Tuesday, April 19, 2005
APRIL 2005 "CULTURE WARS"
My first issue of the magazine arrived the other day. The publisher, E. Michael Jones, has an interesting article in this issue titled "St. Vincent Ferrer and the Conversion of the Jews." I'll attempt to give an overview of the article by quoting selected passages. The time period is 14th century Spain.
Jews, by the fact that they were no Christian, could not be touched by the law. Jews were, as a result, allowed to engage in many kinds of subversive activity with impunity, a fact that was bound to cause resentment in a strictly ordered society. "The laws against blasphemy, for example, could not be enforced against them. They could encourage heresy, and in defense could claim the freedom of worship granted to the Jews."
Because Jews were above (or at least beyond) the law in many instances, Christians were often tempted to apostatize in order to obtain their "freedom." Heretics like the Cathars of Leon, according to Lucas of Tuy, writing about 1230, would circumcise themselves so that "under the guise of Jews," they could "propound heretical dogmas and dispute with Christians; what they dared not utter as heretics they could freely disseminate as Jews." Because they had imbibed the best of Arab culture, becoming learned in science and medicine, they traveled in court circles and gave to them as air of sophisticated impiety, which again caused resentment among the more piouis but less wealthy and powerful.
Jews, as a result, became synonymous with Enlightenment decadence. ...
Because of the prevalence of Jews in Spain and the high level of influence and sophistication that they had achieved under Muslim rule, Spain's tolerance of the Jews and their heretical ideas exceeded that of any other nation in Europe. Because of the wealth they acquired, the Jews were able to engage in ostentatious display, which only increased the odium against them. The Jews became visible in a way that only pointed out by contrast the poverty of the Christians...
But the biggest problem by far was Jewish involvement in usury. As in the rest of Europe, Christians in Spain were forbidden to take interest on loans, thus granting a monopoly to the Jews for a practice which, over a relatively short period of time, could concentrate all available capital in their hands. As in France at the beginning of the 12th century, Jews were hated most because they were money-lenders, and money lenders were hated because in a pre-capitalist economy usurious compound interest could ruin anyone caught in its snares in a relatively short period of time. ...
On June 9, 1391, the storm finally broke. There was an uprising in the city of Seville; the Juderia was sacked, and 4000 Jews were killed. Those who were not killed saved their lives by submitting to baptism. Two of the town's synagogues were converted into churches for the Christians, old and new, who settled in the quarter that before housed the town's Jews. The rioting then spread north, first to Cordova, then to Toledo and Burgos until all of Castile was swept into the vortex of anti-Semitic violence. The situation was complicated by the fact that Castile, nominally under the rule of the boy king Henry the Invalid, was in a state of interregnum. No one had the power to stop the rioting when it took place, and no one had the power to punish the rioters when it was over. All in all 50,000 people died. ...
Forced conversion was, in other words, more often than not an instrument of the state rather than the church. ...once the Jew submitted to baptism he could walk unharmed through the very mob which only minutes before was determined to kill him. ...
Conversion, in other words, stopped insurrection, which made it dear to the ruler's heart. Royal involvement in forced conversion was a tradition every bit as long standing in Spain as suspicion of the Jew as a subversive. ...
The Church was in many ways caught in the middle here. The popes did not condone forced baptism, but on the other hand, they had to affirm that, sacramentally, baptism left an indelible mark. The princes were more often than not the first to advocate forced baptism as a way of ending civil disorder, but they were also the first to allow the Jews to return to their former way of life once the disorder passed. In both instances, expediency trumped dogmatic considerations. Princes and kings needed Jews to lend them money, and so they were more likely to allow them to do what was theologically impossible, namely, undo the indelible mark which baptism placed on the soul. Bishops and popes, on the other hand, were the first to resist forced baptism when it was proposed, but they were also the first to resist the idea that once baptized a Jew could return to his former way of life.
Eventually, the Church, taking the lead in the matter, came down on the side of baptism. If force were so absolute then it overcame all capacity on the part of the candidate to resist it, the sacrament was not valid, and the man remained a Jew. If on the other hand, there was some degree of assent, the sacrament was valid, and the Jew was no longer a Jew, and therefore, subject "to the rigors of canonical penalties should he fail to practice his new religion." That means that "although Jews cannot be forced to accept baptism, still, if they have in fact received it owing to force, they cannot now evade the penalties of heretics...
St. Vincent Ferrer was in Valencia when the riot broke out on July 9, 1391. ...
The sermons of St. Vincent Ferrer seem by a number of accounts to have been miraculous events. Huge crowds assembled to hear him and the fact that they heard his words at all in the days before electronic amplification is miracle enough. But it also seems that people from different parts of Europe understood his sermons even though he preached them in the Valencian dialect, the only language he ever knew...his Catalan was intelligible to Moor, Greek, German, Frenchman, Italian and Hungarian...[he also] healed the infirm and repeatedly restored the dead to life. Ferrer tramped from one end of Spain to the other during the uprisings of 1391, and because of his efforts Jews converted by the thousands. ...
