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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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