CHRISTIANITY AND THE JEWS
In dream I saw two Jews that met by chance,
One old, stern-eyed, deep-browed, yet garlanded
With living light of love around his head,
The other young, with sweet seraphic glance.
Around went on the Town’s satanic dance,
Hunger a-piping while at heart he bled.
_Shalom Aleichem_, mournfully each said,
Nor eyed the other straight but looked askance.
--ISRAEL ZANGWILL.
CHRISTIANITY, long despised and persecuted, had by slow yet steady
steps made its way among the nations, until from a creed of slaves
it was raised by Constantine to the sovereignty of the Roman world.
♦323 A.D.♦ The cross from being an emblem of shame became the ensign
of victory, and the great church of the Resurrection, built by the
first Christian Emperor on the hill of Calvary, proclaimed to mankind
the triumph of the new religion. But the gospel which was intended to
inculcate universal peace, charity, and good-will among men brought
nothing but new causes of discord, cruelty, and rancour. Apostles
and missionaries are apt to imagine that religion is everything
and national character nothing, that men are formed by the creeds
which they profess, and that, if you extended to all nations the
same doctrines, you would produce in all the same dispositions. The
history of religion, however, conclusively demonstrates that it is
not churches which form men, but men who form churches. An idea when
transplanted into foreign soil, in order to take root and bear fruit,
must first adapt itself to the conditions of the soil. The nations of
the West in embracing Christ’s teaching assimilated from it only as
much as was congenial to them and conveniently overlooked the rest.
Mercy--the essence of the doctrine--was sacrificed to the passions of
the disciples. Henceforth the old warfare between Jew and Gentile is
to manifest itself chiefly as a struggle between the Synagogue and the
Church, between the teaching of the New Hebrew Prophet and the Old
Hebrew Prophet, so beautifully imagined by a modern Jewish writer in
the lines quoted above.
The Jews were told that the observances of the Mosaic Law were
instituted on account of the hardness of their hearts and were no
longer acceptable in the sight of God; that the circumcision of the
spirit had superseded the circumcision of the flesh; that faith, and
not works, is the key to eternal life; that their national calamities
were judgments for their rejection and crucifixion of Jesus; and that
their only hope of peace in this world and of salvation in the next
lay in conversion. Nor was the enmity towards the Jews confined to
refutation of their doctrines and attempts at persuasion. The Jews had
always been held by the Christians responsible for all the persecutions
and calumnies with which their sect had been assailed. “The other
nations,” says Justin to his Jewish collocutor in 140 A.D., “are not
so much to blame for this injustice towards us and Christ as you, the
cause of their evil prejudice against Him and us, who are from Him.
After the crucifixion and resurrection you sent forth chosen men from
Jerusalem throughout the earth, saying that there has arisen a godless
heresy, that of the Christians.”[33] The accusation is repeated, among
others, by Origen: “The Jews who at the commencement of the teaching
of Christianity spread evil reports of the Word, that, forsooth,
the Christians sacrifice a child and partake of its flesh, and also
that they in their love for deeds of darkness extinguish the lights
and indulge in promiscuous incest.”[34] Here we find the sufferings
of Christ linked to the sufferings of His followers; the crime of
the Pharisees associated with those of their descendants; and, in
defiance of the essential tenet of Christianity, and of the sublime
example of its author, the sins of the fathers are now to be visited
upon the children. The Christians, while gratifying their own lust for
revenge, flattered themselves that they avenged the wrongs of Christ;
by oppressing the Jews they were convinced that they carried out the
decrees of Providence. Thus pious vindictiveness was added to the other
and older motives of hatred--a new ring to the plant of anti-Judaism.
But for the existence of those other motives of hatred, with which
theology had little or nothing to do, the theological odium henceforth
bestowed upon the Jews would have been merely preposterous. The
founder of Christianity, Himself a Jew, had appeared to His own people
as the Messiah whom they eagerly expected and with all the divine
prophecies concerning whose advent they were thoroughly familiar.
They investigated His credentials and, as a nation, they were not
satisfied that He was what His followers claimed Him to be. Instead
of remembering that His Jewish fellow-countrymen were, after all, the
most competent to form a judgment of their new Teacher, as they had
done in the case of other inspired Rabbis and prophets, the Christians
proceeded to insult and outrage them for having come to the conclusion
that He failed to fulfil the conditions required by their Scriptures.
St. Jerome, though devoted to the study of Hebrew, expressed his hatred
of the race in forcible language. Augustine followed in his older
contemporary’s footsteps, and abhorrence of the Jews became an article
of faith, sanctioned by these oracles of Orthodoxy and acted upon by
the pious princes of later times.
