by Paul Johnson
Nor is this surprising, for in Palestine and the western diaspora the position of the Jews was much harder. In 313 the Emperor Constantine had become a Christian catechumen and ended state persecution. There followed a brief period of general toleration. From the 340s, however, Christianity began to assume some of the characteristics of a state church. The first edicts against pagan worship date from this time. There was a brief pagan reaction under the Emperor Julian in the 360s, followed by a harsh and systematic campaign to eradicate paganism altogether. Christianity was now a mass religion. In the eastern Mediterranean it was often a mob religion too. Popular religious leaders held vast torchlight meetings, at which angry slogans were shouted: ‘To the gallows with the Iscariot!’, ‘Ibas has corrupted the true doctrine of Cyril!’, ‘Down with the Judophile!’ These mobs were initially raised to threaten participants in church councils. But they were easily set to work smashing idols and burning pagan temples. It was only a matter of time before they turned on the Jews too. Christianity became the norm throughout the Roman empire in the late fourth century and paganism began to disappear. As it did so, the Jews became conspicuous—a large, well-organized, comparatively wealthy minority, well educated and highly religious, rejecting Christianity not out of ignorance but from obstinacy. They became, for Christianity, a ‘problem’, to be ‘solved’. They were unpopular with the mob, which believed that Jews had helped the authorities when the emperors persecuted Christians. They had greeted with relief the pagan revival under Julian, who is known in Jewish tradition not as the Apostate but as ‘Julian the Hellene’. During the 380s, under the Emperor Theodosius I, religious uniformity became the official policy of the empire, and a mass of statutes and regulations began to rain down on heretics, pagans and nonconformists of all kinds. At the same time, Christian mob attacks on synagogues became common. This was contrary to the public policy of the empire, since the Jews were a valuable and respectable element in society, who gave consistent support to duly constituted authority. In 388, a Christian mob, instigated by the local bishop, burned down the synagogue at Callinicum on the Euphrates. Theodosius I decided to make this a test-case and ordered it rebuilt at Christian expense. He was hotly denounced by the most influential of all the Christian prelates, Bishop Ambrose of Milan. He warned Theodosius in a letter that the royal order was highly damaging to the church’s prestige: ‘What is more important,’ he asked, ‘the parade of discipline or the cause of religion? The maintenance of civil law is secondary to religious interest.’ He preached a sermon in front of the emperor putting this argument, and the royal command was shamefacedly withdrawn.165
During the late-fourth and fifth centuries, Jews living in Christian societies had most of their communal rights and all their privileges withdrawn. They were excluded from state office and the army. Proselytism and intermarriage with Christians was punishable by death. It was never the aim of responsible Christian leaders to extirpate Judaism by force. St Augustine (354-430), the most influential of all the Latin theologians, argued that the Jews, by their mere existence, were part of God’s design, since they were witnesses to the truth of Christianity, their failure and humiliation symbolizing the triumph of church over synagogue. The policy of the church, therefore, was to allow small Jewish communities to survive in conditions of degradation and impotence. The Greek church, however, inheriting the whole corpus of pagan Hellenistic anti-Semitism, was more emotionally hostile. Early in the fifth century, the leading Greek theologian John Chrysostom (354-407) delivered eight ‘Sermons Against the Jews’ at Antioch, and these became the pattern for anti-Jewish tirades, making the fullest possible use (and misuse) of key passages in the gospels of St Matthew and John. Thus a specifically Christian anti-Semitism, presenting the Jews as murderers of Christ, was grafted on to the seething mass of pagan smears and rumours, and Jewish communities were now at risk in every Christian city.
In Palestine, from the early decades of the fourth century, Jerusalem and the other sites associated with Jesus were Christianized, and churches and monasteries established. Small Jewish communities survived, especially in Galilee, where the Talmud of the West was completed around the time of St Jerome (342-420), who established his own private monastic circle in Jerusalem and testified to the poverty and misery of the Jews. Shortly after his death, a band of Syrian monks under the fanatic Barsauma conducted a series of pogroms against Jewish Palestine, burning synagogues and entire villages. During the Dark Ages, indeed, Palestine became increasingly impoverished and depopulated as a result of religious conflict. Pelagianism, Arianism and later the Monophysite controversies divided the Christians themselves. Each tendency persecuted the other with ferocious zeal when it captured state power. In the fourth century, the Samaritans enjoyed a revival: at least eight new synagogues were built at this time. But their increase attracted the hostile attention of the Byzantine authorities. In 438 the Emperor Theodosius II applied the anti-Jewish statutes to them. Some forty-five years later they staged a rebellion, massacred Christian communities and burned churches. Byzantine armies put them down, and in the repression they lost their ancient sanctuary on Mount Gerizim, which became a basilica of the Blessed Virgin. Under the Emperor Justinian (527-65), a ruler of still stricter orthodoxy, who allowed citizenship only to the baptized, and hounded even Christians if they would not submit to the decisions of the Council of Chalcedon—as well as everyone else—the Samaritans rose again. The vengeance which followed was so bloody that they were virtually destroyed as a nation and a faith. The Jews lay low at this time and certainly gave the Samaritans no help. But in the first half of the seventh century, the Emperors Phocas and Heraclius, under pressure from monkish fanatics, who warned them their empire would be destroyed by the circumcised, tried to impose baptism on the Jews by force.
