In France, during the first quarter of the thirteenth century, no persecutions of the Jews are recorded. In the south their condition appears to have been prosperous. They were protected by Raymond, the heretic but powerful Count of Toulouse. One of the bitterest charges made against him by Innocent III. was, that he employed and favoured Jews; and when, after his submission, he had to sign the conditions on which his offences would be overlooked, one of them was, that he should no longer employ Jewish officers.

In 1223, Philip Augustus died, and was succeeded by Louis VIII., called, it is to be presumed in mockery, Louis the Lion. During his short reign of three years, we hear that he passed a decree annulling all future interest on debts incurred to Jews, and ordering the payment of the capital, in three separate instalments, each after the interval of a year.

In 1226, Louis VIII. died, and his son, the renowned Louis IX., known to history as St. Louis, succeeded to the throne. He was at the time a minor, and France was under the Regency of Blanche of Castile for nearly ten years. Louis’s first act seems to have been the annulling of one third of all debts due to Jews, and an immunity from arrest or distraint for the two remaining portions. He also called a council at Melun on the Seine, which forbade Christian men, for the future, to borrow money from the Jews on any terms. He is said to have issued this order ‘for the good of his soul.’ How this could be does not clearly appear. Possibly he felt so strongly the power and the will of the Jews to use their money-lending facilities in an oppressive way that he sought in this way to prevent their injurious influence. Or he may have regarded the scriptural prohibitions addressed to the Jews, against lending their money on usury to their own countrymen, as applying to all loans on usury, though Scripture expressly asserts otherwise (Deut. xxiii. 20). That this was so seems evident from the fact that Louis’s enactment was levelled as much against the Lombards and Caorsini[114] usurers as against the Jews. It would seem that Louis wished to induce them to abandon usury for agriculture or handicraft, as was also the desire of his contemporary Edward I. of England. But both monarchs failed in the attempt.

In the state to which matters had now grown, it would have been next to impossible to abate the dislike of the people to them, so as to induce them to permit the Jews to engage in the work either of the artisan or the peasant. The hatred of the populace was in no way abated by the quiet of the last forty years. In 1239 there were riots in Paris and Orleans, and other great cities, on the old charge of crucifying boys at the Passover, in which property was wrecked and wholesale murders took place. At Ploermel, in Brittany, the duke of that country summoned an assembly of the nobles and bishops, at which it was declared that agriculture was ruined by the monstrous exactions of the Jews; and a series of laws were passed, which for injustice and cruelty exceed any ever put forth in any country. It was decreed that all debts to Jews should be cancelled; that all Jews should be banished from the country; that no person who should kill a Jew should be liable to prosecution for it; and that no judge or magistrate should take cognisance of any such offence. A petition was further addressed to the King of France, requesting him to carry out the same regulations throughout his dominions. The Council of Lyons, held in the ensuing year, required all Christian princes, on pain of excommunication, to force the Jews in their several territories to refund to the Crusaders the sums they had exacted from them. The Jews were forbidden to exact any debt from a Crusader’s family, until he himself returned from Palestine, or until satisfactory evidence of his death had been produced. Another Council prohibited them from practising as physicians, ‘because, being in direct league with Satan, if they did cure any one, it would probably be by their master’s aid!’ Whatever evils men experienced, for which they were unable to assign any special cause, were supposed to be due to the secret spells and diabolical influence of the Jews, much as in a succeeding generation the same evils were attributed to witchcraft. The main source and centre of their evil knowledge was supposed to be the mysterious and terrible Talmud. Edicts were issued for its destruction, and it was burned, we are told, by cartloads in the streets of Paris.

A considerable exodus seems to have followed on these measures; which was taken advantage of by the king, who seized on the goods of those who had taken flight, and thus raised money for the crusade on which he was about to enter. About the same time he ordered them to wear a special badge, called the rouelle—a piece of blue cloth worn both on the front and on the back of the Jewish gabardine.

Notwithstanding these severities, it is plain that Louis was actuated more by a desire of converting the Jews to Christ than of venting his horror and hate of them. We read of a solemn conference held in the year 1254 between Rabbi Jechiel and a convert from Judaism, named Nicolas, before Blanche, who acted as regent during her son’s absence. Both parties claimed the victory; neither, consequently, underwent any conversion. It was probably disappointment at this result which induced Louis to send home orders that they should now be banished from the realm, which, we are told, the queen-mother punctually executed.

During Louis’s absence occurred also the first ‘rising of the shepherds,’ as it is called. This was led by an apostate Hungarian monk, who had originally been a Mussulman. The avowed purpose was the rescue of King Louis from the hands of his enemies. They committed pillage and murder wherever they went, but the Jews were the especial objects of their violence. It is probable that if they had confined their outrages to them, they might have escaped punishment. But the massacre of the Christians could not be overlooked, especially of priests and friars; and the Hungarian and his followers were overpowered and slain.

