The Cross and the Jews
When I was a child–one brought up in the Jewish Orthodox tradition–it was a staple of my childish, unreflective mind that the cross was a bad thing, and in some ways even a frightening thing. Should a cross be exhibited in my presence, I would automatically turn my eyes away from this baleful item.
As I matured, growing up in a Christian country, I was naturally exposed in both churches and museums to numerous sculptures and paintings depicting Jesus on the cross, so that in time, the cross took on a benign quality for me, as simply the expression of Christian veneration. But I can’t say that I had a true understanding of the meaning of the cross for Christianity or for Jews, nor had I ever given it much thought.
But all that changed when I read James Carroll’s book Constantine’s Sword, whose subtitle is The Church and the Jews. This is not a new book, but it was new for me when I read it during my vacation in Florida this past winter, and it was through this work that I came to appreciate and understand my youthful reactions to the cross.
Carroll begins his historical narrative of the Church’s deplorable record toward the Jews with his sighting of the huge cross that Carmelite nuns had placed in the field near the wall of the Auschwitz concentration camp. For Carroll, an ex-priest and still devoted Catholic, the cross at Auschwitz was a revelation. He was “seeing the cross in its full and awful truth for the first time.” And it was this apocalypse that initiated his deep and thorough delving into the history of the relationship between the Church and the Jews since its inception, following the emergence of the followers of Jesus.
The question Carroll now had to face squarely was disturbing, to say the least. It was the issue of the link between the ancient Christian hatred of Jews and its connection to the 20th century murderous hatred that produced the death camps. Because Carroll is a Catholic, he focused on his own Church, but his narrative did not exclude the role of the Reformation in general and of German Protestantism in particular. Like every narrative, the story unfolds with a beginning, a middle and an end. The end in this case is the cross at Auschwitz. Writes Carroll, “Once the end reveals itself, the beginning and the middle can be understood anew.”
It came as a revelation to me that initially the cross was not a reflective symbol of early Christianity. Prior to the fourth century, symbols such as palm branches, fish, birds of paradise, or the monogram of Jesus were favoured, but the cross is not to be found, for example, on the catacombs of Rome. The place of the cross in the Christian imagination came not with Paul but with the Roman Emperor Constantine at the beginning of the fourth century. For Constantine, the cross was transformed into a sword in a vision he supposedly had of a cross of light in the heavens accompanied by the message “Conquer by this.” Carroll writes that “Constantine put the Roman execution device [the cross], now rendered with a spear, at the center not only of the story of his conversion to Christianity, but of the Christian story itself.”
It is common knowledge that prior to Constantine’s conversion and conquests in the name of Christianity, Judaism and Christianity were pretty much on par in the Roman Empire. At the beginning of the fourth century, there were at least three million Jews throughout the Empire, comparable to the number of Christians. In fact, Jews enjoyed a higher level of tolerance from the imperial authorities than Christians did. Maybe that was because Christianity had within it the proselytizing drive, and Judaism did not, making Christianity more offensive to pagan cults and culture.
Constantine and his mother Helena, together, transformed that world. Under the auspices of Ambrose (339-397), the bishop of Milan, Helena was elevated as the source of discovery and rescue of the actual cross – allegedly – upon which Jesus was crucified. Here emerged the concept of the True Cross. The negative image of the Jew was also bound up with the discovery of the True Cross, because the legend associated with this breakthrough involved a Jew who knew the secret of the long-buried treasure and would only reveal its location after extensive torture. Carroll holds that the purported finding of the True Cross was the definitive victory over the Jews, “the end of a two-hundred-year-old sibling rivalry,” after which a relative equality between Christians and Jews would never exist again.
The significance of the True Cross was that it placed new accent on the role of the cross, both literally and theologically, which in turn emphasized the death of Jesus, not his life and resurrection. Since, as we know, Jews were incriminated in the crucifixion of Jesus, whether rightly or wrongly, the legend of the True Cross reinforced the unfolding hatred of Jews. It acted as a signal that the punishment of the Jews was long overdue and was now justified, particularly since the astonishing and “miraculous” discovery was attributed to the saintly Helena, popularized as a benefactress of churches, priests and nuns, and devoted mother of the emperor. (Never mind that her emperor son was the murderer of his own son as well as other contenders to his throne, and that she was part of a family filled with violence and immorality.) Thus with Helena as its foundation, the idea of the centrality of the cross spread quickly, and with it the focus on Jesus’ crucifixion, suffering, death and burial.
