The great Sephardi diaspora, from Spain in 1492, from Portugal in 1497, set Jews in motion everywhere, for the arrival of refugees in large numbers usually led to further expulsions. Many Jews, reduced to near destitution, denied entrance to cities from which Jews had already been banned, took to peddling. It is no coincidence that the legend of the Wandering Jew assumed mature form about this time. The story of a Jew who had struck Christ on his via dolorosa, and so been condemned to wander until the Second Coming, first appeared in a Bolognese chronicle in 1223; Roger of Wendover recorded it five years later in his Flowers of History. But it was in the early decades of the sixteenth century that the Wanderer became Ahasuerus, the Jewish archetype pedlar, old, bearded, ragged, sad, a harbinger of calamity.1 The Bishop of Schleswig claimed he saw him in a church in Hamburg in 1542, and as the hundred or more folktale versions circulated in print, he was seen repeatedly: at Lübeck in 1603, Paris in 1604, Brussels in 1640, Leipzig in 1642, Munich 1721, London in 1818. He became the subject of a vast literature. There were, of course, innumerable, genuine wandering Jews: it was the Jewish predicament in the Renaissance and after, to become again ‘strangers and sojourners’, like Abraham.
One such wanderer was Solomon ibn Verga (c. 1450-c. 1525), a native of Malaga, thrown out of Spain, then Portugal, who came to Italy in 1506 and wandered there. We do not know where, if anywhere, he finally settled; but he spent some time in Rome. There he wrote a book called Shevet Yehuda, the Rod of Judah, asking, in effect, Why do men hate Jews? This essay has some claim to be called the first work of Jewish history since Josephus’ Antiquities 1,400 years before, for Ibn Verga describes no less than sixty-four persecutions of Jews. In writing it he signalled the first sign, albeit a faint one, of a return of Jewish historical self-consciousness.
It was evidence of the pitiful Jewish predicament in Christian Europe that Ibn Verga could not get his book published in his lifetime, and it was first printed about 1554 in Turkey. But, all the same, Ibn Verga was a man of the Renaissance, a rationalist, a sceptic, an independent mind. He was strongly critical of the Talmud, he mocked Maimonides, he parodied the views of Judah Halevi. Using the form of imaginary dialogues, he derided much Jewish scholarship. If the Jews were downtrodden, it was to a great extent their own fault. They were proud but at the same time too passive and trustful in God; hopeful and over-obedient, they neglected both political and military science and so were ‘twice naked’. Neither Jews nor Christians would recognize the case for rival beliefs; both countenanced superstition and legends. If the Christians were intolerant, the Jews were unaccommodating. He pointed out that, as a rule, ‘the kings of Spain and France, the nobility, the learned and all the men of dignity were friendly to the Jews’; prejudice came chiefly from the ignorant, uneducated poor. ‘I have never seen a man of reason hate the Jews’, he has a wise man say, ‘and there is none who hates them except the common people. For this there is a reason–the Jew is arrogant and always seeks to rule; you would never think that they are exiles and slaves driven from people to people. Rather, they seek to show themselves lords and masters. Therefore the masses envy them.’2 Why did not the Jews try to break down prejudice by behaving more modestly and humbly, and by preaching religious tolerance and understanding?3
Ibn Verga wrote in Hebrew and was clearly addressing himself to an educated Jewish readership, who would know the justice of his criticisms. So we must attach some weight to his charges. But the evidence we have does not suggest that overbearing arrogance was usually the reason why Jews were attacked. The usual cause of trouble was an influx of strange Jews, pushing numbers in the established Jewish community beyond a critical point. In Venice, for instance, which had been a major trading state since the tenth century, and which was a natural place for Jews to settle, they had met some resistance. In the thirteenth century they were corralled on the island of Spinalunga, the Giudecca; at other times they were forced to live on the mainland at Mestre. They had to wear a circular yellow badge, then a yellow hat, then a red hat. But there were always Jews there. They did well. They made important contributions to the Venetian economy, not least by paying special taxes. They had a charter or condotta, repeatedly confirmed.
In May 1509 the forces of the League of Cambrai defeated the Venetian army at Agnadello, and there was a panic flight from the terra firma to the main islands. The refugees included over 5,000 Jews, many of them immigrants from Spain and Portugal. Two years later, an agitation for their expulsion began, touched off by sermons from the friars. It culminated in 1515-16 in a decision by the state to confine the entire Jewish community to a segregated area of the city. The spot chosen was a former canon foundry, known as the ghetto nuovo, in the part of the central islands furthest removed from the Piazza San Marco. The new foundry was formed into an island by canals, equipped with high walls, all windows facing outward bricked up, and two gates set up manned by four Christian watchmen; six other watchmen were to man two patrol boats, and all ten were to be paid for by the Jewish community, which was also instructed to take out a perpetual lease of the property at one-third above the going rate.4
The concept of a separate quarter for Jews was not new. It went back to antiquity. Most major Islamic cities had one. In Dark Age Europe the Jews had often demanded segregation and high walls as a condition for settling in a town. But they objected strongly to the Venetian proposal. It was plainly designed to secure the maximum economic advantage from a Jewish presence (including special taxes) while ensuring Jews had the minimum social contacts with the rest of the population. They were, in effect, permitted to do their business by day, at an inconvenient distance, and locked in at night. But Venice insisted, and in fact the system probably prevented subsequent proposals, to expel the Jews altogether, from being accepted. The original ghetto nuovo accommodated Italian Jews chiefly of German origin. In 1541 Jews of the Levant were moved into the nearby old foundry or ghetto vecchio. Finally in 1633 the area was further enlarged by adding the ghetto novissimo to house western Jews.5 At this time (1632) there were 2,412 Jews in the ghetto out of a total Venetian population of 98,244. With the extra space the ghetto was able to house nearly 5,000 Jews by 1655.6 To live thus enclosed, the Jews paid not only ordinary taxes and custom dues, but a special annual tax of 10,000 ducats a year and forced levies, during the first century of the ghetto, of at least 60,000 ducats, totalling not less than 250,000 ducats in all.7
Why did the Jews submit so patiently to this kind of oppression? In a book about the Jews of Venice, Simhah Luzzatto (1583-1663), who served them as rabbi for fifty-seven years, argued that Jewish passivity, which so irritated Ibn Verga, was a matter of faith: ‘For they believe that any recognizable change which relates to them…derives from a higher cause and not human effort.’8 Many Jews were disturbed at the time by the failure of the huge and once wealthy and powerful Spanish community to offer any resistance to their cruel expulsion. Some pointed to the contrast with Jewish bellicosity in antiquity; why could not Jews be more like their ancestor, Mordecai? They quoted the Book of Esther: ‘And all the king’s servants that were in the king’s gate bowed and reverenced Haman…. But Mordecai bowed not, nor did he do reverence.’9 But the same text–a favourite among Jews, then and now–offered alternative guidance. Had not Esther, on Mordecai’s advice, concealed her Jewishness? She ‘had not showed her people nor her kindred’, as many marranos pointed out. The concealed, secret Jew, as well as the passive Jew, was as old as the Bible. Then, too, there was Naaman who ‘bowed in the House of Rimmon’. Yet Jews were aware that the Book of Esther contained a warning, for the evil Haman had proposed a general massacre of the Jews to King Ahasuerus. Rabbi Joseph ibn Yahya, in his commentary on Esther published in Bologna in 1538, pointed out that Haman’s reasoning–the Jews being ‘scattered abroad and dispersed among the people’ made them incapable of resistance–applied equally well to the Jews of his day.10
The truth is that Jewish communities accepted oppression, and second-class status, provided it had definite rules which were not constantly and arbitrarily changed without warning. What they hated most was uncertainty. The ghetto offered security and even comfort of a kind. It made the observance of the law easier in many ways, by concentrating and isolating Jews. If segregation, as the church claimed, safeguarded Christians from evil Jewish contacts, equally it protected Jews from secularity. The law-code of Joseph Caro (1488-1575), which became the authoritative halakhic text for many generations of orthodox Jews, might have been designed for the self-containment and introspection which the ghetto produced.
