History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  To the East, the Jews had been active in the Russian border territories, especially on the shores of the Black Sea, since Hellenistic times at least. Indeed, legends connect the arrival of Jews in Armenia and Georgia with the Ten Lost Tribes of the despoiled northern kingdom of Israel. In the first half of the eighth century, the Kingdom of the Khazars had been converted to Judaism. From early medieval times Jews had been active over a vast swathe of territory in southern Euro-Asia, both as traders and as proselytizers. In the 1470s, in the rapidly expanding Principality of Moscow, Jewish activities brought into existence a semi-secret sect which the authorities termed the Judaizers, and ferocious efforts were made to stamp it out. Tsar Ivan IV Vasilievich, ‘Ivan the Terrible’ (1530-84), ordered Jews who refused to embrace Christianity to be drowned, and Jews were officially excluded from Russian territory until the partition of Poland in the late eighteenth century.

  The Russian barrier to further eastern penetration led to intensive Jewish settlement in Poland, Lithuania and the Ukraine. As in western Europe in the Dark and early Middle Ages, the Jews served as a key element in a vast colonization process, marked by a rapid expansion in the agricultural and trading economy, and a phenomenal increase in population. In about 1500 there were only 20,000-30,000 Jews living in Poland, out of a total population of five million. By 1575, while the total population had risen to seven million, the number of Jews had jumped to 150,000, and thereafter the rise was still more rapid. In 1503 the Polish monarchy appointed Rabbi Jacob Polak ‘Rabbi of Poland’, and the emergence of a chief rabbinate, backed by the crown, allowed the development of a form of self-government which the Jews had not known since the end of the exilarchate. From 1551 the chief rabbi was elected by the Jews themselves. This was, to be sure, oligarchic rather than democratic rule. The rabbinate had wide powers over law and finances, appointing judges and a great variety of other officials. When he shared his powers with local councils, only between 1 and 5 per cent of Jewish householders had the right to vote.38 The royal purpose in devolving power on the Jews was, of course, self-interested. There was a great deal of Polish hostility to the Jews. In Cracow, for instance, where the local merchant class was strong, Jews were usually kept out. The kings found they could make money out of the Jews by selling to certain cities and towns, such as Warsaw, the privilege de non tolerandis Judaeis. But they could make even more by allowing Jewish communities to grow up, and milking them. The rabbinate and local Jewish councils were primarily tax-raising agencies. Only 30 per cent of what they raised went on welfare and official salaries; all the rest was handed over to the crown in return for protection.

  The association of the rabbinate with communal finance and so with the business affairs of those who had to provide it led the eastern or Ashkenazi Jews to go even further than the early-sixteenth-century Italians in giving halakhic approval to new methods of credit-finance. Polish Jews operating near the frontiers of civilization had links with Jewish family firms in the Netherlands and Germany. A new kind of credit instrument, the mamram, emerged and got rabbinical approval. In 1607 Jewish communities in Poland and Lithuania were also authorized to use heter iskah, an inter-Jewish borrowing system which allowed one Jew to finance another in return for a percentage. This rationalization of the law eventually led even conservative authorities, like the famous Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal of Prague, to sanction lending at interest.

  With easy access to credit, Jewish pioneer settlers played a leading part in developing eastern Poland, the interior of Lithuania, and the Ukraine, especially from the 1560s onwards. The population of western Europe was expanding fast. It needed to import growing quantities of grain. Ambitious Polish landowners, anxious to meet the need, went into partnership with Jewish entrepreneurs to create new wheat-growing areas to supply the market, take the grain down-river to the Baltic ports, and then ship it west. The Polish magnates—Radziwills, Sovieskis, Zamojkis, Ostrogskis, Lubomirskis-owned or conquered the land. The ports were run by German Lutherans. The Dutch Calvinists owned most of the ships. But the Jews did the rest. They not only managed the estates but in some cases held the deeds as pledges in return for working capital. Sometimes they leased the estates themselves. They ran the tolls. They built and ran mills and distilleries. They owned the river boats, taking out the wheat and bringing back in return wine, cloth and luxury goods, which they sold in their shops. They were in soap, glazing, tanning and furs. They created entire villages and townships (shtetls), where they lived in the centre, while peasants (Catholics in Poland and Lithuania, Orthodox in the Ukraine) occupied the suburbs.

