Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (69 page)

"Listening to the past," Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, "attuned to the striving of ancestors, we perceive that to be a Jew is to hold one's soul clean and open to the flow of that stream of striving, so that God may not be ashamed of His creation." Is there a counterpoint between Judaism's emphasis on salvation history as
history
and Christianity's effort to define itself by what lies ahead? "The quest for immortality is common to all men," Heschel said. "To most of them the vexing question points to the future. We Jews think not only of the end but also of the beginning. We have our immortality in the past."
⁶

The Christian story is equally time bound, as if, in the biblical vision, time itself has become a mode of God's presence. But think of Pascal's image, as George Steiner puts it, "of Christ's agony persisting until the end of time."
⁷
And yet from another point of view, Christians understand the meaning of the Lord's coming as a transcendence of time. Because the first followers of Jesus were convinced, within Jewish messianic categories, that time itself was about to end, they experienced the "drawing nigh" of eternity. That meant both that the past collapsed into the present—"In the beginning was the Word," the Word who is Jesus—and that, because Jesus would soon return, the future infused the present, too. The urgent expectation of those first followers was disappointed, but not before it changed the way they experienced time. For Christians, God had become, in a phrase of Rahner's, the absolute future. The future becomes absolute as it becomes ours.
⁸
The future, it can seem, is all we have. To Christians, Jesus is "eternity in time," to use the critic David Denby's term, but it is time as unfolding before us. Denby read the New Testament for his
Great Books,
and he summed up this development as "the version of time and history that Christianity brought into Western consciousness, a way of conceiving of time that had an immense influence on theology and literature at least through the Renaissance ... The Christian mode of thinking had shaped literature and art and institutions, it had been woven through history and could not be shaken out. It had woven itself into me, too."
⁹

As it happens, Denby is Jewish. Perhaps his sense of the distinctiveness of Christian time-consciousness notes too little the Jewish aspect of that first Christian mindset. I understand these things as a Christian, and I surely take Heschel's point about the primacy of the past. Yet it strikes me that in the chanting of the Shema there is no future, no past. Doesn't the classic Jewish proclamation transcend time as much as a theology of Incarnation? In the notion of
tikkun,
there is the hope that the broken shards of the past can open to a messianic future, establishing Judaism's vital redemptive character, but in the Shema past and future bow. There is only now. Only this. Only God. The Holy One of Israel transcends Israel, too, both as a mystical entity, the biblical people of God, and certainly as the modern state of Israel, despite all temptations of Zionism. If Catholics are not exempt from judgment, neither are Jews. The Holy One transcends—and Jews themselves insist on this—even the Holocaust. The Jewish absolute, in this sense, is "more absolute" than Christianity's, since Christians cannot bring themselves to say, quite, that God transcends the Church, which in the tradition is "mystically" identified with Jesus.

Israel has never identified itself with God. Indeed, the Shema is an affirmation of God's radical otherness. Ironically, the Christian imagination attributes a kind of materialism to Judaism—the legalisms of the Torah, an emphasis on the this-worldly importance of history, the money-grubbing stereotype, Marx's atheistic positivism, and so on—yet in this central religious act, Judaism is anything but materialistic. God is above all that is, including time and history, yet God cares for people in the here and now. Perhaps the ability to affirm that paradox is why the faith of Jews survives—survives everything. The Jewish proclamation of God's existence, God's oneness, and God's immediate relevance to human life, affirmed twice daily for thousands of years, is the spine not just of Jewish religion but of the civilization that springs from it. There need be no argument over whether Western consciousness owes more to Christians than to Jews.

Those who have gone at Jews brandishing the cross, in recent days as well as in ancient times, apparently regard this resolute Shema as the cross's competition. The cross is meant to be a symbol of love, but looked at from below, it can be a symbol only of domination. And it can even be a symbol, in Flannery's phrase, of the "animus against God." The cross drives this story, from its beginning at Golgotha to its end at what John Paul II called "this Golgotha of the modern world."
¹⁰
By the close of the crusading Middle Ages, the ambivalent Renaissance, the blood-tainted Reformation, and the tainted-blood Counter-Reformation, the cross had become an icon of all that Jews were required by the Holy One of Israel to reject. And what Christian, after Auschwitz, can say that they were wrong?

