Jewish Dogs: An Image and Its Interpreters (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture) - Hardcover

Stow, Kenneth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804752818 ISBN 13: 9780804752817

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2006

Synopsis

This book is a study of Catholic teachings on purity, and the anxiety these teachings have generated with respect to relations with the Jews since the time of St. Paul.

About this title

About the Author

Kenneth Stow, now Emeritus, was Professor of Jewish History at the University of Haifa for nearly thirty years. He is author of Theater of Acculturation: The Roman Ghetto in the Sixteen Century (2001), The Jews in Rome, Volumes I and II (1995, 1997), and Alienated Minority: The Jews in Medieval Latin Europe (1992), among others.

From the Back Cover

Jewish Dogs is not a study of "anti-Semitism" or "anti-Judaism." Instead, this book argues that to anchor claims of supersession, Catholics have viewed Jews as metaphoric--and sometimes not so metaphoric--dogs. The dog has for millennia been the focus of impurity, and Catholicism fosters doctrines of physical purity that go hand in hand with those of ritual purity. The purity is that of the "one loaf" spoken of by Paul in Corinthians that is, at once, the Eucharist and the collective Christian Corpus, the body of the faithful. Paul views this "loaf" as physically corruptible, and as John Chrysostom said at the close of the fourth century, the greatest threat to the loaf's purity are the Jews. They are the dogs who wish to steal the bread that belongs exclusively to the children. Eventually, Jews were said to attack the "loaf" through ritual murder and attempts to defile the Host itself; the victim of ritual murder is identified with the Host, as is common in Catholic martyrdom. Pope Pius IX still spoke of Jewish dogs barking throughout the streets of Rome in 1871. Other Catholic clergy were dismayed. This book is thus as much a study of Catholic doctrinal history as it is a study of Jews.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Jewish Dogs

An Image and Its Interpreters Continuity in the Catholic-Jewish EncounterBy Kenneth Stow

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2006 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5281-7

Contents

Preface.............................................................................ixIntroduction: Equality, Supersession, and Anxiety...................................11. Ambivalence and Continuity.......................................................372. The Bollandists and Their Work...................................................553. Richard of Pontoise and Philip Augustus..........................................754. The Jewish Version: The Bollandist Reconstruction Vindicated.....................995. A Usable Past....................................................................1196. Purity and Its Discontents.......................................................1337. Denouement.......................................................................158Appendix One: Bollandist and Parallel Texts.........................................177Appendix Two: Translation of the Blois Letters......................................198Notes...............................................................................203Select Bibliography.................................................................293Index...............................................................................309

Chapter One

Ambivalence and Continuity

At the far edge of the balcony in the reading room of the Vatican Library, so far left that going any further would mean literally falling off and onto the floor below, there is a section labeled "Judaica." This small Judaica collection (the stacks have a large and admirable one) contains a Babylonian Talmud. This is the same Talmud that was first burned in Paris in 1240 by papal order and again, in Rome itself, in 1553. Afterward, the Talmud was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books. The ban itself no longer exists. Hesitancy about the Talmud apparently does. One reaches the Judaica section only intentionally. Nobody passes by on the way to somewhere else. The possibility of chance encounter piquing a reader's bibliographic curiosity is minimal to nil.

Ambivalence about things Jewish is present elsewhere in the reading room, too. In the entries on ritual murder in the Enciclopedia cattolica, issued at Rome in 1953 and prominently displayed on the left side of the reading room's main floor, the watchword is indecision. Indecision features in similar entries in the adjacently shelved New Catholic Encyclopedia (issued in 1967 by the Catholic University of America Press) as well. The ritual murder accusation, both encyclopedias imply, was fabricated, and the New Catholic Encyclopedia uses words like "infamous," and "delusion." Yet an alleged victim such as Hugh of Lincoln (1255) is listed as St. Hugh, and on the subject of Simonino of Trent (1475), one reads: "The incident still awaits critical historical investigation." The Enciclopedia cattolica is unabashedly tentative. On Simonino, called "santo, martire"-even though Simonino was never actually canonized-the entry says that "public opinion, like the [records of the] trial itself, ... attributes the Jews with guilt. ... a fully critical study is still awaited" (L'opinione pubblica e il processo ... attribuirono agli Ebrei la colpa.... uno studio critico ancora manca). For the editors of the two encyclopedias, the jury was still out.

