<div dir="ltr"><p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif">I appended one of the 109 comments, among them being "Isn't hate speech against Muslims the equivalent of yelling 'Fire' in a crowded theater?"</font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif"><br></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif">I've written about this sea-change to violence in Christian theology in my review of </font><span style="font-family:georgia,serif">Rita Brock's and Rebecca Ann Parker's book </span><i style="font-family:georgia,serif">Saving Paradise</i><span style="font-family:georgia,serif"> at <a href="http://www.NickGier.com/paradise.pdf">www.NickGier.com/paradise.pdf</a>.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif">The Words That Killed Medieval Jews</font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b><font face="georgia, serif"><br></font></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif">By SARA LIPTON DEC. 11, 2015 <i>The New York Times</i></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif"><br></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif">Do harsh words lead to violent acts?
At a moment when hate speech seems to be proliferating, it’s a question worth
asking.</font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif"><br></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif">Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch
recently expressed worry that heated anti-Muslim political rhetoric would spark
an increase in attacks against Muslims. Some claim that last month’s mass
shooting in Colorado Springs was provoked by Carly Fiorina’s assertion that
Planned Parenthood was “harvesting baby parts”; Mrs. Fiorina countered that
language could not be held responsible for the deeds of a “deranged” man.
Similar debates have been occasioned by the beating of a homeless Hispanic man
in Boston, allegedly inspired by Donald J. Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric,
and by the shooting deaths of police officers in California, Texas and
Illinois, which some have attributed to anti-police sentiment expressed at Black
Lives Matter protests.</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif"><br></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif">No historian can claim to have
insight into the motives of living individuals. But history does show that a
heightening of rhetoric against a certain group can incite violence against
that group, even when no violence is called for. When a group is labeled
hostile and brutal, its members are more likely to be treated with hostility
and brutality. Visual images are particularly powerful, spurring actions that
may well be unintended by the images’ creators.</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif"><br></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif">The experience of Jews in medieval
Europe offers a sobering example. Official Christian theology and policy toward
Jews remained largely unchanged in the Middle Ages. Over roughly 1,000 years,
Christianity condemned the major tenets of Judaism and held “the Jews”
responsible for the death of Jesus. But the terms in which these ideas were
expressed changed radically.</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif"><br></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif">Before about 1100, Christian
devotions focused on Christ’s divine nature and triumph over death. Images of
the crucifixion showed Jesus alive and healthy on the cross. For this reason,
his killers were not major focuses in Christian thought. No anti-Jewish
polemics were composed during these centuries; artworks portrayed his
executioners not as Jews, but as Roman soldiers (which was more historically
accurate) or as yokels. Though there are scattered records of anti-Jewish
episodes like forced conversions, we find no consistent pattern of anti-Jewish
violence.</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif"><br></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif">In the decades around 1100, a shift
in the focus of Christian veneration brought Jews to the fore. In an effort to spur
compassion among Christian worshipers, preachers and artists began to dwell in
vivid detail on Christ’s pain. Christ morphed from triumphant divine judge to
suffering human savior. A parallel tactic, designed to foster a sense of
Christian unity, was to emphasize the cruelty of his supposed tormentors, the
Jews.</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif"><br></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif">Partly out of identification with
this newly vulnerable Christ, partly in response to recent Turkish military
successes, and partly because an internal reform movement was questioning
fundamentals of faith, Christians began to see themselves as threatened, too. </font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif"><br></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif">In 1084 the pope wrote that Christianity “has fallen under the scorn, not only
of the Devil, but of Jews, Saracens, and pagans.” The “Goad of Love<i>,”</i> a
retelling of the crucifixion that is considered the first anti-Jewish Passion
treatise, was written around 1155-80. It describes Jews as consumed with sadism
and blood lust. They were seen as enemies not only of Christ, but also of
living Christians; it was at this time that Jews began to be accused of
ritually sacrificing Christian children.</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif">Ferocious anti-Jewish rhetoric began
to permeate sermons, plays and polemical texts. Jews were labeled demonic and
greedy. In one diatribe, the head of the most influential monastery in
Christendom thundered at the Jews: “Why are you not called brute animals? Why
not beasts?” Images began to portray Jews as hooknosed caricatures of evil.</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif"><br></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif">The first records of large-scale
anti-Jewish violence coincide with this rhetorical shift. Although the pope who
preached the First Crusade had called only for an “armed pilgrimage” to retake
Jerusalem from Muslims, the first victims of the Crusade were not the Turkish
rulers of Jerusalem but Jewish residents of the German Rhineland. </font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif"><br></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif">Contemporary
accounts record the crusaders asking why, if they were traveling to a distant
land to “kill and to subjugate all those kingdoms that do not believe in the
Crucified,” they should not also attack “the Jews, who killed and crucified
him?”</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif"><br></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif">Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Jews
were massacred in towns where they had peacefully resided for generations. At
no point did Christian authorities promote or consent to the violence.
