Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (67 page)

Here, for example, is the text of a resolution passed by the Fifth General Congregation of the Society of Jesus, which met in 1593–1594: "Those, however, who are descended from parents who are recent Christians have routinely been in the habit of inflicting a great deal of hindrance and harm on the Society (as has become clear from our daily experience). For this reason many have earnestly requested a decree on the authority of this present congregation that no one will hereafter be admitted to this Society who is descended of Hebrew or Saracen stock."
⁶²

In the Sixth General Congregation, which met fourteen years later, the restriction was extended from "parents" back to "the fifth degree of family lineage," with the requirement that a candidate for admission to the order not be descended from a Jew or Saracen "within that degree of family relationship."
⁶³
The restrictive regulation was allowed to stand by one General Congregation after another, although the exclusion of those of "Saracen" stock dropped away. Here is the regulation governing admission of candidates as it was approved by the Twenty-seventh General Congregation, in 1923: "The impediment of origin extends to all who are descended from the Jewish race, unless it is clear that their father, grandfather, and great-grandfather have belonged to the Catholic Church."
⁶⁴
The Jesuits finally did away with this rejection of those descended from Jews, but this is how the fathers meeting at the Twenty-ninth General Congregation put it: "Regarding the impediment of origin, introduced by decrees 52 and 53 of the Fifth General Congregation, explained in decree 28 of the Sixth Congregation, preserved, albeit in mitigated form, by decree 27 of the Twenty-seventh Congregation but not contained in the Constitutions, the present congregation did not wish to retain it as a secondary impediment, but substituted for it a statement reminding the provincials ... of the cautions to be exercised before admitting a candidate about whom there is some doubt as to the character of his hereditary background."
⁶⁵
This is as close as the Society of Jesus could come that year to a ringing repudiation of
limpieza de sangre.
It was 1946.

In the fall of 1998, the Vatican sponsored a meeting of historians on the subject of the Inquisition, a follow-up to the earlier opening of the archives, to which I referred in chapter 32. Pope John Paul II asked the scholars to withhold moral judgments, and instead to "help in the most precise possible reconstruction" of the milieu within which the Inquisition developed. Revisionist historians emphasize that "the black legend," in historian Carlo Ginzburg's phrase, has been exaggerated, and it seems that the Vatican hopes for a tempering of history's profoundly negative judgment of the Inquisition. As we saw earlier, the worst abuses of Inquisition violence occurred in the first phase of its long existence. But questions of torture and execution as a mode of thought control, and even the historical context that might mitigate the harshest judgments, are one thing; the overall impact of the Inquisition on Jews, and those of Jewish ancestry, is another. The fact is that the Inquisition moved Christian suspicion of Jews to a whole new level of irrationality. Thus the positive assertions of "We Remember" seem of a piece with the document's failure even to mention the Inquisition, and with the later reliance on euphemism in "Memory and Reconciliation," where the Inquisition was referred to as "the use of force in the service of the truth." Nevertheless, the question remains: Was the Inquisition the hospitable organism to which the virus of modern antisemitic racism first attached itself?

Pope Paul V, who formally embraced the
limpieza
standard in 1611, was also the pope who presided over the start of the Inquisition's move against Galileo Galilei. Those proceedings were concluded by Pope Urban VIII (1623–1644), who sympathized with the scientist but condemned him anyway.
⁶⁶
In 1992, Pope John Paul II apologized for that condemnation—the earth does indeed revolve around the sun—but that Vatican acknowledgment of error had something of the self-exoneration of "We Remember" about it. The pope cited "a tragic mutual incomprehension" between the Inquisition and the scientist—"as if," in Hans Küng's words, "there were errors on both sides." I was interviewing Küng in 1996 at his home in'Tübingen, Germany. "What?" He banged his fist on the table. "Galileo was right. The others were wrong."
⁶⁷

