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Other documents randomly have
different content
some time kept in suspense as to their fate, but were at last suffered
to leave the city unencumbered by any property whatsoever. The
proceedings would have been more thoroughly reminiscent of the
Middle Age but for the fact that, in spite of the inexorable pastry-
cook’s warnings, there were now found Christians humane enough
to feed and to shelter the miserable exiles. The pastry-cook and his
party ruled Frankfort with impunity for a whole year.
Meanwhile similar things happened at Worms. There also the
Jews were hated as competitors and detested as infidels; but the
anti-Jewish movement in that town was led by a learned lawyer; not
by an honest, if stupid, confectioner. Consequently the warfare
assumed a different character. Instead of open assault, the lawyer
preferred a siege. He closed the outlets of the town to the Jews, and
hindered them from procuring even milk for their children. These
subtle preliminaries were followed by an ultimatum addressed to the
Jews, bidding them to evacuate the city, bag and baggage, within an
hour. The wretches departed, leaving behind them
1615
their synagogues and cemeteries to the fury of the
populace. The fugitives were allowed by the Archbishop of Mayence
and the Count of Darmstadt to take up their abode in the villages and
hamlets of the neighbourhood, where they met some of their brother-
sufferers from Frankfort.
Soon afterwards the Council of Worms, indignant at its
humiliation, invited the Elector of the Palatinate to take possession of
the town. The prince accepted the invitation, and a few months later
the Jews were permitted to return. Not long after the Jews of
Frankfort also were re-admitted by the Electorate of Mayence and
Darmstadt, to the sound of trumpets. The heroic pastry-cook was
hanged and quartered, his house was razed to the ground, and his
family banished. The city was compelled by the Emperor to pay to
the Jews a large indemnity for their losses and sufferings, and they
expressed their joy by ordaining that the eve of their return should be
observed as a fast and the day itself as a feast. However, the social
position of the Jews both in Frankfort and in Worms remained the
same. In both towns they continued to live on sufferance. Only a
limited number of families was allowed to reside, and only a limited
number of individuals to marry.
1620–1648 The terrible Thirty Years’ War caused less suffering
to the Jews of Protestant Germany than to the
Christians. While Protestants and Catholics, animated by a spirit of
intolerance and the lust for power, were eagerly butchering each
other and devastating each other’s territories, the Jews made their
fortunes by impartial speculations in the booty of both sides. Their
opportunities must have been considerable; for it was during this war
that the English and other European tongues were enriched with the
German word “plunder.”
 CHAPTER XV

CATHOLIC REACTION

But if the Reformation brought with it Protestant hostility and new

tribulations to the outcasts of humanity, it also proved the cause of
fresh persecution on the part of Catholicism. Even while the Popes
at Rome tolerated or cherished the Jews, their agents abroad, the
wandering Friars, and all those soldiers of orthodoxy by whose
fanatical zeal the fabric of Papal supremacy had been reared and
was maintained, exerted themselves strenuously and furiously to
oppose the spreading epidemic of rebellion. In their eyes the Jews
were the most implacable enemies of Christ and the eternal
promoters of dissent and heresy. It was, therefore, against the Jews
that they directed their deadliest shafts. The belief prevailed that the
first step to the conquest of Judaism was the cremation of Jewish
books, which after the invention of the printing press had multiplied.
This new attack on Judaism, as so many other attacks in the past,
was led by a renegade Jew, John Pfefferkorn by name, and a
butcher by trade—also convicted of burglary and otherwise an
123
1509 unlimited miscreant. This gentleman, acting in
concert with the Dominicans of Cologne, obtained from
the Emperor Maximilian authority to confiscate all Hebrew writings
opposed to the Christian faith—a very comprehensive sentence
which would have been carried out, but for the efforts made on
behalf of literature and commonsense by John Reuchlin, the Father
of German Humanism. This great scholar had restored Hebrew and
promoted Greek studies in Germany. He was attracted by Hebrew
mysticism and had many friends among the Jews. In 1490, whilst on
a visit in Italy, he had made the acquaintance of Pico de Mirandola
whose Cabbalistic doctrines he embraced and expounded in his
work De Verbo Mirifico. In 1492 he was employed on a mission to
the Emperor at Linz, and it was there that he met Jacob Loans, the
Emperor’s Jewish physician, under whose guidance he began to
read Hebrew. Although a good Catholic, Reuchlin was a broad-
minded man, and his leaning to Cabbalistic theosophy and the
esoteric wisdom of the Rabbis, without making him an admirer of the
Jews as a people, induced him to defend their books. Summoned by
Maximilian to express his opinion on Pfefferkorn’s proposal, Reuchlin
did so in a manner which, while saving the Jewish writings from the
fire, exposed the defender to the utmost rigour of the disappointed
Dominicans; from whose clutches, however, after a severe struggle,
he was rescued by the enthusiastic assistance of his brother-
humanists.
