The Jews of Spain

The land of opportunity for Jews—from the 8th to the 12th century—was Spain.

As the armies of Islam conquered larger and larger swaths of Europe, the Jews of the Middle East saw new opportunities opening up for them in Muslim Europe.

One of the best opportunities proved to be Spain, starting with the Muslim conquest of 711. Indeed, things were so good for Jews there, that to this day, half the Jewish world is known as Sephardi meaning “Spanish.” (The other half would later become known as Ashkenazi, meaning “German.”) (1)

In the Muslim Spain, Jews found a symbiotic relationship emerging between them and the non-Jewish world that surrounded them.

So for one thing, the Muslims impacted on the Jews. Some of the greatest Jewish scholars wrote in Arabic. But the impact was much greater the other way around. Indeed there can be no question that the Islamic world, especially in Spain, did remarkably well because of the large number of Jews who were allowed to operate freely there. The positive impact of the Jews of Moslem Spain is yet another example of the fulfillment of the prophecy in Genesis: “I will bless you and make your name great. You shall be a blessing. And I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you. (Genesis 12:2-3) To quote the great Jewish historian Cecil Roth:

The essential contribution of the Jews, as Jews, to the cultural life of the medieval world, and of medieval Europe in particular depended basically upon two factors. They were literate: and they were international….Their work as intermediaries between the two mutually-exclusive cultural worlds [Moslem and Christian] was without any doubt the characteristic Jewish function in the Middle Ages: it was a function that they performed by virtue of their specific position and circumstances as Jews. That did not however preclude them from making memorable contributions to European civilization as individuals(2)

JEWISH CONTRIBUTIONS

The Jewish contributions came in every sphere—whether economic or intellectual. For example:

Jews excelled in skilled crafts. Jews were excellent tanners, metalworkers, goldsmiths, silversmiths, and jewelers. (We see some of these skills surviving today. Yemenite Jews continue their reputation as silversmiths and Jewish diamond merchants are famous the world over.)

Jews excelled in the sciences, particularly in medicine. Jewish doctors were everywhere, among the most famous was Maimonides (who we will speak about later) and Hasdai ibn Shaprut, the 10th century physician to two caliphs who was considered one of the most influential people in Spain.

Jews excelled in trade. Jews were the middlemen between the Muslim and Christian worlds, which at this time were engaged in huge rivalry and were not communicating directly with each other. As a result Jews became traders who covered the Far East, the Middle East, and Europe.

Jews excelled in scholarship. The Muslims were fascinated by classical knowledge, but since they did not know either Greek or Latin, the Jews came in to fill the gap translating these works into Arabic. The Jews also helped to disseminate Arabic scholarship and much of the classical scholarship of the ancient world (much of which had been lost after the collapse of the Roman Empire) to Christian Europe translating Arabic texts first into Hebrew, then sending these translated texts to Europe, where other Jews translated the Hebrew into Latin—the language of the Roman Empire that was still the language of scholarship in Western Europe.

WRITERS AND PHILOSOPHERS

Some of the greatest Jewish writers and philosophers came from this time period. Three deserve special mention:

Abraham ibn Ezra, the famed scientist, philosopher, astronomer, and biblical commentator. Bachya ibn Pakuda, the famed moralist who authored Duties of the Heart (a book that continues to be a highly popular text in Jewish ethical studies today), examining the obligations of one’s inner life and presenting a system to assess one’s true religious commitment.

Judah HaLevi, the famed author of The Kuzari, a philosophical novel based on the story of the king of Khazaria, a kingdom located between the Black Sea and Caspian Sea. (In the 8th century the king of Khazaria, undecided whether he should affiliate with the Christians or Muslims, had great scholars argue before him the merits of the world’s religions, and as a result of this debate converted to Judaism as eventually did a goodly portion of his country; the history of Khazaria ended in 11th century when it was destroyed by a Byzantine/Russian coalition.) Basing himself on this reportedly true story, Judah HaLevi imaginatively recreated the debate before the king in his novel, which continues to be popular to this day.

The Jewish paradise in Spain ended abruptly when a cruel Muslim Berber Dynasty—Almohades—came to power in the 12th century. When Almohades seized southern Spain, they gave the Jews three choices: covert to Islam, leave, or die.

Of the many Jews fleeing Spain at this time was none other than the famed Maimonides (often known as Rambam, the acronym of his full name, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, Moses the son of Maimom).

(Incidentally, you may have noticed that so many of the famous Jews were known by their acronyms. This is because Jews up until this time did not have last names. While Sephardic Jews started taking last names more than 500 years ago most Ashkenazi Jews did not use last names until forced to by Christian authorities around the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Jews were traditionally known by their first names and their father’s names, sometimes by their tribal names, such as Cohen or Levi, or places of their origin (i.e. Toledano from Toledo in Spain), and therefore, it was easier to shorten so many words to an acronym.)

MAIMONIDES

Maimonides was born Moses ben Maimon on the eve of Passover in 1135 in Cordoba, Spain, to a prominent rabbinical family. In his family tree figured King David and Rabbi Yehudah HaNassi, who had compiled the Mishnah (as we saw in Part 39).

His primary teacher was his father, Rabbi Maimon ben Joseph, a Jewish judge, who taught him not only the Talmud, but also the fundamentals of mathematics, astronomy and philosophy.

Maimonides was only 13 when his family was forced to leave Spain. After wandering homeless for many years—wanderings during which his father died—Maimonides and his brother David finally settled in Fustat near Cairo, Egypt. There Maimonides continued his Torah studies, while his brother David, a dealer in gems, supported the family. When David perished in a sea voyage in 1166, the burden fell on Maimonides.

Maimonides refused to make money from his Torah knowledge, and therefore, in order to earn a living, he became a physician having begun his study of medicine years earlier while living in Fez. Within a short time, he was so famous as a healer that he was appointed physician to the Court of Sultan Saladin in Cairo. He was also appointed the chief rabbi of Cairo.

