History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

The Jews escaped this calvary. Their view of God is very simple and clear. Some Jewish scholars argue that there is, in fact, a lot of dogma in Judaism. That is true in the sense that there are many negative prohibitions – chiefly against idolatry. But the Jews usually avoided the positive dogmas which the vanity of theologians tends to create and which are the source of so much trouble. They never adopted, for instance, the idea of Original Sin. Of all the ancient peoples, the Jews were perhaps the least interested in death, and this saved them a host of problems. It is true that belief in resurrection and the afterlife was the main distinguishing mark of Pharisaism, and thus a fundament of rabbinic Judaism. Indeed the first definite statement of dogma in the whole of Judaism, in the Mishnah, deals with this: ‘All Israel share in the world to come except the one who says resurrection has no origin in the Law.’161 But the Jews had a way of concentrating on life and pushing death – and its dogmas – into the background. Predestination, single and double, purgatory, indulgences, prayers for the dead and the intercession of the saints – these vexatious sources of Christian discord caused Jews little or no trouble.

Maimonides’ commentary on the Tenth Chapter of the Mishnah, on the Tractate Sanhedrin, lists the following articles of faith: the existence of a perfect Being, the author of all creation; God’s unity; his incorporeality; his pre-existence; worship without intermediary; belief in the truth of prophecy; the uniqueness of Moses; the Torah in its entirety is divinely given; the Torah is unchangeable; God is omniscient; He punishes and rewards in the afterlife; the coming of the Messiah; the resurrection. This credo, reformulated as the Ani Ma’amin (‘I believe’), is printed in the Jewish prayer-book. It has given rise to little controversy. Indeed, credal formulation has not been an important preoccupation of Jewish scholars. Judaism is not so much about doctrine – that is taken for granted – as behaviour; the code matters more than the creed. The lasting achievement, then, of the sages was to transform the Torah into a universal, timeless, comprehensive and coherent guide to every aspect of human conduct. Next to monotheism itself, the Torah became the essence of the Jewish faith.

Christianity became the norm throughout the Roman empire in the late fourth century and paganism began to disappear. As it did so, the Jews became conspicuous–a large, well-organized, comparatively wealthy minority, well educated and highly religious, rejecting Christianity not out of ignorance but from obstinacy. They became, for Christianity, a ‘problem’, to be ‘solved’. They were unpopular with the mob, which believed that Jews had helped the authorities when the emperors persecuted Christians. They had greeted with relief the pagan revival under Julian, who is known in Jewish tradition not as the Apostate but as ‘Julian the Hellene’. During the 380s, under the Emperor Theodosius I, religious uniformity became the official policy of the empire, and a mass of statutes and regulations began to rain down on heretics, pagans and nonconformists of all kinds. At the same time, Christian mob attacks on synagogues became common.

During the late-fourth and fifth centuries, Jews living in Christian societies had most of their communal rights and all their privileges withdrawn. They were excluded from state office and the army. Proselytism and intermarriage with Christians was punishable by death. It was never the aim of responsible Christian leaders to extirpate Judaism by force. St Augustine (354–430), the most influential of all the Latin theologians, argued that the Jews, by their mere existence, were part of God’s design, since they were witnesses to the truth of Christianity, their failure and humiliation symbolizing the triumph of church over synagogue. The policy of the church, therefore, was to allow small Jewish Communities to survive in conditions of degradation and impotence. The Greek church, however, inheriting the whole corpus of pagan Hellenistic anti-Semitism, was more emotionally hostile. Early in the fifth century, the leading Greek theologian John Chrysostom (354–407) delivered eight ‘Sermons Against the Jews’ at Antioch, and these became the pattern for anti-Jewish tirades, making the fullest possible use (and misuse) of key passages in the gospels of At Matthew and John. Thus a specifically Christian anti-Semitism, presenting the Jews as murderers of Christ, was grafted on to the seething mass of pagan smears and rumours, and Jewish communities were now at risk in every Christian city.

Like Christianity, Islam was originally a heterodox movement within Judaism which diverged to the point where it became a separate religion, and then rapidly developed its own dynamic and characteristics. The Jewish presence in Arabia is very ancient.