The outbreak of the Lutheran rebellion paralysed the forces of
Catholicism for a while. But it was not long ere the Papacy recovered
from its panic. The latter half of the sixteenth, and the first half of the
seventeenth century—the hundred years between the rise of the
Order of Jesus and the peace of Westphalia—form a period of
unprecedented activity for the conversion of the world to the one true
faith. The Catholic sovereigns were at the zenith of
1540–1648
their power and bigotry, and both their consciences
and their swords lay under the absolute control of the Pope; for on
the triumph of Dogmatism depended the realisation of their own
dreams of Despotism at home and conquest abroad. On the other
hand, Protestantism was grimly determined to conquer or die. If one
half of Western Christendom was passionately attached to the
traditions made dear by the familiarity of ages, the other half was no
less passionately attracted by the novelty of the prospect which had
just unfolded its charms to their vision. The result of this antagonism
was the most faithful imitation of hell on earth that the modern world
has witnessed. Europe, convulsed by revolt and made desolate by
barbarous repression, presented a scene for which, fortunately, it
would be hard to find a parallel even in the annals of civilised
mankind. While the Inquisition was revelling in human hecatombs in
Spain, the Spanish general Alva was ravaging heretical Holland, and
a Spanish Armada was preparing to assail heretical England.
Religious motives receded further and yet further into distance as
time went on; but the slaughter begun for the glory of God was
continued for the love of power; and those who were formerly burnt
as heretics were now butchered as malcontents. The Titanic feud
culminated in the Thirty Years’ War, during which no fewer than ten
millions of Christians were massacred in the name of Christ.
The Treaty of Westphalia staunched the flow of blood for a
moment, but did not heal the wound. Open violence was aided by
patient intrigue, and the monks carried on the enterprise wherein
monarchs had failed. Meanwhile, as though the legions of St.
Dominic, of St. Francis, and the other monastic orders were not
sufficient for the work of destruction, to them was added, as we have
seen, the more formidable Society of Jesus. By this time also the
Spanish Inquisition had accomplished its special mission of blotting
out the Morescos and Marranos, and had entered into an alliance
with Loyola’s legion; the two bodies forming together a two-edged
sword in the hand of the Catholic reaction.
Between Martin Luther and Ignatius Loyola there is commonly
supposed to gape a very wide chasm. However that may be, there is
one point at which the two apostles meet—hatred of Israel. Loyola’s
disciples penetrated by degrees into every realm in Europe, and into
every realm they brought with them that supple and sinuous spirit
which was destined to dominate European history for ages, and to
endow the European languages with a new word of evil import. In
them Israel found an enemy powerful as Fate, and, like Fate,
everywhere present, everywhere invisible and inexorable. Thus
those Jews who had escaped from the zeal of nascent Protestantism
were doomed to fall a prey to the zeal of reanimated Catholicism.
As in Italy, so in Central Europe, the reign of Pope Paul IV.
marks the revival of Catholic Obscurantism. In 1557 the Inquisition
was introduced into France under Henry II.—a prince who could be
profligate without being gay, and who atoned for his gloomy
immorality by so genuine a horror of heresy and culture that at his
accession both Huguenots and scholars thought it advisable to quit
Paris. In 1559—four years after the creation of the Ghetto in Rome—
all Hebrew books were confiscated in Prague, at the instigation of a
baptized Jew named Asher. A fire that soon after broke out in the
Jewish quarter afforded the Catholics of Prague an opportunity of
exhibiting their piety. They plundered the houses of the Jews, and
even threw their women and children into the flames. At the same
time the Emperor Ferdinand I. ordered the expulsion of the Jews
from Prague and the rest of Bohemia, imposed many restrictions on
those of Austria, and drove them from Lower Austria.
1569
Ten years later the Jews of Avignon and Venaissin,
which, besides Marseilles, were the only communities left in France
after the expulsion of 1395, and which, favoured by the enlightened
Popes Leo X., Clement VII., and Paul III., had acquired great wealth,
were ordered to quit the country, and, like the refugees from Spain
and Italy, they sought and found a haven of refuge in the Sultan’s
dominions.