In addition to being a famous doctor and healer, Maimonides was a prolific writer. Of his voluminous works—most of which were composed in Arabic but written with Hebrew characters—four stand out as perhaps the most famous:

Commentary on the Mishnah—his explanation of theMishnah

Mishneh Torah - His greatest accomplishment-A monumental compendium covering all of the Oral Law and Halacha (it’s also known as Yad Hazakah)

Guide to the Perplexed -written in Arabic . The Guide isphilosophical treatise which discusses both traditional Jewish thought in comparison to classical Greek philosophy. It is considered the single greatest philosophical work ever produced by a Jew.

Discourse on the World to Come—his explanation of the Messianic Age which includes the 13 Principles of Faith (this discourse is contained in his introduction to Tractate Sanhedrin 10:1)

(For translations of key excerpts from Maimonides’ seminal works see The Essential Maimonides by Avraham Yaakov Finkel.)

During his time some of the writings of Maimonides proved highly controversial. Some of his statements were deemed too radical, others were simply misunderstood. At one point, his works were banned, and after his death in 1204, burned at the instigation of the rabbis.

However, when nine years later, the French king Louis IX ordered the Talmud burned, Jews interpreted this as a “measure-for-measure” punishment from God for the burning of the works of Maimonides. Indeed, the rabbi who instigated the ban and burning, Rabbi Jonah Gerondi, subsequently repented for doing so and authored the book Sha’arei Teshuva, “Gates of Repentance,” as a form of atonement for his derogatory statements about Maimonides.

Today the works of Maimonides are universally accepted and revered. Indeed, Maimonides is known in the Jewish world as one of most important of the Rishonim or “the First Ones.”

This group of Jewish sages follows those we have previously discussed: the Tanaim or “Teachers” (200 BCE to 100 CE) who are quoted in the Mishnah; the Amoraim or “Explainers” (200 to 500), who are quoted in the Gemara; and the Gaonim or “Geniuses” (500 to 1038) who were the masters of the post-Talmudic Babylonian academies. The Rishonim (1038 to 1440) added significantly to Jewish scholarship.

In addition to Maimonides, among the most famous of the Rishonim was the French rabbi, Solomon ben Isaac, known the world over by his acronym—Rashi.

RASHI

A question may be asked here, how did Jews end up in France? First of all, some Jews settled already some 1,000 years earlier in the far-flung outposts of the Roman Empire. But for a long time these Jewish settlements were small. The expansion came through some interesting quirks of fate.

Jewish tradition has it that in the 8th century Charlemagne, the King of the Franks, seeing how helpful Jews were to the Muslims, asked the caliph to send him a few rabbis, knowing that once he had rabbis more Jews would follow.

Additionally, Jews were frequently kidnapped by pirates who knew that their fellow Jews would pay handsomely to redeem them. There is the legend of the four captives, rabbis from the Babylonian community, each of whom was ransomed by a different Jewish community. According to the legend a small group of French Jews put up a lot of money to redeem Rabbi Nosson HaBavli in just such circumstances on the condition that he come and start a yeshiva in their community in France—which he did.(3)

Rashi, the most famous of the French rabbis was born Solomon Ben Isaac in 1040 in France, though he was sent to study in a yeshiva in Germany.

After he completed his studies, Rashi returned to France and settled in his hometown of Troyes. Just like Maimonides, he refused to make money from his Torah knowledge, earning a living instead from several vineyards that he owned.

Rashi had an absolutely encyclopedic knowledge of the Oral and Written Law. He took it upon himself to answer some of the most obvious questions that come up when reading the text of the Tanach (the 24 Books of the Hebrew Bible). This is why today so many editions of the Torah include his explanations alongside the text.

Another thing that Rashi did was to write a commentary on the entire Babylonian Talmud. Today this commentary appears on the “inner” margin of virtually every Talmudic page. We find his explanations indispensable because as we move further and further away from Mount Sinai, it becomes harder and harder to understand the nuances of Jewish law.

Rashi did not have sons, but he did have two very famous daughters, Miriam and Yocheved, whom he educated in the Talmud. Rashi’s daughters married great scholars and fathered great scholars. Rashi’s sons-in-law, his students, and his descendants became part of a group of scholars that is known as the Ba’alei HaTosefot, meaning “Masters of Addition.” The Ba’alei HaTosefot added commentary to the Talmud which is featured on the “outer” margin of every Talmudic page. The best known of this group is Rashi’s grandson, Rabbi Jacob ben Meir, also known as Rabbeinu Ta’am.

Rashi lived until 1105 and he survived the first Crusade, which saw the slaughter of about 30% of the Jews of Europe.

According to Jewish tradition, he met one of the leaders of the Crusade, the Norman nobleman Godfrey de Bouillon. As Godfrey embarked on the Crusade to liberate the Holy Land from the Muslims, Rashi told him that he would succeed but that he would come back home with only two horses. In response, Godfrey vowed that if Rashi’s prediction was wrong, he’d kill him upon his return.

As it happened, Godfrey came back home from the Crusade with onlythree horses, but as he entered the archway to the city of Troyes, the center stone of the arch fell and killed one of them.

Next we will see just what role Godfrey de Bouillon played in the Crusades and how this shameful period in history came about.

It is far beyond the scope of this overview to discuss the dozens of great Rabbinic personalities who lived between the 11th and 15th centuries. Despite this being one of the most difficult periods of time in Jewish history, the 400 year period of the Rishonim (which more of less corresponds to the late Middle Ages) was one of the greatest periods of Torah scholarship. The impact of the Rishonim was monumental and, together with the Rabbis who created the Talmud, they played a pivotal role in the transmitting the Torah and shaping the law and practice of Diaspora Judaism.

1) While the term Sephardi is often used to categorize all Jews who came from the Middle East/Moslem world, the term is not really accurate. Many of these communities have little or no connection historically with the Jews of Spain i.e. Persian Jews, Yemenite Jews etc. The more accurate term would be Edot HaMizrach or “communities of the East” which would cover all non-Ashkenazi Jewish communities.
2) Dagobert D. Runes ed., The Hebrew Impact on Civilization. (New York, 1951), pp. 349-356.
3) The story is assumed to a legend and the actual creator of the first Yeshiva in France was probably Rabbeinu Gershom Me’or HaGaolah (965-1040). While this actual story may not be factually accurate, it does reflect the grim reality of kidnap and ransom which was an unfortunate feature of Jewish life during this period.

