Israel in Europe

by G. F. Abbott

Hitherto the life of Israel in Italy had been a life chequered by sunlight and shade. Henceforth it is to be all shade. The sixteenth century is the century of the Ghetto and its foul degradation. The Italian Jews were destined to feel the effects of the Catholic reaction, provoked by the attacks of the Reformers, and although this reaction commenced latest, it lasted longest in Italy.

In 1540 Ignatius Loyola promulgated his gospel of obedience, intolerance and intellectual suicide, and the doctrine that no deed is unholy or immoral which is done in the service of the Catholic Church—than which no more startling or sinister doctrine was ever preached to the foolish sons of man. At the same time the Inquisition, having placed the extermination of the Moors and the Jews in Spain on a sound business basis, sought fresh employment for its energy and its racks. The experience of the older institution, thus united with the ardour of the young, presented a combination of forces such as none but the most resourceful of heretics could resist. It was not long before the Jews of Italy became aware of this revival of enthusiasm for the Faith.

♦1540♦

In the very same inauspicious year the Holy Office began the persecution of the Marranos of Naples, then under Spanish rule. These pseudo-Christians were ordered to wear the badge or to leave the country. Rightly divining that the badge was only the prelude to worse things, they preferred to go into exile. Some of them bent their steps to Ancona and Ferrara, but the majority set out for Turkey. Many were captured by pirates on their voyage and were carried off to Marseilles, where the French King Henry II., though otherwise a prince of unimpeachably obscurantist leanings, received them kindly; but, as he dared not retain them, he despatched them to Turkey. ♦1550♦ Ten years later the Dominicans inflamed the Genoese against the small Jewish community in the Republic, and the Jews were banished. These were but two episodes in the later history of the Italian Jews, interesting chiefly as indicative of that change of feeling which led to the tragedy of the Ghetto.

As we have seen, there always was a natural tendency for the children of Israel to gravitate towards the same point—a habit which originated the Jewries of England, the Judenstadt of Germany, the Juderias of Spain and the Jewish quarters in most mediaeval countries. But we have also seen that, under tolerable conditions, the Jews entertained no unconquerable aversion from dwelling amidst the Gentiles, and that, when treated as human beings, they developed a certain degree of community of feeling and interest with their fellow-creatures. Further, we have noticed this gradual reconciliation blocked partly by the efforts of the Synagogue, but far more successfully by those of the Church; and we have found in certain countries the Jews claiming from the princes who favoured and fleeced them segregation as a privilege and as a means of self-protection.

In the time of Pope Gregory VII. the Bishop of Speyer, in order to save the Jews from the violence of the mob, allotted to them a particular quarter which they might fortify and defend. In the middle of the thirteenth century King Ferdinand of Castile granted a similar privilege to the Jews of Seville. In the city of Cologne the Jews, a century later, paid an annual fee of twenty marks to the officer whose task it was to lock the gates of their special quarter at sundown and to unlock them at dawn. The feudal lawlessness of the times made such precautions necessary not only for the Jews, but for all mortals who were not strong enough to secure respect for their persons and property; so much so that the Jews of Prague who lived outside the Jewish quarter resolved of their own accord to join their brethren in the Judenstadt for greater safety. ♦1473♦ Compulsory concentration of the Jews within separate quarters, it is true, was not unknown even in those days. Restrictions of this kind seem to have been in force in Sicily as early as the fourteenth century, and in certain German States even in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries, while the “Jewish barrier” of Tudela dates from the eleventh century. Such cases, however, were sporadic and exceptional. It is in the enlightened age with which we are now dealing, and in the most enlightened country in Europe, that the isolation of Israel begins to be rigidly and universally enforced as a means of coercion. The walls of the Jewish quarter are no longer a bulwark against attack, but a barrier against escape.

The name, as well as the institution under its new and offensive form, is of Venetian origin. The term is derived from the Getto—the old, walled iron-foundry, within the precincts of which the first Jewish Ghetto was established in the city of St. Mark, in 1516. The Jews had made Venice their home in very early times; but their colony, in its subsequent extent, dates from the beginning of the thirteenth century. It was then that Jewish merchants from north and east began to pour into the city that was to become, partly by their help, the commercial capital of Italy. Their relations to the Christian inhabitants were neither hostile nor yet hearty. The common people detested them, but the Government was consistent in its protection of their persons and interests. An incident that occurred in the fifteenth century serves to illustrate the Jew’s position in the Venetian Republic.

During the Holy Week of 1475 a Christian child was drowned at Trent, and its body was caught in a grating close to the house of a Jew. The priests immediately saw in the accident evidence of ritual murder, and, by exhibiting the body in public, they stirred up the populace against the supposed murderers. All the Jews of the city, male and female, young and old, rich and poor, were cast into prison by order of the Bishop. A baptized Jew came forth as accuser, and the prisoners, put to the torture, confessed that they had slain little Simon and drunk his blood on the night of the Passover. A Jewess was said to have supplied the weapon for the crime. With the exception of four Jews, who embraced Christianity, the rest were banished from Trent. Cardinal Hadrian, writing half a century later, describes the rocks of Trent as a place “where the Jews, owing to Simon’s murder, dare not even approach.”[77]

Meanwhile the corpse of the child was embalmed and advertised by the monks as a wonder-working relic. Thousands of pilgrims repaired to the shrine, and, such is the power of faith, swore that they saw the remains shining with an unearthly light. The miracle brought profit to the monks, and yet they, with as little logic as gratitude, denounced those whom they considered its proximate cause. The fame, or infamy, of the incident spread far and wide. In Great Britain it is believed to have given rise to the ballad of the Jew’s Daughter; in other countries it gave rise to persecution of the Jews. But the Doge and Senate of Venice, on the Jews’ complaining of their danger, ordered the Podesta of Padua to take them under his protection, repudiated the charge of murder as an impudent fiction, and, when Pope Sixtus IV. was besought to add little Simon to the roll of the other young martyrs slain by Jews, he not only emphatically refused to do so, but sent an encyclical to all the towns of Italy, forbidding them to honour Simon as a saint.

Long after Christian heresy had been condemned by Venetian law, and the authority of the Inquisition, under certain important limitations, recognised, the Jews were suffered to prosper in the Republic. Even the Holy Office was not permitted to molest them. Toleration was essential to the welfare of the mercantile commonwealth, and the statesmen of Venice, in conformity with the old Italian tradition, declined to sacrifice the interests of the State—the supreme aim of a Government—to theological bigotry. Venetian justice in those days might have chosen for its motto the divine precept given to Israel on the eve of its redemption from the house of bondage: “One law shall be to him that is home-born and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you.” Venice, accordingly, was the resort and rendezvous of foreigners of every race and religion: a city of many colours and many tongues; a humming bee-hive of traders and travellers, of scholars and Shylocks, all of whom were welcomed so long as they conformed to the laws of the land. Among these multifarious elements of harmonious confusion none was more conspicuous than the Jew.