THE GHETTO
HITHERTO the life of Israel in Italy had been a life chequered by
sunlight and shade. Henceforth it is to be all shade. The sixteenth
century is the century of the Ghetto and its foul degradation. The
Italian Jews were destined to feel the effects of the Catholic
reaction, provoked by the attacks of the Reformers, and although this
reaction commenced latest, it lasted longest in Italy.
In 1540 Ignatius Loyola promulgated his gospel of obedience,
intolerance and intellectual suicide, and the doctrine that no deed
is unholy or immoral which is done in the service of the Catholic
Church--than which no more startling or sinister doctrine was ever
preached to the foolish sons of man. At the same time the Inquisition,
having placed the extermination of the Moors and the Jews in Spain on
a sound business basis, sought fresh employment for its energy and its
racks. The experience of the older institution, thus united with the
ardour of the young, presented a combination of forces such as none but
the most resourceful of heretics could resist. It was not long before
the Jews of Italy became aware of this revival of enthusiasm for the
Faith.
♦1540♦
In the very same inauspicious year the Holy Office began the
persecution of the Marranos of Naples, then under Spanish rule.
These pseudo-Christians were ordered to wear the badge or to leave
the country. Rightly divining that the badge was only the prelude to
worse things, they preferred to go into exile. Some of them bent their
steps to Ancona and Ferrara, but the majority set out for Turkey.
Many were captured by pirates on their voyage and were carried off
to Marseilles, where the French King Henry II., though otherwise a
prince of unimpeachably obscurantist leanings, received them kindly;
but, as he dared not retain them, he despatched them to Turkey. ♦1550♦
Ten years later the Dominicans inflamed the Genoese against the small
Jewish community in the Republic, and the Jews were banished. These
were but two episodes in the later history of the Italian Jews,
interesting chiefly as indicative of that change of feeling which led
to the tragedy of the Ghetto.
As we have seen, there always was a natural tendency for the children
of Israel to gravitate towards the same point--a habit which originated
the Jewries of England, the _Judenstadt_ of Germany, the _Juderias_
of Spain and the Jewish quarters in most mediaeval countries. But we
have also seen that, under tolerable conditions, the Jews entertained
no unconquerable aversion from dwelling amidst the Gentiles, and that,
when treated as human beings, they developed a certain degree of
community of feeling and interest with their fellow-creatures. Further,
we have noticed this gradual reconciliation blocked partly by the
efforts of the Synagogue, but far more successfully by those of the
Church; and we have found in certain countries the Jews claiming from
the princes who favoured and fleeced them segregation as a privilege
and as a means of self-protection.
In the time of Pope Gregory VII. the Bishop of Speyer, in order
to save the Jews from the violence of the mob, allotted to them a
particular quarter which they might fortify and defend. In the middle
of the thirteenth century King Ferdinand of Castile granted a similar
privilege to the Jews of Seville. In the city of Cologne the Jews, a
century later, paid an annual fee of twenty marks to the officer whose
task it was to lock the gates of their special quarter at sundown
and to unlock them at dawn. The feudal lawlessness of the times made
such precautions necessary not only for the Jews, but for all mortals
who were not strong enough to secure respect for their persons and
property; so much so that the Jews of Prague who lived outside the
Jewish quarter resolved of their own accord to join their brethren in
the _Judenstadt_ for greater safety. ♦1473♦ Compulsory concentration
of the Jews within separate quarters, it is true, was not unknown
even in those days. Restrictions of this kind seem to have been in
force in Sicily as early as the fourteenth century, and in certain
German States even in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries, while the
“Jewish barrier” of Tudela dates from the eleventh century. Such cases,
however, were sporadic and exceptional. It is in the enlightened age
with which we are now dealing, and in the most enlightened country
in Europe, that the isolation of Israel begins to be rigidly and
universally enforced as a means of coercion. The walls of the Jewish
quarter are no longer a bulwark against attack, but a barrier against
escape.