The same reserve is found as late as 1968 in the Bibliotheca Sanctorum, a modern review of sainthood produced at the Pontifical Lateran University's John XXIII Institute. Father Grard Mathon of the Catholic University of Lille, the author of the entry on Richard of Pontoise, another "supposed victim" (pretese vittime) of ritual murder (about whom we shall have much to say below), first casts doubt on it, writing, "these supposed crimes are today much contested" (questi pretesi crimini sono oggi assai contestati). But he goes on to say that "it would be best to hold off judgment" (sar bene attenersi a una valutazione prudente), much as does F. D. Lazenby, the author of the Catholic Encyclopedia's 1967 essay on Simonino of Trent.

This recent scholarship marks a step backward. Much earlier, the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1910-12, published by Appleton, and bearing an imprimatur, said about William of Norwich (the first alleged ritual murder victim): "This [charge] has been well named 'one of the most notable and disastrous lies of history.'" And, in 1938, Donald Attwater, commenting on Richard of Pontoise in the revised, Thurston edition of Alban Butler's eighteenth-century Lives of the Saints, said that perhaps an "unbalanced" Jew might have murdered a Christian, but that the Jewish people as a whole were to be "acquitted." He repeated himself in the new printing of Butler in 1956. In 1965, at the time of the Vatican II Council, which at last formally absolved the Jews of guilt for Jesus' death, Attwater clarified matters still further, echoing the 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia. In the entry on William of Norwich in The Penguin Dictionary of Saints, he now declared unambiguously: "No instance of the charge has been substantiated."

Attwater knew, of course, that opinions were not unanimous. W. H. Hart, the editor of the chronicles and charters of Gloucester, writing in the 1860s, had wondered whether many of the stories "would pass scrutiny." However, this did not prevent him from adding that "it is not my intention here to discuss the truth of these charges, ... but the frequency ... is sufficient to demand our attention." Yet if Hart seems disingenuous, what should we say of Paul Guerin? In his Petits Bollandistes, of about 1888, summarizing and often imaginatively retelling the episodes found in the original Bollandist Acta Sanctorum, Guerin describes the deaths of Wve martyrs to "Jewish savagery." Richard of Pontoise, Guerin tells, was struck with a fury found only among the "children of the race of Canaan." This, apparently, is an allusion to the Canaanite woman, the children, and the dogs of Matthew 15:26, which is reinforced when Guerin cites Dr. Tiberino's canine perception of the Jews of Trent (1475) in retelling the story of Simonino. But Guerin then steps back to say that it is contrary to "natural equity" to accuse the whole people of these atrocities. Have not the popes, many times, but specifically Alexander II, saved Jews from the wrath of mobs and princes? What Guerin really believed we are left to guess.

Other scholars were transparent. In the 1880s, the Anglican Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould called the ritual murder charge a canard. The lie so incensed him that throwing caution to the winds, he queried, in his Lives of the Saints, whether the Jews, as persecuted and despised as they were in the Middle Ages, did not have the unassailable right to hate Christians. They most certainly did not, would have been the answer of many in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Catholic establishment, whose campaign to resurrect the ritual murder charge makes even ambivalence seem radically rejectionist. Within the Church, the 1880s through the first decades of the twentieth century witnessed a wholesale revival of ritual murder accusations-and their widespread acceptance.

Fin de sicle and Catholic Modernism

The story of the revival is laid out splendidly by Elphge Vacandard in a virtually, and regrettably, forgotten essay of 1913. Vacandard criticizes works like August Rohling's 1872 Der Talmudjude (The Talmud Jew), which accuse Jews of murdering Christian children and ritually using their blood. Rebuttals, like that by the Protestant Hebraist Franz Delitzsch in 1882, Vacandard notes, left Rohling and others unmoved. Nor did they deter Father Henri Desportes. In the later 1880s, Desportes compiled a list of 150 alleged ritual murders in his Le Mystre du sang chez les juifs. This list was faithfully reprinted, Vacandard is chagrined to say, in the Milanese Osservatore cattolico. Ritual murder and blood-libel accusations were also rampant in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Roman Jesuit organ La civilt cattolica. That various medieval popes roundly condemned these accusations seems not to have mattered.

