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Title: Israel in Europe
Author: Abbott, George F.
Language: English
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ISRAEL IN EUROPE
[Illustration: (Macmillan logo)]
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
PAGE
AUTHORITIES xi
INTRODUCTION xv
CHAPTER I
HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM 1
CHAPTER II
THE JEW IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 18
CHAPTER III
JUDAISM AND PAGANISM 28
CHAPTER IV
THE DISPERSION 34
CHAPTER V
CHRISTIANITY AND THE JEWS 41
CHAPTER VI
MIDDLE AGES 62
CHAPTER VII
THE CRUSADES 83
CHAPTER VIII
USURY AND THE JEWS 105
CHAPTER IX
THE JEWS IN ENGLAND 115
CHAPTER X
THE JEWS IN SPAIN 141
CHAPTER XI
AFTER THE EXPULSION 167
CHAPTER XII
THE RENAISSANCE 178
CHAPTER XIII
THE GHETTO 196
CHAPTER XIV
THE REFORMATION AND THE JEWS 214
CHAPTER XV
CATHOLIC REACTION 232
CHAPTER XVI
IN HOLLAND 245
CHAPTER XVII
IN ENGLAND AFTER THE EXPULSION 255
CHAPTER XVIII
RESETTLEMENT 275
CHAPTER XIX
THE EVE OF EMANCIPATION 286
CHAPTER XX
PALINGENESIA 301
CHAPTER XXI
IN RUSSIA 329
CHAPTER XXII
IN ROUMANIA 379
CHAPTER XXIII
ANTI-SEMITISM 404
CHAPTER XXIV
ZIONISM 482
INDEX 519
MAP
APPROXIMATE DENSITY OF THE JEWISH POPULATION _At end_.
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:
“‘My ministry is finish’d; in thine hands,
Blest of the Lord, O Joshua! I have put
The book of life, and in thine arms expire.’
He ceas’d, and instantly the hand of death
Press’d on his heart and stopp’d its vital pulse;
His eye-lids dropt upon their sightless balls:
One deep-drawn sigh dismiss’d his parting soul;
To heaven it rose; his body sank to earth,
And God’s archangel guarded his remains.”
In charming contrast to this portentous rhapsody stands Goldsmith’s own
tender oratorio, _The Captivity_. It deals with the sons of Israel in
exile, working and weeping on the banks of the Euphrates; yet keeping
their hearts turned longingly to the fields of Sharon, the plains of
Kedron, the cedar-clad hills of Lebanon, and Zion. “Insulted, chained,
and all the world their foe,” the captives nourish their faith in the
God of their fathers:
“Our God is all we boast below,
To him we turn our eyes;
And every added weight of woe
Shall make our homage rise.”
Thus sings the chorus of Prophets in Exile. Yet, even in the midst of
their woes, they see cause for pride and self-glorification: They are
the only worshippers of the true God; the rest of the world worships
idle idols:
“Are not, this very morn, those feasts begun,
Where prostrate Error hails the rising sun?
Do not our tyrant lords this day ordain
For superstitious rites and mirth profane?
And should we mourn? should coward Virtue fly,
When vaunting Folly lifts her head on high?
No! rather let us triumph still the more,
And as our fortune sinks, our spirit soar.”
Faith has its reward. While the captives bewail their lot, deliverance
is close at hand. The star of Cyrus has risen; Babylon the proud falls,
and the prophecy concerning the restoration of Israel is fulfilled.
But strong as is the sympathy with the fortunes and the spirit of
Israel in both these works, neither of them can be legitimately
considered as bearing directly on the Jewish question. The Shylock
tradition is still powerful in England, for want of a Lessing. It is
not ponderous poetasters, like Cumberland and Burgess, nor yet sweet
singers like the gentle Goldsmith, who will overthrow a convention
hallowed by the genius of a Shakespeare.
CHAPTER XX
PALINGENESIA
THE French Revolution is over. For a while the volcanic forces, which
had long groaned in subterranean bondage, broke their prison, burst
into the light of day, and brought death and desolation upon the face
of the earth. But their task is done. Nemesis has obtained the due and
forfeit of her bond, and the Titans have returned to their Tartarean
abode, until such time as their services may be needed again. A
sentimentalist will, no doubt, find much to lament in the unsparing
fury of the avengers. Their hand has struck down everything that stood
high--good, evil, and indifferent alike--with elemental impartiality.
But the philosopher may, on the whole, see reason to rejoice. At all
events, he will, if he happens to be a Jew. For among the ruins of
tyranny he will recognise the rusty chains which had for centuries
weighed upon the limbs of Israel. They are gone, whatever may have
survived. Whatever may be said of the rest, they were an evil. The
Jew sees nothing but the hand of God in the desolation wrought by
another. For him the Powers of Darkness had broken their prison; for
him the proud ones of the earth had been laid low; for him the dreams
of freedom dreamt by the poets and thinkers of France had been turned
into a reality of despotism. What matter? Cyrus was a despot, and yet a
deliverer of Israel; Alexander was another; and Napoleon was doubtless
destined to be the third. Strange, indeed, are the ways of the Lord,
but His mercy endureth for ever toward Israel.
The hopes of the Jews were not disappointed. The work of
enfranchisement, commenced by philosophers like Montesquieu, and
carried on by patriots like Mirabeau, was completed by Napoleon. Though
deeply sensible of the disagreeable fact that usury and extortion had
been the favourite pursuits of the Jews from time immemorial, Napoleon
did not allow himself to be biassed by the mediaeval view of the
matter. Like Alexander the Great, Caesar, Charlemagne, and Cromwell, he
saw the advantage of securing the support of so numerous, so opulent,
and so scattered a nation as the Israelites, and one at least of his
motives undoubtedly was to conciliate the Jews of Old Prussia, Poland,
and Southern Russia, in the hope of profiting by their sympathy and
assistance in the contest in which he was then engaged. While depriving
individual Jews, notorious for rapacity, of their civil rights, and
restricting the operations of the Jews of the north-east of France
by temporarily refusing to them the right to sequester the goods of
their debtors, the Emperor decided to hear the Jewish side of the
question. ♦1806 July♦ By his order an assembly of Hebrew notables from
the French and German departments, as well as from Italy, was summoned
in Paris. Twelve questions were put to the delegates concerning the
Jew’s attitude towards the Gentile, the authority of the Rabbis, usury
and conscription; and, on the answers proving satisfactory, Napoleon
astonished the assembly with an announcement which no Jewish ear had
ever hoped to hear in Europe. The _Sanhedrin_, or National Council
of Israel, after a prorogation of seventeen centuries, was once more
convoked. The Hebrew polity had outlasted the heathen Roman Empire,
the Holy Roman Empire, Feudalism, and the French Monarchy. Time and
the seismic convulsions which had overthrown these mighty fabrics,
once regarded as eternal, had respected the humble institutions of
the outcasts of humanity. The constitutions of other nations were
built upon the earth and were subject to the laws which govern earthly
things; the constitution of the Jews was preserved in the archives of
Heaven, and was therefore immortal. ♦1807 Feb. 9♦ And so, at a word
from Napoleon, seventy-one delegates of the French and Italian Jewries
were gathered together in Paris, elected by the synagogues of the two
countries in accordance with the ancient forms and usages of Israel.
♦1807 March 2♦
The fruit of the _Sanhedrin’s_ deliberations was a charter which
defined the relations between Jew and Gentile in France. While
retaining the essential features of Judaism, the Rabbis wisely conceded
much to the demands of the country which so generously adopted them.
The Nine Responses of the document form a rational compromise between
the rights of God and the rights of Caesar: polygamy is forbidden;
divorce is allowed in accordance with the civil law of the land;
intermarriage with the Gentiles is tolerated, though not sanctioned,
by the Synagogue; French Jews are bidden to regard the French people
as brethren; acts of justice and charity are recommended towards all
believers in the Creator, without distinction of creed; Jews born in
France are exhorted to look upon the country as their fatherland, to
educate their children in its language, to acquire real property in
it, to renounce pursuits hated by their neighbours, and in every way
to endeavour to earn the esteem and goodwill of the latter; usury is
forbidden towards the stranger as towards the brother; and the interest
raised on loans is not, in any case, to exceed the legal rate. Thus an
effective answer was given to all the legal arguments which had been
advanced by the opponents of Jewish emancipation, and an honest attempt
was made by the doctors and chiefs of the nation to remove from the
children of Israel a portion at least of that odium under which they
had so long laboured.
♦1808 March 17♦
When the _Sanhedrin_ had brought its labours to an end, the Emperor
repealed the exceptional measures of 1806 and recognised the
Consistorial organisation which for a century fixed the status of
Israel in France. Every two thousand Jews were to form a community
under a synagogue and a board of trustees, with Paris for their
centre. Napoleon, it is true, while granting this liberal charter,
was compelled to yield to the anti-Jewish prejudices of the people of
Alsace and other parts of Eastern France, where the Jew was hated
more than ever, for the disasters of the Reign of Terror and the
distress caused by Napoleon’s campaigns, by impoverishing the peasants,
had delivered them up to the tender mercies of the money-lender. In
accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants of those districts
Napoleon took some steps highly detrimental to Jewish interests.
He enacted, for example, that loans to minors, women, soldiers and
domestic servants, as well as loans raised on agricultural implements,
should be null; that no more Jews should be allowed to enter Alsace;
that every Jew should serve in the army; and that no Jew should engage
in trade without permission from the Prefect. The duration of this
decree was limited to ten years. But, such local disadvantages and the
indignation aroused thereby notwithstanding, the well-earned gratitude
of Israel was expressed in many Hebrew hymns composed in honour of the
Deliverer whom the Lord had raised for His people.
A few years afterwards even these enactments were withdrawn, and the
Jews were accorded complete equality, civil and political. From 1814
till 1831 French legislation, despite certain fluctuations under the
brief restoration of the Bourbons, was enriched with various Acts, all
tending to lift the Israelites to a position worthy of their country,
and schools were established for the education of the Rabbis, who since
the latter date until recently were regarded as public functionaries
and were paid by the State.[138] ♦1833♦ Two years later the French
Government gave a signal proof of its interest in the welfare of the
Jewish portion of the French people by suspending relations with a
Swiss canton which had denied justice to a French Israelite on account
of his religion. For in Switzerland, when the French domination
expired, the old prejudices came to life again, and it was not till
1874 that political equality was accorded to the Swiss Jews.
♦1805♦
Meanwhile Napoleon’s arms had carried on, even outside France, the
work begun by the philosophers of the preceding generation. The
Inquisition was crushed in every Catholic country under the Emperor’s
heel, while in Germany Napoleon’s conquest brought to the Jews a relief
which departed with the French legions, to return by slow degrees in
the succeeding years. It was one of the bitterest examples of irony
presented by history. The French autocrat had given to the German
Jews freedom, and the people whom the Jews aided with their lives to
throw off the French autocrat’s yoke robbed them of it. In Frankfort,
where the ghetto had been abolished in 1811, immediately on the French
garrison’s withdrawal a clamour arose demanding its restoration. In
other “free towns” also, where rights of equality had been granted to
Israel while the fear of Napoleon hung over them, the ancient hatred
revived immediately on his downfall, and the old state of bondage was
restored. Even in Prussia, where the law recognised the equality of
the Jews in theory, slavery was their lot in reality: many trades and
industries were prohibited to them, the road to academic distinction
was barred to them, and Jews who had attained to the rank of officers
during the War of Liberation were forced to resign their commissions.
Nor were these disabilities removed even when the German Diet, which,
by the Act signed in Vienna on June 8, 1815, was to manage the affairs
of the German Confederacy, had established the principle of religious
freedom among the Christians, and had pledged itself to consider
measures for improving the lot of the Jews.
This reaction was partly due to an exaggerated sentiment of nationality
and hatred of everything foreign, aroused by the presence of the
French legions in the country, and strengthened by the sacrifices and
the success of the struggle for independence. National consciousness
found an ally in the Christian revolt against the French Religion of
Reason. Enthusiasm for the faith, which the French had overthrown,
added zest to the enthusiasm for the fatherland, which the French had
overrun. “Christian Germanism” became, not only a patriotic motto,
but a veritable cult of a novel and jealous god to whom everything
that was non-Christian and non-German, including the Jew, ought to be
immolated. ♦1819♦ “Hep, hep!” (_Hierosolyma est perdita_) became the
battle-cry of the Jew-baiters in many German towns, and the persecution
spread even into Denmark, where the Jews had been placed on a footing
of equality since 1814. ♦1828–30♦ The Prussian Government proposed a
plan for the improvement of the social and political condition of the
Jews, but the measure had to be abandoned owing to the opposition which
it met with on the part of the representatives of the Prussian people.
♦1840♦ This return to mediaeval intolerance once assumed in Prussia the
mediaeval form of a blood-accusation; but the charge only served to
establish the innocence of the Jews and the stupid credulity of their
assailants. None the less, it supplied a striking illustration of the
retrogression of the public mind. For the prejudice, even when its
basis was proved false, continued to subsist in a more or less latent
condition among the lower intellectual strata of society--as prejudices
have a way of doing for long centuries after they have vanished from
the surface--and during the revolution of 1848, on the Upper Rhine,
it led to a general persecution of the Jews, who sought refuge in the
neighbouring territory of Switzerland. But the reaction was temporary,
and the revolutionary movement proved, in the main, favourable to the
cause of Jewish emancipation.
Although the Prussians, fired by patriotism, had rallied round their
king and unanimously supported him in the effort to deliver the country
from French domination, they had not been left untouched by the lessons
of the French Revolution. To the Prussian patriots individual freedom
was as precious as national independence. So strong was this feeling
that Frederick William III. had been obliged to promise that at the end
of the struggle he would reward his subjects’ sacrifices by granting to
them a representative form of government. But few monarchs have ever
parted with power except under compulsion. When the War of Liberation
was over, and the country’s independence assured, the king forgot his
promises. Hence there arose between the prince and his people a bitter
conflict, which continued under his successor. Frederick William IV.
as Crown Prince had evinced a lively sympathy with the popular demand
for a Constitution; but with the sceptre he inherited the absolutist
principles of his ancestors, and strove to prop up the authority of
the throne by the help of religion. The German Liberals, however, had
outgrown the mediaeval notion that kings rule by the grace of God. They
claimed that the will of the people should be the supreme law of the
State, and laughed at the Sovereign’s antiquated pretensions. The fate
of the German Jews was naturally bound up in that of German Liberalism.
The year 1846 was chiefly distinguished by the agitation which
prevailed in Prussia and all Northern Germany in favour of religious
toleration and liberty of conscience; and the emancipation of the
Jews was one of the demands submitted to the King of Prussia by the
Prussian Estates, especially those of Cologne, Posen and Berlin, for
various measures of domestic and social improvement, as, for example,
the reform of criminal justice, the publication of the procedure of
trials and of the debates of the Estates, and the extension of the
representation of towns and rural communities. ♦1847♦ In the following
year the question of Jewish emancipation was again introduced into
the Prussian Chambers and found only two opponents, one of them
being Bismarck, who then declared that he was “no enemy of the Jews,
and if they are my enemies,” he said, “I forgive them. Under some
circumstances I even like them. I willingly accord them every right,
only not that of an important official power in a Christian State. For
me the words, ‘By the grace of God,’ are no mere empty sounds, and I
call that a Christian State which makes the end and aim of its teaching
the truths of Christianity. If I should see a Jew a representative of
the King’s most sacred Majesty, I should feel deeply humiliated.”
However, the National Parliament which met at Frankfort-on-the-Main
in 1848, under Liberal auspices, among other steps which it took in
order to secure popular freedom, removed all religious disabilities.
The Prussian Constitution of 1850 imitated the example; and the
establishment of the new _régime_, in 1871, threw the doors open to
the Jews throughout the German Empire. The Reichstag now contains many
distinguished members of the Jewish faith.
In Austria the edifice of toleration reared by Joseph II. was
overthrown by his successors, Leopold II. and Francis I., who revived
most of the antiquated restrictions and regulations against the Jews,
and again confined them within special quarters. This barbarous
policy lasted far into the nineteenth century. In many parts of the
country the Jews were forbidden to own, or even to rent land, except
that on which their houses stood, or to migrate from one province to
another without special permission. In Austrian Poland, or Galicia,
the Jews were especially hated. There, as elsewhere in Poland, they
formed a vast multitude, settled in the chief towns and villages.
The greater part of their emoluments was derived from the sale of
intoxicating liquors, to which the Poles, like all northern nations,
were immoderately addicted. From the time of Joseph II. the Jews had
been by repeated laws prohibited from trading in alcohol. But these
laws were disregarded. The landowners possessed the exclusive rights
of distilling, and they had from the first coming of the Jews to
Poland farmed out these rights to the latter. Deplorably enough, a
number of the Jews, in despair of finding other means of livelihood,
allowed themselves to become the go-betweens in this demoralising
traffic, and thus the most temperate race of Europe laid itself open
to the hostility and scorn of those who would feign have seen a check
put to the intemperate propensities of the people and its consequent
impoverishment.
The condition of the Jews was incomparably better in the parts of the
Empire upon which the rule of the Hapsburgs weighed less heavily. In
Hungary and Transylvania they had long enjoyed freedom of tenure
under the protection of the Magyar nobles. These were in the habit
of employing Jewish bailiffs, and did not consider it beneath their
dignity even to obey the orders of Jewish officers in the war for
independence, in which the Jews took an important part. ♦1848♦ After
the suppression of the rebellion the latter were made by the Imperial
Government to pay for their patriotic ardour; but when the day came for
the distribution of prizes they secured their reward. By the Austrian
Constitution of 1860, which received its finishing touches eight years
later, the Jews obtained full liberty. At present several Jews sit in
the Legislature, and the race flourishes not only in Vienna, Budapesth,
and other great towns, but even in the Austrian section of Poland.
The daylight of a tolerant and liberal administration has chased the
ghosts of the past out of Galicia. Even the most orthodox followers of
the Synagogue are fast forgetting their ancient wrongs and prejudices.
In olden times Jewish boys on their birth were imprisoned by their
parents within a pair of stays, laced tighter and tighter every
year, that the child’s chest might remain too narrow for military
service--a suicidal training, the evil consequences of which are
to this day visible in the form of chest diseases and consumption
among the Galician Jews. But the practice has long been abandoned.
Humaner conditions in the army, and the spread of education among the
Austro-Polish Jews, have reconciled them to the service, and now one
half of the Galicia contingent of the Austro-Hungarian Army consists of
Jewish recruits. The Empire has gained loyal defenders, and the Jews
the benefit of a disciplinary and patriotic education.
In Italy the Papal States were the last retreat of the Middle Age. The
Holy Office had disappeared from Parma, Tuscany, and Sicily in the
eighteenth century, but in Rome it continued to flourish; and where the
Inquisition held sway there was no peace for Israel. ♦1809♦ The Roman
Jews, liberated by Napoleon, were thrust back into slavery after his
fall. Then the reign of darkness was restored under the double crown
of Dogmatism and Despotism. The temporal power enforced the doctrines
of the spiritual, and the spiritual was abused to sanctify the decrees
of the temporal. How could the lot of the infidel Jew be other than
what it was? The Roman Ghetto continued to be the home of squalor and
sorrow far into the nineteenth century. As late as 1847 decrees were
issued forbidding the inmates to quit their cage, the Jews were still
compelled to hear sermons at church, and everything that bigotry could
do was done to bring about their conversion.
It is true that Pope Pius IX. inaugurated his reign with a display of
toleration till then unparalleled in the annals of the Papacy. In 1846
a general amnesty was proclaimed by which thousands of prisoners and
exiles were pardoned for crimes which they had never committed, or
of which they had never been legally convicted; two years later the
Jews were relieved from the necessity of listening to sermons; and
daylight seemed at last to have dawned upon Rome. But this period of
liberalism proved as transient as it was unprecedented. The reaction
soon set in, and the influence of the Jesuits and of obscurantism
was re-established. In 1856 the Pope issued an encyclical condemning
somnambulism and clairvoyance, and bidding all bishops to suppress
the anti-Christian practices. Nine years later he hurled an anathema
against the Freemasons--the deadly enemies of the Inquisition. In
brief, the pontificate of Pius IX., despite its promising beginning,
is chiefly distinguished for two fresh victories over reason: the
discovery of the Immaculate Conception and the invention of Papal
Infallibility.
♦1858♦
Under such conditions it is not surprising that the Church should not
hesitate to allow a nurse to baptize her Jewish charge secretly, and
then, on the ground that the child was a Christian, to tear it from
the arms of its parents, and rear it to be a monk and a persecutor of
its own people. Obscurantism and oppression vanished from Rome only
with the Pope’s authority. For the Jews, as for the Christians of
Rome, light came in the train of Italian unity. Among other mediaeval
barbarities which ceased on the day on which the Italian Army entered
Rome were the Inquisition and the bondage of the Jews. Israel has
outlived Temporal Power also. In the Vatican all facilities are now
given for the study of Rabbinic and Talmudic literature, once condemned
to the flames. The pestilent slums of the Ghetto have been wiped off
the face of the earth, and there is nothing left to recall the days
of darkness, save the grey old synagogue and, close by, the Tiber,
murmuring the sad tales of a world that is past.
♦1808♦
In Spain also the Inquisition, suppressed by Napoleon, revived after
his fall; but only as the shade of its former self. ♦1826♦ Its last
victims were a Quaker and a Jew, the former hanged, the latter roasted.
But even Spain had to follow the tide of the times. ♦1837♦ The Jews,
pitilessly driven out of the country when Catholicism ruled the
Peninsula, were readmitted as soon as Catholicism faded into a mere
name. In 1881 the Spanish Government actually invited the Jews who
fled from Russia to settle in its dominions. Seville, where the Holy
Office had instituted its human sacrifices in 1480, now boasts a Hebrew
synagogue. Israel has outlived the Spanish Inquisition also.
♦1821♦
In Portugal, when early in the nineteenth century liberty of conscience
was proclaimed, strange individuals from the interior of the country
appeared at the synagogues of Lisbon and Oporto. They were the
descendants of the old _Marranos_. For three centuries they had
eluded the ferrets of the Holy Office and, Christians in appearance,
had remained Jews at heart, waiting, as only a Jew can wait, for the
blessed day of deliverance. They now emerged, and came to participate
with their brethren in the worship of their God after the fashion of
their fathers.
Thus the good seed sown in Western Europe during the preceding century
brought forth its fruit. England could not long remain a stranger
to the march of events. But, slow as usual and averse from hasty
experiments, she pondered while others performed. Besides, she had been
spared the volcanic eruption of the Continent which, while destroying
much that was venerable and valuable, had cleared the ground for the
reception of new things.
There is every reason to believe that the ordinary Englishman’s view of
the Jews during the first half of the nineteenth century differed in
no respect from the view entertained by the ordinary American of the
same period, as described by Oliver Wendell Holmes.[139] The ordinary
Englishman, like his transatlantic cousin, grew up inheriting the
traditional Protestant idea that the Jews were a race lying under a
curse for their obstinacy in refusing the Gospel. The great historical
Church of Christendom was presented to him as Bunyan depicted it. In
the nurseries of old-fashioned English Orthodoxy there was one religion
in the world--one religion and a multitude of detestable, literally
damnable impositions, believed in by countless millions, who were
doomed to perdition for so believing. The Jews were the believers in
one of these false religions. It had been true once, but now was a
pernicious and abominable lie. The principal use of the Jews seemed to
be to lend money and to fulfil the predictions of the old prophets of
their race. No doubt, the individual sons of Abraham whom the ordinary
Englishman found in the ill-flavoured streets of East London were apt
to be unpleasing specimens of the race and to confirm the prevailing
view of it.
The first unambiguous indication of a changing attitude towards the
Jew appears in Sir Walter Scott’s _Ivanhoe_. Scott in that work gives
utterance to the feeling of toleration which had gradually been growing
up in the country. It was in 1819, during the severest season of the
novelist’s illness, that Mr. Skene of Rubislaw, his friend, “sitting
by his bedside, and trying to amuse him as well as he could,” spoke
about the Jews, as he had known them years before in Germany, “still
locked up at night in their own quarter by great gates,” and suggested
that a group of Jews would be an interesting figure in a novel.[140]
The suggestion did not fall on stony ground. Scott’s eye seized on the
artistic possibilities of the subject, and the result was the group
of Jews which we have in Ivanhoe. Although the author in introducing
the characters seems to have been innocent of any deliberate aim at
propagandism, his treatment of them is a sufficient proof of his own
sympathy, and no doubt served the purpose of kindling sympathy in many
thousands of readers.
Not that the work attempts any revolutionary subversion of preconceived
ideas. The difference between Isaac of York and Nathan the Wise is the
same as the difference between Scott and Lessing and their respective
countries. The British writer does not try to persuade us that the
person whom we abhorred a few generations before as an incarnation of
all that is diabolical, and whom we still regard with considerable
suspicion, is really an angel. Whether it be that there was no need
for a revolt against the Elizabethan tradition, or Scott was not equal
to the task, his portrait of the Jew does not depart too abruptly from
the convention sanctioned by his great predecessors. His Isaac is not
a Barabas or Shylock transformed, but only reformed. Though in many
respects an improvement on both, Scott’s Jew possesses all the typical
attributes of his progenitors: wealth, avarice, cowardice, rapacity,
cunning, affection for his kith and kin, hatred for the Gentile. But,
whereas in both Barabas and Shylock we find love for the ducats taking
precedence of love for the daughter, in Isaac the terms are reversed.
It is with exquisite reluctance that he parts with his shekels in order
to save his life. Ransom is an extreme measure, resorted to only on an
emergency such as forces the master of a ship to cast his merchandise
into the sea. But on hearing that his captor, Front-de-Bœuf, has given
his daughter to be a handmaiden to Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert, Isaac
throws himself at the knight’s feet, imploring him to take all he
possesses and deliver up the maiden. Whereupon the Norman, surprised,
exclaims: “I thought your race had loved nothing save their money-bags.”
“Think not so vilely of us,” answers the Jew. “Jews though we be, the
hunted fox, the tortured wildcat, loves its young--the despised and
persecuted race of Abraham love their children.”
On being told that his daughter’s doom is irrevocable, Isaac changes
his attitude. Outraged affection makes a hero of the Jew, and for his
child’s sake he dares to face tortures, to escape from which he had
just promised to part even with one thousand silver pounds:
“Do thy worst,” he cries out. “My daughter is my flesh and blood,
dearer to me a thousand times than those limbs which thy cruelty
threatens.”
While emphasising the good qualities of the Jew, the author takes
care to excuse the bad ones. Isaac is despoiled and spurned as much
as Barabas or Shylock. But there is an all-important difference in
Scott’s manner of presenting these facts. He describes Isaac as a
victim rather than as a villain, as an object of compassion rather than
of ridicule. “Dog of a Jew,” “unbelieving Jew,” “unbelieving dog” are
the usual modes of address employed by the mediaeval Christian towards
the Jew; just as they are the usual modes of address employed by the
modern Turk towards the Christian _rayah_. The Jews are “a nation of
stiff-necked unbelievers,” the Christian “scorns to hold intercourse
with a Jew,” his propinquity, nay his mere presence, is considered as
bringing pollution--sentiments which far exceed in bitterness those
entertained by the Turk towards the Christian. Under such circumstances
Isaac makes his appearance: a grey-haired and grey-bearded Hebrew “with
features keen and regular, an aquiline nose and piercing black eyes,”
wearing “a high, square, yellow cap of a peculiar fashion, assigned
to his nation to distinguish them from the Christians.” Thus attired,
“he is introduced with little ceremony, and, advancing with fear and
hesitation, and many a bow of deep humility,” he takes his seat at the
lower end of the table, “where, however, no one offers to make room for
him.” “The attendants of the Abbot crossed themselves, with looks of
pious horror,” fearing the contamination from “this son of a rejected
people,” “an outcast in the present society, like his people among the
nations, looking in vain for welcome or resting place.”
Isaac has scarcely taken his seat, when he is addressed, with brutal
frankness, as a creature whose vocation it is “to gnaw the bowels of
our nobles with usury, and to gull women and boys with gauds and
toys.” So treated, the Jew realises that “there is but one road to the
favour of a Christian”--money. Hence his avarice. Furthermore, the
impression of a craven and cruel miser, that might perhaps be derived
from the above presentation, is softened by the author, who hastens to
declare that any mean and unamiable traits that there may be in the
Jew’s character are due “to the prejudices of the credulous vulgar and
the persecutions by the greedy and rapacious nobility.”
Scott endeavours to engage the reader’s sympathy for his Jew by
dwelling at great length on these causes of moral degradation: “except
perhaps the flying fish, there was no race existing on the earth, in
the air, or the waters, who were the object of such an unremitting,
general, and relentless persecution as the Jews of this period.” “The
obstinacy and avarice of the Jews being thus in a measure placed in
opposition to the fanaticism and tyranny of those under whom they
lived, seemed to increase in proportion to the persecution with which
they were visited.” “On these terms they lived; and their character,
influenced accordingly, was watchful, suspicious, and timid--yet
obstinate, uncomplying, and skilful in evading the dangers to which
they were exposed.” Thus we are led to the conclusion that the Jew’s
vices have grown, thanks to his treatment, his virtues in spite of
it. For Isaac is not altogether impervious to gratitude and pity. He
handsomely rewards the Christian who saves his life, and he himself
saves a Christian’s life by receiving him into his house and allowing
his daughter to doctor him.
But, just as he is to the father, Scott is more than just to the
daughter.[141] While Isaac is at the best a reformed Barabas or
Shylock, Rebecca is the jewel of the story. The author exhausts his
conventional colours in painting her beauty, and his vocabulary
in singing the praises of her character. “Her form was exquisitely
symmetrical,” “the brilliancy of her eyes, the superb arch of her
eyebrows, her well-formed, aquiline nose, her teeth as white as pearls,
and the profusion of her sable tresses,” made up a figure which “might
have compared with the proudest beauties of England.” She is indeed
“the very Bride of the Canticles,” as Prince John remarks; “the Rose of
Sharon and the Lily of the Valley,” as the Prior’s warmer imagination
suggests. Immeasurably superior to Abigail in beauty and to Jessica
in virtue, she equals Portia in wisdom--a perfect heroine of romance.
Withal there is in Rebecca a power of quiet self-sacrifice that raises
her almost to the level of a saint. Altogether as noble an example of
womanhood as there is to be found in a literature rich in noble women.
To sum up, in contrast to Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s creations, there
is a great deal of the tragic, and little, if anything, of the comic in
Scott’s Jew.
It would, however, be an error to suppose that Scott was the spokesman
of a unanimous public. His _Ivanhoe_ appeared in 1819. Four years later
we find the writer who with Scott shared the applause of the age,
giving an entirely different character to the Jew. The _Age of Bronze_,
written in 1823, carries on the _Merchant of Venice_ tradition. To
Byron the Jew is simply a symbol of relentless and unprincipled
rapacity. Referring to the Royal Exchange, “the New Symplegades--the
crushing stocks,”
“Where Midas might again his wish behold
In real paper or imagined gold,
Where Fortune plays, while Rumour holds the stake,
And the world trembles to bid brokers break,”
the poet moralises at the expense of the Jew, to whom he traces our own
greed and recklessness in speculation:
“But let us not to own the truth refuse,
Was ever Christian land so rich in Jews?
Those parted with their teeth to good King John,
And now, Ye Kings! they kindly draw your own.”
Alas! times have changed since the day of “good King John.” Now the
Jews, far from being the victims of the royal forceps,
“All states, all things, all sovereigns they control,
And waft a loan ‘from Indus to the pole.’
And philanthropic Israel deigns to drain
Her mild per-centage from exhausted Spain.
Not without Abraham’s seed can Russia march;
’Tis gold, not steel, that rears the conqueror’s arch.”
Nor is this all. Sad as the state of things must be, since Spain the
persecutrix has been degraded into a suppliant, the worst of the
calamity lies in the circumstance that these new tyrants of poor Spain
and poor Russia are a people apart; a people without a country; a
people of parasites:
“Two Jews, a chosen people, can command
In every realm their Scripture-promised land.
What is the happiness of earth to them?
A congress forms their ‘New Jerusalem.’
On Shylock’s shore behold them stand afresh,
To cut from nations’ hearts their ‘pound of flesh.’”
But our modern Jeremiah’s indignation is not altogether disinterested.
He confesses elsewhere, with a candour worthy of his prophetic
character,
“In my younger days they lent me cash that way,
Which I found very troublesome to pay.”[142]
And not only Byron but piety also was still inimical to the Jew. Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, whose philosophy, in its second childhood, sought
comfort in the cradle of theology--a not uncommon development--gives
vent to some exceedingly quaint sentiments on the subject. On April 13,
1830, he declares that the Jews who hold that the mission of Israel is
to be “a light among the nations” are utterly mistaken. The doctrine
of the unity of God “has been preserved, and gloriously preached by
Christianity alone.” No nation, ancient or modern, has ever learnt
this great truth from the Jews. “But from Christians they did learn
it in various degrees, and are still learning it. The religion of the
Jews is, indeed, a light; but it is as the light of the glow-worm,
which gives no heat, and illumines nothing but itself.”[143] Here we
find Coleridge, in the nineteenth century, reviving the complaint of
Jewish aloofness--of the provincial and non-missionary character of
Judaism--which was one of the causes of the Roman hatred towards the
race in the first. Nor is this the only case of revival presented by
Coleridge’s attitude.
Luther, three hundred years earlier had said, “I am persuaded if
the Jews heard our preaching, and how we handle the Old Testament,
many of them might be won.”[144] Coleridge now says: “If Rhenferd’s
Essays were translated--if the Jews were made acquainted with the real
argument--I believe there would be a Christian synagogue in a year’s
time.”[145] He is, however, somewhat in advance of Luther, inasmuch as
he does not insist upon the Jews’ abandoning circumcision and “their
distinctive customs and national type,” but advocates their admission
into the Christian fold “as of the seed of Abraham.” He is also in
advance of Luther in forgiving the Jews their claim to be considered
a superior order; for he finds that this claim was also maintained by
the earlier Christians of Jewish blood, as is attested both by St.
Peter’s conduct and by St. Paul’s protests. He also refers to the
practice of the Abyssinians--another people claiming descent from
Abraham and preserving the Mosaic Law--and asks: “Why do we expect the
Jews to abandon their national customs and distinctions?” Coleridge
would be satisfied with their rejection of the covenant of works and
with their acceptance of “the promised fulfilment in Christ.” But what
really distinguishes Coleridge’s missionary zeal from that of the great
Reformer is his demand that the Jews should be addressed “kindly.”
It is hard to imagine Coleridge in his old age taking a Jew on to
London Bridge, tying a stone round his neck and hurling him into the
river.[146]
However, though three centuries of humanism had not been altogether
wasted, the philosopher is in theory as hostile to the poor Jew as
Luther himself: “The Jews of the lower orders,” he tells us, “are the
very lowest of mankind; they have not a principle of honesty in them;
to grasp and be getting money for ever is their single and exclusive
occupation.” Nor was this prejudiced view of the race softened in
Coleridge by his profound admiration for its literature, any more
than it was in Luther. The latter was an enthusiastic admirer of the
Psalms--the book that has played a larger part in men’s lives than
any other--and so was Coleridge: “Mr. Coleridge, like so many of the
elder divines of the Christian Church, had an affectionate reverence
for the moral and evangelical portion of the Book of Psalms. He told
me that, after having studied every page of the Bible with the deepest
attention, he had found no other part of Scripture come home so
closely to his inmost yearnings and necessities.”[147] But Coleridge’s
affection for ancient Hebrew literature deepened, if anything, his
contempt for the modern Jew. He called Isaiah “his ideal of the Hebrew
prophet,” and used this ideal as a means of emphasising his scorn for
the actual: “The two images farthest removed from each other which
can be comprehended under one term are, I think, Isaiah--‘Hear, O
heavens, and give ear, O earth!’--and Levi of Holywell Street--‘Old
clothes!’--both of them Jews, you’ll observe. _Immane quantum
discrepant!_”[148] The philosopher does not deign to reflect on the
possible causes of this lamentable discrepancy.
Again, Coleridge, like Luther, delighted in clandestine conversion.
He was on friendly terms with several learned Jews, and, finding
them men of a metaphysical turn of mind, he liked, as was his wont,
to preach to them “earnestly and also hopelessly” on Kant’s text
regarding the “object” and “subject,” and other things weighty, though
incomprehensible. At one time he was engaged in undermining the faith
of four different victims of his zeal and friendship, or may be of
his sense of humour: a Jew, a Swedenborgian, a Roman Catholic, and a
New Jerusalemite. “He said he had made most way with the disciple of
Swedenborg, who might be considered as convert, that he had perplexed
the Jew, and had put the Roman Catholic into a bad humour; but that
upon the New Jerusalemite he had made no more impression than if he had
been arguing with the man in the moon.”[149]
Even the genial Elia was not above entertaining and elaborating the
hoary platitude that Jews and Gentiles can never mix. Although he
declares that he has, in the abstract, no disrespect for Jews, he
admits that he would not care to be in habits of familiar intercourse
with any of them. Centuries of injury, contempt and hate, on the
one side--of cloaked revenge, dissimulation and hate, on the other,
between our and their fathers, he thinks, must and ought to affect the
blood of the children. He cannot believe that a few fine words, such
as “candour,” “liberality,” “the light of the nineteenth century,”
can close up the breaches of so deadly a disunion. In brief, he
frankly confesses that he does not relish the approximation of Jew and
Christian which was becoming fashionable, affirming that “the spirit of
the Synagogue is essentially separative.”[150]
Yet, in defiance of Byronic wrath, of Elian humour, and of Coleridgean
theology, the demand for justice daily gained ground. In 1830 Mr.
Robert Grant, member of Parliament for Inverness, sounded the
trumpet-call to battle by proposing that Jews should be admitted to
the House of Commons. The Bill was carried on the first reading by 18
votes, but was lost on the second by 63. The initial success of the
proposal was evidence of the progress of public opinion; its final
rejection showed that there was room for further progress. Indeed,
the victory of light over darkness was not to be won without a severe
conflict: the prejudices of eighteen centuries had to be assaulted
and taken one after the other, ere triumph could be secured. How
strong these fortifications were can easily be seen by a glance at the
catalogue of any great public library under the proper heading. There
the modern Englishman’s wondering eye finds a formidable array of
pamphlets extending over many years, and covering the whole field of
racial and theological intolerance. But the opposite phalanx, though
as yet inferior in numbers, shows a brave front too. In January, 1831,
Macaulay fulminated from the pages of the _Edinburgh Review_ in support
of the good cause:
“The English Jews, we are told, are not Englishmen. They are a
separate people, living locally in this island, but living morally and
politically in communion with their brethren who are scattered over
all the world. An English Jew looks on a Dutch or Portuguese Jew as
his countryman, and on an English Christian as a stranger. This want
of patriotic feeling, it is said, renders a Jew unfit to exercise
political functions.”
This premosaic platitude, and other coeval arguments, Macaulay sets
himself to demolish; and, whatever may be thought of the intrinsic
value of his weapons, the principle for which he battled no longer
stands in need of vindication.
The warfare continued with vigour on both sides. The Jews, encouraged
by Mr. Grant’s partial success, went on petitioning the House of
Commons for political equality, and their petitions found a constant
champion in Lord John Russell, who year after year brought in a Bill
on the subject. But the forces of the enemy held out gallantly. That
a Jew should represent a Christian constituency, and, who knows? even
control the destinies of the British Empire, was still a proposition
that shocked a great many good souls; while others ridiculed it as
preposterous. A. W. Kinglake voices the latter class of opponents in
his _Eothen_. A Greek in the Levant had expressed to the author his
wonder that a man of Rothschild’s position should be denied political
recognition. The English traveller scowls at the idea, and quotes
it simply as an illustration of the Greek’s monstrous materialism.
“Rothschild (the late money-monger) had never been the Prime Minister
of England! I gravely tried to throw some light upon the mysterious
causes that had kept the worthy Israelite out of the Cabinet.” Had
Kinglake been endowed with the gift of foreseeing coming, as he was
with the gift of describing current events, he would probably never
have written the eloquent page on which the above passage occurs. But
in his own day there was nothing absurd in his attitude. Till 1828 no
more than twelve Jewish brokers were permitted to carry on business in
the City of London, and vacancies were filled at an enormous cost. Even
baptized Jews were excluded from the freedom of the City, and therefore
no Jew could keep a shop, or exercise any retail trade, till 1832.
The struggle for the enfranchisement of the Jews was only one operation
in a campaign wherein the whole English world was concerned, and on the
result of which depended far larger issues than the fate of the small
community of English Jews. It was a campaign between the powers of the
past and the powers of the future. Among those engaged in this struggle
was a man in whom the two ages met. He had inherited the traditions of
old England, and he was destined to promote the development of the new.
His life witnessed the death of one world and the birth of another. His
career is an epitome of English history in the nineteenth century.
In 1833 Gladstone, then aged twenty-four years, voted for Irish
Coercion, opposed the admission of Dissenters to the Universities,
and the admission of Jews to Parliament. He was consistent. Irish
Reform, Repeal of the Test Acts, and Relief of the Jews, were three
verses of one song, the burden of which was “Let each to-morrow find
us farther than to-day.” In 1847 Gladstone, then aged thirty-eight
years, “astonished his father as well as a great host of his
political supporters by voting in favour of the removal of Jewish
disabilities.”[151] His desertion, as was natural, aroused a vast
amount of indignation in the camp. For had he not, only eight short
years earlier, been described as “the rising hope of the stern and
unbending Tories”? But the indignation, natural though it might be,
was unjustifiable. Gladstone was again consistent. Several important
things had happened since his first vote. Both Dissenters and Roman
Catholics had been rehabilitated. In other words, the Tory party had
surrendered their first line of defence--Anglicanism, and abandoned
their second--Protestantism: was there any reason, except blind
bigotry, for their dogged defence of the third? Gladstone could see
none. The admission of the Jews was henceforth not only dictated by
justice, but demanded by sheer logic. Furthermore, the Jews in 1833
had been permitted to practise at the bar; in 1835 the shrievalty had
been conceded to them; in 1845 the offices of alderman and of Lord
Mayor had been thrown open to them; in 1846 an Act of Parliament had
established the right of Jewish charities to hold land, and Jewish
schools and synagogues were placed on the same footing as those
of Dissenters. The same year witnessed the repeal of Queen Anne’s
statute, which encouraged conversion; of the exception of the Jews
from the Irish Naturalisation Act of 1783; and of the obsolete statute
_De Judaismo_, which prescribed a special dress for Jews. After the
bestowal of civil privileges, the withdrawal of political rights was
absurd. Gladstone could not conceive why people should be loth to grant
to the Jews nominal, after having admitted them to practical equality.
But though prejudice had died out, its ghost still haunted the English
mind. Men clung to the shadow, as men will, when the substance is
gone. Those orators of the press and the pulpit whose vocation it
is to voice the views of yesterday still strove to give articulate
utterance and a body to a defunct cause. Sophisms, in default of
reasons, were year after year dealt out for popular consumption, and
the position was sufficiently irrational to find many defenders. But
the result henceforth was a foregone conclusion. Even stupidity is not
impregnable. Prejudice, resting as it did upon unreality, could not
long hold out against the batteries of commonsense.
Yet ghosts die hard. Baron Lionel de Rothschild, though returned five
times for the City of London, was not allowed to vote. Another Jew,
Alderman Salomons, elected for Greenwich in 1851, ventured to take his
seat, to speak, and to vote in the House, though in repeating the oath
he omitted the words “on the true faith of a Christian.” The experiment
cost him a fine of £500 and expulsion from Parliament. Meanwhile, the
Bill for the admission of the Jews continued to be annually introduced,
to be regularly passed by the Commons, and as regularly rejected by
the Lords. The comedy did not come to an end till 1858, when an Act
was passed allowing Jews to omit from the oath the concluding words
to which they conscientiously objected. Immediately after Baron de
Rothschild took his seat in the House of Commons, and another “red
letter day” was added to the _Jewish Calendar_.
The Factories Act of 1870 permits Jews to labour on Sundays in certain
cases, provided they keep their own Sabbath; and the Universities Tests
Act, passed in the following year, just after a Jew had become Senior
Wrangler at Cambridge, enables them to graduate at the English seats of
learning without any violation to their religious principles. At the
present day the House of Commons contains a dozen Jewish members, and
there is scarcely any office or dignity for which an English Jew may
not compete on equal terms with an English Christian. The one remnant
of ancient servitude is to be found in the Anglo-Jewish prayer for the
King, in which the Almighty is quaintly besought to put compassion into
his Majesty’s heart and into the hearts of his counsellors and nobles,
“that they may deal kindly with us and with all Israel.”
Tolerance has not failed to produce once more the results which history
has taught us to expect. As in Alexandria under the Ptolemies, in
Spain under the Saracen Caliphs and the earlier Christian princes, and
in Italy under the Popes of the Renaissance, the Jews cast off their
aloofness and participated in the intellectual life of the Gentiles,
so now they hastened to join in the work of civilisation. When the
fetters were struck off from the limbs of Israel, more than the body
of the people was set free. The demolition of the walls of the ghettos
was symbolical of the demolition of those other walls of prejudice
which had for centuries kept the Jewish colonies as so many patches of
ancient Asia, incongruously inlaid into the mosaic of modern Europe.
The middle of the eighteenth century, which marks the spring-time of
Jewish liberty, also marks the spring-time of Jewish liberalism. It
is the Renaissance of Hebrew history; a new birth of the Hebrew soul.
The Jew assumed a new form of pride: pride in the real greatness of
his past. He became once more conscious of the nobler elements of
his creed and his literature. And with this self-consciousness there
also came a consciousness of something outside and beyond self. Moses
Mendelssohn did for the Jews of Europe what the Humanists had done for
the Christians. By introducing it to the language, literature, and life
of the Gentiles around it he opened for his people a new intellectual
world, broader and fairer than the one in which it had been imprisoned
by the persecutions of the Dark Ages; and that, too, at a moment when
the shadows of death seemed to have irrevocably closed round the body
and the mind of Israel. This deliverance, wondrous and unexpected
though it was, produced no thrill of religious emotion, it called forth
no outpourings of pious thankfulness and praise, such as had greeted
the return from the Babylonian captivity and, again, the Restoration
of the Law by the Maccabees in the days of old. The joy of the nation
manifested itself in a different manner, profane maybe and distasteful
to those who look upon nationality as an end in itself and who set the
interests of sect above the interests of man; but thoroughly sane.
Orthodoxy, of course, continued to hug the dead bones of the past, to
denounce the study of Gentile literature and science as a sin, and to
repeat the words in which men of long ago expressed their feelings in
a language no longer spoken. This was inevitable. Equally inevitable
was another phenomenon: a religious revival springing up simultaneously
with the intellectual awakening. The Jewish race includes many types.
As in antiquity we find Hellenism and Messianism flourishing side by
side, as the preceding century had witnessed the synchronous appearance
of a Spinoza and a Sabbataï Zebi, so now, while Moses Mendelssohn was
writing Platonic dialogues in Berlin, another representative Jew,
Israel Baalshem, was mystifying himself and his brethren with pious
hysteria in Moldavia.[152] But the more advanced classes declared
themselves definitely for sober culture. The concentration which
was forced upon Judaism as a means of self-defence, more especially
after the expulsion from Spain and the subsequent oppression during
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was now to a great extent
abandoned, and then ensued a period of dissent proportionate to the
previous compulsory conformity. There was a vast difference of opinion
as to the length to which reform should go. But one result of the
movement as a whole was a more or less thorough purification of Judaism
of the stains of slavery. The solemn puerilities of the Talmud and the
ponderous frivolities of Rabbinic tradition, grotesque ritualism, and
all the inartistic ineptitudes in belief and practice, with which ages
of barbarism had encrusted Judaism, were relegated to the lumber-room
of antiquarian curiosities, and all that was fresh and truly alive in
the Jewish race sought new vehicles for the expression of new thoughts:
modern emotions were translated into modern modes of utterance and
action. The Messianic dream came to be regarded as a vision of the
night, destined to vanish in the light of freedom, and its place was
taken by an ideal of a spiritual and racial brotherhood of the Jews,
based on their common origin and history, but compatible with patriotic
attachment to the various countries of their adoption.
Nothing is more characteristic of the general healthiness of the
emancipation of the Jewish mind than the new type of renegade Jew which
it brought into being. In the Middle Ages the Jew who renounced the
faith of his fathers often considered it his sacred duty to justify
his apostasy by persecuting his former brethren. The conditions which
produced that vulgar type of renegade having vanished, there began to
appear apostates of another kind--men who, though unwilling to devote
to a sect what was meant for mankind, or, perhaps, unable to sacrifice
their own individuality to an obsolete allegiance, yet never ceased to
cherish those whom they deserted. In them the connection of sentiment
outlasted the links of religion, and these men by their defection did
more for their people than others had done by their loyalty. Heinrich
Heine, born in 1799, was baptized at the age of twenty-five, prompted
partly by the desire to gain that fulness of freedom which in those
days was still denied to the non-Christian in Germany, but also by
a far deeper motive: “I had not been particularly fond of Moses
formerly,” he said in after life, “perhaps because the Hellenic spirit
was predominant in me, and I could not forgive the legislator of the
Jews his hatred towards all art.” The case of Benjamin Disraeli in this
country was an analogous, though not quite a similar one. Among later
examples may be mentioned the great Russo-Jewish composer Rubenstein
who, though baptized in infancy, never sought to conceal his Jewish
birth, but always spoke of it with pride--and that in a country where
it still is better for one to be born a dog than a Jew. Many of these
ex-Jews have attempted, and in part succeeded, in creating among the
Gentiles a feeling of respect towards the Jewish people as a nation of
aristocrats. And, indeed, in one sense the claim is not wholly baseless.
Since the abolition of religious obstacles the Jews have taken an
even more prominent part in the development of the European mind
under all its aspects. Israel wasted no time in turning to excellent
account the bitterly earned lessons of experience. The persecution
of ages had weeded the race of weaklings. None survived but the
fittest. These, strong with the strength of long suffering, confident
with the confidence which springs from the consciousness of trials
nobly endured and triumphs won against incredible odds, versatile by
virtue of their struggle for existence amid so many and so varied
forms of civilisation, and stimulated by the modern enthusiasm for
progress, were predestined to success. The Western Jews, after a
training of eighteen hundred years in the best of schools--the school
of adversity--came forth fully equipped with endowments, moral and
intellectual, which enabled them, as soon as the chance offered, to
conquer a foremost place among the foremost peoples of the world.
Science and art, literature, statesmanship, philosophy, law, medicine,
and music, all owe to the Jewish intellect a debt impossible to
exaggerate. In Germany there is hardly a university not boasting a
professor Hebrew in origin, if not always in religion. Economic thought
and economic practice owe their most daring achievements to Jewish
speculation. Socialism--this latest effort of political philosophy to
reconcile the conflicting interests of society and its constituent
members--is largely the product of the Jewish genius. It would be hard
to enumerate individuals, for their name is legion.[153] But a few
will suffice: Lasalle and Karl Marx in economics, Lasker in politics,
Heine and Auerbach in literature, Mendelssohn, Rubenstein and Joachim
in music, Jacoby in mathematics, Traube in medicine; in psychology
Lazarus and Steinthal, in classical scholarship and comparative
philology Benfey and Barnays are some Jewish workers who have made
themselves illustrious. Not only the purse but the press of Europe is
to a great extent in Jewish hands. The people who control the sinews
of war have contributed more than their share to the arts and sciences
which support and embellish peace. And all this in the course of one
brief half-century, and in the face of the most adverse influences of
legislation, of religious feeling and of social repugnance. History
can show no parallel to so glorious a revolution. Mythology supplies
a picture which aptly symbolises it. Hesiod was not a prophet, yet no
prophecy has ever received a more accurate fulfilment than the poetic
conception couched in the following lines received in the Hebrew
Palingenesia:
“Chaos begat Erebos and black Night;
But from Night issued Air and Day.”
CHAPTER XXI
IN RUSSIA
THE one great power in Europe which has refused to follow the new
spirit is Russia. In the middle of the sixteenth century Czar Ivan IV.,
surnamed the Terrible, voiced the feelings of his nation towards the
Jews in his negotiations with Sigismund Augustus, King of Poland. The
latter monarch had inserted in the treaty of peace a clause providing
that the Jews of Lithuania should be permitted to continue trading
freely with the Russian Empire. Ivan answered: “We do not want these
men who have brought us poison for our bodies and souls; they have
sold deadly herbs among us, and blasphemed our Lord and Saviour.” This
speech affords a melancholy insight into the intellectual condition of
the people over whom Ivan held his terrible sway. Nor can one wonder.
Printing had been popular for upwards of a century in the rest of
Europe before a press found its way into the Muscovite Empire, where
it aroused among the natives no less astonishment and fear than the
first sight of a musket did among the inhabitants of Zululand, and
was promptly consigned to the flames by the priests, as a Satanic
invention. Things did not improve during the succeeding ages. Till
the end of the seventeenth century Russia remained almost as total a
stranger to the development of the Western world and to its nations as
Tibet is at the present day. Venice or Amsterdam loomed immeasurably
larger in contemporary imagination than the vast dominions of the
White Czar. British traders at rare intervals brought from the port
of Archangel, along with their cargoes of furs, strange tales of the
snow-clad plains and sunless forests of those remote regions, and of
their savage inhabitants: of their peculiar customs, their poverty,
squalor, and superstition. And these accounts, corroborated by the
even rarer testimony of diplomatic envoys, who in their books of
travel spoke of princes wallowing in filthy magnificence, of starving
peasants, and of ravening wolves and bears, excited in the Western mind
that kind of wonder, mingled with incredulity, which usually attends
the narratives of travellers in unknown lands.
This home of primordial barbarism was suddenly thrust upon the
attention of the civilised world by the genius of one man. Peter the
Great, a coarse and cruel, but highly gifted barbarian, conceived the
colossal plan of bridging over the gulf that separated his empire
from Western Europe, and of reaching at a single stride the point of
culture towards which others had crept slowly and painfully in the
course of many centuries. It was the conception of a great engineer,
and it required great workmen for its execution. It is, therefore,
no matter for surprise if the work, when the mind and the will of
the original designer were removed, made indifferent progress, if it
remained stationary at times, if it was partially destroyed at others.
It must also be borne in mind that Peter’s dream of a European Russia
was far from being shared by the Russian people. The old Russian party,
which interpreted the feelings of the nation, had no sympathy with the
Emperor’s ambition for a new Russia modelled on a Western pattern. They
wanted to remain Asiatic. And this party found a leader in Peter’s own
son Alexis, who paid for his disloyalty with his life. The idea for
which Alexis and his friends suffered death is still alive. Opposition
to Occidental reform and attachment to Oriental modes of thought and
conduct continue to exercise a powerful influence in Russian politics.
Europe and Asia still fight for supremacy in the heterogeneous mass
which constitutes this hybrid Empire, and there are those who believe
that, although Russia poses as European in manner, in soul she is an
Asiatic power; and that the time will come when the slender ties
which bind her to the West will be snapped by the greater force of her
Eastern affinities. Whether this view is correct or not the future will
show. Our business is with the past.
The history of the Russian Empire from the seventeenth till the
twentieth century is largely a history of individual emperors, and
its spasmodic character of alternate progress and retrogression
is vividly illustrated by the attitude of those emperors towards
their Jewish subjects. Peter the Great welcomed them, his daughter
Elizabeth expelled them, Catherine II. re-admitted them, Alexander I.
favoured them. No democratic visionary was ever animated by a loftier
enthusiasm for the happiness of mankind than this noble autocrat.