Solomon ha-Levi was one of the Jews who converted as a result of Ferrer's efforts....ha-Levi's conversion emphasizes the coercion which the mob exerted but minimizes the fact that Jews had been on the losing end of an intellectual battle with the Catholics ever since Nicholas Donin, another Jewish convert, had arranged the disputation over the Talmud in Paris in the middle of the 13th century. ...
Rabi Solomon followed in the footsteps of his Dominican mentors. He studied at the university of Paris and after completing his studies returned to Castile where he rose rapidly in the hierarchy, eventually becoming Bishop of Burgos. ...
In 1410, shortly before his death, Rabbi Hasdai Crescas wrote Or Adonai as his way of dealing with the conversions which had swept through the Jewish communities in Spain. According to Rabbi Crescas, the chief cause of conversion was "the Greek [i.e. Aristotle] who has dimmed the eyes of Israel in these our times." The medieval confrontation with Aristotle exposed the Talmud in the eyes of the Jews themselves as an unscientific list of opinions and commentaries which was constantly turning in on itself in more and more convoluted fashion. In this regard, "Averroes" opened the Jews to the possibility of Christianity, especially a Christianity that could accommodate the insights of the Greek philosophers and the Jewish prophets, as Aquinas' synthesis had done. ...
One year after the appearance of Or Adonai, St. Vincent Ferrer arrived in Castile at the head of a band of hundreds of people who had been so touched by his sermons and his call to repentance that they followed him from town to town flogging themselves in a public display of the penitence which followed from conversion. ...
The Pope's Challenge
Led by Rabbi Vidal ben Veniste de la Cavalleria, a team of 14 rabbis accepted the pope's challenge and met for debate at the pope's palace on February 7, 1413, under the supervision of Benedict himself. On the following day, the pope laid down the ground rules. The disputation was not a debate between equals; it was rather a form of instruction, according to which the Jews were allowed to defend themselves against the charges which Geronimo Sancte Fide would raise. Sancte Fide, who would prove...a genius in dividing his opponents, opened the disputation by pitting the writings of the old testament against the Talmud. ...
On the second day of the disputation, Rabbi Joseph Albo "got entangled in self contradictions...and the Jewish multitude present laughed at him and considered him defeated." The discussion involved the Messiah. ...
Rabbi Astruc Halevi then claimed that the Jews didn't need a Messiah for the salvation of their souls "because their souls would be saved even if the Messiah never came," but rather for the restoration of their political kingdom. The pope then reminded the Rabbi that if that were the case the Jews needed no Messiah at all, and Rabbi Astruc "had to apologize."
During the course of the disputation, it became clear that the disputants had two very different notions of what the Messiah was supposed to do when he came.
If nothing else, the disputation made it clear that the Jews were seeking a Messiah different than the one who had already arrived, according to the Christians. The Christians saw the Messiah as "a God-man, while the Jewish definition is that of a superior human being. The function of the Christian Messiah is to save souls from Hell, while the Jewish Messiah is to keep the Jewish bodies out of servitude." ...
The Talmud was an esoteric text, written by rabbis solely for rabbis, and as such it was never intended to be the object of public debate. As a result, when the Talmud's more embarrassing passages were dragged into the light by converts who were former insiders, former rabbis themselves, the Jews didn't know what to say. In this regard the disputation of Tortosa followed the same pattern as Donin's attack on the Talmud in Paris a century and a half before. ...
The Jews, quite simply, could not defend their own sacred texts. In the minutes of July 7, 1414, they were recorded as making the following statement:
The Jews here assembled from all the communities in the kingdom...declare that because of their ignorance and lack of enlightenment, they are unable to rebut the arguments of Hieronymus [de Sacte Fide] against the talmudic sayings cited by him, and do not know how to defend those sayings. They are, nevertheless, firmly convinced that, were the authors of those sayings now alive, they would have known how to defend them because, as wise and good men, they could not have uttered any unseemly statements."
This may be an example of sly irony, but it was hardly convincing apologetics. The rabbis then concluded their statement by petitioning the pope to allow them to go home. "inasmuch as they did not have among them a champion competent and worthy of defending the Talmud." The rabbis went on to add that "their weakness was not to be taken as a reflection upon the Talmud," but it certainly seemed that way. ...
The Jews had written the Taolmud to support their religion; they had then turned the religion into a manifestation of the Talmud by claiming that it was "more binding than the Torah itself,' but for the second time in as many centuries, the most learned Jews in France and Spain could not defend their writings in the court of reason.
The Christians in fact asserted exclusive rights over the Torah and cited the blasphemies of the Talmud as proof that the Jews had abandoned the religion of Abraham and Moses..."Judaism was inconsistent with the religion of reason," but the disputation showed something slightly different. It showwed that the Talmud was inconsistent with reason, and inconsistent as well with the Torah. ...
The real issue was the Talmud which had become the heart of the Jewish religion, supplanting the Torah. The real issue was the Jewish inability to defend the Talmud. Once it became apparent that the rabbis could not defend the Talmud against the attacks of former rabbis, Judaism was seen as irrational, outdated, and not worth defending.
I have left out a great many of the details. The story is worth reading in its entirely.
