History of the Jews (38 page)

As an additional manifestation of Christology, Innocent launched a new cult of the eucharist. This in turn created yet another layer of anti-Semitism. In 1243, near Berlin, the Jews were accused of stealing a consecrated host and using it for their own evil purposes. This practice too fitted into the Christian view that the Jews knew the truth but fought against it. They did indeed believe that the host was Christ’s body: that was why they stole it and tortured it, making it relive Christ’s sufferings, just as they stole Christian boys and murdered them in fiendish rituals. As with all conspiracy theories, once the first imaginative jump is made, the rest follows with intoxicating logic. After 1243, cases of host-stealing were reported all over Latin Europe. They came to light, according to court cases, because the host in its agony produced miracles: it rose into the air, provoked earthquakes, changed into butterflies which healed cripples, gave forth angels and doves or—most commonly of all—screamed in pain or cried like a child.
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No plausible evidence to justify any of these slanders has ever been produced. Some accusations may have been the result of a genuine misunderstanding. For instance, in 1230 Jews were accused of forcibly circumcising a five-year-old boy in Norwich. Jews were imprisoned and fined when the case finally came to court in 1234, and it seems to have provoked a violent attack on Norwich Jews by citizens the following year. Around 1240 several Jews were hanged in connection with this case. The most likely explanation is that members of the same Jewish family were reclaiming the son of a convert.
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But most charges against Jews were pure inventions, and whenever a genuine ecclesiastical inquiry was held, its findings always exonerated the Jewish community.
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The slanders must, of course, be seen against the background of Jewish moneylending. It affected a very wide social spectrum. Evidence from thirteenth-century Perpignan in the south of France shows that villagers formed 65 per cent of the borrowers, though they borrowed only 43 per cent of the total sums; townsmen were 30 and 41 per cent; knights and nobles 2 and 9; clergy 1 and 5 per cent.
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The pattern in England was much the same. Large religious houses and the higher nobility used the Jews but on a comparatively small scale. The
big borrowers in both countries were the needy rural gentry—the class most likely to lead a wave of anti-Semitic activism. A squire with name and prestige but no money, and about to lose his lands, was just the man to whip up a mob. The whole of history teaches that money-lending leads to trouble in rural societies. A Jewish betrothal contract from thirteenth-century England shows that money lent at interest was expected to bring in not less than 12.5 per cent a year.
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This does not seem much by medieval standards. Unfortunately, as Lipman points out, lenders had very complex transactions among themselves, often forming syndicates, with layers of borrowing; and all activities were complicated by Judaic rulings, efforts to evade them, Christian rulings, and efforts to evade them too. The net effect was to raise the ultimate rate of interest the borrower had to pay and above all to produce a legal situation of such density that accusations of robbery were almost bound to ensue in the event of any dispute. Internal Jewish as well as Christian courts handled these matters. The records show: ‘Judas, Jew of Bristol, owes two ounces of gold for an inquisition made in a chapter of the Jews whether a Jew ought to take usury from a Jew’; or again Abraham ben Joshua of York told the ‘Justices of the Jews’ that ‘a Jew may take usury by a Christian hand, and if it seems unjust to his opponent, let him go before the masters of his law in chapter and implead him there, because matters of this sort touching his law ought not to be corrected elsewhere’.
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A city merchant could understand these things but not a rustic knight.

