[127] Milman ingeniously suggests, in reference to these continually repeated charges of kidnapping and crucifying children, that the Jews might have brooded over the horrors imputed to them, until they became so diseased in mind that they actually executed the acts so persistently imputed to them. This is an ingenious suggestion, but nothing more. The confessions wrung by torture from the miserable Jews bear on the face of them the impress of fiction, and resemble the acknowledgment of witchcraft obtained by similar means.
[128] This extraordinary law, which obtained in France also, is to be explained by the fact that by becoming a Christian a Jew was no longer subject to the exactions of the sovereign. And it was argued that it was not reasonable that his conversion should be at the king’s expense.
[129] Not long previously to their expulsion he had imprisoned every Jew of any note, until they had paid him a subsidy of £12,000.
[130] It is remarkable, that although the historians of those times describe the most heartrending sufferings endured by the Jews, there is nowhere any expression of pity or horror in their narratives.
PART II.
FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE FOURTEENTH
CENTURY TO THE PRESENT TIME.
CHAPTER XXI.
A.D. 1300-1400.
THE JEWS IN FRANCE.
The history of the Jews in France, in the thirteenth century, may be regarded as terminating with their second expulsion from that country by Philip the Fair. That king died in 1314, and was succeeded by Louis X., called in history Hutin, or Mutin (the Turbulent). One of the first acts of the new king was to recall the Jews, who not only consented to return to a land where for generations past they had experienced nothing but harsh and contemptuous usage, but even to pay a heavy price for the privilege. Nothing gives us a stronger idea of the utter helplessness and friendlessness of the Hebrew people at this period than the readiness with which they would accept any conditions whatever that seemed to promise them protection for the moment against violent or lawless outrage. A semblance of justice, indeed, was shown them: their synagogues were restored to them, and their worship again permitted; they recovered the privilege of burying their dead in their ancient graveyards. Nay, such debts as were still owing to them—the greater portion having been already paid over to the king, who had condescended to make himself their trustee—they were allowed to claim before the public tribunals, conditionally always on their paying two-thirds of it into the royal treasury.[131] In the reign of Philip the Long, a few years afterwards, something like fairness and even mercy seems to have been shown them, possibly as a set-off to the king’s exaction of 150,000 livres from them. They were allowed to lend on usury to certain persons and on certain conditions; they might acquire property in houses and land; and they were not required to wear their distinguishing badge while travelling from one town to another.
About this time (A.D. 1319) a novel charge was preferred against them, and which we might believe to have been at least founded on fact, if it did not seem impossible that the Jews of those times could have been guilty of such suicidal rashness. At Lunel they were accused of travestying the Saviour’s passion—not (as was the ordinary charge) by the crucifixion of a Christian boy—but by carrying a crucifix in a public procession, reviling it as they went, dragging it through mire and filth, and heaping reproaches upon it.[132] For this offence they were tried, convicted, and punished.