While Jewish exiles were instrumental in awakening the spirit which inspired the Renaissance, and the consequent intellectual regeneration of Europe, their literature produced no inconsiderable effect upon the fortunes of that other momentous revolution which changed its religious aspect, the Protestant Reformation. The right of unrestricted perusal and private interpretation of the Scriptures, which was the vital principle of that movement, had always been enjoyed by the Hebrews. Their commentaries on the Bible were surprisingly voluminous: whole libraries were composed of them. The writings of the rabbis which elucidated obscure passages of Holy Writ were composed in a spirit of judicious toleration, entirely foreign to the policy dictated by bigoted ecclesiasticism and Papal authority. To exercise private judgment in religious matters was to invite the discipline of the Inquisition. Not one priest in ten thousand understood a word of Hebrew. Its study was prohibited to Catholics as conducive to heresy. On the other hand, Luther, Calvin, Melanchthon, Zwinglius, Conrad, in short, all the great Reformers, were thoroughly proficient in that language. Rabbinical literature exerted a powerful influence on their minds, inspired their efforts, provoked their rivalry, confirmed their resolution. In this respect, as in numerous others, posterity owes much to the despised Israelites of the mediæval era. A vast interval of time divides the ages of Abd-al-Rahman I. and Luther; the cities of Cordova and Worms are separated by many hundred leagues; but the inherent ideas of personal liberty and private right recognized on the banks of the Guadalquivir ultimately prevailed in the centre of Germany, once the most unlettered of countries. Thus the inheritance of barbarism, rendered possible by Roman decadence, transmitted by Goth, Hun, and Vandal, and perpetuated for the material interests of the Church, was supplanted by the labors and the example of rabbinical industry and learning. The epoch of ignorance, during which men feared to be enlightened by a people whose transcendent knowledge was believed to be of infernal origin, was past; but their disabilities were never entirely removed, and Jew-baiting is, unfortunately, still a popular diversion in some of the countries of Europe.

The importance of the invention of printing was at once understood and appreciated by the Jews. Ten years after it became known, their presses in Italy produced typographical works of extraordinary beauty and excellence. Their prominence in every movement directed towards the weakening of superstition and the emancipation of the human intellect did not prevent them from sustaining intimate and confidential relations with the Holy See. The Papacy was, as a rule, not unfavorably inclined towards them; it borrowed their money, and availed itself of their talents in the conduct of public affairs. Many Jews of Rome attained to great political distinction. Jehid was the financial minister of Alexander III.; and the son of a wealthy Hebrew merchant, named Pietro il Buono, is known to posterity as the anti-pope Anacletus. Such were the Hebrews of the Middle Ages, whose success in literature, art, science, commerce, politics, and diplomacy is to be attributed to the impulse originally imparted to their genius, and to the privileges enjoyed by their ancestors, under the generous and tolerant policy of the Khalifs of Cordova.

