This paper is based on James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword; the Church and the Jews, a history, which was published this Spring. As the paper is the basis for a talk, I have distinguished Carroll's language from mine in only a few places.

James Carroll was a member of a Roman Catholic religious order and a priest. He’s now married, a prolific writer, and a research associate at the Harvard Divinity School. Constantine’s Sword is a critique of the Christian Church, both Catholic and Protestant, for its fundamental anti-semitism. Carroll considers himself a good Catholic, however, and intends to show that anti-semitism is not essential to Christianity. -- And if you never thought it was, you may be surprised!

Catholic reviewers have criticised his book for being anti-Catholic, and historians have criticised it for being insufficiently scholarly. See a well done critical review by Eamon Duffy in The New York Review of Books for July 5, 2001. --I looked in an encyclopedia for most of the topics I’ll cover, and I found little or no mention of anti-semitism. Nor was there much about Christianity under “anti-semitism”. In 3 years of Episcopal seminary, anti-semitism wasn’t mentioned. I recommend Constantine’s Sword as an interesting book about a subject which has been too little discussed.

We liberals think of "anti-semitism" as our own word, but it was invented in 1879, by Wilhelm Marr, a German journalist and a paranoid anti-semite who believed the Jews were planning to take over the world. The belief and practice of anti-Judasim, goes back to long before Christianity, of course: The Jewish people always refused to acknowledge local gods, their observance of religious laws set them apart from the rest of society, and they were a useful scapegoat for the troubles of the day. Carroll tries to show that from the first century of the Common Era until the present, the chief source of anti-semitism has been the Christian Church. There were "righteous gentiles" throughout history, defenders of the Jews in high places, but Carroll’s point is that they couldn’t prevail, because on this issue the Church’s core beliefs were wrong.

1979 -- at AUSCHWITZ -- co-opting the Jews

Constantine’s Sword is a chronological account, but Carroll begins with a piece of contemporary history. When Pope John Paul II celebrated mass for a million Poles in a field near Krakow in 1979, a 20 foot wooden cross was set up behind the altar. In his sermon, the Pope called Auschwitz the "Golgotha of the modern world" and asked Catholics to pray for the victims.

Carroll writes: "Once, for Christians to speak among themselves about the murder of the six million as a kind of crucifixion would have seemed a show of compassion, paying the Jews the highest tribute, as if the remnant of Israel had at last become, in this way, the Body of Christ. Yet such spiritualizing can appear to do what should have been impossible, which is to make the evil worse: the elimination of Jewishness from the place where Jews were eliminated."

The Christian attempt to co-opt the meaning of Judaism has always been the major source of Christian anti-semitism. It is the presumed replacement of the Old Testament with the New, and the centrality of the crucifixion in Western Christianity, with the implied guilt of the Jews both in the original act and in the continual rejection of the Christian claim, which Carroll says has supported anti-semitism at all times.

JUDAISM AT TIME OF JESUS

We tend to see Rome as a civilizing influence rather than as the ruthless totalitarian state it was. The symbol of this authoritaranism was the required public assent to Emperor worship. Most of the subjugated peoples yielded in the symbolic essentials. The Jews of Palestine resisted. No emperor was divine, and their land was a gift to them from the one true God. The Jews believed God would eventually vanquish the invader and restore Israel to freedom. This justified both cooperation and resistance, even against overwhelming military superiority.

Judaism was centered in the oneness of God, the Covenant, the Temple, and the Torah, but there was no single, clearly defined Jewish belief at the beginning of the Common Era. The pressures of war and foreign rule forced every Jewish community to develop a religion of personal and communal piety. Judaism at this time was basically sectarian.

The Pharasees formed the centrist majority. They performed Temple sacrifices and studied the Torah They believed that adherence to Mosaic law would bring salvation from the Romans through God’s intervention. Jesus and his followers were presumably Pharisees. Jesus’s emphasis on a personal relationship with God was a central feature of Pharisaic thought. After the destruction of the Temple in C.E. 70 the Pharisees emerged as rivals of the Jesus movement, so little we learn about them from the New Testament is true.

