The Story of the Jews

by Simon Schama

  What Chrysostom brought forth in his eight homilies of the late 380s was well beyond Pauline vexation; it was, for the first time, a true social pathology of the Jews. It borrowed from ancient demonologies of the kind that had already been circulating in antiquity – the Jews as conspiratorial ravening kidnappers, required by sacred rites to devour Gentiles they had fattened for the purpose – but added to those stories the new certainty that Christ-killing was just an extension of their inborn propensity for homicide. They had murdered Christ, but then why wouldn’t they have done this, since by their own admission (he said) they had murdered their own sons and daughters? ‘It is obvious,’ he thunders in the second homily, ‘they are enmeshed in murder.’34 Feeding off two lines in Psalm 106 which almost certainly referred to the appalling sacrifices of King Manasseh, Chrysostom made those ancient atrocities (supposing they happened) sound as if they occurred but yesterday. ‘They sacrificed their sons and daughters to devils, outraged nature . . . they have become worse than wild beasts and for no reason at all with their own hands murder their offspring to worship the avenging devils who are the foes of our life.’ Even if this did happen many generations ago, Chrysostom railed that the Jews still had the taste of blood on their tongues. His sixth homily begins with the horrifying analogy of ravening beasts who, once tasting flesh and blood, could never get enough of it. Those beasts were the Jews.

  There was more. They were all, it seemed, loathsomely fat, ‘no better than pigs’ (the metaphor carefully chosen), abandoned to voluptuary swill (a particular abomination for an ascetic like John, of course).35 Their lust was well known; the ancients had written of it – another reason why their pretended devotion to Mosaic circumcision was a pretext to heighten their desires. Notoriously they were all ‘hucksters and wicked merchants’ who would rob you as soon as look at you. ‘What else do you want me to tell you? Shall I tell you of their plundering, their covetousness, their abandonment of the poor [an astonishing accusation since the Jews were already famous for their charity], their thefts, their cheating in trade? The day will not be long enough to give you an account of these things.’36 Unfit for true work, John advised ‘they are [however] fit for killing’. That is why, he says, Christ said ‘as for these my enemies who do not want me to be king over them, bring them here and slay them’.37

  If they could not all be killed, at least not yet, then at the very least the ‘Judaising’ – the casual fellowship, the outrageous visits to synagogues on the Jews’ holy days – had to stop. From express bans on Christian clerics going there we can infer that even they had caught the synagogue habit.

  Many, I know, respect the Jews and think that their way of life is a venerable one. This is why I hasten to uproot and tear out this deadly opinion . . . let no man venerate the synagogue because of the holy books, let him hate and avoid it . . . Must you share a greeting with them, exchange even a bare word? Must you not turn away from them since they are the common disgrace and infection of the whole world? . . . Do you not shudder to come into the same place with men possessed who have so many unclean spirits, who have been reared amid slaughter and bloodshed . . . what manner of lawlessness have they not eclipsed by their blood-guiltiness . . . they sacrificed their own daughters to demons?38

  There was only one recourse for a proper, decent Christian: to avoid all contact with these walking infections, except to remind them at all times of the gospel truth ‘you did slay Christ, you did lay violent hands against the Master, you did spill his precious blood. This is why you have no chance for atonement.’39

  These views were not those of some unhinged outlier on the wilder shores of Christianity but came from the mouth of ‘Golden-Tongued’: the most revered and influential preacher, not just in his native city, Antioch, but in all of eastern Christendom. John’s was held to be the voice of authentic piety, one that could cut through the wordly ease of the cosmopolitan city to remind the complacent of their true duties. It is the kind of voice that combined a fiercely unforgiving call for austerity with fanatical battle cries to confront the enemies, the slayers, of Christ. This was, for the Jews, a fatal combination they would have to face over and over again in the Christian centuries.

