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ISRAEL IN EUROPE

ISRAEL IN EUROPE

BY
G. F. ABBOTT

KNIGHT COMMANDER OF THE HELLENIC ORDER OF THE SAVIOUR
AUTHOR OF “SONGS OF MODERN GREECE,”
“THE TALE OF A TOUR IN MACEDONIA,”
“THROUGH INDIA WITH THE PRINCE,” ETC.

LONDON
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1907

GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.

PREFATORY NOTE

The aims and the limits of the present work are sufficiently explained in the Introduction. Here it only remains for me to perform the pleasant duty of recording my gratitude to Mr. I. Abrahams, of Cambridge, for his friendly assistance in the revision of the proofs and my indebtedness to him for many valuable suggestions. He must not, however, be held to share all my views.

G. F. A.

CONTENTS

AUTHORITIES

GENERAL

H. Graetz’s “History of the Jews.”

Dean Milman’s “History of the Jews.”

“The Jewish Encyclopedia.”

PARTICULAR

Ch. I.

E. R. Bevan’s “The House of Seleucus”; “High Priests of Israel.”

Ch. II., IV., V.

J. S. Riggs’ “History of the Jewish People during the Maccabaean and Roman Periods.”

W. D. Morrison’s “The Jews under Roman Rule.”

Mommsen’s “History of Rome.”

Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”

Ch. VI., VII., VIII.

Benjamin of Tudela’s “Travels.” Transl. by Asher.

I. Abrahams’ “Jewish Life in the Middle Ages”; “Maimonides.”

Hallam’s “Middle Ages.”

S. P. Scott’s “History of the Moorish Empire in Europe.”

Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”

A. Marshall’s “Principles of Economics.”

Ch. IX.

J. Jacobs’ “The Jews of Angevin England.”

B. L. Abrahams’ “The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290.”

J. E. Blunt’s “History of the Establishment and Residence of the Jews in England.”

M. Margoliouth’s “The Jews in Great Britain.”

Ch. X., XI.

A. de Castro’s “History of the Jews in Spain.”

J. Finn’s “History of the Jews in Spain and Portugal.”

E. H. Lindo’s “History of the Jews in Spain and Portugal.”

Prescott’s “Ferdinand and Isabella.”

Ch. XII.

The Cambridge Modern History: Vol. I., “The Renaissance.”

W. Roscoe’s “The Life and Pontificate of Leo X.”

Ch. XIII.

I. Abrahams’ “Jewish Life in the Middle Ages.”

W. C. Hazlitt’s “The Venetian Republic.”

Ch. XIV.

The Cambridge Modern History: Vol. II. “The Reformation.”

Ch. XV.

J. Finn’s “History of the Israelites in Poland.”

The Cambridge Modern History: Vol. III., “The Wars of Religion”; Vol. IV., “The Thirty Years’ War.”

Ch. XVI.

Motley’s “Dutch Republic.”

Ch. XVII.

J. E. Blunt’s “History of the Establishment and Residence of the Jews in England.”

M. Margoliouth’s “The Jews in Great Britain.”

Ch. XVIII.

Lucien Wolf’s “Resettlement of Jews in England”; “Manasseh ben Israel’s Mission to Oliver Cromwell.”

S. R. Gardiner’s “History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate.”

J. Morley’s “Oliver Cromwell.”

Ch. XIX., XX.

M. Samuel’s “Memoirs of Moses Mendelssohn.”

Solomon Maimon’s “Autobiography.” Transl. by H. Clark Murray.

E. Schreiber’s “Reformed Judaism and its Pioneers.”

The Cambridge Modern History: Vol. VIII., “The French Revolution”; Vol. IX., “Napoleon.”

Encyclopædia Britannica: Article, “Jews.”

Ch. XXI.

Prince San Donato Demidoff’s “The Jewish Question in Russia.” Transl. by H. Guedalla.

L. Cerf’s “Les Juifs de Russie.”

Leo Wiener’s “History of Yiddish Literature in the 19th Century.”

Beatrice C. Baskerville’s “The Polish Jew.”

Ch. XXII.

Israel Davis’ “Jews in Roumania.”

E. Sincerus’ “Les Juifs en Roumanie: Les lois et leurs conséquences.”

A. M. Goldsmid’s “Persecution of the Jews of Roumania.”

H. Sutherland Edwards’ “Sir William White: His Life and Correspondence.”

“Rumania and the Jews,” by “Verax.”

Ch. XXIII.

Joseph Jacobs’ “The Jewish Question.”

“Aspects of the Jewish Question,” by “A Quarterly Reviewer.”

Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu’s “Israel parmi les Nations.”

E. Drumont’s “La France Juive.”

Encyclopædia Britannica: Article, “Anti-Semitism.”

W. H. Wilkins’ “The Alien Invasion.”

C. Russell and H. S. Lewis’ “The Jew in London.”

Ch. XXIV.

H. Bentwich’s “The Progress of Zionism.”

R. Gottheil’s “The Aims of Zionism.”

T. Herzl’s “A Jewish State.”

“The Jewish Question,” Anon. (Gay and Bird, 1894).

“Aspects of the Jewish Question,” by “A Quarterly Reviewer.”

Encyclopædia Britannica: Article, “Zionism.”

In addition to these main guides reference, on special points, is made to particular authorities in the footnotes.

INTRODUCTION

It was not without reason that Philo, the famous Graeco-Jewish scholar of Alexandria, regarded Aaron’s rod, which “was budded, and brought forth buds, and bloomed blossoms, and yielded almonds,” as an emblem of his race. Torn from the stem that bore and from the soil that nourished them, and for nearly twenty centuries exposed to the wintry blasts of adversity and persecution, the children of Israel still bud and blossom and provide the world with the perennial problem now known as the Jewish Question—a question than which none possesses a deeper interest for the student of the past, or a stronger fascination for the speculator on the future; a question compared with which the Eastern, the Irish, and all other vexed questions are but things of yesterday; a question which has taxed the ingenuity of European statesmen ever since the dispersion of this Eastern people over the lands of the West.

“What to do with the Jew?” This is the question. The manner in which each generation of statesmen, from the legislators of ancient Rome to those of modern Roumania, has attempted to answer it, forming as it does a sure criterion of the material, intellectual and moral conditions which prevailed in each country at each period, might supply the basis for an exceedingly interesting and instructive, if somewhat humiliating, study of European political ethics. Here I will content myself with a lighter labour. I propose to sketch in outline the fortunes of Israel in Europe from the earliest times to the present day. It is a sad tale, and often told; but sufficiently important to bear telling again. My object—in so far as human nature permits—will be neither to excuse nor to deplore; but only to describe and, in some measure, to explain.

It is no exaggeration to say that the Jews have been in Europe for a longer period than some of the nations which glory in the title of European. Ages before the ancestors of the modern Hungarians and Slavonians were heard of, the keen features and guttural accents of the Hebrew trader were familiar in the markets of Greece and Italy. As early as the fourth century B.C. we find the Hebrew word for “earnest-money” domiciled in the Greek language (ἀρραβών), and as early as the second century in the Latin (arrhabo)—a curious illustration of the Jew’s commercial activity in the Mediterranean even in those days.[1] And yet, despite the length of their sojourn among the peoples of the West, the majority of the Jews have remained in many essential respects as Oriental as they were in the time of the Patriarchs. A younger race would have yielded to the influence of environment, a weaker race would have succumbed to oppression, a less inflexible or unsympathetic race might have conquered its conquerors. But the Jews, when they first came into contact with Europe, were already too old for assimilation, too strong for extermination, too hardened in their peculiar cult for propagandism. Even after having ceased to exist as a state Israel survived as a nation; forming the one immobile figure in a perpetually moving panorama. The narrow local idea of the ancient Greek state was merged into the broad cosmopolitanism of the Macedonian Empire, and that, in its turn, was absorbed by the broader cosmopolitanism of Imperial Rome. But the Jew remained faithful to his own olden ideal. Monotheism superseded Polytheism, and the cosmopolitanism of the Roman Empire was succeeded by that of the Roman Church. The Jew still continued rooted in the past. Mediaeval cosmopolitanism gave way to the nationalism of modern Europe. Yet the Jew declined to participate in the change. Too narrow in one age, not narrow enough in another, always at one with himself and at variance with his neighbours, now, as ever, he offers the melancholy picture of one who is a stranger in the land of his fathers and an alien in that of his adoption.

The upshot of this refusal to move with the rest of the world has been mutual hatred, discord, and persecution; each age adding a new ring to the poisonous plant of anti-Judaism. For this result both sides are to blame—or neither. No race has ever had the sentiment of nationality and religion more highly developed, or been more intolerant of dissent, than the Jewish; no race has ever suffered more grievously from national and religious fanaticism and from intolerance of dissent on the part of others. The Jewish colonies forming, as they mostly do, small, exclusive communities amidst uncongenial surroundings, have always been the objects of prejudice—the unenviable privilege of all minorities which stubbornly refuse to conform to the code approved by the majority. The same characteristics evoked a similar hostility against primitive Christianity and led to the persecution of the early martyrs. No one is eccentric with impunity. Notwithstanding the gospel of toleration constantly preached by sages, and occasionally by saints, the attitude of mankind has always been and still is one of hostility towards dissent. Sois mon frère, ou je te tue is a maxim which, in a modified form, might be extended to other than secret revolutionary societies. The only difference consists in the manner in which this tyrannical maxim is acted upon in various countries and ages: legal disability may supersede massacre, or expulsion may be refined into social ostracism; yet the hostility is always present, however much its expression may change. Man is a persecuting animal.

To the Jews in Europe one might apply the words which Balzac’s cynical priest addressed to the disillusioned young poet: “Vous rompiez en visière aux idées du monde et vous n’avez pas eu la considération que le monde accorde à ceux qui obéissent à ses lois.” Now, when to mere outward nonconformity in matters of worship and conduct is superadded a radical discrepancy of moral, political, and social ideals, whether this discrepancy be actively paraded or only passively maintained, the outcome can be no other than violent friction. It is, therefore, not surprising that the “black days” should vastly outnumber the “red” ones in the Jewish Calendar—that brief but most vivid commentary on the tragic history of the race. The marvel is that the race should have survived to continue issuing a calendar.

At the same time, a dispassionate investigation would prove, I think, to the satisfaction of all unbiassed minds, that the degree in which the Jews have merited the odium of dissent has in every age been strictly proportionate to the magnitude of the odium itself. Even at the present hour it would be found upon enquiry that the Jews retain most of their traditional aloofness and fanaticism—most of what their critics stigmatise as their tribalism—in those countries in which they suffer most severely. Nay, in one and the same country the classes least liable to the contempt, declared or tacit, of their neighbours are the classes least distinguished by bigotry. It is only natural that it should be so. People never cling more fanatically to the ideal than when they are debarred from the real. Christianity spread first among slaves and the outcasts of society, and its final triumph was secured by persecution. We see a vivid illustration of this universal principle in modern Ireland. To what is the enormous influence of the Catholic Church over the minds of the peasantry due, but to the ideal consolations which it has long provided for their material sufferings? Likewise in the Near East. The wealthy Christians, in order to save their lands from confiscation, abjured their religion and embraced the dominant creed of Islam. The poor peasants are ready to lay down their lives for their faith, and believe that whosoever dies in defence of it will rise again to life within forty days. It is easy to deride the excesses of spiritual enthusiasm, to denounce the selfish despotism of its ministers, and to deplore the blind fanaticism of its victims. But fanaticism, after all, is only faith strengthened by adversity and soured by oppression.

Jewish history itself shows that the misfortunes which fan bigotry also preserve religion. Whilst independent and powerful, the Jews often forgot the benefits bestowed upon them by their God, and transferred the honour due to Him to the strange gods of their idolatrous neighbours. But when Jehovah in His wrath hid His face from His people and punished its ingratitude by placing it under a foreign yoke, the piety of the Jews acquired in calamity a degree of fervour and constancy which it had never possessed in the day of their prosperity. The same phenomenon has been observed in every age. When well treated, the Jews lost much of their aloofness, and the desire for national rehabilitation was cherished only as a romantic dream. But in times of persecution the longing for redemption, and for restoration under a king of their own race, blazed up into brilliant flame. The hope of the Messianic Redeemer has been a torch of light and comfort through many a long winter’s night. But it has burnt its brightest when the night has been darkest. If at such times the Jews have shown an inordinate tenacity of prophetic promise, who can blame them? They who possess nothing in the present have the best right to claim a portion of the future.

CHAPTER I
HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM

In spite of the well-known influence which Greek culture and Greek thought exercised over a portion of the Jews under Alexander the Great’s successors, the mass of the Hebrew nation never took kindly to Hellenism. Alexander proved himself as great a statesman as he was a warrior. An apostle of Hellenism though he was, he did not seek to consolidate his Empire by enforcing uniformity of cult and custom, as short-sighted despots have done since, but by encouraging friendly intercourse between the Greeks and the various peoples that came under his sceptre. Gifted with rare imagination, he entered into the feelings of races as diverse as the Egyptian and the Jewish. To the latter he allotted the border-lands which had long been the bone of contention between themselves and the Samaritans. He relieved them from taxation during the unproductive Sabbath year. He respected their prejudices, honoured their religion, and appreciated their conscientious scruples. While, out of deference to Chaldean religious feeling, he ordered the Temple of Bel to be rebuilt in Babylon, he forgave the Jewish soldiers their refusal to obey his command as contrary to the teaching of their faith. Conciliation was the principle of Alexander’s imperialism and the secret of his success. ♦301 B.C.♦ The Ptolemies, to whose share, on the partition of the Macedonian Empire, Palestine ultimately fell, inherited Alexander’s enlightened policy. The High Priest of the Jews was recognised as the head of the nation, and it was through him that the tribute was paid. So fared the Jews at home.

Abroad their lot was equally enviable. Some modern critics had doubted the settlement of Jews in Egypt until the third century. But recent discoveries (notably Mr. R. Mond’s Aramaic Papyri) prove that a Jewish community existed in Egypt even in the centuries preceding Alexander. Now persuasion and the hope of profit drew many thousands of them to Alexandria, Cyrene, and other centres of Hellenistic culture. In all these places they lived on terms of perfect equality with the Greek colonists. The newly-built city on the mouth of the Nile soon became a seat of Jewish influence and a school of learning for the Jewish nation. Under the benign rule of the Ptolemies the Jews prospered, multiplied, and attained success in every walk of life, public no less than private. Of the five divisions of Alexandria they occupied nearly two. Egypt was then the granary of Europe, and the corn trade lay largely in Jewish hands. Refinement came in the train of riches, and freedom begot tolerance. The Jews cultivated Greek letters, and some of them became deeply imbued with the spirit of Greek philosophy and even of art. This friendly understanding between the Jewish and the Greek mind gave to the world the mystic union of Moses and Plato in the works of Philo and the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament, which was to prepare the way for the advent of Christianity. And yet the bulk of the Alexandrian Jews remained a peculiar people. Greeks and Egyptians had fused their religions into a common form of worship. But the Jews were still separated from both races by the invincible barriers of belief, law, and custom. They still looked upon Jerusalem as their metropolis, and upon Alexandria as a mere place of exile. In the midst of paganism they formed a monotheistic colony. Their houses of prayer were also schools of Levitical learning, where the Torah was assiduously studied and expounded. Their one link with the State was their own Ethnarch, who acted as supreme sovereign and judge of his people, and represented it at Court.

Similar conditions prevailed in Palestine. There also Hellenic language, manners, feasts, games, and philosophy effected an entrance through the influence of the Greek colonies on the coast, and a party of Jewish Hellenists was formed. In the land which once rang with the prophetic utterances of an Isaiah and a Jeremiah were now sung the love-poems of Sappho, and were quoted the witty sarcasms of the Athenian Voltaire, Euripides. But the Torah, or Jewish religious law, was bitterly opposed to all innovations, and the anti-Greek section of the people, termed the “Pious” (Chassidim or Assideans), regarded with deep misgiving the inroad of the foreign culture. Hence arose an implacable feud between the Liberals and the Conservatives, who hated, anathematised, and later crucified each other as cordially as brethren only can do. But the Chassidim, though politically worsted, were all-powerful in the affections of the community, and the time was not distant when they were to assume the supreme command.

In 198 B.C. Palestine, after a hundred years’ struggle, passed under the sway of the Graeco-Syrian Seleucids, who, unlike their predecessors, initiated a policy of forcible assimilation, and, aided by the Hellenistic party among the Jews themselves, compelled their subjects to adopt their own civilisation and to pay homage to their own gods. However, neither the tolerance of the Graeco-Egyptian nor the violence of the Graeco-Syrian kings succeeded in reconciling the Jew to the ways of the Gentile. ♦175–164 B.C.♦ Antiochus Epiphanes might banish Jehovah from the Temple of Jerusalem and enthrone Zeus in his stead; he might set up altars to the pagan deities in every town and village; and he might exhaust all the resources of despotism in the cause of conversion. The timorous were coerced into a feigned and transient acquiescence, but the bulk of the nation, baited into stubbornness, preferred exile or martyrdom to apostasy. The defiled temple remained empty and the altars cold, until the smouldering discontent of the outraged people broke out into flame, and passive resistance yielded to fierce rebellion.

♦166–141 B.C.♦

The movement was led by the heroic, devout, and fierce house of the Maccabees—a branch of the Hasmonaean family—who, after a long struggle, distinguished by splendid endurance, astuteness, and unspeakable severity, delivered their people from the levelling Hellenism of the foreign rulers, instituted the Sanhedrin (Συνέδριον), and restored the national worship of Jehovah in all its pristine purity and narrowness. ♦163 B.C.♦ The victorious band finally entered Jerusalem “with praise and palm branches and with harps and cymbals and viols and with hymns and with songs,”[2] Simon was acclaimed High Priest and Prince of Israel, and a new era was inaugurated. ♦141. May 23.♦ The restoration of the Temple is still celebrated by the Jews in their annual eight days’ Feast of Dedication (Chanukah), when lamps are lit and a hymn is solemnly sung commemorating the miracle of the solitary flask of oil, which escaped pagan pollution and kept the perpetual light burning in the House of the Lord until the day of redemption.

But religious enthusiasm, though a powerful sword, is an awkward sceptre, and it was not long ere the victorious family forgot, as the “Pious” would have said, the cause of God in the pursuit of self-aggrandisement and earthly renown. The conservative elements had been united in the supreme effort to maintain their religious liberty. But the interest in gaining political independence was limited to the ruling family. The Hasmonaeans, having established their dynasty, aimed at conquest abroad and at royal splendour at home. One of them surrounded himself with a foreign bodyguard, and another assumed the title of King. Of their former character they retained only the enthusiast’s ferocity. Their family was torn with feuds and stained with the blood of its own members. This policy of worldly ambition lost them the support of the Chassidim, who could tolerate bloodshed only for the sake of righteousness. Moreover, the Hasmonaeans, in their new position as an established family, had more in common with the priestly aristocracy than with the poor fanatics by whose enthusiasm they had conquered that position. They, therefore, joined the Hellenizing party, and, though a barefaced adoption of the foreign gods was no longer possible, they endeavoured to effect by example what the Seleucids had vainly attempted to achieve by force. They were not altogether unsuccessful. Greek architecture was introduced into Jerusalem. The Greek numerals were adopted. Greek was understood by all the statesmen of Judaea and employed in diplomatic negotiations. Greek names became not uncommon. The Hebrew bards ceased to hang their harps upon the willow-trees. There was no longer need for bitter lamentation or lyric inspiration. Prose, tame but sober, superseded the fiery poetry of olden times. Hymns gave place to history. The Jews were at last enjoying with calm moderation their triumphs, religious and political, over their foreign and domestic enemies.

But, if the Hebrew muse was silent for want of themes, the Hebrew genius, which had dictated the ancient psalms and inspired the ancient prophets, was not dead. The national attachment to tradition and strict Judaism was manifested by the revival of Hebrew as a spoken tongue. It was employed on the coinage, in public edicts, and in popular songs. Patriotism was nourished by the celebration of the anniversaries of the national victories over the enemies of Judaism. In one word, the crowd refused to follow the fashions of the Court. The Jew had tasted the fruit of Occidental culture and pronounced it unpalatable. Hellenism had been touched and found base metal; and, notwithstanding his Kings’ efforts—their Greek temples and Greek theatres—the Hebrew remained an Oriental. “Cursed is the man who allows his son to learn the Grecian wisdom” was the verdict of the Talmud, and a Jewish poet many centuries after repeats the anathema in a milder form: “Go not near the Grecian wisdom. It has no fruit, but only blossoms.”[3]

But, though the bulk of the nation agreed in its attitude towards foreign culture, there now appears an internal division into several parties, differing from one another in the degree of their attachment to the traditions of the past, and in their aspirations for the future. Two of these sects stand out pre-eminently as representative of Hebrew sentiment, and as the exponents of the two attitudes which have continued to divide the Jewish nation through the ages down to our own day. These are the Pharisees and the Sadducees, whose names are first heard under the early Hasmonaean chiefs, but whose views correspond with those of the Hellenistic and national parties of the Seleucid period. The Pharisees were an offshoot of the Assidean party which, as we have seen, had waged a truceless and successful war against Hellenism. After their victory, the most enthusiastic of the “Pious” retired from public life and nursed their piety and disappointment in ascetic seclusion. But the majority of the party were far from considering their mission fulfilled, or from being satisfied with abstract devotion. They regarded it as a duty both to the faith and to the fatherland to take an active part in politics. The preservation of Judaism in its ancient exclusiveness was their programme. All public undertakings, all national acts, as well as all private transactions, were to be measured by the rigid standard of religion. The Law in the hands of the Pharisees became a Procrustean bed upon which the mind of the nation was to be stretched or maimed, according to the requirements of nationalism and the interpretations of the Scribes. This inflexible orthodoxy, with its concomitants of discipline and sacrifice of individuality, was in perfect accord with the Hebrew temperament, and the Pharisees must be regarded as the interpreters of the views dear to the great mass of their compatriots. As time went on, the Pharisaic attitude became more and more hardened into a theological creed, clothed in a web of ceremonial formalities, but vivified by an inspiring devotion to the will of Jehovah, and an ardent belief in the ultimate triumph of His Elect.

Against this teaching arose the sect of the Sadducees, who played towards Pharisaism a part in one respect analogous to that played by Protestantism towards Catholicism, in another to that played by the Cavaliers towards the Roundheads. They derived all their religious tenets from the letter of Scripture, rejecting the lessons of oral tradition and the “legacies of the Scribes.” They refused to believe in angels or in the resurrection of the dead, and they repudiated the fatalistic doctrine that the future of the individual and of the state depends not upon human action but upon the divine will, fixed once for all. They pointed out that, if this were the case, the belief in God’s justice would be reduced to an absurdity, as saint and sinner would be confused in one indiscriminate verdict. The Sadducees held that man is master of his own fortunes. The Pharisees met the objection of their opponents as to divine justice by the non-Scriptural doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, which had crept into Judaism in the latter years of the Babylonian captivity. If the saint and the sinner fared alike in this life, they argued, the balance would be restored in the next. The righteous would then rise up to everlasting bliss, and the wicked to everlasting shame. This and other minor points formed the ground of dogmatic difference between the two sects. Their difference in questions of practical politics and in social views was characteristic of their respective creeds. The Sadducees, far from expecting the salvation of the nation from a miraculous intervention of the Deity, looked to human wisdom for help. They placed the interests of the State above the interests of the Synagogue. They shared in the aristocrat’s well-bred horror of disturbing enthusiasms and of asceticism. Though recognising the authority of the Law, they were temperate in their piety and could not live by unleavened bread alone. They favoured Hellenism and supported the Hasmonaean kings in their efforts to shake off the trammels of ecclesiastical tyranny. ♦40–4 B.C.♦ The liberal and progressive and, at the same time, degenerate tendencies of the Sadducean protestants are seen under their most pronounced form in the sect of the Herodians, who later helped Herod the Great in his endeavour to render pagan culture popular among his subjects by the erection of temples and theatres, by the adoption of heathen fashions of worship, and by the encouragement of the Hellenic games. The party of the Sadducees included the great priestly families, the noble, and the wealthy, that is, the minority. Their opponents interpreted the feelings of the lower priesthood and of the people. Judaism, as understood by the Pharisees, was the idol for which the nation had suffered martyrdom, and the national devotion to that idol had gained new fervour from the recent struggle with Hellenism.

The hatred of the Jews towards Hellenism may, in one sense, be regarded as a sequel to that older hostility which appears to have embittered the intercourse between Europe and Asia from the very dawn of history. It is an antipathy which under various names and guises continues prevalent to this day—revealing itself now in anti-Semitism, now in anti-Turkism, and again in the exclusion of Asiatic immigrants from English-speaking countries: a sad legacy received from our far-off ancestors and likely to be handed down to a remote posterity. Long before the appearance of the Jew on the stage of European politics this antagonism had manifested itself in the hereditary feud between Hellene and Barbarian which the ingenious Herodotus traced to the reciprocal abductions of ladies by the inhabitants of the two continents, and of which, according to his theory, the Trojan war was the most important and brilliant episode.[4] The same feud was in historic times dignified by the Persian king’s gigantic effort to subdue Europe and, at a later period, by Alexander’s success in subduing Asia. Had the father of history been born again to celebrate the exploits of the latter hero, he would, no doubt, have described the Macedonian campaign as part of the chain of enmity the first links of which he had sought and found in the romantic records of mythical gallantry. The modern student, while smiling a superior smile at his great forerunner’s simple faith in legend and traditional gossip, cannot but admit that there was true insight in Herodotus’s comprehensive survey of history; but, examining things by the light of maturer experience and with a less uncritical eye, he will be inclined to regard this venerable strife as the result of a far deeper antagonism between rival civilisations, rival mental and moral attitudes—the attitudes which in their broadest outlines may be defined as Oriental and Occidental respectively; in their narrower aspect, with which we are more immediately concerned, as Hebraic and Hellenic.

The Jew had one quality in common with the Greek. They both saw life clearly and saw it as a harmonious whole. But they each saw it from an opposite standpoint. The thoroughness, consistency, and unity of each ideal by itself only rendered its incompatibility with the other more complete. It is to this incompatibility that must be attributed the failure of Hellenism in Western Asia generally and among the Jews in particular. A system of life reared upon a purely intellectual basis had no charm for a race essentially spiritual. The cold language of reason conveyed no message to the mind of the Hebrew who, in common with most Orientals, looks to revealed religion alone for guidance in matters of belief and conduct. The Oriental never feels happy except in a creed, and the Hellene offered him nothing better than an ethical code. How mean and how earthy must this code have appeared in the eyes of men accustomed to the splendid terrors of the Mosaic Law! Again, the intellectual freedom—the privilege of investigating all and testing all before accepting anything as true—which the Greek has claimed from all time as man’s inalienable birthright, and upon which he has built his noble civilisation, was repugnant to a people swathed in the bands of tradition and distrusting all things that are not sanctioned by authority. The Greek had no word for Faith as distinct from Conviction. He revered intelligence and scorned intuition. What man’s mental eye could not see clearly was not worth seeing, or rather did not exist for him. Palestine was the home of Revelation; Hellas of Speculation. The one country has given us Philosophy and the Platonic Dialogues; the other the Prophets and the Mosaic Decalogue: the former all argument, the latter all commandment.

The following conversation between two representatives of the two worlds brings their respective attitudes into vivid relief. One is Justin Martyr, the other a mysterious personage—probably a fictitious character—who sowed in Justin’s mind the seed of the new religion.

Justin. Can man achieve a greater triumph than prove that reason reigns supreme over all things, and having captured reason and being borne aloft by it to survey the errors of other men? There is no wisdom except in Philosophy and right reason. It is, therefore, every man’s duty to cultivate Philosophy and to deem that the greatest and most glorious pursuit, all other possessions as of secondary or tertiary value; for, if these are wedded to Philosophy, they are worthy of some acceptance; but, if divorced from Philosophy, they are burdensome and vulgar.

Stranger. What is Philosophy and what the happiness derived therefrom?

Justin. Philosophy is the Knowledge of that which is and is true. The happiness derived therefrom is the prize of that knowledge.

Stranger. How can the Philosophers form a correct notion of God, or teach anything true concerning him, since they have neither seen him nor heard of him?

Justin. God cannot be seen with the eye, but only comprehended by the mind.

Stranger. Has our mind, then, such and so great a power as to perceive that which is not perceptible through the senses? Or can man’s mind ever see God unless it is adorned with the holy spirit?

Justin. To whom can, then, one apply for teaching, if there is no truth in Plato and Pythagoras?

Stranger. There have been men of old, older than any of these reputed philosophers, saintly men and just, beloved of God, who spoke through the divine spirit and predicted the things that were to be. These men are called Prophets. They alone saw the truth and declared it unto men; neither favouring nor fearing any one; not slaves to ambition; but only speaking the things which they heard and saw when filled with holy spirit. Their works are still extant, and the lover of wisdom may find therein all about the beginning and end of things, and every thing that he need know. They had not recourse to proof, for they were above all proof, trustworthy witnesses of the truth. Pray thou above all things that the gates of the light may be opened unto thee.[5]

This diversity of view reveals itself in every phase of Hebrew and Hellenic life—political, social, religious and artistic. The Greeks very early outgrew the primitive reverence for the tribal chief—the belief that he derived his authority from Heaven, and that he was, on that account, entitled to unlimited obedience on the part of man. Even in the oldest form of the Greek state known to us—the Homeric—the king, though wielding a sceptre “given unto him by Zeus,” is in practice, if not in theory, controlled by the wisdom of a senate and by the will of the people. Monarchy gradually developed into oligarchy, and this gave way to democracy. Nor was the evolution effected until the sacerdotal character, which formed one of the king’s principal claims to reverence and obedience, lost its influence over the Greek mind. In historic times the impersonal authority of human law stood alone and paramount, quite distinct from any religious duty, which was a matter of unwritten tradition and custom. The divorce of the Church from the State in Greece was complete. Now, among the Jews the opposite thing happened. Kingship remained hereditary and indissolubly associated with sacerdotalism. The Semite could not, any more than the Mongol, conceive of a separation between the spiritual and the temporal Government. The King of Israel in the older days always was of the house of David, always anointed, and always wore the double crown of princely and priestly authority. And when, after the return from Babylon, the house of David disappears from sight, its power is bequeathed to the hereditary high-priest. To the Jew Church and State, religion and morality, continued to be synonymous terms; the distinction between the sacred and the secular sides of life was never recognised; all law, political and social, emanated from one Heaven-inspired code; and, while Greece was fast progressing towards ochlocracy, Judaea remained a theocracy.

The Greek was an egoist. He disliked uniformity. Although in the direction of his private life he voluntarily submitted to a variety of state regulations such as the citizen of a modern country would resent as an irksome interference with the liberties of the individual, yet, judged by the standard of antiquity, the Greek was anything but amenable to control, and, as time went on, his attitude became little better than that of a highly civilised anarchist. There were limits beyond which the Greek would never admit his neighbour’s right to dictate his conduct any more than his thoughts. He suffered from an almost morbid fear of having his individuality merged in any social institution. He would rather be poor in his own right than prosper by association with others. Discipline was the least conspicuous trait in his character and self-assertion the strongest. The Greek knew everything except how to obey. The Jew, on the other hand, found his chief happiness in self-effacement and submission. His everyday life, to the minutest details, was regulated by the Law. He was not even allowed to be virtuous after his own fashion. The claims of the individual upon the community were only less great than the claims of the community upon the individual. The strength of Hebraism always lay in its power of combination, the weakness of Hellenism in the lack of it.

Equally striking is the contrast discerned between the aesthetic ideals of the two races. Much in Hebrew imagination is couched in forms which would lose all their beauty and freshness, if expressed in colour or marble; much that would look grotesque, if dragged into the daylight of pure reason. Its effect depends entirely on the semi-darkness of emotional suggestion. Now the Greek hated twilight. He had no patience with the vague and the obscure in imagination any more than in thought. Hence artistic expression was nothing to the Jew; everything to the Greek. Judaism shunned pictorial representation; Hellenism worshipped it. And, as art in antiquity was largely the handmaid of religion, this diversity of the aesthetic temperament led to an irreconcilable religious antagonism. The Jew looked upon the pagan’s graven images with abhorrence, and the pagan regarded the Jew’s adoration of the invisible as a proof of atheism.

Not less repugnant to the Hebrew was the Hellenic moral temperament as mirrored in literature, in social life, and in public worship—that temperament which, without being altogether free from pessimism, melancholy, and discontent, yet finds its most natural expression in a healthy enjoyment of life and an equally healthy horror of death. “I would rather be a poor man’s serf on earth than king among the dead!” sighs Achilles in Hades, and the sentiment is one which his whole race has echoed through the ages, and which, despite nineteen centuries of Christianity, is still heard in the folk-songs of modern Greece. The Greek saw the world as it is, and, upon the whole, found it very good. He tasted its pleasures with moderation and bore its pains with a good grace. He perceived beauty in all things; adoring the highest and idealising the meanest. Even the shrill song of the humble grasshopper held sweet music for the Greek. He revelled in the loveliness and colour of life. He was inspired by the glory of the human form. He extolled the majesty of man. The Hebrew mind was nursed by meditation; the Hellenic drew its nourishment from contemplation. Nature was the Greek’s sole guide in taste as well as in conduct; from nature he learnt the canons of the beautiful as well as the laws of right and wrong. Hence no country has produced greater poets than Greece, or fewer saints.

How could this view of things, so sane and yet so earthy, be acceptable to a race oppressed by the sense of human suffering as the fruit of human sin? “Serve the Lord with joy; come before him with singing,” urged the Psalmist in a moment of optimistic cheerfulness. But it was only for a moment.[6] The true note of Hebraism is struck in another text: “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” The Greek understood the meaning of the sad refrain; but he did not allow it to depress him. To the Greek life was a joyous reality, or at the worst an interesting problem; to the Jew a bad dream, or at the best an inscrutable mystery. To the Hebrew mind the sun that shines in the sky and the blossoms that adorn the earth are at most but pale symbols of Divine Love, pledges for a bliss which is not of this world. And yet Socrates emptied the cup of death with a smile and a jest, where Job would have filled the world with curses and bitter lamentation. Laughter came as spontaneously to the Greek as breath, and the two things died together. The Jew could not laugh, and would not allow any one else to do so. The truth is that the Greek never grew old, and the Jew was never young.

Another lively illustration of the gulf which separated the two races is offered by the Greek games. These were introduced into Palestine by the Greek rulers and colonists, were adopted by the Hellenizing minority among the Jews themselves, and were denounced with horror by the Conservative majority. Nudity, in the eyes of the latter, was the colophon of shamelessness, while by the Greeks the discarding of false shame was regarded as one of the first steps to true civilisation. Thucydides mentions the athletic habit of racing perfectly naked as an index to the progress achieved by his country and as one of the things that marked off the Hellene from the Barbarian.[7] The Greeks were free from that morbid consciousness of sex which troubled the over-clothed Asiatics. Nor were they aware of that imaginary war between the spirit and the flesh which gave rise to the revolting self-torments of Eastern aspirants to heaven.

The peculiar characteristics of the Hebrew mind found their supreme manifestation in the sect of the Essenes—the extreme wing of the Pharisaic phalanx. The strictness of the Pharisees was laxity when compared with the painful austerity of their brethren. The latter aimed at nothing less than a pitiless immolation of human nature to the demands of an ideal sanctity. Enamoured of this imaginary holiness, the Essenes disdained all the real comforts and joys of life. Their diet was meagre, their dwellings mean, their dress coarse. Colour and ornament were eschewed as Satanic snares. The mere act of moving a vessel, or even obedience to the most elementary calls of nature, on the Sabbath, was accounted a desecration of the holy day. Contact with unhallowed persons or objects was shunned by the Essenes as scrupulously as contact with an infected person or object is shunned by sane people in time of plague. They refused to taste food cooked, or to wear clothes made, by a non-member of the sect, or to use any implement that had not been manufactured by pure hands. Their life in consequence was largely spent in water. For whosoever was not an Essene was, in the eyes of these saints, a source of pollution. Thus godliness developed into misanthropy and cleanliness into a mania. Thus these holy men lived, turning away from the sorrows of the earth to the peace of an ideal heaven; deriving patience with the present from apocalyptic promises of future glory; and waiting for the day when the unrighteous would be smitten to the dust, the dead rise from their graves, and the just be restored to everlasting bliss under the rule of the Redeemer—the Son of Man revealed to the holy and righteous because they have despised this world and hated all its works and ways in the name of the Lord of Spirits. Celibacy, seclusion, communion of goods, distinctive garb, abstinence, discipline and self-mortification, ecstatic rapture, sanctimonious pride and prejudice—all these Oriental traits, gradually matured and subsequently rejected in their exaggerated form from the main current of Judaism, marked the Essenes out as the prototypes of Christian monasticism, and as the most peculiar class of a very peculiar people. Could anything be more diametrically opposed to the genius of Hellas? Despite Pythagorean asceticism and Orphic mysticism, enthusiastic ritual, symbolic purifications and emotional extravagances, Greek life was in the main sober, Greek culture intellectual, and the Greek mind eminently untheological.

Those who delight in tracing racial temperament to physical environment may find in the contrast between the two countries an exceptionally favourable illustration of their theory. There is more variety of scenery in a single district of Greece than in the whole of Palestine. Grey rocks and green valleys, roaring torrents and placid lakes, sombre mountains and smiling vineyards, snow-clad peaks and sun-seared plains, glaring light and deep shade alternately come and go with a bewildering rapidity in the one country. In the other, from end to end, the plain spreads its calm, monotonous beauty to the everlasting sun, and the stately palms rear their heads to the blue heavens from year’s end to year’s end, severe, uniform, immutable. It is easy to understand why the one race should have drawn its inspiration from within and the other from without; why the one should have sunk the individual in the community and the other sacrificed the community to the individual; why the one should have worshipped the form and the other the spirit. It is especially easy to understand the Greek’s inextinguishable thirst for new things and the Jew’s rigid attachment to the past. Everything in Greece suggests progress; everything in Palestine spells permanence.

The result of this fundamental discrepancy of character was such as might have been foreseen. The intense spirituality of the Jew was scandalised at the genial rationalism and sensuousness of the pagan; while the pagan, in his turn, was repelled by the morose mysticism and austerity of the Jew. History never repeats itself in all particulars. But, so far as repetition is possible, it repeated itself many centuries after, when Puritanism—representing the nearest approach to the sad and stern Hebraic conception of life that the Western mind ever achieved—declared itself the enemy of Romanism, mainly because the latter retained so much of the pagan love for form and delight in things sensuous. Cromwell’s Ironsides illustrated this attitude by marching to battle singing the Psalms of the Hebrew bard. It is given to few mortals, blessed with a calm and truly catholic genius, to reconcile the rival attitudes, and, with Matthew Arnold, to recognise that “it is natural that man should take pleasure in his senses. It is natural, also, that he should take refuge in his heart and imagination from his misery.”

CHAPTER II
THE JEW IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE

The animosity between Jew and Gentile grew in intensity and bitterness under the Roman rule, and its growth was marked by various acts of mutual violence which finally resulted in the disruption of the Jewish State and the dispersion of the Jewish race over the inhabited globe. Already in the first half of the second century B.C. we find a praetor peregrinus ordering the Jews to leave the shores of Italy within ten days. This was only the commencement of a long series of similar measures, all indicative of the repugnance inspired by the Jewish colonists. ♦63 B.C.♦ The hostility was enhanced by Pompey’s sack of Jerusalem and his severity towards the people and the priests of Palestine. Even in Rome, the hospitable harbour of countless races and creeds, there was no place for these unfortunate Semitic exiles, and their sojourn was punctuated by periodical expulsions. History is silent on the first settlement of Jews in the capital of the world, though the origin of their community may plausibly be traced to the embassy of Numenius.[8] In any case, at the time of Pompey’s expedition they already had their own quarter in Rome, on the right bank of the Tiber, and their multitude and cohesion, even then, were such that a contemporary writer did not hesitate to state that a Governor of Palestine, if unpopular in his province, might safely count on being hissed when he returned home.

♦59 B.C.♦

It was not long after that date that Cicero pleaded the cause of the Praetor Flaccus, accused of extortion during his government of Asia Minor. The Roman Jews took a keen interest in the case, and many of them crowded to the trial, for among other charges brought against the ex-praetor was that of having robbed the Temple of Jerusalem. When Cicero reached that count of the indictment, he gave eloquent testimony to the importance of the Jewish element in Rome, to the feelings which he, in common with others, entertained towards them, and to his own want of spirit. “Thou well knowest,” says the orator, addressing the Prosecutor, “how great is their multitude, how great their concord, how powerful they are in our public assemblies. But I will speak in an undertone, so that none but the judges may hear. For there is no lack of individuals ready to incite those fellows against me and all honourable persons. But I will not help them to do so.” Then, in a lowered voice Cicero proceeds to defend his client’s conduct towards the “barbarous superstition” of the Jews, and his patriotic defiance of the “turbulent mob who invade our public assemblies.” “If Pompey,” he says, “did not touch the treasures of the Temple, when he took Jerusalem, his forbearance was but another proof of his prudence: he avoided giving cause of complaint to so suspicious and slanderous a nation. It was not respect for the religion of Jews and enemies that hindered him, but regard for his own reputation.... Every nation has its own religion. We have ours. Whilst Jerusalem was yet unconquered, and the Jews lived in peace, even then they displayed a fanatical repugnance to the splendour of our state, the dignity of our name, and the institutions of our ancestors. But now the hatred which the race nourished towards our rule has been more clearly shown by force of arms. How little the immortal gods love this race has been proved by its defeat and by its humiliation.”[9]

Time did not heal the wound. Pompey had already amalgamated the Jewish kingdom in the Roman province of Syria and carried the last of the Hasmonaean princes captive to Rome. Five years later the proconsul Sabinius stripped the High Priest of the last shreds of civil authority and divided Judaea into five administrative districts. ♦57, 56, 55 B.C.♦ Frequent insurrections broke out in Palestine, and were quelled with greater or less difficulty; the last of them resulting in the robbery of the Temple of a great part of its riches by the Proconsul Marcus Crassus, while not long after the Quaestor Cassius, who acted as Governor after the death of Crassus, sold 30,000 disaffected Jews into slavery; and this state of things lasted till the fall of the Roman Republic.

♦47 B.C.♦

Julius Caesar, like Alexander, was not slow to realise the weight of the Jewish factor in the complex problem presented by the conglomeration of nations which he had set himself to rule. The numbers of the Jews scattered throughout the Empire entitled them to serious consideration; their wealth, their activity, and their unity rendered them worthy of conciliation. Moreover, Caesar, with the eye of a true statesman, saw that the representatives of this race, so capable of adapting themselves to new climatic and political conditions, and yet so tenacious of their peculiar characteristics, might help to promote that cosmopolitan spirit which was the soul of the Roman Empire. These considerations were further reinforced by feelings of gratitude; for Caesar had derived great assistance from the powerful Jewish politician Antipater during his Egyptian campaign. He, therefore, like his illustrious predecessor, granted to the Jews of Alexandria special privileges, shielding their cult from the attacks of the pagan priests, and affording them facilities for commerce, while in Palestine he reunited the five administrative districts under the authority of the High Priest and restored to the Jews some of the territory of which Pompey had deprived them. In Rome also Caesar manifested great friendship to the Jews. The Roman Jews showed that they were not insensible to these acts of kindness. At the tragic death of their benefactor they surpassed all other foreigners in their demonstrations of grief. Amidst the general lamentation, to which every race contributed its share after its own fashion, the Jews, we are told, distinguished themselves by waking and wailing beside the funeral pyre for many nights.[10] This spontaneous offering of sorrow on the part of the foreign subjects of Rome forms the best testimony to the nobility of Rome’s greatest son. Caesar might well claim the title of Father of mankind.

♦44 B.C.♦

The end of Caesar’s life proved also the end of the consideration enjoyed by the Jews under his aegis. Augustus, indeed, unbent so far as to order that prayers for his prosperity should be offered up in the Temple of Jerusalem, and even established a fund for a perpetual sacrifice. But this was only an act of courtesy dictated by reasons of policy. His real feelings towards the Jews and their religion are better illustrated by his biographer’s statement that, while treating the old-established cults with the reverence to which their antiquity and respectability seemed to entitle them, “he held the others in contempt.” Among the gods deemed unworthy of Imperial patronage were those of Egypt and Judaea. During his sojourn in the land of the Pharaohs Augustus refrained from turning aside to visit the temple of Apis. Nor was he more respectful towards Jehovah. On the contrary, “he commended his grandson Caius for not stopping, on his passage through Palestine, at Jerusalem to worship in the Temple.”[11] The ancient writer’s juxtaposition of Apis and Jehovah, linked at last in common bondage, is as significant as it is quaint.

Under the successors of Augustus the Jews of Rome had more than neglect to complain of. Their suppression appears to have been now regarded as a public duty. The biographer of Tiberius, in enumerating that emperor’s virtues, among other proofs of patriotism, includes his persecution of the obnoxious race. After describing the measures taken against “outlandish ceremonies” generally, and how those given to Egyptian and Judaic superstitions were compelled to burn all their ritual vestments and implements, he proceeds to inform us calmly that “the Jewish youth, under pretence of having the military oath of allegiance administered to them, were distributed over the most unhealthy provinces, while the rest of the race, or those who followed their cult, were banished from the city under pain of perpetual servitude if they disobeyed.”[12] The indignation which these arbitrary measures must have stirred up among the Jews found vent in the following reign. The immediate cause of the explosion was Caligula’s order that his own effigy should be placed in the Temple of Jerusalem and that divine honours should be paid to him throughout the empire—an order which, however natural it might have appeared to a Roman, outraged the vital principle of Hebrew monotheism. ♦41 A.D.♦ The result was stern and unanimous resistance on the part of the Jews, bloodshed being only averted by the imperial lunatic’s opportune death.[13]

Meanwhile the Jews of Alexandria shared the woes of their brethren in Palestine and Rome. Their prosperity moved the envy of their Greek fellow-citizens, and the two elements had always met in a commercial rivalry for which they were not unequally matched. If Hebrew astuteness found its hero in Jacob, Odysseus formed a brilliant embodiment of Hellenic resourcefulness. Both characters are typical of their respective races. They are both distinguished not only by strong family affections, by a pathetic love of home when abroad and a passionate longing for travel when at home, by conjugal fidelity tempered by occasional lapses into its opposite, and by deep reverence for the divine, but also by a mastery of wiles and stratagems unsurpassed in any other national literature. It was, therefore, not surprising that the descendants of these versatile heroes should regard each other as enemies. The hostility was increased by social and religious antipathy and by the favours which the Greek kings of Egypt had always showered upon the Jews. The fables and calumnies originally invented by the Seleucid oppressors of Palestine spread to Egypt, where they were amplified by local wits.

Under Augustus and Tiberius the lurking animosity was obliged to content itself with such food as the Greek genius for sarcasm and invective could afford; but the accession of Caligula supplied an opportunity for a more practical display of hatred. The Governor of Alexandria, being in disgrace with the new Emperor and afraid lest the Alexandrians should avail themselves of the circumstance and lodge complaints against him in Rome, became a tool of their prejudices. Two unprincipled scribblers led the anti-Jewish movement. Insult and ridicule were succeeded by violence, and in the summer of 38 A.D. the synagogues of the Jews were polluted with the busts of the Emperor. The governor was induced to deprive the Jews of the civil rights which they had enjoyed so long, and the unfortunate people, thus reduced to the condition of outlaws, were driven out of the divisions of the city which they had hitherto occupied and forced to take up their abode in the harbour. Their dwellings were looted and sacked, the refugees were besieged by the mob in their new quarters, and those who ventured out were seized, tortured, and burnt or crucified. The persecution continued with intermittent vigour until the Jews resolved to send an embassy to Rome to plead their cause before the Emperor. One of the envoys was the famous Jewish Hellenist Philo. Caligula, however, declined to listen to rhetoric or reason; but, on the contrary, he issued the order for his own deification, which, as has been seen, was frustrated only by his death.

Caligula’s successor Claudius favoured the Jews of Palestine for the sake of their King Agrippa, to whose diplomacy he owed in part his crown. But their brethren in Rome suffered another expulsion for “continually disturbing the peace under the instigation of Christ.”[14] The confusion of the Christians with the Jews by the Roman writer is neither uncommon nor unintelligible. But, if the Christians were persecuted as a Jewish sect—secret and, therefore, suspected—the persecution of the Jews themselves was frequently due to their peculiar “superstition.” That, in common with other products of the East, had found its way to Rome, where it acquired great vogue and exercised a strange fascination, especially among women and persons of the lower orders. Many Gentiles visited the synagogues, and some of those who went to scoff remained to worship. Horace, writing in the time of Augustus, makes frequent mention of Judaism,[15] implying that it was spreading and that it formed the topic of conversation in fashionable circles; Josephus mentions a case of the conversion of a noble Roman lady in the reign of Tiberius;[16] Persius, under Caligula and Claudius, sneers at the muttered prayers and gloomy Sabbaths of the Jews and of Roman proselytes to Judaism;[17] while Seneca, under Nero, declares that “to such an extent has the cult of that most accursed of races prevailed that it is already accepted all over the world: the vanquished have given laws to the victors.”[18] Juvenal, writing in the time of Titus and Domitian, bears similar testimony to the prevalence of Judaism among the Romans, many of whom, especially the poor, observed the Jewish Sabbath and dietary laws, practised circumcision, and indulged in Hebrew rites generally.[19] To the Roman satirists these aberrations from good sense and good taste were a rich fountain of ridicule; but serious patriots regarded them with misgiving, as detrimental to public morality. Hence we usually find the expulsions of the Jews and the suppression of their cult accompanied by similar steps taken against Chaldean soothsayers, Egyptian sorcerers, Syrian priests, and other purveyors of rites pernicious to the virtue of Roman men and women.

Under Nero the hostility towards the Jews was temporarily diverted against the Christians, and, while the latter were ruthlessly made to pay with their lives for the Emperor’s criminal aestheticism, the former enjoyed an immunity from persecution, partly secured by feminine influence at Court. But, while the Jews in the West were purchasing a precarious peace and a miserable triumph over the Christians, their brethren in the East were preparing for one of those periodical struggles for independence which move at once the horror and the admiration of the student of Jewish history. The Jews could not bear the sight of the foreign despot in their country. His presence in Jerusalem was a daily insult to Jehovah. The reverses which they had hitherto sustained in their single-combat with the masters of the world had not damped their desire for freedom. Disaster, far from crushing, seemed to invigorate their courage. And for the sake of the Idea they were ready to jeopardise the security and material comfort which they generally enjoyed under the equitable and tolerant rule of the Romans. In the eyes of the zealots the sensible attitude of the higher classes, which acquiesced in the existing state of affairs,—an attitude shared by famous Rabbis such as Jochanan son of Zakkai who re-founded Judaism when the Temple fell—was nothing less than treachery to the national cause. It was felt that, if no attempt were made to check the “seductive arts of Rome,” the whole race would gradually sink into spiritual apathy. Bands of irreconcilables were, as in the time of the Seleucids, scattered about the country and set the example of insubordination by frequent attacks on the Romans and their partisans. These patriots were bound by a vow to spare no one who bended the knee to the hated foreigner, and they fulfilled it with all the scrupulous cruelty which characterises the vows of enthusiasts. The pursuit of personal profit, as not unfrequently happens, was combined with the pursuit of patriotism, and there soon appeared a secret revolutionary association whose emissaries insinuated themselves into the very precincts of the Temple and there struck down those who had incurred their wrath. Sporadic assassination was gradually organised into a regular conspiracy, and the murderers of yesterday were now ennobled by the appellation of rebels. The voices of prudence and moderation were drowned in the clamour of patriotism; the peace party was terrorised into a zeal for liberty which it was far from feeling, and the standard of rebellion was unfurled.

♦66 A.D.♦

In the meantime Alexandria witnessed another explosion of the Graeco-Jewish feud. The Greeks determined to petition Nero for the withdrawal of the rights of citizenship restored to the Jews by Claudius. A public meeting was held in order to select the ambassadors who were to carry the petition to Rome. Some Jews were discovered in the amphitheatre where the meeting was held, and three of them were dragged by the mob through the streets. Their co-religionists, fired with indignation, rushed to the amphitheatre, threatening to commit it and the assembled Greeks to the flames. The Governor attempted to pacify the crowd; but, being himself a renegade Jew, he had little influence over his former brethren, who cast his apostasy in his teeth. Enraged thereat, he let his legions loose upon the Jewish quarter. This was soon converted into an inferno of multiform brutality, wherein fifty thousand Jews are said to have miserably perished.

To return to Palestine. The revolt against the Roman rule, begun in 66 A.D., ended in the famous fall of Jerusalem four years later. ♦70 A.D. Sept. 7.♦ The desperate obstinacy of the defence, and the terrible barbarity which had disgraced the rising, provoked the conquerors to pitiless retaliation. The holy city, which had once been “the joy of the whole earth” and God’s own habitation, was no more. Zion lay deserted. Her sons were slain, and her daughters sold into slavery and shame. And the Prophet’s words seemed to have come true: “Her gates shall lament and mourn; and she, being desolate, shall sit upon the ground.”[20] Those Jews who had not been put to death or driven forth to seek a refuge among their brethren, already scattered over the East and West, were preserved to accompany Titus to Rome as prisoners of war, to supply food for the wild beasts of the arena, victims for the gladiators’ sword in the amphitheatre, and amusement for the sporting public of the capital of the world. Most awful calamity of all, the Temple of Zion—the sanctuary in which the pride and the hope of the whole race centred—was doomed to the flames, and its contents were carried off to grace the pagan victor’s triumph. Among these treasures, hallowed by the veneration of fifteen centuries, were the shittim wood table and the seven-branched candlestick of pure gold, both wrought out of the liberal offerings which the children of Israel had brought to Moses for the service of the tabernacle, at the bidding of God in the desert. They were the works of wise-hearted men of old, selected for the task by the Lord Himself, and instructed thereto by His spirit. For nearly four centuries these spoils of Zion served to adorn the Roman Temple of Peace, until an avenger arose and, having dealt with Rome as Rome had dealt with Jerusalem, transferred them to Carthage.

This national catastrophe, commemorated as it was for all time on the imperishable marbles of the triumphal arch of Titus, left an indelible impression on the mind of Israel. It aroused the strongest feelings of the Hebrew nature, and fixed a chasm between Jew and Gentile which even the lapse of long centuries proved unable to bridge. The conqueror’s name was handed down the ages as a synonym for everything that is monstrous and horrible, and his language was tabooed even in epitaphs, the tombs in the Jewish catacombs at Rome bearing few Latin inscriptions, though Greek ones abound.

Here we may pause to enquire into the causes of this persistent warfare.

CHAPTER III
JUDAISM AND PAGANISM

Over and above the two great causes of the unpopularity of the Jew, already adduced, namely, man’s intolerance of dissent, and the antipathy between the European and the Asiatic, there was another and more obvious barrier to a good understanding between the two elements—one sin which the Gentile could not pardon in the Jew: the Jew’s infatuated arrogance—that contempt for all men born outside the pale of the Synagogue, which national humiliation, instead of effacing, had deepened and embittered. It was this provincial spirit that had prevented the message of Moses from spreading abroad, as the message of Jesus and the message of Mohammed spread in after times. It was the same spirit that now forbade the Jew to feel at home in the presence of the Gentile. Judaism has always lacked the magnetic attraction of Christianity and Islam, not because the rule of life which it prescribes is less pure, or the prospect of peace which it holds out less alluring to the heart that yearns for rest, but because, unlike Christianity and Islam, it deliberately repels instead of inviting outsiders. The doors of Moses’s heaven are jealously closed to the stranger; and those who have entered into it have at no time been more numerous than those who have come out of it. When Jehovah ceased to be the God of a clan, he became the God of a nation, but he could not, and would not, become the God of mankind. In spite of periodical attempts made by individual prophets and Rabbis to soar above the barriers of narrow nationalism, and to infuse their own noble spirit into the teaching of their predecessors and into the minds of their contemporaries, in spite, also, of the broadening of the conception of the divine, due to contact with the sublime religion of Babylon, Jehovah, to the ordinary Jew, remained an essentially tribal god. His interests continued to be bound up with the interests of the chosen people. An elaborate fence of ceremonial and custom separated this people from all other peoples. On leaving their native soil the Jews carried away with them all the spiritual pride and all the pious prejudices which distinguished their ancestors. A wider knowledge of the world and its inhabitants failed to broaden their sympathies. Intermarriage with the Gentiles was prohibited as strictly as ever, in obedience to the old commandment: “Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.”[21] And so it came to pass that, while they appeared to the Gentile a strange and unsocial species of men, to them the Gentile continued to be an unclean animal.

Had it not been for its stern and exclusive spirit, the Hebrew cult might have excited the derision or the scornful curiosity of the Pagans, but it would have hardly been made the object of systematic attack. The Jews would have continued their eccentric worship of “the sky and the clouds”[22] unmolested, though unrespected, and their Temple, with all its uncanny “emptiness,”[23] would have remained standing; for Paganism was nothing if not tolerant. The religion of classical antiquity was a matter of convention rather than of conviction. The earnest and the unhappy sought solace in philosophy; the masses in superstition. Philosophy did not degenerate into theology, but left theology to the poets who, unfettered by doctrine, created or transformed the popular deities and legends, purging or perverting them according to the promptings of their own imagination, or the requirements of their art. The priests in pagan society counted for less than the poets. The word “heresy” in pagan Greece meant simply “free choice,” and later “a philosophical school.” The terms “orthodox” and “heterodox” had hardly as yet acquired their invidious meaning. Religious rancour, that baneful mother of manifold misery to mankind, was not yet born. There is no parallel in antiquity to that unremitting and systematic war of creeds by which, in later ages, men tried to crush those who disagreed with them in matters of metaphysical conjecture. Tolerance and speculative freedom were never better understood than in pagan Greece and Rome. The Pagan was content to navigate his own ship by his own compass—whether of head or of heart—without insisting that every one else should adopt the same compass, or be drowned. The total absence of dogma, which forms at once the charm and the foible of polytheism, while precluding persecution, encouraged a free exchange of religious traditions, not only between sister nations, as the Greek and the Italian, but even between entirely foreign and even hostile races. Thus, while the Latin writers hastened, more or less successfully, to identify the deities of Italy with those of Hellas, Greek travellers in the East, from Herodotus onwards, habitually sought and found, or imagined that they found, common attributes between the divinities of Olympus and those of Memphis and Sidon. Frequent intercourse facilitated the work of assimilation, and not only specific attributes but whole gods and goddesses found their way from one pagan country to another, where they were welcomed. The doors of the Pantheon stood hospitably open to all comers.

In this religious brotherhood of nations there was one disturbing unit: one race alone stubbornly and offensively declined to join the concert. The Jews held that their own religion was wholly true; the religions of others were wholly false. They arrogantly boasted that they alone were God’s people. They believed themselves to be in league with the Creator of the Universe, sharing His secrets and monopolising His favours; for had not the Lord entered into a solemn and everlasting covenant with Abraham? It was they whom the Lord had selected to be a holy and special people unto Himself, above all peoples that are upon the face of the earth: “Ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord, and my servants whom I have chosen.” It was for them that the laws of Nature had been suspended; that the sea was made dry land; that the heavens rained manna, and the rocks gave forth water; that mounts had quaked; that the sun and moon had stood still, and the walls of cities fallen down flat at the sound of the trumpet. It was for them that prophets and inspired men had revealed the oracles and the will of God.

If the Pagan was ready to forgive Jewish eccentricity, no man could tolerate Jewish intolerance; and the resentment which the Jew’s aloofness aroused in the breast even of the educated Gentile is palpable in the pages of many ancient authors. Only three Greek writers make a favourable mention of the Jews, the most eminent among them being Strabo the geographer. He, curiously enough, speaks with admiration of the spiritual worship of Jehovah as contrasted with the monstrous idolatry of Egypt and the anthropomorphic idolatry of Greece. Less curious, but no less rare, is the writer’s appreciation of the moral excellence of the Mosaic Law and his reverence for the Temple of Jerusalem. Strabo’s liberal attitude, however, was not shared by the Romans. They are emphatic and unanimous in their condemnation of Judaism—Horace, Juvenal, Persius, Pliny, and, above all, Tacitus. The great historian seems to give utterance to a common sentiment in denouncing the rites of the Jews as “novel and contrary to the ideas of other mortals.” He accuses the followers of Moses “of holding profane all things that to us are sacred; and, on the other hand, of indulging in things which to us are forbidden.”[24] The Hebrew horror of the worship of images and of the deification of ancestors and Emperors, as exemplified by the fierce storm which Caligula’s mad order to have his own statue set up in the Temple raised, gave great offence to the Romans; while the Jewish marriage laws, which permitted a brother to wed his deceased brother’s wife and an uncle his own niece, could not but be considered by the Romans as a sanction of incest. It is, therefore, not to be wondered at that the severe moralist should brand Mosaic institutions as “evil and disgusting, owing their prevalence to their very depravity.” Likewise, the national movement which, as already mentioned, under the splendid leadership of the Maccabees resulted in the liberation of the Hebrew mind from the tyranny of Hellenism to Tacitus is nothing more than a wicked rebellion against the Macedonian Kings’ laudable efforts to improve the morals of their subjects by the introduction of Greek civilisation. It cannot be denied that the victory of the national party was brought about by “expulsions of citizens, destructions of cities, massacres of brothers, wives and parents,” and other atrocities in which the leaders freely indulged; but it certainly is less than the whole truth to assert that the movement had for its selfish object the restoration to authority of a royal family which, when restored, fomented superstition with a view to “using the influence of the priesthood as a prop of its own power.”[25] Even the good points in the character of the Jews, “their unswerving loyalty to their own kith and kin and their prompt benevolence,” which the truthful Tacitus acknowledges, are in his eyes vitiated by “their hostility and hatred towards all aliens,”[26] and to him, as to so many of his compatriots and contemporaries, the Jews are “a most vile race,” and the Christian sect of them, at all events, “the enemies of mankind.”[27]

This common estimate of the Jew was, of course, very largely based on an ignorance of Jewish life and religion that would be ridiculous but for its terrible consequences. As early as 169 B.C. we hear of the blood accusation which is still brought against the Jews by their enemies. When Antiochus Epiphanes desecrated the Temple of Jerusalem, among other fables that he and his partisans promulgated, it was rumoured that there was found in the sanctuary a Greek kept for a sacrificial purpose by the priests who were said to be in the habit of killing a Greek every year and of feeding on his intestines. On the other hand, the Jews never did anything to dispel the ignorance which rendered such grotesque myths credible. If the advocate of the Jew is inclined to charge the Gentile with intolerance, the advocate of the latter is amply justified in retorting the charge. A race which avoided the places of public amusement as scenes of immorality and idolatry could not but be considered morose and unsocial; a race which, especially after the destruction of the Temple, banished mirth and music even from its wedding feasts, would naturally be shunned as sullen and suspected as fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; a race which would “neither eat nor sleep nor intermarry with strangers” might expect to be represented as “most prone to lust” and as holding “nothing unlawful amongst themselves.” The outward signs of Jewish aloofness were evident to the most careless gaze; the inward, spiritual beauty, and the moral worth of Judaism were not so easily recognised. Thus, prejudiced views, born of Pagan ignorance and nourished by Hebrew intolerance, created a volume of animosity which, as has already been seen, cost its object many sorrows. But worse things were yet to come.