Within the ghetto, Jews were able to pursue an intense, if separate, cultural life. But there were many inter-faith contacts. Around the time the ghetto was created, the Christian printer Daniel Bomberg set up a Hebrew printing-press in Venice. Christians, Jews and converts collaborated in producing a magnificent edition of the two Talmuds (1520-3), whose pagination has become standard ever since. The Jewish typesetters and proof-readers were dispensed from wearing the yellow hat. Other Hebrew printing shops appeared. Not only religious classics but contemporary Jewish works thus got into print. Caro’s popular condensation of his great code, the Shulhan Arukh, was published in Venice, and in 1574 it appeared there in a pocket edition, ‘so that’, the title-page states, ‘it can be carried in one’s bosom and may be referred to at any time and any place, while resting or travelling’.11
Despite the exactions of the state, the Venetian community flourished. It was divided into three nations, the Penentines from Spain, the Levantines who were Turkish subjects, and the Natione Tedesca or Jews of German origin, the oldest, largest and least wealthy section. They alone were allowed to practise moneylending, and they spoke Italian. But they were not granted Venetian citizenship; even at the end of the eighteenth century the law laid down that ‘the Jews of Venice and of the state or any other Jew cannot claim nor enjoy any right of citizenship’.12 Shakespeare was correct in making this point in The Merchant of Venice. He was also plausible in having Jessica say that her father Shylock’s house was full of treasures. Successful Jewish moneylenders often accumulated quantities of unredeemed pledges, especially jewels. Local sumptuary laws were enacted to prevent them wearing such spoil; indeed the Jews drew up their own sumptuary prohibitions, to avert ‘the envy and hatred of the gentiles, who fix their gaze upon us’.13
Despite the restrictive garb, however, there was no lack of gaiety in the Venetian ghetto. A contemporary described the Rejoicing of the Law ceremonies:
A sort of half-carnival is held on this evening, for many maidens and brides mask themselves, so as not to be recognized, and visit all the synagogues. They are thronged at this period by Christian ladies and gentlemen out of curiosity…. There are present all nations, Spaniards, Levantines, Portuguese, Germans, Greeks, Italians and others, and each sings according to his own usage. Since they do not use instruments, some clap their hands above their head, some smite their thighs, some imitate the castanets with their fingers, some pretend to play the guitar by scraping their doublets. In short they so act with these noises, jumpings and dancings, with strange contortions of their faces, mouths, arms and all other members, that it appears to be carnival mimicry.14
The absence of musical instruments was entirely due to opposition by the rabbis. Many of them objected to art music of any kind on the grounds that it involved excessive repetition of the sacred words of the prayers, and especially of God’s name–they argued, not very convincingly, that it might lead the simple to believe there were two or more Gods. (In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, the Puritans put forward similar arguments against polyphonic music, insisting on no more than one note for each syllable of the prayer.) In Senigallia, near Ancona, the record has survived of a furious row between the local rabbi and the maestro di capella, Mordecai della Rocca–the rabbi insisting, with the help of voluminous citations from the Talmud and kabbalistic sources, that music existed simply to bring out the meaning of the text, all else being ‘mere buffoonery’.15 None the less, the Venetian ghetto certainly had an academy of music early in the seventeenth century. Cecil Roth’s studies of Renaissance Venice Jewry show that there were frequent complaints from rigorists about the luxury and worldliness of ghetto life, and the preference for Italian over Hebrew, so that a clamour arose for prayers in the vernacular. Jews wrote plays and works on mathematics, astronomy and economics, all in Italian. They also produced ingenious arguments for taking gondolas on the Sabbath.16 They had their own schools in the ghetto, but they were allowed to attend the medical school at nearby Padua, and take degrees there. Many rabbis would have liked the walls of the ghetto higher.
Indeed, though relations between Jews and the world outside tend to constitute the stuff of history, for most of the time Jews were more concerned by their own internal affairs, which were sometimes stormy. At the time the Venetian ghetto was being set up, Italian Jewry was convulsed by attempts to bring to book Immanuel ben Noah Raphael da Norsa, a rich man who ruled the Ferrara community like a tyrant, with his own tame rabbi, David Piazzighettone, to produce rulings on his behalf. He used to say: ‘Here I sit in my city in the midst of my people, and whoever has any claim against me let him come here to sue me.’ Christians as well as Jews bowed before him, it was said. His activities came to light when Abraham da Finzi, who claimed Norsa had defrauded him of 5,000 gold florins, a ruby and an emerald, took him before the rabbinical court in Bologna. Norsa’s son, claiming his father was away, refused to accept the writ, saying ‘Get away, you fresca di merda.’ The tame rabbi also refused service, exclaiming: ‘What have I to do with you, putto di Haman?’ The case went before half a dozen rabbinical courts all over Italy, and although most sided against Norsa, he had a doughty champion in Abraham Mintz, whose father Rabbi Judah Mintz had been head of the Padua yeshivah for forty-seven years, and who was later rabbi of Mantua. Rival letters and summonses were torn up; rabbis were threatened with the pillory and with being dragged into Christian courts. Each rabbinical group abused the other for lack of family and learning; each boasted of its own genealogies and scholarly prowess, and the argument was envenomed by the Sephardi-Ashkenazi divide. Mintz accused Rabbi Abraham Cohen of Bologna of being ‘a smooth-tongued Sephardi…the Satan in the case’. Cohen retorted: ‘You call my forefathers quarrelsome priests…. I am proud of that name [Sephardi] for we Sephardim sanctified the divine name before the whole world, I among them, and passed through the greatest temptations…. You are a wretch, worthless, a liar and swindler…. You ignorant, stupid, silly, senseless fool.’ He said Mintz had always made his living by robbery and embezzlement, ‘known from one end of the world to the other as a villain and mocker’. It was said, too, that Mintz had succeeded his father only because he played the shofar well. In the end more than fifty rabbis, some from outside Italy, were involved and Norsa had to yield. The case against him looks black, but then the account that has survived was compiled by his rabbinical opponents; rabbis on both sides were linked by networks of marriages and the legal-doctrinal points were complicated by dynastic feuds going back generations.17
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.