The expulsion of the Spanish Jews is one of the saddest and most deplorable tragedies in history. The royal edict which decided their fate, and whose execution had been deferred until the Moorish wars were ended, was published March 31, 1492. The charge brought against them of having menaced the security of the State and the tranquillity of the Church, by projected conspiracy, is too absurd to be seriously considered. To strengthen these unfounded accusations, the threadbare fables relating to the sacrifice of Christian infants at Easter, and the repeated solicitation of Catholics to apostasy, were once more utilized to inflame the passions of the fanatical multitude. Three months only were allowed for the disposal of their property and the completion of their preparations for departure; and, if that term were exceeded, the proclamation made them liable to the seizure of their chattels, and even to the penalty of death. They were prohibited from removing from the kingdom money or vessels of gold or silver; and the only objects specified in the royal ordinance which they were permitted to retain were bills of exchange and portable effects which could easily be transported. The Grand Inquisitor, Torquemada, revered in the annals of the Church as one of her most famous champions, and the confessor of Queen Isabella, to whose credit stand the tortures of a hundred thousand heretics and the grief and misery of other unnumbered multitudes, was the inspiring spirit of this atrocious crime against humanity. His influence neutralized the supplications of an entire people; the remonstrances of the few statesmen who, withstanding the popular clamor, foresaw the certain decline of commercial prosperity incident to the enforcement of this measure; the insidious and hitherto omnipotent agency of vast sums of gold. Accounts differ materially as to the number of Jews expelled from Spain; it was, however, not less than four hundred thousand, and was probably near a million. Their sufferings equalled, if they did not surpass, those of the Moriscoes, afterwards condemned by a similar proscription. The air was filled with their lamentations. Many remained for days in the cemeteries, weeping over the graves of their ancestors. The majority who travelled by land went on foot. With the exiles departed the greater portion of the learning, the skill, the wealth, the industry, and the prosperity of Spain. Their estates were confiscated by the crown. Rigid personal search was made of every individual for concealed valuables, which impelled many to swallow their gold. Brigands stripped them on the highway. Sailors robbed them on the sea. Their wives were ravished, their children despatched before their eyes. Many perished from want of food. A pestilence decimated an entire company, and the survivors were abandoned to die on a desert island, without water or shelter. Great numbers were sold by their barbarous custodians to slave traders. The inadvertent disclosure of wealth was fatal to its possessor; he was at once thrown overboard, and his property became the spoil of the murderer. Those who landed in Morocco were not permitted to enter the cities, and a famine which at that time was desolating the country made it impossible for such an increased population to obtain subsistence. Encamped in the arid desert, they were compelled to have recourse to unwholesome roots and herbs in a desperate effort to sustain life. Thousands died of exposure. Many sold their children to avoid starvation. A large proportion of these refugees landed in Italy, where an enlightened public sentiment stood ready to profit by the wealth and industry that the narrow spirit of Spanish bigotry was so determined to throw away. Pope Alexander VI., the head of the house of Borgia, notwithstanding that the prominent Israelites of Rome offered him a thousand pieces of gold to exclude them, received the heretics proscribed by the most Catholic sovereigns with the utmost consideration and sympathy. The maritime states of the Adriatic compelled their Hebrew citizens, who, fearing commercial rivalry, were inclined to regard this influx of strangers with disfavor, to render substantial assistance to their unfortunate brethren. In Holland, also, the exiles were welcomed with a hospitality that in after years the advantages derived from their establishment abundantly repaid. The antipathy entertained by the Spanish populace towards the Jews, diligently fostered by the infamous arts of the Inquisition, was far from being dissipated by the banishment and extermination of the victims of its malevolence; in default of the living, its vengeance was wreaked upon the dead. Nearly a century after the expulsion, when an avowed Israelite could not be found in the Spanish monarchy, the Hebrew cemetery at Seville was invaded by a mob; the costly monuments were battered into fragments; the graves opened and rifled, and the mouldering bones found in them burned to ashes. A considerable booty in gold and silver trinkets, jewels, precious stuffs, and illuminated manuscripts rewarded this act of sacrilege, whose authors were neither molested nor punished by the authorities.

Among the most eminent victims of Jewish persecution was the great statesman and scholar, Abarbanel. No name in letters stood higher than his. In turn, the favorite and absolute minister of the sovereigns of Portugal, Spain, and Naples, he shared the fate of his countrymen, and, deprived of his offices and home in each of these kingdoms, was three times driven into exile. Such was the respect which his talents inspired, that the princes who had been foremost in persecuting him were glad to avail themselves of his experience in settlements of important questions of diplomacy. His literary ability was so great that his admirers have classed him with Maimonides. In philosophy he was most liberal; in religion a polemic; in politics, strange to say, a republican. In private or in public life no stain or dishonor ever attached to his name.

The scenes witnessed during the expulsion of the Jews from Portugal were even more shocking in their barbarity than those that characterized their expatriation from any other country of Christian Europe. Only two months were allowed them to settle their affairs; if any remained beyond that time they were condemned to slavery. All males under the age of fourteen were to be separated from their relatives, that they might be brought into the pale of the Church, which aimed at the annihilation of their race. The latter part of the inexorable sentence was the first to be executed. The screaming boys were torn from the arms of their parents, who were brutally clubbed until they released their hold; many distracted mothers, unable to sustain the loss of their children, committed suicide or killed their offspring; of the latter some were cast into wells, others were strangled. Every obstacle was thrown in the way of the departure of the Jews until the limited time had expired, and then nearly the entire number was enslaved. Apostasy was now the only remedy for their distressed condition, and this many embraced. Their social status was thereby immensely improved at the expense of their conscience. They contracted distinguished alliances with their recent oppressors, and their children were adopted into the families of the nobility.

