates to within a century of 1096, and it is certainly at or near the place where the Jews awaited the crusaders. Not long ago, on a balmy summer morning, I sat on a stone bench in that courtyard, with the Gothic arches of the church on one side, the pointed leaded windows of the present chapter house on another. The ornate chapter house formerly served as the archbishop's palace, on or near the site of Ruthard's. A large granite crucifix dominated yet another side of the yard. A stone fountain, a vestige of a well, stood in the center of a grassy rectangle, altogether the size, say, of a basketball court. A pair of relatively young trees cast a filigree of shadows toward the fountain. The trees reminded me that everything I was looking at had been reconstructed from the rubble of World War II. A scattering of rose bushes was in bloom that morning, and the red shimmered against the gray stone, a contrast that emphasized the dark weight of a multilayered past.

Solomon bar Simson wrote:

The hand of the Lord rested heavily on His people, and all the Gentiles assembled against the Jews in the courtyard to exterminate them ... When the people of the Sacred Covenant saw that the Heavenly decree had been issued and that the enemy had defeated them and were entering the courtyard, they all cried out together—old and young, maidens and children, menservants and maids—to their Father in Heaven...."There is no questioning the ways of the Holy One, blessed be He and blessed be His Name, Who has given us His Torah and has commanded us to allow ourselves to be killed and slain in witness to the Oneness of His Holy Name..."
¹⁹

Then in a great voice they all cried out as one: "We need tarry no longer, for the enemy is already upon us. Let us hasten and offer ourselves as a sacrifice before God. Anyone possessing a knife should examine it to see that it is not defective, and let him then proceed to slaughter us in sanctification of the Unique and Eternal One, then slaying himself—either cutting his throat or thrusting the knife into his stomach."

In April 1942, Nazis swarmed into the Warsaw Ghetto, hauling Jews to Umschlag Platz, where the boxcars waited. The yellow building behind the high fence at 60 Sienna Street was a children's hospital. One of its doctors was Adina Blandy Szwajger. She survived to tell what happened as the Germans began "taking the sick from the wards to the cattle trucks ... I took morphine upstairs ... and just as, during those two years of real work in the hospital, I had bent down over the little beds, so now I poured this last medicine down those tiny mouths ... and downstairs there was screaming."
²⁰

Or, as Solomon bar Simson wrote of those in the archbishop's courtyard:

The women girded their loins with strength and slew their own sons and daughters, and then themselves. Many men also mustered their strength and slaughtered their wives and children and infants. The most gentle and tender of women slaughtered the child of her delight. They all arose, man and woman alike, and slew one another ... Let the ears hearing this and its like be seared, for who has heard or seen the likes of it? Inquire and seek: was there ever such a mass sacrificial offering since the time of Adam? Did it ever occur that there were one thousand and one hundred offerings on one single day—all of them comparable to the sacrifice of Isaac, the son of Abraham?...For since the day on which the Second Temple was destroyed, their like had not arisen, nor shall there be their like again ... Happy are they and happy is their lot, for all of them are destined for eternal life in the World-to-Come—and may my place be amongst them!
²¹

While Jews were responding, first, to Christian attacks, at a subliminal level it seems possible that Jews and Christians were responding, in some odd way, to the same currents. Crusaders thought they were ushering in the messianic age by forcing Jews to convert or die, while Jews believed that the long-awaited Messiah would come more quickly because of their willing act of self-sacrifice. In both cases, suffering and death had taken on new power as sources of salvation. The term for martyr in Hebrew means "to sanctify the Name"—to die with the words of the Shema on one's lips. For both Christians and Jews, dying for the faith was now sacred, although for the crusaders, killing for the faith was better.

The new cult of martyrdom swept through both communities. Nothing better illustrates the essential similarity than the figure of Isaac, Abraham's son, who had willingly been bound to the altar of sacrifice. But, as is so often true of Judaism and Christianity, the similarity serves only to underscore the difference. The entire history of conflict between Jews and Christians could be said to begin when Saint Paul declared that Jesus, as the sacrificed beloved son of the Father, had replaced Isaac.
²²
It was the Jewish scholar Jon Levenson who drew my attention to Paul's foundational statement: "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us—for it is written, 'Cursed be every one who hangs on a tree'—that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith. To give a human example, brethren: no one annuls even a man's will, or adds to it, once it has been ratified. Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, 'And to offsprings,' referring to many; but, referring to one, 'And to your offspring,' which is Christ."
²³

Jesus, like the classic younger sibling, usurped the place of Isaac, superseded him. And in Paul's reading, emphasizing that singular "offspring," Jesus superseded all of the people Israel. And how did he do this? By that tree, by means of the crucifixion. In Isaac's case, God allowed the father to spare the son—recall that, at the last moment, Abraham's blade came down not on Isaac but on a sacrificial lamb. But in Jesus' case, God himself was the father, and in a shocking reversal of the meaning of love, he showed no such restraint—Jesus became the sacrificial lamb. Because the Son of God died a brutal death at the Father's own hand—albeit by means of "the Jews"—the rest of humanity can be saved.

