I, Hezekiah, the bridegroom, will provide her with clothing, roof and food, supply her with all her needs and wishes according to my ability and to the extent I can afford. I will conduct myself towards her with truth and sincerity, with love and affection, I will not grieve and oppress her and will let her have food, clothes and marital relations to the extent habitual among Jewish men…. Sarna the bride heard the words of Hezekiah and agreed to marry him and be his wife and companion in purity, holiness and fear of God, to listen to his words, to honour and hold him dear, to be his helper and to do in his house what a virtuous Jewish woman is expected to do, to conduct herself towards him with love and consideration, to be under his rule, and her desire will be toward him.⁶²

The Bible said ‘God…hateth putting away’ (i.e. divorce),⁶³ but it was part of the strength of the extended, as opposed to nuclear, family system that divorce was easy provided the contract was properly drawn up. Genizah sources show it was commoner in Egypt than among European or American Jewish families until the second half of the twentieth century.⁶⁴ In divorce the Mishnah favoured the man: ‘A wife is divorced irrespective of her will, but the husband is divorced only when he is willing.’⁶⁵ Jewish women were of less account in Moslem Afro-Asia than in Christian Europe, but genizah records hint that they were often more powerful than their formal rights suggested. If they were beaten they could go to the courts, and sometimes a husband had to seek court protection from a dominant wife. Many letters make it clear that wives handled their husband’s business affairs when he was trading abroad. Women agents and brokers were common. One woman who figures in the records was in fact nicknamed ‘The Broker’, ran a business partnership, got herself expelled from a synagogue but figured on a public subscription-list, and died rich.⁶⁶

Women also played a role in the educational system, which was the real cement of the Jewish world. They had their own all-female classes–usually taught by blind scholars. Female Bible-teachers were common. A woman might also run a school, though this was rare. But the main educational effort was entrusted to men supported by the community. In fact the Jewish legal definition of a town as opposed to a village was that it had at least ten batlanim, ‘persons who do not work’, foregoing private profit to study on behalf of the community. At the end of the eleventh century there were twenty-nine in Fustat, fourteen in Cairo, including the rayyis or head of the Jews (under the Fatimids), the rabbenu (master), who was the chief scholar and religious authority, two judges, five yeshivah scholars, three ravs or masters, six cantors, one teacher and five beadles.67

The community revolved around the school-synagogue complex. Cairo-Fustat was regarded as lax, even luxurious. Maimonides, who hated music, disapproved of the singing of piyyutim during services but the people loved them and he ruled that it would cause too much bitterness to have them stopped. His son Abraham deplored the use of huge cushions and reclining pillows in synagogue, but here again the popular will prevailed. But even in lax Fustat, there were three services daily and four on the Sabbath.⁶⁸ Sabbath and dietary laws were kept in all their rigour. Jewish law was strict, and this caused a constant, though largely unrecorded, leakage into the host communities, but it was the discipline which also kept the Jews together and their heads high. Sabbath (root-verb shabath) meant to cease. All work was forbidden, Exodus specifically prohibiting kindling a fire and the Mishnah listing thirty-nine categories of labour used in making it. The Oral Law principle of erecting ‘fences round the law’, to prevent even accidental breaches, spread the area of prohibition still further. Thus, as you could not break a branch to kindle a fire, you could not ride a horse even if it did not belong to you (animals you owned had to be rested on the Sabbath), since you might have to break a branch to use as a whip. Since Jeremiah 17:21 forbade carrying burdens on the Sabbath, the Mishnah devoted two chapters to the quantitative minimums, and a vast amount of commentary discussed the difference between a private place in which some carrying was allowed, and a public one. Since Exodus 16:29 forbade a man to ‘go out of his place on the seventh day’, there was a huge volume of commentary on walks.⁶⁹

Paid public officials supervised these prohibitions. They played an even more important role in the dietary laws. As food was part of religion and eating a communion with God, the material had not only to come from a permitted species but a blessing pronounced during the killing, which had to be done in regulated form. Animals and fowl had to have their oesophagus and windpipe cut with a knife run three times over finger and three over nail to ensure it was unblemished and sharp. After slaughter, the meat was examined for signs of disease, especially of the lungs, and then veins containing blood picked out, together with prohibited fat and sinews in the hindpart. The shohet or official ritual slaughterer was appointed by the rabbis, and a genizah letter shows they examined him under three heads, religiosity, good conduct and scholarship–a good example, as Goitein has observed, of the tendency of Jewish crafts to ascend into the academic realm.70 After he had done his work, which included the removal of all blood, a guard ensured it was untouched until ready for cooking, at which point it was soaked in water for thirty minutes and salted for an hour to ensure no blood was left. The guard also supervised milking and cheese-making, which was governed by purity rules. To be kosher, an egg had to be unmarked by blood, have one round, one oval end, and its yolk surrounded by white. As the Bible prohibited seething a kid in its mother’s milk, commentators interpreted this as forbidding eating meat and milk foods together, unless each is in a proportion to the other of more than sixty to one. That in turn led to the use of two sets of cooking and serving dishes.⁷¹

Communal slaughtering thus helped to solidify the Jewish parish. Moreover, though a poor Jew might have to be strict in what he ate, he knew he would never want for food, since he could receive every Friday enough money (or equivalent) to cover fourteen meals for his family. From Temple times, the kuppah or collecting box was a pivot around which the Jewish welfare-community revolved, Maimonides stating: ‘We have never seen or heard of a Jewish community which does not have a kuppah.’⁷² There were three trustees, solid citizens, for each kuppah and, charity being mandatory in Jewish law, they had power to seize goods from non-contributors. There were carefully graded forms of welfare-provision, each with its own fund and administrators: clothes, schools for the poor, dowries for poor girls, Passover food and wine for the poor, orphans, the aged, the sick, burials of the poor, and prisoners and refugees. The notion of ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’ was one the Jews adopted before the birth of Christ and always practised even when the community as a whole was distressed. A solvent Jew had to give to the kuppah once he had resided in the community a month; to the soup-kitchen fund after three, the clothing fund after six and the burial fund after nine.⁷³ But as helping the poor was one way of showing gratitude to God, a substitute for the old Temple sacrifices, a pious Jew gave more than the mandatory minimum, and long, elaborately written lists of contributors were hung up in the synagogue at Fustat–for God to see, as well as men. The Jews hated welfare dependence. They quoted the Bible: ‘You must help the poor man in proportion to his needs’, but added, ‘you are not obliged to make him rich.’74 The Bible, Mishnah, Talmud, the commentaries were full of injunctions to work, to achieve independence. The grace after meals pleaded: ‘We beseech you, O God of our fathers, that you cause us not to be in need of the gifts of flesh and blood…but make us only dependent on your hand, which is full, open, holy and ample, so that we may not be ashamed.’ The sages commanded: ‘Flay a carcass in the market-place if necessary, receive thy wages and do not say “I am a great man, and it is beneath my dignity to do such a thing.” ’⁷⁵

