1. General Position of European Jews.—Some faint reflection of the happiness and prosperity that was, for so long, the portion of the Jews in Spain, fell fitfully, and for a short while, to the share of their neighbouring brethren in France, and in the few civilised states of Central Europe. Such happiness and prosperity, however, was nowhere, and at no period, even for the brief intervals in which it lasted, secure. The tolerance extended to the Jews, in the Middle Ages, was based on no appreciation of their higher qualities, and was dictated wholly by self-interest. The scholarship of the Jews was very little cared for, perhaps not at all, unless it showed itself in medical skill. And even then it was a perilous, ratherthan a precious, possession, for if a Jewish physician cured his patient he was quite likely to be accused of witchcraft, or if, despite all his care, the patient died, some affectionate relative or some disappointed legatee would very possibly bring a charge of poisoning against the poor doctor. This happened once in a very distinguished case. Charles the Bald of France died rather suddenly in 877, and it was widely said that he was poisoned by Zedekiah, the Jewish physician of his good father, Louis le Débonnaire, and from that date the fortunes of the Jews in France steadily declined. The schools in the south of France certainly flourished, and were maintained even in the less settled districts in the north and east, and in small towns on the Danube and the Maine, for Jews hunger after education as much as they do after bread; but to the eyes of the outer world the Jews of Central Europe, in these centuries, were just a big mercantile firm planted in a community of boors and warriors.The circumstances of the age, as we have seen,[22] made traders of them, and the tendency of the age was to despise trade, and, while profiting by Jewish enterprise, to put every difficulty in its way. Jews were thus a caste apart. ‘Society,’ in the Middle Ages, knew of only two classes—the lords who owned the soil, and the serfs who, swearing on the Gospel their oaths of fealty, tilled the soil and went with it. In neither rank—in that of landowners nor in that of land-cultivators, were Jews to be found. In the feudal system there was no place for Jews. The only two socially recognised professionswere the Church and the army. The first, Jews could not enter; and the second, in almost all Europe, they might not. Shut out from all else, they became the universal providers of the Middle Ages. They promoted commerce by the interchange of commodities, and they promoted civilisation by the constant communication so kept up between the East and the West. It was a descent, perhaps, from the scholarly rank which Jews had held in the past; it was less pleasant, certainly, than their old pursuits of tilling, and sowing, and planting the grateful earth: but the position was forced upon them; they had practically no choice in the matter, and there was no reason why they should not cheerfully make the best of it. They accepted the state of things, and so long as they were let alone, commerce, too, became in Jewish hands a dignified, a useful, and an honourable calling. They dealt in slaves, as was the necessity of the time, and these slaves were the better off for having Jewish masters; their trading fleets sailed on the Mediterranean, and their ready-tongued travellers brought the products of the East to the markets of the West. But gradually all this sort of commerce became impossible. The troubles of the tenth century, when the Eastern schools were closed, and the Eastern Jews migrated, and lost both their position and their wealth, affected the Jews of Europe. They found themselves deprived of correspondents for extended trading. Then, by force of feeling as well as by law, the slave trade was put down. And not only would the merchant vessels have less freight under these changed conditions, but the Norman pirates inthe tenth and eleventh centuries made the peaceful navigation of the Mediterranean uncommonly difficult. Thus, from no fault of their own, all the larger mercantile undertakings of the Jews gradually failed, and they were thrown back on retail traffic. They were industrious, and honest, and patient, and they grew rich even on that; and then idle, envious eyes looked on them, and one after another of their rights and privileges, as traders, was taken from them. So far as Jews were concerned, trading was made difficult, dishonest, and disgraceful. Among Christians there existed semi-religious associations, or ‘guilds,’ as they were called, of masters and workers. In the thirteenth century such organisations were general in all trades. From these recognised and respectable guilds, Jewish apprentices and Jewish employers of labour were equally excluded. In the cities, and in the free towns, Jewish traders were put on a footing different from, and altogether lower than, the other inhabitants. Agriculture, commerce, public and professional employment, even honest citizenship, were all made impossible to the Jew of the Middle Ages. And almost at will he might be plundered. ‘Les meubles du juif sont au baron,’ was a proverb. His possessions were held on so precarious a tenure that there came to be need for them to be portable and of an easily hidden sort, and thus it was that the Jews, in the ‘dark’ ages, grew by degrees to deal chiefly in money.