1620–1648 During the Thirty Years’ War the Catholic Emperor
Ferdinand II. protected the Jews, forbidding their
coffers to be robbed except by himself. The Bohemian Jews alone,
after having paid a certain sum, are known to have bound
themselves to contribute forty thousand gulden a year towards the
expenses of the war. In Vienna also, now the headquarters of
Catholicism, the Jews were allowed to grow fat. The
1624
Emperor permitted them to build a synagogue and to
discard the badge; but the Christian citizens protested, demanding
their banishment. In face of this opposition the Court acted with
admirable tact. To the Christians it said: “You shall see the Jews
banished, if you pay twenty thousand florins,” and to the Jews it
whispered: “You need not fear, if you pay more.” To judge from the
result, the Jews must have outbidden the Christians.
1630 Not long after, at Prague, an internal feud between
rival factions of the Jewish community led to the
interference of the authorities, and the Emperor ordered that the
Jews should every Sunday morning submit to sermons preached for
their conversion. Absentees were fined a thaler a head, and a higher
sum on repetition of the offence. Inattention and slumber during the
performance were also visited with a fine. However, the Jews had
not suffered through so many centuries without learning how to dull
the edge of persecution. Corrupt courtiers defeated the devout
Emperor’s policy, and the Jews were allowed to remain in spiritual
darkness and in peace.
1648 Despite this cruel treatment, the Jews of Prague
fought valiantly in defence of the city against the
Swedes, and in recognition of their loyalty and gallantry received
from the Emperor, Ferdinand III., an imperial standard which can still
be seen in the old synagogue of the town.
In the meantime the Jesuits continued their restless, though
noiseless, campaign. Even the one traditional refuge of Israel in
Europe was poisoned by their preaching. In Poland the Jews had for
centuries prospered and enjoyed a kind of autonomy. The Kings
protected them, and the nobility, thriftless and extravagant itself,
found the sober, industrious, and keen-witted Jews invaluable as
bailiffs and financial advisers. Beneath the wing of princes and
nobles the Jews acquired great influence. It was to this influence
precisely that the Jesuits attributed the rise of heresy in that country,
and it was this influence that they now decided to use as a means to
their undoing. The rivers of bitterness that flowed from the Stygian
fountain of Jesuitism found the field ready to be fertilised. The
German traders and artisans, settled in various parts of Poland, had
already encountered in the Jews formidable rivals. Commercial envy
was invigorated by the pious prejudices which these immigrants had
imported, along with their guilds, from the Fatherland; and these
feelings often induced them to make common cause with the clergy.
Under the joint pressure of the two classes, Casimir
1496–1505
the Great’s successors had deprived the Jews of their
privileges and confined them to special quarters, or even expelled
them from certain towns. A period of toleration came with Sigismund
I. This sovereign’s good-will towards the Jews was
1507–1548
aided by the Polish nobles, who, hating the Germans
bitterly, were glad to support their rivals—an inclination which they
had ample means of gratifying, as the execution of the anti-Jewish
laws was largely in their own hands. Thanks to the friendship of the
nobility Poland continued to offer an asylum to the persecuted
children of Israel.
1575–1586
 Stephen Bathori, who was elected to the Polish
throne three years after the death of Sigismund Augustus, the last
native King of Poland, showed great favour to the Jews. He guarded
the race in Lithuania against the effects of the blood-accusation, and
bestowed many benefits upon them, to the disgust of his Christian
subjects, who in Poland, as elsewhere, envied the Jews for their
prosperity and hated them for their usury and arrogance. This
prosperity lasted even under Sigismund III., a zealous
1587–1632
Catholic brought up by Jesuits. He confirmed to the
Jews their ancient privileges, but introduced a measure indicating his
religious bias and fraught with disastrous possibilities.
1592
He ordained that for the building of a new synagogue
the permission of the Church should be obtained. About this time the
Reformation had lost much of its vigour in Germany; but in Poland,
through the German immigrants, it was beginning to create a great
spiritual agitation and to find favour among the nobles. Some of the
Polish sectarians went to the extreme of Unitarianism and were
stigmatised as semi-Judaei.
To all these sources of danger for the Jews—the hatred towards
them entertained by the natives on account of their usurious
extortions, by the Germans on account of their commercial ability, by
the Jesuits on account of their infidelity, and of the Judaic proclivities
of some of the Dissenters—was added another, which proved the
immediate cause of persecution.
Upon the banks of the lower Dnieper and the north shore of the
Black Sea there gradually arose several colonies or settlements
formed partly by runaway slaves and convicts in quest of freedom,
and partly by adventurers from many countries and classes in quest
of fortune. These were the ancestors of the Cossack race. Their life
was such as their antecedents promised. Independent and idle, they
knew only one industry—brigandage. The exercise of this industry
brought them into frequent collision with their Tartar neighbours and
supplied them with their one recreation—war. The Kings of Poland,
thinking to make use of these hardened and reckless outlaws for the
defence of their eastern frontiers, granted to them a semi-
autonomous constitution under a freely elected hetman or chieftain.
