Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (58 page)

This explicitly undid the long-standing Catholic policy, dating to Augustine, according to which Jews were to have a protected, if restricted, place in Christendom. But that political reversal was tied to the theological one referred to above. Saint Paul's assessment that Jewish leaders had not recognized Jesus as the Messiah because God, for God's own purposes, made them deaf and blind
⁴
was overturned now, as we saw, by Thomas Aquinas. In a section of the
Summa Theologiae
entitled "The Cause of Christ's Passion," Thomas writes, "A distinction must be drawn between the Jews who were educated and those who were not. The educated, who were called their
rulers,
knew, as did the demons, that Jesus was the Messiah promised in the Law. For they saw all the signs in him which had been foretold."
⁵
Jews, who killed Jesus anyway, were even more heinous than had been thought.

In this era of massive shifts in the scales of political power, as popes looked to secure broad allegiances while bypassing kings, bishops, and even local clergy, and as kings sought to consolidate power over barons and other nobles, the Jews would prove to be decisive weights in those scales. The friars were levers with which to move them.
⁶
In 1263, James I summoned Rabbi Moses ben Nachman (1194-c. 1270), known as Nachmanides, a leading Jewish sage, to appear at the royal palace in Barcelona. The rabbi was in his sixties, a figure whose stature rivaled that of Maimonides. At four meetings that took place over several days in July, Nachmanides was forced to "debate" a Dominican preacher, Pablo Cristiani, or Paul Christian. A convert from Judaism, he had formerly been named Saul. The master general of the Dominican order, a Catalonian named Raymond of Penaforte, now revered as a saint, was present, as were the leading clergy and nobles and prominent Jews of the kingdom.

James I officiated as the two religious figures argued the essential questions that forever separate Jews and Christians: Was Jesus the anointed one? Was he God? Did he suffer and die for human salvation? Was the "Old Law" of Israel—Jewish belief and customs—now superseded and to be, in Cristiani's word, "terminated"?
⁷
Christian and Jewish sources alike assert that Nachmanides held his ground. How could the Messiah have come already, he asked with elegant simplicity, with so much violence and injustice still prevailing? The Dominican, claiming an intimate knowledge of the Talmud, added something new to Christian anti-Jewish polemic, as I first learned from Adam Gregerman, for the friar emphasized that the Talmudic tradition's own logic pointed to the Messiahship of Jesus. Nachmanides countered that Friar Paul's readings were shallow distortions. According to Robert Chazan, the rabbi had two purposes: to persuade "the Dominicans of the fundamental flaws in their new missionizing argumentation, hoping to convince them to abandon it...[and] to prove to his fellow Jews that the new missionizing arguments were as unconvincing as the old."
⁸

Nachmanides specifically rebutted Friar Paul's assertions of rabbinic authority for Christian claims, and mocked the idea that traditional Jewish discourse unintentionally proclaimed Jesus as Messiah.
⁹
In the end, the king himself testified to the rabbi's success, if backhandedly: "For I have never seen a man who was in the wrong argue as well as you did."
¹⁰

But Nachmanides was not cheered. He saw quite plainly what was at stake in the disputation. Later he would write his own account of it, probably to give fellow Jews a primer on how to rebut the arguments of the friars, for it was clear to him that the Dominican campaign against Judaism would only intensify. As if he had seen what was coming, Nachmanides had wanted to cut short his own contest. He had opened the fourth and final session by declaring, "I do not wish to continue the Disputation." This was a plea to the king. "The Jewish community here is large and they ... have begged me to desist, for they are very much afraid of these men, the Preaching Friars, who cast fear on the world."
¹¹

What sort of fear would become apparent soon enough. The king demanded that the disputation continue. Within weeks, James I issued a set of decrees forcing Jews to attend Dominican sermons and giving Friar Paul new powers to missionize among Jews.
¹²
When Nachmanides's own, entirely self-assertive account of the Barcelona disputation was published, with its forthright denunciation of the Dominicans, King James ordered the text burned and the rabbi exiled for two years. For the Dominicans, that was not enough. They charged Nachmanides with blasphemy for what he had said during the course of the debate they had forced on him. Pope Clement IV, in 1266, supported the charge, and rebuked James I for failing to "repress Jewish mischief," especially that of Nachmanides, author of the "book full of flagrant lies."
¹³
Nachmanides might have been killed, but King James enabled his escape, and he fled to Palestine.

