7. The Almohade Dynasty of Kaliphs.—The second cause of the change in Jewish fortunes was the result of a change in the Mahomedan succession to the Kaliphate. The Ommeyade kaliphs were enlightened, just, and liberal rulers, enthusiastic in their belief, and therefore tolerant in upholding it. The Almohade dynasty, which came into power about 1150, introduced a quite different state of things. The Almohades were a sect of fanatic warriors. They had already conquered Barbary, and it was an evil day for Jews and Christians both, when, flushed with their barbarian successes, they succeeded in governing Spain. One of the earliest edicts of Abdel-Mumen, the founder of this line of Mahomedan sovereigns, was directed to the conversion of his subjects. Very soon, Islam or exile was the only choice given to Jews or to Christians. Some took upon them thedisguise of the alien faith and held their own in secret, but many more chose the harder and nobler course of exile, preferring ‘dreary hearths to desert souls,’ Numbers of Jews left the country altogether, and joined their co-religionists in Egypt and in the Mediterranean islands. There were schools at this date in Egypt, uninterfered with by the tolerant Mahomedan sultans, whose seat of government was at Cairo.Of one very celebrated student, whose family sought refuge in that country from the Almohade persecution in Spain, we shall hear later.[19]
CHAPTER XXI.
JEWS IN SPAIN (continued).
(1150–1492.)
1. Under Catholic Kings in Spain.—Most of the Jews who were driven into exile by the Almohade persecutions, travelled no further than those provinces of Spain which had seceded from Mahomedan rule. The Catholic kings were ready, for their own sakes, to give a welcome to the learned, useful Jews. Alfonso VIII., who reigned in Castile from 1166 till 1214, was particularly well affected towards them. It was said that he loved a beautiful Jewess of Toledo named Rachel; the poor girl, at any rate, was murdered by good Catholics on the suspicion of it. For the next hundred and fifty years after the Almohade persecution, the position of the Jews in Spain was still seemingly, and on the surface of things, a positionwith which to be satisfied. They were rich, they were at ease, and they were of use to their countrymen in a hundred ways. But as Spain grew, by sure degrees, less and less Mahomedan, and more and more Catholic, the Popes began to take a more active interest in its affairs. The head of the Church disliked the sight of so many synagogues in Christian Spain, and in respect to heresy in general, and to the Jews as special examples of heresy, the clergy were often more Papist than the Popes. The earlier Catholic kings, however, were too alive to their own interests to be tempted into persecution from religious motives only. They needed the Jews. They depended on Jewish loyalty in their armies, and on Jewish brains in their offices. They could not afford to alienate such service. When, in the middle of the thirteenth century, Pope Gregory IX. tried hard to stir up Alfonso the Wise to join in the general European craze of the time against the Jews, we find Alfonso, proving one of his claims to that surname of his, by refusing to be stirred up. Alfonso’s predecessor, Ferdinand the Saint, had shown a like wisdom under similar circumstances. The Popes notwithstanding, the kings of Spain continued to personally employ Jews as physicians and as ministers of finance, and in every branch of culture and of commerce in their kingdoms, remained well content to see Jews come to the front. So life went on smoothly under those sunny skies, but the volcano was only slumbering, and every now and then ominous little rumbles gave forth a warning of the explosion that was in store.
2. The Toledo Synagogue.—Toledo, the capital of Castile, had become in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a second Cordova. In 1360, when Pedro the Cruel was king, very serious trouble arose for the Jews of Toledo. Pedro earned that surname of ‘Cruel’ from his own subjects, and not from his treatment of the Jews. To them he meant to be kind, but he was a bad man, and even the tender mercies of the wicked, we read, are cruel. Like most of his predecessors, Pedro had a Jew, Samuel Levi, for his finance minister. One of the duties of such a minister is to raise taxes. This office Samuel Levi performed with such a will for his royal master that he became most unpopular with the people. Whilst they were groaning under their imposts, they saw this favoured Jew living in great state, accumulating a large fortune, and building at his own expense a magnificent synagogue in Toledo. They looked on this synagogue as built with their money, and grew to detest the sight of the worshippers in it. In an illogical sort of way they hated the man, and his religion, and his wealth altogether. It was but a step from feeling the hatred to expressing it. One sad day the Jews lost their beautiful synagogue, and poor Samuel Levi was tortured to death. His fortune was confiscated, and King Pedro, his sympathy notwithstanding, took a large share of it. Personally, however, Pedro seems always to have done his best to protect and be pleasant to the Jews, and they were wonderfully faithful to him. In a long struggle which he had with his brother Henry of Transtamare for possession of the crown, the Jews fought loyally for their liege lordPedro. Henry triumphed in the end, and both during the civil war, and at the close of it, there was more slaughter and plunder of the Jews than could be put down to the strict account of the war. Religion was made the excuse for a great deal of the cruelty. ‘Kill them like sheep if they will not be baptized,’ said one famous knight of the period, Bertrand du Guesclin. The illustration had a grim and unintentional point about it. Jews were generally killed ‘like sheep,’ their fleeces being first carefully sheared.
