Israel in Europe

by G. F. Abbott

And yet it would be an error to imagine that the Jew, even in those halcyon days of Italian freedom, was wholly exempt from the penalty which pursues dissent. Whatever the feelings of the cultured and the thoughtful might be, to the populace of Italy the Jew was a pestilent heretic. As early as 1016 we hear of a massacre of the Jews in Rome owing to an earthquake which wrought great havoc in the city. The calamity occurred on Good Friday, and it was ascertained that at the time of its occurrence the Jews were worshipping in their synagogue. A coincidence to the mediaeval mind was tantamount to conclusive proof of cause and effect. The Roman rabble, under the influence of panic and superstition, wreaked a terrible vengeance on the supposed authors of the misfortune, and Pope Benedict VIII. sanctioned a crime which he was probably unable to prevent. Innocent III. proved his consistency by oppressing the “enemies of Christ” in Italy as scrupulously as elsewhere, and the Jews were also expelled from Bologna in 1171. In 1278—when Dante was a precocious youth of twelve years of age, already devoted to his mystic adoration of Beatrice; when Thomas Aquinas, the tolerant of Judaism, had been dead only four years; and two years after the birth of the great painter Giotto, to whom we owe the one portrait of Dante that has escaped the deluge of the centuries—at that period at which the rosy morn of the Renaissance was faintly gilding the eastern firmament, we find the Jews compelled to attend Christian services and to submit to sermons preached against their own religion. But, with few exceptions, no bloody persecution soiled the canvas of Italian history. In the ensuing century synagogues, plain, gaunt, and ungainly, might still be seen in close proximity to gorgeous Christian churches in Rome, and the congregations which thronged the latter on Sundays had not yet discovered that it was their duty to punish their neighbours for worshipping their god on Saturday. But the discovery was not far distant.

In 1321 the Jews of Rome were charged with insulting the crucifix as it was carried through the streets in a procession. The accuser is said to have been a sister of John XXII., a pope among whose principal claims to distinction love of gold ranked high. Several priests corroborated the charge, and the Pope decided to drive the Jews out of the Roman state. The details of the occurrence are uncertain; but the reality of the danger to which the Jews found themselves exposed is proved by the extraordinary fast instituted that year. While fervent prayers were offered up in the synagogues, messengers were despatched to the Pope at Avignon and to King Robert of Naples, his patron, who also was a great friend of the Jews, imploring that the decision might be cancelled. King Robert pleaded their cause successfully, for, it is said, his eloquence was supported by twenty thousand ducats presented by the Roman Jews to the Pope’s sister.

In the middle of the same century we find the Jews of Rome obliged to contribute towards the expenses of the popular amusements in the Roman circus—a form of entertainment which was an abomination unto the Lord of the Jews—12 gold pieces a year; a small matter in itself, yet indicative of the direction in which the current flowed. But a new power came to stem for a while this current.

We are in the heart of the fourteenth century. Dante died in 1321, and his obsequies were sumptuously performed at Ravenna. The tomb which closed over Dante’s remains on that July day received more than the spokesman of Mediaeval Faith. In it was buried Mediaeval Faith itself. Catholicism, and all that it had meant to Dante, was already a thing of the past. “One Church and one Empire for all men,” the idols of the Middle Age, were to be deposed by the ideal of “A Church and an Empire for each race of men,” gradually to develop into “No Church and no Empire for any man.” The last of the Catholics was carried to his grave, as the first of the Humanists appears on the scene. Dante’s censures of popes and cardinals were the rebukes of a brother; Petrarch’s denunciations are the assaults of an enemy. Dante, while condemning individual churchmen, sincerely reveres the Church which their malpractices disgraced. To him the Papal Court may be a home of hypocrisy, a nursery of shame, a cradle of crime, and he will have nothing to do with it; but that does not lead him to question the spiritual authority of that Court. His hero still is Gregory Hildebrand, della fede cristiana il santo atleta—the saintly athlete of the Christian Faith.[76] To Petrarch the Papal Court is all that and more. It is the mother of human slavery and the fount of human misery—a “Western Babylon,” as he calls it in one of his sonnets. It fills him with unutterable abhorrence. Petrarch died in 1374, but the new spirit of which he was the exponent did not die with him. It was transmitted to his disciple Boccaccio, in whose hands the keen weapon of indignation was replaced by the keener one of ridicule. Boccaccio’s popular tales spread the infamy of the monasteries and nunneries, and the hatred towards their inmates, far and wide. Henceforth contempt shall be the portion of the Church which had inspired his predecessors with mere horror. Poggio, Pulci, Franco, and others followed in the footsteps of the master, and though they could not rival Boccaccio in wit, they surpassed him in virulence.

The real importance of these attacks lies in the circumstance that they were levelled not at persons but at institutions. The warfare was not waged so much against the body as against the soul of Catholicism. It is true that Italian Christianity had very early divested itself of some of the Oriental austerity of the cult, and that great part of its original colour had been toned down, or touched up, in accordance with Occidental taste. After twelve centuries of Roman practice very little, indeed, was left of the gospel preached on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. The self-sacrifice of the prophet had been replaced by the self-indulgence of the priest, the simplicity and humility of the saint by the purple splendour of the ecclesiastical prince, and the spirit of the Word had long been stifled beneath the mummeries and pageants of Roman ritual. But still there remained more than the Latin temperament, under the influence of the pagan revival, could bear with equanimity. The young Italian mind had had enough of the creed of abstinence, renunciation, and sacrifice; it panted for enjoyment. The litanies and the agonies of the Church repelled it; her self-mortifications and self-mystifications revolted it. The classic love for form was to oust again the Christian veneration for the spirit. Virgil ceased to be regarded as a heathen prophet of Christianity. Scholars ceased to scan his pages for predictions of the advent of Jesus, and began to revel in the charm of his paganism. In a former generation Dante had found in the poet of Mantua a ghostly guide to the Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven of Catholicism; the new school saw in him a mellifluous minstrel of sensuous joys: a singer of the beauty of flocks and flowers, of the humming bees, of the trilling birds, of the murmuring rivulets, of the loves of shepherds and shepherdesses. The muse of Theocritus had risen from her enchanted sleep of a thousand years and brought back with her the sanity and the light that were to banish the phantoms and the mists of the mediaeval hell. Italy celebrated the resurrection of Pan.

