Lady Katie Magnus

“ Unlike England and France and Spain, Germany never went to the length of expelling her Jews altogether, but she would hunt them, now and again, from place to place in her dominions, and the hospitality she extended to them was, at best, the hospitality of a sponging-house. There is not a state, nor a province, nor a city of now united Germany which has not, at some time or other, taken its evil share in ill-treatment of the Jews. Prague, in Bohemia, could, perhaps, tell the most sensational tales of all, if it were well or wise to write out such sad stories in sober pen and ink. ”

“ It was on ugly, flat, Dutch marshes that the new light of liberty first tremblingly broke, and its unaccustomed rays touched the sluggish canals and solid bridges of the ancient city of Amsterdam into a beauty that had been lacking to the picturesque minarets of Spain, and gave to the respectable Dutch burghers a dignity that is somehow absent from the stateliest of Spanish grandees. It was in 1591 that the first small settlement of Jews was made in Holland, and these earliest settlers were Marannos from Spain. ”

“ This riot in Granada was the first interruption to the 350 years of pleasant and peaceful relations which had existed between the Mahomedans and the Jews. But the Granada riot was like the ‘little cloud’ that Elijah’s servant saw ‘rising up out of the sea,’ after the long drought. The cloud was at first, we read, no bigger than a man’s hand, yet very soon ‘the heavens were black with clouds and wind, and there was a great rain.’
5. ”

“ Alexandrian Jews.—In the time of Alexander of Macedon, Alexander the Great, as he is called, the city of Alexandria, in Egypt, was founded in his honour. A great many Jews joined the Greek and Egyptian colonists, and were among the early settlers in the city. By degrees these Alexandrian Jews grew to be a little less Jewish than the Judean Jews. They had exactly the same rights and privileges as the Macedonians. Greek culture, Greek habits of thought, were in the very air they breathed, and they breathed it in more lustily, perhaps, than those to whom it was native. ”

“ Even in the age in which they lived, these gentle old scholars were not very visible, nor very prominent figures. They seem to stand a little apart, writing their poetry and philosophy, studying among the wise, teaching among the ignorant, and rarely eager for fame, and never for reward. Like the scholars of an older period, these, whom we find behind the scenes of the Middle Ages, used ‘the Law’ neither as a spade to dig with, nor as a crown to shine with. A modest livelihood was contentedly dug out of some handicraft or profession, and as to shining, they never thought about it at all. ”

“ For how were men who might not hold an inch of land to feel any interest in sowing and in planting it? and how could artisans or labourers, working at a small wage, earn a tithe of the tolls and the taxes which alone gained for Jews the right of existing at all? Whilst legislation compelled men to dwell apart and to dress apart, and claimed, at its own caprice, an unjust share of their earnings, it forced such men into mean occupations, and made it difficult to them to follow even these in an upright and honourable fashion. ”

“ The love of religion and of race was as strong among them as ever, but the love had come to be of a jealous and a sullen sort. They dreaded progress or prominence of any kind. Long and miserable experience seemed to show that safety for themselves and tolerance for their faith lay, if anywhere, in being by the outside world altogether unnoticed and unheeded. The culture of the Christians they hated, with a hate born half of repulsion at its palpable effects in persecution, half of fear for its possible tendency to conversion. ”

“ Spanish was more or less to him, as to all of the Maranno-descended Jews, a native tongue. He was clever, too, at drawing, but this long list of his acquirements gives no accurate idea of his powers, for much scholarship is not in itself a guarantee of ability. A mind may be filled full as a storehouse with facts, and yet be empty of ideas, and feeble in intellectual grasp. Spinoza not only learnt, but he thought. He not only acquired information, but be propounded theories. The community was a little distrustful of originality, and rather liked knowledge to run into ready-made moulds. ”

“ Seeds once planted can, nevertheless, only follow the law of nature, and blossom and bear fruit according to their kind. Forced into secret and sordid ways, denied hope, aim, or ambition of any worthy sort, contemptuously shunned when they were not actively hunted, ‘protected’ by princes and persecuted by priests, what wonder if Jews at last became ‘degraded,’ never indeed to the level of what they were thought, but something undoubtedly below the level of what they should have been? ”

