The Age of Faith

  There were Jews in England in 691,13 Many more came in with William the Conqueror, and were at first protected by the Norman rulers as providers of capital and collectors of revenue. Their communities in London, Norwich, York, and other English centers were outside the jurisdiction of the local authorities, and were subject only to the king. This legal isolation widened the barrier between Christian and Jew, and played a part in the pogroms of the twelfth century.

  Gaul had had Jewish merchants from the time of Caesar. By 600 there were Jewish colonies in all the major cities. The Merovingian kings persecuted them with pious ferocity; Chilperic ordered them all to accept Christianity or have their eyes torn out (581).14 Charlemagne, while maintaining discriminatory laws against the Jews, protected them as useful and enterprising farmers and craftsmen, merchants, doctors, and financiers, and employed a Jew as his personal physician. In 787, according to a disputed tradition, he brought the Kalonymos family from Lucca to Mainz to encourage Jewish scholarship in the Frank realm. In 797 he sent a Jew as interpreter or as dragoman with an embassy to Harun al-Rashid. Louis the Pious favored the Jews as stimulators of commerce, and appointed a magister ludaeorum to guard their rights. Despite hostile legends, legal disabilities, and occasional minor persecutions, the Jews enjoyed in France in the ninth and tenth centuries a degree of prosperity and peace hardly known again by the Jews of Europe before the French Revolution.15

  All through Italy there were little Jewish enclaves, from Trani to Venice and Milan. Jews were especially numerous in Padua, and may have influenced the growth of Averroism in the university there. Salerno, home of the first medieval school of scientific medicine in Latin Christendom, contained 600 Jews,16 several of them noted physicians. The Emperor Frederick II had Jewish scholars at his court in Foggia, and Pope Alexander III (1159-81) had several Jews in high position in his household;17 but Frederick joined with Pope Gregory IX in oppressive measures against the Jews of Italy.

  The Spanish Jews called themselves Sephardim, and traced their origin to the royal tribe of Judah.* After the conversion of King Recared (586-601) to orthodox Christianity the Visigothic government united with the powerful hierarchy of the Spanish Church to make life less attractive to the Jews. They were excluded from public office, and were forbidden to marry Christians or have Christian slaves. King Sisebut ordered all Jews to accept Christianity or emigrate (613); his successor repealed this decree, but the Council of Toledo of 633 ruled that those Jews who had submitted to baptism and then returned to Judaism should be separated from their children and sold into slavery. King Chintila renewed Sisebut’s decree (638); and King Egica prohibited Jewish ownership of land, and any business transaction between Christian and Jew (693). When the Moors and Arabs invaded the peninsula (711) the Jews helped them at every turn.

  The conquerors, to repopulate the land, invited immigration; 50,000 Jews came from Asia and Africa,18 some towns, like Lucena, were inhabited almost wholly by Jews. Freed from economic disabilities, the Jews of Moslem Spain spread into every field of agriculture, industry, finance, and the professions. They adopted the dress, language, and customs of the Arabs, garbed themselves in turbans and silk robes, rode in carriages, and were hardly distinguishable from their Semitic cousins. Several Jews became court physicians, and one of these was made adviser to the greatest of the caliphs of Cordova.

  Hasdai ibn Shaprut (915-70) was to Abd-er-Rahman III what Nizam al-Mulk in the next century would be to Malik Shah. Born in the wealthy and cultured Ibn Ezra family, his father taught him Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin; he studied medicine and other sciences at Cordova, cured the Caliph’s ailments, and showed such wide knowledge and good judgment in politics that he was appointed to the diplomatic staff, apparently at the age of twenty-five. He was entrusted with ever larger responsibilities over the financial and commercial life of the state. He had no official title; the Caliph hesitated to arouse resentment by making him officially vizier; but Hasdai performed his many functions with such tact that he won the good will of Arabs, Jews, and Christians alike. He encouraged learning and literature, provided students with scholarships and books, and gathered about him a salon of poets, savants, and philosophers. When he died, Moslems vied with Jews in honoring his memory.

