The Unity of Philosophical Experience (1)

Etienne Gilson’s The Unity of Philosophical Experience is not as great an achievement as his God and Philosophy. Unity lacks the clarity of exposition of the later book.

Gilson’s thesis is that attempting to use some other discipline as a driver of philosophy always ends in failure. He argues this thesis by examining the history of Western philosophy from Abelard to the early C20th.

Abelard himself is his first example: the attempt to use logic as the basis and moulding form of philosophy. Not as a tool of philosophy but as the determinative basis. This, unsurprisingly, turned out to be a dead end.

Gilson then moves on to theology as the basis (or perhaps the supplanter) of philosophy, starting with the example of Al Ghazali noting that al Ghazali, Malebranche and Cotton Mather all end up denying causality except as a manifestation of the will of God because of their theologistic philosophical presumptions (p.38).

Gilson argues that there is a persistent pattern. A philosopher develops an approach to philosophy and reaches some unwelcome consequences. His disciplines, using this thought as their starting point, confess their necessary consequences. People come to realise they can only be dealt with by shifting presumptions. The school then dies. Until, sometime later, the old ideas are stated in a new way and the whole cycle begins again (Pp47-8).

Being an unabashed admirer of Aquinas, Gilson does not apply this analysis to his thought, arguing, in effect, that Aquinas treated philosophy with true seriousness as a thing in itself, giving theology and logic their due but not more than their due. I have expressed elsewhere the problems I have with Aquinas’s metaphysical epistemology and his normative essentialism, but whether they manifest philosophy giving way to theology (as distinct from being convenient to theology) is a moot point.

Gilson does make a very striking observation about the implications of metaphysics for political thought:

Begotten in us by things themselves, concepts are born reformers that never lose touch with reality. Pure ideas, on the other hand, are born within the mind and from the mind, not as an intellectual expression of what is, but as models, or patterns, of what ought to be: hence they are born revolutionists. And this is the reason Aristotle and Aristotelians write books on politics, whereas Plato and Platonists always write Utopias (Pp54-5)

Without buying into the full Thomist epistemological confidence Gilson displays, this grasps something important. Utopias are, after all, wars against people-as-they-are in the name of people–as-they-are-deemed-to-ought-to-be. What is that but the trumping of people-as-experienced by people-as-imagined? The very strong and persistent element of unreality in left-progressivist thought that people note again and again clearly comes from the insistence of the trumping moral purity of their vision over inconvenient elements of grubby reality. Hence their fairly dire policy record (in indigenous policy, environmental policy, educational policy, in the humanities, etc) which is currently playing out in the climate science scandals: scandals that are a manifestation of a shared saviour complex leading to “good cause” advocacy substituting for proper processes that have a more humble view of human cognitive frailty and epistemic limitations. The “purity” of their vision trumping the grubby reality of human frailty. Indeed, the demands of elementary courtesy and moral behaviour. At its worst, it leads to a crippled epistemology (pdf) that effectively bars good policy from happening.
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Indeed, my criticism of Aquinas is that, in effect, he is not “Aristotelian” enough. That he has too much confidence that our ideas of things are directly connected to what is in the world: particularly in our conceptions of the “proper” form of things, as distinct from the actual nature of things. Hence Thomism justifying its own versions of wars against people-as-they-are in the name of people-as-they-are-deemed-to-ought-to-be (in belief, in faith, in sexuality …).

After Aquinas comes William of Ockham, him of the famous razor. He denied the existence of universals, of forms in the Aristotelian sense, dividing knowledge into the intuitive (direct experience) and abstract, the latter of which cannot show the existence (or non-existence) of anything specific (Pp54ff), thereby prefiguring the direction of much modern philosophy. Gilson argues that William of Ockham was an example of psychologism with his notion that:

… to give a psychological analysis of human knowledge was to give a philosophical analysis of reality (p.69).

A view that was to turn up in various permutations in modern philosophy to this day. That William of Ockham’s analysis of causality was very similar to Hume’s Gilson has no trouble demonstrating:

In both doctrines, nothing was left but empirical sequences of facts outside the mind, and habitual associations within the mind, the mere external frame of a world carefully emptied of its intelligibility.
Such a result is inevitable and will always occur whenever a philosopher mistakes the empirical description of our ways of knowing for a correct description of reality itself (p.71)

Which Gilson is having none of:

Psychologism consists in demanding that psychology answer philosophical questions. Psychology is a science: psychologism is a sophism: it substitutes the definition for the defined, the description for the described, the map for the country (p.72)

There is some affinity here to the philosophy of Richard Rorty, where truth is not a specific connection to reality but rather a general feature of being “useful” so that one is never defining reality, merely navigating it.

By the C14th, students of philosophy were confronted with a range of theologies on offer, which all could not be true (but all could be false). Confronted with this confusing complexity, a retreat into scripture and the imitation of Christ was the obvious option and one well underway before Luther took it beyond the limits of Catholic doctrine. Moralism—“practical ethics”—arose as a response to the arid debates of the scholastics: the moralism of scripture or the moralism of human experience. Gilson uses Nicolas of Autrecourt as an example of the first and Petrarch (“the first modern man”) of the latter.

Meister Eckhart applies the techniques of philosophy to deny knowledge—both our knowledge of God and even God’s knowledge of Himself, so the only avenue left is the mystical connection of the divine spark within us to the otherwise unknowable God (Pp85ff). An approach which, when applied as a philosophical method, had profoundly sceptical implications. For the true work of philosophy is to learn what we do not know: Richard Rorty, here we come!

All this distrust of Scholastic philosophy did not actually create a new philosophical system. That distinction belongs to Descartes, the thinker who is usually taken be the start of modern philosophy, the man who sought not to criticise Aristotle but to replace him (p.99).

Gilson argues that Descartes was specifically responding to the scepticism of Montaigne. A scepticism which was a reaction to the horrors of the wars of religion and the explosion in new knowledge coming from Europe’s bursting out into the globe: Gilson notes the first point but not the second. Certainly, Montaigne’s sceptical conservatism has a great deal of similarity with that of David Hume (also a noted essayist).

Descartes may start with Montaigne’s scepticism, but he does not end there. The certain knowledge of mathematics (of which Descartes was a gifted practitioner and pioneer, the inventor of Cartesian geometry which combines algebra with geometry) seemed a light in the gloom of scepticism that offered only negative wisdom. Indeed, geometry and mathematics seemed to the high road to knowledge itself: the standard by which all else must be measured.

Having applied algebra to geometry to great—and certain—effect, Descartes proceeded to apply mathematical methods to physics and philosophy. What could be a better buttress against scepticism than knowledge built on certainty? Hence cogito ergo sum. All sciences were one, unified by a common method therefore unified (ultimately) by the method of mathematics.

Some may think that the problem is not the lack of certainty but thinking in absolutes, as if there is nothing between certainty and scepticism. (This is surely Sir Karl Popper’s problem with his claim there is no verification, only falsification: that there is no mere probably true just those things not yet shown to be certainly false.) But not for Descartes, who had found the method and proceeded to attempt to apply it in a unified way to all science: mathematics had become mathematicism and, on the way through, ended his own career as a mathematician as his project consumed him while mathematics proceeded on.

While Gilson is not always as clear as he might be, his discussion of Descartes is generally pellucid and perceptive:

Yet names have a dreadful power of suggestion. They are invitations to deal in the same way with what we call by the same name. By calling “universal mathematics” a method, which had been abstracted from geometry, algebra and logic, Descartes was pledging himself to the task of making all problems “almost similar to those of mathematics”, as if the extreme simplicity of the object of mathematics was not partly responsible for the evidence of their conclusions (p.114).

Indeed, I would go further. That mathematics is a misleading model for even such a related discipline as logic precisely because mathematics applies only to very specific objects—numbers and other objects of structure and pattern. Thus, its reasoning applies to things whose referents have precise and patterned boundaries which interact in very specific ways.

Logic applies to anything at all, so its referents lack such intrinsic orderings. Hence the capacity to create logical paradoxes, a problem that gets worse the more logic pretends to be like mathematics. To put it another way, mathematics has such an ordered semantics that it can be an entirely formal syntactical system. Lacking such ordered semantics, the more logic aspires to be purely formal in its syntactical operations, the more its reach exceeds its grasp. From this overreach do logical paradoxes arise.

But if the methods of mathematics are problematic for so close a discipline as logic, how more so must they be for sciences that move further and further way from the study of structure and pattern qua structure and pattern?

Gilson notes that:

… our abstract notions validly apply to what they keep of reality, not what they leave out (Pp114-5).

Analysts engage in simplifying abstractions from reality in order to make it amenable to analysis. To discover, for example, that the general equilibrium model of economics is very much like the evolutionary stable states of evolutionary biology is a striking manifestation of the use of abstraction in analysis of dynamic systems of living agents. Conversely, the class analysis of Marxism does not work, as class does not order human behaviour in the way it claims. In particular, it confuses common (as in similar) patterns of action with common (as in collective) action, so fails to grip reality. Firms could not exist if capital was not in competition with capital and labour was not in competition with labour. (Indeed, the power of unions rests on excluding labour competition, aka ‘scabs’.)

Descartes wanted to abstract to concepts so simple that they would work in the same way as the ordered semantics of mathematics. Needless to say, this did not prove fruitful. Even in cogito ergo sum, thought is not really a simple thing. But his system—trying to get the ordered simplicity of mathematics to be the universal method—required base simplicity and so ideas that existed in themselves, apart from the vagaries of human cognition. Ending up with a physics of pure ideas separated from empirical reality. Descartes defending Harvey’s discovery of circulation of blood and then attempting to “explain it” to its discoverer was something of a reductio of his approach (Pp118-9).

As to cogito ergo sum, St Augustine had already made the same point to defeat scepticism, argue for the existence of God and the soul (as did Descartes) but took it no further because, Gilson suggests, there was no further to take it to (Pp126-7).

In his attempt to extend mathematical certainty across the realm of human knowledge, Descartes attempted to demonstrate the existence of the world: something so evident no one had attempted to do that before. Alas, Descartes was trying to prove the evident by the standards of certainty. Having failed to do so, the way was open for a new form of all-embracing scepticism (which, after all, merely required setting certainty as the required standard and demonstrating that it had not been reached).