The name, as well as the institution under its new and offensive form,
is of Venetian origin. The term is derived from the _Getto_--the old,
walled iron-foundry, within the precincts of which the first Jewish
_Ghetto_ was established in the city of St. Mark, in 1516. The Jews had
made Venice their home in very early times; but their colony, in its
subsequent extent, dates from the beginning of the thirteenth century.
It was then that Jewish merchants from north and east began to pour
into the city that was to become, partly by their help, the commercial
capital of Italy. Their relations to the Christian inhabitants were
neither hostile nor yet hearty. The common people detested them, but
the Government was consistent in its protection of their persons and
interests. An incident that occurred in the fifteenth century serves to
illustrate the Jew’s position in the Venetian Republic.
During the Holy Week of 1475 a Christian child was drowned at Trent,
and its body was caught in a grating close to the house of a Jew. The
priests immediately saw in the accident evidence of ritual murder, and,
by exhibiting the body in public, they stirred up the populace against
the supposed murderers. All the Jews of the city, male and female,
young and old, rich and poor, were cast into prison by order of the
Bishop. A baptized Jew came forth as accuser, and the prisoners, put to
the torture, confessed that they had slain little Simon and drunk his
blood on the night of the Passover. A Jewess was said to have supplied
the weapon for the crime. With the exception of four Jews, who embraced
Christianity, the rest were banished from Trent. Cardinal Hadrian,
writing half a century later, describes the rocks of Trent as a place
“where the Jews, owing to Simon’s murder, dare not even approach.”[77]
Meanwhile the corpse of the child was embalmed and advertised by the
monks as a wonder-working relic. Thousands of pilgrims repaired to
the shrine, and, such is the power of faith, swore that they saw the
remains shining with an unearthly light. The miracle brought profit to
the monks, and yet they, with as little logic as gratitude, denounced
those whom they considered its proximate cause. The fame, or infamy,
of the incident spread far and wide. In Great Britain it is believed
to have given rise to the ballad of the _Jew’s Daughter_; in other
countries it gave rise to persecution of the Jews. But the Doge and
Senate of Venice, on the Jews’ complaining of their danger, ordered
the Podesta of Padua to take them under his protection, repudiated the
charge of murder as an impudent fiction, and, when Pope Sixtus IV. was
besought to add little Simon to the roll of the other young martyrs
slain by Jews, he not only emphatically refused to do so, but sent an
encyclical to all the towns of Italy, forbidding them to honour Simon
as a saint.
Long after Christian heresy had been condemned by Venetian law, and
the authority of the Inquisition, under certain important limitations,
recognised, the Jews were suffered to prosper in the Republic. Even
the Holy Office was not permitted to molest them. Toleration was
essential to the welfare of the mercantile commonwealth, and the
statesmen of Venice, in conformity with the old Italian tradition,
declined to sacrifice the interests of the State--the supreme aim of
a Government--to theological bigotry. Venetian justice in those days
might have chosen for its motto the divine precept given to Israel on
the eve of its redemption from the house of bondage: “One law shall be
to him that is home-born and unto the stranger that sojourneth among
you.” Venice, accordingly, was the resort and rendezvous of foreigners
of every race and religion: a city of many colours and many tongues; a
humming bee-hive of traders and travellers, of scholars and Shylocks,
all of whom were welcomed so long as they conformed to the laws of the
land. Among these multifarious elements of harmonious confusion none
was more conspicuous than the Jew.
Spain, as we have seen, embraced the opposite principle, and at the end
of the fifteenth century, a great number of Jewish refugees from that
country joined their brethren in Venice, where they were allowed to
settle under certain conditions agreed to between the Government of the
Republic and Daniel Rodrigues, the Jewish Consul of Venice in Dalmatia.
But, as tolerance began to decline, the life of the Venetian Jews was
made bitter to them by a variety of harsh enactments which hampered
their movements and checked their development; such as the law that
compelled them to reside at Mestre, the law that forbade them to keep
schools, or teach anything, on pain of 50 ducats’ fine and six months’
imprisonment, and numerous other restrictions which culminated in their
confinement in the Ghetto.
