History of the Jews, Vol. 3 (of 6)

by Heinrich Graetz

Some years later (1191) Philip Augustus sent fresh victims to the martyr's grave. In the little town of Bray (on the Seine, north of Sens), which belonged to the county of Champagne, a Christian subject of the king murdered a Jew. The relatives of the murdered man appealed to the countess, and obtained her permission, through rich presents of money, to hang the murderer. By design or accident, the execution took place on the Purim festival, and this circumstance reminded the people of Haman's gallows, and perhaps of something else. As soon as the king had received news of the execution of his subject, in a distorted report, moreover, saying that the Jews had bound the hands of the murderer, crowned him with a crown of thorns, and dragged him through the streets, he hastened to Bray with a force of men, and surrounding the houses of the Jews with guards, offered them the alternative between death and conversion. The congregation did not hesitate a moment, its members bravely determined to kill one another rather than die by the hand of the executioner. Philip caused nearly one hundred to be burnt, and spared only the children under thirteen years. A few days later the king, with blood-imbrued hands, was consecrated as champion of the Cross, and sailed to Syria, to the crusade. The so-called Holy War improved him but little.

All efforts to dislodge that really great hero, Saladin, from Jerusalem and the district belonging to it, had hitherto proved fruitless. Richard the Lion-hearted was compelled to patch up a truce discreditable to the Christians, and the only favor that he obtained was that Christian pilgrims were to be allowed to visit at any time the Church of the Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

A new crusade had to be preached; the dying embers of fanaticism once more had to be rekindled, and naturally the Jews again were the first to suffer. Pope Innocent III, the most thoughtless and arbitrary of all princes of the Church, took the cause in hand with frantic energy. He commissioned a preacher, Fulko de Neuilly, who had till then lived a reckless, sinful life, to preach the crusade in towns and villages; and this agent, a second Rudolph, used the unpopularity of the Jews and the prospect of plundering them as convenient means for enlisting soldiers for the armies of the Cross. He preached that Christian debtors, having taken the Cross, were absolved from their debts to their Jewish creditors. Many barons of northern France inspired, or pretending to be inspired by Fulko's fanatical harangues, enrolled themselves as crusaders. Now that their hatred of the Jews was once more inflamed, they drove them out of their provinces; for, having been impoverished by the canceling of their debts, the Jews had nothing left which the barons could extort from them.

Contrary to all expectations, Philip Augustus, the arch-enemy of the Jews, received the exiles in his own territory, and allowed those who had formerly been expelled by him to return again to their hearths (July, 1198). This inconsistent and tolerant action of the king, who had been hitherto invariably severe, occasioned much surprise. It seems that Philip Augustus had taken this step for the purpose of mortifying the clergy and Pope Innocent III, because they had declared against his second marriage, he having divorced his first wife without the sanction of the Pope.

At first glance it appears as if the French king and the barons were filled with solicitude for the Jews, as if the latter were so dear to them that they could not exist without them. They looked jealously at one another if Jews emigrated from one province to another; they reclaimed them, and entered into compacts whereby any Jews who had changed their places of abode were to be delivered over to their original lord; and they went so far as to place the Jews under oath not to pass beyond their borders. But behind this apparent solicitude there lurked the most contemptible greed for money. The Jews of northern France were considered by the kings and barons as convenient sources whence to obtain gold. As early as the year 1198, Philip Augustus entered into an agreement with Thibaut of Champagne, that neither should detain any Jews who had emigrated from the territory of the one, and settled in that of the other, but that the Jews should be sent back to the province whence they had come. Philip Augustus, however, like most of the kings of France, was not a man of his word; he refused to give up the Jews who had, on account of excessive oppression, moved to Francia from Champagne, which was thickly populated with Jews.

