CHAPTER VIII.

THE ENTRANCE OF THE JEWS INTO EUROPE.

CHASDAI'S LIBRARY.--HIS ACCOUNT OF THE ENTRANCE OF THE JEWS INTO EUROPE.--THE DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM.--A TERRIBLE CARNAGE.--ISRAEL CEASES AS A NATION.--THE DIASPORE.--THE DAUGHTER-RELIGIONS THRIVE UPON THE SUFFERINGS THEY INFLICT UPON THE MOTHER-RELIGION.--THE INDESTRUCTIBILITY OF ISRAEL.--HUMILIATED BUT NOT FORSAKEN.

When we were comfortably seated in the magnificent library of Chasdai ben Isaac, which was furnished luxuriantly, and with an eye to ease and comfort, and stocked with thousands of parchment folios, which stood row upon row, from floor to ceiling, in beautifully arched and decorated alcoves, along the walls of the spacious library hall, our host, Chasdai ben Isaac, began:

"My friends, you asked for an account of 'The Entrance of the Jews into Europe.' The task you honor me with is not an easy one. Upon these shelves stand side by side the best that has been written upon History, Theology and Science, the classics, old and new, in their various tongues, both in prose and poetry, all that has been written for and against the religions of Mohammedanism and Christianity and Judaism, and yet among these thousands of volumes you will search in vain for historic traces of the movements of the Hebrew people since their exile from their native soil. Nay, more, you may even look through the vast library of the Caliph, than which exists at present (950 A. C.) none greater upon the face of the earth, and still you will find naught upon this subject. You may consult the most renowned scholars of our age and meet with no better result.

You marvel why so little is known of the History of the Jews during the period that extends from the _Diaspore_ (70 A. C.) to the time of the conquests of the Arab-Moors of Spain, yet you will cease to marvel when you reflect upon the degradations, persecutions, cruelties, sufferings heaped upon them, when you remember that histories are never written of those who are considered outcasts, pariahs, moral lepers, the accursed by God and man, and the so degraded and execrated, the so persecuted and so barbarously treated are not over-zealous to rejoice their scourgers by flaunting the history of their suffering in their face. What I know of that period is little, and that little have I secured only after much labor and diligent research.

Insatiable Rome, she who had made the world her slave, in whose realm the sun ne'er set, and who, to vaunt of so vast a power, had killed in cold blood, and for no offense at all, fully as many as she ever claimed among the living had stretched at last her cruel hand against Palestine, and the "separate" and "peculiar" and sacred land became a heathen heritage. Jerusalem, the Holy City, lay in ruins. Smoking embers marked the site where stood the Temple of Temples, and the glory of Israel fell, and fell forever, and Israel ceased, and ceased forever, as a nation among the nations of the earth.

Rome enacted a carnage within the holy city, the like of which her inhuman legions, with all their multitudinous and murderous experience, had never seen before. What the famine had left the sword consumed, and what escaped the sword fell a prey to the flames, and what remained, after streams of human blood had quenched the flames, dropped dead beneath the pestilence, and they, that had defied all these grim allies of cruel death, were driven into an open space, the tallest and most handsome were reserved to grace the triumphal march of _Titus_, to be dragged along the streets of Rome with a halter around their neck, and to be executed after the eyes and ears of the Romans had had their fill of the conquered's sufferings; of the rest, all above seventeen years of age were sold to distant countries, to the most cruel servitude, or they were distributed among the provinces to give sport to the people by their gladiatorial combats, fighting for their lives against hungry and ferocious beasts.

One million one hundred and ten thousand Jews perished during this siege; ninety-seven thousand were driven in chains as slaves to distant lands. The old and feeble, and the young and helpless who were spared, not from mercy, but because the Romans for once, weary of their slaughter, and sickened from the loathsome sight and insufferable stench that arose from the heaps of unburied, putrid bodies, were forced to retreat. This pitiable remnant was compelled to take the staff of exile.

Forth they went from their native soil to roam the wide world over. Everywhere homeless, friendless, despised, trodden down, hunted down by man and beast, tortured, an object of derision, a shadow of their former greatness.

