In other parts of Europe, where the fanatical Dominican had been, or whither reports of his deeds or misdeeds had penetrated, the Jews were forced to drain the cup of bitterness to the dregs. In Savoy, which Vincent Ferrer had visited, they were obliged to hide themselves with their holy books in mountain caves. In Germany, persecutions of Jews had always found a congenial soil, and they were promoted by the anarchy which prevailed during the reign of Sigismund and the sessions of the council of Constance. Even the Italian communities, though for the most part undisturbed, lived in continual anxiety, lest the movement strike a responsive chord in their politically distracted land. They convened a great synod, first at Bologna, then at Forli (1416–1418), to consider what measures might be adopted to avert the threatened danger.
Happily, at this moment, after a long schism, bitter strife and a plurality of anti-popes, the council of Constance elected a pope, who, though full of dissimulation, was not the most degraded in the college of cardinals. Martin V, who was said by his contemporaries to have appeared simple and good before his election, but to have shown himself afterwards very clever and not very kind, received the Jews with scant courtesy when, during his progress through Constance, they approached him carrying lighted tapers in festive procession, and offered him the Torah with a prayer for the confirmation of their sufferance. From his white palfrey with silk and gold trappings he answered them: "You have the law, but understand it not. The old has passed away, and the new been found." (The blind finding fault with the seeing.) Yet he treated them with leniency. At the request of Emperor Sigismund, he confirmed the privileges granted to the Jews of Germany and Savoy by the preceding emperor, Rupert, denouncing attacks on their persons and property, and the practice of converting them by force. The emperor, who may be accused of thoughtlessness but not of a spirit of persecution, thereupon issued his commands to all the German princes and magistrates, cities and subjects, to allow his "servi cameræ" the full enjoyment of the privileges and immunities which had been given them by the pope (February 26th, 1418). A deputation of Jews, commissioned by the Italian synod, also waited upon the now generally acknowledged pope, and craved his protection. Even the Spanish Jews appear to have dispatched an embassy to him, consisting of two of their most distinguished men, Don Samuel Abrabanel and Don Samuel Halevi. When the Jews complained of the insecurity of their lives, the attacks on their religious convictions, and the frequent desecration of their sanctuaries, the pope issued a bull (January 31st, 1419), with the following preamble:
"Whereas the Jews are made in the image of God, and a remnant of them will one day be saved, and whereas they have besought our protection, following in the footsteps of our predecessors we command that they be not molested in their synagogues; that their laws, rights, and customs be not assailed; that they be not baptized by force, constrained to observe Christian festivals, nor to wear new badges, and that they be not hindered in their business relations with Christians."
What could have induced Pope Martin to show such friendly countenance to the Jews? Probably he had some idea of checkmating by this means the Jew-hating Benedict, who still played at being pope in his obscure corner. The principal consideration probably was the rich gifts with which the Jewish representatives approached him. Although at the council of Constance no cardinal was poorer than Martin, and his election was in great measure owing to this fact, on the throne of St. Peter he showed no aversion to money. On the contrary, everything might be obtained from him if money were paid down; without it, nothing.
CHAPTER VII.
THE HUSSITES. PROGRESS OF JEWISH LITERATURE
The Hussite Heresy – Consequences for the Jews involved in the Struggle – Jacob Mölin – Abraham Benveniste and Joseph Ibn-Shem Tob in the Service of the Castilian Court – Isaac Campanton, the Poet Solomon Dafiera – Moses Da Rieti – Anti-Christian Polemical Literature – Chayim Ibn-Musa – Simon Duran and his Son Solomon – Joseph Albo as a Religious Philosopher – Jewish Philosophical Systems – Edict of the Council of Basle against the Jews – Fanatical Outbreaks in Majorca – Astruc Sibili and his Conversion to Christianity.
