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

Luther began by saying that he had made up his mind not to write anything further about Jews, nor against them, but because he had learnt that "this miserable, wicked people" dared entice Christians to join them, he wished to warn weak-minded men not to allow themselves to be befooled. Luther's principal argument, in proof of the truth of Christianity against the denial of the Messiahship of Jesus by the Jews, is written in very monkish style. Because the Christians, for more than a thousand years, had robbed them of all the rights of man, had treated them as evil beasts, had trodden them under foot, lacerated, and slain them: in a word, because they had fallen into distress through the harshness of Christians, therefore, they must be rejected, and the Saviour of the world must have appeared!

This is mediæval logic. But it exceeds the limits of indulgence towards the peculiarities of a strong character, when Luther, in his uncharitableness towards Jews, employs language such as was usual with those who burnt Jews at the stake. "Why should the Jews complain of hard captivity among us?" he says. "We Christians suffered persecution and martyrdom at their hands for nearly 300 years, so that we might well complain that they took us captive and killed us. And to this very day we know not what devil brought them into our land" (as if Jews had not dwelt in some districts of what is now Germany long before Germans were there). "We did not bring them from Jerusalem; besides that, no one keeps them: the country and the roads are open to them, let them return to their own land. We will gladly give them presents, if we can but be rid of them, for they are a heavy burden upon us, a plague, a pestilence, a sore trial." Luther, like Pfefferkorn and Eck, stated with malicious delight how the Jews were often driven out by violence "from France and recently from Spain by our beloved Emperor Charles (an historical blunder); this year also from the entire dominion of Bohemia, although one of their securest nests was in Prague; also from Ratisbon, Magdeburg, and many other places in my time."

Without appreciation of the heroic patience displayed by Jews in the midst of hostility, and untaught by history, Luther did nothing but repeat the lying accusations of the vindictive Pfefferkorn, whose falsehood and villainy had been palpably proved by the Humanists. In imitation of this arch-enemy of the Jews he wrote that the Talmud and the rabbis taught that it was no sin to kill the Goyim, that is, heathens and Christians, break an oath to them, or rob and plunder them, and that the one and only aim of Jews was to weaken the Christian religion. It is incomprehensible that Luther, who had taken the part of the Jews so strongly in the heat of the Reformation, could repeat all the false tales about the poisoning of the springs, the murder of Christian children, and the use of human blood. He also maintained, in agreement with Eck, from whom in other respects he was so widely divided, that the Jews were too prosperous in Germany, and in consequence had become insolent.

What is to be done with this wicked, accursed race, which can no longer be tolerated? asked Luther, and he gave an answer to the question which shows equal want of charity and wisdom. First of all the reformer of Wittenberg recommended that the synagogues be reduced to ashes, "to the honor of God and of Christianity." Next, Christians were to destroy the houses of the Jews, and drive them all under one roof, or into a stable like gypsies. All prayer-books and copies of the Talmud and the Old Testament were to be taken from them by force (as Luther's opponents, the Dominicans, had advised), and even praying and the use of God's name were to be forbidden under penalty of death. Their rabbis were to be forbidden to teach. The authorities were to prohibit the Jews from traveling, and to bar the roads against them, so that they must stay at home. Luther advised that their money be taken from them, and that this confiscated wealth be employed to establish a fund to maintain those Jews who should embrace Christianity. The authorities were to compel able-bodied Jews and Jewesses to forced labor, and to keep them strictly employed with the flail, the axe, the spade, the distaff and spindle, so that they might earn their bread in the sweat of their brow, and not live in idleness, feasting, and splendor. Christians were not to show any tender mercy to Jews. Luther urged the emperor and the princes to expel them from the country without delay, and drive them back into their own land. But anticipating that the princes would not consent to such folly, he exhorted the clergy and teachers of the people to fill the minds of their hearers with hatred of Jews. He observed that if he had power over Jews, he would assemble the best and most learned among them, and, under penalty of having their tongues cut out, force them to accept the Christian teaching, that there is not one God, but that there are three Gods. Luther even stirred up the robber-nobles against them. He had heard that a rich Jew was traveling through Germany with twelve horses. This Jew was known as the wealthy Michael, of Frankfort, the protégé of the Margrave of Brandenburg; if the princes did not close the road against him and his fellow-believers, Luther urged the robber-knights to do so, for Christians might learn from his pamphlet how depraved was the Jewish nation. These absurd charges Luther ascribed to a worthless convert, Anton Margaritha, the son of a rabbi of Ratisbon. He had become a Catholic, and being punished on account of calumnies, had turned Lutheran, and written a foolish book against the Jews, and from this book Luther had taken his unjust attacks upon them.

