5. What became of the Spanish and Portuguese Exiles.—The Jews who were expelled from the Peninsula underwent awful experiences. There were so many of them seeking new homes, that governments, not cruelly disposed, yet hesitated in their own interests from offering asylum to such crowds. In Italy, to which many turned in the hope of a genial climate and congenial pursuits, scant hospitality was experienced. Genoa distinctly closed her gates against the fugitives; Venice received them, but shut them up in a ghetto (1516); and Rome, even the Jews of Rome, were very doubtful as to the expediency of extending a welcome. Naples was more generous, but the result was hardly more fortunate for the Jews. In deference, perhaps, to Abarbanel, who led a party of refugees to his kingdom,Ferdinand of Naples received them graciously, and took Abarbanel into his own service. But hardly were they settled in their new homes, when the Black Pestilence broke out in Ferdinand’s State, and for a whole year made ravages among his subjects. Great numbers of the Jewish exiles crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, and made settlements on the northern coast of Africa, and in Egypt. A painful difference, at best, such rough colonising must have proved to the cultured grandees of Spain, and worse than roughnesses were in store for them. The resources of civilisation, in those parts of the world, were not equal to such a sudden influx of strangers needing to be fed, and, delicately nurtured and luxuriously brought up as these Jews had been, they had to suffer the horrors of actual famine. Of those who managed to survive, many were seized by captains of privateering vessels, and sold into slavery, and some lingered on, to meet a worse fate at the hands of the natives. The barbarous tribes of Africa had not arrived at the civilised pitch of persecuting Jews for religion’s sake, but they had mastered the elementary reasons for persecution. They had got so far as to believe that Jews, however poor they looked, were potential mines of wealth, made and designed for plunder. On this belief they acted in a shockingly literal manner. Numbers of Jews who fell into the hands of these savages were actually ripped open by them, in the hope that gold was the ordinary lining of Jewish bodies.
Some eighty thousand of the exiles travelled no further than Portugal, and there, for three or four years, they seemed tolerably secure. But in 1496dynastic considerations induced King Manuel of Portugal, contrary to his own convictions, to follow the lead of his parents-in-law, Ferdinand and Isabella. An edict of expulsion against ‘Jews and Moors’ was pronounced. Ten months were granted for preparation, and then the Jews of Portugal were dispersed, as their Spanish brethren had been, over Italy, Africa, and Western Turkey, and gradually, and by degrees, a small contingent found a safe asylum in the Netherlands.
From 1497 till 1808, when Napoleon put an end to the ‘holy court’ of the Inquisition, no declared Jews were to be found in the Spanish Peninsula. Plenty of secret Jews remained, who, under their name of Marannos, or New Christians, continued, generation after generation, to fill high offices in Church and State. The Marannos were true at heart, and by stealth, to Judaism, and not seldom at the tribunal of the Inquisition they had to pay the penalty of the suspicions which their deceit excited. The Marannos preferred, when they could, to marry among themselves, but there were, of necessity, frequent alliances, prompted by love or by ambition, between the highly placed New Christians and the grandest and most orthodox Catholic families of Spain. In course of time there were very few Catholic nobles who could not trace back to at least one Jew or Jewess amongst their ancestors. In the middle of last century, Joseph, King of Portugal, wishing to make a distinction between his subjects of pure, and those of mixed, descent, asked his minister Pombal if he could arrange for a peculiar hat to be recommended to the wear ofNew Christians. The next day Pombal brought his master three of such hats. ‘For whom are these?’ asked the king. ‘One is for your Majesty, one is for me, and one is for the Inquisitor-General,’ answered Pombal. The minister’s genealogical researches, we may suppose, rather disconcerted the king, but as they went to show that the new hats would have to be pretty generally worn, King Joseph gave up the idea of distinguishing the Jewish descended grandees of his kingdom.
CHAPTER XXX.
THE DARKNESS VISIBLE.
1. Deterioration of Character.—The effects of all the evil treatment which we have traced, began to be clearly manifest in the Jewish character. The ravages on Jewish life and on Jewish property were not the worst results of these ages of persecution. The real injury done to the Jews went far deeper than any amount of outrage or wrong might inflict on an individual. ‘Few natures,’ writes the Laureate, ‘are of such fine mould, that if you sow therein the seed of hate, it blossoms charity.’ Jewish nature is of ‘fine mould,’ or under such a course of manuring, and such a season of neglect, it might well have become altogether overrun with rank weeds. Seeds once planted can, nevertheless, only follow the law of nature, and blossom and bear fruit according to their kind. Forced into secret and sordid ways, deniedhope, aim, or ambition of any worthy sort, contemptuously shunned when they were not actively hunted, ‘protected’ by princes and persecuted by priests, what wonder if Jews at last became ‘degraded,’ never indeed to the level of what they were thought, but something undoubtedly below the level of what they should have been? Agur’s prayer was a wise one. ‘Give me, O Lord,’ he says, ‘neither poverty nor riches: lest I be full, and deny Thee; or lest I be poor, and steal.’ Jews, for generations, were subject to the extreme of both the temptations which Agur prayed against. The cultivated Marannos of Spain yielded to the one; they were ‘full,’ and for continued wealth and ease they denied their God. The ignorant clippers of coin in England yielded to the other temptation; they were poor, and stole.