Jesus would have been simply a good Galilean Jew of his time, if, influenced by John the Baptist, he criticized some of the activities at Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem and got in trouble. It’s unlikely that he would have taken offense at money-changing, however, or the selling of doves at the Temple, as these were necessary elements of Temple sacrifice. Jesus’s Temple protests, in as much as they happened at all, would presumably have been in the tradition of the prophets rather than that of later Christian denigration of Temple worship. Jesus’s central message was one of reconciliation. He promoted an overcoming of the divisions within Judaism at the time, and a “New Covenent,” meaning a renewal of the old covenant, and not its replacement.

50 C.E. - 130 C.E. -- THE CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURES

The Christian Scriptures are filled with references to Jesus’s conflicts with the Jews and to biblical prophecies fortelling in detail the events of Jesus’s life and death. But the gospel accounts were all written 40 to 100 years after the events they describe. They are not contemporary history, and they were subject to many influences.

Those who first told the crucifixion stories would have known the references to the prophesies of Isaiah and Jeremiah were not “historical”. They were not offered as proofs, Carroll suggests, but as expressions of belief. To quote Carroll, “Those first, grief-struck followers of Jesus had created a narrative of his Passion and death in part out of reports of what had happened, but more out of the consoling Scriptures of the Jewish religion. Jesus’s second coming was expected immediately. When time passed, and he hadn’t returned, the original context of the stories was forgotten. The narrative came to be understood as “history remembered” rather than as “prophesy historicized”. The supposedly fulfilled prophecies were used against other Jews, as proofs of the Jesus movement’s supremacy.

By 64 C.E., Nero had singled out the Jewish Jesus sect as a scapegoat onto which to deflect the anger of Roman citizens. Nero’s persecution provided Christians with publicity and martyrs, but from this time on, the gospels were increasingly slanted to emphasize that the followers of Jesus intended no harm to Rome.

The Jews would not be absorbed into the Empire like most other peoples. Even the Roman-friendly Jewish historian Josephus wrote, “we face death on behalf of our laws with a courage no other nation can equal.” In the war of 66-73 C.E., Rome destroyed Jerusalem and killed 600,000 Jewish inhabitants of Palestine. In a second war in 132-135 C.E., Judea was stripped of nearly all its Jews.

It was in the time between these two violent attacks by Rome that the Christian gospels were composed. The wars affected how the story of Jesus was remembered and told, especially to the non-Jews of the Mediterranean world.

The Christian gospels consistently deflect blame from the Romans onto the Jews. Carroll says this should not be interpreted as simply an attempt to placate the Roman authorities. The Gospel writers would have believed the stories, and until late in the 1st century, this was all largely a matter of sectarian conflict among Jewish groups. The phrase “the Jews” appears only 16 times in the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke.

But in the Gospel of John, written around 100 C.E., the phrase appears 71 times, in a story of a cosmic conflict in which Jesus denounces the Jews as the offspring of Satan. The Jews had become demonized as a political, historical, and theological enemy, the symbol of all evil.

The Christian conclusion was finally that the old Israel was superseded by the new Israel, implying that the old Israel no longer had any reason, or right, to exist. Therefore the failure of the Jews to adopt Christianity was a much greater threat than pagan rejection. If the truth of Jesus Christ is proven by the Jewish scriptures, why would the Jews not be convinced by their own scriptures! It was the supposed role of the Jewish Scriptures as foretelling, versus the Christian Scripture’s fulfillment that demonstrated their inadequacy. The Jewish scriptures were both the source of the details of the passion narrative and also the negative background against which the Christian truth could shine. Seen in this way, Jewish denial has remained a threat to Christianity through history, and antisemitism was built into the permanent structure of Christianity

Carroll’s main polemical point here is that the hatred of Jews in the Christian gospels did not originate with the Jew Jesus and his immediate followers and is therefore not essential to the Christian faith. It was the invention of the traumatized late first century successors to the early Christians, and particularly the Greek-speaking Jews of the diaspora and non-Jewish citizens of the Empire.

He gives an example of similar mythmaking from his own life. He had always heard that his grandfather had died in 1918 fighting the English at the Dublin post office during the Easter uprising. As an adult, Carroll visited Ireland and found his grandfather’s grave. The grave marker clearly stated that his grandfather died in 1918, but in Europe, fighting alongside the English, against the Germans. He is quite sure that his mother and father and his other American relatives genuinely believed the myth, even though, unlike the myths about about Jesus’s death, it was easily disproved.

