Saint Ignatius Loyola and the Jews

[Karl Radl]

Saint Ignatius Loyola and the Jews

Accusations of both anti-Semitism (1) and philo-Semitism (2) have been made against the Jesuit order. So in order to understand the truth of these charges it is best to start with the founder of Society of Jesus: Saint Ignatius Loyola.

Ignatius' commentary on jews and Judaism was remarkably restrained for his time in so far as to be completely opposed to the prevailing Catholic theology of the day.

Instead of condemning the jews outright as enemies of the Catholic faith as his Spanish followers (and it was worth remembering that Ignatius himself was Spanish and had been a soldier until his legs were crippled by a cannonball during his participation in the defence of a Spanish fortress so as such had probably originally held to common Spanish theological ideas or at least given lip-service to them) urged him to. (3) He welcomed the jews (both converts and 'New Christians' [aka Marranos/Conversos]) into the Jesuit order and made a point of actively recruiting them. (4)

Nothing speaks more of this weird desire than the fact that Loyola and his early companions spared no expense or effort to get the sentences (including and not limited to those of death) of convicted jewish criminals commuted if they expressed a desire to, or interest in, converting to Christianity and joining the Jesuit order. (5)

Similarly in March 1542 Ignatius obtained a Papal Brief, ‘Cupientes Judaeos’, from Pope Paul III which prohibited jewish friends and relatives of sincere converts to Christianity from disinheriting or cutting them off from financial support (as per the normal jewish custom of sitting Shiva for apostates and treating them as if they were dead), which had heretofore been cited as a serious obstacle to the conversion of the jews to Christianity. (6)

This further lead Ignatius to purchase two houses in Rome for jewish and Islamic catechumens: one for men and the other for women. (7) Within a year Ignatius had converted some forty former jews and Muslims to Christianity. (8)

We know of two specific examples of Ignatius’ conversions of jews; these are the conversion of a jew (and subsequent marriage to his Italian mistress) in September 1541 (9) and a jewish father and his two sons on 22nd July 1556. (10)

All this naturally resulted in the fact that from early on a significant number of the members of the Jesuit order were converts from Judaism or from 'New Christian' families. (11) The most prominent of which was Diego Lainez; the first prominent Jesuit theologian, successor to Ignatius and architect of the structure of the society as we know it today. (12)

This is hardly surprising when Ignatius himself went on record as stating that he desired to be of jewish origin so (a-la Luther's argument in 'That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew') that he could be closer to Jesus, his ‘Lord and Master’, by sharing the same ancestral origin (which absolutely horrified his Spanish listeners). (13)

Indeed Ignatius even claimed that converted jews were better Christians than their non-jewish brethren! (14)

This philo-Semitic attitude caused Ignatius and the Society of Jesus a significant amount of problems in its formative years with brutal opposition to its ‘enlightened’ policies coming from the powerful Spanish and Portuguese churches.

One particularly intransigent opponent of Ignatius’ was Juan Martinez Guijarro, the Archbishop of Toledo, who refused to let the Jesuits operate in his ecclesiastical jurisdiction unless they enforced limpieza de sangre (‘blood purity’) among its members. (15)

Ignatius refused point blank to do this, which has led to his being praised for being ‘most charitable’ among the ‘anti-Semitic climate of the sixteenth century’ even if he was still ‘immersed in the prejudices and misapprehensions of the age’ by modern historians. (16)

As the Jesuit historian Philip Caraman describes it:

‘Ignatius, who had been brought up in the prevalent anti-Semitism of his class, from the time of his conversion had regretted that he had not been born a Jew, which would have given him a blood relationship with his “Lord and Master.”’ (17)

Caraman’s characterisation of Loyola’s counter-cultural theological views also gives us the key to understanding his views on this subject. Since Loyola strove to be as like Jesus as possible just as he had once striven to be a chivalrous and brave knight a-la the medieval courtly romances. He sought material links to Jesus in the perceived jewishness of the latter much as many others before and afterwards sought a link to a purer form of holiness via the medium of relics.

He also sought to ape Jesus and convert the proverbial Pharisees from the darkness of Judaism by his example and preaching of the one true faith. Thus we can see that while Loyola certainly committed a grave error in seeking to bring jewish converts to Christianity into the Society of Jesus: he did so based on sincere, if unorthodox for the time, religious convictions.

Loyola can thus be reasonably asserted to have been a philo-Semite who believed the salvation of the jews was paramount possibly even over and above non-jews attaining salvation. Much like many modern Evangelical Christians Loyola sacrificed his prudence upon the altar of the deluded fantasy that the jews were the original people of God.

References

(1) For example Charlotte Klein, 1974, 'Damascus to Kiev: Civilta Cattolica on Ritual Murder', pp. 180-196 in Alan Dundes, 1991, 'The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore', 1st Edition, University of Wisconsin Press: Madison
(2) For example Rene Fulop-Miller, 1930, 'The Power and Secret of the Jesuits', 1st Edition, Viking: New York, pp. 180-181
(3) John O'Malley S.J., 1993, 'The First Jesuits', 1st Edition, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, pp. 189-190
(4) Ibid, pp. 59; 188-191
(5) Ibid, p. 191
(6) Philip Caraman S.J., 1990, ‘Ignatius Loyola’, 1st Edition, Collins: London, p. 133; W. W. Meissner S.J., 1992, ‘Ignatius of Loyola: The Psychology of a Saint’, 1st Edition, Yale University Press: New Haven, p. 212
(7) Ibid.
(8) Caraman, Op. Cit., p. 134
(9) Ibid, p. 139
(10) Ibid, p. 186
(11) O’Malley, Op. Cit., p. 294
(12) Ibid, p. 31
(13) Ibid, p. 190; Caraman, Op. Cit., p. 133
(14) O’Malley, Op. Cit., p. 76
(15) Caraman, Op. Cit., p. 186
(16) Meissner, Op. Cit., pp. 212; 215
(17) Caraman, Op. Cit., p. 133

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