Hitherto the life of Israel in Italy had been a life chequered by sunlight and shade. Henceforth it is to be all shade. The sixteenth century is the century of the Ghetto and its foul degradation. The Italian Jews were destined to feel the effects of the Catholic reaction, provoked by the attacks of the Reformers, and although this reaction commenced latest, it lasted longest in Italy.

In 1540 Ignatius Loyola promulgated his gospel of obedience, intolerance and intellectual suicide, and the doctrine that no deed is unholy or immoral which is done in the service of the Catholic Church—than which no more startling or sinister doctrine was ever preached to the foolish sons of man. At the same time the Inquisition, having placed the extermination of the Moors and the Jews in Spain on a sound business basis, sought fresh employment for its energy and its racks. The experience of the older institution, thus united with the ardour of the young, presented a combination of forces such as none but the most resourceful of heretics could resist. It was not long before the Jews of Italy became aware of this revival of enthusiasm for the Faith.

In the very same inauspicious year the Holy Office began the persecution of the Marranos of Naples, then under Spanish rule. These pseudo-Christians were ordered to wear the badge or to leave the country. Rightly divining that the badge was only the prelude to worse things, they preferred to go into exile. Some of them bent their steps to Ancona and Ferrara, but the majority set out for Turkey. Many were captured by pirates on their voyage and were carried off to Marseilles, where the French King Henry II., though otherwise a prince of unimpeachably obscurantist leanings, received them kindly; but, as he dared not retain them, he despatched them to Turkey. ♦1550♦ Ten years later the Dominicans inflamed the Genoese against the small Jewish community in the Republic, and the Jews were banished. These were but two episodes in the later history of the Italian Jews, interesting chiefly as indicative of that change of feeling which led to the tragedy of the Ghetto.

As we have seen, there always was a natural tendency for the children of Israel to gravitate towards the same point—a habit which originated the Jewries of England, the Judenstadt of Germany, the Juderias of Spain and the Jewish quarters in most mediaeval countries. But we have also seen that, under tolerable conditions, the Jews entertained no unconquerable aversion from dwelling amidst the Gentiles, and that, when treated as human beings, they developed a certain degree of community of feeling and interest with their fellow-creatures. Further, we have noticed this gradual reconciliation blocked partly by the efforts of the Synagogue, but far more successfully by those of the Church; and we have found in certain countries the Jews claiming from the princes who favoured and fleeced them segregation as a privilege and as a means of self-protection.

In the time of Pope Gregory VII. the Bishop of Speyer, in order to save the Jews from the violence of the mob, allotted to them a particular quarter which they might fortify and defend. In the middle of the thirteenth century King Ferdinand of Castile granted a similar privilege to the Jews of Seville. In the city of Cologne the Jews, a century later, paid an annual fee of twenty marks to the officer whose task it was to lock the gates of their special quarter at sundown and to unlock them at dawn. The feudal lawlessness of the times made such precautions necessary not only for the Jews, but for all mortals who were not strong enough to secure respect for their persons and property; so much so that the Jews of Prague who lived outside the Jewish quarter resolved of their own accord to join their brethren in the Judenstadt for greater safety. ♦1473♦ Compulsory concentration of the Jews within separate quarters, it is true, was not unknown even in those days. Restrictions of this kind seem to have been in force in Sicily as early as the fourteenth century, and in certain German States even in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries, while the “Jewish barrier” of Tudela dates from the eleventh century. Such cases, however, were sporadic and exceptional. It is in the enlightened age with which we are now dealing, and in the most enlightened country in Europe, that the isolation of Israel begins to be rigidly and universally enforced as a means of coercion. The walls of the Jewish quarter are no longer a bulwark against attack, but a barrier against escape.

The name, as well as the institution under its new and offensive form, is of Venetian origin. The term is derived from the Getto—the old, walled iron-foundry, within the precincts of which the first Jewish Ghetto was established in the city of St. Mark, in 1516. The Jews had made Venice their home in very early times; but their colony, in its subsequent extent, dates from the beginning of the thirteenth century. It was then that Jewish merchants from north and east began to pour into the city that was to become, partly by their help, the commercial capital of Italy. Their relations to the Christian inhabitants were neither hostile nor yet hearty. The common people detested them, but the Government was consistent in its protection of their persons and interests. An incident that occurred in the fifteenth century serves to illustrate the Jew’s position in the Venetian Republic.

