Well what a couple of weeks. Don’t know about you but I can’t wait to have Mrs Dale’s Diary back and get shot of that ridiculous new Archers nonsense. That was what the vote was about wasn’t it? We can take back control and return to worrying about Jim overworking and Captain going missing again…..Mrs Dale’s always got a lot on her plate……
The Archers – too trendy by far! (courtesy of the Radio Times)Ah, the ‘good old days’ or back to the future.
Now we’ve got a woman, of all things, leading the Tory Party and the country; I’m not sure Mrs Dale would be too happy about that. Always remember, behind every great woman there’s a Dennis Thatcher. Still, Theresa May might be nasty but she has a sense of humour, hence the gift of death by a thousand gaffes for Boris as Foreign Secretary….and poor old Govey kicked into the very long grass..,…sob, sob. All this and an ageing Blair explaining that we were all quite wrong and sometimes leaders have to make tough decisions. If it looks like a megalomaniac, talks like a megalomaniac…..you know the rest.
You’re all wrong!
Anyway, putting all that to one side (keep up; this is a fast moving piece), I’ve been reading a very long and frankly stodgy book about the early history of the Christian church and its attitude to, and persecution of,…well everyone else, but especially Jews, ‘Constantine’s Sword, the Church and the Jews’ by James Carrol.
The book traces a line from the Christian church’s teaching and treatment of the Jews to the Holocaust. I’ll try to summarise some key points. First a little-known fact….early Christians were Jews…and apparently, so was Jesus, although not according to Hollywood.
It took a long, long time for non-Jews to be admitted to the Christian sect/church. It was good old St. Paul (plain Paul in those days) who persuaded the early Christians that gentiles should be admitted since God was inclusive, the god of all. Gentiles being gentiles they were soon taking over. Still Christianity might have limped along if it hadn’t been for politics. Constantine (Constantine the Great, also known as Constantine I or Saint Constantine, Conny to his friends), Roman Emperor from 306 to 337 AD, really let the cat among the pigeons (or do I mean out of the bag?)
Constantine’s cat looking for pigeons
by curtailing the right to worship any old, or lots of, god(s) by making Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire. It wasn’t so much that he plumped for the wrong god – he could have chosen any from what was a pretty long list and had the same result. Using religion as a unifying force of empire prompted the creation of a formidable religio/political organisation, the Catholic (in the sense of all-embracing) Church.
So the church grew and transformed over time from a minor Jewish sect to a religion in its own right, largely due to Constantine and, quite early on, came to regard Judaism as a heretical religion. Jews wouldn’t accept Jesus as a deity, worse had crucified him and were therefore clearly guilty of ‘murdering’ the son of God. The, by then definitely non-Jewish, Catholic Church therefore took the view that Jews should be ‘preserved’ as witnesses to their crime and the truth of Christ. They should also be scattered and allowed to live but not thrive because of what they had done.
While, at times, in parts of Europe and even in Jerusalem, Moslems, Jews and Christians lived and worked together, collaborating in an atmosphere of great scholarship and creativity, for most of the pre-twentieth century the Church actively denigrated and persecuted Jews. The menu included forced conversion, public burning of holy books, forcing them to dress so that they might be instantly recognised, expelling them, killing them, or simply building ghettos within which to confine them. Does that sound at all familiar?
The Crusades, Christian ‘holy’ wars, triggered significant increases in Jewish persecution. While crusaders were notionally traveling across Europe to retake the Holy Land from Islam, they took the opportunity to attack Jewish communities along the way and large numbers of Jews, under the protection of the Church (as living witnesses to their crime remember) committed suicide or were killed rather than convert to the ‘true’ religion .
At times, of course, significant numbers of Jews did convert, but that didn’t fool the Church. It decided that they probably didn’t mean it and tortured them to prove it. Pope Boniface VIII decreed that every creature was a vassal of the Pope and Pope Pious IX claimed Papal infallibility. Who first made Jews wear a yellow star?…….. a Pope. The Church’s certainty about the rights and wrongs of all this came from the ‘fact’ that the Pope was God’s representative on Earth…well you can’t get a better source than that can you? Who gave the Pope that job description? Well the Pope did. I’m not sure he actually consulted God about it though.
I think that’s what is technically called a closed loop system.
Great debates between Jewish scholars and friars charged with converting the Jews might well be ‘won’ by the ‘wrong’ side but that didn’t matter, in fact it simply proved the devilish cunning of the Jew. Jews were blamed for outbreaks of plague though it scythed down its victims without reference to their religion. Jews were accused of sacrificing babies (the blood libel, which, ironically, may have arisen because of the sacrifice of Jewish children by their parents during Crusader raids on Jewish communities) and condemned for usury, lending money for profit. Jews were banned from all other ways of trading and, guess what?… Christians also practiced usury; it was forbidden by the Church but there you go.
