by John Kelly
It is unclear how long after his interrogation the surgeon was taken across Lake Geneva to Clarens, the destination of this morning’s boat ride, but not more than a week could have elapsed. Clearer is the purpose of the trip: earlier in the summer Pope Clement VI had vigorously denounced the persecution of the Jews. “Recently,” he declared, “. . . it has been brought to our attention by public fame—or, more accurately, infamy—that numerous Christians are blaming the plague . . . on poisonings carried out by the Jews at the instigation of the devil, and that out of their own hotheadedness they have impiously slain many Jews, making no exception for age and sex.” In such an atmosphere, Balavigny’s jailers probably felt it prudent to acquire physical evidence of the surgeon’s guilt. So thus it came to pass that on this brilliant September morning, while rainy London awaited the mortality, Friar Morellet counted the dead in Paris, and Matteo Villani wept bitter tears for his plague-dead brother Giovanni in Florence, surgeon Balavigny and his sleepy burgher guards set sail for Clarens in search of imaginary evidence for an imaginary crime.
One can only guess at Balavigny’s thoughts as he sat huddled at the prow of the boat, watching the sun lick away the last of the morning mist like frosting from a cake, but the surgeon’s state of mind cannot have been very different from Primo Levi’s on arriving at Auschwitz on a desolate Polish morning seven hundred years later. “No human condition is more miserable than this,” wrote Levi. “. . . They have taken away our shoes, our clothes, even our hair; if we speak they will not listen . . . [and] if they listen they will not understand.” In the camps, Levi discovered that when a man lost everything, he often ended up “losing himself.” If a measure of losing yourself is embracing the dementia of your tormentors, by the time surgeon Balavigny disembarked at Clarens, he had stepped through the looking glass. When asked if a village spring looked familiar, Balavigny replied, yes, “this is the spring where I put the poison.” And when one of the burghers, a sharp-eyed notary named Henri Gerard, found a rag near the spring, the surgeon “confirmed that it was the . . . cloth in which the poison had been enclosed.”
Three weeks after losing himself, the surgeon lost his life. In early October, Balavigny was burned at the stake.
We go
Do not ask: where?
We go
We have been told to go
From the days of fathers’ fathers
Abram went, Jacob went,
They all had to go,
Go to a land, go from a land,
All of them bent
Over the full path of the farer . . .
The millenia-long wanderings of the Jews began as they ended, in holocaust. Between a.d. 66, when the Jews of Palestine rose against Rome in the Great Revolt, and a.d. 70, when the victorious imperial standard was planted atop the ruins of the Temple Mount, 1,197,000 Jews were slain or sold into slavery, according to Tacitus. Indeed, for a time after the Revolt, it is said that it was cheaper to buy a Jew than a horse in Rome. In a.d. 128 “nearly all of Judea was laid waste” again. For the second uprising, the historian Dio Cassius puts the butcher’s bill at 985 villages and towns and 50 forts destroyed, 580,000 Jews killed in battle, and “countless numbers of others destroyed by starvation, fire and sword.” Dio and Tacitus probably exaggerated Jewish losses, but not egregiously. The sixty years between a.d. 70 and a.d. 130 tore the heart out of Jewish Palestine. Visiting Jerusalem in the fourth century, St. Jerome found that the memory of those years still hung heavy upon the land. Of the Jewish remnant, Jerome wrote, “a sad people . . . decrepit little women and old men encumbered with rags and years, showing both in their bodies and dress, the wrath of the Lord.”
Seven hundred years later, Benjamin of Tudela, a peripatetic gem merchant with a taste for adventure, picked up the story of the Diaspora. In 1183, Benjamin began a three-year odyssey through the Jewish communities of Europe and the Near East. He visited Constantinople, where he found that no Jew, no matter how wealthy, was allowed to ride a horse, “except for Rabbi Solomon, the Egyptian, who is the King’s doctor.” In Spain, Benjamin found Jews not only rode horses, but rode them with knightly panache, dressed like emirs in exquisite silks and many-gemmed turbans, served as ambassadors and administrators, and became renowned physicians, scholars, and philosophers. At Crisa on Mount Parnassus, the gem merchant came across a colony of straw-hatted Jewish farmers sweating under the Mediterranean sun; in Aleppo, Jewish glass blowers with exaggerated cheek muscles; in Brindisi, dyers with stained hands; and in Constantinople, tanners who polluted the streets of the Jewish quarter with the effluvia of their work. But on the whole, the Diaspora communities that Benjamin described in his
Book of Travels were mercantile in character and often quite small.
