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We are about to begin discussing an excruciating period of Jewish history that is marked by constant and unrelenting Christian persecution. During this period we will see:
And that's only a partial list. (As often as not, the Jews were expelled and then, when a significant economic decline was noted in their absence, they were re-admitted only to be expelled again. It was the classic "can't live with them, can't live without them" philosophy.) The story of these persecutions really begins around the year 1000 -- the first millennium. It seems that people get nervous about big dates, especially Christians whose Book of Revelations predicts that at the end of a thousand years Satan will be released from prison and then he's going to wreak havoc on the world. The approaching millennium led to a religious revival in the Christian world which historians call the "New Piety." The New Piety focused especially on the historicity of Jesus. Focusing on the life of Jesus meant focusing on his death. And, even though the Christian "New Testament" says that the Romans killed Jesus, the Jews were blamed for wanting him to die. And so at this time, we see the notion of Jews as "Christ-killers" -- which first surfaced in the 4th century -- really growing in popularity. But that alone does not explain the vehemence of Christian persecutions. To fully understand the issue, we have to look at other, more complex reasons. REPLACEMENT THEOLOGY To start off, the very existence of the Jews was an irritant to many Christians. And this is why: Christian theology accepts the Hebrew Bible. It does not quarrel with the statements therein that the Jews were a special people chosen by God to receive the Torah and bring holiness into the world. But Christian theology says that the Jews failed in their mission. This is why God sent His "son" (Jesus) to straighten things out, but the Jews refused to recognize him as "god."
As a result, God abandoned the Jews and replaced them with the "new chosen people" -- the Christians. (Hence, the Christian segment of the Bible is called the "New Testament" which is Greek for "New Covenant.") By this line of reasoning however, there would no longer be any purpose for Jews in the world. They should disappear, like did so many mightier peoples. But by the first millennium -- already 1,000 years after the death of Jesus -- the Jews were still all over the place. Christian theology had to come up with some sort of answer to this problem and it did. The Jews must have been doomed to wander the earth by God as a "witness people" -- teste veritatis in Latin. The purpose of a witness people is to survive throughout history to bear witness at the end of days, when Jesus appears again for the so-called "Second Coming." But the explanations of Christian theology could not remove the sore spot that the presence -- at times, strong and prosperous presence -- of the Jews represented. At the heart of the matter was the Christian view of Judaism as a direct competitor for the soul of humanity. The hostility that the Christians felt toward the Jews can be seen readily from the writings of the early fathers of the Christian Church. (See What Did They Think of the Jews? by Allan Gould, pp. 24-25.)
In some places, such calumny incited people to violence.
(We saw in Part 45, for example, how the Crusader mobs devastated the Jewish population of Europe, slaughtering 30%-50% of the Jews living there. Some 10,000 Jews of an estimated population of about 20,000-30,000 were murdered in 1095 as the first Crusade got under way.) In other places, such calumny bred other forms of persecution. MONEY-LENDERS If one were a reasonable Christian listening to one's Church fathers speak of the Jews, one might quite naturally conclude that such a people had no place in a decent society. And this is a conclusion that was drawn over time. Around the first millennium, we see the rise of the Christian trade guilds from which Jews were pointedly excluded. No more Jewish goldsmiths and silversmiths and glass-blowers. Jews were also excluded from owning land, holding office, and from being doctors and lawyers. Jews were forced to wear a "distinguishing garment" -- either a badge or a sign or a silly-looking hat -- which set them apart. This was not only to make them look different but also to humiliate them.
Then, beginning in 1123, when the bishops of the Church undertook a series of meetings -- called Lateran Councils -- to decide Church policy, the Jews were assigned a new function in Christian society. Along with a decree that priests must be celibate, the bishops decided that Christians were not allowed to lend each other money. (This came from a misunderstanding of Biblical commandment that forbids one from charging one's brother interest when making a loan.) As for the Jews, the bishops promulgated a doctrine decreeing them servants of Christians, and then assigning to them the degrading task of lending money -- called usury -- with which the Christians were forbidden to sully their hands. The bishops were not stupid. They knew that you have to charge interest to have banking, and you had to have banking to have economic development, otherwise there is no growth and your economy stagnates. Someone had to lend money. And that someone, the bishops decided, would be the Jews. What happened next is that Jews were not allowed to live in various cities in Europe, unless they supplied a certain number of money-lenders. However, lending money was a very precarious job. For one, it engendered a lot of animosity. After all, who likes to pay back loans? And what happened if the local nobleman or bishop decided not to pay you back? He'd accused the Jew of doing something terrible -- like killing a Christian baby. That way he could renege on his loans, confiscate all Jewish property, and then expel or even kill the Jews. This happened over and over again. Some have claimed that it was Jewish money-lending practices that engendered such actions and, indeed, were responsible for a great deal of anti-Semitism. This is a total myth. At that time Jews charged an average interest rate of 45% on loans. And while this may seem high by today's standards, consider that the Lombards, the Christian Italian bankers living under the nose of the Vatican, charged rates as high as 250%. So we see that the Lombard money-lending practices were many times worse and yet no one went around persecuting Lombard bankers. Persecutions of the Jews, on the other hand, knew no bounds. BLOOD LIBEL It is next to impossible to explain the accusations that were hurled at the Jews during this time. Jews were persecuted not only for being "Christ-killers" but as "baby-killers." The first such accusation -- better known as a "blood libel" -- was leveled in 1144 in Norwich, England. There, Jews were charged with kidnapping a Christian baby and draining the baby of blood. The charge became so popular it would sweep, in various forms, through Europe and then spread to other parts of the world. Now why did Jews need blood in Christian opinion? This is a multiple-choice question:
What do you think the correct answer is? Shockingly, it's (e) -- all of the above. This is a very important lesson in anti-Semitism. You can say anything about the Jews and people will believe it. It's ironic that Jews, who are prohibited by Jewish law of consuming any blood whatsoever (kosher meat is carefully washed and salted to remove all traces of blood) were precisely the people accused of drinking blood. The blood libel makes even less sense when you consider that in the 13th century the Church adopted the doctrine of transubstantiation. This is a mystical idea which maintains that when the priest says mass over the wafer and wine, these objects mystically change into the body and blood of Jesus. Christians who consume the wafer and drink the wine are said to be mystically eating the flesh of Jesus and drinking his blood. It's ironic that the Christian world, while engaged in the ritual of "drinking the blood of Jesus" would accuse the Jews -- who are forbidden to drink blood -- of this totally fabricated hideous crime.
