History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

Many believed the end of the world and the Second Coming were imminent. Men wanted to win themselves grace and remission of sin urgently.

One anti-Semitic tale was that all Jews suffered from haemorrhoids ever since they had called out to Pilate, ‘His blood be upon us and upon our children!’ They had been told by their sages that they could be cured only through ‘the blood of Christ’–that is, by embracing Christianity–but they took the advice literally. To get the necessary blood, with which to make their curative Passover bread, they had to kill a Christ-substitute every year. One Theobald of Cambridge, a convert from Judaism, married this tale to the murder of William and alleged that a congress of Jews in Spain picked out by lot, every year, the town where the ritual murder must take place and that in 1144 the lot fell on Norwich.89 Thus from this one crime flowed two distinct, but intermingled, accusations against the Jews–the ritual murder charge and the blood libel.

The rise of organized heresy in the twelfth century led an increasingly authoritarian and triumphalist papacy to look with suspicion on any non-orthodox form of religious activity, not least on Judaism. The greatest of the medieval centralizers, Innocent III (pope 1198-1216), enacted a series of anti-Jewish decrees at the Fourth Lateran Council, 1216, and gave his sanction to the creation of two preaching orders, the Dominicans and Franciscans, specifically charged with consolidating the orthodox faith in the cities.

As an additional manifestation of Christology, Innocent launched a new cult of the eucharist. This in turn created yet another layer of anti-Semitism. In 1243, near Berlin, the Jews were accused of stealing a consecrated host and using it for their own evil purposes. This practice too fitted into the Christian view that the Jews knew the truth but fought against it. They did indeed believe that the host was Christ’s body: that was why they stole it and tortured it, making it relive Christ’s sufferings, just as they stole Christian boys and murdered them in fiendish rituals.

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

The big borrowers in both countries were the needy rural gentry–the class most likely to lead a wave of anti-Semitic activism.

Converted Jews were prominent on the campus throughout Christendom. Sometimes, as we shall see, converts became scourges of their former co-religionists; more often, especially if forced, they constituted a critical, questing, disturbing element within the intelligentsia.

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.

Every iconoclastic incident, every convulsion, every social challenge has seen, and still sees, Jews in the front line.

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 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.

At first they concentrated on strictly theological issues and even tried to discourage ritual murder charges. But the friars were coarsened by the urban environment on which they concentrated. They were aggressive proselytizers,

They held ‘missions’ in the towns, at which they beat the drum of orthodoxy and zealotry and stirred up rigorist enthusiam.

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

The Franciscans specialized in urban and mercantile problems and took a particular interest in moneylending.

The Franciscans preached love but it did not apply to the Jews as people:

Throughout Europe, the onset of the Black Death, which spread northwards from the Mediterranean, added another universal layer to the anti-Semitic superstructure. Its causes were not understood, and its unprecedented impact–it killed between a half and a quarter of the population–inspired the belief that it was a pestis manufacta, a disease spread by human malice.

Unfortunately, once anti-Semitism spread, it stuck; once a neighbourhood learned to go for local Jews violently, the likelihood was that it would happen again. The Black Death set precedents everywhere, especially in German-speaking countries.

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.

debates had nothing to offer Jews. But they were important to the Christian clergy, both as propaganda exercises for their own zealots and as fishing expeditions to discover Jewish dialectical weaknesses or vulnerable points they had not known existed.

In the aftermath of the Black Death and the countless atrocities inflicted on Jews, it became the fashion in orthodox circles to blame rationalism and other sins against God for these calamities.

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. The church had always presented the Jews as a spiritual danger. Since the twelfth century, popular superstition had presented them as a social and physical danger too. But at least Jews, as such, were an open and public danger: they were known, they lived in recognizable communities, they were forced to bear distinguishing marks and dress. But when they became converts, conversos, or as the populace called them marranos, a term of

abuse derived from the Spanish word for ‘swine’,130 they became a hidden danger.

The Jews were seen as a generally disturbing element, especially in the form of marranos. These forced converts and their descendants, cut off from the discipline of Jewish orthodoxy, tended to turn to anything, including Anabaptism, which was what authority hated most of all–it was a generic term for religious insubordination. Many marranos evolved weird mixtures of Christian and Jewish beliefs. They

were sceptics, sneering at the Virgin Mary and the saints, laughing at images and pious practices. They set up their individual judgment against authority of every kind. Marranos were regarded as potential traitors to the state as well as heretics–authority could instance the useful hate-figure of João Miguez, Duke of Naxos, the most powerful of all the ex-Christian Jews, who advised the sultan himself.

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-establ...

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.

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.

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. Their communities chose their own rabbis, and this devolved form of authority was made workable by an absence of dogmatic theology and a spirit of intellectual tolerance. Above all, they were expert settlers. They had been moving all their history. Strangers and sojourners from their earliest origins, they had, over many generations and in an endless variety of different situations, perfected many immigrant arts, especially skill in concentrating their wealth so that it could be switched quickly from a point of danger to an area of resettlement. Their trades and crafts, their folk-culture and their laws combined to assist their creative mobility. That was one reason why new Jewish arrivals, whatever their misfortunes, always

seemed to have access to working capital. And that, in turn, made th...

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.

Their religion taught them to rationalize.

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

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.

There is no ascertainable reason why

money should be viewed with such opprobrium.

Men bred cattle with honour; they sowed grain and reaped it worthily. 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.

Judaism did not polarize piety and prosperity. It praised the poor, it deplored avarice, but it also constantly suggested links between the good things of life and moral worthiness.

the effect of calamity

was to reinforce the irrational and apocalyptic elements in Judaism and in particular to make Jews hypersensitive to signs of a messianic deliverance.

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 rise of the Jewish press had a loudspeaker effect.

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.

the real genius of the new movement was Isaac ben Solomon Luria (1534-72), known as ha-Ari, the Lion.

Luria won his initial influence by teaching his pupils how to achieve intense states of meditation by concentrating entirely on the letters of the Divine Names.