CATHOLIC REACTION
BUT if the Reformation brought with it Protestant hostility and new
tribulations to the outcasts of humanity, it also proved the cause
of fresh persecution on the part of Catholicism. Even while the
Popes at Rome tolerated or cherished the Jews, their agents abroad,
the wandering Friars, and all those soldiers of orthodoxy by whose
fanatical zeal the fabric of Papal supremacy had been reared and was
maintained, exerted themselves strenuously and furiously to oppose
the spreading epidemic of rebellion. In their eyes the Jews were the
most implacable enemies of Christ and the eternal promoters of dissent
and heresy. It was, therefore, against the Jews that they directed
their deadliest shafts. The belief prevailed that the first step to
the conquest of Judaism was the cremation of Jewish books, which after
the invention of the printing press had multiplied. This new attack on
Judaism, as so many other attacks in the past, was led by a renegade
Jew, John Pfefferkorn by name, and a butcher by trade--also convicted
of burglary and otherwise an unlimited miscreant.[123] ♦1509♦ This
gentleman, acting in concert with the Dominicans of Cologne, obtained
from the Emperor Maximilian authority to confiscate all Hebrew writings
opposed to the Christian faith--a very comprehensive sentence which
would have been carried out, but for the efforts made on behalf of
literature and commonsense by John Reuchlin, the Father of German
Humanism. This great scholar had restored Hebrew and promoted Greek
studies in Germany. He was attracted by Hebrew mysticism and had many
friends among the Jews. In 1490, whilst on a visit in Italy, he had
made the acquaintance of Pico de Mirandola whose Cabbalistic doctrines
he embraced and expounded in his work _De Verbo Mirifico_. In 1492 he
was employed on a mission to the Emperor at Linz, and it was there
that he met Jacob Loans, the Emperor’s Jewish physician, under whose
guidance he began to read Hebrew. Although a good Catholic, Reuchlin
was a broad-minded man, and his leaning to Cabbalistic theosophy and
the esoteric wisdom of the Rabbis, without making him an admirer of
the Jews as a people, induced him to defend their books. Summoned by
Maximilian to express his opinion on Pfefferkorn’s proposal, Reuchlin
did so in a manner which, while saving the Jewish writings from the
fire, exposed the defender to the utmost rigour of the disappointed
Dominicans; from whose clutches, however, after a severe struggle, he
was rescued by the enthusiastic assistance of his brother-humanists.
The outbreak of the Lutheran rebellion paralysed the forces of
Catholicism for a while. But it was not long ere the Papacy recovered
from its panic. The latter half of the sixteenth, and the first half
of the seventeenth century--the hundred years between the rise of
the Order of Jesus and the peace of Westphalia--form a period of
unprecedented activity for the conversion of the world to the one
true faith. ♦1540–1648♦ The Catholic sovereigns were at the zenith of
their power and bigotry, and both their consciences and their swords
lay under the absolute control of the Pope; for on the triumph of
Dogmatism depended the realisation of their own dreams of Despotism at
home and conquest abroad. On the other hand, Protestantism was grimly
determined to conquer or die. If one half of Western Christendom was
passionately attached to the traditions made dear by the familiarity of
ages, the other half was no less passionately attracted by the novelty
of the prospect which had just unfolded its charms to their vision.
The result of this antagonism was the most faithful imitation of hell
on earth that the modern world has witnessed. Europe, convulsed by
revolt and made desolate by barbarous repression, presented a scene
for which, fortunately, it would be hard to find a parallel even in
the annals of civilised mankind. While the Inquisition was revelling
in human hecatombs in Spain, the Spanish general Alva was ravaging
heretical Holland, and a Spanish Armada was preparing to assail
heretical England. Religious motives receded further and yet further
into distance as time went on; but the slaughter begun for the glory of
God was continued for the love of power; and those who were formerly
burnt as heretics were now butchered as malcontents. The Titanic feud
culminated in the Thirty Years’ War, during which no fewer than ten
millions of Christians were massacred in the name of Christ.