3. The Downward Slope to Death.—From the date of Pedro’s death (1369) things grew gradually worse for the Jews of the Peninsula. Perhaps the episode of Samuel Levi hurried events a little. It may have taught people that to confiscate a Jew’s wealth was a quicker way of getting rich through his means than to employ his services. The kings of Spain had begun to have more need of money help than of brain service, for their position had grown to be more secure, and their subjects more cultivated. And they themselves became, to a certain degree, infected by the fanatic enthusiasm of the age. Their religion, interpreted by the priests, had impressed upon them for centuries that Jews were heretics, and their own observations showed them that Jews were rich. They put the two facts together, and acted upon them. ‘Be converted to Christianity,’ they began to cry, ‘or at least let your goods be confiscated to Christians.’ And in their subjects the sovereigns of Spain found keen supporters of these views. That the Jews had grown rich because theywere thrifty, and temperate, and industrious, gained them no popularity among neighbours who were just a little short of these virtues. The clergy, too, had great influence over the populace, and they all but uniformly used it to the prejudice of the Jews. Though so woefully mistaken, it is quite likely that some of the clergy were conscientious in their efforts, and honestly longed to make proselytes of the Jews. Perhaps not one of the least of the trials of the time was an edict which, to this end, decreed that Jews might be marched off to listen to long sermons preached with the object of converting them. Eloquence, however, was by no means depended on by itself; sterner measures were resorted to. In 1380, Jews who openly clung to their religion began to be legally deprived of the rights of Spanish citizens. They were no longer allowed to hold office in State or army, or to practise among Christians as physicians. Their Nagid from that date had no recognised authority, and Jews were requested to have their dwellings apart from the other inhabitants of the cities and towns. The Jewries were to be the distinct quarters for the Jews. This sort of legislation produced its natural effect. Ten years later (1391), after a terrible riot at Seville, in which 4,000 Jews are said to have perished, some of the more brave took heart of grace and made an appeal to the Cortes, or council of the nation, against this state of things. The Cortes, which sat at Madrid, responded to the appeal, acknowledged the injustice, and sent a commission of inquiry to Seville. It did little good. A fierce and eloquent preacher,named Ferdinand Martinez, roused the rabble to further violence by declaiming against State interference with religious doings. It was the bounden duty of a Christian, declared this fanatic demagogue, to hunt down Jews, and it was the inalienable right of a free-born citizen to defy his government. The commission proved powerless, and nobody was punished. Similar outbreaks soon occurred in other cities of Castile, and spread to the neighbouring kingdoms of Navarre and Arragon.On a certain saint’s day in 1391 there was a terrible massacre in Barcelona.[20] The Jewry was sacked, the synagogues were pulled down, and the streets were heaped with dead and outraged bodies. In this riot, however, some Crown property was destroyed by accident, and so punishment was dealt out to some of the ringleaders.
