But William the Norman came, and the days of the Israelite brightened. William knew the value of having the synagogue for his bank; and though a descendant of those heroic pirates who had exhibited robbery on the largest scale in history, and plundered every sea-coast of Europe every year of their lives, he yet felt all the necessity of paying his fellow-freebooters, and regarded the Jews, next to his men-at-arms, as the main prop of his throne.
But it is a curious feature in the annals of Jewish wealth, that it has never lasted long; three generations, at the most, are sure to see its end. The gourd of Jonah is its emblem to this hour; the surprising growth of a night followed by the equally surprising decay of a morning.
The Jews were desperately mulcted by Stephen, a usurper, who felt that he had but little time to lose, and, of course, plundered accordingly. But these were glorious times for what is called "change of property;" the brave earls of the Norman had already run through their estates. Money was not to be found. The times were turbulent, and the barons were forced to build castles for themselves and their cattle. They kept retainers to rob and fight, and led the life of gallant captains of banditti. Italy, the native land of romance and robbery, (its principal talents to this hour,) never exhibited more elaborate specimens of both, than England did in the days of Stephen. But the royal and baronial necessities were not to be fully supplied by the high road, and the unfortunate Jew was made the paymaster of all.
At last the Romish priesthood attacked them. This was fatal. Isaac evaded the fighting baron and the fleecing king by his habitual adroitness, and by those small sacrifices which he well knew how to compensate. But the monks, friars, and bishops were a body with which all his acuteness was unable to contend. What the Jew gained was obviously lost to the monk; and the counter was forced to yield to the cloister. The thirteenth century is still recorded among the Israelites as a kind of secondary overthrow of their nation, and Edward I. as their English Titus. The act of royal and ecclesiastical atrocity banished nearly twenty thousand Jews to seek existence in some less savage region than the "land of chivalry."
From this period they are nearly lost sight of in our English records, until the reign of Charles II. The York and Lancastrian wars certainly offered but slight temptation to the man of traffic; he must have also remembered the penalty of his former sojourn in England, and he wisely left the Plantagenets, at last, to fight it out by themselves. The reign of Cromwell gave them some hope. It is astonishing how the English spirit of that one man raised the character of England throughout Europe. The world had never seen such a brewer before; whatever he did, or wherever he went, he carried with him the homeliness, the heartiness, and the strength of his trade. He kept the insolence of France in order, soundly punished the pride of Spain, and frightened the Teutonic ferocity of Germany into quiet. If he had lived a thousand years, so long would he have kept the Stuarts in banishment. His game was harder at home, but he played his cards with equal success. He crushed at once the king and the parliament; he crushed the Presbyterians, who had crushed the church; he bridled the Independents, who had bridled the Presbyterians; he tamed the army, who had conquered the constitution; and, highest triumph of all, he tamed Ireland. The difficulty of the Wellingtons, the Peels, and the Greys,—the grand problem of Whig and Tory, was no problem to him; he suffered resistance neither moral nor physical; he would have hanged the orators and the gatherers of the "rent," on the same tree. His remedy was simple. He led his battalions at once into Ireland; stormed the rebel garrisons, hanged the rebel leaders; sent the rebel priests in droves to the West Indies; and in six months he made Ireland a place in which it was possible for an honest man to live; and this was while Ireland was still shouting for joy at Protestant massacre—while she was in the full riot of 1641—while legates, and prelates, and Jesuits were crowding the soil, and while tens of thousands of Protestants were weltering in bloody graves. The bold brewer of Huntingdon settled the country at once, and Ireland was obedient for a century to come.
It is not certain whether Cromwell had made overtures to the Jews, or the Jews to him; but the shortness of his reign precluded any actual measures in their favour. However, it is evident that they had received some impression that they would be protected; for immediately on the Restoration, and apparently without any further permission, they began to flock into England, where they have since remained under the general protection of the law.
The original condition of the Jew in England, was that of a man under the direct protection of the king,—a perilous protection, which gave his majesty the right of the liege lord over his bondsman, the right over property, and even over person. But the Jew was not long permitted to hold land. Of this right they were deprived in the reign of the third Henry, though they were suffered to retain the freehold of houses in towns. Successive acts deprived them even of this poor privilege, and no Jew was suffered to dispose of his house without the leave of the king. But, by a curious anomaly, they were again allowed to purchase houses and lands, provided they were held of the king, and even take farms for ten years. Though it seems probable that those alternations of favour and severity were but so many applications of the legal torture to the purses of the Jews.
On the Continent, the condition of the Jews was always opulent, and always comfortless. But, in general, they escaped with the simple penalty of popular contempt. There is money to be made in every country by parsimony, and a steady determination to do nothing but make money. The Jews thus escaped into the wild regions of the Goth and Vandal, and got rich among the Poles and the Russians. They were sometimes dreadfully fleeced; but the men of frost and snow were not men of massacre, and the Jews got rich again. Even now, with all the competition of all the beggars of Germany, they are the masters of all the shop-dealing and inn-keeping, and money-changing, and all the countless kinds of ingenuity that the smallest of traffics can practise upon a people who divide the farthing into a dozen fractions.
The Jew lives, fattens, and plays the financier in Morocco, as he plays the slop-seller, the quack, and the furrier in the north. He is the banker of his Highness Abderrhaman, and supplies Abd-el-Kader with sequins, Naples' soap, horses, and intelligence. The Jews in Turkey always lived in tremendous insecurity; but there too, they grew rich, they shared the favour of the sultans, (and the certainty of being occasionally plundered,) along with the Armenians, a sort of Epicene religionists, or link between the Christian and the Jew; the profession of both being money in every shape, from the hawking of pipes, and the selling of slippers, up to the court bankers; the last being notoriously a perilous distinction, for on the first necessity of the seraglio, the banker's confiscation was reckoned among the ways and means of the state. The banker's stock of bullion was "sent for," and his head generally accompanied it. His will was drawn up already by the Grand Cadi of Constantinople, and the Emperor of the Faithful was regularly declared "his heir."
The Jew in Algiers was, like the Jew every where, rich and wretched; reaping all the coin of the country, and stripped of it at every caprice of the government. The French invasion threw all the Algerine Hebrews into rapture for a while; but they have continued wringing their hands, and hanging their heads, ever since. The Frenchman is as keen as the Jew in saying, though the Jew altogether distances in gain a man who would spend his last sou on a ball, a theatre, or a billiard-table. The Jew eschews all games of chance; the opera costs a franc in Algiers, when they have one; and the Jew would not spend a franc upon the music of the spheres. He laments hourly the Algerian revolution, gnashes his teeth at the name of Charles X., cautiously anathematises Louis Philippe, (whom he regards as the rival of his reputation,) and when out of the hearing of a French sentinel, vents the reverse of a panegyric on the green excellences of his royal highness the Duc d'Aumale. The burden of his political song, is "the Turks were fine fellows; they cut off our heads, but then they spent money. The French do not cut off our heads, but then they spend no money!" The Jew evidently preferred the chance of losing his head to the certainty of making nothing out of the shabbiness of his new masters. Thus Algiers no longer offers a harvest for the Israelite.