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THE RADICAL REFORMERS and the JEWS* Three Separate THE RADICAL REFORMERS AND THE JEWS* Three separate promptings have led me to bring before colleagues in 16th century studies the issues raised in this panel on "Reformers, Radical Reformers, Jews and Heretics," and in particular the issues raised by bracketing "the Radical Reformers and the Jews." Three Promptings The first prompting came during a thorough review of Christian history, in connection with writing an Introduction to Christianity for Jewish Readers. I noticed that from the time of Constantine "Jews and heretics" were bracketed for control and/or persecution in the same periods of suffering. The same rulers and establishment preachers targetted both - e.g., during the Crusades, during the Spanish Inquisition, during the last decades of the Romanovs, during Heydrich's administration of Gleich­ schaltung and "Final Solution" during the German Third Reich. ^> But the great Jewish general historians never recorded what was happening to the Christian "heretics," and the Christian general surveys were silent about mob actions, pogroms and government genocide directed against Jews. The second prompting came from a realization of the degree to which Christian/Jewish dialogue in America, where all communities enjoy the blessings secured by the First Amendment, *A paper by Dr Franklin H Littell, Emeritus Professor of Religion, Temple University, at the 16th Century Studies Conference, 19 October 1991 at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA is tainted - and sometimes corrupted - by the failure of both Jewish communal leaders and church leaders to distinguish between Religious Liberty and toleration, and between legitimate government policies in Christendom and legitimate government policies in an officially secular and pluralistic USA. The third prompting came from a statement by Jules Isaac, a French Jewish historian who lost his family during the Holocaust. Author of a great study Jesus and Israel, he wrote in a smaller essay'on "the teaching of contempt" as follows: "...after very deep historical research, I say and maintain that the fate of Israel [i.e., of the . Jewish people] did not take on a truly inhuman character until the 4th century A. D. with the coming of the Christian Empire."1 The parallel to the Radical Reformers' and later restitutionists' idea of the Fall of the Church was striking, and it clings to the Free Church mind like a burr. Antisemitism in the 16th Century Let me turn now to the section of this discussion which is my portion. References to post-Christian Judaism are missing in most major Anabaptist teachers - for instance, in Menno Simons and Dirck Philipsz. Other- Anabaptist leaders, notably Pilgram Marpeck, pick up a note also prominent among magisterial Reformers. The mythic "Jew" is a polemical weapon: religious opponents are "Judaizers" of the same spirit as the enemies of Jesus; the Jew is stereotyped as "under punishment," "greedy" and usurious.2 Contact with real Jews was slight. "The Radical Reformers and the Jews" 2 From Erasmus to Luther, such was the prevailing complex of constructs about "the Jew" in the Reformation Era, in a Christendom in which theological and cultural antisemitism remained endemic. A recent survey of this miasma is Heiko Obermann's Wurzeln des Antisemitismus.3 Unlike the magisterial Reformers, however, no Anabaptist leader ever justified abuse or persecution of real Jews. Hubmaier attacked the Jews of Regensburg4, leading to their expulsion and the burning of the synagogue, and Menno wrote negatively about "the Jews" in his tract "The Blasphemy of John of Leiden" (1535)5. But these two wellknown anti-Jewish actions occurred while they were still priests in the Latin Church. The incidents were pre-Anabaptist, and neither leader again attacked the Jews after conversion to Anabaptist Christianity and with it ^o Religious Liberty. Radical Reformers and "the Jews" Were there any persons or groups in the Left Wing of the Reformation that were Judaeophile? Did any of them sense that the long centuries during which the political and religious leaders had bracketed "Jews and Heretics" for discrimination and persecution called for an Anabaptist statement on the relation of Jews and Christians different from the traditional set of calumnies and rejections? To begin with, we can make some pleasant statements about what the Christian radicals did no£ teach, although such teachings were rife in the establishments. No Anabaptist taught "The Radical Reformers and the Jews" 3 the deicide calumny. No Anabaptist advocated the burning of synagogues, Hebrew books or Jewish persons. In sum, in terms of the absence of antisemitic theological negatives, the Anabaptists of the 16th century had reached the point officially affirmed by the Roman Catholic Church four centuries later, after the Ecumenical Council: Vatican II (1961-65). Many Christian churches have yet, of course, to reach even that level. So much for the absence of negatives. What is the picture when we turn to