The papacy was not the only institution to turn on the Jews. The strongest monarchies, which traditionally had been the keenest and most effective protectors of Jewish communities, were also the most vehement against heresy. In large parts of Europe, the Counter-Reformation was a great wave of reaction to the disturbing ideas circulated in the first half of the century, a return to sobriety and order, led from the top but with wide popular backing. It was a drive against racialism, subversion and innovation of every kind. The Jews were seen as a generally disturbing element, especially in the form of marranos. These forced converts and their descendants, cut off from the discipline of Jewish orthodoxy, tended to turn to anything, including Anabaptism, which was what authority hated most of all–it was a generic term for religious insubordination. Many marranos evolved weird mixtures of Christian and Jewish beliefs. They were sceptics, sneering at the Virgin Mary and the saints, laughing at images and pious practices. They set up their individual judgment against authority of every kind. Marranos were regarded as potential traitors to the state as well as heretics–authority could instance the useful hate-figure of João Miguez, Duke of Naxos, the most powerful of all the ex-Christian Jews, who advised the sultan himself.
The Counter-Reformation, both clerical and secular, was most suspicious of immigrants, of whom the marranos were one element. Authority learned from experience that movement meant trouble. It did not mind so much the old-established Jews. It was the newcomers who brought dangerous ideas. This fear operated at many levels. The Bakers’ Guild of Venice publicly denounced their immigrant journey-men: ‘They follow in the footsteps of the Lutherans and, boasting of having flung once most Christian Germany into confusion…are now sparing no effort to ruin the bakers’ guild here.’ At the top Charles V’s ambassador to Venice warned the republic that, by failing to stamp out heresy it would invoke ‘the enmity of princes for the sake of winning the friendship of peoples…for they wish no vassal to give obedience to his prince and they seek to destroy all dominion and to make peoples free’.28 Pius V’s nuncio in Venice, Giovanni Antonio Facchinetti, did not hesitate to attribute Venice’s military failures in her war against the Turks to her culpable failure to root out Jews and heretics: it was God himself, rather than the Turks, who was now making war on the republic, and its rulers should ask themselves the question: ‘Why should the majesty of God think itself offended by this state?’29 Authority loved the Jew as a wealth-creator; hated him as an ideas-monger.
Yet the two activities were different faces of the same human coin. Experience showed that the Jew on the move, who was most likely to bring unsettling ideas, was also the most likely to introduce new, or more efficient, ways of adding to a nation’s wealth. History is continually teaching us that the very fact of displacement and resettlement has an invigorating effect on ideas and ways of doing things, and so turns the emigrant into a more efficient economic animal. As far back as the eighth and seventh centuries BC, impoverished Greek herdsmen and olive-growers, leaving their ancient soil, blossomed into successful merchant-colonists throughout the Mediterranean. In the nineteenth century, clansmen who had starved in the Highlands, wretched bog-Irish from Clare and Kerry, semi-serfs from Poland, landless peasants from the Mezzogiorno, transformed themselves into enterprising citizens in Ontario and New Zealand, in Boston, New York and Chicago, in the Midwest, Argentina and New South Wales. In our own day we have constantly seen the almost miraculous effect of movement as mainland Chinese settle in Taiwan and Hong Kong, Vietnamese come to California and Australia, and Cubans to Florida.
The Reformation, Counter-Reformation and the Wars of Religion stamped on the European anthill and sent industrious little communities scurrying in all directions. Sometimes, to escape harassment and persecution, they moved two or three times before achieving permanent settlement. Almost invariably, the final host-areas prospered. It used to be argued, by Max Weber and R. H. Tawney, that modern capitalism was the product of religious notions, variously termed the ‘Protestant ethic’ and the Calvinist ‘salvation panic’, both inculcating a spirit of hard work and accumulation. But there are many insuperable objections to this theory, and it now seems more likely that displacement, rather than sectarian belief, was the common factor. The dynamic impulse to national economies, especially in England and the Netherlands, and later in North America and Germany, was provided not only by Calvinists, but by Lutherans, Catholics from north Italy and, not least, by Jews.30
What these moving communities shared was not theology but an unwillingness to live under the state regimentation of religious and moral ideas at the behest of clerical establishments. All of them repudiated clerical hierarchies, favouring religious government by the congregation and the private conscience. In all these respects the Jews were the most characteristic of the various denominations of emigrants. They had repudiated clericalism ever since the destruction of the Second Temple. They had adopted congregationalism long before any Protestant sect. Their communities chose their own rabbis, and this devolved form of authority was made workable by an absence of dogmatic theology and a spirit of intellectual tolerance. Above all, they were expert settlers. They had been moving all their history. Strangers and sojourners from their earliest origins, they had, over many generations and in an endless variety of different situations, perfected many immigrant arts, especially skill in concentrating their wealth so that it could be switched quickly from a point of danger to an area of resettlement. Their trades and crafts, their folk-culture and their laws combined to assist their creative mobility.
