Читать книгу History of the Jews in America - Peter Wiernik - Страница 6

Canon Law on one side and the rise of cities on the other shattered the position of the Jews until they were reduced to sore straits at the end of the Middle Ages. The church labored persistently and relentlessly through the centuries in which Europe was thoroughly Christianized, to separate the Jews as far as possible from their Gentile neighbors. The ties which united the two parts of the population by a thousand threads of mutual interest, friendship, co-operation and beneficial intercourse, were slowly loosened and, where possible, all but severed. At the various Church Councils, from Nicea to the last Lateran, there was laid down the theory of the necessity to force the Jews out of the national life of the countries in which they dwelt, and to segregate them as a distinct, inferior and outlawed class. The principles enunciated by the higher clergy were disseminated by the priests and the demagogues among the masses. Special laws and restrictions were often followed by attacks, sacking of the Jewish quarters and degradations of various kinds. In the twelfth and the following three centuries the ill-treatment was often followed by expulsions and cancellation of debts, while heavy fines on individual Jews or on entire communities were accepted on both sides as a lesser evil or as easy terms for escaping greater hardships. The climax of this method of dealing with the Jews, the greatest blow administered to the unhappy Children of Israel by Christian princes, was the expulsion from Spain in 1492, and its concomitant, the expulsion from Portugal five years afterwards.

But the Church alone could never have accomplished the ruin of the Jews if the changing economic conditions and the rise of a large and powerful class of Christian merchants did not help to undermine the position of the erstwhile solitary trading class. The burgher classes were the chief opponents and persecutors of their Jewish competitors: they seconded, and in many cases instigated, the efforts of the clergy to exclude the Jews from many occupations. So when the city overpowered the land owner and began to exert a preponderant influence on the government, the cause of the Jew was lost, or at least postponed until a more humane and liberal time, when the ordinary claims of the brotherhood of man were to overcome the narrow-minded mercantile and ecclesiastical policies of a ruder age. The great historian Ranke pointed out that the struggle between the cities and the nobility in Castille was decided in favor of the former by the marriage of Queen Isabella to Ferdinand of Aragon. It was also this marriage which sealed the doom of the Spanish Jews, as well as that of their former friends and protectors, the Moors, who had by that time sunk so low, that it was impossible for them to keep their last stronghold in Europe much longer.

Though the outlook in Spain was very dark, it was much worse in all other known countries, which accounts for the fact that there was hardly any emigration from the Christian parts of Spain in the time immediately preceding the expulsion. The Spanish Jew was then, and has to some extent remained even unto this day, the aristocrat among the Jews of the world. His intense love for that country is still smouldering in the hearts of his descendants, and not without reason. In other European countries the Jew could, during the middle ages, only enjoy the sympathy and sometimes be accorded the protection of the nobility. In Spain and Portugal he actually belonged to that class. For, as Selig (Dr. Paulus) Cassel has justly remarked (in his splendid article Juden in Ersch and Gruber’s Encyclopædia) sufficient attention has not been paid by Jewish historians to the important fact that Spain and Portugal were the only considerable countries during the Middle Ages in which the Jews were permitted to own land. The statement, for which there is an apparent Jewish authority, that they owned about a third of Spain at the time of their exile, is doubtless an exaggeration, but there can be no question of their being extensive holders of land-properties.

This largely explains why the Jew in Spain has not sunk in public estimation as much as he did in other countries, why his fate was different, and, in the end, worse than that of his more humiliated and degraded brother elsewhere. When the German or French Jew was forced out of commerce he could only become a money-lender at the usurious rates prevailing in those times. This vocation drew on him the contempt and hatred of all classes, as was always the case and as is the case in many places even to-day. But while the usurer was despised he was very useful, often even indispensable, especially in those times when there was a great scarcity of the precious metals and of convertible capital. This may explain why the exiled Jews were in other countries usually called back to the places from which they were exiled. The prejudice of the age may render their work disreputable, but it was none the less necessary; they were missed as soon as they left, and on many occasions negotiations for their return were begun as soon as the popular fury cooled down, or when the object of spoliation was attained.

Not so in Spain. The Jewish merchant who could no longer hold his own against his stronger non-Jewish competitor, could do what is often done by others who voluntarily retire from such pursuits, i. e., invest his capital in landed estates. We can imagine that the transition did not at all seem to be forced, that those who caused it, and even its victims, might have considered it as the natural course of events. After the great massacres of 1391, a century before the expulsion, many Jews emigrated to Moorish North Africa, where there still remained some degree of tolerance and friendliness for them, mingled perhaps with some hope of re-conquering the lost parts of the Iberian peninsula. But later there was less thought of migration, least of all of emigrating to the parts of Spain which still remained in the possession of the Moors. The race which was, seven centuries before, assisted by the Jews to become masters of Iberia, and which together with them rose to a height of culture and mental achievement which is not yet properly appreciated in modern history, has now become degenerate and almost savage in its fanaticism. The Jew of Spain was still proud, despite his sufferings. He could not see his fate as clearly as we can now from the perspective of five hundred years. He was rooted in the country in which he lived for many centuries. He was, like most men of wealth and position, inclined to be optimistic, and he could not miss his only possible protection against expropriation or exile—the possession of full rights of citizenship—because the Jews nowhere had it in those times and had not had it since the days of ancient Rome.

The catastrophe of the great expulsion, which came more unexpectedly than we can now perceive, was possibly facilitated by the position which the Jews held as land owners. It certainly contributed to make the decree of exile irrevocable. The holder of real property is more easily and more thoroughly despoiled, because he cannot hide his most valuable possessions or escape with them. He is not missed when he is gone; his absence is hardly felt after the title to his lands has been transferred to the Crown or to favorites of the government. When the robbery is once committed only compunction or an awakened sense of justice could induce the restitution which re-admission or recall would imply. And as abstract moral forces had very little influence in those cruel days, it is no wonder that the expulsion was final—the only one of that nature in Christian Europe.

This peculiar position of the Jews in Spain and Portugal was also the cause of the immense number of conversions which gave these anti-Jewish nations a very large mixture of Jewish blood in their veins. The temptation to cling to the land and to the high social position which could not be enjoyed elsewhere was too strong for all but the strongest. Thus we find Marranos or secret Jews in all the higher walks of life in the times of the discovery of America. The more steadfast of their brethren who were equally prominent in the preceding period assisted in various ways earlier voyages of discovery, and even contributed indirectly to the success of the one great voyage, which did not begin until they were exiled from Spain forever.

But we must constantly bear in mind, when speaking of the Middle Ages and of the two centuries succeeding it, the sixteenth and the seventeenth, that the Jews did not possess the right of citizenship and were not, even when they were treated very well, considered as an integral part of the population. This was the chief weakness of their position and the ultimate cause of all the persecutions, massacres and expulsions. Still they had many opportunities and made the most of them to advance their own interests and those of the countries in which they dwelt. We find them in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in close touch with the current of national life in the countries which were most absorbed in enterprises of navigation and discovery. Many of them were still great merchants, numerous others were scholars, mathematicians and astronomers or astrologers; some had influence in political life as advisers or fiscal officials at the royal courts. They accomplished much, as Jews and as Marranos, even when the danger of persecution must have been ever-present, or later, when in constant terror of the Inquisition. Many of them could therefore participate in the work which led to the discovery of a New World, where their descendants were destined to find a home safer and more free than was ever dreamt of in medieval Jewish philosophy.