Monstrosities of nature

Went to a paper at Melbourne University by Francois Soyer on Monstrosities of Nature: Demonic Possession, Ambiguous Gender and the Inquisition in the Early Modern Iberian World which, after putting the Inquisition in context, concentrated on the Portuguese Inquisition’s 1741-4 Maria Duran case.

Maria Duran was a runaway Catalan housewife (she left after her husband contracted syphilis) who went off and became a dragoon officer in the Spanish cavalry. She then turned up as a nun in a Portuguese convent where she had sex with various of the nuns. Her case was referred to the Inquisition. She was arrested in 1741, and interred for two years in solitary confinement. She was then questioned, tortured, tried (the trial record extends to 800 pages, one of the 47,000 trials carried out by the Portuguese Inquisition from its founding in 1536 to its abolition in 1820) and sentenced to 200 lashes and exile. After the sentence was duly carried out in a 1744 auto-de-fe, she disappears from the historical record.

There was witness testimony that she had been examined by a doctor, and found to be “a simple woman” but nuns and other women testified that she had a penis when she had sex with them—some of this recorded testimony was quite graphic. Given the lack of said penis when medically examined, the possibility of a demonic pact had been considered: it was all too hard for the local Church authorities, who referred the matter (and Maria) to the Inquisition. During the period of examination, she was re-examined by a doctor hired by the Inquisition and also made to stand naked in warm water to see if relaxing the muscles would make the alleged penis appear.

The Inquisition decided there was insufficient evidence to accept that any pact or demonic possession had occurred, that there was no sodomy—as no penis—but that she had told the nuns to not tell any confessor about what they had done: this was the crime she was found guilty of, publicly whipped and exiled. The actual details of her crime were not read out, this was felt to be too embarrassing.

Prior to going through the case, Francois Soyer took us through the origins, remit and operating procedures of the Inquisition. Both the Portuguese and Spanish Inquisition were arms of the state (the king appointed the Inquisitor-Generals) staffed by men of the cloth who enforced Church doctrine. They arose out of the problem of the conversoes; determining whether the forced converts were true Christians or not (since, having publicly accepted Christianity, apostasy was not permitted, so there was no going back).

Sexual concerns (homosexuality, bigamy, bestiality, solicitation of sexual favours by priests in the confessional) developed after the 1545-63 Council of Trent. Homosexuality was “sodomy” or “the abominable sin” (so awful, it could not be named). It was part of a demonic plot to destroy Christendom itself, with the example of Sodom and Gomorrah providing warning of what God would do to a society that tolerated it.

The Inquisition used torture but, as it was staffed by men of the cloth, it was not supposed to draw blood, so used bloodless tortures (which included what is now known as ‘waterboarding’). There would also be a doctor present, to ensure the torture did not go too far. A person could only be tortured once, but that was got around by “suspending” torture sessions rather than officially ending them. The auto-de-fe, held annually, were grand spectacles meant to both terrorise and educate. The Inquisition did not actually carry out punishments themselves: the guilty person was “relayed to the secular arm” but it was Church doctrine that was being enforced.

Francois Soyer found striking that, in 350 years (the Spanish Inquisition ran from 1480-1834), the procedures do not change: inquisitors were asking the same questions in its beginnings as they were in its final days. This was a society and an institution where ‘novelty’ was a bad word. The operations of the Inquisition were highly codified. For example, three denunciations were required for arrest: but they could be years apart. The Inquisition had a network of agents to provide information. Charges read out to the arrested person would be stripped of identifying people and place and, once arrested, people would essentially have to prove their innocence. Not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of trials resulted in guilty verdicts (though not necessarily on all counts).

The Inquisition tended to be sceptical of accusations of demonic possession, it required proof. Exorcism was only likely after such evidence was accepted, particularly if the person renounced the alleged pact. Medical evidence also tended to trump witness statements. The Inquisition was also much less likely to find people guilty of witchcraft than other areas in Europe, such as East Anglia in the 1640s, or parts of the Holy Roman Empire. (Due its insistence on evidence.)

In its own terms, the Inquisition’s concern was for the prisoner’s welfare: their salvation. But it was their welfare not as they might conceive it, but as Church doctrine conceived it. So, the initial examination was put in terms of, having heard the charges, did the person having anything they wanted to unburden themselves over. Reconciliation with the Church was always the first option.

The Portuguese Inquisition recorded about 5,000 denunciations for homosexuality, leading to about 500 trials. Overwhelming, those denounced or tried were men, and generally foreigners. (Makes one wonder if local mores of masculinity was what was being enforced.)

Recolhimento were religious houses for women held to be vulnerable and in danger of falling into prostitution and where they could stay in hopes of reformation (marriage, employment as a domestic, going to a convent). Husbands leaving to go overseas could leave their wives there. Maria had spent some time in one.

‘Hermaphrodites’ (which covered a range of conditions) were accepted as part of nature: what one was supposed to do, however, was pick a gender and stick to it. Failure to do so would attract the attention of the Inquisition.

Francois Soyer’s reading of the evidence of the nuns and other women who had sex with Maria Duran is that they were confronted by having the sex—especially her (to put it mildly) “aggressive” mode of operation—with a woman and concluded she had to be a man (hence the penis) and the devil had to be involved. Maria Duran had previously attracted the attention of the Inquisition over passing as a man: the Spanish Inquisition had merely given her a strict warning not to do it again. But the Inquisition records included details about how she managed to pass as a man—binding her breasts, having a gourd full of water in her pants she would release against a wall, publicly fondling the breasts of women.

