The Wonder of Recovery
The ability of the Jews to recover after every misfortune is one of the great marvels of history, an example of the brave response that mankind has usually shown after each period of suffering. Living apart was not their greatest disgrace; they were happier and healthier living together than among foreign peoples. They also bore poverty easily, since centuries had accustomed them to it. They might swell with pride at some unexpected wealth, but they showed no reaction to their lasting poverty and treated it as fate.
The Badge
The cruelest treatment of them was compelling them to wear distinctive clothing or the Jewish badge, which marked them as hated outcasts, objects of others' pointing fingers. The great Jewish historian writes bitterly of this:
The Jewish badge was a means that provoked street urchins to insult its wearers in the public ways and splash mud on their faces; it was a hint to the ignorant public to attack them, hurt them or even kill them, and these acts gave the ruling class a pretext to deprive them of human rights, plunder their property and banish them. Worse than this outward disgrace was the effect the badge had on the inner life of the Jews, for it made them gradually more ashamed of their character and standing and more submissive, until they lost every sense of self-respect. They neglected their appearance and grew careless of their manner of speaking, since they had no access to any cultured society, and among themselves they could make do with any faulty jargon of their guild. This people lost every taste and sense of beauty and in some respects became a despised and worthless folk, just as their enemies wished.
This statement is exaggerated and too sweeping, for many Jews kept their personal pride and some took pride in the fineness of their clothes; we often hear of the world fame of beautiful Jewish maidens; and Yiddish, which arose in the sixteenth century from a German vernacular mixed with Slavic and Hebrew borrowings, grew in time into a serious and varied literature, so that even Graetz wrote his history of the Jews in it. But there is no doubt that the great crime of those centuries was this deliberate insult to a whole people and the cruel stifling of the human spirit.
Shut Out of Trades
The foundation and main part of this crime was the exclusion of Jews from most occupations except trade and money-changing. For reasons already briefly stated, and because a tenth of the income from Jewish crops was taken by the church, they gradually abandoned farming and finally lost the right to own land. Since they could not join the guilds (which were originally Christian organizations), they could not advance or reach high positions in the industry and production of the day, while the field of their commercial work was also limited by the privileges and monopolies Christians held. In time, in their dealings with Christians, the Jews found themselves confined to small industries, retail trade and money-changing. In some regions they were not permitted to sell Christians anything but old and used goods.
After the thirteenth century the Jews lost their enviable economic superiority. But the liquid capital at their disposal, their international languages and their ties with scattered kinsmen across the world together enabled them to gain first place and real importance in the foreign trade of Christian countries. Their influence in this was so great that the countries that expelled them ultimately lost and those that took them in profited, each in proportion to the volume of its international trade. This was one cause, though not the chief one, of the decline of Spain and Portugal and the rise of Holland, and it forced Antwerp to yield its commercial supremacy to Amsterdam.
Self-Government and the Law Codes
It was a consolation that the Jews could settle their internal affairs by their own laws and customs and by the rulings of their rabbis and synagogue councils. In Judaism, as in Islam, religion, law and morals were inseparably blended. Religion in fact kept pace with life. In 1310 Rabbi Jacob ben Asher codified Jewish law, ritual and ethics in a book called the Arba'ah Turim ("Four Rows"), which later replaced Maimonides' Mishneh Torah (1170). It held a body of laws that made following the teachings of the Talmud and the rulings of Jewish jurists binding on all Jews everywhere in the world. Until 1565 the Arba'ah Turim was in general use as the main guide for the legislation and judgments of the rabbis.
The disasters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries tore the fabric of Jewish social organization. Rabbis, like priests, suffered countless deaths during the Black Death. Persecution, expulsion and a life of wandering nearly ended the observance of Jewish law. The Sephardim refused to accept the language and customs of other Jewish communities, so they built their own synagogues and kept their Spanish or Portuguese. In many cities there were separate Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Greek and German Jewish communities, each with its own rabbi, ritual, charities and jealousies. In this crisis the one thing that saved the Jewish people from dispersal and dissolution was their devotion to family and kinship, the mutual loyalty of parents, children, brothers and sisters, which as a refuge of stability and safety kept them united.
This age of disorder in Jewish custom and morals ended when Rabbi Joseph Karo, at Safed, published his Shulchan Aruch ("The Set Table," Venice, 1564-1565), a new codified collection of Jewish doctrine, law and custom. But since Karo based his code mainly on Spanish Judaism, the Jews of Germany and Poland objected, for they saw that the Spanish rabbi had paid little attention to their own traditions and interpretations. Rabbi Moses Isserles of Cracow therefore added to the Shulchan Aruch his important work Mappah ("The Tablecloth," 1571), setting out the changes German Jews had made to Karo's code. With this correction the Shulchan Aruch remained to our own time the official book of law and authority for all orthodox Jews. The highest praise for a faithful Jew was to say that he observed all the rules of the Shulchan Aruch.
