Historical Setting, 626 C.E. The farm in the Vosges
I can understand Brandell’s frustration with that Church authority at Luxeuil. For all these centuries the ancient Roman’s rumors of poison hate against Jews have been lingering in the shadows, seemingly harmless. Rome is long gone. But now, suddenly, one emperor, far away in the East has himself a skirmish with a tribe of Jews and he decides the Jewish warriors are obstinately undaunted even by the heaps of horrors of wars. Of course, the emperor had no imagination for Jewish fighters winning against the empire. They are a small Persian tribe and he has armies. But he strikes out at that resilience by turning around the longstanding religious tolerance. Now, in the East, Jews must be baptized Christian or die! So, the unbaptized whom the Gentiles called, “stubborn,” maybe really meaning faithful, decided they won’t be Christianized and they are picking up their families and seeking safety in Gaul. Now that Emperor, Heraclius, calls on the kings of Gaul to make similar edicts against Jews. One Merovingian king rising in Austrasia, Dagobert, rules in solidarity with the Emperor, and he is also requiring Christian baptism of Jews. [Footnote] And when it comes to baptism, the Church is the responsible administrator. Hating Jews seems to be the Church’s political responsibility.
The fearsome thing is the animosity that is intentionally taught against Christianity’s own Jewish root.Brandell is concerned that the authority of the Church Doctrine is not only opposed to the Christian songs but also to the ancient dance.
“Papa, I’m definitely not allowed to mention that the vine dance is very likely what Jesus was dancing when he said, ‘I am the vine and you are the branches?’ [John 15:5] When we are dancing together, reaching, connecting one to the next and set ourselves as the vine linked as we are, surely, we are in remembrance of Jesus’ words to his friends. Bound together he told us we are in the spirit of love, ‘you are in me as I am in you,’ and in dancing we are all a part of the same vine together. But Father Albestus says that even the ancient dance should be banned if it tells a gospel story to the illiterate.”
“Why does it matter that the stories are kept hidden from the illiterate?” I wonder.
“He said, offering the stories without knowing Doctrine was the source of my error.”
[Footnote] As noted earlier, #52.6, Dagobert did make an edict against the Jews, and the Jewish encyclopedia article followed the notion that Dagobert’s support of Heraclius was unlikely because the communications between Frankish Gaul and Constantinople would not have supported solidarity. But Carroll and others point to on-going and extensive communications between the East and the West in the early Byzantine era. A better reason for no connection with the edict by Heraclius is that antisemitism was already widespread anyway.
(Continues tomorrow)
Lazarus Ink 