Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (47 page)

But the inner life of Judaism would always be far more concerned with something else: the wound God had permitted to be inflicted on God's people once again. That perplexity would fuel the renewal of Jewish theology, with the
via negativa
of Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) and the mystical innovation of Kabbalah, a spiritual system with which to survive in a hostile world, and which begins to take form here.
³¹
Such a development should not surprise, since Kabbalah nurtures the sense, in the scholar Moshe Idel's phrase, of "God's closeness to those of 'broken hearts.'"
³²
Jews had to confront, as in the past, the harsh reality that the hope of the martyrs had been disappointed, for the catastrophe of 1096, like the turning of the millennium itself, had proved irrelevant to the longed-for coming of the Messiah, no matter how piously the faithful ones had offered themselves. But instead of giving in to dashed hopes, Jews did with that wound what they had learned to do long before, which was to wrap it in the consoling shawl of storytelling. And not just any storytelling. The memory of 1096—events up and down the Rhine, but especially the self-binding of Mainz—would be kept alive in the liturgy, as holy acts of prayer. That memory influences how Jews see the cross, even today, as the sign of the crusaders. And why should there not be contention over this symbol?

For all these centuries, down through the millennium until the present, the memory of Mainz has been lifted up on the annual fast day of Tisha b'Av, the commemoration of the Temple's destruction. From that destruction, so much of this tragic story flows. On Tisha b'Av, parts of the Hebrew chronicles are recited as sacred text.

27. The Blood Libel

O
N MY DESK
before me are half a dozen 3 x 5 photographs I took on my recent journey, pictures of an old cemetery in Mainz. Here is what a recently published city guidebook says:
"Alt Israelitische Friedhof
(Old Jewish Cemetery) in Mombacher Strasse contains the only remaining medieval tombstones of Mainz—those in churchyards or cloisters have all disappeared. On this hill, below the city district
Am Judensand,
grave slabs remind us of famous rabbis, Jewish scholars, and poets, from ca. 1000 onwards—members of an important Jewish community in Mainz."

The old Jewish cemetery is on a street behind the train station, on a hill from which the Rhine can be seen. As a boy, I would have driven on this street, but I never noticed the tombstones on the grassy slope. Almost certainly they were neglected then. Even today, nothing on the spot announces what this cemetery is, or what it means here. In the Hebrew chronicle "Sefer Zekhirah," also known as "The Book of Remembrance of Rabbi Ephraim of Bonn," there is a description of an event, in Würzburg, equivalent to what happened in Mainz when more than a thousand died in the courtyard of the archbishop's palace. "On the following day," the chronicler writes, "the bishop ordered that all the slaughtered saints be collected on wagons—all the choice severed limbs: hips and shoulders, thumbs of hands and feet, sanctified with holy oil, together with everything else that remained of their bodies and limbs—and buried in his garden. Hezekiah, son of our Master Rabbi Eliakim, and Mistress Judith, his wife, purchased this Garden of Eden from the bishop and consecrated it as an eternal burial ground."
¹

It was at the Mainz version of such a Garden of Eden that I stood, my tourist pictures of which lay spread before me now. The gravestones still protruded from the grass. The inscriptions were worn too smooth to read. but the sharp-angled letters were Hebrew in any case, unknown to me. There was no entrance sign, no gate beyond a swinging wire door, nothing to identify the place as the sacred acreage it was. The hillside graveyard was enclosed by a mundane chain-link fence—mundane except for the coiled barbed wire that ran along the top, an eloquent implication. On the day of my visit, there were attached to the fence a pair of bright-colored posters, and it took no language skills to see what they advertised: "Mainz Volkspark ... Circus."

Traffic roared by on Mombacher Strasse. No one gave the hillside or its stones a glance. I was the only visitor that afternoon. Modern-day Mainz makes nothing of its long-dead population of Jews—a sign, surely, of how few living Jews claim the city now. But the cemetery's very anonymity added to the marvel of its survival—and what it had survived! By the miracle of that association, the place of the dead seemed alive to me.

One of the stones I came upon was familiar, a striking jagged monolith growing out of the earth like a last tooth in the mouth of time. Its inscription was partly broken off, but a section remained intact, and made me sure it matched the tombstone I had seen in a photograph in a book of Hebrew chronicles, which placed it in Mainz. The photo caption offers this translation of the fragmented medieval Hebrew: "...daughter of Isaac (who was murdered) and drowned in sanctification of the oneness of God in the year 906 (1146) on the Friday, the fifth of Iyar (19 April). May she rest in Eden, the Garden."

