The Sabbath World (20 page)

In fact, the strength of Antioch’s Jews alarms Chrysostom, since he finds himself competing with them for bodies in his church. The power of the Jews to lure away his congregants crests in the autumn, with the arrival of the Jewish High Holidays, when Jews prepare special foods, spruce up their homes, fast in repentance, build huts for Succoth, and dance in the public square—and many of their Christian neighbors abandon their churches to join them. “Many who belong to us and say that they believe in our teaching, attend their festivals, and even share in their celebrations and join in their fasts,” Chrysostom thunders from the pulpit. “Many among us keep the Sabbath,” he complains.

To keep Judaizers out of synagogue on Saturdays and Jewish holidays, Chrysostom employs some of the most violently anti-Jewish language used up to that point in Christian literature. His diatribes are a common form of preachment known as
Adversus Judaeos
, the sermon against the Jews, but Chrysostom embroiders his text with flowers of classical rhetoric, which teaches the art of slander as enthusiastically as the art of praise. Chrysostom’s later readers will not recognize his strong words as typical Greco-Roman insults; his phrases will be taken literally, becoming a template for the anti-Jewish slanders that will follow in the centuries to come. Jews, he says, are dogs, gluttons, drunks, demons, thieves, cheaters, and child-murderers. They are wolves slavering over a soon-to-be-slaughtered Christian flock. Christians must do everything they can to keep them away: “Since today the Jews, more troublesome than any wolves, are about to encircle our sheep, it is necessary to arm ourselves for battle.”

Wilken teases out a profile of the Judaizers who bother Chrysostom so much. They are neither recent converts from Judaism to Christianity nor old-time Jewish Christians. Rather, they are Christians
from Chrysostom’s own congregation who are drawn to Judaism by the very logic that drew them or their parents or grandparents to Christianity. Since God gave the Good Book to the Jews, and since they read it in Greek rather than in Hebrew, Jews must be closer to the truth than Christians. The Judaizers also admire piety. Chrysostom himself has to admit that the Jews care more about the Sabbath than his own flock does about Sunday:

The Judaizers see no reason not to go to synagogue on Saturday as well as church on Sunday. After all, Jesus kept the Sabbath and Passover. But Chrysostom knows that, inevitably, a Jewish festival will conflict with a Christian one, and that the ensuing squabbles will tear his church apart. If they keep the “fixed days” and “fixed times,” Chrysostom tells his congregation, the Judaizers will “divide the assembly in two.”

I
DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO PRAY
. I
STILL DON’T. THE TUNES, POURED INTO
me as a child and dammed up through adulthood, spilled out with the tears, but the words had no meaning. If they possessed some sort of magic, I had no idea what it was. The prayer book, which must have had something in it to appeal to so many generations of Jews, had been turned by its translators into a gibber-jabber of exalted terms: rock, redeemer, raiments, majesty.

I also resisted the imperative to worship. Worship whom? Worship what? Wasn’t that just mumbling and shuckling in the dark? The oppressiveness of the exercise was embodied in a phrase uttered just before an important prayer: “Open my mouth so that I may utter your praise.”
Really?
I was to ask God to move my lips so that I could utter words that would gratify his ego? The sentence implied a closed robotic loop: I’d switch on God, and he’d operate my mouth by remote control.

What I liked was to walk to synagogue. In Park Slope, the route was a straight shot down Eighth Avenue. Nearly every house on the street was at least a century old, and all of them, if you looked at them
long enough, seemed to stagger backward into history. They were drunk with weird period ornamentation. There was the Montauk Club, a Venetian palace ringed by terra-cotta heads of American Indians. There was the Adams House, half church, half castle, with heavy red Romanesque arches and a fairy-tale tower, built for the entrepreneur who invented both Chiclets and vending machines. There was Temple Beth Elohim, a 1920s synagogue with a surprisingly discreet presence on the street, given that its entrance, atop a sweeping staircase, featured Corinthian columns and grandiosely arched stained-glass windows, and behind those lay a pentagonal edifice meant to symbolize the five books of the Pentateuch.

