What Was Done to My People

Melito preached that sermon in a town in what is now Turkey, and the text was only found in the last century; you can read it today. It came a hundred and thirty years after my execution.

Between Melito and Augustine stood another preacher, in Antioch: John Chrysostom, whose name means golden-mouthed and who is a saint in every branch of the church. In 386 and 387 he preached eight sermons against the Jews, because Christians in his city liked going to the synagogue and he wanted it stopped. They are the most violent language about Jews in the whole of Christian antiquity, and they were read and copied for centuries.

Augustine grounded his doctrine in a psalm, slay them not, and gave the preservation two purposes: the Jews stood as witnesses that the scriptures Christians used were not forged, and as a demonstration of what happens to those who reject me. That doctrine ran the policy of the church for eight hundred years.

Those communities had names: Speyer, Worms, Mainz and Cologne, destroyed in the spring of 1096 before the crusading bands had reached a single Muslim. You met the massacre already, in Lesson 24, as part of the crusade's story; it belongs here too, because of the reason the killers themselves gave.

Thomas of Monmouth was a monk of the cathedral priory who arrived some years after William's death and spent the rest of his life promoting the cult anyway. The body was eventually moved into the cathedral itself, and the offerings followed it there.

The same pattern repeated in Lincoln in 1255, with the same kind of beneficiary. A boy named Hugh was found dead in a well, and nineteen Jews were taken to London and hanged. The king had recently sold his rights over the Jews of England to his brother, so convicting them of a capital crime sent their property straight to the crown. A shrine to Little Saint Hugh went up in Lincoln Cathedral and drew pilgrims for centuries, and the story was still being retold as literature two hundred years later.

In 1955, Lincoln Cathedral put up a plaque beside the site calling the story trumped up, noting that it cost many innocent Jews their lives, and asking pardon for it. Seven hundred years passed between the killing and that apology.⁴

The system did not stay abstract. In 1190 the Jews of York were besieged in the castle tower; many killed themselves, and the rest were killed on surrendering. The debtors then went to the cathedral and burned the bond records that proved what they owed.

The crown's answer was not protection. It required every debt to a Jew to be registered in duplicate and kept in a locked chest in each town, so that records could not be destroyed again and the crown's share could always be collected.

The other two walls of the trap had their own texture. Church councils across the twelfth century did not merely forbid Christian lending; one of them ruled that a manifest usurer was to be excommunicated and denied Christian burial. And the guilds that shut Jews out were themselves religious fraternities, built on Christian oaths and patron saints, and holding land normally required oaths and military service that were closed to them as well.

England's expulsion did not come out of nowhere. Fifteen years earlier Edward I had already banned Jewish moneylending outright, cutting off their ability to pay the taxes he kept levying, and in 1278 he had hundreds arrested on a charge of clipping coin and a great many hanged. When the expulsion came in July 1290, it removed two or three thousand people, and in that same parliament Edward was granted a tax historians describe as the largest of his reign. No Jew lived in England legally for the next three hundred and sixty-six years.

Philip IV's move in France was just as calculated. He arrested every Jew in the country on a single day in July 1306 and confiscated everything before expelling them. When he turned on the Templars the following year, the charge was heresy. There were further returns and further expulsions after 1306, ending with a final one in 1394.

Spain's edict was signed in March 1492. The last ships carrying Jews out sailed that same summer, and Columbus sailed in August. The document that handed the new world to Spain, Inter Caetera, came the following spring from a Spanish pope to those same two monarchs. In the same eighteen months, one crown emptied its country of one people and gained title to lands full of others.

Between a third and a half of Europe died in that plague, and nobody knew why. Confessions that Jews had poisoned the wells were obtained by torture, exactly as you saw in Lesson 28, then circulated between towns as evidence.

Over those two years hundreds of Jewish communities across Germany, Switzerland, France and Spain were destroyed, burned, drowned, or killed in their own houses; more Jews died in that span than in any comparable period before the Nazis.

At Strasbourg the burning happened on a platform built for the purpose in the Jews' own cemetery, after the town council refused to act against them and was overthrown by the guilds, who then carried it out.

Clement VI, the treasury-of-merit pope from Lesson 25, issued his two bulls in 1348, arguing that Jews were dying of the plague in the same numbers as everyone else, which they were, and that the charge against them was therefore absurd. That the ban went unheeded everywhere says something about how much of this was ever really taking orders from Rome.

That requirement has a number: canon 68 of the same 1215 council that made confession compulsory. In practice it took the shape of a badge or a distinctive hat, different from country to country, worn in places until the eighteenth century.

The church did not stop at clothing. In 1240 the Talmud itself was put on trial in Paris, an actual trial with the books as defendant, and in 1242 something like twenty-four cartloads of Jewish manuscripts, most of them irreplaceable, were burned in a public square. Jews were also compelled by law to attend Christian sermons preached at them, in some cities weekly, with officials posted to make sure they were listening.

The word ghetto itself comes from this history. In Venice, in March 1516, the city required its Jews to live on the site of an old foundry, the geto in Venetian, with the gates locked each night by guards whose wages the Jewish community was required to pay.