It was Galileo's intimate nemesis, Urban VIII, who ended the Roman custom according to which a Jew, upon entering the pontiff's presence, was expected to kiss the Holy Father's foot. Urban required instead that the Jew kiss the floor on the spot where the pope's foot had stood. A story told by Jews in Rome had it that Urban VIII intervened when a convert-hungry friar was trying to take a Jew's child away, to baptize the child. But the Jew refused to let the child go. When the pope heard of it, he decreed that if the Jew did not hand over the one child to be baptized, all of his other children would be taken as well. To make the point, a second of the man's children was taken, and both were duly baptized. Freed from the ghetto, the first child was then carried through the streets of Rome, to be hailed.
⁶⁸

37. The Religious Response of the Jews

T
HE TURN IN
the story occasioned by the new restrictions of the Church-mandated ghetto in Rome and other cities should have been an instance par excellence of the "lachrymose tradition" of Jewish history. The ever-tightening vise of Christian paranoiac prejudice squeezed more and more life out of the Jewish community. The forced impoverishment that came with ghettoization entailed a shocking collapse of a once proud culture. The loss of books and the proscription of education led to sharp declines in literacy rates. Among Jews, the
convivencia-era
embrace of an Aristotelian rationalism, represented by the Maimonides school, was perceived now as a source of relativism that had led many to convert to Christianity. The disciplined intellectual life, as defined by the broader culture, became suspect. What looked to that culture like mere superstition replaced philosophy as the touchstone of wisdom. Indeed, the curtailment of significant interaction with that broader culture marked the onset of Jewish inwardness. The word "ghetto" may have originated with a Venice foundry district, but Jews recognized another word inside it—
get,
which in Hebrew means "bill of divorce."
¹
Instead of being only lachrymose, however, this divorce, as sometimes happens among men and women, was the occasion of a remarkable renewal of the injured party.

On the Christian side, the ghetto symbolized the end of the long tradition of mixed messages, tracing back through
Sicut Judaeis
pronouncements, which both protected Jews and promulgated contempt for them; through Saint Augustine's dual proscriptions that Jews should survive, but not thrive; through Saint Paul's repudiation of the Law and his assertion that God does not revoke the Covenant; to the Jesus movement's scapegoating of Jews for the crucifixion and its self-definition as the "new Israel." After the Inquisition, the expulsions, the
limpieza,
and the ghetto, the Catholic Church's attitude toward Judaism would be relentlessly negative. The "divorce" imposed by the popes was supposed, by the twisted logic of this relationship, to bring about the final Jewish submission. When it did not—Kenneth Stow says that the number of Jews accepting baptism in the Roman ghetto, with its population of 3,500 to 4,000, rarely exceeded twenty in any given year
²
—Judaism was cut off from life outside on the assumption it would die. To be sure, conversionist programs were continued, with friars making forays into the ghetto synagogue. As the story about Urban VIII's intervention in the case of the Jewish child indicates, not even children would be exempt from such pressures. Nevertheless, with the twin policies of ghettoization and expulsion, embraced even by the papacy, a new age of Jewish isolation had begun.

Yet behind those walls, and through networks linking urban ghettos, Jews underwent a spiritual renewal that might be compared to the first flourishing of rabbinic Judaism at the onset of the Diaspora, after the devastating wars with Rome. For the first time, European Judaism was truly set apart from Christian culture. We saw in Part Four how the spirit of martyrdom had marked both crusaders and their Jewish victims. The twelfth- and thirteenth-century spiritual revival that showed itself on the Christian side in the monastic renewal of Cluny and its satellites, like Maria Laach, showed itself among Jews in the surfacing of Kabbalah and the appearance of the
Zohar,
attributed to Moses de Leon, at the end of the thirteenth century.

But what developed among Jews in response to the traumas of the sixteenth century had no equivalent among Christians, Catholic or Protestant. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation involved spiritual recoveries of different kinds, but they shared a framework that had nothing to do with Judaism. In its own sphere, the Jewish religion underwent a spiritual and ethical renewal that was nuanced, original, and deeply effective in terms of individual meaning and of communal sustenance. Such was the divorce that Christians would hardly notice this development, or if they did, they would misunderstand and condescend to it.

