The love for liberty which gave birth to the Renaissance was also the parent of another child—the Reformation. The first saw the light in Latin, the second in Teutonic Europe. The vindication of man’s rights was their common object: but while the Renaissance strove to attain that object through the emancipation of the human reason, the Reformation endeavoured to reach it by the emancipation of the human conscience. Intelligence, the inheritance of Hellenism, was the weapon of the one: the other drew its strength from the Hebraic fountain of Intuition. Papacy was the enemy of both. Individual Popes nourished the elder movement and thus unwittingly prepared an example and an ally for the other. While Nicholas I., Pius II., and Leo X. dallied with the infant giant in Italy, its brother across the Alps was training and arming for the fray.
The revolt against the autocracy of the Roman Court was begun in the middle of the fourteenth century by Wickliffe, and was continued by Huss. The licentiousness of the pontiffs and cardinals, of priests and monks, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries invigorated the spirit of the rebels and brought fresh recruits to their ranks; and the German princes, who had long chafed against the fetters imposed upon them by Papal and Imperial interference, took the Reformers under their protection, thus supplying that secular side without which no holy war has ever been.
In Erasmus—“the glory of the priesthood and the shame”—the two movements found a common champion and spokesman. In him the Renaissance crossed the Alps, and in his famous Praise of Folly the Latin hostility to the intellectual tyranny of the Church is found united with the Teutonic hostility to her spiritual tyranny. The vows and the vigils, the self-abasement, the penances and the mournfulness of Catholicism are attacked not less unsparingly than the worldliness, the immorality and the hypocrisy of its ministers. But, if Erasmus marks the meeting, he also marks the parting of the ways.
Beside Erasmus stands Luther. He also combined intellectual attainments with spiritual aims. But the one figure faces the Renaissance; the other the Reformation road. Erasmus, while ridiculing in elegant satire the superstitions of the day, the malpractices of sordid priests, and the excesses of merry friars, shrinks from a breach with the Holy See. Much as he would like to see Catholicism reconciled to commonsense, he recoils with horror before the stakes and the scaffolds of the Holy Office. He could agree with Luther on many points, and yet write: “Even if Luther had spoken everything in the most unobjectionable manner, I had no inclination to die for the sake of Truth.” “Let others affect martyrdom,” he says elsewhere: “for myself I am unworthy of the honour.” Martin Luther was made of sterner stuff and simpler. Though he joined forces with the apostles of culture, he was determined to go much further than they in one direction, not as far in another. The alliance between Literature and Reform, between the two brothers Reason and Conscience, between the Southern and the Northern Ideals, could not last long. The free and cheerful element in Luther’s temperament, and his literary tastes, prevented a definite rupture in his own time. But under his successors the difference between the two sides became too wide for co-operation. Reason and laughter marched one way. Conscience and gloom the other.
We have already seen that the sons of exiled Israel reaped but scant comfort from the triumph of Liberty’s elder offspring. We shall now proceed to show what the victory of the other brought to them.
