1. Jews in the East.—With Persia and Mesopotamia under the sway of the Mahomedans, the kallahs of Sora and Pumbaditha flourished, the Gaonim pursued their studies, and the Head of the Captivity had his settled rank as one of the many vassals and tributaries of the kaliphate. The position of the Jews was much improved. In the time of Omar, the second kaliph, the coinage, which was of course a very important trust, was given into the charge of a Jew. Early in the next century, the ninth, under the famous kaliph, Haroun al-Raschid, a Jew named Isaac was employed as ambassador, and sent on a delicate diplomatic mission from the court at Bagdad to Charlemagne of Germany. But nevertheless, although individual Jews rose to eminence, and Jewish institutions were unmolested, some amount of prejudice against the nation still lingered in the East. Perhaps the remembrance of the oppositionwhich their Prophet had met with from the Jews had a stronger influence on his successors among the scenes where he had personally moved; for the early kaliphs or sultans, as they are indifferently called, were not always so favourably inclined towards their Jewish subjects as was Omar and the great Haroun al-Raschid. In the beginning of the eighth century a Mahomedan ruler named Mutavakel was very hard upon Jews and Christians both. He made them wear a leathern girdle, to distinguish them in their dress from his ‘faithful’ followers, and neither Jew nor Christian in his dominions was allowed to ride on horses, only on donkeys or mules. This sultan would certainly seem to have been an all-round persecutor, and rather an exceptional one. The insecure position, however, of the Jews in the East at this period was due as much to dissensions from within as to persecutions from without. More and more the office of [a]רֵישׁ נְּלוּתָא] grew to be a stumblingblock and an offence. The succession was a constant cause of quarrel among the Jews, and these squabbles made it impossible for the kaliphs to either respect the dignity or to ignore it, either of which attitudes on the part of the Mahomedan sovereign would have been a comfortable one for his Jewish vassals.
2. Close of the Schools: some Scholars.—The schools did some good work, and produced some good scholars, before the end came. Towards the middle of the ninth century we hear of a complete dictionary of the Bible being compiled by a certain Rabbi Menahem ben Saruk. The book is still in existence. Then there was a celebrated Gaon calledSaadia ben Joseph (892–942), who translated the Bible into Arabic, which language was now becoming a second mother-tongue among the Eastern Jews. Another of the more celebrated of the Gaonim was named Sherira, and he has left us quite a detailed chronicle of these Babylonian schools. Sherira was very nearly the last of the Gaonim. He upheld the office worthily for thirty years (967–997), and towards the end of his patriarchate he associated his son Hai with him in the dignity. The ruling kaliph cast a jealous eye on the old man’s wealth and honours. On a trumped-up charge, both father and son were cast into prison, and their riches confiscated. Hai escaped, and a little later, another attempt at this dangerous dignity was made by a certain Hezekiah. It failed, and this last Gaon was executed (1036) by order of the kaliph. All the Eastern schools were now closed, and the scholars were once more scattered. Palestine and the whole of the Byzantine Empire became almost deserted by Jews, and the interest shifts to the Western division of the world.
3. Jews in the West.—In Italy, during the Middle Ages, we hear but very little of the Jews. The Lombards and Florentines were the chief merchants and money dealers, and the Popes, who were paramount in Italy, neither patronised nor persecuted the Jews. As a source of revenue the Popes did not need the Jews. From all quarters, and under all kinds of pretences, streams of money were continually flowing into the Papal treasury. Absolutions, indulgences, dispensations, had each a price, and a heavy one. Rich sinners were even more numerous than richJews, and quite as profitable. The Popes were for the most part too busy, and often, it may be said, too religiously indifferent, to turn persecutors for conscience sake. They lived in great state, and were intent on extending their political as well as their spiritual sovereignty. In these superstitious Middle Ages, which recognised in the Pope the actual ‘infallible’ agent of God, the most effectual weapon in the Popish arsenal would have been powerless against Jews. Jews would have cared nothing for that most dreaded of all punishments in Catholic countries, the Papal malediction. Thus, their money and their souls alike insignificant in the sight of the Popes, the Jews throughout the Papal dominions were mostly let alone. In the northern parts of Europe, where the influence of Mahomedanism had hardly penetrated, the Jews were subject to the old Roman law. They might not enter military service, and had to pay largely for local ‘protection’ from the lords of the soil. In our own England, Jews up to this period have no history. There are but two very slight mentions of them in all the Saxon Chronicles. They would seem not to have settled in England in any numbers before the Conquest, when probably some came over from France in the train of William the Norman. The interest centres now in Southern Europe, and chiefly in Spain, where the kaliphs attained to their greatest state, and where the Jews attained to their greatest prosperity since the captivity.
4. The Policy of the Early Kaliphs.—When the empire that had been founded by help of the Koran and the sword was once firmly established, the swordwas sheathed, and the Koran ceased to be flourished as a weapon. The kaliphs resolved to uphold their sovereignty by the seductive arts of peace rather than by the exterminating process of war. They aspired to something beyond barbarian chieftainship. They aimed at becoming leaders of men and patrons of learning, and of controlling the thoughts as well as the destinies of nations. To this end they cultivated the Jews. The Arabian rulers had the keenness to appreciate the reserves of patience, of loyalty, and of scholarship in the Jewish people. They desired to graft these valuable qualities on their own rather rough and ready followers. They wanted the arts of civilisation to adorn their new dominion; they longed to be as great in the schools and in the marts of the world as they had proved on its battle-fields. ‘The teachers of wisdom are the true luminaries and legislators of the world,’ was a saying of the Kaliph Al-Mamun, who ruled from 813 till 832. The Mahomedan rulers knew how much of all that they desired could be learned from the Jews in their midst. And so, throughout the kaliphate, political and social equality was granted to its Jewish subjects, and the energies and the capacities of the nation were given room to grow.