Yet the genizah documents, such as lists of recipients and donors, show that in practice welfare had to be distributed on a large scale. At the time Maimonides arrived in Fustat (c. 1150-60), of 3,300 Jews, 500 were breadwinners and there were 130 households on charity; in the period 1140-1237, there was an average of one relief recipient for every four donors.⁷⁶ Poverty was often inescapable. In 1201-2, for instance, famine and plague cut Fustat’s population in half, leaving widows and children destitute. The genizah documents show that the jizya or poll-tax, the worst aspect of Moslem rule, was the real terror of the poor, enforced with great ferocity and relentlessness, relatives being held responsible for defaulters and travellers being forced to show tax-clearance certificates before leaving.

Always, in the background, there was the menace of anti-Semitism. It is described in the genizah documents by the word sinuth, hatred. The worst actual persecution occurred under the fanatical or mad Fatimid caliph al-Hakim, early in the eleventh century, who turned first on the Christians, then on the Jews. Another zealot-ruler was Saladin’s nephew al-Malik, who called himself caliph of the Yemen (1196-1201); a letter of August 1198 from the Yemen relates how the Jews were summoned to the ruler’s audience-hall and forcibly converted: ‘Thus all apostacized. Some of the pious, who [then] defected from Islam, were beheaded.’ Parts of Islam were much worse than others for Jews. Morocco was fanatical. So was northern Syria. Anti-dhimmi regulations, such as sumptuary laws, were often strictly enforced to gouge a financial settlement out of the Jewish community. A genizah document of 1121 describes decrees in Baghdad forcing Jews to wear:

two yellow badges, one on the headgear and one on the neck. Furthermore, each Jew must hang round his neck a piece of lead weighing [3 grammes] with the word dhimmi on it. He also has to wear a belt round his waist. The women have to wear one red and one black shoe and have a small bell on their necks or shoes…. The vizier appointed brutal Moslem men to supervise the Jewish males and brutal Moslem women to watch over the females and hurt them with curses and humiliations…. The Moslems were mocking the Jews and the mob and the youths were beating them up in all the streets of Baghdad.77

During most of this period Egypt was a relatively safe place for Jews, though Alexandria retained its long tradition of anti-Semitism dating from Hellenistic times. The writer of one genizah letter, describing an anti-Semitic outbreak there when a Jewish elder was falsely accused of rape, added: ‘anti-Semitism is continually taking on new forms and everyone in the town has become a kind of police inspector over the Jews to express their sinuth’.⁷⁸ But in Fustat and Cairo, the genizah papers show that Jews, Christians and Moslems lived mingled together and went into common business partnerships. Goitein concludes that the evidence does not support the view that in Egypt, at least, anti-Semitism was endemic or serious. But then Egypt under the Fatimids and Ayyubids was a refuge for persecuted Jews (and others) from all over the world.

If the treatment of the Jews under Islam varied, from place to place and from time to time, it was always bad under Byzantine rule. In Latin Christendom, it was tolerable until the preaching of the First Crusade in 1095; thereafter the position of the Jews deteriorated almost everywhere. As in Islam, the powers-that-be always favoured Jews, other things being equal. They were the best of all urban colonists, had useful trading networks, possessed rare skills, accumulated wealth quickly and were easy to tax. They flourished under the Carolingians. The Emperor Louis the Pious, around 825, gave them a number of charters as inducements to settle. The letters of Agobard of Lyons show that they not only enjoyed imperial protection but were allowed to build synagogues. There was periodic trouble–persecutions in France in 1007, for instance; forced conversions in Mainz in 1012. But on the whole Jewish communities did well and spread, especially throughout the Rhine basin, and from the Lower Rhine to England after 1066. As late as 1084 the ruling Bishop of Speyer gave them a charter of privileges, including a defensive wall round their quarter, as an inducement to settle in his city; and in 1090, the Emperor Henry IV renewed this charter and gave them a new one in Worms.

Yet there was a growing ambivalence in the official attitude to Jews. The secular lords tended to treat the Jews as personal property, to be farmed; not only their incomes but, in case of necessity, their capital too were there to be plundered. The ecclesiastical lords, as the rulers of cities, appreciated the economic value of the Jewish presence; as churchmen they abhorred it. Pope Gregory the Great (reigned 590-604) protected the Jews of Rome; but at the same time he created the ideology of a Christian anti-Judaism which was to lead directly to physical attacks on Jews. What he argued, in effect, was that the Jews were not blind to the claims of Christianity. They knew Jesus was the Messiah, was the son of God. But they had rejected Him, and continued to reject Him because their hearts were corrupt. And it had always been thus–the evidence against the Jews was all there in the Bible, which they had written themselves.79 Therein, of course, lay a terrible problem for the Jews. One of their greatest gifts was the critical faculty. They had always had it. It was the source of their rationality, one of the factors which brought them to monotheism in the first place, for their critical sense would not allow them to accept the follies of polytheism. But they were not only critical; they were, perhaps above all, self-critical. And they were, or at any rate had been in ancient times, superb historians. They saw the truth, sometimes the ugly truth, about themselves, and they told it in the Bible. Whereas other peoples produced their national epics to endorse and bolster their self-esteem, the Jews wanted to discover what had gone wrong with their history, as well as what had gone right. That is why the Bible is littered with passages in which the Jews are presented as a sinful people, often too wicked or obstinate to accept God’s law, though they know it. The Jews, in fact, produced the evidence for their own prosecution.

