It may not be amiss, at this point of history, to inquire how far the severe language and harsh treatment with which even really good men among the Christians of the Middle Ages were wont to assail the Jews, had any reasonable justification or excuse. There were some men, as we have seen, with whom the prejudices of their brother Christians had little or no weight; who were capable of regarding the Jews as the children of their Father in heaven, and as such their brethren, though, doubtless, their erring brethren. They might rightly, in such men’s eyes, be the subjects of entreaty, warning, perhaps punishment, but never of hate or contempt. But they who were thus raised above the convictions of their age were very few. And there were others—men of the highest character, whose devotion to God’s service and love for their fellow-men cannot be questioned—men like Louis IX. of France, Peter of Clugny, Savonarola, Martin Luther, Cardinal Borromeo—who regarded the Jews with horror and detestation, as persons beyond the pale of charity, who were simply to be crushed and trampled out.[147] How are we to account for men like these so viewing them? Was the character of the Jews in the Middle Ages such as really to merit a condemnation so unqualified? Is the portraiture of the Jew given by our great dramatist[148] a true one? Shylock is depicted as sordid, vindictive, without mercy and without natural affection. Is he the genuine Hebrew of the sixteenth century, or the mere embodiment of blind and inveterate prejudice?
What do travellers answer when asked whether the soil of the Holy Land is waste and barren, unable to support even its sparse population? They will tell us that it is naturally rich and fertile, but has become unproductive by long neglect and abuse.[149] As it has been with the land of the Jews, so it has been with themselves. Their true national character is among the noblest—if it is not the very noblest—that the world has seen. Whatever great qualities humanity may possess, it is by men of this race that they have been exhibited in their highest development. If we ask from what nation has arisen the ablest legislator, the most far-seeing statesman, the wisest philosopher, the most chivalrous warrior, the greatest monarch, the most Heaven-inspired poet, we must answer, in every instance, From the nation of the Jews. Nor is it to individuals alone that this applies. What struggle for national independence was ever more gallant than that of the Maccabees? Which among all the countless nations, overthrown by the military genius of Rome, ever resisted so long, or with such fatal effect, her illimitable power, as the defenders of Jerusalem? But, no doubt, centuries of oppression had their effect in deteriorating the nobler, and developing the meaner, features of the Jewish character, until the Jews became at last almost—though not quite—what their persecutors believed them to be.[150] Shut out from every nobler pursuit, forbidden the career of the statesman, the soldier, the artist, the author, or the physician, except within the narrow bounds of their own despised race—they were driven to the one sordid trade of money-getting, and compelled even in that to practise the extremity of exaction and rigour, or else—subject as they were to continual lawless plunder—they could not have lived. If they were at any time disposed to show mercy, no one believed it to be anything but a subtle scheme for securing some worldly end. Treated systematically as the outcasts of humanity, what wonder if they often really became so?
FOOTNOTES:
[145] It is stated that the Jewish money-lenders demanded thirty-two and a-half per cent. on their loans, together with compound interest!
[146] The Jews were actually driven out of Ravenna in 1484, in consequence of the agitation he stirred up against them.
[147] Peter of Clugny wrote: ‘If the Saracens are justly to be detested, how much more are the Jews to be execrated and regarded with hate!’ Louis IX. charged them with being in league with evil spirits to injure and destroy men. It has been affirmed that Luther treated the Jews with lenity and toleration. But, if he ever really did evince this spirit towards them, it was only at the outset of his career. Later on he was stern and merciless in his tone towards them. ‘Burn their synagogues and schools,’ were his words; ‘break into and destroy their houses. Forbid their Rabbins, on pain of death, to teach,’ etc.
[148] Shylock, it should be noted, whether a fair picture or not, of the Jews of Shakspeare’s time, is at least a genuine character—a real man. But the Barabbas of Marlowe’s Jew of Malta and the Fagin of Dickens’s Oliver Twist are simply coarse and gross caricatures, pandering to the vulgar taste of the day.
[149] Palestine is a land ‘rich in its soil, boundless in its capabilities of production, glowing in the sunshine of an almost perpetual summer—this enchanting land was indeed (what the patriarch had described it) a field which the Lord had blessed.... But Mohammedan sloth and despotism have converted it into a waste rock and desert, with the exception of some few spots, which remain to attest the veracity of the accounts formerly given of it.’—Bannister’s Holy Land, pp. 37, 38.
[150] Every reader will remember the noble passage in Ivanhoe, where Bois Guilbert taunts Rebecca with the degraded character of her countrymen, and she answers him by appealing to their former greatness. ‘Thou hast spoken of the Jew,’ she says, ‘as the persecution of such as thou has made him. Read the ancient history of the people of God, and tell me if those by whom Jehovah wrought such marvels among the nations were then a people of misers and usurers!’—Ivanhoe, chap. xvi.