Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (73 page)

All of this leaves him repulsed by religion. Finally, in his vision, Voltaire is brought face to face with Jesus, "a man with a gentle, simple face, who seemed to me to be about thirty-five years old." Voltaire asks about the valley of bones he has just toured, and Jesus denies responsibility. Voltaire dares to press him.

"You did not then contribute in any way by your teaching, either badly reported or badly interpreted, to those frightful piles of bones which I saw on my way to consult with you?"

"I have only looked with horror upon those who have made themselves guilty of all these murders."

...[Finally] I asked him to tell me in what true religion consisted.

"Have I not already told you? Love God and your neighbor as yourself."

"Is it necessary for me to take sides either for the Greek Orthodox Church or the Roman Catholic?"

"When I was in the world I never made any difference between the Jew and the Samaritan."

"Well, if that is so, I take you for my only master." Then he made a sign with his head that filled me with peace. The vision disappeared, and I was left with a clear conscience.
²⁷

Voltaire's "clear conscience" had led him to denounce the slaughter of Jews. In that, he was a representative figure not only of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment but of the nineteenth-century revolution. Nevertheless, the conscience of both the Enlightenment and the revolution allowed itself to make a "difference between the Jew and the Samaritan"—between, that is, Jews and all other people. Heinrich Marx, who read approvingly from Voltaire to his son Karl, thereby sowing seeds of the young Marx's lifelong contempt for all religion, was fooled if he thought Voltaire and the other philosophes had a place in their brave new world for him. The spirit of rational tolerance, which did not extend to Jewish religion, did not extend to Jewish human beings either. It would fall to Heinrich's son to help make that deadly point clear.

When the origins of Nazi antisemitism are attributed to modern neo-paganism—and we have seen how they are—more than some Teutonic/ Aryan obsession with forest nymphs is being referred to. Voltaire was an anti-Semite, as indicated by the dismissive use of caricature in his assault on Spinoza, but he was an anti-Semite who defined Jewish inferiority in terms of classical antiquity. Greek and Roman pagans detected in the Jewish refusal "to eat at the same table with other men," as Arthur Hertzberg sums up the charge,
²⁸
evidence of their innate inferiority. Their "obstinate attachment to each other" proved, as Tacitus asserted, "the implacable hatred which they harbor for the rest of mankind."
²⁹
Hatred for Jews originates, that is, in a prior Jewish hatred. Voltaire praised Cicero's hatred of Jews, and, in a letter theatrically addressed to Cicero, notched it up. Jews "are, all of them," he wrote in 1771, "born with raging fanaticism in their hearts, just as the Bretons and the Germans are born with blond hair. I would not be in the least bit surprised if these people would not some day become deadly to the human race."
³⁰

Voltaire's main project was to liberate the human mind from the grip of irrational and violent religion, and so he has to justify his visceral rejection of Jews as such, a rejection to which he remained committed in other than traditional religious terms. "Voltaire had thus, being an ex-Christian," Arthur Hertzberg explains, "abandoned entirely the religious attack on the Jews as Christ-killers or Christ-rejectors. He proposed a new principle on which to base his hatred of them, their innate character."
³¹
Hertzberg summarizes the significance of this idea, planted in the heart of the Enlightenment: "The notion that the new society was to be a re-evocation of classical antiquity was the prime source of post-Christian anti-Semitism in the nineteenth century. The vital link, the man who skipped over the Christian centuries and provided a new, international, secular, anti-Jewish rhetoric in the name of European culture rather than religion, was Voltaire. The defeat of the emancipation of the Jews of Europe existed in embryo even before that process began."
³²

Is it true that the hatred of Jews could "skip over the Christian centuries"? Is it true that the coming defeat of emancipation could be laid at the feet of some pagan antisemitism, as if Tacitus and Cicero are guilty of crimes of which Torquemada, Isabella, and Paul IV are innocent? From the Jewish side, perhaps, ancient Roman hatred could seem like the same thing as later Christian hatred, since both were prompted, at bottom, by the Jewish refusal to renounce the oneness of God. In the former case, that required a boycott of tables where pagan deities were honored; in the latter, a rejection of the divinity of Jesus. But paganism never defined itself as a negation of Judaism, and, beginning with its second generation, Christianity did. That is the fatal difference, and it manifests itself throughout this story. Looked at from the side of non-Jews, there can be no doubt that the traditional demonization of Jews by Christians, beginning with the canonical New Testament, had a radioactive impact all its own, even if anti-Christian Voltaire had reason to deemphasize it—reason, that is, to "skip over the Christian centuries."