#44 of 70 in the Aish.com Jewish History Series
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The Crusades

The Crusaders came to liberate the Holy Land from the “infidels” and woe to any Jews who stood in their way.

As long as the Byzantine (Eastern) Empire, with its seat in Constantinople, dominated the Christian Church, it maintained the balance of power between the bishop of Constantinople and the bishop of Rome. But when it began to crumble, Rome began to assert itself.

As we will see, the Crusades originated with Rome. However, before we can discuss the Crusades and how they impacted the Jews, we must first set the stage and go back in history.

Ever since the 4th century, the Western (Rome-based) Empire had been shrinking considerably, thanks to the Goths and Franks. It finally disappeared altogether in 476. The resulting vacuum in the economic, legal and administrative infrastructure led to a state of chaos. The Church, aligning itself with the Franks, stepped in to restore order.

Consciously modeling its bureaucratic framework on the model of the old, the Church created titles and administrative positions which people were used to. It’s not by accident that the pope (from the Latin papa or “father”) was called pontiff (from pontifex maximus or “chief priest”)—a title previously reserved for the Roman emperor.

Today we remember the period of time when the Church ruled Western Europe with an iron hand as the “Dark Ages,” although more charitable historians will call it the “Middle Ages.”

FEUDALISM

With its well-organized bureaucracy, the Church found itself assuming a position of paramount importance in the evolution of feudalism in European society.

Feudalism has its roots in all the warring that was going on in this period of time. To support the cavalry, the kings gave their soldiers estates of land farmed by dependent laborers. It was a huge pyramid with the majority of the population at the bottom, working as serfs or virtual slaves for somebody else.

Feudal serfs worked at backbreaking labor, dawn to dusk. They usually lived in absolute filth and squalor. It is impossible for us to imagine today the conditions and the deprivations of this time period.

The Church’s role in the feudal system was quite ironic. Not only didn’t the Church fight this injustice, the Church helped to create it, and profited handsomely from it.

The Church supported the inequality of the feudal system through its various dogmatic formulations, which strongly implied that God Himself wants things this way, that poverty has great spiritual value, and that the king is a divinely ordained human being whose authority cannot be questioned.

Why? Because the Church was “a major player” in the feudal game. Early in its history, the Church started to acquire land. At first, the Church took over the properties of pagan temples and temple priests. But it continued to expand it holdings, until it became by far the biggest landowner in Europe, collecting huge amounts of taxes from the hapless peasants.

Oxford scholar Henry Phelps-Brown in Egalitarianism and the Generation of Inequality (p. 33) suggests that the Church, while it embodied monotheism, had yet to rid itself of the old Hellenistic pagan tendencies:

“Thus Christianity itself, and the views on wealth and power that came down from it, did not challenge the inequality of the secular world. They rather upheld it ... In this way they followed the main drift of the pagan philosophies. The inequality of human capacity was obvious, the need for subordination inescapable.”

As the Church’s empire grew in size so did its need for more money to support it. While the Crusades were launched in part to curb the growth of the Islam Empire, a key motivation was to gain new lands and wealth for the growing population of Europe(1). They offered an outlet for the ambitions of land-hungry knights and noblemen.

The ostensible reason given at the time, however, was the reclamation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem from the Muslims and saving the Eastern Christian Empire of Byzantium from the Seljuk Turks. This church had been originally built on the site identified in the 4th century by Empress Helena, the mother of Constantine, as the site where Jesus was buried following his crucifixion.

(This church still stands today, after being rebuilt by the Crusaders; it is a focal point of Christian pilgrimages to Jerusalem although Protestant Christian denominations contend that it is not the site of Jesus’ burial.)

THE “NOBLE” QUEST

To our Western minds, reared on the Hollywood version of so much history, the Crusades mean noble knights rescuing damsels in distress. Oy vey—is that ever a lie.

Now, it’s true that there were knights, and there were kings(2), and there was a chivalric ideal. And that King Richard the Lionhearted, a Crusade leader, (who was incidentally one of the worst kings England ever had) was definitely a macho warrior. But that’s pretty much where it ends.

The Crusades turned into campaigns of slaughter, rape, and pillage, and woe to the poor Jews in the way. Indeed, the Crusades mark the first large-scale European mob violence directed against Jews which is going to become, unfortunately, the pattern for the next hundreds of years. The later pogroms are just going to be a repeat of this idea.

The Jews were not the only—and in fact, not the primary—victims of the Crusaders. Muslims were. All the brutality directed toward them devastated the Arab peoples economically, pushed the Islamic world to be more reactionary and closed, and contributed to Arab hatred of the West.

(Why do Arabs paint the doors of their houses blue to this day? To ward off the evil eye. Why blue? One explanation is that it was the color of the blue-eyed northern Europeans that came to slay them.)

There were altogether ten Crusades covering a swath of time between the 11th through the 13th centuries:

The First Crusade, 1095-1099, saw the taking of Jerusalem from the Muslims, the slaughter of both the Muslim and Jewish populations of the city, and the establishment of the Crusader-run Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (which lasted only until 1187).

The Second Crusade, 1147-1149, was organized to help the Christians to recover lands which they lost to the Turks, but it ended in dismal failure.

The Third Crusade 1189-1192 was organized after Saladin, the Sultan of Egypt, recaptured Jerusalem. This is the Crusade in which King Richard the Lionhearted figured. It was a failure.

The Fourth Crusade, 1202-1204, saw the capture of Constantinople, which at the time was occupied by Greek-speaking Eastern Orthodox Christians, who did not recognize the authority of the Roman Pope.

The Children’s Crusade, 1212, sent thousands of children for the Holy Land, where they were captured by Muslims only to be sold as slaves or to die of hunger or disease.

The Fifth Crusade, 1217-21, was aimed at Egypt, but failed.

Four more Crusades mounted in the 13th century failed to reverse the Muslim gains. In 1291 the last Crusader stronghold at Acco fell.

That’s the picture in a nutshell. Now we can look in greater detail at the aspects of the Crusades which most impacted on the Jews.

(For anyone interested in knowing more about specific Crusades, the authoritative source is a book by H.E. Mayer, called The Crusades, published Oxford University Press.)