In the general population collapse of the early Middle Ages, the Jews suffered disproportionately. From eight million in the first century—roughly 10 percent of the Roman Empire—their numbers fell to a million and a half by Benjamin’s time.* Spain, home to the largest and most prosperous Jewish community in medieval Europe, may have had between a hundred and a hundred and fifty thousand Jews; but the devout and fierce Ashkenazi community of Germany barely numbered twenty-five thousand. However, wherever they lived, the Jews of the Diaspora were usually more prosperous and better educated than their Christian neighbors.
In
World on Fire, a recent book on globalization, Yale scholar Amy Chua notes that in many modern third world countries, a small, skilled, nonnational elite often acts as a go-between to the global economy. In modern Southeast Asia, the overseas Chinese play this role; in modern sub-Saharan Africa, the Lebanese. In the early Middle Ages, when Christian literacy and numeracy rates were close to zero, the comparatively well educated Jews played an analogous role in Europe. “By virtue of their experience in commerce and superior knowledge in commodities, markets and monetary transactions, their versatility in languages and the dispersion of their coreligionists, Jews occupied a preeminent position in international trade,” write scholars Mordechai Breuer and Michael Graetz. Indeed, so preeminent was the Jewish commercial role in the first half of the Middle Ages that many writs of privilege and ordinances contained the formulation
judaei et ceteri mercatores—“Jews and other merchants.”
In the ninth and tenth centuries, Jewish merchants could be found in the pepper markets of India, the silk markets of Samarkand and Baghdad, the slave markets of Egypt (where they sold pagan slaves called “Canaties”), and on the vast, empty expanses of the Silk Road, atop camels laden with jewels and spices. In a letter to his famous philosopher brother Moses, the merchant David Maimonides described the death of one these intrepid Jewish trader-travelers. “The greatest misfortune that has befallen me during my entire life, worse than anything else, was the death of [my colleague],” wrote David. “May his memory be blest; [he] drowned on the Indian Sea carrying much money belonging to me, to him and to others. . . . He was well versed in the Talmud, the Bible and knew [Hebrew] grammar well and my joy in life was to look at him.”
If a trader’s life could be hazardous, it could also be quite lucrative. In the first millennium, Jewish living standards were so far above the European norm, “the term ‘dark early Middle Ages’ . . . has as little applicability for the Jewish medieval period as for the Byzantine Empire,” note scholars Breuer and Graetz. Commerce made some Jews not merely wealthy but fabulously rich. When Aaron of Lincoln died, a special branch of the English Exchequer (Treasury) had to be established to tabulate his fortune, and a French Jew named Elias of Vesoul, anticipating the Rothschilds, built a far-flung banking and commercial empire as early as the eleventh century. However, even men like Aaron and Elias lived the anxious, uncertain existence of outsiders. Upon Aaron’s death, the English Crown seized most of his fortune; from Abraham of Bristol, another wealthy English Jew who was imprisoned in 1268, the Crown extracted one tooth a day until Abraham agreed to deposit ten thousand silver marks in the royal coffers.
The anti-
Semitism that cost Abraham his teeth was grounded, first of all, in theology. The early Church fathers held the Jews culpable of so many sins that between the third and eighth century, a new literary genre,
Adversus Judaeos, was created to describe them all. An early example of the genre,
An Answer to the Jews, accused the Jewish people of forsaking God and worshipping false images; another early example,
Rhythm Against the Jews, of trading God the Father for a calf and God the Son for a thief. Other works in the
Adversus Judaeos tradition included
On the Sabbath, Against the Jews, which accused the Jews of grossness and materialism;
Eight Orations Against the Jews, which likens the Jew to a stubborn animal spoiled by kindness and overindulgence; and
Demonstration Against the Jews, which equates Jerusalem with Sodom and Gomorrah.