An important side note: Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakkai had advocated formal compliance with Roman rule. When Jerusalem was beseiged in C.E. 70, he escaped to Yavneh, on the Mediteranean, where with Roman permission he opened a Talmudical academy to carry on Pharisaic teachings. This provided a new structure for Judaism, the rabbinic tradition, which has sustained it to the present, as what Herman Wouk has called: “a moveable civilization, with an eternal constitution in the Torah, and an enduring portable culture in the Talmud.”

100-200 -- SEPARATION OF JUDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY

The full parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity took place over three centuries, with early conflicts still within the world of Judaism. Both Alexandrian Judaism and Christianity were based on the Greek Septuagint bible. Christian and Jewish tombs, engravings, symbols (the fish) and practices (bread and wine) had much in common.

Jews and Christians continued to coesist, both as rivals and as overlapping communities, on the margins of the Roman Empire. Ultimately both Jews and Christians rejected a large “middle group” who wished to retain both traditions. It finally took Constantine in 312 C.E. to draw a hard line, and the final separation of the followers of Jesus from Judaism was as much a matter of politics as of religion.

312f -- CONSTANTINE at the MILVIAN BRIDGE

Late in the 3d century the population of the Empire was around 50 million. The Jesus movement had developed into an organized Church of 5 million Christians, with Rome as its administrative center. Three million Jews were scattered throughout the Empire. At this time Jews enjoyed a higher level of tolerance than Christians, because they were an ancient religion, and because the Christian belief that only the baptized would be saved violated Roman notions of religious tolerance. When Jews distinguished themselves from the Gentiles, they were not distinguishing between the saved and the damned.

Constantine suceeded his father as Emperor in 306. Maximian also claimed the office, and in 310, Constantine defeated him. In 312, Constantine attacked Maximian’s son Maxentius in Rome. As the story goes, on the night before the battle at the Milvian Bridge over the Tiber, Constantine had a vision of a cross in the sky, above the legend “In Hoc Signo Vinces”. “In This Sign, Conquer”. The battle was thus a contest beween the Christian God and the pagan gods who supported Maxentius. Constantine won easily, and the emperor, his army, and eventually the Empire became Christian.

Whatever the truth was about the vision, Constantine needed a political base in Rome. The Christians were a natural base, not large but unified and with educated leaders. Constantine’s political power became tied to his affiliation with the Christian God.

Christians rallied to the cross as a battle standard. Before Constantine, the cross had lacked religious and symbolic significance. In the Christian catacombs you see the palm branch, the dove, the fish, the monogram of Jesus, but not the cross. Constantine’s vision changed that. When Jesus’s death on the cross replaced his life and resurrection as the source of salvation, the onus shifted further against the Jews, on whom responsibility for the crucifixion had been laid. -- The legend of St. Helen’s finding the “true cross”, by the way, appeared when needed, many decades later.

Christians now became the public majority. Jews were disenfranchised. The first pogrom , an assault on Jews simply because they were Jews, took place in Alexandria in 414. [I looked up pogrom. It’s from the Russian: “like thunder”.] The land of Israel became the Christian “Holy Land,” as part of the long-term Christian claim to be the “new” Israel, superseding the old. From 315 it was a crime for Jews to proselytize; by 415 it was punishable by death.

To unify his Empire, Constantine defined the nature of the Church and of Jesus by fiat. He claimed authority over the whole Church and drew boundaries of dogma. This was a political rather than a religious requirement. He he vigorously persecuted Christian “heretics”. “Heresy” comes from the Greek word for “choice”! The wrong chioce was now treason, a political crime.

361f -- JULIAN, aka THE APOSTATE

During his brief reign beginning in 361, the Emperor Julian, known as “the Apostate”, attempted to undermine Christianity, in part by showing the Christian claim to have replaced Judaism as the true Israel was false. He ordered the Temple rebuilt in Jerusalem, and the large blocks that were added to the Western Wall can still be seen. When Julian died , the project failed, and this was seen as a final proof of the rightness of Christianity. Heresy became a capital crime, paganism was abolished, and unprecedented vengence against the Jews followed.

ca. 400 C.E. -- AUGUSTINE, Bishop of Hippo

Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, and John Chrysoston, bishop of Antioch, preached violent anti-Judaic sermons and inspired violence against Jews. The first ritual murder charge was brought in Antioch. Augustine of Hippo argued against Ambrose and Chrysostom that the Jews were not to be killed, because they had a role in God’s saving plan. They were witnesses to the prophesies concerning Christ. As long as Jews existed, their texts authenticated the ancient character of Christianity. The dispersion of the Jews helped with this. So it was God’s will that they be scattered and allowed to live as exiles everywhere, although at home nowhere. They must serve as witnesses but never thrive, their homelessness and misery both punishment and proof.

