Jewish History. by Simon Dubnow - HTML preview

great a measure of his sympathies. The wars growing out of the

Reformation, which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

devastated Europe in the name of religion, were not calculated to

favor the spread of tolerance and milder manners. The conflict raging

in the bosom of the Church and setting her own children by the ears,

was yet insufficient to divert her maternal care from her

"unbelieving" stepchildren. In Spain and Portugal, stakes continued to

burn two centuries longer for the benefit of the Marranos, the false

Christians. In Germany and Austria, the Jews were kept in the same

condition of servitude as before. Their economic circumstances were

appalling. They were forced to emigrate _en masse_ to Poland,

which offered the adherents of their faith a comparatively quiet life,

and by and by was invested with the Jewish hegemony.

Some of the

smaller states and independent towns of Italy also afforded the Jews

an asylum, though one not always to be depended upon. A group of

hard-driven Spanish exiles, for instance, under the leadership of

Abarbanel had found peace in Italy. The rest had turned to Turkey and

her province Palestine,

For a time, indeed, the Jewish spiritual centre was located in Turkey.

What Europe, old, Christian, and hardhearted, refused the Jews, was

granted them by Turkey, young, Mussulman, and liberal.

On hearing of

the banishment of the Jews from Spain, Sultan Bajazet exclaimed: "How

can you call Ferdinand of Aragon a wise king, the same Ferdinand who

has made his land poor and enriched ours?" His amazement characterizes

the relation of Turkey to the Jews of the day. The one-time Marrano,

Joseph Nassi, rose to be a considerable dignitary at the court of

Sultan Selim (1566-1580). Occasionally he succeeded, by diplomatic

means, in wreaking vengeance upon European courts in retaliation for

the brutal tortures inflicted upon his people. With the generosity of

a Maecenas, he assembled Jewish scholars and poets, and surrounded

himself with a sunlit atmosphere of intellectuality and talent. All

other Jewish communities looked up to that of Constantinople. Now and

again its rabbis played the part of Patriarchs of the synagogue. To

this commanding position the rabbis of Palestine especially were

inclined to lay claim. They even attempted to restore the

Patriarchate, and the famous controversy between Jacob Berab and Levi

ben Chabib regarding the _Semicha_ is another evidence of the

same assertive tendency. Among the Spanish exiles settled in the Holy

Land a peculiar spiritual current set in. The storm-tossed wanderers,

but now returned to their native Jordan from the shores of the

blood-stained Tagus and Guadalquivir, were mightily moved at the sight

of their ancestral home. Ahasuerus, who on his thorn-strewn pilgrim's

path had drained the cup of woe to the dregs, suddenly caught sight of

the home of his childhood razed level with the ground.

The precious,

never-to-be-forgotten ruins exhaled the home feeling, which took

possession of him with irresistible charm. Into his soul there flowed

sweet memories of a golden youth, past beyond recall.

The impact of

these emotions enkindled passionate "longing for Zion"

in the heart of

the forlorn, homeless martyr. He was seized by torturing thirst for

political resurrection. Such melancholy feelings and vehement

outbursts found expression in the practical Kabbala, originating with

Ari (Isaac Luria) and his famous Safed school. A mystical belief in

the coming of Messiah thenceforward became one of the essential

elements of the Jewish spirit. It vanquished the heart of the learned

Joseph Karo, who had brought Rabbinism to its climax by the

compilation of his celebrated ritual code, the Shulchan Aruch. With

equal force it dominated the being of Solomon Molcho, the enthusiastic

youth who, at one time a Marrano, on his public return to Judaism

proclaimed the speedy regeneration of Israel. He sealed his faith in

his prophecy with death at the stake (1532). The Marranos beyond the

Pyrenees and the unfortunate Jews of Italy, who, in the second half of

the sixteenth century had to bear the brunt of papal fanaticism, on

the increase since the Reformation, were kept in a state of constant

excitement by this Messianic doctrine, with its obscure stirrings of

hope. A mournful national feeling pervades the Jewish literature of

the time. Recollections of torments endured enflamed all hearts. A

series of chronicles were thus produced that record the centuries of

Jewish martyrdom--_Jocha-sin, Shebet Jehuda, Emek ha-Bacha_, etc.

