A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (24 page)

From Suleiman’s point of view, the incident was over. He had done what he could, and it was too late to do more; the victims were dead. But from the
conversos
’ point of view, the incident was not over. Some
conversos
who had fled Ancona wanted all merchants to boycott the port
and go to Pesaro, the main port in the duchy of Urbino, instead. They had the support of the duke of Urbino, who defied the pope’s demand that the duke return all
conversos
to Ancona. But it was impossible for a handful of refugees to organize a boycott without help.

Judah Faraj, one of the refugees, sailed to the Ottoman Empire with a letter describing the
conversos
’ plight. His first stop was Salonika in what is now Greece. Jewish merchants there agreed to support the boycott. Next he traveled to Constantinople, where he met with Doña Gracia and her nephew. She immediately called a meeting so that Faraj could tell his story to the city’s rabbis and other community leaders. They too agreed to boycott Ancona for the next eight months—until Passover in the spring of 1557. During that period, all goods that would have been shipped to Ancona were sent to Pesaro.

Doña Gracia transferred all of her business to Pesaro; she also wrote to prominent Jews throughout the Ottoman Empire asking them to join the boycott. Ancona soon felt the results of her efforts. Some merchants went bankrupt. Goods that could not be shipped piled up in warehouses and on the wharves. Jews as well as Christians were harmed by the boycott. On the other hand,
conversos
in Pesaro rejoiced. It was an amazing moment—for the first time in history, a group of Jews, Christians, and Muslims had joined together to express outrage at an injustice.

In the end, however, the boycott failed. Carrying out a boycott is difficult even with today’s instant communications; in the 1550s, it was almost impossible—partly because people’s goals differ. In the end, their internal quarrels sabotaged the effort. But the idea of the boycott offered hope at a time when things looked hopeless for many Jews in western Europe. It also revealed the power of a commitment to working together.

Before long, the port of Ancona was busy again. The town now had its own ghetto. Its purpose, like those in other Italian cities, was not to punish Jews but to lead them to conversion.

Even before the boycott of Ancona was organized, the conflict between Protestants and Catholics had grown more and more deadly. Compromises no longer worked. In 1552, Charles V had become so disillusioned that he retired to a monastery and turned over the throne of the Holy Roman Empire to his brother Ferdinand. Ferdinand did not reach an agreement with the Protestant princes until 1555. That agreement allowed each prince to decide which church would be the official, or state, church in his
domain. In reaching that agreement, the Holy Roman Empire acknowledged that there might be more than one source of religious authority and more than one recognized church within the empire. It was a step toward toleration in the sense of allowing the presence of others without actively opposing them.

The divisions that shook the Holy Roman Empire affected other countries as well. People everywhere were making up their own minds about religious questions, and some were forming their own churches. Although many Christians in what are now Germany and Scandinavia remained Lutherans, other leaders were emerging who did not necessarily share all of Luther’s views.

Among those leaders was John Calvin, a French lawyer who had become a Protestant in the 1530s. Forced to flee France because of his beliefs, Calvin settled in Geneva, Switzerland, where he established a theocracy—a state governed by the godly, in this case Calvinists. In time, Calvin’s ideas became popular in the Netherlands, Scotland, and even France, as well as Switzerland. These were places where few Jews lived; most had been expelled generations earlier.

As quarrels among Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and other Protestant sects intensified, they led to a series of wars that devastated much of the continent for nearly 100 years—from 1550 to 1648. These were more than religious wars; they were also struggles for political domination of the Holy Roman Empire. Each group seemed incapable of tolerating, let alone living with, the others. Each was convinced it was waging a war against heresy. As the fighting continued, villages were burned, towns were looted, and men, women, and children were murdered. There seemed no end to the violence. Hundreds of thousands of people were forced into exile.

Calvinists in particular experienced persecution and exile. These refugees were finding it increasingly difficult to interpret Jewish misfortunes as an expression of God’s wrath. Some now identified with the Israelites of the Hebrew Scriptures and began to imagine a covenant with God that included both Christians and Jews. Their views spread by way of France and the Netherlands to England and Scotland and eventually to North America.

In 1556, the Netherlands, one of the most Protestant regions of Europe, was under the rule of the Catholic king of Spain. When he organized an inquisition, the Dutch revolted and a religious war began. When it finally ended, the southern provinces (present-day Belgium) remained under Spanish rule, and the north (the present kingdom of the Netherlands,
which included both Holland and Zeeland) considered itself a Protestant country, even though it was home to many Catholics. With the independence of the northern provinces came public clamor for a new right: the right to follow one’s own religious beliefs regardless of anyone else’s views.

For the first time, ordinary people had the right to freedom of conscience. Hundreds of refugees flocked to the new country—including many Jews. But those Jews had few rights until 1657, when the government of the United Netherlands took a stand similar to the one the Ottoman Empire took in 1556: it demanded that other nations recognize Dutch Jews as citizens of the Netherlands and treat them accordingly. In doing so, the government was also taking the first steps toward toleration in the modern sense of the word by acknowledging the rights and beliefs of others. It was a toleration that probably grew in part from weariness with war and a strong sense that persecution was bad for business.