  There were similar, if lesser, figures, elsewhere in Moslem Spain. At Seville al-Mutamid invited to his court the scholar and astronomer Isaac ben Baruch, gave him the title of Prince, and made him head rabbi of all the Jewish congregations there.19 At Granada Samuel Halevi ibn Naghdela rivaled the power and wisdom, and exceeded the learning, of Hasdai ibn Shaprut. Born (993) and reared in Cordova, he combined the study of the Talmud with that of Arabic literature, and both with the selling of spices. When Cordova fell to the Berbers he moved to Malaga, and there added to his modest income by composing letters for petitioners to King Habbus of Granada. Struck with the calligraphy and diction of these letters, the King’s vizier visited Samuel, took him to Granada, and installed him in the Alhambra as his secretary. Soon Samuel was also his adviser, and the vizier said that “when Samuel gave counsel the voice of God was heard.” Dying, the vizier recommended Samuel as his successor; and in 1027 Samuel became the only Jew openly to hold the office and name of vizier in a Moslem state; this was the more feasible in Granada, where half the population in the eleventh century was Jewish.20 The Arabs soon applauded the choice, for under Samuel the little state flourished financially, politically, and culturally. He himself was a scholar, poet, astronomer, mathematician, and linguist, knowing seven tongues; he wrote (chiefly in Hebrew) twenty treatises on grammar, several volumes of poetry and philosophy, an introduction to the Talmud, and an anthology of Hebrew literature. He shared his fortune with other poets, came to the rescue of the poet and philosopher Ibn Gabirol, financed young students, and contributed to Jewish communities in three continents. While vizier to the King he was also rabbi to the Jews, and lectured on the Talmud. His grateful people conferred upon him the title of Nagid—Prince (in Israel). When he died (1055) he was succeeded as vizier and Nagid by his son Joseph ibn Naghdela.

  Those centuries—the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth—were the golden age of Spanish Jewry, the happiest and most fruitful period in medieval Hebrew history. When Moses ben Chanoch (d. 965), one of the Bari émigrés, was ransomed in Cordova, he organized there, with Hasdai’s help, an academy that soon acquired the intellectual leadership of the Jewish world. Similar schools were opened at Lucena, Toledo, Barcelona, Granada …; and whereas the schools of Eastern Jewry had almost confined themselves to religious education, these gave instruction also in literature, music, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and philosophy.21 Such education gave to the upper half of the Jewish population in Spain a breadth and depth of culture and refinement at that time equaled only by their Moslem, Byzantine, and Chinese contemporaries. It was then a disgrace for a man of wealth or political position to be unacquainted with history, science, philosophy, and poetry.22 A Jewish aristocracy took form, graced by beautiful women; perhaps it was too keenly conscious of its superiority, but it redeemed its pride by its sense that good birth and fortune are an obligation to generosity and excellence.

  The decline of Spanish Jewry might be dated from the fall of Joseph ibn Naghdela. He served the king almost as ably as his father had done, but not with the modest tact that had reconciled a population half Moorish to be ruled by a Jew. He took all power in his hands, dressed as royally as the king, and laughed at the Koran; gossip called him an atheist. In 1066 the Arabs and Berbers revolted, crucified Joseph, massacred 4000 Jews in Granada, and plundered their homes. The remaining Jews were compelled to sell their lands and emigrate. Twenty years later the Almoravids came from Africa, aflame with orthodoxy; and the long honeymoon of Spanish Moslems and Jews was ended. A Mohammedan theologian announced that the Jews had promised Mohammed to accept Islam at the end of 500 years after the Hegira, if by that time their expected Messiah had not come; the five centuries were up in 1107 by Mohammedan reckoning; the Emir Yusuf demanded
the conversion of all the Jews in Spain, but excused them on payment of an enormous sum into his treasury.23 When the Almohads replaced the Almoravids as rulers of Morocco and Moslem Spain (1148), they gave the Jews and the Christians the same choice that King Sisebut had allowed the Jews 535 years before—apostasy or exile. Many Jews pretended conversion to Islam; many followed the Christians into northern Spain.

  There, at first, they found a royal tolerance as magnanimous as that which they had enjoyed for four centuries under Islam. Alfonso VI and VII of Castile treated the Jews well, made Jew and Christian equal before the law, and sternly repressed an anti-Semitic outbreak in Toledo (1107), where there were then 72,000 Jews.24 A like entente between the mother and daughter religions prevailed for a century in Aragon; indeed King James I invited Jews to settle in Majorca, Catalonia, and Valencia, and in many cases gave Jewish settlers free homes and lands.25 In Barcelona they dominated commerce in the twelfth century, and owned a third of the soil.26 The Jews of Christian Spain were severely taxed, but they prospered, and enjoyed internal autonomy. Trade flowed freely between Christian, Jew, and Moor; the three exchanged gifts on holidays; now and then a king contributed to a synagogue building fund.27 From 1085 even to 1492, Jews could be found in high public office in Spanish Christian states as fiscal agents and diplomats, sometimes as ministers.28 During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Christian clergy joined in this Christian amity.29

