THE CRUSADES
TOWARDS the end of the eleventh century there arose in Europe a gale
of religious enthusiasm that boded no good to infidels. The zealous
temper which at an earlier period had found a congenial pursuit in
the extirpation of heathenism from Saxony, Lithuania, Poland, and
the Baltic provinces, and in the suppression of heresy among the
Vaudois, the Cathari or Albigenses, and others at a later, was now
to be diverted into a different channel. During the preceding ages
the authority of the Popes had been advancing with stealthy, but
undeviating and steady, strides. Their own industry, foresight, and
prudence laid the foundations of their political power; the piety
and the ignorance of the nations which recognised their spiritual
rule consolidated it. Every succeeding age found the Bishop of Rome
in a higher position than that occupied by his predecessors, until
there came one who was fitted to make use of the immense heritage of
authority bequeathed to him.
Gregory VII., surnamed Hildebrand, ascended St. Peter’s throne in 1073.
Though born in an obscure village and of humble parentage, he was a
person endowed by nature with all the qualities necessary to make a
successful master of men: strong and ambitious, and possessed of an
ideal, he was a stranger to fear as to scruple. It was related of him
that, whilst a lad in his father’s workshop and ignorant of letters,
he accidentally framed out of little bits of wood the words: “His
dominion shall be from one sea to the other.” To his contemporaries
the story was prophetic (we may be content to regard it, true or not,
as characteristic) of his career. Gregory’s dream was to deliver the
papacy from the secular influence of the Emperor and to establish a
theocratic Empire. This was the guiding principle of his policy, and,
though his plans were flexible to circumstance, his purpose remained
fixed. Like all great men, Hildebrand knew that, where there is a
strong will, all roads lead to success. The first step to this end
was the purification of the Church of the corruption into which it
had sunk under his depraved predecessors, and the organisation of its
soldiers under strict rules of discipline. This was effected by the
suppression of simony and the enforcement of celibacy on the clergy. At
the same time Gregory did not neglect that which was the main object
of his life: to make Europe a vassal state to the pontifical see. The
thunderbolts of excommunication, which Gregory, the son of Bonic the
carpenter, wielded with Zeus-like majesty and impartiality, were freely
hurled against his enemies in the East and West. In the Emperor Henry
IV. the Pope met an adversary worthy of his heavenly artillery. But,
undismayed by Henry’s power, and unrestrained by considerations of
humanity, he plunged Christendom into that long-drawn strife between
the Guelf and Ghibelline factions which makes the history of Europe
for generations a melancholy tale of murder and outrage, ending in a
blood-stained triumph for St. Peter.
After having temporarily humbled Henry IV. and forced him in the dead
of winter to do penance in his shirt, the iron Pope turned his weapons
against the Jews. In 1078 he promulgated a canonical law forbidding the
hated people to hold any official post in Christendom, and especially
in Spain. Alfonso VI., King of Castile, two years later received
an Apostolic epistle congratulating him on his successes over the
Mohammedans, and admonishing him that “he must cease to suffer the Jews
to rule over the Christians, and to exercise authority over them,”
for such conduct, his Holiness affirmed, was “the same as oppressing
God’s Church and exalting Satan’s Synagogue. To wish to please Christ’s
enemies,” he added, “means to treat Christ himself with contumely.”
However, Alfonso was too busy in the campaign against his own enemies
to devote much attention to the enemies of Christ--or of Gregory
Hildebrand. None the less, the letter marks an epoch. What hitherto was
prejudice now became law.
In Germany also the Pope’s anti-Jewish decrees met with only partial
obedience. Bishop Rudiger of Speyer granted many privileges to the Jews
of his diocese. Their Chief Rabbi enjoyed the same judicial authority
over his own community as the burgomaster over the Christian burgesses.
The Jews were allowed to buy Christian slaves and to defend themselves
against the intrusion of the mob. For all these boons they paid three
and a half pounds of gold annually. The Emperor Henry IV., Gregory’s
antagonist, confirmed and augmented these privileges. He forbade his
subjects, under severe penalties, to compel the Jews, or their slaves,
to be baptized. In litigation between Jews and Christians the Jewish
law and form of oath were to be followed; and the former were exempted
from the ordeals of fire and water. But in spite of these favours their
lot was such as to encourage Messianic expectations. The Redeemer, a
prince of the house of David, was confidently awaited about this time
(1096) to lead the chosen people back to the Holy Land. However, fate
had other things in store for them.
It was a time when the Eastern and Western halves of mankind agreed
in regarding the conversion, or, at least, the extermination of each
other as their divinely appointed task. If the followers of Mohammed
considered it an article of faith that the propagation of Islam at all
costs was the supreme duty of every true believer, the propagation of
the belief in the divinity of Christ, or the annihilation of those who
denied it, was not less firmly held by all good Christians as a sacred
obligation. A collision between the rival creeds was inevitable. All
that was wanting was union on the part of the Christians equal to that
which characterised the Mohammedans. This consummation was prepared by
Peter the Hermit and was brought about by the exertions of the Pope.
