Martyrdom 1: The Martyrs of York and Edith Stein

Posted on February 28, 2004 in Martyrdom Series Morals & Ethics Myths & Mysticism

Some curious declarations have been made by reviewers of the picture Passion. The other day, I mentioned the remarks of Times Religious Correspondent Ruth Gledhill who declared that while she found the film depicted Jews hateful, she thought everyone should see it for “the artistry”. I rejected that idea. Yesterday, on The Gutless Pacifist, Mike M. invited readers to meditate upon an article at BeliefNet by John Dominic Crossan which included a curious statement about the image of Christ depicted in the film: “He is victim, not martyr.”

As I understand it, Crossan establishes his distinction thusly:

Gibson has created a film that is two hours of unrelenting brutality. The fleeting flashbacks to the earlier life of Jesus and Mary serve more to intensify than alleviate the savagery. They do not explain how Jesus’ life led inevitably to this death or why anyone wanted him dead let alone publicly crucified.

Martyrs die for reasons, victims just get taken off and killed is how I understand Crossan’s contrived distinction. I will return to this theme in a later article and rebut it.

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To understand martyrdom, I think we must look across religions, considering incidents which have been — within those dogmas, ethical systems, and spiritual world views — considered to be of an order of sacrifice worthy of adoration by believers. In examining cases, I have found much diversity of conditions under which people have chosen to give up their lives instead of submit to a change or a denial of their conscience. The case of the Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur is unique in that the martyr died so that Hindus could enjoy freedom of religion when practising his own religion was not threatened. Wiccans speak of the “Burning Times” when believers in the earth goddess and innocent people who were simply forced to confess died at the stake or in dungeons. The innocent people who told the inquisitors what they wanted to hear qualify in Wicca as martyrs.

I’d like to share a Jewish perspective on martyrdom. In A Concise Companion to the Jewish Religion, Louis Jacobs relates the story of the Martyrs of York:

Less than a year after the coronation of Richard I (Richard the Lion-heart) in September 1189, anti-Jewish rioting broke out in the city of York, despite the king’s orders that the Jews were not to be molested. The sheriff allowed the Jews to take refuge in the royal castle, Clifford’s Tower, where a tablet marks the spot. Suspecting the intentions of the sheriff, the Jews expelled him from the castle which was surrounded by a mob intent on killing the Jews and plundering their possessions. The Jews of York, among whome was the famous schole Yog Tov of Joigny . . . committed mass suicide on the Sabbath before Passover, corresponding to 6 March 1190. The few who did not give their lives pleaded to be allowed to escape death by converting to Christianity. Being reassured, they left the castle and were massacred. (p. 314)

Though no one denies that martyrdom is dying because of what you believe, many will find this example problematic. Which were the martyrs of York? The ones who killed themselves or the ones who were massacred by the crowd? An argument can be made against both. Those in the castle took their own lives, unwilling to undergo whatever God intended for them. Those who went out gave up their religion — they assimilated which in tribal Judaism seems to be the worst kind of apostasy.

I’d like to make a case for the martyrdom of both groups. Jacobs goes on to relate the result of deliberations made by rabbis which defends the actions of the first group:

In the later Halakhah the martyrdom of the Jews of York was used as proof that “suicide is permitted if it is in order to escape torture or conversion.” (p. 314)

Elsewhere, Jacobs reviews the grounds for acceptable suicide by a Jew and provides these examples:

Saul’s suicide [1 Samuel 31:4-5] is defended on the grounds that he feared torture if he were captured by the Philistines and would have died in any event as a result of the torture. Similarly, Samson’s suicide [Judges 16:30] in which he destroyed himself together with his Philistine tormentors, is defended on the grounds that it constituted an act of Kiddush Ha-Shem, “santification of the divine name”, in the face of heathen mockery of the God of Israel. (pp. 245-46)

Here we have the the glorification of the God of the Tribe, giving one’s life for the People and their God. Popular Christianity has not altogether dispensed with this notion of a righteous suicide. I suspect that a healthy proportion of American Christians might find the case of an American soldier who pulled the pin on a hand grenade rather than be taken as a captive by a squad of Iraqi rebels to be deserving of martyrdom in the sense that it was better this than to be captured by the enemy and, besides, more unbelievers were lost than Christians. Palestinian suicide bombers go to their deaths feeling a certain righteousness as well: their gesture isn’t motivated by insanity, but by frustration and spirituality, an manifested in examples like that of Samson. (They do read and revere the Bible.)

