The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam

These events reflect both the glory and the devastation of the early modern period. As the voyage of Columbus showed so powerfully, the people of Europe were on the brink of a new world. Their horizons were broadening, they were entering hitherto uncharted realms, geographically, intellectually, socially, economically, and politically. Their achievements would make them masters of the globe. But modernity had a darker side. Christian Spain was one of the most powerful and advanced kingdoms in Europe. Ferdinand and Isabella were in the process of creating one of the modern centralized states that were also appearing in other parts of Christendom. Such a kingdom could not tolerate the old autonomous, self-governing institutions, such as the guild, the corporation, or the Jewish community, which had characterized the medieval period. The unification of Spain, which was completed by the conquest of Granada, was succeeded by an act of ethnic cleansing, and Jews and Muslims lost their homes. For some people, modernity was empowering, liberating, and enthralling. Others experienced it—and would continue to experience it—as coercive, invasive, and destructive. As Western modernity spread to other parts of the earth, this pattern would continue. The modernizing program was enlightening and would eventually promote humane values, but it was also aggressive. During the twentieth century, some of the people who experienced modernity primarily as an assault would become fundamentalists.

But that was far in the future. In the late fifteenth century, the people of Europe could not have foreseen the enormity of the change they had initiated. In the course of the next three hundred years, Europe would not only transform its society politically and economically, but also achieve an intellectual revolution. Scientific rationalism would become the order of the day, and would gradually oust the older habits of mind and heart. We shall look at the Great Western Transformation, as this period has been called, in more detail in Chapter 3. Before we can appreciate its full implications, however, we must first look at the way that people in the premodern era experienced the world. In the universities of Spain, students and teachers excitedly discussed the new ideas of the Italian Renaissance. The voyage of Columbus would have been impossible without such scientific discoveries as the magnetic compass or the latest insights in astronomy. By 1492, Western scientific rationalism was becoming spectacularly efficient. People were discovering more fully than ever before the potential of what the Greeks had called logos, which was always reaching out for something fresh. Thanks to modern science, Europeans had discovered a wholly new world and were achieving unprecedented control over the environment. But they had not yet dismissed mythos. Columbus was conversant with science, but he was still at home in the old mythological universe. He seems to have come from a family of converted Jews and to have retained an interest in the Kabbalah, the mystical tradition of Judaism, but he was a devout Christian, and wanted to win the world for Christ. He hoped that when he arrived in India, he would establish a Christian base there for the military conquest of Jerusalem.2 The people of Europe had started their journey to modernity, but they were not yet fully modern in our sense. For them, the myths of Christianity still gave meaning to their rational and scientific explorations.

Nevertheless, Christianity was changing. Spaniards would become leaders of the Counter-Reformation initiated by the Council of Trent (1545–63), which was a modernizing movement that brought the old Catholicism into line with the streamlined efficiency of the new Europe. The Church, like the modern state, became a more centralized body. The Council reinforced the power of the Pope and the bishops; for the first time a catechism was issued to all the faithful, to ensure doctrinal conformity. The clergy were to be educated to a higher standard, so that they could preach more effectively. The liturgy and devotional practices of the laity were rationalized, and rituals that had been meaningful a century earlier but no longer worked in the new era, were jettisoned. Many Spanish Catholics were inspired by the writings of the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), who wanted to revitalize Christianity by returning to fundamentals. His slogan was Ad fontes: “back to the wellsprings!” Erasmus believed that the authentic Christian faith of the early church had been buried under a mound of lifeless medieval theology. By stripping away these later accretions and going back to the sources—the Bible and the Fathers of the Church—Christians would recover the living kernel of the Gospels and experience new birth.

