Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (65 page)

In the first half of the sixteenth century, some of the popes were not only sinners, but knew it. Consequently, even in that period, the Church could turn a relatively benign face toward Jews, as happened, for example, during the pontificate of Paul III, who presided at the opening of Trent.
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His sister had been the mistress of his patron, Alexander VI, the pope who welcomed Iberian Jews to Rome. Paul himself had been a typically hedonistic member of the Borgia pope's court. But he changed, taking the Reformation as a personal challenge to reform his own life. It was he who excommunicated Henry VIII of England, but it was also he who commissioned Michelangelo's grand examination of the Catholic conscience,
The Last Judgment.
More to the point, Paul III was vigorous in his defense of the Jews. He banned performances of a wildly popular Passion play in the Colosseum because it incited attacks on Rome's Jews. His support for Jews was significant enough to draw acid criticism from other prelates.
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But just as the overriding effect of the Council of Trent (its pro-Jewish theology of the crucifixion notwithstanding) was the imposition of rigid Counter-Reformation measures to suppress all "unbelievers," including Jews, so even a Jew-protecting pope like Paul III embraced the era's movement—and machinery—of repression. Popes had generally opposed the Spanish Inquisition since its inception, but they had been unable to stop it, or even to temper it. Now, finally, a pope came to see the necessity of allowing a version of the same Inquisition to come to Rome. In 1542, Paul III authorized the establishment there of a Spanish-type Inquisition, which would pursue the agents of doctrinal impurity who were corrupting the Church from within. He appointed as its head the fearsomely ascetic Gian Pietro Caraffa, who had served as a papal nuncio in Spain. "Were even my father a heretic," Caraffa is remembered as saying, "I would gather the wood to burn him."
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In 1553, Caraffa saw to the burning at the stake in Rome of a Franciscan monk who had converted to Judaism. Caraffa presided at the burnings of dozens of Jews, whether
conversos, marranos
(a derogatory term meaning "pig," applied to secret Jews), "cryptos," or the vaguely suspected relapsed. All such Jews were regarded, in one way or another, as sponsoring heresy.
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Under Caraffa, also in 1553, the Roman Inquisition launched a massive campaign against the Talmud, bringing to relatively tolerant Rome the violent obsession with rabbinic texts that had broken out in Paris three hundred years before. For the first time ever, but establishing a firm precedent, Jewish homes and synagogues in the city were invaded, and all copies of the Talmud and other texts were seized. As such volumes had been hauled to what is now the Place de l'Hotel de Ville in Paris, they were piled in a mound in Rome's Campo dei Fiori, a broad square that still serves as the site of a sumptuous daily food market. A bonfire was lit; the burning of the Talmud had come to Rome.

"Once these books are removed," an advisor to the Roman Inquisition wrote, "...it will soon result that the more they are without that wisdom of their princes, that is, the rabbis, so much the more will they be prepared and disposed to receiving the faith and the wisdom of the word of God."
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In the center of the Campo dei Fiori today stands a morose statue of a hooded monk named Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), a monument raised only in 1887, after the Church lost control of Rome. In part out of admiration for Saint Thomas Aquinas, Bruno had entered the Dominican order, and he quickly distinguished himself as a thinker. Eventually he was influenced by the Kabbalah, in the somewhat fanciful Christian tradition of Pico della Mirandola.
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In line with the speculations of Nicolaus of Cusa and the observations of Copernicus, he posited, for example, the infinity of the universe, a notion condemned by the Church of his time. When Bruno was summoned by the Roman Inquisition in 1576, he "shed his ecclesiastical garments and took flight from the Eternal City."
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He believed that God was omnipresent, and available, in creation—not just in the Church. No doubt influenced by his exposure to Jewish texts, he held that people of differing religions should respect each others freedom of conscience. Bruno's arguments with Church authority became increasingly vituperative, until he was seized in Venice, brought back to Rome, and given the chance to recant. He refused. He was burned at the stake in the Campo dei Fiori by the Inquisition on February 17, 1600.
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To mark the day, citizens of Rome still come to Bruno's statue to lay flowers, and in the year 2000, on the four hundredth anniversary, a demonstration there was attended by hundreds of Italians.
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It is impossible to look at the sculpture's shadowed face and not think of the fires that raged in that place. Caraffa, from a generation before, was the fire starter.

