THE ENTRANCE OF THE JEWS INTO EUROPE.
CHASDAI'S LIBRARY.--HIS ACCOUNT OF THE ENTRANCE OF THE JEWS INTO
EUROPE.--THE DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM.--A TERRIBLE CARNAGE.--ISRAEL
CEASES AS A NATION.--THE DIASPORE.--THE DAUGHTER-RELIGIONS THRIVE
UPON THE SUFFERINGS THEY INFLICT UPON THE MOTHER-RELIGION.--THE
INDESTRUCTIBILITY OF ISRAEL.--HUMILIATED BUT NOT FORSAKEN.
When we were comfortably seated in the magnificent library of Chasdai
ben Isaac, which was furnished luxuriantly, and with an eye to ease
and comfort, and stocked with thousands of parchment folios, which
stood row upon row, from floor to ceiling, in beautifully arched and
decorated alcoves, along the walls of the spacious library hall, our
host, Chasdai ben Isaac, began:
"My friends, you asked for an account of 'The Entrance of the Jews into
Europe.' The task you honor me with is not an easy one. Upon these
shelves stand side by side the best that has been written upon History,
Theology and Science, the classics, old and new, in their various
tongues, both in prose and poetry, all that has been written for and
against the religions of Mohammedanism and Christianity and Judaism,
and yet among these thousands of volumes you will search in vain for
historic traces of the movements of the Hebrew people since their exile
from their native soil. Nay, more, you may even look through the vast
library of the Caliph, than which exists at present (950 A. C.) none
greater upon the face of the earth, and still you will find naught upon
this subject. You may consult the most renowned scholars of our age and
meet with no better result.
You marvel why so little is known of the History of the Jews during the
period that extends from the _Diaspore_ (70 A. C.) to the time of the
conquests of the Arab-Moors of Spain, yet you will cease to marvel when
you reflect upon the degradations, persecutions, cruelties, sufferings
heaped upon them, when you remember that histories are never written of
those who are considered outcasts, pariahs, moral lepers, the accursed
by God and man, and the so degraded and execrated, the so persecuted
and so barbarously treated are not over-zealous to rejoice their
scourgers by flaunting the history of their suffering in their face.
What I know of that period is little, and that little have I secured
only after much labor and diligent research.
Insatiable Rome, she who had made the world her slave, in whose realm
the sun ne'er set, and who, to vaunt of so vast a power, had killed
in cold blood, and for no offense at all, fully as many as she ever
claimed among the living had stretched at last her cruel hand against
Palestine, and the "separate" and "peculiar" and sacred land became
a heathen heritage. Jerusalem, the Holy City, lay in ruins. Smoking
embers marked the site where stood the Temple of Temples, and the
glory of Israel fell, and fell forever, and Israel ceased, and ceased
forever, as a nation among the nations of the earth.
Rome enacted a carnage within the holy city, the like of which her
inhuman legions, with all their multitudinous and murderous experience,
had never seen before. What the famine had left the sword consumed, and
what escaped the sword fell a prey to the flames, and what remained,
after streams of human blood had quenched the flames, dropped dead
beneath the pestilence, and they, that had defied all these grim allies
of cruel death, were driven into an open space, the tallest and most
handsome were reserved to grace the triumphal march of _Titus_, to be
dragged along the streets of Rome with a halter around their neck, and
to be executed after the eyes and ears of the Romans had had their fill
of the conquered's sufferings; of the rest, all above seventeen years
of age were sold to distant countries, to the most cruel servitude, or
they were distributed among the provinces to give sport to the people
by their gladiatorial combats, fighting for their lives against hungry
and ferocious beasts.
One million one hundred and ten thousand Jews perished during this
siege; ninety-seven thousand were driven in chains as slaves to distant
lands. The old and feeble, and the young and helpless who were spared,
not from mercy, but because the Romans for once, weary of their
slaughter, and sickened from the loathsome sight and insufferable
stench that arose from the heaps of unburied, putrid bodies, were
forced to retreat. This pitiable remnant was compelled to take the
staff of exile.
Forth they went from their native soil to roam the wide world over.
Everywhere homeless, friendless, despised, trodden down, hunted down
by man and beast, tortured, an object of derision, a shadow of their
former greatness.
