Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

city known as the Ghetto, apparently from a foundry ( getto ) existing

there. `063258 The Senate ordered all Marranos or converted Jews to

leave Venice; many Christian competitors urged the measure, some

Christian merchants opposed it as threatening the loss of certain

markets, especially in Islam, but Charles V threw his influence into

the scale, and the expulsion decree was carried out. `063259 Soon,

however, Jewish merchants crept back into Venice; exiles from Portugal

replaced the expelled Marranos, and Portuguese became for a time the

language of the Venetian Jews.

Many Iberian exiles were kindly received into Rome by Pope Alexander

VI, and prospered under Julius II, Leo X, Clement VII, and Paul III.

Clement allowed Marranos to practice Judaism freely, holding that they

were not obligated by any compulsory baptism. `063260 In Ancona, the

Adriatic port of the Papal States, where the Jews were a vital element

in international trade, Clement established a haven for professing

Jews, and guaranteed them against molestation. As to Paul III, "no

pope," said Cardinal Sadoleto, "has ever bestowed upon Christians so

many honors, such privileges and concessions, as Paul has given to the

Jews. They are not only assisted, but positively armed, with

benefits and prerogatives." `063261 A bishop complained that

Marranos entering Italy soon returned to the practice of Judaism,

circumcising their baptized children almost "under the eye of the pope

and the populace." Under pressure of such criticism Paul

re-established the Inquisition in Rome (1542), but he "took the part

of the Marranos throughout his life." `063262

His successors, caught in a reaction against the easy ways of the

Renaissance, turned to a policy of making life uncomfortable for the

Jews. Old canonical decrees were again enforced. Paul IV (1555-59)

required every synagogue in the Papal States to contribute ten

ducats ($250?) toward the maintenance of a House of Catechumens, where

Jews were to be instructed in the Christian faith. He forbade the Jews

to employ Christian servants or nurses, to take Christians as

medical patients, to sell Christians anything but old clothes, or to

have any avoidable intercourse with Christians. They were not to use

any but the Christian calendar. All synagogues in Rome were

destroyed but one. No Jew might own realty; those who had any were

to sell it within six months; by this plan Christians were enabled

to buy 500,000 crowns' worth ($12,500,000) of Jewish property for a

fifth of the actual value. `063263 All Jews remaining in Rome were now

(1555) confined to a ghetto where 10,000 persons had to live within

a square kilometer; several families occupied one room; and the low

level of the quarter subjected it to the periodical overflow of the

Tiber, making the region a plague-stricken swamp. `063264 The ghetto

was surrounded by grim walls, whose gates were shut at midnight and

opened at dawn, except on Sundays and Christian holydays, when they

were closed all day. Outside the ghetto the Jews were compelled to

wear a distinctive garb- the men a yellow hat, the women a yellow veil

or badge. Similar ghettos were established in Florence and Siena, and,

by papal edict, in Ancona and Bologna- where it was called

"Inferno." `063265 Paul IV issued a secret order that all Marranos

in Ancona should be cast into Inquisition prisons, and their goods

confiscated. Twenty-four men and one woman were there burned alive

as relapsed heretics (1556); `063266 and twenty-seven Jews were sent

to the galleys for life. `063267 It was, for the Jews of Italy, a

ghastly twilight to a golden age.

A handful of Jewish refugees slipped into France and England despite

the excluding laws. Nearly all Germany was closed to them. Many went

to Antwerp, but only a few were allowed to stay more than a month.

Diogo Mendes a Portuguese Marrano, established at Antwerp a branch

of the bank that his family had founded in Lisbon. By 1532 he was so

successful that the Antwerp Council arrested him and fifteen others on

a charge of practicing Judaism. Henry VIII, who employed Mendes as a

financial agent, intervened, and the thirteen were released on payment

of a heavy fine- the "final cause" of many such arrests. Other Jews

passed on to Amsterdam, where they would prosper after the

liberation of Holland from Spain (1589). Those fugitives who sought

asylum in regions of Islam not directly controlled by the Turkish

sultan fared little better than in Christendom. Jews trying to land at

Oran, Algiers, and Bugia were shot at by Moors, and several were

killed. Forbidden to enter the cities, they built an impromptu

ghetto of huts put together from scraps of lumber; one hut caught

fire, and the entire settlement, including many Jews, was consumed.

