History of the Jews, Vol. 4 (of 6)

by Heinrich Graetz

This is mediæval logic. But it exceeds the limits of indulgence towards the peculiarities of a strong character, when Luther, in his uncharitableness towards Jews, employs language such as was usual with those who burnt Jews at the stake. "Why should the Jews complain of hard captivity among us?" he says. "We Christians suffered persecution and martyrdom at their hands for nearly 300 years, so that we might well complain that they took us captive and killed us. And to this very day we know not what devil brought them into our land" (as if Jews had not dwelt in some districts of what is now Germany long before Germans were there). "We did not bring them from Jerusalem; besides that, no one keeps them: the country and the roads are open to them, let them return to their own land. We will gladly give them presents, if we can but be rid of them, for they are a heavy burden upon us, a plague, a pestilence, a sore trial." Luther, like Pfefferkorn and Eck, stated with malicious delight how the Jews were often driven out by violence "from France and recently from Spain by our beloved Emperor Charles (an historical blunder); this year also from the entire dominion of Bohemia, although one of their securest nests was in Prague; also from Ratisbon, Magdeburg, and many other places in my time."

Without appreciation of the heroic patience displayed by Jews in the midst of hostility, and untaught by history, Luther did nothing but repeat the lying accusations of the vindictive Pfefferkorn, whose falsehood and villainy had been palpably proved by the Humanists. In imitation of this arch-enemy of the Jews he wrote that the Talmud and the rabbis taught that it was no sin to kill the Goyim, that is, heathens and Christians, break an oath to them, or rob and plunder them, and that the one and only aim of Jews was to weaken the Christian religion. It is incomprehensible that Luther, who had taken the part of the Jews so strongly in the heat of the Reformation, could repeat all the false tales about the poisoning of the springs, the murder of Christian children, and the use of human blood. He also maintained, in agreement with Eck, from whom in other respects he was so widely divided, that the Jews were too prosperous in Germany, and in consequence had become insolent.

What is to be done with this wicked, accursed race, which can no longer be tolerated? asked Luther, and he gave an answer to the question which shows equal want of charity and wisdom. First of all the reformer of Wittenberg recommended that the synagogues be reduced to ashes, "to the honor of God and of Christianity." Next, Christians were to destroy the houses of the Jews, and drive them all under one roof, or into a stable like gypsies. All prayer-books and copies of the Talmud and the Old Testament were to be taken from them by force (as Luther's opponents, the Dominicans, had advised), and even praying and the use of God's name were to be forbidden under penalty of death. Their rabbis were to be forbidden to teach. The authorities were to prohibit the Jews from traveling, and to bar the roads against them, so that they must stay at home. Luther advised that their money be taken from them, and that this confiscated wealth be employed to establish a fund to maintain those Jews who should embrace Christianity. The authorities were to compel able-bodied Jews and Jewesses to forced labor, and to keep them strictly employed with the flail, the axe, the spade, the distaff and spindle, so that they might earn their bread in the sweat of their brow, and not live in idleness, feasting, and splendor. Christians were not to show any tender mercy to Jews. Luther urged the emperor and the princes to expel them from the country without delay, and drive them back into their own land. But anticipating that the princes would not consent to such folly, he exhorted the clergy and teachers of the people to fill the minds of their hearers with hatred of Jews. He observed that if he had power over Jews, he would assemble the best and most learned among them, and, under penalty of having their tongues cut out, force them to accept the Christian teaching, that there is not one God, but that there are three Gods. Luther even stirred up the robber-nobles against them. He had heard that a rich Jew was traveling through Germany with twelve horses. This Jew was known as the wealthy Michael, of Frankfort, the protégé of the Margrave of Brandenburg; if the princes did not close the road against him and his fellow-believers, Luther urged the robber-knights to do so, for Christians might learn from his pamphlet how depraved was the Jewish nation. These absurd charges Luther ascribed to a worthless convert, Anton Margaritha, the son of a rabbi of Ratisbon. He had become a Catholic, and being punished on account of calumnies, had turned Lutheran, and written a foolish book against the Jews, and from this book Luther had taken his unjust attacks upon them.

Shortly before his death he exhorted his hearers in a sermon to drive out the Jews:

"Besides all this you still have the Jews, who do great evil in the land. If they could kill us all, they would gladly do so, aye, and often do it, especially those who profess to be physicians—they know all that is known about medicine in Germany; they can give poison to a man of which he will die in an hour, or in ten or twenty years; they thoroughly understand this art. I say to you lastly, as a countryman, if the Jews refuse to be converted, we ought not to suffer them, or bear with them any longer."