  The first outbreak of intolerance was among the Jews themselves. In 1149 Jehuda ibn Ezra, steward of the palace to Alfonso VII of Leon and Castile, turned the powers of his master’s government against the Qaraite Jews of Toledo; the details are unknown, but from that time the once numerous Spanish Qaraites are heard of no more.30 In 1212 some Christian crusaders entered Spain to help free it from the Moors; for the most part they treated the Jews well; one group attacked the Jews of Toledo and killed many of them; but the Christians of the city rose to the defense of their fellow citizens, and stopped the persecution.31 Alfonso X of Castile included anti-Judaic legislation in his law code of 1265, but the code was not put into effect till 1348; meanwhile Alfonso employed a Jewish physician and treasurer, presented to the Jews of Seville three mosques to be turned into synagogues,32 and basked in the splendor that Jewish and Moslem scholarship shed upon his genial reign. In 1276 the military enterprises of Pedro III of Aragon required insufferable taxes; his finance minister and several other officials were Jews; a revolt of nobles and cities against the monarchy compelled the King to dismiss his Jewish aides, and to confirm a resolution of the Cortes (1283) against further employment of Jews in the government. The era of toleration ended when the ecclesiastical Council of Zamora (1313) decreed the imposition of the badge, the segregation of the Jewish from the Christian population, and a ban against the employment of Jewish physicians by Christians, or of Christian servants by Jews.33

  III. JEWISH LIFE IN CHRISTENDOM

  1. Government

  Excepting Palermo and a few towns in Spain, the cities of medieval Christendom required no segregation of their Jewish population. Usually, however, the Jews lived in a voluntary isolation for social convenience, physical security, and religious unity. The synagogue was the geographical, social, and economic center of the Jewish quarter, and drew most Jewish dwellings toward it. There was in consequence much overcrowding, to the detriment of public and private sanitation. In Spain the Hebrew sections contained handsome residences as well as hovels and tenements; in the rest of Europe they verged on slums.34

  Allowing for the universally greater influence of the rich in elections and appointments, the Jewish communities were semidemocratic enclaves in a monarchical world. The taxpaying members of a congregation chose the rabbis and officers of the synagogue. A small group of elected elders sat as a Beth Din or communal court; this levied taxes, fixed prices, administered justice, issued ordinances—not always observed—on Jewish diet, dancing, morals, and dress. It was empowered to try Jewish offenders against Jewish law, and had executive officers to carry out its decrees. Penalties ranged from fines to excommunication or banishment. Capital punishment was rarely within the power or custom of the Beth Din; in its stead the Jewish court used the herem or full excommunication—a majestic and frightening ceremony of charges, curses, and candles extinguished one by one as a symbol of the culprit’s spiritual death. The Jews, like the Christians, used excommunication too frequently, so that in both faiths it lost its terror and effectiveness. The rabbis, like the Church, prosecuted heretics, outlawed them, and on rare occasions burned their books.35

  Normally the Jewish community was not subject to local authority. Its only master was the king; him it paid liberally for a charter protecting its religious and economic rights; later it paid the liberated communes to confirm its autonomy. The Jews, however, were subject to the law of the state, and made it a principle to obey it; “the law of the kingdom is law,” said the Talmud.36 “Pray for the welfare of the government,” said another passage, “since but for fear thereof men would swallow one another alive.”37

  The state laid upon the Jews a poll or head tax, property taxes running up to 33%, and taxes on meat, wine, jewelry, imports, and exports; in addition it required “voluntary” contributions from them to help finance a war, a coronation, or a royal “progress” or tour. The English Jews, numbering in the twelfth century one quarter of one per cent of the population, paid eight per cent of the national taxes. They raised a fourth of the levy for the crusade of Richard I, and donated 5000 marks toward his ransom from German captivity—thrice the amount given by the city of London.38 The Jew was also taxed by his own community, and was periodically dunned for charity, education, and the support of the harassed Jews in Palestine. At any moment, for cause or without, the king might confiscate part or all of the property of “his Jews,” for in feudal law they were all his “men.” When a king died, his agreement to protect the Jews expired; his successor could be induced to renew it only by a large gift; sometimes this was a third of all Jewish property in the state.39 In 1463 Albrecht III, Margrave of Brandenburg, declared that every new German king “may, according to old usage, either burn all the Jews, or show them his mercy, and, to save their lives, take the third penny” (i.e., one third) “of their property.”40 Bracton, the leading English jurist of the thirteenth century, summed up the matter simply: “A Jew cannot have anything of his own, because whatever he acquires he acquires not for himself but for the king.”41