The chief Spanish contribution to the Counter-Reformation was mystical. The mystics of Iberia became explorers of the spiritual world, in rather the same way as the great navigators were discovering new regions of the physical world. Mysticism belonged to the realm of mythos; it functioned in the domain of the unconscious which was inaccessible to the rational faculty and has to be experienced by means of other techniques. Nevertheless, the mystical reformers of Spain wanted to make this form of spirituality less haphazard, and eccentric, less dependent upon the whims of inadequate advisers. John of the Cross (1552–91) weeded out the more dubious and superstitious devotions, and made the mystical process more systematic. The mystics of the new age should know what to expect when they progressed from one stage to another; they must learn how to deal with pitfalls and dangers of the interior life, and husband their spiritual energies productively.

More modern, however, and a sign of things to come was the Society of Jesus, founded by the former soldier Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1555), which embodied the efficiency and effectiveness that would become the hallmark of the modern West. Ignatius was determined to exploit the power of mythos practically. His Jesuits did not have time for the lengthy contemplative disciplines evolved by John of the Cross. His Spiritual Exercises provided a systematic, time-efficient, thirty-day retreat, which offered every Jesuit a crash course in mysticism. Once the Christian had achieved a full conversion to Christ, he should have his priorities right and be ready for action. This emphasis on method, discipline, and organization was similar to the new science. God was experienced as a dynamic force that propelled Jesuits all over the world, in rather the same way as the explorers. Francis Xavier (1506–52) evangelized Japan, Robert di Nobili (1577–1656) India, and Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) China. Religion had not yet been left behind in early modern Spain. It was able to reform itself and exploit the dawning insights of modernity to further its own reach and vision.

Early modern Spain was, therefore, part of the advance guard of modernity. But Ferdinand and Isabella had to contain all this energy. They were trying to unite kingdoms that had hitherto been independent and separate, and had to be welded together. In 1483 the monarchs had established their own Spanish Inquisition to enforce ideological conformity in their unified realm. They were creating a modern, absolute state, but did not yet have the resources to allow their subjects untrammeled intellectual freedom. The state inquisitors sought out dissidents and forced them to abjure their “heresy,” a word whose Greek original meant “to go one’s own way.” The Spanish Inquisition was not an archaic attempt to preserve a bygone world; it was a modernizing institution, employed by the monarchs to create national unity.3 They knew very well that religion could be an explosive and revolutionary force. Protestant rulers in such countries as England were equally ruthless to their own Catholic “dissidents,” who were seen similarly as enemies of the state. We shall see that this kind of coercion was often part of the modernizing process. In Spain, the chief victims of the Inquisition were the Jews, and it is the reaction of the Jewish people to this aggressive modernity that we shall consider in this chapter. Their experience illustrates many of the ways in which people in other parts of the world would respond to modernization.

The Spanish reconquista of the old Muslim territories of al-Andalus was a catastrophe for the Jews of Iberia. In the Islamic state, the three religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam had been able to live together in relative harmony for over six hundred years. The Jews in particular had enjoyed a cultural and spiritual renaissance in Spain, and they were not subject to the pogroms that were the lot of the Jewish people in the rest of Europe.4 But as the Christian armies gradually advanced through the peninsula, conquering more and more territory from Islam, they brought their anti-Semitism with them. In 1378 and 1391, Jewish communities in both Aragon and Castile were attacked by Christians, who dragged Jews to the baptismal fonts and forced them, on pain of death, to convert to Christianity. In Aragon, the preaching of the Dominican friar Vincent Ferrer (1350–1419) regularly inspired anti-Semitic riots; Ferrer also organized public debates between rabbis and Christians that were designed to discredit Judaism. Some Jews tried to evade persecution by voluntarily converting to Christianity. They were officially known as conversos (“converts”), though the Christians called them Marranos (“pigs”), a term of abuse which some of the converts adopted as a badge of pride. The rabbis warned Jews against conversion, but at first the “New Christians,” as the conversos were called, became wealthy and successful. Some became high-ranking priests, others married into the best families, and many achieved spectacular success in commerce. This brought new problems, since the “Old Christians” resented the upward mobility of the new Jewish Christians. Between 1449 and 1474, there were frequent riots against the Marranos, who were killed, had their property destroyed, or were driven out of town.5

