Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

  Heine was well aware that many of his antireligious and anticlerical friends were dismayed by his new hope—however halfhearted it might be—of a personal god to help man in adversity. “Yes,” he acknowledged, “I have made peace with the Creator, as well as the created, to the great indignation of my enlightened friends, who reproach me for thus falling back into the old superstition, as they like to call my coming home to God.” But Heine also emphasized that his “homesickness for heaven” had never led him to embrace any religious creed—either the Judaism of his birth or the Christianity of his opportunistic conversion. “No,” he said, “my religious views and persuasions have remained free from all connection with the Church; no bells allured, no candles blinded my eyes. I have not toyed with any symbols, nor renounced my right to reason….No, my religious convictions and views have remained free from any attachment to a church….I have not played with any symbolism, and my reason has not altogether been renounced. I have forsworn nothing, not even my old pagan gods: to be sure, I have turned away from them, but we parted with love and friendship.”25 He describes a visit to the Louvre in May 1848—the last day he ever left the house that contained what he called his “mattress-grave.” When he gazed upon the statue of the Venus de Milo for the last time, Heine broke down.

  “I lay a long time at her feet,” he recalls, “and wept so bitterly that it would have moved a stone. The goddess looked kindly down on me, but hopelessly, as if she would have said, Dost thou not see I have no arms and cannot help thee?”26

  * * *

  *1 The quotation is from Heine’s 1821 play, Almansor.

  *2 Germany was not, of course, a united state until 1871. I am using the words “Germany” and “German”—to describe a cultural state of mind, not a state with defined borders—more loosely in this chapter, given that it deals with German-speaking Jews who considered the German language and German culture their true patrimony.

  *3 My great-grandfather, a German Jew who studied at the University of Breslau (now Wrocław, in Poland), immigrated to the United States in 1849, after taking part in the failed revolution of 1848. His continuing attachment to German culture was demonstrated in New York in the 1860s and 1870s, when he saw to it that both of his sons learned to read and write German. After my father’s death, I found correspondence from the turn of the century in German between my grandfather and an unknown aunt in Berlin. Only with my father’s generation, born in the twentieth century, did familiarity with the German language die out in the Jacoby family.

  *4 In his poem “American Heartbreak,” Hughes describes slavery as the “rock on which Freedom / Stumped its toe…”

  *5 To avoid confusion, I refer to the composer simply as Mendelssohn from this point.

  *6 One of Heine and Börne’s many disagreements was about Napoleon, for whom Heine retained considerable admiration.

  *7 Ingersoll’s wife, Eva, who was present at his death in 1899, prepared notarized statements testifying that her husband had died as he had lived—as a nonbeliever in any deity or any form of the supernatural. Ingersoll had anticipated that clergymen would spread the same kinds of stories about his deathbed conversion as they had about Paine and Voltaire.

  15

  THE VARIETIES OF COERCIVE EXPERIENCE

  PERHAPS THE MOST WIDELY HELD MISCONCEPTION about the history of Jews in the Western world is that forced conversion, embodied in the popular imagination by the Spanish Inquisition, belongs to a past so distant that it has no possible bearing on conversion in the modern era. This misapprehension is present whether physically coerced conversion is depicted and remembered with straightforward horror or with the ironic humor of Mel Brooks’s Inquisition song in the movie History of the World: Part I.

  The wide array of jokes about the Inquisition simultaneously offers evidence of and one explanation for the fact that forced conversion is lodged in much less accessible regions of modern memory than, say, slavery. The acceptability of jokes is one measure of the degree to which any society has relegated the memory of gross injustice to its dustbin of history: we do not make jokes about African American slavery in the United States (not, at least, in polite society)—an absence that indicates, at a minimum, a continuing sensitivity based on a bad conscience. The Inquisition (though not the Holocaust) is a source of endless comic exploitation everywhere in the Western world; no joke about Torquemada is considered too tasteless.*1 This disparity in historical sensitivity persists even though the emergence of slavery coexisted with the re-establishment of the Inquisition in Spanish and Portuguese New World colonies. Moreover, seventeenth-century religious wars, aimed at imposing religious conformity within nation-states in the Old World and imposing the choice of conversion or exile on a mass scale, were contemporaneous with the arrival of slaves in the English-dominated portion of North America. But those wars were, for the most part, between different kinds of Christians and therefore have somewhat less historical resonance in modern societies whose Christian institutions have embraced ecumenicism as a necessary response to secularism. Thus, the medieval Jewish Converso, stretched on the rack until he confessed to secret “Judaizing,” remains the classic image of the forced convert in the West. The persistence of that image attests not only to the persistent power of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism in Western civilization but to general modern ignorance about the frequency with which people of many beliefs used to find themselves in torture chambers if they professed the wrong doctrine at the wrong time in the wrong place. That free religious choice was the exception, not the rule, for most of Western history—and the history of monotheism—is uncomfortable to remember and useful to forget for those who still detest secularism. Even if one leaves the Inquisition aside, the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment Jewish conversion experience, especially in Europe and in Germany, provides a template for religious switches based on many covert and overt social pressures. Unlike the rack, these pressures are thoroughly compatible with modernism (a truth also applicable to evidence-proof secular ideologies such as Stalinist Communism).