Meanwhile persecution and the accumulation of sufferings brought back
to life the old Messianic Utopia. According to one calculation the
Redeemer was expected in the year 1503, and the end of the world to
come soon after the fall of Rome. Cabbalistic mysticism encouraged
these expectations, and in 1502 a certain Asher, in Istria near
Venice, assumed the character of Precursor. Like John the Baptist,
Asher preached repentance and contrition, promising that the Messiah
would appear in six months. He gained many devoted disciples both in
Italy and in Germany, and his predictions called forth much fasting
and praying and charity, as well as considerable exaltation and
extravagance. The prophet’s sudden death brought the dream to an end;
but it revived thirty years later among the much-tried Marranos of
Spain and Portugal.[78]
Despite all disadvantages, however, the Jews of Venice were able to
hold their own. Their wit, sharpened by an oppression not severe
enough to blunt it, suggested to them various means of evading the
statutes, and escaping the consequences. Their hatred of the Gentile
oppressors sought its gratification in over-reaching and beating them
in the race for wealth. Excluded from most other provinces of activity,
they concentrated all the resources of their fertile genius in the
acquisition of gold. These circumstances were scarcely conducive to
cordiality between them and the Christians.
During the war with Turkey all the Levantine merchants in Venice,
most of whom were Jews, were, in accordance with the barbarous
practice of the times, imprisoned, and their goods seized. On the
18th of October, 1571, the popular enthusiasm, excited by the news
of the Lepanto victory over the Turks, expressed itself, among
other demonstrations--such as cheering, releasing debtors from
prison, closing the shops, mutual embracing, thanksgiving services,
bell-ringing, and the like--also in an outcry against the Jews, who,
for some occult reason, were suddenly accused of being the cause of the
war. ♦1571 Dec.♦ This outcry led to the issue by the Senate of a decree
of expulsion which, however, was only partially carried out, ♦1573♦ and
two years later was revoked through the exertions of Jacopo Soranzo,
the Venetian Agent at Constantinople, who explained to the Doge and the
Council of Ten the harm which the Jewish colonies in Turkey were able
to do to their Catholic enemies in the West.
♦1574♦
Next year a Jewish diplomatist, Solomon Ashkenazi, arrived in Venice as
Envoy Extraordinary, appointed by the Grand Seigneur to conclude peace
with the Republic. It was not without difficulty that the prejudices of
the Venetian Government were overcome, and that the Jew was received.
But, once acknowledged, Solomon was treated with the respect due to
his ambassadorial character, and to the power of the Court which he
represented. The joy of the Venetian Jews at the consideration paid to
their illustrious co-religionist knew no bounds.
Rome followed the example of Venice. The Catholic reaction against
the Reformation brought about a radical change in the attitude of the
Popes towards their Jewish subjects. Humanism was banished from the
Vatican, and with it the broad spirit of toleration which had secured
to the Jews of Rome an exceptional prosperity. The ancient canonical
decrees which had wrought desolation in the distant dependencies of the
Papacy, but had hitherto been allowed to lie dormant in its capital,
are now enforced. The old outcry against the Talmud, as the source of
all the sins and obstinacy of the Jews, was once more raised by Jewish
renegades, and the Court of the Inquisition condemned it to the flames.
♦1553♦ Julius III. signed the decree for the destruction of a book
which Leo X. had helped to disseminate. The houses of the Roman Jews
were invaded by the myrmidons of the Holy Office, and all copies of
that and other Hebrew works found therein were confiscated and publicly
burnt, by a refinement of malice, on the Jewish New Year’s Day. Similar
bonfires blazed in Ferrara, Mantua, Venice, Padua, and even in the
island of Crete.