Shortly before his death he exhorted his hearers in a sermon to drive out the Jews:

"Besides all this you still have the Jews, who do great evil in the land. If they could kill us all, they would gladly do so, aye, and often do it, especially those who profess to be physicians – they know all that is known about medicine in Germany; they can give poison to a man of which he will die in an hour, or in ten or twenty years; they thoroughly understand this art. I say to you lastly, as a countryman, if the Jews refuse to be converted, we ought not to suffer them, or bear with them any longer."

In the reformer and regenerator of Germany, then, the Jews had almost a worse enemy than in the Pfefferkorns, Hoogstratens, and Ecks, certainly worse than in the popes till the middle of the century. But few heeded the words of those wretches, known to be sophists and liars, while Luther's uncharitable utterances were respected as oracles by the Christians of the new faith, and but too well followed out. As Jerome had infected the Catholic world with his openly avowed hatred of Jews, so Luther poisoned the Protestant world for a long time to come with his Jew-hating testament. Protestants became even more bitter against Jews than Catholics had been. The leaders of Catholicism demanded absolute submission to canonical law, but on this condition granted them permission to remain in Catholic countries; Luther, on the other hand, required their absolute expulsion. The popes often issued exhortations to spare the synagogues; but the founder of the Reformation insisted upon their desecration and destruction. It was reserved for him to place Jews on a level with gypsies. This difference arose from the fact that the popes occupied the highest rank in life, and dwelt in Rome, the metropolis of the world, the center of affairs in the four quarters of the globe; thus they had no eye for petty events, and usually left the Jews unnoticed because of their small importance. Luther, on the other hand, who lived in a petty country town and amidst narrow surroundings, listened to all the gossip against Jews, judged them by the measure of a country bumpkin, and reckoned up every farthing that they earned against them. He, therefore, was the cause of their being expelled by Protestant princes. In Roman Catholic states the Dominicans alone were their deadly enemies.

This hatred followed the Jews even into Turkey. If there were neither Roman Catholics nor Protestants, there were Greek Catholic Christians. Turks and Greeks lived together in the towns of both Greece and Asia Minor. The latter, who would not give up their arrogance, but dared not display it towards the ruling Turks, persecuted the Jews with silent hatred, and took advantage of every opportunity to draw upon them the persecution of the government. On one occasion some of them gave rise to a persecution in the town of Amazia in Asia Minor. They caused a poor Greek, who was in the habit of associating with Jews, and had been supported by them, to disappear, and then accused some Jews of having murdered him. Hereupon the Turkish cadis seized the accused, put them to the torture, and forced them to acknowledge the murder. They were hanged, and a respected Jewish physician, Jacob Abi-Ayub, was burnt (about 1545). A few days afterwards a Jew recognized the Greek supposed to have been murdered, induced him to tell how he had been made to disappear, and brought him before the cadi. The latter, justly incensed against the malicious Greek accusers, had them executed. A similar accusation, the falseness of which was brought to light, was lodged against a Jew of the town of Tokat at about the same time.

These cruel occurrences suggested to Moses Hamon, Sultan Solyman's Jewish physician, to obtain a decree from the sultan that an accusation against Jews in Turkey of having murdered a Christian, and other malicious calumnies, should not be brought before the ordinary judges, but before the sultan himself.