That was one reason why new Jewish arrivals, whatever their misfortunes, always seemed to have access to working capital. And that, in turn, made them generally welcome. As one Jewish apologist, Manasseh ben Israel, put it in the mid-seventeenth century:
Hence it may be seen that God hath not left us; for if one persecutes us, another receives us civilly and courteously; and if this prince treats us ill, another treats us well; if one banisheth us out of his country, another invites us with a thousand privileges; as divers princes of Italy have done, the most eminent King of Denmark, and the mighty Duke of Savoy in Nissa. And do we not see that those Republiques do flourish and much increase in trade who admit the Israelites?31
In addition to their general propensities, the Jews had particular contributions to make to the spirit of economic innovation and enterprise. In the Middle Ages, as we have seen, their urban, trading and financial skills were gradually acquired by the surrounding Christian communities; then the Jews had outlived their social and economic usefulness and were often told to go, or discriminated against. They might then move into a less developed area where their skills were still needed. But the alternative was to develop new methods, and the Jews were adept at this too. They kept one jump ahead of the competition, either by raising the efficiency of existing methods, and so lowering rates and prices, or by inaugurating new ones. It was when they moved into a new area that their innovatory spirit was most in evidence, usually because that was the moment for a new generation to take over. Equally important, the Jews were quick to respond to entirely new phenomena and situations. Their religion taught them to rationalize. Capitalism, at all its stages of development, has advanced by rationalizing and so improving the chaos of existing methods. The Jews could do this because, while intensely conservative (as a rule) within their own narrow and isolated world, they had no share in or emotional commitment to society as a whole and so could watch its old traditions, methods and institutions being demolished without a pang–could, indeed, play a leading role in the process of destruction. They were thus natural capitalist entrepreneurs.
This relative freedom to follow the logic of reason which their outsider status gave the Jews was nowhere better demonstrated than in their attitude to money. One of the greatest contributions the Jews made to human progress was to force European culture to come to terms with money and its power. Human societies have always shown an extraordinary unwillingness to demystify money and see it for what it is–a commodity like any other, whose value is relative. They tend, indeed, to attach absolute values to all commodities–failing to see that the value of a thing varies in time and space–and particularly to money because it has a fixed apparent value. They also invest money with special moral overtones. Why did St Paul lay down, and countless millions thoughtlessly repeat, ‘The love of money is the root of all evil’? Why not the love of land or of flocks or horses; or houses or paintings? Or, most of all, the love of power? There is no ascertainable reason why money should be viewed with such opprobrium. Moreover, the moral distinction between money and all other commodities spread over into the notion of investment, making it extraordinarily difficult to construct an ethical framework for saving and economic development. Men bred cattle with honour; they sowed grain and reaped it worthily. But if they made money work for them they were parasites and lived on ‘unearned increment’, as it came to be termed.
The Jews were initially as much victims of this fallacy as anyone else. Indeed, they invented it. But their technique of religious rationalization, and their predicament as unwilling traders in money, eventually made them willing to face the problem, and resolve it. As we have seen, they began by working out a double standard for money dealings with Jews and gentiles. Some elements of this remain even today: many Jewish banks in Israel (and elsewhere) display notices insisting that loans between Jews will observe the religious laws. From the end of the fifteenth century, however, Jewish rationalizers attempted to strip money of its magic. In a dispute at Ferrara in 1500, Rabbi Abraham Farissol of Avignon, using a familiar (and somewhat dishonest) argument of innovators, insisted that things had changed since Biblical times and that money had become a mere commodity:
This has brought into being a new situation and new obligations. [It is natural to give something for nothing to a pauper, for pity’s sake but] in other cases when a man needs something of which his comrade has plenty…he purchases it at a price. Hence…the established practice of paying for the hire of houses and workers…all of whom have their price…. For if nature and wisdom were to demand that aid be given to everyone who needs it so as to satisfy his wants, and that money be loaned without interest to those who need money, then nature would also require that if anyone needs a house or a horse or work to be provided for him, they should all be supplied without payment.32
Farissol felt that an agreed system of prices, wages and interest was socially beneficial since it helped to regulate amicably economic relationships in an ordered society. To earn an income from possession of money was no more, nor less, opprobrious than earning it from possessing land, or any other commodity; ‘it follows in accordance with practice and nature that he who benefits from the money of his comrade is duty bound to pay something back’. About the same time, Isaac Abrabanel produced a similar line of defence in his commentary on the Deuteronomy text, first published in 1551: ‘There is nothing unworthy about interest…because it is proper that people should make a profit out of their money, wine and corn, and if someone wants money from someone else…why should a farmer [who] received wheat to sow his field not give the lender 10 per cent if he is successful, as he usually should be? This is an ordinary business transaction, and correct.’ An interest-free transaction, he added, was reserved for someone to whom we owe especial kindness, such as indeed a needy co-religionist.33
The willingness to face the idea of money squarely, to deal with it honestly and rationally, had deep roots in both Biblical and rabbinical Judaism. Judaism did not polarize piety and prosperity. It praised the poor, it deplored avarice, but it also constantly suggested links between the good things of life and moral worthiness. There is a beautiful passage in Deuteronomy in which Moses stresses the bounty which God will bestow on those who keep his law: ‘And he will love thee, and bless thee, and multiply thee: he will also bless the fruit of thy womb, and the fruit of thy land, thy corn and thy wine, and thine oil, the increase of thy kine and the flocks of thy sheep, in the land which he swore unto thy fathers to give thee.’34 Israel itself shall be wealthy: ‘thou shalt lend unto many nations, but thou shalt not borrow’.35 ‘They that seek the Lord’, said the Psalms, ‘shall not want any good thing.’36 The Psalms and Proverbs, the Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, the book of Ben Sira were full òf such sentiments. The Talmud echoed them: ‘In time of scarcity a man learns to value wealth best.’ ‘Seven characteristics are there which are “comely to the righteous and comely to the world”. One of them is riches.’ Jewish halakhah had always dealt directly with actual and not just theoretical business problems, on the assumption that properly conducted trading was not only wholly compatible with strict morality but positively virtuous since it made possible the good works and systematic charity around which the Jewish community revolved. The cathedocracy had ruled and written realistically about trade because many of its members engaged in it. Men like Maimonides and Nahmanides had never made the assumption, so characteristic of the Christian intelligentsia, that there is an absolute distinction between book-reading and book-writing on the one hand, and book-keeping on the other. Rabbinical Judaism said things about business which all sensible men know to be true and just, but which convention normally excludes from the realm of religious discourse.