Leibniz, Spinoza and Malebranche perceived Descartes had failed in his effort and, rather than critiquing the question and approach, started where Descartes had ended with mind, matter and God. They all finished trying to use God to explain everything (p.147).

Cartesian physics fared even worse than Cartesian metaphysics, conspicuously failing to be compatible with Newton’s discoveries. A striking failure: not even a particularly useful failure. Cartesian metaphysics turned causality into a problem to which Malebranche and Hume responded with similar destructive scepticism (Pp166ff). The failure of Descartes’ attempt to mathematicise philosophy is, for Gilson, expressed in the career of Hume for:

what was Hume, after all, but a sad Montaigne (p.176).

From there, it is on to the man who Hume awoke from his “dogmatic slumbers”, Immanuel Kant.

Surveying the failure of Descartes attempt to mathematicise philosophy, one can see how it lead to another great philosopher to write The Critique of Pure Reason. Confronted with the failure of metaphysics, and the triumph of physics, Kant aimed to use the latter to limit the damage from the former (p.180). Kant specifically held that the imitation of mathematics in reasoning about matters to which it was not suited was dangerous (p.181). Instead, he took his inspiration from the achievement of Newton and applied the methods of physics to philosophy (p.183). The system Kant outlines in The Critique of Pure Reason Gilson argues is a fine exposition of the cognitive apparatus for a Newtonian account of the world: which means that it is entirely tied to the rise and fall of such an account (Pp184-5). As Gilson describes them, Kant’s sensibility and understanding seem rather similar to Aquinas’s imagination and intellect. A priori forms of knowledge were the means of escaping from Humean scepticism based on pure empiricism. Gilson summarises Kant’s project as:

By thus shifting from experience to the intellectual conditions of experience, Kant hoped to achieve a threefold result: first, to rescue science from scepticism; secondly, to rid metaphysics of its pretensions to the title of objective knowledge; thirdly, to make it clear that though a mere illusion, metaphysics was an inevitable illusion (p.186).

In responding to Hume, Kant adapted the response of Rousseau:

Hume’s scepticism was the embodiment of reason as destructive of the very principles of philosophical knowledge and morality. Rousseau’s passionate appeal to feeling, and to moral conscience, against the natural blindness of reason, was to Kant the revelation of a wholly independent and self-contained order of morality (p.187)

For:

Failing a rational justification of morality, and granting that morality is inseperable from human life, there is nothing else to do but to take morality as a self-justifying fact … When after cutting loose from metaphysics, ethics begins to dictate its own metaphysics, moralism begins to appear on the scene. The Kantian principle of the primacy of practical reason is a clear case of moralism, one of the classical escapes from scepticism for those who despair of philosophy (p.187)

So Stephen Hicks’ analysis of Kant as the ultimate intellectual source of post-modernism seems entirely sound as is Mark Lilla’s analysis of Kant as being concerned to rescue faith from the corrosions of scepticism:

By adopting Rousseau’s moral feeling, Kant was obligating himself to accept Rousseau’s natural theology, as rationally unjustifiable but morally necessary (p.187).

But, as Hicks points out, post-modernism is all about faith. (One of the nicer quips about the path of Western thought I have heard—from a female Catholic theologian—was that medievalism was faith-with-reason, the Enlightenment was reason-without-faith and post-modernism is faith-without-reason.) For post-modernism is what happens when modernist faith in the harmonious future (for the radical Enlightenment was actually all about faith: specifically the faith in a glorious future from a transformed humanity coming from the application of reason) has itself failed and the post-modernist is left with nothing but faith in their own moral rectitude. Hyper-moralism indeed. Moralism is their reality principle, in a collective moral narcissism where political correctness is the detritus of utopian faith: a belief in a harmonious public discourse achieved by banishing, constraining or transforming the disharmonious.

Kant had created:

… a physicalism supplemented by a moralism

whose aim was:

… to satisfy two postulates: the physics of Newton is possible, moral duty is possible. … Kanty never succeeded in giving it an organic unity … Having cut loose from metaphysics, Kantism could not grow within like a tree; because it did not germinate internally, but copied models outside, Kantism could be only a set of mutually unrelated adaptations (p.189)

In particular, the sensibility and the understanding, the man in nature and the man in morality, were profoundly divided yet the same person. Hence, for example, pleasure (which arises from our nature) and duty (which arise from the needs of morality) are incompatible. If reason and metaphysics cannot provide the bridge, then one ends up with mysticism as the only possible bridge. That, Gilson suggests, was where Kant was ending up (p.192).


This will be concluded in my next post.

The Anguish of the Jews (3)

This is the third part of my review of Father Edward H. Flannery’s: The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of Antisemitism a manifestation of Catholic grappling with the Holocaust and its implication, very much in the spirit of Vatican II. The previous parts are here and here.


An age of pogroms
In Russia, as part of his general rejection of his assassinated father’s liberal direction, Alexander III, with his virulently anti-Semitic advisor Pobedonostsev, moved Czarist policy in a clearly anti-Semitic direction which was to be maintained across the reigns of him and his son. Pobedonostev’s alleged formula for solving the “Jewish problem” was for one third to emigrate, one third to die and one third to disappear (convert) (P189-90). In 1881, the first of the pogroms occurred which were to be a mark of Russia until the end of the Civil War.

The greatest exodus in Jewish history got underway, with about 100,000 Jews emigrating each year. The regime intervened to stop the first wave of pogroms in 1882, but Ignatiev proclaimed his “temporary laws” which remained in force until 1914. These narrowed the area of the Pale, forbade leases and mortgages to Jews, banned residence in villages, set up a numerus clausus (educational quota) for Jews, and reduced professional quotas for them (p.190).

So did the tradition of Christian-imposed Jewish dhimmitude continue. It is also worth nothing—in considering the horrific post-Romanov history of Russia—how the Czarist regime pioneered the modern use of mass murder as an instrument of domestic policy. Von Plehve said he would drown revolution in Jewish blood (p.192).

It was in this context that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was first concocted (Pp192-3). The antisemitic wave from Russia proper reverberated in Romania and Russian Poland, but not further (p.194). As Flannery points out, it is in this period that the generalisation that Jews were better off under the Crescent than the Cross breaks down with pogroms in Iran (1831, 1834, 1891), Morocco (1912) and worsening conditions for Yemenite Jews (p.194).

The wave of anti-Semitism in Europe led to the creations of various Jewish defence organisations, hopes that assimilation would overcome it and Zionism as a manifestation of the belief that it would not (Pp194-5). Alas, the first principle of Zionism—that Jews were not safe in Europe—was to be horrifically confirmed.

Jews suffered particularly badly from the Great War of 1914-1919. The anti-Jewish temporary laws were abolished in Russia, and Jews served in Russian armies. Jews were suspected of being pro-German and defeated Russian armies turned on Jews as scapegoats with pogroms, shootings and looting. Jews served loyally in Germany but, again, became scapegoats for defeat. Many Jews became refugees.
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The outbreak of civil war in Russia led to a new wave of slaughter. The prominence of Jews among the Bolshevik leadership (Trotsky, Kamenev, Radek, Zinoviev) fed the scapegoating of Jews:

The fact that Jewish leaders in the revolution were alienated Jews, that they were later liquidated, that the vast majority of Jews in Russia or elsewhere were either Social-Democrats or nonn-Communist had little influence on the course of the charge (p.198).

To the stresses of war and defeat (the victorious Western powers having either few Jews or little anti-Semitism) were added the stresses of new states and the association of Jews, via a small number of highly prominent Jewish Marxists, with revolution. Pogroms, restrictions, expulsions, scapegoating occurred across central and eastern Europe and in the Islamic Middle East. Flannery conveys a real sense of why Jewish rights seemed so urgent after World War One and the attraction of Zionism: the doctrine that Jews were not safe in Europe already had a lot of evidence to support it. Flannery notes how much antisemitism had expanded beyond its religious roots: economic, political, cultural, racial antisemitism flourished (p.203).

Conversely, Jewish emancipation also seemed to be advancing: they were also already beginning their astonishing, and widely disproportionate, Nobel prize successes.

Flannery sees Germany as the prime source of modern antisemitism, the:

… favoured spawning ground of anti-Jewish activity (p.206).

Given the intellectual vigour of Germany, there is something to this. But one has to be careful not to read history backwards. Organised antisemitism had far more political success in Russia, Austria, Rumania than in Germany before the rise of the Nazis.

The shock of the loss of the war, the collapse of the Imperial order and the establishment of a Weimar Republic many had little attachment to left a poorer and disoriented Germany: Jews were blamed for every ill including, via the “stab in the back” myth, the loss of the War itself (Pp206ff). But it took the stress of the Great Depression and the spectre of Leninism to bring Hitler to power. Flannery is so taken by the ubiquity of antisemitism in Nazi ideology that he does not really note what a limited role in played in Nazi electoral success (activist motivation was a somewhat different matter).

Once Hitler had achieved full power, policy had only one direction, however, and that was ever stronger squeeze on Jews. Outbreaks of violence punctuated ever more restrictive “regularisation” of antisemitism, driving Jews out of public life and into ever smaller orbit of private life. A Judenfrei (Jew-free) Reich was sought, something to be achieved by a Endlosung (final solution).

In peacetime Germany, that was some form of expulsion. With the coming of war and Germany’s astonishing conquest success, Nazi Germany was confronted with the same “Jewish problem” as Czarist Russia, the previous conqueror of most of Poland, had faced but on an even bigger scale. Unlike its Czarist predecessors, however, Nazi Germany was prepared to embrace the exterminationist logic of Jews being the people “who should not exist”.

Hence the Holocaust. The first step was the Einsatzgruppen, the extermination squads operating behind the armies advancing into the Soviet Union. The process expanded into the gassings and ovens.

The Holocaust, in its Jew-killing, was essentially a giant pogrom, but a progrom with the organisational and technological capacity of a modern state behind it. Like all pogroms, it proceeded fitfully and erratically, building up to a climax and dying away.

