Either the king was misled by a false copy of the original charters, or he desired to avail himself of the opportunity of enlarging their scope without appearing to make fresh concessions; at all events, the privileges accorded under the new statute were, in many respects, more considerable than those formerly enjoyed by the Jews. Not alone did it permit unrestricted trading and residence all over the then very extensive kingdom of Poland, but it annulled canonical laws often laid down by the popes, and only recently re-enacted by the general church council of Basle. Casimir's charter mentioned that Jews and Christians might bathe together, and in all respects enjoy free intercourse with each other. It emphatically decreed that no Christian could summon a Jew before an ecclesiastical tribunal, and that if a Jew was so summoned, he need not appear. The palatines in their several provinces were enjoined to see that the Jews were not molested by the clergy, and generally to extend to them powerful protection. Furthermore, no Jew might be accused of using Christian blood in the Passover ceremonies, or of desecrating hosts, "Jews being innocent of such offenses, which are repudiated by their religion." If a Christian charged an individual Jew with using Christian blood, his accusation had to be supported by native, trustworthy Jewish witnesses and four similarly qualified Christian witnesses, and then the accused was to suffer for his crime, and his co-religionists were not to be dragged into it. In the event, however, of the Christian accuser not being in a position to substantiate his charge by credible testimony, he was to be punished with death. This was a check on ever-recurring calumny with its train of massacres of Jews. Casimir also recognized the judicial autonomy of the Jewish community. In criminal cases between Jews, or between Jews and Christians, the ordinary tribunals were not to interfere, but the palatine, or his representative, assisted by Jews, was to adjudicate. In minor law-suits the decision was to rest with the Jewish elders (rabbis), who were permitted to inflict a fine of six marks in cases where their summonses were not obeyed. To keep the authority of the Jewish courts within reasonable bounds, Casimir's charter enacted that the ban should be pronounced on a Jew only with the concurrence of the entire community. Truly, in no part of Christian Europe were the Jews possessed of such important privileges. They were renewed and issued by the king with the assent of the Polish magnates. Also the Karaite communities of Troki, Luzk, etc., received from Casimir a renewal and confirmation of the privileges granted them by the Lithuanian Duke Witold in the thirteenth century.
The clergy looked with jealous eyes on this complaisance to the Jews, and zealously worked to induce the king to change his friendly attitude. At the head of the Polish priesthood thus hostile to the Jews stood the influential bishop and cardinal of Cracow, Zbigniev Olesnicki. The protection accorded the Jews and Hussites by the king was to him a source of deep chagrin, and, to give effective vent to his feelings, he sent in hot haste for the heretic-hunter Capistrano. Capistrano entered Cracow in triumph, and was received by the king and the clergy like a divine being. During the whole of his stay in Cracow (August 28th, 1453, to May, 1454), aided by Bishop Zbigniev, he stirred up King Casimir against the Hussite heretics and the Jews. He publicly remonstrated with him on the subject, threatening him with hell-fire and an unsuccessful issue to his war with the Prussian order of knights, if he did not abolish the privileges enjoyed by Jews, and abandon the Hussite heretics to the church. It was easy to predict a defeat at the hands of the Prussian knights, seeing that the pope and the whole of the Polish church were secretly assisting them against Casimir.
Therefore, when the Teutonic knights, in aid of their Prussian allies, took the field against Poland, and the Polish army, with King Casimir at its head, was ignominiously put to flight (September, 1454), the game of the clerical party was won. They spread the rumor that the disaster to Poland was a consequence of the king's favor to Jews and heretics. To retrieve his fallen fortunes, and to undertake a vigorous campaign against the Prussians, Casimir needed the assistance of Bishop Zbigniev, and the latter was in a position to make his own terms. The Jews were sacrificed – the king was compelled to give them up. In November, 1454, Casimir revoked all the privileges he had granted the Jews, on the ground that "infidels may not enjoy preference over the worshipers of Christ, and servants may not be better treated than sons." By public criers the king's resolve was made known throughout the land. Besides, Casimir ordered that the Jews of Poland wear a special costume to distinguish them from Christians. Capistrano was victorious all along the line. Through him the Jews were abased even in the land where they had been most exalted. The results of this misfortune were not long in showing themselves. The Jewish communities mournfully wrote to their brethren in Germany, "that 'the monk' had brought grievous trouble," even to those who lived under the scepter of the king of Poland, whose lot had formerly been so happy that they had been able to offer a refuge to the persecuted of other lands. They had not believed that an enemy could reach them across the Polish frontier; and now they had to groan under the oppression of the king and the magnates.
