Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

  * * *

  *1 The dinner in New York commemorating Al Smith, the first Catholic presidential candidate, is a quadrennial event before every presidential election. Smith’s candidacy in 1928 was doomed from the start by anti-Catholic prejudice in an America that still looked askance at all non-Protestant religions.

  *2 These prohibitions are cited in the Codex Theodosianus, under the heading “Regarding Heretics.”

  *3 Passages like these have, of course, led to speculation that Augustine might have been gay. This strikes me as equivalent to the claims that Abraham Lincoln was gay because, on the frontier, he slept in the same bed with male friends in whose homes he had found lodging. For all I know, both Augustine and Lincoln were gay, if gayness is assessed by the intensity of male friendships in the ancient world or the shortage of beds in houses on the nineteenth-century American frontier.

  *4 Many of Paul’s epistles contain passages specifically emphasizing the responsibility of the laity to “edify one another.”

  · PART II ·

  FROM CONVIVENCIA TO THE STAKE

  4

  BISHOP PAUL OF BURGOS (C. 1352–1435)

  Formerly Known as Solomon ha-Levi, Rabbi of Burgos

  Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray

  From the straight road and awoke to find myself

  Alone in a dark forest. How shall I say

  what a forest that was! I never saw so dreary,

  so savage, so stern a wilderness!

  Its very memory imparts form to fear.

  —CANTO I, DANTE’S INFERNO

  WHAT A DIFFERENCE a year can make in the interpretation of an iconic conversion story! Solomon ha-Levi, a Talmudic scholar who converted to Christianity approximately midway in his life’s journey, was one of the most famous converts from Judaism of his time and place—an exemplary catch for Christians who ardently desired the conversion of all Jews. So it is not particularly surprising that some fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Christian sources would date his conversion from 1390 rather than 1391.1 In 1391, a wave of savage attacks against long-established Iberian Jewish communities—some with origins in Roman times—was carried out by Christian mobs throughout the peninsula. Had Solomon ha-Levi, born into one of the most eminent Jewish families in the kingdom of Castile, embraced Catholicism a year earlier, his decision could be more easily seen by Christians as a purely spiritual choice, uninfluenced by Christian persecutions of Jews. For Jewish life throughout Iberia, the assaults that began in 1391—which resulted in the deaths, departures, or forced conversions of tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Jews—signaled the beginning of an end that would come just a century later, when all Jews who refused to convert were expelled in 1492 by order of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. The first wave of conversions lasted about twenty-five years, and, although exact numbers are a matter of considerable dispute, the most conservative estimates suggest that half of the Jews in Iberia submitted to baptism.2 Conversions by eminent Jews like ha-Levi could not have failed to provide a powerful example for less educated, less prosperous members of the Jewish community. He would eventually become a bishop and counselor to kings, cardinals, and a pope (actually, an antipope in Catholic history).

  But there could be no more appropriate epigraph than the famous opening lines of Dante’s Inferno for the conversion to Catholicism, as he was nearing age forty, of a man steeped in Jewish learning.*1 For the threatened Jews of his community, the world in which Solomon became Paul embodied fear in its most concrete forms. The rejection of Judaism by a scholar as eminent as ha-Levi (known both as “Pablo” and as “Pablo de Santa Maria” in his new incarnation), had it occurred before the 1391 attacks, could be seen and exalted by Christians as a straightforward recognition on the part of a once-devout rabbi that Christianity was the completion of Jewish prophecy.*2 That is how Paul himself, in his subsequent Christian theological writings, presented his conversion. The same conversion could be and was seen by some Jews (then and now) as loathsome, pure, unforced apostasy—a voluntary act of treachery against the Jewish people.