Christian apologists did not, on the whole, believe that Jews should be punished for the crime of their ancestors in killing Christ. They made a different point. Jewish contemporaries of Jesus had witnessed his miracles, seen the prophecies fulfilled and had refused to acknowledge him because he was poor and humble. That was their sin. But every generation of Jews ever since had shown the same spirit of obstinacy, as in the Bible. They were constantly concealing the truth, tampering with it, or suppressing the evidence. St Jerome accused them of cutting out references to the Trinity in the prophets. There were clues in Ezra and Nehemiah which, said St Justin, they had taken out. The old rabbis who compiled the Talmud knew the truth and even put it in the record in hidden form–that was one reason Christian debaters tried to use it for their arguments. Even the Jewish historian, Josephus, had written the truth about Jesus (it was in fact an obvious interpolation when the manuscript chain was under Christian control), but the Jews set their faces against it. It was not ignorance. It was malice. Here is a comment from the twelfth-century historian Gerald of Wales:

even the testimony of their historian, whose books they have in Hebrew and consider authentic, they will not accept about Christ. But Master Robert, the Prior of St Frideswide at Oxford, whom we have seen and was old and trustworthy…was skilled in the scriptures and knew Hebrew. He sent to diverse towns and cities of England in which Jews have dwellings, from whom he collected many Josephuses written in Hebrew…and in two of them he found this testimony about Christ written fully and at length, but as if recently scratched out; but in all the rest removed earlier, as if never there. And when this was shown to the Jews of Oxford summoned for that purpose, they were convicted, and confused at this fraudulent malice and bad faith towards Christ.80

The tragedy of this Christian line of argument was that it led directly to a new kind of anti-Semitism. That the Jews could know the truth of Christianity and still reject it seemed such extraordinary behaviour that it could scarcely be human. Hence the notion that the Jews were quite different to ordinary people, an idea reinforced by their laws about food, slaughtering, cooking and circumcision. There were stories that the Jews had concealed tails, suffered from a bloody flux, had a peculiar smell–which instantly disappeared when they were baptized. This in turn led to reports that Jews served the devil–which explained everything–and communed with him at secret, vicious ceremonies.

An accumulation of anti-Jewish feeling seems to have built up for some time before the preaching of the First Crusade at Clermont-Ferrand in 1095 unleashed it. The wave of crusading fervour had been provoked by countless stories of Christians being ill treated in the Holy Land. The Moslems were the chief villains of these tales, but Jews were often included as treacherous auxiliaries. It was an age of Christian fundamentalism, which produced a reformed papacy and rigorist orders like the Cistercians. Many believed the end of the world and the Second Coming were imminent. Men wanted to win themselves grace and remission of sin urgently. The assembling of a mass of armed men in north-west Europe provided opportunities for all kinds of antinomian behaviour and produced a breakdown in normal order. Men sold up to pay their crusading expenses. Or they borrowed money. They expected debts to be cancelled. The Jews, one of the few groups with working capital–ready cash–were in an exposed position. It is worth nothing that even fervent crusaders did not attack the Jews in their own neighbourhoods, whose inhabitants they knew to be ordinary people like themselves. But once on the march, they readily turned on the Jews of other cities. Then the Christian townspeople, caught up in the frenzy and the lust for loot, would sometimes join in. Local rulers were taken by surprise at the sudden fury and lost control.

We have an account of the massacres by the twelfth-century Jewish chronicler Rabbi Solomon ben Samson.81 They began in Rouen in France and in the spring of 1096 spread to the Rhineland cities. As the crusading host, often no better than a mob, gathered, any Jewish community on its line of march was in jeopardy. The Bishop of Speyer stopped the rioting quickly by using force and hanging the ringleaders: ‘For he was a righteous man among the gentiles, and the Ever-Present brought about the merit of our deliverance through him.’⁸² The Archbishop of Cologne did the same. But at Mainz the Archbishop had to flee for his own life. The Jews tried to fight but were overcome. The males were massacred or forcibly converted. Children were slaughtered to prevent them being brought up Christians, and the women, holed up in the archbishop’s castle, committed mass suicide–over 1,000 perished in all. The ancient, rich and populous Jewish communities of the Rhineland were destroyed, most Jews being killed or dragged to the fonts. Others, dismayed by the sudden, inexplicable hatred of fellow townsmen, scattered. They had learned that protective charters were no more use than (as they put it) ‘parchment for covering jars’.

The anti-Semitic ideology and folklore which helped to detonate the first crusader riots proved to be simply the plinth on which a vast superstructure of hostile myth and rumour was built. In 1144 there occurred an ominous incident at Norwich in East Anglia, then the richest and most populous area in England. There had been few if any Jews in Anglo-Saxon England. They came, along with many other Flemish immigrants, in the wake of William the Conqueror’s invasion. Half of them settled in London, but Jewish communities sprang up in York, Winchester, Lincoln, Canterbury, Northampton and Oxford. There were no Jewish quarters, but usually two Jewish streets, one for well-to-do Jews, the other for the poor: thus in Oxford, near St Aldates, there was Great Jewry Street and Little Jewry Lane.⁸³ Jews built themselves good houses, often of stone for security. Indeed at Lincoln two twelfth-century Jews’ houses (one perhaps used as a synagogue) survive, among the earliest in England to do so.⁸⁴ Norwich, which was settled by Rhineland Jews, did not have a large community: 200 at most, out of a total Jewish population in England which, at its maximum, was not more than 5,000. But its activities have been thoroughly explored by the researches of V. D. Lipman.⁸⁵ In Norwich the Jews lived near the market-place and castle (for safety), but were interspersed with Christians. Their chief activity was moneylending on the security of lands and rents. They were also pawnbrokers. Some English Jews were doctors.86 As in some other towns of the seventeen settled by Jews in England, there was one outstandingly rich family, the Jurnets. They can be traced through five generations. They had business partners in London, travelled, operated on a national scale and handled very large sums. Their big stone house in King Street was set apart from those of the other Jews. They patronized Talmud scholars and some were scholars in their own right.⁸⁷

