History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  Luther was not content with verbal abuse. Even before he wrote his anti-Semitic pamphlet, he got Jews expelled from Saxony in 1537, and in the 1540s he drove them from many German towns; he tried unsuccessfully to get the elector to expel them from Brandenburg in 1543. His followers continued to agitate against Jews there: they sacked the Berlin synagogue in 1572 and the following year finally got their way, the Jews being banned from the entire country. Jean Calvin, on the other hand, was more well disposed towards Jews, partly because he tended to agree with them on the question of lending at interest; he reported Jewish arguments objectively in his writings and was even accused, by his Lutheran enemies, of being a Judaizer.24 None the less, Jews were expelled from Calvinist cities and the Calvinist Palatinate.25

  Because of Protestant hostility, the Jews were driven into the arms of the emperor. Charles V, when wearing his Spanish hat, was no friend. He got the papacy to set up an inquisition in Portugal in 1543, threw many marranos out of Lisbon seven years later, expelled the Jews from Naples in 1541 and turned them out of some of his territories in Flanders. But in Germany he found the Jews useful allies and at the diets of Augsburg (1530), Speyer (1544) and Regensburg (1546) his protection prevented their expulsion. The Catholic prince-bishops also found the Jews a useful ally against their Protestant burghers, even if they were not prepared to admit it in public. Hence at the Peace of Augsburg, it was agreed to omit the ecclesiastical states from its central provision, cuius regio, eius religio (religion follows the faith of the prince), and this allowed Jews to remain in Germany. Josel of Rosheim, senior rabbi in Alsace, who acted as the Jewish spokesman in this tense period, denounced Luther as a ‘ruffian’ and called Emperor Charles ‘an angel of the Lord’; the Jews prayed for the success of the imperial army in their synagogues, and supplied it with money and provisions—thus setting a new and important Jewish survival-pattern.26

  None the less, the Counter-Reformation, when it came, dealt harshly with the Jews as well as the Protestants. Traditionally the popes, like other princes, had used and protected Jews. There had been 50,000 Jews in Italy even before the Spanish expulsions, and the number was quickly swollen by refugees. The influx caused trouble, as in Venice, but on the whole papal policy remained benign. Paul III (1534-49) even encouraged the settlement of Jews expelled from Naples (1541) and six years later accepted marranos too, promising them protection from the Inquisition. His successor Julius III renewed the guarantees. In May 1555, however, Cardinal Caraffa, Grand Inquisitor and scourge of Jews, dissidents and heretics, became pope as Paul IV and immediately reversed the policy. Not only in Ancona but in many other Italian cities, papal and other, Christians and Jews were mixing freely, and he took Erasmus’ view that the influence of Judaism was a mortal threat to faith. Two months after his election, with the Bull Cum nimis absurdam he applied the Venetian solution in Rome, where the city’s Jews were driven on to the left bank of the Tiber and surrounded by a wall. In Ancona, at the same time, he carried out a purge of marranos, burning twenty-five of them in public. The ghetto was quickly extended to all cities in the papal states and from 1562 the word became the official term used in anti-Jewish laws. There were great bonfires of Hebrew books, not only in Rome and Bologna but in Florence. Pius V (1566-72) was even fiercer, his Bull Hebraeorum Gens (1569) expelling Jewish communities, some of which had had a continuous existence since antiquity. Later popes varied, but it remained papal policy to ghetto Jews in the papal states and to put pressure on other rulers to do likewise. Thus the ghetto was introduced in Tuscany in 1570-1, in Padua 1601-3, in Verona in 1599 and in Mantua in 1601-3. The Dukes of Ferrara refused to comply, but they agreed to stop Jews printing books.27 In the end, Leghorn was the only city which did not create a ghetto of some kind.

  The papacy was not the only institution to turn on the Jews. The strongest monarchies, which traditionally had been the keenest and most effective protectors of Jewish communities, were also the most vehement against heresy. In large parts of Europe, the Counter-Reformation was a great wave of reaction to the disturbing ideas circulated in the first half of the century, a return to sobriety and order, led from the top but with wide popular backing. It was a drive against racialism, subversion and innovation of every kind. The Jews were seen as a generally disturbing element, especially in the form of marranos. These forced converts and their descendants, cut off from the discipline of Jewish orthodoxy, tended to turn to anything, including Anabaptism, which was what authority hated most of all—it was a generic term for religious insubordination. Many marranos evolved weird mixtures of Christian and Jewish beliefs. They were sceptics, sneering at the Virgin Mary and the saints, laughing at images and pious practices. They set up their individual judgment against authority of every kind. Marranos were regarded as potential traitors to the state as well as heretics—authority could instance the useful hate-figure of João Miguez, Duke of Naxos, the most powerful of all the ex-Christian Jews, who advised the sultan himself.

  The Counter-Reformation, both clerical and secular, was most suspicious of immigrants, of whom the marranos were one element. Authority learned from experience that movement meant trouble. It did not mind so much the old-established Jews. It was the newcomers who brought dangerous ideas. This fear operated at many levels. The Bakers’ Guild of Venice publicly denounced their immigrant journey-men: ‘They follow in the footsteps of the Lutherans and, boasting of having flung once most Christian Germany into confusion…are now sparing no effort to ruin the bakers’ guild here.’ At the top Charles V’s ambassador to Venice warned the republic that, by failing to stamp out heresy it would invoke ‘the enmity of princes for the sake of winning the friendship of peoples…for they wish no vassal to give obedience to his prince and they seek to destroy all dominion and to make peoples free’.28 Pius V’s nuncio in Venice, Giovanni Antonio Facchinetti, did not hesitate to attribute Venice’s military failures in her war against the Turks to her culpable failure to root out Jews and heretics: it was God himself, rather than the Turks, who was now making war on the republic, and its rulers should ask themselves the question: ‘Why should the majesty of God think itself offended by this state?’29 Authority loved the Jew as a wealth-creator; hated him as an ideas-monger.

  Yet the two activities were different faces of the same human coin. Experience showed that the Jew on the move, who was most likely to bring unsettling ideas, was also the most likely to introduce new, or more efficient, ways of adding to a nation’s wealth. History is continually teaching us that the very fact of displacement and resettlement has an invigorating effect on ideas and ways of doing things, and so turns the emigrant into a more efficient economic animal. As far back as the eighth and seventh centuries BC, impoverished Greek herdsmen and olive-growers, leaving their ancient soil, blossomed into successful merchant-colonists throughout the Mediterranean. In the nineteenth century, clansmen who had starved in the Highlands, wretched bog-Irish from Clare and Kerry, semi-serfs from Poland, landless peasants from the Mezzogiorno, transformed themselves into enterprising citizens in Ontario and New Zealand, in Boston, New York and Chicago, in the Midwest, Argentina and New South Wales. In our own day we have constantly seen the almost miraculous effect of movement as mainland Chinese settle in Taiwan and Hong Kong, Vietnamese come to California and Australia, and Cubans to Florida.

  The Reformation, Counter-Reformation and the Wars of Religion stamped on the European anthill and sent industrious little communities scurrying in all directions. Sometimes, to escape harassment and persecution, they moved two or three times before achieving permanent settlement. Almost invariably, the final host-areas prospered. It used to be argued, by Max Weber and R. H. Tawney, that modern capitalism was the product of religious notions, variously termed the ‘Protestant ethic’ and the Calvinist ‘salvation panic’, both inculcating a spirit of hard work and accumulation. But there are many insuperable objections to this theory, and it now seems more likely that displacement, rather than sectarian belief, was the common fac
tor. The dynamic impulse to national economies, especially in England and the Netherlands, and later in North America and Germany, was provided not only by Calvinists, but by Lutherans, Catholics from north Italy and, not least, by Jews.30

  What these moving communities shared was not theology but an unwillingness to live under the state regimentation of religious and moral ideas at the behest of clerical establishments. All of them repudiated clerical hierarchies, favouring religious government by the congregation and the private conscience. In all these respects the Jews were the most characteristic of the various denominations of emigrants. They had repudiated clericalism ever since the destruction of the Second Temple. They had adopted congregationalism long before any Protestant sect. Their communities chose their own rabbis, and this devolved form of authority was made workable by an absence of dogmatic theology and a spirit of intellectual tolerance. Above all, they were expert settlers. They had been moving all their history. Strangers and sojourners from their earliest origins, they had, over many generations and in an endless variety of different situations, perfected many immigrant arts, especially skill in concentrating their wealth so that it could be switched quickly from a point of danger to an area of resettlement. Their trades and crafts, their folk-culture and their laws combined to assist their creative mobility.

  That was one reason why new Jewish arrivals, whatever their misfortunes, always seemed to have access to working capital. And that, in turn, made them generally welcome. As one Jewish apologist, Manasseh ben Israel, put it in the mid-seventeenth century:

  Hence it may be seen that God hath not left us; for if one persecutes us, another receives us civilly and courteously; and if this prince treats us ill, another treats us well; if one banisheth us out of his country, another invites us with a thousand privileges; as divers princes of Italy have done, the most eminent King of Denmark, and the mighty Duke of Savoy in Nissa. And do we not see that those Republiques do flourish and much increase in trade who admit the Israelites?31

  In addition to their general propensities, the Jews had particular contributions to make to the spirit of economic innovation and enterprise. In the Middle Ages, as we have seen, their urban, trading and financial skills were gradually acquired by the surrounding Christian communities; then the Jews had outlived their social and economic usefulness and were often told to go, or discriminated against. They might then move into a less developed area where their skills were still needed. But the alternative was to develop new methods, and the Jews were adept at this too. They kept one jump ahead of the competition, either by raising the efficiency of existing methods, and so lowering rates and prices, or by inaugurating new ones. It was when they moved into a new area that their innovatory spirit was most in evidence, usually because that was the moment for a new generation to take over. Equally important, the Jews were quick to respond to entirely new phenomena and situations. Their religion taught them to rationalize. Capitalism, at all its stages of development, has advanced by rationalizing and so improving the chaos of existing methods. The Jews could do this because, while intensely conservative (as a rule) within their own narrow and isolated world, they had no share in or emotional commitment to society as a whole and so could watch its old traditions, methods and institutions being demolished without a pang—could, indeed, play a leading role in the process of destruction. They were thus natural capitalist entrepreneurs.

  This relative freedom to follow the logic of reason which their outsider status gave the Jews was nowhere better demonstrated than in their attitude to money. One of the greatest contributions the Jews made to human progress was to force European culture to come to terms with money and its power. Human societies have always shown an extraordinary unwillingness to demystify money and see it for what it is—a commodity like any other, whose value is relative. They tend, indeed, to attach absolute values to all commodities—failing to see that the value of a thing varies in time and space—and particularly to money because it has a fixed apparent value. They also invest money with special moral overtones. Why did St Paul lay down, and countless millions thoughtlessly repeat, ‘The love of money is the root of all evil’? Why not the love of land or of flocks or horses; or houses or paintings? Or, most of all, the love of power? There is no ascertainable reason why money should be viewed with such opprobrium. Moreover, the moral distinction between money and all other commodities spread over into the notion of investment, making it extraordinarily difficult to construct an ethical framework for saving and economic development. Men bred cattle with honour; they sowed grain and reaped it worthily. But if they made money work for them they were parasites and lived on ‘unearned increment’, as it came to be termed.

  The Jews were initially as much victims of this fallacy as anyone else. Indeed, they invented it. But their technique of religious rationalization, and their predicament as unwilling traders in money, eventually made them willing to face the problem, and resolve it. As we have seen, they began by working out a double standard for money dealings with Jews and gentiles. Some elements of this remain even today: many Jewish banks in Israel (and elsewhere) display notices insisting that loans between Jews will observe the religious laws. From the end of the fifteenth century, however, Jewish rationalizers attempted to strip money of its magic. In a dispute at Ferrara in 1500, Rabbi Abraham Farissol of Avignon, using a familiar (and somewhat dishonest) argument of innovators, insisted that things had changed since Biblical times and that money had become a mere commodity:

  This has brought into being a new situation and new obligations. [It is natural to give something for nothing to a pauper, for pity’s sake but] in other cases when a man needs something of which his comrade has plenty…he purchases it at a price. Hence…the established practice of paying for the hire of houses and workers…all of whom have their price…. For if nature and wisdom were to demand that aid be given to everyone who needs it so as to satisfy his wants, and that money be loaned without interest to those who need money, then nature would also require that if anyone needs a house or a horse or work to be provided for him, they should all be supplied without payment.32

  Farissol felt that an agreed system of prices, wages and interest was socially beneficial since it helped to regulate amicably economic relationships in an ordered society. To earn an income from possession of money was no more, nor less, opprobrious than earning it from possessing land, or any other commodity; ‘it follows in accordance with practice and nature that he who benefits from the money of his comrade is duty bound to pay something back’. About the same time, Isaac Abrabanel produced a similar line of defence in his commentary on the Deuteronomy text, first published in 1551: ‘There is nothing unworthy about interest…because it is proper that people should make a profit out of their money, wine and corn, and if someone wants money from someone else…why should a farmer [who] received wheat to sow his field not give the lender 10 per cent if he is successful, as he usually should be? This is an ordinary business transaction, and correct.’ An interest-free transaction, he added, was reserved for someone to whom we owe especial kindness, such as indeed a needy co-religionist.33

  The willingness to face the idea of money squarely, to deal with it honestly and rationally, had deep roots in both Biblical and rabbinical Judaism. Judaism did not polarize piety and prosperity. It praised the poor, it deplored avarice, but it also constantly suggested links between the good things of life and moral worthiness. There is a beautiful passage in Deuteronomy in which Moses stresses the bounty which God will bestow on those who keep his law: ‘And he will love thee, and bless thee, and multiply thee: he will also bless the fruit of thy womb, and the fruit of thy land, thy corn and thy wine, and thine oil, the increase of thy kine and the flocks of thy sheep, in the land which he swore unto thy fathers to give thee.’34 Israel itself shall be wealthy: ‘thou shalt lend unto many nations, but thou shalt not borrow’.35 ‘They that seek the Lord’, said the Psalms, ‘shall not want any good thing.’36 The Psalms and Proverbs, th
e Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, the book of Ben Sira were full òf such sentiments. The Talmud echoed them: ‘In time of scarcity a man learns to value wealth best.’ ‘Seven characteristics are there which are “comely to the righteous and comely to the world”. One of them is riches.’ Jewish halakhah had always dealt directly with actual and not just theoretical business problems, on the assumption that properly conducted trading was not only wholly compatible with strict morality but positively virtuous since it made possible the good works and systematic charity around which the Jewish community revolved. The cathedocracy had ruled and written realistically about trade because many of its members engaged in it. Men like Maimonides and Nahmanides had never made the assumption, so characteristic of the Christian intelligentsia, that there is an absolute distinction between book-reading and book-writing on the one hand, and book-keeping on the other. Rabbinical Judaism said things about business which all sensible men know to be true and just, but which convention normally excludes from the realm of religious discourse.

  That being so, the Jews were well prepared to take advantage of the growth in the world economy which marked the sixteenth century; indeed, in view of their exclusion from the Spanish peninsula, and their treatment in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe, they had no alternative but to push the diaspora further and seek new outlets for their business skills. To the West, Columbus’ voyages were not the only ones which had a Jewish and marrano background in finance and technology. Expelled Jews went to the Americas as the earliest traders. They set up factories. In St Thomas, for instance, they became the first large-scale plantation-owners. Spanish laws forbidding Jews to emigrate to the colonies proved ineffective and in 1577 were repealed. Jews and marranos were particularly active in settling Brazil; the first governor-general, Thomas de Souza, sent out in 1549, was certainly of Jewish origin. They owned most of the sugar plantations. They controlled the trade in precious and semi-precious stones. Jews expelled from Brazil in 1654 helped to create the sugar industry in Barbados and Jamaica. The new British colonies in the West welcomed them. The Governor of Jamaica, rejecting a petition for their expulsion in 1671, wrote that ‘he was of opinion that his Majesty could not have more profitable subjects than the Jews and the Hollanders; they had great stocks and correspondence’. The government in Surinam pronounced: ‘We have found that the Hebrew nation…have…proved themselves useful and beneficial to the colony.’37