life story. In the schools he won a distinguished place, and all his
life he was as loyal to his duties as to his affections, and faithful
to both even unto death. In the revolt against Rome the scholar turned
soldier, and the husband was patriot. Akiba stood by Barcochba to the
last, and when Bither fell, he was taken prisoner by the Romans, and
by them most cruelly put to death. But his beautiful enthusiasm did
not desert him even under torture. There is a Talmudic legend that he
smiled at his executioners, and that one of them tauntingly exclaimed
to the poor old man slowly dying under their hands, ‘Why, you look as
if you rejoice!’ ‘And I do,’ came the unflinching answer. ‘Every day of
my life I have repeated the שְׁמַע. To-day, for the first time, I _feel_
what it is to love the Lord my God with all my heart, and all my soul,
and all my strength. How should I not rejoice?’
=8. Hadrian’s Resolve accomplished.=――Akiba’s death was the last act
in this war, which the Talmud calls ‘the war of extermination.’ Hadrian
did what he had proposed to himself to do. A ploughshare was passed
over what had been Jerusalem, and the foundations of a new city were
laid, and it was called Ælia Capitolina――Ælia in honour of the Emperor,
Capitolina in honour of Jupiter. ‘One hundred and fifty years later
Jerusalem was a term of ancient geography.’[5] The Jews of Palestine
were massacred by thousands. Numbers were sold as slaves at the same
price as horses at the annual fair held near Hebron. Judea was left,
practically, a desert. Wolves and hyenas prowled about the ruined city,
and such of the people as were not sold or slaughtered lived a banished,
frightened existence in the caves among the mountains. One right the
Roman Emperor conceded to the Jews he had ‘crushed.’ Once a year they
were given the opportunity of ‘buying their own tears,’ as the Church
historian, St. Jerome, expresses it. Throughout all the long months
they were forbidden, on pain of death, to approach the city. But on
each anniversary of the sacking of Jerusalem all Jews who wished might
come near and look upon what had been ‘the joy of the whole earth.’ The
outcasts might come and lean against the bit of broken wall which was
all that was left to them of all that had been theirs. They might weep
and pray; but if they asked to wait and weep a little longer than the
limited time by law permitted, then the Roman guard who watched could
fix his own price for the privilege. He could make them ‘buy their
tears.’
CHAPTER XIV.
THE REVIVAL OF THE SCHOOLS: THEIR WORK.
=1. One of History’s Miracles.=――If, shivering in the winter, we stand
in a frozen field, full of dry brown trees, all stumps and twigs and
branches, looking all alike and all lifeless, we can hardly believe
that, six months hence, that bare field will be a blooming orchard,
with the sunlight flickering down on it through a canopy of pink and
white and green. It seems a miracle, and in a sense it is one. Like
nature, history, too, has her miracles, and both sorts of marvels are
easy to understand when we remember that ‘kings of the earth and all
people,’ like ‘snow and hail and stormy wind’ עשָֹׁה דְבָרוֹ, ‘fulfil His word.’
Hadrian left Judea a desert, and the life, as he thought, crushed out
of Judaism. He was hardly dead――he died on the first day of the year
138――when the seemingly sapless twigs began tremblingly to put out
their little tender shoots. What one may call the oak of the forest,
the glorious Temple, was hopelessly shattered by the storm, but, to
keep up the simile, little cuttings from it were planted, and watered
with tears, and they took root and grew. Small meeting-houses for
prayer became general throughout the country. And these meeting-houses
served, too, a double purpose, showing the intimate practical relation
which exists between charity and religion. ‘He prayeth well who loveth
well.’ These little buildings were used also as temporary homes for
poor strangers, who were therein provided with free board and lodging.
The recital of the קִדּוּשׁ in our synagogues on the eves of Sabbaths
and holy days, and of the הַבְדָּלָה at the going out of Sabbaths and holy
days, is a remnant of this institution. And in these ancient, humble
synagogues, as in our grander modern ones, the presence of ten men
(_minyan_) made a sufficient beginning of a congregation. One after
another, too, the schools of Palestine reopened, and by the year 175
the Sanhedrin was in active work, with Simon, the sixth president in
direct line from Hillel, at its head.
=2. The Schools: their Work.=――The head-quarters of the schools of the
west were fixed at Tiberias, and the centre of the eastern group was
at Sura. The נָשִׂא, or Prince, was the patriarch of the western Jews; and
the רֵישׁ נְּלוּתָא, or Prince of the Captivity, ruled the eastern division.
But there was a great difference, both of social and of religious
position, between the patriarch and the prince. The patriarch in the
west was president of the Sanhedrin, and generally distinguished by
learning and knowledge of the Law; the prince, in the east, was merely
a political vassal of the Persian or Parthian court. Some ‘princes’
acquired distinction in the knowledge of the Law, but it was an
accident of their position, and not a cause or a consequence of it.
Each eastern school had its own president. The high colleges, or
Kallahs, were not always sitting; they met only for some months during
the year. The work they did was not quite on the same lines as the
university education of these days, although the name Kallahs may
possibly bear a like meaning. Some commentators find the root of the
word in כל, which means all or universal. The teaching was certainly
that, in every sense. A week before each of the festivals popular
lectures were given, and any one who liked might enter the halls.
Tents were often put up to accommodate the extra numbers. One teacher
of the period is said to have had 1,200 regular pupils of his own. The
professors, however, did not deliver lectures, of which their students
took more or less attentive notes. The instruction in these colleges
was carried on by means of discussion and debate. Question was met by
counter-question, and answers were often wrapped up in a parable or an
allegory. The widest digressions were encouraged. The mere mention of
some historical personage who had lived somewhere would lead perhaps
to a long debate on political geography; this might glide off into a
description of the physical peculiarities of the place or the people
named, and this again into an animated botanical or even physiological
discourse. All sorts of subjects were included in the ‘course’ of
study――ethics, metaphysics, jurisprudence, and all the science that
the period was capable of. Astronomy was one of the favourite subjects,
and a certain famous scholar named Samuel, who died about the year 250,
and who was a friend of Shapor, king of Persia, said, ‘The paths of the
heavenly bodies are as clear to me as the streets of Nehardea.’
=3. The Masters of the Schools.=――If the method of instruction differed
somewhat from our modern sort, no less different were the instructors.
Many of the most eminent ‘doctors’ were only humble tradesmen.
Tentmakers or shoemakers often, or carpenters, or weavers, or bakers.
One of them, Rabbi Zadok, distinctly taught, ‘Use the Law, not as a
crown to shine with, nor as a spade to dig with.’ Their practice gave
expression to their belief that labour is one form, and perhaps not the
least admirable form, of praise. They hated idleness, and they loved
learning. They managed to give full employment to their heads and their
hands, and they kept their hearts too in active and healthy condition,
since the good of others rather than self-culture was the aim of their
studies. The _Tanaim_[6] did not indulge in writing books, but they
made good shoes, and good tents, and good loaves, and they turned
out good and fairly educated young Jews by the score. So we, their
descendants, may be grateful both for what they did and for what they
did not do.
=4. The Moral Influence of the Schools.=――Dispersed as the Jews
were amongst all people, these schools became a breakwater against
the floods of barbarous ignorance and ungodly cultivation which surged
around. The schools gave a religious education in the widest sense of
the word, since the word of God supplied the text for every discussion
and for every discourse. A guide for health, a code for justice,
a theme for literature, a field for every branch of historic and
scientific inquiry, was sought and found in the Bible. ‘Turn it, and
turn it again,’ says the Mishnah, ‘for everything is in it.’ The ‘Law’
was to the Jew a treasury of knowledge as well as a ‘tree of life.’
The minor moralities, the everyday virtues of sobriety, and of content,
and of cheerfulness, the students must have learnt by example in the
persons of their humble and hard-working teachers.
=5. The Political Influence of the Schools.=――Politically, these
schools united the Jews and kept them a nation. Each community was
visited in turn by a legate of the Patriarch, and this brought the
whole of the scattered people into close and intimate relations.
And besides this official connection with one another, there was the
feeling of freemasonry which always exists among scholars, and which
keeps up a bond of mutual interest. The constitution of the schools,
too, helped and confirmed this sense of community. There were no
class distinctions in the Kallahs, no broad line of division between
‘town and gown’――absolutely no differences, save of character and of
brain power, between student and student, or even between student and
professor. Those who taught and those who learnt were all workers, and
all of the people. This old Jewish school system produced a democracy
of a very pure and patriotic sort, and with no opening for demagogues.
=6. The Literary Influence of the Schools.=――The literary influence
was the most lasting of all, for the Talmud was its outcome. ‘Moses
commanded unto us a law.’ From the very first, the ‘Law’ had to be
explained and applied. The unwritten record of the numberless instances
in which it had been so explained and applied, from the time of Moses
unto that of Ezra, had become by this date an enormous traditional
store. There had come to be a commentary and a precedent attaching to
every phrase and almost to every word in the Pentateuch. The comments
on the Law dated from its giving, on Sinai. Take, as an instance, the
command, ‘Ye shall dwell in booths.’ It looks at first simple enough.
But questions would soon arise. Did the ‘ye’ mean men, women, and
children? did the ‘dwell’ include sleeping and eating? of what sort and
material were the ‘booths’ to be? All such points were endless subjects
for commentary, and were practically settled by custom. Commentary by
this time had grown to an unmanageable bulk, and custom, in dispersion,
had grown somewhat uncertain and unsettled. Whilst the Temple stood,
and the people dwelt in their own land, wise and educated men were
always at hand to expound the Law, and there was no need for all
the shifting wealth of tradition to be stored, as it were, in one
bank. But when the schools were scattered, and might at any time be
closed, the fear grew that the currency, so to speak, might be debased,
and perhaps some valuable bits of it altogether lost. A resolve was
gradually formed to make the oral Law into a written one, and to turn
the traditions of seventeen centuries into an authoritative code. In
one sense it was a pity, for wise men, who obtained a knowledge of the
Law of Moses with its traditional interpretation through _vivâ voce_
instruction, were better able to get at the true spirit of the Law and
of the tradition than those who had to rely on the dead letter of books.
Once written down, misunderstandings might creep in, and what had been
useful as a guiding rein might be twisted by awkward hands into a yoke
or a halter. There was a danger even of very earnest folks receiving
this new written law with so much enthusiasm that they would count it
as a second revelation, and hold it equal with the Law itself. But few
things are unmixed good or unmixed evil. In most matters there is a
balance to be struck, and here it was certainly better to risk some
drawbacks from making the oral Law into a written one, than to face the
grave chance of its being by degrees forgotten altogether. To Hillel,
30 years B.C., had first occurred the idea of collecting and sifting
the enormous traditional store; and, about the year 200, Jehudah
the Prince, or Jehudah the Holy, as he is often called, the seventh
president of the Sanhedrin in succession from Hillel, seriously
began the work of compilation. It was no light work. Rills from the
‘fount of living waters’ which first flowed at Sinai had run into two
channels――Halacha, rule; and Hagada, legend――the one an arguing and
legal sort of commentary on the Law, the other a chatty and poetic
and discursive one. Jehudah ha-Nasi gathered up all the vast store
of Halacha; the traditions and interpretations of the wilderness, the
decisions of the judges, the constitutional customs under the kings,
the earnest communings of the exile, the vivid expoundings of Ezra, and
the later commentaries and discussions in the schools. Jehudah ha-Nasi
classified all this accumulation of Halacha, and by the year 200,
he had arranged it all, under six different headings, into some five
hundred chapters. Rabbi Jehudah’s compilation became known as the
Mishnah, from the root שָׁנָה, to learn by heart, as contrasted with
Mikra――which stood for Bible-reading, from קָרָא, to read from a book.
The Mishnah contains nearly four thousand rules, under the six heads
of Seeds, Festivals, Women, Civil and Criminal law, Sacrificial laws,
and laws of Cleanliness. To this code, later on, was added the Gemara,
which is a sort of complement and commentary to the Mishnah, and
includes the store of Hagada. Mishnah and Gemara together form the
Talmud. And as the Talmud literature grew, which was a literature
more or less intended for the learned, and was the result of learned
discussions in the schools, there grew up also a system of popular
lectures, and Biblical expositions and sermons for the people. These
discourses were given in the synagogues, and formed the basis of the
Midrashim literature (Midrash, from דָּרַשׁ, to expound). The language of
the Talmud is partly Rabbinical Hebrew, partly Aramaic. There are two
Talmuds in existence, the Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud.
The Babylonian one is the more perfect and authoritative, and was
completed by a certain learned Rabbi Ashi, about the year 500. Long
before that date the Palestine schools, one after the other, had to be
closed, and the Palestinian scholars had mostly emigrated to Babylon.
CHAPTER XV.
CHRISTIANITY A STATE RELIGION.
=1. How the new faith spread among the Heathen.=――Whilst the growth
from the seed which Moses had sown was being threshed out in the
schools, the gleanings of the apostle Paul were being garnered as
harvest in high places. The new religion had made progress in its first
three hundred years of existence, but without the practice of universal
love which it professed to teach. The Christian command, ‘Love one
another,’ was being, indeed, even less generally obeyed three hundred
years after the death of Jesus than had been the Mosaic injunction on
which it was founded, ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself,’ three hundred
years after the death of Moses. But notwithstanding that sects in
Christianity were already both plentiful and pugnacious, the new faith
was driving paganism to the wall, and it is not difficult to understand
how it was that this had come about. To Jews, the dogma of a Trinity
was, and always is, unthinkable; but to heathens it was a welcome
thinning of the ranks of their crowded Olympus. Christianity gave them
a much purer and simpler idea of Divinity than they had hitherto held,
and such selections from the old morality as they were bidden to accept
with the new doctrine were not of an irksome sort. All the observances,
and many of the restraints, of the Jewish Law, Paul, we know, had cast
aside, and thus his teaching had been well received by the heathen
almost from the first. Paul was accommodating, and proselytes in the
early days had been won by persuasion; but Christianity, grown stronger,
had grown aggressive, and by the end of the third century it had become
a political as well as a religious danger to pagan supremacy. In the
year 306, when Constantine, after a struggle, had succeeded in gaining
the imperial dignity, he clearly saw the advantage which putting
himself at the head of the Christian party would secure to him.
