Humiliation Can Be A Two Way Street

June 22, 1998

“Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, sense, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that....”

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, Act III, Sc. 1

From the time of the First Crusade when Christians who didn’t go to the Holy Land stayed home and killed Jews, to the genocidal slaughters at Auschwitz and other death camps, the most repulsive blot on centuries of European Christian “civilization” has been anti-Semitism. 2,000 years of tragedy and suffering because one is Jewish is almost beyond comprehension. In re-telling another story of how Christians can hate, it must be noted that anti-Semitism was not limited to Roman Catholics. There has been much Protestant anti-Semitism, including the key Reformer, Martin Luther.

Some months ago, the Vatican issued a somewhat tepid, understated acknowledgment of the anti-Semitic acts and pronouncements through the centuries. Then I came across one of the lesser known, and less genocidal, acts.

My source is a comprehensive history of the Papacy, SAINTS AND SINNERS, A HISTORY OF THE POPES, by Eamon Duffy, who is a Roman Catholic church historian.

Pope Leo XII (Annibale della Genga), whose tenure was from 1823 to 1829, was elected because the majority of Cardinals wanted stronger spiritual leadership. Leo XII was puritanical and conservative. Apparently he believed people should get no joy from life. People playing games on Sundays and feast days could be jailed. Applause and encores in the theater were forbidden on the grounds that Leo “and his advisers thought they provided the occasion for display of seditious political feeling.” Women were forbidden to wear tight-fitting dresses.

Jewish people, as historically usual, became scapegoats and victims – confined to ghettos with walls and locked gates. They were not allowed to own real estate.

In addition, they were persecuted in a most reprehensible manner. “Three hundred Roman Jews were required to attend special Christian sermons every week and the hiring of Christian proxies was forbidden.”

I am not a trained educator, but I know enough about learning to be convinced that such coerced attendance is a method least likely to have any effect. My belief is that it was deliberately planned to be an insulting, humiliating experience.

There is a surprise ending, however—a forerunner to the way O. Henry would develop his short stories.

The successor to Leo XII was Gregory XVI (Dom Mauro Cappelari), 1831-1846.

In the political ferment which eventually led to Italy as a nation, Pope Gregory XVI spent enormous sums resisting the Carbonari and “Young Italy” movement led by Mazzini. At the time of Gregory’s death, the debt owed by the Papal States was sixty million scudi. (According to the dictionary, a “scudi” was a monetary unit of a gold or silver coin).

Where would the Pope go to get a loan of that magnitude? Here’s the “O. Henry” twist: He went to the famous banking family, the Rothchilds, who were guess what, Jewish!! So perforce, restrictions and persecutions of the Jewish people in Rome had to be lightened and mitigated.

I have the fond hope that the Vatican hierarchy were thoroughly discomfited and humiliated to go hat in hand to plead for that loan.