Those who went to Fez found the gates closed against them. They

squatted in the fields and lived on herbs and roots. Mothers killed

their infants rather than let them die of starvation; parents sold

their children for a little bread; pestilence carried off hundreds

of children and adults. Pirates raided the camp and stole children

to sell them as slaves. `063268 Murderers ripped open the bodies of

Jews to find jewels they were believed to have swallowed. `063269

After all these sufferings the survivors, with incredible courage, and

under endless disabilities, developed new Jewish communities in

Moorish North Africa. At Algiers, Simon Duran II repeatedly risked his

life to protect the exiles and to organize them into some security. At

Fez, Jakob Berab became the most famous Talmudist of his time.

Under the Mameluk and Ottoman sultans the Spanish refugees found

humane acceptance in Cairo, and soon rose to leadership of the

Jewish community. Selim I abolished the old office of Nagid or prince,

by which one rabbi had appointed all rabbis, and had controlled all

Jewish affairs, in Egypt; thereafter each Jewish community was to

choose its own rabbi and manage its own internal concerns. The new

rabbi of Cairo, David ibn abi-Zimra, a Spanish immigrant, ended the

Seleucid method of chronology which the Jews of Asia and Africa were

using, and persuaded them to adopt (as the Jews of Europe had done

in the eleventh century) a calendar that reckoned by the year since

creation ( anno mundi ), tentatively fixed as 3761 B.C.

Wherever the Sephardic or Iberian Jews went they acquired

cultural- often political- leadership over the native Jews. In

Salonika they became, and remained till 1918, a numerical majority

of the population, so that non-Spanish Jews who came to live there had

to learn Spanish. Under this Jewish hegemony Salonika was for a time

the most flourishing commercial center in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Sultan Bajazet II welcomed Jewish exiles to Turkey, for they brought

with them precisely those skills in handicrafts, trade, and medicine

which were least developed among the Turks. Said Bajazet of

Ferdinand the Catholic: "You call Ferdinand a wise king, who has

made his country poor and enriched ours?" `063270 Like all non-Moslems

in Islam, the Jews were subject to a poll or head tax, but this

exempted them from military service. Most of the Turkish Jews remained

poor, but many rose to wealth and influence. Soon nearly all

physicians in Constantinople were Jews. Suleiman so favored his Jewish

physician that he freed him and his family from all taxation. Jews

rose to such prominence as diplomats under Suleiman that Christian

ambassadors had to court these Jews as an approach to the Sultan.

Suleiman was shocked by the oppression of the Ancona Jews under Paul

IV, and remonstrated against it to the Pope (March 9, 1556); he

demanded the release of such Ancona Jews as were subjects of Turkey,

and they were freed. `063271 Gracia Mendesia, of the Mendes banking

family, after practicing philanthropy, and suffering insult and

injury, in Antwerp, Ferrara, and Venice, finally found peace in

Istanbul.

The Holy Land, under Turkish rule, received again the people that

had first made it holy. As Jerusalem was sacred to Christians and

Moslems as well as to Jews, only a limited number of Hebrews was

allowed to live there. But at Safed, in Upper Galilee, the Jews grew

so rapidly in number and cultural prestige that Jakob Berab tried to

establish a Sanhedrin there as a ruling congress for all Jewry. It was

a bold conception, but the Jews were too divided in space, language,

and ways to permit such a unification of rule. Nevertheless, in Jewish

prayers throughout Islam and Christendom, Yahveh was supplicated to

"gather the dispersed... from the four corners of the earth"; and at

Yom Kippur and Passover the Jews everywhere joined in the hope that

sustained them through all tragedies: "Next year we shall be in

Jerusalem." `063272

IV. THE TECHNIQUE OF SURVIVAL

-

The ability of the Jews to recover from misfortune is one of the

impressive wonders of history, part of that heroic resilience which

man in general has shown after the catastrophes of life.

Segregation was not the worst indignity; they were happier and safer

with one another than amid the hostile crowd. Poverty they could bear,

since they had known it for centuries, and it was not their

prerogative; indeed, they were more likely to be proud of their

occasional wealth than conscious of their immemorial indigence. The

unkindest cut of all, however motived, was the badge or distinguishing

garment that marked them off as the despised and rejected of men.