At first Constantine had placed the religion of the Jews on a footing
of equality with those of the other subject nations. But his tolerance
vanished at his conversion. Under his reign, the Jews were subjected to
innumerable restrictions and extortions; the faithful were forbidden
to hold any intercourse with the murderers of Christ, and all the gall
which could be spared from the sectarian feuds within the fold of the
Church was poured upon the enemy outside. Judaism was branded as a
godless sect, and its extermination was advocated as a religious duty.
The apostasy of Christians to Judaism was punished severely, while the
apostasy of Jews to Christianity was strenuously encouraged, and the
Synagogue was deprived of the precious privilege of persecution, which
henceforth was to be the exclusive prerogative of the Church. The edict
of Hadrian, which forbade the Jews to live in Jerusalem, was re-enacted
by Constantine, who only allowed them on the anniversary of the
destruction of the Temple to mourn on its ruins--for a consideration.
♦337♦
But the real persecution did not commence until the accession of
Constantius. Then the Rabbis were banished, marriages between Jews and
Christian women were punished with death, and so was the circumcision
of Christian slaves; while the communities of Palestine suffered
terrible oppression at the hands of the Emperor’s cousin Gallus, and
were goaded to a rebellion which ended in the extirpation of many
thousands and the destruction of many cities. ♦352♦ But the Jews
endured all these calamities with the patience characteristic of their
race, until relief came from an unexpected quarter.
In 361 Julian, whom the Church stigmatised by the title of Apostate,
ascended the throne of Constantine the Great. Julian’s ambition was to
banish the worship of the Cross from his Empire, to reform paganism
and to restore it to its ancient glory. Brought up under wise Greek
teachers, he was early imbued with a profound love and reverence for
the beliefs and customs of Hellas. He felt strongly the instinctive
repugnance of the Hellenic spirit to Oriental modes of thought. The
Christian creed repelled him, and the pathos of Christ’s career
left him unmoved. To Julian Jesus was simply the “dead Jew.” His
philosophical attachment to paganism and contempt for “the religion of
the Galileans” were strengthened by his experience of the Christian
tutors to whom his later education had been entrusted by his cousin
Constantius. While in his cousin’s power, Julian had been forced to
conceal his views and to observe outwardly the rules of a creed
which he despised. Compulsory conformity deepened his resentment
towards the Christian Church, without, however, blinding him to the
beauty of the principle of toleration which she denied. Although, on
becoming Emperor, he favoured those who remained faithful to the old
religion, Julian did not oppress the followers of the new, holding
that the intrinsic superiority of paganism would eventually secure
its triumph. His confidence was misplaced. The classical ritual was
no longer acceptable to serious men, and the Neo-Platonic mysticism
which endeavoured to transform sensuous polytheism into a spiritual
philosophy possessed no attraction for the multitude. Christianity had
adopted enough of pagan speculation to conciliate the educated and
more than enough of pagan practice to satisfy the ignorant. The Greek
pantheon had ceased to have any reason for existing. All that imperial
encouragement could do was to galvanise into a semblance of life a body
that was already dead.
But though Julian’s success was ephemeral and the revival of polytheism
impossible, yet the attempt brought for a while pagan tolerance to
a world distracted by Christian sectarianism and the sanguinary
squabbles of metaphysicians and priests. Towards the Jews Julian proved
particularly gracious. He introduced Jehovah to his chorus of deities,
and treated Him with especial reverence. It was enough for Julian that
Jehovah was a god. He cared little about the claims to universal and
exclusive veneration advanced on His behalf by some of His worshippers.
The Emperor’s desire to humble the Christians, combined with his
genuine pity for the suffering Jews, suggested to him the design of
rebuilding the Temple of Jerusalem, of investing it with its ancient
splendour, and of recalling the children of Israel to the home of their
fathers.
Alypius of Antioch, Julian’s faithful friend, was entrusted with the
execution of the scheme, and was sent to Palestine for the purpose. The
Jews saw the finger of God in the Imperial enthusiast’s resolve. It
seemed to them that the long-expected day of redemption had dawned,
and they answered the summons with alacrity. Leaving their homes and
their occupations, they crowded to Zion from far and near, both men
and women, bringing with them their offerings for the service of the
Temple, gold and silver and purple and silk, even as their ancestors
had done in obedience to the call of the Lord through Moses, and again
on their return from Babylon in the days of yore. No Pharaoh with a
taste for monumental architecture had ever exacted from his subjects a
larger tribute in money and labour than this pagan Prince of Zionists
now received freely from the children of Israel. To share in the work
was a title to everlasting glory, while ignominy would be the portion
of those who shirked it. But there were few who wished to do so. The
building of the Temple was a labour of love, and no sacrifice was
deemed too great, no service too painful for the realisation of the
dream which so many generations of Jews had already dreamt, and which
so many more were fated to dream in the future.[35]
♦363♦
Alas! the glorious self-denial of a whole race was wasted, and its
hopes were dashed to the ground by the Emperor’s untimely death. The
work was abandoned six months after its inception, all traces of it
soon vanished, and the site over which the plough had once been drawn
remained a final loneliness. The pilgrims dispersed, disheartened and
abashed, and their enemies rejoiced. The Christians, in their turn,
detected the finger of God in this failure of the Jews to escape the
lot assigned to them from above, as a punishment for their sins, and
continued to assist Providence.