  2. Economy

  To these political inconveniences were added economic restrictions. The Jews were not legally or generally prevented from owning land; at one time or another in the Middle Ages they owned considerable tracts in Moslem or Christian Spain, in Sicily, Silesia, Poland, England, and France.42 But circumstances made such ownership increasingly impractical. Forbidden by Christian law to hire Christian slaves, and by Jewish law to hire Jewish slaves, the Jew had to work his holding with free labor, hard to get and costly to retain. Jewish law forbade the Jew to work on Saturday, Christian law usually forbade him to work on Sunday; such leisure was a hardship. Feudal custom or law made it impossible for a Jew to find a place within the feudal system; any such position required a Christian oath of fealty, and military service; but the laws of nearly all Christian states forbade the Jews to carry arms.43 In Visi-gothic Spain King Sisebut revoked all grants of land made to Jews by his predecessors; King Egica “nationalized” all Jewish holdings that had at any time belonged to Christians; and in 1293 the Cortes of Valladolid prohibited the sale of land to Jews. The ever-present possibility of expulsion or attack persuaded the Jews, after the ninth century, to avoid landed property or rural solitude. All these conditions discouraged Jewish agriculture, and inclined the Jew to urban life, to industry, trade, and finance.

  In the Near East and in southern Europe the Jews were active in industry; indeed in several cases it was they who brought advanced handicraft techniques from Islam or Byzantium to Western lands. Benjamin of Tudela found hundreds of Jew
ish glassworkers at Antioch and Tyre; Jews in Egypt and Greece were renowned for the excellence of their dyed and embroidered textiles; and as late as the thirteenth century Frederick II called in Jewish craftsmen to manage the state’s silk industry in Sicily. There and elsewhere Jews engaged in the metal trades, especially in goldsmithing and jewelry; they worked the tin mines of Cornwall until 1290.44 Hebrew artisans in southern Europe were organized in strong guilds, and competed successfully with Christian craftsmen. But in northern Europe the Christian guilds acquired a monopoly in many trades. State after state forbade the Jews to serve Christians as smiths, carpenters, tailors, shoemakers, millers, bakers, or physicians, or to sell wine, flour, butter, or oil in the markets,45 or to buy a home anywhere except in the Jewish quarter.

  So restricted, the Jews took to trade. Rab, the Babylonian Talmudist, had given his people a shrewd motto: “Trade with a hundred florins, and you will afford meat and wine; put the same sum into agriculture, and at most you may have bread and salt.”46 The Jewish pedlar was known in every city and town; the Jewish merchant at every market and fair. International commerce was their specialty, almost their monopoly, before the eleventh century; their packs, caravans, and ships crossed deserts, mountains, and seas; and in most instances they accompanied their goods. They served as commercial links between Christendom and Islam, between Europe and Asia, between the Slavic and the Western states. They handled most of the trade in slaves.47 They were helped by their skill and patience in learning languages; by the understanding of Hebrew, and the similarity of laws and customs, among widely separated Jewish communities; and by the hospitality of the Jewish quarter in every city to any foreign Jew; so Benjamin of Tudela traveled halfway across the world, and found himself everywhere at home. Ibn Khordadbeh, director of the post for the Baghdad caliphate in 870, told in his Book of Routes of Jewish merchants who spoke Persian, Greek, Arabic, Frank, Spanish, and Slavonic; and he described the land and sea routes by which they traveled from Spain and Italy to Egypt, India, and China.48 These merchants took eunuchs, slaves, brocades, furs, and swords to the Far East, and brought back musk, aloes, camphor, spices, and silks.49The capture of Jerusalem by the Crusades, and the conquest of the Mediterranean by the fleets of Venice and Genoa, gave the Italian merchants an advantage over the Jews; and Jewish commercial leadership ended with the eleventh century. Even before the Crusades Venice had forbidden the transport of Jewish merchants on Venetian ships, and soon afterward the Hanseatic League closed its ports on the North Sea and the Baltic to Jewish trade.50 By the twelfth century Jewish commerce was mostly domestic; and even within that narrow scope it was limited by laws prohibiting the sale of divers goods by Jews.51