In the Netherlands, toleration was a decision made by rulers; it was not a God-given right. Only a few people in the 1600s believed it was such a right. Among them was an English minister named Roger Williams who immigrated to Britain’s North American colonies in 1631. In a book published in England, he called the alliance of church and state “a bloody tenent of persecution.” He believed that when the “wall of separation” between the “Garden of the Church” and the “Wilderness of the World” breaks down, the only way to set things right is to rebuild that wall.
¹⁵
In 1635, Williams was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for having such “erroneous and very dangerous” opinions.

To Williams, who later founded the colony of Rhode Island, “mere toleration” was not enough. He advocated total “freedom of conscience” and insisted that it be extended to all. He believed that Christianity would flourish only under a government that had the courage to guarantee liberty for “diverse and contrary consciences.” It was a lonely position to take in the 1600s, but his stand would gain more support in the 1700s and beyond.

In 1790, George Washington, the first president of the United States, wrote a letter to a Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island. In that letter he described the new nation as giving “bigotry no sanction” and “persecution no assistance.” A growing number of Jews and non-Jews welcomed those words. They considered a government willing to protect all of its citizens their best protection. But to many others, toleration remained a dangerous idea.

(1200s–1666)

At a time when much of western Europe was in the midst of religious wars, the rulers of Poland and the Ottoman Empire offered many minorities a safe haven. In both places, rulers actively encouraged outsiders of different backgrounds to settle in their territory. Jews were among the thousands who piled their belongings onto ships, ox-drawn wagons, or handcarts and made their way to a new land. Some of those people were fleeing persecution, war, and famine; others were attracted to the possibility of a better life in a more welcoming place.

THE MIGRATION OF JEWS TO POLAND AND THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE (1200S–1500S)

In the thirteenth century, the centers of Jewish life in Europe were mainly in the west. By 1500, those centers had shifted to the east—to Poland and the Ottoman Empire. That shift was the direct result of 200 years of expulsions and an increasingly violent antisemitism in the west.

Poland’s leaders were the first to recruit outsiders. Their efforts began in the 1200s, when Poland was a land ravaged by the repeated invasions of Tartars, Mongols, and other nomadic tribes from central Asia. The invaders had devastated the countryside and destroyed villages and towns. Poland needed to rebuild, but at the time few Poles had the skills, tools, or freedom needed to revive the economy. So Polish kings and princes recruited artisans, merchants, bankers, and builders from other countries by offering them more freedom and independence than they had in their native lands.

Many responded enthusiastically. Most of the new arrivals came from other parts of Europe, particularly cities in what is now Germany. They received special charters that allowed them to live under their own laws and customs. Krakow, Lublin, Lwow, and Brest were a few of the cities in Poland that operated under these charters in the thirteenth century and later.

Like immigrants throughout history, the newcomers arrived with more than knowledge, skills, and experience; they also came with attitudes, values, and heartfelt beliefs. Those beliefs included the notion that competition was evil. Many believed that the amount of wealth in the world was fixed; it could not be increased or decreased. They claimed, therefore, that a competitor could succeed only by stealing their business and their livelihood. The newcomers were not the only ones to regard their rivals as potential thieves. Many Poles held similar views.

As a result, both newcomers and established merchants and artisans tried to eliminate competition by denying their rivals the right to buy and sell goods or even to live in a particular city or town. Both focused on religious minorities—Jews, Muslims, and even Christians who belonged to the Armenian and Greek Orthodox Churches. (Most people in Poland were Roman Catholic.) For the most part, rulers in other parts of Europe had supported such efforts to thwart competition, but Polish rulers in the 1200s did not.

Poland was not a united country in the thirteenth century. It was divided into dozens of principalities and duchies. Each had its own laws and its own ruler. And as in other parts of Europe, nearly all of these regions limited the rights and privileges of citizenship in a city or town
to burghers—Christian merchants and artisans who owned property in a city or town. Nevertheless, Poland’s rulers had no interest in limiting the rights of Jews and other minorities in order to satisfy the burghers. Some rulers protected minorities out of a sense of simple fairness. One king justified a decree that gave Jews and non-Jews equal trading rights by noting that Jews “pay the same taxes and carry the same burdens as non-Jews.”
¹
Others were frank about their need for the goods and services Jews provided. Jews in Poland helped establish trade with other countries, lent money to build roads and ports, and found ways to turn salt mines, forests, and other resources into flourishing industries.

Poland’s rulers also saw their support of Jews as a way of balancing and sometimes curbing the growing power of the burghers. Kings and other nobles had little interest in allowing anyone to monopolize the sale of horses, spices, iron, or other goods. After all, competition tends to keep prices down—and nobles were consumers as well as rulers.

In 1264, one of these rulers—Prince Boleslaw of Great Poland and Kalisz—issued a charter that placed Jews directly under his rule rather than under the laws and restrictions of whatever city they happened to live in. Their right to settle in a place came directly from the prince. Like charters issued in western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the one issued by Boleslaw defined his obligations toward Jews. In exchange for their taxes, he agreed to provide them with his personal protection. Anyone who attacked a Jew not only faced the usual punishment for the crime but also had to pay an additional fine to the royal treasury.

Many of the rights and privileges provided in this new charter were similar to those Jews had once had in other parts of Europe. These included the right to own and inherit property; engage in lawful trade; travel within the borders of the country without paying a special tax or duty; determine who will be welcomed into one’s home (no one could demand hospitality without the host’s consent); remain a Jew (Christians could not force Jews to convert); and live under Jewish law (if there was a dispute between a Jew and a Christian, each party had the right to argue its case according to its own laws).