No matter how Christians take it, that rejection is not an act of negation, for the anguish it assumes itself opens to a holy recognition. "When thou hidest thy face," the psalmist prayed, "they are dismayed; when thou takest away their breath, they die and return to their dust."
¹¹

In the modern era, to which we turn now, when the face of God became hidden in the mists of secularism, could Catholics have recovered the cross as what it must have been for Jesus—since, after all, he too saw it from below? To him, the cross was the Shema made wood, Jesus' own witness to the Holy One of Israel, for that is what it meant when, despite not seeing God's face himself, he found a way to pray, "Into your hands I commend my spirit." If Catholics had seen this, could they have joined with Jews in announcing what they both still knew—that even when human beings leap from God's hiddenness to God's death, God is the One who does not die? Could Catholics have then recognized that the modern assault on hierarchy was not an assault on God? Indeed, this history suggests it was the work of God. Does the Catholic Church's blindness to the real meaning of Judaism have anything to do with Catholic blindness to post-medieval democratic values as a trace of God in time? Kabbalah, with its ideology of God's emanation in the souls of all people, planted seeds of tolerance in the Western mind, whether condescending Christian apologists knew it or not. Leibnitz and Locke,
¹²
perhaps through Spinoza, were beneficiaries of the spacious hopefulness of
tikkun,
and now science would flow from the currents of the Jewish mystical tradition. How little the Church would understand not only of the secular, as it broke in, but of the deepest meaning of its own spirituality.

In the new age, whether defined by the ascendancy of capitalism, by political revolutions, or by secularity, the battle would continue, as always, to be between the Church and the Jews, emphatically or subtly. In chapter 32 I recalled my own, admittedly ludicrous brush with the spirit of the Inquisition. At last I understand why the Indexed book they took from me should have been Sartre's
The Age of Reason.
Neither I nor my inquisitor had read the book. Its title and its author were enough to frighten us. If I recall
The Age of Reason
now, it is to draw this story forward into the Enlightenment, where we will see why fear seized the Church by its very soul.

PART SIX

EMANCIPATION, REVOLUTION, AND A NEW FEAR OF JEWS

39. Karl Marx, Second Son of Trier

W
E RETURN TO
this city again and again: Trier, on the Moselle, upriver from its confluence with the Rhine, site of the ancient Roman capital of the north, when the city was known as Augusta Treverorum, then as Treveris. We saw this as Constantine's first headquarters, how he launched his campaign to unify the empire from here, how his greatest palace is preserved still, how on the site of his mother's palace stands the present cathedral.

Because it was Saint Helena's home, Trier became the first episcopal see in Gaul, and subsequently the seat of powerful prince electors of the Holy Roman Empire. Helena, as we saw, is revered for having brought from Jerusalem a nail of the True Cross and relics of Saint Matthias, the apostle elected to replace the traitor Judas. But Helena's place of honor in Trier is due above all to the Robe of Christ, the tunic attributed to her discovery and preserved in the hidden reliquary of the cathedral. The tunic, you recall, is what had brought me to Trier with my mother. We had come as pilgrims for only the second showing in the twentieth century. As an object of Old Testament prophecy—"for my raiment they cast lots"
¹
—the Seamless Robe, when centurions were remembered rolling dice for it, became a proof of the claims made for Jesus. As such, it had been a challenge to the thin piety of a self-doubting teenager. But far more than that, it was a permanent rebuke to Jews. It gave every baptized witness the right to nudge a Jew with "Don't you see?" Gazing across the bowed heads of Germans, I had been sophisticated enough to ask, "Is this the real Robe?" To ask if there had ever been such a thing at all—to ask, that is, if the friends of Jesus simply lifted the detail from a psalm they loved, for the sake of a consoling continuity—had been unthinkable to me. Even more so was the Robe's connection to Christian antisemitism.

It was here in Trier, as we saw, that Jews first suffered the insult of the crusaders, and it was here—that "comely" girl who threw herself into the Moselle—that Jews first set the pattern of their resistance. And 842 years later, it was near here that Allied armies first broke into Germany. Ike and Monty retraced the routes of Constantine and the crusaders, moving east. And now, as we track the story of Catholics and Jews into the darkest corner of the Enlightenment, we will see still more of the mystery of this place.