♦1095♦
At the great Council of Clermont Urban II. described to the noble
crowd of prelates and barons, assembled from all parts of Western
Christendom, the sufferings of the Eastern Christians at the hands
of the Saracens. With burning eloquence, and, no doubt, considerable
exaggeration, he depicted the dark deeds of “the enemies of God”: their
destruction and desecration of Christian churches; their slaughter,
torture, and forcible conversion of Christian men, and their violation
of Christian women; and he ended with a passionate appeal to all
present to hasten to the assistance of the Holy Land, “enslaved by
the godless and calling aloud to be delivered”; promising, at the
same time, a plenary indulgence and general remission of sins to all
who should enlist under the banner of the Cross. The effect of the
Pontiff’s harangue on his chivalrous, sinful, and bigoted hearers was
stupendous. It was the first official instigation to that hatred of
the non-European and non-Christian which, however loth we may be to
acknowledge the fact, in a less furious form, still survives amongst
us. Many obeyed the summons with fervour born of pure piety; many
more saw in the enterprise a comparatively cheap means of obtaining
pardon for all their crimes, past and to come; while others welcomed
an opportunity for satisfying their adventurous dispositions, for
gaining wealth and renown, or for quenching in the blood of foreigners
that fanatical zeal which could not find its full gratification in the
butchery of fellow-countrymen.
Among such foreigners--Asiatic at once and infidel--the nearest were
the Jews. Cruelty, like its opposite, begins at home. It was natural
that the champions of the Cross should begin the vindication of
their sacred emblem by the extermination of the race which had made
so criminal a use of it. The shadow of the Old Crime once more fell
upon the hapless people, and darkened their lives. Religious frenzy
kindled the ancient feud, and greed fanned it. The vast and motley
rabble of savage peasants who, under the command of a monk and the
guidance of a goat, followed in the wake of the knightly army, incited
by the lower clergy, fell upon the Jewish colonies which lay along
their route through Central Europe--at Rouen, on the Moselle and the
Rhine, at Verdun, Trèves, Speyer, Metz, Cologne, Mayence, Worms,
Strasburg--massacring, pillaging, raping, and baptizing, without
remorse or restraint.
But the Jews, as on so many occasions before and since, so now proved
in a practical and ghastly manner that they dreaded death less than
apostasy. Many of them met bigotry with bigotry, and cheated their
assailants of both glory and gain by committing their property, their
families and themselves to destruction. Martyrdom is a pathetic yet
forcible reply to oppression. At Trèves the Jews, on hearing that the
holy army was drawing near, were so terrified that some of them killed
their own children; matrons and maidens drowned themselves in the
Moselle in order to escape baptism or disgrace; and the rest of the
community vainly implored the hard-hearted Bishop for protection. His
answer was that nothing could save them but conversion. Thereupon the
wretches hastened to be converted. The scene must have been a perfect
study in the grimly ludicrous. The enemy was outside ready to pounce
upon his prey. The latter said to the Bishop: “Tell us quickly what to
believe.” The Bishop recited the creed, and the converts repeated it
after him with all the fervour and fluency which the fear of death can
only inspire.
At Speyer the Jews stoutly refused to be baptized, and many were,
therefore, massacred. Those who succeeded in escaping sought shelter
in the palace of the Bishop, who not only protected them, but incurred
the censures of his contemporaries by ordering the execution of some
of the holy murderers. A similar tragedy was acted at Worms, where
some of the victims were temporarily saved by the Bishop, while a few
were baptized, and the rest, men and women, committed suicide. At
Mayence, they were slaughtered in the Archbishop’s palace, where they
had taken refuge, and many murdered each other rather than betray their
faith. At Cologne the majority of the community were rescued by the
good burghers and their humane Bishop Hermann III. The Emperor Henry
IV, also, on his return from his third Italian campaign, publicly
denounced the crimes of the Crusaders, instituted proceedings against
the Archbishop of Mayence, who had shared the spoils of the Jews, and
permitted the surviving converts to return to Judaism; ♦1097♦ thereby
drawing down upon himself an indignant reproof from his own antipope,
Clement III., on whose behalf he had undertaken that expedition to
Italy. For, however grateful Clement might be to Henry, he could not
conscientiously connive at his impious interference with the designs of
Providence.
♦1146♦
Similar scenes were repeated at the Second Crusade. Pope Eugenius
III. issued a Bull, announcing that all who joined in the Holy War
would be released from the interest which they owed to the Jewish
money-lenders. St. Bernard seconded the Pope’s recruiting efforts.
Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Clugny, exerted himself by might and main
to inflame King Louis VII. of France and other noble Crusaders against
the Jews: “Of what use is it,” wrote he to the king, “to go forth to
seek the enemies of Christendom in distant lands, if the blasphemous
Jews, who are much worse than the Saracens, are permitted in our very
midst to scoff with impunity at Christ and the Sacrament?... Yet, I
do not require you to put to death these accursed beings, because it
is written ‘Do not slay them.’ God does not wish to annihilate them,
but like Cain, the Fratricide, they must be made to suffer fearful
torments, and continue reserved for greater ignominy, and to an
existence more bitter than death.” In conformity with this charitable
doctrine, the Jews of France were forced to yield their ill-gotten
gains for the service of the cause of God.
Far worse was their fate in Germany. Even the partial protection which
the citizens of the Rhineland had afforded the persecuted people in
the First Crusade was now withdrawn, and the undisciplined mob gave
the reins to the gratification of its religious zeal and of its lust.
St. Bernard endeavoured to curb the demon of fanaticism, which his
own eloquence had raised, by admonishing the enthusiasts, with more
earnestness than consistency, that “the Jews are not to be persecuted,
not to be butchered.” But his well-meant efforts produced no other
effect than to turn the fury of the mob against himself; for a rival
monk, Rudolf, had been going up and down the Rhineland, everywhere
preaching, with tears in his eyes, that all Jews who were found by the
Crusaders should be slain as “murderers of our dear Lord”--an appeal
far more acceptable to the brutal herd of besotted hinds to whom it was
addressed. The persecution commenced at Trèves, in August, 1146, where
a Jew was seized by the Crusaders, and, on refusing to be saved by
baptism, was murdered and mutilated. Soon afterwards a Jewess at Speyer
was tortured on the rack. Many others were waylaid and made to suffer
for their constancy at Würsburg and elsewhere. From Germany the frenzy
passed into France. At Carenton, Rameru, and Sully the Jews were hunted
and massacred.
For one who, in the face of such deeds, strives to preserve his
faith in human nature, it is reassuring to note that the German
bishops exerted themselves on behalf of the miserable victims, and,
by accepting a simulated and temporary conversion, rescued many from
martyrdom. The Emperor also extended to them his protection. But this
favour was to cost the recipients dearly. Henceforth the German Jews
were regarded as the Emperor’s _protégés_, which gradually came to mean
the Emperor’s serfs. All they possessed, including their families and
their own persons, were the Emperor’s chattels to be bought, sold, or
pledged by him at pleasure. They were designated “Chamber-servants”
(_Servi Camerae_ or _Kammerknechte_); a servitude, however, that had
the advantage of making it the Emperor’s interest to safeguard them
against oppression, and to suffer no one to fleece them but himself.
And yet, such is the wonderful vitality of the race, the Jewish
traveller, Benjamin of Tudela, who visited the Jewry on the Rhine only
seventy years after the First, and twenty after the Second, Crusade,
describes these colonies as rich in money and culture and hope; the
brethren whom he found there as hospitable, cheerfully alive, and
awaiting the Messiah. This expectation had never been entertained in
vain. The wish had always yielded its own fulfilment. About this time,
it gave rise to David Alroy, another Redeemer destined to delude the
hapless nation for a while. He appeared in Asia Minor, and summoned
his brethren to his banner. Many gave up all they possessed in order
to respond to the call, and the enthusiasm spread from Baghdad to East
and West. But the Messiah was excommunicated by the Synagogue, and
murdered by his own father-in-law while asleep. According to another
version,[49] Alroy, when face to face with the Sultan, exclaimed: “Cut
off my head and I shall yet live.” He thus astutely exchanged prompt
death for lingering torture. Many Jews, however, continued to believe
in him for generations after his death.
The same spirit of religious mania which gave birth and sustenance to
the Crusades animated other movements, more enduring in their results,
if less romantic in their form. In 1198 the throne of St. Peter was
filled by Innocent III., a young and zealous priest, fired with the
lofty ambition to make Romanism the dominant creed over East and West,
and himself the autocrat of a united Roman Catholic world. His genius
was all but equal to this Titanic task, and in a reign of eighteen
years Innocent, favoured by the convulsions and feuds which rent the
whole of Europe, succeeded in raising the Papacy to a pinnacle of
power only dreamt of by his predecessors, and attained by few of his
successors. A worthy spiritual descendant of Gregory VII., he made and
unmade Emperors and Kings at will, visiting the disobedience of princes
upon whole nations, or compelling them to submission by releasing their
subjects from their oath of allegiance. He exercised an absolute sway
over the conscience and the mind of contemporary Christendom, and his
pontificate was distinguished, in Gibbon’s scathing phrase, by “the
two most signal triumphs over sense and humanity, the establishment
of transubstantiation and the origin of the Inquisition.” ♦1200♦ It
was he, who by a rigorous interdict laid upon the Kingdom of France,
compelled the headstrong Philip Augustus to recall the wife whom he had
dismissed; ♦1208♦ who by the ban of excommunication forced John, King
of England, to lay his crown at the feet of his legate, ♦1211♦ and who
by the execution of a like sentence against the Emperor Otho, John’s
nephew, had humbled that mighty and haughty monarch to the dust. It was
under his auspices that the Fifth Crusade was undertaken, ♦1203♦ and it
was with his connivance that the forces, ostensibly recruited for the
deliverance of the holy Sepulchre from the infidels, were employed to
subjugate the Christian Empire of the East, and thus to pave the way
for the advent of the Turk.
