Israel in Europe

by G. F. Abbott

Around went on the Town’s satanic dance,

Hunger a-piping while at heart he bled.

Shalom Aleichem, mournfully each said,

Nor eyed the other straight but looked askance.

—Israel Zangwill.

Christianity, long despised and persecuted, had by slow yet steady steps made its way among the nations, until from a creed of slaves it was raised by Constantine to the sovereignty of the Roman world. ♦323 A.D.♦ The cross from being an emblem of shame became the ensign of victory, and the great church of the Resurrection, built by the first Christian Emperor on the hill of Calvary, proclaimed to mankind the triumph of the new religion. But the gospel which was intended to inculcate universal peace, charity, and good-will among men brought nothing but new causes of discord, cruelty, and rancour. Apostles and missionaries are apt to imagine that religion is everything and national character nothing, that men are formed by the creeds which they profess, and that, if you extended to all nations the same doctrines, you would produce in all the same dispositions. The history of religion, however, conclusively demonstrates that it is not churches which form men, but men who form churches. An idea when transplanted into foreign soil, in order to take root and bear fruit, must first adapt itself to the conditions of the soil. The nations of the West in embracing Christ’s teaching assimilated from it only as much as was congenial to them and conveniently overlooked the rest. Mercy—the essence of the doctrine—was sacrificed to the passions of the disciples. Henceforth the old warfare between Jew and Gentile is to manifest itself chiefly as a struggle between the Synagogue and the Church, between the teaching of the New Hebrew Prophet and the Old Hebrew Prophet, so beautifully imagined by a modern Jewish writer in the lines quoted above.

The Jews were told that the observances of the Mosaic Law were instituted on account of the hardness of their hearts and were no longer acceptable in the sight of God; that the circumcision of the spirit had superseded the circumcision of the flesh; that faith, and not works, is the key to eternal life; that their national calamities were judgments for their rejection and crucifixion of Jesus; and that their only hope of peace in this world and of salvation in the next lay in conversion. Nor was the enmity towards the Jews confined to refutation of their doctrines and attempts at persuasion. The Jews had always been held by the Christians responsible for all the persecutions and calumnies with which their sect had been assailed. “The other nations,” says Justin to his Jewish collocutor in 140 A.D., “are not so much to blame for this injustice towards us and Christ as you, the cause of their evil prejudice against Him and us, who are from Him. After the crucifixion and resurrection you sent forth chosen men from Jerusalem throughout the earth, saying that there has arisen a godless heresy, that of the Christians.”[33] The accusation is repeated, among others, by Origen: “The Jews who at the commencement of the teaching of Christianity spread evil reports of the Word, that, forsooth, the Christians sacrifice a child and partake of its flesh, and also that they in their love for deeds of darkness extinguish the lights and indulge in promiscuous incest.”[34] Here we find the sufferings of Christ linked to the sufferings of His followers; the crime of the Pharisees associated with those of their descendants; and, in defiance of the essential tenet of Christianity, and of the sublime example of its author, the sins of the fathers are now to be visited upon the children. The Christians, while gratifying their own lust for revenge, flattered themselves that they avenged the wrongs of Christ; by oppressing the Jews they were convinced that they carried out the decrees of Providence. Thus pious vindictiveness was added to the other and older motives of hatred—a new ring to the plant of anti-Judaism. But for the existence of those other motives of hatred, with which theology had little or nothing to do, the theological odium henceforth bestowed upon the Jews would have been merely preposterous. The founder of Christianity, Himself a Jew, had appeared to His own people as the Messiah whom they eagerly expected and with all the divine prophecies concerning whose advent they were thoroughly familiar. They investigated His credentials and, as a nation, they were not satisfied that He was what His followers claimed Him to be. Instead of remembering that His Jewish fellow-countrymen were, after all, the most competent to form a judgment of their new Teacher, as they had done in the case of other inspired Rabbis and prophets, the Christians proceeded to insult and outrage them for having come to the conclusion that He failed to fulfil the conditions required by their Scriptures. St. Jerome, though devoted to the study of Hebrew, expressed his hatred of the race in forcible language. Augustine followed in his older contemporary’s footsteps, and abhorrence of the Jews became an article of faith, sanctioned by these oracles of Orthodoxy and acted upon by the pious princes of later times.

At first Constantine had placed the religion of the Jews on a footing of equality with those of the other subject nations. But his tolerance vanished at his conversion. Under his reign, the Jews were subjected to innumerable restrictions and extortions; the faithful were forbidden to hold any intercourse with the murderers of Christ, and all the gall which could be spared from the sectarian feuds within the fold of the Church was poured upon the enemy outside. Judaism was branded as a godless sect, and its extermination was advocated as a religious duty. The apostasy of Christians to Judaism was punished severely, while the apostasy of Jews to Christianity was strenuously encouraged, and the Synagogue was deprived of the precious privilege of persecution, which henceforth was to be the exclusive prerogative of the Church. The edict of Hadrian, which forbade the Jews to live in Jerusalem, was re-enacted by Constantine, who only allowed them on the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple to mourn on its ruins—for a consideration.

♦337♦

But the real persecution did not commence until the accession of Constantius. Then the Rabbis were banished, marriages between Jews and Christian women were punished with death, and so was the circumcision of Christian slaves; while the communities of Palestine suffered terrible oppression at the hands of the Emperor’s cousin Gallus, and were goaded to a rebellion which ended in the extirpation of many thousands and the destruction of many cities. ♦352♦ But the Jews endured all these calamities with the patience characteristic of their race, until relief came from an unexpected quarter.