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ISRAEL IN EUROPE

ISRAEL IN EUROPE

BY
G. F. ABBOTT

KNIGHT COMMANDER OF THE HELLENIC ORDER OF THE SAVIOUR
AUTHOR OF “SONGS OF MODERN GREECE,”
“THE TALE OF A TOUR IN MACEDONIA,”
“THROUGH INDIA WITH THE PRINCE,” ETC.

LONDON
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1907

GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.

PREFATORY NOTE

The aims and the limits of the present work are sufficiently explained in the Introduction. Here it only remains for me to perform the pleasant duty of recording my gratitude to Mr. I. Abrahams, of Cambridge, for his friendly assistance in the revision of the proofs and my indebtedness to him for many valuable suggestions. He must not, however, be held to share all my views.

G. F. A.

CONTENTS

AUTHORITIES

GENERAL

H. Graetz’s “History of the Jews.”

Dean Milman’s “History of the Jews.”

“The Jewish Encyclopedia.”

PARTICULAR

Ch. I.

E. R. Bevan’s “The House of Seleucus”; “High Priests of Israel.”

Ch. II., IV., V.

J. S. Riggs’ “History of the Jewish People during the Maccabaean and Roman Periods.”

W. D. Morrison’s “The Jews under Roman Rule.”

Mommsen’s “History of Rome.”

Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”

Ch. VI., VII., VIII.

Benjamin of Tudela’s “Travels.” Transl. by Asher.

I. Abrahams’ “Jewish Life in the Middle Ages”; “Maimonides.”

Hallam’s “Middle Ages.”

S. P. Scott’s “History of the Moorish Empire in Europe.”

Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”

A. Marshall’s “Principles of Economics.”

Ch. IX.

J. Jacobs’ “The Jews of Angevin England.”

B. L. Abrahams’ “The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290.”

J. E. Blunt’s “History of the Establishment and Residence of the Jews in England.”

M. Margoliouth’s “The Jews in Great Britain.”

Ch. X., XI.

A. de Castro’s “History of the Jews in Spain.”

J. Finn’s “History of the Jews in Spain and Portugal.”

E. H. Lindo’s “History of the Jews in Spain and Portugal.”

Prescott’s “Ferdinand and Isabella.”

Ch. XII.

The Cambridge Modern History: Vol. I., “The Renaissance.”

W. Roscoe’s “The Life and Pontificate of Leo X.”

Ch. XIII.

I. Abrahams’ “Jewish Life in the Middle Ages.”

W. C. Hazlitt’s “The Venetian Republic.”

Ch. XIV.

The Cambridge Modern History: Vol. II. “The Reformation.”

Ch. XV.

J. Finn’s “History of the Israelites in Poland.”

The Cambridge Modern History: Vol. III., “The Wars of Religion”; Vol. IV., “The Thirty Years’ War.”

Ch. XVI.

Motley’s “Dutch Republic.”

Ch. XVII.

J. E. Blunt’s “History of the Establishment and Residence of the Jews in England.”

M. Margoliouth’s “The Jews in Great Britain.”

Ch. XVIII.

Lucien Wolf’s “Resettlement of Jews in England”; “Manasseh ben Israel’s Mission to Oliver Cromwell.”

S. R. Gardiner’s “History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate.”

J. Morley’s “Oliver Cromwell.”

Ch. XIX., XX.

M. Samuel’s “Memoirs of Moses Mendelssohn.”

Solomon Maimon’s “Autobiography.” Transl. by H. Clark Murray.

E. Schreiber’s “Reformed Judaism and its Pioneers.”

The Cambridge Modern History: Vol. VIII., “The French Revolution”; Vol. IX., “Napoleon.”

Encyclopædia Britannica: Article, “Jews.”

Ch. XXI.

Prince San Donato Demidoff’s “The Jewish Question in Russia.” Transl. by H. Guedalla.

L. Cerf’s “Les Juifs de Russie.”

Leo Wiener’s “History of Yiddish Literature in the 19th Century.”

Beatrice C. Baskerville’s “The Polish Jew.”

Ch. XXII.

Israel Davis’ “Jews in Roumania.”

E. Sincerus’ “Les Juifs en Roumanie: Les lois et leurs conséquences.”

A. M. Goldsmid’s “Persecution of the Jews of Roumania.”

H. Sutherland Edwards’ “Sir William White: His Life and Correspondence.”

“Rumania and the Jews,” by “Verax.”

Ch. XXIII.

Joseph Jacobs’ “The Jewish Question.”

“Aspects of the Jewish Question,” by “A Quarterly Reviewer.”

Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu’s “Israel parmi les Nations.”

E. Drumont’s “La France Juive.”

Encyclopædia Britannica: Article, “Anti-Semitism.”

W. H. Wilkins’ “The Alien Invasion.”

C. Russell and H. S. Lewis’ “The Jew in London.”

Ch. XXIV.

H. Bentwich’s “The Progress of Zionism.”

R. Gottheil’s “The Aims of Zionism.”

T. Herzl’s “A Jewish State.”

“The Jewish Question,” Anon. (Gay and Bird, 1894).

“Aspects of the Jewish Question,” by “A Quarterly Reviewer.”

Encyclopædia Britannica: Article, “Zionism.”

In addition to these main guides reference, on special points, is made to particular authorities in the footnotes.

INTRODUCTION

It was not without reason that Philo, the famous Graeco-Jewish scholar of Alexandria, regarded Aaron’s rod, which “was budded, and brought forth buds, and bloomed blossoms, and yielded almonds,” as an emblem of his race. Torn from the stem that bore and from the soil that nourished them, and for nearly twenty centuries exposed to the wintry blasts of adversity and persecution, the children of Israel still bud and blossom and provide the world with the perennial problem now known as the Jewish Question—a question than which none possesses a deeper interest for the student of the past, or a stronger fascination for the speculator on the future; a question compared with which the Eastern, the Irish, and all other vexed questions are but things of yesterday; a question which has taxed the ingenuity of European statesmen ever since the dispersion of this Eastern people over the lands of the West.

“What to do with the Jew?” This is the question. The manner in which each generation of statesmen, from the legislators of ancient Rome to those of modern Roumania, has attempted to answer it, forming as it does a sure criterion of the material, intellectual and moral conditions which prevailed in each country at each period, might supply the basis for an exceedingly interesting and instructive, if somewhat humiliating, study of European political ethics. Here I will content myself with a lighter labour. I propose to sketch in outline the fortunes of Israel in Europe from the earliest times to the present day. It is a sad tale, and often told; but sufficiently important to bear telling again. My object—in so far as human nature permits—will be neither to excuse nor to deplore; but only to describe and, in some measure, to explain.

It is no exaggeration to say that the Jews have been in Europe for a longer period than some of the nations which glory in the title of European. Ages before the ancestors of the modern Hungarians and Slavonians were heard of, the keen features and guttural accents of the Hebrew trader were familiar in the markets of Greece and Italy. As early as the fourth century B.C. we find the Hebrew word for “earnest-money” domiciled in the Greek language (ἀρραβών), and as early as the second century in the Latin (arrhabo)—a curious illustration of the Jew’s commercial activity in the Mediterranean even in those days.[1] And yet, despite the length of their sojourn among the peoples of the West, the majority of the Jews have remained in many essential respects as Oriental as they were in the time of the Patriarchs. A younger race would have yielded to the influence of environment, a weaker race would have succumbed to oppression, a less inflexible or unsympathetic race might have conquered its conquerors. But the Jews, when they first came into contact with Europe, were already too old for assimilation, too strong for extermination, too hardened in their peculiar cult for propagandism. Even after having ceased to exist as a state Israel survived as a nation; forming the one immobile figure in a perpetually moving panorama. The narrow local idea of the ancient Greek state was merged into the broad cosmopolitanism of the Macedonian Empire, and that, in its turn, was absorbed by the broader cosmopolitanism of Imperial Rome. But the Jew remained faithful to his own olden ideal. Monotheism superseded Polytheism, and the cosmopolitanism of the Roman Empire was succeeded by that of the Roman Church. The Jew still continued rooted in the past. Mediaeval cosmopolitanism gave way to the nationalism of modern Europe. Yet the Jew declined to participate in the change. Too narrow in one age, not narrow enough in another, always at one with himself and at variance with his neighbours, now, as ever, he offers the melancholy picture of one who is a stranger in the land of his fathers and an alien in that of his adoption.

The upshot of this refusal to move with the rest of the world has been mutual hatred, discord, and persecution; each age adding a new ring to the poisonous plant of anti-Judaism. For this result both sides are to blame—or neither. No race has ever had the sentiment of nationality and religion more highly developed, or been more intolerant of dissent, than the Jewish; no race has ever suffered more grievously from national and religious fanaticism and from intolerance of dissent on the part of others. The Jewish colonies forming, as they mostly do, small, exclusive communities amidst uncongenial surroundings, have always been the objects of prejudice—the unenviable privilege of all minorities which stubbornly refuse to conform to the code approved by the majority. The same characteristics evoked a similar hostility against primitive Christianity and led to the persecution of the early martyrs. No one is eccentric with impunity. Notwithstanding the gospel of toleration constantly preached by sages, and occasionally by saints, the attitude of mankind has always been and still is one of hostility towards dissent. Sois mon frère, ou je te tue is a maxim which, in a modified form, might be extended to other than secret revolutionary societies. The only difference consists in the manner in which this tyrannical maxim is acted upon in various countries and ages: legal disability may supersede massacre, or expulsion may be refined into social ostracism; yet the hostility is always present, however much its expression may change. Man is a persecuting animal.

To the Jews in Europe one might apply the words which Balzac’s cynical priest addressed to the disillusioned young poet: “Vous rompiez en visière aux idées du monde et vous n’avez pas eu la considération que le monde accorde à ceux qui obéissent à ses lois.” Now, when to mere outward nonconformity in matters of worship and conduct is superadded a radical discrepancy of moral, political, and social ideals, whether this discrepancy be actively paraded or only passively maintained, the outcome can be no other than violent friction. It is, therefore, not surprising that the “black days” should vastly outnumber the “red” ones in the Jewish Calendar—that brief but most vivid commentary on the tragic history of the race. The marvel is that the race should have survived to continue issuing a calendar.

At the same time, a dispassionate investigation would prove, I think, to the satisfaction of all unbiassed minds, that the degree in which the Jews have merited the odium of dissent has in every age been strictly proportionate to the magnitude of the odium itself. Even at the present hour it would be found upon enquiry that the Jews retain most of their traditional aloofness and fanaticism—most of what their critics stigmatise as their tribalism—in those countries in which they suffer most severely. Nay, in one and the same country the classes least liable to the contempt, declared or tacit, of their neighbours are the classes least distinguished by bigotry. It is only natural that it should be so. People never cling more fanatically to the ideal than when they are debarred from the real. Christianity spread first among slaves and the outcasts of society, and its final triumph was secured by persecution. We see a vivid illustration of this universal principle in modern Ireland. To what is the enormous influence of the Catholic Church over the minds of the peasantry due, but to the ideal consolations which it has long provided for their material sufferings? Likewise in the Near East. The wealthy Christians, in order to save their lands from confiscation, abjured their religion and embraced the dominant creed of Islam. The poor peasants are ready to lay down their lives for their faith, and believe that whosoever dies in defence of it will rise again to life within forty days. It is easy to deride the excesses of spiritual enthusiasm, to denounce the selfish despotism of its ministers, and to deplore the blind fanaticism of its victims. But fanaticism, after all, is only faith strengthened by adversity and soured by oppression.

Jewish history itself shows that the misfortunes which fan bigotry also preserve religion. Whilst independent and powerful, the Jews often forgot the benefits bestowed upon them by their God, and transferred the honour due to Him to the strange gods of their idolatrous neighbours. But when Jehovah in His wrath hid His face from His people and punished its ingratitude by placing it under a foreign yoke, the piety of the Jews acquired in calamity a degree of fervour and constancy which it had never possessed in the day of their prosperity. The same phenomenon has been observed in every age. When well treated, the Jews lost much of their aloofness, and the desire for national rehabilitation was cherished only as a romantic dream. But in times of persecution the longing for redemption, and for restoration under a king of their own race, blazed up into brilliant flame. The hope of the Messianic Redeemer has been a torch of light and comfort through many a long winter’s night. But it has burnt its brightest when the night has been darkest. If at such times the Jews have shown an inordinate tenacity of prophetic promise, who can blame them? They who possess nothing in the present have the best right to claim a portion of the future.

CHAPTER I
HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM

In spite of the well-known influence which Greek culture and Greek thought exercised over a portion of the Jews under Alexander the Great’s successors, the mass of the Hebrew nation never took kindly to Hellenism. Alexander proved himself as great a statesman as he was a warrior. An apostle of Hellenism though he was, he did not seek to consolidate his Empire by enforcing uniformity of cult and custom, as short-sighted despots have done since, but by encouraging friendly intercourse between the Greeks and the various peoples that came under his sceptre. Gifted with rare imagination, he entered into the feelings of races as diverse as the Egyptian and the Jewish. To the latter he allotted the border-lands which had long been the bone of contention between themselves and the Samaritans. He relieved them from taxation during the unproductive Sabbath year. He respected their prejudices, honoured their religion, and appreciated their conscientious scruples. While, out of deference to Chaldean religious feeling, he ordered the Temple of Bel to be rebuilt in Babylon, he forgave the Jewish soldiers their refusal to obey his command as contrary to the teaching of their faith. Conciliation was the principle of Alexander’s imperialism and the secret of his success. ♦301 B.C.♦ The Ptolemies, to whose share, on the partition of the Macedonian Empire, Palestine ultimately fell, inherited Alexander’s enlightened policy. The High Priest of the Jews was recognised as the head of the nation, and it was through him that the tribute was paid. So fared the Jews at home.

Abroad their lot was equally enviable. Some modern critics had doubted the settlement of Jews in Egypt until the third century. But recent discoveries (notably Mr. R. Mond’s Aramaic Papyri) prove that a Jewish community existed in Egypt even in the centuries preceding Alexander. Now persuasion and the hope of profit drew many thousands of them to Alexandria, Cyrene, and other centres of Hellenistic culture. In all these places they lived on terms of perfect equality with the Greek colonists. The newly-built city on the mouth of the Nile soon became a seat of Jewish influence and a school of learning for the Jewish nation. Under the benign rule of the Ptolemies the Jews prospered, multiplied, and attained success in every walk of life, public no less than private. Of the five divisions of Alexandria they occupied nearly two. Egypt was then the granary of Europe, and the corn trade lay largely in Jewish hands. Refinement came in the train of riches, and freedom begot tolerance. The Jews cultivated Greek letters, and some of them became deeply imbued with the spirit of Greek philosophy and even of art. This friendly understanding between the Jewish and the Greek mind gave to the world the mystic union of Moses and Plato in the works of Philo and the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament, which was to prepare the way for the advent of Christianity. And yet the bulk of the Alexandrian Jews remained a peculiar people. Greeks and Egyptians had fused their religions into a common form of worship. But the Jews were still separated from both races by the invincible barriers of belief, law, and custom. They still looked upon Jerusalem as their metropolis, and upon Alexandria as a mere place of exile. In the midst of paganism they formed a monotheistic colony. Their houses of prayer were also schools of Levitical learning, where the Torah was assiduously studied and expounded. Their one link with the State was their own Ethnarch, who acted as supreme sovereign and judge of his people, and represented it at Court.

Similar conditions prevailed in Palestine. There also Hellenic language, manners, feasts, games, and philosophy effected an entrance through the influence of the Greek colonies on the coast, and a party of Jewish Hellenists was formed. In the land which once rang with the prophetic utterances of an Isaiah and a Jeremiah were now sung the love-poems of Sappho, and were quoted the witty sarcasms of the Athenian Voltaire, Euripides. But the Torah, or Jewish religious law, was bitterly opposed to all innovations, and the anti-Greek section of the people, termed the “Pious” (Chassidim or Assideans), regarded with deep misgiving the inroad of the foreign culture. Hence arose an implacable feud between the Liberals and the Conservatives, who hated, anathematised, and later crucified each other as cordially as brethren only can do. But the Chassidim, though politically worsted, were all-powerful in the affections of the community, and the time was not distant when they were to assume the supreme command.

