A Rabbi asks a priest a question... part 15

Continued from last week…

There were three major centers of Christianity by the year 150 AD, Antioch in Asia, Alexandria in Africa, and Rome in Europe. These were called the patriarchates, or “father churches.” Jerusalem had been levelled and replaced by the Roman city of Aelia Capitolina and Constantinople didn’t yet exist. These three father churches were thought to be of special distinction because of their founding by St. Peter, whom Jesus chose as leader of the early Church. Peter had founded the church in Antioch, Syria and through his delegate St. Mark was considered the founder of the church in Alexandria, Egypt, but above all, the church founded by St. Peter and also by St. Paul was Rome.

Peter and Paul had both died there and their relics remained there. The early Christians considered the Roman church the first of the churches as evidenced by St. Ignatius of Antioch and St. Irenaeus of Lyon. Around 650 AD, the armies of a new prophet swept out of the Arabian Peninsula and in short order captured two of the original patriarchates, Alexandria and Antioch and thus began the slow but steady erosion of Christianity in the lands of its beginning. Rome, too, had been conquered by the Germanic tribes of the west, but something else happened there. The conquerors were converted by the conquered and soon there were mass baptisms of Germanic tribes into the Roman Church. They may have become Christians, but the mass conversions meant that they were not the most literate nor best educated of believers. Among these new Christians, the Jews continued in their uneasy but useful position, living their lives largely without threat to life and limb. (Note: I use the world “largely.” There were certainly some incidents of major persecution during the era, but nothing like what was to come.)

Christianity in the East held on under the new rulers and their new religion. In fact, the invaders didn’t try to convert them. The Christians paid a special tax and their governmental and technical expertise was useful to the new masters. That started to change in around 900 AD.  300 years after the first Arab invasion of Roman Christian territory, the great Christian centers, Egypt, Syria, Tunisia started to become Arabized. Christians found themselves under increasing pressure to convert to the new religion. There had been an increase during the previous century in the persecution of those Christians still remaining in the Holy Land and pilgrimage to the Christian shrines had been forbidden. In addition to the increasing Arabic pressure, a central Asian people, the Turks accepted the new religion and its prophet, and did so with the devotion of new converts.

An ambassador from Constantinople arrived in Rome in 1095 from the Byzantine/Roman emperor Alexius asking for help against these new invaders, the Turks who were invading what was left of the old Roman Christian empire. The pope called a council in Clermont in France and urged the nobility of Europe to come to the aid of their Christian brothers in the east in addition to the depredation of the Turkish invaders.

Around this same time, the Fatimid Caliph of Cairo al-Hakim, (or Hakim the crazy to those who knew him well) under whose jurisdiction the Holy Land fell, decreed that the Christians would no longer be allowed to observe the feasts of Epiphany or Easter. Wine was outlawed not just for Muslims but for Christians, which made the celebration of Mass impossible, and wasn’t much appreciated by Jews either who use wine in their religious rituals. In 1005, he ordered Jews and Christians to wear distinctive item of clothing. In1009, al- Hakim ordered the destruction of the Holy Sepulcher in order to end the Holy Fire ceremony that he was sure was a fraud. Eventually all Christian religious buildings in the Holy Land were confiscated or destroyed. The situation in the Holy Land, and the Turkish juggernaut into the remaining Christian territory, (which was only stopped in 1683 at the gates of Vienna,) finally woke up a sleeping Christendom. The nobility of Europe “took the cross,” that is, they pledged themselves to make pilgrimage to the holy sites. Access to the Christian shrines could only be had by means of war with the rulers of the east.  The nobility of Europe prepared for war. The peasants of Europe were not to be outdone by the nobility and felt no need to prepare. God would help them! A holy (and probably looney) hermit named Peter decided to act on the pope’s call to liberate the formerly Christian lands of the east. He gathered 20,000 peasants together in Easter 1096 and declared a people’s crusade. They promptly started the march to Jerusalem though they weren’t quite sure where Jerusalem was. This did not strike them as a problem.

 At one point they seem to have been led by a goose. I quote Albert of Aachen, a contemporary source:

“There was also another abominable wickedness in this gathering of people on foot, who were stupid and insanely irresponsible…They claimed that a certain goose was inspired by the Holy Ghost, and a she-goat filled with no less than the same, and they had made these their leaders for this holy journey to Jerusalem; they even worshipped them excessively, and as the beasts directed their courses for them in their animal way, many of the troops believed they were confirming it to be true according to the entire purpose of the spirit.”

Things soon went from stupid to evil when the goose died and was replaced by politicians. Peter the Hermit was joined by Count Emicho of Flonheim who knew a good thing when he saw it. The peoples crusade arrived in Germany in spring 1096, and promptly started slaughtering Jews, the reasoning being, “We don’t have to wait until Jerusalem to kill the enemies of Christ, we’ve got plenty of Jews right here in the Rhine valley.” In Speyer, Worms, Mainz and Cologne, Jews died by the thousands despite the efforts by Catholic bishops to protect them. Things changed for "We’re right. You’re wrong.” to “We’re right. You’re dead.” When they finally got the Roman/Byzantine Empire, they were ambushed by the Turks and what goes around comes around. Of the 20,000 only 3,000 survived. The delicate balance ended. Jews became even useful to the moneyed interests of the west. Now there was a way to cancel debts to Jewish moneylenders. Preach a crusade and kill the Jews. How efficient! 

