The Revolutionary Jew and His Impact on World History

The Revolutionary Jew and His Impact on World History

by E. Michael Jones

2 January 2004

Then the year 1648 arrives, which had been mentioned in the Zohar as the year of the resurrection. The cry went up from the whole House of Israel at the horrors of the Cossack insurrection that had broken out in Poland and Russia and that became known in Jewish history as the Chmielnicki massacres. -- Gerschom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi

The kabbalists had calculated that the year 1648 would bring the redemption; instead it had brought Chmielnicki. -- Chaim Potok, Wanderings

Three events which could be interpreted as "signs" happened in 1648 and 1649. The treaties of Westphalia proclaimed, to a certain extent at least, freedom of conscience; above all they marked the end of Spanish supremacy, and therefore of that of Catholicism. For a good many jews in Amsterdam, who were former victims of the Spanish Inquisition, 1648 might have been the dawn of redemption. Furthermore, Jewish refugees now arriving in Amsterdam were still in a state of terror as a result of the massacres perpetrated by Chmielnicki's Cossacks in Poland. Might not these horrors be the birth pangs of the Messiah spoken of by the traditional texts? Finally, did not the news of the beheading of Charles I herald the overthrow of the things of this world and the beginning of the longed-for new era? -- Menasseh Ben Israel, The Hope of Israel

1648 ANNUS MIRABILIS

According to the Zohar, the year 1648 was to be the mystical year of resurrection, when the Jews could expect deliverance from their more than millennium long exile. Heinrich Graetz, a German Jew, a devotee of the Enlightenment and author of the most frequently cited histories of the Jewish people, calls the Zohar that "lying book" and by extension impugns the entire Kabbalistic tradition. Since the Enlightenment was in many ways a direct result of the disappointment which followed from the failure of the Messianic expectations which reached their fever pitch and denouement in the second half of the 17th century, his skepticism is understandable, as is his scorn for the Kaballah, the mish-mash of what he considered Gnostic and Talmudic mumbo-jumbo that had led to the rise and fall of Messianic hope in the first place. Graetz espoused a worldview which was the complete antithesis of the Messianic fever of the mid-17th century. He was so convinced in his opposition to the Kaballah because he had the benefit of historical hindsight and could see where its vaporous illusions were leading the Jewish people. Expectation of redemption fostered by the widespread dissemination of Kabbalistic doctrine made the Jews, in Graetz's words, "more reckless and careless than was their custom at other times."

Just what Graetz meant by reckless can be derived from his analysis of Polish Jewry, which had become by the time of the period in question a hotbed of Kabbalistic thought. Beginning with the Statute of Kalisz in 1251, the Jews of Poland were granted rights like nowhere else in Europe. They were even granted their own autonomous legal system, known as the kahal, which allowed them to adjudicate intra-Jewish disputes without recourse to the Polish Christian legal system. This autonomy, in turn, necessitated the intensive study of the Talmud, which, according to Graetz, led to the peculiar corruption of Polish Jews. The reliance on the Talmud as the basis of Jewish legal autonomy created a culture of "hair-splitting judgment" among the rabbis, according to Graetz, as well as "a love of twisting, distorting, ingenious quibbling, and a foregone antipathy to what did not lie within their field of vision," which in turn trickled down to find expression in the behavior of vulgar, who "found pleasure and a sort of triumphant delight in deception and cheating." Since by the end of the 18th century, the overwhelming majority of Jews lived in Poland, Jews in general earned, as a result, the reputation of being "a nation of deceivers," to give Immanuel Kant's formulation. "It does indeed seem strange," Kant, the quintessential Enlightenment philosopher, continued, "to conceive of a nation of deceivers, but it is also very strange to conceive of a nation of merchants, the majority of whom, bound by an ancient superstition accepted by the state they live in, do not seek any civil dignity, but prefer to make good this disadvantage with the benefits of trickery at the expense of the people who shelter them and at the expense of each other. In a nation of merchants, unproductive members of society...it cannot be otherwise" (Kant, Werke Bd. vii, p. 205-6). From his vantage point in Koenigsberg, the capital of what was then East Prussia, a country which the Teutonic Knights wrested by force from the Slavic natives, all Jews were Polish Jews.

