Gutenberg’s bible was published in 1454 a new world opened. In effect, the world of the Middle Ages was ending and the modern world was being ushered in. Among the changes wrought by the printing press was that it created a new area of Jewish law: copyright

Until modern technology, the printing press was the single, greatest discovery in the history of the Western world. Its impact cannot be underestimated. It changed civilization. When Gutenberg’s bible was published in 1454 a new world opened. In effect, the world of the Middle Ages was ending and the modern world was being ushered in.

Among the changes wrought by the printing press was that it created a new area of Jewish law: copyright.

Until that time, there was no money to be made from a book. The number of copies created was always relatively small. However, the advent of the printing press necessitated questions about copyright, because the business owner who prepared the plates had a significant monetary interest in the endeavor. A book made in the hundreds or even thousands required the investment in paper (which still was not cheap in Europe) and binding. The publication of a major work required a major investment. And a printer would not undertake such an investment unless he was somehow guaranteed that he would have no competition in the sale of that item. That opened a new area in Jewish law: copyright law.

Interestingly, copyright law in Judaism predates copyright law in the Western world by a number of centuries. The first reference to it is in the early 1500s by the Maharam of Padua, Rabbi Meir ben Isaac Katzenellenbogen (1482–1565). There was a study that perhaps two out of every three Ashkenazic Jews are descended from him. There are many Katzenellenbogens in Israel and the United States today. Rabbi Meir ben Isaac Katzenellenbogen was an East European Jew who moved to Italy and became the Chief Rabbi of Padua. He was going to publish a corrected and annotated edition of the Mishnah Torah by Maimonides, which he had worked on for more than a decade. When he had it ready for print he made the best arrangement he could with one of the printers. The printer said, however, that he would not publish it unless the Maharam of Padua obtained for him exclusive rights.

In Jewish books today, especially in matters of Jewish law, there is something called a haskama, an approbation, i.e. a great rabbi has given his approval that the work contains worthwhile ideas. Many such approbations contain wording to the effect that since this book was published at such expense no one has the right to republish this book for “x” number of years without the permission of the author or printer. It usually was for seven years.

In the 18^th century, one of the classic disputes between Jewish groups (the Hassidim and Mitnagdim) was over which Babylonian Talmud edition had the right to be published in Eastern Europe. Families would not marry into each other if they had the “unaccepted” Talmud in their houses.

The main vehicle of enforcing such a law in the Jewish world was through censure or even excommunication and/or having the author’s books banned. The threat of economic sanctions served as the main weapon against copyright infringement.

Today, copyright law has new variables such as printers on other sides of the world (international copyright law), which not only clouds the issue but makes it even harder to enforce. There always were people who violated it anyway with underground presses. Nevertheless, generally speaking that was how the law was enforced.

Rabbi Solomon ibn Gabirol, a Spanish Jew (born 1021 CE), was a person of enormous intellect fluent in Latin, Greek, Arabic and Hebrew, as well as different dialects of what now is Spanish. He is considered one of the primary philosopher-poets in Jewish history.

Rabbi Solomon ibn Gabirol was a Spanish Jew (he lived in the city ofSaragosa) born in approximately 1021 CE. He was orphaned at a very early age and died at an early age, perhaps 27 or 35.

He was a person of enormous intellect who combined within himself many different facets, including fluency in many languages: Latin, Greek, Arabic and Hebrew, as well as different dialects of what now is Spanish. He is considered one of the primary poets in Jewish history, and wrote them both in Arabic and Hebrew. His hundreds of poems cover all sorts of topics: weddings, nature, life, relationships, marriage, etc.

As reflected in his poetry, he had a very strong interest in philosophy, in particular Plato. This set him apart from the other Jewish philosophers of the times. In the medieval world philosophy held a very central role in the thought processes of civilization and religion – and Aristotle was not only held in the highest esteem, but his ideas were viewed as infallible. Although the non-Jews made Aristotle their measuring rod, among the Jews he was not quite as popular. Rabbi Saadiah Gaon, for instance, ignored Aristotelian philosophy. Rabbi Judah Halevi’s Kuzari was also non-Aristotelian. Likewise, Rabbi Solomon ibn Gabirol was non-Aristotelian.

He wrote a famous book in Hebrew called, “The Source of Life” (Mekor Chaim), which was translated into Latin (Fons Vitae) and Arabic. It was tremendously popular among the non-Jews, whereas the Jews largely ignored it.

The Crown of Sovereignty

What he is remembered for among the Jews is his religious poetry. There is one particular poem that stands out above the others, “The Crown of Sovereignty” (Keter Malchut). It is recited till today on Yom Kippurnight by Sephardic Jews.

The Crown of Sovereignty” (Keter Malchut), recited today on Yom Kippur night by Sephardic Jews, the masterpiece of Rabbi Solomon ibn Gabirol, is the poem of Jewish literature. It expresses as no other poem the essence of the soul of the Jewish people and humanity.

The poem, a few hundred stanzas long, is a magnificent description of God, man, the people of Israeland the Torah. Besides the imagery, rhyme and meter it is also a restatement of his philosophic viewpoint of the world and the Jewish people. It is the poem of Jewish literature. It expresses as no other poem the essence of the soul of the Jewish people and humanity.

In “The Crown of Sovereignty” ibn Gabirol describes how he prepares to appear before God for judgment. Metaphorically, he describes how he sets up his army, his defense: “I have established my battlefront and arranged my soldiers.” Then he describes how when he comes closer to the Day of Judgment he realizes that he cannot rely on his soldiers and his strategy may not work. In other words, he realizes the weaknesses of man.