Martin Luther in his Table-Talk gives a full and vivid description of the German Jews in his day. He tells us that their footsteps are to be found throughout Germany. In Saxony many names of places speak of them: Ziman, Damen, Resen, Sygretz, Schvitz, Pratha, Thablon.84 At Frankfort-on-the-Maine they are extremely numerous: “They have a whole street to themselves of which every house is filled with them. They are compelled to wear little yellow rings on their coats, thereby to be known; they have no houses or grounds of their own, only furniture; and, indeed, they can only lend money upon houses or grounds at great hasard.”85 “They are not permitted to keep or trade in cattle; their main occupations being brokage and usury.”86
But this does not exhaust the list of oppression:
“A rich Jew, on his death bed, ordered that his remains should be conveyed to Ratisbon. His friends, knowing that even the corpse of a Jew could not travel without paying heavy toll, devised the expedient of packing the carcase in a barrel of wine, which they then forwarded in the ordinary way. The waggoners, not knowing what lay within, tapped the barrel, and swilled away right joyously, till they found out they had been drinking Jew’s pickle. How it fared with them you may imagine.”87
Nor was extortion the only danger that the travelling Jew had to face: “Two Jewish Rabbis, named Schamaria and Jacob, came to me at Wittenberg, desiring of me letters of safe conduct, which I granted them, and they were well pleased.”88
The unpopularity of the Jews in Germany at this time arose partly from their staunch adherence to the Idea, their aloofness and their dissent in modes of thinking and living from their neighbours:
“They sit as on a wheelbarrow, without a country, people or Government; yet they wait on with earnest confidence; they cheer up themselves and say: ‘It will soon be better with us.’... They eat nothing the Christians kill or touch; they drink no wine; they have many superstitions; they wash the flesh most diligently, whereas they cannot be cleansed through the flesh. They drink not milk, because God said: ‘Thou shalt not boil the young kid in his mother’s milk.’”89
Partly from their rapacity and their hostility to the non-Jew: “’Tis a pernicious race, oppressing all men by their usury and rapine. If they give a prince or a magistrate a thousand florins, they extort twenty thousand from the subjects in payment. We must ever keep on our guard against them. They think to render homage to God by injuring the Christians, and yet we employ their physicians; ’tis a tempting of God.”90
Partly from their arrogance:
“They have haughty prayers, wherein they praise and call upon God, as if they alone were his people, cursing and condemning all other nations, relying on the 23rd Psalm: ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall lack nothing.’ As if that psalm was written exclusively concerning them.”91
How far these unamiable qualities were the cause, and how far the effect of the Gentile’s antipathy to the Jew, is a question which prejudice on either side finds no difficulty in answering. The humble-minded and impartial student prefers to record the fact and ignore the question. But it is passing strange to find the Jew’s resolute faith in the Faithful Shepherd characterised as an offence against good manners.
We have seen that the persecution of the Jews in mediaeval Germany, from the awful carnage in the Rhineland (1096 foll.) to their expulsion from Ratisbon (1476), had for its proximate cause the hatred entertained towards them by the Catholic Church. The orgies of the Crusaders were mainly dictated by pious vindictiveness; the violent efforts of the Dominican friars and of the Inquisition to convert the Jews were prompted by the desire to save them from heresy and to prevent them from infecting others by their example. All the heresies from the Albigensian, through the Hussite, up to the movement which culminated in Luther’s secession from the Roman fold, were considered by the Church as having their roots in Jewish teaching and practice. The adoration of the Virgin, of Saints, and of relics, which offended the Jew in the Roman cult were also the special objects of Protestant detestation. They had both suffered for the sake of conscience; dissent, the crime of Judaism, was the glory of Protestantism; Rome, the secular foe of the one, was also the sworn enemy of the other; and they were both branded by Rome with the common epithet of Heretics. We might, therefore, have reasonably expected that Luther and his brother-reformers would have regarded the Jews with sympathy. But history does not confirm this a priori conclusion.
Protestantism from the first proved as hostile to the Jews as Catholicism. It has been suggested that Luther’s animosity was due to the fact that the enthusiasm for Reform and for the simplification of doctrine and worship had produced a tendency towards Hebrew Unitarianism, the leaders of which movement were stigmatised as Semi-Judaei. It would perhaps be nearer the truth to say that the hostility towards the Jew was so old and so deep, and it sprang from so many sources, that not even community of interests and enmities could obliterate it. We have already seen Jews and Christians both lost in the same maze of Cabbalistic mysticism; but this partnership in folly did not improve the relations between the two sects. Nor did the Reformers’ attachment to the Hebrew Bible produce any affection for the race of whose genius that Bible was the fruit. The Jew was detested in the concrete as much as he was admired in the abstract. Luther’s disappointed hope of converting the Jews to Protestantism may have also influenced him. But, be the origin of the feeling what it may, the promoters of the Protestant cause and their followers, from the sixteenth century onwards, adopted a most unfriendly attitude towards Israel. Nor, so far as Luther is concerned, is this development altogether unintelligible.
Luther the rebel against the Church was one person; Luther the founder of a Church, another. While engaged in his duel with Rome, Martin Luther strove to secure the favour and assistance of the Humanists of his day. He took pains to represent the cause of Reform as being the cause of Reason. He described his friends as the friends of liberal culture, and his foes as the foes of light. He invited theological discussion, and professed himself ready to be guided in the interpretation of the Scriptures by pure reason. But when the struggle was over and the battle was won, the despotic character and inflexible dogmatism of the religious leader alienated many of his literary allies, Erasmus among them; while the same causes also estranged many of his religious sympathisers. Indeed, Luther’s bearing in the hour of his success seemed to lend colour to the assertion of his adversaries, that, had he been pope, instead of Leo X., he would have defended the Church against a much more formidable antagonist than the monk of Wittenberg. After all, a rebel often is only a tyrant out of power.
