Heinrich Graetz - History of the Jews, Vol. 4 (of 6)

The art of poetry, which should beautify life, began to work like poison on the moral atmosphere of the Jews. For some centuries past romantic works had variously portrayed the character of a creditor, who, as equivalent for a debt, claimed a certain portion cut from the body of his creditor, either a liege lord from his vassal, or a nobleman from a burgher. At first this was harmless fiction, but afterwards it was turned against the Jews, as though only a Jewish Shylock could be capable of such hardness of heart as to insist on the payment of a pound of flesh from a Christian. Thus cannibal hatred of Christians was foisted on the Jews, and received credence. Romances took up the theme, and made it popular.

The depraved, dissolute clergy – a class of men who, in an age of public decency, would have been objects of universal contempt, or might have earned the corrections of a Bridewell – affected to feel insulted by contact with the Jews, and, under the pretext that their cloth was disgraced by them, caused new scenes of horror and cruelty. In Prague, since the time of Charles IV the chief city of Germany, a bloody persecution was set on foot by their agency. A local priest – perhaps one of those whom Emperor Wenceslaus had caused to be pilloried with their concubines – passed through the Jewish quarter on Easter Sunday (April 18th, 1389) with the host, to visit a dying person. Jewish children playing in the street – it was one of the latter days of the Passover feast – were throwing sand at one another, and a few grains happened to fall upon the priest's robe. His attendants immediately turned upon the children, and cruelly beat them. Their cries quickly brought their parents to their rescue, whereupon the priest fled to the market-place, loudly proclaiming that his holy office had been profaned by Jews. To invest the incident with the necessary importance, he exaggerated it, and said that he was pelted with stones until forced to drop the host. The citizens and lower orders of Prague immediately banded themselves together, and, armed with murderous weapons of every description, made a violent attack upon the houses of the Jews. As usual, they offered their victims the choice between death and baptism, but they found them steadfast in their faith. Many thousands perished in the massacre, which lasted a whole day and night. Several of the Jews, among them their venerable rabbi, first took the lives of their wives and children, and then their own, to escape the cruelties of their enemies. The synagogue was laid in ashes, and the holy books and scrolls torn and trodden under foot. Not even the burial ground escaped the fury of these Christian zealots. The corpses in the streets were stripped of their clothing, left naked, and then burnt.

For the same offense – that is, for no offense at all – the communities in the vicinity of the Bohemian capital were "confined, oppressed, ill-treated and persecuted." The reigning pope issued a bull condemning the outrages (July 2d, 1389), and based his action upon the edict of Pope Innocent IV, which enacted that Jews should not be forcibly baptized, nor disturbed in the observance of their festivals; but he failed to produce an impression on the consciences of the faithful. It was in vain, too, that the Jews appealed to their liege lord, the German emperor Wenceslaus, in whose capital the persecution had originated. This prince – who, had he not been an emperor, would certainly have been a freebooter – was a man of sense only on the rare occasions when he was not intoxicated. His reply to the representations of his Jewish subjects was that they had deserved the attacks made upon them, as they had had no right to show themselves outside their houses on Easter Sunday. For the goods and chattels they had left behind them he exhibited more concern, promptly ordering them to be appropriated to his empty exchequer. This was the measure of his general attitude towards the Jews. During several years he attempted to possess himself of their monetary claims on his Christian subjects, and to carry out his design he convened (1385) a conference of representatives of the Suabian cities, which met at Ulm. Despite the impoverishment of the German communities, he exacted from every Jew, even from every Jewish youth and maiden, the so-called "golden penny" poll-tax, amounting to one gulden annually. He openly declared that the possessions of the Jews were his personal property, and forbade them to sell or mortgage anything. And still Emperor Wenceslaus was not the worst of rulers in the eyes of the Jews. The rabbi, Avigedor Kara, of Prague, boasted his friendship; and the Jews of Germany whispered significantly to one another that his allegiance to the teaching of Christ was very weak.

