Part 7
“Thou, O Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.” So early did the compulsory tendencies of the Jews reveal themselves. Their alienation among other peoples made them close up in their ceremonial law as in a shell; their book was sealed amid inferior ‘revelations’ swarming around them, and themselves sealed in it: but, meanwhile, detached from the soil and the guilds of every country, forced to be exchangers, pedlars, they must travel to and fro, and their knowledge was increased. They became so well acquainted with the lore of different lands, with the medical and other knowledge of various countries, that they were supposed to possess occult powers. Occasionally, this reputation might be of service to them, as in the instance where Queen Elizabeth employed a Jewish physician for his supposed occult knowledge; but more often it harmed them, as in the evil fate that overtook that same physician, whom jealous rivals accused of an attempt to poison the Queen. For many centuries they presented the most remarkable instance of a people who had largely outgrown their primitive superstitions, and acquired a religious and intellectual enlightenment beyond the rest of the world, who yet kept all this culture within the hard walls of their barbaric stronghold, their ancient forms and formulas, from which they did not dare to venture.
XIII.
THE POUND OF FLESH.
Passing out of Rome by the Via Appia, one comes to many places of antiquarian interest, but presently arrives at a spot whose significance increases with time. This is the church called _Domine quo vadis_. There, says the legend, St. Peter, once more flying from danger, met Jesus, and said, “Lord, whither goest thou?” Jesus answered, ‘_Venio Romam iterum crucifigi._’ Whereupon Peter returned, and met his fate--that hard one of a mythical martyrdom, followed by resurrection as a Pontifical Jupiter, wielding his keys as thunderbolts. A fac-simile of the holy footprints of Jesus is here in the church, the originals, sunk in marble, being preserved in Saint Sebastian’s Church.
Goethe had perhaps seen the worshippers around these footprints (near by the Jewish catacomb with its seven-branch candlestick), when there arose in him the idea of a poem which, alas, never got farther than the outline given in a further chapter. Writing from Terni, October 27th, 1786, he says: “Yesterday I felt inspired to undertake a work which at present would be ill-timed. Approaching nearer and nearer to the centre of Romanism, surrounded by Roman Catholics, boxed up with a priest in a sedan, and striving anxiously to observe and to study without prejudice true nature and noble art, I have arrived at a vivid conviction that all traces of original Christianity are extinct here. Indeed, while I tried to bring it before my mind in its purity, as we see it recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, I could not help shuddering to think of the shapeless, not to say grotesque, mass of heathenism which heavily overlies its benign beginnings. Accordingly, the ‘Wandering Jew’ again occurred to me as having been a witness of all this wonderful development and envelopment, and as having lived to experience so strange a state of things, that Christ himself, when he shall come a second time to gather his harvest, will be in danger of being crucified a second time. The legend _Venio iterum crucifigi_ was to serve me as the material of this catastrophe.”[30]
Perhaps Goethe also witnessed “Holy-Cross Day” in Rome, when the Jews were “compelled to come in” and hear the annual sermon--“haled,” as one said, “as it were by the head and hair, and against their obstinate hearts, to partake of the heavenly grace.” Had the two visionary Wanderers--Jesus and Ahasuerus--once more encountered each other in sight of the crosses, they could only have hung side by side; he who gave the blow in Jerusalem, now conceivably the one person in Rome able to recognise the freshly-crucified from a cross of his own--the cross of his race. From another poet have come the words which typical Ahasuerus might, after the experience of so many centuries, speak to the fellow-sufferer he once had insulted:
“Thou art the judge. We are bruised thus, But, the judgment over, join sides with us! Thine too is the cause! and not more Thine Than ours is the work of these dogs and swine, Whose life laughs through and spits at their creed, Who maintain Thee in word, and defy Thee in deed!
“We withstood Christ then? be mindful how, At least we withstand Barabbas now! Was our outrage sore? but the worst we spared. To have called these--Christians, had we dared! Let defiance of them pay mistrust of Thee, And Rome make amends for Calvary!
“By the torture prolonged from age to age, By the infamy, Israel’s heritage, By the Ghetto’s plague, by the garb’s disgrace. By the badge of shame, by the felon’s place, By the branding tool, the bloody whip, And the summons to Christian fellowship--
“We boast our proof that at least the Jew, Would wrest Christ’s name from the Devil’s crew. Thy face took never so deep a shade, But we fought them in it, God our aid! A trophy to bear, as we march, Thy band, South, east, and on to the Pleasant Land!”[31]
Holy-Cross Day was appropriate for this work of striking the Jewish race in the face, as they fainted at the Christian door, and showing them now themselves the crucified, by a High Priest Christ taught to hate his enemies and pierce them with nail and spear. For it was about the time of the alleged discovery of the True Cross, already noticed, that this fable of the Wandering Jew probably first began its career.[32] Already at that time it was shown on the walls of imperial Christendom that Jesus and Ahasuerus, as types of Humanity, had changed places--the nails and the thorn-crown transferred from one to the other; and, what is more, the cruel dogmas and superstitions abandoned by the one made by the other into the established religion of Europe.
