History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

There was such a variety of views about the Messiah in Judaism that it was almost impossible to be heretical on the subject.123 Judaism was about the Law and its observance; Christianity was about dogmatic theology. A Jew might be in trouble over a fine point of Sabbath observance which a Christian found ridiculous. On the other hand, a Christian might be burned alive for holding a view of God which all Jews would see as a matter of legitimate opinion and controversy.

For the first time, moreover, it seemed to make sense for an ambitious and clever Jew to accept baptism willingly: he was joining a wider, progressive culture. The Jewish remnant took refuge in kabbalah, aggadic stories, superstition and poetry. It was the triumph of irrationality. The works of Maimonides and other rationalists were not exactly burned, but they became marginal.

Jews were progressively eased out of the royal service. After the Black Death disturbances, the whole position of the Jews in Spain began to deteriorate quite rapidly, as the blood libels and other anti-Semitic tales got a grip on the people.

None the less, Tortosa was a propaganda defeat for Judaism and to some extent an intellectual one too. For the first time in Spain, the Jews could be seen as forming enclaves of obscurantism and irrational backwardness, amid a superior culture.

Again we see fear of the Jew, especially in his concealed form as a converso, fomenting disorder, dissent and doubt in society.

During the same year the national inquisition replaced the traditional papal one in Aragon, and from February 1483 the entire organization was put under central control, its effective master being a Dominican prior, Tomás de Torquemada.

Prior Torquemada had become confessor to Queen Isabella of Castile in 1469, the year she married King Ferdinand of Aragon, leading to the unification of the two kingdoms in 1479. The anti-Jewish policy was to some extent a personal creation of these two monarchs. The Inquisition they set up had many opponents,

The papacy, too, objected to the Inquisition, partly because it was a royal and national instrument outside papal power, partly because it clearly offended natural justice. Sixtus IV in April 1482 demanded that Rome be given the right to hear appeals, that the accused should be told the names of hostile witnesses, and that in any event personal enemies and former servants should be disqualified as such, that repentant heretics should be allowed to confess and receive absolution instead of facing trial, and that they should be given the right to choose their counsel.

There had been Jews in Spain from early classical times, perhaps even since Solomon’s day, and the community had developed marked characteristics. In the Dark and early Middle Ages, dispersed Jews tended to fall into two main groups: those in touch with the Babylonian academies and those linked to Palestine. There were two such communities, each with its synagogue, in Maimonides’ Fustat (and a third synagogue for the Karaites). From the fourteenth century, however, it is more accurate to speak of Spanish or Sephardi Jews – the term is a corruption of an old name for Spain – and Ashkenazi or German Jews radiating from the Rhineland.146 The Sephardis created their own Judaeo-Spanish language, Ladino or Judezmo, once written in rabbinic cursive script, as opposed to the modern (originally Ashkenazi) Hebrew cursive. They were learned, literary, rich, immensely proud of their lineage, worldly-wise, often pleasure-loving and not over-strict,

Christopher Columbus, for instance, was legally Genoese but did not write Italian, and may have come from a Spanish family of Jewish origin. The name Colon was common among Jews living in Italy. Fie boasted of his connections with King David, liked Jewish and marrano society, was influenced by Jewish superstitions, and his patrons at the Aragonese court were mainly New Christians. He used the tables drawn up by Abraham Zacuto and the instruments perfected by Joseph Vecinho. Even his interpreter, Luis de Torres, was Jewish – though baptized just before they sailed for America. Thus Jews, having lost Spain in the old world, helped to recreate it in the new.147 Sephardis went to France, too, and characteristic of their impact there was the glittering but urbane Michel de Montaigne, whose mother Antoinette Louppes was a direct descendant of Spanish Jews.

The degradation and impoverishment of the Jews in Europe, the fact that their contribution to the economy and culture had become marginal by the end of the Middle Ages, might have been expected to erode if not demolish the wall of hatred which had been built around them. But that did not happen. Like other forms of irrational conduct, anti-semitism did not respond to the laws of economics. On the contrary: like some vicious organism, it bred new mutations of itself.

