Search

In western europe during the post-reformation period, catholic and Protestant scholars engaged in a scholarly, often ethnographic study of the Jewish religion, and produced competent, if still polemical, works grounded in Jewish sources. But in Poland in the eighteenth century, despite its brief Renaissance of the early sixteenth century, some Catholic clergy were still writing of Jewish thirst for Christian blood in a manner reminiscent of medieval works. In religious rhetoric, as in the ideas of Church hierocracy, Poland froze in time while the outside world moved on. The Polish Catholic Church's reaction to the new religious ideas of the Reformation, including its control of the dissemination of knowledge through restrictions on printing and education, contributed to the cultural insularity of Poland and the Polish Catholic Church, and prevented its clergy, and others, from benefiting from, and participating in, western European Christian scholarship. Polish clergy's writings continued to raise ritual murder accusations and blood libels against Jews as late as the eighteenth century. Whereas the early ritual murder accusations against Jews in twelfth-and thirteenth-century Western Europe were associated with Passover, when Jews were accused of reenacting the crucifixion of Jesus on a small boy, the blood motif was later added to the charges, according to which Jews were said to seek Christian blood in order to make matzah, the unleavened bread eaten during the Passover holiday. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the reformation, the catholic clergy in poland sought to combat the spread of heretical ideas and, simultaneously, to promote Catholic doctrines, the one abetting the other. Catholic piety and dogma were promoted through devotional works and artwork in newly built or renovated baroque churches, serving as indirect religious polemic against Protestants. In more overt and more direct polemic, the Church provided Catholics with explicit counterarguments to Protestant ideas and and sought to discourage contacts between Catholics and heretics and others who did not submit to the authority of the Church. PROMOTING MARY AND THE SAINTS The vast majority of books written and published by the Catholic clergy in post-Reformation Poland were devotional. Still, even in these works, elements of polemic appeared in the promotion of baroque piety in the form of the cults of Mary, Jesus, and the saints, all figures the Protestants were challenging. The Church offered constructive responses to Protestant claims that Mary was Jesus' mother but not an object of veneration, that the cult of saints was a form of idolatry, and, as the anti-Trinitarians insisted, that Jesus was not divine. Protestants, for their part, acknowledged no intermediaries in the people's relationship with God. Wojciech Węgierski, a seventeenth-century Polish Protestant leader, wrote, “The Holy Scripture says that we should pray concerning our spiritual and bodily needs only to the true God, Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, who knows our hearts and human thoughts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An eighteenth-century anonymous preacher lamented in his sermon on “human ingratitude” for the Thursday preceding Easter that “our Savior Jesus” suffered now from “bad and cruel Catholics” just as he had suffered from “malicious Jews” and “heretics”: And so I have been preaching about human ingratitude. And how much more I could say about the horrible ingratitude that our Savior Jesus had experienced in the Most Dear Sacrament, and continues to experience in our times, and is bound to experience until the end of times because of the cruel faithlessness of people who don't believe. Not once was He tortured in the Most Holy Hosts by malicious Jews. Not once was He thrown out of the pyx and trampled, or thrown into fire by blind heretics robbing holy Catholic churches. And not once, was He secretly stolen and desecrated by people possessed by the Devil. And … how much humiliation does he suffer from believing, but bad and cruel, Catholics! The Catholic clergy's frustration with its loss of influence went beyond their frustration with those in power. Many ordinary Catholics, too, ignored the teachings of the Church. The sins and religious ignorance of those the preacher called “bad and cruel Catholics” exposed how far the Church was from its ideal. The Church felt beset on all sides by “malicious Jews,” “blind heretics,” and disobedient Catholics themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the end of the seventeenth century, a noted franciscan preacher, Antoni Węgrzynowicz, in a sermon addressed to an audience of nobles, lamented the nobles' blatant disobedience to Church teachings, their questionable daily behavior, their assaults on the Church during political gatherings, and their relationships with Jews. To appeal to the nobles' own fears, Węgrzynowicz claimed the political crises Poland faced, including the destructive wars with its neighbors, were a consequence of the nobles' reckless conduct. He urged that they return to the right path, one more in line with Church teachings: You will not hear during the sessions of the Sejm and the Sejmiks [regional diets] anything but screaming against priests, and servants of God … The sins of the Poles led to the collapse of the integrity of the [territories] of the Polish Crown, so our motherland has shrunk as it lost so many provinces … O Poles! Bring your sins to an end … Stop violating the laws, privileges and freedoms of the Church, give to God what belongs to God, to the Church what belongs to the Church and to the King what belongs to [him]. End all injustice in courts, and judge the cases of the poor the same way you would those of the rich, don't be corrupted. Stop giving special and undeserved favors to the Jews, [these favors] are a sign of great contempt for the Christian religion. Stop the drunkenness, adulteries and all kinds of lewdness. Refrain, Ladies and Lords, from luxurious sophisticated clothes! [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Catholic church legislation against jews often did not stand alone but coincided with the rise of heretical movements within the Church itself. This was true of the 1215 regulations of the IV Lateran Council promulgated in the midst of the Church's battle against various heresies in Europe, and of the 1555 papal bull Cum Nimis Absurdum, which established the Roman ghetto during the crisis of the Reformation. In Poland the Church reacted in similar ways. According to surviving sources, regulations of Jewish-Christian interaction – first promulgated at the Council of Breslau in 1267 and ordering a geographic segregation between Jews and Christians – did not reappear in Poland until the first half of the fifteenth century when, in the wake of the heresy of Jan Hus in Bohemia, Huss's followers moved north into the Polish territories, thereby posing a challenge to the Church in Poland. Reacting to the Hussite heresy, the 1420 provincial synod held at Kalisz and Wieluń issued a number of decrees against heresy and recommended a number of “remedies” to combat it, requiring, among other things, that secular authorities cooperate with the Church in combating its spread. The “heresy” apparently affected mostly the literate elites. One paragraph of the 1420 synodal laws ordered confiscation of the books of those suspected of heresy when they were captured, but in pre-print culture, only a few could afford to own books. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On january 16, 2004, the associated press reported that israel's chief rabbis, Yona Metzger and Shlomo Amar, had received an audience with Pope John Paul II. The rabbis asked the pope to speak out against anti-Semitism and to devote a day in the Catholic calendar “for study and reflection on the Jewish faith.” The pope replied that he had “striven to promote Jewish-Catholic dialogue and to foster ever greater understanding, respect and cooperation.” But, in his native country of Poland, the Polish society and the Catholic Church continued to struggle with the difficult legacy of Polish-Jewish relations. Surrounded by denial, condemnations, and apologetics, the question of relations between the Polish Catholic Church and the Jews still stirs strong emotions and controversies even though of the millions of Jews in Poland in 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland, fewer than twenty thousand remain. One such controversy centered around a painting, formerly known as Infanticidia or “Ritual Murder by Jews,” in the cathedral church in Sandomierz, a small town in southeastern Poland. The painting depicts the murder of a Christian child by Jews, a crime of which Sandomierz Jews were accused a number of times in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The painting itself is said to commemorate a murder of 1710. These tales were popularized in two notorious books published contemporaneously by the local priest, Stefan Żuchowski, instigator of one of the trials of Jews for such alleged crimes and commissioner of the painting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]