That being so, the Jews were well prepared to take advantage of the growth in the world economy which marked the sixteenth century; indeed, in view of their exclusion from the Spanish peninsula, and their treatment in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe, they had no alternative but to push the diaspora further and seek new outlets for their business skills. To the West, Columbus’ voyages were not the only ones which had a Jewish and marrano background in finance and technology. Expelled Jews went to the Americas as the earliest traders. They set up factories. In St Thomas, for instance, they became the first large-scale plantation-owners. Spanish laws forbidding Jews to emigrate to the colonies proved ineffective and in 1577 were repealed. Jews and marranos were particularly active in settling Brazil; the first governor-general, Thomas de Souza, sent out in 1549, was certainly of Jewish origin. They owned most of the sugar plantations. They controlled the trade in precious and semi-precious stones. Jews expelled from Brazil in 1654 helped to create the sugar industry in Barbados and Jamaica. The new British colonies in the West welcomed them. The Governor of Jamaica, rejecting a petition for their expulsion in 1671, wrote that ‘he was of opinion that his Majesty could not have more profitable subjects than the Jews and the Hollanders; they had great stocks and correspondence’. The government in Surinam pronounced: ‘We have found that the Hebrew nation…have…proved themselves useful and beneficial to the colony.’37
To the East, the Jews had been active in the Russian border territories, especially on the shores of the Black Sea, since Hellenistic times at least. Indeed, legends connect the arrival of Jews in Armenia and Georgia with the Ten Lost Tribes of the despoiled northern kingdom of Israel. In the first half of the eighth century, the Kingdom of the Khazars had been converted to Judaism. From early medieval times Jews had been active over a vast swathe of territory in southern Euro-Asia, both as traders and as proselytizers. In the 1470s, in the rapidly expanding Principality of Moscow, Jewish activities brought into existence a semi-secret sect which the authorities termed the Judaizers, and ferocious efforts were made to stamp it out. Tsar Ivan IV Vasilievich, ‘Ivan the Terrible’ (1530-84), ordered Jews who refused to embrace Christianity to be drowned, and Jews were officially excluded from Russian territory until the partition of Poland in the late eighteenth century.
The Russian barrier to further eastern penetration led to intensive Jewish settlement in Poland, Lithuania and the Ukraine. As in western Europe in the Dark and early Middle Ages, the Jews served as a key element in a vast colonization process, marked by a rapid expansion in the agricultural and trading economy, and a phenomenal increase in population. In about 1500 there were only 20,000-30,000 Jews living in Poland, out of a total population of five million. By 1575, while the total population had risen to seven million, the number of Jews had jumped to 150,000, and thereafter the rise was still more rapid. In 1503 the Polish monarchy appointed Rabbi Jacob Polak ‘Rabbi of Poland’, and the emergence of a chief rabbinate, backed by the crown, allowed the development of a form of self-government which the Jews had not known since the end of the exilarchate. From 1551 the chief rabbi was elected by the Jews themselves. This was, to be sure, oligarchic rather than democratic rule. The rabbinate had wide powers over law and finances, appointing judges and a great variety of other officials. When he shared his powers with local councils, only between 1 and 5 per cent of Jewish householders had the right to vote.38 The royal purpose in devolving power on the Jews was, of course, self-interested. There was a great deal of Polish hostility to the Jews. In Cracow, for instance, where the local merchant class was strong, Jews were usually kept out. The kings found they could make money out of the Jews by selling to certain cities and towns, such as Warsaw, the privilege de non tolerandis Judaeis. But they could make even more by allowing Jewish communities to grow up, and milking them. The rabbinate and local Jewish councils were primarily tax-raising agencies. Only 30 per cent of what they raised went on welfare and official salaries; all the rest was handed over to the crown in return for protection.
The association of the rabbinate with communal finance and so with the business affairs of those who had to provide it led the eastern or Ashkenazi Jews to go even further than the early-sixteenth-century Italians in giving halakhic approval to new methods of credit-finance. Polish Jews operating near the frontiers of civilization had links with Jewish family firms in the Netherlands and Germany. A new kind of credit instrument, the mamram, emerged and got rabbinical approval. In 1607 Jewish communities in Poland and Lithuania were also authorized to use heter iskah, an inter-Jewish borrowing system which allowed one Jew to finance another in return for a percentage. This rationalization of the law eventually led even conservative authorities, like the famous Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal of Prague, to sanction lending at interest.
With easy access to credit, Jewish pioneer settlers played a leading part in developing eastern Poland, the interior of Lithuania, and the Ukraine, especially from the 1560s onwards. The population of western Europe was expanding fast. It needed to import growing quantities of grain. Ambitious Polish landowners, anxious to meet the need, went into partnership with Jewish entrepreneurs to create new wheat-growing areas to supply the market, take the grain down-river to the Baltic ports, and then ship it west. The Polish magnates–Radziwills, Sovieskis, Zamojkis, Ostrogskis, Lubomirskis-owned or conquered the land. The ports were run by German Lutherans. The Dutch Calvinists owned most of the ships. But the Jews did the rest. They not only managed the estates but in some cases held the deeds as pledges in return for working capital. Sometimes they leased the estates themselves. They ran the tolls. They built and ran mills and distilleries. They owned the river boats, taking out the wheat and bringing back in return wine, cloth and luxury goods, which they sold in their shops. They were in soap, glazing, tanning and furs. They created entire villages and townships (shtetls), where they lived in the centre, while peasants (Catholics in Poland and Lithuania, Orthodox in the Ukraine) occupied the suburbs.
Before 1569 when the Union of Brest-Litovsk made the Polish settlement of the Ukraine possible, there were only twenty-four Jewish settlements there with 4,000 inhabitants; by 1648 there were 115, with a numbered population of 51,325, the total being much greater. Most of these places were owned by Polish nobles, absentee-landlords, the Jews acting as middlemen and intermediaries with the peasants–a role fraught with future danger. Often Jews were effectively the magnates too. At the end of the sixteenth century Israel of Zloczew, for instance, leased an entire region of hundreds of square miles from a consortium of nobles to whom he paid the enormous annual sum of 4,500 zlotys. He sub-let tolls, taverns and mills to his poorer relatives.39 Jews from all over Europe arrived to take part in this colonizing process. In many settlements they constituted the majority of the inhabitants, so that for the first time outside Palestine they dominated the local culture. But they were important at every level of society and administration. They farmed the taxes and the customs. They advised government. And every Polish magnate had a Jewish counsellor in his castle, keeping the books, writing letters, running the economic show.