  Before 1569 when the Union of Brest-Litovsk made the Polish settlement of the Ukraine possible, there were only twenty-four Jewish settlements there with 4,000 inhabitants; by 1648 there were 115, with a numbered population of 51,325, the total being much greater. Most of these places were owned by Polish nobles, absentee-landlords, the Jews acting as middlemen and intermediaries with the peasants—a role fraught with future danger. Often Jews were effectively the magnates too. At the end of the sixteenth century Israel of Zloczew, for instance, leased an entire region of hundreds of square miles from a consortium of nobles to whom he paid the enormous annual sum of 4,500 zlotys. He sub-let tolls, taverns and mills to his poorer relatives.39 Jews from all over Europe arrived to take part in this colonizing process. In many settlements they constituted the majority of the inhabitants, so that for the first time outside Palestine they dominated the local culture. But they were important at every level of society and administration. They farmed the taxes and the customs. They advised government. And every Polish magnate had a Jewish counsellor in his castle, keeping the books, writing letters, running the economic show.

  Indeed, by the end of the sixteenth century, there were few men of importance in east-central Europe who ‘knew not Joseph’. One great Jewish archetype had come into his own at last. By the last quarter of the century, the ideological thrust of the Counter-Reformation had spent itself. Philip II of Spain was the last of the committed princes, acting in close concert with the papacy. In his old age, in the spirit of Paul IV, he turned the Jews out of his Duchy of Milan (1597). But other princes backed the Catholic cause, or indeed the Protestant one, from reasons of self-interest. Or they became politiques, and compromised. The power and influence of the church declined; the authority of the state increased. The most influential legal and political writers—Montaigne, Jean Bodin, Lipsius, Francis Bacon—advocated a secular view of public policy. Nations should not be disturbed and divided by religious broils. It was the function of the state to achieve reasonable settlements and promote unity and prosperity. In this new atmosphere of toleration and realpolitik, sophisticated Jews were welcomed on their merits.40

  Thus the Republic of Venice, from 1577 onwards, authorized the Dalmatian marrano, Daniel Rodriguez, to create the new port of Spalato (Split), as part of a new policy, in which Jews played a notable part, of re-routing trade down the Balkan rivers.41 The Duke of Tuscany gave the Jews of Leghorn a charter. The Duke of Savoy acted to create Jewish settlements in Nice and Turin. The kings of France issued letters of protection to Jewish merchants. Henri IV even played cards with one, Manoel de Pimentel, whom he called ‘the king of the Gamblers’. In Amsterdam, the Calvinist authorities did not inquire into the religious views of marranos, or of Sephardi Jews who arrived in the 1590s, or indeed of Ashkenazi settlers who moved in from about 1620. They held their services, at first in private. They ran a Torah school from 1616, printed their own books from the 1620s. To the Dutch, they were a useful and well-behaved addition to the mercantile community.42 In Frankfurt, the community became so prosperous that general rabbinical synods were held there in 1562, 1582 and 1603.

  German-speaking towns and principalities which had expelled Jews earlier in the century readmitted them. The Habsburg Emperor Maximilian II allowed the Jews to return to Bohemia and in 1577 his successor, Rudolph II, gave them a charter of privileges. The old Jewish community of Vienna was reconstituted a
nd in Prague, where Rudolph had set up his court, there were 3,000 Jews by the end of the century. Famous teaching rabbis like the Maharal, Ephraim Solomon ben Aaron of Luntschits and Isaiah ben Abraham ha-Levi Horowitz lived in the Jewish quarter alongside merchant princes like Jacob Bassevi von Treuenberg, Mordecai Zemah Cohen and Marcus Meisel. Rudolph had a famous interview with the Maharal in his palace, and he patronized gifted Jews of all kinds, from astronomers to jewel-smiths. But he found Jews most useful of all as financiers. He made Meisel into the first ‘court Jew’—a type which was to dominate government finance in much of central Europe for 150 years, and remained of some significance until 1914.