Graetz, the Enlightenment Jew and apostle of German culture and Jewish assimilation to it, echoes Kant but confines his censure to the Jews of Poland, who, according to his judgment, "acquired the quibbling method of the schools and employed it to outwit the less cunning." Piety and knowledge of the hair-splitting distinctions of the Talmud became one and the same thing for the Polish Jew, a combination which, when added to the dogmatism of the rabbis, "undermined their moral sense" and made them prone to "sophistry and boastfulness."

Largely as a result of the concessions of the Polish crown which began with the Statute of Kalisz, Poland became known throughout Europe as the "paradisus Judeorum," the paradise of the Jews. When persecutions would flare up in the traditionally Jewish sections of Europe, in the German principalities, particularly in the urban centers of the Rhein valley, as they frequently did throughout the middle ages, the Jews who wished to escape their persecution inevitably headed east toward Poland, taking their language, "juedische Deutsch," or Yiddish with them. When Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize toward the end of the 20th century, he was designated a Pole by the selection committee, and yet in spite of that fact had to admit in a moment of candor that he understood Polish only with difficulty, even though he lived his entire youth in Poland. Jews did not assimilate in Poland; most of them did not learn the language of the Christian Poles, because, other than rudimentary commerce and illicit sexual activity, the Jews had virtually no contact with the Poles even though they had lived in their country for centuries. The Jews established their own state within a state there; they established their own legal system and courts there as well, and, if demographic evidence is conclusive in matters like this, the Polish paradise was the most successful modus vivendi Jews ever found in the West.

JEWISH DEMOGRAPHICS

A short summary of Jewish demographics gives some indication of how successful the Jews were living under Polish rule. Between 1340 and 1772, when Poland was partitioned for the first time, the Jewish population of Poland increased 75-fold while, during the same period of time the Christian population only quintupled. The disparity in population increase is explainable in simple terms. Persecution in the west, largely during the period from the 11th to the 16th century, caused massive immigration. Jews moved to Polish territory during that period of time in unprecedented numbers. By the time Poland was partitioned for the third and final time in 1795, 80 percent of the world's Jews lived there.

This phenomenal expansion of the Jewish population in Poland was matched by a correspondingly rapid increase in wealth, and that, in turn, corresponded to a dramatic expansion of the territorial limits of Poland. The Golden Age of Polish Jews, according to Pogonowski, lasted from 1500 to 1648. By 1634, which is to say toward the closing years of this age, Poland had become the largest country in Europe. Its territory extended from the Baltic almost to the Black Sea and from Silesia in the west to what is now the heart of the Ukraine, two hundred kilometers east of the Dnieper River. As a result, by the middle of the 17th century, as much as 60 percent of Poland's population was not ethnically Polish, a situation which was bound to cause friction sooner or later, depending on how wisely the Polish rulers treated their alloethnic subjects.

Instead of wisdom, what followed was a classical case of cultural drift in which imperial expansion covered over internal decay until finally the contradictions and injustices which had become an integral part of the system became so insupportable that the bubble burst, and an orgy of violence followed, eventually dragging the Polish state into extinction. The story of Poland was in many ways the story of Imperial Rome writ small. Imperial expansion to the east into what is now the Ukraine, the Crimea and Belorus resulted in the creation of huge estates, some the size of western European countries like Holland and Switzerland. The estates were called Latifundia, an ironic comment on the blindness of the Polish nobility, who failed to see the mischief which the Latifundia system had wrought in ancient Rome. The Polish Noble's republic was a classic oligarchy, as Plato defined the term in his Republic. As in ancient Greece, so in Poland; wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, led to rebellion among the lower classes. As in ancient Rome, wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer hands fueled a system of imperialism in which the chief losers were the overwhelming majority of the Polish people, in particular, as in Rome, the citizen soldiers, who were driven to the wall by the monopoly conditions the Latifundia fostered. When the rebellion finally came, all Poles would be held responsible for the excesses of magnates who created the system which had dispossessed the average Polish citizen in the first place.