I enjoyed the presentation and subsequent discussion, though I was struck by the way the academics and graduate students present had difficulty talking about the gender, sexuality and natural law theological issues. It is not that they said anything silly or stupid, it was just a general diffidence and awkwardness. Admittedly, I have done a fair bit of reading in all three issues: still, it was striking. A useful reminder that, like the nuns confronted by Maria Duran’s sexual predation, dealing with things outside your normal framings can be difficult.

The Devil and the Jews

Joshua Trachtenberg’s The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism examines medieval Christian images of Jews and of “the Jew”. The book was first published in 1943, and the shadow of Hitler’s megacidal hate looms over the book, as the author makes clear in his preface.

Noting that use of stereotypes of Jews as figures of abuse was still part of the world-view of children (I can remember ‘Jew’ being a term of miserly abuse in the schoolyard), Rabbi Trachtenberg makes an observation that applies way beyond his subject:

… the lie is a more potent weapon, skillfully wielded, than the bare and simple truth … For the lie can be molded to match the “will to believe”; the truth is made of less malleable stuff (p.xiv).

One need only to consider the endless production of conspiracy theories—so easy to produce, rather more effort to debunk—to see the truth in this observation. Nor does it only apply to lies, in the sense of deliberate untruth. Plenty of myths and misconceptions are believed because they conform to what people want to believe.

Trachtenberg is firmly of the view that materialist explanations of Jew-hatred are inadequate, citing Maurice Samuel’s The Great Hatred as showing it as a psychological-cultural phenomenon.

The question Trachtenberg seeks to answer is stated in the first sentence of the Introduction:

Why are Jews so cordially hated—and feared? By what mysterious legerdemain can a weak, defenseless minority be invested in the public eye with the awesome attributes of omnipotence? How is it that men believe of Jews what common sense would forbid them to believe of anyone else? … No lie is too petty, or too silly, or too big to work its calculated effect. (p.1)

The answer lies in a particular, long, history.

Jew-hatred extends beyond Christianity, both predating it and occurring outside Christendom. It is a particular, demonological intensity of Jew-hatred that comes from medieval Christendom. Trachtenberg notes that there were effectively “two Churches”. The official hierarchy which:

… officially excoriated the Jews while extending them the promise of protection

and what the lesser clergy and laity did. Whatever the nuances:

… the practical consequences of Christian principle are justly attributable to “the Church” (p.7).

Not least because the framings with which Jews were conceived were most emphatically Christian.

The book is divided into three parts: The “Demonic” Jew, The Jew as Sorcerer, The Jew as Heretic. The first Part explores the association of Jews with Satan and the diabolic. For just as Satan was the enemy of God, so Jews were framed as the enemy of mankind (and of God): the association was thus “natural”.
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While Christian polemics against Jews date back to the beginning of the Christian era, they became particularly intense from the period of the Crusades onwards: a period of a resurgence of Muslim aggression, the rise of mass heresies and social unrest; with a Church that saw itself as threatened from within and without as it strived to maintain the sacerdotal unity of God’s people (p.11). In this context of stress and urgent concern for Christian strength and unity, an intense hatred against “the Jew” was generated; a fantastic (yet clearly seriously believed) projection of ill-nature such that every charge was somehow plausible.

A ubiquitous, and projected, framing
One of the fundamental principles was:

Medieval Christendom was so firmly convinced of the incontestable truth of its own tradition and teaching that it could conceive of no rival truth … there is overwhelming evidence that the Catholic world believed that the Jew himself recognized the truth of Christian doctrine! (p.15)

That, of course, meant Jewish failure to embrace Christianity was a willful failure, which required maleficent explanation. (A notion by no means absent from our own time—see all the invective against “climate deniers”.)

Many of the accusations against the Jews rested on the belief that the Jews accepted the truth of Christian doctrine (for example, the significance of the host due to transubstantiation). While Church leaders from Jerome to Luther denounced the Jewish “refusal” to agree with the “obvious” Christian interpretations of the Scriptures they shared. The enemies of Jesus in the Gospels were the Jews and the devil: so it became natural to associate them in what became a staple construction of Christian thought about Jews (Pp20-1). Jews became associated with the Antichrist (it was often asserted that the Antichrist would be a Jew: just as in our time, it is alleged that the Antichrist will be homosexual). Jews became associated with physical features of diabolic significance—horns (either pictorially or as markers on their apparel), tails (carefully hidden), a distinctive odour.

Having delineated this diabolic association in Part One, Part Two explores the (therefore natural and reinforcing) association of Jews with occult power. Jews were frequently held to produce many sorcerers. The discovery by Christian Europe of the Kabbalah was then interpreted accordingly, reinforcing the prior conception. Jewish doctors were often held to owe their success to occult powers. Jews were also held to be poisoners.

Popular plays and literature relayed and reinforced these notions. So stories that previously had no Jewish character—or might even have Jewish victims—such as the usurer requiring a pound of flesh—became a stock instance of Jewish villainy (p.106).

How completely the accusations against Jews rested on Christian framings—and had nothing to do with what Jews actually believed—is particularly powerfully conveyed by accusations of desecration of the host (and its use for occult purposes):

The absurdity of attributing to Jews an acceptance and utilization of this most un-Jewish of dogmas never occurred to their accusers. Transubstantiation had been proclaimed a true belief by the Church, therefore it must be believed by all men; how they responded to that belief was something else (p.110).

Living in pervasively Christian societies, the Christian message proclaimed in stone, art and preaching, underpinning the laws and institutions of society (indeed, much law was Church law, via Church courts) the Jews stood exposed as the only “holdouts” to be understood in terms of this omnipresent Christian framing of just about everything.