The Byzantine empire, enfeebled by its multitudinous religious disputes, invited invasion. It came first in 611 when the Persians broke into Palestine, taking Jerusalem three years later after a twenty-day siege. The Jews were accused of assisting them. But if, as the Christians alleged, the Persians had given, in return, a promise to restore the city to the Jews, they certainly did not keep their word. In any case, Heraclius retook the city in 629 and a massacre of Jews followed. But this was the last act of Greek power in Palestine. The same year, Mohammed completed the conquest of Mecca. The Byzantines were decisively defeated at the battle of the Yarmuk in 636, and within four years the Moslems occupied all Palestine and most of Syria too. Chalcedonians and Monophysites, Nestorians and Copts, Seleucians and Armenians, Latins and Greeks, Samaritans and Jews, were all collectively submerged beneath the flood of Islam.
Like Christianity, Islam was originally a heterodox movement within Judaism which diverged to the point where it became a separate religion, and then rapidly developed its own dynamic and characteristics. The Jewish presence in Arabia is very ancient. In the south, in what is now Yemen, Jewish trading interests date back to the first century BC, but in the north or Hijaz, it goes back very much further. One Arab historical legend says that Jewish settlement in Medina occurred under King David, and another puts it back to Moses. Babylonian inscriptions discovered in 1956 suggest that Jewish religious communities were introduced into the Hijaz in the sixth century BC, and they may have been there even before.166 But the first definite confirmation, in the form of Jewish names in tomb inscriptions and graffiti, does not go back further than the first century BC. At all events, during the early Christian era, Judaism spread in north Arabia and some tribes became wholly Jewish. There is evidence that Jewish poets flourished in the region of Medina in the fourth century AD, and it is even possible that a Jewish-ruled state existed there at this time. According to Arab sources, about twenty tribes in and around Medina were Jewish.
These settled oasis tribes were traders as much as pastoralists, and Islam was from the start a semi-urban trader’s religion rather than a desert one. But the desert was important, because Jews living on its fringes, or moving to it to escape the corr
uptions of city life, such as the Nazarites, had always practised a more rigorous form of Judaism and, in particular, had been uncompromising in their monotheism. That was what attracted Mohammed. The influence of Christianity, which would not have been strictly monotheistic in his eyes, was very slight, at any rate at this early stage. What he seems to have wished to do was to destroy the polytheistic paganism of the oasis culture by giving the Arabs Jewish ethical monotheism in a language they could understand and in terms adapted to their ways. He accepted the Jewish God and their prophets, the idea of fixed law embodied in scripture—the Koran being an Arabic substitute for the Bible—and the addition of an Oral Law applied in religious courts. Like the Jews, the Moslems were originally reluctant to commit Oral Law to writing. Like the Jews, they eventually did so. Like the Jews, they developed the practice of submitting points of law to their rabbis or muftis, soliciting a responsum, and the earliest responsa seem to have consciously adopted a Judaic formula. Like the Jews, the Moslems accepted strict and elaborate codes covering diet, ritual purity and cleanliness.
Mohammed’s development of a separate religion began when he realized that the Jews of Medina were not prepared to accept his arbitrarily contrived Arab version of Judaism. Had Mohammed possessed the skill and patience to work out an Arab halakhah, the result might have been different. But it is unlikely. One of the strongest characteristics of Judaism is the willingness of Jewish communities to exist in distant areas without the need for acculturalization. At all events, Mohammed was rebuffed, and he thereafter gave a deliberate new thrust to Islamic monotheism. He altered the nature of the Sabbath and changed it to Friday. He changed the orientation of prayers from Jerusalem to Mecca. He redated the principal feast. Most important of all, he declared that most of the Jewish dietary laws were simply a punishment for their past misdeeds, and so abolished them, though he retained the prohibitions on pork, blood and carcasses, and some of the slaughtering rules. All these changes made it quite impossible to bring about a merging of Jewish and Islamic communities, however much they might agree on ethical or dogmatic fundamentals; but, in addition, Islam soon developed a dogmatic dynamism of its own, and theological debate—leading to violent sectarianism—soon began to play a central role in Islam, as in Christianity.