Paul III may have appointed Caraffa, and he may have authorized the coming of the Inquisition to Rome. But he did not approve the other, equally perverting innovation that now began to make its way from Spain to the center of Catholicism—though it did so, ironically, because of him. In 1546, Paul III had appointed a
converso
priest to a clerical position at the cathedral in Toledo. It should have been a routine matter, but the archbishop of Toledo, the reach of whose power can be seen in his having been a tutor to Spain's King Philip II, defied the pope by rejecting the appointed priest on the grounds that he had impure blood.
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Recall that this sort of discrimination against "New Christians" and their descendants had been staunchly opposed by the papacy. Paul III vacillated before finally withdrawing the appointment. The emboldened archbishop carried the matter further than any prelate ever had, issuing, in 1547, the Statute of Toledo—the statute of so-called
limpieza de sangre,
or blood purity—according to which no one of Jewish blood could hold office in the cathedral. Paul III refused to approve the decree, and most other prelates, including many in Spain, denounced it. But the Inquisition began extending such
limpieza
statutes to other institutions. People of Jewish ancestry were banned from holding office in Iberian universities, in religious orders, in various guilds, and in some municipalities. As we have already seen, this emphasis on blood purity was a line in the sand of history. On one side of it stood the Inquisition and what would prove to be its most damning legacy, a turn of mind given over to racism. On the other side of that line, still, was the papacy, clinging, however tentatively, to an ancient responsibility. What would prove to be the succeeding era's most fateful question had set inquisitor against pope.

But then, in 1555, the story took a decisive turn, perhaps its most decisive, when the grand inquisitor Caraffa, the man who had burned the Franciscan Jew, Judaizing Christians, and the Talmud, was elected to fill the Shoes of the Fisherman. Gian Pietro Caraffa became Pope Paul IV (1555–1559)- He was seventy-nine years old. Acting quickly, here is what he did: He ratified the blood purity Statute of Toledo.
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He forbade Jews to possess any religious book except the Bible. From now on the Talmud would be on the Index of Forbidden Books. To enforce that proscription, he abolished Hebrew printing in Rome, which during the Renaissance had become its world capital.

Most momentously, in July 1555, Paul IV issued the bull
Cum Nimis Absurdum:

Forasmuch as it is unreasonable and unseemly that the Jews, whom God has condemned to eternal slavery because of their guilt, should, under the pretense that Christian love cherishes them and endures their dwelling in our midst, show such ingratitude to the Christians as to render them insult for their grace and presume to mastery instead of the subjection which beseems them; and forasmuch as it has come to our notice that in Rome and in other cities their shamefulness is carried so far that they not only make bold to dwell among Christians, even near their churches, and without any distinction in their dress, but even rent houses in the distinguished streets and squares of these cities, villages and localities, acquire and possess landed property, keep Christian nurses, maids, and other servants, and do much else that is for a disgrace to the Christian name; therefore do we perceive ourselves constrained to issue the following ordinance.
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Jews are to own no real estate. Jews are to attend no Christian university. Jews are to hire no Christian servants. Jews' mercantile roles are to be strictly regulated. Jews' taxes are to be increased. Jews are no longer to ignore the ancient requirement to wear distinctive clothing and badges. Jews are to refuse to be addressed as "sir" by Christians. "In no public document, until the advent of Hitler," wrote the historian Malcolm Hay, "have Jews been addressed with more unseemly language than that employed in this message to Christendom."
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What makes
Cum Nimis Absurdum
a milestone of papal notoriety, though, is less its language than its central ordinance: Jews are to live on a single street, or in a distinctive quarter cut off from other sections of the town or city. This quarter is to have only one entrance. The bull, in other words, mandated that henceforth Jews in Christendom were to live in the ghetto.

