llogically, Christians justified persecutions of Jews by calling them
"Christ-killers," though their own theology said God had decreed Christ's death;
therefore the Jews only obeyed the will of God. Gospel passages interpolated
after the church's rise to power in Rome absolved Pilate of guilt because he
represented the Holy City. The Jews were condemned by the ancient liturgical
phrase copied into the Gospel, which used to invoke the fertilizing power of a
god's blood but was later interpreted as an acceptance of blood guilt: "His
blood be on us, and on our children" (Matthew 27:23-25).
This pious forgery became the foundation for centuries of persecutions, culminating even in
the present century with the extermination of millions of Jews under the Nazi
regime, the latest in a two-thousand-year history of pogroms (an organized
massacre, esp. of Jews.)
Up to the middle of the 14th century the free city of Cologne remained a haven for Jewish
merchants, weavers' guilds, and other commercial enterprises, resisting
domination by the church. Then Catholic forces moved in; Jewish merchants were
burned alive in their houses with their wives and children; those who escaped
the immolation were banished. Their property remained in Christian hands, with
50 percent going to the victorious archbishop.1
The great plagues of the 14th century were usually attributed to the Jews, said to cause
the pestilence by poisoning wells and streams with a combination of holy wafers
stolen from the churches and the menstrual blood of Jewish women. Each wave of
plague brought a wave of massacre of Jewish communities. In 1382, rioters looted
and vandalized the Jewish quarter in Paris.2 In 1391, the
Archdeacon of Seville instigated a "Holy War against the Jews." Mobs stormed the
ghetto, tore down synagogues, and murdered an estimated 41,000
persons.3 Twelve thousand Jews perished in Bavaria at the time
of the Black Death; two thousand were burned at Strasbourg for causing the
plague of 1348; at Chinon an immense trench was dug and filled with blazing wood
to burn 160 Jews in a single day.4
The church encouraged persecution of Jews to divert attention from the developing idea that
these terrible plagues, which killed about half of Europe's population before
the end of the century, were caused by a malicious God. The pope himself
referred in a bull to "the pestilence with which God is afflicting the Christian
people." The horrors of the plague revived Gnostic opinions of the evil Jehovah.
One professor wrote: "The hostility of God is stronger than the hostility of
man."5
The real cause of the plagues was the Christian commerce with the Holy Land. Crusaders'
ships carried millions of Oriental black rats, with their fleas, the true
carriers of the plague bacillus.6 Being ignorant of this,
Christian authorities made no effort to control the rats but tried to
exterminate Jews instead. Jew-killing probably served to vent some of the
popular resentment of clergymen, who behaved badly during the plagues. Most
deserted their flocks in haste to leave plague-stricken areas. Churchmen
generally were accused of "panic fear and neglect."7
Persecutions were supported by many made-to-order myths. In Spain, the
popular myth of the ritual murder was combined with the myth of plague-magic to
give Tomás de Torquemada (1420-98, Spanish monk and grand inquisitor, known for
his ruthless administration of the Inquisition) his excuse to expel the Jews
from the country in 1490 and take their property for the enrichment of the
church. Some Jews were arrested and tortured until they confessed having stolen
a consecrated host and kidnapped a four-year-old boy called Santo Nino (Holy
Child) from the doorway of a church. They gave the child five thousand lashes,
crowned him with thorns, and extracted his heart to make anti-Christian magic.
All Jewry was involved in this plot to destroy Christendom by black magic, the
confessions said. Jews planned to kidnap Christian children and use their hearts
or blood or ashes to make charms which, thrown into rivers and wells, would make
all Christians sick.
It was said Santo Nino bore his sufferings with great serenity, and even directed the
Jews in the removal of his heart. The child's blind mother miraculously
recovered her sight at the moment of his death (an interpolated allegory of
Judaism receiving enlightenment by the death of Christ, perhaps). The Holy Child
went directly to heaven, which accounted for the authorities' inability to find
his remains where the Jews said they were buried.8
This mythic porridge started the expulsion of thousands of Jews from Spain and
Christian seizure of their assets. In 1260 the Jewish population of Toledo had
built "the largest and most beautiful synagogue in Spain." In the 15th century
the Jews of Toledo were massacred and the synagogue appropriated by the church.