In 1144 this little community was the centre of an appalling accusation. On 20 March, shortly before Easter and Passover, a boy called William, son of a substantial farmer and apprenticed to a skinner, disappeared. He was last seen going into a Jew’s house. Two days later, on the Wednesday of Holy Week, his body was found east of the city in Thorpe Wood, ‘dressed in his jacket and shoes with his head shaved and punctured with countless stabs’. Our knowledge of the details comes primarily from a hagiography, The Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich, compiled by Thomas of Monmouth, a monk of Norwich Priory, shortly afterwards.⁸⁸ According to Thomas, the boy’s mother Elvira and a local priest called Godwin accused the Norwich Jews of murder, saying the crime was a re-enactment of Christ’s passion. Later, Christian maidservants working in a Jewish house said the boy was seized after synagogue service, gagged, tied with cords, his head pierced with thorns, then bound as if on a cross, his left hand and foot nailed, his side pierced and scalding water poured over his body–they claimed they saw this through a chink in the door. A group of Jews were accused of the sacrilege before an ecclesiastical court. But the local sheriff claimed they were king’s property, refused to let them stand trial, and hustled them to safety in Norwich Castle.

At this point the first miracles connected with the boy’s body began to take place. Initially the local church authorities, like the secular ones, were hostile to the whole story. But two years later a monk who favoured the cult was appointed Bishop of Norwich and it is significant that his formal election in the priory was made the occasion for an anti-Jewish demonstration. The same year Eleazir, a local Jewish moneylender, was murdered by the servants of one Sir Simon de Nover, who owed him money. Slowly the legend expanded. The ritual murder of a Christ-substitute at Easter fitted the official view that the Jews knew the truth but rejected it. Then it was pointed out that the day the murder was discovered, 22 March, was the second day of the Jewish Passover. For this the Jews, as was well known, made special unleavened bread. One anti-Semitic tale was that all Jews suffered from haemorrhoids ever since they had called out to Pilate, ‘His blood be upon us and upon our children!’ They had been told by their sages that they could be cured only through ‘the blood of Christ’–that is, by embracing Christianity–but they took the advice literally. To get the necessary blood, with which to make their curative Passover bread, they had to kill a Christ-substitute every year. One Theobald of Cambridge, a convert from Judaism, married this tale to the murder of William and alleged that a congress of Jews in Spain picked out by lot, every year, the town where the ritual murder must take place and that in 1144 the lot fell on Norwich.89 Thus from this one crime flowed two distinct, but intermingled, accusations against the Jews–the ritual murder charge and the blood libel.⁹⁰

This episode was particularly devastating to Jewish security because William, by the very nature of his ritual death, acquired an element of Christ’s sanctity and power to work miracles. So they flowed–and each was a further proof of Jewish malice. Canonization, not yet centrally controlled by Rome, was conferred by popular clamour. And, since the body of a saint of this exciting type brought wealth to the church which owned it, by attracting pilgrims, gifts and endowments, accusations of ritual murder tended to be made whenever a child was killed in suspicious circumstances near a settlement of Jews–at Gloucester in 1168, Bury St Edmunds in 1181 and Bristol in 1183. The preaching of a new crusade always brought anti-Semitic sentiment to the boil. The Third Crusade, launched 1189-90, in which England figured largely because Richard the Lionheart led it, whipped up mob fury already aroused by the ritual murder charges. A deputation of wealthy Jews attending Richard’s coronation in 1189 was attacked by the crowd, followed by an assault on London’s Jewry. With the approach of Easter the next year, pogroms broke out, the most serious being at York, where the wealthy Jewish community was massacred, despite taking refuge in the castle. Norwich, of course, was one victim, a chronicler recording: ‘Many of those who were hastening to go to Jerusalem determined first to rise against the Jews…. So on 6 February all the Jews who were found in their own houses in Norwich were slaughtered; some had taken refuge in the castle.’⁹¹

This was another milestone in the destruction of Latin Jewry. The rise of organized heresy in the twelfth century led an increasingly authoritarian and triumphalist papacy to look with suspicion on any non-orthodox form of religious activity, not least on Judaism. The greatest of the medieval centralizers, Innocent III (pope 1198-1216), enacted a series of anti-Jewish decrees at the Fourth Lateran Council, 1216, and gave his sanction to the creation of two preaching orders, the Dominicans and Franciscans, specifically charged with consolidating the orthodox faith in the cities. The Dominicans were further mandated to put down heresy by inquiring into doubtful practices, interrogating and trying suspects, and handing over to the secular power for punishment those found guilty.

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.92

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.⁹³ But most charges against Jews were pure inventions, and whenever a genuine ecclesiastical inquiry was held, its findings always exonerated the Jewish community.⁹⁴

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.⁹⁵ 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.96 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’.⁹⁷ 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.⁹⁸ 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.⁹⁹

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.100 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 1268.¹⁰¹

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.¹⁰²

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.103 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.¹⁰⁴

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.¹⁰⁵ 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.106

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.¹⁰⁷ 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.¹⁰⁸ 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’.¹⁰⁹ 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’.¹¹⁰ 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.111 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.’¹¹² 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.

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.

