Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (24 page)

The devil-doll

In scattered pockets in the southern Tyrol lie the territories of the old Imperial bishopric based around the town of Brixen, now called Bressanone, a German-speaking part of Italy. Brixen formed, with its southern neighbour Trento, the ‘plug’ that secured the Brenner Pass for the Emperor. For those who enjoy such things, the Brixen diocesan museum is an absolute classic of its kind, crammed with tortured, worm-eaten wooden panels of biblical suffering of a kind churned out by the region’s sculptors and painters for centuries. Its unique, and indeed demented, claim on everyone’s time however is its extensive and elaborate sequence of crib scenes, little panoramas crammed with tiny people and commissioned by the bishops in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. ‘Crib’ generally just implies Baby Jesus, and there are many renderings of him, but the sculptors in wood and wax soon tired of such simplicities and branched out into areas of ever greater mania. There is one amazing ensemble of Herod, with the face of a gold-painted monkey, laughing dementedly as his chariot is escorted by demons (with spitted babies on their spears) into the Mouth of Hell. There is a bizarre scene of Jesus helping his father to cut up timber, with some angels assisting – not a scene I remember from the Bible. And, even more apocryphally, a masterpiece Flight into Egypt, an event which conventionally has all the interest and excitement of a long family car journey on a motorway, but which is spectacularly bought to life here by showing the Holy Family on a rickety bridge with their donkey, crossing the Valley of Wild Beasts, with dozens of little model lions, tigers and porcupines (oddly) waiting below to eat them if they fall off. This is a fate fended off by a hit-squad of angels wielding swords of flame to secure the area – another scene I
really
cannot remember from the Bible.

Chuckling at the wilder shores of popular Catholicism and taking in yet another room crowded with saints and martyrs, suddenly the mood went all wrong as I found myself face to face with something truly horrible: a small carving from about 1495 of the child martyr-saint Simon of Trento. Most of these devil-dolls have long been chucked away or boxed up and the Vatican itself finally disowned him in the 1960s, but here was a brilliantly extreme rendering of what was once a ubiquitous image. Early in the reign of Maximilian I the sensational discovery was made in Trento, apparently in the cellar of a Jewish family, of the body of a missing two-year-old boy. The story got around that the Jews had killed him and had used his blood to mix into their matzo bread. The little statue shows the child covered in dozens of knife nicks with blood dripping from them and holding up a sign showing the pincers, augers and so on used by the Jews. The result of the discovery was a spasm of violent hysteria which resulted in eight Jewish men being executed and a ninth committing suicide in prison (three of Simon’s assailants are shown as tiny figures beneath his feet). The entire Jewish community was then arrested and a further fifteen Jews burned at the stake.

The devotional cult of Simon of Trento spread rapidly, with altars and churches and shrines in his name scattered everywhere. The notorious Old Bridge Tower in Frankfurt was decorated into the nineteenth century not only with its horrendous portrayal of the ‘Jewish Pig’ but also with an image of Simon’s corpse and the instruments of his death. This cult proved unstoppable, with dozens of miracles assigned to Simon’s intercession, and it popularized anti-Semitic fantasies which bubbled up at seemingly random intervals across the Empire.

The real reasons for the blood libel turning up in Trento in 1495 can never be recovered, but it was an important example of the often unstable and vicious links between popular Catholicism and anti-Semitism which littered Habsburg history (and which would also, of course, implicate Protestants). There is no correct place in this book for a discussion of the Jews of the Empire, but here is as good a one as any. By the seventeenth century the events in Trento may have seemed a long time ago, but they existed too in a sort of permanent present, folded into a Counter-Reformation iconography which created a Manichaean opposition between Christian and Jew, but which nonetheless could not hide the enduring, long-standing nature of an oddly stable relationship.

Under the intolerable shadow of the 1940s it is extremely hard but necessary to reimagine a world of sometimes violent and yet
not
genocidal oppression. In his general ban on all forms of religion in the Empire except Catholicism, even Ferdinand II made an exception for Judaism. The Jewish communities were as ancient as, often far more ancient than, any other settler group in Central Europe, and they held a place of confused respect because of their crucial role in the Christian story. Jews could not be understood simply as heretics if they shared the religion of Jesus himself and they fell into a quite separate category from simple evil-doers such as Muslims. But this category was nonetheless not an enviable one, with Jewish ‘stubbornness’ and engagement in businesses forbidden to Christians (such as money-lending) making their presence intermittently unacceptable and with the threat of massacre or expulsion always waiting in the wings.