However, these and many other triumphs notwithstanding, Innocent’s
dream of world-wide dominion could not be fully realised while such a
thing as individual conscience remained in the world, and individual
conscience could not be abolished without persecution. Innocent was
too great a despot to shrink from the difficulties of the work; too
sincere a Catholic to show any pity to unbelief. The thirteenth
century opened under evil omens for dissenters. Immediately on his
accession Innocent had demanded the suppression of the Albigenses of
Southern France, those unfortunate forerunners of the Reformation,
because they, choosing to follow the dictates of their own conscience,
refused to conform to the practices of the Church and to comply with
the commands of her clergy. ♦1207♦ Raymund VI., Count of Toulouse,
however, declined to consider the massacre of his subjects one of his
duties as a sovereign, and was excommunicated. In the following year
the Pope, seizing the pretext offered by the murder of his legate,
proclaimed an unholy war against the heretics. And so great was the
Pope’s power over the superstitious and unscrupulous world of mediaeval
Europe, that thousands volunteered to carry out the Pontiff’s atrocious
orders. Raymund, who alone among the Christian princes had ventured
to raise his voice in defence of the persecuted, had meanwhile been
stripped of his dominions, dragged naked into the Church, scourged by
the Pope’s legate, and was now forced to lead the crusade against his
own people. The harmless population was almost exterminated by the
most barbarous means, their heresy was all but quenched in blood; and
one of the most prosperous and civilised provinces of Europe was laid
waste. The ferocity of the soldiers was eclipsed by that of the monks
and priests, great numbers of whom swelled the ranks of the butchers.
On the 22nd of July, 1209, the city of Beziers was taken by storm. The
Abbot Arnold, being asked how the heretics were to be distinguished
from true believers, replied, “Slay all; God will know his own.” “We
spared,” said the same monk in his report to the Pope, “no dignity, no
sex, no age; nearly twenty thousand human beings have perished by the
sword. After that great massacre the town was plundered and burnt, and
the revenge of God seemed to rage upon it in a wonderful manner.”
So fared European heretics within the Church. Infidels of alien blood
could hardly expect better treatment. The popular notion that the
dispersion and sufferings of the Jews were a divine punishment for
the crucifixion of Christ was raised by Innocent to the dignity of a
dogma. It followed as a logical corollary that it was the sacred duty
of Christ’s Vicar on earth to make the culprits feel the full rigour of
the sentence. After the fashion of fanatics, Innocent mistook his own
intolerance for holy enthusiasm, and, while indulging his own hatred,
he imagined that he was only hating the enemies of Heaven. It was also
currently believed that the example and the teaching of the Jews tended
to pervert their Christian neighbours, and to encourage protest and
heresy. The Albigensian sect in France, already mentioned, like the
Hussite reform movement in Bohemia two centuries later, was attributed
to Jewish influence. For both these reasons, their own infidelity and
their tendency to foster infidelity in others, the Jews ought to be
crushed.
The times were propitious. In 1167 the assassination of Raymund,
Viscount of Beziers, had deprived the Jews of their protector. ♦1170♦
His successor Roger, who favoured the Albigensian heretics, had Jewish
sheriffs; but his partiality to these two classes of enemies of
Catholicism had provoked the wrath of the Pope and led to the prince’s
tragic death. At Montpellier William VIII. and his sons excluded the
Jews from the office of Sheriff. ♦1178–1201♦ But these restrictions
were not sufficient. Innocent began the attack methodically in 1205,
when he wrote to Philip Augustus, King of France, complaining of
the usurious extortions of the Jews in that country, of their being
allowed to employ Christian servants and nurses, and of the fact that
Christians were not admitted to depose against Jews--things which were
contrary to the resolution of the Third Lateran Council held under Pope
Alexander III. ♦1179♦ Moreover, Innocent complained that the Jewish
community of Sens had built a new synagogue which rose to a greater
height than the neighbouring Christian church, and disturbed the
service in the latter by loud and insolent chanting; that they scoffed
at Christianity, and that they murdered Christians; and he ended by
exhorting Philip Augustus to oppress the enemies of Christ. A similar
epistle was addressed to Alfonso, King of Castile, threatening him with
St. Peter’s displeasure, should he continue to allow the Synagogue
to thrive at the expense of the Church. Three years later a pastoral
epistle to the same effect was sent to the Count of Nevers, urging him
to coerce the Jews and condemn them to serfdom, for they, “like the
fratricide Cain, are doomed to wander about the earth as fugitives and
vagabonds, and their faces must be covered with insult.” The writer
further pointed out that it is disgraceful for Christian princes to
receive Jews into their towns and villages, to employ them as usurers
in order to extort money from the Christians, and to allow them to
press wine which was used in the Lord’s Supper.