As the 18th Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelsohn put it, if it weren’t for Augustine’s “brainwave, we would have been exterminated long ago.” -- But it was a deadly idea as well. ‘Let them survive but not thrive’ underlay the destructive ambivalence that characterized Christian-Jewish relations from then on. For a thousand years, popes and bishops would attempt to protect Jews from Christian mobs who wanted to kill them because of what the popes and bishops had taught about them! This was especially so at every point in history when Jews appeared, economically or culturally, to thrive.

ca. 800 -- CHARLEMAGNE

The consolidation of Europe was the mark of Charlemagne’s reign. Jewish citizenship rights ended completely. Jews were now subject to perpetual serfdom. They became dependent on the benevolence of princes, bishops, and popes for the next 700 years. Jewish communities were useful as financial centers. Jews could lend at interest, which in theory Christians could not, they were highly mobile, and they had a European network. Many Jews were well respected, and were magnanimous in their role. But popular immagination made villains of them, especially in bad times.

1096f - THE CRUSADES

According to a later popular account, a priest known as Peter the Hermit had a dream in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher that Christ wanted him to purge the holy places of Jerusalem. As proof, Peter was led to find the lance which had pierced Jesus’s side. He went to Pope Urban II and asked him to call for the First Crusade.

Urban was pleased to be able unite the warring Christian princes and a divided Church against a common enemy outside of Christendom, in a replay of Constantine’s effort to unify his divided Empire under the Christian banner. The Muslims were now the official enemies. A central feature of Augustine’s thelogy of Jewish witness was that the Jews were never to return to Jerusalem. That the Muslims had allowed some Jews to live in Jerusalem was considered part of the Muslim desecration of the Holy Land. Violence was defined as a religious act. The laity were licensed to kill in the name of the Gospel, and wearing the sign of the cross marked them for certain salvation.

Peter the Hermit preached violence against the Jews, and the first target of the cross-wearing army as they left for the Holy Land, was the Jews of the Rhineland. Guilbert of Nogent (1053-1124) wrote, “We desire to combat the enemies of God in the East, but we have under our eyes the Jews, a race more inimical to God than all the others.” -- [The Rhineland, 1960... ]

Crusader attacks on Jews were Europe’s first large-scale pogroms. They were fueled in part by the anti-Jewish bias of the newly rising burgher class. Jewish life at this time was relatively humane and thriving. Jews had prospered in finance, medicine, international trade, and translation services. The hated Jew of the crusader’s imagination was unrelated to the actual Jews of the time. What the people had against the Jews was not based on actual conditions but was “liturgical knowledge,” learned in the big Churches and cathedrals

The Jewish Mainz chronicler quotes a Christian preacher speaking to the Jews: “You are the children of those who killed your object of veneration, hanging him on a tree; and he himself had said: ‘There will yet come a day when my children will come and avenge my blood.’ We are his children and it is...therefore obligatory for us to avenge him, since you [the Christians] are the ones who rebel and disbelieve him.”

The Millenium was still an influence as well. The Crusaders thought they were ushering in the messianic age by forcing Jews to convert or die.

1100f -- ANSELM and BERNARD -- Crucifixion theology.

In his book Why God became Man, Anselm of Centerbury fully developed the theology of the cross which is preached today in the Catholic Church. After Adam’s fall, men were in a state of sin. In the feudal terms of the time, forgiveness could be brought about only by rendering satisfaction and restoring honor to a Supreme Being who has been insulted by an inferior being, and only a person of equal rank could make amends. So, God became man, in sinless Jesus, expressly in order to die on the cross in atonement for our sins. For Anselm, God was the ultimate feudal lord.

Bernard of Clairvaux repeated Augustine’s plea not to kill the Jews because they were witnesses and villains. “The Jews are for us the living words of scripture, for they remind us always of what our Lord suffered. They are dispersed all over the world so that by expiating their crime they may be everywhere the living witnesses of our redemption.” Bernard furthered Alselm’s idea of restoring God’s honor by means of the crucifixion.

1144f -- BLOOD LIBEL -- Folk mythology against the Jews.

