A.D. 1200-1300.
THE JEWS IN FRANCE AND GERMANY.
In France, during the first quarter of the thirteenth century, no
persecutions of the Jews are recorded. In the south their condition
appears to have been prosperous. They were protected by Raymond, the
heretic but powerful Count of Toulouse. One of the bitterest charges
made against him by Innocent III. was, that he employed and favoured
Jews; and when, after his submission, he had to sign the conditions
on which his offences would be overlooked, one of them was, that he
should no longer employ Jewish officers.
In 1223, Philip Augustus died, and was succeeded by Louis VIII.,
called, it is to be presumed in mockery, Louis the Lion. During his
short reign of three years, we hear that he passed a decree annulling
all future interest on debts incurred to Jews, and ordering the
payment of the capital, in three separate instalments, each after the
interval of a year.
In 1226, Louis VIII. died, and his son, the renowned Louis IX., known
to history as St. Louis, succeeded to the throne. He was at the time
a minor, and France was under the Regency of Blanche of Castile for
nearly ten years. Louis’s first act seems to have been the annulling
of one third of all debts due to Jews, and an immunity from arrest or
distraint for the two remaining portions. He also called a council at
Melun on the Seine, which forbade Christian men, for the future, to
borrow money from the Jews on any terms. He is said to have issued
this order ‘for the good of his soul.’ How this could be does not
clearly appear. Possibly he felt so strongly the power and the will
of the Jews to use their money-lending facilities in an oppressive
way that he sought in this way to prevent their injurious influence.
Or he may have regarded the scriptural prohibitions addressed to the
Jews, against lending their money on usury _to their own countrymen_,
as applying to _all_ loans on usury, though Scripture expressly
asserts otherwise (Deut. xxiii. 20). That this was so seems evident
from the fact that Louis’s enactment was levelled as much against the
Lombards and Caorsini[114] usurers as against the Jews. It would seem
that Louis wished to induce them to abandon usury for agriculture or
handicraft, as was also the desire of his contemporary Edward I. of
England. But both monarchs failed in the attempt.
In the state to which matters had now grown, it would have been next
to impossible to abate the dislike of the people to them, so as to
induce them to permit the Jews to engage in the work either of the
artisan or the peasant. The hatred of the populace was in no way
abated by the quiet of the last forty years. In 1239 there were riots
in Paris and Orleans, and other great cities, on the old charge of
crucifying boys at the Passover, in which property was wrecked and
wholesale murders took place. At Ploermel, in Brittany, the duke
of that country summoned an assembly of the nobles and bishops, at
which it was declared that agriculture was ruined by the monstrous
exactions of the Jews; and a series of laws were passed, which for
injustice and cruelty exceed any ever put forth in any country. It
was decreed that all debts to Jews should be cancelled; that all Jews
should be banished from the country; that no person who should kill
a Jew should be liable to prosecution for it; and that no judge or
magistrate should take cognisance of any such offence. A petition was
further addressed to the King of France, requesting him to carry out
the same regulations throughout his dominions. The Council of Lyons,
held in the ensuing year, required all Christian princes, on pain
of excommunication, to force the Jews in their several territories
to refund to the Crusaders the sums they had exacted from them. The
Jews were forbidden to exact any debt from a Crusader’s family,
until he himself returned from Palestine, or until satisfactory
evidence of his death had been produced. Another Council prohibited
them from practising as physicians, ‘because, being in direct league
with Satan, if they did cure any one, it would probably be by their
master’s aid!’ Whatever evils men experienced, for which they were
unable to assign any special cause, were supposed to be due to the
secret spells and diabolical influence of the Jews, much as in a
succeeding generation the same evils were attributed to witchcraft.
The main source and centre of their evil knowledge was supposed to
be the mysterious and terrible Talmud. Edicts were issued for its
destruction, and it was burned, we are told, by cartloads in the
streets of Paris.
A considerable exodus seems to have followed on these measures; which
was taken advantage of by the king, who seized on the goods of those
who had taken flight, and thus raised money for the crusade on which
he was about to enter. About the same time he ordered them to wear a
special badge, called the _rouelle_—a piece of blue cloth worn both
on the front and on the back of the Jewish gabardine.
Notwithstanding these severities, it is plain that Louis was actuated
more by a desire of converting the Jews to Christ than of venting
his horror and hate of them. We read of a solemn conference held
in the year 1254 between Rabbi Jechiel and a convert from Judaism,
named Nicolas, before Blanche, who acted as regent during her son’s
absence. Both parties claimed the victory; neither, consequently,
underwent any conversion. It was probably disappointment at this
result which induced Louis to send home orders that they should now
be banished from the realm, which, we are told, the queen-mother
punctually executed.
During Louis’s absence occurred also the first ‘rising of the
shepherds,’ as it is called. This was led by an apostate Hungarian
monk, who had originally been a Mussulman. The avowed purpose was the
rescue of King Louis from the hands of his enemies. They committed
pillage and murder wherever they went, but the Jews were the especial
objects of their violence. It is probable that if they had confined
their outrages to them, they might have escaped punishment. But
the massacre of the Christians could not be overlooked, especially
of priests and friars; and the Hungarian and his followers were
overpowered and slain.
Philip the Hardy succeeded to the throne in 1270, and one of
his first acts was to recall the Jews to France, it having been
discovered that, however much the people might complain of their
avarice and exactions, they got on considerably worse without them.