But then the accusations got even more wild. Starting in Switzerland and Germany in the 13th century, Jews were accused of kidnapping communion wafers from churches. Why would the Jews do this in Christian view? To torture it. Medieval documents tell stories describing how a Jew (usually called Abraham) steals a wafer from a church, sticks a knife in it, and blood starts pouring out. And then he cuts it up into pieces and sends it to different Jews who all torture it. This would be funny, if not for a fact that thousands of Jews were slaughtered as a result of such stories. For example, the entire Jewish community of Berlitz, near Berlin in Germany, was all burned alive based on the accusation of torturing a wafer! (To read more about this subject see The Devil and the Jew by Joshua Trachtenburg or "Why the Jews?" by Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin.) JEW TAXES Throughout this time, the Jews were physically marginalized -- beaten, burned, raped. And they were economically marginalized -- pillaged, robbed, taxed nearly to death. Indeed, their money was one of the reasons they were tolerated at all. Jews were a good source of income to the crown. They were specially taxed with special punitive "Jew taxes." We will see later in Germany that 38 special taxes were imposed on the Jews. There was a tax to be born, a tax to die, a tax to wear a kippah, a tax to be married, a tax to be circumcised, a tax to buy Shabbat candles, a tax to exempt you from the German army in which you were not allowed to serve anyway because you were a Jew. If you want to know why Jews are so good at evading taxes and why so many Jews are into accounting, it comes from literally 1,500 years of trying to stay alive not being taxed to death by their enemies. And what would happen eventually, once Jews were drained of their money they would be expelled. This is what happened in England where heavy taxng of the Jewish population of 5,000 people supplied the crown with 20% of all of its income. In 1290 -- on the 9th day of Av, which is the same day that the Temple in Jerusalem was twice destroyed, and which is therefore the worst day in Jewish history -- the Jews were expelled from England and not permitted to return for almost four centuries. Other countries would soon follow suit, but first would come another twist in the persecution of the Jews. NEXT: THE BLACK DEATH |
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In the 14th century the bubonic plague -- known as the "Black Death" -- hit Europe. At that time, people had no idea of the causes of diseases and no idea that lack of hygiene caused the spread of bacteria. Some historians have cynically pointed out that bathing defined the difference between the Classical Age and the Dark Ages. The Greeks and Romans were very clean people and public baths were everywhere. Medieval Europeans, on the other hand, didn't bathe at all. Sometimes they didn't change their clothes for an entire year. The tailors or seamstresses would literally stitch new clothes onto people around Easter-time and that was it for the year. They kept their windows closed because they taught that disease traveled through the air -- something they called "bad ether." Needless to say, when any new disease arrived in Europe, the unsanitary conditions helped it spread. And so it happened with the "Black Death" -- a bacteria carried by flea-ridden rats. The bubonic plague is estimated to have killed up to half the population of Europe -- about 25 million people.
