Still ours, O Lord,
Thy Holy Word.”[83]
The Feast of Tabernacles year after year rekindled their gratitude for the miraculous preservation in the wilderness. The Feast of Dedication reminded them of their deliverance from the Hellenic yoke. On the Passover Eve was read the Seder, most ancient of home services, and round the festive board were then gathered the shades of the gifted men of old who had sung the glories of Israel, and of the brave men who had suffered for the faith of Israel. Then was retold for the thousandth time, with tears and with laughter, to the accompaniment of song and wine, the tale of their ancestors’ departure from Egypt. At the end of the meal the door was opened, and a wine cup was left upon the table. This was done for the reception of Elijah, the harbinger of the expected Messiah. In this and like domestic rites the memory of the past was annually revived, and, if its splendour made the sordid present look more sordid still, it also kept alive the hope of redemption. The magic carpet of faith, that priceless heirloom of Israel, transported the inmates of the Ghetto out of their noisome surroundings far away to the radiant realms of Zion. The Messianic Utopia never was more real to the Jews than at this time. From a favourite dream it grew into a fervent desire. It was firmly held that the Redeemer would soon come in His glory and might, would gather His people from the four corners of the earth, would slay their foes, would restore the Temple of Jerusalem, and would compel the nations to acknowledge the Majesty of the God of the Jews. We have already seen one of these seventeenth century Messiahs, Sabbataï Zebi of Smyrna. His was not the only attempt in which the longings of the race recognised their fulfilment. These Messianic phenomena, whatever else may be thought of them, are the most pathetic illustrations of that immortal hope, which formed the Jew’s only consolation in times of unexampled suffering, and from which he drew his invincible fortitude. But for that hope the Jewish nation would have long since ceased to fill thinkers with wonder at its vitality. Faith in God, which after all means faith in one’s self—this is the talisman which has enabled the Jew, as it has enabled the Greek, to pass triumphantly through trials which would have crushed most other races. The same blast which extinguishes a small fire fans a great one to an even mightier flame.
CHAPTER XIV
THE REFORMATION AND THE JEWS
The love for liberty which gave birth to the Renaissance was also the parent of another child—the Reformation. The first saw the light in Latin, the second in Teutonic Europe. The vindication of man’s rights was their common object: but while the Renaissance strove to attain that object through the emancipation of the human reason, the Reformation endeavoured to reach it by the emancipation of the human conscience. Intelligence, the inheritance of Hellenism, was the weapon of the one: the other drew its strength from the Hebraic fountain of Intuition. Papacy was the enemy of both. Individual Popes nourished the elder movement and thus unwittingly prepared an example and an ally for the other. While Nicholas I., Pius II., and Leo X. dallied with the infant giant in Italy, its brother across the Alps was training and arming for the fray.
The revolt against the autocracy of the Roman Court was begun in the middle of the fourteenth century by Wickliffe, and was continued by Huss. The licentiousness of the pontiffs and cardinals, of priests and monks, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries invigorated the spirit of the rebels and brought fresh recruits to their ranks; and the German princes, who had long chafed against the fetters imposed upon them by Papal and Imperial interference, took the Reformers under their protection, thus supplying that secular side without which no holy war has ever been.
In Erasmus—“the glory of the priesthood and the shame”—the two movements found a common champion and spokesman. In him the Renaissance crossed the Alps, and in his famous Praise of Folly the Latin hostility to the intellectual tyranny of the Church is found united with the Teutonic hostility to her spiritual tyranny. The vows and the vigils, the self-abasement, the penances and the mournfulness of Catholicism are attacked not less unsparingly than the worldliness, the immorality and the hypocrisy of its ministers. But, if Erasmus marks the meeting, he also marks the parting of the ways.
Beside Erasmus stands Luther. He also combined intellectual attainments with spiritual aims. But the one figure faces the Renaissance; the other the Reformation road. Erasmus, while ridiculing in elegant satire the superstitions of the day, the malpractices of sordid priests, and the excesses of merry friars, shrinks from a breach with the Holy See. Much as he would like to see Catholicism reconciled to commonsense, he recoils with horror before the stakes and the scaffolds of the Holy Office. He could agree with Luther on many points, and yet write: “Even if Luther had spoken everything in the most unobjectionable manner, I had no inclination to die for the sake of Truth.” “Let others affect martyrdom,” he says elsewhere: “for myself I am unworthy of the honour.” Martin Luther was made of sterner stuff and simpler. Though he joined forces with the apostles of culture, he was determined to go much further than they in one direction, not as far in another. The alliance between Literature and Reform, between the two brothers Reason and Conscience, between the Southern and the Northern Ideals, could not last long. The free and cheerful element in Luther’s temperament, and his literary tastes, prevented a definite rupture in his own time. But under his successors the difference between the two sides became too wide for co-operation. Reason and laughter marched one way. Conscience and gloom the other.
We have already seen that the sons of exiled Israel reaped but scant comfort from the triumph of Liberty’s elder offspring. We shall now proceed to show what the victory of the other brought to them.
Martin Luther in his Table-Talk gives a full and vivid description of the German Jews in his day. He tells us that their footsteps are to be found throughout Germany. In Saxony many names of places speak of them: Ziman, Damen, Resen, Sygretz, Schvitz, Pratha, Thablon.[84] At Frankfort-on-the-Maine they are extremely numerous: “They have a whole street to themselves of which every house is filled with them. They are compelled to wear little yellow rings on their coats, thereby to be known; they have no houses or grounds of their own, only furniture; and, indeed, they can only lend money upon houses or grounds at great hasard.”[85] “They are not permitted to keep or trade in cattle; their main occupations being brokage and usury.”[86]