The end is that he comes before God without anything. His army is dispersed. His weapons have fallen. His courage is gone. The true essence of a man is that as long as things go well we are very confident, but when they do not and we have to view the raw person of who we are it is not always a pretty picture. Psychologically, it is not easy to take a hard look at oneself in the mirror. One who is stripped of all defenses and illusions sees a different picture of himself.

“The Crown of Sovereignty” is a masterpiece of poetry without comparison. His remarkable breadth of knowledge, from the Talmud and philosophy is, is on display. How he describes the things that happen to us in life; the frustration and futility of death; the questions of Job, etc. It is a towering accomplishment. Unfortunately, it does not have the wide popularity that it should have.

Nevertheless, all later Jewish poets borrowed from ibn Gabirol – both his style and ideas.

In October 1347, a ship came from the Crimea and docked in Messina, Sicily. Rats on board brought with them the Black Death, the bubonic plague, to Europe. Our best estimates now are that at least 25 million people died in Europe over a period of 50 years (peaking between 1348 and 1350). This was almost 40% of the population (some estimates say as high as 60%).

The medieval world was terribly superstitious. Christian Europe was steeply entrenched in belief in witches, witchcraft, demons and evil spirits – and they believed that the evil powers could be brought into being and then harm others simply by thinking them. This led to accusations against the Jews such as “host desecration.” “Desecrating the host” means stealing the holy bread, the wafers, of the communion of the Church.

Throughout the history of the Jews in Europe, from about 1250 onward, pogroms happened on a regular basis for the sin of desecrating the host. And many Jews, under torture, confessed and implicated other Jews. (In medieval Europe a confession wasn’t considered authentic unless the accused was tortured. Thus extracted, anybody could be made to confess anything. It, therefore, went on without an end: one person accusing another to end their torture.)

They insisted that the Jews return the desecrated host. Of course, if there never was one to begin with how does one return it?

Another popular accusation was that Jews poisoned the wells. This accusation gained widespread acceptance when the Black Death, the bubonic plague, wracked Europe in the 1300s.

There were two forms of the plague: one spread by the fleas while another was a virus in the air. The idea that fleas or an airborne virus carried the plague was beyond the understanding of fourteenth century Europeans. Somebody had to be doing it. The scapegoat naturally became the Jews. How did the Jews do it? They poisoned the wells.

How did they know this? They tortured Jews until they confessed.

To protect themselves from Jews poisoning the wells, Christians set up guards around the wells… but the plague continued. If the wells were guarded, how did the Jews poison them? (That option that the Jews were not poisoning the wells was not considered.) They concluded that the Jews did it through Jewish thoughts or prayers.

We find echoes of the Black Death in Jewish custom and law even today. For instance, Jews have an old custom on the first day of Rosh Hashanah to go to a body of water, recite some prayers and symbolically cast one’s sins into the sea. Jewish law says one must go to a body of water which is outside the town. Many commentators say that in the time of the Black Death the custom became to do it at a private well or outside the city, not at a public well or inside the city, to reduce the chance of the Christians accusing the Jews of poisoning the well or, later, cursing the waters through magic incantations.

We find echoes of the Black Death in Jewish custom and law even today. For instance, Jews have an old custom on the first day of Rosh Hashannah to go to a body of water, recite some prayers and symbolically cast one’s sins into the sea. Jewish law says one must go to a body of water which is outside the town. Many commentators say that in the time of the Black Death the custom became to do it at a private well or outside the city, not at a public well or inside the city, to reduce the chance of the Christians accusing the Jews of poisoning the well or, later, cursing the waters through magic incantations.

Once the Jews were accused of poisoning the wells, a wave of pogroms ensued. In January 1349, the entire Jewish community in the city of Basel was burned at the stake. The Jewish communities of Freiburg, Augsburg, Nurnberg, Munich, Konigsberg, Regensburg, and other centers, all were either exiled or burned. In Worms, in March 1349, the entire Jewish community committed suicide. In Cologne, the Jews were forced to flee.

In Mainz, which had the largest Jewish community in Europe, the Jews defended themselves against the mob and killed over 200 Christians. Then the Christians came to take revenge. On one day alone, on August 24, 1349, they killed 6,000 Jews in Mainz.

Of the 3,000 Jews in Erfurt, none survived the attack of the Christian mobs. By 1350, those Jews that survived the Black Death itself were destroyed by the ravages of the mobs. The Jewish communities in Antwerp and Brussels were entirely exterminated in 1350. There were almost no Jews left in Germany or the Low Countries by 1351.

In the Jewish cemetery in Worms, there is the burial place of the Maharam of Rothenburg with a large headstone dated back to the 14th century. Next to him is another headstone that says this is the man who gave the ransom to get his body out from the castle and bring it to a Jewish burial. They are among the oldest tombstones in all of Europe. It is miraculous that they survived the Nazi occupation in WWII.

Rabbi Meir ben Baruch, the Maharam of Rothenburg (1225-1293) became the leader of Ashkenazic Jewry and one of the greatest rabbis of all time. We have close to 3,500 legal responses of his. It is just enormous.

In his time, Christian Europe discovered the advantages of extorting money from Jews. The Talmud already mentions the problem of non-Jews kidnapping Jews and holding them for ransom; it’s not a new problem. Even though the primary rule in Jewish law is that we do everything to save a Jewish captive – including selling a Torah scroll; a human being is worth more than anything else in the world – nevertheless, if, in the judgment of the Jewish court and the community, giving the ransom will mean further ransom and greater extortion, then we do not redeem captive for extortion. Therefore, a number of authorities wrote decisions setting the limit as to how much could be paid for certain Jews.