As in ancient Rome, the citizen soldiers who had been the backbone of the republic's legions became the disenfranchised rural proletariat once wealth became concentrated in the hands of the magnates. "The citizen-soldiers who owned small and medium estates," according to Pogonowski, "suffered numerous bankruptcies and were becoming landless while still retaining their full civil rights and privileges." As a result, "many of them had to seek employment in the huge estates called latifundia." This, of course, meant that more political power migrated to the land magnates, who were now the employers of the enfranchised. As a result, "the political machines of the owners of the latifundia enabled them to attain an oligarchic control of the politics of Poland." Their control of the national parliament was based on their grip on the provincial legislatures."

In 1633, the Sejm passed a law forbidding Poland's nobility from selling liquor or enagaging in commercial activities. The Polish noble citizens -- both the wealthy and the impoverished --, in other words, retained political control of the country, but lost economic control because they were forbidden to engage in commercial activity. Because the Polish magnates owned the land but were unable to engage in commerce, they were forced to hand over the job of income extraction to the nation's Jews, who would pay a set fee for a lease to raise the money the nobles needed. The system of pre-paid, short-term leases was known in Poland as "arenda." The connection between the arenda system of tax-farming and the Jews was so intimate that it eventually found expression in the Polish language. In legal contracts in the 17th and 18th century, the Polish word "arendarz" or tax-farmer and "Jew" are synonymous. According to Pogonowski, "15 percent of urban and 80 percent of rural Jewish heads of households were occupied within the arenda system."

The Jewish legal system, or kahal, brokered these licenses to well-to-do Jews, who in turn often subleased them to less well-to-do relatives. In Polish private law, arenda was defined as "the leasing of immovable property or rights. The subject of the lease might be a whole territory, held either in ownership or in pledge [or] the subject might be a tavern, mill or the right to collect various payments such as a bridge toll or a payment connected with a jurisdiction." A Jew, for example, might take out a short-term lease on a church, in defiance of church law. This meant that he was in sole possession of the key to the church door, which could only be opened for the performance of weddings or baptisms after payment of a fee, a practice which naturally led to resentment among Christians. Since the lease was of necessity a short-term lease, it was in the Jew's interest to charge as much money as he could to make back his investment and some profit, since the lease might not be renewed. Or, if it were, someone else might outbid him for it. There was, in other words, no financial incentive to create good will among the local population from which the arendator earned his living. The Jewish tax-farmers had the support of the state -- Pogonowski estimates that 20 to 70 percent of the income of the large estates was generated by tax-farming leases held by Jews -- but lacked the good will of the community which was the source of that livelihood. Since the Jew was not a part of that community, and in fact had developed, as Graetz indicates, a whole culture of treating the goyim with contempt, he could exploit the situation well beyond what would have been considered tolerable had Catholic Poles been running the system:

Arenda-type short-term leases resulted in intensive exploitation of the leased estates, as the lessees tended to overwork the land, peasants and equipment without worrying about long-term effects. The peasants experienced additional hardships when Jewish attendators obtained the right to collect and even impose taxes and fees for church services. The peasants and Cossacks in Kresy [the newly colonized lands of the east] bitterly resented having to pay Jews for the use of Eastern Orthodox and Greek-catholic churches for funerals, baptism, weddings and other similar occasions (Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski, Jews in Poland: A Documentary History The Rise of jews as a Nation from Congressus Judaicus in Poland to the Knesset in Israel [New York: Hippocrene Books, Inc. 1993], p. 68).

Because of the arenda system and the prohibition against distilling spirits which became legally binding in 1633, the Jews assumed total control of the liquor business, which meant that, on the one hand, they could manipulate the price of grain by diverting it to more profitable use as distilled spirits and that, on the other hand, it was in their interest to engage in the intense promotion of alcohol consumption, to maximize profits during the short-term of the lease. This led to chronic drunkenness, decreased productivity, and, of course, increased resentment against Jews, as a group which was perceived as constantly seeking to exploit the weaknesses of the majority population as a way of enhancing their own wealth and power.