That the daughter of Isaac died in 1146 indicates that she was a martyred victim of the Second Crusade, which was launched by a call of Pope Eugene III in March of that year. That the young woman died in April, within the month, suggests with what efficiency crusader violence returned to Mainz. But in the Second Crusade, something different happened, for the successors of the well-meaning but hapless Archbishop Ruthard were determined that the anti-Jewish horror of 1096 not repeat itself. Bishops of the Church, including the popes, had been uniformly appalled at the Rhineland violence unleashed in the First Crusade. That outbreak had prompted an ecclesiastical examination of conscience, which ultimately led to the promulgation of the landmark papal bull
Sicut Judaeis
by Callixtus II (1119–1124). An echo of Gregory the Great's intervention five hundred years before, this medieval defense of Jews would be reissued by more than twenty popes during the subsequent four centuries. Setting an iron precedent, Callixtus offered Jews "the shield of our protection. We decree," he said, "that no Christian shall use violence to force them [Jews] into baptism."
²
This prohibition was a strengthening of the bull of Pope Gregory, issued in recognition that, after the events of 1096, the tradition of papal protection of Jews had to be urgently reinforced, and it was.

When, twenty years after
Sicut Judaeis,
reports were heard of the first attacks on Jews—one of whose victims was the "daughter of Isaac"—a papal legate came to the Rhineland to speak forcefully against such attacks. He was Bernard of Clairvaux, known to us as Saint Bernard. A great monastic reformer and theologian, he was the main preacher of the Second Crusade—its equivalent to Peter the Hermit. Although an enthusiastic supporter of attacks on Muslims, Bernard published an important proclamation condemning attacks on Jews, and he traveled throughout the Rhineland denouncing all who would incite anti-Jewish violence.

Bernard was described by his biographer as a man "of graceful body, pleasant face, very polished manners, shrewd wit and persuasive eloquence."
³
Clearly his preaching had an impact, as indicated even by at least one Hebrew chronicle, which portrays him—"a decent priest"—as a rare Christian hero. This is a passage from "Sefer Zekhirah":

Upon hearing this [that crusaders were coming again], our hearts melted and our spirit failed us, because of the fury of the oppressor who intended to destroy us. We cried out to our God, saying: "Alas, Lord, God, not even fifty years, the number of years in a jubilee, have passed since our blood was shed in witness to the Oneness of Your Revered Name on the day of the great slaughter. Will You forsake us eternally, O Lord? Will You extend Your anger to all generations? Do not permit this suffering to recur."

The Lord heard our outcry, and He turned to us and had mercy upon us. In His great mercy and grace, He sent a decent priest, one honored and respected by all the clergy in France, named Abbé Bernard of Clairvaux...[who] spoke raucously, as is their manner; and this is what he said to them: "It is good that you go against the Ishmaelites. But whosoever touches a Jew to take his life, is like one who harms Jesus himself. My disciple Radulf [the anti-Jewish Christian leader), who has spoken about annihilating the Jews, has spoken in error, for in the Book of Psalms it is written of them: 'Slay them not, lest my people forget.'"
⁴

Bernard's interpretation of Psalm 59, verse 11, as the Lord's commandment not to kill Jews reproduces the use Augustine made of the same verse. Just as Augustine, with his tremendous authority, trumped the violent anti-Jewishness of Saint Ambrose, enabling Judaism to survive into the Middle Ages, so Bernard's intervention would prove crucial. "Were it not for the mercy of our Creator in sending the aforementioned Abbé and his later epistles," the chronicler says, "no remnant or vestige would have remained of Israel. Blessed the Redeemer and Savior, blessed be His Name!"
⁵

And yet. We saw, in considering Augustine's defense of Jews, that it involved an ambivalence that would eventually prove tragic, and we asked whether unbridled theological derision could really coexist with respect for the lives of those held in such contempt. I have noted that more than twenty popes would reissue
Sicut Judaeis
over four centuries, a positive record of which the Vatican can rightly be proud. Yet why was it necessary for them to do so? Bishops, popes, and kings would more or less consistently oppose the anti-Jewish violence that would, from now on, more or less consistently mark the behavior of lower clergy, townspeople, and peasants. But were the people responding to the other clear message they heard from their leaders?