♦364–378♦
Under the Arian Emperor Valens the Jews were left unmolested. ♦379–395♦
Theodosius the Great also protected them against the attacks of
fanaticism, and ♦395–408♦ under the rule of Arcadius they were able
to purchase peace by bribing the Emperor’s favourites. ♦408–450♦ But
with the accession of Theodosius the Younger orthodoxy and intolerance,
which had been interrupted by the short reign of heresy, were restored
to power.
The effects of this restoration were soon felt by the Jews. John
Chrysostom had been denouncing them in Antioch, and the preacher’s
eloquence was translated into acts of violence by the people of the
neighbouring town of Imnestar. ♦415♦ The occasion of the riot was the
Feast of Purim, when the Jews celebrated their triumph over Haman
by a carnival of intoxication and ribaldry accompanied with the
crucifixion of their enemy in effigy. The merriment, it appears, was
further accentuated by coarse jokes at the expense of Christianity. The
Christians of the town, who had frequently complained of these orgies
in vain, now accused the Jews of having crucified not a straw-Haman but
a live Christian lad. The charge led to the severe punishment of the
revellers.[36]
The same year witnessed a persecution of the Jews on a far larger
scale in Alexandria. In that city Jews and Christians had long lived
on terms of mutual repugnance, which not rarely resulted in reciprocal
outrage. An episode of this kind afforded Cyril, the dictatorial and
bigoted Patriarch, an excuse for indiscriminate vengeance. Early one
morning the pugnacious ecclesiastic led a rabble of zealots against the
Jews’ quarter, demolished their synagogues, pillaged their dwellings,
and hounded the inmates out of the city in which they had lived and
prospered for seven centuries. Forty thousand of them, the most
industrious and thrifty part of the population, were driven forth to
join their brethren in exile. The Prefect Orestes, unable to prevent
the assault, or to punish the culprits, was fain to express his
disapproval of their conduct--an indiscretion for which he narrowly
escaped being stoned to death by the monks.
In the meantime the Christian inhabitants of Antioch volunteered to
avenge the grievances of their brethren at Imnestar by ejecting their
Jewish fellow-citizens from the synagogues. The Emperor Theodosius
compelled them to restore the buildings to the owners. But this
decision was denounced by Simeon the Stylites, who on ascending his
column had renounced all worldly luxuries except Jew-hatred. From
that lofty pulpit the hermit addressed an epistle to the Emperor,
rebuking him for his sinful indulgence to the enemies of Heaven. The
pious Emperor was not proof against reprimand from so eminent a saint.
♦423♦ He immediately revoked his edict and removed the Prefect who had
pleaded the cause of the Jews.
♦425♦
Two years later Theodosius the Younger abolished the semi-autonomous
jurisdiction of the Jewish Patriarch of Tiberias and appropriated his
revenues. He imposed many grievous restrictions on the celebration of
Jewish festivals, excluded the Jews from public offices, and prohibited
the erection of new synagogues. The harsh laws of Theodosius remained
in force under his successors. The Jews were looked upon with contempt
and aversion in every part of the Byzantine Empire, their persons and
their synagogues, in the towns where such existed, were frequently made
the objects of assault, and the riots excited by the rivalry between
the Christian factions in the circus often ended in combined attacks
upon the Jewish quarter. Meanwhile Palestine, with few exceptions,
had become completely Christianized; Greek churches and monasteries
occupied the places once held by the synagogues of the Jews, abbots and
bishops bore sway over the land of the Pharisees, and Jerusalem from a
capital of Judaism became the stronghold and the sanctuary of the Cross.
Suffering once more kindled the hope for the Redeemer. Moses of
Crete, in the middle of the fifth century, undertook to fulfil the
old prophecies and to gratify the expectations of his persecuted
brethren. He gained the adherence of all the Jews in the island and
confidently promised to them that he would lead them dry-shod to the
Holy Land, even as his great namesake had done before him. On the
appointed day the Messiah marched to the coast, followed by all the
Jewish congregations, and, taking up his station on a rock which
jutted out into the sea, he commanded his adherents to cast themselves
fearlessly into the deep. Incredible as it may appear to us creatures
of commonsense, many obeyed the command, to find the waters unwilling
to divide. Several perished through the stubbornness of the element and
their own inability to swim; others were rescued from the consequences
of excessive faith by Greek sailors. Moses vanished.