  The great Jewish strength lay in the ability to take quick advantage of new opportunities; to recognize an unprecedented situation when it arose and devise methods of handling it. Christians had long learned how to deal with conventional financial problems, but they were conservative and slow to react to novelty. Towards the close of the sixteenth century, the principal novelty was the ever-growing scale and cost of war. Meisel supplied Rudolph, a leading collector, with objets d’art and scientific instruments but his main function was to help finance the war against Turkey. In return the emperor allowed him to loan money not only against actual pledges, such as jewellery, but against promissory notes and lands. The relationship between the two men—the clever, devout Jew and the selfish, self-indulgent Habsburg—was inevitably exploitative on both sides. When Meisel died in 1601, leaving over half a million florins, the state seized his estate on the grounds that his transactions, despite imperial permission, were illegal. But Meisel, no doubt foreseeing this, had already spent vast sums on the Prague community. He built a synagogue, to which Rudolph gave the privileges of denying entrance to the police, displaying the star of David and tax immunity; he endowed a Jewish cemetery; he set up a hospital; he even paved the streets of the Jewish quarter. He financed Jewish communities in Poland, and contributed to the entire range of Jewish funds, including those in Palestine. The epitaph on his Prague tombstone (which survives) is doubtless the truth: ‘None of his contemporaries was truly his equal in deeds of charity.’43 In effect, it paid the leading members of the Jewish community to be exploited by the crown, provided it was the only one and protected them from other predators.

  During this period at least the Habsburgs kept their part of the bargain. When the Frankfurt mob, led by Vincent Fettmilch, stormed the Jewish quarter in Frankfurt in 1614, expelling the Jews and plundering their houses, the Emperor Matthias declared the insurgents rebels and outlaws and hanged their leaders two years later. The Jews were restored to their homes, with imperial ceremony and new privileges, a highly satisfactory event which they celebrated annually thereafter as ‘The Purim of Vincent’. In turn, the Jews helped the Habsburgs. In 1618 the Thirty Years War broke out in Germany and during its opening phase the Habsburgs came close to destruction. It was the Jews, especially the financier Jacob Bassevi of Prague, who kept them in the saddle. Hence when the tide turned at the Battle of the White Mountain, and the imperial armies recaptured the city (1620), the Jewish quarter was the only one they did not pillage. The Emperor Ferdinand II himself presented Bassevi with two of the finest confiscated Protestant houses.

  This terrible conflict, which brought ruin to Germany, pushed the Jews to the very centre of the European economy. Huge armies had to be kept in the field for years at a time, and often right through the winter. The Jewish food-supply network in eastern Europe enabled them to provide the food and fodder. They set up foundries and powder-mills and scoured Europe and the east for arms. Above all, they raised ready money, often by finding novel ways of exploiting sluggish imperial assets. It was Bassevi who in 1622 set up a consortium, with Prince Liechtenstein and the imperial general Wallenstein, which leased the imperial silver mint. The emperor got a huge sum to finance the war, and Bassevi and his colleagues recuperated it by debasing the coinage. Bassevi was called Judenfürst (princely Jew) by his community; he was raised to the imperial peerage. On the other hand, his property was confiscated in 1631 and when he died in 1634, soon after his protector Wallenstein was assassinated, all his privileges were revoked. The life of a Jewish war-financier was vulnerable. But when had the life of any Jew not been vulnerable?