CHAPTER IV
THE DISPERSION

The struggle for freedom already narrated and its ruthless suppression were not calculated to diminish the Jew’s unpopularity at Rome. Under the successors of Titus we have fresh persecutions to chronicle. The Jews were heavily taxed, and heathen proselytes to Judaism were punished with loss of property, with exile, or with death—penalties from which not even kinship with the Emperor could save the culprit. ♦94 A.D.♦ At last the Jews, driven from the city by an edict of Domitian, were forced to live in the valley of Egeria which was grudgingly let out to them. This valley, once green with a sacred grove famed in legend as the place where “King Numa kept nightly tryst with his divine mistress,” was now notorious as a desolation of malarious mud deposited by the overflow of the Tiber. In this miserable locality the Jews were allowed to build their Proseucha, or house for prayer—a rallying-point for a congregation of poor wretches “whose basket and wisp of hay are all their furniture.”[28] Thus Juvenal in one luminous line draws a picture as vivid as it is repulsive of the condition of Israel at Rome towards the end of the first century of our era. It may be added that the same edict which drove the Jews from Rome also expelled the philosophers, among them Epictetus.

A streak of light amid general gloom is shed by the reign of Domitian’s successor. Nerva was one of the few Emperors who knew how to reconcile absolute power with personal freedom, and the Jews shared with the rest of his subjects those blessings of justice and liberty that induced Tacitus to celebrate his short reign as the beginning of an era in which “one was permitted to think what he chose and to say what he thought.”[29] ♦Sept. 96–Jan. 98.♦ The Jews were allowed to worship their God in peace, and the fiscal tyranny under which they laboured was lightened. Nerva’s toleration is commemorated by a coin bearing on the reverse the Jewish symbol of a palm-tree and the inscription Fisci Judaici calumnia sublata.

However, kindness had as little effect upon the Jews as cruelty. Their religious and national antipathy to the alien ruler blinded them to the benefits of Roman administration. The memory of their defeat rankled, and the desire for emancipation was intensified by hunger for revenge. The prosperity of the present was valued only inasmuch as it enabled them to avenge their sufferings in the past. Their subjection was regarded merely as a trial and as a sign of the approaching advent of the Deliverer destined to rebuild the Temple and to raise the children of Israel to the sovereignty of the world—the Messiah whom the Lord had promised to His people through the prophets of old. The forty years that had elapsed since the capture of Jerusalem by Titus were for the Jews of the Empire at large years of comparative rest and recovery. All the strength gathered during that period was now put forth in a last desperate dash for freedom.

The Babylonian Jews gave the signal for the holy war by opposing the Emperor Trajan’s plans of conquest in Mesopotamia. ♦115 A.D.♦ Thence the insurrection rapidly spread to Palestine, Egypt, Cyrene, and Cyprus. In every one of these countries the infuriated rabble fell upon their neighbours, whom the suddenness and unexpectedness of the attack rendered an easy prey to the rage of the assailants. If one tenth of the tales of horror related by Dion Cassius be true, it is sufficient to explain the hatred inspired by the Jews in after times, and to extenuate, if not to justify, the terrible retribution which followed. Two hundred and twenty thousand Greeks and Romans were, according to Dion, butchered in Cyrene. Lybia was utterly devastated. Two hundred and forty thousand Greeks were slaughtered in Cyprus. Great numbers of Greek and Roman heathens and Christians perished in Egypt, and many of the victims were sawed asunder after the fashion set by David, and afterwards imitated by the Mohammedan conqueror of the Balkan Peninsula. It is even added that the butchers, not satiated by the mere sight of the mangled bodies, devoured the flesh, licked up the blood, girded themselves with the entrails, and wrapped themselves in the skins of their victims—abominations which are only credible to one familiar with the treatment mutually meted out by the inhabitants of the Near East at the present day.[30]

♦117 A.D.♦

The insurrection was quelled, and temporary calm restored, by Trajan’s successor, Hadrian, who appears to have yielded to the Jews’ demand for the rebuilding of the Temple. The Emperor’s assent was received with wild enthusiasm. The Jews believed that the day of national rehabilitation had come:

“No more the death sound of the trumpet’s cry—

No more they perish at the foe’s rash hands;

But trophies shall float in the world o’er evil.

Dear Jewish land! fair town, inspirer of songs,

No more shall unclean foot of Greeks within thy bounds

Go forth.”[31]

Thus sang an unknown Jewish poet of Alexandria, venting his spleen against the Greeks in Greek verse. But the dreamers were rudely awakened. The Emperor was not slow to perceive that the restoration of the Temple would mean a perpetuation of the Jewish problem. He, therefore, qualified his original concession by terms which were not acceptable to the Jews. Their bitter disenchantment and their hatred of Hadrian were concealed for a while. ♦130 A.D.♦ The Emperor visited Palestine and endeavoured to conciliate the Jews by bringing them into closer contact with the Pagans. But he unfortunately adopted towards that end the very means calculated to defeat it. He proposed to rebuild Jerusalem on a plan which the Jews regarded as a deliberate desecration. He did not understand that what the nation wanted was not fusion with the foreigners but rigid separation from them. Again the Jews concealed their feelings; and while the deluded Emperor wrote to the Senate at home praising the peaceful disposition and loyalty of this much-maligned people, they were preparing for a fresh revolt. Arms were manufactured and hidden in underground passages, secret means of communication were established, and Hadrian had scarcely turned his back on Jerusalem when the Jews once more “lifted themselves up to establish a vision.”

♦132 A.D.♦

The rebellion was headed by Bar-Cochba, in whom the enthusiastic mob recognised the prophesied Messiah and round whose standard they rallied in force sufficient to defy the Imperial legions for two years. The Jewish Christians, who refused to recognise the new Messiah and to take part in the holy war, were remorselessly persecuted, and the rebellion blazed from one end of the country to the other. However, Hadrian’s army, under the able command of Julius Severus and of the Emperor himself, prevailed in the end. ♦135 A.D.♦ Bar-Cochba was defeated, and the last sparks of the insurrection were extinguished beneath mountains of corpses. It is reckoned (though these figures are scarcely trustworthy) that no fewer than five hundred and eighty thousand Jews succumbed to the sword during the war, in addition to an unknown multitude starved or burnt to death. Palestine was turned into a wilderness. All the fortresses were demolished, and nearly one thousand towns and villages lay in ashes. The destruction of the Jewish State, commenced by Titus, was accomplished by Hadrian. The spot upon which the proud Temple had once stood was now defiled by the plough, and all the holy sites were devoted to idols. The Samaritans shared the ruin of their secular enemies. Mount Gerizim also was polluted by a shrine to Jupiter, while on Mount Golgotha, where a century before the awful crime had been committed, a fane was dedicated to the Goddess of Lust. A pagan colony of Phoenician and Syrian soldiers, who had served their time, occupied part of Jerusalem, the very name of which was soon forgotten in that of Aelia Capitolina. Judaism was interdicted under heavy penalties, and the Jews were forbidden to enter the city of their fathers. The Babylonian captivity had been to the children of Israel only a fatherly rod; but this last calamity proved their utter ruin. Henceforth they are doomed to wander among the sons of men, a sign and a scorn to the nations of the earth.

The slaughter ceased as soon as there ceased to be any rebels to slay. A period of compulsion and persecution, as the Jewish writers term it, ensued; but the fear of further trouble having disappeared once and for ever, the Romans forgot their anger. Though Israel had been extinguished as a state it was suffered to live as a sect. The throne had perished; but the altar remained. At first danger induced the Jews to compromise and to dissemble. A council of Rabbis, secretly held at Lydda, decided that death by torture might be avoided by the breach of all the commandments, except the three vital prohibitions of idolatry, adultery, and murder. But the reign of terror and hypocrisy did not last long. ♦138 A.D.♦ Under Antoninus Pius most of Hadrian’s decrees were revoked, and a new “red-letter day” was added to the Jewish Calendar. Though still forbidden to enter Jerusalem, the Jews were allowed to return to Palestine. Both in Italy and in the provinces of the Empire they enjoyed all the privileges that had been conferred on their fathers by the best of Antoninus’s predecessors. While admitted to the dignities, and sometimes to the emoluments, of municipal life on terms of equality with their fellow-subjects, they were suffered to maintain their social and religious independence under the jurisdiction of a patriarch whose seat was at Tiberias, and who exercised his authority and collected an annual tribute through his representatives in each colony.

♦218–222 A.D.♦

The follies of some Emperors proved as beneficial to the Jews as the wisdom of others. Heliogabalus carried his superstitious veneration for the Mosaic Law to the length of circumcision and abstinence from pork. ♦222–235 A.D.♦ The Syrian Emperor Alexander Severus, nicknamed by the Greeks Archisynagogos, or Head of the Synagogue, expressed his eclectic friendliness to Judaism by placing in his private apartment a picture of Abraham next to those of Orpheus and Christ, and by causing the Jewish moral maxim, “Do not unto others what thou wouldst not that others did unto you,” to be engraven on the Imperial palace and on the public buildings. During this reign the Jewish Patriarch possessed an almost royal authority, and Hadrian’s decrees, which forbade the Jews to enter Jerusalem and to exercise the functions of judges, were repealed.

Under the circumstances, Israel throve and multiplied apace. Synagogues sprang up in every important city in the Empire, and the Jews fasted and feasted without fear and often without moderation. Tolerance begot tolerance. Religious zeal, unopposed, lost much of its bitterness, and the Jews gradually reconciled themselves to their new position. Their hatred of the Pagan was almost forgotten in their hatred of the Christian; and, while they helped in the occasional persecution of the latter, they aped the manners of the former. The ladies of the Jewish Patriarch’s family esteemed it an honour to be allowed to dress their hair according to the Roman fashion and to learn Greek. The Jewish laws forbidding Hellenic art and restricting the intercourse with the Gentiles ceased to be enforced. But nothing shows the extent and the depth of the repugnance which the Gentile inspired in the Jew more clearly than the fact that the abrogation of the law of the Synagogue, which prohibited the use of the oil of the heathens, was regarded as so daring an innovation that the Babylonian Jews at first refused to believe the report. Bread made by the heathens continued to be tabooed.

The faith in the coming of the Messiah, indeed, was still as firmly held as ever. But, in the absence of persecution, from a definite expectation it faded into a pleasantly vague hope. While cherishing their dream for the future, the Jews were sensible enough not to neglect the realities of the present. The subjugation of the earth by force of arms might come in God’s good time; meanwhile they resolved to achieve its conquest by force of wit; and it was then that they developed that commercial dexterity and laid the foundations of that financial supremacy which have earned them the envy of the Gentiles, and which, in after ages, were destined to cost them so much suffering. Their skill and their knowledge, their industry and their frugality, ensured to them a speedy success. By the end of the third century their European colonies had spread from Illyria in the East to Spain in the West, to Gaul and the provinces of the Rhine in the North; and it appears that, though trade, including trade in slaves, was their principal occupation, their prosperity in many of these settlements was also derived to some small extent from agriculture and the handicrafts. The civil and military services were also indebted to their talents, and, in a word, these Semitic exiles, though their peculiar customs were mercilessly ridiculed on the stage, could have none but a sentimental regret for the loss of Palestine. Their position in the Roman Empire at this period was a prototype of the position which they have since held in the world at large: “Everywhere and nowhere at home, and everywhere and nowhere powerful.”[32]

But the calm was not to last, and signs of the long terrible tempest, which was to toss the ship of Israel in after years, were already visible on the horizon.

CHAPTER V
CHRISTIANITY AND THE JEWS

In dream I saw two Jews that met by chance,

One old, stern-eyed, deep-browed, yet garlanded

With living light of love around his head,

The other young, with sweet seraphic glance.

Around went on the Town’s satanic dance,

Hunger a-piping while at heart he bled.

Shalom Aleichem, mournfully each said,

Nor eyed the other straight but looked askance.

—Israel Zangwill.

Christianity, long despised and persecuted, had by slow yet steady steps made its way among the nations, until from a creed of slaves it was raised by Constantine to the sovereignty of the Roman world. ♦323 A.D.♦ The cross from being an emblem of shame became the ensign of victory, and the great church of the Resurrection, built by the first Christian Emperor on the hill of Calvary, proclaimed to mankind the triumph of the new religion. But the gospel which was intended to inculcate universal peace, charity, and good-will among men brought nothing but new causes of discord, cruelty, and rancour. Apostles and missionaries are apt to imagine that religion is everything and national character nothing, that men are formed by the creeds which they profess, and that, if you extended to all nations the same doctrines, you would produce in all the same dispositions. The history of religion, however, conclusively demonstrates that it is not churches which form men, but men who form churches. An idea when transplanted into foreign soil, in order to take root and bear fruit, must first adapt itself to the conditions of the soil. The nations of the West in embracing Christ’s teaching assimilated from it only as much as was congenial to them and conveniently overlooked the rest. Mercy—the essence of the doctrine—was sacrificed to the passions of the disciples. Henceforth the old warfare between Jew and Gentile is to manifest itself chiefly as a struggle between the Synagogue and the Church, between the teaching of the New Hebrew Prophet and the Old Hebrew Prophet, so beautifully imagined by a modern Jewish writer in the lines quoted above.

The Jews were told that the observances of the Mosaic Law were instituted on account of the hardness of their hearts and were no longer acceptable in the sight of God; that the circumcision of the spirit had superseded the circumcision of the flesh; that faith, and not works, is the key to eternal life; that their national calamities were judgments for their rejection and crucifixion of Jesus; and that their only hope of peace in this world and of salvation in the next lay in conversion. Nor was the enmity towards the Jews confined to refutation of their doctrines and attempts at persuasion. The Jews had always been held by the Christians responsible for all the persecutions and calumnies with which their sect had been assailed. “The other nations,” says Justin to his Jewish collocutor in 140 A.D., “are not so much to blame for this injustice towards us and Christ as you, the cause of their evil prejudice against Him and us, who are from Him. After the crucifixion and resurrection you sent forth chosen men from Jerusalem throughout the earth, saying that there has arisen a godless heresy, that of the Christians.”[33] The accusation is repeated, among others, by Origen: “The Jews who at the commencement of the teaching of Christianity spread evil reports of the Word, that, forsooth, the Christians sacrifice a child and partake of its flesh, and also that they in their love for deeds of darkness extinguish the lights and indulge in promiscuous incest.”[34] Here we find the sufferings of Christ linked to the sufferings of His followers; the crime of the Pharisees associated with those of their descendants; and, in defiance of the essential tenet of Christianity, and of the sublime example of its author, the sins of the fathers are now to be visited upon the children. The Christians, while gratifying their own lust for revenge, flattered themselves that they avenged the wrongs of Christ; by oppressing the Jews they were convinced that they carried out the decrees of Providence. Thus pious vindictiveness was added to the other and older motives of hatred—a new ring to the plant of anti-Judaism. But for the existence of those other motives of hatred, with which theology had little or nothing to do, the theological odium henceforth bestowed upon the Jews would have been merely preposterous. The founder of Christianity, Himself a Jew, had appeared to His own people as the Messiah whom they eagerly expected and with all the divine prophecies concerning whose advent they were thoroughly familiar. They investigated His credentials and, as a nation, they were not satisfied that He was what His followers claimed Him to be. Instead of remembering that His Jewish fellow-countrymen were, after all, the most competent to form a judgment of their new Teacher, as they had done in the case of other inspired Rabbis and prophets, the Christians proceeded to insult and outrage them for having come to the conclusion that He failed to fulfil the conditions required by their Scriptures. St. Jerome, though devoted to the study of Hebrew, expressed his hatred of the race in forcible language. Augustine followed in his older contemporary’s footsteps, and abhorrence of the Jews became an article of faith, sanctioned by these oracles of Orthodoxy and acted upon by the pious princes of later times.

At first Constantine had placed the religion of the Jews on a footing of equality with those of the other subject nations. But his tolerance vanished at his conversion. Under his reign, the Jews were subjected to innumerable restrictions and extortions; the faithful were forbidden to hold any intercourse with the murderers of Christ, and all the gall which could be spared from the sectarian feuds within the fold of the Church was poured upon the enemy outside. Judaism was branded as a godless sect, and its extermination was advocated as a religious duty. The apostasy of Christians to Judaism was punished severely, while the apostasy of Jews to Christianity was strenuously encouraged, and the Synagogue was deprived of the precious privilege of persecution, which henceforth was to be the exclusive prerogative of the Church. The edict of Hadrian, which forbade the Jews to live in Jerusalem, was re-enacted by Constantine, who only allowed them on the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple to mourn on its ruins—for a consideration.

♦337♦

But the real persecution did not commence until the accession of Constantius. Then the Rabbis were banished, marriages between Jews and Christian women were punished with death, and so was the circumcision of Christian slaves; while the communities of Palestine suffered terrible oppression at the hands of the Emperor’s cousin Gallus, and were goaded to a rebellion which ended in the extirpation of many thousands and the destruction of many cities. ♦352♦ But the Jews endured all these calamities with the patience characteristic of their race, until relief came from an unexpected quarter.

In 361 Julian, whom the Church stigmatised by the title of Apostate, ascended the throne of Constantine the Great. Julian’s ambition was to banish the worship of the Cross from his Empire, to reform paganism and to restore it to its ancient glory. Brought up under wise Greek teachers, he was early imbued with a profound love and reverence for the beliefs and customs of Hellas. He felt strongly the instinctive repugnance of the Hellenic spirit to Oriental modes of thought. The Christian creed repelled him, and the pathos of Christ’s career left him unmoved. To Julian Jesus was simply the “dead Jew.” His philosophical attachment to paganism and contempt for “the religion of the Galileans” were strengthened by his experience of the Christian tutors to whom his later education had been entrusted by his cousin Constantius. While in his cousin’s power, Julian had been forced to conceal his views and to observe outwardly the rules of a creed which he despised. Compulsory conformity deepened his resentment towards the Christian Church, without, however, blinding him to the beauty of the principle of toleration which she denied. Although, on becoming Emperor, he favoured those who remained faithful to the old religion, Julian did not oppress the followers of the new, holding that the intrinsic superiority of paganism would eventually secure its triumph. His confidence was misplaced. The classical ritual was no longer acceptable to serious men, and the Neo-Platonic mysticism which endeavoured to transform sensuous polytheism into a spiritual philosophy possessed no attraction for the multitude. Christianity had adopted enough of pagan speculation to conciliate the educated and more than enough of pagan practice to satisfy the ignorant. The Greek pantheon had ceased to have any reason for existing. All that imperial encouragement could do was to galvanise into a semblance of life a body that was already dead.

But though Julian’s success was ephemeral and the revival of polytheism impossible, yet the attempt brought for a while pagan tolerance to a world distracted by Christian sectarianism and the sanguinary squabbles of metaphysicians and priests. Towards the Jews Julian proved particularly gracious. He introduced Jehovah to his chorus of deities, and treated Him with especial reverence. It was enough for Julian that Jehovah was a god. He cared little about the claims to universal and exclusive veneration advanced on His behalf by some of His worshippers. The Emperor’s desire to humble the Christians, combined with his genuine pity for the suffering Jews, suggested to him the design of rebuilding the Temple of Jerusalem, of investing it with its ancient splendour, and of recalling the children of Israel to the home of their fathers.

Alypius of Antioch, Julian’s faithful friend, was entrusted with the execution of the scheme, and was sent to Palestine for the purpose. The Jews saw the finger of God in the Imperial enthusiast’s resolve. It seemed to them that the long-expected day of redemption had dawned, and they answered the summons with alacrity. Leaving their homes and their occupations, they crowded to Zion from far and near, both men and women, bringing with them their offerings for the service of the Temple, gold and silver and purple and silk, even as their ancestors had done in obedience to the call of the Lord through Moses, and again on their return from Babylon in the days of yore. No Pharaoh with a taste for monumental architecture had ever exacted from his subjects a larger tribute in money and labour than this pagan Prince of Zionists now received freely from the children of Israel. To share in the work was a title to everlasting glory, while ignominy would be the portion of those who shirked it. But there were few who wished to do so. The building of the Temple was a labour of love, and no sacrifice was deemed too great, no service too painful for the realisation of the dream which so many generations of Jews had already dreamt, and which so many more were fated to dream in the future.[35]

♦363♦

Alas! the glorious self-denial of a whole race was wasted, and its hopes were dashed to the ground by the Emperor’s untimely death. The work was abandoned six months after its inception, all traces of it soon vanished, and the site over which the plough had once been drawn remained a final loneliness. The pilgrims dispersed, disheartened and abashed, and their enemies rejoiced. The Christians, in their turn, detected the finger of God in this failure of the Jews to escape the lot assigned to them from above, as a punishment for their sins, and continued to assist Providence.

♦364–378♦

Under the Arian Emperor Valens the Jews were left unmolested. ♦379–395♦ Theodosius the Great also protected them against the attacks of fanaticism, and ♦395–408♦ under the rule of Arcadius they were able to purchase peace by bribing the Emperor’s favourites. ♦408–450♦ But with the accession of Theodosius the Younger orthodoxy and intolerance, which had been interrupted by the short reign of heresy, were restored to power.

The effects of this restoration were soon felt by the Jews. John Chrysostom had been denouncing them in Antioch, and the preacher’s eloquence was translated into acts of violence by the people of the neighbouring town of Imnestar. ♦415♦ The occasion of the riot was the Feast of Purim, when the Jews celebrated their triumph over Haman by a carnival of intoxication and ribaldry accompanied with the crucifixion of their enemy in effigy. The merriment, it appears, was further accentuated by coarse jokes at the expense of Christianity. The Christians of the town, who had frequently complained of these orgies in vain, now accused the Jews of having crucified not a straw-Haman but a live Christian lad. The charge led to the severe punishment of the revellers.[36]

The same year witnessed a persecution of the Jews on a far larger scale in Alexandria. In that city Jews and Christians had long lived on terms of mutual repugnance, which not rarely resulted in reciprocal outrage. An episode of this kind afforded Cyril, the dictatorial and bigoted Patriarch, an excuse for indiscriminate vengeance. Early one morning the pugnacious ecclesiastic led a rabble of zealots against the Jews’ quarter, demolished their synagogues, pillaged their dwellings, and hounded the inmates out of the city in which they had lived and prospered for seven centuries. Forty thousand of them, the most industrious and thrifty part of the population, were driven forth to join their brethren in exile. The Prefect Orestes, unable to prevent the assault, or to punish the culprits, was fain to express his disapproval of their conduct—an indiscretion for which he narrowly escaped being stoned to death by the monks.

In the meantime the Christian inhabitants of Antioch volunteered to avenge the grievances of their brethren at Imnestar by ejecting their Jewish fellow-citizens from the synagogues. The Emperor Theodosius compelled them to restore the buildings to the owners. But this decision was denounced by Simeon the Stylites, who on ascending his column had renounced all worldly luxuries except Jew-hatred. From that lofty pulpit the hermit addressed an epistle to the Emperor, rebuking him for his sinful indulgence to the enemies of Heaven. The pious Emperor was not proof against reprimand from so eminent a saint. ♦423♦ He immediately revoked his edict and removed the Prefect who had pleaded the cause of the Jews.

♦425♦

Two years later Theodosius the Younger abolished the semi-autonomous jurisdiction of the Jewish Patriarch of Tiberias and appropriated his revenues. He imposed many grievous restrictions on the celebration of Jewish festivals, excluded the Jews from public offices, and prohibited the erection of new synagogues. The harsh laws of Theodosius remained in force under his successors. The Jews were looked upon with contempt and aversion in every part of the Byzantine Empire, their persons and their synagogues, in the towns where such existed, were frequently made the objects of assault, and the riots excited by the rivalry between the Christian factions in the circus often ended in combined attacks upon the Jewish quarter. Meanwhile Palestine, with few exceptions, had become completely Christianized; Greek churches and monasteries occupied the places once held by the synagogues of the Jews, abbots and bishops bore sway over the land of the Pharisees, and Jerusalem from a capital of Judaism became the stronghold and the sanctuary of the Cross.

Suffering once more kindled the hope for the Redeemer. Moses of Crete, in the middle of the fifth century, undertook to fulfil the old prophecies and to gratify the expectations of his persecuted brethren. He gained the adherence of all the Jews in the island and confidently promised to them that he would lead them dry-shod to the Holy Land, even as his great namesake had done before him. On the appointed day the Messiah marched to the coast, followed by all the Jewish congregations, and, taking up his station on a rock which jutted out into the sea, he commanded his adherents to cast themselves fearlessly into the deep. Incredible as it may appear to us creatures of commonsense, many obeyed the command, to find the waters unwilling to divide. Several perished through the stubbornness of the element and their own inability to swim; others were rescued from the consequences of excessive faith by Greek sailors. Moses vanished.

♦527–565♦

Justinian aggravated the servitude of the Jews. In his reign the holy vessels of the Temple which had already wandered over the East, been taken to Rome by Titus, and thence transferred to Carthage by Genseric the Vandal, found their way to Constantinople. The Jews of New Rome had the mortification to see these memorials of their departed greatness in the train of Belisarius who, having destroyed the empire of the Vandals, carried into captivity the grandson of Genseric, and with him the sacred vessels, which were finally deposited in a church at Jerusalem. ♦535♦ In the same year the evidence of Jews against Christians was declared inadmissible, and two years later Justinian passed a law burdening the Jews with the expensive duties of magistracy, while denying to them its exemptions and privileges. Soon after the Jews were forbidden by law to observe Passover before the Christian Easter.

Under Justinian the Samaritans fared even worse than the Jews. Oppression goaded them repeatedly to rebellion, and each attempt, accompanied as such attempts were with atrocities against the Christians, rendered the yoke heavier. One of these desperate revolts occurred in 556 A.D., when the Samaritans of Caesarea took advantage of one of the inevitable circus-riots and, aided by the Jews, massacred the Christian inhabitants. The crime brought down upon them a heavy and indiscriminate punishment.

A respite followed on Justinian’s death, and it continued under his immediate successors. But the reign of Phocas witnessed a renewal of the feud. ♦608♦ The Jews of Antioch suddenly fell upon the Christians, whom they slaughtered and burnt; while they dragged the Patriarch through the streets and put him to death. A military force suppressed the riot and wreaked vengeance on the guilty people. A few years after, the Jews seized an opportunity for venting their ill-concealed hatred of the Greeks. This was the advance of the Persians upon Palestine.

A certain rich Jew of Tiberias, Benjamin by name, led the revolt, and called upon his fellow-countrymen to join the Persians. The Jews gladly complied, and assembled from all parts of Palestine, bringing their fury and their fire to bear upon the Christians. ♦614♦ With their assistance the Persians took Jerusalem, massacred ninety thousand Christian inhabitants, and sacked all the Christian sanctuaries, for their Jewish allies would spare none and nothing that reminded them of their national humiliation. From the capital terror and havoc spread throughout the land, the conquerors destroying the monasteries and killing the monks wherever they found them. An attempt to surprise and slay the Christians of Tyre during the Easter celebrations, however, failed. The latter, having been informed of the design, seized the Jews in the town, who were to act as secret auxiliaries of the assailants, killed one hundred of them for each atrocity perpetrated by their accomplices outside the city, and threw the heads of the victims over the walls for the edification of their co-religionists. This performance had the desired effect. The besiegers, dismayed at the shower of Hebrew heads which fell upon them, beat a hasty retreat, pursued by the Tyrian Christians.

For fourteen years Palestine remained in the hands of the Persians and the Jews. Several Christians in despair embraced Judaism, among them a monk of Mount Sinai, who changed his name into Abraham, married a Jewess, and, renegade-like, distinguished himself by joining in the persecution of the faith which he had betrayed. But the Jews, who had fondly hoped that their Persian allies would make the country over to them, were doomed to disappointment. Discontent culminated in a rupture with their friends and the banishment of many Jews to Persia. The rest then resolved to revenge themselves by a second act of treachery. They entered into negotiations with the Emperor Heraclius, and, on his promising to forgive and forget their past misdeeds, aided him to recover the province. ♦628♦ The Persian invaders were driven back, and the Greeks reigned once more supreme over Western Asia.

The Jews acclaimed the victor and his army with servile adulation, and entertained both with a liberality springing from cold calculation. But their enthusiasm was too transparent, and their atrocities too recent to delude Heraclius. At Jerusalem the monks earnestly implored the Emperor to punish the traitors, and with one stroke to remove for ever the danger of a repetition of their crime. Heraclius objected to the breach of faith which the holy men so vehemently recommended; but his scruples were overruled by their offers to take the sin upon themselves, by their casuistical demonstrations that the extermination of the enemies of Heaven was a meritorious deed beside which common honesty counted for nothing, and by the promise to fast and pray on his behalf. The Jews were persecuted; many of them were slaughtered, and others fled to the hills or to Egypt, where they were welcomed by their brethren. Thus double treachery ended in double disaster.

The sufferings of the Jews in the Byzantine Empire were revived by Leo the Isaurian, who seems to have tried to recover the confidence of the clergy, forfeited by his iconoclastic proclivities, by a zealous persecution of those eternal enemies of Orthodoxy. In 723 he issued a decree threatening with terrible penalties all Jews who refused to be baptized. Some submitted to the ordeal in order to save their lives; others preferred to seek safety in voluntary exile, or glory in self-inflicted martyrdom; many burning themselves to death in their synagogues.

Under Leo’s successors, though the Jews continued to be excluded from public offices, they were allowed full freedom in the exercise of their religion and the pursuit of commerce. Basil, however, in the middle of the ninth century, renewed the endeavours of the Church to convert the infidels, and under his auspices public disputations were held between Christian and Hebrew theologians; the persuasive eloquence of the former being strengthened by promises of political preferment to converts. Many Jews hastened to profit by this opening to power. ♦886♦ But on the Emperor’s death they exhibited an equal alacrity in returning to the old faith. ♦900♦ Whereupon Leo the Philosopher ordered that backsliders should be put to death as traitors to the Church. This severity, however, was relaxed under his unphilosophical successors.

Benjamin of Tudela, that invaluable guide to the mediaeval Jewry, who visited Constantinople about the middle of the twelfth century,[37] describes the condition of his co-religionists as follows: “They are forbidden to go out on horseback, except Solomon of Egypt, who is the King’s physician, and through whom the Jews find great alleviation in the persecution. For the persecution in which they live is heavy.... The Christians hate the Jews, be they good or bad, and lay upon them a heavy yoke. They beat them in the streets and hold them in a state of cruel slavery. But the Jews are rich and kind, loving mercy and religion, and they endure patiently the persecution. The quarter in which they live separately is called Pera.”[38]

Briefly, the history of Israel in the Eastern Empire is a story of ecclesiastical persecution tempered at times by imperial protection, until the Turkish conquest deprived the Christians of the means of oppression. Somewhat better conditions prevailed in the West.

The Jews continued to live in Rome, Ravenna, Naples, Genoa, and Milan, devoted to the peaceful pursuit of commerce, long after persecution had commenced in the East. Ambrosius, Bishop of Milan, it is true, denounced and derided the infidels, but he was prevented from an active demonstration of his theories on the subject by the firmness of Theodosius I. ♦399♦ This Emperor’s feeble successor, Honorius, forbade the collection of the Jewish Patriarch’s tax in Italy; but the order was revoked five years later. In all the cities mentioned the Jews formed separate, semi-autonomous communities, their only complaint being their exclusion from judicial and military dignities, which they did not covet, and the prohibition to build new synagogues or to own Christian slaves. The latter law, though bitterly resented by the Jews, was perfectly justified from the Christian, or indeed from an equitable, point of view. The Jews were large slave-dealers and slave-owners, and it was their custom to convert their slaves to Judaism in order to avoid the presence of Gentiles under their roofs. All slaves who refused to be circumcised were, in obedience to the Talmud, sold again. It was, therefore, the duty of the Church to protect these helpless brutes in human form against proselytism. On the other hand, from the standpoint of the Jews, the prohibition was a severe blow at their power of competition, as in that age slave labour was, if not the only, certainly the most usual kind of labour available.

♦489♦

The conquest of Italy by Theodoric, the Ostrogoth, and the principles of toleration upon which, though a Christian and a heretic and a hater of Hebrew “obduracy,” this prince based his rule, seemed to promise a perpetuation of the prosperity of Israel. How enlightened Theodoric’s administration was is shown by the following incident. The Jews of Genoa, on asking for permission to repair their synagogue, received from the King this reply: “Why do you desire that which you should avoid? We accord you, indeed, the permission you request; but we blame the wish, which is tainted with error. We cannot command religion, however, nor compel anyone to believe contrary to his conscience.”[39] But the fanaticism of Theodoric’s orthodox subjects, denied an outlet against the Arian conquerors, vented itself on the Jews, who suddenly found themselves exposed to the ferocity of the Italian rabble, were insulted and robbed, and saw their synagogues looted and burnt, until the civil authorities intervened, stopped the havoc, and forced the aggressors to make reparation for the losses inflicted upon their fellow-townsmen, thereby earning the cordial anathemas of the whole Catholic world.

Thus ended the fifth century. Nor did the position of the Jews deteriorate in the sixth. ♦536♦ How happy and wealthy they continued to be in Italy under the Ostrogothic rule is proved by the brave resistance which they opposed to Justinian’s general, Belisarius, in his conquering progress through the peninsula, and more especially at Naples. Byzantine domination over Italy ceased in 589, when the greater part of the country fell under the power of the Lombards, who also left the Jews in peace. Outbursts of popular intolerance disgraced the Italian peninsula from time to time, but, as a rule, Israel was able to secure official indulgence with the wealth which it amassed under the interested protection of the Popes. ♦590–604♦ Gregory the Great, although he persecuted the Manichaean heretics of Sicily and ordered the reclamation of the pagan peasants of Sardinia “etiam cum verberibus,” and although, in his anxiety to extinguish slavery, he revived the ordinance of the Emperor Constantius and impressed upon the princes of Austrasia and Burgundy the necessity of forbidding the possession of Christian slaves by Jews, yet laid down the principle that no other means than friendly exhortation and pecuniary temptation should be employed in the conversion of the latter, and he sheltered them from the aggressive piety of the inferior bishops.

In Gaul Jews must have settled at a very early period, though the origin of their colonies is lost in the mists of unrecorded time, and no sure evidence of their presence in that province is extant before the second century. Whether the first Jewish settlers north of the Alps arrived as prisoners of war or as peddlers, they make their appearance in history as Roman citizens, and as such they were treated with respect by the Frankish and Burgundian conquerors, who allowed them to practise agriculture, medicine, and trade without let or hindrance, until the introduction of Christianity. The advent of the Cross here, as elsewhere, proved fatal to the sons of Israel. Nor could it be otherwise. Time had passed on, the Roman Empire had been swept away, and a new order of things had sprung into existence. Younger races dominated the regions over which the Roman eagle once spread his proud wings, and the worship of one God, the God of the Jews, had dethroned the many deities of paganism. The Jew alone had remained the same. Despite lapse of time and all vicissitudes, the Hebrew of Western Europe still was a faithful facsimile of his Asiatic forefathers. Like them he continued hemmed in by an iron circle which he would not overstep and into which he reluctantly admitted outsiders. The Jews everywhere dwelt apart, suspicious and suspected. Jewish writers glory in this arrogant and dangerous isolation: “In spite of their separation from Judaea and Babylonia, the centres of Judaism, the Jews of Gaul lived in strict accordance with the precepts of their religion. Wherever they settled they built their synagogues and constituted their communities in exact agreement with the directions of the Talmud.”[40] Such constancy, admirable in itself, was, from a practical point of view, pregnant with perils which were not slow in declaring themselves.

In 465 the Council of Vannes forbade the clergy to participate in Jewish banquets, because it was considered beneath the dignity of Christians to eat the viands of the Jews, while the Jews refused to partake of the viands of the Christians. This was the commencement of an active display of antipathy destined to endure down to our own day.

♦516♦

In Burgundy the conversion of King Sigismund to the Catholic faith inaugurated an era of oppression of all heretics—Arians as well as Jews. True believers, whether laymen or clergymen, were prohibited from taking part in Jewish banquets. From Burgundy the spirit of hostility spread to other countries. ♦538 and 545♦ The third and fourth Councils at Orleans reiterated the above prohibition, and the Jews were forbidden to appear abroad during Easter, because their presence was “an insult to Christianity.” ♦554♦ Clerical fanaticism was invested with constitutional authority by Childebert I. of Paris a few years after.

Among these earlier persecutors of Judaism none distinguished himself more highly than Avitus, Bishop of Clermont. In him the Jews of Gaul found an enemy as implacable as their brethren of Alexandria had found in Cyril. He repeatedly strove to convert the Jews of his diocese, and, on his sermons proving ineffectual, he incited the Christians to attack the synagogues and to raze them to the ground. But even this argument failed to persuade the stiff-necked infidels of the truth of Christianity. The good Bishop, therefore, gave them the option of baptism or banishment, thus forestalling the King of England by seven and the King of Spain by nine centuries. One Jew chose baptism, and paraded the streets in his garments of symbolic purity during the Pentecost. But another Jew undertook to interpret the feelings of his brethren by soiling the devout apostate’s white clothes with rancid oil. The inopportune anointment led to a massacre and to the forcible baptism of five hundred more Jews, while the rest fled to Marseilles. ♦576♦ This triumph of the faith at Clermont was received with great rejoicings in the neighbouring countries, and Bishop Gregory of Tours showed a laudable lack of ecclesiastical jealousy by inviting a poet to sing in bad Latin the success of his colleague.

♦581♦

Five years later the Council of Maçon passed various enactments emphasising the social inferiority of the Jews, and the bigotry of the Councillors. King Chilperic also dabbled in compulsory proselytism, and the later Merovingian Kings Clotaire II. and Dagobert carried on the work in grim earnest. ♦615. 629♦ The former of these princes, in obedience to the decrees of the Clermont and Maçon Councils, debarred the Jews from such official posts as conferred on the holders authority over Christians, and in the following year the Council of Paris recommended their indiscriminate dismissal from all state offices. But the decline of the “Merovingian drones” brought at last relief to the Jews of Gaul.

In Spain, as in Gaul, Israel had pitched its tent very early—in all probability before the fall of the Roman Republic. The number of the colonists was subsequently increased by the captives carried off from Palestine by Titus and Hadrian, and sold in various provinces of the Empire, as well as by voluntary emigrants; so that the peninsula was gradually dotted with their synagogues; many towns became known as “Jewish” owing to the predominance of the chosen people in their population, and many Jewish families pointed with pride to lengthy pedigrees, real or imaginary, some dating their immigration from the destruction of the Second Temple, others tracing their ancestry to David; and not a few even claiming descent from settlers brought to Spain by no less a personage than Nebuchadnezzar!

Here they remained unmolested until the conversion of the country to Christianity, when the familiar process began. The new religion, having wiped out idolatry, sought a fresh field among the Jews. Their infidelity justified persecution; their wealth and their weakness invited it. As early as the reign of Constantine the Great we find Bishop Severus of Magona, in the island of Minorca, burning their synagogues and forcing them to embrace Christianity, and Bishop Hosius of Cordova prohibiting Christians, under pain of excommunication, from trading, intermarrying, or otherwise mixing with the contaminated race. ♦320♦ But the lot of Israel did not become unbearable until long after the Visigoths from the North invaded, devastated, and permanently occupied the peninsula. The first Arian kings, while persecuting the Catholics, allowed full liberty, civil and political, to the Israelites, who consequently rose to great affluence and to the most important dignities in the state. This happy period ended in the sixth century when King Reccared abjured the Arian heresy and was received into the bosom of the Church. Then came orthodoxy, and with it persecution. In 589 the Council of Toledo forbade the Jews to own Christian slaves, and to hold public offices. The Jews tried to avoid the first restriction by offering a great sum of money to King Reccared. ♦599♦ But he refused the offer, and earned the eulogies of Pope Gregory the Great, who compared him to King David; for as David had poured the water brought to him out before the Lord, so had Reccared sacrificed to God the gold offered to him. This was precisely the principle which nine centuries later dictated Ferdinand and Isabella’s policy towards the Jews. Indeed, early Visigothic legislation supplies many curious precedents for mediaeval Spanish bigotry. As time went on it doomed the whole Jewish race to servitude, and invented many of the maxims and methods afterwards adopted and perfected by the Inquisition.

Throughout the seventh century the hapless people experienced all the rigour of Spanish statesmanship, guided by priestly malevolence. Even bribery, the last resource of the oppressed, was provided against by regulations which in their stringency showed that, if the Jews were eager to purchase mercy, their ecclesiastical oppressors were not above selling the commodity. ♦612♦ Under King Sisebut, the treatment of the Jews was a rehearsal of the tragedy acted in the same country eight hundred and sixty years later. They were imprisoned, plundered, or burnt, and finally they were given the choice between apostasy and expatriation. The most “stiff-necked” amongst them preferred the loss of country and property to loss of self-respect. Ninety thousand yielded to force, and saved themselves by apparent conversion. The Church, while disapproving of compulsory proselytism, pronounced a heavy sentence on those who openly renounced the creed which nothing but the fear of banishment had driven them to embrace. Baptism became a mask and a mockery. But even outward conformity could not long be maintained unsupported by internal conviction, and many neophytes seized the first opportunity of throwing off the hateful cloak. Thereupon the Church, sorely scandalized at the sight of proselytes falling back into the slough whence she had rescued them, induced Sisenand, one of Sisebut’s successors, to restrain by force the Jews once baptized from relapsing into Judaism, or from frequenting other Jews, and, furthermore, to order that the children of the former should be torn from their parents and be educated in monasteries and nunneries. Those who were discovered secretly indulging in Hebrew rites were condemned to lose their freedom and to serve the King’s favourites. Side by side with these inhuman measures was carried on a less harmful, though not less stupid, missionary campaign. All the polemical arguments of the early Fathers were now refurbished, but with no greater success than had attended them when brand-new.

However, these efforts of the Church notwithstanding, the nobles of Spain continued to extend their protection over the persecuted people until the accession of King Chintilla, who in a General Council wrested from them a confirmation of the anti-Jewish enactments of his predecessors, and, moreover, proclaimed a wholesale expulsion of all Jews who refused to embrace Christianity. Again many Israelites were driven out of the country, and many into hypocrisy.

It was hoped that this signal proof of piety on the King’s part would break at last the inflexible infidelity of the race. ♦638♦ The Church also decreed that every king in the future should at his coronation take a solemn oath to continue the persecution of heretics. But persecution presupposes a perfect accord between the civil authority and the ecclesiastical; and, as has sometimes happened since, the secular power in Spain recognised certain limits to its capacity for obeying the spiritual. Chintilla died in 642, and later sovereigns refused to carry out the decrees of the Church, while others tried to do so in vain. The Jews were too useful to be dispensed with. Political necessity overruled religious bigotry, and Spain, as every other country in Europe, continued to present the strange spectacle of a proscribed sect flourishing under the very eyes of the judges who had repeatedly pronounced its doom. Despite the manifold disabilities under which the Jews laboured, they remained and multiplied in the peninsula, the pseudo-converts practising Judaism in secret; some of the avowed Jews refuting the arguments of their assailants in polemical treatises; all nursing a sullen hatred of their rulers and waiting for an opportunity of gratifying it.

Such an opportunity offered itself in the Arab invasion, and the Mohammedan Caliphs found in these suffering children of a kindred race and religion ready and valuable allies. It is not improbable that the fear of such an alliance between the followers of Mohammed and those of Moses had intensified among the Christians of Spain the anti-Jewish feeling which found vent in the violent persecution of the Jews during the years immediately preceding the conquest of the peninsula. If so, the Spaniards by their treatment of the Jews created the situation which they feared. The Mohammedan invasion was prepared by the intrigues of the Jews of Spain with their co-religionists in Africa, who exposed to the Saracens the weaknesses of the Visigothic kingdoms. Tarik, the Mohammedan conqueror, in his triumphant career through the peninsula, ♦711♦ after the battle of Xeres, where Roderic the last of the Visigothic kings had fallen, was everywhere supported by the Jews. Cordova, Granada, Malaga, and other cities were entrusted to the safe-keeping of the Jews, and Toledo was betrayed to the invader by the Jews, who, while the Christian inhabitants were assembled in church praying for divine help, ♦712♦ threw the gates open to the enemy, acclaiming him as a saviour and an avenger.

Persecution had again awakened the desire for redemption, which had never been allowed to remain dormant long. ♦About 720♦ The new Messiah appeared in the person of a Syrian Jewish Reformer, named Serene. It so happened that the Jews of Syria were at that time suffering almost as cruelly at the hands of the fanatical Caliph Omar II. as at those of the Christian Emperor Leo. ♦717–720♦ When, therefore, the Messiah arose, promising to restore them to independence and to exterminate their enemies, many Eastern Jews lent an attentive ear to his gospel. The Redeemer’s fame reached Spain, and the Jews of that country also, still smarting under the sufferings of centuries and probably disappointed in the extravagant hopes which they had built upon the Arab conquest, hastened to enlist under his banner. But Serene’s career was cut short by Omar II.’s successor. The Commander of the Faithful seized the Messiah and subjected him to a severe cross-examination. Whether it was due to the subtlety of the theological riddles propounded to him by the Caliph, or to some more tangible test of constancy, the Prophet’s courage failed him. It was even said, by those who had refused to follow the Messiah, or who having followed were disillusioned, that Serene declared his mission to be only a practical pleasantry at the expense of his credulous co-religionists. Be that as it may, poor Serene was delivered up to the tender mercies of the Synagogue, and his disgrace dissipated the Messianic dream for the time.

But in less than a generation another Reformer of the Messianic type appeared in the Persian town of Ispahan to rekindle the enthusiasm and try the faith of his people. This was Obaiah Abu Isa ben Ishak. He, somewhat more modest than his predecessor, claimed to be only one—though the last and most perfect—of a line of five forerunners who were to prepare the way for the coming Redeemer. He also held out the promise to free the children of Israel from thraldom. Nor did he preach to deaf ears. One of the most striking inconsistencies in the Jewish character is the combination which it presents of unlimited shrewdness and suspiciousness with an almost equal capacity for being duped. The people who in every age have been hated as past masters of deceit, have themselves often been the greatest victims of imposture. Religious belief is so strong in them that, especially in times of suffering, nothing seems improbable that agrees with their predisposition. Libenter homines id quod volunt credunt. Ten thousand Jews rallied round Obaiah’s standard. The war for independence began at Ispahan and for a while seemed to promise success. But the Prophet fell in battle, and, though his memory was kept green by his followers, who endured till the tenth century, none proved able to carry on the work of deliverance.

CHAPTER VI
MIDDLE AGES

“Jews massacred in France,” “Jews massacred in Germany,” “Jews massacred in England,” “Jews massacred in Germany and France,” “Jews massacred in Spain,” again and again and again. These headings, not to mention expulsions, oppressions and spoliations without number, stare us in the face as we turn over the pages of the history of Mediaeval Europe, and the cold lines assume a terrible significance as we peruse tale after tale of bodily and mental torment, such as no other people ever suffered and survived. And as we read on, and try to realise the awful scenes, the desolate cry of the sufferers rings in our ears, like a long-drawn wail borne across the centuries: “How long, O Lord, how long?”

It would, of course, be an absurd exaggeration to assert that the life of Israel through the Middle Ages was an unbroken horror of carnage and rapine. There were spells of respite, some of them fairly long, during which the Jew was permitted to live and grow fat. But these Sabbaths of rest can be likened not inaptly to the periods during which a prudent husbandman suffers his land to lie fallow, in the hope of a richer harvest. They are only intervals between the acts of a tedious and bloody tragedy, with a continent for its stage and seven centuries for its night. But, though covering so vast an extent in space and time, the drama is not devoid of unity: the unity of plot. The motives and the characters are ever the same, each scene ends in strict accord with the foregoing, and the performance is a masterpiece of mournful monotony. Nor is it easy to bestow the crown of excellence on any European nation of actors without being unjust to their colleagues.

The drama naturally divides itself into two periods: the period of spontaneous but unsystematic hostility, and the period of deliberate and organised persecution.

While the Church was engaged in disseminating the gospel abroad, in rooting out heresy at home and in establishing her own authority, she had little time to devote to the persecution of the Jews; and the only canon law against them was the prohibition to dwell under the same roof with Christians and to employ Christian servants—a law which, in the absence of rigorous supervision, often remained a dead letter, and much oftener was observed, simply because neither side felt any violent desire to break it. The Jews consequently throve amazingly, their synagogues grew in number and splendour, and their antipathy to outside influences, though continuing to be as implacable as ever, found its chief expression in social isolation tempered by commercial exploitation.

In every country and in every city in Europe they remained sharply separated from their Christian neighbours, shunning intermarriage with them, and forming a perfectly distinct body of people, with the synagogue for its centre and its soul. The synagogue elected its own officers in accordance with the traditions of the Temple and the instructions of the Talmud, passing communal ordinances which, as in ancient times, regulated the whole of Jewish life: enforcing monogamy, prohibiting shaving, fixing the tax on meat, restraining gambling, forbidding the promiscuous dancing of Jews and Jewesses, dictating marriage settlements and divorce, defining the dress and diet of men and women. The State frequently levied the taxes on the Jewish community in a lump sum, leaving the assessment among individual members and the collection to the officers of the synagogue.[41] Justice also was administered by the Beth Din, or Jewish religious tribunal. Thus, despite much external interference, the Jewries constituted self-governing colonies—strange oases in mediaeval society. Their members were neither villeins nor freeholders; neither men-at-arms nor mechanics. Feudalism concerned them as little as Catholicism. They took no more part in the martial exercises than in the spiritual devotions of their neighbours. They belonged neither to the knightly orders nor to the commercial and industrial corporations; but they lived a life of their own, in closer communion of interests and tastes with their brethren in Cairo or Babylon than with their fellow-townsmen. In the ninth century, for instance, Babylon was to the Jews of Western Europe what Rome was to the Catholics—the oracle of Divine knowledge—and Rabbinical decisions issued therefrom were obeyed as implicitly as Papal Bulls. The Mediaeval Jews were as indifferent to the beauties of Chivalry as to its duties. The notes of the minstrel fell dead upon their ears, and the sterile subtleties of Talmudical exegesis thrilled them more than the amours of romance. Latin, the language of Western Christendom, was abhorred by the descendants of those whom the Roman destroyer of the Temple had driven into exile, and the study of the Torah was the one form of literature to which all Jews, old and young, rich and poor, devoted themselves with a single-minded earnestness worthy of the ancient Pharisees and Scribes. Even in their mutual greetings they retained the oriental formula “Peace be to thee,” “To thee a goodly blessing.”

This ominous isolation was to the Jews a source of pride, with which no bribe could induce them to part. The thought of making themselves one with the uncircumcised was as repugnant to them as it had been to their ancestors on entering Canaan. Their poetical literature, which through the Jewish hymn-book supplied a bond of sympathy between all the scattered sections of Mediaeval Jewry, is a lasting monument of their sorrows and of their self-glorification; of their faith in the promises of the past and of their firm trust in the future. All these sentiments may be regarded as embodied in that love for an idealised and idolised Zion which brightened many a gloomy hour, and which was for the Jews what political ambitions and aspirations were for their Christian neighbours. They looked upon themselves but as sojourners in the land, and upon their residence among the Gentiles as an evil dream from which the Lord in His time would awaken them, and lead His people back to the land of their fathers. Israel still was the slave of the Idea, and its victim.

This social isolation was symbolised and perpetuated by local segregation. The Jews everywhere dwelt together in special quarters, distinguished even amid the gloom and squalor of a mediaeval town by a darkness and dirtiness which contrasted curiously with the occasional magnificence of the interior of the houses and with the personal cleanliness of the inmates. In these quarters they resided, many families in one house, eating meat killed and cooked in a special manner, frequently fasting when their neighbours feasted, and feasting when they fasted; or, worse still, sometimes, by a fatal coincidence, celebrating their Deliverance while the Christians mourned the sufferings of their Saviour; as a rule, resting on the day on which the others worked, and working on the day on which they rested. They attended no mass, partook of no sacrament, showed no reverence for the crucifix and the saints; but they lived unbaptized, unblest and circumcised, worshipping their own God after their own fashion and in their own tongue, indulging in mysterious ablutions, observing the new moons and a thousand quaint rules of conduct, abstaining from touching fire from Friday evening till Saturday night, from eating pork, from drinking wine and milk, or from using vessels, touched by a Gentile. Their religious symbolism was alien to that of their neighbours; their allegorical wedding customs, their rejoicings and their wailings equally weird; their music as wonderful as their symbolism; the nasal sing-song strains that floated out of the windows of the synagogue of a morning, or those that filled the night air with their strangeness, as a funeral procession hurried through the street, sounded horribly harsh, unmelodious, and unmeaning to non-Hebrew ears. Their very children were unlike the children of the Gentile; precocious in worship as in work, they knew nothing of the sprightly brownies, elves, and fairies of European folk-lore, but believed in the solemn and sober spirits of Asiatic mythology. Altogether they must have seemed a singular and sinister people, with usury for their favourite pursuit, and prayer for their main recreation.

Thus they lived, and when they died they were buried in special cemeteries, emphasising the amiable principle that there could be no union or intercommunion between Jew and Gentile even in death.

Is it to be wondered at that the Jews everywhere were looked upon with aversion and suspicion? The chastity of Jewish life, the gracious charm of the Sabbath, the serene beauty of the Jewish home were unknown, for Jewish homes in the Middle Ages rarely received a non-Jewish guest. If an inquisitive Catholic strayed into a synagogue on a Sabbath morning, what he saw therein would tend to strengthen his antipathy. He would find a congregation of men with their heads covered, gathered together in a place which had none of the attributes of a church: no images, no font, no altar, no holy-water stoup; a club-room rather than a House of the Lord. He would see some of these men absorbed in learned study, and others in lively gossip; some chanting, and others chattering aloud; many dropping in casually at odd times; all heedless of the precentor, whose trilling airs soared aloft in triumphant discord, amid the pandemonium of tongues, now melting into melodramatic tears or hysterical laughter, now drowned by the shrill blast of the ram’s horn.

How could the ignorant Gentile know that these listless or belated worshippers had already prayed abundantly at home, and, like people who go to a public banquet after having enjoyed a good dinner in private, had no appetite for further devotion? To him the whole scene, with the din of children crying and running about, and the free and easy nonchalance of the men, must have appeared an orgy of indecorous levity. Worse still, he might have surprised this congregation discussing lawsuits, or prices of goods; for the synagogue was much more than a prayer-house to the Jew, and in it were made proclamations and bargains such as the mediaeval citizen was accustomed to see made in the market-place. Everything that the visitor witnessed would impress him as uncouth, unchristian, and uncanny; and he would go away amazed and scandalised, if not disgusted.

And yet, such is the apparent inconsistency of human nature, it was to this despised and detested assembly that the Christians of the lower orders, when ill, often had recourse for medical assistance. As in the old days at Rome, so in mediaeval Europe the Hebrew rites commanded the veneration of the Gentiles. The mystery of the unknown fascinated them. Many people, who ordinarily shunned the Jewish community, in time of trouble repaired to the synagogue, took part in its processions and ceremonies, and made votive offerings, that ailing friends might recover, that seafaring relatives might reach harbour in safety, that women in child-bed might be happily delivered, and that the barren might rejoice in offspring. The real proficiency of the Jews in medicine encouraged the popular superstition; for medicine and magic were as closely associated in the mediaeval mind as they still are in the minds of the less advanced races. Jewish women were dreaded as sorceresses, and the Rabbis were believed to be on terms of intimacy with the powers of darkness. It was held that

“Unregarded herbs, and flowers, and blossoms

Display undreamt of powers when gathered by them.”

And Christian knights applied to them for scraps of parchment covered with Hebrew texts as protective charms for their persons and castles.

Even so at the present day the Christians of the East resort to Mohammedan friars for charms and amulets of all kinds, and Mohammedans make offerings to Christian saints. Creeds may be mutually exclusive; there is free trade in popular religion. This liberalism, however, is not incompatible with a deep and abiding abhorrence. It is not the deities but the demons of the rival race that the ignorant strive to propitiate. The act is the outcome of fear, and the help received implies no gratitude. Consequently, the mediaeval Jews and Gentiles, like modern Christians and Turks, despite superstitious sympathy, contiguity of centuries, occasional intercourse for festive purposes, and interchange of gifts, cherished no fellow-feeling for each other. Even genuine personal friendship could do little to counteract national and religious antipathy. The Jews were still aliens and infidels, therefore enemies, and they frequently fell victims to insult and assault, and sometimes to massacre, at the hands of the populace. Hostility found an appropriate occasion for self-manifestation on the great festivals of the Church, and more especially at Easter. At those times the sight of a Jew reminded the Christians of the Old Crime, and the maltreatment of him suggested itself as a natural deed of piety. The sentiment was holy; the practical expression of it partly childish, partly fiendish.

At Toulouse, for example, it was the traditional custom to slap a Jew on the face every Good Friday. The Count opened the ceremony by publicly giving the president of the Jewish community a box on the ear, and his subjects followed suit, until the blow was commuted for a tribute in the twelfth century. At Beziers pious wantonness took the form of an attack on the Jews’ houses with stones from Palm Sunday till Easter. The use of other weapons was contrary to the rules of the game; but none other were needed. A sermon from the Bishop was the regular preamble to the commencement of hostilities, and this Christian pastime continued in public favour year after year until a prelate, less cruel or more practical than his predecessors, abolished it for a consideration. In May 1160 a treaty was concluded providing that any priest who should stir up the people against the Jews should be excommunicated, while the Jews, on their side, pledged themselves to pay four pounds of silver every Palm Sunday. Elsewhere, an old pagan rite for the propitiation of the powers of vegetation was cloaked in the devotional cremation of a straw “Judas” during Holy Week; a custom still surviving in many parts of Europe. But racial and religious animosity, especially when fuelled by material grievances, knows no seasons. In Germany Jew-baiting was a perennial amusement of gentlemen impoverished by usury, and the Judenstrasse, or Jews’ street, a not unusual field of ignoble distinction.

However, during the earlier Middle Ages, the Jews, though exposed to popular hatred, were generally shielded from popular outrage by the princes, spiritual and temporal, who countenanced their usury, sharing the profits, and availed themselves, not without strict precautions, of their medical skill and administrative ability. We find them as land-owners, physicians and civil officials in Provence and Languedoc. At Montpellier, under the wing of the Count of Toulouse, there flourished a Jewish academy where medicine and Rabbinical literature were cultivated successfully—an institution which helped much to create and promote a medical profession throughout Southern Europe, while the great School of Salerno also owed much to Jewish talent. In a word, medical studies in the Middle Ages were deeply indebted to the Hebrew doctors. They were the first to discard the ancient belief in the demoniacal origin of disease and to substitute physic for exorcisms. Their adoption of rational methods in the treatment of patients helped to revolutionise the theory and practice of medicine, to emancipate the European mind from superstition, and to earn for them the cordial detestation of the monks and priests, whose relics and prayers were discredited and whose incomes decreased in proportion to the Jewish practitioners’ success. Thus the animosity of the lower clergy against the mediaeval Jew may, in part, be traced to professional rivalry.

In Spain the Jews had always been most numerous and prosperous. Under the Saracen conquerors, with few exceptions,—as, for instance, the persecution by Ibn Tumart,—they enjoyed a peace such as they had seldom experienced under Christian rule. The liberty usually accorded to them enabled the Spanish Jews to attain distinction in other fields of activity besides money-lending. They were farmers, land-owners and slave-dealers. The last kind of trade was particularly encouraged by the Caliphs of Andalusia who formed their bodyguards of picked Slavonian slaves. They also were physicians, financiers, civil administrators, and they vied with their Mohammedan masters in learning as well as in material splendour and love of display. The influence of Moorish culture on the spiritual and intellectual development of the Spanish Jews has been very ably outlined by a modern Jewish writer in the following words:—“The milder rule of the Moslem gave the Jew a needed pause in the struggle for existence, and the similarity of the Semitic genius in both prevented the perceptible tendency to narrowness, and brought the Jewish mind again into free contact with the world’s thought.... The first aim of the Caliphs, after the victory of Islam was assured, was to resuscitate Greek science and philosophy. Translators were employed to bring forth from their Syriac tombs Aristotle and Galen. And the Jews at once took part in this Semitic renaissance.”[42] The writer might have added that it was mainly through the instrumentality of the Jews that this Arabic resuscitation of Hellenic philosophy and science was transmitted from Islam to Christendom. Learned Jews, familiar with both languages, rendered the Arabic translations of Aristotle into Latin, thus bringing them within reach of the Schoolmen, who valued these versions highly, not only for their fidelity to the original but also for the explanatory comments which accompanied the text. In fact, the first acquaintance of mediaeval Europe with any of the Aristotelian writings, other than the Organon, was due to the Arabs and Jews of Spain.[43] Thus these two Semitic races, by a dispensation of fate the irony of which was not to become apparent until our own day, were the first to stimulate in Western students a thirst for Hellenic literature and to supply them with the means of gratifying it.