The notion that the Jew knew the truth but rejected it, preferring to work with the forces of darkness – and therefore could not be human in the sense that Christians were – was already well established. The Jew’s unnatural and inhuman relations with the Judensau drove it ever more firmly into the German popular mind. And if a particular category of person was not human, it could effectively be excluded from society. That, indeed, was what was already happening. For the walls of hatred, far from disappearing, were being replaced by real ones, as the European ghetto made its appearance.

He pointed out that, as a rule, ‘the kings of Spain and France, the nobility, the learned and all the men of dignity were friendly to the Jews’; prejudice came chiefly from the ignorant, uneducated poor. ‘I have never seen a man of reason hate the Jews’, he has a wise man say, ‘and there is none who hates them except the common people. For this there is a reason – the Jew is arrogant and always seeks to rule; you would never think that they are exiles and slaves driven from people to people. Rather, they seek to show themselves lords and masters. Therefore the masses envy them.’2 Why did not the Jews try to break down prejudice by behaving more modestly and humbly, and by preaching religious tolerance and understanding?3

The refugees included over 5,000 Jews, many of them immigrants from Spain and Portugal. Two years later, an agitation for their expulsion began, touched off by sermons from the friars. It culminated in 1515–16 in a decision by the state to confine the entire Jewish community to a segregated area of the city. The spot chosen was a former canon foundry, known as the ghetto nuovo, in the part of the central islands furthest removed from the Piazza San Marco. The new foundry was formed into an island by canals, equipped with high walls, all windows facing outward bricked up, and two gates set up manned by four Christian watchmen; six other watchmen were to man two patrol boats, and all ten were to be paid for by the Jewish community, which was also instructed to take out a perpetual lease of the property at one-third above the going rate.4

Jewish passivity, which so irritated Ibn Verga, was a matter of faith: ‘For they believe that any recognizable change which relates to them . . . derives from a higher cause and not human effort.’8 Many Jews were disturbed at the time by the failure of the huge and once wealthy and powerful Spanish community to offer any resistance to their cruel expulsion. Some pointed to the contrast with Jewish bellicosity in antiquity; why could not Jews be more like their ancestor, Mordecai?

The truth is that Jewish communities accepted oppression, and second-class status, provided it had definite rules which were not constamly and arbitrarily changed without warning. What they hated most was uncertainty. The ghetto offered security and even comfort of a kind. It made the observance of the law easier in many ways, by concentrating and isolating Jews.

They alone were allowed to practise moneylending, and they spoke Italian. But they were not granted Venetian citizenship;

Jews were particularly valued as captives since it was believed, usually correctly, that even if they were themselves poor a Jewish community somewhere could be persuaded to ransom them. If a Jew was taken by Turks from a Christian ship, his release was usually negotiated from Constantinople. In

eye on Jews and took them even from Christian ships on the grounds that they were Ottoman subjects. The knights kept their captives in a slave-barracks and sold them off periodically to speculators, who paid a price for Jews above the going rate;

But the principal factor affecting Jewish destinies in sixteenth-century Europe was the Reformation. In the long run, the rise of Protestantism was of huge benefit to the Jews. It broke up the monolithic unity of Latin Europe. It meant that it was no longer possible for Christians even to aspire to a single-faith society. Thus it ended the exposed isolation of the Jews as the only nonconformist group. In large parts of Europe it brought about the destruction of the friars, the Jews’ most hated enemies, and the end of such institutions as clerical celibacy and monasticism, both of which worked heavily against Jewish interests. The Reformation, building on the work of Renaissance scholars, also brought renewed interest in Hebrew studies and the Old Testament in particular. Many Catholic apologists blamed the Jews, and still more marranos, for aiding and inspiring Protestant thinkers.

