Archduke Albert issued the order that in the early morning of the 23d May, 1420 (10th Sivan), all the Jews in his realm should be thrown into prison, and this was promptly done. The moneyed Jews were stripped of their possessions, and the poor forthwith banished the country. In the gaols, wives were separated from their husbands, and children from their parents. When from helplessness they fell to hopelessness, Christian priests came to them with crosses in their hands and honeyed words on their lips to convert them. A few of the poorer-spirited saved their lives by accepting baptism. The more resolute slew themselves and their kinsfolk by opening their veins with straps, cords, or whatever they found to hand. The spirit of the survivors was broken by the length and cruelty of their imprisonment. Their children were taken from them, and immured in cloisters. Still they remained firm, and on the 13th March (9th Nisan), 1421, after nearly a year's confinement, they were committed to the flames. In Vienna alone more than a hundred perished in one field near the Danube. Another order was then issued by Archduke Albert, forbidding Jews to stay thenceforth in Austria.
The converts proved no gain to the church. The majority seized the first opportunity of emigrating and relapsing into Judaism. They bent their steps to Bohemia, rendered tolerant by the Hussite schism, or northwards to Poland and southwards to Italy. How attached the Austrian Jews were to their religion is shown by the conduct of one clever youth. Having received baptism, he had become the favorite of Duke Frederick, afterwards the German emperor, but, although living in luxury, he was seized with remorse for his apostasy, and boldly expressed his desire to return to Judaism. Frederick exerted himself to dissuade his favorite from this idea. He begged, entreated, and even threatened him; he sent a priest to advise him; all, however, in vain. Finally, the duke handed the "obstinate heretic and backslider" over to the ecclesiastical authorities, who condemned him to the stake. Unfettered and with a Hebrew song on his lips the Jewish youth mounted the scaffold.
In the meantime, the devastating war broke out between the fierce Hussites and the not less barbarous Roman Catholics, between the Czechs and the Germans. A variety of nationalities participated in the sanguinary struggle as to the use of the cup by the laity in the eucharist. Emperor Sigismund, who found it impossible to subdue the insurrection with his own troops, summoned the imperial army to his standard. Wild free-lances, men of Brabant and Holland, were taken into his pay. From all quarters armed troops poured into the Bohemian valleys and against the capital, Prague, where the blind hero, Zisca, bade defiance to a world of foes. On the way, the German imperial army exhibited its courage by attacks on the defenseless Jews. "We are marching afar," exclaimed the mercenaries, "to avenge our insulted God, and shall those who slew him be spared?" Wherever they came across Jewish communities, on the Rhine, in Thuringia and Bavaria, they put them to the sword, or forced them to apostatize. The crusaders threatened, on their return from victory over the Hussites, to wipe the Jewish people from the face of the earth. Jewish fathers of families true to their faith gave orders that, at a certain signal, their children should be killed to avoid falling into the hands of the bloodthirsty soldiery. Letters of lamentation over the threatened disaster, calling upon him to implore the intervention of heaven, were addressed from far and near to the illustrious rabbi of Mayence, Jacob ben Moses Mölin Halevi (Maharil, born 1365, died 1427), the most pious rabbi of his time. His arrangement of the synagogue ritual and melodies is used to this day in many German communities, and their colonies in Poland and Hungary. Jacob Mölin ordered a general fast, accompanied by fervent prayer, and his instructions were circulated from one community to another throughout the land. The German congregations forthwith assembled for solemn mourning and humiliation, and fasted during four days between New Year and Atonement (8th–11th September, 1421), and for three successive days after Tabernacles, the observance being as strict as on the most sacred fast days of the Jewish calendar. It was a time of feverish tension for the German Jews. In their despair they prayed that victory might be vouchsafed to the Hussites, and it seemed as if their supplications were heard. For, shortly afterwards, the imperial army and its mercenary allies assembled near Saatz were stricken with such terror at the news of Zisca's approach, that they sought safety in disorderly flight, disbanding in all directions, and hurrying home by different routes. Famished and footsore, a few of the very men who had vowed death and extirpation to the Jews, appeared at the doors of their houses, begging for bread, which was gladly given them. Privation had so reduced the fugitives that they could not have harmed a child.