Unfortunately the Cossacks were for the most part members of the
Eastern Church, and were therefore hated by the Jesuits, who, after
having crushed the Polish heretics, turned their attention to these
schismatics. King Sigismund III. began the crusade by oppressing
the colonists with heavy taxes.
Now, these colonies were under the control of several noble
Polish families which sold the lease of the imposts to their Jewish
bailiffs. The latter were intended to act the part for which the training
of a thousand years had so well qualified them—the part of the
sponge. Thanks to this arrangement, Jewish communities rapidly
sprang up and spread in the Ukraine and Little Russia, and to them
was entrusted the odious privilege of collecting and even of inventing
taxes. How galling these burdens were may be gathered from the
following example: The Cossacks were bound to pay a duty on every
new-born infant and on every wedding. As a safeguard against
evasion, the Jewish tax-farmers kept the keys of the churches, and
on each wedding or baptism the clergyman was obliged to apply to
them for admittance into his own church. Nor were these tax-farmers
scrupulous or lenient in the exercise of their privileges. Slaves to
everybody else, they were eager to play the despots over those
whom fate had placed under themselves. In their lust for profit and
power, they readily helped the nobles in plundering and the Jesuits
in tormenting the Cossacks. Hence the position of the Jews in the
Ukraine and Little Russia became one of extreme danger, and the
resentment which their conduct excited soon translated itself into
acts of vengeance. And vengeance, when it fell on Jews, did not
restrict itself to the individuals who had deserved it. “All Israelites are
surety one for the other” was the Rabbinic motto of solidarity. The
Cossacks were now to give a new meaning to this maxim. Where
single units had offended, whole communities were punished.
During a brief revolt of the Cossacks, in 1638, two hundred Jews
were slain and several synagogues destroyed. The Jews, not
warned by this omen, continued to provoke severer punishment with
a recklessness which was partly derived from the belief in the near
advent of the Messiah. The year 1648 had been fixed by the mystics
124
as the era of triumph and universal sovereignty for Israel. The
expected date came, but it brought with it, not redemption, but
retribution. In that year there broke out an insurrection led by a
Cossack who, having been cheated out of his wife and property by a
Jew, had no cause to love the race. Chmielnicki, in declaring to his
compatriots that “they had been delivered by the Poles into bondage
to the cursed breed of the Jews,” was voicing their wrongs with a
conviction deepened by personal suffering.
After their first victory, the wild Cossacks let themselves loose
upon the Jews, many of whom were massacred, while others saved
themselves by embracing the Orthodox faith. Four Jewish
communities, in their anxiety to escape death, gave themselves and
their belongings up to the Tartars, who accepted the gift and sold the
givers as slaves in Turkey, where they were ransomed by their
brethren. The rebellion continued with a ferocity and ruthlessness
such as might have been expected from the character of the rebels
and the magnitude of the wrongs which they had to avenge. Long
oppressed by Papists and Jews, in slaying them they not only
gratified their personal animosity, but felt that they were chastising
the enemies of their Church. In this somewhat hackneyed work they
displayed considerable originality and variety of cruelty. Every
guerilla chief had his own favourite instrument of torture; one of them
affecting the lasso, by which the women of the enemy were caught
and dragged to shame.
Shortly after the first victory, a detachment of Cossacks captured
by stratagem a fortress where six thousand Jews had taken refuge,
and put them all to torture and death. Another detachment attacked a
town harbouring six hundred Polish nobles and two thousand Jews.
The two classes, bound together by a common danger, offered a
stout resistance, until the crafty Cossacks succeeded in dividing
them. They assured the nobles that their sole object was to punish
the Jews, promising to withdraw if the latter were surrendered to
them. The Jews were persuaded to deliver up their arms; the
Cossacks were admitted into the town, robbed the Jews of all their
belongings, and then set before them the alternative of baptism or
death. Three-fourths of the whole community were tortured and
executed. Then the Cossacks turned their wrath against the Polish
nobles, whom they easily overpowered and slaughtered.
A third body of insurgents was at the same time wreaking a
similar vengeance upon the Jews of Little Russia, where many
thousands perished, and the havoc spread as widely as the
rebellion, until the whole country, from South Ukraine to Lemberg,
was marked with traces of massacre—here in pools of Jewish and
Polish blood, there in heaps of Jewish and Polish bodies. At last
peace was concluded on condition that no Papist or
1649 Aug.
Jew should reside in the Cossack provinces.