But there is not much actual evidence that the interest of the Reformers in the Old Testament made them pro-Jewish as such. Such Christian Hebraists as Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522), Sebastian Münster, Professor of Hebrew at Basel after 1528, and Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560) were as strongly opposed to Judaism as any Dominican, though Melanchthon, for instance, criticized the blood libel and other anti-Semitic excesses. They rejected the Mishnah and the Talmud and indeed all Jewish commentary except parts of the kabbalah. Erasmus, the most important of them all, rejected the kabbalah too and considered Jewish scholarship exceedingly dangerous – more destructive of faith than the obscurantism of the medieval schoolmen:

It is true that, right at the beginning, the Jews welcomed the Reformation, because it divided their enemies. True also that Luther, in particular, turned to the Jews for support in his new construing of the Bible and his rejection of papal claims. In his 1523 pamphlet, Das Jesus Christus ein geborener Jude sei, he argued that there was now no reason at all why they should not embrace Christ, and foolishly looked forward to a voluntary mass conversion. When the Jews retorted that the Talmud conveyed an even better understanding of the Bible than his own, and reciprocated the invitation to convert, Luther first attacked them for their obstinacy (1526), then in 1543 turned on them in fury. His pamphlet Von den Juden und ihren Lügen (‘On the Jews and their Lies’), published in Wittenberg, may be termed the first work of modern anti-Semitism, and a giant step forward on the road to the Holocaust. ‘First’, he urged, ‘their synagogues should be set on fire, and whatever is left should be buried in dirt so that no one may ever be able to see a stone or cinder of it.’ Jewish prayer-books should be destroyed and rabbis forbidden to preach. Then the Jewish people should be dealt with, their homes ‘smashed and destroyed’ and their inmates ‘put under one roof or in a stable like gypsies, to teach them they are not master in our land’. Jews should be banned from the roads and markets, their property seized and then these ‘poisonous envenomed worms’ should be drafted into forced labour ...

Two months after his election, with the Bull Cum nimis absurdam he applied the Venetian solution in Rome, where the city’s Jews were driven on to the left bank of the Tiber and surrounded by a wall.

There were great bonfires of Hebrew books, not only in Rome and Bologna but in Florence. Pius V (1566–72) was even fiercer, his Bull Hebraeorum Gens (1569) expelling Jewish communities, some of which had had a continuous existence since antiquity. Later popes varied, but it remained papal policy to ghetto Jews in the papal states and to put pressure on other rulers to do likewise.

It used to be argued, by Max Weber and R. H. Tawney, that modern capitalism was the product of religious notions, variously termed the ‘Protestant ethic’ and the Calvinist ‘salvation panic’, both inculcating a spirit of hard work and accumulation. But there are many insuperable objections to this theory, and it now seems more likely that displacement, rather than sectarian belief, was the common factor. The dynamic impulse to national economies, especially in England and the Netherlands, and later in North America and Germany, was provided not only by Calvinists, but by Lutherans, Catholics from north Italy and, not least, by Jews.30 What these moving communities shared was not theology but an unwillingness to live under the state regimentation of religious and moral ideas at the behest of clerical establishments. All of them repudiated clerical hierarchies, favouring religious government by the congregation and the private conscience. In all these respects the Jews were the most characteristic of the various denominations of emigrants. They had repudiated clericalism ever since the destruction of the Second Temple. They had adopted congregationalism long before any Protestant sect.

addition to their general propensities, the Jews had particular contributions to make to the spirit of economic innovation and enterprise. In the Middle Ages, as we have seen, their urban, trading and financial skills were gradually acquired by the surrounding Christian communities; then the Jews had outlived their social and economic usefulness and were often told to go, or discriminated against. They might then move into a less developed area where their skills were still needed. But the alternative was to develop new methods, and the Jews were adept at this too. They kept one jump ahead of the competition, either by raising the efficiency of existing methods, and so lowering rates and prices, or by inaugurating new ones. It was when they moved into a new area that their innovatory spirit was most in evidence, usually because that was the moment for a new generation to take over. Equally important, the Jews were quick to respond to entirely new phenomena and situations. Their religion taught them to rationalize. Capitalism, at all its stages of development, has advanced by rationalizing and so improving the chaos of existing methods. The Jews could do this because, while intensely conservative (as a rule) within their own narrow and isolated world, they had no share in or emotional commitment to society as a whole and so could watch its old traditions, methods and institutions being demolished without a pang

