History of the Jews (43 page)

The Norsa case gives the impression of a vigorous group of Italian Jewish communities, well capable of defending themselves. Jews tended to thrive on their ability, like anyone else. There were some remarkable Jewish success-stories in sixteenth-century Italy. There was, for instance, the polymath Abraham Colorni, born in Mantua in 1540, who achieved an astonishing reputation as an engineer in the service of the Dukes of Ferrara. Like Leonardo da Vinci he specialized in military gear, designing mines, explosives, pontoons, collapsible boats, folding siege-ladders and forts. He manufactured an early machine-gun, producing 2,000 arquebuses which could each fire ten shots from a single priming. But he was also a distinguished mathematician, compiling tables and developing a new mirror-method for measuring distances. He was a brilliant escapologist. He wrote on secret writing and denounced the art of chiromancy. Not least, he was a notable conjuror, specializing in card-tricks. Not surprisingly, he was invited to the dazzling Prague court of Rudolph
II
, the wizard-emperor.
¹⁸

At the other end of the spectrum, however, were the wretched Jews who fell victims of the wide-ranging if intermittent war between Christians and Turks in the Mediterranean, and were sold into slavery. It was Jewish policy to keep on good terms with both sides. Jews fleeing from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s were well received in Constantinople and in return helped to create a local arms-industry. They reinforced an existing Jewish community in Ottoman Salonika until it became one of the largest in the world, over 20,000 Jews living in the city by 1553. There were Jewish traders throughout the Levant, the Aegean and the Adriatic, and at times the Jews of Venice, thanks to their connections in the Balkans and further east, were able to dominate a great portion of the city’s eastern trade. Jews operated from other Italian ports especially Ancona, Leghorn (Livorno), Naples and Genoa. There were very few commercial ships which did not have
a Jewish businessman on board. But all such were at risk from Ottoman and Christian warships and privateers. Jews were particularly valued as captives since it was believed, usually correctly, that even if they were themselves poor a Jewish community somewhere could be persuaded to ransom them.

If a Jew was taken by Turks from a Christian ship, his release was usually negotiated from Constantinople. In Venice, the Jewish Levantine and Portuguese congregations set up a special organization for redeeming Jewish captives taken by Christians from Turkish ships. Jewish merchants paid a special tax on all goods to support it, which acted as a form of insurance since they were likely victims. The chief predators were the Knights of St John, who turned their base in Malta into the last European centre of the slave-trade. They always had their eye on Jews and took them even from Christian ships on the grounds that they were Ottoman subjects. The knights kept their captives in a slave-barracks and sold them off periodically to speculators, who paid a price for Jews above the going rate; it was assumed all Jews were rich and would be ransomed. The Venetian Jews maintained an agent in Malta who noted the arrival of Jewish captives and arranged their release if funds were available. The Christian owners exploited the Jewish relief-system to demand exorbitant prices. One Judah Surnago, aged seventy-five, was shut up naked in a cellar for two months so that he was blind and unable to stand. The owner said he would pluck out his beard and eyelashes and load him with chains unless the Jewish agent paid 200 ducats. This was done, but the agent refused to pay 600 ducats for Aaron Afia of Rhodes, who was also ill treated by his speculator owner, pointing out that if the poor man died in captivity, the owner would lose his capital. This happened in the case of Joseph Levy, beaten by the owner to stimulate a higher price, who died under the lash.
¹⁹

This odious business went on for 300 years. In 1663, the old Cromwellian Philip Skippon described the Maltese slave-prison and noted: ‘Jews, Moors and Turks are made slaves here and are publicly sold in the market…. The Jews are distinguished from the rest by a little piece of yellow cloth on their hats or caps, etc. We saw a rich Jew who was taken about a year before and sold in the market for 400 scudi the morning we visited the prison. Supposing himself free, by reason of a passport he held from Venice, he struck the merchant that bought him. Whereupon he was presently sent hither, his beard and hair shaven off, a great chain clapp’d on his legs, and bastinadoed with 50 blows.’
²⁰
As late as 1768 the Jewish community in London sent £80 to help ransom a batch of Jewish slaves in Malta, and it was another thirty years before Napoleon ended the trade.

