Part 5

The curse of Cain came upon yet another name,--Malchus. This servant of Caiaphas, whose ear cut off by Peter was healed by Jesus, had no reason to be thankful, it would appear by the legend; this relates that he struck Christ with an iron gauntlet, and was doomed to walk around a column underground, against which he vainly dashes his head, until Judgment Day. We have already seen (I.) that the Wandering Jew, under the name of Joseph, was reported as undergoing a similar punishment in Jerusalem, in 1641. The story of Malchus seems to blend that of Ahasuerus with the Talmudic myth of Cain, which is related in Mr. Baring-Gould’s _Curious Myths_ (ii. p. 116). When Seth sought the Tree of Knowledge in order to plant a scion of it in the grave of Adam, (see VIII.), he saw its roots in Hell, and Cain trying to climb thereby into Paradise. The roots laced themselves around Cain and pierced him through and through, holding him bound in living agony for ever.

According to Christian and Jewish revelations Cain must have discovered that, in his fratricide, he had been unsophisticated in the art of punishing an offender against one’s will. The divine method is more ingenious. In the romance of Huon de Bordeaux (13th Cent.) by Huon de Villeneuve, the writer reports having seen a cask, with serpents and iron prongs inside, rolling rapidly along. Cain is shut in it, and therein must roll on till the end of the world. This rolling cask would appear to be the prison and punishment of Malchus, adapted to the idea of perpetual wandering. Al Sâmeri was also called _Al kharaïti_, “the turner.” Professor D’Ancona (_Nuova Antologia_, Oct., 1880, “La Leggenda dell’ Ebreo Errante”) shows that the story of Malchus is Italian. M. Gaston Paris ascribes it great antiquity, identifying the name and idea with the legend of Marcus the Leper, which is old enough to be represented in early Italian proverbs. This Marcus, having been cured by Jesus, afterwards struck him, and the curse laid upon him was held to explain the incurability of leprosy. M. Paris finds in this legend the idea of the blow given Jesus. If with this are combined the legend of Joseph of Arimathea (thrown into prison by the Jews, where his life was miraculously preserved), and the words to St. John, we have, he thinks, the story of Cartaphilus.

VIII.

THE JEW IN THEOLOGY.

The fable concerning Judas is one of many which indicate the formation of a special Christian doctrine concerning the Jewish race.

After the ruin of their Temple at Jerusalem and desolation of their city, the Jews made repeated efforts--like that led by Bar-Cocheba--to recover their independence. As the possibility of recovering their city and rebuilding their Temple faded away they managed, even in their dispersed condition, to constitute an _imperium in imperio_ under an officer called Resh Gelutha, or “Prince of the Captivity.” As was natural, they never lost an opportunity of opposing the new empire, of which Jesus had been made General. In the fourth century they joined the Arians. When Julian was called the Apostate he gave them leave to rebuild their Temple at Jerusalem, their hope of doing which was suddenly quenched by that Emperor’s death. These great events, of which the most typical can alone be mentioned here, were steadily constituting a definite creed concerning the Jewish race, a creed afterwards to be written upon all Europe in their blood, and illustrated in the flames that consumed them.

The Christians believed that the Jews, as a race, gave themselves up to be the devil’s agent for the crucifixion of Christ. Even the idea of converting them seems hardly to have occurred to any Christian before the Reformation--unless the Holy Cross Day torture at Rome be called such--and, justly as the Jews now resent the efforts of conversionists, the existence of a Society of that kind is a result of the tardy recognition of their humanity. The scenes of the Passion--so long preached, pictured, acted on the stage--cast upon the Jews a shadow never relieved, and were a perpetual instruction in horror of that people. The supernatural character ascribed to them by Christians as well as themselves, implied, since they had rejected Christ, infranatural wickedness. They were to Christendom the chosen people still, but now chosen of Satan.

While the sacred names and superstitions of the Jewish people were preserved, a deadly hatred of those who had really founded Christianity, and furnished its Messiah, was carefully fostered. The connection of Christianity with Judaism was reduced to a series of fairy-tales. Characteristic of these was that about the True Cross. Seth receives from the Archangel Michael a branch of the Tree of Knowledge to plant in Adam’s grave, and is told that when it should bear fruit Adam would recover. Out of Adam’s grave grows the Tree, which Solomon hews down for the Temple. The workmen cannot so adapt it, and it is used as a bridge over a lake. The Queen of Sheba, crossing it, beholds a vision of Christ on the Cross, and informs Solomon that when a certain person shall be suspended on that wood the fall of the Jewish nation would be at hand. Solomon in alarm buries the wood, and then springs over it the pool of Bethesda. Shortly before the crucifixion the tree floated on the water, and ultimately, as a cross, bore its fruit. The Jews concealed the Cross, while pagans built a Temple of Venus on the spot where it stood. Helena, mother of Constantine, having sentenced a Jew to torture and death, remits the punishment on condition that he will inform her where the Cross is. Out of the three found the true one manifests itself by performing cures. Thus the Cross itself was a holy immortal Wanderer, with the branded Jew ever beside it, seeking to destroy or bury it.