The great historian of the Jews writes bitterly:

-

The Jew-badge was an invitation to the gamin to insult the wearers

and to bespatter them with mud; it was a suggestion to stupid mobs

to fall upon them, to maltreat them, and even to kill them; and it

afforded the higher class an opportunity to ostracize the Jews, to

plunder them, or to exile them. Worse than this outward dishonor was

the influence of the badge on the Jews themselves. They became more

and more accustomed to their ignominious position, and lost all

feeling of self-respect. They neglected their outward appearance....

They became more and more careless of their speech, because they

were not admitted to cultured circles, and in their own midst they

could make themselves understood by means of a jargon. They lost all

taste and sense of beauty, and to some extent became despicable, as

their enemies desired them to be. `063273

-

This is exaggerated and too general; many Jews retained their pride,

some gloried in the splendor of their dress; we hear again and again

of Jewish girls renowned for their beauty; and the Judisch, which in

the sixteenth century evolved as a jargon of German with Slavic and

Hebraic borrowings, was developing a vigorous and varied literature

even as Graetz wrote his History of the Jews. But in any case the

supreme crime of those centuries was the deliberate degradation of

an entire people, the merciless murder of the soul.

Part and basis of the crime was the exclusion of the Jews from

almost all occupations but commerce and finance. For reasons already

summarized, `063274 and because a tithe of agricultural produce was

demanded by the Church, Jews more and more withdrew from cultivation

of the soil; and finally they were forbidden to own land. `063275

Since they were not admitted to the guilds (which were formally

Christian religious organizations), they could not rise in the

manufacturing world, and their mercantile operations were hedged in

with Christian monopolies. By and large, in their dealings with

Christians, they found themselves limited to petty industry, trade,

and moneylending. In some regions they were forbidden to sell to

Christians anything but secondhand goods. After the thirteenth century

they lost their invidious pre-eminence in finance. But their fluid

capital, their international languages, their international

connections through scattered relatives, enabled them to achieve a

high place in the foreign commerce of the Christian states. So

prominent was the Jewish role that those countries which excluded them

lost, and those that received them gained, in the volume of their

international trade. This was one- not the main- reason why Spain

and Portugal declined while Holland rose, and why Antwerp yielded

commercial leadership to Amsterdam.

It was a saving consolation that the Jews, in their internal

affairs, could be ruled by their own laws and customs, their own

rabbis and synagogue councils. As in Islam, so in Jewry, religion,

law, and morality were inextricably one; religion was held to be

coextensive with life. In 1310 Rabbi Jakob ben Asher formulated Jewish

law, ritual, and morality in Arabaah Turim ( Four Rows ); this

replaced the Mishna Torah (1170) of Maimonides with a code in

which all the legislation of the Talmud and the rulings of the

Geonim were made obligatory on all Jews everywhere. The Turim became

the accepted guide for rabbinical law and judgment till 1565.

The disasters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries disrupted

the social organization of the Jews. The rabbis, like the priests,

suffered a high mortality in the Black Death. Persecutions,

expulsions, and a fugitive life almost put an end to Jewish law. The

Sephardic Jews found it difficult to accept the language and customs

of the Jewish communities which offered to absorb them; they set up

their own synagogues, kept their own Spanish or Portuguese speech; and

in many cities there were separate congregations of Spanish,

Portuguese, Italian, Greek, or German Jews, each with its own rabbi,

customs, charities, and jealousies. `063276 In this crisis the

Jewish family saved the Jewish people; the mutual devotion of

parents and children, brothers and sisters, provided a haven of

stability and security. These centuries of disorder in Jewish mores

ended when Rabbi Joseph Karo issued from Safed his Shulchan Aruch

(Venice, 1564-65); in this Table in Order the religion, law, and

customs of the Jews were once more codified. But as Karo based his

code chiefly on Spanish Judaism, the Hebrews of Germany and Poland

felt that he had paid too little attention to their own traditions and

interpretations of the Law; Rabbi Moses Isserles of Cracow added to

the Table in Order his Mapath ha-Shulchan ( A Cloth for the

Table, 1571), which formulated the Askenazi variations on Karo's

mostly Sephardic code. With this emendation the Shulchan Aruch

remained till our own time the Justinian and Blackstone of orthodox

Jews. To say of a Jew that he obeyed all the precepts of the Shulchan

Aruch was the summit of Jewish praise.

