Israel in Europe

by G. F. Abbott

And yet, such is the wonderful vitality of the race, the Jewish traveller, Benjamin of Tudela, who visited the Jewry on the Rhine only seventy years after the First, and twenty after the Second, Crusade, describes these colonies as rich in money and culture and hope; the brethren whom he found there as hospitable, cheerfully alive, and awaiting the Messiah. This expectation had never been entertained in vain. The wish had always yielded its own fulfilment. About this time, it gave rise to David Alroy, another Redeemer destined to delude the hapless nation for a while. He appeared in Asia Minor, and summoned his brethren to his banner. Many gave up all they possessed in order to respond to the call, and the enthusiasm spread from Baghdad to East and West. But the Messiah was excommunicated by the Synagogue, and murdered by his own father-in-law while asleep. According to another version,[49] Alroy, when face to face with the Sultan, exclaimed: “Cut off my head and I shall yet live.” He thus astutely exchanged prompt death for lingering torture. Many Jews, however, continued to believe in him for generations after his death.

The same spirit of religious mania which gave birth and sustenance to the Crusades animated other movements, more enduring in their results, if less romantic in their form. In 1198 the throne of St. Peter was filled by Innocent III., a young and zealous priest, fired with the lofty ambition to make Romanism the dominant creed over East and West, and himself the autocrat of a united Roman Catholic world. His genius was all but equal to this Titanic task, and in a reign of eighteen years Innocent, favoured by the convulsions and feuds which rent the whole of Europe, succeeded in raising the Papacy to a pinnacle of power only dreamt of by his predecessors, and attained by few of his successors. A worthy spiritual descendant of Gregory VII., he made and unmade Emperors and Kings at will, visiting the disobedience of princes upon whole nations, or compelling them to submission by releasing their subjects from their oath of allegiance. He exercised an absolute sway over the conscience and the mind of contemporary Christendom, and his pontificate was distinguished, in Gibbon’s scathing phrase, by “the two most signal triumphs over sense and humanity, the establishment of transubstantiation and the origin of the Inquisition.” ♦1200♦ It was he, who by a rigorous interdict laid upon the Kingdom of France, compelled the headstrong Philip Augustus to recall the wife whom he had dismissed; ♦1208♦ who by the ban of excommunication forced John, King of England, to lay his crown at the feet of his legate, ♦1211♦ and who by the execution of a like sentence against the Emperor Otho, John’s nephew, had humbled that mighty and haughty monarch to the dust. It was under his auspices that the Fifth Crusade was undertaken, ♦1203♦ and it was with his connivance that the forces, ostensibly recruited for the deliverance of the holy Sepulchre from the infidels, were employed to subjugate the Christian Empire of the East, and thus to pave the way for the advent of the Turk.

However, these and many other triumphs notwithstanding, Innocent’s dream of world-wide dominion could not be fully realised while such a thing as individual conscience remained in the world, and individual conscience could not be abolished without persecution. Innocent was too great a despot to shrink from the difficulties of the work; too sincere a Catholic to show any pity to unbelief. The thirteenth century opened under evil omens for dissenters. Immediately on his accession Innocent had demanded the suppression of the Albigenses of Southern France, those unfortunate forerunners of the Reformation, because they, choosing to follow the dictates of their own conscience, refused to conform to the practices of the Church and to comply with the commands of her clergy. ♦1207♦ Raymund VI., Count of Toulouse, however, declined to consider the massacre of his subjects one of his duties as a sovereign, and was excommunicated. In the following year the Pope, seizing the pretext offered by the murder of his legate, proclaimed an unholy war against the heretics. And so great was the Pope’s power over the superstitious and unscrupulous world of mediaeval Europe, that thousands volunteered to carry out the Pontiff’s atrocious orders. Raymund, who alone among the Christian princes had ventured to raise his voice in defence of the persecuted, had meanwhile been stripped of his dominions, dragged naked into the Church, scourged by the Pope’s legate, and was now forced to lead the crusade against his own people. The harmless population was almost exterminated by the most barbarous means, their heresy was all but quenched in blood; and one of the most prosperous and civilised provinces of Europe was laid waste. The ferocity of the soldiers was eclipsed by that of the monks and priests, great numbers of whom swelled the ranks of the butchers. On the 22nd of July, 1209, the city of Beziers was taken by storm. The Abbot Arnold, being asked how the heretics were to be distinguished from true believers, replied, “Slay all; God will know his own.” “We spared,” said the same monk in his report to the Pope, “no dignity, no sex, no age; nearly twenty thousand human beings have perished by the sword. After that great massacre the town was plundered and burnt, and the revenge of God seemed to rage upon it in a wonderful manner.”