♦1209♦
All the above exhortations were systematised by the Council of Avignon.
By the Statutes then passed the Jews were officially pronounced
as polluted and polluting. It was decreed that “Jews and harlots
should not dare to touch with their hands bread or fruits exposed
for sale.”[50] The old Church law which forbade the Jews to employ
Christian servants was renewed and enforced. The faithful were warned
neither to receive services from Jews nor to render services to them,
but to avoid them as a pest. All who had any dealings with Jews who
transgressed these decrees were threatened with excommunication.
Raymund of Toulouse, the protector of the Albigensian heretics and
friend of the Jews, and all the barons of free cities, were bound by
oath to carry out the decisions of the Council.
♦1211♦
Once more oppression from without fanned the longing for Redemption in
the hearts of the Jews. The yearning after Zion, invigorated by Jehuda
Halevi’s poetry, impelled more than three hundred Rabbis of France and
England to emigrate to the Holy Land, where they visited the spots
hallowed by the spirits of the past, wept over the ruins of their
departed glory, and built synagogues and schools in order to keep alive
the memory and the hope of a better day.
Meanwhile the Pope did not allow the iron to cool. In 1215 a great
Œcumenical Council was convoked in Rome, under his presidency, to
complete the ruin of the Albigenses, to stimulate the Crusades against
the Saracens of Spain and Palestine, and, generally, to promote the
kingdom of God on earth. The Jews, knowing from experience that
any measures taken to that end could not fail to redound to their
detriment, hastened to send deputies to Rome, in order to ward off the
blow. But their endeavours proved fruitless. Four out of the seventy
canonical decrees passed by the Council referred to them. The King of
France, the Duke of Burgundy, and all other princes were called upon
to lend their help in reducing the doomed people in their respective
dominions to that state of bondage which was ordained for it by the
divine will, as interpreted by theological bigotry. The Pope’s order
met with general obedience. In most European countries the Jews
were forbidden to hold any public appointment of trust, or to show
themselves in the streets at Easter. They were obliged to pay tithes
to the Church that persecuted them, and the head of each Jewish family
was forced to subscribe an annual sum at the Easter festival. They
were compelled by heavy fines and penalties to wear a yellow badge
of distinction, which in their case meant a badge of shame, and the
Christians were exhorted by their pastors not to allow their homes or
their shops to be defiled by the presence of Heaven’s enemies.
However, papal decrees and anathemas notwithstanding, self-interest
might have prevailed over religious fanaticism, and the sovereigns who
had hitherto sold their connivance to the Jews might have continued
to shield them. In fact, the Duke of Toulouse and the barons, despite
the oath which they had been obliged to take, continued to invest
the Jews with public dignities, and in Spain the Pope’s commands
were strenuously ignored. But there now came into being a power of
persecution, even more formidable than Papacy itself. The pan-Catholic
enthusiasm, which had inspired Innocent’s anti-Jewish policy was
bequeathed to two bodies of apostles, through whose organised zeal it
was destined to spread far and wide, and, like a poisonous breath,
to blight many a noble flower in the bud. The age of stationary and
corpulent monks was succeeded by the age of lean and wandering friars.
♦1223♦ A few years after Innocent’s death were instituted the Order
of Dominic and the Order of Francis, the precursors of the stakes and
scaffolds of the Inquisition. The latter order had been called into
existence with the special object of stamping out the Albigensian
heresy. But an essential part of the mission of both bodies was to hunt
out dissent, to root out free-thought, and to realise the bigot’s ideal
of spiritual peace by means of intellectual starvation. Uniformity
was their idol, and to that idol they were prepared to sacrifice the
moral sense of mankind and the lives of their fellow-creatures. The
Jews supplied them with a splendid field for the exercise of their
missionary ardour: numerous, obstinate, rich and unpopular, they
offered a prey as tempting as it was safe. The friars were in some
ways an undoubted power for good; but the Jews experienced none of this
better side of their activity.
In 1227 a Council at Narbonne confirmed the canonical ordinances
against the Jews, and many ancient decrees of the Merovingian kings
were revived. Not only were the Jews forbidden to take interest on
money and compelled to wear the badge and to pay taxes to the Church,
but they were again prohibited from stirring abroad during Easter.
