But if the Reformation brought with it Protestant hostility and new tribulations to the outcasts of humanity, it also proved the cause of fresh persecution on the part of Catholicism. Even while the Popes at Rome tolerated or cherished the Jews, their agents abroad, the wandering Friars, and all those soldiers of orthodoxy by whose fanatical zeal the fabric of Papal supremacy had been reared and was maintained, exerted themselves strenuously and furiously to oppose the spreading epidemic of rebellion. In their eyes the Jews were the most implacable enemies of Christ and the eternal promoters of dissent and heresy. It was, therefore, against the Jews that they directed their deadliest shafts. The belief prevailed that the first step to the conquest of Judaism was the cremation of Jewish books, which after the invention of the printing press had multiplied. This new attack on Judaism, as so many other attacks in the past, was led by a renegade Jew, John Pfefferkorn by name, and a butcher by trade—also convicted of burglary and otherwise an unlimited miscreant.123 ♦1509♦ This gentleman, acting in concert with the Dominicans of Cologne, obtained from the Emperor Maximilian authority to confiscate all Hebrew writings opposed to the Christian faith—a very comprehensive sentence which would have been carried out, but for the efforts made on behalf of literature and commonsense by John Reuchlin, the Father of German Humanism. This great scholar had restored Hebrew and promoted Greek studies in Germany. He was attracted by Hebrew mysticism and had many friends among the Jews. In 1490, whilst on a visit in Italy, he had made the acquaintance of Pico de Mirandola whose Cabbalistic doctrines he embraced and expounded in his work De Verbo Mirifico. In 1492 he was employed on a mission to the Emperor at Linz, and it was there that he met Jacob Loans, the Emperor’s Jewish physician, under whose guidance he began to read Hebrew. Although a good Catholic, Reuchlin was a broad-minded man, and his leaning to Cabbalistic theosophy and the esoteric wisdom of the Rabbis, without making him an admirer of the Jews as a people, induced him to defend their books. Summoned by Maximilian to express his opinion on Pfefferkorn’s proposal, Reuchlin did so in a manner which, while saving the Jewish writings from the fire, exposed the defender to the utmost rigour of the disappointed Dominicans; from whose clutches, however, after a severe struggle, he was rescued by the enthusiastic assistance of his brother-humanists.

The outbreak of the Lutheran rebellion paralysed the forces of Catholicism for a while. But it was not long ere the Papacy recovered from its panic. The latter half of the sixteenth, and the first half of the seventeenth century—the hundred years between the rise of the Order of Jesus and the peace of Westphalia—form a period of unprecedented activity for the conversion of the world to the one true faith. ♦1540–1648♦ The Catholic sovereigns were at the zenith of their power and bigotry, and both their consciences and their swords lay under the absolute control of the Pope; for on the triumph of Dogmatism depended the realisation of their own dreams of Despotism at home and conquest abroad. On the other hand, Protestantism was grimly determined to conquer or die. If one half of Western Christendom was passionately attached to the traditions made dear by the familiarity of ages, the other half was no less passionately attracted by the novelty of the prospect which had just unfolded its charms to their vision. The result of this antagonism was the most faithful imitation of hell on earth that the modern world has witnessed. Europe, convulsed by revolt and made desolate by barbarous repression, presented a scene for which, fortunately, it would be hard to find a parallel even in the annals of civilised mankind. While the Inquisition was revelling in human hecatombs in Spain, the Spanish general Alva was ravaging heretical Holland, and a Spanish Armada was preparing to assail heretical England. Religious motives receded further and yet further into distance as time went on; but the slaughter begun for the glory of God was continued for the love of power; and those who were formerly burnt as heretics were now butchered as malcontents. The Titanic feud culminated in the Thirty Years’ War, during which no fewer than ten millions of Christians were massacred in the name of Christ.

The Treaty of Westphalia staunched the flow of blood for a moment, but did not heal the wound. Open violence was aided by patient intrigue, and the monks carried on the enterprise wherein monarchs had failed. Meanwhile, as though the legions of St. Dominic, of St. Francis, and the other monastic orders were not sufficient for the work of destruction, to them was added, as we have seen, the more formidable Society of Jesus. By this time also the Spanish Inquisition had accomplished its special mission of blotting out the Morescos and Marranos, and had entered into an alliance with Loyola’s legion; the two bodies forming together a two-edged sword in the hand of the Catholic reaction.

