The Story of the Jews

by Simon Schama

  In the more feverish realms of the late-medieval imagination Jews were unnatural, vampirical creatures, doomed never to escape their own blood-curse. Stories allied to the anal haemorrhage generated an entire mythology of unstanchable open wounds, the curse of the blood-shedding Jews. The intended contrast of course was between the blood of the Lamb which would wash humanity clean of sin and the impure effusion of Jewish anal flux that testified to the race’s perpetually damned impurity. Circumcision, perfect for Christ (and obsessively pondered and visualised), had been made redundant with the blood sacrifice on the cross, but since the Jews wilfully perpetuated the practice it was thought that they suffered a blood-deficit. That of course would account for their notoriously anaemic pallor and disgusting smell. Although the full blood libel would not arrive in the repertoire of Judeophobic demonology until some centuries later, it was widely assumed in the later medieval period that Jews were obliged to resort to occasional top-ups, if at all possible from the bodies of freshly slaughtered juicy young Christians.

  Fortunately, the crimes of the Jews could be thwarted by blood-effusions on which they had not counted. During the thirteenth century, the physical torments endured by the suffering Christ became a compulsive fascination for the evangelists. Imitating the life of Christ as the friars urged meant experiencing his ordeals in literally excruciating detail: the scourging, the crown of thorns, the piercing of his side by the lance of Longinus. The instruments of the Passion – the flail, the tongs, the nails, the ladder, the hammer – all became extensions of the cross itself, each with their own particular penitential and salvific power. Paintings of the Passion became more viscerally graphic, and as they did the image of the Jews who had inflicted all this torment on the body of the Saviour became correspondingly more vicious. Obscure stories that represented the Jews as given over to gratuitous cruelty developed their own cult. The Jew said to have presented a cloth soaked in vinegar or ‘rotyn wyn’ for the agonised cross-bearing Jesus to mop his brow and scourged body was one popular example; the Levite teacher who had slapped Jesus’ face at synagogue school was another.23 Spitting Jews and hooting Jews, jeering Jews and poking Jews began to populate Christian devotional images, some with gratifying punishments like the Jew who presumed to touch the body of the Virgin at her funeral and whose hands and arms became miraculously glued to her bier in punishment, until they were amputated or he was released by his conversion.24

  By the lights of these Judeophobic obsessions, the blood thirst of the crucifiers could never be slaked. Come Easter, it was popularly rumoured, they could not forbear from re-enacting the Passion on Christ’s material person as it was embodied in the Eucharistic host. An entire pan-European madness took hold of the popular Christian imagination, from the thirteenth century on, in which Jews plotted to procure a host by any means possible and then desecrate it by stabbing, and other forms of mutilation, after which it would be buried, boiled or ground to powder in a mortar, or any combination of the three.25 The demand made by the friars that Christians should separate themselves physically from Jews, and especially avoid working in their households, either as wet nurses or servants, was intensified by the paranoid suspicion that those who were in the domestic orbit of the Jews could be persuaded, or blackmailed, into procuring a host for their acts of desecration. The charge of usury thus became connected to that of blasphemy when it was said that Jews actively ensnared Christian women in debt, the better to offer forgiveness of the loan in return for a purloined host wafer.

  The rest of the fantasy – visualised in altarpieces such as Uccello’s at Urbino and Jaime Serra’s at the monastery of Sigena in Catalonia, and in stained-glass windows – unfolded just as richly. The Jews would proceed to stab the host which to their consternation spurted blood back at them in great, reproving gouts. Often, too, from within the pierced wafer a perfectly undamaged boy would arise who the dumbfounded Jews would realise was the Christ-child in person. In other variants, the Jews would conceal their mutilated host underground or elsewhere but would inevitably be found out by similar miraculous manifestations.

  All this might have been no more than another elaboration of the demonisation that had begun at the latest with the sermons of Chrysostom a millennium before. But in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it had lethal consequences. Stories of host desecration, especially in turbulent times, were enough to unleash immense waves of killing. The most influential Dominican preacher in Florence in the early years of the fourteenth century, Giordano da Rivalto of Pisa, took the Jews to task for grinding the host in a mortar, and when some thousands were slaughtered as a result rejoiced that ‘all the Jews were killed so that it was impossible to find one in all of the province. It was a blessed thing that we could kill them.’ In 1298, a popular army led by the knight known as ‘King’ Rintfleisch swept through 146 communities in Franconia in south Germany, massacring the entire Jewish population on the strength of such rumours. At Gamburg in Lower Franconia, 130 Jews died at the stake; in Nuremberg, 728 perished despite fleeing to the protection of the local castle, including rabbinical scholars such as Yehiel ben Menahem Hakohen; another 840 were killed in Würzburg. This was a culture in which Jews were also represented in cathedral sculpture as so thoroughly dehumanised and demonised, it comes as no surprise to learn of a second wave of massacres forty years later in the Rhineland, the so-called ‘Armleder’ riots in which the leading part in the killing was, as the name suggests, played by leather workers. Most ominously for the Jews, there were almost no sections of the German population – peasants, burghers and knights – who were not part of these armies of Judeophobic mass killing.

  Even in an age when slaughter was commonplace it is possible to slit the throats of small children as they hang on their mothers’ skirts, torture, mutilate and murder an entire cultural population, only if those defenceless people are made over into agents of satanic depravity, walking vectors of epidemic, and habitual infanticides. This was how popular Christian culture came to see the Jews, even (or especially) when actual Jews had been expelled from their presence. It was at this time that the caricature of the Jew began to appear in sacred art and sculpture: the hook-nosed, black-haired, bulbous-lipped tormentors of Christ and abductors of children. The ugliness of their physiognomy was the unmistakable sign of their moral filthiness. They became in the Christian imagination a species of beast, given to beastly habits; hence the appearance on the sculptural decoration of German cathedrals and churches at Wittenberg, Regensburg, Bamberg, Magdeburg, Colmar, Strasbourg and many many more, of the Judensau – Jew-Sow – Jews sucking from the teats of a sow and opening their mouths wide to ingest its excrement.

  At which point, something truly remarkable happened: an act of spontaneous resistance to pictorial denigration, a flowering of spectacular images within the very heart of Judaism. It was as if the wordy defiance of Nahmanides had translated itself into the mind’s eye and thence to the scribe’s resolution and on to the artful hand of the illuminator. It was the first time since the mosaics of late antiquity that Jewish religious practice, and the texts which ordered it, took to delighting the eye as well as instructing it. The profusion of images made by the illuminators of Hebrew manuscripts did not stop with elaborately decorated capital initials beginning chapters of the Bible. They encompassed an immense bestiary of animals and birds – crows and doves, eagles and ducks, camels and ostriches, cats and mice, lions and elephants, snakes and tortoises, and many others.26 Nor was this some sort of randomly encyclopedic menagerie. If the Germans knowing the Jews had a thing about swine made them their carnal companions, Jewish scribes would take back the bestialisation. Drawing on a wealth of animal imagery from the Bible, and Spanish Jewish poetry, by identifying the deer with Israel they would be the hart and hind pursued by the baying dogs of Christian persecution; or they would be the fleet-footed hare outrunning the foxes.27 Depending on context, the same animals could appear on different sides. Eagles, notorious as the first creatures to kill on departin
g from Noah’s ark, could be either ravening predators or protecting guardians of beleaguered Israel. Lions might appear as wild things, tamed by God into crouching cats, or because they had been the arms of Judah, son of Jacob, the rampant defender of Israel. Hybrid creatures and fantastic animals would also appear in this counter-iconography, sometimes liberated from Christian use. The unicorn, often represented with its head in the lap of the Virgin, returns to being the one-horned re-em of the Old Testament. Dragons, too, are everywhere in the Hebrew manuscripts, almost always with the scaly body of a serpent and the wings of a bat or bird, their mouths alight with hostile fire.

  And there were some fanciful creatures which were adapted in the illuminations to act the part of the Jews themselves: most spectacularly the gryphons who populate the Birds’ Head Haggadah, an early illuminated manuscript made in late thirteenth-century Ashkenazi Germany, possibly in Mainz. Their birdiness is confined to their beaked heads. Otherwise they are dressed like Jews, notably sporting the inverted funnel-shaped Judenhut of the German Ashkenazim, and they act out the story of the Passover.28 The opposing Egyptians, however, do not have any sort of animal characteristics. Much worse, they are entirely blank-faced, featureless. The German world (in contrast to Spain and Italy in particular) often read the Second Commandment narrowly to mean a ban not just on ‘graven images’ (idolatrous sculpture) but on the ‘likeness of all living things in heaven above and earth below’. Meir von Rothenburg, elegist of the Paris Talmud burnings, and a Pietist in the spirit of Eleazar of Worms, made known his disapproval of any pictures occurring in sacred books as a profane distraction from devotional prayer.

  He comprehensively lost the battle of images, however, especially in the Passover Haggadot. For those books were meant to be used not in the synagogue but in Jewish homes, the shared possession of an extended family, along with friends and neighbours. Sometimes, the most richly illustrated might even be commissioned by a wealthy patron to serve the whole community. And in Aragon and Catalonia, and particularly in France and Italy (but also in some parts of Germany), as the custom became more popular through the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, so patrons and scribes swept aside objections to portraying Bible figures with human faces, and still more significantly engaged in the act of Passover remembrance themselves. The craze for depiction would extend beyond Haggadot to the mahzorim, which collected the rites and prayers of the festivals and fasts of the Jewish year, to siddurim prayer books used every day and Sabbath, to the Pentateuch Torah, divided (their beginnings spectacularly ornamented) into the perashot portions to be read each week at the communal Sabbath service, and eventually into entire Hebrew Bibles and even works of philosophy, among which the veneration given to Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah would be registered in exquisite, sumptuous illuminations.29

  But it was through the Passover Haggadah that the Jews took back their sense of who they were, liberated themselves from the dehumanisation of Christian polemics. So it was no coincidence then that it was exactly at the time they were most hard-pressed by conversionary campaigns, urban slaughters and rabid paranoia, that they responded with their own imagery. It was one of those moments, which Jews sometimes find it difficult to imagine, when words alone seemed not enough. Most obviously, most dramatically and most courageously, they were answering the blood charge implicit in Easter, its sanguine martyrology and its gory demonology. One extraordinary Spanish Haggadah from the early fourteenth century makes the counterpoint dramatically clear by arranging the participants in a Passover Seder according to the conventions of the Last Supper! This may have been the spontaneous response of a Christian illuminator commissioned by the Jewish scribe and patron, or it may actually have been the intended thrust of a conscious iconic counter-attack.

  In glowing, brilliant, often very beautiful images, the devotional imagery of the life and Passion of Christ was answered with the life of Moses. There were times when the story in pictures extended further back – even to Creation itself where the Sarajevo Haggadah, for example, represents the radiance of divine Creation through a burst of sunrays hovering over the deep, and to Abraham’s close call with filial sacrifice, Jacob wrestling with the angel (fully represented) and Joseph in Egypt, the prefiguration of the Moses cycle. Salvation through sacrifice thundered at Jews in the synagogues helplessly vulnerable to enforced Christian sermons, was countered with the theophany on Sinai, the giving of the Law, the making of the Jews. A thousand persecutions from time immemorial were graphically countered by the inspirational chronicle of Pharaoh’s humbling before the plagues (the illuminators, especially in the Aragonese ‘Golden’ Haggadah, had a wonderful time with frogs, locusts, wild beasts and, in a gloriously cartoonish way, lice).

  And the sense, intrinsic to Seder nights, that the founding liberation epic was a perennial vindication, the army of the oppressor, drowned in the Red Sea, was emphasised by representing Pharaoh and his soldiers in the standard costume of contemporary medieval Europe. Pharaoh wore the crown of the kings of France or the German emperor, and his soldiers wore chain mail and helmets as they sank beneath the waves. Still more tellingly, in many fourteenth-century Haggadot, Jews and Gentiles have indistinguishable bodies, heads, faces; the Spanish Jews sometimes wearing the hooded headdress, the houce, but sometimes not. Images of Miriam and Israelite women rejoicing at the destruction of the Egyptian army have the Jewish women as graceful, long-limbed singers and dancers (including a player of the tambourine). Aaron and Joshua likewise appear as heroic figures, liberated from the grotesque caricatures. Even the Israelite slaves toiling for Pharaoh in Egypt have the same human features as everyone else. Occasionally, too, they have the unmistakable rough faces of the Jewish labourer, the shtarke.

  Many of these types were borrowed, to be sure, from Christian iconography, but that was exactly the point. Embattled and beleaguered as they were, the Jews had emerged from fearfulness, to take what they needed from the host culture and indeed to employ their best artists when their own were not yet skilled or in short supply, and unproblematically apply their work to an act of visual restoration.

  And, not least, they represented themselves. Not as birds or beasts (though the hares and the deer were always hounded Israel) but as men, women and children, fathers and mothers and their progeny gathered round the Seder table, or sometimes (though more rarely) inside the synagogue free of the intimidation of the friars. More than one such picture of the interior of the synagogue strikingly shows men and women, on the same level, albeit with the women standing behind the men, yet another corrective to assumptions about the conventions of worship in the medieval period. These scenes of Seder constitute the most eloquent reproof imaginable to the hideous versions of their Passover as conspiracies of child-killing. If one wants the opposite of the stereotype of Jews stabbing the Eucharistic host, one need look no further than a touching Seder scene in which the dish of matzot (the non-Eucharist) along with the bitter herbs, the maror (often represented as an artichoke), is passed along the table, touching the heads of each of the participants (a Sephardi rite that seems to have disappeared) as if sealing the significance in their memory boxes.

  In another fifteenth-century Haggadah drawing made by the most accomplished illuminator of all, the Ashkenazi Joel ben Simon Feibush, two women dressed exactly as their Gentile contemporaries would have been together hold a basket of matzot in the gesture commanded at the same time as Jews say ‘ho lachmah di’anya’, ‘behold, this is the bread of affliction our forefathers ate when they came out of Egypt’.

  Many of the scenes of preparation for Passover and the meal itself, including a compelling one in which a wealthy and grandly enthroned Jew hands out matzot and haroset (the paste of fruit, nuts and wine symbolising the mortar used for the Egyptian buildings – the sweet counterbalancing the bitter) to the less fortunate lines of children and their mothers, thus fulfilling the obligation to charity, reverse the Christian accusation of unfeeling inhumanity that Jews have towards their children. Children
and domestic affection are everywhere in these pictures.

  Some of the most stirring moments of self-liberation from both the atrocities of Christian stereotyping and the asperities of rabbinical obligation are the simplest, such as when on the pretext of inserting an illumination for a blessing prayer or a festive ritual, a Jew just appears doing something quite indifferent to, or even at odds with, any sort of solemn commandment. Even Moses had his days off. Which means that in those embattled times, when Jews commissioned pictures or drew them themselves to rally the troops, they were capable of comedy. The blessing over wine, for instance, in a German mahzor prayer book, is represented with unique irreverence, as a man bent back, propping himself up on a table, draining the jug of its very last dregs. Even better, tucked away in a margin of an illustration of the preparations for Passover is a perfect image of a fancily dressed young Jew bending his knuckles in the unmistakable act of examining his nails. Of course, if pushed the illuminator and the scribe would defend his inclusion in a sacred book by claiming it was the merest speck and crumb of leaven which might have got lodged under the nail. But if you believe that you also believe in kosher unicorns.