Meanwhile, heavy but deserved judgment descended on Christendom. After an existence of more than a thousand years the sin-laden Byzantine empire, which had stood its ground for centuries in spite of its rottenness, had at length collapsed with the fall of Constantinople (May 29th, 1453). The Turkish conqueror, Mahomet II, had given New Rome over to slavery, spoliation, massacre, and every horror and outrage, yet had, by no means, requited the wrongs she had inflicted on others and herself. From Constantine, the founder of the Byzantine empire, who placed a blood-stained sword in the hands of the church, to the last of the emperors, Constantine Dragosses, of the Palæologus family, everyone in the long series of rulers (with the exception of the apostate Julian) was more or less inspired by falsehood and treachery, and an arrogant, hypocritical, persecuting spirit. And the people, as well as the servants of state and church, were worthy of their rulers. From them the German, Latin and Slavonic peoples had derived the principle that the Jews ought to be degraded by exceptional laws, or even exterminated. Now, however, Byzantium itself lay shattered in the dust, and wild barbarians were raising the new Turkish empire on its site. Heavy vengeance had been exacted. Mahomet II, the conqueror of Constantinople, threw a threatening glance at the remainder of Europe, the countries of the Latin Church. The whole of Christendom was in danger; yet the Christian rulers and nations were unable to organize an effective resistance against the Turkish conquerors. The perfidy and corruption of the papacy now bore bitter fruit. When the faithless pope, Nicholas V, called upon Christendom to undertake a crusade against the Turks, his legates at the diet of Ratisbon were compelled to listen to unsparing denunciation of his corruption. Neither the pope nor the emperor, they were told, had any real thought of undertaking a war against the Turks; their sole idea was to squander upon themselves the money they might collect. When the Turks made preparations to invade Hungary, and threatened to carry the victorious crescent from the right to the left side of the Danube, Capistrano preached himself hoarse to kindle enthusiasm for a new crusade. His tirades had ceased to draw. Their only effect was to assemble a ragged mob of students, peasants, mendicant friars, half-starved adventurers and romantic fanatics. The ghost of mediævalism vanished before the dawn of a new day.
It seems almost providential that, at a moment when the persecutions in Europe were increasing in number and virulence, the new Turkish empire should have arisen to offer an hospitable asylum to the hunted Jews. When, three days after the chastisement which he inflicted on Constantinople, the sultan, Mahomet II, proclaimed that all the fugitive inhabitants might return to their homes and estates without fear of molestation, he gave a benevolent thought to the Jews. He permitted them to settle freely in Constantinople and other towns, allotted them special dwelling-places, and allowed them to erect synagogues and schools. Soon after his capture of Constantinople, he ordered the election of a Greek patriarch, whom he invested with a certain political authority over all the Greeks in his new dominions, and also nominated a chief rabbi to preside over the Hebrew communities. This was a pious, learned, upright Israelite, named Moses Kapsali. Mahomet even summoned this rabbi to the divan, and singled him out for special distinction, giving him a seat next to the mufti, the Chief Ulema of the Mahometans, and precedence over the patriarch. Moses Kapsali (born about 1420, died about 1495), also received from the sultan a kind of political suzerainty over the Jewish communities in Turkey. The taxes imposed upon the Jews he had to apportion among communities and individuals; he had to superintend their collection and to pay them into the sultan's exchequer. He was furthermore empowered to inflict punishment on his co-religionists, and no rabbi could hold office without his sanction. In short, he was the chief and the official representative of a completely organized Jewish communal system.