  Most twentieth-century scholars, however, concluded that ha-Levi converted not in 1390 but in 1391, at the height of violence that had already ravaged the Jewish quarters of Seville, Toledo, and Córdoba and would soon spread to Barcelona, Valencia, and Majorca. The later date makes much more sense in view of ha-Levi’s status as a Jew who was influential among both Jews and Christians and enjoyed the protection of the Christian rulers of Castile for his services to the monarchy. Why would a respected Talmudic scholar—moreover, one with powerful connections at the Christian court—suddenly decide to have himself and his family baptized for purely religious reasons? He was an ambitious man, versed not only in the Torah and Talmud but in Christian theological argument, classical philosophy, and, as a product of the Convivencia, most likely in Islamic writings. He read Hebrew, Arabic (the language in which Maimonides usually wrote), and Latin, a language whose mastery was unusual among his Jewish contemporaries.

  Since the first Muslim invasion of Iberia, Muslims, Christians, and Jews had accommodated one another with varying degrees of tolerance and suspicion, and occasional violence—the latter usually, but not always, committed by Christians against Jews. For the most part, though, Muslim rulers had not only allowed but encouraged a cross-fertilization of cultures that did not exist anywhere else in Europe during the Middle Ages. The cultural flowering of the Convivencia had included everything from plumbing unknown since Roman times to translations of the vast body of classical Greek literature into Arabic—awaiting the time when it would be retranslated from the Arabic into Latin and the emerging vernacular languages of Europe. This renascence lasted well into Paul’s time, even though the long Christian Reconquista—its irreversible victories beginning with the recapture of Toledo in 1085 and ending with Ferdinand and Isabella’s triumphal entry into Granada in 1492—created unpredictable combinations of latitudinarianism and persecution for both Jews and Muslims.

  The conversion of a Jew like Paul of Burgos, however, attested to the weight of one military victory after another by the Christians over the Moorish rulers. The fabled city of Córdoba fell in 1236; Valencia, in 1238; and Seville, in 1248. At the time of Paul’s conversion, only Granada survived as the last outpost of what a learned tenth-century Saxon nun, Hroswitha of Gandersheim, had described as the “ornament of the world.” Another century would pass before Ferdinand and Isabella—having conquered the last Moorish city and its monarch, Boabdil—would expel all Jews from Spain unless they agreed to convert to Christianity. But the handwriting was already on the wall in the 1390s for ancient Jewish communities throughout the peninsula. The Conversos of Paul’s generation were known as New Christians, to distinguish them from Old Christians, who presumably had no Jewish ancestors—or none who could be identified.

  The ha-Levi family, including Solomon, was among the most influential clans within the Jewish community of Burgos—one of the three largest, richest, and most politically influential Jewish population centers in Castile. It makes little sense that Solomon, having assumed his role as the community’s leading rabbi, would suddenly have seen the light of Christ unless he had been given a push by outside events leading to the inescapable conclusion that there was no future in Spain for Jews who remained Jews. Many scholars mention the oft-told tale that ha-Levi was convinced of the truth of Christianity by the writings of Thomas Aquinas. “There is no need to doubt this tradition,” asserts Benzion Netanyahu, who considers the influence of Muslim, Christian, and classical pagan thought on the Jews of Spain a historical tragedy.3

  There is every need and reason to doubt such a tradition (though it is certainly likely that a scholar like ha-Levi, who was literate in Latin, would have read Aquinas). I daresay that more Jews have converted to Christianity because they saw other Jews being murdered, deprived of their property, and stripped of royal protection than because they had encountered Aquinas’s use of logic and reason in the service of Chris
tian religious beliefs (just as Maimonides had used classical logic in the service of Judaic beliefs). Attributing ha-Levi’s conversion to his reading of Aquinas is just another way of saying that no Jew in the Diaspora can be a real Jew. That is a political and moral position, but it is hardly a historical fact.

