by Will Durant
They turned to finance. In a hostile environment where popular violence might destroy, or royal cupidity confiscate, their immovable goods, the Jews were forced to the conclusion that their savings should be in liquid and mobile form. They took first to the simple business of money-changing, then to receiving money for commercial investment, then to lending money at interest. The Pentateuch52 and the Talmud53 had forbidden this among Jews, but not between Jew and non-Jew. As economic life grew more complex, and the need for financing became more acute with the expansion of commerce and industry, the Jews lent one another money through a Christian intermediary,54 or through silent partnerships in an enterprise and its profits—a device allowed by the rabbis and several Christian theologians.55 Since both the Koran and the Church forbade the charging of interest, and Christian moneylenders were consequently scarce before the thirteenth century, Moslem and Christian borrowers—including ecclesiastics, churches, and monasteries56—applied to Jews for loans; so Aaron of Lincoln financed the building of nine Cistercian monasteries and the great abbey of St. Albans.57In the thirteenth century Christian bankers invaded the field, adopted the methods that had been developed by the Jews, and soon surpassed them in wealth and range. “The Christian usurer, although he did not have to safeguard himself to anything like the same extent against the chances of murder and pillage, was no less exacting” than the Jew.58 Both alike pressed the debtor with Roman severity, and the kings exploited them all.
All moneylenders were subject to high taxation, and, in the case of the Jews, to occasional outright confiscation. The kings made it a principle to allow high interest rates, and periodically to squeeze the profits out of the financiers. The cost of collection was high, and in many cases the creditor had to bribe officials to allow him to capture his due.59 In 1198 Innocent III commanded all Christian princes, in preparation for the Fourth Crusade, to compel full remission of interest demanded of Christians by Jews.60 Louis IX, the saintly king of France, “for the salvation of his own soul and those of his ancestors,” freed all his subjects from a third of whatever they owed to Jews.61English kings on occasion granted letters of release—canceling interest or principle or both—to subjects owing money to Jews; not rarely the kings sold such letters, and noted in their registers the sums they received for their vicarious philanthropy.62 The British government required a copy of every loan agreement; an Exchequer of the Jews was formed to file and supervise these agreements, and to hear cases concerning them; when a Jewish banker could not meet the taxes or levies laid upon him, the government, checking its record of his loans, confiscated all or part of them, and notified the debtors to pay not the lender but the government.63 When, in 1187, Henry II levied a special tax upon the people of England, the Jews were compelled to pay one fourth, the Christians one tenth, of their property; nearly half the entire tax was paid by the Jews.64 At times “the Jews financed the kingdom.”65 In 1210 King John ordered all Jews in England—men, women, and children—to be imprisoned; a “tallage” of 66,000 marks was taken from them;66 those suspected of concealing the full amount of their hoards were tortured by having a tooth pulled out each day till they confessed.67 * In 1230 Henry III, charging that the Jews had clipped the coin of the realm (apparently some had), confiscated a third of all the movable property of the English Jews. The operation having proved profitable, it was repeated in 1239; two years later 20,000 silver marks were exacted from the Jews; 60,000 marks—a sum equal to the whole yearly revenue of the Crown—were exacted in 1244. When Henry III borrowed 5000 marks from the Earl of Cornwall, he consigned to him all the Jews of England as security.68 A series of imposts from 1252 to 1255 drove the Jews to such desperation that they begged permission to leave England en masse; permission was refused.69 In 1275 Edward I strictly prohibited lending at interest. Loans continued nevertheless; and as the risk was greater, interest rates rose. Edward ordered all Jews in England arrested and their goods seized. Many Christian lenders were also arrested, and three of them were hanged. Of the Jews 280 were hanged, drawn, and quartered in London; there were additional executions in the counties; and the property of hundreds of Jews was confiscated to the state.70
In the uneasy intervals between confiscations the Jewish bankers prospered, and some became too visibly rich. They not only advanced capital to build castles, cathedrals, and monasteries, but they raised for themselves substantial houses; in England their homes were among the first dwellings built of stone. There were rich and poor among the Jews, despite Rabbi Eleazar’s dictum that “all men are equal before God—women and slaves, rich and poor.”71 The rabbis sought to mitigate poverty, and check profiteering wealth, by a variety of economic regulations. They emphasized the responsibility of the group for the welfare of all, and softened the stings of adversity with organized charity. They did not denounce riches, but they succeeded in giving to learning a prestige equal to that of wealth. They branded monopoly and “corners” as sins;72 they forbade the retailer to profit by more than a sixth of the wholesale price;73 they watched over weights and measures; they fixed maximum prices and minimum wages.74 Many of these regulations failed; the rabbis could not isolate the economic life of the Jews from that of their neighbors in Islam or Christendom; and the law of supply and demand of goods and services found a way around all legislation.
