Salud y Sexualidad

History of Jewish Persecution and Expulsion

Frederick Schweitzer

In the common or Christian era, persecution and expulsion—the threat or a ctuality—have been constants in Jewish history. Th e primary motive or rationale has consistently been anti-Semitism, which has taken many forms. Anti-Semitism may be defi ned basically as fear and hatred of the Jews. It derives from the accusa-tion of Jews as “Christ-killers,” deicides, perpetrators of the inexpiable arch-crime that makes them a criminal people for all time. In committing that arch-crime and all subsequent criminality they presumably engaged in, Jews were seen as the agents of Satan, armed with his superhuman powers and devoted to his service; this de-monization was pronounced by Jesus himself, castigating Jews, saying that God is not your father, “your father is the devil and you choose to carry out his desires”; he is a “murderer” and “liar” (John 8:44). Th e Antichrist is the Jewish leader who will wade through oceans of blood and tears to rule the world and infl ict infi nite suff er-ing and destruction for three and a half years until Jesus’ second comer-ing and the end of history. Parallel is the notion of Jews as eternal conspirators, bent on taking over the world; destroying Christianity; and fomenting revolutions, wars, epidemics, de-pressions, and every kinds of calamities. Th e Shylock image depicts Jews as greedy exploiters guilty of terrible economic depredations; the Jews invented both capital-ism and communcapital-ism, which they, as international bankers and international revo-lutionaries, deploy to dominate peoples by manipulating governments, controlling the media, and subverting culture. Jewish brainpower augments such threats by using ideas as weapons: “Intelligence—that is the mortal sin of the Jews,” exclaimed one fearful anti-Semite (Perry and Schweitzer 2002, 166). A later addition to this farrago, but with medieval precedents, is that of the “alien” and “foreign” Jews as race defi lers and polluters of the nation. Another stereotype is of the Jews as the bearers of disease and plague; poisoners of air, food, wine, and water; and the Jew-ish physician who poisons his patients as required by the Talmud.

By 1200, two powerful motives to wreak violence on Jews had emerged: the ac-cusation of ritual murder (about 244 are recorded but this is certainly an under-statement; 72 such accusations have been documented in the 20th century) and host desecration (a minimum of 100 medieval examples). As putatively ordained by Jewish law, ritual murder is a crime committed to celebrate Passover and requires kidnapping a Christian, usually a boy in the image of the Christ child, and draining away his blood in a replay of the crucifi xion for ritual, medicinal, or magical pur-poses. Some medieval popes resolutely condemned ritual murder as utterly false, but to very little avail, as at Trent in 1475, the site of the shrine (until 1965) of Blessed Simon of Trent, the alleged victim of ritual murder. Th e cycle at Trent repeated the

archetypal pattern that began in 1144 with another alleged victim of ritual murder, St. William the Martyr of Norwich in England: after torture, trials, confessions, and executions of suspects, the remnant was expelled, their property was confi scated, a proclamation barred Jews “forever” from Trent, and a lucrative pilgrims’ shrine was erected. Th e archetypal pattern of host desecration was similar: the Jews were ac-cused of stealing the consecrated hosts of the body of Christ, whereupon accusers claimed they “tortured Jesus again” by stabbing, beating, boiling, or burning the hosts, which “bled” or cried out, making it impossible to destroy or hide them. Th e Jews would be caught, tried, confess under duress, and be burnt alive. Th eir prop-erty would be confi scated, and the synagogue would be converted into a church or chapel. Th ose who escaped burning were massacred, baptized, or expelled. Th ese presumed crimes cost the lives of countless numbers of Jews. Although most Prot-estant denominations condemned Eucharistic transubstantiation as superstition, and host desecration lapsed in those areas, it persisted long afterward in Catholic lands. Protestantism did not signifi cantly curb accusations of ritual murder, which continued unabated in Central and Eastern Europe, and began to appear in Latin America and later in the Middle East.

Whatever the circumstances or pretext for persecution on a given occasion, it is this body of myths and stereotypes of the Jew as standing menace that causes anti-Semitism to endure and makes it dangerous and often lethal. Th is web of myths and supporting ideology originated in the New Testament as interpreted by the Church Fathers and elaborated and acted upon in the Christian Middle Ages and, usually in various secular guises, in later periods and the present. Th us, it did not lie at the root of expulsions and persecutions of Jews in the pre-Christian era.

