Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (63 page)

Expulsion of Jews was not new. They had been expelled from France a century earlier, from various principalities of Germany in the twelfth century, from England in 1290, from Provence in 1394, and from Austria in 1421.
⁵⁰
But these expulsions involved relatively small Jewish communities, and were sometimes reversed in fairly short order. The rationale offered for the expulsion of Jews from Spain was also different. In their edict, the monarchs explained that they were banishing Jews, despite the economic cost to themselves, and despite human reluctance, as a way to protect
conversos
from being drawn back—"attracted and perverted to their injurious opinions and beliefs"—into Judaism. "We have been informed by the Inquisitors..." they decreed, "that the mingling of Jews with Christians leads to the worst evils. The Jews try their best to seduce the [New] Christians ... persuading them to follow the Law of Moses. In consequence, our holy Catholic faith is debased and humbled. We have thus arrived at the conclusion that the only efficacious means to put an end to these evils consists in the definitive breaking of all relations between Jews and Christians, and this can only be obtained by their expulsion from our kingdom."
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After decades of trying and failing to remedy the problem of the
conversos,
the Catholic monarchs accepted the logic of the grand inquisitor, concluding that the proximity of real Jews was the real problem. When a delegation of prominent Jews met with Ferdinand and Isabella and offered to pay to be allowed to remain, Torquemada is said to have burst in on the royal audience, thrown pieces of silver on the floor, and demanded to know what Judas was offering this time. The monarchs did not withdraw the edict of expulsion. It was issued in the names not only of "Their Majesties," but "of the Reverend Prior of the Holy Cross, Inquisitor General." The reference is to the convent, Santa Cruz at Segovia, of which Torquemada was prior,
⁵²
but it means that the expulsion order, too, was stamped with the cross.

The Jews had three months either to convert or to get out of Spain. It is difficult to establish numbers with certainty. There were probably about 300,000 Jews in Iberia at this time, out of a total population numbering in the low millions. About half of the Jews became Christians rather than go into exile.
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This, ironically—yet more forced conversions—was bound to make the
converso
crisis worse.
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Many tens of thousands of Jews left Spain in the spring and summer of 1492. Yitzhak Baer puts the number at more than 150,000.
⁵⁵

One chronicler of the exile wrote:

In the first week of July, they took the route for quitting their native land, great and small, old and young; on foot, on horses, asses, and in carts; each continuing his journey to his destined port. They experienced great trouble and suffered indescribable misfortunes on the roads and country they travelled; some falling, others rising; some dying, others coming into the world; some fainting, others being attacked with illness; that there was not a Christian but what felt for them, and persuaded them to be baptized. Some from misery were converted; but they were very few. The rabbis encouraged them, and made the young people and women sing, and play on pipes and tambors to enliven them, and keep up their spirits.
⁵⁶

Many Jews went from Spain to Portugal, only to be ordered by the Portuguese king, in 1497, to accept baptism.
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Many left for lands controlled by Muslims—in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire in the Levant.
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Some made their way to the Netherlands, others to central Europe. When I visited the Ramu Cemetery in Krakow in 1996, the Jewish burial place abutting the site of the city's oldest synagogue, I saw a gravestone dated 1493. I would later learn that Jews were expelled from Krakow in 1494, although not permanently, unlike Spain.
⁵⁹
After Poland and the Ottoman Empire, the most sizable contingent of Iberian Jews took refuge in the only place in the rest of Europe that would have them: the papal territories in Italy, especially Rome.

36. The Roman Ghetto

S
TAMP FOR INFAMOUS POPE
" was the headline in a Catholic newspaper not long ago.
¹
The story reported that the Vatican had just unveiled a new postage stamp honoring Pope Alexander VI (1492–1503). First known as Rodrigo de Borja y Borja, he was one of the notorious Borgia popes. He was also the nephew of a pope and the father of numerous children, including Lucrezia Borgia. His son, Cesare, whom he made a cardinal at age eighteen, was likely the murderer of his brother Juan. Alexander VI drew the demarcation line dividing the New World between Spain and Portugal, commissioned Michelangelo to design a new St. Peter's Basilica, and saw to the burning of Savonarola (1452–1498), the Dominican reformer who had challenged the Medicis in Florence.
²
Alexander VI's intrigues and appetites made him, in the words of the postage-stamp story, "an example of why the Church should pronounce a millennial
mea culpa
for historic wrongs." Apparently, the stamp was being issued only because of the parallel between the Vatican jubilee years of 1500 and 2000.