It is said that during his reign, which lasted for twenty-five years,
they continued unmolested, and again gathered in great riches. They
were banished, however, from Gascony, in 1288, by Edward I. of
England, a preliminary measure, one might think, to his expulsion
of them from his English domains. A story is told by Walsingham of
his having taken this step in consequence of a miraculous escape
which he had from being struck dead by a flash of lightning, which
passed directly over his bed and killed two of his chamberlains
who were standing close by. As a sign of his gratitude for this
deliverance, he is said to have banished the Jews. Edward was a man
rather in advance of his day, and it is difficult to believe that
he could have thought that the merciless banishment of the Jews
would be a fit requital of mercy shown to him. We shall see more of
his motives in an ensuing chapter. But it is proper to remark that
this age, apparently beyond any other, credited the most extravagant
conceptions respecting the Satanic hatred of the Jews for the
Christian mysteries. They are continually charged with endeavouring
to possess themselves of the sacred wafer, and then offering it
the grossest insults, their sacrilege being as often exposed and
punished by some special miracle. A woman is persuaded by a Jew to
convey to him the consecrated host, which he stabs in several places,
whereupon it bleeds profusely; and some Christian customers, coming
in, see it, and indict him for the offence; or he puts the wafer
into his purse, in which are a number of silver pieces, and these
are turned into seven wafers, similar to the one he had placed among
them. Staggered by the miracle, he becomes a convert to the gospel.
Stories like these are continually to be met with. That the mass of
the people believed them is beyond dispute; but whether the more
intelligent among the clergy attached any real faith to such tales,
or simply used them as a means of accomplishing their own ends, in
exciting popular fury against the Jews, is a matter very difficult to
determine.
In 1285, Philip IV., called the Fair, the shameless murderer of
the Knights Templars, succeeded his father. His first acts were
extremely hostile to the Church, but he showed no lenity to the
Jews. Six years after his accession, he repeated the act of several
of his predecessors, and expelled them from the kingdom. It does
not appear that the banishment was rigidly enforced, as we find a
second expulsion taking place not many years afterwards. In fact,
these repeated sentences of exile and subsequent recall read very
much as though they were simply regular stages in a prescribed system
of spoliation. After the Jews had been resident in a country a
sufficient length of time to have amassed wealth enough to be worth
seizing upon, it was discovered that they had been guilty of some
terrible wickedness, which rendered it impossible for a Christian
sovereign to tolerate them within his dominions. They had seized some
Christian boy, perhaps, and indulged their natural hate at once of
the Saviour and His worshippers, by subjecting him to death on the
cross. The fact that they had done so was made abundantly clear by
some astounding miracle, which rendered human testimony needless.
The immediate authors of the deed were executed, and their property
confiscated to the Crown, and their countrymen were condemned to
forfeit all but their movables, and with these to quit the realm.
Sometimes the charge was varied, and they were found to have poisoned
wells, or leagued with some foreign enemies, or (as we have seen)
profaned or insulted the Host. But it always came to the same result.
The Jews were driven out of the land, until they were in a condition
to pay a large sum for readmission; and then the king, in the midst
of his just anger, remembered mercy, and allowed them to return and
grow rich, until their renewed wealth brought some fresh wickedness
to light.
In Germany, though the virulence of both clergy and people seems
to have been very nearly of the same character as in France, the
sovereigns of the country were evidently disposed to extend the
shield of their protection over this unhappy and persecuted race.
Frederick II., a monarch whose character forms a curious and
interesting study, dealt with them in a manner which contrasts
strangely with the demeanour of contemporary rulers towards them. At
Hagenau, in Lower Alsatia, three children had been found dead in the
house of a Jew. There was no evidence that the Jew had murdered them;
but the tale was instantly conveyed to the emperor with a demand for
vengeance. ‘Three children found dead! Let them be buried then,’
was his answer. He followed up this novel mode of dealing with the
matter, by causing a judicial inquiry to be made as to whether it
was a regular Jewish custom to sacrifice Christian children at the
feast of the Passover. Of course no legal tribunal could give any
other decision than that there was no sort of evidence of such a
practice.[115]
At the Council of Vienna, held in 1267, restrictions unheard of
even in the harshest times were proposed and ordered. The Jews were
forbidden to hold even the most ordinary intercourse of every-day
life with the Christians. They were not to be allowed to use the
public baths, or put up at the public inns, or to accept any public
contract, or employ any Christian servant. To the requirements
already exacted of them was added that of wearing a high peaked cap,
which at once and inevitably declared their nationality. A permit
must be purchased, before it could be lawful for any one to buy meat
of a Jew.
At Munich, in 1287, an old woman having confessed that she had sold a
child to the Jews, whose blood they intended to use for some unholy
purpose, the rabble, without further inquiry, slaughtered all the
Jews on whom they could lay their hands. The city guard, unable to
quell the tumult, advised the Jews to retire for safety into their
synagogue, which being a building of solid stone, was likely to be
secure against violence. But the populace attacked and destroyed it,
and all within it, notwithstanding the efforts of the duke himself to
protect them.
To close the horrors of this century, there was another frightful
massacre of the Jews at Nuremburg in 1292. A fanatic peasant, named
Raind Fleish, gave out, during the war raging between Nassau and
Austria, that he had been sent by Almighty God to exterminate the
whole race of Israel. The people, believing him, set upon the Jews
in Nuremburg and the other Bavarian cities, and burnt all that fell
into their hands. The others, preferring to die by their own act
rather than by the swords of their enemies, set their own houses on
fire, and perished with their wives and children in the flames.
FOOTNOTES:
[114] Caorsini, Italian usurers who drove a great trade in
money-lending.
[115] As an instance of the unbounded credulity of the people as
to any accusation made against the Jews, it was affirmed that they
had entered into a league with the Mongolian Tartars, to enter and
overrun Germany. They had loaded a number of waggons, it is said,
with arms for their use, and pretended that the casks in which their
arms were conveyed contained poisoned wine, which the Mongolians
would unsuspectingly drink, and so be destroyed. The story was
generally believed.