The art of printing, even then developed to a considerable degree of

perfection, became for the dispersed Jews the strongest bond of

spiritual union. The papal _index librorum prohibitorum_

was

impotent in the face of the all-pervading propaganda for thought and

feeling carried on by the printing press.

After Palestine and Turkey, Holland for a time became the spiritual

centre of the scattered Jews (in the seventeenth century). Holland was

warmly attached to the cause of liberty. When it succeeded in freeing

itself from the clutches of fanatical Spain and her rapacious king,

Philip II, it inaugurated the golden era of liberty of conscience, of

peaceful development in culture and industry, and granted an asylum to

the persecuted and abandoned of all countries. By the thousands the

harassed Ghetto sons, especially the Marranos from Spain and Portugal,

migrated to Holland. Amsterdam became a second Cordova.

The

intellectual life was quickened. Freedom from restraint tended to

break down the national exclusivism of the Jew, and intercourse with

his liberal surroundings varied his mental pursuits.

Rabbinism, the

Kabbala, philosophy, national poetry--they all had their prominent

representatives in Holland. These manifold tendencies were united in

the literary activity of Manasseh ben Israel, a scholar of extensive,

though not intensive, encyclopedic attainments. Free thought and

religious rationalism were embodied in Uriel Acosta. To a still higher

degree they were illustrated in the theory of life expounded by the

immortal author of the "Theologico-Political Tractate"

(1640-1677).

This advanced state of culture in Holland did not fail to react upon

the neighboring countries. Under the impulse of enthusiasm for the

Bible Puritan England under Cromwell opened its portals to the Jews.

In Italy, in the dank atmosphere of rabbinical dialectics and morbid

mysticism, great figures loom up--Leon de Modena, the antagonist of

Rabbinism and of the Kabbala, and Joseph del Medigo, mathematician,

philosopher, and mystic, the disciple of Galileo.

These purple patches were nothing more than the accidents of a

transition period. The people as a whole was on the decline. The

Jewish mind darted hither and thither, like a startled bird seeking

its nest. Holland or Turkey was an inadequate substitute for Spain, if

only for the reason that but a tiny fraction of the Jews had found

shelter in either. The Jewish national centre must perforce coincide

with the numerical centre of the dispersed people, in which, moreover,

conditions must grant Jews the possibility of living undisturbed in

closely compacted masses, and of perfecting a well-knit organization

of social and individual life. Outside of Spain these conditions were

fulfilled only by Poland, which gradually, beginning with the

sixteenth century, assumed the hegemony over the Jewry of the world.

This marks the displacement of the Sephardic (Spanish, in a broader

sense, Romanic) element, and the supremacy of the Ashkenazic

(German-Polish) element.

Poland had been a resort for Jewish immigrants from Germany since the

outbreak of the Crusades, until, in the sixteenth century, it rose to

the position of a Jewish centre of the first magnitude.

As the

merchant middle class, the Jews were protected and advanced by the

kings and the Szlachta. The consequent security of their position

induced so rapid a growth of the Jewish element that in a little while

the Jews of Poland outnumbered those of the old Jewish settlements in

Occidental Europe. The numerous privileges granted the Jews, by

Boleslaus of Kalish (1246), Kasimir the Great (1347-1370), Witowt

(1388), Kasimir IV (1447), and some of their successors, fortified

their position in the extended territory covered by Poland, Lithuania,

and the Ukraine. Their peculiar circumstances in Poland left an

impress upon their inner life. An intense mental activity was called

forth. This activity can be traced back to German beginnings, though

at the same time it is made up of many original elements. For a space

Rabbinism monopolized the intellectual endeavors of the Polish Jews.