By the Ukase of 1804 all Jews engaged in farming, manufactures, and
handicrafts, or those who had been educated in Russian schools, were
relieved from the exceptional laws against their race; while special
privileges were granted to those who could show proficiency in the
Russian, German, or Polish language. Other decrees, issued in 1809,
ensured to the Jews full freedom of trade. These concessions, while
testifying to the Emperor’s tolerant wisdom, show the severity of the
conditions under which the race laboured normally. On the partition
of Poland the Russian Empire had received an enormous addition to
its Jewish population, and the Czars, with few exceptions, continued
towards it the inhuman policy already adopted under Casimir the
Great’s successors. The Jews were pent in ghettos, and every care
was taken to check their growth and to hamper their activity. Among
other forms of oppression, the emperors of Russia initiated towards
their Jewish subjects a system analogous to the one formerly enforced
by the Sultans of Turkey on the Christian _rayahs_: the infamous
system of “child-tribute.” Boys of tender age were torn from their
parents and reared in their master’s faith for the defence of their
master’s dominions. Alexander I. determined to lift this heavy yoke,
and, as has been seen, he took some initial steps towards that end.
But, unfortunately, the closing years of the high-minded idealist’s
life witnessed a return to despotism, and consequently a series of
conspiracies, which in their turn retarded the progress of freedom and
hardened the hearts of its foes.
♦1825♦
Alexander’s stern son, Nicholas I., was a nineteenth century Phalaris.
His reign was inaugurated with an insurrectionary movement, whose
failure accelerated the triumph of the Asiatic ideals in Russian
policy. Nicholas, imbued with a strong antipathy to all that was
Occidental, and convinced that the greatness of Russia abroad depended
on tyranny at home, set himself the task of undoing the little his
predecessors had done in the way of reform. ♦1830 and 1848♦ The Poles
and the Hungarians experienced his relentless severity in a manner
which, while filling Europe with horror, inspired little inclination
for interference. In perfect consonance with the character and the
principles of Nicholas was his treatment of the Jews, who, under him,
lost all the poor privileges conferred upon them by his father, and
were not only condemned again to the old sorrows of servitude, but by a
special ukase, published in the beginning of September, 1828, they were
for the first time subjected to the military conscription.
Under Alexander II., the Czar Liberator, some of those oppressive
measures were mitigated, and permission was granted for three Jews to
settle at each railway station. But the improvement, limited as it was,
did not last long. Like some of his ancestors, Alexander II. vacillated
between the two antagonistic forces which wrestle for mastery in
Russia: the party of progress and freedom and the party of reaction
and despotism. Devoid of initiative and strength of purpose himself,
this amiable ruler was led now to right, now to left. The disasters
of the Crimean War had already shown that absolutism had failed in
the one thing which justified its existence--military efficiency. If
Russia could not achieve foreign supremacy, she ought at least to
secure domestic prosperity. ♦1855♦ The party of progress carried the
day, and the Emperor Nicholas with it, who, however, did not live to
work out his repentance, but left the task to his son. As early as
1856 Alexander II. had a plan of a Constitution drawn up; but the
design was postponed owing to more pressing needs. The years 1861–1864,
however, witnessed the emancipation of the serfs, the abolition of
the terrible corporal punishment by the knout, the institution of
the zemstvos, or provincial assemblies, and other measures of reform
which awakened the hopes and the enthusiasm of the Russian people.
_Svobodnaya Rossia_--Free Russia--was on every man’s lips. A new era
had dawned for the cowering masses of the Empire. ♦1863♦ The Polish
rebellion diverted this enthusiasm from internal reform to the defence
of the Fatherland against its hereditary enemy, who, it was suspected,
was aided by some foreign powers.
Military success abroad presupposes union at home, and union often
means the sacrifice of the individual and his interests and rights.
This common historical phenomenon now received a fresh illustration.
Victory took away all the blessings conferred by defeat. The Poles
were crushed, and with them the budding liberty of the Russians. The
people and the press, in calling for the utter annihilation of the
supposed enemy of their country, were unwittingly advocating their own
doom--in extinguishing Poland, they extinguished the last hope of their
country’s happiness. For the defeat of the Poles decided the struggle
in favour of despotism, all schemes of constitutional reform were
abandoned, and Alexander II.’s reign closed as Alexander I.’s had done:
in a craven recantation of the principles which had distinguished its
beginning. This backsliding created bitter disappointment in the hearts
of all Russian friends of liberty, and drove the more desperate among
them to the declaration of a war which culminated in the unfortunate
monarch’s murder. ♦1881 March 13♦ The crime of the Nihilists, however,
defeated its own object and ruined the cause it was meant to serve.
At the very moment of his death the Czar was actually meditating a
plan for some form of representative government, to begin with the
convocation of an Assembly of Notables. The intention died with him.
Henceforth the relations between the Government and the governed are
more than ever marked by mutual distrust.[154] The assassination of
the humane Emperor, far from weakening, strengthened the hands of
the champions of autocracy and intolerance, and these champions were
reinforced by the advocates of Nationalism or Panslavism--a movement
which, like Nihilism, derives its theories from modern Teutonic
speculation, but applies them after a primitive fashion purely Russian.
Russian national consciousness is a recent growth. It sprang up at the
beginning of the nineteenth century under the stimulus of Napoleon’s
invasion. Hatred of the foreign invader brought patriotism into being,
and the exultation of victory forced it to precocious maturity. The
Polish rebellions of 1830 and 1863 assisted its development, which
was also accelerated by the spread of education and the growth of the
press. The extreme partisans of the Nationalist idea, henceforth the
ruling body in the Empire, were imbued with the conviction that the
preservation of the Russian nation required the forcible assimilation
or, failing that, the utter extermination of all that is not Russian.
Under the fell influence of that conviction a systematic campaign was
entered upon for the Russification of all the alien races which had
been incorporated in the Empire during the preceding century. After
the complete subjugation of the Poles--brought about by Muravieff in
a manner which earned him the title of “Hangman of Warsaw”--came the
turn of the inhabitants of the Baltic provinces, who, partly German by
blood, had long adopted the German tongue, German culture, and German
ideals, and who since their conquest by the Russians, in the eighteenth
century, had furnished the Empire with some of its best statesmen,
warriors, and scientists. The Panslavic zeal for assimilation was
intensified by the fear of German expansion. Prussia by her brilliant
war against Austria in 1866 laid the foundations of that national
edifice which was completed by the war, even more brilliant, against
France in 1870, thus realising the national dream of German unity.
It was feared by the Russians that the absorption of the Germanised
provinces of the Baltic would be the next step of Pan-germanic
ambition. Impelled by those motives, Russia inaugurated the
amalgamation of these regions in 1867. Alexander II., notwithstanding
his personal sympathies and his public assurances to the natives of
the Baltic provinces, was carried away by the Panslavic current, which
gained further strength from the national conflict with Turkey in 1877.
♦1881–1894♦
Under Alexander III. the period of partial reform, thanks to the
industry of MM. Pobiedonostseff, Katkoff, and Count Ignatieff, and the
indecision of their Liberal opponents, gave way to one of reaction
in all directions. In administrative matters Alexander III., despite
the advice of so firm a believer in the divine origin of kingship as
the German Emperor William I., reverted to the methods of his own
grandfather, Nicholas I.: the press censorship was revived, the village
communes were placed under the absolute power of the police, flogging
was restored as an instrument of “educating” the peasants; and the very
mention of the Czar Liberator’s name became a punishable offence. At
the same time the work of Russification proceeded, and side by side
with the policy of racial uniformity was carried on a crusade for
religious conformity. ♦1880–1890♦ Panslavism rooted out the national
institutions and language of the Baltic provinces; Panorthodoxy stamped
out their heretical and schismatic doctrines. The Holy Synod in 1893,
inspired by the Imperial Procurator, M. Pobiedonostseff--who, though
a layman, wielded an absolute control over the Russian Church and
was by his opponents nicknamed “Lay Pope”--demanded the suppression
of Protestants, Roman Catholics, Mohammedans, Buddhists, and other
dissenters throughout the Empire. The thirteen years of Alexander
III.’s reign form one of the gloomiest pages in a history not
remarkable for brightness.
♦1894♦
Comparative tolerance followed upon the Czar’s death, and high hopes
were built on the reputed liberality of his successor, Nicholas II. But
these hopes have never been fulfilled. On the contrary, obscurantism
continued to reign supreme, and of late years the Panslavist and
Panorthodox programme has been vigorously pursued in the Caucasus,
in Poland, and in Finland, as well as among the Buddhists of the
trans-Baikalian district. In all these provinces national institutions
have been attacked with a remorseless fury and a brutal thoroughness
worthy of the Inquisition in its worst days. The Armenian Church was
plundered,[155] and Russian bishops were inflicted upon a population
whose language they did not understand. The Tartars, once loyal and
contented, were roused to appeal to the Sultan of Turkey and the
Western Powers for relief from the tyranny of the Czar. In their
petition these Russian Mohammedans describe how their religious
tribunals have been suppressed, how their children are forced into
Russian schools, how when serving in the army they are made to eat food
condemned by the law of Islam, and how they are compelled to observe
Christian festivals and to abandon their faith.[156] But in no part of
the Empire was more systematically repeated the process which, under
Alexander III., had achieved the Russification of the Baltic provinces
than in Finland. Nothing more inhuman or more insane than Russia’s
treatment of that country has been known in Europe since the revocation
of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV. The constitution of Finland,
which Alexander I. on annexing the country in 1809 had solemnly
pledged himself to respect, was abolished; its press was silenced; its
University degraded; its religion trampled under foot; its best men
were banished; ♦1899–1903♦ and all means were employed in the patriotic
endeavour to grind down this highly cultured, but non-Slavonic and
non-Orthodox, province of the north to the level of the rest of the
Empire; with the result that the most loyal and prosperous section
of the Czar’s subjects has been turned into the most disloyal and
miserable. Thus Germans, Esthonians, Poles, Finns, Circassians,
Georgians, Armenians, Mongols, Tartars--all have experienced the
Russian rage for uniformity national and religious; and so have even
dissenters of Russian blood, like the Old Believers and the Dukhobors,
not to mention the Polish and Lithuanian Uniates, whose churches have
been confiscated and converted to other uses, whose clergy has been
suppressed, and who are forced, under severe penalties, to worship, to
be married and buried, and to have their children christened according
to the rites of the Orthodox Church.[157]
Tyranny is a plant that can only flourish in darkness. The press is,
therefore, gagged, public meetings are severely prohibited, and both
Church and State assiduously discourage the education of the masses.
Elementary schools are insufficient and inefficient, while private
initiative is jealously forbidden to supplement the shortcomings of
public instruction. The Government does not provide for the people,
and will not allow it to provide for itself. The authorities at
Moscow have been known to prohibit even factory owners from keeping
elementary schools for the improvement of their working people. When
such is the state of things in the greatest industrial centre of the
Empire, it is not hard to imagine the conditions which prevail in the
remote country districts with their dull agricultural population.[158]
Hence the necessity for employing foreigners in every department of
commercial and industrial life. The success of the foreigner, however,
arouses the jealousy of the native, and Russian economists are apt
to attribute to the predominance of the former that wretchedness of
the Russian masses, which is mainly due to their defective education.
Under the circumstances, it is not surprising to find that the Jews
suffer as grievously as they did in the Middle Ages. The hostility of
a people still barbarous in all essentials has always succeeded in
defeating the good intentions of the best Czars, and in heightening
the horrors consequent on the despotic temper of the worst. If the
treatment of Israel in various countries may be taken as an index to
their respective progress on the road to civilisation, Russia must
be pronounced as standing at this hour where England stood in the
thirteenth century.
In 1881 a violent outbreak of anti-Jewish feeling, encouraged by the
Nationalist newspapers, on one hand, and by the Nihilists on the other,
led to much bloodshed and to the destruction of Jewish property and
life in the southern and western provinces of Russia, especially in
Russian Poland. Many causes contributed to the explosion. For years
past, indeed since the abolition of serfdom, the peasantry, especially
in South Russia, had been deteriorating both materially and morally.
A contemporary observer thus describes the state of things on the eve
of the event: “The bad harvests in the succession of years immediately
preceding 1881, and the accompanying ravages of a virulent and
widespread cattle plague, have completed the misery which idleness and
improvidence were steadily producing; and the removal of restraint,
the separation of families, and the assemblage of large numbers of the
most ignorant classes amid the strange scenes of town and camp life,
have unsettled their minds and degraded their morals.” After relating
the effect of these conditions on the relations between peasant and
landlord, the writer proceeds to explain some of the causes of the
peasant’s ill-feeling towards the Jew. “Besides the landlord, there is
another class in the south and west by whom the peasant thinks that he
has been defrauded. The Jews, whom Government restrictions prevent from
becoming agriculturists, and who are debarred from accepting employment
in any ordinary industrial establishment, by the fact of their Sabbath
limiting them to four and a half days of labour during the Christian
week, have from necessity turned their attention almost exclusively
to trade. The improvidence of the agriculturist and his want of
capital have rendered the assistance of a money-lender and middleman
an absolute necessity to him, and this requirement has been naturally
supplied by the presence of the Jew, whose sobriety, thrift, energy,
and commercial instincts render him especially fit for the vocation.
The more improvident the peasantry, the greater are the immediate
profits of the Jews, and whilst the former have become steadily
impoverished, many of the latter have acquired comparative wealth.
There is nothing astonishing, therefore, in the ill-feeling which has
arisen towards the Jews, and that ill-feeling has been accompanied
by the persuasion that there must be a special injustice in the
superior material prosperity of a race whom the Government, by penal
legislation, had emphatically marked out as inferior to the Christians.
Religious fanaticism is almost unknown in Russia, and indifferentism
is rather the rule among a peasantry which lives in amity with
Mahommedans, Roman Catholics, and Lutherans alike; but it requires a
strong hand to restrain a semi-civilized and poverty-stricken people
from attacking and plundering their richer and defenceless neighbours.
The Government did not show this strong hand in defence of the Jews,
and political agitators eagerly fanned the flame of animosity against
the alien race, and saw with pleasure the spread of disturbances
which would either lead to a collision between the people and the
authorities, or open the eyes of the masses to the weakness of the
latter, and to their own strength.”[159]
The venerable charge of ritual murder was once more brought against
the Jews, and within a few weeks all the provinces from the Baltic to
the Black Sea were a theatre of arson, rapine, and slaughter, such as
Europe had not witnessed since the tragedy of the Black Death in the
fourteenth century. The civilised world shuddered at the appalling
spectacle; but the local authorities, both civil and military, looked,
for the most part, complacently on. The peasantry, having slaked
their thirst for vengeance, plunder, rape, and gin, by sacking the
Jewish houses, drinking shops, and brothels, proceeded to embody their
grievances against the Jew in the following series of demands:
1. “That Jews, members of town councils and provincial assemblies,
vice-directors of town banks, members of different institutions and
committees, should voluntarily give up their present posts, casting off
the cloak of pride and braggadocio; as persons not possessing civic
honesty, they are unfit to hold such places.
2. “That the Jews should impress on their wives and daughters not to
deck themselves out in silk, velvet, gold, etc., as such attire is
neither in keeping with their education nor the position they hold in
society.
3. “That the Jews should dismiss from their service all Russian
female servants, who, after living in Jewish houses, certainly become
prostitutes, forget their religion, and who are intentionally depraved
by the Jews.
4. “To banish, without delay, all Jews belonging to other places who do
not possess any real property in town.
5. “To close all drinking shops.
6. “To forbid Jews to abuse the Christians, and, in general, to scoff
at them.
7. “To prohibit Jews from buying up in the markets the first
necessaries of life with the intention of selling them to the Russians.
8. “To impress on wholesale dealers in spirits not to mix with vodka
any foreign element which is sometimes injurious to health.
9. “Not to trade on the Sabbath before noon, and at Christmas and
Easter not to trade for three days, and not to work on our holidays.
10. “To prohibit Jews buying wheat for trading purposes within thirty
versts of the town of Pereyaslav, and therefore to remove all existing
grain and flour stores.
11. “To prohibit Jews from buying up uncut wheat; also to lease land
from private individuals.
12. “The Town Council is begged not to let, and the Jews not to hire,
the grounds at fairs and at marketplaces, with the object of farming
them out.”[160]
No better proof of the mediaeval character of the Russian peasant’s
mind could be desired than that furnished by the above document. Even
so hearty an apologist of that peasant as Mr. Goldwin Smith finds
himself compelled to remark that these demands “by their grotesque
mixture of real and fancied grievances, remind us of the demands made
by the ignorant, but suffering, peasants of the Middle Ages.” Their
demand that the Jews should be forced “to cast off the cloak of pride
and braggadocio,” has its exact parallel in the complaints of the
Spanish bigots laid before Don Henry in 1371.[161]
But the feeling which found so terrible an expression was by no
means confined to the lower and illiterate classes of the community.
The crime itself was attributed to the deliberate policy of Count
Ignatieff. A high-bred and accomplished Russian lady, a few months
after the massacres, described the general attitude of her compatriots
towards the Jews in very fluent English, as follows:--“Well, we do
not like the Jews, that is a fact; and the dislike is reciprocal. But
the reason we do not like them is not because of their speculative
monotheism, but because of their practical heathenism. To us they are
what the relics of the Amorites and Canaanites were to the Hebrews in
old times--a debased and demoralized element which is alien to our
national life, and a source of indescribable evils to our people. It
is not to the Jew as a rejecter of Christianity that we object; it is
to the Jew as a bitter enemy of Christian emancipation, the vampire of
our rural communes, the tempter of our youth, and the centre of the
demoralizing, corrupting agencies which impair our civilization.”[162]
The modern Russian lady’s denunciation of the Jew, in tone as well as
in substance, is a significant, though, of course, quite unconscious,
echo of Ivan the Terrible’s cruder statement of more than three
centuries ago.[163] The sole difference consists in form--the religious
objection is minimised and the social emphasised in accordance with
Western modes of expression; but fundamentally the two utterances are
identical.
The Minister of the Interior, in less emotional language, explained
the outbreak as due to causes of a purely economic character. “During
the last twenty years,” he said, “the Jews have not only gradually got
into their hands the trade and industry, but have also acquired by
deed of purchase and leases considerable landed estates, and, owing to
their numbers and solidarity, they have, with few exceptions, directed
all their efforts, not towards increasing the productiveness of the
country, but to the spoliation of the native population, chiefly the
poorer classes, by which means they called forth a protest from the
latter, which unfortunately expressed itself in a violent form.”[164]
Vice-Consul Wagstaff in an official despatch, while giving the Jews
full credit for their remarkable intelligence, thrift, and business
qualities, enumerates the complaints made against them by the
Russians--namely, that “the Jews are the principal keepers of drinking
shops and houses of ill-fame, receivers of stolen goods, illegal
pawnbrokers and usurers. As Government contractors they frequently
collude with unscrupulous officials in defrauding the State to vast
amounts. They use their religion for business purposes, ‘boycott’
outsiders, play into each other’s hands at land sales, and thus despoil
the peasantry. Often the harvest of a peasant who has been entangled
in their toils passes into their grasp, as it stands in the field, on
their own terms. They themselves do not raise agricultural products,
but they reap the benefit of others’ labour, and steadily become rich
while proprietors are gradually getting ruined. In their relation to
Russia they are compared to parasites that have settled on a plant not
vigorous enough to throw them off, and which is being gradually sapped
of its vitality.”[165]
Another witness describes the gradual subjection of the impoverished
peasant to the Jewish money-lender and adds, “The Jews’ two great
factors in dealing with the Russian peasant are _vodka_ (native gin)
and a few roubles at a pinch, and with these powers he enslaves and
uses him for his own ends. Many large properties, belonging to
influential and hereditary Russian noblemen, are rented out to Jews,
because the proprietors find that they pay higher rents than the
Russian tenants.” He concludes, however, with the reflection: “The
real source of the evil lies in the mental and moral condition of the
masses, and it is there the remedy must be applied.”[166]
These are the reasons alleged for the persecution of the Russian Jews.
First as to “productiveness,” the neglect of which is brought forward
as a criminal charge against the Jew. It is an old complaint. The
Andalusian monk of yore inveighed against the Jews of Spain because
“they preferred to gain their livelihood by traffic rather than by
manual labour or mechanical arts.”[167] Modern economic science teaches
us that a country can dispense as little with the distributors as with
the producers of wealth. Productiveness, however, is well known to be
the pet idea of Russian economists. The last two Ministers of Finance
have for close on a quarter of a century been fostering production
with a reckless energy which by many unbiassed students is regarded
as fatal. Everything is done to encourage production and exportation,
with the result that the soil gets exhausted, and the reserves of
corn, on which the Russian farmer once relied in time of famine, have
disappeared from the country.[168] Like all measures carried to excess
and without due regard to local conditions, the fever of productiveness
is not an unmixed blessing, and the neglect of it will not be laid, by
the impartial outsider, as a crime at the door of the Jew, especially
when he remembers that the Jew is not a free agent in the choice of
his profession. For, even if the law permitted and the Jew wished to
devote himself to agriculture, he would be prevented from doing so by
the Russian system of village communes--an intrusion into which on the
part of non-Christians would be resented by none more bitterly than by
the Russian peasant himself. It is thus seen that the Jew could not in
any case become a “producer,” but was irresistibly compelled to turn
to handicrafts, retail commerce and money-lending.
As to Jewish extortion. The manumission of the serfs opened up fields
for money-lending which it would have been impossible to resist the
temptation of exploiting even to capitalists whose opportunities
for investment are less circumscribed than are those of the Russian
Jew. That reform, though undoubtedly beneficial in the long run,
was meanwhile bound to upset the social fabric, especially in
Little Russia, and to produce the evils which generally accompany a
radical change brought about in a country unprepared for it. By the
Ukase of 1864 there was created a state of transition. The old was
pronounced out of date; the new was not yet born. While ruining many
noble landlords, the abolition of serfdom brought into being a vast
proletariat of freedmen poor in manual skill and capital, and poorer
still in resource. Both these classes, bewildered by the unaccustomed
conditions rudely thrust upon them, rushed to the Jew for loans as
naturally as the moth rushes to the candle, and, like the moth, they
suffered in the act. The Jew had no cause to treat either borrower
with lenience; but, as might have been expected, the peasant was by
far the greater sufferer of the two. He was less prepared for the
struggle. For centuries he had lived under a restraint which, while
stunting his manhood, conferred upon him some of the privileges, as
well as more than all the punishments, of childhood. If the leading
strings deprived the peasant of the freedom to act, they also deprived
him of the freedom to ruin himself. These strings were suddenly
removed. The peasant, still an infant in mind, was invested with all
the responsibilities of an adult. The very qualities which had enabled
him to bear his servitude now proved his unfitness for liberty.
His utter lack of initiative, of enterprise, of self-reliance, and
of self-restraint, and his abject submissiveness to the decrees of
fate--all characteristic of the serf--are well summarised in the one
word _nitchevo_, the commonest and most comprehensive expression in the
_mujik’s_ vocabulary. It means “no matter,” and corresponds exactly
to the _malesh_ of the Egyptian fellah--another peasantry sunk in
ignorance and fatalistic resignation, as the results of centuries of
serfdom.
In addition to these defects the Russian peasant is a constitutional
procrastinator. He never does to-day what he thinks he can by hook or
by crook put off till to-morrow. Two of the most precious boons of
his newly-acquired liberty, in his eyes, were the license it allowed
him to postpone his work as long as he liked and to drink as much as
he liked. Under the old system “the proprietor thrashed his serfs if
they were drunk too often, and he kept their pockets so empty, and
the price of the vodki, of which he was the monopolist, so high, that
they had comparatively little opportunity of gratifying their passion
for liquor. This was very well while it lasted, but now that the
control is withdrawn the reaction is all the greater.”[169] This is an
ample answer to the charge brought against the Jew as the promoter of
intemperance.
As to the charge of collusion with Government officials, it can
easily be met. Both culprits, of course, deserve punishment. But it
is scarcely fair that the one should be only fined, dismissed, or
imprisoned, and the other slaughtered or starved with the rest of
his nation. With regard to “boycotting” outsiders and playing into
each other’s hands, is it not natural that people belonging to a sect
which their neighbours scorn should assist their fellow-sufferers in
preference to their persecutors? There is no stronger bond between man
and man than the bond of a common stigma.
The charges of immoral pursuits and habits of depravity may, or
may not, be exaggerated. But, even admitting that the Jew is all
that his Russian enemy considers him to be, a sufficient answer to
the invectives of the latter is supplied by the old saying: “Every
country has the Jews it deserves.” Without having recourse to the
obvious retort--which in the case of the Russian peasant would be
particularly apposite--that, if there was no demand for the facilities
for immorality supplied by the Jew, the Jew would not think it worth
his while to supply them, we may urge the self-evident truth, that
legal disabilities, by barring the way to an honest and honourable
career, drive their victims to the exercise of the lowest and meanest
of callings. The struggle for existence under such banausic conditions
degenerates into a savage warfare in which there is no room for
scruple or shame. The outcast has no reputation to lose. And, the more
unprincipled the contest becomes, the greater grows the necessity for
oppression, in countries where statesmanship has not yet discovered
less rude remedies. It is a vicious circle from which there appears to
be no escape.
Accordingly, the undisciplined fury of the populace in 1881 was
supplemented by a systematic and carefully reasoned-out persecution
on the part of the Government. Instead of endeavouring to raise the
Russian masses to a level of mental and moral strength sufficiently
high to enable them to compete with the Jew, the Czar’s ministers
devoted their ingenuity to the invention of new means for lowering
the Jew to the level of the Russian masses. The disabilities of the
hated race were increased. Jewish property in the open country was
confiscated, and the owners were driven into ghettos. It was enacted
that henceforth no Jew should be allowed to live in a village or to
acquire property therein. The whole of the Russian Empire was, with
reference to the Jews, divided into three distinct sections. The bulk
of the race were confined to the fifteen provinces known as the “Pale
of Jewish Settlement.” Those Jews who belonged to a merchants’ guild
of the first class for ten years, University graduates, and skilled
artisans were permitted to move freely and to settle in any part of
European Russia they chose, except the departments of Moscow and
Taurien, in which no Jewish workman was allowed to reside. The third
section comprised Siberia, and that was closed to all Jews, except
convicts. The result of these enactments was that the few towns within
the “pale” were overcrowded with Jewish residents, herded together and
forced to carry on a fierce competition for existence with each other.
At the same time, laws were passed rendering the admittance of Jewish
youths to the high schools and Universities prohibitive, and the Jews
were forbidden to act as State or municipal officers, or teachers, or
to practise at the bar without a special license from the Minister of
Justice. These and many other measures of restriction were adopted with
the ostensible object of saving the Russian peasant from the clutches
of the Jewish harpy. The joint effect of persecution and legislation on
the Jews was misery. But these crimes proved the reverse of beneficial
to the very peasants on whose behalf they were avowedly committed. In
every village and township the departure of the Jewish traders and
artisans was immediately marked by a rise in the prices of commodities,
and was soon followed by commercial and industrial stagnation.
That regard for the moral and material welfare of the people, however,
was not the sole, or the principal, motive of the Russian Government’s
policy is unwittingly confessed by the fair patriot already quoted.
Referring to the prohibition of the Jews from keeping public houses,
she says: “That our objection is solely to the anti-national Jews, not
the Jews who become Russians in all but their origin, is proved by the
decision of the Commission in favour of allowing the Karaite Jews to
sell drink as freely as any other of their Russian fellow-subjects. It
is only the Talmudist Jews who are forbidden that privilege.”[170] It
is hard for the ordinary man to see how belief in the Bible justifies
a pursuit which is otherwise condemned as injurious to body and soul,
or in what mysterious way the Talmud affects the quality of liquor. The
ordinary man will find it easier to draw from these facts the inference
that the Government’s real end was the suppression of the Jew, the
suppression of the drink-selling Jew being only a means to that end.
In the attitude of the Russian people towards the Jews at the present
moment we recognise all the features made familiar by the history of
the Jewish nation in the past. Social nonconformity and aloofness
led to anti-Judaism in antiquity. To this motive of persecution the
advent of Christianity added religious rancour, and the Middle Ages
economic rivalry. The nineteenth century was destined to strengthen the
texture of hatred by the addition of a new strand--Nationalism. All
these causes, as we have seen, combined to make the Jew an object of
detestation variously disguised. In ancient Rome we found impatience
of dissent justifying itself by the pretext of regard for public
morality; in Catholic and Protestant Europe cruelty and cupidity
hallowed by the cloak of religious zeal; in modern Europe we see
narrow-minded intolerance and jealousy trying to ennoble themselves
by the title of patriotism. Each age has inherited the passions of
the past and has increased the sad inheritance by the addition of new
prejudices. In Russia modern culture spreads a little way over the face
of mediaevalism, as the waters of a river at its mouth spread over
the surface of the ocean, modifying its colour without affecting its
depths. Consequently the Jew is still persecuted for his heresy, as
well as for his usury, exclusiveness, and foreign extraction.
Russian officials and English apologists of Russian anti-Semitism will
not admit that the persecution of the Russian Jews is religious, though
acknowledging that religion, too, plays its part. They claim that it is
essentially economical and social, “and that the main cause has always
been the unhappy relation of a wandering and parasitic race, retaining
its tribal exclusiveness, to the races among which it sojourns, and on
the produce of which it feeds.”[171] This view is natural in a modern
spectator of the West; but it is not quite correct, as it implies
modern and Western conditions and sentiments in a country which only
in a small measure is modern and Western. The late Mr. Lecky wrote:
“The Russian persecution stands in some degree apart from other forms
of the anti-Semitic movement on account of its unparalleled magnitude
and ferocity.” It also stands apart, to the same degree, on account
of its origin. Jew-hatred in Russia is a thoroughly genuine survival.
In Western Europe it is largely an artificial revival. The Russian
Jews have never been emancipated from servitude, because the Russian
Christians, with few exceptions, have never been emancipated from
ignorance and bigotry. In other words, the modern term anti-Semitism,
with all its quasi-scientific connotation, can hardly be applied to
the Russian variety of the epidemic. But, be the causes what they
may, the result is the same. To the slaughtered Jew, it is a matter
of comparative indifference whether he is slain as a parasite or for
the love of Christ. The student also must be very extraordinarily
constituted who can derive any consolation from the fact that the
principles of toleration made dear to us by the experience and the
sacrifices of two thousand years, are violated in so outrageous a
manner not from religious, but from “economical and social” motives.
But, though the source of Russian antipathy to the Jew may be a matter
of dispute, there is no question as to the sincerity and the depth of
the feeling. An authority on the Jewish Question, writing in 1882,
expressed the opinion that the disasters of that and the previous
year were inevitable, and that, “unless the Jews are removed from the
countries in which they have taken place, we may certainly anticipate
their recurrence upon a much larger scale.”[172] This anticipation was
justified by subsequent events. In 1891 and 1892 new anti-Jewish riots,
encouraged by the authorities, were followed by fresh restrictive
enactments.
Many Jews who had contrived to settle in towns outside the “pale” were
driven back into it, and others within the “pale” were forced to quit
the villages and townships in which they had dwelt for years and,
leaving their property and business connections, to take up their abode
in the over-crowded larger towns. The persecution reached its climax in
the winter of 1891–92, when thousands of men, women and little children
were heartlessly expelled from Moscow, at a time of the year when even
soldiers are not suffered to drill in the open air on account of the
cold. These and other measures of unbearable harshness drove, as it was
intended that they should, about a quarter of a million of Jews out of
the Empire; and then the nations of the West, alarmed by the influx of
the destitute refugees, raised a bitter outcry against the barbarity of
the Czar.
The Czar, however, in the words of one of his own servants and
apologists, “remained deaf to protests of the Lord Mayor of London,
for example,” and declared that “he will leave unheeded any and all
such foreign remonstrances demanding a change in methods which have
been deliberately adopted.” In fact, all the measures of repression and
restriction which ignorant foreigners misrepresented as “the barbarous
expulsion of the Jews from Russia” had for their virtuous object to
prevent collision between the Jews and the peasants, to relieve the
latter from what they could not be persuaded was not a Jewish tyranny,
and, in one word, to secure good order and to maintain stability in the
community.[173] It is interesting to hear the Russian version of the
matter. Unfortunately a euphemism does not constitute a refutation.
In 1896 the Jewish Question was re-opened, and the Jews, as well as
other sufferers, ventured to hope for an improvement of their lot
from Nicholas II.’s reputed zeal for reform. Much also was expected
from “the generous and sympathetic instincts of the young Empress.”
But these expectations were not realised, and at the present hour the
country in which the race is most numerous[174] is also the country
in which it suffers most grievously. The treatment of the Jews in
Russia can be summed up in one sentence: deliberate starvation of
body and soul. The Jew, as has been seen, is loathed not only as a
non-Slav and non-Orthodox, but also as a parasite who exhausts the
organism on which he lives. Isolation, it is held, by forcing him
to feed upon himself, will kill him. The Jews are, therefore, only
allowed to reside in certain specified quarters of certain towns in
certain districts, and are forbidden to move from place to place
without special permission or such a special form of passport as is
granted to prostitutes. Overcrowding produces poverty, disease, and
all the filthy degradation of ghetto life. A faint conception of what
such life means may be formed from a recent petition to the Russian
Committee of Ministers signed by many thousands of Russian Jews: “Not
less than 20 per cent. of the entire population of the Jewish Pale of
Settlement,” say the petitioners, “are reduced to such a condition of
wretchedness that they have to be supported from charitable sources. In
great Jewish communities like those of Vilna, Berditcheff, and Odessa,
the number of the Jewish poor amounts to as much as 25 to 33 per cent.
Co-extensive with this widespread poverty there is in all the Jewish
communities an enormous labouring and artisan proletariat that knows
not to-day wherewith it may exist on the morrow. The simple weapon
which the labourer and artisan possesses in his relations with his
employer--the power of leaving his work and seeking better conditions
of employment elsewhere--has become impossible of use on account of
the limitation of freedom of movement and the prohibition of residence
elsewhere than in the few towns of the Pale of Settlement. If they do
not wish to die of hunger or go begging Jewish workmen must submit
unreservedly to the conditions prescribed by the manufacturers. The
Jewish capitalists, too, are seriously injured by the burdensome effect
of the special regulations which have, owing to the restraints of the
May laws, taken from them every freedom of action, and deprived them of
the power of disposing of their products in markets outside the Pale of
Settlement....”[175]
In addition, the Jews are confined to the most ignoble occupations.
They are excluded from the High Schools and the Universities of the
Christians, and are forbidden to keep secular schools of their own.
The only teaching accessible to the ordinary Russian Jew is Rabbinical
teaching. The centre of this education is the Talmudical School of
Walosin, known among the Jews as the “Tree of Life College,” founded
in 1803 by a disciple of Elijah Wilna, a famous Hebrew scholar, and
maintained by contributions collected from all parts of the Russian
“pale.” The institution provides spiritual and bodily food--both very
primitive in quality and meagre in quantity--to some four hundred
hungry students who spend three-fourths of their time poring over the
records of the past, and the other fourth is denouncing a present
of which they know nothing. Ignorance fosters fanaticism, and the
authority of the Synagogue which, under different circumstances, might
have been used as an instrument of conciliation, is turned into a
source of bitterness. The seed of discord between Jew and Gentile,
sown by oppression, is nursed by the benighted Rabbis, who regard
thirst for secular knowledge as more sinful than thirst for alcohol;
and the poisonous plant is assisted in its growth by the young Jews
who, having contrived to obtain abroad an education denied to them
at home, intensify the just animosity of their people against the
Christian oppressors. The ill-feeling is invigorated further still by
the Jewish recruits who, on the expiration of their term of service,
return to their families exasperated by the hardships and the insults
which they have experienced in the ranks, for the Hebrew soldier in the
Russian army is treated exactly as the Christian recruit is treated
in the Turkish Gendarmerie. In both cases, not only is promotion out
of the question,[176] but the infidels are the victims of unmeasured
invective, malice, and injury at the hands of their colleagues and
superiors. They are, as a race, considered unclean and unfriendly.
They form a small minority. They are powerless to protect themselves,
and the officers will not take them under their protection. The less
deserved the insult, the more anxious will the victim be to recover his
self-esteem by revenge. Is it, then, to be wondered at that the Russian
Jews are distinguished among their fellow-slaves for their eager
participation in any insurrectionary movement that offers the faintest
hope of relief and revenge? To turn a population which, by instinct
and interest alike, is the most conservative and peaceful in the world
into a people of anarchists is, indeed, the highest triumph hitherto
achieved by Russian statesmanship.
The hatred towards the Jew is shared by the Russian’s enemy, the
Pole, and for similar reasons--economic preponderance and excessive
addiction to usury and the trade in liquor. In 1863 the revolutionary
Government of Poland endeavoured to enlist the sympathies of the Jews
in the struggle against the common oppressor by conceding to them civic
equality. The experiment was crowned with brilliant success. Justice
turned the Jews of Poland into Polish patriots. But the reconciliation
did not outlive the revolution. After that short spell of liberty the
ancient prejudice revived, and now, though legally the Jews of Poland
are still Polish citizens, the Catholics of Poland, encouraged by their
Orthodox tyrants of Russia, vie with them in their fierce contempt for
the race which stood their common fatherland in so good stead in the
hour of its need. How intense this feeling is, may be seen from the
following account by an English eye-witness:
“To the Jew in Warsaw is meted out a wealth of disfavour and contempt
that is hardly pleasant to witness. The British stranger, however, who
normally lives far from any personal contact with these huge Jewish
populations, is not altogether in a position to pass judgment on
this deeply-seated anti-Semitic rancour. It pervades all classes of
Polish society, and finds expression in a variety of ways. The youth
who obligingly performs my minor marketing for me, in return for
a tolerant attitude on my part on the subject of small change, was
interested in the fate of an egg which I had pronounced to have passed
the age limit of culinary usefulness.
“‘Don’t throw it away,’ he begged; ‘give it to me.’
“‘What do you want it for?’
“‘Oh, it will do to throw at a Jew.’”[177]
One exception to the mutual antipathy which divides the Jew of Poland
from his Gentile fellow-countryman is offered by the upper class of the
Jews of Warsaw. While the masses of the nation, cut-off from all but
commercial intercourse with their Christian neighbours, live huddled
together in separate quarters, fed on the traditions of the past, and
observing, in dress, diet and deportment, the ordinances of the Talmud
in all their ancient strictness, a small minority of their cultured
brethren has overstepped the narrow limits of orthodox Judaism and
identified itself in all things, save creed, with the Poles, whose
national aspirations it shares and with whom it does not even shrink
from intermarrying occasionally. But this reconciliation is confined
to that infinitesimal class which, thanks to its wealth, is free from
persecution, and in temperament, sentiment, and ideas belongs to the
most advanced section of Occidental Jews rather than to the Jewry of
Eastern Europe. Besides, it is a reconciliation strenuously opposed by
the Russian authorities which, while inciting the Poles against the
Jews, encourage the Jews to cling to their exclusiveness and to resist
all Polish national aspirations as alien to them.
Yet, in spite of all disabilities, and as though in quiet mockery
of them, the Russian Jews contrive not only to exist, but, in some
degree, to prosper. Their skill, their sobriety, their industry,
their indomitable patience, their reciprocity, and their cunning--all
fostered by the persecution of centuries--enable them to hold their
own in the struggle, and to evade many of the regulations which are
intended to bring about their extinction. They often obtain a tacit
permission to live in various trading places beyond the “pale,” and
in many villages in which they have no legal right of residence.
Vocations forbidden by law are pursued by the connivance of corrupt
officials, and the despised outcasts frequently succeed in amassing
large fortunes as merchants or contractors, by the practice of
medicine, or at the Bar, or in earning a respectable livelihood as
professors and authors, and even as Government servants!
Even culture is not allowed to die out. National enthusiasm, fomented
by persecution, and denied political self-expression, finds an outlet
in literature. In spite of the State, the Church, and the Synagogue,
the darkness of the Russian ghetto is illumined by gifted writers in
prose and verse, like Perez, Abramovitch, Spektor, Goldfaden, and
others, who have invested the debased Yiddish jargon of the Russian Jew
with the dignity of their own genius, and have produced a literature
popular in form as well as in sentiment--a literature which reflects
with wonderful vividness and fidelity the humour and the sadness of
Russian life, and under a different guise carries on Mendelssohn’s
educational mission. In addition to these original works, there is a
vast activity in every department of foreign literature and science,
including translations from many European languages, and a vigorous
periodical press which disseminates the products of Western thought
among the masses of the ghetto. So that the Russian Jew has access,
through his own Yiddish, not only to works of native creation, but
also to the most popular of foreign books, great and otherwise: from
Goethe’s _Faust_ and Shakespeare’s _Hamlet_ to Sir A. Conan Doyle’s
_Adventures of Sherlock Holmes_. Side by side with these efforts to
foster the Yiddish element proceeds a movement on behalf of the Hebrew
element, while the upper classes of Polish Jews are actively promoting
Polish culture among their poorer Yiddish-speaking brethren. All these
movements, whether conducted on parallel or on mutually antagonistic
lines, supply sure evidence of one thing--the vitality of the Russian
Jewry.
This success, however, while affording consolation to the sufferers,
fans the aversion of the persecutors and spurs the Government to a
periodical renewal of the measures of coercion. It is acknowledged
that, under fair conditions, the Russian Jew, owing to his superior
intelligence, versatility, perseverance, and temperance, would in a
few years beat the Russian Christian in every field of activity. Hence
it is the Russian Christian’s interest and resolve to crush him. This
resolve is cynically avowed by Russians of the highest rank. The late
M. De Plehve, Minister of the Interior, in an audience granted to a
deputation of Jews in April, 1904, confessed with amazing candour that
the barbarous treatment of their race was dictated by no other reason
than its superiority over the Russian. “You are a superior race,” said
the Minister. “Therefore, if free entrance to the High Schools were
to be accorded to you, you would attain, although through worthy and
honest means, too much power. It is not just that the minority should
overrule the majority.” He then proceeded to inform his hearers that
he held the Jews responsible for the revolutionary agitation in the
Empire and for the murders of Imperial functionaries, concluding with a
warning and a threat, and dismissing them with the assurance, “You need
not count on obtaining equal rights with the Christian population.”[178]
The eternal feud found another tragic and characteristic expression
on a large scale in the spring of 1903. It was Easter Day. The good
Christian folk of Kishineff, the capital city of Bessarabia, had
been to church where they had heard the glad tidings of their Lord’s
resurrection, had joined in the hymn of triumph, and then had greeted
one another with the kiss of brotherly love and the salutation, “Christ
is risen!” “He is risen, indeed!” Directly after, they fell upon their
fellow-citizens--whose ancestors crucified Christ nineteen hundred
years ago. The Jewish colony was sacked, many Jews were slaughtered
without distinction of sex or age, and their dwellings, as well as
their shops, were looted. Soldiers were seen helping the rioters in the
work of destruction and carrying off their share of the spoils.
Like its predecessors, this outrage excited profound indignation in
many parts of the civilised world. Protests were raised in France, in
the United States of America, and in Australia. At Melbourne there
was held a crowded meeting, presided over by the Lord Mayor, and the
Anglican Bishop of the city moved a resolution, which was unanimously
carried, expressing “the meeting’s abhorrence of the merciless
outrages committed upon the Kishineff Jews, including helpless women
and children,” and the hope “that the Russian Government would take
effectual measures to prevent the repetition of crimes which were a
stain on humanity at large.” The Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne moved
that the resolution be transmitted to the Lord Mayor of London. Similar
resolutions were adopted at meetings held in Sydney.[179] In London
mass meetings were held at Mile-end and Hyde Park, where thousands
of Jews with their women and children assembled to record their
horror at the massacre of their Russian brethren, in their various
tongues--Russian, German, Yiddish, French, Italian, and English. All
the speakers agreed in tracing the outrages to the instigation or the
encouragement of the Russian Government. The second meeting embodied
its sentiments in the following terms:
“The meeting expresses: (1) Its deep sympathy with all the sufferers
from the riots at Kishineff, and its condolence with the relatives of
the victims. (2) Its admiration for all those who, without distinction
of nationality or creed, risked their lives in defending the helpless
Jewish population. (3) Its indignation at, and abhorrence of, the
conduct of the Russian Government, which, in order to intimidate the
revolutionary forces of the people, failed to take steps to prevent
the cowardly massacre of innocent men, women, and children. (4) Its
belief that only the development of a powerful working-class movement
in Russia can prevent the repetition of similar atrocities. This
meeting also sends fraternal encouragement to all who are working for
the overthrow of the present régime and the advent of Socialism in
Russia.”[180]
The conviction that the massacre was due to the direct inspiration of
the Russian Government was shared by others than the Jews. Dr. Barth,
the German Radical Leader, published in _Die Nation_, a Berlin weekly
journal, an unsigned paper, stated to be from the pen of a Russian
occupying a high position, in which the writer says:
“M. Plehve, Minister of the Interior, is directly responsible for the
Kishineff massacre. He is a patron of M. Kruschevan, the editor of the
anti-Semite paper _Bessarabets_, and has even granted him a subsidy of
25,000 roubles to conduct a second anti-Semite organ at St. Petersburg
called the _Znamya_. M. Plehve desired to increase the subsidy, but M.
Witte, the Minister of Finances, intervened. M. Kruschevan then, thanks
to M. Plehve’s patronage, was enabled to draw money from the National
Bank without security.”
After asserting that General von Raaben, the Governor of Bessarabia,
did nothing to avert or stop the rioting, while M. Ostragoff, the
Vice-Governor, was actually at the same time a contributor to the
_Bessarabets_, and also the censor, the writer proceeds: “M. Plehve
desires to divert Christians from their own grievances, so he conducts
a campaign of Jew-baiting. The Czar was indignant when he heard of the
massacre. He wished to send an aide-de-camp to report on the matter,
but M. Plehve managed to dissuade his Majesty, and sent instead M.
Kopuchin, one of his creatures, who drew up a mild report, which M.
Plehve further doctored before submitting to the Czar.”
Summing up, the writer says; “The Kishineff massacre has nothing to do
with revolutionary tendencies. It is simply the result of systematic
Jew-baiting, organised by M. Plehve, whose position is still unshaken,
and who holds the Czar under his thumb by working upon his feelings
and persuading him that the country is honeycombed with revolution and
anarchy. No change is possible until M. Plehve has ceased to have the
ear of the Czar. Further anti-Semitic disturbances are probable.”[181]
An American diplomatist endorses the statement that M. De Plehve was
really responsible for the massacre,[182] while a Russian Prince
affirms that the instigators of the massacre, such as the Moldavian
Kruschevan, editor of the _Bessarabets_, “were under the personal
protection of the Minister.”[183]
Despite the efforts of the Russian Government to represent the brutal
outrage as due solely to a spontaneous explosion of popular fury
arising from “national, religious, and economic hatred,”[184] certain
facts which came to light during the mock trial, held towards the end
of that year in the very scene of the massacre, seem to prove that,
though such hatred did exist, the spark which set the mine on fire was
not of popular origin. The passions of the people had been carefully
inflamed by a pamphlet entitled _Who is to blame?_--the work of an
anti-Semitic agitator of the name of Pronin, who was in relations
with the proprietor of the _Novoe Vremya_, the eloquent exponent of
Panslavism. But that was not all. Though special envoys of the Ministry
of Justice and the Ministry of the Interior kept a watchful eye on the
course of the proceedings; though the Court exerted itself to prevent
the production of undesirable evidence; and though, in true mediaeval
fashion, an attempt was made to lay the blame for the crime on the
shoulders of the victims--by stories of a Jew’s assault on a Christian
woman, of the desecration of churches and the murder of priests--yet
the evidence given, even under such conditions, without absolving the
populace, tends to establish the deliberate connivance, not to say the
complicity, of the Government.
A Christian ex-mayor of the city and another respectable citizen of
Kishineff both declared that, in their opinion, the contemptuous and
intolerant attitude of the Christian population towards the Jews is
due to the special legislation to which the latter are subjected.
The ex-mayor further stated that throughout the riots the police and
military authorities refused to intervene on behalf of the victims.
The administrator of the properties of the monasteries in Bessarabia
and two other witnesses deposed that they had repeatedly appealed to
the police to protect the Jews, but in vain. A Jew, whose son had been
butchered before his eyes, testified that he had fallen at the feet
of a police officer and, leading him to the spot where the bodies of
his son and another man were lying in pools of blood, had besought
him, with tears in his eyes, to shield the survivors. The officer did
not raise a finger in their defence. Several policemen also confessed
that, on asking for orders from their superiors, the answer they had
received was, “Let the Jews help themselves; we cannot help them.”
General Beckmann deposed that at the commencement of the riots he had
at his disposal a force amply sufficient to quell the disturbance,
but he received no orders to act. “It was only,” he said, “when the
Governor grew alarmed for the safety of the Christian population that
he took measures to allay the fury of the mob.”[185] The myth of Jewish
provocation was also disposed of by a police officer, who stated that,
when the outbreak occurred, there was not a single Jew in the square
in which the outrage was alleged to have taken place. To conclude,
“evidence was given by physicians and others as to the mutilation of
the bodies of murdered Jews, and two priests of the Orthodox Church
testified that the report that the Jews had desecrated a church and
murdered a priest was absolutely without foundation.”[186]
And the punishment for this wholesale assassination of a harmless and
defenceless population?
Two men, convicted of murder, were sentenced to seven and five years’
penal servitude respectively.
Twenty-two others to periods of imprisonment, ranging from one to two
years, and one to six months.
Forty-eight civil actions for damages that were brought against the
accused were all dismissed.[187]
Even Richard the Crusader did better in 1189.
One luminous spot in the gloomy picture is the action of the Eastern
Church. Not only did the priests and monks of Bessarabia exculpate the
Jews from all provocation of the massacre, but even Father John of
Kronstadt publicly condemned the dastardly crime of his co-religionists.
The only genuine result of the trial and of the revelations made
in its course was to intensify the wrath of the fanatical Russian
and Moldavian populace, both of the town and of the open country,
who threatened reprisals for the punishment of a few of their
brother-butchers. The fear of such reprisals forced many thousands
of the poorer Jews of Bessarabia to migrate into the districts of
Russian and Austrian Poland, which were already congested to a terrible
degree, while those who possessed the necessary means determined to
emigrate from the Czar’s dominions and seek a home in the West. While
the trial was still proceeding, a deputation of Bessarabian Jews
arrived in the city. Their object was to confer with the heads of the
Jewish community, on behalf of their co-religionists in various rural
districts of Bessarabia, with a view to leaving the country which had
declared in so sanguinary a manner its unwillingness to harbour them.
It was proposed that a number of Jewish families should emigrate to the
Argentine Republic and join their brethren, already settled in that and
other parts of America by Baron Hirsch at different times, especially
after the exodus of 1892. Four thousand souls, the delegates affirmed,
were anxious to wind up their affairs and quit the inhospitable
country.[188]
Flight, under the apprehension of slaughter, is avowed to be one of
the objects which induced the Russian authorities to connive at the
massacre and to profess their inability to prevent its repetition:
“Russian policy at the present hour,” proudly declares an eminent
Russian anti-Semite, “seems to have one object in view--that of
starting a free emigration of the Jews from Russia. But the total
number of Jewish emigrants during the last twenty years was only
about a million.”[189] Obviously, occasional slaughter alone is sadly
insufficient.
As in 1881 and 1891, so in 1903 the Czar’s ministers hastened to
supplement massacre by measures of administrative coercion. They
decided to forbid Jews, until the revision of the laws concerning them
has been accomplished by means of fresh legislation, to acquire land
or real estate, or to enjoy the usufruct thereof, either within or
without the Governments situated within the residential “pale.” This
decision of the Committee of Ministers was submitted to the Czar and
received his approval. Permission, however, was granted to the Jews to
settle and acquire real estate at places within the “pale,” which in
consequence of their industrial development partake of the character
of towns.[190] A few months later, at the moment when the Kishineff
trial was drawing to a close, the Governor-General at Warsaw issued
peremptory instructions to all the Assistant Governors in the Vistula
Province, directing them to put in rigorous force the Law of 1891,
which prohibits Jews from purchasing or leasing immoveable property in
the rural districts.[191]
This outburst of Jew-hatred was not confined to Bessarabia. Soon after
the Kishineff massacre reports reached this country of further outrages
being apprehended owing to the symptoms of anti-Semitism manifested
by the inhabitants of the western provinces of the Empire. Nor were
these forebodings falsified by events. In the middle of September,
1903, Jew-baiting was once more indulged in at Gomel, a town of
Mohileff within the Jewish “pale.” A petty squabble between a Jew and
a Christian in the bazaar afforded an excuse to the co-religionists of
the latter to wreck the Jewish quarter. Several persons were killed
on both sides; but the only details available are official, which in
Russia is not a synonym for authentic.[192]
The charge most frequently brought against the Jews by the Russian
people is, as has been shown, their aversion from productive labour,
and their exclusive attachment to traffic in goods and money. The
Russian Government some years ago attempted to remove the grievance
by affording to the Jews facilities for the pursuit of agriculture.
In seven out of the fifteen provinces open to the Jews, efforts were
made to form Jewish agricultural settlements. But they do not seem to
have been attended by conspicuous success. Towards the end of 1903 an
inquiry instituted into the matter elicited conflicting answers. Three
of the seven reports, drawn up by provincial Governors, are altogether
discouraging. It is pointed out that the Jewish peasant shirks the
hard work of tilling the soil and only helps to reap the produce. In
one province, the official document asserts, sixty per cent. of the
Jews have already abandoned the settlement and turned to the more
congenial pursuits of commerce and industry. Another report draws an
unfavourable comparison between the Jewish and the Christian farmer,
and repeats the opinion that the former takes little interest in the
culture of the soil, preferring less laborious occupations. All three
reports agree in showing that the experiment of making a husbandman of
the Hebrew is a complete failure. On the other hand, we find a fourth
Governor maintaining that in his province the only difference between
a Christian and a Jewish agriculturist consists in their respective
religions. A fifth, while admitting the Jew’s practical ill-success,
attributes it to the smallness of his farm, which forces him to give up
agriculture as profitless, and he adds that under favourable conditions
the results have been not disappointing. The Governor of Kherson states
that, though at first the Jews evinced little inclination to turn to
the land, upon the revision and improvement of the original conditions,
the settlements became more popular; so that in 1898 seventy-three per
cent. of the Jewish population were exclusively devoted to agriculture,
nineteen per cent. varied the monotony of farming by the combination of
trade, while only eight per cent. were engaged entirely in commerce or
industry. This authority expresses the conviction that, as time goes
on, the Jew will develop into a successful agriculturist, provided he
is allowed to compete on fair terms with the Christian farmers.[193]
An impartial examination of these contradictory opinions seems to lead
to the conclusion that the Jew, by nature and the education of two
thousand years, is too good a tradesman to make a good husbandman. He
is too keen-witted, too enterprising, too ambitious to find adequate
satisfaction in the slow and solitary culture of the soil. In this
respect the modern Jew is like the modern Greek. The drudgery of
field work repels him. The tedium of country life depresses him. “No
profit goes where no pleasure is ta’en.” It is in the bustle of the
market-place, where man meets man, where wit is pitted against wit,
and the intellect is sharpened on the whetstone of competition, that
his restless soul finds its highest gratification and most congenial
employment. He is a born townsman and a born traveller. He has none
of the stolid endurance of the earth-born. Although he can excel in
most pursuits, there is apparently one thing beyond the reach of his
versatility. He cannot dig.
The Russian peasant under normal conditions is the reverse of all this:
indolent, intemperate, improvident, unintelligent, and unambitious,
he lives entirely in the present, unhaunted by regrets of the past,
unharassed by plans for the future, and blissfully unaware of the
existence of any world beyond the world which his eye can see--a very
type of the earth-born, such as England knew him in the glorious
days of Chivalry and Wat Tyler. To such a race even less formidable
and foreign a competitor than the unbelieving Jew would appear a
monster of iniquity. And yet, there is abundant evidence to prove
that it is not the Russian peasant’s instinctive antipathy which is
primarily responsible for the sufferings of the Jew. The Russian Jew,
owing to his difference from the Russian Christian in race, religion,
temperament and mode of living, is by the latter regarded with contempt
and prejudice. These feelings, however, are not the only causes of
persecution. Formerly, as we have seen, the Jews were reproached with
excessive addiction to trade in liquor, whereby, it was alleged, they
ruined the peasantry in health, purse and morals. This charge, whatever
its value may have once been, can no longer be brought against the
Jews; for the Russian Government, since it established a monopoly of
spirits, has become the exclusive public-house keeper in the Empire.