Graetz talks about the Jew experienced in financial matters as a salutary counterbalance to the impetuous, headstrong, and ultimately child-like Polish nobleman:

The high nobility continued to be dependent on Jews, who in a measure counterbalanced the national defects. Polish flightiness, levity, unsteadiness, extravagance and recklessness were compensated for by Jewish prudence, sagacity, economy and cautiousness. The Jew was more than a financier to the Polish nobleman; he was his help in embarrassment, his prudent adviser, his all in all.

There are other ways of viewing the "unique utilitarian alliance [that] was formed between the huge landowners and the Jewish financial elite." Looked at one way, Jewish migration to Poland brought with it Jewish capital, and Jewish capital was soon put at the disposal of the Polish crown and the large landowning magnates, whose estates expanded dramatically in size. The Polish magnates proceeded to use both the Jews and their money to expand the Polish empire into the fertile steppes of the Ukraine, Belorus and the northern shore of the Black Sea. Looked at in another way, this alliance concentrated the wealth into fewer and fewer hands, especially during the period of intense Jewish colonization in the Ukraine during the 80-year period between 1569 and 1648. Since the leases involved monopoly rights, the Jewish tax-farmers could increase the political power of their wealthy patrons, and their own wealth and influence as well, by driving the smaller independent landowners to the wall. Increasing their power in the short term, however, only increased the magnitude and violence of the reaction when it eventually came. It was during this Drang nach Osten, this expansion to the East, that troubles began to appear in the Jewish paradise. The success of the new system contained within it the seeds of its own destruction.

RADICAL DISJUNCTION

The radical disjunction between political and economic power in Poland meant that the enfranchised noble citizens gradually lost control of their culture. The easygoing Polish oligarchs, wedded to an economic system that seemed so eminently successful in nbringing new lands under the Polish crown, failed to understand that the control over those territories was being undermined from within by the very people they relied on for its administration. This happened gradually, of course, and it began to manifest itself first in the area of religion. Flush with the short-term wealth which the arenda system created and the territorial expansion which it enabled, the Polish kings ignored the biggest cultural crisis of their day, the Protestant revolt against Catholic hegemony over Europe. There was no Inquisition in Poland. As a result, what might have happened in Spain did happen there. Poland became a model for tolerance, but in doing so paved the way for its own extinction at the end of the 18th century.

At a time when the Duke of Alba was battling Calvinists and Jews in the Netherlands and in effect setting up a barrier beyond which the Reformation would not pass, saving all of southern Europe beginning at Antwerp from the rebellion which had devastated England and the North, Sigismunnd August II, ruler of both Poland and Lithuania, surrounded himself with Jews and the Protestant revolutionaries the Poles called Demi-Jews. The "Reformers" in Poland were largely Unitarian and Socinian followers of Michael Servetus, who, in Graetz's words, "undermined the foundations of Christianity," by "rejecting the veneration of Jesus as a divine person."

Flush with the moneny they provided, King Sigismund indulged his disordered passion and handed the country over to his Jewish and Demi-Jewish administrators for them to rule as they wished. As a result peasants everywhere groaned under the predations of the Jewish tax-farmers, who in turn lent money to the king at usurious rates of interest, thereby keeping him under their power as well. Rabbi Mendel Frank of Brest, according to Walsh, "was so influential that he was called the King's Officer." As in England at the same time, the Polish nobles were torn between religious principle and economic interest. As in England, economic considerations won out and "the nobility in most cases held its protecting hand over the Jews to whom it was tied by the community of economic interests." In other words, the Polish oligarchs "were either in debt to the Jews, or employed them to squeeze taxes from them out of the peasants, naturally at a good profit for the tax-farmers, who took their toll from dairies, millsl, distilleries, farms." The Jews "were indispensable to the easygoing magnate, who was wont to let his estates take care of themselves and wile away his time at the capital, at the court, in merry amusements, or at the tumultuous sessions of the national and provincial assemblies, where politics was looked upon as a form of entertainment rather than as a serious pursuit. This Polish aristocracy put a check on the anti-Semitic endeavors of the clergy." The Jesuits warred with the Jews over the mind of the Polish oligarchs, but there was no Inquisition in Poland, and no Counter-Reformation. Calvinism was spreading among these nobles virtually unchecked by any official Catholic resistance. As a result, Poland became, in Graetz's words, " a second Babylon for the Jews."