These riots are often blamed on the great Dominican preacher Vicente Ferrer (c. 1350-1419), afterwards canonized. But his role was much more subtle, and more sinister from the Jew’s point of view. Indeed he helped to develop a pattern of anti-Semitism which was to reverberate thunderously in the twentieth century. It is true that his public preachings were often associated with anti-Semitic hysteria and outrages. But he did not encourage rioting; on the contrary–he deplored it. He publicly condemned the 1391 riots. He thought it wicked and un-Christian that the mob should take the law into its own hands. Instead, it was the duty of the state to act, and proceed lawfully. The riots showed clearly that the Jews posed a ‘problem’ to society to which a ‘solution’ must be found. Hence Ferrer and his clerical colleagues were responsible for a series of anti-Jewish policies approved by the Spanish-favoured antipope Benedict XIII, and for the selection as King of Aragon of Ferdinand I, who began to implement them. The war against the Jews was taken out of the hands of the mob and made the official business of church and government.126

It was against this background that the last of the great Jewish–Christian debates took place at Tortosa in 1413-14. It was not a genuine debate, more a public show–even a show-trial. Ferrer did not officially participate but he acted behind the scenes. His aim seems to have been to whip up popular enthusiasm for Christianity as the sole valid religion; to demolish the claims of Judaism in a big public spectacle; and then, with church, state and populace behind him, and the Jews demoralized, to effect a mass conversion. The Jewish leaders wanted to have nothing to do with it. But in many cases the rabbis had no choice but to attend. The antipope, whom Ferrer was later to disown, presided. Ferdinand, the king Ferrer had made, controlled the political framework. Some seventy seats were provided for cardinals, bishops and other grandees. Benedict announced right at the beginning that it was not proposed to hold a discussion between equal parties but to prove the truth of Christianity from talmudic sources. It was, in effect, the trial of the Jewish religion. The prosecuting counsel was Joshua Lorki, one of Ferrer’s converts, renamed Gerónimo de Sante Fé. There were about twenty Jewish participants, including the leading philosopher and apologist Joseph Albo, who later wrote a famous treatise on Jewish religious principles, the Sefer ha-Ikkarim, or Book of Principles. But they were given none of the freedom Nahmanides seems to have enjoyed at Barcelona. They were under threat from Gerónimo right at the start, both for ‘Jewish obstinacy’ and, ingeniously, for heresy against their own religion, which would have put them in the power of the Inquisition.¹²⁷

The ground covered was chiefly the familiar one of proving Jesus the Messiah from Jewish sources, though Original Sin and the causes of the Exile were also discussed, and many technical questions on Jewish texts were raised on the Christian side. The Christians were by now very well briefed for this kind of exercise and Gerónimo was both learned and clever. A total of sixty-nine sessions were held, over twenty-one months, and while the rabbis were in Tortosa, Ferrer and his friars were moving through their leaderless communities, making converts. In some cases the converts were brought to Tortosa for display and to provide a triumphant counterpoint to the Christian propaganda within the disputation. Rabbi Astruk ha-Levi protested vigorously as the debates dragged on:

We are away from our homes. Our resources are diminished and are almost entirely gone. In our absence great damage has occurred to our communities. We do not know the fate of our wives and children. We have inadequate maintenance here and even lack food. We have been put to extraordinary expenses. Why should people suffering from such woes be held accountable for their arguments, when contending with Gerónimo and others who are in the greatest prosperity and luxury?128

Rabbi Astruk contended that a point was reached when no further purpose was served by repeating the old arguments–it was a matter of what each man believed. What did a stage-managed debate against a background of hostility prove? ‘A Christian living in the land of the Saracens’, he said, ‘may be defeated by the arguments of a pagan or a Saracen but it does not follow that his faith has been refuted.’¹²⁹ During the later stages of the dispute, the Jews claimed they did not understand the questions and tried, whenever possible, to preserve a dignified silence.

None the less, Tortosa was a propaganda defeat for Judaism and to some extent an intellectual one too. For the first time in Spain, the Jews could be seen as forming enclaves of obscurantism and irrational backwardness, amid a superior culture. This, as much as the legal and economic pressure, and the fear generated by the high-pressure conversion drives of the friars, produced a stampede of converts. So to a great extent Ferrer succeeded in his object. Alas, converting Jews did not solve ‘the Jewish problem’. What it did, as the Spanish authorities rapidly discovered, was to present it in a new and far less tractable form. For the problem now became racial as well as religious. The church had always presented the Jews as a spiritual danger. Since the twelfth century, popular superstition had presented them as a social and physical danger too. But at least Jews, as such, were an open and public danger: they were known, they lived in recognizable communities, they were forced to bear distinguishing marks and dress. But when they became converts, conversos, or as the populace called them marranos, a term of abuse derived from the Spanish word for ‘swine’,130 they became a hidden danger. Spanish townsfolk knew that many, perhaps most, of the converts were reluctant. They ceased formally to be Jews from fear, or to gain advantage. As Jews they suffered from severe legal disabilities. As conversos they had the same economic rights, in theory, as other Christians. A marrano was thus much more unpopular than a practising Jew because he was an interloper in trade and craft, an economic threat; and, since he was probably a secret Jew, he was a hypocrite and a hidden subversive too.

The faithful rabbis warned what would happen. Rabbi Yitzhak Arama told converts: ‘You will find no rest among the gentiles, and your life will hang in the balance.’ Of the anusim (forcible converts) he prophesied: ‘One third burnt by fire, one third flying hither to hide and those who remain living in deadly fear.’¹³¹ Rabbi Yehuda ibn Verga saw the anusim as three pairs of turtle doves: the first pair would remain in Spain and be ‘plucked’, would lose their property, be slaughtered or burned; the second pair would be plucked too–would lose their goods–but would save their bodies by fleeing when bad times came; the third pair, who ‘will be the first to flee’, would save both body and goods.¹³²

This pessimistic view was soon confirmed by events. A Spanish Jew found he could not evade anti-Semitic hostility by converting. If he moved to another town, as many did, his Christianity became even more suspect. His Christian persecutor changed tactics. With conversion, anti-Semitism became racial rather than religious, but the anti-Semites found, as their successors were to do in Nazi Germany, that it was exceedingly difficult to identify and isolate Jews by racial criteria. They were forced back, as the Nazis were to be, on the old religious ones. In fifteenth-century Spain, a Jew could not be persecuted on religious grounds, because he was born a Jew, or his parents were; it had to be shown that he was still practising Judaism secretly in some form. The Castilian king Alfonso VII is alleged to have ruled that ‘No converso of Jewish origin be allowed to hold public office or enjoy any benefice in Toledo and its area of jurisdiction, since they are suspected in their fidelity to Christ.’¹³³

