History of the Jews, Vol. 4 (of 6). Graetz Heinrich

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СКАЧАТЬ arose passionate strife between pope and anti-pope, between one college of cardinals and another, dividing the whole of Christendom into two huge, bitterly hostile camps. It was only natural that the clergy should infect the lay world with their immeasurable dissoluteness and vice. Yet these degenerate, inhuman and degraded Christian communities presumed to treat the modest, virtuous, pious Jews as outcasts and accursed of God. Although superior in everything save wickedness and the virtues of a robber chivalry, they were denied the commonest rights of man. They were baited and slaughtered like beasts of the field. In Nördlingen the entire Jewish community, including women and children, was murdered (1384). All over Suabia they were persecuted, and in Augsburg they were imprisoned until a ransom of 20,000 florins was paid. A characteristic illustration is furnished by the following occurrence: The rabbis and communal leaders of central Germany had determined to hold a synod at Weissenfels, in Saxony, for the purpose of deliberating upon certain religious questions, and adopting resolutions of public utility (1386). They had provided themselves with safe-conduct passes from the Saxon princes, it being unsafe for Christians to travel on the public highroads, and, of course, much more so for Jews. Nevertheless, a party of German robber-nobles, anticipating rich booty, waylaid the travelers on their return journey, and, having plundered and ill-used them, threw them into prison, and liberated them only on the payment of a ransom of 5,000 groschen. The rabbis and their companions complained to the princes of this attack, and the latter, indignant at the disrespect with which their authority had been treated, summoned the noble marauders to answer the charges urged against them. The line of defense adopted by the spokesman of the accused was that they had no idea of disregarding the safe-conduct passes of the princes, but that they held the opinion that the Jews, the enemies of the church, did not deserve the protection of Christian authorities. The speaker continued that, for his own part, wherever he met the enemies of Christ, he would give them no quarter. A defense of this kind could not fail to obtain applause. Its spirit was that of the majority of the Christians of that day. The accused were absolved from blame, and the Jews dismissed without redress, "for the defense captivated the princes."

      The art of poetry, which should beautify life, began to work like poison on the moral atmosphere of the Jews. For some centuries past romantic works had variously portrayed the character of a creditor, who, as equivalent for a debt, claimed a certain portion cut from the body of his creditor, either a liege lord from his vassal, or a nobleman from a burgher. At first this was harmless fiction, but afterwards it was turned against the Jews, as though only a Jewish Shylock could be capable of such hardness of heart as to insist on the payment of a pound of flesh from a Christian. Thus cannibal hatred of Christians was foisted on the Jews, and received credence. Romances took up the theme, and made it popular.

      The depraved, dissolute clergy – a class of men who, in an age of public decency, would have been objects of universal contempt, or might have earned the corrections of a Bridewell – affected to feel insulted by contact with the Jews, and, under the pretext that their cloth was disgraced by them, caused new scenes of horror and cruelty. In Prague, since the time of Charles IV the chief city of Germany, a bloody persecution was set on foot by their agency. A local priest – perhaps one of those whom Emperor Wenceslaus had caused to be pilloried with their concubines – passed through the Jewish quarter on Easter Sunday (April 18th, 1389) with the host, to visit a dying person. Jewish children playing in the street – it was one of the latter days of the Passover feast – were throwing sand at one another, and a few grains happened to fall upon the priest's robe. His attendants immediately turned upon the children, and cruelly beat them. Their cries quickly brought their parents to their rescue, whereupon the priest fled to the market-place, loudly proclaiming that his holy office had been profaned by Jews. To invest the incident with the necessary importance, he exaggerated it, and said that he was pelted with stones until forced to drop the host. The citizens and lower orders of Prague immediately banded themselves together, and, armed with murderous weapons of every description, made a violent attack upon the houses of the Jews. As usual, they offered their victims the choice between death and baptism, but they found them steadfast in their faith. Many thousands perished in the massacre, which lasted a whole day and night. Several of the Jews, among them their venerable rabbi, first took the lives of their wives and children, and then their own, to escape the cruelties of their enemies. The synagogue was laid in ashes, and the holy books and scrolls torn and trodden under foot. Not even the burial ground escaped the fury of these Christian zealots. The corpses in the streets were stripped of their clothing, left naked, and then burnt.