Although they didn't know what caused the disease, the Europeans had no trouble figuring it out -- it had to be the Jews! The Jews must be getting poison from the devil and pouring it down the wells of Christians (or throwing it into the air) to kill them all off. To be fair, the Church said this was not so, but the masses didn't hear it. The Church's message that the Jews killed "god" but meant no harm to the Christian world just didn't add up. During the time of the bubonic plague (chiefly 1348-1349), you had massacres of Jews in various European communities. For example, Jews of Strasbourg were burned alive. The collection of documents of Jewish history, Scattered Among the Nations (edited by Alexis Rubin) contains this account:
(Note in particular the last sentence above.) When we look at these ridiculous accusations against the Jews, we have to keep in mind that they are not limited to the Dark Ages. The ignorant superstitious masses of Medieval Europe were not the only ones to believe such things. We see this phenomenon in every age including the 20th century. For example, an aid to the Mayor of Chicago said in 1990 that the reason why the black community has such high instances of AIDS was because Jewish doctors deliberately put it in their blood supply. The Palestinian Authority has said the same thing several times. The PA has made other outrageous accusations against Israel such as that the Israeli Government puts hormones in all the wheat sold to Gaza to turn all Arab women into prostitutes and poisons the chewing gum sold to Arab children. In front of Hilary Clinton, Yassir Arafat's wife said that Jews were poisoning the Palestinian water supply. Professor Michael Curtis of Rutgers University summed it up perfectly: "Anything and everything is a reason to hate the Jew. Whatever you hate, the Jew is that." GHETTO Needless to say, when you think a people are capable of poisoning your wells, you do not want them anywhere near you. Indeed, as part of the general physical and economic isolation of the Jews throughout the 11th to the 16th centuries (which we covered in Part 46), there were created special areas for Jews to live. These were called "ghettos" -- a name of Italian origin. The Italian word ghetto means "foundry" or "ironworks," and refers to a place where metal was smelted -- a really disgusting smelly part of town, full of smoke and polluted water. In other words, the perfect place for undesirable people.
Although the term ghetto as a place for the Jews was first used in Venice in 1516, the herding of Jews into areas specifically designated for them began several hundred years earlier. These areas were usually fenced off by a moat or a hedge to designate its boundaries. Jews were allowed outside during the day hours, but at night they had to stay in. The ghetto was a mixed blessing for the Jews. While they were kept apart from the rest of society, which was humiliating, they were also kept together. Living together helped them to preserve a sense of community and, since there was no socializing with non-Jews, it was also a guard against assimilation. The worst part of living in the ghetto was that whenever the masses got it in their heads to kill the Jews -- as they often did around Easter time -- they knew exactly where to find them. The Christians always did offer the Jews a way out of the ghetto -- through conversion to Christianity. NACHMANIDES It was during one of these efforts to get the Jews to convert to Christianity that the great Kabbalist and Torah-Talmud scholar known as Nachmanides came to prominence. Nachmanides, Rabbi Moses ben Nachman, better known as Ramban (not to be confused with Rambam or Maimonides) was born in Christian Barcelona in 1194. He became the defender of the Jews in the great Disputation of 1263 -- the most famous of the debates in which the Christians attempted to prove to Jews their religion was wrong in order to get them to convert. Jews tried to avoid these debates like the plague. Every debate was a no-win situation as Jews were not allowed to make Christianity look bad in any way -- in other words, Jews were not allowed to win. In 1263, a debate was staged in front of the Spanish King James of Aragon, and Nachmanides was given the royal permission to speak without fear of retribution. Nachmanides took full of advantage of this and didn't mince any words. His opponent was a Jew who had converted to Christianity named Pablo Christiani (a name he adopted after his conversion). As we will see later in history, there were no bigger anti-Semites than those Jews who were trying to out-Christian the Christians. In fact, it was Pablo's idea to challenge the great scholar to this debate, which is a little bit like a high school physics teacher challenging Einstein. Realizing that Pablo might need some help, the Church sent the generals of the Dominican and Franciscan orders as his advisors. But even they couldn't stand up to Nachmanides. The debate revolved around three questions:
Nachmanides answered that had the Messiah come the Biblical prophecies of his coming would have been fulfilled. Since the lion wasn't lying down with the lamb and peace did not rule the planet, clearly the Messiah had not come. Indeed, noted Nachmanides, "from the time of Jesus until the present the world has been filled with violence and injustice, and the Christians have shed more blood than other peoples." As for the divinity of Jesus, Nachmanides said that it was just impossible for any Jew to believe that "the Creator of heaven and earth resorted to the womb of a certain Jewish woman ... and was born an infant ... and then was betrayed into the hands of his enemies and sentenced to death ... The mind of a Jew, or any other person, cannot tolerate this."