In 1285, the Maharam of Rothenburg left Europe to go to the Land of Israel, which was then under Turkish rule. The leader of the Turks openly solicited Jewish immigration expecting the Jews would build up the country, etc.

Simultaneously, the situation in Europe turned even worse for the Jews. They had been kicked out of France and England, and now they had to leave Germany, Austria and Bohemia. The question was where to go. Most opted to go east, and that is the beginning of the large Jewish emigration to Poland, Lithuania and parts of Russia. Some went south. There was a sizable emigration to Spain. Others headed for the Holy Land. The Maharam of Rothenburg was among them.

He set out incognito, because it was illegal to leave one’s town, especially Jews. He came to Lombardy in northern Italy, but there he was recognized by a Jew that had converted to Christianity, a bitter apostate, who turned him over to a local baron. The baron sold him to the Emperor of Austria for a fee. The emperor held him for ransom in one of his castles.

However, the Maharam of Rothenburg refused to allow the Jews to ransom him. The emperor started out with a very high ransom 30,000 marks, but at the end he was willing to take almost anything.

While incarcerated, Divine intervention allowed the Maharam of Rothenburg to have visitors and even run his academy. He stayed in prison for the last seven years of his life, but never allowed the Jews to ransom him, even though there were numerous offers to do so. He died in 1293 in prison. The emperor then held the body for ransom. But the Maharam had left a will forbidding it.

Here Jewish legend takes over, although there is no reason to doubt it. For seven years his body lay in the dungeon and didn’t decompose. When the emperor died, his son, the next emperor, took a small token amount of money and the Maharam’s body was removed.

In the Jewish cemetery in Worms, there is the burial place of the Maharam of Rothenburg with a large headstone dated back to the 14^th century. Next to him is another headstone that says this is the man who gave the ransom to get his body out from the castle and bring it to a Jewish burial. The only reward he wanted was to be buried next to the Maharam of Rothenburg. The two lie side by side. It’s one of the oldest tombstones in all of Europe. It is amazing that it survived the Nazi occupation in WWII.

King Louis IX of France forced the Jewish communities under his control to give up their copies of the Talmud and in 1242 had 24 cartloads worth of Jewish books burned in the square in front of the Louvre in Paris. For his efforts, the Church canonized him as a saint in 1297.

One of the surest patterns in Jewish history is that Jews who convert to Christianity become the worst enemies of the Jews.

Around 1240, a Parisian Jew named Nicholas Donin, who had converted to Christianity, convinced the king of France, Louis IX, that he would be able to prove the truth of Christianity through the Talmud. This is the same claim that Pablo Christiani, another converted Jew, would make in Spain in 1267 in his famous debate with Nachmanides.

The Church was always partial to converted Jews. Donin was very ambitious and had visions of rising high in the Church. Convincing the authorities that you could prove Christianity through the most authoritative book unique to the Jews was a sure path up the ladder to success in the Church for a Jewish convert. By winning such an argument, all the Jews would convert it was believed.

King Louis’s actions were not lost on future generations. Wherever the Nazis came to power they burned Jewish books (and later Jewish people). For instance, the great library of the academy in Lublin, Poland, which had over 55,000 volumes and was one of the great Jewish libraries of the world, was burned by the Nazis immediately upon their arrival in Lublin.

Louis ordered the rabbi of Paris, Rabbeinu Yechiel — mentioned many times in the Tosafos commentary of the Talmud — to debate Donin. All of the debates in Europe were losing propositions for the Jews. If they won they lost and if they lost they lost. There was no freedom of speech. Only Nachmanides succeeded in winning the right to free speech, and even after he won the debate he and his community faced intensified persecution for his efforts. In all other debates, one could say nothing that would be critical of the Church or Christianity, effectively making it not a debate at all.

Nevertheless, Rabbeinu Yechiel made such a skillful defense that the king agreed that it was true that one could not prove Christianity through the Talmud. Nevertheless, he said that the Talmud was an insult to the Christianity.

Therefore, in 1242, he ordered the burning of 24 cartloads of priceless Hebrew manuscripts. We have to bear in mind that in the Middle Ages each book to be hand-written. The Talmud alone is, in today’s format, about 2,300 pages. They wrote using quill pens and manufactured ink on parchment (or vellum paper that then began to be produced). The pure physical labor of sitting and writing that volume of words alone boggles the mind.

The 24 cartloads amounted to some 12,000 volumes. Louis had all the copies of the Talmud he could get his hand on collected and burned them. For his efforts, the Church canonized him as a saint in 1297. (He is the famous Louis after which the American city and baseball Cardinals are called after.)

That event effectively marked the end of the Jewish community in France. The king followed it up with an expulsion of the Jews from France — after despoiling them, and taking away their money and property, of course. The Jewish community in France never really recovered. It never again became the great seat of learning or even the great seat of Jewish tradition as it was in the 11^th through 13^th centuries.

Today, the majority of Jews in France are Sephardic Jews who came from Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco within the last century. It is not a scholarly or a particularly strong Jewish community. It certainly never again looked like Rashi’s community, after they burned the Talmud.

The crusaders murdered 25,000 Jews from the great Jewish communities of Speyers, Worms and Mainz on their way to liberate the Holy Land.

Generally, the population in Europe during the Middle Ages was divided into castes, or as it was called inFrance, “estates.” The first estate was knighthood, the noblemen. The second estate was the clergy. The third estate was the commoners, and then there were the peasants or serfs who were not even an estate.

The knights were trained for war. Therefore, they could not exist in a time of peace. They were completely non-productive unless they were fighting. Consequently,Europewas in a constant state of war. These wars had nothing to do with the public good, logic or even money. The phenomenon of ever-warring knights had become an industry with a life of its own. Besides needing war, every knight needed horses, servants, pages, squires… and had to throw a banquet virtually every night. It was its own self-perpetuating industry.