♦1555–1559♦
Matters grew worse under the bigoted Pope Paul IV. The very first
month of his reign was signalised by a Bull ordering every synagogue
throughout the States of the Church to contribute ten ducats for the
maintenance of the House of Catechumens, in which Jews were to be
educated in the Christian faith. A few weeks later, a second Bull
forbade the Jews to employ Christian servants or nurses, to own real
estate, to practice medicine, to trade in anything but old clothes,
or to have any intercourse with Christians. The synagogues were
destroyed, except one; and it was proclaimed that all the Jews who were
not labouring for the public good should quit Rome by a fixed date.
The meaning of this mysterious sentence became clear to the victims
when shortly after they were forced to repair the walls of the city.
The edict of banishment, it is true, was immediately repealed by the
intervention of Cardinal Fernese; but the harshness of their treatment
was in itself sufficient to drive the wretched people to exile.
♦1555♦ Many Jews left Rome, and those who remained were penned in the
Ghetto.[79]
Previous to this date most of the Roman Jews voluntarily dwelt in a
special quarter on the left bank of the Tiber, known as _Seraglio delli
Hebrei_ or _Septus Hebraicus_; but they were not isolated from the
Christians; for many of the latter, even members of the nobility, had
their luxurious palaces in the midst of the Jewish houses, and many a
stately Roman church reared its proud _Campanile_ in the vicinity of
a synagogue. All this was now altered. The palaces of the Christian
nobility and the places of Christian worship were removed, or fenced
off, from the abodes of the unclean, and these were surrounded by great
grim walls, with porticoes and gates guarded by watchmen, who shut them
at midnight and opened them at early morning, except on the Sabbath and
on the Lord’s Day, or other Christian feasts, when the gates remained
closed the whole day, so that no infidel could go forth and defile the
Christian festivities with his unhallowed presence. On week days the
bell that called the faithful to vespers was for the Jew who valued his
life a signal to retire to his prison. All the inmates of this prison,
men and women alike, on leaving its precincts, were obliged to wear a
special garb: the men a yellow hat, the women a yellow veil or a large
circular badge of the same colour on their breast. Thanks to this mark
of distinction no Jew or Jewess could step or stand outside the Ghetto
gates without meeting with insult and outrage on the part of the mob.
The yellow badge was the favourite mark for the missiles of the street
urchins, and for the sneers of their elders; so that the prison often
became a haven of refuge for the Jew.
Meanwhile the Portuguese Marranos, who had found an asylum in Ancona,
under the protection of Pope Clement VII., and who had continued to
live there unmolested under Paul III. and Julius III., were exposed
to even more violent persecution than their Jewish brethren of Rome.
A month after the establishment of the Ghetto in the latter city, a
secret order was issued by Paul IV. that all the Marranos of Ancona
should be cast into the vaults of the Holy Office and their goods
confiscated. Some of the prisoners professed penitence, and were
banished to Malta; the rest were burnt at the stake. The few who
succeeded in escaping the racks of the Inquisition took refuge in the
dominions of the Dukes of Urbino and Ferrara, while of the exiles
in Malta some fled to Turkey; and all these refugees combined in a
scheme of revenge upon the Pope by attempting to place his seaport
Ancona under a commercial ban. But their efforts failed, owing to the
conflicting interests of the various Jewish communities in Italy and
the Levant, and the Rabbis assembled at Constantinople for the purpose
could not arrive at a unanimous decision.
♦1558♦
Not long after, the Duke of Urbino was compelled by the Inquisition to
banish the refugees from his dominions, and they, having barely escaped
the Pope’s naval police, fled to Turkey. In the same year the Duke of
Ferrara also was obliged to withdraw his protection from the Marranos.
Throughout the reign of Paul IV. the persecution of the Jews and
crypto-Jews left in the Papal States raged fiercely, baptized renegades
being always the hounds in the chase. Paul IV. died in 1559, and his
body was accompanied to the grave by the curses of the Romans. His
statue was demolished, and a Jew insulted the tyrant’s image by placing
upon its head his own yellow hat, while the mob applauded the act with
shouts of bitter joy. The buildings of the Holy Office were burnt, and
the Dominicans roughly handled by the populace.
