As the fatal day drew near, the emigrants, sixteen thousand all told, men, women, and children, might be seen hurrying from different parts of England to the coast, some riding, the majority trudging, sullen and weary, along the muddy roads, the men with their scanty luggage slung over their shoulders, the women with their babes in their arms. Thus they went their last journey on English soil, under the bleak sky of an English October, objects of scorn rather than of pity to the people among whom they had lived for more than two hundred years. The King’s biographer relates with great exultation how “the perfidious and unbelieving horde was driven forth from England, in one day into exile,” and the English Parliament, which nine years before had demanded the expulsion of the unbelievers, now expressed the gratitude of the nation for the fulfilment of their desire, by voting a tenth and a fifteenth to the King. But if the English were glad to get rid of the Jews, the Jews were not sorry to depart. It was only what they had already begged to be allowed to do. Though born and bred among the English, they did not even speak their language. They spoke the language of the Normans who had brought them to England for their own purposes, and ejected them when those purposes no longer held. They were as foreign to the land on this day of their departure, as their fathers had been on the day of their arrival, full two centuries earlier. Their residence in England was a mere episode in their long career of sorrow and trial, only a temporary halt on the weary pilgrimage which began at Zion and would end in Zion.
Nor were their last experiences such as to sweeten their feelings towards the land they were leaving. Despite the king’s merciful provision, there was no lack of opportunities for expressing, otherwise than by looks and words, the bitter hatred nourished against the emigrants. The old chroniclers have handed down to us an incident which may safely be regarded as only an extreme specimen of the cruel memories which the children of Israel carried away from England. On St. Denis’ Day the Jews of London set out on their way to the sea-coast, and got on board a ship at the mouth of the Thames. The captain had cast anchor during the ebb-tide, so that his vessel grounded on the sands. Thereupon he requested the passengers to land, till it was again afloat. They obeyed, and he led them a long way off so that, when they returned to the river-side, the tide was full. Then he ran into the water, hauled himself on board by means of a rope, and referred the hapless Jews to Moses for help. Many of them tried to follow him but perished in the attempt, and the captain divided their property with his crew. The chroniclers add that the ship-master and his sailors were afterwards indicted, convicted of murder, and hanged. Similar crimes of robbery and murder were brought home to the inhabitants of the Cinque Ports; but the punishment of the offenders brought little consolation to the victims.
The sea proved as cruel to the Jews as the land had been. Fierce storms swept the Channel, many of the ships were wrecked and many of the exiles were robbed and drowned by the captains, or were cast naked on the French coast. Those who escaped shipwreck and murder reached the shore they sought only to find it as inhospitable as the one from which they fled. A decree of the Parliament de la Chandeleur, issued in obedience to the Pope’s wishes, bade all Jewish refugees from England to quit the kingdom by the middle of next Lent. Some of them, thanks to their French tongue, may have escaped detection and remained in France, sharing the treatment of their co-religionists already described; another party, mostly poor, took refuge in Flanders; but the majority joined their brethren in Spain, whither we shall follow them.
CHAPTER X
THE JEWS IN SPAIN
As we have seen in a previous chapter, the lot of the Spanish Jews under Mohammedan rule was supremely enviable. Their condition in the Christian parts of the Iberian Peninsula was less uniformly prosperous. We there find two forces at work, one favourable to the children of Israel and the other the exact opposite. The people and the Church were ill-disposed towards them; the princes and the nobles protected them. Their history is therefore marked by the vicissitudes of the conflict between those two forces, and their ultimate fate was to be determined by the result of that conflict. That they should be mulcted by the Christian princes was only what might have been expected. In Spain they were subjected, among other burdens, to a hearth tax, a coronation tax, a tax on various kinds of their own food, and a tax for the King’s dinner. In Portugal, under Sancho II., they had to pay, besides other things, a fleet tax, and were obliged to supply a new anchor and cable to every vessel built for the royal marine. On the other hand, they enjoyed a large measure of communal autonomy, settled their disputes in their own Beth-Din, or religious tribunal, and even passed capital sentence on culprits of their own persuasion. Despite manifold restrictions in the exercise of certain trades and handicrafts, they often succeeded in eluding the law, which in the earlier days was not rigorously enforced, and in pursuing a variety of occupations. They dealt in corn, cattle, silk, spices, timber, and slaves. They were goldsmiths, mechanics, peddlers, and pawnbrokers. The trade in cloth and wool, both domestic and foreign, was largely in their hands; but they abstained from the manufacture of cloth, partly owing to prohibitive legislation by the State, as was the case in Majorca during the fourteenth century, and partly in obedience to the Talmud, which denounced weaving as an immoral occupation, inasmuch as it tended to facilitate undesirable propinquity between the sexes. Many of the upper classes found equally, or more, lucrative employment as physicians, clerks of the Treasury, and public officials.