He faced both ways for a while, but before the end of his reign
Christianity was the state religion of Rome.
=2. The First Christian Emperor.=――Constantine was sixty-two years old
at the time of his formal conversion. He had been a quite comfortable
heathen all these sixty-two years, and on his accession had ruled at
first with fairness and justice. But when political motives, and his
mother, the Empress Helena, who was an ardent believer in the new
doctrine, had united to make him change his faith, he changed with
it his character. He became both cruel and unjust. It seemed as if he
really could not understand why, if he were converted, pagans, or Jews
either, should remain unconverted. He never could grasp the fact that
he, in his unconverted state, had been a heathen; whilst the Jews,
in their unconverted state, were Jews. But this really made all the
difference.
=3. Constantine legislates on the Subject: the Effects.=――Constantine
tried to force the Jews into Christianity by making Judaism difficult
to them and distasteful to others. All sorts of harsh and oppressive
measures were passed into law. Throughout the Roman dominions Jewish
subjects were forbidden to hold slaves or property, and, unless
baptized, every office in state or army was closed to them. No new
synagogues were allowed to be built, and restrictions were put upon
Jewish forms of worship. On the place in Jerusalem where the Temple had
stood a grand church was raised to the memory of Jesus. The permission
to make occasional pilgrimages to the ruins of the city was withdrawn.
Jews might no longer draw near the walls of Jerusalem and buy the
privilege of weeping there. Constantius, the son and successor of
Constantine, was just as zealous in the new faith as his father, and
quite as unsuccessful in his object. His Jewish subjects did not become
converts to Christianity, but crowds of them throughout the Roman
Empire left their homes, and joined their brethren in Babylon and
Mesopotamia, or made new settlements on the shores of the Tigris
and Euphrates. The schools of Palestine were gradually closed, and
the power of the Patriarch, with his followers so thinned, naturally
declined. It was one of the last of the patriarchs, Hillel II., who
fixed the permanent Jewish calendar which is still in force. Before his
time each president, for the time being, of the Sanhedrin had, month by
month, fixed the date of the new moon by observation, and had settled
at the beginning of each year, by calculation, what the character of
the year was to be, whether a leap year or an ordinary year. Gamaliel,
who died in 420, was the very last patriarch נָשִׂיא, or president, of the
Sanhedrin.
=4. Jews in the East under Persian Rule.=――The Eastern Jews, reinforced
by these Western ones, remained under their Persian masters unmolested
for quite another century. The Persians were fire-worshippers, and
their simple belief forbade persecution under the name of religion. The
sun was their divinity, and every morning as they stood on the hilltops
to salute it as it rose, and watched it shining impartially on sea
and on land, on the pinnacles of a king’s palace and on the twigs of a
bird’s nest, they made a beautiful meaning out of the beautiful sight.
They saw that there was no limit and no selection in their sun-god’s
rays. As he warmed the roses into life, he did not stay to ask if
they were going to be white roses or red ones. So these Persians who
worshipped the sun tried humbly to imitate its wide and generous ways.
They did not stay to ask any questions of their fellow-citizens, but
like the sun with the roses, so long as each was good ‘according to its
kind,’ gave each his due share of warmth and light with the rest. Thus,
under the kindly protection of the fire-worshippers, the Babylonian
schools flourished when the Palestinian schools were closed. And as
the patriarch of the West lost his followers, the reigning Prince of
the Captivity רֵישׁ נְּלוּתָא gained extra state and influence. He came to be
greatly respected by all the scholars of the period, whether native
subjects of Persia or immigrants from the Western world.
=5. Julian the Apostate.=――The zeal of the early converts, and the
legislation of the first two Christian Emperors, made life very
difficult to the Jews; and Christianity, in the name of which they
were persecuted, grew very distasteful to them. When on the death of
Constantius, in 360, an emperor was crowned who proclaimed himself a
pagan, there was great and barely concealed delight amongst the Jewish
subjects of Rome. One’s estimate of men or things depends so much on
the point of view. By the fathers of the Church this pagan Emperor
is called Julian the Apostate; by the heads of the Synagogue he must
have been looked upon as a saviour. Immediately on his accession he
declared all the persecuting laws to be a dead letter; he reduced
taxes, abolished disabilities, and finally gave permission to the Jews
to rebuild their Temple. Great were the rejoicings wherever this good
news travelled. East and west, throughout the Roman dominions, Jews
met and congratulated each other, and all hastened to send gifts and
contributions to Jerusalem, like as in the old days when the Tabernacle
was furnished in the wilderness by loving, liberal hands, which had
to be ‘restrained from giving.’ Those on the spot set to work with
a will, and the walls rose as by magic; and it really seemed to the
Jews, in the exalted mood they were in, as if the ruins were helping
to transform themselves into the Temple. It was all like a dream――so
hurried, and so wonderful, and so unreal. Julian’s whole reign only
lasted three years. He was crowned Emperor in 360, and he died in 363,
and his death put a stop to it all. Even before his death a check
had come. There had been a slight earthquake, or explosion, on the
site of the ruins, which had greatly startled and terrified the
excitable workmen. This incident gave rise to all sorts of tales of
supernatural interference with their purpose; and very soon the work,
so enthusiastically begun, was despairingly abandoned. A new and
Christian Emperor was crowned in Rome, and the old bad state of things
was re-established. Altogether, this brief lapse into paganism in the
middle of the fourth century is like a flash of lightning from out
dense thunder-clouds. It just enables us to see the surrounding ‘thick
darkness.’
Illustration: _Edw^d. Weller_
THE ROMAN EMPIRE
AT THE CLOSE OF THE REPUBLIC
_London Longmans & Co._
CHAPTER XVI.
THE BREAK-UP OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE:
SOME OF ITS CONSEQUENCES.
=1. Political Changes.=――Theodosius, who died in 395, was the last of
the Roman Emperors who held undivided sway over those vast dominions.
After his death the ancient empire of Rome was split up into two great
states, and styled the Empire of the East and the Empire of the West.
The Northern barbarians found their opportunity in this division, and,
in 410, and again in 455, great hordes of Goths and Vandals swooped
down on beautiful, debased Rome, and plundered it. Within a century
of the death of Theodosius the Roman Empire of the West had ceased to
exist. The Emperors of the Eastern division――the Byzantine Emperors,
as they were by-and-by called――fixed their court at Constantinople,
and kept up their title and much of their power for over one thousand
years――till the year 1453, in fact, when Constantinople was sacked by
the Saracens. The general shifting of boundaries which ensued on the
break-up of a great power like Rome brought about various changes in
government, which are easier to recognise than changes in sentiment
and circumstance. We will look at the political changes first, and the
map will be a help to the understanding of them. The conquests of the
barbarians resulted in new names and new masters to the old historic
sites. Goths and Vandals, Lombards and Franks, rose on the ruins of the
great Roman state. From the latter half of the fourth century to the
end of the fifth there was general storm and upheaval throughout those
dominions, in almost every province of which Jews were to be found. Not
to speak for a moment of the Eastern division of the empire, there were
Jews in Italy, in Greece, in the Archipelago, in such parts of Germany
as were civilised, in Gaul, and in Spain. By the beginning of the sixth
century, things had settled down a little, and we can see some order,
and find some well-known names and landmarks. Justinian was at that
date Emperor of the Eastern remains of the great Roman state; Recared,
the first Christian king of the Goths, ruled in Spain; Chilperic, who
has been called the Nero of France, was his contemporary; and towards
the end of that same century Pope Gregory I. was the head of the Church.
=2. Social Changes.=――At this period of stress and storm, Jews were
scattered in all the places where it was felt. But the legislation of
the age forbade them to take the part of Roman citizens in the struggle.
They were not regarded as Roman citizens either by Church council or by
State code. In the eye of the law they were heretics, to be compelled
or converted into Christianity, but to stand distinctly outside of
it meanwhile. War was the all but universal profession. Jews might
not hold military rank. They might not even be civil guardians of the
peace, since ‘no Jew in any cause could be witness against a Christian.’
They might neither aspire to be owners of land, nor leaders of men.
There were difficulties put in the way of their holding property,
and difficulties in the way of their bequeathing it. By the time of
Justinian (530‒560) the ‘must nots’ and the ‘shall nots,’ of which the
Jews were the occasion, amounted to quite a considerable portion of the
famous Roman code. This sort of legislation, and the warfare consequent
on the break-up of the Roman Empire, together produced one very
noteworthy effect. With the fall of Jerusalem the people of the Land
became in a sense the people of the Book. With the fall of Rome they
seem to gradually become, and for many centuries to remain, the people
of the ledger. It was another and a narrower change, and one for
which the Jews themselves must be held wholly free from blame. Cruel
legislation turned a people with the strongest home instincts into
an almost willing community of wanderers. It reduced men who, through
generations, had loved to live by the work of their hands, to the
necessity of living by the exercise of their wits. There was no leisure
to train workers of the Bezaleel and Aholiab type into ‘skilfulness in
all manner of cunning workmanship,’ for rough weapons were the chief
demand of the age. There was no longer a chance for the old to sit,
in peaceful sense of proprietorship, under their own vine and fig tree,
whilst young tillers of the soil vigorously ‘gathered in their corn
and their wine and their oil.’ The oliveyards and the vineyards and the
corn-fields were often battle-fields, or sometimes pleasant adjuncts
to the monasteries which were beginning to be built. In any case they
were not for Jews, who might not be landowners, save in the sense that
‘six feet of English soil’ were offered in perpetuity by our English
Harold to the invader.
=3. Monks and Saints.=――In the practical occupation of their lives,
Jews and Christians were distinctly divided by legislation, and through
religious sentiment they were drifting further and further apart. About
this period, the end of the fifth century, the Church hero of the day
was a certain Simon Stylites, afterwards canonised as saint, and added
to that long roll of deified beings, to be prayed to and protected by,
which was making the Christian heaven something of a heathen Olympus.
Saint Simon Stylites’s claim to saintship and to hero-worship lay in
the fact that he was living on the top of a pillar, and that ‘living’
meant to him not the common round of daily duties and daily cares,
but a miserable and useless existence, persevered in from the purest
motives. Saint Simon Stylites may serve as an extreme example of
what was then, and for centuries after, the highest Christian ideal.
There came to be a whole class of men called monks, and of women who
were called nuns, who of their own free will gave up all the innocent
pleasures and happinesses of life. They prayed, and fasted, and
scourged themselves at regular intervals, and chose to live in bareness
and discomfort, and often in actual dirt. They put peas in their shoes,
and hair shirts on their backs; and the kindnesses they did――and they
did many――were done from duty to God rather than from love of man.
In the intervals of their set prayings and fastings they doctored the
sick, but they seldom remembered that ‘a cheerful heart doeth good like
a medicine.’ There was once a small sect among the Jews[7] who thought
they could best serve God by selfishly withdrawing from the world in
which He had placed them, who chose to suffer rather than to do, and
who made an especial study and an especial care of their own souls.
This sect, the Essenes, which was scanty and short-lived, was never in
sympathy with the body of the Jewish nation. It was a system altogether
repugnant to Jewish notions of what is pleasing to God. Cleanliness, in
the Jewish code, is not even next to godliness, but is a detailed and
indispensable part of it. Wilful dirt, and discomfort, and dismalness,
are, all alike, considered immoral, and the whole teaching of the Bible
is on the lines that ‘the servants of the Lord shall rejoice before
Him,’ and ‘serve Him with gladness.’ The monks of Christianity were an
exaggerated outcome of that outlived error, the Essenes of Judaism; and
we can understand how the silent, cowled, and barefooted monks, and the
multitude of the readily worshipped ‘saints,’ made the principles of
Christianity distasteful to the Jew, in like manner as the persecuting,
blundering populace rendered the practice of it disgraceful. More and
more the Jews lived a distinct and separate life from the peoples among
whom they dwelt, separated by religious thought as well as by so-called
religious legislation.
=4. How Jews became Traders.=――Leisure and a sense of security are
needed for any industrious or cultivated occupation. The irruption of
the barbarians, with the warfare which it brought in its train, not
only gave little leisure for industry, but the constant movement of
armed hosts made settled work of any sort impossible. There was also
the less occasion for skilled labour, as food and clothing and weapons
were the principal wants of those conquering and uncultured hordes
from the North. The misery, however, which these men caused as they
marched was felt less by the Jews than by the natives of the soil,
whose peaceful homes and whose growing crops were destroyed. Jews, by
this time, were used to most minor hardships. They had, for very long,
been wanderers and pariahs. They had been learning now for centuries,
to ‘hold all mortal joys with a loose hand.’ ‘I do not call my wife
wife, but home,’ said a Jewish scholar once. The tender little love
speech came to have a very wide and literal meaning. Home, in our sense
of the word, was to the Jew often roofless, and his pack served for
his pillow. But steadfast, faithful affection, as often, walled the
roofless dwelling round like a fenced city, and wife and children made
‘home’ to him out of the most unlikely places.
Jews accepted the new state of things. They bravely adapted themselves
to the altered circumstances of their lot, and made the best of it.
They had to live, though a hard and hurried and undignified sort
of living it became. With a quickness which experience taught and
self-interest quickened, they tried to make themselves useful and
acceptable. Their own wants, as wayfarers in strange lands, made
them swift to perceive the wants of others. They used their sorrows
for stepping-stones. They had known ‘straitness and the want of all
things;’ surely they could supply some. Such property as they managed
to keep must needs have been of a portable sort, and much of it of
a serviceable kind, and likely to prove useful to rough new-comers.
Barter would naturally ensue, and what the purchaser could not get from
the Jew at hand could probably be obtained, through his medium, from
a Jew farther off. And this was the very small beginning of the great
system of international trading, in which Jews have so large a share.