The racial rhetoric of Nazism, the use of advanced technological and bureaucratic techniques, obscures this reality. As does the inclusion of other victims—homosexuals, gypsies, slavs, ideological and class enemies—and the use of the eugenic euthanasia campaign as a forerunner. Jews were not the only victims: depending on how one counts the numbers, they were not even necessarily a majority of the victims. But they were the motivating victims, the group where animus was most directed against, establishing a logic of eliminationist enmity which was then applied to other categories of people.

Flannery notes that the role of the Churches was very mixed, and that Pope Pius XII was far from the only silent religious leader. Flannery sees the Pope’s silence as the apex of a triangle that includes the wider acquiescence of much of the episcopacy, the apathy or collusion of Catholics with Nazism—itself, as he notes, resting on a history of Catholic anti-Semitism—the wider indifference or antipathy to Jews in Western society while:

… the base of the triangle is reached when we consider the centuries-old Judaeophobia that conditioned the growth of Western civilization almost from its beginnings … Perennial Christian anti-Semitism, now intertwined with vicious racist Judaeophobia, had already taken its toll. We have in this dark symbiosis the deepest root of the “silence of Pius XII”(p.226)

A judicious assessment. Flannery also briefly discusses the controversy among historians on the role of the Church and the controversy over apparent Jewish passivity in the face of the unfolding horror, a passivity that Flannery sees as misconstrued and unfairly criticised (Pp226ff).

Flannery sees the horror as a terrible lesson:

For the first time racial antisemitism was fully seen for what it is: an attack not alone on Jews but on the human personality as such. To the greatest antisemite of history, Adolf Hitler, falls the credit of having stripped antisemitism of all its disguises and shown it in its quintessence. For this lesson by the “master,” the price of 6,000,000 Jewish lives were paid (p.229).

A lesson “poorly learned” since antisemitism survived.

I would take this point further. Just as, in looking at the history of the Jews, one can see the roots of Islamic dhimmitude in the treatment of the Jews as a degraded-but-permitted religious minority in the Christian Roman Empire, so in the Catholic theology of Genesis 19 can we see the notion of God-the-virtuous-exterminator of the morally quarantined. A notion inherent in Catholic teaching to this day, which reached such intensity as in the The Golden Legend, used to justify Catholic imperialism in the Americas and which still parades the same-sex attracted as the people who should not exist, as metaphysically deformed. When a prelate such as Cardinal Pell talks of Catholic teaching being that “men and women were made for each other” that is—in full accord with Church teaching—casting the same-sex attracted out of the realm of the properly human. If one can talk of fellow humans as metaphysically deformed, then one simply has not absorbed the real lessons of the Holocaust, that the pink triangles and yellow stars of the death camps teach the same lesson.

And where did the Church gets this idea of God as the virtuous exterminator of the morally quarantined? From Philo of Alexanddria, a Jewish thinker. This idea of defining the properly human as being smaller than the set of actual humans is a game no one should play because it is a game that can be played against any of us. It is a betrayal of morality at the most fundamental level.

Soviet burdens
Flannery turns his attention to the postwar scene, dealing with “Red antisemitism” in the Soviet bloc, where one confronts the analytical difficulty that:

In the Soviet empire, every non-Communist group suffers oppression of one kind or another (p.231).

Flannery observes:

The cleavage between the Romanov and Communist tyrannies was, in reality, by no means as absolute as some historians would have it. The cleavage is absolute only on paper; in historical fact, similarities between the two regimes are considerable (p.231).

Romanov wavering between forcible russification and xenophobic segregation, Karl Marx’s distrust of the role of Jews in society and C19th socialist complaints about Jewish “unproductiveness” all turn up:

Poorly disguised, these elements—distrust, Russification, xenophobia, economic complaints—all turn up again at one stage or another of the evolution of the Soviet regime (p.231)

Indeed, Bolshevik-Jewish tensions predated the Russian Revolution with the fights between Bundists and Bolsheviks over ethnic and national self-determination. Lenin was particularly scathing about Jewish claims (p.232). Jews were overwhelming non-Bolshevik in their sympathies, the high profile Jews in Bolshevik ranks being thoroughly alienated from Jewish society and identity (Pp232-3).

In power, Lenin condemned antisemitism, with criminal penalties. In part, this was about maximising support but also because:

The principle involved was the illusory conviction that if antisemitism would die out both Jew and anti-Jew would unite in the common supranational solidarity of the classless society (p.233).

And when those with authority find people do not conform to their theories, they typically attack the failing-to-conform people, rather than adjusting their theories: particularly if those theories are basic to their authority.

Jewish religious life suffered particularly under the regime’s drive against all manifestations of religious life. The trauma of collectivisation affected them particularly severely, given their middleman economic role, while they also became scapegoats for enormous suffering collectivisation inflicted. The revival of their business life under the New Economic Policy also engendered animus—both on the grounds of success and in the affront to socialist principles.

After a brief pause in the 1930s, when official policy again strenuously denounced antisemitism, the Great Purges revived it dramatically, given Jewish Bolsheviks were conspicuous targets. The Nazi-Soviet pact naturally did not help. Soviet silence about Nazi Jewish policy meant that Jews were not forewarned when the Nazis invaded. Popular passivity and antisemitism combined to ensure that the Soviet Empire had a lower rate of Jewish rescues than other occupied countries (p.237). Jewish refugees after the war overwhelmingly preferred Poland to the Soviet Union while the Soviet leadership maintained an official silence over the extent of Nazi persecution of Jews (p.238).

The last years of Stalin’s life seem to be leading up to a new antisemitic campaign, building off a strenuous anti-Zionist and “anti-cosmpolitan” campaign that was clearly targeted at Jews in general (Pp238ff). Stalin’s death brought this to an end. Policy shifted to a passive one of denying any form of specifically Jewish self-expression on the grounds that they were now fully assimilated, and so had no need of such. The normal religious discrimination was applied with extra rigour against Judaism (Pp242ff).

Modern Western Jew-hatred
Flannery discusses antisemitism in the US under the chapter heading of “Polite Antisemitism”. When Jews first arrived in the Americas:

… their old-world image was there to greet them (p.249).

Disabilities against voting or holding office persisted in some areas until the C19th. But practise in the opportunity-ridden new society tended to be ahead of the law.

The C19th saw a major influx of Jews, though nativist sentiment tended to be more preoccupied with Catholics, but familiar charges of Jewish disloyalty where made during the Civil War while General Grant quarantined Jews from his military lines. Social discrimination against Jews both expressed resentment against immigration success and assuaged concern about one’s own social identity: a pressure that increased with the mass onset of Jewish immigration fleeing Czarist repression (Pp250ff).

Official policy remained opposed to mal-treatment of minorities, including Jews. But, as Flannery notes:

… the original ideals of freedom and equality for all were officially and publicly paeaned, but now intolerance toward minority groups … was so openly discussed as apparently to enjoy the dignity of a counter-tradition (Pp252-3)

A counter-tradition fully on display in the current controversies over equal rights for the same-sex attracted. The notion that life, liberty and pursuit of happiness only applies to the “in” group.

By the second decade of the C20th, Jews were beginning to “catch up” with African-Americans as focus of prejudiced concern. The hyper-patriotism of the Great War and the xenophobic isolationist disillusion that followed it aggravated these trends. The KuKluxKlan was refounded in 1915 and became a successful mass-organisation with Jews being one of its prime targets. Henry Ford pushed anti-Semitism while immigration from southern and eastern Europe was cut back, leading to a dramatic drop in Jewish immigration. Restrictive covenants (and the beginnings of residential zoning) were used to keep out people of “Hebrew” descent. These general trends were exacerbated by the Great Depression. Father Coughlin, a very popular broadcaster, turned to anti-Semitism after 1936.

Organised and public antisemitism never recovered from the blow of American participation in the Second World War and the revelation of the horrors of Nazi Germany. Antisemitism continued, but increasingly as a fringe manifestation.

Flannery’s conclusion is that the economic opportunities of the US greatly blunted any anti-Semitic trend. Conversely, such circumstances have produced:

… a social hostility that is uniquely American. In an atmosphere of social snobbery and economic class consciousness, the Jew is destined to suffer more discrimination than others, not so much because of his “difference,” but by reason of his achievements. It is an observable fact that discrimination grows in virulence as the group discriminated against enters more vigorously into competition with the discriminators (p.262)

Black-white racism certainly displays this pattern.

Flannery considers more recent history, taking the 1961 trial of Eichmann; the 1965 statement by Vatican II (Nostra Aetate) rejecting the charge of deicide, deploring persecution of Jews and calling for dialogue; and the sympathy for Israel during the 1967 Six Day War as hopeful signs of the dwindling of antisemitism (p.263). But not a hope that has been fulfilled.

Flannery judges Christian antisemitism is declining. Certainly, the pro-Israel sentiment among Evangelical Chrisitians is striking (p.264).

He takes anti-Zionism to be primarily an anti-Jewish phenomena:

At the core of the anti-Zionist rationale is a fallacy and a refusal … defining Jewishness as <>only a religon, not a peoplehood or nation, whereas it is essentially all these; the refusal, in not allowing Jews to define themselves (p.268)

though a phenomenon that also varies greatly in its basis and implications. Criticising Israeli policy and practices is one thing, but to go beyond that:

Martin Luther King saw clearly when, challenging a Black student who attacked “Zionists,” he snapped: “When people criticise Zionists they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism” (p.269)

Which leads naturally into considering Arab antisemitism.

Prospects for Jew-hatred
As Flannery points out, Jew-hatred flourishes openly in the Arab world, building on previous Arab-Nazi links. Including Haj Amir El-Husayni’s approval of the Holocaust. Flannery points out that antisemitism has deep roots in Islam: particularly the concept of dhimmitude:

The intensity of Arab resentment of Israel today cannot be fully understood except in light of this traditional principle and practice that has been turned upside down in our own time by the Israeli presence and successes (p.270).

In other words, the existence and success of the Jewish state is a cosmic insult. Bigotry is always insulted by the notion of equality.

