into the world. Then, in 37 A.D., the Apostle St. James came to preach the new gospel in Iberia, “so that Spain was the first land after Judea to receive the holy law of grace.” Following the writings of Vargas, he goes so far as to say: “and although to many it has seemed apocryphal that the Toledo Jews wrote to denounce the Passion of Our Lord, the assertion is not without good foundation.”38
Amador de los Rios is probably correct in his opinion that the Jews made their first appearance in Spain during the Visigothic dominion, after the fall of Jerusalem; and scarcely had they settled in the peninsula when they began to experience the bitterness of persecution. But after they had been delivered from this by the Saracen invaders, to whom by race and creed they were fairly sympathetic, they enjoyed—alike under Moslem and Christian rule—a season of prosperity in Spain, which endured until the close of the thirteenth century. And this notwithstanding the undercurrent of mutual contempt and hatred, of Christian for Jew and Jew for Christian, that was invincible in an age of strong religious feeling.
To the Christian every Jew he encountered was his natural and hereditary enemy, a descendant of those who had crucified the Saviour; therefore he was an object of execration, a man upon whom it must be meritorious to avenge the world’s greatest crime which had been perpetrated by his forbears.
The Jew, on the other hand, held the Christian in a contempt as thorough. From the standpoint of his own pure and unadulterated monotheism, he looked scornfully upon a religion that must appear to him no better than an adaptation of polytheism, developed upon the doctrines of one whom the Jews had rejected as an impostor who had attempted to usurp the place of the promised Messiah. To the truly devout Jew of those days the Christian religion can have been little better than a blasphemy. Nor was that the only source of his contempt. Looking back upon his own splendid ancestry, upon the antiquity of his race and the high order of its culture—the fruit of centuries of intellectual evolution—what but scorn could he entertain for these Spaniards of yesterday’s hatching, who were just emerging from the slough of barbarism?
It is clear that mutual esteem between the races was out of all question in an age of strong religious prejudices. Toleration, however, was possible, and the Jew applied himself to win it. To this end he employed at once the vices and the virtues of the unfortunate, which centuries of tribulation had rendered inherent in him.
Armed with a stoicism that was almost pitiful, he donned a mask of indifference to confront expressed hatred and contempt; to violence he opposed cunning and the long-suffering patience that is so peculiarly his own—the patience that is allied with a high order of intelligence; the patience which, interpreted into “an infinite capacity for taking pains,” has been urged as the definition of genius, and is the secret of the Jew’s success wherever he is established.
In the cohesion in a foreign land of this people that cannot keep together as a nation, and in their extraordinary commercial acuteness, lies the strength of the Jews. They grew wealthy by their industry and thrift, until they were in a position to purchase those privileges which in Christendom are the birth-right of every Christian. Their numbers, too, made it difficult in Spain to treat them with contumely; for upon the reasoned estimate of Amador de los Rios39 there were close upon a million Jews in Castile at the end of the thirteenth century.
They formed by their solidarity—as they always do—an imperium in imperio, a state of their own within the state; they had their own language and customs; they were governed by their own laws, which were enforced by their Rabbis and chiefs, and they pursued their own religion unmolested, for even the observation of the Sabbath was respected by the Castilians. Thus they came to create for themselves in a foreign country a simulacrum of their own native land.
It is true that they were afflicted from time to time by sporadic, local persecutions; but in the main they enjoyed a tolerance and religious liberty which the poor harried Albigenses beyond the Pyrenees might well have envied. For the Church, which had already established the Inquisition, was very far—for reasons that shall be considered in the next chapter—from instigating any persecution of the Children of Israel. Thus, Honorius III, whilst carrying forward the policy of Innocent III, and enjoining the extirpation of heretics in Southern France and elsewhere, confirmed (November 7, 1217) the privileges accorded to the Jews by his predecessors upon the throne of St. Peter. These were that no Jew should be constrained to receive baptism; that should he incline to embrace the Christian Faith he must be received in it with love and benevolence; that his feasts and religious ceremonies must be respected by Christians; that the whipping or stoning of Jews be forbidden and punished; that their burial-places be held sacred.
And when King Ferdinand III—afterwards canonized—wrested Seville from the Moors (1224), he made over one of the best districts of the city to the Jews, and gave them the four mosques contained in it that they might convert them into synagogues.
The only restraint placed upon them by the law was that they must refrain, under pain of death, from attempting to proselytize among Christians, and that they must show respect for the Christian religion.
These were the halcyon days of Hebrew prosperity in Spain. Their distinguished abilities were recognized, and they won to many positions of importance in the government. The finances of the kingdom were in their control, and Castile prospered under their able administration of its commerce. Alfonso VIII, in whose reign it is estimated there were 12,000 Jews in Toledo alone, employed a Jew as his treasurer, and did not disdain to take a Jewess for his mistress—an interesting little fact in view of the law that was so soon to be promulgated on that subject.
Hardly less than their value to the nation’s commerce were their services to science, art, and literature. They excelled particularly in medicine and chemistry, and the most skilful doctors and surgeons of the Middle Ages were men of their race.
In the middle of the thirteenth century a change unfortunately set in, and this external harmony so laboriously established was disturbed by an excrescence of the real feelings that had never ceased to underlie it. Largely the Jews were themselves to blame. Deluded by the religious liberty that was conceded them, by the dignities to which men of their faith had climbed, and by the prosperity which they had attained, they failed to perceive that their accumulated wealth was in itself a menace to their safety.
Emboldened by the consideration shown them, they committed the imprudence of giving a free rein to their Oriental taste for splendour; they surrounded themselves with luxury, and permitted themselves an ostentatious magnificence in their raiment and equipages, and thus proclaimed the wealth they had been amassing through generations of comparative obscurity.
Had they confined themselves to this strictly personal display all might yet have been well. But being dressed and housed in princely fashion, they put on princely ways. They grew haughty and arrogant with the horrible arrogance of wealth. They allowed their disdain of the less affluent Christians to transpire in their contemptuous bearing towards them, and being unchecked in this it was but another step to abuse the privileges which they enjoyed.
Their parade of wealth had provoked envy—the most dangerous and maleficent of the passions implanted in the human heart. Their arrogance and cavalier bearing stirred that envy into activity.
Questions arose touching the sources of their wealth. It was propounded against them that their usurious practices had ruined many of the Christians whom they now dared to spurn. And although usury had been sanctioned and it had been proclaimed lawful for them to charge a rate of interest as high as 40 per centum, it was suddenly remembered that usury had in all times been uncompromisingly condemned by the Church—and by the term usury the Church then understood any interest, however slight, paid upon borrowed money.
Fanaticism began to stir uneasily in its slumber, and presently, under the spur of greed, it roused itself and reared its horrid head. Public feeling against the Israelites was increased by the fact that they had practically acquired control of the ever-unpopular offices for the collection of taxes.
The populace grew menacing. Evil tales concerning them were put about, and they were accused, among other ritual abominations, of practising human sacrifices.
Whether there was any real ground for the accusation is one of those