Last week, I watched this 1986 movie called The Disputation featuring the consummate actor, Christopher Lee. In it, he plays with great aplomb the part of that great and long-lived Catalan King of Aragon and Count of Barcelona, James I the Conqueror (1213-1276).
The movie is about the Great Disputation of Barcelona of 1263, whereby a a former Jew-convert turned Dominican priest by the name of Pablo Christiani, debated a matter of great theological import for both faiths, with Nachmanides, the great Catalan Rabbinic scholar and Kabbalist of the 13th century.
The apparent crux of the matter was the divine or human nature of Jesus Christ, and whether the Messiah had already come or was going to make another appearance or not.
The actual message of the disputation was altogether different. It went exactly like this:
Jews of Aragon, convert or else!
But if you think I am making things up, consider how Jews were treated at the time in France by the Crown.
As it happens, Jews had it all good in Roman Gaul, under the Franks, Merovingians, Carolingians, but only until the year of our Lord 1,000 or so. However, during the reign of Robert II the Pious (987-1031), Life became harder and harder for them.
King Robert decided to persecute the Jews, by giving them the choice between being burned to death and conversion. Other Church officials like Alduin, Bishop of Limoges, gave their dioceses the choice between baptism and exile. In one instance, after a month-long theological disputation, four Jews converted, others killed themselves, and the rest fled or were expelled.
As it happens, the timeline of the French persecution of the Jews coincided with that of the Crusades (1096). Both in France and Rhineland, crusaders started their trek to the Holy Land by either killing or forcibly baptizing thousands of Jews.
In 1256, 3,000 Jews were massacred in Bretagne, Anjou, and Poitou. All in all, northern France was bad for them while the southern coast cities provided a safe haven and center for Jewish life.
By 1268, King Louis IX the Saint (1226-1270), had decided to arrest Jews and seize their property. Soon thereafter, however, he rescinded his order. Instead, he took the advice of friar Paul Christian a.k.a. Pablo Christiani, who had asked him to compel the Jews, under penalty of a fine, to wear the badge decreed by Lateran IV in 1215.
An interesting thing comes to mind. It’s an immutable rule of thumb that the most avid proponents of any stern measures are usually the newly converted. This applies to all things. Those who quit smoking become rabid anti-smokers. I am one, I should know, eh 😏! Those who used to overeat, but are now into healthy living, are quick to harshly judge the overindulging. Again, guilty as charged. Former alcoholics, religious converts, you name it, are the first who cast boulders. You get the picture, right!
In the case of the Disputation of Barcelona, it took a Jewish-Christian convert to spur the secular powers into taking anti-Semitic action. If it wasn’t tragic, I would call this ironic. Although irony ain’t in it. Life is more of an exercise into petulant sardonicism than mere irony.
Turns out the Jews were right all along: the greatest enemies to Jews are themselves. Look at Pablo Christiani, born Saúl (Shaul ben NN) to a pious Jewish family. Yeah, yeah, look at him and notice how much damage he did to his own ilk.
This converso Dominican friar advanced the decrees and canon of Lateran IV with the zeal of the newly converted. Beware of the zeal of the converted, people, beware!
The Fourth Council of the Lateran (1215)
This 12th ecumenical council of the Catholic Church was instrumental in cementing European intolerance against heretics and Jews/Muslims. Among its many decrees, the one compelling Jews to wear a distinctive badge on their clothes, comes to mind.
| Canon 68 | Ut Iudaei discernantur a christianis in habitu | That Jews should be distinguished from Christians in their dress | Mandated a special dress code for Jews and Saracens to distinguish them from Christians so that no Christian shall come to marry them ignorant of who they are.[71] |
Wikipedia tells us this badge consisted of a piece of red felt or cloth cut in the form of a wheel, four fingers in circumference, which had to be attached to the outer garment at the chest and back.
This was how European antisemitism took its first determined steps on the path towards the Holocaust.
The status of Jews south of the Pyrenees
Before the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition was established in 1478, Spanish Jews had a relatively protected existence under the Christian Kings and even under the Moors. Since everything is relative, compared to their brethren elsewhere in Europe and in general the Mediterranean basin, the Spanish peninsula provided a safe haven to Jews before the final chapter of the Reconquista in 1492.
Things really took a downturn after the Inquisition came into being. And really degraded right after their Holy Majesties, Fernand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile, took over the last Muslim bastion in continental Spain, Granada, on January 2, 1492.
Guess what other significant event in world history happened in October 1492? Think Big.
In the decades following the end of the Reconquista, at least 200,000 Jews and an equal number of Muslims fled the consequences of the Alhambra Decree of March 1492 that ordered the Expulsion of practicing Jews, as well as other measures aimed at the Muslims inhabitants of the peninsula.
The Reunited Most Christian Spain was mortal to all other Faiths.
The Sephardi Jews of Spain migrated to four distinct areas: North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, Portugal, and Italy. Sultan Bayezid II (1481-1512) of the Ottoman Empire welcomed them with open arms, going as far as sending the Ottoman Navy to fetch and bring them safely to Ottoman lands such as Thessaloniki and Smyrna/Izmir. Many of the Sephardi settled areas that will later become Bulgaria, Serbia, and Bosnia.