The first school founded by the Jews in Spain was that of Cordova (948), followed by those of Toledo, Barcelona and Granada. All these institutions were thronged with eager students and formed centres of light, the rays whereof shone all the brighter amid the gloom of the Dark Ages. Not only Talmudic, Biblical, and Cabbalistic lore were there cultivated, but secular philosophy was diligently studied; and Aristotle was revered as a disciple of Solomon! Poetry, music, mathematics, astronomy, metaphysics and medicine were also included in the curriculum, and the Spanish Jews, as the result of this encyclopaedic training, were men of the broadest and most varied culture; the same individual often combining in his own person the subtleties of the Rabbinical scholar with the elegant taste of a poet; the sagacity of a financier with the practical skill of a physician.

♦915–970♦

All these talents are found embodied in Abu-Yussuf Chasdai of Cordova, a European in every respect except religion and name. From his father Chasdai inherited great wealth and liberal views on its uses. He studied the science of medicine, but he shone especially as a patron and man of letters, and as a diplomatist. Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin were almost equally familiar to him. He rendered brilliant political services to Caliph Abdul-Rahman III. in his relations with the Christian sovereigns of Northern Spain and other European potentates, and he was rewarded by his master with a post which in reality, though not in name, represented the powers of a Minister of Foreign Affairs, of Trade, and of Finance, all in one—an elevation which enabled Chasdai “to take the oppressor’s yoke from his people,” and “to break the scourge that wounded it.” Fate decreed that envoys from the Byzantine persecutors of the Jews should come to Cordova to solicit the aid of the Western against the Eastern Caliphs, and they were received by the Jewish Minister.

Under the paternal, if at times despotic, rule of the Caliphs the Hebrew character cast away some of its sternness and austerity—a change which is pleasantly reflected in the literature of the period. The Hebrew Muse ceased to weep and wail over old misfortunes, and the lays of the Hispano-Jewish minstrels laugh with the sunshine or sigh with the lyric tenderness of their new country. These traits are brilliantly illustrated by the work of the Castilian poet Jehuda Halevi, born in 1086, and thus described by an enthusiastic co-religionist:

“Pure and true, without blemish,

Were both his song and his soul.

When the Creator had formed this soul,

Pleased with Himself at His work,

He kissed the beautiful creation,

And the glorious echo of his holy kiss

Trembles yet in every song of the poet,

Sanctified through this Divine grace.”

There is nothing mournful in Halevi’s poetry. In his early youth he sang of wine and of the gazelle-like eyes of his beloved, of her rosy lips, of her raven hair, and of her unfaithfulness. In his manhood he studied the Talmud, natural science, and metaphysics. He also, like many other Jewish writers, practised medicine; not with conspicuous success, as he naïvely confesses in a letter to a friend: “I occupy myself in the hours which belong neither to the day nor to the night with the vanity of medical science, although I am unable to heal.” Halevi’s heart remained wholly devoted to poetry, and his masterpiece is the Songs of Zion, wherein he pours forth all that deep veneration for the past and that ardent belief in the future glory of Israel, which have inspired Jewish genius through the ages. Jehuda voices the national sentiment in the following touching lines:

“O City of the world, beauteous in proud splendour,

From the far West, behold me solicitous on thy behalf!

Oh that I had eagle’s wings, that I might fly to thee,

Till I wet thy dust with my flowing tears!

My heart is in the East,

Whilst I tarry in the West.

How may I be joyous,

Or where find my pleasure?

How fulfil my vow,

O Zion! when I am in the power of Edom,

And bend beneath Arabia’s yoke?

Truly Spain’s welfare concerns me not;

Let me but behold thy precious dust,

And gaze upon the spot where once the Temple stood.”

Nor was the longing a mere matter of sentiment. Jehuda was earnestly convinced that Israel could not have a national existence outside the Holy Land. He urged his people to quit the fields of Edom and to seek its native home in Zion. But the cry aroused no echo. The Jews of Spain, allowed to enjoy the comforts and luxuries of existence, felt no desire to exchange the real for a wild chase after the ideal. The poet, however, proved his own sincerity by undertaking a weary pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Leaving his peaceful home, his only daughter, his friends, his pupils, and his studies, he set out on his adventurous journey, accompanied by the good wishes and praises of numerous admirers through Spain. The long and stormy voyage and the hardships thereof did not quench the poet’s enthusiasm for the Holy Land:

“The sea rages, my soul rejoices;

It draws near the Temple of its God!”

At Alexandria, Halevi was met by a crowd of Jews to whom his name was known and dear. They entertained him sumptuously, but could not prevail upon him to relinquish his aim. Once more Halevi resisted the seductions of safety and comfort and set out for Jerusalem, which he found in the possession of unsympathetic Christian princes and bishops. His sentiments of disillusion and sorrow are commemorated in the lines:

“Mine eye longed to behold Thy glory,

But, as if I were deemed unworthy,

I could only tread on the threshold of Thy Temple.

I must also endure the sufferings of my people;

Therefore I wander aimlessly about,

As I dare not pay homage to any other being.”[44]

This prophet and singer of Zionism died in the land which his soul loved so dearly.

Another great Jew of Spain was Moses Maimonides, born at Cordova in 1135. He came of a long line of Rabbis, who traced their descent from the royal house of David, and he might be described as a Talmudist by inheritance as well as by training. He had scarcely completed his thirteenth year when Cordova was taken by the fanatical sect of the Almohades, who offered to the Jews and Christians of the city the alternatives of Islam or death. The ancient Jewish community was broken up, and the family of Maimonides migrated to Almeria. But this town also, three years later, fell into the hands of the same fanatical Mohammedans, and the Jews and Christians were once more driven forth to seek freedom of worship elsewhere. Henceforward the family of Maimonides wandered hither and thither through Spain, unable to find a home. But this roaming life did not prevent the youth from attaining great proficiency in various branches of learning, sacred and profane. His father’s teaching was always ready at hand, and his own quick and clear intellect found it easy to acquire and to digest the lessons of experience. Aristotle, as has been said, was much studied, though little understood, by the Jews and Arabs of Spain. Maimonides’ intellect had much in common with the Greek philosopher’s scientific mind, while he possessed a sense of religion to which the Greek was a stranger. In the character of Maimonides the two temperaments, the Hebraic and the Hellenic, the reasoning and the emotional, met in a harmonious combination. Truth in thought as well as in action, was the object for which he strove, and the idle fictions of poetry were as severely condemned by him as by the mediaeval monks; but he was far from adopting the monastic definition of poetry as “the Devil’s wine.” His earnestness was free from fanaticism, and he could be severe without being savage. Unsparing in his scorn of what he considered false, he was most forbearing towards the victims of falsehood. Like many earnest men, Maimonides was born a missionary. Neither fatigue of body nor pain of mind deterred him from the diffusion of what he deemed to be the light, and to the propagation of rational Judaism he devoted his whole life ungrudgingly and unfalteringly. To this end he made himself master of all the knowledge accessible in his time. He studied ancient Paganism as well as contemporary Islam and Christianity; philosophy, medicine, logic, mathematics, and astronomy. Thus equipped, he entered the arena.

His people, after ten years’ wandering in Spain, had repaired to Fez, where persecution had driven many Jews to assume the mask of Mohammedanism—a form of compulsory hypocrisy, examples of which abounded in every country. A zealot wrote a pamphlet denouncing these apparent renegades as traitors to the cause of Israel. Maimonides, who was one of them, undertook to vindicate their conduct. But, while defending their prudence, he strove to combat their lukewarmness, and to confirm the wavering; endeavours which nearly cost him his life at the hands of the Mohammedans. In the dead of night he and his family embarked on board a vessel bound to Palestine. After a month’s perilous voyage the refugees landed at St. Jean d’Acre (Acco), whence they proceeded to Jerusalem, then in Christian hands, and finally reached Egypt. There Maimonides lost his father first, and then his brother, suffered severely in his health and fortune, and was obliged to eke out a modest livelihood by the practice of medicine. But in the midst of all afflictions and occupations he continued his first great work on the Talmud, which appeared in 1168 under the characteristic title, The Light. This work, though it failed to make its mark among the Jews of Egypt, gradually brought fame to the author abroad. In 1175 he was already revered as a great Rabbinical authority, and questions bearing on religion and law were submitted to him from all parts of Israel. At the same time he busied himself with the affairs of the Cairo community of which he was made Rabbi. In 1180 he completed his Religious Code, in which he wedded Judaism to philosophy. The object of the book was to introduce light and limit into the chaos of Biblical and Talmudical teaching. The Code attained wide popularity, and copies of it were diligently conned in every corner of the Jewish world from India in the East to Spain in the West. The learning as well as the character of Maimonides excited universal respect, and many were the titles bestowed upon the sage by his admiring co-religionists. Maimonides was proclaimed “the Enlightener of the eyes of Israel.” Opposition and calumny, the involuntary tributes which envy pays to success, came in due course; but Maimonides who had not been intoxicated by praise did not suffer himself to be intimidated by obloquy. His reputation as a physician was almost as great as his theological renown; a Mohammedan poet declares that “Galen’s art heals only the body, but Maimonides’ the body and soul”; Saladin, then Vizier of Egypt, engaged him as his physician, and Richard Coeur de Lion, who during his crusade in the Holy Land heard of Maimonides, invited him to be his physician in ordinary, an honour which the sage declined. Thanks to the high esteem in which he was held by the Mohammedan rulers of Egypt, Maimonides was, in about 1187, made supreme and hereditary head of all the Egyptian communities. While at the height of his power and popularity Maimonides found himself once more exposed to the danger which he had so narrowly escaped in Morocco. A traveller from that country recognised in the official chief of the Hebrew community of Egypt his pseudo-Mohammedan friend of Fez, and denounced him as an apostate. The penalty for apostacy prescribed by the Laws of Islam is death. Maimonides, however, succeeded in convincing the Vizier of the Moorish visitor’s mistake, and thus was enabled to return to the calm pursuit of his labours, communal, medical and philosophical. Soon afterwards Palestine was re-conquered by Saladin, and the Jews were allowed to settle in Jerusalem—a boon for which Maimonides is supposed to be responsible.

♦1190♦

In the midst of his manifold duties, and his feud with a rival Rabbi of Baghdad, Maimonides found time to produce another philosophical work, the Guide to the Perplexed, a work which forms the crown of his intellectual achievement, and which has been pronounced “perhaps the most remarkable metaphysical tour de force in the history of human thought.”[45] At any rate, it is a brave attempt at reconciliation between Aristotelian philosophy and Judaic religion, between Rationalism and Revelation, between Hellenic free-thought and Hebrew feeling. Therein is propounded the eternal problem of the origin and destiny of things, and solved in a manner that carried conviction at the time. The book has, indeed, been a guide to the perplexed for many generations, and, though it has not always commanded obedience among the Jews, it has served as a stimulus to enquiring minds and, through mediaeval scholasticism, has exercised an abiding influence over Christian theology. If metaphysical speculation be of any value to mankind, the world owes a great debt to the work of Maimonides. He died in 1204, at the age of seventy, full of years and honours, and his end was followed by a general outburst of grief. In Egypt both Jews and Mohammedans held a public mourning for three days, in Jerusalem a public fast was proclaimed, and similar funeral services and fasts were observed in many synagogues all over the world. The verdict of his contemporaries was, “From Moses the Prophet till Moses Maimonides there has never appeared his equal.” Posterity was not so unanimous in its appreciation. His tomb at Tiberias was adorned with the epitaph:

“Here lies a man, and yet no man.

If thou wert a man, Angels of heaven

Must have overshadowed thy mother.”

This inscription was in later times replaced by the following:

“Here lies Moses Maimonides, the excommunicated heretic.”[46]

The two epitaphs form an epitome of the sage’s posthumous career—characteristic, though hardly unique. Maimonides had to share the fate of all advocates of compromise ere he was accepted as the oracle of Jewish orthodoxy.[47]

The condition of Israel across the Pyrenees must now engage our attention.

♦768–814♦

Charlemagne, the great founder of the Frankish Empire, in spite of his enthusiasm for the advancement of the Catholic faith and in defiance of the decrees of a Church which he adored, and by which he was afterwards honoured as a saint, considered it his duty to contribute to the progress of the Jewish colonies in France and Germany. If the Churchman saw in the Jews the enemies of Christ, the statesman saw in them useful subjects, through whose international connections the interests of his Empire might be served. Among other liberties, he allowed them to act as intermediaries in the slave trade. Exempt from the burdens as well as from the honours of chivalry on one hand, and from the degradation of the peasantry on the other, the Jews at this period devoted all their energies to commerce. But Charlemagne was more than an imperial shopkeeper. The spiritual needs of his subjects, Jewish no less than Christian, received as much attention from him as their material welfare. Though his own learning was of very late and limited growth, this great soldier was keenly alive to the value of scholarship, and he endeavoured to diffuse education by encouraging learned men of both creeds to bring their lights from Italy to the dark regions of the North. Under his long reign the Jews prospered and spread over many parts of Germany. In the ninth century great Jewish colonies were to be found in Magdeburg, Mersburg, and Ratisbon, whence they penetrated into the Slavonic lands of Bohemia and Poland. But even Charlemagne could not quite overlook the chasm which separated the Jew from the Christian. In deposing against a Christian, the Jewish witness was obliged to stand within a circle of thorns, to hold the Torah in his right hand, and to call down upon himself frightful curses if he spoke not the truth. The Jews were also forbidden to buy or sell sacred church vessels, to receive Christian hostages for debt, and to trade in wine and cereals.

♦814–840♦

The favourable condition of Israel in Western Europe, with the exception of the above prohibitions, lasted under Charlemagne’s successor Louis, who, a pious Catholic though he was, did not refrain from bestowing benefits upon the Jews and from defending them against popular prejudice and ecclesiastical oppression. Influenced partly by the principles of enlightened statesmanship which he had inherited from his father, and partly by the philo-judaism of his second wife Judith, he showered many favours upon the Jews. The works of the Jewish writers, Josephus and Philo, were assiduously studied at Court. Jews and Jewesses were received and petted in royal circles, and their co-religionists were held in high esteem by the nobility. They were exempt from the barbarous punishment of the scourge and from the ordeals of fire and water. They were permitted to employ Christian workmen and to own Christian slaves, to settle their disputes in their own courts of justice, to build new synagogues, to farm the revenues of the realm, and to carry on trade freely. For their sake the market-day was changed from the Sabbath to Sunday. In return for all these privileges they had to pay a tax to the treasury, which exercised a supervision over their incomes.

But this very toleration excited the resentment of strict Catholics, who could not see without disgust the canons of the Church disregarded and her enemies honoured. The clerical party, under the leadership of St. Agobard, Bishop of Lyons, wished to reduce the Jews to the position which they occupied under the bigoted Merovingian dynasty. An opportunity for the expression of these feelings offered itself in an incident such as has often proved the immediate cause of bloodshed between the faithful and unbelievers in the Ottoman Empire. A female slave of a rich Jew of Lyons ran away from her master and sought freedom in baptism. The Jews demanded the restoration of the slave. The Bishop refused to comply. The Court supported the Jews, the clerical party the Bishop. The Emperor endeavoured to restore peace by summoning a council wherein the bishops and the heads of the Jewish community might settle their differences by argument. The adversaries met and “roared rather than spoke” to each other. The council broke up, and the feud continued to rage. The Bishop preached to his flock sermons hostile to the Jews. ♦828♦ The friends of the latter intrigued in the Imperial Court on their behalf, and prevailed upon the Emperor to command St. Agobard to desist from his oratorical exercises, and the Governor of Lyons to lend his assistance to the Jews.

The bellicose saint paid no heed to the Imperial mandate, and the Emperor was obliged to send two courtiers to enforce respect for his orders; but they failed. The bishop then appealed to his brother prelates, entreating them to bring home to Louis his sinful conduct. His appeal met with hearty response. It was generally felt that the question was a test of the relative strength of Church and Court, and the supporters of the one were as determined to uphold their cause as were the partisans of the other. A number of prelates met at Lyons and held a consultation as to the best means of humbling the Jews and bringing the Emperor to the path of orthodoxy. ♦829♦ The fruit of this meeting was a joint letter of protest “concerning the superstitions of the Jews,” addressed to Louis. The manifesto produced no result, and in the following year the Bishop of Lyons joined the conspiracy of the Emperor’s sons against their father, was worsted, and paid for his treason by temporary exile to Italy, whence, however, he soon returned on condition, it seems, that he should leave the Jews alone.

The struggle only served to demonstrate the Emperor’s power and determination to protect his material interests in the teeth of ecclesiastical opposition. ♦838♦ Nor did Louis the “Pious” withdraw his countenance from the Jews even after the scandalous apostasy of his favourite Bishop Bodo to Judaism—an event which produced an enormous shock through Frankish Christendom, especially as it occurred directly after the bishop’s visit to Rome.[48] It is probable that a closer inspection of the Holy See accelerated Bodo’s resolution, though contemporary indignation traced it to the direct agency of Satan.

♦843♦

The golden age of Franko-Jewish history continued under Charles the Bald, son of Louis and Judith, who numbered amongst his closest friends the Jewish physician Zedekiah and another Jew called Judah. But the same causes brought about similar effects. The favour shown to the Jews by Louis’s successor excited the enmity of the pious, who found a leader in Agobard’s successor and other bishops, and held several councils with the object of inventing means for the curtailment of imperial power, the exaltation of ecclesiastical authority, and the suppression of the Jews. Again letters were addressed to the Emperor, in which he was recommended to enforce towards the murderers of Christ the measures which had been originated by Constantine the Great and Theodosius the Younger, adopted by the Spanish Visigoths and the Merovingian Kings of France, and sanctioned by the unanimous intolerance of so many Synods in the East and West. But these new enemies of the Jews proved no more successful than their predecessors. ♦877♦ Charles the Bald contented himself with extorting one-tenth of their earnings from the Jews, while his Christian subjects paid one-eleventh. Thanks to their commercial enterprise and integrity the “murderers of Christ” continued to prosper under the judicious fleecing of the Carlovingians, until the partition of the empire into a number of small states, the wane of the secular and the growth of the spiritual power brought about a change.

♦899–914♦

Charles the Simple was induced by his love of God and fear of the Pope to surrender all the lands and vineyards of the Jews in the Duchy of Narbonne to the Church. Boso, King of Burgundy and Provence, also made to the Church a gift of the property of his Jewish subjects, and this cavalier treatment of the wretched people continued under the first Capets, their degradation keeping pace with the progress of Papal influence. So deep was the suspicion now inspired by them, that when King Hugh Capet died in 996 his Jewish physician was generally accused of having murdered him.

♦965♦

A parallel evolution took place in Germany. When Otto the Great wished to show his piety by endowing the newly-built church of Magdeburg, he did so by bestowing upon it the revenue which he derived from the Jews. Likewise Otto II., sixteen years later, made an offering of the Jews of Merseburg to the local bishops. At the beginning of the eleventh century there occurred in Germany an event which may be regarded as the prelude to the subsequent persecutions of Judaism. ♦1005♦ The chaplain of the Duke Conrad suddenly scandalised the Christian world by going over to the Synagogue, and exasperated the brethren whom he had forsaken by producing a scurrilous lampoon on Christianity. The Emperor Henry caused to be published a reply in every respect worthy of the apostate’s pamphlet. Six years after the Jews were driven forth from Mayence, a decree was issued ordering the Jews of various towns to be branded, that they might not seek refuge in baptism, and so rigorous was the persecution that a contemporary Jewish poet commemorates it in lugubrious songs, wherein he expresses the fear that the children of Israel might be forced to forget the faith of their fathers. But the alarm was premature. Though, as a general rule, traffic in goods and in money were the only callings left open to the Jews, in some of the German states they still possessed the rights of citizenship and were permitted to own real estate.

Thus the first period of the mediaeval drama came to a close, as the second was opening.

CHAPTER VII
THE CRUSADES

Towards the end of the eleventh century there arose in Europe a gale of religious enthusiasm that boded no good to infidels. The zealous temper which at an earlier period had found a congenial pursuit in the extirpation of heathenism from Saxony, Lithuania, Poland, and the Baltic provinces, and in the suppression of heresy among the Vaudois, the Cathari or Albigenses, and others at a later, was now to be diverted into a different channel. During the preceding ages the authority of the Popes had been advancing with stealthy, but undeviating and steady, strides. Their own industry, foresight, and prudence laid the foundations of their political power; the piety and the ignorance of the nations which recognised their spiritual rule consolidated it. Every succeeding age found the Bishop of Rome in a higher position than that occupied by his predecessors, until there came one who was fitted to make use of the immense heritage of authority bequeathed to him.

Gregory VII., surnamed Hildebrand, ascended St. Peter’s throne in 1073. Though born in an obscure village and of humble parentage, he was a person endowed by nature with all the qualities necessary to make a successful master of men: strong and ambitious, and possessed of an ideal, he was a stranger to fear as to scruple. It was related of him that, whilst a lad in his father’s workshop and ignorant of letters, he accidentally framed out of little bits of wood the words: “His dominion shall be from one sea to the other.” To his contemporaries the story was prophetic (we may be content to regard it, true or not, as characteristic) of his career. Gregory’s dream was to deliver the papacy from the secular influence of the Emperor and to establish a theocratic Empire. This was the guiding principle of his policy, and, though his plans were flexible to circumstance, his purpose remained fixed. Like all great men, Hildebrand knew that, where there is a strong will, all roads lead to success. The first step to this end was the purification of the Church of the corruption into which it had sunk under his depraved predecessors, and the organisation of its soldiers under strict rules of discipline. This was effected by the suppression of simony and the enforcement of celibacy on the clergy. At the same time Gregory did not neglect that which was the main object of his life: to make Europe a vassal state to the pontifical see. The thunderbolts of excommunication, which Gregory, the son of Bonic the carpenter, wielded with Zeus-like majesty and impartiality, were freely hurled against his enemies in the East and West. In the Emperor Henry IV. the Pope met an adversary worthy of his heavenly artillery. But, undismayed by Henry’s power, and unrestrained by considerations of humanity, he plunged Christendom into that long-drawn strife between the Guelf and Ghibelline factions which makes the history of Europe for generations a melancholy tale of murder and outrage, ending in a blood-stained triumph for St. Peter.

After having temporarily humbled Henry IV. and forced him in the dead of winter to do penance in his shirt, the iron Pope turned his weapons against the Jews. In 1078 he promulgated a canonical law forbidding the hated people to hold any official post in Christendom, and especially in Spain. Alfonso VI., King of Castile, two years later received an Apostolic epistle congratulating him on his successes over the Mohammedans, and admonishing him that “he must cease to suffer the Jews to rule over the Christians, and to exercise authority over them,” for such conduct, his Holiness affirmed, was “the same as oppressing God’s Church and exalting Satan’s Synagogue. To wish to please Christ’s enemies,” he added, “means to treat Christ himself with contumely.” However, Alfonso was too busy in the campaign against his own enemies to devote much attention to the enemies of Christ—or of Gregory Hildebrand. None the less, the letter marks an epoch. What hitherto was prejudice now became law.

In Germany also the Pope’s anti-Jewish decrees met with only partial obedience. Bishop Rudiger of Speyer granted many privileges to the Jews of his diocese. Their Chief Rabbi enjoyed the same judicial authority over his own community as the burgomaster over the Christian burgesses. The Jews were allowed to buy Christian slaves and to defend themselves against the intrusion of the mob. For all these boons they paid three and a half pounds of gold annually. The Emperor Henry IV., Gregory’s antagonist, confirmed and augmented these privileges. He forbade his subjects, under severe penalties, to compel the Jews, or their slaves, to be baptized. In litigation between Jews and Christians the Jewish law and form of oath were to be followed; and the former were exempted from the ordeals of fire and water. But in spite of these favours their lot was such as to encourage Messianic expectations. The Redeemer, a prince of the house of David, was confidently awaited about this time (1096) to lead the chosen people back to the Holy Land. However, fate had other things in store for them.

It was a time when the Eastern and Western halves of mankind agreed in regarding the conversion, or, at least, the extermination of each other as their divinely appointed task. If the followers of Mohammed considered it an article of faith that the propagation of Islam at all costs was the supreme duty of every true believer, the propagation of the belief in the divinity of Christ, or the annihilation of those who denied it, was not less firmly held by all good Christians as a sacred obligation. A collision between the rival creeds was inevitable. All that was wanting was union on the part of the Christians equal to that which characterised the Mohammedans. This consummation was prepared by Peter the Hermit and was brought about by the exertions of the Pope.

♦1095♦

At the great Council of Clermont Urban II. described to the noble crowd of prelates and barons, assembled from all parts of Western Christendom, the sufferings of the Eastern Christians at the hands of the Saracens. With burning eloquence, and, no doubt, considerable exaggeration, he depicted the dark deeds of “the enemies of God”: their destruction and desecration of Christian churches; their slaughter, torture, and forcible conversion of Christian men, and their violation of Christian women; and he ended with a passionate appeal to all present to hasten to the assistance of the Holy Land, “enslaved by the godless and calling aloud to be delivered”; promising, at the same time, a plenary indulgence and general remission of sins to all who should enlist under the banner of the Cross. The effect of the Pontiff’s harangue on his chivalrous, sinful, and bigoted hearers was stupendous. It was the first official instigation to that hatred of the non-European and non-Christian which, however loth we may be to acknowledge the fact, in a less furious form, still survives amongst us. Many obeyed the summons with fervour born of pure piety; many more saw in the enterprise a comparatively cheap means of obtaining pardon for all their crimes, past and to come; while others welcomed an opportunity for satisfying their adventurous dispositions, for gaining wealth and renown, or for quenching in the blood of foreigners that fanatical zeal which could not find its full gratification in the butchery of fellow-countrymen.

Among such foreigners—Asiatic at once and infidel—the nearest were the Jews. Cruelty, like its opposite, begins at home. It was natural that the champions of the Cross should begin the vindication of their sacred emblem by the extermination of the race which had made so criminal a use of it. The shadow of the Old Crime once more fell upon the hapless people, and darkened their lives. Religious frenzy kindled the ancient feud, and greed fanned it. The vast and motley rabble of savage peasants who, under the command of a monk and the guidance of a goat, followed in the wake of the knightly army, incited by the lower clergy, fell upon the Jewish colonies which lay along their route through Central Europe—at Rouen, on the Moselle and the Rhine, at Verdun, Trèves, Speyer, Metz, Cologne, Mayence, Worms, Strasburg—massacring, pillaging, raping, and baptizing, without remorse or restraint.

But the Jews, as on so many occasions before and since, so now proved in a practical and ghastly manner that they dreaded death less than apostasy. Many of them met bigotry with bigotry, and cheated their assailants of both glory and gain by committing their property, their families and themselves to destruction. Martyrdom is a pathetic yet forcible reply to oppression. At Trèves the Jews, on hearing that the holy army was drawing near, were so terrified that some of them killed their own children; matrons and maidens drowned themselves in the Moselle in order to escape baptism or disgrace; and the rest of the community vainly implored the hard-hearted Bishop for protection. His answer was that nothing could save them but conversion. Thereupon the wretches hastened to be converted. The scene must have been a perfect study in the grimly ludicrous. The enemy was outside ready to pounce upon his prey. The latter said to the Bishop: “Tell us quickly what to believe.” The Bishop recited the creed, and the converts repeated it after him with all the fervour and fluency which the fear of death can only inspire.

At Speyer the Jews stoutly refused to be baptized, and many were, therefore, massacred. Those who succeeded in escaping sought shelter in the palace of the Bishop, who not only protected them, but incurred the censures of his contemporaries by ordering the execution of some of the holy murderers. A similar tragedy was acted at Worms, where some of the victims were temporarily saved by the Bishop, while a few were baptized, and the rest, men and women, committed suicide. At Mayence, they were slaughtered in the Archbishop’s palace, where they had taken refuge, and many murdered each other rather than betray their faith. At Cologne the majority of the community were rescued by the good burghers and their humane Bishop Hermann III. The Emperor Henry IV, also, on his return from his third Italian campaign, publicly denounced the crimes of the Crusaders, instituted proceedings against the Archbishop of Mayence, who had shared the spoils of the Jews, and permitted the surviving converts to return to Judaism; ♦1097♦ thereby drawing down upon himself an indignant reproof from his own antipope, Clement III., on whose behalf he had undertaken that expedition to Italy. For, however grateful Clement might be to Henry, he could not conscientiously connive at his impious interference with the designs of Providence.

♦1146♦

Similar scenes were repeated at the Second Crusade. Pope Eugenius III. issued a Bull, announcing that all who joined in the Holy War would be released from the interest which they owed to the Jewish money-lenders. St. Bernard seconded the Pope’s recruiting efforts. Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Clugny, exerted himself by might and main to inflame King Louis VII. of France and other noble Crusaders against the Jews: “Of what use is it,” wrote he to the king, “to go forth to seek the enemies of Christendom in distant lands, if the blasphemous Jews, who are much worse than the Saracens, are permitted in our very midst to scoff with impunity at Christ and the Sacrament?... Yet, I do not require you to put to death these accursed beings, because it is written ‘Do not slay them.’ God does not wish to annihilate them, but like Cain, the Fratricide, they must be made to suffer fearful torments, and continue reserved for greater ignominy, and to an existence more bitter than death.” In conformity with this charitable doctrine, the Jews of France were forced to yield their ill-gotten gains for the service of the cause of God.

Far worse was their fate in Germany. Even the partial protection which the citizens of the Rhineland had afforded the persecuted people in the First Crusade was now withdrawn, and the undisciplined mob gave the reins to the gratification of its religious zeal and of its lust. St. Bernard endeavoured to curb the demon of fanaticism, which his own eloquence had raised, by admonishing the enthusiasts, with more earnestness than consistency, that “the Jews are not to be persecuted, not to be butchered.” But his well-meant efforts produced no other effect than to turn the fury of the mob against himself; for a rival monk, Rudolf, had been going up and down the Rhineland, everywhere preaching, with tears in his eyes, that all Jews who were found by the Crusaders should be slain as “murderers of our dear Lord”—an appeal far more acceptable to the brutal herd of besotted hinds to whom it was addressed. The persecution commenced at Trèves, in August, 1146, where a Jew was seized by the Crusaders, and, on refusing to be saved by baptism, was murdered and mutilated. Soon afterwards a Jewess at Speyer was tortured on the rack. Many others were waylaid and made to suffer for their constancy at Würsburg and elsewhere. From Germany the frenzy passed into France. At Carenton, Rameru, and Sully the Jews were hunted and massacred.

For one who, in the face of such deeds, strives to preserve his faith in human nature, it is reassuring to note that the German bishops exerted themselves on behalf of the miserable victims, and, by accepting a simulated and temporary conversion, rescued many from martyrdom. The Emperor also extended to them his protection. But this favour was to cost the recipients dearly. Henceforth the German Jews were regarded as the Emperor’s protégés, which gradually came to mean the Emperor’s serfs. All they possessed, including their families and their own persons, were the Emperor’s chattels to be bought, sold, or pledged by him at pleasure. They were designated “Chamber-servants” (Servi Camerae or Kammerknechte); a servitude, however, that had the advantage of making it the Emperor’s interest to safeguard them against oppression, and to suffer no one to fleece them but himself.

And yet, such is the wonderful vitality of the race, the Jewish traveller, Benjamin of Tudela, who visited the Jewry on the Rhine only seventy years after the First, and twenty after the Second, Crusade, describes these colonies as rich in money and culture and hope; the brethren whom he found there as hospitable, cheerfully alive, and awaiting the Messiah. This expectation had never been entertained in vain. The wish had always yielded its own fulfilment. About this time, it gave rise to David Alroy, another Redeemer destined to delude the hapless nation for a while. He appeared in Asia Minor, and summoned his brethren to his banner. Many gave up all they possessed in order to respond to the call, and the enthusiasm spread from Baghdad to East and West. But the Messiah was excommunicated by the Synagogue, and murdered by his own father-in-law while asleep. According to another version,[49] Alroy, when face to face with the Sultan, exclaimed: “Cut off my head and I shall yet live.” He thus astutely exchanged prompt death for lingering torture. Many Jews, however, continued to believe in him for generations after his death.

The same spirit of religious mania which gave birth and sustenance to the Crusades animated other movements, more enduring in their results, if less romantic in their form. In 1198 the throne of St. Peter was filled by Innocent III., a young and zealous priest, fired with the lofty ambition to make Romanism the dominant creed over East and West, and himself the autocrat of a united Roman Catholic world. His genius was all but equal to this Titanic task, and in a reign of eighteen years Innocent, favoured by the convulsions and feuds which rent the whole of Europe, succeeded in raising the Papacy to a pinnacle of power only dreamt of by his predecessors, and attained by few of his successors. A worthy spiritual descendant of Gregory VII., he made and unmade Emperors and Kings at will, visiting the disobedience of princes upon whole nations, or compelling them to submission by releasing their subjects from their oath of allegiance. He exercised an absolute sway over the conscience and the mind of contemporary Christendom, and his pontificate was distinguished, in Gibbon’s scathing phrase, by “the two most signal triumphs over sense and humanity, the establishment of transubstantiation and the origin of the Inquisition.” ♦1200♦ It was he, who by a rigorous interdict laid upon the Kingdom of France, compelled the headstrong Philip Augustus to recall the wife whom he had dismissed; ♦1208♦ who by the ban of excommunication forced John, King of England, to lay his crown at the feet of his legate, ♦1211♦ and who by the execution of a like sentence against the Emperor Otho, John’s nephew, had humbled that mighty and haughty monarch to the dust. It was under his auspices that the Fifth Crusade was undertaken, ♦1203♦ and it was with his connivance that the forces, ostensibly recruited for the deliverance of the holy Sepulchre from the infidels, were employed to subjugate the Christian Empire of the East, and thus to pave the way for the advent of the Turk.

However, these and many other triumphs notwithstanding, Innocent’s dream of world-wide dominion could not be fully realised while such a thing as individual conscience remained in the world, and individual conscience could not be abolished without persecution. Innocent was too great a despot to shrink from the difficulties of the work; too sincere a Catholic to show any pity to unbelief. The thirteenth century opened under evil omens for dissenters. Immediately on his accession Innocent had demanded the suppression of the Albigenses of Southern France, those unfortunate forerunners of the Reformation, because they, choosing to follow the dictates of their own conscience, refused to conform to the practices of the Church and to comply with the commands of her clergy. ♦1207♦ Raymund VI., Count of Toulouse, however, declined to consider the massacre of his subjects one of his duties as a sovereign, and was excommunicated. In the following year the Pope, seizing the pretext offered by the murder of his legate, proclaimed an unholy war against the heretics. And so great was the Pope’s power over the superstitious and unscrupulous world of mediaeval Europe, that thousands volunteered to carry out the Pontiff’s atrocious orders. Raymund, who alone among the Christian princes had ventured to raise his voice in defence of the persecuted, had meanwhile been stripped of his dominions, dragged naked into the Church, scourged by the Pope’s legate, and was now forced to lead the crusade against his own people. The harmless population was almost exterminated by the most barbarous means, their heresy was all but quenched in blood; and one of the most prosperous and civilised provinces of Europe was laid waste. The ferocity of the soldiers was eclipsed by that of the monks and priests, great numbers of whom swelled the ranks of the butchers. On the 22nd of July, 1209, the city of Beziers was taken by storm. The Abbot Arnold, being asked how the heretics were to be distinguished from true believers, replied, “Slay all; God will know his own.” “We spared,” said the same monk in his report to the Pope, “no dignity, no sex, no age; nearly twenty thousand human beings have perished by the sword. After that great massacre the town was plundered and burnt, and the revenge of God seemed to rage upon it in a wonderful manner.”

So fared European heretics within the Church. Infidels of alien blood could hardly expect better treatment. The popular notion that the dispersion and sufferings of the Jews were a divine punishment for the crucifixion of Christ was raised by Innocent to the dignity of a dogma. It followed as a logical corollary that it was the sacred duty of Christ’s Vicar on earth to make the culprits feel the full rigour of the sentence. After the fashion of fanatics, Innocent mistook his own intolerance for holy enthusiasm, and, while indulging his own hatred, he imagined that he was only hating the enemies of Heaven. It was also currently believed that the example and the teaching of the Jews tended to pervert their Christian neighbours, and to encourage protest and heresy. The Albigensian sect in France, already mentioned, like the Hussite reform movement in Bohemia two centuries later, was attributed to Jewish influence. For both these reasons, their own infidelity and their tendency to foster infidelity in others, the Jews ought to be crushed.

The times were propitious. In 1167 the assassination of Raymund, Viscount of Beziers, had deprived the Jews of their protector. ♦1170♦ His successor Roger, who favoured the Albigensian heretics, had Jewish sheriffs; but his partiality to these two classes of enemies of Catholicism had provoked the wrath of the Pope and led to the prince’s tragic death. At Montpellier William VIII. and his sons excluded the Jews from the office of Sheriff. ♦1178–1201♦ But these restrictions were not sufficient. Innocent began the attack methodically in 1205, when he wrote to Philip Augustus, King of France, complaining of the usurious extortions of the Jews in that country, of their being allowed to employ Christian servants and nurses, and of the fact that Christians were not admitted to depose against Jews—things which were contrary to the resolution of the Third Lateran Council held under Pope Alexander III. ♦1179♦ Moreover, Innocent complained that the Jewish community of Sens had built a new synagogue which rose to a greater height than the neighbouring Christian church, and disturbed the service in the latter by loud and insolent chanting; that they scoffed at Christianity, and that they murdered Christians; and he ended by exhorting Philip Augustus to oppress the enemies of Christ. A similar epistle was addressed to Alfonso, King of Castile, threatening him with St. Peter’s displeasure, should he continue to allow the Synagogue to thrive at the expense of the Church. Three years later a pastoral epistle to the same effect was sent to the Count of Nevers, urging him to coerce the Jews and condemn them to serfdom, for they, “like the fratricide Cain, are doomed to wander about the earth as fugitives and vagabonds, and their faces must be covered with insult.” The writer further pointed out that it is disgraceful for Christian princes to receive Jews into their towns and villages, to employ them as usurers in order to extort money from the Christians, and to allow them to press wine which was used in the Lord’s Supper.

♦1209♦

All the above exhortations were systematised by the Council of Avignon. By the Statutes then passed the Jews were officially pronounced as polluted and polluting. It was decreed that “Jews and harlots should not dare to touch with their hands bread or fruits exposed for sale.”[50] The old Church law which forbade the Jews to employ Christian servants was renewed and enforced. The faithful were warned neither to receive services from Jews nor to render services to them, but to avoid them as a pest. All who had any dealings with Jews who transgressed these decrees were threatened with excommunication. Raymund of Toulouse, the protector of the Albigensian heretics and friend of the Jews, and all the barons of free cities, were bound by oath to carry out the decisions of the Council.

♦1211♦

Once more oppression from without fanned the longing for Redemption in the hearts of the Jews. The yearning after Zion, invigorated by Jehuda Halevi’s poetry, impelled more than three hundred Rabbis of France and England to emigrate to the Holy Land, where they visited the spots hallowed by the spirits of the past, wept over the ruins of their departed glory, and built synagogues and schools in order to keep alive the memory and the hope of a better day.

Meanwhile the Pope did not allow the iron to cool. In 1215 a great Œcumenical Council was convoked in Rome, under his presidency, to complete the ruin of the Albigenses, to stimulate the Crusades against the Saracens of Spain and Palestine, and, generally, to promote the kingdom of God on earth. The Jews, knowing from experience that any measures taken to that end could not fail to redound to their detriment, hastened to send deputies to Rome, in order to ward off the blow. But their endeavours proved fruitless. Four out of the seventy canonical decrees passed by the Council referred to them. The King of France, the Duke of Burgundy, and all other princes were called upon to lend their help in reducing the doomed people in their respective dominions to that state of bondage which was ordained for it by the divine will, as interpreted by theological bigotry. The Pope’s order met with general obedience. In most European countries the Jews were forbidden to hold any public appointment of trust, or to show themselves in the streets at Easter. They were obliged to pay tithes to the Church that persecuted them, and the head of each Jewish family was forced to subscribe an annual sum at the Easter festival. They were compelled by heavy fines and penalties to wear a yellow badge of distinction, which in their case meant a badge of shame, and the Christians were exhorted by their pastors not to allow their homes or their shops to be defiled by the presence of Heaven’s enemies.

However, papal decrees and anathemas notwithstanding, self-interest might have prevailed over religious fanaticism, and the sovereigns who had hitherto sold their connivance to the Jews might have continued to shield them. In fact, the Duke of Toulouse and the barons, despite the oath which they had been obliged to take, continued to invest the Jews with public dignities, and in Spain the Pope’s commands were strenuously ignored. But there now came into being a power of persecution, even more formidable than Papacy itself. The pan-Catholic enthusiasm, which had inspired Innocent’s anti-Jewish policy was bequeathed to two bodies of apostles, through whose organised zeal it was destined to spread far and wide, and, like a poisonous breath, to blight many a noble flower in the bud. The age of stationary and corpulent monks was succeeded by the age of lean and wandering friars. ♦1223♦ A few years after Innocent’s death were instituted the Order of Dominic and the Order of Francis, the precursors of the stakes and scaffolds of the Inquisition. The latter order had been called into existence with the special object of stamping out the Albigensian heresy. But an essential part of the mission of both bodies was to hunt out dissent, to root out free-thought, and to realise the bigot’s ideal of spiritual peace by means of intellectual starvation. Uniformity was their idol, and to that idol they were prepared to sacrifice the moral sense of mankind and the lives of their fellow-creatures. The Jews supplied them with a splendid field for the exercise of their missionary ardour: numerous, obstinate, rich and unpopular, they offered a prey as tempting as it was safe. The friars were in some ways an undoubted power for good; but the Jews experienced none of this better side of their activity.

In 1227 a Council at Narbonne confirmed the canonical ordinances against the Jews, and many ancient decrees of the Merovingian kings were revived. Not only were the Jews forbidden to take interest on money and compelled to wear the badge and to pay taxes to the Church, but they were again prohibited from stirring abroad during Easter. ♦1231♦ Shortly afterwards two other Councils at Rouen and Tours re-enacted and enlarged the anti-Jewish statutes of the Council of Rome.

But the Dominicans were as subtle as they were zealous. They felt that the citadel of Judaism which had held out for so many centuries, could not be carried by storm. They resorted to less crude tactics. With a patience, perseverance, and ingenuity worthy of their high ambition, they devoted themselves to the study of the Hebrew language and literature, their Master Raymund de Peñaforte prevailing upon the Kings of Aragon and Castile to found special colleges for the purpose. The Prophets of the Old Testament had already supplied the apologists of the Church with proofs of the truth of Christianity.[51] The Talmud was now to supply them with fresh proofs of the falsity of Judaism. From the pages of that marvellous compilation of noble thoughts and multifarious absurdity, they culled everything that was likely to reflect discredit on the morality or the intelligence of their adversaries. In this campaign the Dominicans were fortunate enough to enlist the services of renegade Jews, who, after the fashion of renegades, strove to prove their loyalty to the faith they embraced by a bitter persecution of the one they deserted. One of these apostates, Nicolas Donin by name, in 1239 submitted to Pope Gregory IX. a minute indictment of the pernicious book, and induced him to issue Bulls to the Kings of England, Spain, and France, as well as to the bishops in those countries, ordering a general confiscation of the Talmud, and a public enquiry into the charges brought against its contents. The Pope’s instructions, so far as we know, appear to have produced no impression in the first two kingdoms, but in France there reigned Louis IX., known to fame as St. Louis: in mundane affairs a brave, high-minded, just and humane prince; but not far in advance of his age in things celestial. In fact, he possessed all the prejudices of an ordinary mediaeval knight, and more than the superstition of an ordinary mediaeval monk. He was sincerely convinced that the road to heaven lay through Jerusalem. Acting on this conviction, he led the last two Crusades, and laid down his life in the cause of Catholicism; a sacrifice which earned him a place among the saints of the Church. Such a prince could not, without flagrant inconsistency, ignore the Pontiff’s wishes. He, therefore, ordered that a careful search for the suspected book should be made throughout his dominions, that all copies should be seized, and that a public disputation should be held, in which four Rabbis were to take up the challenge thrown down by Donin.

The antagonists met in the precincts of the Court, and a brilliant assembly of secular and spiritual magnates formed the audience. Donin warmly denounced the Talmud as a farrago of blasphemy, slander, superstition, immorality and folly, and the Rabbis defended it as warmly as they dared. The debate, though distinguished by all the scurrility and more than all the ferocity of a village prize-fight, seems to have been conducted on the principle that whichever side had the best of the argument, the Christian should win; and the Court of Inquisitors returned a verdict accordingly. The Talmud was found guilty of all the charges brought against it and was sentenced to the flames. Execution was delayed for two years through bribery; but it was carried out in 1242. Fourteen—some say four and twenty—cartloads of Rabbinical lore and legislation fed the bonfire. The grief of the French Jews at the loss of their sacred books was bitter, and the most pious amongst them kept the anniversary of the cremation as a day of fasting.[52]

♦1263♦

Twenty-one years later a similar tourney took place in Barcelona by order, and in the presence, of Jayme I., King of Aragon. Don Jayme had borrowed from his northern neighbours the axiom that the Jews were to be treated as royal chattels. Moreover, his conscience was in the keeping of Raymund de Peñaforte, the Master of the Dominicans, a great Inquisitor born before his time. King Jayme had led an amorous and not immaculate youth. He was, therefore, in his old age, peculiarly susceptible to his Confessor’s admonitions. The sins of love should be atoned for by acts of persecution. The religious freedom of the Jews should be offered up as a sacrifice of expiation. It was the logic and the morality of the Middle Ages.

The outcome of Jayme’s remorse was a theological contest at the royal court of Barcelona. There again the lists were held for Christianity by a Dominican friar of Jewish antecedents, while the champion of Judaism was Nachmanides, famed in the annals of Israel as the greatest philosopher, physician, theologian, and controversialist of his age. Pablo Christiani politely endeavoured to prove that the prophets of the Jews had predicted the advent and recognised the divinity of Jesus. Nachmanides with equal politeness denied that they had done anything of the kind. After five days’ refined recrimination the Court unanimously pronounced in favour of Christianity. The books of the Jews were expurgated of all “anti-Christian” passages, Nachmanides’s account of the controversy was burnt publicly as blasphemous, and the author, then in his seventieth year, banished from Spain, ended his days in Jerusalem. Pablo, whose ambition was kindled by victory, undertook a tour through the Iberian Peninsula and Provence, and, armed with a royal edict, compelled the Jews to engage in religious controversies with him and to defray the expenses of his missionary journeys.

Missions to the Jews became the fashion of the day, and the kingdoms of the West were overrun by itinerant dialecticians seeking whom they might convert. The Jews were forced to attend church and to listen to sermons against their own religion. Thanks to their long training in Rabbinical subtleties, the benighted people sometimes proved more than a match for their assailants, and, if fair play were not contrary to the laws of ecclesiastical warfare, they might succeed in converting the would-be convertors. But, though religious discussion was invited, nay, forced by the Church, it was always on the clear understanding that the Christians might beat the Jews, but that the Jews should under no circumstances be allowed to beat the Christians. To prevent any misconception on the subject, Thomas Aquinas, justly celebrated as one of the least bigoted of theologians, and distinguished among schoolmen for his tolerance of Judaism, gravely cautioned his readers to have no intercourse with the Jews, unless they felt sure that their faith was proof against reason.

In later years the work of conversion in the various countries was entrusted by the Popes to Dominican friars and inquisitors, who carried it on with a diligence never practised except by men fanatically believing in the truth of their doctrines and with a ruthlessness only possible in men too firmly persuaded of the holiness of the end to be scrupulous about the means. These apostles were authorised to reinforce the powers of their eloquence by an appeal to the secular arm. Even so modern missionaries in China have been known in time of peril to forget that an apostle should be above earthly weapons and “to clamour for a gunboat with which to ensure respect for the Gospel.”[53]

And while disappointed theologians represented the Jew’s loyalty to his religion as a proof of his anti-Christian tendencies, scholars represented his aloofness as a proof of his anti-social nature, and they both agreed in denouncing him as “an enemy of mankind.” This lesson, to use the words of a distinguished Jewish writer, “was dinned into the ears of the masses until the calumny became part of the popular creed. The poets formulated the idea for the gentry, the friars brought it to the folk.”[54]

The animosity thus fomented against the Jews found frequent opportunities of translating itself into acts of horror. In France, after the war declared against the unfortunate people by the Church, they lost the royal protection which they had enjoyed hitherto, and were henceforth exposed not only to the spasmodic fury of the populace, but also to systematic persecution on the part of bishops, barons and towns. Bishop Odo of Paris, in 1197, forbade the Christians to have any dealings, social or commercial, with the Jews. ♦1236♦ The Crusaders called to arms by Gregory IX. attacked the Jewish communities of Anjou, Poitou, Bordeaux, Angoulème, and elsewhere, and on the Jews refusing to be baptized, the holy warriors trampled many of them, men, women and children, to death under the hoofs of their horses, burned their synagogues, and pillaged and sacked their private dwellings. St. Louis encouraged the conversion of the Jews, permitting the children of baptized fathers to be torn away from their unregenerate mothers. ♦1246♦ By a decree of the Council of Beziers the disabilities of the Jews were once more confirmed, and the Christians were now forbidden to call in Jewish doctors, thus depriving the Jews of the profession which they had hitherto almost monopolised in Europe. ♦1257♦ A few years after Pope Alexander IV., who had just established the Inquisition in France at the request of St. Louis, issued another Bull in which the ruler of that kingdom and other princes were again exhorted to enforce the distinctive garb upon the Jews and to burn all copies of the Talmud. To omit minor acts of oppression, the fanatical sect of the “Shepherds,” following the example of the Crusaders, massacred the Jews on the Garonne in 1320.

♦1218–1250♦

In Germany the sufferings of Israel were equally severe. The Emperor Frederick II., despite his infidelity and his enmity towards the Papacy, adopted the Pope’s anti-Jewish decrees. He excluded the Jews from public offices, he censured the Archduke of Austria for tolerating and protecting them, he enforced the use of the badge in his Italian and Sicilian dominions, and he oppressed them with heavy taxes, dwelling with especial satisfaction on the dictum that the Jews were the Emperor’s serfs. In the troublous period which followed Frederick’s death the Jews were slain and burnt in great numbers at Weissenberg, Magdeburg, and Erfurt, while other cities year after year witnessed wholesale slaughter, and “Jew-roaster” became a coveted title of honour. In addition to occasional massacre, from the end of the twelfth to the middle of the fifteenth century the German Jews underwent eight expulsions and confiscations of their communal property: Vienna (1196), Mecklenburg (1225), Frankfort (1241), Brandenburg (1243), Nuremberg (1390), Prague (1391), Heidelberg (1391), and Ratisbon (1476).

In Switzerland the persecution commenced about the middle of the fourteenth century, and several expulsions are recorded in the ensuing century. In Eastern Europe the Jews suffered in Russia and Hungary. The semi-civilised and semi-Christianized Magyars, who had hitherto tolerated the Jews, were incited to acts of oppression by the Western friars. Poland and Lithuania were the only European countries where the Jews of the later Middle Ages found shelter, and consequently both those countries received large numbers of fugitives from the Western fields of carnage.

Credulity joined hands with bigotry. No story told of the Jews was too extravagant for belief; no charge brought against them too trivial for repetition, provided it afforded an excuse for persecution. Some of the odious crimes attributed by the heathens in the early centuries to the Christians, as a justification of their suppression, were now revived by the Christians against the Jews. The latter were accused of enveigling Christian children into their houses and sacrificing them for ritual or medicinal purposes, of travestying the sacraments of the Church, of poisoning wells and of committing all kinds of abominations, which plainly rendered their utter extermination a public duty. Similar charges, curiously enough, are still brought against the Jews by the Christians of Eastern Europe, by the Jews themselves against Hebrew converts to Islam in Turkey, and by the Chinese against Protestant missionaries—“charges of gross personal immorality and of kidnapping and mutilation of children, which, however monstrous and malevolent, are not the less, but the more serious, because they are firmly believed by the ignorant audiences to whom they are addressed.”[55] To the vulgar all that is strange is sinister.

The free propagation of these heinous and disgusting myths among the vulgar masses of mediaeval Europe led, as it had done in ancient times and as it has done more recently, to a horrible persecution of those against whom they were levelled. ♦1171♦ The Jews were ruthlessly burnt by order of Duke Theobalt at Blois, were massacred by the populace in Languedoc and Central France, ♦1321♦ and on the plague breaking out in the following year, they were burnt en masse—men, women and children. A season of alternate persecution and toleration ensued, until they were banished from Central France and finally driven out from the rest of the country by the insane King Charles VI., ♦1394–5♦ at the end of the fourteenth century.

In Germany wherever the dead body of a Christian was found, the murder was promptly laid at the door of the Jews, who on such occasions were bidden to be baptized or die. So firm a hold had the blood-accusation got upon the minds of the people that there was no mystery which could not be cleared up by a simple reference to the Jews. The outbreak of the Black Death in Germany also was attributed to Jewish malevolence. It is now held that this scourge originated in India and was conveyed to Europe by trade routes and armies, or that it arose from the insanitary conditions of mediaeval life. But the mediaeval world was convinced that it could only be the work of the Jews. Their comparative immunity from the disease, due perhaps to their superior temperance, lent colour to the theory; confessions extorted by torture dissipated all doubts on the subject. It was commonly believed that the Jews of Spain, those redoubtable professors of the Black Art, had invented this fiendish method for the extermination of Christianity; that they had despatched emissaries with boxes of poison concocted of basilisks and lizards, or even of Christian hearts, to all the Jewish congregations in Europe and had persuaded or compelled them to disseminate death among the Christians by poisoning the wells and springs. The arch-poisoner was even indicated by name. The Jews were in consequence subjected to a widespread persecution, at the hands of a mob maddened by the terrible and mysterious epidemic. ♦1348–50♦ Despite the Emperor’s energetic efforts to save his serfs, the more disinterested exertions of humane burgomasters, sheriffs, and municipal councils, and Pope Clement VI.’s Bull in which the absurdity of the poison charge was solemnly exposed, the wretched people were slaughtered and burnt by thousands in many parts of Germany, and at last they were banished from the Empire. Yet their services were so valuable that they gradually returned, only to submit to new social restrictions and contumelious enactments on the part of the Church.

Similar scenes were performed through the length and breadth of Switzerland and Belgium.

In Poland alone, which had long been a haven of refuge to the hunted Jews, these abominable calumnies found a very limited market as yet. It was there enacted that a charge of ritual murder brought by a Christian against a Jew, unless the accuser succeeded in substantiating it, should be punished with death. This generous treatment of the Polish Jews, it is said, was partly due to King Casimir IV.’s love for a Jewish mistress. Through her influence the children of Israel obtained many privileges which placed them on a footing of social equality with the Christians. At a time when they were oppressed, reviled and butchered in almost every Western country, in Poland their lives and liberties were as safe as those of the nobility itself. Whilst the native peasants were still treated as serfs, the Jews were allowed the aristocratic privilege of wearing rapiers. Any Jew might, by simply renouncing his religion, become a nobleman. As stewards of the estates belonging to the Polish magnates, the Jews possessed even the power of inflicting capital punishment on the Christian slaves of the soil: so much so that during the terrible pestilence not more than ten thousand Jews were massacred in Poland.

CHAPTER VIII
USURY AND THE JEWS

Another cause of the hatred inspired by the mediaeval Jew was usury, a term which was then synonymous with money-lending generally.

For an age accustomed to regard lending money at interest as a purely economic transaction, the rate of interest as an economic phenomenon obeying the law of demand and supply, and the whole thing as a question of commerce rather than of ethics, it is not easy to understand the theological wrath vented on money-lenders in old times. Yet in the Middle Ages trade in money was treated as a heinous sin, and those engaged in this occupation, to us perfectly legitimate, as criminals of the deepest dye. Dante, in whom “ten silent centuries found a voice,” expresses the mediaeval feeling on the subject by placing Cahors, a city of Provence, notorious in the thirteenth century as a nest of usurers, beside Sodom in Hell:

“E pero lo minor giron suggella,

Del segno suo e Sodomma e Caorsa.”[56]

It was a superstition of very ancient growth, and its origin can be traced back to the constitution of primitive society. In the youth of the human race, when the members of each community looked upon themselves as members of one family, it was naturally very bad form for those who had more than they needed to refuse a share of their superfluity to a brother in want. The sentiment, once rooted, continued from generation to generation, and survived the tribal system in which it arose. From a social law it became a religious tenet, and inspired legislators lent to it the sanction of their authority. It is found incorporated both in the Old Testament and in the Koran. Moses said: “Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of victuals, usury of anything that is lent upon usury;”[57] and, many centuries after, the Psalmist sang: “Lord, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? Who shall dwell in thy holy hill?... He that putteth not out his money to usury.”[58] Mohammed, following Moses, emphatically declares that “They who devour usury shall not arise from the dead, but as he ariseth whom Satan hath infected with a touch: this shall happen to them because they say, Truly selling is but as usury: and yet God hath permitted selling and forbidden usury. He therefore who, when there cometh unto him an admonition from his Lord, abstaineth from usury for the future, shall have what is past forgiven him, and his affair belongeth unto God. But whoever return to usury, they shall be the companions of Hell fire, they shall continue therein for ever.”[59]

Philosophy in this case failed to rise superior to theology. Plato regards usury as a source of distress, discontent and unrest, usurers as creating, by their extortions, a dangerous class of “drones and paupers” in the State,[60] and in his laws forbids “lending money at interest.”[61] Although the Greek for interest is “offspring” (τόκος), Aristotle pronounced that money was “barren,” and therefore to derive profit from lending it out was to put it to an unnatural use.[62] The tradition was carried on through succeeding ages, and Plutarch in the midst of his numerous labours found time to denounce usurers.

The Fathers of the Church adopted a sentiment which accorded so well with the communistic ideals of early Christianity, and St. Chrysostom anathematizes money-lenders as men who “traffic in other people’s misfortunes, seeking gain through their adversity: under the pretence of compassion they dig a pit for the oppressed.”[63] The Mediaeval Church, as was natural, inherited the venerable doctrine of the sinfulness of lending money at interest and of speculative trade, and prohibited such transactions in theory. But in practice the prohibition was found impossible; nay, in many cases, injurious. No capitalist would part with his money, or tradesman with his goods, without profit. In the absence of loans and middlemen commerce would come to a standstill, and large numbers of people would be doomed to choose between a sinful life and virtuous starvation. The dilemma was an awkward one, but not too awkward for scholastic subtlety, and the sophists of the Church devoted much time and ingenuity to hair-breadth distinctions, attempting to explain the inexplicable and to reconcile the irreconcilable, by arguing that rent for a house or a horse was lawful, but interest on money unlawful, and, like their brethren of the law, they tried to avoid practical mischief by the sacrifice of intellectual sincerity. The scholastic position, being absurd, met with general acceptance.

However, in the earlier Middle Ages there was little temptation for transgression, little scope for commercial speculation, while, on the other hand, casuistry afforded abundant devices for evasion. The Church was, as a rule, content to enforce the law on clerics, but towards laymen she was more lenient. Nay, she encouraged traders to buy and sell goods unaltered, despite St. Chrysostom’s sentence that such traders are “ejected from the temple of God.” And yet she refused, as much as Mohammed did, to accept the commonsense view that “selling is but as usury,” and, while sanctioning the one, continued to condemn the other. But so long as the Papacy was too weak to persecute, the condemnation remained a dead letter, the Church being obliged to connive at a sin which she was powerless to conquer.

Meanwhile, as European society developed, money-lending went on increasing. And what would now be regarded as the inevitable accompaniment of material activity was then denounced as a symptom of moral degeneracy. At the same time the power of the Church grew, and her eagerness to suppress what she considered a sin grew with her ability. Under Gregory VII., the hurler of thunderbolts, the Papacy entered upon that career of political conquest which achieved its highest triumphs under Innocent III. ♦1083♦ Gregory had been on the throne for ten years when one of those missiles fell upon usurers, a term which, it must be remembered, in that age applied to all money-lenders alike. The warfare inaugurated by Hildebrand was carried on with unabated vigour by his successors. A decree issued by the Lateran General Council of 1139 deprived usurers of the consolations of the Church, denied them Christian burial, and doomed them to infamy in this life and to everlasting torment in the next. The religious enthusiasm aroused by the Crusades, and the economic ruin which they threatened, accentuated the common prejudice against the outlaws of the Church. Many of the holy warriors were obliged to resort to the usurer’s hoard for the expenses of these campaigns, and the Church felt that it was her duty to see that her champions were not left destitute and homeless. Pope after Pope, throughout the twelfth century, from Eugenius III. onwards, absolved Crusaders from their financial embarrassments, and Innocent III. went so far as to ordain that the Jews should be compelled to refund to their debtors any interest that might have already been paid to them.

The prejudice was further strengthened and disseminated by the religious Orders of St. Francis and St. Dominic, which soon attained a degree of official and unofficial influence calculated to enforce their precepts. Members of both orders compiled moral codes, which were accepted throughout Western Christendom as manuals of Christian ethics and guides of Christian conduct. One of the principal sins condemned in those books was usury, and the doctrine, thundered from the pulpit, preached in the market-place, and whispered in the confessional, carried with it all the weight which attaches to the words of persons invested with the power of loosing and binding in this world and in the world to come.