These settled oasis tribes were traders as much as pastoralists, and Islam was from the start a semi-urban trader’s religion rather than a desert one. But the desert was important, because Jews living on its fringes, or moving to it to escape the corruptions of city life, such as the Nazarites, had always practised a more rigorous form of Judaism and, in particular, had been uncompromising in their monotheism. That was what attracted Mohammed. The influence of Christianity, which would not have been strictly monotheistic in his eyes, was very slight, at any rate at this early stage. What he seems to have wished to do was to destroy the polytheistic paganism of the oasis culture by giving the Arabs Jewish ethical monotheism in a language they could understand and in terms adapted to their ways. He accepted the Jewish God and their prophets, the idea of fixed law embodied in scripture – the Koran being an Arabic substitute for the Bible – and the addition of an Oral Law applied in religious courts. Like the Jews, the Moslems were originally reluctant to commit Oral Law to writing. Like the Jews, they eventually did so. Like the Jews, they developed the practice of submitting points of law to their rabbis or muftis, soliciting a responsum, and the earliest responsa seem to have consciously adopted a Judaic formula. Like the Jews, the Moslems accepted strict and elaborate codes covering diet, ritual purity and cleanliness. Mohammed’s development of a separate religion began wh...

He altered the nature of the Sabbath and changed it to Friday. He changed the orientation of prayers from Jerusalem to Mecca. He redated the principal feast. Most important of all, he declared that most of the Jewish dietary laws were simply a punishment for their past misdeeds, and so abolished them, though he retained the prohibitions on pork, blood and carcasses, and some of the slaughtering rules. All these changes made it quite impossible to bring about a merging of Jewish and Islamic communities, however much they might agree on ethical or dogmatic fundamentals; but, in addition, Islam soon developed a dogmatic dynamism of its own, and theological debate – leading to violent sectarianism – soon began to play a central role in Islam, as in Christianity. Above all, Islam quickly created a theory and practice of forcible conversion, as the Jews had done in the time of Joshua, David and the Hasmoneans, but which rabbinic Judaism had implicitly and conclusively renounced.

From being about eight million at the time of Christ, including 10 per cent of the Roman empire, they had fallen by the tenth century to between one million and one and a half million. Of course the population of all the former Roman territories fell during this period, but Jewish losses were proportionately much higher than the population as a whole.

Despite its many inconvenient prohibitions, their religion was undoubtedly a help to them in their economic life. The ancient Israelite religion had always supplied a strong motivation to work hard. As it matured into Judaism, the stress on work became greater. With the rise of rabbinic Judaism after 70 AD, its economic impact increased.

Rabbinical Judaism was a gospel of work because it demanded that Jews make the fullest possible use of God’s gifts. It required the fit and able to be industrious and fruitful not least so they could fulfil their philanthropic duties. Its intellectual approach pushed in the same direction. Economic progress is the product of rationalization. Rabbinical Judaism is essentially a method whereby ancient laws are adapted to modern and differing conditions by a process of rationalization. The Jews were the first great rationalizers in world history. This had all kinds of consequences as we shall see, but one of its earliest, in a worldly sense, was to turn Jews into methodical, problem-solving businessmen. A great deal of Jewish legal scholarship in the Dark and Middle Ages was devoted to making business dealings fair, honest and efficient.

The Jews were thus burdened with a religious law which forbade them to lend at interest among themselves, but permitted it towards strangers. The provision seems to have been designed to protect and keep together a poor community whose chief aim was collective survival. Lending therefore came under philanthropy – but you were not obliged to be charitable towards those you did not know or care for. Interest was thus synonymous with hostility. As a settled community in Palestine, of course, the Jews needed to borrow money from each other like anyone else. The Biblical record shows that the law was constantly evaded.9 The papyri from the Jewish community in Elephantine tell the same tale. Yet the religious authorities tried to enforce the law strictly. They laid down that not only the principals to a usurious transaction but any accessory committed a sin.

However, the more strictly and intelligently the law was enforced and obeyed, the more calamitous it was for the Jews in their relations with the rest of the world. For, in a situation where the Jews were small, scattered communities in a gentile universe, it not merely permitted Jews to serve as moneylenders to non-Jews but in a sense positively encouraged them to do so. It is true that some Jewish authorities recognized this danger and fought against it. Philo, who understood perfectly well why a primitive law-code differentiated between brothers and strangers, argued that the prohibition of usury extended to anyone of the same nation and citizenship, irrespective of religion.12 One ruling said that if possible interest-free loans should be made to Jews and gentiles alike, though the Jews should have priority. Another praised a man who would not take interest from a foreigner. A third disapproved of charging foreigners interest and said it was lawful only when a Jew could live in no other way.13 On the other hand, some authorities stressed the difference between Jews and non-Jews. A midrash on the Deuteronomy text, probably written by the nationalistic Rabbi Akiva, seemed to say that Jews were obliged to charge interest to foreigners.