The constant wars sunkEuropeinto the throes of virtual chaos. Bands of knights roamed the European countryside. They were nothing more than gangsters traveling from town to town. If the town had money, it bought off the knights, hoping they would take the money and leave. If they tried to defend themselves and lost the ensuing carnage was unspeakable in its brutality. The men were killed, the women were raped, the children were sold into slavery and all the plunder that could be taken was taken.

This was everyday life in medievalFrance.

That is one of the reasons that a Crusade was such a good idea. The Pope wanted to get the knights out ofEurope. It was essential to move them away somewhere. Anywhere. The Crusades was a perfect answer. It solved so many needs in one shot.

Even as the crusaders headed out they thought to themselves that if they were going on a religious crusade against the non-believers why wait untilTurkey orPalestine? There were non-believers in their midst: the Jews, who killed Jesus, and who refused to adopt Christianity and whose beliefs.

The French knights despoiled the great Jewish communities of Speyers,WormsandMainz. Those communities were destroyed between Passover and Shavous of 1096. Thousands of Jews were killed and other thousands were forcibly converted.

All told, there were perhaps 25,000 Jews killed. In our time, it may not seem like a lot.Auschwitz, at its height, could do that in two or three days. But you need to remember that everyone had to be killed by hand in the Middle Ages. After a while one’s arm gets tired. There is a physical limit to how many people one can kill, unlike the modern world. We have unlimited possibilities because of technology.

The First Crusade was the major watershed of Jewish history in the medieval world. It changed all of Jewish life inEurope. It changed the attitude of Christians towards Jews and Jews toward Christians… and even Jews towards Jews.

Rabbi Moses ben Nachman, Nachmanides (1194-1270 CE), was the leader of Spanish Jewry. Perhaps the most dramatic event in his life was the Great Debate, in which he was given permission by the king to speak freely in defense of Judaism against an apostate Jew converted to Christianity.

Rabbi Moses ben Nachman, Nachmanides, was born in Gerona, Spain. He would become the leader of Spanish Jewry. Perhaps the most dramatic event in his life was the Great Debate. It is a watershed in Jewish history.

King James I of Aragon was a very devoted Roman Catholic. In his court was a Jew by the name of Pablo Christiani – whom the Church called Friar Paul – who had converted to Roman Catholicism. He told the king that he was a Hebrew scholar (the king was barely literate) and that he would be able to prove from the Hebrew Bible and Talmud the truth of Christianity and the falsehood of Judaism. Furthermore, he could prove it to the greatest rabbi of the time, Rabbi Moses ben Nachman

The king thought that if he could convince the greatest rabbi of the veracity of Christianity the rest of the Jews would follow and he would have his ticket to heaven, indeed a front row seat.

Not only did he authorize a debate, but in history this debate marked the beginning of a series of debates –lasting some three centuries — in medieval Europe.

Nachmanides, known by his acronym “Ramban,” is most famous today for his classic commentary on the Five Books of Moses, which weaves together deep textual analysis, Jewish tradition and Kabbalah into a unified whole.

This is the only debate that the Jews won…because it was the only debate that was fair. Nachmanides agreed to the debate on the condition that the king grant him permission to speak freely. In those days, no one was allowed to say anything contrary to Christian doctrine. The cardinals and other Church officials said it would be blasphemy. However, the king concluded that it would only be fair if he was able to say what he wanted to say and guaranteed Nachmanides protection no matter what he said. That is why this is the only debate in medieval times that was fair.

The debate took place in Barcelona in 1267 CE the week before Shavout, the Jewish holiday commemorating the day that the Torah was given on Mount Sinai. We have an exact record of the debate kept by Nachmanides himself. Every night after each day’s debate, he wrote down what he said and what Pablo Christiani said.

Nachmanides said some very strong things. He said, for instance, that the Christian founder came into the world as the “Prince of Peace,” but more blood had been spilled by Christians that anybody else in the history of humanity. Their founder came on behalf of the poor, but no one had exploited the poor more than the Church.

There has never been such a combination of intellectual and emotional dismemberment of a person, Pablo Christiani. At its end, the king awarded the victory to Nachmanides and even gave him a donation of 300 gold coins for his academy.

However, the Church could not suffer such a defeat without taking vengeance. Indeed, after this debacle for the Church debates were never again fair. That is why such debates were always disastrous for the Jews and Jews avoided such debates where they could. They learned that being invited to a debate was like being invited to a pogrom.

On that very Shavuos just after the debate, Nachmanides held a sermon in the great synagogue in Barcelona. In it he restated to the Jewish audience the positive side of the debate, i.e. not what is wrong with Christianity but what it meant to be the people of the Torah. The Church claimed that although he had been granted permission to speak freely at the debate, he had no permission to do so at his synagogue. Therefore, his sermon was deemed heresy. From that time on the Church hounded until he was forced to leave Spain.

He was 72 when he left Spain and headed for the Land of Israel. He eventually arrived in the city of Jerusalem, but could not find a quorum of 10 Jews due to the ravages of the Crusades and the Muslims.

He gathered a few Jews from the city of Nablus (biblical Shechem) and Hebron, and brought them back. He then purchased a building in Jerusalem from his personal funds and made it a synagogue, thereby reestablishing the Jewish community in Jerusalem.

That synagogue stood until 1948 when the Arabs blew it up. Today, however, the synagogue of Nachmanides has been rebuilt in the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem.

We have letters that he wrote home to his family. He writes about his homesickness for his family: his children and grandchildren. Nevertheless, he thanks God for allowing him to come to the Land of Israel and there to rebuild the community in Jerusalem.