Towards the Jews Luther’s conduct was the same as towards his fellow-Christians and fellow-rebels. At first he undertook to defend them against all the time-honoured prejudices of the Middle Ages. He denounced in no measured terms the un-Christian spirit of “silly theologians” and their insolence towards the Jews, and in 1523 he published a work under the startling title, Jesus was born a Jew; in which he declares, “Those fools the Papists, bishops, sophists, monks, have formerly so dealt with the Jews, that every good Christian would have rather been a Jew. And if I had been a Jew, and seen such stupidity and such blockheads reign in the Christian Church, I would rather be a pig than a Christian. They have treated the Jews as if they were dogs, not men, and as if they were fit for nothing but to be reviled. They are blood-relations of our Lord; therefore, if we respect flesh and blood, the Jews belong to Christ more than we. I beg, therefore; my dear Papists, if you become tired of abusing me as a heretic, that you begin to revile me as a Jew.
“Therefore, it is my advice that we should treat them kindly but now we drive them by force, treating them deceitfully or ignominiously, saying they must have Christian blood to wash away the Jewish stain, and I know not what nonsense. Also we prohibit them from working amongst us, from living and having social intercourse with us, forcing them, if they would remain with us, to be usurers.”92
These were the sentiments of Luther the rebel. Luther the victor retained nothing of them, save the vigour with which they are expressed. Although in preparing his German translation of the Bible Luther availed himself of the assistance of Jewish Rabbis, he regarded them with no less aversion than the Papists to whom he often compares them. His violent tergiversation was made manifest in 1544, when he published a pamphlet under the suggestive title Concerning the Jews and their lies. In this work the apostle of emancipation gives the reins to a Jew-hatred fully equal to that exhibited by the Catholic enemies of Judaism. The quotations from Luther’s Table-Talk, given already, have shown that he shared the antipathy nourished by his contemporaries against the Jewish people. Some more quotations from the same book will show that he surpassed them in his hostility towards the Jewish creed.
Martin Luther is deeply impressed by the ancient greatness of the Hebrew race: “It was a mighty nation.”93 “What are we poor miserable folk—what is Rome, compared with Jerusalem?”94 “The Jews above all other nations had great privileges; they had the chief promises, the highest worship of God, and a worship more pleasing to human nature than God’s service of faith in the New Testament.... The Jews had excelling men among them, as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, Daniel, Samuel, Paul. Who can otherwise than grieve that so great and glorious a nation should so lamentably be destroyed?”
Martin Luther is as deeply sensible of our debt to the Jews: “The Latin Church had no excelling men and teachers, but Augustin; and the Churches of the East none but Athanasius, and he was nothing particular; therefore, we are twigs grafted into the right tree. The prophets call the Jews, especially those of the line of Abraham, a fair switch, out of which Christ himself came.”95 Nor is he blind to their sufferings—“The Jews are the most miserable people on earth. They are plagued everywhere and scattered about all countries, having no certain resting place”96—or to their heroic faith in the future.97
But these noble sentiments of admiration, gratitude, and pity seem to be mere transient emotions; the theologian within him is too powerful for the man. The Jew’s sublime confidence is no virtue in Luther’s eyes. It is a wicked delusion: “Thus hardened are they; but let them know assuredly, that there is none other Lord or God, but only he that already sits at the right hand of God the Father.”98 Their attachment to the rites of their religion is to Luther another proof of their wickedness: “Such superstitions proceed out of God’s anger. They that are without faith, have laws without end, as we see in the Papists and Turks. But they are rightly served, for seeing they refused to have Christ and his gospel, instead of freedom they must have servitude.”99 Their calamities, far from inspiring Luther with compassion, supply him with a fresh argument for denunciation: “The glory of the Temple was great, that the whole world must worship there. But God, out of special wisdom, caused this Temple to be destroyed, to the end the Jews might be put to confusion, and no more brag and boast thereof.”100 And again, “Either God must be unjust, or you, Jews, wicked and ungodly; for ye have been in misery and fearful exile a far longer time than ye were in the land of Canaan. Ye had not the Temple of Solomon more than three hundred years, while ye have been hunted up and down above fifteen hundred. At Babylon ye had more eminence than at Jerusalem, for Daniel was a greater and more powerful prince at Babylon than either David or Solomon at Jerusalem.... You have been above fifteen hundred years a race rejected of God without government, without laws, without prophets, without temple. This argument ye cannot solve; it strikes you to the ground like a thunder-clap; ye can show no other reason for your condition than your sins.”101
