A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (23 page)

By the 1540s, however, the pope could no longer ignore calls for reform. The Reformation had grown well beyond the heresy of Luther and a few other preachers; it now divided one country after another. In 1545, just one year before Luther’s death, Pope Paul III called for a church assembly in Trent in what is now Italy (it was then a free city in the Holy Roman Empire). Most Protestants refused to attend; they no longer saw themselves as part of the Catholic Church or subject to the pope’s laws. The few who did come were not allowed to vote.

Nevertheless, the council, which met on and off between 1545 and 1563, called for important reforms—reforms that eliminated many of the abuses that had disturbed Luther and other Christians. The group also tried to define exactly what Catholics believed and set new, tougher regulations for the training of priests.

The council did not pay much attention to Jews; its emphasis was on heresy within the church. But Jews were the focus of at least one statement. In reply to the question of who killed Jesus, Catholic leaders at the Council of Trent wrote in 1551:

In the guilt of the crucifixion are involved all those who frequently fell into sin; for as our sins consigned Christ to death on the cross, most certainly those who wallow in sin and iniquity themselves crucify again the Son of God. This guilt seems more enormous in us than in the Jews since, according to the testimony of the apostle, if they had known it they would never have crucified the Lord of glory; while, we, on the contrary, professing to know him yet denying him by our actions, seem in some sort to lay violent hands on him.
¹²

In other words, the church was saying that Jesus was crucified for the sins of all people, especially Christians, and not just because of the sins of “the Jews.” If this understanding of the crucifixion had been widely preached and taught, history—particularly the history of antisemitism—might have taken a different course; the Protestant hymn quoted earlier in this chapter expressed much the same idea, and it might have come to be broadly echoed. But at the time, the myth of Jews as “Christ killers” was very powerful, and it continued to inform the way both Catholics and Protestants viewed Jews. Indeed, few people knew of the statement made at the Council of Trent until 1965, when the Catholic Church once again considered reform.

Even as the Council of Trent debated a variety of reforms, the pope and other church leaders were trying to stamp out every form of heresy, and they directed their efforts not only at Protestants but also at
conversos
and Jews. Some regarded
conversos
as a particular threat to Christianity. All Jews who had converted to Christianity—not just the ones forcibly baptized in Spain and Portugal—were viewed with suspicion. Even humanists referred to Pfefferkorn as a “baptized Jew” rather than as a full-fledged Christian. For example, Erasmus, the most famous humanist of his day, said of Pfefferkorn, “If one were to operate on him, six hundred Jews would spring out.”

In 1547, the archbishop of Toledo in Spain protested when Pope Paul III appointed a priest who came from a Jewish family to serve in Toledo’s cathedral. The archbishop claimed that the priest had “impure blood” (see
Chapter 6
). Paul backed down and named someone else to the post. His concession encouraged the archbishop to go even further: later that year, he issued the Statute of Toledo. It stated that no one of “Jewish blood” could ever hold office in the cathedral. The Spanish Inquisition then applied the archbishop’s ruling to other positions as well—including those at some universities, religious orders, guilds, and city governments. Paul III denounced this statute, which contradicted the idea that the church was universal, or open to all. But by the mid-1550s, the statute was increasingly seen as part of the church’s war on heresy.

A new Catholic religious order known as the Society of Jesus, or the Jesuits, was central to that continuing war. Founded in 1540 by Ignatius Loyola, the Society of Jesus established hundreds of colleges and seminaries throughout Europe and soon carried Christianity to India, Japan, China, Africa, and the Americas. Like several other religious orders, the Jesuits required that their members provide genealogical charts to prove that there were no Jews among their ancestors. These regulations remained in force until 1946.

The weapons used by the Jesuits and others in the war against heresy included not only education but also the inquisition, which became in 1542 the Vatican’s final court of appeal in heresy trials. Seven years later, the church issued its first “Index of Forbidden Books”—a list of books church leaders believed would contaminate or corrupt the morals of Roman Catholics. That list would eventually include works not only by religious scholars but also by scientists, such as Galileo and Copernicus. Their heresy? They used logic and mathematics to conclude that the earth
revolved around the sun—at a time when the church taught that the sun revolved around the earth.

By the 1550s, popes were not as willing to protect Jews as they had been earlier. In August 1553, a Franciscan friar who converted to Judaism was burned at the stake in Rome. A few months later, Julius III, who served as pope from 1550 to 1555, declared that the Talmud was disrespectful to Christians and ordered it burned. Book burnings took place in Rome, Bologna, Florence, Venice, and other cities in Italy. In 1555 the church had a new pope, Paul IV, and he was even more determined to end all heresies than earlier popes had been.

Almost immediately, Paul issued a bull in which he stated:

It is absurd and inconvenient that the Jews, who through their own fault were condemned by God to eternal slavery, can… show such ingratitude towards Christians and affront them by asking for their mercy. [They] have become so bold as to not only live amongst Christians but near their churches without any distinctive clothing.
¹³

He therefore ordered that Jews in Rome and the Papal States wear special clothing and be confined to ghettos.

