Sometimes popular resentment and the Church’s pressure reached a critical point, forcing the king to expel the Jews, not without demanding financial compensation from the bourgeois and/or confiscating some of the Jews’ money. The Jews were first expelled from the Kingdom of France (at the time hardly bigger than today’s Ile de France) in 1182, their property confiscated by Philip Augustus. Many took refuge in Flanders and Alsace. The latter, under Count Philippe, achieved such prosperity that the king grew jealous, to the point of recalling the Jews in 1198. The Jewish financiers were in fact weaving international networks; they knew how to make themselves indispensable by stoking princely rivalries.
Throughout the Middle Ages, the Church continued to condemn Jewish usury for its damage to the social fabric. The issue was central to the Fourth Lateran Council convened in 1215 by Innocent III. Five edicts issued by the council concerned the Jews, two of them condemning the usurers’ abusive practice of appropriating the properties of defaulting debtors. Decree 67 of the council said:
“The more Christians are restrained from the practice of usury, the more are they oppressed in this manner by the treachery of the Jews, so that in a short time they exhaust the resources of the Christians. Wishing, therefore, in this matter to protect the Christians against cruel oppression by the Jews, we ordain in this decree that if in future, under any pretext, Jews extort from Christians oppressive and excessive interest, the society of Christians shall be denied them until they have made suitable satisfaction for their excesses.” The pope complained that the Jews extort “not only usury, but usury on the usury,” that is to say, compound interest (on a second loan contracted by a debtor to pay a first loan).
Of course, throughout the thirteenth century, some Christians were also in the moneylending business despite the religious prohibition. In his Divine Comedy (begun in 1306), the Italian poet Dante would reserve for them one of the spheres of the most infamous of the nine concentric regions of hell, alongside sodomites, because like them they do violence to “the natural order” through sterile activity.
The edict of Innocent III had only a limited immediate effect, but under the reign of the son of Philip Augustus, Louis VIII (1223–1226), and especially his grandson Louis IX, also known as Saint Louis (1226–1270), the status of the Jews was marked by the growing influence of the Church—though the interests of the Crown were not forgotten. In 1223 a decree prohibited interest on loans made by Jews and asked the nobility to accept repayment of principal on behalf of the Jews. But this decree had to be republished in 1230, which proves that it was very imperfectly applied. Saint Louis was distinguished by his commitment to fully liberate France from Jewish usury, beginning by breaking the royal treasury’s dependence on the Jews. His contemporary and biographer William of Chartres depicts his concern “that the Jews should not oppress Christians by usury, and they shall not be authorized to engage, under the shelter of my protection, in such activities and infect my country by their poison.”158 In 1234, Louis IX freed his subjects from one-third of their debts to Jews, and ordered that the same share be returned to those who had already repaid their loans. Additionally, he prohibited imprisoning Christians or selling their property to pay off debts owed to Jews. In 1240, Jean I, duke of Brittany, expelled all Jews and released all his subjects from all debts, mortgages, or pledges contracted with them.
In 1306, Louis IX’s grandson Philip the Fair arrested and exiled the Jews, seizing their properties including the debts they held, without even doing the service to his subjects of freeing them from those debts. According to estimates, one hundred thousand Jews were exiled under harsh conditions. Philip had hitherto exploited the wealth of the Jews; he had imposed on them a new tax in 1292 and, three years later, seized their property, giving them eight days to redeem it. But in 1306, with his treasury empty, he decided to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs. Given that the kingdom had expanded since the first expulsion under Philip Augustus, the Jews were compelled to flee even further away. Many probably ended their journey in Poland, together with the German Yiddish-speaking Jews, called Ashkenaz (the Hebrew name for Germany). Since the thirteenth century, in fact, Poland constituted a Paradisus Judeorum and attracted several waves of Jews fleeing restrictions and persecutions. Beginning in 1264, the Statute on Jewish Liberties granted them the right to self-governance.