Th e fate of Jews at the hands of the Assyrians (the inventors of mass deportation and resettlement, and thus initiators of the Diaspora), Babylonians, Hellenistic Greeks, and Romans was the usual one of peoples defeated in war, whose territory was conquered and occupied, or whose revolts against foreign occupation and rule failed. Jewish revolts in Judaea against Roman rule in 66–73 and 132–135 resulted in their expulsion from Jerusalem, from which they were barred for centuries; many captives were enslaved and settled permanently in Rome, and other Jewish com-munities were unmolested. Even the anti-Semitic Voltaire, rebutting the idea that the Diaspora was divine retribution for deicide, explained, “Indeed, if while Jerusa-lem and its Temple existed, the Jews were sometimes driven from their country by the vicissitudes of empires, they have still more frequently been expelled through a blind zeal from every country in which they have dwelt since the progress of Chris-tianity and Islam” (Perry and Schweitzer 2007, doc. 10).

Th e prototypical expulsion of Jews by Christian authorities was by Bishop Cyril of Alexandria in 414, the earliest recorded. He assaulted the city’s Jewish quarter, converting synagogues into churches, confi scating property, and expelling survi-vors who did not accept baptism. His actions violated the Christian belief—one of the few restraints on persecution—that Jews must survive until the end-time and the return of Christ in order to testify to the truth of Christianity. By the 10th cen-tury, church policy had been elaborated suffi ciently that popes stipulated that Jews were to be preached to “incessantly,” and if they refused baptism, they should be

expelled so that the righteous would be uncontaminated by infi dels. By then there had been many expulsions, threatened or actual, accompanied by confi scations, forcible conversions (violating church law), and—especially when lay leaders or mobs took part—massacres. Th us, in Spain, before the Muslim conquest of 711, the Jews were twice commanded to be baptized or banished, and the numerous church councils meeting at Toledo issued a series of anti-Jewish edicts that verged on pre-scribing genocide. In the years 558 to 629, several bishops and kings of Gaul or-dered Jews to be baptized or banished. In 629, the Byzantine emperor Heraclius reconquered Judaea from Persia, enslaved and deported many of its Jews, and in subsequent years imposed the choice of baptism or expulsion on all the Jews of the Byzantine Empire; Heraclius probably commanded the kings of the Franks, Bur-gundians, Lombards, and Visigoths in the west (theoretically his subordinates) to throw down the same gauntlet of baptism or banishment—which, urged by their clergy, they did. Scattered in the chronicles are references to expulsions and forced conversions by the clergy of Sens, France, in 876; Vienna in the 930s; Mainz, Ger-many, in the 930s and 1012; Orléans, France, in 1007–1010 (where riots and forced baptisms set off similar ravages in Rouen, Limoges, and elsewhere in France); Bolo-gna, Italy, in 1171; and Bury St. Edmunds, England, in 1190.

When Christian scholars and ecclesiastics discovered the Talmud in the 12th cen-tury, they concluded that Jews followed it rather than the Bible, that it was heretical and “of earth,” and therefore the criminal Jews forfeited any right to tolerance; this idea exposed Jews increasingly to inquisitorial proceedings, conversionist sermons, and coerced baptism. In the same period, the belief arose, contradicting Christian tradition, that the Jews knew Jesus was divine, but with malice aforethought cruci-fi ed him anyway, and so revealed their irredeemably evil and satanic nature. In the many anti-Jewish treatises of the 12th and 13th centuries, Jews are equated with sexual depravity, with money as “fi lthy lucre,” and generally with fi lth and excrement.

Such attitudes and rationales went far to dehumanize Jews—Christian polemic constantly refers to them as dogs, goats, pigs, vermin, and the like—psychologically empowering their tormentors to murder and maim with impunity. Papal policy as set forth in Calixtus II’s Constitutio pro Judeis, issued in 1120 and reissued at least 15 times by 1450, was rarely suffi cient to counter angry preaching and incitement.

Calixtus condemned forced baptism, assaults on Jews and their property, dese-cration of synagogues and cemeteries, and acknowledged their right of local self-government and to practice Judaism. Church law forbade forcible baptism and in earlier centuries Jews were permitted to return to their ancestral faith, but in 1201 Pope Innocent III nullifi ed the prohibition, pronouncing that despite torture or in-timidation, one who has received “the grace of Baptism . . . might properly be forced to hold to the faith which they had accepted perforce” (Perry and Schweitzer 1994, 137–138).