In 198 B.C. Palestine, after a hundred years’ struggle, passed under the sway of the Graeco-Syrian Seleucids, who, unlike their predecessors, initiated a policy of forcible assimilation, and, aided by the Hellenistic party among the Jews themselves, compelled their subjects to adopt their own civilisation and to pay homage to their own gods. However, neither the tolerance of the Graeco-Egyptian nor the violence of the Graeco-Syrian kings succeeded in reconciling the Jew to the ways of the Gentile. ♦175–164 B.C.♦ Antiochus Epiphanes might banish Jehovah from the Temple of Jerusalem and enthrone Zeus in his stead; he might set up altars to the pagan deities in every town and village; and he might exhaust all the resources of despotism in the cause of conversion. The timorous were coerced into a feigned and transient acquiescence, but the bulk of the nation, baited into stubbornness, preferred exile or martyrdom to apostasy. The defiled temple remained empty and the altars cold, until the smouldering discontent of the outraged people broke out into flame, and passive resistance yielded to fierce rebellion.

♦166–141 B.C.♦

The movement was led by the heroic, devout, and fierce house of the Maccabees—a branch of the Hasmonaean family—who, after a long struggle, distinguished by splendid endurance, astuteness, and unspeakable severity, delivered their people from the levelling Hellenism of the foreign rulers, instituted the Sanhedrin (Συνέδριον), and restored the national worship of Jehovah in all its pristine purity and narrowness. ♦163 B.C.♦ The victorious band finally entered Jerusalem “with praise and palm branches and with harps and cymbals and viols and with hymns and with songs,”[2] Simon was acclaimed High Priest and Prince of Israel, and a new era was inaugurated. ♦141. May 23.♦ The restoration of the Temple is still celebrated by the Jews in their annual eight days’ Feast of Dedication (Chanukah), when lamps are lit and a hymn is solemnly sung commemorating the miracle of the solitary flask of oil, which escaped pagan pollution and kept the perpetual light burning in the House of the Lord until the day of redemption.

But religious enthusiasm, though a powerful sword, is an awkward sceptre, and it was not long ere the victorious family forgot, as the “Pious” would have said, the cause of God in the pursuit of self-aggrandisement and earthly renown. The conservative elements had been united in the supreme effort to maintain their religious liberty. But the interest in gaining political independence was limited to the ruling family. The Hasmonaeans, having established their dynasty, aimed at conquest abroad and at royal splendour at home. One of them surrounded himself with a foreign bodyguard, and another assumed the title of King. Of their former character they retained only the enthusiast’s ferocity. Their family was torn with feuds and stained with the blood of its own members. This policy of worldly ambition lost them the support of the Chassidim, who could tolerate bloodshed only for the sake of righteousness. Moreover, the Hasmonaeans, in their new position as an established family, had more in common with the priestly aristocracy than with the poor fanatics by whose enthusiasm they had conquered that position. They, therefore, joined the Hellenizing party, and, though a barefaced adoption of the foreign gods was no longer possible, they endeavoured to effect by example what the Seleucids had vainly attempted to achieve by force. They were not altogether unsuccessful. Greek architecture was introduced into Jerusalem. The Greek numerals were adopted. Greek was understood by all the statesmen of Judaea and employed in diplomatic negotiations. Greek names became not uncommon. The Hebrew bards ceased to hang their harps upon the willow-trees. There was no longer need for bitter lamentation or lyric inspiration. Prose, tame but sober, superseded the fiery poetry of olden times. Hymns gave place to history. The Jews were at last enjoying with calm moderation their triumphs, religious and political, over their foreign and domestic enemies.

But, if the Hebrew muse was silent for want of themes, the Hebrew genius, which had dictated the ancient psalms and inspired the ancient prophets, was not dead. The national attachment to tradition and strict Judaism was manifested by the revival of Hebrew as a spoken tongue. It was employed on the coinage, in public edicts, and in popular songs. Patriotism was nourished by the celebration of the anniversaries of the national victories over the enemies of Judaism. In one word, the crowd refused to follow the fashions of the Court. The Jew had tasted the fruit of Occidental culture and pronounced it unpalatable. Hellenism had been touched and found base metal; and, notwithstanding his Kings’ efforts—their Greek temples and Greek theatres—the Hebrew remained an Oriental. “Cursed is the man who allows his son to learn the Grecian wisdom” was the verdict of the Talmud, and a Jewish poet many centuries after repeats the anathema in a milder form: “Go not near the Grecian wisdom. It has no fruit, but only blossoms.”[3]

But, though the bulk of the nation agreed in its attitude towards foreign culture, there now appears an internal division into several parties, differing from one another in the degree of their attachment to the traditions of the past, and in their aspirations for the future. Two of these sects stand out pre-eminently as representative of Hebrew sentiment, and as the exponents of the two attitudes which have continued to divide the Jewish nation through the ages down to our own day. These are the Pharisees and the Sadducees, whose names are first heard under the early Hasmonaean chiefs, but whose views correspond with those of the Hellenistic and national parties of the Seleucid period. The Pharisees were an offshoot of the Assidean party which, as we have seen, had waged a truceless and successful war against Hellenism. After their victory, the most enthusiastic of the “Pious” retired from public life and nursed their piety and disappointment in ascetic seclusion. But the majority of the party were far from considering their mission fulfilled, or from being satisfied with abstract devotion. They regarded it as a duty both to the faith and to the fatherland to take an active part in politics. The preservation of Judaism in its ancient exclusiveness was their programme. All public undertakings, all national acts, as well as all private transactions, were to be measured by the rigid standard of religion. The Law in the hands of the Pharisees became a Procrustean bed upon which the mind of the nation was to be stretched or maimed, according to the requirements of nationalism and the interpretations of the Scribes. This inflexible orthodoxy, with its concomitants of discipline and sacrifice of individuality, was in perfect accord with the Hebrew temperament, and the Pharisees must be regarded as the interpreters of the views dear to the great mass of their compatriots. As time went on, the Pharisaic attitude became more and more hardened into a theological creed, clothed in a web of ceremonial formalities, but vivified by an inspiring devotion to the will of Jehovah, and an ardent belief in the ultimate triumph of His Elect.

Against this teaching arose the sect of the Sadducees, who played towards Pharisaism a part in one respect analogous to that played by Protestantism towards Catholicism, in another to that played by the Cavaliers towards the Roundheads. They derived all their religious tenets from the letter of Scripture, rejecting the lessons of oral tradition and the “legacies of the Scribes.” They refused to believe in angels or in the resurrection of the dead, and they repudiated the fatalistic doctrine that the future of the individual and of the state depends not upon human action but upon the divine will, fixed once for all. They pointed out that, if this were the case, the belief in God’s justice would be reduced to an absurdity, as saint and sinner would be confused in one indiscriminate verdict. The Sadducees held that man is master of his own fortunes. The Pharisees met the objection of their opponents as to divine justice by the non-Scriptural doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, which had crept into Judaism in the latter years of the Babylonian captivity. If the saint and the sinner fared alike in this life, they argued, the balance would be restored in the next. The righteous would then rise up to everlasting bliss, and the wicked to everlasting shame. This and other minor points formed the ground of dogmatic difference between the two sects. Their difference in questions of practical politics and in social views was characteristic of their respective creeds. The Sadducees, far from expecting the salvation of the nation from a miraculous intervention of the Deity, looked to human wisdom for help. They placed the interests of the State above the interests of the Synagogue. They shared in the aristocrat’s well-bred horror of disturbing enthusiasms and of asceticism. Though recognising the authority of the Law, they were temperate in their piety and could not live by unleavened bread alone. They favoured Hellenism and supported the Hasmonaean kings in their efforts to shake off the trammels of ecclesiastical tyranny. ♦40–4 B.C.♦ The liberal and progressive and, at the same time, degenerate tendencies of the Sadducean protestants are seen under their most pronounced form in the sect of the Herodians, who later helped Herod the Great in his endeavour to render pagan culture popular among his subjects by the erection of temples and theatres, by the adoption of heathen fashions of worship, and by the encouragement of the Hellenic games. The party of the Sadducees included the great priestly families, the noble, and the wealthy, that is, the minority. Their opponents interpreted the feelings of the lower priesthood and of the people. Judaism, as understood by the Pharisees, was the idol for which the nation had suffered martyrdom, and the national devotion to that idol had gained new fervour from the recent struggle with Hellenism.

The hatred of the Jews towards Hellenism may, in one sense, be regarded as a sequel to that older hostility which appears to have embittered the intercourse between Europe and Asia from the very dawn of history. It is an antipathy which under various names and guises continues prevalent to this day—revealing itself now in anti-Semitism, now in anti-Turkism, and again in the exclusion of Asiatic immigrants from English-speaking countries: a sad legacy received from our far-off ancestors and likely to be handed down to a remote posterity. Long before the appearance of the Jew on the stage of European politics this antagonism had manifested itself in the hereditary feud between Hellene and Barbarian which the ingenious Herodotus traced to the reciprocal abductions of ladies by the inhabitants of the two continents, and of which, according to his theory, the Trojan war was the most important and brilliant episode.[4] The same feud was in historic times dignified by the Persian king’s gigantic effort to subdue Europe and, at a later period, by Alexander’s success in subduing Asia. Had the father of history been born again to celebrate the exploits of the latter hero, he would, no doubt, have described the Macedonian campaign as part of the chain of enmity the first links of which he had sought and found in the romantic records of mythical gallantry. The modern student, while smiling a superior smile at his great forerunner’s simple faith in legend and traditional gossip, cannot but admit that there was true insight in Herodotus’s comprehensive survey of history; but, examining things by the light of maturer experience and with a less uncritical eye, he will be inclined to regard this venerable strife as the result of a far deeper antagonism between rival civilisations, rival mental and moral attitudes—the attitudes which in their broadest outlines may be defined as Oriental and Occidental respectively; in their narrower aspect, with which we are more immediately concerned, as Hebraic and Hellenic.

The Jew had one quality in common with the Greek. They both saw life clearly and saw it as a harmonious whole. But they each saw it from an opposite standpoint. The thoroughness, consistency, and unity of each ideal by itself only rendered its incompatibility with the other more complete. It is to this incompatibility that must be attributed the failure of Hellenism in Western Asia generally and among the Jews in particular. A system of life reared upon a purely intellectual basis had no charm for a race essentially spiritual. The cold language of reason conveyed no message to the mind of the Hebrew who, in common with most Orientals, looks to revealed religion alone for guidance in matters of belief and conduct. The Oriental never feels happy except in a creed, and the Hellene offered him nothing better than an ethical code. How mean and how earthy must this code have appeared in the eyes of men accustomed to the splendid terrors of the Mosaic Law! Again, the intellectual freedom—the privilege of investigating all and testing all before accepting anything as true—which the Greek has claimed from all time as man’s inalienable birthright, and upon which he has built his noble civilisation, was repugnant to a people swathed in the bands of tradition and distrusting all things that are not sanctioned by authority. The Greek had no word for Faith as distinct from Conviction. He revered intelligence and scorned intuition. What man’s mental eye could not see clearly was not worth seeing, or rather did not exist for him. Palestine was the home of Revelation; Hellas of Speculation. The one country has given us Philosophy and the Platonic Dialogues; the other the Prophets and the Mosaic Decalogue: the former all argument, the latter all commandment.

The following conversation between two representatives of the two worlds brings their respective attitudes into vivid relief. One is Justin Martyr, the other a mysterious personage—probably a fictitious character—who sowed in Justin’s mind the seed of the new religion.

Justin. Can man achieve a greater triumph than prove that reason reigns supreme over all things, and having captured reason and being borne aloft by it to survey the errors of other men? There is no wisdom except in Philosophy and right reason. It is, therefore, every man’s duty to cultivate Philosophy and to deem that the greatest and most glorious pursuit, all other possessions as of secondary or tertiary value; for, if these are wedded to Philosophy, they are worthy of some acceptance; but, if divorced from Philosophy, they are burdensome and vulgar.

Stranger. What is Philosophy and what the happiness derived therefrom?

Justin. Philosophy is the Knowledge of that which is and is true. The happiness derived therefrom is the prize of that knowledge.

Stranger. How can the Philosophers form a correct notion of God, or teach anything true concerning him, since they have neither seen him nor heard of him?

Justin. God cannot be seen with the eye, but only comprehended by the mind.

Stranger. Has our mind, then, such and so great a power as to perceive that which is not perceptible through the senses? Or can man’s mind ever see God unless it is adorned with the holy spirit?

Justin. To whom can, then, one apply for teaching, if there is no truth in Plato and Pythagoras?

Stranger. There have been men of old, older than any of these reputed philosophers, saintly men and just, beloved of God, who spoke through the divine spirit and predicted the things that were to be. These men are called Prophets. They alone saw the truth and declared it unto men; neither favouring nor fearing any one; not slaves to ambition; but only speaking the things which they heard and saw when filled with holy spirit. Their works are still extant, and the lover of wisdom may find therein all about the beginning and end of things, and every thing that he need know. They had not recourse to proof, for they were above all proof, trustworthy witnesses of the truth. Pray thou above all things that the gates of the light may be opened unto thee.[5]

This diversity of view reveals itself in every phase of Hebrew and Hellenic life—political, social, religious and artistic. The Greeks very early outgrew the primitive reverence for the tribal chief—the belief that he derived his authority from Heaven, and that he was, on that account, entitled to unlimited obedience on the part of man. Even in the oldest form of the Greek state known to us—the Homeric—the king, though wielding a sceptre “given unto him by Zeus,” is in practice, if not in theory, controlled by the wisdom of a senate and by the will of the people. Monarchy gradually developed into oligarchy, and this gave way to democracy. Nor was the evolution effected until the sacerdotal character, which formed one of the king’s principal claims to reverence and obedience, lost its influence over the Greek mind. In historic times the impersonal authority of human law stood alone and paramount, quite distinct from any religious duty, which was a matter of unwritten tradition and custom. The divorce of the Church from the State in Greece was complete. Now, among the Jews the opposite thing happened. Kingship remained hereditary and indissolubly associated with sacerdotalism. The Semite could not, any more than the Mongol, conceive of a separation between the spiritual and the temporal Government. The King of Israel in the older days always was of the house of David, always anointed, and always wore the double crown of princely and priestly authority. And when, after the return from Babylon, the house of David disappears from sight, its power is bequeathed to the hereditary high-priest. To the Jew Church and State, religion and morality, continued to be synonymous terms; the distinction between the sacred and the secular sides of life was never recognised; all law, political and social, emanated from one Heaven-inspired code; and, while Greece was fast progressing towards ochlocracy, Judaea remained a theocracy.

The Greek was an egoist. He disliked uniformity. Although in the direction of his private life he voluntarily submitted to a variety of state regulations such as the citizen of a modern country would resent as an irksome interference with the liberties of the individual, yet, judged by the standard of antiquity, the Greek was anything but amenable to control, and, as time went on, his attitude became little better than that of a highly civilised anarchist. There were limits beyond which the Greek would never admit his neighbour’s right to dictate his conduct any more than his thoughts. He suffered from an almost morbid fear of having his individuality merged in any social institution. He would rather be poor in his own right than prosper by association with others. Discipline was the least conspicuous trait in his character and self-assertion the strongest. The Greek knew everything except how to obey. The Jew, on the other hand, found his chief happiness in self-effacement and submission. His everyday life, to the minutest details, was regulated by the Law. He was not even allowed to be virtuous after his own fashion. The claims of the individual upon the community were only less great than the claims of the community upon the individual. The strength of Hebraism always lay in its power of combination, the weakness of Hellenism in the lack of it.

Equally striking is the contrast discerned between the aesthetic ideals of the two races. Much in Hebrew imagination is couched in forms which would lose all their beauty and freshness, if expressed in colour or marble; much that would look grotesque, if dragged into the daylight of pure reason. Its effect depends entirely on the semi-darkness of emotional suggestion. Now the Greek hated twilight. He had no patience with the vague and the obscure in imagination any more than in thought. Hence artistic expression was nothing to the Jew; everything to the Greek. Judaism shunned pictorial representation; Hellenism worshipped it. And, as art in antiquity was largely the handmaid of religion, this diversity of the aesthetic temperament led to an irreconcilable religious antagonism. The Jew looked upon the pagan’s graven images with abhorrence, and the pagan regarded the Jew’s adoration of the invisible as a proof of atheism.