Flannery’s discussion of Soviet antisemitism (Pp27iff) has lost its historical resonance with the collapse of the Soviet Empire. His discussion of the resurgence of antisemitism on the Left, alas, has not. Flannery points out the progenitors of socialist theory (with the exception of Saint Simon) were all bitter antisemites and that there is a clear tension between a goal of egalitarian classlessness and particularist identities (Pp274ff).

To put it another way, Jews were previously attacked for not having a state, now they are attacked for having one.

Flannery judges antisemitism in the West generally, and in Latin America, though still extant, to be in decline though he notes Latin America (particularly Argentina) has quite a nasty record of antisemitic persecutions and violence. Flannery takes limited comfort in this decline, holding that:

A civilization contaminated so long with a toxin so virulent could hardly be detoxified in such short order (p.283)

On that sombre note, Flannery finishes with an analysis of the roots of antisemitism.

He rejects the notion of it being a manifestation of generic prejudice (on the grounds of its intensely distinctive features), being of Providential (a denial of human responsibility) or economic (such always manifesting in the context of already established antisemitism) even though envy and scapegoating certainly played a role.

Flannery holds the reaction to Judaism being the first basis of antisemitism (p.287) and warns firmly against de-Judaizing antisemitism (Pp284ff). But the intensity and persistence of antisemitism he puts down to the deicide accusation and the theological challenge the persistence of Judaism posed to Christianity (p.288).

A challenge it also poses to Islam, of course. Both Christianity and Islam seek to appropriate the Judaic prophetic tradition, thereby turning Jews into inconvenient “squatters” on what each religion has deemed itself to be the new, divinely granted, landlord of.

This theological challenge then created a reason to denigrate those so inconveniently posing the challenge:

In retrospect, it is permitted to wonder whether, humanly speaking, a certain inevitability did not affect this conflict between two faiths laying claim to election by the One True God and to a large extent using the same source of revelation to uphold their claim (p.289).

One just has to consider the status of Jews in and under Islam to answer “yes”.

An objection might be mounted that classical antisemitism lacked any such framing. But the theological culture of Judaism was also a challenge to Hellenic cultural pretensions and Roman claims of divine imperial authority. So Flannery’s general analysis is easily transferrable to classical antisemitism.

Just as the theological culture of Judaism was also a challenge to Enlightenment rationalism. Leading to an antisemitism even more bitter because the option of conversion was foreclosed:

Rationalism abolished not only religious prejudice, but also religious restraints (p.289)

Which led to both Jewish emancipation but also the Holocaust.

As for the connection between Christian and racial antisemitism:

Ontologically considered … Christian and modern racist antisemitism are radically different and opposed: historically they form a continuum. Modern racist antisemitism … would not have been possible without centuries of anti-Judaic and anti-Semitic precedents. … Hitler had his target, the Jews, already set up, defenceless, and discredited. (Pp289-90)

Quite.

Nazi measures against the Jews paralleled previous Church measures, but took the latter as a starting point. With Jews serving as a new scapegoat: an avenue for attacking Christian perspectives where a direct attack was eschewed for tactical reasons (p.291). Flannery argues that that too has deep historical roots, building from Freud’s observation that:

In its depths anti-Judaism is anti-Christianity (p.292)

As Flannery observes:

It is an observable fact that it is often the rigid Christian who is the most likely candidate for anti-Semitism. … in such cases antisemitism is an attribute of the “super-Christian,” the Christian who overcompensates for his/her unrecognized anti-Christianity (p.293).

There is surely much to this. After all, the second principle of Christianity (love thy neighbour as thy self) is a burdensome one and antisemitism is a great release from its burdens. Just as queer hatred is cathartic for the sexual burdens of traditional Christianity.

One does not have to buy into Freudian psychology to see that projection is a genuine phenomenon:

… to the rigorist … the Jew conveniently serves as a projective screen for the angers generated by rigid standards and at the same time for disowning (by projection) the instinctual self of which his conscience disapproves. Poliakov, interestingly, has extend this interpretation to including Nazi antisemites, several of the most vicious of whom—Himmler, Goebbels, Hoess and others—he finds, were products of families of a “rigid Catholic piety” (p.293)

Antisemitism becomes thus both a conflict between persons and within persons. It is these psychological depths, allied to the theological challenge of Judaism, which Flannery holds provides the deeper unity in antisemitism, regardless of whether it is Christian (or, for that matter, Islamic) or racial.

Flannery is speaking to Catholics particularly, so he stresses how anti-religious this motivation is. If one takes a more Haidtian or theological incorrectness line about religion, this distinction looks more doubtful. But that antisemitism represents a revolt against the injunctions of compassion that are the higher manifestation of religion is clearly true.

Flannery finishes by holding that the history of antisemitism is one that Christians need know of and repentant for (p.295).

The Anguish of the Jews suffers somewhat from irritating errors a good editor should attend to such as dates being a year or two off, holding Hypatia to be Jewish or referring to “Emperor” Frederick II of Prussia. Flannery’s grasp of the classical sources is also somewhat patchy. But it is both a profoundly good-hearted and deeply informative work. Its central thesis is powerful and perceptive: indeed, further consideration of Islamic antisemitism only reinforces it.

Reading The Anguish of the Jews, one can see the patterns and logic of bigotry quite clearly. How bigotry is one of exclusion from the moral community (even the properly human). How truncated the conception of the excluded is. Indeed, how its framings work to keep that conception truncated. How scapegoating is a great simplification. How such exclusion allows people to hold to the effortless virtue of their superiority, to which equality is both an insult and a threat. One doubts that the late Father Flannery would have entirely agreed, but that his points so easily and often translate to queer-hatred display both the enduring logic and patterns of bigotry and the perceptive seriousness with which he approached his task.

The Anguish of the Jews (2)

This is the second part of my review of Father Edward H. Flannery’s The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of Antisemitism a manifestation of Catholic grappling with the Holocaust and its implication, very much in the spirit of Vatican II. It continues from my previous post.


Medieval travails
As Christianity became more dominant in Europe, however, Jewish fortunes declined—as a direct consequence:

During the first half of the second Christian millennium, the history of antisemitism and the history of Judaism so converged as almost to coincide. It is a scandal of Christian history that, while the Church and the Christian state were at the zenith of their power and influence, the sons of Israel reached the nadir of their unending oppression (p.90)

(And, presumably, so did the daughters of Israel.)

With no common pagan enemy to combine against, the Muslim attacks on Latin Christendom fading (while Muslim Spain provided a contrast—albeit a somewhat erratic one—of Jewish economic and cultural success) plus the disturbing role of commerce in the labour-for-protection political economy of knightly manorial society, the utility to local priests and other clerics to act as “gatekeepers or righteousness” selling effortless virtue against the Jews became an increasingly powerful force. Combined with royal temptations to liquidate their debts by liquidating creditors (something which operated against other easily isolated targets, such as the Templars), this encouraged the spread of popular and economic antisemitism, counterbalanced uneasily with rulers’ interest in taxable economic activity (which operated to make Jews to become the special servants, and the especially exploited resources, of rulers) and Church hierarchy concern for the niceties of doctrine (such as thou shalt not murder). Forced baptisms, burning of Jewish books, massacres (particular during and after the First Crusade) and expulsions become recurring features of the experience of Jews in Latin Christendom. Culminating in the expulsion of the Jews from Iberia once the Muslims had been finally crushed.

Flannery sets out the forces driving the usury accusations against Jews, and records with horror the rise of the ritual murder libel:

The ritual-murder calumny stands in the judgement of history as the most monstrous instrument of anti-Jewish persecution devised in the Middle Ages. To its account must be laid many of the tortures, forced baptisms, exiles, and massacres of that and later ages. Its inception in the twelfth century, moreover, indicates the course the Jewish image was taking. Unbeliever and usurer; now ritual murderer. Gradually stripped of his human features, the Jew assumes a satanic guise (p.101).

Not that Christians were the only persecutors. The Almohades in Spain persecuted Jews as well.

The Fourth Lateran Council required distinctive dress for Jews and Saracen, as a barrier to close personal relations (particularly marriage and concubinage). Something Muslims had imposed some centuries earlier (p.103). If the Muslim concept of the dhimmi seems to be derived from Eastern Roman restrictions on Jews, Christians could also learn some Jew-repressing techniques from Muslims.
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Another feature of this period is mischief for Jews from converts: it was a convert’s accusations that led to the first outbreak of Talmud burning, for example (Pp104ff). But a convert may have particular reason to emphasize, indeed demonstrate, his rejection of his past and his embrace of the (superior) new. (This phenomena is hardly unknown as a consequence of queer-hatred: not only the desire to prove that they love God so much, to be “the best little boy in the world”, so as to overcome the “taint” of their sexuality but also the desire to exorcise the hated part of themselves by cathartic action against people-like-that—the original meaning of the term ‘homophobia’ was to be fearful of one’s own, actual or possible, homosexuality.)

The same battle between doctrinal absolutism and Aristotelian reason that marked Islam (in the conflict between al Ghazali and ibn Rushd aka Averroes) and Latin Christendom (particularly the condemnations of 1210-1270) also marked rabbinical Judaism, with anti-Maimonedes rabbis denouncing his supporters to the Christian Inquisition and burning their books (p.106).

The C13th and C14th centuries saw regular massacres of Jews in Latin Christendom, with entire communities being wiped out and Jewish parents killing themselves and their children to avoid forced baptism. Germany saw up to 100,000 Jews being killed because of an alleged desecration of a host while the rumour that Jews were conspiring to poison all Christians spread—the birth of the notion of a Jewish world conspiracy centuries before the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Kings expelled Jews then let them back in for their money-lending then expelled them again (Pp106ff). The onset of the Black Death intensified the popular animus, scapegoating and massacre (Pp106ff). Popes and Emperors sought to restrain the slaughter, but were either ineffectual or sent mixed messages (such as handing over the property of slaughtered Jews to favourites).

Of course, the deicide theology was the greatest “mixed message” of them all. Theological Jew-hatred had preceded popular Jew-hatred and led to it and all the violence it entailed.