INFIDEL CLEANSING

Pope Urban II mounted the first campaign, in part in response to a plea for help from Christians in Constantinople who were besieged by the Muslims. Its aim was to beat back the “infidels” (as Christians called their fellow monotheists) and to recapture the Holy Land. In his sermon the Pope declared:

“...A grave report has come has come from the lands of Jerusalem and from the city of Constantinople that a people from the kingdom of the Persians, a foreign race, a race absolutely alien to God…has invaded the land of those Christians [and] has reduced the people with sword, rapine and fire…

Let those who in the past have been accustom to spread private war so vilely among the faithful advance against the infidels…Let those who were formally brigands now become soldiers of Christ; those who once waged war against their brothers…fight lawfully against barbarians; those who until now have been mercenaries for a few coins achieve eternal rewards.”(3)

To sweeten the pie, the Pope promised those that signed up that there would be plenty of booty, not to mention the spiritual benefit of having all your sins forgiven by God.

The Pope received an enthusiastic response. An armed force of 15,000—including 5,000 knights and the rest infantry—set off wearing a large red cross on their outer garments (hence their name Crusaders from the Latin word meaning “cross,” though they called themselves “pilgrims”).

A peasant force also joined in. As these peasants started marching through Europe (in advance of the knights and their army), they needed to eat, and eat they did by pillaging the countryside. As they were marching along they got the idea that they might as well get rid of the infidels in their midst—namely the Jews.

Here is one eyewitness account of an attack on the Jewry of Mainz in May of 1096. This comes from The First Crusade by August Krey, and it is a letter written by a Jew who survived:

“The Jews of the city, knowing of the slaughter of their brethren fled in hope of safety to the Bishop of Ruthard. They put an infinite treasure in his guard and trust having much faith in his protection. He placed the Jews in a very spacious hall in his own house that they might remain safe and sound in a very secure and strong place.

“But ... the band held council, and after sunrise attacked the Jews in the hall with arrows and lances, breaking down the bolts in the doors. They killed the Jews, about 700 in number who in vain resisted the force of an attack of so many thousands. They killed the women also and with their sword pierced tender children whatever age and sex…”

This is how about 30%-50% of the Jewish community of Europe met its end. Some 10,000 Jews of an estimated population of about 20,000-30,000 were slaughtered by Crusaders mobs.

FALL OF JERUSALEM

After conquering Antioch in Turkey, the Crusaders got to Jerusalem, many of their number gone due to the heavy fighting along the way.

At the gates of Jerusalem, fighting in the blistering sun heating up their heavy impregnable armor, many more of the knights died.

In Part 44, in our discussion of Rashi, we mentioned the French nobleman Godfrey du Bouillon. Godfrey—plus Raymond of Guilles, Raymond of Flanders, and Robert of Normandy—besieged the gates of Jerusalem which at that time had a significant population of Jews. Their forces breached the walls and poured into the city.

(Incidentally, the Crusader cry of “Hep! Hep!” originated at this time. It was an acronym for the Latin of “Jerusalem Has Fallen.” With time it became “Hip, Hip, Hooray!”—a cheer that Jews never use.)

What happened after the Crusaders entered the city?

We have one account from Ibn Al Kalanisi, the Moslem chronicler, describing hair-raising behavior of unnecessary brutality-Thousand of Muslim men, women and children were slaughtered. The poor Jews had all huddled together in a synagogue and this is where the Crusaders found them, set the place on fire, and burned them alive. One of the Crusaders, Raymond of Aguilers joyfully recounted:

“With the fall of Jerusalem and its towers one could see marvelous work. Some of the pagans were mercifully beheaded, others pierced by arrows plunged from towers, and yet others, tortured for a long time, were burned to death in searing flames. Piles of heads, hands and feet lay in the houses and streets, and men and knights were sunning to and fro over corpses.” (4)

The Crusaders, once they conquered Jerusalem, embarked on a vast building effort all over Israel. The ruins of the many fortresses and churches they built can be visited today. (Most of these were destroyed by the Muslims once they reclaimed their earlier holdings, in fear that the Crusaders would return.)

The Crusaders established special orders of military monks to look after this kingdom. Those that interest us in particular are the Knights Templars and the Knights Hospitalers.

The Knights Templars were stationed on the Temple Mount (hence their name). Interestingly, Knights Templars did not destroy the Dome of the Rock (though the Crusaders did destroy all the mosques that they did not turn into churches). Why? They thought it was the “Temple of Solomon,” and that the nearby Al Aksa mosque was the “Palace of Solomon.” (SeeJerusalem: An Archeological Biography by Hershel Shanks, p. 238-239.)

So what did they do? They removed the crescent from the top of the Dome of the Rock, replaced it with a cross, and called the place Templum Domini, “Temple of God.” They turned the El Aksa mosque, as well as the vaulted space below the mosque, into a monastery. Consistent with their other errors, they called this space, which had been built by Herod—“Solomon’s Stables.”

(These so-called stables have been recently been renovated by the Muslim Wakf (Muslim religious authority) and transformed into another mosque amid enormous archeological devastation, which the government of Israel felt powerless to stop.)

The Knights Hospitalers were supposed to provide hospitality to the large numbers of Christian pilgrims who would come down and visit the Christian holy sites, and to care for the sick among them. (Thus we see the word for hospitality became synonymous with a place of care for the sick—hospice or hospital.)

The Knights Hospitalers built their main complex near the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, a logical place for it. Another complex—consisting of church, hospice and hospital—was built in what is today the heart of the Jewish Quarter of the Old City Jerusalem near the main staircase going down to the Western Wall. This ruin has been preserved and is a tourist attraction. Nearby Crusader buildings have been renovated and are in use as apartments, schools and shops. (See Jerusalem Architecture by David Kroyanker, p. 37-43.)

Needless to say, the Knights Hospitalers did not provide hospitality to Jews. In fact, they brought in Christian Arab tribes to help populate the city with Christians.

But Jews always yearned to be part of the holy city. One such Jew, who braved the Crusader occupation of the Holy Land, was none other than the famed poet and writer Judah HaLevi (whose work The Kuzari we discussed in Part 44).

