exalted originally, was degraded by coming under the supposed
preternatural fate of the Jewish race, that this Joseph of Arimathea,
by giving a baptismal name to Cartaphilus, gave the English populace
their epithet for the beggars or impostors who were supposed to be the
Wandering Jew. He was called “Poor Joe!” Of him, as representing the
dregs of the myth, more must be said hereafter. Another example of this
degradation is shown in the fact that in various parts of Europe the
storm-demon is called _Maccabee_. The process by which this was brought
about has not, to my knowledge, been traced, but the following facts
seem to bear on it.
In 2 Maccabæus, v. 2–4, it is written--“Then it happened that through
all the city, for the space almost of forty days, there were seen
horsemen running in the air, in cloth of gold, and armed with lances
like a band of soldiers.... Wherefore every man prayed that that
apparition might turn to good.” These apparitions, resembling those
said by Josephus to have reappeared at the siege of Jerusalem, were
adopted as good Christian omens. Judas Maccabæus also records his
vision of the prophet Jeremiah giving him a golden sword to defend the
holy people. It is probable that this was the germ of the superstition
which proved so fatal to the Christians at the siege of Constantinople
(1453). After the capture of the city, men, women and children rushed
into the Church of St. Sophia for protection, because of a prophecy
that “one day the Turks would enter Constantinople and pursue the
Romans as far as the column of Constantine in the square before St.
Sophia; but that this would be the term of their calamities; that an
angel would descend from heaven with a sword in his hand, and would
deliver the empire, with that celestial weapon, to a poor man seated
at the foot of the column. ‘Take this sword,’ would he say, ‘and
avenge the people of the Lord.’ At these animating words the Turks
would instantly fly.... While they expected the descent of the tardy
angel, the doors were broken with axes; and, as the Turks encountered
no resistance, their bloodless hands were employed in selecting and
securing the multitude of their prisoners” (Gibbon, ch. lxviii.).
It looks as if the association of the wild aerial chase with
_Maccabee_, in France and other southern regions, might have resulted
from the diffusion of the superstition which drew such a thunderbolt
upon the Christians of Constantinople, and its gradual subjection to
the demonising doom which rested upon even the brightest figures of
Jewish history not wearing the Christian uniform.
XI.
“THE VERY DEVIL INCARNATION.”
“Enter Launcelot Gobbo!” So begins Scene ii. of Act II. in the
_Merchant of Venice_. Or as the original stage-direction ran, “Enter
the Clown!” His very name suggests the glutton and knave, yet it seems
to be from him some Shakspearian guides derive their chief light on the
great poet’s picture of Shylock!
Gobbo does indeed cast light upon the Jew, but it comes from the mob
which he represented. To say “my master is a very Jew,” and “the Jew
... is the devil himself,” are equivalent phrases in the capacious
mouth of Gobbo. He speaks for his gaping herd, and their breed is not
unknown. Judenhetze is able to turn out such men in the latter days of
the nineteenth century.
Bochart, in his _Hierozoicon_ (seventeenth century), says there was
a Sea-monster called “The Old Jew;” with the white-bearded face of
a man he had the hairy body of an ox, otherwise calf-shaped. This
monster always appeared the night before Saturday on the surface of the
sea, and one could see him until sunset next day leaping and diving
like a frog, and following ships. This monster, no doubt a variety
of Al-Sâmeri, elsewhere considered, is a fair type of what every Jew
was, for many centuries, in the eyes of the multitudinous Gobbites.
What stood for religion in them was the vulgar ribaldry of the Miracle
Plays, under which those holy farces presently perished. In them Judas,
still the buffeted Wanderer, was the one figure-head of the Jewish
race, with the devil for his familiar.
In ancient Persian pictures Ahriman and his host have flame for hair.
After the introduction of Christianity the deities of Europe, which
it degraded to devils, were described and painted with fiery hair and
beard; as it stands in the German saying, “Roter Bart, Teufelsart.” In
the early Miracle Plays Judas was made up with red hair and beard to
show the fiery abode to which he belonged. This feature survived also
in the “yellow bonnet” which the Jews were compelled to wear, which
replaced the scarlet or red bonnets which the “Scarlet Woman” found too
like her own.[28] The significant costume, and the ideas it expressed,
passed to the conventional stage-Jew. Barabas, in Marlowe’s _Jew of
Malta_, and after him, Shylock, were represented with the “orange-tawny
bonnet,” and fiery red hair and beard.