4. The Marannos, or New Christians.—For a hundred years this state of things went on throughout the Catholic dominions of Spain, which, by this date, included nearly the whole of the country. Not only did the unrighteous laws set Jews apart in their dwellings and in their occupations, but in their dress also there was a mark set upon them. They might wear only the coarsest materials, and no trimmings or ornaments; and the men might not shave nor the women adorn their hair. These impertinent, everyday degradations must have sorely hurt a people like the Jews, who delight in taking life pleasantly. The alternative of baptism became a terrible temptation, and very many yielded to it. They let the waters of baptism flow over their limbs, and they stood, unprotesting,whilst the sign of the cross was made on their foreheads. In the eyes of the Church these men, who lied with their lips and in every outward action of their lives, were new Christians, and eligible for all offices of trust and state. In the language of the synagogue, they, who thus sold their souls and took the profit, were Marannos,a corruption of the word maranatha,[21] which means ‘anathema,’ or ‘curse on thee.’ In their own sight they were Jews still—‘Jews in their hearts,’ they would have said, for secretly, and at some risk, they practised Jewish rites, holding the Passover service often in cellars, and singing the Sabbath hymns under their breath, with doors and windows fast shut. Perhaps the truth lies between the two extremes, and it needs Him who ‘sees with larger, other eyes than ours’ to judge justly of this human weakness and hypocrisy. If the sin was great, so also was the penalty.
5. An Effort at Argument.—Early in the fifteenth century an attempt was made by a Jewish convert to have the question between Judaism and Catholicism discussed and settled, if possible, by force of talk. Under the presidency of the Antipope Benedict XIII. a prolonged sitting was held at Tortosa, in Spain, between Rabbis and monks. The conference held sixty-eight meetings, and lasted twenty-one months (from February 1413 till November 1414). It must have been conducted rather on the model of the famous argument between the wolf and the lamb in Æsop’s fables, for, as the upshot, the Rabbis weredismissed, and the Pope issued a bull imposing new penalties on the Jews, and forbidding them, among other things, to read the Talmud.
6. The Inquisition.—In 1469, Isabella, sister of Henry IV. of Castile, married Ferdinand, Crown Prince of Arragon. This marriage made a united and Catholic Spain; for Granada, the last of the Mahomedan cities, fell before the end of their reign. The young sovereigns were very anxious that their beautiful kingdom should be quite and altogether Catholic, free from any touch or taint of alien faith. They both agreed that, for the air to be entirely pure, no Jews or Mahomedans ought to breathe in it. Isabella really thought this, for she was sincere in her bigoted belief, and good according to her dim lights. Ferdinand, it is to be feared, had a second thought for his treasury. He liked to convert Jews, but he also very much liked the confiscated possessions of unconverted Jews. The first official act of the royal pair was to ask from the ruling Pope, Sixtus IV., permission to set up a tribunal which might make searching inquiry into the religion of any suspected subjects. The request was granted, and in 1480 the Inquisition was started, with the Pope’s blessing, at Seville.
7. Objects and Functions of the Inquisition.—The inquiry was aimed not at the Mahomedans, who were open and nearly vanquished enemies, nor even at those Jews who were living honest and unheeded if poor and degraded lives in their Jewries, but in reality at the converted Marannos. The Marannos were rich and prosperous, and by this date so numerous that it issaid quite a third of the whole population of Spain were New Christians. Many of them were nobles in the state, and for a century past they had been marrying and intermarrying amongst the best Catholic families. These were the people who were suspected, and truly, of being still Jews in their hearts, and in secret observance. The chief object of the Inquisition was to hunt out this hidden Judaism, and to make it an excuse for despoiling the ‘New Christians’ of the evident wealth and state which were so envied. Under penalty of being himself excommunicated, every loyal Spaniard was invited to become a spy. No one was safe from this terrible tribunal. A child might denounce his parent, a wife her husband, a brother his sister, or even a criminal his judge. The accused was not allowed to know the name of his accuser. He was not permitted to have any legal adviser. Torture was resorted to on mere suspicion. There was no possibility of appeal. The punishments of the Inquisition, which were wholly capricious, varied from penance, scourging, and imprisonment, to death. All degrees of punishment were accompanied by confiscation of goods to the State. The executions were solemn ceremonials, and were called autos-da-fé, or acts of faith. The accused was clothed in a long flame-coloured garment (the san benito), a cross was placed in his hand, and then, with a crowd of victims similarly robed, he was led to the Quemadero (place of burning). A pause was made whilst a sermon was preached to ears dulled a little, we may hope, to this profanation of ‘the Name.’ Then, at a given signal, fire was set to the fagots, and, in presence ofking and queen, and court and crowd, the act of faith was finished in flames.