Münster, 1535: Israel’s future?

The illegal seizure of 40 percent of the West Bank. Settler violence. Muslim and Christian holy sites closed. Animal sacrifice by Jews on the premises of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Mayhem in Lebanon. Members of the Knesset quaffing champagne after the passage of a new law-making capital punishment the default sentence for Palestinians convicted of “terrorism.” Where will it all end? Will it all end? Who, after all, stands in the way? Certainly not the United States, Israel’s steadfast and largely uncritical backer and advocate, perhaps Israel’s only remaining friend.

Lately my thoughts have often turned to 16th century Münster, Germany, and another set-apart people who went terribly wrong themselves after having suffered persecution.

The Protestant Reformation spawned many radical sects whose leaders believed that the Magisterial Reformation under Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Huldrych Zwingli had not gone far enough in overturning Roman Catholic innovation and restoring a simple and authentic Gospel. The most enduring of these movements has been the Anabaptists, who survive today in such groups as the Mennonites, Brethren, and Amish.

The word “Anabaptist” means “one who baptizes again” and refers to the movement’s insistence that persons baptized as infants in the Catholic and mainstream Protestant churches must be re-baptized as fully conscious, assenting, accountable, committed believers. This tenet, along with a refusal to bear arms, take oaths, or countenance the fusion of church and state, was perceived as a threat to the structure of late medieval and early modern society, and the Anabaptists faced severe persecution that resulted in a broad diaspora from their Swiss origins and an especially strong sense of being a people set apart by and for the things of God. Their repute among other Europeans suffered considerably because of the excesses, usually communistic and/or apocalyptic, that the Anabaptists sometimes practiced as they produced local and regional variations of faith and practice.

As one of my teachers, Sir Diarmaid MacCulloch, writes in his Groundwork of Christian History:

One section of the movement…were so convinced that all existing human institutions were of the Devil that they sought to overthrow them with a wild militancy which recalls the fanaticism of the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot in Kampuchea.

In the northwest German city of Münster, Anabaptists managed to gain control of the town council, displacing the Lutherans who themselves had expelled the Catholic bishop. The Anabaptists swiftly instituted a theoretically (see Animal Farm) egalitarian dictatorship. Hailing the imminent thousand-year rule of the saints, they dispatched emissaries of the glad tidings throughout northern Germany and the Low Countries, with the result that thousands of the hopeful faithful flocked to Münster, much like Jews making aliyah to Israel. The Catholic bishop mustered an army, as bishops were wont to do in those days before social media, and besieged the city.

With the situation becoming increasingly desperate, the Anabaptist leader pronounced himself king of the world, enforced outright communism (for other people, anyway), made polygamy compulsory on pain of death, and collected for himself a harem whose ranks were swelled by the enslavement of under-age girls. By this point the Lutherans and Catholics, who had been at each other’s throats for the possession of Germany’s soul and much of its property, had suspended hostilities long enough to wage war against Münster together. With the aid of a traitor, they finally breached the city, executed the Anabaptist leadership, and in grisly fashion put an end to the social experiment, after which the Anabaptist movement as a whole set about reining in its excesses and cultivating the benign and wholesome reputation that it enjoys today.

In sum, what happened to the Anabaptists in Münster was that the surrounding political units and faith communities buried their differences long enough to bury a group who thought themselves the peculiar people of God but who were in fact merely peculiar, and not in a nice way.

One might say that Anabaptist Münster, in its own way, brought people together. Something analogous could happen in the Levant in our time if enough other nations finally reach the end of their tolerance for Israel’s excesses. Mortal enemies might well embrace for just long enough to address a vexatious and offensive problem.

While living in the West Bank and making frequent trips into Israel, I met many fine people on the Israeli side of that hideous wall, people going about their daily lives responsibly, hoping for better things for their troubled region, appreciative of anyone who was present between the Mediterranean and the Jordan with a constructive purpose. I would hate for any harm to come to those acquaintances, but a safe and placid future seems increasingly unlikely.

One of my neighbors in the West Bank was a prosperous agribusinessman who was well-connected in both the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government and who, in the sometimes surreal environment of the not-so-Holy Land, numbered among his friends an Israeli general. He recounted to the general, a decent man, some instances he had witnessed of soldiers violently abusing Palestinians just for sport, and said, “You people are going to have to stop doing this. It’s going to catch up with you someday, and everything will come crashing down around you.”

The general responded with a hollow, mirthless laugh.

“Your’re right, of course you’re right,” he said. “But we won’t change. We’ll just keep right on like we are, until the end.”

The best way for the US to assist and preserve Israel would be to insist on a certain amount of behavior modification as a condition for the continued torrent of funding and moral support, but nothing that has happened in the last eighty years inspires optimism regarding such a possibility. An increasing number of Jews look askance at Israel today, and we might usefully recall that the preponderance of Anabaptists in the sixteenth century were not wild-eyed, violent utopians. The Anabaptist cause went on to better things after its more irresponsible elements were dispatched, and Jews might want to begin pondering their own possibilities for a lunatic-free future. It’s difficult to imagine today’s status quo lasting forever.

Lot Hildegard is a Christian theologian and freelance writer who spent two years at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and has taught in a Palestinian university and in an American Muslim school. His social commentary and short fiction have appeared in an assortment of print and online publications.