This favorable situation of the Jews had a stimulating effect on the degenerate Karaites, who migrated in considerable numbers from Asia, the Crimea and southern Poland, to take up their abode with their more happily placed brethren in Constantinople and Adrianople. The Karaites, whose fundamental principle is the study and reasonable interpretation of the Bible, were in so lamentable a state of ignorance, that their entire religious structure had become a system of authorized dogmas and traditions more rigid even than that of the Rabbanites. The extent of their intellectual decline may be measured by the fact that in the course of a century they failed to produce a single moderately original theological writer. Those with a bent for study were compelled to sit at the feet of Rabbanite teachers and receive from them instruction in the Scriptures and the Talmud. The proud masters of Bible exegesis had become the humble disciples of the once despised Rabbanites. The petrifaction of Karaism is illustrated by an event in European Turkey. A Karaite college, consisting of Menachem Bashyasi, his son Moses Bashyasi, Menachem Maroli, Michael the Old, his son Joseph, and a few others, had permitted the lights necessary for the Sabbath eve to be prepared on Friday, so that the holy day need not be spent in darkness. The college gave adequate reasons for the innovation. According to a Karaite principle, not only an ecclesiastical authority, but any individual is justified in abolishing an ancient custom, or annulling former decisions, if he can cite sufficient exegetical authority. Nevertheless, stormy opposition arose (about 1460) against this decision, aimed at a custom derived, perhaps, from Anan, the founder of Karaism, and hence possessing the sacredness conferred by the rust of seven centuries. Schism and friction were the result. The section of the community which ventured to prepare the lights required for the Sabbath eve was abused, and charged with heresy. Moreover, the schism relating to the commencement of the festivals was still unhealed. The Palestinian Karaite communities and their neighbors continued to distinguish between an ordinary and a leap year by the state of the barley harvest, and to regulate their festivals by the appearance of the new moon. On the other hand, the communities in Turkey, the Crimea, and southern Poland, used the calendar of the Rabbanites. These hereditary differences were eating more and more into the solidarity of the sect, for there was no means of composing them, and agreeing upon uniform principles.
The conspicuous decrepitude of Karaism and the ignorance of its followers afforded the Rabbanites in the Turkish empire an opportunity for reconciling them to Talmudic Judaism, or, at least, overcoming their bitter hostility towards it. Rabbanite teachers, Enoch Saporta, an immigrant from Catalonia, Eliezer Kapsali, from Greece, and Elias Halevi, from Germany, stipulated that their Karaite pupils, whom they instructed in the Talmud, should thenceforward abstain, in writing and in speech, from reviling Talmudic authorities, and from desecrating the festivals of the Rabbanite calendar. In the difficult position in which studiously inclined Karaites found themselves, they could not do otherwise than give this promise. The Turkish chief rabbi, Moses Kapsali, was of opinion that, as the Karaites rejected the Talmud, they might not be taught in it. But he was a disciple of the strict German school, which, in its gloomy ultra-piety, would allow no concessions, even though the gradual conversion of a dissenting sect could be effected.
When contrasted with the miserable condition of the Jews in Germany, the lot of those who had taken up their abode in the newly-risen Turkish empire must have seemed unalloyed happiness. Jewish immigrants who had escaped the ceaseless persecutions to which they had been subjected in Germany expressed themselves in terms of rapture over the happy condition of the Turkish Jews. Unlike their co-religionists under Christian rule, they were not compelled to yield up the third part of their fortunes in royal taxes; nor were they in any way hindered in the conduct of business. They were permitted to dispose of their property as they pleased, and had absolute freedom of movement throughout the length and breadth of the empire. They were subject to no sumptuary laws, and were thus able to clothe themselves in silk and gold, if they chose.
