It is wonderful to be back with all of you following my second month long Sabbatical. Surely the highlight of my time away was my participation in the Rabbinic Action Committee mission to Paris and Jerusalem. Seventeen Rabbis, from Chicago, representing the Conservative, Orthodox, Reform and Reconstructionist movements went on this mission. Accompanying us in Paris was David Shyovitz of Northwestern University. Dr. Shyovitz’s specialty is medieval and early modern European Jewish history. Professor Shyovitz would guide us on a walking tour of Paris the morning we arrived.

We left Chicago at 6:00 pm on Sunday and arrived in Paris at 10:00 am Monday morning. If you did not sleep on the plane, you were out of luck, because our six mile walking tour was about to begin. Professor Shyovitz took us on a tour of what can only be called the “darker side” of the City of Lights. Our first stop was the plaza at the Hotel de Ville, or, in English, City Hall Plaza. 

Before 1802 this plaza was called the Place de Greve.  The Place de Greve was the site of most public executions in Paris in the ancien regime. In 1236, a Jewish convert to Christianity, Nicholas Donin, submitted 35 charges against the Talmud to the Pope. Some of the charges included claims that the Talmud attacked the Church, that the Talmud had foolish and revolting stories in it, and that the Talmud had subverted the true practice of Judaism so as to make conversion to Christianity more difficult. After a series of investigations, King Louis lX ordered 24 cartloads of Talmud manuscripts burned on the very spot that we were standing.

After lunch on the Rue de Rosiers, the Jewish Quarter known as Le Marais, we went to the Eglise des Billettes. On this site a Host Desecration incident was alleged to have taken place. This constituted another very dark episode in the history of Jewery in France.  

In 1215, The Fourth Lateran Council declared that the wafer used in Holy Communion did not represent the body of Jesus but was the actual body of Jesus. This is known as the Doctrine of Transubstantiation. Some Catholics came to believe that Jews wanted to reinstate the agonies of the crucifixion upon it by stabbing, burning, or otherwise tormenting it. 

Artistic Depiction of a Host Desecration

In 1290 a Jewish man named Jonathas was accused of stabbing a communion wafer at the site of the Church where we were visiting. Supposedly the wafer bled.  As a result of this desecration, Jonathas was burned at the stake.  These kinds of accusations spread throughout Europe, resulting in the execution of Jews throughout the continent.

We then stopped in a plaza below the beautiful medieval gothic Chapel of Ste. Chapelle .

Here we learned about the various expulsions of Jews from France throughout the Middle Ages.  For example in 1305 Philip the Fair imprisoned all the Jews and seized all of their belongings except the shirts on their backs. He expelled 100,000 Jews from France allowing them to travel only with one day’s provisions. I hope he was called “Philip the Fair” because of his complexion and not because of his ethics. Maybe the French have a sense of irony? I don’t know.  The Jews were allowed to return but were expelled again in 1322 by Phillip V and again in 1394 by Charles VI.

We of course visited the famous Cathedral of Notre Dame. Dr. Shyovitz explained that the 28 statues that are above the three portals of the Cathedral represent the 28 Kings of Judah, the human ancestors of Mary and of Jesus according to Christian theology.

Synagoga

Ecclesia

Dr. Shyovitz also pointed out the statues of Synagoga and Ecclesia that stood on each side of the center portal of the Cathedral. Synagoga, representing the Jewish people, is depicted as a woman with a drooping posture who is blindfolded, her staff broken, the crown on her head fallen, the Tablets of the Law slipping from her hand. Ecclesia, representing the church, is depicted as a woman proudly gazing into the future, a crown on her head, a cross topped staff and a chalice in her hand.  This depiction of Christian triumphalism and Jewish disgrace appears on the facades of many Churches throughout Europe.

