Wandering and Expulsion
The Jews north of the Alps were more unfortunate and more rootless than those in Italy. They were driven out of England in 1290, out of France in 1360 and out of Flanders in 1370 (per the book's dates). France had readmitted its exiles in 1315 on condition that they hand the king two thirds of all they had earned by moneylending before their banishment. When those sums had been seized for the treasury, the Jews were expelled again (1321). They returned only to be accused of spreading the Black Death and banished once more (1349).
In 1360 they were invited back to lend money and use their financial skill to raise a large sum, which was paid to England as ransom to free the captured French king. In 1394 a Jew who had recently converted to Christianity vanished mysteriously, and the Jews were blamed. Under torture some confessed that they had urged the convert to return to Judaism. Public feeling flared against them, and Charles VI reluctantly issued another decree of banishment for the unfortunate people.
Prague and the Hussites
Prague had a large Jewish population. Some of its Jews were drawn to the sermons of Milic, a forerunner of Hus, because he had great knowledge of the Old Testament and valued it highly. Hus learned Hebrew, read Hebrew commentaries and quoted Rashi and Maimonides. The Taborites, who pushed Hus's reforming ideas to the edge of communism, called themselves "the chosen people" and gave the names Edom, Moab and Amalek to German provinces they attacked. On the whole Hussite troops did not hesitate to kill Jews. When they took Prague (1421) they did not follow the Muslim practice of letting the defeated choose between Islam and a tax, but forced Jews to accept Christianity or die.
Poland and Lithuania
Of all Christian countries only Poland, like Italy, remained hospitable to Jews. In 1098, 1146 and 1196 many German Jews migrated to Poland to escape the Crusaders. They were well received there and prospered, so that by about 1207 some owned large estates. In 1264 Boleslav, called "the Pious," granted the Jews civil rights by decree. After the plague ended, more Germans moved to Poland and were welcomed by the ruling nobility, who saw them as a yeast needed for their country's economic growth, especially since Poland had as yet no middle class.
Casimir III, "the Great," confirmed and extended Jewish rights in Poland, and Grand Duke Vytautas guaranteed the same rights in Lithuania. But in 1407 a priest at Cracow told his hearers that the Jews had killed a Christian boy, and that charge brought on a massacre. Casimir IV again confirmed and expanded Jewish rights (1447), declaring: "We desire that the Jews, whom we have taken under our protection for our own benefit and for the benefit of the royal treasury, live in welfare and security in our prosperous reign."
The clergy protested. Archbishop Olesnicki threatened the king with hell, and John of Capistrano, who had come to Poland as the pope's representative, delivered fiery speeches against him in the public square of Cracow. Later, when the king was defeated by foreign enemies, the people cried that God had punished him for helping unbelievers. Needing the clergy's support for his next war, he revoked the decree. Planned massacres of Jews took place in Poland in 1463 and 1494. Perhaps to prevent such disasters, the Jews of Cracow were afterward moved to a suburb called Kazimierz.
There and in other Polish and Lithuanian centers the Jews slowly overcame their difficulties, and their numbers and prosperity rose. Under Sigismund I they regained their liberties except the freedom to choose where to live, and under Sigismund II they lived under the favor of the state. In 1556 three Jews at Sochaczew were accused of stabbing the Christian host until it bled. Their pleas of innocence were useless, and they were put to death on the order of the bishop of Chelm. Sigismund II declared that the charge was a kind of "religious trick" meant to prove to Jews and Protestants that the host really became the body and blood of Christ. He added bluntly: "I am disgusted by this abominable crime, and I am not so senseless as to believe that blood can exist in the host." But with the death of this skeptical king (1572) the age of peace and tolerance between the Polish state and its Jews came to an end.
Germany and the Reformation
In medieval Germany the Jews lived for a time in peace and carried on energetic trade along the great rivers and in free cities and ports. Some archbishops even asked the emperor for permission to admit Jews to their cities. In 1354 Charles IV, by the Golden Bull, allowed the electors, like the emperor, to employ Jews as "servants of the chamber." The electors thereby gained the right to admit Jews to their estates, place them under protection, put them to work and extract fines from them on various grounds.
In Germany, as in Italy, scholars who wished to study the original text of the Old Testament took up Hebrew, and the sharp dispute between Reuchlin and Pfefferkorn made the language more popular still. In the same period the whole Talmud was printed (1520), giving a fresh impulse to Hebrew study.
Jewish influence reached its peak in the age of the Reformation. In doctrine the Reformation was a return to the simpler faith and strict moral law of early Christianity, when Christianity was mixed with and tied to Judaism. The Protestants' hostility to religious images and statues surely echoed the Semitic hatred of "graven images." Some Protestant sects kept the Sabbath on Saturday, and the rejection of Mary-worship and the cult of saints closely resembled the pure monotheism of the Jews. By accepting sexual need and the lawfulness of marriage, Protestant ministers were much closer to Jewish rabbis than to Catholic priests.
The opponents of the reformers accused them of "Judaizing" or called them "half-Jews." Karlstadt himself said that Melanchthon wished to imitate Moses exactly. Calvin counted "Judaizing" among the grave sins of Servetus, and the Spanish scholar in turn admitted that his study of Hebrew had made him doubt the Trinity. Calvin's rule over Geneva recalled the dominance of the priesthood in ancient Israel.
Zwingli was accused of "Judaizing" because he learned Hebrew in the company of Jews and based many of his sermons and commentaries on the Old Testament. He himself confesses how he was enchanted by Hebrew:
I have found this sacred language far more cultivated, beautiful and dignified than one can imagine. Though its words are few, no meaning is felt to be lacking, since every word in its treasury is used in several different ways. I even dare say that anyone who grasps the dignity and beauty of this language will see that no other tongue can, with so few words, express itself so firmly and clearly. No language is so rich in conveying many-sided and meaningful comparisons. No language can so easily set the human heart beating with joy.
Luther does not show such enthusiasm but complains: "How I hate those who, like Zwingli, use several languages. Zwingli spoke Greek and Hebrew from the pulpit at Marburg."
Luther's Late Attack
In the harshness of his old age Luther attacked the Jews fiercely, as if he had never learned anything from them; no one feels heroic before his creditor. In his treatise On the Jews and Their Lies (1542) he fired a volley of charges: they had not accepted Christ as God; their long suffering and wandering were the result of divine wrath; they had forced their way into Christian lands; they had grown rich by shameless usury; the Talmud counted deceit, theft and the killing of Christians as good deeds; and Jews poisoned wells and killed Christian children to use their blood in their rites.
The biography of old Luther shows with what force he urged Germans to burn Jewish houses, close their synagogues and schools, seize their property, force the men and women into labor and make them choose between accepting Christianity and losing their tongues. In a sermon shortly before his death he said Jewish physicians deliberately poisoned Christian patients.
Such slanders led Protestantism, which owed so much to Judaism, to lean more toward anti-Semitism than official Catholicism did, though the Catholic masses showed more hostility to Jews than Protestants did. Such fanatics finally pushed the electors of Saxony and Brandenburg to banish the Jews from their territories. They laid the foundation of public hatred of the Jews in Germany for centuries to come and prepared the people for mass killings and burnings.