Christian theology, which applied the Psalm verse “Slay them not” to Jews, and
insisted that Jews were not to be killed for their religion, had not changed.
Clerics were at a loss to explain the attacks. A churchman from a nearby town
attributed the massacres to “some error of mind.”</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif"><br></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif">But not all the Rhineland killers
were crazy. The crusaders set out in the Easter season. Both crusade and Easter
preaching stirred up rage about the crucifixion and fear of hostile and
threatening enemies. It is hardly surprising that armed and belligerent bands
turned such rhetoric into anti-Jewish action.</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif"><br></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif">For the rest of the Middle Ages,
this pattern was repeated: Preaching about the crusades, proclamations of
Jewish “enmity” or unsubstantiated anti-Jewish accusations were followed by
outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence, which the same shocked authorities that had
aroused Christians’ passions were then unable to restrain. We see this in the
Rhineland during the Second Crusade (1146), in England during the Third Crusade
(1190), in Franconia in 1298, in many locales following the Black Death in
1348, and in Iberia in 1391. Sometimes the perpetrators were zealous holy warriors,
sometimes they were opportunistic business rivals, sometimes they were parents
grieving for children lost to accident or crime, or fearful of the ravages of a
new disease.</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif"><br></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif">Some may well have been insane. But
sane or deranged, they did not pick their victims in a vacuum. It was repeated
and dehumanizing excoriation that led those medieval Christians to attack
people who had long been their neighbors.</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif"><br></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif">Today’s purveyors of anti-Muslim,
anti-immigrant, anti-police and anti-abortion rhetoric and imagery may not for
a moment intend to provoke violence against Muslims, immigrants, police
officers and health care providers. But in the light of history, they should
not be shocked when that violence comes to pass.</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif"><br></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif"><span style="color:blue"><a href="http://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/history/people/faculty/lipton.html">Sara Lipton</a></span>, a professor of history at the State
University of New York, Stony Brook, is the author of “Dark Mirror: The
Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography.”</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif"> </font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font face="georgia, serif">Comment: Ms. Lipton makes a very insightful
point, which I also made in my book Six Million Crucifixions, How Christian
Teachings About Jews Paved the Road to the Holocaust. There's no question that
the demonization and dehumanization process that Jews were subjected to led to
violence and eventually to genocide. Indeed, those two elements are the common
denominator of all genocides, including of course the Holocaust but also
Darfur, Rwanda, Armenia, Yugoslavia and all others. Even though hate speed does
not axiomatically lead to murder or violence, it is a key component and the key
differentiator between a random act of violence, and those perpetrated on a
mass scale.<br>
<br>
Hate Speech is clearly defined. Curtailing Hate Speech is not equivalent to
curtailing freedom of speech. And even if for the sake of argument we said it
was, limiting freedom of speech would be a good thing when you take into
account the consequences of allowing anyone to say anything about other people
or peoples.</font></p><div><font face="georgia, serif"><br></font></div><font face="georgia, serif">-- <br></font><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div> <div style="height:auto;width:auto"> <div> <div><div><font face="georgia, serif"><br></font></div></div></div></div></div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><font size="2"><div><font face="georgia, serif">A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in. <br><br>-Greek proverb</font></div><div><font face="georgia, serif"><br>
“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.
Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance
from another. This immaturity is self- imposed when its cause lies not
in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it
without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! ‘Have courage to use your
own understand-ing!—that is the motto of enlightenment.<br>
<br>
--Immanuel Kant<br>
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