During the Holy Week of 1475 a Christian child was drowned at Trent, and its body was caught in a grating close to the house of a Jew. The priests immediately saw in the accident evidence of ritual murder, and, by exhibiting the body in public, they stirred up the populace against the supposed murderers. All the Jews of the city, male and female, young and old, rich and poor, were cast into prison by order of the Bishop. A baptized Jew came forth as accuser, and the prisoners, put to the torture, confessed that they had slain little Simon and drunk his blood on the night of the Passover. A Jewess was said to have supplied the weapon for the crime. With the exception of four Jews, who embraced Christianity, the rest were banished from Trent. Cardinal Hadrian, writing half a century later, describes the rocks of Trent as a place “where the Jews, owing to Simon’s murder, dare not even approach.”77

Meanwhile the corpse of the child was embalmed and advertised by the monks as a wonder-working relic. Thousands of pilgrims repaired to the shrine, and, such is the power of faith, swore that they saw the remains shining with an unearthly light. The miracle brought profit to the monks, and yet they, with as little logic as gratitude, denounced those whom they considered its proximate cause. The fame, or infamy, of the incident spread far and wide. In Great Britain it is believed to have given rise to the ballad of the Jew’s Daughter; in other countries it gave rise to persecution of the Jews. But the Doge and Senate of Venice, on the Jews’ complaining of their danger, ordered the Podesta of Padua to take them under his protection, repudiated the charge of murder as an impudent fiction, and, when Pope Sixtus IV. was besought to add little Simon to the roll of the other young martyrs slain by Jews, he not only emphatically refused to do so, but sent an encyclical to all the towns of Italy, forbidding them to honour Simon as a saint.

Long after Christian heresy had been condemned by Venetian law, and the authority of the Inquisition, under certain important limitations, recognised, the Jews were suffered to prosper in the Republic. Even the Holy Office was not permitted to molest them. Toleration was essential to the welfare of the mercantile commonwealth, and the statesmen of Venice, in conformity with the old Italian tradition, declined to sacrifice the interests of the State—the supreme aim of a Government—to theological bigotry. Venetian justice in those days might have chosen for its motto the divine precept given to Israel on the eve of its redemption from the house of bondage: “One law shall be to him that is home-born and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you.” Venice, accordingly, was the resort and rendezvous of foreigners of every race and religion: a city of many colours and many tongues; a humming bee-hive of traders and travellers, of scholars and Shylocks, all of whom were welcomed so long as they conformed to the laws of the land. Among these multifarious elements of harmonious confusion none was more conspicuous than the Jew.

Spain, as we have seen, embraced the opposite principle, and at the end of the fifteenth century, a great number of Jewish refugees from that country joined their brethren in Venice, where they were allowed to settle under certain conditions agreed to between the Government of the Republic and Daniel Rodrigues, the Jewish Consul of Venice in Dalmatia. But, as tolerance began to decline, the life of the Venetian Jews was made bitter to them by a variety of harsh enactments which hampered their movements and checked their development; such as the law that compelled them to reside at Mestre, the law that forbade them to keep schools, or teach anything, on pain of 50 ducats’ fine and six months’ imprisonment, and numerous other restrictions which culminated in their confinement in the Ghetto.

Meanwhile persecution and the accumulation of sufferings brought back to life the old Messianic Utopia. According to one calculation the Redeemer was expected in the year 1503, and the end of the world to come soon after the fall of Rome. Cabbalistic mysticism encouraged these expectations, and in 1502 a certain Asher, in Istria near Venice, assumed the character of Precursor. Like John the Baptist, Asher preached repentance and contrition, promising that the Messiah would appear in six months. He gained many devoted disciples both in Italy and in Germany, and his predictions called forth much fasting and praying and charity, as well as considerable exaltation and extravagance. The prophet’s sudden death brought the dream to an end; but it revived thirty years later among the much-tried Marranos of Spain and Portugal.78

Despite all disadvantages, however, the Jews of Venice were able to hold their own. Their wit, sharpened by an oppression not severe enough to blunt it, suggested to them various means of evading the statutes, and escaping the consequences. Their hatred of the Gentile oppressors sought its gratification in over-reaching and beating them in the race for wealth. Excluded from most other provinces of activity, they concentrated all the resources of their fertile genius in the acquisition of gold. These circumstances were scarcely conducive to cordiality between them and the Christians.