“ Moral and Material Effects upon the Jews.—Walled off from the high roads of life, and shunned for shambling along its bypaths, the Jews of Germany, in these cruel circumstances, were slowly deteriorating in their manners and in their modes of living. Hemmed in by the ghetto, they were growing content with the ghetto. Meeting with contempt and hatred all round, they were beginning to hate back again, and to feel, in their turn, as bitter and as unreasoning a contempt for everything belonging to their persecutors. ”

“ We cannot breathe freely, we cannot see clearly.’ This subtlest effect of the poison of persecution seemed to have entered into the Jewish system. They would not speak the language of their enemies, they would not read their books. They huddled in their own close quarters, carrying on mean trades, or hawking petty wares, and speaking, with bated breath, a barbarous dialect, half Hebrew, half German, Judisch Deutsch, as it was called, and as different from the old grand Hebrew tongue as were they themselves from Palestinian or even from Spanish Jews. ”

“ To the credit of these trading Jews, so often tempted to drive a hard bargain, to seem and even to be hard, and sordid, and grasping—to their credit be it said that they acted in the spirit of their Law, and proved the gentlest and most generous slave-owners the world has ever known. So fond grew the grateful slaves of their Jewish masters, that they very often desired to become Jews themselves, and were thus the indirect cause of an immense deal of harsh and suspicious legislation. ”

“ Jews are always, at the best of times, a little impatient of authority. They were not too easy to manage even under Moses. Under these unsympathetic Romans, and that Rome-patronised king of theirs, they grew turbulent and desperate. Herod Agrippa, in truth, was not of much use to them. He had a beautiful sister, Berenice, and on occasion she would kneel in picturesque attitudes, and he would plead in eloquent periods, to one or other of the Roman oppressors; but, on the whole, Herod and Berenice both kept on excellent terms with Rome, and prudence rather than patriotism was their ideal. ”

“ How Cyrus’s Permission was received.—To many of the Jewish settlers in Babylon, and especially to those who had been born there, Palestine must have come to sound like England does to her colonists—as a name, whenever and wherever heard, brimful of the tenderest loves and longings, but still more or less a name. To old folks the old land is a memory, to young people a hope, but to old and young alike the land where they live and work is home. And Jews are particularly homelike in their natures, soon fitting into, and growing fond of, and looking native to, any spot whereon they settle. ”

“ The ravages on Jewish life and on Jewish property were not the worst results of these ages of persecution. The real injury done to the Jews went far deeper than any amount of outrage or wrong might inflict on an individual. ‘Few natures,’ writes the Laureate, ‘are of such fine mould, that if you sow therein the seed of hate, it blossoms charity.’ Jewish nature is of ‘fine mould,’ or under such a course of manuring, and such a season of neglect, it might well have become altogether overrun with rank weeds. ”

“ But if there be heroism in endurance, in patient fulfilment of duty when desire is altogether unsatisfied, in earnest endeavour for good, with evil rampant all round, then these Jewish men lived heroic lives, although it was life lived from within rather than from without. They worked on without hurry and without rest, and in trust when hope failed. Their outward action on passing events was small, but the impression they made on the spirit and intellect of their time was great, and on the liturgy and the literature of their people they have left enduring marks. ”

“ The conscience of men was stirred, yet still, for many years to come, the Jews of England were regarded not as neighbours, but as ‘aliens.’ It is written that ‘it is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord.’ The long hoping without fuss, the long waiting without anger, of those days were good for the English Jews; and their quiet steadfastness, no less than their active work, had a share in bringing about the happy state of things that was, though so slowly, coming to them. ”