The destruction of Jerusalem and the dispersion and persecution of the race are clear evidence of God’s anger: “But the Jews are so hardened that they listen to nothing: though overcome by testimonies, they yield not an inch”102—so “stiff-necked, haughty and presumptuous they are”:103 Verily, an arrogant and cruel race of men, boasting, like the Papists, “that they alone are God’s people, and will allow of none but of those that are of their Church.”104 To Luther, as to Tacitus, the Jews are the enemies of mankind: “And truly, they hate us Christians as they do death. It galls them to see us. If I were master of the country, I would not allow them to practise usury.”105
The reputed proficiency of the Jews in the black art is another grievous offence in Luther’s eyes: “There are sorcerers among the Jews, who delight in tormenting Christians, for they hold us as dogs. Duke Albert of Saxony well punished one of these wretches. A Jew offered to sell him a talisman covered with strange characters, which he said effectually protected the wearer against any sword or dagger thrust. The Duke replied: ‘I will essay thy charm upon thyself, Jew,’ and, putting the talisman round the fellow’s neck, he drew his sword and passed it through his body. ‘Thou feelest, Jew!’ said he, ‘how it would have been with me had I purchased thy talisman?’”106 The story contains several points of interest for the student of mediaeval Christianity, Luther’s own approbation of the Duke’s act being not the least interesting of them.
Luther, the champion of spiritual freedom, could not forgive the Jews for differing from him in the interpretation of the Scriptures: “The Jews read our books, and thereout raise objections against us; ’tis a nation that scorns and blasphemes even as the lawyers, the Papists, and adversaries do, taking out of our writings the knowledge of our cause, and using the same as weapons against us.”107 Yet the very tactics which Luther so ingenuously condemns in the Jews, lawyers, and Papists, he himself is the first to adopt. In his endeavours to convert the Jews he draws all his arguments, as others had done before him, from the Hebrew Bible: “I am persuaded if the Jews heard our preaching, and how we handle the Old Testament, many of them might be won, but, through disputing, they have become more and more stiff-necked, haughty, and presumptuous.”108 And elsewhere: “I have studied the chief passages of Scripture that constitute the grounds upon which the Jews argue against us; as where God said to Abraham: ‘I will make my covenant between me and thee, and with thy seed after thee, in their generations, for an everlasting covenant....’ Here the Jews brag, as the Papists do upon the passage, ‘Thou art Peter.’ I would willingly bereave the Jews of this bragging by rejecting the Law of Moses, so that they should not be able to gainsay me. We have against them the prophet Jeremiah, where he says, ‘Behold, the time cometh, saith the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah, not as the covenant which I made with their fathers.’...”109 On another occasion he tries to refute the Jews by quoting Jeremiah’s prophecy “touching Christ: ‘Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous branch, and a King shall reign and prosper ... and this is the name whereby he shall be called, The Lord our Righteousness.’ This argument the Jews are not able to solve; yet, if they deny that this sentence is spoken of Christ, they must show unto us another King, descended from David, who should govern so long as the sun and moon endure, as the promises of the prophets declare.”110
Luther in these passages, and passages like these, repeats all the well-worn arguments with which Christians from the earliest times strove to persuade the Jews that the Messiah had come. He insists that “the Law of Moses continued but for a while, therefore it must be abolished”; that “the circumcision was to continue but for a while, until the Messiah came; when he came, the commandment was at an end,” superseded by “the circumcision of the heart”;111 that it was faith and not works that justified Abraham,112 and so forth. But the Jews answered Luther’s arguments, as their fathers had answered the arguments of Justin Martyr, of Tertullian, and of other ancient authorities, and the arguments of the Dominican friars: “The covenant of the circumcision given before Moses’ time, and made between God and Abraham and his seed Isaac in his generation, they say, must and shall be an everlasting covenant, which they will not suffer to be taken from them.”113
