1000 years of Christianity
A MILLENNIUM OF CHRISTIANITY 1000-2000
The year 1000 was a turning point for relations between Christians and Jews. For much of the first millennium of the Common Era the Jewish people had lived in Europe in relatively peaceful and prosperous conditions. However, Jews who emigrated into northern Europe during the closing stages of the 10th century and throughout the 11th century, met with considerable popular animosity. This negative feeling was rooted partly in their immigrant and therefore minority status, and partly in traditionally negative Christian thinking vis-a-vis Jews.
During the Crusades, this thinking resulted in Jewish people in Europe becoming linked in the public mind with the other enemies of Christ, the Muslims. Hence the ease with which Crusaders looted Jewish villages and killed Jewish people along the way to the Holy Land. The Crusaders would sometimes attend a Mass in the morning, and spend the afternoon killing Jews in the name of Christ. Eventually St Bernard of Clairvaux intervened, reminding the Crusaders that the Jews ought not be persecuted too much. If they were treated too harshly, it would be difficult to convert them. "They are living signs to us," he said, "representing the Lord's passion. For this reason they are dispersed to all regions, that they may pay the penalty of so great a crime, that they may be witnesses of our redemption."
During the middle decades of the 12th century, new negative stereotypes emerged, which intensified majority perceptions of this Jewish minority as different and threatening. This is the period during which Christian stereotypes projected Jews as powerful, as implacably hostile to Western civilization, as committed to and capable of bringing profound harm to the majority society in which they lived. Stereotypes of this kind were partly due to the failure of the Church to convert the vast majority of European Jews to Christianity. Every conciliatory effort had been made to persuade the Jews to convert, but with very little success. In a religiously oriented society, the refusal of Jesus' own people to embrace Christianity cast an intolerable shadow of doubt over the Church's claim for Jesus as universal Saviour.
Yet neither could they be exterminated. The Church decreed that in order to fulfil their destiny as 'living signs' pointing toward the day of Christendom's universal victory the Jews must survive as inferiors in Christian society. A further contributing factor to the Church's dilemma involved the feudal system of Western Europe. In order to prevent Jewish people from sowing seeds of doubt among Christian believers, they were excluded from the feudal system, and therefore from contact with Christians. Ironically, this resulted in the Jews becoming, in effect, free agents, developing their state-given role as merchants and money-lenders, while Christians were enslaved within the feudal system. Hence the rising fear and hatred of the economically-powerful and influential Jew.
Shakespeare's Shylock epitomizes the stereotype of the Jewish moneylender consumed by hatred for Christianity and Christians. His demand for his pound of flesh represents just the kind of notion of malevolence and cruelty that twelfth century northern European Christians attributed to their Jewish neighbours. This fear of the stereotypic Jew gained in momentum, until Jewish living quarters began to be confined to certain parts of towns and cities, and eventually to walled ghettos, with gates locked at sunset each day.
In Spain the Jews had lived peacefully under the Moslem Moors since the 8th century, but after the Christian reconquest of Spain in the 14th and 15th centuries, thousands of Spanish Jews were killed, either in riots, or by the Vatican Inquisitors. The Inquisition charged many Jews with being secretly still Jews after they had been baptized. By the end of the 15th century all of Spain's Jews were expelled and driven to Eastern Europe. There they also were forced to live in ghettos, so they would not 'contaminate' Christian society. Efforts to baptize them forcibly had come to an end.
In the 16th century, it was Martin Luther who opened the gates of the ghetto system in Germany. His return to a biblically-based system of Christianity led him to believe that whereas the Jews had resisted conversion to the Catholic Church, they would be only too willing to embrace his reformed Protestant Christianity. When the Jews remained stubbornly intransigent, he ordered them released from the ghettos into Christian society, where he felt they would be persuaded to convert by their contact with Protestant Christians. When this move also failed, Luther's fury drove him to remove from the Jews the protection of the law, and to authorize the wholesale destruction of Jewish property. The Jews were then forced to work to earn their food as farm labourers and menial workers, under virtual slave labour conditions. This development was eventually adopted by a 20th century German leader looking for his own 'solution' to the 'problem' of the Jews.
With the advent of the Enlightenment in Western Europe, the Jewish people were dealt what turned out to be a back-handed advantage. The French working class revolution resulted in Jews for the first time being made equal before the law with all other citizens of France. As emancipated Jews enjoyed increasing prosperity and political success in European society, this period also saw an increase in voluntary Jewish conversions to Christianity for economic and social advantage. The Church in Europe colluded with Jewish financiers, merchants and public servants who wished to gain political or financial advantage through baptism, whether or not the convert held any genuine personal conviction concerning Christianity. The Church's policy was that each convert was one less Jewish challenge to the dominance of the majority faith. Underlying its willingness to accept conversions under these conditions, was the Church's continuing desire to bring about the disappearance of Judaism as a living faith. In fact it was the apparent acceptance of Jews in European society and in the Church which eventually placed them in the greatest of danger.
When political emancipation meant it was no longer possible to contain Jews in a socially inferior position for theological purposes, and when it became obvious that most Jewish conversions to Christianity were for political or economic advantage, it was necessary to find a new means of ridding Western European society of the Jewish 'problem'. The answer was a revival of the 12th century stereotypes of Jews as powerful, and dangerous, and politically and financially untrustworthy. The 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion' was written in the late 19th century, purporting to outline an international Jewish plot to control the finances of the entire Western world. This forgery was distributed throughout Europe, and it inflamed anti-Jewish hatred built on the foundation of Christian antisemitism which had been in existence since the beginnings of Church history. Christian hatred of the Jews for refusing to acknowledge Christ as Messiah, and for what Christians traditionally saw as Jewish culpability for the death of Christ, was always the basic foundation for antisemitism, of any variety.
The final 'nail' in the Jewish coffin was racial antisemitism, enabled by the rise of pseudo-sciences such as craniometry, by which skulls of various races were measured, and by this means assessment made of their owners' intelligence. Through deliberately falsified results of these so-called scientific experiments, it was argued that the Jews were in fact a sub-species of human being, not equal with other races, and therefore not deserving of the same consideration.
Christians added these new racial stereotypes to their images of the Jews as scheming, traitorous Christ killers. The Jews were no longer regarded as capable of 'cleansing' through the baptismal font. They were now recognized to be less than fully human, and as such were beyond redemption. Their continuing existence only served to pollute the 'pure' white races of the world. So the final stage was set for the most tragic event in human history. Most historians, both Christian and non-Christian acknowledge that without the basis of Christian theological antisemitism, the streams of political and racial antisemitism would not have been sufficient to give rise to the most murderous hatred in the history of humanity.
In an audience with two Catholic churchmen soon after his seizure of power in 1933, Adolf Hitler explained his anti-Jewish policy. The Church, he said, had always regarded the Jews as parasites, had discriminated against them, and restricted them to ghettos on the fringes of Christian society. In removing Jewish influences from the life of the German nation, he merely intended to accomplish what the Church had for so long attempted. As his visitors well knew, the racial doctrine that formed the core of Nazi ideology was profoundly anti-Christian; but it was true, as Hitler implied, that centuries of Christian contempt for the Jews, theologically grounded in the ancient charge of deicide, had prepared the soil in which such a doctrine could take root.
It was only following the tragic climax of that doctrine of hatred, at the very end of the second millennium of Christian history, that a positive turnaround began in relations between Christians and Jews.
Lorraine Parkinson,
5th October, 2000