This was the most dangerous argument of all because financial oppression of Jews tended to occur in areas where they were most disliked, and if Jews reacted by concentrating on moneylending to gentiles, the unpopularity – and so, of course, the pressure – would increase. Thus the Jews became an element in a vicious circle. The Christians, on the basis of the Biblical rulings, condemned interest-taking absolutely, and from 1179 those who practised it were excommunicated. But the Christians also imposed the harshest financial burdens on the Jews. The Jews reacted by engaging in the one business where Christian laws actually discriminated in their favour, and so became identified with the hated trade of moneylending. Rabbi Joseph Colon, who knew both France and Italy in the second half of the fifteenth century, wrote that the Jews of both countries hardly engaged in any other profession.

The Arab Moslems were slow to develop any religious animus against the Jews. In Moslem eyes, the Jews had sinned by rejecting Mohammed’s claims, but they had not crucified him. Jewish monotheism was as pure as Islam’s. The Jews had no offensive dogmas. Their laws on diet and cleanliness were in many ways similar. There is, then, very little anti-Jewish polemic in Islamic religious writing. Nor had the Arabs inherited the vast pagan-Greek corpus of anti-Semitism, on which to superimpose their own variety. Finally, Judaism, unlike Christianity, never constituted a political and military threat to Islam, as did the Byzantine East and later the Latin West. For all these reasons the Jews found it easier to live and prosper in Islamic territories. Sometimes they flourished.

Both Moslem sources and Jewish responsa show that, at this time, Jewish merchants were operating in India and China, where most of the luxuries originated. From the tenth century, especially in Baghdad, the Jews served as bankers to Moslem courts. They accepted deposits from Jewish traders, then lent large sums to the caliph.

Throughout the seventh century, Jews were flogged, executed, had their property confiscated, were subjected to ruinous taxes, forbidden to trade and, at times, dragged to the baptismal font. Many were obliged to accept Christianity but continued privately to observe the Jewish laws. Thus the secret Jew, later called the marrano, emerged into history – the source of endless anxiety for Spain, for Spanish Christianity, and for Spanish Judaism.17 Hence when the Moslems invaded Spain in 711, the Jews helped them to overrun it, often garrisoning captured cities behind the advancing Arab armies. This happened in Córdoba, Granada, Toledo and Seville, where large and wealthy Jewish communities were soon established. Indeed later Arab geographers refer to Granada, as well as Lucena and Tarragona, as ‘Jewish cities’. Córdoba became the capital of the Ummayid dynasty, who made themselves caliphs, and treated the Jews with extraordinary favour and tolerance.

They had much to offer each successive wave of conquerors in terms of financial, medical and diplomatic skills. They served the new masters as tax-farmers and advisers, as well as doctors. But from this time onwards, Jews were sometimes safer in Spain under Christian rulers.

Jews too were given a choice between conversion and death. The Almohads carried their fanaticism into Spain from the year 1146. Synagogues and yeshivot were shut down.

the paramount importance of scholarship in medieval Jewish society. He was both the archetype and the greatest of the cathedocrats. Ruling and knowledge were intimately associated in rabbinical Judaism. Of course by knowledge was meant, essentially, knowledge of the Torah. The Torah was not just a book about God. It pre-existed creation, in the same way as God did. In fact, it was the blueprint of creation.

Hence it was in a peculiar sense not just the Law and religion but the wisdom of Israel and the key to the ruling of Jews. Philo called it the ideal law of the philosophers, as Moses was the ideal lawgiver. Torah, he wrote in his book on Moses, was ‘stamped with the seals of nature’ and ‘the most perfect picture of the cosmic polity’.19 It followed that the greater the knowledge of Torah, the greater the right to rule, especially over Jews.

The phrase, ‘not of the scholarly families, being of the merchants’, was dismissive – even though the merchant’s cash kept the academies going. In Babylonia, the gaon or head of each academy came from one of six families, and in Palestine he had to be descended from Hillel, Ezra the Scribe, or David himself. An outsider of colossal learning could be accepted, but this was rare.

As a rule, our knowledge of individual Jews and even of whole Jewish societies, from the second century AD to early modern times, is fragmentary. The Jews had stopped writing history, and their disturbed, wandering and often persecuted existence meant that few documents survived.

But it was highly effective: a Spanish contemporary said judges opposed the work precisely because it enabled laymen to check their decisions. That was exactly what Maimonides wanted – for the Law, the sword and armour of the Jews, to become the working property of all of them.

