THE REFORMATION AND THE JEWS
THE love for liberty which gave birth to the Renaissance was also the
parent of another child--the Reformation. The first saw the light
in Latin, the second in Teutonic Europe. The vindication of man’s
rights was their common object: but while the Renaissance strove to
attain that object through the emancipation of the human reason, the
Reformation endeavoured to reach it by the emancipation of the human
conscience. Intelligence, the inheritance of Hellenism, was the weapon
of the one: the other drew its strength from the Hebraic fountain of
Intuition. Papacy was the enemy of both. Individual Popes nourished the
elder movement and thus unwittingly prepared an example and an ally for
the other. While Nicholas I., Pius II., and Leo X. dallied with the
infant giant in Italy, its brother across the Alps was training and
arming for the fray.
The revolt against the autocracy of the Roman Court was begun in the
middle of the fourteenth century by Wickliffe, and was continued by
Huss. The licentiousness of the pontiffs and cardinals, of priests and
monks, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries invigorated the
spirit of the rebels and brought fresh recruits to their ranks; and the
German princes, who had long chafed against the fetters imposed upon
them by Papal and Imperial interference, took the Reformers under their
protection, thus supplying that secular side without which no holy war
has ever been.
In Erasmus--“the glory of the priesthood and the shame”--the two
movements found a common champion and spokesman. In him the
Renaissance crossed the Alps, and in his famous _Praise of Folly_ the
Latin hostility to the intellectual tyranny of the Church is found
united with the Teutonic hostility to her spiritual tyranny. The vows
and the vigils, the self-abasement, the penances and the mournfulness
of Catholicism are attacked not less unsparingly than the worldliness,
the immorality and the hypocrisy of its ministers. But, if Erasmus
marks the meeting, he also marks the parting of the ways.
Beside Erasmus stands Luther. He also combined intellectual attainments
with spiritual aims. But the one figure faces the Renaissance; the
other the Reformation road. Erasmus, while ridiculing in elegant satire
the superstitions of the day, the malpractices of sordid priests, and
the excesses of merry friars, shrinks from a breach with the Holy See.
Much as he would like to see Catholicism reconciled to commonsense, he
recoils with horror before the stakes and the scaffolds of the Holy
Office. He could agree with Luther on many points, and yet write:
“Even if Luther had spoken everything in the most unobjectionable
manner, I had no inclination to die for the sake of Truth.” “Let others
affect martyrdom,” he says elsewhere: “for myself I am unworthy of the
honour.” Martin Luther was made of sterner stuff and simpler. Though
he joined forces with the apostles of culture, he was determined to go
much further than they in one direction, not as far in another. The
alliance between Literature and Reform, between the two brothers Reason
and Conscience, between the Southern and the Northern Ideals, could not
last long. The free and cheerful element in Luther’s temperament, and
his literary tastes, prevented a definite rupture in his own time. But
under his successors the difference between the two sides became too
wide for co-operation. Reason and laughter marched one way. Conscience
and gloom the other.
We have already seen that the sons of exiled Israel reaped but scant
comfort from the triumph of Liberty’s elder offspring. We shall now
proceed to show what the victory of the other brought to them.