By the death of Sigismund II in 1572, the Jews had attained enough power to name his successor in collaboration with the Porte in Constantinople, the Huguenots in France, and the English Protestants. The man who brokered the deal was Solomon ben Nathan Ashkenazi, adviser to Grand Visier Mohammed Sokoli. Solomon Ashkenazi was a German Jew by birth who had migrated, as so many of his race had, to the paradise of the Jews, where he eventually became chief physician to King Sigismund. He then migrated by way of Venice to Constantinople, where he served the sultan as faithfully as he had served the Polish king. Solomon Ashkenazi had succeeded Joseph Nasi, also an adviser to the sultan, as "a sort of unofficial leader of world Jewry." Like Nasi, Ashkenazi orchestrated events following the death of Sigismund from behind the scenes. "Christian cabinets," Graetz informs us, "did not suspect that the course of events which compelled them to side with one party or the other was set in motion by a Jewish hand. This was especially so in the case of the election of the Polish king.

Locked into such a profitable alliance with the Jews, the Polish magnates saw little reason to change a system from which they profited so effortlessly and enormously. As a result the exactions of the Jewish tax-farmers became onerous to the point of intolerable among the peasantry in general, but especially among the newly colonized Cossacks, who never felt themselves a part of the Polish nation or, as Orthodox, part of the Catholic culture of the west. The political crisis, which had been growing during the last 80 years of Poilsh imperial expansion, corresponded as well to the worst excesses of the arenda system. Reform of the system was urgently necessary; and a bill of reform eventually made its way to the Seym.

In 1647, as one of the preconditions that prepared the way for a Polish crusade against the Ottoman empire, the Cossacks were promised full civil rights and enfranchisement over a period of time as Polish citizens. That meant that "the harsh exploitation by Jewish holders of short-time leases was to be lessened by banning the collection of such payments as church fees for funerals, weddings, baptisms, etc." It also meant that disobedience to the tax-farmers was no longer to be considered a capital crime. It also meant that the Jesuits would no longer be assigned to Cossack territory in the Southern Ukraine, and that as a result they would no longer pressure Orthodox to submit to Rome's authority. Finally, it meant that the Jews were to be evicted from the southern Ukraine along with the Jesuits.

When the bill came to a vote in 1648, the Seym, dominated by the alliance of huge landowners and their Jewish administrators, defeated the measure, providing a classic instance of how the concentration of wealth and power into a few hands can enable that group to pursue its own interests, with total disregard of the common good, over the brink of that self-interest into national disaster.

The situation in Poland during the first half of the 17th century was roughly analogous to the situation in Spain a century and a half earlier. Spain was the only other country in Europe with an equally influential Jewish population. As in Poland, many Sephardic Jews engaged in behavior that caused resentment among the lower classes. During the famine in Cuenca in 1326, Jewish usurers charaged farmers 40 percent interest on the money they needed to borrow to buy grain for sowing. Blasphemy had become a Jewish custom in Spain. Moses, according to Walsh, "had condemned blasphemers to death. Yet it was a custom of many Jews to blaspheme the Prophet for whom Moses had warned them to prepare." The Jews, as a result, "were disliked not for practicing things that Moses taught, but for doing the things he had forbidden. They had profited hugely on the sale of fellow-beings as slaves, and practiced usury as a matter of course, and flagrantly." Blasphemy went hand in hand with Jewish proselytizing, which often took place by compulsion. Jews would force Christian servants to get circumcised as a condition of employment. They would encourage people to whom they had lent money to abjure Christ.

The Jews who defined themselves as the antithesis of Christianity had developed the habit of conspiring with Christendom's enemies. Although they flourished under Visigothic rule in Spain, they were not long thereafter found conspiring with the Arabs in Africa to overthrow the Visigothic monarchy. At the beginning of the 8th century they used their contacts with African Jews to prepare the invasion of the Mohammedan Berbers across the straights of Gibraltar. Once the Mohammedans conquered Spain, the Jews flourished under their rule, achieving as a result one of the most sophisticated cultures in Europe at the time. The Jews excelled in medicine and brought Aristotle to Europe. However, the flower of Sephardic culture drew its economic substance from unsavory roots. The Sephardic Jews grew rich on slaves and usury.