Between Martin Luther and Ignatius Loyola there is commonly supposed to gape a very wide chasm. However that may be, there is one point at which the two apostles meet—hatred of Israel. Loyola’s disciples penetrated by degrees into every realm in Europe, and into every realm they brought with them that supple and sinuous spirit which was destined to dominate European history for ages, and to endow the European languages with a new word of evil import. In them Israel found an enemy powerful as Fate, and, like Fate, everywhere present, everywhere invisible and inexorable. Thus those Jews who had escaped from the zeal of nascent Protestantism were doomed to fall a prey to the zeal of reanimated Catholicism.

As in Italy, so in Central Europe, the reign of Pope Paul IV. marks the revival of Catholic Obscurantism. In 1557 the Inquisition was introduced into France under Henry II.—a prince who could be profligate without being gay, and who atoned for his gloomy immorality by so genuine a horror of heresy and culture that at his accession both Huguenots and scholars thought it advisable to quit Paris. In 1559—four years after the creation of the Ghetto in Rome—all Hebrew books were confiscated in Prague, at the instigation of a baptized Jew named Asher. A fire that soon after broke out in the Jewish quarter afforded the Catholics of Prague an opportunity of exhibiting their piety. They plundered the houses of the Jews, and even threw their women and children into the flames. At the same time the Emperor Ferdinand I. ordered the expulsion of the Jews from Prague and the rest of Bohemia, imposed many restrictions on those of Austria, and drove them from Lower Austria. ♦1569♦ Ten years later the Jews of Avignon and Venaissin, which, besides Marseilles, were the only communities left in France after the expulsion of 1395, and which, favoured by the enlightened Popes Leo X., Clement VII., and Paul III., had acquired great wealth, were ordered to quit the country, and, like the refugees from Spain and Italy, they sought and found a haven of refuge in the Sultan’s dominions.

During the Thirty Years’ War the Catholic Emperor Ferdinand II. protected the Jews, forbidding their coffers to be robbed except by himself. The Bohemian Jews alone, after having paid a certain sum, are known to have bound themselves to contribute forty thousand gulden a year towards the expenses of the war. In Vienna also, now the headquarters of Catholicism, the Jews were allowed to grow fat. ♦1624♦ The Emperor permitted them to build a synagogue and to discard the badge; but the Christian citizens protested, demanding their banishment. In face of this opposition the Court acted with admirable tact. To the Christians it said: “You shall see the Jews banished, if you pay twenty thousand florins,” and to the Jews it whispered: “You need not fear, if you pay more.” To judge from the result, the Jews must have outbidden the Christians.

Not long after, at Prague, an internal feud between rival factions of the Jewish community led to the interference of the authorities, and the Emperor ordered that the Jews should every Sunday morning submit to sermons preached for their conversion. Absentees were fined a thaler a head, and a higher sum on repetition of the offence. Inattention and slumber during the performance were also visited with a fine. However, the Jews had not suffered through so many centuries without learning how to dull the edge of persecution. Corrupt courtiers defeated the devout Emperor’s policy, and the Jews were allowed to remain in spiritual darkness and in peace.

Despite this cruel treatment, the Jews of Prague fought valiantly in defence of the city against the Swedes, and in recognition of their loyalty and gallantry received from the Emperor, Ferdinand III., an imperial standard which can still be seen in the old synagogue of the town.

In the meantime the Jesuits continued their restless, though noiseless, campaign. Even the one traditional refuge of Israel in Europe was poisoned by their preaching. In Poland the Jews had for centuries prospered and enjoyed a kind of autonomy. The Kings protected them, and the nobility, thriftless and extravagant itself, found the sober, industrious, and keen-witted Jews invaluable as bailiffs and financial advisers. Beneath the wing of princes and nobles the Jews acquired great influence. It was to this influence precisely that the Jesuits attributed the rise of heresy in that country, and it was this influence that they now decided to use as a means to their undoing. The rivers of bitterness that flowed from the Stygian fountain of Jesuitism found the field ready to be fertilised. The German traders and artisans, settled in various parts of Poland, had already encountered in the Jews formidable rivals. Commercial envy was invigorated by the pious prejudices which these immigrants had imported, along with their guilds, from the Fatherland; and these feelings often induced them to make common cause with the clergy. ♦1496–1505♦ Under the joint pressure of the two classes, Casimir the Great’s successors had deprived the Jews of their privileges and confined them to special quarters, or even expelled them from certain towns. A period of toleration came with Sigismund I. ♦1507–1548♦ This sovereign’s good-will towards the Jews was aided by the Polish nobles, who, hating the Germans bitterly, were glad to support their rivals—an inclination which they had ample means of gratifying, as the execution of the anti-Jewish laws was largely in their own hands. Thanks to the friendship of the nobility Poland continued to offer an asylum to the persecuted children of Israel.