Above all, Islam quickly created a theory and practice of forcible conversion, as the Jews had done in the time of Joshua, David and the Hasmoneans, but which rabbinic Judaism had implicitly and conclusively renounced. It spread with astonishing speed, to engulf the Near East, the whole of the southern Mediterranean, Spain and vast areas of Asia. By the early eighth century, the Jewish communities, which still retained precarious footholds in the Greek and Latin worlds, found themselves cocooned in a vast Islamic theocracy, which they had in a sense spawned and renounced, and which now held the key to their very survival. But, by now, they had developed their own life-support system, the Talmud, and its unique formula for self-government—the cathedocracy.
PART THREE
Cathedocracy
In the year 1168 an exceptionally observant Jewish traveller from Spain—probably a gem-merchant—visited the great Byzantine capital city of Constantinople. We know virtually nothing about Benjamin of Tudela save that he wrote a Book of Travels about his extensive journeys around the northern Mediterranean and the Middle East in the years 1159-72. It is the most sensible, objective and reliable of all travel books written during the Middle Ages, was published as early as 1556, thereafter translated into almost all European languages, and became a primary source-book for scholars of the period.1
Benjamin made careful notes on the conditions of Jewish communities wherever he stopped, but he seems to have spent more time in Constantinople than anywhere else, and his description of this great city, then by far the largest in the world, is particularly full. He found that there were about 2,500 Jews there, divided into two distinct communities. The majority, 2,000, were Jews in the rabbinical tradition, who accepted the Mishnah, the Talmud and the whole multi-layered superstructure of commentary. The remaining 500 were Karaites, who followed the Pentateuch alone, rejecting the Oral Law and everything which flowed from it. They had organized themselves as a distinct body since the eighth century and throughout the diaspora they were regarded by rabbinic Jews with such hostility that, says Benjamin, a high fence divided the two sections of the Jewish quarter.
Benjamin wrote that the Jews were ‘craftsmen in silk’ and merchants of all kinds. They included ‘many rich men’. But none was allowed by law to ride a horse, ‘except for Rabbi Solomon the Egyptian, who is the King’s doctor. Through him, the Jews find much relief in their oppression—for they live under heavy oppressions.’ Under the Justinian code, and subsequent statutes, the Jews of Byzantium, unlike pagans and heretics, enjoyed legal status. In theory at least, Jewish synagogues were legally protected places of worship. The state also recognized Jewish courts of law, and its magistrates enforced their decisions between Jews. Jews who went about their lawful business were supposed to be safe, since the law specifically forbade anti-Semitic acts and stated that ‘the Jew is not to be trampled upon for being Jewish and not to suffer contumely for his religion…the law forbids private revenge’.2 None the less, the Jews were second-class citizens; scarcely citizens at all, in fact. They lost their right to serve in government posts completely in 425, though they were forced to serve as decurions on city councils, as this cost money. The Jews were not allowed to build any new synagogues. They had to shift the date of their Passover so that it always took place after the Christian Easter. It was an offence for Jews to insist that their scriptures be read in Hebrew even in their own communities. The law made it as easy as possible to convert Jews, though the baptismal formula contained a statement by each Jewish convert that he had not been induced by fear or hope of gain. Any Jew caught molesting a convert was burned alive, and a converted Jew who reverted to his faith was treated as a heretic.3
Yet Benjamin suggests that popular hostility towards the Jews was as much occupational as religious: ‘Most of the hatred towards them comes because of the tanners who pour out their dirty water outside their houses and thus defile the Jewish quarter. For this the Greeks hate the Jews, whether good or bad, and hold them under a heavy yoke. They strike them in the streets and give them hard employment.’ All the same, concluded Benjamin, ‘the Jews are rich, kind and charitable. They observe the commandments of the scriptures and cheerfully bear the yoke of their oppression.’4
Benjamin of Tudela travelled through north-eastern Spain, Barcelona, Provence, and then by way of Marseilles, Gerona and Pisa to Rome. He visited Salerno, Amalfi and other south Italian towns, then crossed via Corfu to Greece, and, after seeing Constantinople, passed through the Aegean to Cyprus, then via Antioch into Palestine, and through Aleppo and Mosul into Babylonia and Persia. He visited Cairo and Alexandria, returning to Spain via Sicily. He noted Jewish conditions and occupations carefully, and though he describes one Jewish agricultural colony at Crisa on Mount Parnassus, the picture he gives is of an overwhelmingly urban people—glassworkers in Aleppo, silkweavers in Thebes, tanners in Constantinople, dyers in Brindisi, merchants and dealers everywhere.