Ferdinand and Isabella were alarmed by this development. The conversion of the Jews was not drawing their united kingdom together but instead causing fresh divisions. The monarchs were also disturbed to hear reports that some of the “New Christians” had lapsed, returned to the old faith, and lived as secret Jews. They had, it was said, formed an underground movement to entice other conversos back into the Jewish fold. Inquisitors were instructed to hunt out these closet Jews, who, it was thought, could be recognized by such practices as refusing to eat pork or to work on Saturday. Suspects were tortured until they confessed to infidelity, and gave information about other secret “Judaizers.” As a result, some 13,000 conversos were killed by the Inquisition during the first twelve years of its existence. But in fact many of those who were thus killed or imprisoned, or had their property confiscated, were loyal Catholics who had no Judaizing tendencies at all. The experience not unnaturally made many of the conversos bitter and skeptical of their new faith.6

When Ferdinand and Isabella conquered Granada in 1492, they inherited a new and substantial Jewish population in that city-state. The situation, they decided, had got out of hand, and as a final solution to the Jewish problem, the monarchs signed the Edict of Expulsion. Spanish Jewry was destroyed. About 70,000 Jews converted to Christianity, and stayed on to be plagued by the Inquisition; the remaining 130,000, as we have seen, went into exile. The loss of Spanish Jewry was mourned by Jews all over the world as the greatest catastrophe to have befallen their people since the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, when the Jews lost their land and were forced into exile in scattered communities outside Palestine, known collectively as the Diaspora. From that time on, exile was a painful leitmotif of Jewish life. The expulsion from Spain in 1492 came at the end of a century that had seen the ejection of Jews from one part of Europe after another. They were deported from Vienna and Linz in 1421, from Cologne in 1424, from Augsburg in 1439, from Bavaria in 1442, and from the crown cities of Moravia in 1454. Jews were expelled from Perugia (1485), Vicenza (1486), Parma (1488), Milan and Lucca (1489), and Tuscany in 1494. Gradually the Jews drifted east, establishing, as they thought, a foothold for themselves in Poland.7 Exile now seemed an endemic and inescapable part of the Jewish condition.

This was certainly the conviction of those Spanish Jews who after the expulsion took refuge in the North African and Balkan provinces of the Ottoman empire. They were used to Muslim society, but the loss of Spain—or Sefarad, as they called it—had inflicted a deep psychic wound. These Sephardic Jews felt that they themselves and everything else were in the wrong place.8 Exile is a spiritual as well as a physical dislocation. The world of the exile is wholly unfamiliar and, therefore, without meaning. A violent uprooting, which takes away all normal props, breaks up our world, snatches us forever from places that are saturated in memories crucial to our identity, and plunges us permanently in an alien environment, can make us feel that our very existence has been jeopardized. When exile is also associated with human cruelty, it raises urgent questions about the problem of evil in a world supposedly created by a just and benevolent God.

The experience of the Sephardic Jews was an extreme form of the uprooting and displacement that other peoples would later experience when they were caught up in an aggressive modernizing process. We shall see that when modern Western civilization took root in a foreign environment, it transformed the culture so drastically that many people felt alienated and disoriented. The old world had been swept away, and the new one was so strange that people could not recognize their once-familiar surroundings and could make no sense of their lives. Many would become convinced, like the Sephardics, that their very existence was threatened. They would fear annihilation and extinction. In their confusion and pain, many would do what some of the Spanish exiles did, and turn to religion. But because their lives were so utterly changed, they would have to evolve new forms of faith to make the old traditions speak to them in their radically altered circumstances.