3. Morals
The rich tried to atone for their accumulations by abundant charity. They acknowledged the social obligations of wealth, and perhaps they feared the curse or fury of the poor. No Jew is known to have died of hunger while living in a Jewish community.75 Periodically, and as early as the second century after Christ, each member of the congregation, however poor, was assessed by official overseers for a contribution to the kupah or “community chest,” which took care of the old, poor, or sick, and the education and marriage of orphans.76 Hospitality was accorded freely, especially to wandering scholars; in some communities incoming travelers were billeted in private homes by officers of the congregation. Jewish philanthropic societies grew to a great number as the Middle Ages advanced; not only were there many hospitals, orphanages, poorhouses, and homes for the aged, but there were organizations providing ransoms for prisoners, dowries for poor brides, visits to the sick, care for destitute widows, and free burial for the dead.77 Christians complained of Jewish greed, and tried to stir Christians to charity by citing the exemplary generosity of the Jews.78
Class differences disported themselves in dress, diet, speech, and a hundred other ways. The simple Jew wore a long-sleeved and girdled robe or caftan, usually black as if in mourning for his ruined Temple and ravished land; but in Spain the well-to-do Jews proclaimed their prosperity with silks and furs; and the rabbis deplored in vain the handle given to hostility and discontent by such displays. When the king of Castile banned finery in raiment the Jewish males obeyed, but continued to array their wives in splendor; when the king demanded an explanation they assured him that the royal gallantry could never have meant the restrictions to apply to women;79 and the Jews continued throughout the Middle Ages to robe their ladies well. But they forbade them to appear in public with uncovered hair; such an offense was ground for divorce; and the Jew was instructed not to pray in the presence of a woman whose hair was visible.80
The hygienic features of the Law alleviated the effects of congested settlements. Circumcision, the weekly bath, the prohibition of wine or putrid meat as food, gave the Jews superior protection against diseases rampant in their Christian vicinities.81 Leprosy was frequent among the Christian poor, who ate salted meat or fish, but was rare among the Jews. Perhaps for like reasons the Jews suffered less than Christians from cholera and kindred ailments.82 But in the slums of Rome, infested with mosquitoes from the Campagna marshes, Jew and Christian alike shivered with malaria.
The moral life of the medieval Jew reflected his Oriental heritage and his European disabilities. Discriminated against at every turn, pillaged and massacred, humiliated and condemned for crimes not his own, the Jew, like the ph
ysically weak everywhere, resorted to cunning in self-defense. The rabbis repeated again and again that “to cheat a Gentile is even worse than to cheat a Jew,”83 but some Jews took the chance;84 and perhaps Christians too bargained as shrewdly as they knew. Some bankers, Jewish or Christian, were ruthless in their resolve to be paid; though doubtless there were in the Middle Ages, as in the eighteenth century, moneylenders as honest and faithful as Meyer Anselm of the rote Schild. Certain Jews and Christians clipped coins or received stolen goods.85 The frequent use of Jews in high financial office suggests that their Christian employers had confidence in their integrity. Of violent crimes—murder, robbery, rape—the Jews were seldom guilty. Drunkenness was rarer among them in Christian than in Moslem lands.
Their sex life, despite a background of polygamy, was remarkably wholesome. They were less given to pederasty than other peoples of Eastern origin. Their women were modest maidens, industrious wives, prolific and conscientious mothers; and early marriage reduced prostitution to a human minimum.86 Bachelors were rarities. Rabbi Asher ben Yehiel ruled that a bachelor of twenty, unless absorbed in study of the Law, might be compelled to marry by the court.87 Marriages were arranged by the parents; few girls, says a Jewish document of the eleventh century, were “indelicate or impudent enough to express their own fancies or preference”;88 but no marriage was fully legal without the consent of both parties.89 The father might give his daughter in marriage in her early years, even at six; but such child marriages were not consummated till maturity, and when the daughter came of age she could annul it if she wished.90 The betrothal was a formal act, making the girl legally the man’s wife; they could not thereafter separate except by a bill of divorce. At the betrothal a contract (ketuba) was signed for the dowry and the marriage settlement. The latter was a sum set aside out of the husband’s estate to be paid his wife in case the husband should divorce her or die. Without a marriage settlement of at least 200 zuzas (which could buy a one-family house), no marriage with a virgin bride was valid.
Polygamy was practiced by rich Jews in Islamic lands, but was rare among the Jews of Christendom.91 Post-Talmudic rabbinical literature refers a thousand times to a man’s “wife,” never to his “wives.” About the year 1000 Rabbi Gershom ben Judah of Mainz decreed the excommunication of any polygamous Jew; and soon thereafter, in all Europe except Spain, polygamy and concubinage became almost extinct among the Jews. Cases continued to occur, however, where a wife barren for ten years after marriage allowed her husband to take a concubine or an additional wife;92 parentage was vital. The same decree of Gershom abolished the old right of the husband to divorce his wife without her consent or guilt. Divorces were probably less frequent in medieval Jewry than in modern America.
Despite the comparative looseness of the marriage bond in law, the family was the saving center of Jewish life. External danger brought internal unity; and hostile witnesses testify to the “warmth and dignity … thoughtfulness, consideration, parental and fraternal affection,” that marked and mark the Jewish family.94 The young husband, merged with his wife in work, joy, and tribulation, developed a profound attachment for her as part of his larger self; he became a father, and the children growing up around him stimulated his reserve energies and engaged his deepest loyalties. He had probably known no woman carnally before marriage, and had, in so small and intimate a community, few chances for infidelity afterward. Almost from their birth he saved to provide a dowry for his daughters and a marriage settlement for his sons; and he took it for granted that he should support them in the early years of their married life; this seemed wiser than to let youth prepare with a decade of promiscuity for the restrictions of monogamy. In many cases the bridegroom came to live with the bride in her father’s home—seldom to the increment of happiness. The authority of the oldest father in the home was almost as absolute as in republican Rome. He could excommunicate his children, and might beat his wife within reason; if he seriously injured her the community fined him to the limit of his resources. Usually his authority was exercised with a sternness that never quite concealed a passionate love.
The position of woman was legally low, morally high. Like Plato, the Jew thanked God that he had not been born a woman; and the woman replied humbly, “I thank God that I was made according to His will.”95 In the synagogue the women occupied a separate place in the gallery or behind the men—a clumsy compliment to their distracting charms; and they could not be counted toward making a quorum. Songs in praise of a woman’s beauty were considered indecorous, though the Talmud allowed them.96 Flirtation, if any, was by correspondence; public conversation between the sexes—even between man and wife—was forbidden by the rabbis.97 Dancing was permitted, but only of woman with woman, of man with man.98 While the husband was by law the sole heir of his wife, the widow did not inherit from her husband; when he died she received the equivalent of her dowry and the marriage settlement; for the rest her sons, the natural heirs, were relied upon to support her decently. Daughters inherited only in the absence of sons; otherwise they had to depend upon brotherly affection, which seldom failed.99 Girls were not sent to school; in their case a little knowledge was accounted an especially dangerous thing. However, they were allowed to study privately; we hear of several women who gave public lectures on the Law—though sometimes the lecturer screened herself from her audience.100Despite every physical and legal disadvantage, the deserving Jewish woman received after marriage full honor and devotion. Judah ben Moses ibn Tibbon (1170) quoted approvingly a Moslem sage: “None but the honorable honor women, none but the despicable despise them.”101
The parental relation was more nearly perfect than the marital. The Jew, with the vanity of the commonplace, prided himself on his reproductive ability and his children; his most solemn oath was taken by laying his hand upon the testes of the man receiving the pledge; hence the word testimony. Every man was commanded to have at least two children; usually there were more. The child was reverenced as a visitor from heaven, a very angel become flesh. The father was reverenced almost as a vicar of God; the son stood in his father’s presence until bidden to be seated, and gave him a solicitous obedience that fully comported with the pride of youth. In the ceremony of circumcision the boy was dedicated to Yahveh by the covenant of Abraham; and every family felt obligated to train one son for the rabbinate. When the boy had completed his thirteenth year he was received into manhood, and into all the obligations of the Law, by a solemn ceremony of confirmation.* Religion cast its awe and sanctity over every stage of development, and eased the tasks of parentage.
4. Religion
In like manner religion stood as a spiritual policeman over every phase of the moral code. Doubtless loopholes were found in the Law, and legal fictions were concocted to restore the freedom of adaptation indispensable to an enterprising people. But apparently the medieval Jew accepted the Law, by and large, as a bulwark saving him not only from eternal damnation but, more visibly, from group disintegration. It harassed him at every turn, but he honored it as the very home and school of his growth, the vital medium of his life.
Every home in Judaism was a church, every school was a temple, every father was a priest. The prayers and ritual of the synagogue had their briefer counterparts in the home. The fasts and festivals of the faith were celebrated there with educative ceremonies that bound the present with the past, the living with the dead and the yet unborn. Every Friday eve of the Sabbath the father called his wife, children, and servants around him, blessed them individually, and led them in prayer, religious readings, and sacred songs. To the doorpost of each major room was attached a tube (mezuzah) containing a parchment roll inscribed with two passages from Deuteronomy (vi, 4-9; xi, 13-21), reminding the Jew that his God is one, and must be loved “with all thy heart and soul and strength.” From the age of four the child was brought to the synagogue; and there religion was impressed upon him in his most formative years.
The synagogue was not merely a temple, it was the social center
of the Jewish community; synagoge, like ecclesia, synod, and college, meant an assemblage, a con-greg-ation. In pre-Christian days it had been essentially a school; it is still called Schule by Ashkenazic Jews. In the Dispersion it took on a strange variety of functions. In some synagogues it was the custom to publish, on the Sabbath, the decisions reached by the Beth Din during the week; to collect taxes, advertise lost articles, accept complaints of one member against another, and announce the coming sale of property so that any claimant on it might protest the sale. The synagogue dispensed communal charity, and, in Asia, served as a lodging for travelers. The building itself was always the finest in the Jewish quarter; sometimes, especially in Spain and Italy, it was an architectural masterpiece, expensively and lovingly adorned. Christian authorities repeatedly forbade the erection of synagogues equaling in height the tallest Christian church in the city; in 1221 Pope Honorius III ordered the destruction of such a synagogue in Bourges.103 Seville had twenty-three synagogues in the fourteenth century, Toledo and Cordova almost as many; one built in Cordova in 1315 is now maintained as a national monument by the Spanish government.