The rabbi of Cracow, Moses Isserles, and the rabbi of Ostrog, Solomon

Luria (d. 1572), disputed first place with the foremost rabbinical

authorities of other countries. Their decisions and circular letters

regarding religious and legal questions were accorded binding force.

Associates and successors of theirs founded Talmud academies

throughout the country, and large numbers of students attended them.

Commentators upon the Talmud and expounders of classical works in

Jewish theological literature appeared in shoals. Jewish printing

establishments in Cracow and Lublin were assiduous in turning out a

mass of writings, which spread the fame of the Polish rabbis to the

remotest communities. The large autonomy enjoyed by the Polish and

Lithuanian Jews conferred executive power upon rabbinical legislation.

The _Kahal_, or Jewish communal government, to a certain degree

invested with judicial and administrative competence, could not do

without the guiding hand of the rabbis as interpreters of the law. The

guild of rabbis, on their side, chose a "college of judges," with

fairly extensive jurisdiction, from among their own members. The

organization of the Rabbinical Conferences, or the

"Synods of the Four

Countries," formed the keystone of this intricate social-spiritual

hierarchy. The comprehensive inner autonomy and the system of Talmud

academies (_Yeshiboth_) that covered the whole of Poland remind

one of the brilliant days of the Exilarchate and the Babylonia of the

Geonim. One element was lacking, there was no versatile, commanding

thinker like Saadia Gaon. Secular knowledge and philosophy were under

the ban in Poland. Rabbinism absorbed the whole output of intellectual

energy. As little as the Poles resembled the Arabs of the "golden

age," did the Polish Jews resemble their brethren in faith in the

Orient at Saadia's time or in the Spain of Gabirol and Maimonides.

Isolation and clannishness were inevitable in view of the character of

the Christian environment and the almost insuperable barriers raised

between the classes of Polish society. But it was this exclusiveness

that gave peculiar stability and completeness to the life of the Jew

as an individual and as a member of Jewish society, and it was the

same exclusiveness that afforded opportunity for the development of a

sharply defined culture, for its fixation to the point of resisting

violent shocks and beyond the danger point of extinction through

foreign invasion.

The fateful year 1648 formed a turning point in the history of the

Polish Jews, as in the history of the countries belonging to the

Polish crown. The Cossack butcheries and wars of extermination of

1648-1658 were the same for the Polish Jews that the Crusades, the

Black Death, and all the other occasions for carnage had been for the

Jews of Western Europe. It seemed as though history desired to avoid

the reproach of partiality, and hastened to mete out even-handed

justice by apportioning the same measure of woe to the Jews of Poland

as to the Jews of Western Europe. But the Polish Jews were prepared to

accept the questionable gift from the hands of history.

They had

mounted that eminence of spiritual stability on which suffering loses

the power to weaken its victim, but, on the contrary, endues him with

strength. More than ever they shrank into their shell.

They shut

themselves up more completely in their inner world, and became morally

dulled against the persecutions, the bitter humiliations, the deep

scorn, which their surroundings visited upon them. The Polish Jew

gradually accustomed himself to his pitiable condition.

He hardly knew

that life might be other than it was. That the Polish lord to whom he

was a means of entertainment might treat him with a trace of respect,

or that his neighbors, the middle class merchant, the German guild

member, and the Little Russian peasant, might cherish kindly feelings

toward him, he could not conceive as a possibility.

Seeing himself

surrounded by enemies, he took precautions to fortify his camp, not so

much to protect himself against hostile assaults from without--they

were inevitable--as to paralyze the disastrous consequences of such

assaults in his inner world. To compass this end he brought into play

all the means suggested by his exceptional position before the law and

by his own peculiar social constitution. The _Kahal_, the

autonomous rabbinical administration of communal affairs, more and

more assumed the character of an inner dictatorship.

Jewish society

was persistently kept under the discipline of rigid principles. In

many affairs the synagogue attained the position of a court of final

appeal. The people were united, or rather packed, into a solid mass by

purely mechanical processes--by pressure from without, and by drawing

tight a noose from within. Besides this social factor tending to

consolidate the Jewish people into a separate union, an intellectual

lever was applied to produce the same result. Rabbinism employed the

mystical as its adjutant. The one exercised control over all minds,

the other over all hearts. The growth of mysticism was fostered both

by the unfortunate conditions under which the Polish Jews endured

existence and by the Messianic movements which made their appearance

among the Jews of other countries.