The descendants of David the sweet singer, and of Ezra the Scribe, and
of countless unrecorded generations who ‘gathered in their wine and
their oil,’ and were ‘skilful in all manner of workmanship,’ turned
to buying and selling, and often to haggling and to hoarding. It was
circumstances which made traders out of the studious, vine-growing
handicraftsmen of the Book. And it was circumstances, quite as much as
their own wits, which made them successful and proficient at their new
calling. Jews were widely dispersed and yet closely connected, and were
forced to be onlookers rather than actors in the world’s affairs. This
position gave them exceptional opportunities for trading. They were
denied all healthy and ordinary ambitions, and thus money-making became
to them an interesting and sometimes an absorbing pursuit, even when
it was not; which it mostly was, a painful and sordid necessity. Jews
ceased to be producers; the Land and the Book seemed alike to be closed
against them. They developed into the chief traders and financiers of
the Middle Ages, ranging from pedlars and hawkers to contractors of
State loans.
=5. The Slave Trade.=――The incessant warfare, and the imperfect
civilisation, of these early centuries made of men and women and
children a recognised article of commerce. Selling people into slavery
has a dreadful sound, but in those days it was not quite so dreadful
a thing, nor even so avoidable a one, as it would be in these. Great
tracts of cultivated land were constantly being laid waste; what was to
be done with the vanquished dwellers thereon? In that rough and ready
system of waging war, it was centuries too soon for trying any of our
modern methods of treaties of peace or diplomatic settlement. The
hostile inhabitants of a conquered state had to be exterminated or to
be rendered harmless. It really resolved itself with the victors into
a question of slaughter or of slavery. And of that hard choice, slavery
was possibly the less uncomfortable fate to the conquered, whilst to
the conquerors it was decidedly the more economical arrangement, and on
the whole, perhaps, the more humane; for, transformed from enemies into
property, the slaves were pretty sure of fair treatment from buyer and
from seller both, and their chief hardship would be the chance of being
sold in separate lots, and of being divided from their families as well
as from their country.
=6. Jews as Slave-owners.=――In their owners, at any rate, as events
turned out, the captives were, for the most part, fortunate. The
principal purchasers of slaves were found among the Jews. Jews were
so widely scattered by this time that they seemed to be always and
everywhere at hand to buy, and to have the means equally ready to
pay. They were the kindest of masters. ‘Remember how ye were slaves
in the land of Egypt,’ is the preface to God’s law on the treatment
of dependants. ‘For ye know the heart of a stranger,’ is further and
tenderly urged. To the credit of these trading Jews, so often tempted
to drive a hard bargain, to seem and even to be hard, and sordid, and
grasping――to their credit be it said that they acted in the spirit of
their Law, and proved the gentlest and most generous slave-owners the
world has ever known. So fond grew the grateful slaves of their Jewish
masters, that they very often desired to become Jews themselves, and
were thus the indirect cause of an immense deal of harsh and suspicious
legislation. The Church conscientiously abhorred Jews. It could not be
expected to look on calmly at the possible manufacture of more of them.
So council after council of the Church busied itself in devising plans
to prevent, or in imposing penalties to punish, any conversions to
Judaism.
=7. Church Councils.=――The early Church, in its practice as in its
precepts, borrowed much from the ancient Synagogue. The Sanhedrin was
something of a model for the Council. Both assemblies claimed a supreme
authority quite independently of political conditions. The new faith
had held its first deliberative sitting at Jerusalem about the year 50,
when the matter to decide was the question, which had been raised at
Antioch, whether heathen converts could dispense with the Abrahamic
covenant. According to Church tradition, a brother of Jesus presided
at this assembly, and Paul opened the discussion. At any rate, this
was the very first so-called Council of the Church. As time went on the
meetings multiplied, though the debates were rarely decisive of such
great issues as was that first one. Jews were a frequent and favourite
subject for discussion, and concerning them the expression of opinion
and the consequent legislation were apt to be, unhappily, unanimous.
There were occasional exceptions. The Pope or Father of the Church, for
the time being, was the head of these councils, and towards the end of
the sixth century, when Gregory I. was Pope, his firmness and humanity
for a brief while gave some check to the persecuting mania. Pope
Gregory was just as much in earnest as any of the Church dignitaries,
past or present, in hating the slave trade, but he hated it because
it was slavery, and not only because Jews were slave-owners. He loved
righteousness and he hated wrong-doing, but he did not put Jewish or
Christian labels on these things, and love or hate accordingly. Pope
Gregory was several centuries in advance of his age.
=8. Eastern Jews.=――Whilst the Goths and the Vandals were overrunning
Europe, and the Jews of the West were turning into pedlars, the Jews
of the East were also beginning to have a history apart from their
schools. For nearly 500 years the history of the Babylonian Jews was
almost that of the happy nations who have none. From the time when
Jerusalem fell, till the beginning of the sixth century, the troubles
of the Jews who were settled on the banks of the Tigris and of the
Euphrates had been but slight; occasionally irritating, but very rarely
serious. In Mesopotamia, for a very long period, Jews as citizens
were undistinguishable from other citizens, and they on their side,
as a certain Rabbi Samuel expressed it, ‘respected the law of the
land no less than the law of Moses.’ Their Judaism was absolutely
uninterfered with, and they had leisure for little scholarly quarrels
among themselves. There was, it is true, a fanatic sect among the
fire-worshippers, who were often trying to disturb the pleasant and
peaceful terms on which the Jews lived with their Persian masters, but
they seldom succeeded. Unluckily, however, neither the peace nor the
pleasantness was secure; both depended on a good many causes, among
which the disposition of the reigning ruler counted for much. At the
beginning of the sixth century troubles began for the Eastern Jews,
and speedily grew formidable. In the year 530 their reigning רֵישׁ נְּלוּתָא
Prince of the Captivity, was hanged by order of the State. This act
was followed by other persecuting measures. Many Jewish religious rites
were prohibited, and the schools were closed. Luckily, by this time
the great work of the schools was accomplished, the Babylonian Talmud
having been finished by Rabbi Aschi some forty years before.
=9. War between the Persian and the Byzantine Empires.=――Early in the
next century there was a terrible struggle between the Persians and the
Romans, or, to be exact, between the Persians and that Eastern division
(all that was left by this date) of the great Roman Empire which held
its court at Constantinople, and which was now called the Byzantine
Empire. The Jews throughout the Persian dominions, despite recent
differences, were loyal to their Persian masters, and helped them to
fight and to conquer. Egypt and Syria were wrested from the Romans,
and Jerusalem fell before the Persian arms. Throughout the war the Jews
helped the Persians loyally as Persian subjects, but in Jerusalem it is
to be feared that the Jews fought rather as personal, than as Persian,
enemies of Rome. The old scenes brought back the old memories, and Jews
remembered only too well and too fiercely. There was terrible fighting
in Jerusalem. The church which Constantine’s mother, the Empress Helena,
had built on the ruins of the Temple, was pulled down, the Christians
were cruelly massacred or sold as slaves, or sometimes sold as slaves
and then massacred. It was to a great extent a religious war, which
accounts for its bitterness. The Persians were monotheistic in their
faith, and they hated what was pagan in Christianity, the trinity of
Gods, the plurality of saints, and the worship of relics. The successes
of Chosroes, the Persian Emperor, did not, however, last long. Twenty
years later the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius reversed it all. He reduced
the Persian ruler to submission, he made Syria and Egypt come again
under his control, he rebuilt his churches in Jerusalem, and forbade
the Jews, as in the days of Hadrian, to approach within a certain
measured distance of its walls. This was contrary to the promise which
the Emperor had made to the Jews, and was a weak concession to the
wishes of the bishops, who readily, however, gave him absolution for
breaking his word.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE RISE OF MAHOMEDANISM.
(600‒650.)
=1. ‘The Koran or the Sword.’=――Another change was impending. Persians
and Romans both were soon to be put on their defence against a common
enemy. By the beginning of the seventh century it was clear that
boundaries were again to be altered, and faiths to be again unsettled.
A new and mysterious movement had begun, with Mahomed, half soldier and
half prophet, at its head. The end Mahomed had in view was conversion;
the means he employed was conquest. Across the deserts of Arabia came
his cry of ‘the Koran or the sword.’ It sounded a fierce and fanatic
cry enough, but at least there was a suggestion of choice about it, and
that may have been part of the secret of its success. People by this
time were so used to the threat of the ‘sword,’ that many were more
than half willing to accept, without any inquiry, the ‘Koran,’ which
was offered as an alternative. And those who did inquire were, for
the most part, all the more ready to accept. For the Koran, or sacred
book of Mahomed, was a simple book. The unity of God was its one dogma.
It promised much in the way of reward, and demanded little in the way
of belief. Its acceptance was the main point, and to the ‘faithful,’
things were to be made pleasant in both worlds. The Koran was a
formidable rival to the books of Zoroaster, and to the Gospels of the
Christian Church. The fire-worshippers in the East, beset by civilising
influences, were ready for a new creed, and the Christ-worshippers
in the West, possessed as they were by the persecuting spirit, and
materialised as they had become by pagan influences, were making their
religion dishonoured and unacceptable. So the victorious cry of ‘the
Koran or the sword’ swept onward like a trumpet call, and the man who
raised it, before he died――and he died in 632――found half the inhabited
world ready to cry with him that ‘Allah was God, and Mahomed was His
prophet.’
=2. What Mahomed learned from the Jews.=――From very early times there
had been a settlement of Jews in Arabia. Tradition says that the Queen
of Sheba travelled thence to pay her famous visit to King Solomon. But,
however that may be, there are tolerably trustworthy records which tell
of Jewish dwellers in Arabian valleys before the Christian era. At one
time there undoubtedly existed an Arab-Jewish state. Its limits and
dates are not very exactly defined, but over this Himyerite kingdom, as
it was called, there was certainly a Jewish king ruling at the time of
its downfall in the year 530. It was brought to an end by a Christian
king of Abyssinia, who in his turn was defeated by Chosroes II. of
Persia. There is also a story, seemingly legend, and yet historical,
of a people called the Khozars, whose king, Bulan, became a convert to
Judaism, and who founded a Jewish dynasty and ruled long and happily
by the shores of the Caspian Sea. But however much or however little
of truth there may be in these traditions which treat of kings and
dynasties, certain it is that, divided by the desert from the pursuit
of persecutors all round, Arabian Jews did live, century after century,
in their fertile valleys, secure in the possession of perfect freedom
of faith. In the northern parts of Arabia these Jews were wandering
herdsmen like their Ishmaelitish brethren, but in the south and east
they carried on a considerable trade with India and Persia and the
Byzantine Empire. They were much more civilised than the native Arabs
among whom they dwelt. The Jews were people with a past, which is
in itself impressive. They could tell tales without end, of heroic
ancestry, or could speak of the higher life with the authority
befitting descendants of seers and prophets. They were the direct heirs
of Abraham; these other Arabians, fulfilling the destiny of Ishmael,
whose ‘hand was to be against every man, and every man’s hand against
his,’ had the blood of Hagar the bondwoman in their veins. The Arabian
Jews came naturally to have that influence over the native tribes which
the higher always exercises on the lower. And thus it came to pass that
the new faith, which Mahomed came from Arabia to preach, showed many
signs of the Jewish surroundings in which its founder had been born and
brought up.
=3. Islam.=――The very name which was given to Mahomedanism has a
certain Jewish suggestiveness about it. Arabic and Hebrew belong to the
same group of languages, the Semitic. The Arabic ‘Islam’ and the Hebrew
שָׁלוֹם are derived from a like radical term, which denotes soundness,
or a perfect and unimpaired condition. Peace is another rendering of
the word, and expresses a very similar meaning, since ‘peace’ would
naturally ensue from a sound and healthy state of things.
=4. Likenesses between Islam and Judaism.=――There was a kinship of
religious thought, as well as of language and of race, between the Arab
and the Jew. The Unity of God is the first principle of Islam as it
is of Judaism. Abraham and Moses are the heroes of the Koran as of the
Pentateuch, and the covenant of Abraham and the dietary laws of Moses
are enjoined by Mahomed on his followers.
=5. Differences between Islam and Judaism.=――But there were differences
too, and these of a very vital sort. ‘Allah was God.’ That doctrine
of the new faith, the Jews, worshippers of One, might agree with. That
‘Mahomed was His prophet’ was debatable. Moses, even, was not always
unquestioningly obeyed. There was small hope for Mahomed. And much of
the teaching of the new prophet soon showed that the deserts of Arabia,
and not the heights of Sinai, inspired it. Judaism, for all its minute
bodily observance, is essentially a spiritual religion. Future rewards
are not mapped out after any human pattern, and such Hereafter as
is hinted at is of a purely spiritual kind. ‘In My presence there
is fulness of joy,’ is the nearest glimpse God vouchsafes of His
heaven. ‘Allah’s’ promised paradise was of a quite different sort.
Creature comforts, and very earthly delights, were to be the portion of
believers in him, and in Mahomed his prophet. It was a programme likely
to appeal to a lower class of mind, and the Jews remained unaffected
by it. Mahomed was never able to count the Jews among his converts.
From among the Jews of Arabia he met, indeed, at first with contempt
and opposition. They would not grasp the hand that held the Koran,
and so the other, the sword-arm, was lifted against them. There was
some fighting, and much bad feeling, at first between the Jews and the
followers of Mahomed. During the lifetime of the Prophet some Jews were
oppressed and some were exiled, and some were forced to serve under
the banner of Islam. But after his death, and as the tide of Mahomedan
conquest swept on, the Jews found cause to rejoice in the more tolerant
treatment which they experienced from the rulers who adopted the faith
of Islam.
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE CONQUESTS OF THE KALIPHS:
EFFECT, RELIGIOUS AND SOCIAL, ON THE JEWS.
(600‒800.)
