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

by Heinrich Graetz

The dialogues end with comforting prophecies in the feeling words of Isaiah. This edifying description served doubtless to sustain the Marranos in their newly-recovered creed, and to endure sufferings of every kind for it, even death itself.

Samuel Usque was of opinion that the sufferings of the Jewish people were soon to decrease, and that the long looked-for morning would soon follow the darkness of night. But the church showed him that this anticipation was ill-founded. He lived to see fresh tribulations arise in his immediate neighborhood, and a whole system of fresh persecutions put into practice, which the Jewish historian, Joseph Cohen, was able to record in his annals of Jewish martyrdom. These fresh troubles had their origin in the reaction which the Roman Catholic Church was ardently desirous to institute against the ever-growing Reformation. Two men strove at almost the same time, quite independently of each other, to re-establish declining Catholicism, and thereby laid snares in the way of the progress of the human race. A Neapolitan, Pietro Caraffa, and a Spaniard, Ignatius Loyola, both men of zeal, and ready to take the initiative, began with self-castigation, and ended by reducing the minds and bodies of others to bondage. The worm-eaten papacy, supposed to be crumbling away beneath the laughter and derision of its opponents, for which its very friends had nothing but a shrug of the shoulders, was raised by these two men to a height greater almost than in the time of Innocent III and his immediate successors, because it rested, not on the tottering foundations of dreamy belief, but on the firm ground of powerful conviction and reckless determination. Caraffa, afterwards Pope Paul IV, and Loyola, the founder of the order of Jesuits, so powerful to this day, were very much in earnest in impressing the minds of the faithful with the belief in the supremacy of the papacy and the pope's power to bind and to loose, both in heaven and on earth, they themselves being firmly convinced thereof. Caraffa re-established the discipline of the church which had grown lax, increased its severity, and placed a rod of iron in her hand. He introduced into the Catholic world at large the means which Torquemada, Deza, and Ximenes de Cisneros had employed in Spain to force Jews and Moors to become members of the church, namely, the stake. All who held a belief differing by so much as a hair's breadth from the papacy were to abjure it, or be burnt. Merciless force, which does not think, and destroys all independent thought, was to restore credit to the defamed church.

To regain possession of the minds which had striven to emancipate themselves, and to keep them in bondage, the Inquisition thought it in the highest degree necessary to watch the press. The press had brought mischief and schism into the church (so thought Caraffa and his associates); the press, then, must be gagged. Only what was approved by the pope and his followers was to be printed. Censorship of the press had been introduced by previous popes, but as anything had hitherto been obtainable by bribery, publishers had been able to print and disseminate seditious works against the existing church system, either with or without the knowledge of the clergy appointed to control such publications. The seditious controversial pamphlets in the Reuchlin quarrel, the famous "Letters," Von Hutten's shafts at the papacy, Luther's first pamphlets against the Romish Babylonian harlot, inflammable materials which, appearing in rapid succession, on all sides kindled the tow of which the church tent was woven, were the result of negligent censorship. This was now to be changed. The censorship was henceforth intrusted only to priests faithful to the papacy, and, either from conviction or from instincts of self-preservation, they exercised their office without leniency.

The Jews soon felt the effect of this fierce Catholic reaction, for they had no sort of protection, and owed their miserable existence only to neglect in the enforcement of the canonical laws against them. As soon as the church began seriously to put these hostile decrees into execution, the existence, or at least the peace, of the Jews was endangered. First of all the question of the Talmud was again raised, but not with the lukewarmness of forty years before. At that time Pfefferkorn and the Dominicans of Cologne could not hope to obtain a hearing before the papal chair for their proposal to burn the Talmud, but were obliged to have recourse to all sorts of ruses in order to gain over the emperor to their policy. Now a totally different spirit prevailed. The universal harm caused by the Talmud needed only to be hinted at by malicious converts for a decree to be at once issued against it. By such the fresh outcry against it was raised.

