The history of the Jews

by Gotthard Deutsch

TALMUDIC LITERATURE

In the beginning of the thirteenth century, orthodox authorities in France and Spain attacked Maimonides’ philosophy. Their leaders were Meir Abulafia in Spain, and Solomon ben Abraham of Montpellier in France. They denounced the work of Maimonides to the Dominicans, and the latter burned it publicly at Paris in 1244. Of Talmudic authorities who possessed secular learning and worked in the field of exegesis the most prominent was Moses ben Nachman of Gerona (Ramban, 1200-1270). His commentary on the Pentateuch contains sound exegetical views, is strictly traditional and gives space to Kabalistic interpretations. He indulged in vehement invectives against Ibn Ezra, and in his notes on Alfasi vehemently attacked Zerahiah Halevi for his critical remarks on Alfasi in “The Wars of the Lord.”

One of the most prominent Spanish Rabbis was Solomon Ibn Adret (Rashba), in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. He was opposed to philosophy and issued a prohibition that no one should read the Moreh before he was twenty-five years old. He professed a belief in every statement in the Talmud, even if in conflict with well-known scientific facts. He left thousands of responsa.

A younger contemporary of his is Asher ben Yechiel, a disciple of Meir of Rothenburg (German rabbi of the thirteenth century), who emigrated to Spain in 1305 and died in Toledo in 1327. He wrote a work on the plan of that by Alfasi, making an abstract of the practical laws of the Talmud. It is printed in most of the Talmud editions, and quoted as Rosh. He had eight sons who were Talmudic scholars, and of these the most prominent was Jacob ben Asher, who died in 1350. He wrote an important set of codes of the Rabbinic law, called Turim. The first, Orah Hayyim, treated chiefly of liturgics, the second, Eben Haezer, of matrimonial laws, the third, Yoreh Deah, of dietary laws, the fourth, Hoshen Mishpat, of civil laws.

Another disciple of Meir of Rothenburg was Mordecai ben Hillel, who was killed in Nuremberg during the Rindfleisch riots of 1298. He wrote notes to Alfasi’s code of value, because of their many historical references. To the fourteenth century belongs Isaac ben Sheshet (Ribash) of Barcelona, who fled after the persecution of 1391, and became Chief Rabbi of Algiers, where he died about 1410. In his decisions he is very orthodox, but distinguished by his humanitarian views. Thus he forced his congregations to rescind an order against the landing of further immigrants. His successor was Simeon ben Zemach Duran, whose responsa are collected under the title (Tashbez). He is supposed to have been the first rabbi who received a salary. In Italy, in the thirteenth century, Isaiah di Trani the Elder, and his grandson, Isaiah di Trani the Younger, flourished.

In the latter half of the fifteenth century Joseph Colon wrote a volume of responsa. His opponent was Elijah Kapsali. Of special interest in Colon’s decisions is the case of the congregation of Nuremberg, in which he held that all German congregations were obliged to contribute toward the expenses of the trial of Israel Bruna, who was accused of complicity in the murder of a Christian child in 1477. In Germany the most important rabbi of the fifteenth century was Israel Isserlein of Marburg, 1400-1470, author of Terumat Ha-Deshen, a collection of responsa containing important historical notes. When the authorities in Breslau issued a law that Jews had to swear with uncovered head and by the name Yahve, he permitted it, provided it was not meant as an attempt to convert the Jews.

The German and French rabbis in the thirteenth century were characterized by their strict adherence to authority and rigorous view of the law. The most prominent is Judah ben Samuel Hechasid, author of “Sefer Hasidim.” Eleazar ben Jehudah of Worms, a descendant of the Kalonymos family, and author of Rokeah (druggist), is a type of this ascetic school. Another is Moses of Coucy, author of a compendium of the 613 commandments Sefer Mizwot Haggadol, abbreviated Semag.

In the thirteenth century the study of Kabbala received strong impetus from Isaac, the blind, son of Rabed. His disciples were Ezra and Ezriel; their disciple was Ramban, and he introduced Kabbala into his commentary on the Pentateuch. About 1390 Moses of Leon wrote the Zohar, a Kabbalistic Midrash on the Pentateuch, which he claimed was written by Simeon ben Yohai, disciple of Akiba, and discovered by him in a cave. It is written in Aramaic.

