Jewish Dogs is not a study of “anti-Semitism” or “anti-Judaism.” Instead, this book argues that to anchor claims of supersession, Catholics have viewed Jews as metaphoric—and sometimes not so metaphoric—dogs. The dog has for millennia been the focus of impurity, and Catholicism fosters doctrines of physical purity that go hand in hand with those of ritual purity. The purity is that of the “one loaf” spoken of by Paul in Corinthians that is, at once, the Eucharist and the collective Christian Corpus, the body of the faithful. Paul views this “loaf” as physically corruptible, and as John Chrysostom said at the close of the fourth century, the greatest threat to the loaf’s purity are the Jews. They are the dogs who wish to steal the bread that belongs exclusively to the children. Eventually, Jews were said to attack the “loaf” through ritual murder and attempts to defile the Host itself; the victim of ritual murder is identified with the Host, as is common in Catholic martyrdom. Pope Pius IX still spoke of Jewish dogs barking throughout the streets of Rome in 1871. Other Catholic clergy were dismayed. This book is thus as much a study of Catholic doctrinal history as it is a study of Jews.

Kenneth Stow, now Emeritus, was Professor of Jewish History at the University of Haifa for nearly thirty years. He is author of Theater of Acculturation: The Roman Ghetto in the Sixteen Century (2001), The Jews in Rome, Volumes I and II (1995, 1997), and Alienated Minority: The Jews in Medieval Latin Europe (1992), among others.

Jewish Dogs

An Image and Its Interpreters Continuity in the Catholic-Jewish EncounterBy Kenneth Stow

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2006 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5281-7

Contents

Preface.............................................................................ixIntroduction: Equality, Supersession, and Anxiety...................................11. Ambivalence and Continuity.......................................................372. The Bollandists and Their Work...................................................553. Richard of Pontoise and Philip Augustus..........................................754. The Jewish Version: The Bollandist Reconstruction Vindicated.....................995. A Usable Past....................................................................1196. Purity and Its Discontents.......................................................1337. Denouement.......................................................................158Appendix One: Bollandist and Parallel Texts.........................................177Appendix Two: Translation of the Blois Letters......................................198Notes...............................................................................203Select Bibliography.................................................................293Index...............................................................................309

Chapter One

Ambivalence and Continuity

At the far edge of the balcony in the reading room of the Vatican Library, so far left that going any further would mean literally falling off and onto the floor below, there is a section labeled "Judaica." This small Judaica collection (the stacks have a large and admirable one) contains a Babylonian Talmud. This is the same Talmud that was first burned in Paris in 1240 by papal order and again, in Rome itself, in 1553. Afterward, the Talmud was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books. The ban itself no longer exists. Hesitancy about the Talmud apparently does. One reaches the Judaica section only intentionally. Nobody passes by on the way to somewhere else. The possibility of chance encounter piquing a reader's bibliographic curiosity is minimal to nil.

Ambivalence about things Jewish is present elsewhere in the reading room, too. In the entries on ritual murder in the Enciclopedia cattolica, issued at Rome in 1953 and prominently displayed on the left side of the reading room's main floor, the watchword is indecision. Indecision features in similar entries in the adjacently shelved New Catholic Encyclopedia (issued in 1967 by the Catholic University of America Press) as well. The ritual murder accusation, both encyclopedias imply, was fabricated, and the New Catholic Encyclopedia uses words like "infamous," and "delusion." Yet an alleged victim such as Hugh of Lincoln (1255) is listed as St. Hugh, and on the subject of Simonino of Trent (1475), one reads: "The incident still awaits critical historical investigation." The Enciclopedia cattolica is unabashedly tentative. On Simonino, called "santo, martire"-even though Simonino was never actually canonized-the entry says that "public opinion, like the [records of the] trial itself, ... attributes the Jews with guilt. ... a fully critical study is still awaited" (L'opinione pubblica e il processo ... attribuirono agli Ebrei la colpa.... uno studio critico ancora manca). For the editors of the two encyclopedias, the jury was still out.

The same reserve is found as late as 1968 in the Bibliotheca Sanctorum, a modern review of sainthood produced at the Pontifical Lateran University's John XXIII Institute. Father Grard Mathon of the Catholic University of Lille, the author of the entry on Richard of Pontoise, another "supposed victim" (pretese vittime) of ritual murder (about whom we shall have much to say below), first casts doubt on it, writing, "these supposed crimes are today much contested" (questi pretesi crimini sono oggi assai contestati). But he goes on to say that "it would be best to hold off judgment" (sar bene attenersi a una valutazione prudente), much as does F. D. Lazenby, the author of the Catholic Encyclopedia's 1967 essay on Simonino of Trent.

This recent scholarship marks a step backward. Much earlier, the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1910-12, published by Appleton, and bearing an imprimatur, said about William of Norwich (the first alleged ritual murder victim): "This [charge] has been well named 'one of the most notable and disastrous lies of history.'" And, in 1938, Donald Attwater, commenting on Richard of Pontoise in the revised, Thurston edition of Alban Butler's eighteenth-century Lives of the Saints, said that perhaps an "unbalanced" Jew might have murdered a Christian, but that the Jewish people as a whole were to be "acquitted." He repeated himself in the new printing of Butler in 1956. In 1965, at the time of the Vatican II Council, which at last formally absolved the Jews of guilt for Jesus' death, Attwater clarified matters still further, echoing the 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia. In the entry on William of Norwich in The Penguin Dictionary of Saints, he now declared unambiguously: "No instance of the charge has been substantiated."

Attwater knew, of course, that opinions were not unanimous. W. H. Hart, the editor of the chronicles and charters of Gloucester, writing in the 1860s, had wondered whether many of the stories "would pass scrutiny." However, this did not prevent him from adding that "it is not my intention here to discuss the truth of these charges, ... but the frequency ... is sufficient to demand our attention." Yet if Hart seems disingenuous, what should we say of Paul Guerin? In his Petits Bollandistes, of about 1888, summarizing and often imaginatively retelling the episodes found in the original Bollandist Acta Sanctorum, Guerin describes the deaths of Wve martyrs to "Jewish savagery." Richard of Pontoise, Guerin tells, was struck with a fury found only among the "children of the race of Canaan." This, apparently, is an allusion to the Canaanite woman, the children, and the dogs of Matthew 15:26, which is reinforced when Guerin cites Dr. Tiberino's canine perception of the Jews of Trent (1475) in retelling the story of Simonino. But Guerin then steps back to say that it is contrary to "natural equity" to accuse the whole people of these atrocities. Have not the popes, many times, but specifically Alexander II, saved Jews from the wrath of mobs and princes? What Guerin really believed we are left to guess.

Other scholars were transparent. In the 1880s, the Anglican Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould called the ritual murder charge a canard. The lie so incensed him that throwing caution to the winds, he queried, in his Lives of the Saints, whether the Jews, as persecuted and despised as they were in the Middle Ages, did not have the unassailable right to hate Christians. They most certainly did not, would have been the answer of many in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Catholic establishment, whose campaign to resurrect the ritual murder charge makes even ambivalence seem radically rejectionist. Within the Church, the 1880s through the first decades of the twentieth century witnessed a wholesale revival of ritual murder accusations-and their widespread acceptance.

Fin de sicle and Catholic Modernism

The story of the revival is laid out splendidly by Elphge Vacandard in a virtually, and regrettably,...