1420–1442 C.E
Meanwhile history received a fresh impulse, which, although coming from weak hands, produced a forward movement. The spreading corruption in the church, the self-deifying arrogance of the popes and the licentiousness of priests and monks revolted the moral sense of the people, opened their eyes, and encouraged them to doubt the very foundations of the Roman Catholic system. No improvement could be expected from the princes of the church, the jurists and diplomatists who met in council at Constance to deliberate on a scheme of thorough reform. They had only a worldly object in view, seeking to gloss over the prevailing rottenness by transferring the papal power to the high ecclesiastics, substituting the rule of an aristocratic hierarchy for papal absolutism. A Czech priest, John Huss, of Prague, inspired by the teachings of Wycliffe, spoke the magic word that loosened the bonds in which the church had ensnared the minds of men. "Not this or that pope," he said in effect, "but the papacy and the entire organization of the Catholic church constitute the fundamental evil from which Christendom is suffering." The flames to which the council of Constance condemned this courageous priest only served to light up the truth he had uttered. They fired a multitude in Bohemia, who entered on a life and death struggle with Catholicism. Whenever a party in Christendom opposes itself to the ruling church, it assumes a tinge of the Old Testament, not to say Jewish, spirit. The Hussites regarded Catholicism, not unjustly, as heathenism, and themselves as Israelites, who must wage holy war against Philistines, Moabites, and Ammonites. Churches and monasteries were to them the sanctuaries of a dissolute idolatry, temples to Baal and Moloch and groves of Ashtaroth, to be consumed with fire and sword. The Hussite war, although largely due to the mutual race-hatred of Czechs and Germans, and to religious indignation, began in a small way the work of clearing the church doctrine of its mephitic elements.
For the Jews, this movement was decidedly calamitous, the responsibility for which must rest, not with the wild Hussites, but with the Catholic fanaticism stirred up against the new heresy. The former went little beyond denunciations of Jewish usury; at the most, sacked Jewish together with Catholic houses. Of special Hussite hostility to the Jews no evidence is forthcoming. On the other hand, Catholics accused Jews of secretly supplying the Hussites with money and arms; and in the Bavarian towns near the Böhmerwald, they persecuted them unmercifully as friends and allies of the heretics. The Dominicans – the "army of anti-Christ" as they were called – included the Jews in their fierce pulpit denunciations of the Hussites, and inflamed the people and princes against them. The crusades against the Hussites, like those against the Mahometans and Waldenses, commenced with massacres of Jews. Revived fanaticism first affected the Jews in Austria – a land which, like Spain, passed from liberal tolerance of Jews to persecution, and in bigotry approximated so close to the Iberian kingdom that it ultimately joined it. The mind of Archduke Albert, an earnest and well-intentioned prince, was systematically filled with hatred against the "enemies of God." Fable after fable was invented, which, devoid even of originality, sufficed to drive to extreme measures a man of pure character, ignorant of the lying devices of the Jew-haters. Three Christian children went skating in Vienna; the ice broke through, and they were drowned. When the anxious parents failed to find them, a malicious rumor was set on foot that they had been slaughtered by Jews, who required their blood for the ensuing Passover celebration. Then a Jew was charged with a crime calculated to incense the populace to a still greater degree. The wife of the sacristan of Enns was said to have purloined the consecrated host from the church, and sold it to a wealthy Jew named Israel, who had sent it to a large number of Jewish communities in and out of Austria. The charges of Jewish murders of Christian children and Jewish profanations of hosts had not lost their charm in the fifteenth century, and their inventors could calculate their effect with accuracy. By order of the archduke, the sacristan's wife and her two accomplices or seducers, Israel and his wife, were brought to Vienna, examined, and forced to confess. The records of the case are silent as to the means employed to obtain the avowal of guilt; but the procedure of mediæval Christendom in such trials is well known.
Archduke Albert issued the order that in the early morning of the 23d May, 1420 (10th Sivan), all the Jews in his realm should be thrown into prison, and this was promptly done. The moneyed Jews were stripped of their possessions, and the poor forthwith banished the country. In the gaols, wives were separated from their husbands, and children from their parents. When from helplessness they fell to hopelessness, Christian priests came to them with crosses in their hands and honeyed words on their lips to convert them. A few of the poorer-spirited saved their lives by accepting baptism. The more resolute slew themselves and their kinsfolk by opening their veins with straps, cords, or whatever they found to hand. The spirit of the survivors was broken by the length and cruelty of their imprisonment. Their children were taken from them, and immured in cloisters. Still they remained firm, and on the 13th March (9th Nisan), 1421, after nearly a year's confinement, they were committed to the flames. In Vienna alone more than a hundred perished in one field near the Danube. Another order was then issued by Archduke Albert, forbidding Jews to stay thenceforth in Austria.