During the war with Turkey all the Levantine merchants in Venice, most of whom were Jews, were, in accordance with the barbarous practice of the times, imprisoned, and their goods seized. On the 18th of October, 1571, the popular enthusiasm, excited by the news of the Lepanto victory over the Turks, expressed itself, among other demonstrations—such as cheering, releasing debtors from prison, closing the shops, mutual embracing, thanksgiving services, bell-ringing, and the like—also in an outcry against the Jews, who, for some occult reason, were suddenly accused of being the cause of the war. ♦1571 Dec.♦ This outcry led to the issue by the Senate of a decree of expulsion which, however, was only partially carried out, ♦1573♦ and two years later was revoked through the exertions of Jacopo Soranzo, the Venetian Agent at Constantinople, who explained to the Doge and the Council of Ten the harm which the Jewish colonies in Turkey were able to do to their Catholic enemies in the West.

Next year a Jewish diplomatist, Solomon Ashkenazi, arrived in Venice as Envoy Extraordinary, appointed by the Grand Seigneur to conclude peace with the Republic. It was not without difficulty that the prejudices of the Venetian Government were overcome, and that the Jew was received. But, once acknowledged, Solomon was treated with the respect due to his ambassadorial character, and to the power of the Court which he represented. The joy of the Venetian Jews at the consideration paid to their illustrious co-religionist knew no bounds.

Rome followed the example of Venice. The Catholic reaction against the Reformation brought about a radical change in the attitude of the Popes towards their Jewish subjects. Humanism was banished from the Vatican, and with it the broad spirit of toleration which had secured to the Jews of Rome an exceptional prosperity. The ancient canonical decrees which had wrought desolation in the distant dependencies of the Papacy, but had hitherto been allowed to lie dormant in its capital, are now enforced. The old outcry against the Talmud, as the source of all the sins and obstinacy of the Jews, was once more raised by Jewish renegades, and the Court of the Inquisition condemned it to the flames. ♦1553♦ Julius III. signed the decree for the destruction of a book which Leo X. had helped to disseminate. The houses of the Roman Jews were invaded by the myrmidons of the Holy Office, and all copies of that and other Hebrew works found therein were confiscated and publicly burnt, by a refinement of malice, on the Jewish New Year’s Day. Similar bonfires blazed in Ferrara, Mantua, Venice, Padua, and even in the island of Crete.

Matters grew worse under the bigoted Pope Paul IV. The very first month of his reign was signalised by a Bull ordering every synagogue throughout the States of the Church to contribute ten ducats for the maintenance of the House of Catechumens, in which Jews were to be educated in the Christian faith. A few weeks later, a second Bull forbade the Jews to employ Christian servants or nurses, to own real estate, to practice medicine, to trade in anything but old clothes, or to have any intercourse with Christians. The synagogues were destroyed, except one; and it was proclaimed that all the Jews who were not labouring for the public good should quit Rome by a fixed date. The meaning of this mysterious sentence became clear to the victims when shortly after they were forced to repair the walls of the city. The edict of banishment, it is true, was immediately repealed by the intervention of Cardinal Fernese; but the harshness of their treatment was in itself sufficient to drive the wretched people to exile. ♦1555♦ Many Jews left Rome, and those who remained were penned in the Ghetto.79

Previous to this date most of the Roman Jews voluntarily dwelt in a special quarter on the left bank of the Tiber, known as Seraglio delli Hebrei or Septus Hebraicus; but they were not isolated from the Christians; for many of the latter, even members of the nobility, had their luxurious palaces in the midst of the Jewish houses, and many a stately Roman church reared its proud Campanile in the vicinity of a synagogue. All this was now altered. The palaces of the Christian nobility and the places of Christian worship were removed, or fenced off, from the abodes of the unclean, and these were surrounded by great grim walls, with porticoes and gates guarded by watchmen, who shut them at midnight and opened them at early morning, except on the Sabbath and on the Lord’s Day, or other Christian feasts, when the gates remained closed the whole day, so that no infidel could go forth and defile the Christian festivities with his unhallowed presence. On week days the bell that called the faithful to vespers was for the Jew who valued his life a signal to retire to his prison. All the inmates of this prison, men and women alike, on leaving its precincts, were obliged to wear a special garb: the men a yellow hat, the women a yellow veil or a large circular badge of the same colour on their breast. Thanks to this mark of distinction no Jew or Jewess could step or stand outside the Ghetto gates without meeting with insult and outrage on the part of the mob. The yellow badge was the favourite mark for the missiles of the street urchins, and for the sneers of their elders; so that the prison often became a haven of refuge for the Jew.

