Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (54 page)

Gregory IX took the Chair of Peter in 1227, little more than a decade after the Fourth Lateran Council, which had fired such a resounding warning shot at Jews. It was this Gregory who, with the aptly named constitution
Excommunicamus
(1231), took the fateful step of establishing the first papal Inquisition. This new institution took its name from its stated mission:
inquisitio haereticae pravitatis
.
¹⁶
Initially, as the Latin indicates, the Inquisition was aimed at Christian heretics, who, once condemned, were handed over to secular authority to be burned at the stake—or, if they were lucky, as Hans Küng points out, to have their tongues removed.

From within a self-defined world of univocal orthodoxy, heretics and Jews began to look more and more like the same thing. Soon, the papal Inquisition was directed by Pope Gregory to launch an investigation into the Talmud. A convert from Judaism, one Nicholas Donin, testified in 1236 before the pope himself about the blasphemous and heretical content of this compilation of writings.
¹⁷
Gregory ordered the archbishops and kings of Europe, as well as the Franciscans and Dominicans, to expose the secrets of the Talmud, "the chief cause that holds the Jews obstinate in their perfidy."
¹⁸
The University of Paris was especially commissioned for the task.

This investigation was a matter not only of uncovering blasphemies—indeed, certain passages in the Talmud denigrated Jesus and his mother—but of determining whether rabbinic commentaries were heretical
within the context of Judaism.
The Church, in other words, was making the unprecedented claim—"an entirely new development in the Christian theology of the Jew," Jeremy Cohen calls it
¹⁹
—to moral and theological authority over the content of Jewish belief.

Here is an indictment of the Talmud solemnly given by Gregory's successor, Innocent IV (1243–1254):

Ungrateful to the Lord Jesus Christ, who, His forbearance overflowing, patiently awaits their conversion, they manifest no shame for their guilt, nor do they reverence the dignity of the Christian faith. Omitting or condemning the Mosaic Law and the Prophets, they follow certain traditions of their elders ... In Hebrew they call them "Thalamuth," and an immense book it is, exceeding the text of the Bible in size, and in it are blasphemies against God and His Christ, and against the blessed Virgin, fables that are manifestly beyond all explanation, erroneous abuses, and unheard-of stupidities—yet this is what they teach and feed their children ... and render them totally alien to the Law and the Prophets, fearing lest the Truth which is understood in the same Law and Prophets, bearing patent testimony to the only-begotten Son of God, who was to come in flesh, they be converted to the faith, and return humbly to their Redeemer.
²⁰

Only two blocks from Notre-Dame, on the right bank of the Seine, there stands a lovely plaza, spread like an apron before the dignified, mansard-roofed Hotel de Ville. Not long ago, I spent a quiet afternoon sitting at a small table in one of the sidewalk cafés that line one edge of the square. Visible to my right were the soaring towers of the cathedral, their gargoyles alert. Just beyond was the needle spire of the exquisite Sainte-Chapelle, built as a reliquary for the crown of thorns,
²¹
which made me think of the Seamless Robe—Helena's legacy was as alive in Paris as in Trier. Anchoring the distance, across the square, was the congested bazaar of the weekend market. Despite this lively scene, my concentration was taken over by the layered history of the place. Near here was the mustering point for the Jews of Paris rounded up on July 16, 1942. Thirteen thousand were taken away that day, four thousand of them children. There was no protest. More than half of the eighty-five thousand Jews deported from France to Nazi extermination camps came from Paris—the streets around me. Their confiscated artworks, bank accounts, and apartments are still being adjudicated.

What is the line between that day and the day in 1242 when up to twenty-four cartloads of books, something like twelve thousand volumes,
²²
were dumped onto the pavement of this same plaza? Those books were all the known copies of the Talmud to be found in Paris and its environs, brought here by the soldiers of King Louis IX, also known as Saint Louis.
²³
His men had invaded and ransacked Jewish homes and synagogues to get at the books.