Th e Crusades, which represent Christendom’s adaptation of the Muslim idea of holy war and jihad, faced the Jews with the choice of baptism or death. For more than two centuries, crusading ardor caused enormous Jewish casualties, begin-ning in 1096 in France, the Rhine valley, and the communities (such as Prague) en-countered on the trek east, for as one preacher explained, “After traversing great

distances, we desire to attack the enemies of God in the East, although the Jews, of all races the worst foes of God, are before our eyes. Th at’s doing our work back-wards” (Perry and Schweitzer 1994, 133–134). In Bavaria in 1298, following rumors of host profanation, great bands of people led by one Rintfl eisch rampaged over the countryside for most of the summer massacring thousands of Jews. A generation later, from 1337 to 1339, another bloodthirsty mob led by one Armleder ran amok over the same areas and into neighboring lands, seeking revenge on the Jews for host desecration. Massive casualties stemmed from a series of massacres in France by the Pastouraux (shepherds), spontaneous crusading movements of starving fl a-gellants in the 1320s, who accused Jews and lepers of poisoning the wells. More widespread and lethal massacres followed the Black Plague of 1348: the ensuing Judenbrand (Jew-burning) caused huge casualties and blotted out some 300 Jewish communities. Persecution was so prevalent that occasionally Jews expressed thankfulness for expulsion as a lesser evil. After 1400, resort was made more often to expulsion so that by 1541 all of Western and most of Central Europe was devoid of Jews. A great many towns and principalities in politically fragmented Germany executed expulsions in those decades: Augsburg, Brandenburg, Cologne, Constance, Geneva, Nuremberg, Salzburg, to name a very few. Th e cycle of massacre, arrest/

expulsion, readmission (out of fi nancial calculation), and expulsion several times over, was cynically used, as at Mainz in 1420, 1438, 1462, and 1471. For money, monarchs granted municipalities the prerogative—examples appear in England, Germany, Italy, and Poland—de non tolerandis Judaeis, enabling town councils to exclude or expel Jews arbitrarily and without royal permission. Learning from the monarchs, townspeople were fertile in inventing devices to destroy and profi t.

Th e Jewish community of Vienna was extinguished in the 1420s by a process of host desecration allegations; arrests, trials, and burnings at the stake; forced con-versions, especially of children; confi scations; and expulsion “forever” from all Aus-tria. In the 17th century, the Habsburg emperor invited Jews back to Vienna, but as the learned anti-Semitic professor Johannes Eisenmenger explained, they had to be re-expelled because they “cruelly murdered” a Christian woman, torturing and lacerating her with many stabbings, and, because this crime was “accompanied by numerous robberies and other ruthless depravities, his imperial majesty, moved by praiseworthy Christian zeal, decreed the expulsion of the evil-doing Jews. In the year 1670 he had proclaimed with trumpet blasts in the public squares of Vienna that all Jews be eternally banned and that none be any more seen, upon pain of life and limb.” Th e Jews fl ed to Turkey and Venice (Perry and Schweitzer 2007, doc. 9).

In 1568, Pope St. Pius V expelled the Jews from the Papal States except for Rome and Ancona, thus eradicating numerous small communities, expropriating syna-gogues and cemeteries for Catholic use, and sweeping those who did not escape abroad into the notorious Roman ghetto (founded in 1555), where they were sub-jected to tyrannous theocratic rule, policies calculated to impoverish, missionary pressures and compulsory weekly sermons, censorship of their books, and much else intended to crush and humiliate them until the insalubrious, overcrowded, curfew-regimented ghetto’s dissolution in 1870. Since Passion plays—Jew-hatred dramatized—often unleashed sack and mayhem, the popes banned performances

in Rome, but everywhere else Jews remained subject to that annual danger and to paroxysms sometimes triggered by Antichrist plays. In 1586, the prohibition on Jewish settlement in the Papal States was rescinded, and they became a place of refuge in some measure.

Th roughout the two centuries of their presence in England after 1066, the Jews’

fi nancial contributions accounted for some 10 percent of royal revenues; thus, the Crown protected them the better to exploit and ultimately kill this golden goose.

Riots, arson, and massacre at the time of the Th ird Crusade and Richard the Lion-Heart’s coronation in 1190 may have been the single worst atrocity against Jews in the Middle Ages; John’s reign was more notable for extortionate taxation, a prerog-ative the Magna Carta compelled him to share with the barons. Under the long reign of the pious Henry III, Jews were subject to a range of extortionate taxes, forced loans, fi nes, confi scations, pogroms, arbitrary arrests to be sold as chattel, and accusations of ritual murder (Chaucer refers to the alleged victim, Little St.

