by Will Durant
When, in 1095, Pope Urban II proclaimed the First Crusade, some Christians thought it desirable to kill the Jews of Europe before proceeding so far to fight Turks in Jerusalem. Godfrey of Bouillon, having accepted the leadership of the crusade, announced that he would avenge the blood of Jesus upon the Jews, and would leave not one of them alive; and his companions proclaimed their intention to kill all Jews who would not accept Christianity. A monk further aroused Christian ardor by declaring that an inscription found on the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem made the conversion of all Jews a moral obligation of all Christians.142 The Crusaders planned to move south along the Rhine, where lay the richest settlements in northern Europe. The German Jews had played a leading part in the development of Rhenish commerce, and had behaved with a restraint and piety that had won the respect of Christian laity and clergy alike. Bishop Rüdiger of Speyer was on cordial terms with the Jews of his district, and gave them a charter guaranteeing their autonomy and security. In 1095 the Emperor Henry IV issued a similar charter for all the Jews of his realm.143 Upon these peaceful Jewish congregations the news of the crusade, its proposed route, and the threats of its leaders, broke with paralyzing terror. The rabbis proclaimed several days of fasting and prayer.
Arrived at Speyer, the Crusaders dragged eleven Jews into a church, and ordered them to accept baptism; refusing, the eleven were slain (May 3, 1096). Other Jews of the city took refuge with Bishop Johannsen, who not only protected them but caused the execution of certain Crusaders who had shared in the murders at the church. As some Crusaders neared Trier, its Jews appealed to Bishop Egilbert; he offered protection on condition of baptism. Most of the Jews consented; but several women killed their children and threw themselves into the Moselle (June 1, 1096). At Mainz Archbishop Ruthard hid 1300 Jews in his cellars; Crusaders forced their way in, and killed 1014; the Bishop was able to save a few by concealing them in the cathedral (May 27, 1096). Four Mainz Jews accepted baptism, but committed suicide soon afterward. As the Crusaders approached Cologne, the Christians hid the Jews in their homes; the mob burned down the Jewish quarter, and killed the few Jews upon whom they could lay their hands. Bishop Hermann, at great danger to himself, secretly conveyed the Jews from their Christian hiding places to Christian homes in the country; the pilgrims discovered the maneuver, hunted their prey in the villages, and killed every Jew they found (June, 1096). In two of these villages 200 Jews were slain; in four others the Jews, surrounded by the mob, killed one another rather than be baptized. Mothers delivered of infants during these attacks slew them at birth. At Worms Bishop Allebranches received such of the Jews as he could into his palace, and saved them; upon the rest the Crusaders fell with the savagery of anonymity, killing many, and then plundering and burning the homes of the Jews; here many Jews committed suicide rather than repudiate their faith. Seven days later a crowd besieged the episcopal residence; the Bishop told the Jews that he could no longer hold back the mob, and advised them to accept baptism. The Jews asked to be left alone for a while; when the Bishop returned he found that nearly all of them had killed one another. The besiegers broke in and slew the rest; all in all, some 800 Jews died in this pogrom at Worms (August 20, 1096). Similar scenes occurred at Metz, Regensburg, and Prague.144
The Second Crusade (1147) threatened to better the example of the First. Peter the Venerable, the saintly Abbot of Cluny, advised Louis VII of France to begin by attacking the French Jews. “I do not require you to put to death these accursed beings… God does not wish to annihilate them; but, like Cain the fratricide, they must be made to suffer fearful torments, and be preserved for greater ignominy, for an existence more bitter than death.”145Abbot Suger of St. Denis protested against this conception of Christianity, and Louis VII contented himself with capital levies on rich Jews. But the German Jews were not let off with mere confiscation. A French monk, Rodolphe, leaving his monastery without permission, preached a pogrom in Germany. At Cologne Simon “the Pious” was murdered and mutilated; at Speyer a woman was tortured on the rack to persuade her to Christianity. Again the secular prelates did all they could to protect the Jews. Bishop Arnold of Cologne gave them a fortified castle as refuge, and allowed them to arm themselves; the Crusaders refrained from attacking the castle, but killed any unconverted Jew that fell into their clutches. Archbishop Henry at Mainz admitted into his house some Jews pursued by a mob; the mob forced a way in, and killed them before his eyes. The Archbishop appealed to St. Bernard, the most influential Christian of his time; Bernard replied with a strong denunciation of Rodolphe, and demanded an end to violence against the Jews. When Rodolphe continued his campaign Bernard came in person to Germany, and forced the monk to return to his monastery. Shortly thereafter the mutilated body of a Christian was found at Würzburg; Christians charged Jews with the crime, attacked them despite the protests of Bishop Embicho, and killed twenty; many others, wounded, were tended by Christians (1147); and the Bishop buried the dead in his garden.146 From Germany the idea of beginning the Crusades at home passed back to France, and Jews were massacred at Carentan, Rameru, and Sully. In Bohemia 150 Jews were murdered by Crusaders. After the terror had passed, the local Christian clergy did what it could to help the surviving Jews; and those who had accepted baptism under duress were allowed to return to Judaism without incurring the dire penalties of apostasy.147
These pogroms began a long series of violent assaults, which continued till our time. In 1235 an unsolved murder at Baden was laid to the Jews, and a massacre ensued. In 1243 the entire Jewish population of Belitz, near Berlin, was burned alive on the charge that some of them had defiled a consecrated Host.148 In 1283 the accusation of ritual murder was raised at Mainz, and despite all the efforts of Archbishop Werner, ten Jews were killed, and Jewish homes were pillaged. In 1285 a like rumor excited Munich; 180 Jews fled for refuge to a synagogue; the mob set fire to it, and all 180 were burned to death. A year later forty Jews were killed at Oberwesel on the charge that they had drained the blood of a Christian. In 1298 every Jew in Rottingen was burned to death on the charge of desecrating a sacramental wafer. Rind-fleisch, a pious baron, organized and armed a band of Christians sworn to kill all Jews; they completely exterminated the Jewish community at Würzburg, and slew 698 Jews in Nuremberg. The persecution spread, and in half a year 140 Jewish congregations were wiped out.149 The Jews of Germany, having repeatedly rebuilt their communities after such attacks, lost heart; and in 1286 many Jewish families left Mainz, Worms, Speyer, and other German towns, and migrated to Palestine to live in Islam. As Poland and Lithuania were inviting immigrants, and had not yet experienced pogroms, a slow exodus of Jews from the Rhineland began to the Slavic East.
The Jews of England, excluded from landholding and from the guilds, became merchants and financiers. Some waxed rich through usury, and all were hated for it. Lords and squires equipped themselves for the Crusades with money borrowed from the Jews; in return they pledged the revenues of their lands; and the Christian peasant fumed at the thought of moneylenders fattening on his toil. In 1144 young William of Norwich was found dead; the Jews were accused of having killed him to use his blood; and the Jewish quarter of the city was sacked and fired.150 King Henry II protected the Jews; Henry III did likewise, but took £422,000 from them in taxes and capital levies in seven years. At the coronation of Richard I in London (1190) a minor altercation, encouraged by nobles seeking escape from their debts to Jews,151 developed into a pogrom that spread to Lincoln, Stamford, and Linn. In York, in the same year, a mob led by Richard de Malabestia, “who was deeply indebted to the Jews,”152 killed 350 of them; in addition 150 York Jews, led by their Rabbi Yom Tob, slew themselves.153 In 1211 300 rabbis left England and France to begin life anew in Palestine; seven years later many Jews emigrated when Henry III enforced the edict of the badge. In 1255 rumor spread through Lincoln that a boy named Hugh had been enticed into the Jewish quarter and there had been scourged, crucified, and pierced with a lance, in the presence of a rejoicing Jewish crowd. Armed ba
nds invaded the settlement, seized the rabbi who was supposed to have presided over the ceremony, tied him to the tail of a horse, dragged him through the streets, and hanged him. Ninety-one Jews were arrested, eighteen were hanged; many prisoners were saved by the intercession of courageous Dominican monks.*154
During the civil war that disordered England between 1257 and 1267, the populace got out of hand, and pogroms almost wiped out the Jewish communities of London, Canterbury, Northampton, Winchester, Worcester, Lincoln, and Cambridge. Houses were looted and destroyed, deeds and bonds were burned, and the surviving Jews were left almost penniless.155The English kings were now borrowing from the Christian bankers of Florence or Cahors; they no longer needed the Jews, and found it troublesome to protect them. In 1290 Edward I ordered the 16,000 remaining Jews of England to leave the country by November 1, abandoning all their immovable realty and all their collectible loans. Many were drowned in crossing the Channel in small boats; some were robbed by the ships’ crews; those who reached France were told by the government that they must leave by Lent of 1291.156
In France, too, the spiritual climate changed for the Jews with the Crusades against the Turks in Asia and the Albigensian heretics of Languedoc. Bishops preached anti-Semitic sermons that stirred the people; at Béziers an attack upon the Jewish quarter was a regular rite of Holy Week; finally (1160) a Christian prelate forbade such preaching, but required the Jewish community to pay a special tax every Palm Sunday.157 At Toulouse the Jews were forced to send a representative to the cathedral each Good Friday to receive publicly a box on the ears as a mild reminder of everlasting guilt.158In 1171 several Jews were burned at Blois on a charge of using Christian blood in Passover rites.159 Seeing a chance to turn a pious penny, King Philip Augustus ordered all the Jews in his realm to be imprisoned as poisoners of Christian wells,160 and then released them on payment of a heavy ransom (1180). A year later he banished them, confiscated all their realty, and gave their synagogues to the Church. In 1190 he had eighty Jews of Orange killed because one of his agents had been hanged by the city authorities for murdering a Jew.161 In 1198 he recalled the Jews to France, and so regulated their banking business as to secure large profits to himself.162 In 1236 Christian crusaders invaded the Jewish settlements of Anjou and Poitou—especially those at Bordeaux and Angoulême—and bade all Jews be baptized; when the Jews refused, the crusaders trampled 3000 of them to death under their horses’ hoofs.163 Pope Gregory IX condemned the slaughter, but did not raise the dead. St. Louis advised his people not to discuss religion with Jews; “the layman,” he told Joinville, “when he hears any speak ill of the Christian faith, should defend it not with words but with the sword, which he should thrust into the other’s belly as far as it will go.”164 In 1254 he banished the Jews from France, confiscating their property and their synagogues; a few years later he readmitted them, and restored their synagogues. They were rebuilding their communities when Philip the Fair (1306) had them all imprisoned, confiscated their credits and all their goods except the clothes they wore, and expelled them, to the number of 100,000, from France, with provisions for one day. The King profited so handsomely from the operation that he presented a synagogue to his coachman.165
So crowded a juxtaposition of bloody episodes scattered over two centuries makes a one-sided picture. In Provence, Italy, Sicily, and in the Byzantine Empire after the ninth century there were only minor persecutions of the Jews; and they found means of protecting themselves in Christian Spain. Even in Germany, England, and France the periods of peace were long; and a generation after each tragedy the Jews there were again numerous, and some were prosperous. Nevertheless their traditions carried down the bitter memory of those tragic interludes. The days of peace were made anxious by the ever-present danger of pogroms; and every Jew had to learn by heart the prayer to be recited in the moment of martyrdom.166 The pursuit of wealth was made more feverish by the harassed insecurity of its gains; the gibes of gamins in the street were ever ready to greet the wearers of the yellow badge; the ignominy of a helpless and secluded minority burned into the soul, broke down individual pride and interracial amity, and left in the eyes of the northern Jew that somber judenschmerz—the sorrow of the Jews—which recalls a thousand insults and injuries.
For that one death on the cross how many crucifixions!
CHAPTER XVII
The Mind and Heart of the Jew
500–1300
I. LETTERS
IN every age the soul of the Jew has been torn between the resolve to make his way in a hostile world, and his hunger for the goods of the mind. A Jewish merchant is a dead scholar; he envies and generously honors the man who, escaping the fever of wealth, pursues in peace the love of learning and the mirage of wisdom. The Jewish traders and bankers who went to the fairs of Troyes stopped on the way to hear the great Rashi expound the Talmud.1So, amid commercial cares, or degrading poverty, or mortal contumely, the Jews of the Middle Ages continued to produce grammarians, theologians, mystics, poets, scientists, and philosophers; and for a while (1150-1200) only the Moslems equaled them in widespread literacy and intellectual wealth.2They had the advantage of living in contact or communication with Islam; many of them read Arabic; the whole rich world of medieval Moslem culture was open to them; they took from Islam in science, medicine, and philosophy what they had given in religion to Mohammed and the Koran; and by their mediation they aroused the mind of the Christian West with the stimulus of Saracen thought.
Within Islam the Jews used Arabic in daily speech and written prose; their poets kept to Hebrew, but accepted Arabic meters and poetic forms. In Christendom the Jews spoke the language of the people among whom they lived, but wrote their literature, and worshiped Yahveh, in the ancient tongue. After Maimonides the Jews of Spain, fleeing from Almohad persecution, abandoned Arabic for Hebrew as their literary medium. The revival of Hebrew was made possible by the devoted labors of Jewish philologists. The Old Testament text had become difficult to understand through lack of vowels and punctuation; three centuries of scholarship—from the seventh to the tenth—evolved the “Masoretic” (tradition-sanctioned) text by adding vowel points, accent strokes, punctuation marks, verse separations, and marginal notes. Thereafter any literate Jew could read the Scriptures of his people.
Such studies compelled the development of Hebrew grammar and lexicography. The poetry and learning of Menachem ben Saruk (910-70) attracted the attention of Hasdai ben Shaprut; the great minister called him to Cordova, and encouraged him in the task of compiling a dictionary of Biblical Hebrew. Menachem’s pupil Jehuda ibn Daud Chayuj (c. 1000) put Hebrew grammar upon a scientific basis with three Arabic works on the language of the Bible; Chayuj’s pupil Jonah ibn Janaeh (995-1050) of Saragossa surpassed him with an Arabic Book of Critique that advanced Hebrew syntax and lexicography; Judah ibn Quraish of Morocco (fl. 900) founded the comparative philology of the Semitic languages by his study of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic; the Qaraite Jew Abraham al-Fasi (i.e., of Fez, c. 980) furthered the matter with a dictionary in which all the words of the Old Testament were reduced to their roots alphabetically arranged. Nathan ben Yechiel of Rome (d. 1106) excelled all other Jewish lexicographers with his dictionary of the Talmud. In Narbonne Joseph Kimchi and his sons Moses and David (1160-1235) labored for generations in these fields; David’s Michlol, or Compendium, became for centuries the authoritative grammar of Hebrew, and was a constant aid to King James’ translators of the Bible.3 These names are chosen from a thousand.
Profiting from this widespread scholarship, Hebrew poetry emancipated itself from Arabic exemplars, developed its own forms and themes, and produced in Spain alone three men quite equal to any triad in the Moslem or Christian literature of their age. Solomon ibn Gabirol, known to the Christian world as the philosopher Avicebron, was prepared by his personal tragedy to voice the feelings of Israel. This “poet among philosophers, and philosopher among poets,” as Heine called him,4 was born at Malaga about 1021. He lost both parents early,
and grew up in a poverty that inclined him to morose contemplation. His verses caught the fancy of Yekutiel ibn Hassan, a high official in the Moslem city-state of Saragossa. There for a time Gabirol found protection and happiness, and sang the joy of life. But Yekutiel was assassinated by enemies of the emir, and Gabirol fled. For years he wandered through Moslem Spain, poor and sick, and so thin that “a fly could now bear me up with ease.” Samuel ibn Naghdela, himself a poet, gave him refuge at Granada. There Solomon wrote his philosophical works, and pledged his poetry to wisdom:
How shall I forsake wisdom?
I have made a covenant with her.
She is my mother, I am her dearest child;
She hath clasped her jewels about my neck….
While life is mine my spirit shall aspire
Unto her heavenly heights.…
I will not rest until I find her source.5
Presumably his impetuous pride caused his quarrel with Samuel. Still a youth in his late twenties, he resumed his wandering poverty; misfortune humbled his spirit, and he turned from philosophy to religion:
Lord, what is man? A carcass fouled and trodden,
A noxious creature brimming with deceit,
A fading flower that shrivels in the heat.6
His poetry took at times the somber grandeur of the Psalms:
Establish peace for us, O Lord,