The faculty of the University of Paris, heirs of Peter Abelard and teachers of Thomas Aquinas, had held its trial in the form of a debate, with conscripted Jewish sages speaking for the Talmud and Dominicans speaking against. The faculty rendered its verdict: The Talmud was a work of heresy. The Talmud was the reason Jews were refusing to convert. Destroy the Talmud, and the truth of "fulfillment" arguments from the Old Testament, rationally offered, would be clear to them at last. The king's men took their stations around the mountain of books, to keep back the Jews as the torchbearers approached. The two-sword theory of Saint Bernard was here given its first mature expression, as the king carried out the physical sanction decreed by the spiritual court. The bonfire was lit. The Talmud burned. It would take one and a half days to consume all volumes.
²⁴

Jewish elegies would mark the event, an ongoing communal lament that would sear the memory of European Jewry "with a grief akin," as Marc Saperstein put it, "to that in the wake of the Crusade massacres."
²⁵
What was begun at Trier and Mainz in the spring of 1096 was continued in Paris in 1242, but with this difference: The assault on the Talmud came not from a mob but from the established seat, intellectual and ecclesiastical, of Christendom itself. First the crusaders, then
Cur Deus Homo.
If Anselm had turned God into a slayer of the innocent, now Innocent III, Saint Bernard, and Gregory IX had prepared the way for as much to be done to the Church. Already the meanings of this transformation, seen in the torching of the Talmud, were clear. The Augustinian mandate—"Do not slay them!"—was a protection for an Old Testament Judaism that had survived only in the Christian imagination. Jews were to be protected as long as they were true Jews, as Christians defined what was true. And now that truth could be so rationally explained, the category of invincible ignorance that had held from Augustine to Abelard would be reversed. The Talmud debate in Paris was a mere prelude to great debates that would follow, especially in Spain, where the Moors had been vanquished thirty years before. In the age to come, Jewish ignorance would be defined, ipso facto, as willful. With the advent of an operational, double-edged Inquisition, the once blurred line between error and truth could be clearly drawn.

The public burning in the great square of Paris was a first indication that a living, growing Judaism would not be allowed to survive in a Europe ever more under the sway of the sword-perverted cross. And what was written on those destroyed pages? Here are lines "picked from the Talmud at random," as the distinguished rabbi Emil Bernhard Cohn put it, "...to lift a corner of the veil":

Love of humanity is more than charity. The value of charity lies only in love, which lives in it. Love surpasses charity in three respects: Charity touches only a man's money; love touches the man himself. Charity is only for the poor; love is for both poor and rich. Charity is only for the living; love is for both living and dead. Love without reproof of error is no love. He who judges his neighbor leniently will himself be judged leniently by God. Let man always be intelligent and affable in his God-fearing. Let him answer softly, curb his wrath and let him live in peace with his brethren and his kin and with every man, yes, even with the pagan on the street, in order that he be beloved in heaven and on earth, and be acceptable to all men. The kindly man is the truly God-fearing man.
²⁶

PART FIVE

THE INQUISITION: ENTER RACISM

31. One Road

A
T FIRST GLANCE,
they made the most unlikely duo since Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley posed for that famous Oval Office photo. On Saturday, September 27, 1997, Bob Dylan appeared on the same platform with Pope John Paul II at a youth festival in Bologna, Italy. "In one of history's more surreal celebrity pairings," the story in
USA Today
said, "the leader of the Roman Catholic Church and the Jewish-born protest singer clasped hands and chatted before 200,000 spectators at the outdoor concert."
¹

Bob Dylan wore an embroidered black suit and a white cowboy hat, and the pope, as customary, was garbed in the papal white soutane and white skullcap. It was reported that Dylan appeared at the Church-sponsored rally at the pope's explicit invitation.
²
The rock icon sang "Knockin on Heaven's Door" and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" while John Paul sat behind him in a throne-like chair. One photo showed the elderly pontiff—he was seventy-seven at the time—resting his chin on the palm of his hand. Dylan, who at fifty-six was no spring chicken himself, seemed totally focused on the knob of the microphone in front of him.