Martin Luther in his _Table-Talk_ gives a full and vivid description
of the German Jews in his day. He tells us that their footsteps are to
be found throughout Germany. In Saxony many names of places speak of
them: Ziman, Damen, Resen, Sygretz, Schvitz, Pratha, Thablon.[84] At
Frankfort-on-the-Maine they are extremely numerous: “They have a whole
street to themselves of which every house is filled with them. They
are compelled to wear little yellow rings on their coats, thereby to
be known; they have no houses or grounds of their own, only furniture;
and, indeed, they can only lend money upon houses or grounds at great
hasard.”[85] “They are not permitted to keep or trade in cattle; their
main occupations being brokage and usury.”[86]
But this does not exhaust the list of oppression:
“A rich Jew, on his death bed, ordered that his remains should be
conveyed to Ratisbon. His friends, knowing that even the corpse of a
Jew could not travel without paying heavy toll, devised the expedient
of packing the carcase in a barrel of wine, which they then forwarded
in the ordinary way. The waggoners, not knowing what lay within, tapped
the barrel, and swilled away right joyously, till they found out
they had been drinking Jew’s pickle. How it fared with them you may
imagine.”[87]
Nor was extortion the only danger that the travelling Jew had to
face: “Two Jewish Rabbis, named Schamaria and Jacob, came to me at
Wittenberg, desiring of me letters of safe conduct, which I granted
them, and they were well pleased.”[88]
The unpopularity of the Jews in Germany at this time arose partly from
their staunch adherence to the Idea, their aloofness and their dissent
in modes of thinking and living from their neighbours:
“They sit as on a wheelbarrow, without a country, people or Government;
yet they wait on with earnest confidence; they cheer up themselves
and say: ‘It will soon be better with us.’... They eat nothing
the Christians kill or touch; they drink no wine; they have many
superstitions; they wash the flesh most diligently, whereas they cannot
be cleansed through the flesh. They drink not milk, because God said:
‘Thou shalt not boil the young kid in his mother’s milk.’”[89]
Partly from their rapacity and their hostility to the non-Jew: “’Tis
a pernicious race, oppressing all men by their usury and rapine. If
they give a prince or a magistrate a thousand florins, they extort
twenty thousand from the subjects in payment. We must ever keep on our
guard against them. They think to render homage to God by injuring the
Christians, and yet we employ their physicians; ’tis a tempting of
God.”[90]
Partly from their arrogance:
“They have haughty prayers, wherein they praise and call upon God,
as if they alone were his people, cursing and condemning all other
nations, relying on the 23rd Psalm: ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall
lack nothing.’ As if that psalm was written exclusively concerning
them.”[91]
How far these unamiable qualities were the cause, and how far the
effect of the Gentile’s antipathy to the Jew, is a question which
prejudice on either side finds no difficulty in answering. The
humble-minded and impartial student prefers to record the fact and
ignore the question. But it is passing strange to find the Jew’s
resolute faith in the Faithful Shepherd characterised as an offence
against good manners.
We have seen that the persecution of the Jews in mediaeval Germany,
from the awful carnage in the Rhineland (1096 foll.) to their
expulsion from Ratisbon (1476), had for its proximate cause the hatred
entertained towards them by the Catholic Church. The orgies of the
Crusaders were mainly dictated by pious vindictiveness; the violent
efforts of the Dominican friars and of the Inquisition to convert
the Jews were prompted by the desire to save them from heresy and to
prevent them from infecting others by their example. All the heresies
from the Albigensian, through the Hussite, up to the movement which
culminated in Luther’s secession from the Roman fold, were considered
by the Church as having their roots in Jewish teaching and practice.
The adoration of the Virgin, of Saints, and of relics, which offended
the Jew in the Roman cult were also the special objects of Protestant
detestation. They had both suffered for the sake of conscience;
dissent, the crime of Judaism, was the glory of Protestantism; Rome,
the secular foe of the one, was also the sworn enemy of the other; and
they were both branded by Rome with the common epithet of Heretics.
We might, therefore, have reasonably expected that Luther and his
brother-reformers would have regarded the Jews with sympathy. But
history does not confirm this _a priori_ conclusion.
Protestantism from the first proved as hostile to the Jews as
Catholicism. It has been suggested that Luther’s animosity was due to
the fact that the enthusiasm for Reform and for the simplification
of doctrine and worship had produced a tendency towards Hebrew
Unitarianism, the leaders of which movement were stigmatised as
_Semi-Judaei_. It would perhaps be nearer the truth to say that the
hostility towards the Jew was so old and so deep, and it sprang from
so many sources, that not even community of interests and enmities
could obliterate it. We have already seen Jews and Christians both
lost in the same maze of Cabbalistic mysticism; but this partnership
in folly did not improve the relations between the two sects. Nor did
the Reformers’ attachment to the Hebrew Bible produce any affection
for the race of whose genius that Bible was the fruit. The Jew was
detested in the concrete as much as he was admired in the abstract.