Race-hatred had much to do with the shaping of this theology, which anathematised the race from whose primitive superstitions it was chiefly borrowed, without discrimination or comprehension.

The “anti-Semitic” venom crept for ages through the veins of Christendom. Fed by millions of pulpits the deadly stream percolated through the world, and a consistent theory concerning the Jews was formed, not very different from that which at length appeared in Swedenborg’s pious phantasmagoria. In the history of Israel, says Mr. White, Swedenborg “sees nothing but selfish Jacob over and over again; and throughout the _Arcana Celestia_ he pursues the Jews with one whip of epithets as the basest of mankind.”[24] The Jewish race was “chosen” by God not because of their excellence, but for their baseness: their lack of interior religion made them fit actors in a drama where literalness was needed; their sensuality adapted them to be the instrument of incarnation; and Jesus was born of a Jewish mother because he could go no lower! “In that body, whose every faculty was an avenue to the Hells, he met as on a battle-field the Powers of Evil and Darkness and subdued them.” A fine offset this to the late Lord Beaconsfield’s proud reflection that the majority of Christendom hold a Jewess to be Queen of Heaven! It is true that Mary was excepted by Christendom from the general curse which it saw resting upon the Jewish race; but her exaltation, in the fifth century, was largely due to legends of the Jews, which represented her as an unchaste woman. Her apotheosis among Christians was the other side of her condemnation by the Jews; their vision of her in Hell was replied to in the story of her Assumption. The Jews were never benefited by any of the holy personages transmitted from their race for the homage of Christendom. They were held to be the official persecutors and crucifiers of such as were divinely sent unto them: whatever the light seen in their history, the only credit of the Jews was to lie under the shadow it cast.

It was largely through the Miracle Plays that hatred of the Jews, diffused by mediæval homilies, gained the shape which proved so fatal to the Jews. On the stage the holy drama represented a great struggle between the hosts of Heaven and Hell, of which the scene was on earth. In that drama the Jewish race was not merely the “heavy villain,” it was the incarnation of all devils. It would appear that for a thousand years no Christian regarded any Jew as a man at all. In those excesses of cruelty too wild to be now comprehensible--when every European river ran red with Jewish blood, when Jews’ eyes and teeth were plucked out and their bodies burnt as torches in saturnalia beside which those of Nero with his Christian martyrs were trivial--it is plain that there was an epidemic possession wrought by the long education of the people in the belief that the Jews, from a supernatural, had become an infranatural people.

They from whose ears the reported denunciations of the Jews by Jesus--as “of their Father the Devil,” as “vipers,” “children of Hell”--were never suffered to die out, and who avenged the crucifixion of one man by the crucifixion of a race for centuries, are condemned for inhumanity. But the charge is inexact. They were as charitable as are their posterity to those whom they regarded as human beings. Their theology had dehumanised the Jews, and its progress was traced in Christian inhumanities wrought in pious zeal for the Trinity. It was not a suspicion admitted into any mind, thus sophisticated, that it was a man against whom Judas and the Jews had raised their hand. It was against the Eternal Majesty. That they saw as the obvious functional work of Satan. It was the culminating attack in an eternal war against God. Hence those perpetual dooms beheld overhanging all concerned in the crucifixion, which denoted the unpardonable and everlasting nature of the offence against the eternal Avenger of his honour. It is only the God of Theology whose vengeance never sleeps nor ends with any generation, whose wrath is fresh every day, and his hell eternal. Only when man has had his human heart dexterously removed, and has become the changeling of some vampyre Phantasm he coweringly adores, could he be the instrument of the crimes that Christianity has committed against humanity.

Seven times shall Cain be avenged, seventy and seven times Lamech, ran the old song; but Jesus said, seventy times seven shalt thou forgive. The human Jesus was speedily overlaid and lost beneath the myths that gathered around the passive Jesus--the babe, the dead body. No holiday was appointed for the Sermon on the Mount, nor was there any Festival of the Golden Rule.

IX.

THE JEW IN FOLK-LORE.

It is related in the _Legenda Aurea_ of John Capgrave that St. Brendain, on his famous voyage, came to an island filled with beautiful birds whose music entranced the souls of listeners. The birds told the saint that they had been angels; when the rebel angels plotted their designs in heaven they had been tempted by the Archfiend to join his party; they did not yield, but dallied with the temptation, and when the wicked beings were cast into the sea of fire, they were transformed into birds. They sang hymns of joy, awaiting their release.

