Israel in Europe

“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

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.

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:

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:

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:

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:

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.