Meritorious achievements, all of them, but they did not shield the Jews against impending banishment. The exiles found asylums in Italy and Holland, and in each country they at once projected themselves into the predominant intellectual movement. A physician, Abraham Portaleone, distinguished himself on the field of antiquarian research; another, David d'Ascoli, wrote a defense of Jews; and a third, David de Pomis, a defense of Jewish physicians. The most famous was Amatus Lusitanus, one of whose important discoveries is said to have brought him close up to that of the circulation of the blood. Before the banishment of Jews from Spain took effect, Antonio di Moro, a Jewish peddler of Cordova, flourished as the last of Spanish troubadours, and Rodrigo da Cota, a neo-Christian of Seville, as the first of Spanish dramatists, the supposed author of Celestina, one of the most celebrated of old Spanish dramatic compositions.
The proscribed, in the guise of Marranos, and under the hospitable shelter of their new homes, could not be banished from literary Spain, even in its newest departures. Indeed, for a long time Spanish and Italian literatures were brought into contact with each other only through the instrumentality of Jews. Not quite half a century after the expulsion of Jews from Portugal and their settlement in Italy, a Jew, Solomon Usque, made a Spanish translation of Petrarch (1567), dedicated to Alessandro Farnese, duke of Parma, and wrote Italian odes, dedicated to Cardinal Borromeo.
At the zenith of the Renaissance, Jews won renown as Italian poets, and did valiant work as translators from Latin into Hebrew and Italian. In the later days of the movement, in the Reformation period, illustrious Christian scholars studied Hebrew under Jewish tutorship, and gave it a place on the curriculum of the universities. Luther himself submitted to rabbinical guidance in his biblical studies.
In great numbers the Spanish exiles turned to Turkey, where numerous new communities rapidly arose. There, too, in Constantinople and elsewhere, Jews, like Elias Mizrachi and Elias Kapsali, were the first to pursue scientific research.
We have now reached the days of deepest misery for Judaism. Yet, in the face of unrelenting oppression, Jews win places of esteem as diplomats, custodians and advocates of important interests at royal courts. From the earliest period of their history, Jews manifested special talent for the arts of diplomacy. In the Arabic-Spanish period they exercised great political influence upon Mohammedan caliphs. The Fatimide and Omayyad dynasties employed Jewish representatives and ministers, Samuel ibn Nagdela, for instance, being grand vizir of the caliph of Granada. Christian sovereigns also valued their services: as is well known, Charlemagne sent a Jewish ambassador to Haroun al Rashid; Pope Alexander III. appointed Yechiel ben Abraham as minister of finance; and so late as in the fifteenth century the wise statesman Isaac Abrabanel was minister to Alfonso V., of Portugal, and, wonderful to relate, for eight years to Ferdinand and Isabella, of Spain. At this time Jewish literature was blessed with a patron in the person of Joseph Nasi, duke of Naxos, whom, it is said, Sultan Selim II. wished to crown king of Cyprus. His rival was Solomon Ashkenazi, Turkish ambassador to the Venetian republic, who exercised decisive influence upon the election of a Polish king. And this is not the end of the roll of Jewish diplomats and ministers.
Unfortunately, the Kabbala, whose spell was cast about even the most vigorous of Jewish minds, was the leading intellectual current of those sad days, the prevailing misery but serving to render her allurements more fascinating. But in the hands of such men as Abraham Herrera, who influenced Benedict Spinoza, even Kabbalistic studies were informed with a scientific spirit, and brought into connection with Neoplatonic philosophy.
Mention of Spinoza suggests Holland where Jews were kindly received, and shortly after their arrival they interested themselves in the philosophical pursuits in vogue. The best index to their position in Holland is furnished by Manasseh ben Israel's prominent rôle in the politics and the literary ventures of Amsterdam, and by his negotiations with Oliver Cromwell. We may pardon the pride which made him say, "I have enjoyed the friendship of the wisest and the best of Europe." Uriel Acosta and Baruch Spinoza, though children of the Amsterdam Judengasse, were ardent patriots.
The last great Spanish poet was Antonio Enrique de Gomez, the Jewish Calderon, burnt in effigy at Seville; while the last Portuguese poet of note was Antonio Jose de Silva, who perished at the stake for his faith, leaving his dramas as a precious possession to Portuguese literature.
Even in the dreariest days of decadence, when the study of the Talmud seemed to engross their attention, Jews prosecuted scientific inquiries, as witness Moses Isserles's translation of Theorica, an astronomical treatise by Peurbach, the Vienna humanist.
With the migration of Jews eastward, Judendeutsch, a Jewish-German dialect, with its literature, was introduced into Slavic countries. It is a fact not generally known that this jargon is the depository of certain Middle High German expressions and elements no longer used in the modern German, and that philologists are forced to resort to the study of the Polish-Jewish patois to reconstruct the old idiom. In 1523, the year of Luther's Pentateuch translation, a Jewish-German Bible dictionary was published at Cracow, and in 1540 appeared the first Jewish-German translation of the Pentateuch. The Germans strongly influenced the popular literature of the Jews. The two nationalities seized the same subjects, often imitating the same models, or using the same translations. The German "Till Eulenspiegel" was printed in 1500, the Jewish-German in 1600. Besides incorporating German folklore, Jewish-German writings borrowed from German romances, assimilated foreign literatures, did not neglect the traditions of the Jews themselves, and embraced even folk-songs, some of which have perpetuated themselves until the modern era.