History of the Jews (39 page)

Throughout Europe, the onset of the Black Death, which spread northwards from the Mediterranean, added another universal layer to the anti-Semitic superstructure. Its causes were not understood, and its unprecedented impact—it killed between a half and a quarter of the population—inspired the belief that it was a
pestis manufacta
, a disease spread by human malice. Inquiry focused on the Jews, especially after terrified Jews confessed under torture. In September 1348 in the Castle of Chillon on Lake Geneva, Jews admitted that the plague was the work of one John of Savoy, who had been told by the rabbis: ‘See, I give you a little package, half a span in size, which contains a preparation of poison and venom in a narrow, stitched leathern bag. This you are to distribute among the wells, the cisterns
and the springs about Venice and in the other places where you go.’
¹¹³
The fantasy spread rapidly, especially as more Jews confessed under torture—in Freiburg, for instance, a Jew admitted that the motive was ‘because you Christians have destroyed so many Jews…and also because we too want to be lords, for you have lorded long enough’. Everywhere Jews were accused of poisoning wells. On 26 September 1248 Pope Clement
VI
issued a bull in Avignon contradicting the allegation and blaming it on the devil: he argued that the Jews were suffering as badly as any other element in the community. The Emperor Charles
IV
, King Peter
IV
of Aragon and other rulers put out similar statements. Nevertheless, the greatest wave of anti-Semitism since 1096 engulfed over 300 Jewish communities, especially in Germany, Austria, France and Spain. According to Jewish sources, 6,000 died in Mainz and 2,000 in Strasbourg.
¹¹⁴
Charles
IV
found he had to issue pardons to cities which murdered their Jews: ‘Forgiveness is [granted] for every transgression involving the slaying and destruction of Jews which has been committed without the positive knowledge of the leading citizens, or in their ignorance, or in any other fashion whatever.’ This pardon dates from 1350, by which time it was generally known that the Jews were not responsible. Unfortunately, once anti-Semitism spread, it stuck; once a neighbourhood learned to go for local Jews violently, the likelihood was that it would happen again. The Black Death set precedents everywhere, especially in German-speaking countries.

In the early Middle Ages, and even as late as the early fourteenth century, Spain was the safest Latin territory for Jews. For a long time it was a place where Jews and Christians were more likely to meet in debate than come to blows. Not that the notion of Christian and Jewish experts meeting in scholarly battle was Spanish. Thanks to the work of Hyam Maccoby the complex story of the debates is now better understood.
¹¹⁵
The process of public debate began at Paris in 1240 as a direct result of Pope Gregory
IX
’s ban on the Talmud. In his letter to the princes of Europe, he asked them to seize all the condemned books on the first Saturday in Lent, ‘while the Jews are gathered in the synagogue’, and place the haul ‘in the custody of our dear sons, the Dominican and Franciscan friars’.
¹¹⁶
Louis
IX
, a crusader and anti-Semite, was the only monarch to co-operate with Gregory’s campaign. The 1240 confrontation was not, therefore, a debate—Louis once said that the best way to argue with a Jew was to plunge a sword in him—so much as a trial of the Talmud, the prosecutor being Nicholas Donin, a former Jew, now a zealous Franciscan, who had incited Gregory to launch the campaign in the
first place. The Jewish spokesman, Rabbi Jehiel, was in effect the witness for the defence, and the ‘debate’ consisted of his interrogation. As Donin knew the Talmud well, he was able to take the Rabbi through all the passages in the Talmud—only a tiny proportion of the whole—to which Christians might or did object: those insulting Christ (i.e. describing Jesus in Hell drowned in boiling excrement) or blaspheming God the Father (showing him weeping or out-argued) or forbidding Jews to mix with Christians. On the last point, Jehiel was able to show that it was Christian law which really prevented intercourse, though it is true that most Jews in their hearts regarded the Latins as barbarians. Jehiel insisted: ‘We sell cattle to Christians, we have partnership with Christians, we allow ourselves to be alone with them, we give our children Christian wet-nurses, and we teach Torah to Christians—for there are now many Christian priests who can read Hebrew books.’
¹¹⁷
However, the books were duly burned in 1242. Official policy admitted that the Talmud was not heretical as a whole but rather contained blasphemous passages—thus being liable to censorship rather than destruction. The points made by Donin quickly became routine ammunition for clerical anti-Semitism.
¹¹⁸