=1. Progress of Mahomedanism.=――There were great changes brought about
in the position of the Jews from the spread of the new faith. The
followers of Mahomed conquered east and west. First Syria was overrun,
and the Christian subjects of the Byzantine Empire driven out of
Jerusalem, and a mosque, sacred to Allah, was erected on the ruins of
the Jewish Temple and of the Christian church. The power of Persia was
broken and finally subdued by the Mahomedans,[8] and their victories
over the Persians were rendered the easier by the help and sympathy
which they found among the oppressed Persian Jews. Then from Asia the
followers of the Prophet turned to Africa, and, establishing themselves
in Egypt, looked threateningly across the straits at Spain. Within
fifty years of the death of Mahomed the enormous empire of the kaliphs,
as his successors were called, extended from the Caspian Sea to the
Straits of Gibraltar, and was soon to bridge these, and to come to its
greatest triumph in the Peninsula. It was just in these countries that
Jews most congregated, and therefore the history of Islam has a special
importance for the students of Jewish history.
=2. Gaonim.=――The first effect of the Mahomedan supremacy was felt in
the neighbourhood where it arose, and chiefly amongst those scholars of
Babylon who, within the memories of elderly men, had seen their schools
closed and their רֵישׁ נְּלוּתָא hanged. It was no part of the Mahomedan policy
to make war on schools. Conquest once assured, the conquered might
occupy themselves as they pleased. So long even as contrary beliefs
did not take the active form of opposition to Islam, the holders of
such beliefs were contemptuously and good-naturedly ignored. It was a
pleasant experience for the Jews. Under the tolerant sway of the first
kaliph, Omar, who had reason, in his quarrels with the Persians, to
make friends with the Jews, the schools were reopened, an heir of the
murdered רֵישׁ נְּלוּתָא was reinstated, and the heads of the colleges took
on themselves all their old duties and dignities with the new name of
Gaonim.[9] Talmudic studies were again revived, and the _kallahs_ (high
colleges) of Sora and Pumbaditha grew to be quite celebrated centres of
learning. They were diligent students, these Gaonim, and a Gaon called
Jehuda, who was blind, and who lived about the year 750, was one of the
most active of them all in compiling the laws and decisions contained
in the Talmud, and arranging them in systematic order. The Gaonim
gradually became the great authorities on all religious and legal
questions; and only political matters, and subjects which lay a little
outside of the keenest interest, were left to the management of the
רֵישׁ נְּלוּתָא. His authority waned again. Some of those who wielded it were
not very wise, and managed to come into collision with the Mahomedan
rulers. Then from an hereditary dignity it became an elective one, and
the succession provoked quarrels. At a certain stage in their history
the Jews would seem to have prized scholars more than ‘princes.’ At
any rate, the Gaonim came to the front, and the office of Head of the
Captivity grew to be of less and less importance. Finally, under the
combined influences of neglect from the Jews and of some jealousy from
the Mahomedans, the office, after having existed for 700 years, expired
altogether, as we shall see, in the tenth century.
=3. Spain in the hands of the Mahomedans.=――Eighty years after the
death of the Prophet, the Koran and the sword, having made their
triumphant way in Asia and in Africa, the Mahomedans proclaimed the
one and sheathed the other in Europe. In 710 the flag with the crescent
floated from the cathedrals and citadels of Spain, and Mahomedan
kaliphs ruled in the place of Catholic kings. It made an enormous
change in the condition of the Jews. Christian legislation had been
hard on them for centuries. In public life it kept them from ‘use and
name and fame,’ and in private life it prevented any sort of dignity or
pleasantness. A Jew might neither be born nor be married, neither love
nor work nor play, without penalties and restrictions. He might have
the children he had begotten, or the servants he had bought, taken from
him at any moment without excuse or possibility of redress. He could be
forced into a church and made to listen unwillingly to bad sermons, and
if he resisted he might be scourged. Would he be converted, or would
he have his property taken from him? was a common form of question to
the Jews. And when, about the date of Mahomed’s death, a Catholic king
named Sisebut was reigning in Spain, even so much of choice, as was
implied in this, was withdrawn. Not conversion or confiscation, but
baptism or exile, was the alternative presented to his Jewish subjects
by this royal fanatic Sisebut. It was a terrible state of things, for
the difficulty to the Jews was to find any place where they should be
better off. Dagobert was the contemporary king of France, and the laws
he administered, and those that his predecessor Clotaire had had to
administer, were precisely of the same sort. Heraclius, the ruler of
the Byzantine Empire, had only lately renewed those edicts of Hadrian
and Constantine which forbade Jews to approach Jerusalem; and with his
recent experience of the part which Jews had taken in his struggle with
Chosroes, Heraclius could not have been in a very friendly mood towards
Jews generally. They could anticipate no welcome in any corner of
Heraclius’s dominions. They might perhaps have tried Italy, where the
Popes were powerful; for the Popes, as a rule, were not unjust to the
Jews. And some did, and found in the comparative kindness of the heads
of the Church good cause for believing that religion was not always
a motive for persecution, though it too often served as an excuse for
cruelty and plunder. And many had migrated to the East; and many, who
were obliged to remain in Europe, had taken upon them, in hate and fear
and trembling, the forced disguise of converts. Then came the conquests
of the kaliphs, which brought about an altogether new state of things
for the Jews. In Spain, we shall see that it made a brilliant silver
lining to the clouds, a rift in that thick darkness which had descended
upon the nation when Jerusalem fell.
=4. The Karaite Movement.=――Mahomed did not succeed in converting the
Jews, but nevertheless the indirect influences of the faith he preached,
helped perhaps a little by communal disputes, did produce a distinct
sect among the Jews about the middle of the eighth century. There is
so little that is really new, that many historians call Karaism only
an old school of thought revived under new conditions and with a fresh
name, and consider Judaism to be quite as accountable for it as Islam.
We know that there were anciently three Jewish sects: the Essenes, who
never struck root in Judaism at all; the Pharisees, the best of whom
developed into the great earnest body of Rabbis; and the Sadducees,
of whom Josephus said ‘they were able to persuade none but the rich,’
and who did, in truth, all but die out with the prosperous days into
which they had fitted so easily. With Islam triumphant the prosperous
days seemed dawning again, and once more the yoke of the Law began
to be grumbled at. The oral law was now a written and settled code,
and the obligations of codified tradition were more numerous than the
injunctions of the Law. The murmurers said that they would observe
the text, but not the commentary; they would read the Law, but they
would skip the traditional interpretations. These grumblers grew
numerous enough to be recognised: they were called Textualists, or
Scripturalists; and yet more distinctively Karaites, from the Hebrew
root קָרָא, to read.[10]
=5. Mahomedan Causes for Karaism.=――In their objection to tradition
the Sadducees and the Karaites were alike, and so far it seems
probable that the one sect was a survival of the other. But there
were other influences at work, which may account for the appearance
or the reappearance, as it may be, at this period of the later sect of
separatists. The Arabs, by whom the impressionable Jews were surrounded,
had enthusiastically accepted a most simple form of faith, a faith
which had no priesthood and but one prophet. No sooner did tradition
gather about Islam than a sect arose among the Mahomedans to throw it
off. There had come quickly a Sunnah to the Koran, as there had grown
slowly a Talmud to the Law. A party in Islam rejected the stricter
traditions of the Sunnah, and a party among the Jews, about the same
date, grew openly impatient of the Rabbinical ruling of the Talmud.
Rebellion of any sort is catching, and there can be little doubt that
each set of grumblers helped the other.
=6. The Leader of the Karaite Movement.=――The man who first gave
expression to the Jewish discontent with tradition was a certain Anan,
son of David, a native of Babylon. Anan had a personal grievance of
his own, a position which gives a certain point and eloquence to any
general sense of injury. He had wished to be made רֵישׁ נְּלוּתָא. But the
election had come and gone, and he had been passed over; and, worst
slight of all, a younger brother of his own had been appointed to the
office. So Anan, disappointed of being patriarch of his people, and of
leading them on the old and orthodox road, determined to become their
spokesman and advocate in the new direction.
=7. What became of the Sect.=――Their tenets never made much way.
They were, in fact, impossible. The Karaite said he would obey ‘the
Law’――the strict and literal text, but would have nothing to do with
tradition. Now let us see his difficulty. Take, as an instance, the
command, ‘Ye shall kindle no fire in your habitations on the Sabbath’
(Exod. xxxv. 3). A ‘literal,’ consistent Karaite, living in a cold
climate, would have to freeze for twenty-four hours regularly every
seventh day, for he could not accept traditional observance, which
lightens the yoke of the Law by limiting the meaning of the ‘ye’
to Jews, and permitting fire to be kindled in Jewish dwellings by
the friendly hands of outsiders. Commentary――that is, explanation
of some sort――is necessary to every law, and personal and off-hand
interpretation is no more likely to be right than traditional ruling.
It is somewhat conceited to think our own wisdom is all-sufficient,
and that of our ancestors must be wrong; and it is just a little mean,
perhaps, to be over-eager to throw off burdens which good men have
deliberately borne. As our English poetess[11] wisely says,――
‘If we tried
To sink the past beneath our feet, be sure
The future would not stand.’
The Karaites never grew very numerous nor very powerful, though they
were occasionally very troublesome. At the present day, stray remnants
of the sect are discoverable in Jerusalem, and in parts of Turkey,
Egypt, Galicia, and the Crimea.
=8. Good out of Evil.=――Sects never do prosper among Jews. The ideal
of the nation, like the ideal of the religion, is Unity. The Karaites
made but little impression in the way they wanted, which was a separate
and a harmful way, but the means they employed brought about another
and a very useful end. Rejecting all commentary, and relying entirely
on the text of Scripture, they were forced to examine the text very
closely. The Rabbis, to refute them, had to be equally particular about
their interpretations. No arbitrary renderings could be given where
both parties were inclined to be so positive. Each would examine, and
re-examine, every phrase and word and letter for himself. This contest
between Karaites and Talmudists brought about a very exact sort of
scholarship; and accuracy is, we know, one of the conditions of truth.
The Scriptures were exhaustively studied; the language was treated
grammatically and scientifically; punctuation was added to the text,
and the Pentateuch, after being divided into portions and paragraphs
(פַרְשִׁיוֹת and סְדָרִים), was thus, as it were, put under the microscope. This
work was mostly done by the Karaite scholars, and it was called the
Massora[12] text. Thus the chief effect of the Karaite movement was to
bring about a religious-literary revival. Historians who are fond of
tracing back big events to a small original germ tell us that among
the causes which led to the English Reformation (1525) may certainly
be counted the spirit of earnest and profound inquiry into Scriptural
renderings which Anan, son of David, aroused among the Jews. In this
sense the Karaites are sometimes called the Protestants of Judaism.
CHAPTER XIX.
LIFE UNDER THE KALIPHS.
(700‒1000.)
=1. Jews in the East.=――With Persia and Mesopotamia under the sway
of the Mahomedans, the _kallahs_ of Sora and Pumbaditha flourished,
the Gaonim pursued their studies, and the Head of the Captivity had
his settled rank as one of the many vassals and tributaries of the
kaliphate. The position of the Jews was much improved. In the time
of Omar, the second kaliph, the coinage, which was of course a very
important trust, was given into the charge of a Jew. Early in the
next century, the ninth, under the famous kaliph, Haroun al-Raschid,
a Jew named Isaac was employed as ambassador, and sent on a delicate
diplomatic mission from the court at Bagdad to Charlemagne of Germany.
But nevertheless, although individual Jews rose to eminence, and
Jewish institutions were unmolested, some amount of prejudice against
the nation still lingered in the East. Perhaps the remembrance of
the opposition which their Prophet had met with from the Jews had
a stronger influence on his successors among the scenes where he
had personally moved; for the early kaliphs or sultans, as they are
indifferently called, were not always so favourably inclined towards
their Jewish subjects as was Omar and the great Haroun al-Raschid. In
the beginning of the eighth century a Mahomedan ruler named Mutavakel
was very hard upon Jews and Christians both. He made them wear a
leathern girdle, to distinguish them in their dress from his ‘faithful’
followers, and neither Jew nor Christian in his dominions was allowed
to ride on horses, only on donkeys or mules. This sultan would
certainly seem to have been an all-round persecutor, and rather an
exceptional one. The insecure position, however, of the Jews in the
East at this period was due as much to dissensions from within as to
persecutions from without. More and more the office of רֵישׁ נְּלוּתָא grew to
be a stumblingblock and an offence. The succession was a constant cause
of quarrel among the Jews, and these squabbles made it impossible for
the kaliphs to either respect the dignity or to ignore it, either of
which attitudes on the part of the Mahomedan sovereign would have been
a comfortable one for his Jewish vassals.
=2. Close of the Schools: some Scholars.=――The schools did some good
work, and produced some good scholars, before the end came. Towards
the middle of the ninth century we hear of a complete dictionary of
the Bible being compiled by a certain Rabbi Menahem ben Saruk. The book
is still in existence. Then there was a celebrated Gaon called Saadia
ben Joseph (892‒942), who translated the Bible into Arabic, which
language was now becoming a second mother-tongue among the Eastern
Jews. Another of the more celebrated of the Gaonim was named Sherira,
and he has left us quite a detailed chronicle of these Babylonian
schools. Sherira was very nearly the last of the Gaonim. He upheld the
office worthily for thirty years (967‒997), and towards the end of his
patriarchate he associated his son Hai with him in the dignity. The
ruling kaliph cast a jealous eye on the old man’s wealth and honours.
On a trumped-up charge, both father and son were cast into prison,
and their riches confiscated. Hai escaped, and a little later, another
attempt at this dangerous dignity was made by a certain Hezekiah. It
failed, and this last Gaon was executed (1036) by order of the kaliph.
All the Eastern schools were now closed, and the scholars were once
more scattered. Palestine and the whole of the Byzantine Empire
became almost deserted by Jews, and the interest shifts to the Western
division of the world.