The situation of climate sceptics in a contemporary society pervaded by a sense of climate catastrophism is vaguely analogous—including accusation of malefic motivation, since legitimate dissent from “obvious” truth is ruled out. But it does not really replicate the intensity of the isolation and anathematisation of Jews in medieval Christendom. (Islam had a set place within its framework—that of dhimmi—for Jews, a place Jews shared with Christians and so did not suffer the same benighted uniqueness: that Jews, and for that matter heretic and schismatic Christians, were better off under Muslim rule can be see by the migration flows—from Christendom to Islam, almost never in the other direction.)

One accusation that fitted naturally into the pattern of Christian projections onto the Jews, but actually predated Christianity, was that of ritual murder. It seems to have arisen during Jewish-Hellenic tensions under the Seleucids (p.126) and was also levied against peoples other than Jews. In medieval Christendom, it became a standard accusation against Jews and other “diabolic” forces. This was one set of accusations the Popes repeatedly refused to countenance, regularly denouncing it (Pp134ff). (A certain Papal scepticism was also apparent in various specific incidents of anti-Jewish frenzy.) But the accusations lived on, becoming folklore in parts of Germany and the Balkans into the C20th (p.139). One of the themes of the book is that accusations against the Jews never die, they just get recycled and recast.

A related, recurring, accusation, was the Jewish use (and even recommendation) of human blood for medicinal and other occult purposes. As with other accusations, converted Jews were often sources (they would be sure ways to ingratiate oneself with one’s new religious community) but follow a pattern that was old (dating back to the Hellenistic slanders mentioned above) and persisting to the C20th. Yet no set of accusation shows more strongly how it is the framings of the accusers—not any beliefs or practises of Jews—that matter, given it is hard to conceive of any group more careful and restrictive about blood than practicing Jews. But, as Rabbi Trachtenberg writes:

That such use of human parts, and especially of blood, was inherently abhorrent and inconceivable to the Jew, for magic or medicine or any other purpose, is of no significance here (p.143).

Quite. In understanding patterns of hate, it is the beliefs, framings and needs of the haters that matter, not the hated.

Having gone through so much calumny against the Jews, setting out its patterns, in Parts One and Two, at the beginning of Part Three, Jew as Heretic, Trachtenberg points out that Christian-Jewish relations from the fall of the Western Empire until about the C11th were generally quite good (Pp159ff). This was a Europe that was not yet fully Christianised.

So Jews and Christians shared a tradition and scriptures of monotheist revelation in contrast to surrounding paganism. With the vanquishing of paganism, that left the Jews alone as the only overt non-Christians. Suddenly, similarities were no longer salient, only differences. (The rise of non-religious and anti-religious philosophies in modern times has, of course, reversed this: hence the modern use of ‘Judaeo-Christian’. Indeed, some analyses of modern anti-Semitism see it as, in part, a covert or “first-stage” attack on Christianity—since if everything “Jewish” is tainted and wicked, that would include a religion wholly founded by Jews.)

The theological Jew
By the C11th, several trends coincided. The rise of a feudal structure worsened the legal situation of Jews (who had no natural “place” in it and were forbidden to bear arms), the rise of a Christian merchant class reduced their economic value and meant they had Christian competitors, the Crusading impulse encouraged violence against non-Christians (of whom Jews were the only locally-available targets) as well as other strictures against them. But this was all framed by a Church that was now the only source of religious authority and whose doctrines increasingly pervaded popular consciousness. Which meant insertion into popular culture the notion of
the theological Jew.

This strikes me as a key point: that official ideology put Jews in a very particular theological role. A role determined by the framings of Christian theory, not the actual beliefs and practise of Jews.

Not that Jews were or are the only group to which this has been done. One can equally talk of the notion of the theological queer, one that still resonates in our own time.

Sometimes, they even intersect. Jews were so far outside the realm of the “properly” human that having sex with a Jew was sometimes treated as form of bestiality and at least one Parisian man (and his Jewish de facto wife by whom he had several children) were burnt alive for “sodomy”: that is, sex outside its proper purpose and “natural” categories for, in the words of the chronicler who covered the case:

… since coition with a Jewess is precisely the same as if a man should copulate with a dog (p.187).

When one reads that Christian Jew-hatred was not “true” anti-Semitism since it was “only” against their beliefs, incidents such as this give the lie to such apologia. As does the way accusations, practices and beliefs were projected onto Jews that, not only had nothing to do with Judaism as a belief-system or practice, but actively contradicted both.

The concept of the theological Jew was first developed early in the Christian era and included a denial of Jewish “ownership” of the Church (as the body of believers) before Jesus (p.162). Trachtenberg expresses the tension of Church policy well:

… the paradox of Christian policy towards Jews. Bitterly condemned and excoriated, they were yet to be tolerated on humanitarian grounds, and indeed preserved on theological grounds, as living testimony to the truth of Christian teaching. Yet the impulse to punish the hated and to convert by all means the unregenerate constantly warred against the moral and dogmatic scruples which, at best, animated only a small minority of the more highly placed and responsible clergy (p.164).

The tension in Church thinking was nicely illustrated by Pope Innocent III in 1199:

Although the Jewish perfidy is in every way worthy of condemnation, nevertheless, they are not to be severely oppressed by the faithful (p.165)

“Non-severe” oppression is clearly fine: indeed, Innocent III sponsored highly oppressive legislation against Jews. That the Popes issued repeated statements against violence against Jews simply demonstrated the natural implication of the Churchly condemnation and denunciation of Jews. If one declares a group profoundly problematic—indeed, hateful to God—it is sheer hypocrisy to piously denounce the predictable consequences of that. The “charity” which one holds appropriate to those whose existence your own framing has made problematic is the sort of “charity” which should be shoved where the sun don’t shine: it certainly gives no moral credit, it merely limits the degree of moral failure.