Luther’s disappointed hope of converting the Jews to Protestantism
may have also influenced him. But, be the origin of the feeling what
it may, the promoters of the Protestant cause and their followers,
from the sixteenth century onwards, adopted a most unfriendly attitude
towards Israel. Nor, so far as Luther is concerned, is this development
altogether unintelligible.
Luther the rebel against the Church was one person; Luther the
founder of a Church, another. While engaged in his duel with Rome,
Martin Luther strove to secure the favour and assistance of the
Humanists of his day. He took pains to represent the cause of Reform
as being the cause of Reason. He described his friends as the friends
of liberal culture, and his foes as the foes of light. He invited
theological discussion, and professed himself ready to be guided in the
interpretation of the Scriptures by pure reason. But when the struggle
was over and the battle was won, the despotic character and inflexible
dogmatism of the religious leader alienated many of his literary
allies, Erasmus among them; while the same causes also estranged many
of his religious sympathisers. Indeed, Luther’s bearing in the hour of
his success seemed to lend colour to the assertion of his adversaries,
that, had he been pope, instead of Leo X., he would have defended the
Church against a much more formidable antagonist than the monk of
Wittenberg. After all, a rebel often is only a tyrant out of power.
Towards the Jews Luther’s conduct was the same as towards his
fellow-Christians and fellow-rebels. At first he undertook to defend
them against all the time-honoured prejudices of the Middle Ages.
He denounced in no measured terms the un-Christian spirit of “silly
theologians” and their insolence towards the Jews, and in 1523 he
published a work under the startling title, _Jesus was born a Jew_;
in which he declares, “Those fools the Papists, bishops, sophists,
monks, have formerly so dealt with the Jews, that every good Christian
would have rather been a Jew. And if I had been a Jew, and seen such
stupidity and such blockheads reign in the Christian Church, I would
rather be a pig than a Christian. They have treated the Jews as if
they were dogs, not men, and as if they were fit for nothing but to
be reviled. They are blood-relations of our Lord; therefore, if we
respect flesh and blood, the Jews belong to Christ more than we. I beg,
therefore; my dear Papists, if you become tired of abusing me as a
heretic, that you begin to revile me as a Jew.
“Therefore, it is my advice that we should treat them kindly but now
we drive them by force, treating them deceitfully or ignominiously,
saying they must have Christian blood to wash away the Jewish stain,
and I know not what nonsense. Also we prohibit them from working
amongst us, from living and having social intercourse with us, forcing
them, if they would remain with us, to be usurers.”[92]
These were the sentiments of Luther the rebel. Luther the victor
retained nothing of them, save the vigour with which they are
expressed. Although in preparing his German translation of the Bible
Luther availed himself of the assistance of Jewish Rabbis, he regarded
them with no less aversion than the Papists to whom he often compares
them. His violent tergiversation was made manifest in 1544, when he
published a pamphlet under the suggestive title _Concerning the Jews
and their lies_. In this work the apostle of emancipation gives the
reins to a Jew-hatred fully equal to that exhibited by the Catholic
enemies of Judaism. The quotations from Luther’s _Table-Talk_, given
already, have shown that he shared the antipathy nourished by his
contemporaries against the Jewish people. Some more quotations from the
same book will show that he surpassed them in his hostility towards the
Jewish creed.
Martin Luther is deeply impressed by the ancient greatness of the
Hebrew race: “It was a mighty nation.”[93] “What are we poor miserable
folk--what is Rome, compared with Jerusalem?”[94] “The Jews above all
other nations had great privileges; they had the chief promises, the
highest worship of God, and a worship more pleasing to human nature
than God’s service of faith in the New Testament.... The Jews had
excelling men among them, as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David,
Daniel, Samuel, Paul. Who can otherwise than grieve that so great and
glorious a nation should so lamentably be destroyed?”
