Spain reached the Jews living in the Christian countries of Europe.
Their circumstances were too grievous, and in sombreness their inner
life matched their outer estate. Their horizon was as contracted as
the streets of the Jewries in which they were penned. The crusades
(beginning in 1096) clearly showed the Jews of France and Germany what
sentiments their neighbors cherished towards them. They were the first
returns which Christianity paid the Jewish people for its old-time
teaching of religion. The descendants of the "chosen people," the
originators of the Bible, were condemned to torture of a sort to
exhaust their spiritual heritage. Judaism suffered the tragic fate of
King Lear. Was it conceivable that the horrors--the rivers of blood,
the groans of massacred communities, the serried ranks of martyrs, the
ever-haunting fear of the morrow--should fail to leave traces in the
character of Judaism? The Jewish people realized its imminent danger.
It convulsively held fast to its precious relics, clung to the pillars
of its religion, which it regarded as the only asylum. The Jewish
spirit again withdrew from the outer world. It gave itself up wholly
to the study of the Talmud. In northern France and in Germany,
Talmudic learning degenerated into the extreme of scholastic pedantry,
the lot of every branch of science that is lopped off from the main
trunk of knowledge, and vegetates in a heavy, dank atmosphere, lacking
light and air. Rashi (1064-1105), whose genial activity began before
the first crusade, opened up Jewish religious literature to the
popular mind, by his systematic commentaries on the Bible and the
Talmud. On the other hand, the Tossafists, the school of commentators
succeeding him, by their petty quibbling and hairsplitting casuistry
made the Talmudic books more intricate and less intelligible. Such
being the intellectual bias of the age, a sober, rationalistic
philosophy could not assert itself. In lieu of an Ibn Ezra or a
Maimonides, we have Jehuda Hachassid and Eliezer of Worms, with their
mystical books of devotion, _Sefer Chassidim, Rokeach_, etc.,
filled with pietistic reflections on the other world, in which the
earth figures as a "vale of tears." Poetry likewise took on the dismal
hue of its environment. Instead of the varied lyrical notes of Gabirol
and Halevi, who sang the weal and woe, not only of the nation, but
also of the individual, and lost themselves in psychologic analysis,
there now fall upon our ear the melancholy, heartrending strains of
synagogue poetry, the harrowing outcries that forced themselves from
the oppressed bosoms of the hunted people, the prayerful lamentations
that so often shook the crumbling walls of the medieval synagogues at
the very moment when, full of worshipers, they were fired by the
inhuman crusaders. A mighty chord reverberates in this poetry:
_Morituri te salutant_.
One small spot there was, in the whole of Europe, in which Jews could
still hope to endure existence and enjoy a measure of security. This
was Southern France, or the Provence. The population of Provence had
assimilated the culture of the neighboring country, Arabic Spain, and
become the mediator between it and the rest of Europe. This work of
mediation was undertaken primarily by the Jews. In the twelfth century
several universities existed in Provence, which were frequented in
great numbers by students from all countries. At these universities
the teachers of philosophy, medicine, and other branches of science
were for the most part Jews. The rationalistic philosophy of the
Spanish Jews was there proclaimed _ex cathedra_. The Tibbonides
translated all the more important works of the Jewish thinkers of
Spain from Arabic into Hebrew. The Kimchis devoted themselves to
grammatical studies and the investigation of the Bible. In
Montpellier, Narbonne, and Lunel, intellectual work was in full swing.
Rational ideas gradually leavened the masses of the Provençal
population. Conscience freed from intellectual trammels began to
revolt against the oppression exercised by the Roman clergy. Through
the Albigensian heresy, Innocent III, founder of the papal power, had
his attention directed to the Jews, whom he considered the dangerous
protagonists of rationalism. The "heresy" was stifled, Provence in all
her magnificence fell a prey to the Roman mania for destruction, and,
on the ruins of a noble civilization, the Dominican Inquisition raged
with all its horrors (1213).
Thenceforward the Catholic Church devoted herself to a hostile watch
upon the Jews. Either she persecuted them directly through her
Inquisition, or indirectly through her omnipotent influence on kings
and peoples. In the hearts of the citizens of medieval Europe, the
flame of religious hatred was enkindled, and religious hatred served
as a cloak for the basest passions. Jewish history from that time on
became a history of uninterrupted suffering. The Lateran Council
declared the Jews to be outcasts, and designed a peculiar,
dishonorable badge for them, a round patch of yellow cloth, to be worn
on their upper garment (1215). In France the Jews became by turns the
victims of royal rapacity and the scapegoats of popular fanaticism.