Indeed, by the end of the sixteenth century, there were few men of importance in east-central Europe who ‘knew not Joseph’. One great Jewish archetype had come into his own at last. By the last quarter of the century, the ideological thrust of the Counter-Reformation had spent itself. Philip II of Spain was the last of the committed princes, acting in close concert with the papacy. In his old age, in the spirit of Paul IV, he turned the Jews out of his Duchy of Milan (1597). But other princes backed the Catholic cause, or indeed the Protestant one, from reasons of self-interest. Or they became politiques, and compromised. The power and influence of the church declined; the authority of the state increased. The most influential legal and political writers–Montaigne, Jean Bodin, Lipsius, Francis Bacon–advocated a secular view of public policy. Nations should not be disturbed and divided by religious broils. It was the function of the state to achieve reasonable settlements and promote unity and prosperity. In this new atmosphere of toleration and realpolitik, sophisticated Jews were welcomed on their merits.40
Thus the Republic of Venice, from 1577 onwards, authorized the Dalmatian marrano, Daniel Rodriguez, to create the new port of Spalato (Split), as part of a new policy, in which Jews played a notable part, of re-routing trade down the Balkan rivers.41 The Duke of Tuscany gave the Jews of Leghorn a charter. The Duke of Savoy acted to create Jewish settlements in Nice and Turin. The kings of France issued letters of protection to Jewish merchants. Henri IV even played cards with one, Manoel de Pimentel, whom he called ‘the king of the Gamblers’. In Amsterdam, the Calvinist authorities did not inquire into the religious views of marranos, or of Sephardi Jews who arrived in the 1590s, or indeed of Ashkenazi settlers who moved in from about 1620. They held their services, at first in private. They ran a Torah school from 1616, printed their own books from the 1620s. To the Dutch, they were a useful and well-behaved addition to the mercantile community.42 In Frankfurt, the community became so prosperous that general rabbinical synods were held there in 1562, 1582 and 1603.
German-speaking towns and principalities which had expelled Jews earlier in the century readmitted them. The Habsburg Emperor Maximilian II allowed the Jews to return to Bohemia and in 1577 his successor, Rudolph II, gave them a charter of privileges. The old Jewish community of Vienna was reconstituted and in Prague, where Rudolph had set up his court, there were 3,000 Jews by the end of the century. Famous teaching rabbis like the Maharal, Ephraim Solomon ben Aaron of Luntschits and Isaiah ben Abraham ha-Levi Horowitz lived in the Jewish quarter alongside merchant princes like Jacob Bassevi von Treuenberg, Mordecai Zemah Cohen and Marcus Meisel. Rudolph had a famous interview with the Maharal in his palace, and he patronized gifted Jews of all kinds, from astronomers to jewel-smiths. But he found Jews most useful of all as financiers. He made Meisel into the first ‘court Jew’–a type which was to dominate government finance in much of central Europe for 150 years, and remained of some significance until 1914.
The great Jewish strength lay in the ability to take quick advantage of new opportunities; to recognize an unprecedented situation when it arose and devise methods of handling it. Christians had long learned how to deal with conventional financial problems, but they were conservative and slow to react to novelty. Towards the close of the sixteenth century, the principal novelty was the ever-growing scale and cost of war. Meisel supplied Rudolph, a leading collector, with objets d’art and scientific instruments but his main function was to help finance the war against Turkey. In return the emperor allowed him to loan money not only against actual pledges, such as jewellery, but against promissory notes and lands. The relationship between the two men–the clever, devout Jew and the selfish, self-indulgent Habsburg–was inevitably exploitative on both sides. When Meisel died in 1601, leaving over half a million florins, the state seized his estate on the grounds that his transactions, despite imperial permission, were illegal. But Meisel, no doubt foreseeing this, had already spent vast sums on the Prague community. He built a synagogue, to which Rudolph gave the privileges of denying entrance to the police, displaying the star of David and tax immunity; he endowed a Jewish cemetery; he set up a hospital; he even paved the streets of the Jewish quarter. He financed Jewish communities in Poland, and contributed to the entire range of Jewish funds, including those in Palestine. The epitaph on his Prague tombstone (which survives) is doubtless the truth: ‘None of his contemporaries was truly his equal in deeds of charity.’43 In effect, it paid the leading members of the Jewish community to be exploited by the crown, provided it was the only one and protected them from other predators.
During this period at least the Habsburgs kept their part of the bargain. When the Frankfurt mob, led by Vincent Fettmilch, stormed the Jewish quarter in Frankfurt in 1614, expelling the Jews and plundering their houses, the Emperor Matthias declared the insurgents rebels and outlaws and hanged their leaders two years later. The Jews were restored to their homes, with imperial ceremony and new privileges, a highly satisfactory event which they celebrated annually thereafter as ‘The Purim of Vincent’. In turn, the Jews helped the Habsburgs. In 1618 the Thirty Years War broke out in Germany and during its opening phase the Habsburgs came close to destruction. It was the Jews, especially the financier Jacob Bassevi of Prague, who kept them in the saddle. Hence when the tide turned at the Battle of the White Mountain, and the imperial armies recaptured the city (1620), the Jewish quarter was the only one they did not pillage. The Emperor Ferdinand II himself presented Bassevi with two of the finest confiscated Protestant houses.
This terrible conflict, which brought ruin to Germany, pushed the Jews to the very centre of the European economy. Huge armies had to be kept in the field for years at a time, and often right through the winter. The Jewish food-supply network in eastern Europe enabled them to provide the food and fodder. They set up foundries and powder-mills and scoured Europe and the east for arms. Above all, they raised ready money, often by finding novel ways of exploiting sluggish imperial assets. It was Bassevi who in 1622 set up a consortium, with Prince Liechtenstein and the imperial general Wallenstein, which leased the imperial silver mint. The emperor got a huge sum to finance the war, and Bassevi and his colleagues recuperated it by debasing the coinage. Bassevi was called Judenfürst (princely Jew) by his community; he was raised to the imperial peerage. On the other hand, his property was confiscated in 1631 and when he died in 1634, soon after his protector Wallenstein was assassinated, all his privileges were revoked. The life of a Jewish war-financier was vulnerable. But when had the life of any Jew not been vulnerable?