The higher ideals which keep men straight were sometimes lost sight of in the gloom. Honour and honesty came often to be regarded as impossible virtues. Life was so uncertain that it grew unduly dear, and men and women, in their terror, became, not unseldom, selfish and cowardly. Instances crop up in contemporary records, though they are happily rare, of Jews being denounced and betrayed by Jews. The carefully guarded secret of a co-religionist’s hidden hoards would now and again be disclosed to the enemy, as a means of averting the ‘evil eye’ from a too close scrutiny into the traitor’s own concerns. Men were even found capable of owning to untrue accusations, and of inventing stories of never-designed plots, with the object of gaining favour and ‘protection’ for themselves and their families. Under the terribleconditions of their life, the very virtues of the Jews turned to vices. The old Jewish characteristics of steadfastness, and prudence, and intelligence, seemed to take new and lower forms; for bare life’s sake, the loyal, large-minded Jew learnt to be narrow, and secret, and cunning. There was such awful need to be rich. Rich Jews could gain at best a lofty tolerance, and for poor Jews there must have seemed no cause nor excuse for living at all. Money-getting became the one absorbing pursuit of the race, the one ambition of life, the one possible protection against cruel and tortured death. And the money got, it brought no leisure, no gracious possibilities with it of refinement or of culture. To toil for wealth which they might not openly enjoy, and to passionately believe in a religion which they might not openly profess, was the portion of the Jews for centuries. It was a sort of suffering which sapped at the very roots of self-respect, and which inevitably resulted in defects of bearing and of conduct. The outcast Jew learnt to stoop where he should have stood upright, and to swagger and to push when standing room was grudgingly allotted him. He came by degrees to merit, in his outward aspect, some of the contempt which he had never earned, and in this sadly changed aspect of the heirs of the prophets, the darkness of the ‘dark ages’ was made visible.
2. Atmospheric Conditions.—Nothing, again, perhaps shows more plainly the density of the darkness than the extraordinary light which was cast upon it in the seventeenth century by a baleful shooting star, which rose like a rocket in the East, just as thedawn was beginning to break in the Western world. The miserable condition of the Jews had by this time a little shaken their faith. They had been martyrs, and mute inglorious martyrs, for so long. They suffered, among other things, from suppressed religion. Their faith in God was as fervent as ever, but the fervour, denied any honoured and open expression, had come to be of a dangerous and an emotional sort. This spiritual weakness, such as it was, did not lead them, however, in the direction of doubt, but of credulity. They did not think that the Lord’s ‘hand was shortened,’ that it could not ‘save,’ but they grew over-eager to see it stretched out on their behalf, and far too ready to welcome any sorry impostor by way of Saviour. As had happened before the fall of Jerusalem, and again before the coming of Barcochba, the very air that was breathed by unhappy Jews seemed full of portent and prophecy, and a ‘Messiah’ was almost bound to appear in response to the wild and superstitious hopes in which they indulged. And when, at length, such a one came forward, he found he had marvellously little to do to keep up the character.
3. A Shooting Star: Sabbatai Zevi (1626–1676).—Smyrna, in Turkey, was the birthplace of the wretched impostor who, for some three years in the latter half of the seventeenth century, ‘made,’ as an old chronicler expresses it, ‘a madness among the Jews.’ The father of Sabbatai Zevi was a merchant, and in no wise remarkable. The son was something of a scholar, and gained a certain amount of unwelcome prominence in his youth by propounding somerather startling religious theories, an exploit which led to his being banished from the city by order of the authorities of the synagogue. Before his exile he was twice married and twice divorced. We do not know what effect these domestic experiences may have had on his character, but we hear of him next (1664) at Jerusalem, interesting himself greatly in all Jewish questions, and finding in a certain Jew of the place, named Nathan, an enthusiastic listener to all his wild plans. Whether the sight of the fallen city may have inspired Sabbatai with a genuine and passionate desire to help in its restoration, or whether he was a conscious impostor from the very first, and only influenced by the desire of revenge on the Smyrna synagogue, it is difficult to decide. It is not easy to think that, within the very walls of Jerusalem, a Jew could plan a deliberate imposture on his nation. In his actions, however, it is certain, Sabbatai was never honest. Quite suddenly he proclaimed himself the Messiah of the Jews, appointed Nathan his prophet, and proceeded to predict the very date when he, Sabbatai Zevi, should be acknowledged sole monarch of the universe, with the capital and head-quarters of his kingdom fixed in a restored and beautified Jerusalem.
4. How the News was received.—The news of a Messiah having arisen spread like wildfire through all the cities of Turkey. Business of every sort was suspended, and men and women abandoned their ordinary occupations, and gave themselves up entirely to what they called good works. Believing that they were about ‘to inherit all things,’ rich andpoor alike refused to labour. Those who had led self-indulgent lives now fasted and scourged themselves, and became so lavish in their charity, and were so urgent to make amends, that the beggars had an extremely good time. There must have been something very persuasive about Sabbatai Zevi, for a certain Samuel Pennia who began by making a strenuous stand against all this folly, ended by becoming a violent convert to it. Sabbatai presently went to his birthplace, Smyrna. In that city early recollections stirred some of the people to just sufficient doubt to make them ask their old townsman to perform a miracle in proof of his Messiahship. Sabbatai, says the same old chronicle, ‘was horribly puzzled for a miracle,’ but his effrontery was equal to the credulity of his dupes. In an audience before the cadi or judge of the city, Sabbatai suddenly and gravely exclaimed, ‘See you not a pillar of fire?’ Many of the crowd, in the hysterical excitement of the moment, really believed that they saw something of the sort, and those who did not see were silent, hardly liking to proclaim their want of faith or their defective sight. Sabbatai was triumphant, and men who refused to acknowledge him were actually, in some cases, excommunicated by the synagogues.