Meanwhile thousands of Jewish fugitives who had saved their
lives by baptism, of women who had been violated by the Cossacks,
and of children whose parents had been slaughtered, swarmed into
Poland, where King John Casimir allowed them to return to Judaism,
for, being a Roman Catholic himself, he naturally regarded the Greek
baptism as worse than valueless.
After a few months’ pause the war between the Cossacks and
the Poles broke out anew, and it was now transferred to Polish
territory. Again the first victims were Jews, but the slaughter was
necessarily limited by the comparatively small number of people left
to slay. This second rebellion ended in the defeat of
1651 Nov.
the Cossacks, and one of the terms of peace was that
the Jews should be allowed to settle again, and resume their
financial oppression, in the Ukraine. However, the Cossacks felt
bound by the treaty only so long as they felt unable to break it. As
soon as the opportunity offered, they once more raised the standard
of revolt, and Chmielnicki, aided by the Russians, carried victory and
devastation far and wide. The Jews who were beyond
1654–1655
the reach of the Cossacks succumbed to the fury of
their Russian allies, and thus the community of Wilna was
completely wiped out.
Then to the enemies of Poland was added Charles X. of
Sweden, Charles XII.’s grandfather; “a great and mighty man, lion of
the North in his time.” The battle of Warsaw, which
1656
lasted three days, resulted in a splendid victory for this
“imperious, stern-browed, swift-striking man, who had dreamed of a
new Goth empire.” In that battle the chivalry of Poland was broken,
and John Casimir, the most brilliant cavalier of all, was nearly ruined.
The Jewish communities which had been spared by Cossack and
Russian were impoverished by the Swede. But even this fresh
calamity did not exhaust the measure of their woes. Those who had
escaped slaughter at the hands of Cossacks, Russians, and Swedes
were now exposed to the hatred of the Polish general, Czarnicki,
who attacked them on the ground that they had acted in collusion
with the Swedish invaders. And while Poland was turned into a vast
battlefield, whereon the nations cut each other’s throat, the Jews
were treated as common foes by all. During these ten years of
international manslaughter, no fewer than a quarter of a million of
Polish Jews were massacred.
The humiliation of Poland brought lasting ruin to the Jews.
Fugitives, reduced to the verge of starvation, were scattered over
Europe seeking shelter—from Amsterdam and the Rhine in the north
and west, to Italy, Hungary, and Turkey in the south and east.
Everywhere they were welcomed by their brethren, who fed and
clothed them, and many of the funds intended for the maintenance of
the Jews in Palestine were diverted to the relief of these helpless
wanderers.
In the midst of their sufferings the Polish Jews heard of the
Messiah of Smyrna. One of Sabbataï Zebi’s apostles, Jacob
Leibovicz Frank by name, founded a curious sect, which, among
other things, believed in a kind of Trinity, abolished the Law, and
carried on a fierce warfare against the orthodox Rabbis. In the
middle of the eighteenth century these Frankist dissenters revived
one of the ancient denunciations of the Talmud, and tried to induce
the Polish Government to confiscate all the Rabbinical writings. But
finally, as Sabbataï and his immediate followers in Turkey were
absorbed by Islam, so Frank’s disciples were absorbed by
Catholicism.
While the Jews of Poland were sinking into destitution or flying
into exile, their brethren of Austria also were experiencing the hatred
of the Jesuits. At the instigation of the latter the Empress Margaret
 demanded their banishment from Vienna. The
1669
Emperor Leopold I. was at first averse from the
measure, because he derived an annual revenue of 50,000 florins
from the Austrian Jews. But the Empress insisted, her fanaticism
receiving fresh impulse from a narrow escape which she had
experienced at a ball accident. Attributing her preservation to a
miraculous intervention of the Deity, she was anxious to show her
gratitude by a sacrifice of the Jews, whom her father confessor had
taught her to regard as the enemies of Heaven. The piety of the
Empress proved too powerful for her consort’s avarice. Leopold
yielded at last, and the Jews were ordered to leave Vienna. In vain
did they try prayers and presents. In vain did they turn every stone
both at home and abroad. Their gifts were accepted by the Emperor
and Empress, but the decree remained unrevoked, for the influence
of the Jesuits was invincible. The Jews had to go and
1670
seek new homes in Moravia, Bohemia, and Poland.
Their quarter was bought by the magistrates of Vienna for the
Emperor, and was christened Leopoldstadt. Their synagogue was
levelled to the ground. On its site was built a church dedicated to the
Emperor’s patron saint; and the glorious event was commemorated
by a golden tablet whereon the Jewish house for prayer was
described as a “charnel-house.”