affirmatives? Perhaps the most familiar reference involves that sector of the Radical Reformation identified as Anti-Trinitarian - the 16th century fore-runners of Dutch, English and American Unitarianism. Like the other sectors of the "Left Wing," they thought the turning point in Christian history came with Constantine. The Anti-Trinitarians identified the "Fall of the Church" with the rise of professionals to power - apparatchiks, so to say, hierarchs who lorded it over the laity, and theologians who drowned out the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Michael Servetus, the best known Anti-Trinitarian, called his program book Restitutio Christianismi and used his sharp wit to attack scholastic sophistries. According to the great Unitarian scholar E Morse Wilbur, Servetus was not opposed to the idea of the Trinity but rather to false representations of it. "Its three persons or hypostases were mere mathematical abstractions, having no relation to the living God, nor to the Christ of the New Testament, nor to the Holy Spirit of Christian experience. Its very terms - Trinity, hypostasis, person, essense, substance - were inventions of "The Radical Reformers and the Jews" 4 philosophers, and had not a shadow of support from Scripture."6 In Book I of De Trinitatis Erroribus Servetus asked if the little boy who went with his parents to Egypt and back was named "Hypostasis." He also generalized that the dogmatic disputes wouldn't have caused so much trouble "had the Greeks learned Hebrew."7 Servetus appears to have been permanently oriented against oppression of mind and spirit and toward toleration by the misuse of the Trinitarian dogma in the persecution of Moors and Jews in his Spanish homeland8. Apparently, in the confrontation between the super-powers of that age he was also inspired by the idea of re-stating the doctrine of the Trinity in such a way that Muslims and Christians could agree upon it. Where the theme of the Reformers was reformatio, the Radical Reformers' slogan was restitutio. For some that meant return to the Early Church before the union of church and state. For others the key idea was the believers' church, in a covenant sealed by believers' baptism. For others it was recovery of a purified Christian teaching, before abstractions and sophistries mushroomed. As one specialist put it - "The original antitrinitarian departure in the 16th century was not philosophical but Biblical. The intention was to hold exclusively to the expressions that the Scriptures used in reference to God, and to eliminate everything else as 'Greek' and 'Scholastic'..."9 "The Radical Reformers and the Jews" Himself a Jesuit, the writer thought that Adam Pastor, who was a restitutionist in both doctrine and polity, was the point of departure for a new appreciation of the antitrinitarian contribution to church history. Pastor, a splendid Bible scholar, disputed with Menno on the Trinity and before he was put under the ban was for a decade one of the most influential of Anabaptist leaders in the lowlands.10 Among Italian "evangelical Rationalists" there was a strong anti-Trinitarian note, and some of them became Sabbatarians. There was Marrano influence among refugees from Spain, and eventually it spread from the papal states and north Italy to Moravia and Poland. Before the Counter-Reformation set in, there was a substantial Anti-Trinitarian Anabaptist church in Poland. Elisabeth Mielecka, daughter of Prince Nicolas Radzevvil and wife of Palatin of Ponolic, probably appeared in higher profile than most when she announced "the Decalogue is my religion" and initiated Sabbath observance.11 Nevertheless, the return to the pre-Constantinian church carried pre-Nicaean as well as pre-Roman Imperial implications. It is not surprising that some radicals might return to use of the scriptures that the early Christians called "Scripture," and to the core of the way of life (Torah) that the early Christians considered normative. The publication of George Williams' History of the Polish Reformation, long delayed, will fill us in on this front. "The Radical Reformers and the Jews" 6 Appreciation of the Hebrew texts and normative use of the Bible against later philosophical accretions and institutional innovations was a major force in the movements of the Radical Reformation until savage persecution wiped out almost all of the leaders with formal education. It is worth recalling that before the bloody decade in which some 5,000 Anabaptist leaders were put to death (1523-33), two leftwing scholars, Hetzer and Denck, produced a translation of the Old Testament prophets of such quality that it went through 17 editions in 4 years and was used also by enemies like Martin Luther12. After the great period of persecution, those caught and put to the question by the authorities were usually unlettered folk, noteworthy for their extensive memorization of the Scriptures in the vernacular, but of course unable to read Hebrew. Members of the Left Wing made full use of Old Testament stories and lessons.
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