The converts proved no gain to the church. The majority seized the first opportunity of emigrating and relapsing into Judaism. They bent their steps to Bohemia, rendered tolerant by the Hussite schism, or northwards to Poland and southwards to Italy. How attached the Austrian Jews were to their religion is shown by the conduct of one clever youth. Having received baptism, he had become the favorite of Duke Frederick, afterwards the German emperor, but, although living in luxury, he was seized with remorse for his apostasy, and boldly expressed his desire to return to Judaism. Frederick exerted himself to dissuade his favorite from this idea. He begged, entreated, and even threatened him; he sent a priest to advise him; all, however, in vain. Finally, the duke handed the "obstinate heretic and backslider" over to the ecclesiastical authorities, who condemned him to the stake. Unfettered and with a Hebrew song on his lips the Jewish youth mounted the scaffold.
In the meantime, the devastating war broke out between the fierce Hussites and the not less barbarous Roman Catholics, between the Czechs and the Germans. A variety of nationalities participated in the sanguinary struggle as to the use of the cup by the laity in the eucharist. Emperor Sigismund, who found it impossible to subdue the insurrection with his own troops, summoned the imperial army to his standard. Wild free-lances, men of Brabant and Holland, were taken into his pay. From all quarters armed troops poured into the Bohemian valleys and against the capital, Prague, where the blind hero, Zisca, bade defiance to a world of foes. On the way, the German imperial army exhibited its courage by attacks on the defenseless Jews. "We are marching afar," exclaimed the mercenaries, "to avenge our insulted God, and shall those who slew him be spared?" Wherever they came across Jewish communities, on the Rhine, in Thuringia and Bavaria, they put them to the sword, or forced them to apostatize. The crusaders threatened, on their return from victory over the Hussites, to wipe the Jewish people from the face of the earth. Jewish fathers of families true to their faith gave orders that, at a certain signal, their children should be killed to avoid falling into the hands of the bloodthirsty soldiery. Letters of lamentation over the threatened disaster, calling upon him to implore the intervention of heaven, were addressed from far and near to the illustrious rabbi of Mayence, Jacob ben Moses Mölin Halevi (Maharil, born 1365, died 1427), the most pious rabbi of his time. His arrangement of the synagogue ritual and melodies is used to this day in many German communities, and their colonies in Poland and Hungary. Jacob Mölin ordered a general fast, accompanied by fervent prayer, and his instructions were circulated from one community to another throughout the land. The German congregations forthwith assembled for solemn mourning and humiliation, and fasted during four days between New Year and Atonement (8th–11th September, 1421), and for three successive days after Tabernacles, the observance being as strict as on the most sacred fast days of the Jewish calendar. It was a time of feverish tension for the German Jews. In their despair they prayed that victory might be vouchsafed to the Hussites, and it seemed as if their supplications were heard. For, shortly afterwards, the imperial army and its mercenary allies assembled near Saatz were stricken with such terror at the news of Zisca's approach, that they sought safety in disorderly flight, disbanding in all directions, and hurrying home by different routes. Famished and footsore, a few of the very men who had vowed death and extirpation to the Jews, appeared at the doors of their houses, begging for bread, which was gladly given them. Privation had so reduced the fugitives that they could not have harmed a child.
The Dominican clergy commissioned to preach against the Hussites did not cease to foster Catholic hatred of Jews. From their pulpits they thundered against heretics and Jews alike, cautioning the faithful against holding intercourse with them, and consciously and unconsciously inciting to attacks on their persons and property. The Jews flew for help to the pope, Martin V – doubtless not with empty hands – and again obtained a very favorable bull (23d February, 1422), in which Christians were enjoined to remember that their religion had been inherited from Jews, who were necessary for the corroboration of Christian truth. The pope forbade the monks to preach against intercourse between Jews and Christians, and declared null and void the ban with which transgressors had been threatened. He recommended to Catholics a friendly and benevolent attitude towards their Hebrew fellow-citizens, severely denounced violent attacks upon them, and confirmed all the privileges which had from time to time been granted by the papacy. This bull was, however, as ineffectual as the protection which Emperor Sigismund had so solemnly promised the Jews. A persecuting spirit continued to animate the Christian church. The monks did not cease to declaim against the "accursed" Jewish nation; the populace did not refrain from tormenting, injuring and murdering Jews; even succeeding popes ignored the bull, and restored the odious canonical restrictions in all their stringency. Turning a deaf ear to both pope and emperor, the citizens of Cologne expelled the Jewish community, perhaps the oldest in Germany. The exiles took up their abode at Deutz (1426). In the South German towns, Ravensburg, Ueberlingen and Lindau, the Jews were burnt because of a lying blood accusation (1431).