And when occasionally a ray of tolerance found its way to these
outcast people, and under the spell of its genial warmth the degraded
dog was metamorphosed again into a human being, and the Jewish mind
awoke again into life, and the Jew, strengthened and rejuvenated and
encouraged, dared to enter again into the arena of useful activity,
that single ray was at once recalled by priests, who were more cunning
and contriving than humane and godly, for only upon the suffering of
the mother-religion could the daughter-religion expect to exist. It
was feared that the prosperity of Judaism would prove the absurdity
of Christianity's and Islam's claims and prophecies. If the Jews are
permitted to prosper and flourish and follow their religion, and
that religion is shown to be full of life and vigor, what reason for
existence have the daughter-religions? Success and prosperity must
accompany only that religion which the masses are to accept and follow,
and for which superiority is claimed over the others. Such was their
sophistical and self-interested reasoning, and so they afflicted and
tortured the Jews, denied them every human right, and then kindly and
magnanimously credited God with their own wickedness, claiming that God
visited these punishments upon the Jews for their rejection of Christ
or Mohammed. Hence, the uninterrupted persecutions and sufferings of
the Jews.
But God had not withdrawn his guiding hand from His Chosen People. He
had cast them down, but he forsook them not. Never before had they been
so nigh unto extinction, and still they despaired not. With David they
said: 'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I
fear no evil, for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff shall comfort
me.'[14] They lost not their faith in God and in their divine mission.
They doubted not that there was a meaning to their sudden change of
fortune. They believed that as each seed when sown must endure darkness
and suffer decay before it can multiply its kind a hundredfold, so
had God scattered the children of Israel as seeds among the nations
of the earth, and subjected them to threats and sufferings that the
number of true believers might increase a thousandfold. They regarded
it a special distinction to be chosen by God to spread monotheism and
civilization among the children of men.[15]
[14] Ps. xxiii. 4.
[15] Talmud Babli, Pessachim 87 b.
"This strong faith in the superior wisdom of God's doing was the elixir
that preserved them during their indescribable sufferings. This it was
that established unconsciously a bond of union among them, scattered
though they were, and whithersoever they went, however near to or
however far from the land where once stood the cradle of their nation,
their temple and palaces, where ruled and sang and spoke their princes
and bards and inspired orators of deathless fame, however removed from
this dearly beloved center, one past and one future, one hope and
one aim, characterized them all and planted within them the seeds of
indestructibility.
What wonder then that soon after this terrible national calamity, a
disaster from which no other people on the face of the earth could have
possibly survived, we hear of large Jewish communities in Asia, Africa
and Europe? Some of these were established even before the dissolution
of the Jewish kingdom. At the time of Titus numerous Jewish communities
existed in the countries bordering on the Euphrates and the Tigris,
in Asia Minor on the north coast of Africa, in Greece and in Italy.
The Jewish community in Rome was large and influential long before the
reign of Titus, having been brought thither as slaves by _Pompey_,
after his conquest of Jerusalem. After the terrible siege of Jerusalem,
crowds of exiles wandered to them and swelled their number, and these
destitute exiles must have diminished the community's opulence and
respectability and popularity, for before the _Diaspore_ Latin authors
speak of them as a wealthy and respected community; after this period,
the notices of them by _Juvenal_ and _Martial_ are contemptuous,
and imply that many of them were in the lowest state of penury, the
outcasts of society.
Whatever city in Asia Minor and Greece the Apostle Paul enters he seems
to find a synagogue. In some of these cities the Jews seem to have
flourished; in most of them, however, they were proscribed as an odious
people, and were objects of hatred and abhorrence. The rule seemed to
be, in localities where Christianity predominated the Jews suffered;
where the Heathens were in power the Jewish communities flourished.
In Italy they were permitted, with few exceptions, to live in peace.
Even though _Theoderic_ wrote: "Why should we give them peace in this
life, when God will not give them peace in the life to come?" and
even though _Cassiodorus_ piously bestowed upon them the flattering
appellations of "scorpions, wild asses, dogs," etc., it never came to
very serious persecutions, and the valiant defense of _Naples_ by the
Jews against the great _Belisarius_, for which History gives them their
deserved credit, clearly shows how the Jew can be patriotic for his
adopted fatherland.
Concerning the Jews in Western Europe, we have no knowledge before
the second century. When the Franks and Burgundians conquered the
Roman colonies in Gaul, the Jews, who had been brought thither as
slaves, were classed by the victors, as Romans, and shared equal fate
with them. They were permitted to follow agricultural pursuits and
trades. Their own ships furrowed the ocean. Jewish physicians were
sought by the princes of the Church and of the Realm. As soldiers they
distinguished themselves in the warfare between Clovis and Theoderic.
Their religious practices were not interfered with, the Jew was
everywhere respected by the heathen.
But the sun of their prosperity was extinguished when the heathen kings
adopted Christianity. With the change of their religion came a change
of heart; the heart that was formerly full of love toward the Jew,
turned into stone. The clergy dictated, and the kings and the people
obeyed with the sword, and the Jews bled and suffered and perished
by the thousands, or were dragged under tortures to baptism into the
alone-saving and all-loving church.
So much for the early history of the Jews in France. We now come to the
history of the Jews in Spain. That theme is vast. It demands a chapter
for itself.
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