The fruitful lands taken from the slothful Greek Christians were occupied by them, and offered rich reward to their industry. Turkey was, in short, correctly described by an enthusiastic Jew as a land "in which nothing, absolutely nothing, is wanting." Two young immigrants, Kalmann and David, thought that if German Jews realized but a tenth part of the happiness to be found in Turkey, they would brave any hardships to get there. These two young men persuaded Isaac Zarfati, who had journeyed in Turkey in earlier times, and whose name was by no means unknown in Germany, to write a circular letter to the Jews of the Rhineland, Styria, Moravia and Hungary, to acquaint them with the happy lot of Jews under the crescent as compared with their hard fate under the shadow of the cross, and to call upon them to escape from the German house of bondage and emigrate to Turkey. The lights and shadows of his subject could not have been more sharply defined than they are in Zarfati's letter (written in 1456), whose graphic, often somewhat too artificial language does not readily lend itself to translation:
"I have heard of the afflictions, more bitter than death, that have befallen our brethren in Germany – of the tyrannical laws, the compulsory baptisms and the banishments. And when they flee from one place, a yet harder fate befalls them in another. I hear an insolent people raising its voice in fury against the faithful; I see its hand uplifted to smite them. On all sides I learn of anguish of soul and torment of body; of daily exactions levied by merciless extortioners. The clergy and the monks, false priests, rise up against the unhappy people of God and say: 'Let us pursue them even unto destruction; let the name of Israel be no more known among men.' They imagine that their faith is in danger because the Jews in Jerusalem might, peradventure, buy the Church of the Sepulcher. For this reason they have made a law that every Jew found upon a Christian ship bound for the East shall be flung into the sea. Alas! how evilly are the people of God in Germany entreated; how sadly is their strength departed! They are driven hither and thither, and they are pursued even unto death. The sword of the oppressor ever hangs over their heads; they are flung into the devouring flames, into swift flowing rivers and into foul swamps. Brothers and teachers! friends and acquaintances! I, Isaac Zarfati, from a French stock, born in Germany, where I sat at the feet of my teachers, I proclaim to you that Turkey is a land wherein nothing is lacking. If ye will, all shall yet be well with you. The way to the Holy Land lies open to you through Turkey. Is it not better for you to live under Moslems than under Christians? Here every man may dwell at peace under his own vine and his own fig-tree. In Christendom, on the contrary, ye dare not clothe your children in red or in blue, according to your taste, without exposing them to insult and yourselves to extortion; and, therefore, are ye condemned to go about meanly clad in sad-colored raiment. All your days are full of sorrow, even your Sabbaths and the times appointed for feasting. Strangers enjoy your goods; and, therefore, of what profit is the wealth of your rich men? They hoard it but to their own sorrow, and in a day it is lost to them for ever. Ye call your riches your own – alas! they belong to your oppressors. They bring false accusations against you. They respect neither age nor wisdom; and, though they gave you a pledge sealed sixty-fold, yet would they break it. They continually lay double punishments upon you, a death of torment and confiscation of goods. They prohibit teaching in your schools; they break in upon you during your hours of prayer; and they forbid you to work or conduct your business on Christian feast-days. And now, seeing all these things, O Israel, wherefore sleepest thou? Arise, and leave this accursed land for ever!"
Isaac Zarfati's appeal induced many Jews to emigrate forthwith to Turkey and Palestine. Their grave demeanor, extreme piety, and peculiar apparel at once distinguished them from the Jews of Greece and the Orient, and ere long the new-comers exercised considerable influence upon the other inhabitants of the countries in which they settled.
There were peculiar circumstances connected with the prohibition of the emigration of Jews to Palestine. The Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem had obtained permission from a pasha to build a synagogue on one of the slopes of Mount Zion. The site of this synagogue adjoined a piece of land owned by Franciscan monks, or rather containing the ruins of one of their chapels, known as David's chapel. When this permission was given to the Jews, the monks raised as much clamor as though all Palestine, including the Holy City, had been their peculiar inheritance since the beginning of time. They forthwith carried their complaints to the pope, and represented that, if the Jews were permitted to take such liberties as this, it would not be long before they took possession of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher itself. The pope at once issued a bull directing that no Christian shipowner should convey Jewish emigrants to the Holy Land. As the Levantine trade was at that time almost entirely in the hands of the Venetians, the doge was prevailed upon to issue stringent orders to all the shipmasters of the mainland and the islands not to give passage to Palestine to any Jews.
It is, indeed, strange that, while the Christian powers were under the impression that they had hemmed in the children of Israel on all sides like hunted animals, the Turks of Eastern Europe opened a way of escape to them. Ere another half century had passed, their Spanish brethren, savagely hunted from the Peninsula, were destined to seek the same asylum.