On the other hand, the ill-omened “Seven Whistlers” or “Seven Plovers,” of English superstition are said to have been Jews who assisted in the crucifixion of Jesus.

These birds are types of the fables that flitted about the world in the Middle Ages, each the transformation and diminution of their like which had been set free by the decay of both European and Jewish mythology. Christianity had preserved both with care. The Jewish mythology it had disintegrated and recombined for its own supernatural authentication; to the European deities it had given a new lease of life by degrading them to devils, affirming their power to haunt and harm their former worshippers. If there had been any kindly attributes or pleasant tales associated with these deities they were transferred to the Christian saints; if any evils had been told of such, they were intensified under the sweeping anathema of the new religion.

Into this miasmatic atmosphere anti-Semitic prejudice and theology were diffused. The same process as that just mentioned concerning “paganism” presently overtook the Jews. When all hope of changing or exterminating it had passed away the theological theory was naturally formed by which all the good in the Jewish system was transferred to Christianity, and everything repulsive was diabolised. Unfortunately for the Jews their anathema came later than that which had degraded the deities and beliefs of pagan Europe; their sacred forms, rites, superstitions were the more vivid; so that the fading phantoms of European mythology were able to acquire new life by union with the fresher ones imported from the East. In this way the demons, gnomes, witches, which, from representing the majesty as well as the menace of nature, had been doomed to bear responsibility for all its cruelties, now came to nestle with the Jews. These were already the normal scapegoat for the fall of man and martyrdoms of Christians; now there entered into them a troop of imaginary horrors worse than any known to their most barbarous days. Of these a few characteristic examples may be selected from the very large number known to every student of folk-lore.

The periodical assemblies of witches believed to occur in various wild places were called “Witches’ Sabbaths,” because Jews were supposed to be the chief attendants at them. They there received their wages for supporting the kingdom of Antichrist. They celebrated a grand mass before the Devil. The blood of Christian children was said to be essential to their sacrifices. In some regions where, under the ancient religion, the effigy of winter had been burnt on one or another day of spring, it became the custom to burn it on Good Friday and under the name of Judas. The ceremony of scourging and burning Judas still takes place annually in the London Docks. In Spain it is considered necessary to spit after pronouncing the word “Jew;” and from that country the paganised effigies of that people have spread through distant regions of the world. In some regions (as Oldenberg) the birthday of poor everlasting Judas is said to be February 14, in others (as Franconia) it is fixed as April 1, and these days are unlucky. The stigma of Iscariot passed upon certain trees, as the aspen, which was said to tremble perpetually because he hung upon it; and the Judas-tree, with its blood-drop blossoms. In the Bergstrasse, or high road between Darmstadt and Heidelberg, the peasantry still believe that every Jew possesses the “evil eye,” and that if a sick person wishes to die swiftly he must get a Rabbi to pray for his convalescence. In sundry places Jews are believed able to foretell the weather by means of dividing a loaf of bread, putting the parts together again, and shoving it with a mysterious word into an oven. They are also believed to spread diseases by spells written in Hebrew on bits of paper, and to deal in such charms. In some regions noises heard in mines were indifferently attributed to kobolds, or to the ghosts of Jews believed to have been made to work in them as slaves by the Romans. In East Friesland it is considered very unlucky to meet a Jew first in the morning; if a Jew is the first to enter one’s house on Monday, or even to look into the window, it renders the whole week unlucky to the house, and was once an offence that might be prosecuted.[25] Other Jews impaled in the ever-repeated Christian legend took on, in the popular imagination, the diabolical forms into which the pagan deities had been degraded by missionaries. In storms Herod was said still to hunt the Innocents. The Perigord peasant names the fierce thunderstorm “la chasse Herode.” This was probably an ingenious development of the Herr-Rote, or Haar-Rote, the red-haired demon-huntsman. Associated with him was Herodias. Grimm says that the Italians sometimes identify their misshapen fairy Befana--a terror to children, who has sprung out of Epiphania--as Herod’s daughter (Salome); so that both mother and daughter were made into evil wanderers.[26] Herodias, who prompted her daughter to demand the head of John the Baptist, was associated with Diana and Holda in the nocturnal expeditions of demons and witches. She was at the head of an aerial host of such. Only from midnight to cockcrow can she rest, and then sits upon oaks and hazel-trees. She was said to have an unrequited passion for John, and when his head was brought in on a charger would have kissed it, but it recoiled and blew upon her, and she was whirled into the air, where she wanders. In Lower Saxony whirlwinds are accounted for by the dancing of Herodias, as elsewhere to that of the devil. Herod and Herodias are said by Josephus to have been banished to Lyons, and eventually to have died in Spain; perhaps this may account for the special prominence she holds in the folk-lore of Spanish America. In Mexico the puppet Herodias dances in a kind of Punch and Judy show in Holy Week, to the music of rattles made of “Judas bones.” In Eugene Sue’s _Wandering Jew_ Herodias appears in Arctic America. M. Gaston Paris cites several Italian proverbs in which Judas and Malchus are united (as in Sicily, _lu Juda--Marcu_) to characterise an ugly or unpleasant countenance. It has been thought (though I have not investigated the matter) that our puppet-show, _Punch and Judy_, is a distant outcome of an old play, _Pontius cum Judæis_, in which the Jews were severely handled by the pro-consul.