In the familiar legend of the True Cross, Helena is for a time baffled by a certain Judas, who has occult sources of knowledge, and warns the Jews that the empress is coming to find what, if found, will cause the downfall of their religion. But she having threatened a general massacre, the Jews inform her that this Judas can alone reveal the place of the cross. He refuses; is starved at the bottom of a dry well for six days; on the seventh, consents. When the cross appears, Judas is converted by its miracles and baptized.
In a paper read to the New Shakspeare Society, April 9th, 1875, Miss Toulmin Smith announced her discovery that the story of the “Pound of Flesh” is contained in the thirteenth century English poem, “_Cursor Mundi_,” there interwoven with the legend of the Finding of the Holy Cross. A Christian goldsmith, in the service of Queen Helena, owes a sum of money to a Jew; if he cannot pay it at a certain time he is to render the weight of the wanting money in his own flesh. The bond is forfeit; the Jew prepares to cut the flesh; but the judges decide that no drop of blood must be shed. The Jew being thus defeated, Queen Helena declares that he must give up all his goods to the State and lose his tongue. This sentence is remitted on his agreeing to tell her where the Holy Cross is hidden,--which he did.
It might easily arise, as a saga on this Jew’s knowledge, that he had personally participated in the hiding of the Cross, just after the crucifixion, and had been miraculously preserved through centuries as “a witness” to reveal its place of concealment, and thereby also to be “a witness” to the truth of the Christian legend. This might even have been in the minds of those who gave him the name of Judas, though perhaps that is merely a token of homage to the True Cross, as potent enough to convert a Judas. It is in harmony with the endless plots and counterplots of the True Cross Tale that the traitor of Christ should live to become traitor to Antichrist. At the same time there is a suggestion in it of precise retribution in kind which naturally combines with the story of the “Pound of Flesh.” It is highly probable that Shylock and the Eternal Jew are twins of the True Cross Mythology, though Ahasuerus be a later name and figure.
But this Holy Cross itself was, and is, a perpetual symbol of the pound-of-flesh principle which lay at the foundation of the ancient Jewish system, and from it, after that foundation had crumbled for the Jews, was adopted as the chief corner-stone of Christianity. This I have demonstrated elsewhere,[33] and the history of the legend, with the conclusions based on it, though they may appear here as an episode, will be found closely related to the development of our subject.
Mr. Swinburne speaks of Marlowe’s Jew as the real man, while Shakspeare’s is a mouthpiece for the finest poetry.[34] A surprising criticism! The genesis of the conventional stage-Jew in England has already been given in this work (XI.), and my reader will do well to refer to it at this point.
It is sufficiently remarkable that, in this year 1881, London should have witnessed on the stage, as acted by two eminent Shakspeare interpreters, the two stage-Jews which competed for popular favour in the time of Marlowe and Shakspeare. The “Shylock” of Mr. Booth is an odious, avaricious, bloodthirsty villain; that of Mr. Irving is a fatal, powerful and pathetic character. The fine acting of Mr. Booth cannot strive against the art of Shakspeare, who at no point could have raised sympathy with a man he meant should be utterly repulsive. Mr. Booth’s personation rests too much on the traditional make-up of Shylock, which is really that of Barabas. When Edmund Kean, as a poor unknown actor, first went to play Shylock at Drury Lane, he raised some laughter behind the scenes by taking from his small bundle a black wig! Black it was, not red; human, not diabolic: the smiling company said, “_That_ will be a failure”; but it was not. One after another the outside traits of Shylock, costume borrowed from Barabas, have disappeared; not a word of Shakspeare’s text has had to disappear with them; the character which the poet conceived has been largely unsheathed by Mr. Irving.
We know that no such figure as that at the Lyceum appeared on Shakspeare’s own stage at the Globe. Shylock, as acted by Shakspeare’s friend Burbage, was a comic figure. His make-up consisted of exceedingly red hair and beard, a false nose preternaturally long and hooked, and a tawny petticoat. Such a figure must have been largely meant to make fun for the pit and gallery, of which Shakspeare was rarely oblivious, and Burbage never.