Not less repugnant to the Hebrew was the Hellenic moral temperament as mirrored in literature, in social life, and in public worship—that temperament which, without being altogether free from pessimism, melancholy, and discontent, yet finds its most natural expression in a healthy enjoyment of life and an equally healthy horror of death. “I would rather be a poor man’s serf on earth than king among the dead!” sighs Achilles in Hades, and the sentiment is one which his whole race has echoed through the ages, and which, despite nineteen centuries of Christianity, is still heard in the folk-songs of modern Greece. The Greek saw the world as it is, and, upon the whole, found it very good. He tasted its pleasures with moderation and bore its pains with a good grace. He perceived beauty in all things; adoring the highest and idealising the meanest. Even the shrill song of the humble grasshopper held sweet music for the Greek. He revelled in the loveliness and colour of life. He was inspired by the glory of the human form. He extolled the majesty of man. The Hebrew mind was nursed by meditation; the Hellenic drew its nourishment from contemplation. Nature was the Greek’s sole guide in taste as well as in conduct; from nature he learnt the canons of the beautiful as well as the laws of right and wrong. Hence no country has produced greater poets than Greece, or fewer saints.

How could this view of things, so sane and yet so earthy, be acceptable to a race oppressed by the sense of human suffering as the fruit of human sin? “Serve the Lord with joy; come before him with singing,” urged the Psalmist in a moment of optimistic cheerfulness. But it was only for a moment.[6] The true note of Hebraism is struck in another text: “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” The Greek understood the meaning of the sad refrain; but he did not allow it to depress him. To the Greek life was a joyous reality, or at the worst an interesting problem; to the Jew a bad dream, or at the best an inscrutable mystery. To the Hebrew mind the sun that shines in the sky and the blossoms that adorn the earth are at most but pale symbols of Divine Love, pledges for a bliss which is not of this world. And yet Socrates emptied the cup of death with a smile and a jest, where Job would have filled the world with curses and bitter lamentation. Laughter came as spontaneously to the Greek as breath, and the two things died together. The Jew could not laugh, and would not allow any one else to do so. The truth is that the Greek never grew old, and the Jew was never young.

Another lively illustration of the gulf which separated the two races is offered by the Greek games. These were introduced into Palestine by the Greek rulers and colonists, were adopted by the Hellenizing minority among the Jews themselves, and were denounced with horror by the Conservative majority. Nudity, in the eyes of the latter, was the colophon of shamelessness, while by the Greeks the discarding of false shame was regarded as one of the first steps to true civilisation. Thucydides mentions the athletic habit of racing perfectly naked as an index to the progress achieved by his country and as one of the things that marked off the Hellene from the Barbarian.[7] The Greeks were free from that morbid consciousness of sex which troubled the over-clothed Asiatics. Nor were they aware of that imaginary war between the spirit and the flesh which gave rise to the revolting self-torments of Eastern aspirants to heaven.

The peculiar characteristics of the Hebrew mind found their supreme manifestation in the sect of the Essenes—the extreme wing of the Pharisaic phalanx. The strictness of the Pharisees was laxity when compared with the painful austerity of their brethren. The latter aimed at nothing less than a pitiless immolation of human nature to the demands of an ideal sanctity. Enamoured of this imaginary holiness, the Essenes disdained all the real comforts and joys of life. Their diet was meagre, their dwellings mean, their dress coarse. Colour and ornament were eschewed as Satanic snares. The mere act of moving a vessel, or even obedience to the most elementary calls of nature, on the Sabbath, was accounted a desecration of the holy day. Contact with unhallowed persons or objects was shunned by the Essenes as scrupulously as contact with an infected person or object is shunned by sane people in time of plague. They refused to taste food cooked, or to wear clothes made, by a non-member of the sect, or to use any implement that had not been manufactured by pure hands. Their life in consequence was largely spent in water. For whosoever was not an Essene was, in the eyes of these saints, a source of pollution. Thus godliness developed into misanthropy and cleanliness into a mania. Thus these holy men lived, turning away from the sorrows of the earth to the peace of an ideal heaven; deriving patience with the present from apocalyptic promises of future glory; and waiting for the day when the unrighteous would be smitten to the dust, the dead rise from their graves, and the just be restored to everlasting bliss under the rule of the Redeemer—the Son of Man revealed to the holy and righteous because they have despised this world and hated all its works and ways in the name of the Lord of Spirits. Celibacy, seclusion, communion of goods, distinctive garb, abstinence, discipline and self-mortification, ecstatic rapture, sanctimonious pride and prejudice—all these Oriental traits, gradually matured and subsequently rejected in their exaggerated form from the main current of Judaism, marked the Essenes out as the prototypes of Christian monasticism, and as the most peculiar class of a very peculiar people. Could anything be more diametrically opposed to the genius of Hellas? Despite Pythagorean asceticism and Orphic mysticism, enthusiastic ritual, symbolic purifications and emotional extravagances, Greek life was in the main sober, Greek culture intellectual, and the Greek mind eminently untheological.

Those who delight in tracing racial temperament to physical environment may find in the contrast between the two countries an exceptionally favourable illustration of their theory. There is more variety of scenery in a single district of Greece than in the whole of Palestine. Grey rocks and green valleys, roaring torrents and placid lakes, sombre mountains and smiling vineyards, snow-clad peaks and sun-seared plains, glaring light and deep shade alternately come and go with a bewildering rapidity in the one country. In the other, from end to end, the plain spreads its calm, monotonous beauty to the everlasting sun, and the stately palms rear their heads to the blue heavens from year’s end to year’s end, severe, uniform, immutable. It is easy to understand why the one race should have drawn its inspiration from within and the other from without; why the one should have sunk the individual in the community and the other sacrificed the community to the individual; why the one should have worshipped the form and the other the spirit. It is especially easy to understand the Greek’s inextinguishable thirst for new things and the Jew’s rigid attachment to the past. Everything in Greece suggests progress; everything in Palestine spells permanence.

The result of this fundamental discrepancy of character was such as might have been foreseen. The intense spirituality of the Jew was scandalised at the genial rationalism and sensuousness of the pagan; while the pagan, in his turn, was repelled by the morose mysticism and austerity of the Jew. History never repeats itself in all particulars. But, so far as repetition is possible, it repeated itself many centuries after, when Puritanism—representing the nearest approach to the sad and stern Hebraic conception of life that the Western mind ever achieved—declared itself the enemy of Romanism, mainly because the latter retained so much of the pagan love for form and delight in things sensuous. Cromwell’s Ironsides illustrated this attitude by marching to battle singing the Psalms of the Hebrew bard. It is given to few mortals, blessed with a calm and truly catholic genius, to reconcile the rival attitudes, and, with Matthew Arnold, to recognise that “it is natural that man should take pleasure in his senses. It is natural, also, that he should take refuge in his heart and imagination from his misery.”

CHAPTER II
THE JEW IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE

The animosity between Jew and Gentile grew in intensity and bitterness under the Roman rule, and its growth was marked by various acts of mutual violence which finally resulted in the disruption of the Jewish State and the dispersion of the Jewish race over the inhabited globe. Already in the first half of the second century B.C. we find a praetor peregrinus ordering the Jews to leave the shores of Italy within ten days. This was only the commencement of a long series of similar measures, all indicative of the repugnance inspired by the Jewish colonists. ♦63 B.C.♦ The hostility was enhanced by Pompey’s sack of Jerusalem and his severity towards the people and the priests of Palestine. Even in Rome, the hospitable harbour of countless races and creeds, there was no place for these unfortunate Semitic exiles, and their sojourn was punctuated by periodical expulsions. History is silent on the first settlement of Jews in the capital of the world, though the origin of their community may plausibly be traced to the embassy of Numenius.[8] In any case, at the time of Pompey’s expedition they already had their own quarter in Rome, on the right bank of the Tiber, and their multitude and cohesion, even then, were such that a contemporary writer did not hesitate to state that a Governor of Palestine, if unpopular in his province, might safely count on being hissed when he returned home.

♦59 B.C.♦

It was not long after that date that Cicero pleaded the cause of the Praetor Flaccus, accused of extortion during his government of Asia Minor. The Roman Jews took a keen interest in the case, and many of them crowded to the trial, for among other charges brought against the ex-praetor was that of having robbed the Temple of Jerusalem. When Cicero reached that count of the indictment, he gave eloquent testimony to the importance of the Jewish element in Rome, to the feelings which he, in common with others, entertained towards them, and to his own want of spirit. “Thou well knowest,” says the orator, addressing the Prosecutor, “how great is their multitude, how great their concord, how powerful they are in our public assemblies. But I will speak in an undertone, so that none but the judges may hear. For there is no lack of individuals ready to incite those fellows against me and all honourable persons. But I will not help them to do so.” Then, in a lowered voice Cicero proceeds to defend his client’s conduct towards the “barbarous superstition” of the Jews, and his patriotic defiance of the “turbulent mob who invade our public assemblies.” “If Pompey,” he says, “did not touch the treasures of the Temple, when he took Jerusalem, his forbearance was but another proof of his prudence: he avoided giving cause of complaint to so suspicious and slanderous a nation. It was not respect for the religion of Jews and enemies that hindered him, but regard for his own reputation.... Every nation has its own religion. We have ours. Whilst Jerusalem was yet unconquered, and the Jews lived in peace, even then they displayed a fanatical repugnance to the splendour of our state, the dignity of our name, and the institutions of our ancestors. But now the hatred which the race nourished towards our rule has been more clearly shown by force of arms. How little the immortal gods love this race has been proved by its defeat and by its humiliation.”[9]

Time did not heal the wound. Pompey had already amalgamated the Jewish kingdom in the Roman province of Syria and carried the last of the Hasmonaean princes captive to Rome. Five years later the proconsul Sabinius stripped the High Priest of the last shreds of civil authority and divided Judaea into five administrative districts. ♦57, 56, 55 B.C.♦ Frequent insurrections broke out in Palestine, and were quelled with greater or less difficulty; the last of them resulting in the robbery of the Temple of a great part of its riches by the Proconsul Marcus Crassus, while not long after the Quaestor Cassius, who acted as Governor after the death of Crassus, sold 30,000 disaffected Jews into slavery; and this state of things lasted till the fall of the Roman Republic.

♦47 B.C.♦

Julius Caesar, like Alexander, was not slow to realise the weight of the Jewish factor in the complex problem presented by the conglomeration of nations which he had set himself to rule. The numbers of the Jews scattered throughout the Empire entitled them to serious consideration; their wealth, their activity, and their unity rendered them worthy of conciliation. Moreover, Caesar, with the eye of a true statesman, saw that the representatives of this race, so capable of adapting themselves to new climatic and political conditions, and yet so tenacious of their peculiar characteristics, might help to promote that cosmopolitan spirit which was the soul of the Roman Empire. These considerations were further reinforced by feelings of gratitude; for Caesar had derived great assistance from the powerful Jewish politician Antipater during his Egyptian campaign. He, therefore, like his illustrious predecessor, granted to the Jews of Alexandria special privileges, shielding their cult from the attacks of the pagan priests, and affording them facilities for commerce, while in Palestine he reunited the five administrative districts under the authority of the High Priest and restored to the Jews some of the territory of which Pompey had deprived them. In Rome also Caesar manifested great friendship to the Jews. The Roman Jews showed that they were not insensible to these acts of kindness. At the tragic death of their benefactor they surpassed all other foreigners in their demonstrations of grief. Amidst the general lamentation, to which every race contributed its share after its own fashion, the Jews, we are told, distinguished themselves by waking and wailing beside the funeral pyre for many nights.[10] This spontaneous offering of sorrow on the part of the foreign subjects of Rome forms the best testimony to the nobility of Rome’s greatest son. Caesar might well claim the title of Father of mankind.

♦44 B.C.♦

The end of Caesar’s life proved also the end of the consideration enjoyed by the Jews under his aegis. Augustus, indeed, unbent so far as to order that prayers for his prosperity should be offered up in the Temple of Jerusalem, and even established a fund for a perpetual sacrifice. But this was only an act of courtesy dictated by reasons of policy. His real feelings towards the Jews and their religion are better illustrated by his biographer’s statement that, while treating the old-established cults with the reverence to which their antiquity and respectability seemed to entitle them, “he held the others in contempt.” Among the gods deemed unworthy of Imperial patronage were those of Egypt and Judaea. During his sojourn in the land of the Pharaohs Augustus refrained from turning aside to visit the temple of Apis. Nor was he more respectful towards Jehovah. On the contrary, “he commended his grandson Caius for not stopping, on his passage through Palestine, at Jerusalem to worship in the Temple.”[11] The ancient writer’s juxtaposition of Apis and Jehovah, linked at last in common bondage, is as significant as it is quaint.

Under the successors of Augustus the Jews of Rome had more than neglect to complain of. Their suppression appears to have been now regarded as a public duty. The biographer of Tiberius, in enumerating that emperor’s virtues, among other proofs of patriotism, includes his persecution of the obnoxious race. After describing the measures taken against “outlandish ceremonies” generally, and how those given to Egyptian and Judaic superstitions were compelled to burn all their ritual vestments and implements, he proceeds to inform us calmly that “the Jewish youth, under pretence of having the military oath of allegiance administered to them, were distributed over the most unhealthy provinces, while the rest of the race, or those who followed their cult, were banished from the city under pain of perpetual servitude if they disobeyed.”[12] The indignation which these arbitrary measures must have stirred up among the Jews found vent in the following reign. The immediate cause of the explosion was Caligula’s order that his own effigy should be placed in the Temple of Jerusalem and that divine honours should be paid to him throughout the empire—an order which, however natural it might have appeared to a Roman, outraged the vital principle of Hebrew monotheism. ♦41 A.D.♦ The result was stern and unanimous resistance on the part of the Jews, bloodshed being only averted by the imperial lunatic’s opportune death.[13]

Meanwhile the Jews of Alexandria shared the woes of their brethren in Palestine and Rome. Their prosperity moved the envy of their Greek fellow-citizens, and the two elements had always met in a commercial rivalry for which they were not unequally matched. If Hebrew astuteness found its hero in Jacob, Odysseus formed a brilliant embodiment of Hellenic resourcefulness. Both characters are typical of their respective races. They are both distinguished not only by strong family affections, by a pathetic love of home when abroad and a passionate longing for travel when at home, by conjugal fidelity tempered by occasional lapses into its opposite, and by deep reverence for the divine, but also by a mastery of wiles and stratagems unsurpassed in any other national literature. It was, therefore, not surprising that the descendants of these versatile heroes should regard each other as enemies. The hostility was increased by social and religious antipathy and by the favours which the Greek kings of Egypt had always showered upon the Jews. The fables and calumnies originally invented by the Seleucid oppressors of Palestine spread to Egypt, where they were amplified by local wits.

Under Augustus and Tiberius the lurking animosity was obliged to content itself with such food as the Greek genius for sarcasm and invective could afford; but the accession of Caligula supplied an opportunity for a more practical display of hatred. The Governor of Alexandria, being in disgrace with the new Emperor and afraid lest the Alexandrians should avail themselves of the circumstance and lodge complaints against him in Rome, became a tool of their prejudices. Two unprincipled scribblers led the anti-Jewish movement. Insult and ridicule were succeeded by violence, and in the summer of 38 A.D. the synagogues of the Jews were polluted with the busts of the Emperor. The governor was induced to deprive the Jews of the civil rights which they had enjoyed so long, and the unfortunate people, thus reduced to the condition of outlaws, were driven out of the divisions of the city which they had hitherto occupied and forced to take up their abode in the harbour. Their dwellings were looted and sacked, the refugees were besieged by the mob in their new quarters, and those who ventured out were seized, tortured, and burnt or crucified. The persecution continued with intermittent vigour until the Jews resolved to send an embassy to Rome to plead their cause before the Emperor. One of the envoys was the famous Jewish Hellenist Philo. Caligula, however, declined to listen to rhetoric or reason; but, on the contrary, he issued the order for his own deification, which, as has been seen, was frustrated only by his death.