But the lot of the Jews was not permanently improved by the
disappearance of their arch-enemy. Pius IV. was besought to alleviate
their burdens, and he issued a favourable Bull. Those Jews who lived
outside the city were allowed to dispense with the badge, to acquire
land to a certain value, and to trade in other articles besides old
clothes. ♦1566–1572♦ But even these slight concessions were withdrawn
by Pius V., who vied with Paul IV. in his conscientious persecution
of heresy and unbelief. In the third month after his accession to
St. Peter’s throne all the old restrictions were once more enforced
on the Jews of the Papal States, and were extended to their brethren
throughout the Catholic world. Infractions of these decrees were
punished severely, and were made the pretext for robbery. ♦1569♦
Finally Pius V., deaf to the advice of his wisest counsellors and to
the interests of his own State, issued a Bull, expelling all the Jews
in his dominions, save those of Rome and Ancona. As usual, a few turned
Christians, but the majority preferred to quit in a hurry, leaving
behind them all the property which they could not realise and all the
debts which they could not collect at the short notice given. The
exiles were scattered among the neighbouring States of Urbino, Ferrara,
Mantua, and Milan.
♦1572–1585♦
Gregory XIII., the successor of Pius V., carried on the anti-Jewish
programme of his predecessors. He renewed the canonical law which
forbade Jewish physicians to attend on Christian patients, punishing
transgressors on both sides. Jews suspected of holding intercourse with
heretics, of harbouring refugees from Spain, or of otherwise helping
the enemies and the victims of the Church, were dragged before the
Inquisition and condemned to loss of goods, to slavery in the galleys,
or to death. The Talmud and other Hebrew writings were again hunted
out and burnt. Gregory also encouraged the Jesuits in their work of
conversion, and the Jews were compelled, by a Papal Bull of 1584, to
listen to sermons at the church of St. Angelo, near the Ghetto, and
to pay the preachers employed to pervert them. Many of the wretches,
yielding to fear or to temptation, embraced Christianity; many more
left Rome.
♦1585–1592♦
Sixtus V., actuated by a broader and humaner spirit and by a more
enlightened thirst for gold than had animated any of his antecessors
or contemporaries, abolished these cruel decrees, ♦1586♦ pulled down
the barriers which circumscribed the judicial and financial status of
the Jews, forbade the gallant knights of Malta to enslave the Jews
whom they met on the high seas in their voyages to and from the
Levant, granted to the Jews perfect liberty of conscience, residence
and commerce in his dominions, and, in lieu of the unlimited rapacity
of former Popes, substituted a fixed capitation tax of twelve Giulii
on all males between the ages of sixteen and sixty. This revolution
tempted many Jews to return to Rome. Sixtus crowned his liberality by
allowing the printing of the Talmud and of other Hebrew books, after
previous subjection to censorship.
♦1592–1605♦
But the relief was only temporary. Under Clement VIII., otherwise an
excellent man and an able statesman, the reign of intolerance was
revived. ♦1593♦ He expelled the Jews from the States of the Church,
except Rome and Ancona, and forbade the use of Hebrew books. ♦1597♦ A
few years later he ordered their expulsion from the Milan district,
and they barely escaped a similar sentence at Ferrara, which, upon the
failure of the line of Este, had recently been added to the Pope’s
dominions.
In the seventeenth century we hear of more Papal Bulls, barring the
Italian Jews from all honourable professions and limiting their
commercial activity to trade in cast-off clothes.