The “restrained” attitude of the higher clergy and official doctrine was more than counterbalanced by that of the lesser clergy:

But popes, kings, nobility, bishops, all had little influence over the populace, which had at long last swallowed the theological conception of the Jew whole, and minus the accompanying theological sophistry. The greatest direct influence upon the people was exerted by the lesser clergy, both secular and monastic, who were, if anything, in advance of their flock in ignorance, fanatical piety and superstition. Nor was the clergy particularly responsive to the will of the hierarchy, even in more vital matters of doctrine and practice. The first massacres of Jews were directly inspired by clerical preaching, and the murderous bands were sometimes led by priests (p.166).

In other words, what really counted was the moral dynamics, not the niceties of doctrine. The moral dynamics were that Jews were declared by Church doctrine to be hateful to God, the populace were told to be servants of God and the lesser clergy were the “gatekeepers of righteousness”. That combination was all that was required.

Particularly as:

The Church employed the term Jew as all-inclusive, embracing the entire people, past, present and future (p.167).

An effect made particularly severe given that the principle of corporate responsibility was something of a medieval commonplace.

Trachtenberg holds the First Crusade to be the crucial turning point in the situation of the Jews. Its support of violence against non-Christians led the Jews particularly vulnerable, since they were the only non-Christians locally to hand: massacres of Jews followed. They were, after all, the “Christ-killers”, as centuries of Church doctrine and preaching had declared.

Not only did the vanquishing of paganism make Jewish-Christian differences salient (rather than their similarities), rising secular power threatened Church authority, rising literacy encouraged heresy, advancing Islam threatened Christendom from without and the restless energy of a rising commercial society added its destabilising influence to the mix—by spreading ideas, lay literacy, social tensions and increased funding of secular authority. The Jews—as they had during the Christianisation of the Empire and were to again during the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution—provided a splendid “useful enemy” to unite people against under the banner of the Church. One’s role as “gatekeepers of righteousness” is so much more effective if righteousness has a clear enemy.

It is hardly surprising that anti-heresy propaganda was redoubled, that the Inquisition was founded and the Jews would be early and continual victims of both. Heretics were inspired by the Devil and were the enemies of God, Church and Christian belief. Jews were inspired by the inspired by the Devil and were enemies of God, Church and Christian belief, so obviously Jews were heretics! A tradition of classing Jews as heretics began in this period and continued for centuries: Luther, for example, declared the baptism of Jews to be a “return to their natural religion” (p.175).

Church theory demurred, of course, since Jews were not, and never had been, Christians so could not be heretics. But, as per normal, the moral dynamics overrode the niceties of doctrine (p.176).

Sometimes, Jews made their own situation worse. In 1232, an orthodox Jewish group in Montpellier enlisted Dominican assistance in suppressing the ideas of Maimonedes, asking them to proceed against Jewish heretics in the same way that, as agents of the Inquisition, they proceeded against Christian heretics. Through this opened door came much more restrictive Church control of Jewish publication, leading to the burning of thousands of Jewish books: a campaign against the Talmud in particular was unleashed that continue to the modern era (Pp178-9).

Inquisitorial powers were used against Jews in response to the various standard anti-Jewish accusations, leading to burnings of Jews at the stake: the power and procedures of the Inquisition making guilty verdicts somewhat more likely. As part of the process of publicly identifying the enemies of the Church, this period also saw the introduction of compulsory “Jew badges” (p.180).

One of the marks of this campaign of hate was something that has been a staple of Jew-hatred—the claim that Jews are full of hate (Pp181ff). ‘Projection’ I believe psychologists call it. Jews were presumed to be the allies of any outside enemies of Christendom, since they hated Christian and Christianity so (p.183): another staple accusation of Jew-hatred.

Being cast as enemies of the Christian community, it was presumed that Jews were eager conspirators with enemies of Christendom, or merely of “Christians like us”. Such notions were not entirely baseless: Jews did assist the Zoroastrian Persians and later the Muslims against the Eastern Romans and the Muslims against the Visigothic kingdom. But since the Eastern Roman Empire and the Visigothic Kingdom had been highly persecutory in their treatment of Jews, this was hardly to be wondered at. But that the Jews might have legitimate complaints was ruled out of consideration and the accusations—following the logic of their underlying moral dynamic—operated way beyond actual evidence. Hence followers of Simon de Montfort despoiled the Jews of London on the grounds they were plotting with the royalists (p.184). Enemies were constantly put in the same category as Jews or labelled as Jews: thus, Lutherans were accused of being Jews (p.186).

This was particularly ludicrous as Luther’s reaction to the Jews was much the same as Muhammad’s and the early Church: confident (even arrogant) expectation that they would recognise his ideas as completing their own tradition followed by excoriation when they (clearly, entirely wilfully) failed to do so (p.217). (Though Luther did not go as far as Muhammad’s killing the men of two Jewish tribes and selling their women and children into slavery.) But, as ever, the accusations represented manifestations of the framings of the accusers: not the beliefs and practices of the hated.

The issue of usury displayed with particular force the way Christian framings got the Jews coming and going. Church doctrine banned Christian practice of usury. This, for a while, gave Jews a commercial advantage in moneylending: doing something that was both useful and condemned. With the rise of Christian competitors, Jews lost their utility, gained Christian competitors eager to squeeze them out but retained the damning association with the added burden of providing Christian rulers a quick way to liquidate debts by liquidating their creditors. Edward I’s expulsion of the Jews was a boon to the royal exchequer: a process not confined to Jews but which regularly included them (p.189).

For Jews suffered the particular taint of usury. Once usury was also associated with heresy by the Church (in a 1257 bull by Pope Alexander IV), it reinforced the taint of heresy on the Jews (p.191). Christian usury even became treated as a form of “Judaizing” (Pp191-2). Usury became diabolic, reinforcing the notion of Jews as the people of the Devil (Pp192ff).