Luther’s eloquence, or perhaps his power to protect them, occasionally prevailed with the Jews. He tells us that the two Rabbis, Schamaria and Jacob, who went to him at Wittenberg to solicit a safe conduct, “struck to the heart, silenced and convinced, forsook their errors, became converts, and the day following, in the presence of the whole university at Wittenberg, were baptized Christians.”114 The long sufferings of the race, and the ever deferred fulfilment of the hope of redemption, sometimes produced heartsickness and despair: “In 1537, when I was at Frankfurt, a great rabbi said to me, ‘My father had read very much, and waited for the coming of the Messiah, but at last he fainted, and out of hope said: As our Messiah has not come in fifteen hundred years, most certainly Christ Jesus must be he.’”115 And again, “A Jew came to me at Wittenberg, and said: He was desirous to be baptized, and made a Christian, but that he would first go to Rome to see the chief head of Christendom. From this intention myself, Philip Melanchthon, and other divines laboured to dissuade him, fearing lest, when he witnessed the offences and knaveries at Rome, he might be scared from Christendom. But the Jew went to Rome, and when he had sufficiently seen the abominations acted there he returned to us again, desiring to be baptized, and said: ‘Now I will willingly worship the God of the Christians, for he is a patient God. If he can endure such wickedness and villainy as is done at Rome, he can suffer and endure all the vices and knaveries of the world.’”116
But all those that are baptized are not converts. Martin Luther was too shrewd not to perceive the distinction. How he would have dealt with such hypocrites he tells us with charming frankness: “If a Jew, not converted at heart, were to ask baptism at my hands, I would take him on to the bridge, tie a stone round his neck, and hurl him into the river; for these wretches are wont to make a jest of our religion. Yet, after all, water and the Divine Word being the essence of baptism, a Jew, or any other, would be none the less validly baptized, that his own feelings and intentions were not the result of faith.”117
Yet, even such cases of pseudo-conversion were rare. The Jews, as a sect, far from yielding to the efforts of the Christians to make them embrace Christianity, entertained hopes of the Christians embracing Judaism. The Protestant’s devotion to the study of the Hebrew language, and the extraordinary vogue which Cabbalistic mysticism had obtained among the early Reformers through Reuchlin’s books, encouraged this notion. But Luther assures them that “their hope is futile. ’Tis they must accept our religion, and of the crucified Christ, and overcome all their objections, especially that of the alteration of the Sabbath, which sorely annoys them, but ’twas ordered by the apostles, in honour of the Lord’s resurrection.”118
It was in vain that Luther changed his ground, and, abandoning his attacks on the religious prejudices of the Jews, turned his artillery against their racial pride, and endeavoured to prove that their vaunted purity of blood was a myth:
“During the 70 years when they were captives at Babylon, they were so confused and mingled together, that even then they hardly knew out of what tribe each was descended. How should it be now, when they have been so long hunted and driven about by the Gentiles, whose soldiers spared neither their wives nor their daughters, so that now they are, as it were, all bastards, none of them knowing out of what tribe he is?”119 Luther knew not that the sentiment of nationality depends far more on community of interests and aspirations, of memories of the past and hopes for the future, than on any physiological similarity of blood.
Nevertheless, despite his occasional successes, Luther himself was aware of the futility of his endeavours. He sorrowfully recognises the impossibility of reconciling Jew and Gentile: “In the porch of a Church at Cologne there is a statue of a dean, who, in the one hand holds a cat, and in the other a mouse. This dean had been a Jew, but was baptized, and became a Christian. He ordered this statue to be set up after his death, to show, that a Jew and a Christian agree as little as a cat and a mouse. And truly they hate us Christians as they do death.”120
All these sentiments, accompanied with suggestions for the suppression of the miserable people, were embodied by Luther in his published pamphlets.121 The Reformer’s unmeasured hostility bears to the habitual tolerance of many popes the same relation as the mental horizon of the provincial monk does to the broader vision of the monarch of a great empire.