How could this suspicion be proved? In Ciudad Real, where the plight of the conversos has been examined in detail by the historian Haim Beinart, the first accusation that a ‘New Christian’ was secretly taking part in mitzvot dated from 1430. The ex-Jews were usually hard-working, anxious to get on, often clever; they rose in wealth and in the public service, and the trouble developed pari passu. In the 1440s, the first anti-conversos riots broke out in Toledo. In 1449 in Ciudad Real they lasted a fortnight. The conversos fought back, organized an armed band of 300, killed an Old Christian; in the struggle twenty-two were murdered and many houses burned. In 1453, Constantinople fell to the Turks and Byzantium, the old enemy of the Jews, was no more; many Jews believed that the Messiah would now come, and some conversos felt they could soon revert to their old religion.134 They even proposed to go to Turkey and live openly as Jews. There were riots in Ciudad Real in 1464, 1467 and 1474, the last particularly severe, perhaps engineered by a semi-professional group of anti-Semites who moved into a city, putting up at friendly religious houses. In 1474 the conversos of Ciudad Real lost houses and furniture, their flocks in the suburbs, their shops and stock in the city. Any list of debtors found by the rioters was destroyed–an invariable practice. The frightened conversos fled to the protection of the corregidor or governor in the citadel, but (states the official deposition), ‘The rioters stormed it, destroyed the central tower, killing many; the corregidor and many of the conversos were expelled; the town was closed to them and none permitted to re-enter.’¹³⁵ Some fled to the protection of a kind nobleman at Palma, near Córdoba, where they remained three years.

Riots against converts led to the same sequence of events as riots against Jews. The state was terrified of riots as a symptom of popular unrest. It could not prevent the riots, or even punish them adequately, so it sought to remove the cause by attacking the conversos. This was not difficult. Many were indeed secret Jews. A contemporary Jewish account says that those who fled to Palma observed mitzvot in public, kept Sabbath and festivals, fasted and prayed on Yom Kippur, observed Passover and celebrated other feasts ‘no less than the Jews and no worse than them’. One Franciscan fanatic, Alfonso de Espina, a converso himself, or the son of one, compiled a volume, Fortalitium Fidei, listing (among other things), twenty-five ‘transgressions’ by which treacherous conversos could be identified. These included not only secret Jewish practices but, perhaps more easily noted, evidence of bad Christianity: avoiding the sacraments, working on Sundays, avoiding making the sign of the cross, never mentioning Jesus or Mary, or perfunctory attendance at mass. To these he added all the crimes (such as stealing the host) popularly ascribed to Jews, together with some new ones, such as ‘holding philosophical discussions’. Again we see fear of the Jew, especially in his concealed form as a converso, fomenting disorder, dissent and doubt in society.

Fra Alfonso was the ideologue of the next phase of anti-Semitism. Having shown that it was indeed possible to identify the secret Jew not on a racial but on a religious basis, he advocated the solution: isolation and segregation. The populace should shun suspect conversos and the state should interpose physical barriers between them and the true Christian population. At the same time, church and state alike should combine to search out and destroy those among the conversos who, by practising Judaism, were legally heretics. He described in great detail the methods and punishments to be used, based on the old thirteenth-century Inquisition. But he hinted that a new kind, suited to Spain’s peculiar national needs, ought to be set up.136

In due course the state adopted all Fra Alfonso’s programme. Segregation was decreed by the Cortes at Toledo in 1480. At the same time a special Spanish inquisition was being created. The first inquisitors, including the vicar-general of the Dominicans, were appointed to operate a central inquiry for Andalucia, run from Seville. It began work in January 1481 and in the next eight years burned over 700 at the stake there. Some sources put the figure as high as 2,000.¹³⁷ During the same year the national inquisition replaced the traditional papal one in Aragon, and from February 1483 the entire organization was put under central control, its effective master being a Dominican prior, Tomás de Torquemada. In less than twelve years the Inquisition condemned about 13,000 conversos, men and women, for the secret practice of Judaism. The Inquisition sought all kinds of victims, but secret Jews were among the chief ones. In its whole existence it numbered a total of about 341,000 victims. Of these, more than 32,000 were killed by burning, 17,659 burned in effigy and 291,000 given lesser punishments. The great majority of those killed, some 20,226, suffered before 1540 under the first five inquisitors-general, and most of them were of Jewish origin. But the auto-da-fé continued to claim victims until 1790.¹³⁸

Prior Torquemada had become confessor to Queen Isabella of Castile in 1469, the year she married King Ferdinand of Aragon, leading to the unification of the two kingdoms in 1479. The anti-Jewish policy was to some extent a personal creation of these two monarchs. The Inquisition they set up had many opponents, internal and external. One was the queen’s secretary, Fernando del Pulgar, himself a converso. In a letter addressed to the primate, Cardinal-Archbishop Pedro Gonzales de Mendoza of Toledo, and intended for publication, he complained of the segregation edicts which prevented converts from living in Guipuzcoa and intermarrying with its people or learning the trade of mason; he admitted some converts reverted, but pointed out that in Andalucia there were, for instance, 10,000 young women conversos who had never left their parents’ homes and simply followed their fathers’ ways–to burn them all was extremely cruel and would simply force them to flee. To which associates of Torquemada replied that it was better to burn some innocents than allow heresy to spread: ‘Better for a man to enter heaven with one eye than go to hell with both.’ The only result was the demotion of Pulgar from royal secretary to royal chronicler.139

The papacy, too, objected to the Inquisition, partly because it was a royal and national instrument outside papal power, partly because it clearly offended natural justice. Sixtus IV in April 1482 demanded that Rome be given the right to hear appeals, that the accused should be told the names of hostile witnesses, and that in any event personal enemies and former servants should be disqualified as such, that repentant heretics should be allowed to confess and receive absolution instead of facing trial, and that they should be given the right to choose their counsel. Ferdinand flatly declined to do any of these things and in his reply insisted that it was essential he should appoint inquisitors, because when the system was run solely by the church, heresy had flourished. Popes continued to object, to little avail.¹⁴⁰