Meanwhile the Portuguese Marranos, who had found an asylum in Ancona, under the protection of Pope Clement VII., and who had continued to live there unmolested under Paul III. and Julius III., were exposed to even more violent persecution than their Jewish brethren of Rome. A month after the establishment of the Ghetto in the latter city, a secret order was issued by Paul IV. that all the Marranos of Ancona should be cast into the vaults of the Holy Office and their goods confiscated. Some of the prisoners professed penitence, and were banished to Malta; the rest were burnt at the stake. The few who succeeded in escaping the racks of the Inquisition took refuge in the dominions of the Dukes of Urbino and Ferrara, while of the exiles in Malta some fled to Turkey; and all these refugees combined in a scheme of revenge upon the Pope by attempting to place his seaport Ancona under a commercial ban. But their efforts failed, owing to the conflicting interests of the various Jewish communities in Italy and the Levant, and the Rabbis assembled at Constantinople for the purpose could not arrive at a unanimous decision.

Not long after, the Duke of Urbino was compelled by the Inquisition to banish the refugees from his dominions, and they, having barely escaped the Pope’s naval police, fled to Turkey. In the same year the Duke of Ferrara also was obliged to withdraw his protection from the Marranos. Throughout the reign of Paul IV. the persecution of the Jews and crypto-Jews left in the Papal States raged fiercely, baptized renegades being always the hounds in the chase. Paul IV. died in 1559, and his body was accompanied to the grave by the curses of the Romans. His statue was demolished, and a Jew insulted the tyrant’s image by placing upon its head his own yellow hat, while the mob applauded the act with shouts of bitter joy. The buildings of the Holy Office were burnt, and the Dominicans roughly handled by the populace.

But the lot of the Jews was not permanently improved by the disappearance of their arch-enemy. Pius IV. was besought to alleviate their burdens, and he issued a favourable Bull. Those Jews who lived outside the city were allowed to dispense with the badge, to acquire land to a certain value, and to trade in other articles besides old clothes. ♦1566–1572♦ But even these slight concessions were withdrawn by Pius V., who vied with Paul IV. in his conscientious persecution of heresy and unbelief. In the third month after his accession to St. Peter’s throne all the old restrictions were once more enforced on the Jews of the Papal States, and were extended to their brethren throughout the Catholic world. Infractions of these decrees were punished severely, and were made the pretext for robbery. ♦1569♦ Finally Pius V., deaf to the advice of his wisest counsellors and to the interests of his own State, issued a Bull, expelling all the Jews in his dominions, save those of Rome and Ancona. As usual, a few turned Christians, but the majority preferred to quit in a hurry, leaving behind them all the property which they could not realise and all the debts which they could not collect at the short notice given. The exiles were scattered among the neighbouring States of Urbino, Ferrara, Mantua, and Milan.

Gregory XIII., the successor of Pius V., carried on the anti-Jewish programme of his predecessors. He renewed the canonical law which forbade Jewish physicians to attend on Christian patients, punishing transgressors on both sides. Jews suspected of holding intercourse with heretics, of harbouring refugees from Spain, or of otherwise helping the enemies and the victims of the Church, were dragged before the Inquisition and condemned to loss of goods, to slavery in the galleys, or to death. The Talmud and other Hebrew writings were again hunted out and burnt. Gregory also encouraged the Jesuits in their work of conversion, and the Jews were compelled, by a Papal Bull of 1584, to listen to sermons at the church of St. Angelo, near the Ghetto, and to pay the preachers employed to pervert them. Many of the wretches, yielding to fear or to temptation, embraced Christianity; many more left Rome.