This relative freedom to follow the logic of reason which their outsider status gave the Jews was nowhere better demonstrated than in their attitude to money. One of the greatest contributions the Jews made to human progress was to force European culture to come to terms with money and its power. Human societies have always shown an extraordinary unwillingness to demystify money and see it for what it is – a commodity like any other, whose value is relative. They tend, indeed, to attach absolute values to all commodities – failing to see that the value of a thing varies in time and space – and particularly to money because it has a fixed apparent value. They also invest money with special moral overtones.

But if they made money work for them they were parasites and lived on ‘unearned increment’, as it came to be termed. The Jews were initially as much victims of this fallacy as anyone else. Indeed, they invented it. But their technique of religious rationalization, and their predicament as unwilling traders in money, eventually made them willing to face the problem, and resolve it. As we have seen, they began by working out a double standard for money dealings with Jews and gentiles. Some elements of this remain even today: many Jewish banks in Israel (and elsewhere) display notices insisting that loans between Jews will observe the religious laws.

To earn an income from possession of money was no more, nor less, opprobrious than earning it from possessing land, or any other commodity;

An interest-free transaction, he added, was reserved for someone to whom we owe especial kindness, such as indeed a needy co-religionist.

That being so, the Jews were well prepared to take advantage of the growth in the world economy which marked the sixteenth century; indeed, in view of their exclusion from the Spanish peninsula, and their treatment in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe, they had no alternative but to push the diaspora further and seek new outlets for their business skills. To the West, Columbus’ voyages were not the only ones which had a Jewish and marrano background in finance and technology. Expelled Jews went to the Americas as the earliest traders.

Not only the imperialist commanders but the Swedes and Lutherans too strictly forbade any looting of Jewish quarters. Hence it is a curious fact that, during the Thirty Years War, for the first time in their history, the Jews were treated better, rather than worse, than the population as a whole. While Germany underwent the worst harrowing in its history, the Jews survived and even prospered. As the historian Jonathan Israel has put it: ‘There is not a scrap of evidence to show that central European Jewry declined at all in size during the Thirty Years War.’

Moreover, they were found to be just as useful in peacetime as in war. They became a permanent part of the absolutist princely state, raising the money for the gigantic baroque palaces and planned capital cities which were its hallmarks, and launching the mercantilist economic policies which kept it afloat. Jewish loans financed the great Karlskirche in Vienna and the splendid Schönbrunn Palace of the Habsburgs. Some Jews acted as virtual chief ministers to German princes, helping them to effect the concentration of political and economic power in the palace from which the Jews, as well as sovereigns, benefited.

The rationalist optimism of the twelfth century reflected in the works of Maimonides had largely disappeared by the end of the fourteenth century, as Jewish communities almost everywhere came under pressure. Among the Jewish upper classes, kabbalistic mysticism strengthened its grip. The destruction and scattering of the great Spanish community from the 1490s reinforced the trend towards irrationalism in two specific ways. First, it democratized the kabbalah. From being an esoteric science taught orally among an educated elite, or through secretly circulated manuscripts, it became public property.

the kabbalah mixed with the folk-superstitions and vulgarized aggadic tales which had always constituted a great part of the everyday religion of ordinary Jews.

Secondly, the Spanish expulsions made the kabbalah itself dynamic by adding an eschatological element concentrated on the notion of Zion and the coming of the Messiah. The kabbalah and its growing volume of superstitious accretions ceased to be just a mystic way of knowing God and became an historical force, a means to accelerate Israel’s redemption. It moved to the very centre of Judaistic belief and took on some of the characteristics of a mass movement.

History shows repeatedly that what helps to spread a religious idea fastest is a clear and practical description of the mechanics of salvation.