In Spain, at any rate for a time, the debates were more genuine and covered a wide area. Were cathedrals better than the Temple? Should priests/rabbis marry? ‘Why are more of the gentiles white and handsome whilst most of the Jews are black and ugly?’, to which the Jews replied that Christian women had sexual intercourse during menstruation, so passing on the redness of blood to their children’s complexion, and also that when gentiles had sex ‘they are surrounded by beautiful paintings and give birth to their likeness’.
¹¹⁹
It was the Spanish, or rather King James
I
of Aragon, who staged by far the best of the debates, at Barcelona on 20-31 July 1263. The idea again came from an ex-Jew, Pablo Christiani (many Jewish converts chose the name Paul), and he was backed by Raymund de Penaforte, head of the Dominican Inquisition in Aragon and Master of the Order, and Peter de Janua, general of the Spanish Franciscans. The Jews had a sole spokesman, but the best: Nahmanides, learned, fluent, well-born, self-confident. He agreed to come to Barcelona to take part because he knew King James, who employed many Jews as officials, was well-disposed and anyway guaranteed him complete liberty of speech. James was a vast man, with many mistresses and illegitimate children, who had angered the Pope by repudiating his first wife and who did not hesitate to tear out the tongue of the Bishop of Gerona. He ignored papal demands to get rid of his Jewish bureaucrats.

The exact course of the debate is not clear, since the Christian
and Jewish accounts of it conflict. The Christian version shows Nahmanides caught in inconsistencies, defeated in argument, reduced to silence and finally fleeing in disorder. Nahmanides’ own account is clearer and much better presented. The Christian attack was designed to show, from aggadic and homiletical passages in the Talmud, that the Messiah had indeed appeared, that he was both human and divine and had died to save mankind, and that in consequence Judaism had lost its
raison d’être
. Nahmanides replied by contesting the meaning attributed to these passages, denying that Jews were obliged to accept the aggadah and insisting that the doctrine of the Messiah was not of paramount importance for Jews. He counter-attacked by arguing that the belief in Jesus had proved disastrous. Rome, once master of the world, had declined the moment it accepted Christianity ‘and now the followers of Mohammed have greater territories than they’. Moreover, he added, ‘from the time of Jesus until the present the world has been filled with violence and injustice, and the Christians have shed more blood than all other peoples’. On the Incarnation, he said: ‘The doctrine in which you believe, the foundation of your faith, cannot be accepted by reason, nature affords no grounds for it, nor have the prophets ever expressed it.’ He told the king that only lifelong indoctrination could persuade a rational person that God was born from a human womb, lived on earth, was executed and then ‘returned to his original place’.
¹²⁰
According to the Jewish account, the Christian clergy, aware that the debate was going against them, made sure the proceedings ended without a conclusion. The following Sabbath, the king attended the synagogue, made a speech, heard a reply from Nahmanides, and sent him home with a purse of 300
solidos
.

The likelihood is that both the conflicting accounts presented what each side would have liked to have said, rather than what it did say.
¹²¹
Some Jewish scholars have argued that Nahmanides’ version is a work of propaganda, and disingenuous too, since in his own writings he placed much more weight on aggadic interpretations than he admitted in the debate. According to this view, Pablo was well aware of the internal Jewish conflict between rationalists and anti-rationalists; the agenda of the debate was cleverly drawn up to exploit this and catch Nahmanides in contradictions or force him to deny previous views.
¹²²
But as Maccoby points out, much of the debate was at cross-purposes. There was such a variety of views about the Messiah in Judaism that it was almost impossible to be heretical on the subject.
¹²³
Judaism was about the Law and its observance; Christianity was about dogmatic theology. A Jew might be in trouble over a fine point of Sabbath observance which a Christian found ridiculous. On the other hand, a
Christian might be burned alive for holding a view of God which all Jews would see as a matter of legitimate opinion and controversy. Barcelona showed the difficulty Christians and Jews had in debating honestly the central point which divided their faiths because they could not agree what that point was.