We now have a beginning and an end to the story of the Church and the Jews. It begins with the True Cross and ends at Auschwitz. We know the middle as well. It is a horrific tale of repeated pogroms, expulsions, inquisitions, murderous mobs, and other forms of violence against Jews that persisted through the centuries and culminated in the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust. Throughout, the Church was an instrument of ideological preaching that encouraged ferocity against the Jews, and the cross was its most effective propaganda tool.
It was as if enduring hostility mounted against the Jews was an unremitting war of the cross. There is a clear indication of the place of the cross in murderous Christian passions from the earliest pogroms – that is, the crusaders’ onslaught against Jews in 1096 on their way to Jerusalem. Although the crusaders’ main objective was to drive Muslims from the Holy City, they got sidetracked en route, massacring and terrorizing thousands of Jewish men, women and children in the Rhineland.
Solomon bar Simson, in telling the story of the crusaders’ rampage against Jews of the Rhineland, wrote about the symbolic importance of the cross to Christian mobs as follows: “They decorated themselves prominently with their signs, placing a profane symbol – a horizontal line over a vertical one – on the vestments of every man and woman… their ranks swelled until the number of men, women and children exceeded a locust horde covering the earth.”
Carroll writes that the Crusaders’ ferocity was fuelled by a cross-inspired righteousness. That inspiration can be seen again and again in the abhorrent historical record, whether it was the initiation of the blood libel in England in 1144 that lives on today among anti-Semites, or the expulsion of Jews from France in the 14th century, or the Spanish Inquisition of 1492. And it remains the inspiration for the papal cross at Auschwitz, which ultimately must be seen as an express desire to Christianize the Holocaust.
It turns out that my childhood inclination to find the cross offensive was unwittingly deserved. I wish I could now say otherwise. And as the current fashion of wearing crosses as ornaments proliferated, I’m now confronted by this icon’s presence in unexpected times and places. I am not surprised when a church authority is so adorned, but when Oprah Winfrey sports a diamond-encrusted cross on one of her trendy shows, I do find it remarkable.
I don’t doubt that today’s wearers of the cross are merely making a positive statement about their commitment to Christianity. Nor do I have reason to believe that such adornment has any intended malice. Nevertheless, it would be well for all, Jew and Christian alike, to appreciate that the cross is an expression of accentuation of the death of Jesus rather than his life, and that this has had – and continues to have – grave consequences for Jews, not the least of which is the current intensification of anti-Semitism that is still buttressed by the accusation of the role of the Jew in Jesus’ crucifixion.
As I matured, growing up in a Christian country, I was naturally exposed in both churches and museums to numerous sculptures and paintings depicting Jesus on the cross, so that in time, the cross took on a benign quality for me, as simply the expression of Christian veneration. But I can’t say that I had a true understanding of the meaning of the cross for Christianity or for Jews, nor had I ever given it much thought.
But all that changed when I read James Carroll’s book Constantine’s Sword, whose subtitle is The Church and the Jews. This is not a new book, but it was new for me when I read it during my vacation in Florida this past winter, and it was through this work that I came to appreciate and understand my youthful reactions to the cross.
Carroll begins his historical narrative of the Church’s deplorable record toward the Jews with his sighting of the huge cross that Carmelite nuns had placed in the field near the wall of the Auschwitz concentration camp. For Carroll, an ex-priest and still devoted Catholic, the cross at Auschwitz was a revelation. He was “seeing the cross in its full and awful truth for the first time.” And it was this apocalypse that initiated his deep and thorough delving into the history of the relationship between the Church and the Jews since its inception, following the emergence of the followers of Jesus.
The question Carroll now had to face squarely was disturbing, to say the least. It was the issue of the link between the ancient Christian hatred of Jews and its connection to the 20th century murderous hatred that produced the death camps. Because Carroll is a Catholic, he focused on his own Church, but his narrative did not exclude the role of the Reformation in general and of German Protestantism in particular. Like every narrative, the story unfolds with a beginning, a middle and an end. The end in this case is the cross at Auschwitz. Writes Carroll, “Once the end reveals itself, the beginning and the middle can be understood anew.”
It came as a revelation to me that initially the cross was not a reflective symbol of early Christianity. Prior to the fourth century, symbols such as palm branches, fish, birds of paradise, or the monogram of Jesus were favoured, but the cross is not to be found, for example, on the catacombs of Rome. The place of the cross in the Christian imagination came not with Paul but with the Roman Emperor Constantine at the beginning of the fourth century. For Constantine, the cross was transformed into a sword in a vision he supposedly had of a cross of light in the heavens accompanied by the message “Conquer by this.” Carroll writes that “Constantine put the Roman execution device [the cross], now rendered with a spear, at the center not only of the story of his conversion to Christianity, but of the Christian story itself.”