The degradation of Israel was now complete. Persecution, cruel
and, through all changes, consistent beyond a parallel in history, had
at last achieved its demoralising work. The Jews, treated as pariahs
throughout Southern and Central Europe, lost all feeling of self-
respect. Spurned and dishonoured everywhere, they became day
after day more and more worthy of contempt: slovenly in dress and
dialect, dead to all sense of beauty or honesty, treacherous, and
utterly broken in spirit. “Zeus takes away the half of his manhood
from a man, when the day of slavery overtakes him,” says the wise
old poet. The Jews now furnished a melancholy proof of the truth of
the saying. Among the other gifts of servitude they acquired that of
cringing cowardice. So little manliness was left in them that they,
who had once astonished Rome with their dogged valour, dared not
defend themselves even against the attacks of a street urchin; and
the prophet’s terrible prediction was fulfilled: “You shall speak humbly
from the ground, and from the dust shall proceed your word.”
The dispersion of the Polish refugees over Europe resulted in
the subjugation of Judaism in all countries to the sophistical and
soulless teaching of Polish Talmudism. The long-ringleted Rabbis of
Poland carried into every country their narrow subtlety and hatred of
secular studies, so that at a time when the Middle Age was passing
away from Christendom they restored it to Israel.
From the sixteenth century the Jews fell completely under the
domination of the Synagogue. Having abandoned all hope of being
allowed to participate in the life of the Gentiles, they withdrew more
and more severely behind the old moat by which their ancestors had
surrounded themselves. Tribalism was their only alternative to utter
extinction; and they seized upon it, nothing loth. They grew fanatical,
entrusted the education of their children to none but the Polish
Rabbis, clung to their bastard Germano-Hebrew jargon (Jüdisch-
Deutsch or “Yiddish”), and even in writing a European language they
employed the Hebrew characters. The Jewish literature of the period
reflects the social and intellectual condition of the race. When it
deals not with subjects of Biblical exegesis, it consists of rude
popular songs and stories drawn from Talmudic and Cabbalistic
sources or from German and Oriental folk-lore. But this Cimmerian
darkness contained in it the promise of a dawn. The light of the
eighteenth century was sooner or later to penetrate the mists of
bigotry and to bring the Jewish Middle Age to an end. For while the
Jew shares the general effects which persecution long drawn out
inflicts, yet there is in him a power of resiliency which is his own
peculiar possession and which saves him from falling permanently
into the slough of degradation and disgrace. This power he derives
in part from his religion, in part from his history. His religion gives him
steadfastness; his history teaches him to hope.
 CHAPTER XVI

IN HOLLAND

Holland was at this time the one European country in which man
was allowed to worship his Maker according to the dictates of his
conscience. Commercial activity in Europe has always been
accompanied, or followed, by speculative freedom, and where these
two forms of national vigour flourish religious bigotry languishes. The
Dutch, like the Italians, and even in a higher degree, had from the
earliest times shown a spirit of insubordination to papal authority.
The decrees of the Holy See had frequently met with a stubborn
resistance in which beggars and princes, prelates and burgesses
heartily participated. The long feud between Guelf and Ghibelline,
stirred up by Gregory Hildebrand’s overweening ambition, had found
both the people and the clergy of Holland on the side of the Pope’s
enemies. And not only the decrees but also the doctrines of Rome
had often failed to command obedience in this undutiful daughter of
the Church, who from the very first lent an attentive ear to the
whisperings of infidelity. All the heresies that sprang up in Europe
from the beginning of the twelfth century to the beginning of the
sixteenth—from Tanchelyn to Luther—had been welcomed by the
Dutch. Wickliffe found numerous sympathisers in the Netherlands;
and the victims of the Holy See eager avengers. Many Hollanders,
who had taken part in the crusade against Huss and his followers in
Bohemia, returned home horror-struck at the cruelty of those under
whose banner they had fought. Scepticism grew with the growth of
ecclesiastical depravity and persecution with the growth of
ecclesiastical authority, so that in no other region, not even excepting
Spain, was the infernal ingenuity of the Inquisition more severely
taxed than in Holland. It was here that the longest anathemas were
pronounced, and the most hideous tortures endured. The annual
returns of the banned, fleeced, flayed, and burnt, amounted to
thousands. But at last tyranny bred despair, and despair rebellion.
People and nobility were united in a common cause. If the burgesses
hated the priests for their persecuting spirit, the barons hated them
as cordially for the wealth and power which they had contrived to
usurp. And then came the invention of the printing press to prepare
the way for the great day of the Reformation, on which was signed
the death-warrant of mediaeval Catholicism.