It was during this black period of Jewish history that an English
gentleman came to Rome. He was a traveller who had an eye for other
things than picturesque ruins, and a heart in which there was room
for other people than those whom chance had made his compatriots and
co-religionists. His name was John Evelyn. Among the things which he
saw in Rome was the Jewish quarter, and he records his impressions in
the following words, under date January 7, 1645:
“A sermon was preached to the Jews at Ponte Sisto, who are constrained
to sit till the hour is done; but it is with so much malice in their
countenances, spitting, humming, coughing, and motion, that it is
almost impossible they should hear a word from the preacher. A
conversion is very rare.”[80]
Again under date January 15, 1645:
“I went to the Ghetto, where the Jewes dwell as in a suburbe by
themselves; being invited by a Jew of my acquaintance to see a
circumcision. I passed by the Piazza Judea, where their Seraglio
begins; for being inviron’d with walls, they are lock’d up every night.
In this place remaines yet part of a stately fabric, which my Jew told
me had been a palace of theirs for the ambassador of their nation
when their country was subject to the Romans. Being led through the
Synagogue into a private house, I found a world of people in a chamber:
by and by came an old man, who prepared and layd in order divers
instruments brought by a little child of about 7 yeares old in a box.
These the man lay’d in a silver bason; the knife was much like a short
razor to shut into the haft. Then they burnt some incense in a censer,
which perfum’d the rome all the while the ceremony was performing. In
the basin was a little cap made of white paper like a capuchin’s hood,
not bigger than the finger.... Whilst the ceremony was performing, all
the company fell a singing an Hebrew hymn in a barbarous tone, waving
themselves to and fro, a ceremony they observe in all their devotions.
The Jewes in Rome all wear yellow hatts, live only upon brokage
and usury, very poore and despicable beyond what they are in other
territories of Princes where they are permitted.”
And again under date May 6, 1645:
“The Jewes in Rome wore red hatts til the Card. of Lions, being
short-sighted, lately saluted one of them thinking him to be a Cardinal
as he pass’d by his coach; on which an order was made that they should
use only the yellow colour.”
Next year Evelyn visited the Jewish quarter at Venice:
“The next day I was conducted to the Ghetta, where the Jewes dwell
together as in a tribe or ward, where I was present at a marriage.
The bride was clad in white, sitting in a lofty chaire, and cover’d
with a white vaile; then two old Rabbies joyned them together, one
of them holding a glasse of wine in his hand, which in the midst of
the ceremony, pretending to deliver to the woman, he let fall, the
breaking whereof was to signify the frailty of our nature, and that we
must expect disasters and crosses amidst all enjoyments. This don, we
had a fine banquet, and were brought into the bride-chamber, where the
bed was dress’d up with flowers, and the counterpan strewed in workes.
At this ceremony we saw divers very beautiful Portuguez Jewesses with
whom we had some conversation.”[81]
These two little pictures, which, like the portraits on ancient
Egyptian mummy cases, preserve for us in undimmed freshness the
features of the dead past, show that not even the gloom and the filth
of the Ghetto were potent enough to kill the Jew’s attachment to his
traditions and his love for symbolism, or to befoul the poetry of
his inner life. But, ere we enter upon that phase of the subject, we
must record another oppressive law, passed in Rome at a time when
the century that was to witness the downfall of ancient dynasties,
the death of despotism, and the awakening of the popular soul was
already far advanced. This eighteenth century Edict, in forty-four
Articles, codifies all the prohibitions which had been decreed during
the foregoing ages: it forms the epilogue to the sordid tragedy. One
of the articles runs as follows: “Jews and Christians are forbidden to
play, eat, drink, hold intercourse, or exchange confidences of ever
so trifling a nature with one another. Such shall not be allowed in
palaces, houses, or vineyards, in the streets, in taverns, in neither
shops nor any other place.... The Jews who offend in this matter
shall incur the penalties of a fine of 10 _Scudi_ and imprisonment;
Christians, a similar fine and corporal punishment.”[82]
Thus the children of Israel dwelt apart in these narrow quarters,
multiplying fast, while the space allotted to them remained the same;
herded together, many families in the same house, often in the same
room; and breathing the air of what, under the circumstances, rapidly
developed into veritable slums. The world beyond gradually outgrew
mediaeval conditions of life; the streets became straight, broad and
airy; light penetrated into courts which the overhanging upper stories
once doomed to perpetual darkness; but the Ghetto knew none of these
blessings. Year after year life in the Ghetto grew more squalid, and
the inmates more indifferent alike to the demands of contemporary
fashion and of common decency. Confinement initiated degradation; the
fatal gift of fecundity, cultivated as a religious duty, promoted it,
and soon the Roman Ghetto became a by-word for its filth and misery. At
one time as many as ten thousand souls swarmed in a space less than a
square kilometre. To the curse of over-population was added the yearly
overflow of the Tiber, which transformed the narrow, crooked lanes
into marshy alleys, filled the basements with pestiferous mud, and
turned the whole quarter into a dismal abode of prematurely aged men,
of stunted, elderly children, and of repulsive wrecks of womanhood: a
place where Poverty and the Plague stalked hand in hand, and where man
was engaged in a perpetual struggle with Death.