By the seventeenth century Poland, then the largest country in Europe, hosted the majority of the world’s Jews. Various theories have been put forward to explain the extraordinary population growth of this community. Some researchers cite a possible conversion of the Khazar kingdom (in present Kazakhstan) in the early ninth century,159 but the evidence is very thin, and the absence of any trace of Turkish influence in Yiddish makes this a risky hypothesis.160 In fact, it was after the Middle Ages that the Polish Jewish population seems to have exploded, thanks in large part to a widespread practice of early marriage. Between 1340 and 1772 the Jewish population of Poland grew 75 times larger, going from about 10 thousand to 750 thousand.161
In England, Edward I prohibited Jewish usury in 1275, then banished the Jews (about 16,000 people) from his kingdom in 1290 by his decree on The Statutes of Jewry: “Forasmuch as the King hath seen that divers evils and the disinheriting of good men of his land have happened by the usuries which the Jews have made in time past, and that divers sins have followed thereupon albeit that he and his ancestors have received much benefit from the Jewish people in all times past, nevertheless, for the honor of God and the common benefit of the people the King hath ordained and established, that from henceforth no Jew shall lend anything at usury either upon land, or upon rent or upon other thing.” Most of the expelled Jews emigrated to the big commercial capitals of Europe. To circumvent laws that restricted their commercial and political activity, many took the opportunity to nominally convert to Christianity. A significant number moved to Venice, which was already home to a large and prosperous Jewish colony, and became the banking capital of Europe. Some would return later to London in Christian disguise.
Truth be told, the Roman Catholic Church’s attitude toward moneylending and banking was ambivalent. The crusade spawned a huge increase in banking activity, since it required mortgages, interest-bearing loans, and bills of exchange at a scale previously unknown. Such activity became the specialty of the Knights Templar (the Poor Knights of Christ of the Order of the Temple of Solomon, by their full name), founded in the early twelfth century by nine soldier-monks from Troyes—a city with an influential Jewish community. Taking as their insignia the seal of Solomon (or Star of David) in the middle of the Cross Pattée (footed cross) the Templars were heavily influenced by the trade and finance of the Jews. In an 1139 bull, Pope Innocent II granted them exemption from paying tithes (church tax), full use of tithes they collected, and the right to keep any kind of booty seized in the Holy Land from conquered Saracens.
The Templars invented modern banking. They issued the check or money order called the “letter of credit” and their command posts served as safe-deposit boxes for kings and wealthy individuals. They provided transportation of funds secured by their reputation and warrior tradition. They also acted as officers to recover debts or safeguard property under litigation. The prohibition of usury was circumvented by “reciprocal gifts.” By seizing their debtors’ assets at death, they appropriated, in the middle of the thirteenth century, part of France’s territory and formed a state within the state. When French king Philip the Fair targeted the Jewish financial networks in 1306, he simultaneously attacked the Templars, who were an essential link in these networks.
The “Jewish question” became complicated in Europe when the Talmud became known to Christians. Written in Hebrew, it had been carefully concealed from public view, actually containing the statement: “The goyim who seek to discover the secrets of the Law of Israel commit a crime that calls for the death penalty” (Sanhedrin 59a). It was in 1236 that Nicolas Donin, a converted Jew who be
came a Dominican monk, gained an audience with Pope Gregory IX to convince him of the blasphemous character of the Talmud, which presents Christ as the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier and a prostitute (Sanhedrin 106a), capable of miracles only by sorcery, and not risen but “sent to hell, where he was punished by being boiled in excrement” (Gittin 56b).162 A disputatio (debate on the public square lasting sometimes several months) was organized in Paris in the presence of Blanche of Castile, between Donin and Rabbi Yehiel, during which the latter failed to convince his audience that the Talmud was talking about another Jesus and another Mary. Following these exchanges, Gregory IX publicly condemned the Talmud as “the first cause that keeps the Jews stubborn in their perfidy.” In 1242, more than 10,000 volumes were burned. Judaism stopped being perceived as the religion of the Old Testament, and began to be viewed as a threat to public order, since the Talmud preaches violence and deception against Christians.163
In the twelfth century, the prayer of Kol Nidre, solemnly declaimed three times the day before Yom Kippur, the holiday of forgiveness, was already in use in all Jewish communities, Sephardic as well as Ashkenazi: “All vows, obligations, oaths or anathemas, pledges of all names, which we shall have vowed, sworn, devoted or bound ourselves to, from this day of atonement (whose arrival we hope for in happiness) to the next, we repent, aforehand, of them all, they shall be deemed absolved, forgiven, annulled, void and made of no effect; they shall not be binding nor have any power; the vows shall not be reckoned vows, the obligations shall not be reckoned obligatory, nor the oaths considered as oaths.”164 For Jewish author Samuel Roth, this yearly ceremony in which every Jew, young and old, absolved himself before God of all his lies, perjuries, and betrayals of trust against Gentiles, has largely contributed to the Jews’ moral corruption for a millennium: “Can it be doubted what a fearful influence for evil this must exert on his character as a citizen and as a human being?” (Jews Must Live, 1934).165 This practice creates, among other things, unlimited tolerance for apostasy, since it declares Christian baptism inoperative. With each wave of expulsions, many Jewish families chose conversion rather than exile, while continuing to “Judaize” discreetly or covertly. The fifth edict of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) concerns the problem of crypto-Jews, that is to say, insincere converts.