♦527–565♦
Justinian aggravated the servitude of the Jews. In his reign the
holy vessels of the Temple which had already wandered over the East,
been taken to Rome by Titus, and thence transferred to Carthage by
Genseric the Vandal, found their way to Constantinople. The Jews
of New Rome had the mortification to see these memorials of their
departed greatness in the train of Belisarius who, having destroyed
the empire of the Vandals, carried into captivity the grandson of
Genseric, and with him the sacred vessels, which were finally deposited
in a church at Jerusalem. ♦535♦ In the same year the evidence of Jews
against Christians was declared inadmissible, and two years later
Justinian passed a law burdening the Jews with the expensive duties of
magistracy, while denying to them its exemptions and privileges. Soon
after the Jews were forbidden by law to observe Passover before the
Christian Easter.
Under Justinian the Samaritans fared even worse than the Jews.
Oppression goaded them repeatedly to rebellion, and each attempt,
accompanied as such attempts were with atrocities against the
Christians, rendered the yoke heavier. One of these desperate revolts
occurred in 556 A.D., when the Samaritans of Caesarea took advantage of
one of the inevitable circus-riots and, aided by the Jews, massacred
the Christian inhabitants. The crime brought down upon them a heavy and
indiscriminate punishment.
A respite followed on Justinian’s death, and it continued under his
immediate successors. But the reign of Phocas witnessed a renewal of
the feud. ♦608♦ The Jews of Antioch suddenly fell upon the Christians,
whom they slaughtered and burnt; while they dragged the Patriarch
through the streets and put him to death. A military force suppressed
the riot and wreaked vengeance on the guilty people. A few years after,
the Jews seized an opportunity for venting their ill-concealed hatred
of the Greeks. This was the advance of the Persians upon Palestine.
A certain rich Jew of Tiberias, Benjamin by name, led the revolt,
and called upon his fellow-countrymen to join the Persians. The Jews
gladly complied, and assembled from all parts of Palestine, bringing
their fury and their fire to bear upon the Christians. ♦614♦ With their
assistance the Persians took Jerusalem, massacred ninety thousand
Christian inhabitants, and sacked all the Christian sanctuaries, for
their Jewish allies would spare none and nothing that reminded them of
their national humiliation. From the capital terror and havoc spread
throughout the land, the conquerors destroying the monasteries and
killing the monks wherever they found them. An attempt to surprise and
slay the Christians of Tyre during the Easter celebrations, however,
failed. The latter, having been informed of the design, seized the Jews
in the town, who were to act as secret auxiliaries of the assailants,
killed one hundred of them for each atrocity perpetrated by their
accomplices outside the city, and threw the heads of the victims
over the walls for the edification of their co-religionists. This
performance had the desired effect. The besiegers, dismayed at the
shower of Hebrew heads which fell upon them, beat a hasty retreat,
pursued by the Tyrian Christians.
For fourteen years Palestine remained in the hands of the Persians and
the Jews. Several Christians in despair embraced Judaism, among them
a monk of Mount Sinai, who changed his name into Abraham, married a
Jewess, and, renegade-like, distinguished himself by joining in the
persecution of the faith which he had betrayed. But the Jews, who had
fondly hoped that their Persian allies would make the country over to
them, were doomed to disappointment. Discontent culminated in a rupture
with their friends and the banishment of many Jews to Persia. The
rest then resolved to revenge themselves by a second act of treachery.
They entered into negotiations with the Emperor Heraclius, and, on
his promising to forgive and forget their past misdeeds, aided him to
recover the province. ♦628♦ The Persian invaders were driven back, and
the Greeks reigned once more supreme over Western Asia.
The Jews acclaimed the victor and his army with servile adulation, and
entertained both with a liberality springing from cold calculation.
But their enthusiasm was too transparent, and their atrocities too
recent to delude Heraclius. At Jerusalem the monks earnestly implored
the Emperor to punish the traitors, and with one stroke to remove for
ever the danger of a repetition of their crime. Heraclius objected
to the breach of faith which the holy men so vehemently recommended;
but his scruples were overruled by their offers to take the sin upon
themselves, by their casuistical demonstrations that the extermination
of the enemies of Heaven was a meritorious deed beside which common
honesty counted for nothing, and by the promise to fast and pray on his
behalf. The Jews were persecuted; many of them were slaughtered, and
others fled to the hills or to Egypt, where they were welcomed by their
brethren. Thus double treachery ended in double disaster.
