7.17. J. The Reformation and Since
Chapter 3 A Summary of Jewish History J. The Reformation and Since With the Reformation there commenced a new period of the world’s history, and the principles which were then promulgated could not but eventually affect the Jews also among those peoples by whom they were adopted. Yet it cannot be said that for a considerable period subsequent to that great movement their condition was very materially altered or their sufferings much lessened. Indeed, it is humiliating to find that some of the reformers, men of God though they were, had not more place in their hearts for compassion for this long oppressed people than their papal antagonists. Luther himself is a notable illustration of this. He began well. In his exposition of Psalms 22:1-31, he blames the cruelty of the nations toward the Jews, and describes the enormities which have been committed against them as “worse than beastly.”1 In 1523 he published a remarkable book with the startling title Das Jesus ein Geborene Jude Gewesen (That Jesus was born a Jew), in which he says, among other things: “Those fools the papists, bishops, sophists, monks, have formerly so dealt with the Jews, that every good Christian would rather have been a Jew. And if I had been a Jew, and seen such stupidity and such blockheads reign in the Christian Church, I would rather be a pig than a Christian. They have treated the Jews as if they were dogs, not men, and as if they were fit for nothing but to be reviled. They are blood relations of our Lord; therefore if we respect flesh and blood, the Jews belong to Christ more than we. I beg, therefore, my dear Papists, if you become tired of abusing me as a heretic, that you begin to revile me as a Jew. Therefore it is my advice that we should treat them kindly; but now we drive them by force, treating them deceitfully or ignominiously, saying they must have Christian blood to wash away the Jewish stain, and I know not what nonsense. Also we prohibit them from working amongst us, from living and having social intercourse with us, forcing them, if they would remain with us, to be usurers.”
1 Geschichte des Jüdischen Volkes, p. 420. But Luther, who in some respects reminds one of the Apostle Paul, lacked not only the patience and Christlike spirit of the great Apostle, but the prophetic light and insight into God’s plan and purpose with this unique people which would have enabled him to persevere in his love for them in spite of all their opposition and hardness of heart. Because they were not converted in masses, and stirred by their continued opposition to the Gospel and the sins of some individual Jews, he turned against them in great bitterness; so much so that it seems scarcely credible that it could have been the same Luther, who in 1523 wrote Das Jesus ein Geborene Jude Gewesen, that twenty-one years later (in 1544) wrote Von den Juden und Ihren Lügen (About the Jews and their Lies), which breathes fire and sword against them, and in which he seeks to stir up the same spirit of hatred against them among the Protestant peoples and princes which he had previously denounced among the Catholics. “If the denunciations of Israel by the early Fathers of the Church had continued to dictate Christian intolerance through the ages, and their authority was quoted in support of the persecutions and massacres which sullied mediæval Europe, Luther’s utterances exercised a similar influence over the Protestant world both in his own and after times down to the present day. Protestant Germany took up the tale of persecution in the sixteenth century where Catholic Germany had left off in the fifteenth. The Jews were given the alternative of baptism and banishment in Berlin, were expelled from Bavaria in 1553, from Brandenburg in 1573, and the tragedy of oppression was carried on through the ensuing centuries.”1 1 Abbott, Israel in Europe, p. 227. Nor has Israel ceased to weep since their so-called “emancipation” ushered in late in the eighteenth century, when, chiefly through the influence of the French Revolution, civil and political rights have been granted to them in most of the countries in Europe, but not in those lands where the great bulk of the scattered people is to be found.
Indeed, the sorrows of Israel within these past ten years in the great Northern Empire of Russia (where more than half of the whole Jewish nation lives in a condition of more or less chronic wretchedness) and in Roumania, etc., have been such as to move even hard-hearted worldly men with compassion for them. “The picture,” says Max Nordau in a masterly and comprehensive Survey of the General Condition of the Jews at the Close of the Nineteenth Century presented by him at the first Zionist Congress, “might almost be tinted as a monochrome, for wherever Jews are dwelling in any number among the nations there Jewish misery prevails. this misery is not that of mere common poverty, which, according to the unchanging lot of earth, is ever our unfailing companion. It is a peculiar misery which befalls the Jews, not as men, but as Jews, and from which they would not suffer were they not Jews. Jewish distress is of two kinds, physical and moral.
“In Eastern Europe, in North Africa, in Western Asia, exactly in those lands where the overwhelming majority of Jews, probably nine-tenths of them, dwell, Jewish misery is to be understood literally. It is a daily physical oppression, a terror of the day to follow, a tortuous struggle to support a bare existence. In Western Europe the battle of life is of late somewhat easier, although indications are not lacking to show that even here it may become more severe. But still, for the time being the question of food and shelter, of safety of body and life, is less anxious. Here the misery is of a moral description, and consists in daily mortification of self-respect and sense of honour, in the rough suppression of their effort to attain complete mental rest and satisfaction which none who is not a Jew need deny himself.” No wonder that in a very eloquent address on the same subject two years later he pathetically exclaimed: “We are living like Troglodytes, in perpetual darkness. To us the sun of justice is not shining. We are living like the creatures in the depths of the ocean. Upon us press the weight of a thousand atmospheres of mistrust and disdain. We have lived for centuries in a glacial period, surrounded by the bitter cold of malice and hatred. These are the permanent powers which have permanently influenced us, without noise, without incident to give rise to sensational reports, yet under which we have retrograded steadily, gradually, and unmistakably.” And not only are the great majority of the Jewish people full of sorrow and wretchedness from within, but they have been for many centuries, and still continue to be, a butt and a derision from without.
“Thou makest us a strife unto our neighbours, And our enemies laugh unto themselves.”
One need only be reminded of the ever present “Jewish Question” in all the lands of their dispersion, or have even a very slight acquaintance with the references to the Jews in the literature of the Middle Ages; one need only note the coarse jests and unjustifiable gibes, the shameful caricatures of the Jews to be found in the trashy anti-Semitic effusions of the “most civilised” nations of Europe at the present day; one need only be reminded of the fact that the honourable name of “Jew” has become a proverb and a byword among all the nations of the earth—to see how truly these words of the Psalmist have been and are still being fulfilled.
“What strikes one as very remarkable” observed von Döllinger, the President of the Academy of Sciences in Munich, in an address on “The Jews in Europe,” delivered before that learned body in 1881, “is that in the ‘Christian’ chronicles and histories of the Middle Ages no sign of compassion, not a word of indignation, is to be met with in their reports of the outrages committed against the Jews. Many of the clerical chroniclers even manifest their pleasure in them. Thus, for instance, the monk of Waverly relates in a triumphant tone the slaughter in London at the coronation of Richard I., which had taken place without any cause being given for it by the Jews, and concludes by exclaiming: “Blessed be the Lord who hath delivered up the wicked.”1 Truly Israel has had, and still has, much cause for weeping!
1 Annals Monast., p. 246. And it is a pathetic and sorrowful sight to see Israel weep. “Go to Jerusalem,” wrote the late Franz Delitzsch in an early number of his Saat auf Hoffnung, “and there you can see it. On the south-western side of the Temple hill, where the tremendous ruins of the area of Solomon’s Temple stand, is ‘the Wailing Place of the Jews.’ As their fathers of yore by the waters of Babylon, so the elders of the daughter of Zion mourn here every Friday, laying their hoary heads low in the dust by the crumbling Temple wall, and their tears fall in torrents on the open page of the Book of Lamentations, which they hold with their trembling hands. Youths, lying on their faces, moisten the penitential Psalms of David with their tears. Maidens, with dishevelled hair, bow their heads to the ground, kissing the ancient stones, and weeping for the misery of their people.”
“Mournfully the Precentor begins the chant of lamentation:
“ ‘ Because of the palace that lies desolate.’
“ And the people respond:
“ ‘ We sit solitary and weep.’
“The Precentor the continues his plaint:
“ ‘ Because of the temple that is destroyed,’
“ ‘ Because of the walls that are laid low,’
“ ‘ Because of our glory, that is departed from us,’
“ ‘ Because of the great men that are no more among us.’
“And again the people answer:
“ ‘ We sit solitary and weep.’
“Once more the Precentor continues:
“ ‘ Because of the precious stones that are burnt,’
“ ‘ Because of our priests that have stumbled,’
“ ‘ Because of our kings that have despised Him.’
“And ever more plaintive comes the response of the people:
“ ‘ We sit solitary and weep.’ ”