Kings in theory, and often in practice, stood to benefit enormously from a large and busy Jewish community. In twelfth-century England, the Angevin kings undoubtedly did well out of rich Jewish lenders. There was a special Exchequer of the Jews, which ran chests in each town with a Jewish community. Each chest was run by two Jews and two Christians, who kept a record of all debtbonds. At headquarters there was one Jewish as well as Christian judges, and a rabbi to advise.
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The king in effect took a cut of all Jewish business transactions, and he needed to know who owed what Jew which money. When Aaron of Lincoln, the most successful Jewish financier in medieval England, died in 1186, a special exchequer was set up to deal with his estate. By one of those ironies which glitter through all Jewish history, Aaron had financed the vast expansion programme of the ultra-rigorist Cistercian order by lending them the then-colossal sum of 6,400 marks in return for mortgages. The king inherited his debts, though some were resold to his son Elias.
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If windfalls like this had occurred more often, the kings of England would certainly have kept the Jewish communities in being. But
Aaron’s prosperity antedated the great anti-Semitic outbreaks of the 1190s, which destroyed the community in York and other places.
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Thereafter it became steadily more difficult for English Jews to make money. The anti-Jewish code of the Lateran Council in 1215 added to their burden. In England the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, one of the architects of Magna Carta, which itself had an anti-Jewish clause, tried to organize a boycott of Jewish business. The Jews were in economic decline in England throughout the thirteenth century. Aaron of York, who told the chronicler Matthew Paris he had paid the king over 30,000 marks, died impoverished in 1268.
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Under Edward
I
, a former crusader and a hammer of the Celts with an insatiable need for cash, the decline accelerated. To some extent the Jews’ role as lenders to the great had been taken over by the Knights Templar of Jerusalem and their European Commanderies, the first real Christian bankers. The Jews had been pushed downmarket into small-scale lending, coin-changing and pawnbroking. For Edward, it was no longer profitable enough to milk the Jews systematically; he was tempted to go in for the kill and a quick seizure of their assets. In 1275 he passed an anti-Jewish statute, making usury illegal; the crime was later linked to blasphemy, a yet more serious offence. In 1278 groups of Jews were arrested throughout the country. Many were taken to the Tower of London. One chronicler says 300 were hanged. Their property went to the crown and the sum realized tempted Edward to go further. The next stage was to accuse Jews of habitual coin-clipping. A dozen were hanged in Norwich for this offence. Finally, in the late 1280s, Edward found he needed a large sum in cash to ransom his cousin Charles of Salerno. He confiscated the property of his Gascony Jews, expelling them completely in 1289. The next year, alleging widespread evasion of the law against usury, he threw them out of England too, grabbing all of their assets. The richest Jew in Norwich yielded £300. Jews in eleven different towns produced a total of £9,100, of which eighteen families provided about £6,000. It was a disappointing haul, but by this time the Jewish community had shrunk to only half its maximum size—there were only 2,500 left to expel.
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By this time medieval Christian governments saw themselves as confronted with a ‘Jewish problem’, to which expulsion was a ‘final solution’. It had been tried before: in part of the Rhineland in 1012, in France in 1182, in upper Bavaria in 1276. The device worked in England, more or less, because of the Channel barrier, but in Continental Europe, with its thousands of straggling lordships, expulsion was difficult to enforce. None the less, governments were under constant ideological pressure to take anti-Jewish measures.
Innocent
III
had argued in his Lateran decrees that, because of their unscrupulous use of money power, the Jews had reversed the natural order—the free Christian had become the servant of the Jewish slave—and government must restore nature by imposing disabilities.
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So governments tried. From the twelfth century onwards, Jews became less useful to princes. Their trading and money-handling skills had been acquired by Christians. The age was a notable one for founding new towns, but the Jews were no longer needed as urban colonists—the Christians could do that for themselves. So authority looked less benignly on the Jewish presence which, thanks to the blood and ritual murder libels, became a source of frequent rioting They also, quite genuinely, began to fear the Jewish contribution to the spread of disturbing ideas. In the later Middle Ages, heresy was often linked to radicalism. Heretics occasionally had contact with learned Jews, who discussed scriptural texts with them and lent them books. The Jews always had books, often ones regarded by authority as subversive. When the church seized them, the Jews would ransom their books, like slaves. When their York community was massacred in 1190, they managed to get their books to Cologne, to be sold to the Jews there.
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In theory, the Jews were banned from universities, both by Christian law and by their own. But they congregated in university cities. Students, as always, were in the van of anti-Semitism. At Turin they had the right, on the first fall of snow of the winter, to pelt the Jews with snowballs unless they paid a ransom of twenty-five ducats; at Mantua the ‘fine’ was sweets and writing-paper, at Padua a fat capon. At Pisa, on the feast of St Catherine, the students put the fattest Jew they could find on the scales and ‘fined’ the community his weight in sweets. At Bologna the Jews had to provide a student banquet. Where there was a medical school, Jews had to provide corpses, or pay money, and this sometimes led to desecration of Jewish cemeteries.
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All this indicates that Jews were an accepted, if unpopular, part of the university community. They often taught there. In 1300, for instance, Jacob ben Machir became dean of the Montpellier medical school. In the early fifteenth century, Master Elias Sabot taught medicine at Pavia (and was summoned to England to treat the ailing Henry
IV
). Converted Jews were prominent on the campus throughout Christendom. Sometimes, as we shall see, converts became scourges of their former co-religionists; more often, especially if forced, they constituted a critical, questing, disturbing element within the intelligentsia. The church was by no means wide of the mark when it identified Jewish influences in the Albigensian movement or the Hussites in fifteenth-century Bohemia. Jews were active in the two forces which
finally broke the church’s monopoly, the Renaissance and Reformation. They were the fermenting yeast. The populist accusations hurled against Jews in the Middle Ages were all, without exception, fantasy. But the claim that they were intellectually subversive had an element of truth. The point was made by the Viennese-Jewish novelist, Jakob Wasserman, in his famous autobiography,
Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude
:

 

The unfortunate fact is that one cannot dispute the truth that the persecutors, promoted agents and volunteers alike, had something to go on. Every iconoclastic incident, every convulsion, every social challenge has seen, and still sees, Jews in the front line. Wherever a peremptory demand for a clean sweep is made, wherever the idea of governmental metamorphosis is to be translated into action with frenzied zeal, Jews have been and still are the leaders.
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The medieval Latin state did not permit them the luxury of leadership, but it could not wholly deny them the role of mentor.

Hence, during the second half of the Middle Ages, churchmen devised instruments to counter what they saw as Jewish subversion. Foremost among them were the friars. Dominicans and Franciscans came to dominate university life in the thirteenth century, and they also captured important bishoprics. They supervised every aspect of Jewish life in Latin countries. They took the view that Augustine’s relatively tolerant attitude, whereby the Jews were preserved as ‘witnesses’ and allowed to practise their faith, was no longer tenable; they wanted to remove all Jewish rights.
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In 1236 Pope Gregory
IX
was persuaded to condemn the Talmud and this proved in effect, though not in intention, a decisive shift from Augustinian tolerance.
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The friars did not begin as anti-Semites. St Francis had no animosity towards Jews, and St Dominic, according to testimony at his canonization process, was ‘loving to all, the rich, the poor, the Jews, the gentiles’.
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At first they concentrated on strictly theological issues and even tried to discourage ritual murder charges.

But the friars were coarsened by the urban environment on which they concentrated. They were aggressive proselytizers, to lapsed Christians, to the heterodox, not least to Jews. They held ‘missions’ in the towns, at which they beat the drum of orthodoxy and zealotry and stirred up rigorist enthusiam. They tended to open their friaries in or near the Jewish quarter, as bases for harassment. The Jews learned to fear them more than any other Christian group. They saw them as the incarnation of the scourge threatened by Moses in Deuteronomy 32:22, ‘those which are not a people’.
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Their policy gradually
became to convert the Jews or get them out. In England, the Franciscans were behind a royal decree which removed the right of Jews to buy urban freeholds and they may have been an element in securing their expulsion.
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Soon they turned to outright anti-Semitism. In 1247 two Franciscans helped to circulate a blood libel at Valréas which led to a bloody pogrom. In 1288, following a blood libel in Troyes, Dominicans and Franciscans united to provoke a massacre of local Jews.

Even in Italy, where attitudes to Jews were fairly tolerant even in the later Middle Ages, the Franciscans were a baneful force. There, the municipalities allowed Jews to open banks under regulation and in return for lump sums or an annual tax. The Jews survived because their interest-rates, at 15-20 per cent, undercut Christian ones. The Franciscans specialized in urban and mercantile problems and took a particular interest in moneylending. They kept close watch over the Jews and hounded them unmercifully at the slightest breach of the rules. The Franciscans preached love but it did not apply to the Jews as people: ‘In respect of abstract and general love,’ the Friar Bernardino of Siena laid down, ‘we are permitted to love them. However, there can be no concrete love towards them.’
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The Franciscans organized boycotts and set up ‘piety funds’ to undercut the Jews and drive them out of business; then they could raise a clamour for their expulsion. Some Franciscan anti-Semites, like John of Capistrano, ranged over a huge area, on both sides of the Alps, his preaching to mass open-air congregations often leading to pogroms. His disciple Bernardino de Fletre, a third-generation Franciscan agitator, conducted a mission at Trent in 1475 which produced accusations that the Jews had murdered a two-year-old boy. In the uproar that followed, the entire Jewish community was arrested, many tortured and executed, the rest expelled.