When the Spaniards began their reconquista, the Jews were not persecuted. According to Walsh,

Saint Fernando, on taking Cordoba from the Saracens, turned over four mosques to the large Jewish population, to convert into synagogues, and gave them one of the most delightful parts of the city for their homes, on two conditions: that they refrain from reviling the Christian religion, and from proselytizing among Christians. The Jews made both promises, and kept neither.

Resentment against usury combined with the suspicion that the Jews were using their influence to thwart the reconquista, or take control themselves of the already reconquered regions with the secret help of the Moors led to the riots of the late 14th century. If the monarchs did nothing to curb the Jewish influence, the outraged citizens simply took the law into their own hands and widespread bloodshed was the result. Leniency only created more violence, as in the case of Pedro the Cruel, who was perceived as giving "his Jewish friends complete control of his government; a circumstance that led his enemies to call him a Jewish changeling, and contributed to his denunciation by a Pope as 'a facilitator of Jews and Moors, a propagator of infidelity, and a slayer of Christians.'" By the end of the 14th century, Spain's Christian population, convinced that the Jews were "planning to rule Spain, enslave the Christians, and establish a New Jerusalem in the West" began acting on their suspicions by taking the law into their own hands. Widespread bloodshed was one result. Widespread conversion, both sincere and forced, was another.

RABBI SOLOMON CONVERTS

The similarities with Poland are obvious. The Sephardic Jews were, if anything, more a part of Spanish culture than the Ashkenazim were part of Polish culture. The differences, however, are even more striking than the similarities. Unlike the situation in Poland, many Spanish Jews became sincere converts to Christianity. Resentment against the Jews had led to widespread rioting in 1391, and that in turn riveted the attention of the church on the Jews. St. Vincent Ferrer, as a consequence, led crusades for the conversion of the Jews. In 1391 he achieved his most spectacular success when Rabbi Solomon ha-Levi converted to the Catholic faith and became Paul of Burgos or Paul de Santa Maria (1351-1435). Levi was thoroughly conversant with Talmudic literature and was acquainted with the leading Jewish scholars of his day as well. He embraced Christianity as a result of the efforts of St. Vincent Ferrer and reading the works of St. Thomas Aquinas. His conversion, however, only increased the general animus against the Jews by revealing the evidence anti-Christian conspiracy from the inside, so to speak. There was evidence enough. The man formerly known as Rabbi Solomon ha-Levi was, after all, a Jewish insider if there ever was one, and he followed up on his conversion by implicating the Jews in a conspiracy to overthrow the Christian monarchs of the Iberian peninsula. After his conversion, Levi published "two dialogues in which he categorically declared that the Jews were bent upon ruling Spain."

Similarly, another Jewish convert Fray Alonso de Espina eventually became confessor to Henry IV and Rector of the University of Salamanca. In 1459 Espina wrote Fortalitium Fidei, one of the most bitterly anti-Jewish documents in history. In his diatribe against the Conversos, Espina "suggested that if an Inquisition were established in Castile, large numbers of them would be found to be only pretending Christians, engaged in judaizing and in undermining the Faith they professed."

Not all of the conversions following the turmoil of 1391, as numerous Jewish converts themselves indicated, were sincere. The fear which the reprisals created led to an equally unfortunate spate of forced conversions in the first place. Forced conversion is antithetical to the Christian faith. "The unwilling," Pope Gregory the Great wrote at the beginning of a tradition that would remain unchanged throughout the papacy, "are not to be compelled." Gregory is also responsible for the creation of the formula which would guide later popes in their dealings with the Jews. "Sicut Judaeis non," a formula which, according to Synan, was "destined to recur endlessly in papal documents concerning Jewish rights and disabilities throughout the Middle Ages":

Just as license out not to be presumed for the Jews to do anything in their synagogues beyond what is permitted by law, so in those points conceded to them, they ought to suffer nothing prejudicial (Edward A. Synan, The Popes and the Jews in the Middle Ages [New York: The MacMillan Company, 1965], p. 46.