Still, it is strange to think that those who kill themselves as martyrs while denying “the crown” to those who were killed after agreeing to convert. Jacobs makes no specific statement regarding the latter crowd. In retelling the myth* of the Martyrs of York, rabbis use the second group largely to justify the actions of the first. (As I pointed out above, this is retroactive thinking.) If the second group are not martyrs, one can take the extreme view that they got what they deserved because they assimilated. Or one could brush off their deaths as collateral damage that followed the real martyrdom at the hands of the martyrs themselves.

The issue becomes problematic when one considers six million Jews marching off to the Holocaust: were they not martyrs? Do we see something of Crossan’s dangerous distinction developing when we think of the second group as I have proposed above? Are the only people worthy of counting as martyrs those few who had the nerve to point a gun or a knife at themselves or take poison to avoid the certainty of their reduction to dust in the hellish ovens of Auschwitz?

I would suspect that many Jews and many nonJews — myself included — would find this extension from those who agreed to convert to be outrageous. Yet the dubious place of this second group is amplified by Jewish condemnation of the canonization of Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, who before her baptism and marriage to Christ was called Edith Stein. Catholic articles that tell of her “road to sainthood” speak only of her unique place as both a Catholic and a Jew:

The mystery of the life and death of Edith Stein is a symbol of how Christians should have been relating to the Jews over the centuries, as well as a magnifying glass on how Christians have been relating to the Jews,” he said. “By her life and death, she teaches the Christian community that it should, like Jesus himself, live with, pray with, suffer with and, if need be, die with the Jewish community ­ not hate, oppress and kill the blood brothers and sisters of Jesus.

Though the article from which I drew this quote includes fragments from the testimony of a Jewish doctor in defense of one of the required miracles,
Catholics seldom mention Jewish objection to the canonization. Some of it mentions that Stein wrote against the Jewish religion when she explained why she became a Catholic. She accepted the notion that the sufferings of the Jews were God’s punishment for having crucified Christ. On the other hand, she urged Pope Pius XII to write an encyclical in defense of the Jews. Her ambiguous place merits more than summary dismissal, says Rabbi Melanie Aron. Other Jews would continue to disagree.

From the perspective of Jews other than those like Rabbi Aron, Edith Stein is no saint. She betrayed the faith of her mother. She was picked out for martyrdom not because of her beliefs, but because the Nazis wanted to punish the Dutch bishops for speaking out against atrocity by seizing Stein and a few other converts who were living in monasteries and executing them. The most critical of Stein consider her collateral damage — more of a victim as Crossan might put it. Stein only died because she happened to have Jewish ancestors. Those who were massacred at York died for similar reasons. Because these had renounced their Judaism and had not been yet baptized, they fall into a spiritual no-man’s land. Some might call them cowards for converting instead of waiting for the mob to batter down the gates of the castle and slay them; or taking the knife to their own throats as did their confrers.

But I suggest that these, too, were martyrs who were neither Christian or Jewish, but Universal martyrs. They made a choice for life, to persist in their being. They rejected the suicide’s dagger and they went out into the crowd, putting themselves in the hands of God. If they knew that they might not live and they went ahead anyways, I think we can count them as saints of a kind. Given that we know them only by their action and not by their minds, I am inclined to grant them the benefit of the doubt. They, too, are Martyrs of York.

Next: At the top of the pyramid

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*I hold that myth is a religiously charged recounting of a story, whether the details are true or false. Thus, I can believe that Christ was actually crucified and that the Martyrs of York did actually die as Jacobs says they did. The stories become mythic when they are recounted and embellished as parables or examples of how life should be lived and why we are here.