Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (57 page)

But the stresses of this tumultuous age—recall that the Fourth Lateran Council had already issued its anti-Jewish strictures, and the conversionist Franciscans and Dominicans were fanning out across Iberia as much as France—are nowhere more tragically dramatized than in the denouement of the story of Alfonso the Wise. He not only wanted a reconquered Iberia, unified under himself, but also had attempted, through dynastic alliances and wars, to expand the power of Castile north into France. Twice (in 1257 and c. 1275) Alfonso sought to be elected Holy Roman Emperor, to assert his vision of absolute unity over Europe. In all of this he was defeated. Had he succeeded in the period of his ecumenical open-mindedness toward Jews, the history of Europe could have been very different. On the other hand, there would have remained in a kingdom of such univocal sway the question of Jewish difference, which might only then have surfaced as something at which such a monarch could take offense.

As it happened, Alfonso the Wise took offense at Jews not when he was gathering power, but when he began to lose it. Toward the end of his reign, he was betrayed by his son Sancho, who led a revolt against him (1280–1281). Alfonso's fierce reaction included an apparently out-of-the-blue attack on the very Jews with whom he had been so intimate.
²²
It is not clear what prompted such a response, but what followed would make it appear that
convivencia
was a house built on sand after all. Jews of Toledo were imprisoned in their own synagogues. The wealthiest among them were made to pay exorbitant ransoms. Many were tortured and forced to convert. "The Jewish community of Toledo was demolished," Baer says, "like 'Sodom and Gomorrah.'"
²³
It would attempt a recovery in the next generation, when Samuel Halevy rose to prominence and a temporary amity reestablished itself between Christians and Jews. But, as we saw, that would not last either. The days of Jews in Toledo were already numbered. As even the "wisest" and most humane of the Christian rulers revealed himself, in the end, to be an enemy of Jews, so the Jerusalem of Spain went the way of its namesake.

Alfonso's attack was not merely a matter of an ancient anti-Jewish dormant gene asserting itself, which is the way his assault on Jews, and the Iberian nightmare it foreshadows, is often read. This analysis, in effect, reinforces the doom-laden expectation that Jews must always be victims. In this view,
convivencia
was a temporary aberration, a mistake in history, instead of a genuine opening to a new possibility. I would argue that Jewish-Christian-Muslim amity in Iberia was no mistake; it was a development grounded in the core meaning of each tradition, one that could have continued to thrive. That it did not do so was the result not just of inbred Christian Jew-hatred but of a complex interplay of factors, one of which was the agency of Jews themselves. Jews, in other words, are not mere victims here.

There were forces at work beneath the surface of the Alfonsine
convivencia
that began with a powerful Jewish rejection of all that the king claimed for himself. At the time that Alfonso was fighting off his son and attacking Jews, one of the great Jewish sages, Moses de Leon (c. 1240–1305), working in Castile, was composing what the critic Harold Bloom has characterized as "the only indubitably great book in all of Western esotericism,"
²⁴
the
Zohar,
or Book of Splendor. As Bloom's word "esotericism" indicates, the
Zohar
is usually discussed as a mystical text. A multivolume work composed in Hebrew and Aramaic, it is defined by the scholar Gershom Scholem as "the central work in the literature of the Kabbalah."
²⁵
Kabbalah, a labyrinthine Jewish tradition of teachings about God and God's creation, now began to coalesce as an identifiable vision. With Moses de Leon, long-buried currents of Neo-Platonic and Gnostic systems of interpreting the tradition and its texts surfaced, and from then on, the tradition of Kabbalah, as much mythmaking as mystical, would be a major force in Jewish spirituality. More than that, Kabbalah would have profound implications for the place of Judaism both in Christendom and in the Enlightenment, and we will see more of its religious and political significance later.