In keeping with this the crimes popularly ascribed to the Jews, for
which they suffered so terribly, were not human crimes. They were
utterly without motive--such as no man, however vile, could have
committed. For one example out of many, the Jews of Lincoln were
charged with having fattened a Christian child of eight years on white
bread and milk, then scourged him, crowned him with thorns, crucified
him, giving him gall. For that impossible crime 112 eminent Jews were
tortured and slain. It was rumoured that the earth would not receive
the body of that child, yet for years Christian pilgrims visited its
grave.
Such wild, popular notions were faithfully reflected in Marlowe’s
_Jew of Malta_. “Barabas,” says Charles Lamb, “is a mere monster,
brought in with a large painted nose, to please the rabble. He kills in
sport--poisons whole nunneries--invents infernal machines. He is just
such an exhibition as, a century or two earlier, might have been played
before the Londoners, _by the Royal command_, when a general pillage
and massacre of the Hebrews had been previously resolved on in the
cabinet.”
It will be now apparent to those who have followed the travels of
this Jew-myth that it had carried about in its endless wanderings
the belief in which it originated, and of whose development it was a
type--the infranatural, finally the infernal, nature of the Jewish
race. It inevitably blended with all the superstitions about uncanny
phantoms, bringing the most evil and ominous shapes haunting the
popular imagination in every locality into connection with the detested
race. Demons from the air, goblins from their caves, birds of ill-omen,
fearful gales, betokening the proximity of the Wandering Phantom,
brought an ever-accumulating mass of fear, suspicion and hatred upon
the race of which its supposed doom was a too faithful emblem. This
vast cesspool of vulgar superstition mirrored the dogmas of a theology
ever developing downward. It was not permitted the masses to look upon
the alleged offences of Judas or Ahasuerus in comparison with offences
familiar to them. As we have seen, the offence thought of was the
wrong and insult done to a God; it was an intensification of the same
feeling that regarded theft from a church as worse than theft from the
poorest widow, or a slight untruth under oath as more wicked than the
most malicious lie not sworn to. Out of such a principle of unreason
naturally came the doom of a race through many centuries to realise
every ingenuity of torture fabled in the Greek Hades, with Gehenna
added. Every revolving century was their Ixion-wheel, and every stream
their Phlegethon.
XII.
THE WANDERING RACE.
Professor Child, of Harvard University, has remarked that, “in the
second form of the legend, the punishment of perpetual existence, which
gives rise to the old names, _Judæus non mortalis_, _Ewiger Jude_, is
aggravated by a condemnation to perpetual change of place, which is
indicated by a corresponding name, _Wandering Jew_, _Juif Errant_,
etc.”[29] In this change a great deal of history is represented. The
Jewish race under persecution steadily became a wandering race. They
were compelled to “move on” by the remorseless police of Christendom.
One after another the laws of nations detached them from the soil, from
the trade-guilds, from civic position, and they became a nation without
a country.
This process went on for a long time before it was represented in any
myth or legend. Mohammed said, “The Jews are the People of the Book.”
Joshua ben Siras ben Eliezer, a priest in Jerusalem two hundred years
before the burning of the Second Temple (quoted by Heine), wrote, “All
this is the Book of the Covenant made with the Most High God, namely,
the Law which Moses commanded as a precious treasure to the House of
Jacob. Wisdom floweth therefrom as the water of Pison when it is great,
and as the water of Tigris when it overfloweth its banks in spring.
Instruction floweth from it as the Euphrates when it is great, and as
Jordan in the harvest. Correction cometh forth from it as the light,
and as the water of the Nile in autumn. There is none that hath made
an end of learning it, there is none that will ever find out all its
mystery, for its wisdom is richer than any sea and its word deeper than
any abyss.”