Popes throughout the period in question walked a fine line between two extremes, symbolized in our account by Poland, which erred by allowing Jews to usurp Christian privilege and Spain, which erred by excessive rigor, especially by promoting the abuse of forced conversion. Popes protested both abuses, but, in the case of Spain, unscrupulous politicians, seeking in forced conversion a quick fix to a difficult problem, ignored the warnings and created a deeper more intractable problem instead of solving the original problem. Many Jews accepted baptism as a way of retaining possession of their goods and lives. "Given the forced nature of the mass conversions of 1391," Kamen writes, "it was obvious that many could not have been genine Christians." The king of Aragon repudiated the concept of forced conversion and made it clear to the Jews there that they could return to their ancestral religion, but that was not the case in Barcelona, which, as a result, became a hotbed of subversive activity all the way up to the time of the Spanish Civil War.

COLLABORATION

The rabbis collaborated with the unscrupulous Spanish politicians by allowing for conversion under duress. The early Church was split over whether Christians who renounced the faith during the Roman persecution should be readmitted to the Church. The less rigoristic debated which penances should be applied, but the Church never condoned renunciation of the faith, even if death were the consequence. Talmudic Judaism, however, came up with an accommodation of the practice of lying about conversion based on a distinction which would have consequences which were every bit as serious as those which followed from the forced conversions in the first place. In the fifteenth century, the Rabbis in North Africa distinguished between anusim or unwilling converts and meshumadim, those who converted voluntarily. As a result, the only sort of Jew who was ostracized by the synagogue was the sincere convert. The fact taht the liar and dissembler was tacitly tolerated, in clear violation of the scriptural principle articulated in the Book of Maccabees, was to have far-reaching consequences. One of the most obvious is that the rabbis and the unscrupulous anti-Semitic Christian politicians collaborated in creating an atmosphere where subversion flourished. Jews who had prospered by converting and thereby ignoring the tenets of their own religion could continue to prosper as Christians while retaining the same opportunistic attitude toward Christianity. The Christians who were moved to violence against Jews now harbored the same animus, clouded by religious ambiguity, against the conversos, whom they now called Marranos, a derogatory term of dubious origin which means swine. Forced conversion, in other words, only strengthened the very suspicions it was supposed to allay. And the rabbis were instrumental in strengthening them. As a result, Jews were regarded as a fifth column within the state, and conversos were regarded, because of the very conversion that was forced on them, as an even more dangerous fifth column within the Church. Some conversos were precisely that. Fray Vicente de Rocamora, the confessor of Empress Maria, sister of Philip II, "threw off the mask of Catholicism and joined the Hebrew community at Amsterdam as Isaac of Rocamoro." The Jewish community at Amsterdam in the 17th century was made up almost exclusively of conversos who had thrown off the Catholic faith shortly after escaping from Spain and Portugal and arriving there. It was made up, in other words, of apostate Catholics who had lied about their faith.

The system of forced conversion was exploited bythe cynical Jews who converted insincerely as a way of retaining power and wealth, and it punished those Jews whose conversions were sincere because they continued to suffer the rigors of anti-Semitism. Later Jewish apologists seem unaware of the complexity of the situation and the implications which flow from it. Describing the aftermath of the forced conversions, Cecil Roth writes that

within a generation or two, the Marranos became assimilated enough. Their worldly success was phenomenal. They almost controlled the economic life of the country. They made fabulous fortunes as bankers and merchants. They thronged the liberal professions.... Many of them attained high rank even in the Church. But with all their eminence, the vast majority (and those who had entered Holy Orders were no exceptions) remained faithful at heart to the religion of their fathers, which they handed on, despite unbelievable difficulties from generation to generation. Their Christianity was merely a mask.... They were Christians in nothing, and Jews in everything but name.