Stephen Bathori, who was elected to the Polish throne three years after the death of Sigismund Augustus, the last native King of Poland, showed great favour to the Jews. He guarded the race in Lithuania against the effects of the blood-accusation, and bestowed many benefits upon them, to the disgust of his Christian subjects, who in Poland, as elsewhere, envied the Jews for their prosperity and hated them for their usury and arrogance. ♦1587–1632♦ This prosperity lasted even under Sigismund III., a zealous Catholic brought up by Jesuits. He confirmed to the Jews their ancient privileges, but introduced a measure indicating his religious bias and fraught with disastrous possibilities. ♦1592♦ He ordained that for the building of a new synagogue the permission of the Church should be obtained. About this time the Reformation had lost much of its vigour in Germany; but in Poland, through the German immigrants, it was beginning to create a great spiritual agitation and to find favour among the nobles. Some of the Polish sectarians went to the extreme of Unitarianism and were stigmatised as semi-Judaei.

To all these sources of danger for the Jews—the hatred towards them entertained by the natives on account of their usurious extortions, by the Germans on account of their commercial ability, by the Jesuits on account of their infidelity, and of the Judaic proclivities of some of the Dissenters—was added another, which proved the immediate cause of persecution.

Upon the banks of the lower Dnieper and the north shore of the Black Sea there gradually arose several colonies or settlements formed partly by runaway slaves and convicts in quest of freedom, and partly by adventurers from many countries and classes in quest of fortune. These were the ancestors of the Cossack race. Their life was such as their antecedents promised. Independent and idle, they knew only one industry—brigandage. The exercise of this industry brought them into frequent collision with their Tartar neighbours and supplied them with their one recreation—war. The Kings of Poland, thinking to make use of these hardened and reckless outlaws for the defence of their eastern frontiers, granted to them a semi-autonomous constitution under a freely elected hetman or chieftain. Unfortunately the Cossacks were for the most part members of the Eastern Church, and were therefore hated by the Jesuits, who, after having crushed the Polish heretics, turned their attention to these schismatics. King Sigismund III. began the crusade by oppressing the colonists with heavy taxes.

Now, these colonies were under the control of several noble Polish families which sold the lease of the imposts to their Jewish bailiffs. The latter were intended to act the part for which the training of a thousand years had so well qualified them—the part of the sponge. Thanks to this arrangement, Jewish communities rapidly sprang up and spread in the Ukraine and Little Russia, and to them was entrusted the odious privilege of collecting and even of inventing taxes. How galling these burdens were may be gathered from the following example: The Cossacks were bound to pay a duty on every new-born infant and on every wedding. As a safeguard against evasion, the Jewish tax-farmers kept the keys of the churches, and on each wedding or baptism the clergyman was obliged to apply to them for admittance into his own church. Nor were these tax-farmers scrupulous or lenient in the exercise of their privileges. Slaves to everybody else, they were eager to play the despots over those whom fate had placed under themselves. In their lust for profit and power, they readily helped the nobles in plundering and the Jesuits in tormenting the Cossacks. Hence the position of the Jews in the Ukraine and Little Russia became one of extreme danger, and the resentment which their conduct excited soon translated itself into acts of vengeance. And vengeance, when it fell on Jews, did not restrict itself to the individuals who had deserved it. “All Israelites are surety one for the other” was the Rabbinic motto of solidarity. The Cossacks were now to give a new meaning to this maxim. Where single units had offended, whole communities were punished.

During a brief revolt of the Cossacks, in 1638, two hundred Jews were slain and several synagogues destroyed. The Jews, not warned by this omen, continued to provoke severer punishment with a recklessness which was partly derived from the belief in the near advent of the Messiah. The year 1648 had been fixed by the mystics as the era of triumph and universal sovereignty for Israel.124 The expected date came, but it brought with it, not redemption, but retribution. In that year there broke out an insurrection led by a Cossack who, having been cheated out of his wife and property by a Jew, had no cause to love the race. Chmielnicki, in declaring to his compatriots that “they had been delivered by the Poles into bondage to the cursed breed of the Jews,” was voicing their wrongs with a conviction deepened by personal suffering.