2. Jews become Money-lenders.—Jews had no liking for the trade of money-lending, but if they were to live at all, some means of earning a living had to be hit upon. Coin and jewels and deeds anddocuments which represent money, were the easiest sort of property for hunted folks to hold or to hide. There were plenty of needy people, too proud or too idle to work, and just a little too scrupulous to rob outright, who were always eager to buy on credit and to borrow on interest. The knight might want a suit of armour, or trappings for his horse, or a set of ornaments for his lady love; the priest might covet a jewelled cup or cross for his altar, and from king to peasant a loan might be needed for any purpose. Every one with such wants would go to ‘his Jew’ to supply them, and if the actual things were not forthcoming, the money was generally at hand to procure them elsewhere. The very fact of being able to lend gained Jews a chance of consideration from eager borrowers. Only a chance, perhaps, for the mood when borrowing differs greatly from the mood when repaying. The goods or the money once had, the obligation to pay was frequently altogether forgotten, and the Jew’s reminder of what was due to him was often bitterly resented by the debtors, and his demand for interest on the debt denounced by them as usury.
3. Charge of Usury.—Usury was a favourite accusation and a plausible excuse for ill-treatment of the Jews in the Middle Ages. Charges of killing Christian children and using their blood in passover rites, and accusations of poisoning the drinking wells, were both excellent means in their way of provoking a riot, and of justifying an ignorant populace in the plunder of Jewish quarters; but such charges had this drawback, that Passover, the presumed season for the bloodshedding, came only once a year, andan epidemic of disease, the effect not of poisoned wells, but of unclean living, was an even less regular and to be reckoned upon occurrence. Borrowing, however, was always going on, and there was just enough of dangerous half-truth in that charge of ‘usury,’ as applied to Jews, to make it always a safe cry to raise when creditors became urgent.
‘A lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright;
A lie which is half a truth is a harder matter to fight.’
The word usury has a Latin root, and means simply interest on money;Shakespeare speaks of usance.[23] When Jews first became traders, instead of scholars and agriculturists, especial Rabbinical legislation was found necessary, and was brought to bear on the subject of lending on ‘interest’ ([a]נֶשֶׁךְ], which word is translated, in the Authorised Version of the Bible, ‘usury’). The strict Mosaic prohibition, ‘Thou shalt not lend to thy brother upon interest,’ was then, as in Bible times, in full force. But because of the altered condition of things, Jews of a more elastic conscience were gradually led to give a wider meaning to the 19th and 20th verses of the 23rd chapter of Deuteronomy. Large trading operations involved the employment of capital, and capital could not be employed without interest. Transactions, therefore, which necessitated the use of money as a marketable commodity, gained, in course of time, a sort of sanction from precedent, and fairinterest on money passed between Jew and Jew as between Jew and Christian, or between Jew and Mahomedan. Money, and just ‘interest’ on money, could be legally taken by either, or from either, it being always understood that the borrower should be of full age, of sound judgment, capable of completely understanding the full conditions, direct and indirect, of the bargain, and that the transaction should be, in every sense, a matter of public business and of mutual convenience. For the abuse of this state of things, for the demand of a usurious rate of interest for the loans required of them in those days, the Jews were not responsible. The value of money is variable. The lender may legally make his rate of interest vary with, and be more or less in proportion to, the risk to which his capital is exposed. The worse the security and the less the chance of ultimate repayment, the higher naturally would be the ‘interest’ asked.Usury is unjust interest, and ‘divers weights and divers measures,’ and ‘a false balance,’ are all by Jewish law an ‘abomination to the Lord.’[24] Usury, therefore, is contrary to the laws and religion of the Jews. There have been Jews who have been usurers, but it has been in distinct despite of their Judaism. And in so far as the poor Jews of the Middle Ages may have defiled and disgraced the Name by usurious practice, the blame may certainly, in fairness, be divided between those who lent and those who borrowed.