Judah HaLevi managed to reach the city, but was trampled to death by a Christian Arab horseman just outside one of the city gates. As he lay dying, he is said to have recited one of his own poems: “Zion, shall I see you ... I shall cherish your stones and kiss them, and your earth will be sweeter than honey to my taste.” (See Martin Gilbert, Jerusalem: An Illustrated Atlas, p. 21.)

SULTAN SALADIN

The reign of the Crusaders over the Holy Land was short lived. In less than one hundred years, in fact in 1187, the Crusaders are conquered by Sultan Saladin of Egypt (whose family, by-the-way was employing Maimonides as their physician as we saw in Part 44).

Sultan Saladin beat the Crusaders at what was one of the most important battles in the medieval history of the Middle East—at the Horns of Hattin, which is northwest of the Sea of Galilee. There Saladin very skillfully managed to lure the Crusaders out into the open. In the middle of the summer and burning heat, they found themselves vastly outmaneuvered and outnumbered, and this is how Saladin destroyed them.

Even though they lost Jerusalem, the Crusaders didn’t give up. They mounted campaign after campaign to recoup the Holy Land. They never did get Jerusalem back, (although the Moslems did grant them access to Christian holy sites there). Finally, in 1291, the last Crusader stronghold—in Acco (also known as Acre)—fell.(5)

Today we have amazing ruins from the Crusader period all over Israel. Some of the most massive and impressive are in Caesarea, Acco, Tiberias and in Belvoir (near the battle site of Hattin). If you should happen to visit any of these sites, keep in mind while admiring them, what the Crusaders did to the Jews.

1) It is a mistake to view contemporary Muslim hostility to the West as a by-product of the Crusades and Christian Europe’s invasion of the Middle East. It is important to remember that the Muslim world initiated the conflict with its invasion of Spain in 711, their attempt to conquer France in 732 (The Battle of Tours) and it’s numerous attempt to conquer Constantinople-These Islamic military campaigns drew their legitimacy from the Islamic concept of Jihad -the Islamic imperative to place the whole world under Moslem sovereignty make the whole world dhar al-Islam-The World of Islam (see Part 42 ). For a good overview of a history of the spread of Islam see: Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism .(New Haven: Yale University Press), 2006
2) No European Kings participated in the First Crusade, but it did attract the cream of the nobility of Western Europe: France, Germany and Italy, most of whom were of Norman extraction.
3) From the contemporary accounts of Robert the Monk and Fulcher of Chartres as quoted in The First Crusade-A New History, by Thomas Asbridge, Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 33-36.
4)Thomas Asbridge, The First Crusade-A New History, (Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 316.
5) It’s interesting to note that following the Crusades successive Muslim dynasties left much of the coastal plain of Israel (between Jaffa and Haifa) desolate out of a lingering fear that the Crusaders might one day return. This turned out to be a blessing for the early Zionist movement in the late 19th and 20th centuries as they were able to purchase large tracts of land and settle the coastal plain. Today this coastal paln contains cities such as Tel Aviv, Petach Tikva, Herzelia, Kfar Saba, Raanana, Netanya , Hadera, Pardes Hanna and Zikron Yaacov

#45 of 70 in the Aish.com Jewish History Series
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Blood Libel

Nothing can rationally explain the extreme Christian accusations leveled against the Jews at this time: Jews killed babies and drank their blood!

We are about to begin discussing an excruciating period of Jewish history that is marked by constant and unrelenting Christian persecution.

During this period we will see:

the Jews expelled from England (1290)
the Jews expelled from France (1306 and 1394)
the Jews expelled from Hungary (1349 and 1360)
the Jews expelled from German states (1348 and 1498)
the Jews expelled from Austria (1421)
the Jews expelled from Lithuania (1445 and 1495)
the Jews expelled from Spain (1492)
the Jews expelled from Portugal (1497)

And that’s only a partial list.

(As often as not, the Jews were expelled and then, when a significant economic decline was noted in their absence, they were re-admitted only to be expelled again. It was the classic “can’t live with them, can’t live without them” philosophy.)

The story of these persecutions really begins around the year 1000—the first millennium. It seems that people get nervous about big dates, especially Christians whose Book of Revelations predicts that at the end of a thousand years Satan will be released from prison and then he’s going to wreak havoc on the world.

The approaching millennium led to a religious revival in the Christian world which historians call the “New Piety.” The New Piety focused especially on the historicity of Jesus. Focusing on the life of Jesus meant focusing on his death. And, even though the Christian “New Testament” says that the Romans killed Jesus, the Jews were blamed for wanting him to die.

And so at this time, we see the notion of Jews as “Christ-killers”—which first surfaced in the 4th century—really growing in popularity.

But that alone does not explain the vehemence of Christian persecutions. To fully understand the issue, we have to look at other, more complex reasons.

REPLACEMENT THEOLOGY

To start off, the very existence of the Jews was an irritant to many Christians. And this is why:

Christian theology accepts the Hebrew Bible. It does not quarrel with the statements therein that the Jews were a special people chosen by God to receive the Torah and bring holiness into the world. But Christian theology says that the Jews failed in their mission. This is why God sent His “son” (Jesus) to straighten things out, but the Jews refused to recognize him as “god.”

As a result, God abandoned the Jews and replaced them with the “new chosen people”—the Christians. (Hence, the Christian segment of the Bible is called the “New Testament” which is Greek for “scripture.”)

By this line of reasoning however, there would no longer be any purpose for Jews in the world. They should disappear, like did so many mightier peoples. But by the first millennium—already 1,000 years after the death of Jesus—the Jews were still all over the place.

Christian theology had to come up with some sort of answer to this problem and it did. The Jews must have been doomed to wander the earth by God as a “witness people”—teste veritatis in Latin. The purpose of a witness people is to survive throughout history to bear witness at the end of days that Jesus is the Messiah, when he appears again for the so-called “Second Coming.”

But the explanations of Christian theology could not remove the sore spot that the presence—at times, strong and prosperous presence—of the Jews represented. At the heart of the matter was the Christian view of Judaism as a direct competitor for the soul of humanity.