At the end of the debate, which was interrupted as the Church scrambled to minimize the damage, the king said, "I have never seen a man support a wrong cause so well," and gave Nachmanides 300 solidos (pieces of gold) and the promise of continued immunity. Unfortunately, the promise did not hold. The Church ordered Nachmanides to be tried on the charge of blasphemy, and he was forced to leave Spain. In 1267, he arrived in Jerusalem, where there were so few Jews at the time that he could not find ten men for a minyan in order to pray. Determined to set up a synagogue, he sent to Hebron and imported a couple of Jews. His original synagogue was outside the city walls on Mount Zion, though after his death in 1270 it was moved inside. (After the 1967 Six-Day War, the synagogue -- which in the meantime had been turned into a dumpsite -- was restored and is a vibrant place of worship today. Incidentally, the Ramban Synagogue is a subterranean synagogue because at the time Muslim law forbid any Jewish place of worship to be taller than any Muslim place of worship, as we saw in Part 42). Meanwhile, back in Europe, the Church was still trying to undo the damage of Nachmanides' tour de force. The consequences unfortunately were not good for the Jews. For one, the Church ordered a censorship of all Jewish books containing any anti-Christian references. In any such books were found -- without the pages ripped out or otherwise obliterated -- they were burned. For another, Pope Clement IV issued a special document, called a papal bull, titled Turbato Corde, which later became the basis for the Inquisition policy for persecuting "Judaizers" as we shall see in the next installment. NEXT: THE INQUISITION
Published: Sunday, October 14,
2001
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In Part 45, when we discussed the Crusades, we covered the war of the Church against the Muslims in the Middle East. Now we turn to the war of the Church against Muslims in Europe. This war went on for quite some time in fits and starts -- from the time the Muslim Moors arrived in Spain in 711. It took a long time for the Christians to vanquish them. The first Muslim stronghold to fall was Toledo in 1085; the last was Granada in 1492. As soon as the Christian conquest began, things turned very bad for the Jews. In their blood-thirsty vengeance against the Muslims, the Spanish Christians included the Jews, whom they put in the category of infidels. In Barcelona, for example, the whole Jewish community was murdered by a rioting mob. First given shelter by some Christians, these Jews were pressured to convert. Those who did not were refused protection. Writes Professor B. Netanyahu in his 1,400-page work, The Origins of the Inquisition, quoting an eyewitness account of the time:
Just how many Jews converted in these forced mass conversions that accompanied the Christian conquest of Spain? Estimates rage between tens of thousands to as many as 600,000. (See The Origins of the Inquisition, p. 1095.) Many of those who converted did so only outwardly, continuing to practice Judaism in secret. In due time, the Christians caught on to these phony conversions and decided to root out the heretics. THE SPANISH INQUISITION The Inquisition we are going to cover now is the Spanish Inquisition, which began officially by papal bull issued by Pope Sixtus IV on November 1, 1478. (We should note, however, that the very first Inquisition actually took place in 1233 under orders from Pope Gregory IX to combat a group of French-Christian heretics called "Albigenses." This first Inquisition was relatively mild and did not as a rule sentence people to death. Not so the Spanish Inquisition which was directed against Jewish heretics.) Unlike its earlier version, the Spanish Inquisition sought to punish Jews who had converted to Christianity but were not really "sincere" in their conversions. There is a great deal of irony in this. First you tell people they have to convert or die, then, when they do convert, you decide to kill them anyway because their conversions are not "sincere."
There was another reason for the Inquisition, which had little to do with the sincerity of conversions. Once Jews converted to Christianity they had an open access to the playing field, economically and politically. And, of course, they prospered mightily. That engendered a lot of hostility from the Christians - a pattern we have seen in Jewish history ever since the enslavement of the Israelites by the Egyptians. The Christians began to call converted Jews "New Christians" to distinguish them from the "Old Christians" i.e. themselves. Derogatorily, Jewish converts to Christianity were called conversos meaning "converts," or worse yet marranos, meaning "pigs." The basic accusation was that these Jews were not real converts to Christianity - they were secretly practicing Judaism. That was certainly often the case. There were large numbers of Jews who would be outwardly Christian but who would continue to practice Judaism secretly. Until this day, there exist Christian communities with clear Jewish roots dating back to this time. There are people in the United States (in New England, New Mexico and Arizona) as well as in South and Central America, who are descended from Spanish or Portuguese settlers, and who have strange customs they cannot explain. For example, even though they are Catholics, on Friday night they go down to the cellar to light candles. They don't know the origins of the custom, but they do it. These people are clearly descended from Jews who pretended to be Christians and yet were practicing Jewish rituals in secret. The job of the Inquisition was to find such people, torture them until they admitted their "crime," and then kill them. FERDINAND AND ISABELLA Every American child knows about King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella - they are the monarchs who backed Christopher Columbus in his discovery of America. However, here are a few things that most people don't know about them. The marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1469 unified Spain, in some measure making the final victory over the Muslims possible. Prior to their reign, Spain was a collection of provinces - the two primary being Aragon and Castile. When Ferdinand of Aragon married Isabella of Castile, these two provinces were united into a mighty kingdom. Isabella was a "fervent" Christian and, in 1478, she asked the Pope for permission to set up an Inquisition to weed out heresy in the Christian world. The Pope obliged, issuing on November 1, 1478, a papal bull called Exigit Sincere Devotionis. Ferdinand and Isabella followed that up with a royal decree on September 27, 1480. One might think that ridding Christianity of heretics should involve targeting other groups, not just false Jewish converts. However, the royal decree mentioned no one else. Writes Professor B. Netanyahu (p.3):
Although the first inquisitors got to work a few months after the decree, it was not until 1487 -- when Tom?s de Torquemada, a Spanish Dominican monk, was appointed Grand Inquisitor -- that the Inquisition got its bloody reputation. Torquemada - who was descended from Jewish converts to Christianity some time back (though he certainly did not have a Jewish mother) - outdid the worst anti-Semites with his brutality. How did the Inquisition work? Jewish conversos would be arrested and accused of not being true Christians. They wouldn't even know who was accusing them; evidence would be presented against them in secret. Then they would be tortured until they confessed to being heretics. Then, once they confessed, they would be killed. The usual form was burning at the stake, though if they were willing to kiss the cross, they would be spared the horrible pain of burning and would be strangled instead.
