The condition of the Jews was incomparably better in the parts of the Empire upon which the rule of the Hapsburgs weighed less heavily. In Hungary and Transylvania they had long enjoyed freedom of tenure under the protection of the Magyar nobles. These were in the habit of employing Jewish bailiffs, and did not consider it beneath their dignity even to obey the orders of Jewish officers in the war for independence, in which the Jews took an important part. ♦1848♦ After the suppression of the rebellion the latter were made by the Imperial Government to pay for their patriotic ardour; but when the day came for the distribution of prizes they secured their reward. By the Austrian Constitution of 1860, which received its finishing touches eight years later, the Jews obtained full liberty. At present several Jews sit in the Legislature, and the race flourishes not only in Vienna, Budapesth, and other great towns, but even in the Austrian section of Poland.
The daylight of a tolerant and liberal administration has chased the ghosts of the past out of Galicia. Even the most orthodox followers of the Synagogue are fast forgetting their ancient wrongs and prejudices. In olden times Jewish boys on their birth were imprisoned by their parents within a pair of stays, laced tighter and tighter every year, that the child’s chest might remain too narrow for military service—a suicidal training, the evil consequences of which are to this day visible in the form of chest diseases and consumption among the Galician Jews. But the practice has long been abandoned. Humaner conditions in the army, and the spread of education among the Austro-Polish Jews, have reconciled them to the service, and now one half of the Galicia contingent of the Austro-Hungarian Army consists of Jewish recruits. The Empire has gained loyal defenders, and the Jews the benefit of a disciplinary and patriotic education.
In Italy the Papal States were the last retreat of the Middle Age. The Holy Office had disappeared from Parma, Tuscany, and Sicily in the eighteenth century, but in Rome it continued to flourish; and where the Inquisition held sway there was no peace for Israel. ♦1809♦ The Roman Jews, liberated by Napoleon, were thrust back into slavery after his fall. Then the reign of darkness was restored under the double crown of Dogmatism and Despotism. The temporal power enforced the doctrines of the spiritual, and the spiritual was abused to sanctify the decrees of the temporal. How could the lot of the infidel Jew be other than what it was? The Roman Ghetto continued to be the home of squalor and sorrow far into the nineteenth century. As late as 1847 decrees were issued forbidding the inmates to quit their cage, the Jews were still compelled to hear sermons at church, and everything that bigotry could do was done to bring about their conversion.
It is true that Pope Pius IX. inaugurated his reign with a display of toleration till then unparalleled in the annals of the Papacy. In 1846 a general amnesty was proclaimed by which thousands of prisoners and exiles were pardoned for crimes which they had never committed, or of which they had never been legally convicted; two years later the Jews were relieved from the necessity of listening to sermons; and daylight seemed at last to have dawned upon Rome. But this period of liberalism proved as transient as it was unprecedented. The reaction soon set in, and the influence of the Jesuits and of obscurantism was re-established. In 1856 the Pope issued an encyclical condemning somnambulism and clairvoyance, and bidding all bishops to suppress the anti-Christian practices. Nine years later he hurled an anathema against the Freemasons—the deadly enemies of the Inquisition. In brief, the pontificate of Pius IX., despite its promising beginning, is chiefly distinguished for two fresh victories over reason: the discovery of the Immaculate Conception and the invention of Papal Infallibility.
♦1858♦
Under such conditions it is not surprising that the Church should not hesitate to allow a nurse to baptize her Jewish charge secretly, and then, on the ground that the child was a Christian, to tear it from the arms of its parents, and rear it to be a monk and a persecutor of its own people. Obscurantism and oppression vanished from Rome only with the Pope’s authority. For the Jews, as for the Christians of Rome, light came in the train of Italian unity. Among other mediaeval barbarities which ceased on the day on which the Italian Army entered Rome were the Inquisition and the bondage of the Jews. Israel has outlived Temporal Power also. In the Vatican all facilities are now given for the study of Rabbinic and Talmudic literature, once condemned to the flames. The pestilent slums of the Ghetto have been wiped off the face of the earth, and there is nothing left to recall the days of darkness, save the grey old synagogue and, close by, the Tiber, murmuring the sad tales of a world that is past.
♦1808♦
In Spain also the Inquisition, suppressed by Napoleon, revived after his fall; but only as the shade of its former self. ♦1826♦ Its last victims were a Quaker and a Jew, the former hanged, the latter roasted. But even Spain had to follow the tide of the times. ♦1837♦ The Jews, pitilessly driven out of the country when Catholicism ruled the Peninsula, were readmitted as soon as Catholicism faded into a mere name. In 1881 the Spanish Government actually invited the Jews who fled from Russia to settle in its dominions. Seville, where the Holy Office had instituted its human sacrifices in 1480, now boasts a Hebrew synagogue. Israel has outlived the Spanish Inquisition also.
♦1821♦
In Portugal, when early in the nineteenth century liberty of conscience was proclaimed, strange individuals from the interior of the country appeared at the synagogues of Lisbon and Oporto. They were the descendants of the old Marranos. For three centuries they had eluded the ferrets of the Holy Office and, Christians in appearance, had remained Jews at heart, waiting, as only a Jew can wait, for the blessed day of deliverance. They now emerged, and came to participate with their brethren in the worship of their God after the fashion of their fathers.