X.

THE WEIRD OF THE WANDERER.

There is one class of survivals from the fatalistic ideas of all so-called paganisms which have always been very strong in the popular mind of Europe. It was a creed in which all ancient faiths converged, that an irresistible power was lodged in any officially-uttered curse. The word once solemnly spoken, became the weird, the fatum, and not even the tongue that spake could revoke it. Oftenest the dooms that represented this belief in the Middle Ages were supposed to come from Heaven in response to some defiant invocation, or blasphemous challenge like that of the Flying Dutchman. It is a notable fact for the antiquarian that in the year 1881 the courts of England should be trying a case involving the question of whether a lecturer took out his watch and gave the deity, whose existence he denied, five minutes to strike him dead. That is an old myth normally fixed on misbelievers; and it is probable that the motives for selecting that particular slander for judicial denial, if traced out, would be found connected with the ancient superstition that such words must have the eternal effect of real natural forces. From the ancient patriarchalism, which has so many political and social survivals in Europe, came the idea that a father’s curse (or blessing) carried with it the fatal forces of the universe. More universal still was the potency supposed to attend the word of a priest, however casual. This notion is still met with in the many stories of persons said to have died soon after ridiculing the proceedings of “revivalists.”

Grässe has collected some examples of such superstitions in Europe, beginning so far back as the legend of Domitilla, the grand-daughter of Domitian. In her room, after she had become a Christian, her husband introduced dancers to win her back to the world and to himself: he began showing them how to dance, but could not stop; and after dancing two days and nights, died. Such “dances” are now familiar in folk-lore, and are associated with some of the stone circles of England. In Kolbeck, near Halbustadt, there is a legend that, in the year 1012, a peasant named Albrecht and fifteen others who danced before the Church on Christmas while Mass was going on, were ordered by the priest to dance for a year. The Bishop of Cologne had to come and release these dancers, who had worn a deep hole in the ground. In the same vein is the story of “the merry smith of Jüterbogk,” a small survival of Sisyphus. A remarkable story of this kind is that of Freiburg (A. Müller, _Theatr. Freiburg Chron._, 1633). An irritable father, Lorent Richter, ordered his son of fourteen years to do something: the boy hesitated, standing in the middle of the room. “Cursed boy,” cried the father, “may you stand there for ever!” The boy remained standing there, propped by supports, and after many years the priests, by many prayers, could only secure the small commutation of a removal to a corner where he would not be so much in the way of the household. “At last the kind God a little altered the punishment by allowing him to sit during the last six months of the year, and also to lie in a bed placed near him. When asked what he did, he answered that he was punished by God the Lord for his sins; that he left all to His will; and trusted in the merits of Christ to obtain final happiness.” After seven years--a number associated with many famous sleepers--the boy “was relieved, 11th Sept., 1552.” His footprints were pointed out on the floor for a hundred years. The father had wished to obliterate this memento of his anger, but the authorities decided that the footprints should remain as a warning to wrathful parents and disobedient children.

The great majority of “dooms” known to Northern paganism have exchanged connotations with the legend of the Wandering Jew. The sentence pronounced upon such royal huntsmen or robber-knights as Dyterbjernat of Danzig, Diedrick of Bern, Duke Abel the fratricide (Schleswig), and others, is usually of this character. In the Netherlands it is the story of a son who refused to listen to his father’s Christian advice, but called his dogs into the wood: the father cried, “Hunt, then, for ever!” and so he hunts on, and his voice, mingled with the baying of dogs, is heard in the woods about the Castle of Wynedal. In Thuringia, it is Hakelnberg who would not listen to the priest, who bade him “hunt until the last day.” These formulas of the curse are related to that of the Jew legend: the primitive pagan legend is different, _e.g._ the hunt long known as the Horlething, on the banks of the Wye. It was said King Herla went to the marriage feast of a dwarf: when he returned to his palace he found that he had been in the mountain with the dwarf two hundred years, and was under a doom to ride on until the day of judgment. The visit to the dwarfs festival simply meant a relapse into paganism.