Because of their Ottoman connections, following the Spanish dispersal, the Jews were regarded by many Italians as enemies. That was a collateral reason for the ghetto system of segregation. They were popularly supposed, for instance, to have tried to help the Turks take Malta during the great siege of 1565. But the principal factor affecting Jewish destinies in sixteenth-century Europe was the Reformation. In the long run, the rise of Protestantism was of huge benefit to the Jews. It broke up the monolithic unity of Latin Europe. It meant that it was no longer possible for Christians even to aspire to a single-faith society. Thus it ended the exposed isolation of the Jews as the only nonconformist group. In large parts of Europe it brought about the destruction of the friars, the Jews’ most hated enemies, and the end of such institutions as clerical celibacy and monasticism, both of which worked heavily against Jewish interests.

The Reformation, building on the work of Renaissance scholars, also brought renewed interest in Hebrew studies and the Old Testament in particular. Many Catholic apologists blamed the Jews, and still more
marranos
, for aiding and inspiring Protestant thinkers. The Jews themselves circulated tales about powerful Christians, such as even the King of Spain, being descended from
marranos
and secretly working for Christian destruction; their chroniclers attributed the rise of Protestantism in Navarre, for example, to the
marrano
factor. But there is not much actual evidence that the interest of the Reformers in the Old Testament made them pro-Jewish as such. Such Christian Hebraists as Pico della Mirandola (1463-94), Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1522), Sebastian Münster, Professor of Hebrew at Basel after 1528, and Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560) were as strongly opposed to Judaism as any Dominican, though Melanchthon, for instance, criticized the blood libel and other anti-Semitic excesses. They rejected the Mishnah and the Talmud and indeed all Jewish commentary except parts of the kabbalah. Erasmus, the most important of them all, rejected the kabbalah too and considered Jewish scholarship exceedingly dangerous—more destructive of faith than the obscurantism of the medieval schoolmen: ‘Nothing more adverse and inimical to Christ can be found than this plague.’
²¹
He wrote to the Cologne inquisitor: ‘Who is there among us who does not hate this race of men?…If it is Christian to hate the Jews, here we are all Christians in profusion.’
²²

It is true that, right at the beginning, the Jews welcomed the Reformation, because it divided their enemies. True also that Luther, in particular, turned to the Jews for support in his new construing of the Bible and his rejection of papal claims. In his 1523 pamphlet,
Das
Jesus Christus ein geborener Jude sei
, he argued that there was now no reason at all why they should not embrace Christ, and foolishly looked forward to a voluntary mass conversion. When the Jews retorted that the Talmud conveyed an even better understanding of the Bible than his own, and reciprocated the invitation to convert, Luther first attacked them for their obstinacy (1526), then in 1543 turned on them in fury. His pamphlet
Von den Juden und ihren Lügen
(‘On the Jews and their Lies’), published in Wittenberg, may be termed the first work of modern anti-Semitism, and a giant step forward on the road to the Holocaust. ‘First’, he urged, ‘their synagogues should be set on fire, and whatever is left should be buried in dirt so that no one may ever be able to see a stone or cinder of it.’ Jewish prayer-books should be destroyed and rabbis forbidden to preach. Then the Jewish people should be dealt with, their homes ‘smashed and destroyed’ and their inmates ‘put under one roof or in a stable like gypsies, to teach them they are not master in our land’. Jews should be banned from the roads and markets, their property seized and then these ‘poisonous envenomed worms’ should be drafted into forced labour and made to earn their bread ‘by the sweat of their noses’. In the last resort they should be simply kicked out ‘for all time’.
²³
In his tirade against Jews, Luther concentrated on their role as moneylenders and insisted that their wealth did not belong to them since it had been ‘extorted usuriously from us’. The usurer, Luther argued,

 

is a double-dyed thief and murderer…. Whoever eats up, rots and steals the nourishment of another, that man commits as great a murder (so far as in him lies) as he who starves a man or does him in. Such does a usurer, and sits there safe on his stool when he ought rather to be hanging on the gallows, and be eaten by as many ravens as he has stolen guilders…. Therefore is there on earth no greater enemy of man, after the Devil, than a gripe-money and usurer, for he wants to be God over all men…. Usury is a great, huge monster, like a werewolf…. And since we break on the wheel and behead highwaymen, murderers and housebreakers, how much more ought we to break on the wheel and kill…hunt down, curse and behead all usurers!