Hatred against Jews, restrained in Turkey, raged the more openly in Christian countries. The republic of Genoa for a long time had not suffered a Jew to remain more than three days within its boundaries. Notwithstanding this, fugitives from Spain or Provence from time to time were received in the town of Novi, near Genoa; they went in and out of the capital itself, and were suffered to remain there. In the party differences between the patrician families, the little community, repulsed by the one side, was taken up by the other. Most of them were intelligent artisans, capitalists, or physicians. But again the Dominicans stirred up the people against them, and roused the professional jealousy of Christian physicians. Contrary to the wishes of Doge Doria, the Jews were driven out of Genoa (April, 1550), and, heralded by the sound of trumpets, a proclamation was made that henceforth no Jews should be suffered. This expulsion from Genoa is of importance, because a clever Jewish historian was included in it, whose fate represents in miniature the painful lot experienced by the Jewish race on a large scale.

The vicissitudes in the life of the nations, as well as the changes in the life of the Jewish people, especially since their cruel expulsion from Spain and Portugal, and the heartless persecution of the Marranos, at length brought some clear-seeing Jews to the conviction that history is not ruled by chance, but that a higher hand guides it, bringing to pass destined events by bloodshed and tears. Since the time of the crusades, no century had been richer in changeful, almost dramatic, events than the sixteenth, when not only fresh continents were discovered, but when a new spirit began to prevail among mankind, striving after new creations, but always kept down by the leaden weight of existing systems. This wealth of occurrences taught a few thoughtful Jews, mostly of Sephardic origin, to trace the work of Providence in the apparently whimsical and irregular course of universal and Jewish history. They considered history a comfort to that portion of mankind which had been overthrown, overridden, and downtrodden by the tumultuous course of events. And what race stood in more need of consolation than the Jewish, a martyr people apparently born only for sorrow, always eating its bread in tears? Almost at one and the same time, three enlightened Jews undertook the task of studying history, and placing before the Jewish reading world its brazen tables. These were the physician, Joseph Cohen, the learned Talmudist, Joseph Ibn-Verga, and the poet, Samuel Usque. All three began with the same fundamental idea. The spirit of the prophets, which recognized in the course of historical events the fittest means for instruction and improvement, had come upon them, incontestably showing that Jews even in their degradation are not like the gypsy rabble, neither having nor knowing a history; that, in fact, they stood higher than those who wielded the scepter and the sword, the rack and the club, for the subjugation of mankind.

The greatest of these historians was Joseph ben Joshua Cohen (born at Avignon, 1496, died 1575). His ancestors had come from Spain at the great expulsion, his father Joshua emigrating to Avignon, and thence moving to Novi, in Genoese territory. For a while he lived in Genoa, and was expelled thence. Joseph Cohen had studied medicine, devoting himself both to the theory and the practice. He appears to have been family physician to the doge, Andrea Doria. His heart beat warmly for his Jewish brethren, and he was zealous in his endeavors to lighten their unhappy lot. He once exerted himself to obtain the release of a father and son, cast into prison by the heartless Giannettino Doria, nephew and presumptive heir to the doge. But he succeeded in delivering only the father, the son did not escape till the stormy night of Fiesco's conspiracy. At the last expulsion from Genoa (1550), the inhabitants of the little town of Voltaggio begged him to settle amongst them as a physician, and he lived there for eighteen years. But history attracted him more than the practice of medicine, and he began to search for chronicles in order to write a sort of universal history in the form of annals. He began with the period of the decline of the Roman empire and the formation of the modern states, and represented the course of the world's history as a struggle between Asia and Europe, between the Crescent and the Cross; the former represented by the then powerful dominion of Turkey; the latter, by France, which had set up Charlemagne, the first emperor of a Christian realm. He connected the whole of European history with these two groups of nations. He included all the events and wars of Christendom, and of the Mahometan countries in "The Annals of the Kings of France and of the House of Othman," the title of his historical work. In the history of his own times, which he either witnessed himself, or obtained from the experience of contemporaries, he is an impartial narrator, and, therefore, his work is a trustworthy source of information. The Hebrew historical style, borrowed from the best books of the Bible, renders his account most forcible. The Biblical language and dramatic style give a charm to the work, and raise it above the level of a dry chronicle.