If Luther, the genial and joyous, entertained so uncharitable feelings towards the Jews, it is not difficult to understand the attitude of his morose and narrower successors, armed as they were by the sanction of his example. It has been well said, “the opinions of a great man are a valuable possession and a ruinous inheritance.” The denunciations of Israel by the early Fathers of the Church had continued to dictate Christian intolerance through the ages, and their authority was quoted in support of the persecutions and massacres which sullied mediaeval Europe. Luther’s utterances exercised a similar influence over the Protestant world, both in his own and in after times, down to the present day. Protestant Germany took up the tale of persecution in the sixteenth century where Catholic Germany had left off in the fifteenth. The Jews were given the alternatives of baptism and banishment in Berlin, were expelled from Bavaria in 1553, from Brandenburg in 1573, and the tragedy of oppression was carried on through the ensuing centuries. How vigorously the plant of anti-Judaism continued to flourish in Germany may be seen from the following incident.
In about 1612 a Jewish jeweller, with a dozen friends, in search of a home, presented a petition to the Senate of Hamburg, offering nine thousand marks for the right of residence in the city for twelve years, promising to pay an annual tax of four hundred marks, and professing themselves ready to submit to any conditions. But Hamburg, the Protestant, refused to listen even to the argument which so frequently overcame Papist fanaticism. Hamburg already contained Portuguese Jews disguised as Christians. These, induced by the example of their brethren in Amsterdam, had recently thrown off the mask, and by so doing had accentuated the indignation of the Lutheran citizens against the whole race. The Senate, indeed, aware of the commercial value of the Jews, declined to yield to the popular demand for their expulsion. The clergy lifted up their voices against the Laodicean lukewarmness of the Government, and the latter, anxious to avoid the reproach of lack of Christian fervour on one hand, and, on the other, the material loss which the banishment of the Jews would entail, appealed to the theological faculties of Frankfort-on-the-Oder and Jena for a justification of their tolerance. These august bodies approved of the Senate’s policy, but recommended the Jews of Hamburg to embrace Christianity. The Senate welcomed the approbation, ignored the recommendation, and granted to the Jews the right of abode on payment of one thousand marks a year, and subject to certain restrictions. For example, they were forbidden to have synagogues and to practise Jewish rites or circumcision, though they were allowed to have a cemetery of their own. As the colony grew in numbers, in wealth, and in commercial importance, it ventured to transgress many of these prohibitions. Relying on their power, the Jews of Hamburg quietly built a synagogue in about 1626.
This humble and unobtrusive building, however, created a sensation out of all proportion to its intrinsic merits. ♦1627♦ The Emperor, Ferdinand II., wrote an indignant letter to the Senate, complaining that the Jews should be allowed a freedom of worship which was denied to Roman Catholics. This shell from a Papist quarter set fire to the Lutheran powder magazine. The good ministers of Hamburg again lifted up their voices, and, with that middle-class logic which distinguishes Protestant controversialism, pointed out that, if the Jews were allowed freedom of worship, the same freedom should be accorded to Catholics—a monstrous absurdity, of course. The Lutheran clergy were reinforced by the Hamburg physicians, who nourished for their Jewish confrères the affection proverbial between men of a trade. The Senate, obliged to take cognisance of the clamour, summoned the Jews to give an account of themselves. They, with the sophistry of persecution and the confidence of wealth, replied that they had no synagogue, but only a house for prayer; threatening to leave Hamburg in a body, if they were forbidden the free exercise of their religion. The Senate was compelled to overlook the sophism, and to pay serious attention to the threat; the consequence being that, not only that synagogue was tolerated, but two more were built.122
The animosity of the Lutherans grew with the growth of Jewish prosperity. John Miller, Senior at St. Peter’s Church, an Inquisitor in everything but name, preached a crusade from the pulpit and in the press. The humiliation of the Jews became by degrees a monomania with Miller. He could endure neither their feasts nor their fasts. Their rejoicings vexed him, and their wailings drove him mad. Their unbelief filled him with horror, and their obstinacy with despair. ♦1644♦ At last Miller vented his feelings in a pamphlet remarkable for its pious scurrility. Three theological faculties endorsed Miller’s teaching, and declared that it was contrary to sound religion to permit Jewish doctors to attend on Christian patients. But the crusade produced no other result than to show how faithfully Luther’s spirit continued to animate German Protestantism in its dealings with the people whom the Reformer had so vehemently denounced in his lifetime.
