The Legend of the Wandering Jew
Roger of Wendover recorded in his Flowers of History (1228) that an Armenian archbishop visiting the abbey of St Albans in the early thirteenth century was asked whether the rumor was true that the Jew who had spoken with Christ was still alive in the Near East. The archbishop assured the monks that it was. His attendant added that before leaving Armenia the archbishop had dined with that undying Jew, whose Latin name was Cartaphilus. When Jesus was leaving Pilate's court, it was this Cartaphilus who struck the Son of God on the back and said, "Go faster." Jesus answered, "I am going, but you will wait until I return." Other Armenians who visited St Albans in 1252 repeated the story.
Popular storytelling embroidered it and changed the Jew's name. It added that every hundred years or so he fell gravely ill and into a deep swoon, and then rose again as a vigorous youth, with fresh memories of the trial, death and resurrection of Christ. The tale later faded from memory and returned in the sixteenth century, until excited Europeans claimed to have seen Ahasuerus, as the Wandering Jew was now called, at Hamburg (1547 and 1564), Vienna (1599), Lubeck (1601), Paris (1644), Newcastle (1790) and finally Utah (1868). In a Europe whose faith had grown shaky, the legend was welcomed as proof of Christ's divinity and resurrection, and as a new sign of his return.
For us the myth is the sad emblem of a people who lost their homeland in the seventy-first year of the Christian era, wandered over four continents for eighteen centuries and suffered again and again a pain equal to crucifixion, before they could find their ancient home in the ebb and flow of our unstable age.
Under the Crescent
In their dispersion the Jews suffered least under the Ottoman sultans, and also in the lands of the popes in France and Italy. Jewish minorities lived in safety in Constantinople, Salonika, Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, Arabia, Egypt, North Africa and the part of Spain still in Moorish hands. The Berbers tolerated them reluctantly, yet Simon Duran managed to settle a large Jewish group in Algiers. In Alexandria, as Rabbi Obadiah of Bertinoro described in 1488, the Jews lived well, drank wine freely, sat cross-legged on carpets like Muslims and took off their shoes before entering a synagogue or a friend's house. German Jews who had taken refuge in the Ottoman lands wrote home to their relatives with great praise for their conditions. In Palestine the Ottoman pasha allowed them to build a synagogue on the slope of Mount Zion. Some Western Jews made pilgrimages to Palestine, and to die in the Holy Land, above all in Jerusalem, was counted a great blessing.
Italy: A Refuge of Tolerance
Yet the center of Jewish thought and culture in that age was strict Italy, and in that land of light the Jews lived with less trouble than anywhere else. At Naples they enjoyed the friendship of King Robert of Anjou, and in Ancona, Ferrara, Padua, Venice, Verona, Mantua, Florence, Pisa and the other centers of the Renaissance they lived prosperous and comfortable lives. Erasmus said, "Italy is full of Jews, but in Spain there is not a single Christian." In Italy commerce and finance were honored, and since Jews always served them, the public valued them as warmers of the market. The old rule that Jews wear distinctive dress or a special badge had been almost entirely abandoned there, and wealthy Jews dressed as richly as their Italian neighbors. Young Jews had access to the universities, and a growing number of Christians were studying Arabic.
At times zealous opponents such as St John of Capistrano stirred up their followers to demand full enforcement of the "Blue Law," which listed the social disabilities of the Jews. Though Popes Eugene IV and Nicholas V backed Capistrano, his eloquence had little lasting effect in Italy. Another Franciscan friar, Bernardino of Feltre, attacked the Jews so loudly that the city authorities of Milan, Ferrara and Venice ordered him either to be silent or to leave.
The Accusation at Trent
In 1475 the body of a small child was found near a Jewish house in the city of Trent, and Bernardino cried out that the Jews had killed him. The bishop imprisoned all the Jews of the city, and under torture some confessed that they had killed the boy to drink his blood in observance of Passover. The result was a terrible punishment of the whole Jewish community of Trent. The body of "little Simon" was embalmed and carried about the city as a relic. Thousands of simple believers flocked to the new shrine, and the rumor of Jewish cruelty crossed the Alps and fed anti-Semitism in Germany.
The Senate of Venice rejected the story as a religious fabrication and ordered the authorities of its territories to protect the Jews. Two jurists from Padua who came to Trent to investigate the affair were nearly torn apart by an angry mob. Pope Sixtus IV was pressed to make Simon a saint, but he refused and forbade the cult of the child. Even so, in 1582 Simon was beatified in a ceremony.
The Popes and the Jews of Rome
In Rome the Jews enjoyed more freedom than anywhere else in Christendom and lived in more favorable conditions, partly because the popes were usually cultured men, and partly because the bitter feud of the two powerful families, the Orsini and the Colonna, kept the people so busy with war and civil bloodshed that there was no room for hatred of others. Perhaps the main reason was that the Romans were too intent on the commercial side of Christianity to bind themselves to dry religious bigotry. Rome had as yet no ghetto. Most Jews lived in the Hebrew quarter on the left bank of the Tiber, but the law did not compel them to. Many palaces of Roman nobles rose among Jewish houses, and synagogues were built near churches.
Some burdens were customary. The Jews had to pay a special tax for the cost of sports and contests, and had to send some of their athletes, half-naked, against their people's custom, to take part. Roman theater and carnival farces showed ugly and mocking pictures of Jews, though Jewish women were generally portrayed as beautiful and noble. Compare Marlowe's The Jew of Malta with Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice: the contrast between Barabas and Abigail in the first, and Shylock and Jessica in the second, is striking.