Jews had learned from long experience to recognize the signs of impending peril. Nahmanides was reluctant to take part in the debate: the fact that it was being held at all was ominous. Such debates had nothing to offer Jews. But they were important to the Christian clergy, both as propaganda exercises for their own zealots and as fishing expeditions to discover Jewish dialectical weaknesses or vulnerable points they had not known existed. The year after the dispute, Raymund de Penaforte was head of a commission which examined the Talmud for blasphemy, and in 1265 took part in the trial of Nahmanides for publishing his account of the debate. He was convicted and, though only lightly punished by the king, decided to leave Spain for good and went to Palestine. Thus a great pillar of Spanish Judaism was removed.

In Nahmanides’ day the Jews in Spain could still with reason regard themselves as the intellectually superior community. Their skills were still extremely useful, if not quite indispensable, to Christian rulers. But the Christians were catching up fast, and by the end of the thirteenth century they had absorbed Aristotelianism themselves, had written their own
summae
, and in trade and administration were a match for anything the Jews could provide. During the fourteenth century the Jews, even in Spain, were in steady relative decline. Their economic position was eroded by anti-Semitic laws. Their numbers were depleted by forcible conversion. For the first time, moreover, it seemed to make sense for an ambitious and clever Jew to accept baptism willingly: he was joining a wider, progressive culture. The Jewish remnant took refuge in kabbalah, aggadic stories, superstition and poetry. It was the triumph of irrationality. The works of Maimonides and other rationalists were not exactly burned, but they became marginal. In the aftermath of the Black Death and the countless atrocities inflicted on Jews, it became the fashion in orthodox circles to blame rationalism and other sins against God for these calamities.

So Judaism, which in the eleventh and twelfth centuries had been in the intellectual forefront, turned in on itself. Maimonides had included belief in the Messiah as a Jewish article of faith but he had always deplored apocalyptic and messianism as the ‘myth of the rabble’. ‘Do not think’, he wrote in his
Mishneh Torah
, ‘that the
Messiah will have to work signs and miracles…. the Torah with all its laws and ordinances is everlastingly valid and nothing will be added to it or taken away from it.’ There would be ‘no departure from the normal course of things or any change in the ordained order’—any suggestions to the contrary in the Bible were mere ‘figures of speech’.
¹²⁴
With the increasing misery of Jewish communities, apocalyptic and messianism began to revive. Angels and devils multiplied. So did scruples and weird devotions. The Rabbi Jacob ben Yakar used to clean a space before the Ark with his beard; Rabbi Shalom in Austria ate meat dishes in one room and dairy food in another, and insisted that gentiles who brought him water wear white robes. There was a widespread belief that piety would hasten the Messiah and so shatter the legions of oppressors. The Jews launched an internal witchhunt against informers, who were cursed every Sabbath and sometimes executed if caught. They remained remarkably tolerant in some ways: in smaller communities, a Jew who felt he had been wronged could make what was termed ‘an authorized scandal’ by interrupting prayers or Torah-readings. But increasing resort was made to excommunications. There were degrees of punishment:
nazifah
, a mere seven-day exclusion;
niddui
, isolation from the community;
herem
, a still more drastic form of expulsion, which might mean intervention by Christian royal officers and seizure of the offender’s assets. Maimonides had listed the twenty-four offences which the sages said deserved
niddui
, ranging from insulting a scholar (even after he was dead) to keeping dangerous dogs. But as the Middle Ages progressed, punishments became more complex and severe and, under the influence of Christian procedures, excommunication itself developed into a dramatic and fearful ceremony. A severe
herem
was pronounced in the synagogue before the open Ark or while holding a Torah scroll, to the sound of the
shofar
; when the sentence was pronounced, the guilty man was anathematized and cursed, while all the candles were extinguished.

But internal discipline could not stop the haemorrhage of converts as the Christian pressure increased. Even by the close of the thirteenth century, the Christian kings of Aragon were being reported to Rome by their own bishops for favouring Jews, or not containing them vigorously enough. In 1282 the crown prince, the Infante Sancho, rebelling against his father, played the anti-Semitic card to rally the clergy to his side.
¹²⁵
Jews were progressively eased out of the royal service. After the Black Death disturbances, the whole position of the Jews in Spain began to deteriorate quite rapidly, as the blood libels and other anti-Semitic tales got a grip on the people. In Seville, for instance, there were anti-Semitic riots in 1378 and a positive explosion in 1391.