The key point is that it really didn't matter if they repented - they died either way. What if some people refused to confess even under torture? Or worse, what if some people admitted right away to practicing Judaism secretly, but even when tortured refused to concede the truth of Christianity? If they survived the horrendous tortures, they would be burned at the stake in a ceremony called auto-da-fe meaning "act of faith." This went on until 1834 when the Inquisition was finally abolished, by which time every Spaniard came to fear its power. By then the Inquisition's field of operations had spread to Christian heretics, Protestants sects, witches, and even people who read the wrong books. The Spanish Inquisition was not the only Inquisition, because as the Jewish conversos fled to other more friendly countries, the Inquisition followed them, even as far as Brazil, where the last person was burned at the stake in the 19th century. EXPULSION The year 1492 marked the fall of Granada, the last Muslim stronghold on the Iberian Peninsula, bringing to an end the Muslim domination of Spain which had lasted nearly 800 years. Spain returned to being a completely Christian country. Shortly thereafter, Ferdinand and Isabella, decided to throw all the Jews out of Spain. This time, in the expulsion edict, the monarchs were not targeting Jewish converts to Christianity, rather they were targeting Jews who had never converted. Why? One factor that certainly played a big role (besides anti-Semitism) was that Jewish money was now needed to rebuild the kingdom after the costly war against the Muslims. Rather than slowly squeezing the money out of the Jews through taxation, it was easier to expel them all at once and confiscate the wealth and property they would leave behind. The Jews tried to get the edict reversed, of course. The key player in the drama was Don Isaac Abravanel -- who was a great Torah scholar and rabbi. He was one of the great Jewish personalities of this period of time, and had served as the treasurer of Spain, thus being the most powerful Jew in Spain. He tried very hard to rescind the expulsion order, at one point offering the monarchs 300,000 ducats for a reprieve. He actually won a delay, but his success only ignited the ire of the Grand Inquisitor Tomas de Torquemada. Torquemada - who had an enormous amount of influence over the Queen Isabella, being her confessor - walked in while Abravanel was pleading his cause. Incensed, he threw the cross at the Queen, hitting her in the head and yelled: "Judas sold his master (Jesus) for 30 pieces of silver. Now you would sell him anew!" And so Don Isaac Abravanel lost. But he was so important to the monarchs that they gave him a special dispensation to stay; they even agreed that another nine Jews could stay with him so he could pray with a minyan. He refused. In fact, he became the leader of the Jews of Spain as they went into exile. Now, on what day was the Jewish community sent into exile? August 2, 1492. This day just happened to be the 9th of Av, the same date as the destruction of the first and second Temple in Jerusalem (and many other disasters as we have already seen). On that day the Jews of Spain (some 150,000 - 200,000 people) were forced to abandon their vast possessions and leave. The remainder (around 60,000 though it's unknown exactly how many) stayed, agreeing to convert. CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS The day after the expulsion, August 3, 1492, Christopher Columbus left on his famed voyage of discovery. His diary begins:
Many people like to speculate that Columbus was a Jew, and there is a good case for it. (For those interested, there are a lot of fascinating tidbits about Columbus collected in a book called Christopher Columbus's Jewish Connection by Jane Francis Amler.) Here are some examples:
Furthermore, there's no question that Columbus's voyage to America was spiritually linked to the expulsion. Just as one of the greatest Jewish communities of Medieval Europe is being destroyed, God was opening up the doors of what is going to eventually become the greatest refuge for Jews in history -- America. This is another tremendous pattern we see in history: God making the cure before the disease. Incidentally, Columbus's voyage was not financed by Isabella selling her jewels as is often stated. The major financiers were two court officials - both Jewish conversos - Louis de Santangel, chancellor of the royal household, and Gabriel Sanchez, treasurer of Aragon.
