VIII. THE JEW IN THEOLOGY.

The fable concerning Judas is one of many which indicate the formation of a special Christian doctrine concerning the Jewish race.

After the ruin of their Temple at Jerusalem and desolation of their city, the Jews made repeated efforts—like that led by Bar-Cocheba—to recover their independence. As the possibility of recovering their city and rebuilding their Temple faded away they managed, even in their dispersed condition, to constitute an imperium in imperio under an officer called Resh Gelutha, or “Prince of the Captivity.” As was natural, they never lost an opportunity of opposing the new empire, of which Jesus had been made General. In the fourth century they joined the Arians. When Julian was called the Apostate he gave them leave to rebuild their Temple at Jerusalem, their hope of doing which was suddenly quenched by that Emperor’s death. These great events, of which the most typical can alone be mentioned here, were steadily constituting a definite creed concerning the Jewish race, a creed afterwards to be written upon all Europe in their blood, and illustrated in the flames that consumed them.

The Christians believed that the Jews, as a race, gave themselves up to be the devil’s agent for the crucifixion of Christ. Even the idea of converting them seems hardly to have occurred to any Christian before the Reformation—unless the Holy Cross Day torture at Rome be called such—and, justly as the Jews now resent the efforts of conversionists, the existence of a Society of that kind is a result of the tardy recognition of their humanity. The scenes of the Passion—so long preached, pictured, acted on the stage—cast upon the Jews a shadow never relieved, and were a perpetual instruction in horror of that people. The supernatural character ascribed to them by Christians as well as themselves, implied, since they had rejected Christ, infranatural wickedness. They were to Christendom the chosen people still, but now chosen of Satan.

While the sacred names and superstitions of the Jewish people were preserved, a deadly hatred of those who had really founded Christianity, and furnished its Messiah, was carefully fostered. The connection of Christianity with Judaism was reduced to a series of fairy-tales. Characteristic of these was that about the True Cross. Seth receives from the Archangel Michael a branch of the Tree of Knowledge to plant in Adam’s grave, and is told that when it should bear fruit Adam would recover. Out of Adam’s grave grows the Tree, which Solomon hews down for the Temple. The workmen cannot so adapt it, and it is used as a bridge over a lake. The Queen of Sheba, crossing it, beholds a vision of Christ on the Cross, and informs Solomon that when a certain person shall be suspended on that wood the fall of the Jewish nation would be at hand. Solomon in alarm buries the wood, and then springs over it the pool of Bethesda. Shortly before the crucifixion the tree floated on the water, and ultimately, as a cross, bore its fruit. The Jews concealed the Cross, while pagans built a Temple of Venus on the spot where it stood. Helena, mother of Constantine, having sentenced a Jew to torture and death, remits the punishment on condition that he will inform her where the Cross is. Out of the three found the true one manifests itself by performing cures. Thus the Cross itself was a holy immortal Wanderer, with the branded Jew ever beside it, seeking to destroy or bury it.

Race-hatred had much to do with the shaping of this theology, which anathematised the race from whose primitive superstitions it was chiefly borrowed, without discrimination or comprehension.

The “anti-Semitic” venom crept for ages through the veins of Christendom. Fed by millions of pulpits the deadly stream percolated through the world, and a consistent theory concerning the Jews was formed, not very different from that which at length appeared in Swedenborg’s pious phantasmagoria. In the history of Israel, says Mr. White, Swedenborg “sees nothing but selfish Jacob over and over again; and throughout the Arcana Celestia he pursues the Jews with one whip of epithets as the basest of mankind.”⁠[24] The Jewish race was “chosen” by God not because of their excellence, but for their baseness: their lack of interior religion made them fit actors in a drama where literalness was needed; their sensuality adapted them to be the instrument of incarnation; and Jesus was born of a Jewish mother because he could go no lower! “In that body, whose every faculty was an avenue to the Hells, he met as on a battle-field the Powers of Evil and Darkness and subdued them.” A fine offset this to the late Lord Beaconsfield’s proud reflection that the majority of Christendom hold a Jewess to be Queen of Heaven! It is true that Mary was excepted by Christendom from the general curse which it saw resting upon the Jewish race; but her exaltation, in the fifth century, was largely due to legends of the Jews, which represented her as an unchaste woman. Her apotheosis among Christians was the other side of her condemnation by the Jews; their vision of her in Hell was replied to in the story of her Assumption. The Jews were never benefited by any of the holy personages transmitted from their race for the homage of Christendom. They were held to be the official persecutors and crucifiers of such as were divinely sent unto them: whatever the light seen in their history, the only credit of the Jews was to lie under the shadow it cast.

It was largely through the Miracle Plays that hatred of the Jews, diffused by mediæval homilies, gained the shape which proved so fatal to the Jews. On the stage the holy drama represented a great struggle between the hosts of Heaven and Hell, of which the scene was on earth. In that drama the Jewish race was not merely the “heavy villain,” it was the incarnation of all devils. It would appear that for a thousand years no Christian regarded any Jew as a man at all. In those excesses of cruelty too wild to be now comprehensible—when every European river ran red with Jewish blood, when Jews’ eyes and teeth were plucked out and their bodies burnt as torches in saturnalia beside which those of Nero with his Christian martyrs were trivial—it is plain that there was an epidemic possession wrought by the long education of the people in the belief that the Jews, from a supernatural, had become an infranatural people.

They from whose ears the reported denunciations of the Jews by Jesus—as “of their Father the Devil,” as “vipers,” “children of Hell”—were never suffered to die out, and who avenged the crucifixion of one man by the crucifixion of a race for centuries, are condemned for inhumanity. But the charge is inexact. They were as charitable as are their posterity to those whom they regarded as human beings. Their theology had dehumanised the Jews, and its progress was traced in Christian inhumanities wrought in pious zeal for the Trinity. It was not a suspicion admitted into any mind, thus sophisticated, that it was a man against whom Judas and the Jews had raised their hand. It was against the Eternal Majesty. That they saw as the obvious functional work of Satan. It was the culminating attack in an eternal war against God. Hence those perpetual dooms beheld overhanging all concerned in the crucifixion, which denoted the unpardonable and everlasting nature of the offence against the eternal Avenger of his honour. It is only the God of Theology whose vengeance never sleeps nor ends with any generation, whose wrath is fresh every day, and his hell eternal. Only when man has had his human heart dexterously removed, and has become the changeling of some vampyre Phantasm he coweringly adores, could he be the instrument of the crimes that Christianity has committed against humanity.

Seven times shall Cain be avenged, seventy and seven times Lamech, ran the old song; but Jesus said, seventy times seven shalt thou forgive. The human Jesus was speedily overlaid and lost beneath the myths that gathered around the passive Jesus—the babe, the dead body. No holiday was appointed for the Sermon on the Mount, nor was there any Festival of the Golden Rule.