=3. Jews in the West.=――In Italy, during the Middle Ages, we hear but
very little of the Jews. The Lombards and Florentines were the chief
merchants and money dealers, and the Popes, who were paramount in Italy,
neither patronised nor persecuted the Jews. As a source of revenue the
Popes did not need the Jews. From all quarters, and under all kinds
of pretences, streams of money were continually flowing into the Papal
treasury. Absolutions, indulgences, dispensations, had each a price,
and a heavy one. Rich sinners were even more numerous than rich Jews,
and quite as profitable. The Popes were for the most part too busy, and
often, it may be said, too religiously indifferent, to turn persecutors
for conscience sake. They lived in great state, and were intent on
extending their political as well as their spiritual sovereignty.
In these superstitious Middle Ages, which recognised in the Pope the
actual ‘infallible’ agent of God, the most effectual weapon in the
Popish arsenal would have been powerless against Jews. Jews would have
cared nothing for that most dreaded of all punishments in Catholic
countries, the Papal malediction. Thus, their money and their souls
alike insignificant in the sight of the Popes, the Jews throughout
the Papal dominions were mostly let alone. In the northern parts of
Europe, where the influence of Mahomedanism had hardly penetrated, the
Jews were subject to the old Roman law. They might not enter military
service, and had to pay largely for local ‘protection’ from the
lords of the soil. In our own England, Jews up to this period have
no history. There are but two very slight mentions of them in all the
Saxon Chronicles. They would seem not to have settled in England in
any numbers before the Conquest, when probably some came over from
France in the train of William the Norman. The interest centres now in
Southern Europe, and chiefly in Spain, where the kaliphs attained to
their greatest state, and where the Jews attained to their greatest
prosperity since the captivity.
=4. The Policy of the Early Kaliphs.=――When the empire that had been
founded by help of the Koran and the sword was once firmly established,
the sword was sheathed, and the Koran ceased to be flourished as
a weapon. The kaliphs resolved to uphold their sovereignty by the
seductive arts of peace rather than by the exterminating process of war.
They aspired to something beyond barbarian chieftainship. They aimed
at becoming leaders of men and patrons of learning, and of controlling
the thoughts as well as the destinies of nations. To this end they
cultivated the Jews. The Arabian rulers had the keenness to appreciate
the reserves of patience, of loyalty, and of scholarship in the Jewish
people. They desired to graft these valuable qualities on their own
rather rough and ready followers. They wanted the arts of civilisation
to adorn their new dominion; they longed to be as great in the schools
and in the marts of the world as they had proved on its battle-fields.
‘The teachers of wisdom are the true luminaries and legislators of
the world,’ was a saying of the Kaliph Al-Mamun, who ruled from 813
till 832. The Mahomedan rulers knew how much of all that they desired
could be learned from the Jews in their midst. And so, throughout the
kaliphate, political and social equality was granted to its Jewish
subjects, and the energies and the capacities of the nation were given
room to grow.
=5. Some Effects of this Policy.=――The Empire of the Kaliphs was of
immense extent. By the tenth century it had three separate seats of
government――at Bagdad, at Cairo, and at Cordova, and the influence of
each of these three kaliphates was felt even beyond its own immediate
boundary. The Carlovingian dynasty in France caught for a while
something of the enlightened spirit of the Mahomedan rulers, and in
France as in Spain, Jewish physicians and Jewish teachers and Jewish
merchants became quite the fashion. Not only did there come to be
crowded colleges presided over by Jewish Rabbis in the sunny southern
cities of Europe, but fleets of trading vessels, commanded by Jewish
captains, were to be seen sailing in the Mediterranean. The sight awoke
some slumbering enmities. In the ninth century a certain Archbishop
of Lyons was as concerned for the worldly interests of his countrymen
as the most zealous of Church dignitaries could have been for their
spiritual ones. This Archbishop Agobard presented a petition, in 829,
to his royal master, Louis le Débonnaire, praying that the commerce
of good French Christians might be protected against the wicked Jews.
Conscience would have been a safer cry than commerce to have raised,
and a fairer one to have invoked religious legislation about. King
Louis refused to receive the worthy archbishop’s petition. He was
evidently in favour of free trading, and so long as the vessels were
seaworthy, and the freight honest, he did not appear to consider the
religious opinions of the supercargos to be any of his business, or
of his archbishop’s either. King Louis had a Jewish physician, and it
seems as if this doctor――Zedekiah was his name――managed to keep his
royal patient healthy in mind as well as in body. At any rate, whether
from nature or from ‘treatment,’ this King of France was, certainly,
possessed of fine principles. ‘Divine law,’ we find him writing in one
of his despatches, ‘bids me protect my subjects who share my belief;
but it nowhere forbids me to be just towards those who differ from me.’
His acts matched his convictions, and under the more tolerant treatment,
which had been first introduced by the Mahomedans, the Jewish position
in all the south of Europe improved greatly in the eighth and ninth
centuries. Not only were commercial operations extended, but Jews were
largely employed in public and in private positions of trust. They were
often made collectors of revenue, and stewards in the great households
of the nobles. They were allowed to serve in the army, and there is
evidence that at least in one province, that of Languedoc, they were
permitted to be landowners. In Narbonne, for years, one of the two
annually elected prefects or mayors of the town was a Jew. Their
synagogues and their schools multiplied, and those of Salerno, and
Montpelier, and Toulouse, and Marseilles, and, a little later on, of
Paris, produced some famous Rabbis, and many crops of diligent students.
CHAPTER XX.
JEWS IN SPAIN.
(711‒1150.)
=1. ‘Like a dream in the night.’=――Life in Spain, for the four
centuries during which the dynasty of Ommeyade kaliphs ruled, was to
the Jews like a brilliant dream breaking in on the long night of their
history. There was to be by-and-by a terrible awakening, but while
the dream lasted they gave themselves up to its delight. ‘An earthly
paradise,’ ‘a garden of Eden,’ Spain is fondly called by old Jewish
writers of those days. The liberty it gave was so new, so wonderful,
so sweet. Men might work and might worship at their will. Women might
be fair without fear. Children might grow up clever, and find no locked
doors, labelled ‘conversion,’ barring their pathway to success. Wealth
might be honestly won and pleasantly enjoyed, taking its rightful
place as a means for diffusing happiness. Each country, says a recent
writer,[13] has the Jews it deserves. Mahomedan Spain deserved good
Jews, and it had them, and it was richly repaid in its own generous
coin. In the Middle Ages, Spain led the van in culture and in commerce,
and in her loyal Jewish subjects she found, literally, her guides,
philosophers, and friends. They stood by her as loyally on the field
of battle as in the council-chamber and in the mart. Jews must have
been also a valuable contingent of the army, for in 1086 we find the
generals on both sides, on the eve of a decisive engagement, agreeing
so to fix the day that it might not interfere with the Sabbath of their
Jewish soldiers. The kaliphs took, too, an intelligent interest and a
keen pride in their scholarly Jews, and there was plenty of space in
that beautiful land for every one to enjoy his little corner and his
little book.[14] The memory of the sunny skies and the gracious leisure
of Spain took deep root in grateful Jewish hearts. The long dream
of liberty was so sweet that the sharp awakening to persecution was
forgotten, or, at least, the fragrant shade of the orange groves would
seem to have been remembered longer than the fierce heat of the fagots
and the stake. It is good to be able to ‘write injuries in dust, and
kindnesses in marble.’ In 1492, the Jews were wickedly expelled from
the land in which they had been, for centuries, so happy, and 200 years
later we hear of descendants of those cruelly exiled Jews sending
secretly to Spain and Portugal for citrons and branches of the palm,
that their סוּכּוֹת might look ‘homelike’ in the bleak north lands in which
their lot was cast.
=2. The Schools.=――Once given a fair field and some choice, Jewish
activity showed itself, as of old, in an intellectual direction. The
schools of Spain soon became as famous as the _kallahs_ of Babylon.
Cordova and Granada and Toledo took the place of ancient Sora and
Pumbaditha, and of yet more ancient Jamnia and Tiberias. Cordova under
the kaliphs was the Athens of the Middle Ages to Southern Europe; and
as for Toledo, a Hebrew poet[15] shall speak for himself on the subject
of its charms:
‘I found that words could ne’er express
The half of all its loveliness;
From place to place I wandered wide,
With amorous sight unsatisfied,
Until I reached all cities’ queen,
Tolaitola,[16] the fairest seen.’
And among the fairest of the sights in these fair cities were the
crowded colleges in which Jew and Arab learned often side by side, and
from which Jewish Arabic professors turned out students by the score,
wise in literature and in philosophy and in medicine, as well as in
their own especial theological line. It is said on good authority, that
at this period, nearly a thousand years before the era of Board schools,
there was not a Jew in Spain who could not read the Bible in Hebrew and
in Arabic.
=3. The First Nagid of Spain.=――One day in the year 948 there was a
sudden stir and commotion in the famous college of Cordova. A knotty
point had come on for discussion, and puzzled silence had ensued
in place of ready answers, when, from an unnoticed corner, a very
shabby-looking stranger quietly got up and solved the difficulty.
All eyes were turned on the ragged scholar, and the president rose
impetuously from his high seat, and in tones of earnest admiration
exclaimed to the astonished assembly, ‘Yon slave in sackcloth is my
master, he must be yours.’ It was a hasty decision to come to, but it
was fully justified by the facts of the story. The stranger in the mean
garments was in truth an escaped slave, or, to speak quite accurately,
a captive redeemed. In the lately closed schools of Babylon he had been
one of the most learned of the Rabbis. He had had thrilling adventures
since those quiet days at Sora, which place he had left, accompanied by
three other scholars, for the purpose of collecting contributions for
the maintenance of the schools in Babylon. His wife and his young son
had travelled with Rabbi Moses ben Hanoch, and all of them had fallen
into the hands of pirates, and had been carried on board a privateering
vessel engaged in the slave trade. In dread of worse than captivity,
the wife had thrown herself overboard during the voyage, the three
companions had been sold at ports at which they touched,[17] and
Rabbi Moses and his son were exposed for sale in the slave market in
Cordova. It was considered, in those days, a paramount duty of every
congregation to redeem captive brethren, and a kind-hearted Jew, seeing
two co-religionists in such evil plight, had at once bought them at
the current price, which was not high, for their attainments were not
known, and were therefore not counted in, and had set them free. Then
father and son, sad and yet grateful, had wandered through the stately
streets of Cordova, and some instinct had led them to the doors of the
synagogue and the schools, with the result we have seen. ‘Moses clad
in sackcloth,’ as he was called, became quite a celebrated character in
Cordova. The reigning kaliph, Abderahman III., was a very enlightened
ruler, and took a scholarly, as well as a kind-hearted, interest in
the learned Rabbi. Abderahman had, too, a Jewish minister named Hasdai
ben Isaac, whom he greatly valued; and it is quite possible, since
the whole Jewish nation is often judged by single specimens, that the
kaliph’s experience of the upright Hasdai influenced his general policy
towards the Jews in his dominions. Moses ben Hanoch lived long as
president of the schools, and his son, Hanoch ben Moses, succeeded him.
Hanoch ben Moses’ powers and privileges were considerably extended,
and he was given the title of Nagid, or prince, of the Jewish community
in Spain. It became an office somewhat more honorary and less official
than, but yet very similar to, that held of old by the רֵישׁ נְּלוּתָא Head of
the captivity, in Babylon, and thus the dignity that had died out in
the East was revived in name, at least, in the West.
=4. Another Nagid: Troubles in Granada.=――Another famous Nagid was
Samuel ha-Levi ibn-Nagrela, who was born in Cordova nearly fifty years
later (993). In 1013 the kaliphate of Cordova had suffered from a
barbarian invasion, and many of the great people had moved into other
cities of the Peninsula. The colleges at Granada grew famous, and
Samuel ha-Levi, or Samuel ha-Nagid, as he is generally called, who
was at their head from about 1025 till 1055, was not only a first-rate
theologian and a tolerable poet, but a clever statesman and a very
charming companion. Like Hasdai ben Isaac, Samuel ha-Nagid held the
post of minister at the court of the kaliph, and like him again, he
held it to the benefit of his sovereign and of his co-religionists.
His son Joseph inherited his honours, but not all his fine qualities.
He had not good manners, and he was imprudent. During his Nagidship
there was a very serious riot in Granada (1066). The Jews were accused
of converting their neighbours. This was a fault of which they were
so very unlikely to be guilty, that one has to look deeper for the
cause of the disturbance. One may find it perhaps in the fact that the
populace spent their wrath not on the synagogues, but on the houses and
warehouses of the Jews. That looks as if plunder had more to do with
the matter than religion. It is, however, quite possible that the Nagid
Joseph, through want of tact, had managed to excite some ill feeling.
If it were so, he paid the penalty. He was killed in the course of the
riot. A great deal of property was destroyed and more stolen, and some
fifteen hundred Jewish families had to leave Granada, and to find an
asylum in the other provinces of Spain. This riot in Granada was the
first interruption to the 350 years of pleasant and peaceful relations
which had existed between the Mahomedans and the Jews. But the Granada
riot was like the ‘little cloud’ that Elijah’s servant saw ‘rising up
out of the sea,’ after the long drought. The cloud was at first, we
read, no bigger than a man’s hand, yet very soon ‘the heavens were
black with clouds and wind, and there was a great rain.’
=5. Revival of Catholicism in Spain.=――Two causes helped to bring about
the change that was impending on the Jews, and the first, sad to say,
was the gradual return of Spain to Christianity. From the time of the
Mahomedan conquest in 711, a small remnant of the Visigoths, who were
Christians, had managed to keep their hold on some of the mountain
passes in the north of Spain. From the very first this tiny settlement
had never ceased trying to win back their country from the Moors. The
little Christian remnant had grown bigger and stronger by degrees, and
one by one, very slowly, but very surely, several Mahomedan states had
been won from Islam, and separate crowns had been set on the heads of
Catholic sovereigns. By 1060, Castile, Leon, Asturias, Arragon, Navarre,
and Portugal were all independent kingdoms, separate from the Kaliphate
in politics and in religion. In 1085 the important city of Toledo was
added to the confederation under the presidency of Alfonso VI., and
became the capital of his kingdom of Castile.