The two have more in common than is readily apparent. When Karol Wojtyla was elected to the Chair of Peter in 1978, he was condescended to in the press as a guitar-strumming Boy Scout leader, and in fact he was known in Poland for his love of folk songs and his knack for composing lyrics. As a young man during the Nazi era, Wojtyla had combined art and resistance—although as an actor member of a nationalist Polish theater group, not as a singer. While Bob Dylan was first making his name as the bard of the civil rights and peace movements—who of that generation can forget the mandatory pulse of "The Times They Are A-Changin'"?—Wojtyla was making his first mark on the wider Church at the Second Vatican Council. One priest who was there told me that the bishops' rancorous debate on
Nostra Aetate,
the declaration that renounces the charge that all Jews are corporately guilty forever of the murder of Christ, took a definitive turn toward approval when the theretofore silent Pole spoke resoundingly in favor. "I remember raising my head," this priest told me, "and thinking, Who is that prophet? Wojtyla spoke of the Church's obligation to change its teaching on the Jews with a passion that could only have come from personal experience. For an unknown bishop from Poland, it was amazing. Wojtyla made the difference."
³

The
USA Today
writer carefully described Dylan as "Jewish-born." His given name was Robert Zimmerman. In the 1970s, Dylan became what the press dubbed a "born-again Christian," which was inaccurate, since the phrase assumes an initial baptism. Nevertheless, his conversion to Christianity was a surprise not only to his legion of aging, post-religious fans, but to many Jews, for whom such a turn understandably evokes a visceral reaction.
⁴
Within a few years of Dylan's conversion, his religious identity had become ambiguous. By the time of his son's bar mitzvah, he was understood by many as having returned to Judaism. Since then, he has declined to discuss his religious life in public. On the occasion of his appearance with the pope, he denied that the event had any personal spiritual significance. "Playing for the pope is just a show," he said. "I don't judge who asks me to play. That's not my position. I'm grateful to be asked for whatever reason."

John Paul II, on the other hand, seems to have had a ready reason for the joint appearance. At the conclusion of Dylan's brief set, the pope went to the microphone. '"The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,'" he said in his heavily accented English, quoting Dylan's legendary lyric. For that large audience of Italian young people, His Holiness defined the wind as "the breath and life of the Holy Spirit." Then, as if justifying the presence of Bob Dylan and, not incidentally, defending Dylan's now renounced conversion, John Paul raised the epic question: '"How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?'" And he answered it: "One! There is only one road for man, and it is Christ, who said, 'I am the life'!"

The line His Holiness quoted comes from Jesus' answer to the apostle Thomas's question, "How can we know the way?" Jesus replied, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me."
⁵

Thus, at the Dylan concert, John Paul II was claiming for Jesus only what the earliest Church had claimed for him—the claim from which Jews dissent. Yet given the long history of ecclesiastical politics, John Paul's claim for Jesus could seem simultaneously, if implicitly, a claim for himself. There are mixed messages in recent Catholic history on the question of whether other religions offer "ways" to salvation. When John Paul II convened a congress of world religions at Assisi in 1986, for example, his patent respect for other spiritual leaders seemed to indicate a new level of Church ecumenism, although Vatican officials quickly sought to correct that impression. "This cannot be a model," said Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.
⁶
Church theologians who are
too
respectful of other religions are still disciplined, or even excommunicated.
⁷

The defense of the exclusivist and universalist reach of Christian salvation has, at least since the era of monarchical feudalism, been at the center of papal self-assertion. Whatever John Paul II's personal impulses of openness toward other religions amount to, his long tenure—at more than twenty years, he is one of the longest-serving popes—has been devoted to the restoration of the medieval monarchy as the model for Church authority, with tremendous consequences for relations with other faiths. Indeed, John Paul's emphatic proclamation of that "One!" in response to the Dylan lyric echoes the claim of Boniface VIII (1294–1303), even to the word. That pope's bull
Unam Sanctam
gave the claim to absolute papal authority its ultimate expression, as, in fact, those same words—"one ... holy"—had done for Constantine at Nicaea. Efforts to assure the unity of the Church quickly, in Constantine's method, become efforts to centralize authority. Boniface, like John Paul II after him, came to the papacy following a period in which papal authority had been diluted, although in that era the struggle was less with dissenting theologians than with competing monarchs. Boniface was fighting what would prove to be a losing battle against nationalist feeling, much as today's Vatican resists the ideology of pluralism.