The persecutions and massacres continued into the C15th. With the rise of the preaching orders of Dominicans and Franciscans, the practice of compulsory sermons expanded, to be not finally abolished until 1848:

The practice gives eloquent evidence not only of the desperate desire of the Church to convert Jews to Christianity but also the medieval notion that the Faith was perfectly lucid, that mere exposure to it was all that was required for conviction (p.114).

The Franciscan reformer St John Capistrano “Scourge of the Jews” gained the office of Inquisitor to the Jews for Germany and the Slavonic countries and travelled around, ensuring realms enforced the Church council restrictions on the Jews (p.115).

Flannery then considers Spain and Italy, suggesting that it is difficult to explain the very different trajectories of Jewish life in them (p.122). It seems to me quite simple: the former became a single jurisdiction built out of quasi-religious wars in which the Jews became an unwanted breach in the apotheosis of religious unity. The latter continued to be a land of competing jurisdictions.

To be sure, there were more specific factors, as Flannery notes. (Northern) Italy stopped being feudal early, Jews were never notably richer than Gentiles, nor did they dominate particular professions (such as moneylending). He also gives the Papacy credit for promoting toleration against popular pressures (Pp124-5). I am sceptical. First, he has already noted that economic causes of any popular resentment were generally absent. Second, it was the Church that insisted on the religiously suspect category of the Jews in the first place, and bitterly opposed giving them equality before the law. True, the Papacy also firmly opposed killing Jews but, in the competition for trade and talent that marked Italian politics, the costs of intolerance were also higher. That the pressures of competitive jurisdictions might have mattered more than the Church’s policy of subordinated toleration is indicated by Flannery’s own text, where he points out that, where various Popes, issued more restrictive measures, these were generally not enforced (p.126). There is not much Catholic self-congratulation to be had, given that it was the Church that made the Jews a suspect category in the first place.

In Spain, Jews had prospered under Muslim rule in the C11th and C12th. With the rise of Almohades who offered Islam or death, Jews fled to the Christian kingdoms, particularly Castile. Christian rulers were happy to take advantage of this windfall of talented new subjects, granting them equality before the law to the extent that the Papacy complained (p.128). As Christian rule advanced, some attempts were made to implement the anti-Jewish Church rulings, but only fitfully and with limited success.

There was some importing of French and German Jew-hatred violence in Navarre (p.130). The royal favour to the Jews in Castile in particular generated resentment at their success and the obvious wealth of Jewish grandees. (Jewish wealth was always more visible than Jewish poverty.) The Jews were strong supporters of Pedro the Cruel, so when he was overthrown and killed by his brother Henry of Trastamara, their downward trajectory began (p.132). In 1391, incited by an archdeacon who had long agitated against the Jews, a wave of massacre, forced baptism and frightened conversion devastated the Jewish communities in Castile and Aragon (Pp132-3).

With the arrival of converted Jews (converso) the Church had its appetite for further conversion increased while those who “stubbornly” maintained their faith were seen as both recalcitrant and a temptation to their converted brethren. A wave of missionary effort originally spearheaded by converted Jews and St Vincent Ferrer led to another way of conversion in the 1440s (Pp133-4).

But they were despised by steadfast Jews as renegades and despised by “Old Christians” who distrusted their honesty and labelled them marranos (swine). That many retained their wealth and married into the Spanish Christian elite generated much envy that added to the malice. Jewish communities generally accepted them back if they sought this, but the Church regarded baptism as binding (Pp135ff).

Malice against the marranos erupted into violence and eventually into the limpieza de sangre “purity of the blood” laws. It is in C15th Catholic Spain that anti-Jewish racism first arises (p.136). In 1479, Catherine and Ferdinand joined Castile and Aragon: Iberia now only had three significant jurisdictions (Portugal, Castile-Aragon and Granada: Navarre was too tiny to count). The new monarchs wanted to promote unity in their conjoined kingdoms and agreed to Torquemada’s projects: the Spanish Inquisition was born and unleashed against the marranos (p.137ff).

The persecution drove marranos into closer connection with their unconverted Jewish brethren. Seeing this—in the typical way of bigotry—as a result of the infamy of the despised and not the natural consequence of persecution, Torquemada turned his attention to the open Jews. After the fall of Granada in 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella—while still in front of the conquered city—issued the decree banning all Jews from their realms upon pain of death on the grounds that they “seduced” the New Christians. The decree applied even to places such as Sardinia and Sicily where this “problem” did not apply and despite pleas from local Christians (p.139).

300,000 Jews fled, mostly to Italy and Turkey. The Ottoman Sultan asked:

Do you call Ferdinand a wise king, who has impoverished his own kingdom to enrich mine?

The loss of talent and commercial skills was great. Wealthy and cultured Sephardic Jews tended to take on leadership roles in the new Jewish communities.

Those who fled to Portugal were allowed in for a limited time (for a fee) then enslaved and their children taken. The next monarch freed the slaves but then decided to force all Portugese Jews into the Church. The pattern of forced conversion, distrust, massacres, even more brutal Inquisition ensued with the result that marranos were discovered in Portugal as late as the C20th (Pp140-1).

Flannery summarises (Pp141ff) the nature of medieval antisemitism as continuing from the earlier age with the same themes, the same redemption by baptism, the same permitted, though degraded, existence. There was no racial element—except with Iberian marranism. And yet, as he also points out, the image of the Jew in the later medieval period was an increasingly degraded one. The gulf between Christian and Jew became ever wider, affecting their image of each other and, indeed, their behaviour, though Christians were typically entirely oblivious about how much Christian behaviour, and the incentives Christians created, drove Jewish responses.

Intellectual revolutions
While the Renaissance, Reformation, Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment swept Christian Europe, they affected the Jews little, for whom this was the age of the ghetto. Typically surrounded by a wall with a Christian gatekeeper, overcrowded, Jewish life went on in highly introverted fashion. It bred a “ghetto mentality”. Petty concerns became obsessions, Jews became physically stunted, stooped, with intense senses of common identity, common grievance, deeply suspicious of the outside world while twisting them into whatever shapes were required to deal with it (Pp145ff). Jews were both intensely intellectually active and intensely insular. They were confined to a small number of permitted professions, which they tended to dominate. If Jews were no longer they great threatening enemy of Christendom, their image continue to deteriorate into one of petty, malicious avarice.

Jews flourished in Turkey and Palestine, found Poland something of a refuge. Meanwhile, antisemitism without Jews flourished in England and France. The rise of Christian Hebrew scholars led to new advocates for the Jews in Christian circles.

Then came Martin Luther, who followed a familiar pattern of the religious reformer. At first, he expected the Jews to become his followers. When they failed to do so and, worse, some of his followers took the authority of scripture so far as to show some tendencies to “Judaize”, Luther turned on the Jews with vicious rhetoric. His last sermon called for their expulsion from Germany (Pp152-3). There were some massacres in the C17th and expulsions from Vienna in 1670. Maria Theresa ordered them out of Bohemia in 1747, but pleas from Hofjuden (court Jews) to various monarchs led to the order not being implemented. The court Jews were Jewish financiers to princes (including some princes of the Church).

The absolutist states kept up the regulation of Jewish life—they could not walk by twos, appear in public when the prince was in town, buy ahead of Christians at markets, frequent certain streets, needed passes to travel and pay a body tax in transit, clothing was prescribed and the number of guests at wedding limited. Marriages were often controlled—they might be limited to the number of deaths, or to the oldest son.

The printing press printed Jewish books (though there had been attempts to ban that) but also anti-Jewish tracts including Johann Eisenmenger Judaism Unmasked, a compendium of malice and accusation useful for antisemites ever since (p.154).

With the Counter-Reformation came a new Catholic rigour against the Jews. The first Counter-Reformation pope, Paul IV, imposed a ghetto on Rome’s Jews for the first time, allowed 60 converted Jews to be burned by the Inquisition, imposed a yellow badge, barred them from owning land, practising usury, restricted them to a small number of menial trades, restricted to one synagogue (all others being destroyed), conversionist sermons were ordered and Jewish converts were forbidden to enter religious orders (p.155). Subsequent Popes alternated being relaxing Paul’s policies or imposing their own strictures.

Medieval Poland was a haven for Jews fleeing from expulsions. Crown and nobles accepted them and found them useful. People and clergy not: the Church in particular fulminated against the granting of rights to Jews. Jewish numbers rapidly increased and the Crown granted Jews a form of self-government.

A 1648-9 revolt by (Orthodox) Ukrainian Cossacks saw Polish Catholic nobles, their Jewish middlemen and fellow Jews massacred in great numbers. The Swedish invasion of 1655-8 saw fresh massacres by Cossacks, Russians and Swedes and then, when the invaders departed, by Poles for them allegedly aiding the invaders. Estimates of the total death toll from the decade of massacre range from 100-500,000 with 700 Jewish communities destroyed. European Jewry did what it could do to help, including taking in refugees but Polish Jewry never recovered its previous status. Anti-Jewish riots, particularly by students, became regular events. Ritual murder and host-desecration charges multiplied to the extent that Polish Jews appealed to the Pope for help, who appointed a Cardinal (future Pope Clement XIV) to investigate and, from his report, ordered the Church to protect the Jews.

These turmoils led to the rise of the Hasidic movement within Judaism. Flannery points out that the age of the ghetto also saw the development of insinuations of Jewish bodily and mental inferiorities which meant that Christian theological antisemitism was no longer the only line of animus (Pp155ff).

The age of emancipation
With the beginnings of the rise of modern industrial capitalism, the situation of Jews improved. Prosperity was more general, Jews spread into new fields (particularly shopkeepers and craftsmen), the notion that citizenship was a general right, not a Christian privilege, began to spread. More Christians began to think that the treatment of Jews as legal and moral inferiors was not compatible with love thy neighbour. The ghetto barriers crumbled even before they were abolished.

This was the period of Jewish emancipation. It was also, as the other side of this, one of Jewish assimilation: a different sort of threat to Jewish identity. Moses Mendelssohn epitomised the possibilities of the age: reaching the heights of German intellectual and literary life he was also opposed to the Talmudic traditionalists who saw assimilation as a profound threat to Jewishness. In 1782, Joseph II issued his Patent of Toleration, abolishing a range of Jewish legal restrictions and disabilities. The American colonies were already leading the way on this, though the last Jewish disabilities were not abolished in all US states until the mid C19th. In 1791, Jews were granted complete civic freedom in all of France.

French Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies carried Jewish emancipation with their conquests. Napoleon himself summoned the first Sanhedrin in over 1,500 years and then issued highly restrictive regulations of Jewish life that ruined some French Jews and offended all of them (Pp164-5).

The tying of Jewish emancipation to French imperialism meant that the rising German nationalism saw Jews as an enemy, with such luminaries as Friedrich Schleiermacher, Johann Fichte and Goethe pushing the cause. Fichte in particular posed Jews as ethnic enemies of Germany.

Napoleon’s downfall reversed most of the gains Jews had made, but the experience of political lobbying, of new possibilities and connections with liberal groups meant that a struggle for Jewish emancipation was underway over the next half century that was, in the end, generally a complete (legal) success. French Jews (re)won civic freedom in the 1830 Revolution, German Jews as a result of the 1848 Revolution. All Italian Jews won their civic freedom with the downfall of the Papal States in 1870. The widening opportunities of expanding capitalist economies eased the process along (Pp165ff).

The process of Jewish international cooperation in self defence was particularly encouraged by notable anti-Jewish controversies in 1840 in Damascus and the Mortara affair in 1858 in Bologna. The latter discredited the Papacy further in the eyes of many and led to the founding in 1860 of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, a formal (and for many years the dominant) international Jewish advocacy organisation.

After the downfall of the Papal States, the great holdout against Jewish emancipation was Czarist Russia, where a half or more of the world’s Jews now lived, a result of Imperial Russia’s annexation of more than half of Poland.

The previous Czarist policy had been, from the time of Ivan the Terrible (when a Judaizing sect was apparently discovered) to the acquisition of Poland, one of exclusion. Peter the Great had let Jews into some provinces, but his successor Empresses reverted. When suggested that there were commercial reasons to admit Jews, Empress Elizabeth responded with:

From the enemies of Christ I accept no profit (p.171).

Then Imperial Russia acquired most of Poland and suddenly, the Czarist regime had a very large “Jewish problem”. Jews were restricted to the newly acquired provinces—now the “Pale of Settlement”. Catherine the Great permitted foreigners into central Russia “except Jews”: a phrase that became standard in much legislation(Pp170ff).

A Czarist regime which conceived itself as ruling a unified ethnically Russian and Orthodox state took Jews to be both an ethnic and religious threat to unity. One People, One Faith, One Czar was the desired aim. Either elimination through death or expulsion or total assimilation (Russification) were the only policies compatible with this aim. Deliberate massacre was not acceptable state policy, the Jews were too numerous to expel and, being particularly traditionalist, resisted assimilation even if that was seriously offered (which it generally was not and, when it was, largely foundered on Jewish clinging to their traditions leading to official frustration and reversion). So official policy writhed around in the unsatisfactory middle ground of now more, now less, repression. Anti-Jewish pamphleteering flourished, including the notion of a Jewish world-conspiracy, while blood-libel trials occurred in 1857 and 1878.

The only European rival for repression of the Jews was Romania, where about 200,000 Jews lived in thoroughly medieval repression, blood libel trials and all, repression of the Jews having followed immediately on from the achievement of independence from Turkey (Pp173-4).

Flannery points out (Pp174-5) that emancipation, while definitely an advance, had a dark side for Jews. As traditional Christian perspectives waned, and nationalism rose, anti-Jewish animosities acquired new, secular, rationalist and ethnic bases. If being Jewish was a religious category, the “evil” of Jewishness could be escaped from by conversion. If it was an ethnic category, it was innate and there was no escaping from it.

Rationalist scepticism against the pretensions of priests was hardly likely to accept the pretensions of rabbis. Just as Marx was later to be an anti-capitalist antisemite, so Baruch Spinoza was a rationalist critique of the Jewish identity. Various luminaries of the Enlightenment turned their scorn on these most pious of peoples, still wrapped in the religious traditionalism that had so long been their refuge from Christian oppression, who were the root source of the priestly Christianity the sceptics abominated—Voltaire, Frederick II, Diderot, d’Holbach. (Flannery notes that the Voltaire-Frederick correspondence was one of Hitler’s intellectual sources.) Similarly in Germany—Fichte, Hegel and Shleiermacher were all rationalist critics of Jews and Jewishness (Pp176-7).

Alphonse Toussenel published in 1840 The Jews, Kings of the Epoch which pioneered the modern economic critique of Jews as “the people of Hell” and purveyors of “Jewish capitalism” upon whom economic penalties should be imposed. Various socialist writes, led by such luminaries as Pierre Proudhon, Karl Marx, Bruno Bauer, inveigled against Jewish “unproductiveness”, “parasitism” and so on. This socialist antisemitism died away after anti-Semitism was condemned at the Socialist International Congress of 1891 (p.177).

If the alteration in the situation of the Jews was a striking feature of an age of vast changes, then it also became focus for all those in revolt against, or who felt threatened by, those changes. (A pattern, by the way, that queer-hatred and anti-queer activism displays in our own time.) If left antisemitism faded, right antisemitism drew increasing strength.

A new weapon for cultural and ethnic opposition to Jewishness arose. As Flannery writes:

Racial antisemitism broke out in Germany in the 1870s, spread to Austria-Hungary and France, reverberated in Russia, then subsided before its bloody climax in Nazi Germany (p.179).

The term ‘anti-Semitism’ was coined in William Marr’s The Victory of Judaism Over Germanism published in 1879, which warned of Jewish “domination” of Germany life:

The theory of racial inferiority can be traced to Hegel’s apotheosis of the German state and spirit and to Christian Lassen’s (1800-1876) of the linguistic distinction between Aryan and Semitic to racial characteristics. In France, Ernst Rehan, biblical critic and devotee of science, (1823-92) followed Lassen in his relegation of the Jews to an inferior racial status. … In the closing years of the century, a host of philosophers, pseudo-scientists, demagogues, and pamphleteers richly varied and orchestrated this them (p.179).

In other words, the message was ubiquitous.

Partly because, as Kertzer points out, the Catholic Church continued to put considerable resources in supporting anti-Semitism. But also because this was the period when European domination of the globe was reaching its peak, a domination that cried out for explanation. Racial theory provided explanation in a very congenial form (to those thereby designated to be members of the “superior” race). The impact of Darwin (the Origin of Species was published in 1859) was very much part of the mix so that racial theory looked like it was using the “latest science”. Darwinism also spun off eugenics (with its looming catastrophe of “racial collapse) and generated (particularly from some of Darwin’s own rhetoric) an image of life as a continuous and bitter struggle for existence while undermining the old scriptural verities, particularly scriptural notions of time and religious notions of a humanity both fallen (so always flawed) and metaphysically distinct (who partook of both nature and of spirit).

Resentment of the role of (some) Jews in high finance, the rise of a fierce and exclusory German nationalism and the continuing identification by both Protestant and Catholic clerics of Jews as enemies, along with secularists and anti-clericals, of the Christian order kept the notion of a “Jewish problem” going (p.180). Marr’s book entered a Germany in the grip of the Kulturkampf, where Father August Rohling had published:

… his scathing assault on Judaism in The Talmud Jew—little more than a recasting of Eisenmenger’s view—which went into edition after edition even after its thoroughgoing refutation by competent scholars (p.180

in the grip of a financial crisis after a financial crash in which some Jews were involved. A war of competing pamphlets ensued.

The furor might have spent itself had not Bismarck—having made peace with the Church and turned against the National Liberal Party—given the nod to antisemites to strike at the Jews as a means of rallying the disparate political factions against the liberal, democratic cause. The antisemitic movement was off to a false start (p.180).

Anti-Semitism was completely mainstream. The government’s chief whip and court chaplain founded the antisemitic Christian Social Worker’s Union to fight “Jewish Socialism” and the “domination of German life” by Jews. A petition with 300,000 signatures called for restrictions on Jews: it was countered by a philosemitic signature with 26 prominent signatories. Treitschke made the much quoted remark that “The Jews are our misfortune”. There were two ritual murder trials and a synagogue was burned.

Antisemitic ideologies multiplied—Christian-social, economic, ethnological and national, metaphysical and anti-Christian—with intellectual supporters of varying degree of prominence. The last could deal directly with Christianity having Jewish roots: other racial antisemites were reduced to such embarrassing expedients as claiming Christ was of no specific race, or that He and His apostles were Nordic (Pp181-2).

By the 1890s, these divisions were undermining the anti-Semitic movement as were the involvement of prominent anti-Semites in various scandals. A defensive organisation against anti-Semitism was formed in 1891, in 1893 Jews organised against anti-Jewish libels and, in 1894, the Catholic journal Germania disavowed anti-Semitism.

In Hungary, Jews got caught in liberal versus conservative struggles and were often seen as “tools” of the Habsburg monarchy. Father Rohling, a professor at the University of Prague, waged a war against the “Talmudic Jew”. But the spectacular collapse of a ritual murder trial brought down the surge in anti-Semitism (Pp182-3).

In the Austrian half of the Danubian Monarchy, anti-Semitism proved sturdier, with Georg Schoenerer organising anti-Semitic socialist parties. Various ritual murder charges were laid and Karl Lueger, of the Christian Social party, became Mayor of Vienna until his death in 1910, after which anti-Semitism died away (p.183).

France had few Jews but again Jews became caught in a wider conflict, this time between Republicans and anti-Republicans (monarchists, Catholics hostile to the Republics anti-clerical secularism and the officer class of the army). Edouard Drumont published his La France Juive in 1886 whose racist (but ostensibly Christian, if somewhat anticlerical) message proved very popular. He wrote several anti-Semitic pamphlets, edited a daily anti-Semitic newspaper (from 1892) and founded an anti-Semitic league (1889). That some Jews were involved in the Panama Canal scandal was grist to his mill, though Catholic scholar Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu in his 1893 Les Juifs et l’antisemitisme argued that the laicisation or secularisation of Jews was a result, not a cause, of the “de-Christianisation” of society.