From the point of view of Jews themselves this ‘stubbornness’ was at the very heart of their identity, since their European diaspora in the centuries after the destruction of the Temple by the Emperor Titus. This exodus gave them a separate narrative of great power – of an endless, generationally renewed act to maintain themselves in a hostile, cold and forbidding environment. For Christians much of the Old Testament provided simply a picturesque and enthralling sequence of dramas suitable for wall decorations and engravings. It was understood that the Old Testament was crammed with clues that, in an immense effort of futile scholarship, were made anticipations of the New Testament. For the Jews the same material, grotesquely abused and misunderstood by Christians, was an endlessly rich source of reassurance and challenge, a constant reminder of the need for constancy in exile and the keeping of the laws maintained at such cost by their ancestors. This oddly shared inheritance, however much mutually denied and contested, is of course one of the defining and most powerful and creative threads in European history. But except for short periods (under Rudolf II in Prague, most obviously, but even then for in many ways trivial and freaky reasons) there was almost no dialogue. The Jews could draw on a rich range of louche and brutal stereotypes from across the Hebrew Bible who could easily be seen as prefiguring of the richly clad and mounted European princes who either threatened or patronized them. In theory a densely nuanced alternative history of the Habsburgs could be reconstructed through Jewish eyes, except for the basic problem that the events we consider ‘history’ were viewed by them as irrelevant, the ‘abomination of the land’, a mere backdrop of meaningless European savagery against which their real life could be carried out.

The story of Simon of Trento is merely one incident, albeit a particularly disgusting one, in a centuries-long argument within Christianity about what to do with Judaism. The Habsburgs had special tribunals to look after issues of financial or administrative concern: these dealt variously with mines, vineyards, forests, rivers, soldiers and Jews. So just as colonies of German miners in northern Hungary reported in directly to the Emperor, so did they. This protection was real and meant that except at times of civil collapse it was rare for Jews to suffer genuine violence. But it was also far from benign, with often crushing levels of taxation and impoverishment in return for being otherwise left alone. The sheer restrictiveness under which Jews operated is very hard to conceive, but was much less extreme than it appears to us, as for centuries everyone lived within a highly constrained society with many duties and few privileges. But as these ‘feudal’ shackles fell off and gentiles and landlords and guilds lost their power, the disabilities of the Jews became ever starker, with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Emperors twisting themselves in knots over how to deal with them legally.

What is striking throughout the arguments about the right place for Jews in society is that the Jews themselves were never consulted. The Emperor and his advisers, generally key Catholic notables, were driven by an odd mixture of piety and efficiency, but almost never by curiosity. The actual needs of Jews were not relevant to their decisions. There was a scholastic strand which valued the Jews almost as living fossils. This saw them not just as the much-debased inheritors of Old Testament traditions but also as intermediaries with ancient Egyptian magic, through the Kabbala and, even more bizarrely, as the unwitting descendants of the ‘Land of Cham’ with access to the secrets hidden within the still-undecoded world of hieroglyphics. These very odd forms of esoteric study bothered few people, but it did mean that there was an active academic curiosity which could border almost on respect within Catholic university circles, and which again made Judaism quite different from any other religion. The other powerful strand within Christianity was a sense that certain actions might result in the final removal of this anomaly scattered across the Empire, through some dazzling act which would at last convert the Jews. In the fervent and peculiar world of Ferdinand II there were attempts to force Jews to listen to sermons, grand gestures such as the establishment of a privileged new ghetto on the opposite bank of the Danube from Vienna, offers of money.