“those who say that Ferdinand and Isabella are wise are indeed fools; for he gives me, his enemy, his national treasure, the Jews.”
Bayezid II, The Sultan of the Ottoman Turks
Some of them even used Venice or other Italian port-cities as steppingstones towards finding refuge in Constantinople, as the movie the Secret Passage (2004) showcased. To them, the city on the Bosporus was their place of deliverance on a shinning hill. The Jewish Diaspora would later become rich and productive denizens of the Ottoman Empire.
It seems History is truly about Change and Migration Flows. From agony to ecstasy or from West to East, such was the fate of the Spanish Jews.
Incidentally, I urge every Christian, Muslim, and Jew to visit both Spain and Turkey. These are two key places where one can see with the naked eye the immanent nature of change in History.
In History as in Nature, Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.
Those who dabble in Chemistry and Physics know what I am talking about.
Suffice to say that these two corners of the Middle Sea, as the Romans used to call the Mediterranean, house an irrefutable amount of evidence showcasing the meandering vector of historical progress.
Spain is the perfect example of a Christian country that had almost been totally conquered and Islamized by the Moors, who had even changed its name to Al-Andalus. Spend a month in any given three cities there and you will see how a church or basilica was converted into a mosque only to be rededicated to the Christian God, sometimes going back and forth more than once, even in the span of the same century.
Here you can see the different phases of the Islamic expansion into the peninsula and beyond, into France, from its apogee in 719 AD to its perigee in 1492.
In Turkiye, one can see the same process but in reverse, and on a larger time scale. You can see this both in Anatolia but also in Rumelia and especially in Byzantium / Constantinople / Tarigrad / Istanbul. Suffice to look at Hagia Sophia and any number of churches turned mosques but also at the surviving Christian places of prayer, which were built in the Greek or Roman or Greco-Roman styles and were later modified in the Oriental styles.
Syncretism, not just Custom, is King Everywhere, I tell you.
The Disputation (the movie)
I consider Christopher Lee a great man, a superlative actor, and an interesting King James of Aragon to boot. His boudoir dialogues with his mistress Consuelo are most revealing.
In one instance, his lover turned confidante turned advisor, tells him Jews cannot be allowed to convert given the grave danger they pose to the Christian faith.
The King is puzzled. He asks his lover to explain herself. So, Consuelo tells him how the Christian faith is based on two tenets: worshipping Jesus Christ as our Savior and Redeemer and the wicked Jews who had condemned him to the Cross.
As one cannot exist without the other, a potential conversion would leave Christianity destitute of a scapegoat whom to blame for our Lord Son’s martyrdom.
Put it in terms adapted to the meanest understanding, Christians need Jews to play Bad Cop so that they themselves may continue to be the Good Cop.
To me, this encapsulates the nature of the Christian-Jewish relations quite brilliantly.
And while the King wants to bring about a second coming of the Christ by peacefully and rationally converting all the Jews, his lover would have none of it. King James is a most firm believer in and associates His Second Coming, with the Day of Judgment and the Reign of Saints. And he makes this his magnum opus, his Life’s Goal.
Consuelo, on the other hand, prefers things just the way they are:
“with Christ to save us and the Jews to carry the Burden (i.e., deicide and blood libel) by being much more wicked than we (Christians) are.”
Consuelo, The Disputation (1986)
Between their characters, the nature of Christianity’s blood feud with Mosaicism, is very well portrayed. It explains succinctly and in fine strokes the root causes of the ills of the 20th century.
Faith is morally necessary for the sanity of the body politic and to ensure our children develop robust ethical faculties. Without faith, there can be no redemption of our Spirit. Science and materialism cannot explain everything. Perhaps one day, they may shed light on the nature and meaning of the Universe. Until then, a Creator explains the unexplained better than a Nil answer.
Naked religion however is responsible for all the evils visited by people on their brethren all throughout history. For how can there be a difference between the unimaginable cruelty of the Roman persecutions that have condemned early Christians to martyrdom by fire, crucifixion, or death in the arena, and the later revanche inflicted by Christians abandoning the tenets of their faith and castigating the unassuming Peoples of the Book?
For most people do not realize that Christian intransigence and wanton cruelty was aimed at Jews and Muslim people, who are also present and recognized in the Scriptures. We are all God’s children, whether we realize it or not.
Whatever happened to the original notion of ‘turning the other cheek’? Was that just a gimmick to secure the affection of the low classes and grow the ranks of their Sect during the early patristic era? To me, violence begets violence. And religious persecution always reeked of fratricide. No matter how you slice and dice it, killing in the name of God goes against and pollutes His Name.
The true nature of Man is detestable. It can pervert any civilizing notion like aspiring to do better, being and doing good deeds, making Life less miserable, into a hideous simulacrum that ends in a sectarian hecatomb.
The more I live the more I realize, and it pains me to say it, that disputations are never the answer. Not in a world that abides by the rules of a sum-zero game, whereby one’s gains are another’s losses. In the absence of Self-Control, Men are Beasts.
Homo homini lupus
Götterdämmerung 