The Treaty of Westphalia staunched the flow of blood for a moment,
but did not heal the wound. Open violence was aided by patient
intrigue, and the monks carried on the enterprise wherein monarchs
had failed. Meanwhile, as though the legions of St. Dominic, of St.
Francis, and the other monastic orders were not sufficient for the
work of destruction, to them was added, as we have seen, the more
formidable Society of Jesus. By this time also the Spanish Inquisition
had accomplished its special mission of blotting out the Morescos
and Marranos, and had entered into an alliance with Loyola’s legion;
the two bodies forming together a two-edged sword in the hand of the
Catholic reaction.
Between Martin Luther and Ignatius Loyola there is commonly supposed
to gape a very wide chasm. However that may be, there is one point
at which the two apostles meet--hatred of Israel. Loyola’s disciples
penetrated by degrees into every realm in Europe, and into every
realm they brought with them that supple and sinuous spirit which
was destined to dominate European history for ages, and to endow the
European languages with a new word of evil import. In them Israel
found an enemy powerful as Fate, and, like Fate, everywhere present,
everywhere invisible and inexorable. Thus those Jews who had escaped
from the zeal of nascent Protestantism were doomed to fall a prey to
the zeal of reanimated Catholicism.
As in Italy, so in Central Europe, the reign of Pope Paul IV. marks
the revival of Catholic Obscurantism. In 1557 the Inquisition was
introduced into France under Henry II.--a prince who could be
profligate without being gay, and who atoned for his gloomy immorality
by so genuine a horror of heresy and culture that at his accession
both Huguenots and scholars thought it advisable to quit Paris. In
1559--four years after the creation of the Ghetto in Rome--all Hebrew
books were confiscated in Prague, at the instigation of a baptized Jew
named Asher. A fire that soon after broke out in the Jewish quarter
afforded the Catholics of Prague an opportunity of exhibiting their
piety. They plundered the houses of the Jews, and even threw their
women and children into the flames. At the same time the Emperor
Ferdinand I. ordered the expulsion of the Jews from Prague and the rest
of Bohemia, imposed many restrictions on those of Austria, and drove
them from Lower Austria. ♦1569♦ Ten years later the Jews of Avignon
and Venaissin, which, besides Marseilles, were the only communities
left in France after the expulsion of 1395, and which, favoured by the
enlightened Popes Leo X., Clement VII., and Paul III., had acquired
great wealth, were ordered to quit the country, and, like the refugees
from Spain and Italy, they sought and found a haven of refuge in the
Sultan’s dominions.
♦1620–1648♦
During the Thirty Years’ War the Catholic Emperor Ferdinand II.
protected the Jews, forbidding their coffers to be robbed except by
himself. The Bohemian Jews alone, after having paid a certain sum,
are known to have bound themselves to contribute forty thousand
gulden a year towards the expenses of the war. In Vienna also, now
the headquarters of Catholicism, the Jews were allowed to grow fat.
♦1624♦ The Emperor permitted them to build a synagogue and to discard
the badge; but the Christian citizens protested, demanding their
banishment. In face of this opposition the Court acted with admirable
tact. To the Christians it said: “You shall see the Jews banished, if
you pay twenty thousand florins,” and to the Jews it whispered: “You
need not fear, if you pay more.” To judge from the result, the Jews
must have outbidden the Christians.
♦1630♦
Not long after, at Prague, an internal feud between rival factions of
the Jewish community led to the interference of the authorities, and
the Emperor ordered that the Jews should every Sunday morning submit to
sermons preached for their conversion. Absentees were fined a thaler a
head, and a higher sum on repetition of the offence. Inattention and
slumber during the performance were also visited with a fine. However,
the Jews had not suffered through so many centuries without learning
how to dull the edge of persecution. Corrupt courtiers defeated the
devout Emperor’s policy, and the Jews were allowed to remain in
spiritual darkness and in peace.