Homilies Against the Jews declares uncircumcised Gentiles the new Chosen People, a point also made by
Books of Testimonies Against the Jews, though the latter work makes the point with more literary grace. Using the parable of Jacob and his two wives,
Testimonies presents the elder wife Leah, with her defective eyes, as the embodiment of the synagogue, and the beautiful young wife Rachel as the symbol of a Church Triumphant.
Contra Judaeos also uses biblical imagery, although in this case to get at the core of the theological argument with the Jews.
Contra presents Cain as the symbol of the Jewish people, and Abel, the brother he slew, as the symbol of Christ.
In its mildest form, early medieval Christianity expressed its theological grievances against the Jews as a complaint: the Jewish people rejected Christ, the Light and the Way. In a sterner formulation, the grievances acquired the menace of accusation: although recognizing Christ’s divinity, the Jews rejected Him because He was poor and humble. And in their most vitriolic form, the grievances became a bill of indictment for murder: Jews were Christ killers.
Political and social factors have also helped to fuel anti-Semitism through the ages. Thus, in the decades after Christ’s death, Christian Jews, eager to separate their new religion from its temple roots, launched an attack on their orthodox counterparts, an attack that grew increasingly more expansive as the decades passed. Thus, in Mark, the earliest gospel, written around a.d. 68, Satan is associated with the scribes. In Luke, written ten years later, the “evil one” becomes affiliated with a wider segment of Jewish society, but the target is still individual groups like “the chief priests and the captains of the temple.” But by the time John writes, around the year a.d. 100, Satan’s allies have become simply “the Jews.” The phrase “the Jews” appears seventy-one times in John, compared to a total of sixteen times in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
The Jewish faithful often responded to Christian Jews in kind. “May the
minim [the heretics] perish in an instant; may they be effaced from the Book of Life and not be counted among the just,” goes the
Shemoneh Esrei prayer. The orthodox establishment also disparaged Christ as the illegitimate child of a Roman solider named Panthera, denounced His miracles as tricks and the Resurrection as a hoax.
As Christianity became non-Jewish, religious rivalry replaced intragroup conflict as an engine of anti-Semitism. During the early Middle Ages especially, Church authorities became alarmed at the number of Christians who were attracted to Jewish teachings. John Chrysostom, hammer of the “Judaizers”—Christians attracted to Jewish teachings—declared, “I know that many people hold a high regard for the Jews and consider their way of life worthy of respect at the present time. This is why I am hurrying to pull up this fatal notion by the roots. . . . A place where a whore stands on display is a whorehouse. What is more, the synagogue is not only a whorehouse and a theatre; it is also a den of thieves and a haunt of wild animals.” Another seminal anti-Semite, the ninth-century bishop Agobard of Lyon, believed Christians who broke bread with Jews risked spiritual seduction. Agobard lived just long enough to see one his most paranoid fantasies realized. On a trip to Rome in the 820s, Bodo, father-confessor to Louis the Pious, Charlemagne’s son and successor, fled to Spain, converted to Judaism, and married a Jewess.
Of the impious Bodo, Agobard’s successor at Lyon, the dyspeptic Archbishop Amulo, thundered, “Now he lives in Spain, . . . his bearded figure squats in the synagogues of Satan and joins with other Jews in blaspheming Christ in His Church.”
In the centuries leading up to the Black Death, anti-Semitism also became a useful tool for financiers and nation builders. In 1289 English-controlled Gascony expelled its Jews and seized their property. The following year, 1290, the English Crown turned on native Jews. Edward I, grandfather of Edward III, ordered the Jews of England expelled and their goods confiscated, although, having long been a favorite target of the English Exchequer, the Jews did not have much left to confiscate. In the mid-thirteenth century, when the treasury shook down Aaron of York, it got more than 30,000 silver marks; by the expulsion of 1290, together the Jews of eleven leading English towns could barely raise a third that sum.
In France, where feelings against Jews traditionally ran high, the monarchy used a policy of expulsion to win popular support and to enrich itself. Thrown out in 1306, the Jews were readmitted in 1315, expelled again in 1322, brought back again in 1359, and expelled again in 1394.