Since all formulations of Jewish law were based on the Talmud, we

can- or can we?- imagine the trepidation with which the Jews

followed the vicissitudes of their second holy book. In its literary

and less authoritative section- the Haggada- there were some

passages that ridiculed certain Christian beliefs. Converts from

Judaism paved their way into Christian acceptance by denouncing

these passages, and calling for the suppression of the entire

Talmud. Despite such movements, culminating in the attack of

Pfefferkorn on Reuchlin, Leo X encouraged the first printing of the

Talmud (Venice, 1520); but Julius III signalized the passing of the

Renaissance by ordering the Inquisition to burn all copies to be found

in Italy (1553). Jewish homes were invaded; thousands of copies were

seized; there were bonfires of Jewish books in Rome, Bologna, Ravenna,

Ferrara, Padua, Venice, and Mantua; Milan, however, refused to obey

the incendiary decree. `063277 Committees of Jews pleaded with the

Pope to rescind his edict; he procrastinated while the volumes burned;

but Pius IV ruled that the Talmud might be published after

submitting to censorship. Thereafter the Jews censured their own

publications. `063278

The Zohar, text of Jewish Cabalism, survived uninjured because

some Catholic scholars thought they found in it proofs of the divinity

of Christ. The Zohar had been written shortly before 1295 as one

of a series of mystical works transmitting the Cabala or "secret

tradition" of Jews who took refuge from poverty, persecution, and

befuddlement in contemplating the divine and esoteric symbolism of

numbers, letters, backward reading of words, the Ineffable Name of

Yahveh, and so on. Sorrowing Jews gathered in private groups to

seek, by fasting, weeping, ascetic austerities, and Cabalistic

interpretations, some novel revelation, above all as to the coming

of the Messiah who would redeem Israel from all its griefs.

Those who have tried to feel the unprecedented depth of racial

suffering which the Jews experienced in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and

sixteenth centuries, can understand such forgivable escapes into

consolatory mysticism, and the repeated deception of the desperate

Jews by belief that the Messiah had actually come. In 1524 a young and

handsome Arabian Jew, calling himself David Reubeni, rode on a white

horse through Rome to the Vatican, and presented himself to Clement

VII as brother and envoy of a Jewish king whom he described as

reigning in Arabia over the old Hebrew tribe of Reuben. His king, said

David, had 300,000 soldiers, with insufficient arms; if the Pope and

the European princes would provide the weapons, the tribe would

drive the Moslems out of Palestine. Clement was interested, and

treated David with all the courtesies due to an ambassador. The Jews

of Rome were pleased to see a Jew so honored; they supplied David with

the means to keep high diplomatic state; and when an invitation came

to him from John III of Portugal, he sailed in a ship with a

numerous retinue and under a Jewish flag.

John III was so taken with his proposals that he suspended the

persecution of the Marranos. The Jews of Portugal, most of them

baptized against their will, became half-hysterical with joy, and many

proclaimed their belief that David was the Messiah. Diogo Pires, a

converted Jew who had become secretary to the King, had himself

circumcised to prove his Judaism; he changed his name to Solomon

Molcho, made his way to Turkey, and announced that Reubeni was the

forerunner of the Messiah, who himself would arrive in 1540. Reubeni

had made no claims to be either Messiah or forerunner; he was a

visionary impostor who wanted money, ships, and arms. The flight of

Pires-Molcho aroused King John's suspicions; he bade Reubeni depart;

David left, was stranded on the coast of Spain, and was arrested by

the Inquisition. Charles V, apparently to please Clement, ordered

him released. Reubeni went to Venice (1530), and proposed to the

Senate that it should arm the Jews of Europe for an attack upon the

Turks.

Meanwhile Molcho came to Ancona received a passport from the Pope,

rode across Italy, and preached Judaism fervently in Rome. When the

Inquisition sought to arrest him as a relapsed Converso, Clement

rescued him and sent him safely out of the city. Although Molcho had

now lost faith in Reubeni, he joined him in a rash mission to

Ratisbon, where they petitioned Charles to arm the Marranos against

Islam. Charles had them arrested, and brought them with him to Mantua.