Cardinal Edward Cassidy, head of the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with Jews, said in an address to a group of Jewish leaders in Washington, D.C., in May 1998, that "the ghetto, which came into being in 1555 with a papal bull, became in Nazi Germany the antechamber of the extermination."
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Before that bull, however, the ghetto already had a long tradition. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) had issued orders isolating Jews, including residence in confined quarters, but such requirements had been irregularly enforced. Cologne had its ghetto as early as 1150; Frankfurt's dates to 1460. No sooner had refugees arrived in Poland from Iberia than a ghetto was established in Kazimierz, in Kraków, in 1496.
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But never before had a decree ordering the establishment of a Jewish quarter been issued with such seriousness of intent, and never before, as subsequent history would show, was such a mandate to be so rigorously enforced. And never before had such a mandate been issued by a pope.

Cum Nimis Absurdum
was promulgated on July 12. On July 23, male Jews living in Rome were required to begin wearing yellow conical hats (women had to wear veils). On July 26, all of Rome's Jews were rounded up and brought to the district beside the Tiber—about a mile square, about a mile from the Vatican—that would thenceforth serve as the ghetto.
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(The word "ghetto" originated in Venice, where Jews had previously been confined to a district near the new iron foundry, or
geto nuevo.)
Work commenced immediately on an encircling wall, which took two months to build and for which the Jews themselves were required to pay. The restrictions of life inside the ghetto would lead to an almost immediate and complete physical and cultural—although not religious—impoverishment of the once proud Jewish community. Jews would be required to live within its confines, a cramped population that at times exceeded ten thousand, until late in the nineteenth century. Across the street from what served as the gate of the ghetto stands the Church of San Gregorio alla Divina Pietà, with an inscription from Isaiah above the door. An English translation of the verse reads, in part, "I spread out my hands all the day to a rebellious people, who walk in a way that is not good."
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The suffering caused by the ghetto was extreme, and as Cardinal Cassidy indicates, the ultimate consequences of this escalation, when joined to other historical currents, have been unspeakable. But there is reason to believe that even the remorseless Paul IV intended something else. In the preface to
Cum Nimis Absurdum,
the pope explained that the purpose of his restrictive policies was to lead Jews to conversion.
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He had fully and finally abandoned the Augustinian idea that Jews served God's purposes by continuing to live, as degraded "witnesses," among Christians. The sole principle now would be that Jews had been allowed to survive only to glorify God and the truth of his Church by converting. Thus the innovative inhumanity of the ghetto was not intended to be permanent. Indeed, the very brutality of these new policies was designed to make them necessary only briefly. Some Jews did respond to the new regime by converting, but most did not.

To put the best face on it, the ghetto and all its restrictions were not intended as a kind of social torture, the organized application of pain designed to force the surrender of stiff-necked Jews. Caraffa and other Church officials would have learned from the
converso
disaster in Iberia that forced conversion is by definition untrustworthy, and would lead to an underground counter-religion of crypto-Judaism. What Paul IV imagined was that if the Jewish degradation was made complete, Jews themselves would recognize it as, in the words of the historian Kenneth Stow, "the fulfillment of the prophecies of servitude, and therefore, as a result of this recognition, they would convert."
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Jews who had not recognized the fulfillment of prophecies about the Messiah embedded in the life of Jesus, in other words, would recognize that fulfillment in their own lives. What Paul IV was doing with
Cum Nimis Absurdum
was reducing to a new level—to the absurd?—the "fulfillment" mistake that the Jesus movement had made in the first generation when it claimed a "New Covenant" that fulfilled and therefore superseded the "Old."