The sufferings of the Jews in the Byzantine Empire were revived by Leo
the Isaurian, who seems to have tried to recover the confidence of
the clergy, forfeited by his iconoclastic proclivities, by a zealous
persecution of those eternal enemies of Orthodoxy. In 723 he issued
a decree threatening with terrible penalties all Jews who refused
to be baptized. Some submitted to the ordeal in order to save their
lives; others preferred to seek safety in voluntary exile, or glory in
self-inflicted martyrdom; many burning themselves to death in their
synagogues.
Under Leo’s successors, though the Jews continued to be excluded from
public offices, they were allowed full freedom in the exercise of their
religion and the pursuit of commerce. Basil, however, in the middle
of the ninth century, renewed the endeavours of the Church to convert
the infidels, and under his auspices public disputations were held
between Christian and Hebrew theologians; the persuasive eloquence
of the former being strengthened by promises of political preferment
to converts. Many Jews hastened to profit by this opening to power.
♦886♦ But on the Emperor’s death they exhibited an equal alacrity in
returning to the old faith. ♦900♦ Whereupon Leo the Philosopher ordered
that backsliders should be put to death as traitors to the Church. This
severity, however, was relaxed under his unphilosophical successors.
Benjamin of Tudela, that invaluable guide to the mediaeval Jewry, who
visited Constantinople about the middle of the twelfth century,[37]
describes the condition of his co-religionists as follows: “They are
forbidden to go out on horseback, except Solomon of Egypt, who is the
King’s physician, and through whom the Jews find great alleviation in
the persecution. For the persecution in which they live is heavy....
The Christians hate the Jews, be they good or bad, and lay upon them
a heavy yoke. They beat them in the streets and hold them in a state
of cruel slavery. But the Jews are rich and kind, loving mercy and
religion, and they endure patiently the persecution. The quarter in
which they live separately is called Pera.”[38]
Briefly, the history of Israel in the Eastern Empire is a story of
ecclesiastical persecution tempered at times by imperial protection,
until the Turkish conquest deprived the Christians of the means of
oppression. Somewhat better conditions prevailed in the West.
The Jews continued to live in Rome, Ravenna, Naples, Genoa, and Milan,
devoted to the peaceful pursuit of commerce, long after persecution
had commenced in the East. Ambrosius, Bishop of Milan, it is true,
denounced and derided the infidels, but he was prevented from an
active demonstration of his theories on the subject by the firmness
of Theodosius I. ♦399♦ This Emperor’s feeble successor, Honorius,
forbade the collection of the Jewish Patriarch’s tax in Italy; but
the order was revoked five years later. In all the cities mentioned
the Jews formed separate, semi-autonomous communities, their only
complaint being their exclusion from judicial and military dignities,
which they did not covet, and the prohibition to build new synagogues
or to own Christian slaves. The latter law, though bitterly resented
by the Jews, was perfectly justified from the Christian, or indeed
from an equitable, point of view. The Jews were large slave-dealers
and slave-owners, and it was their custom to convert their slaves
to Judaism in order to avoid the presence of Gentiles under their
roofs. All slaves who refused to be circumcised were, in obedience to
the Talmud, sold again. It was, therefore, the duty of the Church to
protect these helpless brutes in human form against proselytism. On
the other hand, from the standpoint of the Jews, the prohibition was a
severe blow at their power of competition, as in that age slave labour
was, if not the only, certainly the most usual kind of labour available.
♦489♦
The conquest of Italy by Theodoric, the Ostrogoth, and the principles
of toleration upon which, though a Christian and a heretic and a hater
of Hebrew “obduracy,” this prince based his rule, seemed to promise a
perpetuation of the prosperity of Israel. How enlightened Theodoric’s
administration was is shown by the following incident. The Jews of
Genoa, on asking for permission to repair their synagogue, received
from the King this reply: “Why do you desire that which you should
avoid? We accord you, indeed, the permission you request; but we blame
the wish, which is tainted with error. We cannot command religion,
however, nor compel anyone to believe contrary to his conscience.”[39]
But the fanaticism of Theodoric’s orthodox subjects, denied an outlet
against the Arian conquerors, vented itself on the Jews, who suddenly
found themselves exposed to the ferocity of the Italian rabble, were
insulted and robbed, and saw their synagogues looted and burnt, until
the civil authorities intervened, stopped the havoc, and forced the
aggressors to make reparation for the losses inflicted upon their
fellow-townsmen, thereby earning the cordial anathemas of the whole
Catholic world.
