Sarah Copia Sullam, our poetess, was an enthusiastic Jewess. The first literary effort which is recorded of her was an unsigned letter, bearing date of the year 1618, which she sent to an Italian priest, Ceba by name, who had written a poem on the Jewish subject of Queen Esther. Our poetesswas so delighted to see a Jewish heroine praised, that her letter to the priest was full of gratitude and enthusiasm. The priest found out the name of his correspondent, and did his best to convert her. Sarah, however, was firm in her faith, and her replies give full reasons for her firmness. Recognising at last that his arguments had failed, the priest wrote to her again, begging permission to pray for the salvation of her soul. To this she responded, granting him his request on the condition that he would allow her to pray for his conversion to Judaism. We do not hear of any further correspondence between the priest and the poetess. Later on, she was accused by another Christian priest of denying the immortality of the soul. She indignantly defended herself from this charge in an eloquent manifesto. She seems to have applied herself with great zeal not only to literature, but to science, and she had a tragedy dedicated to her.
Deborah Ascarelli, another Jewish poetess, translated many Hebrew hymns into Italian, and composed also original poems in Italian.
2. Polish Jews.—It was at the northern extremity of Europe, in Poland, that the most dull and dismal night prevailed. Refugees of the very poor and hunted sort had found their way to Poland from the date of the eleventh century, and had met and mingled there with members of the Karaite sect, and, perhaps, with some remnants of that once powerful, converted nation of the Khozars,who flourished on the shores of the Caspian Sea in the eighth and ninth centuries.[58] One hears little concerning the Jews in Poland till the fourteenth century, when, under Casimir the Great, and possibly owing to the influence of a Jewess of whom the king was very fond, a certain legal status was accorded to them. It was not a very elevated one, and mostly of a ‘protective’ nature. Their lives and property were secured to them, and their synagogues and burial-grounds were defended from pillage and desecration. Rights of trading were granted, but public or state employment was withheld. This tolerable, but somewhat sordid condition of things continued till towards the middle of the seventeenth century, by which time the Jews of Poland, who were mostly German by descent and by language, formed a very large proportion of the middle-class population of the country. They were not, at any time, a very high class of Jews. The original settlement had consisted of cruelly hunted and persecuted small traders, and reinforcements had come from the like stock. It was a community in which Judaism struck deep roots, but the soil was poor to begin with, and was always terribly in want of modern methods of manuring. In theory and practice, in manners, outward appearance, language, views, and opinions, these Polish Jews were most conservative, some might even say stagnant or retrogressive. There came to be among their students many who inclined more to Kabbala than to Talmud, and to Talmud than to Torah; and then, towards the middle of the seventeenth century, fierce oppressions arose, with the effect of yet more completely lowering the standard. At this date, a Cossack chief, with the help of Tartarsand Russians, overran Poland, and perpetrated unspeakable atrocities on the Jewish and Catholic inhabitants of the country. And when the Cossacks had finished their work, the Russians began theirs. Between 1648 and 1651, more than 200,000 Jews were slaughtered in the Polish dominions. Those who survived were not of the heroic stuff to rise superior to such terrible circumstances. They sank under them, both morally and physically. The small industries were given up, or pursued in a shambling way, and many schools were closed, and those that were kept open degenerated in aim and method. Crowds of Polish Rabbis were reduced to actual beggary, and emigrated in starving batches to Holland and Germany, or even so far as Italy and England. Those who remained in Poland relapsed into something, to superficial gaze, not very unlike barbarism.
3. French Jews.—From France, in consequence of the edict of Charles VI., the Jewish race was exiled in 1394. This edict remained in force for nearly four centuries—till, in fact, the year 1784, when, during the reign of the good though weak Louis XVI., royal letters patent were issued which authorised Jews to live in any part of the French dominions. During this long interval, France, through conquest and by treaty, had extended her boundaries, and in the newer portions of her territory the rule of expulsion was not always strictly enforced. Gradually in the course of these centuries, and without any formal permission being granted them, Jews had returned to French soil, and in most cases the authorities had shut their eyes to these illegal infringements of an unrepealedlaw. Whenever legislation, however, was directed to the fact, it proved equal to the occasion, and generally recognised the presence of Jews in the spirit of Louis XIII., who in 1615 issued a solemn edict forbidding his subjects, under the severest penalties, to hold any converse with Jews, or to receive them in their houses. Still, though always socially banned, and often plundered and persecuted, these Jews in their French ghettos managed to exist and to hold their own. By the middle of the eighteenth century there were small communities of Jews established in various parts of France, and a settlement of some 500 in Paris itself. In Bordeaux there had existed an influential community of Marannos from the year 1552, when the first contingent of refugees arrived from Portugal. These Bordeaux settlers were much superior to the rest of the Jews in France, both in position and in cultivation. They did not, however, diffuse much of their superior sweetness and light; on the contrary, they were so very anxious to preserve both from any possible deterioration, that when, during the reign of Louis XIV. (1761), fugitives from less fortunate parts of France sought asylum in Bordeaux, they received no sort of welcome from their co-religionists, who gave a chilling support to the State order to move on. The most numerous section of French Jews was to be found in Alsace, which province, from the date of the treaty of Westphalia (1648) till the termination of the Franco-German war (1871), was French. The nationality of the Government, however, made very little difference to the Jews who lived under it. Their position in the Rhenish provinces was mostmiserable. They were limited to the lowest forms of trading, reviled for pursuing such, and then taxed far beyond any honest possibilities of payment. It was not till Mendelssohn’s efforts, towards the close of the eighteenth century, had begun to bring about a change in the general position of the Continental Jews that these Alsace Jews, among the rest, began to share in the result.
