The animosity thus fomented against the Jews found frequent opportunities of translating itself into acts of horror. In France, after the war declared against the unfortunate people by the Church, they lost the royal protection which they had enjoyed hitherto, and were henceforth exposed not only to the spasmodic fury of the populace, but also to systematic persecution on the part of bishops, barons and towns. Bishop Odo of Paris, in 1197, forbade the Christians to have any dealings, social or commercial, with the Jews. ♦1236♦ The Crusaders called to arms by Gregory IX. attacked the Jewish communities of Anjou, Poitou, Bordeaux, Angoulème, and elsewhere, and on the Jews refusing to be baptized, the holy warriors trampled many of them, men, women and children, to death under the hoofs of their horses, burned their synagogues, and pillaged and sacked their private dwellings. St. Louis encouraged the conversion of the Jews, permitting the children of baptized fathers to be torn away from their unregenerate mothers. ♦1246♦ By a decree of the Council of Beziers the disabilities of the Jews were once more confirmed, and the Christians were now forbidden to call in Jewish doctors, thus depriving the Jews of the profession which they had hitherto almost monopolised in Europe. ♦1257♦ A few years after Pope Alexander IV., who had just established the Inquisition in France at the request of St. Louis, issued another Bull in which the ruler of that kingdom and other princes were again exhorted to enforce the distinctive garb upon the Jews and to burn all copies of the Talmud. To omit minor acts of oppression, the fanatical sect of the “Shepherds,” following the example of the Crusaders, massacred the Jews on the Garonne in 1320.
♦1218–1250♦
In Germany the sufferings of Israel were equally severe. The Emperor Frederick II., despite his infidelity and his enmity towards the Papacy, adopted the Pope’s anti-Jewish decrees. He excluded the Jews from public offices, he censured the Archduke of Austria for tolerating and protecting them, he enforced the use of the badge in his Italian and Sicilian dominions, and he oppressed them with heavy taxes, dwelling with especial satisfaction on the dictum that the Jews were the Emperor’s serfs. In the troublous period which followed Frederick’s death the Jews were slain and burnt in great numbers at Weissenberg, Magdeburg, and Erfurt, while other cities year after year witnessed wholesale slaughter, and “Jew-roaster” became a coveted title of honour. In addition to occasional massacre, from the end of the twelfth to the middle of the fifteenth century the German Jews underwent eight expulsions and confiscations of their communal property: Vienna (1196), Mecklenburg (1225), Frankfort (1241), Brandenburg (1243), Nuremberg (1390), Prague (1391), Heidelberg (1391), and Ratisbon (1476).
In Switzerland the persecution commenced about the middle of the fourteenth century, and several expulsions are recorded in the ensuing century. In Eastern Europe the Jews suffered in Russia and Hungary. The semi-civilised and semi-Christianized Magyars, who had hitherto tolerated the Jews, were incited to acts of oppression by the Western friars. Poland and Lithuania were the only European countries where the Jews of the later Middle Ages found shelter, and consequently both those countries received large numbers of fugitives from the Western fields of carnage.
Credulity joined hands with bigotry. No story told of the Jews was too extravagant for belief; no charge brought against them too trivial for repetition, provided it afforded an excuse for persecution. Some of the odious crimes attributed by the heathens in the early centuries to the Christians, as a justification of their suppression, were now revived by the Christians against the Jews. The latter were accused of enveigling Christian children into their houses and sacrificing them for ritual or medicinal purposes, of travestying the sacraments of the Church, of poisoning wells and of committing all kinds of abominations, which plainly rendered their utter extermination a public duty. Similar charges, curiously enough, are still brought against the Jews by the Christians of Eastern Europe, by the Jews themselves against Hebrew converts to Islam in Turkey, and by the Chinese against Protestant missionaries—“charges of gross personal immorality and of kidnapping and mutilation of children, which, however monstrous and malevolent, are not the less, but the more serious, because they are firmly believed by the ignorant audiences to whom they are addressed.”[55] To the vulgar all that is strange is sinister.
The free propagation of these heinous and disgusting myths among the vulgar masses of mediaeval Europe led, as it had done in ancient times and as it has done more recently, to a horrible persecution of those against whom they were levelled. ♦1171♦ The Jews were ruthlessly burnt by order of Duke Theobalt at Blois, were massacred by the populace in Languedoc and Central France, ♦1321♦ and on the plague breaking out in the following year, they were burnt en masse—men, women and children. A season of alternate persecution and toleration ensued, until they were banished from Central France and finally driven out from the rest of the country by the insane King Charles VI., ♦1394–5♦ at the end of the fourteenth century.
In Germany wherever the dead body of a Christian was found, the murder was promptly laid at the door of the Jews, who on such occasions were bidden to be baptized or die. So firm a hold had the blood-accusation got upon the minds of the people that there was no mystery which could not be cleared up by a simple reference to the Jews. The outbreak of the Black Death in Germany also was attributed to Jewish malevolence. It is now held that this scourge originated in India and was conveyed to Europe by trade routes and armies, or that it arose from the insanitary conditions of mediaeval life. But the mediaeval world was convinced that it could only be the work of the Jews. Their comparative immunity from the disease, due perhaps to their superior temperance, lent colour to the theory; confessions extorted by torture dissipated all doubts on the subject. It was commonly believed that the Jews of Spain, those redoubtable professors of the Black Art, had invented this fiendish method for the extermination of Christianity; that they had despatched emissaries with boxes of poison concocted of basilisks and lizards, or even of Christian hearts, to all the Jewish congregations in Europe and had persuaded or compelled them to disseminate death among the Christians by poisoning the wells and springs. The arch-poisoner was even indicated by name. The Jews were in consequence subjected to a widespread persecution, at the hands of a mob maddened by the terrible and mysterious epidemic. ♦1348–50♦ Despite the Emperor’s energetic efforts to save his serfs, the more disinterested exertions of humane burgomasters, sheriffs, and municipal councils, and Pope Clement VI.’s Bull in which the absurdity of the poison charge was solemnly exposed, the wretched people were slaughtered and burnt by thousands in many parts of Germany, and at last they were banished from the Empire. Yet their services were so valuable that they gradually returned, only to submit to new social restrictions and contumelious enactments on the part of the Church.
Similar scenes were performed through the length and breadth of Switzerland and Belgium.
In Poland alone, which had long been a haven of refuge to the hunted Jews, these abominable calumnies found a very limited market as yet. It was there enacted that a charge of ritual murder brought by a Christian against a Jew, unless the accuser succeeded in substantiating it, should be punished with death. This generous treatment of the Polish Jews, it is said, was partly due to King Casimir IV.’s love for a Jewish mistress. Through her influence the children of Israel obtained many privileges which placed them on a footing of social equality with the Christians. At a time when they were oppressed, reviled and butchered in almost every Western country, in Poland their lives and liberties were as safe as those of the nobility itself. Whilst the native peasants were still treated as serfs, the Jews were allowed the aristocratic privilege of wearing rapiers. Any Jew might, by simply renouncing his religion, become a nobleman. As stewards of the estates belonging to the Polish magnates, the Jews possessed even the power of inflicting capital punishment on the Christian slaves of the soil: so much so that during the terrible pestilence not more than ten thousand Jews were massacred in Poland.