♦1648♦
Despite this cruel treatment, the Jews of Prague fought valiantly in
defence of the city against the Swedes, and in recognition of their
loyalty and gallantry received from the Emperor, Ferdinand III., an
imperial standard which can still be seen in the old synagogue of the
town.
In the meantime the Jesuits continued their restless, though noiseless,
campaign. Even the one traditional refuge of Israel in Europe was
poisoned by their preaching. In Poland the Jews had for centuries
prospered and enjoyed a kind of autonomy. The Kings protected them,
and the nobility, thriftless and extravagant itself, found the
sober, industrious, and keen-witted Jews invaluable as bailiffs and
financial advisers. Beneath the wing of princes and nobles the Jews
acquired great influence. It was to this influence precisely that the
Jesuits attributed the rise of heresy in that country, and it was this
influence that they now decided to use as a means to their undoing. The
rivers of bitterness that flowed from the Stygian fountain of Jesuitism
found the field ready to be fertilised. The German traders and
artisans, settled in various parts of Poland, had already encountered
in the Jews formidable rivals. Commercial envy was invigorated by the
pious prejudices which these immigrants had imported, along with their
guilds, from the Fatherland; and these feelings often induced them to
make common cause with the clergy. ♦1496–1505♦ Under the joint pressure
of the two classes, Casimir the Great’s successors had deprived the
Jews of their privileges and confined them to special quarters, or even
expelled them from certain towns. A period of toleration came with
Sigismund I. ♦1507–1548♦ This sovereign’s good-will towards the Jews
was aided by the Polish nobles, who, hating the Germans bitterly, were
glad to support their rivals--an inclination which they had ample means
of gratifying, as the execution of the anti-Jewish laws was largely
in their own hands. Thanks to the friendship of the nobility Poland
continued to offer an asylum to the persecuted children of Israel.
♦1575–1586♦
Stephen Bathori, who was elected to the Polish throne three years after
the death of Sigismund Augustus, the last native King of Poland, showed
great favour to the Jews. He guarded the race in Lithuania against the
effects of the blood-accusation, and bestowed many benefits upon them,
to the disgust of his Christian subjects, who in Poland, as elsewhere,
envied the Jews for their prosperity and hated them for their usury
and arrogance. ♦1587–1632♦ This prosperity lasted even under Sigismund
III., a zealous Catholic brought up by Jesuits. He confirmed to the
Jews their ancient privileges, but introduced a measure indicating
his religious bias and fraught with disastrous possibilities. ♦1592♦
He ordained that for the building of a new synagogue the permission
of the Church should be obtained. About this time the Reformation had
lost much of its vigour in Germany; but in Poland, through the German
immigrants, it was beginning to create a great spiritual agitation and
to find favour among the nobles. Some of the Polish sectarians went to
the extreme of Unitarianism and were stigmatised as _semi-Judaei_.
To all these sources of danger for the Jews--the hatred towards them
entertained by the natives on account of their usurious extortions, by
the Germans on account of their commercial ability, by the Jesuits on
account of their infidelity, and of the Judaic proclivities of some of
the Dissenters--was added another, which proved the immediate cause of
persecution.
Upon the banks of the lower Dnieper and the north shore of the Black
Sea there gradually arose several colonies or settlements formed
partly by runaway slaves and convicts in quest of freedom, and partly
by adventurers from many countries and classes in quest of fortune.
These were the ancestors of the Cossack race. Their life was such as
their antecedents promised. Independent and idle, they knew only one
industry--brigandage. The exercise of this industry brought them into
frequent collision with their Tartar neighbours and supplied them with
their one recreation--war. The Kings of Poland, thinking to make use of
these hardened and reckless outlaws for the defence of their eastern
frontiers, granted to them a semi-autonomous constitution under a
freely elected _hetman_ or chieftain. Unfortunately the Cossacks were
for the most part members of the Eastern Church, and were therefore
hated by the Jesuits, who, after having crushed the Polish heretics,
turned their attention to these schismatics. King Sigismund III. began
the crusade by oppressing the colonists with heavy taxes.