The first letter Columbus sent back from the New World was not to Ferdinand and Isabella, but to Santangel and Sanchez thanking them for their support and telling them what he found. The voyage of Columbus is a landmark in the Age of Exploration when numerous discoverers opened up the New World. While no other is believed to be Jewish, their discoveries were, to a significant extent, made possible by Jewish inventions or Jewish improvements to existing inventions. For example, the key tools of navigators -- the quadrant and the astral lobe - were of Jewish manufacture. In fact, the type of quadrant then in use was called "Jacob's Staff"; it had been invented by Rabbi Levi ben Gershon also known as Gershonides. The famous atlas that Columbus and the other explorers used was known as the Catalon Atlas. It was the creation of the Crasca Family, Jews from Majorca, Spain. Not only was the Catalon Atlas considered the greatest and most significant collection of maps at the time, it had no competition to speak of. Jews had a virtual monopoly at map making then, culling information from Jewish merchants from all over the known world. A BLESSING While Columbus was off discovering America, what was happening to the Jews newly thrown out of Spain? Most made their way across the border to Portugal, but their stay there was short-lived. Five years later, Portugal offered them the same choice as Spain: "convert, leave or die." Thousands went to Turkey, which historically has been very nice to the Jews. Opening his doors to them, the Sultan of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, Bayezid II, declared: "They tell me that Ferdinand of Spain is a wise man but he is a fool. For he takes his treasure and sends it all to me." How did the movement of the Jews affect these countries? Spain, after some good years, went into a tremendous decline. Turkey, on the other hand, prospered. The Ottoman Empire became one of the greatest powers in the world. The next two sultans, Selim I and Suleiman I, expanded the empire as far as Vienna, Austria. (Incidentally, it was Suleiman -- known as "Suleiman the Magnificent" -- who re-built the walls of Jerusalem - the same walls that stand today and define the Old City.) If we recall the lesson of Part 4, God had given Abraham and his descendants a special blessing:
God said to Abraham that he and his descendants -- the Jews -- would be under God's protection. The nations and peoples who would be good to the Jews will do well. Empires and peoples that would be bad to the Jews will do poorly. That is one of the great patterns of history that we have seen and that we will continue to see in future installments. You can literally chart the rise and fall of virtually all the countries in the Middle East and the Western world by how they treated the Jews. One such country, surprisingly, was Poland. NEXT: THE JEWS OF POLAND
Published: Sunday, October 21,
2001
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The period of history we are looking at is known as the Renaissance which historians generally date from about 1350 to about 1650. Renaissance means "rebirth." Rebirth of what? Of knowledge. We have now left the Dark Ages dominated by the repressive policies of the Church in Rome and are beginning a time period associated with individual expression, self-consciousness, and worldly experience, and accomplishments in scholarship, literature, science, and the arts. In the Renaissance, we see some powerful kings emerging in England and in France, while the power of the Church begins to wane. The famous personalities of this period of time are Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Petrarch, Rabelais, Descartes, Copernicus, just to name a few. This is also a time when Jews made their way into Poland. Today we tend to think of Jewish life in Poland as being confined to the shtetl, but that did not happen until the 18th century. We also tend to think of Poland as synonymous with anti-Semitism, pogroms, etc. But during the time of the Renaissance the picture was quite different.
Before we begin the fascinating story of the Jews of Poland, we have to keep in mind the historical pattern that we see constantly in Jewish history. The places where the Jews will do the best are almost always the places where the Jews will suffer the worst in the end. You'd expect there'd be places that would be good for the Jews and other places where Jews would have a rough time. But that's not what happens. The best of times and the worst of times tend to happen in the same place. We just saw it in Spain, we're going to see it now in Poland, we'll see it later in Germany. It's one of the great patterns in Jewish history ever since the Jews were invited into Egypt and then enslaved there. So how did the Jews come to Poland? A POLISH INVITATION Poland became Christian very late, only at the turn of the 11th century, and only then did it join the European community of nations (so to speak). After that, it took a couple of hundred years before Poland started to emerge as a nation-state with strong development potential. If you want to develop your country economically and culturally, who do you need? You need Jews. Why were the Jews so necessary? First, they could read and write. Jews were always highly educated as they had to be literate to read and obey the Torah, and general education came along as part of the parcel. Second, Jews were excellent bankers, accountants, and administrators who knew how to keep the economy healthy. So in 1264, King Boleslav of Poland granted a charter inviting the Jews there. The charter was an amazing document, granting Jews unprecedented rights and privileges. For example, it stated that:
This was an amazing document. We saw previously that Jews (see Part 46) would be brought in as money-lenders (being excluded from other professions), then when a bishop or nobleman wanted his debt annulled, he brought a "blood libel" against the Jews and had them expelled or killed. King Boleslav boldly promised the Jews that this would not happen in Poland. Jews did not immediately flock into Poland, though some did settle there to test the waters. But when other countries started expelling Jews -- England being the first in 13th century and Italy and Portugal being the more recent in the 15th century (as we saw in Parts 46 and 48) -- Poland became an attractive destination point. Then in 1569, Poland unified with Lithuania, and as a result expanded its borders to the east. What we know as the Ukraine today and some of Belorussia, became vassal lands of Poland which was still a semi-feudal country. These lands needed to be managed and job openings in administration (at which Jews excelled) sprung up everywhere. Another Polish king, Sigismund II Augustus, issued another invitation. Here is an excerpt from his edict, granting the Jews permission to open a yeshiva at Lublin, dated August 23, 1567:
GOLDEN AGE OF POLISH JEWRY In Poland, the Jews were allowed to have their own governing body called the Va'ad Arba Artzot, which was composed of various rabbis who oversaw the affairs of the Jews in eastern Europe. The Poles did not interfere with Jewish life and scholarship flourished. Some important personalities of this period, which a student of Jewish history should remember, were:
POPULATION BOOM Along with the growth in Torah scholarship came population growth. In 1500 there were about 50,000 Jews living in Poland. By 1650 there were 500,000 Jews. This means that by the mid 17th century about 30% of the Jewish population of the world was living in Poland! Where did these Jews settle within Poland? Jews were generally urban people as they were historically not allowed to own land in most of the places they lived. However, they also created their own farm communities called shtetls. Although we tend to think of the shtetl today as a poor farming village (like in Fiddler on the Roof), during the Golden Age of Polish Jewry, many of these communities were actually quite prosperous. And there were thousands of them.