In 1144 Jews were accused of the “blood libel” in England, the ritual murder of a Christian in a mock eucharist. The Church hierarchy consistently, but ineffectively, rejected the blood libel. -- We might compare the church’s current official denunciations of violence against gays and abortionists.

1200f -- THOMAS ACQUINAS -- Jews deliberately defiant

By, supposedly, demonstrating the rational truth of the Christian religion, Acquinas overturned Augustine’s idea of the Jew’s “invincible ignorance”, that God had made the Jews blind to the truth. Acquinas concluded that the Jews knew Jesus was the Messiah and killed him out of deliberate defiance.

Dominicans and Franciscans were dispatched to preach to the Jews, and the Jews were forced to listen. The Popes consistently opposed the forced baptism of Jews as a result of these efforts, but they upheld such baptisms after the fact, the conversion of the Jews being a prelude to the return of the Messiah.

1215 -- 4th LATERAN COUNCIL

The 4th Lateran Council put in place the main elements of Roman Catholic culture as we know it, and this council that first passed resolutions designed to isolate and denigrate Jews. Because Jews were the “servants of sin”, they should be the servants of Christian princes. A special form of dress was prescribed. They were banned from public office and heavily taxed.

1231f -- THE INQUISITION -- ethnic anti-semitism.

Pope Gregory IX established the first papal Inquisition in 1231 to investigate and stamp out heresy. He ordered an investigation into the Talmud, as the “chief cause that holds the Jews obstinate in their perfidy.” In 1242, 12,000 volumes of the Talmud were burned in the Place de l’Hotel de Ville in Paris, where some of us have probably enjoyed a cup of coffee. -- This is also the place where on July 16, 1942 13,000 Jews were gathered to be shipped to extermination camps.

Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived in relative harmony in Mulsim spain, during what was called the “convivencia.” This was a great period in the history of the Jews, and in the history of thought in general.

By 1145 however, fundamentalist muslims had invaded Spain, and the Christian reconquest had began. After the reconquest, Jews were forced to attend conversionist sermons. The Jews were considered to be still murdering Christ by refusing to convert. They were accused of stealing the Eucharistic host and blaspheming it, and accused again of the blood libel and of poisoning wells which caused the plague.

As a result of preacher-inspired violence in Spain in the 1390’s (and perhaps in conjunction with the beginnings of Renaissance rationalism) up to 200,000 Spanish Jews converted to Christianity. The “conversos” became even more financially and politically successful than they had been as Jews. This caused envy and anger, which grew into racial hatred. By 1449 it was suggested that the pure blood of the Castilian Old Christians was being defiled by that of the Jews. Toledo passed an ordinance decreeing that no Christian of Jewish descent could hold a public office. Jews would be legally defined in Spain not by religion but by blood. This was the beginning of modern anti-semitism, the shift from religious to racial (really ethinc) anti-semitism, of Jews as successful and assimilated, but accused of being parasitical on the host society.

1517f -- THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION

Martin Luther vowed to become a monk, if God would save him from a violent thunderstorm. -- [I once worked for a clergyman who made a similar vow on a life raft in the South Pacific, or so he said.] -- Apparently the fear of death drove Luther all his life. His trust in Jesus Christ as providing a victory over death was threatened by the Jews, who by their stubborn existence were seen as denying Christ. In his last breath, Luther blamed his own approaching death on the Jews.

Luther posted his 95 theses on the door of a Wittenberg church in 1517. In 1523 he published the treatise “That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew”, which was relatively friendly towards the Jews. As fellow enemies of Rome, he hoped they would be converted to Reformed Christianity and wrote and preached to this end.

The Jews didn’t respond, and in 1543, after 20 years of Roman and Jewish rejection, an embittered Luther published “On the Jews and Their Lies”. Many Catholics blamed the Jews for the Reformation, and because of his emphasis on the Old Testament Rome accused Luther of being a Judaizer. Luther responded that, since Christ, Jews have no more future as Jews. Luther said, “next to the devil you have no enemy more cruel, nore venimous and virulent, that a true jew.” He wanted Germany to be judenrein. “They are for us a heavy burden, the calamity of our being; they are a pest in our midst.”

The Reformation did let loose some forces ultimately favorable to Jews. The first glimmerings of individual rights appeared, and Calvinism’s embrace of economic enterprise as a work of religion laid the basis of modern capitalism, in which Jewish collaboration was often welcomed.