At my synagogue, which lurked behind its dingy walls like an Eastern European
shtiebel
, I waited for the moment when they unrolled the Torah and chanted the sacred history, the chanters swaying over the pulpit like reeds in the wind. The light in which the patriarchs and matriarchs lived seemed brighter and cleaner—closer to Creation—than the brownish city light in which I moved. In it, contours sharpened; depths deepened. The men and women of the Bible were also spiritual superheroes, yet in their domestic lives they were mean-spirited, violent, pettily jealous. They spoke directly to God and dared to negotiate with him. Abraham bargained. Hagar begged. Rebecca complained. Moses placated. But they also coveted, lied, stole, murdered, raped. Jacob cheated Esau. Laban cheated Jacob. Jacob cheated him back. Jacob’s sons murdered the inhabitants of a town who had agreed to convert to their faith, then sold their brother into slavery. Joseph, as a child, was an insufferable braggart.

But if the biblical personality possessed vitality rather than uplift, the biblical concept of time had a more palliative effect. Abraham was seventy-five when he left his home to follow God’s call, and one hundred when Isaac was born. Isaac was forty when he married Rebecca. Jacob worked unhappily for his brother-in-law for fourteen years. Women endured years without children, or hope of any. The success or failure of a biblical life was a thing to be determined in the epic mode, in the fullness of time between creation and redemption, not in an impatient New York season.

Enthralled as I was by the reading of the Torah, I was even more entranced by the ritual for taking it out of its cabinet, known, in a high archaism, as the Ark, after the box in which the Israelites carried it for forty years in the desert. It had been years since I went regularly to synagogue, and I had become enough of a stranger to see how odd this ritual was. You didn’t just take out the Torah. You lifted it in your arms, cradled it, carried it around the room, kissed it, laid it down gently on the lectern, and blessed it over and over before you read it—chanted it, actually. Then you did the whole thing all over again before you put it away. This was idolatry of the highest order. The Torah might as well have been an infant Jesus, and we who carried it a procession of Madonnas. This wasn’t just a religion of the Book. It was a fetish of it.

W
HENEVER PEOPLE BEGIN READING
the Book, they start keeping the Sabbath. And when they keep the Sabbath they read the Book. It is no accident that religions centered on the Word of God and the texts in which it is written have set aside a day for absorbing them. If there hadn’t been a Fourth Commandment, the people of the Book would have had to invent one. The ties that bind the Sabbath to the Book are also a closed loop. Driving it is the conviction—still held today, though as a highbrow rather than a devotional belief—that reading is a sacred act.

It was because they began to read Scripture—really to read it, every day, compulsively, in a desperate search for forgotten or obscured truths—that ordinary Christians experienced the lure of the Sabbath in the sixteenth century. And they began to read Scripture because, all of a sudden, they could. In 1517, when Martin Luther nailed to the door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany, a poster advertising a sermon in which he planned to advance ninety-five theses against the Catholic Church’s trade in indulgences—forgiveness for sins, procured for a small sum—the printing press had existed for less than seventy years. (In Europe, anyway—new scholarship places its invention
a generation earlier in Korea.) Printed matter was a novelty, though posters, pamphlets, and broadsheets had begun to sprout on city walls and street corners. Luther’s attack on the Church may have been the spark that ignited the Protestant Reformation, but the kindling that caught and spread the fire was the fly sheets on which he had his theses printed and distributed throughout Germany. It took only two weeks for his views, which did not seem shocking to his fellow professors, to reach minds far removed from Wittenberg University and therefore less accustomed to sharp theological disputation.

Luther’s outsized influence stemmed from his prescient grasp of the power of print. His Ninety-five Theses soon became a flood of tracts and pamphlets, written by him and by like-minded theologians and rebutted by their opponents. Luther wrote nearly as fast as the presses printed, supplementing his sermons and catechisms and broadsides with a new and soon-to-be-definitive translation of the Latin Bible into German. According to one estimate, one-third of all the books sold in Germany between 1518 and 1525 were written by Luther. “Printing,” he declared, “is God’s ultimate and greatest gift. Indeed through printing God wants the whole world, to the ends of the earth, to know the roots of true religion and wants to transmit it in every language. Printing is the last flicker of the flame which glows before the end of the world.”