While the Pope’s new book exonerates the Jews of deicide it triggers thoughts about another Church doctrine that caused untold pain to Jews: the Witness People. Photo courtesy of TIme.com taken by Evandor Inetti / Zuma

In a book to be published March 10, Pope Benedict XVI writes that the Jews are not responsible for the death of Jesus. Sadly, he is about 1,500 years too late. In that time, many Jews suffered and died from this doctrine. Here is a brief review of a related church doctrine that caused untold suffering to Jews.

In the writings of the early Church Fathers one can see how the Church was bothered by a number of theological problems regarding the Jews.

Already by the year 400, it began to be perplexing to the Christian world why the Jews survived. After all, it had already been 330 years since the Temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed. It was already more than centuries since the Jewish people had been driven from their homeland. They were, if not despised, at least not liked in the rest of the world. Historically, no nation could survive those blows and remain alive as an entity. It would assimilate and disappear. The Romans were able to swallow up hundreds and hundreds of small nations, tribes, societies and cultures. They are not even remembered any longer. In Greece alone there were over 65 different city-states, and they are all like they never existed.

Yet, here the persecuted, scattered Jewish people somehow showed no signs of giving up. The problem for Christianity was: Why?

The problem was compounded if you said – as the Church said – that the Jewish people were intrinsically evil and had done the greatest wrong in the history of civilization by rejected Jesus. This was compounded even more when the Church came to the doctrine of deicide. Only in our time, through Vatican II, has the Church officially withdrawn that concept. Of course, when a concept has been floating around for 1,500 years it does not die very easily. The canard that Jews are Christ-killers reverberates in the world today yet.

In any event, the problem for the Church theologians was that if the Jews are guilty of all that, what are they still doing here?

In response, the Church developed the notion of the Witness People.

The early Christians believed firmly that Jesus was coming back very soon. One can see in the writings of the early Christian fathers that they were very “other-worldly.” They said, in effect, that there was no use doing anything in the world. In fact, this is part of the idea that contributed to the Dark Ages. What is the use of building great cities or culture if tomorrow the Kingdom of God will be here? God does not need another skyscraper. The idea that the Second Coming was imminent served as a brake on any sort of progress in civilization.

Therefore, they postulated, when the Second Coming would occur – imminently – there had to be someone to get up and say in effect, “We were wrong.” Who was the logical candidate for that task, they reasoned? The people of Israel.

From the notion of the Witness People there arose during the Middle Ages (about the 12^th century) the idea of the “Pope’s Jews.” The head of the Roman Catholic Church kept a number of Jews in Rome under his personal protection. All the other Jews in the world were expendable. However, he had to keep a certain amount to be sure that there would be Jews around to witness the Second Coming.

The “Pope’s Jews” existed literally until the Second World War. Indeed, the only time Pope Pius XII protested to the Gestapo and Nazis about the deportation and extermination of Jews was when they came to take Rome’s 7,000 Jews, which including “his” Jews.

Since the introduction of the Witness People doctrine, many centuries have passed and the Church has undergone a great deal of change, as has Western civilization. The faith of Western man in many things has been shaken. Even in the most religious and pious of Catholic circles today there is very little reference to the Second Coming. The Protestant fundamentalists still espouse it. But, one does not hear the Pope proclaim it. The cardinals and bishops do not talk about it. It has been put on the back burner, so to speak.

For that very reason, the idea of the Witness People has become harder and harder to “sell.” The longer it takes, the less sense it makes.

Nonetheless, the Witness People was and is a basic tenet of Christianity that the Church found necessary in order to explain Jewish survival and existence.

When Constantine, the emperor of Rome, became a Christian it meant that the empire became Christian, with momentous consequences for the Jewish and pagan worlds.

As Jews began to establish an autonomous way of life and put down deep roots in Babylon — a place at the far end of the Roman Empire and insulated from a Rome in steep decline — a Roman general by the name of Constantine rose in the ranks. His conversion to Christianity would literally shake up the entire world.

His mother, Helena, secretly converted to Christianity in about 310 CE. Had she done so publicly she would have been executed. She also kept her Christianity hidden because she had her son’s career in mind. If it was discovered that his mother was an avowed Christian, he would lose his rank if not his head.

Constantine, who was a great warrior and man of considerable talents, rose to the top of the political ladder until he was able, through a bloodless coup, to usurp power and become the emperor of Rome. Then, his mother was able to convince him to mount what really was the first crusade against the infidels in Palestine… even though Constantine was not yet a Christian! However, his mother had been drumming it into him for so many years that he was already filled with great zeal.

When he finally became emperor, he took a large Roman army east with the intention of settling the score once and for with all the guerilla bands that were picking Rome apart. On the eve of one of the great battles, in 330 CE, Constantine saw a vision in which his mother stood on the right hand of Jesus. He promised him, “If you will give me victory in this battle, then I will officially become a Christian.” Constantine won the battle and fulfilled his promise.

When the emperor became a Christian it meant that the empire became Christian.

Suddenly, the persecuted became the establishment. Constantine cleansed the Roman bureaucracy of pagans and replaced them with Christians. As happens many times with converts, he became more fanatical than those who had long been believers before him. In short, he was determined to make the entire empire Christian.

And he probably would have done it if not for making the mistake… of dying.

Christian Persecution of Jews in Israel

Before he died, he came to Israel and built the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. He also came to Jerusalem and built a church on Mount Moriah. He tried as well to establish Christianity throughout the rest of the country.

He naturally did not find a favorable response from the Jewish community. This intensified the anti-Jewish feeling of Christians. Indeed, the beginnings of official Christian persecution of Jews can be traced to this time.

