Blemish? Yeah, I guess you could call it that

I’m reading David McCullough’s fascinating, thousand-page history of Christianity, which is simply called Christianity, with the snappy subtitle, “The First Three Thousand Years,” implying that there will be some backstory, which there is. I’ve gotten to about 1100 AD, or page 400, depending on how you want to keep track. According to McCullough, “one of the characteristics of Western Christianity between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries is its identification of various groups within the Western world as distinct, marginal and a constant potential threat to good order.” Preeminent among these groups, of course, were the Jews, who would serve as scapegoats for Christian hysteria for centuries to come, whenever Christians got upset about something. The worst of the worst was the “blood libel,” the absurd and grotesque assertion that Jews kidnapped and murdered Christian children for their blood to use in Jewish rituals. According to McCullough, “Recurrences of the blood libel persisted into the twentieth century as a blemish on Christian attitudes to Jews, spreading from the West into Orthodoxy in later centuries.”

First of all, I’d call the blood libel a little more than a “blemish,” and, secondly, Christian attitudes to Jews were in themselves pretty consistently awful even without the “blemish.” How can you blemish a blemish? The real blood libel goes back to the gospel of St. Matthew, in which “the Jews” supposedly announce “Let his blood be on our head and on the heads of our descendants.” Christians, unfortunately, had a tendency to read their Bible and take it literally, and much of the New Testament is as bloody as the Old.

I’m also reading Immanuel Kant’s Religion Considered Within the Limits of Reason Alone, which, though fortunately not a thousand pages long, is probably an even better read than McCullough. Yet Kant goes very much out of his way to beat up on the Jews, claiming that Judaism really isn’t a religion, among its very many sins being that it doesn’t believe in an afterlife. Kant’s argument for immortality is that it would be “irrational” for rational beings like ourselves to submit to what we do have to submit to as mortal critters unless there were somehow an afterlife where we virtuous folk could be rewarded for our good deeds, good deeds which on this terrestrial globe are far more likely to be punished than rewarded, and which in any event ultimately are punished, by the worst of all punishments, death. Yeah, Immanuel, you do have a point. Too bad the Jews got it right, and you got it wrong.

Update“David McCullough” is actually “Diarmaid MacCullough”. Sorry, Mac!