Self-abasement was superseded by self-reverence; and abstinence by temperance. The dignity of the individual, long lost in the mediaeval worship of authority, was restored; the glorification of man succeeded to the glorification of the Kingdom of God on earth. The beauty of the naked human body was once more recognised and its cult revived. Fecundity and not chastity became the ideal virtue. And what the poets described in warm, impassioned melody, the artists of a later day depicted in no less warm and impassioned colour. Dante’s ethereal love for Beatrice would have been shocked at Raphael’s Madonna: Madonna the mother; no longer Madonna the maiden.

Nor was the new cult confined to profane poets, artists, and scholars. The divines of the Roman Church were also carried away by it. Rationalism invaded the Vatican, was petted by the priests, and promulgated from the pulpit. In sermons preached before the Pope and his cardinals the dogmas of Christianity were blended with the doctrines of ancient philosophy, and Hebrew theology was identified with heathen mythology. Christ’s self-sacrifice was compared to that of Socrates and of other great and good men of antiquity who had laid down their lives for the sake of truth and the benefit of mankind. Pontifical documents were couched in pagan phraseology; the Father and the Son appeared as Jupiter and Apollo; and the Holy Virgin as Diana, or even as Venus with the child Cupid; while sacred hymns were solemnly addressed by pious Catholics to the deities of Olympus. These and other vagaries were seriously indulged in, after a fashion abundantly grotesque, but none the less instructive. When pruned of its absurd extravagances and picturesque ineptitudes, this enthusiasm for paganism can be regarded both as the fruit and as the cause of an essentially healthy growth. The Italians of the fifteenth century succeeded where Julian the Apostate had failed in the fourth; and to that success may be traced all the subsequent developments of European culture.

How this revolution came about has been explained at great length by historians: how, partly through Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s influence, the nobles and merchant princes of the Italian republics took the new learning under their generous patronage; how young Italian pupils repaired to Constantinople to study the language and literature of ancient Greece at the feet of men to whom that language was a living mother tongue; how Greek teachers were encouraged to bring their treasures to Italy; how they were received by a public as eager to fathom the mysteries of Greek grammar as a modern public is to fathom the mysteries of a detective story; and how the stream gradually swelled into the mighty flood that followed on the fall of Constantine’s city in 1453. But all this was only a period of gestation. Modern Europe was really born on the day on which an obscure Dutch chandler made known to the world the marvellous invention which was to supersede the scribe’s pen, and to draw forth the torch of knowledge from the monk’s cell, and from the wealthy merchant’s study to the crowds in the street.

By a coincidence, apparently strange, the century which opened the prison-gates of the Christian condemned the Jew to a new dungeon. The age of the revival of learning and of the printing press is also the age of vigorous persecution of Israel in Italy. The compulsory attendance of Jews at divine service now began to be enforced in a manner more rigid at once and more stupid. Officials posted at the entrance to the church examined the ears of the Jews, lest the inward flow of the truth should be stemmed by cottonwool. Other officials, inside the church, were charged with the duty of preventing the wretched congregation from taking refuge in sleep. A Bull of Benedict XIII., issued at Valencia in 1415, decrees that at least three public sermons a year should be inflicted on the Jews, and prescribes the arguments that are to be employed for their conversion: proofs of Christ’s Messianic character drawn from the Prophets and the Talmud, exposure of the errors and vanities of the latter book, and demonstration of the fact that the destruction of the Temple and the woes of the Jews are due to the hardness of their hearts.

In 1442 Pope Eugenius IV., impelled by the son of an apostate Jew, ordained that the Jews of Rome should keep their doors and their windows shut during Easter Week. By 1443 the modest annual sum of 12 gold pieces, originally contributed by the Jews to the sports in the Roman circus, had grown to 1130 pieces. Nor were the Romans any longer content with the extortion of money, but they now insisted on a personal participation of the Jews in the detested joys of the arena. The descendants of Titus, and of the Romans who gazed at the savage spectacle of Jewish captives torn to pieces by wild beasts, or forced to kill one another for the delectation of the victors, revived the taste of their remote ancestors for sportful homicide. The fifteenth-century Carnival in Rome opened with a foot-race, which was in every respect worthy of its pagan prototype of the first century. Eight Jews were compelled to appear semi-naked, and, incited by blows and invectives, to cover the whole of the long course. Some reached the goal exhausted, others dropped dead on the way. On the same day the secular and religious chiefs of the Jewish community were obliged to walk at the head of the procession of Roman Senators across the course, amidst a tempest of execration and derision on the part of the mob; while the eccentricities of the Jew and the prejudices of the Gentile found similar scope for display upon the stage. In the Carnival plays and farces of Rome the Jew supplied a stock character that never failed to provoke the contemptuous merriment of the audience.