This all set the scene for the Dreyfus affair, which bitterly divided French society from 1894-1906:

To the partisans, Dreyfus the Jew represented all the liberal, alien and de-Christianizing pressures on the traditional Christian order of France. The case was not only a fine example of scapegoat theory but still more of the projective or symbolic nature of anti-Semitism and its paranoid character. The Jew here is no longer a human being—an Alfred Dreyfus—but an archetype (p187)

The Dreyfus affair, profoundly influenced Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl, who took away the message that assimilation would not solve the problem of anti-Semitism and what Jews needed was a state of their own, thereby kicking off Zionism (p.187).

The “almost fanatical” support of the large majority Catholic opinion for the army against Dreyfus resulted in a major decline in the standing and position of the Church. It was disestablished, anticlericalism became the firm policy of the Republic and the Church was increasingly identified with reaction and anti-Republicanism. The silence of the hierarchy (which, after all, could have been read as tacit support of the bulk of Catholic opinion), and the prominent role of individual Catholics in defending Dreyfus, had little effect (Pp187-8). Flannery also notes that:

Undeniably, Jews were commonly found in the anti-clerical, anti-Christian, and revolutionary camps. Yet it is myopic for Christians to wonder at this. Secularist liberals had shown themselves the Jews’ emancipators and friends, while conservative Christian parties remained closed to them. The emancipated Jew was left with little choice (p.188)

A point which applies equally well to gays, lesbians and transgenders.


This review will concluded in my next post.

The Anguish of the Jews (1)

Father Edward H. Flannery’s: The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of Antisemitism is a manifestation of Catholic grappling with the Holocaust and its implication. It is a book very much in the spirit of Vatican II (it was originally published in 1965 with a revised edition in 1985 that was re-issued in 2004). As the 2004 Foreword sets out, since Vatican II the Catholic Church has fairly comprehensively moved away from the “theology of contempt” for Jews.

At the start of his concluding chapter, Father Flannery writes:

As an historian of antisemitism looks back over the millennia of horrors he has recorded, an inescapable conclusion emerges: Antisemitism is the longest and deepest hate of human history (p.284).

Which rather depends on whether misogyny gets counted as a hatred. But, leaving that aside, one takes his point.

As he wrote in the Introduction to 1985 edition, Father Flannery (who died in 1998) clearly saw his book as an attempt to counter widespread Catholic ignorance of Jewish history, particularly the Jewish experience of suffering and oppression. A process he applies to himself as well as others (hence the revised edition 20 years after the first). He also makes it clear that the driving context is the Holocaust, Nuremburg and Eichmann trials.

He tackles the difficulties of the term ‘anti-Semitism’, which was first coined in 1879 to cover racial antipathy but then broadened to cover all forms of Jew-hatred, holding that:

The distinguishing mark of all antisemitism in the strict sense is hatred or contempt and a stereotyping of Jewish people as such. In the absence of either of these qualifiers antisemitism does not exist (p.4).

I use the term ‘Jew-hatred’ in part because of the current fad for clever-clever pedantry according to which Arabs “cannot be anti-Semitic because they are Semites” (a deeply stupid objection since Arabs and Jews do not identify as sharing a common Semitic identity, even leaving aside issues of the genetic diversity of both populations: a classic case of how ostentatious anti-racism perpetuates racial categories, the ideological equivalent of the point that the opposite of love not being hatred but indifference). Flannery uses the term ‘antisemitism’ instead.

Classical Jew-hatred
Flannery, quite correctly, does not count various Biblical episodes as antisemitism as such. Rather, they fit into the wider tensions and rivalries of the various periods. In the case of the story of Esther he accepts common scholarship holding that it belongs to the period the Maccabees and Seleucid rule, not of Persian domination (p.10). It was the conquests of Alexander the Great and the spread of Hellenistic culture that first brought the Jews to irritated (and worse) wider notice. The Jews often ostentatiously resisted Hellenisation: this was offensive to Hellenic self-confidence.
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In Alexandria, a very Greek-city, a centre of Hellenic intellectualism and scholarship, there was a large, self-governing Jewish quarter and some Jews were very commercially successful. This did not endear them to Egyptians living under Greek rule, so began the familiar pattern of Jews as scapegoats for other frustrations. Starting in the C3rdBC, various writers began to retail belittling claims about the origins of the Jews and the misanthropic nature of their religions and beliefs. (Some of which—such as the Jews worshipped the golden head of an ass—were later used against Christians.)

With the conquest of Palestine by the Seleucids (enthusiastic Hellenisers), the tensions worsened: complicated by the rise of Hellenizers within the Jewish community. Antiochus IV Epiphanes (r 173-163) attempted to suppress Judaism entirely, provoking the revolt of the Maccabees, which established an Jewish state for the next 75 years and lead to an enormous increase in Jewish self-confidence, and some very extravagant Jewish claims about being the source of Hellenic science, ethics and literature (p.14).

There followed a Hellenic literary counterattack in which accusations are repeated and occasionally added to. The first works which were specific attacks on the Jews date from this period, including the first accusation of ritual murder by Apion in his History of Egypt. With the rise of Roman ascendancy, Greek literary antisemitism faded, Jews being cast again as an oddity (but not with any greater accuracy in description of them).

Roman-Jewish relations were complicated. On one hand, the Romans repressed rebellion with great brutality. On the other, the Romans granted the Jews exemptions from the common rituals and observances that were a staple of Roman religious (and civic) life. This was a period of Jewish proselytizing: it was probably significant that it was an avid Hellenizing emperor (Hadrian) who provoked the final revolt in his attempt to suppress Judaism via banning circumcision, other cultic practices and creating a pagan city in Jerusalem (p.21). That revolt ended Jewish political authority but their wider privileges continued. There was also a certain amount of popular antisemitism during the early Roman Empire, with anti-Jewish riots in various cities (Pp21-2).

Roman intellectuals were particularly prone to display contempt of the Jews, including figures of the stature of Cicero, Seneca and Tacitus. After that, the cultural antisemitism of the classical period went into decline. Flannery notes that this antisemitism was not economic, theological nor racial but nevertheless was the origins of many of the accusations which were to be a continuing feature of Jew-hatred: a period that has tended to be somewhat neglected in histories of antisemitism as it does not fit to various preferred stories about Jews and Jew-hatred (Pp24ff).

Christian Jew-hatred
Just as classical antisemitism was waning, the Christian Church was increasing in power: this was the period of competition between church and synagogue and the rise of theological Jew-hatred. In the process, Christians found themselves subject to the same accusations previously made against the Jews:

At first, both were indistinguishable to the contemptuous Roman eye; accordingly both enjoyed the same privileges, both suffered the same opprobrium. Once the distinction between them became clear, however, the Church fell heir to many of the same charges that Jews alone had elicited in the past. It was now the Church that was a detestable superstition with absurd and extravagant rites, the new hater of mankind, the worshipper of the head of an ass, the ritual murderer, the devotee of debauchery and incest (p.28).

Flannery points out that the early Christian Church was very much part of the wider Jewish community. It was crystallization of Gospel universalism, along with the realization that most Jews would not become Christians (which, of course, encouraged moving outside the boundaries of Jewry), that led to separation and antagonism.

The greater the separation, the greater the antagonism; for the less and less connections bound and restrained and the less and less such connections would be sought or occur. (In our own day, prejudice against the same-sex attracted is strongly correlated with a lack of social connections to “out” gays and lesbians.)

Flannery argues that Jewish persecution of Christians occurred first, having numbers and connections to Roman authorities on their side, though early Christian writers were also prone to exaggerate the level of Jewish hostility. In 80AD, the Sanhedrin formally expelled Christian belief from having any legitimacy in the Jewish community (Pp30-1).

On the Christian side, the failure of Jews to accept Christ was more and more regarded as blindness and malice, seeping into the New Testament works—particularly the gospel of St John—that were written down at this time (p.33). One can see quite clearly religious leaders on both sides acting as “gatekeepers of righteousness”, setting and enforcing the limits of their religious community.

On whether the Gospel of John is antisemitic, Flannery concludes it is not since it does not fulfil his definition, though he agrees:

… it is replete with an anti-Judaistic theology and anti-Jewish pronouncement, prophetic in nature, that have made it a seedbed of anti-Semitism (p.33).

It would no doubt not occur to the good Father, but the Gospel of St John is also the Gospel which is most open to a “queer” reading and one wonders if that is not part of what motivates its discouragement of looking to Jewish practices and authority. Since St Paul was both, as Flannery notes, tolerant of “Judaizing” (p.30) and the only New Testament writer who has anything to say about same-sex activity, one wonders if there is not an internal Christian debate being manifested here. There is a long—if somewhat subterranean—tradition of queer Jew-hatred precisely because of the Jewish origin of the homicidal anathematization of same-sex activity (of which Gore Vidal is a contemporary manifestation).

Flannery’s quite relaxed willingness to read the New Testament in the context of the time—seeing the intensifying anti-Judaism the later the various books are committed to writing as reflecting contemporary circumstance (Pp33ff)—manifests the Catholic belief that Scripture is the product of the Church (understood as the body of believers) rather than the Protestant belief in the primacy of Scriptural authority.

As the church overtook the synagogue in numbers, the polemics between Christian and Jewish writers intensified (see previous point about “gatekeepers of righteousness”). They were, after all, claiming to be the possessors and true inheritors of the same prophetic and Scriptural tradition. Christian claims of Jewish hatred of Christians and Christianity intensified, with enough incidents of Jewish violence against Christians to give them some, though limited, credence (Pp34ff).

Christian anti-Judaism theology took form in this period, based on the Messiahship of Christ, the abrogation of the Law, and the vocation of the Church. It concluded that:

… the Church and Israel are synonymous; the Jews are an apostate nation, truant from its providential role of chosen people (p.39).

As Flannery notes, a thesis infuriating to Jews since it struck directly at their identity.

Flannery takes us through the patristic literature of the first to third centuries and its attitude to Judaism (which seems to be more the focus than Jews as such). The most ominous development within this tradition is the notion of the tribulations of the Jews as a divine punishment for rejecting Christ, which becomes a divine punishment for killing Christ. The accusation of deicide thus appears (Pp38ff). Flannery also identifies three points of threat from Judaism behind this literature:

… its appeal to the Christian masses caused strong Judaizing tendencies in the Church; its proselytizing continued unabated; Jews were associated with several of the Christian heresies (p.42).