=6. Effect on the Jews.=――So long as the Mahomedan power was
paramount in the Peninsula, the partial return to Catholicism made
little difference in the position of the Jews. The Catholic kings did
not like their Jewish subjects in the same way as did the Mahomedan
kaliphs, but, in their newly established kingdoms, they found Jews too
serviceable and too much respected to make it either safe or politic
to ill-use them. Their own footing was hard to win and hard to keep.
It needed constant fighting, and even then it was not too secure.
Meanwhile, the whole business of life could not be carried on by
soldiers. People had to be fed, to be taught, to be healed; and all
these very necessary functions were most admirably filled by Jews. It
would not have done for the kings to snub such useful subjects, and
it was hardly possible at that stage to persecute them. One wants both
hands free for earnest work of any sort. Catholicism was not yet strong
enough in Spain to strike out a different line of action from Islam. It
is even possible that the kings learnt some lessons from the kaliphs,
and got to see, as they did, something of the value and of the virtues
of Judaism. It is quite certain that at the close of the eleventh
century, when crusades came into fashion, neither Alfonso (VI.) of
Castile nor Peter of Arragon, who were both good Catholics, would allow
the cry of _Hep, Hep,_[18] to be raised in their dominions. And it
is equally certain that this same king Alfonso put down with a strong
hand an outburst at Toledo, in 1108, which threatened Jewish peace and
Jewish property. The early kaliphs of Spain practised toleration as a
principle; the early kings, perhaps, more as a habit; but the result to
the Jews was the same. Whilst the Ommeyade dynasty yet maintained its
supremacy in Spain the Jews still prospered, and Judaism was unmolested.
=7. The Almohade Dynasty of Kaliphs.=――The second cause of the
change in Jewish fortunes was the result of a change in the Mahomedan
succession to the Kaliphate. The Ommeyade kaliphs were enlightened,
just, and liberal rulers, enthusiastic in their belief, and therefore
tolerant in upholding it. The Almohade dynasty, which came into power
about 1150, introduced a quite different state of things. The Almohades
were a sect of fanatic warriors. They had already conquered Barbary,
and it was an evil day for Jews and Christians both, when, flushed
with their barbarian successes, they succeeded in governing Spain.
One of the earliest edicts of Abdel-Mumen, the founder of this line of
Mahomedan sovereigns, was directed to the conversion of his subjects.
Very soon, Islam or exile was the only choice given to Jews or to
Christians. Some took upon them the disguise of the alien faith and
held their own in secret, but many more chose the harder and nobler
course of exile, preferring ‘dreary hearths to desert souls,’ Numbers
of Jews left the country altogether, and joined their co-religionists
in Egypt and in the Mediterranean islands. There were schools at this
date in Egypt, uninterfered with by the tolerant Mahomedan sultans,
whose seat of government was at Cairo. Of one very celebrated
student, whose family sought refuge in that country from the Almohade
persecution in Spain, we shall hear later.[19]
CHAPTER XXI.
JEWS IN SPAIN (_continued_).
(1150‒1492.)
=1. Under Catholic Kings in Spain.=――Most of the Jews who were driven
into exile by the Almohade persecutions, travelled no further than
those provinces of Spain which had seceded from Mahomedan rule. The
Catholic kings were ready, for their own sakes, to give a welcome to
the learned, useful Jews. Alfonso VIII., who reigned in Castile from
1166 till 1214, was particularly well affected towards them. It was
said that he loved a beautiful Jewess of Toledo named Rachel; the poor
girl, at any rate, was murdered by good Catholics on the suspicion of
it. For the next hundred and fifty years after the Almohade persecution,
the position of the Jews in Spain was still seemingly, and on the
surface of things, a position with which to be satisfied. They were
rich, they were at ease, and they were of use to their countrymen
in a hundred ways. But as Spain grew, by sure degrees, less and less
Mahomedan, and more and more Catholic, the Popes began to take a more
active interest in its affairs. The head of the Church disliked the
sight of so many synagogues in Christian Spain, and in respect to
heresy in general, and to the Jews as special examples of heresy, the
clergy were often more Papist than the Popes. The earlier Catholic
kings, however, were too alive to their own interests to be tempted
into persecution from religious motives only. They needed the Jews.
They depended on Jewish loyalty in their armies, and on Jewish brains
in their offices. They could not afford to alienate such service. When,
in the middle of the thirteenth century, Pope Gregory IX. tried hard
to stir up Alfonso the Wise to join in the general European craze
of the time against the Jews, we find Alfonso, proving one of his
claims to that surname of his, by refusing to be stirred up. Alfonso’s
predecessor, Ferdinand the Saint, had shown a like wisdom under similar
circumstances. The Popes notwithstanding, the kings of Spain continued
to personally employ Jews as physicians and as ministers of finance,
and in every branch of culture and of commerce in their kingdoms,
remained well content to see Jews come to the front. So life went on
smoothly under those sunny skies, but the volcano was only slumbering,
and every now and then ominous little rumbles gave forth a warning of
the explosion that was in store.
=2. The Toledo Synagogue.=――Toledo, the capital of Castile, had become
in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a second Cordova. In 1360, when
Pedro the Cruel was king, very serious trouble arose for the Jews of
Toledo. Pedro earned that surname of ‘Cruel’ from his own subjects, and
not from his treatment of the Jews. To them he meant to be kind, but
he was a bad man, and even the tender mercies of the wicked, we read,
are cruel. Like most of his predecessors, Pedro had a Jew, Samuel Levi,
for his finance minister. One of the duties of such a minister is to
raise taxes. This office Samuel Levi performed with such a will for
his royal master that he became most unpopular with the people. Whilst
they were groaning under their imposts, they saw this favoured Jew
living in great state, accumulating a large fortune, and building at
his own expense a magnificent synagogue in Toledo. They looked on this
synagogue as built with their money, and grew to detest the sight of
the worshippers in it. In an illogical sort of way they hated the man,
and his religion, and his wealth altogether. It was but a step from
feeling the hatred to expressing it. One sad day the Jews lost their
beautiful synagogue, and poor Samuel Levi was tortured to death. His
fortune was confiscated, and King Pedro, his sympathy notwithstanding,
took a large share of it. Personally, however, Pedro seems always to
have done his best to protect and be pleasant to the Jews, and they
were wonderfully faithful to him. In a long struggle which he had with
his brother Henry of Transtamare for possession of the crown, the Jews
fought loyally for their liege lord Pedro. Henry triumphed in the end,
and both during the civil war, and at the close of it, there was more
slaughter and plunder of the Jews than could be put down to the strict
account of the war. Religion was made the excuse for a great deal of
the cruelty. ‘Kill them like sheep if they will not be baptized,’ said
one famous knight of the period, Bertrand du Guesclin. The illustration
had a grim and unintentional point about it. Jews were generally killed
‘like sheep,’ their fleeces being first carefully sheared.
=3. The Downward Slope to Death.=――From the date of Pedro’s death
(1369) things grew gradually worse for the Jews of the Peninsula.
Perhaps the episode of Samuel Levi hurried events a little. It may
have taught people that to confiscate a Jew’s wealth was a quicker
way of getting rich through his means than to employ his services. The
kings of Spain had begun to have more need of money help than of brain
service, for their position had grown to be more secure, and their
subjects more cultivated. And they themselves became, to a certain
degree, infected by the fanatic enthusiasm of the age. Their religion,
interpreted by the priests, had impressed upon them for centuries
that Jews were heretics, and their own observations showed them that
Jews were rich. They put the two facts together, and acted upon them.
‘Be converted to Christianity,’ they began to cry, ‘or at least let
your goods be confiscated to Christians.’ And in their subjects the
sovereigns of Spain found keen supporters of these views. That the
Jews had grown rich because they were thrifty, and temperate, and
industrious, gained them no popularity among neighbours who were just
a little short of these virtues. The clergy, too, had great influence
over the populace, and they all but uniformly used it to the prejudice
of the Jews. Though so woefully mistaken, it is quite likely that some
of the clergy were conscientious in their efforts, and honestly longed
to make proselytes of the Jews. Perhaps not one of the least of the
trials of the time was an edict which, to this end, decreed that Jews
might be marched off to listen to long sermons preached with the object
of converting them. Eloquence, however, was by no means depended on
by itself; sterner measures were resorted to. In 1380, Jews who openly
clung to their religion began to be legally deprived of the rights of
Spanish citizens. They were no longer allowed to hold office in State
or army, or to practise among Christians as physicians. Their Nagid
from that date had no recognised authority, and Jews were requested to
have their dwellings apart from the other inhabitants of the cities and
towns. The Jewries were to be the distinct quarters for the Jews. This
sort of legislation produced its natural effect. Ten years later (1391),
after a terrible riot at Seville, in which 4,000 Jews are said to have
perished, some of the more brave took heart of grace and made an appeal
to the Cortes, or council of the nation, against this state of things.
The Cortes, which sat at Madrid, responded to the appeal, acknowledged
the injustice, and sent a commission of inquiry to Seville. It did
little good. A fierce and eloquent preacher, named Ferdinand Martinez,
roused the rabble to further violence by declaiming against State
interference with religious doings. It was the bounden duty of a
Christian, declared this fanatic demagogue, to hunt down Jews, and it
was the inalienable right of a free-born citizen to defy his government.
The commission proved powerless, and nobody was punished. Similar
outbreaks soon occurred in other cities of Castile, and spread to the
neighbouring kingdoms of Navarre and Arragon. On a certain saint’s day
in 1391 there was a terrible massacre in Barcelona.[20] The Jewry was
sacked, the synagogues were pulled down, and the streets were heaped
with dead and outraged bodies. In this riot, however, some Crown
property was destroyed by accident, and so punishment was dealt out
to some of the ringleaders.
=4. The Marannos, or New Christians.=――For a hundred years this state
of things went on throughout the Catholic dominions of Spain, which,
by this date, included nearly the whole of the country. Not only did
the unrighteous laws set Jews apart in their dwellings and in their
occupations, but in their dress also there was a mark set upon them.
They might wear only the coarsest materials, and no trimmings or
ornaments; and the men might not shave nor the women adorn their hair.
These impertinent, everyday degradations must have sorely hurt a people
like the Jews, who delight in taking life pleasantly. The alternative
of baptism became a terrible temptation, and very many yielded to it.
They let the waters of baptism flow over their limbs, and they stood,
unprotesting, whilst the sign of the cross was made on their foreheads.
In the eyes of the Church these men, who lied with their lips and in
every outward action of their lives, were new Christians, and eligible
for all offices of trust and state. In the language of the synagogue,
they, who thus sold their souls and took the profit, were Marannos, a
corruption of the word maranatha,[21] which means ‘anathema,’ or ‘curse
on thee.’ In their own sight they were Jews still――‘Jews in their
hearts,’ they would have said, for secretly, and at some risk, they
practised Jewish rites, holding the Passover service often in cellars,
and singing the Sabbath hymns under their breath, with doors and
windows fast shut. Perhaps the truth lies between the two extremes,
and it needs Him who ‘sees with larger, other eyes than ours’ to judge
justly of this human weakness and hypocrisy. If the sin was great, so
also was the penalty.
=5. An Effort at Argument.=――Early in the fifteenth century an attempt
was made by a Jewish convert to have the question between Judaism and
Catholicism discussed and settled, if possible, by force of talk. Under
the presidency of the Antipope Benedict XIII. a prolonged sitting was
held at Tortosa, in Spain, between Rabbis and monks. The conference
held sixty-eight meetings, and lasted twenty-one months (from February
1413 till November 1414). It must have been conducted rather on the
model of the famous argument between the wolf and the lamb in Æsop’s
fables, for, as the upshot, the Rabbis were dismissed, and the Pope
issued a bull imposing new penalties on the Jews, and forbidding them,
among other things, to read the Talmud.
=6. The Inquisition.=――In 1469, Isabella, sister of Henry IV. of
Castile, married Ferdinand, Crown Prince of Arragon. This marriage made
a united and Catholic Spain; for Granada, the last of the Mahomedan
cities, fell before the end of their reign. The young sovereigns
were very anxious that their beautiful kingdom should be quite and
altogether Catholic, free from any touch or taint of alien faith.
They both agreed that, for the air to be entirely pure, no Jews or
Mahomedans ought to breathe in it. Isabella really thought this, for
she was sincere in her bigoted belief, and good according to her dim
lights. Ferdinand, it is to be feared, had a second thought for his
treasury. He liked to convert Jews, but he also very much liked the
confiscated possessions of unconverted Jews. The first official act of
the royal pair was to ask from the ruling Pope, Sixtus IV., permission
to set up a tribunal which might make searching inquiry into the
religion of any suspected subjects. The request was granted, and in
1480 the Inquisition was started, with the Pope’s blessing, at Seville.
=7. Objects and Functions of the Inquisition.=――The inquiry was aimed
not at the Mahomedans, who were open and nearly vanquished enemies,
nor even at those Jews who were living honest and unheeded if poor
and degraded lives in their Jewries, but in reality at the converted
Marannos. The Marannos were rich and prosperous, and by this date so
numerous that it is said quite a third of the whole population of Spain
were New Christians. Many of them were nobles in the state, and for a
century past they had been marrying and intermarrying amongst the best
Catholic families. These were the people who were suspected, and truly,
of being still Jews in their hearts, and in secret observance. The
chief object of the Inquisition was to hunt out this hidden Judaism,
and to make it an excuse for despoiling the ‘New Christians’ of the
evident wealth and state which were so envied. Under penalty of being
himself excommunicated, every loyal Spaniard was invited to become
a spy. No one was safe from this terrible tribunal. A child might
denounce his parent, a wife her husband, a brother his sister, or even
a criminal his judge. The accused was not allowed to know the name of
his accuser. He was not permitted to have any legal adviser. Torture
was resorted to on mere suspicion. There was no possibility of appeal.
The punishments of the Inquisition, which were wholly capricious,
varied from penance, scourging, and imprisonment, to death. All degrees
of punishment were accompanied by confiscation of goods to the State.