Thus, from the time of Philip Augustus, the Jews of northern France lost one of the most precious privileges of mankind, freedom of motion. Whilst formerly they were able to move about at will from place to place, they were now compelled to remain in their native place like serfs. If they ventured to move from it, the lord of the land seized their real property, and confiscated it. At first the Jews did not know what to make of this state of affairs, and the rabbinical authority of the time, Isaac of Dampierre, decided that no Jew should buy property that had been confiscated; and if he did buy such property, he was to return it to its original owner. Gradually this robbery became law. Not only freedom of motion, but even the right to possess property was denied them. "The property of the Jews belongs to the baron" was the leading principle of the legislation of northern France concerning the Jews. The king and the barons, indeed, allowed the Jews to take a high rate of interest (two deniers a week on a livre), because it served their purposes. The bonds had to be drawn up by a notary, sealed with the public seal, and witnessed by two notables. In this manner the lord of the province could obtain information of all money transactions. On every settled account the lord levied a large tax (cens). The Jews of northern France were valued only for their possessions; they were treated as revenue-producing bondmen. A nobleman sold to the Duchess of Champagne all his "chattels and Jews." The Jews were thus secure from expulsion and persecution, because they were needed, but they suffered from innumerable annoyances, and their moral sense was thereby blunted. They were restricted to the business of money getting, and they acquired as much as possible in order to be able to satisfy their tormentors. The clergy did not fail to add fuel to the fire of hatred against the Jews, and shut them out of the Christian world like lepers. Bishop Odo, of Paris, who issued canonical constitutions (1197), forbade Christians to buy meat of Jews, to hold discussions with them, and generally to have any intercourse with them. Those who disobeyed were subject to the sentence of excommunication. If the Jews of northern France had not then been possessed of a burning passion for the study of the Talmud, they would certainly have become as degenerate as their enemies pictured, and wished them to be. The Talmud alone saved them from brutalized selfishness and moral decay.

After the death of Isaac, the compiler of the Tossafoth (about 1200), the study of the Talmud in northern France was furthered by three men of his school: Judah Sir Leon ben Isaac, the Pious (ha-Chasid), in Paris (born 1166, died 1224), Samson ben Abraham in Sens (died before 1226), and the latter's brother, Isaac the Younger (Rizba), in Dampierre. All three expounded the Talmud in their schools in the usual manner, decided religious questions that were submitted to them, and wrote Tossafoth, those of Samson existing in a separate form under the name of Sens Tossafoth.

These three rabbis of northern France did not lead the way to new developments in any branch of learning. They had no taste for science or poetry, and they studied Holy Writ, only in the light of the Agadic method of exposition. They were not destitute of acuteness, but they wanted breadth of view. Samson was so incapable of doing justice to the sincerity of religious feeling in the Karaites, who, if possible, were over-scrupulous in the discharge of their religious duties, that he not only held it illegal to intermarry with them, but wished them to be regarded as idolaters, whose wine a Rabbanite might not drink. Judah Sir Leon wrote a book in which he endeavors to hold up the higher ideals towards which the truly pious should strive. This work is, indeed, instinct with religious feeling, and of singularly pure morality; but it is also full of perverted ideas of the world, and of crass superstition. It mirrors faithfully the spirit of that time: that religious scrupulousness which fearfully considers at every step whether it does not commit or occasion a sin; that gloomy disposition which detects in every natural impulse the incitement of Satan; that paltry spirit which treats every trifling occurrence as full of significance. Side by side with sentences of which philosophers need not be ashamed, in this "Book of the Pious," there occur absurdities which could have been produced only by the decline in all conditions of life, which the Jews had experienced since the reign of Philip Augustus.

Judah Sir Leon, the Pious, became the master of many pupils, who afterwards acquired renown: Solomon of Montpellier, Moses of Coucy, Isaac of Vienna, and others became rabbis, and promoters of the study of the Talmud in Spain, France, and Germany. All were guided by his spirit, beheld Judaism only as through a thick layer of fog, and were opponents of free investigation. The disciples of his school later on arrayed themselves against the Spanish exponents of a higher conception of Judaism.

In England, and in those French provinces which at that time belonged to England (Normandy, Bretagne, Anjou, Touraine, Maine, Guienne, Poitou and Gascony), the Jews lived under Henry II, for a long time, in undisturbed and happy quiet. They inhabited the large towns, and in London many of them attained to such wealth that their houses had the appearance of royal palaces. The summons to the first and second crusades found no response among the stolid islanders, and in consequence no martyrs were found among the Jews of England at that time. Many Englishmen had conceived such a predilection for Judaism that they entered into the covenant. There existed a congregation which consisted entirely of proselytes. Their communal and intellectual life was like that of France, which at that time stood in close connection with England. In London, Jacob of Orleans, a pupil of Tam, a famous Tossafist, founded his school. Benjamin of Canterbury was likewise a disciple of the teacher of Rameru. The knightly son of Henry, Richard the Lion-hearted, was equally averse to persecution, and the Jewish community of England might have developed peacefully under him, had not the fanaticism kindled by Thomas à Becket included them among its victims. At Richard's coronation (3d September, 1189), the first persecution broke out against the Jews, culminating a century later in their general expulsion. Richard's coronation ceremony was the first scene of a bloody drama for the Jews.