The situation of Jews in the Middle Ages cannot be understood simply by examining their relationships with Christians; that external aspect is secondary to the internal structure of the community itself, whose most salient characteristic was the oppression by the “doctors of the law” on the masses of Jews in order to preserve them from any outside influence. The Talmud, conceived as “a wall around the Torah,” allowed the rabbis to “stand guard over the guard itself,” according to the Talmudic expression.166 Though Moses Maimonides attempted to reconcile faith and Aristotelian science in the Guide for the Perplexed (Moreh Neboukhim), his effort was violently rejected at the time, and his disciples ostracized, by community elites. “In 1232, Rabbi Solomon of Montpellier hurled anathemas [complete exclusion from the community, often leading to death] against all those who would read the Moreh Neboukhim or engage in scientific and philosophical studies,” reports the Jewish historian Bernard Lazare, who gave a vivid portrayal of medieval Jewish communities. “These miserable Jews, whom the whole world tormented for their faith, persecuted their own coreligionists more fiercely, more bitterly, than they had ever been persecuted. Those accused of indifference were condemned to the worst tortures; blasphemers had their tongues cut off; Jewish women who had relations with Christians were condemned to be disfigured, and their noses were removed.” Rationalists resisted, but they were an isolated minority. “As for the mass of Jews, they had completely fallen under the yoke of the obscurantists. They were now separated from the world, every horizon closed, with nothing left to nourish their minds but futile talmudic commentaries, idle and mediocre discussions on the law; they were enclosed and stifled by ceremonial practices, like mummies swaddled by their bands: their directors and guides had locked them in the narrowest and most abominable of dungeons. From there emerged a fearful bewilderment, a terrible decay, a collapse of intellectualism, a compression of the brain that rendered them unfit to conceive any idea.”167
Forced Conversions in Spain and Portugal
While the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe were living in complete cultural isolation, Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula were preparing to exercise a decisive influence on European affairs. Documented from the fifth century onward, this community flourished under the rule of Muslims, whose conquest they facilitated during the eighth century. Muslim Andalusia was a highly cultured society with a relatively peaceful coexistence between Muslims, Jews, and Christians. Many Jews exiled from France took refuge there between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, but Catholic Spain also received them. It is estimated that in the kingdom of Aragon in 1294, 22% of tax revenues were levied on the Jews, who made up only 3% of the population.
