History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

Fourth Lateran Counc...

creation of two preaching orders, the Dominicans and Franciscans, specifically charged with consolidating th...

put down ...

stealing a consecrated host and using it for their own evil purposes.

most charges against Jews were pure inventions, and whenever a genuine ecclesiastical inquiry was held, its findings always exonerated the Jewish community.94

background of Jewish moneylending.

The big borrowers

were the needy rural gentry–the class most likely to lead a wave of anti-Semitic activism.

The whole of history teaches that money-lending leads to trouble in rural societies.

medieval Christian governments saw themselves as confronted with a ‘Jewish problem’, to which expulsion was a ‘final solution’.

From the twelfth century onwards, Jews became less useful to princes. Their trading and money-handling skills had been acquired by Christians.

So authority looked less benignly on the Jewish presence which, thanks to the blood and ritual murder libels, became a source of frequent rioting They also, quite genuinely, began to fear the Jewish contribution to the spread of disturbing ideas.

they constituted a critical, questing, disturbing element within the intelligentsia.

the fermenting yeast.

Hence, 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

Their policy gradually became to convert the Jews or get them out.

the Black Death,

added another universal layer to the anti-Semitic superstructure.

In Nahmanides’ day the Jews in Spain could still with reason regard themselves as the intellectually superior community. Their skills were still extremely useful, if not quite indispensable, to Christian rulers. But the Christians were catching up fast, and by the end of the thirteenth century they had absorbed Aristotelianism themselves, had written their own summae, and in trade and administration were a match for anything the Jews could provide. During the fourteenth century the Jews, even in Spain, were in steady relative decline. Their economic position was eroded by anti-Semitic laws. Their numbers were depleted by forcible conversion. 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.

So Judaism, which in the eleventh and twelfth centuries had been in the intellectual forefront, turned in on itself.

With the increasing misery of Jewish communities, apocalyptic and messianism began to revive. Angels and devils multiplied. So did scruples and weird devotions.

increasing resort was made to excommunications.

haemorrhage of converts

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.

The war against the Jews was taken out of the hands of the mob and made the official business of church and government.

the last of the great Jewish–Christian debates took place at Tortosa in 1413-14. It was not a genuine debate,

It was, in effect, the trial of the Jewish religion.

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. This, as much as the legal and economic pressure, and the fear generated by the high-pressure conversion drives of the friars, produced a stampede of converts. So to a great extent Ferrer succeeded in his object. Alas, converting Jews did not solve ‘the Jewish problem’. What it did, as the Spanish authorities rapidly discovered, was to present it in a new and far less tractable form. For the problem now became racial as well as religious.

A marrano was thus much more unpopular than a practising Jew because he was an interloper in trade and craft, an economic threat; and, since he was probably a secret Jew, he was a hypocrite and a hidden subversive too.

Spanish Jew found he could not evade anti-Semitic hostility by converting.

With conversion, anti-Semitism became racial rather than religious, but the anti-Semites found, as their successors were to do in Nazi Germany, that it was exceedingly difficult to identify and isolate Jews by racial criteria. They were forced back, as the Nazis were to be, on the old religious ones.

the solution: isolation and segregation. The populace should shun suspect conversos and the state should interpose physical barriers between them and the true Christian population. At

Tomás de Torquemada.

In less than twelve years the Inquisition condemned about 13,000 conversos, men and women, for the secret practice of Judaism. The Inquisition sought all kinds of victims, but secret Jews were among the chief ones. In its whole existence it numbered a total of about 341,000 victims. Of these, more than 32,000 were killed by burning, 17,659 burned in effigy and 291,000 given lesser punishments. The great majority of those killed, some 20,226, suffered before 1540 under the first five inquisitors-general, and most of them were of Jewish origin. But the auto-da-fé continued to claim victims until 1790.

Both Ferdinand and Isabella claimed they were acting purely from orthodox and Catholic zeal.

The truth seems to be that both monarchs were driven by a mixture of religious and financial motives and also, more importantly, by the desire to impose a centralizing, emotional unity on their disparate and divided territories. But, most of all, they were caught up in the sinister, impersonal logic of anti-Semitism itself.

Dealing with the Jews, open or secret, was now almost the principal activity of the government. All the gaols were full. Tens of thousands were under house arrest and often starving. Despairing of ending contact between conversos and Jews by the conventional means of inquisitorial investigation, egged on by rapacious followers anxious to loot, the reyos determined on a gigantic act of will to produce a ‘final solution’. On 31 March they signed an Edict of Expulsion, promulgated a month later, physically driving from Spain any Jew who would not accept immediate conversion.

The destruction of Spanish Jewry was the most momentous event in Jewish history since the mid-second century AD.

What Spain lost, others gained; and in the long run the Sephardi diaspora was to prove exceedingly creative and of critical importance in Jewish development. But at the time it seemed an unrelieved disaster for the Jews.

Nor was it the only one. At the close of the European Middle Ages–the Jewish Middle Ages were not to end until the last decades of the eighteenth century–the Jews had ceased to make, at any rate for the time being, a primary contribution to the European economy and culture. They had become dispensable, and were being ejected in consequence. The Spanish expulsions were preceded by many in Germany and Italy.

One expulsion provoked another, as refugees streamed into cities which already housed more Jews than their rulers now wanted.

Christian bankers and craftsmen got the Jews banned as soon as their guilds were powerful enough.

So they moved into the less developed territories further east

by the year 1500 Poland was regarded as the safest country in Europe for Jews, and it soon became the Ashkenazi heartland.

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. In Germany in particular it began to develop its own repulsive iconography–the Judensau.

Jews were portrayed venerating the sow, sucking its teats, embracing its hindquarters, devouring its excrement.

The great Sephardi diaspora, from Spain in 1492, from Portugal in 1497, set Jews in motion everywhere, for the arrival of refugees in large numbers usually led to further expulsions. Many Jews, reduced to near destitution, denied entrance to cities from which Jews had already been banned, took to peddling. It is no coincidence that the legend of the Wandering Jew assumed mature form about this time.

Venice,

1515-16 in a decision by the state to confine the entire Jewish community to a segregated area of the city.

ghetto nuovo,