♦1231♦ Shortly afterwards two other Councils at Rouen and Tours
re-enacted and enlarged the anti-Jewish statutes of the Council of Rome.
But the Dominicans were as subtle as they were zealous. They felt
that the citadel of Judaism which had held out for so many centuries,
could not be carried by storm. They resorted to less crude tactics.
With a patience, perseverance, and ingenuity worthy of their high
ambition, they devoted themselves to the study of the Hebrew language
and literature, their Master Raymund de Peñaforte prevailing upon the
Kings of Aragon and Castile to found special colleges for the purpose.
The Prophets of the Old Testament had already supplied the apologists
of the Church with proofs of the truth of Christianity.[51] The Talmud
was now to supply them with fresh proofs of the falsity of Judaism.
From the pages of that marvellous compilation of noble thoughts
and multifarious absurdity, they culled everything that was likely
to reflect discredit on the morality or the intelligence of their
adversaries. In this campaign the Dominicans were fortunate enough
to enlist the services of renegade Jews, who, after the fashion of
renegades, strove to prove their loyalty to the faith they embraced by
a bitter persecution of the one they deserted. One of these apostates,
Nicolas Donin by name, in 1239 submitted to Pope Gregory IX. a minute
indictment of the pernicious book, and induced him to issue Bulls to
the Kings of England, Spain, and France, as well as to the bishops
in those countries, ordering a general confiscation of the Talmud,
and a public enquiry into the charges brought against its contents.
The Pope’s instructions, so far as we know, appear to have produced
no impression in the first two kingdoms, but in France there reigned
Louis IX., known to fame as St. Louis: in mundane affairs a brave,
high-minded, just and humane prince; but not far in advance of his
age in things celestial. In fact, he possessed all the prejudices of
an ordinary mediaeval knight, and more than the superstition of an
ordinary mediaeval monk. He was sincerely convinced that the road to
heaven lay through Jerusalem. Acting on this conviction, he led the
last two Crusades, and laid down his life in the cause of Catholicism;
a sacrifice which earned him a place among the saints of the Church.
Such a prince could not, without flagrant inconsistency, ignore the
Pontiff’s wishes. He, therefore, ordered that a careful search for the
suspected book should be made throughout his dominions, that all copies
should be seized, and that a public disputation should be held, in
which four Rabbis were to take up the challenge thrown down by Donin.
The antagonists met in the precincts of the Court, and a brilliant
assembly of secular and spiritual magnates formed the audience. Donin
warmly denounced the Talmud as a farrago of blasphemy, slander,
superstition, immorality and folly, and the Rabbis defended it as
warmly as they dared. The debate, though distinguished by all the
scurrility and more than all the ferocity of a village prize-fight,
seems to have been conducted on the principle that whichever side had
the best of the argument, the Christian should win; and the Court
of Inquisitors returned a verdict accordingly. The Talmud was found
guilty of all the charges brought against it and was sentenced to the
flames. Execution was delayed for two years through bribery; but it
was carried out in 1242. Fourteen--some say four and twenty--cartloads
of Rabbinical lore and legislation fed the bonfire. The grief of the
French Jews at the loss of their sacred books was bitter, and the most
pious amongst them kept the anniversary of the cremation as a day of
fasting.[52]
♦1263♦
Twenty-one years later a similar tourney took place in Barcelona by
order, and in the presence, of Jayme I., King of Aragon. Don Jayme had
borrowed from his northern neighbours the axiom that the Jews were
to be treated as royal chattels. Moreover, his conscience was in the
keeping of Raymund de Peñaforte, the Master of the Dominicans, a great
Inquisitor born before his time. King Jayme had led an amorous and
not immaculate youth. He was, therefore, in his old age, peculiarly
susceptible to his Confessor’s admonitions. The sins of love should be
atoned for by acts of persecution. The religious freedom of the Jews
should be offered up as a sacrifice of expiation. It was the logic and
the morality of the Middle Ages.
The outcome of Jayme’s remorse was a theological contest at the royal
court of Barcelona. There again the lists were held for Christianity
by a Dominican friar of Jewish antecedents, while the champion of
Judaism was Nachmanides, famed in the annals of Israel as the greatest
philosopher, physician, theologian, and controversialist of his age.
Pablo Christiani politely endeavoured to prove that the prophets of the
Jews had predicted the advent and recognised the divinity of Jesus.
Nachmanides with equal politeness denied that they had done anything of
the kind. After five days’ refined recrimination the Court unanimously
pronounced in favour of Christianity. The books of the Jews were
expurgated of all “anti-Christian” passages, Nachmanides’s account of
the controversy was burnt publicly as blasphemous, and the author,
then in his seventieth year, banished from Spain, ended his days in
Jerusalem. Pablo, whose ambition was kindled by victory, undertook a
tour through the Iberian Peninsula and Provence, and, armed with a
royal edict, compelled the Jews to engage in religious controversies
with him and to defray the expenses of his missionary journeys.