The Spanish Jews, by reason of the peculiarities of their situation, the hostility of their rulers,—which their pecuniary resources and natural acuteness often baffled, yet never entirely overcame,—and their successive domination by races of different origin, faith, and language, were impressed with mental characteristics and peculiarities not to be met with in their brethren of other countries. Their rigid formalism was proverbial, and the Hebrew of Toledo observed more conscientiously the precepts of the Pentateuch and the Talmud than the Hebrew of Damascus or Jerusalem. But their traditional reserve did not prevent them from soliciting proselytes; and it is stated that the rabbis, ignoring the prohibitory injunctions of the national Code, upon one occasion challenged the bishops to a debate, in presence of the throne, upon the merits of their respective systems; an act of audacity which does not seem to have excited even the surprise of the prelates of that age. The Spanish grandee prides himself upon his Gothic ancestry, the sangre azul, whose presence is presumed to indicate conclusively that in the ascending line can be found no progenitor of the despised Semitic race. The falsity of this presumption was, however, established by the councils convoked by royal authority at Burgos, Valladolid, and Madrid during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to settle the question of purity of blood. According to the statutes adopted by these Informaciones de Nobleza, as they were called, descent from a Jewish ancestor was solemnly declared to be no blemish upon a noble escutcheon, a decision which affected not a few of the oldest and haughtiest families of Castile and Aragon.

There are to-day few of the great houses of Portugal and Spain which have not an admixture of Hebrew blood. Works have been published by ecclesiastics tracing this contaminated lineage to its source, which all the authority of a despotic government was not able to suppress. It is said that the Portuguese King Joseph I. once ordered every male of Jewish descent in his dominions to wear a yellow hat. The Marquis of Pombal appeared with three; and on being asked by the King for what use he intended them, he answered, “In obedience to the royal decree, I have brought one for Your Majesty, one for the Grand Inquisitor, and one for myself.” This anecdote, whose authenticity is well established, shows the extent to which the blood of a once proscribed and persecuted people, despite all attempts at its annihilation, had been infused into the veins of the proudest and most exclusive aristocracy in Europe.

CHAPTER XXV
THE CHRISTIANS UNDER MOSLEM RULE
711–1492

Scarcity of Information concerning the Tributary Christians—Supremacy of the Church under the Visigoths—Independence of the Spanish Hierarchy—Its Wealth—Civil Organization of the Christians under the Moors—Their Privileges—Restrictions imposed upon Them—Freedom of Worship—Churches, Monasteries, and Convents—Conditions in Sicily—Greater Severity of the Laws in that Island—Anomaly in the Ecclesiastical Government of Spain—The Khalif the Virtual Head of the Church—Abuse of His Power—Results of the Arab Occupation of Septimania—Increased Authority of the Spanish Hierarchy resulting from its Isolation—Social Life of the Christian Tributaries—Their Devotion to Arab Learning—They are employed by the Khalifs in Important Missions—Innate Hostility of Moslem and Christian—Number and Influence of the Renegades—The Martyrs—Causes of Persecution—Contrast between the Maxims and Policy of the Two Religions—Impediments to Racial Amalgamation.

No portion of Spanish annals presents such difficulties to historical research as that which relates to the condition of the Christians under the Moorish domination. Arab writers, usually so minute and circumstantial in their narratives, have scarcely mentioned the subject. The extraordinary conduct of the martyrs, who courted death by open violation of Moslem law, seems alone to have attracted their attention or deserved their notice. From this significant silence the inference would seem to be that the great mass of Christian tributaries were contented and peaceable. We learn from St. Eulogius and other eminent ecclesiastics that the majority of the conquered race had apostatized. It is with unconcealed feelings of sorrow and vexation that they refer to the widespread defection from the ancient faith. Even among those whose constancy was unshaken, the zealots were in a minority. It is not strange, therefore, that the Arabs should have considered the latter as irresponsible persons, whose offences, unpardonable under the Code of Islam, were punished because the law permitted the exercise of no discretion on the part of the magistrate. It is evident that those who solicited the honors of martyrdom were not regarded as representatives of either their sect or their nationality. The Moorish historians recount the voluntary sacrifice of those enthusiasts with every manifestation of wonder and pity. It was not until their obstinacy, provoking dissension and revolt, began to menace the safety of the government, that their language reveals a feeling of vindictiveness against their misguided tributaries.