The Jews in these independent communities spoke their own language called Yiddish. Original Yiddish was written in Hebrew letters and was a mixture of Hebrew, Slavic, and German. (Note that Yiddish underwent constant development and "modern" Yiddish is not like the "old" Yiddish which first appeared in the 13th century, nor "middle" Yiddish of this period of time.) Overall, the Jews did well, but working alongside Polish and Ukrainian Christians (who thought Jews killed Jesus) had its downside. There were several instances of Christian rioting against Jews. For example, in 1399 in Poznan, a rabbi and 13 elders were accused of stealing Church property and they were tortured and burnt at the stake. (The Poles must have forgot the king's edict.) Another problem was that Jews worked as administrators and tax collectors for Polish feudal lords. This did not make them popular among the local folk, who needed little encouragement to unleash their anti-Semitic rage. This was especially true in places like the Ukraine, where the Catholic Poles were viewed as an occupying power in an Eastern Orthodox land, and the Jews -- being representatives of the occupation forces -- were the easiest to resent. And while the Polish nobility might have needed the Jews, the common Poles didn't. There were instances when the Polish soldiers would purposely leave town, abandoning the Jews to the mercy (or lack thereof) of the Ukrainians. This happened, for example, in 1648 in the city of Tulchin. The Polish soldiers made a deal with the Cossacks and left town. The Jews defended the city by themselves until it fell and they were all slaughtered. POGROMS When the Ukrainians decided to throw the Poles out of their land, a full-scale massacres of Jews began. The year 1635 saw the first big explosion of violence in Ukraine against Poles and Jews. But this attempt at the revolution was crushed. It returned with new vigor thirteen years later. This second rebellion, in 1648, which succeeded in freeing Ukraine from Polish rule, was led by a Ukrainian Cossack named Bogdan Chmielnicki. In large measure it was directed at the Jews.
Chmielnicki was one of the biggest anti-Semites in human history, on par with Hitler. His aim was genocide and his forces murdered an estimated 100,000 Jews in the most horrendous ways: Here is one description (from Yeven Mezulah, pp. 31-32):
Here is another account from a Luthuanian Rabbi Shabbetai ben Meir HaCohen (1621-1662) also known as the Shach, who survived this time:
It's no wonder when Jews hear the word Cossack they break out in a sweat. These people killed 100,000 Jews and destroyed 300 Jewish communities in the most brutal way one could imagine. Yet to this day Chmielnicki is considered a nationalist hero in the Ukraine, where they regard him as a kind of "George Washington." In Kiev there is a big statue in the square erected in his honor. So this is how, in 1648-1649, the Golden Age of Polish Jewry came crashing down. These pogroms took place in Eastern Poland, and the Jews in other parts remained there. Poland continued for many years to be the center of the Ashkenazi Jewish world as we shall see in future installments. However, before we cover that period of time, we will backtrack a bit to talk about the Protestant Reformation which also took place during the Renaissance. NEXT: REFORMATION AND THE JEWS
Published: Sunday, October 28,
2001
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The Reformation exposed the
corruption of the Church and brought about the advent of Protestantism.
For the Jews it just meant more bad news.
Jewish history did not happen in a vacuum, and we have to always keep in mind the events going on in the world at large that impacted the Jews in a major way. One of those huge events that shook up Europe was the Protestant Reformation. What brought it about? Simply put, the corruption of the Church in Rome. As we saw in Part 45, with the decline of the Roman Empire, the Church became the great feudal player in the economic system of Europe. This was a system that, while virtually enslaving huge masses of people, made the Church very rich and very powerful - both politically and militarily. "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely," said Lord Acton, and this was certainly true of the Church at this time. Rolling in wealth, the Church built great edifices and fielded its own armies and sank deeper and deeper into immorality, materialism, and decadence. The list of papal affairs and political intrigues is extensive. For example, Pope Alexander VI bribed some members of the college of cardinals to insure his election in 1492, the year the Jews were thrown out of Spain. [History of Christianity, Paul Johnson, p. 280, 363] Once in office, he brought the papacy to new heights of spiritual laxity.
A number of popes before him had abandoned celibacy, but Alexander VI openly flaunted his reputation as a great lover. He had a portrait of his mistress - dressed up like Mary, the mother of Jesus - painted over the door in his bedroom, and he publicly acknowledged his illegitimate children, who became famous in their own right, Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia. [Chronicle of the World, Derrik Mercer ed., DK Publishing, p.391] Giovanni Boccaccio, the great 14th century Italian humanist writer offers us a humorous insight into the corruption and decadence of the Church of his day. In his classic work, Decameron, a Jew by the name of Abraham is convinced by a Christian friend to visit Rome in the hope that he will be so impressed that he will convert to Christianity. Abraham returns disgusted and reports:
DANGEROUS BOOK Those wanting to reform the moral stature of the Church were powerless. Even as the hypocrisy of the situation was becoming intolerable, the Church used its power to stifle any signs of defiance.