The point to emphasize here is that thirteenth-century Kabbalists, based in Iberia, and perhaps especially in Castile,
²⁶
engaged in a daring act of intellectual resistance, for their vision was a direct, if subtle, repudiation of all that the king of Castile was just then claiming for himself. In the
Zohar
we find the figure of a second-century rabbi, Simeon bar Yochai, who is remembered as risking his life to organize a secret campaign of opposition to the Roman overlord during the period of the savage Roman wars against the Jewish people. He is known among devotees as the Rashby, an acronym for his formal name. The
Zohar
records his commentaries on the Torah, together with descriptions of covert assemblies he convened, at which he expounded the mysteries of God's life in creation. The Kabbalists living in the time of Alfonso X, centered around the figure of Moses de Leon, modeled themselves on the Rashby, and they saw the Castilian king of their own day, with his increasingly absolutist claims to power, as equivalent to the oppressive emperor of ancient Rome. So when they compiled the sayings of the heroic master who taught how the Torah offered a way to stand against a prevailing ideology, they were engaged in politics as much as religion. "These mystics saw themselves as the true heirs of the Rashby and his associates," the historian Neil Asher Silberman writes, "meeting in secret conclaves far from the centers of royal power, connecting with the divine forces and envisioning a radical change in the order of things. As radical opponents of the ideology of the
Reconquista,
they shaped the earlier kabbalistic traditions into a far more politically focussed myth."
²⁷

Taking off from the Neo-Platonic vision of creation as an emanation of God, the
Zohar
implies, in Bloom's words, that "all theories of emanation are also theories of language."
²⁸
One of the most potent ideas of Kabbalah is that "turns of language," in Bloom's phrase, somehow substitute for God—that the names of God, beyond mere representation, make God available to those who know them. When this idea is later misunderstood, especially by Christians, there will follow a common denigration of Kabbalah as a kind of code-magic, but in fact it represents a profound affirmation not only of the way God is invested in what God has made—in Kabbalah, emanation occurs within God, not out from God—but of the way words themselves embody the things for which words stand.

Here is one example of this idea and its explosive implications.
Shekhinah,
usually translated "Spirit," is one name of God associated with the Wisdom tradition, rendered in Greek as
Sophia
, implying the way it is taken as a female principle of divinity. Another is
Tiferet,
which means "Glory." One spectacular vision laid out in the
Zohar
assumes the marriage of these two emanations of God, a physical coming together of divine attributes, which is nonetheless imagined within the context of a strict monotheism. Silberman, whose work especially informs me, writes:

The sheer anthropomorphism and blatantly sexual imagery of this configuration ... has scandalized countless religious authorities from the time of its composition to the present. It is certainly an understatement to say that its ascribed roles to male and female within the constellation of divine forces are, by today's standards, exceedingly politically incorrect. Yet the political point made in the ideal of the "marriage" of Tiferet and ... the Shekhinah was a direct repudiation of the royal ideology of the Castilian king. For where Alfonso sang as a troubadour of his love and attachment to the Virgin, the Zohar described the great, painful rift that had been forced on the heavenly king and queen. As already expressed by earlier Castilian kabbalists, the Shekhinah—the regal, motherly guardian of Israel—had been abducted by the forces of darkness, who were now even more explicitly parallel to the Alfonsine ideal.
²⁹

When Alfonso's dream of empire began to collapse, even to the traitorous rebellion of his own son, Kabbalists could only behold the drama as an enactment of divine intervention on behalf of Israel. This was so because "the worldview of the Kabbalah has always been that events in heaven are closely mirrored by unfolding historical events on earth. Could Alfonso's humiliation mean that the forces of darkness were being weakened?"
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The coming year 1300 sparked an apocalyptic fervor in Europe, among Jews as well as Christians, and that too played into Iberian Jewry's sense that political events were fraught with religious meaning. This belief among Jews of a benign cosmic order that required a rejection of its enemies on earth, even if those enemies were in a position to wreak havoc with Jews, strengthened a spirit of Jewish resistance at a time when few could have predicted how necessary it was about to become. Soon even many court Jews, those once favored associates of the Crown—linguists, scientists, financiers, philosophers—aligned themselves with the radical Kabbalists. The Rashby, hero of Jewish resistance to Rome, was one figure to rally around; his saga was a text with which to construct a new gyre of commentary and inventive interpretation. Far more than an "esoteric" mysticism, the Kabbalah was launched as a bracing source of Jewish identity, even if, increasingly, and for ever more obvious reasons, Jews would celebrate it in secret.