  In the dominant social narrative about Jewish emancipation (though not one shared by all Jews), progress and assimilation characterized the lives of European Jews—at least in countries like Holland, Germany, France, England, and those parts of Italy not subject to political control by the Papal States. Notorious cases like the Dreyfus affair intruded into this narrative and called it into question for both secular Zionists and devout Orthodox Jews but did not vitiate it entirely for either Jews or Gentiles. Moreover, the new United States of America offered unique civil protection for Jews and a haven for those who had given up any hope of achieving equality or prosperity in Europe. If Jews did not like the way they were treated in the Old World, they could leave for a country where their legal emancipation had not been a question since Day One of the nation’s existence (whatever extralegal barriers might and did exist). With all of the new choices available to Jews on both sides of the Atlantic, why would truly voluntary conversion not be one of them? Why should anyone speak of forced conversion in a post-Enlightenment context? The two-hundred-year-old narrative of voluntary conversion of Jews as a long-term victory for religious freedom would be disrupted only by the Nazi death camps. That conversion had not saved those of Jewish “blood” from filling the trains rolling toward Auschwitz, Chelmno, Majdanek, and Treblinka was a reality that could not be denied by Jews or Christians—especially after the scandalous attempts by both the Catholic Church and some Protestant leaders to single out Christian converts from Judaism for protection from the Nazi assault on unconverted Jews.

  •

  In the nineteenth century, German Jews imagined that they were avoiding discrimination, not death, by converting. If one adopts the most optimistic narrative of progress in religious toleration, the conversions of Heine and his literary friends, or Moses Mendelssohn’s children, cannot be considered “forced” simply because they chose to take advantage (or, in Heine’s case, to try to take advantage) of the greater
opportunities open to Christians. Furthermore, it was in one sense predictable that German Jews might be especially amenable to conversion, since Germany was the birthplace of a Reform Judaism that wished to fit into rather than stand out from Gentile culture. For Gentiles in many countries (at least for Protestants, who used the vernacular rather than Latin in their own services), a Judaism that was not couched entirely in an impenetrable—again, to Gentiles—ancient language seemed more open to each nation’s culture. Whether Reform Jews might convert to Christianity was beside the point. Orthodox Jews have long maintained that Reform Judaism is only one step from a willingness to abandon Judaism altogether. The difference is in the perspective: For the Orthodox Jew, conversion to Christianity is seen as a cultural and religious catastrophe rather than a legitimate choice. Therefore, anything seen as a step on that road, such as the abandonment of the laws of family purity, or services in the vernacular rather than Hebrew in Reform synagogues, was a catastrophe in the making.

  The holes—in some countries pinpricks, in others brutal gashes—in the toleration/progress story of modern Jewry become fully evident only when the general narrative is broken down into specifics. First, the situation of Jews varied so vastly from country to country in the nineteenth century, and from region to region within certain countries, that it is dangerous to talk about what conversion meant to all but the most religiously observant. Second, although the rack and pyre were no longer part of the repertoire of acceptable punishments for “false” religious beliefs in the industrializing, better-educated countries of the world, the idea that there were true and false religions was very much alive. Third, forced conversion, in the literal sense, was still a real possibility for Jews in some places, and that possibility not only called spiritually motivated, voluntary conversions of Jews into question (for Jews no less than for Gentiles) but thrust the worst of the bad old days into the somewhat more enlightened religious psyche of the nineteenth century. The world was growing smaller. Knowledge of what happened in places where the Inquisition, in the literal as well as metaphoric senses, was still active did not stay in those places.