CHAPTER VII
THE PERIOD OF IMPROVEMENT (1492-1791)

The Jews of Spain went to Turkey, North Africa, Oriental countries, and especially to Palestine. They came in such numbers that their language, the so-called Ladino, became the language of the Jews in these countries, taking the place of Arabic and Greek. Sultan Bajazed II, 1481-1513, is reported to have said that he could not understand why Ferdinand of Spain should be called a wise king, since he had impoverished his own country and enriched Turkey. Jews stood very high at Court. Joseph Hamon was physician to Sultans Bajazed II and Selim I (1512-1520) and his son, Moses Hamon, to Sultan Soliman II (1520-1566). Joseph Mendes (died 1579) and his aunt, Gracia, whose daughter Reyna he had married, were Marranos who had fled from Spain to Antwerp, then to Venice, and finally to Constantinople. Joseph was a special favorite of the Sultan, who forced the Republic of Venice to surrender the property of Donna Gracia, which had been confiscated. The Sultan made Joseph Duke of Naxos, and he seriously contemplated the establishment of a Jewish state there. Owing to Don Joseph’s influence, the Pope was forced to free a number of Marranos who had been imprisoned in the Papal States and charged with apostasy. A number of Jews, prompted by Messianic expectations, founded settlements in Jerusalem and Safed.

In Italy the condition of the Jews changed for the worse. Venice established the first ghetto, called thus after the gun foundry “Gietto” in the vicinity. At the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century the Popes employed Jewish physicians, such as Bonet del Lattes under Leo X. But Paul IV and Pius V issued oppressive laws against the Jews, restricting their commercial activity to trading in cast-off clothing, enforcing the marks of distinction, Jew Badges, and ordering the censorship of Hebrew literature. The reaction against Protestantism and the foundation of the Jesuit order further tended to make the condition of the Jews still worse. The Council of Trent, 1563, prohibited the Talmud altogether, but later on modified its decree to the effect that the word Talmud should not be printed on the title page of the work and that every edition should be submitted to the ecclesiastic censor aided by Jewish converts. Prominent among the latter were Elijah and Solomon Romano, grandsons of Elijah Levita.

The Italian Jews, in order to obviate the dangers arising from informations against Jewish literature, decided in 1564 that no book should be printed without the consent of three prominent rabbis and the trustees of the congregation in the district where the press was located. By these measures the Hebrew printing trade, which had flourished in Italy during the first half of the sixteenth century, was ruined and the press transferred to Poland. There, owing to the low state of industry, the art of printing declined.

The frequent expulsions and the constant oppressions fostered Messianic hopes. In 1507 a Messianic pretender arose in Northern Italy. His name was Asher Lemlein. Of the particulars of his career we know nothing. Of greater importance is the appearance of a man who called himself David Reubeni in Venice, 1522. He pretended to be the brother of the reigning king of the tribe of Reuben, living in Arabia, and planned an alliance of the Christian powers against the Mohammedans. For this he pledged the aid of the ten tribes living there. The Pope sent him to Portugal, where he made the acquaintance of Solomon Molcho, a young Marrano, who returned with Reubeni to Italy, preached and prophesied there and became a favorite of the Pope. The Jews feared the results of his eccentricities and denounced him to the authorities as an apostate from Christianity, but the Pope shielded him. Finally both went to Germany in 1530, where they hoped to win Charles V to their plans. They were imprisoned; Molcho, as an apostate, was burned at the stake and Reubeni sent to Portugal, where every trace of him was lost. Who he was is not known. He seems to have travelled in the East, and probably was an Arab.

The Reformation of 1517 at first influenced the condition of the Jews for the better. The accusations that the Jews desecrated hosts ceased. As late as 1492 a number of Jews were burned for this supposed crime at Sternberg in Mecklenburg. In 1510, thirty-nine Jews were burned at Berlin for the same cause. But aside from this Protestantism in itself stood for religious toleration. Luther, in the beginning of his career, spoke of the Jews as “cousins of our Lord,” who should be treated with kindness. He thought that his purified Christianity would win them over, but, toward the end of his life, when he had failed in his efforts and was embittered for other reasons, he wrote two pamphlets filled with invective against the Jews. In these he advocated the confiscation of their property, the destruction of their synagogues, and the forcible baptism of their children. Still more bitter than Luther’s attacks were those of John Eck, his Catholic opponent.

It seems, however, that the Reformation increased the number of Jewish converts. Prominent among these was Emanuel Tremellius, an Italian, who first became a monk and then a Protestant. He was a friend of Calvin, and translated the Bible for him into Latin. He also translated Calvin’s Catechism into Hebrew. Another convert was Luke Helic, who assisted the Moravian Brethren in translating the Bible into the Slavic language. A calumniator of Judaism was Antonius Margaritha, the son of a rabbi of Ratisbon, named Jacob Margaliot, who in 1530 wrote a libel on Judaism. Characteristic was the act of the Protestant Landgrave, Louis of Hesse, who advised the suppression of an anti-Jewish book, “Jüdenfeind,” by Nigrinus (1570) saying that the same arguments might just as well be used by Catholics against Protestants.