Roth's justification of false conversion lends credence to the claims of the anti-Semites in two ways. First of all, it ignores the fact that many conversions were sincere. Both Roth and the Spanish anti-Semites dismiss this possibility out of hand. Secondly, Roth's justification of duplicity condones subversion and in many ways makes it a Jewish characteristic. In this Roth is simply following the example of the rabbis of the time, who in contrast to the scriptural example of the Maccabees, accepted the idea of outward conversion as long as it was coupled with an inward denial of what was professed outwardly. This rabbinic acceptance of duplicity would have far-reaching consequences for European Jewry. In the short term, it set the stage for the conversion of Sabbetai Zevi, the Jewish Messiah, to Islam in 1666. Because of the tradition established by the Sephardic rabbis, Zevi, the false Messiah, could claim, with some plausibility, that his conversion to Islam was only for show. He could claim that it was really an attempt to subvert the Turkish empire from within. Of course, he could also make similar claims to the sultan of Constantinople, claiming that his preaching in the synagogues of the Levant was really an attempt to convert Jews to Islam.

By condoning false conversion under duress, the rabbis created a nation of subversives. The net result was chaos and confusion so total, so demoralizing and so debilitating that medieval Judaism did not survive the crisis. Medieval Judaism, like medieval Islam, was ultimately incapable of negotiating a modus vivendi which accommodated both faith and reason. Medieval Judaism broke apart on the rock of false conversion, as manifested in the case of Sabbetai Zevi. European Jewry, which was virtually unanimous in accepting Zevi as the Messiah, attempted to repress any indication that Zevi had existed after his conversion to Islam, but the evidence of his existence was like the rock just beneath the surace which determines traffic on the river. The messianic fever which infected Europe beginning in 1648 reached its peak and denouement when Zevi converted to Islam in 1666, another Annus Mirabilis. Thereafter, the ship of medieval Judaism foundered and eventually broke into two parts, corresponding to faith and reason respectively, since their union could find in Judaism no unifying force any more. On the one hand, reason found itself represented by Spinoza's rationalism, which led to the German Enlightenment Jew epitomized by Moses Mendelssohn, the man whom Lessing immortalized in German literature as Nathan der Weise. On the other hand, faith divorced from reason led to the Jewish form of quietism known as Hassidism, which continued to thrive in the shtetls of Poland and the Pale of Settlement all the way up to the Nazi genocide.

As anyone with a rudimentary sense of the relationship between Christianity and culture could have anticipated, the regimen of false conversions in Spain did nothing but make a bad situation worse. The cynical Jewish converts continued to exploit the siutation to their advantage under the protection of the Church, while at the same time the sincere Jewish converts were forced to live under constant and intolerable suspicion.

Spain's response to this intolerable situation was the Inquisition. By the 1470s, it was becoming increasingly clear that forced conversions had not solved Spain's Jewish problem. They had in fact made it worse by making it more inaccessible. The longer the government did nothing, the more the mob violence increased. Queen Isabella's predecessor, now known to history under the unfortunate name of Enrique el Impotente, was perceived as handing over to the unscrupulous insincere conversos the administration of both Church and state and doing nothing to curb the rioting and pillaging of the Jews and their possessions which followed in the wake of his inaction. When the civil disorder against the Jews became a serious threat to Spain's military campaign against the Moors, the Spanish crown, united now under Ferdinand and Isabella, imported the Inquisition, created by St. Dominic as a way of ridding Southern France of the Albigensian heretics, in order to bring legal order to resentments which were leading to the mob violence which threatened to engulf Spain. On September 27, 1480, a papal bull commissioned the Dominicans Juan de San Martin and Miguel de Morillo to begin inquiries into reports of subversion of the faith. The Spanish Inquisition had come into existence. Twelve years later, Ferdinand and Isabella, after expelling the Moors from Spain, expelled the Jews as well. In doing so, they saved Spain from the fate of Poland by exporting a problem they could not solve. Over the course of the 16th century, northern Europe inherited the problem which Spain could not solve and cities like Antwerp became, as a result, a hotbed of revolutionary activity.

[to be continued...]

E. MICHAEL JONES

The above article appeared in the September 2003 number of Culture Wars, a monthly magazine edited by EMJ. Home page here: http://www.culturewars.com/

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