But a conventional stage-figure is generally an evolution, and this farcical Shylock was no exception. The famous Isaac of Norwich was a typical Jew in his time. A thirteenth century caricature, preserved in the Pell Office, shows us the popular notion of him. He is pictured as a three-faced idol surrounded by devils. The three faces are not especially ugly or comical, but repulsive enough; and we may detect in the figure the reflection of a period when the diabolical theory of the Jew was serious, and no laughing matter. Similarly, in the old Miracle Plays, Satan was a serious figure, though he gradually became a mere laughing-stock, like Pantaloon in the pantomimes. The stage-Jew shared the same decline as the stage-devil--his supposed inspirer. In his malignant and formidable aspect he was, indeed, in Shakspeare’s day, the main figure of Marlowe’s popular play; but even he had the long nose and sundry grotesque features; and it can hardly be doubted that, in the still more ludicrous make-up of Shylock, the Globe Theatre followed the popular feeling.
Perhaps there may be hidden in the name Shylock the idea of a lock-shearer, shaver of the last hair from his victim; at any rate “the shearer sheared” would include the whole significance of the story which Shakspeare took in hand. In the character of Shylock, he retained the grotesquerie which might please the rabble, at the same time turning their scowl to laughter. Even now, while Mr. Irving is giving his pathetic impersonation, the occasional laugh reminds us how easily some parts of the text would lend themselves to a farcical interpretation, if the painted nose and comic gestures were present. But it is more remarkable to observe how rare and superficial are these ludicrous incidents. The farcical Shylock has passed away from the English stage through force of the more real character which Shakspeare drew. Shakspeare may not have intended all the far-reaching moral belonging to the ancient legend of the pound of flesh, but surely no one can carefully compare his Shylock with the Barabas of his contemporary without recognising a purpose to modify and soften the popular feeling towards the Jew, to picture a man where Marlowe had painted a monster, if not indeed to mirror for Christians their own injustice and cruelty.
Let us take our stand beside Portia when she summons the Merchant and Shylock to stand forth. The two men have long legendary antecedents and have met many times before. There are eleven versions of the bond story in the early literature of Europe. In four of these versions no Jew appears. Karl Simrock believes that it is an ancient law-anecdote--an illustration of the law of retaliation pressed to an extreme. The evidences he gives of its use for this purpose are interesting, and it appears to me probable that it might have been in this way that the Jew was first introduced into the story. Where a Jew and a Christian confronted each other in any issue it might be assumed that all mitigations of the _summum jus_ were removed from the question; only the naked technical terms of the law could then be conceived as restraining either from doing the utmost injury he could to the other. There is an old Persian version of the tale, in which, perhaps for a similar reason, a Moslem and an Armenian confront each other; and in this case the failure of the bond is not because of the blood, but because of the extreme exactness of weight demanded by the court. An Egyptian form of the story has a similar end.
Side by side, in all ages and races, have struggled with each other the principle of Retaliation and that of Forgiveness. In religion the vindictive principle has euphemistic names: it is called law and justice. The other principle, that of remission, has had to exist by sufferance, and in nearly all religions has been recognised only in subordinate alliance with its antagonist. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, blood for blood, is primitive law. Projected into heaven, magnified in the divine majesty, it becomes the principle that a deity cannot be just and yet a justifier of offenders. “Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins.” Since finite man is naturally assumed to be incapable of directly satisfying an infinite law, all religions, based on the idea of a divine lawgiver, are employed in devising schemes by which commutations may be secured and vicarious satisfactions of divine law obtained. Nature never forgives. No deity inferred from the always relentless forces of nature has ever been supposed able to forgive the smallest sin until it was exactly atoned for. For this reason the divine mercifulness has generally become a separate personification. The story of the “Pound of Flesh” is one of the earliest fables concerning these conflicting principles.
The following legend was related to me by a Hindu, as one he had been told in his childhood. The chief of the Indian triad, Indra, pursued the god Agni. Agni changed himself to a dove in order to escape; but Indra changed himself to a hawk, to continue the pursuit. The dove took refuge with Vishnu, second person of the triad, the Hindu Saviour. Indra flying up, demanded the dove; Vishnu, concealing it in his bosom, refused to give up the dove. Indra then took an oath that if the dove were not surrendered he would tear from Vishnu’s breast an amount of flesh equal to the body of the dove. Vishnu still refused to surrender the bird, but bared his breast. The divine hawk tore from it the exact quantity, and the drops of blood--the blood of a Saviour--as they fell to the ground wrote the scriptures of the Vedas.