Oddly, there is one way Alexander VI may well be deserving of a respectful commemoration—his refusal to endorse the gravest of "historic wrongs." He was a man of Catalonia, and had been a subject of Queen Isabella. His admiration for her and Ferdinand, and his effort to ingratiate himself with them, is reflected in his having bestowed on them the honorific "Catholic Monarchs" not long after he ascended to the Chair of Peter. It may even be that Alexander did so, as one historian suggests, in appreciation for their having expelled the Jews from their realm.
³
But if so, that response was overridden in the pope's own heart when large numbers of desperate Iberian Jews began presenting themselves at the borders of papal territories in Italy, including the gates of Rome. The arrival of these Jews in Italy—all told, they would have numbered close to nine thousand
⁴
—was a jolt to Italian Christians and Jews alike. "You would have thought that they wore masks," one Christian who watched them wrote. "They were bony, pallid, their eyes sunk in the sockets; and had they not made slight movements, it would have been imagined that they were dead."
⁵
The historian Cecil Roth reports that in Genoa, friars greeted the starving refugees at the docks, "a crucifix in one arm, and loaves of bread in the other, offering food in return for conversion."
⁶

But not in Rome. The Jewish community already living there probably numbered about a thousand people,
⁷
and suddenly nearly that many, or perhaps more, Spanish refugees decamped on the Appian Way, asking to be admitted. These may seem to be small numbers, but according to the historian Kenneth Stow, whose work informs my discussion of Jews in Italy, the entire population of Rome then was only about 50,000.
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An equivalent in today's figures to the number of Iberian Jews arriving in Rome in the summer of 1492 would be about 100,000. The Roman Jewish community had roots extending back before the Christian era, but by now it included descendants of various European refugee groups. Rome had been a steady haven. Still, Jewish leaders seem to have been reluctant to welcome the mass of newcomers. If so, it was no doubt because their situation at that time of rising tension was precarious.

The record from Jewish as well as Christian sources is that Pope Alexander VI welcomed the Iberian refugees into Rome and pressed local Jews to do so as well. In contrast to his fellow Spaniards, and unlike the quayside friar in Genoa, Alexander declared that Jews in Rome "are permitted to lead their life, free from interference from Christians, to continue in their own rites, to gain wealth, and to enjoy many other privileges."
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When Jews were expelled from Portugal in 1497, and from Provence in 1498, many of them, too, would make their way to the papal territories and to Rome. The pope's personal physician by then was the eminent Maestro Boneto, who from 1499 would also serve as the rabbi of the Roman congregation. The "notorious" Alexander VI was remembered by Jews as a magnanimous protector.

As such, the Borgia pope had fulfilled the best tradition of papal support for Jews. The Jewish community in Rome had concentrated itself along the Tiber, in Trastevere, in the shadow of Vatican Hill. Popes had sponsored anti-Jewish legislation, as we have seen, but in general such provisions as the distinctive badge were less strictly imposed in Rome than elsewhere. The abuse of Jews in the carnival was a feature of Roman life. The Talmud had occasionally been attacked. Friars had at times been allowed to pursue their aggressive conversions. But when medieval popes were strong enough to impose their will, they defended Jews with remarkable consistency. To repeat a point made earlier,
Sicut Judaeis,
the papal bull of protection, had been issued by twenty-three popes, from the twelfth to the fifteenth century.
¹⁰
It is in this context that Alexander VI's otherwise uncharacteristic virtue must be understood. He was responding to something that, by then, was deeply ingrained in the meaning of his office.