  When war came, especially the new kind of total war inaugurated by Wallenstein and Gustavus Adolphus, the need to win it—or just to survive—took precedence over ideology, religion, race and tradition. The Jews, with their extraordinary capacity to get their hands on scarce supplies and raise cash in a bleak and hostile world, soon made themselves indispensable to all sides. When the Swedes reversed the Catholic tide, and most of German Jewry fell under Lutheran rule, they began by penalizing the Jews with forced loans. But within a year, Jews were operating as principal contractors to the Swedish army. As with the Habsburgs, they supplied food, munitions and, above all, horses. Moreover, the Lutheran commanders found, as had the Catholic Habsburgs, that as the Jews were second-class citizens and often a persecuted minority, they were content to be paid in credit, protection and privileges—the last enabling them to make the cash for themselves. In due course, as more and more European powers intervened in the struggle, the Jews of the Rhineland and Alsace, of Bohemia and Vienna, supplied them all. In Emmerich, occupied by Dutch troops, Solomon Gomperz became rich by selling them food and tobacco. In Alsace, the Jews sold Cardinal Richelieu’s army horses and fodder. All these services brought privileged status in return. Richelieu, who controlled the entire maritime effort of France, gave the Portuguese marranos special status in the ports, though it was obvious they were Jews, not Christians. In 1636 Ferdinand II issued orders to his commanders that the Jews of Worms were not to be subjected to forced loans or billeting, or harassed in any way. In fact it was rare for either side to conscript Jews for service. Not only the imperialist commanders but the Swedes and Lutherans too strictly forbade any looting of Jewish quarters. Hence it is a curious fact that, during the Thirty Years War, for the first time in their history, the Jews were treated better, rather than worse, than the population as a whole. While Germany underwent the worst harrowing in its history, the Jews survived and even prospered. As the historian Jonathan Israel has put it: ‘There is not a scrap of evidence to show that central European Jewry declined at all in size during the Thirty Years War.’44

  In the closing stages of the war, court Jews were acting as provision-contractors for entire armies, though the first actual contracts for them to do so date only from the 1650s. Moreover, they were found to be just as useful in peacetime as in war. They became a permanent part of the absolutist princely state, raising the money for the gigantic baroque palaces and planned capital cities which were its hallmarks, and launching the mercantilist economic policies which kept it afloat. Jewish loans financed the great Karlskirche in Vienna and the splendid Schönbrunn Palace of the Habsburgs. Some Jews acted as virtual chief ministers to German princes, helping them to effect the concentration of political and economic power in the palace from which the Jews, as well as sovereigns, benefited. There were a score or more famous dynasties of court Jews. Three generations of the Gomperz family served the prince-bishops of Munster, five the Hohenzollerns. The Behrends served the court of Hanover, the Lehmanns Saxony. From another professional court family, the Fuersts, Samuel Fuerst was court Jew to successive Dukes of Schleswig-Holstein, Jeremiah Fuerst to the Duke of Mecklenburg and Israel Fuerst to the court of Holstein-Gottorp. The Goldschmidts served several German princes and the Danish royal family too. Indeed, German Jews, both Sephardi and Ashkenazi, were active at Scandinavian courts: the de Lima and the de Casseres families served the Danes, the de Sampaios the Swedes. The Kings of Poland employed the Lehmanns and the Abensurs, the Kings of Portugal the da Costas, the Kings of Spain the Bocarros.45

  Jewish skill in raising and deploying huge sums of cash played a decisive role in two of the greatest military confrontations of the second half of the seventeenth century: the Habsburgs’ successful resistance t
o the advance of Turkey into Europe and their subsequent counter-offensive; and the great coalition which halted Louis XIV’s attempt to dominate the Continent. Samuel Oppenheimer (1630-1703) played the leading role in both. He was Imperial War Purveyor to the Austrian monarchy during the 1673-9 struggle against France, and in Austria’s struggle against Turkey from 1682 he got the sole contract to supply her armies. He produced the uniforms and rations for the troops, paid their wages, supplied and fed their horses, ran the hospitals for their wounded and even built rafts to transport guns, horses and men down the river-systems. It was he, as much as anyone else, who saved Vienna during the frantic siege of 1683 when the emperor fled; it was he who played a decisive role in the siege and capture of Budapest (1686) and Belgrade (1689-98). In 1688 Oppenheimer was called on to equip and pay the armies raised to resist Louis XIV’s invasion of the Palatinate, so that for some years he was running the finances of a two-front war, marshalling the resources of a vast network of Jewish financial families, throughout Germany and the Netherlands, to raise the cash.