Hugh of Lincoln, in his Canterbury Tales) that utterly impoverished them. Henry expressed royal attitudes accurately in stating, “No Jew shall remain in Our realm unless he can serve the king” (Baron 1952–1983, 4:109). Under Edward I, the Jews were unable to “serve the king” and enrich his treasury; he accused them of parti-cipating in “a malicious conspiracy, continu[ing] a new form of usury more mali-cious than the old” (Baron 1952–1983, 4:113). In his 1275 “Statute concerning Jewry,” Edward forbade “usury” by anyone and permitted Jews to enter commerce, handicrafts, and agriculture; but—as with later similar eff orts—these fi elds fi ercely

A massacre of Jews in York, England, is dramatized in this 19th-century engraving.

During the Third Crusade, there were several anti-Semitic riots in England in which Jews were killed by angry mobs.

Religious zealotry and anti-Semitism were widespread in Europe during the Middle Ages. (John Clark Ridpath, Ridpath’s History of the World, 1901)

resisted new competitors. Edward’s halfhearted scheme failed, and in 1290 he ex-pelled the Jews, perhaps 16,000 persons; many Jewish children were prevented from leaving with their families, suggesting that Edward partly implemented the theolo-gian Duns Scotus’s prescription to kidnap and baptize children to prevent their parents from killing them.

Philip II Augustus of France initiated drastic changes in royal Jewry policy when he ordered “his Jews” (his chattel) arrested in their synagogues on a Sabbath day, and extracted an enormous fi ne for the crime, seemingly, of being Jews; he can-celed all debts payable to Jews but made one-fi fth payable to his treasury. A year later, in 1182, he expelled all the Jews, confi scating their real property and allowing them three months to dispose of other possessions. Th e king soon ran out of money, however, and recalled the Jews in 1194, establishing a division of the exchequer to manage Jewish revenues. St. Louis IX was less concerned to profi t from his Jews than to make them disappear by conversion, to forbid their use of the Talmud—

burning so many copies in the 1240s that few survived, and to compel them to re-nounce “usury” or “leave my land.” Philip IV the Fair ruled almost all of France;

consequently, his brutal policies aff ected some 100,000 Jews. Philip’s sole concern was to replenish his treasury: in 1306, his agents simultaneously arrested all the Jews, condemned them to exile for some unspecifi ed crime and to depart within a month, forfeit all their property except for a few pennies and the clothes they were wearing, and transfer to the exchequer all loan records so that he could col-lect every penny of interest and principle. Th at was essentially the end of France’s 1,000-year-old Jewish community. Out of fi nancial desperation, Jews were recalled in 1315 only to be expelled in 1322, recalled again in 1359, and banished “in perpe-tuity” in 1394 with the usual staggering cruelty and losses.

In the 13th century, Spain was remarkably hospitable to Jewish life, but in the 14th century the violence that was rife elsewhere spilled over into Spain. Accusa-tions of ritual murder and host desecration multiplied. In the 1340s, massacres stimulated by the Black Plague erupted, and dynastic wars also triggered pogroms in the 1360s. In 1391, following a campaign of the most rabid preaching of “holy war” by Archdeacon Ferrand Martínez, brutal riots exploded that resulted in the bloody sacking of the Jewish quarter of Seville, despite the eff orts of civil authori-ties and some clergy to check it. Massacre and rapine swept across Spain, causing as many as 50,000 deaths and forcing Jews to chose baptism or death or, when pos-sible, fl ight that took many to North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. Perhaps 200,000, the majority of Spanish Jewry, acceded to baptism. Violence increased their number in subsequent decades, and such “new Christians” or Marranos—the term means “pigs” in Castilian—became subject to the Inquisition. Many Marra-nos, secretly maintaining contact with professing Jews, were Christian in name only. As Christians, however, Marranos could enter the professions and hold offi ce in church and state, until laws requiring limpieza de sangre (purity of blood)—

closely paralleling the 1935 Nazi racial laws—disqualifi ed and removed them. Th e secret allegiance of Marranos to Judaism aroused such anger that the Spanish In-quisition was founded in 1478 to deal with them, but it emerged that the Inquisi-tion must fail—despite autos-da-fé and forced baptisms, growing impoverishment