  How far would the call to make them a pariah tribe go? Whom would it reach? Would the laws of the empire protect them from physical attack if it came to that, or would the state stand by lest the enraged turn their hatred on them, accuse them of indifference to Christ’s urgings? It was not as if Chrysostom was ignored or unheeded. That the homilies survived by being written down and circulated by those who heard them is itself evidence of how much attention contemporaries paid to them. In 398, just eleven years after completing them, John was elevated to the patriarchate of Constantinople which put him as close as he could want to the seat of imperial power. This must have been gratifying since the intensity of his phobic outpourings was determined, at least in part, by the memory, still frighteningly vivid, of the apostate emperor Julian who, in Antioch itself in 362–3, had promised to restore the Jews to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple.

  Julian’s brief but dramatic campaign of de-Christianising the Roman Empire, restoring pagan temples and cult holidays and tolerating all religions equally was particularly galling to the Church since he had been brought up by Christian parents. His father was the half-brother of the first Christian emperor Constantine who, while upholding the right of Jews to worship according to their traditions, referred to them as ‘impure in their crimes . . . justly stricken with blindness’. Julian would be different, a philosopher-prince. The People of the Book did not particularly love him for his epicureanism, and he looked on the contents of that book with some distaste, taking particular exception to the special covenant implying that only the Israelites enjoyed the true blessings of God; but he saw no reason why they should not, like any other people, be protected in the worship of whatever god they happened to favour, as long as – unlike the Christians – they did not seek to foist it on everyone else. And his humanity went out to the modern Jews who had lost their Temple and their golden city. On the one day permitted for their pilgrimage, the 9th of Ab (the anniversary of the destruction), the remnant western wall of Herod’s Temple had already become not only a site of public and vocal lament, but a tourist attraction for Christians with mixed feelings. One traveller in 333 wrote of their coming close to the statue of Hadrian which stood on the Temple site and ‘mourning, loudly tearing their clothes after which they go home’.40

  Chrysostom would have felt the sudden chill most acutely because the theatre in which this sudden, extraordinary understanding between the last of the pagan emperors and the Jews was played out was his own Antioch. Julian went there in 362 to muster the forces he would take into battle against the Persians. Some sources, mostly anti-Julian, have the emperor convening a deputation of Jews from the city and throughout Syria and asking them why they were not making sacrifices to their God as required by the laws of Moses. The laws of Moses, they replied, do not allow us to sacrifice outside Jerusalem. ‘Restore to us the city, rebuild the temple and altar and we shall make sacrifices as we did of old.’ The violently Judeophobic preacher Ephrem Syrus painted a picture of an unholy alliance, the Jews rejoicing in the evil of ‘Julian the magician and idol worshipper’: ‘The circumcised blew their trumpets and behaved like madmen.’ But it seems much more plausible to assume that at least some of the Jews would have had mixed feelings about the project, given that the advent of the Messiah was supposed to be the precondition of restoration.

  Suddenly the project appealed to Julian, the ambitious shaper of history, not least because it would dramatically confound the Christian truism that the ruins of the Temple would serve forever as a reminder of the consequences of rejecting the Saviour. But it is still an astonishing fact that a Roman emperor, much less one born of Christian parents, should have thought that the ‘great monument to perpetuate the memory of his reign’, as the contemporaneous Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus put it, would be the re
storation ‘at enormous expense . . . of the once magnificent temple at Jerusalem’ destroyed by his own people.41

  By the spring of 363 matters were moving fast. To oversee the project, Julian appointed the Antiochene he trusted most, Alypius, who had served as governor in Britain. A letter to the patriarch Hillel II requested an estimate of the cost of rebuilding, a tax collector was appointed to receive the monies collected by Jewish communities for the project (a reminder of the old shekels imposed for the upkeep of the Temple), limestone and timber supplies were moved towards Jerusalem, and a temporary synagogue was actually established by one of the half-destroyed porticos of the building. On his way to campaign against the Persians, Julian announced that ‘I am building with all zeal the new temple of the most high God’.