The defiance began in the 14th century with challenges to Church doctrine and attempts at translating the Bible into languages other than Latin (the language of the Roman Empire which few spoke). These attempts were brutally put down. Why didn't the Church want the common people to read the Bible? Just imagine what might happen if the serfs should get a hold of a Bible and find out what it actually said about the obligations of every person (even "his lordship" and "his eminence") of loving his neighbor and of treating him with equality since all human beings were created in the image of God. It is precisely for this reason that the Church refrained from translating the Bible into the vernacular. Writes Henry Phelps-Brown in Egalitarianism and the Generation of Inequality (p. 68):
MARTIN LUTHER In 1506, the Church of Rome undertook one of its grandest and most expensive projects - the building of a new St. Peter's Basilica as the centerpiece of the Vatican. The Church was to be so lavish and so huge that, when completed 150 years later, it was the largest Church ever built and it remained so until 1989. Such an astronomical project would take an astronomical sum of money, and, as a source of fund-raising, the Church turned to the sale of indulgences. The practice of granting indulgences - remission of punishment for sins through the intercession of the Church - already had a long history. But early on, indulgences were granted when a sinner performed some hazardous duty for the Church - like going on a crusade. (A crusade to the Holy Land got you forgiveness for all sins ever committed.) Later, it became possible to buy indulgences on your deathbed. (Thus, you insured that you would enter heaven immediately, bypassing purgatory.) With the Church engaged in a major fund-raising effort, the sale on indulgences took on new significance. Pope Sixtus IV's fund-raising campaign touted indulgences which would free your deceased loved ones suffering in purgatory. Church envoys resorted to imitating the anguished wailing of parents who, in the throes of holy purification fires, pleaded with their children to buy an indulgence and ease their torment.
One creative envoy, a Dominican monk by the name of Johann Tetzel, made up a little ditty: "As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs." At the height of the indulgence sale, Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar from Germany, traveled to Rome and was shocked by what he saw. How could the Church sell God's gifts to the highest bidder? And how could the bishops and cardinals behave with such moral laxity and worldliness? Luther returned home and was plunged into a crisis of faith. He resolved his dilemma by coming up with the theory of grace, which would later become part of the Protestant theology. This theory holds that salvation comes by God's grace -- or God's indulgence, so to speak. A gift from God could clearly not be sold by the Church. Full of youthful idealistic zeal (he was only 34 at the time), Luther posted his protest - the now famous "Ninety-Five Theses" - on the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, on October 31, 1517. The long and short of it was that his protest reached Rome and he was asked, in no uncertain terms, to recant. He refused, proclaiming his famous defense, "Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise." He was excommunicated four years later. But it was too late to silence him, thanks to a remarkable technological advance which would change history forever - the Gutenberg press. A mere fifty years before Luther's protest, Johann Gutenberg had perfected a system of making metal letters in moulds, setting them in rows, and using the templates thus formed to print multiple copies of a document in minutes, which previously would have had to be copied tediously by hand over many hours.
When this incredible printing machine was applied to Luther's "Ninety Five Theses" - which, in effect, represented an indictment of the Church - all hell broke loose. What might have been a local dispute, with the protestant muzzled by his excommunication, became a public controversy that spread far and wide. Martin Luther's new religion, called Protestantism, got a lot of backing across northern Europe from the nobles who were more than happy to throw the Church out of their land and seize the Church's wealth. The Church had its allies as well, and Europe was thrown into the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). This war between Protestants and Catholics meant a lot of bloodshed and loss of life and destruction. And it had a big impact on the Jews. LUTHER AND THE JEWS Luther had seen how shamefully the Church had treated the Jews, and he had a plan to change that. He was sure that the reason that Jews did not convert to Christianity was that they couldn't stomach the corruption of the Church. Now the Jews would see that the Protestants were different and that they would be nice to the Jews. And then, the Jews would all become Christians. He wrote in his work entitled, That Jesus Christ Was A Jew:
Naturally, the Jews didn't go for Protestantism either. Their allegiance to Judaism and the Torah had nothing to do with the Christians being nasty to them. To Jews, Christianity was a false religion from the start, and the behavior of the Christians over the years only proved it. Now Martin Luther would further add to that proof. As soon as the Jews rejected his overtures and didn't start converting en masse, Luther turned into one of the most virulent anti-Semites in history. A few years later, he wrote in his Concerning The Jews And Their Lies:
Luther's "honest advice" outlined a plan for dealing with the Jews. It included:
(For more on Luther's plan see A History of the Jews by Paul Johnson, p. 242. See also Why the Jews? by Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin, p. 107.) Four hundred years later, Hitler and the Nazis, using Luther's writings in their anti-Jewish propaganda, would put that plan into action. NEXT: THE KABBALISTS
Published: Sunday, November 04,
2001
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Lessons 1 - 5 Lessons 6 - 10 Lessons 11 -15 Lessons 16 -20 Lessons 21 -25 Lessons 26 -30 Lessons 31 -35 Lessons 36 -40 Lessons 41-45 Lessons 46-50 Lessons 51 -55 |
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