Joseph Cohen introduced the history of the various persecutions of the Jews at the different periods when they occurred. His chief aim was to point out the justice of God in the course of history, showing how violence and cunning met with their desert, and were cast down from the height attained. He sympathized with the sorrows which he described; therefore, he often wrote with intense bitterness.

Very different is another historical work of the same period, upon which three generations, father, son, and grandson, were employed. Judah Ibn-Verga, Kabbalist and astronomer, a member of the distinguished Ibn-Verga family, related to the Abrabanels, had noted down in a book some of the persecutions which Jews had undergone in different countries and at various times. Solomon Ibn-Verga, who had witnessed the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal, and who for a time had pretended to be a Christian, and then emigrated to Turkey as a Marrano, added several narratives to his father's notes. He understood the Latin language, and so borrowed and added fresh material from various Latin documents. His son, Joseph Ibn-Verga, who belonged to the college of rabbis at Adrianople, completed the work by adding some of the events of his own times and the age immediately preceding, and then published the whole under the title of "Judah's Rod of Correction" (Shebet Jehuda). Joseph Ibn-Verga was also learned in Latin, and incorporated many narratives from Latin documents. This martyrology of the Ibn-Vergas, then, is not a unit, but a medley without plan or order, destitute even of chronological sequence. Imaginary conversations between Jews and Spanish or Portuguese kings are given as having actually taken place. But the Hebrew style is brilliant and graceful, without possessing biblical coloring like that of the historical works of Elias Kapsali and Joseph Cohen. Ibn-Verga sought (towards the end of the first part) to show the reason why the Jewish race, above all the Spanish Jews, were visited with so many intolerable trials, and found it in the preference once shown for the Jewish nation: "Whom God loves most He chasteneth most." But the chief sources of persecution were to be found in the division between Jews and Christians in the matter of food and drink, in the revenge taken by Christians for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, in the offenses of Spanish Jews against Christian women, in the envy of their riches, and in the false oaths of which they were guilty. Ibn-Verga did not conceal the faults of his race; perhaps he exaggerated them. Joseph Ibn-Verga added a heartfelt prayer about the numerous sufferings which Israel had undergone, and was still enduring, the last causing the first to be forgotten. All the nations of the world were united in hatred to this race; all creatures in heaven and on earth allied in enmity against it; before a Jewish child began to prattle it was pursued by hatred and scorn. "We are despised like the lowest worms; may God soon fulfill His promises to His people."

The most original of the three historians, as well as of the three Usques, probably belonging to the same family, was Samuel, who had no doubt fled from the fire of the Inquisition in Portugal. He settled with his relations in Ferrara. Like Solomon Usque, known under his Spanish name of Duarte Gomez, he was a poet, but his muse did not occupy herself with foreign material, with imitations and adaptations, but created something original and peculiar. The brilliant and tragical history of the Israelite people had great attraction for him; it did not exist merely as a lifeless mass of learning in his memory, but lived in his heart as a fresh bubbling spring from which he drew comfort and inspiration. Biblical history with its heroes, kings, and men of God, the history subsequent to the Captivity, with its alternations of splendid victory and unhappy overthrow, the history since the destruction of the Jewish rule by the Romans, all the events and changes of these three periods were present to Samuel Usque's mind. The material gathered from many sources he transformed by the breath of poetry into a long, most touching lament and consolation in the Portuguese language, not in verse, but in elevated prose, more charming than a poetic garb. It is a conversation of three shepherds, Icabo, Numeo, and Zicareo, the first of whom laments with bitter tears the tragical fate of Israel since its appearance on the scene of history; the other two pour the balm of comfort into the broken heart of the unhappy shepherd, and show him that these sufferings are the necessary steps to the attainment of a glorious goal. Samuel Usque named this historical dialogue, "Consolation for the Sorrows of Israel." By his vivid picture of the Jewish past, he intended to give to the Portuguese fugitives in Ferrara and elsewhere, who had again attached themselves to Judaism, comfort in their great sorrow and suffering, and lead them to look forward to a happy future.