4. Social Life in Germany.—In the Austrian and German principalities, although wholesale massacre, and conversion by means of fire and rack, were slowly passing away with other miserable customs of the Middle Ages, yet expulsions, and exactions, and disabilities of all kinds were still in full force against the Jews.Throughout the many separate states which in these days constitute the great united Empire of Germany, the race, as we have seen,[59] were reckoned as serfs of the Imperial Chamber, and were thus under the nominal protection of the Emperor. A typical instance of the sort of ‘protection’ which the German Jews enjoyed is afforded to us by the ancient Jewish charter of Frankfort. By the terms of this document we find that it was only on the most humiliating terms that Jews gained the privilege of living there at all, and that this official permission had, in every case, to be renewed on petition every three years. The inhabitants of the Jewish quarter might not leave it, except within rigidly fixed hours; nor could they receive a guest, nor even remove a sick person, without a special magistrate’s licence. Worse hardships were notunusual, and irritating and petty restrictions of this Frankfort charter type were general in all the cities of Germany where Jews settled.
In Bohemia and its capital, Prague, Jews suffered unspeakable miseries. The more sensational sort may be omitted, but one instance will give an idea of the perfectly matter-of-course injustice with which Jews were treated in the concerns of everyday life. There died in Prague, in 1601, a certain Mordecai Meisel, a very rich man and an upright one, who had used his money in his lifetime most generously and justly. He died childless, and left his property to a nephew. The Emperor Rudolf, without the shadow of an excuse, or the smallest claim of any kind, set aside this will, and took the dead man’s property for himself.
In Vienna, the Austrian capital, the Jews, in spite of disabilities, enjoyed for some time comparative prosperity. This happier state of things came to an abrupt close in 1670, when, under the Emperor Leopold I., the community was heavily fined, the tombs of their dead were burst open, half in hopes of pillage, half in wanton desecration, and their schools and synagogues first despoiled, and then turned into churches. In 1745 there was a revival of the older and more wholesale way of doing things. In midwinter of that year, by order of the Empress Maria Theresa, 20,000 Jews were suddenly expelled from Bohemia and Moravia.
5. Moral and Material Effects upon the Jews.—Walled off from the high roads of life, and shunned for shambling along its bypaths, the Jews ofGermany, in these cruel circumstances, were slowly deteriorating in their manners and in their modes of living. Hemmed in by the ghetto, they were growing content with the ghetto. Meeting with contempt and hatred all round, they were beginning to hate back again, and to feel, in their turn, as bitter and as unreasoning a contempt for everything belonging to their persecutors. Spinoza once wrote, ‘The heaviest burden that men can lay upon us is not that they persecute us with their hatred and scorn, but it is by the planting of hatred and scorn in our souls. We cannot breathe freely, we cannot see clearly.’ This subtlest effect of the poison of persecution seemed to have entered into the Jewish system. They would not speak the language of their enemies, they would not read their books. They huddled in their own close quarters, carrying on mean trades, or hawking petty wares, and speaking, with bated breath, a barbarous dialect, half Hebrew, half German, Judisch Deutsch, as it was called, and as different from the old grand Hebrew tongue as were they themselves from Palestinian or even from Spanish Jews. The love of religion and of race was as strong among them as ever, but the love had come to be of a jealous and a sullen sort. They dreaded progress or prominence of any kind. Long and miserable experience seemed to show that safety for themselves and tolerance for their faith lay, if anywhere, in being by the outside world altogether unnoticed and unheeded. The culture of the Christians they hated, with a hate born half of repulsion at its palpable effects in persecution, half of fear for its possibletendency to conversion. And so by degrees they locked, from the inside also, those closed gates which led out on the open roads to use, and name, and fame. Intelligent men were content to limit all intellectual occupation to the study of the Law, and to find sufficient interest and entertainment in the endless discussion of its more intricate passages. ‘Talmudical mountebanks,’ one old chronicler somewhat unkindly calls these grim and unattractive students of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It seems a harsh phrase. The long-winded, hair-splitting arguments over trivial, abstruse points were rather a forced than a voluntary kind of mental gymnastics; and if such discussions were not interesting to outsiders, they were never meant for them. Learned philologists, before and since, have indulged in discussions, quite as long, over the meaning and form of a single particle in Homer! The Jewish Rabbis never forgot the moral education of their disciples; and the longest and weariest of these dismal dissertations of theirs seldom wound up without some popular moral lesson. At any rate, these crowds of Jewish ‘unemployed,’ oppressed and distressed as they were, did not meet to talk sedition or to plot revenge. And in their attitude of resolute aloofness from the interests of the hard outside world, there was at least no trace of self-seeking. Perhaps, in the cruel circumstances of their lot, they were not altogether so mistaken as, at the first look, they seem. One may hardly dare to blame them, these ringleted, gaberdined, bigoted heroes, who, for generations, turned their faces to the wall, and seemed,to superficial gaze, to hug their chains. They were quite sharp enough to know that, in shutting themselves in, they were also shutting themselves out, but it was so they made their dogged, miserable choice between the chances and the prizes of conversion, and the blanks—the weary, hopeless, certain blanks of a rigid loyalty to their race and their religion.
As we read the story of the wise and liberal philosopher, who broke through the barriers and let in the light of learning, and of social countenance, on mediæval benighted Judaism, we shall see that the very children of the emancipator were dazzled by the unaccustomed rays, that his sons wavered and his daughters apostatised, and that in the third generation—only the third—the fetters which degraded were called degrading, and were altogether cast off, and the grandchildren of Moses Mendelssohn, the typical Jew, were Jews no longer.