After their first victory, the wild Cossacks let themselves loose upon the Jews, many of whom were massacred, while others saved themselves by embracing the Orthodox faith. Four Jewish communities, in their anxiety to escape death, gave themselves and their belongings up to the Tartars, who accepted the gift and sold the givers as slaves in Turkey, where they were ransomed by their brethren. The rebellion continued with a ferocity and ruthlessness such as might have been expected from the character of the rebels and the magnitude of the wrongs which they had to avenge. Long oppressed by Papists and Jews, in slaying them they not only gratified their personal animosity, but felt that they were chastising the enemies of their Church. In this somewhat hackneyed work they displayed considerable originality and variety of cruelty. Every guerilla chief had his own favourite instrument of torture; one of them affecting the lasso, by which the women of the enemy were caught and dragged to shame.

Shortly after the first victory, a detachment of Cossacks captured by stratagem a fortress where six thousand Jews had taken refuge, and put them all to torture and death. Another detachment attacked a town harbouring six hundred Polish nobles and two thousand Jews. The two classes, bound together by a common danger, offered a stout resistance, until the crafty Cossacks succeeded in dividing them. They assured the nobles that their sole object was to punish the Jews, promising to withdraw if the latter were surrendered to them. The Jews were persuaded to deliver up their arms; the Cossacks were admitted into the town, robbed the Jews of all their belongings, and then set before them the alternative of baptism or death. Three-fourths of the whole community were tortured and executed. Then the Cossacks turned their wrath against the Polish nobles, whom they easily overpowered and slaughtered.

A third body of insurgents was at the same time wreaking a similar vengeance upon the Jews of Little Russia, where many thousands perished, and the havoc spread as widely as the rebellion, until the whole country, from South Ukraine to Lemberg, was marked with traces of massacre—here in pools of Jewish and Polish blood, there in heaps of Jewish and Polish bodies. ♦1649 Aug.♦ At last peace was concluded on condition that no Papist or Jew should reside in the Cossack provinces.

Meanwhile thousands of Jewish fugitives who had saved their lives by baptism, of women who had been violated by the Cossacks, and of children whose parents had been slaughtered, swarmed into Poland, where King John Casimir allowed them to return to Judaism, for, being a Roman Catholic himself, he naturally regarded the Greek baptism as worse than valueless.

After a few months’ pause the war between the Cossacks and the Poles broke out anew, and it was now transferred to Polish territory. Again the first victims were Jews, but the slaughter was necessarily limited by the comparatively small number of people left to slay. ♦1651 Nov.♦ This second rebellion ended in the defeat of the Cossacks, and one of the terms of peace was that the Jews should be allowed to settle again, and resume their financial oppression, in the Ukraine. However, the Cossacks felt bound by the treaty only so long as they felt unable to break it. As soon as the opportunity offered, they once more raised the standard of revolt, and Chmielnicki, aided by the Russians, carried victory and devastation far and wide. ♦1654–1655♦ The Jews who were beyond the reach of the Cossacks succumbed to the fury of their Russian allies, and thus the community of Wilna was completely wiped out.

Then to the enemies of Poland was added Charles X. of Sweden, Charles XII.’s grandfather; “a great and mighty man, lion of the North in his time.” ♦1656♦ The battle of Warsaw, which lasted three days, resulted in a splendid victory for this “imperious, stern-browed, swift-striking man, who had dreamed of a new Goth empire.” In that battle the chivalry of Poland was broken, and John Casimir, the most brilliant cavalier of all, was nearly ruined. The Jewish communities which had been spared by Cossack and Russian were impoverished by the Swede. But even this fresh calamity did not exhaust the measure of their woes. Those who had escaped slaughter at the hands of Cossacks, Russians, and Swedes were now exposed to the hatred of the Polish general, Czarnicki, who attacked them on the ground that they had acted in collusion with the Swedish invaders. And while Poland was turned into a vast battlefield, whereon the nations cut each other’s throat, the Jews were treated as common foes by all. During these ten years of international manslaughter, no fewer than a quarter of a million of Polish Jews were massacred.

The humiliation of Poland brought lasting ruin to the Jews. Fugitives, reduced to the verge of starvation, were scattered over Europe seeking shelter—from Amsterdam and the Rhine in the north and west, to Italy, Hungary, and Turkey in the south and east. Everywhere they were welcomed by their brethren, who fed and clothed them, and many of the funds intended for the maintenance of the Jews in Palestine were diverted to the relief of these helpless wanderers.