Martin Luther is as deeply sensible of our debt to the Jews: “The
Latin Church had no excelling men and teachers, but Augustin; and
the Churches of the East none but Athanasius, and he was nothing
particular; therefore, we are twigs grafted into the right tree. The
prophets call the Jews, especially those of the line of Abraham, a fair
switch, out of which Christ himself came.”[95] Nor is he blind to their
sufferings--“The Jews are the most miserable people on earth. They are
plagued everywhere and scattered about all countries, having no certain
resting place”[96]--or to their heroic faith in the future.[97]
But these noble sentiments of admiration, gratitude, and pity seem to
be mere transient emotions; the theologian within him is too powerful
for the man. The Jew’s sublime confidence is no virtue in Luther’s
eyes. It is a wicked delusion: “Thus hardened are they; but let them
know assuredly, that there is none other Lord or God, but only he
that already sits at the right hand of God the Father.”[98] Their
attachment to the rites of their religion is to Luther another proof
of their wickedness: “Such superstitions proceed out of God’s anger.
They that are without faith, have laws without end, as we see in
the Papists and Turks. But they are rightly served, for seeing they
refused to have Christ and his gospel, instead of freedom they must
have servitude.”[99] Their calamities, far from inspiring Luther with
compassion, supply him with a fresh argument for denunciation: “The
glory of the Temple was great, that the whole world must worship there.
But God, out of special wisdom, caused this Temple to be destroyed, to
the end the Jews might be put to confusion, and no more brag and boast
thereof.”[100] And again, “Either God must be unjust, or you, Jews,
wicked and ungodly; for ye have been in misery and fearful exile a far
longer time than ye were in the land of Canaan. Ye had not the Temple
of Solomon more than three hundred years, while ye have been hunted
up and down above fifteen hundred. At Babylon ye had more eminence
than at Jerusalem, for Daniel was a greater and more powerful prince
at Babylon than either David or Solomon at Jerusalem.... You have been
above fifteen hundred years a race rejected of God without government,
without laws, without prophets, without temple. This argument ye cannot
solve; it strikes you to the ground like a thunder-clap; ye can show no
other reason for your condition than your sins.”[101]
The destruction of Jerusalem and the dispersion and persecution of the
race are clear evidence of God’s anger: “But the Jews are so hardened
that they listen to nothing: though overcome by testimonies, they
yield not an inch”[102]--so “stiff-necked, haughty and presumptuous
they are”:[103] Verily, an arrogant and cruel race of men, boasting,
like the Papists, “that they alone are God’s people, and will allow
of none but of those that are of their Church.”[104] To Luther, as to
Tacitus, the Jews are the enemies of mankind: “And truly, they hate us
Christians as they do death. It galls them to see us. If I were master
of the country, I would not allow them to practise usury.”[105]
The reputed proficiency of the Jews in the black art is another
grievous offence in Luther’s eyes: “There are sorcerers among the
Jews, who delight in tormenting Christians, for they hold us as dogs.
Duke Albert of Saxony well punished one of these wretches. A Jew
offered to sell him a talisman covered with strange characters, which
he said effectually protected the wearer against any sword or dagger
thrust. The Duke replied: ‘I will essay thy charm upon thyself, Jew,’
and, putting the talisman round the fellow’s neck, he drew his sword
and passed it through his body. ‘Thou feelest, Jew!’ said he, ‘how
it would have been with me had I purchased thy talisman?’”[106] The
story contains several points of interest for the student of mediaeval
Christianity, Luther’s own approbation of the Duke’s act being not the
least interesting of them.