And yet, despite pontifical anathemas and public opinion, things pursued their natural course, and usurers were to be found even among the tenants of ecclesiastical and monastic estates, until Gregory X., in 1274, issued a Bull forbidding the letting of lands or houses to the accursed tribe. But though the pious execrated the money-lender, the needy could not dispense with his services. The chief effect of the prohibition of money-lending, and of the superstitious disrepute in which it was held, was to force this important branch of economic life into the hands of the least respectable members of the community. Usury was by no means eschewed by the Christians, as Dante shows. But the masses of mediaeval Europe, especially in the north and centre, were too superstitious to brave the ban of the Church, too stupid and ignorant and thriftless to succeed in a business requiring dexterity, alertness, and economy. Thus trade in money, as most other kinds of European trade, fell from the very first into the hands of the Jews—the only people who had capital to lend and no caste to lose. Moreover, there was little else for the Jew to do in feudal Europe. The laws and the prejudices which in many countries forbade him to own land or to engage in various handicrafts and trades on one hand, and his own religious scruples on the other, narrowed his range of activity, and the current of energy and intelligence, compressed into one channel, ran with proportionately greater force. The reputation of the Jews for usury dates from the sixth century. But money-lending really became their characteristic pursuit since the commencement of the persecution already narrated. Then the Jews, by the periodical enactments of councils and the frequent publications of ecclesiastical edicts, were excluded from the markets, and thus, being unable to compete with the Christian merchants, were driven to deal only in second-hand articles, while others, possessed of some capital but forbidden to invest it in goods, were compelled to put it out to interest.

As has been seen, the money-lending transactions of the Jews had long continued to be carried on with the connivance of the Church and under the protection of the State, many princes being only too glad to avail themselves of the Jews’ skill in pecuniary dealings for the improvement of their own finances. Under mediaeval conditions of financial administration the Jew was literally indispensable to the State. The sovereigns of Europe, as yet unversed in the mysteries of systematic taxation, needed a class of men who would for their own sake collect money from the king’s subjects and keep it, as it were, in trust for the king’s treasury. At the worst, the Jews in a mediaeval country might be described as sponges which imbibed the wealth of the nation and then were squeezed for the benefit of the crown. At the best, they fulfilled the function of the clouds which collect the water in small drops and then yield it back to the earth in rich showers, the rainfall being only too often accelerated by artificial explosives. In either case it was the duty of a Jew to be wealthy.

The growing wealth of the Jews must have always excited the envy and the cupidity of their neighbours. But it was not until the awakening of religious bigotry by the Crusades and the Mendicant Orders that the dormant animosity declared itself in wholesale persecution. Nor is the violence of the popular feeling, apart from religious motives, quite inexplicable or inexcusable. The Jews from the earliest times evinced a fierce contempt for the Gentile. Despite the doctrine of universal love inculcated by certain Hebrew teachers, the bulk of the community clung to the older lesson. Jewish tolerance of outsiders, like Christian tolerance, was the glory and the property of the few. A Jehuda Halevi or a Maimonides might preach broad humanitarianism, but it would be unreasonable to suppose that their preaching was more effective on their co-religionists than the similar preaching of a Thomas Aquinas or a St. Bernard was on theirs. And it is important not to forget that in every-day life it is not the minds of the cultured few but the instincts of the masses that count. With the ordinary mediaeval Jew, as with the ordinary mediaeval Christian, charity not only began but ended at home. The tribal spirit of their religion made the Jews hard to the non-Jew and callous to his needs. Moses had already said: “Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother,” and Rabbinical law enforced the commandment; but the prohibition was accompanied by a significant permission: “Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury,” an ominous distinction of which the Jews took full advantage, though Jewish moralists and Rabbis constantly opposed the extent to which reliance was placed upon it.

The racial and religious antagonism, in which the Jew found himself engaged from his earliest contact with the nations, widened the gulf. The grievous persecution to which he found himself periodically exposed since his advent in Europe further embittered his soul, and sore experience taught him that peace could only be purchased by gold. He had nothing but avarice to oppose to the fanaticism of those under whom he lived, and he strove to raise a wall of gold between himself and tyranny. He took shelter behind his shekels, and, naturally, endeavoured by all means, fair or foul, to make that shelter as effective as he could. Even supposing that the Jew omitted no opportunity of fleecing the Gentile, he was more than justified in doing so—he was compelled by the Gentile’s own treatment of him. It was the Gentile who taught the Jew the supreme virtue of money as a preservative against oppression, exile, and death; and he had no right to complain of the disciple’s wonderful quickness in learning his lesson and “bettering the instruction.” His hatred of the Gentile, thus combined with love of gain and love of life, rendered him impervious to compassion. The Gentile merited little mercy at the hands of the Jew, and he got no more than he merited. The exploitation of the Gentile, begun as a necessity and promoted as a means of self-defence, thus found an abiding place among the lower orders of the mediaeval Jews.

Besides, in the Middle Ages borrowing for commercial purposes was rare. As a rule, a loan was resorted to only on an emergency, and the interest was determined by the necessity of the borrower. Under the circumstances exorbitant rates were unavoidable. The discouragement of money-lending, coupled with the scarcity of capital, by limiting competition, would in any case have tended to raise the normal rate of interest to a distressing height,[64] in obedience to the law of demand and supply which now is one of the commonplaces of political economy. The uncertainty of recovery raised it to a greater height still. Like the Christian bankers in the Turkey of not long ago, the Jewish money-lenders of the Middle Ages must have lent their money at considerable risk, sometimes amounting to certainty of loss. The mediaeval baron, far more than the mediaeval burgess, was largely beholden to the Jew both in peace and in war. The pomp and pride of chivalry could not be maintained without money. For the pageant of a tournament, as for the more costly splendour of a campaign, the usurer’s purse was appealed to. But, if the baron found himself obliged to coax and flatter the Jew and to submit to exorbitant terms when he wanted a loan, he revenged himself when he had the Jew in his power. Such opportunities were not rare, and then the borrower repayed himself with interest. The conditions of the transaction were such as to tempt avarice, but not to encourage moderation. A loan to a mediaeval pasha was a speculation which might result either in wealth or in penury and death.

This a priori reasoning is amply confirmed by history. Among the Jews’ clients none were more conspicuous than the sovereigns of Christendom; and the devices to which these crowned robbers descended in their attempts to reconcile expediency with conscience would be highly amusing were they less tragic. ♦1169♦ King Louis VII. of France, though a Crusader, protected the Jews and disregarded the decree of the Lateran Council, which forbade them to employ Christian servants. His example was at first followed by his son Philip Augustus, who, however, gradually changed his attitude. Though nominally Lord Paramount of France, the French King in reality could call nothing but a small tract of the country his own; the royal domain being surrounded by the territories of the great feudatory Dukes and Counts. Philip wished to convert this theoretical suzerainty into actual possession, and to this end he needed money. The wealth of the Jews suggested to him a short-cut to the accomplishment of his desire. Though not the only usurers in the kingdom, the Jews were the most unpopular. He, therefore, caused a number of them to be cast into prison, and held them to ransom. ♦1180♦ On paying 1500 marks, they were set at liberty. The success of the experiment induced Philip to try operations on a larger scale. ♦1181♦ A few months later he conceived the happy thought of ridding himself of his sins and of his debts at once by cancelling the claims of the Jews, by compelling them to give up the pledges held by them, by confiscating their real property, and by expelling them from his Kingdom. ♦1198♦ Some years after, in consistency with the principle of expedience, he thought it advisable to mortify the Pope and to enrich himself by recalling the exiles, and forbidding them to leave his dominions.

Louis IX., as became a king and a saint of unquestionable respectability, released all his subjects of one-third of the money which they owed to the Jews “for the salvation of his own soul, and those of his ancestors,” and, in 1253, he sent from Palestine an order banishing all Jews, except those who would take to legitimate commerce and handicrafts.

Philip the Fair, whose cruel rapacity and vindictiveness were exemplified in the ruin of the Knights Templars, accompanied as it was by the torture and cremation of their persons and the confiscation of their treasures, showed the same tyrannical and predatory spirit towards the Jews. ♦1306♦ They had just concluded their severe fast on the Day of Lamentation in remembrance of the destruction of the Temple, when the King’s constables seized them, young and old, women and children, and dragged them all to prison, where they were told that they should quit the country within a month, under penalty of death. They were plundered of all their possessions, save the clothes which they wore and one day’s provisions, and were turned adrift—some hundred thousand souls—leaving to the King cartloads of gold, silver, and precious stones. A few embraced Christianity, and some who ventured to tarry after the prescribed date suffered death; but the majority chose to lose all, and quit the country in which their forefathers had lived from time immemorial, rather than be false to their faith. Their communal buildings and immoveable property were confiscated, and Philip the Fair made a present of a synagogue to his coachman.

Most of the exiles settled in the neighbourhood, waiting for a favourable opportunity of returning to their devastated homes. Nor had they to wait long. ♦1315♦ Financial necessity overcame fanaticism, and nine years later Philip’s successor, Louis X., was glad to have them back and to help them in the collection of the moneys due to them, on condition that two-thirds of the sums collected should be surrendered to the Royal Exchequer.

In Germany, also, the Emperors time and again performed their duty to the Church by cancelling their debts to the Jews. But it would be a mistake to suppose that piety was an indispensable cloak for plunder. A law enacted in France condemned Jewish converts to Christianity to loss of all their goods for the benefit of the King or their Lord Paramount; for it was felt that conversion would exempt the victims from extortion. Thus even the interests of religion were at times subordinated to rapacity.

CHAPTER IX
THE JEWS IN ENGLAND

The first mention of Jews on this side of the Channel is said to occur in the Church Constitutions of Egbert, Archbishop of York, towards the middle of the eighth century; the second in a monastic charter of some hundred years later. But they do not seem to have crossed over in any considerable force till the Norman Conquest. ♦1066♦ Among the foreigners who followed William to his new dominions were many families of French Jews. Their ready money and their eagerness to part with it rendered them welcome to the king and his barons. The former received from them advances, when his feudal dues were in arrear; the latter had recourse to the Jew’s money-bag whenever the expense of military service or the extravagance of their life made a loan necessary. To men of lower rank also, such as litigants who were obliged to follow the King’s Court from county to county, or to repair to Rome in order to plead their cases before the Pope’s Curia, the Jew’s purse was of constant help. No less useful was the Jew to the English tax-payer. In those days of picturesque inefficiency taxes were levied at irregular intervals and in lump sums. The subject, suddenly called upon to pay a large amount at short notice, was only too glad to borrow from the Jew.

However, such intercourse with the Gentiles, high and low, notwithstanding, the Jews formed in England, as they did on the Continent, a people apart. In each town the synagogue formed a centre round which clustered the colony. Newcomers gravitated towards the same centre, and thus spontaneously grew the Jewries of London, Norwich, York, Northampton, and other English cities. These Jewish quarters were the King’s property and, like his forests, they were outside the jurisdiction of the common law. But, while their judicial and financial interests were under royal control, the Jews were allowed full liberty of worship, were permitted to build synagogues and to conduct their religious affairs under their own Chief Rabbi, thus constituting a self-governing and self-centred community. The literary activity of the Jews during their sojourn in England reveals a marvellous detachment from their environment. Commentaries and super-commentaries on the Old Testament and the Talmud, learned treatises on minute points of ritual and ceremonial, discussions on the benedictory formulas that are appropriate to each occasion of life: on rising in the morning, or lying down at night, on eating, washing, on being married, on hearing thunder, and a myriad other profound trivialities—such was the stuff that their studies were made of. And whilst Norman and Saxon, Celt and Dane were being welded into one English people, Israel remained a race distinct in face, speech, domestic economy, deportment, diet of the body and diet of the soul.

The singularity of the Jews’ habits, their usury, the wealth accumulated thereby, and the ostentatious display of it, must from the very first have evoked among the English feelings of distrust and jealousy, dislike and contempt, such as at a later period inspired a genial poet to pronounce that “Hell is without light where they sing lamentations.” But during the first century of their residence in the country they seem to have suffered from no active manifestation of these feelings. William the Conqueror favoured them, and William Rufus actually farmed out vacant bishoprics to them. ♦1087–1100♦ The latter prince’s easy tolerance of Judaism is denounced by the monkish historians in many quaint tales, which, though meant to throw light on William’s irreligion, also serve to illustrate his sense of humour. At one time a Jew, whose son had been lured to Christianity, went to the King, and, by means of prayers and a present of sixty marks, prevailed upon him to lend his assistance in recovering the strayed lamb. The King did his utmost to carry out his part of the contract, but, on finding the youth obdurate, told the father that inasmuch as he had failed he was not entitled to the present; but inasmuch as he had conscientiously striven to succeed, he deserved to be paid for his trouble, and he kept thirty marks. On another occasion William summoned some Christian theologians and some learned Rabbis to his presence, and, telling them that he was anxious to embrace that doctrine which upon comparison should be found to have truth on its side, he set them disputing for his own entertainment.

The King’s good-natured attitude was even shared by his antagonists. St. Anselm, the Norman Archbishop of Canterbury, for example, and other eminent ecclesiastics, in their efforts to convert the Jews, did not overstep the limits of argument; at times of peril churches and monasteries afforded an asylum to the effects and to the families of Jews; no attempt was made to poison the relations, such as they were, between the two elements; and there are instances of Jews helping the monks with prayers and otherwise in their efforts to resist the encroachments of Archbishops, and even of Jews drinking with Gentiles.

Meanwhile, the Continent was undergoing the spiritual travail which resulted in the tremendous explosion of the Crusades. England, as a member of the Catholic family of nations, and in many ways under Continental influence, could not long remain deaf to the cry which rang throughout Christendom. The unsettled condition of the country under the first three Norman kings, and the convulsions to which it fell a prey under the fourth, had hitherto prevented England from responding to the Pope’s call in an adequate manner; but the religious fever was infectious, and on reaching England it translated any vague sentimental dislike of the Jews that may have existed into an open and determined hostility, which led to deeds of violence such as had already disgraced the Continent.

The atrocious charge of sacrificing Christian children and using their blood in their mysterious Passover rites, or in medicine, is now for the first time heard under the definite form which has since become familiar; and the English town of Norwich seems to be entitled to the unenviable credit of its birth. The populace of that city was one day, in 1144, horrified by the rumour that the Jews had kidnapped and murdered a boy, named William, for the purpose of obtaining his blood. A renegade Jew brought forth the libel, and the local bishop adopted it. The sheriff considered the evidence insufficient, and refused to sanction a trial before the Bishop’s Court. But the people, encouraged by the clergy, took the law into their own hands, and, despite the sheriff’s efforts to protect the Jews, many of the latter were slaughtered, while the rest fled in fear for their lives.

♦1155–1189♦

Within the next thirty-four years the same blood-accusation recurred at Gloucester and Bury St. Edmunds, and led to a similar catastrophe.[65] But during the reign of Henry II. anti-Jewish feeling, with the last exception, was firmly checked. That King, renowned in history as “the greatest prince of his time for wisdom, virtue, and abilities,” followed in the footsteps of William the Conqueror and William Rufus, and, in the opinion of the monastic chroniclers, sullied his otherwise stainless character by the favour which he showed to the Jews. He delivered them from the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts and granted to them the privilege of settling their disputes in their own Beth Din, or Religious Tribunal, and of burying their dead outside the cities in which they dwelt. Henceforward the Jews were to be regarded as the King’s own chattels, and to enjoy the protection of the King’s officers, as they did in Germany, and on the same terms.

Royal favours, of course, are never granted without an equivalent. The wealth of the Jews, being moveable and concentrated in few hands, was much more accessible to the King than that of his Christian subjects. They were, accordingly, made to pay more than the latter. When, in 1187, Henry levied a contribution, he received from the Jews alone nearly one-half of the whole amount, they contributing one-fourth of their property (£60,000), while the Christians one-tenth (£70,000). But, though the King’s Exchequer was the richer for the King’s clemency, the Jews enjoyed the right to live and grow wealthy. England was not a loser by this toleration of the children of Israel. Their ready money, despite the high rates of interest at which it was lent, supplied a powerful stimulus to industry and to architecture. Many a castle and cathedral owed their existence to Jewish capital. And not only the means of erection but also models for imitation were due to the Jews, who by their example taught the rude English burgesses the superiority of a stone house over a mud hovel, as is shown by the buildings at Bury St. Edmunds and Lincoln which still bear the name of “Jews’ houses.” Indeed, in this and subsequent reigns we hear marvellous tales of Jewish opulence and magnificence, such as that of Abraham fil Rabbi, Jurnet of Norwich, and Aaron of Lincoln, and even of unwelcomed proselytes to Judaism. Both these blessings, however, material prosperity and religious popularity, proved curses in disguise to their possessors. The riches of the Jew could not but rouse the cupidity of mediaeval barons, and his dissent the bigotry of mediaeval priests. Moreover, it would have been contrary to all the laws of probability and human nature had the Jews been left unmolested much longer in a land where the crusading spirit was abroad, where the popular hatred of the Jew had been recently fanned by abominable calumny and by royal favour, and where the civil authority was so frequently set at naught by feudal lawlessness. Last and most ominous sign, the Jews by an Act, passed in 1181, were forbidden to keep or bear arms.

♦1189♦

Where prejudice is, pretexts for persecution are not wanting. A favourable opportunity for the expression of public feeling was offered by the coronation of Richard Coeur de Lion. Richard was the first English King who took up the cross against the infidels, and his reign was appropriately inaugurated by an anti-Jewish demonstration. The Jews were by royal edict forbidden to show their unchristian countenances in the Abbey during the ceremony. But some of them, armed with rich gifts from their people to the King, presumed to take up their station outside the Church. The street was thronged with the servants and retainers of the barons and knights who assisted at the coronation, as well as by a miscellaneous mob, drawn thither by curiosity. The foreign faces of the Jews were soon detected by the fanatical crowd, in holiday mood, and were at once made the marks of insult and riot. The wretches tried to escape; the populace pursued them; and one at least was obliged to save his life by baptism. Later in the day a rumour got abroad that the King had ordered a general slaughter of the Jews. The alleged command found many persons only too ready to carry it out. All the Jews that happened to be out of doors were cut to pieces, without remorse and without resistance, while those who had wisely remained at home were attacked by the zealous and greedy crowd, who broke into their houses, murdered the inmates, plundered their effects, and ended by setting fire to the Jewry. The riotous and avaricious instincts of the populace once roused, the havoc spread far and wide, and the city of London soon became a scene of pillage and rapine, in which no invidious distinction was made between Christian and infidel, but all were impartially robbed who were worth robbing. The King’s endeavours to bring these atrocities home to the guilty resulted in the discovery that the punishment would involve so great a number that, after having hanged three offenders, he was forced to desist. The very magnitude of the crime saved its authors.

Nor did the excitement terminate in the capital. The good news of the massacre of the Jews travelled to the provinces, and everywhere found the field ready to receive the seed. All the principal towns in England swarmed at that time with Crusaders preparing for their expedition. The sight of these warriors stirred the martial and religious spirit of the people, and, when they started the campaign against the Crescent by falling upon the native Jews, they found numerous and enthusiastic auxiliaries among the burgesses, the priests, and the impoverished gentlemen. Indeed, how could any one refuse to help in the destruction of God’s enemies, who in many cases also happened to be the assailants’ creditors? In York the immediate excuse for an attack was a certain Joceus, who, being forcibly baptized in London on the day of Richard’s coronation, on his return home renounced the creed thrust upon him and thereby earned the odium of apostasy. Accompanied by a number of his co-religionists the hunted man sought refuge with all his treasures in the castle. The mob, incited by a fanatical Canon and led by the castellan, laid siege to the castle. The Jews had recourse to desperate measures. Some of them, acting on the heroic advice of a Rabbi, killed their own wives and children, flung the corpses from the battlements upon the besieging crowd, and then prepared to consign the castle and themselves to the flames. The others capitulated, and were massacred by the mob, at the instigation of a gentleman deeply indebted to them. Then the crowd, headed by the landed proprietors of the neighbourhood, all of whom owed money to the Jews, hastened to the Cathedral, where the bonds were kept, and burnt them on the altar, under the benedictions of the priests.

Like deeds were perpetrated at Norwich, Bury St. Edmunds, Lynn, Lincoln, Colchester, and Stamford, and in all these places, as in London, the King’s officers found themselves powerless to prevent or punish. Richard, however, could not afford to have his Jews butchered or driven out of the country. He, therefore, issued a charter, confirming to the wealthiest among them the privileges which they had enjoyed under his predecessors: the privilege of owning land, of bequeathing and inheriting money-debts, of moving to and fro in the country without let or hindrance, and of exemption from all tolls. In return for his protection, the King claimed a closer supervision of their property and profits. His Treasury was to know how much they had, and how much they made. Staffs of Jewish and Christian clerks, appointed in various parts of the country, were to witness their deeds, enter them into a special register, and see that three copies were made of every bond: one to be placed into the hands of a magistrate, another into those of some respectable private citizen, and a third to be left with the Jew. Debts due to the Jews were really due to the King, and might not be compounded or cancelled without his consent. Disputes between Jews were to be settled at the royal Courts, and, in a word, a severe and vigilant eye was to be kept on the Israelites and their money-bags.

♦1199–1216♦

John, Richard’s miserable successor, whose reign brought nothing but ruin to himself and shame on his country, found it expedient to continue towards the Jews the lucrative generosity initiated by better men. The oppression of the Jews was a monopoly of the crown, and John made it quite plain that he would not tolerate any rivals. He invested Jacob of London with the dignity of Chief Rabbi over all the Jewish congregations throughout England and styled him his “dear, dear friend,” warning his subjects that any insult or injury offered to him would be regarded by the King as an insult to himself. He extended to the whole colony the favours and immunities granted to a privileged few by Richard, and, like him, accompanied this act of grace with an even more rigorous control of their affairs. The Jews had to pay dearly even for this limited and precarious protection. The sole difference between the treatment of them on the part of the King and that meted out to them by his subjects was that the latter despoiled them spasmodically, the former systematically. It was no longer a question of occasional contributions, such as the £60,000 wrung from them by Henry II., and like impositions levied to defray the expenses of Richard’s Crusade, but a steady and unsparing bleeding: tallages, inheritance duties and a heavy percentage on all loan transactions, in addition to confiscations and general fines, or fines for breaches of the law, with which the King would now and again diversify the monotony of normal brigandage. The procedure was perfectly immoral and yet perfectly legal. The King’s treasury was replenished out of the pockets of men who were as absolutely his as his own palaces, and whom he could sell or mortgage as any other property, according to his convenience. Even the King’s commissioners—Jews deputed to collect the tallage—had power to seize the wives and children of their own co-religionists. It is computed that at this period the Jews contributed about one-twelfth of the whole royal revenue.

♦1210♦

But John’s cruelty was boundless as his meanness. Not content with ordinary measures of extortion, he suddenly ordered all the Jews—men, women and children—to be imprisoned and forced to yield all they possessed. Thus by one fell swoop were snatched from them the fruits of a life’s laborious accumulation, and many were brought to the verge of starvation. Men and women, until yesterday opulent, were seen begging from door to door in the day time, and at night prowling about the purlieus of the city like homeless and hungry curs. Those who were suspected of being the owners of hidden treasure were tortured until they confessed, and, in the case of a Jew of Bristol, at least, a tooth a day was found an efficient test of a Jew’s squeezability. Grinder after grinder was drawn from his jaw in horrible agony, till the victim, after having lost several teeth, paid the 10,000 marks demanded of him. By such a fiscal policy the King’s protégés were made to feel the full weight of royal favour. But even this condition of serfdom and occasional torture was preferable to the lot that was in store for them in the future. John, whatever his own standard of humanity might have been, when the citizens of London threatened an attack upon the Jews, stood boldly forth in their defence, and told the Mayor and burgesses that he held them responsible for the safety of the Jews, vowing a bloody vengeance if any harm befell them.

♦1216–1272♦

Henry III. was as exacting as his predecessors; but he lacked the firmness by which some of them had prevented their subjects from trespassing on the royal preserves. Under his weak rule the nobles and the towns grew in importance. The decline of the King’s prerogative and the increased power of the subjects were alike fatal to the Jews. The burgesses hated them as the instruments of royal avarice and as interlopers in a community for the freedom of which they themselves had paid a heavy price to King or lord paramount. Their exemption from municipal burdens, and their independence of municipal authority irritated their fellow-townsmen. The constant interference of the King’s officers on behalf of the King’s serfs was resented as a violation of privilege. These grievances, reasonable enough, were intensified by religious rancour, and by that antipathy which the English, perhaps more than any other, bourgeoisie has always displayed towards foreigners. The Jew’s isolation also added to his unpopularity, and all these causes, acting upon the minds of the townspeople, gave rise to frequent acts of aggression. The Kings, as has been seen, had always found it hard to curb popular license, each attempt at repression, each measure of precaution, only serving to embitter the ill-feeling towards those on whose behalf these efforts were made. ♦1234♦ Under Henry III. the wrath of the burgesses broke out again and again in many towns, notably at Norwich, where the Jews’ quarter was sacked and burnt, and the inhabitants narrowly escaped massacre, and at Oxford, where town and gown joined in the work of devastation and pillage.

The animosity of the towns was shared by the smaller nobility who lay under heavy obligations to the Jewish money-lenders, but, unlike their betters, had not the means of making their tenants pay their debts for them. The great barons played towards the Jews within their domains the same rôle as the King, only on a smaller scale. They lent them their protection, were sleeping partners in their usurious transactions, and upon occasion made them disgorge their ill-gotten gains. This rôle was beyond the ability of the smaller nobility. So far from sharing in the spoils of usury, they themselves were among its worst victims. The King’s Continental expeditions forced them to mortgage their estates to the Jews, from whose clutches none but the lands of tenants on the royal demesne were safe; and, if the holders of the pledge were afraid to enforce their claims in person, they passed the bonds to the more powerful nobles, who seized the land of their inferiors and sometimes refused to part with it, even when the debtors offered to redeem it by paying off the debt with interest.

In addition to these private motives, there were political reasons to foment the anti-Jewish movement; common interests which bound all the hostile elements together. It was felt by both Lords and Commons that, but for the Jews’ ready money, Henry would not have been able to carry on his unpopular wars abroad, or his anti-constitutional policy at home, and to indulge that preference for Provençal and other foreign favourites which his English subjects resented so strongly. That the source of the King’s power to defy public opinion was rightly guessed is shown by the enormous sums which Henry extorted from the Jews at various times; in 1230, under the pretext that they clipped and adulterated the coin of the realm—a very common offence in those days[66]—they were made to pay into the Royal Exchequer one-third of their moveable property. The operation was repeated in 1239. In 1241, 20,000 marks were exacted from them; and two years after 60,000 marks—a sum equal to the whole yearly revenue of the crown—above 4000 marks being wrung from Aaron of York alone. In 1250 new oppression, on a charge of forgery, elicited 30,000 marks from the same wretched millionaire, and from 1252 to 1255 Henry robbed the Jews three times by such exquisite cruelty that the whole race, in despair, twice begged for permission to depart from England. But the King replied, “How can I remedy the oppressions you complain of? I am myself a beggar. I am spoiled, I am stripped of all my revenues”—referring to the attempt made by the Council to secure constitutional Government by the refusal of supplies—“I must have money from any hand, from any quarter, or by any means.” He then delivered them over to Richard, Earl of Cornwall, that he might persuade them to stay, or, in the words of Matthew Paris, “that those whom the one brother had flayed, the other might embowel.” The same witty chronicler informs us that these spoliations excited no pity for the victims in Henry’s Christian subjects, “because it is proved and is manifest, that they are continually convicted of forging charters, seals and coins,” and elsewhere he describes the Jews as “a sign for the nations, like Cain the accursed.”

The burgesses and the barons in their anti-Jewish campaign found powerful allies among the high dignitaries of the Church, who had a two-fold set of grievances against Israel: practical grievances, and grievances begotten of religious bigotry. Pope Innocent III., in pursuance of his aggressive autocratism, had claimed the right of filling vacant benefices all over the Catholic world. In England the election to the see of Canterbury gave rise to a long struggle between Pope and King, which ended in John’s shameful and abject surrender. ♦1207♦ Cardinal Langton, Innocent’s nominee and instrument, on being raised to the primacy, made common cause with John’s disaffected nobility, and the two acting in concert frustrated the unpopular prince’s projected invasion of France in 1213. The same Archbishop passed at his provincial synod a decree, forcing the Jews to wear the badge and forbidding them to keep Christian servants or to build new synagogues. He also issued orders to his flock, threatening to excommunicate anyone who should have relations with the enemies of Christ, or sell to them the necessaries of life. The Jews were to be treated as a race outside the pale of humanity. Langton’s example was followed by the Bishops, many of whom exerted themselves both officially and unofficially to check intercourse between Jews and Christians. The crusade was carried on after Langton’s death. At one time the Archbishop of Canterbury demands the demolition of the Jewish synagogues, at another he calls upon the temporal power to prevent Jewish converts from relapsing into infidelity; on a third occasion he writes to the Queen remonstrating with her on her business transactions with the Jews, and threatening the royal lady with everlasting damnation. Similarly, time and again bishops hold the thunderbolt of excommunication over the heads of all true believers who should assist at a Jewish wedding, or accept Jewish hospitality.

These attacks by the Church were prejudicial to the King’s pecuniary interests, and during Henry III.’s minority met with vigorous opposition on the part of his guardians. When the young King assumed the responsibilities of Government, he found himself placed in a difficult position: his interests compelled him to protect the Jews, while his loyalty to the Church forbade him to ignore the behests of her ministers. ♦1222♦ He compromised by sanctioning the use of the badge, and by ♦1233♦ building a house for the reception of Jewish converts (Domus Conversorum) on one hand, while, on the other, he shielded, to the best of his ability, the hunted people from the effects of ecclesiastical and popular wrath.

The war declared by the Papacy against the Jews on religious principle was continued on grounds of practical necessity. Owing to the enormous expenditure of money, incurred partly by the architectural extravagance of the age, partly by an almost equally extravagant hospitality; partly by the exactions of Kings and Popes, and partly by bad management, the estates of the Church in England had begun to be encumbered with debt in the twelfth century, and loans were frequently contracted at ruinous interest.

A typical case has been preserved for us in the contemporary chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond, a Norman-English monk of Bury St. Edmunds. In his crabbed dog-Latin, the good brother tells the story of his monastery’s distress: how under old Abbot Hugo’s feeble rule the finances became entangled, how deficit followed in the footsteps of deficit, and debt was added to debt, until there was no ready money left to keep the rain out of the house. William the sacristan was ordered by the old Abbot to repair a room which had fallen into ruins; but as the order was not accompanied by the means of carrying it out, Brother William would fain go to Benedict the Jew for a loan of forty marks. The room was repaired, the rain was kept out, but the creditor clamoured for his money. In the absence of cash, the original loan grew rapidly at compound interest, and the forty marks were swelled to a hundred pounds. Then the Jew came to the Abbot with his bills and demanded to be repaid; not only these hundred pounds, but also another hundred pounds, which the Abbot owed him on his private account. Old Hugo, at his wits’ end, tries to silence the Jew by granting him a bond for four hundred pounds to be paid at the end of four years. The Jew goes away not displeased, only to reappear at the expiration of the term. On his second visit he, of course, found the Abbot as penniless as on the first, and extracted from him a bond for eight hundred and eighty pounds, payable in eleven years by annual instalments of eighty pounds. Furthermore, he now produced other claims, sundry sums lent fourteen years before, so that the whole debt amounted to twelve hundred pounds, besides interest. The matter was left pending until old Hugo was called to a world where there is neither borrowing nor lending at compound interest; but only paying just debts.

Old Abbot Hugo is dead, and young Abbot Samson has succeeded to his honours and to his deficits. Samson’s first anxiety was to free the house from the claws of the insatiable Benedict and other Hebrew and Christian harpies, and he did it in a manner characteristic of the age. In some four years he paid off the debts of the convent; but at the same time he obtained from the King permission to revenge himself on the Jews. The royal abettor of what followed was oblivious of the fact that he was himself more than an accomplice in the usurer’s exactions. Huge sums were at that very moment being extorted for royal purposes from the Jewish communities which were in as constant a condition of indebtedness to the Crown as others were to them. Nevertheless, the Jews were driven out of the Liberties of Bury St. Edmunds by men-at-arms, and forbidden to return thither under severe penalties; while sentence of excommunication was pronounced against any one who should be found sheltering them. Such was the condition of an English monastery towards the end of the twelfth century.

Things went from bad to worse, until, in the thirteenth century, we are told, “there was scarcely anyone in England, especially a bishop, who was not caught in the meshes of the usurers.” We hear of archiepiscopal buildings and priories falling into decay for want of funds, and of churches that could not afford clergymen; of a bishop seeking the intervention of the King in order to obtain respite of his debts to the Jews, and of a prior asking for permission to let one of his churches, as a common building, for five years, in order to pay off part of the debt; of another bishop pledging the plate of his cathedral, and of an abbot pledging the bones of the patron saint of his Abbey; and we even read of an archbishop carrying his zeal for retrenchment to the cruel length of imposing a limit to the number of dishes with which the good Abbot of Glastonbury might be served in his private room.

At the same time the ancient superstition regarding usury had been invigorated in England, as on the Continent, by the diligent preaching of Franciscan and Dominican friars, no less than by the economic distress of debtors. It is true that the practice was not confined to the Jews. Besides English usurers, the Italian bankers of Milan, Florence, Lucca, Pisa, Rome, and other cities, had stretched their tentacles over Europe. In France their position was confirmed by a diplomatic agreement with Philip III. In England Italian usurers scoured the country collecting taxes for the Pope and lending money on their own account at exorbitant interest. As the Jews lent under royal so did these Lombards lend under papal patronage. The extortions of the former were not amenable to any tribunal; the latter were in the habit of, in the words of the chronicler, “cloaking their usury under the show of trade,” and thus carried on their business under forms not forbidden by Canon law—even supposing that the ecclesiastical courts would have cared or dared to condemn the Pope’s agents. To the Italian usurers the great barons extended the same protection as to the Jews, and for similar reasons; but the smaller nobility and gentry, the clergy, and the lower orders of the laity hated them intensely. One of these usurers, brother of the Pope’s own Legate, was murdered at Oxford, while in London Bishop Roger pronounced a solemn anathema against the whole class. Henry III. was, after all, a Catholic and a King. The sufferings of his subjects moved him to banish the Cahorsines from his kingdom, and, were it not for his chronic impecuniosity, he might have adopted similar measures against the Jews. As it was, in spite of his religious scruples, he could ill afford to lose the rich income which he still derived from them.

While the clamour against the Jewish usurers was gathering force from bigotry, penury, and policy, the Jews were fast losing the means which had hitherto enabled them to procure an inadequate protection at the hands of the King and his great barons. Early in the thirteenth century the merchants of Lombardy and Southern France, as has been shown, began to compete with the Jewish money-lenders. But the loss of the monopoly which the Jews had long enjoyed was, in England, followed by greater losses still. ♦1257–1267♦ During the Civil Wars the ranks of the malcontents were filled with all sorts of ruffians, some driven to rebellion by discontent, others drawn to it by the hope of booty; and it was the policy of the rebel barons to let all these disorderly elements loose upon the King’s friends and supporters. The royal demesnes were ruthlessly ravaged, and then the fury of the revolutionists, who numbered amongst their allies both the lay and the clerical mobs, was directed against the King’s protégés. Every success of the popular party over the King was duly celebrated by a slaughter of his Jewish serfs and destruction of their quarters. The appetite for plunder and havoc was further stimulated by superstition, and at Easter, 1263, the Jews were stripped and butchered in the City of London. This was the prologue to a long tragedy that continued throughout that troublous period. The spoliation of the London Jews was repeated, and the Jewries of Canterbury, Northampton, Winchester, Worcester, Lincoln, and Cambridge were attacked, looted, and destroyed. Many of the unfortunate race were massacred, while some saved themselves by baptism and others by exorbitant ransom. Deeds and bonds were burnt, and thus the Jews were deprived of the one bulwark that had stood between them and annihilation; so much so, that in the last year of Henry III.’s reign their contribution to the revenue of the crown fell from £5000 to 2000 marks.

Henry III. died in 1272, and Edward I. was proclaimed King. Edward as heir-apparent had distinguished himself by his piety, no less than by his valour and public spirit, and at the time of his accession he was actually fighting the infidels in the Holy Land. His loyalty to the Church prejudiced him against the Jews both as “enemies of Christ” and as usurers. His scrupulous regard for the interests of his subjects was calculated to deepen the prejudice. Edward’s political ideal was a harmonious co-operation and contribution of all classes to the welfare of the State. The Jewry, as constituted under his predecessors, formed an anomaly and a scandal. Measures of restriction had already been taken against the Jews, and supplied a precedent for further proceedings in the same direction. One of these measures was the statute of 1270, which forbade the Jews to acquire houses in London in addition to those which they already possessed, to enjoy a freehold howsoever held, to receive rent-charges as security, and obliged them to return to the Christian debtors, or to other Christians, the lands which they had already seized, on repayment of the principal without interest. A petition, preferred by the victims of this Act, to be allowed the full privileges which accompanied the tenure of land under the feudal system—namely, the guardianship of minors, the right to give wards in marriage, and the presentation to livings—had elicited an indignant protest from the Bishops, who expressed their outraged feelings in language that was wanting neither in clearness nor in vigour. The “perfidious Jews” were reminded that their residence in England was entirely due to the King’s grace—a sentiment with which Prince Edward had fully concurred. ♦1274♦ On his return from Palestine, he resumed the work of administrative reform which he had commenced as heir-apparent.

Despite the statute of 1270, he found the Jews still absorbed in the one occupation which they had practised for ages under the pressure of necessity and with the sanction of custom and royal patronage. The religious sensitiveness of a pilgrim fresh from the Holy Land, acting on the political anxiety of a statesman honestly desirous to do his duty by his subjects, compelled him to new measures of restriction. Moreover, the reasons of self-interest which had influenced his predecessors had lost much of their force. John’s and Henry III.’s merciless rapacity had sapped the foundations of Jewish prosperity; the barons’ even more merciless cruelty had accomplished their ruin; and while the fortunes of the Jews waned, those of their Italian rivals waxed; so the Jews, an unholy and unpopular class at the best of times, had now also become an unnecessary one. About the same time the Church renewed the campaign against usurers. ♦1274♦ Pope Gregory X., by a decree passed at the Council of Lyons, requested the princes of Christendom to double their efforts to suppress the accursed trade. Edward hastened to obey the orders of the Church. The transactions of the Florentine bankers in England were subjected to enquiry and restriction by his order, and then he proceeded against the Jews.

There were two ways open to him: either to withdraw his countenance from the Jewish money-lenders, or to compel them to give up the sinful practice. He was too humane to adopt the former course; for the withdrawal of royal protection would have been the signal for instant attack on the part of the people. How real this danger was can be judged from the fact that in 1275 the Jews were driven out of Cambridge at the instigation of Edward’s own mother. ♦1275♦ He, therefore, chose the latter alternative, and issued a general and severe prohibition of usury, accompanied with the permission that the Jews might engage in commercial and industrial pursuits or in agriculture. The Jews were asked to change at a moment’s notice a mode of life which had become a second nature to them, and one which they had been encouraged—one may almost say compelled—to pursue in England for two centuries. The hardship of the prohibition was aggravated by the impossibility of profiting by the permission. So long as the Jew was liable to violence from his neighbours, he could hardly engage in any occupation which involved the possession of bulky goods. Jewels and bonds were the only kinds of moveable property that could easily be secured against attack. As a writer who can scarcely be accused of undue partiality to the Jews has observed: “The ancient house at Lincoln seems to suggest by its plan and arrangements that the inhabitants were prepared to stand a siege, and men who lived under such conditions could hardly venture to pursue ordinary avocations.”[67] But there were more specific reasons explaining the Jew’s inability to conform to Edward’s decree. A Jew could not become a tradesman, because a tradesman ought to be a member of a Guild; as a general rule, no one could join a Guild, who was not a burgess; and the law forbade the Jews to become burgesses. But, even if the law allowed it, the Jews could not, without violating their religion, participate in the feasts and ceremonies of the Guilds. Nor were the handicrafts more accessible to the Jews; for most of them were in the hands of close corporations into which the despised Jew could not easily gain admittance. Moreover, an apprenticeship of many years was required, and apprenticeship necessitated residence in the master’s house. Now the Church forbade the Christians, on pain of excommunication, to receive Jews in their houses, and, therefore, a Jewish boy, even if his own parents’ prejudices and the scruples of the Synagogue were overcome, could not become a Christian’s apprentice. Agriculture was likewise out of the question, because, even if the landlords would have them, the Jews, being forbidden by their religion to take the oath of fealty, could not become villeins. The popular hatred of the Jew rendered the profession of peddler or carrier equally perilous. His Semitic face and conspicuous yellow badge, which he was compelled to wear from the age of seven, would have made him a target for insult and assault on every road and at every fair in the country.

Thus the Jew, after two hundred years’ residence in England, found himself labouring under all the disabilities of an alien, the only occupation left open to him being that which foreign merchants were allowed to pursue—namely, the export trade in wool and corn; but for this occupation, limited at the best, a great capital was needed, and, therefore, after the recent sufferings of the race, few could find profit in it. For all these reasons, Edward’s alternative remained a dead letter, and, as the Jews could not suffer themselves to starve, usury continued rampant, and the second error proved worse than the first. The distemper was far too complex to be cured by Edward’s simple remedy. It might have been encouraged by impunity; it certainly was accentuated by severity. The money-lenders, no longer under official supervision, exceeded all bounds of extortion: the peril of detection had to be paid for. The demand for loans increased as the supply diminished, the rate of interest rose, and, as the transactions had to be kept secret, all sorts of subterfuges were resorted to: a bond was given for a multiple of the sum actually received, and the interest often figured under the euphemism of “gift” or “compensation for delay,” or, if the money-lender combined traffic in goods with traffic in money, the interest was paid in kind. It was contrary to common sense and human experience to expect that a royal statute should have prevailed over what really was an inevitable necessity, and the abuses that followed were only such as might have been anticipated in a society where the borrowers were many and needy, the lenders few and greedy, and the two classes were impelled to deal with each other by the strongest of motives—the motive of self-preservation.

But even clandestine usury required capital, and the poorer Jews, devoid of industrial skill or legal standing, despised by the people, denounced by the clergy, helpless, hopeless, and unscrupulous, betook themselves to highway robbery, burglary, coin-clipping, or baptism. The penultimate source of revenue, which, as has been noted, supplied already one of the most common charges brought against the Jews, forced Edward to strike hard and quickly. His severity was proportionate to the magnitude of the evil. The depreciation of the currency due to the prevalence of forgery had led to an alarming rise in the price of commodities; foreign merchants had left the country, and trade fallen into stagnation. The greater share of the blame was generally, and not unjustly, attributed to the Jews. In one night all the Jews in the country were thrown into prison, their domiciles were searched, and their effects seized. Edward, in his anxiety to punish none but the guilty, issued an edict, in which he warned his Christian subjects against false accusations, such as might easily have been concocted by people eager to gratify their religious bigotry, private malice, or cupidity. The enquiry resulted in the conviction of many Jews and Christians. Of the latter, three were sentenced to death and the rest to fines. But no mercy was shown to the Jews. Two hundred and eighty of them were hanged, drawn, and quartered in London alone, and all the houses, lands, and goods of a great number were confiscated. A very few took refuge in conversion, and received a moiety of the money realised by the confiscation of their brethren’s property.

This deplorable state of things convinced Edward of the futility of his policy. Other causes intensified his anger against the Jews. In the first year of his reign a Dominican friar embraced Judaism, a little later a Jew was burnt for blasphemy at Norwich, and, in 1278, a Jewess at Nottingham created great excitement by abusing in virulent terms the Christians in the market place; all this despite the King’s proclamation that blasphemy against Christ, the Virgin Mary, or the Catholic faith should be visited with loss of life or limbs, and the penalties, not less severe, which the Church reserved for apostates. ♦1281♦ Parliament now urged the expulsion of the Jews. Edward, his native moderation notwithstanding, could not defy public opinion. The precedent of his mentor, the brave and wise baron Simon de Montfort, also pointed in the same direction. ♦About 1253♦ The latter had expelled the Jews from Leicester and given to the burgesses a solemn promise that they should never return.[68] The example could not but have its influence upon Edward, and his own mental attitude was too orthodox to render him impervious to the overwhelming prejudices of the age. He had endeavoured to reconcile duty with humanity, and had failed. Neither did the Christians wish to receive the Jews amongst themselves, nor would the Jews have embraced such an invitation. So long as they remained in England, mutual antipathy and mutual bigotry would bar amalgamation, and therefore, under the feudal system, the only calling which the Jews could pursue, in a Christian country, would be the sinful traffic in money. Since the Jews could not be improved, they ought to be removed.

While Edward was slowly coming to the one inevitable conclusion, there arrived in England, at the end of 1286, a Bull from the Pope Honorius IV., addressed to the archbishops and bishops. After a lengthy enumeration of the familiar charges brought against the Jews—their obedience to “a wicked and deceitful book, called Talmud, containing manifold abominations, falsehoods, heresies, and abuses”; their seduction of brethren snatched from infidelity, and their perversion of Christians; their immorality, their criminal intercourse with Christians, and other “horrible deeds done to the shame of our Creator and the detriment of the Catholic faith”—Honorius bade the bishops increase their severity, and their “spiritual and temporal penalties” against the “accursed and perfidious” people. ♦1287♦ In consequence of this mandate, we find a synod at Exeter passing ordinances restricting still further the Jew’s discretion in matters of dress and behaviour. The apostolic epistle accelerated Edward’s decision. It is also probable that the King, on the eve of his struggle with Scotland and France, thought it prudent to conciliate his English subjects by yielding to their demand for the expulsion of the hated people.

On the 18th of July, 1290, a decree was issued ordering that all Jews should leave England before the Feast of All Saints, sentence of death being pronounced against any who should be found lingering in the country after the prescribed date.

The severity of the measure was somewhat mitigated by the king’s sincere anxiety to spare the exiles gratuitous insult and injury. The officers charged with the execution of the decree were ordered to ensure the safe arrival of the Jews on the coast, and their embarkation. They were permitted to carry away all the effects that were in their possession at the time, together with any pledges that were not redeemed by the Christian debtors before a certain day. As a further inducement for the payment of debts, the latter were given to understand that, if they did not pay a moiety to the Jews before their departure, they would remain debtors to the Treasury for the full amount. A few Jews, personally known and favoured at Court, were even allowed to sell their real property to any Christian who would buy it. In a word, everything that could be done to alleviate the misery of the exiles, was suggested by Edward.

The autumn was spent in hurried preparations. Those who had money out at interest hastened to collect it, and those who had property too unwieldy for transport hastened to part with it for what it would yield. It is easy to imagine the enormous loss which this compulsory liquidation must have entailed on the wretched Jews. Their goods were sold at such prices as might have been expected from the urgency of the case, and the knowledge that all that could not be disposed of would have to be left behind. Their houses, their synagogues, and their cemeteries fell into the hands of the King, who distributed them among his favourites. Their bonds and mortgages were also appropriated by the Royal Exchequer; but the debts were imperfectly collected, and the remainder, after many years’ delay, were finally remitted by Edward III.

As the fatal day drew near, the emigrants, sixteen thousand all told, men, women, and children, might be seen hurrying from different parts of England to the coast, some riding, the majority trudging, sullen and weary, along the muddy roads, the men with their scanty luggage slung over their shoulders, the women with their babes in their arms. Thus they went their last journey on English soil, under the bleak sky of an English October, objects of scorn rather than of pity to the people among whom they had lived for more than two hundred years. The King’s biographer relates with great exultation how “the perfidious and unbelieving horde was driven forth from England, in one day into exile,” and the English Parliament, which nine years before had demanded the expulsion of the unbelievers, now expressed the gratitude of the nation for the fulfilment of their desire, by voting a tenth and a fifteenth to the King. But if the English were glad to get rid of the Jews, the Jews were not sorry to depart. It was only what they had already begged to be allowed to do. Though born and bred among the English, they did not even speak their language. They spoke the language of the Normans who had brought them to England for their own purposes, and ejected them when those purposes no longer held. They were as foreign to the land on this day of their departure, as their fathers had been on the day of their arrival, full two centuries earlier. Their residence in England was a mere episode in their long career of sorrow and trial, only a temporary halt on the weary pilgrimage which began at Zion and would end in Zion.

Nor were their last experiences such as to sweeten their feelings towards the land they were leaving. Despite the king’s merciful provision, there was no lack of opportunities for expressing, otherwise than by looks and words, the bitter hatred nourished against the emigrants. The old chroniclers have handed down to us an incident which may safely be regarded as only an extreme specimen of the cruel memories which the children of Israel carried away from England. On St. Denis’ Day the Jews of London set out on their way to the sea-coast, and got on board a ship at the mouth of the Thames. The captain had cast anchor during the ebb-tide, so that his vessel grounded on the sands. Thereupon he requested the passengers to land, till it was again afloat. They obeyed, and he led them a long way off so that, when they returned to the river-side, the tide was full. Then he ran into the water, hauled himself on board by means of a rope, and referred the hapless Jews to Moses for help. Many of them tried to follow him but perished in the attempt, and the captain divided their property with his crew. The chroniclers add that the ship-master and his sailors were afterwards indicted, convicted of murder, and hanged. Similar crimes of robbery and murder were brought home to the inhabitants of the Cinque Ports; but the punishment of the offenders brought little consolation to the victims.

The sea proved as cruel to the Jews as the land had been. Fierce storms swept the Channel, many of the ships were wrecked and many of the exiles were robbed and drowned by the captains, or were cast naked on the French coast. Those who escaped shipwreck and murder reached the shore they sought only to find it as inhospitable as the one from which they fled. A decree of the Parliament de la Chandeleur, issued in obedience to the Pope’s wishes, bade all Jewish refugees from England to quit the kingdom by the middle of next Lent. Some of them, thanks to their French tongue, may have escaped detection and remained in France, sharing the treatment of their co-religionists already described; another party, mostly poor, took refuge in Flanders; but the majority joined their brethren in Spain, whither we shall follow them.

CHAPTER X
THE JEWS IN SPAIN

As we have seen in a previous chapter, the lot of the Spanish Jews under Mohammedan rule was supremely enviable. Their condition in the Christian parts of the Iberian Peninsula was less uniformly prosperous. We there find two forces at work, one favourable to the children of Israel and the other the exact opposite. The people and the Church were ill-disposed towards them; the princes and the nobles protected them. Their history is therefore marked by the vicissitudes of the conflict between those two forces, and their ultimate fate was to be determined by the result of that conflict. That they should be mulcted by the Christian princes was only what might have been expected. In Spain they were subjected, among other burdens, to a hearth tax, a coronation tax, a tax on various kinds of their own food, and a tax for the King’s dinner. In Portugal, under Sancho II., they had to pay, besides other things, a fleet tax, and were obliged to supply a new anchor and cable to every vessel built for the royal marine. On the other hand, they enjoyed a large measure of communal autonomy, settled their disputes in their own Beth-Din, or religious tribunal, and even passed capital sentence on culprits of their own persuasion. Despite manifold restrictions in the exercise of certain trades and handicrafts, they often succeeded in eluding the law, which in the earlier days was not rigorously enforced, and in pursuing a variety of occupations. They dealt in corn, cattle, silk, spices, timber, and slaves. They were goldsmiths, mechanics, peddlers, and pawnbrokers. The trade in cloth and wool, both domestic and foreign, was largely in their hands; but they abstained from the manufacture of cloth, partly owing to prohibitive legislation by the State, as was the case in Majorca during the fourteenth century, and partly in obedience to the Talmud, which denounced weaving as an immoral occupation, inasmuch as it tended to facilitate undesirable propinquity between the sexes. Many of the upper classes found equally, or more, lucrative employment as physicians, clerks of the Treasury, and public officials.

Then was formed in Spain that higher type of Jew which compelled even the Christians to forget their contempt for the race. Visigothic legislation was ignored in practice, and the Jews ceased to be systematically trampled upon. ♦1061–1073♦ Pope Alexander II., the coadjutor and immediate predecessor of Gregory Hildebrand, in a decree issued to all the bishops of Spain, draws a distinction between the Saracens and the Jews, the latter being described as worthy of toleration on account of “their readiness to serve.” Some of the municipalities treated them on equal terms with the Christians, and in both Aragon and Castile the Jews were allowed to act as judges. The Christian princes found in them some of the qualities which commanded their respect towards the Arabs, and they would fain avail themselves of their lights. They employed Jewish physicians, Jewish financiers, and Jewish tutors. ♦1085♦ Alfonso VI. of Castile began by diplomacy the liberation of Spain, which was to be accomplished by the military prowess of his successors. In this initial stage of the movement, despite the persecution proclaimed against the “enemies of Christ” by Pope Gregory VII., the Castilian King employed the astute and polyglot Jews, notably his private physician, Isaac Ibn Shalbib, and after the conquest of Toledo he confirmed to the Jews of that town all the liberties which they had enjoyed under the Mohammedan rulers. Then Alfonso, resolved to attack the Saracen King of Seville, whom he had used as a tool in taking Toledo, thought it necessary to apprise his former ally of his change of policy and bid him defiance. The delicate task was entrusted to Ibn Shalbib, attended by five hundred Christian knights. The Jewish diplomatist carried out his master’s instructions so thoroughly and so boldly that the Mohammedan prince, in his fury, forgot the inviolability of the ambassadorial character, and nailed the unfortunate envoy to a gibbet.

The comparative liberty enjoyed by the Spanish Jews, under the aegis of the Kings, brought with it opulence and luxury. The Spanish synagogues were renowned throughout Europe for their beauty, and the private dwellings of the Spanish Jews were not less noted for their magnificence. The Spanish Jews, as their brethren elsewhere, set much store by social distinction, and knew how to combine extravagance with economy. The stately names and expensive equipages of the Christian nobility were copied by them, not wisely but too well. Their profuse ostentation of wealth in domestic decoration and personal apparel excited the envy, and royal patronage the jealousy of their neighbours. These feelings, intensified by religious antipathy, laid up a fund of prejudice which only awaited a suitable opportunity for converting itself into active hostility. The same causes which brought about the eruption of anti-Judaism in other countries operated in Spain also. First, the Crusading spirit which, though it produced no immediate massacres in Spain, as it did in Central Europe, remained longer alive by the Spaniard’s undying enmity to the Jew’s cousin, the Saracen invader, whose invasion, it must be remembered, the Jews had facilitated, or, at all events, welcomed. Secondly, the hatred of heresy which, fostered by the monastic orders, found in Spain a more fertile soil than in any other Christian country. So strong and so pertinacious were these influences in the Iberian Peninsula that the Kings who favoured the Jews were often obliged to assuage public irritation, and to save their protégés from the ebullitions of popular fanaticism by separating them from the Christians. Already in the eleventh century we hear of a “Jewish barrier” erected in Tudela. This separation was also countenanced by the Church, though from widely different motives. ♦1079♦ In Coyaca, in the Asturias, a Council decreed that no Christian should reside in the same house with Jews, or partake of their food. Persons caught transgressing this canon were sentenced, if noblemen, to one year’s excommunication, if of lower degree to one hundred lashes. Thus the normal isolation of Israel was encouraged by two powers which, acting with opposite intent, converged to the same dangerous result. But it was not until late in the thirteenth century that the gathering animosity came to a head, and declared itself in more methodical efforts at segregation and humiliation, conversion or extirpation.

♦1212♦

Meanwhile the undercurrent of prejudice was checked by the action of the Kings. When, for instance, the Crusaders from across the Pyrenees, red-handed from the massacre of the Albigenses, came to Spain as allies in the war against the Mohammedans, and began the work of exterminating the infidels by attacking the Jews of Toledo, King Alfonso IX. warded off the blows, and the misdirected zeal of the foreign fanatics was condemned even by the populace of Castile. ♦1215♦ When, again, Innocent III. at the Fourth Lateran Council ordered the Jews to be marked off by a special badge, the Jews of Spain, through their influence at Court, succeeded in avoiding the effects of the decree. King Alfonso connived at their disobedience, and vain were the unwearied efforts of Innocent’s successor, Honorius III., to enforce the Jewish disabilities. ♦1220♦ Similar immunity from the ignominious ordinances of St. Peter’s See was secured by the Jews of Aragon through the exertions of the physician of King Jayme I. ♦1248♦ Several years after King Ferdinand allotted three parishes to the Jewish community of Seville, and surrounded them with a wall for their defence. Within this enclosure were the exchanges, markets, slaughter-houses, synagogues and tribunals of the Jews, while their cemetery spread over an adjacent field.

♦1252–84♦

But how long could the Court maintain its Judaeophile attitude in the teeth of the growing animosity against the race? Alfonso X., surnamed the Wise, employed Jews as Chamberlains and Chancellors of the Exchequer, as well as in the construction of his famous Astronomical Tables. ♦1261♦ But the same King was forced to throw a sop to Cerberus by enacting that “the Jews may not enlarge, elevate, or beautify their synagogues.” Another law of Alfonso’s contained the following ominous statement: “Although the Jews deny Christ, they are still suffered in all Christian countries, so that they should remind everybody that they belong to that race which crucified Jesus.” During this reign conversion of a Christian to Judaism was punished with death. No Jew was to be elevated to any public office. The wearing of the badge was made compulsory, and anyone seen without it was, if rich, fined; if poor, scourged. Social intercourse between Jews and Christians was made a punishable offence. The Jews should not appear abroad on Good Friday. Though himself in the hands of a Jewish physician, Alfonso decreed that no Christian should take medicine prepared by a Jew. These restrictions, however, were tempered by measures protective of the religion, the persons and the property of the Jews; and they did not really become active until a much later period.

♦1263♦

Two years later there occurred in Barcelona, under the auspices of Jayme I., the famous disputation between the Dominican Pablo Christiani and the Rabbi Nachmanides, which led to the latter’s exile, and to the expurgation of the Talmud.[69]

In the meantime the silly and sinister fables which caused the persecution of the Jews in England and elsewhere met with credence in Spain also. But, if the pious were exasperated by these stories, less foolish persons found a sufficient food for their spleen in the better founded charges of rapacity constantly brought against the Jewish money-lenders; while the holy indignation of others was aroused by the occasional sight of Christian proselytes seeking in the arms of the Synagogue a spiritual rest which they could not find in the Church; or by the spectacle, even less edifying, of Christian noblemen seeking in the arms of a Jewish bride the wherewithal to regild their tarnished escutcheons. All these grievances, assiduously nursed by fanatical clerics and loudly voiced by insolvent debtors, culminated in violent attacks upon the “accursed people” during the fourteenth century. The Jewish colonies were repeatedly looted and burnt and the inmates slaughtered without mercy and without regard to sex or age. ♦About 1330♦ In one attack of this kind in the kingdom of Navarre no fewer than ten thousand Israelites perished.

But the time had not yet come for a general persecution of Israel in Spain. The demon of Jew-hatred, if irritated, was also curbed by kingly favour. ♦1325–1350♦ Alfonso XI. drew down upon himself the wrath of pious Christians by employing Jewish ministers in his treasury. Under this prince the Spanish Jews, indeed, enjoyed what some writers have described as their Golden Age. They were powerful at Court, and equally influential with the great nobility, many Castilian magnates employing them as bailiffs and advisers. Their wealth and their power cowed clerical and popular fanaticism, and overawed the avaricious proclivities of impecunious hidalgos. ♦1350–1369♦ This prosperity lasted under Alfonso’s successor, Don Pedro, or Peter the Cruel. Samuel Levi, treasurer to the King and his victim, is reported to have left behind him the princely fortune of 400,000 ducats; an affluence which proved his undoing.

♦1333–1379♦

Nor was royal favour limited to one class of Jews, any more than Jewish usefulness was limited to one province of activity. Henry II. of Castile, the half-brother of Don Pedro, and other Iberian sovereigns employed the talents of the Jews in various capacities. Through their correspondence with their brethren all over Europe and the East, the Jews were the best agents for commercial and political negotiations. Their astronomical science, and their skill in map-drawing and in the construction of nautical instruments, recommended them to princes anxious to profit by the exploration of new lands. Jewish pilots and navigators must have been in great demand, for they subsequently helped Vasco da Gama in his voyages; while Jewish capitalists and adventurers participated in many of the great transatlantic expeditions of later times. ♦1334♦ Jayme III., the last king of Mallorca, describes Juceff Faguin, a Jew of Barcelona, as a man who “had navigated the whole of the then known world”; while Benjamin of Tudela’s older Itinerary is a work of world-wide renown. ♦1404–1454♦ John II. of Castile, in the ensuing century, even sought the assistance of Jews in the compilation of a national Cancionero, for the Jews in Christian, as in Mohammedan, Spain attained high distinction as troubadours. One of them, Santob de Carrion, who flourished in Castile in the fourteenth century, produced a Spanish Book of Maxims, which, thanks to its charming quaintness, preserved its popularity far into the fifteenth. Not less important are the contributions of Iberian Jews to the vernacular drama.

The Jew’s old aversion to the language of Titus, the destroyer of the Temple, had also partially vanished from Spain, and many Jewish politicians employed Latin in the diplomatic correspondence which they conducted for their Christian masters, while the Spanish language in the fourteenth century even bade fair to oust Hebrew, the Book of Esther being, in some parts of the peninsula, read in the vernacular on the Feast of Purim, for the benefit of the women, to whom the sacred tongue was no longer intelligible. Naturally such liberalism scandalised strait-laced pietists, who did their utmost to prevent the profanation of Holy Writ. But the real check to the gradual reconciliation between Jew and Gentile in Spain did not proceed from the Jewish side, as we shall see.