The executions were solemn ceremonials, and were called _autos-da-fé_,
or acts of faith. The accused was clothed in a long flame-coloured
garment (the _san benito_), a cross was placed in his hand, and then,
with a crowd of victims similarly robed, he was led to the _Quemadero_
(place of burning). A pause was made whilst a sermon was preached to
ears dulled a little, we may hope, to this profanation of ‘the Name.’
Then, at a given signal, fire was set to the fagots, and, in presence
of king and queen, and court and crowd, the act of faith was finished
in flames.
=8. Some Statistics of the Inquisition.=――On its first establishment
15,000 arrests were made. From January 1481 to November of the same
year, 2,000 people were burned in the province of Cadiz, and 400 in
the city of Seville alone. The prisons overflowed, and even the dead
were not let lie in peace, for graves were opened and desecrated. In
1483 a monk of the order of St. Dominic, named Thomas Torquemada, was
appointed chief Inquisitor, and the powers of the office were extended
to Arragon. Under the direction of Torquemada the work went on, faster
and fiercer than ever. In eighteen years of Torquemada’s Inquisitorship
over 10,000 persons were burnt at the stake, and over 97,000 underwent
varying degrees of ‘punishment.’ The Pope himself trembled at the
monster he had raised, and wished, perhaps, that he had heeded the
stern Jewish command, ‘Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.’
But the scruples of the Pope were powerless before the passion of
Torquemada, and the Inquisition continued denouncing and confiscating
and burning, and in this awful reckoning, 6,000 victims are counted to
Torquemada’s personal share.
=9. Edict of Expulsion.=――‘When thou passest through the fire, thou
shalt not be burned.’ ‘No weapon that is formed against thee shall
prosper; this is the heritage of the servants of the Lord.’ Did
Ferdinand and Isabella, by chance, in chapel or at confession, hear
some echo of these words in the year 1492? Did they reflect how utterly
futile were thousands of mortal burnings against God’s eternal will?
Did they tremble for the ‘prosperity’ of that threatened ‘weapon’ of
theirs, the Inquisition? And was it in hate, or in fear, or only in
desperate foolishness that they resolved upon another method of rooting
out the Jews? We shall never know; but in the March of that year, 1492,
a royal edict was suddenly published that all Jews, men, women, and
children, on that day four months were to be expelled from Spain. They
were to take no property with them, except such as they could carry;
and one alternative only, that of being converted to Christianity,
was offered to them. It was an awful sentence. Not only had Spain for
centuries been home to the Jews, but in all Europe at that date there
seemed no chance of finding another. It was exile without hope. And
yet, to the everlasting credit of Jews and Judaism, that alternative of
conversion was never entertained for a minute, and for conscience sake,
the whole body of Spanish Jews, some 300,000, literally and truly left
_all_ to follow after righteousness. All history cannot show a finer
example of national steadfastness and suffering for the truth.
=10. Abarbanel’s Intercession.=――An effort was made at the last moment
to soften the hard hearts of Ferdinand and Isabella. They had a Jewish
treasurer called Abarbanel, a learned, upright man, who used all the
weight of his influence and his character and his services on the
side of his unhappy people. He even condescended to bribe the king,
and offered to pay 3,000 ducats into the treasury as a ransom. The
mercenary Ferdinand hesitated. The property of the Jews was as precious
to him as their souls――perhaps, on the whole, more so, and the edict
might have been repealed after all, had not Torquemada passionately
broken in on the interview. He held a crucifix on high, and exclaimed,
‘Behold him, whom Judas sold for thirty pieces of silver! Are you
bargaining to sell him yet again, and at a higher price?’ The king and
queen were frightened at this threatening eloquence, and held to their
resolve. And on the 30th of July, 1492, to the disgrace of the rulers
and to the ruin of their country, every unbaptized Jew and Jewess was
turned out of Spain.
Illustration: _Edw^d. Weller_
EUROPE
in the
MIDDLE AGES
_London Longmans & Co._
CHAPTER XXII.
JEWS IN CENTRAL EUROPE IN THE MIDDLE AGES.
=1. General Position of European Jews.=――Some faint reflection of the
happiness and prosperity that was, for so long, the portion of the Jews
in Spain, fell fitfully, and for a short while, to the share of their
neighbouring brethren in France, and in the few civilised states of
Central Europe. Such happiness and prosperity, however, was nowhere,
and at no period, even for the brief intervals in which it lasted,
secure. The tolerance extended to the Jews, in the Middle Ages, was
based on no appreciation of their higher qualities, and was dictated
wholly by self-interest. The scholarship of the Jews was very little
cared for, perhaps not at all, unless it showed itself in medical skill.
And even then it was a perilous, rather than a precious, possession,
for if a Jewish physician cured his patient he was quite likely to
be accused of witchcraft, or if, despite all his care, the patient
died, some affectionate relative or some disappointed legatee would
very possibly bring a charge of poisoning against the poor doctor.
This happened once in a very distinguished case. Charles the Bald of
France died rather suddenly in 877, and it was widely said that he
was poisoned by Zedekiah, the Jewish physician of his good father,
Louis le Débonnaire, and from that date the fortunes of the Jews in
France steadily declined. The schools in the south of France certainly
flourished, and were maintained even in the less settled districts in
the north and east, and in small towns on the Danube and the Maine, for
Jews hunger after education as much as they do after bread; but to the
eyes of the outer world the Jews of Central Europe, in these centuries,
were just a big mercantile firm planted in a community of boors and
warriors. The circumstances of the age, as we have seen,[22] made
traders of them, and the tendency of the age was to despise trade, and,
while profiting by Jewish enterprise, to put every difficulty in its
way. Jews were thus a caste apart. ‘Society,’ in the Middle Ages, knew
of only two classes――the lords who owned the soil, and the serfs who,
swearing on the Gospel their oaths of fealty, tilled the soil and
went with it. In neither rank――in that of landowners nor in that of
land-cultivators, were Jews to be found. In the feudal system there
was no place for Jews. The only two socially recognised professions
were the Church and the army. The first, Jews could not enter; and
the second, in almost all Europe, they might not. Shut out from all
else, they became the universal providers of the Middle Ages. They
promoted commerce by the interchange of commodities, and they promoted
civilisation by the constant communication so kept up between the East
and the West. It was a descent, perhaps, from the scholarly rank which
Jews had held in the past; it was less pleasant, certainly, than their
old pursuits of tilling, and sowing, and planting the grateful earth:
but the position was forced upon them; they had practically no choice
in the matter, and there was no reason why they should not cheerfully
make the best of it. They accepted the state of things, and so long as
they were let alone, commerce, too, became in Jewish hands a dignified,
a useful, and an honourable calling. They dealt in slaves, as was the
necessity of the time, and these slaves were the better off for having
Jewish masters; their trading fleets sailed on the Mediterranean, and
their ready-tongued travellers brought the products of the East to
the markets of the West. But gradually all this sort of commerce
became impossible. The troubles of the tenth century, when the Eastern
schools were closed, and the Eastern Jews migrated, and lost both
their position and their wealth, affected the Jews of Europe. They
found themselves deprived of correspondents for extended trading. Then,
by force of feeling as well as by law, the slave trade was put down.
And not only would the merchant vessels have less freight under these
changed conditions, but the Norman pirates in the tenth and eleventh
centuries made the peaceful navigation of the Mediterranean uncommonly
difficult. Thus, from no fault of their own, all the larger mercantile
undertakings of the Jews gradually failed, and they were thrown back
on retail traffic. They were industrious, and honest, and patient,
and they grew rich even on that; and then idle, envious eyes looked on
them, and one after another of their rights and privileges, as traders,
was taken from them. So far as Jews were concerned, trading was made
difficult, dishonest, and disgraceful. Among Christians there existed
semi-religious associations, or ‘guilds,’ as they were called, of
masters and workers. In the thirteenth century such organisations
were general in all trades. From these recognised and respectable
guilds, Jewish apprentices and Jewish employers of labour were equally
excluded. In the cities, and in the free towns, Jewish traders were
put on a footing different from, and altogether lower than, the other
inhabitants. Agriculture, commerce, public and professional employment,
even honest citizenship, were all made impossible to the Jew of the
Middle Ages. And almost at will he might be plundered. ‘_Les meubles
du juif sont au baron_,’ was a proverb. His possessions were held on so
precarious a tenure that there came to be need for them to be portable
and of an easily hidden sort, and thus it was that the Jews, in the
‘dark’ ages, grew by degrees to deal chiefly in money.
=2. Jews become Money-lenders.=――Jews had no liking for the trade of
money-lending, but if they were to live at all, some means of earning
a living had to be hit upon. Coin and jewels and deeds and documents
which represent money, were the easiest sort of property for hunted
folks to hold or to hide. There were plenty of needy people, too proud
or too idle to work, and just a little too scrupulous to rob outright,
who were always eager to buy on credit and to borrow on interest. The
knight might want a suit of armour, or trappings for his horse, or a
set of ornaments for his lady love; the priest might covet a jewelled
cup or cross for his altar, and from king to peasant a loan might be
needed for any purpose. Every one with such wants would go to ‘his
Jew’ to supply them, and if the actual things were not forthcoming, the
money was generally at hand to procure them elsewhere. The very fact
of being able to lend gained Jews a chance of consideration from eager
borrowers. Only a chance, perhaps, for the mood when borrowing differs
greatly from the mood when repaying. The goods or the money once had,
the obligation to pay was frequently altogether forgotten, and the
Jew’s reminder of what was due to him was often bitterly resented by
the debtors, and his demand for interest on the debt denounced by them
as usury.
=3. Charge of Usury.=――Usury was a favourite accusation and a plausible
excuse for ill-treatment of the Jews in the Middle Ages. Charges of
killing Christian children and using their blood in passover rites,
and accusations of poisoning the drinking wells, were both excellent
means in their way of provoking a riot, and of justifying an ignorant
populace in the plunder of Jewish quarters; but such charges had this
drawback, that Passover, the presumed season for the bloodshedding,
came only once a year, and an epidemic of disease, the effect not of
poisoned wells, but of unclean living, was an even less regular and to
be reckoned upon occurrence. Borrowing, however, was always going on,
and there was just enough of dangerous half-truth in that charge of
‘usury,’ as applied to Jews, to make it always a safe cry to raise when
creditors became urgent.
‘A lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright;
A lie which is half a truth is a harder matter to fight.’
The word usury has a Latin root, and means simply interest on money;
Shakespeare speaks of usance.[23] When Jews first became traders,
instead of scholars and agriculturists, especial Rabbinical legislation
was found necessary, and was brought to bear on the subject of lending
on ‘interest’ (נֶשֶׁךְ, which word is translated, in the Authorised Version
of the Bible, ‘usury’). The strict Mosaic prohibition, ‘Thou shalt not
lend to thy brother upon interest,’ was then, as in Bible times, in
full force. But because of the altered condition of things, Jews of
a more elastic conscience were gradually led to give a wider meaning
to the 19th and 20th verses of the 23rd chapter of Deuteronomy. Large
trading operations involved the employment of capital, and capital
could not be employed without interest. Transactions, therefore, which
necessitated the use of money as a marketable commodity, gained, in
course of time, a sort of sanction from precedent, and fair interest
on money passed between Jew and Jew as between Jew and Christian, or
between Jew and Mahomedan. Money, and just ‘interest’ on money, could
be legally taken by either, or from either, it being always understood
that the borrower should be of full age, of sound judgment, capable
of completely understanding the full conditions, direct and indirect,
of the bargain, and that the transaction should be, in every sense, a
matter of public business and of mutual convenience. For the abuse of
this state of things, for the demand of a usurious rate of interest for
the loans required of them in those days, the Jews were not responsible.
The value of money is variable. The lender may legally make his rate
of interest vary with, and be more or less in proportion to, the risk
to which his capital is exposed. The worse the security and the less
the chance of ultimate repayment, the higher naturally would be the
‘interest’ asked. Usury is unjust interest, and ‘divers weights and
divers measures,’ and ‘a false balance,’ are all by Jewish law an
‘abomination to the Lord.’[24] Usury, therefore, is contrary to the
laws and religion of the Jews. There have been Jews who have been
usurers, but it has been in distinct despite of their Judaism. And
in so far as the poor Jews of the Middle Ages may have defiled and
disgraced the Name by usurious practice, the blame may certainly, in
fairness, be divided between those who lent and those who borrowed.
CHAPTER XXIII.
JEWS IN CENTRAL EUROPE (_continued_).
=1. The Crusades.=――Towards the close of the eleventh century there
came to be national as well as individual causes for borrowing of the
Jews, and national and religious, as well as individual and especial,
grounds for plunder and persecution. In the year 630, Mahomed had
entered Jerusalem as a conqueror, and for over 400 years the mosque
which he had erected to Allah stood unchallenged on the ruins of the
Empress Helena’s church. This particular conquest of Mahomed’s was
a religious as well as a political eyesore to Catholic Europe. It
asserted the ascendency of Islam on the very spot of all others which
was to Christians most sacred. As Catholicism spread, the desire to
regain the sepulchre of their Saviour from unbelievers grew strong
amongst the followers of Jesus. The warlike spirit of the age sought
a pious motive for its expression, and thus, blessed and encouraged on
all sides, sworn soldiers of the cross set off from France and Germany
and England to wrest Jerusalem from the Mahomedans. ‘Zeal is a good
thing, but love is a better.’ This sudden fury of fanaticism had very
sad results for the Jews. To them, as a matter of sentiment, it made
little difference whether Christian or Mahomedan ruled in their lost
land, and whether the cross or the crescent was set up where the שְׁכִינָה
had shone. In either case alike their shrine was desolate and deserted,
and Jews must have looked on this struggle between Christians and
Mahomedans, for the possession of their own lost city with a sullen
sense of unhappy indifference. And yet, as a matter of fact and history,
the Crusades were of very terrible import to the Jews. By a process
of reasoning which it is not difficult to follow, the massacre of Jews
and the plunder of Jews were held to be rightful preliminaries to each
of these chivalrous expeditions to the East. It was ‘unbelievers’ whom
the crusaders were setting off to fight, and here were ‘unbelievers’ of
an older sort, dwelling in their midst; was it not well to begin with
them? Money, too, was wanted for their holy wars; was not Jewish wealth
conveniently close at hand? Killing Jewish unbelievers was surely no
murder; plundering Jews, to use their treasures in so holy a cause,
was still less ‘robbery.’ This was crusading logic. Jews are always
a little slow to appreciate the much-sung chivalry of the Middle Ages.