"The Jews are not to be persecuted, killed, or even put to flight," Bernard wrote in "Letter to the People of England." But in explaining why, again repeating Augustine, he plants the seed of the very violence he abhors. "The Jews are for us the living words of scripture, for they remind us always of what our Lord suffered. They are dispersed all over the world so that by expiating their crime they may be everywhere the living witnesses of our redemption. Hence the same Psalm [59] adds, 'only let thy power disperse them.'...If the Jews are utterly wiped out, what will become of our hope for their promised salvation, their eventual conversion?"
⁶

This is a far cry from a defense of the rights of Jews, and it serves to confirm in the Christian every impulse of negation. "To label a group the most heinous of enemies and then to demand for them tolerance (albeit limited) and safety"—this is Robert Chazan's assessment of Bernard's intervention—"is probably to make demands that the human psyche, over the long run, must have difficulty in meeting."
⁷
Such ambivalence, in other words, has a fuse attached to it. This mode of thought survived well into the twentieth century. The primate of Poland, Cardinal Augustyn Hlond, issued a pastoral letter in 1936 that included a clear prohibition of anti-Jewish violence. "I warn against that moral stance, imported from abroad, that is basically and ruthlessly anti-Jewish. It is contrary to Catholic ethics. One may not hate anyone. It is forbidden to assault, beat up, maim or slander Jews. One should honor Jews as human beings and neighbors ... Beware of those who are inciting anti-Jewish violence. They serve an evil cause."
⁸

What more could a defender of Roman Catholic behavior during the Nazi era hope for? But alas—and true to Augustyn Hlond's namesake—this very statement, with its rejection of slander, begins with these words: "There will be the Jewish problem as long as the Jews remain. It is a fact that the Jews are fighting against the Catholic Church, persisting in freethinking, and are the vanguard of godlessness, Bolshevism and subversion. It is a fact that the Jewish influence on morality is pernicious and that their publishing houses disseminate pornography. It is a fact that the Jews deceive, levy interest, and are pimps. It is a fact that the religious and ethical influence of the Jewish young people on Polish young people is a negative one."
⁹
I characterized this passage as "an attack on Jews" in print,
¹⁰
and was criticized for it by Catholics who wanted to emphasize Hlond's pro forma rejection of violence.
¹¹
But what was the real effect of his pastoral letter? Does the negation of this tradition consistently outweigh the affirmation? The letter was read from the pulpits of Poland as part of an official Catholic endorsement of a Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses.

Saint Bernard is credited by Christians and Jews both with an intervention during the Second Crusade that prevented a recurrence of the savage anti-Jewish violence of the First Crusade. But his concurrent powerful negation of Judaism may have been related to the other momentous turn in the story that occurred just then. It is as if anti-Jewish crusader violence, once expressly forbidden, had been channeled into a slyer form. In 1144, within three years of Bernard's Rhineland preaching, and within even less time of his letter to Christians in England, Jews were accused of the "Blood Libel" for the first recorded time—and it happened in England.

The Blood Libel charges Jews with replaying the crucifixion of Jesus by murdering a Christian child, always a boy, and using his blood in perverse rituals that mock the Eucharist. This first accusation was made in Norwich when a tanner's apprentice, a boy named William, was found dead in a woods, and his death was blamed on Jews.
¹²
The false charge was brought during Holy Week, with the retaliatory murder of a Jew being carried out on Good Friday. The "informant" who brought the report of the murder was himself a Jew,
¹³
like Judas Iscariot, and like the Jew who led Helena to the hidden True Cross. The Blood Libel resembled a virus that then lodged itself in the Christian imagination. Jews were accused of crucifying boys in 1147 in Wurzburg, near Mainz, and of the same or similar crimes in Gloucester in 1168, in Blois in 1171, in Saragossa in 1182
¹⁴
—and again and again after that, all over Europe, even into the twentieth century. The ritual murder charge appears in "The Prioress's Tale" of Chaucer
¹⁵
and in James Joyce's
Ulysses
.
¹⁶
Numerous "victims" of the Jewish "murders," like Saint William of Norwich, would be revered as saints of the Church. The niche in which the virus thrived, of course—and here is what it means that the Crusades spawned it—was the unleashed cult of the cross.