I am standing in a burgher's modest house at 10 Bruckenstrasse, in the center of the city, less than a five-minute walk from the market square and the cathedral in one direction, and a shorter distance from Constantine's palace in another. The house consists of three stories, on each of which are two or three small rooms. From the street, the building—its linteled doorway, its eight windows, each with its grid of panes, its capstone at the blushing crown of a timid arch—impresses like a self-important bureaucrat, cravat in place, vest properly gilded with the chain of a watch, the only thing of real value hidden. A courtyard in the rear separates the house from its one outbuilding, which in 1818 would have been a stable and carriage house. In that year. Trier was a country town, home to about 12,000 people,
²
compared to today's population of nearly 100,000. In the guidebooks of Trier, 1818 is always featured because that is the year Karl Marx was born, and this is the house of his birth.

Today Karl-Marx-Haus is a museum. The philosopher and revolutionary's letters and manuscripts are on display, as are first editions, in various languages, of
Das Kapital
and
The Communist Manifesto.
The domestic furniture has been removed from the former parlor and bedrooms, and the walls are decked with photographs and prints. There are pictures of the young Marx, a dandy with styled hair and a carefully trimmed beard and mustache; of the "Young Hegelians," a clique at the university in Berlin; of Friedrich Engels. There are broadsides and posters:
Workers Unite!
A defiant earnestness marks the display, and one assumes that the museum dates to a time when the ideas of Karl Marx were still threatening, and that even now its tone is set by true believers.

Except for this: I am standing in the second-floor room where Marx was born. To my left are a pair of large windows, overlooking the street, through which rivers of light pour onto the wall before me, illuminating a large genealogical chart. In the Soviet Union this family history was never referred to. The chart traces Marx's forebears back to the fourteenth century—to "Eliesar um 1370," a paternal ancestor who is identified as a rabbi of Mainz. I think of that city's ancient Jewish cemetery and imagine Eliesar buried there. Dozens upon dozens of Marx's ancestors are named. "Levi, Isak, Israel," we read. "Hirsh, Abraham, Chaim." Many of the males are identified as rabbis: "Moses Halevi Marx, Joshua Heschel Lwow, Josef ben Gerson ha-Cohen of Krakow." From this line of men were drawn rabbis to the congregation of Trier beginning in 1650. The rabbi of Trier in Marx's own time was his father's brother. Both of Marx's grandfathers were rabbis.
³

It is impossible to look at those names and dates without thinking of others. The year 1096, of course, and this Jewish community's encounter with Peter the Prelate; 1155, when Saint Bernard of Clairvaux preached here against mob attacks on Jews, unaware of his own part in prompting them; 1349, when, after charges of well poisoning, the entire Jewish population of Trier was slaughtered. In 1418, ahead of Spain, though after England, the Jews of Trier were expelled, which is why the chart shows the family moving east for several generations, as far as Poland. "How lonely sits the city that was full of people!" begins the Book of Lamentations. It is impossible not to hear the echo of such verses here. "How like a widow has she become, she that was great among the nations! She that was a princess among the cities has become a vassal ... among all her lovers she has none to comfort her; all her friends have dealt treacherously with her, they have become her enemies."
⁴

The princess is the family tree itself, and the ladders linking mothers and fathers, children and grandchildren, sisters and brothers, and cousins to the tenth degree are precisely how she withstood her affliction. In fact, this lineage represents a positive history more than a negative one, a veritable sacrament of the self-renewing vitality of rabbinic Judaism. It means everything that the legacy of Karl Marx should be traced to the community that supported the great Talmudic academy of Mainz, where the exegetical imagination took hold in the heart of Europe. A genealogy gives us our genes, and the diagram before me charts the flow of lifeblood through the spiritual centers of Jewish revival. I think of Nachmanides, Moses de Leon, Don Todros, Isaac Luria, and the Baal Shem Tov here, in this room where Marx was born, whether they'd have been named that day or not. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, members of this family had settled in cities north and south, east and west; this family's elders had continually tested tradition against the new experiences of intellectual alienation and exile. And, apparently, a center held. Marx had ancestors; so did his genius.