In the second half of the seventeenth century, mysticism reached its

zenith in Turkey, the country in which, had stood the cradle of the

"practical Kabbala." The teachings of Ari, Vital, and the school

established by them spread like wildfire. Messianic extravagances

intoxicated the baited and persecuted people. In Smyrna appeared the

false Messiah, Sabbatai Zebi. As by magic he attracted to himself a

tremendous company of adherents in the East and in the West. For a

quarter of a century (1650-1676), he kept the Jewish communities

everywhere in a state of quivering suspense.

The harassed people tossed to and fro like a fever patient, and raved

about political re-birth. Its delirious visions still further heated

its agitated blood. It came to its senses but slowly.

Not even the

apostasy and death of Sabbatai Zebi sufficed to sober all his

followers. Under the guise of a symbolic faith in a Messiah, many of

them, publicly or secretly, continued the propaganda for his

doctrines.

This propaganda prepared the fertile soil from which, in the

eighteenth century, shot up Messianic systems, tending to split

Judaism into sects. Nowhere did the mystical teachings evoke so ready

a response as in Poland, the very centre of Judaism. At first an ally

of the rabbinical school, mysticism grown passionate and uncontrollable now and again acted as the violent opponent of

Rabbinism. Secret devotion to the Sabbatian doctrines, which had made

their home in Poland, sometimes led to such extremes in dogma and

ethics that the rabbis could not contain themselves.

Chayyim Malach,

Judah Chassid, and other Galician mystics, in the second decade of the

eighteenth century brought down upon themselves a rabbinical decree of

excommunication. The mystical tendency was the precursor of the

heretical half-Christian sect of Frankists, who ventured so far as to

lift a hand against the fundamentals of Judaism: they rejected the

Talmud in favor of the Zohar (1756-1773). At the same time a much more

profound movement, instinct with greater vitality, made its appearance

among the Polish-Jewish masses, a movement rooted in their social and

spiritual organization. The wretched, debased condition of the average

Jew, conjoined with the traditions of the Kabbala and the excrescences

of Rabbinism, created a foothold for Chassidic teaching.

Chassidism

replaced Talmudic ratiocination by exalted religious sentiment. By the

force of enthusiasm for faith, it drew its adherents together into a

firmly welded unit in contrast with Rabbinism, which sought the same

goal by the aid of the formal law. Scenting danger, the rabbinical

hierarchy declared war upon the Kabbala. Emden opposed Eibeschütz, the

Polish Sabbatians and Frankists were fought to the death, the Wilna

Gaon organized a campaign against the Chassidim. Too late! Rabbinism

was too old, too arid, to tone down the impulsive outbreaks of passion

among the people. In their religious exaltation the masses were

looking for an elixir. They were languishing, not for light to

illumine the reason, but for warmth to set the heart aglow. They

desired to lose themselves in ecstatic self-renunciation. Chassidism

and its necessary dependence upon the Zaddik offered the masses the

means of this forgetfulness of self through faith. They were the

medium through which the people saw the world in a rosy light, and the

consequences following upon their prevalence were seen in a marked

intensification of Jewish exclusiveness.

The same aloofness characterizes the Jews of the rest of the

eighteenth century diaspora. Wherever, as in Germany, Austria, and

Italy, Jews were settled in considerable numbers, they were separated

from their surroundings by forbidding Ghetto walls. On the whole, no

difference is noticeable between conditions affecting Jews in one

country and those in another. Everywhere they were merely tolerated,

everywhere oppressed and humiliated. The bloody persecutions of the

middle ages were replaced by the burden of the exceptional laws, which

in practice degraded the Jews socially to an inferior race, to

citizens of a subordinate degree. The consequences were uniformly the

same in all countries: spiritual isolation and a morbid religious

mood. During the first half of the "century of reason,"

Jewry

presented the appearance of an exhausted wanderer, heavily dragging

himself on his way, his consciousness clouded, his trend of thought

obviously anti-rationalistic. At the very moment in which Europe was

beginning to realize its medieval errors and repent of them, and the

era of universal ideals of humanity was dawning, Judaism raised

barricades between itself and the world at large. Elijah Gaon and

Israel Besht were the contemporaries of Voltaire and Rousseau.