On the apparent conflict between free will and predestination, he quoted Ecclesiastes – ‘exceeding deep, who can find it out?’44 – and in his writings there are passages which favour both absolute freedom of the will to obey or disobey the Law, and strict determinism. He attacked astrologers, for rendering the Law futile. On the other hand, the first of his thirteen principles of faith is: ‘God alone performed, performs and will perform all actions.’

What Maimonides was trying to do was to strengthen the faith by stripping it of superstition and buttressing what remained by reason. But of course in doing so he introduced and popularized a critical approach to its mysteries which would eventually tempt men much further. Reason, once let out of the bottle of pure faith, develops a life and will of its own.

Gnosticism, or the lore of secret knowledge-systems, is an extremely insidious parasitic growth, which attaches itself like a poisonous ivy to the healthy trunk of a major religion. In Christianity, the early church fathers had to fight desperately to prevent it from smothering the faith. It attacked Judaism too, especially in the diaspora.

The rationalism for which Maimonides stood was, in part, a reaction to the growth of esoteric literature and its penetration of Jewish intellectual life. And rationalism did have some effect. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it forced the leading mystics, at any rate those with a claim to intellectual respectability, to refine their literature and corpus of belief, purge it of its magical dross and the gnostic clutter of centuries, and turn it into a coherent system. The higher kabbalah, as we might call it, began to emerge in Provençal France in the second half of the twelfth century.

For kabbalah not only introduced gnostic concepts which were totally alien to the ethical monotheism of the Bible, it was in a sense a completely different religion: pantheism.

By a remarkable paradox, the current of speculation which was to carry Spinoza out of Judaism brought him to pantheism too, so that he was the end-product both of the rationalism of Maimonides and the anti-rationalism of his opponents.

In a harsh world, the poor looked to superstition and folk religion for comfort; the rich, if they had the strength of mind, to rationalism, if not, to mystic kabbalah. Judaism had too many external enemies to want to risk its internal harmony by imposing a uniformity no one really wanted. Indeed, one can see medieval Judaism as essentially a system designed to hold Jewish communities together in the face of many perils: economic disaster, plague, arbitrary rule, above all the assault of two great imperialist religions. The state, whether Christian or Islamic, was not as a rule the main enemy. Often, indeed, it was the best friend. The Jews were staunchly loyal to duly constituted authority, for religious reasons and from plain self-interest: they were a minority dependent on the ruler for protection.

The rulers responded. They regarded Jews as an exceptionally law-abiding and wealth-producing element in the community. The stronger authority was, the more likely the Jews were to be safe. Trouble came, in both Christian and Moslem lands, during waves of religious enthusiasm, when fundamentalist priests overawed the ruler or, worse still, turned him into a zealous convert. The Jews could never be sure when these moments would come. They prepared against them. They had renounced resistance by force in the second century, and did not resume it until the twentieth in Palestine. But there were other methods. One was for their ablest members to adopt professions which made them useful to the host communities but also kept them mobile. In Islam this was not usually difficult. Able Jews became doctors. Islamic rulers made daily use of their services; so did humble people if they could, consulting them even for minor complaints such as constipation and diarrhoea, as prescriptions which survive in the geniza show.

It was a great economic and social strength of Judaism, as opposed to Islam, that it rejected polygamy. The Pentateuch did not actually prohibit it, but Proverbs 31:10–31 appeared to uphold monogamy and it was the rule from post-Exilic times; from the age of Rabbi Gershom (960–1028), bigamy and polygamy were punished by the severest type of excommunication in European Jewry.

male became adult at thirteen, when he could make up a quorum for the services and put on phylacteries, and from the early thirteenth century this point was marked by the bar-mitzvah, meaning he had come under the yoke of the commandments.61 Then he was married as soon as convenient – Maimonides was most unusual in not marrying until he was past thirty.

Marriage was a social and business transaction designed to keep society cohesive, so the contract or ketubbah was read out at the ceremony and it was drawn up, like a partnership agreement, to avoid disputes or make dissolution uncontentious.

Jewish women were of less account in Moslem Afro-Asia than in Christian Europe, but genizah records hint that they were often more powerful than their formal rights suggested. If they were beaten they could go to the courts, and sometimes a husband had to seek court protection from a dominant wife. Many letters make it clear that wives handled their husband’s business affairs when he was trading abroad. Women agents and brokers were common. One woman who figures in the records was in fact nicknamed ‘The Broker’, ran a business partnership, got herself expelled from a synagogue but figured on a public subscription-list, and died rich.66

The notion of ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’ was one the Jews adopted before the birth of Christ and always practised even when the community as a whole was distressed.