Now, these colonies were under the control of several noble Polish
families which sold the lease of the imposts to their Jewish bailiffs.
The latter were intended to act the part for which the training of a
thousand years had so well qualified them--the part of the sponge.
Thanks to this arrangement, Jewish communities rapidly sprang up and
spread in the Ukraine and Little Russia, and to them was entrusted the
odious privilege of collecting and even of inventing taxes. How galling
these burdens were may be gathered from the following example: The
Cossacks were bound to pay a duty on every new-born infant and on every
wedding. As a safeguard against evasion, the Jewish tax-farmers kept
the keys of the churches, and on each wedding or baptism the clergyman
was obliged to apply to them for admittance into his own church. Nor
were these tax-farmers scrupulous or lenient in the exercise of their
privileges. Slaves to everybody else, they were eager to play the
despots over those whom fate had placed under themselves. In their
lust for profit and power, they readily helped the nobles in plundering
and the Jesuits in tormenting the Cossacks. Hence the position of the
Jews in the Ukraine and Little Russia became one of extreme danger,
and the resentment which their conduct excited soon translated itself
into acts of vengeance. And vengeance, when it fell on Jews, did not
restrict itself to the individuals who had deserved it. “All Israelites
are surety one for the other” was the Rabbinic motto of solidarity. The
Cossacks were now to give a new meaning to this maxim. Where single
units had offended, whole communities were punished.
During a brief revolt of the Cossacks, in 1638, two hundred Jews were
slain and several synagogues destroyed. The Jews, not warned by this
omen, continued to provoke severer punishment with a recklessness
which was partly derived from the belief in the near advent of the
Messiah. The year 1648 had been fixed by the mystics as the era of
triumph and universal sovereignty for Israel.[124] The expected date
came, but it brought with it, not redemption, but retribution. In that
year there broke out an insurrection led by a Cossack who, having been
cheated out of his wife and property by a Jew, had no cause to love
the race. Chmielnicki, in declaring to his compatriots that “they had
been delivered by the Poles into bondage to the cursed breed of the
Jews,” was voicing their wrongs with a conviction deepened by personal
suffering.
After their first victory, the wild Cossacks let themselves loose upon
the Jews, many of whom were massacred, while others saved themselves
by embracing the Orthodox faith. Four Jewish communities, in their
anxiety to escape death, gave themselves and their belongings up to the
Tartars, who accepted the gift and sold the givers as slaves in Turkey,
where they were ransomed by their brethren. The rebellion continued
with a ferocity and ruthlessness such as might have been expected from
the character of the rebels and the magnitude of the wrongs which they
had to avenge. Long oppressed by Papists and Jews, in slaying them
they not only gratified their personal animosity, but felt that they
were chastising the enemies of their Church. In this somewhat hackneyed
work they displayed considerable originality and variety of cruelty.
Every guerilla chief had his own favourite instrument of torture; one
of them affecting the lasso, by which the women of the enemy were
caught and dragged to shame.
Shortly after the first victory, a detachment of Cossacks captured by
stratagem a fortress where six thousand Jews had taken refuge, and
put them all to torture and death. Another detachment attacked a town
harbouring six hundred Polish nobles and two thousand Jews. The two
classes, bound together by a common danger, offered a stout resistance,
until the crafty Cossacks succeeded in dividing them. They assured
the nobles that their sole object was to punish the Jews, promising
to withdraw if the latter were surrendered to them. The Jews were
persuaded to deliver up their arms; the Cossacks were admitted into
the town, robbed the Jews of all their belongings, and then set before
them the alternative of baptism or death. Three-fourths of the whole
community were tortured and executed. Then the Cossacks turned their
wrath against the Polish nobles, whom they easily overpowered and
slaughtered.