The Dominican clergy commissioned to preach against the Hussites did not cease to foster Catholic hatred of Jews. From their pulpits they thundered against heretics and Jews alike, cautioning the faithful against holding intercourse with them, and consciously and unconsciously inciting to attacks on their persons and property. The Jews flew for help to the pope, Martin V—doubtless not with empty hands—and again obtained a very favorable bull (23d February, 1422), in which Christians were enjoined to remember that their religion had been inherited from Jews, who were necessary for the corroboration of Christian truth. The pope forbade the monks to preach against intercourse between Jews and Christians, and declared null and void the ban with which transgressors had been threatened. He recommended to Catholics a friendly and benevolent attitude towards their Hebrew fellow-citizens, severely denounced violent attacks upon them, and confirmed all the privileges which had from time to time been granted by the papacy. This bull was, however, as ineffectual as the protection which Emperor Sigismund had so solemnly promised the Jews. A persecuting spirit continued to animate the Christian church. The monks did not cease to declaim against the "accursed" Jewish nation; the populace did not refrain from tormenting, injuring and murdering Jews; even succeeding popes ignored the bull, and restored the odious canonical restrictions in all their stringency. Turning a deaf ear to both pope and emperor, the citizens of Cologne expelled the Jewish community, perhaps the oldest in Germany. The exiles took up their abode at Deutz (1426). In the South German towns, Ravensburg, Ueberlingen and Lindau, the Jews were burnt because of a lying blood accusation (1431).
The literary work of the German Jews was, as a consequence, poor and inconsiderable. Anxiety and persecution had deadened their intellect. Even in Talmudical study the German rabbis hardly rose above mediocrity, and gave nothing of consequence to the world. Some rabbis were installed by the reigning prince; at least Emperor Sigismund commissioned one of his Jewish agents, Chayim of Landshut, "to appoint three rabbis (Judenmeister) in Germany." Under such auspices, appointments were probably determined less by merit than by money. For a college, in which students were prepared for the rabbinate, a heavy tax had to be paid, notwithstanding that the instruction was given gratuitously. Besides Jacob Mölin, only one name of importance emerges from the darkness of this period, Menachem of Merseburg, or, as he was generally called, Meïl Zedek. He wrote a comprehensive work on the practice of the Talmudic marriage and civil law, which the Saxon communities adopted for their authoritative guidance. He, at least, departed from the beaten track of his older contemporaries or teachers, Jacob Mölin and Isaac Tyrnau, who attached value to every insignificant detail of the liturgy. By and by Menachem of Merseburg was recognized as an authority, and an excellent regulation drawn up by him received universal assent. Among the Jews at that period, marriages took place at a very early age; girls in their teens were hurried into matrimony. According to Talmudical law a girl, under age, who had been given in marriage by her mother or brothers and not by her father, was permitted, on attaining her majority, in her twelfth year, and even much later under some circumstances, to dissolve her union without further ceremony than a declaration of her intention to do so, or the contracting of another marriage (Miun). Menachem of Merseburg felt the indecency of so sudden and often capricious a dissolution of marriage, and he decided that formal bills of divorce should be required.
The literary achievements of the Spanish Jews during this period were not of a higher character; they exhibited unmistakable signs of decay, notwithstanding that their situation had become more tolerable since the death of the bigoted and wanton queen regent, Catalina, and the fall of the anti-pope, Benedict XIII, and his Jewish accomplices. Don Juan II—or, rather, his favorite, Alvaro de Luna, to whom the management of the state was confided—stood too much in need of the assistance of Jewish financiers during the frequently recurring civil wars and insurrections to do anything to offend them. Hence, during his reign, restrictive laws against the Jews seem to have been enacted only to be broken. Jews were again admitted to public employment, regardless of the fact that such appointments had been sternly forbidden both by kings and popes. An influential Jew, Abraham Benveniste, surnamed Senior, distinguished for his intelligence and wealth, was invested with a high dignity at the court of Don Juan, and was thus in a position to frustrate threatened persecutions of his co-religionists. Also Joseph ben Shem Tob Ibn-Shem Tob, a cultivated and fruitful writer, proficient in philosophic studies, was in the service of the state under Juan II. On the one hand, the cortes did not fail to remind the king that by his father's laws and by papal decrees the Jews were excluded from public offices, and, on the other hand, Pope Eugenius IV, successor to Martin V, strained every effort to humiliate the Jews and harden their lot, even forbidding Don Juan to befriend them; but these representations were of no avail. To the cortes of Burgos the king replied evasively that he would cause an examination to be made of the laws promulgated in regard to the Jews by his father, and of the papal bulls, and he would take care to observe everything calculated to promote the service of God and the welfare of the state. Against the pope's interference with his crown-rights he entered a protest.
This king gave permission to the no less noble than wealthy rabbi, Abraham Benveniste, to hold a meeting of delegates from various communities in the royal palace of Avila (1432). These delegates were to bring harmony into the state of moral and religious disorder caused by the attacks of the masses in 1412–1415. The smaller communities were without teachers, the large ones without rabbis and preachers. Many of them had been reduced to poverty, and the richer members were unwilling to contribute to the support of religious institutions. Evil ways and denunciations by the unscrupulous had acquired the upper hand, because the representative men and the few rabbis did not venture to punish the evildoers. Abraham Benveniste, therefore, framed a statute (the law of Avila), which compelled people to establish schools and colleges, to introduce order into the communities, and to punish miscreants. Juan II confirmed this statute.