Elias Levita, the Hebrew grammarian, who had lived for a long time in the house of Cardinal Egidio de Viterbo, and had instructed many Christians in the Hebrew language, both personally and by his writings, and had also imparted to some a superficial knowledge of the Kabbala, left two grandsons, the children of his daughter, who were received in Christian circles. One of them, Eliano, had learnt Hebrew thoroughly, and was a proof reader and copyist in several towns of Italy; his brother, Solomon Romano, had traveled much in Germany, Turkey, Palestine, and Egypt, and understood many languages: Hebrew, Latin, Spanish, Arabic, and Turkish. Eliano, the elder, had become a Christian under the name of Victor Eliano, and was a priest, later even a canon. Solomon Romano was so indignant at this that he hastened to Venice to persuade his brother to return to the bosom of Judaism. But instead of converting, he himself became converted. A Venetian patrician, much attached to the church, set about bringing him over to Christianity, and what he began, a Jesuit finished. Solomon Romano was baptized (1551), and assumed the name of John Baptista, to the great grief of his mother, who was still living. He became a Jesuit and afterwards an ecclesiastical writer, wrote upon the mysteries of the Christian faith, a Hebrew and Arabic catechism, and other similar works. This grandson of the grammarian Elias Levita, with two other converts, Joseph Moro and Ananel di Foligno, not content with having forsworn their religion, appeared before the pope, like Nicholas Donin, to denounce the Talmud, and repeated the same slanders, namely, that the books of the Talmud contained abuse of Jesus, the church, the whole of Christendom, and that they hindered the conversion of the Jews in a body. Julius III was by no means bigoted, least of all was he inimical to Jews. But it no longer lay with the pope to decide upon the Talmud; this task devolved on the court of the Inquisition, that is to say, on the fanatical Caraffa, and Julius III was obliged to approve and sign the decree laid before him by the inquisitor general (August 12th, 1553)—another proof of the emptiness of the boasted infallibility of the papacy. Leo X had encouraged the printing of the Talmud, and the third pope after him decreed its destruction. The officers of the Inquisition invaded the houses of the Roman Jews, confiscated the copies of the Talmud and compilations made from it, and burnt them with special malice on the Jewish New Year's Day (September 9th), so that the Jews might feel the grief at the destruction of their sacred books the more keenly. The inquisitors did not wage war against the Talmud in Rome only. Copies were burnt by hundreds of thousands throughout the whole Romagna, in Ferrara, Mantua, Venice, Padua, and in the island of Candia, which belonged to Venice. The officers of the Inquisition in their fury no longer distinguished between the Talmud and other Hebrew writings. Everything that fell into their hands became a prey to the flames; they even seized copies of the Holy Scriptures. The Jews of all Catholic countries were in despair; they were robbed by this confiscation of the rabbinical books which contain the precepts of a religious life, and in which there is no word referring to Christianity. They, therefore, appealed to the pope to revoke the decree, or at least to permit them the use of these harmless rabbinical writings. Julius III agreed to this latter request, and issued a bull (May 29th, 1554) that the Jews be compelled, under pain of corporal punishment, to give up all copies of the Talmud, but that the bailiffs be not allowed to seize other Hebrew works, or vex the Jews. Transgressors of this decree were to be visited with severe ecclesiastical punishment. Henceforward all Hebrew books were subjected to inspection before they were published, lest they contain a shadow of reproach against Christianity or Rome. The censors were mostly baptized Jews, who thus had the opportunity of tormenting their former brethren in faith.

Matters became worse for the Jews after the death of Julius III, as the college of cardinals insisted that all henceforth elected to the papacy should belong to the strictest church party, if possible, be monks. Cultivated dignitaries, interested in humanistic studies, who loved the arts and sciences, if such there still were, had fallen into disfavor.

Marcellus II, the first of the reactionary popes, was succeeded in the papal chair by the bigoted and fanatical Caraffa, under the name of Paul IV (May, 1555-August, 1559). He retained in old age all the violence and passion of his youth, and framed his policy accordingly. He hated not only Protestants and Jews, but also the Spaniards, the most useful tools of ecclesiastical fanaticism; he termed them and the bigoted king, Philip II, "worthless seed of the Jews and Moors." Soon after his accession to the papal chair he issued a bull, by which every synagogue throughout the Papal States was ordered to contribute ten ducats for the maintenance of the house of catechumens in which Jews were educated in the Christian faith. Still more severe was his second bull against the Jews (July 12th, 1555), which enforced the canonical laws against them with great harshness. They were to remain shut up in Ghettos, and were to possess only one synagogue; the rest were to be destroyed. They were not allowed to employ Christian servants, not even wet-nurses, and were forbidden to have intercourse with Christians in general. Every Jew was commanded to wear a green cap, and every Jewess a green veil, even outside the precincts of the city. They were not to be addressed as "Sir" by the Christian population. They were forbidden to own real estate, and those who had any were ordered to sell it within six months; thus they were compelled to part with their lands, worth more than 500,000 gold crowns, for a fifth of their value. But the severest blow was that Jewish physicians were prohibited from attendance on Christians, though so many popes owed their health to them. Heavy penalties were attached to the infringement of this edict. These cruel measures were carried out with extreme severity, and confiscation of copies of the Talmud was not interrupted. Thereupon, many Jews forsook Rome, which had become so malicious towards them, and betook themselves to more tolerant states, but they were maltreated on the way by fanatical mobs. Those who remained in Rome were treated in a most undignified manner by the pope. First it was said that they had only made a feint of selling their lands, and had executed sham deeds of sale, and for this they were imprisoned; next the pope announced that those Jews who were not working for the common good should leave Rome within a given time. When the terrified Jews asked for an explanation of what was meant by "working for the general good," they received the Pharaoh-like reply, "You shall know at the proper time."