Caligula’s successor Claudius favoured the Jews of Palestine for the sake of their King Agrippa, to whose diplomacy he owed in part his crown. But their brethren in Rome suffered another expulsion for “continually disturbing the peace under the instigation of Christ.”[14] The confusion of the Christians with the Jews by the Roman writer is neither uncommon nor unintelligible. But, if the Christians were persecuted as a Jewish sect—secret and, therefore, suspected—the persecution of the Jews themselves was frequently due to their peculiar “superstition.” That, in common with other products of the East, had found its way to Rome, where it acquired great vogue and exercised a strange fascination, especially among women and persons of the lower orders. Many Gentiles visited the synagogues, and some of those who went to scoff remained to worship. Horace, writing in the time of Augustus, makes frequent mention of Judaism,[15] implying that it was spreading and that it formed the topic of conversation in fashionable circles; Josephus mentions a case of the conversion of a noble Roman lady in the reign of Tiberius;[16] Persius, under Caligula and Claudius, sneers at the muttered prayers and gloomy Sabbaths of the Jews and of Roman proselytes to Judaism;[17] while Seneca, under Nero, declares that “to such an extent has the cult of that most accursed of races prevailed that it is already accepted all over the world: the vanquished have given laws to the victors.”[18] Juvenal, writing in the time of Titus and Domitian, bears similar testimony to the prevalence of Judaism among the Romans, many of whom, especially the poor, observed the Jewish Sabbath and dietary laws, practised circumcision, and indulged in Hebrew rites generally.[19] To the Roman satirists these aberrations from good sense and good taste were a rich fountain of ridicule; but serious patriots regarded them with misgiving, as detrimental to public morality. Hence we usually find the expulsions of the Jews and the suppression of their cult accompanied by similar steps taken against Chaldean soothsayers, Egyptian sorcerers, Syrian priests, and other purveyors of rites pernicious to the virtue of Roman men and women.

Under Nero the hostility towards the Jews was temporarily diverted against the Christians, and, while the latter were ruthlessly made to pay with their lives for the Emperor’s criminal aestheticism, the former enjoyed an immunity from persecution, partly secured by feminine influence at Court. But, while the Jews in the West were purchasing a precarious peace and a miserable triumph over the Christians, their brethren in the East were preparing for one of those periodical struggles for independence which move at once the horror and the admiration of the student of Jewish history. The Jews could not bear the sight of the foreign despot in their country. His presence in Jerusalem was a daily insult to Jehovah. The reverses which they had hitherto sustained in their single-combat with the masters of the world had not damped their desire for freedom. Disaster, far from crushing, seemed to invigorate their courage. And for the sake of the Idea they were ready to jeopardise the security and material comfort which they generally enjoyed under the equitable and tolerant rule of the Romans. In the eyes of the zealots the sensible attitude of the higher classes, which acquiesced in the existing state of affairs,—an attitude shared by famous Rabbis such as Jochanan son of Zakkai who re-founded Judaism when the Temple fell—was nothing less than treachery to the national cause. It was felt that, if no attempt were made to check the “seductive arts of Rome,” the whole race would gradually sink into spiritual apathy. Bands of irreconcilables were, as in the time of the Seleucids, scattered about the country and set the example of insubordination by frequent attacks on the Romans and their partisans. These patriots were bound by a vow to spare no one who bended the knee to the hated foreigner, and they fulfilled it with all the scrupulous cruelty which characterises the vows of enthusiasts. The pursuit of personal profit, as not unfrequently happens, was combined with the pursuit of patriotism, and there soon appeared a secret revolutionary association whose emissaries insinuated themselves into the very precincts of the Temple and there struck down those who had incurred their wrath. Sporadic assassination was gradually organised into a regular conspiracy, and the murderers of yesterday were now ennobled by the appellation of rebels. The voices of prudence and moderation were drowned in the clamour of patriotism; the peace party was terrorised into a zeal for liberty which it was far from feeling, and the standard of rebellion was unfurled.

♦66 A.D.♦

In the meantime Alexandria witnessed another explosion of the Graeco-Jewish feud. The Greeks determined to petition Nero for the withdrawal of the rights of citizenship restored to the Jews by Claudius. A public meeting was held in order to select the ambassadors who were to carry the petition to Rome. Some Jews were discovered in the amphitheatre where the meeting was held, and three of them were dragged by the mob through the streets. Their co-religionists, fired with indignation, rushed to the amphitheatre, threatening to commit it and the assembled Greeks to the flames. The Governor attempted to pacify the crowd; but, being himself a renegade Jew, he had little influence over his former brethren, who cast his apostasy in his teeth. Enraged thereat, he let his legions loose upon the Jewish quarter. This was soon converted into an inferno of multiform brutality, wherein fifty thousand Jews are said to have miserably perished.

To return to Palestine. The revolt against the Roman rule, begun in 66 A.D., ended in the famous fall of Jerusalem four years later. ♦70 A.D. Sept. 7.♦ The desperate obstinacy of the defence, and the terrible barbarity which had disgraced the rising, provoked the conquerors to pitiless retaliation. The holy city, which had once been “the joy of the whole earth” and God’s own habitation, was no more. Zion lay deserted. Her sons were slain, and her daughters sold into slavery and shame. And the Prophet’s words seemed to have come true: “Her gates shall lament and mourn; and she, being desolate, shall sit upon the ground.”[20] Those Jews who had not been put to death or driven forth to seek a refuge among their brethren, already scattered over the East and West, were preserved to accompany Titus to Rome as prisoners of war, to supply food for the wild beasts of the arena, victims for the gladiators’ sword in the amphitheatre, and amusement for the sporting public of the capital of the world. Most awful calamity of all, the Temple of Zion—the sanctuary in which the pride and the hope of the whole race centred—was doomed to the flames, and its contents were carried off to grace the pagan victor’s triumph. Among these treasures, hallowed by the veneration of fifteen centuries, were the shittim wood table and the seven-branched candlestick of pure gold, both wrought out of the liberal offerings which the children of Israel had brought to Moses for the service of the tabernacle, at the bidding of God in the desert. They were the works of wise-hearted men of old, selected for the task by the Lord Himself, and instructed thereto by His spirit. For nearly four centuries these spoils of Zion served to adorn the Roman Temple of Peace, until an avenger arose and, having dealt with Rome as Rome had dealt with Jerusalem, transferred them to Carthage.

This national catastrophe, commemorated as it was for all time on the imperishable marbles of the triumphal arch of Titus, left an indelible impression on the mind of Israel. It aroused the strongest feelings of the Hebrew nature, and fixed a chasm between Jew and Gentile which even the lapse of long centuries proved unable to bridge. The conqueror’s name was handed down the ages as a synonym for everything that is monstrous and horrible, and his language was tabooed even in epitaphs, the tombs in the Jewish catacombs at Rome bearing few Latin inscriptions, though Greek ones abound.

Here we may pause to enquire into the causes of this persistent warfare.

CHAPTER III
JUDAISM AND PAGANISM

Over and above the two great causes of the unpopularity of the Jew, already adduced, namely, man’s intolerance of dissent, and the antipathy between the European and the Asiatic, there was another and more obvious barrier to a good understanding between the two elements—one sin which the Gentile could not pardon in the Jew: the Jew’s infatuated arrogance—that contempt for all men born outside the pale of the Synagogue, which national humiliation, instead of effacing, had deepened and embittered. It was this provincial spirit that had prevented the message of Moses from spreading abroad, as the message of Jesus and the message of Mohammed spread in after times. It was the same spirit that now forbade the Jew to feel at home in the presence of the Gentile. Judaism has always lacked the magnetic attraction of Christianity and Islam, not because the rule of life which it prescribes is less pure, or the prospect of peace which it holds out less alluring to the heart that yearns for rest, but because, unlike Christianity and Islam, it deliberately repels instead of inviting outsiders. The doors of Moses’s heaven are jealously closed to the stranger; and those who have entered into it have at no time been more numerous than those who have come out of it. When Jehovah ceased to be the God of a clan, he became the God of a nation, but he could not, and would not, become the God of mankind. In spite of periodical attempts made by individual prophets and Rabbis to soar above the barriers of narrow nationalism, and to infuse their own noble spirit into the teaching of their predecessors and into the minds of their contemporaries, in spite, also, of the broadening of the conception of the divine, due to contact with the sublime religion of Babylon, Jehovah, to the ordinary Jew, remained an essentially tribal god. His interests continued to be bound up with the interests of the chosen people. An elaborate fence of ceremonial and custom separated this people from all other peoples. On leaving their native soil the Jews carried away with them all the spiritual pride and all the pious prejudices which distinguished their ancestors. A wider knowledge of the world and its inhabitants failed to broaden their sympathies. Intermarriage with the Gentiles was prohibited as strictly as ever, in obedience to the old commandment: “Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.”[21] And so it came to pass that, while they appeared to the Gentile a strange and unsocial species of men, to them the Gentile continued to be an unclean animal.

Had it not been for its stern and exclusive spirit, the Hebrew cult might have excited the derision or the scornful curiosity of the Pagans, but it would have hardly been made the object of systematic attack. The Jews would have continued their eccentric worship of “the sky and the clouds”[22] unmolested, though unrespected, and their Temple, with all its uncanny “emptiness,”[23] would have remained standing; for Paganism was nothing if not tolerant. The religion of classical antiquity was a matter of convention rather than of conviction. The earnest and the unhappy sought solace in philosophy; the masses in superstition. Philosophy did not degenerate into theology, but left theology to the poets who, unfettered by doctrine, created or transformed the popular deities and legends, purging or perverting them according to the promptings of their own imagination, or the requirements of their art. The priests in pagan society counted for less than the poets. The word “heresy” in pagan Greece meant simply “free choice,” and later “a philosophical school.” The terms “orthodox” and “heterodox” had hardly as yet acquired their invidious meaning. Religious rancour, that baneful mother of manifold misery to mankind, was not yet born. There is no parallel in antiquity to that unremitting and systematic war of creeds by which, in later ages, men tried to crush those who disagreed with them in matters of metaphysical conjecture. Tolerance and speculative freedom were never better understood than in pagan Greece and Rome. The Pagan was content to navigate his own ship by his own compass—whether of head or of heart—without insisting that every one else should adopt the same compass, or be drowned. The total absence of dogma, which forms at once the charm and the foible of polytheism, while precluding persecution, encouraged a free exchange of religious traditions, not only between sister nations, as the Greek and the Italian, but even between entirely foreign and even hostile races. Thus, while the Latin writers hastened, more or less successfully, to identify the deities of Italy with those of Hellas, Greek travellers in the East, from Herodotus onwards, habitually sought and found, or imagined that they found, common attributes between the divinities of Olympus and those of Memphis and Sidon. Frequent intercourse facilitated the work of assimilation, and not only specific attributes but whole gods and goddesses found their way from one pagan country to another, where they were welcomed. The doors of the Pantheon stood hospitably open to all comers.

In this religious brotherhood of nations there was one disturbing unit: one race alone stubbornly and offensively declined to join the concert. The Jews held that their own religion was wholly true; the religions of others were wholly false. They arrogantly boasted that they alone were God’s people. They believed themselves to be in league with the Creator of the Universe, sharing His secrets and monopolising His favours; for had not the Lord entered into a solemn and everlasting covenant with Abraham? It was they whom the Lord had selected to be a holy and special people unto Himself, above all peoples that are upon the face of the earth: “Ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord, and my servants whom I have chosen.” It was for them that the laws of Nature had been suspended; that the sea was made dry land; that the heavens rained manna, and the rocks gave forth water; that mounts had quaked; that the sun and moon had stood still, and the walls of cities fallen down flat at the sound of the trumpet. It was for them that prophets and inspired men had revealed the oracles and the will of God.

If the Pagan was ready to forgive Jewish eccentricity, no man could tolerate Jewish intolerance; and the resentment which the Jew’s aloofness aroused in the breast even of the educated Gentile is palpable in the pages of many ancient authors. Only three Greek writers make a favourable mention of the Jews, the most eminent among them being Strabo the geographer. He, curiously enough, speaks with admiration of the spiritual worship of Jehovah as contrasted with the monstrous idolatry of Egypt and the anthropomorphic idolatry of Greece. Less curious, but no less rare, is the writer’s appreciation of the moral excellence of the Mosaic Law and his reverence for the Temple of Jerusalem. Strabo’s liberal attitude, however, was not shared by the Romans. They are emphatic and unanimous in their condemnation of Judaism—Horace, Juvenal, Persius, Pliny, and, above all, Tacitus. The great historian seems to give utterance to a common sentiment in denouncing the rites of the Jews as “novel and contrary to the ideas of other mortals.” He accuses the followers of Moses “of holding profane all things that to us are sacred; and, on the other hand, of indulging in things which to us are forbidden.”[24] The Hebrew horror of the worship of images and of the deification of ancestors and Emperors, as exemplified by the fierce storm which Caligula’s mad order to have his own statue set up in the Temple raised, gave great offence to the Romans; while the Jewish marriage laws, which permitted a brother to wed his deceased brother’s wife and an uncle his own niece, could not but be considered by the Romans as a sanction of incest. It is, therefore, not to be wondered at that the severe moralist should brand Mosaic institutions as “evil and disgusting, owing their prevalence to their very depravity.” Likewise, the national movement which, as already mentioned, under the splendid leadership of the Maccabees resulted in the liberation of the Hebrew mind from the tyranny of Hellenism to Tacitus is nothing more than a wicked rebellion against the Macedonian Kings’ laudable efforts to improve the morals of their subjects by the introduction of Greek civilisation. It cannot be denied that the victory of the national party was brought about by “expulsions of citizens, destructions of cities, massacres of brothers, wives and parents,” and other atrocities in which the leaders freely indulged; but it certainly is less than the whole truth to assert that the movement had for its selfish object the restoration to authority of a royal family which, when restored, fomented superstition with a view to “using the influence of the priesthood as a prop of its own power.”[25] Even the good points in the character of the Jews, “their unswerving loyalty to their own kith and kin and their prompt benevolence,” which the truthful Tacitus acknowledges, are in his eyes vitiated by “their hostility and hatred towards all aliens,”[26] and to him, as to so many of his compatriots and contemporaries, the Jews are “a most vile race,” and the Christian sect of them, at all events, “the enemies of mankind.”[27]

This common estimate of the Jew was, of course, very largely based on an ignorance of Jewish life and religion that would be ridiculous but for its terrible consequences. As early as 169 B.C. we hear of the blood accusation which is still brought against the Jews by their enemies. When Antiochus Epiphanes desecrated the Temple of Jerusalem, among other fables that he and his partisans promulgated, it was rumoured that there was found in the sanctuary a Greek kept for a sacrificial purpose by the priests who were said to be in the habit of killing a Greek every year and of feeding on his intestines. On the other hand, the Jews never did anything to dispel the ignorance which rendered such grotesque myths credible. If the advocate of the Jew is inclined to charge the Gentile with intolerance, the advocate of the latter is amply justified in retorting the charge. A race which avoided the places of public amusement as scenes of immorality and idolatry could not but be considered morose and unsocial; a race which, especially after the destruction of the Temple, banished mirth and music even from its wedding feasts, would naturally be shunned as sullen and suspected as fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; a race which would “neither eat nor sleep nor intermarry with strangers” might expect to be represented as “most prone to lust” and as holding “nothing unlawful amongst themselves.” The outward signs of Jewish aloofness were evident to the most careless gaze; the inward, spiritual beauty, and the moral worth of Judaism were not so easily recognised. Thus, prejudiced views, born of Pagan ignorance and nourished by Hebrew intolerance, created a volume of animosity which, as has already been seen, cost its object many sorrows. But worse things were yet to come.

CHAPTER IV
THE DISPERSION

The struggle for freedom already narrated and its ruthless suppression were not calculated to diminish the Jew’s unpopularity at Rome. Under the successors of Titus we have fresh persecutions to chronicle. The Jews were heavily taxed, and heathen proselytes to Judaism were punished with loss of property, with exile, or with death—penalties from which not even kinship with the Emperor could save the culprit. ♦94 A.D.♦ At last the Jews, driven from the city by an edict of Domitian, were forced to live in the valley of Egeria which was grudgingly let out to them. This valley, once green with a sacred grove famed in legend as the place where “King Numa kept nightly tryst with his divine mistress,” was now notorious as a desolation of malarious mud deposited by the overflow of the Tiber. In this miserable locality the Jews were allowed to build their Proseucha, or house for prayer—a rallying-point for a congregation of poor wretches “whose basket and wisp of hay are all their furniture.”[28] Thus Juvenal in one luminous line draws a picture as vivid as it is repulsive of the condition of Israel at Rome towards the end of the first century of our era. It may be added that the same edict which drove the Jews from Rome also expelled the philosophers, among them Epictetus.