Among the various versions of this story in India I have not been able to find any in accepted sacred books preserving with the simplicity of this folk-tale the ancient moral antagonism between the deities afterwards found in alliance as a triad. Hindu orthodoxy has outgrown the phase of faith which could sanction that probably provincial legend. Its spirit survives in one of Vishnu’s titles, Yadjña Varâha, “the boar of sacrifice,” derived from Vishnu’s third incarnation, by which he saved the world from demons by becoming himself a victim. We may see in the fable reflection of a sacrificial age, an age in which the will and word of a god became inexorable fate, but also the dawning conception of a divineness in the mitigation of the law, which ultimately adds saving man-gods or demi-gods to nature-gods that cannot be appeased.
The earliest version, probably B.C. 300, is the story in the Mahábhárata (_Vana parva_) of the trial of the best of mankind, King Usinára. Indra and Agni, wishing to test his fidelity to the laws of righteousness, assume the forms of falcon and pigeon. The latter (Agni) pursued by the former (Indra) seeks and receives the king’s protection. The falcon demands the pigeon, and is refused on the ground that it is written that to kill a twice-born man, to kill a cow, and to abandon a being that has taken refuge with one, are equal sins. This is a quotation from the Laws of Manu. The falcon argues that it is the law of nature that it shall feed on pigeons, and a statute against nature is no law. He (the falcon) will be starved, consequently his mate and little ones must perish, and thus in preserving one the king will slay many. The falcon is offered by Usinára other food--a boar, bull, gazelle--but the falcon declares that it is not the law of its nature to eat such things. The king then declares that he will not give up the pigeon, but he will give anything else in his power which the falcon may demand. The falcon replies that he can only accept a quantity of the king’s own flesh equal in weight to the pigeon’s body. Usinára gladly accedes to this substitution. Balances are produced, and the pigeon is placed in one scale. The king cuts off a piece of his flesh that appears large enough, but is insufficient; he cuts again and again, but still the pigeon outweighs his piled-up flesh. Finally, all his flesh gone, the king gets into the scale himself. The two gods then resume their divine shape, announce to Usinára that for the sacrifice he has made he will be glorified in all worlds throughout eternity, and the king ascends transfigured into heaven.
This legend is repeated under the title _Syena-Kapotiyam_ (Dove and Hawk) in the _Purana Sarvasvan_ in the Bodleian Library, where it is in Bengali characters. There is another version in the _Markandêyâ Purâna_ (ch. iii.), in which Indra appears to the sage Vipulasvan in the form of a large famished bird. Finding that this bird can only be nourished by human flesh, the sage appeals to his sons to give it some of their flesh; and on their refusal he curses them, and tells the bird that after he has performed certain funeral ceremonies his body shall be for its nourishment. Whereupon Indra bids the sage abandon his body only by the power of contemplation, reveals his divine nature, and offers Vipulasvan whatever he may ask.
Indra here says, “I eat no living creature,” which shows a moral advance. Perhaps his conversion may have been in some measure due to the teaching of Buddha. It is instructive to compare the Mahábhárata legend with an early Buddhist version cited by M. Focaux from the _Dsang-loung_,[35] a version all the more significant because the hero of it, Sivi, was traditionally the son of Usinára and had already appeared in the fourth book of Mahábhárata as tried in the same way with his father, and with the same results. Sivi had become a popular type of self-sacrifice. According to the Buddhist legend, Indra, perceiving that his divine existence was drawing to a close, confided to Visvakarman[36] his grief at not seeing in the world any man who would become a Buddha. Visvakarman declared King Sivi such a man. The falcon and pigeon test is then applied. But the Buddhist Sivi does not, like his Brahman prototype, offer to compensate the falcon with the flesh of other animals. He agrees to give his own flesh. The gods descend and weep tears of emotion at seeing the king as a skeleton outweighing the dove which all of his flesh could not equal. Nor is the Buddhist saint caught up to heaven. He is offered the empire and throne of Indra himself, but refuses it; he desires only to be a Buddha. Sivi’s body is restored to greater beauty than before, and he becomes the Buddha amid universal joy.
Other versions show the legend further detached from brahmanic ideas, and resting more completely upon Buddha’s compassionateness to all creatures. Of this description is one in the “Sermons” by Asphagosha, for the translation of which I am indebted to Professor Beal. Sakra (a name of Indra) tempted by a heretic to believe that the teaching of Buddha was false, and that men followed it from motives of self-interest, sought for a perfect man who was practising austerities solely for the sake of becoming a Buddha. Finding one, Sivaka Raja, he agreed with Visvakarman to tempt him. All happens as in the old legend, except that Sivaka rests his refusal not upon the law of Manu, nor upon the sanctity of asylum, but upon his love of all living things. To this his mercifulness the falcon appeals, reminding him of its own young, and Sivaka calls for a knife and cuts off a piece of his flesh, not caring whether it is more or less than the body of the dove. He then faints. All living creatures raise lamentations, and the deities, much affected, heal the wound.