The position of the Jew in other parts of Germany was far worse than in the commercial city of Hamburg. He was still spurned and scorned, oppressed, reviled, and hunted more fiercely than any pariah. Few Jewish congregations were left. At Frankfort-on-the-Main Jews were allowed to live on terms usually accorded to convicts. They were forbidden to wander forth from their Ghetto, except on urgent business. They were forbidden to walk two together in the neighbourhood of the town-hall, especially during Christian festivals and weddings. Whilst in the Ghetto itself, they were forbidden to talk aloud, or to receive strangers without the knowledge of the magistrates. They were forbidden to buy victuals in the market at the same time as the Christians. Handicapped in the race for money, they were yet overburdened with taxes. Their persons were marked with a badge and their houses with grotesque shields of quasi-armorial character. Even this sorry existence was not assured to them, for the town council reserved to itself the power of expelling any Jew at pleasure. As usual, the Jews contrived to obtain by artifice that which was withheld by force. They purchased indulgence, and the laws often remained mere memorials of Christian intolerance. But, while the magistrates derived profit from their merciful connivance, the guilds, which found formidable rivals in the Jews, strove to obtain their expulsion. The campaign was led by a brave and enthusiastic pastry-cook.
Operations commenced on a certain September day in the year 1614. The Jews were at prayer, when a great noise was heard outside the gates of the Ghetto. A free fight ensued, the Christians, with the heroic pastry-cook at their head, assaulting; the Jews defending. Many fell on both sides, until victory inclined towards the confectioner’s army, and the quarters of the enemy were given up to plunder, destruction, and desecration, which lasted through the night. 1380 Jews, who had taken refuge in the burial ground, were for some time kept in suspense as to their fate, but were at last suffered to leave the city unencumbered by any property whatsoever. The proceedings would have been more thoroughly reminiscent of the Middle Age but for the fact that, in spite of the inexorable pastry-cook’s warnings, there were now found Christians humane enough to feed and to shelter the miserable exiles. The pastry-cook and his party ruled Frankfort with impunity for a whole year.
Meanwhile similar things happened at Worms. There also the Jews were hated as competitors and detested as infidels; but the anti-Jewish movement in that town was led by a learned lawyer; not by an honest, if stupid, confectioner. Consequently the warfare assumed a different character. Instead of open assault, the lawyer preferred a siege. He closed the outlets of the town to the Jews, and hindered them from procuring even milk for their children. These subtle preliminaries were followed by an ultimatum addressed to the Jews, bidding them to evacuate the city, bag and baggage, within an hour. ♦1615♦ The wretches departed, leaving behind them their synagogues and cemeteries to the fury of the populace. The fugitives were allowed by the Archbishop of Mayence and the Count of Darmstadt to take up their abode in the villages and hamlets of the neighbourhood, where they met some of their brother-sufferers from Frankfort.
Soon afterwards the Council of Worms, indignant at its humiliation, invited the Elector of the Palatinate to take possession of the town. The prince accepted the invitation, and a few months later the Jews were permitted to return. Not long after the Jews of Frankfort also were re-admitted by the Electorate of Mayence and Darmstadt, to the sound of trumpets. The heroic pastry-cook was hanged and quartered, his house was razed to the ground, and his family banished. The city was compelled by the Emperor to pay to the Jews a large indemnity for their losses and sufferings, and they expressed their joy by ordaining that the eve of their return should be observed as a fast and the day itself as a feast. However, the social position of the Jews both in Frankfort and in Worms remained the same. In both towns they continued to live on sufferance. Only a limited number of families was allowed to reside, and only a limited number of individuals to marry.
The terrible Thirty Years’ War caused less suffering to the Jews of Protestant Germany than to the Christians. While Protestants and Catholics, animated by a spirit of intolerance and the lust for power, were eagerly butchering each other and devastating each other’s territories, the Jews made their fortunes by impartial speculations in the booty of both sides. Their opportunities must have been considerable; for it was during this war that the English and other European tongues were enriched with the German word “plunder.”