Convivencia
would not survive
reconquista.
Above Christians the old Constantinian cloud—how Christians behave when they come fully into power—crossed the sky again, throwing shadows. The Church, as we shall shortly see, mobilized in a new way, wielding its spiritual sword and blessing the king's decidedly unspiritual one. The Castilian regime's campaign against Jews, particularly against wealthy Jews from whom money could be extorted or robbed, went on nearly unchecked through the turn of the century. In response, one of Alfonso's former Jewish associates, Don Todros, in a series of powerful sermons to Jewish congregations throughout Castile, denounced the king and decreed an era of Jewish separation and purification based on renewed observance of the Torah. Don Todros gave shape, if indirectly, to the Kabbalistic vision of cosmic conflict between light and darkness, which he defined as a conflict between the Crown and Israel.

Jewish courtiers who tried to save their positions of influence and their fortunes were denounced by Don Todros as vigorously as the oppressive royals were, and with that something new began to happen among Jews themselves. A class distinction suddenly cut across the old religious boundaries, and Jews were able to be named as enemies by other Jews. "The passionate struggle for freedom and redemption was now to be waged against the wealthy wicked by the forces of the righteous poor."
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Wealth and poverty, independent of other factors, became categories of moral judgment.

Don Todros's bold leadership at this crucial time has led some later historians of Kabbalah to conclude that he was the real figure behind the
Zohar's
hero, Rabbi Simeon bar Yochai.
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However it is remembered, the story of Don Todros's powerful appropriation of Kabbalah to defend Israel and inveigh against unjust privilege makes clear that the Jewish communities of Iberia, and then the Mediterranean where the message spread, were not passively waiting for the sky to fall, as Christian memory often portrays this history. No, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, an enduring Jewish faith in Israel as God's chosen people was refracted through a new politics and a new spirituality, both of which would feed back into an old Christian animus, but in ways of which Christians would remain ignorant to this day.

34. Convert-Making: The Failure of Success

W
HILE THE DENOUEMENT
of Alfonsine
convivencia
played itself out in Castile, events in Aragon, to the east, unfolded somewhat differently. In 1242, the year of the burning of the Talmud in Paris, King James I of Aragon (1213–1276) issued an edict requiring all Jews in his kingdom to attend the conversionist sermons of the Dominicans and Franciscans. Clearly, Europe's dark cloud was drifting south. The Talmud was condemned in France, as we saw, not mainly for its blasphemies but for its heretical character in relation to "the Old Law which God gave to Moses," as Pope Gregory IX's complaint put it.
¹
Similarly, the sermon mandate was an implication of the Church's innovative claim to spiritual authority over the religious lives of Jews. But within two years of James I's edict, that implication was made explicit by the newly elected Pope Innocent IV, whose condemnation of the Talmud we heard earlier. Justifying the forcing of Jews to listen to Christian sermons, he said: "Indeed, we believe that the pope, who is the vicar of Jesus Christ, has authority not only over Christians but also over all infidels, since Christ had authority over all ... Therefore, the pope can judge the Jews, if they violate the law of the Gospel in moral matters and their own prelates do not check them, and also if they invent heresies against their own law."
²

Following upon the edict of James I, and similar edicts by other Christian rulers, the Dominicans and Franciscans escalated their campaign. They went about "forcibly entering synagogues," according to Jeremy Cohen, author of the exhaustive study
The Friars and the Jews
, "and subjecting Jews to offensive harangues, participation in debates whose outcomes had been predetermined, and the violence of the mob. The intent of the friars was obvious: to eliminate the Jewish presence in Christendom—both by inducing the Jews to convert and by destroying all remnants of Judaism even after no Jews remained."
³