A third body of insurgents was at the same time wreaking a similar
vengeance upon the Jews of Little Russia, where many thousands
perished, and the havoc spread as widely as the rebellion, until the
whole country, from South Ukraine to Lemberg, was marked with traces of
massacre--here in pools of Jewish and Polish blood, there in heaps of
Jewish and Polish bodies. ♦1649 Aug.♦ At last peace was concluded on
condition that no Papist or Jew should reside in the Cossack provinces.
Meanwhile thousands of Jewish fugitives who had saved their lives
by baptism, of women who had been violated by the Cossacks, and of
children whose parents had been slaughtered, swarmed into Poland, where
King John Casimir allowed them to return to Judaism, for, being a Roman
Catholic himself, he naturally regarded the Greek baptism as worse
than valueless.
After a few months’ pause the war between the Cossacks and the Poles
broke out anew, and it was now transferred to Polish territory. Again
the first victims were Jews, but the slaughter was necessarily limited
by the comparatively small number of people left to slay. ♦1651 Nov.♦
This second rebellion ended in the defeat of the Cossacks, and one of
the terms of peace was that the Jews should be allowed to settle again,
and resume their financial oppression, in the Ukraine. However, the
Cossacks felt bound by the treaty only so long as they felt unable to
break it. As soon as the opportunity offered, they once more raised the
standard of revolt, and Chmielnicki, aided by the Russians, carried
victory and devastation far and wide. ♦1654–1655♦ The Jews who were
beyond the reach of the Cossacks succumbed to the fury of their Russian
allies, and thus the community of Wilna was completely wiped out.
Then to the enemies of Poland was added Charles X. of Sweden, Charles
XII.’s grandfather; “a great and mighty man, lion of the North in his
time.” ♦1656♦ The battle of Warsaw, which lasted three days, resulted
in a splendid victory for this “imperious, stern-browed, swift-striking
man, who had dreamed of a new Goth empire.” In that battle the chivalry
of Poland was broken, and John Casimir, the most brilliant cavalier of
all, was nearly ruined. The Jewish communities which had been spared
by Cossack and Russian were impoverished by the Swede. But even this
fresh calamity did not exhaust the measure of their woes. Those who
had escaped slaughter at the hands of Cossacks, Russians, and Swedes
were now exposed to the hatred of the Polish general, Czarnicki, who
attacked them on the ground that they had acted in collusion with the
Swedish invaders. And while Poland was turned into a vast battlefield,
whereon the nations cut each other’s throat, the Jews were treated
as common foes by all. During these ten years of international
manslaughter, no fewer than a quarter of a million of Polish Jews were
massacred.
The humiliation of Poland brought lasting ruin to the Jews. Fugitives,
reduced to the verge of starvation, were scattered over Europe
seeking shelter--from Amsterdam and the Rhine in the north and west,
to Italy, Hungary, and Turkey in the south and east. Everywhere they
were welcomed by their brethren, who fed and clothed them, and many of
the funds intended for the maintenance of the Jews in Palestine were
diverted to the relief of these helpless wanderers.
In the midst of their sufferings the Polish Jews heard of the Messiah
of Smyrna. One of Sabbataï Zebi’s apostles, Jacob Leibovicz Frank by
name, founded a curious sect, which, among other things, believed in
a kind of Trinity, abolished the Law, and carried on a fierce warfare
against the orthodox Rabbis. In the middle of the eighteenth century
these Frankist dissenters revived one of the ancient denunciations of
the Talmud, and tried to induce the Polish Government to confiscate all
the Rabbinical writings. But finally, as Sabbataï and his immediate
followers in Turkey were absorbed by Islam, so Frank’s disciples were
absorbed by Catholicism.