 

Luther was not content with verbal abuse. Even before he wrote his anti-Semitic pamphlet, he got Jews expelled from Saxony in 1537, and in the 1540s he drove them from many German towns; he tried unsuccessfully to get the elector to expel them from Brandenburg in 1543. His followers continued to agitate against Jews there: they sacked the Berlin synagogue in 1572 and the following year finally got their way, the Jews being banned from the entire country. Jean Calvin, on the other hand, was more well disposed towards Jews, partly because he tended to agree with them on the question of lending at
interest; he reported Jewish arguments objectively in his writings and was even accused, by his Lutheran enemies, of being a Judaizer.
²⁴
None the less, Jews were expelled from Calvinist cities and the Calvinist Palatinate.
²⁵

Because of Protestant hostility, the Jews were driven into the arms of the emperor. Charles
V
, when wearing his Spanish hat, was no friend. He got the papacy to set up an inquisition in Portugal in 1543, threw many
marranos
out of Lisbon seven years later, expelled the Jews from Naples in 1541 and turned them out of some of his territories in Flanders. But in Germany he found the Jews useful allies and at the diets of Augsburg (1530), Speyer (1544) and Regensburg (1546) his protection prevented their expulsion. The Catholic prince-bishops also found the Jews a useful ally against their Protestant burghers, even if they were not prepared to admit it in public. Hence at the Peace of Augsburg, it was agreed to omit the ecclesiastical states from its central provision,
cuius regio, eius religio
(religion follows the faith of the prince), and this allowed Jews to remain in Germany. Josel of Rosheim, senior rabbi in Alsace, who acted as the Jewish spokesman in this tense period, denounced Luther as a ‘ruffian’ and called Emperor Charles ‘an angel of the Lord’; the Jews prayed for the success of the imperial army in their synagogues, and supplied it with money and provisions—thus setting a new and important Jewish survival-pattern.
²⁶

None the less, the Counter-Reformation, when it came, dealt harshly with the Jews as well as the Protestants. Traditionally the popes, like other princes, had used and protected Jews. There had been 50,000 Jews in Italy even before the Spanish expulsions, and the number was quickly swollen by refugees. The influx caused trouble, as in Venice, but on the whole papal policy remained benign. Paul
III
(1534-49) even encouraged the settlement of Jews expelled from Naples (1541) and six years later accepted
marranos
too, promising them protection from the Inquisition. His successor Julius
III
renewed the guarantees. In May 1555, however, Cardinal Caraffa, Grand Inquisitor and scourge of Jews, dissidents and heretics, became pope as Paul
IV
and immediately reversed the policy. Not only in Ancona but in many other Italian cities, papal and other, Christians and Jews were mixing freely, and he took Erasmus’ view that the influence of Judaism was a mortal threat to faith. Two months after his election, with the Bull
Cum nimis absurdam
he applied the Venetian solution in Rome, where the city’s Jews were driven on to the left bank of the Tiber and surrounded by a wall. In Ancona, at the same time, he carried out a purge of
marranos
, burning twenty-five of them in
public. The ghetto was quickly extended to all cities in the papal states and from 1562 the word became the official term used in anti-Jewish laws. There were great bonfires of Hebrew books, not only in Rome and Bologna but in Florence. Pius
V
(1566-72) was even fiercer, his Bull
Hebraeorum Gens
(1569) expelling Jewish communities, some of which had had a continuous existence since antiquity. Later popes varied, but it remained papal policy to ghetto Jews in the papal states and to put pressure on other rulers to do likewise. Thus the ghetto was introduced in Tuscany in 1570-1, in Padua 1601-3, in Verona in 1599 and in Mantua in 1601-3. The Dukes of Ferrara refused to comply, but they agreed to stop Jews printing books.
²⁷
In the end, Leghorn was the only city which did not create a ghetto of some kind.