The marriage of print and religious polemic did not, in fact, herald the end of the world, but it did bring about something almost as revolutionary: “a truly mass readership and a popular literature within everybody’s reach,” in the words of the great French social historian Lucien Febvre. In Germany, literacy rates had doubled by the end of the century. Those who could not read found people to read to them. One study of a mining community in the Tyrol in the 1560s has groups of miners following a popular preacher from house to church to house on Sundays to hear him read from the Bible and preach out loud. In France, people reading forbidden books were prosecuted harshly, often by being burned at the stake. As a result, there are court records to tell us who they were: carpenters, barrel-makers, weavers, tailors, nail-makers, porters, pewter workers, leather workers, and furriers;
respectable tradesmen as well as wandering journeymen; curates, students, schoolmasters, and doctors. And then there were the wives, sisters, and daughters of these men, some of whom were also burned at the stake.

To understand why reading became a mass phenomenon, you have to try to feel what these new readers felt. Religious reform, to them, was no remote technical matter. Attacking Church customs—indulgences, the saying of Masses for the dead, Latin liturgy, purgatory, celibacy, clerical immunity from civil taxes and laws, and traditional ceremonies and festivals—was a way of tackling the most pressing issues in any society in any era, which are: Who’s in charge? Who gets to control the allocation of time and resources? What kind of regime should govern, and according to which code? Saying that the Church and its spokesmen should not dictate Christian practice and that individuals should determine their own devotional activities was to buck centuries of centralized authority. Luther’s doctrine of
sola scriptura
—Scripture alone—reflected the fact that all religious laws that could be traced back to the Church and only to the Church had lost all legitimacy, at least in his eyes. If they were null and void, what code was there to follow but Scripture?

The Church had pushed the Bible so far to the margins of the religious experience that it wasn’t even taught in most seminaries. Now people could read the Bible in their own vernacular languages, rather than struggle through it in Latin—and few had had the skills even to do that. Now they could interpret the text in the privacy of their homes and churches. And they could come up with their own original scriptural justifications for just about every aspect of life. Christ wouldn’t have wanted things to be like this! That runs contrary to the Ten Commandments!

The consequences of translating the Bible, printing it, and putting it in everyone’s hands cannot be overstated. People encountering God’s word in their own languages felt, as if for the first time, pride in those languages, and in their own cultures. They were able to filter God’s truths through familiar idioms, which made them more intimately their own. They could read the tale of nation-building in the
Old Testament and imagine themselves as part of a distinct nation, with its own destiny, rather than as, say, subjects of the Hapsburg or Holy Roman Empires. The Bible also raised for its readers questions of social organization. Hardly a political order dreamed up in the subsequent hundred years failed to have scriptural warrant behind it. By the seventeenth century, as the historian Fania Oz-Salzberger writes, “there were biblical royalists, biblical republicans, biblical regicides, biblical patriarchalists and defenders of the old order, biblical economic revolutionaries and deniers of private property, biblical French imperialists, biblical English patriots, and their biblical Scottish counterparts.”

But no period was as radical as the first decade of the Reformation. Groups mushroomed overnight, joyously predicting the end of days. Iconoclastic mobs mauled statues of the Virgin Mary. Charismatic women cultivated followings, and, though women’s thoughts had until then almost never found their way onto printing presses, these women went so far as to publish them. Evangelists renounced their clerical positions and moved to the countryside to preach a new social order to peasants. The ferment of the early Reformation came to a head in 1524, when uprisings swept across Europe in the massive upheaval called the Peasants’ War. Inspired by the evangelists’ preaching, peasants revolted against landlords, some of whom happened to be rich monasteries, and miners struck against kings. Princes and mayors and kings quashed the disturbances only through the application of extreme force, and rebels were slaughtered throughout the continent.