The popes worshiped Christ as the savior of mankind and bitterly disliked the Jews' belief that the Messiah had not yet come, and yet on the whole they treated the Jews with great generosity. When the Inquisition was established, the popes exempted unconverted Jews from its strict rules. The Inquisition could pursue Jews only when they attacked Christianity or tried to convert a Christian to Judaism. Even "Jews whose constant business was to spread Judaism were generally safe from persecution by the Church," though the state and the people harassed them in various ways. Several popes issued decrees to restrain popular hostility. Clement VI worked hard in this cause and made Avignon, the seat of the papacy, a welcome refuge for Jews fleeing the plundering of the French government. In 1419 Martin V declared to the Catholic world:
Because the Jews too were created in the image of God and will one day attain salvation, and because they need our protection, we order, following in the footsteps of our predecessors, that no one hinder the rites of their synagogues or violate their laws, rights and customs. No Jew is to be forced to accept baptism, to celebrate Christian feasts or to wear the Jewish badge, and no one is to hinder their dealings with Christians.
As we shall see, Eugene IV and Nicholas V passed laws limiting the rights of the Jews. But apart from them, in the words of the historian Graetz, "among the rulers of Italy the popes generally treated the Jews with great friendliness and kindness." Some popes, such as Alexander VI, Julius II and Leo X, despite the old laws, entrusted their health to Jewish physicians. In the time of the Medici popes many Jewish writers gratefully acknowledged the security and welfare their coreligionists enjoyed, and one of them called Clement VII a "kind friend of the children of Israel." Another learned Jewish historian wrote that this was the height of Renaissance happiness, when a line of cultured, refined, comfort-loving and shrewd popes, who counted raising the general level of culture as important a duty as protecting the religious interests of the Catholic church, followed one another on the papal throne. From the middle of the fifteenth century they showed a tendency to overlook the troublesome details of religious rules and a generous tolerance toward all outside the Catholic faith.
The guild of Jewish money-changers and lenders formed an essential part of the economic life of their domains, and like all intellectuals they valued the company of Jewish physicians and scholars. As a result, the liberating regulations laid down by the Church Fathers and codified in the Third and Fourth Lateran Councils were almost wholly abandoned under these popes. Other Italian princes, the Medici in Florence, the Este in Ferrara and the Gonzaga in Mantua, made the same policy their own. On the whole the Jews, though now and then facing harsh and fanatical Catholic behavior, as when Savonarola took power in Florence in 1497, mixed with their neighbors and shared in their lives to a degree rarely seen in history.
Jews in the Renaissance
In some respects the Jews made a distinct contribution to the Renaissance. They reflected it in their way of life and in their Hebrew literary work and rendered valuable service to philosophy, music and theater. At many Italian courts Jews were well-known, respected figures.
Immanuel ben Solomon of Rome was born in the same year as Dante (1265) and later became his close friend. He was the complete example of the faithful Renaissance Jew. He practiced medicine but was also expert in preaching, biblical knowledge, grammar and the sciences. A man of wealth, business and affairs, he was also a poet and a maker of light verse that often overstepped the bounds of propriety. A master of Hebrew, he introduced the sonnet form into that language; in fluency and force of thought he matched the Italians, and until Heinrich Heine no Jewish poet equaled him in verse and wit. Perhaps he was influenced by the skepticism of Averroes, then widely popular, for in one poem he expressed distaste for paradise and its pious inhabitants and preferred hell, where the most alluring company gathered. In old age, imitating Dante, he wrote a weak work called Hell and Paradise. Judaism, like Protestantism, has no purgatory. More generous than Dante, he followed rabbinic tradition in admitting all "the righteous of the world" to paradise, but condemned Aristotle to hell for believing that the universe is eternal.
Kalonymus had the same sting and delight in his writing. King Robert of Naples met the young scholar while traveling in Provence and took him to Italy. At first Kalonymus gave all his effort to science and philosophy and translated into Hebrew the works of Aristotle, Archimedes, Ptolemy, Galen, al-Farabi and Averroes. His interest in moral questions is clear throughout his writings. But he soon found the gaiety of Neapolitan life too seductive. After he moved to Rome he became the Horace of the Jews, writing satires in which he mocked, in a good-humored tone, the faults of Christians, Jews and himself. In his verses he lamented that he had been created a man, since as a woman he would not have had to plunge into the Bible and Talmud or memorize the 613 commandments of Jewish law. In his own treatise he made fun of the Talmud, and the fame of this satire among Roman Jews shows they were not as bound to their religion as their darker-fated brothers in other lands.
The Renaissance revived interest in the study of the Jewish people, as in the study of Greek history and civilization. Cardinal Egidio da Viterbo invited Elijah Levita from Germany to Rome (1509). The Jewish scholar spent thirteen years in the cardinal's palace as an honored guest, teaching him Hebrew and learning Greek from him. Through Egidio's efforts in Italy, and those of Reuchlin and several Christian students taught by Jewish teachers, chairs of Hebrew were founded at several universities and academies.
Elijah del Medigo, who taught at Padua, refused to accept Christianity yet won such standing that when a sharp dispute over a philosophical question arose among his Christian students, the university authorities and the Venetian Senate appointed him to judge it. He did so with such skill and tact that both sides were content. Pico della Mirandola invited him to teach Hebrew in Florence. There he joined the Medici humanist circle, and today we can see his portrait in the picture of that circle by Benozzo Gozzoli on the wall of the Medici palace.