Those Jewish individuals and small communities that remained in the Land of Israel had to go underground. Although there has never been a time without some Jewish presence in the Land of Israel — even when the numbers of Jews was very few and life there very tenuous — Constantine’s conversion marked a very significant, long-term weakening of the Jewish presence in Israel. With the weakening of the Jewish presence also came the weakening of the Sanhedrin, as well as the weakening of the Prince of the Sanhedrin, with momentous consequences, as we will explain just ahead.

Constantinus – More Bad News for the Jews

When Constantine died, his son – Constantinus, also called by historians Constantine II – took over. He, too, was a strong Christian. In modesty, he renamed Byzantium “Constantinople.” Now the early Church fathers really began to gain control of the Roman Empire.

As with all revolutionaries, when the Christians gained power they were more brutal than those they replaced. They, who had for years pleaded for religious tolerance, now said no other religion was acceptable except Christianity. Instead of throwing Christians to the lions they threw non-Christians to the lions. The religion of love, peace and brotherhood looked very much like the religion of Rome. The same people that ran the prisons and public executions for the Romans ran them for the Christians.

This put the Jews under tremendous pressure – so much so that a relatively large amount (perhaps a few thousand) converted to Christianity. Some of them rose to high office in the Church, a situation that will be repeated many times in history. These apostate Jews became the worst enemies of the Jewish people. They understood Jewish life and understood best how to completely destroy it.

Therefore, we have for the first time in recorded history – in 350 CE — the phenomenon of synagogues being burned under official Church sanction. They also officially closed all schools of Jewish learning, banned circumcision, kosher food, the observance of the Jewish Sabbath and other practices.

A Brief Relief

In 360 CE, after three consecutive Christian emperors, a pagan by the name of Julian the Greek took the throne. He tried to undo what his predecessors had done. Because of his enmity toward Christianity, he was probably the most favorable emperor the Jews ever had.

He espoused Jewish causes, and even promised to destroy the Church on the Temple Mount and rebuild the Temple there. To prove that he was serious, he set aside a large amount of money and sent Roman contractors who indeed tore down the Church there and started building the Temple.

It was a wild, incredible moment in Jewish history.

Meanwhile, he took his army east to fight the Persians and Parthians — but unfortunately made a few very bad tactical errors. The first was to take a pagan army into Christian territory to fight the Persians. What happened is that while he was fighting the Persians the Christians were decimating his army behind him.

For three years, no one in Rome knew what happened to his army, until they confirmed that it had been destroyed and he had been killed. With his death, the project of rebuilding the Temple unceremoniously also died.

Establishment of the Permanent Jewish Calendar

The next emperor, Theodosius, was again a virulent anti-pagan Christian. He not only set about to undo what Julian had done but to Christianizing the empire more than ever.

He passed a series of decrees that affected the Jewish people. One was that he forbade the meeting of the Sanhedrin. Among the consequences of that was the effective abolition of a Jewish calendar, because, as we have discussed before (see the article on The Men of the Great Assembly), it was dependent upon declaration of the dates by members of the Sanhedrin. Without knowing the dates of the Jewish holidays there is no way for Jews to survive as Jews.

When the Communists came to power in Russia in 1917 they banned the Jewish calendar even before they banned the prayer-book. They realized that without knowing the precise dates of the Jewish holy days no Jew could possibly maintain his religion. If one Jew thought Yom Kippur was Wednesday and one thought it was Thursday and another thought Friday the structure of Jewish life would collapse. Therefore, they banned the calendar first.

More than any other decree, this decree of Theodosius impelled the establishment of the permanent Jewish calendar, as we know it today. Starting in 380 CE there was serious discussion to officially adopt it. By 415 CE, it was officially adopted by the Jewish people.

The permanent Jewish calendar, based on mathematical calculations,[1] had always been known to and used by the Jew leaders. The Sanhedrin met because, within certain parameters, they had the power to adjust the calendar. For instance, the Sanhedrin had the power to lengthen a year by a month if the farmers needed it or if the date of Passover would not fall in the spring or other possible considerations. This flexibility was its genius. It allowed human beings to tweak it as needed. Nevertheless, the Sanhedrin always had mathematical calculations to guide them – and it was those calculations that were used in the permanent Jewish calendar.

The permanent calendar operates on a nineteen-year cycle. Every nineteen years there are seven leap years (years with an additional month). It is so accurate that even now, after 1500 years, the Jewish calendar is only off by a couple of minutes. Compare that to the Julian calendar, used by the Western world, which already centuries ago had to be corrected by more than 11 days.

The permanent calendar was made official by the Prince of the people of the time, a man named Hillel, who is not to be confused with the more famous Hillel who lived four centuries earlier. In fact, this Hillel would be the next to last Prince of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel. He saw that Christian persecution was ruining Jewish life, including making it impossible for the Sanhedrin to meet and set the dates of the Jewish calendar. It was he who proposed, at a clandestine meeting of the Sanhedrin, that a permanent calendar be instituted.

After successfully doing that, he was then able to get the permanent calendar instituted in all Jewish communities throughout the world no matter how remote. From then on, there were always Jews who could figure out the calendar no matter the situation.

There are stories of Jews who were shipwrecked on islands (for example, after they were expelled from Spain in 1492) or imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps who were able to use the principles of the Jewish calendar to recreate it accurately for themselves. Some of these calendars are on display in the Israel Museum. There is one Jewish family that was shipwrecked on an island for 11 years! Can you imagine? There was this Jewish family alone on a desolate island celebrating Passover and Yom Kipper, etc. at the correct times.

As would be true throughout history, this is a prime example of how the attempt of the Christian world to break the Jewish people and religion only strengthened it.