Heresies came and went, crushed (until the Reformation) by the Inquisition and the efforts of the preaching orders (who typically also ran the Inquisition). The enduring Jew suffered the enduring taint of heresy (p.196). With the rise of the campaign against sorcery and witchcraft, Jews as people of the Devil gained further entrenchment. Heresy was regarded as the work of the Devil, since only such maleficent origins could explain turning away from the obvious truth of the Faith (p.199). Sorcery was also the work of the Devil. By natural association, witchcraft became a form of heresy. (Trachtenberg briefly wanders off into Margaret Murray’s fantasies [Pp201ff], but that still had some scholarly credence at the time.) With the Jews, as the people of the Devil, becoming heretics, sorcerers, usurers: the embodiment of all the negative qualities that the Church’s framings of rejection created. The result was that:

The mythical Jew, outlined by early Christian theology and ultimately puffed out to impossible proportions, supplanted the real Jew in the medieval mind, until the real Jew to all intents and purposes ceased to exist. The only Jew who the medieval Christian recognized was a figment of the imagination (p.216)

A framing that the Reformation gave no respite from: Luther being an enthusiastic proponent of Jew-hatred.

All of which, of course, prepared the ground for the fictitious Jew of more modern anti-Semitism. Trachtenberg concludes by briefly pointing out that the rise of anti-Christian anti-Semitism provided no relief, since it just recast the myth of the demonic Jew—motivated by a lust for power, gold and hate for Gentiles—in new language with a new “demonology” of international finance and international communism. Indeed, (though Trachtenberg does not make this point) it was made worse since its “scientific” basis meant that the Christian path for Jewish redemption (conversion) was no longer open.

Trachtenberg’s book is a study of hatred, with Jews figuring almost entirely as victims. But, in a sense, that is entirely fair enough since nothing actual Jews actually did or believed even remotely justified the level and forms of demonization that was heaped upon them. Indeed, the disconnect between the reality of Judaism and Jews from the hateful framings projected upon them is the heart of the phenomenon Trachtenberg analyses. Which means Trachtenberg’s study illuminates rather more than just the travails of the Jews.

One of the enduring problems in Holocaust studies is that Jews were not the only victims of Nazi social purification-by-slaughter. Nor have the Nazis been the only regime to engage in such purification-by-slaughter. Nor was the Nazi policy as systematic as has often been implied or alleged.

And yet, the history of Jew-hatred in Christendom remains deeply revealing about the processes of demonization: of how people-as-they-are become submerged by framings of people-as-they-are-imagined-to-be. Of how such framings need to be understood in terms of the premises and situations of the framers, with those so framed being projected into those framings. How the will-to-believe trumps how the hated actually are. But beings of common humanity cannot fulfil the role such framings require, so of course they have to be re-imagined. If they are re-imagined enough, the reality of them can disappear entirely. And then, they can perform any role those wishing them to want: including demonic things in human form whose elimination is “necessary”.

The Holocaust was not inevitable: but the long history of massacres of Jews demonstrate just where the Christian framings of “the Jew” naturally led. Where all such demonizations risk ending up. The history of Christian demonization of Jews that Trachtenberg conveys with such scholarly passion in The Devil and the Jews remains a profoundly cautionary tale precisely because it is not even remotely the only such tale.

About being a touch sceptical about Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW)

I tend to be somewhat sceptical about CAGW, and even more resistant to the moral bullying that comes with it. There are several reasons for this.

(1) Teasing. A lot of people seem awfully certain about such matters, and such certainty is fun to prod.

(2) Resistance. I am a gay man of classically liberal orientation. The minute people start shouting at me that I have to believe something, it gets my back up. Particularly when the list of things “caused” by global warming/climate change has long since become ludicrous. Not to mention all the fun with the ever-moving ice-free Arctic prediction, and so on.

(3) Incivility. There is a lot of bullying involved in the support for CAGW and it is worth quietly resisting it. Or not so quietly, when adherents begin to stray into some politically very nasty territory. And some scientifically dubious ones, as retired climatologist Tim Ball comments in the context of the hacked CRU emails.

(4) Track record. I have seen these tactics before—the self-righteous certainty, the demonising of dissent. They never lead to good places. Particularly for public policy. Indeed, my experience from these sorts of tactics from folk of the associated ideological bent, is that they are more or less guaranteed to get things wrong in a major way, from Cold War policy, to education, to indigenous policy, to environmental policy (notably land use and water), to economic reform … The problem is precisely the cognitive blockages the tactics arise from and encourage. If you have to support X to be a “good person”, then any attempt to show, or even suggest, not-X is immediately ruled out of consideration regardless of the evidence. Monocultures are dangerous, particularly cognitive monocultures which, as this post points out, in by far the best comment I have seen on the CRU emails, is the real story of those emails.
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(5) Too much of not-how-science-should-be-done. This is connected to (3) and (4) but is nicely expressed in this post on the hostility to dissent involved. His point that:

One suspects that a reason more people are skeptical of alarmist predictions is that they know enough about human behavior to distrust someone who claims to be correct but refuses to respond to or even allow questions or replication

is particularly pertinent.

(6) Qualms about the science. These include the IPCC’s remarkably silly economic modelling and issues about long-term CO2 and temperature patterns, the relatively quick saturation of the narrow wavelengths on which CO2 blocks heat, dubious CO2 in the atmosphere longevity estimates, the long-term pattern of negative feedbacks in the atmosphere, the mixed nature of warming effects, the difficulties in the temperature record, and so on. This is without even getting to the nonsense of the climate models. It is also noticeable that critics and proponents tend to talk past each other. It is much easier to get to some anthropogenic effects than to “these dominate” and “the best approach is to cut emissions” (particularly if you believe the IPCC’s assumptions about CO2 longevity). That the problematic items in the IPCC’s projections are all dubious in the same direction is a big warning sign. At its most basic, here are some simple questions:
1: What percentage of the atmosphere is CO2?