In Holland alone rebellion did not degenerate into a new species
of despotism. While the hidalgos of Castile, impelled by lust for glory
and gold, carried into a new world the cross and the cruelty of the
old, conquering kingdoms for Charles and Philip, souls for Christ and
wealth for themselves; while even in England one sovereign was
engaged in persecuting Popery, another Puritanism, and a third both,
the citizens of the Netherlands were laying the foundations of a less
splendid but far more solid prosperity. As in the Venetian, so in the
Dutch Republic, integrity and intelligence in the individual were
esteemed more highly than orthodoxy, and an extensive commerce
was regarded as more valuable to the State than a rigid creed—an
attitude which earned the Hollanders a reputation for worldly
weakliness and carnal self-seeking among our stern upholders of
sanctity and inspired their brother-Protestants of Barebone’s
Parliament to denounce them as enemies of Christ. Briefly, the
Dutch had never submitted to the suicidal necessity of extinguishing
liberty at home in order to achieve greatness abroad, nor had they
subscribed to the mad doctrine which, under one form or another,
had obsessed Europe during so many centuries: that it is a good
man’s duty to make a hell of this world in order to inherit paradise in
the next.
It was in Holland, accordingly, that the Jews of Spain and
Portugal, fleeing from the holocausts of the Holy Office, found a
harbour of safety. Whilst the Netherlands lay under Spanish rule
these emigrants were repeatedly expelled from various Dutch cities,
owing to the citizens’ dread of seeing the Inquisition—which had
been introduced into the country by Charles V. in 1522—established
amongst them. But the liberation from the foreign yoke was to
change all this—not without a struggle. In 1591 a Jewish consul of
the Sultan of Morocco proposed to the burgesses of Middelburg that
they should permit the Portuguese Marranos to settle in their town.
The shrewd burgesses would gladly have welcomed these
commercial allies, but they were obliged to yield to the prejudices of
the Protestant clergy, not unnaturally embittered by their long fight
for liberty. The opposition, however, was short-lived. The Dutch
recognised kindred spirits in the Jews. They shared their implacable
hatred of the Spanish tyrant and of Catholicism, as they shared their
aptitude for trade. Under William of Orange the dream of toleration
became a political reality, and in 1593 the first contingent of
Portuguese pseudo-Christians landed at Amsterdam.
But, though the flames of the Quemadero had been left far
behind, the fear which centuries of ill-usage had instilled into the
Jews’ hearts remained with them. The secrecy, with which these
hunted refugees at first deemed it necessary to meet and worship,
excited the suspicion of their Christian neighbours, who, not
unreasonably, concluding that so many precautions covered a
sinister design, informed the authorities. On the Fast of
1596
Atonement the Jews, while at prayer, were surprised
by armed men. The appearance of these myrmidons awakened
memories of the Inquisition in the breasts of the worshippers, who
fled, thereby deepening the suspicion. And while the Jews were
trying to escape from imaginary Papists, the Dutch officers searched
the Jewish prayer-house for crucifices and wafers. An explanation
ensued, the prisoners were released, and the congregation returned
to its devotions. After this incident, which made it clear to the Dutch
that the Marranos were not Papist conspirators, but only harmless
hypocrites, the latter were allowed to stay, under certain restrictions,
and a synagogue was inaugurated in 1598 amid great enthusiasm.
The good news drew more refugees from Spain and Portugal to
Holland. The persecuted crypto-Jews of the Peninsula began to look
upon Amsterdam as a new Jerusalem, or rather as a new world—so
different and so novel was the treatment which they met with there
from that to which they were accustomed in every other Christian
country. To Amsterdam, therefore, they continued to flee from the
racks and the stakes of the Inquisition—men, women, and even
monks—in ever increasing numbers, so that a new synagogue had
to be built in 1608. Six years afterwards they secured a burial ground
in the neighbourhood of the town. The community rejoiced
exceedingly in the acquisition of this cemetery, though on every body
carried thither they had to pay a tax to each church that the funeral
procession passed on its way. Tolerated though they were, these
Peninsular exiles were still distrusted by the common people as
Catholic spies in disguise, and it was not till 1615 that they were
officially recognised as settlers and traders. Before long a Hebrew
printing press was established in Amsterdam, and gradually mere
tolerance grew into warm welcome. The community was about this
time joined by immigrants driven out of Germany by the ravages of
the Thirty-Years’ War. These German Jews formed the mob of the
colony; despised by their cultured brethren as uncouth and, in turn,
despising them as spurious Jews. Hence arose a schism, and the
German section set up a synagogue of their own. But community of
creed and the subtle affinity of blood, reinforced by the necessity of
presenting a united front to a hostile world, overcame the prejudices
of class, and a reconciliation was effected in 1639. Amsterdam
speedily became the seat of a prosperous and united Hebrew
congregation, and the stronghold of a vigorous and uncompromising
Judaism. The colony consisted of men and women, everyone of
whom had suffered for the faith. It was natural, therefore, that they
should strive to safeguard by all means in their power a treasure
preserved at so enormous a cost of blood and tears. Faith,
unfortunately, is not far removed from fanaticism, and the victims of
tyranny are only too prone to become its ministers. The Jews of
Amsterdam had undergone a long and severe course in the most
distinguished school of cruelty and bigotry, and it is no wonder if they
graduated with high honours. The Rabbis enjoyed an immense
power over the souls and the purses of their disciples; they levied
heavy fines upon members of the Synagogue who incurred their
displeasure; and in their promptitude to stifle freedom of thought they
rivalled the Satraps of the Church. A sad illustration of Hebrew
intolerance is supplied by the story of the hapless Uriel Acosta.