The Renaissance, which produced the Reformation, also had a favorable effect on the position of the Jews. When John Pfefferkorn, a convert from Judaism, in 1506 accused the Jews of blaspheming Jesus in their prayers and in their literature, and proposed the confiscation of all their books, John Reuchlin, a famous diplomat and expert Hebrew scholar, rendered an opinion in their favor. The Dominicans of Cologne, among them a former rabbi, Victor von Karben, whose tool Pfefferkorn had been, made the latter’s cause their own, but did not succeed. In Frankfort-on-the-Main, where the books had been confiscated, they were ordered to be returned to their owners, and a long and bitter controversy, in which both parties engaged in vile attacks, ensued. In the meantime the Reformation intervened; and the Pope, who had been appealed to, ended the matter by an order in 1516 that both parties should keep their peace. He reversed this decision in favor of the Dominicans in 1520.

Such occasions as the calumniations of Pfefferkorn and others showed the arbitrariness of municipalities and lords in the treatment of the Jews, and pointed out the advisability of Jews appointing an advocate, “Shtadlan,” who would always defend their rights when necessary. One of the most famous of these was Josel Rosheim (1478-1554) who was originally appointed as their advocate by the Jews of Alsace, and often acted in behalf of all the Jews of Germany, here and there arbitrating dissensions in congregations. He obtained various charters from Emperor Charles V, in which protection to the Jews was promised. Among these stipulations, one issued in 1530 is of special interest. The Emperor prohibited the expulsion of Jews from his territory without his consent. This rule, however, was not even observed in the immediate possessions of the German rulers. At various times Ferdinand I, brother of Charles V, and German Emperor (1522-1564) ordered expulsions from Austria in 1557, and in 1541 and 1561 from Bohemia; they were hardly ever carried out. When the expulsion from Bohemia was decreed, Mordecai Meisels, a wealthy Jew of Prague, 1528-1601, and the descendant of the Italian family Soncino, which in 1513 established a printing press in Prague, went to Rome and obtained a bull from the Pope for the protection of the Jews. The law of expulsion from Bohemia was repealed. Meisels was in other ways a great benefactor of his co-religionists.

In Berlin, where the Jews had been expelled in 1510, Leopold (Lippold) was a physician and favorite of the Margrave Joachim II of Brandenburg. After the death of his master he was accused of having poisoned him and executed in 1573. A new refuge was opened to the Jews in Holland, when this country gained its independence from Spain. A family of fugitive Marranos is said to have been driven to Emden, Hanover, by unfavorable winds, and thence they were advised to go to Amsterdam (1593). Moses ben Uri of Emden followed them and instructed them in Judaism. Some other converts followed, among them monks, statesmen and scholars. One of the most prominent rabbis of Amsterdam was Menasseh ben Israel, who in 1654, tried to obtain from Cromwell official permission for the Jews to resettle in England, whence they had been expelled in 1290. A bill introduced into Parliament for the readmission failed to pass, but prominent jurists rendered an opinion that the expulsion was not a legal act. The Jews already in London were not molested, opened a synagogue and acquired a cemetery in 1660. Charles II was favorable to the Jews, some of whom had assisted him financially before he had ascended the throne; in 1664 he confirmed their right of residence.

About the middle of the seventeenth century a colony of Marranos from Amsterdam settled in Brazil, which was then under Dutch rule. When the Portuguese reconquered it (1654) the Jews were expelled and settled in the Dutch West Indies and New York, then New Amsterdam. Governor Stuyvesant objected to their landing, but the directors of the West India Company, among whom there were several Jews, overruled his decision. Meantime the Jews had settled in Rhode Island, where Roger Williams had promulgated full religious freedom in 1657.

In Amsterdam the Portuguese community combined strict traditional piety with secular learning and great commercial activity. To the Portuguese Jews, Amsterdam owes its importance as the center of the diamond trade. Uriel Acosta, who held high office in Spain and emigrated to Holland in order to openly profess Judaism, became imbued with deistic ideas, was tried as a heretic and did penance. Then, excommunicated as a backslider, he became despondent and, having attempted to kill Rabbi Saul Morteira, committed suicide in 1640. Baruch or Benedict Spinoza (1633-1677) was also excommunicated, but disregarded all attempts to bring him back to Judaism. He is the originator of a famous system of philosophy, called Pantheism or Monism, laid down in his principal work, the “Ethics.” He also occupies a prominent place in the history of Biblical Criticism through his work, “Tractatus Theologico Politicus.”