Sixtus V., actuated by a broader and humaner spirit and by a more enlightened thirst for gold than had animated any of his antecessors or contemporaries, abolished these cruel decrees, ♦1586♦ pulled down the barriers which circumscribed the judicial and financial status of the Jews, forbade the gallant knights of Malta to enslave the Jews whom they met on the high seas in their voyages to and from the Levant, granted to the Jews perfect liberty of conscience, residence and commerce in his dominions, and, in lieu of the unlimited rapacity of former Popes, substituted a fixed capitation tax of twelve Giulii on all males between the ages of sixteen and sixty. This revolution tempted many Jews to return to Rome. Sixtus crowned his liberality by allowing the printing of the Talmud and of other Hebrew books, after previous subjection to censorship.

But the relief was only temporary. Under Clement VIII., otherwise an excellent man and an able statesman, the reign of intolerance was revived. ♦1593♦ He expelled the Jews from the States of the Church, except Rome and Ancona, and forbade the use of Hebrew books. ♦1597♦ A few years later he ordered their expulsion from the Milan district, and they barely escaped a similar sentence at Ferrara, which, upon the failure of the line of Este, had recently been added to the Pope’s dominions.

In the seventeenth century we hear of more Papal Bulls, barring the Italian Jews from all honourable professions and limiting their commercial activity to trade in cast-off clothes.

It was during this black period of Jewish history that an English gentleman came to Rome. He was a traveller who had an eye for other things than picturesque ruins, and a heart in which there was room for other people than those whom chance had made his compatriots and co-religionists. His name was John Evelyn. Among the things which he saw in Rome was the Jewish quarter, and he records his impressions in the following words, under date January 7, 1645:

“A sermon was preached to the Jews at Ponte Sisto, who are constrained to sit till the hour is done; but it is with so much malice in their countenances, spitting, humming, coughing, and motion, that it is almost impossible they should hear a word from the preacher. A conversion is very rare.”80

Again under date January 15, 1645:

“I went to the Ghetto, where the Jewes dwell as in a suburbe by themselves; being invited by a Jew of my acquaintance to see a circumcision. I passed by the Piazza Judea, where their Seraglio begins; for being inviron’d with walls, they are lock’d up every night. In this place remaines yet part of a stately fabric, which my Jew told me had been a palace of theirs for the ambassador of their nation when their country was subject to the Romans. Being led through the Synagogue into a private house, I found a world of people in a chamber: by and by came an old man, who prepared and layd in order divers instruments brought by a little child of about 7 yeares old in a box. These the man lay’d in a silver bason; the knife was much like a short razor to shut into the haft. Then they burnt some incense in a censer, which perfum’d the rome all the while the ceremony was performing. In the basin was a little cap made of white paper like a capuchin’s hood, not bigger than the finger.... Whilst the ceremony was performing, all the company fell a singing an Hebrew hymn in a barbarous tone, waving themselves to and fro, a ceremony they observe in all their devotions. The Jewes in Rome all wear yellow hatts, live only upon brokage and usury, very poore and despicable beyond what they are in other territories of Princes where they are permitted.”

And again under date May 6, 1645:

“The Jewes in Rome wore red hatts til the Card. of Lions, being short-sighted, lately saluted one of them thinking him to be a Cardinal as he pass’d by his coach; on which an order was made that they should use only the yellow colour.”

Next year Evelyn visited the Jewish quarter at Venice:

“The next day I was conducted to the Ghetta, where the Jewes dwell together as in a tribe or ward, where I was present at a marriage. The bride was clad in white, sitting in a lofty chaire, and cover’d with a white vaile; then two old Rabbies joyned them together, one of them holding a glasse of wine in his hand, which in the midst of the ceremony, pretending to deliver to the woman, he let fall, the breaking whereof was to signify the frailty of our nature, and that we must expect disasters and crosses amidst all enjoyments. This don, we had a fine banquet, and were brought into the bride-chamber, where the bed was dress’d up with flowers, and the counterpan strewed in workes. At this ceremony we saw divers very beautiful Portuguez Jewesses with whom we had some conversation.”81