Not only the Jews were being protected by this tradition; so was something central to the idea of Christian faith. Since Saint Augustine and Gregory the Great, the Jews had functioned as a partner in a theological dialectic. As we saw, Augustine had called them the "witness people," positively affirming the tradition of Jewish faithfulness to the God of Israel. After Augustine, their witness was tied to the state of their degradation, which was itself taken as proof of the truth of Christian claims. Jews were degraded because they denied those claims. Christians who affirmed them could expect the opposite of degradation, which was salvation. Thus a Christian's sure expectation of his reward was reinforced by the felt experience of a Jew's quite palpable punishment. In order for this dialectic to be sustained, three things were necessary. First, Jews could not be allowed to thrive. Their perpetual punishment was a sine qua non. Second, though, their punishment could not be excessive, leading to their disappearance. Therefore violence was ruled out. Third, their place within the Christian community had to be protected so that each new generation of Christians could benefit from their witness. The impulse to kill Jews, or, now, to expel them, violated this system, which is why popes opposed it.

But in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, something new had begun to happen, undercutting the balance of this dialectic. The trauma of a massive collapse of the spiritual order of the Church had destroyed the former equanimity. The expulsion of Jews from Iberia was significant both as symptom and attempted cure, but then, it was also significant as an apparent unleashing of the virus of Jew hatred. At bottom, the Spanish Inquisition had provided a clear diagnosis that the cause of the Church's shaken faith was the very presence of Jews. Expulsion was not a first attempt at racial extermination, but it surely was the beginning of the strategy of elimination.

The amorphous spirit of heresy coalesced as a mortal danger to the Church around the figure of Martin Luther (1483–1546). Any examination of the civilizational roots of the Holocaust must take into account the impact of the Reformation, and of Martin Luther's own attitudes, on what Daniel Goldhagen called "the cognitive model of Jews that governed Germany."
¹¹
My concern, as I said early on, is mainly with the Roman Catholic aspects of this narrative, but the Holocaust is the endpoint of a variegated European history, not a specifically Catholic one—or, for that matter, an exclusively Christian one.

As we move into the early fifteenth century, we must acknowledge the important, and expressly non-Catholic, turn the story takes in Germany. It was, as the historian Salo Wittmayer Baron describes, "in the territory of the Holy Roman Empire that the great drama of the Reformation immediately affected many Jewish communities and constituted a major factor in the subsequent destinies of the Jewish people, down to the Nazi era and beyond."
¹²
Martin Luther posted his Ninety-five Theses on the door of a Wittenberg church in 1517. In 1543, he published an antisemitic text, "On the Jews and Their Lies," and Hitler himself would appeal to anti-Jewish slanders that began with the great reformer himself. "The underlying cultural model of 'the Jew' (
der Jude)
" Goldhagen writes, "was composed of three notions: that the Jew was different from the German, that he was a binary opposite of the German, and that he was not just benignly different but malevolent and corrosive."
¹³
All these elements of Jew hatred were present in the long history of German Christianity, but they became solidified after Luther's diatribes.

The tragic character of Luther's impact on the fate of Jews in Germany is only fully apparent when "On the Jews and Their Lies" is read against an earlier treatise, "That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew," written twenty years earlier, in 1523. During those twenty years, Luther had been seared in the fires of ferocious Catholic rejection. His bitterness poisoned much that began as good, including his attitude toward Jews. As "That Christ Was Born a Jew" shows, he began as a stout defender of Jews. He denounced the Blood Libel and the idea that all Jews were serfs of the emperor. In a commentary on Psalm 22, which, you will recall, provided the first Christians with much of the narrative detail used against Jews, Luther condemned the way "Passion preachers (during Easter week] do nothing else but enormously exaggerate the Jews' misdeeds against Christ and thus embitter the hearts of the faithful against them."
¹⁴
As one who felt the early sting of official Roman Catholic rejection, Luther manifested a remarkable sympathy for Jews, and he even averred that Jews had been right to resist Catholic efforts to convert them. "If I had been a Jew," he wrote in "That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew," "...I should rather have turned into a pig than become a Christian."
¹⁵
Luther hoped that Jews would come to see in his reformed Christianity the true faith of their fathers. He, too, proved to be a conversionist. He preached on the Five Books of Moses, expecting that Jesus, seen fully as a Jew, could finally be embraced by Jews as the Messiah.