The situation of the Jews was particularly favorable in Castile during the reign of King Peter I (1350–1369), known as Peter the Cruel: “Don Pedro was, indeed, so surrounded by Jews, that his enemies reproached his court for its Jewish character,” writes Heinrich Graetz. The treasurer and advisor to the king, Samuel Ha-Levi, was a particularly powerful figure. Graetz relates his dubious role in the failure of Peter’s marriage with the very Catholic Blanche de Bourbon, a descendant of St. Louis, and in the civil war that followed. While his ministers were negotiating his marriage, the king fell in love with a certain Maria de Padilla. Samuel, and with him all the Jews of Spain, sided with Maria. “The reason assigned was that Blanche, having observed with displeasure the influence possessed by Samuel and other Jews at her husband’s court, and the honors and distinctions enjoyed by them, had made the firm resolve, which she even commenced to put into execution, to compass the fall of the more prominent Jews, and obtain the banishment of the whole of the Jewish population from Spain. She made no secret of her aversion to the Jews, but, on the contrary, expressed it openly. For this reason, it is stated, the Jewish courtiers took up a position of antagonism to the queen, and, on their part, lost no opportunity of increasing Don Pedro’s dislike for her. If Blanche de Bourbon really fostered such anti-Jewish feelings, and circumstances certainly seem to bear out this view, then the Jews were compelled in self-defense to prevent the queen from acquiring any ascendency, declare themselves for the Padilla party, and support it with all the means in their power.” The scheme was successful. “Samuel Abulafia, by the wisdom of his counsels, his able financial administration, and his zeal for the cause of Maria de Padilla, continued to rise in the favor of the king. His power was greater than that of the grandees of the realm. His wealth was princely, and eighty black slaves served in his palace.” Peter would ultimately poison his wife Blanche, but only after putting Samuel to death and confiscating his fortune. He was excommunicated by the pope and perished in the civil war against his brother Henry of Trastamara, backed by the famous Bertrand du Guesclin.168 But the power of the Jews decreased only temporarily. In 1371, the citizens complained in a petition to the new king of Castile that they controlled the cities.
At the end of the fourteenth century, episodic clashes throughout Spain degenerated into massacres. On June 9, 1391, a crowd gripped by a frenzy of killing and looting invaded the vast Jewish district of Seville. Jews could only escape it by taking refuge in churches and undergoing baptism. Violence spread like wildfire in Castile, then under the authority of a weak king, and from there to the entire Iberian Peninsula. The estimated number of victims in one year amounted to approximately fifty thousand deaths and tens of thousands of converts.
In the early fifteenth century, tensions continued to mount. The years 1412–1415 were marked by a new round of collective conversions: many were forced, but some were voluntary, with motives ranging from opportunism to sincere religious conviction (due to the preaching of the Dominican monk Vincent Ferrer in p
articular).169 In a quarter century (1391–1415), pressures, threats, and sermons made over a hundred thousand converts. Although church and Spanish law prohibited forced baptisms in theory, it still held those forced conversions legally irreversible.
Freed from the restrictions imposed on Jews, these converts, called “New Christians,” conversos, or marranos, experienced a meteoric socio-economic ascension. In the words of historian of Marranism Yirmiyahu Yovel: “Conversos rushed into Christian society and infiltrated most of its interstices. After one or two generations, they were in the councils of Castile and Aragon, exercising the functions of royal counselors and administrators, commanding the army and navy, and occupying all ecclesiastical offices from parish priest to bishop and cardinal. Those who wanted to keep a secret Jewish aspect of their identity would sometimes seek refuge in Catholic monasteries. The conversos were priests and soldiers, politicians and professors, judges and theologians, writers, poets and legal advisors—and of course, as in the past, doctors, accountants and high-flying merchants. Some allied themselves by marriage to the greatest families of Spanish nobility [. . .] Their ascent and penetration in society were of astonishing magnitude and speed.”170
This rise of the New Christians naturally generated hostility among ethnic Christians (called by contrast “Old Christians”). The former group not only practiced strict endogamy for the most part, sometimes within blood ties prohibited by the Church (marriage between first cousins or between uncle and niece),171 but also continued to “Judaize”: “Many converts,” writes Yirmiyahu Yovel, “effectively tried to keep—in the privacy of their homes and their clandestine behavior—a form of Jewish identity. They secretly observed some Jewish rituals, refrained as much as possible from eating forbidden foods, practiced silent prayer, murmured old formulas and Jewish blessings, and taught their children that they would be saved by the Law of Moses and not by that of Christ; they considered themselves captives in the ‘land of idolatry’ and awaited their own Messiah.” Many met secretly and developed codes and verbal masks. The biblical figure of Esther, the clandestine Jew, was particularly popular among the Judaizers; subsequent generations of Marranos would pray to “Saint Esther.”172
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