Next week: How odd of God to choose the Jews.

A Rabbi asks a priest a question... part 14

Continued from last week…

December 31, 406, or maybe 405 the Rhine River froze solid or maybe it didn’t. What did happen is this: three German tribes, the Vandals, Alans and Suebi, managed to cross the Rhine. The Rhine and the Danube were the natural northern borders of the Roman Empire, which had been Christian for almost a century. One can picture a German barbarian walking out on the ice stamping his feet and shouting, “Come on, Hildegund, Schnell! Vee is moofing to France!” 

In the search for plumbing, wine and the other amenities of Roman life, the German barbarians crossed the border en masse and there just weren’t enough soldiers to stop them. The bulk of the army was back in the east fighting Visigoths, the Germanic cousins of the Vandals and their friends. The Roman Empire in the west pretty much crumbled. The Visigoths reached Italy from the east while the Vandals went down through France and Spain and reached Italy from the North African coast. Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410 and again really sacked by the Vandals in 455.

The Vandals and the Visigoths were Christian – sort of. They were Arians. Remember the Arians? They were the people who thought the idea of a Triune God was crazy and Ariansim appealed to militarist monarchies like the Germans with its neat chain of command. The German barbarians took their religion seriously and thus were not very nice to any Trinitarian Nicene Catholics who got in their way. One of those Nicene Catholics was St Augustine, the bishop of the town of Hippo Regius in what is now Algeria. (Did you know that North Africa, just like Egypt, Turkey, Syria and the Holy Land were once the heartlands of the Catholic faith?) The Vandals besieged Hippo as St. Augustine lay dying and eventually captured the city, burning everything except Augustine’s cathedral and library. The survival of so many of his writings insured that he would be one of the greatest theological influences in Europe. He commented on just about everything in his 75 years and he was the dominant voice in the western attitude toward the Jews for almost a thousand years.

Augustine was never shy about his opinions. He was always denouncing heretical opinions. He thoroughly denounced any movements in the Church that rejected the Hebrew Scriptures and the fierce tribal God of the Jews. Augustine held the Catholic view that the God of the New and Old Testaments were one and the same, that the Old Testament was divinely inspired and that the Jews were a people specially chosen by God. They were chosen in the Old Testament to bring forth the messiah. They were chosen in the New Testament for a somewhat less desirable task. Augustine believed Jewish people would be converted at the end of time, but the destruction of the temple and the scattering of Jews by Rome fulfilled Old Testament prophecy. God had spared them in their unconverted state as a warning to Christians of what could happen to those who reject Christ. They should be allowed to live unmolested in Christian lands and lead free and unhindered lives.

Augustine believed that the Old Testament referred to the Jews in the verse, “Slay them not, lest they should at last forget Your law” (Psalm 59:11). Augustine. (God) has said, ‘but whosoever shall kill Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.’… not by bodily death shall the ungodly race of carnal Jews perish. For whoever destroys them in this way shall suffer sevenfold vengeance, that is, shall bring upon himself the sevenfold penalty under which the Jews lie for the crucifixion of Christ. ’So to the end of the seven days of time, the continued preservation of the Jews will be a proof to believing Christians of the subjection merited by those who, in the pride of their kingdom, put the Lord to death.” (St. Augustine, “Contra Judaeos”) It sounds pretty awful at first read, but Augustine’s likening the Jews to Cain threatened anyone who would harm them with a curse. (Looking at modern German, French and Russian demographics, Augustine may have had a point!)

So from the year 400 AD until almost 1100 AD, the teaching of Augustine prevailed in the west and the Jews became a protected and increasingly valued (though not necessarily beloved) part of European society. Christian Europe had a problem. The Scriptures seemed to forbid usury, the taking interest on a loan from a fellow Christian. How does one do business without a system of credit? Enter the Jews. There was no law in scripture that forbad having the infidel Jews loaning money at interest to their Christian neighbors.

Jews were a readymade banking society. They were a small group of very mobile people who had trusted contacts throughout the Middle East and Europe among their fellow Jews scattered throughout the world. They were able to travel and do business where a Muslim or Christian might be unwelcome, and they were literate! The great emperor Charlemagne (800 AD) was never quite able to write his own name, though he really tried. Jews could read write and count! Jews became the grease that allowed the wheels of commerce to turn in an increasingly isolated and illiterate world. It was always good to have a few of them around, not too many, but a few. So it went until 1096.

Next week: Count Emicho and a goose filled with the Holy Spirit (I’m not making this up either!)

A Rabbi asks a priest a question... part 13

Continued from last week…

For some reason or other Jews felt more and more uncomfortable in the Roman Empire. Judaism flourished east of the Jordan River, back in old Babylon there were great opportunities for Jews. A lot of the locals were monotheist Persian followers of the prophet Zoroaster, people spoke Aramaic, there were fewer of the pesky Christians insisting that you could be a good Israelite and eat pork, but above all, there was a thriving Jewish community. There had been one for at least 600 years. They had their own laws and were led by a descendant of King David called the exilarch, the respected leader of the Jewish community. 