In the reformer and regenerator of Germany, then, the Jews had almost a worse enemy than in the Pfefferkorns, Hoogstratens, and Ecks, certainly worse than in the popes till the middle of the century. But few heeded the words of those wretches, known to be sophists and liars, while Luther's uncharitable utterances were respected as oracles by the Christians of the new faith, and but too well followed out. As Jerome had infected the Catholic world with his openly avowed hatred of Jews, so Luther poisoned the Protestant world for a long time to come with his Jew-hating testament. Protestants became even more bitter against Jews than Catholics had been. The leaders of Catholicism demanded absolute submission to canonical law, but on this condition granted them permission to remain in Catholic countries; Luther, on the other hand, required their absolute expulsion. The popes often issued exhortations to spare the synagogues; but the founder of the Reformation insisted upon their desecration and destruction. It was reserved for him to place Jews on a level with gypsies. This difference arose from the fact that the popes occupied the highest rank in life, and dwelt in Rome, the metropolis of the world, the center of affairs in the four quarters of the globe; thus they had no eye for petty events, and usually left the Jews unnoticed because of their small importance. Luther, on the other hand, who lived in a petty country town and amidst narrow surroundings, listened to all the gossip against Jews, judged them by the measure of a country bumpkin, and reckoned up every farthing that they earned against them. He, therefore, was the cause of their being expelled by Protestant princes. In Roman Catholic states the Dominicans alone were their deadly enemies.

This hatred followed the Jews even into Turkey. If there were neither Roman Catholics nor Protestants, there were Greek Catholic Christians. Turks and Greeks lived together in the towns of both Greece and Asia Minor. The latter, who would not give up their arrogance, but dared not display it towards the ruling Turks, persecuted the Jews with silent hatred, and took advantage of every opportunity to draw upon them the persecution of the government. On one occasion some of them gave rise to a persecution in the town of Amazia in Asia Minor. They caused a poor Greek, who was in the habit of associating with Jews, and had been supported by them, to disappear, and then accused some Jews of having murdered him. Hereupon the Turkish cadis seized the accused, put them to the torture, and forced them to acknowledge the murder. They were hanged, and a respected Jewish physician, Jacob Abi-Ayub, was burnt (about 1545). A few days afterwards a Jew recognized the Greek supposed to have been murdered, induced him to tell how he had been made to disappear, and brought him before the cadi. The latter, justly incensed against the malicious Greek accusers, had them executed. A similar accusation, the falseness of which was brought to light, was lodged against a Jew of the town of Tokat at about the same time.

These cruel occurrences suggested to Moses Hamon, Sultan Solyman's Jewish physician, to obtain a decree from the sultan that an accusation against Jews in Turkey of having murdered a Christian, and other malicious calumnies, should not be brought before the ordinary judges, but before the sultan himself.

Hatred against Jews, restrained in Turkey, raged the more openly in Christian countries. The republic of Genoa for a long time had not suffered a Jew to remain more than three days within its boundaries. Notwithstanding this, fugitives from Spain or Provence from time to time were received in the town of Novi, near Genoa; they went in and out of the capital itself, and were suffered to remain there. In the party differences between the patrician families, the little community, repulsed by the one side, was taken up by the other. Most of them were intelligent artisans, capitalists, or physicians. But again the Dominicans stirred up the people against them, and roused the professional jealousy of Christian physicians. Contrary to the wishes of Doge Doria, the Jews were driven out of Genoa (April, 1550), and, heralded by the sound of trumpets, a proclamation was made that henceforth no Jews should be suffered. This expulsion from Genoa is of importance, because a clever Jewish historian was included in it, whose fate represents in miniature the painful lot experienced by the Jewish race on a large scale.

The vicissitudes in the life of the nations, as well as the changes in the life of the Jewish people, especially since their cruel expulsion from Spain and Portugal, and the heartless persecution of the Marranos, at length brought some clear-seeing Jews to the conviction that history is not ruled by chance, but that a higher hand guides it, bringing to pass destined events by bloodshed and tears. Since the time of the crusades, no century had been richer in changeful, almost dramatic, events than the sixteenth, when not only fresh continents were discovered, but when a new spirit began to prevail among mankind, striving after new creations, but always kept down by the leaden weight of existing systems. This wealth of occurrences taught a few thoughtful Jews, mostly of Sephardic origin, to trace the work of Providence in the apparently whimsical and irregular course of universal and Jewish history. They considered history a comfort to that portion of mankind which had been overthrown, overridden, and downtrodden by the tumultuous course of events. And what race stood in more need of consolation than the Jewish, a martyr people apparently born only for sorrow, always eating its bread in tears? Almost at one and the same time, three enlightened Jews undertook the task of studying history, and placing before the Jewish reading world its brazen tables. These were the physician, Joseph Cohen, the learned Talmudist, Joseph Ibn-Verga, and the poet, Samuel Usque. All three began with the same fundamental idea. The spirit of the prophets, which recognized in the course of historical events the fittest means for instruction and improvement, had come upon them, incontestably showing that Jews even in their degradation are not like the gypsy rabble, neither having nor knowing a history; that, in fact, they stood higher than those who wielded the scepter and the sword, the rack and the club, for the subjugation of mankind.