In the midst of their sufferings the Polish Jews heard of the Messiah of Smyrna. One of Sabbataï Zebi’s apostles, Jacob Leibovicz Frank by name, founded a curious sect, which, among other things, believed in a kind of Trinity, abolished the Law, and carried on a fierce warfare against the orthodox Rabbis. In the middle of the eighteenth century these Frankist dissenters revived one of the ancient denunciations of the Talmud, and tried to induce the Polish Government to confiscate all the Rabbinical writings. But finally, as Sabbataï and his immediate followers in Turkey were absorbed by Islam, so Frank’s disciples were absorbed by Catholicism.

While the Jews of Poland were sinking into destitution or flying into exile, their brethren of Austria also were experiencing the hatred of the Jesuits. At the instigation of the latter the Empress Margaret demanded their banishment from Vienna. ♦1669♦ The Emperor Leopold I. was at first averse from the measure, because he derived an annual revenue of 50,000 florins from the Austrian Jews. But the Empress insisted, her fanaticism receiving fresh impulse from a narrow escape which she had experienced at a ball accident. Attributing her preservation to a miraculous intervention of the Deity, she was anxious to show her gratitude by a sacrifice of the Jews, whom her father confessor had taught her to regard as the enemies of Heaven. The piety of the Empress proved too powerful for her consort’s avarice. Leopold yielded at last, and the Jews were ordered to leave Vienna. In vain did they try prayers and presents. In vain did they turn every stone both at home and abroad. Their gifts were accepted by the Emperor and Empress, but the decree remained unrevoked, for the influence of the Jesuits was invincible. ♦1670♦ The Jews had to go and seek new homes in Moravia, Bohemia, and Poland. Their quarter was bought by the magistrates of Vienna for the Emperor, and was christened Leopoldstadt. Their synagogue was levelled to the ground. On its site was built a church dedicated to the Emperor’s patron saint; and the glorious event was commemorated by a golden tablet whereon the Jewish house for prayer was described as a “charnel-house.”

The degradation of Israel was now complete. Persecution, cruel and, through all changes, consistent beyond a parallel in history, had at last achieved its demoralising work. The Jews, treated as pariahs throughout Southern and Central Europe, lost all feeling of self-respect. Spurned and dishonoured everywhere, they became day after day more and more worthy of contempt: slovenly in dress and dialect, dead to all sense of beauty or honesty, treacherous, and utterly broken in spirit. “Zeus takes away the half of his manhood from a man, when the day of slavery overtakes him,” says the wise old poet. The Jews now furnished a melancholy proof of the truth of the saying. Among the other gifts of servitude they acquired that of cringing cowardice. So little manliness was left in them that they, who had once astonished Rome with their dogged valour, dared not defend themselves even against the attacks of a street urchin; and the prophet’s terrible prediction was fulfilled: “You shall speak humbly from the ground, and from the dust shall proceed your word.”

The dispersion of the Polish refugees over Europe resulted in the subjugation of Judaism in all countries to the sophistical and soulless teaching of Polish Talmudism. The long-ringleted Rabbis of Poland carried into every country their narrow subtlety and hatred of secular studies, so that at a time when the Middle Age was passing away from Christendom they restored it to Israel.

From the sixteenth century the Jews fell completely under the domination of the Synagogue. Having abandoned all hope of being allowed to participate in the life of the Gentiles, they withdrew more and more severely behind the old moat by which their ancestors had surrounded themselves. Tribalism was their only alternative to utter extinction; and they seized upon it, nothing loth. They grew fanatical, entrusted the education of their children to none but the Polish Rabbis, clung to their bastard Germano-Hebrew jargon (Jüdisch-Deutsch or “Yiddish”), and even in writing a European language they employed the Hebrew characters. The Jewish literature of the period reflects the social and intellectual condition of the race. When it deals not with subjects of Biblical exegesis, it consists of rude popular songs and stories drawn from Talmudic and Cabbalistic sources or from German and Oriental folk-lore. But this Cimmerian darkness contained in it the promise of a dawn. The light of the eighteenth century was sooner or later to penetrate the mists of bigotry and to bring the Jewish Middle Age to an end. For while the Jew shares the general effects which persecution long drawn out inflicts, yet there is in him a power of resiliency which is his own peculiar possession and which saves him from falling permanently into the slough of degradation and disgrace. This power he derives in part from his religion, in part from his history. His religion gives him steadfastness; his history teaches him to hope.