The literary work of the German Jews was, as a consequence, poor and inconsiderable. Anxiety and persecution had deadened their intellect. Even in Talmudical study the German rabbis hardly rose above mediocrity, and gave nothing of consequence to the world. Some rabbis were installed by the reigning prince; at least Emperor Sigismund commissioned one of his Jewish agents, Chayim of Landshut, "to appoint three rabbis (Judenmeister) in Germany." Under such auspices, appointments were probably determined less by merit than by money. For a college, in which students were prepared for the rabbinate, a heavy tax had to be paid, notwithstanding that the instruction was given gratuitously. Besides Jacob Mölin, only one name of importance emerges from the darkness of this period, Menachem of Merseburg, or, as he was generally called, Meïl Zedek. He wrote a comprehensive work on the practice of the Talmudic marriage and civil law, which the Saxon communities adopted for their authoritative guidance. He, at least, departed from the beaten track of his older contemporaries or teachers, Jacob Mölin and Isaac Tyrnau, who attached value to every insignificant detail of the liturgy. By and by Menachem of Merseburg was recognized as an authority, and an excellent regulation drawn up by him received universal assent. Among the Jews at that period, marriages took place at a very early age; girls in their teens were hurried into matrimony. According to Talmudical law a girl, under age, who had been given in marriage by her mother or brothers and not by her father, was permitted, on attaining her majority, in her twelfth year, and even much later under some circumstances, to dissolve her union without further ceremony than a declaration of her intention to do so, or the contracting of another marriage (Miun). Menachem of Merseburg felt the indecency of so sudden and often capricious a dissolution of marriage, and he decided that formal bills of divorce should be required.
The literary achievements of the Spanish Jews during this period were not of a higher character; they exhibited unmistakable signs of decay, notwithstanding that their situation had become more tolerable since the death of the bigoted and wanton queen regent, Catalina, and the fall of the anti-pope, Benedict XIII, and his Jewish accomplices. Don Juan II – or, rather, his favorite, Alvaro de Luna, to whom the management of the state was confided – stood too much in need of the assistance of Jewish financiers during the frequently recurring civil wars and insurrections to do anything to offend them. Hence, during his reign, restrictive laws against the Jews seem to have been enacted only to be broken. Jews were again admitted to public employment, regardless of the fact that such appointments had been sternly forbidden both by kings and popes. An influential Jew, Abraham Benveniste, surnamed Senior, distinguished for his intelligence and wealth, was invested with a high dignity at the court of Don Juan, and was thus in a position to frustrate threatened persecutions of his co-religionists. Also Joseph ben Shem Tob Ibn-Shem Tob, a cultivated and fruitful writer, proficient in philosophic studies, was in the service of the state under Juan II. On the one hand, the cortes did not fail to remind the king that by his father's laws and by papal decrees the Jews were excluded from public offices, and, on the other hand, Pope Eugenius IV, successor to Martin V, strained every effort to humiliate the Jews and harden their lot, even forbidding Don Juan to befriend them; but these representations were of no avail. To the cortes of Burgos the king replied evasively that he would cause an examination to be made of the laws promulgated in regard to the Jews by his father, and of the papal bulls, and he would take care to observe everything calculated to promote the service of God and the welfare of the state. Against the pope's interference with his crown-rights he entered a protest.
This king gave permission to the no less noble than wealthy rabbi, Abraham Benveniste, to hold a meeting of delegates from various communities in the royal palace of Avila (1432). These delegates were to bring harmony into the state of moral and religious disorder caused by the attacks of the masses in 1412–1415. The smaller communities were without teachers, the large ones without rabbis and preachers. Many of them had been reduced to poverty, and the richer members were unwilling to contribute to the support of religious institutions. Evil ways and denunciations by the unscrupulous had acquired the upper hand, because the representative men and the few rabbis did not venture to punish the evildoers. Abraham Benveniste, therefore, framed a statute (the law of Avila), which compelled people to establish schools and colleges, to introduce order into the communities, and to punish miscreants. Juan II confirmed this statute.