A streak of light amid general gloom is shed by the reign of Domitian’s successor. Nerva was one of the few Emperors who knew how to reconcile absolute power with personal freedom, and the Jews shared with the rest of his subjects those blessings of justice and liberty that induced Tacitus to celebrate his short reign as the beginning of an era in which “one was permitted to think what he chose and to say what he thought.”[29] ♦Sept. 96–Jan. 98.♦ The Jews were allowed to worship their God in peace, and the fiscal tyranny under which they laboured was lightened. Nerva’s toleration is commemorated by a coin bearing on the reverse the Jewish symbol of a palm-tree and the inscription Fisci Judaici calumnia sublata.

However, kindness had as little effect upon the Jews as cruelty. Their religious and national antipathy to the alien ruler blinded them to the benefits of Roman administration. The memory of their defeat rankled, and the desire for emancipation was intensified by hunger for revenge. The prosperity of the present was valued only inasmuch as it enabled them to avenge their sufferings in the past. Their subjection was regarded merely as a trial and as a sign of the approaching advent of the Deliverer destined to rebuild the Temple and to raise the children of Israel to the sovereignty of the world—the Messiah whom the Lord had promised to His people through the prophets of old. The forty years that had elapsed since the capture of Jerusalem by Titus were for the Jews of the Empire at large years of comparative rest and recovery. All the strength gathered during that period was now put forth in a last desperate dash for freedom.

The Babylonian Jews gave the signal for the holy war by opposing the Emperor Trajan’s plans of conquest in Mesopotamia. ♦115 A.D.♦ Thence the insurrection rapidly spread to Palestine, Egypt, Cyrene, and Cyprus. In every one of these countries the infuriated rabble fell upon their neighbours, whom the suddenness and unexpectedness of the attack rendered an easy prey to the rage of the assailants. If one tenth of the tales of horror related by Dion Cassius be true, it is sufficient to explain the hatred inspired by the Jews in after times, and to extenuate, if not to justify, the terrible retribution which followed. Two hundred and twenty thousand Greeks and Romans were, according to Dion, butchered in Cyrene. Lybia was utterly devastated. Two hundred and forty thousand Greeks were slaughtered in Cyprus. Great numbers of Greek and Roman heathens and Christians perished in Egypt, and many of the victims were sawed asunder after the fashion set by David, and afterwards imitated by the Mohammedan conqueror of the Balkan Peninsula. It is even added that the butchers, not satiated by the mere sight of the mangled bodies, devoured the flesh, licked up the blood, girded themselves with the entrails, and wrapped themselves in the skins of their victims—abominations which are only credible to one familiar with the treatment mutually meted out by the inhabitants of the Near East at the present day.[30]

♦117 A.D.♦

The insurrection was quelled, and temporary calm restored, by Trajan’s successor, Hadrian, who appears to have yielded to the Jews’ demand for the rebuilding of the Temple. The Emperor’s assent was received with wild enthusiasm. The Jews believed that the day of national rehabilitation had come:

“No more the death sound of the trumpet’s cry—

No more they perish at the foe’s rash hands;

But trophies shall float in the world o’er evil.

Dear Jewish land! fair town, inspirer of songs,

No more shall unclean foot of Greeks within thy bounds

Go forth.”[31]

Thus sang an unknown Jewish poet of Alexandria, venting his spleen against the Greeks in Greek verse. But the dreamers were rudely awakened. The Emperor was not slow to perceive that the restoration of the Temple would mean a perpetuation of the Jewish problem. He, therefore, qualified his original concession by terms which were not acceptable to the Jews. Their bitter disenchantment and their hatred of Hadrian were concealed for a while. ♦130 A.D.♦ The Emperor visited Palestine and endeavoured to conciliate the Jews by bringing them into closer contact with the Pagans. But he unfortunately adopted towards that end the very means calculated to defeat it. He proposed to rebuild Jerusalem on a plan which the Jews regarded as a deliberate desecration. He did not understand that what the nation wanted was not fusion with the foreigners but rigid separation from them. Again the Jews concealed their feelings; and while the deluded Emperor wrote to the Senate at home praising the peaceful disposition and loyalty of this much-maligned people, they were preparing for a fresh revolt. Arms were manufactured and hidden in underground passages, secret means of communication were established, and Hadrian had scarcely turned his back on Jerusalem when the Jews once more “lifted themselves up to establish a vision.”

♦132 A.D.♦

The rebellion was headed by Bar-Cochba, in whom the enthusiastic mob recognised the prophesied Messiah and round whose standard they rallied in force sufficient to defy the Imperial legions for two years. The Jewish Christians, who refused to recognise the new Messiah and to take part in the holy war, were remorselessly persecuted, and the rebellion blazed from one end of the country to the other. However, Hadrian’s army, under the able command of Julius Severus and of the Emperor himself, prevailed in the end. ♦135 A.D.♦ Bar-Cochba was defeated, and the last sparks of the insurrection were extinguished beneath mountains of corpses. It is reckoned (though these figures are scarcely trustworthy) that no fewer than five hundred and eighty thousand Jews succumbed to the sword during the war, in addition to an unknown multitude starved or burnt to death. Palestine was turned into a wilderness. All the fortresses were demolished, and nearly one thousand towns and villages lay in ashes. The destruction of the Jewish State, commenced by Titus, was accomplished by Hadrian. The spot upon which the proud Temple had once stood was now defiled by the plough, and all the holy sites were devoted to idols. The Samaritans shared the ruin of their secular enemies. Mount Gerizim also was polluted by a shrine to Jupiter, while on Mount Golgotha, where a century before the awful crime had been committed, a fane was dedicated to the Goddess of Lust. A pagan colony of Phoenician and Syrian soldiers, who had served their time, occupied part of Jerusalem, the very name of which was soon forgotten in that of Aelia Capitolina. Judaism was interdicted under heavy penalties, and the Jews were forbidden to enter the city of their fathers. The Babylonian captivity had been to the children of Israel only a fatherly rod; but this last calamity proved their utter ruin. Henceforth they are doomed to wander among the sons of men, a sign and a scorn to the nations of the earth.

The slaughter ceased as soon as there ceased to be any rebels to slay. A period of compulsion and persecution, as the Jewish writers term it, ensued; but the fear of further trouble having disappeared once and for ever, the Romans forgot their anger. Though Israel had been extinguished as a state it was suffered to live as a sect. The throne had perished; but the altar remained. At first danger induced the Jews to compromise and to dissemble. A council of Rabbis, secretly held at Lydda, decided that death by torture might be avoided by the breach of all the commandments, except the three vital prohibitions of idolatry, adultery, and murder. But the reign of terror and hypocrisy did not last long. ♦138 A.D.♦ Under Antoninus Pius most of Hadrian’s decrees were revoked, and a new “red-letter day” was added to the Jewish Calendar. Though still forbidden to enter Jerusalem, the Jews were allowed to return to Palestine. Both in Italy and in the provinces of the Empire they enjoyed all the privileges that had been conferred on their fathers by the best of Antoninus’s predecessors. While admitted to the dignities, and sometimes to the emoluments, of municipal life on terms of equality with their fellow-subjects, they were suffered to maintain their social and religious independence under the jurisdiction of a patriarch whose seat was at Tiberias, and who exercised his authority and collected an annual tribute through his representatives in each colony.

♦218–222 A.D.♦

The follies of some Emperors proved as beneficial to the Jews as the wisdom of others. Heliogabalus carried his superstitious veneration for the Mosaic Law to the length of circumcision and abstinence from pork. ♦222–235 A.D.♦ The Syrian Emperor Alexander Severus, nicknamed by the Greeks Archisynagogos, or Head of the Synagogue, expressed his eclectic friendliness to Judaism by placing in his private apartment a picture of Abraham next to those of Orpheus and Christ, and by causing the Jewish moral maxim, “Do not unto others what thou wouldst not that others did unto you,” to be engraven on the Imperial palace and on the public buildings. During this reign the Jewish Patriarch possessed an almost royal authority, and Hadrian’s decrees, which forbade the Jews to enter Jerusalem and to exercise the functions of judges, were repealed.

Under the circumstances, Israel throve and multiplied apace. Synagogues sprang up in every important city in the Empire, and the Jews fasted and feasted without fear and often without moderation. Tolerance begot tolerance. Religious zeal, unopposed, lost much of its bitterness, and the Jews gradually reconciled themselves to their new position. Their hatred of the Pagan was almost forgotten in their hatred of the Christian; and, while they helped in the occasional persecution of the latter, they aped the manners of the former. The ladies of the Jewish Patriarch’s family esteemed it an honour to be allowed to dress their hair according to the Roman fashion and to learn Greek. The Jewish laws forbidding Hellenic art and restricting the intercourse with the Gentiles ceased to be enforced. But nothing shows the extent and the depth of the repugnance which the Gentile inspired in the Jew more clearly than the fact that the abrogation of the law of the Synagogue, which prohibited the use of the oil of the heathens, was regarded as so daring an innovation that the Babylonian Jews at first refused to believe the report. Bread made by the heathens continued to be tabooed.

The faith in the coming of the Messiah, indeed, was still as firmly held as ever. But, in the absence of persecution, from a definite expectation it faded into a pleasantly vague hope. While cherishing their dream for the future, the Jews were sensible enough not to neglect the realities of the present. The subjugation of the earth by force of arms might come in God’s good time; meanwhile they resolved to achieve its conquest by force of wit; and it was then that they developed that commercial dexterity and laid the foundations of that financial supremacy which have earned them the envy of the Gentiles, and which, in after ages, were destined to cost them so much suffering. Their skill and their knowledge, their industry and their frugality, ensured to them a speedy success. By the end of the third century their European colonies had spread from Illyria in the East to Spain in the West, to Gaul and the provinces of the Rhine in the North; and it appears that, though trade, including trade in slaves, was their principal occupation, their prosperity in many of these settlements was also derived to some small extent from agriculture and the handicrafts. The civil and military services were also indebted to their talents, and, in a word, these Semitic exiles, though their peculiar customs were mercilessly ridiculed on the stage, could have none but a sentimental regret for the loss of Palestine. Their position in the Roman Empire at this period was a prototype of the position which they have since held in the world at large: “Everywhere and nowhere at home, and everywhere and nowhere powerful.”[32]

But the calm was not to last, and signs of the long terrible tempest, which was to toss the ship of Israel in after years, were already visible on the horizon.

CHAPTER V
CHRISTIANITY AND THE JEWS

In dream I saw two Jews that met by chance,

One old, stern-eyed, deep-browed, yet garlanded

With living light of love around his head,

The other young, with sweet seraphic glance.

Around went on the Town’s satanic dance,

Hunger a-piping while at heart he bled.

Shalom Aleichem, mournfully each said,

Nor eyed the other straight but looked askance.

—Israel Zangwill.

Christianity, long despised and persecuted, had by slow yet steady steps made its way among the nations, until from a creed of slaves it was raised by Constantine to the sovereignty of the Roman world. ♦323 A.D.♦ The cross from being an emblem of shame became the ensign of victory, and the great church of the Resurrection, built by the first Christian Emperor on the hill of Calvary, proclaimed to mankind the triumph of the new religion. But the gospel which was intended to inculcate universal peace, charity, and good-will among men brought nothing but new causes of discord, cruelty, and rancour. Apostles and missionaries are apt to imagine that religion is everything and national character nothing, that men are formed by the creeds which they profess, and that, if you extended to all nations the same doctrines, you would produce in all the same dispositions. The history of religion, however, conclusively demonstrates that it is not churches which form men, but men who form churches. An idea when transplanted into foreign soil, in order to take root and bear fruit, must first adapt itself to the conditions of the soil. The nations of the West in embracing Christ’s teaching assimilated from it only as much as was congenial to them and conveniently overlooked the rest. Mercy—the essence of the doctrine—was sacrificed to the passions of the disciples. Henceforth the old warfare between Jew and Gentile is to manifest itself chiefly as a struggle between the Synagogue and the Church, between the teaching of the New Hebrew Prophet and the Old Hebrew Prophet, so beautifully imagined by a modern Jewish writer in the lines quoted above.

The Jews were told that the observances of the Mosaic Law were instituted on account of the hardness of their hearts and were no longer acceptable in the sight of God; that the circumcision of the spirit had superseded the circumcision of the flesh; that faith, and not works, is the key to eternal life; that their national calamities were judgments for their rejection and crucifixion of Jesus; and that their only hope of peace in this world and of salvation in the next lay in conversion. Nor was the enmity towards the Jews confined to refutation of their doctrines and attempts at persuasion. The Jews had always been held by the Christians responsible for all the persecutions and calumnies with which their sect had been assailed. “The other nations,” says Justin to his Jewish collocutor in 140 A.D., “are not so much to blame for this injustice towards us and Christ as you, the cause of their evil prejudice against Him and us, who are from Him. After the crucifixion and resurrection you sent forth chosen men from Jerusalem throughout the earth, saying that there has arisen a godless heresy, that of the Christians.”[33] The accusation is repeated, among others, by Origen: “The Jews who at the commencement of the teaching of Christianity spread evil reports of the Word, that, forsooth, the Christians sacrifice a child and partake of its flesh, and also that they in their love for deeds of darkness extinguish the lights and indulge in promiscuous incest.”[34] Here we find the sufferings of Christ linked to the sufferings of His followers; the crime of the Pharisees associated with those of their descendants; and, in defiance of the essential tenet of Christianity, and of the sublime example of its author, the sins of the fathers are now to be visited upon the children. The Christians, while gratifying their own lust for revenge, flattered themselves that they avenged the wrongs of Christ; by oppressing the Jews they were convinced that they carried out the decrees of Providence. Thus pious vindictiveness was added to the other and older motives of hatred—a new ring to the plant of anti-Judaism. But for the existence of those other motives of hatred, with which theology had little or nothing to do, the theological odium henceforth bestowed upon the Jews would have been merely preposterous. The founder of Christianity, Himself a Jew, had appeared to His own people as the Messiah whom they eagerly expected and with all the divine prophecies concerning whose advent they were thoroughly familiar. They investigated His credentials and, as a nation, they were not satisfied that He was what His followers claimed Him to be. Instead of remembering that His Jewish fellow-countrymen were, after all, the most competent to form a judgment of their new Teacher, as they had done in the case of other inspired Rabbis and prophets, the Christians proceeded to insult and outrage them for having come to the conclusion that He failed to fulfil the conditions required by their Scriptures. St. Jerome, though devoted to the study of Hebrew, expressed his hatred of the race in forcible language. Augustine followed in his older contemporary’s footsteps, and abhorrence of the Jews became an article of faith, sanctioned by these oracles of Orthodoxy and acted upon by the pious princes of later times.

At first Constantine had placed the religion of the Jews on a footing of equality with those of the other subject nations. But his tolerance vanished at his conversion. Under his reign, the Jews were subjected to innumerable restrictions and extortions; the faithful were forbidden to hold any intercourse with the murderers of Christ, and all the gall which could be spared from the sectarian feuds within the fold of the Church was poured upon the enemy outside. Judaism was branded as a godless sect, and its extermination was advocated as a religious duty. The apostasy of Christians to Judaism was punished severely, while the apostasy of Jews to Christianity was strenuously encouraged, and the Synagogue was deprived of the precious privilege of persecution, which henceforth was to be the exclusive prerogative of the Church. The edict of Hadrian, which forbade the Jews to live in Jerusalem, was re-enacted by Constantine, who only allowed them on the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple to mourn on its ruins—for a consideration.

♦337♦

But the real persecution did not commence until the accession of Constantius. Then the Rabbis were banished, marriages between Jews and Christian women were punished with death, and so was the circumcision of Christian slaves; while the communities of Palestine suffered terrible oppression at the hands of the Emperor’s cousin Gallus, and were goaded to a rebellion which ended in the extirpation of many thousands and the destruction of many cities. ♦352♦ But the Jews endured all these calamities with the patience characteristic of their race, until relief came from an unexpected quarter.

In 361 Julian, whom the Church stigmatised by the title of Apostate, ascended the throne of Constantine the Great. Julian’s ambition was to banish the worship of the Cross from his Empire, to reform paganism and to restore it to its ancient glory. Brought up under wise Greek teachers, he was early imbued with a profound love and reverence for the beliefs and customs of Hellas. He felt strongly the instinctive repugnance of the Hellenic spirit to Oriental modes of thought. The Christian creed repelled him, and the pathos of Christ’s career left him unmoved. To Julian Jesus was simply the “dead Jew.” His philosophical attachment to paganism and contempt for “the religion of the Galileans” were strengthened by his experience of the Christian tutors to whom his later education had been entrusted by his cousin Constantius. While in his cousin’s power, Julian had been forced to conceal his views and to observe outwardly the rules of a creed which he despised. Compulsory conformity deepened his resentment towards the Christian Church, without, however, blinding him to the beauty of the principle of toleration which she denied. Although, on becoming Emperor, he favoured those who remained faithful to the old religion, Julian did not oppress the followers of the new, holding that the intrinsic superiority of paganism would eventually secure its triumph. His confidence was misplaced. The classical ritual was no longer acceptable to serious men, and the Neo-Platonic mysticism which endeavoured to transform sensuous polytheism into a spiritual philosophy possessed no attraction for the multitude. Christianity had adopted enough of pagan speculation to conciliate the educated and more than enough of pagan practice to satisfy the ignorant. The Greek pantheon had ceased to have any reason for existing. All that imperial encouragement could do was to galvanise into a semblance of life a body that was already dead.

But though Julian’s success was ephemeral and the revival of polytheism impossible, yet the attempt brought for a while pagan tolerance to a world distracted by Christian sectarianism and the sanguinary squabbles of metaphysicians and priests. Towards the Jews Julian proved particularly gracious. He introduced Jehovah to his chorus of deities, and treated Him with especial reverence. It was enough for Julian that Jehovah was a god. He cared little about the claims to universal and exclusive veneration advanced on His behalf by some of His worshippers. The Emperor’s desire to humble the Christians, combined with his genuine pity for the suffering Jews, suggested to him the design of rebuilding the Temple of Jerusalem, of investing it with its ancient splendour, and of recalling the children of Israel to the home of their fathers.

Alypius of Antioch, Julian’s faithful friend, was entrusted with the execution of the scheme, and was sent to Palestine for the purpose. The Jews saw the finger of God in the Imperial enthusiast’s resolve. It seemed to them that the long-expected day of redemption had dawned, and they answered the summons with alacrity. Leaving their homes and their occupations, they crowded to Zion from far and near, both men and women, bringing with them their offerings for the service of the Temple, gold and silver and purple and silk, even as their ancestors had done in obedience to the call of the Lord through Moses, and again on their return from Babylon in the days of yore. No Pharaoh with a taste for monumental architecture had ever exacted from his subjects a larger tribute in money and labour than this pagan Prince of Zionists now received freely from the children of Israel. To share in the work was a title to everlasting glory, while ignominy would be the portion of those who shirked it. But there were few who wished to do so. The building of the Temple was a labour of love, and no sacrifice was deemed too great, no service too painful for the realisation of the dream which so many generations of Jews had already dreamt, and which so many more were fated to dream in the future.[35]

♦363♦

Alas! the glorious self-denial of a whole race was wasted, and its hopes were dashed to the ground by the Emperor’s untimely death. The work was abandoned six months after its inception, all traces of it soon vanished, and the site over which the plough had once been drawn remained a final loneliness. The pilgrims dispersed, disheartened and abashed, and their enemies rejoiced. The Christians, in their turn, detected the finger of God in this failure of the Jews to escape the lot assigned to them from above, as a punishment for their sins, and continued to assist Providence.

♦364–378♦

Under the Arian Emperor Valens the Jews were left unmolested. ♦379–395♦ Theodosius the Great also protected them against the attacks of fanaticism, and ♦395–408♦ under the rule of Arcadius they were able to purchase peace by bribing the Emperor’s favourites. ♦408–450♦ But with the accession of Theodosius the Younger orthodoxy and intolerance, which had been interrupted by the short reign of heresy, were restored to power.

The effects of this restoration were soon felt by the Jews. John Chrysostom had been denouncing them in Antioch, and the preacher’s eloquence was translated into acts of violence by the people of the neighbouring town of Imnestar. ♦415♦ The occasion of the riot was the Feast of Purim, when the Jews celebrated their triumph over Haman by a carnival of intoxication and ribaldry accompanied with the crucifixion of their enemy in effigy. The merriment, it appears, was further accentuated by coarse jokes at the expense of Christianity. The Christians of the town, who had frequently complained of these orgies in vain, now accused the Jews of having crucified not a straw-Haman but a live Christian lad. The charge led to the severe punishment of the revellers.[36]

The same year witnessed a persecution of the Jews on a far larger scale in Alexandria. In that city Jews and Christians had long lived on terms of mutual repugnance, which not rarely resulted in reciprocal outrage. An episode of this kind afforded Cyril, the dictatorial and bigoted Patriarch, an excuse for indiscriminate vengeance. Early one morning the pugnacious ecclesiastic led a rabble of zealots against the Jews’ quarter, demolished their synagogues, pillaged their dwellings, and hounded the inmates out of the city in which they had lived and prospered for seven centuries. Forty thousand of them, the most industrious and thrifty part of the population, were driven forth to join their brethren in exile. The Prefect Orestes, unable to prevent the assault, or to punish the culprits, was fain to express his disapproval of their conduct—an indiscretion for which he narrowly escaped being stoned to death by the monks.

In the meantime the Christian inhabitants of Antioch volunteered to avenge the grievances of their brethren at Imnestar by ejecting their Jewish fellow-citizens from the synagogues. The Emperor Theodosius compelled them to restore the buildings to the owners. But this decision was denounced by Simeon the Stylites, who on ascending his column had renounced all worldly luxuries except Jew-hatred. From that lofty pulpit the hermit addressed an epistle to the Emperor, rebuking him for his sinful indulgence to the enemies of Heaven. The pious Emperor was not proof against reprimand from so eminent a saint. ♦423♦ He immediately revoked his edict and removed the Prefect who had pleaded the cause of the Jews.

♦425♦

Two years later Theodosius the Younger abolished the semi-autonomous jurisdiction of the Jewish Patriarch of Tiberias and appropriated his revenues. He imposed many grievous restrictions on the celebration of Jewish festivals, excluded the Jews from public offices, and prohibited the erection of new synagogues. The harsh laws of Theodosius remained in force under his successors. The Jews were looked upon with contempt and aversion in every part of the Byzantine Empire, their persons and their synagogues, in the towns where such existed, were frequently made the objects of assault, and the riots excited by the rivalry between the Christian factions in the circus often ended in combined attacks upon the Jewish quarter. Meanwhile Palestine, with few exceptions, had become completely Christianized; Greek churches and monasteries occupied the places once held by the synagogues of the Jews, abbots and bishops bore sway over the land of the Pharisees, and Jerusalem from a capital of Judaism became the stronghold and the sanctuary of the Cross.

Suffering once more kindled the hope for the Redeemer. Moses of Crete, in the middle of the fifth century, undertook to fulfil the old prophecies and to gratify the expectations of his persecuted brethren. He gained the adherence of all the Jews in the island and confidently promised to them that he would lead them dry-shod to the Holy Land, even as his great namesake had done before him. On the appointed day the Messiah marched to the coast, followed by all the Jewish congregations, and, taking up his station on a rock which jutted out into the sea, he commanded his adherents to cast themselves fearlessly into the deep. Incredible as it may appear to us creatures of commonsense, many obeyed the command, to find the waters unwilling to divide. Several perished through the stubbornness of the element and their own inability to swim; others were rescued from the consequences of excessive faith by Greek sailors. Moses vanished.

♦527–565♦

Justinian aggravated the servitude of the Jews. In his reign the holy vessels of the Temple which had already wandered over the East, been taken to Rome by Titus, and thence transferred to Carthage by Genseric the Vandal, found their way to Constantinople. The Jews of New Rome had the mortification to see these memorials of their departed greatness in the train of Belisarius who, having destroyed the empire of the Vandals, carried into captivity the grandson of Genseric, and with him the sacred vessels, which were finally deposited in a church at Jerusalem. ♦535♦ In the same year the evidence of Jews against Christians was declared inadmissible, and two years later Justinian passed a law burdening the Jews with the expensive duties of magistracy, while denying to them its exemptions and privileges. Soon after the Jews were forbidden by law to observe Passover before the Christian Easter.

Under Justinian the Samaritans fared even worse than the Jews. Oppression goaded them repeatedly to rebellion, and each attempt, accompanied as such attempts were with atrocities against the Christians, rendered the yoke heavier. One of these desperate revolts occurred in 556 A.D., when the Samaritans of Caesarea took advantage of one of the inevitable circus-riots and, aided by the Jews, massacred the Christian inhabitants. The crime brought down upon them a heavy and indiscriminate punishment.

A respite followed on Justinian’s death, and it continued under his immediate successors. But the reign of Phocas witnessed a renewal of the feud. ♦608♦ The Jews of Antioch suddenly fell upon the Christians, whom they slaughtered and burnt; while they dragged the Patriarch through the streets and put him to death. A military force suppressed the riot and wreaked vengeance on the guilty people. A few years after, the Jews seized an opportunity for venting their ill-concealed hatred of the Greeks. This was the advance of the Persians upon Palestine.

A certain rich Jew of Tiberias, Benjamin by name, led the revolt, and called upon his fellow-countrymen to join the Persians. The Jews gladly complied, and assembled from all parts of Palestine, bringing their fury and their fire to bear upon the Christians. ♦614♦ With their assistance the Persians took Jerusalem, massacred ninety thousand Christian inhabitants, and sacked all the Christian sanctuaries, for their Jewish allies would spare none and nothing that reminded them of their national humiliation. From the capital terror and havoc spread throughout the land, the conquerors destroying the monasteries and killing the monks wherever they found them. An attempt to surprise and slay the Christians of Tyre during the Easter celebrations, however, failed. The latter, having been informed of the design, seized the Jews in the town, who were to act as secret auxiliaries of the assailants, killed one hundred of them for each atrocity perpetrated by their accomplices outside the city, and threw the heads of the victims over the walls for the edification of their co-religionists. This performance had the desired effect. The besiegers, dismayed at the shower of Hebrew heads which fell upon them, beat a hasty retreat, pursued by the Tyrian Christians.

For fourteen years Palestine remained in the hands of the Persians and the Jews. Several Christians in despair embraced Judaism, among them a monk of Mount Sinai, who changed his name into Abraham, married a Jewess, and, renegade-like, distinguished himself by joining in the persecution of the faith which he had betrayed. But the Jews, who had fondly hoped that their Persian allies would make the country over to them, were doomed to disappointment. Discontent culminated in a rupture with their friends and the banishment of many Jews to Persia. The rest then resolved to revenge themselves by a second act of treachery. They entered into negotiations with the Emperor Heraclius, and, on his promising to forgive and forget their past misdeeds, aided him to recover the province. ♦628♦ The Persian invaders were driven back, and the Greeks reigned once more supreme over Western Asia.

The Jews acclaimed the victor and his army with servile adulation, and entertained both with a liberality springing from cold calculation. But their enthusiasm was too transparent, and their atrocities too recent to delude Heraclius. At Jerusalem the monks earnestly implored the Emperor to punish the traitors, and with one stroke to remove for ever the danger of a repetition of their crime. Heraclius objected to the breach of faith which the holy men so vehemently recommended; but his scruples were overruled by their offers to take the sin upon themselves, by their casuistical demonstrations that the extermination of the enemies of Heaven was a meritorious deed beside which common honesty counted for nothing, and by the promise to fast and pray on his behalf. The Jews were persecuted; many of them were slaughtered, and others fled to the hills or to Egypt, where they were welcomed by their brethren. Thus double treachery ended in double disaster.

The sufferings of the Jews in the Byzantine Empire were revived by Leo the Isaurian, who seems to have tried to recover the confidence of the clergy, forfeited by his iconoclastic proclivities, by a zealous persecution of those eternal enemies of Orthodoxy. In 723 he issued a decree threatening with terrible penalties all Jews who refused to be baptized. Some submitted to the ordeal in order to save their lives; others preferred to seek safety in voluntary exile, or glory in self-inflicted martyrdom; many burning themselves to death in their synagogues.

Under Leo’s successors, though the Jews continued to be excluded from public offices, they were allowed full freedom in the exercise of their religion and the pursuit of commerce. Basil, however, in the middle of the ninth century, renewed the endeavours of the Church to convert the infidels, and under his auspices public disputations were held between Christian and Hebrew theologians; the persuasive eloquence of the former being strengthened by promises of political preferment to converts. Many Jews hastened to profit by this opening to power. ♦886♦ But on the Emperor’s death they exhibited an equal alacrity in returning to the old faith. ♦900♦ Whereupon Leo the Philosopher ordered that backsliders should be put to death as traitors to the Church. This severity, however, was relaxed under his unphilosophical successors.

Benjamin of Tudela, that invaluable guide to the mediaeval Jewry, who visited Constantinople about the middle of the twelfth century,[37] describes the condition of his co-religionists as follows: “They are forbidden to go out on horseback, except Solomon of Egypt, who is the King’s physician, and through whom the Jews find great alleviation in the persecution. For the persecution in which they live is heavy.... The Christians hate the Jews, be they good or bad, and lay upon them a heavy yoke. They beat them in the streets and hold them in a state of cruel slavery. But the Jews are rich and kind, loving mercy and religion, and they endure patiently the persecution. The quarter in which they live separately is called Pera.”[38]

Briefly, the history of Israel in the Eastern Empire is a story of ecclesiastical persecution tempered at times by imperial protection, until the Turkish conquest deprived the Christians of the means of oppression. Somewhat better conditions prevailed in the West.

The Jews continued to live in Rome, Ravenna, Naples, Genoa, and Milan, devoted to the peaceful pursuit of commerce, long after persecution had commenced in the East. Ambrosius, Bishop of Milan, it is true, denounced and derided the infidels, but he was prevented from an active demonstration of his theories on the subject by the firmness of Theodosius I. ♦399♦ This Emperor’s feeble successor, Honorius, forbade the collection of the Jewish Patriarch’s tax in Italy; but the order was revoked five years later. In all the cities mentioned the Jews formed separate, semi-autonomous communities, their only complaint being their exclusion from judicial and military dignities, which they did not covet, and the prohibition to build new synagogues or to own Christian slaves. The latter law, though bitterly resented by the Jews, was perfectly justified from the Christian, or indeed from an equitable, point of view. The Jews were large slave-dealers and slave-owners, and it was their custom to convert their slaves to Judaism in order to avoid the presence of Gentiles under their roofs. All slaves who refused to be circumcised were, in obedience to the Talmud, sold again. It was, therefore, the duty of the Church to protect these helpless brutes in human form against proselytism. On the other hand, from the standpoint of the Jews, the prohibition was a severe blow at their power of competition, as in that age slave labour was, if not the only, certainly the most usual kind of labour available.

♦489♦

The conquest of Italy by Theodoric, the Ostrogoth, and the principles of toleration upon which, though a Christian and a heretic and a hater of Hebrew “obduracy,” this prince based his rule, seemed to promise a perpetuation of the prosperity of Israel. How enlightened Theodoric’s administration was is shown by the following incident. The Jews of Genoa, on asking for permission to repair their synagogue, received from the King this reply: “Why do you desire that which you should avoid? We accord you, indeed, the permission you request; but we blame the wish, which is tainted with error. We cannot command religion, however, nor compel anyone to believe contrary to his conscience.”[39] But the fanaticism of Theodoric’s orthodox subjects, denied an outlet against the Arian conquerors, vented itself on the Jews, who suddenly found themselves exposed to the ferocity of the Italian rabble, were insulted and robbed, and saw their synagogues looted and burnt, until the civil authorities intervened, stopped the havoc, and forced the aggressors to make reparation for the losses inflicted upon their fellow-townsmen, thereby earning the cordial anathemas of the whole Catholic world.

Thus ended the fifth century. Nor did the position of the Jews deteriorate in the sixth. ♦536♦ How happy and wealthy they continued to be in Italy under the Ostrogothic rule is proved by the brave resistance which they opposed to Justinian’s general, Belisarius, in his conquering progress through the peninsula, and more especially at Naples. Byzantine domination over Italy ceased in 589, when the greater part of the country fell under the power of the Lombards, who also left the Jews in peace. Outbursts of popular intolerance disgraced the Italian peninsula from time to time, but, as a rule, Israel was able to secure official indulgence with the wealth which it amassed under the interested protection of the Popes. ♦590–604♦ Gregory the Great, although he persecuted the Manichaean heretics of Sicily and ordered the reclamation of the pagan peasants of Sardinia “etiam cum verberibus,” and although, in his anxiety to extinguish slavery, he revived the ordinance of the Emperor Constantius and impressed upon the princes of Austrasia and Burgundy the necessity of forbidding the possession of Christian slaves by Jews, yet laid down the principle that no other means than friendly exhortation and pecuniary temptation should be employed in the conversion of the latter, and he sheltered them from the aggressive piety of the inferior bishops.

In Gaul Jews must have settled at a very early period, though the origin of their colonies is lost in the mists of unrecorded time, and no sure evidence of their presence in that province is extant before the second century. Whether the first Jewish settlers north of the Alps arrived as prisoners of war or as peddlers, they make their appearance in history as Roman citizens, and as such they were treated with respect by the Frankish and Burgundian conquerors, who allowed them to practise agriculture, medicine, and trade without let or hindrance, until the introduction of Christianity. The advent of the Cross here, as elsewhere, proved fatal to the sons of Israel. Nor could it be otherwise. Time had passed on, the Roman Empire had been swept away, and a new order of things had sprung into existence. Younger races dominated the regions over which the Roman eagle once spread his proud wings, and the worship of one God, the God of the Jews, had dethroned the many deities of paganism. The Jew alone had remained the same. Despite lapse of time and all vicissitudes, the Hebrew of Western Europe still was a faithful facsimile of his Asiatic forefathers. Like them he continued hemmed in by an iron circle which he would not overstep and into which he reluctantly admitted outsiders. The Jews everywhere dwelt apart, suspicious and suspected. Jewish writers glory in this arrogant and dangerous isolation: “In spite of their separation from Judaea and Babylonia, the centres of Judaism, the Jews of Gaul lived in strict accordance with the precepts of their religion. Wherever they settled they built their synagogues and constituted their communities in exact agreement with the directions of the Talmud.”[40] Such constancy, admirable in itself, was, from a practical point of view, pregnant with perils which were not slow in declaring themselves.

In 465 the Council of Vannes forbade the clergy to participate in Jewish banquets, because it was considered beneath the dignity of Christians to eat the viands of the Jews, while the Jews refused to partake of the viands of the Christians. This was the commencement of an active display of antipathy destined to endure down to our own day.

♦516♦

In Burgundy the conversion of King Sigismund to the Catholic faith inaugurated an era of oppression of all heretics—Arians as well as Jews. True believers, whether laymen or clergymen, were prohibited from taking part in Jewish banquets. From Burgundy the spirit of hostility spread to other countries. ♦538 and 545♦ The third and fourth Councils at Orleans reiterated the above prohibition, and the Jews were forbidden to appear abroad during Easter, because their presence was “an insult to Christianity.” ♦554♦ Clerical fanaticism was invested with constitutional authority by Childebert I. of Paris a few years after.

Among these earlier persecutors of Judaism none distinguished himself more highly than Avitus, Bishop of Clermont. In him the Jews of Gaul found an enemy as implacable as their brethren of Alexandria had found in Cyril. He repeatedly strove to convert the Jews of his diocese, and, on his sermons proving ineffectual, he incited the Christians to attack the synagogues and to raze them to the ground. But even this argument failed to persuade the stiff-necked infidels of the truth of Christianity. The good Bishop, therefore, gave them the option of baptism or banishment, thus forestalling the King of England by seven and the King of Spain by nine centuries. One Jew chose baptism, and paraded the streets in his garments of symbolic purity during the Pentecost. But another Jew undertook to interpret the feelings of his brethren by soiling the devout apostate’s white clothes with rancid oil. The inopportune anointment led to a massacre and to the forcible baptism of five hundred more Jews, while the rest fled to Marseilles. ♦576♦ This triumph of the faith at Clermont was received with great rejoicings in the neighbouring countries, and Bishop Gregory of Tours showed a laudable lack of ecclesiastical jealousy by inviting a poet to sing in bad Latin the success of his colleague.

♦581♦

Five years later the Council of Maçon passed various enactments emphasising the social inferiority of the Jews, and the bigotry of the Councillors. King Chilperic also dabbled in compulsory proselytism, and the later Merovingian Kings Clotaire II. and Dagobert carried on the work in grim earnest. ♦615. 629♦ The former of these princes, in obedience to the decrees of the Clermont and Maçon Councils, debarred the Jews from such official posts as conferred on the holders authority over Christians, and in the following year the Council of Paris recommended their indiscriminate dismissal from all state offices. But the decline of the “Merovingian drones” brought at last relief to the Jews of Gaul.

In Spain, as in Gaul, Israel had pitched its tent very early—in all probability before the fall of the Roman Republic. The number of the colonists was subsequently increased by the captives carried off from Palestine by Titus and Hadrian, and sold in various provinces of the Empire, as well as by voluntary emigrants; so that the peninsula was gradually dotted with their synagogues; many towns became known as “Jewish” owing to the predominance of the chosen people in their population, and many Jewish families pointed with pride to lengthy pedigrees, real or imaginary, some dating their immigration from the destruction of the Second Temple, others tracing their ancestry to David; and not a few even claiming descent from settlers brought to Spain by no less a personage than Nebuchadnezzar!

Here they remained unmolested until the conversion of the country to Christianity, when the familiar process began. The new religion, having wiped out idolatry, sought a fresh field among the Jews. Their infidelity justified persecution; their wealth and their weakness invited it. As early as the reign of Constantine the Great we find Bishop Severus of Magona, in the island of Minorca, burning their synagogues and forcing them to embrace Christianity, and Bishop Hosius of Cordova prohibiting Christians, under pain of excommunication, from trading, intermarrying, or otherwise mixing with the contaminated race. ♦320♦ But the lot of Israel did not become unbearable until long after the Visigoths from the North invaded, devastated, and permanently occupied the peninsula. The first Arian kings, while persecuting the Catholics, allowed full liberty, civil and political, to the Israelites, who consequently rose to great affluence and to the most important dignities in the state. This happy period ended in the sixth century when King Reccared abjured the Arian heresy and was received into the bosom of the Church. Then came orthodoxy, and with it persecution. In 589 the Council of Toledo forbade the Jews to own Christian slaves, and to hold public offices. The Jews tried to avoid the first restriction by offering a great sum of money to King Reccared. ♦599♦ But he refused the offer, and earned the eulogies of Pope Gregory the Great, who compared him to King David; for as David had poured the water brought to him out before the Lord, so had Reccared sacrificed to God the gold offered to him. This was precisely the principle which nine centuries later dictated Ferdinand and Isabella’s policy towards the Jews. Indeed, early Visigothic legislation supplies many curious precedents for mediaeval Spanish bigotry. As time went on it doomed the whole Jewish race to servitude, and invented many of the maxims and methods afterwards adopted and perfected by the Inquisition.

Throughout the seventh century the hapless people experienced all the rigour of Spanish statesmanship, guided by priestly malevolence. Even bribery, the last resource of the oppressed, was provided against by regulations which in their stringency showed that, if the Jews were eager to purchase mercy, their ecclesiastical oppressors were not above selling the commodity. ♦612♦ Under King Sisebut, the treatment of the Jews was a rehearsal of the tragedy acted in the same country eight hundred and sixty years later. They were imprisoned, plundered, or burnt, and finally they were given the choice between apostasy and expatriation. The most “stiff-necked” amongst them preferred the loss of country and property to loss of self-respect. Ninety thousand yielded to force, and saved themselves by apparent conversion. The Church, while disapproving of compulsory proselytism, pronounced a heavy sentence on those who openly renounced the creed which nothing but the fear of banishment had driven them to embrace. Baptism became a mask and a mockery. But even outward conformity could not long be maintained unsupported by internal conviction, and many neophytes seized the first opportunity of throwing off the hateful cloak. Thereupon the Church, sorely scandalized at the sight of proselytes falling back into the slough whence she had rescued them, induced Sisenand, one of Sisebut’s successors, to restrain by force the Jews once baptized from relapsing into Judaism, or from frequenting other Jews, and, furthermore, to order that the children of the former should be torn from their parents and be educated in monasteries and nunneries. Those who were discovered secretly indulging in Hebrew rites were condemned to lose their freedom and to serve the King’s favourites. Side by side with these inhuman measures was carried on a less harmful, though not less stupid, missionary campaign. All the polemical arguments of the early Fathers were now refurbished, but with no greater success than had attended them when brand-new.

However, these efforts of the Church notwithstanding, the nobles of Spain continued to extend their protection over the persecuted people until the accession of King Chintilla, who in a General Council wrested from them a confirmation of the anti-Jewish enactments of his predecessors, and, moreover, proclaimed a wholesale expulsion of all Jews who refused to embrace Christianity. Again many Israelites were driven out of the country, and many into hypocrisy.

It was hoped that this signal proof of piety on the King’s part would break at last the inflexible infidelity of the race. ♦638♦ The Church also decreed that every king in the future should at his coronation take a solemn oath to continue the persecution of heretics. But persecution presupposes a perfect accord between the civil authority and the ecclesiastical; and, as has sometimes happened since, the secular power in Spain recognised certain limits to its capacity for obeying the spiritual. Chintilla died in 642, and later sovereigns refused to carry out the decrees of the Church, while others tried to do so in vain. The Jews were too useful to be dispensed with. Political necessity overruled religious bigotry, and Spain, as every other country in Europe, continued to present the strange spectacle of a proscribed sect flourishing under the very eyes of the judges who had repeatedly pronounced its doom. Despite the manifold disabilities under which the Jews laboured, they remained and multiplied in the peninsula, the pseudo-converts practising Judaism in secret; some of the avowed Jews refuting the arguments of their assailants in polemical treatises; all nursing a sullen hatred of their rulers and waiting for an opportunity of gratifying it.

Such an opportunity offered itself in the Arab invasion, and the Mohammedan Caliphs found in these suffering children of a kindred race and religion ready and valuable allies. It is not improbable that the fear of such an alliance between the followers of Mohammed and those of Moses had intensified among the Christians of Spain the anti-Jewish feeling which found vent in the violent persecution of the Jews during the years immediately preceding the conquest of the peninsula. If so, the Spaniards by their treatment of the Jews created the situation which they feared. The Mohammedan invasion was prepared by the intrigues of the Jews of Spain with their co-religionists in Africa, who exposed to the Saracens the weaknesses of the Visigothic kingdoms. Tarik, the Mohammedan conqueror, in his triumphant career through the peninsula, ♦711♦ after the battle of Xeres, where Roderic the last of the Visigothic kings had fallen, was everywhere supported by the Jews. Cordova, Granada, Malaga, and other cities were entrusted to the safe-keeping of the Jews, and Toledo was betrayed to the invader by the Jews, who, while the Christian inhabitants were assembled in church praying for divine help, ♦712♦ threw the gates open to the enemy, acclaiming him as a saviour and an avenger.

Persecution had again awakened the desire for redemption, which had never been allowed to remain dormant long. ♦About 720♦ The new Messiah appeared in the person of a Syrian Jewish Reformer, named Serene. It so happened that the Jews of Syria were at that time suffering almost as cruelly at the hands of the fanatical Caliph Omar II. as at those of the Christian Emperor Leo. ♦717–720♦ When, therefore, the Messiah arose, promising to restore them to independence and to exterminate their enemies, many Eastern Jews lent an attentive ear to his gospel. The Redeemer’s fame reached Spain, and the Jews of that country also, still smarting under the sufferings of centuries and probably disappointed in the extravagant hopes which they had built upon the Arab conquest, hastened to enlist under his banner. But Serene’s career was cut short by Omar II.’s successor. The Commander of the Faithful seized the Messiah and subjected him to a severe cross-examination. Whether it was due to the subtlety of the theological riddles propounded to him by the Caliph, or to some more tangible test of constancy, the Prophet’s courage failed him. It was even said, by those who had refused to follow the Messiah, or who having followed were disillusioned, that Serene declared his mission to be only a practical pleasantry at the expense of his credulous co-religionists. Be that as it may, poor Serene was delivered up to the tender mercies of the Synagogue, and his disgrace dissipated the Messianic dream for the time.

But in less than a generation another Reformer of the Messianic type appeared in the Persian town of Ispahan to rekindle the enthusiasm and try the faith of his people. This was Obaiah Abu Isa ben Ishak. He, somewhat more modest than his predecessor, claimed to be only one—though the last and most perfect—of a line of five forerunners who were to prepare the way for the coming Redeemer. He also held out the promise to free the children of Israel from thraldom. Nor did he preach to deaf ears. One of the most striking inconsistencies in the Jewish character is the combination which it presents of unlimited shrewdness and suspiciousness with an almost equal capacity for being duped. The people who in every age have been hated as past masters of deceit, have themselves often been the greatest victims of imposture. Religious belief is so strong in them that, especially in times of suffering, nothing seems improbable that agrees with their predisposition. Libenter homines id quod volunt credunt. Ten thousand Jews rallied round Obaiah’s standard. The war for independence began at Ispahan and for a while seemed to promise success. But the Prophet fell in battle, and, though his memory was kept green by his followers, who endured till the tenth century, none proved able to carry on the work of deliverance.

CHAPTER VI
MIDDLE AGES

“Jews massacred in France,” “Jews massacred in Germany,” “Jews massacred in England,” “Jews massacred in Germany and France,” “Jews massacred in Spain,” again and again and again. These headings, not to mention expulsions, oppressions and spoliations without number, stare us in the face as we turn over the pages of the history of Mediaeval Europe, and the cold lines assume a terrible significance as we peruse tale after tale of bodily and mental torment, such as no other people ever suffered and survived. And as we read on, and try to realise the awful scenes, the desolate cry of the sufferers rings in our ears, like a long-drawn wail borne across the centuries: “How long, O Lord, how long?”

It would, of course, be an absurd exaggeration to assert that the life of Israel through the Middle Ages was an unbroken horror of carnage and rapine. There were spells of respite, some of them fairly long, during which the Jew was permitted to live and grow fat. But these Sabbaths of rest can be likened not inaptly to the periods during which a prudent husbandman suffers his land to lie fallow, in the hope of a richer harvest. They are only intervals between the acts of a tedious and bloody tragedy, with a continent for its stage and seven centuries for its night. But, though covering so vast an extent in space and time, the drama is not devoid of unity: the unity of plot. The motives and the characters are ever the same, each scene ends in strict accord with the foregoing, and the performance is a masterpiece of mournful monotony. Nor is it easy to bestow the crown of excellence on any European nation of actors without being unjust to their colleagues.

The drama naturally divides itself into two periods: the period of spontaneous but unsystematic hostility, and the period of deliberate and organised persecution.

While the Church was engaged in disseminating the gospel abroad, in rooting out heresy at home and in establishing her own authority, she had little time to devote to the persecution of the Jews; and the only canon law against them was the prohibition to dwell under the same roof with Christians and to employ Christian servants—a law which, in the absence of rigorous supervision, often remained a dead letter, and much oftener was observed, simply because neither side felt any violent desire to break it. The Jews consequently throve amazingly, their synagogues grew in number and splendour, and their antipathy to outside influences, though continuing to be as implacable as ever, found its chief expression in social isolation tempered by commercial exploitation.

In every country and in every city in Europe they remained sharply separated from their Christian neighbours, shunning intermarriage with them, and forming a perfectly distinct body of people, with the synagogue for its centre and its soul. The synagogue elected its own officers in accordance with the traditions of the Temple and the instructions of the Talmud, passing communal ordinances which, as in ancient times, regulated the whole of Jewish life: enforcing monogamy, prohibiting shaving, fixing the tax on meat, restraining gambling, forbidding the promiscuous dancing of Jews and Jewesses, dictating marriage settlements and divorce, defining the dress and diet of men and women. The State frequently levied the taxes on the Jewish community in a lump sum, leaving the assessment among individual members and the collection to the officers of the synagogue.[41] Justice also was administered by the Beth Din, or Jewish religious tribunal. Thus, despite much external interference, the Jewries constituted self-governing colonies—strange oases in mediaeval society. Their members were neither villeins nor freeholders; neither men-at-arms nor mechanics. Feudalism concerned them as little as Catholicism. They took no more part in the martial exercises than in the spiritual devotions of their neighbours. They belonged neither to the knightly orders nor to the commercial and industrial corporations; but they lived a life of their own, in closer communion of interests and tastes with their brethren in Cairo or Babylon than with their fellow-townsmen. In the ninth century, for instance, Babylon was to the Jews of Western Europe what Rome was to the Catholics—the oracle of Divine knowledge—and Rabbinical decisions issued therefrom were obeyed as implicitly as Papal Bulls. The Mediaeval Jews were as indifferent to the beauties of Chivalry as to its duties. The notes of the minstrel fell dead upon their ears, and the sterile subtleties of Talmudical exegesis thrilled them more than the amours of romance. Latin, the language of Western Christendom, was abhorred by the descendants of those whom the Roman destroyer of the Temple had driven into exile, and the study of the Torah was the one form of literature to which all Jews, old and young, rich and poor, devoted themselves with a single-minded earnestness worthy of the ancient Pharisees and Scribes. Even in their mutual greetings they retained the oriental formula “Peace be to thee,” “To thee a goodly blessing.”