The seclusion of the Ghetto widened the breach between the two worlds.
If the Gentile forbade the Jew to assume the title, or to pursue the
callings, of a Christian gentleman, the Jewish communal law forbade
him to wear the garb of the Christian gentleman. The diversity in
dress was only an external type of the deeper diversity of character
that separated the two elements. The ignorance of the Gentile grew
more profound, and the prejudice of the Jew more implacable than they
had ever been before. The Ghetto was an institution beside which
monasticism might appear the ideal of sociability. The young monk on
entering the cloisters of his convent carried into them the indelible
impressions of family-life and the tender memories of boyhood. The
inmate of the Ghetto, so far as the outer world was concerned, was
born a monk. Everybody within the walls of the Ghetto was a brother,
everybody beyond its gates an enemy. In infancy the outer world was
an unknown, non-existing world. Later the child of the Ghetto was
accustomed to hear those beyond described as idolaters; monsters whose
impurity was to be shunned, whose cruelty to be feared, whose rapacity
to be baffled by cunning--the protection and the pest of the weak.
These lessons were illustrated by the tales of assault and insult, of
which its parents and its relatives were constantly the victims, more
especially on Christian holidays. Still later personal experience gave
flesh and blood to the hearsay tales of childhood.
But this outward misery was redeemed by the purity and purifying
influence of domestic life. The home was the one spot on earth where
the hunted Jew felt a man. On crossing the threshold of his house
he discarded, along with the garb of shame, all fear and servility.
Everywhere else spurned like a dog, under his own roof he was honoured
as master and priest. The Sabbath lamp chased the shades and sorrows
of servitude out of the Jew’s heart. His pride was fostered and his
humanity saved by the religious and social life of the Ghetto. Rendered
by familiarity callous to obloquy on the part of the Gentiles, the
Jew remained morbidly sensitive to the opinion of his own people.
Persecution from without brought closer union within. As often happens
in adversity, individual interests were sacrificed to the public
good. Reciprocity in spiritual no less than in temporal matters--the
power of combination--the principle of social fraternity--always a
characteristic of the Jew--grew into a passion unparalleled in history
since the early days of Christianity.
Various communal ordinances (_takkanoth_) enforced this sentiment
of mutual loyalty. For example, no Jew was allowed to compete with
a brother-Jew in renting a house from a Christian, or to replace a
tenant without the latter’s consent. A series of such laws, many of
them dating from a much earlier period, were re-enacted by a congress
of Italian Rabbis on the very eve of the creation of the Roman Ghetto.
Thus the Jews virtually acquired a perpetual lease of their homes;
their communal right to the house (_jus casaca_) being an asset which
could be sold, bequeathed, or bestowed as dowry upon a daughter. The
Popes were not slow to take cognisance of this ordinance. Clement
VIII. legalised the arrangement, so that, whilst the rent was regularly
paid, eviction was practically impossible. But one of his successors
carried the principle of Jewish reciprocity to its logical conclusion
and turned it against the Jews themselves, by making the community as
a body responsible for the rent of all the houses in the Ghetto, empty
as well as tenanted. The same reciprocity of interests was recognised
in matters pertaining to the soul. Each member of the brotherhood
was responsible for the sins of the rest, and the confession of the
individual was a confession for the whole community.