Some Jews had always been town-dwellers, but in the Dark Ages they became almost exclusively so. Their European settlements, nearly all in towns, were very ancient. The First Book of Maccabees gives a list of Jewish colonies scattered through the Mediterranean. As the historian Cecil Roth put it, culturally the Jews could be termed the first Europeans.5 In the early Roman empire, there were distinctive Jewish communities as far north as Lyons, Bonn and Cologne, and as far west as Cadiz and Toledo. During the Dark Ages, they spread further north and east—into the Baltic and Poland, and down into the Ukraine. Yet though the Jews were widely scattered, they were not numerous. From being about eight million at the time of Christ, including 10 per cent of the Roman empire, they had fallen by the tenth century to between one million and one and a half million. Of course the population of all th
e former Roman territories fell during this period, but Jewish losses were proportionately much higher than the population as a whole. Under Tiberius, for instance, there were 50,000 to 60,000 Jews in Rome alone, out of a total population of one million, plus forty other Jewish settlements in Italy. In the late empire, the number of Italian Jews collapsed, and even by 1638 there were no more than 25,000 in total, only 0.2 per cent of the population. These losses were only partly due to general economic and demographic factors. In all areas, and at all periods, Jews were being assimilated and blending into the surrounding populace.6
Yet the social importance of the Jews, especially in Dark Age Europe, was much greater than their tiny numbers suggest. Wherever towns survived, or urban communities sprang up, Jews would sooner or later establish themselves. The near destruction of Palestinian Jewry in the second century AD turned the survivors of Jewish rural communities into marginal town-dwellers. After the Arab conquest in the seventh century, the large Jewish agricultural communities in Babylonia were progressively wrecked by high taxation, so that there too the Jews drifted into towns and became craftsmen, tradesmen and dealers. Everywhere these urban Jews, the vast majority literate and numerate, managed to settle, unless penal laws or physical violence made it impossible.
Indeed in Europe, the Jews played a critically important role in Dark Age urban life. The evidence is hard to come by but much can be gleaned from the responsa literature. In many ways the Jews were the only real link between the cities of Roman antiquity and the emerging town communes of the early Middle Ages—indeed, it has been argued that the very word commune is a translation of the Hebrew kahal.7 The Jews carried with them certain basic skills: the ability to compute exchange-rates, to write a business letter and, perhaps even more important, the ability to get it delivered along their wide-spun family and religious networks. Despite its many inconvenient prohibitions, their religion was undoubtedly a help to them in their economic life. The ancient Israelite religion had always supplied a strong motivation to work hard. As it matured into Judaism, the stress on work became greater. With the rise of rabbinic Judaism after 70 AD, its economic impact increased. Historians have frequently noticed, at different periods and in diverse societies, that the weakening of clericalism tends to strengthen economic dynamism. During the second century AD, clericalism virtually disappeared from Jewish societies. The Temple priests, the Sadducees, the teeming servitors of a state-supported religion all vanished. The rabbis, who replaced the clerics, were not a parasitic caste. It is true that some scholars were supported by the community, but even scholars were encouraged to acquire a trade. Rabbis as a whole were specifically enjoined to do so. Indeed rabbis were often the most assiduous and efficient traders. The routes by which they communicated their decisions and responsa were trading routes too. Rabbinical Judaism was a gospel of work because it demanded that Jews make the fullest possible use of God’s gifts. It required the fit and able to be industrious and fruitful not least so they could fulfil their philanthropic duties. Its intellectual approach pushed in the same direction. Economic progress is the product of rationalization. Rabbinical Judaism is essentially a method whereby ancient laws are adapted to modern and differing conditions by a process of rationalization. The Jews were the first great rationalizers in world history. This had all kinds of consequences as we shall see, but one of its earliest, in a worldly sense, was to turn Jews into methodical, problem-solving businessmen. A great deal of Jewish legal scholarship in the Dark and Middle Ages was devoted to making business dealings fair, honest and efficient.