The literature of the Spanish Jews, however, was powerless to recover itself. Despite the calm succeeding the storm, it seemed to wither like autumn leaves. The decline was most marked in the department of Talmudic study. After the emigration of Isaac ben Sheshet and the death of Chasdaï Crescas, no Spanish rabbi obtained more than local authority and reputation. The only upholder of the traditions of the rabbinate was Isaac ben Jacob Campanton, who lived to be more than a hundred years old (born 1360, died at Peñafiel 1463); but he produced only one work (Darke ha-Talmud), which exhibited neither genius nor learning. Still, in his day, Campanton passed for the Gaon of Castile. Neo-Hebraic poetry, which had blossomed so profusely on Spanish soil, faded and drooped. Of those who cultivated it during this period only a few are remembered – Solomon Dafiera, Don Vidal Benveniste, the leading speaker on the Jewish side at the disputation of Tortosa, and Solomon Bonfed. The most gifted was the last. He was ambitious to emulate Ibn-Gebirol; but he possessed little more than the sensitiveness and moroseness of his great exemplar, like him imagining himself to be the sport of fortune, with a prescriptive right to lamentation.
The Jews of Italy failed to distinguish themselves in poetry even during the Medici period, in spite of the high culture which, with the Hussite movement, was eating away the foundations of mediæval Catholicism. Since Immanuel Romi, the Jews of Italy had produced but one poet; even he was not a poet in the noblest sense of the word. Moses ben Isaac (Gajo) da Rieti, of Perugia (born 1388, died after 1451 ), a physician by profession, a dabbler in philosophy, and a graceful writer in both Hebrew and Italian, might have passed for an artist if poetry were a thing of meter and rhyme, for in his sublimely conceived poem both were faultless. His desire was to glorify in poetry Judaism and Jewish antiquity, the sciences, and the illustrious men of all ages. He employed an ingenious form of verse, in which the stanzas were connected by threes by means of cross-rhymes. But Da Rieti's language is often rough, many of his allusions show want of taste, and where he should rise to lofty thought he sinks into puerilities. Only in one respect does his work mark an advance in neo-Hebrew poetry. He breaks entirely with the traditional Judæo-Arabic method of a single rhyme. There is variety in his versification; the ear is not wearied by monotonous repetition of the same or similar sounds, and the lines fall naturally into stanzas. He also avoids playing on Biblical verses, the objectionable habit of Judæo-Spanish poets. In a word, Da Rieti supplied the correct form for neo-Hebrew poetry, but he was unable to vivify it with an attractive spirit. Yet the Italian Jews adopted a part of his poem into their liturgy, and recited extracts daily.
From the Apennine Peninsula let us turn back to the Pyrenean, where the pulsation of historic life among the Jews, though gradually becoming weaker, still was stronger than in the other countries in which they were dispersed. The two branches of intellectual activity which formerly, in their palmy days, had exercised every mind – the severe study of the Talmud and the airy pursuit of the poetic muse – had lost their predominance in the Spanish Jewries. The systematic study of the Scriptures also was no longer properly cultivated. The literary activity of this period was almost exclusively directed towards combating the intrusiveness of the church, repelling its attacks on Judaism, and withstanding its proselytizing zeal. Faithful and strong-minded Jewish thinkers held it a duty to proclaim their convictions aloud, and to admonish waverers and strengthen them. The more the preaching monks, especially apostates of the stamp of Paul de Santa Maria, Geronimo de Santa Fé, and Pedro de la Caballeria, exerted themselves to prove that the Christian Trinity was the true God of Israel, taught and typified in the Bible and the Talmud, and the more the church stretched forth its tentacles towards the Jews, straining every nerve to fold them in its fatal embrace, the more necessary was it for the synagogue to watch over its sacred trust, and guard its holy of holies from idolatrous desecration. It was especially necessary that the weaker-minded should be spared confusion in religious and doctrinal matters. Hence Jewish preachers devoted themselves more than ever to expounding the doctrine of the unity of God in their pulpits. They pointed out the essential and irreconcilable difference between the Jewish and the Christian conception of the Deity, and characterized their identification as false and impious. The time resembled that other epoch in Jewish history when Hellenized Jews tried to induce their brethren to deny God, and were supported by the secular arm. Some preachers, in their zeal, went to extremes. Instead of relying exclusively on the convincing demonstrations in the Bible text, or on the attractive illustrations of the Agada, they resorted to the armory of scholasticism, employing the formulæ of philosophy and, in the presence of the Torah, and by the side of the Hebrew prophets and the Talmudical sages, quoted Plato, Aristotle, and Averroes.