We have seen how, beginning in the twelfth century, Kabbalah had surfaced as a source of a new Jewish mythology and a new Jewish mysticism. We have seen how some Christians, from John of the Cross to Pico della Mirandola and Giordano Bruno, were influenced by Kabbalah, but to the extent that most Christians were aware of it, they regarded it as superstition, the mumbo-jumbo of numerology or magic or witchcraft. But the richness of this tradition is manifest by nothing more clearly than the fact that, in the crisis-ridden sixteenth century, Kabbalah reinvented itself, and flourished anew.

What Jews behind their ghetto walls were doing was nothing less than recasting, in a state of physical distress, the spiritual meaning of their situation. Jewish spirituality evolved on its own terms, of course, but in times of crisis, as now, dynamic interactions between the two communities were decisive. If the Christian world had cut them off, the Jews would turn their separation into a religious value. Christianity ceases to be mentioned now in Jewish texts. If, after the various expulsions and corrallings, they were once again a people in exile, they would define exile itself as holy, a kind of metaphysical truth of the human condition. If Jews seemed once again to have been abandoned by God, they reenvisioned creation as the work of God's self-abandonment. If Jews were forbidden even the remotest suggestion of sexual liaison with Christians, they would turn intra-Jewish matrimony into a dynastic principle of social cohesion, even across national boundaries, as families from various ghettos arranged marriages. If Jews were forbidden to leave the ghetto at night, then night would become not only the time for study and prayer, but an image of God's own darkness. (Jews in the ghetto, in the seventeenth century, drank newly imported coffee as a way of staying awake.
³
) This mysticism. Stow writes, "allowed Jews to transcend the physical limits of the ghetto. It permitted them to fantasize that things were the opposite of what they seemed to be in reality. Closure was really an opening. By being restricted to the ghetto, therefore, the Jews were being propelled mystically toward their rendezvous with the liberation of the messianic moment. Mystical speculation made them immune to the threats of the outside world."
⁴

The prophet of the new Jewish mysticism, "the central figure of the new Kabbalah," in Gershom Scholem's phrase,
⁵
was Isaac Luria (1534–1572).
⁶
He was a contemporary of the ghetto-creating inquisitor pope, Paul IV, but Luria, "the Holy Lion," had a ferocity that expressed itself differently. He lived in Palestine, in Safed, a city that still draws mystical seekers. "Rising from the haze and fog of Upper Galilee's deepest ravines and valleys, Safed has no biblical pedigree, no deep roots in the scriptural or prophetic history of Israel..." Neil Asher Silberman writes. "Yet after 1492, with the horror and uncertainty of the Spanish Expulsion and the increasing flow of Jewish immigrants toward the Ottoman Empire, Safed was one of the several towns in the Holy Land that received a significant number of refugees."
⁷
Silberman cites a "massive influx of sages back into the Land of Israel." By the time of Luria's arrival, Safed was a vital center of Jewish scholarship that ran the gamut from text-observant Torah study, to unbridled mystical theorizing, to feats of memorization, to pursuits in chemistry and astronomy along tracks laid down by Kabbalist texts. "In the span of less than three years—that seems in retrospect like a lifetime—the young kabbalist burst upon the mystical scene in Safed ... He offered his followers a profoundly disturbing secret: he helped them understand the nature of
evil
and the means by which it would eventually be overcome."
⁸
God, too, was understood as grappling with evil. In Luria's view, as Harold Bloom summarizes it, creation itself is "God's catharsis of Himself, a vast sublimation in which His terrible rigor might find some peace."
⁹

Refracted through Luria's genius, Kabbalah offered a bracing world-view that enabled its adherents to stand amid the swirl of individualism that marked the unfolding new epoch—without being swept away by it. Kabbalah was rooted in an enduring faith in Israel as God's chosen people, and that peoplehood was never more to the point. Thus Jews found a way to temper the individualism that would mark the coming modern age. Because exile was defined as essential to the human condition, the scattering of the Jewish people would become a condition of cohesion, not dispersal.