Luther, the champion of spiritual freedom, could not forgive the Jews
for differing from him in the interpretation of the Scriptures: “The
Jews read our books, and thereout raise objections against us; ’tis a
nation that scorns and blasphemes even as the lawyers, the Papists,
and adversaries do, taking out of our writings the knowledge of our
cause, and using the same as weapons against us.”[107] Yet the very
tactics which Luther so ingenuously condemns in the Jews, lawyers, and
Papists, he himself is the first to adopt. In his endeavours to convert
the Jews he draws all his arguments, as others had done before him,
from the Hebrew Bible: “I am persuaded if the Jews heard our preaching,
and how we handle the Old Testament, many of them might be won, but,
through disputing, they have become more and more stiff-necked,
haughty, and presumptuous.”[108] And elsewhere: “I have studied the
chief passages of Scripture that constitute the grounds upon which the
Jews argue against us; as where God said to Abraham: ‘I will make my
covenant between me and thee, and with thy seed after thee, in their
generations, for an everlasting covenant....’ Here the Jews brag, as
the Papists do upon the passage, ‘Thou art Peter.’ I would willingly
bereave the Jews of this bragging by rejecting the Law of Moses, so
that they should not be able to gainsay me. We have against them the
prophet Jeremiah, where he says, ‘Behold, the time cometh, saith the
Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and
with the house of Judah, not as the covenant which I made with their
fathers.’...”[109] On another occasion he tries to refute the Jews by
quoting Jeremiah’s prophecy “touching Christ: ‘Behold, the days come,
saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous branch, and a
King shall reign and prosper ... and this is the name whereby he shall
be called, The Lord our Righteousness.’ This argument the Jews are
not able to solve; yet, if they deny that this sentence is spoken of
Christ, they must show unto us another King, descended from David, who
should govern so long as the sun and moon endure, as the promises of
the prophets declare.”[110]
Luther in these passages, and passages like these, repeats all the
well-worn arguments with which Christians from the earliest times
strove to persuade the Jews that the Messiah had come. He insists
that “the Law of Moses continued but for a while, therefore it must
be abolished”; that “the circumcision was to continue but for a
while, until the Messiah came; when he came, the commandment was at
an end,” superseded by “the circumcision of the heart”;[111] that it
was faith and not works that justified Abraham,[112] and so forth. But
the Jews answered Luther’s arguments, as their fathers had answered
the arguments of Justin Martyr, of Tertullian, and of other ancient
authorities, and the arguments of the Dominican friars: “The covenant
of the circumcision given before Moses’ time, and made between God and
Abraham and his seed Isaac in his generation, they say, must and shall
be an everlasting covenant, which they will not suffer to be taken from
them.”[113]
Luther’s eloquence, or perhaps his power to protect them, occasionally
prevailed with the Jews. He tells us that the two Rabbis, Schamaria
and Jacob, who went to him at Wittenberg to solicit a safe conduct,
“struck to the heart, silenced and convinced, forsook their errors,
became converts, and the day following, in the presence of the whole
university at Wittenberg, were baptized Christians.”[114] The long
sufferings of the race, and the ever deferred fulfilment of the hope
of redemption, sometimes produced heartsickness and despair: “In
1537, when I was at Frankfurt, a great rabbi said to me, ‘My father
had read very much, and waited for the coming of the Messiah, but at
last he fainted, and out of hope said: As our Messiah has not come in
fifteen hundred years, most certainly Christ Jesus must be he.’”[115]
And again, “A Jew came to me at Wittenberg, and said: He was desirous
to be baptized, and made a Christian, but that he would first go to
Rome to see the chief head of Christendom. From this intention myself,
Philip Melanchthon, and other divines laboured to dissuade him, fearing
lest, when he witnessed the offences and knaveries at Rome, he might
be scared from Christendom. But the Jew went to Rome, and when he had
sufficiently seen the abominations acted there he returned to us again,
desiring to be baptized, and said: ‘Now I will willingly worship the