They saw its seamy side.
An era of most wicked persecution opened for the Jews of Central
Europe with the first crusade in 1096. The frenzy of intolerance and
fanaticism which was called forth under the fair names of religion
and chivalry spread like an epidemic. At Trèves it began; and there,
the rabble, under the direction of heartless and impecunious knights,
sacked the Jewish quarters and massacred the inhabitants. The example
set at Trèves was followed at Metz, at Strasburg, at Mainz, at Worms,
at Cologne, and at Spires. All along the banks of the Rhine, of the
Moselle, of the Maine, and the Danube, in the flourishing towns which
Jewish enterprise had made wealthy and prosperous, Jewish men and women,
and even little children, were slaughtered like cattle. The spoils
gained from murder and robbery went to defray the costs of the holy
wars. Sometimes the alternative of baptism was given to the victims;
oftener no choice was offered, but sacrilege followed on sacking,
and murder on robbery. Some commanders burnt the Jews; some contented
themselves with burning only Jewish books and scrolls. But it is a
remarkable fact that although their books were burnt, lest those who
read them should be contaminated, it was never thought necessary to
subject their valuables in coin and jewels to the like purging process!
On the whole, burning was the favourite fashion of killing Jews, but
occasionally some town or some leader would hit on a more original
method. Spires, for instance, drowned her Jews, and Mainz once drove
hers into wholesale suicide, and Strasburg got rid of two thousand at
one time in an enormous bonfire.
In 1098, Jerusalem, after many a repulse, was safe in the crusaders’
hands, and the conquerors celebrated their success by so complete a
massacre of the Jews then living in Jerusalem and its suburbs, that
when the city was again retaken by the Mahomedans, hardly a Jew was
left to exult at the reversal of Christian arms. For fifty years
Jerusalem remained a Mahomedan conquest. At the end of that time
(1147) a second crusade was organised to retake it. All who joined
this expedition were solemnly released by Pope Eugenius III. from all
obligations to pay any debts which they might owe to the Jews. And in
this second crusade, as in the first, a broad red track of Jewish blood
marked the way which the crusaders took to the East, and the flames
from burning Jewries were beacon-lights on their path.
=2. Glimpses of Better Things.=――There were occasional incidents which
show like light in the darkness of that cruel age. The Spanish Jews,
whose misfortunes were of later date, did not neglect their unhappy
co-religionists. More than once we find the still prosperous Jews of
Spain sending sympathetic messages and substantial supplies to the
persecuted Jews of France and Germany. And amongst Christians there was
many a brave, good man who had the courage to be humane, and to stand
out as an exception to the general line of conduct which was pursued
towards the Jews. The Bishop of Spires and the Bishop of Cologne both
did their very best to protect the Jews in the terrible scenes that
preceded the first crusade (1096). And in the second crusade (1147)
the famous monk, St. Bernard of France, distinguished himself in the
same way. He did all he could, by voice and hand and pen, to check
the prevailing fashion of cruelty. Pope Alexander III. was another
advocate of fair treatment for the Jews, and Pope Innocent IV. actually
issued a bull laughing to scorn the accusations brought against them of
killing children for the flavouring of passover cakes, and denouncing
as ‘crimes’ the cruelties which were practised by Christians upon Jews.
But how sadly exceptional such instances were may be judged from the
fact that Church historians try to explain away the humanity of that
good Bishop of Cologne in 1096 by saying that he was bribed by the Jews,
and that his kindness to them was bought with their own money. ‘Save me
from my friends,’ that poor bishop might well exclaim. It was defending
his orthodoxy at the expense of his honesty with a vengeance.
=3. Life in France till the Expulsion thence.=――From the date of
Charles the Bald’s death (877), and the accusation of poison brought
against his Jewish doctor Zedekiah, the position of the Jews in France
grew slowly and gradually, but quite steadily, worse, till injustice
reached its climax in an edict of expulsion (1394). From the ninth to
the twelfth century Jewish schools and synagogues continued to exist,
and the people were tolerably protected from violence. So late as 1165,
when a famous Jewish Spanish traveller named Benjamin of Tudela was
visiting France, he found such institutions flourishing in most of the
towns which he included in his travels, and he seems to have made a
very comprehensive tour both north and south. In Narbonne the traveller
speaks of great tracts of land being cultivated by Jews and being held
by them, under what we should call a leasehold tenure, from the lords
of the soil. Paris seems to have been a favourite city with the race
even at that time, and Christian writers confirm Benjamin of Tudela’s
account of the prosperous and respected condition of the Jews who were
dwelling there. The crusades, and the need of money for conducting
them, were the chief causes for the persecutions which were so soon
to follow. The sufferings of the Jews in France were, as a rule, due
less to bigotry and religious hatred on the part of the priests and the
populace, than to the avarice of the kings. In Spain, Jews were hunted
out of the country as heretics. In France they were treated more as
sponges, first squeezed, and then tossed away. Towards the end of the
twelfth century King Philip Augustus ordered them, in a body, out of
his dominions (1180), and the purchase-money that the Jews gave for
the right to return brought them a short interval of ‘protection.’
Expelling the Jews, and selling permission to them to come back, was
found an excellent means of raising a large sum of money, and the
process was repeated in 1306, when Philip IV., one of the most cruel
sovereigns who ever sat on any throne, was King of France. Before they
were expelled, in 1306, their goods were pillaged and confiscated to
a great extent, and it must have been difficult for the poor exiles to
raise the enormous sum which was demanded, a few years later, for the
right to return. Like Noah’s dove, which in the whole wide world found
no resting-place for the sole of her tiny foot, the Jews, at this date,
had small choice or chance of safe asylum in any country, or we might
wonder at their paying for permission to go back to such inhospitable
shores. Under ‘Saint’ Louis (Louis IX., 1226‒1270) a new form of
persecution was hit upon. Killing Jews and plundering their property
was commonplace; it was decided to destroy their literature. So a
raid was made on Jewish libraries, and, as a beginning, twenty-four
cart-loads full of Talmudical books were burnt in Paris. It was under
this king, too, that the Jews were prohibited from practising as
physicians, and that they were all compelled to wear a conspicuous
garment. It was called the _rouelle_, and its distinctiveness consisted
in a bit of blue cloth being sewn in front of, and behind, the outer
dress of both men and women. Louis the Saint must have the virtue of
originality added to his other claims for saintship.
In 1320 there was another crusade, another accusation against the
Jews, and another large sum of Jewish money paid into the royal
treasury. These three contemporaneous occurrences, examined closely,
seem to have a somewhat suspicious connection with one another. The
crusade of 1320, which was called the rising of the shepherds, was set
on foot by peasants, who were presumably too poor to pay its expenses,
and a preliminary crusade against the Jews was a very convenient way
of raising the necessary money for the holy expedition. So a cry was
raised against them of poisoning the wells. Any charge against Jews
was sure to result in plunder, or in a bribe big enough to make plunder
unnecessary. In 1348‒1349 the Black Pestilence was raging in Europe.
This frightful epidemic was said to spare the Jews. So far as it did
spare them, their cleanlier lives and their more temperate habits
would be quite sufficient explanation for all reasonable people of the
somewhat doubtful fact. But the reasonable people would seem to have
been few in those days, and the fanatics many. The Jews were accused,
both of causing the pestilence and of not suffering from it, and again
that ridiculous charge of poisoning the wells was brought against them.
It must have been taken for granted that Jews lived without drinking!
The accusation, however, was good enough for its purpose. The Jews
died by the sword if not by the plague; they were not permitted the
choice granted to David their king, who elected to be punished by the
pestilence rather than by the sword, to fall by the ‘hand of God rather
than by the hand of man.’
=4. Expelled from France.=――On September 17, 1394, on יוֹם כִּפּוּר, when
Charles VI. was king, with a six weeks’ notice, the Jews were commanded
to leave France altogether, and this third expulsion was decided and
general, and included all the Jews in all parts of the country.
=5. Treatment of Jews in the German States.=――In the ninth and tenth
centuries many French Jews had crossed the Rhine, and, emigrating into
Germany, had established colonies there, which the crusaders, some
two centuries later, on their way to the Holy Land, found conveniently
handy to pillage. From Germany the Jews were never expelled in a body
as they were from France and Spain, and, as we shall presently see,
from England, but there were many local and partial expulsions; and
German Jews, from the ninth till nearly the nineteenth century, lived,
as it were, in the midst of alarms, and led, for the most part, a
miserable existence. Throughout the Middle Ages, their legal position
in these dominions was that of serfs of the Emperor, and they paid
a certain tax for somewhat uncertain ‘protection.’ The Emperors
themselves were often kindly inclined towards the Jews, and Frederick
Barbarossa, who ruled in the twelfth century, was particularly humane.
A greedy fanatic once entered this Emperor’s presence with the news
that three Christian children had been found dead in a Jew’s house on
the eve of the Passover; and ‘what was to be done?’ the man excitedly
asked. ‘Three children dead!’ said the Emperor calmly; ‘why, let
them be buried, of course.’ But all the Emperors of Germany were not
like Frederick Barbarossa, and very few of the princes. The Jews were
shunned and oppressed in the German states, even when and where they
were not openly and violently outraged. They walked among men with
Cain’s mark set upon them without Cain’s sin. Each city, each street,
each house nearly in the German dominions could ‘tell sorrowful
stories.’ And because _finis_ was never written on the page of Jewish
history in Germany as it was for a while in Spain, and France, and
England, the sad tale in this part of the world comes to no abrupt and
dramatic conclusion, and breaks off with no certain and settled date.
CHAPTER XXIV.
JEWS IN ENGLAND. (1066‒1210.)
=1. The First Seventy Years.=――Beyond a rare mention in the Saxon
Chronicles, there are no records concerning English Jews till after
the Conquest (1066), when Jews from France and Germany, seeking happier
homes, may have crossed the Channel in the train of William the Norman,
on the chance of finding such. They were probably accepted by William’s
new subjects as one of the many consequences of the invasion, and Jews
gradually gained a tolerably comfortable and secure position in the
towns in which they settled. London and Oxford became head-quarters.
The selection of London, the capital, is sufficiently explained. The
attraction of Oxford was, in all likelihood, its scholarly reputation.
King Alfred’s idea of making Oxford a seat of learning was already
being realised in the eleventh century, and although none of the
colleges bear much earlier date than that of the thirteenth, yet the
names of some of these――Moses-Hall and Jacob-Hall, for instance――give
silent evidence of the presence of Jews and of the growth of Jewish
teaching, and, it may be, of Jewish trading influences in Oxford.
Little colonies of Jews established themselves also in York, and in
Lincoln, and in Norwich, and in various other towns, and set up small
businesses, and always managed, however poor they might be at first,
to find some small room which would serve as a meeting-place for
prayer and for school work. In London they were soon numerous enough
and prosperous enough to gain the great privilege of being allotted
a ‘burying place for their dead.’ This first בֵּית חַיִּים of the Jews in
England was situated in St. Giles, Cripplegate. Thus things went well
for a time. William I. was a conqueror, but not an oppressor; William
Rufus, though dissolute and dishonest, was yet a mediæval sort of
gentleman, who, having once promised protection, kept his word, and
Henry I. was a scholar, and had some sympathy with the historic race
who were so bravely and patiently accommodating themselves to altered
circumstances. It was in the reign of Stephen (1135‒1154) that the
troubles of the Jews in England began.
=2. ‘Saints’ and Supplies.=――The civil wars, consequent on the
disputed succession after Henry’s death, had drained the country
of money. The wealth of the Jewish traders was in close and awkward
contrast with the poverty of the Christian knights. An evil eye was
cast on these riches, and as the conscience of the country was scarcely
yet hardened to the open and unprovoked plunder of Jews, men cast about
them for a plausible excuse for robbing them. Nothing more original
was found, nor was perhaps necessary, than the one which had so often
served on the Continent――the accusation of child-killing for Passover
purposes. One day, in the town of Norwich, a certain small boy, named
William, was missing, and straightway he was declared to have been
murdered, and the Jews were accused of having murdered him. It is
not even certain that the body of the little lost boy was ever found.
William of Norwich, however, was made into a saint, and added to
the muster-roll of miracle-working martyrs, whilst the supposed
perpetrators of a never committed crime were hanged, and the English
Jews generally were taxed to the estimated, and somewhat fancy, value
of the sainted child. The real martyrs in the affair were certainly the
Jews, and the real miracle was the easy raising of vast sums of money
through such manifestly ridiculous charges. The Jews had to submit to
be plundered, and it was better for them, perhaps, that their goods
should be ‘confiscated’ at the order of the king, than at the mercy of
the populace. The fashion that Stephen set was found to be a convenient
and ready mode of raising supplies. St. William of Norwich was the
first saint that the Jews in England contributed to the calendar, but
he was, during the Middle Ages, the type of a class of what might be
called the patron saints of impecunious kings, and lazy priests, and
‘chivalrous’ nobles. These so-called saints always managed to fill
the empty coffers of their devotees, and to that extent miraculous
powers may certainly be conceded to them. The most celebrated of them
all is a certain Hugh of Lincoln, who is said to have lived and died
in the reign of Henry III. The local celebrity of this small saint was
secured by the hanging of twenty Jews of that town, the imprisonment of
more than a hundred, and a general confiscation of Jewish property in
Lincoln. The literary interest attaching to the little Hugh, which has
outlasted the religious, was ensured by Chaucer selecting him for the
hero of one of his famous Canterbury Tales.[25]