Jews and Moors in Spain

by Joseph Krauskopf

Forth they went from their native soil to roam the wide world over. Everywhere homeless, friendless, despised, trodden down, hunted down by man and beast, tortured, an object of derision, a shadow of their former greatness.

And when occasionally a ray of tolerance found its way to these outcast people, and under the spell of its genial warmth the degraded dog was metamorphosed again into a human being, and the Jewish mind awoke again into life, and the Jew, strengthened and rejuvenated and encouraged, dared to enter again into the arena of useful activity, that single ray was at once recalled by priests, who were more cunning and contriving than humane and godly, for only upon the suffering of the mother-religion could the daughter-religion expect to exist. It was feared that the prosperity of Judaism would prove the absurdity of Christianity's and Islam's claims and prophecies. If the Jews are permitted to prosper and flourish and follow their religion, and that religion is shown to be full of life and vigor, what reason for existence have the daughter-religions? Success and prosperity must accompany only that religion which the masses are to accept and follow, and for which superiority is claimed over the others. Such was their sophistical and self-interested reasoning, and so they afflicted and tortured the Jews, denied them every human right, and then kindly and magnanimously credited God with their own wickedness, claiming that God visited these punishments upon the Jews for their rejection of Christ or Mohammed. Hence, the uninterrupted persecutions and sufferings of the Jews.

But God had not withdrawn his guiding hand from His Chosen People. He had cast them down, but he forsook them not. Never before had they been so nigh unto extinction, and still they despaired not. With David they said: 'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff shall comfort me.'[14] They lost not their faith in God and in their divine mission. They doubted not that there was a meaning to their sudden change of fortune. They believed that as each seed when sown must endure darkness and suffer decay before it can multiply its kind a hundredfold, so had God scattered the children of Israel as seeds among the nations of the earth, and subjected them to threats and sufferings that the number of true believers might increase a thousandfold. They regarded it a special distinction to be chosen by God to spread monotheism and civilization among the children of men.[15]

"This strong faith in the superior wisdom of God's doing was the elixir that preserved them during their indescribable sufferings. This it was that established unconsciously a bond of union among them, scattered though they were, and whithersoever they went, however near to or however far from the land where once stood the cradle of their nation, their temple and palaces, where ruled and sang and spoke their princes and bards and inspired orators of deathless fame, however removed from this dearly beloved center, one past and one future, one hope and one aim, characterized them all and planted within them the seeds of indestructibility.

What wonder then that soon after this terrible national calamity, a disaster from which no other people on the face of the earth could have possibly survived, we hear of large Jewish communities in Asia, Africa and Europe? Some of these were established even before the dissolution of the Jewish kingdom. At the time of Titus numerous Jewish communities existed in the countries bordering on the Euphrates and the Tigris, in Asia Minor on the north coast of Africa, in Greece and in Italy. The Jewish community in Rome was large and influential long before the reign of Titus, having been brought thither as slaves by Pompey, after his conquest of Jerusalem. After the terrible siege of Jerusalem, crowds of exiles wandered to them and swelled their number, and these destitute exiles must have diminished the community's opulence and respectability and popularity, for before the Diaspore Latin authors speak of them as a wealthy and respected community; after this period, the notices of them by Juvenal and Martial are contemptuous, and imply that many of them were in the lowest state of penury, the outcasts of society.

Whatever city in Asia Minor and Greece the Apostle Paul enters he seems to find a synagogue. In some of these cities the Jews seem to have flourished; in most of them, however, they were proscribed as an odious people, and were objects of hatred and abhorrence. The rule seemed to be, in localities where Christianity predominated the Jews suffered; where the Heathens were in power the Jewish communities flourished.

In Italy they were permitted, with few exceptions, to live in peace. Even though Theoderic wrote: "Why should we give them peace in this life, when God will not give them peace in the life to come?" and even though Cassiodorus piously bestowed upon them the flattering appellations of "scorpions, wild asses, dogs," etc., it never came to very serious persecutions, and the valiant defense of Naples by the Jews against the great Belisarius, for which History gives them their deserved credit, clearly shows how the Jew can be patriotic for his adopted fatherland.

Concerning the Jews in Western Europe, we have no knowledge before the second century. When the Franks and Burgundians conquered the Roman colonies in Gaul, the Jews, who had been brought thither as slaves, were classed by the victors, as Romans, and shared equal fate with them. They were permitted to follow agricultural pursuits and trades. Their own ships furrowed the ocean. Jewish physicians were sought by the princes of the Church and of the Realm. As soldiers they distinguished themselves in the warfare between Clovis and Theoderic. Their religious practices were not interfered with, the Jew was everywhere respected by the heathen.

But the sun of their prosperity was extinguished when the heathen kings adopted Christianity. With the change of their religion came a change of heart; the heart that was formerly full of love toward the Jew, turned into stone. The clergy dictated, and the kings and the people obeyed with the sword, and the Jews bled and suffered and perished by the thousands, or were dragged under tortures to baptism into the alone-saving and all-loving church.