♦1348♦

All this sunshine was already overshadowed by the clouds which herald the storm. In the year of the Black Death the charge of well-poisoning stirred up the mob of Barcelona against the Jews, twenty of whom were slain and their houses sacked, a wholesale massacre being averted only by the intervention of the higher classes. A few days later a similar outbreak at Cervera resulted in the murder of eighteen Jews and the flight of the rest. Destruction threatened all the Jewish communities of Northern Spain, and their members, panic-stricken, betook themselves to prayer, fasting, and other precautions of a more practical character against the impending attack, which, however, was prevented by the nobility and by a Papal Bull, in which Clement VI.—who, though no saint, was an accomplished gentleman and a broad-minded prince—exposed the absurdity of the poison charge, and prohibited the Christians from assaulting the Jews on pain of excommunication.

During the long civil war in Castile between Don Pedro and his brother Don Henry, the heirs of Alfonso XI., the Jews had the misfortune to back the losing side. They sustained heavy losses in many a battle and siege, and suffered terribly at the hands of friend and foe alike. The great community of Toledo was decimated out of all recognition. Throughout Castile congregations once flourishing were reduced to penury, and many of their members in sheer despair embraced Christianity. The Jews of Burgos, even after Don Pedro’s death, remained stubbornly loyal to his memory, and when all Spain had recognised Don Henry’s rule they alone had the courage to defy him—a constancy which moved the usurper’s admiration, and secured to the besieged terms of submission honourable to both sides alike. Peace was restored, but it brought small comfort to Israel. Don Henry had always pretended that one of the causes of his enmity to his brother was the latter’s partiality for the Jews. The vanquished enemy’s favourites would now have been made to suffer the extreme rigour of Henry’s vengeance but for the financial straits in which the victor found himself. Instead of annihilating, Don Henry preferred to exploit the Jews. But the King’s forbearance roused the indignation of his followers, who felt despoiled of the fruits of their victory. In 1371 the Cortes assembled at Toro rebuked the King for employing the enemies of the faith at Court, and for allowing them to farm the revenues of the Crown. The representatives of the nation insisted that the Jews should be excluded from State offices, confined within special quarters, compelled to wear the badge, and forbidden to display their riches in their apparel or equipages, or to bear Christian names. The King, while dismissing most of these demands, thought it wise to concede the last three, and he also decreed some measures intended to restrain the rapacity of Jewish money-lenders. The clergy also, who had sanctioned Don Henry’s usurpation of the throne, claimed a reward in the shape of anti-Jewish legislation. ♦1375♦ Religious disputations were, therefore, revived, and Jewish renegades were once more the protagonists in the sorry farce.

At the same time the Church renewed its efforts to prevent the Christians from mingling with the impure race. The necessity for this persistent confirmation of anti-Jewish regulations shows that, though the antipathy between Jew and Gentile was spontaneous, and though both Church and Synagogue vied with each other in their endeavours to keep the two elements in sempiternal alienation, yet the social instinct which forms the strongest trait of human nature often triumphed over the barriers set up by religious bigotry. But human nature was allowed little opportunity for asserting itself. ♦1388♦ The Council of Palencia passed a decision forbidding Catholics to dwell within the quarters assigned to the Jews and Moors, under penalty of excommunication. ♦1390♦ Two years later the Jews of Majorca were forbidden to carry arms. ♦1391♦ Next year, thanks to the eloquence of the fanatical priest Martinez, a series of wholesale massacres took place in Castile and Aragon, in which thousands of Jews were sacrificed to priestly and popular rage, and the cities of Seville, Toledo, Cordova, Catalonia, Barcelona, Valencia, as well as the island of Majorca, were coloured red with Jewish blood; while great numbers of the unfortunate people sought safety in half-hearted apostasy. Efforts were made to confirm the hold upon these captured infidels, popularly known as Marranos, or “the Damned,” by ecclesiastical preferment and by the bestowal of municipal dignities; while many impecunious aristocrats, anxious to restore their declining fortunes, brought riches to themselves and a lasting reproach to their posterity by courting the fair daughters of converted Israel; so much so that many a noble Castilian pedigree to this day can be traced to such an alliance. But neither ecclesiastical or civic honours nor social advancement were sufficiently potent to keep the “new Christians” in the faith. There were, of course, exceptions to the rule—a truism which we are apt to overlook in dealing with the history of the Jews. Some, no doubt, who had honestly outgrown the racial and religious swathings of Judaism, were glad enough to adopt Christianity. Unfettered by spiritual convictions, they preferred the creed which entailed no social stigma. They deserve as little blame as admiration. Others, however, there were who, setting worldly advantages, or the gratification of private grudges, above principle, found both profit and pleasure in the persecution or vilification of their former brethren. But neither of these classes represented the majority. Most of the neophytes, as soon as they safely could, slipped the suffocating cloak, and came forth in their true character, while others vacillated between Church and Synagogue, trying to serve two masters, and by so doing increased the animosity of the priests against the race; for the theologian does not agree with the psychologist in holding that a feigned or fictitious faith is better than none at all. As in the time of the Visigoth tyrants, so now thousands of Jews and forced converts fled to Africa. Many towns on the coast, from Algiers westward, were filled with the unfortunate refugees from Spain and Majorca, who found the African Berbers more humane than the European Christians.

The recent tribulations and the anticipation of worse sufferings in the near future gave rise to a new Messianic frenzy. According to the Scriptures, the advent of the Redeemer was to be preceded by terrible persecution. ♦1391♦ Three Messiahs appeared to voice the convictions and to try the faith of the hunted people: Abraham of Granada, Shem-Tob, and Moses Botarel. All three were mystics, the last one also an impostor.

The fifteenth century adds fresh scenes to the tale of sorrow, new “black-letter days” to the Jewish Calendar, and more dark pages to the history of Europe. In 1408 the anti-Jewish statutes of Alfonso the Wise were revived. Ruinous fines were imposed upon any Christian who should confer, or Jew who should accept, municipal or other office. ♦1412♦ Four years later the intercourse of the Jews with the Christians was restricted, and their commercial and industrial activity hampered by numerous prohibitions. They were forbidden to act as physicians, apothecaries, and stewards to the nobility; as bakers, millers, or vintners. They were debarred from selling oil or butter; from exercising the handicrafts of smith, carpenter, tailor, or shoemaker, and, of course, from farming or collecting the public revenues. It was further decreed that no Jew should carry any kind of arms, or be addressed as Don; that the unclean people should live in special quarters (Juderias) provided with not more than one gate each, and that they should not employ Christian servants. Thus the seclusion which was at first granted to the Jews as a privilege and a protection was now enforced as a means of oppression. Furthermore, they were stripped of their gay apparel, and compelled to wear a peculiar garment of coarse stuff and to display the hated badge, except such as could pay for permission to discard it, especially on their journeys. Lastly, they were forbidden to have their hair cut or their beards shaved. Confiscation of goods and corporal chastisement were the penalties inflicted for any breach of these and other regulations, the aim of which was, by humiliating and impoverishing the race, to induce it to embrace Christianity. A contemporary Jewish writer thus describes the sad effects of this edict: “Inmates of palaces were driven into wretched nooks, and dark and lowly huts. Instead of rustling apparel, we were obliged to wear miserable clothes which drew contempt upon us. Prohibited from shaving the beard, we had to appear like mourners. The rich tax-farmers sank into want, for they knew no trade by which they could gain a livelihood, and the handicraftsmen found no custom. Starvation stared everyone in the face. Children died on their mothers’ knees from hunger and exposure.”[70]

In the midst of all this suffering the Church was not idle. The chief of the apostles was Vincent Ferrer, a Dominican friar and indefatigable winner of souls, afterwards canonised for his exertions. This sincere, though forbidding saint, who called his bigotry religion and his hatred of heretics love of God, rushed from synagogue to synagogue, crucifix in hand, preaching the gospel of peace in a voice of thunder, and endeavouring to persuade the infidels to repentance by promises of comfort in this world and by threats of everlasting damnation in the next. Ferrer was more than an orator. His sermons were accompanied with exhibitions of the priest’s dramatic genius and of the saint’s thaumaturgic powers. Impressive processions and sacred hymns, banners, crucifices, and assaults upon the Jews heightened the effect of his impassioned appeals. Thousands of wretches succumbed to Ferrer’s eloquence, and many synagogues were turned into churches. This result was by contemporary piety attributed to the fiery exhortations addressed to the Jews, and to the miracles performed for their benefit, by St. Vincent; but a twentieth century heretic, while admitting the efficacy of exhortation and miracle, may be pardoned for suspecting that the systematic persecution on the part of the State and the spontaneous fury of the mob had at least some influence in turning the hearts of the infidels.

♦1413♦

From Castile the preacher and persecution travelled to Aragon. The newly-elected King Ferdinand, who owed his elevation to Ferrer’s influence, showed his gratitude by placing his conscience in the saint’s keeping and the royal power at his disposal. St. Vincent, thus armed with both necessaries of success—enthusiasm and means—journeyed to and fro in the country, denouncing, exhorting, threatening, and baptizing; and the victims of his fervour in the two kingdoms are said to have exceeded twenty thousand souls. Such is the persuasive power of theological reasoning, when assisted by brute force. In the same year a compulsory controversy between Hebrew renegades and Rabbis, on the traditional lines, was begun in Tortosa.

No more splendid assembly ever met for the purpose of enforcing the gospel of divine mercy by the gratification of human vanity. The anti-pope Benedict XIII., clad in his pontifical robes, sat on a lofty throne, surrounded by cardinals and prelates refulgent with brocade of gold and gems. A thousand Spanish grandees thronged behind this glorious group, while before it stood a small band of Jews anxious to defend their faith, without imperilling their lives. The truth of Christianity was beyond cavil. The falsity of Judaism, after the advent of Christ, was equally clear. Does the Talmud recognise Jesus as the Messiah or not? That was the question which was debated in sixty-eight sittings extending over a period of twenty-one months.

And so the ruin of the Jews was progressing satisfactorily. The originators of the persecution passed away one after the other. Benedict XIII. was deposed by the Council of Constance and denounced by Vincent Ferrer as an “unfrocked and spurious Pope.” The renegade Jew Geronimo vanished into his native obscurity. King Ferdinand died in 1416, and St. Vincent was translated to heaven three years later. But the tribulations of Israel did not cease. ♦1419♦ Pope Martin V., indeed, surprised the world with a Bull of toleration, dictated, as one would gladly have believed, by Christian charity; as documents prove, procured by bribery. But the plant of anti-Judaism had taken too deep roots to be permanently stunted by this tardy edict. ♦1442♦ Pope Eugenius IV. addressed another Bull to the Bishops of Castile and Leon, withdrawing the indulgences granted to the Jews by his predecessor, and he renewed all the old restrictions, adding that the unclean people should be confined to their houses during Holy Week. Autograph letters to the Castilian ecclesiastics exhorted them to enforce the Pontiff’s orders without mercy. ♦1447♦ Pope Nicholas V. aggravated all these measures of oppression.

The Spanish Jews were now regarded simply as outlaws. The pious eschewed all dealings with them. Husbandmen deserted the fields, and shepherds the flocks belonging to the proscribed people; while the towns framed new regulations for their utter suppression. King Henry IV. of Castile and Juan II. of Aragon, horror-struck at the terrible cruelty of this treatment, or rather alarmed at its consequences on the royal exchequer, endeavoured to mitigate the sufferings of the Jews. But their efforts met with no success. The campaign on the part of the Dominicans was carried on vigorously, backsliders were scented out and punished, charges of child-murder were preferred against the Jews, and the populace was stirred up to acts of violence, which grew in ferocity and frequency as the years rolled on. In 1468 a charge of this description led to a massacre at Sepulveda. ♦1469♦ In the following year the Cortes of Ocaña insisted that the anti-Jewish edicts should be stringently enforced. Despite Henry’s feeble protests, the Jews for many years continued to be exposed to the utmost cruelty of the priests and of the populace in an age when the priests and the populace were most cruel. They were not members of the Church, of the feudal aristocracy, or of the commercial and industrial corporations. Though living among the Christians, they were not of them. They were unpopular. They could not defend themselves; and neither bishops, barons, nor burgesses would lift a finger in their defence. They were, therefore, abandoned without reserve and without remorse to the tender mercies of clerical and civic fanaticism. The Marranos especially continued to be the pet aversion and occupation of the Church.

A monastic writer of Andalusia, where the “new Christians” were most numerous and now most miserable, quoted by Prescott, summarises contemporary feeling regarding them in the following eloquent lines: “This accursed race were either unwilling to bring their children to be baptized, or, if they did, they washed away the stain on returning home. They dressed their stews and other dishes with oil, instead of lard; abstained from pork; kept the Passover; ate meat in Lent; and sent oil to replenish the lamps of their synagogues; with many other abominable ceremonies of their religion. They entertained no respect for monastic life, and frequently profaned the sanctity of religious houses by the violation or seduction of their inmates. They were an exceedingly politic and ambitious people, engrossing the most lucrative municipal offices, and preferred to gain their livelihood by traffic, in which they made exorbitant gains, rather than by manual labour or mechanical arts. They considered themselves in the hands of the Egyptians, whom it was a merit to deceive and plunder. By their wicked contrivances they amassed great wealth, and they were often able to ally themselves by marriage with noble Christian families.” Here we find all the old sources of the Gentile’s hatred towards the Jew: antipathy due to diversity of character—as manifested in occupation, daily diet, and conduct; steeled by economic jealousy, and edged by religious bigotry.

♦1469 Oct. 19♦

Such was the frame of the public mind, when short-sighted statecraft, in the person of Ferdinand, King of Aragon, was wedded to narrow piety in that of Isabella, heiress to the Crown of Castile. The legitimate offspring of such a union could be no other than persecution. But, even if the sovereigns were enlightened and tolerant, it is doubtful whether they could have stemmed the current. In 1473 the mob massacred the Constable of Castile at Jaen, because he attempted to repress its fury, and, after Isabella the Catholic’s accession to the throne, petitions poured in from all sides clamouring for the extirpation of the “Jewish heresy.” The bigots of Seville, headed by the Dominican prior of the monastery of St. Paul, agitated for the introduction of the Inquisition—a tribunal originally established during Innocent III.’s pontificate at the beginning of the thirteenth century for the suppression of heresy—and their demand was seconded by the Papal Nuncio. In 1477 Friar Philip de Barberi, Inquisitor for Sicily, arrived in Seville to persuade the Spanish monarchs of the manifold virtues of his remedy for infidelity. The prospect of plunder lured Ferdinand, while Isabella’s feminine tenderness was assailed by the importunities and the casuistry of her spiritual advisers. Torquemada, the narrow-hearted Dominican of universal notoriety, had already poisoned the Queen’s mind with his pernicious maxims of intolerance, when he acted as the guardian of her conscience in early youth. In that susceptible age he had extorted from his pupil the promise that she would devote her life “to the extirpation of heresy, for the glory of God and the exaltation of the Catholic faith.” He now reappears on the scene to claim the fulfilment of the fatal vow. The young queen, noble and generous though she was by nature, could not long withstand the unanimous exhortations of persons whose sanctity her religion taught her to revere, and the superiority of whose wisdom her own modesty prompted her to accept without question. Much less could she resist her own beloved husband’s solicitations. All that was good or engaging in her conspired with all that was ignoble in her counsellors to warp her judgment, to silence the voice of her heart, and to force her to give her consent to one of the greatest crimes of any time.

It required but little effort to induce Pope Sixtus IV. to allow the establishment of the Holy Office in Castile for the detection and punishment of backsliders to Judaism, and the necessary Bull was issued on November 1st, 1478. But the Queen still hesitated to make use of the dread weapon, while her husband was not without misgivings regarding the absolute power claimed by the tribunal. As a last resource, before proceeding to extremes, the monarchs commanded Cardinal Mendoza, the Archbishop of Seville, to set forth the doctrines of the Catholic faith in a short catechism, and to cause his clergy to diffuse the light among the benighted Marranos throughout his diocese. This worthy and humane ecclesiastic gladly obeyed the royal command, and betook himself to the work of friendly persuasion. But with little success. The Christians were incited to acts of hostility by rumours of Jewish plots against the Church and the State, and of Jewish crimes of the traditional type, such as sacrifices of children and insults offered to the Host. The Government, yielding to public clamour, expelled the Jews from Seville and Cordova in 1478, and renewed the severe measures of repression in 1480. Furthermore, an ill-advised Jew, by the publication of a caustic criticism of Christianity at that inopportune moment, threw oil into the fire, and precipitated a catastrophe which perhaps no power on earth could have averted in any case. A people whose inflexibility had triumphed over the temptations and the persecutions of fifteen centuries was hardly likely to be bent by the good Archbishop’s catechism; and, after two years’ fruitless endeavour, a Commission appointed for the purpose returned a highly disappointing report. The term of grace having expired, the only remaining alternative was the Inquisition.[71]

On September 17th, 1480, the tribunal was constituted of two Dominicans and two other ecclesiastics appointed by the Crown, and was ordered to commence operations at Seville without delay. The civil authorities were instructed to lend the assistance of the secular arm to the Judges; but, owing to the opposition which the latter at first encountered on the part of the high-spirited Castilians, they were obliged to confine their activity for a while within those districts of Andalusia which depended directly from the Crown. However, limited as the field at first was, it proved more than sufficient for the purpose. The new year, 1481, was inaugurated with an edict, published on January 2nd, bidding all true Catholics to aid the tribunal in the fulfilment of its mission, by indicating any person that might be known as, or suspected of, entertaining heretical opinions. The result was a monster hunt with men for quarry and hounds, and Satan for their master. Soon the number of victims grew to such an extent that the court was obliged to exchange its seat in the monastery of St. Paul, within the city of Seville, for the larger castle of Triana, in the environs. There it established its headquarters and blasphemed the Deity whom it professed to serve by the following inscription, engraven over the portal: Exsurge, Domine; judica causam tuam; capite nobis vulpes, “Arise, O Lord; judge thine own cause; capture for us the foxes.”

Day after day the Satanic sport went on, and the number of “foxes” increased apace. The Jews were not even allowed the privilege accorded to the animal. Flight was forbidden under penalty of death, and was prevented by guards posted at the gates of the city. None the less, some of the victims succeeded in escaping to Granada, France, Germany, and Italy, where they made an appeal to the Holy See from the barbarity of the Holy Office. Sixtus IV. contented himself with a gentle rebuke of his subalterns for their excessive zeal, soon followed by a request for more strenuous “purification,” addressed to Ferdinand and Isabella.

Never, perhaps, since the fall of the Roman Empire did the detestable trade of the informer flourish so lustily as it did during the ensuing years in Castile. Bigotry, malice, cupidity were all invited to contribute to the havoc, and, as the accuser’s identity was sedulously concealed from the accused, the last motive for self-restraint was removed. A new coat or a clean shirt on Saturday morning, a cold hearth on Friday evening, avoidance of food popular among the Christians, or a taste for a kind of drink affected by the Jews, a visit to a Jewish house,—these were some of the proofs of Judaism accepted as conclusive evidence by this model court of justice. The grave itself afforded no refuge from its clutches. A person who was observed to turn his face to the wall when dying was at once pounced upon, and his body shared the fate of living heretics.

The Inquisition had been in existence for three days when six wretches suffered at the stake. Seventeen more followed in March, and at the end of ten months the “bag” had reached the number of two hundred and ninety-eight, in Seville alone, in addition to many effigies of those who had been fortunate enough to escape. The plague which devastated Seville in that year of evil omen did not interrupt the other plague. The Inquisition once more moved its racks, and continued its infernal work in Aracena. Meanwhile, its branch establishments carried on a brisk business in human lives in other parts of Andalusia, and their diligence is proved by the fact, which we owe to the Jesuit historian Mariana, that the net total of victims for the year amounted to two thousand burnt alive, and seventeen thousand sentenced to loss of property, loss of civil rights, or incarceration—mercies which figured in the balance sheet under the comprehensive euphemism “reconciliation.” ♦1483♦ In the third year Thomas de Torquemada was appointed by Sixtus IV. Inquisitor-General of Castile and Aragon, invested with full powers to draw up a new constitution for the Holy Office. His labours resulted in the modern Inquisition, which for centuries after blasted the Iberian Peninsula and supplied historians, novelists, and dramatists with an inexhaustible mine of horrors. The Spaniards were not pleased to see the extension of the grim tribunal’s operations, and Pedro Arbués, the first Inquisitor who, in spite of popular protests, ventured to make his appearance in Aragon, was murdered in the Cathedral of Saragossa. ♦1485♦ But all opposition was soon silenced.

Year after year edicts were issued and read in every church on the first two Sundays of Lent, spurring the faithful, on pain of eternal damnation, to denounce their fellow-citizens, and often their nearest and dearest; for loyalty to the cause cancelled all other bonds. Neither friendship nor family affection was permitted to interfere with the course of fanaticism, and the vilest crimes against nature and morality were hallowed by the blessings of the Church. The Marranos and their Jewish sympathisers and abettors, against whom the terrible engine continued to be almost exclusively directed under Torquemada’s management, were decimated, mulcted, and mutilated at the average annual rate of six thousand roasted or “reconciled,” not including an unknown number of orphaned children doomed to starvation or vice by the confiscation of their patrimony.

None were spared, but the most exalted were the first to be laid low; judges and municipal officers, noblemen, and even clergymen suspected of Judaism were mysteriously snatched from their homes, conveyed to the subterranean dungeons of the Inquisition, and there, amid the terrors of darkness and solitude, were kept for a while in strict ignorance of the specific crime with which they were charged. When sufficiently bewildered in his lonely, cold, and lightless cell, the prisoner was dragged before the court and asked to give straight and lucid answers to crooked and vague questions. It was accepted as a principle of judicial procedure that every prisoner was guilty until he proved himself to be innocent, and that it was better that ten innocents should suffer than one infidel escape. Denial of guilt was visited with torture, persistence in denial with more torture, and confession of sin—to obtain which was an essential element in the Inquisitorial process—with sentence of death or confiscation of goods, the greater part of which went to defray the expenses of the prisoner’s trial and to fill the pockets of his judges, while the remainder was swallowed up by the Royal Treasury.

Thus the martyrs, mangled by the rack, emaciated by privation, and almost maddened by mental suffering, were led to the place of execution. The spectacle partook of the pomp of a Roman pageant and of the horror of a cannibal feast. Noble Castilians, arrayed in the dark livery of the Holy Office, disdained not to act as banner-bearers and body-guards to the monastic executioners. A brilliant throng of gorgeously apparelled ecclesiastics added to the magnificence of the procession and enhanced by contrast the humiliation of the convicts, who, clad in coarse yellow frocks made hideous with a scarlet cross and designs of demons and hell-flames, haggard and already half-dead with torture and terror, tottered to the funeral pyre. This was piled on the Quemadero—a spacious stone platform, with the statues of the four major prophets erected at the four corners, to which the victims were bound. The semi-decomposed bodies of those convicted after death, torn out of their tombs, were placed upon the pile, the fuel was ignited, and the same flames gradually and slowly reduced the quick and the dead to ashes.

The havoc of war and the massacres due to sudden eruptions of popular fury have frequently surpassed these hecatombs in number of victims. But in sustained and cold-blooded ferocity authentic history contains nothing, and feverish fiction little, that can compare with one of them. And yet the Inquisitors were men—no doubt honest, pious, and honourable men, most of them; some perhaps amiable, nay even charitable men. Unfortunately they imagined themselves to be something more—ministers of Heaven’s will on earth. It was this fatal certainty of the righteousness of their cause that turned the Inquisitors into monsters. Man would less often become a fiend if he never mistook himself for an angel.

Torquemada himself, who has been execrated through the ages as the red-handed protagonist of the appalling tragedy, hardly deserves his great reputation. There is little originality in his crime. He was not more cruel, but only more conscientious, courageous, and consistent than millions of the men of his generation and creed. When in the nineteenth century we find Cardinal Newman—an English gentleman and scholar—preaching that “To spare a heresiarch is a false and dangerous pity. It is to endanger the souls of thousands, and it is uncharitable towards himself,”[72] can we wonder that a Spanish priest should have acted on that principle in the fifteenth century? Strong convictions do not, of course, excuse unscrupulous and unrelenting brutality, but they explain it. Given such a conviction, persecution becomes a duty and toleration a sin. If the persecutor cannot command our respect, he is at least entitled to our compassion. Torquemada deserves our pity almost as much as his victims. The drama in which he distinguished himself was an example of that highest kind of tragedy which needs no villain. Faith had spun the plot; chance supplied the actor.

Year after year the hunt went on. But, in spite of Torquemada’s unremitting endeavours, few Israelites hesitated in the option between the font and the stake offered to them. Few chose the first, and, even with these, conversion was merely a device for escape from death. Inquisitors come and Inquisitors go, but Israel endures for ever; and the hope of a better future supplied an indomitable patience with the present. Disappointment infuriated the persecutors, but failed to increase the ranks of the proselytes. It was in vain that ancient calumnies were revived, and fresh ones invented. It was in vain that the spies redoubled their activity, and the judges strained their murderous ingenuity. It was in vain that a tempest of execration and derision raged round the children of Israel. Torquemada and his accomplices were at last forced to recognise the fact that Judaism could not be extirpated, save by the extirpation of the Jews. And forthwith all his influence was brought to bear on persuading the sovereigns to drive the unclean and accursed race out of the country.

This was an unexpected blow for the wretched Jews, who feared exile even more than execution. They had borne imprisonment, ignominy, penury, and mutilation unflinchingly, in the hope that time would soften the heart, or at least wear out the arm, of persecution. But final banishment, with all the terrible perils of shipwreck, of famine, of attack by pirates and of disease which a large and unprotected crowd voyaging the high seas was certain to encounter in those days, would mean irretrievable ruin for the whole race. Moreover the Jews loved Spain with passionate devotion,[73] as is shown by the mediaeval Hebrew poetry which assumes some of its most glowing eloquence in praise of Andalusia. So, in order to avoid expatriation, the leading Jews offered thirty—some say three hundred—thousand ducats to the sovereigns as a ransom for their people.

Ferdinand and Isabella, intent on bringing their costly Moorish campaign to a successful issue, were not disinclined to listen to a proposal which promised a reinforcement of their military resources. They received the Jewish deputy in audience, and there was every prospect of the negotiations coming to a happy conclusion, when, at the psychological moment, Torquemada, the sleepless and ruthless, burst into the apartment of the palace where the interview was held, and, lifting up a crucifix, which he drew forth from beneath his cassock, thundered at the King and Queen: “Judas Iscariot sold his master for thirty pieces of silver. Your Highnesses would sell Him anew for thirty thousand; here He is, take Him and barter Him away.” With these words the terrible actor cast the crucifix upon the table and left the room.

The effect of the scene on the sovereigns’ minds was such as the crafty priest had anticipated. His sudden and opportune appearance, and his equally sudden disappearance, savoured of the miraculous; his solemn warning seemed to issue from Heaven. The same superstitious subservience to ghostly influence which had induced Isabella more than a dozen years before to sanction the persecution of the Jews, now induced her to order their expulsion. Nor was there a voice to protest. The Castilians who would have bitterly resented the arbitrary banishment of one of themselves, heard with complacency a similar decision taken against a whole nation. For Israel was a people apart. They had no share in its interests; and it had no share in their rights.

♦1492♦

It was the month of March in 1492, a year of incomparable moment for Spain, for Europe, and for the world at large. That year witnessed the capitulation of Granada, and the downfall of the Mohammedan Empire in the West; a victory for the Cross which was received with hearty thanksgivings throughout Christendom as a providential compensation for the loss of Constantinople. The same year saw the departure of Christopher Columbus, under the flag of the Spanish monarchs, on that memorable voyage which was to result in a triumph wherein the whole of mankind had reason to rejoice. The same hands which signed those two glorious treaties now affixed their signatures to the edict that banished the Jews from the land in which they had lived longer than their persecutors, which they had loved as much, and adorned more than they.

The end of July was fixed as the limit for their preparations. They were permitted to liquidate their possessions and to carry away the proceeds in bills of exchange, but not in gold or silver, for an existing law forbade the exportation of precious metals from the country. The consequence of the edict was that the Jews were forced to sell or barter away some of their effects at a nominal price, and to leave the greater portion behind them. If contemporary witnesses are to be believed, a house was seen bartered for an ass, and a vineyard for a suit of clothes. In Aragon the property of the Jews was sequestered by the authorities for the benefit of their creditors, and the people constantly reviled for their excessive wealth and usury were found to owe more than they possessed!

The last months of the Jews’ sojourn in Spain were spent by the priests in frantic efforts at conversion. But those who had opposed an adamant firmness to temptation when they had much to lose, could not be expected to yield when reduced to beggary. The consciousness of suffering for the Idea brought with it an exaltation that shed a halo over their misery. This affliction also was a fatherly rod, to be borne with fortitude; an ordeal to be endured as a test of faith; a humiliation that contained in it a promise of future glory. The God of their fathers, who had led them out of the house of bondage and fed them in the wilderness in the days of old, would not suffer his children to perish. The waters would again be divided for them, and the sea made dry land. This last expectation, confidently encouraged by the Rabbis, proved vain when the exiles reached the coast. But failure did not shake the faith of the children of Israel. The severer the martyrdom, the greater the certainty of beatitude. Scattered and scorned though they were, the day would dawn when they would once more be gathered under Jehovah’s parent pinion. The light of Zion still shone in the distance undimmed.

Thus, poor in worldly possessions, but rich in hope; defenceless, yet strong in faith, they journeyed from all parts of the country to the frontiers: the healthy and the sick, old men bending over their staffs, little footsore children tottering by their fathers’ sides, and infants clinging to their mothers’ breasts. Venerable Rabbis and scholars, delicately nurtured maidens, young gentlemen, yesterday proud cavaliers, to-day penniless and broken-spirited paupers—they all dragged their weary limbs in various directions: some north, others south; one group to the east and another to the west. Many a wet eye followed the melancholy processions, and many a warm Spanish heart melted to pity, but no hand was held out to the wanderers, no word of comfort was addressed to them: the fear of God restrained many; the fear of Torquemada more. The time of year added to the sadness of the spectacle. Andalusia was bathing in the exuberant beauty of a Spanish summer; the sky smiled blue and bright overhead, the earth was spangled with flowers beneath, the birds warbled blithely in the trees and bushes, the air was sweet with the scent of orange blossoms; Nature seemed to hold a carnival of joy in mockery of the misery and heartlessness of man.

The banishment of the Jews from England at the close of the thirteenth century was mere child’s play compared with their expulsion from Spain at the close of the fifteenth. The Jews who left England had only been in the country for two centuries; those who now left Spain had lived there more than twelve. The English exiles had borne small part in England’s greatness; the Spanish Jews had served the state in the highest capacities, had won universal fame in art, science and literature, and had become to the rest of the world’s Jewries an exemplar of that harmonious combination of piety with culture which was nowhere, outside Spain, so prominent a feature of mediaeval life. And in quantity as in quality the Spanish banishment far surpassed its English prototype. The exiles from England amounted at most to sixteen thousand; those from Spain were computed at least as one hundred and sixty thousand. Some accounts even raise them to five times that number. It was a movement on a scale comparable only to that of the exodus of Israel from Egypt, with the sole difference that, whereas the Jews had dwelt in Egypt as strangers and bondsmen in the land, in Spain they had become in many respects Spaniards. But the crime, augmented by a similar crime against the Moors, brought its penalty with it. Even accepting the lowest estimate as nearest the correct one, the price in skill, industry and intelligence, which Spain—despite her recent military achievements and her budding power beyond the seas—had to pay for the gratification of her religious fanaticism cannot easily be calculated; but it can be seen to this day. The same yoke which crushed the alien and the infidel could not but cramp the native and the Christian. Freedom of thought, speech, or action was dead. Intellectual culture was soon to be succeeded by monasticism, and material prosperity by mendicity. Meanwhile the value of Ferdinand and Isabella’s Hebrew subjects could not but have been realised immediately on their departure. The Spanish Government, prompted by the Spanish Church, had said to the Jews: “Be baptized or be gone!” The Jews went, and the life of Spain went with them. Stately mansions fell into mossy decay, rich cornfields and vineyards were turned into waste land, busy and populous cities were suddenly silenced as by a magician’s black art. In return, Spain nursed the cold comfort of having served the cause of the gloomy and bloodthirsty monster that the age called God.

Nothing throws a clearer light on the spirit of the times than the comments of contemporary writers on Ferdinand and Isabella’s suicidal policy. The Spanish historians join in a chorus of indiscriminate panegyric; the Spanish poets sing pæans to the triumph of the Faith. Foreign spectators, while deprecating the severity of the methods employed, have nothing but praise for the motive. They all applaud the deed as a sacrifice of temporal to spiritual interests. It is true that Ferdinand’s treasury was the richer for the confiscated property of the Jews. But, though lust for plunder may be regarded as the mainspring of his own policy, it was not the primary motive of the Dominicans, nor had it any share in Isabella’s conduct. This amiable princess has laid her soul bare in the confession: “In the love of Christ and his maiden mother I have caused great misery, and have depopulated towns and districts, provinces and kingdoms.” The expulsion of the Jews, like the autos-da-fé, was a crime committed principally por amor de Dios.

CHAPTER XI
AFTER THE EXPULSION

Twelve thousand of Spanish fugitives sought shelter in Navarre, where, after a few years’ peace, they were again confronted with the alternatives of baptism or banishment. Most of them, worn out with distress and disappointment, adopted Christianity, and some of these converts returned to Spain.

Eighty thousand of the exiles crossed into Portugal and purchased permission to tarry in that kingdom for eight months, preparatory to their departure for Africa. King John II. even connived at the permanent settlement of some of them in the country. But the King’s tolerance was not shared by his subjects. ♦1481♦ John had already been beset with complaints of Jewish cavaliers being suffered to parade the streets mounted on richly caparisoned horses and mules, arrayed in fine cloaks and velvet doublets, and dangling gilt swords at their sides. Under his successor popular hatred obtained the satisfaction which had hitherto been denied to it. King Emanuel, a liberal but deeply enamoured prince, was forced to yield to the wishes of his superstitious betrothed,—the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella,—who made the banishment of the Jews a condition of her acceptance of his suit; and he ordered the hapless people to quit his dominions. ♦1495♦ But, as though the measure of Israel’s woes were not yet full, the same King, yielding again to the pressure of love, caused all Jewish children of fourteen years of age and under to be torn from their parents in order to be kept in Portugal, and be reared in the Catholic faith. The scenes of agony which followed this diabolical edict would be revolting beyond endurance, but for their occurrence directly after the autos-da-fé. Many Jewish mothers, mad with grief and despair, slew their darlings with their own hands and then destroyed themselves. A contemporary writer concludes his description of these ghastly events with the characteristic comment: “It was a great mistake in King Emanuel to think of converting to Christianity any Jew old enough to pronounce the name of Moses.” In the writer’s opinion the age limit ought to have been three years.

Many Jews, afraid to face the perils of the unknown, shielded themselves from the storm under the cloak of conversion, and either remained in Portugal or returned to Spain to join the pseudo-converts left there, and for ages after supplied the hounds of the Inquisition with a healthy occupation. The State, of course, aided the Church in her lethal work; for dissent in religion is close akin to dissent in politics, and domestic discord is incompatible with vigorous expansion abroad.

♦1498♦

Meanwhile Torquemada’s successor, Deza, surpassed the great Inquisitor in ferocity and energy. One of his confederates, called Lucero, was nicknamed even by his own associates Tenebrero, on account of the darkness and cruelty of his temper, which drove the people of Cordova to revolt. ♦1506♦ Immediately after Cardinal Ximenes became Grand Inquisitor, and, with his predecessor’s fate before his eyes, proved less savage. But what the Inquisition lost in height of iniquity was amply compensated by the extension of its activity over a new field—the vanquished Mohammedans—who were also permitted to choose between baptism and banishment; while the Morescoes, or Moorish converts, were treated in the same manner as the Jewish Marranos.

There were no fewer than thirty-four tracks by which the “foxes” could be run to earth. One of these was the eating of bitter herbs and lettuces at the time of the Passover. Every Christian was virtually a spy and an informer, sometimes unintentionally, more often with deliberate eagerness. Pedigrees were strictly examined, and those found tainted with Jewish blood were cruelly persecuted, or at least treated as social outcasts. Neither moral excellence nor even high position in the Church, accompanied by sincere devotion, was accepted as an expiation for the sin of birth. Detected heretics were punished by imprisonment, by exile, by ruinous fines, and by fire. And yet the pestilent sect, too clever to be convinced by theological reasoning or to betray its want of conviction, survived and flourished in secret—a vast freemasonry of passive unbelievers spreading its crooked subterranean passages in every direction under the very foundations of the Holy Office. Neither the penalties inflicted by the State, nor the tortures, even more terrible, of the Church availed against the treacherous tenacity of the eternal people. Persecution, which goads the brave to heroism, makes hypocrites of the timid; and these Marranos, compelled to pit their cunning against that of the Holy Office, developed all the unlovely qualities of those who lead a double life; who live a daily lie. They were forced to be false either to their God or to themselves. They chose the latter course. They aped their Christian neighbours in demeanour and dialect, participated in religious rites and sacraments which they abhorred, ate food which nauseated them, kissed relics which inspired them with repugnance, and sprinkled themselves with holy water which made them inwardly feel polluted. But the sad and sordid comedy could not always be maintained. The voice of conscience occasionally proved too strong even for the instinct of self-preservation, and many a Marrano ended a miserable life by a noble martyrdom. Again, the power of the blood, sometimes in the second or third generation, asserted itself, and the child or the grandchild of a convert, though he might be a priest or a monk, reverted to the faith of his fathers.

The pseudo-converts of Portugal fared no better. In 1506 they were massacred, and their women were dishonoured in great numbers at Lisbon and in the open country. ♦About 1524♦ In the midst of these tribulations they heard of David Reubeni, who had arisen in the East to fulfil the ancient prophecies, and to bring about the ever-expected and ever-deferred liberation of Israel. David came over to Europe, declaring himself to be the brother of a Jewish prince reigning in Arabia, sent to solicit the Pope’s assistance for a holy war against the Mohammedans. Clement VII., a Pontiff too mediocre to excel in virtue or in fanaticism, yet an adroit diplomat, received the envoy in audience, and treated him with great distinction. David was acclaimed by the Roman and other Jews with enthusiasm, and was finally invited by the King of Portugal to his Court, whither he set sail in a ship flying a Jewish flag. At Lisbon David met with a magnificent reception on the part of the King and with frenetic applause on the part of the Marranos, who saw in him the promised Redeemer and the future King of Israel. But he was soon after expelled from Portugal, owing to the relapse into Judaism of a young Marrano visionary, Diogo Pires by name.

This “new-Christian,” excited by David’s mission, underwent circumcision and received mysterious and wonderful messages from heaven. He assumed the name of Solomon Molcho and fled to Turkey, where he was welcomed with open arms by his co-religionists at Salonica and Adrianople, communicated his Cabbalistic hallucinations through Eastern and Central Europe, ♦1530♦ preached the pleasures of martyrdom, visited Rome, in obedience to a divine vision, and made himself supremely ridiculous by prophesying multifarious calamities to the Eternal City. After an unsuccessful effort to win over the King of Portugal and Charles V., Solomon proceeded to Venice in order to secure the favour of that Republic, and there he narrowly escaped the effects of a poisoned draught administered to him by a brother-Jew. In the meantime some of his predictions, strangely enough, had come true. Rome was sacked by the Imperial troops and devastated by a flood, Lisbon was ruined by earthquakes, and a brilliant comet announced the approaching end of the world. Thereupon Solomon returned to Rome, where the Pope honoured him as a true, if mournful, prophet. But, whilst in Rome, he had another narrow escape—this time from the claws of the Inquisition—and was spirited away by the friendly Pope in the dead of night, only to fall into them next year at Mantua. ♦1532♦ There at last the poor self-deluded Messiah was accorded the crown of martyrdom which he had so ardently coveted. He was burnt alive. Solomon’s followers long refused to believe that he was dead; cherishing hopes of his miraculous escape and re-appearance. But he was dead in earnest.

David Reubeni was denied even this last honour. The Emperor Charles handed him over to the Spanish Holy Office, in the vaults of which he languished for three years and was finally killed in an obscure manner. An uncharitable and uncritical world has branded Solomon as a fool and David as a rogue. Nothing fails like failure. If an unsuccessful patriot is called an adventurer and an unsuccessful financier a swindler, an unsuccessful Messiah must submit to be stigmatised as an impostor.

Not many years afterwards the Inquisition was erected in Portugal at the instigation of Ignatius Loyola, and at the beginning of the seventeenth century there occurred at Lisbon an event which supplied it with a fresh excuse for persecution. A Franciscan monk of noble descent, Diogo by name, declared that by reading the Bible he came to the conclusion that Judaism and not Christianity was the true religion. Diogo was thrown into a dungeon; but, as he freely confessed his guilt, there seemed to be no occasion for torture. However, monks have seldom been governed by lay logic. Diogo was put to the rack in order to betray his accomplices. ♦1603♦ After two years of torture, varied with theological discussion, he was burnt at the stake in the presence of a large concourse of people, including the Regent. Diogo’s example invigorated the courage of the Portuguese crypto-Jews and caused many to denounce Christianity openly, regardless of consequences. Diogo’s martyrdom was celebrated by a young Jewish poet who, however, escaped the crown which his enthusiasm deserved by fleeing to Amsterdam. Another young Marrano poet also was induced by Diogo’s constancy to revert to Judaism. This revival of zeal for the old faith spurred the Holy Office to greater strenuousness on its part. At one time one hundred and fifty Marranos were arrested, tortured and threatened with cremation. The multitude of victims, however, was embarrassing to the Government. Moreover the Court lay under heavy pecuniary obligations to the Marranos, and the latter exerted themselves by might and money to procure the release of their brethren. They offered to Philip III. not only a gift of the sums due to them but, in addition, 1,200,000 cruzados (£120,000), and they also spent 150,000 cruzados among the King’s councillors in order to convince them of the justice of their cause. Philip III. was not deaf to a plea for mercy supported by so powerful an array of arguments, and he induced Pope Clement VIII. to pardon the prisoners. ♦1604♦ The Inquisition was reluctantly obliged to content itself with the semblance of an execution. The captives, clad as penitents, were led to the auto-da-fé in Lisbon, where they publicly expressed a hypocritical contrition for their sin and were rewarded with loss of all civic rights.

♦1609♦

Five years later the Morescoes, or Moorish converts, were finally expelled by Philip III., while the Marranos endured and supplied victims for the grim altar of the Holy Office. Granada, Cordova, Lisbon, and other cities in both Spain and Portugal continued to be illuminated with the funereal flames of the autos-da-fé. As late as 1652 we find a distinguished Portuguese diplomatist of Jewish origin, Emanuel Fernando de Villa-Real, on his return from Paris, where he acted as consul of the Portuguese Court, seized, tortured, and burnt at the stake. ♦1655♦ Three years later fifty-seven crypto-Jews were on one day sentenced at Cuenca; the majority to corporal punishment and loss of property, ten to death by fire. In the same year twelve more wretches were roasted in Granada, and in 1660 sixty Marranos at Seville were led to the auto-da-fé, where four of them were strangled and burnt, and three burnt alive, while the effigies of those who had fled were solemnly cremated. Amongst the latter was the picture of Antonio Enriquez de Gomez, the popular soldier and dramatist, contemporary of Calderon, and author of twenty-two comedies which earned great applause in Madrid. The original of the picture had fortunately escaped to France, where he died five years after at the age of sixty.

Another large contingent of Spanish emigrants repaired to the ports of Santa Maria and Cadiz, and was conveyed by a Spanish fleet to the Barbary coast. They landed at Ercilla, a Christian colony, on their way to Morocco. But, long before they reached their destination, the desert tribes attacked them, plucked them of the little money which they had contrived to conceal on their persons before leaving Spain, massacred many of the men, violated many of the women; and the survivors, after untold hardships, and almost starving, retraced their steps to Ercilla and sought repose in baptism.

Many Spanish Jews found refuge in Turkey. Bayezid II., on hearing of their expulsion from Spain, is said to have exclaimed: “Do they call this Ferdinand a politic prince, who thus impoverishes his own kingdom and enriches ours?” The Turkish monarch’s speech may be apocryphal. It sounds far too modern and occidental for a Turk of the fifteenth century. Bayezid was probably swayed by religious rather than by economic considerations. The Jews are regarded by the Mohammedans as a “People of the Book,” and they have much more in common with them than with the Christians. Both sects believe in one only God, and reject the doctrine of the Trinity as polytheistic; they both practise circumcision; they both indulge in ceremonial ablutions and similar forms of external symbolism. Hence there has always existed a certain degree of sympathy between the followers of the Mohammedan and those of the Mosaic law. It is also probable that the Sultan was glad to emphasise Moslem benevolence by harbouring the victims of Christian barbarity.

But, be the Sultan’s motives what they may, his action is certain, and highly creditable to his humanity. He welcomed the immigrants into his dominions, where they throve as long as the Ottoman Empire. In the golden age of the Osmanli the Jews of the Levant eclipsed their Greek fellow-subjects in wealth and rivalled their Turkish masters in display. ♦1566♦ All the physicians of Constantinople were Jews. A Jew became Duke of Naxos and lord of other islands in the Aegean, while another Jew was sent as envoy extraordinary to Venice. ♦1574♦ So great was Jewish influence over the Sultans Solyman and Selim II. that the Christian ambassadors were compelled to disguise their mortification, to court the favour and to solicit the mediation of the Jews of Stamboul. Under the circumstances the light of Zion, which had shone so bright through the clouds of adversity, was dimmed by the glare of prosperity.

But the harmonic curve of the woes of Israel was not to be broken. The Osmanli, who had filled Europe with the fame and the terror of their arms a few generations before, began to decay as soon as they ceased to conquer. An essentially nomad race, the Turkish found a sedentary life pernicious to its vigour. The Sultans sank into the soft dissipations of the harem, leaving women and eunuchs to rule the Empire and Janissaries to defend it. The Jews had reason to lament the decline of their lords. The yoke of tyranny began to weigh heavily upon their necks. Their opulence attracted the rapacity of the Pashas, and their impotence encouraged it. Fanaticism followed greed, and the Jews, among other forms of oppression to which they were subjected, were marked off from the true believers by a black turban—a badge which may still be seen in Turkey, as a survival of a necessity that exists no longer.

In that age of darkness and tribulation the hope of the Messiah flamed up again. In the middle of the seventeenth century the promised Redeemer made his appearance among the Turkish Jews in the person of Sabbataï Zebi, born at Smyrna in 1626. Sabbataï’s boyhood was spent in solitude and prayer; his early youth in Cabbalistic mysticism, in self-mortification and in a self-denial all the easier because Sabbataï was one of those happy, or unhappy, mortals who are born blind to the temptations of the flesh and to its joys. His strange life and even stranger ideas soon excited attention. Some pronounced the young man mad and others inspired. He regarded himself as the Messiah, and revealed himself as such in the year 1648, which, mystics had foretold, was to see the first dawn of the Redemption. The Synagogue excommunicated Sabbataï for his presumption. But many believed in the handsome and eccentric youth. Sabbataï’s belief in his own Messianic mission and the devotion of his disciples were confirmed by persecution. Banished from Smyrna, the prophet wandered to Stamboul and Salonica, gaining adherents, and he took care that the year 1666, which had been fixed as that of the Messianic era, should find him in Jerusalem. That city both by virtue of its traditions and owing to the condition of its Jewish inhabitants—impoverished by extortion and ground down by oppression—afforded an environment eminently favourable to miraculous display. Thence Sabbataï journeyed forth in triumph to Aleppo, and finally returned to his native city, where his new glory made the Synagogue forget his earlier condemnation and disgrace. At Smyrna the enthusiasm of Sabbataï’s followers reached the height of frenzy. The Messiah’s fame and the madness of his disciples spread to the furthest corners of the earth—Venice, Leghorn, Avignon, Amsterdam, London. The Rabbis of Prague and Hamburg were suspected by the Orthodox of being secret adherents of the Prophet of Smyrna, and excommunicated each other as heartily as if they were Christian sectarians. In all these centres of Judaism the Kingdom of Heaven was believed to have come, the belief being shared by Christian Millennarians, and the Western Jews abandoned themselves to an extravagance of excitement scarcely compatible with elementary sanity. At Hamburg the synagogue was converted into a theatre of corybantic exaltation, wherein stately Spanish cavaliers and grey-bearded men of business might be seen hopping, jumping and twirling solemnly about with the scroll of the Law in their arms. Not less remarkable was the behaviour of believers in the East. In Persia the Jews refused to till their fields or to pay tribute, for, they said, the Messiah had come. From all these quarters homage and treasure poured into the court of Sabbataï, who now was universally hailed as King of Kings, and signed himself, or allowed his scribes to do so, “I, the Lord, your God, Sabbataï Zebi.”

But the Messiah’s reign was brief and his end inglorious. Sabbataï resolved to repair to Constantinople that he might proclaim his advent from the very capital of the East. He was not unexpected. In the Straits of the Dardanelles Turkish officers arrested him, and took him fettered to Stamboul. The landing-place was crowded with a multitude of believers and others, all eager to behold the man who had filled the world with so singular an epidemic. Among the latter class of spectators was a pasha who welcomed the Redeemer with a vigorous slap in the face. The treatment subsequently meted out to poor Sabbataï was in harmony with this reception. He was thrown into prison, and nothing but the Grand Vizier’s unwillingness to create a new martyr saved him from death. Finally he was summoned before the Sultan. After a short audience, the Messiah issued forth from the Padishah’s presence a turbaned Mohammedan, and his name was Mehmed Effendi.

But even this catastrophe failed to break the spell which Sabbataï’s personality had cast over the minds of men. The masses clung to the hope which he had raised for ages after his death. Some of his adherents, including his wife, imitated his example and embraced Islam. The sect of these Hebrew Mohammedans, under the name of Dunmehs, or Converts, still endures at Salonica and other cities of the Ottoman Empire, and among them the belief prevails that Sabbataï is not really dead. They form a body apart, knit together by ties of consanguinity, detested by their former brethren in the faith as a sect of apostates and suspected by their new brethren as a sect of hypocrites.

The further decay of the Ottoman Empire, which brought humiliation to the conquerors and kindled the desire for national rehabilitation among their Christian subjects, however, brought peace and commercial prosperity to the Jews. ♦1717♦ Lady Mary Wortley Montague, in her account of the policy and the manners of the Turks in the eighteenth century, gives a glowing description of the Jewish colony of Adrianople.

“I observed,” she says, “that most of the rich tradespeople are Jews. That people are in incredible power in this country. They have many privileges above all the natural Turks themselves, and have formed a very comfortable commonwealth here, being judged by their own laws. They have drawn the whole trade of the empire into their hands, partly by the firm union amongst themselves, partly by the idle temper and want of industry of the Turk. Every Bassa has his Jew, who is his homme d’affaires; he is let into all his secrets and does all his business. No bargain is made, no bribes received, no merchandizes disposed of, but what passes through his hands. They are the physicians, the stewards, and the interpreters of all the great men. You may judge how advantageous this is to a people who never fail to make use of the smallest advantages. They have found the secret of making themselves so necessary that they are certain of the protection of the Court whatever Ministry is in power. Even the English, French, and Italian merchants, who are sensible of their artifices, are, however, forced to trust their affairs to their negotiation, nothing of trade being managed without them, and the meanest among them being too important to be disobliged, since the whole body take care of his interests with as much vigour as they would those of the most considerable of their members. They are, many of them, vastly rich.”

At the present moment the Jews, thanks to the profound incompetence and sloth of the Turks, the unpopularity, disunion and unrest of the Christian rayahs, and their own superior ability and concord, thrive in many parts of the Sultan’s dominions, still preserving the speech of their Spanish persecutors.

A few of the refugees from Spain found their way into France and England, while some of those who were subsequently persecuted in Portugal drifted to Holland. But a large number of Spanish Jews set sail for Italy.

CHAPTER XII
THE RENAISSANCE

While Popes and Emperors waged a fierce warfare against each other for the heritage of the Roman Caesars, the democratic spirit of the Italian people grew in safe obscurity, deriving fresh vitality from the feud between those two great enemies of freedom. The Emperor’s defeat saved Italy from political servitude, and the Pope’s victory came too late to endanger intellectual liberty. The people who claimed the right to act as they pleased were a fortiori ready to vindicate their right to think what they pleased. Thus free thought, which was stunted by the Popes of Rome in the far-off lands of the North, flourished under the very shadow of St. Peter’s throne. It was natural that it should be so. They who sit nearest the stage are least liable to be duped by scenic devices. The Italians were too near the Holy See to be impressed by its tricks or to be terrified by its theatrical thunder. They had seen Gregory VII. as an illiterate Tuscan lad playing in his father’s workshop, and they had known Innocent III. as plain Signor Lothario, son of the Count of Segni. No one is a demigod to his own parishioners.

Hence the lofty pretensions of the Popes were nowhere less respected than in their immediate neighbourhood. The spiritual autocrats, whose anathemas made foreign princes and peoples tremble with superstitious terror, found many severe critics among their own countrymen. The Italian chronicler Salimbene (1221–1288), though himself a monk, in his vivid and varied picture of thirteenth century life, does not hesitate to comment freely on the greed, profligacy, gluttony, heresy and other sins of many a contemporary pope, cardinal and bishop. Even more significant is the attitude of the author of the Divina Commedia. There the judges are judged, and they who doomed others to everlasting torture are themselves consigned to a similar fate by the stern Florentine poet, the spokesman of the Middle Ages. Celestine V., who, yielding to base fear, abdicated St. Peter’s chair in 1294, is sentenced by Dante to wander in hell naked, his face bedewed with blood and tears, and beset by wasps and hornets; one of the dolorous tribe of trimmers—“Wretches who never lived”; sinners whose very disembodied shades are “both to God displeasing and to His foes.”[74] Pope Anastasius is condemned to an even worse plight, as a heretic. Nicholas III. is found planted with his heels upwards, waiting to be succeeded in that uncomfortable position by Boniface VIII., “the chief of the new Pharisees,” who, in his turn, is to be followed by Clement V., “the lawless pastor,” who, besides many other sins of omission and commission, abetted Philip the Fair in the suppression of the Templars, and with him divided the guilt, if he were defrauded of the fruits, of the atrocious crime. To an equally sad eternity are doomed popes and cardinals “over whom Avarice dominion absolute maintains”; the monks of Cologne; and the “Joyous Friars” (Frati Godenti), notorious for things worse than joyousness.

Nor did the great religious upheavals of the Middle Ages which helped to tighten the Papal grip on the European mind produce any injurious effects in Italy. Far otherwise. The most serious of those movements, the Crusades, proved of signal benefit to the Italian republics. The campaigns that drained other countries of men and money, opened new sources of profit and power to Venice and Genoa, Florence, Milan and Pisa; they invigorated their maritime trade, and increased their knowledge of foreign lands. While the kings and knights of Northern and Central Europe dreamed dreams of military glory, of victory for the Cross, and of conquest for themselves, the commonwealths of Italy realised the more solid, if less splendid, boons of extensive commerce, and even more extensive credit. When Bayezid, surnamed the Lightning, towards the end of the fourteenth century, threatened to carry war into the heart of holy Christendom and boasted that his horse should eat his oats on the altar of St. Peter at Rome, it was not the Romans who resented the impious insolence of the infidel. Nor were they moved when the King of Hungary, Sigismund, panic-stricken, sent a bishop and two knights with letters to King Charles VI. of France, the eldest son of the Church, imploring him to ward off the evils that menaced it. The Italians saw with calm unconcern the young Count de Nevers, heir of the Duke of Burgundy, and cousin of the French monarch, accompanied by four other princes, lead his brilliant host of knights and squires against the “enemies of God.” It was the villeins of Burgundy and the burgesses of Flanders who paid the expenses of the ruinous campaign undertaken to save Rome from the Turk. And if the honest, but credulous, Froissart is to be believed, the Italians, so far from sympathizing with the aim of the expedition, actually assisted the infidels by information and advice. Bayezid, on hearing that the Christian forces had crossed the Danube, is reported by the Chronicler to have said: “My wishes are now accomplished. It is now four months since I heard of the expedition from my good friend the Duke of Milan, who advised me to draw up my men with prudence.”

♦1396 Sept. 28♦

Furthermore, when the champions of the Cross met those of the Crescent on the fatal field of Nicopolis, and left upon it the flower of their chivalry, the Italians were the only people who had no reason to mourn the disaster. All useless prisoners were put to death; but the young Count de Nevers, and a score other princes and barons of France, were held by Bayezid to ransom. After a long and painful captivity the survivors obtained their liberty for 200,000 florins. But, while this immense sum and the costs of the negotiations and embassies, as well as the means for the prisoners’ return home in a manner befitting their high estate, were laboriously raised by extraordinary taxes levied by the Duke of Burgundy upon all towns under his obedience, and more especially upon those of Flanders—Ghent, Bruges, Mechlin, and Antwerp—the merchants of Genoa showed their enterprising genius, no less than their prosperity, by giving prompt security to the Sultan for five times the amount stipulated. Lastly, when the French lords, on their arrival at Venice, found themselves hardly able to defray the expenses of their sojourn in “one of the dearest towns in the world for strangers,” as Sir John sensibly observes, they met with scant courtesy at the hands of the Venetians. The King of Hungary, though the revenues of his realm were “ruined for this and the ensuing year,” volunteered to assist the princes by “offering for sale to the rulers of Venice the rents he received from that town, which amounted to 7000 ducats yearly”; but the Venetians, on hearing of the proposal, “coldly replied that they would consider the matter,” and after a fortnight’s consideration answered, “as I was told by one who heard it,” that “if the King of Hungary was disposed to sell his whole kingdom, the Venetians would willingly make the purchase, and pay the money down; but as for such a trifle as 7000 ducats of yearly revenue, which he possessed in the city of Venice, it was of so little value that they could not set a price on it either to buy or sell, and that they would not trouble themselves about so small an object.”

The narrative brings into vivid, if somewhat unpleasant, prominence the contrast between the Italians and their neighbours over the Alps: their wealth, their pride, their eagerness to draw profit from other people’s enthusiasms, and their utter want of interest in the questions which agitated so deeply the rest of mediaeval Christendom. The sons of Italy were too much engrossed in the affairs of this world to make any sacrifices to the next. Already sensuous bliss was all the bliss they knew or cared for. Undistracted by celestial chimeras, they would gladly have exchanged all the dreams of eternity for one day’s enjoyment of earthly realities. But, if their worldly prosperity and their practical wisdom made the Italians selfish, they also made them tolerant. To them the prejudice of feudalism was as unprofitable as its idealism.

The Jews reaped the fruit of Italian tolerance. By one of those wonderful paradoxes with which history loves to surprise the student, the people that had crucified Christ, the people that was held guilty of the sufferings of His disciples at the hands of the Pagans, the people that was execrated as a perpetual source of heresy, had from the first dwelt and prospered in the very city which had witnessed the most terrible of those sufferings, and which had early claimed to be revered as the capital of Christendom and the Supreme Court of orthodoxy. While their brethren in France, Germany, and England underwent martyrdom, the Jews of Rome enjoyed comparative, if not uninterrupted, peace. The fury of the Crusades, which stained the waters of the Rhine and the Moselle with Hebrew blood, found no parallel on the banks of the Tiber. The calumnies which stirred up a tempest against the Jews in Norwich, aroused no responsive echo in Rome. The Bulls which doomed the “accursed people” to persecution in those distant realms remained unheeded in the very place where they were framed and signed. The Popes, who denounced and proscribed the “unclean and perfidious race” abroad, with few exceptions, cherished, protected, and trusted individual members of it at home.

♦1162–1165♦

Pope Alexander III., the great antagonist of the German Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and of Henry II. of England, had a Jewish Minister of Finance, or treasurer of the household, and on his return to Rome, after his voluntary exile in France, he was met by a jubilant procession of Jewish Rabbis. The Roman Jews were not subject to any special tax, nor was their evidence against Christians considered invalid. Even greater was the liberty enjoyed by the Jews of Southern Italy and Sicily, where they chiefly abounded. The Norman Kings confirmed to them the ancient privilege of trial according to their own laws. ♦1198–1250♦ In Sicily, under Frederick II., there were Jewish administrators and Jewish landowners. A favourite minister of King Roger of Sicily frequented the Jewish synagogues and contributed to the expenses of the Jewish community. Broadly speaking, until the end of the fifteenth century, such ill-feeling as existed towards the Jews in Italy proceeded entirely from their own aloofness and eccentricity, and was in no way fostered by priests or pontiffs. Nothing is more eloquent of the general prosperity of the Italian Jews in those days than the silence of history concerning any religious activity amongst them.

Besides the absence of ecclesiastical fanaticism, there were other reasons to account for the Jew’s normal immunity from persecution in mediaeval Italy. The Italians had no cause to envy the Jew his commercial success. In Italy the sons of Israel found keen competitors in the native Christians. The financial genius of the Florentine and the Venetian was more than a match for that of the Jew. The Italians, therefore, did not exclude the Jews from their municipal and industrial organizations, but, by making the entrance to their Guilds less difficult for non-Christians, enabled the latter to engage in various trades elsewhere closed to them. Nor was the Holy See strong enough to ban usury in Italy and to fan the superstitious antipathy towards money-lenders as it did in other countries. Among the Italians the interests of the market counted for more than the interests of the Church, and canonical prohibitions were easily set at naught for the sake of convenience. Furthermore, the division of the peninsula into a number of States politically sundered, and often hostile to each other, but geographically connected, enabled the Jews to seek refuge in one place from persecution in another, and as soon as the tempest was over to return to their homes.