This controversial literature, cultivated on a large scale, was designed to defend Judaism against calumny and abuse, rather than to convert a single Christian soul. Its aim was to open the eyes of Jews, so that ignorance or credulity might not lead them into the snares prepared for them. Doubtless it also desired to stir up the new-Christians, and to re-animate their Jewish spirit beneath the disguise they had assumed to save their lives. Hence the majority of the polemical writings of the day were merely vindications of Judaism from the old charges fulminated by Nicholas de Lyra a century before, or more recently by Geronimo de Santa Fé and others, and widely circulated by the Christian clergy. Solomon-Paul of Burgos, who had been appointed bishop of his native town, wrote, in his eighty-second year (1434, a year before his death), a venomous tract against Judaism – "Searching the Scriptures" (Scrutinium Scriptuarum) – in the form of a dialogue between a teacher and his pupil, the unbelieving Saul and the converted Paul. Solomon-Paul does not seem to have retained much of the wit which, according to Jewish and Christian panegyrists, had at one time distinguished him – it had probably become blunted amid the luxurious ease of the episcopal palace – for his tract, devoutly Christian and Catholic in tone, is pointless and dull. Another ex-rabbi who devoted himself to attacking Judaism was Juan de España, also called Juan the Old (at Toledo), a convert who in old age had embraced Christianity under the influence of Vincent Ferrer's proselytizing efforts. He wrote a treatise on his own conversion and a Christian commentary on the seventy-second Psalm, in both of which he asserted the genuineness of his change of creed, and urged the Jews to abjure their errors. How many weak-minded Jews must have been influenced by the zeal, earnest or hypocritical, of such men as these, belonging to their own race, and learned in their literature!
It is impossible to exaggerate the services of the men who, deeply impressed with the gravity of the crisis, threw themselves into the breach, with exhortations to their co-religionists to remain faithful to their creed. In defiance of the dangers which menaced them, they scattered their inspiriting discourses far and wide. Foremost among them were the men who had distinguished themselves at the Tortosa disputation by their unyielding attitude and their courage in withstanding the unjustifiable attacks upon the Talmud – Don Vidal (Ferrer) Ibn-Labi and Joseph Albo. The former drew up in Hebrew a refutation of Geronimo's impeachment of the Talmud (Kodesh ha-Kodashim), and the latter circulated, in Spanish, an account of a religious controversy he had sustained with an eminent church dignitary. Isaac ben Kalonymos, of a learned Provençal family named Nathan, who associated a great deal with learned Christians, and frequently had to defend his religious convictions, wrote two polemical works, one entitled "Correction of the False Teacher," directed against Geronimo's libelous essay, and the other, called "The Fortress," of unknown purpose. He also compiled a laborious work of reference intended to assist others in defending Judaism from attack. Isaac Nathan, in his intercourse with Christians, often had to listen to criticisms of Judaism, or evidences drawn from the Hebrew Bible, in favor of Christian dogmas, which he found were always based on false renderings of Hebrew words. To put an end to these illusory outgrowths of prevailing ignorance of the original text of the Scriptures, or, at least, to lighten the labors of his brethren in refuting them, he resolved to compile a comprehensive digest of the linguistic materials of the Bible, by which the actual meaning of each word should be made clear. According to the plan adopted, any one can ascertain, at a glance, both how often a certain word occurs in the Bible, and its varying meanings according to the contexts. The work thus undertaken by Isaac Nathan was of colossal scope, and occupied a long series of years (September, 1437–1445). It was a Bible concordance, that is, the verses were grouped alphabetically under the reference words according to roots and derivations. The existing Latin concordances served in a measure as models, although their purpose was the less ambitious one of assisting preachers to find texts. Isaac Nathan, who produced various other works, by this concordance rendered inestimable and lasting service to the study of the Bible, although his labor was of a purely mechanical kind. Originating from the temporary needs of the polemical situation, it has been, and will ever remain, a powerful weapon for ensuring the triumph of Judaism in its struggles with other religious systems.