The charge of usury still remains. But it can easily be proved that in
many districts the usurer is the powerful Russian landlord and not the
Jew. As a distinguished Russian Liberal has appositely remarked, “the
usurer must needs be a wealthy person--a poor devil like the Jewish
colonist settled amidst the ‘Little Russian’ peasantry may possibly
long for credit; he certainly is not in a position to give it.”[194]
According to the same authority, in “Little Russia” most of the Jewish
villagers are either shop-keepers and retail dealers, or cobblers,
tailors, smiths and the like. They form the commercial and industrial
element in the rural population, and their expulsion means economic
distress to the Russian husbandman, who, therefore, if left to himself,
is not unwilling to forgive the Jew the Old Crime, and to forget his
own prejudice against the foreigner and the follower of an abhorred
creed. But he is not left to himself. The peasant’s latent antipathy
is stirred to violence by the Nationalist agitators and Government
officials, who collaborate in endeavouring to stifle the alien and
revolutionary Jew through the brutality of the lower classes; assisted
by the artisans and mechanics who by the persecution of the foreigner
and the infidel seek the extinction of a successful competitor. All the
outbreaks of anti-Jewish hatred, from 1881 to this day, were organised
by the police authorities in accordance with a well-matured plan known
as _pogrom_. The procedure consists in deliberately inciting by word
of mouth and printed proclamations the dregs of society against the
classes or sects of the community obnoxious to the Government, and
then, when the work is done, suppressing the riot by the barbarous
methods which are so typical of Russian administration. The same
process is applied for the mutual extermination of others than the
Jews. It is a process based on the maxim _divide et impera_--the last
resource of an incompetent ruler.[195]
♦1904–05♦
The disasters which befell the Russian arms in the Far East,
the discontent which they created at home, and the danger of a
revolutionary upheaval of all the oppressed elements of the Empire
induced the Czar’s Government to reconsider its attitude towards
the suffering subjects of the Czar. The Austrian journal _Pester
Lloyd_ ventured to give some good advice to that effect: “During the
Napoleonic Wars the rulers captivated their subjects by promising
them liberty and constitutions. Whoever wishes well to Russia must
advise her to imitate the example.” In accordance with that policy of
tardy conciliation which circumstances dictated, some Russian Liberals
who had been banished for their championship of the interests of the
people were permitted to return from exile, new Governors-General were
appointed to Finland and Poland, with instructions to pursue a more
lenient policy than their predecessors, a decree was issued ordering
the Finnish Parliament to assemble, its property was restored to the
Armenian Church, and other steps were taken showing that there was
at least a desire to diminish the sources of general discontent by
conceding to necessity what had hitherto been denied to justice.
The Jews, naturally enough, could not be forgotten. Besides the
danger which, in common with the other distressed and disaffected
subjects, they constitute to the Russian State, there were less
negative reasons for their propitiation. The Russian Government was
anxious to replenish the Treasury, emptied by the unfortunate war. The
Jewish financiers of the West constitute a great power, and that power
is known to entertain a deep and abiding hostility towards Russia.
Jewish capitalists the world over are actuated by a strong desire to
avenge the wrongs of their co-religionists, and they have the means of
gratifying that desire. Once more the Jew’s wealth has proved potent
enough to blunt the edge of prejudice. The Czar’s Ministers endeavoured
to pacify the Jewish financiers by making a few trivial concessions
to their persecuted brethren. M. De Plehve in May 1904, acting in
direct contradiction to the views expressed in April, submitted to the
Council of the Empire a Bill for repealing the law under which Jews
were forbidden to reside within fifty versts of the Western frontier.
It is true that the imputation that the Bill was dictated by a Jewish
banker as an indispensable condition for a loan was strongly resented
and repudiated in official circles. The Russians, in proof of the
spontaneous nature of the proposal, declared that the Minister had,
long before the necessity for loans arose, been striving towards a
relaxation of Jewish disabilities. This statement has been partially
corroborated by a distinguished Jewish gentleman, who also affirms from
personal knowledge that M. De Plehve had for some time past endeavoured
to alleviate the lot of the Russian Jews by granting to them every
liberty--save emancipation.[196] It was added that the process had
naturally been gradual, owing to Russian social conditions, that as
early as May 1903 the Council of the Empire had passed a Bill of M. De
Plehve’s permitting the Jews to reside in 103 new places, and that 65
more had been added in the autumn. At the same time a Commission had
been appointed to examine the laws relating to the Jews, especially
those engaged in productive labour. These statements may, of course,
be literally correct. But, until M. De Plehve’s utterances of the
previous April be proved to be a forgery, it is permissible to doubt
their accuracy in so far as the Minister’s good-will towards the Jews
is concerned.
M. De Plehve was in the State what M. Pobiedonostseff was in the
Church. The Minister of the Interior, like the Imperial Procurator of
the Holy Synod, represented and led for the last two decades or more
the party of reaction. By their Panslavist followers these two men
were described as the two pillars of the patriotic edifice of Russian
national life, which is raised on the ruins of the other nationalities.
By their opponents they were denounced as the two ministering demons
of Despotism and Dogmatism under their most repulsive aspects. It
was, therefore, with no surprise that the civilised world heard on
July 28, 1904, that M. De Plehve’s name had been entered on the roll
of Russian victims to that ruthless spirit of revenge, whose cult
their own ruthlessness helps to promote. He died unlamented, as he
had lived unloved; for a tyrant has no friends. But that he was, as
an individual, the incarnate fiend that his enemies depicted, is a
theory improbable in itself, and disproved by those who came into
contact with him. At the very worst he may have been an ambitious man
who, by pursuing the course which he did, “sought to win the favour of
the reactionary faction which at present controls the Czar, and thus
to fight his way towards the highest power.”[197] But a less severe
estimate would, perhaps, be nearer the true one. M. De Plehve was
the champion of an ideal. He honestly believed that in autocracy lay
Russia’s salvation. Though surrounded by dangers, and warned by the
fate of his former master Alexander II., of his predecessor Sipyaghin,
of his instrument in the oppression of Finland Bobrikoff, and of many
of his colleagues and subordinates, he unflinchingly persevered in
the path which he had marked out for himself. A man who imperils his
own life in the pursuit of a certain object is not the man to treat
with tenderness those who strive to thwart him. M. De Plehve’s object
was to silence opposition to the principles of autocracy. He pursued
that object with the unswerving firmness of a strong man, and crushed
the obstacles with the relentless conscientiousness of one who is
absolutely convinced of the righteousness of his cause. To such a man
political virtue means thoroughness combined with an utter lack of
scruple and a total disregard of all moral restraint in the service of
the State and the pursuit of its welfare. He was engaged in a game the
stakes of which were greatness or death. He lost it.
But though the dispassionate student can have nothing but pity for a
brave man perishing in the performance of what he deemed to be his
duty, he can also sympathise with those who hailed their arch-enemy’s
death with savage delight. They saw in M. De Plehve, not a tragic
character drawing upon himself the vengeance of an inexorable Atê, but
only the merciless Minister, the oppressor of those who differed from
him in their political ideals, the executioner of men whose sole crime
was their loyalty to the faith of their fathers and the traditions
of their race. As the lawyer Korobchevsky said before the Court, in
defence of the assassin: “The bomb which killed the late Minister of
the Interior was filled, not with dynamite, but with the burning tears
of the mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters of the men whom he sent
to the gallows, or to die slowly in prison or in Siberia.”
Among the sufferers from M. De Plehve’s policy none had greater reasons
to hate him than the Jews. He regarded them, not without cause, as the
most energetic opponents to his autocratic schemes, and his antipathy
towards them on that account was enhanced by his just appreciation
of their abilities. Hence the exceptional rigour in his treatment of
them. M. De Plehve used to refer to the revolutionary activity of the
Jewish youth as a justification for his own measures of coercion. That
the Jews should be ready to join, or even lead, in every attempt to
overthrow the social and political system under which they suffer so
grievously is only natural. Equally natural it is that the man to
whom that system was everything should have tried to suppress them.
The Kishineff massacre, as we have seen, was universally attributed
to M. De Plehve, and when the news of his assassination went forth
few surpassed the Jews in their exultation. The Jewish daily paper
_Forward_, of New York, immediately organised a meeting under the
auspices of the United Russian Revolutionists. The demonstrators filled
one of the largest halls in New York to overflowing, and at every
mention of M. De Plehve’s assassin, Sazonoff, burst into delirious
applause. He was praised as the worthy son of a noble cause; his victim
was described as the captured Port Arthur of Russian despotism, and the
interference of the police alone checked the enthusiasm.[198]
But, even granting the spontaneity and the disinterestedness of the
concessions which the Russian Government declared itself prepared to
make to the Jews, they would have only affected a limited number of
them. M. De Plehve’s plan at best was to bring about the conciliation
of the race by the absorption of the better class of them and by the
half-hearted application of some palliatives to the grievances of
the poorer, such as the enlargement of the area within which they
are confined, and permission to emigrate.[199] The experiment in
assimilation, of which the Baltic provinces, Poland and Finland,
supplied a sample, was not one that commended itself to the Jews. But,
even if it succeeded, the vast majority of the race would continue in
their normal state of slavery. The same remark applies to a remedial
scheme drafted and adopted a few weeks later by a departmental
conference presided over by M. De Witte. The Financial Minister’s
association with the step lent colour to the suspicion that this
newly-awakened benevolence towards the Jew was not foreign to Russia’s
anxiety to procure fresh supplies of money by the assistance of Jewish
bankers abroad. However that may be, the measures taken do not seem to
have produced any marked effect on the condition of the Russian Jews.
That relief which the wretched people could not gain from the Czar’s
compassion, they failed to obtain even from his fears.
On Aug. 4, 1904, anti-Semitic disturbances broke out at Ostrowez,
in the Government of Radom, where, according to private statements,
twenty Jews were killed; according to the Russian authorities, one
was seriously wounded, and died the following day, while twenty-two
persons were slightly injured. The same official account ascribes the
disturbances to the fact that a Jewish boy struck a Christian--the
blow, it is said, was exaggerated to murder, and the mob set out to
revenge themselves on the Jews. At Partscheff also, in the Government
of Siedlce, on the following day, it was said that hundreds of Jews
perished. The official version of the occurrence stated that “the
police dispersed, without using force, a crowd of Jews who had
assembled to hide a baptized Jew. In a scuffle that ensued twenty
persons were wounded.”[200] On September 4 and 5 anti-Semitic riots
occurred at Smela, in the Province of Kieff. This is the official
account: “A Jewish shopkeeper struck a peasant woman whom he suspected
of having stolen some cloth. Immediately a crowd collected, and
plundered and sacked one hundred houses and one hundred and fifty shops
belonging to Jews. That evening a party of sixty Jews attacked and beat
the Christian inhabitants. When the Jews began to fire on the latter
the police were summoned, who made use of their revolvers, wounding
two persons. The next evening several hundred railway employés, in
spite of the prohibition of the officials, went by train to Smela from
the adjacent station of Bobrinskaia. The rioting was renewed, and the
troops were summoned. The soldiers made use of their weapons, and five
persons were seriously wounded, while a large number were slightly
injured. Many arrests were made.”[201] In reading these official
statements one must constantly bear in mind the Russian Government’s
desire to minimise a misfortune or a misdeed which they dare not deny.
A few days later, on September 11, on the occasion of the Jewish New
Year, another anti-Jewish disturbance occurred at Sosnowice, a town
on the Siberian frontier. A number of boys threw stones at some Jews
who were engaged in their annual ceremony, slightly injuring a child.
This gave rise to a rumour that the Jews had killed a child. Numbers
of workmen marched through the streets in the evening, smashing the
window-panes of Jewish dwelling-houses and of the synagogue. Several
Jews were injured by stones or knives. Doctors were afraid to render
assistance to the injured, owing to the attitude of the mob.[202]
Hardly a month had passed since the last-mentioned event, when a
new outrage occurred in Mohileff. The following is a condensed
description of the occurrence by a well-qualified observer who supports
his statements by references to numerous witnesses: A political
demonstration in the town of Mohileff took place exactly one week
before the anti-Jewish riots. In Russia it is a crime for even four men
to come together in a private room without the knowledge and permission
of the police, and it is, therefore, a heinous atrocity for a crowd
to gather in the streets for a political purpose. Yet that is what
happened on October 15 in Mohileff. The Jewish workmen of the place
assembled by way of protesting against the cruelty of the police, who,
without a word of warning, had shot down harmless and unarmed Hebrew
working women and men; and against the unjust condemnation to twelve
years’ penal servitude of their comrades in Yakootsk; and they recorded
their wish that the war should stop. A few policemen advanced against
the workmen and tried to disperse them, but were themselves scattered
by the crowd. Then an overwhelming police force marched against the
malcontents, but to their disgust found nobody. At this the Prefect of
the Police of Mohileff determined that, during the mobilisation which
was to take place in a few days, from Tsukermann’s synagogue to the
railway station the Jews should be thrashed until not a stone remained
on the pavement.
On October 22 the mobilisation of the Reserves was promulgated.
According to law, the vodka-shops should have been shut on this
occasion, and the Jewish population had earnestly petitioned the
authorities to insist on that precaution against disorders being
observed. But the shops were opened. To the Jewish Reserve soldiers,
who had assembled by order of the military authorities, the Police
Prefect addressed the following remarkable words in the presence of a
great crowd: “You contemptible Jews! You are all foreign democrats!
You ought to kiss the hands and feet of the Christians! You have been
beaten too little as yet! You must be thrashed again!”
“We may pitch into the Jews and loot their shops,” the fellows said;
“there will be no punishment. The police allow it; hurrah!” The
subsequent attitude of the police amply bore out this expectation. At
three p.m. a band of petty local traders, not reserves, who had been
steadily gathering since morning, and were now led by striplings, swept
across the city, crying, “Pitch into the Jews!” and belabouring all
passing Jews with cudgels and stones. That day, however, the matter
did not go beyond the assaulting of individuals and the breaking of
windows. But none the less several persons were grievously wounded and
disfigured in the presence of the police, who looked on approving.
The next morning, Sunday, October 23, the panic-stricken Jews sent a
deputation to the Police Prefect to petition for help and to have the
dram-shops closed. The Prefect consulted the Governor, and then told
the petitioners that he had been authorised to use his own judgment.
This answer was construed as a promise that the taverns would not be
opened. But shortly before noon notices were posted up in the streets,
signed by the Police Prefect himself, informing the public that the
reports to the effect that on the day before there had been disorders
in the town, in the course of which several persons had been grievously
wounded, were misleading. What had really happened was “an ordinary,
insignificant street brawl.” This meant that the deeds of violence
already done were but the flowers, and that the fruits were yet to come.
And they came a few minutes later. On the stroke of twelve all the
brandy shops were opened, and already at one o’clock the sanguinary
battle began. Everything had been organised beforehand. In all
there were about one hundred houses and twenty-five shops plundered
and gutted. A crowd of about 150 men did the business: sacked the
jewellers’ shops, looted the wares, broke the windows and doors of
private houses which were tenanted by Jews, and maltreated the people.
They chose the poorest quarters of the city for the scene of their
depredations, but they advanced to the centre of the town as well. The
unfortunate Jews implored the police to intervene and save them, but
these were the replies they received: “Be off to your democrats! Let
them help you.” “That will teach you to beat the police.” “You have not
been thrashed enough yet; when your throats are being cut we shall see.”
The few Jews who dared to defend themselves were arrested and beaten by
the police, who refused to lay a finger upon the hooligans. One witness
says: “None of the rioters were arrested; but the police said to them,
‘Lads, that’s enough. Now you can go to another place.’”
Why, it may be asked, did the police behave so cruelly and, one may
add, so treacherously towards the Jews? The motives are well known, for
the Police Prefect himself avowed them. Among the witnesses whom the
writer produces in proof of that statement there is one whose words are
well worth noting:
“The Police Prefect sent for me on October 24, and said: ‘You Jews are
being beaten on three grounds. In the first place, you sneak off to
America, and our Russians have to spill their blood instead of you.
Secondly, you are not devoted to the autocracy, and you cry, “Down with
the autocracy!” And in the third place, you have no liking for the
police, and you beat the members of the force.’”
During the height and heat of the riots a deputation from the Jewish
community called upon the Governor, Klingenberg, and respectfully
petitioned him to shield the Jews from the rioters. And the Czar’s
highest representative made answer: “That sort of thing happens
everywhere. I cannot set a soldier to guard every Jew.” And as for the
police, the Governor publicly praised their exemplary conduct, and a
money gratification was given them! Yet the police were morally bound
to save the Jews. Doubly bound, indeed, for, besides their duty to the
Czar, they were bribed by the Jews to protect them. Bribed to do their
duty!
The accusations made against the Jews, and made especially for foreign
consumption, are chiefly these: They sell vodka to the reserve soldiers
at exorbitant prices and thus incense these men, who naturally avenge
themselves by pillaging Jewish shops and houses. They evade military
service, and then Orthodox Russians have to serve in lieu of the Jewish
deserters. That, of course, embitters the Christian recruits and
explains their conduct. These accusations are serious and would, of
course, explain everything except the conduct of the police--if they
were true. But they are false, and not false only, but impossible, as
every Russian knows.
In the first place, it was not reserves who attacked the Jews, but
local loafers and hooligans. In the second place, the Jews could not
raise the price of alcohol, nor sell it at all, because it is the
Imperial Government which alone sells vodka, having a monopoly of
it. In the third place, the Christians have not to serve in the army
in lieu of Jews. The latter are bound to provide a certain number of
reserves, and for all of them who desert the Jewish community must find
members of the same faith. In like manner, Russians must take the place
of fugitive Russians, not of Jews.
Lastly, there remains the charge of desertion. Is it true? Yes, quite
true; but then it is true of Christians and Jews alike, for the war
was very unpopular. The interesting part of the story is that the
Christians shirked their duty far more extensively and successfully
than the Jews. That can be proved by figures, and the following data
are not likely to be challenged by anyone. Before the reserves were
called out at all the total of Jews in the Manchurian army was roughly
thirty thousand men. In all probability it exceeded that number, the
bulk of them serving in Siberian regiments. It is as well, however, to
state the case moderately. Now, since the mobilisation of the reserves
(in the districts where the Jewish element is largely represented,
such as Vilna, Odessa, Warsaw, Kieff), the active Russian army had no
less than fifty thousand soldiers of the Jewish faith. And that is an
enormous percentage. Indeed, so abnormally great is that percentage of
Jews that, if the other nationalities who acknowledge the sway of the
Czar, contributed a proportionate number of soldiers, Kuropatkin’s army
would have numbered approximately one million!
And the people who thus shed their blood more freely than the Christian
Russians would be excusable if they deserted _en masse_, because the
Jews enjoy none of the privileges accorded to the Russians, and they
could not therefore be blamed if they refused to look upon Muscovy
as their fatherland. But, in spite of the injustice done them by the
Czar’s Government, they generously gave their lives to the Czar. And
the Czar’s agents in return egged on the hooligans of all Southern and
Western Russia to pillage, burn, and destroy Jewish property, and to
beat and kill Jewish men and women.[203]
These experiences and the apprehension of massacres on a larger scale
have impelled the Jews to form a great revolutionary association for
organised resistance to the organised forces of their enemies. A secret
society--already notorious as the _Bund_--arose in Lithuania, whence it
spread to Poland and other parts of the Russian Empire. Its aims are
to foster Jewish national feeling and to protect Jewish interests. But
the protection which this body could afford the victims of deliberate
persecution was necessarily limited. If it rescued them from occasional
slaughter, it could not defend them against chronic starvation.
Consequently, the exodus, especially from the Province of Mohileff,
continued: The emigrants were, for the most part, Jewish young people
of both sexes, who, not having any means of existence, left the towns
and villages. Some villages even became quite deserted. In the town
of Mohileff itself, where there are no factories of any kind or
industrial or commercial undertakings except shops which are held by
Jews, business was quite suspended.[204] Within the next five months no
fewer than 75,160 Russian Jews arrived in New York alone.[205]
How this readiness to quit hearth and home, in order to seek a new
life under unknown skies in the furthest corners of the earth, carries
us back across the ages to the flight of Israel from Egypt! To the
Russian Jews groaning in servitude the Czar’s Empire is a foreign
land; his religion a foreign religion. In leaving Russia they leave
a hotbed of idolatry as fierce, as cruel, as Godless as the idolatry
of Egypt, Babylon, Syria, or Rome. To them the Russian god who can
sanction such persecution is a veritable Moloch. He can claim no
kinship with Jehovah. They owe it to themselves to escape from the
house of bondage, and to their God to continue bearing witness to His
unity. They, therefore, like their remote ancestors, seek freedom of
worship by expatriation. Treated as aliens in their native country,
they renounce it with as little regret as if they had not been born and
bred in it. There are, of course, both in Poland and in Russia proper
Jews who would gladly conform in everything except religion. Such Jews
deplore the estrangement of the Jew from the Gentile, and believe that
the lot of the former can be improved only by the removal of the legal
restrictions which perpetuate that estrangement. According to them, if
the Jews were allowed to mingle freely with the other inhabitants of
the Empire, they would in time lose all those characteristics which
mark them off as a people apart, and become patriotic subjects of
the Czar. But the Russian Government in its persecution of the race
makes no invidious distinctions between these “Assimilators” and their
sterner brethren. The Jew who ventures to advise assimilation alienates
his friends without conciliating his masters. By its indiscriminate
severity the Russian autocracy feeds the old spirit of dogged
resistance, sullen resentment, and inflexible arrogance.
It also feeds, as might have been expected, the old dream of Redemption
and national rehabilitation. The Russian Ghetto at the present day
is the citadel of Hebrew orthodoxy and the recruiting ground for the
Zionist movement of which we shall speak in the sequel. It is natural
that it should be. The Jew in the Empire of the Czars finds little or
no scope for development. As we have seen, he is debarred from holding
real property, from pursuing liberal professions, from engaging in
many trades. He is a stranger in the land of his birth, an outcast
among his fellow-countrymen. Chronic contempt and oppression are only
relieved by periodical massacre. Forbidden to be a citizen, he cannot
be a patriot. He has no life in the present. He, therefore, lives in
the future. He is an uncompromising idealist. The same conditions which
deprive him of all inducement to national assimilation also encourage
his religious and social separatism. The intolerance of his Christian
neighbours reacts on his own bigotry. If politically he lives on hopes,
religiously he lives on traditions. Amidst all his calamities, the Jew
of the Russian Ghetto is sustained by the expectation that the real
history of his race is still to come. He believes that the ruins of
the Temple will one day prove the foundations of new greatness. While
awaiting the fulfilment of the ancient prophecies, he clings to the
tribal distinctions, to the ceremonial laws, and to all those rules of
omission and performance which tend to perpetuate his self-isolation.
In the West the Jews have, as patriotic citizens of various states,
succeeded, by generous concessions quite compatible with true loyalty
to their traditions, in the effort to reconcile the old Jewish life
with modern political conditions. In Russia the Jews are denied the
opportunity. But they still love the land. Therein lies the irony and
the hope.
Such is the lot of Israel in Russia. It is hardly better on the western
side of the Pruth--in that other European country which within three
days’ journey of London continues the Middle Ages.
CHAPTER XXII
IN ROUMANIA
IN no part of Europe is mediaeval prejudice against the Hebrew race
more fiercely rampant than in Roumania; for in no other part of Europe,
save Russia, are mediaeval social conditions and modes of thought
and conduct so rife. There is hardly any middle class in Roumania
yet. In that country industries are unknown, commerce is scarce and
the mechanics are few. Theoretically a modern constitutional state,
in reality it is a country peopled by two extreme castes: the small
peasant proprietors or labourers, and the nobles. The husbandman
drudges in the open country and the nobleman dissipates in the capital.
In fact, though not in name, we find in the Roumania of to-day
Froissart’s England, less the splendour and the servitude of feudalism.
Out of a population of five and a half millions, five millions are
peasants, and these, deprived to a large extent of the rights of
citizenship and of the opportunities for self-improvement, live in
almost as abject misery and as crass ignorance[206] as they did five
centuries ago, represented by only thirty members in the Lower House of
the national Parliament and by none in the Senate, while the remaining
eleven twelfths of the Lower House and the whole of the Senate are
elected by the aristocracy of a quarter of a million, which also
furnishes all the officials. The one product of the nineteenth century
that has found a sincere appreciation in Roumania is Nationalism, and
it is under this modern cloak that mediaeval bigotry loves to parade
its terrors on the banks of the Danube.
In Moldavia, the northern portion of the kingdom, Jews are first heard
of in the fifteenth century, though they do not become conspicuous
until the eighteenth. It was in a village of this province that was
born, about 1700, Israel Baalshem, the founder of the Hebrew sect
of dissenters known, or rather not known, as the “New Chassidim.”
Baalshem’s mission, when denuded of those vulgar accessories of the
supernatural without which man seems incapable of being lifted to
higher things, was a noble one. In the century which preceded his
advent Judaism had degenerated into a school of casuistry; simplicity
was lost in a maze of sophistical subtlety, conscience was stifled
beneath a mountain of formalism, and faith was drowned in the ocean
of Rabbinical nonsense.[207] In no part of Europe was the decay more
complete than in these regions. The long-ringleted Rabbis of Poland had
extended their lethal domination over Moldavia, and with their solemn
puerilities had perpetuated the spiritual sterility of those districts.
This, at all events, is the impression made on the mind of a modern
student, whose rationalism may dull him to the latent spirituality of
the Rabbis and reveal to him perhaps all too clearly their sophistry.
But, in any case, sophistry can only appeal to a people which has
reached an advanced stage of intellectual senility. The Moldavian Jews
were still in their intellectual infancy. It was emotion and not logic
that their soul craved for. The Rabbis were mere priests, the Jews of
Moldavia needed a prophet. Israel Baalshem arrived in time to supply
the demand and to tear asunder the net of Talmudism.
An angel announced his birth and foretold to his parents that their son
would enlighten Israel. After a virtuous, if somewhat eccentric life,
devoted at first to prayer and lamentation in the savage solitude of
the Carpathian mountains, then to hysterical rapture and to miracles
in the haunts of men, Baalshem bequeathed his doctrine and his
enthusiasm to faithful disciples who carried the legacy over Moldavia,
Galicia, and the Russian “pale.” The principal dogma of Baalshem’s
teaching is the universality of God, His real and living presence in
every part of creation, pervading, inspiring, and vivifying all. Every
being, every thing, every thought, every action is a manifestation or
an image of Divine power and love. All things are holy, or contain
in them the germs of holiness. This knowledge is the fruit of faith,
not of learning. It is a revelation. The practical results of this
ethereal teaching are love, charity, and cheerful optimism. For how can
one presume to hate, despise, or condemn anything as evil, foolish,
unclean, or ugly, since it is the vehicle of Goodness, of Wisdom, of
Purity, and of Beauty? The true lover of the Creator must also be a
lover of His creatures. The end and aim of our life is union with
God--fusion with the Light of which all things are more or less dim
reflections. From this exposition of his doctrine it will be seen that
Israel Baalshem was a typical mystic. He belongs to the same family of
seers as the Neo-Platonists, as St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross,
as John Bunyan and George Fox, as the Mohammedan Sufis, and many other
inspired dissenters who, scattered though they are over many countries,
many centuries and many creeds, have three cardinal characteristics in
common: protest against formalism, thirst for vision or revelation, and
intense desire for absorption in the One.
This Gospel of Love first preached “in the wild ravines of Wallachia
and the dreary steppes of the Ukraine” found many listeners. The
Rabbis--the upholders of book-taught wisdom--denounced the doctrine
of direct inspiration. The “Pious” retaliated with denunciations of
the Rabbis. The contest resulted in excommunication, in cremation
of books and in persecution, which only helped to spread the new
teaching further. However, after the death of the founder and the
first apostles, there arose internal dissensions which led to a
subdivision of the “Pious” into sects. Degeneration, hypocrisy, and
corruption followed disintegration, love was forgotten in the pursuit
of sectarian and selfish ambitions, and to-day the Chassidim, though
numbering in Roumania, Poland, and South-western Russia about half a
million of adherents, are scorned by the orthodox as a mob of fanatics,
redeemed by genuine faith, but deluded and exploited by leaders who are
no longer saints.[208]
The Jews of Moldavia, already numerous in the time of Israel Baalshem,
received new additions towards the end of the eighteenth century. Then
a large number of Jewish refugees entered the country from Austria,
Poland, and Russia, so that at the beginning of the nineteenth century
they are found scattered all over the province as village inn-keepers
and resident traders, or as itinerant merchants visiting the rural
districts and buying or advancing money upon the crops. In the big
towns also they established important colonies--as for example in
Jassy, where they form more than one third of the population, and
in Galatz, where they occupy whole streets with their shops. In all
these centres they live by trade or as craftsmen--tinsmiths, glaziers,
shoemakers, hatters, tailors, butchers, bakers and the like. The
southern province of Wallachia is studded with smaller colonies both of
Spanish and of Polish Jews, while there are families, settled chiefly
in Bucharest, whose ancestors have been in the country from time
immemorial. Like their brethren of Moldavia the Wallachian Jews also
are engaged in commerce, handicrafts, and finance, thus forming that
industrious and intelligent middle class which the Christian population
lacks. These Jews for ages lived on terms of comparative peace with
their neighbours; the rich among them educating their children at the
schools frequented by the children of the native nobility. But these
friendly relations were not destined to endure.
As in many other lands, so in Roumania the religion, the success,
and the aloofness of the Jew raised a host of enemies against him
among the Christians. Here, as elsewhere, the Jews were often accused
of child-murder in the eighteenth century. But, while under Turkish
domination, the Christians were obliged to suppress an animosity which
they had no power of satisfying. It is not till the beginning of the
nineteenth century, when Russia’s interference loosened the Sultan’s
grasp on the Danubian provinces and the Nationalist spirit added fuel
to the older hatred, that the first symptoms of anti-Judaism appear
in Moldavia. In 1804 Prince Mourousi issued a decree forbidding the
Jews to hold land, except that attached to inns. The process of
restriction, once commenced, advanced with steady and rapid strides,
accompanied by periodical assaults on the unpopular race. The fact
that the Jews had gathered the threads of commerce in their own hands
was alleged as a reason for crushing them. But for this fact no one
could be held responsible, unless it were the Roumanians themselves. An
essentially agricultural people, the native Christians despise trade,
which consequently has always been left to the Jews in Moldavia, just
as in Wallachia it is largely monopolised by Greeks and Armenians.
In 1840 the opening of the Black Sea to international commerce drew
many more Jews to the country, and the ill-feeling against them
grew in proportion to the increase in their numbers. In 1867 the
Roumanian politician, Bratiano, exploited the widespread prejudice for
electioneering purposes, and the active persecution of Israel entered
upon its acutest stage. Religious fanaticism in some measure, and
racial rivalry in a greater, lent colour to a hostility which arose
mainly from economic jealousy. Usury, that plausible phantom of a
long-exploded fallacy, was brought forward as an additional excuse for
intolerance.
Analogous causes led to analogous conditions in Roumania’s western
neighbour, Servia. Under Ottoman rule the lot of the Jew in that
country differed little from that of his Christian fellow-slave. The
Mohammedan theocracy recognises no rights except those of the true
believers. Both Jews and Christians, inasmuch as they refuse to accept
the latest addition to the revealed Word of God, are outside the pale
of citizenship. But, on the whole, the Jews, thanks to their pacific
disposition and lack of political aspirations, as well as to the closer
resemblance between the Mosaic and the Mohammedan forms of worship,
suffered less than the Christian _rayahs_ from Turkish oppression.
The emancipation of the province, while rescuing the Christian from
ignominy, condemned the Jew to an even worse fate. Under the Turk the
Jew was at least allowed the congenial privilege of buying and selling,
whereas under the Christian even that consolation was denied to him.
In Servia, by a curious dispensation of constitutional legislation,
the very opposite to the one prevailing amongst us before 1858, the
Jews, while forbidden the most elementary rights of citizenship,
were theoretically eligible to the highest offices in the state.
According to Servian law, a Jew could be a Prime Minister, but not a
grocer. He might make laws for others, but could not appeal to them
for his own protection. This Gilbertian state of things had attracted
the attention of the friends of Israel abroad, and for many years
successive representatives of Great Britain and of other Western
Powers at Belgrade, spurred by the Jewish charitable associations,
had endeavoured to induce the Servians to grant to the Jews the
necessaries, as well as the luxuries, of existence. In 1875 the
Servians, no longer able to resist the pressure of Europe, proceeded
to show their liberality by electing a Jew to the Skuptchina. But
the European Powers declined to be deluded by this clever display of
legerdemain. Our own Foreign Office, besides steps taken directly
at Belgrade, made an effort to enlist Prince Bismarck’s and Prince
Gortchakoff’s powerful influence on behalf of the Servian Israelites.
The effort was, of course, unsuccessful. The German Chancellor cared
nothing for the Jews, and his Russian colleague less than nothing.[209]
Meanwhile similar remonstrances were made, and similar results
obtained, at Bucharest, until the Congress of Berlin in 1878 afforded
the champions of the Jews and justice an opportunity of forcing upon
the Roumanians the counsels of toleration to which they had hitherto
refused to listen.[210] Among these champions none was more staunch
than Lord Beaconsfield. It was the one subject on which the Commander
of the Tories out-whigged the most advanced of Whigs. Even Gladstone
in the most radical period of his career pronounced Disraeli on the
Jewish Question “much more than rational, he was fanatical.”[211]
Though baptized at the age of twelve, Disraeli remained a genuine and
loyal son of Israel. While as a British statesman of a certain school
he opposed Gladstone’s campaign on behalf of the Eastern Christians in
1876, as a Jew he was working heart and soul on behalf of the Eastern
Jews. He also was consistent. By the aid of M. Waddington, the French
Delegate at the Congress of Berlin, and his own diplomatic adroitness,
Disraeli succeeded in gaining over Prince Bismarck and, through him, in
overcoming the good Emperor William’s conscientious scruples about the
propriety of treating Eastern Jews as if they were Christians. And so
it came to pass that by Art. 44 of the Treaty of Berlin the recognition
of Roumanian Independence was made conditional upon the abolition of
all religious disabilities in the Danubian principalities.
What followed might have supplied valuable material to Aristophanes. To
the stipulation of the Treaty the Roumanians returned the astounding
answer that “there was no such thing as a Roumanian Jew.” This calm
denial of the existence of more than a quarter of a million of human
beings failed to satisfy the signatories to the Treaty. Thereupon the
Roumanians lifted up their voices and, with remarkable lack of sense
of the ludicrous, protested against the “iniquity” of being forced
to admit the Jews to the rights of Roumanian citizenship, solemnly
declaring that the Russian or even the Turkish yoke was preferable
to this grievous condition. The chief reasons brought forward by
Roumanian politicians in justification of their attitude in 1878,
and since that date re-echoed even in this country by apologists of
Roumanian bigotry, were based upon grounds of national sentimentality.
It was urged that it is contrary to Roumanian traditions to admit to
political equality any one who is not of pure Roumanian blood; that
the preservation of the purity of their race has ever been the chief
concern of the Roumanians; and that the accident of being born on
Roumanian soil does not constitute a title to the status of Roumanian
citizenship.
Now, apart from the facts that the ancestors of many Roumanian Jews
have been in the country for ages, and that many of their descendants
have fought gallantly for Roumania’s freedom, the “purity of race,” on
which Roumanian patriots are so fond of dwelling, is as pure a myth
as any to be found in the collection of legends that still passes for
history in the Balkan Peninsula. In the first place, the very origin
of the Roumanians is surrounded by a denser cloud of mist than that
which usually surrounds the origin of nations. That their language is
akin to Latin is no more certain proof of the Roman descent which they
claim than is the parallel kinship of Spanish, Portuguese, and French
to the tongue of ancient Rome a proof of the Latin origin of the modern
Spaniards, Portuguese, and Frenchmen. But, even granting that Rome
is, to use the phrase of a recent Roumanian Minister, “le berceau de
leur race,” the original nucleus of Roman colonists has undergone in
the course of ages such matrimonial vicissitudes as must have caused
the blood to lose a considerable portion of its primitive “purity.”
The Roman settlers found the country already peopled by an alien race.
Ovid, banished by Augustus to Tomi on the Black Sea--near the modern
town of Kustendje--describes the district as one inhabited by savages.
♦8–17 A.D.♦ All his letters from the country during his ten years’
exile are one long lament over his hard fate. He dwells again and again
on the bitterness of the lot which has cast him among people who do not
understand Latin, he expresses the fear that he will gradually forget
his own tongue, and his whole correspondence is an alternate wail on
the horrors of barbarous warfare and the hardships of barbarous life.
Towards the end of the first century Trajan conquered Dacia, the modern
Wallachia, and, in pursuance of the old Roman policy, the conquerors
endeavoured to confirm their hold upon the country by the settlement
of Latin colonists and by the introduction of the Latin language.
♦250 A.D.♦ The Latinisation of Dacia was, however, interrupted by the
invasion of the Goths, a warlike horde lured by the prospect of reaping
where the peaceful peasantry of Dacia had sown under the protection
of the Roman eagles. They met with no opposition in the newly and
imperfectly settled province; and this absence of opposition is the
best proof of the precarious nature of the Roman rule and of the
paucity of the Roman settlers. Twenty years later the Emperor Aurelian,
convinced of the impossibility of holding the country, relinquished
it to the Goths and Vandals. Upon the evacuation of Dacia most of the
Roman subjects crossed the Danube and settled in the region stretching
from the river’s southern bank, and then was formed the new Dacia which
corresponds to modern Bulgaria. The old country of the same name on
the northern bank of the Danube retained, it is true, a great number
of its inhabitants, but the mere fact of their consenting to serve a
Gothic master, when the option to remain under Roman rule was open to
them, shows how feeble the Roman element must have been among them.
This population was gradually blended with the dominant Gothic tribe,
and there was formed an independent state inhabited by a mixed race
which, characteristically enough, claimed the renown of a Scandinavian
origin, or descent from the old indigenous “savage Getae” whom Ovid
has immortalised in his Pontic Epistles. Interest promoted peaceful
relations, and even alliance, with the Roman Empire, and thus the Roman
language continued to be heard on the northern bank of the Danube.
Yet another hundred years have passed by, and a new horde of
barbarians, even more fierce and monstrous, overthrew the power of the
Goths, who in abject terror implored the Emperor Valens to permit them
to cross the river and settle in Thrace. ♦375 A.D.♦ Valens, hoping to
ensure the stability of his Empire by enlisting the services of new and
hardy subjects, granted the request of the Goths, though not without
hesitation and misgivings. The barbarians crossed the Danube to find
themselves compelled to part with their arms and their children. This
harsh demand, justified though it may have been as a precautionary
measure, excited the indignation of the immigrants, who tried to force
a passage in defiance of the Roman legions. The latter met violence
with violence, until an Imperial order reached them to transport the
new-comers across the river. The passage was stormy, and many were
drowned, but there survived a number sufficient to rout the Imperial
troops and to turn the Eastern Empire into a field of massacre, rapine,
and ruin.[212]
Such are the titles upon which the modern Roumanians have always based
their claims to a Roman pedigree. First, it is to be observed that the
term Roumanian includes not only the inhabitants of Wallachia, the
ancient Dacia, occupied for a while by the Roman legions, but also the
inhabitants of Moldavia, over whom the Roman never bore sway. Secondly,
even in Dacia, how many of the original Romans were there left after
the double evacuation and conquest of the province? Nor did matters
improve after the fourth century. Roumania is the highway over which,
during the last fifteen hundred years, wave after wave of Goth, Hun,
Avar, Slav, and Bulgar has poured on its southward course; and it must
be a truly extraordinary flood that leaves no alluvial deposit behind
it. If to these inundations be added the Greek element which, though
never very numerous, exercised a powerful influence over the country
during the Ottoman domination, it would need exceptionally robust faith
to uphold the purity doctrine.
In fact, the quantity of foreign blood in Roumania is amply attested
by the features of the modern Roumanian peasant and by the Roumanian
language itself. This language, besides a large admixture of Slavonic
words and idioms which the professors of Bucharest have been earnestly
endeavouring to eliminate, is phonetically very closely related to the
Slavonic dialects of the neighbourhood, and until two generations ago
was actually written in Slavonic characters. It was about 1848--the
_annus mirabilis_ of Continental Nationalism--that the Latin alphabet
was introduced, but, despite the strenuous exertions of patriotic
pedants, even this alphabet had to be modified so as to meet the
phonetic requirements of non-Latin throats,[213] and the feat has been
accomplished, clumsily enough, by a profusion of accents and other
accessories more or less picturesque and bewildering. The very family
names of the Roumanians, when not artificially brought into harmony
with modern academic sentiment, reveal a non-Latin origin. Those of the
peasantry are frequently Slavonic, while those of the nobility are not
infrequently Greek. Yet the purists banished the Slavonic element from
the dictionary of the Roumanian language compiled under the auspices of
the Roumanian Academy by two native Latinists. Take, again, Roumanian
folk-lore. Any one who has given the subject even superficial attention
can see at a glance the deep impress of Slavonic thought and custom in
the legends and superstitions of the Roumanian peasantry. Yet, such
are the sublime effects of racial fanaticism, when a few years ago a
competition was instituted at Bucharest for the best comparative study
of the national folk-lore, the work on which the prize was bestowed did
not contain a single allusion to the folk-lore of the adjacent Slavonic
countries.
Of course, these facts, ignored though they are by the Roumanians and
their advocates, do not prevent a Roumanian from being a Roumanian,
however much they may prevent him from being a Roman; nay, one would
be loth to grudge to natives of Moldo-Wallachia the pleasure of
contemplating a long line of noble Latin ancestors, imaginary though it
be, did they not make this harmless gratification of their vanity an
excuse for depriving other natives of Moldo-Wallachia of the very means
of existence. Moreover, one may not unreasonably ask, in what way would
the enfranchisement of the Jews impair the “purity” of the Roumanian
race? The Jews in other lands are often charged, and not unjustly, with
aversion from intermarriage with the Gentiles. Indeed, the Roumanians
themselves seem to feel the force of this objection, for they attempt
to parry it by the argument that, should the Jews be admitted to the
deliberations of the Roumanian Parliament, they would form a compact
party of obstructionists--why, does not appear. A more probable result
of such an admittance has recently been suggested by one of those
very Jews who, although a Roumanian for many generations, although
educated in Roumania’s schools and imbued with Roumanian traditions,
has been compelled to leave his country, because that country--“the
only country I knew and, God knows, loved with heart and soul, reckoned
me a ‘foreigner’ and as such deprived me of the chance of earning a
livelihood.” This exile declares: “Were the treaty of Berlin lived
up to, and the Jews given emancipation, they, being all literate and
city-dwellers, would, according to the provisions of the electoral law,
belong to either the first or the second electoral college, and would
therefore either share the privileges of the present privileged class,
whose number exactly equals that of the resident Jews, and share its
power, or would compel that privileged class to give up its privileges
and change the laws so as to give the great mass of people a voice in
the running of their public affairs.”[214]
When the dialecticians of Bucharest realised that their ingenuity
produced no impression upon the blunt minds of Western statesmen,
they changed their tactics. A commission of deputies was appointed
to investigate and report on the question of Jewish disabilities.
The commissioners’ report began with the subtle distinction between
“Roumanian Jews” and “native Jews,” declaring that only the latter
variety was in existence, and adding that these Jews, though born
in the country, were really aliens. As such, they might obtain
naturalisation, if they applied for it individually; but the boon could
only be granted by a special Act, passed for each particular case.
This revision was effected by the simple alteration of Art. 7 of the
Roumanian Constitution, which had hitherto restricted the right of
naturalisation to “foreigners of Christian denominations,” into one
embracing all “foreigners” alike, without distinction of creed, who had
lived for ten years in the country.
By this generous concession the Roumanians claimed, and their
apologists have innocently endorsed the claim, that they did as much
as could fairly be expected from them. The illusory and disingenuous
nature of the concession was patent to all, and the friends of the Jews
were quick and emphatic in pointing it out to the Western Cabinets. But
the Western Cabinets had by this time begun to think that they had done
enough for Israel. Some of the Powers, like Germany, were anxious to
conciliate Roumania in order to obtain a railway concession. Others,
like England, were equally anxious to secure commercial advantages,
while they one and all were cordially tired of the tedious and
unremunerative crusade on behalf of justice. ♦1880♦ Lord Salisbury, in
authorising the British representative to announce to the Bucharest
Government the glad news that they could henceforth regard their
country as a sovereign state, timidly expressed a hope, on behalf
of England and France, that, in return for the Powers’ forbearance,
Roumania, by a liberal application of the revised article of the
Constitution, would bring matters “into exact conformity with the
_spirit_ of the Treaty of Berlin.” Thus the East once more succeeded
in the time-honoured method of conquering by sheer inertia, and by
dividing the Western Powers through their separate interests; and the
Jews were left to float or founder according to the decrees of Fate.
They did not float.
The Roumanians, through the alteration in the letter of their
Constitution, by which the Jews were no longer excluded from the
franchise as non-Christians but as non-Roumanians, had nominally placed
them on a par with other aliens--Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, and
Italians--and, having done this, they professed intense astonishment
that the Jews, alone among foreigners, continued to clamour for civil
and political rights. Yet the reason of their obstinacy is not far to
seek. The subjects of England, France, Germany, and Italy are quite
content with their status, for they would gain nothing by enrolling
themselves as Roumanian citizens. Their nationality affords them ample
protection against injustice, while the wretched Jews, whose cause
France and England had pleaded in vain, if they are not Roumanian
citizens, are citizens of no city. They have no Government to which
they might appeal in an hour of need. Furthermore, it was feared from
the very first that the cumbrous machinery of individual naturalisation
would be put in motion as rarely as possible, and experience has more
than confirmed those fears. During the twenty-four years which elapsed
between the Treaty of Berlin and 1902, very few live Jews were granted
the franchise. For the posthumous naturalisation of the six hundred who
had fallen in battle fighting for the freedom of Roumania, and that of
two hundred more, admitted at the same time, was an exceptional act of
liberality which has created no precedent. From 1878 to 1888, out of
4000 applications only thirty were granted, and since that date fifty
more, bringing up the whole number to a grand total of eighty.[215]
During the same period the disabilities, under which the hapless race
was suffered to remain labouring, have grown almost incredible in
their severity, and have eclipsed the grievances which the Treaty of
Berlin so unsuccessfully attempted to remove. Those grievances already
amounted to oppression. The Jews were obliged to serve in the army as
their Christian fellow-countrymen, and to pay the same taxes; and yet,
though burdened with the same duties, they were denied equal rights.
They were made to assist in the defence of a country which they were
forbidden to call their own, and to contribute to the expenditure of
a Government whose actions they had no voice in controlling. But, at
all events, they were allowed the privilege of earning a livelihood.
Since that time all the weight of Roumanian legislation and popular
fanaticism has been brought to bear upon one object--the extinction of
the Jewish race in the kingdom.
As an example of this systematic persecution may be mentioned the
law of 1885, excluding the Jews from the trade in liquor, which had
been open to them since 1849. This arbitrary act was justified by the
argument that the Jews were fostering the vice of intoxication among
the peasants. But the law has not lessened the consumption of liquor by
a single drop. The Roumanian peasant still drinks as much as he drank
before. Nor does the fact that his drink now comes from a Christian
instead of a Hebrew source seem to produce any difference in its
effects. The truth is that the Roumanian peasant is one of the most
thirsty in the world, occupying as he does the third place in the scale
of universal bibulosity. The brandy bottle is his companion in joy, and
ever present comforter in sorrow. At weddings, as at funerals, brandy
is an honoured guest. On holidays it enhances the merriment, and on
week-days it relieves the monotony of work. To the brandy bottle, as to
an infallible counsellor, the Roumanian peasant still appeals at times
of taxation or any other domestic calamity.
Among such calamities the greatest and most frequent is famine; for,
though Roumania is, next to Russia, the principal grain-exporting
country in Europe, the Roumanian agriculturist, like his Russian
neighbour, and for similar reasons, is one of the most favourite
victims of hunger. “It sometimes happens,” says the Queen of Roumania,
“that in one year the soil yields enormously, and in the succeeding
year, owing to a failure of the crops, we have famine.... It is
difficult for any but those who have seen it for themselves to imagine
what a poor harvest means in a purely agricultural state. It is
horrible. Hunger in its most appalling aspect stalks everywhere....
Picture fields that look like empty threshing-floors; starving cattle,
their bones starting through their flesh, browsing on the barren
ground, and falling dead from sheer exhaustion; men, women and children
without so much as a handful of meal left to provide their meagre diet
of ‘mamaliga.’” At such times “the taverns are far too much frequented;
it is one way of cheating an empty stomach.”[216]
It is, of course, undeniable, and the fact is attested by all those
who have studied the question of temperance reform in any part of
the world, that the supply tends to foster the demand. But no one
has ever asserted that it creates it. Nor has it been demonstrated
that temperance is promoted by the exclusion of one portion of the
population from a trade which is open to all others.
Other laws have been passed, forbidding the Jew to lend money to the
Christian, and the Christian to be ruined by the Jew. The futility of
such enactments, everywhere manifest, is nowhere more clearly proved
than in Roumania. The _boyards_, impoverished by the extravagance which
characterises the newly-emancipated and semi-civilised nobleman, still
go to the money-lender. But the main object is achieved--to represent
the Jew as corrupting the wealthy, and as ruining the poor. It would
perhaps have been wiser on the part of Roumanian legislators to try to
reform their people instead of persecuting those who simply minister
to its vices and exploit its follies. Eradicate the demand, and the
supply will cease of its own accord, is a remedy not yet understood
at Bucharest. Still primitive in their mental attitude, Roumanian
politicians act on the principle ridiculed by the Eastern proverb: They
beat the saddle when the beast is to blame.
How far the Roumanian’s misfortunes are to be traced to the Jew can be
shown from the fact, established by statistics, that the number of
Jews in the Balkan States, though the case is far different in other
parts of the world, is in inverse ratio to the advanced condition of
the general population. In Servia the Jews are barely counted by the
hundred (00.20), and so they are in Greece (00.34). In the latter
country the race would be even more scarce, were it not that many
shrewd and enterprising Greeks are tempted to emigrate to foreign
countries. In Bulgaria also the Jews form an insignificant minority
(00.76).[217] In the kingdom of Greece they enjoy perfect freedom of
worship and all the rights and privileges of Hellenic citizens. In the
Principality of Bulgaria also they are treated on equal terms with
the Christians. Why is it that in Roumania only they figure in their
hundreds of thousands and are oppressed? The answer is obvious. The
Jews have become numerous in Roumania, where the degraded condition of
the people offers the line of least resistance; and the rulers of those
countries fearing lest, if they do not protect their own compatriots
from the competition of a superior race, the wealth and influence of
the latter might increase to a dangerous extent, harass and handicap
them by prohibitive legislation.
However, the Jew’s fecundity seems to be proof against any degree of
persecution. In spite of all checks, the Jews in Roumania, as their
forefathers in Egypt, “increased abundantly and multiplied, and the
land was filled with them.” The Roumanian legislators were, therefore,
bound, in consistency with their own policy, “to deal wisely with
them.” And now ensued a literal repetition of the first chapter of the
Book of Exodus. King Charles appears to be actuated by the same fears
as those which dictated the policy of Pharaoh: “lest they multiply,
and it come to pass, that, when there falleth out any war, they join
also unto our enemies, and fight against us, and so get them up out
of the land.” The experience of thousands of years has taught no
lesson to Roumanian statesmen, and Jewish disabilities have kept pace
with the increase of the victims. At the present moment the Jews are
excluded not only from the public service but also from the learned
professions. They are allowed neither to own land nor even to till
it in the capacity of hired labourers. Mere residence in a country
district is a punishable offence, and when the Jew, driven from the
open country, takes refuge in a city, most avenues to an honest living
are studiously closed to him. He is permitted to engage in none but the
lowest trades and handicrafts. Nay, even as journeymen artisans the
Jews are not allowed to exceed the proportion of one to two Christians.
Education is altogether forbidden to them. In addition to these and
like restrictions, which doom Israel to perpetual penury and ignorance,
these unfortunate Roumanians who cannot boast a “Latin” pedigree
are treated by their “Roman” fellow-countrymen as pariahs. They are
insulted and baited by high and low, without the slightest means
of redress; their social, as well as their political, status being
literally more degraded than that of the gipsy; and that will convey
a sufficiently clear idea to those who know the feelings of loathing
and horror which that unfortunate outcast inspires in the Roumanian
peasant. In one word, the Roumanian Jews can only be described as
bondsmen in their native land.
In the Middle Ages the Synagogue, as well as the Church, indulged in
various gruesome performances calculated to strike terror into the
hearts of sinners. One of the varieties of the ban, book, and candle
rite was also adopted by the Law Courts as a means of extracting
evidence from unwilling witnesses. The Austrian newspapers, in the
summer of 1902, published detailed accounts of a judicial torture
of the kind, known as “Sacramentum more Judaico,” revived by the
modern Roumanians in cases where Jews are engaged in litigation
with Christians. Without the least regard for his religious
susceptibilities, the Roumanian Jew is obliged to go through all the
ritual solemnity of a mock burial: his nails are cut, he is wound up
in a shroud, placed into a coffin and then laid out, corpse-like,
in the synagogue. The Rabbi, under the eyes of a congregation of
revolted co-religionists and scornful unbelievers, pronounces an awful,
comprehensive and minute malediction upon the Jewish plaintiff and
his progeny, should he not speak the truth. The corpse repeats the
imprecations after the Rabbi; for if he declines to curse himself and
his family he loses his case.[218]
At length, worn out by persecution and having abandoned all hope
of succour, the Jews of Roumania began to emigrate in considerable
numbers. In the year 1900 there was a great exodus; but the stream was
temporarily stemmed by the accession to power of M. Carp, from whose
well-known liberality the would-be exiles anticipated a mitigation
of their sufferings. They were disappointed. M. Carp’s cabinet was
short-lived, and its successor, instead of relieving rather aggravated
the sorrows of Israel. Emigration was resumed and continued on an
ever-increasing scale. The Jews now began to leave the country by tens
of thousands, on their way to England and America, assisted thereto by
wealthy co-religionists abroad.[219]
The outpouring of this crowd of needy refugees into Austria was not
calculated to please the inhabitants of that empire. Measures were
taken to prevent any of them from seeking a permanent home in the
dominions of the Hapsburgs, and the police were charged, gently but
firmly, to speed the unwelcome guests on their journey. When the funds,
generously contributed for the purpose, fell short of the requirements
of the travellers, the Austrian authorities hastened to send them back,
and the Austrian newspapers began to denounce the Government through
whose tyranny these destitute Israelites were compelled to leave their
native country. This protest elicited from the Roumanian Government
one of its customary _démentis_. Those who had not hesitated to deny
the very existence of “Roumanian Jews” could have no difficulty in
declaring that “There is absolutely no foundation for the malicious
statement published by some foreign papers regarding a wholesale
emigration of the Jews from Roumania.” The statement was based “on
a perversion of the new Roumanian Labour Law,” and the Roumanian
Government deprecated the publication of such articles, “as they might
call forth, as was the case years ago, an unhealthy excitement in the
minds of the people.”[220]
But, facts being more convincing than official denials, the exodus
grew more alarming, because the forces to which it owed its origin
continued in operation. The “Jewish Colonization Association” now came
to the aid of the indigent exiles, and endeavoured to save them from
additional suffering by preventing those who were not provided with
the necessary passage money, or were not physically fit, from leaving
their homes.[221] These wise measures restrained to a certain extent
indiscriminate expatriation, but, as might have been foreseen, failed
to check it entirely. The exodus continued, and the outcry against
Roumania spread, for now the countries into which the undesirable
current flowed were compelled by self-interest to do what they had
hitherto vainly attempted to effect from a sense of philanthropy.