The hostility that the Christians felt toward the Jews can be seen readily from the writings of the early fathers of the Christian Church. (See What Did They Think of the Jews? by Allan Gould, pp. 24-25.)

From John Chrysostom, the Patriarch of Constantinople, we get this:

“Jews are the most worthless of men - they are lecherous, greedy, rapacious - they are perfidious murderers of Christians, they worship the devil, their religion is a sickness ... The Jews are the odious assassins of Christ and for killing god there is no expiation, no indulgence, no pardon. Christians may never cease vengeance. The Jews must live in servitude forever. It is incumbent on all Christians to hate the Jews.”

From Gregory of Nyssa, we get more of the same:

“Slayers of the lord, murderers of the prophets, adversaries of god, haters of god, men who show contempt for the law, foes of grace, enemies of the father’s faith, advocates of the devil, brood of vipers, slanderers, scoffers, men whose minds are in darkness, leaven of the Pharisees, assembly of demons, sinners, wicked men, stoners and haters of righteousness.”

In some places, such calumny incited people to violence.

(We saw in Part 45, for example, how the Crusader mobs devastated the Jewish population of Europe, slaughtering 30%-50% of the Jews living there. Some 10,000 Jews of an estimated population of about 20,000-30,000 were murdered in 1095 as the first Crusade got under way.)

In other places, such calumny bred other forms of persecution.

MONEY-LENDERS

If one were a reasonable Christian listening to one’s Church fathers speak of the Jews, one might quite naturally conclude that such a people had no place in a decent society.

And this is a conclusion that was drawn over time.

Around the first millennium, we see the rise of the Christian trade guilds from which Jews were pointedly excluded. No more Jewish goldsmiths and silversmiths and glass-blowers. Jews were also excluded from owning land, holding office, and from being doctors and lawyers.

Jews were forced to wear a “distinguishing garment”—either a badge or a sign or a silly-looking hat—which set them apart. This was not only to make them look different but also to humiliate them.

Then, beginning in 1123, when the bishops of the Church undertook a series of meetings—called Lateran Councils—to decide Church policy, the Jews were assigned a new function in Christian society.

Along with a decree that priests must be celibate, the bishops decided that Christians were not allowed to lend each other money. (This came from a misunderstanding of Biblical commandment that forbids one from charging one’s brother interest when making a loan.)

As for the Jews, the bishops promulgated a doctrine decreeing them servants of Christians, and then assigning to them the degrading task of lending money—called usury—with which the Christians were forbidden to sully their hands.

The bishops were not stupid. They knew that you have to charge interest to have banking, and you had to have banking to have economic development, otherwise there is no growth and your economy stagnates. Someone had to lend money. And that someone, the bishops decided, would be the Jews.

What happened next is that Jews were not allowed to live in various cities in Europe, unless they supplied a certain number of money-lenders.

However, lending money was a very precarious job. For one, it engendered a lot of animosity. After all, who likes to pay back loans?

And what happened if the local nobleman or bishop decided not to pay you back? He’d accused the Jew of doing something terrible—like killing a Christian baby. That way he could renege on his loans, confiscate all Jewish property, and then expel or even kill the Jews.

This happened over and over again.

Some have claimed that it was Jewish money-lending practices that engendered such actions and, indeed, were responsible for a great deal of anti-Semitism. This is a total myth. At that time Jews charged an average interest rate of between 33% and 43% on loans. And while this may seem high by today’s standards, consider that the Lombards, the Christian Italian bankers living under the nose of the Vatican, charged rates as high as 250%. So we see that the Lombard money-lending practices were many times worse and yet no one went around persecuting Lombard bankers.(1)

Persecutions of the Jews, on the other hand, knew no bounds.

BLOOD LIBEL

It is next to impossible to explain the accusations that were hurled at the Jews during this time. Jews were persecuted not only for being “Christ-killers” but as “baby-killers.”

The first such accusation—better known as a “blood libel”—was leveled in 1144 in Norwich, England. There, Jews were charged with kidnapping a Christian baby and draining the baby of blood. The charge became so popular it would sweep, in various forms, through Europe and then spread to other parts of the world.

The most famous of all blood libel legends is that of the ritual murder of the child Hugh of Lincoln, England in 1255. The story was immortalized in a ballad so well-known in England and Scotland that is number 155 in the standard cannon of English and Scottish ballads compiled by Francis James Child in the 19th century. The best-know tale of ritual murder is thePrioress’s Tale, found in Chaucer’s 14th century classic work or early English fiction, Canterbury Tales. One verse of the tale goes like this: (2)

From that time forward these Jews conspired to chase this innocent child from the earth’s face. Down a dark alley-way they found and hired a murderer who owned that secret place; and as the boy passed at his happy pace this cursed Jew grabbed him and held him, slit his little throat and cast him in a pit.

Now why did Jews need blood in Christian opinion? This is a multiple-choice question:

Jews suffered from hemorrhoids as a punishment for killing Jesus and drinking blood was the best cure for hemorrhoids at the time.
All Jewish men menstruate and need a monthly blood transfusion.
Jewish men, when they’re circumcised, lose so much blood because of that surgical procedure that they need to drink Christian babies’ blood.
It’s the chief ingredient in matzah, and therefore prior to every Passover Jews would be requiring a large supply.
All of the above.

What do you think the correct answer is? Shockingly, it’s (e)—all of the above.

This is a very important lesson in anti-Semitism. You can say anything about the Jews and people will believe it.

It’s ironic that Jews, who are prohibited by Jewish law of consuming any blood whatsoever (kosher meat is carefully washed and salted to remove all traces of blood) were precisely the people accused of drinking blood.

The blood libel makes even less sense when you consider that in the 13th century the Church adopted the doctrine of transubstantiation. This is a mystical idea which maintains that when the priest says mass over the wafer and wine, these objects mystically change into the body and blood of Jesus. Christians who consume the wafer and drink the wine are said to be mystically eating the flesh of Jesus and drinking his blood.(3)

It’s ironic that the Christian world, while engaged in the ritual of “drinking the blood of Jesus” would accuse the Jews—who are forbidden to drink blood—of this totally fabricated hideous crime.

But then the accusations got even more wild.

Starting in Switzerland and Germany in the 13th century, Jews were accused of kidnapping communion wafers from churches. Why would the Jews do this in Christian view?