2: By how much did it warm 1900 to 2000?
(Using 5 year moving averages)
3: By how much did it warm 1979 to 1998?
(Using 13 month moving averages)
4: By how much has it warmed since 1998? ?
(Using 13 month moving averages)
5. What % of atmospheric CO2 comes from human sources?
6. What share of the atmosphere is that?
(0.04%, 0.65oC, 0.6oC, -0.2oC, 5%, 15ppm or 0.0015%: a video presents what 15ppm means) A post like this has become sadly striking in its calm sensibleness. When even the BBC is now admitting that “the scientific debate is over” crap is crap (as it always was), the problems in the science are surely no longer deniable.

(7) History. CAGW does remind me awfully strongly of eugenics. Something based on the “best science” that all the “great and the good” just had to support. (Indeed, with the demonising of “denialism” it is beginning to look a bit like the witch-craze, which was also supported by the great and the good.) Then there is the see-saw nature of climate alarmism (a young Steven Schneider, now friend and advisor to Al Gore, can be seen worrying about coming ice age here). More generally, CAGW is both an obvious gravy train and allows a whole lot of pre-existing agendas that failed on the basis of their previous “we must follow this!” levers another life. It’s sheer ideological convenience is suspect. Not to mention the commercial convenience it has now developed.

(8) Policy Implications. Ian Callinan AC QC put it well (pdf):

Emissions regulation offers government an irresistible opportunity to centralize and control every aspect of our lives; on our roads, on our travels, in our workplaces, on our farms, in our forests and our mines, and, more threateningly, in our homes, constructed as they will be compelled to be, of very specific materials and of prescribed sizes. It is not difficult to foresee a diktat as to how many lights we may turn on and when we must turn them off: the great curfew. The new regime has the capacity to make the wartime National Security Regulations look like a timid exercise of government restraint.

If the issue is so desperately important, then clearly desperate measures are “required”. It is also worth noting that CAGW takes attention away from other environmental issues.

On a lighter note, the best comment on global warming I have seen for a long time:

I love hot weather. But now climate experts are suggesting that there may be one or two decades of cold weather before the heat arrives Great, so I get to suffer the adverse economic consequences of futilely trying to stave off global warming, only to drop dead right before it warms up. And I live in Boston.

The Origins of English Individualism

For years, people have been recommending that I read The Origins of English Individualism by Alan Macfarlane. Well, I finally did and yes, it is a classic study, well worth reading. Even though I was a little irritated at the beginning, with the tired academic squeamishness where Western sins are very real but Western achievements get the shudder-quote treatment.

The author was studying witchcraft trials in post-medieval England and came across some puzzling results – a lack of sexual and food-and-hunger motifs in the confessions (common in witchcraft trials elsewhere in Europe); the very individualistic outlook of suspects (also notably different from trials on the Continent); the lack of attacks on rising folk, rather those accused were slightly poorer folk making demands on their neighbours (i.e. witchcraft accusations reinforced economic differentiation rather than attacking it, a far more normal pattern). Then he turned to sexual and marital relations in the same period where he found the English seemed singularly unconcerned about incest. Indeed, compared to even Mediterranean societies in the same period, kinship didn’t seem very important, parents didn’t exert much control over marriage and relations between the sexes were unusually relaxed.

I love studies that start with an empirical puzzle.
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What he found is that post-medieval England lacked a classic peasantry – that is, multi-generation households farming household land under the direction of a patriarch. Instead, you had individual ownership of land, a highly mobile populace, children leaving home when teenagers (even eldest sons) and (a dead give-away) female ownership of ordinary land. There was also an active land market, an active rural labour market and personal wills disposing of land. These are unnecessary in a society where land is collectively owned by the household – there land is typically reassigned to balance household numbers, children and younger siblings provide the labour force and land is family-owned so not up for testamentory disposal.

If ‘capitalism’ is individual ownership with an active markets in capital (including land), then England was ‘capitalist’ well before the Industrial Revolution.

So, when did the English peasantry disappear?

Macfarlane examines the evidence carefully (England is one of the best historically-documented off all human societies, rivalled only by Japan and bits of Europe) right back to 1200. With some caveats for local variations, Macfarlane could find no evidence that England ever had a peasantry in the classic sense. As far back as he was able to go, he found individual ownership, active land and rural labour markets, mobile populations. England – the rural society without a peasantry.

Macfarlane can offer no explanation of English exceptionalism, though he does cite a passage from Tacitus about Germans having very individualist property arrangements. I was reminded of something I had read in The Year 1000:

Thirty wills survive today from the late Anglo-Saxon period and ten of those are the wills of women (p.164).

Fernand Braudel makes similar comments about trying to find when capitalism started in England and being unable to find a period when there weren’t strong capitalist elements.

MacFarlane also found period commentary on how the English were richer than people on the Continent, and more assertive and acquisitive, something which gels with other evidence about relative living standards and high levels of social mobility. (In fact, a lot of the period Continental commentary on the English sounds much like what one reads today about Americans, and there are certain similarities also between period English commentary on Continentals with some current-day American commentary on Europeans.) American exceptionalism starts with English exceptionalism. A great read.