1555 -- THE GHETTO -- antechamber to Auschwitz

The reality of Jewish ghettoization had been around for a long time, but the Roman ghetto was made official by a papal bull of Pope Paul IV, in 1555. Special dress for Jews was ordered as well.

Thanks to Aquinas, and against the old Augustinian idea of bearing witness, Jews were to be allowed to survive only to glorify God and the truth of his Church by thier conversion. Life in the ghetto was intended from then on to put pressure on Jews to convert.

Paul IV’s counterreformation plans included the immediate conversion of all Jews, which would complete salvation history. Jewish refusal caused more bitterness. Popes came and went, but none dismanteled the Roman ghetto. Only the French Revolution and Napoleon did that at the end of the 18th century, and then only temporarily.

Every time the 19th century popes retook control of Rome, they literally rebuilt the walls of the ghetto. One proof of the validity of Christianity was still presumed to be the deserved fate of the Jews. Jewish emancipation, without conversion, would be a violation of the order with which God, in Christ, had receemed the world. [447] Jews in the Roman ghetto were in desperate condition when they were finally freed in 1870 by Garibaldi. For 300 years, the keeper of the keys of the Jew’s first squalid concentratrion camp was the pope. A contemporary Catholic historian has called the Roman ghetto, the “antechamber to Auschwitz”.

1789f -- THE FRENCH REVOLUTION -- Jews as citizens

In France in 1791 Jews became full citizens of a country for the first time anywhere since 70 C.E. But, the French Revolution assumed that, in return, Jews would renounce Jewish “nationhood”. As one writer put it: “To the Jew as an individual, everything, to the Jew as a nation, nothing.” They were to be simply fellow citizens, much as the Inquisiton had wanted Jews to become fellow Christians. Some enlightenment Jews like Moses Mendelsohn saw no conflict between religion and civic equality. Others, like Disraeli, Henrich Heine, Felix Meldelsohn, and Heinrich Marx, Karl Marx’s father, became nominal converts to Christianity.

Jews benefitted from the Revolution and from Napoleon’s victories, and the Church suffered. Consequently, after Waterloo and again after the failed Revolution of 1848, the conservative reaction was disastrous for Jews. The Jews were blamed for the Revolution, and Pope Pius VII rebuilt the ghetto.

What happened in 16th Century Spain might have been considered a rehersal for 19th and 20th century Europe. The pattern was: The Jewish community is forced or permitted to assimilate. It is then seen as an invasion of Christian society, and barriers are thrown up again, this time on the basis of ethnicity.

1870f -- KARL MARX -- Jews as capitalists and revolutionaries

Medieval Europe, by denying Jews permission to join guilds or own land, had forced them into moneylending and then hated them for it. Karl Marx, from a Jewish family although baptized a Lutheran, claimed that the basis of Judaism was self-interest. The worldly cult of the Jews was hucksterism and their worldly god, money. Marx later turned his conception of the Jew into that of the hated capitalist. The few Jews like the Rothschilds who became successful financiers, represented all Jews for the anti-semites.

Ironically, Jews were blamed also for opposition to modern capitalism. Although he had rejected his heritage, Marx was identified by his enemies, particularly after his defense of the Paris Commune, as “the Jew Marx”. And Jews such as Trotsky, who were involved in the early days of Russian Bolshevism, took disproportunate blame as well.

1869 -- VATICAN I

At Vatican Council I (1869-1870), Papal infallibility was proclaimed, with considerable desension within the Church hierarchy, largely as a political counter to the threat from Italian nationalism. At the same time, socialism, Communism, rationalism, pantheism, subjectivism, modernism, and “Americanism” (a democratizing movement within the Church) were all condemed. The Church’s true mortal enemies were named as Freemasons, Protestants, and Jews.

1894f -- THE DREYFUS AFFAIR -- ethnic/Christian anti-semitism

We know the story of Captain Alfred Dreyfus’s arrest and conviction and the wave of anti-semitism it inspired in France. Ethnic anti-semitism had been present in France for some time, but now thousands of French priests attended antisemitic congresses and gave Jew-baiting speeches and sermons. From Catholic pulpits, Jews were again execrated as revolutionaries, financiers, traitors, killers of Christ, and ritual murderers of Christian children.