To torture it.

Medieval documents tell stories describing how a Jew (usually called always called Abraham) steals a wafer from a church, sticks a knife in it, and blood starts pouring out. And then he cuts it up into pieces and sends it to different Jews who all torture it.

This would be funny, if not for a fact that thousands of Jews were slaughtered as a result of such stories. For example, the entire Jewish community of Berlitz, near Berlin in Germany, was all burned alive based on the accusation of torturing a wafer!

(To read more about this subject see The Devil and the Jew by Joshua Trachtenburg or “Why the Jews?” by Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin.)

JEW TAXES

Throughout this time, the Jews were physically marginalized—beaten, burned, raped. And they were economically marginalized—pillaged, robbed, taxed nearly to death. Indeed, their money was one of the reasons they were tolerated at all. Jews were a good source of income to the crown. They were specially taxed with special punitive “Jew taxes.”

We will see later in Germany that 38 special taxes were imposed on the Jews. There was a tax to be born, a tax to die, a tax to wear a kippah, a tax to be married, a tax to be circumcised, a tax to buy Shabbat candles, a tax to exempt you from the German army in which you were not allowed to serve anyway because you were a Jew.

And what would happen eventually, once Jews were drained of their money they would be expelled. In 1182 King Philip II of France, out of the need to acquire some “quick and easy” money, expelled the Jews of France and confiscated all their property. The lure of future Jewish tax revenue caused him to rethink his policy and invite the Jews back to France in 1198.

This is also what happened in England where heavy taxation of the Jewish population of about 5,000 people supplied the crown with almost 20% of all of its income.

In 1290—on the 9th day of Av, which is the same day that the Temple in Jerusalem was twice destroyed, and which is therefore the worst day in Jewish history -drained of their wealth by a crushing taxation - the Jews were expelled from England and not permitted to return for almost four centuries. King Edward I declared all debts owed to the Jews cancelled and that the principal (but not the interest) be paid directly to him. As the Edict of Expulsion stated:

...therefore, we in, in requital of their crimes and for the honor of the Crucified, have banished them from our realm as traitors. We…do hereby make totally null and void all penalties and usuries and whatsoever else…may be claimed on account of Jewry…pay the amount to us at such convenient times as may be determined by you.(4)

Other countries would soon follow suit, but first would come another twist in the persecution of the Jews.

1) Despite the Church’s prohibition against Christian involvement in usury, Christians and even members of the clergy continued the practice throughout Europe. For a more detailed description of Jewish and Gentile money lending see: Salo Baron , Arcadius Kahan, Economic History of the Jews, (Keter Publishing House Jerusalem LTD., 1975), pp.43-47.
2) Alan Dundes, The Blood Libel-A Case in Anti-Semitic Folklore, (The University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p.41.
3) “...body and blood [of Christ] are truly contained in the sacrament of the Alter under the species of bread and wine, transubstantiated by the divine power-the bread into his body and the wine into his blood.” Text from the decision of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 as cited in: Bernard Lohse, A Short History of Chrisitan Doctrine-From the First Century to the Present, (Fortress Press, 1966), p. 153.
4) Edict of Expulsion ok King Edward I as quoted in: Alexis P. Rubin ed.,Scattered Among the Nations-Documents Affecting Jewish History 49 to 1975, (Jason Aronson Inc., 1995), pp. 76-77.

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The Black Death

Although the Europeans didn’t know what brought on the bubonic plague, they had no trouble naming the cause—it had to be the Jews!

In the 14th century the bubonic plague—known as the “Black Death”—hit Europe. At that time, people had no idea of the causes of diseases and no idea that lack of hygiene caused the spread of bacteria.

Some historians have cynically pointed out that bathing defined the difference between the Classical Age and the Dark Ages. The Greeks and Romans were very clean people and public baths were everywhere. Medieval Europeans, on the other hand, didn’t bathe at all. Sometimes they didn’t change their clothes for an entire year. The tailors or seamstresses would literally stitch new clothes onto people around Easter-time and that was it for the year. They kept their windows closed because they thought that disease traveled through the air—something they called “bad ether.”

Needless to say, when any new disease arrived in Europe, the unsanitary conditions helped it spread. And so it happened with the “Black Death”—a bacteria carried by flea-ridden rats.

The bubonic plague is estimated to have killed up to half the population of Europe—about 25 million people.

Although they didn’t know what caused the disease, the Europeans had no trouble figuring it out—it had to be the Jews! The Jews must be getting poison from the devil and pouring it down the wells of Christians (or throwing it into the air) to kill them all off.

To be fair, the Church, specifically Pope Clemement VI, said this was not so, but the masses didn’t hear it. The Church’s message that the Jews killed “god” but meant no harm to the Christian world just didn’t add up.

During the time of the bubonic plague (chiefly 1348-1349), you had massacres of Jews in various European communities. For example, Jews of Strasbourg were burned alive. The collection of documents of Jewish history, Scattered Among the Nations (edited by Alexis Rubin) contains this account:

“On Saturday that was St. Valentine’s Day, they burnt the Jews on a wooden platform in their cemetery. There were about 2,000 of them. Those who wanted to baptize themselves were spared. Many small children were taken out of the fire and baptized against the will of their fathers and mothers. Everything that was owed to the Jews was cancelled…”

(Note in particular the last sentence above.)

In Basle, Switzerland in January of 1349, the entire Jewish community, several hundred Jews, were all burnt alive in a wooden house specially constructed for the purpose on a Island in the Rhine.(1)

When we look at these ridiculous accusations against the Jews, we have to keep in mind that they are not limited to the Dark Ages. The ignorant superstitious masses of Medieval Europe were not the only ones to believe such things. We see this phenomenon in every age including modern history.

For example, an aid to the Mayor of Chicago said in 1990 that the reason why the black community has such high instances of AIDS was because Jewish doctors deliberately put it in their blood supply. The Palestinian Authority has said the same thing several times. The PA has made other outrageous accusations against Israel such as the Israeli Government puts hormones in all the wheat sold to Gaza to turn all Arab women into prostitutes and poisons the chewing gum sold to Arab children. In front of Hilary Clinton, Yassir Arafat’s wife said that Jews were poisoning the Palestinian water supply.

