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the hardness of their hearts and were no longer acceptable in the sight of God; that the circumcision of the spirit had superseded the circumcision of the flesh; that faith, and not works, is the key to eternal life; that their national calamities were judgments for their rejection and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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.