America, the favourite haven of refuge for the fortune-seeker of every
colour and clime, undertook the task of spokesman. The late Mr. Hay,
Secretary of State, in September, 1902, through the representatives of
the United States in the countries which took part in the Congress of
Berlin, reminded the Governments of those countries of Art. 44 of the
Treaty signed by them in 1878, urging them to bring home to Roumania
her flagrant and persistent failure to fulfil the conditions on which
she had obtained her independence. After a handsome tribute to the
intellectual and moral qualities of the Jew, based on history and
experience, the American Minister protested, on behalf of his country,
against “the treatment to which the Jews of Roumania are subjected,
not alone because it has unimpeachable ground to remonstrate against
resultant injury to itself, but in the name of humanity.” He concluded
with a vigorous appeal to “the principles of International Law and
eternal justice,” and with an offer to lend the moral support of the
United States to any effort made to enforce respect for the Treaty of
Berlin.[222]
This powerful impeachment, coming as it did from a distant party in
no way connected with the affairs of Continental Europe, may have
caused heart-searchings in nearer and more immediately concerned
countries; but it failed to awaken those countries to a proper sense
of their interests, not to say duties. The only quarter in which
America’s appeal to humanity found an echo was England. A number
of representative men, such as the late Archbishop of Canterbury,
the present Bishop of London, Lord Kelvin, the Marquess of Ripon,
the late Mr. Lecky, Sir Charles Dilke, the Master of Balliol, and
others, publicly expressed their profound sympathy with the victims of
persecution. Mr. Chamberlain also seized the opportunity of declaring
that, as history proves, the Jews, “while preserving with extraordinary
tenacity their national characteristics and the tenets of their
religion, have been amongst the most loyal subjects of the states in
which they have found a home, and the impolicy of persecution in such
a case is almost greater than its cruelty.”[223] Other Englishmen
also joined in the denunciation of Roumania not so much from pity for
the victims of oppression as from fear lest, unless the Roumanian
Government was compelled to change its policy, England should have to
face another inroad of “undesirable” Jewish immigrants.
In like manner, the only Government which volunteered to second
Mr. Hay’s Note was the British, and on the common basis of these
two representations, the signatory Powers of the Treaty of Berlin
“exchanged views.” The results of this exchange can be summed up only
too easily. The historian of the future will probably derive therefrom
some interesting lessons regarding European politics and ethics in the
beginning of the twentieth century. They are as follows:
Germany, under whose presidency the stipulation concerning the Jews of
Roumania was framed, did not choose to consider herself called upon to
insist on the execution of that stipulation. The Liberal section of the
German press received the American Note with sincere, but ineffectual,
appreciation; while of the Conservative majority some pronounced it
naïve, and others affected to regard it as an attempt on America’s part
to interfere in European affairs, or even as an electioneering trick
having for its sole object to enhance President Roosevelt’s political
prestige! The German Government, though more courteous than the German
press, proved equally cold. As we have already seen, that Government
was the last to join in the efforts to improve the lot of the Roumanian
Jews and the first to declare itself satisfied with the deceptive
revision of Article 7 of the Roumanian Constitution. This attitude,
when considered in conjunction with the fact that a Hohenzollern reigns
in Roumania, and with that kingdom’s place in the present political
combinations of the Continent, enables us to understand, if not to
applaud, Germany’s reception of Mr. Hay’s Note.
Austria-Hungary, whose proximity to Roumania pointed her out as the
Power primarily concerned, and entitled to act, declined to take any
steps singly or collectively. The self-restraint of Austria, like that
of Germany, and even in a greater degree, was dictated by political
considerations, Roumania being practically the only State in the
Balkans, where the influence of Austria-Hungary and of the Triple
Alliance still counts for something. Besides, the Vienna Cabinet could
not decently join in advocating Jewish emancipation, for it was Austria
which in May, 1887, concluded with Roumania a treaty whereby some
seventy thousand Jewish residents in the latter kingdom--who, according
to a practice common in Mohammedan countries, had enjoyed Austrian
protection while Roumania was under Ottoman rule--were deprived of the
status of Austrian subjects, without receiving any other status in
exchange.
Italy was deterred from lending her support to the American Note by
Roumania’s relations with the Triple Alliance and also by the vogue
which the “Roman” idea obtains in the land which the Roumanians are
pleased to regard as “the cradle of their race.”
Russia, whose treatment of her own Jewish subjects would have made
an appeal to “humanity and eternal justice” on behalf of the Jews in
another country a sad mockery, decorously refrained from supporting the
American Note. It is true that the Russian press imitated the Teutonic
in scoffing at America’s action as a pretext for gaining admission to
the counsels of the European Areopagus, and in condemning it as an
impertinence! But the Czar’s Government, with better taste, extricated
itself from an awkward position by basing its refusal on the ground
that the grievances set forth in Mr. Hay’s despatch were so old that
it was hardly worth while troubling about them. In the opinion of the
Russian Ministers, the Jews must by now be thoroughly accustomed to
starvation.
France, with all the good intentions in the world, could do nothing
without Russia’s consent and, therefore, contented herself with the
expression of a modest hope that the Roumanian Government might of
their own accord decide to fulfil their obligations, seeing that the
real sufferer is Roumania itself, and with pointing to the lack of
means of enforcing such fulfilment.[224]
In brief, the European Powers considered that they did their duty by
expressing their platonic concurrence with that part of the American
Note which referred to the obligations of humanity and civilisation
generally. But to the more definite appeal to the Treaty of Berlin they
refused to pay any attention whatsoever. Nor can we wonder at their
refusal. The appeal was not a very happy one; for every party to that
contract has conscientiously broken it in turn. Russia, in defiance of
its provisions, has fortified Batoum; Turkey has not even attempted to
carry out the reforms in the European Provinces of the Empire, ordained
by the Treaty; Great Britain has done nothing for the Armenians. Why
then should poor Roumania alone be called upon to carry out her share
of an agreement, already disregarded with impunity by everyone else
concerned?
Such a retort would, of course, have been too candid and too rational
for diplomacy. Instead, the Roumanian Government had again recourse
to the more correct, if somewhat hackneyed, expedient of an official
contradiction of the truth. The Roumanian Minister in London declared
that “the idea that any persecution existed was absolutely erroneous.”
The Jews were foreigners, and “the disabilities imposed upon foreigners
were absolutely necessary for the protection of his countrymen, who
had bought their independence with the sword, and had a right to
manage their economic affairs according to their requirements, etc.,
etc.”[225] What the Roumanian conception of such a right is has been
very eloquently explained by Roumania’s accomplished Queen. After
having drawn a pitiful and, although exaggerated, in the main faithful
picture of Roumania’s economic misery, Her Majesty declares that,
under such conditions, the civilised world ought not “to require her
to harbour and support others, when she herself stands in dire need
of assistance.” Those “others” are “foreigners,” that is, Roumanian
Jews; their exodus is represented as the voluntary emigration of “a
foreign population” due to the instinct which prompts a rat to quit
a sinking ship, and their departure is welcome, because they, being
traders, drain the country of its wealth. This interesting economic
doctrine is expounded by Her Majesty as follows: “It is a fact that no
money has ever been introduced into Roumania through any one in trade.
Any that such a man may possess goes abroad, first to purchase his
stock and outfit, and later for supplies to carry on his business, even
such articles as buttons and the commonest kinds of braids not being
manufactured here except on the very smallest scale.”[226] Here again
the Jewish apologist is more convincing than his Roumanian accuser.
Admitting that, on the whole, the Queen’s statements are correct, he
asks: “But why is it so? For the reason that the ruling class prohibits
‘foreigners’ to acquire lands in the country, and by means of this and
other laws keeps foreign capital from coming in.”[227]
Protests pass away, grievances remain. The well-meant action of Mr. Hay
and Lord Lansdowne, far from bettering, really aggravated the condition
of the people on whose behalf it was taken. The Roumanian politicians,
with characteristic astuteness, perceived that the immediate cause of
the complaint was the emigration of the Jews to the United States,
England and Canada, and, naturally enough, arrived at the conclusion
that the one thing needful was to remove the ground of complaint by
stopping emigration. A telegraphic order was sent to all the local
authorities, forbidding the issue of passports to the Jews. Those
who had already reached the frontier were forcibly turned back, and
hundreds of others, who had sold all they possessed in order to raise
the funds necessary for the journey, were compelled to return home and
perish.[228] Thus an act intended as a blessing proved an unmitigated
curse, and modern Roumania by this new measure has outstripped even
mediaeval Spain in cruelty. For the Spanish sovereigns, blinded by
religious bigotry, had yet given to the Jews the alternatives of
conversion or exile. Their Roumanian imitators, infatuated by racial
fanaticism, will not baptize the Jews, nor dare they banish them; but,
like Pharaoh of old, they virtually bid them stay and be slaves.
CHAPTER XXIII
ANTI-SEMITISM
WE have followed the fortunes of the Jewish people from the moment of
its first contact with the nations of the West to the last quarter of
the nineteenth century. We have seen that this contact was from the
beginning marked by mutual antipathy, enfeebled at times, invigorated
at others, always present. Some Jewish writers have endeavoured to
show that the hatred of the Gentile towards the Jew in the Middle Ages
was an artificial creation due entirely to the efforts of the Catholic
Church; that it flowed from above, and that the masses of Christendom,
when not incited by the classes, were most amicably disposed towards
Israel. This view is hardly tenable. It is inconceivable that the
Church, or any other authority, could have succeeded so well in
kindling the conflagrations which we have witnessed, if the fuel were
not ready to be kindled. It is also a view contrary to the recorded
facts. We have seen in the earlier Middle Ages popular prejudice
spontaneously manifesting itself in the insults and injuries which were
heaped upon the Jews, and restrained with difficulty by the princes and
prelates of Europe. In the time of the Crusades also it was not St.
Bernard who fanned the fury of the mob against the Jews of the Rhine,
but an obscure monk. The exhortations of the saint were disregarded;
but the harangues of the fanatic found an eager audience, simply
because they were in accord with popular feeling. During the same
period bishops and burgomasters strove to save the victims, in vain.
Again, the persecution of the Spanish Jews in the fifteenth century
would never have attained the dimensions which it did attain, were
it not for the deep-rooted animosity which the bulk of the Spanish
people nourished against them. Castile was then the home of chivalry
and charity. The pretensions of the Pope to interfere in the affairs
of the kingdom had met with scornful opposition on the part of the
Castilian nobles. Three centuries before an Aragonese monarch had given
away his life in defence of the persecuted heretics of Provence. Less
than two centuries before Aragon was one of the few countries that
refused to comply with the joint request of Philip the Fair of France
and Pope Clement V. to persecute the Knights Templars. At the time
when the Inquisition was established in Spain both Castile and Aragon
were hailing the revival of culture. Under Ferdinand and Isabella, as
well as in the subsequent reigns, the Castilians and the Aragonese
vigorously resisted an institution so contrary to the principles
of freedom dear to them. Nor was in Spain the danger of dissension
sufficiently great to justify recourse to so terrible an instrument
of concord. The Spaniards less than any other people had reason to
sacrifice liberty of conscience for the sake of political conquest.
It is, therefore, highly improbable that the Holy Office would ever
have gained a firm footing in Spain, but for the fact that its way was
paved by the popular prejudice against the Jews and the Moors, and its
success assured by the persecution of those races. Though the Spaniards
hated the Inquisition bitterly, they hated the Semites more bitterly
still; and of the two the Jew more bitterly than the Moor.
We have also seen that neither the Renaissance nor the Reformation,
both movements directly or indirectly hostile to the Church, brought
any amelioration to the lot of the Jew. In every country Jew-hatred
existed as the product of other than ecclesiastical influences. Here
and there, under exceptionally favourable conditions, the Jews may
have been tolerated; they were not loved. This negative attitude was
liable to be at any moment converted into active hostility. All that
the Church did was to turn the feeling to account, to intensify and to
sanctify it. Lastly, we have seen that the emancipation of the Jews did
not come about until the end of the eighteenth and the middle of the
nineteenth century--a period no longer of protest against the Church,
but one of rebellion against all the prejudices of all the ages. It was
not until the gospel of humanity, in its broadest sense, was accepted
that the secular clamour against the Jewish portion of the human race
was silenced; and even then not without difficulty. But, though the
plant of anti-Judaism was cut at the root, the root remained, and it
was destined in our own day to put forth a new shoot.
Writers have expended much ingenuity in defining the origin and the
nature of modern anti-Semitism. Some regard it as a resuscitation of
mediaeval religious bigotry; others as the latest manifestation of the
old struggle between Europe and Asia; a third school, rejecting both
those theories, interprets it as a purely political question arising
from the social and economic conditions created by the emancipation
of the Jews; while a fourth sect have attempted to show that the
modern revival is “the fruit of a great ethnographical and political
error.” Those who see in anti-Semitism nothing but a revival of
mediaeval religious rancour ignore the conflict between Jew and Gentile
before the rise of the Mediaeval Church, or even before the rise of
Christianity. Those who explain it as a purely racial struggle forget
the Crusades and the Inquisition and the superstitious horror of usury.
Those who interpret it simply as a question of modern European politics
disregard both those periods of history. Finally, whatever may be said
of crude ethnographical theories and of nebulous nationalist creeds,
it would be doing them too much honour to suppose that they are the
real causes of anti-Semitism. Men do not slaughter their fellow-men for
the mere sake of an abstract hypothesis, though priests may. All these
things do nothing but give a name and a watchword to a movement born
of far less ethereal parents. In our day the political activity which
has used anti-Semitism as an instrument has only done what clerical
activity had done in the past. It has availed itself of a force not of
its own creation. The fact is that every human action is the result of
manifold motives. The complexity of the motives is not diminished by
the multitude of the actors. There is a strong temptation to simplify
matters by singling out one of those motives and ignoring the rest.
But, though truth is always simple, simplicity need not always be true.
There may be new things under the sun. Anti-Semitism, however, is not
one of them. Its roots lie deep in the past.
Viewed, then, in the light of two thousand years’ recorded experience,
modern anti-Semitism appears to be neither religious, nor racial, nor
economical in its origin and character. It is all three, and something
more. We find in it all the motives which led to the persecution of the
Jews in the past. In antiquity the struggle was chiefly due to racial
antagonism, in the Middle Ages chiefly to religious antagonism, in the
nineteenth century we might expect it to assume chiefly a nationalist
garb. But, as in antiquity religious antipathy was blended with racial
hatred, as in the Middle Ages economic rivalry accentuated religious
bigotry, so in our time religious, racial, and economic reasons have
contributed to the movement in various degrees according to the
peculiar conditions, material and moral, prevailing in each country
where anti-Semitism has found an echo. If it were possible to unite
all these causes in one general principle, it would be this: every age
has its own fashionable cult, which for the time being overshadows all
other cults, gives a name to the age, explains its achievements, and
extenuates its crimes. Every age has found in the Jew an uncompromising
dissenter and a sacrificial victim. The cult _par excellence_ of the
nineteenth century is Nationalism.
What is this dreadful Nationalism? It is a reversion to a primitive
type of patriotism--the narrow feeling which makes men regard all those
who live in the same place, or who speak the same language, or who
are supposed to be descended from a common ancestor, as brethren; all
others as foreigners and potential foes. This feeling in its crudest
form is purely a family-feeling, in the worst sense of the term. It
grows into a larger allegiance to the tribe, then to the race, and
that in its turn develops into the broad patriotism which manifests
itself now as Imperialism, now as Catholicism.
There is yet a third form of patriotism--the purest and noblest of all:
loyalty to common intellectual ideals. The Greeks attained to this
lofty conception, and an Athenian orator, in enumerating his country’s
claims to the admiration of mankind, dwells with just pride on this
product of its civilisation. Athens, he says, “has made the name of
the Hellenes to be no longer a name of race, but one of mind, so that
Hellenes should be called those who share in our culture rather than
in our nature.”[229] Isocrates in making this statement, however,
gave utterance to a dream of his own rather than to a feeling common
among his countrymen. The Macedonian Empire strove to convert that
philosophical dream into a political fact. Alexander and his successors
studded Asia with Greek theatres, Greek schools, Greek gymnasia, and
the East was covered with a veneer of pseudo-Hellenic civilisation.
But their success was only partial, superficial and ephemeral. The
intellectual unity could not go deep and therefore did not last long.
The barriers--social, religious and racial--which separated the Hellene
from the Barbarian proved insuperable; and the Isocratean ideal of a
nationality based on community of intellectual aims remained an ideal.
Hellenism demanded a degree of mental development to which mankind has
never yet attained. Hence its failure as a political bond. This was
not the case with Imperialism and Catholicism. They both appealed to
more elementary and therefore less rare qualities in man. Hence their
success. Rome achieved more than Greece because she aimed at less.
The Roman Empire represented the first, the Roman Church the second
variety of this broad patriotism. _Civis Romanus_ was a title which
united in a common allegiance the Italian and the Greek, the Jew and
the Egyptian, the Spaniard, the Briton and the Gaul. Catholic Rome
inherited the imperial feeling of Pagan Rome, but dressed it in a
religious form. The dictatorship of the Caesars was divided between
the Christian Emperor and the Pope: the former inheriting their
political power, the latter the spiritual and moral. Charlemagne
wielded the authority of an Imperator Romanus, his papal contemporary
that of a Pontifex Maximus. Then came the decay and fall of the
Carlovingian fabric; and, gradually, the Papacy built up a spiritual
empire with the _débris_ of the secular. All Catholics were subjects
of that Empire. In the Middle Ages Europe presented a picture of
wonderful uniformity in sentiments, ideals, customs, political and
social institutions. All countries, like so many coins issued from
one mint, seemed to be cast in the same mould, stamped with the same
effigy and adorned with the same legend. National consciousness was
in the Middle Ages practically non-existent, or, if it did exist, in
the later centuries, it was obscured by the religious sentiment. As
in modern Islam we find Arabs, Persians, Indians, Malays, Chinese,
Syrians, Egyptians, Berbers, Moors, Turks, Albanians--nations differing
widely in origin and language--united by the ties of a common creed,
so in mediaeval Christendom we find English, Scotch, French, Italian,
German and Spanish knights all forming one vast brotherhood. The
reader of Froissart cannot fail to notice this community of feeling
and the marvellous ease with which gentlemen from all those nations
made themselves at home in one another’s countries. The chronicler
himself, in his style and mental attitude, supplies a striking example
of this cosmopolitanism. By the mediaeval Christian, as by the
modern Mohammedan, the human race was divided into two halves: true
believers and others. The universal acceptance of Latin as the medium
of communication was another token and bond of brotherhood among the
Christians of mediaeval Europe, as the use of Arabic, as a sacred
tongue, is a token and a bond of brotherhood among the Mohammedans of
the present day.
This feeling of international patriotism, which found its highest
development and expression in the Crusades, began to fade as soon as
Catholic faith began to decay. Disintegration followed both in the
Church and in the State. Loyalty to one ideal and to one authority
was gradually superseded by local and later by racial patriotism.
Various political units succeeded to the Unity of mediaeval Europe,
the vernaculars ousted the Latin language from its position as the
one vehicle of thought, and the old cosmopolitan universities of
Paris and Bologna were replaced by national institutions. Since the
fifteenth century nationalism has been growing steadily, but in the
eighteenth its growth was to some extent checked by humanitarianism.
The great thinkers of that age extolled the freedom and the perfection
of the individual as the highest aim of culture, describing exclusive
attachment to one’s country and race as a characteristic of a
comparatively barbarous state of society: a remnant of aboriginal
ancestor-worship. Nationalism, accordingly, did not reach its
adolescence until the nineteenth century. Then the zeal for peace
was eclipsed by the splendour of the French exploits in war, and the
doctrine of universal freedom was forgotten in Napoleon’s efforts
at universal dominion. These efforts aroused in every country which
Napoleon attacked a passionate protest which resulted in successful
revolt. But the triumph was won at a tremendous cost. Each nation in
proportion to its sense of what was due to itself was oblivious of what
was due to others. The principles of the brotherhood of men and of
universal toleration were denied, the narrow jealousies of race which
the philosophers of the preceding century had driven from the realm of
culture were re-installed, and Nationalism--arrogant, intemperate, and
intolerant--arose on the ruins of Humanitarianism. This evolution, or
revolution, has added a new element in social troubles, and has brought
into being a new set of ideas.
For the last hundred years ethnographical theory has dominated the
civilised world and its destinies as theological dogma had done
during the Middle Ages. Consciously or not, the idea of race directs
the policy of nations, inspires their poetry, and tinges their
philosophy with the same prejudice as religion did formerly. Aryan and
non-Aryan have become terms conveying all but the odious connotation
of Christian and infidel; and in place of the spiritual we have
adopted a scientific mythology. The fiction of our Aryan origin has
flattered us into the benevolent belief of our mental superiority over
the Mongol, and of our moral superiority over the Semite. To dispute
this tenet is to commit sacrilege. But even within the bosom of this
imaginary Aryan fold there are schisms: so-called Celtic, Germanic,
Latin, Anglo-Saxon, and Slavonic sects, divided against one another by
the phantom barriers of ethnographical speculation as frantically as
in older days Christendom was divided by the metaphysical figments of
Arian, Manichaean, Nestorian, and what not. In the name of race are now
done as many great deeds and as many great follies are committed as
were once in the name of God. The worship of race has, as the worship
of the Cross had done before, given birth to new Crusades which have
equalled the old in the degree to which they have disturbed the peace
and agitated the minds of men, and in the violence of the passions
which they have excited. Nationalism more than any other cause has
helped to bring discredit upon the principles of liberty, equality, and
fraternity--to prove the eighteenth century dream of world-wide peace
a glorious impossibility--and to show the enormous chasm which still
gapes between the aspirations of a few thinkers and the instincts of
the masses.
Though common to all European countries, the creed of the age found
articulate exposition first in Germany, and gave rise to various
academic doctrines which attempted to account for the genesis and
evolution of Nationalism in scientific or pseudo-scientific terms. But
names do not alter facts. Ethnographical speculations are in this case
mainly interesting as having supplied a plausible explanation for the
rise of anti-Semitism. Those who are able to see through new guises,
and to detect what old things they conceal, know that anti-Semitism
is little more than a new Protean manifestation of Jew-hatred.
Divested of its academic paraphernalia, the movement is revealed in
all its venerable vulgarity--a hoary-headed abomination long since
excommunicated by the conscience of civilised mankind.
This reactionary movement began in Eastern Germany and Austria. In
those countries the Jews are very numerous,[230] very wealthy, and
very influential. Both countries are famous as hot-beds of racial
fanaticism. In Germany Nationalism was begotten of the independence
secured by the Thirty Years’ War in the seventeenth century, was
nursed by the patriotic preachers and poets of the eighteenth, was
invigorated by the wars for emancipation from Napoleon’s rule, and was
educated by Hegel and his disciples. The Jews in Germany, as elsewhere,
are the one element which declines to be fused in the nationalist
crucible. Their international connections help them to overstep the
barriers of country. Their own racial consciousness, fostered by the
same writers, is at least as intense as that of the Germans; but it
does not coincide with any geographical entity. They are, therefore,
regarded as a cosmopolitan tribe--“everywhere and nowhere at home.”
They are distinct not only as a race, but as a sect, and as a class.
Accordingly, the reaction against tolerance includes in its ranks
clerics and Christian Socialists, aristocrats, as well as Nationalists,
that is, the enemies of dissent and the enemies of wealth, as well
as the enemies of the alien and the enemies of the upstart. And the
term “Jew” is used in a religious or a racial sense according to the
speaker. In both Germany and Austria we saw that the philosophical
gospel of social liberty was very slowly applied to practical politics,
and that, even when it had been accepted, it was subject to reactions.
When Jewish manumission was finally accomplished, the Jews by their
genius filled a much larger place in the sphere of national life than
was deemed proportional to their numbers. And this undue preponderance,
rendered all the easier by the superior cohesion of the Jewish over
the German social system, was further accentuated by specialisation.
The Jews, whose training in Europe for centuries, owing partly to
their own racial instincts and Rabbinical teaching, but chiefly to
the conditions imposed upon them from outside, had been of a peculiar
kind, showed these peculiarities by their choice of fields of activity.
They abstained from the productive and concentrated their efforts
to the intellectual, financial, and distributive industries of the
countries of which they became enfranchised citizens. Jews flooded the
Universities, the Academies, the Medical Profession, the Civil Service,
and the Bar. Many of the judges, and nearly one-half of the practising
lawyers of Germany, are said to be Jews. Jews came forth as authors,
journalists, and artists. Above all, Jews, thanks to the hereditary
faculty for accumulation fostered in them during the long period when
money-dealing was the one pursuit open to them, asserted themselves
as financiers. It is impossible to move anywhere in Berlin or Vienna
without seeing the name of Israel written in great letters of gold not
only over the shops, but over the whole face of German life. Success
awakened jealousy, and economic distress--due to entirely different
causes--stimulated it. What if the competition was fair? What if the
Jews were distinguished by their peaceful and patriotic attitude? What
if they supplied the least proportion of criminals and paupers? What if
German freedom had been bought partially with Jewish blood, and German
unity achieved by the help of Jewish brains and Jewish money?
The landed gentry, richer in ancestors than in money or intelligence,
had every reason to envy the Jew’s wealth, and much reason to dislike
the Jew’s ostentatious display of it. They could not respect in the Jew
a gifted _arrivé_. They saw in him a vulgar _parvenu_--one who by his
“subversive Mephistophelian endowment, brains,” demolishes the fences
of creed and caste, and invades the highest and most exclusive circles,
thus acting as a solvent in society. If he is wise, the proud nobleman
of narrow circumstances makes his pride compensate for his poverty, and
magnanimously despises the luxuries which he cannot procure. If, as
more often happens, he is foolish, he enters into a rivalry of vanity
with the upstart, and the result is a mortgaged estate--mortgaged most
likely to his rival. In either case, he can have little love for the
opulent and clever interloper. The animosity of the aristocracy is
shared by the middle classes, and for analogous reasons. The German
professional man, and more especially his wife, resents his Jewish
colleague’s comparative luxury as a personal affront. The excessive
power of money in modern society, and the consequent diminution of the
respect once paid to blood or learning, naturally enable the Jewish
banker to succeed where the poor baron fails; and the Jewish professor
or doctor, though many of these latter are poor enough, to outshine
his Christian competitor. This excessive power of money is due to
causes far deeper than the enfranchisement of the Jews. It is the
normal result of Germany’s modern development. The influence of the
nobles depended largely on their domains of land; and when industries
arose to compete with agriculture, the importance of land necessarily
declined. At the same time, industry and commerce began, with Germany’s
expansion, to divert more and more the attention of the intelligent
from the path of academic distinction--once the only path to honour
open to the ambitious burgher--into that of material prosperity.
Chrematistic enterprise has introduced a new social standard, and
an aristocracy of wealth has come to supplant the old aristocracies
of birth and erudition. This social revolution, through which every
country in the world has passed and has to pass, was unhesitatingly
ascribed to the Jew, who was thus accused of having created the
conditions, which in reality he had only exploited.
If from the aristocratic and the cultured classes we turn to the rural
population, we find similar causes yielding similar results. In the
German country districts it is objected to the Jews not cultivating
the land themselves, but lying in wait for the failing farmer:
“Everywhere,” says an authority, “the peasant proprietor hated the
Jew,” and he proceeds to sketch the peasant tragedy of which that
hatred was the consequence. The land had to be mortgaged to pay family
claims; the owner had recourse to the ubiquitous and importunate
money-lender; the money-lender, whose business it is to trade upon the
necessity of the borrower, took advantage of the latter’s distress,
and extorted as much as he could. “The Jew grew fat as the Gentile
got lean. A few bad harvests, cattle-plague, or potato-disease, and
the wretched peasant, clinging with the unreasonable frantic love of
a faithful animal to its habitat, had, in dumb agony, to see his farm
sold up, his stock disposed of, and the acres he had toiled early and
late to redeem, and watered by the sweat of his stubborn brow, knocked
down by the Jewish interloper to the highest bidder.”[231] In the
Austrian country districts it is urged that the presence of the Jew is
synonymous with misery; his absence with comparative prosperity. In
Hungary, the late M. Elisée Reclus--the famous author of the _Nouvelle
Géographie Universelle_--informs us, “The rich magnate goes bankrupt,
and it is almost always a Jew who acquires the encumbered property,”
and another witness adds: “The Jew is no less active in profiting by
the vices and necessities of the peasant than by those of the noble.”
In Galicia, especially, we are told that the land is rapidly passing
into the hands of the Jews, and that many a former proprietor is now
reduced to work as a day-labourer in his own farm for the benefit of a
Jewish master. All this is an absurdly exaggerated version of facts in
themselves sad enough. The Jews as a whole are by no means a wealthy
community, and the gainers by the supposed exploitation are the few,
not the many. And if, as is the case, the condition of affairs in
agricultural states is bad, who is to blame? Wherever there is agrarian
depression there are sure to be money-lenders enough and Shylocks too
many. It does not appear that Christian money-lenders have ever been
more tender-hearted than their Jewish _confrères_. Why then set down
to the Jew, as a Jew, what is the common and inevitable attribute of
his profession? The ruin of the borrower does not justify the slaughter
of the lender. Philanthropists would be better employed if, instead
of bewailing in mournful diatribes the woes of the bankrupt peasant
and inveighing against the cruelty of his oppressor, combined to
establish agricultural banks where the farmer could obtain money at
less exorbitant interest. This measure, and measures like this, not
slaughter and senile lamentation, would be a remedy consonant both
with the nature of the evil and with the dictates of civilisation
and justice. Until something of the sort is done, it is worse than
futile to demand that dealers in money, any more than dealers in corn,
cotton, or cheese, should work from altruistic motives. But nothing
rational is ever attempted. Instead, everywhere the nobles ruined by
their own improvidence and extravagance, the peasants by their rustic
incompetence, and both by the exactions of a wasting militarism,
complain of the extortion of the Jewish usurers. It was inevitable
that the old-world monster of Jew-hatred, never really dead, should
have raised its hoary head again. All the elements of an anti-Jewish
movement were present. The only thing that lacked was opportunity. The
deficiency was not long in being supplied.
The Franco-German war and the achievement of German unity fanned
the flame of patriotism. As in the time of Napoleon the First, so
in that of Napoleon III., a great national danger created a strong
fellow-feeling between the different members of the German race; a
great national triumph stirred up an enthusiasm for the Empire which
was indulged in at the cost of individual liberty. Despotism throve
on the exuberance of nationalism. The Germans were led back from the
constitutional and democratic ideals of 1848 to an ultra-monarchic
servility which made it possible for the present Kaiser’s grandfather
a few years after, prompted by Bismarck, to assert openly the
ridiculous old claim to divine right. Thus the ground was prepared
for any anti-alien and anti-liberal agitation. Other causes came to
accelerate the movement. The war had involved enormous pecuniary and
personal sacrifices. The extraordinary success, instead of satisfying,
stimulated German ambition. It aroused an extravagant financial
optimism and self-confidence. Germany, intoxicated with military
victory, was still thirsting for aggrandisement of a different kind.
Economy was cast to the winds, and a fever of wild speculation seized
on all classes of the community. Companies were floated, and swallowed
up the superfluous capital of the great as well as the savings of the
humble. Sanguine expectation was the temper of the day. Berlin would
vie with Paris in elegance and with London in suburban comfort, and
every one of its citizens would be a millionaire!
Then came the terrible crash. The bubble burst, and the magnificent
day-dreams were dispelled by misery. A succession of bad harvests, and
the rapid increase in American corn competition, by impoverishing the
agricultural class, added to the general depression. The disillusioned
public wanted a victim whereupon to vent its wrath. Those who promoted
the companies had to suffer for the folly of those who were ruined by
their failure. A great many of the former, by selling out at the right
moment, rose to affluence. The discontented public, naturally enough,
noticing these large fortunes in the midst of the general wreck, jumped
to the conclusion that the few had enriched themselves by robbing the
many. “Exposures” followed, and among the implicated financiers there
were found many Jews. It was then in order to fill Jewish pockets that
the heroes of Germany had bled on the battlefield, and the burghers
of Germany had been bled at home! The nationalist ideal of Germany
for the Germans, then, was to lead to a Germany for the Israelites!
All those trials had been endured and all those triumphs achieved in
order to deliver up the Fatherland to an alien and infidel race--a
race with which neither the intellect nor the heart of Germany has any
affinity or sympathy! This was the cry of anguish that succeeded to
the paeans of self-glorification, and those nationalists who uttered
these sentiments forgot that their very nationalism had been largely
created and fostered by Jewish thinkers. They also forgot that it was a
Jewish statesman, Lasker, who, at the cost of all personal and party
interests and of his popularity, had alone had the courage to expose in
the Prussian Chamber the evils of extravagant speculation, in 1873, and
to urge both the public and the Government to turn back, while there
was yet time, from the road to ruin which they pursued. But it has been
well said: “Who would think of gratitude when a scapegoat is required?”
A tongue was given to the popular indignation in a pamphlet by an
obscure German journalist, Wilhelm Marr by name, who seized the
opportunity of attaining to fame and fortune by a plentiful effusion
of his anti-Jewish venom. The work anathematized the Jews not only
as blood-sucking leeches, but as enemies of the Germanic race, and
as forming a distinct and self-centred solecism in German national
life. The Coryphaeus was ably supported by a crowd hitherto mute. The
opponents of industrial and the opponents of religious liberalism,
men of rank, men of letters, and high ecclesiastics joined in the
chorus, and another “black day” (July 30, 1878) was added to the Jewish
calendar. In Adolph Stöcker, a Christian Socialist and court preacher,
and a staunch Conservative in the Prussian Diet, the new crusade found
its Peter the Hermit. He was the first man of position to preach from
the pulpit and to declare in the press that Hebrew influence in the
State was disastrous to the Christian section of the community, that
Semitic preponderance was fatal to the Teutonic race. As though the
printing presses of Germany were only waiting for the signal, a whole
library of anti-Semitic literature was rapidly produced, and as rapidly
consumed. Some of the most popular journals opened their columns to the
campaign, Jewish journalists opposed violence with violence, and the
feud daily assumed larger dimensions, until by the end of 1879 it had
spread and raged over the whole of the empire.
“It is not right that the minority should rule over the majority,”
cried some. Others accused the Jews, loosely and without adducing any
proofs, of forming a freemasonry and of always placing the interests of
their brethren above those of the country. That there was some kind
of systematic co-operation among the Jews seems probable. It is also
probable that there was a certain degree of truth in the charge of
“clandestine manipulation of the press” for the purpose of shielding
even Jews unworthy of protection. But for this the Germans had only
themselves to thank. By attacking the Jews as a tribe they stimulated
the tribal feeling among them. The social isolation to which they
condemned the Jew intensified his gift of reciprocity. To the German
Christians the Jew, however patriotic and unexceptionable he may be
as a citizen, as a man is a Jew--an alien, an infidel, an upstart, a
parasite. His genius is said to be purely utilitarian, his religion
externally an observance of empty forms, essentially a worship of
the golden calf, and worldly success his highest moral ideal. German
professors analysed the Jewish mind and found it Semitic, German
theologians sought for the Jewish soul and could find none. Both
classes, agreeing in nothing else, concurred in denouncing the Jew as
a sinister creature, strangely wanting in spiritual qualities--a being
whose whole existence, devoid of faith of any kind, revolves between
his cash-book and the book of the Law. Perhaps the most remarkable
consequence of all was the growth of an anti-Semitic school of exegesis
of the Old Testament.
These, then, were the grievances of the orthodox: the Jew’s want of
religious feeling. Free-thinkers denounced him for a superabundance
of that very feeling. Stöcker, with unctuous smartness, said, “the
creed of the Jews stands on the blank page between the Old and the
New Testament.” Duhring ponderously objected to “the tenacity with
which the inherited religious manner of viewing things is rooted in
the Jewish mind.” These charges, mutually exclusive though they were,
were gladly espoused by those who only needed some theory whereby to
dignify their spite. The Jew’s own foibles--his arrogance and love of
display--supplied that minimum of excuse which has ever been deemed
sufficient for persecution. The Jews, said their accusers, hold in
their hands the golden key which opens all doors, and flourish it
insolently before their less fortunate neighbours. They have killed the
ancient simplicity and frugality of German life by their ostentatious
luxury, and corrupted German idealism by their inordinate pursuit of
material comfort. German idealism has been killed by nationalism and
militarism. But, of course, no German patriot can be expected to see
this. What, however, surprises one is that it does not seem to have
occurred to those who denounce the Jew as the promoter of materialism
that they have the remedy in their own hands. Let them cease to
worship mammon, and mammon’s ministers will be discredited. As it
is, they inveigh against the Jew for enjoying the very things which
they themselves hunger after. In Germany, as elsewhere, Christian
panegyrists of plain living and high thinking would perhaps like the
Jewish millionaire better if they resembled him less.
Prince Bismarck, in the prosecution of his great political object
of a united Germany had courted the support of the Liberal party,
which, on its side, was not unwilling to help a man who, no matter
how anti-Liberal his domestic policy might be, was, in the main, the
hierophant of the German nation’s aspirations. Thus, in 1866, there
came into being the National Liberal Party. Their position was,
however, a false one, as their support of Bismarck and their Liberal
tendencies could not be reconciled for a long time. But, while the
alliance lasted, the Liberals were instrumental in introducing many
legislative measures in the direction of progress, including certain
reforms as to banking and commerce. These innovations gave offence
to several classes of the population, and the fact that one of the
leaders of the National Liberal Party, Lasker, and a great many of its
members were Jews, was a brilliant opportunity for the reactionary
elements.[232] The Conservatives caught at the opportunity for
discrediting the obnoxious reforms by describing them as deliberately
intended to serve the interests of the Jews. Prince Bismarck, now
hostile to a party for which he had no further use, transferred the
weight of his political and personal influence to their adversaries
and tried to lure the extreme Conservatives and Catholics, as well
as the working classes, by invigorating the anti-Jewish agitation.
The organs of these three parties were filled with diatribes against
the Jews, and in October, 1879, the first anti-Jewish society was
founded in Berlin and Dresden, with the object “to unite all non-Jewish
Germans of all persuasions, all parties, all stations, into one common
league, which, setting aside all separate interests, all political
differences, shall strive, with all earnestness and diligence for the
one end viz., to save our German fatherland from becoming completely
Judaised, and render residence in it supportable to the posterity of
the aborigines.”[233] In accordance with this patriotic programme the
society christened itself “The Anti-Semitic League,” partly because
there was a sound of learning in the word and partly to make it clear
that the race, and not merely the religion, of the Jew had aroused
animosity.[234] Prince Bismarck on being interrogated about the
movement is said to have answered, “As a Minister of State, I condemn
it; but as a Prussian, as a German, as a Christian, as a man, I cannot
help but approve of it.” This speech, when compared with the speaker’s
utterances of thirty years before,[235] affords sufficiently painful
evidence of the long stride which German statesmanship had taken
backwards.
Thus the pedantry of the schools joined hands with the prejudice of
the streets, social and political interests combined with national
vanity, economic jealousy, scientific sophistry, and religious bigotry
to bring into being a movement so utterly incongruous with modern, and
especially with German, ideas.
In 1880 and 1881 the warfare continued with systematized vigour and
increasing violence. _Judenhetze_, under its less vulgar name, became
a virulent epidemic. Both Catholic and Lutheran clerics, mortally
hostile in everything else, joined forces against the common enemy,
and vied with each other in their efforts to gain the goodwill of
the Christian Socialists. The Social Democrats were the only party
to denounce the anti-Semitic agitation and to take under their
protection the persecuted people; an attitude which earned them the
sincere detestation of the ultra-Conservatives. Herr Marr, the great
anti-Jewish pamphleteer, however, devoted a whole masterpiece to the
demonstration of the fact that the Social Democrats, whom he elegantly
called “red mice,” were in every way to be preferred to the Jewish
“golden rats.” But the movement, none the less, continued progressing.
Meetings were held at which the “Semites” were furiously attacked. The
members of the “German” League passed solemn resolutions to eschew all
intercourse, social or commercial, with the enemies of the Teutonic
race, and Herr Stöcker and his followers, in their zeal for “the
strengthening of the Christian Germanic spirit,” presented a petition
to the Prussian Chambers, praying:
“That immigration of foreign Jews into Germany might have some
restrictions placed upon it.
“That the Jews might be excluded from all posts of supreme authority,
and that in courts of justice a certain limitation of their power be
instituted.
“That Christian schools, though used by Jewish scholars, should remain
distinctively Christian, and that Jewish teachers only be employed
where the nature of the subject taught renders it desirable.
“That a census or report of the Jewish population be forthwith
prepared.”[236]
The anti-Semitic Leagues, though disapproving of violence in their
manifestoes, in practice were only too ready to encourage the most
sordid passions and the basest prejudices of the poor and ignorant
masses, so that, while anti-Semitism led to stormy scenes in the
Prussian Diet, it translated itself into more stormy riots outside.
Pamphlets and duels were the order of the day among the upper classes,
sanguinary encounters between the Jewish and German mobs among the
lower. The Liberals protested, the Crown Prince Frederick tried to save
the Jews from this dastardly persecution, and the movement was publicly
denounced by many distinguished Germans, such as Virchow and Mommsen,
as a subversion of the principles of humanitarianism promulgated by
German philosophy, as a blasphemy against German ideals, and as a stain
on German civilisation. But Jew-baiting was not checked before many
thousands of Jews were compelled to leave their country--the country
to which they gave Mendelssohn the philosopher and Mendelssohn the
composer, Heine and Börne, Offenbach and Auerbach, Ense, Ewald, Jacoby,
and a host of other great men, including Lasker, who a few years before
had done his utmost to avert the financial catastrophe for which his
co-religionists now suffered.
A German who has played an active part in his country’s history from
1848 onwards does not hesitate to ascribe “the disgraceful orgies of
the Jews’ Chace, begun on a large scale at Berlin on the New Year’s
night of 1880–81,” to Prince Bismarck’s direct inspiration. “There was
evidently,” he says, writing not long after those events, “more method
in those ugly rushes and riots than may be generally suspected.... The
German citizens of Hebrew origin, or of the Mosaic faith, belong, in
their great majority, to the Liberal and Radical camp. Several of them
have achieved the most honourable prominence in the progressive parties
to which they attached themselves. The great statesman whose ideal is
his own Dictatorship under cover of the King’s personal Government,
finding these popular leaders of Semitic blood as stumbling-blocks in
his path, did not scruple to dally coquettishly with the organisers
and approvers of the Jews’ Hunt. An underhand alliance was struck
up, in old Roman fashion, between out-and-out partisans of Caesarism
and certain shady leaders of a misguided rabble. A Court Preacher,
Stöcker, acted as the go-between and spiritual head of the crusade.
The same man is now in the German Parliament a chief exponent of this
cross-breed between princely absolutism and professed philanthropic
care for the multitude.”[237]
Soon, however, a discrepancy became apparent between the leaders of
the nationalist and the leaders of the religious and economic forces.
While anti-Semites, strictly so called, clamoured for a revival of the
ancient disabilities which doomed the Jew to political servitude and
social ostracism, the Christian Socialists were not prepared to go so
far. This moderation was partly due to the fact that the anti-Semites
had manifested symptoms of wishing to include Christianity in their
denunciation of Judaism as a Semitic creed--a tendency which, of
course, could inspire no sympathy in orthodox theologians and Court
Preachers. The schism was temporarily healed in 1886: but it was
reopened three years later. However, this divergence of views did not
affect the rank and file of the anti-Jewish agitators. They cared
little for intellectual theories; but were frankly actuated by the
blind and unreasoning instincts of their mediaeval ancestors. Again the
populace found allies among the impecunious and the unscrupulous, who
supplied it with food for its credulity, and among the Catholic clergy,
who inflamed its fanaticism. The mediaeval charge of ritual murder was
once more revived, and it led to the destruction of Jewish houses and
the burning of Jewish synagogues.
Prince Bismarck’s retirement, in 1890, and the abandonment of his
anti-Liberal programme did not mend matters. The Conservatives
endeavoured to gain the popular ear by coming forth as the champions
of national unity and of the Christian faith, and by denouncing the
Jews as the enemies of both. ♦1892♦ This change of attitude brought
about a reconciliation with the nationalist anti-Semites, whose
rabid programme was fully accepted. And now the two sections united
brought to bear all their strength against the Jews. Christianity and
stupidity, respectability and sansculottism, were found marshalled
in one compact phalanx as in the days of yore. In the autumn of
1893 a Bill was brought into the German Diet, asking that the Talmud
should be subjected to an official examination, and it was seriously
proposed that the old Commission appointed for that purpose by the
Emperor Maximilian at the instigation of Pfefferkorn at the beginning
of the sixteenth century should be roused from its sleep of ages. But
the alliance was too grotesque to be effective. The saner section of
the Conservatives was shocked at the unprincipled tactics and the
excessive fury of their allies, and, though the lower orders of their
supporters in the country were not troubled by such delicacy, yet
the extreme anti-Semitic party lost, through its own extravagance,
much of its influence among the educated. Herr Stöcker was expelled
from Court, and soon after from the ranks of the Conservative party.
The Catholics also were shamed into breaking all connection with the
scandalous demagogues, and thus the anti-Semitic distemper, though
still an element of discord in the Reichstag, has ceased to be an
element of danger--for the present. But, if the paroxysm is over, the
disease is not cured. Indeed, individual anti-Semites still display
a degree of fervour that would have done credit to Herr Marr himself
on the hey-day of his frenzy. The leader of these loyal Jew-haters is
Count Puckler, whose speeches are sold in the streets of Berlin, and
read by many Germans with profound approval. All that is needed is some
encouragement from above, and then we may again see many volunteering
to translate the prophet’s visions into deeds of blood.
From Germany Anti-Semitism found its way to the neighbouring states.
In the Austro-Hungarian Empire politicians and publicists caught the
rabies and spread it without delay. As early as 1880 an attempt was
made to establish in Hungary an anti-Semitic league after the German
pattern, and, though the healthier and more enlightened portion of
the nation was loth to forget the liberal traditions of the past
and the services rendered by the Jews in the struggle for Hungarian
independence, the obscurantist elements among the people and the
aristocracy, in the Church and the official classes,--the vulgar high
and low--were not disinclined to listen to the dictates of bigotry
and superstition. An opportunity for a declaration of the latent
prejudice offered in 1881, when a Catholic Professor of Hebrew gravely
accused the Jews of secretly holding the destruction of the Gentiles
as a religious tenet; the ritual murder of Christians being only
one method for carrying out this moral obligation. Despite exposure
and open repudiation, the worthy Professor’s utterances tallied so
well with preconceived ideas that the prehistoric fiction found many
eager believers. ♦1882♦ The disappearance of a Christian girl from a
Hungarian village in the next year strengthened the belief and led to
brutal outrages on the Jews at Buda-Pesth, Zala and elsewhere, the
riots being only quelled by the proclamation of martial law. This
measure, as was natural, was turned into an instrument of attack on the
Liberal Government, already unpopular, as sheltering the enemies of
mankind. An inquiry was instituted into the alleged murder, many Jews
were arrested, and evidence was manufactured. But in the trial which
ensued the plot was stripped of all its shameful vestments of perjury,
forgery, and intimidation, and the prisoners were acquitted.
While the anti-Semites were covering themselves with contempt and
ridicule in Hungary, in Austria the movement attained serious
dimensions. The campaign, begun with occasional pamphlets, followed
the development of German anti-Semitism. In Austria, as in Germany,
Liberalism had been undermined by that worst form of racial intolerance
known as Christian Socialism, which was and is nothing but the old
spirit of clerical reaction masquerading in the guise of anti-Semitic
prejudice and pseudo-democratic demagogy.[238] In Austria, as in
Germany, the operations were conducted by two bodies of men--the
racial and the religious enemies of the Jew. The two bodies met on
the common ground of objection to the Jews’ acquiring land. The
anti-Semites proper did not like to see the land falling into the hands
of non-Austrians, and the Christian Socialists objected to its falling
into the hands of infidel financiers. The agitation was gradually
organised, and in 1882 two leagues were formed in Vienna. Austrian,
like German, anti-Semitism was immediately exploited for party
purposes. Many politicians, though themselves free from anti-Semitic
prejudice, were ready to adopt a cause which promised to add to their
own strength or to weaken their opponents. They, therefore, loudly
preached a doctrine which they despised, excited passions which they
did not share, and advocated principles which in all probability
they would have shrunk from acting upon. Thus the support of the
anti-Semitic leagues was solicited by the Radical Nationalists on one
hand, and by the Liberal Government on the other. The Nationalists
being less insincere in their prejudices, won the victory which they
deserved, and the coalition between them and the Christian Socialists
derived additional strength from the anti-clerical policy of the
Liberal party, which compelled many Catholics who had hitherto stood
aloof, to join the ranks of anti-Semitism. ♦1892♦ Henceforth the
agitation was conducted under the auspices of the Roman Church. The
clerical press disseminated the seed in the cafés, and the priests
fulminated against the Jews from the pulpit. The time-dishonoured
charge of ritual murder was not forgotten, and the Hungarian Upper
House, in 1894, rejected the Liberal Bill which placed Judaism on a
footing of equality with other denominations.
The Liberals had succeeded in offending both the Radical Nationalists
and the Clericals. They offended the former by advocating Jewish
rights, and the latter by combating the tyranny of the Church. The
alliance between those two enemies of Liberalism was, in 1895,
blessed by the Pope, who hoped to gain over, or at least to control,
the Radicals by drawing closer the bonds which united them with the
Clericals. The Vatican, disappointed in the long-cherished hope of
recovering its temporal power by the help of the Catholic monarchs,
was induced to court the democracy. Thus the spiritual tribunal which
has always taken its stand on the lofty platform of obedience to
authority, in the pursuance of secular ends did not hesitate to lend
its sanction to the advocates of violence and revolt. The anti-Jewish
agitation, hallowed by the Vicar of Christ, carried all before it.
The anti-Semites secured a vast majority in the Municipal Council of
Vienna, notwithstanding the opposition on the part of the Emperor, who
dissolved the council twice, only to be met each time with an even
greater anti-Semitic triumph; and in the Parliamentary Elections of
1897 the allied powers of Radical Nationalism and Clericalism secured
a strong position in the Austrian Reichsrath. This was the meridian
of anti-Semitic popularity in Austria. But here, as in Germany,
the unseemly and unnatural coalition between rabid Nationalism and
respectable Clericalism could not last long, and, while it lasted,
could command but little respect. Three years afterwards the General
Election showed a decline of public confidence in the allies, and many
of the Radical Nationalists deserted the ranks to form an independent
and anti-Clerical party, while, on the other hand, the Vatican thought
it expedient to withdraw its sanction from the Christian Socialists.
Austro-Hungarian anti-Semitism, however, though much weakened, is
not dead, and it would be taking too sanguine a view of human nature
and human intelligence to hope that the prejudices, the passions,
and the sophisms which have led to the recrudescence of Jew-hatred
will not assert themselves again. In point of fact, there are ample
signs to confirm this pessimistic forecast. On October 21, 1904, the
Diet of Lower Austria witnessed a scene which a spectator pronounced
“unparalleled for vulgarity and demagogic impudence even in this
country of crazy Parliamentarism.” The anti-Semitic and Christian
Socialist parties, which still command an overwhelming majority
both in the Diet and in the Vienna Municipal Council, had organised
a torch-light procession in honour of the sixtieth birthday of Dr.
Lueger, the anti-Semite Burgomaster of Vienna. The Premier instructed
the police to prohibit the demonstration. Thereupon the outraged
worshippers of the great hero of Christian Socialism brought in a
motion in which they accused the Premier of having yielded to Jewish
pressure and to the terrorism of the Social Democrats, the champions
of the Jews, and of “having thereby given proof of shameful cowardice.”
The motion was carried amid loud acclamations in honour of Dr. Lueger
who, on his followers asserting that the reason for the Government’s
attitude was “the jealousy caused in the highest circles by the
Burgomaster’s popularity,” modestly assured the House that “he was not
jealous of the Emperor and repudiated the supposition that he envied
the reverence and affection which surrounded the Monarch’s person.”
At the end of the sitting Dr. Lueger was enthusiastically cheered
in the streets, while a Social Democratic Deputy was insulted and
spat upon.[239] This demagogue, who by the volume of his voice, the
character of his wit and the extent of his power over the Viennese mob,
recalls vividly the Cleon of Aristophanes, a year later warned the
Austrian Jews openly and with impunity that the Kishineff tragedy might
repeat itself in Vienna. Even more recently twenty thousand Christian
Socialists, Clericals and anti-Semites, headed and inflamed by Dr.
Lueger, made a violent demonstration outside the Hungarian Delegation
building, as a protest against the policy of the “Judaeo-Magyars.”[240]
Within a week of this outburst Dr. Lueger, in company with Herr
Schneider, a militant anti-Semite Deputy, paid a visit to Bucharest,
where he was fêted by all classes of Roumanian society, from the
King downwards: a glorification of this arch-enemy of the Jews as
significant as it is natural in a country where Jew-hatred is at its
height. Clearly, Austrian anti-Semitism is anything but dead.
The reply of the Austrian Jews to the anti-Semites is characteristic
of the movement. Hitherto they had been content to identify themselves
politically with their Christian compatriots. But the continued
antipathy on the part of the latter has recently forced them to adopt a
purely Jewish attitude. On the initiative of the Jewish representatives
of Galicia in the Reichsrath and in the Galician Diet, the Jews
of that province have resolved to create a Jewish organisation for
the defence of the political rights and economic interests of their
community.[241] Thus modern Jew-haters foster by their own efforts the
very tribalism which they condemn, just as their mediaeval ancestors
compelled the Jews to adopt money-lending as a profession and then
denounced them for so doing.
In France the power of the Jews since the establishment of the Third
Republic increased steadily, and their number was to some extent
swelled by the arrival of brethren driven by anti-Semitism out of
Germany. Yet, as late as 1881 a writer felt justified in stating
that “the effervescence of a certain feeling against the Jews is
apparent in almost all the large states of the world with the single
exception perhaps of France.”[242] This comparative immunity from the
general delirium, however, was not to last much longer. Nationalism,
clericalism, and economic jealousy in France, as elsewhere, were at
work, and demagogues ready to make use of these forces were not wanting.
Ernest Renan, in 1882, aimed some of his delicately-pointed shafts of
irony at “the modern Israelite with whom our great commercial towns
of Europe have become acquainted during the last fifty years.... How
careless he shows himself of a paradise mankind has accepted upon
his word; with what ease he accommodates himself to all the folds of
modern civilisation; how quickly he is freed from all dynastic and
feudal prejudice; and how can he enjoy a world he has not made, gather
the fruits of a field he has not tilled, supplant the blockhead who
persecutes him, or make himself necessary to the fool who despises him.
It is for him, you would think, that Clovis and his Franks fought,
that the race of Capet unfolded its policy of a thousand years, that
Philip Augustus conquered at Bouvines and Condé at Rocroi!... He who
overturned the world by his faith in the kingdom of God believes now
in wealth only.”[243] That Renan, the high-priest of Idealism, should
feel aggrieved at the materialism of the modern representative of his
beloved Semitic race is not surprising. It is, however, surprising that
the Jew, who has so often been persecuted for his obstinate adherence
to his traditions and for his detachment from his surroundings, should
be taken to task by Renan for the ease with which “he accommodates
himself to all the folds of modern civilisation.” Either Renan is right
or the anti-Semites. One and the same body of men cannot very well be
both obdurate and accommodating. It is, however, the Jew’s special
privilege to be denounced by one half of the world for the possession
of a certain quality, and by the other half for the lack of it.
Consistency has never been a marked characteristic of Jew-haters, and,
perhaps, it is not reasonable to expect it from men under the spell of
so engrossing a pastime as the excommunication of their fellows.