In 1666, the year which the Christian Millenarians regarded as Messianic by reason of a passage in Revelation xiii, 18, Judaism was stirred by Sabbatai Zebi of Smyrna, who proclaimed himself the Messiah. Expelled from that city he went to Egypt, where he received the enthusiastic support of Raphael Joseph, a wealthy tax-farmer. In Palestine, whither he went, he found many admirers, and the prophet, Nathan of Gaza, proclaimed him the true Messiah. Being denounced for high treason, Sabbatai was brought to Constantinople and imprisoned in the fort of Abydos, but the means supplied by his followers enabled him to hold court like a prince. Everywhere in Europe the majority of the Jews believed him to be the Messiah. The representatives of the Jews in Poland sent two prominent rabbis as a committee to him, but Nehemiah Hakohen, the Polish Kabbalist, who had come to ascertain the truth, denounced him as an impostor. Sabbatai Zebi was brought before the Sultan to answer a charge of high treason; and, in order to save his life, he turned to Islam. The Sultan gave him an office, and for ten years, until his death, he remained in contact with the Jews. Many of his followers turned to Islam, and still exist as a special sect called Donmah in Salonica. Others of his followers who remained true to Judaism formed a mystic community, which adopted the name of Hasidim. They were excommunicated by the most prominent rabbis, but progressed rapidly, although many of them were unmasked as frauds. Nehemiah Hayon, an Oriental, wrote a book in which he taught the doctrine of the Trinity (1712) and Jacob Frank, a Polish Jew, formed a Judæo-Christian sect. The latter was supported by those who wished to convert the Jews to Christianity, and lived in princely style in Offenbach, where he died in 1793.

The center of Hasidism was in Podolia and Volhynia; Israel Besht, 1695-1760, may be considered as its founder. His work was continued by his disciples, among whom Baer Mezdzyrzecz (1700-1772) was the most prominent. Later Nahman of Bratzlav (1779-1810) developed the theory of miraculous powers of healing granted to favored individuals and the mystic interpretation of the Bible and the Rabbinic commands. They still have a great number of devotees in parts of Austrian and Russian Poland.

Persecutions in the seventeenth century are of rarer occurrence than in former times. The most serious one was that which, with several interruptions, lasted from 1648 to 1655, and the leader of which was the Cossack captain Chmelnicki. The Cossacks, who were under the sovereignty of the Polish king, rebelled against their masters, and the Jews had to suffer, partly because they were unable to protect themselves, and partly because, as tax-farmers, they had been the instrument of the extortion practised by the Polish nobles. Thousands were massacred, and since that time the 20th of Sivan is observed as a fast-day in Poland. They fled in all directions, and many great Talmudists among them became rabbis in Western Europe.

The Jesuits in Poland and in those places where the Catholic Church had succeeded in crushing the Reformation became very powerful and fostered hatred of the Jews, often resulting in mob violence. In 1664 such a massacre occurred in Lemberg. The Jews were accused of the murder of Christians; similar charges were often made. In 1659 two prominent Jews were put to death on Rosh Hashanah in Rossieny, Lithuania, under the charge of ritual murder; in 1694 Lazarus Abeles and a friend of his were imprisoned in Prague, charged with having killed the son of Abeles, who wanted to become a Christian. Abeles hanged himself and his friend was cruelly put to death. In Vienna and Prague mission services, which the Jews were compelled to attend every Sabbath, were held by the Jesuits since 1630. In 1670 Emperor Leopold I expelled the Jews from Vienna, influenced partly by the hatred of the citizens and partly by the bigotry of the Empress, a Spanish princess. Some of the refugees were given permission by the Elector Frederick William of Brandenburg to settle in Berlin. At about the same time Halle, Halberstadt and Dessau were opened to them. In 1670 Herz Levi of Metz was accused of having murdered a Christian child and was put to death. His innocence was afterwards proved.

Peculiar to the history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the court Jews, Hof-Jude, Hof-factor, Minister-Resident. Prominent among them were Elijah Gomperz of Cleve, Moses Benjamin Wolf of Dessau, Jost Libman of Berlin, Behrendt Lehman of Dresden, and Samuel Oppenheimer and Samson Wertheimer of Vienna. These Jews did service as jewelers, bankers, general brokers and army contractors, and, as such, were exempt from Jewish taxes and certain disabilities. They possessed great influence, which they used to good advantage for their fellow-Jews. Samuel Oppenheimer, who died in 1703, obtained from Emperor Leopold an order of confiscation of an anti-Jewish book, “Entdecktes Judenthum,” by J. A. Eisenmenger (1700), which, up to date, has served as a repertory for anti-Semitic writers.