These two little pictures, which, like the portraits on ancient Egyptian mummy cases, preserve for us in undimmed freshness the features of the dead past, show that not even the gloom and the filth of the Ghetto were potent enough to kill the Jew’s attachment to his traditions and his love for symbolism, or to befoul the poetry of his inner life. But, ere we enter upon that phase of the subject, we must record another oppressive law, passed in Rome at a time when the century that was to witness the downfall of ancient dynasties, the death of despotism, and the awakening of the popular soul was already far advanced. This eighteenth century Edict, in forty-four Articles, codifies all the prohibitions which had been decreed during the foregoing ages: it forms the epilogue to the sordid tragedy. One of the articles runs as follows: “Jews and Christians are forbidden to play, eat, drink, hold intercourse, or exchange confidences of ever so trifling a nature with one another. Such shall not be allowed in palaces, houses, or vineyards, in the streets, in taverns, in neither shops nor any other place.... The Jews who offend in this matter shall incur the penalties of a fine of 10 Scudi and imprisonment; Christians, a similar fine and corporal punishment.”82

Thus the children of Israel dwelt apart in these narrow quarters, multiplying fast, while the space allotted to them remained the same; herded together, many families in the same house, often in the same room; and breathing the air of what, under the circumstances, rapidly developed into veritable slums. The world beyond gradually outgrew mediaeval conditions of life; the streets became straight, broad and airy; light penetrated into courts which the overhanging upper stories once doomed to perpetual darkness; but the Ghetto knew none of these blessings. Year after year life in the Ghetto grew more squalid, and the inmates more indifferent alike to the demands of contemporary fashion and of common decency. Confinement initiated degradation; the fatal gift of fecundity, cultivated as a religious duty, promoted it, and soon the Roman Ghetto became a by-word for its filth and misery. At one time as many as ten thousand souls swarmed in a space less than a square kilometre. To the curse of over-population was added the yearly overflow of the Tiber, which transformed the narrow, crooked lanes into marshy alleys, filled the basements with pestiferous mud, and turned the whole quarter into a dismal abode of prematurely aged men, of stunted, elderly children, and of repulsive wrecks of womanhood: a place where Poverty and the Plague stalked hand in hand, and where man was engaged in a perpetual struggle with Death.

The seclusion of the Ghetto widened the breach between the two worlds. If the Gentile forbade the Jew to assume the title, or to pursue the callings, of a Christian gentleman, the Jewish communal law forbade him to wear the garb of the Christian gentleman. The diversity in dress was only an external type of the deeper diversity of character that separated the two elements. The ignorance of the Gentile grew more profound, and the prejudice of the Jew more implacable than they had ever been before. The Ghetto was an institution beside which monasticism might appear the ideal of sociability. The young monk on entering the cloisters of his convent carried into them the indelible impressions of family-life and the tender memories of boyhood. The inmate of the Ghetto, so far as the outer world was concerned, was born a monk. Everybody within the walls of the Ghetto was a brother, everybody beyond its gates an enemy. In infancy the outer world was an unknown, non-existing world. Later the child of the Ghetto was accustomed to hear those beyond described as idolaters; monsters whose impurity was to be shunned, whose cruelty to be feared, whose rapacity to be baffled by cunning—the protection and the pest of the weak. These lessons were illustrated by the tales of assault and insult, of which its parents and its relatives were constantly the victims, more especially on Christian holidays. Still later personal experience gave flesh and blood to the hearsay tales of childhood.

But this outward misery was redeemed by the purity and purifying influence of domestic life. The home was the one spot on earth where the hunted Jew felt a man. On crossing the threshold of his house he discarded, along with the garb of shame, all fear and servility. Everywhere else spurned like a dog, under his own roof he was honoured as master and priest. The Sabbath lamp chased the shades and sorrows of servitude out of the Jew’s heart. His pride was fostered and his humanity saved by the religious and social life of the Ghetto. Rendered by familiarity callous to obloquy on the part of the Gentiles, the Jew remained morbidly sensitive to the opinion of his own people. Persecution from without brought closer union within. As often happens in adversity, individual interests were sacrificed to the public good. Reciprocity in spiritual no less than in temporal matters—the power of combination—the principle of social fraternity—always a characteristic of the Jew—grew into a passion unparalleled in history since the early days of Christianity.