Witchcraft

It took me a while to finish Witchcraft in Europe: 400-1700. Reading through primary sources is something that I find I can only do in spurts. The pieces tend to the wordy, which can be good for helping one go to sleep. Which is not to say I did other than appreciate the book greatly. The short lead-in commentaries were intelligent, helpful and informed. The pieces themselves were great insights into what people thought and did, though the misogyny becomes wearing after a while. Wow, what weird things people believed and acted upon. And we are talking the intellectual elite here – such substantial intellectual figures as Jean Bodin (Pp290-302).

What is also striking is how relatively quickly the mass persecutions arose, and then later died away. The ‘Witch Craze’ itself starts in the mid-C15th and is dying rapidly in the late C17th. Some of the stories are remarkable – the persecutions in Spain were essentially ended by the dissident reports of an Inquisitor, Alonso de Salazar Frias, in 1610-14, arguing that the treatment of evidence was very bad and making a series of recommendations. Which the Spanish Inquisition’s ruling tribunal basically adopted as instructions to all Inquisitors. Once proper evidentiary procedures were enforced, the whole thing died away in Spain (Pp407-418).

But it definitely helps if you don’t think too much about the human misery and suffering that underlies it all – in Latin Christendom, about 50,000 people were killed (p.17), often burnt alive, often after appalling torture, from C13th to the C18th for witchcraft. One Johannes Junius, a burgomeister, who "confessed" to witchcraft and was burnt, smuggled out this letter to his daughter (his hands were so severely crippled it took him several days to write the letter).
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Letter of Johannes Junius, Burgomeister of Bamberg, to his daughter Veronica, 1628

Many hundred thousand good-nights, dearly beloved daughter Veronica. Innocent have I come into prison, innocent have I been tortured, innocent must I die. For whatever comes into the witch prison must become a witch or be tortured until he invents something out of his head and—God pity him—bethinks him of something.

I can tell you how it has come with me. When I was the first time put to the torture, Dr. Braun, Dr. Kotzendorffer , and two strange doctors were there. Then Dr. Braun asks me, "Kinsman, how come you here?" I answer, "Through falsehood, through misfortune." "Hear, you," he says, "you are a witch; will you confess it voluntarily? If not, we’ll bring in witnesses and the executioner for you." I said "I am not witch, I have a pure conscience in the matter; if there are a thousand witnesses, I am not anxious, but I’ll gladly hear the witnesses." Now the chancellor’s son was set before me…and afterwards Hoppfens Elsse. She had seen me dance on Haupts-Moor…I answered: "I have never renounced God and will never do it—God graciously keep me from doing it. I’ll rather hear whatever I must." And then came also—God in highest Heaven, have mercy—the executioner, and put the thumb-screws on me, both hands bound together, so that blood ran out at the nails and everywhere, so that for four weeks I could not use my hands, as you can see from the writing…Thereafter they first stripped me, bound my hands behind me, and drew me up in the torture. Then I thought heaven and earth were at an end; eight times did they draw me up and let me fall again, so that I suffered terrible agony…

And this happened on Friday, June 30, and with God’s help I had to bear that torture…When at last the executioner led me back into the prison, he said to me: "Sir, I beg you, for God’s sake confess something, whether it be true or not. Invent something, for you cannot endure the torture which you’ll be put to; and even if you bear it all, yet you will not escape, not if you were an earl, but one torture will follow another until even you say you are a witch. Not before that," he said, "will they let you go, as you may see by all their trials, for one is just like another…"

And so I begged, since I was in wretched plight, to be given one day for thought and a priest. The priest was refused me, but the time for thought was given. Now, my dear child, see in what hazard I stood and still stand. I must say that I am a witch, though I am not,—must now renounce God, though I have never done it before. Day and night I was deeply troubled, but at last there came to me a new idea. I would not be anxious, but, since I have been given no priest with whom I could take counsel, I would myself think of something and say it. It were surely better that I just say it with mouth and words, even though I had not really done it, and afterwards I would confess to the priest, and let those answer for it who compel me to do it…And so I made my confession, as follows; but I was all a lie.

Now follows, dear child, what I confessed in order to escape the great anguish and bitter torture, which was impossible for me longer to bear…

[paraphrases his confession]

Then I had to tell what people I had seen. I said that I had not recognised them. "You old rascal, I must set the executioner at you. Say—was not the Chancellor there?" So I said yes. "Who besides?" I had not recognised anybody. So he said, "Take one street after another, begin at the market, go out on one street and back on the next." I had to name eight persons there. Then came the Zinkenwert—one person more. Then over to the upper bridge to the Georgthor, on both sides. Knew nobody again. Did I know nobody in the castle—whoever it might be. I should speak without fear. And thus continuously they asked me on all the streets, though I could not and would not say more. So they gave me to the executioner, told him to strip me, shave me all over, and put me to the torture. "The rascal know one on the market-place, is with him daily, and yet won’t name him." By that they meant Dietmayer, so I had to name him too.

Then I had to tell what crimes I had committed. I said nothing…"Draw the rascal up!" So I said that I was to kill my children, but I had killed a horse instead. It did not help. I had also taken a sacred wafter, and had desecrated it. When I said this, they left me in peace.

Now, dear child, here you have all my confession, for which I must die. And they are sheer lies and made-up things, so help me God. For all this I was forced to say through fear of the torture which was threatened beyond what I had already endured. For they never leave off with the torture till one confesses something; be he never so good, he must be a witch. Nobody escapes, though he were an earl…

Dear child, keep this letter secret so that people do not find it, else I shall be tortured most piteously and the jailers will be beheaded. So strictly is it forbidden…Dear child, pay this man a dollar…I have taken several days to write this: my hand are both lame. I am in a sad plight.

Good night, for your father Johannese Junius will never see you more.
July 24, 2628.