  This is not to say that Jewish, Christian, and Muslim intellectuals in Iberia were not unusually well acquainted with one another’s beliefs throughout what were still the Dark Ages in much of Northern Europe. The Jews, obviously, were in a very different position from both Muslims and Christians, in that their fate depended on the religious liberality or repressiveness of particular Muslim and Christian rulers. Both Muslim rulers before the Reconquista and Christian rulers afterward made use of Jews as high-level political advisers as well as ordinary tax collectors. But the events of 1391, which demonstrated the combined inability and unwillingness of Christian authorities at that time to protect even their favorite Jews from mobs, made it clear that even court Jews at the highest level of the realm would have to convert in order to retain their former occupations and privileges. The collection of taxes in Castile, for instance, was carried out by the office of the chief treasurer, who was a Jew. By the end of the fourteenth century, the treasurer’s office was staffed by Conversos. Whether taxes were collected by religious Jews or Conversos made little difference to the rulers, who in either case were able to insulate themselves to some degree from the ordinary populace’s natural hatred of tax levies. And it seems unlikely, given the profound suspicion of the sincerity of Conversos that led to the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition by the Vatican in 1478 (at the request of Ferdinand and Isabella), that ordinary people made any distinction between tax collectors who remained faithful to Judaism and those who converted to Christianity.

  It should be superfluous to state that the vast majority of Jews in Spain were neither moneylenders nor tax collectors; what is true is that nearly all lenders and tax collectors, before the wave of persecutions began in 1391, were Jews. Representing the royal treasury was one way in which elite men of the Jewish community made a living and exercised political influence. After 1391, that influence would become increasingly constricted for ambitious Jews. Converting to Christianity was the smart thing to do, if your interest lay in kingdoms belonging to this world.

  •

  Ha-Levi’s conversion was no more “ordinary” than Augustine’s, because ha-Levi, like Augustine, was a man of extraordinary intelligence and learning. Given his subsequent career in the church and his defenses of Christian theology, it is impossible to regard him as a member of the anousim, the Hebrew term for Iberian Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity but nevertheless continued to practice certain Jewish traditions in secret in order to preserve their identity. Historically, such people were more commonly called Marranos (a pejorative probably derived from the Spanish word for “swine”); or Conversos (literally, the converted).*3 The dilemma posed by the transformation of Solomon ha-Levi into Bishop Paul of Burgos is that, although his subsequent opportunistic church career can hardly be regarded as anything but treason by devoutly observant Jews, his original change of faith cannot be viewed outside the context of the death and destruction then being wreaked upon Jewish communities. It is natural that, over generations, many Conversos would sincerely embrace Christianity and lose touch with their origins (insofar as the Inquisition would let them). Solomon ha-Levi’s instant makeover, though, has nothing to do with the attenuation of old religious loyalties may occur over many generations. It is certainly within the realm of psychological possibility that a man might rationalize a forced conversion in spiritual terms rather than acknowledge his own legitimate fear as well as vaulting ambition.

  •

  Before his conversion, ha-Levi was already a promising diplomat. In 1389, he was chosen by King Juan I of Castile to serve, along with other diplomats and nobles, on a diplomatic mission to Aquitaine in France (then under English rule). In a sense, ha-Levi and the other nobles were hostages to guarantee the payment of a dowry promised by Juan to the duke of Lancaster, in return for the marriage of the duke’s daughter Catalina (Catherine) to Juan’s son Enrique. Unlike tax collection, diplomacy at such a level was not ordinarily engaged in by Jews, and most monarchs in Christendom would never have countenanced such participation. During this period, negotiations for an armistice between England and France (the latter an ally of Castile) were also under way. As a representative of Castile, ha-Levi would surely have met many important European diplomats, including representatives of both church and state. They would become valuable contacts throughout his post-conversion career.

  There is ample evidence, however, that at the time Solomon ha-Levi was a believing Jew, albeit one with doubts. In a letter written on Purim—apparently, the first such holiday he had ever spent among Gentiles—he wrote to a friend, Rab Don Meir Alguadex, of his loneliness in Aquitaine.