The intellectual structure of Cicero's anti-Judaism enabled Voltaire to imagine he had done so. But where could Voltaire's visceral, prerational, and "innate" mistrust of Jews have come from if not the culture into which he was born? That culture was decidedly linked by what Malcolm Hay, one of the first Catholic historians of antisemitism, called "the chain of error" to the deep Christian past.
³³
That chain runs, as we have seen, back through the various popes to Saint Bernard, Saint John Chrysostom, Saint Ambrose, and ultimately to Saint John the Evangelist. In other words, the exclusive assertion of an ancient pagan justification for a contemporary and irrational reaction to a group of human beings, intended as a way of marginalizing the influence of Christian justifications for that same reaction, is itself irrational. Christian efforts
³⁴
in our day to claim exoneration on the basis of Voltaire's paean to paganism are equally so.

In her monumental twentieth-century study of antisemitism, in
The Origins of Totalitarianism,
Hannah Arendt, for a different motive, would do much the same thing. She saw how Christian hatred of Jews for essentially religious reasons had been transformed in the modern era into a profoundly secular, indeed anti-religious, phenomenon. She posited a radical discontinuity between the hatred of Jews displayed by Nazis and that displayed over the centuries by Christians, locating the break in the Enlightenment. She did this because the idea of a
continuous
flow of such venom, from her stance as a post-Holocaust historian, was simply too horrible. "In view of the final catastrophe, which brought the Jews so near to complete annihilation," she wrote, "the thesis of eternal antisemitism has become more dangerous than ever. Today it would absolve Jew-haters of crimes greater than anybody had ever believed possible."
³⁵

On the contrary, seeing how the hatred of Jews in one era prepares for the hatred of Jews in another, refining it, perhaps, but always making it more lethal, absolves no one. Instead, the drawing of a clear narrative arc, naming each link in the "chain of errors," requires every participant so named in this almost, yes, eternal drama to be held accountable. At the beginning of this book, we compared its narrative to a drama, classically defined and causally determined, with a beginning, which leads to a middle, which leads to the end.
³⁶
A drama is not a mere sequence of episodes: "The king died, and then the queen died" is the episodic sequence we saw before, the one given by E. M. Forster to make the point. No, a drama consists in "The king died, and then the queen died of grief."
³⁷
The cause of the action, grief, is what we care about. Escapist entertainment, and episodic history, may ask of a narrative, "What then?" But drama, as Forster defines it, asks "Why?" The answer to that question is always found in the connection between cause and consequence. "Don't look at this as a bunch of little threads," as prosecutors tell jurors. "Look at it as threads in a rope."

This way of thinking, with attention to causality and consequence through a narrative unfolding over time, resists the spectacle of isolated incidents on which our sound-bite culture thrives. Reality perceived as uncaused instances is reality of which no moral account can be made. By this schema, for example, the bank deposits and artworks of murdered Jews exist only in locked Swiss vaults and on unprovenanced museum walls, and not also in a starkly untied rope of history. Such moral disconnectedness defines the contemporary anomie, suggests why accomplishing a true moral reckoning with the Shoah has proven so difficult, and represents the real moral paralysis of which Arendt was so properly afraid. And not incidentally, this impoverishment of the moral imagination, defined as causal disconnectedness, has its source in the self-satisfied illusion of an Enlightenment that regarded its age—Reason!—as superior to the point of being discontinuous with what went before.