This ominous isolation was to the Jews a source of pride, with which no bribe could induce them to part. The thought of making themselves one with the uncircumcised was as repugnant to them as it had been to their ancestors on entering Canaan. Their poetical literature, which through the Jewish hymn-book supplied a bond of sympathy between all the scattered sections of Mediaeval Jewry, is a lasting monument of their sorrows and of their self-glorification; of their faith in the promises of the past and of their firm trust in the future. All these sentiments may be regarded as embodied in that love for an idealised and idolised Zion which brightened many a gloomy hour, and which was for the Jews what political ambitions and aspirations were for their Christian neighbours. They looked upon themselves but as sojourners in the land, and upon their residence among the Gentiles as an evil dream from which the Lord in His time would awaken them, and lead His people back to the land of their fathers. Israel still was the slave of the Idea, and its victim.

This social isolation was symbolised and perpetuated by local segregation. The Jews everywhere dwelt together in special quarters, distinguished even amid the gloom and squalor of a mediaeval town by a darkness and dirtiness which contrasted curiously with the occasional magnificence of the interior of the houses and with the personal cleanliness of the inmates. In these quarters they resided, many families in one house, eating meat killed and cooked in a special manner, frequently fasting when their neighbours feasted, and feasting when they fasted; or, worse still, sometimes, by a fatal coincidence, celebrating their Deliverance while the Christians mourned the sufferings of their Saviour; as a rule, resting on the day on which the others worked, and working on the day on which they rested. They attended no mass, partook of no sacrament, showed no reverence for the crucifix and the saints; but they lived unbaptized, unblest and circumcised, worshipping their own God after their own fashion and in their own tongue, indulging in mysterious ablutions, observing the new moons and a thousand quaint rules of conduct, abstaining from touching fire from Friday evening till Saturday night, from eating pork, from drinking wine and milk, or from using vessels, touched by a Gentile. Their religious symbolism was alien to that of their neighbours; their allegorical wedding customs, their rejoicings and their wailings equally weird; their music as wonderful as their symbolism; the nasal sing-song strains that floated out of the windows of the synagogue of a morning, or those that filled the night air with their strangeness, as a funeral procession hurried through the street, sounded horribly harsh, unmelodious, and unmeaning to non-Hebrew ears. Their very children were unlike the children of the Gentile; precocious in worship as in work, they knew nothing of the sprightly brownies, elves, and fairies of European folk-lore, but believed in the solemn and sober spirits of Asiatic mythology. Altogether they must have seemed a singular and sinister people, with usury for their favourite pursuit, and prayer for their main recreation.

Thus they lived, and when they died they were buried in special cemeteries, emphasising the amiable principle that there could be no union or intercommunion between Jew and Gentile even in death.

Is it to be wondered at that the Jews everywhere were looked upon with aversion and suspicion? The chastity of Jewish life, the gracious charm of the Sabbath, the serene beauty of the Jewish home were unknown, for Jewish homes in the Middle Ages rarely received a non-Jewish guest. If an inquisitive Catholic strayed into a synagogue on a Sabbath morning, what he saw therein would tend to strengthen his antipathy. He would find a congregation of men with their heads covered, gathered together in a place which had none of the attributes of a church: no images, no font, no altar, no holy-water stoup; a club-room rather than a House of the Lord. He would see some of these men absorbed in learned study, and others in lively gossip; some chanting, and others chattering aloud; many dropping in casually at odd times; all heedless of the precentor, whose trilling airs soared aloft in triumphant discord, amid the pandemonium of tongues, now melting into melodramatic tears or hysterical laughter, now drowned by the shrill blast of the ram’s horn.

How could the ignorant Gentile know that these listless or belated worshippers had already prayed abundantly at home, and, like people who go to a public banquet after having enjoyed a good dinner in private, had no appetite for further devotion? To him the whole scene, with the din of children crying and running about, and the free and easy nonchalance of the men, must have appeared an orgy of indecorous levity. Worse still, he might have surprised this congregation discussing lawsuits, or prices of goods; for the synagogue was much more than a prayer-house to the Jew, and in it were made proclamations and bargains such as the mediaeval citizen was accustomed to see made in the market-place. Everything that the visitor witnessed would impress him as uncouth, unchristian, and uncanny; and he would go away amazed and scandalised, if not disgusted.

And yet, such is the apparent inconsistency of human nature, it was to this despised and detested assembly that the Christians of the lower orders, when ill, often had recourse for medical assistance. As in the old days at Rome, so in mediaeval Europe the Hebrew rites commanded the veneration of the Gentiles. The mystery of the unknown fascinated them. Many people, who ordinarily shunned the Jewish community, in time of trouble repaired to the synagogue, took part in its processions and ceremonies, and made votive offerings, that ailing friends might recover, that seafaring relatives might reach harbour in safety, that women in child-bed might be happily delivered, and that the barren might rejoice in offspring. The real proficiency of the Jews in medicine encouraged the popular superstition; for medicine and magic were as closely associated in the mediaeval mind as they still are in the minds of the less advanced races. Jewish women were dreaded as sorceresses, and the Rabbis were believed to be on terms of intimacy with the powers of darkness. It was held that

“Unregarded herbs, and flowers, and blossoms

Display undreamt of powers when gathered by them.”

And Christian knights applied to them for scraps of parchment covered with Hebrew texts as protective charms for their persons and castles.

Even so at the present day the Christians of the East resort to Mohammedan friars for charms and amulets of all kinds, and Mohammedans make offerings to Christian saints. Creeds may be mutually exclusive; there is free trade in popular religion. This liberalism, however, is not incompatible with a deep and abiding abhorrence. It is not the deities but the demons of the rival race that the ignorant strive to propitiate. The act is the outcome of fear, and the help received implies no gratitude. Consequently, the mediaeval Jews and Gentiles, like modern Christians and Turks, despite superstitious sympathy, contiguity of centuries, occasional intercourse for festive purposes, and interchange of gifts, cherished no fellow-feeling for each other. Even genuine personal friendship could do little to counteract national and religious antipathy. The Jews were still aliens and infidels, therefore enemies, and they frequently fell victims to insult and assault, and sometimes to massacre, at the hands of the populace. Hostility found an appropriate occasion for self-manifestation on the great festivals of the Church, and more especially at Easter. At those times the sight of a Jew reminded the Christians of the Old Crime, and the maltreatment of him suggested itself as a natural deed of piety. The sentiment was holy; the practical expression of it partly childish, partly fiendish.

At Toulouse, for example, it was the traditional custom to slap a Jew on the face every Good Friday. The Count opened the ceremony by publicly giving the president of the Jewish community a box on the ear, and his subjects followed suit, until the blow was commuted for a tribute in the twelfth century. At Beziers pious wantonness took the form of an attack on the Jews’ houses with stones from Palm Sunday till Easter. The use of other weapons was contrary to the rules of the game; but none other were needed. A sermon from the Bishop was the regular preamble to the commencement of hostilities, and this Christian pastime continued in public favour year after year until a prelate, less cruel or more practical than his predecessors, abolished it for a consideration. In May 1160 a treaty was concluded providing that any priest who should stir up the people against the Jews should be excommunicated, while the Jews, on their side, pledged themselves to pay four pounds of silver every Palm Sunday. Elsewhere, an old pagan rite for the propitiation of the powers of vegetation was cloaked in the devotional cremation of a straw “Judas” during Holy Week; a custom still surviving in many parts of Europe. But racial and religious animosity, especially when fuelled by material grievances, knows no seasons. In Germany Jew-baiting was a perennial amusement of gentlemen impoverished by usury, and the Judenstrasse, or Jews’ street, a not unusual field of ignoble distinction.

However, during the earlier Middle Ages, the Jews, though exposed to popular hatred, were generally shielded from popular outrage by the princes, spiritual and temporal, who countenanced their usury, sharing the profits, and availed themselves, not without strict precautions, of their medical skill and administrative ability. We find them as land-owners, physicians and civil officials in Provence and Languedoc. At Montpellier, under the wing of the Count of Toulouse, there flourished a Jewish academy where medicine and Rabbinical literature were cultivated successfully—an institution which helped much to create and promote a medical profession throughout Southern Europe, while the great School of Salerno also owed much to Jewish talent. In a word, medical studies in the Middle Ages were deeply indebted to the Hebrew doctors. They were the first to discard the ancient belief in the demoniacal origin of disease and to substitute physic for exorcisms. Their adoption of rational methods in the treatment of patients helped to revolutionise the theory and practice of medicine, to emancipate the European mind from superstition, and to earn for them the cordial detestation of the monks and priests, whose relics and prayers were discredited and whose incomes decreased in proportion to the Jewish practitioners’ success. Thus the animosity of the lower clergy against the mediaeval Jew may, in part, be traced to professional rivalry.

In Spain the Jews had always been most numerous and prosperous. Under the Saracen conquerors, with few exceptions,—as, for instance, the persecution by Ibn Tumart,—they enjoyed a peace such as they had seldom experienced under Christian rule. The liberty usually accorded to them enabled the Spanish Jews to attain distinction in other fields of activity besides money-lending. They were farmers, land-owners and slave-dealers. The last kind of trade was particularly encouraged by the Caliphs of Andalusia who formed their bodyguards of picked Slavonian slaves. They also were physicians, financiers, civil administrators, and they vied with their Mohammedan masters in learning as well as in material splendour and love of display. The influence of Moorish culture on the spiritual and intellectual development of the Spanish Jews has been very ably outlined by a modern Jewish writer in the following words:—“The milder rule of the Moslem gave the Jew a needed pause in the struggle for existence, and the similarity of the Semitic genius in both prevented the perceptible tendency to narrowness, and brought the Jewish mind again into free contact with the world’s thought.... The first aim of the Caliphs, after the victory of Islam was assured, was to resuscitate Greek science and philosophy. Translators were employed to bring forth from their Syriac tombs Aristotle and Galen. And the Jews at once took part in this Semitic renaissance.”[42] The writer might have added that it was mainly through the instrumentality of the Jews that this Arabic resuscitation of Hellenic philosophy and science was transmitted from Islam to Christendom. Learned Jews, familiar with both languages, rendered the Arabic translations of Aristotle into Latin, thus bringing them within reach of the Schoolmen, who valued these versions highly, not only for their fidelity to the original but also for the explanatory comments which accompanied the text. In fact, the first acquaintance of mediaeval Europe with any of the Aristotelian writings, other than the Organon, was due to the Arabs and Jews of Spain.[43] Thus these two Semitic races, by a dispensation of fate the irony of which was not to become apparent until our own day, were the first to stimulate in Western students a thirst for Hellenic literature and to supply them with the means of gratifying it.

The first school founded by the Jews in Spain was that of Cordova (948), followed by those of Toledo, Barcelona and Granada. All these institutions were thronged with eager students and formed centres of light, the rays whereof shone all the brighter amid the gloom of the Dark Ages. Not only Talmudic, Biblical, and Cabbalistic lore were there cultivated, but secular philosophy was diligently studied; and Aristotle was revered as a disciple of Solomon! Poetry, music, mathematics, astronomy, metaphysics and medicine were also included in the curriculum, and the Spanish Jews, as the result of this encyclopaedic training, were men of the broadest and most varied culture; the same individual often combining in his own person the subtleties of the Rabbinical scholar with the elegant taste of a poet; the sagacity of a financier with the practical skill of a physician.

♦915–970♦

All these talents are found embodied in Abu-Yussuf Chasdai of Cordova, a European in every respect except religion and name. From his father Chasdai inherited great wealth and liberal views on its uses. He studied the science of medicine, but he shone especially as a patron and man of letters, and as a diplomatist. Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin were almost equally familiar to him. He rendered brilliant political services to Caliph Abdul-Rahman III. in his relations with the Christian sovereigns of Northern Spain and other European potentates, and he was rewarded by his master with a post which in reality, though not in name, represented the powers of a Minister of Foreign Affairs, of Trade, and of Finance, all in one—an elevation which enabled Chasdai “to take the oppressor’s yoke from his people,” and “to break the scourge that wounded it.” Fate decreed that envoys from the Byzantine persecutors of the Jews should come to Cordova to solicit the aid of the Western against the Eastern Caliphs, and they were received by the Jewish Minister.

Under the paternal, if at times despotic, rule of the Caliphs the Hebrew character cast away some of its sternness and austerity—a change which is pleasantly reflected in the literature of the period. The Hebrew Muse ceased to weep and wail over old misfortunes, and the lays of the Hispano-Jewish minstrels laugh with the sunshine or sigh with the lyric tenderness of their new country. These traits are brilliantly illustrated by the work of the Castilian poet Jehuda Halevi, born in 1086, and thus described by an enthusiastic co-religionist:

“Pure and true, without blemish,

Were both his song and his soul.

When the Creator had formed this soul,

Pleased with Himself at His work,

He kissed the beautiful creation,

And the glorious echo of his holy kiss

Trembles yet in every song of the poet,

Sanctified through this Divine grace.”

There is nothing mournful in Halevi’s poetry. In his early youth he sang of wine and of the gazelle-like eyes of his beloved, of her rosy lips, of her raven hair, and of her unfaithfulness. In his manhood he studied the Talmud, natural science, and metaphysics. He also, like many other Jewish writers, practised medicine; not with conspicuous success, as he naïvely confesses in a letter to a friend: “I occupy myself in the hours which belong neither to the day nor to the night with the vanity of medical science, although I am unable to heal.” Halevi’s heart remained wholly devoted to poetry, and his masterpiece is the Songs of Zion, wherein he pours forth all that deep veneration for the past and that ardent belief in the future glory of Israel, which have inspired Jewish genius through the ages. Jehuda voices the national sentiment in the following touching lines:

“O City of the world, beauteous in proud splendour,

From the far West, behold me solicitous on thy behalf!

Oh that I had eagle’s wings, that I might fly to thee,

Till I wet thy dust with my flowing tears!

My heart is in the East,

Whilst I tarry in the West.

How may I be joyous,

Or where find my pleasure?

How fulfil my vow,

O Zion! when I am in the power of Edom,

And bend beneath Arabia’s yoke?

Truly Spain’s welfare concerns me not;

Let me but behold thy precious dust,

And gaze upon the spot where once the Temple stood.”

Nor was the longing a mere matter of sentiment. Jehuda was earnestly convinced that Israel could not have a national existence outside the Holy Land. He urged his people to quit the fields of Edom and to seek its native home in Zion. But the cry aroused no echo. The Jews of Spain, allowed to enjoy the comforts and luxuries of existence, felt no desire to exchange the real for a wild chase after the ideal. The poet, however, proved his own sincerity by undertaking a weary pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Leaving his peaceful home, his only daughter, his friends, his pupils, and his studies, he set out on his adventurous journey, accompanied by the good wishes and praises of numerous admirers through Spain. The long and stormy voyage and the hardships thereof did not quench the poet’s enthusiasm for the Holy Land:

“The sea rages, my soul rejoices;

It draws near the Temple of its God!”

At Alexandria, Halevi was met by a crowd of Jews to whom his name was known and dear. They entertained him sumptuously, but could not prevail upon him to relinquish his aim. Once more Halevi resisted the seductions of safety and comfort and set out for Jerusalem, which he found in the possession of unsympathetic Christian princes and bishops. His sentiments of disillusion and sorrow are commemorated in the lines:

“Mine eye longed to behold Thy glory,

But, as if I were deemed unworthy,

I could only tread on the threshold of Thy Temple.

I must also endure the sufferings of my people;

Therefore I wander aimlessly about,

As I dare not pay homage to any other being.”[44]

This prophet and singer of Zionism died in the land which his soul loved so dearly.