  When the Lord cast me out from my father’s house, and my sins drove me out from abiding in the inheritance of my forefathers…I was thrust into the pit [i.e., the service of the Castilian king], then did I see many terrible happenings…but all this means nothing to me when I reflect upon that which my tender soul hath suffered because of the inadequate observance of the commandments required of it….Here I sit, apart from the camp of the Shekhinah, Levites and Israel, and even those commandments which can be performed in private and of which one makes little, such as kiddush and havdalah, I have not had the benefit of these many days.4

  In the letter, ha-Levi regrets that he has no wine and cannot participate in the inebriation that has always been a part of the Purim celebration for many observant Jews. He declares that he must reach into his own soul for intoxication and that he will celebrate the holiday with his own songs and verses.5 As the historian Yitzhak Baer notes, this letter was written with a combination of humor and melancholy and “should not be studied for auguries of the writer’s eventual conversion and tragic political fate.”6

  And yet these sentiments were expressed only two years before the pogroms and ha-Levi’s conversion (if one accepts, as I do, that the conversion took place during the savagery of 1391 and not before). It certainly displays the state of mind of a man who was aware of the conflicts between his worldly ambitions and the faith of his fathers. The letter is of particular interest because it is the only Hebrew text that remains from his pre-conversion life.*4

  What the letter does not explain is why, after his conversion, ha-Levi went on not only to pursue his ambitions at the highest level of the Catholic hierarchy (as opposed to simply serving as an adviser to the monarchs of Castile) but also to support a wide variety of restrictive laws against Jews. If Solomon ha-Levi felt compelled to become Paul of Burgos in 1391, as so many Iberian Jews did feel compelled to convert, something happened to make him pursue his new faith with an ardor, and a callousness toward his people, unshared by most other Conversos. One need not believe that Jews are obliged to become martyrs to view Paul of Burgos as a turncoat.

  Before his conversion, Paul had been known to both Christians and Jews as a powerful spokesman for Judaism in the theological disputations with Catholics that were a recurrent feature of cultural life throughout Iberia in the late fourteenth century. There are essentially two ways of reconstructing Paul’s conversion, and they reflect differing, though occasionally intersecting, historical views about how Jews are to be judged for abandoning Judaism and what justifies such abandonment in a moral sense. The first judgment, articulated forcefully by Netanyahu, is that Paul was already corrupted by his contact with and knowledge of Christian and Muslim teachings, as well as the freethinking philosophy of the Muslim scholar Averroës, who in many respects anticipated some of the key tenets of Enlightenment deism. In Netanyahu’s portrait, Paul was undone as much by his attraction to non-Jewish cultural and religious thinking as by his own worldly ambitions. The persecutions of 1391 were an added inducement that did not, however, rise to the level of irresistible “f
orce.” Netanyahu does not pretend to have documentation for his imaginative reconstruction of what Paul did, and why he did it, but that does not stop him from offering a fairly detailed scenario, which goes something like this:

  By the time the pogroms neared Burgos, the Jewish communities of Seville, Córdoba, and Toledo had already been devastated. Paul (still Solomon) tells his people that it would be pointless for the Jewish community of Burgos to suffer the same assaults when, by converting right now, they can save themselves, their homes, and their businesses from destruction. The rabbi convenes a general meeting and presents a hopeless portrait of the condition of Jews throughout Iberia. He may even talk about the conditions of Jews in other countries of the West, mentioning past and contemporary persecutions in England, France, and Germany (including the devastation of Jewish communities in the Rhineland by the warriors of the First Crusade in 1096) and conclude that the end is coming for Jewish life in the Iberian Peninsula as well. The Catholic Church is on the rise everywhere west of the Bosporus. Solomon does not try to convince those in his audience that Christianity is superior to Judaism as a religion (that would be a bit much, in that he has been their chief rabbi). He does remind the Jews, though, that even the Muslim rulers of Andalusia have had to retreat, one by one, before the power of Christian soldiers. Netanyahu continues: