The Age of Louis XIV

by Will Durant

  The great majority of the Sephardic exiles sought refuge in Islam, and formed or joined Jewish settlements in North Africa, Salonika, Cairo, Constantinople, Adrianople, Smyrna, Aleppo, and Iran. In these centers the Jews were subject to political and economic disabilities, but rarely to physical persecution. Jews rose to prominence not only as physicians but in affairs of state. Joseph Nassi, a Marrano, was a favorite of Selim II, and as Duke of Naxos (1566) he received the revenues of ten islands in the Aegean. 7 A German Jew, Solomon ben Nathan Ashkenazi, was Turkey’s ambassador to Vienna in 1571, and negotiated there the peace that for a time ended war with the Porte.

  In Italy the fortunes of the Jews fluctuated with the needs and moods of dukes and popes. In Milan and Naples, ruled by Spain, life was almost impossible for them; in 1669 an explicit decree expelled them from all Spanish possessions. In Pisa and Livorno (Leghorn) the Tuscan grand dukes gave them nearly complete liberty, being anxious to develop the commerce of these free ports. A charter granted in 1593 to merchants in these cities was in effect an invitation to Marranos: “We desire that . . . no Inquisition, Visitation, Denunciation, or Accusal shall be made against you or your families, even though, during the past, they may have lived outside our dominions in the guise of Christians, or with the name of being such.” 8 The plan succeeded; Livorno flourished; and the Jewish community there, exceeded in number only by those in Rome and Venice, became famous for its culture as well as its wealth.

  The Venetian Senate, fearing the relationships of the Jews with Turkey, repeatedly expelled them, and repeatedly allowed them to return as a valuable element not only in commerce and finance but in industry; Jewish enterprises in Venice employed four thousand Christian workingmen. 9 German and Oriental, as well as Sephardic, Jews settled there, and the Senate protected them from the Inquisition. They lived nearly all in the Giudecca, or Jewish quarter, but were not confined to it; this “ghetto” included many rich families, fine homes, and a luxuriously furnished synagogue built in 1584, and rebuilt in 1655 under the supervision of the famous architect Baldassare Longhena. The six thousand Jews of Venice had the highest cultural level of any Jewish community in this age.

  At Ferrara a colony of Marranos from Portugal settled about 1560, but it was dispersed in 1581 by order of the Pope, who acted under pressure by the Portuguese Inquisition. In Mantua the Gonzaga dukes protected the Jews, but periodically mulcted them with contributions and “loans”; and in 1610 all Mantuan Jews were compelled to reside in a walled ghetto whose gates were locked at sunset and opened at dawn. 10 When plague came to Mantua the Jews were accused of having brought it in; and when, in the War of the Mantuan Succession, the troops of the Emperor took the city, they sacked the ghetto thoroughly, appropriated 800,000 scudi in jewels and money, and ordered the Jews to leave Mantua within three days with only such property as they could carry. 11

  In Rome, where previously the papacy had usually protected the Jews, the popes after 1565, with the exception of Sixtus V, issued a long succession of hostile decrees. Pius V (1566) commanded all Catholic powers to enforce to the full the canonical restrictions and disabilities of the Jews. They were hereafter to be confined to ghettos physically closed off from the Christian population; they were to wear a distinctive badge or garb; they were to be excluded from the ownership of land; and they were not to have more than one synagogue in any city. In 1569, in a bull accusing them of usury, procuring, witchcraft, and magic arts, Pius V directed that all Jews be expelled from the Papal States, except from the cities of Ancona and Rome. 12 Gregory XIII (1581) forbade the Christian employment of Jewish physicians, ordered the confiscation of Hebrew books, and (1584) renewed the compulsion laid upon the Jews to hear sermons aimed at their conversion. Sixtus V ended the persecution for a time. He opened the ghetto (1586), allowed the Jews to reside anywhere in the Papal States, dispensed them from wearing a distinctive mark or dress, permitted them to print the Talmud and other Hebrew literature, granted them full freedom of worship, and bade the Christians treat the Jews and their synagogues with humane respect. 13 But this Christian pontificate was brief. Clement VIII renewed the edict of expulsion (1593). By 1640 nearly all the Jews of Italy were living in ghettos; when stepping outside these they were to wear some badge of their tribe; they were excluded from agriculture and the guilds. Montaigne, touring Rome in 1581, described how the Jews, on their Sabbath, were required to send sixty of their youths to the Church of Sant’ Angelo in Pescheria to hear exhortations to conversion. 14 John Evelyn saw such a ceremony in Rome (January 7, 1645), and observed that “a conversion is very rare.” Many of the less pleasant characteristics of the Jews in body and character were the result of long confinement, humiliation, and poverty.

  In France the Jews were theoretically subject to all the restrictions called for by Pius V; actually their importance in industry, commerce, and finance earned them a tacit toleration. In one of his ordinances Colbert emphasized the benefits accruing to Marseilles from the mercantile enterprises of the Jews. 15 Marrano refugees established themselves in Bordeaux and Bayonne, and contributed so much to the economic life of southwestern France that they were allowed to practice their Judaic rituals with less and less concealment. When an army of mercenaries invaded Bordeaux in 1675, the town council feared that the exodus of frightened Jews would cripple the prosperity of the city; without them, reported a sous-intendant, “the trade of Bordeaux and of the whole province would be inevitably ruined.” 16 Louis XIV took the Jewish community at Metz under his protection; when local magistrates tortured to death (1670) a Jew accused of ritual child murder, the King condemned the execution as judicial slaughter, and ordered that henceforth criminal charges against Jews were to be brought before the royal Council. 17 Toward the end of Louis’ reign, when the War of the Spanish Succession had brought the French government close to bankruptcy, Samuel Bernard, a Jewish financier, put his fortune at the King’s disposal; and the proud monarch was grateful for the aid of “the greatest banker in Europe.” 18

  II. THE DUTCH JERUSALEM

  The migration of the Jews from Spain and Portugal played a part (sometimes exaggerated) 19 in the passage of commercial leadership from those countries to the Netherlands. There the exiled Jews went first to Antwerp; but in 1549 Charles V ordered the expulsion from the Low Countries of all Marranos who had entered from Portugal in the preceding five years. The burgomasters of Antwerp pleaded for exemption from this edict; it was enforced, and the new immigrants resumed their search for a home. Antwerp lost its commercial prominence not from this partial migration but through the disasters that befell the city in the war of liberation and the Treaty of Westphalia, which closed the Scheldt to navigation.

  The imperfect but growing freedom of religion in the United Provinces attracted Jews to the Dutch towns—The Hague, Rotterdam, Haarlem, and, above all, Amsterdam. Marrano Jews appeared there in 1593; four years later they opened a synagogue. Hebrew was their language in worship, Spanish or Portuguese in their daily life. In 1615, after a report drawn up by Hugo Grotius, the city authorities formally authorized the Jewish community, granting freedom of worship but forbidding intermarriage with Christians and attacks upon the Christian religion; 20 hence the trepidation of the synagogue leaders when the heresies of Uriel Acosta and Baruch Spinoza touched the fundamentals of the Christian creed.

  The Jews included some of the wealthiest merchants in the thriving port. They managed a substantial segment of Dutch trade with the Spanish Peninsula, and with the East and West Indies. On one occasion, at the wedding of a Jewish girl, forty of the guests had fortunes totaling forty million florins. 21 In 1688, when Stadholder William III was planning his expedition to capture the crown of England, Isaac Suasso, we are told, advanced him two million florins without interest, saying, “If you are fortunate, you will repay them to me; if not, I am willing to lose them.” 22 Some of this wealth was made too conspicuous; David Pinto adorned his home so gaudily that the civic authorities reproved him; 23 we should add, however,
that the Pinto family gave millions to Jewish and Christian charities. 24 Behind this economic front was a busy cultural life, with scholars, rabbis, physicians, poets, mathematicians, and philosophers. Schools provided education, and a Hebrew printing press founded by Manasseh ben Israel in 1627 issued a great number of books and pamphlets; for the next two centuries Amsterdam was to be the center of the Jewish book trade. In 1671–75 the Portuguese-Jewish community, numbering four thousand families, signalized its prosperity by building the beautiful synagogue that is still one of the sights of Amsterdam; Christians, we are told, took part in the dedication. It was a happy moment in the life of the modern Jews.

  There were spots on this sun. About 1630 Ashkenazic, or Eastern, Jews* came into Amsterdam from Poland and Germany. They had their own dialect of German, and set up their own synagogue; they multiplied rapidly, and aroused much antipathy among the Sephardic Jews, who were proud of their superior language, culture, dress, and wealth, and looked upon marriage with an Ashkenazic Jew as almost apostasy. Within the Sephardic group itself a class division formed: the small trades and proliferating poor denounced the “millionaires” who controlled the politics and personnel of the synagogue. “The dollar binds and looses,” said a contemporary satire; “it raises the ignorant to the chief offices in the community.” 25 The intellectual leaders—Saul Levi Morteira, Isaac Aboab da Fonseca, and Manasseh ben Israel—were men of ability and integrity; but they were cautiously conservative in politics, religion, and morals. They became as dogmatic as the Spanish persecutors of their forebears, and they exercised a watchful inquisition over potential heresies. 26

  Manasseh ben Israel left his mark upon history by reopening England to the Jews. Born in La Rochelle of Marrano parents recently arrived from Lisbon, he was brought to Amsterdam in childhood, became a devoted student in Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, and English, and at eighteen was chosen preacher of the congregation Neveh Shalom. He pleased Christians as well as Jews by writing El Conciliador to reconcile alleged discrepancies in the Bible. He had many Christian correspondents and friends—Huet, Grotius, Christina of Sweden, Dionysius Vossius, who translated his book into Latin, and Rembrandt, who etched his portrait in 1636. Above all he attracted the interest of Christian visionaries because he preached the early coming of a Messiah who would rule the earth.

  For Manasseh was a Cabalist and mystic idealist, who dreamed that soon the lost ten tribes of Israel would be found and be united, that they were probably the American Indians, that the Jews would be readmitted to England and Scandinavia, and that the Holy Land would then be restored to Israel in full Messianic glory. Puritans of the Fifth Monarchy sect in England corresponded with Manasseh, and though their Messiah was not his they welcomed his views on the early coming of the Kingdom of God. So encouraged, he published (1650) a treatise, Esperança de Israel, pleading for the re-entry of Jews into England. For a Latin translation of this book he wrote a preface addressed to the English Parliament; he explained that according to Scriptural prophecies the return of the Jews to their homeland would be preceded by their dispersion into all countries; he begged the English government to help realize this preliminary condition by receiving the Jews into England and letting them freely exercise their religion and build their synagogues. He expressed the hope that he might be allowed to come to England to prepare the establishment of a Hebrew community.

  Cromwell was favorably disposed. “Great is my sympathy with this poor people,” he said, “whom God chose, and to whom He gave His Law.” 27 Lord Middlesex, perhaps representing the Parliament, sent a letter of acknowledgment and thanks “to my dear brother, the Hebrew philosopher, Manasseh ben Israel.” The English ambassador in Holland visited Manasseh, and was received with Hebrew music and prayer (August, 1651). But in October Parliament passed a Navigation Act obviously aimed at Dutch trade; commercial competition led to the First Dutch War (1652–54), and Manasseh had to bide his time. “Barebone’s Parliament” (1653) received with favor his renewed plea; a safe-conduct was dispatched to him; when peace came Cromwell seconded the invitation; and in October, 1655, Manasseh and his son crossed to England.

  III. ENGLAND AND THE JEWS

  Between the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290 and the accession of Cromwell in 1649, no Jews were legally permitted there. Some Jewish peddlers may have appeared in the villages, some merchants and physicians in the towns; but nearly all that the Elizabethan knew or thought of Jews was derived from Christian gossip or literature. From such sources Marlowe drew his Barabas and Shakespeare his Shylock.

  Some critics 28 have thought that Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice at his company’s suggestion to profit from the storm of anti-Semitism just aroused in England by the case of Rodrigo Lopez, executed in 1594 for allegedly trying to poison Queen Elizabeth. Born in Portugal of Jewish parents, Lopez settled in London in 1559, and made his way to prominence in the medical profession. Engaged as physician to the Earl of Leicester, he was accused of helping him to remove enemies by poison. In 1586 he became chief physician to the Queen. He treated, among others, the second Earl of Essex, but earned his enmity by revealing his ailments to others. About 1590 he joined Francis Walsingham in intrigues with the court of Spain against Dom Antonio, pretender to the Portuguese crown, and he received, apparently from agents of Philip II, a diamond ring then valued at a hundred pounds. In 1593 Esteban da Gama was seized in Lopez’ house on a charge of conspiring against Antonio; others were arrested, and some of the confessions implicated Lopez in a plot against Elizabeth. Essex, who had supported Antonio, led the prosecution of the physician. Put on the rack, Lopez confessed to having received and concealed an offer of fifty thousand ducats to poison the Queen; but he claimed that his intention had been merely to mulct the Spanish King. He and two others were hanged, drawn, and quartered. With his last breath he declared, to the derision of the spectators, that he loved the Queen as well as he loved Jesus Christ. 29 Shakespeare, friendly to Essex, produced The Merchant of Venice two months after the execution; and many auditors must have noted that Shylock’s intended victim was called Antonio.

  The spread of the Bible, accelerated by the King James Version, modified anti-Semitism by giving England a closer acquaintance with the Old Testament. The ideas and feelings of the ancient Hebrews entered intimately into the thought and phrases of the Puritans. The wars of the Jews seemed to them to prefigure their own wars against Charles I; somehow Jehovah the God of Hosts fitted their needs better than the Prince of Peace described in the New Testament. Many Puritan regiments inscribed their banners with the Lion of Judah, and Cromwell’s Ironsides marched to battle singing Biblical songs. Accepting the magnificent literature of the Old Testament as literally the Word of God, the Puritans felt constrained to acknowledge the Jews as chosen by God to be the immediate recipients of His revelation; one preacher told his congregation that the Jews should still be honored as the select of God; and some Levellers called themselves Jews. 30 Many Puritans perceived that Christ’s explicit confirmation of the Mosaic Law outweighed Paul’s rejection of it and laid upon all Biblical Christians the obligation to practice that Law; one Puritan leader, Major General Thomas Harrison, close aide to Cromwell, proposed that the Mosaic Code be made part of English law. 31 In 1649 a bill was introduced into the House of Commons to change the Lord’s day from the pagan Sunday to the Jewish Sabbath. Now, said the Puritans, the English too were the chosen people of God.

  During the reign of James I (1603–25) a small group of Marranos had settled in London. At first they attended Christian services, but later they made little effort to conceal their fidelity to Judaism. Jewish financiers like Antonio Carvajal shared in meeting the monetary needs of the Long Parliament and the Commonwealth. 32 When Cromwell came to power he used Marrano merchants as sources of economic and political information regarding Holland and Spain. He noted with some envy the prosperity that had come to Dutch commerce partly through the influx and international connections of the Jews.


  Soon after Manasseh ben Israel’s arrival in England Cromwell received him, and put a London residence at his disposal. Manasseh presented a petition, and circulated through the press a “Declaration” stating the religious and economic case for the admission of Jews into England. He explained why the Jews, through their legal disabilities and physical and financial insecurity, had been forced to abstain from agriculture and take to trade. He pointed out that the Amsterdam Jews lived by commercial investment rather than by moneylending, that they practiced no usury, but placed their liquid funds in banks and were satisfied with five per cent interest on these deposits. He showed the baselessness of the legend that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood in religious rituals. He assured Christians that Jews made no attempt to secure converts. He concluded by asking that Jews be admitted to England on condition of taking an oath of loyalty to the realm; that they receive religious freedom, and protection from violence; and that their internal disputes be settled by their rabbis and laws without prejudice to English law and interests.

  On December 4, 1655, Cromwell assembled at Whitehall a conference of jurists, officials, and clergymen to consider the admission of the Jews. He himself defended the idea with force and eloquence, stressing not the economic but the religious aspect: the pure Gospel must be preached to the Jews, but “can we preach to them, if we will not tolerate them among us?” 33 His arguments met with little sympathy. The clergymen insisted that Jews had no place in a Christian commonwealth; representatives of commerce objected that Jewish merchants would deflect trade and wealth from English hands. The conference voted that Jews could not settle in England “except by private sufferance of His Highness.” 34