It seems that when the exiles returned to Zion at the beginning of Persian rule in the area, a few stayed behind, quite a few it seems. Just as in 1949 everyone was ready to go back to the Holy Land and fight for the new Jewish state. 

Everyone? 

“Well, I’ll be there next year. Be sure to write. I’ll send money. I just have to wrap a few things up back here in New York.” 

As it is now, so it was then. They had good lives in Babylon. Business was good. It seemed you found fewer and fewer Jews in places like Rome and Athens and Corinth. Some had the idea, “Christian, Jew, what’s the difference?”

In Babylon, a Jew was a Jew, a member of a respected community. The Romans were always worried about the Jews rising up, and then the Romans became Christians. Judaism found itself increasingly under pressure in the Greco-Roman world. There were three choices: Tough it out, join the Christians, or move. Then there was a brief moment of hope! In 361, there was new emperor, Flavius Claudius Iulianus Augustus (331-363) born in Constantine’s new capital and raised as a Christian, the nephew of Constantine the Great. As soon as he was emperor, he renounced Christianity with all its ridiculous theological squabbles and restored the old Roman religion dressed up in Greek philosophy. He also decided that it would be useful to rebuild the Jewish temple in Jerusalem in order to refute the claim that the Church was a superior spiritual temple, and that God had rejected the old temple and its adherents. The proposal was met with great enthusiasm by the Jews. It didn’t work out so well. The whole thing was a mess. It sounds like something from a low budget action film:

“He [Julian the Apostate] planned at vast cost to restore the once splendid Temple at Jerusalem, which after many mortal combats during the siege by Vespasian and later by Titus had barely been stormed. He had entrusted the speedy performance of this work to Alypius of Antioch... But though this Alypius pushed the work on with vigor, aided by the governor of the province, terrible balls of fire kept bursting forth near the foundations of the Temple and made the place inaccessible to the workmen, some of whom were burned to death; and since in this way the element persistently repelled them, the enterprise halted.” (Ammianus Marcellinus (330-395) Res Gestae Book 13) Goodness Gracious! Great Balls of Fire!

Note that Ammianus was a contemporary. There were a lot of contemporary authors who commented on the attempt to rebuild the temple and they add wind and storm and earthquake to the script. My favorite is St. Gregory Nazianzen in his “Second Invective against Julian” they just don’t write like that anymore. Julian died fighting the Persians after just three years on the throne.  Pierced by a spear, it is rumored his dying words were “Thou hast conquered, pale Galilean.”  He probably just said “Uhhhhh…”  But the “pale Galilean” stuff makes good copy. The Galilean had conquered and the Jews had egg on their face.  More restrictions were placed on the Jews and more of them gave up and accepted baptism. The center of Jewish life was clearly now on the east side of the Jordan in Babylon where the sages were busy compiling the Babylonian Talmud and codifying a Jewish way of life.

In 380, the emperor Theodosius issued the Edict of Thessalonica, which declared Nicene Trinitarian Christianity to be the legal imperial religion. He also ended state support for the traditional Roman religious cult, in effect making Roman paganism, illegal. He also had no great love for the Jews who remained in the west. In 404, Jews were barred from most governmental jobs. In 418, they were completely excluded for civil service and the military positions. In 425, they were banned from all government jobs, except of course from one: tax collector. If you are going to hate someone, might as well be a Jew and not a Roman. Still Judaism itself was never made illegal. Jew’s in the west made another mistake 300 years later.

The Romans and the Persians had never had an easy time of it and a war with the Persian or their kinsmen the Parthians had simmered since the times of Julius Caesar. This was one of the reasons that the Roman state had issues with the Judeans and their Jewish descendants. The Jews got along quite well with the Persians. The Persians, after all, had been the ones who freed them from Babylonian captivity in the old days and allowed them to rebuild the temple centuries before the birth of Jesus. There was always a chance they might do it once again. The Sassanid Persian dynasty had been good to the Jews. The Babylonian Talmud was composed between the third and sixth centuries in Sassanid Persia and the great Jewish centers in Sura and Pumbedita were the home of the best Jewish scholarship. War broke out once again between the Romans and the Persians in 602 and in 613, the Persian army captured Damascus with the help of Jews. They took Jerusalem in 614, burned Constantine’s magnificent Church of the Holy Sepulcher and captured the relics of the True Cross. The city was back in Jewish hands after five centuries of exile. Hopes were high, but in 622 the Emperor Heraclius launched a counter offensive and in 629 Heraclius recaptured Jerusalem, repaired the church of the Holy Sepulcher and restored the True Cross to Jerusalem in a majestic ceremony. The hopes of the Jews lay in Babylon, not in the west. The Persians and Romans were bankrupt and exhausted by the wars.

No one noticed a storm blowing up from the Arabian Desert, the storm called Mohammed.

Next week: meanwhile in the west.