Of course, Renan himself, his mellifluous mockery notwithstanding,
was the very antithesis of a Jew-hater. Nationalism had no greater
enemy and Liberalism no warmer champion than Renan. He never tired
of asserting that ethnographical facts possessed only a scientific
importance, and were devoid of all political significance.[244] So
far as the Jews were concerned, he proclaimed with enthusiasm the
services rendered by them to the cause of civilisation and progress
in the past, and emphatically expressed his conviction that they were
destined to render equally brilliant services in the future: “Every
Jew,” he said, “is essentially a Liberal, while the enemies of Judaism,
examined closely, will be found to be, in general, the enemies of the
modern spirit. This,” he added, “applies especially to the French Jews,
such as they have been made by the Revolution; but I am persuaded
that every country which will repeat the experiment, renounce State
religion, secularise the civil life, and establish the equality of all
the citizens before the law, will arrive at the same result and will
find as excellent patriots in the Jewish creed as in other creeds.”
“The work of the nineteenth century,” he declared on another occasion,
“is to demolish all the ghettos, and I do not congratulate those who
elsewhere seek to rebuild them.”[245]
But at the very moment, when Renan was giving utterance to these
noble sentiments, there was preparing in his own country an agitation
precisely similar to that which had “elsewhere sought to rebuild the
ghettos.”
The slumbering prejudice against the Jew was in France first awakened
by the Panama scandals, and immediately afterwards there was formed in
Paris a union with the object of freeing the country from the financial
tyranny of Jews and other non-Catholics and foreigners. The Vatican,
ever on the alert, saw in the movement an opportunity of strengthening
the clerical interest in a state which had so sadly neglected its
traditional _rôle_ of the Pope’s champion, and from an eldest daughter
of the Church had turned into its bitterest enemy. The Pope, therefore,
bestowed upon the union his blessing. ♦1882♦ But the institution after
a brief career ended in a bankruptcy from which not even Papal prayers
could save it. Like Julius Caesar’s spirit, however, the union even
after its dissolution continued to harass its rivals. Its failure,
attributed to the machinations of the Jews, put fresh life into the
anti-Semitic agitation. Publicists interpreted the popular feeling
and gratified the national _amour propre_ by describing in sombre
colours the pernicious influence of the Jewish plutocracy on the life
of France, and by tracing to that influence the undeniable immorality
of French society.[246] The discomfiture of that brilliant and weak
adventurer, Boulanger, brought about, as it was, chiefly by the efforts
of a Jewish journalist of German extraction and connections, drew down
upon the Jews, and especially upon foreign Jews, the wrath of General
Boulanger’s supporters. An anti-Semitic League was founded in Paris,
with branches in the provinces. The Royalists and the Nationalists,
the warriors of the Church and the warriors of the army, the desperate
defenders of lost causes, who had nothing more to lose, and the zealots
for new causes, who had as yet everything to win, all rallied round
the standard of anti-Semitism, which derived additional popularity
and glory from the alliance of France with Russia, the persecutrix of
Israel. ♦1892♦ Soon after an anti-Semitic journal made its appearance
in Paris, and its columns were filled with scandals, scented out with
truly inquisitorial diligence, and with attacks on Jewish officers.
Anti-Jewish feeling daily grew in bitterness, the term “Juif” came to
be accepted as a synonym for variety of villainy, and the position of
the Jewish officers in the French army became intolerable, till the
ferment culminated in the arrest and conviction of Captain Dreyfus.
♦1894♦
All the prejudices and passions of the past and all the conflicting
interests of the present were now gathered up into a storm almost
unparalleled in the history of contemporary Europe. The most popular
newspapers vied with each other in pandering to the lowest feelings and
most ignorant prejudices of the vulgarest classes of the French nation.
From one end of France to the other nothing was heard but execrations
of the Jewish traitor. The modern Frenchman was not unwilling to
forgive the Jew his supposed enmity to Christianity, but what patriot
could forgive him his supposed treachery to the French army? The hatred
of the race, expressed with eloquent virulence in Parliament and in the
press, found even more vigorous expression with dynamite, ♦1895♦ and
an attempt was made to blow up the Rothschild Bank in Paris. Meanwhile
the Captain’s friends worked with untiring earnestness, patience, and
ability to establish his innocence. A series of disclosures ensued; the
public, led by the late M. Zola, Colonel Picquart, and other advocates
of justice, began to feel qualms on the subject, and the demand for
a revision of the trial grew daily louder. By this time the Dreyfus
affair had been drawn into the mad vortex of party politics, and this
accounts for the extent and depth of an agitation hardly intelligible
when viewed in relation to the comparatively small number of French
Jews.[247] To be or not to be revised, that was the question, and
upon the answer the rival parties staked their reputations and their
political ideals. The Liberals defended Dreyfus not so much because
they believed him to be innocent, as because he was attacked by the
Clericals. The Clericals, on the other hand, denounced the Dreyfusards
as enemies of their country and of its army--the Christian Faith was
tactfully kept in the background--a distinguished Academician wrote a
book on Nationalism in which he analysed Zola’s genius and character,
and proved to his own satisfaction, and to the satisfaction of
thousands of readers, that Zola was not a Frenchman.
But in the midst of all this clamour, riot, vilification and assault,
the demand for a revision continued persistently to gain ground, and
the Liberals, representing the sanest and healthiest element in the
Republic, finally prevailed. ♦1898♦ The new trial at Rennes brought
to light the forgeries and perjuries by which the conviction of the
Jewish captain had been secured. None the less, the sentence was
not revoked. The verdict of the new court-martial was an attempt
to save judicial appearances by finding the prisoner guilty, and
to save justice by recommending him to mercy. Dreyfus was restored
to his family, but not to his honour. However, public opinion both
in France and abroad had forestalled the verdict of the Court by
acquitting the prisoner of the crime and by pitying in him the victim
of a foul conspiracy. Nationalism, Clericalism, Royalism, and all the
legions of anti-Semitism received a severe blow by the triumph of the
Dreyfusards; but, though their star was no longer at its zenith, it
had not yet set. The agitation in favour of a complete reversal of
Captain Dreyfus’ sentence continued, and the demand for a new revision
of the case was pronounced by the Nationalists as a fresh development
of the “anti-national” policy of the Liberals, and as a conspiracy on
their part for the purpose of inflicting a new humiliation on the Army
by constraining it to proclaim the innocence of a man it had twice
condemned as a traitor. A joint manifesto, bearing the signatures of
the Patriotic League, the National Anti-Semitic Federation, and the
French Socialist Party, was issued appealing to the French public “to
frustrate the efforts of the occult Sectarians, Internationalists, and
financial powers.”[248]
At the same time anti-Semitic sentiments found applauding audiences in
the French theatres, as was shown in December, 1903, by the success at
the Paris Gymnase of _Le Retour de Jérusalem_--a play which flattered
the feelings of the audience by dwelling on the familiar points of
the anti-Semitic creed: the Jews’ clannishness, their readiness to
help their own co-religionists, their _sans patrie_; and justified its
prejudices by emphasising that natural incompatibility of temperament
which is supposed to doom Jew and Gentile to everlasting alienation.
Nevertheless, the wiser section of the French people carried the day in
the end. ♦1906 July 12–13♦ The Court of Cassation, the highest tribunal
in France, after two years’ examination, quashed the verdict of the
Rennes court-martial, declaring that there never was any foundation
for any of the charges brought against Captain Dreyfus. The French
Government thereupon submitted to Parliament a Bill providing for the
complete rehabilitation of all the victims of the conspiracy. The Bill
was passed by an overwhelming majority. Captain Dreyfus was promoted to
the rank of Major and presented with the Cross of the Legion of Honour,
Col. Picquart was made a Brigadier-General, the remains of M. Zola were
transferred to the Pantheon, and in the gallery of the Senate were
erected busts of the two Senators who first stood out in favour of the
innocence of Dreyfus. Thus France wiped out the stain on its national
character, and the drama which had agitated the world for twelve years
came to a happy end. This end, however, satisfactory as it is, must be
regarded as a victory of justice due to special political causes rather
than as a proof of a revolution of the popular attitude towards the
Jews, or as a guarantee against a recrudescence of French anti-Semitism
in the future. The “Jewish Peril” is one of those evil spirits which
are in the habit of vanishing and re-appearing from time to time,
always with a fresh face and changed garb, but always the same.
The Jewish Question from France passed to the French colony of
Algeria. In 1870 an Act, known as the Crémieux Decree, enfranchised
the Jewish inhabitants of the colony _en masse_. For twenty-five years
the measure excited little or no protest. But, as a result of the
anti-Jewish agitation in the mother country, it suddenly became the
subject on which elections were passionately fought and the barrier
that divided local politicians into two opposite parties: _Judaisants_
and _Anti-Juifs_. A Commission appointed to inquire into this sudden
revulsion of feeling, reported that the alleged reasons were “usury”
and the unwillingness of the Jews to assimilate themselves to the
French. Usury, it was recognised by sensible Frenchmen, is inevitable
in a country still in the Algerian stage of economic development.
Moreover, the official inquiry proved that all the Jews are not
usurers, and that all the usurers are not Jews; that, in fact, the mass
of the Jewish inhabitants of Algeria are very poor.[249] None the less,
these allegations bring into vivid relief the essential antiquity of
modern anti-Semitism.
The modern version of Jew-hatred, as was only natural, was welcomed in
both Roumania and Russia. Both countries are still mediaeval in most
respects; but the foreign doctrine of Nationalism, concealing, as it
does, a very old instinct under a new euphemistic name, presented
nothing incongruous with indigenous bigotry. Economic considerations
deepened the bitter feeling against the Jew, as has been narrated.
Italy and Greece have declined to listen to the new creed of
intolerance. There are few Jews in those countries. Besides, both the
Italians and the Greeks, though sensitively attached to their national
ideals, have too keen a sense of proportion, and the Greeks, at all
events, too much commercial ability to entertain any jealousy of the
Jew.
England has not failed in this, as in former ages, to follow, after
a lukewarm and sluggish fashion, the Continental evolution of the
feeling towards the Jew. In popular literature and art the Jew had
never ceased to figure as an object of derision and repugnance. What
reader of Dickens need be reminded of the execrable Mr. Fagin, trainer
of juvenile criminals and tormentor of poor Oliver Twist, or of
Cruikshank’s portrait of that and other Israelites? But these pleasant
creations, however grossly they may sin against truth, were as innocent
of any deliberate intention to stir up a hatred against the Jew as
Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s personifications of evil in the characters
of Shylock and Barabas. The taint of malignant anti-Semitism made its
first unmistakable appearance in England during the Eastern Crisis of
1876–1878. A Jew was then Prime Minister, and that Jew opposed the
pro-Bulgarian policy of the Liberal party. To that party the conflict
between the Sultan and his Christian subjects was then, as it still
is, a conflict between the Cross and the Crescent, between Europe and
Asia, between Aryanism and Semitism. What mattered to the Liberal
politicians that Islam, in point of fact, since its first missionary
zeal spent itself many centuries ago in Asia and Africa, has never
tried, and does not want, to kill Christianity? What mattered to them
that Christianity, in point of history, is a Semitic creed, and in
its original Eastern form nearer to Islam than to the product of the
Western temperament which passes under the same name? What mattered to
them that the Turks, after five or six centuries of constant marriage
to women of the subject races, have, ethnographically speaking, become
more European than the Bulgarians, who, in point of blood, are more
Turkish than the modern Turks? What mattered to them that the Turks
are not Semites at all? What mattered to the opponents of the Jew
that the doctrine of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire had been
promulgated before Disraeli left school, and that his Eastern policy
of a regenerated Turkey was a policy evolved by as good Christians as
themselves long before Disraeli became a power in the land--by men
like the Duke of Wellington and Sir Stratford Canning--and carried on
by contemporary diplomatists and statesmen like Lord Salisbury, Sir
Henry Layard, and Sir Henry Elliot? These are mere facts. The Liberal
party wanted broad principles and a euphonious war-cry. Disraeli was
opposed to Russia’s ambition, and Disraeli was a Jew. What could be
easier than to connect the two things? The enemy of Russia was an enemy
of Christianity, of Aryanism, of Europe. If any doubt was possible,
it could easily be dispelled by a reference to Disraeli’s romances.
There, as elsewhere, in season and out of season, Disraeli preached
the greatness of his persecuted race with a sincerity, a courage and a
consistency which, in the eyes of the neutral student, form the noblest
trait in his character; in the eyes of a political opponent, the most
conclusive proof of his Jewish hostility to Christianity. Accordingly,
we find Mr. Gladstone, in 1876, confiding to the sympathetic ear of his
friend, the Duke of Argyll, the following philosophical reflection: “I
have a strong suspicion that Dizzy’s crypto-Judaism has had to do with
his policy: the Jews of the East _bitterly_ hate the Christians, who
have not always used them well.”[250]
At the same time other politicians vented their prejudice against the
Jews, and against Disraeli’s “Jewish aims” in various books,[251]
pamphlets, speeches and articles, while soon after, when the eloquent
tongue was for ever silenced, and the man who had bent Europe to his
will was no longer able to defend himself, reverend ecclesiastics took
pains to trace, with an enthusiasm and an acumen worthy of a less
ignoble task, the origin and development of the great statesman’s
“deceitfulness,” of his “political dishonesty,” of his “disregard of
morality in the pursuit of personal ambition,” of his “theological
and political scepticism,” of his “jealousy for the spiritual and
intellectual supremacy of the Semitic race,” and the rest of his
virtues, from his early home education under his Jewish sceptic of a
father and his vulgar Jewess of a mother, through his school life,
his apprenticeship in a solicitor’s office, the various stages of his
literary and political career, up to the moment of his death. It was,
however, pointed out with an air of charitable patronage not unamusing,
when the relative magnitude of the author and the subject of the
criticism is considered, that “it would be harsh and unfair to judge
him by our ordinary standard of political morality,” for “Mr. Disraeli
started on his public career with little or no furniture of moral
or religious principles of any kind.”[252] The writer repeated the
favourite explanation of Disraeli’s opposition to Gladstone’s Eastern
policy, namely, that it arose from the fact that “the ‘bag and baggage’
policy cut rudely across his cherished convictions respecting the
‘Semitic principle.’ The Turks, indeed,” the learned theologian naïvely
observes, “do not belong to the Semitic race; but their theocratic
polity is the product of a Semitic brain, and was, therefore, sacred
in the eyes of Lord Beaconsfield.”[253] In the writer’s opinion
Disraeli’s dearest ideal, when it was not his own pre-eminence,
was the pre-eminence of the Jewish nation, his whole career being a
compound of selfishness and Semitism.
While chivalrous theologians made these interesting _post-mortem_
investigations into the character of the champion of Semitism, learned
professors made equally interesting studies in the character of
anti-Semitism. And while the former denounced that representative of
the race as one who had made “self-aggrandisement the one aim of his
life,” the latter endeavoured to justify the conduct of its enemies
on the ground of Hebrew “tribalism,” “materialism,” “opportunism,”
“cosmopolitanism,” and other vices ending in --ism.[254]
As these charges are still brought against the Jews by their enemies
in England, it may be not irrelevant to answer some of them once for
all. No one with a biographical dictionary on his book-shelf requires
to be told that the Jewish people, far from specialising in material
aims, has never shirked its due share in the world’s intellectual
work, though it has seldom been accorded its due share of the world’s
recognition. Look wheresoever we like, in science, art, music,
philosophy, letters, politics, we everywhere find the Jew generously
contributing to the common fund of human knowledge. From Higher
Criticism, which was initiated by a Jew in the third century, and
Comparative Philology, also originated by a Jew in the ninth, through
Spinoza’s philosophical work in the seventeenth, and Mendelssohn’s in
the eighteenth, down to the psychological labours of Steinthal, who
died in 1892--to mention only a few of the best known names--we find
proofs which speak for themselves, and abundantly refute the calumny
that the Jews are a race of mere money-mongers and money-grabbers. In
the Dark Ages the conditions under which Israel was doomed to live
were by no means favourable to the development of spiritual qualities.
Mediaeval Europe, as a rule, did not allow more than three outlets to
Hebrew activity. The Jew could only become a merchant, a financier,
or a physician, and in all these three professions he achieved the
distinction to which his superiority entitled him. Imaginative by
nature, cosmopolitan by necessity, a reasoner and a linguist by
education, with all his faculties sharpened by persecution, and all his
passions disciplined by adversity, the Jew could not but assert himself
among his narrow-minded and ignorant contemporaries. Accordingly we
find the mediaeval Jew foremost in Medicine, Commerce, and Finance.
As to medicine, enough has already been said. As to commerce, the
supremacy of the Jews has never been disputed. Their financial
pre-eminence is equally recognised. But it is not often recalled that
the Jews, in order to facilitate the transmission of their wealth
amidst the violence and extortions of the Middle Ages, were the first
to invent the admirable system of paper currency--an invention which,
Alison the historian asserts, had it been made earlier, might have
averted the downfall of the Western Roman Empire. But, apart from
chrematistic pursuits, even in the Middle Ages the Jews, prevented by
persecution and social isolation from tying themselves permanently to
any particular country, and forced to lead a nomad existence, used
their opportunities of travel not only for the purpose of commerce, but
also for the transmission of knowledge. Thus, consciously or not, the
mediaeval Jew became the great middleman by whose agency what learning
there was found its way from country to country. In Spain, before the
holy war against the race deprived it of the conditions necessary for
the development of its genius, we have seen the Jews distinguishing
themselves in literature, scholastic philosophy, science, and
diplomacy. After their expulsion the Spanish exiles influenced the
culture of the countries over which they spread in many ways; Baruch
Spinoza being only the greatest star in a great constellation. Even
in England, where few of those refugees contrived to penetrate,
we find their spiritual influence in King James’s translation of
the Bible, which in many places bears the traces of David Kimchi’s
Commentary.[255]
The place of Israel in the mediaeval world has been described with
equal justness and eloquence by Lecky: “While those around them were
grovelling in the darkness of besotted ignorance; while juggling
miracles and lying relics were themes on which almost all Europe
was expatiating; while the intellect of Christendom, enthralled by
countless persecutions, had sunk into a deadly torpor, in which all
love of inquiry and all search for truth were abandoned, the Jews
were still pursuing the path of knowledge, amassing learning, and
stimulating progress, with the same unflinching constancy that they
manifested in their faith. They were the most skilful physicians, the
ablest financiers, and among the most profound philosophers; while they
were only second to the moderns in the cultivation of natural science,
they were also the chief interpreters to Western Europe of Arabian
learning.”[256]
In modern Europe also we have seen how varied and how beneficial has,
since their emancipation, been the activity of the Jews in other
than financial departments. In face of these facts how ineffably
ridiculous seems the anti-Semite’s homily on “A Jew of the Coheleth
type” who “pursues gain with an undivided soul, whereas the soul of the
Christian or the Idealist is divided,” and his calm, self-sufficient
pronouncement that “much of the best Christian and Idealist intellect
is entirely given to objects quite different from gain or power.” The
remark, of course, is true in so far as the two “types” are concerned.
But, unless the writer means to make the astounding assertion that,
other conditions being identical, the one type is peculiar to the
Jews, and the other to the Christians--that the ordinary Jew is born
a materialist, and the ordinary Christian an Idealist,--his statement
is pointless. It becomes worse than pointless when he proceeds to
emphasise the “compact organisation” of Jewish, as contrasted with
the “loose texture” of Christian society, and to proclaim that “in
this respect the Gentile, instead of starting fair, is handicapped in
the race.”[257] The only logical inference to be drawn from these
premisses is that the balance must be redressed by oppressing the Jew.
But the author shrinks from drawing that inference. Mediaeval and
Continental anti-Semites have been more consistent and courageous.
Such was the genesis of English anti-Semitism. However, the bulk of the
public took little or no notice of these utterances. The English people
is not intellectual enough to be moved by literary theories. Its very
slowness in discarding old errors is a guarantee against precipitancy
in embracing new ones. But, when a grievance is presented to it in
the more tangible form of a practical and mischievous fact, then the
English people begins to think.
The persecution of the Jews in Russia, Roumania, Hungary, and
Germany threatened to flood England with a crowd of refugees more
industrious than the English workman, more frugal, and far more
temperate. The consequence would have been a fall in wages. The
danger was too practical to be ignored; fortunately, both for the
English workman and for the Jew, it was temporarily averted by the
Jewish charitable associations, which directed emigration into safer
channels. But, though the immediate cause for alarm disappeared,
the anti-Jewish feeling remained; and was fed by the influx of new
crowds from Eastern Europe at a later period. Again the Board of
Guardians, the Russo-Jewish Committee and other organisations exerted
themselves strenuously to prevent the immigrants from becoming in any
case a burden to the British rate-payer. With that object in view,
measures were taken that those victims of oppression who remained in
England should be enabled without delay to earn their own bread by
that industry for which they might be best fitted; but, wherever it
was possible, a home was found for them in countries less populous
than England and more suitable for colonisation. At the same time,
by means of representations addressed to Jewish authorities, and
published in Jewish papers abroad, regarding the congested state of
the British labour market, efforts were made to stem the tide of
further immigration.[258] But these efforts have not proved entirely
successful. So that the interminable cycle of prejudice and platitude,
interrupted for a while, has again resumed its ancient course. As in
the early days of the nineteenth century, so now, at the commencement
of the twentieth, our libraries are slowly enriched with volumes of
exquisite dulness. We are called upon to fight the old battle over
again. The enemy appears under many colours; but all the legions,
though they know it not, fight for the same cause. And, though their
diversity is great, none of the banners are new.
First comes our ancient friend, the theologian, Bible in hand; as
valiant of heart as ever, and as loud of voice. He is a worthy
descendant of St. Dominic, though perhaps he would be horrified if
he were told so. But History is cruel, and the records of the past
remain indelible. What student of history can fail to catch the note of
familiarity in our modern missionary’s oratory?
“Jesus is the Way”: saith the preacher, “Although the Jews have the
law, they cannot come to God, because Jesus is the Way. Although they
have the Old Testament, they do not know the truth, because Jesus is
_the_ Truth and Life!” and after several sentences rich in emphasis,
fervour, and capital letters, comes the old, old conclusion: “adoption
and true spiritual life there is none, where Christ has not kindled
it. Israel, in its present state, the Christless Israel, shows this to
the whole world. Notwithstanding the great activity and energy of the
religious life of the Jews, they have--we say it with great sorrow--no
life indeed--what they have is all carnal--and this accounts for the
phenomenon that they have not been of much spiritual use to the world
since Christ’s coming. In Christ alone will Israel live again and be a
blessing to the world.”[259]
So speaks the advocate of conversion. His hope in the future is as
great as his forgetfulness of the past. “The great God,” he informs us
with touching assurance, “is, in His providence, now rapidly preparing
the way for the final and only possible solution.” Ah, my good friend,
it is very natural in a Christian to believe that “true spiritual life
there is none, where Christ has not kindled it,” it is very pleasant to
point the finger of scorn at “Christless Israel,” it is very well to
prophesy that “in Christ alone will Israel live again and be a blessing
to the world.” But how are we to convince Israel that it is so? This
ancient nation which, having defied the onslaughts of centuries, has
lived so long, seen so much, suffered so much, and survived so much,
is it likely to succumb to our timeworn arguments? Or would you advise
us to bid the Jew once more choose between baptism and the stake? This
argument also has been tried and found inadequate. Convert the Jews!
You might as hopefully attempt to convert the Pyramids.
Thus far the apostle. Next comes the patriot--a student of statistics,
sad and, so far as religious bias goes, quite sober. In tones of
sepulchral solemnity he warns us that, if England is to escape the
fate of the Continent, namely, “of the Jews becoming stronger, richer,
and vastly more numerous; with the corresponding certainty of the
press being captured” by them, “and the national life stifled by the
substitution of material aims for those which, however faultily, have
formed the unselfish and imperial objects of the Englishmen who have
made the Empire”--if these dire calamities are to be averted, England
must “abandon her secular practice of complacent acceptance of every
human being choosing to settle on these shores.” Should nothing be done
to check the evil, there is bound to ensue an outbreak against the race
“the members of which are always in exile and strangers in the land of
their adoption.”[260]
The appeal to the Empire is quite modern, although, if the author had
any intelligent conception of his own case, he might have seen that
Imperialism is the very last thing in the world he should have summoned
to the support of his narrow Nationalism: the two things differ as
widely as the author differs from Julius Caesar. If the British Empire
were confined to Englishmen, it would soon cease to be an empire.
Equally novel is the interpretation of our expansion as due to an
unselfish zeal for somebody else’s good--the author does not state
whose. But the specific charge brought against the Jewish race as one
“the members of which are always in exile and strangers in the land of
their adoption” is hardly worthy of the author’s originality.
The prophet objects to the Jews as not having been “of much spiritual
use to the world.” It is hard to dispute the statement, because it is
impossible to know the particular meaning which the prophet attaches
to the word “spiritual.” His position is unassailable. The patriot,
however, denounces the Jews as the promoters of “material aims,” and
thereby convicts himself either of gross ignorance or of deliberate
distortion of facts. What the world of thought owes to the Jews has
already been described with a fulness of detail which will probably
appear superfluous to most educated people. As regards the assertion
that the Jew still looks upon himself as one in exile and a stranger
in a foreign land, we propose to deal with it when we come to consider
the attitude of the Jews towards the Zionist movement. Here it is
sufficient to point out that the term “Jew” is far too wide to warrant
any sweeping generalisation. There are Jews and Jews, just as there are
Christians and Christians. History abundantly proves that the Jew in
the past retained most of his clannishness where he was most grievously
oppressed. As to modern Judaism, since the day of Moses Mendelssohn
there has set in a disintegration which renders a comprehensive and
confident pronouncement only possible to those who consider prejudice
an adequate substitute for knowledge. But there is no necessity for
such a universal pronouncement. If we want an answer to the question,
“Can the Jew be a patriot?” we need only glance at the history of
modern Europe. Did not Jews fight with the Germans against the French
in the days of Napoleon, with the Hungarians against the Austrians
in 1848, with the Austrians against the Prussians in 1866, with the
Germans against the French and the French against the Germans in 1870,
with the Roumanians against the Turks in 1877? Or can man express his
devotion to his country in a more unambiguous manner than by dying for
it? Unless, indeed, the perfidious Jew even in dying is actuated by
some ulterior motive.
But why should we look further than home? In 1831 Macaulay wrote: “If
the Jews have not felt towards England like children, it is because
she has treated them like a step-mother.” England has ceased to treat
the Jews like a step-mother. How far has England’s change of attitude
towards the Jew affected the Jew’s attitude towards England? On
Sunday, December 28, 1902, Lord Roberts attended a special service,
at the Central Synagogue in Great Portland Street, held for Jewish
members of the regular and auxiliary forces who fell in South Africa
fighting for England. The day was well chosen; for on the same day
is performed the annual celebration in remembrance of the warlike
exploits of the Maccabees--a coincidence which disproves in a practical
manner the dogmatic generalisation that “a man’s heart cannot belong
to two nations,” and which shows that the English Jew, at all events,
can be both a Hebrew and an Englishman: he can cherish the ideals of
the past and yet live in the realities of the present. The soldiers
in whose memory the ceremony was held formed a portion of a force
counting more than 1,200 officers and men, who took a creditable part
in the war. This number assumes new significance, when we consider
that the total Hebrew population of Great Britain that year did not
exceed 180,000,[261] and that with us every soldier is a volunteer. The
Jew has done as much for the English mother as any of her Christian
sons: he has laid down his life in defence of her cause. Moreover, to
join the army, the Jew must necessarily sacrifice something besides
life--something that he holds higher than life--some of his religion,
and particularly the ceremonial rites, such as the dietary laws and
the Sabbath. But foremost English Rabbis, like the late Simeon Singer,
maintained that duty to England justified and even consecrated this
sacrifice.
Nor was this most unequivocal proof of patriotism a solitary instance.
For the last ten years the Feast of Dedication has been associated with
a celebration for the men serving in the Regular and Auxiliary Forces.
On December 13, 1903, the Rev. Francis L. Cohen, to whose initiative
the custom is due, inaugurated the second decade of these celebrations
at the New West-end synagogue in the presence of 38 officers and
167 men, and also a number of new Jewish officers, including a
Major-General and a General. The preacher dwelt on the promptitude
with which Jewish Britons responded to the call during the last war.
He referred to the 127 Jews who then “gave their lives for the flag
they all honoured and loved,” and announced that, as a testimony “to
the pride and joy wherewith the Jews hail their privilege of sharing
in the voluntary burden of their common country’s defence,” they
sought to endow a trophy “to be competed for from year to year at the
great annual meeting of the National Rifle Association, such as might
stimulate others of their fellow-citizens to perfect themselves in the
military use of that weapon which might at any moment again be required
to protect the immunity of their Sovereign’s territories.”[262] The
truth is that religion has long ceased to be the principal force in the
composition of nations. In the present stage of the world’s development
sympathy with one’s co-religionists does not exclude loyalty to one’s
country, any more than loyalty to one’s country prevents hatred of
one’s co-religionists in other countries.
The continuance of oppression and persecution in Eastern Europe has
kept the stream of emigration flowing. As was natural, great numbers
of the hunted race turned to England as to the one European country
where liberty has not yet been seriously endangered by the revival of
intolerance. But the welcome which they met with in this sanctuary of
freedom has not been unanimous. The “Alien Invasion,” as it is termed,
has roused considerable anxiety and apprehension in certain bosoms. We
are told by the melancholic patriot, in a more recent and more popular
publication,[263] that it is a menace to the nation, that “British
right of asylum hitherto has been as profitable to the Empire as to
the immigrants,” but that “it is otherwise to-day.” We are exhorted
to reconsider our position, and to ask ourselves whether we are right
in “permitting free import of the sweepings of foreign cities to
contaminate our English life, to raise rents, and lower the standard of
existence.” We are, lastly, advised to shut our doors to “undesirable
aliens.” The question thus put admits of but one answer. If these
aliens are undesirable, we ought not to desire them. No one would
cavil with our advisers were it not that under the mask of a movement
for the exclusion of “undesirable” individuals there seems to lurk in
some quarters a retrogressive animosity against the Jewish race as a
whole, or a wish to stir up such an animosity. The melancholic patriot
opportunely reminds us that “the foreigners who settle in England are
almost entirely of the Jewish race, and it is therefore impossible
to discuss the question of foreign immigration without raising the
Jewish question.” Thus, having thrown off the mask, he proceeds to give
utterance to candid and undisguised anti-Semitism:
“The peculiarity of this race is that they refuse assimilation by
intermarriage, equally with Russians in Russia, with Arabs in Tunis,
or with the English in England, just as rigidly as did their ancestors
refuse intermarriage with Gentiles in the days of Nehemiah.” The
matter presented in this form offers the interesting point of being
not new. The aloofness of the Jew has already been shown to have been
the fundamental cause of his sufferings. Had the Jews not formed a
“peculiar people” they would not have been made the milch-cows and the
scapegoats of the nations through the ages. But it can also be shown
that at the present day this is only partially true in the countries
which have genuinely adopted the Jews. It is estimated that there
occur far more marriages in England between Jews and Christians than
between Protestants and Catholics. By the Jewish law marriage between
a Jew and a proselyte is perfectly lawful. The barrier is thus, after
all, one of religion rather than of race. Naturally an inclination
towards such intermarriage would not prevail on either side except in
comparatively rare cases. Yet the strange fact remains that such mixed
marriages are at least as common in the lower as in the upper classes
of Jewish society.
Besides, though the clannishness of the race in the past explains
its persecution, does it excuse it? Is it an argument that a modern
statesman in a free country should accept as justifying exclusion?
Moreover, if the Jews really are so black as the author paints them,
is it not rather unpatriotic of him to wish to see them intermarrying
with us, and thus contriving “to contaminate our English life” far
more effectively than they will be able to do if they continue to be a
people apart? However, consistency in reasoning is not, as has already
been remarked, the anti-Semite’s forte.
The oracle supplies us with seven reasons--mystic and ominous
number--why “the immigration of the poorest Jews from Russia and Poland
is a national evil.”
1. “They lower the Englishman’s standard of comfort, and are unduly
addicted to the calling of usury.”
2. The competition is injurious to the Englishman because it is “not to
determine the survival of the fittest, but to determine the survival of
the fittest to exist on a herring and a piece of black bread.”
3. “They subsist contentedly on a diet which is insufficient to sustain
the meat-eating Anglo-Saxon.”
4. “Their habits of huddling together under circumstances of
unmentionable filth destroy the possibility of dealing with the housing
question, and set at naught our municipal sanitary laws.”
5. “They lower the wages of unskilled women and unskilled labourers.”
6. “They raise rent.”
7. “They enlarge the area of the sweating system.”
The usury charge has been answered by experience and Economic Science
ages ago. But the patriot contributes to the discussion quite a fresh
element when he describes the Jewish immigrants as paupers and, in the
same breath, as usurers. He does not deign to explain how men who,
as he later asserts, are induced to leave their homes by destitution
and are drawn to London by the “magnetism” of the Jewish charities,
how these penniless beggars can “adopt money-lending as a means of
livelihood.” If they are paupers they cannot be money-lenders, and if
they are money-lenders they cannot be paupers. To starve and to lend at
the same time is a feat that even a Jew is hardly capable of.
As to sweating and sanitation, these are matters for which legislation,
if it is worth the name, ought to be able to devise far less drastic
remedies than that proposed by statistical patriotism. The remaining
reasons, when pruned of repetition and reduced to their logical
dimensions, resolve themselves into this: We do not want the Jew,
because he can work harder than we, for less wages than we, and can
live more frugally than we. In other words, because for the purposes
of the struggle for existence he is better equipped than we. He is too
formidable a rival.
But on this point also the enemies of the Jew are at fatal variance.
Another writer pronounces the explanation of the Jewish immigrant’s
success as due to his lower standard of living and greater capacity
for labouring, paradoxical. “It is,” he says, “as though one were
to maintain that of two pieces of machinery the worse did most work
and required less fuel.” He seeks and finds the true reason of the
displacement of the English craftsman, not in the “alleged frugality
of the foreign comer” or in “his readiness to do more for his money,”
but in “the Jewish system of out-door poor relief ... which makes
rivalry and successful competition an impossibility.” As an instance,
he quotes the fact that poor children who attend the Jews’ Free School
in Bell-lane are partially fed and clothed by a charitable Hebrew
family. The writer, though apparently resenting even competition in
philanthropy as something monstrous and dishonest, yet is charitable
enough to admit that “it may be good, it may be bad; fair or unfair to
other schools.”[264] One would think that schools were shops competing
with one another as to which of them will attract the greatest number
of customers and not disinterested institutions for the education of
the community. Furthermore, one would think that the fact quoted alone
ought to move good Christians to an emulation of the Jewish rival and
thank him for the example of beneficence which he sets them, instead
of turning that very example into a new reproach and adducing it as a
reason for excluding him from the country. Finally, one would think
that, instead of reviling the Jew for assisting his less fortunate
co-religionists, a true patriot might be induced, in sheer rivalry, to
assist his own. But what actually happens is this. We tell the Jew, “We
let our own unemployed starve, and you don’t. This is not fair to our
poor unemployed.” Verily, the ethics of anti-Semitism are as wonderful
as its logic.
The same narrow-minded dread of the alien competitor is at the present
day exhibited in South Africa. At a meeting in Cape Town on Sept. 23rd,
1904, the speakers began by denouncing the Indians as Asiatics, but
they soon extended their objections to Jews, Greeks, and Italians.
The Jews were accused of working on Sundays, the Greeks of keeping
their shops open later than the natives, the Italians of sending
large sums of money (their hardly earned savings) out of the Colony
to their homes. A writer commenting on this report sensibly remarks:
“Against stupidity of this sort argument fights in vain.”[265] And his
opinion will be shared by most sane people in England. Yet many of
these people will probably be ready to approve the exclusion of the
Jewish immigrant, not seeing that what is rightly condemned as stupid
intolerance in one country can hardly be justified as enlightened
statesmanship in another.
Time was when thrift, extreme frugality, success in life, and
clannishness were the causes of the Englishman’s hatred for the Scotch
competitor, when the latter after the Union began to emigrate to the
South. Those aliens were, like the Jews, accused of “herding together”
and of living on little, were envied for getting on in the world, and
were denounced for pushing one another on. The clamour has passed away,
and no sober Englishman of to-day would dream of reviving it. Patriotic
bigots in those days advised the exclusion of the Scotch “undesirable,”
and had a goodly following among people who, having failed in life
themselves, could not forgive the foreigner his success. “But,” as a
writer on the subject pertinently asks, “would it have been well for
England, even in a purely commercial point of view, if the Scotch had
been legally excluded? Have not her children reaped benefits from
the labours of those whom their forefathers desired to forbid the
country?”[266]
To such considerations, however, our modern patriot is nobly
invulnerable. He soon forgets even his seven reasons, feeble and
contradictory as they are, in his Nationalist enthusiasm. The Jewish
millionaire is as hateful to him as the Jewish pauper. He describes the
Jews as a race gifted with indomitable cunning and an extraordinary
capacity for perceiving “with lightning glance the exact moment to
corner a market,” as “a powerful, exclusive and intolerant race” of
experts “in the flotation of companies,” as adepts “in the art of
deluding the public by the inflation of worthless securities with an
artificial and effervescent value,” as a tribe whose “undue economic
predominance” has been promoted by--O ye shades of King John and
Torquemada--“the mild spirit of Christianity!”
To descend from the ludicrously sublime to the sublimely ludicrous:
“Jewish ascendancy at Court is so conspicuous as to be the subject
of incessant lamentation on the part of full-blooded Englishmen.”
Surely the end of the British Empire cannot be very distant when the
King goes to Newmarket “accompanied by a Jewish financier,” “is the
guest of a Jewish financier,” and when, highest horror of all, “in the
published names of the dinner party on the first night every one was
a Jewish financier, or his relation, with the exception of the King’s
aide-de-camp and the Portuguese Minister”--the latter, if not a Jew, an
alien!
The patriot then warns us in tones irresistibly reminiscent of Lewis
Carroll: “The time has come to speak out about this alien influence.
There is danger ahead.... There are ugly rumours to the effect that
wealthy members of the Jewish community have placed the King of
England under undue obligations. If this be true, it is the duty of
the people of England to extricate their Sovereign from the toils of
the modernized version of Isaac of York. If it be untrue, there is the
less reason for Jews occupying their too prominent position at Court.
No sincere lover of his country can contemplate without anxiety the
gradual disappearance of the old families and the ascendancy of the
smart Semites who treat as trenchermen and led captains what remains
of English society. The efficiency of the British nation requires the
ascendancy of the Anglo-Saxon, not the Semitic, element in it. It
is time to restrict the immigration of potential money-lenders from
Eastern Europe.” The Jeremiad concludes with a truly ominous reminder:
“In 1290 the Jews were expelled from England.”
Continental anti-Semitism can show nothing superior to these
lamentations of our “full-blooded” “Anglo-Saxon.” In them we have all
the hereditary features of Jew-hatred exaggerated by insular distrust
of everything foreign and by provincial lack of sense of proportion or
humour. This manifesto, however, despite its limitations, is a fair
specimen of a kind of literature common enough on the Continent, though
still rare in these backward islands. Those interested in the subject
will find in the German anti-Semitic pamphlets and in the Russian
Panslavist newspapers the prototypes of all the arguments, sentiments
and self-contradictions of which those embodied in this lugubrious
production are pale copies. But the pamphlet is more than a literary
curiosity. Like the proverbial straw which, of no importance in itself,
yet deserves notice as indicating the direction of the current, this
product of a provincial mind is worthy of some attention as a sign
of the times. Already there have been found Englishmen illiberal
enough to overlook all the good points in the character of poor Jewish
immigrants--their untiring industry, sobriety and self-sacrifice--and
to ridicule, in supreme bad taste, the pathetic devotion which impels
these wretched wanderers to seek solace for their sufferings in prayer
and in the study of the Book which has been the only source of comfort
to millions of their people for the last twenty centuries and to
millions of our own for more than half that time.[267]
From another point of view also the pamphlet is a document, even more
valuable, because more candid, than a less crude performance would have
been. It forms a hyphen of connection between pure anti-Semitism--a
small matter in England as yet--and another tendency entirely different
in origin, far more widely spread, and shared by persons who, in other
respects, have little in common with the provincial patriot. This is
the tendency towards a reaction of which the anti-alien agitation is
one symptom, and the clamour for protection another; both pointing to
a change of sentiment in favour of the political ideals fashionable
before the reign of Queen Victoria.
Until the nineteenth century England was essentially a Tory country.
The few ruled the many, and their rule was based on the assumption--no
doubt largely justified in those days--that the many were not fit to
rule themselves. A seat in the House of Commons was virtually a family
heirloom; patronage filled the Church, and favouritism controlled
the army and the navy. The whole of English public life--civil,
religious, and military--was under the sway of an oligarchy, and fair
competition was a thing unknown. It was the reign of Protection in
the broadest acceptation of the term. Then came the awakening of the
masses--an awakening the first token of which had already appeared
in the transference of a literary man’s homage from a noble patron
to the general public--and gradually the lethargic acquiescence in
the decrees of an aristocratic Providence was supplanted by healthy
discontent. The fruit of this deep and slow evolution was the series
of reforms which, by transferring to public opinion the power which
was formerly vested in a privileged class, turned England from a pure
aristocracy into a moderate kind of democracy. The rotten boroughs were
swept out of existence, and, by the removal of religious disabilities,
the English Parliament and the English Universities became truly
representative institutions. Along with these changes came the demand
for free competition in another sphere--commerce--and the agitation
resulted in the repeal of the Corn Laws. In every department of life
the individual claimed and, in part, obtained freedom of initiative and
action. _Laissez-faire_ became the motto of the Victorian era, and the
free international exchange of goods promised at last to realise the
ideals of international friendship and reciprocity which the eighteenth
century had preached but proved unable to practise.
We now seem to be entering on a new chapter in our history. It looks as
though the Liberal current which has carried the nation thus far has
spent its force, and the counter-current is asserting itself. The House
of Commons still is an assembly of popular representatives, but it has
lost much of its power for good or evil, and much of the respect which
was once paid to it. _Laissez-faire_ is only mentioned to be derided,
the principle of free competition is openly assailed, internationalism
is branded as cosmopolitanism and appeals to humanity as proofs of
morbid sentimentality; while protection is confidently advocated in
commerce and industry. How has this change of sentiment come about?
One of its causes may be found in the growth of the Imperial idea.
The history of all nations shows that national expansion, though
often achieved by individual enterprise, can only be maintained by
organised effort, by concentration of power in a few hands, and by a
proportionate diminution of individual freedom. Democracy and Empire
have never flourished together. That the one may prosper, the other
must perish. For this reason we find the true democrat necessarily what
is now called amongst us a Little Englander; the true Imperialist as
necessarily a dictator. The anti-democratic reaction in England was
inevitable, owing partly to the expansion of Greater Britain itself,
and partly to the development of other countries on Imperialist and
despotic lines. For it is now less possible than ever for England to
develop uninfluenced by the example of her neighbours. And the example
set by those neighbours, as has been shown, is narrow and militant
nationalism in their relations with foreigners, and with regard to
domestic matters despotism and centralisation. But the growth of this
inevitable reaction has in England been accelerated by other and more
specific causes.
For a generation after the establishment of Free Trade England enjoyed
an unparalleled prosperity--an unchallenged commercial and industrial
supremacy. The British flag commanded the seas over which British
fleets carried the products of British labour to the four corners of
the earth, and the British traveller abroad made himself unpopular and
ridiculous by patronising Mont Blanc and by looking superciliously down
upon all who had not the good fortune to be born British. Those were
the proud days in which Lord Palmerston described Prussia as a country
of “d----d professors,” and Matthew Arnold wrote his parable of the
young Englishman and the upset perambulator.
But this undisputed sovereignty could not last for ever. Europe
recovered from the devastating cataclysm which had left England alone
unscathed. The heaps of ruins with which the Napoleonic wars had
strewn the Continent were replaced by new edifices. Young states
arose out of the ashes of the old ones, and a new life chased away
the shadows of death. All these renovated countries, having once set
their houses in comparative order, began to look abroad for expansion.
Germany proved with marvellous quickness that she could produce other
things than “d----d professors”; France likewise; not to mention the
smaller countries of Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and Switzerland. On
the other side of the Atlantic also the American Republic emerged from
the ordeal of her Civil War with renewed vigour, which soon displayed
itself in commercial and industrial activity. The upshot of this
perfectly natural revolution was that England found herself degraded
from an autocratic mistress of the world’s trade to the position of
one among many competitors. We saw with surprise and dismay that
we were no longer the models and the despair of others. Then our
Olympian complacency gave place to nervous anxiety, and our arrogant
self-sufficiency was succeeded by serious scepticism concerning the
titles on which our former estimate of ourselves rested. We ceased
to brag of our own “unparalleled progress,” and began to watch more
and more carefully the progress achieved by others. We acquired the
habit of asking ourselves how is it that the monopoly which we had
foolishly regarded as our inalienable birthright was slipping from our
hands; whence sprang this rapid development of countries which until
the last half-century were in their commercial and industrial infancy;
how came it to pass that nations which until yesterday were content to
copy us slavishly or to admire us passively are to-day rivalling us so
successfully? This inquiry led to the discovery that the foreigner’s
progress arose from superior intelligence, better education, greater
adaptability, and other advantages of a similar nature. We came to the
conclusion that, unless we rouse ourselves to strenuous exertion, we
shall be left behind in the race. This conviction has already found a
most laudable expression in the earnest efforts made in every part of
England to revise and to improve our commercial and industrial methods
and by special education to qualify ourselves for the struggle under
the new conditions. So far our loss of the monopoly has proved a
blessing in disguise, for it has aroused that spirit of manly emulation
to which undisputed supremacy is fatal. But, unfortunately, the same
consciousness of our altered position relatively to the rest of the
world has also aroused a spirit of an entirely different kind. Many
among us--too intelligent to ignore the changed state of things, not
intelligent enough to diagnose the real cause of the change--have come
to the conclusion that our competitors owe their success to those very
fiscal and administrative fetters which we had discarded as obsolete,
and that if we wish to save ourselves from ultimate defeat we must
adopt their antiquated systems. Freedom, they say, means anarchy, and
victory is only possible by discipline, organisation, centralisation.
Individualism is hostile to efficiency. The democratic ideal is out of
date. At the same time, the cult of humanitarianism has been driven out
by the cult of nationalism.
As might have been foreseen by anyone who has watched the march of
events with some comprehension of their meaning, the cry for protection
was accompanied by the demand for the exclusion of alien immigrants.
The sequence was logical and unavoidable. If it is to our profit to
exclude the products of foreign labour by prohibitive duties, it
is in the same way to our profit to exclude the foreign labourer.
The two things, whether viewed from the economic point of view, the
political, or the psychological, are indissolubly connected. They
both are one expression of the twofold tendencies towards despotism
and nationalism--control over the individual and hostility to the
foreigner--reaction against free competition on the one hand and
against internationalism on the other. Lukewarm or unintelligent
pleaders for the one policy may oppose the other. But that the two
demands are only two manifestations of one and the same principle is
proved by the fact that, in their most uncompromising form, they are
defended by the same advocates. At a meeting of the members of an
East-end club which the late Home Secretary addressed on Dec. 7, 1903,
a resolution, approving of the new trade policy was moved by Mr.
D. J. Morgan, M.P., and was seconded by Major Evans Gordon, M.P., both
prominent champions of the anti-alien cause. A protectionist writer on
the subject of foreign immigration into England concludes his study of
the problem with the following illuminating remarks: “Strong rivals,
devoid of sentimentality and of the capacity for being fascinated by
magic words--such as the word ‘free’--are striving to thrust us from
our position. It is full time for us to abandon our long-played _rôle_
of philanthropist among nations, and so to order our affairs, social
and economic, that we reap as much advantage as possible and foreign
nations as little. And one of these things to be altered is the free
entry of foreigners into England.”[268]
As the numbers of foreign immigrants and the numbers of native
unemployed went on steadily increasing, the outcry against the former
went on steadily gaining in volume and vigour, and at last cohered
into a definite campaign which, as might have been expected from the
nature of the case, included in its ranks not only the friends of
their own country, but the enemies of every other; not only aggressive
Protectionists, but also philosophical Revisionists; not only the
advocates of the British labourer, but also the adversaries of the Jew.
The first authoritative alarm of the Alien Peril was sounded in
January, 1902, when Mr. Balfour, in the course of the debate on the
Speech from the Throne, pointed out that, owing to America’s adoption
of severer measures against alien immigration, England would be
receiving even more immigrants than before. Not long afterwards a
Royal Commission was appointed to inquire into the matter, and, after
forty-nine public sittings, in which the evidence of one hundred and
seventy-five witnesses was received, came to the conclusion that,
although “it has not been proved that there is any serious direct
displacement of skilled English labour,” “the continuous stream of
fresh arrivals produces a glut in the unskilled labour market.”[269]
Five out of the seven members recommended the exclusion of certain
classes of immigrants, who were pronounced “undesirable” either on
account of their character or owing to the economic position of the
districts in which they settled in great numbers, and expressed the
hope that the legislature would act on their recommendation.
Both objections--moral and economic--had been anticipated outside
the Commission. On one occasion a London magistrate, in sentencing
a foreign thief to six months’ hard labour, availed himself of the
opportunity for stating that “the case fully illustrated how desirable
and necessary it was to check the unwelcome invasion of alien
criminals. At present,” he said, “the dregs of foreign countries flowed
incessantly into hospitable England, and within a few days were engaged
in committing all sorts of offences. The sooner Parliament framed laws
to prohibit the landing of these undesirables the better.”[270] Such
cases, and cases far less serious, accompanied by similar comments
from the bench, became matters of daily occurrence. So unpopular did
foreigners become that their exclusion would be urged because some
of them at times obstructed thoroughfares with their wheel barrows,
thus wasting the valuable time of the Police Courts and disturbing
the equanimity of the Metropolitan constables. One day, for example,
a Russian lad was brought up at the City Summons Court for causing
obstruction with a barrow of fruit. Sir Henry Knight, the Magistrate,
imposed on the offender a fine of two shillings, and, with admirable
sense of proportion, improved the occasion as follows: “We must
have these people stopped from being dumped down upon us. It is
abominable!”[271]
On February 16, 1903, was formed an Immigration Reform Association,
with the object of enlightening the public in general and legislators
in particular on the alien question by means of pamphlets widely
distributed among Members of Parliament and other speakers, as well
as among working-class organisations. The information thus liberally
supplied emphasised the connection of foreign immigrants with crime
and vice, described the economic evils which result from the inflow
of resourceless aliens and from their competition with the native
labourers, and dwelt with especial minuteness on the overcrowding of
certain districts of East London and the consequent dispossession of
the native working population by the invaders. Towards the end of
the same year (Dec. 7, 1903), Mr. Akers-Douglas, the Home Secretary,
addressing the members of an East-end London Club, discoursed, amid
great applause, on “the dumping of undesirable aliens,” quoting
statistics to show how rapidly their numbers grew, and how the
grievances of overcrowding, of crime and of competition grew with them,
and concluding with the assurance that the Government was seriously
contemplating stringent measures for checking the evil in time. A
few months later (March 29, 1904) the Home Secretary redeemed his
promise by bringing in a Bill “to make provision with respect to the
Immigration of Aliens, and other matters incidental thereto.”[272]
In introducing this Bill Mr. Akers-Douglas took pains to persuade the
House that the proposed measures were not directed against aliens as
aliens, but against aliens as undesirables, and then proceeded to
describe the evils, already mentioned, which the Bill was intended to
remedy. Sir Charles Dilke protested against the measure on the ground
that the majority of the aliens who came to this country, and who
would be struck by the Bill, were the helpless victims of political
and religious persecution. He affirmed that the native tradespeople
had no grievance against foreign labourers, because they were able to
absorb the comparatively small number of the latter by making them
into good trade unionists. He disputed the figures quoted by the Home
Secretary, asserting, on the strength of the Census and of the Royal
Commission’s own Report, that the number of foreigners in this country
all told was a mere drop in the ocean, and infinitely smaller than
the number of foreigners resident in almost every other civilised
country--in fact, that many more destitute Britons emigrated from the
United Kingdom than destitute aliens came into it. The speaker next
pointed out that the Bill would be used to exclude from England people
whom afterwards we should be ashamed to have excluded. This measure,
he said, had it been enforced at the time of the Paris Commune, would
certainly have excluded many of the most distinguished exiles who
arrived here in a state of starvation and whose return was afterwards
welcomed by France with every expression of gratitude to this country
for having maintained them--men like Dalou, one of the greatest
sculptors of modern times, like the brothers Reclus, and many of the
greatest scientists to whom we had been proud to give hospitality,
or men like Prince Peter Kropotkin, who arrived in England stripped
of every particle of his property by the Russian Government and was
welcomed by the people of this country. The Russian Jews, against
whom the heaviest allegations were made, inhabited Stepney and some
portions of the East-end, and there were some in Manchester and Leeds.
Of these some 20,000 were engaged in the tailoring industry, some 3500
in cabinet-making, and some 3000 in the boot and shoe trade. These
were the whole of the people against whom this agitation was directed.
The speaker had seen the broken-down prisoners from the “pale” sent
for political reasons across Siberia. Those men were not the dangerous
persons they were represented to be, miserable as might be their
condition when they came here. They were not of a stock inferior to
our own; and their stock, when it mixed with our own in the course of
years, he believed, went rather to improve than to deteriorate the
British race.
Leave was then given to bring in the Bill, which was read a first time.
A month later (April 25, 1904) the Bill stood for second reading in
the House of Commons and gave rise to a long and lively debate which
lasted through the afternoon and evening sittings. In the course of the
debate, the measure was discussed in all its aspects, was strenuously
attacked by one party and defended as strenuously by the other. Sir
Charles Dilke was again foremost in the fray. He moved an amendment
“that this House, holding that the evils of low-priced alien labour
can best be met by legislation to prevent sweating, desires to assure
itself, before assenting to the Aliens Bill, that sufficient regard is
had in the proposed measure to the retention of the principle of asylum
for the victims of persecution.” This amendment the mover supported
by an eloquent speech in which, having once more traversed the Home
Secretary’s statistics, and once more reminded the House that these
immigrants against whom the measure was directed were the victims of
persecution for their religion--people whose friends had been burnt
alive and hunted from their homes to death--finally expressed his
conviction that behind this measure, not in the House, of course, but
in the country, there was kindled an anti-Jewish feeling, warning those
members of the Conservative party who participated in this agitation
that they had raised a devil which they would find it very difficult to
lay.
This statement, naturally enough, provoked many contradictions; but
the speaker, in reply, justly asserted that the fact was patent to all
readers of the newspapers which supported the Bill.
Other Liberal orators followed, some of whom described the Bill as
an example of panic legislation, and others as partly prompted by
an agitation directed against the Jews. Among the latter was Mr.
Trevelyan, who remarked that the measure aimed almost as much at those
who managed to prosper as at those who were poverty-stricken, and that
all the evidence went to prove that the great mass of these aliens were
sober and industrious people who in the long run became good citizens.
He maintained that among many people outside the House there was a
frankly anti-Semitic movement which he dreaded and deplored, and that
this petty and evil step was in exactly the same direction as that in
which the Governments of Russia and Roumania had been going.
The long debate ended with a division, in which the amendment was
negatived by a Government majority of 124, and the Bill was read
a second time. But its triumph was far from being assured by this
victory. Outside the House there was as much divergence of opinion
on the merits of the measure, its scope, and its probable effects as
there was inside, and the rival parties spared no pains to present the
motives of their adversaries in the least flattering colours. Thus,
while the advocates of the Bill denounced the opposition to it as “a
net constructed with the primary purpose of catching votes,”[273] its
opponents derided it as “an attempt on the part of the Government to
gratify a small but noisy section of their supporters, and to purchase
a little popularity in the constituencies by dealing harshly with a
number of unfortunate aliens who have no votes.”[274]
The English Jews were not left unmoved by the fresh calamity which
threatened their suffering brethren. As early as May, 1903, while the
Royal Commission was still carrying on its investigations, Mr. Israel
Zangwill, at a mass meeting of Zionists, foretold the recommendations
of the Commission, and expressed the fear that the exclusion of
undesirable aliens might prove only the beginning of worse things.