Ritual distinction, competition for converts and doctrinal unity, in other words. None of which required Jew-hatred as such.

Flannery identifies the fourth century, the Constantinian century, as the crucial (and disastrous) century for Christian attitudes to the Jews. With the Christianizing of the empire, Jews lost ground badly:

… its privileges were largely withdrawn, its proselytism was outlawed, and in 425 the patriarchate was abolished (p.47).

The centre of Jewish scholarship moved to Babylonia, in Rome’s great rival the Sassanid Empire. Within the Empire:

…the choice for Judaism was plain: either continue a losing and perilous competition or retire into the world of the Talmud. The rabbinate opted for the latter alternative, considering it the price of survival (p.48).

So, in considering Christian complaints about Muslim bars on conversion, it is well to remember that Christians did it to Jews first.

Apart from the already mentioned issues, Flannery identifies the deterioration of Jewish image and status to:

The influx of the Roman middle class into the Church … brought with them the antisemitic opinions bequeathed by classical antiquity. A third source may be seen in the rigidly verbal method of scriptural interpretation used at the time, which took every unflattering reference to Jews in the Old Testament at face value. A denigration of the Jews assumed something of a dogmatic character. A fourth and most decisive factor was the full flowering of that theology which laid Jewish miseries to divine punishment for Christ’s crucifixion (p.48).

Flannery takes us through the burgeoning literature up to its peak in the preaching of St John Chrysostom whose preaching in his infamous Homilies Against the Jews he has no hesitation in characterizing as antisemitic:

All this is dwarfed by St John Chrysostom (c344-407) who, up to his time, stands without peer or parallel in the entire literature Adversus Judaeos. The virulence of his attack is surprising even in an age when rhetorical denunciation was indulged with complete abandon (p.50)

Denunciation which, as Flannery quotes, clearly involved attacks evidencing and encouraging “hatred or contempt and a stereotyping of Jewish people as such”. But where Flannery holds that St John, the patron saint of preachers, did the most long-term damage was his development of a very clear theology of Judaism: that God hated the Jews because they killed Christ. Flannery notes people have struggled to explain why St John Chrysostom was so intense in his denunciation.

For myself, I think a contributing factor was that he was such an avid adapter of Philo of Alexandria’s adaptation of classical natural law to the Judaic tradition of scriptural revelation. If you are, in effect, a “Judaizer” in one part of your faith, it becomes all the more urgent to emphasize how much you hate “Judaizing” in everything else. The horrible irony is even greater when one considers that Philo’s doctrine of divine punishment for practices, for the form of one’s activity, was easily extendable from sexual to religious practices.

St Augustine of Hippo, while engaging in what by now were standard denigrations (post-Christ, Judaism is a corruption; Judas is the image of the Jewish people; they bear the guilt of killing Christ; they have a carnal understanding of Scripture), developed a less virulent theology of Judaism, given the implications of St John Chrysostom’s teaching was that every attempt should be made to suppress Judaism. St Augustine’s notion of Jews as a “witness people”, witnesses “for the salvation of the nation but not their own” gave them a space within Christian framings of the human society, if a degraded one. Indeed, when one considers the theological and legal restrictions placed on Jews by the Christianised Roman Empire, one sees a pre-figuring of the Islamic concept of the dhimmi. St Augustine’s notion that obligation to love still applies to Jews was clearly more formal than substantive while his holding that Christians should still seek to lead them to Christ’s salvation just increases the similarity to the later Islamic notion of the dhimmi.

On the point of blaming the Jews for the death of Christ, what Flannery does not consider is that the only alternative to identifying the Jews as the killers of Christ was to identify the Roman state itself as the killer (Christ was, after all, killed by Roman soldiers under the authority of a Roman official by a Roman method of punishment incited by a group of priests): not a good option if the Roman state was now Christian. How could Christians support a deicide state? So, when a group of priests sat down with the Roman state to consider the question of who killed Christ, they agreed (even if it never became formal doctrine as distinct from increasingly standard rhetoric) it was—the Jews. Which was convenient for the Roman state, convenient for the priests but very inconvenient for the Jews: who, of course, were not present, nor consulted, nor able to speak on their own behalf. (Hardly the only time that the Church has treated a group thusly.) So, when St Augustine wrote:

The Jews held him, the Jews insulted him, the Jews bound him, they crowned him with thorns, dishonored him by spitting upon him, they scourged him, they heaped abuses upon him, they hung him upon a tree, they pierced him with a lance (Pp52-3)

he is mixing inaccurate categorisation (“the Jews” did nothing, some people who were Jewish did certain things) with straight contradiction of the Gospels (much of that was done by Roman soldiers under a Roman official following Roman practices).

Flannery notes scattered references (even in St John Chrysostom, St Augustine and St Ambrose) to positive Jewish qualities (p.54), the general tendency is for these anti-Jewish themes (particularly as articulated by St Augustine) to be repeated.

Various Christian Councils passed anti-Jewish decisions: forbidding Jewish-Christian marriage (unless preceded by conversion to Christianity); joint celebration of Passover; forbidding Christians to keep the Jewish Sabbath, receive gifts or bread from Jewish festivals (p.55). The Roman state was torn between its Christianisation and the previous precedent of tolerating Judaism. So Judaism was legal in the Empire, with a range of legal consequences from that. But Christianity was clearly preferred: Jewish proselytising and conversion to Judaism was banned; converts to Judaism became intestate but Jewish parents could not disinherit their children who converted to Christianity; Jews were banned from circumcising slaves or buying Christian slaves, which had the effect of driving them out of various trades and occupations (since uncircumcised slaves brought with them the burden of ritual impurity). Construction and repair of synagogues was regulated. Jews were barred from public office. The Jewish patriarchate was abolished. The language of law often incorporating denigration of Jews and Judaism (Pp57-8).

This religious and legal tension was reflected in popular violence from both sides, with the 414 massacre and flight of the Jewish community in Alexandria after Jews had killed some Christians being the worst outbreak (Pp59ff). Attacks on synagogues were frequent. Flannery includes the killing of Hypatia, the famous neoplatonist philosopher in 415 by anchorites in this by saying she is Jewish: something I have not seen in any other source.

Flannery identifies that:

… the principal source of Christian antisemitism was the Church’s theological anti-Judaism. It is apparent that there exists a certain level of theological negation or polemical intensity which, when reached, produces an effect that is no longer purely theological or polemical: ideological opposition has turned to hatred and stereotype—the life-blood of antisemitsm (Pp62-63)

Again, a point which is extendable. Though it was still better to be a Jew than a heretic (p.64). Flannery concludes that:

Christian antisemitism was rooted, finally, in the survival of a vibrant and often defiant Judaism. The refusal of the Synagogue to join the Church stood forth as a serious challenge to the Christian apologia, a scandal to the Christian faithful, and a source of worry to their pastors, alarmed by the Judaizing tendencies within their flock. Antisemitism thus was not rooted only in Christian doctrine but also in a pastoral zeal which resorted to every and any means to find … “a therapy for the Jewish disease” (p.65).

That both faiths claims exclusive election by the One True God gave them plenty to argue over: since monotheism encourages the view that not only is there a single truth, but that there is a single correct view of what is. But that Jews and Christians had a common history made Jews preferable to Christians than pagans (or heretics, since they were taken to be explicit, directly threatening, “deniers” of Christian truth).

With the collapse of the Western Empire, Jews entered a period of highly variable fortunes. In the Eastern Empire, the legal persecution of the Jews continued and tightened: the could not own a Christian slave, their property rights were narrowed, they were barred from public functions (except the decurionate) and practising law, they could not testify against Christians. Justinian’s laws even regulated the internal practices of the Jewish religion (p.68). Jewish resistance was at times violent and Jews became regular collaborators with the Empire’s enemies (Pp69-70).

In Latin Christendom, Pope Gregory the Great set the continuing Papal pattern of enforcement of the law (including protection of Jewish legal rights) coupled with rhetorical excoriation. In Visigothic Spain, King Sisebut imposed the choice of baptism or exile, creating the problem of insincere converts (a theme what was to recur in Iberian history). This repression included removal of children from non-Christian parents: something, as Flannery points out, was to be a long, sad part of Church history. Visigothic Spain had a continuing history of persecution of Jews (Pp75ff). Flannery puts this history down to the fact that the Jews were numerous, successful and assertive enough to raise Church fears for the Christian faith and royal fears of social disunity.

In the Merovingian Frankish kingdom, there were the normal legal disabilities, with some forced baptisms, until King Dagobert expelled the Jews. The Carolingian successors of the Merovingians were far more tolerant. Karl-lo-magne and his success Louis the Pious treated the Jews as well as their Christian subjects. This attracted the ire of Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons, who wanted the traditional Theodosian code restrictions placed on the Jews (he was apparently particularly disturbed that friendly relations between Christians and Jews were common) leading to years of dispute between clerics and dynasty which continued until the collapse of Carolingian power. In the long run, after Charles the Bald, the intolerance of Agobard and his clerical successors won out (Pp83ff).

Once again, we see priests acting as “gatekeepers of righteousness”, setting the limits of the religious community. This period saw ritual attacks on Jews and omission of the genuflection from the Good Friday service prayer for the Jews: a genuflection which was restored in 1956 (Pp86-7). The C8th and C9th were periods lacking popular of economic anti-Semitism but of juridical and legislative anti-Semitism (p.88).

As Flannery notes, Jews generally fared better under non-Christian rulers (p.81) though not without various travails. The Sassanids harassed the Jews in their territories who eventually responded by helping the Arabs in their overthrow of Sassanid rule (p.81). Muslim rule also oscillated: Muhammad shifted from hoping the Jews would accept him to attempting to suppress Judaism and Christianity entirely: his successor Omar expelled them from Arabia (which has ever since been officially a “country of one religion”) but they were permitted in the rest of the Muslim empire in a situation of clear religious, legal and social inferiority (Pp81-2).


This will be continued in my next two posts.