This storm of spoliation and persecution had no far-reaching consequences in the history of the German Jews. It could not affect their abject condition, for they had been too long accustomed to turn their cheeks submissively to the smiter. Quite different were the effects of a contemporary persecution in Spain. Here the very heart of the Jewish race was attacked, and the results made themselves felt in the history of the whole Jewish people. The Spanish Jews had until then been more hated than despised; the horrors of this persecution, however, so thoroughly cowed their spirits, so paralyzed their energies, and humbled their pride, that they, too, became the scorn of their oppressors. As in Prague, the outbreak was the work of an ecclesiastic and a mob, but here it assumed the vastest proportions, and developed permanent results, the operations of which were disastrous in the extreme. It arose in Seville through the agitation of a fanatical priest, Ferdinand (Ferrand) Martinez, who seemed to consider implacable hatred of the Jews as the essence of his religion. His discourses were devoted to stirring up the populace against them, and he thundered against their hardened infidelity, their pride, their heaped-up riches, their greed, and their usury. In Seville he found the people only too ready to listen to him, for there the Jews were hated with special intensity. The citizens could not forgive them the important part they had played in the civil war between Don Pedro and Don Henry II, and particularly the suspicious circumstances of the death of Joseph Pichon, who had been so popular among them. As long as Don Juan I lived, Martinez took care to restrain the mob from open violence, for though the king regarded the Jews with but little affection, he was in the habit of punishing lawless outbreaks with the utmost severity. No sooner was he dead, however, than the bigoted cleric thought he might dare the utmost. The circumstances of the government were favorable to the development of his plans. The new monarch, Henry III, was a boy of only eleven years of age, and in the council of regency discord reigned, threatening to involve the country in another civil war.

One day (March 15, 1391) – a memorable day, not only for the Jews and for Spain, but for the history of the entire world, for on that day the first germ of the monstrous Inquisition was created – Martinez, preaching as usual against the Jews, deliberately incited the mob to riot in the expectation that many Jews would abjure their religion. The passions of the multitude became inflamed, and broke out in wild uproar. The authorities of the city, the Mayor (Alguacil mayor), Don Alvar Perez de Guzman, and two of the magistrates interposed to protect the Jews, arresting two of the ringleaders in the riot, and ordering them to be flogged. This proceeding excited the fanatical mob only the more. In their fury they put a large number of Jews to death, and threatened with a like fate the governor of the city, Don Juan Alfonso, and the officials who were attempting to shield the unfortunate Hebrews. A few of the leading Jews of Seville, perceiving that the local authorities were not strong enough to grapple with the rising, hurried to the court of the young king, and appealed to the council of regency to stop the slaughter of their brethren. Their representations were favorably received. Messengers were dispatched forthwith to Seville with instructions to tell the populace to abstain from further outrage. The local nobility seconded the action of the king, and, ranging themselves on the side of the Jews, succeeded in mastering the rioters. When the Christian inhabitants of the neighboring towns showed a disposition to imitate the scenes enacted in Seville, the council of regency also sent messengers thither armed with the same powers. Thus, for a brief moment, the threatened Jew-hunt was delayed, but by no means suppressed. It was soon renewed with greater violence, and on a far more extended scale. The young king and a few of the members of the council of regency were probably earnest in their desire not to permit the massacres, but, unfortunately, they were not sufficiently interested to take adequate precautions against them. One such precaution should have been to silence the outrage-monger, Ferdinand Martinez, or at least to prohibit his inflammatory harangues; but they did nothing of the kind. They left him perfectly free to level his poisonous eloquence at the Jews, and he was not slow to take advantage of their inaction. Encouraged by the dissensions in the government, and the disorder which consequently reigned throughout the entire land, he again set himself to stir up the rabble of Seville, and this time with greater success. Hardly three months after the last outbreak, the mob resumed (June 6th, 1391) its holy work of massacre by setting fire to the Jewish quarter (Juderia) and slaughtering its inhabitants. The result was that, of the important and wealthy community of Seville, which had numbered 7,000 families, or 30,000 souls, but few remained. Murder counted not more than 4,000 victims, but to escape death the majority permitted themselves to be baptized. Women and children were sold into Mahometan slavery by the bloody rioters. Of the three synagogues of Seville two were transformed into churches. Among the large number who sought refuge from fire and sword at the baptismal font was Samuel Abrabanel, the ancestor of the afterwards celebrated Abrabanel family, and an ornament of his community in the reign of Don Henry II, with whom he possessed great influence. He adopted the Christian name of Juan de Sevilla.