Thus ended the fifth century. Nor did the position of the Jews
deteriorate in the sixth. ♦536♦ How happy and wealthy they continued
to be in Italy under the Ostrogothic rule is proved by the brave
resistance which they opposed to Justinian’s general, Belisarius, in
his conquering progress through the peninsula, and more especially at
Naples. Byzantine domination over Italy ceased in 589, when the greater
part of the country fell under the power of the Lombards, who also
left the Jews in peace. Outbursts of popular intolerance disgraced
the Italian peninsula from time to time, but, as a rule, Israel was
able to secure official indulgence with the wealth which it amassed
under the interested protection of the Popes. ♦590–604♦ Gregory the
Great, although he persecuted the Manichaean heretics of Sicily and
ordered the reclamation of the pagan peasants of Sardinia “etiam cum
verberibus,” and although, in his anxiety to extinguish slavery, he
revived the ordinance of the Emperor Constantius and impressed upon
the princes of Austrasia and Burgundy the necessity of forbidding the
possession of Christian slaves by Jews, yet laid down the principle
that no other means than friendly exhortation and pecuniary temptation
should be employed in the conversion of the latter, and he sheltered
them from the aggressive piety of the inferior bishops.
In Gaul Jews must have settled at a very early period, though the
origin of their colonies is lost in the mists of unrecorded time, and
no sure evidence of their presence in that province is extant before
the second century. Whether the first Jewish settlers north of the Alps
arrived as prisoners of war or as peddlers, they make their appearance
in history as Roman citizens, and as such they were treated with
respect by the Frankish and Burgundian conquerors, who allowed them to
practise agriculture, medicine, and trade without let or hindrance,
until the introduction of Christianity. The advent of the Cross here,
as elsewhere, proved fatal to the sons of Israel. Nor could it be
otherwise. Time had passed on, the Roman Empire had been swept away,
and a new order of things had sprung into existence. Younger races
dominated the regions over which the Roman eagle once spread his proud
wings, and the worship of one God, the God of the Jews, had dethroned
the many deities of paganism. The Jew alone had remained the same.
Despite lapse of time and all vicissitudes, the Hebrew of Western
Europe still was a faithful _facsimile_ of his Asiatic forefathers.
Like them he continued hemmed in by an iron circle which he would
not overstep and into which he reluctantly admitted outsiders. The
Jews everywhere dwelt apart, suspicious and suspected. Jewish writers
glory in this arrogant and dangerous isolation: “In spite of their
separation from Judaea and Babylonia, the centres of Judaism, the Jews
of Gaul lived in strict accordance with the precepts of their religion.
Wherever they settled they built their synagogues and constituted their
communities in exact agreement with the directions of the Talmud.”[40]
Such constancy, admirable in itself, was, from a practical point of
view, pregnant with perils which were not slow in declaring themselves.
In 465 the Council of Vannes forbade the clergy to participate in
Jewish banquets, because it was considered beneath the dignity of
Christians to eat the viands of the Jews, while the Jews refused to
partake of the viands of the Christians. This was the commencement of
an active display of antipathy destined to endure down to our own day.
♦516♦
In Burgundy the conversion of King Sigismund to the Catholic faith
inaugurated an era of oppression of all heretics--Arians as well as
Jews. True believers, whether laymen or clergymen, were prohibited
from taking part in Jewish banquets. From Burgundy the spirit of
hostility spread to other countries. ♦538 and 545♦ The third and fourth
Councils at Orleans reiterated the above prohibition, and the Jews were
forbidden to appear abroad during Easter, because their presence was
“an insult to Christianity.” ♦554♦ Clerical fanaticism was invested
with constitutional authority by Childebert I. of Paris a few years
after.
Among these earlier persecutors of Judaism none distinguished himself
more highly than Avitus, Bishop of Clermont. In him the Jews of Gaul
found an enemy as implacable as their brethren of Alexandria had found
in Cyril. He repeatedly strove to convert the Jews of his diocese,
and, on his sermons proving ineffectual, he incited the Christians to
attack the synagogues and to raze them to the ground. But even this
argument failed to persuade the stiff-necked infidels of the truth
of Christianity. The good Bishop, therefore, gave them the option of
baptism or banishment, thus forestalling the King of England by seven
and the King of Spain by nine centuries. One Jew chose baptism, and
paraded the streets in his garments of symbolic purity during the
Pentecost. But another Jew undertook to interpret the feelings of his
brethren by soiling the devout apostate’s white clothes with rancid
oil. The inopportune anointment led to a massacre and to the forcible
baptism of five hundred more Jews, while the rest fled to Marseilles.
♦576♦ This triumph of the faith at Clermont was received with great
rejoicings in the neighbouring countries, and Bishop Gregory of Tours
showed a laudable lack of ecclesiastical jealousy by inviting a poet to
sing in bad Latin the success of his colleague.
♦581♦
Five years later the Council of Maçon passed various enactments
emphasising the social inferiority of the Jews, and the bigotry of the
Councillors. King Chilperic also dabbled in compulsory proselytism,
and the later Merovingian Kings Clotaire II. and Dagobert carried on
the work in grim earnest. ♦615. 629♦ The former of these princes, in
obedience to the decrees of the Clermont and Maçon Councils, debarred
the Jews from such official posts as conferred on the holders authority
over Christians, and in the following year the Council of Paris
recommended their indiscriminate dismissal from all state offices. But
the decline of the “Merovingian drones” brought at last relief to the
Jews of Gaul.