The literature of the Spanish Jews, however, was powerless to recover itself. Despite the calm succeeding the storm, it seemed to wither like autumn leaves. The decline was most marked in the department of Talmudic study. After the emigration of Isaac ben Sheshet and the death of Chasdaï Crescas, no Spanish rabbi obtained more than local authority and reputation. The only upholder of the traditions of the rabbinate was Isaac ben Jacob Campanton, who lived to be more than a hundred years old (born 1360, died at Peñafiel 1463); but he produced only one work (Darke ha-Talmud), which exhibited neither genius nor learning. Still, in his day, Campanton passed for the Gaon of Castile. Neo-Hebraic poetry, which had blossomed so profusely on Spanish soil, faded and drooped. Of those who cultivated it during this period only a few are remembered—Solomon Dafiera, Don Vidal Benveniste, the leading speaker on the Jewish side at the disputation of Tortosa, and Solomon Bonfed. The most gifted was the last. He was ambitious to emulate Ibn-Gebirol; but he possessed little more than the sensitiveness and moroseness of his great exemplar, like him imagining himself to be the sport of fortune, with a prescriptive right to lamentation.
The Jews of Italy failed to distinguish themselves in poetry even during the Medici period, in spite of the high culture which, with the Hussite movement, was eating away the foundations of mediæval Catholicism. Since Immanuel Romi, the Jews of Italy had produced but one poet; even he was not a poet in the noblest sense of the word. Moses ben Isaac (Gajo) da Rieti, of Perugia (born 1388, died after 1451 ), a physician by profession, a dabbler in philosophy, and a graceful writer in both Hebrew and Italian, might have passed for an artist if poetry were a thing of meter and rhyme, for in his sublimely conceived poem both were faultless. His desire was to glorify in poetry Judaism and Jewish antiquity, the sciences, and the illustrious men of all ages. He employed an ingenious form of verse, in which the stanzas were connected by threes by means of cross-rhymes. But Da Rieti's language is often rough, many of his allusions show want of taste, and where he should rise to lofty thought he sinks into puerilities. Only in one respect does his work mark an advance in neo-Hebrew poetry. He breaks entirely with the traditional Judæo-Arabic method of a single rhyme. There is variety in his versification; the ear is not wearied by monotonous repetition of the same or similar sounds, and the lines fall naturally into stanzas. He also avoids playing on Biblical verses, the objectionable habit of Judæo-Spanish poets. In a word, Da Rieti supplied the correct form for neo-Hebrew poetry, but he was unable to vivify it with an attractive spirit. Yet the Italian Jews adopted a part of his poem into their liturgy, and recited extracts daily.
From the Apennine Peninsula let us turn back to the Pyrenean, where the pulsation of historic life among the Jews, though gradually becoming weaker, still was stronger than in the other countries in which they were dispersed. The two branches of intellectual activity which formerly, in their palmy days, had exercised every mind—the severe study of the Talmud and the airy pursuit of the poetic muse—had lost their predominance in the Spanish Jewries. The systematic study of the Scriptures also was no longer properly cultivated. The literary activity of this period was almost exclusively directed towards combating the intrusiveness of the church, repelling its attacks on Judaism, and withstanding its proselytizing zeal. Faithful and strong-minded Jewish thinkers held it a duty to proclaim their convictions aloud, and to admonish waverers and strengthen them. The more the preaching monks, especially apostates of the stamp of Paul de Santa Maria, Geronimo de Santa Fé, and Pedro de la Caballeria, exerted themselves to prove that the Christian Trinity was the true God of Israel, taught and typified in the Bible and the Talmud, and the more the church stretched forth its tentacles towards the Jews, straining every nerve to fold them in its fatal embrace, the more necessary was it for the synagogue to watch over its sacred trust, and guard its holy of holies from idolatrous desecration. It was especially necessary that the weaker-minded should be spared confusion in religious and doctrinal matters. Hence Jewish preachers devoted themselves more than ever to expounding the doctrine of the unity of God in their pulpits. They pointed out the essential and irreconcilable difference between the Jewish and the Christian conception of the Deity, and characterized their identification as false and impious. The time resembled that other epoch in Jewish history when Hellenized Jews tried to induce their brethren to deny God, and were supported by the secular arm. Some preachers, in their zeal, went to extremes. Instead of relying exclusively on the convincing demonstrations in the Bible text, or on the attractive illustrations of the Agada, they resorted to the armory of scholasticism, employing the formulæ of philosophy and, in the presence of the Torah, and by the side of the Hebrew prophets and the Talmudical sages, quoted Plato, Aristotle, and Averroes.