God of the Christians, for he is a patient God. If he can endure such
wickedness and villainy as is done at Rome, he can suffer and endure
all the vices and knaveries of the world.’”[116]
But all those that are baptized are not converts. Martin Luther was too
shrewd not to perceive the distinction. How he would have dealt with
such hypocrites he tells us with charming frankness: “If a Jew, not
converted at heart, were to ask baptism at my hands, I would take him
on to the bridge, tie a stone round his neck, and hurl him into the
river; for these wretches are wont to make a jest of our religion. Yet,
after all, water and the Divine Word being the essence of baptism, a
Jew, or any other, would be none the less validly baptized, that his
own feelings and intentions were not the result of faith.”[117]
Yet, even such cases of pseudo-conversion were rare. The Jews, as a
sect, far from yielding to the efforts of the Christians to make them
embrace Christianity, entertained hopes of the Christians embracing
Judaism. The Protestant’s devotion to the study of the Hebrew language,
and the extraordinary vogue which Cabbalistic mysticism had obtained
among the early Reformers through Reuchlin’s books, encouraged this
notion. But Luther assures them that “their hope is futile. ’Tis they
must accept our religion, and of the crucified Christ, and overcome all
their objections, especially that of the alteration of the Sabbath,
which sorely annoys them, but ’twas ordered by the apostles, in honour
of the Lord’s resurrection.”[118]
It was in vain that Luther changed his ground, and, abandoning his
attacks on the religious prejudices of the Jews, turned his artillery
against their racial pride, and endeavoured to prove that their vaunted
purity of blood was a myth:
“During the 70 years when they were captives at Babylon, they were so
confused and mingled together, that even then they hardly knew out of
what tribe each was descended. How should it be now, when they have
been so long hunted and driven about by the Gentiles, whose soldiers
spared neither their wives nor their daughters, so that now they are,
as it were, all bastards, none of them knowing out of what tribe he
is?”[119] Luther knew not that the sentiment of nationality depends far
more on community of interests and aspirations, of memories of the past
and hopes for the future, than on any physiological similarity of blood.
Nevertheless, despite his occasional successes, Luther himself was
aware of the futility of his endeavours. He sorrowfully recognises
the impossibility of reconciling Jew and Gentile: “In the porch of a
Church at Cologne there is a statue of a dean, who, in the one hand
holds a cat, and in the other a mouse. This dean had been a Jew, but
was baptized, and became a Christian. He ordered this statue to be set
up after his death, to show, that a Jew and a Christian agree as little
as a cat and a mouse. And truly they hate us Christians as they do
death.”[120]
All these sentiments, accompanied with suggestions for the suppression
of the miserable people, were embodied by Luther in his published
pamphlets.[121] The Reformer’s unmeasured hostility bears to the
habitual tolerance of many popes the same relation as the mental
horizon of the provincial monk does to the broader vision of the
monarch of a great empire.
If Luther, the genial and joyous, entertained so uncharitable feelings
towards the Jews, it is not difficult to understand the attitude of his
morose and narrower successors, armed as they were by the sanction of
his example. It has been well said, “the opinions of a great man are
a valuable possession and a ruinous inheritance.” The denunciations
of Israel by the early Fathers of the Church had continued to dictate
Christian intolerance through the ages, and their authority was quoted
in support of the persecutions and massacres which sullied mediaeval
Europe. Luther’s utterances exercised a similar influence over the
Protestant world, both in his own and in after times, down to the
present day. Protestant Germany took up the tale of persecution in the
sixteenth century where Catholic Germany had left off in the fifteenth.
The Jews were given the alternatives of baptism and banishment in
Berlin, were expelled from Bavaria in 1553, from Brandenburg in 1573,
and the tragedy of oppression was carried on through the ensuing
centuries. How vigorously the plant of anti-Judaism continued to
flourish in Germany may be seen from the following incident.