Massacres, confiscations, banishments followed by dearly purchased
permission to return, by renewed restrictions, persecutions, and
oppressions--these were the measures that characterized the treatment
of the Jews in France until their final expulsion (1394). In Germany
the Jews were not so much hated as despised. They were _servi
camerae_, serfs of the state, and as such had to pay oppressive
taxes. Besides, they were limited to the meanest trades and to usury
and peddling. They were shut up in their narrow Jewries, huddled in
wretched cabins, which clustered about the dilapidated synagogue in a
shamefaced way. What strange homes! What gigantic misery, what
boundless suffering dumbly borne, was concealed in those crumbling,
curse-laden dwellings! And yet, how resplendent they were with
spiritual light, what exalted virtues, what lofty heroism they
harbored! In those gloomy, tumbledown Jew houses, intellectual
endeavor was at white heat. The torch of faith blazed clear in them,
and on the pure domestic hearth played a gentle flame. In the abject,
dishonored son of the Ghetto was hidden an intellectual giant. In his
nerveless body, bent double by suffering, and enveloped in the shabby
old cloak still further disfigured by the yellow wheel, dwelt the soul
of a thinker. The son of the Ghetto might have worn his badge with
pride, for in truth it was a medal of distinction awarded by the papal
Church to the Jews, for dauntlessness and courage. The awkward, puny
Jew in his way was stronger and braver than a German knight armed
cap-a-pie, for he was penetrated by the faith that "moves mountains."
And when the worst came to the worst, he demonstrated his courage.
When his peaceful home was stormed by the bestialized hordes of
Armleder, or the drunken bands of the Flagellants, or the furious
avengers of the "Black Death," he did not yield, did not purchase life
by disgraceful treason. With invincible courage he put his head under
the executioner's axe, and breathed forth his heroic spirit with the
enthusiastic cry: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is One."
At length the turn of the Spanish Jews arrived. For the unbroken peace
they had enjoyed, they had to atone by centuries of unexampled
suffering. By degrees, the Arabs were forced out of the Pyrenean
Peninsula, and the power they had to abdicate was assumed by the
Catholic kings of Castile and Aragon. In 1236 occurred the fall of
Cordova, the most important centre of Arabic Jewish culture.
Thereafter Arab power held sway only in the province of Granada. The
fortunes of the Spanish Jews underwent a calamitous change. The kings
and the upper ten thousand were, indeed, favorably disposed toward
them. At the courts of Castile and Aragon, the Jews were active as
ministers, physicians, astronomers. But the people, incited by the
propaganda of the clerics, nursed frightful hatred against the Jews,
not only as "infidels," but also as intellectual aristocrats. The rage
of the populace was the combustible material in the terrific
explosions that occurred periodically, in the bloody saturnalia of the
Pastouraux (1320), in the Black Death riots (1348), in the massacre of
Seville (1391).
Dire blows of fortune were unable to weigh down the Spanish Jew,
accustomed to independence, as they did the German Jew. He carried his
head proudly on high, for he was conscious that in all respects he
stood above the rabble pursuing him, above its very leaders, the
clerics. In spite of untoward fate his mental development proceeded,
but inevitably it was modified by the trend of the times. By the side
of the philosophic tendency of the previous age, a mystical tendency
appeared in literature. The Kabbala, with its mist-shrouded symbolism,
so grateful to the feelings and the imagination, chimed in better than
rationalistic philosophy with the depressed humor under which the
greater part of the Jews were then laboring. Another force
antagonistic to rationalistic philosophy was the Rabbinism
transplanted from France and Germany. The controversy between
Rabbinism and philosophy, which dragged itself through three-quarters
of a century (1232-1305), ended in the formal triumph of Rabbinism.
However, philosophic activity merely languished, it did not cease
entirely; in fact, the three currents for some time ran along parallel
with one another. Next to the pillars of Rabbinism, Asheri, Rashba,
Isaac ben Sheshet, loomed up the philosophers, Gersonides (Ralbag),
Kreskas, and Albo, and a long line of Kabbalists, beginning with
Nachmanides and Moses de Leon, the compiler of the Zohar, and ending
with the anonymous authors of the mysterious "Kana and Pelia."