Both Ferdinand and Isabella claimed they were acting purely from orthodox and Catholic zeal. Both hotly rejected the charge, made by their enemies at the time and by historians since, that they wanted to confiscate the property of convicted heretics. Writing to her agents in Rome, Isabella protested that she had never touched ‘a single maravedi’ of confiscated property–that part of the money had been made into a dowry-fund for children of the Inquisition’s victims–and that whoever claimed she had acted for love of money was a liar: she boasted that, from her passionate devotion to the faith, she had caused the ruin of royal towns, emptied them of their inhabitants and desolated whole regions.¹⁴¹ Ferdinand, too, stressed the losses to the royal revenue, but said all the factors had been weighed carefully before the decision to launch the Inquisition on a national campaign was taken and that they had ‘set the service of our Lord God above our own service…[and] in preference to any other consideration’.¹⁴² The truth seems to be that both monarchs were driven by a mixture of religious and financial motives and also, more importantly, by the desire to impose a centralizing, emotional unity on their disparate and divided territories. But, most of all, they were caught up in the sinister, impersonal logic of anti-Semitism itself. The historical record shows, time and again, that it develops a power and momentum of its own.

Haim Beinart’s study of Ciudad Real reveals a pitiful pattern of human degradation. The object of concealing the names of hostile witnesses was to avoid family blood-feuds, but it gave the Inquisition its most evil aspect, particularly since many informers were motivated by malice, especially against rich or prominent men. Thus Juan Gonzales Pintado, who had been secretary to two kings, had naturally made enemies: he was burned alive for it. Still more wretched was the testimony of husbands against wives, and vice versa, sons against fathers, brothers against sisters. One of the worst informers was Fernan Falcon who testified in the posthumous trial of his own father, who seems to have been head of the local crypto-Jewish community: ‘All that is stated against him in the arraignment is true, and more yet-enough to fill over an entire sheet of paper.’ Falcon was a witness in all the Ciudad Real trials, 1483-5, his favourite descriptive phrase about an accused being ‘a Jew in every way’. Of one, Carolina de Zamora, he said ‘that he would see to it that they burned her even if he had to do thirty rounds in hell’; in fact the most damning witness against her was her own son, a monk, who swore to see her burned–though she got off with a flogging. Many of the women accused turned out to be learned as well as pious. Leonor Gonzales managed to escape to Portugal. The court gave her son, Juan de la Sierra, authority to go to Portugal and persuade her to return. He did so, she came back, was tried, convicted and burned alive. Some did escape. Others attempted it and were caught. The richest converso of the city, Sancho de Ciudad, bought a boat and sailed with his family for Valencia, but the winds drove them back, they were caught and all were burned in effigy. If a man was convicted posthumously, his remains were dug up and burned too–a symbol of what was supposedly happening to him in hell.143

A few got off. But usually the evidence was overwhelming. In Ciudad Real, in this period, it was only necessary to resort to torture twice. Many of those convicted were clearly strict Jews. One woman was trapped because she was seen lighting a candle on Sabbath eve to avoid kindling the next day; another because she declined to drink from the same cup as one who had eaten pork; a strict compliance with the laws of ritual slaughtering brought many to the stake. Not all got death sentences. A converso who abjured might get a term of imprisonment-possibly life-which could be commuted to a fine if he was rich. But he had to wear a sackcloth garment with two yellow crosses for at least a year, sometimes for ever, and if he failed to do so could be branded relapso and burned. He also had a special obligation to inform the Inquisition, failing which he was branded a ‘rebel against the church’, and burned. The list of positive and negative penalties imposed on such a man was enormous: he was banned from all benefices and offices down to town-crier, could not practise as a doctor, lawyer or notary, bear arms, receive moneys or goods, carve stone, own a tavern, ride a horse or travel by cart or carriage, wear gold, silver, pearls, jewels of any kind, silk and brocade, or grow a beard.144 These prohibitions were inherited by the children, females to the first generation, males to the second.¹⁴⁵

This ferocious persecution lasted twelve years in its initial impulse and spread to every Jewish community in Spain. The misery and loss was appalling but all the results served to do was to reveal the magnitude of the ‘Jewish problem’ in the eyes of authority. It coincided with the final phase of the conquest of the old Moorish kingdom of Granada, the reyos catholicos entering the fallen city triumphantly on 2 January 1492. The débâcle added yet more Jewish communities, as well as Moslem ones, to the Spanish state. Dealing with the Jews, open or secret, was now almost the principal activity of the government. All the gaols were full. Tens of thousands were under house arrest and often starving. Despairing of ending contact between conversos and Jews by the conventional means of inquisitorial investigation, egged on by rapacious followers anxious to loot, the reyos determined on a gigantic act of will to produce a ‘final solution’. On 31 March they signed an Edict of Expulsion, promulgated a month later, physically driving from Spain any Jew who would not accept immediate conversion.

There were then about 200,000 Jews still in the kingdom. It is an indication of the demoralized state of the Jewish community, and also of the attachment Jews nevertheless felt for Spain, the country where they had enjoyed most comfort and security in the past, that very large numbers, including the senior rabbi and most of the leading families, chose to be baptized. About 100,000 trudged across the frontier into Portugal, from which in turn they were expelled four years later. About 50,000 went across the straits into North Africa, or by ship to Turkey. By the end of July 1492 the expulsion was an accomplished fact.

The destruction of Spanish Jewry was the most momentous event in Jewish history since the mid-second century AD. There had been Jews in Spain from early classical times, perhaps even since Solomon’s day, and the community had developed marked characteristics. In the Dark and early Middle Ages, dispersed Jews tended to fall into two main groups: those in touch with the Babylonian academies and those linked to Palestine. There were two such communities, each with its synagogue, in Maimonides’ Fustat (and a third synagogue for the Karaites). From the fourteenth century, however, it is more accurate to speak of Spanish or Sephardi Jews–the term is a corruption of an old name for Spain–and Ashkenazi or German Jews radiating from the Rhineland.146 The Sephardis created their own Judaeo-Spanish language, Ladino or Judezmo, once written in rabbinic cursive script, as opposed to the modern (originally Ashkenazi) Hebrew cursive. They were learned, literary, rich, immensely proud of their lineage, worldly-wise, often pleasure-loving and not over-strict, following the liberal codification of Joseph Caro. They were a bridgehead of the Latin world in Arab culture and vice versa, and transmitters of classical science and philosophy. Sephardis were brilliant craftsmen in precious metals and stones, mathematicians, makers of precision instruments, accurate maps and navigational tables.