One day in the late fourth century, a woman stood on a pier in Carthage and, “wild with grief,” watched as a ship slipped over the horizon, taking with it everything she loved and ever would love. The woman’s name was Monica, and there was more than a touch of the domineering matriarch about her. It would be an exaggeration to say that St. Augustine would never have become St. Augustine without the overbearing, suffocating Monica, but had she not been so inescapable and controlling, the dissolute young pagan might have wallowed in the fleshpots of Milan for another decade before embracing Christianity in 387.
Like Churchill, another man with a difficult mother, Augustine was also a nonstop talker; his words, recorded by an ever-present staff of copyists, grew to fill nearly a hundred books, including two works of historic importance. These are the autobiographical
Confessions, where the sound of a personal voice can be heard for one of the few times in the Middle Ages—“I closed her eyes and a great sorrow surged through me,” Augustine wrote of his mother’s death—and
City of God, which helped to define Christian policy toward the Jews for nearly a millennium. When the eighteenth-century philosopher Moses Mendelssohn exclaimed that, without Augustine’s “lovely brainwave, we [Jews] would have been exterminated long ago,” he was referring to
City of God.
While
City, and Augustine’s other “Jewish” writings, rehearse all the familiar arguments of Christian anti-Semitism, including the Jews’ unwillingness to recognize the divinity of Christ, Augustine’s novelty was to add a “but” at the end of the traditional indictment. In Augustine’s vision, the Jews had a divinely appointed role; God intended them to “bear witness” to a Christianity Triumphant.* And since the Jews had to remain Jews to fulfill the role, the Augustinian “but” amounted to a ticket to survival—the only such ticket early Christianity issued to a dissident minority. As Jacob Neusner has noted, “Judaism endured in the West for two reasons. First, Christianity wanted it to endure and, second, Israel, the Jewish people, wanted it to. The fate of paganism in the fourth century shows the importance of the first of the two factors.”
During the nearly seven-hundred-year ascendancy of the Augustinian “but,” the virus of anti-Semitism remained in an attenuated form. Even vicious anti-Semites like Agobard of Lyon rarely talked of mass conversion, mass expulsion, or mass extermination. The ninth and tenth centuries were a period of relative peace and prosperity for European Jews, particularly in Spain and Germany, where immigrants from northern Italy established the first Ashkenazi settlements. Indeed, Louis the Pious, leader of the Carolingian Empire, the
largest empire of its day, was renowned as a friend of the Jews, as was his father Charlemagne. However, the human mind can only hold two contradictory thoughts for so long. Consequently, after the turn of the millennium, the complex Augustinian formulation, “Hate the Jews, respect the Jews” gave way to the simpler formulation, “Hate the Jews.” In 1007 there were persecutions in France, and in 1012 forced conversions in Germany; then, in 1096, an apocalypse. For centuries afterward the names of the Jews slaughtered during the Crusader pogroms* of 1096 would be read aloud in European synagogues on Saturday mornings.
The pogroms originated in Rouen. Shouting, “We depart to wage war against the enemies of God, while here in our very midst dwell the . . . murderers of our Redeemer,” a group of Crusaders ran through the streets of the town, slaying Jews. In Speyer and Cologne, resolute action by a local bishop managed to avert wholesale slaughter, but in Mainz, which had a weak bishop and an unsympathetic citizenry, the carnage was terrible. As a Crusader force breached the town wall, the local Jewish community gathered in the courtyard of the bishop’s palace. Rabbi Solomon bar Simson describes what happened next. “In a great voice, they all cried, ‘We need tarry no longer, the enemy is already upon us. Let us hasten to offer ourselves as a sacrifice before God. . . . The women girded their loins with strength and slew their own sons and daughters and then themselves. Many men also mustered their strength and slaughtered their wives and children and infants. The most gentle and tender of women slaughtered the child of her delight. [Then] they all arose, men and women alike, and slew one another. . . . Let the ears hearing this and its like be seared, for who has heard or seen the likes of it . . .” In Worms, the Jewish community recited the ancient Shema prayer: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord, our God, the Lord is One,” as they fell beneath the Crusader swords. Afterward the dead were stripped naked and dragged away.