When war came, especially the new kind of total war inaugurated by Wallenstein and Gustavus Adolphus, the need to win it–or just to survive–took precedence over ideology, religion, race and tradition. The Jews, with their extraordinary capacity to get their hands on scarce supplies and raise cash in a bleak and hostile world, soon made themselves indispensable to all sides. When the Swedes reversed the Catholic tide, and most of German Jewry fell under Lutheran rule, they began by penalizing the Jews with forced loans. But within a year, Jews were operating as principal contractors to the Swedish army. As with the Habsburgs, they supplied food, munitions and, above all, horses. Moreover, the Lutheran commanders found, as had the Catholic Habsburgs, that as the Jews were second-class citizens and often a persecuted minority, they were content to be paid in credit, protection and privileges–the last enabling them to make the cash for themselves. In due course, as more and more European powers intervened in the struggle, the Jews of the Rhineland and Alsace, of Bohemia and Vienna, supplied them all. In Emmerich, occupied by Dutch troops, Solomon Gomperz became rich by selling them food and tobacco. In Alsace, the Jews sold Cardinal Richelieu’s army horses and fodder. All these services brought privileged status in return. Richelieu, who controlled the entire maritime effort of France, gave the Portuguese marranos special status in the ports, though it was obvious they were Jews, not Christians. In 1636 Ferdinand II issued orders to his commanders that the Jews of Worms were not to be subjected to forced loans or billeting, or harassed in any way. In fact it was rare for either side to conscript Jews for service. Not only the imperialist commanders but the Swedes and Lutherans too strictly forbade any looting of Jewish quarters. Hence it is a curious fact that, during the Thirty Years War, for the first time in their history, the Jews were treated better, rather than worse, than the population as a whole. While Germany underwent the worst harrowing in its history, the Jews survived and even prospered. As the historian Jonathan Israel has put it: ‘There is not a scrap of evidence to show that central European Jewry declined at all in size during the Thirty Years War.’44
In the closing stages of the war, court Jews were acting as provision-contractors for entire armies, though the first actual contracts for them to do so date only from the 1650s. Moreover, they were found to be just as useful in peacetime as in war. They became a permanent part of the absolutist princely state, raising the money for the gigantic baroque palaces and planned capital cities which were its hallmarks, and launching the mercantilist economic policies which kept it afloat. Jewish loans financed the great Karlskirche in Vienna and the splendid Schönbrunn Palace of the Habsburgs. Some Jews acted as virtual chief ministers to German princes, helping them to effect the concentration of political and economic power in the palace from which the Jews, as well as sovereigns, benefited. There were a score or more famous dynasties of court Jews. Three generations of the Gomperz family served the prince-bishops of Munster, five the Hohenzollerns. The Behrends served the court of Hanover, the Lehmanns Saxony. From another professional court family, the Fuersts, Samuel Fuerst was court Jew to successive Dukes of Schleswig-Holstein, Jeremiah Fuerst to the Duke of Mecklenburg and Israel Fuerst to the court of Holstein-Gottorp. The Goldschmidts served several German princes and the Danish royal family too. Indeed, German Jews, both Sephardi and Ashkenazi, were active at Scandinavian courts: the de Lima and the de Casseres families served the Danes, the de Sampaios the Swedes. The Kings of Poland employed the Lehmanns and the Abensurs, the Kings of Portugal the da Costas, the Kings of Spain the Bocarros.45
Jewish skill in raising and deploying huge sums of cash played a decisive role in two of the greatest military confrontations of the second half of the seventeenth century: the Habsburgs’ successful resistance to the advance of Turkey into Europe and their subsequent counter-offensive; and the great coalition which halted Louis XIV’s attempt to dominate the Continent. Samuel Oppenheimer (1630-1703) played the leading role in both. He was Imperial War Purveyor to the Austrian monarchy during the 1673-9 struggle against France, and in Austria’s struggle against Turkey from 1682 he got the sole contract to supply her armies. He produced the uniforms and rations for the troops, paid their wages, supplied and fed their horses, ran the hospitals for their wounded and even built rafts to transport guns, horses and men down the river-systems. It was he, as much as anyone else, who saved Vienna during the frantic siege of 1683 when the emperor fled; it was he who played a decisive role in the siege and capture of Budapest (1686) and Belgrade (1689-98). In 1688 Oppenheimer was called on to equip and pay the armies raised to resist Louis XIV’s invasion of the Palatinate, so that for some years he was running the finances of a two-front war, marshalling the resources of a vast network of Jewish financial families, throughout Germany and the Netherlands, to raise the cash.
Court Jews had all kinds of titles–Hoffaktor, Hofjude, Hof-provediteur, Hofagent, Kabinettfaktor, Kommenzienrat, General-provediteurand many others; the great Oppenheimer seems to have been called Oberhoffaktor in peace and Oberkriegsfaktor in war. They enjoyed great privileges: easy access to the sovereign, the right to travel anywhere, any time they liked; exemption from the Jewish courts and usually from local courts too, instead coming under the jurisdiction of the princely court, the Hofgericht. They constituted a distinct class not only in general but in Jewish society: it became rare for court Jews to marry any other kind. Thus virtually all of them were interrelated. These alliances did not always work. Oppenheimer’s nephew, Samson Wertheimer, became his greatest rival and enemy. But as a rule it was the family links which made the Jewish system for raising and transferring vast sums so efficient.
Moreover, the family principle tended to reinforce the Jewish principle in the lives of these men who straddled two worlds. The court Jew was tempted to assimilate to the glittering aristocratic societies he served. Some were awarded the right to have coats of arms, in addition to their official titles. They were allowed to wear swords or carry pistols; to ride on horseback and keep carriages; they and their womenfolk could dress as they pleased. Most important of all, they could live as and where they wanted. They could buy a house outside the Jewish quarter or even in a town where Jews were banned–thus Oppenheimer won the right to live in Vienna not only for himself but for an estimated one hundred families related to or dependent on him. But few of these men, at any rate in the seventeenth century, were keen actually to break away from the Jewish community. Although their way of life might be remote from the ghetto, they served their fellow Jews with their money and their negotiating power. They knew that the family network and the Jewish embrace was their only refuge in time of trouble. They could not trust the Christian law. The Christian mob was always ready to spring. Princes were usually volatile and faithless. Even if one were loyal, he might die and then a court Jew’s enemies would fall on him like wolves.
Oppenheimer’s experience was instructive. No one ever rendered greater services to the Habsburgs. Yet when the Peace of Nijmegen (1679) left him owed 200,000 florins, the Austrian Treasury refused to pay and even a personal appeal to the emperor secured only part-repayment. In 1692, by which time he was owed 700,000 florins, the Treasury brought false charges against him and he was forced to buy his freedom by producing half a million. Two years later he was owed the colossal sum of five million, and this later rose still higher. Yet during the brief peace, 1698-1702, when there was less need for his services, the mob was allowed to attack and plunder his house in Vienna. The authorities eventually acted and hanged two of the rioters, but when the old man died in 1703 the state repudiated his debts. As Oppenheimer had himself borrowed hugely to finance his loans, this gave Europe a taste of its first modern financial crisis, and the Habsburgs had to go cap in hand to the old man’s competitor, Wertheimer, to get out of the mess they had created. But the heirs were never paid and the estate had to be auctioned off sixty years later.46
Another member of the family, Joseph Oppenheimer (c. 1698-1738), who tried to assist the new Duke of Württemberg from 1733 to establish an authoritarian state based upon ducal control of the economy, was a tragic victim when the duke died suddenly four years later. Oppenheimer was arrested the same day, charged with subverting the rights of the community and embezzling its revenues, convicted and hanged. His body was publicly exhibited in an iron cage. The rise and fall of Oppenheimer, also known as Süss or ‘Jud’ (Jew) Süss, acted as a warning to Jews who put their trust in gentiles and was later the subject of a famous novel by Leon Feuchtwanger.
