by Jack Cooper
...Henry IV defied the pope to help the Jews
Henry IV (1040–1106), ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, was a great friend to the Jews. Under his rule, Jews were exempt from certain taxes and enjoyed liberal trading privileges. While Henry was on a trip to Italy, Jewish communities were victim to members of the First Crusade. Some were killed while others were forced to accept Christianity to save their lives.
When Henry returned home and received the news of what had occurred, he sent out edicts to shelter and protect the Jews. Those who had accepted Christianity to save their lives were excused to return to their faith. This last action on Henry’s part enraged Pope Clement III, who said that it was a desecration of Church sacraments.
Not only did Henry ignore the pope, but he began to investigate the murders of Jews. There were convictions and even an archbishop was punished for enriching himself with valuables entrusted to him by terrified Jews.
It is paradoxical that Church leaders decried Henry’s actions of “Christian charity” because the beneficiaries happened to be Jews.1
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1. Eliot Rosenberg, But Were They Good for the Jews? Over 150 Historical Figures Viewed from a Jewish Perspective (Secaucus, NJ: Carol, 1997), 53–54.
...Rashi was a lexicographer, divorce lawyer, and a commentator
The most famous and prolific commentator on all phases of Jewish Scriptures and writings was Solomon bar Isaac, better known as Rashi. Every page in the commentaries has a section devoted exclusively to Rashi, printed in a distinctive style of writing called “Rashi script.”
While Rashi was preparing his commentaries, he frequently ran into situations wherein he was unable to explain himself in Hebrew (the language of the Scriptures) or Aramaic (the language of the Talmud). When this happened, Rashi would resort to using French words – transcribed in Hebrew characters – to cover given situations.
As a result of Rashi’s efforts, we find some 3,500 of these French words in his commentaries on the Talmud and another 1,500 in his work on the Bible. Of course, much of the French language incorporated into Rashi’s commentaries has changed over time, but the words he used are perpetuated in the holy books studied by Jews and others the world over.1 Indeed, scholars of Old French find in Rashi’s commentary a valuable source of information about that language.2
Use of Rashi’s commentaries was not limited to Jews. Using Rashi’s work, Christian biblical interpreter Nicholas de Lyre produced some outstanding interpretations of Scripture. One of the people who used de Lyre’s translations was Martin Luther, who used them extensively in his own work. Luther went on to challenge the Catholic Church, and the Reformation was born.3
One would not expect such a famous scholar to involve himself in everyday, mundane matters of law, but Rashi agreed to take the case of a woman who claimed that her husband had divorced her and had denied her the amount of money stipulated in the marriage contract.
The husband claimed that his wife had an unsightly skin condition which she had not disclosed to him at their betrothal. The wife claimed that she had been healthy on her wedding day, and that the skin condition had developed after their marriage, to which effect she produced witnesses. Rashi delivered a verdict in favor of the wife and admonished her husband, using quotations from the Talmud to demonstrate that he was acting in a manner not befitting a Jewish husband.4
The range and depth of Rashi’s work is even more amazing given that he earned his livelihood raising grapes and was a foremost vintner.
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1. Esther Benbassa, The Jews of France: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 34–35.
2. Maurice Liber, Rashi (1906; repr., Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004), 56.
3. Abram Leon Sachar, A History of the Jews (New York: Knopf, 1964), 186.
4. Jacob R. Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World: A Source Book, 315–1791 (New York: Atheneum, 1938), 302–3.
...a Christian king sent Jews back to Judaism
William Rufus, king of England from 1087 to 1100, was noted for his scandalously impious behavior. He was constantly raiding the coffers of the church for his personal use and would do almost anything for money.
In one instance, a group of Jews offered Rufus a large sum of money if he would induce a number of their fellow Jews to return to Judaism after they had converted to Christianity. Rufus was successful in this endeavor and collected a handsome sum for his efforts.
Soon after, another Jew approached Rufus offering him sixty marks to get his apostate son to return to Judaism. The king attempted to do so, but the young man obstinately refused. When the father asked Rufus for his money back, Rufus refused, saying he had tried, but the young man was set on remaining a Christian. After a good deal of haggling, King Rufus decided to return half the money to the Jewish father.1
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1. D’Blossiers Tovey, Anglia Judaica, or, A History of the Jews in England, edited by Elizabeth Pearl (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990), 7–8.
...a French king expelled the Jews – and then wanted them back
Philip Augustus was king of France from 1180 to 1223. He was an implacable anti-Semite, and within one year of ascending the throne, he began his persecution of the Jews. In 1181 he had all the Jews in his kingdom arrested and imprisoned. They were released only upon the payment of a large ransom. He followed this with an edict that all Christians owing money to Jews did not have to repay their debt. He did, however, insist that 20 percent of the debt be remitted to the treasury. Having extorted all their money, Philip Augustus ordered the Jews out of the part of France ruled by him, which at that time was only the cities of Paris and Orleans.1 The expulsion took place over the objections of counts, barons, and even bishops, because they felt their trade would suffer.
Following their expulsion, many Jews settled in areas controlled by other French nobles. Seeing his revenues drop precipitously with the departure of the Jews, Philip was forced to reconsider his edict of expulsion. This was not so easily done. He had to deal with many nobles, some with larger armies than his. Jews at that time were considered the property of the ruler of the area in which they lived. So valuable were they to the economy of their regions that the nobles, not wishing to lose them, imposed a kind of serfdom on the Jews in that they were not permitted freedom of movement.2
Once Philip decided he wanted his Jews back, he began to run into trouble. The nobles were loath to part with such a valuable segment of their population. Eventually, Philip struck a bargain with Thibaut, the ruler of the French district of Champagne, that each would send back any Jews who moved from one jurisdiction to another.3 True to form, Philip violated his end of the bargain.
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1. Professor Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, vol. 3 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1894), 402.
2. Ibid., 406.
3. Ibid.
...the illegal immigrant doctor brought his own minyan
In 1290 King Edward IV expelled all the Jews of England.1 However, in 1410, King Henry IV was ailing and was seeking a new doctor. In violation of the edict of expulsion issued against Jews, he sent for Jewish doctor Elijah ben Sabbetai Beer. Dr. Beer had served Pope Martin V and his successor Eugenius IV. He also served as court physician to the duke of Ferrara and lectured in medicine at the University of Pavia. At the time of his summons, Dr. Beer was in Bologna.
In the previous year, the mayor of London, Richard Whittington, had summoned another Jewish physician, Samson of Mirabeau, from France to tend to his wife. What made Dr. Beer’s trip different from others is the fact that he brought with him an entourage of ten men. While Jews may and do pray in private, public prayers require a quorum of ten adult males. Dr. Beer’s stature was such that he was able to enter the country and to make his prayers more in keeping with that of a regular Jewish community.
The speed with which kings and popes would make exceptions
to a national and/or Church policy when it suited their individual convenience is noteworthy.
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1. Professor Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, vol.3 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1894), 645.
...Jews were only expelled if the balance sheet agreed
Whenever a country, in a fit of religious fervor, decided to expel its Jews, it would be faced with a choice between cleansing the realm of unbelievers and the attendant loss of revenues from the taxation of the Jews and the costs associated with the loss of trade conducted by the Jews.
In 1306, the king of France, with the unlikely name of Philip the Fair, issued an order of expulsion for all Jews in the kingdom and the confiscation of all their property. When the sale of the Jewish assets was totaled, it was found that the proceeds were insufficient to cover the loss of revenue occasioned by the departure of the Jews. Unwilling to suffer a negative balance, the king authorized the recall of a limited number of expelled Jews to recover the debts owed to them. The king would then be able to cut himself in on the proceeds and thereby to erase the negative balance.
In 1315, King Louis X (the Quarrelsome) issued a decree that the Jews could return to France for a period of twelve years. For a fee, he returned to them their confiscated synagogues and cemeteries. He also returned copies of the Torah (the Five Books of Moses), but he withheld the Talmud. The Jews were permitted to recover one-third of the debts due to them at the time of the 1306 expulsion with the remaining two-thirds accruing to the Crown. Although some Jews did return, it was noted that many of them left before the expiration of the twelve years.
In 1359, Charles of Normandy was acting as regent while Jean II (the Good) was being held for ransom by his British captors. In desperate need of money, Charles decided to recall the Jews for a period of twenty years. This offer attracted few takers. The Jews were put off by the heavy reentry fee and the stiff annual residence charge. Another factor was the limited stay of twenty years. When Charles V ascended the throne in 1364, he extended the deadline by six years. In 1374, for the payment of a large sum of money, he added ten years to the length of residence for the Jews. With the death of the king in 1380, Louis d’Anjou, acting as regent, extended the stay of the Jews until 1401.
However the argument turned out to be moot. The burdensome taxes and fees so impoverished the Jewish community that they were no longer able to meet their financial obligations to the Crown, and they were expelled in 1394.1
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1. Esther Benbassa, The Jews of France: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 15–16, 20–21.
...Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales could be outlawed today as hate speech
One of the great classics of English literature is The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.1 It is assigned reading in many high schools and colleges in the English-speaking world. The format of the book has a group of travelers deciding to help pass the time by having each of them regale the others with a tale. One of the stories is The Prioress’s Tale.
The Prioress’s Tale tells of a young Christian boy who becomes enamored of a liturgical song, “O Alma Redemptoris.” Being gifted with a beautiful singing voice, the lad learns the piece by heart and sings it whenever he is moved to do so.
It happens that the boy’s route to school takes him through a Jewish neighborhood. Satan tempts three Jews by giving them the idea that the song is offensive and should not be tolerated. The Jews hire an assassin who waylays the lad, slits his throat, and hides the body. The boy’s widowed mother institutes a search for her son, and when the searchers pass nearby where the body is hidden, the boy miraculously breaks forth into song and is soon found. The Jews responsible are quickly rounded up, sentenced and quartered, and the boy is laid to rest.
If we juxtapose The Prioress’s Tale into twenty-first-century Europe, we find the following paradox. The Council of Europe in 2002 passed a law criminalizing hate speech on the Internet as “any written material, any image or any other representation of ideas or theories which advocates, promotes, or incites hatred, discrimination or violence, against any individual or group of individuals, based on race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin, as well as religion if used as a pretext for any of these factors.” 2
The Canterbury Tales, if it had been sent over the Internet today, would have been in violation of the law. Of course, the law was passed more than eleven hundred years after the writing, and the hate speech is in book form.
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1. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, translated by Burton Raffel, with an introduction by John Miles Foley (New York: Modern Library, 2008).
2. Sean D. Murphy, United States Practice in International Law, vol. 2, 2002–2004 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 245.
...Church ritual copies heavily from the Jews
Many of the most common Christian rituals are derived from ancient Jewish customs. Foremost in Christian ceremonies is baptism, which originated in the Jewish ritual bath. The Mass, which is the central part of the church service, stems from the Passover festive meal, the Seder, which means “order.” The Last Supper is also reported to have been a Seder. Synagogues are usually constructed so that the worshipers face east toward Jerusalem. So, too, are many churches. The prayer book stems from the Psalter used in the days of the Jewish Second Temple.1 The vestments of priests and bishops can be traced back to the ancient Israelite priests.
The rite of anointing was common Jewish practice long before it was adopted by Christians. Indeed, the term Messiah literally means “the anointed one.” The church as a place of sanctuary derives from the cities of refuge as set forth in the Book of Leviticus. The poor boxes in the church are direct descendents of the Jewish practice of worshipers in the synagogue giving charity every day except the Sabbath and holy days.
The establishment of Jewish religious schools was common practice long before Christians opened Sunday schools. Rabbis are ordained by semichah, or laying on of the hands, and priests are ordained in a similar fashion.2
The observance of the Sabbath from the sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday is a Jewish practice, which was changed to Sunday by the Christians.3 It should be noted that some of the early Christians were more than eager to distance themselves from Judaism. In a rather bizarre incident, a conclave of Christian clerics called the Council of Laodicea passed a resolution in Asia Minor, outlawing resting during the Friday night–Saturday Jewish Sabbath.4
Nevertheless, all these similarities between Christian and Jewish rituals indicate that the daughter religion displays strong hereditary characteristics of the mother faith.
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1. In the Roman Church, “Te Deum,” “Magnificat,” “Miserere,” and “In Exitu Israel” are all from the Psalms. In the Greek Church, “The Trisagion” is based on the Kedushah of the Jewish service which is derived from Isaiah 6:3. The central service of the Catholic service (mass) or the Protestant service (communion) is derived from the wine and the unleavened bread used at the Passover Seder. The Canon Law of the Church originates from the table of forbidden relations from Leviticus 19. Augustine’s De Civitate is merely Latin for the Jewish Kingdom of God or the widely used “Kingdom of Heaven.” Even the concept of “original sin” takes as its starting point the Jewish concept of the sin of eating from the Tree of Knowledge (Genesis 3:1–7), although Christian theology develops the idea in ways that are contrary to the Jewish understanding. Joseph Jacobs, Contributions of the Jews to Civilization: An Estimate (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1919), 90–95.
2. Ibid., 90–93.
3. Louis H. Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World: Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to Justinian (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 375–76.
4. Ibid.
...Jewish rituals limited Jewish deaths during the Black Plague
When the Black Plague struck Europe in
1348–1349, it is estimated that the death toll ran as high as one-third to one-half of the population.1 But Historian Berel Wein puts the Jewish death toll at close to 20 percent of the Jewish population of Europe.2 Why the wide discrepancy between people who lived in the same city and drank the same water? For the answer to that question, we must look to the ritual behavior of the Jews then and now.
Upon arising in the morning, an observant Jew must wash his hands on the following occasions: “On awakening from sleep, on leaving the lavatory or bath,...after taking off one’s shoes with bare hands, after having sexual intercourse, after touching a vermin,...after touching parts of the body which are generally covered, after leaving a cemetery...or leaving a house where a corpse lay...” (Shulchan Aruch [Code of Jewish Law] 1:5).3
In addition, all Jews are mandated to wash their hands before eating, as well as before reciting the benedictions after the meal (1:137).
Meat that is prepared for Jews to eat must be thoroughly soaked, salted, and rinsed (1:116–17) so that there is not the slightest chance of ingesting any blood (an excellent medium for harboring bacteria).
A woman must cleanse herself thoroughly and then immerse herself in a ritual bath after the cessation of her monthly menstrual cycle (4:21).
Visiting the sick is an integral part of Jewish law. However, the primary objective of the visitation is to assist in caring for the sick person (4:87). If he is adequately cared for, then the visit may be in the more conventional sense of supplying company and good cheer.
When a Jew dies, Jewish law dictates that “His body shall not remain all night...but thou shalt bury him the same day” (4:101). Also, one should not eat in the same room where there is a dead body, even if it means one must go to another house (4:94).