So spake the genius of Israel, and, so speaking, itself uttered its
first doom. A people to whom a book had become their Fatherland, which
had come to see in it their Jordan, their Tigris, their Nile, had
already given up their hold upon the territories of this world and
become a wandering colony of Jahve, governed by a code unrelated to
the vices or the aims of other races. This abstract country, whose
geography was books and texts, was fenced around and fortified
as strongly as the territory of any nation. Its fortresses were
ceremonies, customs, national traditions, and a perfect patience
derived from faith in the God of their fathers. The Cain whom they
abhorred was not more effectually “cursed from the earth,” prohibited
from tillage of the ground than this race which had taken Jahve for
their portion and his law for their habitation.
In such a system there could be no compromise. And as a matter of
fact there never was any compromise with the enemies of their faith.
These people, who have shown ingenuity and cleverness of every kind,
have never developed any sort of Jesuitism. I was astonished lately
at learning of an instance in which a Jew outwitted his persecutors
in true Christian style, for I never heard of another. This Jew was a
pedlar, and he was wandering in France in the neighbourhood of one of
those districts where the Virgin Mary is still continually opening new
water-cure establishments. This Jew, having heard the latest miracle
which had evoked a new fountain, smiled, and even made light of it.
Thereon the innkeepers excited a mob, and they resolved to hang the
_miscreant_--that is, the unbeliever--faggots being old-fashioned. They
seized the poor pedlar and bore him off pallid with terror. As they
passed near the new fountain, the Jew begged permission to moisten his
lips thereat; this was conceded, but no sooner had the water touched
his lips than he leaped about with joy, and declared that the fountain
had healed a severe rheumatism which he had suffered from for many
years. “A miracle! a miracle!” shouted the crowd; the Jew suddenly
became a hero, and was carried before the priest, who appointed
the next day to baptize him before all the people and make a grand
demonstration. The Jew, however, disappeared during the night.
This story, which I found in a recent number of the _Jewish World_, is
a modern appendage to the old legend mentioned by Mr. Baring-Gould,
that the gipsies were said to wander under a doom pronounced on them
because they refused to shelter the Virgin and child in the flight
into Egypt. But this witty pedlar is not a fair representative of the
race. “Sufferance is the badge of all our tribe,” said Shylock. Though
Shylock has been regarded by many as a type of avarice and extortion,
yet even he cannot be tempted by money when his struggle with the
Merchant becomes a religious issue. Shakspeare rightly shows Shylock
unyielding; many times the money due to him cannot bribe him from the
blow he feels empowered to strike for his despised Israel. And when,
in the beginning of this century, Nathan Rothschild started as the
great banker of London, no temptations could induce him, shrewd as he
was, to lend money or enter into any contracts for the benefit of Spain
or its colonies. The Israelite was never lost in the banker, and showed
his supremacy when it came to a race which had banished his own from
the Iberian Peninsula; though at the same time his charities and those
of his house have included Christians hardly less than Jews. The same
unyielding religious spirit was shown when thirty-three years ago Baron
Lionel de Rothschild was elected Member of Parliament for the City of
London. The honour of being the first Jew in that body could not induce
him to swear his allegiance “on the true faith of a Christian,” and on
the New Testament. He remained out of his seat for eleven years--and
with him David Salomons, who paid the penalty of £500 for voting in the
House without being duly sworn--when Parliament yielded to men who did
not yield, and the oath was changed for Jews.
It has sometimes excited wonder why this wanderer among the races,
uncompromising amid the hatred of ages, was not exterminated. It must
often have appeared to them that, like the bush in their own legend,
they were burnt without being consumed, because their God was in the
bush. But no miraculous force need be sought in the case, nor any
exceptional tenacity of life in them as a race; their circumstances
developed in them special faculties adapted to the commerce and
civilisation of the world. Heine said truly “the Jews were legally
condemned to become rich.” The populace generally believed that Jewish
wealth was got from the Devil, their wages for maintaining the kingdom
of Antichrist in the world. The Jewish banker, Samuel Bernard, who died
in 1789, leaving a large property, had a black cock which was popularly
believed to be connected with his wealth. The suspicion was confirmed
when the bird died a day or two before its master.
As a matter of fact the Jews were driven to deal in money and
jewellery--a word supposed by some to be derived from “Jew”--by the
general exclusion of them from the possession of land and from the
acquisition of property by handicraft. Gold and silver alone were left
for their enterprise.