For all these reasons we find the relations between Jews and Christians in Italy more cordial than in any other part of mediaeval Europe. The foreign origin and foreign connections of the Jew, far from being a source of prejudice, proved an attraction to the educated Italian. It is easy to imagine those old schoolmen, with their alert curiosity and unquenchable thirst for knowledge—in an age when books were rare, travel perilous, and all that was distant in space or time a desert, dimly known or utterly unknown—eagerly seizing at every chance of enlarging their mental horizon and of enriching their intellectual stores. A chance of this kind offered itself in the Jewish Rabbis, physicians, and scholars, and the Italians did not neglect it. Friendships between learned Hebrews and Christian divines were not uncommon.[75] In the tenth century we hear of a Jewish doctor Donnolo being on intimate terms with the Lord Abbot Nilus. One of the fruits of such friendships was the indirect transmission to the West of a few rays of Hellenic light long before the dawn of the Renaissance, through translations of the Arabic versions of the Greek classics into Hebrew, and from Hebrew into Latin. The most illustrious of these literary connections between followers of the new and the old Hebrew prophet was the tender affection which, towards the end of the thirteenth century, bound Immanuel, “the Heine of the Middle Ages,” with Dante, the poet of old Catholicism, and the embodiment of all that was true and pure and truly noble in mediaeval Christianity. The two friends must have formed a pair of extraordinary incongruity. Dante, grand, stern, and sombre, couching the gloomiest conceptions in the light and graceful language of Italy; Immanuel, witty and caustic, venting his frolicsome sarcasms in the solemn tongue of the Hebrew prophets. The contrast is brought home to us with almost deliberate vividness by the works of the two friends. They both wrote visits to the land of the dead. Dante’s is a tragedy; Immanuel’s a satirical comedy—almost a parody. But in one respect the Jew shows himself superior to the Christian. His paradise includes the great shades of the pagan world.

And yet it would be an error to imagine that the Jew, even in those halcyon days of Italian freedom, was wholly exempt from the penalty which pursues dissent. Whatever the feelings of the cultured and the thoughtful might be, to the populace of Italy the Jew was a pestilent heretic. As early as 1016 we hear of a massacre of the Jews in Rome owing to an earthquake which wrought great havoc in the city. The calamity occurred on Good Friday, and it was ascertained that at the time of its occurrence the Jews were worshipping in their synagogue. A coincidence to the mediaeval mind was tantamount to conclusive proof of cause and effect. The Roman rabble, under the influence of panic and superstition, wreaked a terrible vengeance on the supposed authors of the misfortune, and Pope Benedict VIII. sanctioned a crime which he was probably unable to prevent. Innocent III. proved his consistency by oppressing the “enemies of Christ” in Italy as scrupulously as elsewhere, and the Jews were also expelled from Bologna in 1171. In 1278—when Dante was a precocious youth of twelve years of age, already devoted to his mystic adoration of Beatrice; when Thomas Aquinas, the tolerant of Judaism, had been dead only four years; and two years after the birth of the great painter Giotto, to whom we owe the one portrait of Dante that has escaped the deluge of the centuries—at that period at which the rosy morn of the Renaissance was faintly gilding the eastern firmament, we find the Jews compelled to attend Christian services and to submit to sermons preached against their own religion. But, with few exceptions, no bloody persecution soiled the canvas of Italian history. In the ensuing century synagogues, plain, gaunt, and ungainly, might still be seen in close proximity to gorgeous Christian churches in Rome, and the congregations which thronged the latter on Sundays had not yet discovered that it was their duty to punish their neighbours for worshipping their god on Saturday. But the discovery was not far distant.

In 1321 the Jews of Rome were charged with insulting the crucifix as it was carried through the streets in a procession. The accuser is said to have been a sister of John XXII., a pope among whose principal claims to distinction love of gold ranked high. Several priests corroborated the charge, and the Pope decided to drive the Jews out of the Roman state. The details of the occurrence are uncertain; but the reality of the danger to which the Jews found themselves exposed is proved by the extraordinary fast instituted that year. While fervent prayers were offered up in the synagogues, messengers were despatched to the Pope at Avignon and to King Robert of Naples, his patron, who also was a great friend of the Jews, imploring that the decision might be cancelled. King Robert pleaded their cause successfully, for, it is said, his eloquence was supported by twenty thousand ducats presented by the Roman Jews to the Pope’s sister.

In the middle of the same century we find the Jews of Rome obliged to contribute towards the expenses of the popular amusements in the Roman circus—a form of entertainment which was an abomination unto the Lord of the Jews—12 gold pieces a year; a small matter in itself, yet indicative of the direction in which the current flowed. But a new power came to stem for a while this current.

We are in the heart of the fourteenth century. Dante died in 1321, and his obsequies were sumptuously performed at Ravenna. The tomb which closed over Dante’s remains on that July day received more than the spokesman of Mediaeval Faith. In it was buried Mediaeval Faith itself. Catholicism, and all that it had meant to Dante, was already a thing of the past. “One Church and one Empire for all men,” the idols of the Middle Age, were to be deposed by the ideal of “A Church and an Empire for each race of men,” gradually to develop into “No Church and no Empire for any man.” The last of the Catholics was carried to his grave, as the first of the Humanists appears on the scene. Dante’s censures of popes and cardinals were the rebukes of a brother; Petrarch’s denunciations are the assaults of an enemy. Dante, while condemning individual churchmen, sincerely reveres the Church which their malpractices disgraced. To him the Papal Court may be a home of hypocrisy, a nursery of shame, a cradle of crime, and he will have nothing to do with it; but that does not lead him to question the spiritual authority of that Court. His hero still is Gregory Hildebrand, della fede cristiana il santo atleta—the saintly athlete of the Christian Faith.[76] To Petrarch the Papal Court is all that and more. It is the mother of human slavery and the fount of human misery—a “Western Babylon,” as he calls it in one of his sonnets. It fills him with unutterable abhorrence. Petrarch died in 1374, but the new spirit of which he was the exponent did not die with him. It was transmitted to his disciple Boccaccio, in whose hands the keen weapon of indignation was replaced by the keener one of ridicule. Boccaccio’s popular tales spread the infamy of the monasteries and nunneries, and the hatred towards their inmates, far and wide. Henceforth contempt shall be the portion of the Church which had inspired his predecessors with mere horror. Poggio, Pulci, Franco, and others followed in the footsteps of the master, and though they could not rival Boccaccio in wit, they surpassed him in virulence.

The real importance of these attacks lies in the circumstance that they were levelled not at persons but at institutions. The warfare was not waged so much against the body as against the soul of Catholicism. It is true that Italian Christianity had very early divested itself of some of the Oriental austerity of the cult, and that great part of its original colour had been toned down, or touched up, in accordance with Occidental taste. After twelve centuries of Roman practice very little, indeed, was left of the gospel preached on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. The self-sacrifice of the prophet had been replaced by the self-indulgence of the priest, the simplicity and humility of the saint by the purple splendour of the ecclesiastical prince, and the spirit of the Word had long been stifled beneath the mummeries and pageants of Roman ritual. But still there remained more than the Latin temperament, under the influence of the pagan revival, could bear with equanimity. The young Italian mind had had enough of the creed of abstinence, renunciation, and sacrifice; it panted for enjoyment. The litanies and the agonies of the Church repelled it; her self-mortifications and self-mystifications revolted it. The classic love for form was to oust again the Christian veneration for the spirit. Virgil ceased to be regarded as a heathen prophet of Christianity. Scholars ceased to scan his pages for predictions of the advent of Jesus, and began to revel in the charm of his paganism. In a former generation Dante had found in the poet of Mantua a ghostly guide to the Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven of Catholicism; the new school saw in him a mellifluous minstrel of sensuous joys: a singer of the beauty of flocks and flowers, of the humming bees, of the trilling birds, of the murmuring rivulets, of the loves of shepherds and shepherdesses. The muse of Theocritus had risen from her enchanted sleep of a thousand years and brought back with her the sanity and the light that were to banish the phantoms and the mists of the mediaeval hell. Italy celebrated the resurrection of Pan.

Self-abasement was superseded by self-reverence; and abstinence by temperance. The dignity of the individual, long lost in the mediaeval worship of authority, was restored; the glorification of man succeeded to the glorification of the Kingdom of God on earth. The beauty of the naked human body was once more recognised and its cult revived. Fecundity and not chastity became the ideal virtue. And what the poets described in warm, impassioned melody, the artists of a later day depicted in no less warm and impassioned colour. Dante’s ethereal love for Beatrice would have been shocked at Raphael’s Madonna: Madonna the mother; no longer Madonna the maiden.

Nor was the new cult confined to profane poets, artists, and scholars. The divines of the Roman Church were also carried away by it. Rationalism invaded the Vatican, was petted by the priests, and promulgated from the pulpit. In sermons preached before the Pope and his cardinals the dogmas of Christianity were blended with the doctrines of ancient philosophy, and Hebrew theology was identified with heathen mythology. Christ’s self-sacrifice was compared to that of Socrates and of other great and good men of antiquity who had laid down their lives for the sake of truth and the benefit of mankind. Pontifical documents were couched in pagan phraseology; the Father and the Son appeared as Jupiter and Apollo; and the Holy Virgin as Diana, or even as Venus with the child Cupid; while sacred hymns were solemnly addressed by pious Catholics to the deities of Olympus. These and other vagaries were seriously indulged in, after a fashion abundantly grotesque, but none the less instructive. When pruned of its absurd extravagances and picturesque ineptitudes, this enthusiasm for paganism can be regarded both as the fruit and as the cause of an essentially healthy growth. The Italians of the fifteenth century succeeded where Julian the Apostate had failed in the fourth; and to that success may be traced all the subsequent developments of European culture.

How this revolution came about has been explained at great length by historians: how, partly through Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s influence, the nobles and merchant princes of the Italian republics took the new learning under their generous patronage; how young Italian pupils repaired to Constantinople to study the language and literature of ancient Greece at the feet of men to whom that language was a living mother tongue; how Greek teachers were encouraged to bring their treasures to Italy; how they were received by a public as eager to fathom the mysteries of Greek grammar as a modern public is to fathom the mysteries of a detective story; and how the stream gradually swelled into the mighty flood that followed on the fall of Constantine’s city in 1453. But all this was only a period of gestation. Modern Europe was really born on the day on which an obscure Dutch chandler made known to the world the marvellous invention which was to supersede the scribe’s pen, and to draw forth the torch of knowledge from the monk’s cell, and from the wealthy merchant’s study to the crowds in the street.

By a coincidence, apparently strange, the century which opened the prison-gates of the Christian condemned the Jew to a new dungeon. The age of the revival of learning and of the printing press is also the age of vigorous persecution of Israel in Italy. The compulsory attendance of Jews at divine service now began to be enforced in a manner more rigid at once and more stupid. Officials posted at the entrance to the church examined the ears of the Jews, lest the inward flow of the truth should be stemmed by cottonwool. Other officials, inside the church, were charged with the duty of preventing the wretched congregation from taking refuge in sleep. A Bull of Benedict XIII., issued at Valencia in 1415, decrees that at least three public sermons a year should be inflicted on the Jews, and prescribes the arguments that are to be employed for their conversion: proofs of Christ’s Messianic character drawn from the Prophets and the Talmud, exposure of the errors and vanities of the latter book, and demonstration of the fact that the destruction of the Temple and the woes of the Jews are due to the hardness of their hearts.

In 1442 Pope Eugenius IV., impelled by the son of an apostate Jew, ordained that the Jews of Rome should keep their doors and their windows shut during Easter Week. By 1443 the modest annual sum of 12 gold pieces, originally contributed by the Jews to the sports in the Roman circus, had grown to 1130 pieces. Nor were the Romans any longer content with the extortion of money, but they now insisted on a personal participation of the Jews in the detested joys of the arena. The descendants of Titus, and of the Romans who gazed at the savage spectacle of Jewish captives torn to pieces by wild beasts, or forced to kill one another for the delectation of the victors, revived the taste of their remote ancestors for sportful homicide. The fifteenth-century Carnival in Rome opened with a foot-race, which was in every respect worthy of its pagan prototype of the first century. Eight Jews were compelled to appear semi-naked, and, incited by blows and invectives, to cover the whole of the long course. Some reached the goal exhausted, others dropped dead on the way. On the same day the secular and religious chiefs of the Jewish community were obliged to walk at the head of the procession of Roman Senators across the course, amidst a tempest of execration and derision on the part of the mob; while the eccentricities of the Jew and the prejudices of the Gentile found similar scope for display upon the stage. In the Carnival plays and farces of Rome the Jew supplied a stock character that never failed to provoke the contemptuous merriment of the audience.

And yet, even in the middle of the fifteenth century, we find the Popes, in defiance of their own decrees, employing Jewish physicians. Nor does the lot of the Jew appear to have grown unbearable for some time after. Sixtus IV., whose intolerance towards the Jews of Spain has been recorded in a previous chapter, died in 1484, and was succeeded by Innocent VIII., a man of many superstitions and many children, but a feeble and ineffectual pontiff, the most interesting year of whose reign, to us, is the year of his death, 1492. In that year, in which the Renaissance reached its zenith, the Jewish population of Italy was augmented by the influx of large numbers of refugees from Spain. One party of them landed at Genoa; and a heart-rending sight they presented, according to an eye-witness, as they emerged from the hulls of the vessels and staggered on to the quay: a host of spectres, haggard with famine and sickness; men with hollow cheeks and deep-sunken eyes; mothers scarcely able to stand, fondling their famished infants in their skeleton arms. On that mole the hapless exiles, shivering under the blasts of the sea, were allowed to tarry for a short time in order to refit their vessels, and to recruit themselves for further trials. The law of the Republic forbade Jewish travellers to remain longer than three days in the country.

The Genoese monks hastened to make spiritual capital out of the wanderers’ desolate condition: children, starving, were baptized in return for a morsel of bread. Those who survived want, illness, and conversion, and finally left the mole of Genoa, were doomed to fresh distress. Their own co-religionists declined to receive them at Rome for fear of competition, and attempted to procure a prohibition of entry from Innocent’s successor by a bribe of one thousand ducats. The Pope, however, though not remarkable for tenderness of heart, was so shocked at the supreme barbarity of the exiles’ brethren that he issued a decree banishing the latter from the city. The Roman Jews, in order to obtain the repeal of the edict, were obliged to pay two thousand ducats, and to receive the refugees into the bargain.

Another contingent reached Naples under equally ghastly conditions. Their voyage from Spain had been a long martyrdom. A great many, especially the young and the delicately reared, had succumbed to hunger and to the foul atmosphere of the narrow and overcrowded vessels. Others had been murdered by the masters of the ships for the sake of their property, or were forced to sell their children in order to defray the expenses of the passage. Those who escaped the terrors of the sea, and reached the two harbours mentioned, brought with them an infectious disease, derived from the privations which they had endured. The infection lurked in Genoa and Naples through the winter; but when Spring came, it burst forth into a frightful plague, which spread with terrible rapidity, swept off upwards of twenty thousand souls in the latter city in one year, and then extended its wasting arms over the whole of the peninsula.

There can be little doubt that the people, who had elsewhere been made the scapegoats for epidemics with the origin of which they had nothing to do, would have been subjected to severe persecution for a visitation which could certainly be traced to their agency. But it so happened that the attention of the Italians was this year, and for many years after, absorbed by other calamities.

On Innocent’s death, Alexander VI. had been raised to St. Peter’s throne, which he strengthened by his own political genius, adorned by his magnificent liberality to the artistic genius of others, and disgraced by his monstrous depravity. ♦1494♦ Under Alexander’s reign Italy witnessed the invasion of Charles VIII. of France, an event which inaugurated a period of turmoil, and turned the country into a battle-ground for foreign princes. Rome alone escaped the consequences of this deluge. The Pope, alarmed at the king’s approach, offered terms of peace, which the French monarch finally accepted. Independence was secured at the cost of dignity, and Alexander VI. was enabled to steer safely amid the storms that raged over the rest of the peninsula. He died in 1503, regretted by a few, execrated by most of his contemporaries. Pius III. reigned for a few months, and was, in his turn, succeeded by Julius II., who proved himself one of the most energetic, warlike, and worldly statesmen that had ever wielded St. Peter’s sceptre. He died in 1513, and in his stead was elected Giovanni de Medici, under the name of Leo X. Born in 1475, a year after Ariosto, Giovanni was the second son of Lorenzo de Medici, chief of the Italian Platonists of the time. In his father’s house and among his father’s friends young Giovanni heard a great deal more of Pagan poetry and philosophy than of Christian theology. But while his contemporary, Ariosto, nourished in a similar school of thought, denounced the rapacity of the Roman Court and derided the papal pretensions to temporal power—laughingly dismissing the fabled gift of Constantine the Great to Pope Silvester to the realms of the moon—Giovanni devoted his life to the service of a Church whose doctrines he did not believe, and to her defence against heresies which he did not detest. His pontificate, accordingly, was distinguished by the elegant frivolities of a cultured gentleman far more than by the piety of a clergyman. Leo’s artistic taste and genial sense of the ludicrous were among his chief virtues; his love of the chase his greatest vice. Abstemious in his own diet, he delighted in providing for, and laughing at, the gluttony of others. But Leo’s principal title to the grateful remembrance of posterity lies in his munificent encouragement of art and letters. He died in 1521.

Most of these pontiffs, refined, intelligent, and irreligious, in fighting the reformers fought enemies to their own power, not the enemies of Christ. While opposing the spirit of rebellion which the licentiousness of some of them had brought into existence and the literary culture of others to maturity, they seem to have ignored the eternal heretics, the Jews. Under their rule Israel enjoyed one of those Sabbaths of rest which invariably preceded a new reign of terror. When an academic feud rent the learned world of the University of Padua into two factions, instead of the philosophical question under dispute being, after the fashion of the times, settled at the point of the rapier, it was submitted to the arbitration of a Jew, the great scholar Elias del Medigo. This worthy, vested in the professorial robes, addressed the students of Padua and Florence, and his decision was accepted as final. Lastly, the gulf between Jew and Gentile in Italy was bridged by a common philosophical faith.

The Italians of the period, in their eager search after truth, often strayed into strange paths. Many of them, weary of groping their way amid the darkness of the scholastic wilderness, rashly ran after any will-of-the-wisp that held out the promise of light and rest. Among these aberrations from commonsense was the rage for the Hebrew mysticism of the Cabbala, which found many susceptible disciples among the literati of Padua and Florence, and led to close and cordial relations between representatives of the two creeds. The omniscient youth Count Giovanni Pico de Mirandola, who had been initiated into the mysteries of the Cabbala by a Jew, maintained that these mysteries yielded the most effective proof of the divinity of Christ, and, what is more remarkable still, he had even converted Pope Sixtus IV. to his way of thinking. Pico de Mirandola placarded Rome with a list of nine hundred theses, and invited all European scholars to come to the city at his own expense that they might be convinced of the infallibility of the Cabbala, while the Pope took great pains to have the Cabbalistic writings translated into Latin for the enlightenment of divinity students. Innocent VIII. was far too old-fashioned to favour new absurdities; and, while he persecuted witches and magicians in Germany and preached abortive crusades against the heretics of the West and the infidels of the East, he prohibited the reading of Pico’s nonsense. But the craze seized Leo X. and the early Reformers, and not only theologians but also men of affairs and men of war fell captives to it. Statesmen and soldiers devoted themselves to the study of Hebrew, in the pathetic belief that they had at last secured the magic key to universal wisdom.

Contrariwise, many Hebrew Cabbalists, filling high places in the Synagogue, found in these theosophic hallucinations a proof of the divine origin of Christianity and openly embraced it. But apart from mysticism, the genius of the Renaissance overstepped the iron circle of Judaism. The charm of Hellenism which had in old times attracted the Jews of Alexandria, once more prevailed against the Hebrew hatred of Gentile culture. Jewish youths gladly attended the Italian universities; the philosophy of Aristotle, the elegant Latinity of Cicero and the subtle criticism of Quintilian met with keen appreciation among them; and, though painting and sculpture continued to be regarded with suspicion, we find Italian Rabbis, like their Christian colleagues, drawing from pagan mythology illustrations for their sermons, and even paying, in full synagogue, rhetorical homage to “that holy goddess Diana.”

Thus Jew and Gentile were drawn near to each other by many intellectual forces. Even theologians succumbed to the mollifying influence of the new spirit. Too enlightened to persecute, not sufficiently in earnest to proselytise, they engaged in friendly and witty arguments with the Jews on the matter of their religion. ♦1523–1534♦ Pope Clement VII. even conceived the plan of a Latin translation of the Old Testament to be brought about by a collaboration of Jewish and Christian scholars. Under such illusory auspices was ushered in the century that was to open to the Jews the blackest chapter in their black history.

CHAPTER XIII
THE GHETTO

Hitherto the life of Israel in Italy had been a life chequered by sunlight and shade. Henceforth it is to be all shade. The sixteenth century is the century of the Ghetto and its foul degradation. The Italian Jews were destined to feel the effects of the Catholic reaction, provoked by the attacks of the Reformers, and although this reaction commenced latest, it lasted longest in Italy.

In 1540 Ignatius Loyola promulgated his gospel of obedience, intolerance and intellectual suicide, and the doctrine that no deed is unholy or immoral which is done in the service of the Catholic Church—than which no more startling or sinister doctrine was ever preached to the foolish sons of man. At the same time the Inquisition, having placed the extermination of the Moors and the Jews in Spain on a sound business basis, sought fresh employment for its energy and its racks. The experience of the older institution, thus united with the ardour of the young, presented a combination of forces such as none but the most resourceful of heretics could resist. It was not long before the Jews of Italy became aware of this revival of enthusiasm for the Faith.

♦1540♦

In the very same inauspicious year the Holy Office began the persecution of the Marranos of Naples, then under Spanish rule. These pseudo-Christians were ordered to wear the badge or to leave the country. Rightly divining that the badge was only the prelude to worse things, they preferred to go into exile. Some of them bent their steps to Ancona and Ferrara, but the majority set out for Turkey. Many were captured by pirates on their voyage and were carried off to Marseilles, where the French King Henry II., though otherwise a prince of unimpeachably obscurantist leanings, received them kindly; but, as he dared not retain them, he despatched them to Turkey. ♦1550♦ Ten years later the Dominicans inflamed the Genoese against the small Jewish community in the Republic, and the Jews were banished. These were but two episodes in the later history of the Italian Jews, interesting chiefly as indicative of that change of feeling which led to the tragedy of the Ghetto.

As we have seen, there always was a natural tendency for the children of Israel to gravitate towards the same point—a habit which originated the Jewries of England, the Judenstadt of Germany, the Juderias of Spain and the Jewish quarters in most mediaeval countries. But we have also seen that, under tolerable conditions, the Jews entertained no unconquerable aversion from dwelling amidst the Gentiles, and that, when treated as human beings, they developed a certain degree of community of feeling and interest with their fellow-creatures. Further, we have noticed this gradual reconciliation blocked partly by the efforts of the Synagogue, but far more successfully by those of the Church; and we have found in certain countries the Jews claiming from the princes who favoured and fleeced them segregation as a privilege and as a means of self-protection.

In the time of Pope Gregory VII. the Bishop of Speyer, in order to save the Jews from the violence of the mob, allotted to them a particular quarter which they might fortify and defend. In the middle of the thirteenth century King Ferdinand of Castile granted a similar privilege to the Jews of Seville. In the city of Cologne the Jews, a century later, paid an annual fee of twenty marks to the officer whose task it was to lock the gates of their special quarter at sundown and to unlock them at dawn. The feudal lawlessness of the times made such precautions necessary not only for the Jews, but for all mortals who were not strong enough to secure respect for their persons and property; so much so that the Jews of Prague who lived outside the Jewish quarter resolved of their own accord to join their brethren in the Judenstadt for greater safety. ♦1473♦ Compulsory concentration of the Jews within separate quarters, it is true, was not unknown even in those days. Restrictions of this kind seem to have been in force in Sicily as early as the fourteenth century, and in certain German States even in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries, while the “Jewish barrier” of Tudela dates from the eleventh century. Such cases, however, were sporadic and exceptional. It is in the enlightened age with which we are now dealing, and in the most enlightened country in Europe, that the isolation of Israel begins to be rigidly and universally enforced as a means of coercion. The walls of the Jewish quarter are no longer a bulwark against attack, but a barrier against escape.

The name, as well as the institution under its new and offensive form, is of Venetian origin. The term is derived from the Getto—the old, walled iron-foundry, within the precincts of which the first Jewish Ghetto was established in the city of St. Mark, in 1516. The Jews had made Venice their home in very early times; but their colony, in its subsequent extent, dates from the beginning of the thirteenth century. It was then that Jewish merchants from north and east began to pour into the city that was to become, partly by their help, the commercial capital of Italy. Their relations to the Christian inhabitants were neither hostile nor yet hearty. The common people detested them, but the Government was consistent in its protection of their persons and interests. An incident that occurred in the fifteenth century serves to illustrate the Jew’s position in the Venetian Republic.

During the Holy Week of 1475 a Christian child was drowned at Trent, and its body was caught in a grating close to the house of a Jew. The priests immediately saw in the accident evidence of ritual murder, and, by exhibiting the body in public, they stirred up the populace against the supposed murderers. All the Jews of the city, male and female, young and old, rich and poor, were cast into prison by order of the Bishop. A baptized Jew came forth as accuser, and the prisoners, put to the torture, confessed that they had slain little Simon and drunk his blood on the night of the Passover. A Jewess was said to have supplied the weapon for the crime. With the exception of four Jews, who embraced Christianity, the rest were banished from Trent. Cardinal Hadrian, writing half a century later, describes the rocks of Trent as a place “where the Jews, owing to Simon’s murder, dare not even approach.”[77]

Meanwhile the corpse of the child was embalmed and advertised by the monks as a wonder-working relic. Thousands of pilgrims repaired to the shrine, and, such is the power of faith, swore that they saw the remains shining with an unearthly light. The miracle brought profit to the monks, and yet they, with as little logic as gratitude, denounced those whom they considered its proximate cause. The fame, or infamy, of the incident spread far and wide. In Great Britain it is believed to have given rise to the ballad of the Jew’s Daughter; in other countries it gave rise to persecution of the Jews. But the Doge and Senate of Venice, on the Jews’ complaining of their danger, ordered the Podesta of Padua to take them under his protection, repudiated the charge of murder as an impudent fiction, and, when Pope Sixtus IV. was besought to add little Simon to the roll of the other young martyrs slain by Jews, he not only emphatically refused to do so, but sent an encyclical to all the towns of Italy, forbidding them to honour Simon as a saint.

Long after Christian heresy had been condemned by Venetian law, and the authority of the Inquisition, under certain important limitations, recognised, the Jews were suffered to prosper in the Republic. Even the Holy Office was not permitted to molest them. Toleration was essential to the welfare of the mercantile commonwealth, and the statesmen of Venice, in conformity with the old Italian tradition, declined to sacrifice the interests of the State—the supreme aim of a Government—to theological bigotry. Venetian justice in those days might have chosen for its motto the divine precept given to Israel on the eve of its redemption from the house of bondage: “One law shall be to him that is home-born and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you.” Venice, accordingly, was the resort and rendezvous of foreigners of every race and religion: a city of many colours and many tongues; a humming bee-hive of traders and travellers, of scholars and Shylocks, all of whom were welcomed so long as they conformed to the laws of the land. Among these multifarious elements of harmonious confusion none was more conspicuous than the Jew.

Spain, as we have seen, embraced the opposite principle, and at the end of the fifteenth century, a great number of Jewish refugees from that country joined their brethren in Venice, where they were allowed to settle under certain conditions agreed to between the Government of the Republic and Daniel Rodrigues, the Jewish Consul of Venice in Dalmatia. But, as tolerance began to decline, the life of the Venetian Jews was made bitter to them by a variety of harsh enactments which hampered their movements and checked their development; such as the law that compelled them to reside at Mestre, the law that forbade them to keep schools, or teach anything, on pain of 50 ducats’ fine and six months’ imprisonment, and numerous other restrictions which culminated in their confinement in the Ghetto.

Meanwhile persecution and the accumulation of sufferings brought back to life the old Messianic Utopia. According to one calculation the Redeemer was expected in the year 1503, and the end of the world to come soon after the fall of Rome. Cabbalistic mysticism encouraged these expectations, and in 1502 a certain Asher, in Istria near Venice, assumed the character of Precursor. Like John the Baptist, Asher preached repentance and contrition, promising that the Messiah would appear in six months. He gained many devoted disciples both in Italy and in Germany, and his predictions called forth much fasting and praying and charity, as well as considerable exaltation and extravagance. The prophet’s sudden death brought the dream to an end; but it revived thirty years later among the much-tried Marranos of Spain and Portugal.[78]

Despite all disadvantages, however, the Jews of Venice were able to hold their own. Their wit, sharpened by an oppression not severe enough to blunt it, suggested to them various means of evading the statutes, and escaping the consequences. Their hatred of the Gentile oppressors sought its gratification in over-reaching and beating them in the race for wealth. Excluded from most other provinces of activity, they concentrated all the resources of their fertile genius in the acquisition of gold. These circumstances were scarcely conducive to cordiality between them and the Christians.

During the war with Turkey all the Levantine merchants in Venice, most of whom were Jews, were, in accordance with the barbarous practice of the times, imprisoned, and their goods seized. On the 18th of October, 1571, the popular enthusiasm, excited by the news of the Lepanto victory over the Turks, expressed itself, among other demonstrations—such as cheering, releasing debtors from prison, closing the shops, mutual embracing, thanksgiving services, bell-ringing, and the like—also in an outcry against the Jews, who, for some occult reason, were suddenly accused of being the cause of the war. ♦1571 Dec.♦ This outcry led to the issue by the Senate of a decree of expulsion which, however, was only partially carried out, ♦1573♦ and two years later was revoked through the exertions of Jacopo Soranzo, the Venetian Agent at Constantinople, who explained to the Doge and the Council of Ten the harm which the Jewish colonies in Turkey were able to do to their Catholic enemies in the West.

♦1574♦

Next year a Jewish diplomatist, Solomon Ashkenazi, arrived in Venice as Envoy Extraordinary, appointed by the Grand Seigneur to conclude peace with the Republic. It was not without difficulty that the prejudices of the Venetian Government were overcome, and that the Jew was received. But, once acknowledged, Solomon was treated with the respect due to his ambassadorial character, and to the power of the Court which he represented. The joy of the Venetian Jews at the consideration paid to their illustrious co-religionist knew no bounds.

Rome followed the example of Venice. The Catholic reaction against the Reformation brought about a radical change in the attitude of the Popes towards their Jewish subjects. Humanism was banished from the Vatican, and with it the broad spirit of toleration which had secured to the Jews of Rome an exceptional prosperity. The ancient canonical decrees which had wrought desolation in the distant dependencies of the Papacy, but had hitherto been allowed to lie dormant in its capital, are now enforced. The old outcry against the Talmud, as the source of all the sins and obstinacy of the Jews, was once more raised by Jewish renegades, and the Court of the Inquisition condemned it to the flames. ♦1553♦ Julius III. signed the decree for the destruction of a book which Leo X. had helped to disseminate. The houses of the Roman Jews were invaded by the myrmidons of the Holy Office, and all copies of that and other Hebrew works found therein were confiscated and publicly burnt, by a refinement of malice, on the Jewish New Year’s Day. Similar bonfires blazed in Ferrara, Mantua, Venice, Padua, and even in the island of Crete.

♦1555–1559♦

Matters grew worse under the bigoted Pope Paul IV. The very first month of his reign was signalised by a Bull ordering every synagogue throughout the States of the Church to contribute ten ducats for the maintenance of the House of Catechumens, in which Jews were to be educated in the Christian faith. A few weeks later, a second Bull forbade the Jews to employ Christian servants or nurses, to own real estate, to practice medicine, to trade in anything but old clothes, or to have any intercourse with Christians. The synagogues were destroyed, except one; and it was proclaimed that all the Jews who were not labouring for the public good should quit Rome by a fixed date. The meaning of this mysterious sentence became clear to the victims when shortly after they were forced to repair the walls of the city. The edict of banishment, it is true, was immediately repealed by the intervention of Cardinal Fernese; but the harshness of their treatment was in itself sufficient to drive the wretched people to exile. ♦1555♦ Many Jews left Rome, and those who remained were penned in the Ghetto.[79]

Previous to this date most of the Roman Jews voluntarily dwelt in a special quarter on the left bank of the Tiber, known as Seraglio delli Hebrei or Septus Hebraicus; but they were not isolated from the Christians; for many of the latter, even members of the nobility, had their luxurious palaces in the midst of the Jewish houses, and many a stately Roman church reared its proud Campanile in the vicinity of a synagogue. All this was now altered. The palaces of the Christian nobility and the places of Christian worship were removed, or fenced off, from the abodes of the unclean, and these were surrounded by great grim walls, with porticoes and gates guarded by watchmen, who shut them at midnight and opened them at early morning, except on the Sabbath and on the Lord’s Day, or other Christian feasts, when the gates remained closed the whole day, so that no infidel could go forth and defile the Christian festivities with his unhallowed presence. On week days the bell that called the faithful to vespers was for the Jew who valued his life a signal to retire to his prison. All the inmates of this prison, men and women alike, on leaving its precincts, were obliged to wear a special garb: the men a yellow hat, the women a yellow veil or a large circular badge of the same colour on their breast. Thanks to this mark of distinction no Jew or Jewess could step or stand outside the Ghetto gates without meeting with insult and outrage on the part of the mob. The yellow badge was the favourite mark for the missiles of the street urchins, and for the sneers of their elders; so that the prison often became a haven of refuge for the Jew.

Meanwhile the Portuguese Marranos, who had found an asylum in Ancona, under the protection of Pope Clement VII., and who had continued to live there unmolested under Paul III. and Julius III., were exposed to even more violent persecution than their Jewish brethren of Rome. A month after the establishment of the Ghetto in the latter city, a secret order was issued by Paul IV. that all the Marranos of Ancona should be cast into the vaults of the Holy Office and their goods confiscated. Some of the prisoners professed penitence, and were banished to Malta; the rest were burnt at the stake. The few who succeeded in escaping the racks of the Inquisition took refuge in the dominions of the Dukes of Urbino and Ferrara, while of the exiles in Malta some fled to Turkey; and all these refugees combined in a scheme of revenge upon the Pope by attempting to place his seaport Ancona under a commercial ban. But their efforts failed, owing to the conflicting interests of the various Jewish communities in Italy and the Levant, and the Rabbis assembled at Constantinople for the purpose could not arrive at a unanimous decision.

♦1558♦

Not long after, the Duke of Urbino was compelled by the Inquisition to banish the refugees from his dominions, and they, having barely escaped the Pope’s naval police, fled to Turkey. In the same year the Duke of Ferrara also was obliged to withdraw his protection from the Marranos. Throughout the reign of Paul IV. the persecution of the Jews and crypto-Jews left in the Papal States raged fiercely, baptized renegades being always the hounds in the chase. Paul IV. died in 1559, and his body was accompanied to the grave by the curses of the Romans. His statue was demolished, and a Jew insulted the tyrant’s image by placing upon its head his own yellow hat, while the mob applauded the act with shouts of bitter joy. The buildings of the Holy Office were burnt, and the Dominicans roughly handled by the populace.

But the lot of the Jews was not permanently improved by the disappearance of their arch-enemy. Pius IV. was besought to alleviate their burdens, and he issued a favourable Bull. Those Jews who lived outside the city were allowed to dispense with the badge, to acquire land to a certain value, and to trade in other articles besides old clothes. ♦1566–1572♦ But even these slight concessions were withdrawn by Pius V., who vied with Paul IV. in his conscientious persecution of heresy and unbelief. In the third month after his accession to St. Peter’s throne all the old restrictions were once more enforced on the Jews of the Papal States, and were extended to their brethren throughout the Catholic world. Infractions of these decrees were punished severely, and were made the pretext for robbery. ♦1569♦ Finally Pius V., deaf to the advice of his wisest counsellors and to the interests of his own State, issued a Bull, expelling all the Jews in his dominions, save those of Rome and Ancona. As usual, a few turned Christians, but the majority preferred to quit in a hurry, leaving behind them all the property which they could not realise and all the debts which they could not collect at the short notice given. The exiles were scattered among the neighbouring States of Urbino, Ferrara, Mantua, and Milan.

♦1572–1585♦

Gregory XIII., the successor of Pius V., carried on the anti-Jewish programme of his predecessors. He renewed the canonical law which forbade Jewish physicians to attend on Christian patients, punishing transgressors on both sides. Jews suspected of holding intercourse with heretics, of harbouring refugees from Spain, or of otherwise helping the enemies and the victims of the Church, were dragged before the Inquisition and condemned to loss of goods, to slavery in the galleys, or to death. The Talmud and other Hebrew writings were again hunted out and burnt. Gregory also encouraged the Jesuits in their work of conversion, and the Jews were compelled, by a Papal Bull of 1584, to listen to sermons at the church of St. Angelo, near the Ghetto, and to pay the preachers employed to pervert them. Many of the wretches, yielding to fear or to temptation, embraced Christianity; many more left Rome.

♦1585–1592♦

Sixtus V., actuated by a broader and humaner spirit and by a more enlightened thirst for gold than had animated any of his antecessors or contemporaries, abolished these cruel decrees, ♦1586♦ pulled down the barriers which circumscribed the judicial and financial status of the Jews, forbade the gallant knights of Malta to enslave the Jews whom they met on the high seas in their voyages to and from the Levant, granted to the Jews perfect liberty of conscience, residence and commerce in his dominions, and, in lieu of the unlimited rapacity of former Popes, substituted a fixed capitation tax of twelve Giulii on all males between the ages of sixteen and sixty. This revolution tempted many Jews to return to Rome. Sixtus crowned his liberality by allowing the printing of the Talmud and of other Hebrew books, after previous subjection to censorship.

♦1592–1605♦

But the relief was only temporary. Under Clement VIII., otherwise an excellent man and an able statesman, the reign of intolerance was revived. ♦1593♦ He expelled the Jews from the States of the Church, except Rome and Ancona, and forbade the use of Hebrew books. ♦1597♦ A few years later he ordered their expulsion from the Milan district, and they barely escaped a similar sentence at Ferrara, which, upon the failure of the line of Este, had recently been added to the Pope’s dominions.

In the seventeenth century we hear of more Papal Bulls, barring the Italian Jews from all honourable professions and limiting their commercial activity to trade in cast-off clothes.

It was during this black period of Jewish history that an English gentleman came to Rome. He was a traveller who had an eye for other things than picturesque ruins, and a heart in which there was room for other people than those whom chance had made his compatriots and co-religionists. His name was John Evelyn. Among the things which he saw in Rome was the Jewish quarter, and he records his impressions in the following words, under date January 7, 1645:

“A sermon was preached to the Jews at Ponte Sisto, who are constrained to sit till the hour is done; but it is with so much malice in their countenances, spitting, humming, coughing, and motion, that it is almost impossible they should hear a word from the preacher. A conversion is very rare.”[80]

Again under date January 15, 1645:

“I went to the Ghetto, where the Jewes dwell as in a suburbe by themselves; being invited by a Jew of my acquaintance to see a circumcision. I passed by the Piazza Judea, where their Seraglio begins; for being inviron’d with walls, they are lock’d up every night. In this place remaines yet part of a stately fabric, which my Jew told me had been a palace of theirs for the ambassador of their nation when their country was subject to the Romans. Being led through the Synagogue into a private house, I found a world of people in a chamber: by and by came an old man, who prepared and layd in order divers instruments brought by a little child of about 7 yeares old in a box. These the man lay’d in a silver bason; the knife was much like a short razor to shut into the haft. Then they burnt some incense in a censer, which perfum’d the rome all the while the ceremony was performing. In the basin was a little cap made of white paper like a capuchin’s hood, not bigger than the finger.... Whilst the ceremony was performing, all the company fell a singing an Hebrew hymn in a barbarous tone, waving themselves to and fro, a ceremony they observe in all their devotions. The Jewes in Rome all wear yellow hatts, live only upon brokage and usury, very poore and despicable beyond what they are in other territories of Princes where they are permitted.”

And again under date May 6, 1645:

“The Jewes in Rome wore red hatts til the Card. of Lions, being short-sighted, lately saluted one of them thinking him to be a Cardinal as he pass’d by his coach; on which an order was made that they should use only the yellow colour.”

Next year Evelyn visited the Jewish quarter at Venice:

“The next day I was conducted to the Ghetta, where the Jewes dwell together as in a tribe or ward, where I was present at a marriage. The bride was clad in white, sitting in a lofty chaire, and cover’d with a white vaile; then two old Rabbies joyned them together, one of them holding a glasse of wine in his hand, which in the midst of the ceremony, pretending to deliver to the woman, he let fall, the breaking whereof was to signify the frailty of our nature, and that we must expect disasters and crosses amidst all enjoyments. This don, we had a fine banquet, and were brought into the bride-chamber, where the bed was dress’d up with flowers, and the counterpan strewed in workes. At this ceremony we saw divers very beautiful Portuguez Jewesses with whom we had some conversation.”[81]

These two little pictures, which, like the portraits on ancient Egyptian mummy cases, preserve for us in undimmed freshness the features of the dead past, show that not even the gloom and the filth of the Ghetto were potent enough to kill the Jew’s attachment to his traditions and his love for symbolism, or to befoul the poetry of his inner life. But, ere we enter upon that phase of the subject, we must record another oppressive law, passed in Rome at a time when the century that was to witness the downfall of ancient dynasties, the death of despotism, and the awakening of the popular soul was already far advanced. This eighteenth century Edict, in forty-four Articles, codifies all the prohibitions which had been decreed during the foregoing ages: it forms the epilogue to the sordid tragedy. One of the articles runs as follows: “Jews and Christians are forbidden to play, eat, drink, hold intercourse, or exchange confidences of ever so trifling a nature with one another. Such shall not be allowed in palaces, houses, or vineyards, in the streets, in taverns, in neither shops nor any other place.... The Jews who offend in this matter shall incur the penalties of a fine of 10 Scudi and imprisonment; Christians, a similar fine and corporal punishment.”[82]

Thus the children of Israel dwelt apart in these narrow quarters, multiplying fast, while the space allotted to them remained the same; herded together, many families in the same house, often in the same room; and breathing the air of what, under the circumstances, rapidly developed into veritable slums. The world beyond gradually outgrew mediaeval conditions of life; the streets became straight, broad and airy; light penetrated into courts which the overhanging upper stories once doomed to perpetual darkness; but the Ghetto knew none of these blessings. Year after year life in the Ghetto grew more squalid, and the inmates more indifferent alike to the demands of contemporary fashion and of common decency. Confinement initiated degradation; the fatal gift of fecundity, cultivated as a religious duty, promoted it, and soon the Roman Ghetto became a by-word for its filth and misery. At one time as many as ten thousand souls swarmed in a space less than a square kilometre. To the curse of over-population was added the yearly overflow of the Tiber, which transformed the narrow, crooked lanes into marshy alleys, filled the basements with pestiferous mud, and turned the whole quarter into a dismal abode of prematurely aged men, of stunted, elderly children, and of repulsive wrecks of womanhood: a place where Poverty and the Plague stalked hand in hand, and where man was engaged in a perpetual struggle with Death.

The seclusion of the Ghetto widened the breach between the two worlds. If the Gentile forbade the Jew to assume the title, or to pursue the callings, of a Christian gentleman, the Jewish communal law forbade him to wear the garb of the Christian gentleman. The diversity in dress was only an external type of the deeper diversity of character that separated the two elements. The ignorance of the Gentile grew more profound, and the prejudice of the Jew more implacable than they had ever been before. The Ghetto was an institution beside which monasticism might appear the ideal of sociability. The young monk on entering the cloisters of his convent carried into them the indelible impressions of family-life and the tender memories of boyhood. The inmate of the Ghetto, so far as the outer world was concerned, was born a monk. Everybody within the walls of the Ghetto was a brother, everybody beyond its gates an enemy. In infancy the outer world was an unknown, non-existing world. Later the child of the Ghetto was accustomed to hear those beyond described as idolaters; monsters whose impurity was to be shunned, whose cruelty to be feared, whose rapacity to be baffled by cunning—the protection and the pest of the weak. These lessons were illustrated by the tales of assault and insult, of which its parents and its relatives were constantly the victims, more especially on Christian holidays. Still later personal experience gave flesh and blood to the hearsay tales of childhood.

But this outward misery was redeemed by the purity and purifying influence of domestic life. The home was the one spot on earth where the hunted Jew felt a man. On crossing the threshold of his house he discarded, along with the garb of shame, all fear and servility. Everywhere else spurned like a dog, under his own roof he was honoured as master and priest. The Sabbath lamp chased the shades and sorrows of servitude out of the Jew’s heart. His pride was fostered and his humanity saved by the religious and social life of the Ghetto. Rendered by familiarity callous to obloquy on the part of the Gentiles, the Jew remained morbidly sensitive to the opinion of his own people. Persecution from without brought closer union within. As often happens in adversity, individual interests were sacrificed to the public good. Reciprocity in spiritual no less than in temporal matters—the power of combination—the principle of social fraternity—always a characteristic of the Jew—grew into a passion unparalleled in history since the early days of Christianity.

Various communal ordinances (takkanoth) enforced this sentiment of mutual loyalty. For example, no Jew was allowed to compete with a brother-Jew in renting a house from a Christian, or to replace a tenant without the latter’s consent. A series of such laws, many of them dating from a much earlier period, were re-enacted by a congress of Italian Rabbis on the very eve of the creation of the Roman Ghetto. Thus the Jews virtually acquired a perpetual lease of their homes; their communal right to the house (jus casaca) being an asset which could be sold, bequeathed, or bestowed as dowry upon a daughter. The Popes were not slow to take cognisance of this ordinance. Clement VIII. legalised the arrangement, so that, whilst the rent was regularly paid, eviction was practically impossible. But one of his successors carried the principle of Jewish reciprocity to its logical conclusion and turned it against the Jews themselves, by making the community as a body responsible for the rent of all the houses in the Ghetto, empty as well as tenanted. The same reciprocity of interests was recognised in matters pertaining to the soul. Each member of the brotherhood was responsible for the sins of the rest, and the confession of the individual was a confession for the whole community.

Israel, cut off from the world, created a world unto itself. Never did Judaism attain a higher degree of religious uniformity, never were the spiritual bonds that bound together the scattered members of the great family drawn closer than in this period of their sorest affliction. Language was gone, country, state; nothing remained to the Jews but religion. It was held that, if the teaching of the Law were allowed to disappear, it would mean the disappearance of the race. Religion was nationalised that the nation might be saved. The rigorous discipline of the Synagogue and the absence of social joy had always encouraged devotion. The Ghetto crystallised it into a code. Joseph Caro’s Shulchan Aruch, or “Table Prepared,” a handbook of law and custom, compiled in the middle of the sixteenth century, fixed the fluid features of Jewish life into the rigid mask which it continued to wear, throughout Europe, till the beginning of the nineteenth century. But deep beneath the ice-surface of ritual—the crust of dead and deadening rules and prohibitions—there ran the living and sustaining current of faith, all the stronger and fiercer for its imprisonment. The outcasts of humanity, in the midst of their degradation—despised, and in many ways despicable—preserved the precious heritage, and their pride therein, unimpaired. Numerous fasts and feasts assisted this preservation. Thus the community fasted on Sabbath afternoons in memory of the death of Moses, or on Sundays in memory of the destruction of the Temple.

On the Day of Atonement they listened with reverence to the touching words in which a noble old Hebrew bard gave utterance to the sorrow of his race:

“Destroyed lies Zion and profaned,

Of splendour and renown bereft,

Her ancient glories wholly waned,

One deathless treasure only left;

Still ours, O Lord,

Thy Holy Word.”[83]

The Feast of Tabernacles year after year rekindled their gratitude for the miraculous preservation in the wilderness. The Feast of Dedication reminded them of their deliverance from the Hellenic yoke. On the Passover Eve was read the Seder, most ancient of home services, and round the festive board were then gathered the shades of the gifted men of old who had sung the glories of Israel, and of the brave men who had suffered for the faith of Israel. Then was retold for the thousandth time, with tears and with laughter, to the accompaniment of song and wine, the tale of their ancestors’ departure from Egypt. At the end of the meal the door was opened, and a wine cup was left upon the table. This was done for the reception of Elijah, the harbinger of the expected Messiah. In this and like domestic rites the memory of the past was annually revived, and, if its splendour made the sordid present look more sordid still, it also kept alive the hope of redemption. The magic carpet of faith, that priceless heirloom of Israel, transported the inmates of the Ghetto out of their noisome surroundings far away to the radiant realms of Zion. The Messianic Utopia never was more real to the Jews than at this time. From a favourite dream it grew into a fervent desire. It was firmly held that the Redeemer would soon come in His glory and might, would gather His people from the four corners of the earth, would slay their foes, would restore the Temple of Jerusalem, and would compel the nations to acknowledge the Majesty of the God of the Jews. We have already seen one of these seventeenth century Messiahs, Sabbataï Zebi of Smyrna. His was not the only attempt in which the longings of the race recognised their fulfilment. These Messianic phenomena, whatever else may be thought of them, are the most pathetic illustrations of that immortal hope, which formed the Jew’s only consolation in times of unexampled suffering, and from which he drew his invincible fortitude. But for that hope the Jewish nation would have long since ceased to fill thinkers with wonder at its vitality. Faith in God, which after all means faith in one’s self—this is the talisman which has enabled the Jew, as it has enabled the Greek, to pass triumphantly through trials which would have crushed most other races. The same blast which extinguishes a small fire fans a great one to an even mightier flame.

CHAPTER XIV
THE REFORMATION AND THE JEWS

The love for liberty which gave birth to the Renaissance was also the parent of another child—the Reformation. The first saw the light in Latin, the second in Teutonic Europe. The vindication of man’s rights was their common object: but while the Renaissance strove to attain that object through the emancipation of the human reason, the Reformation endeavoured to reach it by the emancipation of the human conscience. Intelligence, the inheritance of Hellenism, was the weapon of the one: the other drew its strength from the Hebraic fountain of Intuition. Papacy was the enemy of both. Individual Popes nourished the elder movement and thus unwittingly prepared an example and an ally for the other. While Nicholas I., Pius II., and Leo X. dallied with the infant giant in Italy, its brother across the Alps was training and arming for the fray.

The revolt against the autocracy of the Roman Court was begun in the middle of the fourteenth century by Wickliffe, and was continued by Huss. The licentiousness of the pontiffs and cardinals, of priests and monks, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries invigorated the spirit of the rebels and brought fresh recruits to their ranks; and the German princes, who had long chafed against the fetters imposed upon them by Papal and Imperial interference, took the Reformers under their protection, thus supplying that secular side without which no holy war has ever been.

In Erasmus—“the glory of the priesthood and the shame”—the two movements found a common champion and spokesman. In him the Renaissance crossed the Alps, and in his famous Praise of Folly the Latin hostility to the intellectual tyranny of the Church is found united with the Teutonic hostility to her spiritual tyranny. The vows and the vigils, the self-abasement, the penances and the mournfulness of Catholicism are attacked not less unsparingly than the worldliness, the immorality and the hypocrisy of its ministers. But, if Erasmus marks the meeting, he also marks the parting of the ways.

Beside Erasmus stands Luther. He also combined intellectual attainments with spiritual aims. But the one figure faces the Renaissance; the other the Reformation road. Erasmus, while ridiculing in elegant satire the superstitions of the day, the malpractices of sordid priests, and the excesses of merry friars, shrinks from a breach with the Holy See. Much as he would like to see Catholicism reconciled to commonsense, he recoils with horror before the stakes and the scaffolds of the Holy Office. He could agree with Luther on many points, and yet write: “Even if Luther had spoken everything in the most unobjectionable manner, I had no inclination to die for the sake of Truth.” “Let others affect martyrdom,” he says elsewhere: “for myself I am unworthy of the honour.” Martin Luther was made of sterner stuff and simpler. Though he joined forces with the apostles of culture, he was determined to go much further than they in one direction, not as far in another. The alliance between Literature and Reform, between the two brothers Reason and Conscience, between the Southern and the Northern Ideals, could not last long. The free and cheerful element in Luther’s temperament, and his literary tastes, prevented a definite rupture in his own time. But under his successors the difference between the two sides became too wide for co-operation. Reason and laughter marched one way. Conscience and gloom the other.

We have already seen that the sons of exiled Israel reaped but scant comfort from the triumph of Liberty’s elder offspring. We shall now proceed to show what the victory of the other brought to them.

Martin Luther in his Table-Talk gives a full and vivid description of the German Jews in his day. He tells us that their footsteps are to be found throughout Germany. In Saxony many names of places speak of them: Ziman, Damen, Resen, Sygretz, Schvitz, Pratha, Thablon.[84] At Frankfort-on-the-Maine they are extremely numerous: “They have a whole street to themselves of which every house is filled with them. They are compelled to wear little yellow rings on their coats, thereby to be known; they have no houses or grounds of their own, only furniture; and, indeed, they can only lend money upon houses or grounds at great hasard.”[85] “They are not permitted to keep or trade in cattle; their main occupations being brokage and usury.”[86]

But this does not exhaust the list of oppression:

“A rich Jew, on his death bed, ordered that his remains should be conveyed to Ratisbon. His friends, knowing that even the corpse of a Jew could not travel without paying heavy toll, devised the expedient of packing the carcase in a barrel of wine, which they then forwarded in the ordinary way. The waggoners, not knowing what lay within, tapped the barrel, and swilled away right joyously, till they found out they had been drinking Jew’s pickle. How it fared with them you may imagine.”[87]

Nor was extortion the only danger that the travelling Jew had to face: “Two Jewish Rabbis, named Schamaria and Jacob, came to me at Wittenberg, desiring of me letters of safe conduct, which I granted them, and they were well pleased.”[88]

The unpopularity of the Jews in Germany at this time arose partly from their staunch adherence to the Idea, their aloofness and their dissent in modes of thinking and living from their neighbours:

“They sit as on a wheelbarrow, without a country, people or Government; yet they wait on with earnest confidence; they cheer up themselves and say: ‘It will soon be better with us.’... They eat nothing the Christians kill or touch; they drink no wine; they have many superstitions; they wash the flesh most diligently, whereas they cannot be cleansed through the flesh. They drink not milk, because God said: ‘Thou shalt not boil the young kid in his mother’s milk.’”[89]

Partly from their rapacity and their hostility to the non-Jew: “’Tis a pernicious race, oppressing all men by their usury and rapine. If they give a prince or a magistrate a thousand florins, they extort twenty thousand from the subjects in payment. We must ever keep on our guard against them. They think to render homage to God by injuring the Christians, and yet we employ their physicians; ’tis a tempting of God.”[90]

Partly from their arrogance:

“They have haughty prayers, wherein they praise and call upon God, as if they alone were his people, cursing and condemning all other nations, relying on the 23rd Psalm: ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall lack nothing.’ As if that psalm was written exclusively concerning them.”[91]

How far these unamiable qualities were the cause, and how far the effect of the Gentile’s antipathy to the Jew, is a question which prejudice on either side finds no difficulty in answering. The humble-minded and impartial student prefers to record the fact and ignore the question. But it is passing strange to find the Jew’s resolute faith in the Faithful Shepherd characterised as an offence against good manners.

We have seen that the persecution of the Jews in mediaeval Germany, from the awful carnage in the Rhineland (1096 foll.) to their expulsion from Ratisbon (1476), had for its proximate cause the hatred entertained towards them by the Catholic Church. The orgies of the Crusaders were mainly dictated by pious vindictiveness; the violent efforts of the Dominican friars and of the Inquisition to convert the Jews were prompted by the desire to save them from heresy and to prevent them from infecting others by their example. All the heresies from the Albigensian, through the Hussite, up to the movement which culminated in Luther’s secession from the Roman fold, were considered by the Church as having their roots in Jewish teaching and practice. The adoration of the Virgin, of Saints, and of relics, which offended the Jew in the Roman cult were also the special objects of Protestant detestation. They had both suffered for the sake of conscience; dissent, the crime of Judaism, was the glory of Protestantism; Rome, the secular foe of the one, was also the sworn enemy of the other; and they were both branded by Rome with the common epithet of Heretics. We might, therefore, have reasonably expected that Luther and his brother-reformers would have regarded the Jews with sympathy. But history does not confirm this a priori conclusion.

Protestantism from the first proved as hostile to the Jews as Catholicism. It has been suggested that Luther’s animosity was due to the fact that the enthusiasm for Reform and for the simplification of doctrine and worship had produced a tendency towards Hebrew Unitarianism, the leaders of which movement were stigmatised as Semi-Judaei. It would perhaps be nearer the truth to say that the hostility towards the Jew was so old and so deep, and it sprang from so many sources, that not even community of interests and enmities could obliterate it. We have already seen Jews and Christians both lost in the same maze of Cabbalistic mysticism; but this partnership in folly did not improve the relations between the two sects. Nor did the Reformers’ attachment to the Hebrew Bible produce any affection for the race of whose genius that Bible was the fruit. The Jew was detested in the concrete as much as he was admired in the abstract. Luther’s disappointed hope of converting the Jews to Protestantism may have also influenced him. But, be the origin of the feeling what it may, the promoters of the Protestant cause and their followers, from the sixteenth century onwards, adopted a most unfriendly attitude towards Israel. Nor, so far as Luther is concerned, is this development altogether unintelligible.

Luther the rebel against the Church was one person; Luther the founder of a Church, another. While engaged in his duel with Rome, Martin Luther strove to secure the favour and assistance of the Humanists of his day. He took pains to represent the cause of Reform as being the cause of Reason. He described his friends as the friends of liberal culture, and his foes as the foes of light. He invited theological discussion, and professed himself ready to be guided in the interpretation of the Scriptures by pure reason. But when the struggle was over and the battle was won, the despotic character and inflexible dogmatism of the religious leader alienated many of his literary allies, Erasmus among them; while the same causes also estranged many of his religious sympathisers. Indeed, Luther’s bearing in the hour of his success seemed to lend colour to the assertion of his adversaries, that, had he been pope, instead of Leo X., he would have defended the Church against a much more formidable antagonist than the monk of Wittenberg. After all, a rebel often is only a tyrant out of power.

Towards the Jews Luther’s conduct was the same as towards his fellow-Christians and fellow-rebels. At first he undertook to defend them against all the time-honoured prejudices of the Middle Ages. He denounced in no measured terms the un-Christian spirit of “silly theologians” and their insolence towards the Jews, and in 1523 he published a work under the startling title, Jesus was born a Jew; in which he declares, “Those fools the Papists, bishops, sophists, monks, have formerly so dealt with the Jews, that every good Christian would have rather been a Jew. And if I had been a Jew, and seen such stupidity and such blockheads reign in the Christian Church, I would rather be a pig than a Christian. They have treated the Jews as if they were dogs, not men, and as if they were fit for nothing but to be reviled. They are blood-relations of our Lord; therefore, if we respect flesh and blood, the Jews belong to Christ more than we. I beg, therefore; my dear Papists, if you become tired of abusing me as a heretic, that you begin to revile me as a Jew.

“Therefore, it is my advice that we should treat them kindly but now we drive them by force, treating them deceitfully or ignominiously, saying they must have Christian blood to wash away the Jewish stain, and I know not what nonsense. Also we prohibit them from working amongst us, from living and having social intercourse with us, forcing them, if they would remain with us, to be usurers.”[92]

These were the sentiments of Luther the rebel. Luther the victor retained nothing of them, save the vigour with which they are expressed. Although in preparing his German translation of the Bible Luther availed himself of the assistance of Jewish Rabbis, he regarded them with no less aversion than the Papists to whom he often compares them. His violent tergiversation was made manifest in 1544, when he published a pamphlet under the suggestive title Concerning the Jews and their lies. In this work the apostle of emancipation gives the reins to a Jew-hatred fully equal to that exhibited by the Catholic enemies of Judaism. The quotations from Luther’s Table-Talk, given already, have shown that he shared the antipathy nourished by his contemporaries against the Jewish people. Some more quotations from the same book will show that he surpassed them in his hostility towards the Jewish creed.

Martin Luther is deeply impressed by the ancient greatness of the Hebrew race: “It was a mighty nation.”[93] “What are we poor miserable folk—what is Rome, compared with Jerusalem?”[94] “The Jews above all other nations had great privileges; they had the chief promises, the highest worship of God, and a worship more pleasing to human nature than God’s service of faith in the New Testament.... The Jews had excelling men among them, as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, Daniel, Samuel, Paul. Who can otherwise than grieve that so great and glorious a nation should so lamentably be destroyed?”