Various communal ordinances (takkanoth) enforced this sentiment of mutual loyalty. For example, no Jew was allowed to compete with a brother-Jew in renting a house from a Christian, or to replace a tenant without the latter’s consent. A series of such laws, many of them dating from a much earlier period, were re-enacted by a congress of Italian Rabbis on the very eve of the creation of the Roman Ghetto. Thus the Jews virtually acquired a perpetual lease of their homes; their communal right to the house (jus casaca) being an asset which could be sold, bequeathed, or bestowed as dowry upon a daughter. The Popes were not slow to take cognisance of this ordinance. Clement VIII. legalised the arrangement, so that, whilst the rent was regularly paid, eviction was practically impossible. But one of his successors carried the principle of Jewish reciprocity to its logical conclusion and turned it against the Jews themselves, by making the community as a body responsible for the rent of all the houses in the Ghetto, empty as well as tenanted. The same reciprocity of interests was recognised in matters pertaining to the soul. Each member of the brotherhood was responsible for the sins of the rest, and the confession of the individual was a confession for the whole community.

Israel, cut off from the world, created a world unto itself. Never did Judaism attain a higher degree of religious uniformity, never were the spiritual bonds that bound together the scattered members of the great family drawn closer than in this period of their sorest affliction. Language was gone, country, state; nothing remained to the Jews but religion. It was held that, if the teaching of the Law were allowed to disappear, it would mean the disappearance of the race. Religion was nationalised that the nation might be saved. The rigorous discipline of the Synagogue and the absence of social joy had always encouraged devotion. The Ghetto crystallised it into a code. Joseph Caro’s Shulchan Aruch, or “Table Prepared,” a handbook of law and custom, compiled in the middle of the sixteenth century, fixed the fluid features of Jewish life into the rigid mask which it continued to wear, throughout Europe, till the beginning of the nineteenth century. But deep beneath the ice-surface of ritual—the crust of dead and deadening rules and prohibitions—there ran the living and sustaining current of faith, all the stronger and fiercer for its imprisonment. The outcasts of humanity, in the midst of their degradation—despised, and in many ways despicable—preserved the precious heritage, and their pride therein, unimpaired. Numerous fasts and feasts assisted this preservation. Thus the community fasted on Sabbath afternoons in memory of the death of Moses, or on Sundays in memory of the destruction of the Temple.

On the Day of Atonement they listened with reverence to the touching words in which a noble old Hebrew bard gave utterance to the sorrow of his race:

The Feast of Tabernacles year after year rekindled their gratitude for the miraculous preservation in the wilderness. The Feast of Dedication reminded them of their deliverance from the Hellenic yoke. On the Passover Eve was read the Seder, most ancient of home services, and round the festive board were then gathered the shades of the gifted men of old who had sung the glories of Israel, and of the brave men who had suffered for the faith of Israel. Then was retold for the thousandth time, with tears and with laughter, to the accompaniment of song and wine, the tale of their ancestors’ departure from Egypt. At the end of the meal the door was opened, and a wine cup was left upon the table. This was done for the reception of Elijah, the harbinger of the expected Messiah. In this and like domestic rites the memory of the past was annually revived, and, if its splendour made the sordid present look more sordid still, it also kept alive the hope of redemption. The magic carpet of faith, that priceless heirloom of Israel, transported the inmates of the Ghetto out of their noisome surroundings far away to the radiant realms of Zion. The Messianic Utopia never was more real to the Jews than at this time. From a favourite dream it grew into a fervent desire. It was firmly held that the Redeemer would soon come in His glory and might, would gather His people from the four corners of the earth, would slay their foes, would restore the Temple of Jerusalem, and would compel the nations to acknowledge the Majesty of the God of the Jews. We have already seen one of these seventeenth century Messiahs, Sabbataï Zebi of Smyrna. His was not the only attempt in which the longings of the race recognised their fulfilment. These Messianic phenomena, whatever else may be thought of them, are the most pathetic illustrations of that immortal hope, which formed the Jew’s only consolation in times of unexampled suffering, and from which he drew his invincible fortitude. But for that hope the Jewish nation would have long since ceased to fill thinkers with wonder at its vitality. Faith in God, which after all means faith in one’s self—this is the talisman which has enabled the Jew, as it has enabled the Greek, to pass triumphantly through trials which would have crushed most other races. The same blast which extinguishes a small fire fans a great one to an even mightier flame.