This social isolation was symbolised and perpetuated by local segregation. The Jews everywhere dwelt together in special quarters, distinguished even amid the gloom and squalor of a mediaeval town by a darkness and dirtiness which contrasted curiously with the occasional magnificence of the interior of the houses and with the personal cleanliness of the inmates. In these quarters they resided, many families in one house, eating meat killed and cooked in a special manner, frequently fasting when their neighbours feasted, and feasting when they fasted; or, worse still, sometimes, by a fatal coincidence, celebrating their Deliverance while the Christians mourned the sufferings of their Saviour; as a rule, resting on the day on which the others worked, and working on the day on which they rested. They attended no mass, partook of no sacrament, showed no reverence for the crucifix and the saints; but they lived unbaptized, unblest and circumcised, worshipping their own God after their own fashion and in their own tongue, indulging in mysterious ablutions, observing the new moons and a thousand quaint rules of conduct, abstaining from touching fire from Friday evening till Saturday night, from eating pork, from drinking wine and milk, or from using vessels, touched by a Gentile. Their religious symbolism was alien to that of their neighbours; their allegorical wedding customs, their rejoicings and their wailings equally weird; their music as wonderful as their symbolism; the nasal sing-song strains that floated out of the windows of the synagogue of a morning, or those that filled the night air with their strangeness, as a funeral procession hurried through the street, sounded horribly harsh, unmelodious, and unmeaning to non-Hebrew ears. Their very children were unlike the children of the Gentile; precocious in worship as in work, they knew nothing of the sprightly brownies, elves, and fairies of European folk-lore, but believed in the solemn and sober spirits of Asiatic mythology. Altogether they must have seemed a singular and sinister people, with usury for their favourite pursuit, and prayer for their main recreation.
Thus they lived, and when they died they were buried in special cemeteries, emphasising the amiable principle that there could be no union or intercommunion between Jew and Gentile even in death.
Is it to be wondered at that the Jews everywhere were looked upon with aversion and suspicion? The chastity of Jewish life, the gracious charm of the Sabbath, the serene beauty of the Jewish home were unknown, for Jewish homes in the Middle Ages rarely received a non-Jewish guest. If an inquisitive Catholic strayed into a synagogue on a Sabbath morning, what he saw therein would tend to strengthen his antipathy. He would find a congregation of men with their heads covered, gathered together in a place which had none of the attributes of a church: no images, no font, no altar, no holy-water stoup; a club-room rather than a House of the Lord. He would see some of these men absorbed in learned study, and others in lively gossip; some chanting, and others chattering aloud; many dropping in casually at odd times; all heedless of the precentor, whose trilling airs soared aloft in triumphant discord, amid the pandemonium of tongues, now melting into melodramatic tears or hysterical laughter, now drowned by the shrill blast of the ram’s horn.
How could the ignorant Gentile know that these listless or belated worshippers had already prayed abundantly at home, and, like people who go to a public banquet after having enjoyed a good dinner in private, had no appetite for further devotion? To him the whole scene, with the din of children crying and running about, and the free and easy nonchalance of the men, must have appeared an orgy of indecorous levity. Worse still, he might have surprised this congregation discussing lawsuits, or prices of goods; for the synagogue was much more than a prayer-house to the Jew, and in it were made proclamations and bargains such as the mediaeval citizen was accustomed to see made in the market-place. Everything that the visitor witnessed would impress him as uncouth, unchristian, and uncanny; and he would go away amazed and scandalised, if not disgusted.
And yet, such is the apparent inconsistency of human nature, it was to this despised and detested assembly that the Christians of the lower orders, when ill, often had recourse for medical assistance. As in the old days at Rome, so in mediaeval Europe the Hebrew rites commanded the veneration of the Gentiles. The mystery of the unknown fascinated them. Many people, who ordinarily shunned the Jewish community, in time of trouble repaired to the synagogue, took part in its processions and ceremonies, and made votive offerings, that ailing friends might recover, that seafaring relatives might reach harbour in safety, that women in child-bed might be happily delivered, and that the barren might rejoice in offspring. The real proficiency of the Jews in medicine encouraged the popular superstition; for medicine and magic were as closely associated in the mediaeval mind as they still are in the minds of the less advanced races. Jewish women were dreaded as sorceresses, and the Rabbis were believed to be on terms of intimacy with the powers of darkness. It was held that
“Unregarded herbs, and flowers, and blossoms
Display undreamt of powers when gathered by them.”
And Christian knights applied to them for scraps of parchment covered with Hebrew texts as protective charms for their persons and castles.
Even so at the present day the Christians of the East resort to Mohammedan friars for charms and amulets of all kinds, and Mohammedans make offerings to Christian saints. Creeds may be mutually exclusive; there is free trade in popular religion. This liberalism, however, is not incompatible with a deep and abiding abhorrence. It is not the deities but the demons of the rival race that the ignorant strive to propitiate. The act is the outcome of fear, and the help received implies no gratitude. Consequently, the mediaeval Jews and Gentiles, like modern Christians and Turks, despite superstitious sympathy, contiguity of centuries, occasional intercourse for festive purposes, and interchange of gifts, cherished no fellow-feeling for each other. Even genuine personal friendship could do little to counteract national and religious antipathy. The Jews were still aliens and infidels, therefore enemies, and they frequently fell victims to insult and assault, and sometimes to massacre, at the hands of the populace. Hostility found an appropriate occasion for self-manifestation on the great festivals of the Church, and more especially at Easter. At those times the sight of a Jew reminded the Christians of the Old Crime, and the maltreatment of him suggested itself as a natural deed of piety. The sentiment was holy; the practical expression of it partly childish, partly fiendish.
At Toulouse, for example, it was the traditional custom to slap a Jew on the face every Good Friday. The Count opened the ceremony by publicly giving the president of the Jewish community a box on the ear, and his subjects followed suit, until the blow was commuted for a tribute in the twelfth century. At Beziers pious wantonness took the form of an attack on the Jews’ houses with stones from Palm Sunday till Easter. The use of other weapons was contrary to the rules of the game; but none other were needed. A sermon from the Bishop was the regular preamble to the commencement of hostilities, and this Christian pastime continued in public favour year after year until a prelate, less cruel or more practical than his predecessors, abolished it for a consideration. In May 1160 a treaty was concluded providing that any priest who should stir up the people against the Jews should be excommunicated, while the Jews, on their side, pledged themselves to pay four pounds of silver every Palm Sunday. Elsewhere, an old pagan rite for the propitiation of the powers of vegetation was cloaked in the devotional cremation of a straw “Judas” during Holy Week; a custom still surviving in many parts of Europe. But racial and religious animosity, especially when fuelled by material grievances, knows no seasons. In Germany Jew-baiting was a perennial amusement of gentlemen impoverished by usury, and the Judenstrasse, or Jews’ street, a not unusual field of ignoble distinction.