Paul IV compelled them to do forced labor in repairing the walls of Rome, which he desired to fortify against the Spaniards, of whom he had wilfully made enemies. Once he, whom the Jews not unjustly called Haman, impelled by his fierce enmity against them, commanded his nephew to set fire to all their dwellings under the veil of the darkness of night. The latter was about to carry out the order, though unwillingly, when he met the sensible cardinal, Alexander Farnese, who advised him to delay the execution of the inhuman deed that the pope might have time to consider. The order was revoked on the following day.

The fanatical Pope Paul IV thus ill-treated the Jews, but he raged with even greater fury against the Marranos in his dominions. Many, compelled to become Christians in Portugal, had found an asylum in Ancona, and received an indemnity from Pope Clement VII guaranteeing that they should not be molested by the Inquisition, but might confess Judaism. The next two moderate popes, Paul III and Julius III, had confirmed this privilege to the Marranos, convinced as they were that baptism, enforced by violence, could have no sacramental significance. The more violently the Inquisition now introduced into Portugal proceeded against the Marranos, like that in Spain, the more fugitives took refuge in Italy. They settled, with the property rescued, in Ferrara and Ancona, trusting in the privileges assured to them by the head of Catholic Christendom. But what did the vindictive Pope Paul IV care for an assurance of safety granted by his predecessors, and for a time tacitly recognized by himself, if it was in opposition to his notion of orthodoxy? His perverse spirit could not suffer those to live as Jews who had been sprinkled with baptismal water. Paul, therefore, issued a secret order that all the Marranos in Ancona, already numbering several hundreds, should be thrown into the dungeons of the Inquisition, a trial of their orthodoxy instituted, and their property sequestered (Elul—August, 1555). This was a severe blow to the Marranos, some of whom had been there for half a century, and had lulled themselves into a dream of security. Even those Marranos who were Turkish subjects, and were dwelling only for a short time in the flourishing seaport because of their trade with the Levant, were included in the accusation of Judaizing, and imprisoned, and their goods confiscated, as a matter of course. The furious pope thus cut off a considerable source of his revenue at the moment when he was about to plunge into a costly war with Spain.

But very few Marranos succeeded in escaping from the bailiffs of the Inquisition. They were all received by Duke Guido Ubaldo, of Urbino, and quartered in Pesaro, because he was then at enmity with the pope, and thought to transfer the trade of the Levant from Ancona to Pesaro by means of the connection of the Marranos with Turkey. Duke Hercules II, of Ferrara, also offered the Portuguese and Spanish Jews, from whatever country they might have fled, an asylum in his dominions, and formally invited them thither (December, 1555). Among those who escaped to Pesaro was a man then held in high repute, the celebrated physician Amatus (Chabib) Lusitanus (born 1511, died 1568), a sensible and intelligent man, a skillful physician, a noted scholar, and a man of equal conscientiousness and amiability. As a pretended Christian he had borne the name of João Rodrigo de Castel-Branco. He appears to have been driven from his home by the introduction of the Inquisition into Portugal. He had been for some time in Antwerp, then the most important city of Flanders, afterwards visited both Ferrara and Rome, but had permanently established himself at Ancona (about 1549), where he had openly assumed his family name of Chabib, and Latinized it under the form of Amatus Lusitanus. Although he openly professed himself a Jew, he was frequently summoned to the court of Pope Julius III to attend him in sickness. Sufferers came to him from far and near. The art of healing was to him a sacred office, which he fulfilled with his whole soul in the endeavor to prolong human life. Amatus was able to take a solemn oath—by God and His holy commandments—that he had always labored purely for the welfare of mankind, had never concerned himself about compensation, had never accepted valuable presents, had treated the poor without fee, and made no difference between Jews, and Christians, and Turks. Nothing ever hindered him in his devoted calling, neither family considerations, nor long distances. Amatus had many disciples of his art who were attached to him, and whom he regarded as his children. In his young days he had written medical works so highly esteemed that they were often printed during his lifetime. The greatest interest was excited by his seven "Centuries" (each dealing with a hundred cases of illness), in which he minutely described his remedies and their effect, and gave the characteristics of his patients. These "Cures" procured for him very extensive fame during his lifetime; they were frequently printed in Italy, France, Germany, and even in Spain, and were used by other physicians as text-books. Amatus received an invitation from the king of Poland to come to his court in the capacity of his private physician, an invitation which he did not accept.