  •

  The 1858 kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, the six-year-old son of a Jewish family in Bologna (then part of the Papal States), on the orders of the local head of the Inquisition, was the most notorious case of forced conversion in nineteenth-century Europe. (And, no, the year 1858 is not a typo, as one of this manuscript’s first readers, thinking that such an event could not have happened later than 1558, suggested.) Young Edgardo, it was alleged, had been secretly baptized by a Catholic servant of the Mortara family, and baptism—even though the boy had not yet reached what the church considered the age of reason—was irrevocable. Edgardo, now a Catholic, must be educated as a Catholic and by Catholics and could no longer live in a Jewish home. The abduction of the Mortara boy became an international cause célèbre at the time, but it—like many other cases of forced baptisms and conversions in the territory controlled (with occasional interruptions) by the Vatican until the unification of Italy in 1870—would be largely forgotten in the twentieth century. Only when a Brown University professor, David I. Kertzer, wrote a detailed account of the case (The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, 1997) did the nineteenth-century Inquisition’s activities in Italy re-enter the historical conversation about the special position of Jews in Western attitudes toward conversion.*2

  In 1998, the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews released a report, commissioned eleven years earlier by Pope John Paul II, titled, “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah.” The report’s conclusion—that Catholicism’s historical religious anti-Judaism (Augustine’s “harass, but do not destroy” ethic) bore no responsibility for modern political anti-Semitism—came as no surprise to anyone who understood the deep conservatism of a church hierarchy shaped over a long period by John Paul. In rejecting the idea that anti-Semitism was related to theological anti-Judaism, the report states:

  By the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, Jews generally had achieved an equal standing with other citizens in most States and a certain number of them held influential positions in society. But in that same historical context, notably in the 19th century, a false and exacerbated nationalism took hold. In a climate of eventful social change, Jews were often accused of exercising an influence disproportionate to their numbers. Thus there began to spread in varying degrees throughout most of Europe an anti-Judaism that was essentially more sociological and political than religious.1

  The most important sentence in this passage is the first one, which combines falsehood and fact in equal measure. Although some Jews (mainly “court Jews” and bankers) had achieved influential positions, the fantasy that by the beginning of the nineteenth century “Jews generally had achieved an equal standing with other citizens in most States” could not possibly have been approved with a straight face by the historically educated members of the Vatican commission—least of all by the erudite John Paul. The authors of “We Remember” knew perfectly well that the church had used all of its influence, wherever and whenever it could, to discourage political measures that eased civil restrictions on Jews whenever and wherever they were proposed. The fate of Jews under a regime directly controlled by the Vatican was most clearly demonstrated after 1814, when, with Napoleon’s occupying army on the run, Pope Pius VII returned to Rome from exile. Napoleon’s rule, as it had removed restrictions on Jews in French-occupied areas of Germany, took the same action in areas of Italy, including Rome, that were part of the Papal States. One of the pope’s first edicts on his return to Rome restored the gated Roman ghetto and re-established the Inquisition, which had been abolished by the French during the Napoleonic era.

  Thirty-four years later, Jews in Rome were treated once again to a brief period of emancipation. In 1848, with the Italian Risorgimento becoming a part of the democratic revolutions sweeping much of Europe, Pope Pius IX was exiled from Rome as the victorious troops headed by Giuseppe Garibaldi (soon to be joined by the other great leader of the Risorgimento, Giuseppe Mazzini) entered the ancient city. A secular Roman republic was proclaimed, and, yet again, the gates of the ghetto were opened and Jews were granted legal equality. This time, the papacy was rescued by a French government that did not share Napoleon’s commitment to secularism, after Pius called on the Catholic states of Europe to come to his aid. Pius returned to Rome in April 1850, and one of his first acts—like that of his predecessor Pius VII—was the reinstitution of the ghetto. (One cannot accuse the nineteenth-century papacy of inconsistency.) His next move was to turn to the Rothschild bank for a loan. Originally, the Rothschilds said no deal unless Roman Jews were freed from the ghetto—the last in Western Europe by that time. Pius, in a private letter to James de Rothschild, head of the family bank in France, gave assurances that he would soon abolish the ghetto, while indicating that it would be unseemly to do so as a direct quid pro quo for the loan.

  Needless to say, the Vatican got the loan but the edict ending the ghetto was never issued. Pius IX got the better of the Rothschilds through exactly the sort of sly double-dealing that was such a widely held Christian stereotype about Jewish financiers. Despite having been bailed out by the French Rothschilds, Pius was to play the critical role in the Mortara affair. None of this shady history is mentioned in the 1998 Vatican report claiming that the fortunate European Jews had already enjoyed equal civic status before those nasty nationalist movements of the nineteenth century came along to spoil things.

  The word “conversion,” and its special application to Jews, is never mentioned in the report. Nowhere do we see the ghosts of European Jews who had converted, for whatever reasons, to either Protestantism or Catholicism—of Ludwig Börne, born into a Frankfurt where he and his kind were, like Roman Jews, locked behind ghetto walls at night; of the Anglican-baptized Benjamin Disraeli, asking a stunned and bitterly divided House of Commons in an 1847 debate over the right of Jews to hold public office, “Whe
re is your Christianity, if you do not believe in their Judaism?”; of Edgardo Mortara’s heartbroken parents, Marianna and Momolo, whose son was spirited away to Rome and eventually became a priest. “We Remember” remembered only what the church wanted to remember.