For hundreds of years, Jews, like other ethnic groups, had tended to live together. There were Jewish quarters in Alexandria in the early days of the Roman Empire and in both Muslim and Christian cities in Europe and the Middle East in later centuries. But these were not ghettos; they were places where many Jews—but by no means all—chose to live. A ghetto was a place where Jews were required to live by law. The first ghetto was built in Venice in 1516. (The word in Italian means “foundry”; the Venetian ghetto was located near a foundry.)

About 40 years later, Jews in Rome were also required to live in a ghetto. If they owned property, they had to sell it to Christians. They could not employ Christian servants. They also had to wear distinctive clothing (yellow hats for men and yellow scarves for women). They could leave the ghetto during the day but had to return by sunset. The ghetto gates were locked from sundown to sunrise. Those gates were installed and guarded by Christians, but the Jewish community had to pay the cost through a special tax.

Paul IV also turned his attention to
conversos
. In the past, popes had allowed Jews who had been forced to convert to Christianity in Spain or Portugal to return to Judaism if they chose. But this pope insisted that
conversos
everywhere must remain Christian. He sent officials to carry out the order. In Ancona, a papal state on the Adriatic Sea, the arrival of the pope’s representative set off a firestorm. Since 1492, the year Jews were expelled from Spain, the city had been a refuge for Christians of Jewish descent.

THE GROWTH OF GHETTOS (1215–1570)

By the 1500s many Jews in European cities and towns were required to live in a ghetto—a street, neighborhood, or section of town set aside for Jews. Many ghettos were surrounded by walls and could be entered only through a gate guarded by Christians. The result was a segregated society but not an isolated one. Many Jewish men worked beyond the ghetto but had to return to it at the end of each day.

Almost immediately, the papal representative imprisoned about a hundred
conversos
in Ancona—all from Jewish families of Spanish descent—and confiscated their property. Although they were officially Christians, they considered themselves Jews. When they appealed to the authorities for help, they reminded officials that earlier popes had allowed them to return to Judaism because they had been forced to become Christians. When their appeals went unheard, a group of about 30 prisoners bribed the pope’s representative to look the other way while they fled to more friendly territories—the dukedoms or duchies of Urbino and Ferrara.

Word of the events in Ancona quickly spread through Europe and the Middle East. The news reached Istanbul in the autumn of 1555. Among the first to hear it was Doña Gracia Mendes Nasi, a wealthy Jewish widow. With her nephew’s help, she bought and sold such goods as wool, grain, pepper, and textiles throughout Europe and Asia. Doña Gracia’s parents were
conversos
who had been forcibly converted to Christianity in Portugal. As an adult, Doña Gracia had traveled through Europe seeking a safe haven and eventually found one in the Ottoman Empire, where she converted to Judaism.

The prisoners in Ancona were not strangers to Doña Gracia. She and her family had helped some of them escape from Portugal. Others worked for her company. She immediately arranged a meeting in Istanbul with Suleiman, the sultan of the Ottoman Empire. She pointed out that some of the prisoners had lived in the Ottoman Empire and were therefore entitled to his protection. She also noted that much of the property the pope had confiscated belonged to companies owned by her family and other Jews currently living in the Ottoman Empire. Suleiman promised to help, and he kept his word. He sent a deputy to Ancona to demand the release of all prisoners under Ottoman protection.

Officials in Ancona wanted to help the sultan; his empire was one of the city’s main trading partners. So they sent an agent to explain to the pope that much of the confiscated property belonged not only to Jews in the Ottoman Empire but also to non-Jewish merchants. They noted that ships that once docked in Ancona were now heading for other ports, depriving the city and the pope of earnings from their trade. And they told the pope of their fears that traders from Ancona and other Papal States were now at risk when they tried to do business in the Ottoman Empire. The pope ignored their pleas.

Doña Gracia did not give up. She continued to apply pressure by meeting with the French ambassador. At her request, he brought the pope a letter written by Suleiman. It stated in part:

When you shall have received my Divine and Imperial Seal, which will be presented to you, you must know that certain persons of the race of the Jews have informed my Elevated and Sublime [Court] that, whereas certain subjects and tributaries of Ours have gone to your territories to [trade], and especially to Ancona, their goods and property have been seized on your instructions. This is in particular to the prejudice of Our Treasury, to the amount of 400,000 ducats, over and above the damage done to Our subjects, who have been ruined and cannot pay their obligations to Our said Treasury…. We therefore request Your Holiness, that by virtue of this Our universal and illustrious Seal… you will be pleased to liberate our abovementioned… subjects, with all the property which they had and owned, in order that they may be able to satisfy their debts…. By so doing, you will give Us occasion to treat in friendly fashion your subjects and the other Christians who traffic in these parts.
¹⁴

A bronze medallion of Doña Gracia Mendes Nasi.

The letter was dated March 9, 1556. It reached Italy at the end of April. By then, the first group of prisoners had been burned in Ancona. The pope did not reply to the letter until June 1. He agreed, as a personal favor to a fellow ruler, to release any remaining prisoners who were the sultan’s subjects and return their property. He also agreed to release property that belonged to Doña Gracia’s agents as a friendly gesture. But on the central issue, he stood firm: New Christians who returned to Judaism had to pay the consequences. On June 6, more prisoners were killed, and a week later the last three were murdered.