The Roots of Hatred
Why did Christians and Jews hate each other? The lasting and powerful cause was surely the sharp conflict between their religious beliefs. Judaism stood as an eternal challenge and rebuke to the foundations of Christian doctrine. This religious opposition produced a separation of the two peoples that was at first voluntary and later forced, and out of it came the first ghetto, created in 1516. The separation naturally sharpened the differences in dress, manners, appearance, worship and speech between the two groups. Those differences in turn stirred mutual distrust and fear, and out of fear hatred was born.
The Jews presented their exclusion from marriage with Christians as a great honor, and found proof of racial superiority enough in claiming descent from kings who ruled the children of Israel a thousand years before Christ. They regarded Christians as superstitious idolaters and rather dull-witted people who covered their violence and cruelty with smooth, crafty speech and began wars of brother against brother while worshiping the "Lord of Peace," and so they despised them. Christians in turn despised the Jews as alien, faithless usurpers. Thomas More tells of a pious woman who was deeply troubled to hear that the Virgin Mary was of Jewish race, and admitted that afterward she could no longer worship the Mother of God with her former purity and devotion.
The Host Accusations
The doctrine of the sacrament became a great disaster for the Jews. Christians were bound to believe that at the Mass the priest turns the bread into the body and blood of Christ, but some, such as the Lollards, doubted it. Stories of the consecrated host bleeding after a knife wound or the scratch of a pin strengthened the belief, and who would dare commit such an awful act but a Jew? In the late Middle Ages rumors of bleeding hosts spread widely. In many cases, as at Neuburg near Passau in 1338 and at Brussels in 1369, such rumors led to the killing of Jews and the burning of their homes. In Brussels, to commemorate the bleeding of the host in 1369, a chapel was built in the cathedral of St Gudula so that the miracle might be celebrated every year, and from that ceremony grew the Flemish kermis festival. At Neuburg a church servant confessed that he had smeared an unconsecrated wafer with blood, hidden it in a corner of the church, and then accused the Jews of stabbing it.
It must be said that enlightened churchmen such as Nicholas of Cusa rejected the spread of such legends about Jewish attacks on the host as shameful and cruel.
Money and Rivalry
Economic rivalry also lay behind these religious quarrels. At a time when, following papal rulings, usury was forbidden to Christians, the Jews held almost a monopoly of lending at interest throughout Christendom. Later Christian bankers ignored the religious ban. Firms such as the Bardi, Peruzzi and Strozzi in Florence, and the houses of Welser, Hochstetter and Fugger in Augsburg, rose to rival the Jewish monopoly, and a new point of friction arose between Christians and Jews.
Both Christians and Jews lent at high rates, which reflected the economic instability of the time, made worse by two constant factors, rising prices and debased coinage. Jewish lenders were more exposed to danger than their rivals and often collected their debts only with difficulty or by lucky chance. Church authorities might grant a legal delay in the payment of debts, as happened in the age of the Crusades. Kings might tax Jewish property, force huge loans from Jews, banish them and release their debtors from repayment, or take a share of their lawful interest.
North of the Alps nearly all classes except merchants still counted taking interest as usury and condemned Jewish moneylenders for the sin, especially when they were in their debt. Because the Jews were generally known as the best financial experts, kings in many countries called on them to manage their economies, and the sight of rich Jews holding profitable posts and demanding taxes from the people fed public resentment. Yet some Christian communities welcomed Jewish money-changers and bankers. Frankfurt granted them special privileges on condition that they charge no more than 32.5 percent in interest (per the book), while the rate paid by others reached 43 percent. These figures seem terrible, but the record shows that devout Christian lenders took as much as 266 percent. In 1304 the house of Holzschuher at Nuremberg set the interest rate at 220 percent, and Christian lenders at Brindisi, the main Italian port on the Adriatic, raised it to 240 percent. History also records cities that asked Jewish bankers to return, since they found them fairer and more lenient than their Christian successors. When Ravenna made a treaty with Venice it included the condition that a number of Jewish capitalists be sent from Venice to Ravenna to found cooperative banks to develop its farming and industry.
Nationalism and the Councils
Nationalism added another note to the song of hatred. Every European nation thought racial and religious unity necessary for its survival and therefore sought to convert the Jews to Christianity and absorb them. A number of church councils and some popes were stubborn enemies of the Jews. The Council of Vienne (1311) strictly forbade all dealings and mixing between Christians and Jews. The Council of Zamora (1313) ruled that all Jews should remain in a state of subjection and servitude. The Council of Basel (1431-1433) renewed and enforced the earlier holy decrees forbidding partnership and trade with Jews, serving them and consulting Jewish physicians. It also ordered the authorities to gather Jews in separate quarters, force them to wear a badge and make them attend sermons intended to bring them to Christianity.
Pope Eugene IV, who was struggling with the Council of Basel, did not dare lag behind it in oppressing the Jews. After confirming these decrees he went further and took from the Jews the right to hold public posts, to inherit Christian property and to build new synagogues. He ordered that every year during Holy Week the Jews stay in their houses with doors and windows shut, which was itself a wise precaution against attack by Christians. He also declared that Jewish testimony against Christians would have no legal force. Eugene complained that some Jews spoke ill of Jesus and Mary, and probably this was true, for obviously the seed of hatred bears hatred. In another decree he ordered that any Italian Jew caught studying the Talmud would have his property confiscated. Nicholas V appointed John of Capistrano to oversee the enforcement of every article of this body of oppressive laws (1447) and empowered him to seize the property of any Jewish physician treating a Christian patient.
The Massacres of the Fourteenth Century
Despite these harsh decrees, ordinary Christians treated the Jews with the same good nature and tolerance that is natural to men, women and even animals so long as their aims and interests are not threatened. But every society has a minority who, knowing there is no punishment for collective crimes, will join in any cruelty. So we find a group of Christians calling themselves the "Shepherds," who set out at first on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, gathering vagabonds and rabble around them as they crossed France (1320), and resolved to kill on their way those Jews who refused baptism. At Toulouse five hundred Jews took refuge in a tower in fear. A furious mob besieged them and announced that they must accept baptism or die. The governor's attempt to rescue them was in vain. Finding resistance impossible, the refugees chose the strongest among them to end all their lives, and all but one perished; that one, though ready to accept baptism, was killed by the attackers. In the same way the Jews of a hundred and twenty small villages in southern France and northern Spain were killed, and only a few helpless survivors, stripped of everything, remained.
In 1321 a hundred and twenty Jews near Chinon were put to death on the charge of poisoning wells. In 1336 a German fanatic announced that he had received a revelation from God to avenge the death of Christ by killing Jews. He led 5,000 peasants, called "Armleders" from the strips of leather they tied around their arms, through Alsace and the Rhineland, killing every Jew they found. A mania for murder swept over Bavaria, Bohemia, Moravia and Austria (1337). Pope Benedict XII tried but could not end the terrible situation, and only in Regensburg and Vienna were the Jews mysteriously protected, while elsewhere thousands of Jews were tortured and died.