7.10. C. Degradation and Sufferings Heaped Upon the Jews by the Papal Church
Chapter 3 A Summary of Jewish History C. Degradation and Sufferings Heaped upon the Jews by the Papal Church
IT would be a weary task to give even a brief summary of the precarious conditions of Jewish life under the pagan Roman emperors. We pass over nearly two hundred years in silence, and take up the tread of their history at a date when Christianity had become the State religion of the Roman Empire. For a brief three years the Emperor Constantine was tolerant of all religions, and the Jews enjoyed the same rights as other subjects, and their Rabbis the privileges granted to the leaders of the Christians and to heathen priests. In the year 315, however, a new decree was issued, declaring the Jews to be “an injurious, impious sect,” which must be proscribed and repressed. The first Christian Council of which history takes cognisance, the Council of Nicæa, resolved to break those ties of relationship, the result of their common origin, which until now had existed to some extent between the Synagogue and the Church. Among other things, Easter was henceforth to be observed universally on a fixed date, independent of the Jewish calendar. Eusebius relates that the Emperor addressed the assembled bishops: “It seems unworthy of us to celebrate this holy festival after the custom of the Jews. We desire to have nothing in common with this so hated people, for the Redeemer has marked out another path for us. To this we will keep, and be free from disgraceful association with this people.”
Thus did the first Christian Council wholly forget the love of Christ, and breathe out only hatred and enmity against the unhappy people of the Jews. And these first “Christian” edicts were the precursors of many passed by subsequent Councils, the one aim of which was to degrade and humble them, and to represent them in the eyes of the world as the offscouring and pariahs of mankind. The natural consequences soon followed. Marriages between Jews and Christians were made punishable by death; Jews were excluded from all public offices. Sometimes, indeed, the expensive duties of magistracy were laid upon them, while its exemptions and privileges were denied them. The evidence of Jews against Christians was declared inadmissible; for the Israelite was, in the eyes of the Christian of that period, worse than an infidel, and was designated in the official language of the Church perfidus—i.e., a man to whom no faith or credit could be given; “Oremus et pro perfides Judœis” are the words of the Liturgy of Good Friday, and all the divines and canonists of the period used the expression.1 1 Von Döllinger No Christian was to let or sell his house to a Jew. In one of the earliest Councils it was decreed that no Christian might eat with a Jew; and Chrysostom improved upon this ordinance by protesting that Christians ought not to hold any intercourse with Jews, “whose souls are the habitations of demons and whose synagogues are their playground.” A Jew might not sit in the presence of a priest; in a quarrel, if a Jew should strike a priest, death by fire, with the confiscation of his goods, was the penalty.
They were excluded from all schools, both higher and lower. On Christian festivals Jews were not to be seen in the streets; so it was enacted in the Third and Fourth Councils of Orleans, “since their appearance would be a species of offence to Christianity.” At the Council of Vienna it was decreed that “no Jew should be admitted in a public bathing establishment, an inn, or a house of call for journeymen”—in short, the Jew was to be shunned “like one plague-stricken, whose very breath is infectious, like a dangerous seducer whose speech harbours the poison of scepticism and unbelief.”1 1 Von Döllinger
Jews might not traffic nor practice any profession or handicraft: nor could they engage in agriculture, since the holding of land was forbidden them everywhere. They were shut up to money-lending and usury, which became an additional cause of their moral and physical ruin, since they were used only too often as a sponge in the hands of rulers, which could be wrung out when full, and then given over to the fury of the people. The climax of Jewish hatred on the part of the Papal Church found expression in the Lateran Council of 1215. At this Council the whole of Western Christianity might be said to have been represented, for there were present at it: 71 archbishops, 412 bishops, 800 abbots, and a host of other Church dignitaries and priests. Its decrees were embodied in seventy canons, four of which deal with the Jews, and the one which has proved of the most terrible consequence to the scattered people in Europe for a number of centuries was that which practically put upon them the badge of outlawry. Henceforth the Jews “in all Christendom and in all times” “were ordained to wear a distinctive dress or badge.” This humiliating mark was soon placed upon the scattered people everywhere. In some lands it was a badge in shape of a wheel, red, yellow, or parti-coloured, fixed upon the breast; in others it was a square patch placed upon the shoulder, or hat. At Avignon the sign was a pointed yellow cap; at Prague a sleeve of the same colour; in Italy and Germany a horn-shaped head-dress, red or green, and so on.
“Thus,” says Professor Heman, “were the Jews [by this badge of degradation] given over by the Church and the representatives of the Christian religion to shame and reproach for half a millennium.” And the worst consequences of this degrading position in which they were placed were that the Jews lost all self-respect and sense of their own dignity; they became outwardly obsequious in manner, and everywhere cringed in abject humility and slavishness of spirit; but at heart they became ever more and more embittered against Christians, and more intense in their hostility to Christianity. Utterly helpless in themselves, they were condemned by the leaders of Christianity to be the pariahs of mankind, and were compelled to endure contempt and hatred, plundering and banishment, blows and murder, from all the world. From this time especially the Jewish people became the martyr nation of the earth, and of mankind; and its tormentors were the Christians, who behaved infinitely worse to them than the Mohammedans and heathen.
“The material loss which the Christians are supposed to have suffered in the course of centuries from the usury of the Jews, into which they were forced against their will, has been far outweighed by the loss of property, blood, and life, which the Jews have suffered since they were subjected to wear the yellow badge. But quite impossible to estimate is the injury to character suffered by the Jews as a result of this abominable outrage. The abject, slavish spirit, malicious craftiness, artful cunning, painful timidity, and all other faults of character which till lately have been made a reproach against them—these are all chargeable to the humiliating and scandalous treatment which they have received from Christians since the Lateran Council.”1 1 Heman, Geschichte des Jüdischen Volkes.
Men wise before their age, and even those noted for Christian sanctity within the Papal Church, found no place in their hearts for compassion for this afflicted people. “It is true that here and there in the Dark Ages there was an occasional gleam of pity, or even of justice. It is to the lasting honour of Bernard of Clairvaux that during the whirling excitement of the Second Crusade he urged the soldiers of the Cross not to slaughter the people ‘who were scattered among all nations as living memorials of Christ’s passion.’ And the illustrious Raymond Lull, who in the opening years of the fourteenth century died on the African coast in the name and service of our blessed Redeemer, kneeling on the sand while the stones crashed around him, and crying with his last shaking breath, ‘None but Christ! None but Christ!’ was the pioneer of Jewish missions.” But Peter of Clugny, who was a contemporary of Bernard of Clairvaux, sought to incite Louis VII. of France to plunder the Jews, saying that the blaspheming Jews were worse than the Saracens; and Thomas Aquinas advised Alice of Burgundy that the Jews were by their own guilt under sentence of perpetual slavery, and that the lords of the land had therefore the right to treat Jewish property as their own. The gentle Ambrose already in the fourth century designated burning synagogues in Rome by the mob “a work well pleasing to God,” while a century later the pugilistic Christian bishop and father, Cyril of Alexandria, himself led a “Christian” mob against the Jewish quarter of that imperial city; demolished their synagogues, pillaged their dwellings, and hounded the inmates out of the city in which they had lived and prospered for seven centuries. “Forty thousand of them, the most industrious and thrifty part of the population, were driven forth to join their brethren in exile,” As to the Popes, there are a few notable exceptions of some who shielded the Jews in their own States, chiefly, it must be confessed, because of their commercial enterprise and wealth, which were such important factors in mediæval Europe; but most of the papal pontiffs, who were regarded not only as the heads of Christendom, but as the very “Vicars of Christ” on earth, were their relentless persecutors, and promulgated edicts which breathe fire and sword against the Jews. “Whenever in mediæval times a pope was consecrated the Hebrew congregation were among the attendants, standing with slavish gestures, full of fear or timid hope, while the Chief Rabbi at their head carried on his shoulders the mysterious veiled Roll of the Holy Law. they were accustomed to read their fate in the gloomy or genial countenance of the new pope. Was it to be toleration or oppression? While the Rabbi handed the Vicar of Christ the scroll for confirmation, their eyes scanned keenly the face that turned towards him. As the scroll was handed back, this was the formula which the Pope was accustomed to utter: “We recognise the Law, but we condemn the view of Judaism; for the Law is fulfilled through Christ, whom the blind people of Judah still expect as the Messiah.”1 “A deadly fright had overcome him,” writes Pope Stephen VI. (885—91) to the Archbishop of Narbonne, “on hearing that the Jews there, those enemies of God, by royal grant, possessed allodial property, and that Christians dwelled together with these dogs, and even rendered them services, while by way of punishment for the death of Christ all grants and promises sworn by God Himself had been taken away”; while the declaration of Innocent III. that the whole nation was, for its guilt’s sake, doomed by God to perpetual slavery, became the Magna Charta always appealed to by all who thirsted for the possessions of the Jews and their gains.
1 Hosmer, The Jews, in “The Story of the Nations” series.