In 1614 a serious riot broke out in Frankfort-on-the-Main, led by the guilds, which accused the patricians controlling the municipal council of partiality to the Jews. The council, aided by imperial troops, succeeded in suppressing the rebellion after considerable difficulty. Vincent Fettmilch, the leader, was quartered, his home demolished, and his family expelled from the city. Other ringleaders were beheaded. While the city council thus showed its sincere intention to have the law respected even with regard to the Jews, the new legal regulation for the Jews of Frankfort, “Juden-Staettigkeit,” was a specimen of mediæval ideas, maintaining the usual restrictions on occupation, marriage, residence and quite a number of measures, like the yellow badge, meant to disgrace a Jew. It remained in force until 1807.

The political condition of the Jews at this time nevertheless shows steady improvement, although their threatened expulsion from the city of Metz and their actual expulsion from Vienna and the province of Lower Austria in 1670 were a relapse into the conditions of the fifteenth century. Still, such events are local and few and far between; on the other hand, an improvement is manifest in various instances where Jews were admitted to countries or cities from which they had been expelled in mediæval times. Particularly important was their settlement in Hamburg and Berlin at this time. In Hamburg the municipal council gave to some Portuguese Marranos, who came there to escape from the Inquisition, the right of residence in spite of clerical protest. The first settlers were soon followed by Jews from Germany in the course of the seventeenth century, and finally (1710), they formed a legally-organized congregation. Similarly Portuguese Jews had found a haven of refuge in various cities of Southern France, although there in a Catholic country they had to conceal their Judaism.

In Berlin and the Margravate of Brandenburg, the Elector Frederick William I allowed some Jews, expelled from Vienna, to settle in his states on their plea that they were persecuted for conscience’ sake (1671). Still more important was the readmission of the Jews to England by Cromwell in 1654; and, although the bill for their readmission did not pass, their settlement was quietly overlooked and declared by jurists to be legally justified. Another new country was opened to Jewish settlement by the end of the sixteenth century when the Spanish Netherlands had made themselves independent of the Spanish crown. The constitution of the new country was based on perfect religious freedom, and naturally fugitives from the Inquisition were among the first to avail themselves of this opportunity. They were soon joined by the settlers from other countries, and in the seventeenth century Amsterdam was one of the leading Jewish communities of the world.

The greatest importance, however, attaches to the settlement of the Jews in the New World. While in the Spanish colonies there was not only no religious liberty but even persecutions of Marranos culminating in autos-da-fe, as in the mother country, the conquest of Brazil by the Dutch in 1624 resulted in the first organized Jewish community on the American continent. The loss of Brazil in 1654 forced the Jews to emigrate, and some settled in the Dutch and British possessions in Central and South America, Surinam, Curacoa and Jamaica. But the most important settlement was that of New York in 1654. The intolerance of the Dutch, governor Stuyvesant drove some of the newcomers to Newport, R. I. (1657), where Roger Williams had proclaimed full religious liberty.

In 1733 some Portuguese Jews from England availed themselves of the opportunity created by James Oglethorpe, who made Georgia an asylum for convicts who were willing to reform. They sent some of their poor to Savannah. As the governor was unfavorable to the settlement of the Jews, fearing that their presence would prejudice the success of the colony, some Jews went to South Carolina, for which the philosopher John Locke had drafted a liberal constitution (1697). He expressly declared equal rights for non-Christians. They formed a congregation at Charleston in 1750, for a long time the most flourishing Jewish settlement in the territory now comprised in the United States. Yet up to the end of the eighteenth century only six Jewish communities are known: New York, Newport, R. I., Savannah, Ga., Charleston, S. C., Philadelphia, and Lancaster, Pa. These Jews took part in the American Revolution, and their patriotism was expressly recognized in the reply of George Washington to their addresses of congratulation when he was elected President.

An English law of 1740 gave to the Jews in the American colonies full rights of naturalization, also extended to Canada when it became a British possession. The growth of Jewish population was slow and did not begin until the reactionary governments of Europe, after the July revolution of 1830, made the hope of any improvement appear vain. Thus, since 1830 large streams of Jewish immigrants have settled all over the United States. Another far stronger current of immigration began in consequence of the persecutions in Russia in 1881. The Jewish population of America may now accordingly be figured at 2,000,000 souls. In Spanish America the only settlement of any consequence is in Argentine.