Martin Luther is as deeply sensible of our debt to the Jews: “The Latin Church had no excelling men and teachers, but Augustin; and the Churches of the East none but Athanasius, and he was nothing particular; therefore, we are twigs grafted into the right tree. The prophets call the Jews, especially those of the line of Abraham, a fair switch, out of which Christ himself came.”[95] Nor is he blind to their sufferings—“The Jews are the most miserable people on earth. They are plagued everywhere and scattered about all countries, having no certain resting place”[96]—or to their heroic faith in the future.[97]

But these noble sentiments of admiration, gratitude, and pity seem to be mere transient emotions; the theologian within him is too powerful for the man. The Jew’s sublime confidence is no virtue in Luther’s eyes. It is a wicked delusion: “Thus hardened are they; but let them know assuredly, that there is none other Lord or God, but only he that already sits at the right hand of God the Father.”[98] Their attachment to the rites of their religion is to Luther another proof of their wickedness: “Such superstitions proceed out of God’s anger. They that are without faith, have laws without end, as we see in the Papists and Turks. But they are rightly served, for seeing they refused to have Christ and his gospel, instead of freedom they must have servitude.”[99] Their calamities, far from inspiring Luther with compassion, supply him with a fresh argument for denunciation: “The glory of the Temple was great, that the whole world must worship there. But God, out of special wisdom, caused this Temple to be destroyed, to the end the Jews might be put to confusion, and no more brag and boast thereof.”[100] And again, “Either God must be unjust, or you, Jews, wicked and ungodly; for ye have been in misery and fearful exile a far longer time than ye were in the land of Canaan. Ye had not the Temple of Solomon more than three hundred years, while ye have been hunted up and down above fifteen hundred. At Babylon ye had more eminence than at Jerusalem, for Daniel was a greater and more powerful prince at Babylon than either David or Solomon at Jerusalem.... You have been above fifteen hundred years a race rejected of God without government, without laws, without prophets, without temple. This argument ye cannot solve; it strikes you to the ground like a thunder-clap; ye can show no other reason for your condition than your sins.”[101]

The destruction of Jerusalem and the dispersion and persecution of the race are clear evidence of God’s anger: “But the Jews are so hardened that they listen to nothing: though overcome by testimonies, they yield not an inch”[102]—so “stiff-necked, haughty and presumptuous they are”:[103] Verily, an arrogant and cruel race of men, boasting, like the Papists, “that they alone are God’s people, and will allow of none but of those that are of their Church.”[104] To Luther, as to Tacitus, the Jews are the enemies of mankind: “And truly, they hate us Christians as they do death. It galls them to see us. If I were master of the country, I would not allow them to practise usury.”[105]

The reputed proficiency of the Jews in the black art is another grievous offence in Luther’s eyes: “There are sorcerers among the Jews, who delight in tormenting Christians, for they hold us as dogs. Duke Albert of Saxony well punished one of these wretches. A Jew offered to sell him a talisman covered with strange characters, which he said effectually protected the wearer against any sword or dagger thrust. The Duke replied: ‘I will essay thy charm upon thyself, Jew,’ and, putting the talisman round the fellow’s neck, he drew his sword and passed it through his body. ‘Thou feelest, Jew!’ said he, ‘how it would have been with me had I purchased thy talisman?’”[106] The story contains several points of interest for the student of mediaeval Christianity, Luther’s own approbation of the Duke’s act being not the least interesting of them.

Luther, the champion of spiritual freedom, could not forgive the Jews for differing from him in the interpretation of the Scriptures: “The Jews read our books, and thereout raise objections against us; ’tis a nation that scorns and blasphemes even as the lawyers, the Papists, and adversaries do, taking out of our writings the knowledge of our cause, and using the same as weapons against us.”[107] Yet the very tactics which Luther so ingenuously condemns in the Jews, lawyers, and Papists, he himself is the first to adopt. In his endeavours to convert the Jews he draws all his arguments, as others had done before him, from the Hebrew Bible: “I am persuaded if the Jews heard our preaching, and how we handle the Old Testament, many of them might be won, but, through disputing, they have become more and more stiff-necked, haughty, and presumptuous.”[108] And elsewhere: “I have studied the chief passages of Scripture that constitute the grounds upon which the Jews argue against us; as where God said to Abraham: ‘I will make my covenant between me and thee, and with thy seed after thee, in their generations, for an everlasting covenant....’ Here the Jews brag, as the Papists do upon the passage, ‘Thou art Peter.’ I would willingly bereave the Jews of this bragging by rejecting the Law of Moses, so that they should not be able to gainsay me. We have against them the prophet Jeremiah, where he says, ‘Behold, the time cometh, saith the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah, not as the covenant which I made with their fathers.’...”[109] On another occasion he tries to refute the Jews by quoting Jeremiah’s prophecy “touching Christ: ‘Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous branch, and a King shall reign and prosper ... and this is the name whereby he shall be called, The Lord our Righteousness.’ This argument the Jews are not able to solve; yet, if they deny that this sentence is spoken of Christ, they must show unto us another King, descended from David, who should govern so long as the sun and moon endure, as the promises of the prophets declare.”[110]

Luther in these passages, and passages like these, repeats all the well-worn arguments with which Christians from the earliest times strove to persuade the Jews that the Messiah had come. He insists that “the Law of Moses continued but for a while, therefore it must be abolished”; that “the circumcision was to continue but for a while, until the Messiah came; when he came, the commandment was at an end,” superseded by “the circumcision of the heart”;[111] that it was faith and not works that justified Abraham,[112] and so forth. But the Jews answered Luther’s arguments, as their fathers had answered the arguments of Justin Martyr, of Tertullian, and of other ancient authorities, and the arguments of the Dominican friars: “The covenant of the circumcision given before Moses’ time, and made between God and Abraham and his seed Isaac in his generation, they say, must and shall be an everlasting covenant, which they will not suffer to be taken from them.”[113]

Luther’s eloquence, or perhaps his power to protect them, occasionally prevailed with the Jews. He tells us that the two Rabbis, Schamaria and Jacob, who went to him at Wittenberg to solicit a safe conduct, “struck to the heart, silenced and convinced, forsook their errors, became converts, and the day following, in the presence of the whole university at Wittenberg, were baptized Christians.”[114] The long sufferings of the race, and the ever deferred fulfilment of the hope of redemption, sometimes produced heartsickness and despair: “In 1537, when I was at Frankfurt, a great rabbi said to me, ‘My father had read very much, and waited for the coming of the Messiah, but at last he fainted, and out of hope said: As our Messiah has not come in fifteen hundred years, most certainly Christ Jesus must be he.’”[115] And again, “A Jew came to me at Wittenberg, and said: He was desirous to be baptized, and made a Christian, but that he would first go to Rome to see the chief head of Christendom. From this intention myself, Philip Melanchthon, and other divines laboured to dissuade him, fearing lest, when he witnessed the offences and knaveries at Rome, he might be scared from Christendom. But the Jew went to Rome, and when he had sufficiently seen the abominations acted there he returned to us again, desiring to be baptized, and said: ‘Now I will willingly worship the God of the Christians, for he is a patient God. If he can endure such wickedness and villainy as is done at Rome, he can suffer and endure all the vices and knaveries of the world.’”[116]

But all those that are baptized are not converts. Martin Luther was too shrewd not to perceive the distinction. How he would have dealt with such hypocrites he tells us with charming frankness: “If a Jew, not converted at heart, were to ask baptism at my hands, I would take him on to the bridge, tie a stone round his neck, and hurl him into the river; for these wretches are wont to make a jest of our religion. Yet, after all, water and the Divine Word being the essence of baptism, a Jew, or any other, would be none the less validly baptized, that his own feelings and intentions were not the result of faith.”[117]

Yet, even such cases of pseudo-conversion were rare. The Jews, as a sect, far from yielding to the efforts of the Christians to make them embrace Christianity, entertained hopes of the Christians embracing Judaism. The Protestant’s devotion to the study of the Hebrew language, and the extraordinary vogue which Cabbalistic mysticism had obtained among the early Reformers through Reuchlin’s books, encouraged this notion. But Luther assures them that “their hope is futile. ’Tis they must accept our religion, and of the crucified Christ, and overcome all their objections, especially that of the alteration of the Sabbath, which sorely annoys them, but ’twas ordered by the apostles, in honour of the Lord’s resurrection.”[118]

It was in vain that Luther changed his ground, and, abandoning his attacks on the religious prejudices of the Jews, turned his artillery against their racial pride, and endeavoured to prove that their vaunted purity of blood was a myth:

“During the 70 years when they were captives at Babylon, they were so confused and mingled together, that even then they hardly knew out of what tribe each was descended. How should it be now, when they have been so long hunted and driven about by the Gentiles, whose soldiers spared neither their wives nor their daughters, so that now they are, as it were, all bastards, none of them knowing out of what tribe he is?”[119] Luther knew not that the sentiment of nationality depends far more on community of interests and aspirations, of memories of the past and hopes for the future, than on any physiological similarity of blood.

Nevertheless, despite his occasional successes, Luther himself was aware of the futility of his endeavours. He sorrowfully recognises the impossibility of reconciling Jew and Gentile: “In the porch of a Church at Cologne there is a statue of a dean, who, in the one hand holds a cat, and in the other a mouse. This dean had been a Jew, but was baptized, and became a Christian. He ordered this statue to be set up after his death, to show, that a Jew and a Christian agree as little as a cat and a mouse. And truly they hate us Christians as they do death.”[120]

All these sentiments, accompanied with suggestions for the suppression of the miserable people, were embodied by Luther in his published pamphlets.[121] The Reformer’s unmeasured hostility bears to the habitual tolerance of many popes the same relation as the mental horizon of the provincial monk does to the broader vision of the monarch of a great empire.

If Luther, the genial and joyous, entertained so uncharitable feelings towards the Jews, it is not difficult to understand the attitude of his morose and narrower successors, armed as they were by the sanction of his example. It has been well said, “the opinions of a great man are a valuable possession and a ruinous inheritance.” The denunciations of Israel by the early Fathers of the Church had continued to dictate Christian intolerance through the ages, and their authority was quoted in support of the persecutions and massacres which sullied mediaeval Europe. Luther’s utterances exercised a similar influence over the Protestant world, both in his own and in after times, down to the present day. Protestant Germany took up the tale of persecution in the sixteenth century where Catholic Germany had left off in the fifteenth. The Jews were given the alternatives of baptism and banishment in Berlin, were expelled from Bavaria in 1553, from Brandenburg in 1573, and the tragedy of oppression was carried on through the ensuing centuries. How vigorously the plant of anti-Judaism continued to flourish in Germany may be seen from the following incident.

In about 1612 a Jewish jeweller, with a dozen friends, in search of a home, presented a petition to the Senate of Hamburg, offering nine thousand marks for the right of residence in the city for twelve years, promising to pay an annual tax of four hundred marks, and professing themselves ready to submit to any conditions. But Hamburg, the Protestant, refused to listen even to the argument which so frequently overcame Papist fanaticism. Hamburg already contained Portuguese Jews disguised as Christians. These, induced by the example of their brethren in Amsterdam, had recently thrown off the mask, and by so doing had accentuated the indignation of the Lutheran citizens against the whole race. The Senate, indeed, aware of the commercial value of the Jews, declined to yield to the popular demand for their expulsion. The clergy lifted up their voices against the Laodicean lukewarmness of the Government, and the latter, anxious to avoid the reproach of lack of Christian fervour on one hand, and, on the other, the material loss which the banishment of the Jews would entail, appealed to the theological faculties of Frankfort-on-the-Oder and Jena for a justification of their tolerance. These august bodies approved of the Senate’s policy, but recommended the Jews of Hamburg to embrace Christianity. The Senate welcomed the approbation, ignored the recommendation, and granted to the Jews the right of abode on payment of one thousand marks a year, and subject to certain restrictions. For example, they were forbidden to have synagogues and to practise Jewish rites or circumcision, though they were allowed to have a cemetery of their own. As the colony grew in numbers, in wealth, and in commercial importance, it ventured to transgress many of these prohibitions. Relying on their power, the Jews of Hamburg quietly built a synagogue in about 1626.

This humble and unobtrusive building, however, created a sensation out of all proportion to its intrinsic merits. ♦1627♦ The Emperor, Ferdinand II., wrote an indignant letter to the Senate, complaining that the Jews should be allowed a freedom of worship which was denied to Roman Catholics. This shell from a Papist quarter set fire to the Lutheran powder magazine. The good ministers of Hamburg again lifted up their voices, and, with that middle-class logic which distinguishes Protestant controversialism, pointed out that, if the Jews were allowed freedom of worship, the same freedom should be accorded to Catholics—a monstrous absurdity, of course. The Lutheran clergy were reinforced by the Hamburg physicians, who nourished for their Jewish confrères the affection proverbial between men of a trade. The Senate, obliged to take cognisance of the clamour, summoned the Jews to give an account of themselves. They, with the sophistry of persecution and the confidence of wealth, replied that they had no synagogue, but only a house for prayer; threatening to leave Hamburg in a body, if they were forbidden the free exercise of their religion. The Senate was compelled to overlook the sophism, and to pay serious attention to the threat; the consequence being that, not only that synagogue was tolerated, but two more were built.[122]

The animosity of the Lutherans grew with the growth of Jewish prosperity. John Miller, Senior at St. Peter’s Church, an Inquisitor in everything but name, preached a crusade from the pulpit and in the press. The humiliation of the Jews became by degrees a monomania with Miller. He could endure neither their feasts nor their fasts. Their rejoicings vexed him, and their wailings drove him mad. Their unbelief filled him with horror, and their obstinacy with despair. ♦1644♦ At last Miller vented his feelings in a pamphlet remarkable for its pious scurrility. Three theological faculties endorsed Miller’s teaching, and declared that it was contrary to sound religion to permit Jewish doctors to attend on Christian patients. But the crusade produced no other result than to show how faithfully Luther’s spirit continued to animate German Protestantism in its dealings with the people whom the Reformer had so vehemently denounced in his lifetime.

The position of the Jew in other parts of Germany was far worse than in the commercial city of Hamburg. He was still spurned and scorned, oppressed, reviled, and hunted more fiercely than any pariah. Few Jewish congregations were left. At Frankfort-on-the-Main Jews were allowed to live on terms usually accorded to convicts. They were forbidden to wander forth from their Ghetto, except on urgent business. They were forbidden to walk two together in the neighbourhood of the town-hall, especially during Christian festivals and weddings. Whilst in the Ghetto itself, they were forbidden to talk aloud, or to receive strangers without the knowledge of the magistrates. They were forbidden to buy victuals in the market at the same time as the Christians. Handicapped in the race for money, they were yet overburdened with taxes. Their persons were marked with a badge and their houses with grotesque shields of quasi-armorial character. Even this sorry existence was not assured to them, for the town council reserved to itself the power of expelling any Jew at pleasure. As usual, the Jews contrived to obtain by artifice that which was withheld by force. They purchased indulgence, and the laws often remained mere memorials of Christian intolerance. But, while the magistrates derived profit from their merciful connivance, the guilds, which found formidable rivals in the Jews, strove to obtain their expulsion. The campaign was led by a brave and enthusiastic pastry-cook.

Operations commenced on a certain September day in the year 1614. The Jews were at prayer, when a great noise was heard outside the gates of the Ghetto. A free fight ensued, the Christians, with the heroic pastry-cook at their head, assaulting; the Jews defending. Many fell on both sides, until victory inclined towards the confectioner’s army, and the quarters of the enemy were given up to plunder, destruction, and desecration, which lasted through the night. 1380 Jews, who had taken refuge in the burial ground, were for some time kept in suspense as to their fate, but were at last suffered to leave the city unencumbered by any property whatsoever. The proceedings would have been more thoroughly reminiscent of the Middle Age but for the fact that, in spite of the inexorable pastry-cook’s warnings, there were now found Christians humane enough to feed and to shelter the miserable exiles. The pastry-cook and his party ruled Frankfort with impunity for a whole year.

Meanwhile similar things happened at Worms. There also the Jews were hated as competitors and detested as infidels; but the anti-Jewish movement in that town was led by a learned lawyer; not by an honest, if stupid, confectioner. Consequently the warfare assumed a different character. Instead of open assault, the lawyer preferred a siege. He closed the outlets of the town to the Jews, and hindered them from procuring even milk for their children. These subtle preliminaries were followed by an ultimatum addressed to the Jews, bidding them to evacuate the city, bag and baggage, within an hour. ♦1615♦ The wretches departed, leaving behind them their synagogues and cemeteries to the fury of the populace. The fugitives were allowed by the Archbishop of Mayence and the Count of Darmstadt to take up their abode in the villages and hamlets of the neighbourhood, where they met some of their brother-sufferers from Frankfort.

Soon afterwards the Council of Worms, indignant at its humiliation, invited the Elector of the Palatinate to take possession of the town. The prince accepted the invitation, and a few months later the Jews were permitted to return. Not long after the Jews of Frankfort also were re-admitted by the Electorate of Mayence and Darmstadt, to the sound of trumpets. The heroic pastry-cook was hanged and quartered, his house was razed to the ground, and his family banished. The city was compelled by the Emperor to pay to the Jews a large indemnity for their losses and sufferings, and they expressed their joy by ordaining that the eve of their return should be observed as a fast and the day itself as a feast. However, the social position of the Jews both in Frankfort and in Worms remained the same. In both towns they continued to live on sufferance. Only a limited number of families was allowed to reside, and only a limited number of individuals to marry.

♦1620–1648♦

The terrible Thirty Years’ War caused less suffering to the Jews of Protestant Germany than to the Christians. While Protestants and Catholics, animated by a spirit of intolerance and the lust for power, were eagerly butchering each other and devastating each other’s territories, the Jews made their fortunes by impartial speculations in the booty of both sides. Their opportunities must have been considerable; for it was during this war that the English and other European tongues were enriched with the German word “plunder.”

CHAPTER XV
CATHOLIC REACTION

But if the Reformation brought with it Protestant hostility and new tribulations to the outcasts of humanity, it also proved the cause of fresh persecution on the part of Catholicism. Even while the Popes at Rome tolerated or cherished the Jews, their agents abroad, the wandering Friars, and all those soldiers of orthodoxy by whose fanatical zeal the fabric of Papal supremacy had been reared and was maintained, exerted themselves strenuously and furiously to oppose the spreading epidemic of rebellion. In their eyes the Jews were the most implacable enemies of Christ and the eternal promoters of dissent and heresy. It was, therefore, against the Jews that they directed their deadliest shafts. The belief prevailed that the first step to the conquest of Judaism was the cremation of Jewish books, which after the invention of the printing press had multiplied. This new attack on Judaism, as so many other attacks in the past, was led by a renegade Jew, John Pfefferkorn by name, and a butcher by trade—also convicted of burglary and otherwise an unlimited miscreant.[123] ♦1509♦ This gentleman, acting in concert with the Dominicans of Cologne, obtained from the Emperor Maximilian authority to confiscate all Hebrew writings opposed to the Christian faith—a very comprehensive sentence which would have been carried out, but for the efforts made on behalf of literature and commonsense by John Reuchlin, the Father of German Humanism. This great scholar had restored Hebrew and promoted Greek studies in Germany. He was attracted by Hebrew mysticism and had many friends among the Jews. In 1490, whilst on a visit in Italy, he had made the acquaintance of Pico de Mirandola whose Cabbalistic doctrines he embraced and expounded in his work De Verbo Mirifico. In 1492 he was employed on a mission to the Emperor at Linz, and it was there that he met Jacob Loans, the Emperor’s Jewish physician, under whose guidance he began to read Hebrew. Although a good Catholic, Reuchlin was a broad-minded man, and his leaning to Cabbalistic theosophy and the esoteric wisdom of the Rabbis, without making him an admirer of the Jews as a people, induced him to defend their books. Summoned by Maximilian to express his opinion on Pfefferkorn’s proposal, Reuchlin did so in a manner which, while saving the Jewish writings from the fire, exposed the defender to the utmost rigour of the disappointed Dominicans; from whose clutches, however, after a severe struggle, he was rescued by the enthusiastic assistance of his brother-humanists.

The outbreak of the Lutheran rebellion paralysed the forces of Catholicism for a while. But it was not long ere the Papacy recovered from its panic. The latter half of the sixteenth, and the first half of the seventeenth century—the hundred years between the rise of the Order of Jesus and the peace of Westphalia—form a period of unprecedented activity for the conversion of the world to the one true faith. ♦1540–1648♦ The Catholic sovereigns were at the zenith of their power and bigotry, and both their consciences and their swords lay under the absolute control of the Pope; for on the triumph of Dogmatism depended the realisation of their own dreams of Despotism at home and conquest abroad. On the other hand, Protestantism was grimly determined to conquer or die. If one half of Western Christendom was passionately attached to the traditions made dear by the familiarity of ages, the other half was no less passionately attracted by the novelty of the prospect which had just unfolded its charms to their vision. The result of this antagonism was the most faithful imitation of hell on earth that the modern world has witnessed. Europe, convulsed by revolt and made desolate by barbarous repression, presented a scene for which, fortunately, it would be hard to find a parallel even in the annals of civilised mankind. While the Inquisition was revelling in human hecatombs in Spain, the Spanish general Alva was ravaging heretical Holland, and a Spanish Armada was preparing to assail heretical England. Religious motives receded further and yet further into distance as time went on; but the slaughter begun for the glory of God was continued for the love of power; and those who were formerly burnt as heretics were now butchered as malcontents. The Titanic feud culminated in the Thirty Years’ War, during which no fewer than ten millions of Christians were massacred in the name of Christ.

The Treaty of Westphalia staunched the flow of blood for a moment, but did not heal the wound. Open violence was aided by patient intrigue, and the monks carried on the enterprise wherein monarchs had failed. Meanwhile, as though the legions of St. Dominic, of St. Francis, and the other monastic orders were not sufficient for the work of destruction, to them was added, as we have seen, the more formidable Society of Jesus. By this time also the Spanish Inquisition had accomplished its special mission of blotting out the Morescos and Marranos, and had entered into an alliance with Loyola’s legion; the two bodies forming together a two-edged sword in the hand of the Catholic reaction.

Between Martin Luther and Ignatius Loyola there is commonly supposed to gape a very wide chasm. However that may be, there is one point at which the two apostles meet—hatred of Israel. Loyola’s disciples penetrated by degrees into every realm in Europe, and into every realm they brought with them that supple and sinuous spirit which was destined to dominate European history for ages, and to endow the European languages with a new word of evil import. In them Israel found an enemy powerful as Fate, and, like Fate, everywhere present, everywhere invisible and inexorable. Thus those Jews who had escaped from the zeal of nascent Protestantism were doomed to fall a prey to the zeal of reanimated Catholicism.

As in Italy, so in Central Europe, the reign of Pope Paul IV. marks the revival of Catholic Obscurantism. In 1557 the Inquisition was introduced into France under Henry II.—a prince who could be profligate without being gay, and who atoned for his gloomy immorality by so genuine a horror of heresy and culture that at his accession both Huguenots and scholars thought it advisable to quit Paris. In 1559—four years after the creation of the Ghetto in Rome—all Hebrew books were confiscated in Prague, at the instigation of a baptized Jew named Asher. A fire that soon after broke out in the Jewish quarter afforded the Catholics of Prague an opportunity of exhibiting their piety. They plundered the houses of the Jews, and even threw their women and children into the flames. At the same time the Emperor Ferdinand I. ordered the expulsion of the Jews from Prague and the rest of Bohemia, imposed many restrictions on those of Austria, and drove them from Lower Austria. ♦1569♦ Ten years later the Jews of Avignon and Venaissin, which, besides Marseilles, were the only communities left in France after the expulsion of 1395, and which, favoured by the enlightened Popes Leo X., Clement VII., and Paul III., had acquired great wealth, were ordered to quit the country, and, like the refugees from Spain and Italy, they sought and found a haven of refuge in the Sultan’s dominions.

♦1620–1648♦

During the Thirty Years’ War the Catholic Emperor Ferdinand II. protected the Jews, forbidding their coffers to be robbed except by himself. The Bohemian Jews alone, after having paid a certain sum, are known to have bound themselves to contribute forty thousand gulden a year towards the expenses of the war. In Vienna also, now the headquarters of Catholicism, the Jews were allowed to grow fat. ♦1624♦ The Emperor permitted them to build a synagogue and to discard the badge; but the Christian citizens protested, demanding their banishment. In face of this opposition the Court acted with admirable tact. To the Christians it said: “You shall see the Jews banished, if you pay twenty thousand florins,” and to the Jews it whispered: “You need not fear, if you pay more.” To judge from the result, the Jews must have outbidden the Christians.

♦1630♦

Not long after, at Prague, an internal feud between rival factions of the Jewish community led to the interference of the authorities, and the Emperor ordered that the Jews should every Sunday morning submit to sermons preached for their conversion. Absentees were fined a thaler a head, and a higher sum on repetition of the offence. Inattention and slumber during the performance were also visited with a fine. However, the Jews had not suffered through so many centuries without learning how to dull the edge of persecution. Corrupt courtiers defeated the devout Emperor’s policy, and the Jews were allowed to remain in spiritual darkness and in peace.

♦1648♦

Despite this cruel treatment, the Jews of Prague fought valiantly in defence of the city against the Swedes, and in recognition of their loyalty and gallantry received from the Emperor, Ferdinand III., an imperial standard which can still be seen in the old synagogue of the town.

In the meantime the Jesuits continued their restless, though noiseless, campaign. Even the one traditional refuge of Israel in Europe was poisoned by their preaching. In Poland the Jews had for centuries prospered and enjoyed a kind of autonomy. The Kings protected them, and the nobility, thriftless and extravagant itself, found the sober, industrious, and keen-witted Jews invaluable as bailiffs and financial advisers. Beneath the wing of princes and nobles the Jews acquired great influence. It was to this influence precisely that the Jesuits attributed the rise of heresy in that country, and it was this influence that they now decided to use as a means to their undoing. The rivers of bitterness that flowed from the Stygian fountain of Jesuitism found the field ready to be fertilised. The German traders and artisans, settled in various parts of Poland, had already encountered in the Jews formidable rivals. Commercial envy was invigorated by the pious prejudices which these immigrants had imported, along with their guilds, from the Fatherland; and these feelings often induced them to make common cause with the clergy. ♦1496–1505♦ Under the joint pressure of the two classes, Casimir the Great’s successors had deprived the Jews of their privileges and confined them to special quarters, or even expelled them from certain towns. A period of toleration came with Sigismund I. ♦1507–1548♦ This sovereign’s good-will towards the Jews was aided by the Polish nobles, who, hating the Germans bitterly, were glad to support their rivals—an inclination which they had ample means of gratifying, as the execution of the anti-Jewish laws was largely in their own hands. Thanks to the friendship of the nobility Poland continued to offer an asylum to the persecuted children of Israel.

♦1575–1586♦

Stephen Bathori, who was elected to the Polish throne three years after the death of Sigismund Augustus, the last native King of Poland, showed great favour to the Jews. He guarded the race in Lithuania against the effects of the blood-accusation, and bestowed many benefits upon them, to the disgust of his Christian subjects, who in Poland, as elsewhere, envied the Jews for their prosperity and hated them for their usury and arrogance. ♦1587–1632♦ This prosperity lasted even under Sigismund III., a zealous Catholic brought up by Jesuits. He confirmed to the Jews their ancient privileges, but introduced a measure indicating his religious bias and fraught with disastrous possibilities. ♦1592♦ He ordained that for the building of a new synagogue the permission of the Church should be obtained. About this time the Reformation had lost much of its vigour in Germany; but in Poland, through the German immigrants, it was beginning to create a great spiritual agitation and to find favour among the nobles. Some of the Polish sectarians went to the extreme of Unitarianism and were stigmatised as semi-Judaei.

To all these sources of danger for the Jews—the hatred towards them entertained by the natives on account of their usurious extortions, by the Germans on account of their commercial ability, by the Jesuits on account of their infidelity, and of the Judaic proclivities of some of the Dissenters—was added another, which proved the immediate cause of persecution.

Upon the banks of the lower Dnieper and the north shore of the Black Sea there gradually arose several colonies or settlements formed partly by runaway slaves and convicts in quest of freedom, and partly by adventurers from many countries and classes in quest of fortune. These were the ancestors of the Cossack race. Their life was such as their antecedents promised. Independent and idle, they knew only one industry—brigandage. The exercise of this industry brought them into frequent collision with their Tartar neighbours and supplied them with their one recreation—war. The Kings of Poland, thinking to make use of these hardened and reckless outlaws for the defence of their eastern frontiers, granted to them a semi-autonomous constitution under a freely elected hetman or chieftain. Unfortunately the Cossacks were for the most part members of the Eastern Church, and were therefore hated by the Jesuits, who, after having crushed the Polish heretics, turned their attention to these schismatics. King Sigismund III. began the crusade by oppressing the colonists with heavy taxes.

Now, these colonies were under the control of several noble Polish families which sold the lease of the imposts to their Jewish bailiffs. The latter were intended to act the part for which the training of a thousand years had so well qualified them—the part of the sponge. Thanks to this arrangement, Jewish communities rapidly sprang up and spread in the Ukraine and Little Russia, and to them was entrusted the odious privilege of collecting and even of inventing taxes. How galling these burdens were may be gathered from the following example: The Cossacks were bound to pay a duty on every new-born infant and on every wedding. As a safeguard against evasion, the Jewish tax-farmers kept the keys of the churches, and on each wedding or baptism the clergyman was obliged to apply to them for admittance into his own church. Nor were these tax-farmers scrupulous or lenient in the exercise of their privileges. Slaves to everybody else, they were eager to play the despots over those whom fate had placed under themselves. In their lust for profit and power, they readily helped the nobles in plundering and the Jesuits in tormenting the Cossacks. Hence the position of the Jews in the Ukraine and Little Russia became one of extreme danger, and the resentment which their conduct excited soon translated itself into acts of vengeance. And vengeance, when it fell on Jews, did not restrict itself to the individuals who had deserved it. “All Israelites are surety one for the other” was the Rabbinic motto of solidarity. The Cossacks were now to give a new meaning to this maxim. Where single units had offended, whole communities were punished.

During a brief revolt of the Cossacks, in 1638, two hundred Jews were slain and several synagogues destroyed. The Jews, not warned by this omen, continued to provoke severer punishment with a recklessness which was partly derived from the belief in the near advent of the Messiah. The year 1648 had been fixed by the mystics as the era of triumph and universal sovereignty for Israel.[124] The expected date came, but it brought with it, not redemption, but retribution. In that year there broke out an insurrection led by a Cossack who, having been cheated out of his wife and property by a Jew, had no cause to love the race. Chmielnicki, in declaring to his compatriots that “they had been delivered by the Poles into bondage to the cursed breed of the Jews,” was voicing their wrongs with a conviction deepened by personal suffering.

After their first victory, the wild Cossacks let themselves loose upon the Jews, many of whom were massacred, while others saved themselves by embracing the Orthodox faith. Four Jewish communities, in their anxiety to escape death, gave themselves and their belongings up to the Tartars, who accepted the gift and sold the givers as slaves in Turkey, where they were ransomed by their brethren. The rebellion continued with a ferocity and ruthlessness such as might have been expected from the character of the rebels and the magnitude of the wrongs which they had to avenge. Long oppressed by Papists and Jews, in slaying them they not only gratified their personal animosity, but felt that they were chastising the enemies of their Church. In this somewhat hackneyed work they displayed considerable originality and variety of cruelty. Every guerilla chief had his own favourite instrument of torture; one of them affecting the lasso, by which the women of the enemy were caught and dragged to shame.

Shortly after the first victory, a detachment of Cossacks captured by stratagem a fortress where six thousand Jews had taken refuge, and put them all to torture and death. Another detachment attacked a town harbouring six hundred Polish nobles and two thousand Jews. The two classes, bound together by a common danger, offered a stout resistance, until the crafty Cossacks succeeded in dividing them. They assured the nobles that their sole object was to punish the Jews, promising to withdraw if the latter were surrendered to them. The Jews were persuaded to deliver up their arms; the Cossacks were admitted into the town, robbed the Jews of all their belongings, and then set before them the alternative of baptism or death. Three-fourths of the whole community were tortured and executed. Then the Cossacks turned their wrath against the Polish nobles, whom they easily overpowered and slaughtered.

A third body of insurgents was at the same time wreaking a similar vengeance upon the Jews of Little Russia, where many thousands perished, and the havoc spread as widely as the rebellion, until the whole country, from South Ukraine to Lemberg, was marked with traces of massacre—here in pools of Jewish and Polish blood, there in heaps of Jewish and Polish bodies. ♦1649 Aug.♦ At last peace was concluded on condition that no Papist or Jew should reside in the Cossack provinces.

Meanwhile thousands of Jewish fugitives who had saved their lives by baptism, of women who had been violated by the Cossacks, and of children whose parents had been slaughtered, swarmed into Poland, where King John Casimir allowed them to return to Judaism, for, being a Roman Catholic himself, he naturally regarded the Greek baptism as worse than valueless.

After a few months’ pause the war between the Cossacks and the Poles broke out anew, and it was now transferred to Polish territory. Again the first victims were Jews, but the slaughter was necessarily limited by the comparatively small number of people left to slay. ♦1651 Nov.♦ This second rebellion ended in the defeat of the Cossacks, and one of the terms of peace was that the Jews should be allowed to settle again, and resume their financial oppression, in the Ukraine. However, the Cossacks felt bound by the treaty only so long as they felt unable to break it. As soon as the opportunity offered, they once more raised the standard of revolt, and Chmielnicki, aided by the Russians, carried victory and devastation far and wide. ♦1654–1655♦ The Jews who were beyond the reach of the Cossacks succumbed to the fury of their Russian allies, and thus the community of Wilna was completely wiped out.

Then to the enemies of Poland was added Charles X. of Sweden, Charles XII.’s grandfather; “a great and mighty man, lion of the North in his time.” ♦1656♦ The battle of Warsaw, which lasted three days, resulted in a splendid victory for this “imperious, stern-browed, swift-striking man, who had dreamed of a new Goth empire.” In that battle the chivalry of Poland was broken, and John Casimir, the most brilliant cavalier of all, was nearly ruined. The Jewish communities which had been spared by Cossack and Russian were impoverished by the Swede. But even this fresh calamity did not exhaust the measure of their woes. Those who had escaped slaughter at the hands of Cossacks, Russians, and Swedes were now exposed to the hatred of the Polish general, Czarnicki, who attacked them on the ground that they had acted in collusion with the Swedish invaders. And while Poland was turned into a vast battlefield, whereon the nations cut each other’s throat, the Jews were treated as common foes by all. During these ten years of international manslaughter, no fewer than a quarter of a million of Polish Jews were massacred.

The humiliation of Poland brought lasting ruin to the Jews. Fugitives, reduced to the verge of starvation, were scattered over Europe seeking shelter—from Amsterdam and the Rhine in the north and west, to Italy, Hungary, and Turkey in the south and east. Everywhere they were welcomed by their brethren, who fed and clothed them, and many of the funds intended for the maintenance of the Jews in Palestine were diverted to the relief of these helpless wanderers.

In the midst of their sufferings the Polish Jews heard of the Messiah of Smyrna. One of Sabbataï Zebi’s apostles, Jacob Leibovicz Frank by name, founded a curious sect, which, among other things, believed in a kind of Trinity, abolished the Law, and carried on a fierce warfare against the orthodox Rabbis. In the middle of the eighteenth century these Frankist dissenters revived one of the ancient denunciations of the Talmud, and tried to induce the Polish Government to confiscate all the Rabbinical writings. But finally, as Sabbataï and his immediate followers in Turkey were absorbed by Islam, so Frank’s disciples were absorbed by Catholicism.

While the Jews of Poland were sinking into destitution or flying into exile, their brethren of Austria also were experiencing the hatred of the Jesuits. At the instigation of the latter the Empress Margaret demanded their banishment from Vienna. ♦1669♦ The Emperor Leopold I. was at first averse from the measure, because he derived an annual revenue of 50,000 florins from the Austrian Jews. But the Empress insisted, her fanaticism receiving fresh impulse from a narrow escape which she had experienced at a ball accident. Attributing her preservation to a miraculous intervention of the Deity, she was anxious to show her gratitude by a sacrifice of the Jews, whom her father confessor had taught her to regard as the enemies of Heaven. The piety of the Empress proved too powerful for her consort’s avarice. Leopold yielded at last, and the Jews were ordered to leave Vienna. In vain did they try prayers and presents. In vain did they turn every stone both at home and abroad. Their gifts were accepted by the Emperor and Empress, but the decree remained unrevoked, for the influence of the Jesuits was invincible. ♦1670♦ The Jews had to go and seek new homes in Moravia, Bohemia, and Poland. Their quarter was bought by the magistrates of Vienna for the Emperor, and was christened Leopoldstadt. Their synagogue was levelled to the ground. On its site was built a church dedicated to the Emperor’s patron saint; and the glorious event was commemorated by a golden tablet whereon the Jewish house for prayer was described as a “charnel-house.”

The degradation of Israel was now complete. Persecution, cruel and, through all changes, consistent beyond a parallel in history, had at last achieved its demoralising work. The Jews, treated as pariahs throughout Southern and Central Europe, lost all feeling of self-respect. Spurned and dishonoured everywhere, they became day after day more and more worthy of contempt: slovenly in dress and dialect, dead to all sense of beauty or honesty, treacherous, and utterly broken in spirit. “Zeus takes away the half of his manhood from a man, when the day of slavery overtakes him,” says the wise old poet. The Jews now furnished a melancholy proof of the truth of the saying. Among the other gifts of servitude they acquired that of cringing cowardice. So little manliness was left in them that they, who had once astonished Rome with their dogged valour, dared not defend themselves even against the attacks of a street urchin; and the prophet’s terrible prediction was fulfilled: “You shall speak humbly from the ground, and from the dust shall proceed your word.”

The dispersion of the Polish refugees over Europe resulted in the subjugation of Judaism in all countries to the sophistical and soulless teaching of Polish Talmudism. The long-ringleted Rabbis of Poland carried into every country their narrow subtlety and hatred of secular studies, so that at a time when the Middle Age was passing away from Christendom they restored it to Israel.

From the sixteenth century the Jews fell completely under the domination of the Synagogue. Having abandoned all hope of being allowed to participate in the life of the Gentiles, they withdrew more and more severely behind the old moat by which their ancestors had surrounded themselves. Tribalism was their only alternative to utter extinction; and they seized upon it, nothing loth. They grew fanatical, entrusted the education of their children to none but the Polish Rabbis, clung to their bastard Germano-Hebrew jargon (Jüdisch-Deutsch or “Yiddish”), and even in writing a European language they employed the Hebrew characters. The Jewish literature of the period reflects the social and intellectual condition of the race. When it deals not with subjects of Biblical exegesis, it consists of rude popular songs and stories drawn from Talmudic and Cabbalistic sources or from German and Oriental folk-lore. But this Cimmerian darkness contained in it the promise of a dawn. The light of the eighteenth century was sooner or later to penetrate the mists of bigotry and to bring the Jewish Middle Age to an end. For while the Jew shares the general effects which persecution long drawn out inflicts, yet there is in him a power of resiliency which is his own peculiar possession and which saves him from falling permanently into the slough of degradation and disgrace. This power he derives in part from his religion, in part from his history. His religion gives him steadfastness; his history teaches him to hope.

CHAPTER XVI
IN HOLLAND

Holland was at this time the one European country in which man was allowed to worship his Maker according to the dictates of his conscience. Commercial activity in Europe has always been accompanied, or followed, by speculative freedom, and where these two forms of national vigour flourish religious bigotry languishes. The Dutch, like the Italians, and even in a higher degree, had from the earliest times shown a spirit of insubordination to papal authority. The decrees of the Holy See had frequently met with a stubborn resistance in which beggars and princes, prelates and burgesses heartily participated. The long feud between Guelf and Ghibelline, stirred up by Gregory Hildebrand’s overweening ambition, had found both the people and the clergy of Holland on the side of the Pope’s enemies. And not only the decrees but also the doctrines of Rome had often failed to command obedience in this undutiful daughter of the Church, who from the very first lent an attentive ear to the whisperings of infidelity. All the heresies that sprang up in Europe from the beginning of the twelfth century to the beginning of the sixteenth—from Tanchelyn to Luther—had been welcomed by the Dutch. Wickliffe found numerous sympathisers in the Netherlands; and the victims of the Holy See eager avengers. Many Hollanders, who had taken part in the crusade against Huss and his followers in Bohemia, returned home horror-struck at the cruelty of those under whose banner they had fought. Scepticism grew with the growth of ecclesiastical depravity and persecution with the growth of ecclesiastical authority, so that in no other region, not even excepting Spain, was the infernal ingenuity of the Inquisition more severely taxed than in Holland. It was here that the longest anathemas were pronounced, and the most hideous tortures endured. The annual returns of the banned, fleeced, flayed, and burnt, amounted to thousands. But at last tyranny bred despair, and despair rebellion. People and nobility were united in a common cause. If the burgesses hated the priests for their persecuting spirit, the barons hated them as cordially for the wealth and power which they had contrived to usurp. And then came the invention of the printing press to prepare the way for the great day of the Reformation, on which was signed the death-warrant of mediaeval Catholicism.

In Holland alone rebellion did not degenerate into a new species of despotism. While the hidalgos of Castile, impelled by lust for glory and gold, carried into a new world the cross and the cruelty of the old, conquering kingdoms for Charles and Philip, souls for Christ and wealth for themselves; while even in England one sovereign was engaged in persecuting Popery, another Puritanism, and a third both, the citizens of the Netherlands were laying the foundations of a less splendid but far more solid prosperity. As in the Venetian, so in the Dutch Republic, integrity and intelligence in the individual were esteemed more highly than orthodoxy, and an extensive commerce was regarded as more valuable to the State than a rigid creed—an attitude which earned the Hollanders a reputation for worldly weakliness and carnal self-seeking among our stern upholders of sanctity and inspired their brother-Protestants of Barebone’s Parliament to denounce them as enemies of Christ. Briefly, the Dutch had never submitted to the suicidal necessity of extinguishing liberty at home in order to achieve greatness abroad, nor had they subscribed to the mad doctrine which, under one form or another, had obsessed Europe during so many centuries: that it is a good man’s duty to make a hell of this world in order to inherit paradise in the next.

It was in Holland, accordingly, that the Jews of Spain and Portugal, fleeing from the holocausts of the Holy Office, found a harbour of safety. Whilst the Netherlands lay under Spanish rule these emigrants were repeatedly expelled from various Dutch cities, owing to the citizens’ dread of seeing the Inquisition—which had been introduced into the country by Charles V. in 1522—established amongst them. But the liberation from the foreign yoke was to change all this—not without a struggle. In 1591 a Jewish consul of the Sultan of Morocco proposed to the burgesses of Middelburg that they should permit the Portuguese Marranos to settle in their town. The shrewd burgesses would gladly have welcomed these commercial allies, but they were obliged to yield to the prejudices of the Protestant clergy, not unnaturally embittered by their long fight for liberty. The opposition, however, was short-lived. The Dutch recognised kindred spirits in the Jews. They shared their implacable hatred of the Spanish tyrant and of Catholicism, as they shared their aptitude for trade. Under William of Orange the dream of toleration became a political reality, and in 1593 the first contingent of Portuguese pseudo-Christians landed at Amsterdam.

But, though the flames of the Quemadero had been left far behind, the fear which centuries of ill-usage had instilled into the Jews’ hearts remained with them. The secrecy, with which these hunted refugees at first deemed it necessary to meet and worship, excited the suspicion of their Christian neighbours, who, not unreasonably, concluding that so many precautions covered a sinister design, informed the authorities. ♦1596♦ On the Fast of Atonement the Jews, while at prayer, were surprised by armed men. The appearance of these myrmidons awakened memories of the Inquisition in the breasts of the worshippers, who fled, thereby deepening the suspicion. And while the Jews were trying to escape from imaginary Papists, the Dutch officers searched the Jewish prayer-house for crucifices and wafers. An explanation ensued, the prisoners were released, and the congregation returned to its devotions. After this incident, which made it clear to the Dutch that the Marranos were not Papist conspirators, but only harmless hypocrites, the latter were allowed to stay, under certain restrictions, and a synagogue was inaugurated in 1598 amid great enthusiasm.

The good news drew more refugees from Spain and Portugal to Holland. The persecuted crypto-Jews of the Peninsula began to look upon Amsterdam as a new Jerusalem, or rather as a new world—so different and so novel was the treatment which they met with there from that to which they were accustomed in every other Christian country. To Amsterdam, therefore, they continued to flee from the racks and the stakes of the Inquisition—men, women, and even monks—in ever increasing numbers, so that a new synagogue had to be built in 1608. Six years afterwards they secured a burial ground in the neighbourhood of the town. The community rejoiced exceedingly in the acquisition of this cemetery, though on every body carried thither they had to pay a tax to each church that the funeral procession passed on its way. Tolerated though they were, these Peninsular exiles were still distrusted by the common people as Catholic spies in disguise, and it was not till 1615 that they were officially recognised as settlers and traders. Before long a Hebrew printing press was established in Amsterdam, and gradually mere tolerance grew into warm welcome. The community was about this time joined by immigrants driven out of Germany by the ravages of the Thirty-Years’ War. These German Jews formed the mob of the colony; despised by their cultured brethren as uncouth and, in turn, despising them as spurious Jews. Hence arose a schism, and the German section set up a synagogue of their own. But community of creed and the subtle affinity of blood, reinforced by the necessity of presenting a united front to a hostile world, overcame the prejudices of class, and a reconciliation was effected in 1639. Amsterdam speedily became the seat of a prosperous and united Hebrew congregation, and the stronghold of a vigorous and uncompromising Judaism. The colony consisted of men and women, everyone of whom had suffered for the faith. It was natural, therefore, that they should strive to safeguard by all means in their power a treasure preserved at so enormous a cost of blood and tears. Faith, unfortunately, is not far removed from fanaticism, and the victims of tyranny are only too prone to become its ministers. The Jews of Amsterdam had undergone a long and severe course in the most distinguished school of cruelty and bigotry, and it is no wonder if they graduated with high honours. The Rabbis enjoyed an immense power over the souls and the purses of their disciples; they levied heavy fines upon members of the Synagogue who incurred their displeasure; and in their promptitude to stifle freedom of thought they rivalled the Satraps of the Church. A sad illustration of Hebrew intolerance is supplied by the story of the hapless Uriel Acosta.

He was a gentleman of Oporto, one of those Marranos whose fathers had been taught to love Christ by torture, and who had bought the right of residence in their native land by baptism. Though brought up as a devout Catholic and destined for a clerical career, Uriel was repelled by the mechanical formalities of Catholicism, and he reverted to the old faith; thus escaping from the meshes of the Church only to fall into those of the Synagogue. ♦1617♦ On his arrival at Amsterdam the idealist was rudely awakened to the meanness of reality. He found actual Judaism widely different from the picture which his vivid imagination had drawn of it, and he was, unfortunately for himself, too honest to conceal his disappointment. The independence of character which had induced Uriel to give up social position, home, and fortune for the sake of conscience, also caused him to disagree with the pious mummeries of the Hebrew priests. A long contest between the individual and the institution ended in an inglorious victory for the latter. Uriel Acosta’s rebellion was visited with excommunication and social ostracism. He was figuratively extinguished in more senses than one. All his friends and relatives shunned him as a leper, or rather ignored him as if he had ceased to exist. It was death in life.

Alone in a city whose language he could not speak, stoned by those for whom he had sacrificed all, spurned even by his nearest and dearest, Uriel was driven to the publication of a book which cost him imprisonment and a fine; for the Rabbis denounced it to the Dutch authorities as hostile not only to Judaism, but also to Christianity. This widened the breach between him and his brethren. Thus fifteen years of misery and loneliness dragged on, till, unable to bear his awful isolation any longer, this poor outcast from a people of outcasts tried to regain the favour of the Synagogue and the society of his fellow-men by feigned repentance. ♦1633♦ There ended the second part of the trilogy. The third began when Uriel’s simulated conversion was seen through. The discovery led to new persecution and insults innumerable. He was again ostracized by his relatives, robbed of his betrothed, and excommunicated by the Synagogue.

Seven years of suffering elapsed, and the victim at last, worn out by a fight to which his sensitive nature was unequal, prematurely aged and longing for rest, once more offered to sign a recantation. Pardon was granted, but not without terrible penalties and fresh humiliation. The penitent was made to read aloud his confession of sin; he was subjected to a public castigation—thirty-nine lashes—and was obliged to lie prone across the threshold of the synagogue for all the congregation to walk over and trample upon him. This disgrace drove Uriel to despair, attempt at murder, and suicide.

These things happened in 1640. In the ensuing year John Evelyn, whom we have seen at Venice, paid a visit to the community—probably to the very synagogue—that had witnessed poor Uriel’s sufferings, and he enters his impressions in his Diary as follows:

“August 19. Next day I returned to Amsterdam, where I went to a synagogue of the Jews, being Saturday; the ceremonies, ornaments, lamps, law, and scrolls afforded matter for my wonder and enquiry. The women were secluded from the men, being seated above in galleries, and having their heads muffled with linnen after a fantastical and somewhat extraordinary fashion.

“They have a separate burying-ground, full of sepulchres with Hebrew inscriptions, some of them very stately. In one, looking through a narrow crevice, I perceived divers bookes lye about a corpse, for it seems when any learned Rabbi dies, they bury some of his books with him. With the help of a stick I raked out some of the leaves, written in Hebrew characters, but much impaired.”

“Aug. 28. I was brought acquainted with a Burgundian Jew who had married an apostate Kentish woman. I asked him divers questions; he told me, amongst other things, that the world should never end, that our souls transmigrated, and that even those of the most holy persons did pennance in the bodies of bruits after death, and so he interpreted the banishment and salvage life of Nebucodnezer; that all the Jews should rise again, and be lead to Jerusalem.... He showed me severall bookes of their devotion, which he had translated into English for the instruction of his wife; he told me that when the Messias came, all the ships, barkes, and vessels of Holland should, by the powere of certain strange whirle-winds be loosed from their ankers and transported in a moment to all the desolat ports and havens throughout the world wherever the dispersion was, to convey their breathren and tribes to the Holy Citty; with other such like stuff. He was a merry drunken fellow.” It was the age of Messianic dreams. Oppression had kindled the longing for deliverance, and the Jews all over Europe were eagerly looking to the advent of the Redeemer: an expectation which in the minds of the untutored and the enthusiastic took strange shapes. But even then there were Jews affected by other than Messianic chimeras.

In the Dutch synagogue which Evelyn visited on that Saturday in August 1641, he may perhaps have seen a boy; a wide-eyed, thoughtful little Hebrew of some nine years of age. Evelyn would have fixed his intelligent gaze upon that child’s face, had he had any means of divining that the diminutive Hebrew body before him clothed a soul destined to open new doors of light to Christian Europe. The boy was Baruch Spinoza, born on the 24th of November, 1632, of parents who, for their faith, had given up wealth and a happy home in sunny Spain, and had sought freedom on the foggy shores of the North Sea. Rabbinical lore was young Spinoza’s first study; mediaeval Hebrew wisdom, largely made up of Messianic and Cabbalistic mists, his next; to be followed by the profane philosophy of Descartes: altogether a singular blend of mental nutriment, yet all assimilated and transformed by young Baruch’s brain; a multitude of diverse guides, yet all leading the original mind the same way—not quite their way. Study bred independent thought, and independent thought translated itself into independent action. Baruch ceased to frequent the synagogue; for the synagogue had ceased to supply him with the food for which his soul craved. ♦1656♦ A bribe of 1,000 florins a year was offered by the Rabbis, but was firmly rejected; excommunication followed, and curses many and minute, not unaccompanied by an attempt at assassination; but they were serenely disregarded. Baruch was not Uriel. For answer he translated himself into Benedictus, and the name was not a misnomer; for he was soon to become known as one of the kindliest of men, as well as one of the deepest and boldest of thinkers that our modern world has seen.

When the two goddesses appeared to Spinoza, as they do to every one of us once in our lives: the one plump and proud and persuasively fair, the other modest of look, reverent, and unadorned; and they offered to the young Jew of Amsterdam the momentous option of paths, he did not long hesitate in his choice. Turning his back upon the world, and a deaf ear to its Siren songs of success, he chose to earn a modest livelihood by making lenses. Too honest to accept the Synagogue’s price for hypocrisy, he was too proud even to accept the gifts of disinterested friendship and admiration, and too fond of his freedom to accept even a professorial chair of Philosophy. Like his great contemporary and compatriot Rembrandt, Spinoza was incapable of complying with the world’s behests or of adapting himself to its standards. The public did not inspire him, and its applause left him profoundly unmoved. He scorned the smiles as much as the frowns of Fortune, and calmly pursued his own path, undaunted by obloquy, unseduced by temptation: a veritable Socrates of a man, voluntarily and wholly devoted to the humble service of Truth. In meditation he found his heart’s delight, and, while grinding glasses for optical instruments in his solitary attic, he excogitated other aids for the eye of man. A quiet pipe of tobacco, a friendly chat with his landlord or his fellow-lodgers and their children, and, when bent on more violent dissipation, a single-combat between two spiders, or the antics of a foolish fly entangled in their toils, furnished the cheerful ascetic with abundant diversion. On those last occasions, his biographer tells us, “he would sometimes break into laughter.” ♦1677♦ And having lived his own life, Spinoza died as those die whom the Olympians love: in the meridian of manhood and intellectual vigour, leaving behind him the memory of a blameless character to his friends, and the fruits of a mighty genius to the world at large. For the goddess to whom he had dedicated his whole life did not despise the sacrifice.

Every man who is born into this world is either a Greek or a Jew. Spinoza was both. His teaching may be described as a recapitulation of the world’s thought. Hellenic rationalism and Hebrew mysticism found in his work an organic union. Briefly stated, the lesson which the Jewish sage taught the Western mind, like all great lessons, was a very simple one: that man is not the centre of creation; that the universe is a bigger affair than the earth; and that man holds an exceedingly small place even on this small atom of a planet. Old Europe was gradually growing to the suspicion that one book did not contain the whole of God’s truth between its covers—that it did not constitute a final manifestation of the will of God. She was now to hear, much to her astonishment and indignation, that the human race did not engross the whole attention of Providence. It was an elementary lesson enough; but it came as a revelation even to minds like Lessing’s and Goethe’s. It was a salutary lesson, too; but it was too new to be recognised as such. Man is a creature of conceit; the Tractatus would teach him humility. Therefore, the Synagogue anathematized it, Synodical wisdom condemned it, the States-general interdicted it, the Catholic Church placed it upon the Index: they all execrated it; none of them understood it. Posterity has embraced it. To-day who would be a thinker must in mental attitude, if not in doctrine, be a Spinozist.[125]

CHAPTER XVII
IN ENGLAND AFTER THE EXPULSION

The banishment of the Jews from England by Edward I., in 1290, was not quite so thorough as is popularly supposed to have been. A small section of the community remained behind, or returned, under the disguise of Lombards. This remnant, according to Jewish tradition, was finally driven out in 1358; but there is on record a petition to the Good Parliament which shows that, even after that date, some of them continued to lead a masked kind of existence in England. The same inference is to be drawn from the fact that the House for Jewish Converts, built by Henry III. in the thirteenth century, continued in existence till the seventeenth. Broadly speaking, however, Edward’s expulsion cleared England of Jews. But, while removing the objects of Christian hatred, it did not diminish the hatred itself. Although the “unclean and perfidious” race had, to all intents and purposes, vanished from men’s eyes, the legend of their wickedness and misanthropy lingered in tradition and was consecrated by literature. In the middle of the ensuing century we find Gower, the poet, representing a Jew as saying:

“I am a Jewe, and by my lawe

I shal to no man be felawe

To keepe him trouth in word ne dede.”[126]

A few years afterwards Chaucer, in his Prioresses Tale, immortalised the monkish fiction of child-murder, which had already done yeoman’s service in justifying the persecution of the Jews. Chaucer’s child, to judge from the scene of its murder being laid in Asia, seems to be the eldest member of the large family of massacred Innocents, representatives of which are to be met with in nearly every European country.

“Heere bigynneth the Prioresses tale:

“There was in Asie, in a gret citee,

Amonges Cristen folk a Jewerye,

Sustened by a lord of that contree,

For foule usure and lucre of vilanye,

Hateful to Crist and to his companye;

And thurgh the strete men myght ryde or wende,

For it was free, and open at eyther ende.”

At the further end of this Jewish quarter stood a little school for Christian children, who learnt in it “swich maner doctrine as men used there,” that is, “to singen and to rede.” Among these youthful scholars was a widow’s son, “a litel clergeon, seven year of age,” whom his mother had taught to kneel and pray before the Virgin’s image. Day by day on his way to and from school, as he passed through the Jewry, this Innocent used full merrily to sing “Alma Redemptoris”:

“The swetnes hath his herte perced so

Of Cristes mooder, that, to hir to preye,

He can not stinte of singing by the weye.”

But

“Our firste foo, the serpent Sathanas,

That hath in Jewes herte his waspes nest,”

was sorely vexed at the child’s piety, and stirred up the inmates of the Jewry with such words:

“O Hebraik peple, allas!

Is this to yow a thing that is honest,

That swich a boy shal walken as him lest

In your despyt, and singe of swich sentence,

Which is again your lawes reverence?”

The Jews took the hint, and conspired to chase this Innocent out of the world. They hired a homicide, and, as the boy went by, this cursed Jew seized him, cut his throat, and cast him into a pit.

The poor widow waited all night for her little child in vain, and as soon as it was daylight she hastened to the school and elsewhere, seeking it, until she heard that it had last been seen in the Jewry. Half distracted with anguish and fear, she continued her search among the accursed Jews, now calling on Christ’s mother for help, now imploring every Jew she met to tell her if her child had passed that way. They all answered and said no!

But Jesus, who loves to hear his praises sung by the mouth of Innocence, directed her steps to the pit, and there, wondrous to relate, she heard her child, with its throat cut from ear to ear, singing lustily “Alma Redemptoris.”

“So loude, that al the place gan to ringe.”

The Christian folk, awestruck, sent for the Provost. The boy was taken out of the pit, amid piteous lamentations, “singing his song alway,” and was carried in procession to the Abbey, his mother swooning by the bier. The Jews were punished for their crime “with torment and with shameful death”; they were first drawn by wild horses and afterwards hanged.

Meanwhile, this Innocent was borne to his grave, and when sprinkled with holy water spoke and sang, “O Alma Redemptoris mater!” The abbot, “who was a holy man as monks are, or else ought to be,” began to adjure the child by the holy Trinity to tell him what was the cause of its singing, “sith that thy throte is cut, to my seminge?” The child answers: “‘My throte is cut unto my nekkeboon,’ and I should have died long ago. But Jesus Christ wills that his glory last and be remembered. So I am permitted to sing ‘O Alma’ loud and clear.”

He relates how Christ’s mother sweet, whom he had always loved, came to him and, laying a grain upon his tongue, bade him sing this anthem. Thereupon the holy monk, drawing out the boy’s tongue, removed the grain, and forthwith the boy gave up the ghost softly. The martyr’s “litel body sweet” was laid in a tomb of clear marble.

The Prioresses Tale ends with an apostrophe to young Hugh of Lincoln “sleyn also with cursed Jewes, as it is notable,” and a request that he should pray for us “sinful folk unstable.” Amen.

Bishop Percy, in his Reliques of Ancient Poetry, has preserved the Scottish ballad of The Jew’s Daughter, which turns on an incident bearing a close resemblance to Chaucer’s tale, although it seems to be based on the alleged murder at Trent, in 1475, of a boy called Simon.[127] The name of the victim, on the legend reaching England, may quite easily have been changed into the familiar Hugh. The Scottish version is as follows:

“The rain rins doune through Mirry-land toune,

Sae dois it doune the Pa:

Sae dois the lads of Mirry-land toune,

Quhan they play at the ba’.

Than out and cam the Jewis dochter,

Said, Will ye cum in and dine?

‘I winnae cum in, I cannae cum in,

Without my play-feres mine.’”

However, the boy is enticed with an apple “reid and white” and stabbed in the heart with a little pen-knife by the Jew’s daughter, who then laughingly lays him out on a dressing board, dresses him like a swine, puts him in “a cake of lead” and casts him into a filthy draw-well. Lady Helen, the boy’s mother, misses him in the evening and runs to the “Jewis castel,” calling upon her “bonny Sir Hew.” He answers from the bottom of the well.

And so one century religiously handed down to the next its fictions and its prejudices.

Yet, the Jew is as hard to keep out as Nature herself: Expellas furca tamen usque recurret. In 1410 we hear of a Jewish physician named Elias Sabot who came from Bologna with permission to settle and practise in any part of the realm. There is also reason to believe that the Jewish remnant left in England after Edward’s expulsion was strongly reinforced by the immigration of refugees from Spain towards the end of the fifteenth century. The reign of Queen Elizabeth was also distinguished by the influx of many foreigners—merchants, miners,[128] and physicians—and it is highly probable that there were Jews amongst them. But how perilous such a venture was can be seen from the following episode. In the year 1581 a certain Jeochim Gaunz, or Gaunse, came over with a proposal to furnish to the English Government some new information concerning the methods of smelting and manufacturing copper and lead ores, and conducted experiments in the mining districts of Cumberland. For some nine years the enterprising stranger lived in London unmolested, because unsuspected. But on an evil day, in September 1589, he went to Bristol, and there fell in with the Rev. Richard Crawley, a clergyman interested in Hebrew. On finding that Gaunz knew that language, Mr. Crawley cultivated his acquaintance, and in the course of one of their learned discussions Gaunz betrayed his Judaism. The discovery led to his arrest. Cross-examined by the local magistrates, he boldly confessed that he was a Bohemian Jew, born and bred, unbaptized and absolutely unable to accept the claims of Christianity to a divine origin. He was sent before the Privy Council at Whitehall, where all traces of him are lost.

But the unpopularity of the race in Elizabethan England, apart from Gaunse’s case, is abundantly attested by the Elizabethan drama. A few authors made occasional attempts to whitewash the stage Jew; but these attempts, somewhat dubious at the best, were certainly not successful. That the general opinion of the Jew continued to be anything but a favourable one, is implied by casual references in various plays, and is manifestly proved by the delineation of the Jewish character in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta and in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Marlowe’s Barabas and Shakespeare’s Shylock are both replicas of the Jew as conceived by mediaeval imagination: a money-monger fabulously rich, ineffably tender to his own people, incredibly cruel to the Christian. It is a portrait drawn by prejudice and coloured by ignorance. The two great dramatists adopted the popular lay-figure and breathed into it the spirit of life. The result is a gruesome monstrosity, animated by genius.

Barabas in the first scene of the play “is discovered in his counting-house, with heaps of gold before him.” This wealth is the fruit of extensive trade with the lands of the East. Every wind that blows brings to the Jew of Malta

“argosies

Laden with riches, and exceeding store

Of Persian silks, of gold, and oriental pearl.”

In all this prosperity Barabas sees a fulfilment of the ancient blessing bestowed by Jehovah on the sons of Israel; a proof and a pledge of the Lord’s continued favour to His chosen people:

“Thus trowls our fortune in by land and sea,

And thus are we on every side enriched:

These are the blessings promised to the Jews,

And herein was old Abram’s happiness:

What more may Heaven do for earthly man

Than thus to pour out plenty in their laps,

Ripping the bowels of the earth for them,

Making the seas their servants and the winds

To drive their substance with successful blasts?”

