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This is a review of "Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History. " By James Carroll. Interesting reading, especially in light of the never-ending deluge from that guy who allegedly wasn't going to post anymore. It covers a broad swath of history, right up to present times. Carroll is a Catholic priest, showing that at least some Christians don't feel obliged to whitewash the whole thing, though the current Pope seems to be firmly enough in the whitewash camp. The review is by Andrew Sullivan.
Carroll begins by restating, along the lines of the revisionist scholarship of the Jesus Seminar, the
essential Jewishness of Jesus. Jesus was not, so far as we know, a man alien to the culture or
politics of his time. He lived and died in a region controlled by an imperial power, and asserted in
that context an intense form of Jewish spirituality, animated by a kind of love that was clearly
shocking and inspiring to many of his contemporaries. It was only in the later context of the struggles
between Jesus-following Jews and other variants of Judaism that the Gospel story came to be told
as a conflict not between a Jewish rebel and a brutal Roman Empire but between the founder of a
new religion and ''the Jews,'' a monolithic term that began the process of demonizing the other.
In Carroll's reading, in other words, Jesus came not to supplant but to renew. The love he
proclaimed was the unconditional love that God also displayed throughout the Hebrew Scriptures --
a covenant that could never be broken, since it was unconditional. There is no dichotomy between
the God of Law of the Old Testament and the God of Love of the New. The message is seamless,
made more whole by the witness of Jesus. The notion that Christian anti-Semitism began with Jesus
is therefore meaningless. He would not have even understood such a term. It was Jesus' followers
who reshaped Christianity by defining it less by what it was than by what it was not. Carroll
somewhat unconvincingly exonerates Paul on these grounds, placing his occasional extremism with
regard to the supersession of Judaism in the context of his belief that the end-time was imminent.
And Carroll persuasively shows how the concept of opposing religions is a function primarily of
hindsight.
Still, there are some theological matters that Carroll too easily elides. Part of the reason for the
parting of the ways between Christianity and Judaism in the first centuries of the Christian Era was
their closeness. Christianity surely rests on the Hebrew Bible, as indeed the Gospels, more than any
other documents, prove. But precisely because of this, the early Jewish indifference toward the
notion of Jesus as the Son of God was so threatening. In a world where the fledgling sect of
Christianity was attempting to find its way among competing paganisms and cults, the remaining
recalcitrance of the very people it was designed to embody was bound to create conflict. Call it the
narcissism of small differences. Human history shows that the fiercest conflicts -- from the Balkans
to Ireland -- are fomented by estranged members of the same tangled family.
Carroll's narrative picks up steam with the arrival of Constantine and the fusion of Christianity with
imperial power. He neatly rebuts the notion of Constantine's conversion as some sort of divine
intervention, seeing it more as a canny political move, shoring up support in Rome. And from
Constantine's sword, designed in the shape of a cross, the fusion of a religion opposed to power
with power itself is the core of the corruption of Christianity. When Christians used this secular
power to persecute, banish, murder Jews, they were betraying not just the essence of the faith of
Jesus, they were embodying the very power that killed Christ -- not the evil Jews, but the power of
the state. Mercifully, the injunction to save Jews, to convert them, to see them as pre-eminently
worthy of salvation, was a strong check on the demonization of Jews. But under the Inquisition, the
church itself innovated another definition of Jewishness -- not of faith but of blood -- pioneering
expulsions and then a demarcated Jewish ghetto in a quarter of Rome, to house refugees from
elsewhere. The picture of the displaced Jews' arrival in the capital city is as fresh as the images from
Srebrenica. One contemporary wrote: ''You would have thought that they wore masks. They were
bony, pallid, their eyes sunk in the sockets; and had they not made slight movements, it would have
been imagined that they were dead.'' Even then, Christian friars offered bread only on condition of
conversion. After creating the ghetto, the church in the mid-16th century laid down what Jews could
do and earn and how they could live. By the 17th century, the Jesuits had instituted the forerunner of
the Nuremberg Laws, barring anyone from becoming a Jesuit ''who is descended of Hebrew or
Saracen stock'' -- a baldly racist provision not formally ended until 1946.
Is there a continuous link between this Jew hatred and the final act of vengeance in the Holocaust?
Carroll is wise not to say yes. The uniqueness of Nazi evil, the fact that eliminationist anti-Semitism,
to use Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's phrase, found full fruition only in one state at one point in history,
places earlier Catholic anti-Semitism in some perspective. Indeed, compared with Luther's vicious
rhetoric about the ''pest in the midst of our lands,'' the Jesuits were relatively restrained. But, as
Carroll points out, ''the fact is that the Inquisition moved Christian suspicion of Jews to a whole new
level of irrationality.'' It was a touchstone for the church at moments of insecurity -- in the 19th and
early 20th centuries -- and, although the persecution never regained the insane passion of
Torquemada, it certainly never missed an opportunity to acquiesce in popular anti-Semitism.
CARROLL'S account of Pope Pius XII is particularly damning. His early pact with Hitler was a
foundation stone of the Shoah. The church was capable of resisting state power in Germany. It had
doggedly survived and prospered under Bismarck's Kulturkampf. But Pius XII's elevation of
Catholic self-interest over Catholic conscience was the lowest point in modern Catholic history.
That he barely bothered to protest the deportation of Jews from the Roman ghetto within sight of the
Vatican is eloquent enough. Yes, there were many instances of Catholic heroism. But no honest
Catholic can look objectively at what Pius XII did and did not do without simple shame. The notion
that he could be canonized is beyond this particular Catholic's comprehension. |
