Читать книгу The Jewish People in America (Vol.1-7) - Peter Wiernik - Страница 5

The ten centuries which passed between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the discovery of the New World are commonly known as the Middle Ages or the Dark Ages. They were, on the whole, very dark indeed for most of the inhabitants of Europe, as well as for the Jews who were scattered among them. It was a time of the fermentation of religious and national ideas, a formative period for the mind and the body politic of the races from which the great nations of the present civilized world were evolved. It was a period of violent hatreds, of cruel persecutions, of that terrible earnestness which prompts and justifies the extermination of enemies and even of opponents; there was almost constant war between nations, between classes, between creeds and sects. The ordinary man had no rights even in theory, the truths “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” were not self-evident then; they were not even thought of until a much later era.

The treatment accorded to the Jews in our own times in the countries where the general conditions are nearest to those prevailing in the dark ages, gives a clear idea of what the Jew had to undergo when the average degree of culture was so much lower than it is in the least developed of the Christian countries at present. The records of the times are so filled with pillage, expulsions and massacres, that they impress us as having been common occurrences, though they happened further apart to those who lived through the peaceful intervals which distance of time makes to appear short to us. There were, of course, some bright spots, the most shining of which was the Iberian peninsula during the earlier part of the Moorish domination. Sometimes a kind-hearted king would afford his Jews protection and even grant them valuable privileges; a clear-headed prince often found it to his own interest to utilize them for the advancement of the commerce of his dominion, and in a rare period of peace and prosperity there also happened a general relaxation of the severity which characterized the time. But if we view the entire thousand years as a single historical period, we find the condition of the Jews slowly deteriorating; with the result that while the modern nations were welded together and came out of the medieval furnace strengthened and developed, the Jews were pushed back, segregated and degraded, ready for the numerous expulsions and various sufferings which continued for more than two centuries in Western Europe and are not yet over in other parts of the Old World.

The favorable position of the Jews at the beginning of the Middle Ages is less familiar to the reading public, even to the Jewish reader, than the troublesome times which came later. As a matter of fact the Jews were, except for the lack of national unity and of the possession of an independent home, better situated materially four centuries after the destruction of the Second Temple than before the last dissolution of the Kingdom of Judah. The instinct for commerce which is latent in the “Semitic” race was awakened in the Diaspora and, after an interruption of more than a thousand years, we find, at the end of the classical times, international trade again almost exclusively in the hands of members of that race. The Sumero-Accadians or original Babylonians who were the earliest known international traders on land, and the Phoenicians, who first dared to trade over seas, were of Semitic origin. As foreign commerce is the highest form of activity in regard to the utilization of human productivity, so it is also the forerunner of mental activity and of the spread of an ennobling and instructive culture. The beginnings of both Egyptian and Greek civilization, according to the latest discoveries, point unmistakably to Mesopotamian or Phoenician origin, with a strong probability that the latter received it from the former in times which we usually describe as pre-historic, but about which we now possess considerable exact information. Culture followed the great route of the caravans to Syria and Egypt on one side, to Iran, India and as far as China in an opposite direction. And if we accept the wholly incorrect and un-scientific division of the white race into Aryans and Semites, then this original and most fertile of the cultures of humanity was undoubtedly Semitic. A more modern and more nearly correct division would place these ancient inhabitants of the plateau of Asia as a part of the great Mediterranean or brunette race, which includes, besides all the so-called Semites, a number of European nations which are classed as Aryans. Greece succeeded Phœnicia and was in turn succeeded by Rome in the hegemony of international trade as well as in that of general culture. Both commerce and culture declined when the ancient civilization was all but destroyed by the invasion of the blond barbarians of the northern forests, who were themselves destined to attain in a far-away future the highest form of civilization of which mankind has hitherto proven itself capable. (See Zollschan “Das Rassenproblem,” Vienna, 1910, pp. 206 ff.)

It so happened that at the time of the downfall of the Roman Empire, or, as it is usually called, the beginning of the Middle Ages, another people of Semitic origin, the Jews, were for the most part engaged in international trade. There are records of Jewish merchants of that period shipping or exporting wine, oil, honey, fish, cattle, woolens, etc., from Spain to Rome and other Latin provinces, from Media to Brittannia, from the Persian Gulf and Ethiopia to Macedonia and Italy; there was no important seaport or commercial center in which the Jews did not occupy a commanding position. Their prominence as importers and exporters rather increased than diminished by the downfall of the great Empire. The new nations of the Germanic kingdoms which were founded on the ruins of Rome, knew nothing of international trade, and the position of the Jews as merchants was accepted by them as a matter of course. Hence the first traces of Jewish settlements in modern European countries are almost exclusively to be found in the earliest records of commerce and of trading privileges. They are then known as traders with distant countries, as sea-going men, as owners of vessels and as slave-traders. The commercial note or written obligation to pay, which is accepted in lieu of payment and is itself negotiable as a substitute for money, is a Jewish invention of those times. They developed industries and improved the material conditions of every place in which they were found in large numbers. As late as 1084, when their position had been already much weakened and the coming Crusades were casting their shadows, Bishop Rudiger of Speyer began his edict of privileges granted to the Jews with the statement: “As I wish to turn the village of Speyer into a city ... I call the Jews to settle there.” (See ibid. p. 351.)1