Then was formed in Spain that higher type of Jew which compelled even the Christians to forget their contempt for the race. Visigothic legislation was ignored in practice, and the Jews ceased to be systematically trampled upon. ♦1061–1073♦ Pope Alexander II., the coadjutor and immediate predecessor of Gregory Hildebrand, in a decree issued to all the bishops of Spain, draws a distinction between the Saracens and the Jews, the latter being described as worthy of toleration on account of “their readiness to serve.” Some of the municipalities treated them on equal terms with the Christians, and in both Aragon and Castile the Jews were allowed to act as judges. The Christian princes found in them some of the qualities which commanded their respect towards the Arabs, and they would fain avail themselves of their lights. They employed Jewish physicians, Jewish financiers, and Jewish tutors. ♦1085♦ Alfonso VI. of Castile began by diplomacy the liberation of Spain, which was to be accomplished by the military prowess of his successors. In this initial stage of the movement, despite the persecution proclaimed against the “enemies of Christ” by Pope Gregory VII., the Castilian King employed the astute and polyglot Jews, notably his private physician, Isaac Ibn Shalbib, and after the conquest of Toledo he confirmed to the Jews of that town all the liberties which they had enjoyed under the Mohammedan rulers. Then Alfonso, resolved to attack the Saracen King of Seville, whom he had used as a tool in taking Toledo, thought it necessary to apprise his former ally of his change of policy and bid him defiance. The delicate task was entrusted to Ibn Shalbib, attended by five hundred Christian knights. The Jewish diplomatist carried out his master’s instructions so thoroughly and so boldly that the Mohammedan prince, in his fury, forgot the inviolability of the ambassadorial character, and nailed the unfortunate envoy to a gibbet.
The comparative liberty enjoyed by the Spanish Jews, under the aegis of the Kings, brought with it opulence and luxury. The Spanish synagogues were renowned throughout Europe for their beauty, and the private dwellings of the Spanish Jews were not less noted for their magnificence. The Spanish Jews, as their brethren elsewhere, set much store by social distinction, and knew how to combine extravagance with economy. The stately names and expensive equipages of the Christian nobility were copied by them, not wisely but too well. Their profuse ostentation of wealth in domestic decoration and personal apparel excited the envy, and royal patronage the jealousy of their neighbours. These feelings, intensified by religious antipathy, laid up a fund of prejudice which only awaited a suitable opportunity for converting itself into active hostility. The same causes which brought about the eruption of anti-Judaism in other countries operated in Spain also. First, the Crusading spirit which, though it produced no immediate massacres in Spain, as it did in Central Europe, remained longer alive by the Spaniard’s undying enmity to the Jew’s cousin, the Saracen invader, whose invasion, it must be remembered, the Jews had facilitated, or, at all events, welcomed. Secondly, the hatred of heresy which, fostered by the monastic orders, found in Spain a more fertile soil than in any other Christian country. So strong and so pertinacious were these influences in the Iberian Peninsula that the Kings who favoured the Jews were often obliged to assuage public irritation, and to save their protégés from the ebullitions of popular fanaticism by separating them from the Christians. Already in the eleventh century we hear of a “Jewish barrier” erected in Tudela. This separation was also countenanced by the Church, though from widely different motives. ♦1079♦ In Coyaca, in the Asturias, a Council decreed that no Christian should reside in the same house with Jews, or partake of their food. Persons caught transgressing this canon were sentenced, if noblemen, to one year’s excommunication, if of lower degree to one hundred lashes. Thus the normal isolation of Israel was encouraged by two powers which, acting with opposite intent, converged to the same dangerous result. But it was not until late in the thirteenth century that the gathering animosity came to a head, and declared itself in more methodical efforts at segregation and humiliation, conversion or extirpation.
♦1212♦
Meanwhile the undercurrent of prejudice was checked by the action of the Kings. When, for instance, the Crusaders from across the Pyrenees, red-handed from the massacre of the Albigenses, came to Spain as allies in the war against the Mohammedans, and began the work of exterminating the infidels by attacking the Jews of Toledo, King Alfonso IX. warded off the blows, and the misdirected zeal of the foreign fanatics was condemned even by the populace of Castile. ♦1215♦ When, again, Innocent III. at the Fourth Lateran Council ordered the Jews to be marked off by a special badge, the Jews of Spain, through their influence at Court, succeeded in avoiding the effects of the decree. King Alfonso connived at their disobedience, and vain were the unwearied efforts of Innocent’s successor, Honorius III., to enforce the Jewish disabilities. ♦1220♦ Similar immunity from the ignominious ordinances of St. Peter’s See was secured by the Jews of Aragon through the exertions of the physician of King Jayme I. ♦1248♦ Several years after King Ferdinand allotted three parishes to the Jewish community of Seville, and surrounded them with a wall for their defence. Within this enclosure were the exchanges, markets, slaughter-houses, synagogues and tribunals of the Jews, while their cemetery spread over an adjacent field.
♦1252–84♦