The affair demonstrates how power was flowing to the Dominicans. Within a few years, one of them was elected pope, as Nicholas III (1277—1280)—an extraordinary ascent for an order that had been founded only two thirds of a century before. His time as pope coincided with the collapse of
convivencia
in Castile and with the surfacing among Jews there of Kabbalah. We have already noted that secrecy was an inbuilt characteristic of the
Zohar,
and now it becomes clearer why that had to be so. Talmudic texts were being widely distributed among the missionizers, with the sacred meanings of rabbinic sources twisted against the Jewish people. Kabbalists did not want the same fate to befall their compilations, which were, after all, able to be taken as literary acts of treason. And if the Talmud could be distorted by Christians to argue for the truth of Christian claims, there was no doubt that Kabbalistic texts, if known, could be too. In fact, it may have begun to happen. Putting a new kink in the earlier comity of a tripartite translation culture, the nephew of Alfonso X wrote that his uncle the king had "ordered translated the whole law of the Jews, and even their Talmud, and other knowledge which is called
qabbalah
and which the Jews keep closely secret. And he did this so it might be manifest through their own law that all is a [mere] representation of the Law which we Christians have."
¹⁴

Pope Nicholas III, in promulgating the by now customary
Sicut Judaeis,
altered this bull that was instituted to protect Jews. Not surprisingly, the Dominican pope added a new requirement for the whole Church, mandating "sermons and other means for the conversion of the Jews."'
¹⁵
Now this preaching had the ultimate credential, and was undertaken throughout Europe. In what did such sermons consist? They were unlikely to be the highly reasoned discourses of a Thomas Aquinas, nor were they necessarily ordered arguments for Jesus' Messiahship, whether from the Old Testament or from rabbinic texts. One must assume that the mendicant proselytizers were well intentioned and, perhaps at first, better disposed toward Jews than toward heretics, their other target. But as time wore on, and as heresy proved elusive, and as their efforts failed to bring about the longed-for mass conversion of Jews, which would usher in a new age of holy conformity, one must equally expect to find the onset of a certain intemperance. As Chazan writes, "The most massive effort at winning over Jews ever undertaken had inevitably to produce a significant level of anger and frustration with its failure ... Old stereotypes of Jewish blindness and obtuseness were inevitably reinforced. This occurred not out of a specifically anti-Jewish hue to the missionizing or out of an initially negative disposition on the part of the missionizers. The culprit was ultimately the new environment that spawned the conversionist ardor."
¹⁶

Nevertheless, the friars were generally drawn from the new mercantile middle class, and their sermons in this climate increasingly reflected the prejudices of that class, particularly relating to commerce and moneylending.
¹⁷
Their sermons, that is, grew to depend more on negative arguments against Jews than on positive arguments for Christ. Ongoing Jewish refusal to convert spawned sermons aimed not
at
Jews, but at other Christians
about
Jews, a subtle alteration designed to increase the pressure on Jews. Such an approach required that the anti-Jewish negatives be drawn in ever darker hues, and they were. Drawn from Jeremy Cohen's
The Friars and the Jews,
here is an example of a sermon preached to Christians by a leading Dominican, Giordano da Rivalto, in Florence on November 9, 1304. After beginning with the traditional assertion that Jews murdered Christ, the friar goes on to charge that Jews are
still
murdering Christ. "I say first of all that they repeat it [the crucifixion] in their hearts with ill will—wherefore they are evil at heart and hate Christ with evil hatred; and they would, were they able, crucify him anew every day ... They are hated throughout the world because they are evil toward Christ, whom they curse."
¹⁸
And how do Jews curse Christ? By refusing to convert.