 He was a gentleman of Oporto, one of those Marranos whose
fathers had been taught to love Christ by torture, and who had
bought the right of residence in their native land by baptism. Though
brought up as a devout Catholic and destined for a clerical career,
Uriel was repelled by the mechanical formalities of Catholicism, and
he reverted to the old faith; thus escaping from the meshes of the
Church only to fall into those of the Synagogue. On his
1617
arrival at Amsterdam the idealist was rudely awakened
to the meanness of reality. He found actual Judaism widely different
from the picture which his vivid imagination had drawn of it, and he
was, unfortunately for himself, too honest to conceal his
disappointment. The independence of character which had induced
Uriel to give up social position, home, and fortune for the sake of
conscience, also caused him to disagree with the pious mummeries
of the Hebrew priests. A long contest between the individual and the
institution ended in an inglorious victory for the latter. Uriel Acosta’s
rebellion was visited with excommunication and social ostracism. He
was figuratively extinguished in more senses than one. All his friends
and relatives shunned him as a leper, or rather ignored him as if he
had ceased to exist. It was death in life.
Alone in a city whose language he could not speak, stoned by
those for whom he had sacrificed all, spurned even by his nearest
and dearest, Uriel was driven to the publication of a book which cost
him imprisonment and a fine; for the Rabbis denounced it to the
Dutch authorities as hostile not only to Judaism, but also to
Christianity. This widened the breach between him and his brethren.
Thus fifteen years of misery and loneliness dragged on, till, unable to
bear his awful isolation any longer, this poor outcast from a people of
outcasts tried to regain the favour of the Synagogue and the society
of his fellow-men by feigned repentance. There ended
1633
the second part of the trilogy. The third began when
Uriel’s simulated conversion was seen through. The discovery led to
new persecution and insults innumerable. He was again ostracized
by his relatives, robbed of his betrothed, and excommunicated by the
Synagogue.
 Seven years of suffering elapsed, and the victim at last, worn out
by a fight to which his sensitive nature was unequal, prematurely
aged and longing for rest, once more offered to sign a recantation.
Pardon was granted, but not without terrible penalties and fresh
humiliation. The penitent was made to read aloud his confession of
sin; he was subjected to a public castigation—thirty-nine lashes—
and was obliged to lie prone across the threshold of the synagogue
for all the congregation to walk over and trample upon him. This
disgrace drove Uriel to despair, attempt at murder, and suicide.
These things happened in 1640. In the ensuing year John
Evelyn, whom we have seen at Venice, paid a visit to the community
—probably to the very synagogue—that had witnessed poor Uriel’s
sufferings, and he enters his impressions in his Diary as follows:
“August 19. Next day I returned to Amsterdam, where I went to a
synagogue of the Jews, being Saturday; the ceremonies, ornaments,
lamps, law, and scrolls afforded matter for my wonder and enquiry.
The women were secluded from the men, being seated above in
galleries, and having their heads muffled with linnen after a
fantastical and somewhat extraordinary fashion.
“They have a separate burying-ground, full of sepulchres with
Hebrew inscriptions, some of them very stately. In one, looking
through a narrow crevice, I perceived divers bookes lye about a
corpse, for it seems when any learned Rabbi dies, they bury some of
his books with him. With the help of a stick I raked out some of the
leaves, written in Hebrew characters, but much impaired.”
“Aug. 28. I was brought acquainted with a Burgundian Jew who
had married an apostate Kentish woman. I asked him divers
questions; he told me, amongst other things, that the world should
never end, that our souls transmigrated, and that even those of the
most holy persons did pennance in the bodies of bruits after death,
and so he interpreted the banishment and salvage life of
Nebucodnezer; that all the Jews should rise again, and be lead to
Jerusalem.... He showed me severall bookes of their devotion, which
he had translated into English for the instruction of his wife; he told
me that when the Messias came, all the ships, barkes, and vessels