Yet late nineteenth-century Catholic clerical support for ritual murder accusations was not wall-to-wall. The charge, wrote Georg Kopp, bishop of Fulda and later cardinal of Breslau, was "grounded neither in Judaism nor history ... a thoroughly outrageous lie" (weder durch die jdische Religion, noch durch die Geschichte begrnden ... eine entschiedene frevelentliche Unwahrheit). Kopp, unlike others in Germany who opposed the charge, stood high in Vatican esteem. But he had also played the role of intermediary during the Kulturkampf between the imperial Chancellor Bismarck and Rome-a man of compromise, it would appear, who knew where to draw the line. Joseph Hubert Reinkins, rector of the University of Breslau and, after 1873, Old-Catholic bishop of Germany, was more outspoken. He called ritual murder "a groundless malicious slander" (eine grundlose und durchaus boshafte Verleumdung) and said that it was "a disgrace" (eine Schmach) for anyone who called himself a Christian to make such allegations. Such people had forgotten the origins of Jesus the person, and they were ignoring the words of Paul in Romans 11:18, where he referred to God's everlasting promise (to the Jews). Protestants, too, expressed opposition. Beside Delitzsch, in Protestant academic circles even Paul de Lagarde, otherwise noted for his racist pan-Germanism, called the charge of ritual murder a fraud. Joining them were Protestant divines and scholars who held posts in important universities, including in faculties of theology.

Our interest here, however, is principally in the Catholic reaction, which was sometimes highly critical-and acerbic, splitting religious orders down the middle, which happened with the Jesuits. Roman Jesuits were among the most vocal supporters of the charge of ritual murder. Jesuits outside Rome, including the Bollandist scholars Hippolyte Delehaye and Franois Halkin, unabashedly voiced condemnation (as noted in the Preface). Writing in 1925 and 1926, respectively, Delehaye and Halkin called the charge "inane" and "a murderous and absurd calumny." Adding to their cry was a third Jesuit, the medievalist Peter Browe. At one point, Browe criticized medieval canon law for merely tolerating Jews rather than calling the right of Jews to live in Christian society unimpeachable.

Browe was a major student of the Eucharist, which gives his work great force. He condemned the Host libel in 1926 and decried the practice of forcing Jews to attend missionizing sermons. Browe's essays on the Eucharist appeared in 1929 and 1933, to culminate in 1938, in the two-volume Die eucharistichen Wunder des Mittelalters. In 1941, at the height of the Nazi era, Browe stressed the repugnance of canon law for discriminating against converts because of their Jewish blood. This he did, even though his objections ran counter to Jesuit traditions, which had discriminated against descendants of Jews since shortly after the Order's founding in the mid sixteenth century. Browe did write that in his opinion, medieval French and German Jews, as opposed to Italian ones, expressed odium of Christianity, and he admitted to his hopes for Jewish conversion. Yet saying these things may have made his otherwise unpopular stance more palatable. Besides, what disturbed Browe were the remarks in the Hebrew Crusade chronicles calling Christ "the hanged one" or churches places of impurity. In the context of the widespread massacres of Rhenish Jewry in 1096, these remarks are perhaps understandable. No doubt, they rubbed Browe's sensibilities the wrong way.

Nonetheless, opposing stances on ritual murder rested on more than personal feeling. Delehaye, Halkin, and Browe, as well as others, knew that they were speaking out about Jews and ritual murder in the shadow of what is known as the "modernist" crisis. This is the name given to the struggle during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries over the compatibility of orthodox Catholic doctrine with modern social, scholarly, and scientific teachings. In the words of George Tyrell, an English Jesuit, although not referring to Jews, modernism sought "a synthesis of Catholicism and Science. It was not asserting the latter's supremacy." Modernism's exponents were Catholic believers, not liberal secularists, and this made them all the more a threat.

