The frost-bound rivers bear the weight
Of many a vent’rous elf;
Let each who crowds to see them skate
Be careful for himself:
For, like the world, deceitful ice
Who trusts it makes them rue:
’Tis slippery as the paths of vice,
And quite as faithless too.
[Illustration: ~Stoning Jews in Lent.--A Custom.~]
From the sabbath before Palm-Sunday, to the last hour of the Tuesday
after Easter, “the Christians were accustomed to stone and beat the
Jews,”[11] and all Jews who desired to exempt themselves from the
infliction of this cruelty, commuted for a payment in money. It was
likewise ordained in one of the Catholic services, during Lent, that all
orders of men should be prayed for except the Jews.[12] These usages
were instituted and justified by a dreadful perversion of scripture,
when rite and ceremony triumphed over truth and mercy. Humanity was
dead, for superstition Molochized the heart.
From the dispersion of the Jews they have lived peaceably in all nations
towards all, and in all nations been persecuted, imprisoned, tortured,
and put to death, or massacred by mobs. In England, kings conspired with
their subjects to oppress them. To say nothing of the well-known
persecutions they endured under king John, the walls of London were
repaired with the stones of their dwellings, which his barons had
pillaged and destroyed. Until the reign of Henry II., a spot of ground
near Red-cross-street, in London, was the only place in all England
wherein they were allowed to bury their dead.
In 1262, after the citizens of London broke into their houses, plundered
their property, and murdered seven hundred of them in cold blood, King
Henry III. gave their ruined synagogue in Lothbury to the friars called
the fathers of the sackcloth. The church of St. Olave in the Old Jewry
was another of their synagogues till they were dispossessed of it: were
the sufferings they endured to be recounted we should shudder. Our old
English ancestors would have laughed any one to derision who urged in a
Jew’s behalf, that he had “eyes,” or “hands,” “organs, dimensions,
senses, affections, passions;” or that he was “fed with the same food,
hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the
same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a
Christian is.” They would have deemed a man mad had one been found with
a desire to prove that
------- the poor _Jew_,
In corporal sufferance feels a pang as great
As when a _Christian_ dies.
To say nothing of their more obvious sufferings for many centuries, the
tide of public opinion raged against the Jews vehemently and
incessantly. They were addressed with sneers and contumely; the finger
of vulgar scorn was pointed at them; they were hunted through the
streets in open day, and when protected from the extremity of violence,
it was with tones and looks denoting that only a little lower hate
sanctuaried their persons. In conversation and in books they were a
by-word, and a jest.
* * * * *
A work printed in 1628, for popular entertainment, entitled “A
Miscellany of Seriousness with Merriment, consisting of Witty Questions,
Riddles, Jests,” &c. tells this story as a good joke. A sea captain on a
voyage, with thirty passengers, being overtaken by a violent tempest,
found it necessary to throw half of them overboard, in order to lighten
the vessel. Fifteen of the passengers were Christians, and the other
fifteen were Jews, but in this exigency they unanimously agreed in the
captain’s opinion, and that he should place the whole thirty in a
circle, and throw every ninth man over till only fifteen were left. To
save the Christians, the captain placed his thirty passengers in this
order, viz.: four Christians, five Jews; two Christians, one Jew; three
Christians, one Jew; one Christian, two Jews; two Christians, three
Jews; one Christian, two Jews; two Christians, one Jew. He began to
number from the first of the four Christians thus: