And yet, even in the middle of the fifteenth century, we find the Popes, in defiance of their own decrees, employing Jewish physicians. Nor does the lot of the Jew appear to have grown unbearable for some time after. Sixtus IV., whose intolerance towards the Jews of Spain has been recorded in a previous chapter, died in 1484, and was succeeded by Innocent VIII., a man of many superstitions and many children, but a feeble and ineffectual pontiff, the most interesting year of whose reign, to us, is the year of his death, 1492. In that year, in which the Renaissance reached its zenith, the Jewish population of Italy was augmented by the influx of large numbers of refugees from Spain. One party of them landed at Genoa; and a heart-rending sight they presented, according to an eye-witness, as they emerged from the hulls of the vessels and staggered on to the quay: a host of spectres, haggard with famine and sickness; men with hollow cheeks and deep-sunken eyes; mothers scarcely able to stand, fondling their famished infants in their skeleton arms. On that mole the hapless exiles, shivering under the blasts of the sea, were allowed to tarry for a short time in order to refit their vessels, and to recruit themselves for further trials. The law of the Republic forbade Jewish travellers to remain longer than three days in the country.
The Genoese monks hastened to make spiritual capital out of the wanderers’ desolate condition: children, starving, were baptized in return for a morsel of bread. Those who survived want, illness, and conversion, and finally left the mole of Genoa, were doomed to fresh distress. Their own co-religionists declined to receive them at Rome for fear of competition, and attempted to procure a prohibition of entry from Innocent’s successor by a bribe of one thousand ducats. The Pope, however, though not remarkable for tenderness of heart, was so shocked at the supreme barbarity of the exiles’ brethren that he issued a decree banishing the latter from the city. The Roman Jews, in order to obtain the repeal of the edict, were obliged to pay two thousand ducats, and to receive the refugees into the bargain.
Another contingent reached Naples under equally ghastly conditions. Their voyage from Spain had been a long martyrdom. A great many, especially the young and the delicately reared, had succumbed to hunger and to the foul atmosphere of the narrow and overcrowded vessels. Others had been murdered by the masters of the ships for the sake of their property, or were forced to sell their children in order to defray the expenses of the passage. Those who escaped the terrors of the sea, and reached the two harbours mentioned, brought with them an infectious disease, derived from the privations which they had endured. The infection lurked in Genoa and Naples through the winter; but when Spring came, it burst forth into a frightful plague, which spread with terrible rapidity, swept off upwards of twenty thousand souls in the latter city in one year, and then extended its wasting arms over the whole of the peninsula.
There can be little doubt that the people, who had elsewhere been made the scapegoats for epidemics with the origin of which they had nothing to do, would have been subjected to severe persecution for a visitation which could certainly be traced to their agency. But it so happened that the attention of the Italians was this year, and for many years after, absorbed by other calamities.
On Innocent’s death, Alexander VI. had been raised to St. Peter’s throne, which he strengthened by his own political genius, adorned by his magnificent liberality to the artistic genius of others, and disgraced by his monstrous depravity. ♦1494♦ Under Alexander’s reign Italy witnessed the invasion of Charles VIII. of France, an event which inaugurated a period of turmoil, and turned the country into a battle-ground for foreign princes. Rome alone escaped the consequences of this deluge. The Pope, alarmed at the king’s approach, offered terms of peace, which the French monarch finally accepted. Independence was secured at the cost of dignity, and Alexander VI. was enabled to steer safely amid the storms that raged over the rest of the peninsula. He died in 1503, regretted by a few, execrated by most of his contemporaries. Pius III. reigned for a few months, and was, in his turn, succeeded by Julius II., who proved himself one of the most energetic, warlike, and worldly statesmen that had ever wielded St. Peter’s sceptre. He died in 1513, and in his stead was elected Giovanni de Medici, under the name of Leo X. Born in 1475, a year after Ariosto, Giovanni was the second son of Lorenzo de Medici, chief of the Italian Platonists of the time. In his father’s house and among his father’s friends young Giovanni heard a great deal more of Pagan poetry and philosophy than of Christian theology. But while his contemporary, Ariosto, nourished in a similar school of thought, denounced the rapacity of the Roman Court and derided the papal pretensions to temporal power—laughingly dismissing the fabled gift of Constantine the Great to Pope Silvester to the realms of the moon—Giovanni devoted his life to the service of a Church whose doctrines he did not believe, and to her defence against heresies which he did not detest. His pontificate, accordingly, was distinguished by the elegant frivolities of a cultured gentleman far more than by the piety of a clergyman. Leo’s artistic taste and genial sense of the ludicrous were among his chief virtues; his love of the chase his greatest vice. Abstemious in his own diet, he delighted in providing for, and laughing at, the gluttony of others. But Leo’s principal title to the grateful remembrance of posterity lies in his munificent encouragement of art and letters. He died in 1521.
Most of these pontiffs, refined, intelligent, and irreligious, in fighting the reformers fought enemies to their own power, not the enemies of Christ. While opposing the spirit of rebellion which the licentiousness of some of them had brought into existence and the literary culture of others to maturity, they seem to have ignored the eternal heretics, the Jews. Under their rule Israel enjoyed one of those Sabbaths of rest which invariably preceded a new reign of terror. When an academic feud rent the learned world of the University of Padua into two factions, instead of the philosophical question under dispute being, after the fashion of the times, settled at the point of the rapier, it was submitted to the arbitration of a Jew, the great scholar Elias del Medigo. This worthy, vested in the professorial robes, addressed the students of Padua and Florence, and his decision was accepted as final. Lastly, the gulf between Jew and Gentile in Italy was bridged by a common philosophical faith.
The Italians of the period, in their eager search after truth, often strayed into strange paths. Many of them, weary of groping their way amid the darkness of the scholastic wilderness, rashly ran after any will-of-the-wisp that held out the promise of light and rest. Among these aberrations from commonsense was the rage for the Hebrew mysticism of the Cabbala, which found many susceptible disciples among the literati of Padua and Florence, and led to close and cordial relations between representatives of the two creeds. The omniscient youth Count Giovanni Pico de Mirandola, who had been initiated into the mysteries of the Cabbala by a Jew, maintained that these mysteries yielded the most effective proof of the divinity of Christ, and, what is more remarkable still, he had even converted Pope Sixtus IV. to his way of thinking. Pico de Mirandola placarded Rome with a list of nine hundred theses, and invited all European scholars to come to the city at his own expense that they might be convinced of the infallibility of the Cabbala, while the Pope took great pains to have the Cabbalistic writings translated into Latin for the enlightenment of divinity students. Innocent VIII. was far too old-fashioned to favour new absurdities; and, while he persecuted witches and magicians in Germany and preached abortive crusades against the heretics of the West and the infidels of the East, he prohibited the reading of Pico’s nonsense. But the craze seized Leo X. and the early Reformers, and not only theologians but also men of affairs and men of war fell captives to it. Statesmen and soldiers devoted themselves to the study of Hebrew, in the pathetic belief that they had at last secured the magic key to universal wisdom.
Contrariwise, many Hebrew Cabbalists, filling high places in the Synagogue, found in these theosophic hallucinations a proof of the divine origin of Christianity and openly embraced it. But apart from mysticism, the genius of the Renaissance overstepped the iron circle of Judaism. The charm of Hellenism which had in old times attracted the Jews of Alexandria, once more prevailed against the Hebrew hatred of Gentile culture. Jewish youths gladly attended the Italian universities; the philosophy of Aristotle, the elegant Latinity of Cicero and the subtle criticism of Quintilian met with keen appreciation among them; and, though painting and sculpture continued to be regarded with suspicion, we find Italian Rabbis, like their Christian colleagues, drawing from pagan mythology illustrations for their sermons, and even paying, in full synagogue, rhetorical homage to “that holy goddess Diana.”
Thus Jew and Gentile were drawn near to each other by many intellectual forces. Even theologians succumbed to the mollifying influence of the new spirit. Too enlightened to persecute, not sufficiently in earnest to proselytise, they engaged in friendly and witty arguments with the Jews on the matter of their religion. ♦1523–1534♦ Pope Clement VII. even conceived the plan of a Latin translation of the Old Testament to be brought about by a collaboration of Jewish and Christian scholars. Under such illusory auspices was ushered in the century that was to open to the Jews the blackest chapter in their black history.