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This is the third installment in a five-part series.
Part 1 [November/December 2000], "Living by Law, Looking for Intimacy," explored what Christians can learn from the debates that divide American Jews, taking as a point of departure Samuel G. Freedman's book, Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry.
Part 2 [January/February 2001], "God of Abraham—and Saint Paul," focused on the pathbreaking "Jewish Statement on Christians and Christianity" published last fall in the New York Times and the book of essays it occasioned, Christianity in Jewish Terms, edited by Tikva Frymer-Kensky, David Novak, Peter Ochs, David Fox Sandmel, and Michael A. Signer.
Next, part 4 will discuss German Jews, Edith Stein in particular.
Part 5 concludes the series with Messianic Judiaism.
Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History, by James Carroll, Houghton Mifflin, 576 pp.; $28
Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews, by Miri Rubin, Yale University Press, 266 pp.; $35
What would it mean for Christians to rethink their history with respect to the Jews? James Carroll—former Catholic priest and author of many books, both fiction and nonfiction—has one answer. In his new book, Constantine's Sword, he surveys the centuries since Christ and concludes that Christianity's rejection of the Jews was a fatal flaw at the very beginning of the long history of the church. "Almost every single tenet of Christianity, every single orthodoxy about Jesus, is wrong, says Carroll," an admiring reviewer reports.[1] In Carroll's own words, what we learn from history is that Christians must fashion a new theology "without Golgotha, redemption, or sacrifice," a Christianity which has divested itself of the claim that salvation comes through Christ.
Christians are unlikely to be persuaded, unless they have already all but checked out of the faith. How easy it would be, then, given Carroll's agenda, for believers to reassure themselves that they need not bother with the history that is Carroll's ostensible subject. Yes, yes, anti-Semitism is a terrible thing, and the Nazis were unspeakably evil, but we're enlightened now. How easy to settle for such complacent pieties, instead of trying to reckon with a history that is deeply troubling and twisted, endlessly tangled. (On this, if nothing else, Carroll is persuasive.)
But for Christians who agree with Carroll that "the story could have gone in a way more consonant with the message of Jesus," while yet hoping, contra Carroll, to learn from the past without giving up their faith in the process, there are many places to start. One of the best is Miri Rubin's Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews, published two years ago by Yale University Press, a haunting, provocative, beautiful book. (Yale is to be commended for the thick, glossy paper and the striking color plates.) The prose is, at times, lyrical and poetic. The story is, always, disturbing.
The story is one about stories, stories about medieval Jews stealing Eucharistic wafers and desecrating them—puncturing them, piercing them, battering them. The hosts survive, bleeding sometimes, often changing into crucifixes or performing some other miracle. The Jews don't survive, not as Jews anyway: they either convert, awestruck, or are killed, obstinate.
The first fully documented host desecration narrative is found at the end of the thirteenth century, but the pieces of that story, Rubin shows, had circulated long before. In 1205 Innocent III requested church leaders in Sens and Paris to prevent Jews from hiring Christian wet-nurses, a telling move, since in the later host desecration narratives, it was often a Christian servant who procured the host for Jewish employers. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) made no explicit connection between Jews and the Eucharist, but it did both limit contact between Jews and Christians and lay down transubstantiation as an article of faith.
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