As the pressure mounted, with an all-out campaign to overcome Jewish resistance to Christian claims, the continued assertion of that resistance became
experienced
as a new form of crucifixion. The friars were themselves passionately identified with Christ. Indeed, such identification was an element of their innovative piety. In Saint Francis of Assisi the theme was set with his own stigmata, referred to earlier, the appearance of the wounds of Christ on his hands, feet, and side, which began in 1224, two years before his death. The friars were self-described
alter Christi,
other Christs, and it would have been natural for them to interpret the frustrations of their own mission as a repetition of the frustration felt by the betrayed Jesus. And it would have been easy for them to think that the betrayers were the same.

The inbuilt momentum of such feelings opens to a new perversion when the Dominican Giordano goes on to make the charge of contemporary crucifixion concrete by declaring in his sermon that Jews steal the Eucharistic host to blaspheme it. Giordano claims to have personally witnessed such a desecration—and to have seen with his own eyes an apparition of the youthful Jesus, come upon the scene to stop it. By this miraculous intervention, as Jeremy Cohen summarizes Giordano, Jesus "rallied the local Christian population to slaughter 24,000 Jews in punishment for their evil deed."
¹⁹
At last Jesus himself has been recruited as a booster of mass killings of Jews.

Giordano stoops to another level of denigration by claiming that Jews continue to murder Jesus down to the present by kidnapping a Christian boy every year and crucifying him. When we saw this libel before, it was being spread by barely literate rabble-rousers, and was resoundingly condemned by representatives of the official Church. But now the promulgator is the authorized official himself. Such a development meant, of course, that the situation of Jews would worsen in the fourteenth century. Yet when the new conversionism intersected with an unpredictable natural disaster, the consequences were almost unimaginable.

"In the cities, men fell sick by thousands, and lacking care and aid, almost all died." This is Boccaccio writing of the Black Plague. "In the morning, their bodies were found at the doors of the houses where they had expired during the night." Boccaccio was in Florence, and he says that "in the course of four or five months, more than one hundred thousand persons perished, a number greater than that estimated to be its population before this dreadful malady."
²⁰
Between 1348 and 1351, something like twenty to twenty-five million people died as the disease spread through Europe from the southeast.
²¹
The infection was caused by a bacillus that lived in the blood of rats, and that seems to have arrived in Europe on a merchant ship at Messina, in Sicily. By the time the plague had moved across the continent and into England, one in three of those living in Europe was dead. The bodies of victims were often left where they were, and many corpses were buried in large communal graves.
²²
This catastrophe, understandably, set off" a vast panic, and given what had gone before, it is not surprising that the mass of Christians were ready to blame the Jews.

Everyone was asking what had caused this disaster. Pope Clement VI (1342–1352), was stunned when, in 1348, eleven thousand people died in his own court city of Avignon, including seven cardinals.
²³
He was a Frenchman who had earned a doctorate at the University of Paris, and he summoned his learned advisors. When told that the cause of the plague was some conjunction of planets and stars, he scoffed. Clement ordered the papal physicians to dissect the corpses of plague victims, "in order that the origins of this disease might be known"
²⁴
—an act that can be seen as the beginning of modern medicine. But survivors in the cities thought they knew the cause: a well-poisoning conspiracy of Jews. There was a heartbreaking poignancy in the widespread belief that the conspiracy had begun in Toledo, the one-time home of
convivencia
and center of the culture-creating tradition of Iberian translation. It was as if the intellectual transformation of Europe that
had
been spawned a century before in Toledo, largely, although not exclusively, by Jews, had been inverted by an act of black magic. The fruitful seeding of Christendom's intellect was now perverted into the deadly pollution of its drinking water.