  And then, as far as the Christian fathers were concerned, God unmistakably gave His verdict. According to Ammianus Marcellinus, at the end of May, ‘fearful balls of fire burst forth near the foundations, burning several workers and making the spot inaccessible. Thus the very elements, as if by some fate repelling the enterprise, it was laid aside.’42 The explosions were almost certainly shocks from a Galilean earthquake, but of course they were greeted as vindication by Christians in Palestine and Syria. Lest there be any further doubt what the Almighty thought of the premature restoration, Julian was killed by a Persian spear while on campaign a month later.

  Christians breathed a sigh of relief and offered fervent prayers for their escape from the clutches of paganism and Judaism. The nightmare of a Christian world turned upside down had passed, but it had made the Church fathers acutely aware that perhaps a Christian Roman Empire was more precariously rooted than they had imagined. And yet the weight of punitive repression after the Julian interlude fell more severely on pagans than Christians. Judaism was still preserved as a religio licita; paganism was not. Its temples were destroyed, its cults were suppressed, and it became a crime to practise pagan cults even in the privacy of a home. Although the more militant of the Church fathers wanted to press the imperial government into making the lives of Jews more difficult – the better to encourage conversion – they contented themselves with reinforcing the separation of the two communities: no intermarriage (at a time when the rabbis were making that easier); no circumcision of Gentile servants or slaves; no blessings of Gentile crops and fields; no sharing the table with Jews.

  There were two constraints on the campaign to marginalise and even dehumanise Jews and Judaism. First, the most eloquent and learned of the Church fathers were themselves divided on how aggressively to pursue their conversion and ostracise as pariahs those who stubbornly resisted. Jerome, who spent years in Palestine and had learned Hebrew to make a Latin translation from the original Bible text – the Vulgate – was physically closer to Jews, especially his convert teachers, but adamant about their wilful perversity and their blood guilt for the crucifixion. ‘He that is not of Christ is anti-Christ.’ Everything about the Jews had to be read backwards from their part in the crucifixion, including the unwholesomeness of their practices, the contemptible absurdity of their fleshly circumcision, their vulgar obsession with the letter of the law. Augustine, remarkably and exceptionally, came to see the Jews and their Torah more historically. Since God had singled them out to receive His law, how could it possibly be thought of anything but worthy, even circumcision, which, to Augustine’s understanding, in its ‘putting off ’ of the flesh, was actually a prefiguration of Christ’s own shedding of the flesh. Had not Paul himself, so angry about the Jews’ refusal to see that circumcision had been superseded, had Timothy circumcised? Likewise, Augustine made the effort of historical imagination to register to the full the Jewishness of Jesus and the apostles. And now, he wrote to Jerome in a series of subtly argued polemical exchanges, it was necessary to preserve Jews in the undisturbed observance of their traditions and laws, for God must have wanted them to be universally dispersed, wandering the face of the earth, as custodians of the Bible’s prophecies of Christ – a living museum of perpetual anticipation. To be sure they would only be saved by conversion, but that had to be accomplished, in the fullness of time, if God so wished it, and through persuasion not coercion.43

  The second constraint was the legalistic conservatism of the dominant imperial figure in the later part of the fourth century, Theodosius I, who while doing everything he could to uproot paganism and thus pre-empt any possibility of another Julian revolution, stood by the old implicit compact. As long as the Jews were loyal (and the substantial presence in Persian Babylonia made that an important matter), then they were entitled to the protection of the law against any physical harassment or worse. Chrysostom had barely finished his homilies when the effect of his verbal violence tested Theodosian firmness. The year 388 saw an epidemic of mob attacks against synagogues all over the eastern empire including Alexandria, but especially fierce in Syria. At Callinicum on the Euphrates, the synagogue was burned to the ground by a crowd egged on by the local bishop. At first Theodosius responded with exemplary severity, ordering the synagogue to be rebuilt with the bishop’s own funds, but the decision provoked a storm of protest from clerics horrified that Christians would be forced into funding a place for the Jews. One of the horrified bishops, Ambrose of Milan, already incensed at the order of Magnus Maximus a year earlier which forced the rebuilding of a Roman synagogue, bearded the emperor with the impiety of his sentence, casting himself as the prophet Nathan to Theodosius’ erring David. With a nice sense of the histrionic (and a patrician education in classical rhetoric) Ambrose offered to substitute himself as the culprit, receive punishment and even martyrdom if necessary rather than have the Church pay any recompense to the Jews. ‘I am present,’ he declaimed to the emperor, ‘I am here. I proclaim that I set fire to the synagogue or ordered others to do so so that no building should be left standing where Christ is denied.’ Since God had ordained the destruction of the synagogue by whatever instruments Ambrose chose, he would indeed have done it himself had the opportunity arisen. As for the Jews, ‘do not thou pray for this people, nor show mercy to them’.44 After a personal confrontation Theodosius rescinded his penalty, ordering instead that civic and state funds be used, and even that went unenforced. It was a very bad sign.