Missions to the Jews became the fashion of the day, and the kingdoms
of the West were overrun by itinerant dialecticians seeking whom they
might convert. The Jews were forced to attend church and to listen to
sermons against their own religion. Thanks to their long training in
Rabbinical subtleties, the benighted people sometimes proved more than
a match for their assailants, and, if fair play were not contrary to
the laws of ecclesiastical warfare, they might succeed in converting
the would-be convertors. But, though religious discussion was invited,
nay, forced by the Church, it was always on the clear understanding
that the Christians might beat the Jews, but that the Jews should under
no circumstances be allowed to beat the Christians. To prevent any
misconception on the subject, Thomas Aquinas, justly celebrated as one
of the least bigoted of theologians, and distinguished among schoolmen
for his tolerance of Judaism, gravely cautioned his readers to have no
intercourse with the Jews, unless they felt sure that their faith was
proof against reason.
In later years the work of conversion in the various countries was
entrusted by the Popes to Dominican friars and inquisitors, who carried
it on with a diligence never practised except by men fanatically
believing in the truth of their doctrines and with a ruthlessness only
possible in men too firmly persuaded of the holiness of the end to be
scrupulous about the means. These apostles were authorised to reinforce
the powers of their eloquence by an appeal to the secular arm. Even so
modern missionaries in China have been known in time of peril to forget
that an apostle should be above earthly weapons and “to clamour for a
gunboat with which to ensure respect for the Gospel.”[53]
And while disappointed theologians represented the Jew’s loyalty to
his religion as a proof of his anti-Christian tendencies, scholars
represented his aloofness as a proof of his anti-social nature, and
they both agreed in denouncing him as “an enemy of mankind.” This
lesson, to use the words of a distinguished Jewish writer, “was dinned
into the ears of the masses until the calumny became part of the
popular creed. The poets formulated the idea for the gentry, the friars
brought it to the folk.”[54]
The animosity thus fomented against the Jews found frequent
opportunities of translating itself into acts of horror. In France,
after the war declared against the unfortunate people by the Church,
they lost the royal protection which they had enjoyed hitherto, and
were henceforth exposed not only to the spasmodic fury of the populace,
but also to systematic persecution on the part of bishops, barons
and towns. Bishop Odo of Paris, in 1197, forbade the Christians to
have any dealings, social or commercial, with the Jews. ♦1236♦ The
Crusaders called to arms by Gregory IX. attacked the Jewish communities
of Anjou, Poitou, Bordeaux, Angoulème, and elsewhere, and on the Jews
refusing to be baptized, the holy warriors trampled many of them, men,
women and children, to death under the hoofs of their horses, burned
their synagogues, and pillaged and sacked their private dwellings. St.
Louis encouraged the conversion of the Jews, permitting the children
of baptized fathers to be torn away from their unregenerate mothers.
♦1246♦ By a decree of the Council of Beziers the disabilities of the
Jews were once more confirmed, and the Christians were now forbidden to
call in Jewish doctors, thus depriving the Jews of the profession which
they had hitherto almost monopolised in Europe. ♦1257♦ A few years
after Pope Alexander IV., who had just established the Inquisition
in France at the request of St. Louis, issued another Bull in which
the ruler of that kingdom and other princes were again exhorted to
enforce the distinctive garb upon the Jews and to burn all copies of
the Talmud. To omit minor acts of oppression, the fanatical sect of the
“Shepherds,” following the example of the Crusaders, massacred the Jews
on the Garonne in 1320.
♦1218–1250♦
In Germany the sufferings of Israel were equally severe. The Emperor
Frederick II., despite his infidelity and his enmity towards the
Papacy, adopted the Pope’s anti-Jewish decrees. He excluded the Jews
from public offices, he censured the Archduke of Austria for tolerating
and protecting them, he enforced the use of the badge in his Italian
and Sicilian dominions, and he oppressed them with heavy taxes,
dwelling with especial satisfaction on the dictum that the Jews were
the Emperor’s serfs. In the troublous period which followed Frederick’s
death the Jews were slain and burnt in great numbers at Weissenberg,
Magdeburg, and Erfurt, while other cities year after year witnessed
wholesale slaughter, and “Jew-roaster” became a coveted title of
honour. In addition to occasional massacre, from the end of the twelfth
to the middle of the fifteenth century the German Jews underwent eight
expulsions and confiscations of their communal property: Vienna (1196),
Mecklenburg (1225), Frankfort (1241), Brandenburg (1243), Nuremberg
(1390), Prague (1391), Heidelberg (1391), and Ratisbon (1476).
In Switzerland the persecution commenced about the middle of the
fourteenth century, and several expulsions are recorded in the ensuing
century. In Eastern Europe the Jews suffered in Russia and Hungary.