“The Jews came over to England with the Conqueror,” he said, “but
all their services to him and his successors did not prevent their
expulsion two and a quarter centuries later. He did not wish to be
an alarmist, but nobody who had been caught in a crowd of mafficking
hooligans could doubt the possibility of anti-Jewish riots even in
London.”[275] And when, a year later, the speaker’s prediction as to
the result of the Commission’s work was fulfilled, he again, at another
Zionist meeting, said that England “was catching the epidemic which
rages everywhere against the Jew.”[276] This statement was reported
to Mr. Balfour, who replied that “he believed it to be quite untrue,”
declaring that “the Aliens Bill is designed to protect the country, not
against the Jew, but against the undesirable alien, quite irrespective
of his nationality or his creed. I should regard the rise and growth
of any anti-Semitic feeling in this country as a most serious
national misfortune.”[277] In a letter to _The Times_ Mr. Zangwill
reiterated his assertion, and, while absolving Mr. Balfour himself
from anti-Semitism, he insisted that the Aliens Bill was inspired by
anti-Semites--a statement which he once more repeated emphatically in
the course of an interview with a newspaper representative.[278]
Nor was the indignation confined to Jews only. Speaking at the annual
meeting of the British Jews’ Society in Exeter Hall the Rev. Peter
Thomson declared that the Jew had been rather a blessing to the
East-end than otherwise, and, as the best testimony of this, he quoted
the Chairman of the City of London Brewery Company, who had lamented
that the dividends had gone down because of the immigration of the Jews
into the district where their public houses were situated, concluding
that he himself had no blessing for the Aliens Bill.[279]
A few days later (May 19) a deputation of the Jewish community sought
an interview with the Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Home Affairs
and through Lord Rothschild, who introduced it, drew attention to the
clauses of the Bill which would press harshly and unjustly on the
numerous Jewish immigrants into this country, pointing out that the
investigations of the Royal Commission had proved that the advent
of the aliens was not a source of disadvantage, but of benefit to
England, that the increase of the alien population was insignificant
when compared with that of America, and that the Bill provided no
machinery for the exclusion of the really undesirable, such as existed
in America, but proposed to establish in this country a loathsome
system of Police interference and espionage. The deputation further
offered on behalf of the Jewish community to enter into a bond that the
Jewish immigrants admitted should not become a public charge during the
first two years of their residence, and to assist the authorities in
excluding criminals who might be of the Jewish persuasion.
The Under-Secretary thanked the deputation for the very moderate tone
in which they had set forth their case, disavowed any intention on the
part of the Government to encourage anti-Semitic feeling in England,
said that all, from the Prime Minister downwards, recognised the debt
which England owed to the Jews, admitted that those members of the race
who came here were both healthy and law-abiding, but, he maintained,
the Bill sought to exclude the diseased, bad characters, and the
destitute.
These assurances, however, failed to reassure the Jews. Many of them
continued to apprehend danger; a few even began to regard expulsion
as not improbable in the future. This fear has found a voice in
literature. In a novel[280] published while the fate of the Aliens
hung in the balance, the Jews are banished from England by a wicked
Home Secretary, and then are brought back again, because “England can
_not_ get along without Jewish money and Jewish brains.” The expulsion
is, of course, hardly more convincing than the reason given for the
restoration. The authoress, herself, in the preface, describes her book
as “a story of the impossible,” but she considers that “a warning--even
in the form of fiction--may not be out of place.” The danger may be
imaginary and the warning rather premature; none the less, the book
bears witness to a genuine feeling of alarm. Such a book could not have
been written a generation ago.
Mr. Balfour was, no doubt, quite sincere in repudiating any
anti-Semitic bias on his own part and on the part of his immediate
followers. The idea of a cultured English gentleman of the present
day actuated by religious or racial rancour is too grotesque to be
seriously entertained for a moment, and it is further disproved, if
disproof were needed, by the attempt which, as will be narrated in the
sequel, the Conservative Government, in true Imperial spirit, made to
provide a home in a British possession for those Jews whose presence it
deemed undesirable in the United Kingdom. Another proof that Jew-hatred
is not yet sufficiently powerful in this country to imperil the peace
of the Jews was furnished, about the same time, by one of our most
distinguished prelates, Bishop Welldon, who in a sermon preached at
Westminster Abbey on Good Friday, 1904, exhorted his hearers to an
imitation of Christ’s example, and to a practical demonstration of
their faith by contributing to the East London Jews’ Fund: “That was,”
he said, “the best return they could make for the crucifixion of their
Lord and Master. The Jews gave him strife, and encompassed his death;
we gave them sanctuary and kindness, and without one word of reproach.
They gratefully acknowledged the noble citizenship of Jews in all
parts of the world. In return they offered them on this anniversary
day of our Lord’s Passion what was to Christians the holiest, dearest
examples of the life and character of the Crucified Redeemer.”[281] In
the following year the Bishop of Stepney issued an appeal in connexion
with Holy Week and Good Friday on behalf of the East London Fund for
the Jews. The thoughts of the season, he said, would be incomplete
unless they gave a place to those “whose rejection of their own Messiah
has been one of the great tragedies of history.” There are more than
100,000 Jews in East London parishes, and in some parishes they form
the majority of the population. Following the method suggested some
time ago by the Upper House of Convocation, the diocese of London
treats the East-end Jews as neighbours and parishioners, and by the
tact and patience of the fund’s workers “the barrier of prejudice,
built up by long years of persecution at the hands of Christians, is
being rapidly removed.”[282] While such sentiments prevail in England,
the Jews need not fear for their liberties.
Yet, that the apprehensions of the Jews and of all friends of freedom
are not wholly unjustified, that Sir Charles Dilke and those who agree
with him in suspecting that anti-Semitic prejudice is not so uncommon
in the Kingdom at large as it is among the upper ranks, are not the
victims of a hypochondriacal dread of phantoms, was demonstrated with
deplorable opportuneness by an event which even a temperate pessimist
cannot but regard as a rude and practical version of the creed which
is elsewhere preached in a more refined form. While Mr. Akers-Douglas
at Westminster was giving the finishing touches to his prescription
for the Alien complaint, the people of Limerick were actually trying
remedies of a more drastic and homely nature.
The Jews had hitherto been conspicuous in Ireland chiefly by their
absence. With the exception of Dublin and Belfast, the island knew the
Jew from hearsay only, and his name was to the ordinary Irishman what
it was to the Englishman in the days of Gower and Chaucer--a symbol
for a vile abstraction. In 1871 there were only six Jews in Cork, two
in Limerick and one in Waterford. But of late years persecution on the
Continent has forced some of its victims to seek an asylum in Ireland
as in England, though to a much smaller degree. The increase in the
Jews’ numbers, slight though it was, proved sufficient to arouse a
feeling of alarm and suspicion among the ignorant masses both in the
towns and in the open country. Craftsmen, tradesmen, ploughmen, and
clergymen, all began to look with jealousy upon the clever, thrifty,
and infidel new-comers from beyond the sea. This was especially the
case at Limerick, where lately had sprung up a diminutive colony of
thirty-five Jewish families, which was by the Chief Secretary for
Ireland described as a “well-conducted section of the community,
engaged for the most part in small trades, and dependent for their
livelihood on the goodwill of their customers.”[283]
Yet, small as this colony was, it soon attracted attention. The
Catholic inhabitants of that great centre of picturesque and somnolent
decay were not pleased at the comparative success of their wide-awake
neighbours. The animosity spread from the town to the adjacent
villages. The Irish peasant, proverbially improvident and free from
any comprehension of the nature of a bargain, was ready to buy from
the Jewish peddler his goods, and strongly disinclined to pay for
them. The goods were usually sold on the instalment system, and this,
in an imaginative mind, created a pleasant illusion which, however,
was rudely shattered when the day of reckoning came. Then the peasant
realised that the goods were not a free gift, and bitterly resented
the hardship of being made to discharge his debt. It has been stated
by the Irish peasant’s advocate that over three-quarters of the civil
bill processes at quarter sessions in the island were those of Jews
against such unsophisticated debtors for arrears of payments for
goods purchased.[284] The statement has been shown to be a romantic
exaggeration on an unusually ambitious scale. In plain prose, among
1387 civil bills entered for the county and city of Limerick during the
year 1903 only 31 were issued by Jews, while in the Easter sessions of
1904, out of a total number of 320 civil bills, eight only belonged
to Jews.[285] None the less, it is quite conceivable that often the
peddler’s anxiety to obtain his money, brought into collision with the
peasant’s unwillingness to part with his, led to strained relations
between the two parties. In the circumstances it was perfectly natural
that the Jew should be denounced for “usury and extortion.” Irish
patriots saw in this new oppressor of their innocent fellow-countrymen
a kind of camp-follower of the foreign conquerors. Poor Ireland was
described as a carcase whose bones were picked by the Russian and
Polish jackals of what had been left on them by the Norman lion and the
Anglo-Saxon wolf, and Byron was quoted with considerable effect:
So, when the lion quits his fell repast,
Next prowls the wolf, the filthy jackal last,[286]
The hatred for the creditor was soon extended to his creed.
Milesian patriots, indeed, vigorously repudiated the charge of
religious intolerance, protesting, as the Russians did before them,
that the animosity against the Jew was “merely financial and not
religious,”[287] and there seems no reason to doubt that economic
distress in Ireland, as in Russia and elsewhere, had contributed its
usual share to a hostility which springs from many sources. But the
assertion that the prejudice was due “merely” to financial causes
is amply disproved by facts. These show that the Catholic clergy
was sorely scandalised at the humble prosperity of the unbelievers,
and thus there was laid up a quantity of combustible material which
only awaited a spark for explosion. This spark was supplied at the
beginning of 1904 by Father Creagh, a holy monk of the Redemptorist
Order, inspired by a religious fervour and a credulity rare in these
days and gifted with great eloquence of the kind which once incited the
mobs of Europe to outrages. Like many another mediaeval saint, this
priest was impelled by the purest of motives--piety and patriotism--to
preach a crusade against those whom his untutored conscience taught
him to regard as the enemies of his people and of his God: “It would
be madness for a man to nourish in his own breast a viper that
might at any moment slay its benefactor with a poisonous bite. So
it is madness for a people to allow an evil to grow in their midst
that will eventually cause them ruin.” Thus began the preacher, and
then proceeded to anathematise the Jews as usurers who enslaved the
people, as sinners who rejected Jesus, as the secular persecutors of
Christianity, as the monsters who “slew St. Stephen, the first martyr,
and St. James the Apostle, and ever since, as often as opportunity
offered, did not hesitate to shed Christian blood, and that even in
the meanest and most cruel manner, as in the case of the holy martyr,
St. Simon, who, though a mere child, they took and crucified out of
hatred and derision towards our Lord Jesus Christ. Nowadays they dare
not kidnap and slay Christian children, but they will not hesitate to
expose them to a longer and even more cruel martyrdom by taking the
clothes off their back and the bite out of their mouth.”[288]
Having endowed the Jew with the most diabolical character imaginable
and traced to him the woes of the Catholic Church in France, the
preacher concluded by exhorting his congregation to have no dealings
with the people whom God had cursed. As a result of this atrocious
sermon, no Jew or Jewess could stir abroad without being insulted
or assaulted, and, when the priest’s exhortations reached the open
country, there also, as in the city of Limerick, the Jews fell a prey
to a series of brutal attacks, until the preacher, alarmed at his own
success, urged his flock to desist from stoning the unbelievers but
try to starve them. The good people readily obeyed. They not only
ceased to deal with the Jewish peddlers, but, improving on their
pastor’s precepts, refused even to pay what they owed to them for goods
purchased in the past. And while Catholic customers shunned the Jewish
tradesmen, Catholic tradesmen in some cases refused to sell to the Jews
the necessaries of life. With the exception of two or three families,
the small Jewish colony of Limerick was reduced to utter penury. People
hitherto in comfortable circumstances were forced to sell the very
furniture of their houses in order to buy food, while the majority of
them were saved from starvation only by the charity of some Protestant
gentlemen, who, however, were obliged to observe the utmost secrecy
in rendering assistance for fear of drawing down upon themselves
the pious wrath of the Redemptorist monks and of the six thousand
brethren of the Confraternity of the Holy Family, whose fanaticism the
prophet continued to inflame with his historic fictions. This state of
things did not end until, public opinion being roused in England, the
Government was induced to take adequate measures for the protection
of the Jews against violence, and philanthropists hastened to their
relief. Such was the position of the Jews in a part of Ireland in the
year of grace 1904.
Meanwhile the unblessed Bill, after having been safely piloted through
the stormy debate on the second reading, suffered shipwreck in the
relatively calm harbour of Grand Committee. Every one of its clauses
was subjected to severe criticism, until nothing was left of the essay
in legislation so carefully elaborated by the Home Secretary. This
catastrophe was by the advocates of the measure attributed to “the
obstructive tactics to which its opponents resorted.”[289] A more
philosophical explanation of the failure of the Bill, and one probably
as remote from the truth, would be that the Government, yielding to the
importunity of some of its followers, promised a measure which it had
no power to pass and no great desire to see passed. Be that as it may,
few perhaps regretted the failure of an attempt to shut out from this
country all strangers indiscriminately, for no better reason than that
they are poor and persecuted, thus conspiring with the very Governments
whose conduct we condemn and gratuitously forswearing those traditions
of freedom, tolerance, and hospitality which will probably in the
estimation of future ages stand much higher than a great many things
which we now value as our chief titles to the world’s respect.
These sentiments will naturally be received with derision by persons
who, fortified by copious draughts of statistics, boast a healthy
immunity from “sentimentality,” profess a truly primitive contempt for
abstract ideas, and glory in their emancipation from “the capacity
for being fascinated by magic words--such as the word ‘free.’”[290]
Strong-minded persons of this type confess that “they cannot see what
benefit accrues to the community by the advent of such immigrants that
can possibly compensate the injury to our own people of a hard-working
class.”[291] Robust thinkers of this school consider obstruction with
a barrow of fruit by a poor lad an offence sufficiently serious to
justify exclusion, and this, too, while they denounce the Roumanian
Government’s policy as “directed to the suppression, expulsion, and
political extermination of the Jews.”[292] The statistical mind has its
own way of looking at things, and it is able to discern a difference
in principle between “expulsion” and “exclusion” which is too subtle
for the mere layman’s eye. It is, therefore, not surprising that
statisticians should have continued their self-appointed mission of
enlightening the world on the enormities of the foreign immigrant.
The Immigration Reform Association, immediately on the defeat of the
Bill, announced its determination “to continue, and, if possible, to
extend its work,” and made an appeal to the public for funds.[293] The
magazines continued to be filled with articles on the same melancholy
topic, and a daily newspaper carefully chronicled under the standing
heading “Our Foreigners Day by Day” all cases, however frivolous,
which tended to bring into strong relief the foreigner’s criminality.
Members of Parliament felt it to be their duty to denounce to their
constituencies the Radical Party, which, by its “most persistent
obstruction,” had obliged the Government to withdraw the Bill, and to
ask them to demand its reintroduction.[294] In brief, no efforts were
spared to influence that powerful assemblage of thoughtless dogmatists
known as the reading public, and to guide that monstrous machine which,
propelled by prejudice and fed by newspaper paragraphs, constitutes
what we cynically call public opinion.
The Government also benevolently promised, both through its members
and in the Speech from the Throne, that the Opposition would be
given an early opportunity of reforming their manners with regard to
the question. Naturally. For, according to the Board of Trade alien
immigration returns, the number of foreigners who arrived in the United
Kingdom during the twelve months which ended on December 31st, 1904,
showed few signs of decline. It was, therefore, plain that the Aliens
Bill was not dead; but that the same measure, or a measure conceived
in the same spirit, would, unless some power hitherto undiscovered
removed the grievance, be again submitted to Parliament at some future
date. And this is what actually happened. On April 18, 1905, the Home
Secretary brought in a new Bill which differed from its predecessor
chiefly in being better adapted to the purpose for which it was
intended. And yet, though the arguments by which it was supported
and the object at which it aimed remained the same, it met with an
entirely different reception. The public had, in the meantime, been so
successfully “educated,” and the feeling in favour of legislation for
the restriction of the entrance of aliens had grown so strong, that the
Opposition, mindful of its party interests, refrained from opposing the
measure with the vigour which it had displayed in the previous year,
and the Bill, a few months afterwards, became law. ♦1905 Aug. 11♦ That
being the case, it is well to form a clear idea as to the merits and
the meaning of the measure.
The Aliens Act is avowedly levelled only at the criminal, the
pauper, the diseased, and the prostitute. So far it is a measure
unobjectionable in theory, however impracticable it may prove in
application. Those charged with the execution of its provisions may, if
they can, prevent the arrival of these truly undesirable immigrants. No
one desires them. But this only touches the fringe of the matter. The
exclusion of such immigrants affords no remedy for the congestion and
competition which form the principal grounds of complaint against the
alien immigrants. The bulk of these are Russian and Polish Jews and, as
a class, are, by the late Government’s own admission, neither criminal,
nor destitute, nor diseased, nor immoral. They are not a burden on the
British tax-payer. They crowd neither the British workhouses nor the
British hospitals. The evils complained of can, therefore, be remedied
not by the exclusion of the few bad characters, but only by refusing
an asylum on British soil to the industrious and temperate victim of
Russian or Roumanian tyranny, who, when allowed the opportunity, is,
in the vast majority of cases, transformed, within a few years, into a
valuable British citizen. And the Act, accordingly, while professing
to be directed against undesirable characters, makes no distinction
whatever between the undesirable and the merely unhappy. It provides
nominal protection for political refugees, it is true, but the
subordinate officials, to whose discretion the matter is practically
left, are empowered to prohibit from landing men and women whose sole
crime is that, accustomed to a frugal life, they are willing to accept
a wage which the English working man and woman refuse. Is this a cause
sufficient to justify exclusion? That is the real question at issue,
honestly put. The talk about criminals, paupers and prostitutes is
only a disingenuous effort to clothe a selfish economic matter with a
semblance of morality. It is not their vices but their virtues that
render Jewish immigrants really undesirable. Is that right? The answer
to this question would have been easy enough a few years ago. But now,
when the whole principle of free competition is under reconsideration,
the answer which the majority of Englishmen will be disposed to make to
it must ultimately depend on their decision concerning that principle.
How far can the Act be fairly regarded as a symptom of anti-Semitic
feeling? There can be no doubt that its authors and many of its
supporters, entirely free from religious or racial prejudice
themselves, intended it simply as a remedy for an economic complaint.
But whatever the late Government’s intentions may have been, and
whether in this matter it acted as a leader or a follower, it has
in effect provided anti-aliens and anti-Semites, avowed or secret,
with the very weapon which they wanted, as they showed by their eager
participation in the movement which, if it did not dictate the measure,
certainly assisted in its production. Again, it would be unfair and
untrue to charge all, or even the bulk, of the anti-alien agitators
with anti-Semitism. The great majority of them were and are animated
by no special prejudice against the Jews as such, and, if they teach
the masses any lesson, it is to hate and to despise all foreigners
impartially. But as by far most of these foreigners who come to England
happen to be Jews, it is impossible to dissociate the anti-alien
from the anti-Jewish campaign. On the Continent the haters of the
Jew on racial or religious grounds are few in comparison with those
who persecute him from enlightened motives, economic and social. Yet
we brand them all as anti-Semites, justly in the main, if somewhat
loosely; for differences in motive are of little practical importance
when they lead to agreement in action. In England also the few enemies
of the Jew have recognised in the enemies of the undesirable alien
natural allies, and the two forces, however widely they may differ in
their origin, coalesce into practical anti-Semitism--a coalition which
has found, as we have seen, a common vehicle of expression in the
provincial patriot’s pamphlet. Other signs of anti-Semitism, in the
strict sense of the term, are not wanting; the most sinister of them
hitherto being the Limerick affair. It is, of course, easy to overrate
the significance of these cases. It is not so easy to overlook them.
Even more ominous than these specific cases is the slow formation in
the British Isles of an atmosphere favourable to the dissemination of
any illiberal epidemic whose germs may chance to grow at home or to
be imported from abroad. Narrow nationalism is daily becoming more
aggressive, more unscrupulous, and more unashamed of itself. Public
opinion is daily showing a more ready acquiescence in the sacrifice
of the claims of man to the claims of the Englishman--this is called
patriotism--and of the claims of right to the claims of policy--this is
called Imperialism. Patriotism is a noble sentiment, and the imperial
is a noble ideal. But nobler than either patriotism or Imperialism
are justice and freedom. With these the love of country and the love
of Empire are things for which one may well be content to live and
happy to die. Without them they are merely fair masks for things whose
real names are worship of self, worship of pelf, the deification
of brute force, low lust of conquest abroad, which sooner or later
leads to slavery at home; substitution of the little and the local
for the great and the eternal. It is a gradual approximation towards
that standard of conduct which has turned Germany from a high school
of humanistic culture into a barrack, and which threatens to turn
England from a school of political liberty into a shop. A ledger is
a respectable book enough, but an indifferent substitute for a moral
code. And we seem to take pride in quoting the ledger and in ridiculing
the moral code.
The whole controversy in Parliament and in the press on the Alien
question is an illustration of this attitude. In vain you will seek
amid the conflicting arguments for any clear apprehension of the
principle involved. The same politicians and publicists who denounced
the late Government for endeavouring to exclude the undesired alien
from England, denounced it also for not excluding the undesired alien
from South Africa. The same calumnies from which they defended the Jew
they themselves would level at the Chinaman, and while they appealed
to the ideal of freedom in order to stigmatise the Government’s
attempts to protect the native of England against competition, they
anathematised that Government for not protecting the native of South
Africa against similar competition; objecting not so much to the
conditions under which the yellow man was imported as to the colour of
his skin. Even the most liberal of our public men are apt to use the
terms “white man” or “alien” in a manner which shows that they are far
from being proof against the prejudices which they condemn in others.
At no other time, perhaps, has more painfully been demonstrated the
ominous absence of consistent principle from British statesmanship.
The two political parties, devoid of any sincere faith in the maxims
which they profess, are ready to deny one day what they may defend
the next, and to exchange creeds at a moment’s notice for a moment’s
gain. In such a state of the national temper and of political morality
anti-Semitism would find only too congenial a soil. The present writer,
after a careful study of the whole history of the modern movement
against the Jews, cannot but concur with those who maintain that the
seeds of anti-Semitism are already amongst us. These seeds may still
lie too deep for germination, but there are sufficient reasons to fear
that in England, as on the Continent, any accident may, sooner or
later, bring them near the surface and aërate them into life. The day
on which this may happen will be a black day not for the Jews only.
The meaning of anti-Semitism, as it prevails abroad, can be read by
the light of its results. By their actions thou shalt know them.
But the actions of the anti-Semites, deplorable as they are, are
less deplorable than the social conditions which they illustrate.
Anti-Semitism is a movement retrogressive in a twofold sense.
Retrogressive inasmuch as it shows that the current of European
humanism is flowing backwards, and retrogressive inasmuch as it has
actually checked the gradual and voluntary assimilation of the Jew. It
is a resurrection of the mediaeval monster of intolerance with a fresh
face, and its effects are those which attended mediaeval persecution.
Among the worst Jews it has brought back to life the class of vulgar
apostates which had vanished with the emancipation of the race--lineal
descendants of those renegades who in the Dark Ages poisoned the
shafts of persecution, who slandered their own race, befouled the nest
in which they had been nursed, reviled their own God, and treated
their own brethren with a contempt which none deserved more richly
than themselves. Such a specimen of reversion to a type which one had
fondly imagined to be extinct is the editor of a well-known French
journal, than whom no one distinguished himself more unenviably in
the anti-Dreyfus campaign. He was only one of many Jews who, ashamed
of their despised race, strive to conceal the guilt of their origin
by joining the ranks of its most rabid foes, and who, by their
excessive zeal, betray what they would fain disguise. Readers of M.
Anatole France’s _Histoire Contemporaine_ will remember the exquisite
portraits of Hebrew anti-Semites, such as Madame de Bonmont--“une
dame catholique, mais d’origine juive”--her brother Wallstein, M.
Worms-Clavelin, the prefect, and, above all, the prefect’s wife, who
educated her daughter in a Catholic convent, and who “a garni avec
les chapes magnifiques et vénérables de Saint-Porchaire ces sortes de
meubles appelés vulgairement poufs.”
Among the best Jews it has brought about a reaction against the ideals
established by Mendelssohn’s teaching. It has originated a call back
to orthodoxy, to narrowness, to exclusiveness. Israel at the present
day is essentially a religious brotherhood; anti-Semitism forces it to
become once more a nation. Even those Jews who in time of prosperity
might feel inclined to quit the Synagogue, are in the day of adversity
driven back to it from a sense of chivalry. Persecution strengthens
the feeling of fraternity, and the liberal instincts of the individual
are sacrificed for the sake of the community, as in the days of old.
But, if separatism is fatal to the Jews themselves, it is hardly a
blessing to humanity at large. From the other point of view, the
Gentile, anti-Semitism is not less an evil. Disraeli once said that
“Providence would deal good or ill fortune to nations according as
they dealt well or ill by the Jews.”[295] The saying, when stripped of
its quasi-apocalyptic garb, will be found to conceal a great truth in
it. Hatred towards the Jew has always abounded whenever and wherever
barbarism has abounded. The amount of anti-Semitism in a country
has generally been proportionate to the amount of bigotry, mental
depravity, and moral callousness it contained. That so many now are
willing to advocate anti-Semitism marks the precarious and superficial
character of our civilisation.
I have already said that I consider anti-Semitism as a proof and an
illustration of a tendency to turn back the hand on the dial. It
is a coincidence, not perhaps wholly devoid of significance, that
the age which has witnessed the revival of Jew-hatred is also the
age of revived mediaevalism under other aspects--art, literature,
and religion. The step from Romanticism to Romanism is a very short
one. Indeed, the two things may be regarded as only two different
manifestations of one mental disposition: the disposition to a
mediaeval interpretation of life and its problems. More significant
still are the attempts made in these days to whitewash the great
tyrants of the past whose principles reason and experience have taught
us to abhor. Most significant circumstance of all, the apologists of
the Inquisition, whom the sarcasms of the eighteenth century had shamed
into silence, and Napoleon’s cannon cowed into feigned toleration,
have, within the last thirty years, taken heart again, and ventured
to abuse that liberty of speech which they owe to the triumph of
Rationalism by preaching the cause of Obscurantism. Learned Jesuits
and Benedictines in many parts of Europe have, since 1875, not only
publicly acknowledged and defended the abominations of the Holy Office,
but actually expressed an undisguised longing for its restoration to
the power of roasting every one who dares to think for himself.[296]
That they may succeed is a fear which even the most fantastic of
pessimists would feel unable to cherish. But their mere existence forms
in itself a considerable check on too sanguine optimism.
CHAPTER XXIV
ZIONISM
THE persecution of the Jews in Russia, their oppression in Roumania
and the revival of the old prejudice against them in Western Europe
during the last quarter of the nineteenth century have, as has been
pointed out, arrested the gradual denationalisation of Judaism, which
had commenced in the latter part of the eighteenth under Mendelssohn’s
impulse, and, in proportion as they have widened the hostility between
Jew and Gentile, they have tended to tighten the links of sympathy
between the Jews scattered in various parts of the world. Under the
benign influence of persecution Jewish patriotism has again blazed
up into flame. This sentiment has found a practical expression in
many movements set on foot for the relief and rescue of the suffering
race. One movement of the kind, prompted by the anti-Jewish agitation
in Russia and the resuscitation of the blood accusation against the
Jews of the Near East in the ’fifties, resulted in the birth of a
society the object of which it is to watch over the interests of the
Jews in the countries where they are exposed to danger, to protect
them against persecution, to promote their material welfare, and
to encourage their intellectual development. This is the _Alliance
Israélite Universelle_, founded in Paris, in 1860. Its funds are
derived from thousands of subscribers all over the world, and its
work is carried on by branch establishments in many countries. The
educational activity of the _Alliance_ is especially directed to the
Near East and the coast of North Africa--Bulgaria, Turkey in Europe and
Asia, Persia, Egypt, Tripoli, Tunis, Algeria, Morocco. In all these
countries it maintains numerous schools at an annual expense which in
1903 amounted to 1,200,000 francs. In connection with the _Alliance_
there was established, in 1871, in London the Anglo-Jewish Association,
and in Vienna the _Israelitische Allianz_, whose principal aim is the
elevation of the Jews of Galicia. It was mainly through these societies
that the cause of the Roumanian Jews was advocated in 1872 and that
the members of the Congress of Berlin, in 1878, were induced to take
the ineffectual steps already described for the improvement of the
condition of the Jews in Roumania and Servia. Foremost among these,
and many other organisations for the succour of Jewish victims of
persecution, stands Baron Hirsch’s gigantic fund of £9,000,000 for the
settlement of emigrants in new countries.
But all these efforts can only be described as palliatives. They aim
simply at a temporary alleviation of the sufferings of Israel; they do
not attempt to provide a radical remedy for the evil. The only remedies
that history points out as worthy of the name are either assimilation
of the Jews in various countries to the Gentiles among whom they dwell,
or separation from the latter, geographical as well as political. The
first alternative, as we have seen, has from time to time appeared
within a certain distance of partial realisation, reaching its nearest
approach in the years following on the emancipation of the race under
the influence of the broad principles of humanitarianism which reigned
during the latter half of the eighteenth and the beginning of the
nineteenth century. Whether this approach would ever have developed
into a general absorption of the Jews is a speculative question which
admits of more answers than one. The fact that is of greater value to
the historian is that such a development was checked by the reaction
already described under the name of anti-Semitism. Hence the other
remedy has come more and more to the front under the name of Zionism.
The movement combines in itself two aims, a practical and a sentimental
one. Its practical aim is to provide a solution of the Jewish problem
by bringing about the geographical and political separation of
the Jews from the Gentiles. Its sentimental aim is to satisfy the
traditional attachment of the Jews to the land of their origin. In
neither of its two aims can the movement, under its modern aspect,
claim to be original. Attempts to restore the Jewish State, in some
form or other, have repeatedly been made in the past. In the middle of
the sixteenth century--the age of the Ghetto--Tiberias was proposed
by a Jew as the seat of a new Jewish State. In the middle of the
seventeenth--the age of Sabbataï Zebi--three more schemes of the kind
were advocated: one for a settlement of the Jews in the Dutch West
Indies, another for their emigration to Dutch Guiana, and a third
recommended French Guiana. In the middle of the eighteenth century
South America was again proposed, and North America in the middle of
the nineteenth. But none of these proposals succeeded in evoking any
enthusiasm among the Jews. On the contrary, the orthodox Jews--and
such are the majority of Eastern European Jews--led by their Rabbis,
strenuously opposed the last suggestion of emigration to America which
was made by their more advanced brethren of the West; and the plan
perished still-born.
The Zionist movement, on the other hand, differs from all former
movements, except the first, inasmuch as it strives to enlist in its
favour the heart as well as the head of Israel. In selecting Palestine
as the future home of the race, the leaders of the movement have
endeavoured to gratify a craving, the force of which it is easy to
exaggerate, but impossible to ignore. If there is in Jewish history
one event that has exercised a lasting influence over the fortunes
of the nation, it is the destruction of Jerusalem and the consequent
dispersion. If there is one sentiment that has bound the branches of
the Jewish family together through the ages, more strongly than any
other, it is the hope of ultimate rehabilitation. For eighteen hundred
years the children of Israel have wandered over the earth, insulted,
oppressed, persecuted, without a country, without a home, with scarcely
a resting place, strangers in every realm in which they pitched
their tent. But, though banished from the land of their birth and far
from the tombs of their forefathers, the vast majority of them have
preserved, amidst all trials and temptations, their traditions, their
usages and their faith unimpaired. Without the hope of restoration such
constancy would have been impossible and meaningless.
The destruction of Zion cast its shadow over the soul of the Jewish
people throughout the Middle Ages, and the mourning for it is the
most picturesque, the most pathetic, and the most prominent feature
of their public and domestic life. In the synagogues, as well as in
many private houses, a space on the wall was always left unpainted to
recall the national humiliation. The Jews of every country in token of
grief wore black, whence they were called “Mourners of Zion.” In memory
of the same calamity gold and silver ornaments were banished from the
bridal wreath, and ashes were strewn over the heads of the bride and
the bridegroom at weddings. In Germany the bridegroom wore a cowl of
mourning and the bride a white shroud. A mediaeval table-hymn, sung
after the meal on Friday evenings, or Saturday mornings, ran as follows:
“Build, O rebuild Thou, Thy temple,
Fill again Zion, Thy city,
Clad with delight will we go there,
Other and new songs to sing there,
Merciful One and All-holy,
Praisèd for ever and ever.”
Similar examples might be cited from every side--all showing that the
sad memories of the past and the belief in ultimate triumph were the
two poles between which revolved the spiritual life of the nation. The
Prophets who had predicted the dispersion and the captivity of the
children of Israel had also predicted their repatriation. “Behold, I
will gather them out of all countries whither I have driven them in
mine anger, and in my fury, and in great wrath; and I will bring them
again unto this place, and I will cause them to dwell safely.”[297]
This hope was the life-belt which enabled the Jew to float amidst
the wrecks of so many storms during eighteen centuries. In the night
of their darkest desolation the Jews kept their eyes fixed to the
East, and said to themselves and to one another, “Courage, the day is
at hand.” Attachment to Faith and Fatherland--the religious and the
national ideals--are the two strands, indissolubly entwined, of that
great Messianic dream which runs like a golden thread through the black
web of Jewish history. The Holy Land never ceased to be regarded as the
true home of the race. Benjamin of Tudela, writing about the middle
of the twelfth century, testifies to the tenacity with which many of
the Jewish communities in Europe, which he visited in his tour, clung
to the belief that they were destined to be redeemed from captivity
and be gathered together in the fulness of time. The various Messiahs
whose rise and failure have been narrated in the foregoing pages would
never have attained their wonderful popularity but for this belief.
But even in normal times it was the ardent desire of every good Jew
to die in Jerusalem, and the longing of some to live there. This
desire was nursed by the poets and thinkers of Israel. We have seen at
the beginning of the twelfth century Jehuda Halevi addressing Zion,
in accents full of tenderness, as his “woe-begone darling,” and in
fulfilment of a life-long vow ending his days among her ruins. ♦1211♦ A
century later three hundred Rabbis from France and England set out for
Palestine.
♦1260♦
In 1267 Nachmanides, faithful to his own teaching, performed the
pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and found the city, owing to the ravages of
the Mongols, a heap of ruins--a devastation which was considered to
indicate the near approach of the Messiah. Nachmanides, in a letter to
his son, thus describes the melancholy sight: “Great is the solitude
and great the wastes, and, to characterise it in short, the more sacred
the places, the greater the desolation. Jerusalem is more desolate
than the rest of the country: Judaea more than Galilee. But even in
this destruction it is a blessed land.” He goes on to say that, among
the two thousand inhabitants to which the population of Jerusalem
had been reduced by the Sultan’s sword, he found only two Jews, two
brothers, dyers by trade, in whose house the Ten Men, the quorum
necessary to form a congregation for the purpose of worship, met on
the Sabbath, when they could; for Jews and Jewesses--“wretched folk,
without occupation and trade, pilgrims and beggars”--continued to come
from Damascus, Aleppo, and from other parts, to mourn over the ruins
of Zion. In spite of all the afflictions which met his eye, and in
spite of his longing for the friends and kinsmen whom the aged pilgrim
had forsaken without hope of ever seeing again, Nachmanides is able
to declare that for all those losses he is amply compensated by “the
joy of being a day in thy courts, O Jerusalem, visiting the ruins of
the Temple and crying over the ruined Sanctuary; where I am permitted
to caress the stones, to fondle the dust, and to weep over thy ruins.
I wept bitterly, but I found joy in my tears. I tore my garments, but
I felt relieved by it.” Nor does the Jew’s sublime optimism fail him
even in view of that desolation: “He who thought us worthy to let us
see Jerusalem in her desertion, he shall bless us to behold her again,
built and restored when the glory of the Lord will return unto her ...
you, my son, you all shall live to see the salvation of Jerusalem and
the comfort of Zion.”[298]
The example of this noble old man was followed by many Jews of Spain
and Germany, both in his own and in subsequent times. Down to this
day a pilgrimage to Jerusalem is considered a sacred duty, and many
devote the savings of a laborious life to defray the expenses of a last
visit to the Fatherland--“our own land.” Like shipwrecked mariners
long tost on the waves, they drift year after year from all parts of
the world to this harbour of rest and sorrow and hope. On the eve of
the Passover aged Jews and Jewesses of every country on earth may be
seen leaning against the grim ruin of the Temple--all that remains of
the magnificence of Israel--weeping and wailing for the fall of their
nation. They kiss the ancient stones, they water them with their tears,
and the place rings with their poignant lamentations.
And yet, though many come to lament the faded lustre of their race,
and are happy to die in Palestine, how many are there who would care
to live in it? This is a question to which different Jews would give
different answers. It may be urged that the longing for Zion is a
romantic dream which might lose much of its romance by realisation.
It can also be shown that the Jewish people has seldom thriven in
isolation; that a narrow environment is uncongenial to its temperament;
and that the Jew has always instinctively preferred the life which
is more suitable to the free development of his gifts--that is, the
life of competition with foreign nations. All this may be to a great
extent true; but, none the less, there are Jews who believe that the
majority of their race, or at all events the suffering portion of it,
would, under favourable conditions, gladly return to the land of their
ancestors. The same belief has been held by several distinguished
Christians, British and American, who at various times have lent their
support to the movement for Jewish rehabilitation--some actuated
by an enthusiasm for the Millennium, others by an enthusiasm for
British interests in the East. Among the latter may be mentioned Lord
Palmerston and Lord Salisbury, both of whom years ago countenanced
the attempts made to obtain from the Sultan a concession of territory
in Palestine for the purpose of establishing a self-governing Jewish
colony.[299]
But while the bulk of the race enjoyed comparative toleration, few
Jews were there found willing to relinquish the land of their adoption
for the gratification of a merely sentimental yearning towards that of
their remote forefathers. It was not until the revival of persecution
under its more rabid and sanguinary forms that the Zionist Utopia
became a living reality, and the assertion of Gentile Nationalism
led to a corresponding invigoration of Jewish Nationalism. Then the
Jews began to consider seriously the problem of the future of their
race, and to cast about, once more, for a refuge where they could
worship their God unmolested, develop their moral and intellectual
tendencies uninfluenced by an alien environment, and pursue their daily
occupations unfettered by legal restrictions. Such a refuge could only
be found in Palestine. One of the promoters of this idea summed up the
reasons, which led him to the choice of Palestine, in the following
terms:
“In Europe and America it is a crime to have an Oriental genius or
an Oriental nose; therefore, in God’s name, let the Jew go where his
genius will be free and his nose not remarked.”[300]
The massacres of Russian Jews in 1881 and 1882 coincided with the
publication of various schemes of rescue by members of the persecuted
race, who found many sympathisers outside Russia. The practical fruit
of the agitation was the birth, among other committees and societies
all over Russia and Roumania, of an association under the name of
“Chovevi (Lovers of) Zion,” the programme of which was to promote the
settlement of Jewish refugees in the Holy Land with a view to the
ultimate creation of an autonomous Jewish State. This was the origin
of the movement now known all over the world by the name of Zionism.
From the very first it met with a reception which proved how sincere
and how widespread was the desire for a return to the Land of Promise.
A writer, well qualified to speak on the subject, thus describes the
welcome accorded to the proposal: “It has seized upon the imagination
of the masses and produced a wave of enthusiasm in favour of emigration
to Palestine, the force and the extent of which only those who have
come in contact with it, as I have done, can appreciate.”[301]
It was not, however, until 1896, when Dr. Theodor Herzl came forward
with a definite plan, that the movement acquired cosmopolitan
importance and was placed on a solid practical foundation. Dr. Herzl
was a Jewish journalist of Vienna, born in Buda-Pesth on the 2nd of
May, 1860. He was the son of a well-to-do merchant, and was educated
in Vienna, where his parents had removed shortly after his birth.
Having for some time practised at the Bar, he subsequently gave up
Law for Literature, contributed to the _Berliner Tageblatt_ and other
journals, and wrote several novels and plays. In 1891 he was appointed
Paris correspondent of the Vienna _Neue Freie Presse_, and it was
during his sojourn in Paris that Dr. Herzl, filled with indignation
at the outburst of French anti-Semitism, and dismayed by the triumph
of the enemies of the Jews in Austria, resolved to undertake the lead
in the movement for the rescue of his co-religionists. Even if no
practical result were attained, he felt that the effort would not be
utterly wasted, as it would, at all events, tend--in the words of the
Zionist programme adopted at the first Congress in Basel, in 1897--to
promote “the strengthening of Jewish individual dignity and national
consciousness.”
Firm in this conviction, the young leader expounded his scheme in
a pamphlet which appeared in 1896 in the three principal European
languages, under the title, _The Jewish State: an attempt at a Modern
Solution of the Jewish Question_. According to Dr. Herzl’s proposal
the State was to be a self-governing republic tributary to the
Porte. Christian susceptibilities would be consulted, and diplomatic
complications avoided, by establishing the principle of broad religious
toleration, and by excluding from Jewish jurisdiction the scenes of
Christ’s life and death, and the shrines of the different Christian
communities in Palestine. The plan was received with applause by a
minority in every quarter, and Dr. Herzl found enthusiasts in both
hemispheres ready to help the cause with their pens and with their
purses. A Zionist newspaper was founded in Vienna (_Die Welt_), a
new Zionist Association was organised with numerous ramifications
in all parts of the Jewish world, and in less than seven years from
its beginning the movement numbered several hundred thousand of
adherents. The Association holds annual Congresses in various great
European centres, with a view to disseminating the idea, discussing all
details connected with the movement and deciding on the practical steps
necessary to its success.
It is obvious that the first requisite was the Turkish Government’s
consent to the acquisition of land in Palestine on the terms already
described. For this purpose Dr. Herzl paid a visit to Yildiz Kiosk
in May, 1901, and again in August, 1902. The latter expedition was
undertaken in response to a telegraphic invitation from the Sultan
himself, who expressed the desire to be informed of the precise
programme of the Zionists. Regular conferences took place with high
officials both of the Palace and of the Porte, and in the end Dr. Herzl
drew up and laid before Abdul Hamid a minute statement of his views,
explaining the demands of the Zionists and formulating the conditions
of a Jewish settlement in a part of Palestine and elsewhere in Asia
Minor, on the basis of a charter. The proposals were duly considered,
and the Sultan expressed his deep sympathy with the Jewish people, but
the concessions which he was prepared to make for a Jewish settlement
were not considered adequate by the leaders of the Zionist movement,
and the negotiations led to no definite result.[302]
Indeed, the obstacles in the way of a satisfactory arrangement on the
basis of the Zionist programme are neither few nor small. The Turks, it
is true, have always displayed towards the Jews a degree of toleration
such as the latter have seldom experienced at the hands of Christians.
As we have seen, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Turkey was
the only country that offered an asylum to the Jewish refugees from
the West. Religious sympathy may be partially responsible for this
toleration, strengthened by the fact that the Jews of Turkey, devoid of
all national aspirations, are distinguished among the Sultan’s subjects
by their loyalty to the Ottoman rule, and by their readiness to help
the Porte in the suppression of Christian rebellion. It has also been
suggested that Abdul Hamid was anxious, by a display of sympathy
with the Jews generally and the Zionists in particular, to secure
their powerful championship in the West against the host of enemies
which the Armenian massacres had raised to his Empire. Hence the
present Sultan’s attitude towards the race--an attitude which in its
benevolence contrasts strongly, if not strangely, with the treatment
meted out to his Christian subjects. In 1901 Abdul Hamid appointed
members of the Hebrew community to important posts in the Turkish army,
and attached two more to his personal entourage. On another occasion,
when a blood-accusation was brought against the Jews by the Christians
of the East, he caused the local authorities to take steps to prove its
groundlessness and clear the Jews of the heinous charge. And yet, it
would be hard to imagine the Sultan giving his sanction to the creation
of a fresh nationality within his Empire, and thus adding a new
political problem to the list, already sufficiently long, which makes
up the contemporary history of Turkey. Moreover, concerning the return
of the Jews to the Land of Promise, there are certain old prophecies to
whose fulfilment no true Mohammedan can be expected to contribute. For
both these reasons, political and religious, the Turkish Government in
1882, upon hearing that the Jews who fled from Russia were meditating
an immigration into Palestine, hastened to arrest the movement.
But, even if the Sultan could be brought, as Dr. Herzl hoped, “to
perceive the advantages that would accrue to his Empire from a Jewish
settlement on the basis of the Zionist programme,” it should not
be forgotten that the Sultan is not the only, or indeed the most
important, agent in the matter. Palestine, and Asia Minor generally,
is a field for the eventual occupation of which struggle most of the
Great Powers of Europe. Missions of a semi-religious, semi-political
character, representing several European nationalities, and sedulously
supported by several European Governments, have long been at work in
the land. Among them may be mentioned the Russian, the French, the
Italian, and the German. Russia, who persecutes the Jews at home,
would not see with any degree of pleasure a hostile population,
consisting for the most part of her own victims, settled in a province
to the ultimate absorption of which she aspires; the less so as
that population will in all probability be under British influence.
Although, for reasons not difficult to fathom, the Russian Consuls in
Palestine and Syria are instructed to extend over the Russian Jews in
those countries a protection with which the latter very often would
gladly dispense, the Russian Minister of Finance, in 1902, forbade the
sale of the Jewish Colonial Trust shares in the Czar’s dominions--a
step which created great perturbation in the ranks of Polish Zionists,
the most deeply affected by the prohibition.[303] This measure,
harmonising as it does with Russia’s well-known designs in Palestine,
throws on that Power’s real attitude towards Zionism a light too
clear to be affected even by the Russian Government’s assurances of
a benevolent interest in the movement.[304] An analogous opposition,
in a minor degree, may reasonably be anticipated on the part of the
rival Powers, especially Germany, and that despite the promises which
the German Emperor made to the delegation of Zionists who waited on
him during his visit to Palestine in 1898. Both Russia and Germany
enjoy a strong ascendancy over the present Sultan, whose fear of the
one Power and appreciation of the other’s friendship are too lively
to permit of any action calculated to offend either. The Christians
of the East are also a power to be reckoned with, and they, any more
than the Christians of the West, would not bear to see the sanctuary
of Christendom falling into the hands of the “enemies of Christ.” The
extra-territorialisation of Jerusalem has indeed been suggested by
the Zionists. But is it to be expected that the Jews will ever really
resign themselves to the final abandonment of Zion? The more powerful
they grew in Palestine the less inclined would they be to suffer the
ancient capital of their nation to remain in any hands but Israel’s.
To these external difficulties must be added the lack of unanimity
among the Jews themselves. Although the Zionist movement is undoubtedly
enjoying a considerable measure of popularity, it is subject to
a measure of opposition no less considerable. The great Jewish
financiers of the West, who, thanks to their wealth, have little
reason to complain of persecution, have hitherto shown themselves
coldly sceptical, or even contemptuous, towards the idea. Nor has
its reception been more cordial among the high spiritual authorities
of Israel. Both these classes hold that the plan of restoration,
even if it prove feasible, is not desirable. To the cultured and
prosperous Jew of the West the prospect of exchanging the comforts
and elegant luxuries of civilised life in a European or American city
for the barren obscurity of an Asiatic province is not alluring. The
re-settlement of Israel in Palestine has no charm for him. To him the
old prophecies are an incumbrance, and their fulfilment would be a
disappointment. For such a Jew nothing could be more inexpedient or
more embarrassing than the advent of the Messiah. This attitude is
well illustrated by a saying attributed to a member of the wealthiest
Jewish family in Europe: “If ever the Messiah came,” is this gentleman
reported to have said, “I would apply for the post of Palestinian
ambassador in London.” Less polished, but not less significant, was
another Western Jew’s terse reply to the question whether he would go
to Palestine: “Pas si bête.”
Even so, what time Cyrus permitted the captives of Babylon to
return to the land of their fathers, many preferred to remain in
rich Mesopotamia. The sacrifice of present comfort in the pursuit
of a romantic ideal presupposes a degree of emotional fervour and
of material wretchedness that it would be unreasonable, if not
uncharitable, to demand from a whole nation. But this opposition,
or indifference, to the Zionist efforts at repatriation does
not necessarily and in all cases spring from worldly motives of
self-indulgence. It is only one manifestation of a sincere divergence
of sentiment which has its sources deep in the past of the Jewish race,
or, one might say, of human nature, and which can only be adequately
treated in a separate work on Modern Judaism. Here it is sufficient
to describe it only in so far as it bears on the subject immediately
under discussion. Zionism, while acclaimed with enthusiasm by the Jews
of the East, has met in the West with two sets of adversaries who,
though asunder as the poles, have found a common standpoint in their
opposition to the movement. These adversaries are the extreme Liberal
and the extreme Orthodox Jews of Western Europe and America--the
Sadducees and Pharisees of to-day. The one scoffs at the movement as
too idealistic, the other as not idealistic enough. The contempt of
the one is based on commonsense; that of the other on the Bible. The
one objects to all Messiahs; the other refuses to follow any but _the_
Messiah. To the one Dr. Herzl appeared as a dreamer of dreams; to the
other as a prosaic utilitarian. The sentimental aim of Zionism is an
offence in the eyes of the one; the other condemns its methods as
sordidly practical. They both, starting from diametrically opposite
premises, arrive at the conclusion that the movement is a set-back of
Jewish history, an agitation, artificial and superfluous, which “has no
roots in the past and no fruits to offer for the future.”
The Liberal Jew’s ideal is not separation from the natives of the
country of his adoption, but assimilation to them. He has long lived
in political freedom. All careers are open to him; all objects of
distinction for which men strive are within his reach. He is an ardent
patriot. The political toleration to which he owes his liberty is
accompanied by a religious breadth, or may be scepticism, in which he
fully participates. Like his Christian neighbour, he is content to live
in the present. He has gradually abandoned the ceremonial observances
of the Law and the belief in a Messianic restoration, and is trying
to obliterate all traces of tribal distinction. By intermarriage and
education he endeavours to identify himself with the country of which
he is a citizen. In point of nationality he calls himself a German,
a Frenchman, an Italian, an Englishman, or an American. In point of
creed he may be a Reformed Jew, a Unitarian, a Theist, an Atheist, or a
placid Agnostic. This attitude is as intelligible as the sentiment from
which it springs is respectable. Such a Jew feels that he cannot be a
citizen of two cities. He must choose; and in his choice he is guided
by self-analysis. He feels that the country of his birth has greater
claims upon him than the country of his remote origin; that he has more
in common with his next-door neighbours than with the Patriarchs and
Prophets of Asia.
To this category evidently belongs the anonymous author of a book that
may be regarded as the Liberal Jew’s _apologia pro vita sua_. After
having demonstrated that among modern Jews there is, strictly speaking,
neither racial nor religious unity, the writer goes on to explain what,
in his opinion, should be the attitude of “the modern Occidental Jew”:
“Such a Jew, educated in an English, German, French, or American school
and university, is certainly in looks, manners, character, habits,
tastes, and ideas as different from a Jew of Turkey, or Egypt, or
Russia as he can well be. The people to whom he corresponds in all
essential points are the people of his own country in which he was
born and bred and has lived.... Now, what must such an Occidental
Jew say of himself, if he is true to himself, and if he recognises
truth in all matters as the supreme guide of man? He will have to
say that the strict racial unity of the Jews is doubtful, even with
regard to the past; and as regards the present he will have to deny it
altogether.”[305]
The author proceeds to point out that, with regard to his moral and
intellectual development, the Occidental Jew has undergone the same
educational influences as his Christian compatriot and contemporary:
Hebraism, through the Bible, Hellenism through the Renaissance,
Catholicism, Chivalry, Reformation, French Revolution: “He must
finally, above all, remember his indebtedness to the moral standard
of modern times, that love of man as man which is the result of no one
of these currents alone, but is the outcome of the action of all of
them, and to the standard of truth, as intensified by modern science.
Now, realising all this, he must admit that a very small portion of
his moral and intellectual existence is Jewish in the Oriental sense
of the term, and he cannot thus be cramped back into the laws which
are to govern the thought and life of a Jew as laid down in the Talmud
and embraced by the practices of the devout and observant Jew. He is
speaking and living a lie if he denies this by word or deed.”[306]
The practical question arises: “Recognising the evils of racial
exclusiveness, what ought such a modern Occidental Jew to do?” The
answer is: “He has simply to live up to his convictions in every
detail of his life. He must not only, as he has ever done, perform
the duties of a citizen in the country in which he lives, fully and
conscientiously, but he must refuse, as far as the race question goes,
in any way to recognise the separate claims of the Jews within his
country.... He may feel justly proud of being a descendant of a race
which is not only the oldest and purest, but has through many centuries
steadfastly followed the guidance of a great spiritual idea to the
blessing of mankind, just as a Norman, or a Saxon, or a Celt in Great
Britain may, when called upon to do so, consider, and be gratified
by, the memory of his own racial origin. Beyond this he must not go.
He must spurn and avoid all those symbols and rites which have been
established to signify a separate, even though a chosen, people. His
marriage and his choice of friends must be exclusively guided by those
considerations of inner affinity which are likely to make such unions
perfect as far as things human can be perfect.”[307]
Such a Jew’s advice, if asked by his less advanced brethren of Eastern
Europe, would be, not to perpetuate the narrowness of antiquity, but
to share in the broad development of modern civilisation. Not to go
back to the political and religious isolation of Palestine, but to
move on with the political and religious progress of modern Europe
and America: to seek for light not in the East but in the West. He
regards the memories of Israel with indifference, and its aspirations
with perplexity. He can hardly enter into his Polish brother’s soul
and realise his modes of thought and feeling. To him the longing for
Zion is an incomprehensible mystery, the attempt to gratify it a wild
and hopeless adventure. If Eastern Europe will not have the Jews, he
is ready to help them to migrate to Western Europe, or to America; but
with the Zionist Utopia he neither can nor will have anything to do.
When told that Western Europe has eloquently declared her hostility,
and America may soon follow, he calmly answers that anti-Semitism is a
passing cloud; the wind which has wafted it over the western sky will,
sooner or later, dissipate it.
Precisely similar are the views entertained by the cultured minority
of Russian and more especially of Polish Jews. Despite the strong
anti-Semitic feeling displayed by the Christian inhabitants of those
countries, the more advanced representatives of the race offer a
vigorous opposition to Zionism and its separatist tendencies, holding
that the re-animation of Jewish national sentiment is a temporary
infatuation due to the cruel treatment of the Jews and destined to die
out with it. These Jews also have abandoned the old Jewish national
ideals, convinced that a man may frequent a Jewish synagogue and have
a Semitic nose and yet be as good a Polish or Russian patriot as any
other. They feel that a thousand years’ residence in Poland has weaned
them effectually from any sentimental attachment to Palestine and that,
born and bred as they are in the North, they are physically unfit for
a southern climate. In one word, they consider themselves both in body
and in mind children of the land in which they have lived and suffered
for so many centuries.
In direct opposition to this type of Jew stands the irreconcilable and
uncompromising Israelite--a man who after twenty centuries’ residence
in the West still persists in calling himself Oriental, in cultivating
obedience to antiquated modes of thought, and in adhering to formulas
obsolete and, in his altered circumstances, a trifle absurd. Like the
Zionist of the Russian pale, this Oriental Jew of the West is ready
to exclaim with the Psalmist: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my
right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue
cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my
chief joy.” But, unlike the Russian Zionist, he declines to support
the movement, the object of which is to restore him to Jerusalem.