Each of these actions simply fed into the Jews’ own worst fears and a rich parallel argument developed over what level of cooperation was permissible under Torah and to what extent any leeway at all was going to simply spring the trap which would result in a Jew ceasing to be a Jew. These anxieties expressed themselves in countless ways. For example, Habsburg moves to make Jews write accounts in German not Yiddish were motivated by a genuine wish for greater accountability, but they forced Jews to learn German – which could easily be seen as the high road to a disastrous and shameful assimilation. Each of the stages by which legal disabilities were lessened triggered both creative and sterile fights within each Jewish community as to what would or would not be appropriate as a compromise with the Christian authorities. Each Habsburg dispensation was seen as bountiful, but also – by both sides – as cunning. Perhaps this would be the gesture that at last would persuade the Jews to convert? Some dispensations were provoked by the wish for greater efficiency but they were never provoked by an active concern for the actual welfare of Jewish subjects. With the First Partition of Poland in 1772, the Habsburgs found themselves with three times as many Jewish subjects and a new era arrived but, however rational and even secular, it was not one from which the disgusting little figure of Simon of Trento ever entirely disappeared.

How to build the Tower of Babel

At the end of the Thirty Years War the papacy’s authority lay in ruins. The Pope’s bull attacking the Treaty of Westphalia’s religious toleration clauses was simply ignored and he was increasingly viewed as just the inept ruler of a backward Italian state. The anomaly of the Pope’s still being an elected and generally quite elderly figure also caused problems – in the seventeenth century the papacy appeared almost a revolving door for semi-cadavers, with twelve popes in the saddle as against only five Emperors. These men avoided the low comedy of corruption, stabbings and poison enjoyed by their predecessors and were in some cases intelligent and thoughtful figures, but they seldom had much control over events and the world twisted and turned in ways which they were unable to catch up with.

None of this is to deny the spectacular vibrancy and aggression of Catholicism itself in the century and a half between the Treaty of Westphalia and the French Revolution, but this was achieved with the Pope’s acquiescence rather than through his leadership. Above all, this was the great era of the Society of Jesus. This extraordinary organization has left its stamp all over the Habsburg Empire, and the Jesuits’ distinctive flat-fronted churches and bulky colleges still dot the landscape. A perfect example is in the central Bohemian town of Kutná Hora, left a haggard ruin by the Thirty Years War but put back on its feet as a stronghold of Catholicism with a glowering set of Jesuit buildings at its heart, decorated with the inevitable statues of martyred saints. Each of these colleges was, as one Jesuit perfectly put it, ‘a Trojan horse filled with soldiers from heaven’. Brilliantly educated, self-confident, conniving, the Jesuits dominated teaching across Catholic Europe and specialized in all sorts of town-square spectaculars with fluttering banners, marching and self-examination, sifting the population for conformity and obedience.

Originating in the first shock of the Reformation, the Jesuits fanned out across the globe, converting and studying, ensuring that much of Christianity’s presence would be Catholic rather than Protestant. This global mission put the Jesuits under an intolerable amount of torque, as the world they did so much to analyse and explain, particularly India and China, raised a host of ever more awkward questions about the exclusive claims of Christianity. This would turn into a more general problem for Western religion by the later eighteenth century, with the researches of the Jesuits contributing so much to their own diminution. In the meantime the Jesuits ruled the roost and nowhere more so than in the Habsburg lands.

The Jesuits’ mode of operation is now very hard to sympathize with. One confusion comes from the sense that if some of these highly intelligent men were gathered around a table and we could listen in, almost everything they said would appear to be nonsense – by which I don’t mean a cheap jibe against religion, but their entire understanding of society, science, education: everything would appear to us questionable or odd. They did not have the sort of Gestapo function of the Inquisition, and indeed always kept a distance from that bizarre body, the Society having suffered from investigation itself in its early days. But they did have a deep contempt for other Christian variants, let alone other religions, and pursued ruthlessly any form of intellectual backsliding – generally through teaching and exhortation rather than the rack and thumb-screw. Their churches, often the greatest examples of baroque decoration, may seem to us headache-inducing explosions of gold paint and cherubs, but this Jesuit feeling of emotional excess was all in the service of teaching, and needed the images of exemplary lives and events that littered the ceilings and side-chapels. Above all, they had the Virgin Mary, a figure of extraordinary power whose cult could not really be countered by Protestants, who were left looking rather male and wooden.