Israel in Europe

by G. F. Abbott

Thus the martyrs, mangled by the rack, emaciated by privation, and almost maddened by mental suffering, were led to the place of execution. The spectacle partook of the pomp of a Roman pageant and of the horror of a cannibal feast. Noble Castilians, arrayed in the dark livery of the Holy Office, disdained not to act as banner-bearers and body-guards to the monastic executioners. A brilliant throng of gorgeously apparelled ecclesiastics added to the magnificence of the procession and enhanced by contrast the humiliation of the convicts, who, clad in coarse yellow frocks made hideous with a scarlet cross and designs of demons and hell-flames, haggard and already half-dead with torture and terror, tottered to the funeral pyre. This was piled on the Quemadero—a spacious stone platform, with the statues of the four major prophets erected at the four corners, to which the victims were bound. The semi-decomposed bodies of those convicted after death, torn out of their tombs, were placed upon the pile, the fuel was ignited, and the same flames gradually and slowly reduced the quick and the dead to ashes.

The havoc of war and the massacres due to sudden eruptions of popular fury have frequently surpassed these hecatombs in number of victims. But in sustained and cold-blooded ferocity authentic history contains nothing, and feverish fiction little, that can compare with one of them. And yet the Inquisitors were men—no doubt honest, pious, and honourable men, most of them; some perhaps amiable, nay even charitable men. Unfortunately they imagined themselves to be something more—ministers of Heaven’s will on earth. It was this fatal certainty of the righteousness of their cause that turned the Inquisitors into monsters. Man would less often become a fiend if he never mistook himself for an angel.

Torquemada himself, who has been execrated through the ages as the red-handed protagonist of the appalling tragedy, hardly deserves his great reputation. There is little originality in his crime. He was not more cruel, but only more conscientious, courageous, and consistent than millions of the men of his generation and creed. When in the nineteenth century we find Cardinal Newman—an English gentleman and scholar—preaching that “To spare a heresiarch is a false and dangerous pity. It is to endanger the souls of thousands, and it is uncharitable towards himself,”[72] can we wonder that a Spanish priest should have acted on that principle in the fifteenth century? Strong convictions do not, of course, excuse unscrupulous and unrelenting brutality, but they explain it. Given such a conviction, persecution becomes a duty and toleration a sin. If the persecutor cannot command our respect, he is at least entitled to our compassion. Torquemada deserves our pity almost as much as his victims. The drama in which he distinguished himself was an example of that highest kind of tragedy which needs no villain. Faith had spun the plot; chance supplied the actor.

Year after year the hunt went on. But, in spite of Torquemada’s unremitting endeavours, few Israelites hesitated in the option between the font and the stake offered to them. Few chose the first, and, even with these, conversion was merely a device for escape from death. Inquisitors come and Inquisitors go, but Israel endures for ever; and the hope of a better future supplied an indomitable patience with the present. Disappointment infuriated the persecutors, but failed to increase the ranks of the proselytes. It was in vain that ancient calumnies were revived, and fresh ones invented. It was in vain that the spies redoubled their activity, and the judges strained their murderous ingenuity. It was in vain that a tempest of execration and derision raged round the children of Israel. Torquemada and his accomplices were at last forced to recognise the fact that Judaism could not be extirpated, save by the extirpation of the Jews. And forthwith all his influence was brought to bear on persuading the sovereigns to drive the unclean and accursed race out of the country.

This was an unexpected blow for the wretched Jews, who feared exile even more than execution. They had borne imprisonment, ignominy, penury, and mutilation unflinchingly, in the hope that time would soften the heart, or at least wear out the arm, of persecution. But final banishment, with all the terrible perils of shipwreck, of famine, of attack by pirates and of disease which a large and unprotected crowd voyaging the high seas was certain to encounter in those days, would mean irretrievable ruin for the whole race. Moreover the Jews loved Spain with passionate devotion,[73] as is shown by the mediaeval Hebrew poetry which assumes some of its most glowing eloquence in praise of Andalusia. So, in order to avoid expatriation, the leading Jews offered thirty—some say three hundred—thousand ducats to the sovereigns as a ransom for their people.

Ferdinand and Isabella, intent on bringing their costly Moorish campaign to a successful issue, were not disinclined to listen to a proposal which promised a reinforcement of their military resources. They received the Jewish deputy in audience, and there was every prospect of the negotiations coming to a happy conclusion, when, at the psychological moment, Torquemada, the sleepless and ruthless, burst into the apartment of the palace where the interview was held, and, lifting up a crucifix, which he drew forth from beneath his cassock, thundered at the King and Queen: “Judas Iscariot sold his master for thirty pieces of silver. Your Highnesses would sell Him anew for thirty thousand; here He is, take Him and barter Him away.” With these words the terrible actor cast the crucifix upon the table and left the room.

The effect of the scene on the sovereigns’ minds was such as the crafty priest had anticipated. His sudden and opportune appearance, and his equally sudden disappearance, savoured of the miraculous; his solemn warning seemed to issue from Heaven. The same superstitious subservience to ghostly influence which had induced Isabella more than a dozen years before to sanction the persecution of the Jews, now induced her to order their expulsion. Nor was there a voice to protest. The Castilians who would have bitterly resented the arbitrary banishment of one of themselves, heard with complacency a similar decision taken against a whole nation. For Israel was a people apart. They had no share in its interests; and it had no share in their rights.

♦1492♦

It was the month of March in 1492, a year of incomparable moment for Spain, for Europe, and for the world at large. That year witnessed the capitulation of Granada, and the downfall of the Mohammedan Empire in the West; a victory for the Cross which was received with hearty thanksgivings throughout Christendom as a providential compensation for the loss of Constantinople. The same year saw the departure of Christopher Columbus, under the flag of the Spanish monarchs, on that memorable voyage which was to result in a triumph wherein the whole of mankind had reason to rejoice. The same hands which signed those two glorious treaties now affixed their signatures to the edict that banished the Jews from the land in which they had lived longer than their persecutors, which they had loved as much, and adorned more than they.

The end of July was fixed as the limit for their preparations. They were permitted to liquidate their possessions and to carry away the proceeds in bills of exchange, but not in gold or silver, for an existing law forbade the exportation of precious metals from the country. The consequence of the edict was that the Jews were forced to sell or barter away some of their effects at a nominal price, and to leave the greater portion behind them. If contemporary witnesses are to be believed, a house was seen bartered for an ass, and a vineyard for a suit of clothes. In Aragon the property of the Jews was sequestered by the authorities for the benefit of their creditors, and the people constantly reviled for their excessive wealth and usury were found to owe more than they possessed!