Stoning Jews in Lent.—A Custom.
Stoning Jews in Lent.—A Custom.
From the sabbath before Palm-Sunday, to the last hour of the Tuesday after Easter, “the Christians were accustomed to stone and beat the Jews,”[11] and all Jews who desired to exempt themselves from the infliction of this cruelty, commuted for a payment in money. It was likewise ordained in one of the Catholic services, during Lent, that all orders of men should be prayed for except the Jews.[12] These usages were instituted and justified by a dreadful perversion of scripture, when rite and ceremony triumphed over truth and mercy. Humanity was dead, for superstition Molochized the heart.
From the dispersion of the Jews they have lived peaceably in all nations towards all, and in all nations been persecuted, imprisoned, tortured, and put to death, or massacred by mobs. In England, kings conspired with their subjects to oppress them. To say nothing of the well-known persecutions they endured under king John, the walls of London were repaired with the stones of their dwellings, which his barons had pillaged and destroyed. Until the reign of Henry II., a spot of ground near Red-cross-street, in London, was the only place in all England wherein they were allowed to bury their dead.
In 1262, after the citizens of London broke into their houses, plundered their property, and murdered seven hundred of them in cold blood, King Henry III. gave their ruined synagogue in Lothbury to the friars called the fathers of the sackcloth. The church of St. Olave in the Old Jewry was another of their synagogues till they were dispossessed of it: were the sufferings they endured to be recounted we should shudder. Our old English ancestors would have laughed any one to derision who urged in a Jew’s behalf, that he had “eyes,” or “hands,” “organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions;” or that he was “fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is.” They would have deemed a man mad had one been found with a desire to prove that
———— the poor Jew,
In corporal sufferance feels a pang as great
As when a Christian dies.
To say nothing of their more obvious sufferings for many centuries, the tide of public opinion raged against the Jews vehemently and incessantly. They were addressed with sneers and contumely; the finger of vulgar scorn was pointed at them; they were hunted through the streets in open day, and when protected from the extremity of violence, it was with tones and looks denoting that only a little lower hate sanctuaried their persons. In conversation and in books they were a by-word, and a jest.