The times grew less and less propitious. Catholicism steadily gained
ground in Spain. The scowling Dominican put forward his claim upon the
Jewish soul with vehement emphasis, and made every effort to drag it
into the bosom of the alone-saving Church. The conversion of the Jews
would have been a great triumph, indeed, for Catholicism militant. The
conversion methods of the Dominican monk were of a most insinuating
kind--he usually began with a public religious disputation.
Unfortunately, the Jews were experts in the art of debate, and too
often by their bold replies covered the self-sufficient dignitaries of
Rome with confusion. The Jews should have known, from bitter
experience, that such boldness would not be passed over silently. From
sumptuous debating hall to Dominican prison and scaffold was but a
short step. In 1391, one of these worthy soul-catchers, Bishop
Ferdinando Martinez, set the fanatical mob of Seville on the Jews, and
not without success. Terrorized by the threat of death, many accepted
Catholicism under duress. But they became Christians only in
appearance; in reality they remained true to the faith of their
fathers, and, in secret, running the risk of loss of life, they
fulfilled all the Jewish ordinances. This is the prologue to the
thrilling Marrano tragedy.
Finally, the moment approached when gloomy Catholicism attained to
unchallenged supremacy in the Pyrenean Peninsula. On the ruins of the
enlightened culture of the Arabs, Ferdinand the Catholic and Isabella
of Castile reared the reactionary government of medieval Rome. The
Inquisition was introduced (1480). Torquemada presided as high priest
over the rites attending the human sacrifices. _Ad gloriam
ecclesiae_, the whole of Spain was illuminated. Everywhere the
funeral pyres of the Inquisition flared to the skies, the air was rent
by the despairing shrieks of martyrs enveloped in flames or racked by
tortures, the prisons overflowed with Marranos,--all instruments of
torture were vigorously plied.
At last the hour of redemption struck: in 1492 all Jews were driven
from Spain, and a few years later from Portugal. Jewish-Arabic culture
after five centuries of ascendency suffered a sudden collapse. The
unhappy people again grasped its staff, and wandered forth into the
world without knowing whither.
X
THE RABBINIC-MYSTICAL PERIOD, OR THE HEGEMONY OF THE GERMAN-POLISH
JEWS (1492-1789)
The expulsion from Spain was a stunning blow. The hoary martyr people
which had defied so many storms in its long life was for a moment
dazed. The soil of Europe was quaking under its feet. At the time when
the medieval period had formally come to a close for Occidental
Christendom, and the modern period had opened, the middle ages
continued in unmitigated brutality for the Jews. If anything, the life
of the Jews had become more unendurable than before. What, indeed, had
the much-vaunted modern age to offer them? In the ranks of the
humanistic movement Reuchlin alone stood forth prominently as the
advocate of the Jews, and he was powerless before the prejudices of
the populace. The Reformation in Germany and elsewhere had illuminated
the minds of the people, but had not softened their hearts. Luther
himself, the creator of the Reformation, was not innocent of hating
the followers of an alien faith. The Jews especially did not enjoy too
great a measure of his sympathies. The wars growing out of the
Reformation, which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
devastated Europe in the name of religion, were not calculated to
favor the spread of tolerance and milder manners. The conflict raging
in the bosom of the Church and setting her own children by the ears,
was yet insufficient to divert her maternal care from her
"unbelieving" stepchildren. In Spain and Portugal, stakes continued to
burn two centuries longer for the benefit of the Marranos, the false
Christians. In Germany and Austria, the Jews were kept in the same
condition of servitude as before. Their economic circumstances were
appalling. They were forced to emigrate _en masse_ to Poland,
which offered the adherents of their faith a comparatively quiet life,
and by and by was invested with the Jewish hegemony. Some of the
smaller states and independent towns of Italy also afforded the Jews
an asylum, though one not always to be depended upon. A group of
hard-driven Spanish exiles, for instance, under the leadership of
Abarbanel had found peace in Italy. The rest had turned to Turkey and
her province Palestine,
For a time, indeed, the Jewish spiritual centre was located in Turkey.