So fared European heretics within the Church. Infidels of alien blood could hardly expect better treatment. The popular notion that the dispersion and sufferings of the Jews were a divine punishment for the crucifixion of Christ was raised by Innocent to the dignity of a dogma. It followed as a logical corollary that it was the sacred duty of Christ’s Vicar on earth to make the culprits feel the full rigour of the sentence. After the fashion of fanatics, Innocent mistook his own intolerance for holy enthusiasm, and, while indulging his own hatred, he imagined that he was only hating the enemies of Heaven. It was also currently believed that the example and the teaching of the Jews tended to pervert their Christian neighbours, and to encourage protest and heresy. The Albigensian sect in France, already mentioned, like the Hussite reform movement in Bohemia two centuries later, was attributed to Jewish influence. For both these reasons, their own infidelity and their tendency to foster infidelity in others, the Jews ought to be crushed.

The times were propitious. In 1167 the assassination of Raymund, Viscount of Beziers, had deprived the Jews of their protector. ♦1170♦ His successor Roger, who favoured the Albigensian heretics, had Jewish sheriffs; but his partiality to these two classes of enemies of Catholicism had provoked the wrath of the Pope and led to the prince’s tragic death. At Montpellier William VIII. and his sons excluded the Jews from the office of Sheriff. ♦1178–1201♦ But these restrictions were not sufficient. Innocent began the attack methodically in 1205, when he wrote to Philip Augustus, King of France, complaining of the usurious extortions of the Jews in that country, of their being allowed to employ Christian servants and nurses, and of the fact that Christians were not admitted to depose against Jews—things which were contrary to the resolution of the Third Lateran Council held under Pope Alexander III. ♦1179♦ Moreover, Innocent complained that the Jewish community of Sens had built a new synagogue which rose to a greater height than the neighbouring Christian church, and disturbed the service in the latter by loud and insolent chanting; that they scoffed at Christianity, and that they murdered Christians; and he ended by exhorting Philip Augustus to oppress the enemies of Christ. A similar epistle was addressed to Alfonso, King of Castile, threatening him with St. Peter’s displeasure, should he continue to allow the Synagogue to thrive at the expense of the Church. Three years later a pastoral epistle to the same effect was sent to the Count of Nevers, urging him to coerce the Jews and condemn them to serfdom, for they, “like the fratricide Cain, are doomed to wander about the earth as fugitives and vagabonds, and their faces must be covered with insult.” The writer further pointed out that it is disgraceful for Christian princes to receive Jews into their towns and villages, to employ them as usurers in order to extort money from the Christians, and to allow them to press wine which was used in the Lord’s Supper.

♦1209♦

All the above exhortations were systematised by the Council of Avignon. By the Statutes then passed the Jews were officially pronounced as polluted and polluting. It was decreed that “Jews and harlots should not dare to touch with their hands bread or fruits exposed for sale.”[50] The old Church law which forbade the Jews to employ Christian servants was renewed and enforced. The faithful were warned neither to receive services from Jews nor to render services to them, but to avoid them as a pest. All who had any dealings with Jews who transgressed these decrees were threatened with excommunication. Raymund of Toulouse, the protector of the Albigensian heretics and friend of the Jews, and all the barons of free cities, were bound by oath to carry out the decisions of the Council.

♦1211♦

Once more oppression from without fanned the longing for Redemption in the hearts of the Jews. The yearning after Zion, invigorated by Jehuda Halevi’s poetry, impelled more than three hundred Rabbis of France and England to emigrate to the Holy Land, where they visited the spots hallowed by the spirits of the past, wept over the ruins of their departed glory, and built synagogues and schools in order to keep alive the memory and the hope of a better day.

Meanwhile the Pope did not allow the iron to cool. In 1215 a great Œcumenical Council was convoked in Rome, under his presidency, to complete the ruin of the Albigenses, to stimulate the Crusades against the Saracens of Spain and Palestine, and, generally, to promote the kingdom of God on earth. The Jews, knowing from experience that any measures taken to that end could not fail to redound to their detriment, hastened to send deputies to Rome, in order to ward off the blow. But their endeavours proved fruitless. Four out of the seventy canonical decrees passed by the Council referred to them. The King of France, the Duke of Burgundy, and all other princes were called upon to lend their help in reducing the doomed people in their respective dominions to that state of bondage which was ordained for it by the divine will, as interpreted by theological bigotry. The Pope’s order met with general obedience. In most European countries the Jews were forbidden to hold any public appointment of trust, or to show themselves in the streets at Easter. They were obliged to pay tithes to the Church that persecuted them, and the head of each Jewish family was forced to subscribe an annual sum at the Easter festival. They were compelled by heavy fines and penalties to wear a yellow badge of distinction, which in their case meant a badge of shame, and the Christians were exhorted by their pastors not to allow their homes or their shops to be defiled by the presence of Heaven’s enemies.