The Vatican did little to help. In 1898 the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano said, “Jewry can no longer be excused or rehabilitated. The Jew posseses the largest share of all wealth...The credit of States is in the hands of a few Jews. One finds Jews in the ministries, the civil service, the armies, the universities, and in control of the press...If there is one nation that more than any other has the right to turn to antisemitism, it is France.”

1933f -- THE HOLOCAUST and AFTER

Adolf Hitler learned his anti-semitism in late 19th century Catholic Austria. -- Some friends of ours went several times to the Lachenhaus music festival, organized by the violinist Gidon Kramer in a small town south of Vienna. Kramer is Jewish; the man who organize the festival was a Catholic monk. Our friends said the music was glorious, the little town was lovely, the people were charming and devout, and anti-semitism was as virulent as ever.

The questions remain: Why did the Vactican conclude the first bi-lateral treaty with the Nazi’s in 1933, and give them a much needed boost of legitimacy? Why didn’t Pope Pius XII condemn Nazisim or excommunicate the Catholic Hitler and his fellow party leaders? Why was the Pope silent when late in the war the Roman Jews were rounded up a few hundred yards from the Vatican and sent off to the death camps?

Carroll writes: “To imagine that the Catholic Church was craven in the face of the challenge posed by Adolf Hitler, is to ignore the brave history of Church resistance. Nor does the Church’s anxiety about Bolshevism adequately account for its more benign stance toward Naziism. Not even the other usual explanation, that the Church was too concerned with its own power and prerogatives to risk defending the Jews, is enough to account for what happened. No: Nazism, by tapping into a deep, ever-fresh reservoir of Christian hatred of Jews, was able to make an accomplice of the Catholic Church in history’s worst crime.”

It wasn’t just the Catholics of course. Kristallnacht, the night when Nazi mobs smashed thousands of Jewish shop windows, took place on November 10th, 1938, Luther’s birthday. Afterwards, the Lutheran Bishop of Thuringia exulted: “on the birthday of the greatest anti-Semite of his time, the warner of his people against the Jews, the synogogues are burning in Germany.

“We Remember: A relection on the Shoah,” a Vatican publication of 1998, speaks of modern racial anti-semitism as if it were unrelated to anything that went before and had been invented wholly new at the end of the 19th century. Quote: “The Shoah was the work of a thoroughly modern neo-pagan regime. Its antisemitism had its roots outside of Christianity.” -- But even in mid- 20th century, Catholics up for appointment to high Church offices had to prove they had no Jewish ancestry. In “We remember,” the Vatican distinguishes between the “sinful children” of the Church and the sinless “Church as such” in condeming Christian anti-semitism.

“There is a positive side to contemporary Catholic ambivalence,” Carroll writes. “Vatican II, with its rejection of the deicide charge and its affirmation of God’s ongoing covenant with the Jewish people; the flourishing of Jewish-Catholic dialogue; and the effort of Pope John Paul to confront the legacy of Catholic anti-semitism. But there remain beliefs that may not be changed: the legacy of Jew hatred in foundational Christian texts, the implicitly anti-Jewish Christian idea of revelation as prophecy fulfillment, and the dominant Christian theology of Jesus as the Son of God who supercedes all other ways to God. Catholic ambivalence is nowhere more evident than in the way in which the Church now officially rejects supersessionism (that the New Testament supercedes the Old) while firmly defending its scriptural and theological underpinnings.

I came across a passage in Pasternak’s Doctor Jivago which I think sums up the attitude of many well-meaning, but incomprehending, present day Christians. Lara, one of the major characters, says, "It's so strange that these people [the Jews] who once liberated mankind from the yoke of idolatry, and so many of whom now devote themselves to its liberation from injustice, should be incapable of freeing themselves from an identity that has lost all meaning, that they should not rise above themselves and dissolve among all the rest, whose religion they have founded and who would be so close to them if they knew them better."

A New York Times article on May 25, 2001 quotes the director of a protestant Christian “faith-based” drug-treatment program as saying in testimony before a House subcommittee that, while some of their Jewish clients had returned to the Jewish faith, others had become, quote, “completed Jews”.

Pope John Paul’s prayer at the Western Wall was a welcome act of affirmation of the Temple and of God’s covenant with the Jewish people. But at an Italian youth festival held in 1997, Bob Dylan was invited to sing his well known question, “how many roads must a man walk down...”. And the Pope had the answer: “There is only one road, and it is Christ”. -- Jews, members of other religions, and many liberal Christians would have to disagree.

THE END