Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (60 page)

This is a long way from the mother and her seven sons, yet the position's common sense, rationality, and emphasis on intention are far closer to a modern sensibility than is the headlong rush to martyrdom. Maimonides had other advice—that those who could should flee "those places of hostility and go to a location where one could fulfill the Law without compulsion and fear."
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Which is exactly what he did. But by the late fourteenth century, many an Iberian lew was behaving as if he had internalized Maimonides's distinction between outward "apostasy" and interior faithfulness to the Law "confined to the privacy of his home."
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Many Jews who became Christians did so with full sincerity, but there were also many, perhaps more, for whom the act of undergoing baptism was nothing but a ticket to survival. They remained Jews in everything but public observance. They were the secret Jews, who had adopted a duplicitous mode of survival—observing Sabbath at home on Friday evening and Saturday, attending Mass at the cathedral on Sunday—simply because they did not want to die. In less violent periods, this may have translated into not wanting to lose their possessions or social rank.

There were so many "converts" in such a short time that the Church found it impossible to properly instruct most in the ways of authentic Christian faith. Thus a good number of
conversos
occupied a muddled middle ground between Judaism and Christianity, without necessarily knowing who or what they were. In addition, some
conversos
were active Judaizers, believers who, out of conviction that Christian tenets could be reconciled with Mosaic Law, sought to combine the traditions. The Kiddush cup, for example, could now be raised in Eucharist. In that, they represented, in a way, a reincarnation of those doomed Jewish Christians or Christian Jews of the first centuries, believers whose identity—observing Torah while revering Jesus—was an offense both to Gentile Christians like John Chrysostom and to the rabbis of Yavneh. And as was true in the time of Chrysostom, those occupying this middle ground, defined not as infidels but as heretics, stirred the rage of Christian apologists in ways that Jews as such never did.

In many Iberian cities,
conversos
continued to live near and to work with their former coreligionists, those Jews who refused to convert. This proximity with the increasingly despised refusers would soon be regarded as the self-perpetuating source of heresy, and then the focus of suspicion would revert back to the Christ-rejecting Jews. These ambiguities fed on each other. As the century progressed, few of the "Old Christians"—so called to distinguish them from the
conversos,
or "New Christians"—could keep crucial aspects of the religious and racial identity of these people straight.

Jews who converted maintained their positions of power and affluence. Since they were no longer barred from offices in the king's service and the Church, and no longer subject to anti-Jewish occupational restrictions,
conversos
prospered more than ever. Many married into prominent Old Christian families, and others took up important positions in the Church, sometimes as the most zealous anti-Jewish proselytizers. Yet there were two persistent problems. Ongoing economic crises throughout Iberia kept the broad population off balance. In such periods of dislocation, the fifteenth century's urban poor and distressed peasantry transferred their age-old resentment of Jews onto the New Christians, whose evident prosperity galled as never before. Now when there were hunger riots, as in Toledo in 1467 and 1473,
conversos
were targeted as much as unconverted Jews were—an ominous blurring of religious and racial identity.

The Church, too, had a problem, which grew more grievous as the decades passed. Having coerced Jews to convert in large numbers, Christians began to suspect that the conversions must have been insincere, since they
were
coerced. The irony was doubled and redoubled. Judaizing, the mingling of Christian and Jewish elements of faith, cult, and calendar, was defined as a heresy. The Church now began to move against it in earnest. But that meant investigating the
conversos
as a class, which implied that anyone with "Jewish blood," whatever his or her religious identity had become, was suspect. "In fact," the historian Angus MacKay writes, "the hatred of the
conversos
and their success grew into racial hatred. As early as 1449, the idea was being propagated that the pure blood of the Castilian Old Christians was being defiled by that of the Jewish race."
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Ordinarily, such an idea would have been roundly rejected by all levels of official Catholicism. The Church had consistently emphasized the religious distinction between Judaism and Christianity, ignoring any racial distinction between Jews and Christians. But this was not an ordinary stretch of history. The division between those prepared to follow the logic of radical conversionism to its once unthinkable conclusion and those who maintained an attitude of restraint, even protection, toward Jews cut across the whole Church, including the papacy itself. Beginning about the time of the 1391 pogroms and the consequent forced conversions of large numbers of Jews, a succession of popes taking opposite sides of the question came to power, almost, as it were, alternating between sympathizers with Jews and sympathizers with the anti-Jewish friars. In effect, for the next century and a half, the Church, and the papacy, would be arguing with itself over what to do with the Jews.

The first of the era's papal defenders of Jews, Boniface IX (1389–1404), took office just as the anti-Jewish violence of the 1390s swept Iberia. While Jews were being massacred in Spain and expelled from France (1394), this pope was granting a new charter of protection to Jews in Rome. They had been subjected to the usual restrictions with fluctuating severity, but in a thousand years the Jews of Rome had never been violently attacked as a group, not even after the Black Plague.
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The tradition of
Sicut Judaeis
held.

Pope Martin V (1417–1431) exhibited the usual negative attitudes toward Judaism, but overall, he must be counted as a strong defender of Jews. He forbade the baptizing of Jewish children without their parents' consent—a practice that often followed on the friars' sermons. As the violence mounted in Spain, this pope, in 1422, issued an edict criticizing the preaching of friars against Jews, ordering that "every Christian treat the Jews with a humane kindness."
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When the city council of Toledo, in 1449, passed an ordinance decreeing "that no
converso
of Jewish descent may have or hold any office or benefice in the said city of Toledo," Pope Nicholas V (1447–1455) reacted with a fury suggesting he saw what was at stake in such a move. The bull he issued bore, in Henry Kamen's phrase, "the significant title
Humani generis inimicus
." The enemy of the human race was not the Jew but the new conviction that the Jew could not be changed by his conversion. "We decree and declare," Nicholas wrote, "that all Catholics are one body in Christ according to the teaching of our faith."
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Nicholas V excommunicated the author of the Toledo statute. Yet two years later, the king of Castile formally approved the regulation. Jews would be legally defined now in Spain not by religion but by blood.