In about 1612 a Jewish jeweller, with a dozen friends, in search of
a home, presented a petition to the Senate of Hamburg, offering nine
thousand marks for the right of residence in the city for twelve
years, promising to pay an annual tax of four hundred marks, and
professing themselves ready to submit to any conditions. But Hamburg,
the Protestant, refused to listen even to the argument which so
frequently overcame Papist fanaticism. Hamburg already contained
Portuguese Jews disguised as Christians. These, induced by the example
of their brethren in Amsterdam, had recently thrown off the mask, and
by so doing had accentuated the indignation of the Lutheran citizens
against the whole race. The Senate, indeed, aware of the commercial
value of the Jews, declined to yield to the popular demand for their
expulsion. The clergy lifted up their voices against the Laodicean
lukewarmness of the Government, and the latter, anxious to avoid the
reproach of lack of Christian fervour on one hand, and, on the other,
the material loss which the banishment of the Jews would entail,
appealed to the theological faculties of Frankfort-on-the-Oder and
Jena for a justification of their tolerance. These august bodies
approved of the Senate’s policy, but recommended the Jews of Hamburg to
embrace Christianity. The Senate welcomed the approbation, ignored the
recommendation, and granted to the Jews the right of abode on payment
of one thousand marks a year, and subject to certain restrictions. For
example, they were forbidden to have synagogues and to practise Jewish
rites or circumcision, though they were allowed to have a cemetery of
their own. As the colony grew in numbers, in wealth, and in commercial
importance, it ventured to transgress many of these prohibitions.
Relying on their power, the Jews of Hamburg quietly built a synagogue
in about 1626.
This humble and unobtrusive building, however, created a sensation
out of all proportion to its intrinsic merits. ♦1627♦ The Emperor,
Ferdinand II., wrote an indignant letter to the Senate, complaining
that the Jews should be allowed a freedom of worship which was denied
to Roman Catholics. This shell from a Papist quarter set fire to the
Lutheran powder magazine. The good ministers of Hamburg again lifted
up their voices, and, with that middle-class logic which distinguishes
Protestant controversialism, pointed out that, if the Jews were allowed
freedom of worship, the same freedom should be accorded to Catholics--a
monstrous absurdity, of course. The Lutheran clergy were reinforced by
the Hamburg physicians, who nourished for their Jewish confrères the
affection proverbial between men of a trade. The Senate, obliged to
take cognisance of the clamour, summoned the Jews to give an account of
themselves. They, with the sophistry of persecution and the confidence
of wealth, replied that they had no synagogue, but only a house for
prayer; threatening to leave Hamburg in a body, if they were forbidden
the free exercise of their religion. The Senate was compelled to
overlook the sophism, and to pay serious attention to the threat; the
consequence being that, not only that synagogue was tolerated, but two
more were built.[122]
The animosity of the Lutherans grew with the growth of Jewish
prosperity. John Miller, Senior at St. Peter’s Church, an Inquisitor
in everything but name, preached a crusade from the pulpit and in the
press. The humiliation of the Jews became by degrees a monomania with
Miller. He could endure neither their feasts nor their fasts. Their
rejoicings vexed him, and their wailings drove him mad. Their unbelief
filled him with horror, and their obstinacy with despair. ♦1644♦ At
last Miller vented his feelings in a pamphlet remarkable for its pious
scurrility. Three theological faculties endorsed Miller’s teaching,
and declared that it was contrary to sound religion to permit Jewish
doctors to attend on Christian patients. But the crusade produced no
other result than to show how faithfully Luther’s spirit continued to
animate German Protestantism in its dealings with the people whom the
Reformer had so vehemently denounced in his lifetime.
The position of the Jew in other parts of Germany was far worse than
in the commercial city of Hamburg. He was still spurned and scorned,
oppressed, reviled, and hunted more fiercely than any pariah. Few
Jewish congregations were left. At Frankfort-on-the-Main Jews were
allowed to live on terms usually accorded to convicts. They were
forbidden to wander forth from their Ghetto, except on urgent business.
