IN MEDIAEVAL ROME
IN the whole history of heroism there is nothing finer than the example of the Jews of the Roman Ghetto, a handful of men who for 1,500 years and longer remained true to their own ideals—unmoved and undazzled by the triumphant world-power of the dominant faith; and undaunted
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, by the bloody whip,
And the summons to Christian fellowship.
Helpless victims of all the horrors enumerated in these burning lines of Robert Browning, these Jews were yet free men. Not a trace of what a modern Jewish thinker—Achad Ha’am—has called ‘spiritual slavery’ was theirs. In all fundamental matters they were totally indifferent to the opinion of those who might torture the body but could never crush the soul.
J. H. HERTZ, 1915.
THE history of the daughter religions of Judaism is one uninterrupted series of attempts to commit matricide.
M. STEINSCHNEIDER, 1893.
THE FIRST CRUSADE (1096)[24]
YEA, they slay us and they smite,
Vex our souls with sore affright;
All the closer cleave we, Lord,
To Thine everlasting word.
Not a word of all their Mass
Shall our lips in homage pass;
Though they curse, and bind, and kill,
The living God is with us still.
We still are Thine, though limbs are torn;
Better death than life forsworn.
Noblest matrons seek for death,
Rob their children of their breath;
Fathers, in their fiery zeal,
Slay their sons with murderous steel,
And in heat of holiest strife,
For love of Thee, spare not their life.
The fair and young lie down to die
In witness of Thy Unity;
From dying lips the accents swell,
‘Thy God is One, O Israel’;
And bridegroom answers unto bride,
‘The Lord is God, and none beside’,
And, knit with bonds of holiest faith,
They pass to endless life through death.
KALONYMOS BEN YEHUDAH.
(Trans. E. H. Plumptre.)