The Witness People

After 50 years of intense Christian persecution against Jews, the Church leaders came to the conclusion that the Jews were not going to be easy to get rid. The raging problem that exists in the writings of the early Church fathers is how to explain the Jewish people’s existence after the coming of their founder.

On one hand, the Jews are portrayed as the vilest and evil people, the people who are guilty of deicide, who have no reason to survive and are damned to eternal fire and brimstone. On the other hand, they are here; they exist.

As a result, the Church fathers came up with the theory of the “Witness People.” This postulated that since the Jewish people were present when Jesus came in the world, and since he himself was Jewish, then the Jews, who rejected him, are condemned to live throughout history so that in End of Days they will bear witness to his Second Coming – whereby they will become Christians.

It’s a very important theory to understand that explains a great deal of Christian attitudes toward Jews. For instance, the Pope always has outside of Vatican City a number of Jews who live under papal protection. They are called, “The Pope’s Jews.” The Pope has to keep them alive because he needs them for witnesses. The only protest that Pope Pius XII, the pope at the time of the Holocaust, made against the deportation of Jews to concentration camps was when the Gestapo, in 1944, took the Pope’s Jews out of Rome.

Today, the doctrine of Witness People may no longer hold the importance for many people that it once had, but it colored all Christian-Jewish relationships until our time. That is a very important point to remember going forward.

The history of Jews and Christians took an irrevocable turn for the worse when Constantine converted himself and then the Roman Empire to Christianity. It was not just a one-time event with short-term repercussions. The pattern of Christian persecution against Jews was institutionalized through beliefs and doctrines that grew directly out of the Church leaders during those formative years. Their canonization of certain prejudices ensured that the next 15 or more centuries would be fraught with theological landmines that would make of relations between Christians and Jews difficult, painful and often deadly.

From a sect of Jews to a world dominating religion that defeated the Roman Empire, the story of Christianity is – for better or worse – intimately intertwined with Jewish history.

In the beginning of the second century it looked as if Christianity would die out. Many of them were Essenes, who believed in celibacy. They simply could not replace their numbers from within or without. And it probably would have died out if not for a man named Paul of Tarsus.

He was raised a Pharisee. He converted to Christianity on the basis of a vision of Jesus that he claimed to see while going on the road one day. In this vision he was told that his mission was to spread the word about Christianity. Paul realized from the outset that the success of Christianity lay not with the Jews but with the non-Jews.

Paul said that the “New” Testament cancelled the “Old” Testament; the ideas of Christianity are the culmination of the Hebrew bible. Once their Messiah came it was no longer necessary to observe the Sabbath, dietary laws, circumcision, etc.

Then Paul went out to sell this to the pagan world. And there was no better salesman than he.

He had an enormously receptive audience because he was selling the moral dream of Judaism – love, fairness, honesty, monotheism (albeit imperfect monotheism; it was certainly monotheistic in comparison to the Roman theologies of the time). He was also selling the coming redemption of the world. The early Christians believed that the “Second Coming” of Jesus was imminent. It was a matter of years or perhaps decades. Now, 2,000 years later, they are still waiting. However, that was not the expectation in the early years. The kingdom of heaven on earth was imminent.

In a world dominated by Roman cruelty — where the majority of the world’s population was slaves or vassals to Rome; where the idea of human freedom (as we in the Western world know it) was unimaginable – if you spoke in terms of Jewish moral values, albeit minus the lifestyle that embodies it, you had a ready audience. If you said that slaves are as good as masters; that the poor as good as the rich; that the weak are as great as the mighty; and that God loves everyone; and that everyone could make it to eternity – people were going to listen.

On top of that, when you made it easy by saying you don’t have to do anything except say that you believe, then have the ticket to instant success.

Rome Grows Old

Christianity spread like a wildfire after the downfall of Bar Kochba in about 135 CE. Almost one third of the Roman Empire became Christian in little more than 100 years.

That development evoked a great and bitter response from Rome, which saw it as a subversive religion that bred rebellion and diminished the power and stature of the Caesars. Therefore, the Romans persecuted the Christians without mercy, inventing all sorts of fiendish methods of public execution and torture in order to dissuade conversion to the new faith.

However, the harder the Romans tried to put it down the more popular it became.

The years 260 to 360 CE saw a fundamental change in non-Jewish world, a change that would forever alter the Jewish world. The Roman Empire, which had reigned supreme for almost 300 years and been in existence almost 500, started to decline.

When empires reach the zenith of their strength they begin to get old fast. An observer in the year 260 CE would have scoffed at the statement that the Roman Empire would not be around forever. However, in the perfect hindsight of history, we can see how the fabric of the empire was beginning to unravel. It was not what it once was – neither externally nor internally.

There were many causes for it. One of the main ones was Christianity. Rome was not strong enough — or able enough or ruthless enough — to destroy the Christians. Yet, in persecuting them they guaranteed their popularity among the downtrodden.

The second cause came from external pressure. Rome had bitten off more than it could chew. It had controlled virtually the entire civilized world – from England in the west to India in the east; from Gaul and Germany in the north to the sub-Sahara in Africa. All those places paid tax to Rome, but policing such an empire required an enormous expenditure of effort and money.

After a while, the empire simply got tired. In the early days, volunteers would head off enthusiastically to places like England. There was a romance to it and for lure of financial or other gain. After a period of time, however, few wanted to go; everyone wanted to stay in Rome. Why go to fight against the Gauls and Germans? Why bother with the Persians and Parthians?