It now bears the name of the Church of Santa Maria la Blanca.9
According to contemporary theologians, persecution and seizure of property was a
legitimate activity of Catholic powers. In their view, "no illegitimate violence
was being done to the Jews, infidels, and heretics put to the sword at the
behest of the Church: these people had no rights to be violated."10
The legend of Santo Nino was not even an original invention of the Spanish Inquisition. The
same legend had been used two centuries earlier to stimulate a persecution of
Jews in the Rhineland. The German child-martyr's name was Werner. He was
kidnapped, tortured, and sacrificed to the Jewish God. His mutilated body was
found in a river, and a church was built over his tomb at
Bacharach.11 In 1322, eighteen Swabian Jews were slain at
Ehingen for stealing a consecrated host from a church. Later it was discovered
that the Jews were innocent, and the real culprit was a Christian woman who was
subsequently burned for witchcraft.12
Jews and women were almost equally serviceable as scapegoats for the evils of medieval
life; but women were more detested than Jews, according to a decree of Orvieto
in 1350. This law said if a man and woman became involved in a love affair, one
of them Christian and the other Jewish, the woman in the case, of whichever
faith, must be beheaded or burned alive.13
Often, anti-Semitism went to such lengths that Christian authorities even denied the
origin of their own religion from a Jewish matrix. Opposing a papal aspirant of
Jewish ancestry, St. Bernard wrote: "It would be an insult to Christ if the
offspring of a Jew occupied the throne of Peter."14 Bernard
seems to have wholly forgotten his own church's teaching that Peter himself was
a Jew, as were all the other apostles and Jesus as well. The Jews didn't press
the point, since the former Jewishness of Christ or Peter made no difference in
the political situation.
Anti-Semitism reached an apogee under the rule of Adolf Hitler in the
20th. Hitler made the Jews wear yellow badges, like medieval heretics. A German
Christian organization announced in 1937, "Hitler's word is God's law."15 Hitler said:
-
"My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter, it points
me to the man who once, in loneliness, surrounded by only a few followers,
recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against
them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In
boundless love, as a Christian arid as a man, I read through the passage which
tells us how the Lord rose at last in His might and seized the scourge to
drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was the
fight for the world against the Jewish
poison.16
Evidently Hitler was not much of a reader. He never got to the part that designated Jesus the Bridegroom of Zion; nor did he seem to know who owned the Temple.
References and Notes:
- Agrippa, Henry Cornelius. The Philosophy of Natural Magic. Seacaucus, N.J.: University Books, 1974. Pg. 19.
- Tuchman, Barbara. A Distant Mirror. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978. Pg. 380.
- Coulton, G.G.Inquisition and Liberty. Boston: Beacon Press, 1959. Pg. 288.
- White, Andrw D. A History of the Warfare of Science and Theology in Christendom (2 Vols.). New York: George Braziller, 1955. Vol. 2, Pg. 73.
- Tuchman, Barbara. A Distant Mirror. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978. Pgs. 104, 109.
- de Camp, L. Sprague & Catharine C. Spirits, Stars, and Spells. New York: Canaveral Press, 1966. Pg. 47.
- Coulton, G.G. Inquisition and Liberty. Boston: Beacon Press, 1959. Pg. 202.
- Plaidy, Jean. The Spanish Inquisition. New York: Citadel Press, 1967. Pg. 171 et seqq.
- Pepper, Elizabeth and Wilcock, John. Magical and Mystical Sites. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Pg. 120.
- Russell, J.B. Witchcraft in the Middle Ages. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1972. Pg. 148.
- Guerber, H.A. Legend of the Rhine. New York: A.S. Barnes & Co. 1895. Pgs. 206-7.
- Russell, J.B. Witchcraft in the Middle Ages. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1972. Pg. 167.
- Tuchman, Barbara. A Distant Mirror. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978. Pgs. 118.
- Encyclopedia Britannica., Third Edition, 1970. "Bernard."
- Langer, Walter C. The Mind of Hitler. New York: Basic Books, Inc, 1972, Pg. 63.
- Langer, Walter C. The Mind of Hitler. New York: Basic Books, Inc, 1972, Pg. 39.