They were forbidden to walk two together in the neighbourhood of the
town-hall, especially during Christian festivals and weddings. Whilst
in the Ghetto itself, they were forbidden to talk aloud, or to receive
strangers without the knowledge of the magistrates. They were forbidden
to buy victuals in the market at the same time as the Christians.
Handicapped in the race for money, they were yet overburdened with
taxes. Their persons were marked with a badge and their houses with
grotesque shields of quasi-armorial character. Even this sorry
existence was not assured to them, for the town council reserved to
itself the power of expelling any Jew at pleasure. As usual, the Jews
contrived to obtain by artifice that which was withheld by force. They
purchased indulgence, and the laws often remained mere memorials of
Christian intolerance. But, while the magistrates derived profit from
their merciful connivance, the guilds, which found formidable rivals in
the Jews, strove to obtain their expulsion. The campaign was led by a
brave and enthusiastic pastry-cook.
Operations commenced on a certain September day in the year 1614. The
Jews were at prayer, when a great noise was heard outside the gates
of the Ghetto. A free fight ensued, the Christians, with the heroic
pastry-cook at their head, assaulting; the Jews defending. Many fell on
both sides, until victory inclined towards the confectioner’s army, and
the quarters of the enemy were given up to plunder, destruction, and
desecration, which lasted through the night. 1380 Jews, who had taken
refuge in the burial ground, were for some time kept in suspense as to
their fate, but were at last suffered to leave the city unencumbered
by any property whatsoever. The proceedings would have been more
thoroughly reminiscent of the Middle Age but for the fact that, in
spite of the inexorable pastry-cook’s warnings, there were now found
Christians humane enough to feed and to shelter the miserable exiles.
The pastry-cook and his party ruled Frankfort with impunity for a whole
year.
Meanwhile similar things happened at Worms. There also the Jews were
hated as competitors and detested as infidels; but the anti-Jewish
movement in that town was led by a learned lawyer; not by an honest,
if stupid, confectioner. Consequently the warfare assumed a different
character. Instead of open assault, the lawyer preferred a siege. He
closed the outlets of the town to the Jews, and hindered them from
procuring even milk for their children. These subtle preliminaries
were followed by an ultimatum addressed to the Jews, bidding them to
evacuate the city, bag and baggage, within an hour. ♦1615♦ The wretches
departed, leaving behind them their synagogues and cemeteries to the
fury of the populace. The fugitives were allowed by the Archbishop
of Mayence and the Count of Darmstadt to take up their abode in the
villages and hamlets of the neighbourhood, where they met some of their
brother-sufferers from Frankfort.
Soon afterwards the Council of Worms, indignant at its humiliation,
invited the Elector of the Palatinate to take possession of the town.
The prince accepted the invitation, and a few months later the Jews
were permitted to return. Not long after the Jews of Frankfort also
were re-admitted by the Electorate of Mayence and Darmstadt, to the
sound of trumpets. The heroic pastry-cook was hanged and quartered, his
house was razed to the ground, and his family banished. The city was
compelled by the Emperor to pay to the Jews a large indemnity for their
losses and sufferings, and they expressed their joy by ordaining that
the eve of their return should be observed as a fast and the day itself
as a feast. However, the social position of the Jews both in Frankfort
and in Worms remained the same. In both towns they continued to live on
sufferance. Only a limited number of families was allowed to reside,
and only a limited number of individuals to marry.
♦1620–1648♦
The terrible Thirty Years’ War caused less suffering to the Jews of
Protestant Germany than to the Christians. While Protestants and
Catholics, animated by a spirit of intolerance and the lust for power,
were eagerly butchering each other and devastating each other’s
territories, the Jews made their fortunes by impartial speculations
in the booty of both sides. Their opportunities must have been
considerable; for it was during this war that the English and other
European tongues were enriched with the German word “plunder.”