Paul IV's 1555 bull went further than a wall: it also ordered the distinctive hat, restricted Jews to dealing in second-hand cloth and pawnbroking, and allowed them only one synagogue. That ghetto lasted three hundred and fifteen years, in the city where this book's institution has its head office.

By the later Middle Ages, passion plays staged the Easter story in the open air, in the local language, for crowds who could not read, with Jewish characters costumed to be recognizable. That performance, repeated every year, fed the riots directly.

Some details sharpen both verses further. The Matthew 27:25 crowd was perhaps a few dozen people, in a city of tens of thousands, in a country of a million, of a people spread across the world. Mark does not have that line, Luke does not have it, John does not have it; it survives only in Matthew, the most Jewish of the four gospels, written by a Jew for Jewish readers arguing an inner-Jewish case. That is part of why turning it into a pretext works only if nobody checks: nobody has ever applied the same rule of inherited guilt to any other sentence in the book. My words from the cross that same morning, in full, were: Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.

On John 8:44, look at the company the line keeps. Open the prophets and you will find worse said by Jews to Jews: Isaiah calls his own nation Sodom, Jeremiah says the whole city is corrupt. John's gospel was also written last, decades later, at a time when my followers and the synagogue were separating bitterly and being thrown out of one another's buildings; that gospel's habit of saying "the Jews" when it means the Jerusalem authorities belongs to that moment, not to the scene itself.

The 1965 declaration went further than the single sentence about my execution: it also stated that the Jews are not rejected or accursed.

Luther's 1523 pamphlet did not mince words in either direction: he wrote that Christians had treated Jews more like pigs than like human beings, and that if he had been a Jew and seen how the faith was taught and governed, he would sooner have become a pig than a Christian. He expected conversion once the gospel was preached properly, his way, cleaned of Rome.

His 1543 list went further than burning synagogues and confiscating money. It also called for covering the remains with earth, putting Jews under one roof like gypsies, seizing their Talmudic writings along with their prayer books, abolishing their right of safe travel on the roads, and putting a flail or an axe in the hands of the young and strong to make them earn their bread by sweat.

That book was displayed at party rallies as well as reprinted, and it circulated through the 1930s and into the 1940s. Streicher, who published the most vicious antisemitic newspaper in Germany, made his Nuremberg comparison only as a defense, under oath, as a man trying to save his own neck. He was hanged anyway.

The 1994 Lutheran declaration went beyond repudiation: it also expressed deep and abiding sorrow and rejected the use that had been made of Luther's writings.

The Aryan Paragraph reached further than the lesson above suggests: it barred not only pastors of Jewish descent but anyone married to a person of Jewish descent from holding any church office at all.

Before it was known as the Confessing Church, the pastors who refused had formed an emergency league. Their Barmen Declaration, issued in May 1934, rejected the claim that the church could take its message from anything but the word of God, which is what Barmen actually defended: not the persecuted, but the church's own right to speak on its own authority. Most of the Confessing Church's energy went toward protecting baptized Christians of Jewish descent, its own members, rather than Jews as such.

The institute was founded on a specific day, 6 May 1939, at the Wartburg, the castle above Eisenach. It held conferences and employed scholars with doctorates.

Its de-Judaized New Testament, published in 1940, carried its own title: The Message of God. A year later, in 1941, they produced a hymnbook that had taken out the Hebrew words hallelujah, hosanna and amen.

This is the end of the road that starts with a title on a flag, back in Unit One, Lesson 2. If I am only a title, my people are removable. If I am a man from a village, they are not.

Bonhoeffer's essay actually framed three possible church responses to a state acting wrongly, and the line already quoted above was only the third: first, to ask whether the state's action was even legitimate; second, to bind up the victims regardless of who they were; and third, the spoke in the wheel. That third option was never about bandaging the victims of the machine. It was about stopping the machine.

He acted on it. In 1942 he took part in an operation that got fourteen people out to Switzerland under cover of military intelligence. He was arrested in April 1943 and held for two years before he was hanged, a month before the war in Europe ended.

His stay in America in 1939 had come by way of a lecture invitation. He lasted about two weeks there before sailing home, because he judged he had no right to help rebuild his country afterward if he had not shared its worst hour.

The old theology in that same 1933 essay went further than rejection: Bonhoeffer treated the conversion of Jews as the church's proper hope for them. He wrote the bravest sentence any German churchman wrote that year in a paragraph that still carried the disease. His later writing moved past it, but neither he nor the movement he belonged to started clean.

Three more words matter here. Usury is lending money at interest; for most of this period the church forbade Christians to do it. Supersessionism is the idea that Christians have replaced the Jews as God's people. Deicide is the killing of God, the charge made against a whole people.

Paul himself is worth a look: Romans 11:1 and 11:29 say, in his own letter, that God has not rejected his people.

Canon 68, which you read in this lesson, sits in the same 1215 council whose canon 21 you already read back in Lesson 24. Melito's sermon has a title, On Pascha, and it is in print in English if you want the whole thing. The 1965 Catholic declaration also has a name and an address: Nostra Aetate, section 4, issued 28 October 1965. It is one page long. The Lutheran church's 1994 statement is formally titled its Declaration to the Jewish Community.

One more question: Bonhoeffer was safe abroad in 1939 and chose to go home anyway. What made that the more faithful choice?