  Worse was to follow, though. In the next century the rulers of the divided Christian Roman Empire, embattled on every front – against the barbarians in Europe, against the Persians in Asia Minor, conspiratorial and murderous among themselves, and deeply suspicious of the loyalties of the Jews – were more open to the Church’s campaign to make them less than Romans. A succession of edicts issued between 435 and 438 during the reign of Theodosius II made a Jewish communal life as anomalous and as difficult as possible in the Byzantine Empire. Not only were no new synagogues to be built, but repairs to the fabric of old ones were also forbidden. This was tantamount to giving a blessing to arson, since Jews were now disallowed from seeking redress for damage. Clerics could (and did) arrive at the scene of a half-destroyed synagogue and immediately consecrate the ruin as a church, converting the fabric if not its worshippers. No Jews were to hold any kind of public office except for the responsibility of collecting some taxes which would make them bear all of the odium and none of the privileges. Nor were they to serve in the army, which would seem to be a redundancy for they had long been exempt, but this brought to an end the long tradition of Jewish soldiering in Egypt and Graeco-Roman Asia Minor.

  The Jewish thread, long woven into the cultural fabric of Graeco-Roman life, was unravelling. The symbol of the connection between the empire and the Ioudaioi – the patriarchate, which had begun with the legendary understandings of Judah the Prince and Caracalla and Antoninus Pius – ended with the death of Gamaliel VI in 425. A successor was not appointed and four years later the office of the Patriarch of the Jews was officially done away with, making Jewish anxiety about their becoming an entirely subject population stripped of the protection of the law even more acute. Some of the more dreadful fables, seeping f
rom the pulpit of Chrysostom and the paranoid teachings of Simon Stylites and Ephrem Syrus, began to take root in Christian folk culture. The festival of Purim came under particular suspicion, possibly because of its Persian associations and the central role played by the Jewish Queen Esther. Stories abounded that, celebrating the feast, Jews staged a mock crucifixion under the guise of the executed Haman. Worse, it was said that young Christian boys were being abducted for the purposes of torture and crucifixion. At Inmestar, not far from Antioch, a riot ensued in 414 after rumours spread that Jews had taken one such child for a Purim killing. A millennium and a half later, the same kind of story was still finding believers in Syria, though the festival of Jewish homicidal conspiracy had shifted to Passover and the crime involved the draining of Christian blood for the baking of matzo. From Chrysostom’s insistence that as far as the Jews were concerned, once a bunch of murderers always a bunch of murderers, to the actual accusation of child torture and sacrifice, it was but a small step.

  The possibility of an urban world shared between Jews and Christians – even one lived on theological suffrance, on the Augustinian conditions of tolerance without encouragement – was perishing. Along with it went the legal protection Judaism had enjoyed throughout the Roman Empire both before and after its Christianisation. When the code of the emperor Justinian was issued in 532, for the first time there was no mention that Judaism was still a religio licita. In synagogues from Africa to Syria, the chilling omission would have been noticed. Three years later, in 535, a still more forbidding edict was issued. All synagogues in the empire were to be converted into churches.