What Europe, old, Christian, and hardhearted, refused the Jews, was
granted them by Turkey, young, Mussulman, and liberal. On hearing of
the banishment of the Jews from Spain, Sultan Bajazet exclaimed: "How
can you call Ferdinand of Aragon a wise king, the same Ferdinand who
has made his land poor and enriched ours?" His amazement characterizes
the relation of Turkey to the Jews of the day. The one-time Marrano,
Joseph Nassi, rose to be a considerable dignitary at the court of
Sultan Selim (1566-1580). Occasionally he succeeded, by diplomatic
means, in wreaking vengeance upon European courts in retaliation for
the brutal tortures inflicted upon his people. With the generosity of
a Maecenas, he assembled Jewish scholars and poets, and surrounded
himself with a sunlit atmosphere of intellectuality and talent. All
other Jewish communities looked up to that of Constantinople. Now and
again its rabbis played the part of Patriarchs of the synagogue. To
this commanding position the rabbis of Palestine especially were
inclined to lay claim. They even attempted to restore the
Patriarchate, and the famous controversy between Jacob Berab and Levi
ben Chabib regarding the _Semicha_ is another evidence of the
same assertive tendency. Among the Spanish exiles settled in the Holy
Land a peculiar spiritual current set in. The storm-tossed wanderers,
but now returned to their native Jordan from the shores of the
blood-stained Tagus and Guadalquivir, were mightily moved at the sight
of their ancestral home. Ahasuerus, who on his thorn-strewn pilgrim's
path had drained the cup of woe to the dregs, suddenly caught sight of
the home of his childhood razed level with the ground. The precious,
never-to-be-forgotten ruins exhaled the home feeling, which took
possession of him with irresistible charm. Into his soul there flowed
sweet memories of a golden youth, past beyond recall. The impact of
these emotions enkindled passionate "longing for Zion" in the heart of
the forlorn, homeless martyr. He was seized by torturing thirst for
political resurrection. Such melancholy feelings and vehement
outbursts found expression in the practical Kabbala, originating with
Ari (Isaac Luria) and his famous Safed school. A mystical belief in
the coming of Messiah thenceforward became one of the essential
elements of the Jewish spirit. It vanquished the heart of the learned
Joseph Karo, who had brought Rabbinism to its climax by the
compilation of his celebrated ritual code, the Shulchan Aruch. With
equal force it dominated the being of Solomon Molcho, the enthusiastic
youth who, at one time a Marrano, on his public return to Judaism
proclaimed the speedy regeneration of Israel. He sealed his faith in
his prophecy with death at the stake (1532). The Marranos beyond the
Pyrenees and the unfortunate Jews of Italy, who, in the second half of
the sixteenth century had to bear the brunt of papal fanaticism, on
the increase since the Reformation, were kept in a state of constant
excitement by this Messianic doctrine, with its obscure stirrings of
hope. A mournful national feeling pervades the Jewish literature of
the time. Recollections of torments endured enflamed all hearts. A
series of chronicles were thus produced that record the centuries of
Jewish martyrdom--_Jocha-sin, Shebet Jehuda, Emek ha-Bacha_, etc.
The art of printing, even then developed to a considerable degree of
perfection, became for the dispersed Jews the strongest bond of
spiritual union. The papal _index librorum prohibitorum_ was
impotent in the face of the all-pervading propaganda for thought and
feeling carried on by the printing press.
After Palestine and Turkey, Holland for a time became the spiritual
centre of the scattered Jews (in the seventeenth century). Holland was
warmly attached to the cause of liberty. When it succeeded in freeing
itself from the clutches of fanatical Spain and her rapacious king,
Philip II, it inaugurated the golden era of liberty of conscience, of
peaceful development in culture and industry, and granted an asylum to
the persecuted and abandoned of all countries. By the thousands the
harassed Ghetto sons, especially the Marranos from Spain and Portugal,
migrated to Holland. Amsterdam became a second Cordova. The
intellectual life was quickened. Freedom from restraint tended to
break down the national exclusivism of the Jew, and intercourse with
his liberal surroundings varied his mental pursuits. Rabbinism, the
Kabbala, philosophy, national poetry--they all had their prominent
representatives in Holland. These manifold tendencies were united in
the literary activity of Manasseh ben Israel, a scholar of extensive,
though not intensive, encyclopedic attainments. Free thought and
religious rationalism were embodied in Uriel Acosta. To a still higher
degree they were illustrated in the theory of life expounded by the
immortal author of the "Theologico-Political Tractate" (1640-1677).