“ Whenever, wherever, the practice exists, he frankly denounces it as ‘infamous.’ But he will not admit that ‘usury’ is in any sense a Jewish principle, nor in any but a cruelly acquired one a Jewish practice. ‘The sacred Scriptures,’ says Manasseh, ‘forbid absolutely the robbing of all men, whatsoever religion they be of. In our Law it is a greater sinne to rob or defraud a stranger than if I did it to one of my owne profession. A Jew is bound to shew his charity to all men: he hath a precept not to abhor an Idumean or an Egyptian ”

“ The Stars die out.—Maimonides was not only the greatest of the fixed stars in the Jewish literary firmament of the Middle Ages, but he was also the last star that found a chance of shining through the ever-gathering gloom. Denser and denser grew the thick clouds, and, one by one, the stars waned and died out. ”

“ The conflict between faith and philosophy was waxing strong among Christians. There was a growing tendency to call names on both sides, to denounce science as paganism, and to sneer at religion as superstition. The sounds of this conflict between philosophers and theologians, in the larger world around them, found echoes among the Jews. We must remember that, except in Spain, the poor Jews of Europe, for centuries, had had no healthy interest whatever outside of their religion. ”

“ Jews accepted the new state of things. They bravely adapted themselves to the altered circumstances of their lot, and made the best of it. They had to live, though a hard and hurried and undignified sort of living it became. With a quickness which experience taught and self-interest quickened, they tried to make themselves useful and acceptable. Their own wants, as wayfarers in strange lands, made them swift to perceive the wants of others. ”

“ But the Jewish readiness to revolt against Roman supremacy was not lost upon him. He did not forget how quick the Jews had been to fight. East or west, it seemed to him that if but a breath of freedom were in the air, it was fanned among this Jewish race into a perfect whirlwind. Why should they not submit to Rome, and sink their own nationality? Greater nations than they had passed more or less peacefully under the Roman yoke, whilst to subdue this tiny troublesome dependency had tasked a Titus! To conquer Jews was not enough ”

“ The wealth of the Jewish traders was in close and awkward contrast with the poverty of the Christian knights. An evil eye was cast on these riches, and as the conscience of the country was scarcely yet hardened to the open and unprovoked plunder of Jews, men cast about them for a plausible excuse for robbing them. Nothing more original was found, nor was perhaps necessary, than the one which had so often served on the Continent—the accusation of child-killing for Passover purposes. ”

“ To toil for wealth which they might not openly enjoy, and to passionately believe in a religion which they might not openly profess, was the portion of the Jews for centuries. It was a sort of suffering which sapped at the very roots of self-respect, and which inevitably resulted in defects of bearing and of conduct. The outcast Jew learnt to stoop where he should have stood upright, and to swagger and to push when standing room was grudgingly allotted him. ”

“ It asserted the ascendency of Islam on the very spot of all others which was to Christians most sacred. As Catholicism spread, the desire to regain the sepulchre of their Saviour from unbelievers grew strong amongst the followers of Jesus. The warlike spirit of the age sought a pious motive for its expression, and thus, blessed and encouraged on all sides, sworn soldiers of the cross set off from France and Germany and England to wrest Jerusalem from the Mahomedans. ‘Zeal is a good thing, but love is a better.’ This sudden fury of fanaticism had very sad results for the Jews. ”

“ Killing Jewish unbelievers was surely no murder; plundering Jews, to use their treasures in so holy a cause, was still less ‘robbery.’ This was crusading logic. Jews are always a little slow to appreciate the much-sung chivalry of the Middle Ages. They saw its seamy side.
An era of most wicked persecution opened for the Jews of Central Europe with the first crusade in 1096. The frenzy of intolerance and fanaticism which was called forth under the fair names of religion and chivalry spread like an epidemic. ”

“ Through all those centuries, the race was outcast and alien, under the lash of the Church and under the ban of the State. Church and State changed faiths and names, old dynasties and old beliefs gave place to new, boundaries were shifted, and civilisation took fresh forms, but the darkness that had fallen on the Jews when Titus ruled over pagan Rome, never lifted in all those centuries, save for that brief period during the Mahomedan occupation of Spain. ”