It must, however, be admitted that under the sway of the Castilian king, Henry IV, and that of John II, of Aragon, the condition of the Spanish Jews was one of comparative peace and comfort. But it was the calm that went before the storm. The doubly impotent Castilian king was gentle to a degree ill-befitting a ruler of men. Although, as Infante, Don Henry had allowed himself to be persuaded by his partisans to replenish his exhausted coffers by plundering the houses, not only of the Jews, but also of the new-Christians or converts from Judaism, he had no personal antipathy to the people of Israel. A Jewish physician was his confidential minister. Not long after his accession to the throne he had even sent him to the Portuguese court on the most delicate mission of obtaining the hand of the young, beautiful princess of Portugal for his sovereign. The Jewish diplomatist brought his mission to a successful conclusion, but was assassinated in the hour of his success.
In spite of the papal bull and the repeated ordinances of the cities, Don Henry employed a Jewish farmer of taxes, one Don Chacon, a native of Vitoria; and he, too, fell a sacrifice to his office. A rabbi, Jacob Ibn-Nuñez, his private physician, was appointed by Henry to apportion and collect the tribute of the Jews of Castile; while Abraham Bibago, yet another Jew of eminence, stood high in the favor of John II of Aragon.
The example of the courts naturally affected the greater nobles, who, when their own interests were not concerned, troubled themselves very little about ecclesiastical edicts. The practice of medicine was still entirely in the hands of Jews, and opened to them the cabinets and the hearts of kings and nobles. It was in vain that papal bulls proclaimed that Christians should not employ Jewish physicians. There were few or no Christians who understood the healing art, and the sick had no recourse save to the skill of the Jews. Even the higher clergy had but little regard for the bulls of Eugenius, Nicholas, and Calixtus. They had too much care for the health of the flesh to refuse the medical aid of the Jews on account of a canonical decree. Most of the tyrannical restrictions belonging to the minority of John II and the times of the regent Catalina were completely forgotten. Only on one point did Henry insist with rigor. He would not permit the Jews to clothe themselves luxuriously. This was partly on account of his own preference for simplicity of dress, partly because he was desirous that the envy of Christians should not be excited against them. Under the mild rule of Don Henry, the Jews who had been more or less compulsorily baptized either returned to their faith, or at least observed the Jewish ritual unmolested. During the Feast of the Passover they lived upon rice entirely in order, on the one hand, to partake of nothing leavened, and, on the other, to avoid the suspicion of Judaism.
Hatred of the Jew, which burnt most fiercely in the great towns, naturally made it impossible for the orthodox to behold without indignation this favoritism towards the supposed enemies of their faith, and they made use of a weapon whose efficacy had been proved in other lands. The cry went forth: The Jews have put Christian children to death! Then came the report that "a Jew in the neighborhood of Salamanca had torn a child's heart out;" or, "Jews elsewhere have cut pieces of flesh out of a living Christian child," and so on. By means of such rumors, the fanaticism of the mob was speedily inflamed, the magistrates took up the matter, and the accused Jews were thrown into prison.
The king, well aware of the origin and object of these accusations, had them thoroughly sifted, with the result that the innocence of the accused was completely established. Notwithstanding this fact, the enemies of the Jews maintained their guilt. Some insinuated that the judges had been bribed; while others asserted that the new-Christians had exerted themselves in behalf of their kinsmen, and that the king himself was partial to them.
Among all their enemies the man who raged most bitterly and fiercely against the Spanish Jews was a preacher in Salamanca, Alfonso de Spina, a Franciscan monk, of the same order and opinions as Capistrano. Instead of the venomed tongue, he used the poisoned pen against them. This man enjoyed a certain amount of fame, because he happened to have accompanied Alvaro de Luna, the once all-powerful minister of John II, to the scaffold as his confessor. This bigoted priest thundered unceasingly from the altar steps against the Jews and their patrons, and especially against the new-Christians as secret adherents of their former faith. As his preaching did not appear to him to produce sufficient effect, De Spina issued, in 1460, a virulent work in Latin, directed against Jews, Moslems, and other heretics, under the title "Fortalitium Fidei." In this book he collected everything that the enemies of the Jews had ever written or said against them. He reproduced every absurd legend and idle tale that he could procure, and seasoned the whole collection with every device of rhetoric that his malice could suggest. In his opinion it was only right and natural that all Moslems and heretics should be exterminated root and branch. Against the Jews, however, he proposed to employ apparently lenient measures. He would simply take their younger children from them, and bring them up as Christians, an idea for which he was indebted to the scholastic philosopher, Duns Scotus, and his fellow Franciscan, Capistrano. De Spina most deeply deplored that the various laws for the persecution of the Jews, promulgated during the minority of John II, were no longer in force under his successor. In most trenchant words he rebuked the king, the nobles and the clergy for the favor that they showed to Jews; and, in order to inflame the mob, he untiringly retailed all the old fables of child-murder, theft of the host, and the like, in the most circumstantial narrative, and insinuated that the partiality of the king permitted these abominable crimes to go unpunished.