Israel, cut off from the world, created a world unto itself. Never
did Judaism attain a higher degree of religious uniformity, never
were the spiritual bonds that bound together the scattered members
of the great family drawn closer than in this period of their sorest
affliction. Language was gone, country, state; nothing remained to the
Jews but religion. It was held that, if the teaching of the Law were
allowed to disappear, it would mean the disappearance of the race.
Religion was nationalised that the nation might be saved. The rigorous
discipline of the Synagogue and the absence of social joy had always
encouraged devotion. The Ghetto crystallised it into a code. Joseph
Caro’s _Shulchan Aruch_, or “Table Prepared,” a handbook of law and
custom, compiled in the middle of the sixteenth century, fixed the
fluid features of Jewish life into the rigid mask which it continued to
wear, throughout Europe, till the beginning of the nineteenth century.
But deep beneath the ice-surface of ritual--the crust of dead and
deadening rules and prohibitions--there ran the living and sustaining
current of faith, all the stronger and fiercer for its imprisonment.
The outcasts of humanity, in the midst of their degradation--despised,
and in many ways despicable--preserved the precious heritage, and their
pride therein, unimpaired. Numerous fasts and feasts assisted this
preservation. Thus the community fasted on Sabbath afternoons in memory
of the death of Moses, or on Sundays in memory of the destruction of
the Temple.
On the Day of Atonement they listened with reverence to the touching
words in which a noble old Hebrew bard gave utterance to the sorrow of
his race:
“Destroyed lies Zion and profaned,
Of splendour and renown bereft,
Her ancient glories wholly waned,
One deathless treasure only left;
Still ours, O Lord,
Thy Holy Word.”[83]
The Feast of Tabernacles year after year rekindled their gratitude for
the miraculous preservation in the wilderness. The Feast of Dedication
reminded them of their deliverance from the Hellenic yoke. On the
Passover Eve was read the Seder, most ancient of home services, and
round the festive board were then gathered the shades of the gifted
men of old who had sung the glories of Israel, and of the brave men
who had suffered for the faith of Israel. Then was retold for the
thousandth time, with tears and with laughter, to the accompaniment of
song and wine, the tale of their ancestors’ departure from Egypt. At
the end of the meal the door was opened, and a wine cup was left upon
the table. This was done for the reception of Elijah, the harbinger
of the expected Messiah. In this and like domestic rites the memory
of the past was annually revived, and, if its splendour made the
sordid present look more sordid still, it also kept alive the hope
of redemption. The magic carpet of faith, that priceless heirloom of
Israel, transported the inmates of the Ghetto out of their noisome
surroundings far away to the radiant realms of Zion. The Messianic
Utopia never was more real to the Jews than at this time. From a
favourite dream it grew into a fervent desire. It was firmly held that
the Redeemer would soon come in His glory and might, would gather His
people from the four corners of the earth, would slay their foes,
would restore the Temple of Jerusalem, and would compel the nations
to acknowledge the Majesty of the God of the Jews. We have already
seen one of these seventeenth century Messiahs, Sabbataï Zebi of
Smyrna. His was not the only attempt in which the longings of the race
recognised their fulfilment. These Messianic phenomena, whatever else
may be thought of them, are the most pathetic illustrations of that
immortal hope, which formed the Jew’s only consolation in times of
unexampled suffering, and from which he drew his invincible fortitude.
But for that hope the Jewish nation would have long since ceased to
fill thinkers with wonder at its vitality. Faith in God, which after
all means faith in one’s self--this is the talisman which has enabled
the Jew, as it has enabled the Greek, to pass triumphantly through
trials which would have crushed most other races. The same blast which
extinguishes a small fire fans a great one to an even mightier flame.