Led by the Harvard professor Adrian Vermeule, a group of radical Catholic intellectuals in the U.S. have sought over the past decade to revive a political doctrine known as “integralism.” The ultimate goal of this movement is to integrate the worldly power of the state into the religious power of the Church. When asked by a colleague, “What would happen to me, a Jew?” in such a political arrangement, Vermeule writes that he replied, “Nothing bad.” Cole Aronson isn’t convinced, and examines the case of King Louis IX of France, much admired by the integralists:
The main event of Louis IX’s monarchy was the crusade of 1248–1254. . . . Louis’s crusade did not just lead to anti-Jewish persecution but depended on it. William Chester Jordan, a distinguished scholar of the period, writes that loans from Jews to Christians were canceled and Jewish property confiscated to fund the expedition.
The colossal failure of the crusade—king and army had to be ransomed from their Muslim captors—impelled Louis to ascetic piety and charity. In further acts of t’shuvah, Louis tried bribing Jews into the church, expelled Jews who loaned money at interest, and confiscated new—though not old—synagogues as punishment for Jewish usury. . . . In 1240, Louis IX obeyed Pope Gregory IX’s instruction to rid France of Jewish writings that imperiled the kingdom’s fidelity to Christ. The Talmud was publicly burned with other Jewish books in Paris, effectively terminating a great era of Parisian rabbinic scholarship.
Of course, Vermeule and his allies don’t explicitly endorse anything of this sort, but Aronson concludes from his investigation of their writings that, in their ideal polity, “Jews won’t be citizens, though in an act of ‘toleration,’ the state might let them send a delegation to the legislature.” Aronson notes, however, that the integralists—whose views by and large run contrary to those promulgated by the Vatican during the past century—don’t possess anything like a mass following. But that doesn’t mean Jews have nothing to worry about:
For now, the integralists do not endanger American pluralism. What they might threaten is ecumenical conservatism—the cohort (among which I count myself) of clerics, activists, writers, and the occasional [politician] trying to make American laws more virtuous and American culture more religious. It’s mostly Catholics who lead today’s ecumenical movement, and, given who signs up for conservative politics at top universities, that seems unlikely to change.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/philosophy/14786/the-integralists-and-us/