In most other parts of Europe, even at that late age, the relation between the Jew and the non-Jew was far from satisfactory. What made the quarrel between the two races so hopeless was the fact that both sides were equally right and equally wrong and that both sides could justly claim to be the victim of their opponent’s intolerance and prejudice. In the light of the theory put forward in this book that intolerance is merely a form of self-protection of the mob, it becomes clear that as long as they were faithful to their own respective religions, the Christian and the Jew must have conceded each other as enemies. In the first place, they both of them maintained that their God was the only true God and that all the other Gods of all the other nations were false. In the second place, they were each other’s most dangerous commercial rival. The Jews had come to western Europe as they had originally come to Palestine, as immigrants in search of a new home. The labor unions of that day, the Guilds, had made it impossible for them to take up a trade. They had therefore been obliged to content themselves with such economic makeshifts as pawnbroking and banking. In the Middle Ages these two professions, which closely resembled each other, were not thought fit occupations for decent citizens. Why the Church, until the days of Calvin, should have felt such a repugnance towards money (except in the form of taxes) and should have regarded the taking of interest as a crime, is hard to understand. Usury, of course, was something no government could tolerate and already the Babylonians, some forty centuries before, had passed drastic laws against the money changers who tried to make a profit out of other people’s money. In several chapters of the Old Testament, written two thousand years later, we read how Moses too had expressly forbidden his followers to lend money at exorbitant rates of interest to any one except foreigners. Still later, the great Greek philosophers, including Aristotle and Plato, had given expression to their great disapproval of money that was born of other money. The Church fathers had been even more explicit upon this subject. All during the Middle Ages the money lenders were held in profound contempt. Dante even provided a special little alcove in his Hell for the exclusive benefit of his banker friends.
Theoretically perhaps it could be proved that the pawnbroker and his colleague, the man behind the “banco,” were undesirable citizens and that the world would be better off without them. At the same time, as soon as the world had ceased to be entirely agricultural, it was found to be quite impossible to transact even the simplest business operations without the use of credit. The money lender therefore had become a necessary evil and the Jew, who (according to the views of the Christians) was doomed to eternal damnation any way, was urged to occupy himself with a trade which was necessary but which no respectable man would touch.
In this way these unfortunate exiles were forced into certain unpleasant trades which made them the natural enemy of both the rich and the poor, and then, as soon as they had established themselves, these same enemies turned against them, called them names, locked them up in the dirtiest part of the city and in moments of great emotional stress, hanged them as wicked unbelievers or burned them as renegade Christians.
It was all so terribly silly. And besides it was so stupid. These endless annoyances and persecutions did not make the Jews any fonder of their Christian neighbors. And as a direct result, a large volume of first-rate intelligence was withdrawn from public circulation, thousands of bright young fellows, who might have advanced the cause of commerce and science and the arts, wasted their brains and energy upon the useless study of certain old books filled with abstruse conundrums and hair-splitting syllogisms and millions of helpless boys and girls were doomed to lead stunted lives in stinking tenements, listening on the one hand to their elders who told them that they were God’s chosen people who would surely inherit the earth and all the wealth thereof, and on the other hand being frightened to death by the curses of their neighbors who never ceased to inform them that they were pigs and only fit for the gallows or the wheel.
To ask that people (any people) doomed to live under such adverse circumstances shall retain a normal outlook upon life is to demand the impossible.
Again and again the Jews were goaded into some desperate act by their Christian compatriots and then, when white with rage, they turned upon their oppressors, they were called “traitors” and “ungrateful villains” and were subjected to further humiliations and restrictions. But these restrictions had only one result. They increased the number of Jews who had a grievance, turned the others into nervous wrecks and generally made the Ghetto a ghastly abode of frustrated ambitions and pent-up hatreds.
Spinoza, because he was born in Amsterdam, escaped the misery which was the birthright of most of his relatives. He went first of all to the school maintained by his synagogue (appropriately called “the Tree of Life”) and as soon as he could conjugate his Hebrew verbs was sent to the learned Dr. Franciscus Appinius van den Ende, who was to drill him in Latin and in the sciences.
Dr. Franciscus, as his name indicates, was of Catholic origin. Rumor had it that he was a graduate of the University of Louvain and if one were to believe the best informed deacons of the town, he was really a Jesuit in disguise and a very dangerous person. This however was nonsense. Van den Ende in his youth had actually spent a few years at a Catholic seminary. But his heart was not in his work and he had left his native city of Antwerp, had gone to Amsterdam and there had opened a private school of his own.
He had such a tremendous flair for choosing the methods that would make his pupils like their classical lessons, that heedless of the man’s popish past, the Calvinistic burghers of Amsterdam willingly entrusted their children to his care and were very proud of the fact that the pupils of his school invariably out-hexametered and out-declined the little boys of all other local academies.