The Talmud under Fire
Since every codification of Jewish law rested on the Talmud, we can imagine the anxiety with which Jews watched changes made to their sacred text. In the part of the Talmud that is more literary and narrative, called the Haggadah, there were sentences mocking some Christian beliefs. Converted Jews, in order to accept Christianity, rejected these passages and demanded the Talmud's suppression. Despite such movements, which once led to Pfefferkorn's fierce attack on Reuchlin, Pope Leo X favored the first printing of the Talmud (Venice, 1520). But Julius III ordered the Inquisition to burn every copy it could find in Italy (1553). Raids on Jewish homes began, thousands of copies of the Talmud were seized, and in Rome, Bologna, Ravenna, Ferrara, Padua, Venice and Mantua the flames rose from Jewish books. Milan refused to obey the order. Delegations of Jews appealed to the pope to cancel it, and he put off answering while the volumes burned. At last Pius IV allowed the Talmud to be printed after inspection and censorship. From then on Jews put their publications through censorship.
The Zohar and Mystical Hope
The text of the Zohar, the authority for the secret interpretations of the Jews, was left untouched, because some Catholic scholars supposed that it contained arguments confirming the divinity of Christ. The Zohar was written shortly before 1295 and consists of a series of mystical treatises holding the "secret interpretation" of those Jews who, to escape poverty, persecution and spiritual wandering, took refuge in the divine and hidden meaning of numbers, letters, words read backward, the ineffable name of the Lord and the like. Suffering Jews gathered in secret circles to reach spiritual revelation through fasting, weeping, ascetic practice and symbolic readings of scripture, and above all to learn the signs of the coming of the Messiah who would free the children of Israel from all their pains.
Those who try to grasp the unprecedented intensity of the racial suffering that fell on the Jews in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries can sympathetically excuse their flight into the consoling world of mysticism, and can regard their repeated deception by news of the true Messiah's coming as the natural result of their despair and deprivation.
David Reubeni and Solomon Molcho
In 1524 a handsome young Arab Jew calling himself David Reubeni rode through Rome on a white horse and appeared before Clement VII in the Vatican, presenting himself as the brother and envoy of the Jewish king who, he said, ruled the ancient Hebrew tribe of Reuben in Arabia. He added that his crowned master had readied 300,000 soldiers and a small stock of arms, and that if the pope and the princes of Europe supplied enough weapons, he could drive the Muslims from Palestine with the help of the tribe of Reuben. Clement was interested and received him with full honor as a true ambassador. The Jews of Rome were proud at the sight and provided every means to make sure David lacked nothing in ceremony for his lofty political standing. When John III of Portugal invited David to his court, he set out in a special ship prepared for him, with a large retinue, under the flag of the Jewish people.
John III was so taken with David's proposals that he temporarily stopped persecuting the Marranos. The Jews of Portugal, most of whom had been baptized by force, were wild with joy, and some cried out that David was the Messiah. Diogo Pires, a convert who had risen to be the king's secretary, circumcised himself to prove he was a Jew, changed his name to Solomon Molcho, turned toward the Ottoman lands and announced that David Reubeni was the forerunner and herald of the Messiah and that the Messiah himself would appear in the year 1540. Reubeni had never claimed to be the Messiah or his herald; he was a boaster and dreamer who wanted to obtain money, ships and arms. Pires-Molcho's sudden flight roused the Portuguese king's suspicion, and he asked Reubeni to leave his court. David left the country, but off the Spanish coast his ship ran aground, and he was seized by agents of the Inquisition. Charles V, apparently to please Clement, ordered his release. Reubeni went to Venice (1530) and proposed to the Senate that the Jews of Europe be gathered and armed to attack the Ottoman Turks.
Meanwhile Molcho reached Ancona, obtained a passport from the pope, traveled through Italy and preached his enthusiastic Judaism in Rome. When the Inquisition tried to arrest him for returning to Judaism, Clement saved him and sent him out of the city. Although Molcho had by now lost his faith in Reubeni, he rejoined him and went with him on a lightning mission to Regensburg, where the two sent a petition to Charles V that the Marranos be armed against Islam. Charles arrested them both and took them along to Mantua. There Molcho was condemned to death, but at the last moment was offered a royal pardon on condition that he return to Christianity. Molcho refused and welcomed martyrdom (1532). Reubeni was sent to Spain, fell into the Inquisition's prison and died, apparently of poison, about 1536. The brokenhearted Jews of Europe crept back into their wretched quarters and made despair, asceticism and mysticism their watchwords.