This advanced state of culture in Holland did not fail to react upon
the neighboring countries. Under the impulse of enthusiasm for the
Bible Puritan England under Cromwell opened its portals to the Jews.
In Italy, in the dank atmosphere of rabbinical dialectics and morbid
mysticism, great figures loom up--Leon de Modena, the antagonist of
Rabbinism and of the Kabbala, and Joseph del Medigo, mathematician,
philosopher, and mystic, the disciple of Galileo.
These purple patches were nothing more than the accidents of a
transition period. The people as a whole was on the decline. The
Jewish mind darted hither and thither, like a startled bird seeking
its nest. Holland or Turkey was an inadequate substitute for Spain, if
only for the reason that but a tiny fraction of the Jews had found
shelter in either. The Jewish national centre must perforce coincide
with the numerical centre of the dispersed people, in which, moreover,
conditions must grant Jews the possibility of living undisturbed in
closely compacted masses, and of perfecting a well-knit organization
of social and individual life. Outside of Spain these conditions were
fulfilled only by Poland, which gradually, beginning with the
sixteenth century, assumed the hegemony over the Jewry of the world.
This marks the displacement of the Sephardic (Spanish, in a broader
sense, Romanic) element, and the supremacy of the Ashkenazic
(German-Polish) element.
Poland had been a resort for Jewish immigrants from Germany since the
outbreak of the Crusades, until, in the sixteenth century, it rose to
the position of a Jewish centre of the first magnitude. As the
merchant middle class, the Jews were protected and advanced by the
kings and the Szlachta. The consequent security of their position
induced so rapid a growth of the Jewish element that in a little while
the Jews of Poland outnumbered those of the old Jewish settlements in
Occidental Europe. The numerous privileges granted the Jews, by
Boleslaus of Kalish (1246), Kasimir the Great (1347-1370), Witowt
(1388), Kasimir IV (1447), and some of their successors, fortified
their position in the extended territory covered by Poland, Lithuania,
and the Ukraine. Their peculiar circumstances in Poland left an
impress upon their inner life. An intense mental activity was called
forth. This activity can be traced back to German beginnings, though
at the same time it is made up of many original elements. For a space
Rabbinism monopolized the intellectual endeavors of the Polish Jews.
The rabbi of Cracow, Moses Isserles, and the rabbi of Ostrog, Solomon
Luria (d. 1572), disputed first place with the foremost rabbinical
authorities of other countries. Their decisions and circular letters
regarding religious and legal questions were accorded binding force.
Associates and successors of theirs founded Talmud academies
throughout the country, and large numbers of students attended them.
Commentators upon the Talmud and expounders of classical works in
Jewish theological literature appeared in shoals. Jewish printing
establishments in Cracow and Lublin were assiduous in turning out a
mass of writings, which spread the fame of the Polish rabbis to the
remotest communities. The large autonomy enjoyed by the Polish and
Lithuanian Jews conferred executive power upon rabbinical legislation.
The _Kahal_, or Jewish communal government, to a certain degree
invested with judicial and administrative competence, could not do
without the guiding hand of the rabbis as interpreters of the law. The
guild of rabbis, on their side, chose a "college of judges," with
fairly extensive jurisdiction, from among their own members. The
organization of the Rabbinical Conferences, or the "Synods of the Four
Countries," formed the keystone of this intricate social-spiritual
hierarchy. The comprehensive inner autonomy and the system of Talmud
academies (_Yeshiboth_) that covered the whole of Poland remind
one of the brilliant days of the Exilarchate and the Babylonia of the
Geonim. One element was lacking, there was no versatile, commanding
thinker like Saadia Gaon. Secular knowledge and philosophy were under
the ban in Poland. Rabbinism absorbed the whole output of intellectual
energy. As little as the Poles resembled the Arabs of the "golden
age," did the Polish Jews resemble their brethren in faith in the
Orient at Saadia's time or in the Spain of Gabirol and Maimonides.
Isolation and clannishness were inevitable in view of the character of
the Christian environment and the almost insuperable barriers raised
between the classes of Polish society. But it was this exclusiveness
that gave peculiar stability and completeness to the life of the Jew
as an individual and as a member of Jewish society, and it was the
same exclusiveness that afforded opportunity for the development of a
sharply defined culture, for its fixation to the point of resisting
violent shocks and beyond the danger point of extinction through
foreign invasion.