It is common knowledge that prior to Constantine’s conversion and conquests in the name of Christianity, Judaism and Christianity were pretty much on par in the Roman Empire. At the beginning of the fourth century, there were at least three million Jews throughout the Empire, comparable to the number of Christians. In fact, Jews enjoyed a higher level of tolerance from the imperial authorities than Christians did. Maybe that was because Christianity had within it the proselytizing drive, and Judaism did not, making Christianity more offensive to pagan cults and culture.
Constantine and his mother Helena, together, transformed that world. Under the auspices of Ambrose (339-397), the bishop of Milan, Helena was elevated as the source of discovery and rescue of the actual cross – allegedly – upon which Jesus was crucified. Here emerged the concept of the True Cross. The negative image of the Jew was also bound up with the discovery of the True Cross, because the legend associated with this breakthrough involved a Jew who knew the secret of the long-buried treasure and would only reveal its location after extensive torture. Carroll holds that the purported finding of the True Cross was the definitive victory over the Jews, “the end of a two-hundred-year-old sibling rivalry,” after which a relative equality between Christians and Jews would never exist again.
The significance of the True Cross was that it placed new accent on the role of the cross, both literally and theologically, which in turn emphasized the death of Jesus, not his life and resurrection. Since, as we know, Jews were incriminated in the crucifixion of Jesus, whether rightly or wrongly, the legend of the True Cross reinforced the unfolding hatred of Jews. It acted as a signal that the punishment of the Jews was long overdue and was now justified, particularly since the astonishing and “miraculous” discovery was attributed to the saintly Helena, popularized as a benefactress of churches, priests and nuns, and devoted mother of the emperor. (Never mind that her emperor son was the murderer of his own son as well as other contenders to his throne, and that she was part of a family filled with violence and immorality.) Thus with Helena as its foundation, the idea of the centrality of the cross spread quickly, and with it the focus on Jesus’ crucifixion, suffering, death and burial.
We now have a beginning and an end to the story of the Church and the Jews. It begins with the True Cross and ends at Auschwitz. We know the middle as well. It is a horrific tale of repeated pogroms, expulsions, inquisitions, murderous mobs, and other forms of violence against Jews that persisted through the centuries and culminated in the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust. Throughout, the Church was an instrument of ideological preaching that encouraged ferocity against the Jews, and the cross was its most effective propaganda tool.
It was as if enduring hostility mounted against the Jews was an unremitting war of the cross. There is a clear indication of the place of the cross in murderous Christian passions from the earliest pogroms – that is, the crusaders’ onslaught against Jews in 1096 on their way to Jerusalem. Although the crusaders’ main objective was to drive Muslims from the Holy City, they got sidetracked en route, massacring and terrorizing thousands of Jewish men, women and children in the Rhineland.
Solomon bar Simson, in telling the story of the crusaders’ rampage against Jews of the Rhineland, wrote about the symbolic importance of the cross to Christian mobs as follows: “They decorated themselves prominently with their signs, placing a profane symbol – a horizontal line over a vertical one – on the vestments of every man and woman… their ranks swelled until the number of men, women and children exceeded a locust horde covering the earth.”
Carroll writes that the Crusaders’ ferocity was fuelled by a cross-inspired righteousness. That inspiration can be seen again and again in the abhorrent historical record, whether it was the initiation of the blood libel in England in 1144 that lives on today among anti-Semites, or the expulsion of Jews from France in the 14th century, or the Spanish Inquisition of 1492. And it remains the inspiration for the papal cross at Auschwitz, which ultimately must be seen as an express desire to Christianize the Holocaust.
It turns out that my childhood inclination to find the cross offensive was unwittingly deserved. I wish I could now say otherwise. And as the current fashion of wearing crosses as ornaments proliferated, I’m now confronted by this icon’s presence in unexpected times and places. I am not surprised when a church authority is so adorned, but when Oprah Winfrey sports a diamond-encrusted cross on one of her trendy shows, I do find it remarkable.
I don’t doubt that today’s wearers of the cross are merely making a positive statement about their commitment to Christianity. Nor do I have reason to believe that such adornment has any intended malice. Nevertheless, it would be well for all, Jew and Christian alike, to appreciate that the cross is an expression of accentuation of the death of Jesus rather than his life, and that this has had – and continues to have – grave consequences for Jews, not the least of which is the current intensification of anti-Semitism that is still buttressed by the accusation of the role of the Jew in Jesus’ crucifixion.
posted by Professor Sal at 5:28 AM
1 Comments:
True, the length of the book, Constantine's Sword, is daunting, and the substance is heavy, but the research in it is remarkable. So, one treats this book somewhat as a textbook. My reading of it over the winter was at a pace allowing for absorbtion.
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