CHAPTER XXIII.
JEWS IN CENTRAL EUROPE (continued).
1. The Crusades.—Towards the close of the eleventh century there came to be national as well as individual causes for borrowing of the Jews, and national and religious, as well as individual and especial, grounds for plunder and persecution. In the year 630, Mahomed had entered Jerusalem as a conqueror, and for over 400 years the mosque which he had erected to Allah stood unchallenged on the ruins of the Empress Helena’s church. This particular conquest of Mahomed’s was a religious as well as a political eyesore to Catholic Europe. It asserted the ascendency of Islam on the very spot of all others which was to Christians most sacred. As Catholicism spread, the desire to regain the sepulchre of their Saviour from unbelievers grew strong amongst the followers of Jesus. The warlike spirit of the age sought a pious motive for its expression, and thus, blessed and encouraged on all sides, sworn soldiers of the cross set off from France and Germany and England to wrest Jerusalem from the Mahomedans. ‘Zeal is a good thing, but love is a better.’ This sudden fury of fanaticism had very sad results for the Jews. To them, as a matter of sentiment, it made little difference whether Christian or Mahomedan ruled in their lost land, and whether the cross or the crescent was set up where the [a]שְׁכִינָה] had shone. In either case alike their shrine was desolate and deserted, and Jews must have looked on this struggle betweenChristians and Mahomedans, for the possession of their own lost city with a sullen sense of unhappy indifference. And yet, as a matter of fact and history, the Crusades were of very terrible import to the Jews. By a process of reasoning which it is not difficult to follow, the massacre of Jews and the plunder of Jews were held to be rightful preliminaries to each of these chivalrous expeditions to the East. It was ‘unbelievers’ whom the crusaders were setting off to fight, and here were ‘unbelievers’ of an older sort, dwelling in their midst; was it not well to begin with them? Money, too, was wanted for their holy wars; was not Jewish wealth conveniently close at hand? Killing Jewish unbelievers was surely no murder; plundering Jews, to use their treasures in so holy a cause, was still less ‘robbery.’ This was crusading logic. Jews are always a little slow to appreciate the much-sung chivalry of the Middle Ages. They saw its seamy side.
An era of most wicked persecution opened for the Jews of Central Europe with the first crusade in 1096. The frenzy of intolerance and fanaticism which was called forth under the fair names of religion and chivalry spread like an epidemic. At Trèves it began; and there, the rabble, under the direction of heartless and impecunious knights, sacked the Jewish quarters and massacred the inhabitants. The example set at Trèves was followed at Metz, at Strasburg, at Mainz, at Worms, at Cologne, and at Spires. All along the banks of the Rhine, of the Moselle, of the Maine, and the Danube, in the flourishing towns which Jewish enterprise had made wealthy and prosperous, Jewish menand women, and even little children, were slaughtered like cattle. The spoils gained from murder and robbery went to defray the costs of the holy wars. Sometimes the alternative of baptism was given to the victims; oftener no choice was offered, but sacrilege followed on sacking, and murder on robbery. Some commanders burnt the Jews; some contented themselves with burning only Jewish books and scrolls. But it is a remarkable fact that although their books were burnt, lest those who read them should be contaminated, it was never thought necessary to subject their valuables in coin and jewels to the like purging process! On the whole, burning was the favourite fashion of killing Jews, but occasionally some town or some leader would hit on a more original method. Spires, for instance, drowned her Jews, and Mainz once drove hers into wholesale suicide, and Strasburg got rid of two thousand at one time in an enormous bonfire.