Philip the Hardy succeeded to the throne in 1270, and one of his first acts was to recall the Jews to France, it having been discovered that, however much the people might complain of their avarice and exactions, they got on considerably worse without them. It is said that during his reign, which lasted for twenty-five years, they continued unmolested, and again gathered in great riches. They were banished, however, from Gascony, in 1288, by Edward I. of England, a preliminary measure, one might think, to his expulsion of them from his English domains. A story is told by Walsingham of his having taken this step in consequence of a miraculous escape which he had from being struck dead by a flash of lightning, which passed directly over his bed and killed two of his chamberlains who were standing close by. As a sign of his gratitude for this deliverance, he is said to have banished the Jews. Edward was a man rather in advance of his day, and it is difficult to believe that he could have thought that the merciless banishment of the Jews would be a fit requital of mercy shown to him. We shall see more of his motives in an ensuing chapter. But it is proper to remark that this age, apparently beyond any other, credited the most extravagant conceptions respecting the Satanic hatred of the Jews for the Christian mysteries. They are continually charged with endeavouring to possess themselves of the sacred wafer, and then offering it the grossest insults, their sacrilege being as often exposed and punished by some special miracle. A woman is persuaded by a Jew to convey to him the consecrated host, which he stabs in several places, whereupon it bleeds profusely; and some Christian customers, coming in, see it, and indict him for the offence; or he puts the wafer into his purse, in which are a number of silver pieces, and these are turned into seven wafers, similar to the one he had placed among them. Staggered by the miracle, he becomes a convert to the gospel. Stories like these are continually to be met with. That the mass of the people believed them is beyond dispute; but whether the more intelligent among the clergy attached any real faith to such tales, or simply used them as a means of accomplishing their own ends, in exciting popular fury against the Jews, is a matter very difficult to determine.

In 1285, Philip IV., called the Fair, the shameless murderer of the Knights Templars, succeeded his father. His first acts were extremely hostile to the Church, but he showed no lenity to the Jews. Six years after his accession, he repeated the act of several of his predecessors, and expelled them from the kingdom. It does not appear that the banishment was rigidly enforced, as we find a second expulsion taking place not many years afterwards. In fact, these repeated sentences of exile and subsequent recall read very much as though they were simply regular stages in a prescribed system of spoliation. After the Jews had been resident in a country a sufficient length of time to have amassed wealth enough to be worth seizing upon, it was discovered that they had been guilty of some terrible wickedness, which rendered it impossible for a Christian sovereign to tolerate them within his dominions. They had seized some Christian boy, perhaps, and indulged their natural hate at once of the Saviour and His worshippers, by subjecting him to death on the cross. The fact that they had done so was made abundantly clear by some astounding miracle, which rendered human testimony needless. The immediate authors of the deed were executed, and their property confiscated to the Crown, and their countrymen were condemned to forfeit all but their movables, and with these to quit the realm. Sometimes the charge was varied, and they were found to have poisoned wells, or leagued with some foreign enemies, or (as we have seen) profaned or insulted the Host. But it always came to the same result. The Jews were driven out of the land, until they were in a condition to pay a large sum for readmission; and then the king, in the midst of his just anger, remembered mercy, and allowed them to return and grow rich, until their renewed wealth brought some fresh wickedness to light.

In Germany, though the virulence of both clergy and people seems to have been very nearly of the same character as in France, the sovereigns of the country were evidently disposed to extend the shield of their protection over this unhappy and persecuted race. Frederick II., a monarch whose character forms a curious and interesting study, dealt with them in a manner which contrasts strangely with the demeanour of contemporary rulers towards them. At Hagenau, in Lower Alsatia, three children had been found dead in the house of a Jew. There was no evidence that the Jew had murdered them; but the tale was instantly conveyed to the emperor with a demand for vengeance. ‘Three children found dead! Let them be buried then,’ was his answer. He followed up this novel mode of dealing with the matter, by causing a judicial inquiry to be made as to whether it was a regular Jewish custom to sacrifice Christian children at the feast of the Passover. Of course no legal tribunal could give any other decision than that there was no sort of evidence of such a practice.[115]

At the Council of Vienna, held in 1267, restrictions unheard of even in the harshest times were proposed and ordered. The Jews were forbidden to hold even the most ordinary intercourse of every-day life with the Christians. They were not to be allowed to use the public baths, or put up at the public inns, or to accept any public contract, or employ any Christian servant. To the requirements already exacted of them was added that of wearing a high peaked cap, which at once and inevitably declared their nationality. A permit must be purchased, before it could be lawful for any one to buy meat of a Jew.

At Munich, in 1287, an old woman having confessed that she had sold a child to the Jews, whose blood they intended to use for some unholy purpose, the rabble, without further inquiry, slaughtered all the Jews on whom they could lay their hands. The city guard, unable to quell the tumult, advised the Jews to retire for safety into their synagogue, which being a building of solid stone, was likely to be secure against violence. But the populace attacked and destroyed it, and all within it, notwithstanding the efforts of the duke himself to protect them.

To close the horrors of this century, there was another frightful massacre of the Jews at Nuremburg in 1292. A fanatic peasant, named Raind Fleish, gave out, during the war raging between Nassau and Austria, that he had been sent by Almighty God to exterminate the whole race of Israel. The people, believing him, set upon the Jews in Nuremburg and the other Bavarian cities, and burnt all that fell into their hands. The others, preferring to die by their own act rather than by the swords of their enemies, set their own houses on fire, and perished with their wives and children in the flames.