In the wake of the Paris attacks, the “Western” world has been thrown into something of a panic. Horrified by televised images of the carnage, we are tripping over ourselves to do something, anything, even if it’s the wrong thing, to ensure that something like this doesn’t happen again. Every Muslim, every Syrian, is now seen in some quarters as guilty until proven innocent even though no Syrians appear to be involved in the attack, and the vast majority of Muslims condemn it.
Reacting to public fears, Congress is rushing to enact legislation to make the already difficult and exhaustive process for bringing a trickle of Syrian refugees to the United States even more onerous. Exaggerated claims are thrown willy-nilly, including one claim that as many as 270 million Muslims “have killed in the name of Allah (emphasis added).” Voices of moderation are increasingly crowded out by sensationalistic journalism, the speeches of demagogues, and the steady drumbeat for war.
Among the observations being made is a particularly trenchant one—the comparison of the plight of Syrian refugees to those of Jews attempting to flee Europe in the run-up to World War II. Both groups were attempting to escape potential slaughter at home and seeking a better life for their families. And both met resistance, especially from the United States. Like the Syrians of today, Jews were seen as a potential threat to security, as a vector to introduce communism and anarchism to America, the same threats the Third Reich trumpeted as it sought to strip Jews first of their rights and then of their lives. Americans, broadly, supported keeping Jews out, with the result that thousands were sent away or denied visas, thousands who eventually perished in the Holocaust.
Such a comparison seems even more apt in light of the recent hubbub surrounding Donald Trump, who seemed first to approve, then positively support, the idea of a database for Muslims, and some sort of special ID that displays their religion. Though this has raised the specter of the yellow Star of David forced on Jews in Hitler’s Germany, and perhaps of the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, the roots in this case are deeper, and in a way ironic.
Eight hundred years ago this month, 1400 of the most important leaders of the Roman Catholic Church gathered in Rome for the Fourth Lateran Council. Beset by challenges from within, especially by the heretical teachings of the Waldensians and the Cathars, the assembly composed the definitive medieval statement of Christian belief and practice. Old debates were settled, for instance the long-running dispute over the substantial change in the Eucharist. Confession was enjoined on all believers once a year. Religious and secular authorities were instructed in how to deal with religious deviance.
Part of the process of self-definition, in determining who is “us” is the definition of “not us,” the exclusion of the Other. Fourth Lateran made an attempt to settle this, too, not just for heretics, who could be exiled and reconciled to the Church, but for Jews and Muslims as well. Like today’s Syrian refugees and the pre-World War II Jews, they were seen as a possible source of treachery. Jews and Muslims lived among Christians, occasionally converting even though these conversions were often suspect.
Among the canons dealing with Jews and Muslims is Canon 68. It describes the problem as being that in some places it was difficult to distinguish Jews and Muslims by sight. The main concern seems to be that Christians might, unknowingly, enter into sexual relations or even start a family with one of these enemies of the Church. As a solution, the assembled council decreed “that Jews and Saracens [Muslims] of both sexes in every Christian province and at all times shall be marked off in the eyes of the public through the character of their dress.” This decree was enforced only sporadically, and in many places took the form of an oval patch, suggestive of the Eucharist wafer, a connection to anxieties then current about Jews and the Eucharist, anxieties that manifested themselves in the libel of Host desecration.
Not much imagination is required to see this wafer-shaped patch as the ancestor of Hitler’s yellow star and a special ID for Muslims as its descendant. Such a connection was part and parcel of the medievalism of the Third Reich. And it remains a medieval impulse today, as erstwhile medievalist Carly Fiorina should be able to notice, were she not so busy claiming her medieval education will help her deal with Daesh.
This seems an interesting irony, that we see the modern as medieval simply because it’s brutal because that's what "medieval" means to us, ignoring the actual medieval as it rears its, in this case ugly, head. Like most colloquial uses of the term medieval, it is a gross misrepresentation when applied to Daesh. All fundamentalisms are modern inventions. They are the reaction of the aggrieved to a modernity that in many cases has left their status diminished, an attempt to restore the special place they once held in the cosmos. Medieval Muslim theologians, though, would have found Daesh as unintelligible as the sublime scholastics would find Christian fundamentalism in America.
It is, rather, the Trumps (and, since I started writing this the Carsons and the Rubios) who are being medieval, in the worst possible sense. Even beyond the slander to Syrians, in statements trump has made tarring undocumented Mexican immigrants as criminals, it is not hard to see and echo of the charges of ritual murder and host desecration that brought so much grief to medieval—and indeed modern—Jewry. We’ve also seen the consequences of this sort of essentializing, which reduces human beings to a set of imputed characteristics, is given full run in the genocides of the 20th century. We can see it in the veritable lynching of an innocent immigrant, beaten by Trump supporters in Boston earlier this year.
Like those churchmen, like Germans in the 1930s, we feel besieged, rightly or wrongly, by forces beyond our control. We felt this way after the September 11, 2001 attacks, and our response was to lash out in our anger, helping create the situation that led both to the refugee crisis and to the Paris attacks. In none of these situations did the solution make the problem better. Modern challenges require modern thinking, not a return to the medieval mindset that has repeatedly failed us.