 During Pope Francis visit to the United States last year he visited St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. There he unveiled a sculpture entitled “Synagoga and Ecclesia in Our Time”. The Pope was accompanied by Rabbi Abraham Skorka, the rector of the Seminario Rabinico Latinoamerica in Buenos Aires and a longtime friend. After blessing the statue, the Pope turned to Rabbi Skorka, embraced him and said to him, in Spanish, “That is you and me; Rabbi and Pope, learning from one another.”   How far we have come from the relationship that characterized Catholicism and Judaism in the medieval times!

Our final stop for this tour of the darker side of the City of Lights was the Pantheon. It was originally meant to be a Church dedicated to St. Genevieve. However, following the French Revolution the National Constituent Assembly decided that it would be used as a secular Mausoleum for the remains of great Frenchmen. 

As one enters the main hall, one sees a pendulum suspended from the center of the dome of the Pantheon.  In 1851 Louis Foucalt demonstrated the rotation of the earth for the first time by hanging a pendulum in the Pantheon. This was significant because it was the first physical proof of Copernicus’ claim 400 years earlier that the sun did not revolve around the earth, bringing on day and night, but that it was the earth rotating on its axis that brought on day and night. The Biblical view of the workings of the Universe is articulated in Psalm 19:

In the heavens G-d has pitched a tent for the sun/Which goes forth like a bridegroom from his chamber/ Like and athlete rejoicing to run the course/ It sets out from one end of the sky/ and completes its circuit at the other end/ Nothing is hidden from its warmth.

Foucalt’s pendulum demonstrated that it was not the sun that moved, but the earth.  It totally uprooted the cosmology of the Bible.

Our next stop in the Pantheon was the tomb of Voltaire. Voltaire was the great figure of the Enlightenment, famous for his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and separation of Church and State.  He advocated that Christians should not only tolerate one another, but should tolerate all human beings, for we are children of the same G-d, he writes. However, he reserved a special hatred toward Jews. He writes, “The Jewish people dares spread an irreconcilable hatred against all nations; it revolts against all its masters. Always superstitious, always jealous of the well-being enjoyed by others, always barbarous, crawling in misfortune and insolent in prosperity…..” 

Voltaire's Tomb

According to Arthur Hertzberg, in his book The French Revolution and the Jews, “Modern secular anti-Semitism was fashioned not as a reaction to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, but within the Enlightenment and French Revolution itself.” 

Tomb of Henri Gregoire

 We also visited the tomb of the Catholic Priest, Henri Gregoire. He achieved fame during the French Revolution for his essay “On the Regeneration of the Jews”. In this essay he argues that Jews should be granted equal rights under the new French constitution. He blames what was widely seen as the degeneracy of the Jews on how they had been treated by Christians. To borrow the words of Steven Sondheim, Gregoire argued that the Jews were “depraved because they were deprived”. Henri Gregoire believed that Jews could be “rehabilitated” and brought into the mainstream of French society.

Our final stop in the Pantheon, and for the day, was the tomb of Emile Zola. Zola was the most popular writer in France in in the late 19^th century when he published a 4000 word essay accusing the Military Court and the French Government of anti-Semitism and of a cover-up in the Dreyfus Affair.

It is said that the Dreyfus Affair set off the first wave of political anti-Semitism in Europe, which would culminate in the rise of Hitler in Germany and the destruction of European Jewry. The Dreyfus Affair convinced Theodore Herzl, who was covering it as a journalist, that there was no future for Jews in Europe and that Jews needed their own state. Herzl, of course, went on to become the founder of the modern Zionist movement.

The Tomb of Emile Zola

In 1894 Alfred Dreyfus, the only Jewish officer on the Army’s General Staff, was accused of spying. He was court martialed and sentenced to imprisonment on Devil’s Island, a notorious penal colony off the coast of South America

On that note we boarded our bus and checked into our hotel.  We spent the next day exploring the condition of Jews in France today. We would learn how French Jews are dealing with anti-Semitism in our own time. I will speak about that two weeks from now at Friday night services.Hope you can all join me then.

Shabbat Shalom