That a Jew like Falk could live his life in freedom under English law was a fact of immense importance in Jewish history. It meant that, for the first time since the days of the liberal Roman empire, there was one country where Jews could enjoy something approximating to normal citizenship.

Since Edward I had expelled the English Jews in 1290, it was widely believed there was an absolute legal ban on Jews residing there. In fact a few Jews lived there throughout the centuries of supposed exclusion, especially as doctors and traders.

Manasseh perceived that the defeat of the English royalists and the execution of the king in 1649 offered a unique opportunity for the Jews to gain entry to England. The king’s Puritan opponents, now effectively running the country, had always represented the philosemitic tradition there.

Manasseh came to London himself. He presented a petition to Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector, requesting that the laws forbidding the Jews entry be repealed and that they be granted admission on terms to be laid down by the government.69 What followed was a characteristic English muddle, which is worth examining in detail because it proved of such critical importance in the whole of Jewish history. Cromwell received Manasseh’s petition favourably and referred it to the Council. On 12 November 1655 the Council appointed a sub-committee to examine the matter and seek expert legal advice. On 4 December a conference was held in Whitehall attended by twenty-five lawyers, including the Chief Justice, Sir John Glynne, and the Chief Baron of the Exchequer, William Steele. To the surprise of the politicians they announced that there was no law whatever which prevented Jews coming to England. Edward’s 1290 expulsion was an act of royal prerogative which affected only the individuals concerned.

Hence, by a sort of tacit conspiracy, the question of the special status for the Jews was dropped. As there was no statute stopping them from coming, they came. As the Council said they could practise their religion, they practised

Thus the English Jews, by an act of omission, as it were, became full citizens, subject to no more disabilities than those inherent in their own unwillingness, like Catholics and Nonconformists, to belong to the Church of England or, in their particular case, to swear Christian oaths. Over the next generation, various judicial rulings established the right of Jews to plead and give evidence in the courts, and to have their religious susceptibilities recognized for this purpose. It is true that, like other non-Anglicans, they were barred from many offices and from parliament. But there were no legal restraints, as such, on their economic activities.

Hence almost by accident England became the first place in which it was possible for a modern Jewish community to emerge.

But any ambiguities were resolved in 1664 when the town fell to the English and became New York. Thereafter the Jews enjoyed not only the advantages of English citizenship but the additional religious freedoms the colonists in the New World had taken for themselves.

The Jews always ran their own schools, courts, hospitals and social services. They appointed and paid their own officials, rabbis, judges, slaughterers, circumcisers, schoolteachers, bakers and cleaners. They had their own shops. Wherever they were, the Jews formed tiny states within states. This was the ghetto system, and it applied even in places like Amsterdam where no legal ghettoing existed.

Since all religious groups had virtually equal rights, there was no point in any constituting itself into a separate community. All could participate in a common society. Hence from the start, the Jews in America were not organized on communal but on congregational lines, like the other churches. In Europe, the synagogue was merely one organ of the all-embracing Jewish community. In North America it was the only governing body in Jewish life. American Jews did not belong to ‘the Jewish community’, as they did in Europe. They belonged to a particular synagogue. It might be Sephardi or Ashkenazi; or, of the latter, it might be German, English, Holland, Polish, all of them differing on small ritual points.

The Jews had always been skilful at using and transferring capital. But once they were established in Anglo-Saxon society, the security they then enjoyed in law enabled them to accumulate it too. Confidence in their rights led Jews to expand the scope of their activities. Trading, especially in articles of small volume and high value, such as jewels, easily concealed and whisked from place to place, no longer constituted almost the sole economic occupation in which Jews found it safe to engage.

William of Orange, later William HI of England, who led the coalition from 1672 to 1702, was financed and provisioned by a group of Dutch Sephardi Jews operating chiefly from The Hague.

the London Jews, secure in their property, were able to help the state to avoid them. The Menasseh Lopes family under Queen Anne, the Gideons and the Salvadors under the first three Georges, played notable roles in maintaining the stability of London financial markets.