This threat was enhanced by the modernist condemnations of ritual murder as myth. Anti-modernists, known also as integralists or ultramontanists, were among the myth's most fervent supporters. Centered principally at Rome, anti-modernists opposed all change that might emend the Catholic status quo, whether theological or political, and their position gained special force with the demise of the papal state in 1870 and its replacement by the secular Italian monarchy.

Yet discussions of the opposition between modernism and anti-modernism have consistently ignored how often Jews were the subject of anti-modernist discourse, while the same clerics who condemned ritual murder were often modernists who spoke out with great animus against integralism, especially its demands for disciplinary conformity and insistence on humiliating scholarly concession. Hippolyte Delehaye's recent biographer Bernard Joassart writes that Delehaye resented being stymied by "the abominable fundamentalist campaign [l'abominable campagne intgriste] ... which appeared in L'unit cattolica and the La Critique du libralisme" at the moment when Delehaye was completing the third edition of his classic Lgendes hagiographiques in 1927. The attack on Delehaye had begun years earlier, orchestrated by Delehaye's longtime opponent, the papal Secretary of state Cardinal Merry del Val, who used every tool at his disposal to thwart Delehaye's scholarly studies, which more than once had debunked venerable hagiographic myths. Not coincidentally, Merry del Val was one of the ritual murder charge's chief protagonists.

The parallelism thus was four-pronged: modernism versus anti-modernism, belief in ritual murder libels versus their denunciation. And one may perhaps add two prongs more. For as Andr Vauchez comments, it was only with the ultramontanist anti-modernist victory in the twentieth century, alongside that of popular Catholicism, that child saints began to be canonized. This was the same kind of child-martyr sainthood that was opposed in the fifteenth century by Bishop Battista de' Giudici of Ventimiglia, the prelate who suffered humiliation when he questioned the martyrdom of Simonino of Trent.

It must have specially irritated the Roman establishment that Delehaye took his positions, whether promoting scholarly investigation or urging ritual murder's condemnation, as a continuator, not as a radical. Correctly, Delehaye perceived himself to be following investigative principles that the early seventeenth-century Bollandists had first established. Scholarship, he argued-accurately read texts, not theological wish-revealed true saints and martyrs. Delehaye wrote in his short history of Bollandism that his was the same scholarly path that the original Bollandists had laid out (minus, of course, their support for ritual murder charges, which they had based on their understanding of the texts). Delehaye was willing to go to the limit to defend his historical method, refusing to balk even when his ground-breaking Les Lgendes hagiographiques was threatened with inclusion on the Index of Prohibited Books-together with five books of Alfred Loisy, one of modernism's chief ideological exponents.

The pairing of modernism and opposition to ritual murder repeated in France, notably, in the writings of Vacandard and Flix Vernet. It repeated in Germany, too. The Old-Catholic Joseph Reinkens denounced the teachings of ritual murder as fervently as he decried Roman integralism. He also rejected the corollary doctrine of papal infallibility, which was proclaimed at the First Vatican Council of 1870. Nobody, however, surpassed the theologian Ignaz von Dllinger. So intensely was Dllinger censured for his modernism, that prior to 1881, he voluntarily stopped serving as a priest.

What distinguished Dllinger was his view that condemning ritual murder and attacking integralism were inseparably one. This was unlike Delehaye and Halkin, for whom denouncing ritual murder was an expression of principle that visibly paralleled, but was not of itself vital to renouncing integralist positions. In his famous address of 1881, The Jews in Europe, Dllinger declared that the Jews, whatever their faults, were not to blame for their sorry state. The culprit was Christianity. The ritual murder libel was "an utterly false and impossible" (unwahrscheinlichsten oder unmglichen) charge. As Jacques Kornberg has correctly observed, Dllinger realized that integralism had made stigmatizing Judaism essential to its antimodernist assault. The threat to the Corpus Christi that integralism attributed to Judaism and modernism was one and the same.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Jewish Dogsby Kenneth Stow Copyright © 2006 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0804752818
• ISBN 13: 9780804752817
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 277