His wish is to remain distinct from the Gentiles, and yet to remain
amongst them. He clings to the Pharisaic ideal of social isolation,
while he recoils from geographical and political segregation. He
abhors the Liberal Jew’s doctrine of assimilation and ridicules the
Zionist’s efforts at repatriation. Is the heroic endurance of Israel
under all its sufferings to lead to nothing but racial extinction by
intermarriage--the very thing which, had it been allowed to happen
twenty centuries ago, would have obviated those sufferings? Such an
idea implies a negation of divine justice, and lowers the solemn
tragedy of Jewish history into something quite different. It also forms
a negation of what the orthodox Jew holds to be the mission of Israel
on earth. This mission, according to the orthodox Jew of the West, is
to maintain intact the monotheistic dogma among the nations of the
world. In order to fulfil this mission, Israel must remain severely
apart and yet scattered among the nations. It is the argument “that it
may possibly have been God’s will and meaning, that the Jews should
remain a quiet light among the nations for the purpose of pointing at
the doctrine of the unity of God”--an argument which Coleridge answered
by his famous retort: “The religion of the Jews is, indeed, a light;
but it is as the light of the glow-worm, which gives no heat and
illumines nothing but itself,”[308] and which a modern Jewish writer
has described as “a controversial fiction.”[309] It might, perhaps, be
more justly described as an unhappy afterthought.
A Jew of this type may, or may not, believe in the ultimate political
restoration of his race; but if he believes in it, he holds that it
is to be brought about by some mysterious and miraculous dispensation
of Providence, such as the Pharisees expected to bring about the
conversion of the heathen. He opposes Zionism on the ground that it
discredits Providence by striving to effect by human means that which,
according to the prophets, is to be the special task of God. His
attitude is that of the typical Oriental. Persuaded of the futility of
personal action, he trusts in a vague impersonal Power which envelops
all things and shapes the course of events to an inevitable and
predestined end.
An eminent example of this way of looking at life is presented by a
recent publication, apparently authoritative, though anonymous. On the
one hand the author deplores the liberalism of the Occidental Jew, and
on the other he denounces the Zionism of Dr. Herzl. With regard to the
first, he says: “The miraculous preservation of the Jews is itself an
argument for their election. By every law and rule of history they
should have been exterminated long since, yet we see them to-day in
all parts of the world, fighting steadily and pertinaciously for the
purpose they are set to fulfil. That purpose carries with it the bar on
intermarriage, which, despite occasional breaches, is still jealously
observed by the overwhelming majority of Jews as an essential condition
of their survival.”[310] The purpose in question is the one explained
already, “to be a light to the nations.” With regard to Zionism, the
author’s position is, to say the least, very emphatically set forth.
For that movement, and for its leader, he reserves some of his choicest
sarcasms. Dr. Herzl is “this redoubtable Moses from the Press-club”;
he is accused of having “traded on the resources of prophecy”; “Dr.
Herzl, with ingenious effrontery, represented his scheme of evading the
mission of the exiles, and their duty to the lands of their dispersion,
as a fulfilment of the ancient prophecy.” “Dr. Herzl and those who
think with him are traitors to the history of the Jews.” These and
similar titles are abundantly bestowed on the man who has been guilty
of the heinous sin of seeking to redeem his co-religionists from the
house of bondage by purely human means, without waiting for a direct
interference on the part of the Deity,--or of the European Concert:
“The restoration of the Jews to the land of their old independence,”
affirms the author, “may occur in one of two ways. It may be by the
concerted act of the Governments of the countries of their dispersion,
devised as a measure of self-protection against the spread of the
Jews; or by the fulfilment of prophecy when the Jewish mission is
complete.... But Dr. Herzl’s plan makes short work of the spiritual
element in the new exodus of Jewry. He would force the hand of
Providence. The restoration, instead of occurring on the appointed end
of the dispersion, would be interpolated in the middle of it as a means
of evading its obligations. This plan, which is a travesty of Judaism,
is equally futile as statecraft.”[311]
Many Jews also, who sympathise with the Zionist idea, shrink from
associating themselves with a movement which for the attainment of
its object must necessarily solicit the favour of Abdul Hamid. They
feel that the Sultan, owing to his drastic methods in the treatment of
domestic complaints, is not popular abroad, and they, not unreasonably,
apprehend that any practical advantages which the movement might derive
from its relations with the Sultan would be more than counterbalanced
by the loss of the moral support of the Christian nations.
Lastly, even among Dr. Herzl’s own adherents, the men who year after
year gathered from all parts of the world in Basel, drawn thither by
one common desire, there did not reign that degree of concord which
is essential for the success of any enterprise of the magnitude of
the Zionist movement. The proceedings in those congresses have been
described by a Jew of the Occidental school with a vivacity which need
not be less accurate because it is prompted by candid scepticism.
“There,” says the chronicler, “at the gateway to the playground of
more than one continent, the Zionists met annually to disagree in
many languages on the advisability of setting up Israel among the
nations again; and here the descendants of Abraham proved themselves no
longer a race but a fortuitous concourse of peoples: an exceptionally
cosmopolitan and polyglot multitude. More than that, their differences
were accentuated by the very enthusiasm that had drawn them together.
The Zionism of the English stockbroker and the French _boulevardier_
is different entirely from the sacred hope which the same word
connotes for the rabbi of Eastern Europe.... The young, up-to-date
German student in University club cap, who looked as if he might have
stepped out of ‘Old Heidelberg,’ made no secret of his contempt for the
gabardined and long-curled rabbi. To the latter the cigarette which the
student coolly puffed on the Sabbath was desecration; the non-Jewish
meals in which the student indulged daily were regarded with pious
horror and indignation. Not for this had the other come to Basel, and
the sad-eyed and silent delegate who tramped half-way across Europe on
what he deemed a holy pilgrimage sighed and thought that Israel was in
greater darkness in the centre of its new-born hope than in the unhappy
land of persecution wherein he was suffered to exist. Nor here did he
expect to see the sacred Mosaic ordinances openly flouted, nor those
who had committed the greatest of sins--that of marrying out of the
faith--received with enthusiasm. Intermarriage is the very antithesis
of the Zionistic ideal, and here they were endeavouring to run hand
in hand. Here is the canker which is gnawing at the hope of the sons
of Zion. The Jewish race has always been held inseparable from the
religion of Judaism, and it will ever remain so. But the old tradition,
‘All Israel are brethren,’ no longer holds good for all that. Like the
Christian, the Jew is now a member first of the land that gave him
birth, or which he adopts, and a Jew afterwards.”
The writer goes on to comment on the inevitable outcome of this
diversity among the delegates: sections, plotting and counter-plotting
against one another, faction, cabal, personal animus, tumult,
Babel.[312]
This lack of unanimity will, no doubt, become more and more pronounced
as the movement advances from the purely theoretical to the practical
stage. Let us for a moment picture Israel back in Palestine. Each
community of immigrants, bound together by the ties of language, habit,
and particular home associations, will live in a separate quarter.
They will instinctively cling to their mother tongue and bring up
their children in it. The British Jews will despise their Polish and
Roumanian brethren as ignorant, and will, in their turn, be despised by
them as spurious Jews. The Spanish-speaking Sephardim will scorn and be
scorned by the Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim. All the differences, social
and national, which underlie the religious unity of Israel will emerge
to the surface. The feeling of brotherly equality will be superseded
by class distinctions and, in one word, freedom will bring about the
disruption which oppression had checked. Even as it is, the difference
between the various sections of the Jewish inhabitants of Palestine is
noticeable at every turn. There is, for instance, a small community,
dwelling in a secluded valley of Northern Galilee and first discovered
by Lord Kitchener in the course of his survey work in Palestine. These
are said to be the remnant of the ancient inhabitants. They speak the
tongue of their Syrian neighbours--an Arabic dialect retaining many
elements of Aramaic--they till the soil as their neighbours do, and,
though scrupulous in the observance of their religion and abstaining
from intermarriage with outsiders, they live on the best of terms with
them. On the other hand, the Jewish immigrants are not only distinct
in dress, dialect, and mode of living from these native Jews, but are
amongst themselves divided by the barrier of language, the Spanish Jews
being utterly unable to understand or to make themselves understood
to their brethren from Northern and Central Europe, though they all
employ the Hebrew characters in writing; and by manners, the Spanish
immigrants, owing to their longer residence in the country, being more
Oriental than the new-comers. The Sephardim have adopted the Eastern
garb and head-dress, and, besides their Spanish mother-tongue, also
speak Arabic. The Russian and Polish Jews are clad in long flowing
gowns of silk or cloth, and their heads are covered with fur caps.
The German Jews affect the quaint long coat and low wide-awake of
the land of their origin. None of the Ashkenazim are permitted by
their Rabbis to learn Arabic. Their domestic life is that of the
Western _Judenstadt_. But they all cultivate the long ringlets which
the Levitic law prescribes. Not less marked is their difference in
character, “The Sephardim,” a recent traveller attests, “are tolerant,
easy-going, and sociable. They earn their living largely by manual
labour, are fishers at Tiberias, porters at Jerusalem and Jaffa. The
Ashkenazim limit their activities to traffic, shun work with their
hands, are rigid separatists, sticklers for the observance of the oral
law, and conservative in their Judaism. The Sephardim are stationary in
numbers; the Ashkenazim increase by leaps and bounds. They constitute
the wave of Jewish immigration and stand for the development of Judaism
in Palestine. There are two other sections of Jews in the country
insignificant in number. One comes from Bokhara, the other from
Yemen; the latter are very poor, and follow the humblest callings.
The shoe-blacks of Jerusalem are recruited from their ranks. These
various groups of the Jewish population, one in race and faith, are
so strongly marked off from each other that they may be regarded as
diverse nationalities.”[313] Finally, it should be added that, besides
the orthodox Jews, both Chassidim and Karaites are represented in the
population of the country.
Diversity of political ideals will intensify the discord arising
from social, sectarian, and national differences. In the new Jewish
commonwealth, it is to be feared, the old feud between the Pharisees
and the Sadducees will be revived under a new aspect. The more
advanced Jews from the West will be anxious to administer the country
on Western, that is secular, principles. The Rabbis, with the fanatical
populace of Eastern, Polish, and Roumanian Jews at their back, will
insist on establishing on a large scale that supremacy of the Synagogue
which formed the basis of the ancient Hebrew State, and of the internal
constitution of the Jewish communities whilst in exile. And the Rabbis
will be supported by the traditions of the race. The Jewish catechism
distinctly states that the Law of Moses is only in abeyance, and that
“whenever the Jews return to their own land, and again constitute a
state, it will have full force.” Synagogue and State will thus repeat
the struggle which Church and State waged in Christendom for so many
centuries. And, whichever party won, the result would be almost equally
disastrous. Should the Rabbis succeed in establishing the Levitical
polity the country would, in the opinion of a high authority, “either
pass away through internal chaos or would so offend the modern
political spirit that it would be soon extinguished from outside. If
it were secular, it would not be a Jewish State. The great bulk of its
present supporters would refuse to live in it, and it would ultimately
be abandoned to an outlander population consisting of Hebrew Christians
and Christian Millennarians.”[314]
However, be the practical difficulties as serious as they may, so long
as anti-Semitism endures the enthusiasm for Zionism is bound to endure.
Mr. Israel Zangwill, one of the most eminent champions of the cause in
England, has repeatedly expounded the views of his brother-Zionists.
In his address to a meeting in May, 1903, he declared that “the only
solution of the Jewish question was to be found in a legally-assured
home in Palestine.” He pointed to the recent butchery of the Jews at
Kishineff as a proof “that the question was just where it was in the
Middle Ages,” and expressed his conviction that “the rest of Europe
also tended to slide back into the Dark Ages.” Hence arises the
necessity for leaving Europe. Referring to Baron Hirsch’s emigration
scheme, Mr. Zangwill said, “Baron Hirsch left £2,000,000 for emigration
only, and £7,000,000 for emigration principally. His trustees had
reduced emigration to a minimum. They despaired of emigration. But
because colonists in the Argentine and Canada were a failure, was that
a reason for despair? How dared they despair till they had tried the
one land to which the Jew’s heart turned?”[315]
In August of the same year the Zionist Congress met at Basel, and
several interesting details were given concerning the progress of the
movement. It was stated that the number of members had risen from
120,000 to 320,000, all of whom were directly represented at the
Congress by so-called shekel payments. The Report of the Committee
of Management showed that the year’s receipts amounted to £9886,
that Zionism was on the increase everywhere, and that the Zionist
Colonial Bank in London was already declaring small dividends.[316]
This bank, it should be noted, was founded under the name of Jewish
Colonial Trust, with a capital of £2,000,000 in £1 shares, over
£350,000 of which has been subscribed from among the poorer Jews,
with the result that it boasts no fewer than 135,000 shareholders.
In addition to this institution, two more Jewish National Funds have
been started, one of them known as the Shekel Account. In October of
the same year the Odessa newspapers reported that a number of persons,
acting on behalf of 107 Jews, mostly of the working classes, were
taking steps to effect, through the medium of the Colonial Bank, the
purchase of an immense tract of land in Palestine for the purpose
of colonisation.[317] In the Zionist Congress of 1904 there were
represented about 2,500 organisations in various parts of the world.
These facts amply prove that Zionism has stirred a very real enthusiasm
among a vast section of the Jewish race, even though it has stirred an
equally real opposition.
In the meantime the Jewish population of Palestine has been increasing
steadily and rapidly, by immigration chiefly of Ashkenazim refugees
from Central and Northern Europe. In 1872 there were scarcely 10,000
Jews in the Holy Land; by 1882 they had risen to 20,000; in 1890 there
were only 25,000; in 1902 they were estimated at 60,000--distributed
in the various towns of Jaffa, Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias, and others.
In all these places are to be seen new Jewish colonies housed in neat
white-washed buildings which stretch in barrack-like lines--the bounty
of a Rothschild or a Montefiore. In addition to these urban colonies,
there are numerous agricultural settlements in Central Judaea, Samaria,
and Galilee. Immigration, stimulated by the persecution to which
the Hebrew race is subjected in Eastern Europe, and facilitated by
the construction of the Jaffa-Jerusalem railway, which has now been
running for twelve years, continues, partly under the auspices of
the _Alliance Israélite Universelle_. This society maintains many
schools for boys and girls, endeavouring to infuse French culture and
the new spirit into the ancient body of Judaism, which in Tiberias
especially has always sought its refuge and its tomb. Besides general
instruction, the pursuits of agriculture and gardening are assiduously
encouraged. From the elementary schools the most promising pupils
are sent to the Professional School of Jerusalem or to the Model
Farm of Mikweh, founded in 1870, whence, at the conclusion of their
studies, the students are placed in the Jewish colonies of Palestine
and Syria as head-gardeners and directors of agriculture, while
others are apprenticed to handicrafts, thus being gradually formed a
population both morally and materially equipped for life’s work under
modern conditions. The agricultural colonies, divided into three
groups--Palestine, Samaria, and Galilee--have helped, it is said, to
attach to the soil some 5000 out of the 60,000 Jews of the country.
Other centres of the same nature are in the course of formation across
the Jordan, towards the Howran range of mountains, where vast tracts
of land were acquired a few years ago, and are slowly reclaimed from
the waste of sand, rock, and marsh by the perseverance and untiring
industry of the Jewish colonists.
But, while dwelling on this bright side of the Zionist movement--the
side of enlightened enterprise--it is well to note another side not
so promising. The recent traveller, already quoted, gives a very
pessimistic account of his impressions. It is to be hoped that his
statements are exaggerated and his pessimism inordinate; but, in the
interests of historic truth, we feel compelled to listen to his tale:
“The Ashkenazim,” he tells us, “preponderate so largely as to swamp
the others. If there is ever a Jewish State, it will be Ashkenazim.
The great mass of them is located in Jerusalem, and the rest in Safed,
Tiberias, and Hebron. Gregarious by instinct, urban by habit, they
herd together in the towns, creating new ghettos similar to those
they have left in Europe. A fraction of them maintain themselves by
petty commerce; the rest live on Haluka, a fund provided by their
wealthy co-religionists in the West. This amounts to £50,000 annually
in Jerusalem. Its object is to enable its recipients to study the
Talmud and engage in religious exercises vicariously for those who
contribute it. Haluka is a fruitful source of sloth and hypocrisy, and
places undue power in the hands of the rabbis who are charged with
its administration. To those who know only the trading Jew of our
commercial centres, the modern Sadducees, it reveals a new aspect of
the race--that of the Jew turning aside from all enterprise, content
to live in pious mendicancy, his sole business the observance of the
minutiae of the ceremonial law; the Jew who binds on his phylactery,
wears long ringlets brought down in front of the ears in obedience to
a Levitical precept, and shuns the carrying of a pocket-handkerchief
on the Sabbath, save as a bracelet or a garter. Haluka is a mistake
and a stumbling-block in the path of Zionism. To turn Palestine into a
vast almshouse is not the way to lay the foundation of a Jewish State.
It attracts swarms of slothful bigots whose religion begins and ends
with externals, a salient example of ‘the letter that killeth,’ whose
Pharisaic piety has no influence on their conduct in life. It has
established an unproductive population of inefficients, drawn from the
least desirable element of the race. Its evil effect is patent, and the
better sort of Jews themselves condemn it or advise its restriction
to the aged and infirm. It is depressing to move among crowds of
burly men, contributing nothing to the commonweal, puffed up with
self-satisfied bigotry and proud of their useless existence. Left to
his own devices the Jew gives the land a wide berth and sticks to the
town. But Western philanthropy has expended much money and energy in
putting him on to the land, rightly judging that the foundations of a
nation cannot be laid on the hawking of lead-pencils among the Bedawin
who do not want them.
“An agricultural college has been established near Jaffa, but it was
found that the youths availed themselves of the excellent general
education it afforded in order, not to till the land, but to engage
in more congenial and more profitable pursuits. Agricultural colonies
were founded, and the colonists, in addition to free land, seed, and
implements, were endowed by M. Edmund de Rothschild with 3 francs a
day for every man, 2 francs for every woman, and 1 franc for every
child. This enabled the recipients to sit down and employ Arabs to do
the work, and has been stopped, to the great chagrin of the colonists.
As a matter of fact, the best of the farms to-day depend on native
labour. The mattock and the hoe are repugnant to the Jewish colonists,
who all seek for places in the administration. The financial result is
not cheering. The most prosperous concern, perhaps, is the wine-growing
establishment of Rishon le Sion. Wine-making is the one industry the
Jews take to. They practise it individually on a small scale. The
Western tourist in Hebron is invariably accosted by some ringleted
Israelite, who proffers him his ‘guter Wein,’ and his thoughts go back
to childhood and that Brobdingnagian cluster of grapes which the spies
bore between them from the neighbouring valley of Eschol. The attitude
of the Jew with respect to agriculture is not to be wondered at. His
hereditary tendencies are against it. Centuries of urban life and
urban pursuits lie behind him. Inured to no exercise save that of his
wits, poor in physique, unused to the climate, can it be expected that
this child of the ghetto should turn to and compete with the strong
brown-lined Judaean peasant on the burning hillside? The one exception
is to be found in the Bulgarian Jews of Sephardim stock. Hardy,
stalwart, accustomed to tillage, these have made efficient farmers, and
next to them come the Jews from Roumania. But with every inducement to
settle on the land, and all sorts of props and aids, the agricultural
Jews in Palestine number only about 1000 out of an ever-augmenting
population. The fact is significant.”[318]
Another point worth serious consideration is the political situation
created by Jewish immigration into Palestine. The colonists, the
majority of whom come from Russia, are a bone of contention between
the rival foreign propagandas in the country. The Russians, as has
been seen, while massacring the Jews in Bessarabia, court their
favour in Syria. The German Emperor, while tolerating anti-Semitism
in the Fatherland, earns the thanks of the Zionists by his affability
towards the exiles. The French, through the educational efforts of the
_Alliance Israélite_, whose pupils were hitherto mainly drawn from
the Spanish Jews, seek to turn the Jews of Palestine, as of other
parts of the Near East, into apostles of Gallic preponderance and into
instruments for the promotion of Gallic interests. The Zionists are
regarded by the French supporters of the _Alliance_ as its adversaries,
and that for the reason that, while the mission of the _Alliance_, as
it is understood by the French, is the extension of the Republic’s
influence, and, therefore, very remotely connected with the religious
and national aspirations of the Jewish people, these aspirations are
precisely the point on which the Zionists lay the greatest stress.[319]
Lastly, the poverty of Palestine is a source of infinite difficulties
which can only be overcome by proportionate labour. Mr. Zangwill has
very eloquently described these conditions in one of his speeches: “My
friends,” he said, “you cannot buy Palestine. If you had a hundred
millions you could only buy the place where Palestine once stood.
Palestine itself you must re-create by labour, till it flows again with
milk and honey. The country is a good country. But it needs a great
irrigation scheme. To return there needs no miracle--already a third of
the population are Jews. If the Almighty Himself carried the rest of us
to Palestine by a miracle, what should we gain except a free passage?
In the sweat of our brow we must earn our Palestine. And, therefore,
the day we get Palestine, if the most joyous, will also be the most
terrible day of our movement.”[320]
It was the consideration of the various obstacles enumerated above,
and others of a similar nature, coupled with the urgent need to find a
home for those wretched outcasts whose refuge in England was menaced by
the anti-alien agitation, that induced Dr. Herzl, in July 1903, acting
on Mr. Chamberlain’s suggestion,[321] to propose that an agreement
should be entered into between the British Government and the Jewish
Colonial Trust for the establishment of a Jewish settlement in British
East Africa. The British Government, anxious to find a way out of the
“Alien Invasion” difficulty, welcomed the proposal, and Lord Lansdowne
expressed his readiness to afford every facility to the Commission
which, it was suggested, should be sent by the Zionists to East Africa
for purposes of investigation. If a suitable site could be found, the
Foreign Secretary professed himself willing “to entertain favourably
proposals for the establishment of a Jewish colony on conditions
which will enable the members to observe their national customs. For
this purpose he would be prepared to discuss the details of a scheme
comprising as its main features the grant of a considerable area of
land, the appointment of a Jewish official as the chief of the local
administration, and permission to the colony to have a free hand in
regard to municipal legislation, and the management of religious and
purely domestic matters; such local autonomy being conditional on the
right of His Majesty’s Government to exercise general control.”[322]
This project was announced at one of the meetings of the Zionist
Congress at Basel in August, 1903, and the motion submitted to the
Congress for the appointment of a committee, who should send an
expedition to East Africa in order to make investigations on the spot,
was adopted. But, though 295 voted in its favour, it was opposed by a
great minority of 177 votes, and the Russian delegates left the hall
as a protest. In a mass meeting of Zionists held in the following May
in London Mr. Israel Zangwill spoke warmly in favour of the proposal,
urging on his fellow-Zionists to take advantage of the offer made
by the British Government. But he added, “The Jewish Colonisation
Association, the one body that should have welcomed this offer of
territory with both hands, stood aloof.”[323] Indeed, it cannot be said
that this new departure of Zionism has commanded universal approval.
Nor did opposition to the scheme confine itself to platonic
protests. In the following December, Dr. Max Nordau, one of the most
distinguished men of letters among Dr. Herzl’s followers, who had
declared himself at the Basel Congress of the previous August in
favour of the proposal, was fired at in Paris by a Russian Jew, who
in his cross-examination before the Magistrate confessed that, in
making that attempt on Dr. Nordau’s life, he aimed at the enemy of the
Jewish race--the supporter of a scheme which involved the abandonment
by Zionists of Palestine as the object of the movement.[324] The
incident afforded a painful proof of want of concord, not only among
the Jews generally, not only among the supporters of various movements
all theoretically recognising the necessity of emigration, but even
among the partisans themselves of the Zionist cause. Dr. Herzl,
anxious to allay the ill-feeling aroused by his alleged abandonment
of the Zionist idea, wrote a letter to Sir Francis Montefiore, the
president of the English Zionist Federation, repudiating any desire
to divert the movement away from the Holy Land and to direct it
to East Africa. Nothing, he protested, could be further from the
truth. He felt convinced that the solution of the Jewish problem
could only be effected in that country, Palestine, with which are
indelibly associated the historic and sentimental bias of the Jewish
people. But as the British Government had been generous enough to
offer territory for an autonomous settlement, it would have been
impossible and unreasonable to do otherwise than give the offer careful
consideration.[325]
The clouds of misconception of which Dr. Herzl complained were not
dissipated by this declaration. If the attachment to Palestine is to
be the central idea of Zionism, it is hard to see how its realisation
could be promoted by the adoption of East Africa as a home. East
Africa, as a shrewd diplomatist has wittily observed, is not in
Palestine nor on the road to it. Its name awakens no memories or hopes
in the Jewish heart. Its soil is not hallowed by the temples and the
tombs of Israel. Its hills and vales are not haunted by the spirits
of the old martyrs and heroes of the nation. Neither the victories
of the past nor the prophetic visions for the future are in any way
associated with East Africa. In the circumstances, it is not to be
wondered at that the proposal, as Dr. Herzl admitted, did not meet with
the enthusiasm required for success, and that the strongest opposition
to the scheme came from those very Jews in the Russian “pale” who stand
in most need of a refuge from persecution. It must be borne in mind
that those very Jews who suffer most severely from persecution are the
most sincerely and wholeheartedly attached to the ancient ideals of
the race, and, owing partly to this psychological cause, partly to
their less advanced stage of development, they were the least able to
appreciate the practical advantages of the scheme--the least disposed
to submit to the dictates of prosaic expediency. They firmly believe
that, sooner or later, the beautiful dream is destined to cohere into
substance; and, like all dreamers, they abhor compromise.
The proposal, however, met with opposition in other quarters than
the Russian Ghetto. Sir Charles Eliot, H.M.’s Commissioner for the
East Africa Protectorate, did not approve of it. While disclaiming
all anti-Semitic feeling, he said that his hesitation arose from
doubt as to whether any beneficial result would be obtained from the
scheme. The proposed colony, he pointed out, would not be sufficiently
large to relieve appreciably the congested and suffering Jewish
population of some parts of Eastern Europe, and he expressed the fear
that the climate and agricultural life would in no way be suitable
to Israelites. Moreover, when the country began to attract British
immigrants who showed an inclination to settle all round the proposed
Jewish colony, he considered that the scheme became dangerous and
deprecated its execution. It was, Sir Charles declared, tantamount
to reproducing in East Africa the very conditions which have caused
so much distress in Eastern Europe: that is to say, the existence of
a compact mass of Jews, differing in language and customs from the
surrounding population, to whom they are likely to be superior in
business capacity but inferior in fighting power. To his mind, it is
best to recognise frankly that such conditions can never exist without
danger to the public peace.[326]
Sir Harry Johnston also was at first opposed to the scheme, but,
influenced partly by the development of the idea into a less crude
plan, and by the opening up of the country by the Uganda Railway,
partly, perhaps, by the intimate connection between the proposal and
the solution of our own overcrowding problem, he was ultimately
converted into a warm supporter of it.[327] Soon afterwards a
Commission was despatched to East Africa to report on the tract of
land offered by the British Government for the proposed Zionist
settlement,[328]--a proof that official opposition was abandoned.
But the opposition on the part of the Jews remained, as was shown by
the comments of the Jewish press of America on Mr. Israel Zangwill’s
visit to that country with a view to interesting American Jews in the
project, by his own “absolute and profound disgust” at their cold
irresponsiveness, and even more clearly by the establishment of the
London Zionist League. The President of this association, Mr. Herbert
Bentwich, in his inaugural address, commenting on the matter, said
that the British East Africa scheme had never touched Zionism in the
slightest degree; that it was a mere accident in Jewish history to
which Zionists could not devote their energies; that the offer of
territory had been made as a practical expression of sympathy “by
those who would exclude the alien immigrant from Great Britain and as
such was gratefully to be received, but it could never be dealt with
seriously,” and that the Zionists hoped not to amend but to end the
Jewish distress; that being the object for which the league had been
formed in London.[329]
The Commission’s report, published in English and German, was
partly unfavourable and partly inconclusive; but even if it had
been favourable it is doubtful whether it would have met with
approval. At all events, when the scheme was definitely submitted
to the Zionist Congress at Basel, towards the end of July, 1905,
it gave rise to scenes of an unexampled character in the history
of Zionism. The Congress was divided into “Palestinians,” who were
opposed to any Jewish national settlement outside Palestine, and into
“Territorialists,” who maintained that the true aim of Zionism is to
obtain an autonomous settlement anywhere. The latter party, led by
Mr. Zangwill, was strongly in favour of the British offer; the former
was as strongly against it. After a stormy discussion the scheme was
rejected, and a resolution was adopted by an overwhelming majority,
in which the Seventh Zionist Congress reaffirmed the principle of the
creation of a legally secured home for the Jewish people in Palestine,
repudiating, both as object and as means, all colonising activity
outside Palestine, and adjacent lands, and, while thanking the British
Government for its kindness, it expressed the hope that the latter will
continue to aid the Zionists in their efforts to attain their true aim.
Thus this episode in the history of Zionism came to an end.
While the East Africa scheme was the subject of so much discord both
among the Jews and elsewhere, the leader of the Zionists passed away.
Dr. Herzl died at Edlach, in Austria, on the 3rd of July, 1904, denied
the happiness of seeing the mission to which he had consecrated his
life fulfilled. Among his adherents he has left the reputation of
a fervent apostle of emancipation, an inspired idealist, a Messiah
burning with the desire to rescue his people from persecution and to
lead them back to the Land of Promise. But even those least inclined
to follow his lead, could not but admire in him that single-minded
devotion to an ideal and that steadfastness in its pursuit, which,
whether success crowns their possessor or not, proclaim the great man.
Among the masses of his suffering co-religionists the claims of Dr.
Herzl to gratitude are less liable to qualification. His personality
produced a deep impression on their imagination, and his efforts to
realise the dream of eighteen centuries, aided by the magic of his
eloquence and the grace of his manner, stirred their hearts to their
inmost depths. Parents named their children after Dr. Herzl, and his
death aroused universal grief. Ten thousand mourners, men and women,
accompanied the funeral to the Vienna cemetery, where the remains of
the leader were laid to rest amid the lamentations of his followers.
The latter subsequently gave a tangible proof of their gratitude by
providing for their leader’s orphaned family, and by resolving to
perpetuate his memory in a manner that would have pleased him. The
memorial is to take the form of a forest of ten thousand olive trees
planted in some historic spot in Palestine, and to be known as the
Herzl Forest.
It would be rash to affirm that Zionism has died with Dr. Herzl. Since
his death, however, the movement has suffered a certain transformation.
Although his East Africa project has been rejected by the majority
of the party, and though both those who favoured it and those who
opposed it are now persuaded of the hopelessness of a chartered home
in Palestine, yet the plan of a return to the Land of Promise still is
enthusiastically adhered to, especially by the sufferers of the Russian
Ghetto: with the only difference that repatriation is no longer looked
for from the Sultan, or from the European Powers, but from individual
effort. Side by side with political and diplomatic activity abroad,
the Congress of 1905 resolved upon practical work in Palestine itself.
This will take the form of general investigation into the country’s
resources and its economic possibilities, and attempts at amelioration
of its administrative conditions. In other words, the colonisation of
Palestine is to be encouraged and its autonomy postponed until the Jews
are established in sufficient numbers to obtain their ultimate object.
“Creep into Palestine anyway. Colonise, redeem the land, populate it,
establish factories, stimulate trade; in a word, rebuild Palestine
and then see what the Sultan will say.” This is the advice given by a
prominent Jew to his co-religionists.[330] Whether these endeavours
will yield the desired fruit or not is a matter on which it would be
more prudent to express an opinion after the event. It is equally
difficult to forecast the outcome of Mr. Zangwill’s “Jewish Territorial
Organisation,” which, abandoning Zion at all events for the moment,
seeks to found a Jewish Colony elsewhere. This variation of the Zionist
programme has attracted the sympathy of many of those who stood
completely aloof from the Herzl scheme. At the same time it has driven
a wedge into Zionism proper.
Meanwhile, it would be idle to deny that, viewed as a whole, the Jewish
Question at the present moment stands pretty much where it has been at
any time during the last eighteen hundred years. A few Jews have solved
the problem for themselves by assimilation to their surroundings. Some
more dwell among the Gentiles in a state of benevolent neutrality: one
with them on the surface, but at heart distinct; performing all the
duties of citizenship conscientiously and sharing in the intellectual
and political life of their adopted countries brilliantly; yet,
by their avoidance of intermarriage, implying the existence of an
insuperable barrier between themselves and those who have not the good
fortune to be descended from Abraham. But the bulk of the race still is
a people of wanderers; and their hope of restoration little more than a
beautiful, melancholy dream. There are at the present hour upwards of
ten million Jews, scattered to the four corners of the earth. Nine of
these millions live in Europe: two-thirds of them in Russia, Roumania
and Poland. In the Middle Ages persecution in the West had driven
them Eastwards. Lately persecution in the East has turned the tide
Westwards. There is no rest for Israel. If the past and the present are
any guides regarding the future, it is safe to predict that for many
centuries to come the world will continue to witness the unique and
mournful spectacle of a great people roaming to and fro on the highways
of the earth in search of a home.
[Illustration: APPROXIMATE DENSITY OF THE JEWISH POPULATION.
London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd.]
FOOTNOTES
[1] The oldest Greek author in whose works the term occurs is the
orator Isaeus who flourished B.C. 364; the earliest Latin writer is
Plautus who died B.C. 184. Of course, the word, though very good
Hebrew, may have been imported into Europe by the Phoenicians. But it
would be a bold man who would attempt to distinguish between Jewish and
Phoenician merchants at this time of day.
[2] I. Macc. xiii. 51.
[3] On the other hand, a famous Palestinian authority, Abbahu (c.
279–320 A.D.), was a noted friend of Greek. He taught it to his
daughters as “an ornament.” Of Abbahu it was said that he was the
living illustration of Ecclesiastes vii. 18 “It is good that thou
shouldst take hold of _this_ (_i.e._ the Jewish Law), yet also from
_that_ (_i.e._ Gentile culture) withdraw not thy hand: for he that
feareth God shall come forth of them all.” Hellenism might appeal
sometimes to the Jew’s head, though it never thrilled his heart. Cf. p.
39 below.
[4] Hdt. i. 1–5.
[5] Justin Mart. _Dial._ i.–vii.
[6] I am referring here to what seems to me characteristic of Hebraism
in the earlier periods when it came into contact and conflict with
Hellenism. In its subsequent development Pharisaism (which gradually
absorbed the whole of the Jewish people) avoided undue asceticism
and laid stress on the joy of living. “Joyous service” became the
keynote of Judaism and Jewish life in the Middle-ages, as it was the
keynote of many Pharisees in the first centuries of the Christian
era. The Essenes, though highly important in the history of primitive
Christianity, had less influence on the main development of Rabbinic
Judaism.
[7] Bk. i. ch. vi. 5–7.
[8] Mac. xiv.–xv.
[9] _Pro L. Flacco_, 28. All the references made to the Jews and
Judaism in Greek and Latin literature have been well collected and
interpreted by T. Reinach in his _Textes d’auteurs grecs et romains
relatifs au Judaisme_ (Paris, 1895).
[10] Suetonius, _Julius_, 84.
[11] Id. _Augustus_, 93.
[12] Suetonius, _Tiberius_, 36.
[13] Tacitus, _Historia_, v. 9.
[14] Suetonius, _Claudius_, 25. Cp. _Acts_, xviii. 2.
[15] _Sat._ i. 9, 69, etc.
[16] _Ant._ 18. 3 (4).
[17] _Sat._ v. 184.
[18] Fgm. ap. Augustin., _Civ. D._ 6, 11.
[19] _Sat._ xiv. 96–99, etc.
[20] Isaiah iii. 26.
[21] Deuter. vii. 3; Nehem. xiii. 25.
[22] Juvenal, _Sat._ xiv. 97.
[23] Tacitus, _Hist._ v. 9.
[24] _Hist._ v. 4.
[25] _Hist._ v. 8.
[26] _Ib._ 5. Cp. Juv. _Sat._ xiv. 103–4.
[27] _Annales_, xv. 44.
[28] Juv. _Sat._ iii. 12–14.
[29] _Hist._ i. 1.
[30] It is, however, only fair to add that the Jewish records know
nothing of these atrocities, and, as M. Reinach justly comments, the
above details (for which Dion Cassius is our sole authority) “inspirent
la méfiance.” The numbers of the victims, as reported by Dion, are in
themselves sufficient to throw doubt upon the story.
[31] H. Graetz, _History of the Jews_, Eng. tr. vol. ii. p. 405.
[32] Mommsen, _History of Rome_, Eng. tr. vol. iv. p. 642.
[33] Just. Mart. _Dial._ xvii.
[34] _c Cels._ vi. 27.
[35] This account of the fervid response of the Jews to Julian’s call,
based on the authority of Christian writers, is pronounced by the
Jewish historian Graetz “purely fictitious” (_History of the Jews_,
Eng. tr. vol. ii. p. 606). At any rate, it seems to be a fiction that
bears upon it a clearer mark of verisimilitude than many a “historical”
document relating to this period.
[36] That the ‘Haman’ so burned was only an effigy is now clearly shown
by an original Geonic Responsum on the subject discovered in the Cairo
Geniza and published in the _Jewish Quarterly Review_, xvi. pp. 651 fol.
[37] The exact date of the “Tour” is disputed. It probably occupied the
thirteen years between 1160 and 1173.
[38] Benjamin of Tudela’s _Itinerary_, p. 24 (ed. Asher). A new
critical edition (by M. N. Adler) has recently appeared in the _Jewish
Quarterly Review_. For the passage in the text see _ibid._ xvi. 730.
[39] H. Graetz, _History of the Jews_, vol. iii. p. 31.
[40] H. Graetz, _History of the Jews_, vol. iii. p. 38.
[41] With regard to the legal relations between the Jews and the
various mediaeval states see J. E. Scherer’s _Beiträge zur Geschichte
des Judenrechtes im Mittelalter_ (1901), a work unhappily left
incomplete by the death of the author.
[42] Joseph Jacobs, “The God of Israel” in the _Nineteenth Century_,
September 1879.
[43] J. E. Sandys, _A History of Classical Scholarship_, pp. 539 fol.
[44] H. Graetz, _History of the Jews_, vol. iii. p. 349. For some fine
translations of Jehuda Halevi’s poems the reader may turn to Mrs. H.
Lucas’ _The Jewish Year_ (Macmillan, 1898) and to Mrs. R. N. Salaman’s
_Songs of Exile_ (Macmillan, 1905). Jehuda Halevi’s philosophical
dialogue the _Khazari_ has recently been translated into English by Dr.
H. Hirschfeld (Routledge, 1905).
[45] Joseph Jacobs, “The God of Israel,” _The Nineteenth Century_,
September, 1879. The _Guide_ has been translated into English by Dr. M.
Friedländer (1885; new edition, Routledge, 1904).
[46] H. Graetz, _History of the Jews_, vol. iii. p. 509.
[47] For Maimonides see the volume on the subject by D. Yellin and I.
Abrahams in the _Jewish Worthies Series_, Vol. I. (Macmillan, 1903).
[48] Vogelstein and Rieger, _Geschichte der Juden in Rom_, i, pp. 136
fol. In general this work should be consulted for all points of contact
between the Papacy and Judaism in the middle ages.
[49] Ibn Verga, _Shebet Yehuda_ (ed. Wiener), p. 50.
[50] Statutes of Avignon quoted by Israel Abrahams, _Jewish Life in the
Middle Ages_, p. 408.
[51] In the first century of our era Aristo of Pella is said to have
been the author of an attempt to prove from the Prophets that Jesus
was the Messiah. Justin Martyr followed in his path, and the latter
writer’s arguments subsequently reappear in the works of Tertullian and
other Fathers. See W. Trollope’s edition of _S. Justini Dialogus_, p. 4.
[52] Heine’s famous satire “Disputation” well characterises the
futility of these public controversies; “der Jude wird verbrannt” was
Lessing’s grim summary in _Nathan der Weise_. See also Schechter,
_Studies in Judaism_, pp. 125 fol.
[53] Lord Curzon, _Problems of the Far East_, p. 298.
[54] Israel Abrahams, _Jewish Life in the Middle Ages_, p. 407.
[55] Lord Curzon, _Problems of the Far East_, p. 303.
[56] _Inferno_, xi. 49–50.
[57] Deuter. xxiii. 19.
[58] Ps. xv. 1, 5.
[59] Koran (Sale’s tr.) ch. ii.
[60] _Rep._ 555 E.
[61] _Laws_, 742 c.
[62] _Pol._ i. 3, 23.
[63] Fifth Homily.
[64] We hear, for example, that early in the thirteenth century
interest was fixed by law at 12½ per cent. at Verona, while at Modena
towards the end of the same century it seems to have been as high as 20
per cent. The Republic of Genoa, a hundred years later, despite Italy’s
commercial prosperity, paid from 7 to 10 per cent. to her creditors.
Much more oppressive were the conditions of the money market in France
and England. Instances occur of 50 per cent., and there is an edict
of Philip Augustus limiting the Jews in France to 48 per cent. At the
beginning of the fourteenth century an ordinance of Philip the Fair
allows 20 per cent. after the first year of a loan, while in England
under Henry III. there are cases on record of 10 per cent. for two
months.
[65] The notorious legend of Hugh of Lincoln is placed by the
chronicler, Matthew Paris, in the year 1255. The prolific nature of
monkish imagination on this subject is shown by the subjoined facts
due to Tyrwhitt’s researches: “In the first four months of the _Acta
Sanctorum_ by Bollandus, I find the following names of children
canonized, as having been murdered by Jews:
XXV. Mart. Willielmus Norvicensis, 1144;
Richardus, Parisiis, 1179;
XVII. Apr. Rudolphus, Bernae, 1287;
Wernerus, Wesaliae, anno eodem;
Albertus, Poloniae, 1598.
I suppose the remaining eight months would furnish at least as many
more.” Quoted by Dr. W. W. Skeat, _Chaucer_, Intr., p. xxiii.
[66] A contemporary historian pathetically states that in 1248 “no
foreigner, let alone an Englishman, could look at an English coin with
dry eyes and unbroken heart.” Henry III. issued a new coin; but it was
not long ere it reached the condition of the older one. In England the
penalty for the crime was loss of life or limbs.
[67] W. Cunningham, _The Growth of English Industry and Commerce_, p.
187.
[68] The original charter of expulsion has recently been discovered; it
was, by a gracious irony of history, found at Leicester at a time when
a Jew had been thrice mayor of the town.
[69] See above, p. 98.
[70] Alami, quoted by H. Graetz, _History of the Jews_, vol. iv. p. 220.
[71] _A History of the Inquisition of Spain_, by H. C. Lea (Macmillan,
Vols. I., II. and III. of which have now appeared, 1906), is a
monumental work on its subject.
[72] _Apologia pro vita sua_, p. 29.
[73] This attachment of Jews to countries with which they have
long been identified recurs at the present day. Jewish emigration
associations are constantly faced by the reluctance of very many
Russian Jews to tear themselves from Russia.
[74] As a matter of fact, Celestine V. hardly deserves this sentence.
It was not cowardice but native humility, the consciousness of the
temptations of power, physical weakness, and the hermit’s longing for
tranquillity that impelled the Pope to resign after five months and
eight days’ pontificate. Commentators had hitherto agreed in applying
the above passage to Celestine V., but recent opinion rejects the
traditional interpretation. However that may be, the point which
concerns us is that Dante censures _a_ pope.
[75] See Berliner, _Persönliche Beziehungen zwischen Christen und
Juden_. Reference should also be made to the same author’s _Geschichte
der Juden in Rom._
[76] _Paradiso_, xii.
[77] Praef. ad Librum de _Serm. Lat._, quoted by Tyrwhitt in Dr. W. W.
Skeat’s _Chaucer_, Intr., p. xxiii.
[78] See above, p. 170.
[79] A good account of the Roman Ghetto may be found in E.
Rodocanachi’s _Le Saint-Siège et les Juifs: Le Ghetto à Rome_ (Paris,
1891).
[80] Browning in his _Holy-Cross Day_ has depicted the farcical
grotesqueness of these efforts at conversion as unsparingly as Heine
satirised the compulsory controversies. Cp. above, p. 98 _n._
[81] _Diary_, March 23, 1646.
[82] I. Abrahams, _Jewish Life in the Middle Ages_, pp. 409–410.
[83] S. Schechter, _Studies in Judaism_, p. 15.
[84] William Hazlitt’s Translation, ch. 857.
[85] Ch. 853.
[86] Ch. 852.
[87] Ch. 700.
[88] Ch. 859.
[89] Ch. 852.
[90] Ch. 864.
[91] _Ibid._
[92] H. Graetz, _History of the Jews_, vol. iv. p. 502.
[93] Ch. 857.
[94] Ch. 864.
[95] Ch. 866.
[96] Ch. 852.
[97] _Ibid._
[98] _Ibid._
[99] _Ibid._
[100] Ch. 856.
[101] Ch. 861.
[102] Ch. 864.
[103] Ch. 852.
[104] Ch. 855.
[105] Ch. 867.
[106] Ch. 862.
[107] Ch. 858.
[108] Ch. 852.
[109] Ch. 854.
[110] Ch. 860.
[111] Ch. 854.
[112] Ch. 855.
[113] Ch. 854.
[114] Ch. 861.
[115] Ch. 865.
[116] Ch. 869.
[117] Ch. 355. O Martin, Martin! What of the “circumcision of the
heart,” to say nothing about Christian charity? But this was in 1541.
[118] Ch. 861.
[119] Ch. 865.
[120] Ch. 866.
[121] _Von den Juden und Ihren Luegen_ (1544) is the title of one of
these pamphlets. See H. Graetz, _History of the Jews_, vol. iv. pp. 583
fol.
[122] For the history of the Hamburg Jews, see M. Grunwald’s _Hamburg’s
Deutsche Juden_, 1904.
[123] On Pfefferkorn and Reuchlin see two papers by S. A. Hirsch in _A
Book of Essays_ (Macmillan, 1905).
[124] See above, p. 175.
[125] Perhaps the most lucid and impartial estimate of Spinoza’s place
in the world of thought, accessible to the English reader, is to be
found in Sir Frederick Pollock’s _Spinoza: His Life and Philosophy_.
This work also contains in an appendix a reprint of the English
translation (1706) of the Dutch biography of Spinoza by his friend
the Lutheran minister Johannes Colerus, published in 1705. The latest
biography of Spinoza, based on new materials, is J. Freudenthal’s
_Spinoza, sein Leben und seine Lehre_, Erster Band, _Das Leben
Spinozas_ (Stuttgart, 1904).
[126] _Confessio Amantis_, bk. vii.
[127] See above, p. 199.
[128] It was by some of these German miners whom the merchant venturers
of Cornwall engaged in exploiting the Cornish mines, under a charter
granted by Queen Elizabeth, that the “dowsing rod” (_Schlagruthe_,
or striking-rod) was introduced into England for the purpose of
discovering mineral veins. Professor W. F. Barrett, “Water-Finding,” in
the _Times_, January 21, 1905.
[129] Essay, _Of Usurie_.
[130] _Merchant of Venice_, Act i. Sc. 3.
[131] I. Abrahams, _Jewish Life in the Middle Ages_, p. 251.
[132] S. R. Gardiner, _History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate_,
vol. ii. p. 30, n. 3.
[133] See above, p. 148.
[134] _Spectator_, No. 213, Nov. 3 1711.
[135] _Ib._ No. 495, Sept. 27, 1712.
[136] Quoted in H. Graetz’s _History of the Jews_, vol. v. p. 359.
[137] T. Carlyle, _History of Frederick the Great_, bk. xvi. ch. vii.
[138] This arrangement was abolished by the Separation Law promulgated
on December 9, 1905, when the Republic resolved neither “to recognise,
pay salaries to, nor subsidise any form of worship.” The Jews have
shared the effects of this Act with the Protestants and Roman Catholics
of France, and like the former of these Christian denominations, and
unlike the latter, readily accepted the change.
[139] _Over the Teacups_, pp. 193 fol.
[140] J. G. Lockhart, _Life of Sir W. Scott_, Ch. xlvi.
[141] The original of Scott’s Rebecca is said to have been a real
person--Rebecca Gratz of Philadelphia. Washington Irving, who knew Miss
Gratz, introduced her to Scott’s notice. She was born in 1781, and died
in 1869. Her claim to have been “the original of Rebecca in _Ivanhoe_”
is sustained in a paper with that title in the _Century Magazine_,
1882, pp. 679 fol.
[142] _Don Juan_, Canto II. lxv. It is only fair to add that Scott
also, at the time of his financial distress, embittered by the harsh
treatment which he experienced at the hands of his Jewish creditors,
Abud and Son, expressed himself in very strong terms concerning “the
vagabond stock-jobbing Jews” in general, and the Abuds in particular.
See Scott’s Diary under dates Nov. 25, 1825, and Oct. 9, 1826, in J. G.
Lockhart, _Life of Sir W. Scott_, Ch. lxv. and lxxi.
[143] _Table-Talk._
[144] Luther’s _Table-Talk_, Ch. 852.
[145] Coleridge’s _Table-Talk_, April 14, 1830.
[146] Cp. above, p. 225.
[147] Editor’s note on May 30, 1830.
[148] Aug. 14, 1833.
[149] Editor’s note on April 14, 1830.
[150] Charles Lamb, Essay on _Imperfect Sympathies_.
[151] J. Morley, _Life of W. E. Gladstone_, Vol. i. pp. 106, 375.
[152] See below, pp. 378 fol.
[153] See _The Jewish Encyclopaedia_, passim.
[154] This phase of the internal history of Russia since 1881 is well
summarised in an article on “The Constitutional Agitation in Russia,”
by Prince Kropotkin, _The Nineteenth Century_, January, 1905.
[155] See Memorandum of the Armenian Patriarchate, protesting against
the edict of spoliation, issued on June 12–25, 1903, in _Armenia_,
October and November, 1906.
[156] See A. Vambéry, “The Awakening of the Tartars,” _The Nineteenth
Century_, February, 1905.
[157] _The Times_, October 8, 1904.
[158] According to the census returns of 1897, the number of illiterate
inhabitants in the country varies from 44.9 to 89.2 per cent.
[159] E. F. G. Law, “The Present Condition of Russia,” _The Fortnightly
Review_, April, 1882.
[160] Vice-Consul Wagstaff’s report, in Goldwin Smith’s “The Jews,”
_The Nineteenth Century_, Nov. 1882.
[161] See above, p. 148. Cp. p. 167.
[162] Olga Novikoff, “The Temperance Movement in Russia,” _The
Nineteenth Century_, Sept. 1882. Cp. M. O. Menchikoff, “The Jewish
Peril in Russia,” _The Monthly Review_, Feb. 1904.
[163] See above, p. 329.
[164] Goldwin Smith, _ubi supra_.
[165] _Ibid._
[166] Goldwin Smith, _ubi supra_.
[167] See above, p. 154.
[168] For a full account of this and other aspects of Russian domestic
policy, the reader is referred to Herr Wolf von Schierbrand’s Russia:
_Her Strength and her Weakness_, 1904.
[169] E. F. G. Law, _ubi supra_.
[170] Olga Novikoff, _ubi supra_.
[171] Goldwin Smith, “The Jews,” _The Nineteenth Century_, Nov. 1882.
Cp. Pierre Botkine, Secretary of the Russian Legation in Washington, “A
Voice for Russia,” _The Century Magazine_, Feb. 1893.
[172] Laurence Oliphant, “The Jew and the Eastern Question,” _The
Nineteenth Century_, Aug. 1882.
[173] Pierre Botkine, Secretary of the Russian Legation in Washington,
“A Voice for Russia,” in _The Century Magazine_, Feb. 1893. Cp. “A
reply” to it by Joseph Jacobs, Secretary of the Russo-Jewish Committee,
London, in the same periodical, July, 1893.
[174] In 1902–3 the Russian Empire, according to the Statistical Table
in the _Jewish Year Book_, contained 5,189,401 Jews, representing 04.13
of the total population (125,668,000). There are serious reasons,
however, to believe that their real number is considerably in excess of
this figure.
[175] _The Times_, June 14, 1905.
[176] Towards the end of 1904 a Bill was introduced in the Council
of the Empire, preventing the promotion even of baptized Jews. But,
owing to reasons which will be explained in the sequel, it was
withdrawn.--The newspaper _Voshod_, reported by Reuter in a despatch
dated St. Petersburg, Dec. 23.
[177] H. H. Munro in the _Morning Post_, June 3, 1904.
[178] Statement by M. De Plehve, _The Standard_, April 8, 1904.
[179] Reuter telegram, dated Melbourne, June 4, 1903.
[180] _The Daily Chronicle_, June 22, 1903.
[181] Reuter telegram, dated Berlin, May 30, 1903.
[182] Andrew D. White, “A Diplomat’s Recollections of Russia,” _The
Century Magazine_, Nov. 1904.
[183] Prince Kropotkin, “The Constitutional Agitation in Russia,” _The
Nineteenth Century_, Jan. 1905.
[184] Those were the words of the Crown Prosecutor at the Kishineff
Trial, _The Times_, Dec. 25, 1903.
[185] _The Times_, Dec. 19, 1903.
[186] _Ibid._
[187] Reuter telegram, dated Kishineff, Dec. 21, 1903.
[188] Reuter telegram, dated St. Petersburg, Dec. 17, 1903.
[189] M. O. Menchikoff, one of the editors of the _Novoe Vremya_, “The
Jewish Peril in Russia,” _The Monthly Review_, Feb. 1904.
[190] Reuter telegram, dated St. Petersburg, June 4, 1903.
[191] _The Standard_ correspondent at Kieff, under date Dec. 18, 1903.
[192] A meagre account of the occurrence appeared in _The Standard_,
Sept. 25, 1903.
[193] _The Times_, Dec. 21, 1903.
[194] Tugan-Baranowsky, “Anti-Semitism in Contemporary Russia,” _The
Monthly Review_, Jan. 1904.
[195] Some very illuminating revelations concerning the organisation
of these authorised riots were made during a recent trial at St.
Petersburg. See Reuter telegram from that town, Oct. 26, 1906, and an
account by the _Tribune_ correspondent under same date.
[196] See Reuter telegram, dated St. Petersburg, June 13, and Mr.
Lucien Wolf’s letter in _The Times_ of June 14, 1904.
[197] Andrew D. White, “A Diplomat’s Recollections of Russia,” _The
Century Magazine_, Nov. 1904.
[198] _The Standard_, Aug. 1, 1904.
[199] Lucien Wolf, “M. De Plehve and the Jewish Question,” in _The
Times_, Feb. 6, 1904.
[200] Reuter telegram, Aug. 17, 1904.
[201] Reuter telegram, dated St. Petersburg, Sept. 12, 1904.
[202] Reuter telegram, dated Kattowitz (Silesia), Sept. 12, 1904.
[203] The Special Commissioner of the _Daily Telegraph_, Dec. 10, 1904.
[204] Reuter telegram, dated St. Petersburg, Sept. 3, 1904.
[205] Reuter telegram, dated New York, January 10, 1905.
[206] According to the returns of the last census (1899), 78 per cent.
of the population over 7 years of age can neither read nor write.
[207] See above, p. 243.
[208] See a most interesting sketch of the movement in S. Schechter’s
_Studies in Judaism_, pp. 1 fol., the same author’s article on the
subject in _Nord und Süd_, January, 1905, and S. M. Dubnow’s article in
the _Jewish Encyclopedia_, Vol. vi. pp. 251 fol.
[209] H. Sutherland Edwards, _Sir William White: His Life and
Correspondence_, p. 84.
[210] _Ibid._ See also a summary of this period under title “The Jews
in Roumania” in _The Standard_, Sept. 30, 1902.
[211] J. Morley, _Life of W. E. Gladstone_, Vol. iii. p. 475 (1891).
[212] The story is related at length by Gibbon, _Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire_, Ch. xxvi.
[213] One example will suffice. The peasant word for a convivial
gathering is written _sedatore_, and pronounced shezetoare.
[214] Alexander A. Landesco, in _The Century Magazine_, May, 1906, p.
160.
[215] The Vienna correspondent of _The Times_, June 10, 1902.
[216] Carmen Sylva, “The Jews in Roumania,” _The Century Magazine_,
March, 1906.
[217] See statistics of population in the _Jewish Year Book_ for
1902–03. Cp. the _Statesman’s Year Book_ for 1906.
[218] Report from Bucharest, published in the _Pester Lloyd_, see _The
Standard_, Sept. 27, 1902. Cp. the article “Oath More Judaico” in the
_Jewish Encyclopedia_, ix. p. 367.