[Written in margin] Dear child, six have confessed against me at once: the Chancellor, his son, Neudecker, Zaner, Hoffmaisters Urself, and Hoppfens Elsse—all false, through compulsion, as they have all told me, and begged my forgiveness in God’s name before they were executed…They know nothing but good of me. They were forced to say it, just as I myself was

Mayor Junius was convicted and burnt at the stake.

Modern resonance
The techniques and dynamics remind me most of Stalin’s purges. Indeed, Norman Cohn makes the excellent point (p.89 of Europe’s Inner Demons) that the example of Stalin’s show trials should make it easier to see it was all nonsense. In both cases, the confessions only make sense as inversions of the ideology of the accusers. But then most of the modern techniques of totalitarianism – censorship (Index of Prohibited Books), heresy hunts (Inquisition), propaganda (Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith), show trials (auto de fe), agitprop (preaching friars), population culls (Albigensian Crusade) – were pioneered by the Church. If you claim to have the Truth for the complete moral ordering of society based on such ultimate authority that dissent from the same is wicked – plus have the appropriate set of causal explanations and possess the institutional power to back your claim – there are certain inherent dynamics which follow and will tend to work themselves out: particularly if they become useful weapons in power struggles.

It also helps to understand the Stalinist resonance if we understand the implications of Lenin Jacobinising Marxism. In Lenin's words and emphasis:

A Jacobin who wholly identifies himself with the organization of the proletariat—a proletariat conscious of its class interests—is a revolutionary Social Democrat

. The entire Soviet enterprise was an expression of self-declared beneficent, revolutionary will. Therefore, clearly opposing will was possible (indeed, a ready explanation for anything going wrong, since the Bolsheviks had the key to history, so clearly any failures were a result of malign intent). Hence Lenin's enthusiasm for capital punishment. Leninism came with a ready-made demonology, even more than Marxism proper.

Witchcraft accusations have a further totalitarian confluence. In many societies, accusations of witchcraft are typically levelled against those more successful than their neighbours. They become devices for systematically and brutally selecting against innovation and extra effort. Which is what happened with “kulak” and “hoarder” accusations in the Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mengistu’s Ethiopia, Ho’s North Vietnam, Mao’s China, and so on.

(My favourite quote on totalitarianism as a concept is Peter Berger’s pre-1989 observation concerning

the persistent incapacity of even American professors to grasp a difference understood by every taxi driver in Prague.

The complaints about ‘totalitarian’ not being "predictive" strike me as particularly otiose: are the concepts of monarchy, democracy and dictatorship ‘predictive’ in that sense?)

Ironically, Marx himself endorsed some of the long tradition of conspiracy-mongering, citing alleged research to show that early Christians really had ritually slaughtered children. (As Cohn demonstrates, early Christians were subject to similar accusations by outraged pagans as those later Christians made against witches.)

Historical development
Cohn is very useful to read in conjunction with Witchcraft. He points out that peasant lynchings for witchcraft had occurred for centuries. What was needed to get the mass persecutions going was for officialdom to get in on the act. This was a process that occurred slowly.

Attitudes to Satan changed: Satan evolved from bumbling lesser being to God’s powerful enemy. Sorcery also became equated with heresy. St Thomas Aquinas was one of the important thinkers in this process, since scholastic philosophy provided a complete theoretical and causal structure for such views, even though sorcery itself was a minor element in St Thomas’s work. (Indeed, scholasticism as a complete systematised ontology, epistemology, ethic and causal analysis was unrivalled until the development of Marxism.)

Particularly after the 1231 agreement between Emperor Frederick II and Pope Gregory IX formalised laws for the suppression of ‘heretical depravity’, the developing Inquisition provided a jurisdictional apparatus available for enforcement of such beliefs, replacing the episcopal (bishop-run) inquisition, established in 1184 at the Verona Synod by Pope Lucius III with the support of Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa, with a more centralised and professional papal inquisition.

The removal of the ‘talion’, penalties for false accusation, from witchcraft trials by the use of inquisitorial, rather than accusatory, procedures opened the door to snowballing accusations. Once the belief in the sabbat – large gatherings of witches to worship the Devil – became part of educated belief, it plus inquisitorial torture was enough to set off the mass persecutions.

Endorsements by Popes Alexander IV (1258), John XXII (1326), Pope Alexander V (1409) of the evils of sorcery; an opinion by the authoritative Theology Faculty of the University of Paris linking ‘learned’ ritual magic with popular sorcery as both being diabolic (1398); the activities of popular preachers such as St Bernardino of Siena (1420s): these culminated in Pope Eugenius IV letters to inquisitors (1434, 1437) and the mass persecutions were away, holding Latin (Catholic and Protestant) Christendom in its grip until for the next two-and-half centuries, though the last witch burnings were as late as the 1780s. The 1487 publication of the Malleus Maleficarum provided the ‘encyclopedia’ for the Witch Craze, which was actually notably more virulent in the post-medieval period than in its original late-medieval manifestation. More jurisdictionally important was Pope Innocent VIII’s 1484 Bull Summis desiderantes affectibus, as it brought together the whole set of beliefs in one authoritative document.

There were three groups most commonly burnt alive in Latin Christendom: sodomites, witches and heretics – defilers of body, soul and mind. If you were accused of one, you were quite likely to be accused of another. Indeed, the witch persecutions clearly grew out of heresy persecutions, particularly of the Waldensians. That the Church examined, tortured and condemned before handing over to the civil power for execution (except where it was itself the civil power) was simply a vile manifestation of the squabbling alliance of Church and warlord that post-classical Western civilisation was built on. The witch burnings were the last to get underway, but also the last to end (though execution by hanging for sodomy extended into the C19th).

Johannes Junius stands in for a very large number of victims indeed.