Now this large and gifted community was dispersed all over the Mediterranean and Moslem world and, from Portugal, in a second Sephardi diaspora, to France and north-west Europe. Many embraced Christianity and made their mark therein. Christopher Columbus, for instance, was legally Genoese but did not write Italian, and may have come from a Spanish family of Jewish origin. The name Colon was common among Jews living in Italy. He boasted of his connections with King David, liked Jewish and marrano society, was influenced by Jewish superstitions, and his patrons at the Aragonese court were mainly New Christians. He used the tables drawn up by Abraham Zacuto and the instruments perfected by Joseph Vecinho. Even his interpreter, Luis de Torres, was Jewish–though baptized just before they sailed for America. Thus Jews, having lost Spain in the old world, helped to recreate it in the new.¹⁴⁷ Sephardis went to France, too, and characteristic of their impact there was the glittering but urbane Michel de Montaigne, whose mother Antoinette Louppes was a direct descendant of Spanish Jews.¹⁴⁸ What Spain lost, others gained; and in the long run the Sephardi diaspora was to prove exceedingly creative and of critical importance in Jewish development. But at the time it seemed an unrelieved disaster for the Jews.

Nor was it the only one. At the close of the European Middle Ages–the Jewish Middle Ages were not to end until the last decades of the eighteenth century–the Jews had ceased to make, at any rate for the time being, a primary contribution to the European economy and culture. They had become dispensable, and were being ejected in consequence. The Spanish expulsions were preceded by many in Germany and Italy. Jews were expelled from Vienna and Linz in 1421, from Cologne in 1424, Augsburg in 1439, Bavaria in 1442 (and again in 1450) and from the crown cities of Moravia in 1454. They were thrown out of Perugia in 1485, Vicenza in 1486, Parma in 1488, Milan and Lucca in 1489 and, with the fall of the philosemitic Medicis, from Florence and all Tuscany in 1494. By the end of the decade they had been turned out of the Kingdom of Navarre too.

One expulsion provoked another, as refugees streamed into cities which already housed more Jews than their rulers now wanted. In Italy their only function at the end of the fifteenth century was pawnbroking and making small loans to the poor. Even in backward Rome the role of the Jewish bankers was declining.149 Christian bankers and craftsmen got the Jews banned as soon as their guilds were powerful enough. In Italy, in Provence and in Germany, the Jews had been virtually eliminated from large-scale trade and industry by the year 1500. So they moved into the less developed territories further east–first into Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, then on into Poland, to Warsaw and Cracow, Lwov, Brest-Litovsk and into Lithuania. The demographic axis of Ashkenazi Jewry shifted itself several hundred miles into east-central and eastern Europe. There was trouble here, too–there were anti-Jewish riots in Poland in 1348-9, in 1407 and in 1494; they were expelled from both Cracow and Lithuania the following year. All these movements and expulsions were interlinked. But because the Jews were needed more in the east, they managed to cling on; by the year 1500 Poland was regarded as the safest country in Europe for Jews, and it soon became the Ashkenazi heartland.

The degradation and impoverishment of the Jews in Europe, the fact that their contribution to the economy and culture had become marginal by the end of the Middle Ages, might have been expected to erode if not demolish the wall of hatred which had been built around them. But that did not happen. Like other forms of irrational conduct, anti-semitism did not respond to the laws of economics. On the contrary: like some vicious organism, it bred new mutations of itself. In Germany in particular it began to develop its own repulsive iconography–the Judensau.

The medieval mind delighted in reducing all aspects of the universe to imagery. The conflict between Christianity and Judaism had formed part of the vast panorama of life which swarmed, for instance, over the walls of the cathedrals. But the sculptors had represented it in purely theological terms. The favourite pair of images, often rendered with striking grace, was the triumphant church and the sorrowing synagogue. The medieval sculptor did not deal in anti-Semitic themes; he never portrayed the Jew as a usurer, a diabolical creature who poisoned wells, murdered Christian youth or tortured the host.

There were, however, other images used for Jews in the graphic arts: the golden calf, the owl, the scorpion. In Germany, towards the end of the medieval period, a new one began to emerge: the sow. The motif was not originally conceived as a polemical one, but it gradually came to symbolize all unclean persons, sinners, heretics, above all Jews.150 It seems to have been confined almost exclusively to areas affected by German culture; but there, it became the commonest of all motifs for the Jew, and one of the most potent and enduring of abusive stereotypes.¹⁵¹ It assumed an infinite variety of repellent forms. Jews were portrayed venerating the sow, sucking its teats, embracing its hindquarters, devouring its excrement. It offered rich opportunities to the coarser type of popular artist, presented with a target where none of the usual rules of taste and decorum applied and where the crudest obscenity was not merely acceptable but positively meritorious. Indeed, it is clear that the gross indecency of the image was the prime reason for its popularity over 600 years. With the invention of printing, it proliferated rapidly and became ubiquitous in Germany. It appeared not only in books but in countless prints, in etchings, in oils and watercolours, on the handles of walking-sticks, in faience and on china. Its endless repetition helped on a process which in Germany was to become of great and tragic importance: the dehumanization of the Jew. The notion that the Jew knew the truth but rejected it, preferring to work with the forces of darkness–and therefore could not be human in the sense that Christians were–was already well established. The Jew’s unnatural and inhuman relations with the Judensau drove it ever more firmly into the German popular mind. And if a particular category of person was not human, it could effectively be excluded from society. That, indeed, was what was already happening. For the walls of hatred, far from disappearing, were being replaced by real ones, as the European ghetto made its appearance.