[219] The Vienna correspondent of _The Standard_, Sept. 19, 1902.
[220] Reuter telegram, dated Bucharest, April 12, 1902.
[221] _The Times_, June 10, 1902.
[222] Reuter telegram, dated Washington, Sept. 17, 1902.
[223] _The Standard_, Sept. 23, 1902.
[224] The attitude of the various Powers is described at length by
the correspondents of the London Press in their respective capitals.
See _Standard_, Sept. 20, 25, 26; _Morning Post_, Sept. 20; _Daily
Chronicle_, Sept. 22, etc.
[225] _The Daily Chronicle_, September 29, 1902.
[226] Carmen Sylva, “The Jews in Roumania,” _The Century Magazine_,
March, 1906.
[227] Alexander A. Landesco, _The Century Magazine_, May, 1906, p. 160.
[228] The Vienna correspondent of the _Standard_, Sept. 26, 1902.
[229] Isocrates, _Panegyr._ 50.
[230] In Germany, out of a total population of 56,500,000, there are
587,000 Jews, of whom 376,000 reside in Prussia. In Austria there are
1,150,000 out of a total population of 26,000,000, and in Hungary
850,000 out of a total population of 19,000,000. The percentage of
Jews, therefore, is in Germany 01.04, in Austria 04.80, in Hungary
04.43.--_Jewish Year-Book_, 1902–03.
[231] “The Jews in Germany,” by the author of “German Home Life,” _The
Contemporary Review_, January, 1881.
[232] Ernest Schuster, “The Anti-Jewish Agitation in Germany,” _The
Fortnightly Review_, March 1, 1881.
[233] Statutes quoted by Lucien Wolf in “The Anti-Jewish Agitation,”
_The Nineteenth Century_, February, 1881.
[234] Ernest Schuster, _ubi supra_.
[235] See above, p. 307.
[236] “The Jews in Germany,” by the author of “German Home Life,” _The
Contemporary Review_, January, 1881. For these and similar demands see
also Ernest Schuster, _ubi supra_.
[237] Karl Blind, “The Conflict in Germany,” _The Nineteenth Century_,
February, 1882.
[238] The Vienna Correspondent of the _Times_ in a letter dated Nov.
11, 1904.
[239] _The Times_, October 22, 1904.
[240] Reuter telegram, dated Vienna, June 11, 1906. Cp. “Hidden
Forces in Austrian Politics,” a letter by “Scotus Viaticus” in the
_Spectator_, July 7, 1906.
[241] The Vienna correspondent of _The Times_, January 7, 1907.
[242] Lucien Wolf, “The Anti-Jewish Agitation,” _The Nineteenth
Century_, Feb., 1881.
[243] _Étude sur l’Ecclésiaste_, pp. 91 fol.
[244] See _Qu’est-ce qu’une Nation?_ a paper read at the Sorbonne on
March 11, 1882, in _Discours et Conférences_, pp. 277 fol.
[245] See lectures and speeches delivered in 1883 in _Discours et
Conférences_, pp. 336, 374, etc.
[246] See Ed. Drumont’s _La France Juive_, a work which, published in
1886, raised its author at once to the rank of commander-in-chief of
the anti-Semitic forces in France.
[247] 86,885 in a total population of 38,595,000, _i.e._ a percentage
of 00.22, _Jewish Year Book_, 1902–03.
[248] _The Standard_, Dec. 7, 1903.
[249] A statistic supplied to the Commission for Tlemcen shows that out
of 6000 Jews there are only 10 possessing more than £2000, and another,
supplied for Constantine, shows that out of 1024 Jewish electors there
are only 10 possessed of real estate and 146 merchants. The rest lead a
miserable hand-to-mouth existence.--_Le Temps_, Sept. 25, 1901.
[250] J. Morley, _Life of W. E. Gladstone_, vol. iv. pp. 552, 558.
[251] _E.g._ Sir J. G. T. Sinclair, _A Defence of Russia_ (1877); T. P.
O’Connor, _Lord Beaconsfield: a Biography_ (1878); etc.
[252] In justice to the writer it must be added that this ungenerous
and untrue caricature was the common estimate of Disraeli entertained
by all his political opponents. Except Lord Acton, they all agreed
with the Duke of Argyll in holding that Disraeli was a “fantastic
adventurer”--a man who, having no opinions of his own and no traditions
with which to break, “was free to play with prejudices in which he did
not share, and to express passions which were not his own, except in so
far as they were tinged with personal resentment.” See _Duke of Argyll:
Autobiography and Memoirs_, Vol. i. p. 280.
[253] Malcolm MacColl, “Lord Beaconsfield,” _The Contemporary Review_,
June, 1881.
[254] Goldwin Smith, “The Jews,” _The Nineteenth Century_, Nov., 1882.
The writer repeats all these views, in almost identical terms, in _The
Independent_, June 21, 1906.
[255] Israel Abrahams, _Jewish Life in the Middle Ages_, Introd.
[256] _Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe_, vol.
ii. p. 281.
[257] Goldwin Smith, _ubi supra_.
[258] S. Singer, “The Russo-Jewish Immigrant,” in _The English
Illustrated Magazine_, Sept. 1891.
[259] David Baron, _The Ancient Scriptures and the Modern Jew_, p. 179,
1900.
[260] Arnold White, _The Modern Jew_, 1899.
[261] _Jewish Year Book_, 1902.
[262] Report in _The Standard_, Dec. 14, 1903.
[263] Arnold White, _For Efficiency_, 1902, price 3d.
[264] “The Alien Inquiry: an omitted point,” _The Standard_, Sept. 5,
1903.
[265] _The Pioneer_, Nov. 14, 1904. Commercial jealousy, embittered by
racial prejudice, is also at the root of the anti-Japanese agitation
now raging in California.
[266] Charles Grant, _The Contemporary Review_, March, 1881.
[267] See an article under the title “The East-End Hevra” in _The
Standard_ of April 27, and a reply to it in the issue of May 1, 1903.
[268] J. H. Schooling, “Foreigners in England,” _The Fortnightly
Review_, November, 1904. Mr. Chamberlain also, in the debate on the
Aliens Bill (May 2, 1905), frankly avowed that he supported that
measure because it harmonised with his policy of protection, and he
very logically dwelt on the identity of the principle underlying both
programmes.
[269] Report of the Commission, pp. 19, 20.
[270] _The Daily Chronicle_, January 9, 1903.
[271] _The Daily Chronicle_, Feb. 17, 1904.
[272] For the text of the Bill, see _The Times_, April 1, 1904.
[273] _The Standard_, leading article, April 26, 1904.
[274] Mr. Winston Churchill’s letter to a member of the Jewish
community in Manchester, May 30, 1904.
[275] _The Daily Chronicle_, May 18, 1903.
[276] _The Daily Chronicle_, May 4, 1904.
[277] Letter by Mr. Balfour, dated May 9, 1904.
[278] _The Daily Chronicle_, May 13, 1904.
[279] _Ibid._ May 14, 1904.
[280] _A Modern Exodus._ By Violet Guttenberg.
[281] Report in _The Standard_, April 2, 1904.
[282] Report in _The Times_, April 17, 1905.
[283] Mr. Wyndham’s statement in the House of Commons, April 25, 1904.
[284] “Milesian,” letter in _The Times_, April 4, 1904.
[285] E. B. Levin, letter in _The Times_, April 12, 1904.
[286] “Milesian,” _ubi supra_.
[287] “Milesian,” _ubi supra_.
[288] See _The Times_, April 8 and 12, 1904.
[289] _The Standard_, August 8, 1904.
[290] J. H. Schooling, “Foreigners in England,” _The Fortnightly
Review_, November, 1904.
[291] W. Evans Gordon, “The Economic Side of Alien Immigration,” _The
Nineteenth Century_, February, 1905.
[292] W. Evans Gordon, letter in _The Times_, March 22, 1904.
[293] Letter in _The Standard_, August 8, 1904.
[294] _Ibid._ July 7, 1904.
[295] J. Morley, _Life of W. E. Gladstone_, vol. iii. p. 475.
[296] For a list of such works see the article “Inquisition” in the
_Encyclopaedia Britannica_.
[297] Jeremiah xxxii. 37. Cp. Isaiah xi. 12 etc.
[298] S. Schechter, _Studies in Judaism_, pp. 131–2.
[299] For an exhaustive account of the historic development of Zionism
see Lucien Wolf, “Zionism,” in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_.
[300] For a full enumeration of the arguments and sentiments which
impelled the mass of Russian and Roumanian Jews in the early ’Eighties
to prefer an Eastern to a Western exodus, see Laurence Oliphant, “The
Jew and the Eastern Question,” _The Nineteenth Century_, August, 1882.
[301] Laurence Oliphant, _ubi supra_. On the other hand, it must not be
forgotten that the members of the Chovevi Zion Societies represented
but a very small proportion of the total Jews of the world.
[302] _The Jewish World_, Aug. 15, 1902.
[303] The St. Petersburg correspondent of _The Times_, Oct. 14, 1902.
[304] See the late Minister’s of the Interior utterances on the
subject: Lucien Wolf, “M. De Plehve and the Jewish Question,” in _The
Times_, Feb. 6, 1904.
[305] _The Jewish Question_, Gay and Bird, 1894, p. 27.
[306] Pp. 31–32.
[307] P. 38.
[308] _Table-Talk_, April 13, 1830.
[309] Lucien Wolf, “Zionism,” _Encyclopaedia Britannica_.
[310] _Aspects of the Jewish Question._ By “A Quarterly Reviewer,”
1902, p. 76.
[311] P. 16.
[312] M. J. Landa, “The Doom of Zionism,” in _The Manchester Guardian_,
Jan. 10, 1905.
[313] “Palestine Revisited,” _The Statesman_, Oct. 23, 1904.
[314] Lucien Wolf, article on “Zionism” in the _Encyclopaedia
Britannica_.
[315] Report in _The Daily Chronicle_, May 18, 1903.
[316] Reuter telegram, dated Basel, Aug. 24, 1903.
[317] Reuter telegram, dated St. Petersburg, Oct. 12, 1903.
[318] “Palestine Revisited,” _The Statesman_, October 23, 1904.
[319] On this aspect of the Jewish question see an article by M.
Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu in the _Revue des deux Mondes_, March 1, 1903;
and another on _La Langue Française en Orient_ in _Le Monde Illustré_,
April 11, 1903.
[320] _The Daily Chronicle_, May 18, 1903.
[321] L. J. Greenberg, report of a meeting of “Friends of Jewish
Freedom,” in _The Times_, Dec. 7, 1904.
[322] Communication dated Foreign Office, Aug. 14, 1903.
[323] Report in _The Standard_, May 4, 1904.
[324] Reuter telegram, dated Paris, Dec. 21, 1903; Paris correspondent
of _The Times_, under same date.
[325] _The Daily Chronicle_, Dec. 22, 1903. Cp. Mr. L. J. Greenberg’s
statement, _The Times_, Dec. 7, 1904.
[326] “The East Africa Protectorate,” _The Nineteenth Century_,
September, 1904; cp. his book under the same title (1905), pp. 177–8;
315.
[327] See _The Times_, Dec. 7, 1904.
[328] Reuter telegram, dated Dec. 24, 1904.
[329] Report in _The Times_, Dec. 20, 1904.
[330] _The American Hebrew_, quoted in _The Literary Digest_, May 20,
1905.
INDEX
Abdul Hamid, 491, 492, 501.
Abdul-Rahman III., 71.
Abraham, 39, 312, 502, 518.
Abramovitch, 355.
Abu-Yussuf Chasdai, 71.
Acosta, Uriel, 249–50, 298.
Act of 1858, allowing Jews to omit certain words from oath, 324.
Addison, 282–4.
Aelia Capitolina, _see_ Jerusalem.
Africa, flight of Jews to, 150.
_Age of Bronze_, The (Byron), 316.
Agricultural settlements, 363, 507;
college, 509;
colonies, foundation of, 507, 509.
Agriculture, attitude of Jews towards, 509, 510, 514.
Agrippa, King, 23.
Akers-Douglas, 462–4, 469.
Albigensian sect, in France, 91–5, 144, 217.
Albigenses, 83.
Alexander the Great, 1, 20, 301, 302, 408.
Alexander Severus, Emperor, 39.
Alexander II., Czar, 332–3;
assassination of, 334, 335, 368.
Alexander II., Pope, 142.
Alexander III., restrictive policy, 335.
Alexandria, Jews in, 2, 20, 22, 47, 73, 195;
anti-Jewish movement in, 23;
Graeco-Jewish feud, 25–6.
Alexis Petrovitch, 330.
Alfonso VI. of Castile, 142–3.
Alfonso X. (the Wise), 144–5, 150.
Alfonso XI., 146, 148.
Algeria, Jewish Question in, 436.
Alien Peril, Royal Commission appointed to enquire into, 460, 465,
466.
Alien question, 460, 478.
Aliens Act, 475–6.
Aliens Bill, 462–7, 469, 472–5.
_Alliance Israélite Universelle_, 482, 483, 507, 510.
Almohades, the, 74.
Alroy, David, 90.
Alypius, of Antioch, 45.
Alsace, Jews in, 294–5, 296.
Ambrosius, Bishop of Milan, 52.
America, 277, 357, 397, 398, 403, 417, 460.
American Note (Mr. Hay’s), 398–403.
Amsterdam, 247, 277, 329;
synagogue inaugurated and press established, 248.
Andalusia, Semitic renaissance in, 70.
Anglo-Jewish Association, 483.
Anglo-Jewish prayer to the King, 324.
Anne, Queen, statute of, concerning Jews, 282;
repeal of, 323.
Anti-Semitic League, The, 421–2.
Anti-Semitism, origin of, 407, 411, 434;
literature, 418–9, 433;
its effect on modern Jews, 479–80.
Antioch, Jews of, 47, 49–50.
Antiochus Epiphanes, 3, 32.
Antoninus Pius, 38.
Apis, Temple of, 21.
Aquinas, Thomas, 99, 110, 185.
_Aramaic Papyri_ (discovered by R. Mond), 2.
Archangel, British traders at, 329–30.
Argentine Republic, 361.
Argyll, Duke of, 438.
Arian kings, Israel under, 57.
Armenians, 402.
Arnold, Matthew, 457.
Asher, 200–1.
Ashkenazim, the, 508.
Asia Minor, Jews in, 90.
Assideans, the, _see_ Chassidim.
Atonement, Day of, 212.
Augustus, 21, 22.
Austria, 292, 397, 412, 415;
anti-Semitic agitations in, 426, 429, 490.
Austrian Constitution grants full liberty to Jews, 309.
Avignon, Council of, 93–4, 186, 235.
Avitus, Bishop of Clermont, 56.
Baalshem, Israel, 326, 380, 381, 382.
Babylon, 1, 11, 55, 300;
Jews in, 35, 39.
Babylonian captivity, return from, 325.
Bacon, 272–4.
Balfour, Arthur, 460, 466, 467.
Balkan States, number of Jews in, 395.
Baltic provinces, 334–5;
Russification of, 336.
Barcelona, theological contest at, 98, 145, 147.
Bar-Cochba, 37.
Barth, Dr., publication in _Die Nation_ by, 358.
Basel, Zionist congresses at, 501, 506, 511–6.
Basil, 51–2.
Bathori, Stephen, 237.
Bayezid (the Lightning), 180.
Beaconsfield, Lord, _see_ Disraeli.
Beckmann, General, 360.
Bel, Temple of, 1.
Belisarius, 49, 54.
Benjamin, of Tiberias, 50.
Benjamin, of Tudela, 52, 89–90, 147, 486.
Bentwich, Herbert, 515.
Berlin, 292;
Congress at, 385, 398, 483;
Treaty of, 390, 391, 399, 401;
foundation of anti-Jewish society in, 421;
Jews’ Chace at, 423.
_Bessarabets_, the, anti-Semite paper, 358–9.
Bessarabia, 360, 361;
massacre of Jews in, 510.
Beth Din, the, 64, 141.
Beziers, 68–9;
massacre at, 92;
Council of, 100.
Bismarck, 307, 384, 385, 416, 420, 421, 424.
Black Art, Jewish professors of, 103, 222.
Black Death, 147, 158.
Black Sea opened to international commerce, 383.
Boccaccio, 187, 189.
Bodo, Bishop, apostacy of, 80–1.
Bologna, university of, 410.
_Book of Maxims_ (Santob de Carrion), 147.
Bordeaux, internecine feud at, 294.
Boulanger, General, 432–3.
Bratiano, 383.
British East Africa, 511, 513, 515;
Commission sent to, 515, 516.
British Jews’ Society, 466.
Bucharest, 382, 429.
Buda-Pesth, outrages in, 426.
Bulgaria, 387, 395.
_Bund_, the, secret society, 376.
Cabbala, the, 194–5, 200, 225.
Caesar, Julius, 20–1, 302.
Caligula, 22, 23, 31.
Cambridge, 131, 133, 324.
Canada, emigration of Jews to, 403.
_Cancionero_, 147.
_Captivity, The_ (Goldsmith), quoted, 299.
Cassius, Dion, 35.
Cassius, Quaestor, 20.
Castile, Civil war in, 148;
Holy Office established in, 156, 405.
Cathari, _see_ Albigenses.
Catholicism, the poet of, 184;
warfare against, 187, 311.
Chamberlain, Joseph, 399, 511.
Chanukah, _see_ Feast of Dedication.
Charlemagne, 78–9, 302, 409.
Charles II., 280, 281.
Charles the Simple, 81–2.
Charles X. of Sweden, 241.
Chassidim, the, 3, 4;
“New Chassidim,” 380, 381, 382, 504.
“Chovevi (Lovers of) Zion,” 489.
Christ, 28, 39, 42, 43, 44, 85, 189;
Messianic character of, 190.
Christian Church, prohibition of usury, 106–7;
suppression of, 108;
laws against Jews, 134, 149;
Jews compelled to attend, 185.
“Christian Germanism,” 306.
Christian money-lenders, 415;
Socialism, 426, 428;
Socialists, 422, 424, 427.
Christiani, Pablo, 98–9, 145.
Christianity, and the Jews, 41–61;
tenets of, 42, 43, 98, 99, 103.
Christians, apostacy punished, 44;
massacre of, 49, 100, 144, 148;
at Turkish Court, 174;
repugnance to Jews, 226, 234;
of Rome, 310;
of Roumania, 383.
Chrysostom, John, 47.
Cicero, 18, 19.
Claudius, 23.
Clermont, great Council of, 86.
Clermont-Tonnerre, 296.
Cohen, the Rev. Francis L., 448.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 317–9, 499.
Coleridgean theology, 320.
Colet, John, 274.
Columbus, Christopher, 163.
_Concerning the Jews and their lies_ (Luther), 220.
_Confessions_ (Rousseau), 291.
Confraternity of the Holy Family, 472.
Constantine the Great, 41, 43, 44, 57, 81.
Constitutional Committee of New Haven, 277.
Cordova, 60;
Jews found school at, 71.
Cossacks, 238–9;
war with Poles, 240–1.
Council of Lyons, 132.
Court of Cassation, 435.
Creagh, Father, Jews anathematized by, 471–2.
Crémieux Decree, 436.
Crimean War, 332.
Cromwell, Oliver, 274, 275, 278, 279, 280, 281, 302.
Crusaders absolved from financial embarrassments, 108;
in England, 121;
in Spain, 144;
orgies, 217.
Crusades, the, 83–104.
Cyprus, insurrection in, 35, 36.
Cyrene, insurrection in, 35.
Cyril of Alexandria, 47, 56.
Cyrus, 301, 494.
Dacia, conquest by Trajan, 387, 388.
Dante, friendship with Immanuel, 184, 185, 186–7.
David, 36, 57.
David, Ben, 291.
Declaration of the Rights of Man, The, 296.
_De Judaismo_, statute, 323.
Denmark, persecution of Jews in, 306.
_De Verbo Mirifico_ (Reuchlin), 233.
Diderot, 286.
Dilke, Sir Charles, 399, 462–3, 469.
Diogo Pires (Solomon Molcho), 170–1.
Dispersion, The, 34–40, 283.
Disraeli, Benjamin, 327, 385, 438, 439, 480.
_Divina Commedia_ (Dante), 179.
Dohm, Christian William, 292, 293, 295.
Dominic, Order of, 95–6, 99, 108, 129, 151, 154, 155, 157, 197, 232,
233.
Domitian, 34.
Don Henry, exploitation of Jews, 148;
anti-Jewish legislation, 149.
Donin, Nicolas, 96, 97.
Dresden, foundation of anti-Jewish society in, 421.
Dreyfus, Captain, 433–4, 435–6;
bill submitted to French Government, 435;
anti-Dreyfus campaign, 479.
Duhring, 419.
Dukhobors, 337.
_Dunmehs_, the sect of, 176.
Dutch West Indies, proposed settlement of Jews in, 484.
East London Jews’ Fund, 468.
Edict of Nantes, 336.
_Edinburgh Review_ (Macaulay), 321.
Edward I., 131–7;
expels Jews, 137–40, 255, 258, 280.
Egeria, valley of, Juvenal’s description of Jews in, 34.
Egypt, settlement of Jews in, 2;
gods of, 21;
Greek kings of, 22, 35.
Elia, 320.
Eliot, Sir Charles, 514.
Emancipation, the eve of, 286–300.
Emmanuel, King, attempt to convert Jews, 167–8.
England, Civil Wars, in, 130–1.
England, Jews in, 115–40;
first mention of, 115;
expelled from, 137–40, 277, 454;
recognised as British subjects, 284;
right of naturalisation conceded, 284;
rescinded, 285;
prejudice against Jews in, 298, 311;
struggle for enfranchisement, 320–3, 391, 397, 399, 403;
Eastern Crisis in, 437;
anti-Semitism in, 437, 447–51;
alien invasion, 449, 459–60;
intermarriage of Jews and Christians in, 450;
ethics of, 452–5, 461, 467, 477;
anti-alien agitation in, 511.
England, Elizabethan, unpopularity of Jews in, 259.
English view of Jews, 312.
English Zionist Federation, 513.
_Eothen_ (A. W. Kinglake), 321, 322.
Episcopalians, persecution of, 277.
Erasmus, 274.
_Esprit des Lois_ (Montesquieu), 294.
_Essays_ (Rhenferd), 318.
Essenes, the, 14 _n._, 15, 19.
Europe, training of Jews in, 413;
conflict between Asia and, 437;
(Central), massacre of Jews in, 86–7;
(Eastern), 448, 484;
(Mediaeval), condition of Jews in, 62, 440–2;
myths of, 102;
lower orders, 109;
uniformity of ideals, 409, 410;
(Modern), Jews in, 442;
(Western), Jews in, 55, 482.
European trade (Middle Ages), 109;
indebtedness to Jewish intellects, 328;
humanism, 479.
Euripides, 3.
Evelyn, John, account of Jewish quarter in Rome, 206–7;
in Venice, 207–8;
account of Dutch synagogue, 250, 252.
_Exodiad_, the (Cumberland & Burgess), 298.
Exodus, Book of, 395.
Factories Act, 334.
Faguin, Juceff, 146–7.
Fairfax, General, 277.
_Faust_ (Goethe), 355.
Feast of Dedication (Chanukah), 4, 448.
Ferdinand II., Emperor, Jewish policy, 235–6.
Ferdinand and Isabella, persecution of Jews, 155–62;
expulsion of Jews by, 163–6, 405.
Ferrer, Vincent, 151–2.
Fichte, 293.
Finland, constitution of, abolished, 336;
new Governor-General appointed, 366, 370.
Flaccus, Praetor, 18, 19.
_Forward_, New York Jewish daily paper, 370.
France, persecution of Jews in, 100, 102;
banished from, 102;
right of abode in, 294;
capitation tax removed, 295;
Jews formally enfranchised, 297;
legislation in, removing Jewish disabilities, 304, 357, 401;
power of Jews in, 430;
Jewish Question in, 430–6;
prejudice against Jews in, 432;
anti-Semitism in, 490.
Francis, Order of, 95, 108.
Franco-Jewish history, golden age, of, 78–81.
Franco-German War, 416.
Frederick, Crown Prince, 423.
Frederick the Great, 287, 289;
hostility of, 291;
death of, 293.
Frederick II., Emperor, anti-Jewish policy, 101.
Frederick William II., 293.
Frederick William III., 306.
Frederick William IV., 307.
Free Trade in England, 457.
French Religion of Reason, Christian revolt against, 305.
French Socialist Party, 435.
Froissart, 379.
Galatz, Jewish colonies in, 382.
Galicia, 308, 309;
“New Chassidim” in, 380–1, 415, 429–30, 483.
Gallus, 44.
Gaul, settlement of Jews in, 54;
persecution of, 56.
“General Privilege,” the, 287.
Genoa, Jews of, 53;
Jews banished from, 197.
Gentiles, attitude of, to Jews, 24, 28, 29, 31, 39, 40;
hatred of Jews, 154–5, 404.
George II., 284.
Gerizim, Mount, 37.
German chrematistic enterprise, 414.
German Diet, 305, 425;
Liberals, 307;
press appreciation of American Note by Liberal section, 400.
German Empire, 308.
Germany, Jew-baiting in, 69, 82;
boons granted to Jews, 85, 89;
persecution of Jews in, 101, 103, 217, 227–31, 443;
Black Death in, 102–3;
New Gospel in, 293, 305, 306, 327;
Hebrew professors in, 328, 391, 400;
Nationalism in, 411–2, 417;
anti-Jewish movement in, 416–26, 510;
anti-Semitism in, 414, 425, 478;
Jewish wedding customs in, 485;
opposition to Zionism in, 493.
Germany, National Parliament removes Jewish disabilities, 308;
National Liberal Party in, 420.
_Ghetto_, origin of, 198;
description of Roman, 209, 235, 310, 311;
demolition of, 325;
Russian, 378, 514, 517;
age of, 484.
Gladstone, 322–3, 385, 438.
Godard, 296.
Goethe, 291, 293.
Goldfaden, 355.
Goldsmith, 298–9.
Golgotha, Mount, 37.
Gomez, Antonio Enriquez de, 172–3.
Gordon, Evans, Major, M.P., 460.
Gortchakoff, Prince, 384.
Goths, 388.
Graeco-Jewish feuds, 25.
Granada, 60, 163.
Grant, Mr. Robert, 321.
Greece, Jews in, have same rights as Hellenic citizens, 395;
attitude of, towards Jews, 437.
Greek culture, influence on Jews, 1, 2, 3, 195;
numerals adopted, 5;
language employed in diplomatic negotiations, 5;
Jewish pronouncement on Occidental culture, 5.
Greeks, massacre of, 35.
Grégoire (Abbé), 296.
Gregory, Bishop of Tours, 56.
Gregory the Great (Pope), Jewish policy of, 54, 57.
Gregory VII. (Hildebrand), 83;
canonical law against Jews, 84–5, 108, 187, 245.
Gregory IX., 96, 97, 100.
Gregory X. (Pope), 132.
Grocyn, 274.
Guelph and Ghibelline, strife between, 84.
_Guide to the Perplexed_ (Maimonides), 76–7.
Guilds, 133–4.
Hadrian, 36–7, 38, 39, 44, 57.
Halevi, Jehuda, 72–4, 110, 486.
Haluka, a fund for Jews, 508.
_Hamlet_ (Shakespeare), 355.
Hapsburgs, rule of, 308, 397.
Hasmonaean family, institute the _Sanhedrin_ and restore worship of
Jehovah, 4, 5–7, 19–20.
Hay, Mr., American Secretary of State. _See_ American Note.
Hebraism and Hellenism, 1–17.
Hebrew, as spoken tongue, 5, 276–7;
literature, 64, 304, 355;
history, renaissance of, 325;
new culture, 291.
Hebrew Palingenesia, 328.
Hebron, wine-growing in, 509.
Hegel, 412.
Heine, Heinrich, 327, 328.
Hellene and Barbarian, hereditary feud between, 8.
Heligobalus, Emperor, 39.
Hellas, 9, 30, 44.
Hellene code, 9.
Hellenic literature, 70–1.
Hellenism, causes of failure in Western Asia, 8–9, 326.
Hellenistic culture, centres of, 2, 3.
Henry II., anti-Jewish feeling checked by, 118–9.
Henry III., Jewish quarters pillaged under, 124, 125–7, 131, 132.
Henry IV., Emperor, 84, 85, 88.
Henry VIII., 272, 274.
Heraclius, Emperor, negotiations with Jews, 51.
Herod the Great, 7–8.
Herodians, sect of, 7–8.
Herodotus, 8, 30.
Herz, 291, 292.
Herz, Henrietta, 292.
Herzl, Dr. Theodor, 489, 512;
origin of, 490, 491, 492, 495, 518;
Zionism of, 500–1, 511, 516;
Forest, 517.
Hesiod, 328.
Hirsch, Baron, 361;
fund of, 483;
emigration scheme of, 506.
_Histoire Contemporaine_ (Anatole France), 479.
Holland, Jews in, 245–54, 297.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 312.
Holy Land, the. _See_ Palestine.
Holy Office, the, 156, 158, 160, 169, 171, 309, 311;
defence of, 481.
_See_ also Inquisition.
Honorius, Emperor, 53.
Honorius IV. (Pope), 136–7.
Horace, 24, 31.
Hosius, Bishop of Cordova, 57.
House of Commons, 321, 455, 456;
Jewish members in, 324.
Humanitarianism, 232, 325, 410, 483.
Hungarian Upper House, 427.
Hungarians, ill-treatment of, under Nicholas I., 332.
Hungary, anti-Semitic league in, 425–6;
persecution of Jews in, 443.
Hussite reform movement, 92.
Ignatieff, Count, 335, 341.
Immigration Reform Association, 462, 474.
Innocent III., (Pope), genius and despotism of, 90–5, 126, 185.
Inquisition, the, 95;
in France, 100;
in Spain, 157–8, 170, 196, 234, 311, 405;
in Italy, 202, 234;
in Holland, 246–7, 305, 310, 481.
_See_ also Holy Office.
Inquisitors, Court of, 97, 160–1, 168.
Ireland, position of Jews in, 469–72.
Irish Coercion Bill, 322.
Irish Naturalisation Act, 323.
Isaiah (Prophet), 3, 319.
Islam, Christians embrace creed of, xviii;
victory of, 70;
laws of, 76;
in relation to Christianity, 437.
Isocrates, 408.
Ispahan, war for independence, 61.
_Israelitische Allianz_, 483.
Italy, Jews in, 54, 182–3;
Christianity in, 187–90, 196, 309, 324, 401, 437.
Ivan IV. (the Terrible), 329, 341.
_Ivanhoe_ (Walter Scott), 312–6.
Jacob of London, 122.
Jacob, typical of Jewish race, 22.
James I., 274;
translation of Bible, 441.
Jassy, Jewish colonies in, 382.
Jayme I., King of Aragon, 98, 144.
Jehovah, Temple of, 21, 28–9;
spiritual worship of, 31, 275, 377.
Jerusalem, 2;
victorious entry into, 4;
Greek architecture introduced into, 5;
sack of, 18;
fall of, 26;
colonised by pagan soldiers, 38, 39;
becomes stronghold of the Cross, 48, 73;
destruction of, 484–6, 487;
extra-territorialisation of, 493;
Professional School of, 507.
Jesus, Society of, 234.
_Jesus was born a Jew_ (Luther), 219.
Jew-baiting, 69, 358, 362, 396, 423;
hatred, 405, 416, 480;
and Gentile, discord between, 42, 149, 194, 352, 482;
Occidental, 496, 500.
_Jew of Malta_ (Marlowe), 259–68, 274, 313, 314, 315.
_Jew of Venice_ (Percy), 268.
_Jewish Calendar_, the, xviii;
red-letter days, 38, 280, 324;
black-letter days, 150, 418.
Jewish Colonial Trust, the, 493, 506.
“Jewish Colonization Association,” 398, 512.
Jewish State, the, destruction of, 26–7, 37;
rehabilitation of Jews in, 277, 508.
_See also_ Zionism.
Jewish character, 71–2, 210;
intolerance of, 28–31, 35, 110–1, 249–55, 275;
anti-socialism, 33, 64–6, 99–100, 111, 124, 377, 419, 436, 499;
loyalty, 99;
marriage customs, 31–2, 450;
intermarriage barred, 500, 502, 518;
children contrasted with Gentile, 66;
manner of worship, 66–7;
literature, 71–2, 116, 162, 244, _see also_ Hebrew lit.;
singularity, 116;
patriotism to adopted countries, 279, 376, 413, 446–7, 491;
race, varied types of, 325–7;
survival of the fittest, 327–8;
religious law, _see_ Torah.
_Jewish State: an attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish
Question, The_, 490.
Jewish Territorial Organisation, 517.
Jewish question, the, viewed as a whole, 518.
_Jew’s Daughter, the_, 199, 258.
Jews’ mental ability, 5, 324, 327–8, 412–3, 440, 441, 463;
as financiers, 367;
commercial, 441;
medical, 67, 69, 76, 174, 191.
Jews, causes of unpopularity, 28, 31–3, 155;
charges against: child murder myth, 47, 101–2, 117–8, 156, 198–9,
255–6, 383;
“child tribute,” 331;
ritual murder, 339, 424, 426;
debasing coinage, 125, 136–7, 185–6, 345, 363, 365;
evading military service, 375, 390, 440, 446;
lengthy pedigrees of, 57;
regarded as royal serfs, 89, 103, 123, 124, 305;
missions to, 99;
immunity from disease, 103;
forbidden to own or rent land, 109, 308, 383;
resemblance of, to Puritans, 276;
forced to wear badge, 134, 144, 145, 148, 151;
bill for admission to Parliament, 324;
effect of tolerance towards, 324–5;
as agriculturists, 338, 343, 364;
Talmudist, 347;
fecundity of, 395.
Jews’ Free School, 451–2.
Jews as usurers. _See_ Usurers.
Joachim, 328.
Jocelin, of Brakelond, story of his monastery, 128–9.
Jochanan, son of Zakkai, 25.
John, King, 122–3, 124, 126,132.
Johnston, Sir Harry, 514.
Joseph II., 292–3, 308.
Josephus, 24.
Judaea, 20;
gods of, 21.
Julian, attitude towards Christianity, 44;
towards Jews, 45–6.
Julius Severus, 37.
Justinian, 49.
Juvenal, 24, 31, 34.
Kant, 291, 319.
Karaites, 504.
Katkoff, 335.
Kelvin, Lord, 399.
Kieff, 376.
Kimchi, David, 441.
Kishineff, massacre at, 356–62.
Kitchener, Lord, 503.
Klingenberg, Governor, 374.
Koran, the, 106.
Korobchevsky, 369.
Kronstadt, Father John of, 361.
Kropotkin, Prince Peter, 463.
Kuropatkin’s army, 376.
Langton, Cardinal, passes decree banning Jews, 126–7.
Lansdowne, Lord, 403, 511.
Lasalle, 328.
Lasker, 328, 417–18, 420.
Lateran Council, the Third, 93;
Fourth, 144;
General Council, 108.
Latin language, abhorred by Jews, 64, 147;
as universal medium of communication, 409.
Lavater, 290.
Lazarus, 328.
Lecky, 348, 399.
Leo, the Isaurian, 51, 60.
Leo, the Philosopher, 52.
Lepanto victory, the, 201–2.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 286, 289, 290, 293, 298, 313.
_Light, The_ (Maimonides), 75.
Limerick, 469, 472;
affair, 472, 477.
Lithuania, Jews of, 101, 329, 376.
Lithuanian Uniates, 337.
Locke, 281.
London Jews, spoliation of, 131;
massacre of, 135–6;
Jewish cemetery in, 280;
Diocese of, 468.
London, East, Jews in, 463, 468.
Louis, “the Pious,” Jews’ privileges under, 79, 80.
Louis IX. (St. Louis), 97, 100.
Louis XV., 294.
Louis XVI., 295.
Loyola, Ignatius, 171, 196, 234.
Lueger, Dr., 428, 429.
Lust, Goddess of, 38.
Luther, Martin, 215–27, 234, 318, 319.
Lutheran rebellion, 233.
Lutherans, 229, 339, 422.
Lybia, devastation of, 35.
Lydda, council at, 38.
Macaulay, 447.
Maccabees, house of, 4, 32;
restoration of the Law by, 325.
Macedonia, Empire of, 1, 408.
Maçon, Council of, 56.
Maimon, 291.
Maimonides, Moses, 74–8, 110, 291.
Manasseh, Ben Israel, 279–80.
Manichaeans, 54, 411.
Marcus Crassus, 20.
_Mariage de Figaro_ (Beaumarchais), 295.
Mariana (historian), 158.
Marr, Wilhelm, 418, 422, 425.
_Marranos_, 149, 154, 156, 159, 168, 169, 170, 172, 196, 201, 204,
234, 247, 249, 278, 311.
Martyn, Justin (_Dial_), 10–11, 42, 224.
Marx, Karl, 328.
Medigo, Elias del, 194.
Mediterranean, Jews’ commercial activity in, xvi.
Mehmed Effendi. _See_ Zebi, Sabbataï.
Mendelssohn, Moses, 286, 289–91, 292, 325, 326, 355, 440, 480, 482.
Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Felix, 328.
Mendicant Orders, religious bigotry of, 110.
Mendoza, Cardinal, 156, 157.
_Merchant of Venice_ (Shakespeare), 259, 268–72, 316.
Merovingian kings, 56, 79, 81.
Mesopotamia, 35, 494.
Messiah, the, 43.
Messianic expectation, xix, 39, 43, 85, 90, 200, 212, 251, 278, 281,
282, 298, 494;
frenzy, 150;
era, 279;
dream, 60–1, 326, 486.
Mikweh, Model Farm of, 507.
Millennarians, 278, 279.
Miller, John, 229.
Milton, 279, 281.
Mirabeau, 292, 296, 302.
Mirandola, Count Giovanni Pico de, 233.
_Modern Exodus, A_ (Violet Guttenberg), 467.
Mohammedan theocracy, 383.
Mohammedanism, Jews adopt, 75, 176.
Mohammedans, 59–61, 85, 168;
their view of Jews, 173.
Mohileff, outrage at, 372;
Jewish exodus from, 376–7.
Moldavia, Jews in, 326, 380–1, 382;
anti-Judaism in, 383;
inhabitants of, 388.
Mommsen, 423.
Money-lenders, _see_ Usurers.
Montague, Lady Mary Wortley, 176–7.
Montefiore, Sir Francis, 507, 513.
Montesquieu, 302.
Montfort, Simon de, 136.
Montpellier, Jewish academy at, 69.
Moorish culture, effect on Jews, 70.
More, Sir Thomas, 274.
Morescoes, 168, 172, 234.
Morgan, D. J., M.P., 460.
_Mosaic Decalogue_, 9.
Mosaic Law, 9, 39, 42, 277;
ordinances, 502.
Moscow, 337;
no Jewish workman allowed to reside in, 346;
Jews expelled from, 349–50.
Moses, 2, 27, 28, 31, 60, 211, 277, 279, 327;
Law of, in abeyance, 505.
Moses of Crete, 48–9.
Mourousi, Prince, 383.
Muravieff, 334.
Nachmanides, 98, 145, 486–7.
Naples, 52, 54.
Napoleon, 301, 302–4, 305, 309, 311, 410, 412, 416, 446.
Napoleon III., 416.
Napoleonic wars, 457–8, 481.
Narbonne, Council at, 96.
National anti-Semitic Federation, 435.
National Church, a, scheme for, 277–8.
Nationalism (Russian), 334–8, 348, 365, 383, 436;
cult of, 407–8, 410, 445–6, 453;
(Austrian), 426–8;
book on, 434;
(English), 477;
effects of, 411, 416, 488.
Nationalist newspapers, 338.
Nationalists, attitude in Dreyfus case, 435.
Neo-Platonists, 381.
Nero, 24–5.
Nerva, 34–5.
New York, immigration of Jews to, 377.
Nicholas, Edward, 277.
Nicholas I., 332, 335.
Nicholas II., 335, 350, 358.
Nihilism, 334.
Nihilists, 333, 338.
Nine Responses, The, 303.
Nordau, Dr. Max, 512.
_Nouvelle Géographie Universelle_ (Elisée Reclus), 415.
_Novoe Vremya_, 359.
Numenius, 18.
Obaiah Abu Isa ben Ishak, 61.
Obscurantism, Catholic, 235, 310, 481.
Odessa, 351, 376;
Zionism in, 506.
Odysseus, typical of Hellenic race, 22.
Œcumenical Council held at Rome, 94–5.
_Of Riches_ (Bacon), 273.
_Of Seditions and Troubles_ (Bacon), 272.
_Of Usurie_ (Bacon), 273.
Old Believers, 337.
Omar II., 60.
_On Mendelssohn and the Political Reform of the Jews_ (Mirabeau),
296.
Orestes (Prefect), 47.
_Organon_, the, 70.
Origen, 42.
Orleans, Councils of, 55.
Ostragoff, Vice-Governor of Bessarabia, 358.
Ostrowez, anti-Semitic disturbances at, 371.
Otto the Great, 82.
Otto II., 82.
Ottoman rule, condition of Jew and Christian under, 383.
Ovid, 386–7.
Owen, Dr. John, 277.
Padua, University of, 194.
Pagan toleration, 29–30.
“Pale of Jewish Settlement,” the (Russia), 346, 351, 362, 381, 463,
513.
Palencia, Council of, 149.
Palingenesia, 301–28.
Palestine, 1–3, 9, 14;
natural characteristics of, 16, 18;
insurrections in, 20, 35;
Jews permitted to re-enter, 38;
Christianity in, 48;
Persian advance upon, 50, 57;
re-conquered by Saladin, 76, 484, 488, 489, 490, 492, 497, 503;
Jewish population of, 507, 508;
agricultural college at, 509;
Jewish immigration, 510;
poverty of, 511, 512, 513, 517.
Palmerston, Lord, 457, 488.
Panorthodox programme, 336.
Panslavism, 334.
Panslavist programme, 336.
Paper currency, invention of, 441.
Papists, persecution of (England), 277.
Paris, Council of, 56;
university of, 410.
Parliament de la Chandeleur, 139.
Partscheff, disturbances at, 371.
Passover rites, 117, 168, 487.
Patriotic League (France), 435.
Paul IV. (Pope), 202–3, 204, 235.
Peace, Roman Temple of, 27.
Peñaforte, Raymund de, 96.
Pentateuch, the, 290.
Pepys, 280–1, 281–2.
Pera, Jewish quarter at, 52.
Persius, 24, 31.
_Pester Lloyd_ (extract), 366.
Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Clugny, 88.
Petrarch, 187, 189.
Pfefferkorn, John, 232.
_Phaedo, or the Immortality of the Soul_ (Mendelssohn), 290.
Pharisees, their teaching opposed to Sadducees, 6–7, 42, 48, 500;
and Sadducees of twentieth century, 495;
feud between, 504–5.
Philip the Fair, predatory spirit towards Jews, 113–4, 405.
Philo, 2;
as envoy to Rome, 23.
Phocas, 49.
Picquart, Colonel, 433, 435.
“Pious,” the, 3, 4;
programme of, 6, 291, 381.
_See also_ Chassidim.
Pius IX., 310.
Plato, Dialogues, 9;
idea of usury, 106, 290.
Plehve, M. de, 356, 358–9, 367, 368–70.
Pobiedonostseff, M., 335, 368.
_Pogrom_, 366.
Poland, Jews in, 101, 103–4, 236–7, 240–2, 243, 308, 338, 353–4,
366–7;
spread of the _Bund_ to, 376, 377;
Rabbis of, 380;
emigration of Jews from, 450;
partition of, 331;
assimilation experiment, 370.
Poles, condition of, under Nicholas I., 332;
hatred of Jews, 353.
Polish rebellions, 333, 334;
Uniates, 337;
culture, 355;
Jews, 382, 475, 498.
Pompey, 18, 19–20.
Popes, advance of authority of, 83–4, 178–9, 192–5, 408;
radical change of attitude towards Jews, 202–3.
Portugal, massacre of Jewish converts, 169, 172;
Inquisition erected in, 171, 311.
Prague, expulsion of Jews from, 235.
_Praise of Folly_ (Erasmus), 215.
_Prioresses Tale_, The (Chaucer), 255–8.
_Proseucha_, 34.
Protection, demand for, 459–60.
Protestantism, opposed to Catholicism, 6–7, 233–4;
hostile to Jews, 218, 232;
in England, 274, 282.
Prussia, question of emancipation of Jews introduced, 307;
war against Austria, 334.
Prussian Constitution, 308;
Diet, 423.
Ptolemies, The, 1;
prosperity of Jews under rule of, 2.
Puckler, Count, anti-Semitic speeches by, 425.
Purim, Feast of, 47, 147.
Puritans, 275;
resemblance to Jews, 276;
English, 278.
Quemadero, The, 160, 247.
Raaben, General von, 358.
Rabbis, schools established for, 304.
Rationalism, 481.
Raymund VI., Count of Toulouse, 91–3, 94, 95.
Raymund, Viscount of Beziers, assassination of, 92–3.
Reccared, King, 57–8.
Reclus, the brothers, 463.
Redemptorist monks, fanaticism of, 472.
Reformation, object of, 214, 246.
Reichstag, anti-Semitic feeling in, 425.
_Religious Code_ (Maimonides), 75–6.
_Reliques of Ancient Poetry_ (Bishop Percy), 258, 268.
Renaissance, object of, 214, 286.
Renan, Ernest, 430–31, 432.
Rennes, 434, 435.
Resettlement in England, 275–85.
Resurrection, Church of, 41.
_Retour Le, de Jérusalem_, 435.
Reubeni, David, 169–71.
Reuchlin, John, 225, 232.
Rhine, Jews of, 404.
Rhode, Island of, 277.
Richard Coeur de Lion, 220;
anti-Jewish demonstrations in reign of, 120–1;
confers privileges on Jews, 122.
Ripon, Marquess of, 399.
Rishon le Sion, wine-growing at, 509.
Roberts, Lord, 447.
Roman writers, unanimous condemnation of Jews, 31.
Roman Catholic reaction against the Reformation, 202;
Catholic apologists, 282;
Catholic clerics, 422;
Church, 408;
anti-Semitism fostered by, 427.
Roman rule, Jews under, 18–27, 40;
driven from Rome, 34;
evidence not accepted against Christians, 49;
as traders in Rome, 52, 54, 182, 185–6, 190–1;
edict of prohibitions, 208, 310, 311.
Romans, massacre of, by Jews, 35–6.
Romanticism, relation of, to Romanism, 480.
Roosevelt, President, 400.
Rothschild, Baron Lionel de, 321, 322, 323–4;
Edmund de, 509;
Lord, 466.
Rothschild Bank (Paris), 433.
Roumania, Jews in, 379–403;
oppression of, 482;
prejudice against Hebrew race in, 379, 429, 436;
persecution of, 393–6, 443;
cause of oppression, 395;
emigration from, 397, 398;
England’s attitude towards, 398–9;
political condition of Jews in, 392;
their cause advocated, 483;
Jewish disabilities question in, 391;
Roman colonists in, 386;
as a highway, 388;
Queen of, 393, 402–3;
economic misery of, 402.
Roumanian independence, recognition of, 385;
citizenship, 385–6;
language, 389;
legislation, object of, 393, 474;
Labour Law, 398;
Constitution, revision of, 400;
Jews efficient farmers, 510.
Roumanians, origin of, 386, 388.
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 286.
Rubenstein, 327, 328.
Russell, Lord John, 321.
Russia, Jews in, 329–78;
subjected to conscription, 332;
emancipation of serfs, 333;
Ukase (1804) relieves oppression, 331 (1864), 344;
outbreaks against, 338, 348;
expulsion from, 350;
persecution of, 362, 443, 482, 489;
sign petition to Ministers, 351;
as recruits, 352, 376.
Russia, opposition of, to Occidental reform, 330;
conflict with Turkey, 335;
Jewish question in, 349–50;
Batoum fortified by, 402.
Russian Empire, history of, 331;
emancipation of serfs, 333;
religious fanaticism rare, 339;
tyranny, 336–7;
peasant, 340–1, 344–5, 364;
causes of ill-feeling towards Jews, 338–9;
administrative policy, 346–7, 362, 366, 377;
Christians, ignorance of, 347;
Jews, gifted writers, 355.
Russo-Jewish Committee, 443.
Sadducees, 6;
religious tenets, 7, 8, 495, 508.
Salerno, School of, 69.
Salimbene, 178.
Salisbury, Lord, 488.
Salomons, Alderman, 324.
Samaritans, 37, 49.
Sanhedrin, The, institution of, 4;
convoked, 302, 303.
Sappho, 3.
Sazonoff, 370.
Schiller, 291.
Schneider, Herr, 429.
Scott, Sir Walter, 313, 314, 315.
Seleucids, Graeco-Syrian, policy of, 3, 5, 6, 22.
Semites, hatred of Spaniards for, 405.
Serene, 60–1.
Servia, condition of Jews in, 383, 384, 483.
Servian Law, rights of Jews under, 384.
Severus, Bishops of Magona, 57.
Shakespeare, 273, 300.
Shekel Account, the, 506.
_Shulchan Aruch_ (Joseph Caro), 211.
Shylock, 274, 313, 314, 315.
Siberia, 463.
Sigismund Augustus, King of Poland, 329.
Sigismund, King, converted to Catholicism, 55.
Simeon the Stylites, 48.
Simon, acclaimed High Priest, 4.
Sinai, Mount, 275.
Singer, Simeon, 448.
Sipyaghin, 368.
Sisebut, King, treatment of Jews, 58.
Sisenand, Jews under rule of, 58–9.
Sixtus V., enlightened policy of, 205–6.
Skene, of Rubislaw, 312.
Skuptchina, election of Jew to, 384.
Smela, anti-Semitic riots at, 371.
Socialism in Russia, 358.
Social Democrats, denounce anti-Semitic agitation, 422;
as champions of Jews, 429.
Socrates, 290.
Solomon, of Egypt, 52, 71.
_Songs of Zion_ (Jehuda Halevi), 72.
Sosnowice, anti-Jewish disturbance at, 372.
South Africa, dread of alien competitor in, 452, 478.
Spain, Jews in, 56–7, 59, 60, 69, 70, 74, 75, 84, 103, 140, 166;
higher type of, 142;
causes of anti-Judaism, 143;
slaughter of, 145–6, 149, 157, 158–9;
restrictive measures against, 150–1, 153;
regarded as outlaws, 153;
Jews love for, 162, 200, 317, 324, 326, 343, 441.
Spanish Jews, 173, 382;
persecution of, 404.
_Spectator_, the, 282.
Spektor, 355.
Spinoza, Baruch, 251–4, 298, 326, 440, 441.
St. Agobard, Bishop of Lyons, 79–80, 81.
St. Louis, _see_ Louis IX.
Steinthal, 328, 440.
Stöcker, Adolph, 418, 419, 422;
expelled from Court, 425.
Strabo, favourable mention of Jews, 31.
Suetonius, 21 _n._
Swedenborg, 320.
Switzerland, Jewish persecution in, 101, 304;
political equality of Jews in, 305–6.
Synagogue, 280, 298, 355;
intermarriage tolerated but not sanctioned by, 303;
in Seville, 311;
of Middle Ages, 396;
devotion to, 480;
struggle between State and, 505.
Syria, 60.
Tabernacles, Feast of, 212.
_Table-Talk_ (Martin Luther), 216–7, 220.
Tacitus, 31, 32, 35.
Talleyrand, 297.
Talmud, The, 5, 53, 55, 63, 64, 72, 75;
general confiscation of, 97;
burning of, 97–8, 116, 137, 142, 145, 153, 190, 202, 205, 206, 242,
354, 497, 508.
Talmudical School of Walosin (“Tree of Life College”), 352.
Talmudism, 380, 425.
Tarik, 60.
Tartars, appeal to Sultan of Turkey, 336.
Taurien, Jewish workman forbidden to reside in, 346.
Taylor, Jeremy, 281.
Temple (at Jerusalem), restoration of, 4, 19, 21, 22;
destruction of, 26–7, 29, 297;
Strabo’s reverence for, 31;
Greek fables, 32–33, 35, 37;
rebuilding begun under Julian, 46, 49, 190, 211, 378, 487.
Test Acts, Repeal of, 322.
Testament, New, 275, 277.
Testament, The Old, Septuagint translation of, 2, 96, 106, 116, 275,
277.
Theodoric, conquest of Italy by, 53;
enlightened administration, 53–4.
Theodosius I., 52.
Theodosius the Great, 46, 48.
Theodosius the Younger, 47, 48.
Thirty Years’ War, 234, 235, 248, 412.
Thucydides, 14.
Tiberias, 38, 48, 484, 507.
Tiberius, persecution of Jews by, 21–22.
Titus, triumphal arch of, 27, 34, 35, 49, 57.
Toledo, Council of, 57, 60.
Torah, the, 2, 3, 64.
Torquemada, Thomas de, 155–6, 159, 161–3, 165.
Tortosa, religious controversy at, 152–3.
Toulouse, 68;
Count of, 68, 69.
_Tractatus_, the (Spinoza), 254.
Trajan, Emperor, 35.
Traube, 328.
Trent, 198;
rocks of, 199.
Trevelyan, Charles, 464.
Tsukermann’s Synagogue, 372.
Tudela, “Jewish barrier” of, 143, 198.
Turkey, Jews in, 173–4, 176, 196–7, 384, 491–2;
Christians in, 384;
and the Treaty of Berlin, 402;
policy of a regenerated, 438.
Ukraine, 238–9, 240, 241.
United Russian Revolutionists, 370.
Universities Tests Act, 324.
Urbino, Duke of, 204.
Usury and the Jews, 105–14, 116, 119, 130, 134–5;
typical case of, 128–9;
Bill for abatement of, 273.
Valens, Arian, Emperor, 46.
Vannes, Council of, 55.
Venetian Republic, Jews’ position in, 198–200, 201–2.
Venice, 329.
Victorian era, ideals of, 456.
Vienna, Jews banished from, 242–3;
in, 292, 309, 400;
Act signed in, 305;
anti-Semitic majority in Municipal Council, 428.
Vilna, 351, 376.
Virchow, 423.
Voltaire, 286, 287, 291, 293.
Voltaire-Hirsch lawsuit, 288–9.
Wagstaff, Vice-Consul, 342.
Wallachia, Jews of, 382.
War of Liberation, 305, 307.
Warsaw, Jews of, 354, 376.
Welldon, Bishop, 468.
Wellington, Duke of, 438.
Westphalia, Treaty of, 233–234.
Whalley, Major, 278.
Whitehall, conference at, 278.
_Who is to blame?_ (Pronin), 359.
Wickliffe, 245.
William Rufus, toleration for Judaism, 116–7.
William I. (Emperor), 335.
William and Mary, 282.
Williams, Roger, 278.
Wilna, Elijah, 352.
Witte, M. de, 370.
Zangwill, Israel, 41, 42, 465, 466, 506, 511, 515, 516, 517.
Zebi, Sabbataï, 174–6, 242, 281, 326, 484.
Zion, desolation of, 26;
yearning towards, 94, 164, 488;
mourning over, 485, 487;
effect of destruction of, 485.
Zionism, 482–518;
opposition towards, 493, 495;
and Abdul Hamid, 501;
diversity among the delegates, 503;
progress of, 506.
Zionist Association, 490;
annual congresses, 491;
Zionist Colonial Bank (London), 506.
Zionist League in London, 515.
Zionist programme, 490, 491, 492;
newspaper (_Die Welt_), 490.
_Znamya_, an anti-Semitic organ, 358.
Zola, 433, 434, 435.
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Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.
In the original book, sidenotes (all are dates) were in the outside
margins and often mid-paragraph. In this ebook, they are approximately
in the same positions as in the original book, but above or embedded
within paragraphs, shaded, and sometimes enclosed in ♦diamonds♦ to
indicate that they are sidenotes.
The index was not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page
references. There are no entries between “Witte” and “Zangwill”, and no
missing pages in the original book.
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