Of course there were members of the Church who were appalled at all this, who protested and preached against the perversion of Christian values. Strangely, by and large they didn’t do well; many were burnt to death to show them and others the error of their ways. Those who zealously pursued the orthodoxy of Jewish guilt, degradation and punishment fared better, rising in the hierarchy and, as often as not, being sanctified.
This piece isn’t an anti-Catholic rant. Martin Luther, hardly a pillar of the Catholic Church, wrote ‘On the Jews and their Lies’ and in his last sermon before dieing he condemned Jews. On his death bed, having complained of chest pains, he said that Jews had ‘done this’ to him. 450 years later on Kristallnacht, Martin Sasse, the Lutheran bishop of Thuringia, celebrated that
‘On November 10th, 1938, on Luther’s birthday, the synagogues are burning in Germany.’
Interior of Berlin’s Fasanenstrasse Synagogue, opened in 1912, after it was set on fire during Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938. From ‘Hitler’s War Against the Jews’ (1975) by Lucy Dawidowicz, p. 61.
It’s not an anti-church rant either. Karl Marx agreed with Luther. His first significant essay was ‘On the Jewish Question’ in which he wrote:
‘Money is the jealous god of Israel, besides which no other god may exist.’
Marx’s ancestors were devout Jews and some were Rabbis. To all intents and purposes the Communist Manifesto simply replaced the word ‘Jews’ in his first published essay with the word ‘capitalists’.
Or, if you want a free thinker, try Voltaire:
‘Jews are, all of them born with a raging fanaticism in their hearts…….. I would not be in the least bit surprised if these people would not some day become deadly to the human race.’
Why is this history of religious intolerance and persecution worth writing about? For me it’s because history isn’t dead and may repeat itself not as farce but as a tragic loop.
‘Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.’
which neatly sums up what happened to a minor Jewish sect which got above itself ……..with terrible consequences.
Humans are intelligent pack animals banding together against ‘the other’ pack animals – that’s what we are programmed to do. Have a look at the Milligram experiment findings in an earlier blog if you need convincing:
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. ……….when they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.
Stanley Milgram, 1974
We are all captives of our culture and upbringing and, the more we close in on ourselves and emphasise difference, the narrower and more bigoted our world will be.
That’s why Brexit frightens me. The EU referendum campaign was more like American politics than anything we’ve seen before. Experts were derided, lies told wholesale, promises made which could never be kept, and truth flatly denied, all to gain a result. As O’Nora Oneill put it:
‘A bonfire of accusation and name calling, of back-stabbing and ambition’
Sure we’ll all be poorer and the world less safe but the rise of the politician as bigot and liar, sneering at the poor and disadvantaged and actively working to make their lives more miserable so that we can all feel better if we’re on the inside…that really is the worst damage. I was raised a Christian but given no knowledge of the history of my religion or the crimes committed in its name. I was taught that we stood alone during the Second World War and pretty well saved the world from, and for, Johny Foreigner. Nobody mentioned that the 8th Army, the Desert Rats, was 25% British and 75% ‘imperial’; it contained soldiers from Australia, Britain, India, New Zealand, South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, Basutoland, Bechuanaland, Ceylon, Cyprus, the Gambia, the Gold Coast, Kenya, Mauritius, Nigeria, Palestine, Rodrigues, Sierra Leone, the Seychelles, Swaziland, Tanganyika, and Uganda. The 14th Army, which fought the Japanese in the far East, contained soldiers from India, Nepal, Kenya, Nigeria, Rhodesia, Somalia and, oh yes, England.
We seem to be shifting back to a world of us and them – hard-working families and the work-shy poor, immigrants and refugees (often conflated) and the English, faceless European bureaucrats and …..? We have rising anti-Semitism, rising hate crime and rising intolerance of others. Refugees are feared and abandoned to their fate, drowning in their hundreds or walking across Europe in desperate reverse children’s crusades.
Stephen Hawking had a piece in the Guardian recently which made the point:
If we fail (to collaborate) the forces that contributed to Brexit, the envy and isolationism not just in the UK but around the world that spring from not sharing, of cultures driven by a narrow definition of wealth and a failure to divide it more fairly, both within nations and across national borders, will strengthen. If that were to happen, I would not be optimistic about the long-term outlook for our species.
Or as Benjamin Franklin said:
“we must all hang together or most assuredly we will all hang separately”?