      For the same offense – that is, for no offense at all – the communities in the vicinity of the Bohemian capital were "confined, oppressed, ill-treated and persecuted." The reigning pope issued a bull condemning the outrages (July 2d, 1389), and based his action upon the edict of Pope Innocent IV, which enacted that Jews should not be forcibly baptized, nor disturbed in the observance of their festivals; but he failed to produce an impression on the consciences of the faithful. It was in vain, too, that the Jews appealed to their liege lord, the German emperor Wenceslaus, in whose capital the persecution had originated. This prince – who, had he not been an emperor, would certainly have been a freebooter – was a man of sense only on the rare occasions when he was not intoxicated. His reply to the representations of his Jewish subjects was that they had deserved the attacks made upon them, as they had had no right to show themselves outside their houses on Easter Sunday. For the goods and chattels they had left behind them he exhibited more concern, promptly ordering them to be appropriated to his empty exchequer. This was the measure of his general attitude towards the Jews. During several years he attempted to possess himself of their monetary claims on his Christian subjects, and to carry out his design he convened (1385) a conference of representatives of the Suabian cities, which met at Ulm. Despite the impoverishment of the German communities, he exacted from every Jew, even from every Jewish youth and maiden, the so-called "golden penny" poll-tax, amounting to one gulden annually. He openly declared that the possessions of the Jews were his personal property, and forbade them to sell or mortgage anything. And still Emperor Wenceslaus was not the worst of rulers in the eyes of the Jews. The rabbi, Avigedor Kara, of Prague, boasted his friendship; and the Jews of Germany whispered significantly to one another that his allegiance to the teaching of Christ was very weak.

      This storm of spoliation and persecution had no far-reaching consequences in the history of the German Jews. It could not affect their abject condition, for they had been too long accustomed to turn their cheeks submissively to the smiter. Quite different were the effects of a contemporary persecution in Spain. Here the very heart of the Jewish race was attacked, and the results made themselves felt in the history of the whole Jewish people. The Spanish Jews had until then been more hated than despised; the horrors of this persecution, however, so thoroughly cowed their spirits, so paralyzed their energies, and humbled their pride, that they, too, became the scorn of their oppressors. As in Prague, the outbreak was the work of an ecclesiastic and a mob, but here it assumed the vastest proportions, and developed permanent results, the operations of which were disastrous in the extreme. It arose in Seville through the agitation of a fanatical priest, Ferdinand (Ferrand) Martinez, who seemed to consider implacable hatred of the Jews as the essence of his religion. His discourses were devoted to stirring up the populace against them, and he thundered against their hardened infidelity, their pride, their heaped-up riches, their greed, and their usury. In Seville he found the people only too ready to listen to him, for there the Jews were hated with special intensity. The citizens could not forgive them the important part they had played in the civil war between Don Pedro and Don Henry II, and particularly the suspicious circumstances of the death of Joseph Pichon, who had been so popular among them. As long as Don Juan I lived, Martinez took care to restrain the mob from open violence, for though the king regarded the Jews with but little affection, he was in the habit of punishing lawless outbreaks with the utmost severity. No sooner was he dead, however, than the bigoted cleric thought he might dare the utmost. The circumstances of the government were favorable to the development of his plans. The new monarch, Henry III, was a boy of only eleven years of age, and in the council of regency discord reigned, threatening to involve the country in another civil war.

      One day (March 15, 1391) – a memorable day, not only for the Jews and for Spain, but for the history of the entire world, for on that day the first germ of the monstrous Inquisition was created СКАЧАТЬ