The fanaticism aroused by Alfonso de Spina was by no means without effect; indeed, the most lamentable consequences ere long resulted from it. A monk, crucifix in hand, proposed a general massacre of the Jews of Medina del Campo, near Valladolid, and his words were favorably received. The inhabitants of the town fell upon the Jews, and burnt several of them alive with the sacred books which they happened to find in their possession. Murder was naturally followed by plunder of the victims' goods. The king had the ringleaders of this outrage punished; but this was all that he could do. He was unable to prevent a recurrence of such scenes. He had been compelled to recognize the abject position of the Jews officially in the statute book which his advisers, his secret enemies, Don Pacheco, Marquis of Villena, and the Count of Valencia, prepared at his request. Don Pacheco, who by his intrigues brought both king and country to confusion, was himself of Jewish blood, his mother, who had married a Spanish noble, being the daughter of a Jew named Ruy Capron. Notwithstanding this fact, he included the most odious enactments in Don Henry's revised statute book. All the earlier disabilities were revived: the exclusion of Jews from all offices, even from practice as apothecaries, the wearing of distinctive badges, restriction to the Jewries of towns, and even confinement to their houses during Holy Week.
The civil war kindled by the intrigues of Don Pacheco and other courtiers through the burlesque deposition of Don Henry in Avila, and the coronation of his younger brother, Alfonso, bore more heavily on the Jews than even on the general population of Castile.
In 1467 Alfonso's party had by treason become master of Segovia, and immediately a riot against the Jews began here. The enemies of this unhappy people spread the report that, on the suggestion of their rabbi, Solomon Picho, the Jews of the little community of Sepulveda, not far from Segovia, had during Holy Week so cruelly tortured a Christian child that it died upon the cross (April, 1468). On the motion of Bishop Juan Arias, of Avila, of Jewish race, several Jews (eight or sixteen, according to different accounts), whom the popular voice had accused, were hauled from Sepulveda to Segovia, and there condemned to the stake, the gallows and the bowstring, whereupon the Christians of Sepulveda fell upon the few remaining Jews of the community, massacred some, and hunted the rest from the neighborhood. Is it not strange that in Castile and in Silesia, in Italy and in Poland, the selfsame accusations were raised, and followed by the same sentences?
Scarcely was Alfonso's party dissolved by the death of its puppet king before another sprang up, which professed to defend the rights of the Infanta Isabella, sister of Don Henry. The utter weakness which Henry betrayed encouraged the rebels to make the most outrageous assaults upon his prerogatives. The cortes convened at Ocaña in 1469, wishing to humiliate him, took up the Jewish question. They reminded him of the laws of his ancestors, and told him to his face that he had violated these laws by endowing Jews with the chief offices in the collection of the royal revenues. They further asserted that, owing to this distinguished example, even princes of the church had farmed out the revenues of their dioceses to Jews and Moslems, and that the tax-farmers actually levied their contributions in the churches. In conclusion, they insisted that the edicts be once more stringently enforced, and that heavy penalties be imposed for their transgression.
The finances of this monarch, who, in consequence of his liberality and the expense of putting down the ever-recurring revolts against his authority, was in constant need of money, would have been in a sorry condition had he intrusted them to Christian tax-farmers. The latter bid only a small amount for the privilege; moreover, they might have made use of the rebellious factions to rid themselves of their obligations. A king who said to his treasurer: "Give to these that they may serve me, and to those that they may not rob me; to this end I am king, and have treasures and revenues for all purposes" – such a king could not dispense with Jewish financiers.