And there were good causes why they amassed wealth. The first was
that they did not spend it on Gentile baubles. They cared not for the
pomps and luxuries of a world to which they did not belong. Why then
did they want to accumulate it? Why were they so thrifty and unwearied
in their pursuit of gold? To ascribe this to avarice is to accept a
popular fallacy refuted by the history of that people, who are even
lavish in their charities and in their support of public enterprises
(as in England and America) where they are free and equal citizens.
In their earlier days the Jews’ hope of recovering their country and
re-establishing their Theocracy under the Messiah was a passionate
aspiration, it was as sincere as any patriotism; every Jew held his
wealth and his life as a trust for that end. All their wealth they
hoped one day to lay at the Messiah’s feet. So it began, and then a new
factor re-enforced it. The wealth of the Jews became the main means
of their survival as a people. Kings and Popes protected them for the
money they could get out of them. But for this they would certainly
have been exterminated. From them chiefly was extorted the money for
Henry the Second’s Crusade in their own Holy Land. Mainly by their
labour and wealth Westminster Abbey was built. By such protective
extortions there was established a certain force of natural selection
and evolution, based on their wealth, which gradually made them the
financial princes of Europe and bankers of the world.
Whatever German bigots may say, the financial supremacy of the Jews
has been well and wisely exercised. The nations not included under it
have fared according to their folly. When Queen Isabella of old wished
to protect the Jews because of such advantages, she was confronted by
the fanatic who said, “Judas sold his Lord for thirty pieces of silver;
will you sell Him for thirty millions?” So the Jews suffered in Spain;
but what did Spain suffer? What did Holland and England gain by the
Spanish Jews, first tolerated, then welcomed in their cities? This
Germany will be able to answer if the jealous bigots there let loose on
the Jews should succeed in driving them out of the country.
“Thou, O Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book, even to the
time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be
increased.” So early did the compulsory tendencies of the Jews reveal
themselves. Their alienation among other peoples made them close up
in their ceremonial law as in a shell; their book was sealed amid
inferior ‘revelations’ swarming around them, and themselves sealed in
it: but, meanwhile, detached from the soil and the guilds of every
country, forced to be exchangers, pedlars, they must travel to and
fro, and their knowledge was increased. They became so well acquainted
with the lore of different lands, with the medical and other knowledge
of various countries, that they were supposed to possess occult
powers. Occasionally, this reputation might be of service to them, as
in the instance where Queen Elizabeth employed a Jewish physician for
his supposed occult knowledge; but more often it harmed them, as in
the evil fate that overtook that same physician, whom jealous rivals
accused of an attempt to poison the Queen. For many centuries they
presented the most remarkable instance of a people who had largely
outgrown their primitive superstitions, and acquired a religious and
intellectual enlightenment beyond the rest of the world, who yet kept
all this culture within the hard walls of their barbaric stronghold,
their ancient forms and formulas, from which they did not dare to
venture.
XIII.
THE POUND OF FLESH.
Passing out of Rome by the Via Appia, one comes to many places
of antiquarian interest, but presently arrives at a spot whose
significance increases with time. This is the church called _Domine
quo vadis_. There, says the legend, St. Peter, once more flying
from danger, met Jesus, and said, “Lord, whither goest thou?” Jesus
answered, ‘_Venio Romam iterum crucifigi._’ Whereupon Peter returned,
and met his fate--that hard one of a mythical martyrdom, followed
by resurrection as a Pontifical Jupiter, wielding his keys as
thunderbolts. A fac-simile of the holy footprints of Jesus is here in
the church, the originals, sunk in marble, being preserved in Saint
Sebastian’s Church.