The Jews of Mainz saw themselves as Isaac too, but Jews then and now read differently the story of a father's readiness to kill his son. Christians read it through the lens of a resurrection faith, and see in Abraham's lifting of the knife a certainty that, even if Isaac dies, he will live. As Levenson points out, Søren Kierkegaard gave eloquent expression to this Christian reading, stating that Abraham "reasoned that God was able to raise even from the dead." That is why, for Kierkegaard, Abraham was the avatar of faith. For Jews, according to Levenson, Abraham's virtue is not faith—he does not foresee a resurrection of his son—but obedience.
²⁴
The theological concepts of Jewish and Christian martyrdom are profoundly different, for Jews do not presume a triumph beyond the act of an offered death. Unlike an Easter-inspired Christian imagination, the Jewish religious imagination does not attempt to define how God keeps the promise of the covenant. Jewish obedience to God therefore assumes an existential confrontation with mortality that eludes a faith tied to resurrection. This difference in theological thinking is reflected in Jewish-Christian differences not only over Isaac but over Auschwitz.

Unlike Isaac, the Jews of Mainz were not spared at the last moment. A new cruelty had apparently now infected the God of Judaism. But to the same effect, for whatever the meaning of their acts of martyrdom to those who actually died, to the Hebrew chroniclers the deaths of all these faithful ones were redemptive. Yet still the thought differed from Christian ideas. It was not the definitive act of one man, in place of all others, that formed the core of this piety, as in Paul, but rather the willingly embraced suffering and death of the mass of Jews. This was salvation not
for
a people but
by
a people. This choice of death over apostasy by the whole of that prestigious Jewish community in the north of Europe was seen as a fulfillment of that single maiden's act in Trier, the "comely" girl who threw herself into the Moselle, and of the three hundred in Cologne who were the first to replay the tragedy of Masada. To die rather than convert—these were heroes treasured in Jewish memory. Their witness, which is the meaning of the Greek-derived word "martyr," changed the way Jews understood themselves in relation to the newly threatening dominant culture. After centuries of concerning themselves only minimally with Christianity, Jews now would define themselves by their defiance of it.

Robert Chazan calls this "the Jewish 'countercrusade' mentality," an unprecedented state of mind, conceived in Trier, it seems not too much to say, and born in Mainz. This mentality mirrored that of the crusaders, and consisted, Chazan says, in "the sense of cosmic confrontation, the conviction of the absolute validity of one's own religious heritage, the emphasis on profound self-sacrifice, the certainty of eternal reward for the commitment of the martyrs, the unshakable belief in the ultimate victory and vindication of one's own community and its religious vision."
²⁵
And beginning here, the religious vision of Judaism would itself be a kind of bulwark, as the Christian vision redefined itself in this era as a kind of assault. This conflict, once joined, would shape the Jewish-Christian polarity for centuries.

An imagined Jerusalem would form the crux of the conflict for Christians as each side idealized the holy city in different ways. For both, the place becomes a sort of presence of God in the world. The Temple, too, resumes its centrality for both, but for Christians the
destroyed
Temple is the point. "Destroy this Temple," Jesus had dared, "and in three days I will raise it up."
²⁶
The Resurrection presumes the destruction. Of course, medieval readers of this Scripture had no idea that it was written
after
the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70
C.E.,
and so they could only think of that destruction as proof of Christ's divinity.

For Jews, the
restored
Temple is the dream, and the way the dream will come true is by the faithful and resolute observance of God's Law. Now that observance is epitomized by the refusal to convert. More than ever, that requires a rejection of, in Solomon bar Simson's words, "a crucified scion who was despised, abominated, and held in contempt in his own generation, a bastard son conceived by a menstruating and wanton mother."
²⁷
The more forcefully eleventh-century Jews reject Christianity, the more certainly Christians become convinced that these Jews are as guilty of the murder of Jesus as their ancestors were, for wasn't this rejection itself proof that they wanted Jesus dead? Jews weren't guilty of killing the Messiah only in the past, but in the present too.

It is a truism of the history of the West that the Crusades transformed the Catholic religion—we will see in the next section how that transformation reached even into the abstractions of theology—but the Crusades transformed Judaism as well. "The sudden ordeal of the summer of 1096, a thunderbolt out of a blue sky, had the effect of forging the power to resist," wrote the scholar Leon Poliakov. And resistance would be "characteristic henceforth of the European Jews."
²⁸
The massacre of Jews in the Rhineland was an event of little or no significance in the Christian chronicles, although such sources confirm that it happened. But the Rhineland catastrophe would be a lasting marker in the mind of Judaism. Not only would martyrdom be regarded now as a central religious act among northern European Jews, but the symbolic martyrdom of a total withdrawal from the dominant culture—it is good, runs the Talmudic proverb, to ruin one's life in study—would shape Jewish asceticism and the Jewish aesthetic.
²⁹

Christian hate spawned Jewish hate, but with a difference. Christian hate would almost always, from now on, be armed. Since Christians controlled the armory, Jews had to find other ways to defend themselves and to express their antagonism. In the burgeoning new economy of capital, they did. It is in 1096 that we find the ultimate source of a sublimation of Jewish hatred toward the dominant culture in the potent symbol—and razor-edged weapon—of money. As Poliakov and others point out, money would be the medium of exchange between Jews and Christians, the coin of self-defense, but also of aggression, and, finally, the funding of a new level of Christian hatred.
³⁰
We will return to the complex question of the association of Jews with moneylending below, but the thing to note here is that it is not purely accidental that, in relation to Christendom, finance became nearly the sole realm of Jewish power.