While the Jews of Poland were sinking into destitution or flying
into exile, their brethren of Austria also were experiencing the
hatred of the Jesuits. At the instigation of the latter the Empress
Margaret demanded their banishment from Vienna. ♦1669♦ The Emperor
Leopold I. was at first averse from the measure, because he derived
an annual revenue of 50,000 florins from the Austrian Jews. But the
Empress insisted, her fanaticism receiving fresh impulse from a narrow
escape which she had experienced at a ball accident. Attributing her
preservation to a miraculous intervention of the Deity, she was anxious
to show her gratitude by a sacrifice of the Jews, whom her father
confessor had taught her to regard as the enemies of Heaven. The piety
of the Empress proved too powerful for her consort’s avarice. Leopold
yielded at last, and the Jews were ordered to leave Vienna. In vain
did they try prayers and presents. In vain did they turn every stone
both at home and abroad. Their gifts were accepted by the Emperor and
Empress, but the decree remained unrevoked, for the influence of the
Jesuits was invincible. ♦1670♦ The Jews had to go and seek new homes
in Moravia, Bohemia, and Poland. Their quarter was bought by the
magistrates of Vienna for the Emperor, and was christened Leopoldstadt.
Their synagogue was levelled to the ground. On its site was built a
church dedicated to the Emperor’s patron saint; and the glorious event
was commemorated by a golden tablet whereon the Jewish house for prayer
was described as a “charnel-house.”
The degradation of Israel was now complete. Persecution, cruel
and, through all changes, consistent beyond a parallel in history,
had at last achieved its demoralising work. The Jews, treated as
pariahs throughout Southern and Central Europe, lost all feeling of
self-respect. Spurned and dishonoured everywhere, they became day after
day more and more worthy of contempt: slovenly in dress and dialect,
dead to all sense of beauty or honesty, treacherous, and utterly broken
in spirit. “Zeus takes away the half of his manhood from a man, when
the day of slavery overtakes him,” says the wise old poet. The Jews
now furnished a melancholy proof of the truth of the saying. Among the
other gifts of servitude they acquired that of cringing cowardice. So
little manliness was left in them that they, who had once astonished
Rome with their dogged valour, dared not defend themselves even against
the attacks of a street urchin; and the prophet’s terrible prediction
was fulfilled: “You shall speak humbly from the ground, and from the
dust shall proceed your word.”
The dispersion of the Polish refugees over Europe resulted in the
subjugation of Judaism in all countries to the sophistical and soulless
teaching of Polish Talmudism. The long-ringleted Rabbis of Poland
carried into every country their narrow subtlety and hatred of secular
studies, so that at a time when the Middle Age was passing away from
Christendom they restored it to Israel.
From the sixteenth century the Jews fell completely under the
domination of the Synagogue. Having abandoned all hope of being
allowed to participate in the life of the Gentiles, they withdrew more
and more severely behind the old moat by which their ancestors had
surrounded themselves. Tribalism was their only alternative to utter
extinction; and they seized upon it, nothing loth. They grew fanatical,
entrusted the education of their children to none but the Polish
Rabbis, clung to their bastard Germano-Hebrew jargon (Jüdisch-Deutsch
or “Yiddish”), and even in writing a European language they employed
the Hebrew characters. The Jewish literature of the period reflects
the social and intellectual condition of the race. When it deals not
with subjects of Biblical exegesis, it consists of rude popular songs
and stories drawn from Talmudic and Cabbalistic sources or from German
and Oriental folk-lore. But this Cimmerian darkness contained in it
the promise of a dawn. The light of the eighteenth century was sooner
or later to penetrate the mists of bigotry and to bring the Jewish
Middle Age to an end. For while the Jew shares the general effects
which persecution long drawn out inflicts, yet there is in him a power
of resiliency which is his own peculiar possession and which saves him
from falling permanently into the slough of degradation and disgrace.
This power he derives in part from his religion, in part from his
history. His religion gives him steadfastness; his history teaches him
to hope.