Goethe had perhaps seen the worshippers around these footprints (near
by the Jewish catacomb with its seven-branch candlestick), when there
arose in him the idea of a poem which, alas, never got farther than
the outline given in a further chapter. Writing from Terni, October
27th, 1786, he says: “Yesterday I felt inspired to undertake a work
which at present would be ill-timed. Approaching nearer and nearer
to the centre of Romanism, surrounded by Roman Catholics, boxed up
with a priest in a sedan, and striving anxiously to observe and to
study without prejudice true nature and noble art, I have arrived at a
vivid conviction that all traces of original Christianity are extinct
here. Indeed, while I tried to bring it before my mind in its purity,
as we see it recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, I could not help
shuddering to think of the shapeless, not to say grotesque, mass of
heathenism which heavily overlies its benign beginnings. Accordingly,
the ‘Wandering Jew’ again occurred to me as having been a witness of
all this wonderful development and envelopment, and as having lived to
experience so strange a state of things, that Christ himself, when he
shall come a second time to gather his harvest, will be in danger of
being crucified a second time. The legend _Venio iterum crucifigi_ was
to serve me as the material of this catastrophe.”[30]
Perhaps Goethe also witnessed “Holy-Cross Day” in Rome, when the Jews
were “compelled to come in” and hear the annual sermon--“haled,” as one
said, “as it were by the head and hair, and against their obstinate
hearts, to partake of the heavenly grace.” Had the two visionary
Wanderers--Jesus and Ahasuerus--once more encountered each other in
sight of the crosses, they could only have hung side by side; he who
gave the blow in Jerusalem, now conceivably the one person in Rome
able to recognise the freshly-crucified from a cross of his own--the
cross of his race. From another poet have come the words which typical
Ahasuerus might, after the experience of so many centuries, speak to
the fellow-sufferer he once had insulted:
“Thou art the judge. We are bruised thus,
But, the judgment over, join sides with us!
Thine too is the cause! and not more Thine
Than ours is the work of these dogs and swine,
Whose life laughs through and spits at their creed,
Who maintain Thee in word, and defy Thee in deed!
“We withstood Christ then? be mindful how,
At least we withstand Barabbas now!
Was our outrage sore? but the worst we spared.
To have called these--Christians, had we dared!
Let defiance of them pay mistrust of Thee,
And Rome make amends for Calvary!
“By the torture prolonged from age to age,
By the infamy, Israel’s heritage,
By the Ghetto’s plague, by the garb’s disgrace.
By the badge of shame, by the felon’s place,
By the branding tool, the bloody whip,
And the summons to Christian fellowship--
“We boast our proof that at least the Jew,
Would wrest Christ’s name from the Devil’s crew.
Thy face took never so deep a shade,
But we fought them in it, God our aid!
A trophy to bear, as we march, Thy band,
South, east, and on to the Pleasant Land!”[31]
Holy-Cross Day was appropriate for this work of striking the Jewish
race in the face, as they fainted at the Christian door, and showing
them now themselves the crucified, by a High Priest Christ taught
to hate his enemies and pierce them with nail and spear. For it was
about the time of the alleged discovery of the True Cross, already
noticed, that this fable of the Wandering Jew probably first began its
career.[32] Already at that time it was shown on the walls of imperial
Christendom that Jesus and Ahasuerus, as types of Humanity, had changed
places--the nails and the thorn-crown transferred from one to the
other; and, what is more, the cruel dogmas and superstitions abandoned
by the one made by the other into the established religion of Europe.
In the familiar legend of the True Cross, Helena is for a time baffled
by a certain Judas, who has occult sources of knowledge, and warns the
Jews that the empress is coming to find what, if found, will cause
the downfall of their religion. But she having threatened a general
massacre, the Jews inform her that this Judas can alone reveal the
place of the cross. He refuses; is starved at the bottom of a dry well
for six days; on the seventh, consents. When the cross appears, Judas
is converted by its miracles and baptized.
In a paper read to the New Shakspeare Society, April 9th, 1875, Miss
Toulmin Smith announced her discovery that the story of the “Pound of
Flesh” is contained in the thirteenth century English poem, “_Cursor
Mundi_,” there interwoven with the legend of the Finding of the Holy
Cross. A Christian goldsmith, in the service of Queen Helena, owes a
sum of money to a Jew; if he cannot pay it at a certain time he is
to render the weight of the wanting money in his own flesh. The bond
is forfeit; the Jew prepares to cut the flesh; but the judges decide
that no drop of blood must be shed. The Jew being thus defeated, Queen
Helena declares that he must give up all his goods to the State and
lose his tongue. This sentence is remitted on his agreeing to tell her
where the Holy Cross is hidden,--which he did.