CyberChief

Pope Paul IV established Rome’s compulsory Jewish ghetto in 1555 and from then until 1870 Jews who lived in the Papal States, so everywhere were forced to live separately from the surrounding population. The Jewish Museum of Rome dates their final liberation from that system to 1870, when papal temporal rule ended. In 1555, Pope Paul IV’s Cum nimis absurdum ordered Jews in papal territories to live separately from Christians in specific designated quarters. In Rome, the ghetto occupied a flood-prone area beside the Tiber and Jews were forced to sell their houses, including those inside the ghetto, and become tenants. They were also forced to wear identifying yellow headwear and badges so they could be identified. They couldn’t own land, treat Christians, commerce was almost fully restricted. Under Gregory XIII, some Jews were required to attend Christian sermons l to convert them on Saturdays—the Jewish Sabbath. On June 23, 1858, papal agents seized a six-year-old boy named Edgardo Mortara from his Jewish mother and father in Bologna. A Catholic servant testified that she had secretly baptized him. Authorities consequently classified him as Catholic and took him away from his parents. In 1569, Pius V ordered Jews expelled from the Papal States except Rome and Ancona. Further expulsions followed under Clement VIII in 1593. For dissenting Christians, papal rule could meant censorship, interrogation, imprisonment, forced recantation, and execution. Aonio Paleario preached justification by faith alone and rejection of papal supremacy. He was before the Roman Inquisition, and executed in Rome in 1570. Pietro Carnesecchi, a former papal secretary who embraced justification by faith, mwas imprisoned, and beheaded in Rome on October 1, 1567, Then his body was burned. Before the revolution, the church was constantly involved in religious persecution,enforced conformity, compulsory tithes, and clerical privilege while the monarchy purchased offices, overtaxed, and resisted all reforms. The country was in political paralysis. But after the revolution, for the first time ever, Jews gained human rights. The altar and throne aristocracy was very unhappy about that, all of it. That is where you get the conspiracy theories Webbon, a Christian nationalist who wants to restore the good old days of religious compulsion is peddling about freemasonry. Louis de Bonald was famous for pushing the theory that the emancipation of the Jews was actually a secret hidden conspiracy by them to control all of the revolutionaries in France. There were 40,000 Jews and 28 million non Jews in France at the time. In 1806, Bonald wrote Sur les Juifs where he said Jews were a foreign people whose liberation was a threat to Christians. A Christian government, he argued, should subordinate anyone whose views are hostile to Christianity. Édouard Drumont added to the conspiracy theory by saying that hidden Jewish control of all finances in Freemasonry was the reason why the revolution happened. Any independent institution that supported liberation or liberalism was a captured institution under the control and power of the Jews. Does that sound familiar? Like maybe that’s Tucker’s entire line of conversation for the past two years? He just substituted the word Jew with the word Israel. But it was Maurras who really brought the entire conspiracy theory home. In La Politique religieuse, Maurras claimed that Jews, Protestants, Freemasons, and foreigners formed four cooperating powers that exploited the social fragmentation produced by revolutionary individualism and captured the state. His contribution turned conspiracy into a nationalist political program. Even though he wasn’t Catholic, he wanted an integralist government and later cooperated with fascists. By the way, today’s leading post-liberal thinkers like Vermule and Deenen cite these thinkers as proof of the good old days. As in the days they would like to return to.