But this does not exhaust the list of oppression:
“A rich Jew, on his death bed, ordered that his remains should be conveyed to Ratisbon. His friends, knowing that even the corpse of a Jew could not travel without paying heavy toll, devised the expedient of packing the carcase in a barrel of wine, which they then forwarded in the ordinary way. The waggoners, not knowing what lay within, tapped the barrel, and swilled away right joyously, till they found out they had been drinking Jew’s pickle. How it fared with them you may imagine.”[87]
Nor was extortion the only danger that the travelling Jew had to face: “Two Jewish Rabbis, named Schamaria and Jacob, came to me at Wittenberg, desiring of me letters of safe conduct, which I granted them, and they were well pleased.”[88]
The unpopularity of the Jews in Germany at this time arose partly from their staunch adherence to the Idea, their aloofness and their dissent in modes of thinking and living from their neighbours:
“They sit as on a wheelbarrow, without a country, people or Government; yet they wait on with earnest confidence; they cheer up themselves and say: ‘It will soon be better with us.’... They eat nothing the Christians kill or touch; they drink no wine; they have many superstitions; they wash the flesh most diligently, whereas they cannot be cleansed through the flesh. They drink not milk, because God said: ‘Thou shalt not boil the young kid in his mother’s milk.’”[89]
Partly from their rapacity and their hostility to the non-Jew: “’Tis a pernicious race, oppressing all men by their usury and rapine. If they give a prince or a magistrate a thousand florins, they extort twenty thousand from the subjects in payment. We must ever keep on our guard against them. They think to render homage to God by injuring the Christians, and yet we employ their physicians; ’tis a tempting of God.”[90]
Partly from their arrogance:
“They have haughty prayers, wherein they praise and call upon God, as if they alone were his people, cursing and condemning all other nations, relying on the 23rd Psalm: ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall lack nothing.’ As if that psalm was written exclusively concerning them.”[91]
How far these unamiable qualities were the cause, and how far the effect of the Gentile’s antipathy to the Jew, is a question which prejudice on either side finds no difficulty in answering. The humble-minded and impartial student prefers to record the fact and ignore the question. But it is passing strange to find the Jew’s resolute faith in the Faithful Shepherd characterised as an offence against good manners.
We have seen that the persecution of the Jews in mediaeval Germany, from the awful carnage in the Rhineland (1096 foll.) to their expulsion from Ratisbon (1476), had for its proximate cause the hatred entertained towards them by the Catholic Church. The orgies of the Crusaders were mainly dictated by pious vindictiveness; the violent efforts of the Dominican friars and of the Inquisition to convert the Jews were prompted by the desire to save them from heresy and to prevent them from infecting others by their example. All the heresies from the Albigensian, through the Hussite, up to the movement which culminated in Luther’s secession from the Roman fold, were considered by the Church as having their roots in Jewish teaching and practice. The adoration of the Virgin, of Saints, and of relics, which offended the Jew in the Roman cult were also the special objects of Protestant detestation. They had both suffered for the sake of conscience; dissent, the crime of Judaism, was the glory of Protestantism; Rome, the secular foe of the one, was also the sworn enemy of the other; and they were both branded by Rome with the common epithet of Heretics. We might, therefore, have reasonably expected that Luther and his brother-reformers would have regarded the Jews with sympathy. But history does not confirm this a priori conclusion.