It was significant that Oppenheimer, who had virtually ceased to be a Jew during his prosperity, returned to strict orthodoxy during his imprisonment, refused baptism as a condition of reprieve, and died confessing his faith. A contemporary print shows him clean-shaved. Some other court Jews shaved their beards but most refused. An Elector of Saxony, who employed some twenty Jewish families around his court, offered 5,000 thalers to one patriarch to shave his beard. But the man refused and the elector, in his fury, called for scissors and cut it off himself. Samson Wertheimer not only kept his beard but dressed (as the courtiers said) ‘like a Pole’. Most court Jews, while marrying only among themselves, served their local Jewish communities, often acting as shtadlan (official negotiator). The great Samuel Oppenheimer had agents roaming through Hungary, Slovakia and the Balkans, ransoming poor Jews captured in the Austro-Turkish wars, and resettling them in secure communities. The Jew at court, however wealthy or powerful, knew he was never really safe and he did not have to look far to find Jews who were in desperate trouble.
In 1648-9, the Jews of south-eastern Poland and the Ukraine were struck by catastrophe. This episode was of great importance in Jewish history for several reasons, as we shall see, but its immediate impact was to remind Jews everywhere of the fragility of their position and the power and fury of the forces which could strike them without warning. The Thirty Years War had put growing pressure on the food-exporting resources of Poland. It was because of their Polish networks that Jewish contractors to the various armies had been so successful in supplying them. But the chief beneficiaries had been the Polish landlords; and the chief losers had been the Polish and Ukrainian peasants, who had seen an ever increasing proportion of the crops they raised marketed and sold at huge profit to the ravenous armies. Under the Arenda system, whereby the Polish nobility leased not only land but all fixed assets such as mills, breweries, distilleries, inns and tolls to Jews, in return for fixed payments, the Jews had flourished and their population had grown rapidly. But the system was inherently unstable and unjust. The landlords, absentee and often spendthrift, put continual pressure on the Jews by raising the price each time a lease was renewed; the Jews in turn put pressure on the peasants.
In the Ukraine the injustice was particularly resented since both sets of oppressors, Catholic nobles and Jewish middlemen, were of a different religion to the Orthodox peasantry. Some Jewish leaders were sensitive to the wrongs of the peasants and aware of the danger to the Jews. At a council of rabbis and communal leaders held at Volhynia in 1602, Jewish lessees were begged, for instance, to allow the peasants off work on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays as a sign of goodwill: ‘Let not [the Jews] be ungrateful to the Giver of bounty, the very bounty given; let the name of the Lord be glorified through them.’47 But many Jews were not in a position to exercise benevolence, being sub- and sub-sub-lessees, forced to grind the peasants in order to pay their own rents. They put their trust in cannon. Jews and Poles alike fortified the towns; synagogues were built with embrasures and had guns mounted on the roof.
The Ukrainian peasants finally rose in the late spring of 1648, led by a petty aristocrat called Bogdan Chmielnicki, with the help of Dneiper Cossacks and Tartars from the Crimea. His rising was fundamentally aimed at Polish rule and the Catholic church, and many Polish nobles and clergy were among the victims. But the principal animus was directed against Jews, with whom peasants had had the most contact, and when it came to the point the Poles always abandoned their Jewish allies to save themselves. Thousands of Jews from the villages and shtetls scrambled for safety to the big fortified towns, which turned into death-traps for them. At Tulchin the Polish troops handed over the Jews to the Cossacks in exchange for their own lives; at Tarnopol, the garrison refused to let the Jews in at all. At Bar, the fortress fell and all the Jews were massacred. There was another fierce slaughter at Narol. At Nemirov, the Cossacks got into the fortress by dressing as Poles, ‘and they killed about 6,000 souls in the town’, according to the Jewish chronicle; ‘they drowned several hundreds in the water and by all kinds of cruel torments’. In the synagogue they used the ritual knives to kill Jews, then burned the building down, tore up the sacred books and trampled them underfoot, and used the leather covers for sandals.
We do not know exactly how many Jews died. The Jewish chronicles say 100,000 were killed and 300 communities destroyed. One modern historian believes most of the Jews escaped and that the massacres were ‘less a major turning-point in the history of Polish Jewry than a brutal but relatively short interruption in its steady growth and expansion’.48 The chroniclers’ figures are certainly exaggerated, but the tales of the refugees had a profound emotional effect not only on Polish Jews but on Jewish communities everywhere.49
As in earlier periods, the effect of calamity was to reinforce the irrational and apocalyptic elements in Judaism and in particular to make Jews hypersensitive to signs of a messianic deliverance. The rationalist optimism of the twelfth century reflected in the works of Maimonides had largely disappeared by the end of the fourteenth century, as Jewish communities almost everywhere came under pressure. Among the Jewish upper classes, kabbalistic mysticism strengthened its grip. The destruction and scattering of the great Spanish community from the 1490s reinforced the trend towards irrationalism in two specific ways. First, it democratized the kabbalah. From being an esoteric science taught orally among an educated elite, or through secretly circulated manuscripts, it became public property. Large numbers of manuscripts containing portions of the Zohar or kabbalistic anthologies circulated in Jewish communities everywhere. The rise of the Jewish press had a loudspeaker effect. In 1558-60, two complete versions of the Zohar were printed competitively in Cremona and Mantua. Further printings followed all over the Jewish diaspora, in Leghorn and Constantinople, in Smyrna, Salonika, and especially in Germany and Poland.50 In its popular versions, the kabbalah mixed with the folk-superstitions and vulgarized aggadic tales which had always constituted a great part of the everyday religion of ordinary Jews. After a generation or two, it was impossible to separate one tradition from the other: they merged in a glutinous mass of magic-mystic lore.
Secondly, the Spanish expulsions made the kabbalah itself dynamic by adding an eschatological element concentrated on the notion of Zion and the coming of the Messiah. The kabbalah and its growing volume of superstitious accretions ceased to be just a mystic way of knowing God and became an historical force, a means to accelerate Israel’s redemption. It moved to the very centre of Judaistic belief and took on some of the characteristics of a mass movement.