If the beginning of what we think of as modern antisemitism can be located anywhere, it is here. The shift from a religious definition of Jewishness to a racial one is perhaps the most decisive in this long narrative, and its fault lines, reaching far into the consciousness of Western civilization, will define the moral geography of the modern age. The Church's worry, for example, that its very own
conversos
were corrupting Christians would find a near permanent resonance in the modern European fantasy of Jews as parasites—successful and assimilated, but feeding on the host society. The ultimate example of this image would emerge in Germany, of course, but the fear that led Nazis to regard Jews as bloodsuckers to be excised was anticipated by the Iberian suspicion that Jews were more to be feared as assimilated insiders than as dissenting outsiders. Thus hatred of the other became a society's scare-driven urge to eradicate an alien part of itself.

By the twentieth century, Christians, especially Catholics, would be vigorously distinguishing between the "normal" anti-Judaism based in religious dispute and the pathological antisemitism of race hatred. Yet because of these origins in the Church's own history, that line of argument could only smack of bad faith. Because religious dispute was the source of racial hatred, there are sweeping implications here not just for Christian-Jewish relations, but for fundamental Western attitudes about identity itself. The modern world, which prides itself on being a repudiation of the irrationalities of a culture that could give rise to an Inquisition, was in fact forged in the fires of those irrationalities, and we can still feel their heat.

If this development began in Iberia, it was at first vigorously opposed by the Church in Rome, perhaps because the implications of the shift from religion to blood were apparent. But Rome's opposition would prove to be ineffective. Nicholas V was one of the first of the Renaissance popes, the founder of the Vatican Library, and the patron of Fra Angelico.
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But he was also an avatar of the papal corruption and intrigue that were the rot causing the Church to crumble from within. Heresy was no longer the aberration of individuals, but a set of movements, like that begun by John Hus, which foreshadowed the coming crisis of the Reformation. The words in which Hus was condemned by the Council of Constance (1415) foreshadowed something too: "O cursed Judas, because you have abandoned the councils of peace, and have counseled with the Jews, we take away from you the cup of redemption."
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By the middle of the fifteenth century, it was clear that nothing could check the rising tide of skepticism and dissent. Hus himself had been burned at the stake. So, for that matter, in 1431, had Joan of Arc. In 1442, the bishops of the Church gathered at the Council of Florence and, like youths pushing at a dike, struck their most severe blow yet at those who would not conform: "The holy Roman church firmly believes, professes and preaches that all those who are outside the catholic church, not only pagans but also Jews or heretics and schismatics, cannot share in eternal life, and will go into the everlasting fire, 'which was prepared for the devil and his angels,' unless they are joined to the catholic church before the end of their lives ... Nobody can be saved no matter how much he has given away alms and even if he has shed his blood in the name of Christ, unless he has persevered in the bosom and unity of the catholic church."
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A spirit of barely reined panic infuses this statement, and well it might. Only a decade later, in 1453, Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, whose use of artillery in the siege would prove to be a turning point in the history of warfare, ending, for example, the era of the castle and the culture that depended on it. More immediately, the fall of the city Constantine had founded marked the definitive end of the Christian Eastern Empire and of any hope of reconciliation between Roman Catholicism and the Greek Orthodox "schismatics." Also, the exodus west of scholars from Constantinople, after its fall, would be an important factor in the emergence of secular humanism in Italy, the heart of the Church. So there were solid reasons for the institutional paranoia that was rampant in the Church now. And Jews would suffer for it.

Not all Christians, however, gave in to these new forces, and at the highest level both of the Catholic hierarchy and of the ranks of theologians a humane alternative to antisemitism appeared. It was embodied in one man, a theologian and cardinal native to Germany, Nicolaus of Cusa (1401–1464). He is not well known today outside the circle of scholars, which hints at the fate that befell the alternative he represented, but the story of Nicolaus of Cusa is another of those wayside chapels marking the other track this history might have taken.

Nicolaus was a man of genius, not only an inventive philosopher and theologian but a mathematician whose speculations anticipated Copernicus (1473–1543). The free play of this man's spacious mind led him to apply the insights of one discipline to another. He titled one essay, for example, "The Theological Complement Represented in the Mathematical Complements."
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By means of such "complements," he developed from mathematics a feel for what the Catholic theologian David Tracy calls "the logic of the infinite." Tracy describes Nicolaus of Cusa as "the most balanced of the great Renaissance thinkers."
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Instead of thinking of God in constrained images equivalent to mathematical symbols of the sphere or circle or triangle, Nicolaus proposed thinking of God in an image more like the line, which is by definition unbounded, impossible to hem in or to possess. The discursive reasoning of the scholastics, who slavishly imitated the method of Thomas Aquinas without preserving his spirit, seemed the opposite of such logic of the infinite to Nicolaus, and he criticized the prevailing theology of his day, in effect, for doing too much with too little. Nowhere was that theology better expressed than in the anathemas issued by the Council of Florence, just referred to. Theologians spoke of God as if they understood God fully, and they sought to enforce a uniformity of thought that left no room for mystery, ambiguity, or paradox. Nicolaus of Cusa saw, on the contrary, that God is God precisely in escaping and transcending total comprehension by human beings. Just as a line is defined by its movement in two opposite directions at once, so God is "the coincidence of opposites," the one in whom maximum and minimum fall together.
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In God, this coincidence occurs in such a way that the contraries maintain their differences, which, mathematically speaking, is why God is more like a line than a point.