Apparently there was no possibility of establishing communication

between these two diametrically opposed worlds. But history is a

magician. Not far from the Poland enveloped in medieval darkness, the

morning light of a new life was breaking upon slumbering Jewry in

German lands. New voices made themselves heard, reverberating like an

echo to the appeal issued by the "great century" in behalf of a

spiritual and social regeneration of mankind.

XI

THE MODERN PERIOD OF ENLIGHTENMENT (THE NINETEENTH

CENTURY)

Two phenomena signalized the beginning of the latest period in Jewish

history: the lofty activity of Mendelssohn and the occurrence of the

great French Revolution. The man stands for the spiritual emancipation

of the Jews, the movement for their political emancipation. At bottom,

these two phenomena were by no means the ultimate causes of the social

and spiritual regeneration of the Jewish people. They were only the

products of the more general causes that had effected a similar

regeneration in all the peoples of Western Europe. The new currents,

the abandonment of effete intellectual and social forms, the

substitution of juster and more energetic principles, the protest

against superstition and despotism--all these traits had a common

origin, the resuscitation of reason and free thought, which dominated

all minds without asking whether they belonged to Jew or to Christian.

It might seem that the rejuvenation of the Jews had been consummated

more rapidly than the rejuvenation of the other peoples.

The latter

had had two centuries, the period elapsing since the middle ages, that

is, the period between the Reformation and the great Revolution, in

which to prepare for a more rational and a more humane conduct of

life. As for the Jews, their middle ages began much later, and ended

later, almost on the eve of 1789, so that the revolution in their

minds and their mode of life had to accomplish itself hastily, under

the urgence of swiftly crowding events, by the omission of

intermediate stages. But it must be taken into consideration that long

before, in the Judeo-Hellenic and in the Arabic-Spanish period, the

Jews had passed through their "century of reason." In spite of the

intervening ages of suffering and gloom, the faculty of assimilating

new principles had survived. For the descendants of Philo and

Maimonides the rationalistic movement of the eighteenth century was in

part a repetition of a well-known historical process.

They had had the

benefit of a similar course of studies before, and, therefore, had no

need to cram on the eve of the final examination.

In point of fact, the transformation in the life of the Jews did take

place with extraordinary swiftness. It was hastened in France by the

principles of the Revolution and the proclamation of the civil

equality of Jews with the other citizens. In Germany, however, it

advanced upon purely spiritual lines. Mendelssohn and Lessing, the

heralds of spiritual reform, who exposed old prejudices, carried on

their labors at a time in which the Jews still stood beyond the pale

of the law, a condition which it did not occur to Frederick II, "the

philosopher upon the throne," to improve. A whole generation was

destined to pass before the civil emancipation of the German Jews was

accomplished. Meantime their spiritual emancipation proceeded apace,

without help from the ruling powers. A time so early as the end of the

eighteenth century found the German Jews in a position to keep step

with their Christian fellow-citizens in cultural progress. Enlightened

Jews formed close connections with enlightened Christians, and joined

them in the universal concerns of mankind as confederates espousing

the same fundamental principles. If they renounced some of their

religious and national traditions, it was by no means out of

complaisance for their neighbors. They were guided solely and alone by

those universal principles that forced non-Jews as well as Jews to

reject many traditions as incompatible with reason and conscience.

Non-Jews and Jews alike yielded themselves up to the fresh inspiration

of the time, and permitted themselves to be carried along by the

universal transforming movement. Mendelssohn himself, circumspect and

wise, did not move o