If Voltaire claimed to have thoughts shaped exclusively by Cicero, that does not mean that he did. If Hitler's paranoia about Jews was fueled by the grafting of the secular and neo-pagan racism of modernity to the stock of ancient and medieval Christian Jew-hatred, why does that remove Christian history from the center of the story? The stock remains the stock. Modern secularists found a new language with which to slander Jews, but their impulse to do so—here is the point—was as rooted in the mystery of religion as any grand inquisitor's.

The habit of deflecting this truth is relevant to the pair of masterly elaborations of anti-Jewish stereotyping of the nineteenth century, one of which Karl Marx, the ex-Christian Jew hater, articulated more drastically than anyone, and the other of which "that Jew Marx," in Hitler's phrase, so well embodied. The images, negations of each other, came to define the modern Jew. Both images lived nowhere more vividly than in the Catholic imagination.

42. Jew as Revolutionary, Jew as Financier

A
S A CHILD
growing up in Trier, Karl Marx could well have known of the anti-Jewish pogroms that broke out in the Rhineland during the first decade of his life.
¹
In 1834, at age sixteen, he was confirmed in the Lutheran Evangelical Church.
²
There is every reason to think that he "imbibed," in Padover's word, the Christian prejudice against Jews that would have typified his friends and neighbors, Protestant as well as Catholic. But here it is important to take note of the Lutheran tradition into which he was initiated, if only formally, because, as we observed previously, German antisemitism would prove especially lethal, in no small part because of shadows cast by Martin Luther. "The unmentionable odour of death" that W. H. Auden sensed above Europe in September 1939 he traced back to something rotten in the great reformer's program, the madness, as Auden put it, "from Luther until now."
³

Luther's biographer Richard Marius comments on this perception of Auden and others who laid the Nazi pathology at Luther's feet: "Although the Jews for him were only one among many enemies he castigated with equal fervor, although he did not sink to the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition against Jews, and although he was certainly not to blame for Adolf Hitler, Luther's hatred of the Jews is a sad and dishonorable part of his legacy, and it is not a fringe issue. It lay at the center of his concept of religion. He saw in the Jews a continuing moral depravity he did not see in Catholics. He did not accuse papists of the crimes that he laid at the feet of Jews."
⁴

But that "unmentionable odour of death" was even more decisive than the challenge posed by Jews, yet then the two became intermingled. The core of this entire narrative has involved the Church's too exclusive focus on the death of Christ, which began with Constantine and became progressively more emphatic with the Crusades, the atonement theology of Anselm, the
reconquista,
and the Inquisition, which turned death into an act of faith. All of this is symbolized by the way the cross replaced the face of Christ as the central Christian icon.
⁵
With death at the apex of theology and cult, the vulnerability of Jews, as the ones responsible for death, was axiomatic. Ironically, because suffering and death had been cast as the primary meaning of the life of Christ—the source of Christian salvation—the suffering of Christians became glorified as the "imitation" of Christ, while the suffering of Jews continued to be the proof of their sin in rejecting Christ.
⁶
This positive-negative reading of suffering and death remained a paradoxical note of Catholic attitudes, but with Luther the paradox broke, and the doom of death became absolute, with ever more dreadful consequences for Jews.

Martin Luther's religious vocation began in the terror Luther experienced during a storm, when fear of death prompted his youthful vow to become a monk. One way to understand him is as the embodiment of the death-obsessed Christian, and it was precisely his horror at the prospect of mortality that led the bile of his obsession to spill onto Jews. Marius points out, for example, that his
On the Jews and Their Lies,
which was published in 1543, came within months of the death of his beloved daughter Magdalena, who died in his arms. "Afterward his grief was intense, and he spoke feelingly of the terror before death while affirming his trust in Christ. This combination of woes may have driven him to lash out at someone, and the Jews were there, testifying to his worst fear, that Jesus had not risen from the dead, and that Christians would enjoy no victory over the grave."
⁷
Jews denied, therefore, not just an abstract set of Christian claims, but the only hope this man had. Luther's sense of doom was not theological, but intensely personal, literally physical.