5. Some Effects of this Policy.—The Empire of the Kaliphs was of immense extent. By the tenth century it had three separate seats of government—at Bagdad, at Cairo, and at Cordova, and the influence of each of these three kaliphates was felt even beyond its own immediate boundary. The Carlovingian dynasty in France caught for a while somethingof the enlightened spirit of the Mahomedan rulers, and in France as in Spain, Jewish physicians and Jewish teachers and Jewish merchants became quite the fashion. Not only did there come to be crowded colleges presided over by Jewish Rabbis in the sunny southern cities of Europe, but fleets of trading vessels, commanded by Jewish captains, were to be seen sailing in the Mediterranean. The sight awoke some slumbering enmities. In the ninth century a certain Archbishop of Lyons was as concerned for the worldly interests of his countrymen as the most zealous of Church dignitaries could have been for their spiritual ones. This Archbishop Agobard presented a petition, in 829, to his royal master, Louis le Débonnaire, praying that the commerce of good French Christians might be protected against the wicked Jews. Conscience would have been a safer cry than commerce to have raised, and a fairer one to have invoked religious legislation about. King Louis refused to receive the worthy archbishop’s petition. He was evidently in favour of free trading, and so long as the vessels were seaworthy, and the freight honest, he did not appear to consider the religious opinions of the supercargos to be any of his business, or of his archbishop’s either. King Louis had a Jewish physician, and it seems as if this doctor—Zedekiah was his name—managed to keep his royal patient healthy in mind as well as in body. At any rate, whether from nature or from ‘treatment,’ this King of France was, certainly, possessed of fine principles. ‘Divine law,’ we find him writing in one of his despatches, ‘bids me protect my subjects who share my belief; but itnowhere forbids me to be just towards those who differ from me.’ His acts matched his convictions, and under the more tolerant treatment, which had been first introduced by the Mahomedans, the Jewish position in all the south of Europe improved greatly in the eighth and ninth centuries. Not only were commercial operations extended, but Jews were largely employed in public and in private positions of trust. They were often made collectors of revenue, and stewards in the great households of the nobles. They were allowed to serve in the army, and there is evidence that at least in one province, that of Languedoc, they were permitted to be landowners. In Narbonne, for years, one of the two annually elected prefects or mayors of the town was a Jew. Their synagogues and their schools multiplied, and those of Salerno, and Montpelier, and Toulouse, and Marseilles, and, a little later on, of Paris, produced some famous Rabbis, and many crops of diligent students.
CHAPTER XX.
JEWS IN SPAIN.
(711–1150.)
1. ‘Like a dream in the night.’—Life in Spain, for the four centuries during which the dynasty of Ommeyade kaliphs ruled, was to the Jews like a brilliant dream breaking in on the long night of their history. There was to be by-and-by a terrible awakening, but while the dream lasted they gave themselves up to its delight. ‘An earthlyparadise,’ ‘a garden of Eden,’ Spain is fondly called by old Jewish writers of those days. The liberty it gave was so new, so wonderful, so sweet. Men might work and might worship at their will. Women might be fair without fear. Children might grow up clever, and find no locked doors, labelled ‘conversion,’ barring their pathway to success. Wealth might be honestly won and pleasantly enjoyed, taking its rightful place as a means for diffusing happiness.Each country, says a recent writer,[13] has the Jews it deserves. Mahomedan Spain deserved good Jews, and it had them, and it was richly repaid in its own generous coin. In the Middle Ages, Spain led the van in culture and in commerce, and in her loyal Jewish subjects she found, literally, her guides, philosophers, and friends. They stood by her as loyally on the field of battle as in the council-chamber and in the mart. Jews must have been also a valuable contingent of the army, for in 1086 we find the generals on both sides, on the eve of a decisive engagement, agreeing so to fix the day that it might not interfere with the Sabbath of their Jewish soldiers.The kaliphs took, too, an intelligent interest and a keen pride in their scholarly Jews, and there was plenty of space in that beautiful land for every one to enjoy his little corner and his little book.[14] The memory of the sunny skies and the gracious leisure of Spain took deep root in grateful Jewish hearts. The long dream of liberty was so sweetthat the sharp awakening to persecution was forgotten, or, at least, the fragrant shade of the orange groves would seem to have been remembered longer than the fierce heat of the fagots and the stake. It is good to be able to ‘write injuries in dust, and kindnesses in marble.’ In 1492, the Jews were wickedly expelled from the land in which they had been, for centuries, so happy, and 200 years later we hear of descendants of those cruelly exiled Jews sending secretly to Spain and Portugal for citrons and branches of the palm, that their [a]סוּכּוֹת] might look ‘homelike’ in the bleak north lands in which their lot was cast.
2. The Schools.—Once given a fair field and some choice, Jewish activity showed itself, as of old, in an intellectual direction. The schools of Spain soon became as famous as the kallahs of Babylon. Cordova and Granada and Toledo took the place of ancient Sora and Pumbaditha, and of yet more ancient Jamnia and Tiberias. Cordova under the kaliphs was the Athens of the Middle Ages to Southern Europe;and as for Toledo, a Hebrew poet[15] shall speak for himself on the subject of its charms:
‘I found that words could ne’er express