Professor Michael Curtis of Rutgers University summed it up perfectly: “Anything and everything is a reason to hate the Jew. Whatever you hate, the Jew is that.”

GHETTO

Needless to say, when you think a people are capable of poisoning your wells, you do not want them anywhere near you.

Indeed, as part of the general physical and economic isolation of the Jews throughout the 11th to the 16th centuries (which we covered in Part 46), there were created special areas for Jews to live. These were called “ghettos”—a name of Italian origin. The Italian word ghetto means “foundry” or “ironworks,” and refers to a place where metal was smelted—a really disgusting smelly part of town, full of smoke and polluted water. In other words, the perfect place for undesirable people.

Although the term ghetto as a place for the Jews was first used in Venice in 1516, the herding of Jews into areas specifically designated for them began several hundred years earlier.

These areas were usually fenced off by a moat or a hedge to designate its boundaries. Jews were allowed outside during the day hours, but at night they had to stay in. A good example is the decree of King John I of Castile (in Spain) in 1412 ordering both Jews and Moslems into a ghetto:

In the first place from now on all Jews and Jewesses, Moors and Moorish women of My Kingdom and dominions shall be and live apart from the Christian men and women in a section or part of the city or village….It shall be surrounded by a wall and have but one gate through which one could enter it.(2)

The ghetto was a mixed blessing for the Jews. While they were kept apart from the rest of society, which was humiliating, they were also kept together. Living together helped them to preserve a sense of community and, since there was no socializing with non-Jews, it was also a guard against assimilation.

The worst part of living in the ghetto was that whenever the masses got it in their heads to kill the Jews—as they often did around Easter time—they knew exactly where to find them.

The Christians always offered the Jews a way out of the ghetto—through conversion to Christianity.

NACHMANIDES

It was during one of these efforts to get the Jews to convert to Christianity that the great Kabbalist and Torah scholar known as Nachmanides came to prominence.

Nachmanides, Rabbi Moses ben Nachman, better known as Ramban (not to be confused with Rambam or Maimonides) was born in Christian Barcelona in 1194. He became the defender of the Jews in the great Disputation of 1263—the most famous of the debates in which the Christians attempted to prove to Jews their religion was wrong in order to get them to convert.

Jews tried to avoid these debates like the plague. Every debate was a no-win situation as Jews were not allowed to make Christianity look bad in any way—in other words, Jews were not allowed to win.

In 1263, a debate was staged in front of the Spanish King James I of Aragon, and Nachmanides was given the royal permission to speak without fear of retribution. Nachmanides took full advantage of this and didn’t mince any words.

His primary opponent was a Jew who had converted to Christianity named Pablo Christiani (a name he adopted after his conversion). As we will see later in history, there were no bigger anti-Semites than those Jews who were trying to out-Christian the Christians. In fact, it was Pablo’s idea to challenge the great scholar to this debate, which is a little bit like a high school physics student- challenging Einstein. Realizing that Pablo might need some help, the Church sent the generals of the Dominican and Franciscan orders as his advisors. But even they couldn’t stand up to Nachmanides.

The debate revolved around three questions:

1. Has the Messiah come, as the Christians say, or has he yet to come as the Jews say?
2. Is the Messiah divine, as the Christians say, or human as the Jews say?
3. Do the Jews practice the true law or do the Christians?

Nachmanides answered that had the Messiah come the Biblical prophecies of his coming would have been fulfilled. Since the lion wasn’t lying down with the lamb and peace did not rule the planet, clearly the Messiah had not come. Indeed, noted Nachmanides, “from the time of Jesus until the present the world has been filled with violence and injustice, and the Christians have shed more blood than other peoples.”

As for the divinity of Jesus, Nachmanides said that it was just impossible for any Jew to believe that “the Creator of heaven and earth resorted to the womb of a certain Jewish woman ... and was born an infant ... and then was betrayed into the hands of his enemies and sentenced to death ... The mind of a Jew, or any other person, cannot tolerate this.”

At the end of the debate, which was interrupted as the Church scrambled to minimize the damage, the king said, “I have never seen a man support a wrong cause so well,” and gave Nachmanides 300 solidos (pieces of gold) and the promise of continued immunity.(3)

Unfortunately, the promise did not hold. The Church ordered Nachmanides to be tried on the charge of blasphemy, and he was forced to leave Spain. In 1267, he arrived in Jerusalem, where there were so few Jews at the time that he could not find ten men for a minyan in order to pray.

Determined to set up a synagogue, he went to Hebron and imported a couple of Jews. His original synagogue was outside the city walls on Mount Zion, though after his death in 1270 it was moved inside. (After the 1967 Six-Day War, the synagogue—which in the meantime had been turned into a dumpsite—was restored and is a vibrant place of worship today. Incidentally, the Ramban Synagogue is a subterranean synagogue because at the time Muslim law forbid any Jewish place of worship to be taller than any Muslim place of worship, as we saw in Part 42).

Meanwhile, back in Europe, the Church was still trying to undo the damage of Nachmanides’ tour de force. The consequences unfortunately were not good for the Jews.

For one, the Church continued its policy of censorship of all Jewish books (especially the Talmud) containing any references perceived to be anti-Christian. If any such books were found—without the pages ripped out or otherwise obliterated—they were burned.

For another, Pope Clement IV issued a special document, called a papal bull, titled Turbato Corde, which later became the basis for the Inquisition policy for persecuting “Judaizers” as we shall see in the next installment.

1) See: Barbara Tuchman, The Distant Mirror-The Calamitous 14th Century, (Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), pp. 112-114.
2) Alexis P. Rubin ed., Scattered Among the Nations-Documents Affecting Jewish History 49 to 1975, (Jason Aronson Inc., 1995), pp. 57-58.
3) Nachmanides, himself, recorded the entire debate in a work entitledThe Disputation at Barcelona.See also: Howard M. Sachar, Farewell Espan-The World of the Sephardim Remembered, (Alfred A. Knopt, 1994), pp 39-40.

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Monday, November 23, 2015

The Jews of Spain - The Crusades - Blood Libel - The Black Death