In Spain, as in Gaul, Israel had pitched its tent very early--in all
probability before the fall of the Roman Republic. The number of the
colonists was subsequently increased by the captives carried off
from Palestine by Titus and Hadrian, and sold in various provinces of
the Empire, as well as by voluntary emigrants; so that the peninsula
was gradually dotted with their synagogues; many towns became known
as “Jewish” owing to the predominance of the chosen people in their
population, and many Jewish families pointed with pride to lengthy
pedigrees, real or imaginary, some dating their immigration from the
destruction of the Second Temple, others tracing their ancestry to
David; and not a few even claiming descent from settlers brought to
Spain by no less a personage than Nebuchadnezzar!
Here they remained unmolested until the conversion of the country
to Christianity, when the familiar process began. The new religion,
having wiped out idolatry, sought a fresh field among the Jews. Their
infidelity justified persecution; their wealth and their weakness
invited it. As early as the reign of Constantine the Great we find
Bishop Severus of Magona, in the island of Minorca, burning their
synagogues and forcing them to embrace Christianity, and Bishop Hosius
of Cordova prohibiting Christians, under pain of excommunication, from
trading, intermarrying, or otherwise mixing with the contaminated
race. ♦320♦ But the lot of Israel did not become unbearable until
long after the Visigoths from the North invaded, devastated, and
permanently occupied the peninsula. The first Arian kings, while
persecuting the Catholics, allowed full liberty, civil and political,
to the Israelites, who consequently rose to great affluence and to
the most important dignities in the state. This happy period ended
in the sixth century when King Reccared abjured the Arian heresy and
was received into the bosom of the Church. Then came orthodoxy, and
with it persecution. In 589 the Council of Toledo forbade the Jews to
own Christian slaves, and to hold public offices. The Jews tried to
avoid the first restriction by offering a great sum of money to King
Reccared. ♦599♦ But he refused the offer, and earned the eulogies
of Pope Gregory the Great, who compared him to King David; for as
David had poured the water brought to him out before the Lord, so
had Reccared sacrificed to God the gold offered to him. This was
precisely the principle which nine centuries later dictated Ferdinand
and Isabella’s policy towards the Jews. Indeed, early Visigothic
legislation supplies many curious precedents for mediaeval Spanish
bigotry. As time went on it doomed the whole Jewish race to servitude,
and invented many of the maxims and methods afterwards adopted and
perfected by the Inquisition.
Throughout the seventh century the hapless people experienced all the
rigour of Spanish statesmanship, guided by priestly malevolence. Even
bribery, the last resource of the oppressed, was provided against by
regulations which in their stringency showed that, if the Jews were
eager to purchase mercy, their ecclesiastical oppressors were not
above selling the commodity. ♦612♦ Under King Sisebut, the treatment
of the Jews was a rehearsal of the tragedy acted in the same country
eight hundred and sixty years later. They were imprisoned, plundered,
or burnt, and finally they were given the choice between apostasy
and expatriation. The most “stiff-necked” amongst them preferred the
loss of country and property to loss of self-respect. Ninety thousand
yielded to force, and saved themselves by apparent conversion. The
Church, while disapproving of compulsory proselytism, pronounced a
heavy sentence on those who openly renounced the creed which nothing
but the fear of banishment had driven them to embrace. Baptism became
a mask and a mockery. But even outward conformity could not long be
maintained unsupported by internal conviction, and many neophytes
seized the first opportunity of throwing off the hateful cloak.
Thereupon the Church, sorely scandalized at the sight of proselytes
falling back into the slough whence she had rescued them, induced
Sisenand, one of Sisebut’s successors, to restrain by force the Jews
once baptized from relapsing into Judaism, or from frequenting other
Jews, and, furthermore, to order that the children of the former
should be torn from their parents and be educated in monasteries and
nunneries. Those who were discovered secretly indulging in Hebrew
rites were condemned to lose their freedom and to serve the King’s
favourites. Side by side with these inhuman measures was carried on
a less harmful, though not less stupid, missionary campaign. All the
polemical arguments of the early Fathers were now refurbished, but with
no greater success than had attended them when brand-new.
However, these efforts of the Church notwithstanding, the nobles of
Spain continued to extend their protection over the persecuted people
until the accession of King Chintilla, who in a General Council
wrested from them a confirmation of the anti-Jewish enactments of his
predecessors, and, moreover, proclaimed a wholesale expulsion of all
Jews who refused to embrace Christianity. Again many Israelites were
driven out of the country, and many into hypocrisy.