He represented the Israelite nation now as a mourning widow, wringing her hands in lamentation, and weeping day and night over the sufferings of her sons during thousands of years; now as a prophetess inspired by God, clothed in a radiant robe, whose eye pierces the darkness, and sees a glorious future, and whose lips utter wisdom, and pour balm on burning wounds. Though he was not a regular historian, yet no one has represented the principal features of Jewish history from the earliest times down to his own with so much light and life as Samuel Usque.

The external form of this historico-poetical dialogue is as follows: the shepherd, Icabo (or Jacob, the representative of the Jewish nation), laments in a lonely spot the misery of his flock, dispersed throughout all parts of the world, humiliated, and torn in pieces. "To what quarter of the globe shall I turn and find healing for my wounds, oblivion of my sorrows, and comfort in this grievous, heavy torment? The whole earth is full of my misery and my distress. I am like a poor, heavy-laden pilgrim in the midst of all the riches and delight of favored Asia. Amid the wealth of the gold of sun-burnt Africa, I am an unhappy, starving, fainting exile. And Europe, Europe! my hell upon earth! what shall I say of thee, thou who hast adorned thy greatest triumphs with the limbs of my flock? How can I praise thee, Italy, thou blasphemous and warlike land! Thou who hast fed upon the flesh of my lambs like a ravenous lion! Ye accursed pastures of France, which did furnish poisoned grass for my flocks to feed on! Thou proud, rough mountain-land of Germany, which hast taken my young, and dashed them in pieces from the tops of thy wild Alps! And you sweet, fresh streams of England, from you my flocks have drunk only bitter, brackish waters! Hypocritical, cruel, bloodthirsty Spain, in you voracious and ravening wolves have devoured, and still devour, my fleecy flocks!" The two shepherds, Numeo and Zicareo, attracted by the heartrending lamentations of Icabo, induce him by much persuasion to tell them his sorrow, and thus obtain relief for his burdened heart. But not without a struggle does he bring himself to do this. He then describes to his two friends the former splendor of his flock, and thus brings before their eyes the prosperous days of Israel. Then he passes to the trials which God's flock has had to endure. Icabo is at length induced by gentle persuasion to relate the history of his unhappy race in detail, first its adverse fortunes, and its exile during the existence of the first Temple; then, in a second dialogue, the bitterness endured, and the exile till the second destruction of the Temple by the Romans; and in a third dialogue, the sufferings of his people during the long exile; the first forced baptism which Sisebut, king of the Visigoths, imposed upon the Jews of Spain; the expulsion of the Jews from England and France, Spain and Portugal; the horrors of the Inquisition, which Usque had himself beheld; and lastly, the desecration of a synagogue at Pesaro (1552). In this manner does Icabo (or Samuel Usque) go through the long range of Jewish history. He concludes this summary of sorrows thus:

"Scarcely hadst thou ceased to drink of the poisoned cup of the Babylonians, which had well-nigh proved fatal to thee, O Israel, when thou wast revived to endure the torments inflicted by the Romans; and when this double misfortune, which so cruelly tore thee in pieces, was at an end, thou wert indeed still living, but fast bound to suffering and misery, tortured by fresh pangs. It is the fate of all created beings to experience change; only not thine, for thy unhappy lot is not changed, and has no ending."

The friends offer comfort and consolation to Icabo. They say:

"Sorrows, be they never so great and intense, have an object. They have been partly incurred by a sinful life and by backsliding from God and are intended to serve for the correction and purification of Israel. It is also a blessing that thy people is scattered abroad among all the nations of earth, that the wicked may not succeed in utterly destroying them. When the Spaniards drove thee out, and burnt thy people, God ordained that thou shouldst find a country ready to receive thee, where thou couldst dwell in freedom, namely, Italy."

The enemies who treated Israel so unmercifully were said to have received their punishment. The poet said of the Spaniards that Italy had become their grave; of France, that Spain had been its rod of correction; of Germany, that the Turks were its executioners, who made of it a wall against which to direct their cannon; and of England, that wild and savage Scotland was a perpetual thorn in its side. One great comfort was that all these sufferings, sorrows, and trials which came upon the Jewish race were literally announced and precisely foretold by the prophets. They had only served to elevate Israel, and as the prophecies of evil were verified, so they might trust that the prophecies of good would not remain unfulfilled.