Once the Roman Empire got tired it began spiraling downward until it essentially collapsed on its own. In the early 400s, when Rome was finally conquered and sacked by the barbaric tribes of northern Europe – the Gauls, Visgoths, etc. who plunged the world into the Dark Ages — it was essentially a shell of itself. It was like a rotted, hollow wall that someone could push over with a relatively slight kick.

The Byzantine Lifestyle

At the beginning of the third century, the Roman Empire was so large that it could not be effectively governed from Rome. As a consequence, it divided into two. That division still exists today, albeit in the Christian Church: the Eastern and Western Churches. In Roman times, the capital of the eastern part of the empire was the city of Byzantium, which is the current-day city of Istanbul (which had previously been called Constantinople). It is the bridge between Asia Minor and Europe; it lies at the crossroads between east and west.

The city was not only strategically placed, but large and possessed of great beauty. Even though the Roman officers in charge of the eastern empire nominally paid lip service to Rome as the capital they wanted to make Byzantium more magnificent than Rome and, ultimately, the capital of the empire. The competition between the two cities became so intense that it almost led to civil war. The tax collectors in the east siphoned off so much money that very little of it got to Rome. They used the money to “out-Rome Rome” – and built enormous buildings, palaces, amphitheaters and temples.

At the same time, they developed a lifestyle that today we call “Byzantine,” which refers to a lifestyle of tremendous luxury… as well as tremendous immorality, intrigue and violence. It combined the worst of the East and the worst of the West. Words meant nothing. Nobody said what they meant. Cunning was the operative word in business dealings; excessive and acrimonious bargaining was the norm.

Byzantium had a large Jewish population. And, not surprisingly, for better or worse, the Byzantium lifestyle impacted Jewish life. For the first time, for instance, we find synagogues decorated with Jewish art — with mosaics and frescos, albeit with a Jewish theme. Art – now known as “Byzantine” — had become fashionable and Jews took it on with their usual passion and genius, adding their own Jewish flavor.

Nevertheless, Jewish writings of the time saw reflected in this trend the warning signs of assimilation, which had previously slowed over the years under the of persecution by the Romans. When the host culture is unfriendly or unattractive, Jews tend to find inner strength and rally around Jewish identity. When it is friendly or attractive – even superficially, as in Byzantine culture – assimilation slowly creeps in like a midnight fog.

Indeed, Byzantine culture not only affected Jews in Byzantium, but elsewhere – and especially in the Land of Israel. Unfortunately, it was a vehicle that set in motion the process of assimilation.

Christianity Creeps In

The Byzantine culture produced a reaction not just from Jews but also non-Jews. That reaction was the emergence of Christianity more strongly than ever before. The more Rome oppressed the lower classes, the more Christianity appealed to elements like the downtrodden and slaves. More than ten percent of the Roman Empire was slaves, with another ten percent comprising former slaves. They were a ready audience for the Christian message.

Likewise, proselytizing efforts of the Church concentrated mainly upon women. The basic reasoning was that if the women would become Christians, then the men would as well. In a world where women counted for less than nothing (with the exception of the Jewish people) — in a world were even free women in marriage were little more than slaves – the Christian message was very appealing to women. It spoke to their loftiest ambitions and goals.

Christianity at that time also appealed to the intellectual element that could no longer believe in the nonsense of paganism and Roman mythology. As Roman society teetered on the brink of complete moral collapse, Christianity offered a new, much more appealing vision of the world, promoting what looked like a pristine, simple viewpoint of life, love and religion.

Christian ideals contrasted the Roman-Byzantine way of life so starkly that it made tremendous inroads in the four decades from 260 to 300 CE. The Roman and Byzantine emperors did not know how to handle it. On one hand, they continued the persecution, executing thousands. Moreover, if an officer or nobleman was caught practicing Christianity they executed them with particularly cruel public tortures. On the other hand, deep in their own hearts they wondered if perhaps there was truth to the Christian ideas.

When the Romans came to doubt their own correctness it was the beginning of the end for them.

Babylonian Jewry Puts Down Deep Roots

Further complicating the story, the Persians revolted against Rome in 290 CE, and swept Rome out of Babylonia and Israel. The Persian leader was Tadmor, whom the Talmud mentions a number of times. The Jews had sided with the Romans against the Persians. The Jerusalem Talmud records a curse uttered by Rabbi Yochanon against anyone who supported Tadmor and the Persians.

As Jewish luck would have it, after 400 years of dominance over Persia the Romans finally lost. The Persians drove Rome out of Babylon and Israel, and caused the Jews terrible suffering. Jews were persecuted; the academies had to go underground; Judaism had to be observed clandestinely. And so forth.

Of course, the Persian victory was another strong indication that the Roman Empire was weakening. However, not everyone read the signals that way. Rome, for one, regrouped and sent a large army to join up with the Roman armies in Byzantium and marched east. They defeated the Persians, killing Tadmor.

However, rather than a unified empire, Rome now resembled more a series of small kingdoms loosely aligned with each other. The unifying thread was the taxes each paid to Rome. This satisfied Rome, which operated under a hands-off policy.

However, this time period (from about 260 to 500 CE), with a decentralized Rome, saw the greatest accomplishments of Babylonian Jewry. The academies flourished, scholars abounded and ultimately the Babylonian Talmud was completed. Furthermore, Jews lived an autonomous, independent lifestyle. They established Jewish roots so deep that Jews remained there until recent times, the early 1950s, when Jews from Iraq were sent to Israel.

Constantine’s Conversion

As Jews began to settle in Babylon, a Roman general by the name of Constantine rose in the ranks. His conversion to Christianity would literally shake up the entire world and mark a dividing line — arguably the most significant dividing line — in non-Jewish history.

How he converted and how his conversion impacted the world – Jewish and otherwise – is the next remarkable step in the odyssey that is Jewish history.