There Molcho was sentenced to be burned. At the last moment he was

offered an Imperial pardon if he would return to Christianity; he

refused, and welcomed martyrdom (1532). Reubeni was sent to Spain, was

imprisoned by the Inquisition, and died about 1536, apparently by

poisoning. The brokenhearted Jews of Europe crept back into their

ghettoes, their mysticism, and their despair.

V. JEWISH THOUGHT

-

It was not to be expected that the age of the Second

Dispersion should produce any high culture among the Jews; their

energy was consumed in the brute task of survival. Education, in which

they had excelled, was disrupted by the mobility and insecurity of

life; and while Christian Europe moved with exhilaration into the

Renaissance, the Jews of Christendom moved into the ghetto and the

Cabala. The Second Commandment forbade them to share in the revival of

art. Jewish scholars were many, but for the most part they sank

themselves in the Talmud. There were grammarians like Profiat Duran

and Abraham de Balmes, translators like Isaac ibn-Pulkar, who put

al-Ghazzali into Hebrew, and Jakob Mantin, who rendered Avicenna,

Averroes, Maimonides, and Levi ben Gerson into Latin. Elijah Levita

alarmed orthodox Jews by arguing conclusively (1538) that the

Masoretic text of the Old Testament- i.e., the text with notes, vowel

points and punctuation- was not older than the fifth century A.D.

The Odyssey of the Abrabanels illustrates the vicissitudes of the

Jewish intellect in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Born in

Lisbon in 1437, Don Isaac Abrabanel served Affonso V of Portugal as

finance minister; but he mingled his public life with Biblical and

historical studies, and made his spacious home a salon of scholars,

scientists, and men of affairs. When Affonso died Abrabanel lost the

royal favor, and fled to Spain (1484). He was absorbed in writing

commentaries on the historical books of the Bible when Ferdinand the

Catholic called him to office, and for eight years Isaac shared in

managing the finances of Castile. He labored to avert the disaster

that befell the Jews in 1492; failing, he joined them in their

melancholy exodus. At Naples he was employed by the government, but

the French invaders (1495) sacked his home, destroyed his choice

library, and forced him to flee to Corfu. There he wrote as many a Jew

must have written in those years: "My wife, my sons, and my books

are far from me, and I am left alone, a stranger in a strange

land." `063279 He made his way to Venice, and was given a diplomatic

post (1503). Amid these fluctuations of fortune he found time to write

several philosophical or theological works, now of minor interest; but

he established the principle that Scriptural events and ideas should

be interpreted in terms of the social and political life of their

times. He was allowed to spend his final six years in unwonted

security and peace.

His sons were his decoration. Samuel Abrabanel prospered at

Salonika, was made finance minister at Naples, and earned the love

of his people by his many philanthropies. Judah Leon Abrabanel- Leo

Hebraeus- rose to such prominence as a physician in Genoa and Naples

that he became known as Leon Medigo. He studied many sciences, wrote

poetry, and ventured into metaphysics. In 1505 he was appointed

physician to Gonzalo de Cordoba, but two years later the "Great

Captain" fell out with Ferdinand, and Leon joined his father in

Venice. His Dialoghi d'Amore (written in 1502, published in 1535)

found quite an audience among the Renaissance Italians, for whom the

philosophical analysis of love served as prelude or obbligato to

amorous victories. Intellectual beauty- the beauty of order, plan, and

harmony- is superior to physical beauty, argued the Dialogues; the

supreme beauty is the order, plan, and harmony of the universe,

which is the outward expression of divine beauty; love rises in stages

from the admiration and pursuit of physical to intellectual to

heavenly beauty, and culminates in the intellectual love of God- the

understanding and appreciation of the cosmic order, and the desire

to be united with the Deity. The manuscript may have been known to

Castiglione, who made Bembo speak to like effect in Il cortigiano

(1528); and the printed book may have found its way across a century

to influence Spinoza's amor dei intellectualis. `063280

To this ethereal amour the dispersed Portuguese Jews preferred

Usque's impassioned prose poem in Portuguese, Consolation for the

Sorrows of Israel (Ferrara, 1553). It Pictured the alternate triumphs

and disasters of the Jewish nation, and comforted the Jews with the

assurance that they were still God's chosen people. They had been

Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

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