He does not envy the Christian his fruitless faith, nor does he see any virtue in poverty:

“They say we are a scattered nation:

I cannot tell, but we have scrambled up

More wealth by far than those that brag of faith.”

He mentions wealthy Jews in various lands, “wealthier far than any Christian,” and the opulence of the race consoles him for its political humiliation:

“Give us a peaceful rule, make Christian Kings,

That thirst so much for principality.”

Thus this practical idealist soliloquises, spiritualising the realities of filthy lucre, materialising spiritual prophecies, and, in the midst of national disgrace, retaining his racial pride intact—a living Jew. Nor is he devoid of human affections:

“I have no charge, nor many children,

But one sole daughter, whom I hold as dear

As Agamemnon did his Iphigen:

And all I have is hers.”

Round these two objects, “his girl and his gold,” all the emotions of Barabas centre, and he is happy.

But, alas! Fortune is fickle. At the very moment when Barabas is congratulating himself on his prosperity, calamity is at the door. A Turkish fleet has arrived in the harbour to demand from the Knights of Malta “the ten years’ tribute that remains unpaid.” At this emergency the Knights hurriedly hold a consultation among themselves, and, of course, decide that the Jews shall pay the debts of their Christian masters. The scapegoats are summoned to the senate-house, and the decision is announced to them, by one of the Knights, who candidly tells Barabas:

“Thou art a merchant and a moneyed man

And ’tis thy money, Barabas, we seek.

Barabas. How, my lord! my money?

Ferneze, Governor of Malta: Thine and the rest.”

It is in vain that the Hebrews plead poverty. They are told that they must contribute their share to the welfare of the land in which they are allowed to get their wealth. Nor will their share be the same as that of the faithful. The Christians, in suffering them to live in their country, commit a sin against their God, and the present distress is a punishment for it:

“For through our sufferance of your hateful lives,

Who stand accursed in the sight of Heaven,

These taxes and afflictions are befallen,

And therefore thus we are determined:

“First, the tribute money of the Turks shall all be levied amongst the Jews, and each of them to pay one-half of his estate.

“Secondly, he that denies to pay shall straight become a Christian.

“Lastly, he that denies this shall absolutely lose all he has.”

How truly mediaeval the whole scene is!

The other Jews consent to give up one-half of their estates. Barabas upbraids them for their cowardice, and stoutly refuses to comply. But his refusal of half only leads to the confiscation of the whole of his property. In return for this sacrifice Barabas is cheerfully told that he will be suffered to live in Malta, and, “if he can,” make another fortune. The Hebrew argues: “How can I multiply? of naught is nothing made.” But the Christian retorts: “From naught at first thou com’st to little wealth, from little unto more, from more to most.”

But what need have we of argument?

“If your first curse fall heavy on thy head,

And make thee poor and scorned of all the world,

’Tis not our fault, but thy inherent sin.”

Thus the poor millionaire is preached out of his possessions. What if he individually be blameless? He is one of the accursed race, and must pay the penalty for the collective sins of his forefathers. All that he obtains by his vigorous protests is the comfortless saw:

“Excess of wealth is cause of covetousness,

And covetousness, O, ’tis a monstrous sin.”

He is stripped of all he had, his goods, his money, his ships, his stores; and his mansion is converted into a nunnery. Nothing remains to him but his life, and he is left to bewail his misery and to curse its authors to his heart’s content. This he proceeds to do in the following terms:

“The Plagues of Egypt, and the curse of Heaven,

Earth’s barrenness, and all men’s hatred

Inflict upon them, thou great Primus Motor!

And here upon my knees, striking the earth,

I ban their souls to everlasting pains

And extreme tortures of the fiery deep,

That thus have dealt with me in my distress.”

His brethren, too timid to second Barabas in his struggle, now gather round him and strive to console him in his sorrow. But Barabas is not to be comforted, any more than Job was under like circumstances. Indeed, he compares his lot with Job’s, and finds it immeasurably harder:

“He had seven thousand sheep,

Three thousand camels, and two hundred yoke

Of labouring oxen, and five hundred

She-asses; but for every one of those,

Had they been valued at indifferent rate,

I had at home, and in mine argosy,

And other ships that came from Egypt last,

As much as would have bought his beasts and him,

And yet have kept enough to live upon.”

What is there left to him to live for or upon? He likens himself to a general

“That in a field amidst his enemies

Doth see his soldiers slain, himself disarmed,

And knows no means of his recovery:

Ay, let me sorrow for this sudden chance.”

However, Barabas lies. He is not quite so destitute as he would make us believe. He hints that his genius had foreseen the possibility of such a mishap and provided against it. While he is mourning his misery in loneliness, there enters his lovely daughter Abigail, just turned out of her home by the nuns, lamenting her father’s misfortunes. He tries to calm her:

“Be silent, daughter, sufferance breeds ease,

And time may yield us an occasion

Which on the sudden cannot serve the turn.

Besides, my girl, think me not all so fond

As negligently to forego so much

Without provision for thyself and me:

Ten thousand portagues, besides great pearls,

Rich costly jewels, and stones infinite,

Fearing the worst of this before it fell,

I closely hid.”

But she tells him that his house has been taken possession of by nuns, and therefore he cannot get at his hidden treasure. On hearing of this crowning calamity poor Barabas cries:

“My gold! my gold, and all my wealth is gone!”

accusing Heaven and the stars of their exceeding cruelty. But his courage and cunning do not fail him even then. He rises to the height of his misfortune and instructs his daughter to go to the Abbess of the nunnery, and, by pretending that she wishes to be converted, to obtain access to the treasure. Abigail, after much hesitation, consents to play the part of hypocrite, and she plays it with consummate skill and success. “The hopeless daughter of a hapless Jew” goes to the holy lady and declares that, fearing that her father’s afflictions proceed from sin or want of faith, she desires to pass away her life in penitence. She is admitted to the sisterhood as a novice. Barabas rails at her in simulated wrath, while secretly he gives her some final instructions concerning the treasure, and parts with her on the understanding that at midnight she will join him with the hoard.

Vexed and tormented by the memories of his lost wealth, the wretched Barabas roams the livelong night, sleepless and homeless, haunting, like the ghost of a departed miser, the place where his treasure is hid; and beseeching the God of Israel to direct Abigail’s hand. At last she appears at a window aloft, and lets the bags fall. Whereupon the Jew bursts forth into an ecstasy of joy:

“O my girl!

My gold, my fortune, my felicity.

O girl! O gold! O beauty! O my bliss!”

Two young Christian gentlemen, Mathias and Lodowick, are enamoured of the Jew’s daughter. Barabas, in the bitterness of his soul, resolves to have both youths murdered: Lodowick as the son of the Governor who bereft him of his fortune, Mathias simply as a Christian. In pursuance of this dark design, he makes use of his beloved daughter. He promises her hand to each of the youths in turn; he incenses the one against the other; and he instructs his daughter to receive them both, and entertain them “with all the courtesy she can afford.” “Use them as if they were Philistines,” he says to her, “dissemble, swear, protest, vow love” to each. No considerations of maidenly modesty need restrain her, for neither youth is “of the seed of Abraham.” She obeys, not knowing her father’s real purpose. A mock betrothal to Lodowick takes place. Abigail plights her troth to the youth; for “it’s no sin to deceive a Christian”—one

“That never tasted of the Passover,

Nor e’er shall see the land of Canaan

Nor our Messias that is yet to come.

For they themselves hold it a principle,

Faith is not to be held with heretics;

But all are heretics that are not Jews.”

No sooner has the deluded Lodowick departed, than his rival appears on the scene, and is treated likewise. But Barabas is counting without his daughter. Abigail, though indifferent to Lodowick, reciprocates Mathias’ affection. Besides, the double part she is induced to play for her father’s sake is abhorrent to her nature.

In the meantime Barabas, by foul lies and forged letters, brings about a mortal duel between the two rivals. Abigail, on hearing of her lover’s death and of her father’s villainy, indignant at having been made the instrument of his crime, revolted and sick of life, resolves to return to the nunnery and take the veil in earnest.

Barabas is exasperated by this last blow. He curses his daughter for her desertion, adopts for his heir a rascally Mohammedan slave, who had been his accomplice throughout, and makes use of him to poison all the nuns, his own daughter included.

Barabas is rejoicing at the success of his plot. On hearing the bells ring for the funeral of his victims, he breaks into fiendish exultation:

“There is no music to a Christian’s knell.

How sweet the bells ring now the nuns are dead!”

But his joy is short-lived. Before her death Abigail confessed the part which she had unwillingly taken in the conspiracy that brought about the mutual murder of the two young gentlemen. The friar who received Abigail’s confession taxes Barabas with the crime. The Jew, frightened, tries to save his life by feigned conversion. He promises to do penance:

“To fast, to pray, and wear a shirt of hair,

And on my knees creep to Jerusalem,”

and to give an immense sum to the friar’s monastery. The friar accepts the offer joyously, and is inveigled by the Jew into his house, where he is strangled. But the Mohammedan slave, in a moment of merry and amorous expansiveness, betrays his own and his master’s secrets to his boon companions, who immediately inform the Governor. Barabas and the slave are arrested and sentenced to death. The former drugs himself, and, under the impression that he is dead, is thrown outside the city walls. On recovering from the draught, he determines to avenge his wrongs by delivering the city up to the Turks. The Governor and the Knights of Malta are taken prisoners, and the Jew is made Governor. But, knowing that he will never be safe in a place and amongst people that had so much cause to hate him, he purchases peace and more wealth by a second treachery. He offers to invite the Turkish general and his comrades to a banquet and to murder them, while their soldiers are entrapped in a monastery and blown up. The Christians accept the offer, and Barabas felicitates himself on his cunning:

“Why, is not this

A Kingly kind of trade, to purchase towns

By treachery and sell ’em by deceit?”

But though they hate the Turk, the Christians hate the Jew more heartily still. They apprise the doomed general of Barabas’ plan, and the latter is, literally, made to fall into the pit which he had dug for the Turk. In his fury and despair the wretch confesses all his sins, boasting of the stratagems by which he had meant to bring confusion on them all, “damned Christian dogs and Turkish infidels” alike, and, having cursed his fill, dies. The Knights exact reparation from the Turks for the sack of the city, and thus the play ends in a triumph for the Cross.

The Jew, as has been seen, does not become the villain of the piece, until after he has been made the victim. But the audience is supposed to execrate his villainy and laugh at his sufferings. The author takes good care to disarm pity by painting the Jew in the blackest and most ludicrous colours that he can find on his palette. He endows him with a colossal nose and all the crimes under the sun. Barabas’ cruelty to the poor is only equalled by his insolence to the powerful. He is made to say that he “would for lucre’s sake have sold his soul.” His contempt and hatred towards the Christians is dwelt upon with reiterated emphasis:

“’tis a custom held with us

That when we speak with Gentiles like you,

We turn into the air to purge ourselves;

For unto us the promise doth belong.”

He instructs his Mohammedan slave:

“First be thou void of these affections,

Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear,

Be moved at nothing, see thou pity none,

But to thyself smile when the Christians moan.”

He brags that he himself has always acted on those precepts:

“As for myself, I walk abroad o’ nights,

And kill sick people groaning under walls:

Sometimes I go about and poison wells:

And now and then, to cherish Christian thieves,

I am content to lose some of my crowns,

That I may, walking in my gallery,

See ’em go pinioned along by my door.”

He gives a lurid account of his past life:

“Being young, I studied physic, and began

To practise first upon the Italian;

There I enriched the priests with burials,

And always kept the sextons’ arms in ure

With digging graves and ringing dead men’s knells.”

After a career of treachery as a military engineer, he became a usurer:

“And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting,

And tricks belonging unto brokery,

I filled the jails with bankrupts in a year,

And with young orphans planted hospitals,

And every moon made some or other mad,

And now and then one hang himself for grief,

Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll

How I with interest tormented him.”

And when the Turk had related some of his own exploits in the fields of murder, deceit, and torture of Christians, the Jew sees in him a brother:

“We are villains both:

Both circumcised, we hate Christians both.”

Thus all the anti-Jewish prejudices of the Middle Ages are embodied in Barabas, who, lest the list should be incomplete, is also accused of fornication and of having crucified a child. His daughter with all her charm and loveliness seems to be created partly as a foil to the Jew’s grotesque personality, partly as a means of wounding him through the one weak spot in his anti-Christian cuirass—his affection for her.

The Merchant of Venice has its twin brother in the ballad of Gernutus, the Jew of Venice, preserved in Percy’s Reliques:

“In Venice towne not long agoe

A cruel Jew did dwell,

Which lived all on usurie,

As Italian writers tell.”

Both stories seem to be derived from an Italian novel by Giovanni Fiorentino, written about 1378, and first printed at Milan in 1554.

Shakespeare’s Shylock is cast in the same mould as Marlowe’s Barabas. He loathes the Christian and his manners, his masques, and merriments and foppery. He will not dine with him, lest he should “smell pork, eat of the habitation which your prophet, the Nazarite, conjured the devils into. I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following; but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you.” His covetousness intensifies his superstitious hatred of the Gentile:

“I hate him for he is a Christian;

But more for that, in low simplicity,

He lends out money gratis, and brings down

The rate of usance.”

The Christian’s scorn exasperates the Jew still further:

“If I can catch him once upon the hip,

I will feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him.

He hates our sacred nation; and he rails

On me, my bargains, and my well-won thrift,

Which he calls interest. Cursed be my tribe

If I forgive him!”

But, while abhorring the Christian in his heart, he outwardly fawns upon him, awaiting an opportunity of gratifying his hunger for vengeance. This soon presents itself. Antonio, the upright and proud Venetian merchant, proposes to stand security for a friend who wants to borrow three thousand ducats of the Jew, on Antonio’s bond. Even while negotiating the loan, the Christian reviles the Jew as “an evil soul, a villain with a smiling cheek,” a whited sepulchre. Shylock now reminds him of all the insults and invectives he used to heap upon him in the Exchange:

“You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog,

And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine,

and yet you solicit my help.” The Christian answers:

“I am as like to call thee so again,

To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too,”

and asks him to lend the money as to an enemy. The Jew pretends to forgive and forget; but he takes Antonio at his word, and playfully demands a forfeit “for an equal pound of your fair flesh, to be cut off and taken in what part of your body pleaseth me.” The bond is sealed, and it proves a fatal bond. Antonio’s ships are wrecked at sea, and, when the term expires, he finds himself unable to pay the Jew.

Shylock, like Barabas, has an only daughter, Jessica, whom he cherishes and trusts above all human beings. All the love that he can spare from his ducats is lavished upon this daughter. Fair as Abigail, Jessica lacks the filial loyalty and sweet grace which render the daughter of Barabas so charming a contrast to her father. Jessica is “ashamed to be her father’s child.” She detests him, and to her her own home “is hell.” Enamoured of a Christian youth, she enters into a shameless intrigue with him to deceive and rob her father, and, disguised as a boy, she runs away with her lover, carrying a quantity of gold and jewels from the paternal hoard. The discovery of his daughter’s desertion throws Shylock, as it did Barabas, into despair. He never felt his nation’s curse until now.

While in this mood he hears of Antonio’s losses and rejoices exceedingly thereat. The news of his enemy’s mishap acts as a salve for his own domestic woes. His old grudge against the Christian, embittered by his recent misfortune, steels him against mercy. He recalls the indignities and injuries of which he had been the recipient at Antonio’s hands, all because he was a Jew, and vows to exact the full forfeit: to have the Christian’s flesh. Antonio is taken to prison and implores Shylock for pity; but the latter grimly answers: “I’ll have my bond. Thou call’dst me dog before thou hadst a cause; but since I am a dog, beware my fangs. I will have my bond.”

The Venetian law was strict on the subject of commercial transactions. The prosperity of the Republic depended on its reputation for equity and impartiality, and not even the Doge could interfere with the course of Justice. The trial commences. Antonio appears in court, and Shylock demands justice. He is not to be softened by prayers from the victim’s friends, or by entreaties from the Duke. He will not even accept the money multiplied three times over; but he insists on the due and forfeit of his bond. Thus matters stand, when Portia, the betrothed of Antonio’s friend, appears on the scene in the guise of a young and learned judge. She first endeavours to bend the Jew’s heart; but on finding him inflexible, she acknowledges that there is no power in Venice that can alter a legally established claim: “The bond is forfeit, and lawfully by this the Jew may claim a pound of flesh.”

Antonio is bidden to lay bare his breast, and Shylock is gleefully preparing to execute his cruel intent; the scene has reached its climax of dramatic intensity, when the tables are suddenly turned upon the Jew. The young judge stays his hand with these awful words:

“This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood.

Take thou thy pound of flesh;

But, in the cutting it, if thou dost shed

One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods

Are, by the laws of Venice, confiscate

Unto the state of Venice.”

Shylock has scarcely recovered from this thunderclap, and expressed his willingness to accept the money offered to him at first, when the judge interrupts him: “The Jew shall have all justice—nothing but the penalty”—just a pound of flesh, not a scruple more or less. If not, “thou diest and all thy goods confiscate.”

Shylock is now content to accept only the principal. But the judge again says: “Since the Jew refused the money in open Court, he shall have merely justice and his bond—nothing but the forfeiture,” under the conditions already named.

Shylock offers to give up his claim altogether. But no! the judge again says:

“The law hath yet another hold on you.

It is enacted in the laws of Venice—

If it be proved against an alien

That by direct or indirect attempts

He seek the life of any citizen,

The party ’gainst the which he doth contrive

Shall seize one half his goods; the other half

Comes to the privy coffer of the State;

And the offender’s life lies in the mercy

Of the Duke only, ’gainst all other voice.

In which predicament, I say, thou stand’st.

Down, therefore, and beg mercy of the Duke.”

Antonio intercedes on behalf of his enemy, and allows him to retain the use of one half of his goods, on condition that he become a Christian and bequeath his property to his Christian son-in-law and his daughter. The Jew perforce accepts these terms, leaves the Court crestfallen, and every good man and woman is expected to rejoice at his discomfiture.

Such is the Jew in Shakespeare’s eyes, or rather in the eyes of the public which Shakespeare wished to entertain. Yet, despite the poet’s anxiety to interpret the feelings of his audience, his own humanity and sympathetic imagination reveal themselves in the touching appeal put into the victim’s mouth: “Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian? if you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and, if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.”

But few, if any, of Shakespeare’s contemporaries shared his own broad sense of justice. The Jew was popularly regarded as the quintessence of all that is foul, grim, and greedy in human form. In him the Elizabethan Englishman saw all the qualities that he detested: covetousness, deceitfulness, and cruelty. Moreover, the Jew was still identified with the typical usurer, and usury continued to be regarded in England with all the superstitious horror of the Middle Ages. ♦1546♦ It was not until the reign of Henry VIII. that a law was reluctantly passed, fixing the interest at 10 per cent. But the prejudice against lending money for profit was so strong that the law had to be repealed in the following reign. All loans at interest were again pronounced illegal under Edward VI. by an Act which defeated its own purpose, and was in its turn repealed during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, when, despite the law, the rate of interest was 14 per cent. A second Act, passed in 1571, while violently condemning usury, in the modern sense of the term, permits an interest of 10 per cent. This rate remained in force under James I.

Bacon has recorded for us the opinions and the sentiments of his contemporaries on the subject. In his essay Of Seditions and Troubles, written some time between 1607 and 1612, he says: “Above all things, good Policie is to be used, that the Treasure and Moneyes, in a State, be not gathered into few Hands. For otherwise, a State may have a great Stock, and yet starve.... This is done, chiefly, by suppressing, or at least, keeping a strait Hand, upon the Devouring Trades of Usurie, etc.” In this passage Bacon objects to usury on economic grounds. Elsewhere he sets forth objections of a totally different nature. In the essay Of Riches, published in 1625, he says: “Usury is the certainest Meanes of Gaine, though one of the worst; As that, whereby a Man doth eate his Bread; In sudore vultûs alieni; and besides, doth Plough upon Sundaies.” Aristotle’s mischievous metaphor was still quoted as an argument against usury. It is mentioned by Bacon among the many “witty invectives against usury”[129] current in his time, and it is embodied by Shakespeare in the phrase that usurers “take a breed for barren metal.”[130]

At that time the question was engrossing public attention. In 1621 a Bill for the abatement of usury had been brought into Parliament, and two years later a second Bill to the same effect passed the Commons. Bacon seized the opportunity for the publication of his essay Of Usurie, which appeared in 1623. In a letter to Secretary Conway he states that his object in writing it was to suggest means, whereby “to grind the teeth of usury and yet to make it grind to his Majesty’s mill in good sort, without discontent or perturbation.” In consonance with this view, Bacon describes usury as an evil, indeed, but as an inevitable evil: “For since there must be Borrowing and Lending, and Men are so hard of Heart, as they will not lend freely, Usury must be permitted.” He proceeds to balance the advantages and disadvantages of the practice and comes to the conclusion that it should be recognised and controlled by the State, for “It is better to mitigate Usury by Declaration, than to suffer it to rage by Connivance.” Bacon’s advocacy was not wasted. ♦1624♦ In the following year Usury was once more sanctioned by the Legislature and interest was reduced to 8 per cent. But this measure did not obliterate the deep-seated hatred of the money-lender, nor did it weaken the popular idea that usury was the peculiar attribute of a Jew. Bacon in the same essay tells us that there were among his contemporaries men who recommended “that Usurers should have Orange-tawney Bonnets, because they doe Judaize.”

However, the abhorrence of the Jew was that which is inspired by a repulsive abstraction rather than by a concrete individual. The Jew in the flesh was practically an unknown creature to the ordinary English man and woman of the age. If he was hated as a blood-sucking ghoul, he was not more real than a ghoul. But scarcely had the generation that hissed Barabas and Shylock on the stage passed away, when the Jew reappeared as a human reality upon the soil which his fathers had quitted more than three centuries before.

Meanwhile a great change had come over England. The protest against authority, both in its intellectual and in its spiritual form, had crossed the Channel and been welcomed by responsive souls on our shores. When Erasmus came to England in 1498, he found here more than he brought with him. Grocyn had learnt his Greek in Italy, and Colet had returned from that country breathing scorn for the “ungodly refinements” of theology. In these scholars, and scholars like these, Erasmus found kindred spirits; hearty allies in the struggle for light. Colet enchanted him with his Platonic eloquence, and Sir Thomas More with the sweetness of his temper. And the band of these three noble men—Colet, Erasmus and More—all eager for reform and for purification of mind and soul, sowed the seed from which was to spring a plant that even they little dreamed of. The characteristic compromise between the new and the old under Henry VIII., grew into the purer Protestantism of Elizabeth and James I., and, though in Shakespeare we still see a world essentially Catholic in tone and ideas, it is a world that is fast dying away. Yet a few years more and Protestantism, under its most militant and morose aspect, has banished the last vestiges of mediaeval Catholicism and merriment from Merry England. King Charles is gone, and Oliver Cromwell has inherited the realities, if not the pomp, of royalty.

CHAPTER XVIII
RESETTLEMENT

There was much in Cromwell’s followers to dispose them favourably towards Israel. Their history, their theology, their character, their morals, and their ideals were all as Hebraic as anything could be that had not had its birth in Asia. The Puritans boasted, as the Jews had always done, that they themselves were the only pure Church, and hated all others as idolaters. They believed, as the Jews had always done, that they were the favourite people of Heaven, selected by the Almighty to bear testimony to His unity, to fight His battles and to exterminate His enemies: “Destroy the Amalekites, root and branch, hip and thigh,” was the burden of the Puritan preachers. They dreamed of a Theocracy, as the Jews had always done; of a state in which the civil should be subordinated to religious authority. The spiritual arrogance of the Jew met with its other half in the spiritual arrogance of the Puritan. If the Jew held that for him Jehovah had spoken on Mount Sinai, the Puritan was equally certain that for him God had suffered on the hill of Calvary. If the Jew applied to himself the prophecies of the Old Testament, the Puritan was as eager to appropriate the fulfilments of the New. They both walked with their heads in the skies, but with their feet firm upon solid earth. The daily contemplation of eternal interests did not disqualify either of them for the successful pursuit of temporal ends. Spiritual at once and practical, they saw in material prosperity a proof of divine approbation. Believing, as they did, that “thrift is blessing,” they strove to earn the fruits of thrift by excessive piety. And, while they established their own rule, they had no doubt that they were promoting the Kingdom of God.

The resemblance can be traced to the minutest details. The Puritan’s detestation of the fine arts, of ecclesiastical decoration, and of sacerdotal foppery was not less sincere than that of the Jew. Equally strong was the hatred entertained by both sects towards public amusements. Under the reign of the Puritans the playhouses were closed, masques were anathematised, maypoles demolished; all beauty was denounced as a sin, all pleasure punished as a crime. Even so at the same period (about 1660) a Rabbi of Venice expressed his horror at the establishment of theatres by Venetian Jews, wherein men, women, and children of the chosen people assisted at frivolous performances, and regretted his inability to suppress the graceless and godless gatherings. Both Jews and Puritans in the seventeenth century were ready to subscribe to the words of the Talmudic sage of the first: “I give thanks to thee, O Lord, my God and God of my fathers, that thou hast placed my portion among those who sit in the House of Learning and the House of Prayer, and didst not cast my lot among those who frequent theatres and circuses. For I labour, and they labour; I wait, and they wait; I to inherit paradise, they the pit of destruction.”[131]

Lastly, both Puritans and Jews had suffered sorely for dissent, and they had both made others suffer as sorely for the same reason. The heroic fortitude of both sects under affliction was disgraced by their fierce intolerance when in power.

This close similarity in temperament and ideas found expression in many ways, more or less marvellous, more or less amusing. It originated that partiality to the Old Testament which was responsible for most of the Puritans’ peculiarities and sins. The Lord’s Day in their mouths became the Sabbath; their children were baptized by the uncouth names of ancient Hebrew patriarchs and prophets; their everyday conversation was a compound of sanctity and Semitism. Hebrew was revered as the primitive tongue of mankind, and it was held that a child brought up in solitude would naturally speak Hebrew at four years of age. Not only were their notions on social and moral questions derived from the code of Moses, but even in matters judicial that code was gravely recommended as a substitute for English jurisprudence, and the extreme Puritans, who migrated to America, actually adopted the Mosaic law in Massachusetts, acted Hebrew masquerades in the island of Rhode, and called the members of the Constitutional Committee of New Haven “The seven pillars hewn out for the House of Wisdom.” Last, but most important of all, Cromwell’s Ironsides found in the Old Testament precedent and sanction for deeds which are utterly abhorrent to the teaching of the New.

Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that, while the persecution of Papists and Episcopalians was at its highest in England, the public attitude towards the Jews should have undergone a marked change for the better. Members of the race were already established in London, though secretly. On January 5, 1649, two inhabitants of Amsterdam presented to Fairfax and the Army a petition for the repeal of the banishment of the Jews under Edward I., and they must have found the public mind not unprepared for their request. The question of the rehabilitation of the Jews formed about this time the subject of earnest consideration in certain circles. Edward Nicholas, ex-Secretary to Parliament, advocated it with fervour and biblical erudition, declaring his belief that the tribulations which England had endured for a generation were a punishment for the expulsion of God’s people. A newspaper, published on May 6, 1652, contains the account of a visit to a synagogue in Leghorn by a friendly sailor, ending with the appeal, “Shall they be tolerated by the Pope, and by the Duke of Florence, by the Turks, and by the Barbarians and others, and shall England still have laws in force against them?”[132] ♦1652♦ When Dr. John Owen drew up his scheme for a national Church and submitted it to Parliament, Major Butler and some others attacked it as not liberal enough. Not only did they denounce interference on the part of the State in matters spiritual and doctrinal, but they asked: “Is it not the duty of magistrates to permit the Jews, whose conversion we look for, to live freely and peaceably amongst us?” Roger Williams was strongly on the same side, and so was Whalley, the gallant Major of Naseby fame, both on religious and on practical grounds.

As a result of this agitation in favour of Israel, four conferences were publicly held for a discussion of the matter. The last of these occurred on Wednesday, December 12th, 1655, at Whitehall, under the presidency of the Protector. It was a great event, and it created a deep sensation throughout the country. All the highest authorities of the Church and the State assisted at the consultation, and argued out the question whether the Jews should be permitted to settle and trade in England again.

The proposer was Manasseh Ben Israel, a Rabbi of Amsterdam, the son of a Marrano of Lisbon, who had suffered at the hands of the Inquisition. Manasseh was a true patriot: rich in nothing but Rabbinical and Cabbalistic lore, a fluent speaker, and a prolific writer; withal a firm believer in the approaching advent of the Messiah, and in his own divinely appointed mission to promote that advent. Indeed, he had a family interest in the matter; for he had married a descendant of the House of David, and entertained hopes that, in accordance with the ancient prophecies, the King of Israel might be among his own offspring. Manasseh, thinking that the establishment of the Puritan Commonwealth and of liberty of conscience in England, as well as the enormous attention paid by the European world at that time to questions of biblical prophecy, afforded an opportunity for the readmission of his co-religionists, had already approached the English Puritans and Millennarians, and had made several attempts to obtain a hearing of Parliament; but he had failed until Cromwell’s accession to the head of affairs. Manasseh, in his declaration to the Commonwealth of England, dwelt at great length and with great historical knowledge on the loyalty shown by the Jewish people in the countries where they were treated kindly. Among other examples he quoted the heroic fidelity of the Jews of Burgos to the fallen King of Castile, Don Pedro.[133] But his principal argument was that by the admission of the Jews into England the biblical prophecies concerning the Messianic era—namely, that it would not dawn until the Israelites had been dispersed through all the nations of the earth—would be fulfilled, and thus the era itself brought materially nearer. It was an argument well calculated to appeal to an audience thirsting for the Millennium and the Fifth Monarchy of the Apocalypse, and terribly anxious to pave the way for the Redeemer.

Cromwell himself—whether influenced by Messianic expectations, by the desire to win over the Jews to Christianity through kindness, by broad principles of religious toleration, or by the less aërial motive of making use of the Jews as a means of obtaining intelligence on international affairs and of profiting by their wealth and commercial ability—was earnestly in favour of Manasseh’s proposal, and supported it with great eloquence. But it was not to be. Though the conference decided that there was no legal obstacle to the settlement of Jews in England, public opinion, and religious sentiment more especially, were not yet ripe for so revolutionary a measure. Despite the enlightened example of leaders like Cromwell and Milton, the majority thought otherwise. Liberty of conscience? they said. Yes, but within certain limits. So, after a long and wearisome controversy, in which prophecies and statutes were solemnly quoted by both sides, weighed and rejected, prejudice prevailed over reason and Christian charity; and Manasseh Ben Israel was obliged to depart—not quite empty-handed; for Cromwell rewarded his labours in the good cause with an annual allowance of one hundred pounds, which, however, the rabbi did not live to enjoy. He died on the way to Amsterdam; like Moses, denied the satisfaction of witnessing the fruit of his zeal. For, though a public and general admission of his co-religionists was found impracticable, it was understood that individual members of the race could settle in the country by Cromwell’s private permission. Many availed themselves of this privilege, in the teeth of strong opposition on the part of the Christian merchants of the city, and soon a humble synagogue and a Jewish cemetery were seen in London—nearly four hundred years after their confiscation by Edward I. ♦1657♦ This return is still celebrated by English Jews as Re-settlement Day, its anniversary constituting one of the few “red-letter days” in their calendar. Nor is the man forgotten who practically secured the boon. Manasseh’s memory is held in deservedly high honour among Hebrews, and the English Jewish community in 1904 celebrated the 300th anniversary of his birth.

♦1660♦

When, a few years after the settlement, the Commonwealth was overthrown by the Restoration, the Jewish community survived their protector. Charles II., too needy to despise the Jews, not bigoted enough to persecute them, followed the tolerant policy of his great predecessor, and, though from entirely different motives, granted to them the benefit of an unmolested, if legally unrecognised, residence in his dominions. Mr. Pepys visited their synagogue in London on October 13th, 1663, and seems to have been greatly amazed, amused, and scandalised by what he saw therein:

“After dinner my wife and I, by Mr. Rawlinson’s conduct, to the Jewish Synagogue: where the men and boys in their vayles, and the women behind a lettice out of sight; and some things stand up, which I believe is their law, in a press to which all coming in do bow; and at the putting on their vayles do say something, to which others that hear the Priest do cry Amen, and the party do kiss his vayle. Their service all in a singing way and in Hebrew. And anon their Laws that they take out of the press are carried by several men, four or five several burthens in all, and they do relieve one another; and whether it is that every one desires to have the carrying of it, thus they carried it round about the room while such a service is singing. And in the end they had a prayer for the King, in which they pronounced his name in Portugall; but the prayer, like the rest, in Hebrew.

“But, Lord! to see the disorder, laughing, sporting, and no attention, but confusion in all their service, more like brutes than people knowing the true God, would make a man forswear ever seeing them more; and indeed I never did see so much, or could have imagined there had been any religion in the whole world so absurdly performed as this.”

Such was the impression which the Jewish congregation produced on that keen observer of the surface of things.

The inference to be drawn from these sprightly comments is that the Jew was far from having outlived his unpopularity. Though the doctrine of toleration, for which Cromwell had fought and Milton suffered, was still preached by divines like Taylor and expounded by philosophers like Locke, the English public was far from recognising every man’s right to think, act and worship as seemed good to him. So hard it is even for the faintest ray of light to pierce the mists of prejudice.

To Mr. Pepys we also owe a curious glimpse of the vigour with which the Messianic Utopia was cherished at this time amongst us. The fame of Sabbataï Zebi had reached England, and the Prophet of Smyrna found adherents even in the city of London. We are in 1666, on the eve of the mystic era fixed by enthusiasts as the year that was to see the restoration of Israel to the Holy Land. Under date February 19th, Mr. Pepys makes the following entry in his Diary;—“I am told for certain, what I have heard once or twice already, of a Jew in town, that in the name of the rest do offer to give any man £10 to be paid £100, if a certain person now at Smyrna be within these two years owned by all the Princes of the East, and particularly the Grand Segnor, as the King of the world, in the same manner we do the King of England here, and that this man is the true Messiah. One named a friend of his that had received ten pieces in gold upon this score, and says that the Jew hath disposed of £1,100 in this manner, which is very strange; and certainly this year of 1666 will be a year of great action; but what the consequences of it will be, God knows!”

♦1689♦

But the Messiah did not come; and twenty-four years later, under William and Mary, an attempt was made to fleece the unpopular race in London. It was proposed in the Commons that £100,000 should be exacted from the Jews; and the proposition impressed the House as tempting. But the Jews presented a petition pleading their inability to comply and declaring that they would rather leave the kingdom than submit to such treatment. Their protest was seconded by statesmen who, be their personal feelings towards the Jews what they might, objected to the measure as contrary to the spirit of the British Constitution; and after some discussion the project was abandoned, though not the prejudice which had made such a proposal possible.

Sober Protestantism did not in the least share the Puritan preference for Hebrew ideals. If the Spectator may be taken as a mirror of public opinion on the subject, in the reign of Queen Anne, English Protestants objected to “the Multiplicity of Ceremonies in the Jewish Religion, as Washings, Dresses, Meats, Purgations, and the like.” Addison states that the reason for these minute observances, adduced by the Jews, was their anxiety to create as many occasions as possible of showing their love to God, by doing in all circumstances of life something to please Him. However, this explanation does not seem convincing to the critic, who goes on to remark that Roman Catholic apologists use similar arguments in defence of their own rites, and concludes, “But, notwithstanding the plausible Reason with which both the Jew and the Roman Catholick would excuse their respective Superstitions, it is certain there is something in them very pernicious to Mankind, and destructive to Religion.”[134] Accordingly, a statute of Queen Anne encouraged conversion to Christianity by compelling Jewish parents to support their apostate children.

Addison, elsewhere, recognises the advantages, commercial and other, which the world owes to the Jews’ dispersion through the nations of the earth; but he quaintly observes: “They are like the Pegs and Nails in a great Building, which, though they are but little valued in themselves, are absolutely necessary to keep the whole Frame together.”[135] He is impressed by the multitude of the Jews, despite the decimations and persecutions to which they had been exposed for so many centuries, no less than by their world-wide dissemination and firm adherence to their religion; and he endeavours to explain these remarkable phenomena by several reflections which deserve to be quoted, not only on account of the intrinsic sound sense of some of them, but also for the sake of the picture which they present of the Jewish nation in the early days of the eighteenth century, as it appeared to a highly cultured Gentile, and of the highly cultured Gentile’s attitude towards the nation:

“I can,” says the Spectator, “in the first place attribute their numbers to nothing but their constant Employment, their Abstinence, their Exemption from Wars, and, above all, their frequent Marriages; for they look on Celibacy as an accursed State, and generally are married before Twenty, as hoping the Messiah may descend from them.”

Their dispersion is explained as follows:

“They were always in Rebellions and Tumults while they had the Temple and Holy City in View, for which reason they have often been driven out of their old Habitations in the Land of Promise. They have as often been banished out of most other Places where they have settled.... Besides, the whole People is now a Race of such Merchants as are Wanderers by Profession, and, at the same time, are in most if not all Places incapable of either Lands or Offices, that might engage them to make any part of the World their Home. This Dispersion would probably have lost their Religion had it not been secured by the Strength of its Constitution: For they are to live all in a Body, and generally within the same Enclosure; to marry among themselves, and to eat no Meats that are not killed or prepared their own way. This shuts them out from all Table Conversation, and the most agreeable Intercourses of Life; and, by consequence, excludes them from the most probable Means of Conversion.

“If, in the last place, we consider what Providential Reason may be assigned for these three Particulars, we shall find that their Numbers, Dispersion, and Adherence to their Religion, have furnished every Age, and every Nation of the World, with the strongest Arguments for the Christian Faith, not only as these very Particulars are foretold of them, but as they themselves are the Depositories of these and all the other Prophecies, which tend to their own Confusion. Their Number furnishes us with a sufficient Cloud of Witnesses that attest the Truth of the Old Bible. Their Dispersion spreads these Witnesses thro’ all parts of the World. The Adherence to their Religion makes their Testimony unquestionable. Had the whole Body of the Jews been converted to Christianity, we should certainly have thought all the Prophecies of the Old Testament, that relate to the Coming and History of our Blessed Saviour, forged by Christians, and have looked upon them, with the Prophecies of the Sybils, as made many Years after the Events they pretended to foretell.”

This cold-blooded habit of drawing from the sufferings of fellow-men an assurance of our own salvation is still cultivated by many good Christians. It is a comfortable doctrine, though not particularly complimentary to Providence.

♦1723♦

But if the progress of reason is slow, it is sure. A few years after the publication of Addison’s essay, the Jews already established in England were recognised as British subjects. ♦1725♦ Two years later a Jewish mathematician was made Fellow of the Royal Society, and not long after a Jew became secretary and librarian of the Society. Judges also refrained from summoning Jewish witnesses on the Sabbath. ♦1753♦ The concession of 1723 was followed, thirty years later, by the right of naturalisation. But, even then, though the Commons passed the Bill, the Lords and the Bishops endorsed it, and King George II. ratified it, so loud an outcry from traders and theologians arose thereat that the gift had to be revoked. “No more Jews, no wooden shoes,” was the elegant refrain in which the British public sang its sentiments on the subject, and the effigy of an enlightened Deacon, who had defended the Act, was burnt publicly at Bristol. England, which in the Middle Ages had been induced to persecute and expel the Jews by the example of the Continent, was once more to be influenced by the Continental attitude towards the race. Fortunately, this influence was now of a different kind.

CHAPTER XIX
THE EVE OF EMANCIPATION

About the middle of the eighteenth century a new spirit had arisen on the Continent of Europe; or rather the spirit of the Renaissance, suppressed in Italy, had re-asserted itself in Central Europe under a more highly developed form. Seventeen hundred years had passed since the heavenly choir sang on the plain of Bethlehem the glorious anthem, “Peace on earth, good-will toward men.” And the message which had been blotted out in blood, while the myth and the words were worshipped, was once more heard in a totally different version. Those who delivered it were not angels, but men of the world; the audience not a group of rude Asiatic shepherds, but the most polished of European publics; and the tongue in which it was delivered not the simple Aramaic of Palestine, but the complex vehicle of modern science. Once more man, by an entirely new route, had arrived at the one great truth, the only true commandment: “Love one another, O ye creatures of a day. Bear with one another’s faults and follies. Life is too brief for hatred; human blood too precious to be wasted in mutual destruction.”

It was the age of Voltaire, Diderot and Jean Jacques Rousseau in France; of Lessing and Mendelssohn in Germany. The doctrine of universal charity and happiness which, like its ancient prototype, was later to be inculcated at the point of the sword and illustrated by rape, murder, fire and famine, as yet found its chief expression in poetical visions of freedom and in philosophical theories of equality promulgated by sanguine Encyclopaedists. It was a period of lofty aspirations not yet degraded by mediocre performance; and the Jews, who had hitherto passively or actively shared in every stage of Europe’s progress, were to participate in this development also. Unlike the earlier awakenings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this call for tolerance did not die away on the confines of Christendom. The time had come for the question to be put: “Sind Christ and Jude eher Christ und Jude als Mensch?” Israel was destined to receive at the hands of Reason what Conscience had proved unable to grant. And in this broader awakening both Teuton and Latin were united. The French philosophers served the cause of toleration by teaching that all religions are false; the German by teaching that they are all true.

But, ere this triumph could be achieved, the Jews had to overcome many and powerful enemies. Among these were the two most famous men of the century.

♦1740–86♦

Frederick the Great, King of Prussia and ardent friend of philosophy, appears anything but great or philosophical in his policy towards the children of Israel. Under his reign the prohibitive laws of the Middle Age were revived in a manner which exceeded mediaeval legislation in thoroughness, though it could not plead mediaeval barbarism as an excuse. Only a limited number of Jews were permitted to reside in Frederick’s dominions. By the “General Privilege” of 1750 they were divided into two categories. In the first were included traders and officials of the Synagogue. These had a hereditary right of residence restricted to one child in each family. The right for a second child was purchased by them for 70,000 thalers. The second division embraced persons of independent means tolerated individually; but their right of abode expired with them. The marriage regulations were so severe that they condemned poor Jews to celibacy; while all Jews, rich and poor alike, were debarred from liberal professions, and they all were fleeced by taxes ruinous at once and ludicrous.

Voltaire, the arch-enemy of Feudalism, yet defended the feudal attitude towards the Jews. His enmity for the race did not spring entirely from capricious ill-humour. He had a grudge against the Jews owing to some pecuniary losses sustained, as he complained, through the bankruptcy of a Jewish capitalist of the name of Medina. The story, as told by the inimitable story-teller himself, is worth repeating: “Medina told me that he was not to blame for his bankruptcy: that he was unfortunate, that he had never been a son of Belial. He moved me, I embraced him, we praised God together, and I lost my money. I have never hated the Jewish nation; I hate nobody.”[136]

♦1750–51♦

But this was not all. Whilst in Berlin, Voltaire waged a protracted warfare against a Hebrew jeweller. It was a contest between two great misers, each devoutly bent on over-reaching the other. According to a good, if too emphatic, judge, “nowhere, in the Annals of Jurisprudence, is there a more despicable thing, or a deeper involved in lies and deliriums,” than this Voltaire-Hirsch lawsuit.[137] It arose out of a transaction of illegal stock-jobbing. Voltaire had commissioned the Jew Hirsch to go to Dresden and purchase a number of Saxon Exchequer bills—which were payable in gold to genuine Prussian holders only—giving him for payment a draft on Paris, due after some weeks, and receiving from him a quantity of jewels in pledge, till the bills were delivered. Hirsch went to Dresden, but sent no bills. Voltaire, suspecting foul play, stopped payment of the Paris draft, and ordered Hirsch to come back at once. On the Jew’s arrival an attempt at settlement was made. Voltaire asked for his draft and offered to return the diamonds, accompanied with a sum of money covering part of the Jew’s travelling expenses. Hirsch on examining the diamonds declared that some of them had been changed, and declined to accept them. It was altogether a mauvaise affaire, and to this day it remains a mystery which of the two litigants was more disingenuous.

The case ended in a sentence which forced Hirsch to restore the Paris draft and Voltaire to buy the jewels at a price fixed by sworn experts. Hirsch was at liberty to appeal, if he could prove that the diamonds had been tampered with. In the meantime he was fined ten thalers for falsely denying his signature. Voltaire shrieked hysterically, trying to convince the world and himself that he had triumphed. But the world, at all events, refused to be convinced. The scandal formed the topic of conversation and comment throughout the civilised world. Frederick’s own view of the case was that his friend Voltaire had tried “to pick Jew pockets,” but, instead, had his own pocket picked of some £150, and, moreover, he was made the laughing-stock of Europe in pamphlets and lampoons innumerable—one of these being a French comedy, Tantale en Procès, attributed by some to Frederick himself; a poor production wherein the author ridicules—to the best of his ability—the unfortunate philosopher. The incident was not calculated to sweeten Voltaire’s temper, or to enhance his affection for the Jewish people. Vain and vindictive, the sage, with all his genius and his many amiable qualities, never forgot an injury or forgave a defeat.

On the other hand, the Jews could boast not a few allies. Among the champions of humanity, in the noblest sense of the term, none was more earnest than Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the prince of modern critics. His pure and lofty nature had met with her kindred in Moses Mendelssohn, the Jewish philosopher, born within the same twelvemonth. ♦1728–9♦ The friendship which bound these two children of diverse races and creeds together was a practical proof of Lessing’s own doctrine that virtue is international, and that intellectual affinity recognises no theological boundaries. ♦1779♦ This doctrine, already preached in most eloquent prose, found an artistic embodiment, and a universal audience, in Nathan der Weise—the first appearance of the Jew on the European stage as a human being, and a human being of the very highest order. The Wise Nathan was no other than Moses Mendelssohn, scarcely less remarkable a person than Lessing himself. Years before Mendelssohn had left his native town of Dessau and trudged on to Berlin in search of a future. A friendless and penniless lad, timid, deformed, and repulsively ugly, he was with the utmost difficulty admitted into the Prussian capital, of which he was to become an ornament. For long years after his arrival in Berlin, the gifted and destitute youth laboured and waited with the patient optimism of one conscious of his own powers, until an unwilling world was forced to recognise the beauty and heroism of the soul which lurked under that most unpromising exterior; and the Jewish beggar lad, grown into an awkward, stuttering and insignificant-looking man, gradually rose to be the idol of a salon—the eighteenth century equivalent for a shrine—at which every foreign visitor of distinction and culture, irrespective of religion or nationality, deemed it an honour to be allowed to worship. Though faithful to the cult of his Hebrew fathers, Mendelssohn was deeply imbued with Hellenic thought and sense of beauty. His famous dialogue, Phaedo, or the Immortality of the Soul, might have been written by Plato, had Plato lived in the eighteenth century; so much so that an enthusiastic pastor and physiognomist of Zurich, enchanted by Mendelssohn’s masterpiece, declared that he saw the spirit of Socrates not only in every line of the book, but in every line of the author’s face. Like a present-day phrenologist, Lavater was anxious to obtain a model of Mendelssohn’s head as an advertisement for his science; but, being in addition a pious evangelical minister, he also nourished hopes of winning Mendelssohn over to the Christian faith. In both these objects of his ambition the well-meaning physiognomist was sadly disappointed.

The great work of Mendelssohn’s life is the partial reconciliation which by his writings he assisted in effecting between the two worlds that had so long misjudged and mistrusted each other. His translation of the Pentateuch into pure German inaugurated for the Jews of Germany a new era of literary activity. By substituting modern German for the barbarous Yiddish in their education the book established an intellectual bond between them and their Christian fellow-countrymen. Lessing made the Jew known to the Gentile; Mendelssohn made the Gentile known to the Jew. And even the hostility of Frederick, the master of legions, the sneers of Voltaire, the master of laughter, and the bigotry of the Protestant public and of the Synagogue prevailed not against the united endeavours of the two apostles. In 1763 Mendelssohn carried off the prize offered by the Academy of Berlin for an essay on a philosophical subject, beating no less a competitor than Kant. In the same year Frederick, who three years before, enraged at some thinly-veiled disparagement of his verses by the Jewish critic, had been prevented from punishing him only by the fear of French ridicule, was induced to honour Mendelssohn by granting him the status of a Protected Jew.

Among Mendelssohn’s young contemporaries three are pre-eminent as representatives of the new Hebrew culture: Herz, Ben David, and Maimon. Herz was Kant’s favourite pupil and distinguished himself as a popular exponent of his master’s philosophy. Ben David was a mathematician and a student of Kant’s philosophy. On the latter subject he lectured at the University of Vienna and afterwards in Berlin. Maimon was a Polish Jew who had inherited restlessness of body from his fathers and restlessness of mind from the writings of his great namesake Maimonides. He wandered over the limitless and cheerless desert of Negation, sought to slake his thirst at the mirage of the Cabbala, or to forget it in the mysticism of the “Pious,” and finally, at the age of five-and-twenty, quitting home and family with the readiness characteristic of the born vagrant, he arrived in Berlin, unwashed, unkempt, and untaught in any tongue but his native jargon of Germano-Polish Hebrew. Some time afterwards, however, he became famous by the publication of an Autobiography—a work worthy to stand beside Rousseau’s Confessions in one respect at least: its unsparing and almost savage unreserve. Its sincerity was doubted by George Eliot and by other critics also. But Schiller and Goethe were both impressed by this work, and Maimon was honoured with the latter poet’s acquaintance.

Gradually there was formed in the capital of Prussia a wide circle of intellectual Jews and Jewesses, which stood in strong contrast to the proud and stupid nobility on the one hand and to the homely and stupid bourgeoisie on the other. Between these two frigid zones spread the Jewish class of men and women rich in money and brains, cultivating French literature, wit, and infidelity. Mendelssohn’s house was at first the centre of this circle, and after his death it was succeeded by that of Herz, whose own brilliancy was eclipsed by that of his wife. In her salon were to be met more celebrities than at Court. Mirabeau was captivated by the gifted Jewess’s charm, and little by little even the wives of distinguished men began to acknowledge the beautiful Henrietta’s attraction. Another literary salon was at the same time opened by a Jewish lady in Vienna, and it attained an equal degree of social success. These are only a few examples of that spiritual emancipation which accelerated the political emancipation of Israel in Europe. It is true that the intoxication of freedom produced a certain amount of frivolity, immorality, and blind imitation of Gentile vice; for many Jews and Jewesses, having once broken loose of the Synagogue, drifted into profligacy. But where there is much ripe fruit there must always be some that is rotten.

The campaign for the removal of Jewish disabilities, begun by the two friends, was continued by others. In 1781 Christian William Dohm, a distinguished German author and disciple of Mendelssohn’s, advocated the cause in an eloquent treatise in which he not only reviewed the pathetic history of the Jews in Europe, and defended them against the venerable slanders of seventeen hundred years, but also discussed practical measures for the amelioration of their lot. The plea was read by thousands, and, though refuted by many, it was approved by more. Its earliest tangible effect, however, was produced, not in Berlin, but in Vienna. The new spirit had penetrated into the remotest corners of the German world. Austria, long a by-word among the Jews as a house of bondage, established an era of toleration under the philosophical monarch Joseph II., who, soon after the appearance of Dohm’s work, abolished many of the imposts paid by the children of Israel, granted them permission to pursue all arts and sciences, trades and handicrafts, admitted them to the universities and academies, founded and endowed Jewish schools, and, in pursuance of his futile plan to secure internal harmony by the Germanisation of the various races of his Empire, he made the study of German compulsory on all Jewish adults. ♦1782♦ The reign of toleration, it is true, ended with the good monarch’s life; but nevertheless it forms a landmark on the road to civilisation.

Meanwhile, in Germany also, the new gospel was fighting its way laboriously to the front. The death of Frederick the Great removed a great obstacle from the path of the advocates of the Jewish cause. Under his successor, Frederick William II., a commission was appointed to investigate the complaints of the Prussian Jews and to suggest remedies; and the Jews were asked to choose “honest men” from amongst themselves, with whom the matter might be discussed. ♦1787♦ The Jewish deputies laid before the commission all their grievances; and the poll-tax, levied upon every Jew who crossed or re-crossed the frontiers of a city or province, was abolished in Prussia. But the Jews justly pronounced this concession as falling far below their hopes and their needs. German public opinion was still averse to Jewish emancipation, and its prejudices were shared even by such men as Goethe and Fichte, both of whom, though representing opposite political ideals and though despising Christianity, yet agreed in the orthodox estimate of the Jew—and that in spite of the admiration which the former entertained for “the divine lessons” of Nathan der Weise. Thus, though the good seed had been sown in German soil, it was not in Germany that the flower saw the light of the sun.

Notwithstanding Voltaire’s unfriendly utterances regarding the Jews, the general tenour of his teaching was, of course, in favour of toleration, and it was on the French side of the Rhine that Lessing’s intellectual dream was to find its first realisation in practical politics. ♦1748♦ Montesquieu, moved to righteous indignation by the sight of the suffering Marranos in Portugal, had already protested against the barbarous treatment of the Jews in his Esprit des Lois, stigmatising its injustice, and demonstrating the injury which it had caused to various countries. Nor did he argue in vain. Since the middle of the sixteenth century there had been Jewish communities in France, consisting of refugees from Spain and Portugal. But they were only tolerated as pseudo-Christians. Dissimulation was absolutely necessary for self-preservation, and these hypocrites in spite of themselves were obliged to have their marriages solemnised at church, and otherwise to conform to rites which they detested. To these immigrants were gradually added new-comers from Germany and Poland, whom the Portuguese Jews despised and persecuted in a most revolting manner. An internecine feud between these two classes of refugees at Bordeaux gave King Louis XV. an opportunity of interfering in the affairs of the community. ♦1760♦ The Portuguese section passed a resolution calumniating their poor co-religionists, and trying to procure their exclusion as sturdy beggars and vagabonds. The communal resolution was submitted to the king, and every stone was turned to obtain his ratification of the iniquitous statute. Truly, there is no tyrant like a slave. Soon after Louis XV. issued an order expelling all the stigmatised Jews from Bordeaux within a fortnight; but in the chaos which pervaded French administration at that time there was a gulf between the issue and the execution of royal edicts, which, happily for the wretched outcasts, was never bridged over. ♦1776♦ Meanwhile the protest against the servile position to which Israel had been doomed for ages gained in strength, and, as its first result, the Jews of Paris obtained a legal confirmation of the right of abode in the capital of France.

Far worse was the condition of the Jew in Alsace—a district German in everything save political allegiance. In that province oppression was of that dull, chronic kind which begets degradation without driving its victims to violent despair. The Jews in Alsace were simply regarded and treated as inferior animals. They lived in jealously guarded ghettos, egress from which had to be purchased from the local officials. The right of abode was vested in the hands of the feudal nobility; the same limitations as to the number of residents and marriages prevailed, and the same extortions were practised there as in Germany. The Jews had to pay tribute to king, bishop, and lord paramount for protection, besides the taxes levied by the barons on whose domains they dwelt, and the irregular gifts wrung out of them by the barons’ satellites. And, while money was demanded at every turn, most of the avenues through which money comes were closed to the Jews, cattle-dealing and jewellery being the only trades which they were permitted to pursue openly. The profits derived from these pursuits were, of course, supplemented by surreptitious and, consequently, excessive usury. This last occupation exposed the Jew to the hatred of the simple country folk, and to blackmail on the part of crafty informers. The discontent, fomented by the clergy and the local magistrates, culminated in a petition to Louis XVI., imploring his Majesty to expel the accursed race from Alsace. But it was too late in the day. The movement in favour of toleration had made too much headway. An enquiry was instituted, and the ringleader of the anti-Jewish agitation—a legal rogue rejoicing in the name of Hell—was convicted of blackmail and banished from the province, instead of the Jews. ♦1780♦ At the same time the latter presented to the King a memorial, drawn up by Dohm, and obtained a considerable alleviation of the burdens under which they groaned, of the restrictions which hampered their commercial activity, and of the missionary zeal of the Catholic priests, which threatened the religion of their children. Finally, they were relieved of the odious capitation tax in 1784, the year which witnessed the triumph of Beaumarchais’ Mariage de Figaro at the Theatre Français—a rapier thrust at the dotard giant of feudalism, none the less deadly because inflicted amid peals of laughter; to be followed by the fall of the Bastille and of other things. In the same year a Royal Commission was appointed to revise the laws concerning the Jews and to remove their disabilities.

The Revolution did not stem the current of toleration. In 1789 the National Assembly met in Paris: a council of twelve hundred spiritual and secular fathers patriotically sworn to formulate a new creed—an object which, despite pandemonic wrangling and jangling and chaotic disorder of thought and action, they contrived to achieve in that memorable document, the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The National or, as it now calls itself, Constituent Assembly is the “station for all augury,” whither repair all mortals in distress and doubt. Petitions pour in from every side, and among these is one from the Jews, especially the down-trodden Jews of Alsace. They also come forward to claim a share in the new Elysium, to assert their rights as men. Mirabeau, who already towers high above his brother-councillors, and is looked upon as the one seer among many speakers—the one living force among fleeting shades—espouses the Jewish claim. Three years earlier he had published a work On Mendelssohn and the Political Reform of the Jews. He now sets himself to demolish the remnants of the ancient prejudice still cherished by some of the clerical friends of mankind.

The task was not an easy one. Besides Mirabeau, the Abbé Grégoire, and Clermont-Tonnerre, there were scarcely any politicians of note in France who cared for the Jews. The Declaration of the Rights of Man, while abolishing the religious disabilities of Protestants, made no provision for the Jews. Even the French public of 1789 was not yet quite ripe for so revolutionary a measure as the admission of the Jew to that equality of citizenship which it declared to be the birthright of every human being. A statute of January 28th, 1790, enfranchised the Jews of the south of France who had always held a privileged position; but this exception on behalf of a few only emphasised the disabilities of the many. The bulk of the race, especially in Alsace, continued to be treated as outcasts, until the more advanced section of the Parisian public, under the leadership of the advocate Godard, appealed to the people of the capital for its opinion on the matter. ♦1790 Feb. 25♦ Fifty-three out of the sixty districts voted in favour of the Jews, and the Commune gave a practical expression to the feelings of the majority in the form of an address laid before the Assembly. But it was not till nineteen months after that a definite decision was arrived at, partly by the eloquent advocacy of Talleyrand, who pointed out to the Assembly that the only difference between ordinary Frenchmen and French Jews was their religion. In every other respect they were fellow-countrymen and brothers. If, therefore, religion were allowed to interfere with their enfranchisement, that would be a denial of the principles of the Revolution—a flagrant breach of all those laws of humanity and civil equality for which the French people were fighting. ♦1791 Sept. 27♦ These arguments prevailed in the end, and the French Jews were formally enfranchised. For the first time since the destruction of the Temple the children of Israel, who had hitherto sojourned as strangers in foreign realms, hated, baited, and hunted from place to place, without a country, without a home, without civil or political rights, are citizens. Henceforth the name Juif, made hateful by the horrors of centuries, is to be forgotten in the new appellation of Israelite.

The storm that raged during the next three years left the French Jews comparatively unscathed. Israel had long taken to heart the lesson embodied in the oriental proverb, “The head that is bent is spared by the sword.” In some districts, it is true, the enemies of all religion also tried to suppress the Jewish “superstition”; but on the whole the Jews came through the ordeal better than might have been expected. The Constitution of 1795 confirmed the decrees of the National Assembly.

Holland, as we have seen, had long been a home for the persecuted sons of Israel. But the full rights of citizenship were not conceded to them until 1796, when closer relations with France enabled the gospel of liberty, equality, and fraternity to complete the work of toleration begun by enlightened commercial policy. The gift, however, was not welcomed by the heads of the community. The jealous Synagogue, which had persecuted poor Uriel Acosta to death, and excommunicated Spinoza in the preceding century, was still determined to guard its masterful hold upon its members. The new duties and rights which accompanied the gift, it was feared, would render the Jews less dependent upon their religious pastors. The Rabbis, supported by the Portuguese element which formed the aristocracy of the community and, like all aristocracies, abhorred innovation, offered a strenuous resistance to emancipation. They indited a circular epistle declaring that the Jews renounced their rights of citizenship as contrary to the commands of Holy Writ. They endorsed all the objections raised by the enemies of Jewish emancipation—namely, that the Jews, owing to their traditions of the past and their expectation of the Messiah, are and shall ever be strangers in the land—and they prevented their flock from accepting the invitation to vote in the elections to the National Assembly. On the other hand, the Liberal party, led by Jews of German descent, endeavoured to weaken the power of the Rabbis. The two sections banned each other heartily, and the distance between them grew wider as the Liberals went further and further along the path of reform. This difference of views led to a schism between the lovers of the new and the slaves of the old.

In England prejudice was still so strong that as late as 1783 we find the Jews excluded from the benefit of the Irish Naturalisation Act, passed that year. Yet there appears a faint reflection of Lessing’s teaching in some of the writings which bring the century to a close. Richard Cumberland, the friend of Burke and Reynolds, Garrick and Goldsmith, banteringly eulogized by the last-named author as “the Terence of England, the mender of hearts,” wrote, in collaboration with Burgess, the Exodiad, a long epic, consisting of eight dull books, wherein the two bards sing the deliverance of Israel from Egypt and their journey through the desert. The work begins, after the fashion of epics, with the orthodox invocation of the Muse in a single breathless period:

“Of Israel, by Jehovah’s mighty power

From long captivity redeem’d, with loss

And total overthrow of Egypt’s host,

What time the chosen servant of the Lord

From Goshen to the land of promise led

Through the divided sea the ransom’d tribes,

Sing, heavenly Muse, and prop those mortal powers,

Which but for thy sustaining aid must sink

Under the weight of argument so vast,

Scenes so majestic, subject so sublime.”

It ends with a parting speech from Moses at the point of death: