by Paul Johnson
Haim Beinart’s study of Ciudad Real reveals a pitiful pattern of human degradation. The object of concealing the names of hostile witnesses was to avoid family blood-feuds, but it gave the Inquisition its most evil aspect, particularly since many informers were motivated by malice, especially against rich or prominent men. Thus Juan Gonzales Pintado, who had been secretary to two kings, had naturally made enemies: he was burned alive for it. Still more wretched was the testimony of husbands against wives, and vice versa, sons against fathers, brothers against sisters. One of the worst informers was Fernan Falcon who testified in the posthumous trial of his own father, who seems to have been head of the local crypto-Jewish community: ‘All that is stated against him in the arraignment is true, and more yet-enough to fill over an entire sheet of paper.’ Falcon was a witness in all the Ciudad Real trials, 1483-5, his favourite descriptive phrase about an accused being ‘a Jew in every way’. Of one, Carolina de Zamora, he said ‘that he would see to it that they burned her even if he had to do thirty rounds in hell’; in fact the most damning witness against her was her own son, a monk, who swore to see her burned—though she got off with a flogging. Many of the women accused turned out to be learned as well as pious. Leonor Gonzales managed to escape to Portugal. The court gave her son, Juan de la Sierra, authority to go to Portugal and persuade her to return. He did so, she came back, was tried, convicted and burned alive. Some did escape. Others attempted it and were caught. The richest converso of the city, Sancho de Ciudad, bought a boat and sailed with his family for Valencia, but the winds drove them back, they were caught and all were burned in effigy. If a man was convicted posthumously, his remains were dug up and burned too—a symbol of what was supposedly happening to him in hell.143
A few got off. But usually the evidence was overwhelming. In Ciudad Real, in this period, it was only necessary to resort to torture twice. Many of those convicted were clearly strict Jews. One woman was trapped because she was seen lighting a candle on Sabbath eve to avoid kindling the next day; another because she declined to drink from the same cup as one who had eaten pork; a strict compliance with the laws of ritual slaughtering brought many to the stake. Not all got death sentences. A converso who abjured might get a term of imprisonment-possibly life-which could be commuted to a fine if he was rich. But he had to wear a sackcloth garment with two yellow crosses for at least a year, sometimes for ever, and if he failed to do so could be branded relapso and burned. He also had a special obligation to inform the Inquisition, failing which he was branded a ‘rebel against the church’, and burned. The list of positive and negative penalties imposed on such a man was enormous: he was banned from all benefices and offices down to town-crier, could not practise as a doctor, lawyer or notary, bear arms, receive moneys or goods, carve stone, own a tavern, ride a horse or travel by cart or carriage, wear gold, silver, pearls, jewels of any kind, silk and brocade, or grow a beard.144 These prohibitions were inherited by the children, females to the first generation, males to the second.145
This ferocious persecution lasted twelve years in its initial impulse and spread to every Jewish community in Spain. The misery and loss was appalling but all the results served to do was to reveal the magnitude of the ‘Jewish problem’ in the eyes of authority. It coincided with the final phase of the conquest of the old Moorish kingdom of Granada, the reyos catholicos entering the fallen city triumphantly on 2 January 1492. The débâcle added yet more Jewish communities, as well as Moslem ones, to the Spanish state. Dealing with the Jews, open or secret, was now almost the principal activity of the government. All the gaols were full. Tens of thousands were under house arrest and often starving. Despairing of ending contact between conversos and Jews by the conventional means of inquisitorial investigation, egged on by rapacious followers anxious to loot, the reyos determined on a gigantic act of will to produce a ‘final solution’. On 31 March they signed an Edict of Expulsion, promulgated a month later, physically driving from Spain any Jew who would not accept immediate conversion.
There were then about 200,000 Jews still in the kingdom. It is an indication of the demoralized state of the Jewish community, and also of the attachment Jews nevertheless felt for Spain, the country where they had enjoyed most comfort and security in the past, that very large numbers, including the senior rabbi and most of the leading families, chose to be baptized. About 100,000 trudged across the frontier into Portugal, from which in turn they were expelled four years later. About 50,000 went across the straits into North Africa, or by ship to Turkey. By the end of July 1492 the expulsion was an accomplished fact.
The destruction of Spanish Jewry was the most momentous event in Jewish history since the mid-second century AD. There had been Jews in Spain from early classical times, perhaps even since Solomon’s day, and the community had developed marked characteristics. In the Dark and early Middle Ages, dispersed Jews tended to fall into two main groups: those in touch with the Babylonian academies and those linked to Palestine. There were two such communities, each with its synagogue, in Maimonides’ Fustat (and a third synagogue for the Karaites). From the fourteenth century, however, it is more accurate to speak of Spanish or Sephardi Jews—the term is a corruption of an old name for Spain—and Ashkenazi or German Jews radiating from the Rhineland.146 The Sephardis created their own Judaeo-Spanish language, Ladino or Judezmo, once written in rabbinic cursive script, as opposed to the modern (originally Ashkenazi) Hebrew cursive. They were learned, literary, rich, immensely proud of their lineage, worldly-wise, often pleasure-loving and not over-strict, following the liberal codification of Joseph Caro. They were a bridgehead of the Latin world in Arab culture and vice versa, and transmitters of classical science and philosophy. Sephardis were brilliant craftsmen in precious metals and stones, mathematicians, makers of precision instruments, accurate maps and navigational tables.
Now this large and gifted community was dispersed all over the Mediterranean and Moslem world and, from Portugal, in a second Sephardi diaspora, to France and north-west Europe. Many embraced Christianity and made their mark therein. Christopher Columbus, for instance, was legally Genoese but did not write Italian, and may have come from a Spanish family of Jewish origin. The name Colon was common among Jews living in Italy. He boasted of his connections with King David, liked Jewish and marrano society, was influenced by Jewish superstitions, and his patrons at the Aragonese court were mainly New Christians. He used the tables drawn up by Abraham Zacuto and the instruments perfected by Joseph Vecinho. Even his interpreter, Luis de Torres, was Jewish—though baptized just before they sailed for America. Thus Jews, having lost Spain in the old world, helped to recreate it in the new.147 Sephardis went to France, too, and characteristic of their impact there was the glittering but urbane Michel de Montaigne, whose mother Antoinette Louppes was a direct descendant of Spanish Jews.148 What Spain lost, others gained; and in the long run the Sephardi diaspora was to prove exceedingly creative and of critical importance in Jewish development. But at the time it seemed an unrelieved disaster for the Jews.
Nor was it the only one. At the close of the European Middle Ages—the Jewish Middle Ages were not to end until the last decades of the eighteenth century—the Jews had ceased to make, at any rate for the time being, a primary contribution to the European economy and culture. They had become dispensable, and were being ejected in consequence. The Spanish expulsions were preceded by many in Germany and Italy. Jews were expelled from Vienna and Linz in 1421, from Cologne in 1424, Augsburg in 1439, Bavaria in 1442 (and again in 1450) and from the crown cities of Moravia in 1454. They were thrown out of Perugia in 1485, Vicenza in 1486, Parma in 1488, Milan and Lucca in 1489 and, with the fall of the philosemitic Medicis, from Florence and all Tuscany in 1494. By the end of the decade they had been turned out of the Kingdom of Navarre too.
One expulsion provoked another, as refugees streamed into cities which already housed more Jews than their rulers now wanted. In Italy their only function at the end of the fifteenth century wa
s pawnbroking and making small loans to the poor. Even in backward Rome the role of the Jewish bankers was declining.149 Christian bankers and craftsmen got the Jews banned as soon as their guilds were powerful enough. In Italy, in Provence and in Germany, the Jews had been virtually eliminated from large-scale trade and industry by the year 1500. So they moved into the less developed territories further east—first into Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, then on into Poland, to Warsaw and Cracow, Lwov, Brest-Litovsk and into Lithuania. The demographic axis of Ashkenazi Jewry shifted itself several hundred miles into east-central and eastern Europe. There was trouble here, too—there were anti-Jewish riots in Poland in 1348-9, in 1407 and in 1494; they were expelled from both Cracow and Lithuania the following year. All these movements and expulsions were interlinked. But because the Jews were needed more in the east, they managed to cling on; by the year 1500 Poland was regarded as the safest country in Europe for Jews, and it soon became the Ashkenazi heartland.
The degradation and impoverishment of the Jews in Europe, the fact that their contribution to the economy and culture had become marginal by the end of the Middle Ages, might have been expected to erode if not demolish the wall of hatred which had been built around them. But that did not happen. Like other forms of irrational conduct, anti-semitism did not respond to the laws of economics. On the contrary: like some vicious organism, it bred new mutations of itself. In Germany in particular it began to develop its own repulsive iconography—the Judensau.
The medieval mind delighted in reducing all aspects of the universe to imagery. The conflict between Christianity and Judaism had formed part of the vast panorama of life which swarmed, for instance, over the walls of the cathedrals. But the sculptors had represented it in purely theological terms. The favourite pair of images, often rendered with striking grace, was the triumphant church and the sorrowing synagogue. The medieval sculptor did not deal in anti-Semitic themes; he never portrayed the Jew as a usurer, a diabolical creature who poisoned wells, murdered Christian youth or tortured the host.
There were, however, other images used for Jews in the graphic arts: the golden calf, the owl, the scorpion. In Germany, towards the end of the medieval period, a new one began to emerge: the sow. The motif was not originally conceived as a polemical one, but it gradually came to symbolize all unclean persons, sinners, heretics, above all Jews.150 It seems to have been confined almost exclusively to areas affected by German culture; but there, it became the commonest of all motifs for the Jew, and one of the most potent and enduring of abusive stereotypes.151 It assumed an infinite variety of repellent forms. Jews were portrayed venerating the sow, sucking its teats, embracing its hindquarters, devouring its excrement. It offered rich opportunities to the coarser type of popular artist, presented with a target where none of the usual rules of taste and decorum applied and where the crudest obscenity was not merely acceptable but positively meritorious. Indeed, it is clear that the gross indecency of the image was the prime reason for its popularity over 600 years. With the invention of printing, it proliferated rapidly and became ubiquitous in Germany. It appeared not only in books but in countless prints, in etchings, in oils and watercolours, on the handles of walking-sticks, in faience and on china. Its endless repetition helped on a process which in Germany was to become of great and tragic importance: the dehumanization of the Jew. The notion that the Jew knew the truth but rejected it, preferring to work with the forces of darkness—and therefore could not be human in the sense that Christians were—was already well established. The Jew’s unnatural and inhuman relations with the Judensau drove it ever more firmly into the German popular mind. And if a particular category of person was not human, it could effectively be excluded from society. That, indeed, was what was already happening. For the walls of hatred, far from disappearing, were being replaced by real ones, as the European ghetto made its appearance.
PART FOUR
Ghetto
The great Sephardi diaspora, from Spain in 1492, from Portugal in 1497, set Jews in motion everywhere, for the arrival of refugees in large numbers usually led to further expulsions. Many Jews, reduced to near destitution, denied entrance to cities from which Jews had already been banned, took to peddling. It is no coincidence that the legend of the Wandering Jew assumed mature form about this time. The story of a Jew who had struck Christ on his via dolorosa, and so been condemned to wander until the Second Coming, first appeared in a Bolognese chronicle in 1223; Roger of Wendover recorded it five years later in his Flowers of History. But it was in the early decades of the sixteenth century that the Wanderer became Ahasuerus, the Jewish archetype pedlar, old, bearded, ragged, sad, a harbinger of calamity.1 The Bishop of Schleswig claimed he saw him in a church in Hamburg in 1542, and as the hundred or more folktale versions circulated in print, he was seen repeatedly: at Lübeck in 1603, Paris in 1604, Brussels in 1640, Leipzig in 1642, Munich 1721, London in 1818. He became the subject of a vast literature. There were, of course, innumerable, genuine wandering Jews: it was the Jewish predicament in the Renaissance and after, to become again ‘strangers and sojourners’, like Abraham.
One such wanderer was Solomon ibn Verga (c. 1450-c. 1525), a native of Malaga, thrown out of Spain, then Portugal, who came to Italy in 1506 and wandered there. We do not know where, if anywhere, he finally settled; but he spent some time in Rome. There he wrote a book called Shevet Yehuda, the Rod of Judah, asking, in effect, Why do men hate Jews? This essay has some claim to be called the first work of Jewish history since Josephus’ Antiquities 1,400 years before, for Ibn Verga describes no less than sixty-four persecutions of Jews. In writing it he signalled the first sign, albeit a faint one, of a return of Jewish historical self-consciousness.
It was evidence of the pitiful Jewish predicament in Christian Europe that Ibn Verga could not get his book published in his lifetime, and it was first printed about 1554 in Turkey. But, all the same, Ibn Verga was a man of the Renaissance, a rationalist, a sceptic, an independent mind. He was strongly critical of the Talmud, he mocked Maimonides, he parodied the views of Judah Halevi. Using the form of imaginary dialogues, he derided much Jewish scholarship. If the Jews were downtrodden, it was to a great extent their own fault. They were proud but at the same time too passive and trustful in God; hopeful and over-obedient, they neglected both political and military science and so were ‘twice naked’. Neither Jews nor Christians would recognize the case for rival beliefs; both countenanced superstition and legends. If the Christians were intolerant, the Jews were unaccommodating. He pointed out that, as a rule, ‘the kings of Spain and France, the nobility, the learned and all the men of dignity were friendly to the Jews’; prejudice came chiefly from the ignorant, uneducated poor. ‘I have never seen a man of reason hate the Jews’, he has a wise man say, ‘and there is none who hates them except the common people. For this there is a reason—the Jew is arrogant and always seeks to rule; you would never think that they are exiles and slaves driven from people to people. Rather, they seek to show themselves lords and masters. Therefore the masses envy them.’2 Why did not the Jews try to break down prejudice by behaving more modestly and humbly, and by preaching religious tolerance and understanding?3
Ibn Verga wrote in Hebrew and was clearly addressing himself to an educated Jewish readership, who would know the justice of his criticisms. So we must attach some weight to his charges. But the evidence we have does not suggest that overbearing arrogance was usually the reason why Jews were attacked. The usual cause of trouble was an influx of strange Jews, pushing numbers in the established Jewish community beyond a critical point. In Venice, for instance, which had been a major trading state since the tenth century, and which was a natural place for Jews to settle, they had met some resistance. In the thirteenth century they were corralled on the island of Spinalunga, the Giudecca; at other times they were forced to live on the mainland at Mestre. They had to wear a circular yellow badge, then a yellow hat, then a red hat. But there were always Jews there. They did well. They
made important contributions to the Venetian economy, not least by paying special taxes. They had a charter or condotta, repeatedly confirmed.
In May 1509 the forces of the League of Cambrai defeated the Venetian army at Agnadello, and there was a panic flight from the terra firma to the main islands. The refugees included over 5,000 Jews, many of them immigrants from Spain and Portugal. Two years later, an agitation for their expulsion began, touched off by sermons from the friars. It culminated in 1515-16 in a decision by the state to confine the entire Jewish community to a segregated area of the city. The spot chosen was a former canon foundry, known as the ghetto nuovo, in the part of the central islands furthest removed from the Piazza San Marco. The new foundry was formed into an island by canals, equipped with high walls, all windows facing outward bricked up, and two gates set up manned by four Christian watchmen; six other watchmen were to man two patrol boats, and all ten were to be paid for by the Jewish community, which was also instructed to take out a perpetual lease of the property at one-third above the going rate.4
The concept of a separate quarter for Jews was not new. It went back to antiquity. Most major Islamic cities had one. In Dark Age Europe the Jews had often demanded segregation and high walls as a condition for settling in a town. But they objected strongly to the Venetian proposal. It was plainly designed to secure the maximum economic advantage from a Jewish presence (including special taxes) while ensuring Jews had the minimum social contacts with the rest of the population. They were, in effect, permitted to do their business by day, at an inconvenient distance, and locked in at night. But Venice insisted, and in fact the system probably prevented subsequent proposals, to expel the Jews altogether, from being accepted. The original ghetto nuovo accommodated Italian Jews chiefly of German origin. In 1541 Jews of the Levant were moved into the nearby old foundry or ghetto vecchio. Finally in 1633 the area was further enlarged by adding the ghetto novissimo to house western Jews.5 At this time (1632) there were 2,412 Jews in the ghetto out of a total Venetian population of 98,244. With the extra space the ghetto was able to house nearly 5,000 Jews by 1655.6 To live thus enclosed, the Jews paid not only ordinary taxes and custom dues, but a special annual tax of 10,000 ducats a year and forced levies, during the first century of the ghetto, of at least 60,000 ducats, totalling not less than 250,000 ducats in all.7