But this would take time. In the early sixteenth century, the exiled Jews found that traditional Judaism did nothing for them. The disaster seemed unprecedented, and they found that old pieties no longer worked. Some turned to messianism. For centuries, Jews had waited for a Messiah, an anointed king of the house of David, to bring their long exile to an end and return them to the Promised Land. Some Jewish traditions spoke of a period of tribulation immediately before the advent of the Messiah, and it occurred to some of the Sephardic exiles who had taken refuge in the Balkans, that the suffering and persecution that had befallen themselves and so many of their fellow Jews in Europe could only mean one thing: this must be the time of trial foretold by the prophets and sages, and called the “birth pangs of the Messiah,” because out of this anguish deliverance and new life would come.9 Other peoples who have felt that their world has been destroyed by the onset of modernity would also evolve millennial hopes. But messianism is problematic, because, until now, every single messianic movement that has expected an imminent Redeemer has been disappointed. The Sephardic Jews avoided this dilemma by finding a more satisfying solution. They developed a new mythos.

A group of Sephardics had moved from the Balkans to Palestine, where they settled in Safed in Galilee. There was a tradition that when the Messiah came, he would reveal himself in Galilee, and the Spanish exiles wanted to be the first to greet him.10 Some of them came to believe that they had found him in a saintly, sickly Ashkenazic Jew, Isaac Luria (1534–72), who settled in Safed and was the first to articulate the new myth. He thus founded a form of Kabbalah that still bears his name. We moderns would say that Luria created this myth; that he was so perfectly attuned to the unconscious desires and fears of his people that he was able to evolve an imaginative fiction that brought comfort and hope not only to the exiles in Safed but to Jews all over the world. But we would say this because we think primarily in rational terms and find it hard to enter into the premodern mythical worldview. Luria’s disciples did not perceive him as having “made up” his creation myth; instead, as they saw it, the myth had declared itself to him. To an outsider, not involved in the rituals and practices of Lurianic Kabbalah, this creation story seems bizarre. Moreover, it bears no resemblance to the creation story in the Book of Genesis. But to a Kabbalist of Safed—immersed in the rites and meditative exercises prescribed by Luria, and still, a full generation after it had happened, reeling with the shock of exile—the mythos made perfect sense. It revealed or “unveiled” a truth that had been evident before but which spoke with such power to the condition of Jews in the early modern period that it acquired instant authority. It illuminated their dark world and made life not only tolerable but joyous.

When confronted with the Lurianic creation myth, a modern person will immediately ask: “Did this really happen?” Because the events seem so improbable and cannot be proved, we will dismiss it as demonstrably false. But that is because we accept only a rational version of truth and have lost the sense that there might be another kind. We have developed, for example, a scientific view of history, which we see as a succession of unique events. In the premodern world, however, the events of history were not seen as singular but as examples of eternal laws, revelations of a timeless, constant reality. A historical occurrence would be likely to happen again and again, because all earthly happenings expressed the fundamental laws of existence. In the Bible, for example, a river parts miraculously on at least two occasions to enable the Israelites to make a rite of passage; the Children of Israel are often “going down” into Egypt and then making a return journey to the Promised Land. One of the most frequently recurring biblical themes was exile, which, after the Spanish catastrophe, seemed to color the whole of Jewish existence and to reflect an imbalance in the very ground of being. Lurianic Kabbalah addressed itself to this problem by going back, as all mythology must, to the beginning in order to examine exile, which seemed one of these fundamental laws, and to reveal its full significance.