And when occasionally a ray of tolerance found its way to these outcast people, and under the spell of its genial warmth the degraded dog was metamorphosed again into a human being, and the Jewish mind awoke again into life, and the Jew, strengthened and rejuvenated and encouraged, dared to enter again into the arena of useful activity, that single ray was at once recalled by priests, who were more cunning and contriving than humane and godly, for only upon the suffering of the mother-religion could the daughter-religion expect to exist. It was feared that the prosperity of Judaism would prove the absurdity of Christianity's and Islam's claims and prophecies. If the Jews are permitted to prosper and flourish and follow their religion, and that religion is shown to be full of life and vigor, what reason for existence have the daughter-religions? Success and prosperity must accompany only that religion which the masses are to accept and follow, and for which superiority is claimed over the others. Such was their sophistical and self-interested reasoning, and so they afflicted and tortured the Jews, denied them every human right, and then kindly and magnanimously credited God with their own wickedness, claiming that God visited these punishments upon the Jews for their rejection of Christ or Mohammed. Hence, the uninterrupted persecutions and sufferings of the Jews.

But God had not withdrawn his guiding hand from His Chosen People. He had cast them down, but he forsook them not. Never before had they been so nigh unto extinction, and still they despaired not. With David they said: 'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff shall comfort me.'[14] They lost not their faith in God and in their divine mission. They doubted not that there was a meaning to their sudden change of fortune. They believed that as each seed when sown must endure darkness and suffer decay before it can multiply its kind a hundredfold, so had God scattered the children of Israel as seeds among the nations of the earth, and subjected them to threats and sufferings that the number of true believers might increase a thousandfold. They regarded it a special distinction to be chosen by God to spread monotheism and civilization among the children of men.[15]

[14] Ps. xxiii. 4.

[15] Talmud Babli, Pessachim 87 b.

"This strong faith in the superior wisdom of God's doing was the elixir that preserved them during their indescribable sufferings. This it was that established unconsciously a bond of union among them, scattered though they were, and whithersoever they went, however near to or however far from the land where once stood the cradle of their nation, their temple and palaces, where ruled and sang and spoke their princes and bards and inspired orators of deathless fame, however removed from this dearly beloved center, one past and one future, one hope and one aim, characterized them all and planted within them the seeds of indestructibility.

What wonder then that soon after this terrible national calamity, a disaster from which no other people on the face of the earth could have possibly survived, we hear of large Jewish communities in Asia, Africa and Europe? Some of these were established even before the dissolution of the Jewish kingdom. At the time of Titus numerous Jewish communities existed in the countries bordering on the Euphrates and the Tigris, in Asia Minor on the north coast of Africa, in Greece and in Italy. The Jewish community in Rome was large and influential long before the reign of Titus, having been brought thither as slaves by _Pompey_, after his conquest of Jerusalem. After the terrible siege of Jerusalem, crowds of exiles wandered to them and swelled their number, and these destitute exiles must have diminished the community's opulence and respectability and popularity, for before the _Diaspore_ Latin authors speak of them as a wealthy and respected community; after this period, the notices of them by _Juvenal_ and _Martial_ are contemptuous, and imply that many of them were in the lowest state of penury, the outcasts of society.

Whatever city in Asia Minor and Greece the Apostle Paul enters he seems to find a synagogue. In some of these cities the Jews seem to have flourished; in most of them, however, they were proscribed as an odious people, and were objects of hatred and abhorrence. The rule seemed to be, in localities where Christianity predominated the Jews suffered; where the Heathens were in power the Jewish communities flourished.

In Italy they were permitted, with few exceptions, to live in peace. Even though _Theoderic_ wrote: "Why should we give them peace in this life, when God will not give them peace in the life to come?" and even though _Cassiodorus_ piously bestowed upon them the flattering appellations of "scorpions, wild asses, dogs," etc., it never came to very serious persecutions, and the valiant defense of _Naples_ by the Jews against the great _Belisarius_, for which History gives them their deserved credit, clearly shows how the Jew can be patriotic for his adopted fatherland.

Concerning the Jews in Western Europe, we have no knowledge before the second century. When the Franks and Burgundians conquered the Roman colonies in Gaul, the Jews, who had been brought thither as slaves, were classed by the victors, as Romans, and shared equal fate with them. They were permitted to follow agricultural pursuits and trades. Their own ships furrowed the ocean. Jewish physicians were sought by the princes of the Church and of the Realm. As soldiers they distinguished themselves in the warfare between Clovis and Theoderic. Their religious practices were not interfered with, the Jew was everywhere respected by the heathen.

But the sun of their prosperity was extinguished when the heathen kings adopted Christianity. With the change of their religion came a change of heart; the heart that was formerly full of love toward the Jew, turned into stone. The clergy dictated, and the kings and the people obeyed with the sword, and the Jews bled and suffered and perished by the thousands, or were dragged under tortures to baptism into the alone-saving and all-loving church.

So much for the early history of the Jews in France. We now come to the history of the Jews in Spain. That theme is vast. It demands a chapter for itself.