Group hatreds--some explanations. (Presenting the Issue).

James Carroll's CONSTANTINE'S SWORD: THE CHURCH AND THE JEWS (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2001) tells a story all who would think with and for people of faith must take to heart. Many are its sobering lessons. For this Catholic Southerner no lesson was more difficult to accept than the fact that indeed at the Church's highest levels, including the papacy, centuries before Hitler, anti-Jewish regulations had been grounded in racism based on blood purity.

Blood purity, Carroll shows, is not a peculiarly modern, scientific Aryan notion. Indeed, it is a very Mediterranean idea. Mediterranean cultural anthropology, so much explored in BTB, should have made me test this possibility earlier. Explicitly applied to Jews by Catholics, the blood purity criterion appears late in a Mediterranean society, 15th and 16th century Spain. At first, the Vatican resisted the blood purity heresy. In 1449, Toledo's city council decreed that "no converso of Jewish descent may have or hold any office or benefice" (Carroll: 347). Excommunicating the author of the Toledo statute, Pope Nicholas V declared, "all Catholics are one body in Christ according to the teaching of our faith" (Carroll: 347). Nonetheless, the Toledo statute marked the beginning of a shift from a religious definition of anti-semitism to a racial definition. In spite of Pope Nicholas' decree, by 1611, Pope Paul V incorporated the Toledo principle in a decree that "persons of Jewish descent shall not be admitted to canonicates of cathedrals, dignities in brotherhoods, and offices entrusted with the care of souls" (Carroll: 381).

While some church institutions, including the Jesuits as late as 1946, maintained the blood purity principle, others responded to defend the unity of the baptized, ff not the unity of the human race. Thus, Cardinal Adolf Bertram of Breslau wrote then Cardinal Pacelli to secure protection from Hitler for "non-Aryan Catholics." In a note to Berlin, Vatican Secretary of State Pacelli carefully excluded the fate of non-Aryans in general from Vatican concern, writing: "The Holy See [has] no intention of interfering in Germany's internal affairs." But he added a "word in behalf of those German Catholics who themselves have gone over from Judaism to the Christian religion, or who are descended in the first generation, or more remotely from Jews who adopted the Catholic faith, and who, for reasons known to the Reich government, are likewise suffering from social and economic difficulties" (Carroll: 509-10).

As scholars and people of faith we look for the significance of this history. Many pursue or dismiss such historical investigations in terms of moral judgments to be made on the persons and institutions involved. This is shortsighted. Apologies to descendants for what has been done do no more for the victims of this history than apologetic defenses are likely to do for the perpetrators of these deeds. Far better to understand and reform the social institutions that made the notion of blood purity plausible and its consequences respectable, if not inevitable. And all the more so if we are yet beholden to the dynamics of such social institutions.

Readers of BTB are more than familiar with the strong-group or collectivist model of social cohesion. Familism in many forms at various levels promotes solidarity. Solidarity often seems to empower even weaker group members. Especially in the face of adversity the group-embedded individual will enjoy resources of body and spirit the free individual will often lack. The downside of the collectivist model is that persons do indeed consider the neighbor, but only the neighbor within the group boundaries. Vision is restricted to what is good for the family, the village, the nation, etc. Thus, as much as Nicholas V may have differed from Paul V, Bertram and Pius XII, the difference involved the technical definition of group boundaries. For Paul V and the author of the Toledo statute, familism was a matter of genetic stock. Family membership for Nicholas, Bertram and Pius included those adopted into the family of faith by baptism. Those beyond family boundaries, unadopted non-Aryans, were beyond its concern.

Familism is seductive. By and large the prevailing North Atlantic social model is individualist. To resist the pressure of family and group is, while admittedly often heroic, considered the norm for free individuals. Sometimes our vision is restricted to what is good for ourselves as individuals. Of course, part of that good is the general recognition that one individual's dignity and well-being is best secured by recognizing the dignity and well-being of all individuals without regard for group. Nonetheless, the group virus infects even individualist societies, and this despite the fact that achievement-oriented individualist society contradicts familism. Jefferson was neither the first nor the last American to see the contradiction between race-based slavery and the principles of the American Declaration of Independence. Nor was he alone in failing to come to terms with the contradiction. Segregation whether of racial, ethnic or religious groups in housing, employment, education and other social institutions likewise goes against the grain, but manages to survive quite nicely in a society based on individual achievement. When we see such contradictions, we ask why. We want to know why especially if we happen to know that many of the perpetrators are not personally racists or haters of various target groups.

Someone recently suggested an interesting dynamic that may explain the lag between the realization that group bias is unwarranted and its actual demise. He noted that many popular indicia, polls, the media and general comment, show that both individuals and institutions will go to considerable lengths to avoid being labelled with the term homophobic. Nonetheless, the same individuals and institutions remain silent in the face of anti-gay actions and policies. This, he noted, is especially the case with political and church leaders he knew to be personally sympathetic to the dignity and rights of gay persons. In private, he said, they will defend their willingness to oppose laws guaranteeing equal employment rights for gays or to support laws in defense of marriage (against recognition of same-sex relationships). Their defense is not that the laws are just, but that the people, whether voters or church members, are not ready to accept gays as fellow citizens. Very plausibly, they argue that were they to take a different position, they would soon be replaced by radical rightwing zealots who would give people what they want. The observer of this process suggested these leaders were not homophobic, they were infected with homophobiaphobia, fear of homophobes. He went on to say that he thought these leaders underestimated their own people.

How much anti-Jewish poison was driven by fear of relatively small pockets of insecure people who managed to manipulate both mobs and Christian authorities? In the case of American racism, the Jim Crow codes we negotiated in the South--and in the North--present a crazy quilt pattern. Segregation laws created a cultural map--symbolic lines dividing one people from another. Like the ghetto and special Jewish dress decreed by Lateran IV, they were meant to establish one race as superior to the other. The creators of the cultural map might speak of the dangers of racial mixing. The rules they created scarcely served this purpose. For example, generally blacks and whites could eat together, so long as they stood; seated, they needed separate dining rooms. Likewise, in personal relationships with black people some code creators were quite well disposed towards, even at times quite intimately involved with black people. Was this mere hypocrisy? Or might it be hypocrisy with a purpose, perhaps to pander to those who were negrophobic? In other words, were they actually racists or negrophobiaphobes? By such means insecure white people were given the familistic support of a clearly, if artificially created collectivity.

The answer to familism and the various forms of tribalism that plague religious communities is a vision of the unity of the human family that respects the enormous diversity that characterizes humans. Two authors in this BTB, both associate editors, directly support this vision. Roland E. Murphy, in Once Again--The "Center" of the Old Testament, critiques efforts to find a center for the First Testament collection which is, in fact "rich in its diversity." While acknowledging the "harvest of insights" a search for a center has yielded, he insists that we read these texts for what they say rather than short-changing their richness in a search for continuity with the Second Testament. Robert K. Gnuse, in Words That Testify of God, reviews Walter Brueggemann's THE THEOLOGY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. He credits Brueggeman's success in hearing Israelite testimony about God, but questions his tone-deafness to the testimony of the Enlightenment and historical criticism.

Jeffrey B. Gibson argues in Matthew 6:9-13//Luke 11:2-4: An Eschatological Prayer? that the Lord's Prayer does not have an eschatological focus, but rather reflects a concern that God protect Jesus' disciples from disobedience and unfaithfulness. Philip L. Tite, in Textual and Redactional Aspects of the Book of Dreams (1 Enoch 83-90), explores the process by which two distinct traditions were tied together in the Book of Dreams.

Leland J. White
Editor