In Luria’s myth, the creative process begins with an act of voluntary exile. It starts by asking how the world could exist if God is omnipresent. The answer is the doctrine of Zimzum (“withdrawal”): the infinite and inaccessible Godhead, which Kabbalists called Ein Sof (“Without End”), had to shrink into itself, evacuating, as it were, a region within itself in order to make room for the world. Creation had begun, therefore, with an act of divine ruthlessness: in its compassionate desire to make itself known in and by its creatures, Ein Sof had inflicted exile upon a part of itself. Unlike the orderly, peaceful creation described in the first chapter of Genesis, this was a violent process of primal explosions, disasters, and false starts which seemed to the Sephardic exiles a more accurate appraisal of the world they lived in. At an early stage in the Lurianic process, Ein Sof had tried to fill the emptiness it had created by Zimzum with divine light, but the “vessels” or “pipes” which were supposed to channel it shattered under the strain. Sparks of divine light fell into the abyss of all that was not God. After this “breaking of the vessels,” some of the sparks returned to the Godhead, but others remained trapped in this Godless realm, which was filled with the evil potential that Ein Sof had purged from itself in the act of Zimzum. After this disaster, creation was awry; things were in the wrong place. When Adam was created, he could have rectified the situation and, had he done so, the divine exile would have ended on the first Sabbath. But Adam sinned and henceforth the divine sparks were trapped in material objects, and the Shekhinah, the Presence that is the closest we come to an apprehension of the divine on earth, wandered through the world, a perpetual exile, yearning to be reunited with the Godhead.11

It is a fantastic tale, but if the Kabbalists of Safed had been asked if they believed that this had really occurred, they would have found the question inappropriate. The primordial event described in myth is not simply an incident that happened once in the remote past; it is also an occurrence that happens all the time. We have no concept or word for such an event, because our rational society thinks of time in a strictly chronological way. If the worshippers at Eleusis in ancient Greece had been asked if they could prove that Persephone had been held prisoner by Pluto in the underworld, and that her mother, Demeter, had wandered around mourning the loss of her daughter, they would probably have been bewildered by the query. How could they be certain that Persephone had returned to the earth, as the myth related? Because the fundamental rhythm of life that this mythos had revealed was actually taking place. The fields were harvested, seedcorn placed in underground containers was sown at the correct time, and, finally, the corn grew.12 Both the mythos and the phenomenon of the harvest pointed to something fundamental and universal about the world, in rather the same way as the English word “boat” and the French “bateau” both point to a reality that is extrinsic and independent of either term. The Sephardic Jews would probably have made a similar reply. Exile was a fundamental law of existence. Wherever you looked, Jews were uprooted aliens. Even the gentiles experienced loss, disappointment, and a sense that they were not quite at home in the world—as witness the universal myths about the first human beings being expelled from a primordial paradise. Luria’s complex creation story had revealed this and made it clear in a wholly new way. The exile of the Shekhinah and their own lives as displaced people were not two separate realities but one and the same. Zimzum showed that exile was inscribed in the very ground of being.

Luria was not a writer, and during his lifetime his teachings were known to very few people.13 But his pupils recorded his teachings for posterity and others spread them in Europe. By 1650, Lurianic Kabbalah had become a mass movement, the only theological system to win such general acceptance among Jews at this time.14 It did so not because it could be proved rationally or scientifically, since it obviously could not. It clearly contradicted Genesis in almost every particular. But a literal reading of Scripture is, as we shall see, a modern preoccupation, springing from the prevalence of the rational over the mythical consciousness. Before the modern period, Jews, Christians, and Muslims all relished highly allegorical, symbolic, and esoteric interpretations of their sacred texts. Since God’s Word was infinite, it was capable of yielding a multitude of meanings. So Jews were not distressed, as many modern religious people would be, by Luria’s divergence from the plain meaning of the Bible. His myth spoke to them with authority because it explained their lives and provided them with meaning. Instead of Jews being a marginalized people, thrust out of the modern world that was coming into being, their experience was in tune with the most fundamental laws of existence. Even God suffered exile; everything in creation had been displaced from the very beginning; divine sparks were trapped in matter, and goodness was forced to struggle with evil—an omnipresent fact of life. Further, Jews were not rejects and outcasts, but central actors in the redemptive process. The careful observance of the commandments of the Torah, the Law of Moses, and special rites evolved in Safed could end this universal exile. Jews could thus help to effect the “restoration” (tikkun) of the Shekhinah to the Godhead, the Jewish people to the Promised Land, and the rest of the world to its rightful state.15