The semi-civilised and semi-Christianized Magyars, who had hitherto
tolerated the Jews, were incited to acts of oppression by the Western
friars. Poland and Lithuania were the only European countries where
the Jews of the later Middle Ages found shelter, and consequently both
those countries received large numbers of fugitives from the Western
fields of carnage.
Credulity joined hands with bigotry. No story told of the Jews was too
extravagant for belief; no charge brought against them too trivial for
repetition, provided it afforded an excuse for persecution. Some of
the odious crimes attributed by the heathens in the early centuries
to the Christians, as a justification of their suppression, were now
revived by the Christians against the Jews. The latter were accused of
enveigling Christian children into their houses and sacrificing them
for ritual or medicinal purposes, of travestying the sacraments of the
Church, of poisoning wells and of committing all kinds of abominations,
which plainly rendered their utter extermination a public duty. Similar
charges, curiously enough, are still brought against the Jews by the
Christians of Eastern Europe, by the Jews themselves against Hebrew
converts to Islam in Turkey, and by the Chinese against Protestant
missionaries--“charges of gross personal immorality and of kidnapping
and mutilation of children, which, however monstrous and malevolent,
are not the less, but the more serious, because they are firmly
believed by the ignorant audiences to whom they are addressed.”[55] To
the vulgar all that is strange is sinister.
The free propagation of these heinous and disgusting myths among the
vulgar masses of mediaeval Europe led, as it had done in ancient times
and as it has done more recently, to a horrible persecution of those
against whom they were levelled. ♦1171♦ The Jews were ruthlessly burnt
by order of Duke Theobalt at Blois, were massacred by the populace
in Languedoc and Central France, ♦1321♦ and on the plague breaking
out in the following year, they were burnt _en masse_--men, women and
children. A season of alternate persecution and toleration ensued,
until they were banished from Central France and finally driven out
from the rest of the country by the insane King Charles VI., ♦1394–5♦
at the end of the fourteenth century.
In Germany wherever the dead body of a Christian was found, the murder
was promptly laid at the door of the Jews, who on such occasions were
bidden to be baptized or die. So firm a hold had the blood-accusation
got upon the minds of the people that there was no mystery which could
not be cleared up by a simple reference to the Jews. The outbreak of
the Black Death in Germany also was attributed to Jewish malevolence.
It is now held that this scourge originated in India and was conveyed
to Europe by trade routes and armies, or that it arose from the
insanitary conditions of mediaeval life. But the mediaeval world was
convinced that it could only be the work of the Jews. Their comparative
immunity from the disease, due perhaps to their superior temperance,
lent colour to the theory; confessions extorted by torture dissipated
all doubts on the subject. It was commonly believed that the Jews of
Spain, those redoubtable professors of the Black Art, had invented this
fiendish method for the extermination of Christianity; that they had
despatched emissaries with boxes of poison concocted of basilisks and
lizards, or even of Christian hearts, to all the Jewish congregations
in Europe and had persuaded or compelled them to disseminate death
among the Christians by poisoning the wells and springs. The
arch-poisoner was even indicated by name. The Jews were in consequence
subjected to a widespread persecution, at the hands of a mob maddened
by the terrible and mysterious epidemic. ♦1348–50♦ Despite the
Emperor’s energetic efforts to save his serfs, the more disinterested
exertions of humane burgomasters, sheriffs, and municipal councils, and
Pope Clement VI.’s Bull in which the absurdity of the poison charge was
solemnly exposed, the wretched people were slaughtered and burnt by
thousands in many parts of Germany, and at last they were banished from
the Empire. Yet their services were so valuable that they gradually
returned, only to submit to new social restrictions and contumelious
enactments on the part of the Church.
Similar scenes were performed through the length and breadth of
Switzerland and Belgium.
In Poland alone, which had long been a haven of refuge to the hunted
Jews, these abominable calumnies found a very limited market as yet. It
was there enacted that a charge of ritual murder brought by a Christian
against a Jew, unless the accuser succeeded in substantiating it,
should be punished with death. This generous treatment of the Polish
Jews, it is said, was partly due to King Casimir IV.’s love for a
Jewish mistress. Through her influence the children of Israel obtained
many privileges which placed them on a footing of social equality
with the Christians. At a time when they were oppressed, reviled and
butchered in almost every Western country, in Poland their lives and
liberties were as safe as those of the nobility itself. Whilst the
native peasants were still treated as serfs, the Jews were allowed the
aristocratic privilege of wearing rapiers. Any Jew might, by simply
renouncing his religion, become a nobleman. As stewards of the estates
belonging to the Polish magnates, the Jews possessed even the power of
inflicting capital punishment on the Christian slaves of the soil: so
much so that during the terrible pestilence not more than ten thousand
Jews were massacred in Poland.