It was hoped that this signal proof of piety on the King’s part would
break at last the inflexible infidelity of the race. ♦638♦ The Church
also decreed that every king in the future should at his coronation
take a solemn oath to continue the persecution of heretics. But
persecution presupposes a perfect accord between the civil authority
and the ecclesiastical; and, as has sometimes happened since, the
secular power in Spain recognised certain limits to its capacity for
obeying the spiritual. Chintilla died in 642, and later sovereigns
refused to carry out the decrees of the Church, while others tried
to do so in vain. The Jews were too useful to be dispensed with.
Political necessity overruled religious bigotry, and Spain, as every
other country in Europe, continued to present the strange spectacle of
a proscribed sect flourishing under the very eyes of the judges who
had repeatedly pronounced its doom. Despite the manifold disabilities
under which the Jews laboured, they remained and multiplied in the
peninsula, the pseudo-converts practising Judaism in secret; some of
the avowed Jews refuting the arguments of their assailants in polemical
treatises; all nursing a sullen hatred of their rulers and waiting for
an opportunity of gratifying it.
Such an opportunity offered itself in the Arab invasion, and the
Mohammedan Caliphs found in these suffering children of a kindred race
and religion ready and valuable allies. It is not improbable that the
fear of such an alliance between the followers of Mohammed and those
of Moses had intensified among the Christians of Spain the anti-Jewish
feeling which found vent in the violent persecution of the Jews during
the years immediately preceding the conquest of the peninsula. If so,
the Spaniards by their treatment of the Jews created the situation
which they feared. The Mohammedan invasion was prepared by the
intrigues of the Jews of Spain with their co-religionists in Africa,
who exposed to the Saracens the weaknesses of the Visigothic kingdoms.
Tarik, the Mohammedan conqueror, in his triumphant career through the
peninsula, ♦711♦ after the battle of Xeres, where Roderic the last
of the Visigothic kings had fallen, was everywhere supported by the
Jews. Cordova, Granada, Malaga, and other cities were entrusted to the
safe-keeping of the Jews, and Toledo was betrayed to the invader by the
Jews, who, while the Christian inhabitants were assembled in church
praying for divine help, ♦712♦ threw the gates open to the enemy,
acclaiming him as a saviour and an avenger.
Persecution had again awakened the desire for redemption, which had
never been allowed to remain dormant long. ♦About 720♦ The new Messiah
appeared in the person of a Syrian Jewish Reformer, named Serene. It
so happened that the Jews of Syria were at that time suffering almost
as cruelly at the hands of the fanatical Caliph Omar II. as at those
of the Christian Emperor Leo. ♦717–720♦ When, therefore, the Messiah
arose, promising to restore them to independence and to exterminate
their enemies, many Eastern Jews lent an attentive ear to his gospel.
The Redeemer’s fame reached Spain, and the Jews of that country
also, still smarting under the sufferings of centuries and probably
disappointed in the extravagant hopes which they had built upon the
Arab conquest, hastened to enlist under his banner. But Serene’s career
was cut short by Omar II.’s successor. The Commander of the Faithful
seized the Messiah and subjected him to a severe cross-examination.
Whether it was due to the subtlety of the theological riddles
propounded to him by the Caliph, or to some more tangible test of
constancy, the Prophet’s courage failed him. It was even said, by those
who had refused to follow the Messiah, or who having followed were
disillusioned, that Serene declared his mission to be only a practical
pleasantry at the expense of his credulous co-religionists. Be that
as it may, poor Serene was delivered up to the tender mercies of the
Synagogue, and his disgrace dissipated the Messianic dream for the time.
But in less than a generation another Reformer of the Messianic type
appeared in the Persian town of Ispahan to rekindle the enthusiasm
and try the faith of his people. This was Obaiah Abu Isa ben Ishak.
He, somewhat more modest than his predecessor, claimed to be only
one--though the last and most perfect--of a line of five forerunners
who were to prepare the way for the coming Redeemer. He also held
out the promise to free the children of Israel from thraldom. Nor
did he preach to deaf ears. One of the most striking inconsistencies
in the Jewish character is the combination which it presents of
unlimited shrewdness and suspiciousness with an almost equal capacity
for being duped. The people who in every age have been hated as past
masters of deceit, have themselves often been the greatest victims of
imposture. Religious belief is so strong in them that, especially in
times of suffering, nothing seems improbable that agrees with their
predisposition. _Libenter homines id quod volunt credunt._ Ten thousand
Jews rallied round Obaiah’s standard. The war for independence began at
Ispahan and for a while seemed to promise success. But the Prophet fell
in battle, and, though his memory was kept green by his followers, who
endured till the tenth century, none proved able to carry on the work
of deliverance.