History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

The concept of a separate quarter for Jews was not new. It went back to antiquity. Most major Islamic cities had one.

The truth is that Jewish communities accepted oppression, and second-class status, provided it had definite rules which were not constantly 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. If segregation, as the church claimed, safeguarded Christians from evil Jewish contacts, equally it protected Jews from secularity.

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.

But there is not much actual evidence that the interest of the Reformers in the Old Testament made them pro-Jewish as such.

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.

the Counter-Reformation, when it came, dealt harshly with the Jews as well as the Protestants.

Paul IV

The ghetto was quickly extended to all cities in the papal states

it remained papal policy to ghetto Jews in the papal states and to put pressure on other rulers to do likewise.

The strongest monarchies,

vehement against heresy.

the Counter-Reformation was a great wave of reaction to the disturbing ideas circulated in the first half of the century,

The Jews were seen as a generally disturbing element, especially in the form of marranos.

Many marranos evolved weird mixtures of Christian and Jewish beliefs. They were sceptics,

The Counter-Reformation, both clerical and secular, was most suspicious of immigrants, of whom the marranos were one element. Authority learned from experience that movement meant trouble. It did not mind so much the old-established Jews. It was the newcomers who brought dangerous ideas.

Authority loved the Jew as a wealth-creator; hated him as an ideas-monger. Yet the two activities were different faces of the same human coin. Experience showed that the Jew on the move, who was most likely to bring unsettling ideas, was also the most likely to introduce new, or more efficient, ways of adding to a nation’s wealth.

access to working capital. And that, in turn, made them generally welcome.

particular contributions to make to the spirit of economic innovation and enterprise.

one jump ahead of the competition,

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–could, indeed, play a leading role in the process of destruction. They were thus natural capitalist entrepreneurs.

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.

Rabbinical Judaism said things about business which all sensible men know to be true and just, but which convention normally excludes from the realm of religious discourse. 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.

Expelled Jews went to the Americas as the earliest traders.

The Russian barrier to further eastern penetration led to intensive Jewish settlement in Poland, Lithuania and the Ukraine. As in western Europe in the Dark and early Middle Ages, the Jews served as a key element in a vast colonization process, marked by a rapid expansion in the agricultural and trading economy, and a phenomenal increase in population.

With easy access to credit, Jewish pioneer settlers played a leading part in developing eastern Poland, the interior of Lithuania, and the Ukraine, especially from the 1560s onwards.

Polish settlement of the Ukraine

Most of these places were owned by Polish nobles, absentee-landlords, the Jews acting as middlemen and intermediaries with the peasants–a role fraught with future danger.

Jews from all over Europe arrived to take part in this colonizing process. In many settlements they constituted the majority of the inhabitants, so that for the first time outside Palestine they dominated the local culture. But they were important at every level of society and administration. They farmed the taxes and the customs. They advised government. And every Polish magnate had a Jewish counsellor in his castle, keeping the books, writing letters, running the economic show.

Indeed, by the end of the sixteenth century, there were few men of importance in east-central Europe who ‘knew not Joseph’.

By the last quarter of the century, the ideological thrust of the Counter-Refor...

The great Jewish strength lay in the ability to take quick advantage of new opportunities; to recognize an unprecedented situation when it arose and devise methods of handling

Towards the close of the sixteenth century, the principal novelty was the ever-growing scale and cost of war.

In effect, it paid the leading members of the Jewish community to be exploited by the crown, provided it was the only one and protected them from other predators.

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.

famous dynasties of court Jews.

Gomperz

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Goldschmidts

de Lima

de Casseres

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Jewish skill in raising and deploying huge sums of cash played a decisive role in two of the greatest military confrontations of the second half of the seventeenth century: the Habsburgs’ successful resistance to the advance of Turkey into Europe and their subsequent counter-offensive; and the great coalition which halted Louis XIV’s attempt to dominate the Continent.

Samuel Oppenheimer

Joseph Oppenheimer