Israel in Europe

by G. F. Abbott

But how long could the Court maintain its Judaeophile attitude in the teeth of the growing animosity against the race? Alfonso X., surnamed the Wise, employed Jews as Chamberlains and Chancellors of the Exchequer, as well as in the construction of his famous Astronomical Tables. ♦1261♦ But the same King was forced to throw a sop to Cerberus by enacting that “the Jews may not enlarge, elevate, or beautify their synagogues.” Another law of Alfonso’s contained the following ominous statement: “Although the Jews deny Christ, they are still suffered in all Christian countries, so that they should remind everybody that they belong to that race which crucified Jesus.” During this reign conversion of a Christian to Judaism was punished with death. No Jew was to be elevated to any public office. The wearing of the badge was made compulsory, and anyone seen without it was, if rich, fined; if poor, scourged. Social intercourse between Jews and Christians was made a punishable offence. The Jews should not appear abroad on Good Friday. Though himself in the hands of a Jewish physician, Alfonso decreed that no Christian should take medicine prepared by a Jew. These restrictions, however, were tempered by measures protective of the religion, the persons and the property of the Jews; and they did not really become active until a much later period.

♦1263♦

Two years later there occurred in Barcelona, under the auspices of Jayme I., the famous disputation between the Dominican Pablo Christiani and the Rabbi Nachmanides, which led to the latter’s exile, and to the expurgation of the Talmud.[69]

In the meantime the silly and sinister fables which caused the persecution of the Jews in England and elsewhere met with credence in Spain also. But, if the pious were exasperated by these stories, less foolish persons found a sufficient food for their spleen in the better founded charges of rapacity constantly brought against the Jewish money-lenders; while the holy indignation of others was aroused by the occasional sight of Christian proselytes seeking in the arms of the Synagogue a spiritual rest which they could not find in the Church; or by the spectacle, even less edifying, of Christian noblemen seeking in the arms of a Jewish bride the wherewithal to regild their tarnished escutcheons. All these grievances, assiduously nursed by fanatical clerics and loudly voiced by insolvent debtors, culminated in violent attacks upon the “accursed people” during the fourteenth century. The Jewish colonies were repeatedly looted and burnt and the inmates slaughtered without mercy and without regard to sex or age. ♦About 1330♦ In one attack of this kind in the kingdom of Navarre no fewer than ten thousand Israelites perished.

But the time had not yet come for a general persecution of Israel in Spain. The demon of Jew-hatred, if irritated, was also curbed by kingly favour. ♦1325–1350♦ Alfonso XI. drew down upon himself the wrath of pious Christians by employing Jewish ministers in his treasury. Under this prince the Spanish Jews, indeed, enjoyed what some writers have described as their Golden Age. They were powerful at Court, and equally influential with the great nobility, many Castilian magnates employing them as bailiffs and advisers. Their wealth and their power cowed clerical and popular fanaticism, and overawed the avaricious proclivities of impecunious hidalgos. ♦1350–1369♦ This prosperity lasted under Alfonso’s successor, Don Pedro, or Peter the Cruel. Samuel Levi, treasurer to the King and his victim, is reported to have left behind him the princely fortune of 400,000 ducats; an affluence which proved his undoing.

♦1333–1379♦

Nor was royal favour limited to one class of Jews, any more than Jewish usefulness was limited to one province of activity. Henry II. of Castile, the half-brother of Don Pedro, and other Iberian sovereigns employed the talents of the Jews in various capacities. Through their correspondence with their brethren all over Europe and the East, the Jews were the best agents for commercial and political negotiations. Their astronomical science, and their skill in map-drawing and in the construction of nautical instruments, recommended them to princes anxious to profit by the exploration of new lands. Jewish pilots and navigators must have been in great demand, for they subsequently helped Vasco da Gama in his voyages; while Jewish capitalists and adventurers participated in many of the great transatlantic expeditions of later times. ♦1334♦ Jayme III., the last king of Mallorca, describes Juceff Faguin, a Jew of Barcelona, as a man who “had navigated the whole of the then known world”; while Benjamin of Tudela’s older Itinerary is a work of world-wide renown. ♦1404–1454♦ John II. of Castile, in the ensuing century, even sought the assistance of Jews in the compilation of a national Cancionero, for the Jews in Christian, as in Mohammedan, Spain attained high distinction as troubadours. One of them, Santob de Carrion, who flourished in Castile in the fourteenth century, produced a Spanish Book of Maxims, which, thanks to its charming quaintness, preserved its popularity far into the fifteenth. Not less important are the contributions of Iberian Jews to the vernacular drama.

The Jew’s old aversion to the language of Titus, the destroyer of the Temple, had also partially vanished from Spain, and many Jewish politicians employed Latin in the diplomatic correspondence which they conducted for their Christian masters, while the Spanish language in the fourteenth century even bade fair to oust Hebrew, the Book of Esther being, in some parts of the peninsula, read in the vernacular on the Feast of Purim, for the benefit of the women, to whom the sacred tongue was no longer intelligible. Naturally such liberalism scandalised strait-laced pietists, who did their utmost to prevent the profanation of Holy Writ. But the real check to the gradual reconciliation between Jew and Gentile in Spain did not proceed from the Jewish side, as we shall see.

♦1348♦

All this sunshine was already overshadowed by the clouds which herald the storm. In the year of the Black Death the charge of well-poisoning stirred up the mob of Barcelona against the Jews, twenty of whom were slain and their houses sacked, a wholesale massacre being averted only by the intervention of the higher classes. A few days later a similar outbreak at Cervera resulted in the murder of eighteen Jews and the flight of the rest. Destruction threatened all the Jewish communities of Northern Spain, and their members, panic-stricken, betook themselves to prayer, fasting, and other precautions of a more practical character against the impending attack, which, however, was prevented by the nobility and by a Papal Bull, in which Clement VI.—who, though no saint, was an accomplished gentleman and a broad-minded prince—exposed the absurdity of the poison charge, and prohibited the Christians from assaulting the Jews on pain of excommunication.