The Jews hated welfare dependence. They quoted the Bible: ‘You must help the poor man in proportion to his needs’, but added, ‘you are not obliged to make him rich.’74 The Bible, Mishnah, Talmud, the commentaries were full of injunctions to work, to achieve independence.

Pope Gregory the Great (reigned 590–604) protected the Jews of Rome; but at the same time he created the ideology of a Christian anti-Judaism which was to lead directly to physical attacks on Jews. What he argued, in effect, was that the Jews were not blind to the claims of Christianity. They knew Jesus was the Messiah, was the son of God. But they had rejected Him, and continued to reject Him because their hearts were corrupt. And it had always been thus – the evidence against the Jews was all there in the Bible, which they had written themselves.

They saw the truth, sometimes the ugly truth, about themselves, and they told it in the Bible. Whereas other peoples produced their national epics to endorse and bolster their self-esteem, the Jews wanted to discover what had gone wrong with their history, as well as what had gone right. That is why the Bible is littered with passages in which the Jews are presented as a sinful people, often too wicked or obstinate to accept God’s law, though they know it. The Jews, in fact, produced the evidence for their own prosecution. Christian apologists did not, on the whole, believe that Jews should be punished for the crime of their ancestors in killing Christ. They made a different point. Jewish contemporaries of Jesus had witnessed his miracles, seen the prophecies fulfilled and had refused to acknowledge him because he was poor and humble. That was their sin. But every generation of Jews ever since had shown the same spirit of obstinacy, as in the Bible. They were constantly concealing the truth, tampering with it, or suppressing the evidence. St Jerome accused them of cutting out references to the Trinity in the prophets. There were clues in Ezra and Nehemiah which, said St Justin, they had taken out. The old rabbis who compiled the Talmud knew the truth and even put it in the record in hidden form – that was one reason Christian debaters tried to use it for their arguments.

The wave of crusading fervour had been provoked by countless stories of Christians being ill treated in the Holy Land. The Moslems were the chief villains of these tales, but Jews were often included as treacherous auxiliaries.

The Jews tried to fight but were overcome. The males were massacred or forcibly converted. Children were slaughtered to prevent them being brought up Christians, and the women, holed up in the archbishop’s castle, committed mass suicide – over 1,000 perished in all. The ancient, rich and populous Jewish communities of the Rhineland were destroyed, most Jews being killed or dragged to the fonts. Others, dismayed by the sudden, inexplicable hatred of fellow townsmen, scattered.

The preaching of a new crusade always brought anti-Semitic sentiment to the boil.

The slanders must, of course, be seen against the background of Jewish moneylending.

To some extent the Jews’ role as lenders to the great had been taken over by the Knights Templar of Jerusalem and their European Commanderies, the first real Christian bankers. The Jews had been pushed downmarket into small-scale lending, coin-changing and pawnbroking.

Innocent III had argued in his Lateran decrees that, because of their unscrupulous use of money power, the Jews had reversed the natural order – the free Christian had become the servant of the Jewish slave – and government must restore nature by imposing disabilities.103 So governments tried. From the twelfth century onwards, Jews became less useful to princes. Their trading and money-handling skills had been acquired by Christians.

All this indicates that Jews were an accepted, if unpopular, part of the university community.

The church was by no means wide of the mark when it identified Jewish influences in the Albigensian movement or the Hussites in fifteenth-century Bohemia. Jews were active in the two forces which finally broke the church’s monopoly, the Renaissance and Reformation. They were the fermenting yeast. The populist accusations hurled against Jews in the Middle Ages were all, without exception, fantasy. But the claim that they were intellectually subversive had an element of truth.

during the second half of the Middle Ages, churchmen devised instruments to counter what they saw as Jewish subversion. Foremost among them were the friars.

Dominicans and Franciscans came to dominate university life in the thirteenth century, and they also captured important bishoprics. They supervised every aspect of Jewish life in Latin countries. They took the view that Augustine’s relatively tolerant attitude, whereby the Jews were preserved as ‘witnesses’ and allowed to practise their faith, was no longer tenable; they wanted to remove all Jewish rights.107 In 1236 Pope Gregory IX was persuaded to condemn the Talmud and this proved in effect, though not in intention, a decisive shift from Augustinian tolerance.108 The friars did not begin as anti-Semites. St Francis had no animosity towards Jews, and St Dominic, according to testimony at his canonization process, was ‘loving to all, the rich, the poor, the Jews, the gentiles’.

Official policy admitted that the Talmud was not heretical as a whole but rather contained blasphemous passages – thus being liable to censorship rather than destruction. The points made by Donin quickly became routine ammunition for clerical anti-Semitism.